Nails to the Head

 Nails to the Head

Bancroft the Assassin raised his pistol over the railings of the crib. The baby inside threw his blanket aside, rolled over, almost cried, and then went back to sleep. He cocked the hammer back before noticing a glimmer in the moonlight. He brushed the boy's fuzzy head with the soft end of his glove, then pressed his open palm onto the baby’s head. He squeezed hard enough to feel the blood vessels pump against the leather. With two tense fingers, he pinched a hair and plucked it from his head. He held a tiny hair to the window. It was red. 

“The wrong one.” 

That’s when two weary adults entered. A man and a woman. The very same couple of newlyweds hung on the front of the main hall. He rested baseball bat over his shoulder. Bancroft took one look at him, wirey, squinted eye lids- probably couldn’t even see in the dark, and holding the bat all wrong. His fingers reached for the light switch but Bancroft had already stuck duct tape over it. 

Bancroft stood one step back into teh shadow of the curtains. He held his breath and watched them struggle to find the light, and that’s when he reached across teh room and ripped the bat out of the man’s hands. They watched in the dark, pale as ghosts, as Bancroft lifted the bat in front of them and snapped it in half with his bare hands. The door behind them slammed shut and they screamed from the otherside. 

The assassin slid out without them noticing, and then took their decorations down and used them to block the door. He held his gun to the hard wood, and listened to the allocations of their beating and pounding. The knob twisted , so he put teh weapon low, in the middle, close to the edge, but he noticed a tear in his sleeve he probably got from crawling in through the basement window. He withdrew the weapon.The baby began to cry. He moved to the bathroom. He found bandaids in their cabinet and use them to seal the small cut under his armpit. Then he straightened his mask, opened his kit and began sewing the tear shut. After examining his suit, he came back to the nursery. 

Bancroft tapped on the door. The barging had gone quiet. He didn’t even hear the baby cry. 

Bancroft tapped on the door. The barging had gone quiet. He didn't even hear the baby cry.

He waited.

Nothing.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open with the barrel of his pistol. The couple were gone. The decorations were still piled against the door. The room was exactly as he had left it. No blood. No broken furniture. No footprints. Only the crib.

The baby was awake. Bancroft slowly lowered his pistol. The child stared at him. He stepped closer and examined the baby's head. He remembered the tiny red hair between his fingers. Now there was nothing red. The baby's hair was black. Bancroft reached into his pocket and removed the hair he had pulled from the child's head.

It was still red.

He looked from the hair to the baby.

Then the child smiled. Bancroft stopped breathing. Somewhere behind him, the front door opened. He spun around. The couple stood in the hallway. Their eyes were completely black. Neither of them moved. Bancroft raised his pistol. The woman pointed toward the nursery.

"That's not the one," she whispered.

Bancroft looked back at the crib. The baby was gone. Something scratched beneath the floorboards. He slowly lowered his weapon.

For the first time in his career, Bancroft did not know where his target was.

Then something whispered directly beside his ear.

"Neither do you."

The lights came on. The room was empty. Except for a tiny red hair lying in the center of the floor. Bancroft stared at it. Then he heard a baby crying somewhere underneath the house.

Bone Task

Bone Task 

I- The  Grave Digger

Walt kept these things in his kit. A 36 inch snubnose shovel with a T handle. A 2 foot spade with a sharpened blade,  A blue steel sifter with a 13 inch width, Six 12 foot tarps, A 4 inch sledge hammer, and a crowbar. He showed up at the burial grounds and recovered the kit from a bag he hid in the grass by the statue days earlier. The Mausoleum gate finally appeared in the moonlight and fog. Walt stood in awe, his boot sucked in by mud, sweat and blood dried on his shirt.

He tore the page loose and let it disintegrate in the cold wind. The clouds strangled the starlight from the night sky. Trees bursted into flame from the speed of the dropping temperature then they collapsed under the weight of snow. The walls of the Mausoleum arose. 

Red bright stones in the walls shined like windows with lights within. Curious murmurs and errant chatter echoed as high above a cliff hawks looked down. Sharp black rocks closed in on the boundaries. Bones of animals and man alike littered the ground. 

Spires, bladed cylinders, chains of barbs, heavy curtains of spider web infested with millions of eyes covered the stone walls. The roof stretched up to the edge of the cliff. Blocks and steel rails sealed the door. They hissed at Walt when he touched them. His hands frozen within the gloves, he began climbing. 

Walt heard voices from within. Living voices. Warm voices. He felt them vibrate against the jagged balls of spikes. Spiders bit his hand until it swelled up and turned green. When he slipped, the spires hooked his clothes and tore them to the skin. 

He pulled his kit with him on a strap around his chest. His knife slipped out of his boot and fell to the rocks below. Once on the roof he inspected the damage, He reached his hands beneath his belts and armor, but he found six bleeding wounds, but no broken bones, no internal damage. He stripped his heavy clothes off and tore his t shirt apart to wrap the wounds shut. Then he began looking for the sun vent. 

Once he found the cap he began pounding it with the crowbar and hammer. From the hole he created in the ceiling, he tethered a rope and descended. He put a respiratory mask over his face, and searched with a flash light. Inside of one empty catacomb he saw a freshly disposed body. Not neatly placed but stuffed into the rear and hastily covered. He pulled her out, and began examining the body. Nothing that could work on the website. 

He tore open the sealed catacombs along the walls, the caskets had been broken into long ago. Then he began to smash the floor to pieces. Beneath the floor he discover a smaller chamber beneath the mausoleum with one undisturbed casket. He smashed it open, and hit it big. Just as the scripture told him. Just as he had prayed. An entire skeleton. 

Walt wrapped it up in a tarp and sealed it in a bag. He went up the rope, and climbed down. The exhilaration made his heart race so fast that he didn't notice how numb his fingers and face had become. He wondered about the body he found within. Ragged, no cards, no money. A bottle of Mariisnk Vodka. She probably got in to escape the cold, and it closed on her.

Walt was trapped too. Debts, children, forsaken property, dead dreams. All the way home he wondered about how long she suffered in there. How long did she stay cramming herself into that empty slot. The last thing he did before leaving with the skeleton was place her body in the casket, and close the lid.

II The Medical Student 

The Mausoleum loomed before her. Just as the grave digger showed. He warned her that’s no place for newbs.  She bought the bones by the bucketful from him on the internet. He told her to avoid the Mausoleum but she was overcome with academic inquest, the secrets, knowledge, ancient wonder. The gate wide open, she entered. 

Rain from outside poured down the hole in the ceiling. It splashed down on the tile floor, then washed down the holes carved into the floor. The casket lay submerged at the bottom of the chamber.  She lowered herself into the sand and drowned blocks. The water sent shocks of cold into the core of her body. She tried to push the lid off but once she got it to lift a blast of hot air turned the chamber into a fountain. The gate slammed shut. Icy shadows filled the air. 

The ground quaked as gas clouded her mind. Blades appeared on the walls. The more silty water rose, the closer she stood by the walls. Shivering did nothing to warm her body. The cold air seemed to funnel beneath her. A surge of energy boiled from within the Mausoleum. The walls vibrated with awakening spirits. With the shadows and the cold against her, she felt herself pressing against the razors on the wall, she felt them enter her soft flesh before the casket below finally opened. 

The water washed away as the casket broke apart. The pedestal collapsed, and the water and sediment and loose bones  rushed down a chute. She found the chute to consist of a few tunnels that were finally broadened into a wide drain beneath the Mausoleum. Crawling in the mud, covered in bruises in cuts, she shimmied down. She got stuck a few times, and a few times the water level rose up so high that she had to suck on air pockets in cracks along the ceiling. 

However at the bottom of the chute she did not find a way out as she hoped. She found heaps of bones rolled up and stacked. One casket stood up in the middle, its door off, surrounded by drain gates and flood tunnels. Its hand wings were in the skeletal hands of the deceased. Something stood up inside. A ridge of solid bone down the middle of its skull, its skull was shaped like a dog’s almost. Yet it had two spines. When she touched it, she felt something entombed breaking free, and seeing the sun for the first time in millenia. 

The walls and ceiling twisted around her as she slid through the drain gates, tearing her clothes, slicing open her flesh, carried away by freezing gray water. She hid in a small space in the tunnels, but knew time was running out. She heard what she awoke pacing, fluttering, stomping and chirping. It ate the the marrow out of the bones and spoke to the dark. The steaming blocks of the Mausoleum seemed to listen. Soon she knew the water would drop, and she'd have another chance to escape. Yet the dangers of the Masuolean increased. Floating pillars of fire, collapsing floors, poison fumes. 

III The Monster

In the dark belly I lay dormant, lulled by the sweetness of forgotten souls. In a heavy slumber I am satisfied with the feast. From the shadows I watch fools disturb my resting place. The aroma of lingering guilt fills the palace. The deliciousness of weakness. The shadows of their hearts!

From within the shadow walls I taste the fates of the intruders. A terrible reality intertwines between us. Fear calls to me, and chaos ignites my power. In their panic, the old incantations are useless. 

When the casket opened, I awoke like the wrath of the forgotten. I talk to the spirits in the walls. I can feel how the wizards of old tried to confine us. Time wore down those once impenetrable magics. 

When the entrance slammed shut, I encroached on the makers of meaningless incantations. I drew nearer under whispers of despair. Threads of desperation came unraveled in the dark. 

At that moment they were mine. Within me, captured by an unquenchable hunger, a feast of regret!

IV The Mausoleum 

The girl stopped breathing. She had hidden beneath a stone ledge while the creature paced through the tunnels, dragging its bones against the walls and whispering her name. It knew everything about her—her ambitions, her lies, her failures, the reason she had bought the bones. She had wanted to be the first to discover something nobody else had found. Now she understood that the mausoleum had been built for something far older than any cemetery. Beneath the layers of inscriptions she found the warning: THE DEAD ARE NOT BURIED HERE. THEY ARE FED HERE.

The creature emerged from the darkness and told her the truth. The mausoleum was not its prison. The mausoleum was its mouth. The floor broke beneath her and she fell into the lower chamber.

Three nights later, Walt returned. The skeleton was gone, the buyer had disappeared, and black water had begun leaking from the bag he had carried home. He followed footprints through the snow back to the mausoleum. The gate opened for him. Inside, the corridors seemed longer than before, and hundreds of footprints led downward. He found the medical student alive beneath the earth, covered in blood and mud. She looked at him and whispered, "It followed you."

The walls began to move. Thousands of eyes opened inside the stone. The creature emerged from the darkness in pieces—a skull, a wing, a hand with too many fingers, a spine dragging across the floor. Walt finally understood what it wanted. It did not feed on flesh. It fed on guilt. His debts, his failures, his dead dreams, the woman he had left in the casket, every regret he had carried into the mausoleum had become food.

Voices came from inside the creature. His children. The dead woman. Everyone whose grave he had ever opened. They called to him and told him they were cold. Walt dropped his crowbar. He looked at the girl and told her he was sorry. Then he ran toward the creature, giving himself to it so she could escape.

She crawled from the mausoleum at dawn. For three days she told nobody what had happened. Then she opened the notebook she had carried from the tunnels. A drawing showed Walt standing beside a grave with the creature behind him. Beneath it were the words: THE GRAVE DIGGER BRINGS THE DEAD. The next page showed the student inside the mausoleum: THE STUDENT OPENS THE DOOR. The final page was blank.

Then words began appearing.

THE THIRD MUST CARRY IT OUT.

Three knocks came from her apartment door.

"Open the door," Walt's voice whispered.

She looked toward the window. The snow outside was untouched except for a trail of footprints leading from the woods to her building. At her feet lay a small black stone glowing red from within.

She picked it up.

From somewhere beneath the earth, the creature whispered:

"Now you know."

The lights went out.

Beneath the floorboards, something began digging.

The Third Eye pt III

 The Third Eye: Pt III 

Ralph chased the prints revealed by the eye in his forehead. A white hand beckoned him on. Tears streamed down his face until his eyelids turned red and swelled shut. The agony of the eye in his head felt like the eye was attached to a stake getting pounded into his skull. He saw the naked women dancing in the fire.

He arrived at the burned church, the Eye throbbed when it saw the ruins. Yellow tape. Heaps of brick. The floor still covered in soot. The eye came wide open. When he closed his regular eyes, the wrecked chimney disappeared. The charred beams sank. White walls. Curtains on the window. The beams back up against the rafters. Fresh patched roof with straw and mud sealed the gaps. Footsteps paced on dirt. 

Torches lit the nave. Hands set down candles. They burned in tight rows against stone shelves. 

Rings of candles were lit one at a time. The shoulder of a fur cloak appeared between two flames. Their hands carried the candles. Hoods and veils bounced under the light. A dozen candles lit, then another dozen. 

Ralph thought “No wonder this place burned down.”

Then he got a look out the front door. There were no buildings outside, no roads. Just wagons, horses, and moonlight. The dark of night pressed the land like a trash compactor. 

Out of the dark came a silver fire. A hideous man came inside through the front door. Bald, large nose, wrinkled forehead, one eye sealed shut by scar tissue, gray skin, black lips, he reeked of goat urine. At first Ralph thought he wore black gloves but the silver light got nearer. He saw that a layer of filth covered his hands all the way down to his elbows. Big droopy eyes. Thick veins ran down his face. When he got to the altar he set the silver torch down, and spoke in language Ralph never heard before. The floor opened up before the silver torch. All the people in veils rose from their seats and lined up, and descended into the chamber below. 

Ralph moved closer to the sanctuary below to give the third eye a better look. It pulsed and twisted so hard when the trap door opened that he figured whatever it wanted to see must be down there. The strange preacher no longer held the silver torch, but the emblem of the red mark.

Ralph started to get nervous. He saw the same red mark in the flame of the candles. But he couldn’t get the eye to look at anything else.

A panel in the floor slid open, and veiled worshipers went down. They undressed and stood naked before a crack in a black stone. The crack began to glow red, like the mark. The red mark got brighter until even the walls of the chamber shined red rays back at the pale, shivering folk. 

Ralph watched the red mark intensify, condense, intensify again, seeming to come to the brink of transforming into an entirely new color, as if sucking all other colors out of the room. 

The third eye extended from the socket Ralph had never felt it stretch so far from his skull. Far enough that he could no longer see his own arms and legs. Far enough that it just caught a glimpse of the red mark. It almost focused. Ralph stepped down the stairs. 

“Please dont…” he thought.

The Third Eye turned red.  

The red mark glowed in the basement. Ralph lowered his head and shut his forward eyes. The red mark glowed brighter than any fire above ground, and when its light touched the faces of the folk, it focused a laser on them and reduced them to bones in milliseconds.

But Ralph was safe. The eye was safe. It looked deeply at the red mark. The pupil constricted, and the eye at last focused completely. 

It was a peaceful moment for Ralph. The head pain stopped pulling his skull apart into plates. 

“You must not ignore the red mark.” A voice uttered.

Ralph turned around. The strange preacher stood in the red light beside him. 

The eye stayed focused on the red mark. When it finally flashed, Ralph felt the eyes of everyone in town on him. Everyone who had crossed a red mark, whether they saw it or not, now entered Ralph’s brain through his vision. It hurt so much that he fell to the ground in a paralysed mess. Both hands bent upwards, his wrists twisted, both palms open under his eyes. 

The strange preacher dragged him upstairs and laid him on the altar. Hooded men arrived. The same hooded men that the eye behind Mrs. Slugger.

The hooded men threw flaming glass at the floor and dumped accelerants on the walls. The place went up in flames. When the fire reached the ceiling the walls began to bend. The rafters above him crumbled and collapsed on top. 

The strange preacher threw a shroud with the red mark over the eye, walked through the fire, and vanished into the fog of night. 

Ralph awoke once more, the eye tight in its socket, resting in its blanket of orbital fat. He was laying in the soot. The ruins of the church towered over him. The strange preacher was there. He lay where the floor once was. A pitchfork was stuck in his chest. 

“Dont ignore the red mark.” Ralph remembered him saying. 

A pool of blood sat beneath him. 

The air smelled like smoke. Ralph got up, looked around. He could hear car horns blasting, 0people shouting, breaking glass, even a gunshot. He rushed to town to get home.qq He kept his hat low but it didn’t work. A truck sped down the street and came to a sharp stop.

“That's him” someone inside said.

Ralph turned down and alley and ran through so many backyards. A car collided into another car coming through an intersection. The sound of sirens grew louder. More and more alarms joined in. He saw the red mark on every house. Some people stared into them and screamed. Others didn’t seem to notice them at all.

Dagan: The Curse of Meterhead PT I

 Dagan: The Curse of Meterhead PT 1 

ANGEL CITY OCCULT DEPARTMENT. EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM. BEEEEEEEEEP.

 THIS IS AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST. The Angel City Occult Department has issued an emergency warning for the following counties:DEVASTATION COUNTY. OBLITERATION COUNTY. EGYPT COUNTY.

 BEEP. 

SIGHTINGS OF THE ENTITY KNOWN AS “METERHEAD” HAVE BEEN REPORTED. Residents in affected areas are advised to REMAIN INDOORS and avoid unnecessary travel. If you encounter a gas meter under unusual circumstances, DO NOT APPROACH IT.If you observe a humanoid figure bearing a gas meter in place of a head, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO APPREHEND, SPEAK TO, OR OTHERWISE INTERACT WITH THE ENTITY. DO NOT BREATHE ITS FUMES. DO NOT FOLLOW IT. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH IT. Immediately retreat to a secure location and contact the Angel City Occult Department or local emergency services.

 BEEEEEP. 

The entity known as Meterhead is considered EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. Meterhead is wanted in connection with multiple murders committed in 1911 and again in 1954. The circumstances surrounding these incidents remain under investigation. Residents are reminded that GAS METERS ARE NOT TO BE INVESTIGATED. Do not attempt to determine whether a gas meter is functioning normally. Do not attempt to determine whether it is watching you. If you see the Meterhead, DO NOT INTERFERE. Remain indoors. Secure all doors and windows. Turn off unnecessary lights. Do not respond to knocking. Do not respond if the entity calls your name. And above all…

DO NOT APPROACH THE METERHEAD.

BEEP.

The Angel City Occult Department advises residents that gas rates are expected to increase during this emergency. This concludes the emergency portion of this broadcast. Remain calm. Remain indoors. Do not look for Meterhead. Meterhead will find you.

BEEEEEEEEEP.

When I was a little girl, I hid from my parents. No one believed me but I saw Meterhead in the fog that night. He walked down the sidewalk like a normal person, humming through the gas valves poking from his neck, wind blowing hard against the front cover of his face, water bubbled from loose bolts and cracks. The plastic box over the broken dial exhausted steam and talc powder. Globs of blood washed from nozzles on the side of his head. Every step blew out a funnel of red air from the inlet. The rotating of the inner crack whined as tiny plastic pieces fell loose and rattle around inside of the case. 

I heard about what he had done, but I was not afraid. My parents mentioned Meterhead, but they decided my innocence mattered more than some legend.  I had to hear it from the old people who remembered his rampage. The legend of the headless monster that lived in the abandoned factory and who closed it down for good. I had to learn it from

At first he looked like he cut their throats. Every manager, every owner of the plant. Each one with a gas meter where their head should’ve been. A crank shoved deep inside their throats. Then Meterhead took the supervisors from their beds, and hung them by the head on assembly hooks. They floated like angels to heaven. But there was no heaven. Only the dark dusty rafters of the factory dungeon.  The factory floor where Meterhead lived. 

 They went through every station, still alive. The welding station. The torque station. The spray paint station. The claws squeezed their brains, and they lived to get spray painted gray and dropped in a hydro tester. Some even had their dead bodies packaged and sent out to somewhere out there. Ohio. Hong Kong. Brazil. Somewhere out there, a landlord awaited his shipment of gas meters. When she saw the crate full of blood soaked boxes, he screamed to the janitors and security guards. With each box, he found another body part. The police arrested anyone connected to the factory but they were let off when Meterhead began sabotaging gas meters on cell tech’s homes. Big explosions shook the ground and left craters where there was once a home. He found where they lived, kicked the gas meters until pieces came loose. In one year there was 13 explosions. 33 people died. The factory finally closed its doors before any lawsuits could be completed. At the funerals, Meterhead stood and watched the families. Some say he still lives in those ruins. Some say he went into the river or the carnage swamp. But I alone know him to rise only on certain lonely nights when stars turn black and he comes across relics of his former life. The grass lot where his home once was. The grave of his family members. The parking lot where his playground once was. 

I know this because unlike the others, I followed Meterhead when I saw him. I watched him stand in those places, the meter on his shoulder tilted downward, rain water dripped from his spout. Sometimes he’d stand at the edge of the playground and watch the children play. I understood that in all of his violence, he never harmed a child. Because of this I would approach him in the cold rain and hold my hand out for him to take. 

After the 1911 murders, someone hit him with their car and pinned him down. The mob tied him up, and left him locked inside of a tomb. My father was the man instructed to keep the keys to the tomb door. He kept them locked in a case on the wall and protected them with his shotgun. In any storm, he secured the keys first. 

 I got hold of that key. Meterhead didn’t belong there. He belonged on the playground with the other children. So I unlocked the tomb, and left the door wide open. My father was horrified. He tried to get me to tell on Meterhead. Where did he go? My father asked again and again. But I never answered. 

Meterhead went on to take more lives, then vanish. Many believed he died, but us children, we knew he'd return.

We wanted him to play with us. We created the cult which leaves offerings for him upon his return to the playground.

Dagan: Don't Wake Them

 Dagan: Don’t Wake Them

By Graham Swanson

Two Satyrs, 1619

“The Conjurer

The land kills.
Bite the black granite.
Do not wake what sleeps beneath.
Dawn is when it hungers.”

 

In the mist of early morning, the ungodly hour, 

A long time ago, but not too long, before vaccines, before the secret of the telephone, before hell rose up, there lived an immigrant named Otto Strauhus and his beautiful wife Ella. He worked in the desolate fields of Dagan, a forbidden and cursed land known for its wealth of gems, but infamous for its everlasting curses and brutal murders. One day a farmer named Osmond Hok hired him to work in his field but not for farmwork. Osmond showed Otto a fist full of soil.

“This here is the most fertile soil on the planet. The only other places like this are in China.” 

“But nothing grows.” Otto, smart and stalwart, had seen this kind of problem before across Nebraska and Iowa back before he fled. 

“Nothing THEY will plant. The land here cost a fortune, but I bought it rather cheaply. See those?”

Osmond pointed to a rock in the dirt. Blue, sharped, but incredibly light for its size. He picked it up to show Otto.

“These are bones. Fossils. There used to be cities here made of this material. They are magic.”

“Magic?” Otto cackled, reached for the chain on his neck. A Lutheran cross dangled under his shirt.

“Yes. I need them removed. Once they are all picked up, what I want will grow here.”

“All 400 acres?”

“I will pay you enough to go back east or west, buy yourself a castle by the sea. What do you say?”

Otto took the offer and told Ella in the tent that night.

“He wants me to collect rocks. Says he’ll pay me 2000$ for each acre we complete.”

“To collect stones?”

“Ja, stones. Then we can leave this horrible place.”

Ella crossed her arms, one large shoulder covered in long blonde hair, her fat breasts exposed in the lantern light. Her face reddened by the sun, one eye blinded by an infection. 

“Ich vertrause diesem Mann nicht.”  She told him, afraid that someone may be listening.

“My Sweetheart, we will only be here for a few days. Then we will leave.”

She gave him a mirror to shave with. His long simmering black hair hung in a perfect frame. Once his beard was gone, his bright silver eyes came out, long dark eye lashes dashed his pale eyelids. 

Only it didn’t work out that way he promised her it would.

Indeed after a nonstop day from the frigid early morning when only Venus is up in the dark sky, to the fatal hours when the sun falls beyond the black mountains, Otto cleared the rocks and put them in a wagon. He dumped the wagon out in the river. With no animals, and no assistance, he had to haul the wagon himself through the gravel, shrapnel, and sand to the grassy shore. Hawks screamed in the sky, and wild growls followed him through the wooded reeds. Each haul took him longer than he imagined. Rust covered the axels, the wheels got jammed in cracks in the ground, even with one misstep, he fell into a hole covered in dead stalks and patches of fur. His promise of a few days didn’t come true, and Ella became dissatisfied with her time living in a tent in the stormy ruins of rural Dagan.  Giant spiders, strange eyes that slurp in the night, clapping of hands just outside the firelight. She had no normal humans to talk to. The men who resided in those barren outskirts hid their faces in masks and screamed into the moon. She tried to talk to the women who went to the creek for laundry. Except they couldn’t talk. Their jaws, teeth, gums were so malformed that tongues hung out, or their cheeks sagged into the shape of a horses face. At best they could moan when they saw her, and hiss when she got too close to them. One time a girl got bit by a fish. Her finger turned blue as it bled. Ella sealed the cut. That’s when the girl warned her that the men around these parts each has committed a heinous sin, and must reside away from protected circles of delicate society. 

  After a week, she asked him to quit, and take what money he could get, so they may leave once and for all. 

“Any place, my love, it doesn’ have to be a palace in California. Let us be gone from his land.” 

Otto went back to Osmond’s land to talk with him  about collecting payment. But everything seemed overgrown. The cows moaned, their unmilked utters taut and firm. Despite the frosty powder blowing in the wind, no smoke rose from the chimney of the Osmond house. He stepped up to the porch and found the front door ajar. A bloody hand pint pressed over the marble paint. Inside he found the maid nailed to the ceiling. The youngest children lay chewed to death in a cradle. Heaps of debris obstructed Otto’s passage from room to room. Drawers blocked door ways, holes in the walls created cracks that reached the ceiling. After some searching he discovered a hole in a thin layer of wood under the second story stairs. Inside the hole he discovered an open safe. He found some envelopes with letters, but no gold, no silver, no guns in the house at all. From an open window he noticed the trail of dried blood on the grass. First Otto fed the animals, milked the cows, then he grabbed an axe, and followed the trail of blood into the field.

Fierce wind blew his clothes open and slowed his march. The wind didn' t just blow but it circled around him and collapsed, blowing over dead trees and whipping flails of root and stone high overhead to rain down on Otto’s head. He came closer, he heard the wind. It didn’t just scour the countryside, it whistled and moaned, blowing out from a wide gap in the middle of the field. It’s edges crawled with worms. The angles conjoined and bent in a way no animal he ever knew about could dig. A human would just dig a tunnel straight down, but this one seemed to corkscrew up from the deep clay beneath his feet. Smoke lifted from the bottom of the hole. Blood along the edge glistened. Bails of flies amassed over the blood, bussing, biting, some eating greedy flies that swelled up with blood and drowned on their own spit up. He looked down the hole, braving smoke and heat, and saw a narrow chute carved into the rock surface with a guiding rope leading the way down. Inside he heard the echoes of scowls.

“Osmond! Anyone!” Otto cried into the hole. 

Something hurried up the tunnel. Breathing hard, gasps of pain, muffled nonsense, as a shadow entered the chute. The rope tensed up as dust rattled down the tunnel, almond someone covered in gray earth, covered in bruises, their lips torn, their eyes red and laced in yellow glaucoma. An emaciated form appeared, with tattered ribbons for clothes and a layer of clay covering their skin. Skin broken by bruises and lacerations. Otto wasn’t sure if it was Osmond or some random soul. He reached down to take hold of their arm. 

A face emerged into the light. So black with dirt and muzzled with hair, Otto wasn’t even sure if who appeared was a human. With their eyes fused shut by goo, and their cheeks pulled apart, but Otto held on anyway. The man or creature screamed and kicked but the tunnel was too narrow. The man or creature clearly couldn’t breath and pulling him up the tunnel snapped their ribs and bent their joints around sharp angles of the tunnel.

Otto had never seen a man so sullied by the filth of the earth. So compacted with thickened layers in recesses of the human body,  he thought he saw a heap of tires set ablaze in the hole. Yet it unfolded more. An eye, a tongue, fingers! Otto pulled until he heard an elastic snap from the arm he held. The person inside squeezed them against rocks and fuzz barren roots. 

More limbs unfolded from the ground rot in the hole. Some belonged to the man emerging from the fumes and burning oil. Some were just extras.  He took a hold of Otto’s shirt and tore off the fabric. He tried to grip the man but his hands slid on the wet clay and blood.. The man from the hole reached out and kept a firm grasp on Otto’s suspender belt, his tight grip on  left deep imprints. 

An orange oil dripped down Otto’s cheek. The fluid left a stain that burned the pores of his flesh until they no longer produced color. 

Stiff layers of brown oil soaked through his clothes. The fabric peeled off in fibers as Otto trie to scrape the material from the man’s face. 

“Osmond!” Otto tried “How many fingers? What time of day is it?”

The clay and mud on his body did not scrape oof with his hands, or even finger nails. At first Otto didn’t panic, until he noticed the raw slime of the ground slowly shifting in the sunlight. Like a snake shedding its skin, it moved back into the man’s eyes and mouth. His nostrils were already swollen. His ears were packed. He coughed until he choked, and finally spat out not dirt, but what looked like a red, beating beast heart.  

The more Otto tried to clean him off but his own fingernails dissolved in the oils from the cave material. In the air floated metal powder. Deep in the grains of the cave stone it smelled like pennies. One by one they broke off, and his finger tips bled too much to keep scraping it off.  It felt like running his fingers through a deep fat fryer. 

Otto took a shovel and started stabbing the mud with it. The mud absorbed the blade’s irons and melted it like egg yolk. Otto stood frozen. The nearest town is probably a day away. The nearest doctor, god knows where. It began to get foggy and rain. At first it was just a gentle shower. The fog climbed higher, and voices chanted in the trees. The rain picked up, and the fields began to fill up. And then the cold came. 

Water and sediment began pooling up as Otto shoveled hard. Sirens droned in dark clouds. Shadows of trees emerged from flashes from lightning. Scoop by scoop he dumped raw ground into the hole. The body of the man lay there trembling in the mud. Trying hard to breath, laboring to breath, as the blood from his compound fractures leaked from the scales of muck growing fuzz on his neck. Tiny roots hooked the fresh flakes of skin. The rain beat his face. He remembered being a child and how the rain would wash his face. Deafed and blinded, no relief came for him. The moisture only turned the sludge to wet, hairy leeches sucking on his capillaries, and producing the toxic compound that covered his body like ashes and raw tree pulp. It looked a lot like manure to Otto but it felt more like the limestone of a grave. 

“Get… away.” He told Otto. 

Otto noticed beyond the rain, that shadows moved amid the fog. Creatures unlike any animal he saw. They stood on their hind legs, they carried spears and forks, they howled like baboons, with the body of a large man, but the horned head of some animal from the desert. Not only did the fog move, but so did the branches of the trees. Roots fluttered over the mist as the leafs bounced off. The branches shook as they tightened around the horizon. The ground under Otto trembled. He saw the roots burrough beneath his feet. 

Otto took one look at the man drenched in toxic sediment. Slowly, the ground had reclaimed him. He sank into the ground tilled up by the moving roots and the beats hoofs of creatures speeding by. He tried to pull the man up, but he made no sound, no effort to escape. He just sank like a bag of potatoes, until the arm broke off. Otto then felt the pain on his palm. He looked and saw a layer of orange fluid under the dirt leaving his palm pocked with tiny holes that opened and closed as if breathing. It hurt bad enough to reach his spine. 

Otto hurried off, leaving the arm behind him, as the man sank into the dirt. The creatures darted past him. The trees scraped his face with their branches. He heard echoes in the wind. Angry chants, unspeakable words, threats and promises made by forces unseen. He hurried to his camp area. 

Otto hurried to the tent and began tearing through the wet canvas, calling her name. Her clothes were still there. Her shoes. The little mirror she had given him. Her wedding ring sat in the mud beside the lantern, perfectly clean. There were no footprints around the tent except his own. He looked toward the field. The rain had flattened everything, but beneath the water he could see something moving through the earth. It traveled slowly beneath the grass, making a long raised line toward him. Otto stepped backward. The line stopped. Then another appeared. And another. Soon there were dozens of them, all coming from the field, all stopping at the edge of the ruined tent. From somewhere beneath his feet came a muffled sound. At first he thought it was the wind. Then he heard Ella.

“Otto?”

He dropped to his knees. Her voice came again, directly beneath the earth.

“Otto, I’m cold.”

He began digging with his hands. The mud was warm. Beneath it he found her hair. Then her face. Her eyes were open, but she did not blink. Her mouth moved.

“Don't pull me out.”

Otto froze.

Ella smiled at him from beneath the mud.

“You'll only wake them.”

Behind him, in the darkness beyond the field, hundreds of voices whispered his name.

They Lurk

They Lurk

Death of St. Innocent. 1530.

Black Death. Artist Unknown.

 

Memento Mori.  Daniel Preisler. 1650

In the early morning hours when first shift wakes up  a PSA played on every radio and phone screen. Even the TV lost its sound, a green bar flashed across with code and abbreviated agencies. A tone beeped before the message began playing. A robot voice said,

THIS IS A PUBLIC SAFETY NOTICE

Reports of Unidentified Persons have increased throughout Hitchens County. Residents are advised to lock doors and windows. A Large Concentration of Unidentified Persons has broken up and are moving towards the following counties. Saunderlund County. Torchlight County. Wilkroot County. Residents are advised against approaching any person who appears injured, confused, or displaying unnatural behavior. Stay indoors or find shelter immediately until the Emergency is over. 

Coffee maker steamed. Fang sipped it, but it burned his lips and he spilled it over his shirt.  Work boots fell apart. Pin and needles in his spine, so he took a pill. Take a pill with a dirty glass of water. With kids sleeping before school, the TV is still on washing their pale faces with flashes of eye-catching color. Grocery list on the empty fridge, with baseball photos and drawings. He looked outside, waited for the womanto return, but she didn't. Things flow like a river, somethings stay after being washed up, somethings belong there, living or dead.

 “It’s been awhile.” Mr Fang said nursing the stitches. The wound still felt fresh and moist. It drained pus and blood every morning. He wondered how well he’d be able to handle the machines but if no one else showed up, he’d be the one to do it.

. He was the gravedigger and landskeeper for the cemetery on the hill by a town of 900 souls so removed and remote that Amazon can’t deliver packages there. The newest bridge went up over 100 years ago. The people are either so aged that they’ve forgotten about the rest of the world, or they are intentionally laying low, repelled by the forces of greater society that gave up on its mislaid ruins long ago. Yet it’s graveyard was immense, ornate, and perched in a neat trench overlooking the hill top. The strange folk of the village said that the burial grounds used to be an important spot to watch the river. That senators and even warlocks built homes here and were interred in the soil of the graveyard. Something about purifying the waters of evil spirits, Fang didn’t really believe stories like that. 

. He got up everyday just before first light just so he could watch the fog in the trees and the foxes in the grass. Sometimes he’d catch them resting on the stones. Maybe if he did it fast he could get back home before anyone one saw him out during emergency hours. He turned the TV off and ate his breakfast.  

“Guess we hunker down until the Patrol says it’s okay to come out.” 

He rolled his eyes. It still hurt where the doctor stitched his wound shut. The boy who did it, his old lady’s son, walled himself off from the cops and held out in his barricade until he passed out from dehydration. Now this. And it was probably over nothing. A couple of scared old women.  

 Out the window, long lawn, wet grass, open fields, no dangerous people lingering with blood dripping from their mouths. He had stones to mount and grass to mow. Bones to collect and store. Last time this happened was more than fifteen years ago. They stayed in the basement one sunny day, did nothing, nothing happened to them, and in three days the emergency was lifted. Two people were killed, most people still had to go to work, the few that witnessed them couldn’t even see what was attacking them but for a shadow stumbling in the mist. 

Just stick to the procedure, cops will search around, and it will be over. Soon. 

However his face fell into his hands. The other day he had left the backhoe and two loading buckets out on the cemetery grounds. He got tired and hungry, figured he could store it today, so he took the keys with him and went home. He tapped his toe and thought about it, checking the curtains. He saw no danger yet.. He could run down there, put the backhoe and loading buckets back, and make it home before sunrise. So he put on his coat and darted out into the early morning dark.

As he drove down the highway, around the brick streets, gravel roads, over the bridge, he saw one in the field. Then two in the mist, and three more appeared in the middle of  the road.. They staggered with short steps, falling over creases in the ground, carrying bones with the meat gnawled off.. 

“That’s Uncle Robert.” 

Fang remembered the day of the man’s funeral. He still wore the suit they buried him in.

Mr. Fang drove up the countryside as pale light broke through the dark clouds over the hills. The strangers wandered from their positions in the field. One now wandered along the road, picking at roadkill. The other two fell into the ditch and got stuck in the drainage pipe. He had to slow down behind a truck. They waited for a group of about 6 to cross the road. 

“It’s more than last time.” Mr. Fang told himself. 

A while back they had sightings of a few in a barn. That night a homeless man had fallen asleep under the bridge to the graveyard, and he missed the emergency broadcast. He slept into the night, and was dragged into the creek, where he was disrobed and murdered, then eaten until only his bones were left. 

More recently, a few had been sighted in the river. A man drove to the edge of the river. He rested his car at a sandbar, he rolled down the windows, swallowed a bottle of pills and fell asleep. They got into his car, and murdered him too. They did such a thorough job on his body, that cops only found the puddles of blood on the seats and floor, and one single finger embedded into the steering wheel. 

The Patrol just issued another PSA but didn’t close school. Businesses opened, people drove to work. It was just a few sightings, and they found the ones who had murdered the men within that day. Many questioned if it was even a real emergency. Maybe something else killed the men, and the Patrol is just covering something up. 

Everyone in town had a different story for what had happened, each one contrived before the emergency was declared. Who saw the men who were eaten was a conversation topic like whose husband was cheating. 

Both victims got buried in the graveyard on the hill. Fang couldn’t be certain as he never knew them too well, but he thought he saw them there in the group on the road. 

The music on the radio all had the same message. 

"Residents should avoid the deceased."

Fang drove around the lingering bodies. He drove through the village, to the top of the hill, and up to the old road. It was narrow, dripping wet, and quiet. He pulled up to the garage, unlocked the door to bring in the machines. 

From the hill top he could see for miles. He saw nothing from the summit. The ground below looked just as it usually did. He could see the river, he could see the homes waking up and traffic sparkle in sunlight as it appeared on the highway. 

“Did they say three groups?” Fang thought as he wheeled the machine back inside.

From the countryside to the river, he watched out for a sign of them.

Something dark moved in the river water. At first it looked like a heap of trash floating to the top of the current. But it moved AGAINST the flow. It sank, and rose. Hands reached from the murk and broke the foam. Fang  thought it was just a cloud or a patch of fog, but it moved, it squirmed, and bodies crawled up to the bank. He could hear moans blowing up in the wind. Hundreds of them. Mud coated bodies, bloated and swollen, bursting on the sandbars, tangled together. They drifted downstream, pale and contorted by the pressure of the whirlpools. Other had no skin, just gray bones wrapped in a rag. Their shredded clothing hung from their arms and necks and trailed behind them like weeds. 

The river carried them gently to the shore. A body hit the bank. He slapped and sank into the mud. When he emerged, his entire body was a cast of muck and backwash. Others followed him. They tangled together on the bank. Legs caught in ribcages, fists stuck in mouths. Dark smelly water leaked from their eye sockets. 

Fang watched them break free and wander up the hill. The winds carried their voices nearer to him. Whispers. Then moans. Then a hundred voices speaking at once, rising and falling with the river like some ancient death ritual. 

The ones he noticed lost their balance or their footing, and they slipped and fell back down to the water, where they let the water take them down to the bottom again. Then one appeared at the gate. Others walked behind the road. They crawled in silence leaving black trails behind them. The ones that could walk went towards the roofs under the early morning moon, its light glistening on their bodies. The river kept carrying the rest down and down and down. 

As if the dead belonged there all along.