Host of Monstrosity

Debbs awoke from the train scraping the rail as it turned a curve to transverse around a pond shore. At first he kept his eyes shut, he felt it in his lap, in his arms. The suitcase- he curled up with it, tried to slip back to the mists of dream, but his spinal disks grinded above his hip, and old aches wringed his neck. He gave up hopes of finishing his dream and watched the city emerge from crop dust. Sunshine lit up a billboard warning of the apocalypse over flaming effigies that looked to him like children.

The usher offered to take his suitcase. Debbs refused- “We’re almost there. Leave me be.” the usher insisted with saddened eyes stained yellow from sleepless nights. Debbs surrendered the suitcase, his heart sinking, but once he secured the case’s key in his possession he felt relief. He looked up at the netting overheard where his suitcase rocked against the wall. He kept his eyes on the case and squeezed the key and embedded the shaped into his moist palms.

The train halted. Debbs stepped off with his case in hand and dragged his dead foot down rows of panel and brickwork until the pavement began to shatter and dandelions propped from sidewalk fractures. He found a small place with a sign reading “for rent”. He paid in cash and moved in that day. The place cost him only a few hundred dollars a month. The space fit only a cot and a desk. Debbs liked the tiny space, his own pantry of dominion. He divided his time between starving and resuming his work. The suitcase contained everything he collected so far. His handwritten translation keys from classic latin and Phoenician, and the accounts he claimed along his path. For some he merely asked, for some he disinterred bodies, robbed homes, even tortured for. He set it all out on his desk to review for overlooked details. His title read “The Tolkhamtec Cult”.

He read the first account written in 1608 by a portuguese portmaster- he wrote that a Chinese ship rammed the port and sunk. They tried to rescue the crew- but the sole survivor died trying to save the cargo. The portmaster said what the ship contained looked like a nightmare. At first impression, Debbs thought they discovered a dinosaur fossil but the portmaster described the bones as human in shape, but ape in stature, with backwards legs, stubs on it’s shoulder blades and slots for some undetermined purpose across its solid ribs, with three extra identical limbs, and a cubic skull the size of a war helmet with eye sockets in each corner and an inner, round skull to protect the brain. The portmaster determined the cause of the crash to be fog, and sent the cargo on an Asia bound ship to be returned, only for the vessel to sink in the Mandeb strait.

The other came from 1890. An Indian boy came to the house of a wealthy Oklahoma judge. The judge described the young man as “suspicious” as the kid shook with nervousness and only glanced into the judge’s eyes as he spoke his name before locking his gaze back down at his feet. The judge went with the Indian to the site of where a meteor struck the earth the night before. The impact caused fissures in the desolate bedrock. Smoke rose from the crater, but the Indian took the judge to the ejection of clay. There lay a skeleton in the same shape as described by the portmaster. The Indian claimed that the bones came out in pieces after the impact, but once surfaced they reassembled. The judge told the Indian to halt his spiritualisms, so the Indian began shattering the bones and casting them in every direction. As he claimed, the bones reassembled before the Judge’s eyes. The judge took the skeleton home in a wagon. The next day the neighbor came to the property due to the whooping of unmilked cattle. He found no one inside the house, but he did find food burned on the stove.

The barn door hung open. The neighbor noticed by the sneering of a cow pushing the door open and roaming to the pasture. The neighbor entered and discovered the Judge and his family laying in a row with their heads removed by a nearby spade and piled in an empty grain sack. The locals rounded up the last person to see the Judge alive- the Indian boy. He protested to the mob rigging ropes to a sturdy tree limb to find the skeleton- but no one recovered any such skeleton at the Judge’s property.

In 1910 explorers in the Andes discovered the erect shambles of an unidentified civilization at the base of a cave deep within the earth. The cave collapsed with the explorers inside. A rescue crew only recovered their belongings. Among the torn bags and collapsed tents they found a box composed of crimson puzzle pieces unmentioned in the snow soaked pages of their journals. The rescue crew attempted to open the box. The accounted ended with three hundred blank pages.

Debbs lost sleep, lost weight, lost teeth in the arriving weeks he spent delving into his research. After a month of work, he phoneticized the first line of a page he found in a 15th century tome in the bottom of French catacombs. The stream of unpronounceable consonants strained his voice box and popped his jaw. He took to the mirror to examine how he’d changed since discovering the Tolkhamtec. He found it hard to believe the reflection once belonged to someone swimming in alleyway ponds and peddling cheap drugs cut with baking soda to the ghosts of hometown aspirations. “I’m a changed man,” he declared to himself for his hair turned from yellow- orange to gray. His shoulders thinned to razor blades, and his chest became a fortress sinking into sand. A gap formed below his rib cage as his spine slumped and locked in place. “Soon, I’ll be better than ever before.” He daydreamed of his homecoming in his new form, and the vengeance he wrought in this fantasy caused him to cackle to his reflection with his eyebrows pulled to his hairline and eyelids a canyon apart from each other. Hairs grew from between his remaining teeth. A green film covered his tongue. His breath fogged the mirror and obscured the reflection.

One afternoon Debbs awoke to his window falling shut. His suitcase and the work he stored inside no longer rested under his cot. Instead he found a note- it read “This Is A Warning.”

He crumpled the note and tossed it to the corner.

Debbs sat still for hours on the hardwood, the air sucked from his lungs, the wind taken from his back. Then came a knock at the his door. He crawled forth, and climbed up groaning as the knots in his spine wound tighter around what nerves he had left. The knocks felt limp like a weak handshake slapping at the door. Debbs undid the chains and the three bolts, then peeked out to find a smiling set of blackberry stained teeth. Sunken eyes hid behind glasses thick as bullet proof glass. He held a hand out with knuckles long as pocket knives. “Hello, I’m moving in today- I’m your new neighbor.”

Debbs shook his hand, extended some pleasure of greeting, but kept the door between the two. After pleasantries, Debbs shut the door and sealed it once more. He forgot all about the neighbor within an hour of meeting him.

Debbs grabbed a cane, tossed a winter coat on that touched the ground due to his deformed condition and limped around the neighborhood. He saw one man waiting at a bus with a suitcase. He came within ten feet, stood before the bus stop, and studied the suitcase. The man went from pensive to nervous as the strange hunched over man stood still, and seemed to slip into a trance of deep contemplation before limping towards the bus stop like cries for help from a cavern pit. “Can I help you?” Fear filled the stranger’s eyes as he sat his suit case over his chest.

“That suitcase belongs to me. Let me see inside.”

“Get lost.”

Debbs produced a wad of crumpled dollars, but the stranger dismissed his offer.

“Just let me see inside.”

The stranger looked around for the bus, he checked his time and the fear in his eyes developed into panic. The bus was late. Debbs parted his lips and reached for the case. The stranger swatted his hand, so Debbs struck him in the head with the cane until he dropped the suitcase. He limped into the bushes with it and settled under a bridge where he opened it and found transcripts between the CIA and an agent named DB Cooper, but found none of his material, so he tossed the suitcase and its contents into the canal.

He felt hungry and his knots needed their ointment. The cold air made them crack open and bleed. His tongue too felt like a slug on the tanker of a desert semi truck. He drank a handful of canal water. It tasted bitter and sent shivers of revulsion down his blood vessels. By  sunset,  his search produced three more suitcases. He found clothes that didn’t fit, stacks of money from an unknown land, and the last contained two sandwiches. None of them held his work.  

On his silent return a person shrouded in the cool gusts of night shuffled near him from behind cracks in the shadows. At first it looked like a lost child bundled up with a scarf over their face, but as they entered the overcast from window light, Debbs saw eyes elongated and wrinkled to closed lips along with white hair strands and the reek of antique wine bottles. A thin voice gargled from beneath the scarf as she pulled it away to reveal the crumbling features of an ancient woman.

“I know where it is.” She blindly spoke to the night, but Debbs heard her voice dance-

“Tell me then, old woman.”

“The same person stole from me. You know him, you’ve already met once.”

“Do you mean?”

“Yes, the very same man. Do you know his name?”

“I… forgot.”

“Professor Archer Mollar of Anthropology, or he was until recently... “ She handed him a toothless key. “This will get you into any door once.”

“Do… you want whatever he took from you?”

“I trust you will do the right thing.” She put the scarf back over her face, icy hacks of laughter flexing from underneath. Her quiet steps idled down the sidewalks, then slid into a crack in the sidewalk. Debbs hobbled to the portion of concrete, and found a dark oil sinking into the rift. The key he held by a thin ring that weighed more than five pounds. The material felt cold even as his soft hands sweat against the smooth metal. Electricity vaulted up his arm and his veins pressed against his skin. His fingers tingled. He he felt a physical strength that he lacked before. He held his cane up because it slowed him down. His aches and bodily needs drained away. He heard whispers in a familiar, but far more elegant script- he only recognized the initial verse. Ash he walked the unreadable characters flashed before his eyes between flickering street lights. He decided the ancient woman’s item may be worth the attempt, but he never thought so clearly, with ideas not standing idly until a truck of daily worries crushes them, but fluid notion that connected to other ideas across the vast regions of his brain. He knew nothing of the professor’s habits, nothing of his life. The porchlight of his home appeared from the unfolding architecture that broadened like wings as he turned on the sidewalk. His thoughts raced like bullets where before they dragged like a rusted plow in the sand. By the time his hand fell on the front door handle he knew exactly what he needed to do, and by the time he reached the stairs he knew what to do if the ancient woman planned to deceive him. Yet by the time he reached his door the plans changed. He heard the professor speaking from his room. In lengthy verse he uttered the lost words. Debbs went to sleep with a new plan in mind.

In the morning, Debbs shaved and washed the grime from his body. He combed what hair still clung to his skull, and brushed what teeth still gnashed together when he closed his mouth. Once he smelled nicer he knocked at the professor’s door. Someone scuffled within. Debbs kept knocking. The professor came to the door red faced and agitated.

“What do you want? I’m busy.”

“Just thought neighbors ought to share some breakfast, what do you say-”

“Leave me alone. Come back later rather.” He slammed the door. Before he did a fly escaped and buzzed around the light fixtures. The professor obscured a peek into his room with his body. Debbs saw nothing. He still held onto the key, and now he knew something good waited for him in the professor’s chamber.

Over the next several days Debbs listened and watched the professor’s routine. Both of time stayed awake until sunrise then fell asleep in solitude. He rarely left, but every night spoke the strange chant.

They both came into the kitchen to warm up frozen food in the microwave. Debbs asked what the professor studied. The professor looked stricken with doubts as he inspected the refined appearance of his neighbor.

“I don’t recall mentioning that I’m a professor to you.”

“I can tell that you’re a studious man. What are you researching?”

“Celtic artifacts.”

“You don’t say…I hear you speaking some funny language in your room. Is that celtic?”

“Oh- oh that! That’s a friend of mine… from Malta. It’s a strange language not many know. We both study the celts.”

Debbs uttered the initial verse as best as he remembered and the professor paled like a ghost, then recited the next verse.

“Listen, you don’t know what trouble you’re going to get me in. You speak of this to no one. Not even to me. We just go on living our lives like nothing happens.”

“Fine. I want my things back.”

“What things?”

“My suitcase and everything inside of it.”

“I don't have your damn suitcase.”

“Did you leave this note?” He showed him the bewaring inscription.

The professors tore the paper, and let the two halfs float to the floor. The pages slid across the stained tiles back together. The message changed. You were warned.

The professor dropped his glasses. “They know I’m here. You have to get out of here while you can.”

“Why? What’s in your room?”

“Stay out of there.”

Debbs dangled his new key. The professor recognized it at once.

“Who gave that to you?”

“I think you’re going to show me what’s inside. If it’s nothing of mine than you have nothing to worry about.”

The professor shook his head and turned away to hide his face as he lead Debbs down the hall. The bulbs burned out. The fly from last night lay dead on the carpet.

“I did steal something… but not from you. I took it from a witch in the mountains of Alamikamba. If I show you than they may come for you next!”

“The Tolkhamtec cult doesn’t scare me. In fact, I intend to join them.”

“You damn fool. What makes you so sure they want you?”

“They don’t, or they have no reason yet. But once I learn the secrets, nothing will stop me from becoming one by my own volition.”

The professor unlocked his door and let debbs enter. Flies swarmed empty bean cans stacked by the window. Piles of dirty clothes and rotten books obstructed the floor. Empty whiskey bottles lay in the crumpled bedsheets. The alarm clock blinked with a concerning hour. 42:61. Even the paint on the walls seemed to seep into harsh grains and shining sediment.

The professor dug through a locked chest, and he pulled it out like a diamond from a mud puddle with a satisfied groan. A crimson box composed of jigsaw segments. Debbs collapsed besides the chest, landing on the seam of the professor’s pants, he ripped the box from his hands. Familiar shock tingled his body but this went deeper than his arm, it touched his memories, his fears, his hopes and dreams.

“I can’t open it.”

“We’ll try this…” Debbs searched the box until he found a tiny hole in the top. The perfect size for the toothless key. He inserted it, and twisted it until he heard a series of rapid clicks. The key turned to smoke. A whistle exhausted from the hole. Each jigsaw piece glowed with characters he recognized, and as static rushed into his brain he understood the language all for a brief moment before the hole expanded and swallowed him.

Colors he never before witnessed blinded him as the static sensations rose from his skin, and hurled his body in a cyclone. Debbs braced for slamming against the walls, but no impacts met him. Only wind and screams. Then his hearing, his touch, his smell followed his loss of vision until he felt like a lost sock caught in a tide.

The first sense to return alerted him to the scent of searing meat and burning metal. He heard chains and feet, whips and fluttering wings. Then he felt the grated material- same material that composed the key. Each grain bit into his flesh. Warm blood dripped down his hand. A furnace blasted a stream of smoke from a sky reaching chimney. When he opened his eyes he found his vision blurry. He wiped the tears from his eyes, only to find his impaired vision did not becloud the creatures among him. One the bars of his cage focused, he saw the mossy feathers covering the moaning monstrosities. Some flew by machines that hooked to their shoulder blades and chest, others walked like spiders on seven limbs with their heads twisting and turning,each end with a different feature, a tongue, an ear,  a pair of antennae. Beyond them stood megalithic pyramids built upside down, slowly spinning in a ring of gravity. Below him, other monstrosities reached from a boiling pool and crawled out. Each one a different shape- each one invoked a new level of terror as the cage began to shrink around Debbs until his arms and legs hung out and the bars cut into his back and chest. A mechanism turned a wheel and a pair of mechanical wings slid down a wire. The monsters took the hold of the hooks. Black nails protruded from their fingertips. He felt pricks of pain but the nails also filled him with alcohol. Soon he swooned, his body slipped into numbness, but held onto the bars tight. The monsters each carved a character into his flesh until every inch illustrated in unmistakable detail the bleeding images of the Tolkhamtec. Then the hooks pierced his shoulder and pins secured his body to the wingsuit above him. The cage started cranking. The bars weakened. He closed his eyes, feeling his body sinking- but as the cage dropped to the pool below, he fired high into the air, above the pyramids, to the copper clouds and the black smoke. He saw the parade of Tolkhamtec creatures crawling in curving streets, up walls, and through holes high up in the jagged structures balanced on fine tips. Drawstrings and switches dangled from digital numeric pads. Lights and sounds blinked and squealed. The wings folded inward, then his ascent stopped and he hung for a second and he saw the entire civilization. His fall accelerated at twice the rate as when he flew up. He choked on chimney soot as his eyes locked onto the spear of a tower head. Lower and lower he dropped, like watching a needle pierce thread, until all of his senses at once collapsed at the utterance of one single jaw splitting word.

He awoke in the same room. His head swam and stars sparkled on the ceiling. A crunching noise tickled his ears, but it sounded like something coming from the other side of the room. He tried to rub his eyes, but he only wiped blood into them. He examined his body to see himself naked and covered in the lacerations inflicted by the Tolkhamtec. “The professor- where is he”, Debbs wondered. The box sat on the chest. The crunching continued. He rolled over and tiled his head back. The ancient woman stood with the professor in her arms. Her jaw splitting in half to take full bites from within his skull. Her blind eyes didn’t see him, until the box lid snapped shut. Debbs watched at two red tomato eyes coagulated from her eye sockets. Debbs crawled under the bed and shook as the Professor’s body dropped, and the ancient woman with her soundless steps approached the bed.

“Don’t be afraid. I wouldn’t release you from the box only to eat you. You saw them?”

“Yes...”

“I can turn you into one. Then you may live among us forever more.” A reptile hand offered itself. The bed dropped on him and constricted until the air discharged from his lungs. He tried to take deep breaths but the air stopped at the back of his mouth. His spinal knots cracked, and straightened. He reached for the alcohol dripping finger tips.

The Forbidden Door

The morning hawks picked away at roadkill pulled to the ditch by orange garbed workman. The upper half of critter remains smiled with its tongue out and eyes eaten. It’s lower body remained kneaded into the pavement with patches of fuzz tickling the burning tires of travelers.

Grain elevators at the end of town streamed grain dust into the backs of red trucks coated in gravel powder. The operator watched the sunrise over steaming coffee. The billboard on the entrance of town just barely lit up at the bend of the road. “Welcome to Historic Elkhead.” Below the billboard, a blue linoleum sign gave the route to “Cannistrom”-the town founder museum. Beyond the billboard he saw the morning bridge lights still reflecting in the river. The clock struck seven am.

School bells rang. Kids lined up and entered their institutions, but for two.

One of the missing teenagers dropped his bag from the bridge and watched it tumble to the whirlpools cycloning in the toxic brown river waters. He leaned over the edge and picked a shallow spot where sand and rocks flared. His heart raced. He wore a hoodie that reached his knees and he secured it around his body with a belt. Sweat dripped behind his ears. His palms left streaks of anxious sweat on the rails.

“If you’re going to do it, then what are you waiting for?” a voice called from the other end of the bridge. A year’s worth of unkempt growth crowned his head and hid his eyes but for slivers of green. “Maybe you need a push.”

Nettle leaned over further. His hands gripped the rail. The tangled drawstrings around his neck dangled like a necklace. The river hushed below. Something fat and white bobbed up and down. He sighed for his friend to hear.

“This time I mean it, Zen.” he told his friend. His friend shook his head, his clothing torn up- not from expensive design, but by wear over time. His jacket started as  green fatigues, but as he smiled with egg yolk caught on his chin fuzz, Nettle saw it became patchwork of several garments sewed with clumsy needle work done by the wearer himself.

Nettle looked away from his friend to the river. The white thing stopped bobbing. It grinded against a row of shoreline limestone.

“Wonder who it is?” Zen inquired, leaning next to Nettle. He pulled a cigarette from a pack and lit it. A necklace of car icons peeled from steering wheels and clutch heads hung from his collar. He nor his folks drove any of the luxury brands he ordained himself with. Metal stitching secured the strand of his ankle monitor.

“Another person from the city jumped into the river.”

“Don’t you know that all the towns along this river dump their sewage in this? If you want to drown, don’t drown in this. This river is shit river.”

“At this point, the status of the river doesn’t concern me.”

“It will. Those whirlpools will suck you under. This fall is far, but you'll only break your ribs, maybe your spine if you're lucky, than you sit at the bottom of that river sucking up whatever the city dispatches. I’m glad I decided to skip today…. There’s a secret I want to share.”

“What is it”

“I can’t tell you. We have to go to the meeting room first, and then we can talk about it”

“Should we tell someone about that guy?”

“Yeah, afterwards.”

Zen pulled on Nettles arm and he followed him into town.

The truants loitered in the empty parking lot of the thrift store. They started to discuss their options when an old lady with varicose veins netting her under chins slobbered pleas for them to leave. Zen put his hands in his pockets and stared at her. Nettle didn’t know what his friend might try. Zen kept a knife hidden in a hallowed pen in his back pocket ankle bracelet strapped on.

Zen’s eyes widened as harsh words passed his mind, but he cokced his headback, crossed his arms. “You got it,”  he told her with unforgetting eyes and they walked off.

Nettle sighed. Zen pulled out two cigarettes from them to enjoy. Zen smoked his away. Nettle’s cheeks filled up with smoke and he blew it from his nostrils.

“That’s not how you do it.” He said. “You’re wasting the tobacco.”

They walked down the strip of downtown. A mail lady entered the jewelry store. Zen peered into the lawyers office next door. Blinders sealed the window tight, but he caught a peek of a dark office lit only by the dim glow of a computer screen. “This is the guy my mom went to when she wanted to sue the Walmart for not salting its sidewalk.”

“They didn’t?”

“Of course they did, so she brought her own slush and slipped on that.”

“Did she win the case?”

“No. The lawyer don’t like sketchy shit.”

They passed the banks. Three structures in a row. All three sleek and immaculate from recent renovation. They still smelled drying caulk. Radio antennas and satellites extended from the roofs. Red neon told the time. School started without them. Zen watched the sunrise from dripping red pomegranate juice to a yellow lense burning through the clouds escaping towards the dim west. Purple clouds swelled into gray and white currents. Sun rays flooded the street. Shadows of dull light posts and mailboxes extended like hidden blades. Nettle walked on, paying no notice to  nature around him.

New cars pulled into the bank lots. The weather plane flew overhead. He watched them with thoughtful patience, calculating the physics keeping the aircraft airborne.

Nettle stopped on the sidewalk and looked into the antique shop. Both entered, and quietly went to a stack of yellowed comic books. “These are from before the Comic Code Authority!” Nettle told his friend as they thumbed through them. “Joe Simon, Carmine Infantino, William Gaines- these are good ones.”

The blue hair came from the counter. She looked at Zen’s untreated mess of black hair. His moustache looked more like dirt than facial hair. She ushered both of them out to the sidewalk. Both watched their reflections in passing windows. Zen distributed two more cigarettes. He fluttered some wash beaten dollar bills. “We’ll buy them on our way back. That’ll really scare her.”  They finished the cigarettes, found the alley and followed it to the end where the railroad killed the way forward.  and left the conscious eye of public.

The truants raised their collars, and slid into a trail through weeds that thickened with bushes and spider webs. Once out they came to their meeting room. The brick floor survived. Speargrass stalks and tickseed flowers broke from between the blocks. Burned blocks paneled the border between overflowing grass blades and tarnished crossbars. When they stepped on, cindering air escaped from the sinking blocks. Ash spat from their steps. They sat under the chimney. Zen looked around for the thoughtful poetry he scraped into the throat. A vandal drew over his verses with the collision of spray paint genitals. He tried to rub it off, but his sleeves wore away the brickwork. He wore away half the wall before the wind shrieked and shivers filled their cover. A gust of alfalfa rich wind hurled inside. Loose mineral funneled up the chimney and growled through holes and slips in crumbling mortar.

They pressed against the firebox filling. When the wind stopped, they felt warm again, so they relanced and finished their conspiracy.

“-those rumors might not be silly after all. My grandma told me about it.”

“What’s inside?”

“I don’t know. She told me she was never aloud to see… but i have ideas.”

“Gargoyles? Rockets?”

“Dead bodies- people murdered by the city hundred years ago, covered up and forgotten about. Until today.”

“Now that sounds interesting.”

They smoked two more cigarettes each, left the butts in the hearth, and re entered the bushes and snags of slender branches. “My grandma is one hundred and ten years old. I don't know if she’s lost her mind, or if she remembers wrong or what. So sorry if this is a waste of time.”

“I’m just happy to be out of the house. Won’t you get in trouble?”

“This?” The ankle bracelet blinked. “What’s my parole officer going to do? We only meet on Wednesdays.”

They stomped down a slope, using tree roots, they guided themselves down to a narrow creek. They followed a paddling turtle up the stream. A bike wheel spun in the swallowing mud. They hopped over rocks and tree trunks. Empty blue beer cans hung from branches like ornaments. Empty shotgun shells lay split in the grass.

Zen stopped and encroached onto the shore. He peeled away branches, and gestured at an alley cut into the overgrowth.  “Just as grandma said.” They krept with light steps. The sound of the road and town slipped behind the moaning of swaying tree limbs and the crackling of leaves falling to the ground. “It should be close by.”

Nettle shivered. His feet sunk in mud. He trudged after Zen covered in burs and torn spider web. The scent in the air ripened. Both truants detected spoiled baby formula but saw no children nor belongings to a caregiver-Only grass and bush that grew to their shoulders and hanging vines.

Nettle shoes slipped from his heels. Zen wore boots and crushed anything in his path. Nettle tied his shoes once more, but the backs scraped against his achilles tendons until the flesh reddened and split. The cold air chilled his flesh so that when the blood dripped he felt it itch down his tendon to the bottom of his heel. The blood remained, itching his foot with a sticky resilience that he only satisfied by peeling his shoe away and scraping it against some fallen lumber.

Zen came through the grass. “Come see it.” He lead him to a ten foot wide hole in the ground six feet deep with broken rungs leading below to a pool of blackened and rotten leaves. Nettle looked inward, than around. The trees looked ancient and overgrown. Their trunks pressed against other trees, strangling the smaller ones.

Zen hopped down the hole. Nettle called for him to stop as a solid, hollow collision echoed up. Nettle looked down to see his friend laying in the swamp of slimy forest debris. He held his head climbing back to his feet. Nettle took to the latter. Zen removed the leaves handful by handful until he found a table of solid iron. They plowed the leaves to the edges of the pit, revealing the face of the table, hinges in the center and a dinner plate sized disk rusted into the surface along a hollow notch. Zen tried at the disk until his wrist veins throbbed against his skin. Metal winds sliced into his thumb. He held the minor wound until the blood stopped. Nettle tried stomping on the table, pulling at the gap between hinges before giving up. He climbed from the pit. “Come up here, and look.” Zen climbed up the ladder, but the rungs slid from the dirt and he fell back down. Nettle lowered a hand and pulled Zen up. Both looked down and saw in the fledgling light escaping through gaps in the leaf cover filling in spaces on the tablet.

Cold wind blew. Not winter reminder, not a stream from a barren land, but something cold as graveyard clay. Their flesh tensed and their eyes watered. The wind slowed, and as it did the trees swelled, and grew a coat of purple blisters with pieces of hair flying from pale pores.

The characters they saw on the tablet confused them. At first they appeared as a foreign language, but then began to twirl and spin, even grow extensions or melt into another character. Zen slid out his phone to photograph the wonder. Roots sprouted from walls of the pit, vines dropped and tickled the backs of their necks. Zen’s fingers fumbled his device, but he caught it with his free hand over the pit. The pixels developed. The characters developed into sunlight patterns they recognized. “Condemned”. Faded etchings of skulls and war equipment emerged.

Nettle looked around them. “I don’t think we can leave. Where did we come from?”

Lilac mist rose from the fractured earth broken apart by the developing trees. The mist rose over the trees, and within moments they disappeared and the mist started to smell more like burning rubber as even the vignettes over their heads faded to a skeletal outline before vanishing in the mist.

Zen looked at the image in his device before the glass over the screen cracked in his hand, then silvery fluid boiled from the open ports. The device smoked from within until his burned his hand and he let it fall into the pit. It smacked the tablet.

While the truants cowarded, the phone continued to burn and melt to puddle of silver sludge sinking into the iron. Once  it fell through, a flight of whispers rose and filled the area. Glowing eyes floated around them. Snakes hissed. Wings flapped overhead. Nettle gestured from Zen to see below. A pale, soot covered hand rose from the hole to the the disk plates. Forest clearing screeches drowned out the whispers. The disk spun around in one direction, then turned several more times in the other direction. The disk clicked, than it shifted with the reek of unoiled rust along the network of slots in an unreasonable pattern until a resounding echo of clashing steel beams thundered the ground. The hinges sounded like crashing trains. Hot air blew from the pit in a wind of exhaust that looked orange and red in the lilac mist.

They looked down as it appeared to roll into darkness without impediment. The whispers became growls and forlorn pleas. The first skull to appear looked at the truants with ruptured veins in its eye sockets and mouth. A claw reached over, took hold of its chin and pulled it back down. Feet scuffled. Voices gagged and choked. A rope fired out and slid through the glass. Nettle grabbed it as Zen watched, looking for something heavy to drop down. The pale hands emerged, pulling on the rope, sinking spurs into the dirt as he climbed up the wall. His eyes looked squinted, but the truants saw when his head rose over the pit hollow and sunken sockets. The man wore a wide brimmed a hat and solid colored clothing covered in ash and gray scales. He dropped the rope down and watched the door reseal on the many souls crawling up.

The man sniffed. “You two. Boys. Thanks for helping me out of there.” He spoke like a swamp dweller, without warmth and comfort in his tone, he spoke with firm sincerity. “Now, I’m a busy man with a tight schedule, and I’ve lost some time since they last tossed me in there, but I never let a slave escape me, and I’m not going to start now. You boys hear me alright? I’m looking for someone.”

He took out a hand drawn bill with a rather racist depiction of a slave to show them. “Seen this fellow? Took him wife and three babies with him. He’s hiding out in this town. You boys know where, and you’re going to lead me to his hiding place.”

“No, we can’t help you.”

“You can, and you will.” A revolver hung from his hip. He reached behind the gun, and pulled out two rope nooses. He took each truant by the head and tightened the ropes around their necks. Zen fought the entire time, pulling against the  rope, kicking and spitting- but nothing caused the man.

“Don’t be so sore now. I’m sure you’ve all heard of me before- I’m famous around these parts…. Or i used to be. Suppose that was years ago now.” He drove them from the lilac mists to the alley of growth and to the creek. Both friends shook and looked at each other for ideas but neither found any validation from the other. They marched at the mercy of their captor. “Name is Griffith Alister Cannistrom, if anyone asks.”

The truants swallowed. The town founder from the pioneer days when Indians still wandered the land was named “Cannistrom”.

The lilac mist faded behind them, but the forest now stretched for miles. More dams blocked the creek. More roaming beasts crossed the empty plains. The trees that they had climbed over stood erect. They even saw snow on the ground. The truants thought it only snowed in January. The moon in the sky glowed an August gold against the starving daylight above a cottage standing where only a chimney did before.

A dirty farmer sat to relax after a hard day of hand breaking work. When he looked to the trees he saw the trio walking towards him. He didn’t notice the two boys because he knew who came up his way so he stood up and cleaned his face with what little spit his glands provided him with.  He let go of the ropes holding the truants. He  sniffed the air in front of small farmer.

“It’s been a long day, but I detect from perspiration from the south. Maybe it’ll head north and water your garden.”

“We can use some more snow. Can I help you?”

“Yes sir, I’m here to reclaim property of Mr. Lunis Ellis.”

“No sir, no slaves come running through here.”

“My guides here-” he dropped the ropes. “-Say otherwise. Do I smell some cider?”

A woman inside boiled fluid on a cast iron stove.

“Excuse me, madam- but it's a chilly walk up your way and do you mind if I sample some of that you’re brewing?

Babies cried in the corner. The fireplace, he noticed, unlit. He scraped the mud off his boots and he stepped in, ducking to avoid the top of the doorway, then erecting once more. His head almost touched the rafters.

“That stove is full-warm.” He examined the  fireplace, tapping around with his boot. He let the woman pour him a glass. He sipped it, and asked for another. Once he drank three, he left the cottage, but returned with a bucket of well water that he poured onto the stove. No steam. He opened the oven, sifted through the ashes before removing the ash bin.

“There they are.” He pulled out the bones of two adult skulls and three tiny skeletons. He stored them in a bag, and left the cottage, walking back to the woods. Before he crossed back, he turned to the truants, and gave them each a .32 hollow point bullet from his revolver.  The slave catcher said one last thing. “Don’t come back.”

The slave catcher reentered the lilac haze and flames consumed the cottage. Without gradual fire climbing, the ignition started with spark and blossomed to consume the cottage. The truants gaped as the fire lasted five seconds before collapsing into a cloud of smoke that blinding and choked them. When the smoke cleared, only the chimney remained, the graffiti where they saw it last.

They walked back to the bridge as planned. The body still snagged to a rock. They went around the bride and went down to the shore. The body tilted on the rock like a door. They grabbed him by parment of his clothing and pulled, but nothing moved. They tried harder, than the body gave way- but not as they expected. They fell to the dirt. The person jolted to life in a screaming fit, taking nettle by the ears and forcing him under the copper colored current.

Zen rolled in the rocks, his head ringin from being struck by the stranger. Nettle kicked and splashed. The stranger kept  screaming and screaming until his adam's apples ejected from his mouth. Zen climbed to his feet, and undid the necklace. He wrapped it around the screaming man’s neck until he screamed no more. They waded into the river, and let go of the body. The truants watched it go down where a whirlpool sucked the body up. It circled around a few times before one the last leg sunk to the bottom.