Evil Gnomes

Evil Gnomes

Graham Swanson

written 10/21/2021

There lived in the old village of Elkhead a friendly old man rumored to be a wizard able to hold his 

hands over the ground to find ancient bones deep deep deep under the mud where the Great Green 

River flooded long ago. Of all things long rotten in the ground, he possessed an acute sensitivity. He 

stuck his nose into a fistful of dirt and discovered long-dead dinosaurs, mammoths, strange 

monstrosities, even prehistoric humans unmapped by known strands of DNA, and other creatures older 

than them all. Some drunken squatters even gossiped amongst themselves as they hid under canopies to 

avoid the passing storms. They heard his whispers along the river banks. His voice rippled over the 

whirlpools in lost languages. Over the bluffs, he stood with his palms open to the starlight speaking 

revelations to the raw clay compressed over ancient pits.

Visitors to his home often found the old wizard cradling bones too large to belong to anything alive today, and too twisted to fit any known species. He sat alone in his shack lovingly talking to ancient remains as if talking to a beloved pet. Many good folk believed him to be crazy because when he did speak their language, he choose to lecture on and on to them about how the Great Green River once flowed over the hilltops and bluffs.

“Its mighty currents carry the carcasses of unspeakable monsters too beautiful and timid for humans to comprehend from where the sky meets the sea” he sat on a bench exhausted by excitement, both hands trembled on a cane that revved up like an afterburner.  He carved its shaft from monstrous bones he dug up from tar and petrified slag, the head melted and smoothed his own eye. The one eye left peeled in yellow flutters and deepened like someone who hadn't seen the sun in lifetimes. 

A young child who crashed his bike in front of the old wizard's shack said he saw a dozen tiny ugly men pop up from the ground to bring him food from a heavy smoking pot. They wore pointy shoes and silly tall hats. He spoke to them in whispers, then spotted the boy cowering in the reeds. The old wizard finished eating his food by stabbing it with a fork and slurping it up before it squirmed away and leaped from the plate. The little bearded men stood around the table and treasured the sight of the old man eating raw and living slug-like creatures. The little child never saw them in any book or video. When only a hot red soup of crimson remained on the plate, the old man took the boy by the hand and guided him back home. Along the way home the old man spoke of these glorious forgone times with passion and detail as if he experienced them himself.

Every time the old wizard dug his claws into the cracks across the flat mud he spoke the truth. Diggers took shovels to the worms and unearthed exactly what he told them to find laying in subterranean pits. His fame spread far among villages of folk who claim to descend from the bones he loved that even radio towers of the great city emitted impressive regalias of his discoveries. Despite the immense value of the fossils he discovered, he lived in a roofless, three-wall cabin under the river bridge because he needed no money. He lived off silver coins minted in extinct empires and otherwise never worked. He even learned to see things living in the forest that few have the patience or belief to witness.

One night a young college freshman, Aliya Tyson, left the campus of the small college she attended in the Village of Urep. Once the sunset blushed she regretted not bringing a jacket back as dewey grass turned to frost. According to merrymakers at a party watching from the window, she hopped into a tall truck with high wheels lit up by blinding under carraige lights and never made it home. County detectives found footage from the bank of the truck driving back and forth three times in the dead of the night. By morning they found the ice-capped tire tracks melting in the rising sun along the foamy bank.

Detectives had no clues to convict the man, search parties equipped with sonar and helicopters failed to discover her body, so they recruited the old wizard to find the dead body of the college girl that went missing in the Great Green river. He lead them into the swamp pits where hunters like to shoot and masochate deer in the quiet solitude of twilight. He grabbed a handful of mud, stuck his finger into it, then soaked his finger in his mouth until dirty saliva dripped from the corners of his lips. Then he took two handfuls of wet sand and squeezed until it fell like snakes running through his fingers. Then he reached down into the pool until the mud reached his elbow, and he pulled out another heavy fist of spattering bole. He held it into the morning fog drifting along the trees between gasps of sunlight, and pointed to where the autumn leaves glimmered over a fountain of crystal clear water.

The old wizard jumped into the water, ice-cold steam rose up from the waterline at his waist, he dug around rocks and hibernating fish until his fingers turned blue. He ignored the questions of the police and told them about how the dirt tasted in the times of flying whales and little men living in mushrooms higher than any skyscraper on earth. Once the flesh of his arms turned purple and numb he hollered in success. He rinsed his hands off in the water and jumped out. He held the detectives close, and showed them a tiny piece of bone that weighed as much as a thumbnail. Once the tests came back affirmative, the courts sent the man who picked her up to rot in a gibbet kept deep underground.

A historian from the University heard of this strange bone wizard and recruited him to find the skull of the town’s founder so they could put it up in exhibit. They found the body hundreds of miles away buried deep in unmarked desert. The old man spoke to the skull, gave it childlike nicknames, and the historian took note of how he kept claiming again and again that the town founder didn’t descend from apemen, but from a race of winged beetles that crawled out from the Great Green River once it receded from the bleeding bluffs, and narrowed to the sewage blackened course we all know today. The historian was a modern thinker and a man of science. He doubted the wizard's groove, but the wizard reasoned thus:  

"Biped apes descended from the darling turtle you called Tiktaalik. Man descends from apes. Why not the apes born from cats, rodents, or cockroaches?"

The bone wizard never owned a car, and seldom-used roads. He took the ancient pathways only known to the faces in the moon. On foot, he reached any place in about five minutes. Sports cars raced him on the highway from the flooded swamps on the other side of the river but he always finished first. It became common happenstance to get up in the middle of the night to drink water or take the dog outside and find him in the streetlight trudging out of some bushes and into the gloomy murk hanging over the river.

Some nightshift workers dredging the carnage swamp from the meat plant even looked up at the night sky frozen still under sparkling stars and thought they saw him walking in the air trembling on his wild cane. If anyone asked him about the sighting, he’d recall the past honor of mammoths walking in the sky to the sound of thunder. Rags fell from his starbound shoulders and blew around the smoking corners of town. The handcarved cane became an item of immense curiosity. The old man never let it leave his sight.

German Shepards bowed to the old wizard as he walked through yards and freshly plowed fields. Hunters in the pale forests fired at him only for the cascading rounds to pass through his clothes strike the dirt behind him. No one saw him eat at the food parlors, or bleed at the hospitals. Drunks offered him their best alcohol and local musicians offered him cannabis, but he only laughed at them as he lived on a supply of clear magic rocks he cooked himself. Even vans speeding past red lights did him no harm when they caught him in the headlights.

Not everyone carried the legend of the strange old wizard of the forest where the river once drained. Those serving time in prison, fighting in far off wars, or constantly travelling from crack house to crack house never took time to listen to such legends. To them he seemed just another eccentric rambler robbed of his white sheets of stolen memory. Others attempted to spy on him to learn the secrets of his wealth, and to burglarize his home while he was away. They found nothing but tiny jars full of bones, and writings about the strange little people that lurked in the trees who have been living there long since man evolved to stand up on two legs.

A former methhead, Cream, got in his truck and drove to the brickhouse where his family sat around waiting. Grandma Linder just died, and they didn’t know that their kin agreed long ago to let the strange old man keep passing by. His sister grew up here as much as he did, so she argued with him over ownership of the house. Grandma left the house neglected and dilapidated by the time she died, but everyone saw the work and updates that Cream toiled over since he quit his addiction and found work. The toilets flushed water again, sutures taped shut cracks in the walls, the sinks no longer poured gas, he caulked cabinets falling from the walls, and he even cleaned the soiled couches and heaps of crap out the basement. Under all the rotten boxes he found a hatch. Thick steel latches sealed it shut.

Cream used a torch to cut off the bolts and melt the bindings. Once he lifted the hatch he found a sub basement full of ordinary old man garbage. He shut the hatch again and assumed it all belonged to his late grandfather Linder, that his grandmother chose to hide it away in the subbasement. It never struck him as odd that the subbasement seemed larger and older than the main basement, and if he had gone inside to investigate he would’ve found fossils of tiny evil men who once served as slaves to the master creatures who devoured the mammoths. If he dug even deeper, he would've found vents of air built by the tiny men, and heard their hexes from deep within the earth.

Two large guard dogs scratched at the dirt under the picture window until Shawnice Linder, Cream’s sister, called them over the porch. They dug their claws in and growled at gaps between the ground and the foundation. They snarled with fresh blood on their teeth and snouts. Shawnice stepped down to the grass to grab them but she stopped to utter a scream so stiff that she broke out in a fit of coughing. Bits of carnage floated in the bird bath. Tiny ankles without feet, gnarled organs of green and purple bobbed amid soiled clothes, bits of hair and skull bounced at the top of reddened mash. “The dogs found moles or something.” Shawnice called to Cream as he came rushing outside.

At once Cream recognized the tatters of wool soaking over a small ribcage, the pink carnage dripping to the grass, a crow landed and tried to pick out the pointed ear. He shewed the bird away and picked it out of the bath. The guard dogs leapt into the air and landed hard on cracks in the ground. They stuck their noses into the holes they found and barked down. Shawnice pulled them away and shut them inside as rain clouds obscured the sun and thunderstorms strolled in the distance. A child's bike lay upside down in the grass facing the trees. 

“I’ll come back for the house party. Take care of my dogs.” Shawnice said to him before she left to catch a flight. 

That night as Cream slept he heard a woosh of wind and a tap on the window. He got up, slammed a glass of water, and fought the temptation to reach into his sports bag. Instead he merely unzipped, and looked upon the treasured bags of crystal inside with the smoke stained pipe. He hurled it into his closet, and went outside to find the source of the noise. From the window he saw the ragged coats of the old wizard blow through the moonlight.

The old man fished the bones from the bird bath, held them into the silver moonlight, delicately cleaned them with Clorox wipes and added them to a silk bag strapped to his cane. Cream stood in the dark on the porch with the front door swinging open in the wind. Cold gusts hurled wet leaves down from the roof. The cane firmly planted vibrated in the ground. Animal whispers poured from the trees.

Cream wanted to cuss at the old man, but behind him he noticed sulking in the dark a dozen or more tiny heads and eyes shining from the mist rising from the soggy earth. The two dogs leapt from the terrace to the mist and lunged into the dark curtains of vapor. The whispers and sparkling eyes scattered into the leafless trees beyond the muddy ditches as the dog’s barks dissipated in the wash of midnight gardens. Cream stepped backwards into his home and latched the door shut. Out the window the old man continued reaching into the bird bath.

The gun in the closet felt heavy in his arms but Cream fell asleep in the corner of his closet before he took the chance of discharging it. By sunrise the dog’s food bowls and water dishes sat untouched. His sister called him on the cellphone and asked him how her dogs were doing. He lied about the night before and told her that he dumped the bird bath remains into the compost. He hung up before she finished talking and took the gun with him as he strapped on boots.

Outside the home Cream discovered the bird bath smashed to pieces, his car tires slashed, and two bloody dog collars hung from bare curled branches of the front yard tree. All the potted plants were upside down and spilled, fresh soil covered the sidewalk, mushrooms and weeds grew from the trailer of ruined furniture. Something broke off the lever to the home's water, and severe impacts collapsed the garage door. He called for the dogs to come but he heard only the lonely whistle of gray sky and stagnant choking of leaves in the gutter. He ran into the trees calling for them again and again.

Little whispers laughed at him as he scrambled in the thorns and gravel. One of the dogs he found hanging from an old limestone bridge. He died sometime in the night. The other dog whimpered not too far away. Cream went down a path of limestone steps to the forest floor where he found the surviving dog buried between a fallen tree and a gulch of leaves.

The dog held in its mouth a dead and ugly creature that brought Cream to revulsion. It wore bloody clothing covered in a beard of white fuzz swarming with bees. Its nose was broken off, and its big eyes popped out of its skull. The neck was small, but the dog cleaved it open so it fit in his mouth. Short limbs dangled from foaming jaws. 

Cream fell to his knees and shouted in bewilderment and confusion. One of the creature's little boots fell to the ground. It looked just like one of the hideous men he saw the wizard's shack long ago. As he looked into its face he heard air escape from the holes in his throat. It still lived and whispered into the woods.

Cream guided the dog back home under a chorus of sinister echos and crackling forestry. The dog seemed to find danger under every rock and up every tree as he whimpered and panted at the slightest tussle of dander. No matter how many times Cream asked the dog to drop the dead creature the dog only growled at him and bit harder into the blue flesh. Once back to the house, Cream burned the creature’s body in the grill. White smoke filled the air all day and the dog nursed deep wounds on the kitchen floor as Cream went back into the woods to find and bury the dead dog, but the body disappeared into a squirming heap of snails and blood.

All day long Cream heard their curses cascading from the gnarled oaks. He heard them in the crawl space, and in the walls. The dog went downstairs to hide from their cackles but he ended up growling at the open hatch. Every time Cream glanced out from the upstairs window he saw more and more of them scamper on the lawn. He knew the neighbors must be watching out of jealousy, and so he fired his shot gun at their houses.

More and more of the terrible creatures assembled around his home. They drank from the fountain and stood looking into his windows. They called for Cream to come out to them as he reloaded the weapon to fire again at the neighbors. He thought he hit one of them as he shattered their window, and shot at another car passing by on the road. His duffle bag lay open at his feet. As night fell, and the creatures made their ways up the steps, Cream hit the pipe of crystals again. Too stressed, too frightened, he decided that if anything he needed more ice, a lot more, not less.

The homeless who play in those woods say they saw the old wizard fly in the sky on his cane, and land before the little creatures who knelt before him. Rings of blood surrounded the house. The burned creature crawled out of the grill, its eyes glowing and its mouth gushing green blood. They dragged Cream screaming out from the house by his broken feet, and pulled him deep into the woods to be buried the pits where the mammoth doth sleep. Some say they buried him under even deeper layers where not even the old Wizard can find his remains, in dwelling depths where living monstrosities still eat coals and crawl on the ceiling of the earth.  

Shawnice returned and found her brother gone from the house. Broken glass littered the hardwood and wind soared in through the windows. The doors lay smashed to pieces on the floor, both her dogs shivered in the basement nursing each others wounds. The hatch sealed shut once more with extra thick and reinforced latches. She found  his duffle bag of drugs, and explored the neighbors house to discover the bodies he shot to death. 

One night after Shawnice moved in with her dogs, she heard slurping from outside. She peeked out of the blinds and saw a little man in a funny hat taking water from the bath and drinking it from his hands. Slurp. Slurp. slurp. 

art: A Mansion in the Darkness - Morten Schelde , 2015.

DEMONS

 

by Graham Swanson

DEMONS fluttered from tipped-over garbage canisters and crawled over spilled water cans and smashed HUGGIES boxes. The crooked brickwork glowed over the foggy street lamps and the clouds finally blew away and a few planets shined like holes in the sky. Their bruises and bullet scars on their hands and necks scabbed over. Every night they jump right from bed and get to work. While their women stuffed powder into bags in closed garages, they wasted no time shipping it across town armed with silver daggers.

The liars they intended to kill hid from the war ballads dropping from a heavy bass stereo by waiting in the dark apartments of their elders. They already stepped out and immediately met a spy walking tall with his hands in his pockets. While they wore diamond rings and brand new Nikes, no furniture decorated the living room and no silverware lay divided up in the plastic tray in the kitchen drawer. Boards covered up the windows, but they still watched out the slots towards a street of fools and johns. In the magnificence of the city light, their fake jewels shined brighter.

The new kid drove sweating over the four bodies in his trunk. His gas needle wavered below E. He still had to cross Central to reach the chemical bath of the Bike Shop. If the Cat knew that he took his keys from his pocket to take the Cutlass, then he could count a finger for every corpse that night. He had no money to get more gas, and the frauds of the darkened apartment already spent his treasures in the foggy alleys between wooden faces of lathwork fences. With New Central street in view, the night lit up with ultra-blue and manganese red.

To the new kid’s relief, the lights passed on to speed away after racing vehicles screeching out of the wind mist of the gas station. On Old Central, his phone rang, and on the other end, a voice hissed for him to reveal himself to a posse of lowlifes. He almost hung up, but he saw his reflection lit up by the phone light in all darkened windows. They called him names, they mocked his family, and they threatened to be there in his nightmares. He stayed on the line, “I have the sharpest teeth, I don't even sleep, and your four men learned it tonight.”

The demons on the other line hung up first, and they huddled in the pink warm light of their mother’s basement. She packed bullets into their clips to take with them to stroll for the next morning. She did this with death ringing her eyes and a cigar drooping from her lip every night. She wore the best clothes and drove the car to get lobster to eat and brought them back a to-go platter of calamari. They wanted to storm out to feud but her knife outweighed each of theirs.

Their mistress broke the nose of stronger men who ganged up on her and attempt to wrestle her away. She cracked each of their heads with a knife sharpener from under her bed and told them to get real before they marched into the darkness. Too many of her children left behind rings and she still wore them on her fingers. She never forgot their sweet names or their beautiful faces. They became men under her motherhood shortly before drowning in pools of their own blood.

The man who executed them knew exactly how to shoot them so their spines would separate from their brains, leaving them alive but paralyzed, so that their mothers would stay awake at night in horror knowing how they died. He danced among the potholes and sinking ledges, slept in the trash of abandoned halls, listened to the music of crows singing of the delicate pleasures, the candy-sweet taste of manflesh. He carried no ID because he was older than his driver’s licenses. His heart stopped beating a long time ago, yet he still walked the brick paths smiling at the smell of blood tracking behind him because rain clouds gathered around the moon.

The killer possessed two gods. They rubbed on his hips from the pockets of his raincoat. He took out the Glock to fend off punk muggers from disappointing their mother, and he used the carbine to destroy vehicles and break down stronghold doors. Each time before he delivered mercy of shattering sparks, he took a moment to hold the weapons against his dead heart and held them up to the spirit lights of the sky to be blessed by the souls of fallen demons. Then he spent the ammunition buying souls from the street.

This silent lord spent the night cumming on the face of a girl who until she met him, was on a full scholarship to become a doctor back home. She needed the crack he dosed her with. He took his pubic hair and made her look like a cat with long whiskers. He still had a water wrinkled and color drained copy of CAT IN THE HAT on a shelf. All his books contained brightly colored animations, cartoons, and few words.

The silent lord possessed phenomenal writing skills, and his text messages pounded phones louder than any voice command. With one message, all demons in the neighborhood moved crack. With one more, it all paused. He learned it from leaving love notes behind for the crushes he had in the schoolyard before those girls got pimped. In this Garden of Eden, he was the top cat.

One other old man, the Rat, knew the Cat from the playground swing set. They talked loudly about the girls he acquired back at his club. The Cat pressed one button, and those ladies left their bedrooms to come to his box under the alleyway then they went forth selling his rocks and returning the earnings in duffle bags. They feared him and merely admired the silky personality of their guardian. He was a real DEMON, not just a black goatee in a red cape.

The Rat left his club early after his phone went off with a photo of his car on fire. None of his frightened guards attended to his stifled orders so he left the club by himself to face his accuser. Outside in the empty lot, the car stood perfectly fine. A fresh downpour of rain washed it clean, but the bumpers grinded low against the pavement. He got down to check the tires. Each one completely drained of air but not a single cut of damage.

Naked demons from the club stepped out to see the Cat appear in a cloud of mist as the lot lights blew up and showed the pavement in crystal fragments. Foot patter echoed under the cover of darkness. The silk suit tried to hide in his car but the last thing he saw before the windshield shattered under a shower of red hot sparks was an antler being forced into his armpit and through his heart. He died there trying to murmur to the Cat under bubbles of blood and mucus. “We grew up together as kids, aren’t we are still friends?”

The Cat smiled with an unflinching eye and planted a coverless copy of Stuart Little in the Rat's lap, and turned the pages to that the face of the rat in overalls faced the cab light. The man tried to tear the antler free but his arm didn’t bend far enough to take it all the way out. He died after three more weeping breaths gasping to say something to the persecutor angels in black wings swarming his vehicle and pecking flesh from his bones. Under his club he kept young girls chained to radiators making cam videos for the dark int. The crowd whispered rumors of the dead man being an informant to the 13 Illuminati families, and so they left his body outside his dilapidated home to be eaten by starving dogs.

All the money the Rat obtained ended up in rubber bands on the Cat’s shelf on the pedestal he slept on under the catwalks and alleyways. He kept it out in the open but no thief dared to climb down the gutter to find it. He spent the money as fast as he made it and drove around in a brand new car with no plates, and flew from city to city. Each time he returned to find his home in the box entranced by invisible trespassers. He bought a new box of bullets and he poured them out. He stored his poems inside.

One influencer poet quit school and found himself squatting in the studio apartment of a crumbling tenement complex. He never met the Cat but tried to seduce several of his women, and even got one to come over to stay the night. She told him everything he wanted to know, but she didn’t want to leave with him to a new world. The poet opened the music studio in his laptop and recorded a scathing song swearing vengeance on the Cat and the streets he lived beneath. He put his frustrations aside and went back to pulling a red wagon to peddle albums to the lowlifes carrying paintings into the sewers. They ignored him because they thought if he hated the Cat so much, he’d be better off confronting him rather than singing about it.

The Cat really really really liked the song a lot. He even heard it playing from car windows and from apartment balconies. The more he listened to it, the more he admitted to himself that the young poet of the street possessed remarkable talent worthy of his envy. All the years around the stars of music, from the penthouse rockstars of the Midwest to the limousine trains in the West, he never took a liking to singing, but this kid made him feel the loss for his past. It’s just he wished the young man possessed the courage to sing it to his face on his dais on which his box lay, so he left the alley to be the boy’s number one fan.

The Cat saw the demon poet pass by several times but he never recognized the dirty coat of the Cat sitting on a park bench, standing in the street at night, or watching from rooftops. He watched the boy sleeping from the rickety fire escape and wanted to take his hand and hold it hard. He almost felt emotion thawing in his chest but after a shower of small needles passed in his chest, he choked and fell ever harder in love. He wrote a song with a salute of gunfire from the catwalk at the peasants below.

Bullets shattered the windows of widows and scared hustlers out of their hiding places. Playground pieces ricocheted with rapid bullets, empty clips fell to the ground far below, and a thunder of birds lifted from building tops into the moonlit clouds. The poet never saw the Cat before, but he never forget the shadow silhouetted against the brilliant strobes of white and red fireworks bleaching the walls of sinking ruins with dark coat tails unfurling in the wind. Like nothing he imagined before, his imagination went forever captured by the terror of this demon escaping into the fog of night without even touching the ground. Not even the universities had something so awe inspiring.

The Cat never saw his schemes as crimes but if the poet made songs, then he conducted operas. All the gunfire and no one died that night. Babies giggled in the arms of their mothers at the sparkles and firetruck blasts filled the night sky. The random attack became the talk of the street. The young champions of the school sports team looked up to the horrifying shadow lurking behind the curtains of the city.

Those young demons went home after game practice to play video games as the Cat smoked blunts of 9 POUND hammer. He watched every one of their games and cheered for the injuries they inflicted onto the opposing schools from the back of the bleachers. After the games and the triumph teams marched home, the Cat walked onto the field to anoint the victory with burning sage, or the defeats by crushing the bones of a rabbit. He never participated in the thrill of war games. He ran from the drifting Martin packed with masked warriors.

The Cat participated in his own ways. After academy bells chimed, he hung out in the parking lot by the fast cars paid for by bribes, and inside he told the athletes about weak spots in their opponent's armor. On game night they slaughtered the opposition to the shrieking approval of parents and cheerleaders standing up and throwing their voices out howling in celebration of broken bones. The team burned sage in dark basements to honor their guardian angel. The coaches never could kick the Cat out of the hearts and souls of their champions.

By graduation, these young demons entered the Cat’s service on the front lines of his war against the city. They marched in the middle of the windswept streets with heavy weapons under black robes. With one blow they crushed the spines of their enemies. Everyone came out to greet the death squadrons in the street with prizes and gifts, flowers, and wine bottles. The guardians of the street drove in luxury sedans like the oxcart of Charlemagne and every child adored them.

The Cat finally took total control of his side of the city he adored, and no living being in the city dared test his long awaited reward of mortal souls. His arm reached every phone, every cradle, and every car from the guy sleeping in the ditch to the human resources recruiter of the gleaming corporation towers. Bank vaults opened for him before the robberies commenced, detectives conducted raids only to find photos of their families pinned to the wall, and terrorists from foreign lands walked freely into smokey bars without passports or even a fake ID. The Cat just needed to press SEND. The dice rolled in his favor at last.

Daughters of wealthy publishers flew to the city to meet him and join his brotherhood of slayers in the dark channels under the city. He didn’t even need to seduce them on INSTAGRAM with photos of a palace or a sports car. They volunteered to join his army and use their family’s wealth to destroy his enemies. He sent them to be brides of the heroes strangling brigands on the street and shooting down helicopters over the peer. At all times a ring of all female bodyguards from across the world protected him from police snipers and he didn't need to bite a single neck.

One of the Cat’s trusted warriors yelled at him. Shielded by a phone screen, he accused the Cat of quitting the use of force out of weakness. His longest serving paladin, a follower since before puberty turned his skinny bones into gallant stature, told this to some stranger visiting from a place where the sea met the sky. He said it under the same street lights the Cat lost his heart. They tried to tell the Cat not to be alarmed by the betrayal, but he already knew. Someone was giving the identities of his drug traffickers away to the FBI.

The brave days of the FBI sending agents undercover to infiltrate organizations ended long ago, and now they recruit from within the ranks of their prey. They communicated online far from the front lines of danger. Instant communication means they can kill their enemies with a drone strike with a press of a button in a base fortified in TEXAS. They are experts in covert action. They are all nerds of the internet and they spend all their lives lurking behind computers in dark basements of government offices.

The traitor sat on his pedestal in a tower overlooking the brilliant barrel fires on one side of the city, and the glamorous theaters on the other side. Surrounded by actors, dancers, singers in his parlor, he talked like a Templar but didn’t claim spines. He never tortured a captive rival taken by the Cat nor sold a slave to workhouses down the coast. All because he knocked up one woman and she aborted it without his consent. The Cat knew that people sometimes appear harsh, but they don’t wish vendettas on anyone unless it's someone’s fault.

In the safety of his menagerie of performers, he dressed in the robes of the crusader and wore his dagger in full view across his chest sash. He stood and fired bolts at glass rings on the balcony overlooking the green sea tides. The guests borrowed his guns to fire the next rounds in the contest and he always provided them with spare rounds. In bed, he told a starlet all about the battles he won and the champions he slew with the weapon she undressed him with. As a person on the stage, he took the role of performer.

The stage became his bed, and the sheets sunk to the floor with each thrust of his rupturing hips. His guests didn’t notice the squadron of black robed fighters waiting in the shadows of the wall. After he rolled off her and they cuddled in each other's filth and sweat, the bishops of death drew their shining long swords. Shredded bedding snowed out the window in white ribbons. Hundreds of lost souls from all over the city were at risk, and now the lights fell, the curtain dropped, and a dozen armed men swarmed the stage.

The actors pleaded to be let out as the party ran out of wine to pour over the women and rails to snort off the prop guns. They pushed against the door, but they didn’t know about the dark clerics waiting in the hallway with their heavy weapons rested against their shoulders. Not a single one bowed gracefully before exiting stage left, stage right, and their heads rolled across the floor one by one into the Traitor’s bedroom as the warriors prayed to their weapons to bring the martyr compassion in the afterlife and to understand the sins they committed.

Blood soaked the walls, ran down the columns, and splattered against portraits of the Traitor’s now childless mother. Bloodstained the mattress black. Blood dripped from the ceiling, and blood drenched the laps of the all mighty slayers. One by one they passed each other's weapons around to take turns hacking at the bones, sawing out organs from ribs, taking off arms, legs, but they left the head and face intact for the funeral.

The mother of the traitor must pay the price for the misdeeds of her child. As the graveyard hole swallowed the casket with what could be recovered of the body, she heard two dozen capes hover in the fog. The Cat held an umbrella in one hand over her head as the rain began to filter from clouds of pollution. He braced his divine 9mm in the other against her racing heart. She used to be his favorite person in the whole world.

“I’ve been with you since you were in diapers. I’m not even trying to stop you.”

“So what’s up with you talking shit with him on the phone?” His throat ruptured.

“He was just playing.”

The Cat almost fell for it, but a fake person doesn’t look up to the sky when speaking with conviction with glassy drunken eyes, and rotten breath. Her posture slumped and instead of taking his hand when he offered it to her, she collapsed into the mud in the shadow of the tombstone. The Cat promised her a mausoleum to contain her body and the bodies of her family before he shot her in the temple. He kicked the body into the pit with her son and left to let the gravediggers plug the hole with clay. Crows assembled around the open grave, but they can’t eat fake meat.

The Cat pressed a button on his phone and watched hooded exiles scurry out of doorless vans and bullet riddled dumpsters. All over cars moved his supplies from the array of burning barrels to even the gated communities protected by cameras and Dobermans on the city outskirts. The rain poured harder as night fell and the green sea mist floated first onto the beach of dead crustaceans and capsized fish boats, then filled in the spaces between black towers. He held his weapons over dead and prayed to them to deliver him beyond this deranged and decrepit playground of ruins to an empire greater than Spain. Trappers worked hard knowing he watched them.

Anyone else claiming to be the main pusher deserved the blowtorch that took their eyes. Every time the Cat removed one, he found another in some dirty pit accompanied by lowlifes. They carried newer guns, a bigger arsenal of high powered gunfire capable of shattering the cannon of a battle tank or penetrating the armor of a security truck. The Cat offered them his embrace among the legion of black robed mutilators if they only stopped the lies and agreed to work for him. He even offered to pay their hospital bills, but the lies persisted.

New rivals arose from the ashes of every burned house, and every dead mother. They armed themselves in suits of Kevlar and chain links. The Cat wore rags, mites crawled in nests around his hair, and every woman who slept in his box on the dais under the alley spoke of glaucoma, of open sores and swelling bumps, rashes that he scratched until they bled, and pain that burned so hot that he preferred not to make love to his brides. He dug up the mother he killed and hung her body up in ropes under the cascading waterfalls of light and rain prominently above his home, and every night he asked her to show him a son to help him fight his enemies. Secret enclaves behind alleyway labyrinths echoed with voices of old world children barking the war songs of the lost poet threatening to devour a mangy tabby stray and leave its dead carcass on the doorstep of the Cat.

Bombs reduced secret dance clubs to heaps of crawling brick, matches dropped down fuel lines incinerated gas stations tagged by their vigil, corrupt judges washed ashore on the beach in trash bags, and so the demon knights in dark robes took to marching down the street sweating from the heat of torches in their hands and exhausted from carrying M4s straight from the locker. All down the lane twisted murals parodied them on the bullet torn face of every building from the open streets to the breadths of the narrowest alley path. They put down their hoods to look above at swaying damaged war helmets chained to balconies. Every fluttering shadow up high nearly drew concentrated fire from their weapons. The Cat watched from the highest bell tower warned them not to let these harmless taunts bring dishonor to their new empire before it even got a chance to free the oppressed.

Maidens braced the .44s of their dead boyfriends. They watched from windows. Dishonored policemen with night vision scopes monitored from closed causeways over the silent battlefield. Any homeless man who didn’t run away to find shelter elsewhere found speeding bullets dropping them into heaps of steaming refuse. Any demon unaware of the war declaration endangered themselves by hearing the shots. They swarmed church doors begging for sanctuary. Sisters barred the doors and stood over the palisade arch armed with anointed shotguns to chase the herd back into their hives.

The Cat spat liquor from the top of the bell tower, as one by one his champions found themselves alone shaking in the cold night. For the Cat never knew a son of his own, he always called his black robes executioners his children of the awakening world but a needle of pain showered his dead heart. He gasped as they stormed the brothels. They didn’t come out, and none of his messages pinged with *seen. Helicopters soared overhead and tanks crushed barricades to push their way into the downtrodden theater. Weakness left the burning city and only steel pillars remained in the white charcoal.

The Cat watched war machines tear down the playground of his first drug deal, and bury it in flaming wreckage. The pains in his heart grew. Missiles obliterated the stone porch he met his best friends on where they shared stories of first kisses and sips of stolen whiskey long ago. His black knights exited holes in the brothel wall and charged into wavering curtains of smoke to get decapitated by sniper fire. The survivors escaped to cover behind the walls of the church to be impaled by spiraling javelins, and the remains of his fearless, little army came face to face with halberds in the ranks of the fiercest, most heartless DEMONS- so toned by the horrors of the Cat that they appeared more beast than man with horns and claws, nails and outstretched wings, gleaming MG-42s freshly cleaned and calibrated. His heart vessels quivered in stifled bursts and a trickle of warmth pumped over corrosion in his veins.

Real demons ransacked the city. They pulled down every statue and broke open every fire hydrant. By sunrise, a pink haze glowed over the rebar strips and melted shoes sticking up from smoldering powder as ancient cannons fired into the ocean. The Cat vanished from the tower, but his phone landed in the grasp of a creature born from the kindness of suffering, and everlasting torment. In the dens of monsters, angels gnawed on bones of the dead knights, blood speckled robes looted from rubble and battlefields draped the fireplace, the guns and lances of the Cat's army melted into tiny silver statues worn around every neck in the new city. In a jar on the mantel floated a shriveled black heart. It rippled in a bath of oil.

Orange bags of medicine spilled on the floor but busy hands kept packing nylon until trailers tipped over. All phones across the nation warned of a new epidemic, but in a drafty back room cooled by the spinning blades of a frosty vent fan, the nephilum listening counted freshly minted c-notes. On the floor beneath the office brothers and sisters worked cheap not to build an empire but nor PUNISH the extinguished demons outside and beyond. They wore cave jewels on their belts and platinum crowns above the star on their foreheads.

 

Dark Avengers

Graham Swanson

Ed lost all her friends once she graduated from the University with a degree in High Arts from the prolific professor of the arcane, Dr. Fairfax. Many of the club mates and roommates pressured her to abort the baby growing in her womb, but cold lonely night after cold lonely night she grew more dear to the unborn, and more in love with the boy growing inside her. She wasn’t sure she ever learned anything from the courses but she learned that if she stayed quiet and let Fairfax explain how toasters and air conditioners are the evilest things in the world, she easily earned A grades.

Ed’s best friend, the daughter of Sudanese war refugees, dropped out of school her senior year and ended up frequenting Tinder accounts, drinking cheap gas station wine in rotten apartments. Once she took up a job at the bank Ed seldom called nor heard from her dear friend. Since she was no longer at the same level as herself (the esteem pet of Dr. Fairfax), she saw no reason to waste time befriending who she saw as less worthy.

Ed’s guy friend, Paul, son of the wealthy owner of several buildings downtown in one of those obscure Midwestern cities a far cry from descent civilization, once indulged her through underground galleries hidden in the historic tunnels reeking of ale and 100-year-old dust. Once she graduated by the insisting fist of Dr. Fairfax, he broke her heart at the midnight of her diploma ceremony but leaving long nasty messages on her phone and social media. Paragraph after paragraph detailed how she didn’t deserve a degree, that they let her pass her classes simply because she had strange ancestors and a calmer set of genitals favored by the ideology Dr. Fairfax and his foreign compatriots believed in. They liked the promise she possessed.

Dr. Fairfax and his fellow professors agreed that a new sweeping wave of revolution was needed to arise from the dark corners of the world to heal the planet of all war, all poverty, all disease. Simply put, when those unwashed masses are kept alone and poor, deprived of opportunity, and taught that they are to be hated, one by one they will turn to arms. The Catholic Church. The Taliban. All of Fairfax’s professors agreed that to set the fall of respectable societies across the world, they needed people like Ed to fail in this life.

Fairfax told Ed that their ideology was the best weapon in the war against the privileged classes. The media lies to the people about them. It’s difficult to understand, but soon their small family would take over the planet. He had her supply names of “counter-revolutionaries”. Poor kids in the university who got there by working hard and paying what little money they could. He wanted to see them kicked out of school. More than one time the football statue outside of the mighty coliseum suffered vandalism. Fairfax felt pleasure every time because he knew that his movement respected results. He showed them what happened, and they were overjoyed at his accomplishments and awarded him the highest positions in the faculty of wisdom. Her one duty to him was to abort the pregnancy.

However, Ed already graduated and found work at the first publication she visited in the many lanes and overpasses of the magnificent city showering glitter over the murky slums. No reason persisted any longer to give in to the sway of Dr. Fairfax or his plans for world domination. Though she refused to date most men from her class and harbored deep resentments from the creepy uncles that liked to grab her and reach down into unspeakable places, she gave birth to a red-headed son. Alone with him in a world compelled by thinkers like Fairfax, she decided her son was destined to grow up to be one of the good men with their own car, their own house, millions of dollars, a college doctorate, an honorable job, and best of all he’d be nice to other girls.

Ed named him Poodles, after her favorite artist she slept with while living in dorms. She taught her son to walk by herself, she taught him to talk by herself, and potty trained him in a small craggy apartment overlooking the gunfire from the highway, and human traffickers in the playground. Radios barked of barbarians destroying police cruisers on the highway and marching into state capitols around the country. She remembered Fairfax teaching her not to worry about the chaos, for the real demons in the world rested among the “incels”, virgins who wanted to get married but never could.

As Poodles grew into a smart boy in glasses attending his first days in pre-school, more and more attacks occurred. Young men around her age took up arms and shot up Walmarts and shopping malls. Some drove cars into crowds on the sidewalk. It scared her more than anything, and so she tried her best to teach her son sentimentality and the power of kindness. Once he fell asleep, Ed stood on the balcony and smoked a pack of cigarettes, cussing into the wind, cleaning her glasses, and overlooking the never sleeping streets of dozing hobos.

By the time Poodles turned into a teenager, armies of darkness captured dams and airports on the other side of the world at the same time a new hero arose among the angry, drug-addicted, lonely men lost on never-ending bus rides and flooded city blocks. He sold all his property but for three things. His smartphone. His motorcycle. His MP42 submachine gun.

This champion of the downtrodden documented his journey on social media. Across the country, he found and killed meth cookers, then distributing the loot among his many followers who called him the Guardian Angel of the Plains. He chose to attack targets in the distant Midwest because A: Most small towns are so corrupt, and haven't been reformed since 1910, that their infrastructures are in the perfect position to let someone like him show up and start giving orders. B: The distance is too great, and resources too few, for the police and counter-terrorists to put up a serious defense. By the time Swat arrived his men already turned to shadows and vanished into the wheat fields with truckloads of money. Headless bodies littered courthouse steps. Radios broadcasted messages from their leader, a dark avenger, Ammon.

Poodles took up work at the factory screwing spades onto handles. Then he worked at a construction site mixing concrete. His shoulders bulged and his muscles thickened over his arms and chest. All the while he studied hard and pursued arts like his mom always encouraged to keep him away from violence, drugs, and sex. When she fell asleep in bed in the afternoon from working all night, he went to his friend’s gallery to smash the art of the old boomers in their marble galleries, snort coke from mirrors with hot women, and make love to them in the back of car wagons under the morning stars just as school bells rang.

“What the eyes don't see don't break the heart.”

One day Poodles asked Ed if she still talked to his father. She dated many men since giving birth to him and still slept with his father while her boyfriends babysat. He claimed the boy on his taxes and received the stimulus money among other benefits. She feared Poodles wanted to run away with him, and leave her alone in the city of fallen grace. “No. I haven't seen him in years.”

Before he graduated High School, a pandemic of Lung Parasites quieted the waves of violence and mass shootings, but the violence never found a cure. There is no vaccination for the kinds of torments that drive men to take up arms and murder their fellow humans. As the quarantines ended, and the parasites kept spreading, it took two days for an upswell of random violence to shock any sentiment, any healing, away from the weary minds of the parasite’s survivors. Gangs sought to reclaim lost turf, disturbed and untreated men drank more, vengeful factions escaped from prison and killed female police deputies and judges, left them hanging from lamp posts. Unemployed soldiers enlisted in private camps and attacked ballot counting centers.

Ed encouraged her son to get into a good school, the one where her faithful Dr. Fairfax still lectured on the falsehoods of the galaxy, that sciences and literature are mere cages, studies like psychology exist to imprison in the inflicted, the only truth lies in the blood magic etched on ancient bronze walls. She got him away from the city where the supporters of the new movement threatened to slap anyone who voted against them, and those who opposed the new movement threatened to get fired anyone who voted against them. She drove Poodles hundreds of miles in her own car, and kissed him goodbye, and went back to the chaotic radiance of the city just as the Dark Avenger lead his army against the government, its parties, and the drug gangs alike. She turned the radio off, and couldn’t stand to even have a TV on. in the silence warriors crashed down the very front gates of the city bearing weapons and waving flags. Poodles called his mom every day.

Fairfax considered Ed a traitor to his movement. The fact that she carried out the pregnancy meant that the faculty of his acolytes meant to cast Poodles out like the others. They only needed the purest of ideologists to graduate their academy, and since degrees are useless today anyhow, why the hell not? Fairfax sat in a penthouse surrounded by artworks talking to his most loyal partners and friends. One of them never read a book in her life. The other refused to follow school curriculum (“How to Inspire Your Students?” why the hell would I want to do that? I hate these spoiled brats, and no one can fire me, so fuck it.) in favor of his own preferred reading: Novels written the terrorists freed from prisons in the distant corners of the world.

When Poodles quit school it hurt Ed in more ways than her heart managed to process. She felt betrayed, let down, disappointing, but worst yet she signed off on his student loans, so she received monthly debt notices from collectors from New York calling her in the middle of the night. She called Fairfax to beg of him to let her son back into school. After all, he spent six years studying, why kick him out now? Fairfax only laughed at her. “you didn’t think we’d let your son through, did you?”

Ed didn’t hear from or see Poodles again until he appeared in the footage of the Dark Avenger’s attack on the university. Her son contacted them on Social media, told them what happened, and gave them names of the professors who campaigned against him. By morning all of Fairfax's best professors and proteges hung from pylons on the coliseum and blood painted the statues by the front columns. Fires consumed the English Department and its co offices. Books of the professors, especially the book of Fairfax, lay in ashy heaps in the morning’s social media. Fairfax went into hiding while his friends spoke out against the attack.

In the Dark Avenger’s army, Poodles found brothers, who like him, were impoverished, unmarried, and furious at the failures of the previous generations. He swore off art and let his paintings decompose in a slummy boarding house. He marched with the warriors in several campaigns, winning many battles, and spilling much blood on the dirt and cement alike. He even used his talent in the arts to make his own series of videos for the movement’s ritual executions.

By this time men and women started colonies on Mars, and robots on Earth did all the work. Anyone who caught the lung parasites received 10,000$ checks in the mail to be spent however the recipient chose. It’d been longer than twenty years. Poodle’s red hair turned black and silver, and he changed his name to Rolf to hide his identity from bounty hunters and FBI agents. He traveled in rags, unarmed and masked across the country like the shadow he trained to become.

60 years after Ed gave birth to her son, she became a shut-in who never left her apartment, got her food from drones, and kept everything her son ever left with her. Flying buildings casts islands of darkness over the city. Too many still remembered the trauma in the streets, the screaming of those drowning the bloodbath, rampant gunfire in the night as warriors celebrated victory in the smoke of burning roads. The young moved off to better worlds and left the old behind in buildings that slowly broke down as resources went to keep the flying structures working. She always assumed her son went off to one of those sparkling colonies on the moon, or maybe Mars where the hemp fields go one forever.

Instead, when Rolf came back to the door, she didn’t recognize him. Fairfax had escaped the chaos he manufactured, and the police let him come to her building because they all wanted to capture the evil professor more than another rebel. They hugged for the first time together in the warm wind. The wall of the building collapsed yesterday. Only she knew his sorrow. Only she knew about the battles he would be fighting for the rest of his life.