

13 Broken Nightlights

Collected short fiction by

Barry Napier

All materials contained within are © Barry Napier, 2011

Cover photography by Joshua Minso, Minso Photography

Cover art and design by Barry Napier

#  — TABLE OF CONTENTS —

— TABLE OF CONTENTS —

— FIRMAMENT —

— MI CASA ES SU CASA —

 — A COLLECTION OF TRUE EVILS —

— TAKING QUINN HOME —

— ALL THE LITTLE SECRETS —

 — FAREWELL, FROM THE ELEVENTH HOLE —

— END CREDITS —

— LUNATIC MILE —

 — RIDING IN TRUCKS WITH GHOSTS —

— BUTT OF THE JOKE —

— GRAVE SEASONS —

 — THIS TOUR DON'T ROLL THROUGH SEATTLE —

 — THE MANNERISMS OF RUNNERS —

#  — FIRMAMENT —

If she'd had a clearer mind, Gina would have instantly recognized her son's behavior as eccentric, or even alarming. But her mind had _not_ been clear; they had both been dealing with overwhelming grief, but in entirely separate ways. For instance, she had taken to spending about twenty hours a day in bed. Between periods of staring blankly at the television and thumbing through photo albums, Gina would sob into her pillow uncontrollably, often to the point of hyperventilating.

On the rare occasions that she managed to pull herself out of bed, she would check on Mark. He was nine years old and was handling the death of his father as well as he could. It was a precarious age; at nine, you still danced upon that razor-thin line of not fully understanding death and being naïve enough to believe that those lost to you went to some better place.

Honestly, Gina didn't know which side of that line Mark was favoring. She had not seen him cry a single time since the funeral. Finding out that his father had been killed in a car accident while bringing home their weekly Friday Night Pizza had shocked Mark into baffled silence for a few hours. That silence had eventually led to a powerful and touching moment in the bathroom floor where he had wept with his mother for the better part of an hour.

But after that, there had been nothing. It had been six days since Peter's funeral service and Mark had spoken exactly twelve words since then. He apparently didn't see how talking about his feelings was going to help the unnamable pain that would undoubtedly take a few years off of his youth.

Instead of going to his mother for answers or taking the advice of his grandparents and their pastor, Mark had gone another route. Gina noticed it for the first time four days after the funeral. She awoke to the sounds of a light rain falling, pinging from the oil drum outside of her bedroom window.

She rolled out of bed and searched the house for Mark. This in itself was painful because in every room she entered, part of her still expected to see Peter sitting there. Maybe he'd be reading a book in the den, or shaving in front of the sink in the downstairs bathroom, or drinking a beer at the kitchen table. But of course, he wasn't there. And neither was Mark; nor were his shoes by the back door as usual.

Gina looked out of the kitchen window and saw him in the center of the back yard. He sat directly in the middle of the newly landscaped area where Peter had promised to have a pool installed this summer. She watched Mark sitting in that cool May rain, running his hands effortlessly through the wet dirt.

She thought about calling out, to demand that he come inside out of the rain. Instead she watched him a bit longer. If the rain started to come down harder, she'd call him in. For now, she didn't see the harm in letting him sit out there, no doubt recalling memories of his father. Until he harmed himself or behaved irrationally, she'd let him have his time alone.

Gina exited the kitchen and walked into the living room. As hard as she tried, she couldn't keep from looking at the urn, that oddly golden shape on the mantel. She frowned as she stared at it for a moment. She had no idea where Peter would want his ashes to be scattered. And while she felt that it was rather morbid to have his ashes perched on the mantel as the centerpiece of the living room—hell, of the entire house, basically—she also saw a great symbolism in it. Until she decided where to scatter the ashes, he would serve as the center of the house as well as the shattered lives of his wife and son.

She ended up staring at the urn without moving for several minutes. When she finally tore her gaze away, she returned to the kitchen window. She was relieved to see that Mark was now walking back to the house. His clothes had gotten soaked, but he seemed okay otherwise.

As he rounded the corner, Gina looked out to landscaped area where her son had been sitting. It appeared that he had made a mound of dirt on the ground. The shape of it was peculiar, but it was still too close to some sort of burial ritual for Gina's comfort. When Mark came in through the back door, his hair dripping, she almost commented on this.

But when Mark actually spoke to her, she let it go. When he went so far as to smile at her when they made eye contact, she dropped the idea completely.

"Hi, mom."

Those were the first words he'd spoken in over two days. And it was the first time there had been anything on his face other than a frown or a scowl since finding out that his father had died.

***

The rain continued to fall for the next few days, mostly in light showers but on occasion in significant downpours. It became something of an ambient soundtrack for Gina's coping. She would listen to it dance from the oil drum and drip from the gutters as she tried to get used to sleeping in a bed that, for twelve years, had been occupied by two. She had stacked her photo albums neatly on her bedside table and did her best to distract herself with one of Peter's old Tom Clancy novels. Thirty pages into it she'd started weeping uncontrollably, going back to the photo albums to see his face, his smile, what her life had been like before he had been taken.

Her heart ached when she thought of getting out of bed. She still performed her motherly duty and as far as she was concerned, that was all that could be expected of her. She made Mark lunches and dinners and tried at least twice a day to get him to open up to her. Her mother, who had insisted on staying with them until things were "back to normal", called three times a day to check on them. Gina assured her that she and Mark would be fine; she truly did believe that she and her son would benefit from some alone-time together rather than dealing with a house packed with over-supportive relatives. The fact that her mother had never liked Peter at all didn't help matters, either.

On the eighth day after the funeral, the house was unnervingly quiet as she made herself get out of bed. The rain fell lightly outside and she was somehow certain that she'd find Mark in the back yard again. She went to the kitchen window and sure enough, he was sitting in the same spot, playing in the mud. It was caked on his pants and splattered on his shirt. He was making some sort of a structure again—it looked like a very intricate sand castle from where Gina stood, or maybe the beginnings of the mud version of a snowman.

When Mark stood up and walked back towards the house several moments later, his face was almost gleeful. He wore a wide smile that she had not seen in a long time. It tugged at her heart, as if that single smile alone was enough to let her know that they were going to be okay—that some sort of healing had begun.

When he came in, Mark tracked mud onto the kitchen floor. He grimaced. "Sorry, mom. I'll clean it up."

"It's okay," she said. "Don't worry about it. I'll get it."

As he took his shoes off, Gina ran her hands through his wet hair. It was a lighter shade of brown than his father's, but the resemblance was still uncanny, especially when it fell lazily across his brow.

"How are you doing, Mark?"

He shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Dad seemed really excited about getting the pool, you know? I just like being somewhere that I know made him happy."

The unexpected sweetness of his comment nearly had her crying. But she held it together, leaned down and kissed him on his wet head. "I love you, kiddo. You let me know if you need to talk about anything, okay?"

After a moment's hesitation, Mark nodded. "I love you, too. And I will."

"Okay. Now how about some lunch?"

Mark only nodded and took a seat at the table.

***

The next day, Gina slept in until nine thirty. She would have probably slept later if the pouring rain hadn't have woken her up. Amazingly, it was the first morning where she had opened her eyes and hadn't wanted to start weeping right away. She felt refreshed. There was energy inside of her again. She wanted a shower. She wanted to exercise. She wanted to take Mark into town and watch a movie.

Thinking of Mark, she rolled out of bed and went into the living room. The television was on, broadcasting to an empty room. She then checked Mark's room only to find that he was not there, either. _There's no way he's outside again_ , she thought to herself. _It's pouring out there!_

Still, when she went to the kitchen, his shoes weren't by the back door. She went to the window and realized for the first time that there was something very wrong with whatever Mark was doing out there. The rain came in sheets and from the kitchen window, Mark's shape was only a fuzzy outline.

She got her shoes out of the coat closet in the hall, grabbed her coat and slipped out the back door. The rain pounded her right away, but she was surprised at how refreshing it felt. She took a few steps into it and saw Mark clearer; the scene was even more alarming than before.

Mark stood shirtless, throwing mud in a frenzy. Only, he wasn't _throwing_ it, exactly. He was adding clumps of it to the structure he'd amassed over the last few days. At some point, he had taken her gardening spade from the basement to help with his sculpting. Whatever it was that he was building, it was taller than he was now.

"Mark?" she shouted into the rain.

He paused, slightly turning his head towards her voice. But his arms kept moving, his mud-caked hands throwing more onto the pile.

Gina took one more step, and that's when she saw the shape at his feet. In the rain, its golden hue looked sick somehow, distorted and alien.

" _Mark!"_ she shouted, sprinting into the yard. Mud splashed up her clothes and arms with each stride and it made her shiver. It was only mud, but felt sinister somehow. On her bare arms, it felt disgusting; it could very well have been blood or shit.

"Mark! What are you doing?"

He turned around fully this time; his skin was pale and his eyes sunken. As she approached, her eyes went to the urn. Her heart seemed to stop beating when she saw that it was open. When she observed the faint gray dust around the lip of it and more of it dissolving into the mud, her guts clenched painfully and she doubled over. She went to her knees, wailing, but all she heard was the rain falling around them and a ghastly sound as the mud took her weight, as if it were trying to swallow her.

She finally managed to look up to her son and made no attempt to hide what she knew was an expression laced with sorrow and rage. She looked at him for only a moment, however. Beyond the rain and Mark's face, there was the shape in the mud behind him—the thing he had been sculpting.

It was the perfect shape of a man.

There was an odd color to it in some areas, a color that tore Gina to her core. It was the fresh gray powder of ash.

Trembling, she watched the ash grow fluid in the rain. It dripped down the shape Mark had made, pooling around its base.

***

She knew that it was wrong, but she didn't speak to Mark for the rest of the day. She had screamed at him in the rain for what seemed to her like an eternity, struggling against the urge to strike him. She'd turned away before the urge claimed her and stumbled back to the house, to the bathroom. As she sobbed in the shower, the steam sinking into her, she felt the energy and will from earlier in the morning trying to reassert itself, but she pushed it stubbornly away.

After drying off and returning to bed, she looked at the phone on the bedside table and considered calling her mother. She needed help. Mark needed help. There was no way to reject that there was something wrong with her son. She should have brought him inside after the debacle in the rain, but there was a hatred for Mark now, an unbelievable resentment that only grew stronger when she recalled the urn, turned on its side and emptied in the mud.

Later. She'd go to him later.

For now, there was just her and her grief. It had managed to get her through the last nine days. What was one day more?

At some point, the rain lulled her to sleep.

She awoke to a light knock at her door. She opened on eye and craned her neck. Mark stood in the doorway, uncertain.

"Mom?"

She hesitated, letting the events from the morning sink in. Finally, she allowed her heart access and spoke to him. "Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. I really am."

She almost said, _It's okay_. Instead, she said, "We need to talk about this later, okay?"

"Okay," he said. "Can we do it tomorrow? I'm tired right now. Over breakfast maybe?"

She considered this for a moment, realizing that the horrible scene in the back yard had somehow broken him. He was ready to talk now. That, at least, was good.

"That's fine," she answered softly.

Mark took a few steps out of the room, closing the door behind him. Before he shut it completely, he said, "And mom?"

"Yeah, sweetie?"

"It's going to be okay."

She was glad he shut the door after that, because she didn't know how to respond.

She glanced at the clock on the bedside table and saw that she had slept until four in the afternoon. She considered getting out of bed, but closed her eyes again. The rain had tapered off a bit outside but it still fell steadily, ricocheting from the window and the oil drum.

Peter had loved that sound, too.

She reached out to that empty side of the bed and fell asleep again.

At some point during the night, she dreamed that Peter was sleeping beside her, curled against her with his hand resting on her hip. It was pleasant at first, but when she realized that his body was cold and still dead, she shuddered in her sleep and gasped his name into her pillow.

***

From his room upstairs, Mark looked down to the back yard. The moon shined down on the pools of standing rainwater in the back yard, glistening in the mud like fallen stars. He looked out to the spot where he had spent the last few days building the man out of mud. He was filled with an emotion that he was too young to recognize as longing.

After all of his work, that space was now empty.

All that remained of the figure he had created was a trail of footprints leading towards the back door.

#  — MI CASA ES SU CASA —

When they cut the body open, slicing from neck to navel with expert precision, they found a house.

It was tucked neatly away by the turns and folds of the small intestine; the digestive tract might as well have been a suburb or a glistening countryside.

Being doctors, they needed a reason, a cause. They spent several hours extracting the house from its foundation of tissue and muscle. They carefully pulled the tiny gutters away from the pancreas and eventually removed the entire structure from the side streets and cul-de-sacs of the man's intestines.

They sat it on an examination table and stared at it in awe. As they moved it, they heard the tiny clattering of plumbing within the thin walls. The house was slightly larger than a paperback book. There were microscopic shingles on the roof. Rain gutters traced its edges.

There were porch steps, wet vinyl siding (slightly smeared with blood) and a tiny doorbell.

Several windows ran along the length of the house, including a large picture window that looked in onto a den. The den was connected to a white kitchen, separated only by a countertop. A miniscule bowl of fruit sat on the counter along with a newspaper and a small sparkling thing that may have been a set of keys.

One of the doctors stepped forward. He removed the latex gloves from his hand and touched the roof.

"Real shingle," he said.

With a pair of tongs, he opened the tiny door. He then reached inside with the instrument and grabbed the newspaper from the countertop. He held it up to the lights and read the headlines. The paper rustled like the buzzing of a dying fly's wings.

"This is yesterday's paper," he announced.

He set the paper down as his team watched, fascinated. He then wiped the smears of blood from its vinyl siding with a sponge, not because he wanted to but because it seemed like the only thing to do.

It was then that they saw a small man walk out of one of the tiny bedrooms and into the kitchen. He looked around the living room as if the house seemed brighter than usual. There was a tired frustrated look on his tiny face. The expression was somehow far more menacing than normal on his infinitesimal features.

The men in the operating room looked at the man's face and saw themselves.

The tiny man turned to grab his keys from the counter when a woman came out of the bedroom as well. Her small face looked like a dull pearl. She was sleepy and her hair was askew, like wafting pollen atop her head.

When they saw her, each woman in the operating room felt as if they were looking into a mirror.

The little woman opened her mouth and said something that no one in the operating room could hear. Her voice was as tiny as the frame that expelled it.

The man responded to whatever she said and it was obvious that he was angry.

They had no clue that they were being spied upon by giants with scalpels, credit cards, skin conditions and larger houses. So they went on arguing.

Frustrated, the little man grabbed his keys, walked to the front door and left the house. When he closed the door behind him, he stepped onto the porch and walked slowly down the porch steps. When he reached the yard that was no longer there, he simply disappeared.

Inside, the woman voiced a soundless scream. She looked sad, forlorn, as if she didn't belong there. She glanced around the empty house and retreated back to the bedroom. With another soundless cry, she slammed the door behind her.

The doctors had not heard their tiny voices, but the clamor of the doors had reached them. Two thumps in the midst of silence.

Then stillness.

It was the beating of a heart and, with two final thuds, they had heard it die.

With glances that were both sick and saddened, the doctors turned back to the cadaver. Its torso remained pulled open, yawning as if it were bored now that its treasures had been revealed.

They all wondered collectively what resided within their own bodies.

Perhaps, despite their degrees and advanced surgical procedures, life was nothing more than the slamming of doors, the beating of hearts. And in the dusty corners of it all, they stood as small broken people, screaming voiceless words into a place that no longer cared to listen.

#  — A COLLECTION OF TRUE EVILS —

They had been searching for the book for so long that it was hard to accept the fact that it was now sitting on the table directly in front of them. Five minutes ago, when the book had still been in its cardboard packaging, it had still seemed distant somehow; the two of them had convinced themselves in the backs of their minds that there had been a mistake and that the book in front of them was either a hoax or had been misidentified.

"There's no way it's real," Alex said.

"I wouldn't be too sure," Theo responded quickly. "I mean, just _look_ at it." It made sense that Theo would be so quick in trying to extinguish the doubt of his friend. He had been the one that had found the book on an on-line auction and had eventually purchased it for sixty-one dollars, so he was overly protective of his find.

Alex looked at the book as if he were trying to see through its faded cover and to the fabled text beneath it. They had placed the book perfectly in the center of the table, as if the book itself were the very core of not only the table, but the basement they sat in as well. The dim glow of the single lamp within the basement somehow added to the book's faded appearance and seemed to make it appear more authentic.

Alex, a Gothic Lit professor popular with the horror-fiction crowd, stared at the book as if he had seen it somewhere long ago but had forgotten its appearance. Theo sat across from him, staring intently at the book with a sheet of sweat on his brow although the basement was unnaturally cool. He was obviously proud of the fact that after all their searching, it had been one of his random trips to an on-line auction site that had brought the book to them.

"I say we open it," Alex said finally, his voice like that of a child on Christmas Eve.

Theo smiled nervously, realizing perhaps for the first time how momentous this night could be for them. They gathered here, in the basement of the city library, twice a week to discuss literature concerning the occult. They had been doing this for five years, allowed to do so by the key that the library's janitor hid behind the library's garden shed; he did this in exchange for a bottle of Jack Daniels that Theo delivered to him once a month. This gathering had always been their little secret, known only by them and the janitor whom had been sworn to secrecy. And now as their holy of holies sat before them, its cover dusted with age and its binding gnawed at by some small animal over the course of its one hundred and fifty years of existence, all of those midnight meetings to dabble in the darker things seemed to have paid off.

Before Alex could reach out for it, Theo seemed to back away from the table a bit. "But what about the stories?" he asked. "What if everything we've heard about it is true?"

"All the better," Alex said. "That _is_ why we've spent so long looking for it, right?"

Theo knew he wouldn't win this argument, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Hell, he wanted to open the book just as bad as Alex. But from just looking at its cover and worn binding, Theo knew that this was the real thing and he could feel its history like some invisible force in the basement with them.

With an unspoken final agreement, Alex finally reached out for it and lightly threw open the cover. While the cover had not held the book's title, the first page did. It was a title that was known to few and, in those few learned circles, was whispered about with legendary respect and awe. The title page stared up at them and it was then that they truly realized their victory and their dread.

The book was called _A Collection of True Evils._ As the story went, it had been written between the years of 1856 and 1907. Several demented and disturbed authors had contributed to it, but most of it had come from a man named Harold Nesmith. The book had been in Nesmith's possession when he hung himself from an attic rafter in 1908 after killing his wife and writing down the book's final line.

As Alex and Theo slowly thumbed through the pages, the layout of the text retold the legends of the book to them; some of it was typed and put together in a somewhat disarrayed binding while portions of it had simply been handwritten from an ordinary pen. It was the only copy of the book in the world and as they turned each page with elegant caution, they reminded themselves of this.

They huddled closely together like a pair of preteen boys having just discovered their first _Playboy_. Their eyes and mouths were wide with wonder. The look of the pages and the very bold and off-centered fashion of the type gave further proof that this was indeed the real thing: _A Collection of True Evils_ had been dismissed as rumor by many small groups similar to their own but here it was right in front of them, smelling like the forgotten corners of bookstores and cellars.

Every time Alex turned one of the pages, the smell wafted up in a brief breeze of musty air. There was a very faint trace of tobacco in the dusty scent of the book and Alex wondered if it was from the pipe that Harold Nesmith had been known to smoke from time to time.

"It's incredible," Theo said, running his finger along the bottom of one of the handwritten pages, as if willing the ink to smudge against his finger. Even the sound his finger made against the paper seemed eerily real, almost too authentic for the confines of the library basement.

"Hey," Alex said, so abruptly that it made Theo jump a bit. "What are those?"

He was pointing towards the center of the page, to three columns of oddly sketched shapes that had been placed on the page with painstaking care.

"I think they're inscriptions," Theo said, taking the time to read the writing above the sketches. "Yeah, it says they're inscriptions found above the door to Agatha Redden's cottage."

"Agatha Redden," Alex said, sighing heavily. As beautiful and sacred as the book might be, the fact remained that it had a sordid history. Agatha Redden was a confessed witch from the early 1800s. She had caused turmoil in a small town in Virginia, killing eight children and supposedly cursing two families. Both of those families—all of them, every single member right down to the pets—died in identical fires in the course of two months, long after Agatha had been burned at the stake.

_A Collection of True Evils_ was full of well-documented accounts like this. It was full of accurate histories centered around serial killers, witches, members of satanic cults and all other sorts of undesirables. And the icing on the cake was the fact that Harold Nesmith had also dabbled in the occult and it was believed that every sick soul he had written about had claimed the book as their own; the book was allegedly haunted by more than a dozen such souls.

"I'm starting to get chills," Theo admitted with a nervous laugh.

Alex nodded. He didn't say that he felt the same way, but it was evident in the fact that he didn't argue. He was also vaguely aware of the fact that his stomach seemed to be doing cartwheels. He stopped turning the pages and the two of them simply looked down to the page with Agatha Redden's markings on it.

"Are we in agreement that this is authentic?" Alex asked. He tried to hide it, but his voice was trembling. Theo would have normally been shocked at this, but he was also in a pretty shaken state. They had all heard the stories about the book and now that they actually had it—had actually _opened_ it, at that—it was hard to ignore them even if they were just rumors. Besides that, the seemingly synchronous queasy feeling that had overtaken them within the last few moments was a testament of the book's authority.

"Yeah," Theo said without hesitation. "It's definitely the real thing."

Alex nodded and finally managed to look away from the book. He looked the floor and spoke as if he were speaking to his shoes. "Well, I think we have a decision to make, then," he said.

"To read or not to read," Theo said, attempting to be funny. But as he spoke, he thought he understood why Alex wasn't able to look him in the eye at that moment. They had been meeting to discuss the darker things—some downright evil things from time to time—for over five years, always speaking of it under the assumption that true evil probably didn't exist. It had been their belief that writers, especially ones as troubled as Harold Nesmith, tended to sensationalize evil and the people that were attracted to it. But now that they had put their hands upon the almost legendary _A Collection of True Evils_ , their views had been drastically altered.

Theo felt this but could not explain it. But he knew that it was why Alex could not look at him; all of the knowledge they had accumulated over the years, all of the theories that they had pieced together...it had all just been crushed by the proven existence of this book.

Now the only thing left to be discovered was whether or not the book's alleged curse was true. As if reading his mind, Alex voiced this and Theo was thankful for his honesty. No matter how much it plagued his mind, Theo wasn't sure if he could have found the voice to mention it.

"If the legend is true, we might already be dead," Alex said. It sounded clichéd, but Theo still felt as if he had swallowed a chunk of ice that refused to melt in his stomach.

"We don't know that," Theo said weakly. "Are we to assume that a bunch of ghosts should have jumped out at us when we opened it?"

"That's not what I mean," Alex said. "The rumors _are_ silly. Are we really supposed to believe that every person who has ever come into contact with this book has died before finishing it?"

"It does sound dumb," Theo said.

"And even if it _is_ true," Alex said, "I think the solution is obvious. We simply don't read it."

"Then what was the point of looking for the damned thing for so long?" Theo asked.

Alex had no answer. He now glanced around the basement nervously, bothered by the fact that they were being forced to make such a decision.

"Maybe we should take some time," Theo said. "Let's leave the book here, just to be safe. We'll hide it here in the basement and take a few days to think about what we want to do."

"Why are we going to leave it here?" Alex asked.

Theo gave another nervous smile before he spoke. "This thing made me feel weird the moment we opened it," he said. "There's no way I'm keeping it in my house."

Alex chuckled a bit but nodded in response. He saw that there was a look of hurt on Theo's face and Alex assumed that it was a hurt that stemmed from the fact that they didn't feel safe in touching their treasure. He briefly thought about how a bank robber must feel when they root through their money and constantly fear that the bills are either marked or equipped with an ink bomb.

"Yeah, let's do that," Alex said. "Hide it here, take a few days to think about it and then come back. Either we're going to read it and store it away, or keep it until the legend spreads and sell it for much more than you paid for it."

And that decided it. They hid the book beneath an old writing desk and, despite the fact that they usually spent two hours or more on their meetings, they shut the lamp off less than forty minutes after they had arrived.

They stepped back out into a night that felt heavier with the weight of the decision to be made. Alex returned the basement key to the garden shed and then they pulled away from the library, pretending that the night didn't seem darker than usual.

***

The next morning, Alex woke up feeling groggy. He felt as if he had a hangover although he had not had a drink in almost a week. Outside his window, a bird was chirping in a lively manner to any other birds that might be listening. As Alex sat up in bed and wiped the last remnants of sleep away from his eyes, he noticed an itch on his right arm. He scratched absently at it at first, but then he looked down and saw what was there.

There was a phrase scrawled on his arm, written out in a handwriting that was not his own. Not only that, it looked as if the writing had been there for a long time, almost like a faded tattoo that the owner had regretted very soon after having it put there. The phrase made no sense to him and that bothered him almost as much as the fact that he had no idea how it had gotten there. He rubbed at it, but it didn't smear. And the more he looked at it, the more intense the itch became.

The bird outside his window continued to sing, willing him to get out of bed and get to work. Still scratching at the phrase on his arm, Alex started to feel a cold spike in his gut. He looked at the writing on his arm and remembered a friend of his in college that had gotten a tattoo of Yosemite Sam while stinking drunk and had barely been able to remember the trip to the tattoo parlor.

Confused and growing a bit frightened, Alex got into the shower and scrubbed furiously at the phrase. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the six words on his arm did not go away. In fact, the harder he tried to clean it, the worse the itch became.

Out of the shower, Alex got a cotton swab and soaked it in rubbing alcohol. He rubbed at the writing but this did nothing but irritate the itch even worse. Frustrated and afraid, Alex threw the bottle of alcohol across the bathroom where it bounced from the wall and spilled to the floor.

"Damn," he said, and bent down to clean the mess up.

Behind him, the bird at his window continued to sing. The noise was pleasant enough, but it irritated the hell out of Alex as the smell of spilled rubbing alcohol filled his head. He peered back into his bedroom and saw that the bird was actually hopping about and singing on the window's small ledge. Alex almost expected it to tap out some sort of message on the glass...perhaps the inane phrase on his arm.

Alex turned away from the jubilant bird and finished up cleaning the spill. As he stopped to scratch at the mysterious words on his arm, he actually read them aloud for the first time. He'd looked at the words a hundred times in the twenty minutes he'd been awake and read them silently to himself each time. But this was the first time he had spoken the words aloud.

Strangely, it felt good. Even more peculiar, the itching came to a sudden stop. Rubbing at the spot on his arm, Alex saw that the words were fading away slowly, dissolving harmlessly into his skin. He watched the words disappear in amazement and then, on shaky legs, stood up and walked into his bedroom. He felt a bit dizzy and as he made his way back into his room, the sound of his voice speaking those words seemed to bounce around in his head.

As he approached his closet to get out the day's clothes, he noticed the silence of the room. It took him only a moment to realize that everything seemed so quiet because the bird had finally stopped singing. Alex grinned, glad that the little nuisance had decided to fly away. Yet when he looked to the window where it had been hopping and singing, he saw that it was still there.

The bird hadn't flown away. It was leaning against the glass, not moving. The bird was dead.

***

Alex had never had a soft spot for animals, but he kept thinking about the bird for the entire morning. He thought about the unfortunate creature as often as he tried to rationalize the appearance and sudden disappearance of the phrase on his arm. _It really wasn't such a sudden thing, though_ , he told himself. _It was there when you woke up and it went away when you read it out loud._

And as staggering as that whole episode had been, he found himself testing it out throughout the day. When he was at work, sitting behind his desk during a two hour break between classes, he peered out of his window and watched two squirrels running back and forth between the student commons and the park. Alex spoke that phrase again and waited for the squirrels to stop dead in their tracks. When it didn't work, Alex wasn't really surprised. He watched the squirrels at play for a bit longer and the mix of relief and disappointment made his head hurt. He had somehow known that the words would be meaningless because they weren't on his skin anymore. He didn't know how he knew this, but he did.

He thought about faking sick, posting a notice on the door to his two and four o' clock classes and going home. He tried to block it all out—the words that had been on his arm and the fate of the bird at his window—but it would not go away. No matter how badly he wanted to believe that it had been some vivid dream, his skin still seemed to crawl with the itch of the words.

As he waited for his next class to begin, he continued working on a speech he had to give at a horror convention over the weekend concerning the sudden resurgence of vampire folklore. He hated speaking in front of people, so he wanted to make sure he got the speech exactly right. It was something that should have only taken a few hours at the most, but he had been obsessing over it for almost two weeks now, editing and revising the ten page speech numerous times.

For a while, the nervousness of the upcoming speech preoccupied him enough so that he nearly forgot about the morning's weirdness for a whole ten minutes. This might have lasted longer if the phone had not rung and broken his concentration.

He answered the phone on the first ring because it had startled him a bit and he didn't want to hear the absurdly loud ringing again. "Hello," he said with a slight waver in his voice.

"Alex, we might have a problem." It was Theo's voice on the other end and he sounded very tired.

"What do you mean? Theo, are you okay?"

There was a brief pause and then Theo finally answered, "I don't know. But this whole thing with the book...I think we need to get rid of it." He was talking fast and although Alex wasn't sure, he thought he heard a subtle hint of physical pain in his friend's voice.

"Slow down," Alex said. "What problem are you talking about?"

He clearly heard a tremor in Theo's voice now and Alex was instantly afraid again. He thought of the phrase that had been written on his arm, the dead bird and the way the book had made them feel last night as they had first opened it.

"Look," Theo said. "Has anything happened to you since last night? Anything strange?"

"No," Alex lied, not sure why he was hiding the morning's events from Theo.

"We should meet at the library tonight," Theo said. "We opened it together, so I think we both need to be there when we make any sort of decision about it."

"Theo, you sound crazy. Are you sure you're—"

"I have to go," Theo interrupted. "But meet me there tonight, okay? Midnight." And then without waiting for an answer, Theo hung up.

Alex sat there for a moment, staring at his computer and the last paragraph of his speech. He tried typing some more but wasn't able to keep focus. He left his office and went to his classroom almost half an hour before his students arrived. He made it through the two o' clock class but ended up posting a cancellation notice on the door of his four o' clock Gothic Studies class.

As he drove home, he tried once again to logically do away with any connection between his utterance of the phrase that had been on his arm and the death of the bird on his windowsill. Naturally, there was a chance, no matter how slim, that the two things had been entirely coincidental. But then he also took into account that the instant he had spoken the words, the itch on his arm and the text itself had vanished.

As Alex parked his car in front of his building, he felt a peculiar sensation on his shoulder. He wondered if a bug had bitten him, but only for a moment. As the sensation began to sink in and became more prominent, Alex knew what it signified. Getting out of his car, he quickened his pace when he realized that his shoulder was beginning to itch.

***

He hurried into his apartment and was unbuttoning his shirt before the door closed behind him. He ran through his bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom where it still smelled like rubbing alcohol. He took his shirt off and stared at himself in the mirror. As he looked his body over, searching for whatever words might be there this time, his mind swayed from fear to excitement at a frantic pace.

The itch seemed to worsen when it was exposed to the air and as he looked at himself in the mirror, Alex wasn't at all surprised to see something written on his left shoulder. He read the words silently to himself and as he did, he thought he felt the itch beginning to subside.

The words were written in the same faded tone and in the same script-like text that had been on his arm that morning. He ran his fingers across these new words and found that the skin was not raised; if this was done with some sort of spectral ink, it had sunk into the skin without disturbing the surface.

With a guilty feeling in his stomach, Alex turned away from the mirror and walked into his bedroom. He looked out of the window, hoping to see another bird out there. But the ledge's only occupant was the bird from this morning, stiff and motionless with its dead eyes pointed towards the street as if it were hoping to fall. Alex reached slowly out to the glass as if he intended to resurrect the bird and saw that his hands were trembling.

Behind him, someone knocked on his front door. He gasped and jumped a bit, nearly falling onto his bed as he stumbled backwards. He then sighed in embarrassment, realizing that a simple knock on his door had just scared the hell out of him. _Get a grip,_ he told himself as he walked into the living room and approached the door.

He looked through the peephole, expecting to see Theo standing there. But it was only his landlord, coming to check up on the leaky pipes under the kitchen sink that Alex had reported last week, no doubt. Alex smiled wanly and reached out for the door knob.

But then he stopped. As his shaking fingers grazed the doorknob, the itch on his shoulder seemed to intensify. He peered back out of the peephole at his landlord who stood there waiting with a look of impatience. As Alex watched, the man raised his hand and knocked again.

Alex swallowed hard and leaned closer towards the door. He then opened his mouth and spoke the words that were etched across his shoulder. He spoke softly, whispering the words so quietly that he could hardly even hear them himself. His own voice managed to raise gooseflesh on his arms and as he listened to himself, he wondered if this was what the voice of a ghost might sound like. Thinking of ghosts made him think of Harold Nesmith and Agatha Redden. In that moment he felt certain that they were there with him, that their spirits had latched on to him when he and Theo had opened _A Collection of True Evils_. He could literally feel their dead eyes on him as he spied on his landlord through the peephole.

Out in the hallway, the landlord did nothing except stand his ground and knock once more, louder this time. Frowning, Alex stepped closer to the door with his forehead now pressed against the wood. He spoke the words again, louder this time so that anyone on the other side of the door would hear.

Almost instantly, a queer look came across the landlord's face, as if he were trying to understand the words he had just heard. For Alex, watching everything through the peephole seemed to occur in slow-motion. He watched as his landlord's face went through several expressions within the space of three seconds, none of them pleasant. The man then took a hesitant step away from Alex's door and stumbled to his knees, clutching at the empty air around him for support as he fell.

Alex watched intently, not sure if the man was having trouble breathing or if there was something wrong with his heart. The entire process took no more than ten seconds. When it was all done, the landlord was lying on his side and staring blankly towards the other end of the hall with dead, wide eyes.

He stepped away from the door as the realization of what he had just done began to sink in. And while he felt morally ashamed of the ease in which he had killed the man, the fact still remained that once again, the reading of the words had resulted in the disappearance of the peculiar itch and the inscribed text that had caused it. Alex rubbed at the now blank spot where the words had been and then bit his bottom lip tenderly as he felt tears welling up in his eyes. But before the tears could take him, he picked up the phone and dialed 911. He then sat on his sofa and stared at the walls until he heard sirens approaching.

***

Night took it's time in claiming the world. Alex sat in his apartment after the paramedics had pronounced his landlord dead of severe cardiac arrest and waited for midnight to approach. He wondered if Theo was feeling this same anxiousness or if his insistence on meeting right away was due to Theo also experiencing some sort of weirdness since opening _A Collection of True Evils_.

As he sat and waited, Alex feared that the itch would come again and that he would find more words written on his body. He had already killed a bird and a human being with the power that came with those ghost-phrases, so what else would he be capable of?

The thought bothered him horribly. He tidied up his coffee table, checked his e-mail and watched some TV to help pass the time. He eventually found himself working on his speech for the horror convention and it was this work that seemed to speed the clock along.

He left his house at 11:15 although the library was only a twenty minute trip from his house. He drove down darkened blocks, thinking of the bird, his landlord and the phrases he had spoken that had somehow ended their lives. It was baffling and even a bit ridiculous, but there was no denying that it was really happening. He thought about Agatha Redden and wondered what sort of hex she had placed on the inscriptions within the book. He also found himself thinking about Harold Nesmith, the author of _A Collection of True Evils_ , and what sorts of dark talents he might have acquired in writing down such cursed material.

Driving through the night as midnight approached, Alex truly felt afraid for the first time since discovering the phrase on his arm that morning. To somehow have found himself entwined in the horrors that Harold Nesmith had researched and written about made him feel cold and defenseless. Several times on the way to the library, Alex thought that he could feel itching sensations all over his body but these ended up being nothing more than tricks of his scrambling mind.

He arrived at the library fifteen minutes early and saw no sign of Theo. Alex circled the block twice, driving slowly and wondering exactly what they had gotten themselves into. As he made the circle around the block the second time, he saw that Theo had finally arrived. Usually, the first to arrive would retrieve the key and unlock the basement door but Theo remained in his car, electing to not wander into the darkness alone.

Alex parked his car behind Theo's and the two of them met on the sidewalk in front of the library. It seemed almost forbidden to be here again, less than twenty-four hours after cracking open _A Collection of True Evils_ , creeping through the night like ghouls hiding from the inevitable dawn.

As they came together on the sidewalk, Alex noticed that Theo was walking with his back arched at an awkward angle. Theo tried to nod and grin at him, but it was obvious that he was in pain.

"Did you hurt your back today?" Alex asked him as they started towards the garden shed for the key.

Theo snickered, a sound that came out like a mixture of a grunt and defeated laughter. "You don't know the half of it."

Alex didn't say anything else although he desperately wanted to say something...to say _anything_. But to mention anything about the book in the open and dark spaces of the night seemed dangerous now. Alex slipped into the garden shed to retrieve the key and then they walked through the too-quiet night and into the library's basement.

***

They pulled _A Collection of True Evils_ from its hiding place beneath the writing desk and set it on the large table in the center of the room. Alex took a seat at the table, as he had done countless times since he and Theo had started meeting here, but Theo remained on his feet. He leaned against the table, grimacing in pain.

"You lied to me on the phone today," Theo said. "I can see it in your face: something happened to you today. What was it?"

"Well, what about you?" Alex asked. "Yes, something happened to me, but it's obviously not as bad as whatever happened to you...you look like you're in terrible pain."

"I am," Theo said. "It's mainly my stomach; it feels like there's razorblades in there and every time I move, it gets worse. I've also been coughing up blood all day and I don't know why. My back is killing me and the last two times I took a piss, there was blood in it." As he spoke, a thin trickle of blood ran over his bottom lip. His voice was wavering and came in fragments, as if he were on the verge of tears.

"What about you?" he asked Alex as he wiped the blood away from his mouth.

Alex thought that it would be hard to convey what had happened to him but once he started talking, the course of events actually came out easy and he was relieved to find that Theo was nodding as he listened. If the stern look on his face was any indication, he didn't doubt a word of it.

"That settles it then," Theo said when Alex was done. "We have to get rid of the book. And I don't mean sell it off to someone else. I think we have to destroy it. We could burn it or send it through a wood chipper. Something...I don't...I don't know..."

"Stop talking," Alex said. "You're getting pale. I really think you need to see a doctor." This was an understatement; not only was Theo pale, he was also shaking and there was a glistening sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Alex looked at the book, still sitting on the table as if it had always belonged there. With something very similar to anger in his voice, Alex said, "Let's do it, then. We'll take it outside right now and burn it."

Theo nodded, holding his stomach as he tried to stay upright against the table. Alex picked the book up from the table and as he did, he felt that familiar itching sensation crawling along his back. Only now it burned like fire and he nearly dropped the book on the floor in trying to scratch the itch. The sensation was so strong that it took his breath and he suddenly knew that the book and the powers that haunted it somehow knew what they intended to do.

"We've got to be quick," Alex said. "It knows something is up."

Theo only nodded again, not wanting to waste any breath on speaking. He hobbled to the door bent over in pain and he ended up having to lean on Alex as they left the basement and headed back out into the night.

They made their way to the back of the library where a few picnic tables sat around a swing set for members of the children's library.

Theo fell to the ground with a grunt, still holding his stomach. As he sat up, he coughed up a thick gob of blood and mucus. He spat it to the ground in weary disgust and then looked to Alex. "There's a lighter in my glove box. A Zippo."

Alex ran to Theo's car in a hurry, opened the passenger side door and grabbed the lighter from its place among fast food napkins and registration forms. The night around him seemed intensely quiet, as if the night were anticipating something to happen. The streetlights seemed to be fading out and the solid structures of things around him seemed to waver in and out of focus.

He blinked his eyes furiously, gripped Theo's lighter as tightly as he could in order to anchor himself to reality, and headed back to the rear of the library.

When he returned to the small picnic area behind the library, Theo looked even paler than he had in the basement. He was still coughing violently and as Alex knelt by him with the lighter, he saw that Theo had coughed up more blood while he had been gone. Alex had never seen so much blood and it would have taken him aback if he were not afflicted by the now aching itch that continued to spread across his back.

Alex struggled with the lighter, surprised to find that he was also was shaking. He didn't know if it was a result of frazzled nerves or the sudden fear that seemed to seize him. He could feel a thickness in the air, a weight that seemed to settle on to him like heat on a miserably humid day. He suddenly knew without a doubt that the supposed ghosts within the book were here with them now and they did not want to allow them to destroy their link to the world of the living. The painful itch across his back was proof of this, as was his pale and bleeding friend.

Alex finally managed to get a flame from the lighter, a wavering flicker in the night with the tremors in his hands. Theo opened the book to a random page to expose the paper to the flame. This simple act had him gasping, still sprawled out on the ground and in pain.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked as he put the flame to the page. It was then that he noticed that the page the book had been opened to was the same one he had touched last night, the page with Agatha Redden's symbols scrawled along the center.

Theo opened his mouth to respond but could only get out a wet moan. Finally, through a mouthful of blood, he was able to get out a few garbled words: "Go....get out of here..." His eyes appeared to be suddenly alarmed, as if he knew something Alex didn't.

Alex seemed confused at first because the pain at his back was now more than an unreachable itch, but a searing heat that seemed to boil his skin. But then he saw Theo bend into a fetal position as he let out a cry of pain that chilled Alex's heart. Alex held the flame steady and could smell the smoke that wafted up from the burnt and curling corner of the exposed page.

As he witnessed Theo's pain, Alex lost his grip on the lighter for a split second. What he watched unfold was simply too much, and he momentarily lost control of his body.

As the pages started to slowly catch fire, Theo seemed to freeze for a split second and then his face literally seemed to split in half. There was a wet ripping sound as something white was pushed through Theo's mouth and, after a moment's pause, the rest of his face. At first, Alex though the flecks of white among all of the blood were teeth, but as his friend's face was folded open like some impatient flower in bloom, Alex realized what was happening.

There was paper coming out of Theo's mouth. Somehow, several pieces of paper were defying the laws of physics, pushing through his throat and tearing through bone and flesh. Alex knew that this could not be real, but there it was in front of him: Theo was convulsing on the ground with several sheets of paper sticking out of his head. Closer inspection revealed that the paper consisted of sheets of a manuscript and among them were Agatha Redden's inscriptions. One of the pages had cut neatly through Theo's left eye, its edge curled upwards toward the night sky. Another had torn through the top of his skull and pointed into the night like the horn of some ungodly unicorn.

It was this last bit that shocked Alex's body back into working order. The lighter went forgotten, lying on the ground two feet away from the book. The page that had caught fire for a brief moment stood on the thin threshold of being consumed or sputtering out. And as Alex slowly began to back away from the horrible scene, he did something that he didn't fully understand, something that he would later realize had been influenced by the powers within the book.

He darted forward and patted the flame down with his hand until it was fully extinguished. The heat that briefly engulfed his hand was nothing compared to the stinging that continued to spread across his back. With the small fire out and only the bottom edge of the page charred, Alex picked up the book and gave Theo a final look. If he was still alive, there were no clear signs and besides that, _if_ he were still breathing, he surely wouldn't be for much longer.

"I'm sorry," Alex said, truly meaning it but unable to prevent his course of actions. He could feel himself being pulled away, guided by some unseen hand that seemed to wrap around the entire night. "I'm so sorry," he said again as he left Theo and headed for his car with _A Collection of True Evils_ tucked under his arm.

***

By the time he had gotten back into his car, the itch across his back had started to die down. He threw the book into the back seat and drove home slowly. He felt as if he were dreaming and every movement he made felt as if he were moving underwater. When he unlocked his door and entered his dark apartment, he had been expecting Theo to be waiting for him there, torn face and all, waiting to snatch him away from this world and carry him into whatever hell had inspired Harold Nesmith's work. And although there were no ghosts waiting in his apartment for him, there was a sense of tension in the air as he brought the book into his home.

He fell into his bed and was surprised to find that sleep came easily. He wasn't plagued by guilt at leaving his friend behind in order to save the book, nor was he kept awake in trying to understand why he had felt the need to save the book at the last moment. Sleep claimed him swiftly, even when a growing itch began to spread along the course of his chest.

It was this itching that stirred him awake shortly after five o' clock in the morning. He tore his shirt off and clicked on his bedside lamp. He glanced down to his chest and wasn't at all surprised to see that there was writing there. This time the writing was small and incredibly neat. It was full of punctuation, indents and eerily symmetrical spacing. The writing started at his collarbones and made its way down to his hips. And from what he could tell, the writing wrapped around his ribs and carried on along his back.

It then occurred to him that he had not thought to check his back for writing when he had come home despite the fact that it had been causing him excruciating pain at the library. Alex got up in a panic, almost screaming. But by the time he was in the bathroom with the light on and standing in front of the mirror, he was surprisingly calm. He looked at himself in the mirror and slowly started to read the words that encircled his body. After a while, reading backwards in the reflection and squinting at the small words became too much and his head started to ache.

As the sun came up, Alex dug through his bedroom closet and found a camera that he had only used once. He stood in front of the mirror and took pictures of his bare chest and the words that covered it. He spent the better part of an hour doing this, taking pictures from every possible angle to make sure he didn't miss a single word. He bent in awkward positions to get the words that danced across his back, not stopping until he knew he had captured every single word.

He called the university and cancelled his classes for the day. Then, over a bowl of cereal and cheese toast, he scanned the pictures into his computer. He pulled the first picture up, zoomed in on the text and started to jot the words down on a legal pad. By noon, he had managed to copy down the words from four of the pictures. His wrist was aching, but he didn't care. All he knew was that the itch had stopped and there was something incredibly powerful working through him as he copied the words down from the photos onto paper.

This time, there were no short phrases. Now the words along his chest, ribs and back seemed to be telling a story. He sat there and wrote all day until he had finally copied down every last word that had covered his body. And as he wrote down the ghostly graffiti, the itching became gentle, almost soothing. By the time he was done, the words that had been spread across his body began to fade away.

***

Alex had been so intrigued by the story that he had found written upon his body that it consumed the rest of his week. He didn't attend any of his classes, making up for his absences simply by putting his class assignments on the university's website. Alex spent two days in his apartment, reading the eight legal pad pages over and over again. He was very careful to read the story silently because he still remembered what had happened to the bird, to his landlord and to Theo.

He found himself trying to forget about Theo and what had happened behind the library that night, but it did no good. But when he went to the book sitting on his bedside table and flipped through its cursed pages, the pain of leaving his friend behind was washed away. Alex would stare at _A Collection of True Evils_ for several minutes on end, sometimes without even opening its cover. He would simply look at its cover and dream about the evil hands that had touched it and the remnants of the doomed souls that haunted its pages and any readers who set their eyes upon them.

He read the book slowly, taking it piece by piece. He wasn't really reading it so much as _studying_ it, getting familiar with Nesmith's style and the tormented individuals he wrote about. Some of their philosophies made a sordid sort of sense and Alex began to think that there was some tidy coherence to evil and its misunderstood nature.

When Friday night came around, he had considered calling the people in charge of that weekend's horror convention to regretfully cancel his appearance. In the end, he had decided not to. He had put too much work and thought into his speech and he'd most likely regret passing up the opportunity. So for the first time since bringing _A Collection of True Evils_ into his home, Alex worked on something else. He spent three hours revising his speech on Friday night and then went to sleep feeling somewhat relieved that he had been able to set the book aside, even if for only a few hours.

He awoke Saturday morning with an itch at his back. He checked himself in the mirror but saw no signs of text or other ghostly manifestations anywhere on his skin. He took a shower and checked his body over once more, but still found nothing. The itch came and went throughout the morning and by the time he was at the convention, he assumed that it could be a reaction of his nervous mind to public speaking. He'd never been much on giving presentations and even standing in front of a class of twenty college students sometimes sent his guts aflutter.

He managed to get control of his nerves just before it was time for his speech. He had locked himself inside the men's room and went over his speech one last time. Then, confident that he would do just fine, he returned to the convention and waited for his name to be called.

When the director of a new slasher flick called his name from the stage, a rather large roar of applause filled the room. Alex stood, smiling as politely as he could, and was very much aware of the weight of his speech as it rested in the pocket of his jacket. He walked to the stage, turned to the crowd and once again smiled out to the six hundred or so people in attendance.

He reached for the speech in his jacket pocket, but his hand froze as his fingers grazed the folded pages. As he stood in front of the crowd with a nervous smile on his face, the itch returned to his back. Then, just like the night behind the library where he had watched Theo die, Alex felt something tugging at him. He imagined the itch at his back as the places where the puppeteer had inserted the strings into his flesh. And now the hand that controlled him started to pull.

Alex dropped his hand from his jacket pocket, leaving his speech hidden there. The crowd before him waited, a bit impatiently now. "Sorry," Alex said. "I've got a bit of stage fright, I suppose."

A few muffled laughs sounded out from the audience. Alex cleared his throat and then thought of the book that sat on his bedside table. Then the hand that had been reaching into his jacket pocket for his speech dug into the left pocket of his pants.

He withdrew eight folded pieces of paper that had been torn from a legal pad in his apartment. He unfolded them and sat them on the podium. As he smoothed the pages out, he felt the itching at his back disappear. He looked down to his handwriting on the pages and smiled out to the crowd again.

The six hundred people in the audience continued to stare up at him, waiting for him to give his speech. Alex returned their gazes but all he could think of was the book on his bedside table, the bird at his window and watching his landlord die through a peephole.

His speech would have to wait for another day.

Today, he had a story to tell.

#  — TAKING QUINN HOME —

There was no official last call at Hole in the Wall. Sam had told anyone who cared to listen that he didn't believe in last call; any sort of schedule inside of a bar seemed contradictory to him. And while local law enforcement didn't agree with this policy, they never said anything to him.

I know Sam pretty well. I know that Sam named his bar Hole in the Wall because the place really was nothing more than an afterthought of shoddy construction, a tiny little building on the corner of the quietest block in our small Kentucky town. Unless you specifically looked for it, you'd easily overlook the thin red door that served as the bar's entrance as you passed through.

But inside, Hole in the Wall is charming. The bar itself is made of pine and the posts that run along the sides of the bar are made of fake oak. Sam always keeps eight beers on tap and another dozen or so stocked in his cooler. To appease stubborn FDA regulations, he serves food, too. He has one cook on his staff, an old man named Tony who will occasionally come out and drink with the customers. Everyone that comes through the door is always greeted with a smile and the farewells consist of a conspiratorial glance from Sam as he tries to decide if he should ask if you need another drink or if you're in any shape to drive home.

As inviting and warm as it may be, my clearest memory of the place is from a cold February night a little over three weeks ago. I was sitting at the bar, thumbing the cool sides of a bottle of Corona and listening to Sam talk to one of the two other late night patrons. I can remember hearing their voices while a faint wind sighed against the building. The wind carried a light drizzle of sleet with it, tapping gently at the bar's one window like stray salt falling on a kitchen counter.

"I never call last call," Sam was saying. "But it's Tuesday night, it's almost eleven thirty and it's sleeting. So I have to cut you boys off."

"Oh, c'mon, Sam," Kenny Masters said from the other side of the bar. "Just one more." I looked at Kenny and although he was clearly drunk, his face didn't show it a bit. Perhaps that's why Sam hesitated only slightly before refilling Kenny's Bud Light.

I was almost done with my beer; it was my sixth of the night and if I didn't get home soon, I knew that my wife would start to worry. It was very rare that I went out drinking anymore. But tonight was an exception, one that Anna had insisted upon. She had come home from work and found me in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed and crying over pictures of my brother.

I thought of my brother as I sat there cupping an almost-empty bottle of beer. I closed my eyes, silently toasted him for the hundredth time that night and then downed the rest of the drink in two gulps. My head felt wobbly and my legs didn't want to do anything active right away. Still, I pushed my empty bottle to the side of the bar and got to my feet. I steadied myself against the bar for a moment and Sam turned towards me, noticing the empty bottle.

"You okay?" he asked. "Can you make it home?"

"I'll be fine," I told him. This was the truth. I was nowhere near as drunk as I wanted to be and my house was less than three miles away. As long as I made it home before the sleet started to come down harder, I'd be okay.

With a cocking of his head, Sam motioned me to the far side of the bar. I did as he asked and walked to the far edge of the pine bar, further away from Kenny Masters and the other remaining man whom had said nothing all night.

When Sam and I were huddled at the end of the bar, Sam subtly gestured to the quiet man. "How well do you know him?" Sam asked in a whisper as quiet as the pelting sleet.

I glanced over to the man in question and although I knew his name and had seen him millions of times in town, I didn't know him all that well. His name was Quinn Overstreet and he worked on the maintenance crew at the small country club on the outskirts of town. On the few times I had seen him at Hole in the Wall, he had drank Guinness and kept quiet. That's all I knew about him.

I told Sam all of this and he nodded slowly. "Well, he lives out on the other side of Styer's Trailer Park," Sam said. "Back out in the woods on a small dirt road."

I nodded, vaguely aware of what road he was talking about. I was a bit relieved that this was Sam's reason for pulling me to the side. For a moment, I had feared that he'd mention my brother and give his condolences even though it had been three years to the day since he had died. Sam knew me well enough to know the significance of the date and the reasons I had come to Hole in the Wall that night.

"Anyway," Sam said, taking my train of thought away from my brother's death. "There's no way I'm letting him drive home. He's been in here since seven and he's had nine beers and four or five shooters. I should have stopped serving him, but damned if he doesn't look like he just lost his best friend."

"Are you going to have to drive him home?" I asked.

"It looks that way."

We both looked over to Quinn Overstreet. His was slightly slouched over, his eyes glaring down into his Guinness as if the solution to all of his troubles could be found there. He wore a faded black hat low on his head that shaded most of his face but his posture alone conveyed his misery.

"Look, Ben, I need to ask a favor," Sam said. "I'm taking Quinn home and I'm not too sure about getting my car down that dirt road with it sleeting like this. If you'd let me use your truck, I'll cover your tab."

I thought about it for only a moment. Sam was a good guy and I had absolutely no problem letting him borrow my truck to drive an inebriated customer home. Even without the trade of my bar tab, I would still have let him borrow it.

"Tell you what," I said. "Kenny might not be in driving shape, either. Talk him into coming along and the four of us will make a party of it."

Sam smiled and nodded to me. "Thanks, Ben."

And with that, Sam turned to Kenny and Quinn while I ambled towards the back of the bar in the direction of the restrooms.

By the time I returned, Sam had already killed the lights and had the two men waiting with him by the front door. Kenny was struggling with the left arm of his coat, perhaps a bit more intoxicated than I had originally thought. As I approached them, I saw for the first time that Quinn Overstreet was shaking. It looked as if he were simply cold at first, but as I got closer I saw that there was something more to it, some loose sort of shudder that ran through him.

I looked to Sam and saw that he had noticed this as well. The glance that Sam and I shared acknowledged that we both knew that we had to get Quinn home as soon as possible. If he was getting sick, it was something that neither of us wanted to deal with.

Sam led us out onto the chilly streets and locked the door behind us. As we made our way across the street to my truck, Kenny started humming some sad country song. As far as I could tell, he had not noticed Quinn's bizarre trembling yet. Apparently, Kenny hadn't put up much of an argument against being driven home in his state and I was thankful for that; a lot of the time, Kenny could be an irritable prick when he was drunk.

I handed Sam my keys and the four of us piled into my Ford F-150. I sat in the back of the cab with Kenny, allowing Quinn to have the passenger seat just in case he _did_ get sick on the way home and we had to pull over. Even as Sam pulled carefully out onto the streets—which had just begun to accumulate a faint gleam of the fallen ice—I could see slight vibrations in the seat ahead of me as Quinn continued to shake.

I heard Sam from behind the wheel, asking Quinn if he was okay, but Quinn didn't say anything. He just nodded and grunted a response. Quinn then checked his watch and seemed to get flustered about something for a moment. He managed to relax into the seat, casting his eyes out of the window and up towards the night sky.

"I don't want to go home," Quinn said softly, his face against the glass of the window. "Anywhere else, but not home...they've probably already been there. Probably too late..."

I saw Sam frowning as he took a left that would take us down a stretch of road that eventually led to Styer's Trailer Park. I was also frowning at Quinn's comment and wondered what parts of this man's life were so bad at home that he didn't want to return there on a cold night.

Sam apparently took Quinn's comment as drunken rambling because he didn't ask for an alternate destination. He kept driving down the road, the windshield wipers dancing as the sleet started to come down harder. To my left, Kenny was still humming to himself and now he was keeping some sort of random timing to his song by lightly slapping his knee to the beat of the windshield wipers.

I closed my eyes against all of this and thought about my brother. He had been one of five people to have died during the winter three years ago. For a period of a year or so, murmurs of a serial killer in town had been heard but in the end the brutal killings of those five people had been attributed to hungry wolves that had made their way down from the mountains.

After all, it happened from time to time; occasionally someone would hit a wandering wolf with their car as it crossed the road in search of something to eat. Hunters would often come across them in the woods while looking for deer. Following the first five killings that had included my brother three years ago, eight other local deaths had been blamed on stray wolves. The random style and bloody, butchered shape of the bodies fit perfectly. It made sense and the public, while distraught by the threat of random attacks of wolves, accepted it. Random wolf attacks were natural (albeit grisly) events but it was much more reassuring than the thought of a local serial killer.

It was a pointless and sudden way to die. I had always assumed that this was why I had never fully accepted my brother's death. He had been on his way home from work one night and had stopped by a small plot of land that he and his wife had planned on purchasing in the spring. They were going to build a house on it, were going to raise their two kids and grow old there. He had stepped out of his truck for some reason or another...maybe just to imagine his house sitting on that land. And then, several hours later, after his wife had reported him missing, his body had been found lying face down on the ground by his truck. His neck had been ripped open and the claw marks that had trailed down his torso and legs had left his skin in soft pink little ribbons.

I had seen this all first-hand. His wife had been catatonic upon receiving the news and I had been the one to identify the body. It was an image I saw too often in my head, usually on cold nights when I couldn't get to sleep or on the few instances when the cries of wolves sounded out from the distant mountains.

The image of my brother's mauled body forced me to open my eyes. While I hadn't quite drifted off, a few minutes had passed by pretty quickly. I looked out of the window and saw Styer's Trailer Park. I looked ahead and saw the reflective yellow sign that indicated a sharp right-turn ahead, the turn that would take us to the dirt road that Sam had mentioned earlier in the night.

It occurred to me then how quiet everyone was. Kenny was no longer humming and Sam was saying nothing. He stared ahead with intent, doing all that he could to drive cautiously through the sleet. Beside him, Quinn was still trembling slightly and I thought about the possibility of having to clean another man's vomit out of my seats and floorboards. But even Quinn's shaking was silent. The only sound was the pecking of the sleet and the radio at a very low volume, playing a Pink Floyd song.

Sam made the sharp turn with a slow ease and I saw him relax a bit when he was back on a straight stretch of road. The dirt road was probably another two miles ahead and would cut back into the woods, further away from town. I had never actually been down it before, so I kept my eyes peeled.

It was then that Quinn started to make what I can only describe as a gargled clucking sound. It almost sounded as if he was choking, but the loud exaggerated gasps of air that escaped from his throat betrayed that description. I instantly thought that he was going to throw up all over my dashboard but soon realized that the noises that were coming from his throat weren't that sort of sound either.

"Quinn, are you okay?" I asked from the back seat.

Sam looked over to him briefly, not wanting to take his eyes away from the road. "What's wrong? Quinn, do I need to stop the truck?"

Quinn said nothing. I sat forward, wanting to help in any way I could but not sure of what to do. Beside me, Kenny was sitting in this same fashion, trying to get a grasp of what was going on.

Sam was hunched forward again, almost pressed to the steering wheel and trying to stay focused on the road. "Your truck, your call, Ben" he told me. "What should I do?"

"How long is that dirt road?" I asked.

"Not very long. Maybe a little less than a mile long."

"Then don't stop," I said, looking through the windshield and into the thickening curtain of sleet. "Get him home as quick as you can without killing us."

Sam nodded and I could tell from where I was sitting that he wasn't too thrilled with the idea. I could see him torn between concentrating on the road and trying to keep a check on the retching sounds and the shaking coming from Quinn.

"Hold on Quinn," I said, trying to sound reassuring. "You're almost home."

And then, through his gasps or whatever they were, he let out a very winded _"No."_

Kenny was sitting rigidly in his seat now. If he had been drunk when he had hummed and tapped a drumbeat out on his knee, it was gone now. With each sound that Quinn made, Kenny cringed and pressed back into the seat, a bit more sober with each second.

"Jesus, what's wrong with him?" he asked

Sam and I said nothing because we had no answers. When Sam slowed and turned onto the thin expanse of dirt road that showed up on the left side of the road, my heart fluttered a bit but then dropped like a weight. In that moment, I knew that as soon as we pulled up in front of Quinn's house, we'd have to help him inside and then figure out what was wrong with him.

The road was in horrible shape and I was very glad that Sam had thought of my truck before trying to get his car down it. There were mud holes everywhere and although there was evidence that the road had once been covered in gravel, those days were long gone.

No more than fifty feet down the road, I felt the truck skid a bit as Sam drove across a patch of ice. He let out a curse but instantly righted the truck and slowly made his way further down. I glanced at Quinn and saw that his shaking had subsided a bit but the clucking sounds were still coming from his throat, a bit louder now. His head was still pressed against the glass and he was breathing heavily as he looked out to the trees with their iced-over branches, hanging down like skeletal fingers.

The truck skidded once more and I heard and felt the rear tires pulling extra hard for traction. The rear of the truck skewed to the left slightly but Sam once again managed to get it back on track. He glanced quickly into the rearview, giving me an _I don't know about this_ sort of look.

The sleet continued to pelt the truck and every bounce we took over some bumpy part of the road jarred my bones. One particular jolt we took temporarily stopped Quinn's bizarre sounds but they started again almost right away. I sat forward, intending to see if I could tell if Quinn was even fully awake or not but by the time I had managed to start leaning forward, Sam let out another curse from the front.

"Oh shit," he said, almost screaming it.

I felt the truck lurch to a sudden stop and then instantly felt the back end start to slide to the right in a much more severe motion that any of the other skids. I looked out of the windshield to see what had happened, but the world was spinning like a top as the truck went sliding in a complete circle. And as we slid in that circular motion, we also drifted to the right. I felt the bump as we hit the shallow ditch and then there was a cracking sound.

We finally came to a stop, and when I looked out of the window I saw that we were half in and half out of the road. The rear of the truck was sitting in the road but the front had jumped the thin ditch and had hit a small tree. The tree was bent at the point of impact but the steam rising from the hood of my truck told me that the damage had been mutual.

"I'm sorry, Ben," Sam said and I think he was shaking a bit as he said it, his nerves frazzled and his muscles tight from the wreck.

I was angry about my truck for a split second but then I put myself into Sam's shoes and the anger faded. "What the hell happened?" was all I said.

"A damned wolf jumped out in front of the truck. Two of 'em, actually."

Kenny was looking out of the windows for any sign of them. "You should have run the fuckers over," he said but there was fear in his voice, as if he thought the wolves could somehow get into the truck and attack him.

Sam started trying to get us out of the ditch but I knew within seconds that it was going to take some time. After thirty seconds of useless attempts, I knew that my truck was not going to be freed without the help of another truck. I also knew that with the sleet coming down, this would be next to impossible. If someone was going to pull us out, it would have to be done very soon.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and was not at all surprised to find that I had no signal in the woods. Just another disadvantage to living out in the sticks.

"Does anyone else live down here?" I asked.

I had hoped that Quinn would answer, but the only response I got out of him was another round of those throaty complaints. It was Sam that answered, not sounding very hopeful.

"There's a trailer next to Quinn's but the old man that lives there would probably shoot you for walking onto his property so late and ask questions later. Then there's Quinn's wife and kid. Your best bet would probably be to ask them to use their phone."

"Then that's what we'll do," I said.

"I don't think Quinn is in any shape to walk," Kenny said. "Me neither, for that matter. We'll all end up slipping and falling on our asses."

"He's right," Sam said. "Why don't I walk down there and see if I can get some help?"

"No, I'll go," I said without thinking. "You stay here with Quinn and make sure he doesn't puke all over my truck."

Sam looked as if he was about to argue, but Kenny interrupted him before he could. "What about the wolves?" he asked. "I doubt they ran off very far."

This question frightened me and I instantly thought of my brother and how he had looked when I had identified his body. I shrugged it off and did my best to hide the shudder that ran through me.

"There's an axe in the back of the truck," I said. "I'll take that."

"Ben," Sam said, "if the wolves come for you, I don't think an axe will be enough to fend them off."

"Leave the headlights on," I said, not sure if they'd even do me any good. "If you guys see them coming, blow the horn and scare them off. But I don't really think they'll come for me. Being almost hit by the truck probably scared them off."

I wasn't sure if this was true or not, but it _did_ make me feel safer.

Without any further argument, I grabbed the axe from the back of the truck. I had been splitting fire wood with it over the weekend and the back of the truck still smelled like cedar. I gripped the axe and actually felt much safer with it in my hands. I gave the three men in my truck a gaze that was meant to be comically scared but I don't know if they understood that.

I started walking down the dirt road and realized how short it was almost right away. No more than thirty seconds into the walk, with the faint glow of my headlights behind me, I spotted the unmistakable glow of a porch light up ahead. It twinkled like a star through the trees that surrounded me. The falling sleet that hit and then bounced from my clothes made the light seem surreal somehow. Still, with light on both ends of me, I couldn't help but cast my eyes to all sides, making sure that I wasn't being stalked by the wolves that had caused my truck to go sliding out of the road.

I was so trained on the edges of the woods and the promise of the porch light that I overlooked a mud hole directly in front of me. My foot went into it with an icy splash and I cursed under my breath, nearly dropping the axe. I found a better grip on the handle and was suddenly sure that the wolves _were_ spying on me. I could feel their eyes on me, colder than the sleet and the water that now soaked through my sock.

I rounded a slight corner and saw two trailers. Since the mailboxes were at the head of the dirt road, the only indication of which trailer was Quinn's was the truck with the town's country club logo on its tailgate. I looked beyond the truck and saw Quinn's trailer. His porch light was the one I had seen through the trees, and by its light I saw that his front door was standing open. To the left, about thirty yards away, was the old man's trailer that Sam had mentioned. There was a light on inside but I heeded Sam's advice and decided to head to Quinn's trailer despite the fact that there was not a single light on inside. Besides, the fact that the front door was standing open had me intrigued.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to peer through the falling sleet and murky night to get a better look at the front door. With a few more steps, I was almost able to see into the darkness within the house. The one thing I _did_ see clearly was a small blinking light, signaling from the dark inside.

If I had have used common sense, I would have recognized the weight in my stomach as fear and I would have turned around and headed back for my truck. But when I looked over my shoulder, the truck seemed too far away. After all, there was only about twenty feet between myself and the trailer. I looked ahead to the blinking light within the opened front door, my soaked foot now feeling heavy with the cold.

I tightened my grip on the axe as I passed Quinn's truck. I looked to the left, into the woods, sure that I'd see one of the wolves peeking out at me. But all there was too see were the silhouettes of sleet-specked trees. I then looked to my right and saw the yellow glare of the light that shone from within the neighboring trailer.

When I came to Quinn's open front door, the trailer seemed to open up to me like the mouth of some ancient tomb. Right away my entire body sensed that there was something wrong. The axe felt like concrete in my hands and my entire body seemed to have been enveloped by the frigid sensation that had overtaken my left foot from having stepped in the mud puddle.

I took a step inside and saw that the blinking light I had noticed was the digital readout from a phone. It was coming from the floor, having been knocked from a small end table. Puzzled, I reached out for the wall with a trembling hand (trying to convince myself that it was simply a result of the cold) and fumbled for the light switch. I found it, flipped it and winced at the sudden burst of overhead light.

When I opened my eyes fully, my stomach lurched before I even saw the scene in its entirety. I took a tentative step back and my legs suddenly felt weak and tired.

The living room was caked in blood. There was no other way to describe it. It was on the carpet, splattered on the walls, even dripping from one of the blades from the overhanging ceiling fan. Lying in the floor, in a heap of mess that I couldn't even begin to comprehend as being human remains, was Quinn's wife and son.

There wasn't much skin to be seen, only glistening deep red shades of blood and a few flecks of bone. There was a purplish looking coil in the pile that I couldn't seem to take my eyes away from until my brain realized that I was looking at human intestines. Upon this realization, I noticed the thick smell of spilled blood and what was probably feces.

My throat heaved and I tasted bile in the back of my throat. It took me a moment to remember how to breathe and when my lungs caught up, I slowly turned around, trying not to think of wolves tearing these people apart—trying to imagine how I would break the news to Quinn, a man I barely knew.

I turned and took a single step back outside. The moment I was back in the cold grip of the night, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Before I had time to prepare myself, to even properly register the movement to my right, a tremendous weight slammed against me and I felt myself being taken to the ground. My left arm landed awkwardly and I was lucky as hell that I didn't impale myself on the axe.

The first thing I was aware of was a stench that was vaguely familiar. It smelled like something that had died on the side of the road and it was directly in my face. Before I could even see it, I knew that it was one of the wolves that had darted out in front of my truck. Once my head was stable and my eyes were opened and alert, I saw a massive row of teeth in front of me. The positioning was strange though, the shape and weight of the thing somehow off.

I saw those teeth, felt that hot rancid breath on my face, and instinctively threw the axe up as a shield. I caught the wolf in its snout as it plunged its jaws down for my throat. It let out a grunt and while its weight shifted a bit, it was not enough to thwart its attack. Its teeth grazed my hand, tearing open the meat along my palm. The pain wasn't so bad and it was probably because I realized the futility of the situation. As I felt the weight of the wolf on top of me, I started to feel any sense of hope exit my heart. Still, I fought with it driven by instinct, scrambling and trying to shove it off somehow. As it reared its head back for another attempt at ripping out my throat, I felt the sleet pelting my face and wondered how pale my skin would be when my body was found. I thought of my brother and was saddened and angered at the same time. Was this the last thing he had seen before he had died? Had he been enveloped by this same helpless feeling of defeat?

I let out a cry that was somehow sad and bestial at the same time. I felt the wolf's mucus and drool on my face and saw its eyes for the briefest moment as it brought its maw down again. The eyes looked strange, full of knowledge and a maniacal intent. And as I braced myself for the pain of the attack, I felt one of the wolf's paws lose its grip against me. It swayed just a bit and I felt the shift of weight as the wolf fought for control against the falling ice.

When I felt the slight release of weight from my chest, I tilted the axe's handle upward in a hard jabbing motion. The handle caught the wolf directly under its chin and it let out a yelp as it tilted to the left and fell over. Wasting no time, I scrambled to my feet, nearly slipping on the slick ground and hefted the axe over my head. The wolf saw me bringing it down and did its best to get out of the way.

My aim was pretty good; I had aimed for the wolf's neck but caught it just below the right eye. The blade of the axe tore into its face and it wheeled away from me, howling in pain. I watched as it ran away and it was then that I realized why its shape and weight had seemed so wrong. I thought of that killer glare in its eyes and while the thought itself made no sense, some part of my mind put the pieces together. I watched it run into the woods and did my best to calm my heart.

I did my best to keep a rational mind as I thought to myself: _It looks like its walking upright_.

Feeling naked without the axe, I looked around and dashed towards the old man's trailer. The light was still on and the cry of pain from the wolf had apparently not been loud enough to be heard from inside. I dashed to the trailer and knocked loudly on the door.

On the second knock, the door eased open on its own with a wooden creaking sound. I looked at the door as if it had just spoken to me and then saw that two of its hinges had been strained and busted. I glanced inside, somehow sure that I would see the old man's body in the same shape as Quinn's wife and son. I pushed the door open a bit more and was nearly floored by the smell. It was the same wreaking odor that I had noticed at Quinn's after realizing the totality of the situation.

I didn't think that I could go through seeing a similar sight again. Besides, the smell was enough indication that the old man had been slaughtered too. And as I turned back into the night, running towards the headlights that still shined through the trees, I knew that the wolves had done this. They had done it to my brother and one of them had nearly done it to me.

As I neared the headlights, I kept seeing the wolf running away from me with the axe sunk into the side of its face. And no matter how hard I tried to ignore my original thought upon watching it, I still saw it as scrambling away on two legs.

When I reached my truck, my knees locked up and I felt my heart fluttering in my chest. The driver's side door was open and a bloody arm hung out.

I looked through the windshield and saw that the truck only contained one body. Not only that, but the upholstery on the passenger side was ripped to shreds and the back glass was cracked. When I walked around to the open driver's side door, I saw Sam's body lying in an awkward position, slumped in the floorboard. A large hole had been gnawed in his stomach and the left side of his face had been shredded. His bottom lip seemed to never end, stretching down into the open wound that used to be his neck.

Quinn and Kenny were nowhere to be seen although there was a great deal of blood in the places where they had been sitting. I thought of Kenny and how he had seemed afraid, as if the wolves would be able to climb into the truck with them. I then thought about Quinn and how he had begged to not go home. It was almost like he had known what they would find.

From behind me, I heard something rustling in the woods. I instantly imagined a wolf, walking upright like an enraged bear, closing in on me. I started whimpering then and, doing my best to not touch Sam's mutilated body, I crawled into the truck. I closed the door, set the electric locks and curled into a ball in the passenger seat.

At some point, something nudged the truck and I could feel it shake. I heard something that sounded like sniffing, and then a grunt. After that, there was silence. I sat there, the radio still playing classic rock and the heater still blasting warm air, staring at the small glow of Quinn's porch light through the trees.

I stared at it until the morning sun overtook it.

***

The morning after I had nearly been killed by a wolf, my wife called the police and reported me missing.

Afterwards, I was questioned by the police. The case against me was a good one: blood from both Kenny and Sam had been found in my truck. And while there hadn't been any traces of Quinn's blood, there were peculiar stains on the dashboard that turned out to be saliva. Probably Quinn's it was assumed.

After two weeks, there was still not enough to convict me. Although, given the brutality of the murders and my involvement with the victims, I think they could have put me away if they had really wanted to. Another roadblock in pinning a guilty sentence on me was the strange fact that Quinn's body had never been found. Also, since there had been none of Quinn's blood at the scene, he was seen as a suspect, too.

Oddly enough, seventeen days after the incident, Quinn turned himself in to the police, stating that he had killed Sam and Kenny. He had no problem admitting this, but swore up and down that he had not killed his family. In the midst of the questioning and the brief media circus in town, I got a phone call one evening at work.

"Ben, this is Harry Myers down here at the police department. I've got a strange request for you."

"What's that?" I had asked, already worried that they had somehow found another way to pin the murders on me.

"Well, Quinn keeps refusing his one phone call. But he's been asking us to call you for him for the past three days. I was wondering if you'd be willing to come down here and talk to him."

I had no desire to talk to Quinn. It seemed unreal to me that Quinn had killed Sam and then drug Kenny off into the woods. Hell, even after Quinn confessed several times and after the papers had printed the story, I'd had a hard time believing it. I didn't see how Quinn had mauled Sam's body so horribly. I could only see an animal doing something like that...a wolf, perhaps.

It was because of these curiosities that I found myself pulling up in front of the police department that evening. I checked in, signed a few forms and was then directed to a small cafeteria-like room. There were a few pairs of people speaking quietly to one another at separate tables. At the far end of the room, sitting alone with his hands clasped together as if in prayer, was Quinn.

He looked genuinely pleased to see me but as I neared him, I noticed how he kept looking at my left hand. It was still wrapped up in gauze tape from where the wolf had torn into my hand during the attack. It had taken twelve stitches and, all things considered, hadn't been that bad.

"I'm glad you came," Quinn said softly as I took the seat across from him.

I nodded, not sure of what to say. In the end, I was very direct with him. I had never known him that well, so I wasn't worried about being too blunt.

"It makes no sense," I told him. "Even if you _did_ kill them, I never heard a thing. And in the state you were in, there's no way you could have dragged Kenny's body into the woods during the time that I was gone. You were hammered."

Quinn tilted his head and shrugged. And once again, his eyes were on my wounded hand. "Did the wolf do that?"

"Yeah."

"You were damned lucky," he said. "I don't think anyone's ever gotten away from one before."

It seemed to me that he was stringing me along towards a conversation that would lead nowhere, so I was once again very direct with him. "Why did you want me down here?" I asked.

"To explain things to you."

"You don't have to explain anything to me," I said. "If you say you killed them, then that's fine. But I don't want to hear about it and I—,"

"But I tried to stop it," Quinn interrupted. "That's why I was at Hole in the Wall. I needed to get drunk as hell to keep safe. I had done it twice before, but it didn't work this time. It _almost_ did, but not quite."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him, deciding that I'd give him only a few more seconds before I walked away from his rambling. He was making no sense and was beginning to freak me out. But his next statement glued me to my seat and I could feel the hair on my arms begin to stand erect.

"I was there when your brother was killed," he said simply. "I didn't get drunk for that one. That was long before I found out that I could control it."

I was sure that my face had gone pale at his mention of my brother so I didn't even try to hide the shock. All I could get out was, "You were there?"

"I hate to say it, but I was part of it. Back then it was still new to me and I didn't know any better. I'd feel this pulling inside of me...really strong, especially when the moon was full. And by the time I would realize what it meant, it was too late. The man in me would kind of step away for a minute and this other thing took over."

I was gripping the sides of the table, wanting to call Quinn a lunatic because I saw where this was going. But at the same time, I saw that wounded wolf retreating from me, bounding away on two legs. I had seen the movies, had heard the bullshit legends about werewolves, but it wasn't until I was sitting there with Quinn in that small room that I gave the concept any real thought. The weight of the wolf on me as it attacked _had_ seemed weird s and the grunts and cries of pain that it had let out had sounded close to human. But still, the idea seemed too crazy.

I leaned in close to Quinn and said, "You mean to tell me that you're a werewolf?"

Quinn grimaced but nodded slowly. "It's not like in the movies. Some of it is right, but a lot of it is exaggerated. It does happen on the full moon. There was a full moon that night...remember? I don't think anyone really noticed it because of the sleet, but it was full. I knew it was coming, so I headed down to Hole in the Wall. I found out a few months back that whatever it is inside that triggers that change, it can't work right if you're drunk. But you and Sam wanted to help me out and get me home. I think if I'd had a few more drinks, everything would have ended out okay."

"What about your family?" I asked him, doing everything I could do to not lunge over the table and strangle him. _I was there when your brother was killed._

"I didn't know they were going to go for them," Quinn said and almost instantly there was the glistening of tears in his eyes. "I guess they caught on to what I had been doing and went after my family. But...Ben, I _hated_ it. I didn't like becoming that other thing. It was fun at first...really thrilling and exciting, but I'd see the people in my dreams and wake up not knowing if I was me or the wolf. I couldn't take it...but there's no getting out of it."

He then looked straight at me and said, "You'll find out soon enough."

I shook my head, wanting to cry, wanting to kill Quinn. But as I saw him look back to my bandaged hand, I felt my heart shudder in my chest.

"The next time the moon is full," Quinn said, "you're going to feel it pulling at you from inside." He then actually pointed to my bandaged hand. "They got you; you're one of us now. You'd have been better off if you had just let it kill you."

He then got to his feet and looked down at me with sympathy in his eyes. "I really am sorry about your brother. I'm sorry about what's going to happen to you, too."

He turned his back and walked away. I sat there, staring at the bandage on my hand and didn't say anything as he left through a door on the other side of the room. I eventually stood up and left, staring at the night sky on the way home and trying to estimate how many days were left before the moon would be full again.

***

I wasn't at all surprised to read in the paper two days later that Quinn Overstreet killed himself in his prison cell. On the morning I read it, I kissed Anna before she left for work and then headed to the calendar where I found that the moon would be full again in nine days.

I drove through town, passing Hole in the Wall which was now being run by Sam's older brother. I drove by the plot of land my brother had almost purchased before he had died. And then I drove to the outskirts of town, by Styer's Trailer Park and to the fringe of the dirt road that Quinn had lived down.

I have done this every afternoon since Quinn's revelation. I stare down that road and I _do_ feel something different inside of me, a weight that wants to sink whatever is left of my refusal to believe Quinn's story.

On occasion, I hear a distant howling coming from the mountains and I feel a longing in my heart that sickens me. I feel a tingling in my wounded hand and that weight inside gets a bit heavier. I can feel that pull at my heart and I don't want to fight it. So I bring images of my brother's body to the surface of my memory, hoping to stop the flood of inhuman thoughts.

But I am only sickened further when these images tweak my curiosity and I begin to wonder what the hunt must be like. And there is nothing I can do to stop the ache inside of me that responds to the distant howls and the excitement in knowing that I will soon be called to join them.

#  — ALL THE LITTLE SECRETS —

The yellow post-it note on Cecil's desk stood out like the sun in the dusk-like gloom of his office. He'd been staring at it for almost fifteen minutes; it was stuck to a tan colored folder, positioned delicately in the center of the folder with its simple message just as neatly centered.

TAKE CARE OF THIS.

That was all the post-it said, but Cecil hoped that by staring at it and wishing _really_ hard, he could somehow make the letters change to create some new meaning.

Sighing, he sat forward in his swivel chair and thumbed at the folder. His office door was open, allowing him a clear view of the offices beyond. It was 2:35 on a Friday which meant, as always, he was the last one in the office. Cleo, the secretary, left at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays because she was an intern. And Bansky and Johnson always left around two on Fridays to catch a round of golf. They even bailed out when the weather was miserable and Cecil assumed that they spent those days taking up space at one of the local bars.

Bansky and Johnson held his same role, shared his same responsibilities, but held a bit more power than Cecil. They didn't make much more money but they'd been at this longer, so they had some degree of seniority over him. While he loathed them and their casual attitudes regarding Friday afternoons, Cecil didn't blame them; if he ever made it to their level of the Business, he'd be doing the same thing.

He looked back to the folder and the post-it note that still stared back up at him with that same message: TAKE CARE OF THIS. Cecil wondered which one of the bastards had thrown this on his desk. Probably Johnson—he had a habit of ditching the more bothersome assignments on other people.

But this wasn't so bad. Cecil already knew what was in the folder and he also knew what he'd have to do in order to take care of it. He spent most of his Friday afternoons like this, taking care of things that either didn't fit into everyone else's shortened Friday afternoons or the really nasty stuff that could eventually bring the shit storm that they were constantly worrying about.

Cecil picked up the folder and stood up, looking through the tiny cracks in his drawn blinds. Determined rays of June sunlight peeked into the office, giving off a feeling of sunset. It made Cecil feel tired all of a sudden. He wanted to throw the blinds open, to let the sunlight into his gloomy world, but that was not allowed. One of the many rules of his job was to never leave the blinds open so that any curious eyes couldn't peek in. Other rules included taking the long way home and making all work-related phone calls no longer than thirty seconds. Cecil obeyed these rules by taking the subway home every day and hardly ever using the phone at work.

Despite the weight and importance of the folder he held in his hands—and the hundreds of other folders he had either filed away or destroyed during his two year career with the Business—Cecil led a dull life. No wife, no kids, no real ambitions or dreams. He'd once wanted to be a sports journalist, but it seemed to him that he had left that dream in some other world where people could open the blinds whenever they wanted and weren't always timed when they picked up the telephone.

Cecil walked from behind his desk, fighting the urge to peek outside. He held the folder up into the air and announced to his empty office and the cubicles and empty desks beyond, "I will now be _taking care of this_. While others are playing golf or flirting with a bartender, I will _take care of this_."

There was a brutal mockery to his tone and it made him smile. Too bad no one else was there to hear it. Staring into the empty space of the office beyond his door, Cecil tossed the folder through his doorway. The folder flapped open like a clumsy bird and its contents fluttered to the floor like rebellious feathers. Again, Cecil grinned at his unwitnessed defiance.

"Oops," he said with that same mocking tone. "What if someone were to see this? We'd be in some trouble then, wouldn't we?"

He walked out of his office and bent over to retrieve the contents of the folder. As he stacked the photographs and documents into a neat pile, he looked at them for the third time and was amazed at how easily something like this could be hidden from the public.

There were three photos and seven pages of official government documents to back up the authenticity of the pictures. Two of the photographs were from recent unannounced and very secretive space expedition to Europa, one of Jupiter's more interesting moons. The photographs showed the icy surface and the very faint steam that seemed to be rising from it.

But the third picture was Cecil's favorite and he knew that this was why there was such a to-do about the report in the first place.

The image was from the northernmost point of the moon and had been taken from a group of more than eight hundred pictures from a camera that had been drilled into Europa's icy surface and to the oceans beneath. The picture showed something very large, something with discernable eyes and very clearly defined fins along its side. Whatever it was, it dwarfed the blue whale.

This was all very confusing to Cecil. Why would the government want to keep these types of things a secret? Wasn't such a thing considered a miraculous discovery? Then again, these same people had also kept recent findings on Mars a secret (several small monitoring devices that had not been placed there by any governments on Earth), as well as evidence of the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx. It was all amazing, and Cecil had no idea why the public shouldn't be informed of such things.

But he supposed that his trusting nature and naiveté was why he had been placed in charge of _taking care of this_. He smiled as he placed the photo of the strange aquatic creature back into the folder. Behind him, he heard the phone ring, but he didn't answer it. The only calls he ever answered were from Johnson or Bansky, and Cecil guessed that they were on hole nine by now and wouldn't break away from their game just to check in on him.

Cecil walked past the desk where Cleo sat during the few hours she was at work and then down the hall towards the elevators. He approached them and pressed the DOWN button. When he stepped inside, he placed his fingers against the sensor along the far wall where a machine that he didn't understand registered his fingerprints. A small panel slid open in the wall when his prints were read and accepted, revealing a number pad. Cecil punched in the nine digit passcode and then felt the elevator begin to drop.

When the doors opened twenty seconds later, Cecil was hit with the smell of faint dust and grime. It was like a basement down here and the instant he stepped out of the elevator, he was always very aware of the fact that he was almost exactly a mile underground.

With the folder still in his hand, he walked to the right and then turned left, right, left and then right again. When he had first started working here, this trip had always been torturous. There were marvels behind every door that he passed, innumerable things that the public didn't know about. For instance, the cure for AIDS had been discovered in 1996 and upon this discovery, the doctor and his crew had been kidnapped. The crew had been killed and the doctor had been paid seven hundred million dollars for the formula. It now sat behind a locked door in several vials, waiting for the right time to be given to the public. When that right time would be, Cecil did not know.

Behind another door there was a hallway that led to an apartment-like domicile. Two families lived there, in separate quarters; they were the last surviving Mayans and they had been studying for countless years how to reconnect with the alien civilization that had given them the knowledge to build their calendar.

There was a drug in pill form that could cause telepathy, the mathematical equation (and, until he died, its theorist) that gave proof that time travel could very easily be achieved. There was also an entire chunk of the engine that had helped with the lopsided success of the Philadelphia experiment and hundreds of other treasures that Cecil couldn't even begin to understand.

He had once been asked to check on a woman who was locked away in one of the many domiciles. She was supposed to be able to stare at you for five seconds and know how you would die.

Cecil had been administering tests on her, and Johnson had constantly told him to not look her in the eyes. But she was an attractive woman and her supposed talent made her all the more alluring. Cecil had caught her looking at him, smiling. He had stared back at her and in the end, as Cecil and Johnson had left her quarters, she had stopped them as they opened the door.

"Would you like to know how you die?" she had asked.

Both Cecil and Johnson had turned back to her and knew that she was talking about Cecil. She was staring directly at him with something like respect in her eyes.

"C'mon, Cecil," Johnson had urged, pulling him by the sleeve. "Don't let her mess with your head."

But it was too late. The woman had seen Cecil's intense interest and had asked once more. And there was something in her look, something in the peculiar way that she asked her question that halted Johnson's argument. In that moment, even _he_ wanted to hear what else she had to say.

"Would you like to know how you die?" she asked Cecil again.

"Yes," Cecil said, nodding slowly.

The woman had looked to him solemnly and remained quiet for a moment as a single tear had trailed down her pale cheek. "You don't," she answered with a shaking voice. "My God, it's so beautiful."

That had been the most significant moment in Cecil's life. It hadn't been when he had lost his virginity in the back of a car to a prostitute that had easily been twenty years older than him; it had not been the first time a woman had willingly put her mouth on him; it had not been when he had thought he had found God while sitting in the silent stillness of his father's funeral; it had not even been when, after having worked for the Business for eight months, he had checked in on the extraterrestrial being that lived down here—the only real surviving "little green man"—and it had gently touched his hand and Cecil had seen the universe in its entirety from one ever-expanding edge to the other.

None of that had come close. It had been seeing the prophetic woman weeping at a beauty that Cecil would possibly never see. He didn't know if it had stuck with him because of her joy or because she had essentially promised him immortality in some way. But he sometimes saw her face when he drifted off to sleep and he wondered how she would die and, in her last moments, if she would envy him. Sadly, he liked to think that she would. No one had ever envied him before, nor had they coveted anything he had.

That was why he sometimes wanted to go public with all that he knew. If the kids that had bullied him in high school knew about his job, surely they would be envious. If all of those women who had shrugged him off in college were aware of the life altering things that he knew, surely they would be awed by him and his ability to keep his cool.

The folder in his hand was a key example of this. And as he came to the door that would lead him into a filing system full of artifacts like the photos and documents he now carried, he suddenly found himself wondering how he _had_ kept his wits together in the presence of all of this knowledge. He knew things that only a dozen people across the world knew and had seen things that would cause God Himself to tremble.

And as for God, Cecil knew that there was no definitive proof of its existence, but he could remember seeing the universe in one sweeping motion when his hands had touched the hand of the little green man (he was actually more of a beige color, to be truthful) and there had definitely been some sense of an architectural design to everything.

Cecil unlocked the door in front of him and stepped in. He found it amazing that with all of the secrets and possessions that they had tucked away from the world, the Business couldn't dish out the money to buy new filing cabinets. There were only two of them in the room, standing against the rear wall like fossils from another time. They were emptied twice a month, their contents taken somewhere else within the building where they were reviewed by an unseen boss-type that Cecil, Johnson or Bansky had never seen. From there, no one knew where the documents went. Bansky thought that they were probably burned or shredded. Johnson thought that they were sold to the highest bidder and then integrated into some sort of Secrets of the Universe Society. While Cecil agreed with Bansky's view, this was another matter in which Cecil really had no interest.

Cecil flipped through the appropriate drawer and found the section titled "Space Anomalies Within the Solar System" and filed the Europa photos behind the evidence of pyramids on Mars.

He shut the drawer softly, left the room and trekked back down the hallway. He reached the end of the hallway and came to a very slow and uncertain stop where two halls intersected.

To head back to the elevator, he needed to turn left. But instead, he hesitated and looked to the right. Seven doors down, beneath the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, was a door that he had hoped to one day walk through again. He wondered why he didn't walk down there now...just knock on the door and hope to be invited in.

He felt certain that she would remember him. The way she had let that one stray tear out that day, it was as if she had never wept before in her life. And whatever she had seen—whatever the cause of his apparent immortality—it had been beautiful.

Of course she would remember him.

He took a step in that direction but then stopped again. What if she saw something different this time? What if whatever cosmic force that held things in place had altered some miniscule path that had set a different chain of events in place since he had spoken to her? What if she saw something different now, not something beautiful and awe inspiring, but something dark and brutal?

He felt that way sometimes, as if there were a shadow lurking not behind him in the throes of sunlight, but above him, waiting to be thrown down like a discarded moon onto his head by a god that he had not yet chosen to believe in or deny.

What if she saw something new this time, some concrete end to his days?

Turning away from that enticing door, Cecil wondered why she was even here in the first place. He knew that there was validity to her claims; she had given one hundred and eighty-nine predictions before being confined here and had only missed one. And in that case, she had only been wrong because it wasn't the shotgun blast that had killed the victim, but the fall down the stairs that resulted in the shotgun blast.

He pushed her predictions to the side, even her prediction for him, as he came to the elevator. He thought that the woman could make a killing at state fairs and small freak show circuits. He couldn't really see how she fit in with the detrimental secrets that the Business kept hidden here. How was it dangerous for the public to know how they would die? For that matter, who was to say that anyone would really take her word for it?

But he thought about her voice and how it often trailed behind his dreams as he slept: _"My God, it's so beautiful."_

Cecil stepped into the elevator and punched in the code again. As the elevator began its gradual rise, he wondered if Johnson or Bansky had ever visited the woman and discovered how their lives would end. And if so, how could they spend their time playing golf, strategically thinking out a shot from the rough as their minds were burdened with the secrets behind the locked doors they had left at work...back at work, where Cecil was all by himself.

_All by myself,_ Cecil suddenly though.

When the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open in front him, Cecil did not move. He stood there, motionless, staring out into the empty offices.

He saw the plant on Cleo's desk, its neglected brittle leaves barely spilling out of the ceramic pot. He saw the vacant offices where Johnson and Bansky worked. He saw telephones and coffee machines and boxes of printer paper that had the capability to hold either the drawings of a three year old or the secrets of the world.

He then heard a voice in his head, one that he knew well.

_It' so beautiful_.

When the elevator doors inched shut once more, Cecil reached out and pressed the code in again. He closed his eyes as the elevator hummed around him and descended. He kept them closed until the elevator stopped and the doors opened onto the maze of hallways.

Cecil walked immediately towards the woman's door. He knew that there were cameras currently filming his actions, but he didn't care. According to the woman, he would never die; so what harm could possibly befall him when the Business found out that he was paying her an unassigned visit?

"I'm _taking care of this,_ " Cecil said defiantly as he neared the door.

He slowed his pace a bit as he approached the woman's room. It seemed as if time had jumped somehow, as if he had been propelled forward by some invisible hand from the elevator to the door within the matter of a split second.

He looked to the unmarked door and listened for any noises on the other side. He thought of enormous aquatic creatures on one of Jupiter's moons; he thought of dying plants on office desks; he thought of sentient beings that could conjure up images of the universe with a simple touch.

He thought of a life unlived, spent covering up secrets and filing them away in small metal drawers.

Cecil raised his hand and knocked.

#  — FAREWELL, FROM THE ELEVENTH HOLE —

Until recently, the closest Tony Laggerty had ever come to playing golf was when he and a few of his friends had gotten drunk on a Sunday afternoon and headed over to the local driving range. They had gone with a set of clubs that had been setting in Tony's basement ever since his father died and had passed them on to him in his will. Twenty minutes into their session, as the result of a drunken tee-off, his driver had bent at its shaft and thus ended the afternoon.

The memories he had of the afternoon seemed hazy at best, like a flickering mirage that rose up from the green and ignited a manual form of déjà vu. As he stood at the tee for the par 4 eleventh hole of McDougall Greens, he wondered what those friends were doing right now.

God, it seemed like forever ago. He didn't necessarily miss his friends from that time in his life (in all honesty, they had mostly been losers), but he _did_ miss the fact that at that age—the blur of years between fifteen and twenty—you were still allowed to be naïve about everything life threw at you.

But those thoughts were too much for him, so he shut them down. He focused on the tee and the rolling green ahead of him. The sun beamed down on him with a heat that seemed spiteful. Sweat rolled down his brow and he could also feel it trickling down his back. He felt the fabric of his Nike polo soaking it up. What was he doing wearing a polo anyway?

For that matter, why was he out here at all?

Then he heard the voice of Dr. Gorban, his voice like the sound of teeth scraping across ice cream: _Most people—men especially—deal with death in unique ways. Don't stay cooped up in your house. Get out, go fishing. And if fishing isn't your thing, maybe you should try golf._

So he had. He'd always wanted to try it out and besides that, there was something about the way the expanses of green rolled out along a perfectly designed route that spoke to him. There was a delightful symmetry to the course, but there was also chaos to be found in its midst in the form of bunkers and brilliantly placed water hazards.

Still, as he gripped his driver and settled into the stance he had learned from the single lesson he had taken three days ago, he wondered what Debra would think of him. If there was a Heaven—and Tony liked to believe that there was—and if she was looking down on him, she was no doubt having a laugh over seeing him in a polo and a sun visor. And the goofy shorts.

God, he felt stupid. But if Dr. Hobart was right, then it was worth it. Ten months had passed since Debra had passed away and he had not gone a single day without crying for fifteen minutes on end. Sometimes when he woke up in the morning, he would roll over and still feel her there. The imprint she had left on the pillow during her last night of life had lost its shape since then but Tony would find himself trying to recreate it with his hands and his elbows.

He knew it was pathetic and he was willing to do anything to get beyond it.

So, here he was. And he hoped he didn't look as stupid as he felt.

With a smile that was half enjoyment and half sadness, Tony took his swing. His approach and aim were solid, something the instructor had been impressed with right away. He watched the ball sail into the air until it became nothing more than a white speck against the baby blues of the sky. Squinting against the sun, he followed it and watched it slowly drop.

"I'll be damned," he muttered, when he realized how accurate the shot was going to be. He watched it drop and could barely see the ball as it hit the ground two hundred and seventy yards ahead of him. It took a few bounces and then rolled.

Surely his eyes were being tricked by the glare of the sun. From what he could see, his ball was no more than fifteen yards away from the hole. He had never shot with such accuracy on anything other than a par 3. And even then—when he had been only twelve yards shy of a hole-in-one—he had convinced himself it had been nothing more than luck.

Tony marched slowly towards the hole and his ball, lugging his meager club set with him. He didn't see the point in using golf carts or caddies. Part of the reason he was beginning to enjoy golf was because of the scenery and he preferred to walk the course. Of course, his back would complain about it later on, especially from carrying the clubs over his shoulder.

He thought of Debra as he neared the ball. He tried to imagine her on a golf course, her strawberry blonde hair in a pony tail with a pink visor wrapped around her head. It wasn't hard to imagine her settling in for a putt, slightly tilting her butt in the air in a purposeful pose.

Sighing, he looked around. He heard voices behind him but nothing ahead of him. There were other players two holes behind him but from what he could tell, McDougall Greens were pretty slow today. He liked it that way. In a small community such as this, the chances of him running into someone he knew were pretty good and he was hardly ever in the mood to talk anymore. Especially about Debra. And oddly, she was the topic everyone wanted to speak about at all times.

We sure miss Debra.

Debra was a great woman.

Oh, I remember that amazing casserole Debra made last Thanksgiving.

Tony tried to shake it all out of his head. He selected his putter, lined up with the ball and struck it without much aim. Still, to his amazement, the ball curved slightly to the left and fell squarely in the hole.

_My first eagle_ , Tony thought. _Look at that..._

With a slight sense of pride, he bent down and retrieved the ball. When his hand fell upon it, a voice came out of nowhere and Tony nearly screamed.

"...and you can't afford to miss this sale as we cut our entire inventory in half!"

He looked around frantically, but there was no one within sight. He could barely hear the muffled voices of the party two holes behind him; none of those voices were loud enough to be mistaken for what he had just heard. The voice had been firm, crisp, and had sounded as if the voice from which it had come had been directly beside him.

In all honesty, it sounded like it had come from the cup. Tony found himself looking into it as if it were a well. But it was only several inches deep, a standard and totally unremarkable hole. His ball still sat there, waiting to be pulled out.

He gave the hole a confused look, certain the voice had come from inside of it. It had been crystal clear and the more he thought about it, he began to think of those tacky putt-putt courses where speakers were rigged all along the course: maniacal laughter after sinking a putt on the hole adorned by a clown; the roaring of a lion from the hole that was decorated as a safari.

Was there some sort of odd advertising campaign going on for local companies around McDougall Greens? And even if so,—even if what he had heard had been a strangely conveyed commercial for a local company—why had it frightened him so badly? Why was his heart still stammering? And why had he only caught a fragment of it?

Tony shook it off as best he could. He retrieved his ball, returned the putter to the bag and walked onwards towards the twelfth hole. He knew that when he thought of Debra so intensely he often managed to depress himself. Perhaps this time some other trigger had been pulled. Maybe he was finally losing it, giving in to the grief that had been pulling at him like a tide trying to drag him out into a depthless sea.

He bogied the twelfth hole, pared the thirteenth and sped through the remainder of the course without even paying attention to his score. After all, he was out here as a form of therapy, not as a pointless competition with himself.

As he made his way through the course, he caught himself peeking into each hole, awaiting that odd commercial-like voice to come to him again. Of course, it never did.

Done with the course, he headed to the clubhouse where he had a beer by himself at the end of the bar. He paid his tab and headed out to the parking lot. As he walked towards his car, he kept hearing the segment of conversation he had heard from the cup of the eleventh hole.

...and you can't afford to miss this sale as we cut our entire inventory in half!

As he pulled his keys out of his pocket, Tony saw Wes Anderson getting out of his car on the other end of the lot. He and Wes had been pretty close at one point. Tony and Debra had often spent many Saturday nights with the Andersons, going out to eat or to bars. After Debra had died, Wes and his wife had come by to visit him twice a week. Wes still called him from time to time. After a while, Tony stopped answering the calls.

Tony walked to the left, away from his own car. He didn't want Wes to see him; he really didn't feel like having an obligatory conversation about his dead wife with someone who wanted to make sure that he was "doing okay". Tony lugged his clubs all the way to the opposite end of the parking lot and then walked slowly back towards his car when he was sure that Wes Anderson was out of sight. When Wes was gone, Tony hurried to his car, tossed his clubs in the trunk and sped out of the McDougall Green parking lot.

***

He felt the tears coming and he knew that when they decided to spill, he would not be able to stop them. He was only ten minutes away from home and he prayed that he'd be able to hold it in until then.

He came to a stoplight and idled behind a truck with a loud exhaust. Tony messed with the radio, trying to find a station with an upbeat song. Hopefully a familiar and catchy song would get his mind off of Debra and trick his body into not wanting to cry.

He shuffled through a classic rock station playing "Stairway to Heaven," and then through a pop station playing a terrible teeny-bopper love song, then past a crazed right-wing radio host ranting about foreign policy.

The light turned green. The loud truck ahead of him slowly rolled forward. Tony pressed the SCAN button on the radio and let the radio look for stations on its own as he drove ahead. In front of him, the truck was moving at a turtle's pace. Peering ahead, Tony could see that the driver was talking on a cell phone.

Tony lifted his hand to honk his horn.

To his left, a blaring sound tore through the filtering of radio stations from within Tony's car. With a sudden jump, Tony quickly looked in that direction. He saw a van speeding down the road, hurtling towards the intersection with its hazard lights blinking. The van's driver was pushing down on the horn frantically. His mouth was opened in a misshapen O of alarm.

Tony froze for a second. His brain tried to register what in the hell was going on and by the time he put the pieces together, it was too late.

Tony's body finally unfroze itself and he reached out to throw his car into reverse in order to allow the panicked driver of the van full access through the intersection.

"Maniac," Tony muttered nervously as his hand fell on the gear shift.

But even then he knew there was no use. As he pulled at his gearshift, he heard the squealing of the van's brakes over the insistent blaring of the horn. Tony looked to his left and saw the van's orange hazard lights zooming in on him. For a single moment, Tony's world was nothing but a glowing orange void, blinking in and then out of existence.

The radio rifled through more stations: country western, a cliched modern rock band, another classic rock station...

When the van plowed into the side of his car, the orange that was Tony's world somehow became the rolling grounds of McDougall Greens. Shades of green and blue stretched on forever. Plump white clouds rolled by and every blade of grass seemed perfectly aligned.

A sudden sharp pain tore him away from this illusion and when the real world was there again he was somehow lying half-in and half-out of the driver's seat. His head was a mound of nothing but pain and he could feel his own warm blood gushing down his face, down his neck, and it seemed to never stop coming. Broken glass lay scattered around his head and he could feel flecks of it on his face.

He heard the ticking of his engine and the steam from something that had busted under the hood. He tried to lift his head, to move his body, but there was nothing. He opened his mouth to scream but all that came out was blood, a piece of tooth and a strained breath.

The radio went on and on, looping the same stations back through the demolished car.

Tony thought of the whacking sound a perfectly placed drive made, thought of how the golf ball became a speck of white nothing as the sky claimed it for its own for just a single moment.

He thought of Debra as the darkness approached him. He thought of the Heaven that he hoped beyond hope was there. He thought of Debra waiting for him and of the expansive greenery and endless skies that surely awaited him there.

He then thought of the eleventh hole on McDougall Greens. Not because it was on his mind as he died, but because of what came on the radio as the SCAN function continued to do its duty.

Through the pain and the rapidly gathering darkness, Tony heard it well, blaring from his speakers: _"...and you can't afford to miss this sale as we cut our entire inventory in half!"_

Then the station changed and there was only darkness. And as it came, Tony still saw that simple hole, the eleventh hole, the hole that had spoken to him, the hole that had given him a glimpse of his future, the hole that had let him prematurely hear the sound that would mean his death.

He thought of that hole and admired the way it was perfectly cut out of the ground. Everything about golf, after all, had seemed perfectly symmetrical to him. It was part of its allure.

He gazed into that hole almost lovingly, waiting for the sound of the ball to drop.

#

#

— END CREDITS —

As the rest of the moviegoers got to their feet and marched into the aisle, Jason remained in his seat. He reached into the interior pocket of his coat and withdrew the small pad that was there. A black pen clung to the cover, its cap slightly chewed on.

He listened to the people as they exited, whispering about the movie or what they might do for the rest of the night. There were chuckles and coughs and the squeaky sound of sneakers on the sticky theater floor.

He listened to all of this but he kept his eyes on the screen. The movie was over and the credits were rolling. Jason watched the names of actors scroll upward and uncapped the pen. He flipped the notebook to the first blank page he came to and waited patiently.

Within a few seconds, the small audience had exited the theater. Jason sat in the darkness, watching the screen diligently. He smiled when he realized he was alone; he thought of his father and it was almost as if the old man was there with him.

He waited through a flood of useless names and then, located between the titles for the music and the obligatory thank-yous to the filming locations, Jason saw what he was looking for.

Twelve words rolled by, words that should not have been there.

Jason scribbled the words down into his notebook and then returned it and the pen into his jacket pocket. He exited the theater with urgency in his step. When his foot crushed a stray piece of popcorn on the floor, he thought it sounded like the splintering of bones.

***

He sat in the back of a cab as the driver made his way through late night New York City traffic. Horns blared and lights seemed to shine from every direction. A light rain fell like the gentle drumming of liquid fingers on top of the cab.

Jason took out the notebook and thought of his father. His father had been a short man, slightly overweight, and had worn a pair of glasses that made his eyes appear enormous. Jason had memories of his father projected onto his brain like a frozen movie still that never flickered from the screen. He saw his father peering into a camera, directing people, criticizing the efforts of his actors, shunning the lousy kiss they had just filmed, even yelling at the catering crew about stale bagels. And through it all he would pull at the long white beard on his face as if he were milking it for inspiration.

His father, Val DeSade: the director that Hollywood had at first embraced and then kicked out their back door. Two hit movies had put him in their good graces but then the third film had been released and it had been far too dark for general audiences. The fourth one was the one that had alienated him, though. It had been edited three times and could still not get anything lower than an NC-17 rating.

This was not because of the sex (although there was quite a bit of it) but because of the subject matter. It was too morbid, too dark, too gruesome. Following his fallout with Hollywood, Val had packed up his belongings and moved back to New York. He spent eleven years shooting in discreet locations, paying unknown actors very little and distributing his movies in theaters that usually only showed porno or specialty movies. Over time, the films garnered a cult following on VHS and DVD and were usually shopped around through underground circuits or the internet. Most of his fan base was comprised of Satanists or the goth-trendy sheep that loved the culture but were not quite so ballsy as to accept the dark arts.

Despite the brief glamour and the memories Jason had of his father's success, the memories that remained the strongest were of his final bedridden moments of life. His signature beard had been unkempt, sitting on his face like a strange hairy tumor. He hadn't bathed in days. His enormous eyes peered through his thick lenses but despite their enormity, they had been lifeless.

During his final days, Val had watched mainstream horror classics like _The Shining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ and _The Exorcist_. He had watched the entire Romero collection as well as Argento's work. On the night he had died, he had been watching _Suspiria_.

Jason remembered that night far too well. He could still see his father looking absently to the ceiling, as if contemplating the Heaven that he had always scoffed. Val had spoken to Jason without making eye contact, telling a secret that he had managed to keep for most of his life.

"The secret to it all," he had said, "is in the credits. I placed the instructions in the credits, all broken up. You must watch them all, in order."

"Instructions to what?" Jason had asked him.

"The work. A way to reach the Dark that my movies speak of."

"I don't understand."

"When I'm gone, you must find the instructions. Watch the films in the order of their release. After you watch each one, go to the cellar of The Falcon. You will understand."

Jason had wanted to ask more questions but it seemed that his father, in typical movie fashion, had expelled his final breaths to give these details. Val DeSade gave one last shuddering breath as his body succumbed to the cancer he had been diagnosed with seven years earlier.

Jason had taken his father's hand and knelt by his bedside. He used the remote control to kill the TV and sat there in the darkness with his father, as if sitting in a darkened theater waiting for a movie to begin.

***

Jason stepped out of the cab and sprinted up the apartment steps towards his door. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, making his way quickly through his house. He didn't bother cutting on a light.

He made his way into the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer and reached inside. He grabbed the butcher's knife, studied it for a moment and then placed it into the pocket of his coat where the pad and pen remained.

He left his apartment quickly, throwing up the hood of his coat as he did so. The rain falling on the hood sounded like the light applause of an appreciative audience. This made him think of his father and how Hollywood had shunned him because of his vision. His father had never gotten to experience a crowd roaring with applause for one of his films. He had never had the chance to parade upon a stage and awkwardly accept a meaningless award. It made Jason incredibly angry and sad.

The walk to The Falcon took him twenty minutes. Like the block on which it was located, it had been forgotten by the city. Back in the 80s, it had shown several Val DeSade films and had become something of a meeting place for enthusiasts of the dark arts. As the 90s came along, DeSade's work had still been shown there, mingled in with morbid Japanese horror films and torture porn.

The place had become quite controversial and its end had been imminent. Cops would raid it on occasion to find women soliciting sex, gothic couples engaged in bondage acts and full blown orgies taking place in the back rows. The thing that really caused the eventual condemnation of the place occurred in '94 when a cult was caught sacrificing a dog in the aisles. In their midst was a thirteen year old girl that had been reported as kidnapped two months before. The girl had been bruised and severely catatonic upon her rescue.

As the crumbling shape of the building come into view through the falling rain and glare of streetlights, Jason grew nostalgic. He had been fifteen then, old enough to be interested in those depraved acts but not brave enough to participate. Even his father had warned him against such things and had ordered him to stay away from that culture until he was certain that he could handle it.

Jason came to the front of the building and observed the cracked glass. The tiny marquee inside the ticket booth was crooked and dusty. Some of the letters hung loosely from it like broken teeth. Still, it was readable:

THE FALCON

ADMISSION - $3.00

SATURDAY SEE VAL DeSADE'S

"TASTE OF SIN" for $2.00

It was eerily satisfying to see his father's name up there. He looked away from it with respect and went about his business. He walked around the corner and trailed down the side of the Falcon, coming to the rear of the building. All of the doors were boarded up but it was no secret that those committed to his father's work had been congregating here for the better part of ten years. Here, at the back of the building, a single broken window stood out above a dumpster that the city had forgotten or neglected to remove.

Jason scaled the dumpster and carefully leaned against the building. He reached up, found a grip on the brick windowsill and pulled himself up. This was the same window that many others used from time to time. It was always left open, allowing an easy entrance into the theater.

Inside, he found himself in the hallway behind the projectionist booth. Thin streaks of musky moonlight filled the place through the broken window. He followed this hallway until he came to a short row of stairs that emptied into a small lobby where, once upon a time, popcorn and sodas had been sold. From here, he walked into another hallway, this one taking him by a supply room and to the door that led to the cellar.

He followed a set of wooden stairs down into the dark dampness of the cellar. At the bottom of the stairs, he reached beneath the last step and withdrew the candle and lighter he had brought with him on his first trip here. That had been six years ago, yet he easily recalled the sense of awe and dread that had filled him as he had made that inaugural march down the stairs.

Smiling, Jason lit the candle and stepped into the center of the room. As the wavering light from the candle slowly melted the darkness away, the shadows seemed to move of their own accord, seeking out the more comfortable confines of the darker corners of the cellar. They moved with such purpose that Jason had often wondered if they weren't shadows at all but the souls of the damned that had stayed behind, sensing some great purpose within this place.

The soft candlelight revealed very little, but it was more than enough to serve Jason's purpose. He withdrew the knife from his jacket pocket and approached the far wall. He ran his hands along it, examining the words that he had carved into the neglected concrete on his previous trips.

The words from tonight's film were in the pad within his pocket, but he didn't need them. He had been reciting them in the back of the cab as he had reminisced about his father and as he had walked to the Falcon.

He carved those words into the wall slowly, reading the other lines as he worked. The words weren't _instructions_ as his father had suggested, but rather some sort of chant or incantation. Jason spoke the fragments of it aloud as he carved. He only had two more movies to watch until it would be complete. It would take some time; it wasn't very often that one of his father's movies was shown anymore. And his father had been crafty enough (and perhaps traditional enough, as well) to only include these hidden phrases in the authentic film reels; they had been removed for transition to VHS and DVD.

Still, Jason he knew the day would come when the task would be complete. He felt the certainty of it every time he came down here to engrave the words.

He slashed the final line of that night's fragment into the wall and waited.

When blood began to ooze from the dusty concrete walls, he smiled. It came from the fresh lines he had just carved, trickling down in thin rivulets. Above these words, the previous lines glowed with furious orange light.

From some far off distance, he heard a guttural moaning sound. It was a monstrous sound, anxious and impatient. And behind it were the cries of a hundred throats, voiceless yet speaking volumes of pain, loss and agony.

Jason remained there a moment longer, making sure that the source of that terrible sound was not in the cellar with him. He always tried to ignore the hesitant need within him that wanted to partake of whatever wretched knowledge those voices knew. But it was there, a growing need to understand and embrace the darkness, hiding in plain sight within his troubled heart.

Giving the words, the blood and that sinister orange light a final glance, Jason blew out the candle. He placed it back under the stairs and walked back up to the lobby with the echoes of the moans and growling resonating in his head.

A s he made his exit, he looked towards the front ticket booth and hesitated. The urge to take the miniature marquee from the ticket office was a strong one, but he resisted. In a way, The Falcon was his father's tomb. And if this were the case, the little marquee was his epitaph.

Jason left it there in respect for the dead.

And as a dark promise for the future.

#  — LUNATIC MILE —

A wail of pain swept so suddenly through the house that Rosetta nearly dropped the plate of roast beef that she was carrying to the table. She cut her eyes to the right, towards the hallway the cry had come from. Frowning, she set the plate on the table next to the potatoes and carrots.

Her two grandchildren eyed the meal with mixed reactions.

Gabrielle, the youngest, wouldn't eat much of it but Rosetta kept hoping that the girl's appetite would eventually change. Gabrielle had a taste for flesh, but not of roast, steak or burger. On occasion, she would eat chicken, but it had to be freshly killed and raw. When her hunger pains grew too extreme, Gabrielle would gnaw at her own body. Several months ago, she had started with the pinky of her left hand. That hand now only contained a ring finger and the lower half of her thumb from which a small shard of brilliant white bone poked through.

There was a mangled portion of muscle on her upper arm where she had recently begun testing her palette on other areas.

Victor, her grandson, wasted little time with the roast, however. The boy was fourteen and weighed three hundred and twenty pounds. He sliced into the large roast, taking half of it and setting it onto his own plate where he picked it up with his hands and shoved it towards his mouth. He ate like a glutton, barely chewing the meat and swallowing it in chunks that nearly made him gag.

"Slow down," Rosetta muttered to him, rolling her eyes. She did not like resenting one of her grandchildren, but there were times when she found herself very close to hating the boy.

She pulled out her chair to take her place at the table, but the screaming sound came from down the hallway again. Rosetta sighed, smiled reassuringly to the children and got up from the table.

She walked down the hallway slowly, her old knees begging to sit down for a bit. She had been on her feet all day and her seventy-five year old frame was getting to the point where even standing for prolonged periods of time was a task.

She heard a light gasping coming from the room at the end of the hall, followed by a retching sound. As she neared the door, another resounding scream filled the house. It was a man's voice, but with this third scream it sounded more like the terrified yelps of a small child.

Rosetta opened the door. A rancid smell hit her right away, but it was one that she was used to. It was sweat, blood, decay and fecal matter. There was another smell, too. This one wasn't as recognizable as the others, but Rosetta assumed that it was simply the smell of death. It was a smell that she was well familiar with and she knew that it had a tendency to fill the air when death was imminent.

The room was lit only by two candles, one on each side of the room. In the candlelight, the screaming man looked as if he were already dead, an angry ghost haunting her house. His condition alone suggested he might be dead: a hole had been etched into his stomach and dried sheets of blood clung to his the lower half of his body as well as the floor.

There was a mixture of emotion in his eyes that Rosetta had a hard time reading. She saw hope, despair, agony and a creeping lunacy that would soon take hold.

Seeing Rosetta, the man tried to back away but his naked body was already pinned against the wall. When he moved, the bloody gash in his stomach opened like a mouth and the folds of intestines that spilled out moved in an odd manner, like a worm that could not decide which way was forward and which way was backwards.

The strand of innards hung outward like an umbilical cord. Three feet of them had been uncoiled and straightened out like rope; the end of this loop had been crudely nailed to the wall.

When the man tried to shrink away, his exposed intestine tightened and then relaxed like a rubber band.

"Why..." was all that he said.

"You mustn't keep screaming like that," Rosetta said calmly. "My family is trying to eat."

"Why...?" he croaked again.

"If I have to come back in here again, I'll take out your tongue."

She pictured Gabrielle with the man's tongue on her plate, next to the roast, and wondered if it would appease her. She then wondered how long it would be before the girl discovered that the muscle in her own mouth was very much capable of being bitten into. She also wondered if the girl would feast on this agonized man if given the chance. She supposed so. But despite her cravings, Gabrielle would not get to sink her teeth into this man. He was not here to satisfy their personal pleasures. He was to serve a greater purpose.

Rosetta stepped away, headed back for the door, and saw a flickering sadness in the man's eyes. Even though she was his captor, he did not want to be alone. To be alone in his state was an invitation to madness; Rosetta could clearly see that he was about two tugs of the intestine away from falling into it.

She closed the door and rejoined the children at the dinner table.

Victor, the greedy little pig, had already started on the remaining portion of the roast.

Gabrielle's plate was still empty but she was eying the ring finger of her left hand with much interest.

***

Later, when the children were in bed, Rosetta walked out onto the back porch. She sat on the porch swing and stared out into the night. Her house sat alone in a small clearing in the forests of southern Virginia. Her nearest neighbor was six miles to the east in a similar clearing. Both houses were blocked off by the thickness of the woods to all sides.

Rosetta stared out to the tree line which stood against the dark sky like abstract mountains. The moon was nearly full, casting a sickly glow onto the yard. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a bobcat sounding out, its cry mingling with the constant chorus of whippoorwills, crickets and tree frogs.

Beside her sat an old scarred rocking chair. As she sat there listening to the night, the rocking chair began to rock by itself. It creaked on its ancient rockers and sounded slightly like the joints in her knees early in the morning.

She watched the chair rock back and forth, swaying gently. She studied the space around it, waiting for the form of a man to appear.

His face came first, his eyes as bright and distant as the stars. Then there was his mouth, always wide and smiling. By the time his torso was revealed, covered in simple black cloth, Rosetta could smell him. It was the clichéd smell of Hell—burning things, charcoal, smoke.

"Rosetta, my dear," he said. "How are you tonight?" As always, he was charming. His smile, his eyes, even the tone of his voce...it was all as well-designed as his legends proclaimed.

"As well as can be expected," she said. "My knees are aching. My back is getting weaker."

"Age is catching up to you, no doubt," the man in the rocker said.

"I suppose."

"And the children? How are they?"

Rosetta grunted and shrugged. "Gabrielle's problem is getting worse. Soon I don't think she'll have a left hand remaining. She won't eat proper food. I'll catch her in the woods sometimes, eating rabbits, dead birds and squirrels. Victor...well, he's doing just fine, I guess. But he keeps getting fat and he's getting sloppy with the work."

"Yes, I saw how he bound the man in your back room. Quite creative, but messy and unnecessary. We must work on that."

Rosetta and her visitor sat in silence for a while, looking out to the forest. Rosetta cast a quick glance at him, amazed at how calm he made her feel. She knew what she was supposed to do later tonight and her body demanded that she refuse the work. There was no way that her body could go through it again. But by just looking at the man, she felt thirty years younger and her knees didn't buckle at the thought of the night's excursion. Even though she knew that he wasn't _really_ a man and most would fear him, she remained calm in his presence.

"Rosetta," the man said, "do you trust me? Surely after all of this time, you know that I am not _quite_ the deceiver I am said to be."

"I know that," she said. "And yes, I trust you."

"I will take care of your ailments," he said. "And as far as your grandchildren, I will see to it that they are taken care of. Gabrielle in particular shows great promise. I will not let any harm come to her."

Rosetta nodded, assured and disgusted all at once. Hadn't he made similar promises when he suggested that the children's parents be sacrificed? Her memories of their father—her own son—nailed to that large oak tree in the back yard were as clear as if it had occurred yesterday. She could still see him bleeding and screaming in the moonlight as the forest below seemed to reach out for him.

"Tonight's task," the man said, "will be hard on you, no doubt. But you must do it, Rosetta. And after it is done, I will heal you."

"Yes sir." She wanted desperately to ask him: _If you're so damned powerful, why must you rely on an old woman to do your work?_

But of course she kept this thought to herself. And even if she had have found the courage to voice it, the rocking chair was empty once again as soon as the thought crossed her mind.

It rocked briefly for two more seconds and was still again.

Rosetta remained outside for another half an hour. When she got up from the swing, there was a brief moment where she was confident that her knees felt stronger, that the aches and pains that had assaulted them for the last year or so had retreated in the presence of her visitor.

But by the time she was back inside, the aches were there again and she felt the true nature of her age upon her.

She sat in her bedroom alone, reading a book. On one occasion, she heard the man screaming from the other end of the house. She thought about going to him and fulfilling her earlier threat of removing his tongue.

But she didn't let it bother her. It would be over for him soon enough. Until then, she would do the proper thing and allow him his last few moments to reflect on the life he'd be leaving and, like all other men that had ever lived, had surely took for granted.

And then she would take him for a walk down Lunatic Mile.

***

When the time came, Rosetta returned to the room at the end of the hall. As she approached the door, she could hear the man muttering something inside. From what Rosetta could tell, he believed that he was talking to a woman named Monica, asking her why she had let the dog in the house.

When she entered the room, the man stared at her with incomprehension. He wasn't sure where he was, nor what had happened to him. He had been somewhere else, within some other memory that his poor brain had summoned up to take him away from the reality of what had happened to him.

Keeping her eyes on him, Rosetta walked to the far end of the room where a small cabinet clung loosely to the wall. She opened it and reached inside, bringing out a small tin. She opened the tin and the latches groaned. Inside were several brown pills.

Rosetta took one of the pills out of the tin and carried it to the man. She reached out, grabbed his earlobe between her fingernails and pinched hard. When he didn't scream, she pinched even harder. When she felt his blood on her fingers, she pulled down violently. There was a quick tearing sound as she tore his earlobe off.

Finally, he screamed. When he opened his mouth, Rosetta shoved the pill in. She kept his mouth covered with her left hand and coaxed his throat muscles with her right. She did this until she was confident that he had swallowed the pill.

"Who are you?" the man asked. "What...happened...Where am...I?"

Rosetta only waved a hand at him. She went back to the cabinet and withdrew an old knife, its blade stained and slightly crooked. She approached him slowly, amused at the expression on his face. He clearly realized that she meant him harm, yet that dazed state still possessed him and he studied her with befuddled interest.

With a single motion, Rosetta sliced through the crude internal rope that had kept the man attached to the wall. A dull unpleasant smell escaped the severed gut as it collapsed back against its owner.

He opened his mouth to gasp but his jaw simply hung open, as if awaiting food. He narrowed his eyes at her and began to sob.

Testing him, she beckoned him forward. "Come," she said.

He nodded slowly and stepped forward, clumsily collecting his spilled insides as he approached. He obeyed her without question; the pill had already started working.

She led him through the house and onto the back porch. As she made her way down the stairs and into the yard, the man fell to his knees on the porch and collapsed face first down the stairs. He let out a groan and tried to get to his feet.

"Move it," Rosetta said.

He managed to get to one knee. There was grass on his face and his bottom lip was busted open. He looked around the yard and then to the gash in his stomach where he continued to spill out. He looked to Rosetta, frowned, and then fell again.

"Why must this be so difficult?" she asked the night, envisioning the man that had occupied her rocking chair as she spoke. "Once upon a time, this used to be easy, you know?"

She approached the man's body and gave him a swift kick in the ribs, letting out some of her frustration. Sneering at him, she walked to the far edge of the yard where a small shed sat hidden in the shadows. Victor spent a lot of his spare time in that shed, studying tools, blades and experimenting with animals. Such experiments had taught him anatomy and, Rosetta assumed, had inspired him to bind their current captor in such a unique way. The little fool probably thought he was being clever.

In the shed, she looked past Victor's mess and located the wheelbarrow in the far corner. She pulled it out of the shed and wheeled it across the yard to where the man was once again trying to get to his feet.

"Don't bother," she said angrily.

She bent down and lifted him up by his underarms. When she heaved him forward so that he could fall partially into the wheelbarrow, she felt something in her back give. She cried out in pain and once again struck the man to relieve her anger.

With much grunting and cursing, she eventually had him in the wheelbarrow. His left leg hung out and his head bobbed lifelessly over the back of it, between the handles.

Rosetta lifted the handles and aimed the wheelbarrow for the forest. A thin footpath sat at the furthest edge of the yard, winding its way into the darkness of the woods. She followed this path as she had done countless times before and instantly felt the evil of the place caress her.

***

Long ago, when men had been wise enough to revere evil, the stretch of land that the path wound through had been called Lunatic Mile.

Hunters would accidentally venture onto the grounds and return home with emptiness in their eyes and violence in their hearts. Unfortunate hikers that found the land would forever be plagued with nightmares beyond their darkest imaginings. Even animals were affected by it. birds that flew by fell dead to the ground. Rabbits and squirrels that passed by it would get a taste for blood and turn to their own kind for food.

Even by coming _near_ Lunatic Mile, one could feel some _wrongness_ in the air.

Rosetta knew this well and she felt it creeping over her right away. She knew that the Mile did not start at the very beginning of the trail in her back yard. The true start of Lunatic Mile came in the form of two black stones sitting to either side of the trail.

She saw these now, glinting darkly in the moonlight. As she passed by them, she closed her eyes and could feel the world in which she lived begin to slip away.

Even the man in the wheelbarrow groaned. He tried to lift his head but was far too weak. He had lost too much blood and his trauma had been too great. He would open his mouth on occasion and mumble something about Monica.

After passing the stones and stepping onto Lunatic Mile, the chants of crickets and whippoorwills thinned out. The noises that remained of those creatures now sounded wavering and fragmented, nothing more than fearful sighs in the night.

Rosetta had to stop several times along the way. Once, a bump in the trail had jostled the man she carried and his freed intestines went spilling over the side in a heap. She tossed them back into the wheelbarrow in a messy tangle of knots.

Mainly though, her stopping was due to the pains of her body. Her calves felt as if they were on fire and the muscles in her upper arm were as stiff as boards from carrying the wheelbarrow upright.

But she knew that soon it would all go away. Because even though her frequent visitor—whom always smelled of smoke and fancied her rocking chair—was a shameless bastard, he _did_ keep his promises. He would mend her pains, would make sure that her family was safe. He would do all of those things so long as she kept the power flowing through this place.

As she went on, she saw several dark shapes crossing the path in front of her. These were usually creatures no larger than a cat, but every now and then she would hear something much larger romping through the woods close to the edge of the trail. She knew that she was being watched. She could feel hundreds of evil eyes on her, their stares like spears of hate.

She did her best to keep track of how far along the Mile she had walked. This was hard to do because along Lunatic Mile, time seemed to become its own creature. Time and space held no relevance here. The Mile was just a physical manifestation of evil that had seeped from Hell onto the earth.

Her dark visitor had never given her any real reason for the powers of this place. He had once indicated that there are spots within the makeup of things where a world's boundaries are worn thin. In such places, two worlds can overlap. It just so happened that Lunatic Mile was a straight stretch of Hell with worldly features to support it.

Or so he said.

She often wondered if he told her such foolishness to make her feel as if she were important to him. He was, after all, the most famous liar in the history of the world. Her Baptist upbringing had taught her that. But he had found later in life that once you got to know him, the Devil wasn't so bad.

Her thoughts were broken by sudden movement to her right. Beside her, a figure appeared out of nowhere. It seemed as if the shape had simply materialized out of nothing. Rosetta jumped and nearly shrieked when she saw the figure and then, realizing what she was seeing, rolled her eyes and kept walking.

The figure beside her was the ghost of her former self. It was like looking in a mirror that showed reflections from fifty years ago.

"Remember when we looked like this?" her younger self said.

"Hardly."

"Don't you miss these breasts? Don't you miss the feel of a man's hands on your body?"

At this, the man in the wheelbarrow groaned.

"Fuck off," Rosetta said sternly.

As if on command, the younger reflection did just that. Instead of just winking out though, the form decayed rapidly. Her skin fell away, the tissue beneath rotting too fast to be studied. The skeleton beneath it all seemed contorted somehow; the collarbones were too large and the ribs were exaggerated puzzle pieces. The skeletal shape screamed at her and was then sucked backwards into the darkness of the Mile.

From somewhere further off, another scream filled the night. This one was from the throat of something large and bestial. She could imagine it coming from the throat of the world, an agonizing scream as if it had just discovered the impurity of Lunatic Mile upon its otherwise unblemished face.

To her right, something that sounded almost like a little girl chuckled. Further ahead, something large passed by and temporarily blocked out the light of the moon. Its footsteps filled her aging frame like thunder.

She continued on, knowing that nothing here would harm her. Her visitor would keep her safe as long as she was doing his work.

After another five minutes, she came to her destination. The trail came to an abrupt end and fell into a chasm that was about ten feet wide. Although she had been here more times than she cared to remember and had peered into that chasm each time, she had no idea how deep it was.

"Up you go," she said to her cargo as she positioned the wheelbarrow at the edge of the pit.

"Yeah, Monica never did like that car," he said. "It smelled like mildew ever since that night you left the windows down during that storm."

Rosetta paid no attention to this. She hefted the wheelbarrow upwards and sent him flailing forward. She felt her knees try to give out on her and there was a loud pop in her shoulder. She whimpered in pain and gave one final shove.

As the man fell out, his knee hit the ground first and he had a fleeting second to peer into what awaited him.

"Dark," he said. "Cold...stupid car... _Monicaaaaaaa_...."

She watched him fall away into the dark, his entrails flowing out behind him in glistening rivulets. He did not scream or complain. He just fell and fell. She watched him, listening for the sound of impact, but she never heard it. She watched the darkness swallow him and sighed wearily.

She then turned around and headed back home, pushing the wheelbarrow along with her.

She heard ungodly cries in the darkness but ignored them. She kept her eyes ahead, on the path, on what she knew was real.

At one point something cold and slimy slithered over her forehead like a living spider web. But she looked beyond this and thought of the relief that she had been promised. God, but her legs hurt. And her right shoulder felt as if glass shards had been inserted into her joints.

But when she passed the two black stones, her knees felt like new and her shoulder felt as loose and flexible as ever.

She carried the wheelbarrow back up into the yard with a slight bounce in her step.

***

She returned the wheelbarrow to the shed and walked up the porch steps with a vigor that she had not experienced in nearly ten years. Behind her, the night crept slowly away from the approaching dawn.

She entered the house and walked into the kitchen to put on a cup of coffee. As she entered the room, what she saw froze her in place. She let out a mangled squeak of disgust and fell to her newly revitalized knees.

Victor lay naked in the floor, surrounded by an expanding pool of blood. Sitting atop him, straddling the immense bulk of his stomach, was Gabrielle. Her hands and face were streaked in blood. In her right hand she held an unidentifiable bloody chunk of meat.

At Victor's feet, Rosetta saw the small tin from the back room. It had been opened and a few of the brown pills were scattered on the floor.

Roesetta's eyes were glued to this horror but she was still very much aware of the third person in the room. He sat at the table, watching Gabrielle's work with amusement. He looked horribly out of place within her house rather than on the porch, in the rocking chair. When he smiled at her, she smelled smoke.

"What...is...this?" Rosetta asked. She didn't know if she was asking her visitor or Gabrielle.

"This," the visitor said, getting to his feet, "is your reward."

She could not look away from the children. There were bite marks all over Victor's body. Whole sections of his enormous stomach looked as if they had been flayed and torn into. Every toe on his left foot had been stripped down to the bone.

"This is no reward," she said.

"Do you not see Gabrielle's left hand?" he asked.

Rosetta looked to the girl and saw that her left hand was somehow whole again.

Not only that, but Rosetta realized that there was something else new about Gabrielle. She looked absolutely beautiful...past the blood and the emphasized chewing motions, she looked gorgeous. Rosetta saw the woman that the child would become and it pained her to know that she would forever be entwined with the visitor, his work and Lunatic Mile.

"I told you that I would take care of your family," he went on. "While it may hurt you to admit it, we both know that Victor was a disappointment."

"But..." She could say nothing else. She was aware that he knew her every thought, so it was useless to refute this point.

"This way we can focus our attention on Gabrielle," he went on. "And while I know your human nature is to grieve your grandson, at least he will meet his end by helping with our work. You and Gabrielle are to take him down Lunatic Mile."

"But why Victor?" she asked. "Why not some random person like we've always done?"

"It takes sacrifice," he said. "You needed to give a sign that you are willing to cooperate with the great work that is yet to come."

"What work?" There was scorn and doubt in her voice and for a moment, she feared that her tone would anger him.

But he only grinned to her. "Why settle on just that small path?" he asked. "Why just that one mile? Why not the whole forest? Why not this entire county?"

She knew that she had no choice. She looked away from the children, taking a seat at the table with the man that had owned her for most of her life.

Rosetta said nothing. The kitchen was quiet except for the wet tearing sounds of Gabrielle tearing into Victor's neck.

"Gabrielle, dear," she said softly.

The girl looked up from her meal, glancing towards her grandmother. "Yes?" she said, blood trickling down her chin.

"Would you go get the wheelbarrow, please?"

#  — RIDING IN TRUCKS WITH GHOSTS —

Kevin was only twelve years old, but he had enough years behind him to have gained a fundamental understanding of the difference between real and make believe. This was why he was having such a hard time trying to figure out what was going on with his grandfather's old truck.

He'd been looking at the truck a lot lately. His grandfather had always boasted that it was a '68 Chevy, but that meant nothing to Kevin. He would simply stare at it through the screen door in the kitchen as if it were a monument to his grandfather. Some days, it had looked alive and Kevin had nearly expected its rusted bulk to hop down off the blocks his grandfather had left it on and walk towards the house. Kevin could remember the day that his grandfather and his uncle had put the truck on those concrete blocks; that had been three years ago, right around the time the doctors had identified the cancer in his grandfather's lungs.

Staring out to the truck, Kevin felt his knees trying to bend in an attempt to get his legs moving. In all honesty, Kevin wanted to go out to the truck. He wanted to open that heavy driver's side door that sounded like some ancient drawbridge as it opened and crawl behind the large black steering wheel. He'd gone out there last week and everything had been fine.

Well, maybe not _fine..._ something had happened. His twelve year old mind—still hungry for the magical and fantastic but also craving mature and worldly knowledge—could not decide if it had _really_ happened or of he was just overreacting.

Until he came to some sort of a decision, he would simply stare out to the faded blue paint, to the busted left tail light and the cracked grill with its bronze Chevy symbol hanging loosely in its center.

"Kevin?"

He was startled a bit at the sound of Miranda's voice from behind him. It was a soft yet solid sound. He turned to her and saw that she was dressed in her usual outfit. Kevin had never seen Miranda outside of his house and he found it hard to imagine her wearing anything other than the baby blue shirt and pants that she referred to as "scrubs".

"Hey, Miranda."

"Did I catch you daydreaming again?" she asked.

Kevin smiled, blushing a bit. He had a slight crush on her and often went to great lengths to hide it.

"I guess so."

"Nothing wrong with that," Miranda said. She sat her small backpack down on the kitchen table and looked at him without sitting down. There was a very serious look on her face and it forewarned Kevin of what was coming next. He loved it when Miranda spoke to him, but he always hated this part.

"How is she today?" Miranda asked.

Kevin shrugged, momentarily looking beyond the nurse that had been staying with his mother six days a week for the past three months. He looked past her and to the hallway behind her. His mother's bedroom was at the end of that hall and her door had been closed a lot lately.

"We talked for a little while this morning," Kevin said. "Maybe five minutes. Then she got really tired and that confused look was on her face."

Miranda nodded, as if she understood. Kevin knew that she _did_ understand. She had been with his mother through some of the really tough times—the times when Kevin hadn't been able to stand seeing his mother in such a condition and had to leave the room.

On several of those occasions, he had walked to the kitchen and stared out of the window, studying his grandfather's retired blue truck. He peeked back out at it now, partly due to his recent obsession with it, but also because he wanted to subtly let Miranda know that he didn't feel like talking about his mother this afternoon. He'd spent too much time worrying about his mother this summer...too much time wondering how much longer the tumor on her brain would let her live.

He'd turned to the truck to distract himself. And maybe it wasn't solely the truck. Maybe it was that thin line of trees behind it that separated the house from the enormous hayfield beyond. When his grandfather had been alive, he would take Kevin down the dirt tracks that ran along the side of the field in the Chevy, letting him drive (really just sitting Kevin in his lap and letting the child hold the bottom of the wheel as his old callused hands did the actual steering). Back then, it had been easy for Kevin to imagine that the field went on forever.

But now Kevin knew that it came to a stop half a mile to the west near a grove of pines. He now knew that everything eventually came to an end. Fields, school years, lives, even the mechanical lives of trucks.

"Well," Miranda said, picking up on his silence. "I'm going to go back and check in on her. Is there anything particular that you want for dinner tonight?"

"No," Kevin said absently. "I'm cool with whatever mom wants."

"Okay."

Kevin continued to stare out to the truck. He did his best to recall the exact events of last week. He could remember walking out there and opening the door. He remembered crawling in and being overwhelmed by the lingering scents of his grandfather: sweat, oil and cigarette smoke. Then he had sat there, fiddled with the radio knobs and... _and what?_

He heard the sounds of Miranda taking her pack from the table and heading down the hallway. When he knew that she was gone, he slowly reached out and opened the screen door.

He looked to the truck which had been permanently parked behind the house for a little over three years with awe and caution. As he stared, a very strange idea began to form in his mind. He slowly raised his hand to his throat and rubbed it gently.

_My sore throat,_ he thought. _I had that nasty sore throat last week._ He then thought of the radio knobs in the truck and how they had turned without much trouble.

And then he remembered that brief blaring of static.

_Get going_ , he thought to himself. Only, the thought seemed foreign somehow, as if he were hearing it on the soft breeze that rustled his hair.

As if to prove its existence, the thought came again: _Get going._

Kevin did just that. He retrieved his bike from the side of the house and started pedaling away. He rode out of his yard and kept to the side of Otter Creek Road, the thin unmarked country road his family had lived on since he had been born. He pedaled with a purpose and urgency that he did not understand.

And the entire time, he looked to the ground in hopes of finding something dead.

***

When he first saw the raccoon, there was a moment where he felt like he was doing something very inappropriate. He slowed his bike and came to a stop on the side of the road, looking at the animal's carcass with disgust. He had been riding his bike for twenty minutes and had somehow come to understand the purpose of this trip. But he didn't know the reasons behind it.

_Because you're still a boy,_ he heard his grandfather say within his head. _You're still a boy and good boys do what they're told_. And as he heard this comment from his grandfather, Kevin knew that it had been his grandfather that had told him to _get going_.

As he approached the raccoon's body, Kevin knew that what he was doing went beyond weird. It was bordering on disgusting, and the scariest part was that he couldn't remember rationalizing this bike ride at all.

But that wasn't entirely true. When he had stepped outside and walked towards the truck, he had gotten an idea. It had been that idea that had reminded him of the sore throat that had plagued him most of last week. And had there been something else? Had there been something else about his throat and the truck and the...the _weirdness_ to the whole mess?

He thought that there might be. And he wondered if this dead raccoon had something to do with it.

_Better get a move on,_ his grandfather's voice told him. _You don't want to be messing with this stuff after dark._

Grimacing, Kevin reached out and nudged the animal. It was cold and rigid, which he found odd. He had imagined a dead body to be soft and almost like dough. From the looks of it, this raccoon had been hit by a car; it's back bent downward and its rear left leg had shattered to the point where shards of bone had torn through the skin. As he touched the body, he began to understand why he was here and what he was supposed to do.

He was supposed to take the raccoon with him.

But how? Even if he could convince himself to pick up the carcass (which was gross enough in the first place) how was he supposed to drive his bike back home while carrying it? If he had have known why he was leaving the house before riding away, he could have gotten a plastic bag from under the sink.

_Always be prepared._ Again, this was the voice of his grandfather—the unmistakable voice of Leonard Riley. Kevin heard his grandpa in his head quite a bit, but had never really thought anything of it. It was sort of like he was talking to himself, really. Only, rather than hearing his own voice answering back, he liked to give that internal partner his grandfather's voice.

But as Kevin kneeled by the side of the road, eyeing the raccoon carcass, he knew that there was something different about the voice now. It didn't feel as if it was coming from inside of his head anymore. It was almost like his grandfather was there with him, looking over his shoulder and coaxing him on.

What are you waiting for? Get the bag and scoop the 'coon up.

"What bag?" Kevin asked out loud. And then, behind his own question, he thought, _That's really great Kevin...do you realize that you're having a conversation with yourself?_

But still, an answer came and it was in his grandfather's familiar voice. _The bag tucked in your back pocket._

Kevin reached around to his rear end. When his hand fell on the handle of the plastic bag that was stowed away in his back pocket, he nearly screamed. He knew without a doubt that he had not gotten a plastic bag before leaving the house. It hadn't been there when he left on his bike, it hadn't been there as he pedaled down Otter Creek Road and it hadn't even been there when he had first spotted the raccoon's body.

When he realized his hands were shaking, Kevin closed his eyes. He did his best to find a focal point, but his young life didn't have many pleasantries to escape to in times like this. His father had walked out when he was two; his grandfather, whom had basically been his father for six years, had died of lung cancer; his mother was currently bed-ridden with some sort of cancerous tumor on her brain that the doctors didn't fully understand. So there was really nowhere for his thoughts to hide as he began to understand just how odd it was that he was having conversations with his dead grandpa and that plastic bags were magically appearing in his back pocket.

_And the truck,_ he thought to himself in a cruel taunt. _Let's not forget the weirdness with the truck._

"Shut up," Kevin told no one in particular. The only ears other than his own for his words to fall upon were those of a dead raccoon that had spent at least a day lying in the gentle late-summer breeze.

_Time's a-wasting,_ his grandfather said. He then repeated something he had said only moments ago, and this time when he said it Kevin was once again filled with an icy sensation that raced through his veins and settled in his heart. _You don't want to be messing with this stuff after dark._

"What stuff?" Kevin asked. But he was already pulling the bag out of his back pocket. If it was some sort of a ghostly manifestation, he couldn't tell. It felt like plastic, it sounded like plastic and it bore the Wal Mart logo. It was most definitely one of the many that Miranda kept under the kitchen sink.

_But I didn't get it,_ he thought. _I didn't put it in my pocket..._

He pulled the bag inside out and covered the body with it. He then picked up the bag, pulled the handles back up and felt the stiff body fall to the bottom.

_Go,_ his grandfather said. This time, Kevin was almost positive that the voice had not been in his head. He looked around for a moment, expecting to see the old man spying on him from behind a tree, wearing his brown Penzoil hat low on his brow and smoking a Winston. Of course, he was not there. It was just Kevin and the dead raccoon.

Still, the urgency to return home was rather powerful, so he obeyed the command. He slid the handles of the Wal Mart bag over his handlebars and turned back around. He could see dusk approaching, but he could feel it slowly settling onto the countryside too, and that was somehow worse. While the maturing part of him did not want to believe in ghosts, he did not doubt the advice that he was apparently getting from his dead grandfather. Even if there were no such things as ghosts (he was still undecided on this, as he was about Bigfoot, UFOs and, although it would break his mother's heart, God), he still had a dead raccoon hanging from his handlebars and that was weird enough. Because of that, he most definitely did _not_ want to be out after dark.

He turned hard into his driveway, nearly turning the bike over. He quickly corrected himself and tore through the yard, the plastic bag whipping in the breeze. He could hear birds singing in a disorganized chorus from the tops of the darkening trees. To Kevin, it seemed like they knew that something odd was happening.

He parked his bike in its usual spot—by the side of the house where his grandpa had once parked his riding mower—and walked quickly to the back of the house, carrying the bag and its grim contents with him. The truck sat there on its blocks as patient as ever. Only now there was an air of anxiousness about it, a thickness in the air that Kevin could actually feel on his skin.

As he got closer to the truck, there was a fleeting moment when he thought he saw the image of his grandfather through the passenger side glass. The stained brown Penzoil hat covered his head and tendrils of drifting smoke rolled upwards from his cigarette. When he saw Kevin, he smiled.

But another step towards the truck and he was gone. The fading sunlight of the afternoon shimmered from the glass, breaking the illusion that it had most likely created in the first place.

***

When Leonard Riley had been diagnosed with cancer, he had done his best to make light of it. He had joked about his own condition every chance he got. "Could be worse," he had often quipped. "Lung cancer 'aint so bad. Doc told me that there are people that get rectal cancer. Can you believe _that?_ "

While Kevin had not fully grasped what any of this had meant at the time, he had understood from the looks on the faces of his mother and his uncles that it was his grandfather's morbid way of dealing with what the doctors had labeled as his demise. Still, Kevin had laughed at the jokes even when he didn't understand them. All he had known was that his grandpa was very sick and that if he was laughing, Kevin wanted to laugh with him.

According to his grandpa, the old truck had caught Cancer of the Paint. That's why the blue paint had started to crack and peel. Eventually, when he had retired the old truck, he had diagnosed it with Cancer of the Tires as well.

For some reason, thinking of cancer as he touched the driver's side door made Kevin feel slightly sick. As he grabbed the handle and pulled, the stiff body in the Wal Mart bag thumped against the side.

Kevin slowly climbed into the truck. He sat behind the large steering wheel and peered through its base. He studied the speedometer's numbers and was saddened that the thin red needle would never rise again. He looked away from the panel and then to the radio that sat poorly installed in the cracked console. He reached out towards it but then remembered his sore throat and the static.

That's why you're here, aint it?

This time the voice was most definitely not in his head. He looked to his right and saw his grandfather sitting there. He had all of the qualities of a ghost but for some reason, Kevin was not at all afraid. His grandfather's eyes seemed dark, almost black within their sockets. His skin was totally translucent; Kevin could see his house through his grandfather's face and chest. Through his stomach, there was the faded truck seat and the passenger's side door.

"Did you make my sore throat go away?" Kevin asked. He tried to tell himself that he was being crazy...that he was talking to a ghost. And there were no such things as ghosts.

His grandpa seemed to roll his darkened eyes. He then pointed to his phantom wrist (where there had not once been a watch in the course of his seventy-three years) and made a winding gesture. Without opening his mouth, his grandfather said, _Get moving, kiddo._

Kevin then knew exactly what he had to do. And as he reached into the bag for the carcass, he allowed himself to finally accept what had happened last week.

He had been coughing violently and his throat had felt as if it had been lined with gravel. Miranda had taken on yet another duty for his family and took him to the doctor. After a brief inspection, Kevin was told that he had strep throat. The doctor gave Miranda a prescription form; they filled it at Wal Mart and then went home where Miranda's relief nurse was having a terrible time trying to calm Kevin's mother down from one of her delusions.

Kevin had headed outside instantly, weeping and grimacing at the shredding pain in his throat. He hated to see his mother in such a state. She didn't seem human when she was screaming and wailing like that. To escape the horror, he had run out to his grandfather's truck. He had never had a formal tree house or club house—it had always been his grandfather's old blue Chevy.

"You did," Kevin said as he pulled the raccoon from the bag. "I messed with the radio and then there was this loud static. When I got out of the truck, my sore throat was gone."

His grandfather's ghost shrugged. Again without moving his mouth, the ghost of Leonard Riley spoke. _Not me. The truck, I think_.

In saying this, Kevin watched as the glove compartment in front of his grandfather opened. The ghost did not open it, nor did Kevin. It simply fell open. It was empty inside with the exception of dust and a few crumbs from some long-ago snack.

Kevin placed the raccoon's body into the compartment, taking an odd sort of care not to damage its already shattered rear leg. He then closed the compartment door and looked expectantly to his grandfather.

_It's not quite dark yet,_ Leonard Riley told his grandson. There was something profoundly sad in his thin voice as he added, _Want to do some driving?_

Without warning, Kevin felt a flood of tears coming on. Surprising himself, he let them come as he slid over behind the wheel. He pretended to throw the truck into gear and then mimicked steering as he pressed his foot to pedals that had stopped working years ago.

He sat like that, staring out of the dusty windshield at scenery that never changed. But in Kevin's mind, he was driving down the dirt tracks that ran alongside the hayfields. The truck was kicking up dust and its engine was as efficient and pleasing as the stirring of an electric fan in the heat of a summer night. Bails of hay sat out in the field like abstract mileposts for his journey.

He drove on like this for a while. He watched twilight fall upon the world. He looked over to see if his grandfather thought he should go inside before it got too dark.

But, of course, his grandfather was not there.

***

Miranda woke him up the next morning. "Pancakes are on the table if you want some," she told him through his closed bedroom door.

He got up briskly despite his fragmented sleep from the previous night. He threw on some clothes and walked out into the hallway, casting a loving glance towards the closed door at the other end of the hall. He wanted to go in and say hello, but there was no telling what state she was in this morning. He should probably check with Miranda first.

"How is she this morning?" Kevin asked as he took a seat at the table and squirted syrup onto his pancakes.

"The same." Miranda sat down in front of him with a bagel and a glass of milk. "I just want you to know that we may have to take her back to the hospital in a few days. By her being _the same_...well, that's not good. Do you understand that?"

Kevin only nodded. He ate his breakfast quickly as Miranda sat there, looking at him. He knew that something unpleasant was coming but he focused on the pancakes and the thought of visiting the truck when he was done.

"Kevin, you know that you can talk to me, right? About anything. It's not good to keep things like this bottled up."

"I know."

"Do you? I've noticed you staring into space sometimes. And I know that you've been going out to your grandpa's truck quite a bit. I'm afraid you're isolating yourself. And that's not good."

"I'm fine," he said through a mouthful of pancake. "I mean, there are some things that I...I don't know...things that I need to ask, I guess. But not yet."

"You can't live by _not yet_ ," Miranda said softly, averting her eyes to her glass of milk. "We don't know how much longer..."

She didn't have to finish the comment. Kevin nodded his head sternly, as if agreeing with her, but stopping her at the same time.

"Things are going to be okay," he said defiantly. He then dropped his fork to his nearly empty plate and stood up from the table. The clattering of the fork in the midst of the awkward conversation was bone-jarring.

"Kevin, I didn't mean to—,"

"It's okay," he said, already walking to the back door. "I'm fine."

He opened the door and stepped outside into the perfect weather of a late September morning. Miranda watched him go, eyeing him through the screen door. She wasn't at all surprised to see that he was headed directly for the old truck.

***

As soon as Kevin opened the driver's side door, he heard the scratching. It was frantic and laced with a very desperate mewling sound. He traced the source and was not at all surprised to find that it was coming from the glove compartment.

With a hesitant smile on his face, Kevin reached to the compartment. He felt the commotion from the other side as he rested his hand on the latch. He then held his breath and opened it.

The raccoon sprang out with a burst of blurred motion and sat on the seat. It looked quizzically at Kevin for a moment and then scurried into the floorboard and past his feet. Kevin chuckled as he watched the raccoon bound into the tree line and towards the hayfield. It trotted away with a noticeable energy in its step, carried by its powerful and perfectly mended rear legs.

For a fleeting moment, as the morning sun came through the windshield in a surreal filtered way, Kevin thought that he heard a second voice laughing along with him. He looked to his right, but the passenger's seat was empty.

"Can I drive again, grandpa?" Kevin asked the empty seat.

And although there was no one there, Kevin heard at soft voice like whispered wind. It was a familiar voice and it said, _Drive_.

For the next hour, he sat behind the large black steering wheel, maneuvering through the hayfield and the limitless imagined roads beyond.

On occasion, Kevin would catch glimpses of a flash of brown out of the corner of his eye. It was a familiar shade of brown that Kevin had always associated with Penzoil. When he caught glimpses of this color, the truck seemed to grow thick with the smell of dirt, oil and Winston cigarettes.

As the morning wore on and the steering wheel grew slick with the sweat from Kevin's grip, the truck was filled with the ragged phantom voice of Leonard Riley, the man that had owned it for so long.

_You know_ , he said to his grandson, _your mother might like to take a spin, too._

Kevin smiled and recalled how the raccoon had sprinted from the truck.

"I think so, too," Kevin said and imagined her driving this truck—this truck that was afflicted with Cancer of the Paint and Tires.

He looked towards the house, where he was sure Miranda was watching him through the window if she was not dealing with one of his mother's worse moments.

Kevin thought of his mother; he thought of the tumor, the cancer, of how she had lost her hair and will and spirit to endless chemo treatments and ill news from several doctors that all looked the same.

He thought of how she might look behind the wheel of the truck. He could see her once-beautiful black hair billowing out in waves on the summer wind. Perhaps they could ride together, through fields of blinding greens and golds, towards some other place where everyone knew the joys of riding in trucks with ghosts.

#  — BUTT OF THE JOKE —

For two weeks now, I've been trying to figure out if people are laughing with me or at me.

It's not just people, either. Some mornings it also seems like the yawning space of my living room is laughing at me. It chuckles with contempt and disturbs the dust motes that swim in the morning sun spilling through the blinds. Even the dust laughs—millions of unseen mouths, opening up to bark hysterically at some joke that long ago fell dead to human eyes and ears.

Yeah, the house is laughing at me. I know it. It's been laughing ever since Amy walked out. _How did you not see it coming_ , the halls and kitchen and empty side of the bed ask me as I fall asleep and stir awake. _Were you that blind, really?_

It's hard to decide which is worse: the laughter of the house or the often bemused silence of the crowds.

There is a moment of hesitation when I step out on stage, the weak white light hitting my face like a lazy God granting an epiphany. I glance out to the crowd and say nothing for about five seconds. I just stand there gripping the microphone like a buoy that will save me from a sea of nothing. When I finally speak, I open up with my best material and the laughs from the crowd are mostly genuine. The comedy club bucks gravity in that moment and I become detached, floating away from the laughter and the prying ears and eyes of strangers that seem know that Amy is gone.

Two days ago, I woke up and the pillow where Amy's head once lay was laughing. It was a tired laugh, one that I had heard before in the clubs; it is a laugh that is born of obligation, out of some undeserved respect for the comedian. I smiled at the pillow and reached out to it. I tried to remold the shape of Amy's head in its cover, to make myself and the house believe that she had recently been there.

That morning now seems like a bad dream as I enter the laughing living room and enter the kitchen. When the coffee is percolating, each drip sounds like the laughter of someone with smoker's cough. The rattle of the coffee mugs laugh along as well. I close my eyes against it all because this is surely madness. _Am I really this funny, or are they laughing at me because they knew Amy was going to leave?_

"They." I am referring to furniture and dishes and dust as "they." I like to think it is the result of my comedic creativity, but I feel within my beating (or is it laughing?) heart that it comes from something darker. Something empty and devoid of anything at all, much less laughter.

I leave the house and walk out into the afternoon. The door seems to snicker as I close it and the blaring of a horn elsewhere in town sounds like a maniacal laugh from the forgotten shadows of an asylum.

Driving out to the Parkway, there is a rattle from the glove compartment and it, too, sounds like laughter. The metallic clinking of the gun inside sounds like robots giggling. My pointer finger bends reflexively as if there is a trigger pressed against it. The steering wheel laughs at this confusion of mind, muscle and nerves.

I drive through the twists and the turns of the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway and come to the place where Amy once sprained her ankle as we had made angry love in the back seat. She had laughed about it despite the pain. In the hospital we simply said she missed a step walking downstairs. The sniggers and glow of euphoria and peace on our faces clearly said otherwise, I'm sure.

I pull over and place the car in park. As the car settles, I hear the gravel beneath the tires crunching—it is the demented laughter of dancing skeletons. I sit there and I watch the sun roll like a fat deflating ball below the horizon. A few cars pass, their motors sounding like that deep laugh that most large black men expel like fire in the comedy clubs.

The sun sets and there is a blissful moment where the world is nothing more than hues of gold and fading pinks. The mountains stab the colors into a humid twilight. As the first stars poke through, I feel myself become detached again, floating away to some other place, away from a place where Amy has walked away and left me with a house that finds humor in my grief.

She also left me with writer's block. I haven't been able to come up with a good joke since she walked out three months ago. I've spent the last two weeks back in the clubs, trying to bring that not-so-funny muse out of hiding. Amy always called me a fake because I have never believed in the concept of a muse. "My muse," I had once told her, "is kept in a shoebox under the bed."

"Why?" she had asked.

"So the monsters will always have something to eat."

As I pull the switch that pops the trunk, the concept of monsters is suddenly very frightening. Still, I exit the car and walk dreamily out into the darkening twilight.

I think of the gun in the glove compartment and consider retrieving it. In the end, I decide not to. My fingerprints are already on it. No sense in giving away clues or evidence; it would only give the police something to laugh about. _Wow, look how clumsy this jerk-off was. Not only did he leave the murder weapon with the body, but his prints are all over it!_ And then there would be hysterical laughing amidst coffee and donuts and unsolved murder cases.

I open the trunk and stare at the blanket. It is wrapped carefully, like a tight burrito bursting with meat and cheese and guacamole. I grin not only at the comparison, but at the fact that Amy hated guacamole. Sour cream, too. I have no idea why I find that funny as I lift the blanket and its contents out.

It takes some effort. Finally, after nearly falling down twice, I carry the blanket and the solid shape beneath it to the edge of the parking spot. Thirty feet further ahead there is a small platform where tourists and sightseers can take in an amazing view of the sprawling summits and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I walk with the blanket against my chest. The crickets and tree frogs start their night song. Of course, it sounds like a raucous crowd judging me as I walk out onto the stage, before I have ever uttered a single word.

I reach the platform and don't allow myself the onslaught of reflective thoughts I feel coming. I heft the blanket up right away and let it roll off of my arms, giving it a light toss as it reaches my forearms. As it hits the protruding rocks at the base of the ledge, a tuft of black hair appears out of the top and it makes me think of those laughing dust motes.

Another bounce and the blanket tears slightly. In the wobbling light that is not quite dusk and almost night, I see a flash of breast and then the bottom of a foot.

I watch as Amy rolls into the darkness, into some unseen valley of the mountains. I watch her as she is taken by that chasm that is really nothing more than one of the many mouths of the world, laughing at the hurts and rages of the race it has been forced to tolerate.

I drive back home in silence. I hear the gun clinking against whatever else is in the glove compartment. The sound it makes no longer seems like laughter of any sort. It now sounds like a metronome or a ticking bomb.

When I return home, I walk into the living room. I stand in the dark and silence and listen. Nothing is laughing anymore.

As I undress and step into the shower, I wonder if the house had started laughing before I made the decision to kill her? Or perhaps it had started on the night I waited for her outside of her boyfriend's house with the gun beneath the driver's seat?

I don't know.

I throw my clothes on and practice the routine that I will force upon the late night crowd at a local comedy club. As I walk around the house, reciting the new lines, the house remains in silence.

Hours later, as I walk out onto the small stage to meager applause and those sickly white stage lights, I feel a burning in my gut. What if the audience, like my house, is done with finding humor in me?

What if, this entire time, they have been laughing _at_ me all along?

#  — GRAVE SEASONS —

The boy came sprinting through the woods with his fishing pole slung over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and his black skin glistened with sweat. The tattered sandals he wore on his feet slapped against the ground and sounded impossibly loud in the silence of the forest. He ran without looking back, his heart trembling with excitement and fear. He wanted to look back, but knew that he shouldn't. Instead, he kept his eyes focused ahead of him as Mama Miriam's cabin came into view.

The tiny cabin sat in a quiet clearing so far away from everything that Mama Miriam could often hear log trucks rumbling down the highway six miles away. She'd listen to them in the afternoons, the noise of their engines traveling through the forest to the tiny light-green strip of her front yard where the sound became oddly abstract. She would sit on her porch with the boy that called himself Clairvius, drinking tea in silence and listening to the progress of the world through the trees that hid her away from it all.

It was because of this perfect silence that she was able to hear Clairvius as he made his way out of the woods and into the front yard. He dropped his fishing pole and bounded up the porch steps, his sandals sounding as loud as gunshots. She watched him through the window as she stirred at a pot of stew she had just put on the stove.

"Mama Miriam," Clairvius said in an excited tone as he came through the front door. The screen door slapped against the frame behind him and Miriam bit back a smile when she saw him jump at the noise.

"Calm yourself, boy," Miriam said, setting her spoon down and studying him. The last few years had been rather hard on Clairvius. He was only fourteen but often looked as old as thirty—as he did now. "Now what is it?" she asked him after he took a moment to catch his breath.

"There are two of them on the road," he said, pointing out into the woods beyond the screen door and the front yard. "There are two strangers, walking this way."

"Are they locals?"

"I'm not sure," Clairvius said. "But I don't think so. I heard their voices. They sound like they're from the north."

"Huh," Miriam said. She made her way to the screen door, pushed it open with her large, callused black hand and peeked outside. The dirt road that began at the edge of her yard and wound into the forest looked abandoned. But when she trained her old ears to the forest and concentrated, she could hear two voices breaking the silence.

"I see," she said, her eyes still on the road. "Clairvius, fetch the gun and stay hidden. You know what to do, right?"

"Yes'm, Mama Miriam."

"Good boy."

Clairvius quickly made his way to the back of the cabin. Miriam stood at the door, waiting to see the shapes of the strangers as they rounded the bend to where they would be able to see the clearing and her cabin.

Miriam supposed that if they looked beyond the cabin they would see the rather large field that sat behind it. Thinking of that field and what it meant, Miriam felt a slight tightening in her chest and she could feel her pulse over every square inch of her body.

The strangers came into view two minutes later. Seeing them, Miriam listened for any signs of Clairvius moving around in the rear of the house but was pleased to find that he was being extremely careful. Miriam could smell his sweat and his anticipation, but that was because she had been in this cabin, in this clearing, for over sixty years. She knew every smell and settling noise within the cabin. The smell coming off of Clairvius wasn't one that these strangers were likely to notice, especially from out on the porch.

Miriam stepped out onto the porch, a bit self-aware that her old dress was stretched along the top and torn along the left leg. But what did she care? She was sixty-eight years old and far beyond concerns of vanity. Also, she _belonged_ here. These strangers were only here because of the myths and the mysterious history behind the surrounding woods. Miriam wasn't sure, but she thought that there was a chance that her cabin was now a part of those legends.

There had been countless people out here in the last twenty years, snooping around for any leftovers of the voodoo history that had dominated these Louisiana woods so many years ago. If the legends were intricate enough to lead interested parties out here, surely her cabin was somehow known and used as a landmark of sorts.

The strangers spotted her as they came to the edge of the road. The road emptied out into the cabin's front yard, allowing them a clear view of Miriam standing on the porch. As they continued to approach cautiously, one of them waved.

Miriam waved back, putting on a smile and waving them forward. As Clairvius had said, there were two of them; a man and a woman. It was the man that had waved to her. They both looked rather excited as they approached the porch. The man wore one of those ridiculous straw cowboy hats, a plain white polo shirt and a pair of khakis. The woman was dressed in a sundress and carried a walking stick. Miriam wondered how ignorant this woman was, walking around in these woods with her pretty little legs exposed to mosquitoes, bees and snakes. Still, she managed to maintain her smile as the man approached the porch steps and looked up to her.

"How are you, ma'am?" he said.

"Just fine," Miriam said, taking a seat in the ancient rocker that sat by the front door. "Come on up and sit a spell if you like," she offered although the rocker was the only chair on the porch.

The man walked slowly up the stairs, taking in the dilapidated little cabin. There were a few tiny skulls and rocks lining the porch railings, the skulls those of rats, squirrels and a rabid cat that Clairvius had been forced to kill three years ago. There was also a rather large snake skin wrapped around one of the porch's posts. Miriam felt a surge of delight shoot through her as she saw the woman cringing at it.

"Are you lost?" Miriam asked them.

The woman chuckled at this and looked to the man, rolling her eyes. "We're not quite sure," she said. "We were told that there was a road in these woods and we assumed that this one was it." She pointed to the dirt track that they had just come up, looking at it suspiciously.

"Well that there road is the only one that comes through these woods," Miriam said. "It's the only way I can get to and from town."

She gave them a moment to realize that she didn't have any means of transportation in order to get to town, but they didn't notice. The woman looked slightly uncomfortable, standing arm to arm with her companion. She held eye contact with Miriam and kept a polite smile on her face, but it was clear that she was uncomfortable.

"Do you know much about this land?" the man asked. Miriam assumed he didn't understand how daft of a question it was.

"Aye, I see now," Miriam said, feigning surprise. "You're here seeking some of the dark history surrounding these woods. Yes?"

They both nodded and Miriam was happy to see that the woman's unease had now spread to the man as well.

"Yes ma'am," the man said, removing his hat to wipe sweat away from his brow.

"Tell me then," Miriam said. "What are some of the stories you have heard?"

"The usual stuff about the voodoo rituals," the woman said quickly. She spoke as if she didn't believe any of it, but her stature and the growing fear in her eyes said otherwise. It was almost as if she knew what was about to happen to them.

"Yeah," the man said. "I know all about the dark magic that was practiced out here and how there is supposedly some sort of deal between the people in the nearby town and the spirits of the land. Whatever that means. I think the woods are supposed to be haunted or something, too. It's all centered around some white people hanging a bunch of Haitians back in the 1800s."

Miriam nodded, even though this abridged version was only partially true. Several Haitians _had_ been hanged in 1887 by a group of Christians who believed the Haitian's voodoo practices to be the work of the Devil. It was this ill-conceived belief that kept these strangers coming to the forest. Many of them also believed that all voodoo was dark and of the Devil. And they all wanted to find proof that the fabled history of these woods was accurate. They wanted to go home with stories about how they had come face to face with the cursed land and lived to tell about it.

But none of them ever did.

Smiling, Miriam slowly got out of her rocking chair. "Ease yourselves," she said. "I'll go inside and fetch us some tea. Then I'll tell you all I know about these woods."

"Oh that would be fantastic," the man said. The unease that had crept into him moments ago was fading now. But the woman still seemed to be on edge about something, her eyes trying to survey everything at once.

Nodding to them, Miriam went inside. When she heard the screen door fall back into place, she said a silent prayer and sat down quietly at the kitchen table.

Outside, the couple waited patiently, the man now enjoying himself and happy that they had decided to spend these three days looking into a ghost story that he had heard for most of his life. He studied the little skulls along the porch railing with fascination rather than fear and did his best to ease his girlfriend with a wink.

When the door opened again, it was not Mama Miriam that they saw. Instead, they saw Clairvius, holding a shotgun in his hands.

By the time they were able to make sense of this, it was too late.

At the kitchen table, Miriam winced at each of the gunshots. They filled the cabin like mortar rounds and left her ears ringing afterwards. In the moments following the second shot, she heard one of the bodies fall backwards from the porch and onto the ground.

"It's done," Clairvius called out from the porch.

"Can you do the rest by sunset?" she asked him.

"Yes, Mama Miriam."

Miriam stood up and made her way to the stove to once again stir her stew. As she stirred, she listened to Clairvius moving things around on the porch. She then watched through the kitchen window as the boy made his way around to the field behind the house. She finished the stew, had two bowls of it and then headed out back to watch Clairvius work.

***

Clairvius had dragged the two bodies around to the back after cleaning up the mess that the gunshots had caused. He had caught the man in the neck on the first shot and had placed the second shot squarely between the woman's eyes, removing most of her forehead. Miriam sat several yards away from the bodies, staring emotionlessly at the large red mess along the woman's head.

Near the middle of the large field, Clairvius was digging two holes. He wore no gloves and Miriam could imagine the slight stinging of the shovel's handle against his palms. Miriam had once received many blisters from the same act, digging hole after hole upon a stranger's arrival at the cabin.

But she was old and used up now and it had been nearly five years since her old body had been capable of digging. When Clairvius had come to her six years ago, she had taken it as a sign. He had been the first to show up at her cabin not out of curiosity about the forest's history, but because of his heritage. When his parents had both passed away at young ages, Clairvius claimed that he had been called; he had been instructed by some higher power to leave Haiti and go to Louisiana where he would find a woman named Mama Miriam.

When he had arrived, Miriam had never touched a shovel again. And while she _had_ taken the lives of some of the strangers, Clairvius had taken most of those duties as well.

Miriam watched as the boy finished up the second hole. By rule, the holes should be four feet deep as opposed to the traditional six. The shallowness of the hole allowed Miriam to see the boy's shoulders pumping up and down as he removed the last few shovelfuls of earth. Done with digging, he tossed the shovel out of the hole and crawled out.

Between the two holes there was a bag of salt which Mama Miriam had blessed when she had opened it two months ago. Clairvius unrolled its top and dumped the remainder of the bag out into the holes, dumping just enough to line the bottoms of the graves.

Seeing that the boy was obviously fatigued, Miriam stood up and went to the bodies of the strangers. She grabbed the woman by the wrists and pulled her forward through the grass, towards the graves. A thin streak of blood followed like a hesitant crimson shadow.

"I can do that," Clairvius said, stepping in to take the woman.

"As can I," Miriam said, grinning. "You've done a fine job. And while I may be old and brittle, I can still do my part to help."

"Yes'm."

Clairvius walked to the man's corpse and began pulling him across the field as well. They rolled the bodies into the holes together, as was the custom. There was a light crunching sound as the bodies fell onto the salt.

Once the bodies were in their holes, Clairvius reached for the shovel but Miriam stopped him. In the light of the setting sun, he looked older again and Miriam felt for him. When she had been his age, she had watched her father kill and bury the strangers. She couldn't imagine going about the task herself at such a young age.

"Go inside and get some stew," she told him. "I'll finish here."

Clairvius knew not to argue. He simply nodded and walked back into the cabin. Behind him, Mama Miriam began to fill the holes.

***

She packed down the last bit of earth just as the last light of day was slipping out of the sky, leaving golden ripples across the field. The simple act of refilling the holes had winded her but there was something redeeming in the feel of fresh blisters on her hands.

Miriam walked to the edge of the woods and began kicking the foliage around. After a few moments, she found two suitable rocks. She picked them up, hefted them in her hand and nodded to herself. She then returned to the new graves with a rock in each hand.

She knelt down to the ground, studied her hands for a moment and then bit into one of the fresh blisters. She squeezed at the torn skin until blood came out, working as fast as she could in the dying afternoon sun. She placed her bleeding hand onto first one grave and then the other, leaving a small scarlet stain in the plowed dirt and grass. She then covered these marks with the rocks and slowly got to her feet.

She looked away from the new graves and the rocks that marked them, peering out into the rest of the field that sat beyond. In the shadows of the evening, she studied the other rocks out there and tried to recall how many she had placed within the field. How many graves had she dug? How many times had she marked the graves with her own blood?

She knew that there were at least fifty of them that were her work. Another sixty had been placed there by her father. The rest of them were the work of her grandfather and other men whom she had never met. She had never taken the time to count, but she was sure that there were at least one hundred and fifty rocks—one hundred and fifty _graves_ —in the field, stretching out to the edge of the surrounding forests.

As the sun finally escaped the day, Miriam returned the shovel to its place under the cabin and threw the empty bag of salt into garbage. When she returned to the cabin, Clairvius was busy spooning out another helping of stew.

"Is it done?" he asked her.

"Yes, it's done."

She poured herself a glass of tea and walked out onto the porch. She hunkered down in her rocking chair and listened to the night set in. Somewhere, an owl had gotten an early start. The owl was followed by a fledgling chorus of crickets and tree frogs.

And beyond it all, there was something else. There was a light roaring noise behind all of it, getting louder by the moment. She knew that it wasn't the sounds of engines from the highway; this sounded different somehow...closer.

By the time she realized what the sound was, she saw the white glow of headlights breaking through the trees. She listened to the hum of the truck's engine as the headlights approached, slowly bouncing down the thin dirt road.

When the truck appeared, Miriam smiled thinly. As she watched the driver park and get out of the truck, Miriam got to her feet and descended the porch steps. She met the driver halfway across the yard, a rather large man whom she knew well.

"Good evening, Mama Miriam," the man said.

"How do you do, Sheriff? What can I help you with?"

"I've got one for you," the sheriff said. "Sorry to bring it so late, but it was a hectic day at work."

"It's not a problem," Miriam said. "I can get to it tomorrow."

"Well then," the sheriff said, "just show me where you want it."

"Of course."

Miriam walked to the edge of the cabin and back out towards the field. Behind her, she heard a rummaging sound as the sheriff reached into the back of his truck. He then grunted and followed her behind the cabin.

They walked by the light of his headlights, stopping just shy of the center of the field.

"Here will be fine," Miriam said.

"Right here out in the open?" the sheriff asked. "Won't something come out of the woods and take it? We don't want the rats to have a nice little dinner, do we?"

"Not tonight," Miriam replied. "There will be no creatures on this land tonight."

As she said this, the sheriff noticed the two freshly dug graves in front of them. The soil was still soft and the signs of it having been recently packed were evident.

The sheriff lowered the bulk of the body wrapped in a tarp from his shoulders and set it on the ground. A hand fell out of the wrapped tarp; its fingers were opened in a wide grasping motion, as if searching for help.

"Two?" the sheriff asked. "You already had two today?"

"Yes. They were walking through the woods, curious about the history of the place."

The sheriff was silent for a moment, considering something. He looked away from the graves and the body he had just delivered, casting his eyes to the sky and the half moon above them. "Well, this one...he was a hitch-hiker. He got hit by a car just east of Baton Rouge."

"I thank you, sheriff," Miriam said. "As does the town, I'm sure."

"Jesus. Three in one day. Have you ever gotten three in one day?"

Mama Miriam thought about it for a moment before answering. She also looked to the sky, as if summoning the memory from her loved ones who may be in the rumored Heaven above their heads.

"Not me, no sir. But my father had four in one day. But it happens like that. Sometimes we go as much as six months without anyone coming by and then there are days like today."

"Still," said the sheriff. "Three in one day...what's it mean?"

Miriam laughed. "It means that the crops will be abundant this season. You should know this by now."

"Speaking of which, I have some corn, peas and potatoes in the truck for you."

"Thank you. Now, why not come in and have a bowl of stew, sheriff? I just made it today."

"No thanks, ma'am. I'd best be heading back into town."

"I understand," Miriam said. She was sure that he was not being honest. The sheriff always seemed troubled when he delivered a body to her. Although he knew that it was what the land required, he always seemed jittery when he came to the cabin. It seemed to bother him even worse at night.

Still, he did his best to show respect as they walked back to his truck. "Is there anything you need, Mama Miriam? More food, maintenance around the cabin?"

"No thank you, sheriff. Clairvius and I do just fine by ourselves."

He grinned at her and reached into the cab of his truck. He handed her several plastic bags with the promised corn, peas and potatoes that local farmers had supplied her with. The farmers and most of the townspeople all knew that it was because of Mama Miriam and the land on which her family had lived for so long that the town had any crops and agricultural goods at all. It had been like that for as long as anyone could remember. Probably even further back than 1887 when her relatives had been hung in the woods. It had been this act that had caused the Christians to barter with the voodoo priests in order to revoke the curse that had been placed upon the land.

The general rule to come out of that exchange in regards to the town and the forest around it was a simple one. For what you take from the earth, you must return it with your own.

"Have a nice night," the sheriff said as he got back behind the wheel of his truck.

"Same to you."

She watched him back out of the yard and followed the bouncing trail of his headlights as the truck made its way back down the dirt road and into the forest. She spent another moment listening to the night and taking in the fresh air before she returned to the cabin.

"What did the sheriff have for us?" Clairvius asked her as she returned.

"These," she said, showing him the plastic bags full of vegetables. "And he also brought another offering."

"Would you like to me start digging the grave now?"

"No. It can wait until tomorrow," she said as she started sorting through the vegetables.

***

Mama Miriam awoke shortly after midnight to voices outside of her window. As she slowly sat up in bed, she trained her ears on the voices and discovered that they were coming from much farther away. She got out of bed once her eyes adjusted to the darkness and walked to the front door. She opened it slowly and peered through the screen.

Behind her, she heard Clairvius enter the room. "What is it?" he asked.

She held up a finger to silence him and listened closely. As she looked to the night outside, she saw three darting arcs of light. It took her a moment to realize that these were flashlight beams. As she followed the lights, she then clearly heard at least three voices.

"What the hell is _this?"_ one of them asked.

"Sure is a messed up place to have a house right in the middle of these damned woods. I mean, can you imagine—,"

"...Seriously guys, let's just turn around. This is creepy..."

"Do you think anyone lives there?"

"Hell no, not way out here. I'd go crazy if I—,"

Mama Miriam closed the door quietly and turned to Clairvius. "Fetch the gun," she said.

Clairvius nodded and walked on tiptoes to the back of the house.

Mama Miriam sighed, waited a moment and then walked out on the porch to greet her visitors.

#  — THIS TOUR DON'T ROLL THROUGH SEATTLE —

The fragile strings that comprised the night melodies of thousands of unseen crickets came to a halt as the thin black man approached the street corner. He wore a faded black suit and a dusty fedora that sat at an angle on his head. An acoustic guitar was slung over his shoulders, riding his back like a piece of medieval weaponry. When he arrived, the dusty street corner was vacant with the exception of an old milk crate. He took a seat on the crate, brought his guitar around to his lap and began to play.

He was a young man but his fingers bore the calluses and scars that came from rigorous manual labor and infinite practice on the old bronze strings of his guitar. With the crickets and the moon as his audience, he let his fingers strum the sounds of their ache. He tapped his foot against the sidewalk, keeping a steady beat, as he peered into the darkness of the countryside beyond.

His fingers ran up the fret board like ballet dancers on fire. His eyes stayed on the empty road ahead, his fingers knowing the riffs like a science.

He was expecting to see headlights crest the horizon. Instead, he saw another figure approaching. The posture alone told him that it was a man; there was a strut to his step, something that spoke of confidence and experience. This man also carried a guitar. It hung from a strap across his shoulders and was nestled at his side.

"How do?" the black man on the crate said to the newcomer.

"Can't complain," the visitor said. There was a thick southern drawl to his voice and as he approached, the black man saw that the fellow was quite old. There was a slight tremble in his unmoving hands and his eyes looked tired and ready to close for good. The black man could tell just by the way the old man carried his guitar that he knew all about music; sometimes it was something he could just see in people.

"Let me ask you," the old man said. "You happen to know where in the hell we are?"

The black man shook his head. "No clue, Mister. I'm just waiting on my ride. If you're lost, feel free to stick around. We could play a tune or two if you want," he said, nodding to the old man's guitar.

"Much obliged," the old man said, "but I feel like I need to get on down the road. There's something waiting for me at the end, I think."

With that, he tapped his shaking fingers along the bottom of his guitar and nodded to the black man. He took a few steps away from the corner and then turned back around. Almost as an afterthought, he added lightly in his southern drawl, "I don't know what's happening here, but if anyone comes through asking for Johnny, let them know I went this-a-way."

"Will do, Mister," the black man said, his fingers already resuming their play on the strings. "Best of luck to you."

"Same to you," Johnny said as he walked further down the road.

As the black man started playing again, he hummed along to the tune. It was one of his own songs, one that he had written. And although he had written it and even recorded it in a studio, it really didn't belong to him.

He played for a while longer, still peering into the distance for headlights.

Somewhere further off, a tree frog started to babble. It was a low rumble, the kind you'd hear in those fat bothersome frogs from the Deep South. The black man grinned and did his best to form his freestyle strumming to the frog's tune.

The sound of footsteps from behind him gave him a scare. The sound his spooked fingers made as they clanged against the strings was nearly demonic. He turned around and saw another man approaching.

This man wore a long flannel shirt that clung to him like a shroud. His hair was dirty and unkempt, hanging in his face and covering his eyes. He held a guitar in his left hand, the strap dangling like a broken appendage. He tossed his head back slightly to remove the hair from his face.

"Hi," he said. From that one word alone, the black man thought that this fellow sounded like a little boy when he spoke. But he looked to be in his mid to late twenties.

"Hey there," the black man said. "You looking for your friend?"

"What friend?"

"He said his name was Johnny."

The man looked confused and simply shook his head. "No, I don't know a Johnny. Besides...I have no idea where I am."

"That's just fine," said the black man. "I got a ride on the way. I bet they could take you where you need to go."

"Ah, that would be cool. Thanks."

The black man nodded and resumed playing. The young guy in the flannel shirt sat cross legged on the sidewalk and tried to strum along but couldn't keep up. He'd grin from time to time, amazed at the black man's skills. He managed to finally keep up a rhythm to the black man's playing but his chords sounded like brutish grunts compared to the other man's delicate leads.

As the two awkwardly played together, the night's silence was broken by the approaching sound of an engine. The black man looked up expectantly. The man in the flannel shirt followed his gaze.

A pair of bright headlights appeared, approaching at an alarming speed. The vehicle that was barreling towards them was a very old bus, tearing through the night as if it were well acquainted with these back roads. With a squealing of brakes, the bus came to a stop directly in front of them. The lights from inside, blaring through the windows, looked like hospital lights. They made the man in the flannel shirt cringe.

A peculiar mechanical sound disrupted the night as the door to the bus swung open. After a moment's silence, a large black man dressed in a flawless suit stepped down the stairs and onto the road. He eyed both of the men and smiled widely, adjusting his red tie as he did so. It was odd, but the night seemed to bulge out in a way, as if there was not enough room left in the world to accommodate this man.

"Nice to see you boys," he said. "Best be getting on board now. No time to waste."

"Yes sir," the black man on the crate said. He slung his guitar to his back and headed for the bus obediently.

Behind him, the man with the dirty hair and flannel shirt followed. He stepped towards the bus but the large black man placed a hand like an anvil on his chest and shook his head.

"No more room," he said, although with the exception of the skinny black man, the bus was totally empty. "This tour don't roll through Seattle."

That was more than fine with the young man. He turned away with a slight scowl and, without a word, began walking into the night. He gripped his guitar tightly, his knuckles hardened with prescribed angst. He looked as if he were desperately seeking an amplifier to smash the guitar through, as if plunging a knife into a heart.

On the bus, the skinny black man watched his temporary friend fade away into the night. As he watched this man disappearing through the windows, the large black man stepped onto the bus and took the seat directly across the aisle from him. They looked at each other for a moment in a silence that was both awkward and frightening.

Although there was no one behind the wheel, the bus lurched forward and headed further down the road.

The large black man looked to his companion with much interest and said, "It's nice to finally see you again, Robert."

Robert Johnson then began to remember why he was here and he suddenly did not want to be on this bus. He remembered why his songs weren't really his and why he had returned to that deserted street corner—to that crossroad—earlier in the night. He gripped his guitar tightly, as if it were a shield against the truth, and wished he had never learned to play the damned thing.

"Oh relax," the large man said. As he spoke, his eyes seemed to grow wider to allow more room for his impossibly black pupils. "The time has come, Robert. And I've got one hell of a tour lined up for you."

#  — THE MANNERISMS OF RUNNERS —

It started off as an exercise thing, but now he has no idea why he runs. His leg muscles are toned and immune to shin splints; his ankles work like the hinges of a medieval drawbridge.

There is a rhythm to the wind against his face, to the pounding of his feet on asphalt like the heartbeat of a ghost. He runs and he runs and he has no idea where he is going. Three days ago he tasted salt in the air, the perspiration of the Pacific at his back. Today he smells manure and diesel. A large tractor trailer with a milk company logo barrels by like a big silver bullet looking for a werewolf that isn't there.

He has no idea why he is still running.

There are blisters on his feet and he is certain that both socks are filled with blood. He can feel the broken flaps of skin that were once the balls of his feet rubbing against the blood soaked fabric. His eyes, lips and the insides of his nostrils are dry. His lungs are burning and there is the sensation of a weight that has sat upon his chest for so long that it has started to absorb into his skin, through his breastbone and into his heart.

Sometimes when the milk trucks go racing past, he thinks about jumping in front of one. Then maybe the running would stop and his muscles would get a rest in the ensuing explosion of calcium and Penzoil and New Balance.

He has been running for thirty weeks. He does not sleep. He only watches the world as it slumbers around him, clouds rising and falling and sprinkling stars like salt along the way. The night sky should represent rest, but it only urges him on. _Run faster,_ it says. _There is a maniac behind you._

Maybe that is why he runs; the maniac is surely still on his heels—the maniac he encountered on the corner three blocks from his home. The maniac had worn a sheet of black that covered his entire body, standing outside a bakery at 5 a.m. among the smells of baking bread and dawn. He had looked like a shadow. The man had reached out and touched him.

Tripped him.

Joined him.

Is that why he runs?

Four days ago, he coughed out his tongue.

His calves are burning. The sun exchanges skies with the moon and another day begins. He keeps running. He tastes blood in the back of his mouth. His breath sounds like sandpaper dragging across shattered glass. A car passes and beeps its horn.

He raises his hand to wave and sees the decay on the underside of his forearm. There is no blood, only mottled gray splotches. It looks like mold on bread. This brings to mind the bakery and he peeks behind him to see if he is being followed.

The maniac is back there, gliding like a rogue shadow running from the sun. It runs without feet and points him onward. It then sinks into the road and leaves only the deserted Missouri highway (or was it Kansas or Connecticut or Calvary?) to show him where to go.

The laces of his shoes bounce up and down like the ears of a mauled rabbit. This scene looks familiar. He has been here before.

God, his feet hurt.

He coughs out his tongue; two days pass. A milk truck passes him, like a silver bullet looking for...

A car passes, beeps its horn.

He has run through this place before—always running, breathing electric pain, listening to the squishing sounds from his blistered feet in his soggy red socks.

He tastes the salt of the Pacific for several days. This is soon replaced by the wafting scent of manure and pastures.

He looks back and sees his companion, always pointing forward, always robed in black—a shadow cast not by light but by the absence of it.

He hears the approaching grumble of a milk truck as he brings his left foot up, right foot down, left foot up, right foot down...

He runs on and on.

Soon he will cough and his tongue will fall out. Then a car will pass, beeping its weak little horn.

He has been here before.

And no matter how hard he runs, he will never be faster than the shadow behind him or the truth it carries.

"Firmament" was previously published in The Red Penny Papers

"Mu Casa Es Su Casa" was previously published in Everyday Weirdness

"A Collection of True Evils" was previously published in Bound for Evil (Dead Letter Press)

"Taking Quinn Home" was previously published in Debris (Library of Horror Press)

"All the Little Secrets" was previously published in The Edge of Propinquity

"Farewell, from the Eleventh Hole" was previously published in Stymie Magazine

"End Credits" was previously published in Sand

"Lunatic Mile" was previously published in Night Terrors (Bloodbound Books)

"Riding in Trucks with Ghosts" was previously published in Debris (Library of Horror Press)

"Butt of the Joke" was previously published in The First Line

"Grave Seasons" was previously published in Southern Fried Weirdness

"This Tour Don't Roll Through Seattle" was previously published in Inkspill Magazine

"The Mannerisms of Runners" was previously published in 52 Stitches

— about the author —

Barry Napier is has had more than 30 short stories and poems published in print and online. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his wife and two children. He keeps his online home at www.barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com

— also by barry napier —

The Masks of Our Fathers

Debris: short fiction and poetry ( a collection published by Library of Horror Press)

The Final Study of Cooper M. Reid (a chapbook published by Strange Publications)

The Bleeding Room (a novel published by Graveside Tales, August 2011)

A Mouth for Picket Fences (a poetry collection published by Needfire Press)

