How Pace Wilkens Died

        Deputy Burke waited all night long for the phone to ring. He went ahead and dressed in his uniform. At four am, only flashes of passing headlights disturbed his dark home. Red and platinum beams cast long hurdles onto his ceiling that wound to the wall. The phone sat still. He ran out of coffee, eggs, bacon. He sat in the dark of his home watching the night slip away. An hour and a half after he gave up trying to sleep, he received a call from the Wilken’s residence. At first he sighed, recalled all the domestic turbulence he’d been summoned to address in the past. This time he dropped the phone and bolted out the door. He drove past the coffee shack, and the fast food parlor despite his urging hunger and shaking headaches caused by caffeine deficiency.

       Morning rose over the Wilken's farm. Frost of late February stiffened the dirt. Curtains of mist swirled around the house. The Deputy came into the Wilken’s kitchen. The dog chewed on a human mandible. Lilith Wilken’s held her robe shut. The deputy didn’t ask about Pace’s absence. Lilith didn’t need to say a word. He began his search. No chickens occupied the coop. No machines idled in the barn. The windmill stood tall, rusted in place. He thought for a moment that he saw a caped figure watching him from between the blades. When he shined a light towards the dilapidated rotors, a flock of dark birds lifted away. The deputy zipped up his coat and made his way to the field. He walked along the barb wire. Far off cattle bleated. A school bus droned down the highway at the end of the property. The deputy turned and walked along the drainage ditch. He shined his light within. The sun rose and burned away the clouds and mist, but the trench still stunk of dark mire. His foot kicked a glass capsule. He looked down, sucked on his teeth and put his light back into his belt. Several broken bottles lay scattered among a few last bottles intact. In the middle of the broken glass rested half a pelvic bone, the lower segment of a spinal chord, and some ribs peeking from the dirt. The deputy sucked his teeth, and nudged the bottle he kicked back to its gap in the dirt.

         He called off the search on his radio, and went inside. He watched Lilith sip steaming coffee, and his lymph nodes stiffened. He swallowed dry spit, and told her he found her husband.

         “I worried it would end this way,” he sighed to her, taking a seat before her. “Ever since the first night I got called over to keep him from swatting your head off...and the time after that...and the time after that...”

        The dog devoured the mandible. A few teeth lay under his foaming tongue.

       “This harvest, I finally kicked him out. I boxed up his whiskey and wine, and I sent him away.”

        “I just want you to know, that whatever happened, I don’t blame you. The report is going to say exactly what you told me. He went out there, drank himself to death. Animals got to his body. Not much is left now.”

       The deputy stood up and walked to the door. In his car, he called for a coroner. In the middle of the driveway, under the shadow of dark clouds, stood the hooded figure from the windmill. The deputy got out, and walked with rapid strides, calling for the faceless stranger to reveal himself.

When he came to the figure, he pulled away the hood, revealing canvas stitching with worms squirming out of crude eye holes. Hay and fur fell out from under its torso. The cape and straw blew away in the wind. The deputy shielded his eyes from the hail of dust and hay. When he opened his eyes, a heap of maggots devoured a heart at his boots.

       Lilith Wilkens went to check on her daughter. She carefully tapped on the door. “Gwynth... please get up.” She whispered, then tapped again and repeated herself louder than before. Lilith ripped knots from her hair, and dropped blonde tangles to the floor. She worried- perhaps Gwynth may fail to recognize her own mother. So much changed since she killed Pace.

      He lived up to his tyrannical reputation before she married him, and it grew worse with every year. He started fights with strangers as much as her. He broke into an old woman’s home and urinated on her couch after her dog scratched his truck. Every bar in the county banned him. No farmers lent him any supply or equipment. Most intolerable to Lilith, he swerved to hit animals in the road, living or dead. Each hunting season, he hung up and gutted deer on the front lawn to rot for everyone driving by to see.

       After ten years of mayhem, he crashed his car into the creek, and after spending weeks in the hospitable swore never to touch substance again. Lilith watched him transition into the nicest man she ever met. He went to town meetings. Volunteered to clean up litter. He even made her a stain glass window from his old liqueur bottles and placed it in the barn.

       One night he received a phone call, and left without explaining where he was going or why. When he returned, he didn’t say a word to anyone, and over following nights he developed curious habits. He ate with his hands, and thew up anything he ate. Lilith gave him stomach medicine, but he tossed it out, telling her he didn’t want any pills.

       His behavior only grew more outlandish. Words of books and manuals no longer made sense to him. He worked short hours, let the crops die, and watched as pieces of the house crumbled. At last, a strange derangement tormented his behavior.

     Lilith awoke every night in sweat and shivers. Pace stopped sleeping and lived the night standing in the moonlight, glaring out the open window into the dark leagues around the property lines. After a week of silently observing, Lilith bothered to ask him, “what’s out there?”

     “Can’t you hear them?” he trembled to whisper. When he saw his wife’s confusion he snapped back to the window, smacking both hands onto the pane. “They’re coming, they’re closer...”

She climbed out from the sheets and pulled him towards bed. He growled, and shoved her to the floor. She covered her head with her fists. The nightstand corner caught her by the eyebrow and both slid against the side of the bed. Lilith rocked on the floor, the socket of her eye crunched like a can. Blood dripped from between her fingers. She looked up at Pace opening the window and sticking his head out. Only when the blood tapped the floorboards did she take her quivering eyes from her husband to see the blood on the nightstand, and the drops on her bare legs. Vision faded and floated back. No pain alarmed her. She touched the bleeding gash, ran her finger over the edge of a broken plate above loose flakes, and scraped the red flap of flesh in the corner of her eye with her fingernail before she realized what happened. Pace’s breath escaped in white clouds. When he stepped away, Lilith tried to crawl in his way, but he stepped over her. Glass broke, and he returned with baring a bolt action Remington. His attention remained on the window, his nostrils flaring, he stomped his heel from the doorway. Lilith covered her wound as he planted a heel between her forearm bones. Blinding flashes stripped the dark away with each steaming round fired into the darkness. Pace slammed the window shut, stepped into Lilith’s blood and tracked it down the hall back to the cabinet. His daughter came from her bedroom, sleep stolen eyes near closed, walking in the dark with short, shackled steps, until she saw the blood print reflecting in the moonlight. Her mother crawled from the bedroom, her eyes shined under unfurled fringes of hair, moans tickled the back of her throat.

       Gwynth pulled her mother into the passenger seat of her car. Lilith spent time waiting in the doctor’s office wondering what happened. The doctor took his glasses off and asked about her husband.

      “No, he quit drinking years ago.”

       They gave her pain pills and sent her home with the top half of her head wrapped up.

She awoke at five am with a love note and a flower from the garden. She robed herself, and went down the stairs. As she cracked open eggs, she wiped the fog from the window. Blue sun rays peeked over the distant bluffs. Treeline shadows sharpened against the wet lawn. A shadow stood at the chicken coup stabbing hay bails with a pitchfork. The roosters called.

        Pace Wilkens impaled the hay bail. Wind blew lost strains against the wire fence. He gasped at the paw print in the dirt. He got down to brush away the loose hay, uncovering a trail leading to the chicken coup. He stole the pitchfork. The scrap wood door grinded against the frame, bending the screws as it pulled against the hinges. The hens bocked in their nests like quivering warts. He stalked the isle, looking to the corners, stabbing piles of hay, but finding nothing. Scratches fell from the rafters above. Pace listened, and through cracks in the ceiling he saw short fur. He left, came around the back, and climbed up the stack of hay bails to the roof where he sighed in relief. A fox curled up and looked at him with evolving concern, its nails clicked on the roof as it bolted to its feet and darted to the retreating fog over harvested fields. As he climbed down, the re emergence of cold wind reminded him of the howl of coyotes. The barks and yips strained the fabric of his neurons. He still remembered the attack in the recesses of his earliest memories, when he awoke from his fathers screams, and rushed to the window to watch a pack of coyotes pull him apart in the front lawn.

Pace came inside, wiped his boots on the rug and peeled his gloves off and shoved them into a corner of his coat pockets. Dark fluid soaked into his facial hair. Lilith asked nothing of it. Her stomach closed when she thought of the days when Pace started fights with old men and crashed cars into ATM machines.

        “I have something to tell you-” but the dog barked from the porch. He let the animal inside the house. The dog’s nail clacked on the tiles. It braced itself before the clock shaped like a lighthouse, with the dial replacing the bulb- Pace made it himself and gave it as a gift to Lilith after quitting alcohol and pain killers. The dog growled, and prosecuted the clock with a chain of unleashed howls and barks.

       Lilith stopped scraping the pan with a spatula to pull the dog away.

       “Leave the dog be.,” he shut the stove off, “come to the basement with me.”

He lead her down the steps. He pulled the chain and the light flooded the basement. He took her to the drain in the floor. He removed the cover, reached inside, and pulled out a heavy bottle of dark fluid. Red lather filled the neck.

     “Where does this come from?” he asked. “Who is placing this around the house?”

       Lilith shook her head. Pace ripped out the cork and drank from the bottle. The bittersweet reek of nightshade permeated from the fluid. He assembled his tool box and left to fix the holes in the chicken coop.

        Their daughter sat down for breakfast. Pace repaired loose boards. Lilith book the bottle, sniffed the fluid and her guts heaved. She took the opened bottle outside and hurled it against the pavement once used to bath cows on. Whispers escaped. The fluid ran down cracks and steamed until it all soaked into the earth. When inside, the dog still barked at the clock. she opened the bottom and retrieved a hidden bottle. She poured its contents out into the grass. The grass turned yellow, curled up and blew away in the wind. She put her ear to the bottle. In the droning waves within, she heard coyote snarls and paws beating nearer, the patter of bare feet fleeing- and the ripping of flesh.

Pace drove to town. When he returned, he found another bottle under his brake. He spent the daylight scratching at shadows on the wall, and boarding up windows.

       Prowling steps awoke Lilith from dreams. She felt around and found her husband not in bed. She panicked and put on slippers, rummaging through the house, she found cold mist blowing in from the open back door. Outside he heard a storm in the chicken coop. She recoiled when she saw her husband emerging shirtless, on all fours with a hen bleeding over his collars and down his chest, his teeth deep within its neck. He sat before the musk of feathers and dust, tearing the chinking into strips, swallowing its guts, and sucking the marrow from its bones. Lilith ran barefoot through mud. The hen still kicked and fluttered its wings. Pace growled at her with red teeth, his eyes darker, pupils dense with bronze.

       She ran back to the house with his pouncing heels digging through the mud towards her. His feet sank and he collapsed into the ground. Lilith slammed the door behind her, and waited in the bedroom with the Remington, watching the windows for Pace.

        He stayed in the chicken coop, devouring chickens until he vomited up a stomach full of splintered bones and vermilion slush. He sat in the corner, his sweat pants moist and coated in feathers. The sun rose, and he simmered in a stew of sweat, blood, and goo leaking from his ears. Putrid tubes and bladders rested on his shoulders. The cold wind swept through and the fluids frosted on his body. An unfamiliar engine revved. Pace rose to look out the window.

        Headlights appeared down the driveway and stopped at the tree line. His daughter waltzed from the a gleaming Pontiac Firebird- he recognized, 1983 model, with no license plate. She walked through the morning dark to the back door where she slipped into the house like a sock behind a dryer. The tail lights glowed in the morning mist and with a brief rev of the engine it crunched gravel and disappeared down the far road.

        Pace looked around at the carnage he caused. He tore his hair out, trotted across the yard. He stored all the bottles he found in a hole under the porch. He dug them up, and drank them until his pupils returned to normal.

        He walked upright into the house, showered, clogged the drain with the flayed remains of fowl. Unable to drain, the shower filled up with a pink soup. Pace wandered around the house. The dog slept on the marital bed. Lilith’s car still idled in the garage. He went to his daughters room, and found her sleeping. Lilith stood over her with the gun leveled towards him. Bags of name brand clothing peeked from under her mattress.

      “You need to leave.” She demanded of him.

       “Lilith, it isn't what it seems.” He stepped forward. The board creaked. His daughter rolled her head, and from the window glare she saw a black bar materialize into the weapon. Lilith’s shadow cut across the room.

        “Leave now. Take all your possessions with you.”

       “The gun isn’t loaded. I spent all the bullets.”

      Lilith noticed his pupils returned to their natural shade.

      “It’ s all a bad dream. One that I can’t wake from.” He pleaded.

      Cold air flushed through the screen and brushed dust from the floor. Pace kicked dirty clothes out of the way. His daughter held her breath at the sight of her mother aiming the rifle.

       “Come, let us be a family once more...”

        The daughter lifted, and backed towards the screen.

        “Gywnth,” her mother pleaded. “Stay there.”

The girl listened to nothing, she reached to unhook the latches. With a shove the screen popped out. She stuck her head out, but her moth caught hold of her foot with one hand. The muzzle dipped floorward. Pace pounced for the gun. Lilith pulled the trigger, and pace collapsed to the floor, pressing his ankle. Blood flowed to the floor. His howls echoed down the hall, the stairs, and out the door. Gwynth’s silence shattered and she screeched like a falling missile. Lilith released her, and rushed to her husband rolling into the vanity table. The mirror on top swayed. Pace watched his eye widen, his face tipping nearer to him. Lilith tried to catch the mirror but she she saw daughter slip out the window so she reached back, catching the end of her gown as glass crashed.

         Gywnth climbed down the trellis, and jumped into the bushes. Once out she fled towards the rusted windmill. Squawking crows watched from the blades. She climbed up the ladder to the small seat, weary and fatigued, even hung over from all the substance her suitor provided to her, she held his invitation close to her chest- he promised her everything bedreamt, if she came with him to the city. The barn door scraped. She looked towards it. A hooded figure strolled out and approached the windmill.

        Lilith walked over the broken glass to lift the mirror from Pace. Shards protruded from his face and neck. She quivered, hiding her teeth behind her hand, dropping the weapon, and pulling out the glass. With each fragment her husband moaned a little more, until his fingers reanimated and grasped her windpipe. His grasp constricted. Lilith’s tongue swelled from her mouth as her lungs shriveled up. She reached for a long piece of glass in his cheek. Holding it firmly, she guided it across Pace’s neck.

        Finally his last breath escaped in a white puff. The open window chilled the room with late autumn shivers. Lilith's flesh felt like marble. The dog barked from outside, and jumped at the door.

Lilith rolled his body onto a sheet, and dragged him to the stairs where she slipped and the body tumbled down. Dust fell from the ceiling. She dragged a wagon from the barn, hoisted her husband inside limb by limb and plowed the wagon through the harvested field to the drainage ditch where she rolled the body down. She took his clothes off, and burned them in a barrel.

         Gwynth remained on the windmill. The hooded man walked with two crutches and braces on his legs and spine. He stood beneath the windmill, filled his cheeks with air, and when he expelled the breath purple clouds gathered and sunk. A cyclone of dust speared the harvested fields. Sediment mist filled the air as wind streams deafened the sounds of distant highway travel and the grating of the wagon wheels. Gwynth held on, her hands slipping, her legs fell from the seat, and she grabbed onto the windmill blade. The crows lifted and fled. Her weight shifted the blades. As she slid they sliced into her palms. She held on tighter, but the blade bent, and broke away and fell down with her.

Lilith dropped her wagon when she saw her daughter fall. She ran through the mud, through the uncut weeds, to a sight that sucked the life from her. The blade fell against her neck. Gwynth’s head rolled to the boots of the hooded man.

       “You did this,” Lilith barked. “You’re behind all of it.”

         “Yes. This may be...” The dog ran and heeled at his side. The wind died and bursts of light burned through the clouds behind the hooded stranger. He staggered on his crutches, shifting his body like an adjusting track. A grin stretched across the lightened half of his face. “...The proudest moment in my life.”

       He wiped away a tear.

         “I will offer you what I offered Pace-” He produced a bottle of pulpy wine from his sleeve. “I’ll leave this for you. Keep it. Don’t let anyone else drink from it. And I will make this scene appear like suicide. As for your daughter...”

          The dog brought him her head and dropped it at his feet. “… She can return to life yet.”

         “You're a liar.”

          “No, no. To show my good faith, I will give her back to you. All I ask is that you keep this bottle. Go ahead, take it.”

           Lilith reached, her eyes latched onto the hallow horror, like a person sinking in quicksand, expressed on the drooping flesh of her daughters face. She took the bottle.

         “Good. It’s all that’s left of my family. You don’t remember, because it was so long ago. Your husband threw me across the room, fractured my skull and nearly tore my lumbar in half. While in the hospital my father burned all his assets. My mother drove my Firebird into the river. And I inherited nothing but this degenerative disease. So please, take care of it. Go inside. Now. Hide it. And I will bring your daughter to life. Then, I will see to it that Pace Wilken’s body is never found.”

Lilith took the bottle from him. The dog followed the stranger into the barn. The door closed behind them.

          Lilith spent the remaining daylight scrubbing blood and sweeping broken glass. The clocks stopped. The dog lay on the bed. The front door grinded open. Footsteps went up the stairs. Lilith found something she missed before. The bags of clothes from a store in the city- one she never dared spend money. The tags on the clothes, the lowest price- fifty dollar stockings. Nylon, lingerie- straps and belts, and a love note at the bottom from “Daddy”. The hallway planks moaned. Lilith tossed everything back inside the bags.

        “Oh my god, mom- what are you doing in my room?”

Lilith hugged her daughter. Her neck felt soft like warm cheese, but the rest of her felt as animate as the day she escaped from the womb.

          Harvest season cooled to winter, froze and frosted, then upon the thawing period, Lilith cleaned the chicken coup and sold Pace’s tools and belongings.

         Even as the frozen pastures melted to slush, she awoke before sunrise reaching over to find spare room where she expected to find warm flesh. The dog barked outside. Short, muffled, slobbering barks. She lit a cigarette and watched the sunrise over the windmill. As the sun rays reached over the distant bluffs, the windmill shadows stretched towards the house, standing between the blades she thought she saw the hooded stranger’s cape flutter in the screeching wind. The dog tore the screen with his claws. Lilith idled down the stairs. She let her daughter sleep in, and no longer made breakfast for her. She tried to remember the last time she saw Gwynth, but her mind always swept to the red bottle in the shelf of her fridge door. Every morning she poured it out. Every morning, another bottle returned.

         She let the dog in as she poured the new bottle down the drain and tossed it in the bin with the others. The dog growled at her. She turned to him to see what at first looked like a piece of riveted lumber. She took hold of it, but the dog tightened its grip. It broke in half, and only then did Lilith see the teeth. She held a human mandible.

         When Lilith entered her daughters room to tell her what happened, she met a cold gust of wind. The window wide open, the closet empty, the sheets and blankets on the floor. The expensive clothes gone. A nylon stocking hung from an open drawer. Week’s worth of dust coated the makeup table, the mantle over her bed, and the floorboards.

        Lilith went downstairs. The dog entered the room with the bottle of red elixir. She took the bottle from the dog's panting mouth. She uncorked the mouth, and swallowed hard.

Valentine's Violence

Ned checked his mailbox when he came to the apartments and looked curiously at a bulletin warning of mail fraud committed in the area. The post office he worked at hung similar fliers, but he bit his lip at the thought of those foolish enough to fall into traps.

Inside his mailbox he found a spider kneading webbing on top of the codex of “past due” notes. He hoped to receive the arcade magazine his grandmother subscribed for him. Relief came over him. She always asked about the woman he spent so much time with, but he never revealed so much as a name.

Ned locked the box back, and entered the elevator. The transvestite from the sixth floor caught the door and shoved her way inside. Ned grumbled. Her stubble grew in patches and her shoulders stressed the straps of her glittered gown. Lipstick clung to her teeth when she smiled. The boulder in her throat rocked when she spoke.

“What are you doing tonight, Neddy?” Her voice bounced from deep gutters.

“I’m just getting off work.” He sighed and pressed the second floor key.

“Will you send me to six?”

Ned gave her a sideways glance, and silently tapped the button.

“I like your beard. You remind me of a bear. I have nothing to do tonight.” She smiled at him, holding her elbows, and swaying her hips. The elevator moved.

“Me neither.” he admitted.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. His ankles hurt from all the standing. He wiped grease from his hands onto his khakis. The couch called to him. Beckoning laughter of his favorite animations echoed in the crevices of his brain. The doors opened. “See you around,” the transvestite lost her smile as Ned left and the doors closed on her.

He untangled knots in his beard and scratched the red hair beneath the sack of fat hanging from his abdomen. He reached into his pockets, sorted through fast food receipts and candy wrappers until he recovered his key. A heart sticker his eight year old neighbor pressed onto the door reminded him.

Ned almost dropped his key but caught it suspended before the lock. Thunder broke over the snow fall outside. He married on the 14^th of February because she was born on the 14^th. That way he only needed to provide her with one gift rather than three. But it slipped his mind...

Ned heard her breathing on the other side of the door. A tunnel of tension formed around him. He swallowed hard, hands in empty pockets, and opened the door to a full sized body pillow ordained with an anime schoolgirl.

“oh, you’re home-” he stammered as the veins in his head massaged his skull, squeezing out more sweat than magnified sun beams. “Its okay. But it might ruin the surprise. Don’t come into the kitchen!”

Ned tracked slush across the floorboards and closed the curtain to the kitchen. He panicked through drawers and cupboards, the pantry, under the sink, in the back of the freezer. Coins of tension expanded in his temples. He took half bottle of ten dollar wine and poured it into a pan. Ball Park Franks thawed in hot water. He mixed ranch and hot sauce together in a Tupperware bowl, opened a can of sweet peas and poured them into the pan. He turned the burner to high, looked to two serial boxes. One with a cartoon squirrel hallucinating over LSD induced spheres. The other with a four star general with a helmet hiding the top half of his face riding a tank into sugar city. He poured them both into one bowl, but found no milk, so he used the rest of the wine, but the peas started to burn and the smoke alarm went off but no matter how many times he pressed the button the mechanism kept flashing and stabbing his ears with falcon cries until he grabbed a broom and slapped it from the ceiling where it died on the floor. He opened a window to let the smoke out. Outside, a neon fish advertised a sea food bar. The ought turned his stomach upside down. He turned off the burner and leaped out the window.

When he came back out from the curtain he carried a five star plate. He sat it before his wife and sat on a stood in front of her.

“Happy anniversary. Don't I think of everything?”

He scooped up some food and stabbed it into the hole he cut out. When it dropped down her body he become lost in the Venus glow of her giant eyes, and the tender tone of her blushing cheeks.

“How clumsy of me,” he wiped the sauce from her spaded chin with a red napkin, rubbing the hardened stains on her exposed thigh where the skirt lifted just enough to tickle the other slots he cut into her. He stroked her pink spikes of hair, lowered his head to bite the food from her crossed knees where he stayed down to spit his mouthful into the fuzzy hole.

“It’s your favorite, isn’t it?” Ned slid his finger down the hole, shoving the serving to the deepest limits with a gentle push. He took hold the shy palm hiding her chin, and rubbed her cat ears. She straightened against the chair as he tightened the chords around her waist and chest. He lifted another bite to her mouth and jammed it in. Greasy tartar oozed from her cheeks and tricked down her face. He licked it from the bow tie around her exposed collar. After spitting out loose hairs, he offered her another bite but she cast a spell over him with the hairline quiver of her yearning mouth. The food fell from his fork so he stabbed it into her eye. “Look what you made do! I slaved over this!”

When he pulled the fork out he took with it tangles of polyester filling. Her longing expression failed to depreciate. She looked up at him with cowering acceptance and his heart exploded twice. He loosened the restraints. “Let us not fight, my love. I confess, I didn’t plan this. But I have something to make it up to you. Wait here,”

He kissed her, left the dim candle light to rummage through his belongings, then he returned with a silver band.

“I was hoping to wait until…. forget it. This is my grandma’s wedding ring. After grandpa died she gave it to me to give to the woman I want to be with forever.” He slid into her mouth. “It’s both of ours now.”

That night he clasped her between his thighs, but slept not. The weight of his legs and skull left deep impressions. In the pale window rays he noticed stitching coming undone along her seams, the color draining from her skin and hair, and dried saliva that he never noticed before on regions he boasted too pure to intrude. “It’s nothing. She’d never be unfaithful...” he fell asleep stroking a tear along her neck. She softened, and he sank further and further until sleep claimed him-

In his dreams she leaned over the bent bars of a fractured gibbet, free from her stitched prison, and just like in the anime he deeply coveted to experience, she stood before him as breathing creature above a pool of shadows and smoke. The perfume in her hair drew him near. He went to take hold of her hands, but shivered in cold sweat when he saw blood trickle down her legs. “No, no-” he stepped back from her as a winged lizard man emerged from the pool behind her. It’s scales glistened like green glass shards. One eye focused from a deep gap in the middle of its head. It took hold of his wife, stretched out its leather wings, and launched with her into the saucers of light fluttering between colliding clouds of green gas.

Ned woke up as if his bed collapsed. His legs and arms outstretched under the white sheets. Warm blood droplets left a trail to the end of the bed. He threw the sheets to the floor, dove under the box spring but finding nothing. He stamped to the closet and thew every item to the floor. Nothing hid inside. He bit his fist, checking the corners of the bedroom, then ran in his briefs to the bathroom, checked the shower, checked the towel hooks on the back of the door, and paced around the living room before finding grandma’s ring wrapped in the red napkin.

Ned clocked in overtime hours at the post office, stopped eating fast food, and jogged every morning before he shaved and showered. The animations that brought him joy ceased to entertain him and he started to clean his apartment. No matter what he tried, he still missed her.

The 14^th of February rolled around again. Ned came home from work. He waited at the doorway for the transvestite to take her mail and go upstairs. Once clear, he went to the mailbox. He opened it, but found it empty but for one letter. He slid it out, opened the envelope. His heart cracked open.

“Ned, it’s been so long since I left, please forgive me- but I’m sick, and have nowhere else to turn. Please, I need money. Time is running out. I never forgot you.” It started.

He read it five times. It detailed how to get her the money and why she couldn’t come herself to get it. Ned stood in the lobby for forty five minutes reading over the handwriting. He tore it in half, but stopped before the stairwell. A harp string vibrated within him and reverberated phantasms of himself in dire need, sick and alone in the street, trapped within fiber confinement. Brushing tears away, he turned around and left the building.

Ned walked to the ATM machine, and drained his account.. By the time he returned the sun evaporated beyond the polluted skyline and dark clouds clustered over the building tops. The alley of the apartments swallowed him. Manhole steam rolled up the walls. Cats echoed in the dumpster, and whispers of the sewer rushed under the pavement.

A shadow leaned on a junked refrigerator at the end and breathed like a respirator as white exhaust channeled down the alley. Ned trembled, his hands soft and sweaty, his tears blinding him. Blood throbbed in his ears. He stood before the shadow, opened his mouth but before his tongue called on the shadow to reveal themselves- a refrigerator box fell over him. The shadow emerged. A toothless, tonsured vagabond raised a foot long bayonet over the box. With one claw he forced the box still as he butchered it in a flushing fury of whitened rage. Blood whipped from the blade with each thrust, and pooled onto the frigid pavement. The shadow pulled the moistened cardboard away, stripped the cash and vanished down the steaming manhole.

No body lay in the alley.

The transvestite looked down from her window at the sound of the attack. By the time she arrived at the scene, only a full sized pillow with Ned caught within lay. She took her gloves off, and blushed. “Well, now… This year I’ll have something to do-”

Romance of Rats

Vehicles idled in the hot sun, inching along the strip of simmering pollution and crashing horns penetrating every silent seclusion between gleaming towers and the slums. The sun started to set and the alleys between buildings darkened to purple canals. Beyond the baked beltway, under tunnels and overpasses, stood swampside apartments clustered together like conjoined twins.  

Filth from the alleyways blew into the street. A slender spectre with a rag over his eyes and mouth fiddled with a wire hanger down a car door. The alarm sounded, so he smashed the window with a hammer. He reached inside, opened the door and climbed inside. He broke the lock on the glove department and took the contents. He dropped the paper receipts on the pavement, but kept the keys to one of the apartments, and stole away into trashed packed gutters between structures. The alarm sang until the rats in the garbage heaps filed from the sanctuaries of torn refuse bags, to the warm cracks up the walls of the apartment building.

          Ertha walked to the window, and pulled back the curtains. She barely heard the siren over the infant weeping over her shoulder. Warm fingers of apple reeking vomit reached down her collar. She scratched at the scabs on her face and let the curtains fall. The news anchor on tv muttered about a new zoo opening, but his voice fell mute against her shattering eardrums.

The bathwater ran. She took the baby to the tub, its clothes coated in hairballs and dust deposits. The water from the tap ran clear, but once inside it ingested the rings of sand grain and bug corpses where it turned to a melange of buttery ripples. She held the baby facedown and knelt besides the edge when the door burst against the pile of kitchen trash. Boots kicked through milk jugs and dirty clothes, someone called her by name. She left the infant on the floor, and peeked beyond the door to her heartbound swain. She felt a moment of relief in that he came home instead of running away and leaving her with the child, but she saw the blood dripping from his ear and the bridge of his nose broken inwards. He held a strand of his own greasy hair in one hand, reddened flesh cooked on a bald spot between his bangs.

          She sat in the doorway nursing her neck scabs. “Did you get into a fight?”

          “yes...” He lost his balance and rolled onto the floor besides Ertha. He held his lump of hair for her to see, pinching one firm strand as the locks peeled to the floor, revealing a rope of rat tail. “I went to deliver some bootlegs, but your car- when I got to it the wheels were gone, the stereo gone, the money I made- all of it, gone.”

        “Ian, how could-”

         “This bum comes up to me. I smell him before I hear him. You know how rice socks smell? I recognized him from that show on Alaska where the guy got torn apart by bears- it was him! He looked awful. He handed me this, and told me it would solve both our problems, then disappeared.”

Ertha placed her elbow on his chest and pinned him to the fuzz coated floorboards. “You’re a liar.”

“Yes, maybe I am- but I’m not lying about this” He held the tail firm. “Let me up and I’ll show you.”

The infant screamed against the tile. Ertha shut the door on the child, and followed Ian to the microwave on the counter. He placed the tail inside, and opened the kitchen sink. A wet rat scampered out, crawled up a kitchen towel to the counter, where it went into the microwave. Ertha bit her fist in disgust. Ian held her by the shoulder, “watch, watch.” One more rat came out, then another followed by two, followed by three and they all clustered around the rat tail and squeaked not like rodents with food, but as bending wood, in unified chorus. Ian shut the microwave and tossed it out the window.

                “You always wanted to move away, right?” he asked her as the microwaved crashed. The wounds on his head provided a sharp glee that he never before expressed. “Once that baby is gone, we can…”

              “I thought you wanted to stay here-”

               “I hate this city. I hate this building. I hate the people. And no one will find out.”

                The baby pounded against the bathroom door, hiccuping its tears into silence.

             “Things will be back to the way they were.” She nodded. “Remember when we dreamt of running away together? To someplace romantic like West Virginia?”

             “It’s not a dream…” he held her by the cheeks, smearing his blood into the acne scars. “We’ll come back when the weekend’s over. No one will know. It’s just a freak accident.”

             The vandal tore the rag from his face and he entered the building through the front door latch with a bolt that came unscrewed from the door frame. He counted the stairs and the doors until he stood where the key matched the address. The lock snapped, and he crept inside. A pair of hands saluted like mantis blades from under a layer of quilts. The fabrics lifted with breathing beneath someone sleeping on cushions under the window light. He pulled the cover away, revealing features peeling from the shell of a mannequin. The mannequin moaned in pain. The vandal took it by the neck and squeezed until the insignia painted over its pupils faded. The chest stopped breathing and the raw flesh withered to gray wands and shedded to the floor. The vandal crept around the dark apartment until he found a room of limbs and torsos boxed up before iron stands. All other rooms remained empty but for mites nestled in the carpets and the rats scampering in the pipes.

              The vandal locked the door, and lay besides the lifeless mannequin. He hummed a song from the island he grew up on inspired by a great wave that washed many of the inhabitants away. The idols etched into stones and trees flooded his mind when he shut his eyes and scared sleep away. He lifted his head into the street lights beaming through the window. He touched the glass and looked down at the city. The condensation chilled the burns on his fingers and palms. Once numb, he sat in the dark, and waited for sleep to suppress his imagination, but the patter of thin nails scrapping in the ducts probed his attention. Upstairs, he sighed, a baby screamed and screamed. Not mere crying, but sabor slashes of vocal straint like he never heard from a child before- only from defeathered hens. He wondered if perhaps he mistook the cries for that of an exotic bird trapped in a cage suspended above a cluster of starving alley cats. No, he admitted to himself, sounds just...

In his lost youth studying great apes hidden in gloomy valleys of Salonga Sud he witnessed several patterns and behaviors of rare white primates living deep in the jungle. They hunted in packs, not for meat, but for living rodents to imprison in a hollow tree for reasons he determined to discover.

Any ape born under a new moon, he witnessed, become an object of fury. Once born, the rodents in the tree vaporized and the tree glowed red like burning coals. The dominant hunter took the infant ape and carried it to the tree tops, bit its face until the skull caved in, then shared the meat among lesser hunters, leaving scraps in the higher branches for the orphan apes, and to surprise of the vandal- even the mothers indulged by licking the blood from its bones.  

Once the tree glowed red and the rats turned to smoke, the apes sharpened branches to spears, and hurled them at birds and bats, killing small monkeys, devouring any meat obtainable. They used thread from strips of broken branches to fasten rocks to staffs to crack nuts. The apes began constructing ladders from vines, wheels from mud, and sewing feathers together into coats, and fur into covers- until the glowing at last seceded, and ashy smoke emanating from vents in the trunk fell back to the ground. In the morning, they’d be clacking rocks and eating ants.

The vandal snuck away from the tents of other researchers, and wandered under dark to the territory of apes while the hunters patrolled the valley boundaries. At the bottom of the tree he found toothpick bones and ash dust, yet the pulp of the tree remained unscorched. He dug his hand in deeper, until he found a source of air sucking the dust down a series of slots. He traced one slot with his finger, struggling in the ash, ash up to his elbow, and found tiny elastic tongues prodding his finger tips and propelling it below.

When the forest began to shake he looked back to the vines and fog. He climbed inside the hallowed tree. Then he listened furious apes screech at each other until an ancient hominid stood amongst them. They calmed as he showed them a club f fossilized lumber, and the skull of an ape. In one precise blow the cranium, the skull fractured. The elder then distributed a fragment to each ape. They used them draw a circle around the tree. Once complete, the jungle started to rain- yet no moisture fell from the gathering mounts of rolling cloud. Instead a carpet of rodents assembled within the circle. The apes lost themselves in a storm of clubbing and gnawing, capturing the rats and hurling them dead or crippled into the hollowed tree where they scratched the vandals face, nibbled his earlobes, and slid into his clothes where they tore free with long incisors. They reeked of wet fur and murky caverns.

Claws grasped his lips and eyelids. The vandal tried to escape but anytime he rose out the dominant hunter pushed him back in. He threw a rat at the ape, and slid his body out before the ape raised a spear, hurled it, and impaled him. The ape tore the spear free, and dropped the bleeding body to the bottom with the rats. The vandal smelled only burning hair and felt the rats in his shirt and pant legs breaking apart and pouring down the tears in his clothing. The dust of their combusting bodies jammed his lungs and he choked, prying the primitive spearhead free, his fingers slippery with blood gummed with powder, reaching for the way out. The rats baked in his hands, over his mouth, and scorched fingers, lips, and eyelids.

He thought himself dead until the sun rose back. He crawled from the tree, gasping from his suffering condition, and feared the apes returning and discovering him- but the apes no longer froliced around painted ring. Only balls of white hair floating in gusts between bone stacks remained.

The vandal never again lived among primates but apes echoed in his thoughts in every waking hour. He meditated hard on the crying he heard- “it is the past echoing to me, or perhaps, even, my mind is at last sunken to impassible depths…”  He held the mannequin to him. When the head rolled from its shoulders, he saw the head of a rat poke out from the neck and hiss at him. He dropped the hallow human- and a flock of rats fled from the neck into a crack between the wall and floor, then crawled up to the floor above. The vandal stood. “Whether indeed corrupt illusion from the jungles, or naught other than myne own delusion, these unraveling walls beckon me…”

He climbed out the window. The odor of a dumpster rusted through reached through the grate he stood on. The buzzsaws of traffic and constant construction foamed over the cityscape even at night. Taking hold of the fire escape, the vandal climbed up the ladder to the apartment above his. He no longer heard baby cries, but the squeaking and scampering of the rats remained through the window. He watched them perch on the crib rails as others hopped inside, other hopped out, a family of tails tangled together from between the bars writhed.

The vandal cut open the screen with a utility knife, then he peeled away rotting gaskets to expose the glass. He used the blade to slide under the glass where he pressed until the glass chipped. Rats gathered on the window sill and scratched at the source of air blowing in. The blade sliced their nails and noses, causing them to jump down into the garbage below. Once wide enough for his finger, he inserted a the claw side of his hammer and wrenched it against the glass.

Cracks reached up to the top then the glass fell to the pavement below in two halfs. The vandal coughed. The apartment reeked worse than any dumpster he dug through. He put everything back inside his coat, then he arched his leg over the window where his boot crunched against dirty clothes and styrofoam. Rats squeaked and scurried from under his boots, jumping through refuse into the silent crib. The vandal walked inside, his stomach dropping to his pelvis.

The smell colored the wallpaper and ceiling with gaseous smears. Two rats fought over a piece of meat. The dark within the crib squirmed like fish bait in soil. He heard the tender, wet juice drips of moaning rodents. He lowered the crib bars and reached inside. The rats bit at his hands but he felt no pain on his burned flesh. He swept them aside, but one bit onto his forearm and sunk its incisors in between the bones. The vandal grabbed the rat, and uttered a whisper repeated over and over by the haunting apes- and the rat shriveled up and shrunk like burned popcorn, smoke lifted from its eye sockets. The vandal scooped up the cold remnants from the crib. He carried it out the window with limp steps, disappearing behind the fluttering curtains back down to the vacated apartment, where he inspected the nibbled fingertips, and fleshless nose bridge- and drew a circle with its blood. He heard the apes hollar, and rats burn once more- he rose his hands to the dark and he felt the heat of the seething rodent bones - called to them in the name of the ancient idols, in the name of those swept into the ocean, as the shadows of apes danced with violence along the walls around him.

The police received a phone call from a person that wanted to remain unidentified. The had the landlord open the door for them, who gladly did- citing the occupants ceased rent payments and stopped picking up their mail. What they found they struggled to report that day. The apartment gleamed with clean finished floor and beaming walls. They entered the hall, following a source of cold air. The cold air came from under a door that neither officer nor the landlord could get to move. Then one door screeched open. Crumbled barricades fell into the hallway, and so the police slung inside. On the floor they found strips of clothing, and in the corner they found two adult skeletons huddled on the floor.  Nests of fat, twitching rats quietly snoozed on the floor around them.  

As the police and landlord discussed that they found, the vandal carried the infant’s bones with him to the new zoo in a case he retrieved from the empty apartment. One ape reached out at him from the cage bars. The vandal stood before the ape, looked into its bulking brow, and handed it the case. The ape revealed all of its teeth in smile, tore open the case in the corner of the cage, and nursed the dead infant. Security waited to stop the vandal at the gate before he left, but they never caught him leaving. The ape refused to surrender it’s cadaver to them.

Nest of Soil

A circle of buzzards flew around the head of a woman invested deep in tomes stacked on her desk and around the corners of the room. She kept the lamp on but the electric radiance left the far walls darkened. Bars of street light from the blinds stamped pale patterns on the broen leak stains mapped across the ceiling. Her somach ached, and the walls around her drifted backwards, then came blasting forward back to where they started as she shook herself awake. She smoothed her remaining eyebrow fuzz, and took a pen from the jackdaw nest on far edge.

         Summers slipped whiskey in her coffee. She finished reading the essay, then poured more whiskey into the steaming mug. Maxim Lordstone wrote his name right, the rest looked to her like someone else's work glued together. Whoever caused the infringement even changed fonts, misspelled words new ways- It started reading about Napoleon looking for Egyption hieroglyphs and concluded that Ned Ludd started the Industrial Revolution. Her class was about Birds in Literature. It went on for fifty pages. She sipped her coffee. Her clock struck 7pm. The sun set without her.

        She flipped through the stack of essays and paused when she unburied her manuscript. Summers drank Irish Coffee until the sad feelings metamorphosed into good feelings. The aches on her hips from sitting too long faded and the hunched notches of her spine numbed, but her stomach twisted. She drank more, covered her mouth as gases escaped, then her guts warmed and calmed. She looked at her watched, and gave herself fifteen minutes before the aches re occured. She reached for her manuscript-

       The door jostled. She pulled herself together. A cave deep voice murmured, “Where am I?” before the door jostled again. “Never thought I’d have to do this again,” an older voice uttered. She recognized the voices from the radio. The hinges chimed, the doorstop snapped in half. There stood two mortal shadows. Lordstone dazed beyond the  corners of the room with one eye. His coach lingered into the room from behind him. The coach’s face burned like rouge. He crossed into the lamp light but took a breath, brushed his thighs and folded his hands.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Shouldn’t you be warding further head trauma?"
“Will you be at new stadium next November? Not even the plumbing in this hovel is up to code. Change his status.”

Lordstone rubbed his hands together like a child lost at the mall. His other eye floated like a dead fish.

“If anything happens to him, you will get fired too. Then what?”

“He’ll graduate once we win. Don’t make everyone go down because this guy fails, professor. We both knew this was it way it would go.”

          Summers started taking her things and putting them in a case, and smashed the lamp with her elbow. The lamp flashed both of them. Lordstone’s looked into it like an eclipse, both eyes focused on the lamp flash. Summers swept the light back to the desk and the bird feathers displayed on the wall.

“Cool birds,” Lordstone said. Summers saw a fresh bandage around his red, and raw apple throbbing from beneath.

       She took her valuables, and when she reached for her manuscript the coach held it into the light. He turned the pages, skimmed the middle, skipped to the end and broke in laughter. “These sources are from before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act- there’s no way it’s going anywhere.”

She groaned set her case down, and changed the grade.

“Let me make sure.”

Summers spun showed him a screen displaying the status.

“Where am I?” Lordstone asked again.

“Let’s get to the field. We have the championship to prepare for.”

“T-The championship? I’m going to be in the championship? It can’t be...”

          Their elation bounced down hallway. Summer vomited her coffee back up over her manuscript.  “North American Corvidae in Postmodern readings of late 20th century Romance.” She drew a jackdaw on the title page, sparing no ink, gutting the pages beneath. Ink seeped from the crevices if her fist. The drips of paper ran down the cover, bled through the paper and filled in the splintered surface of her desk. She hated birds. She decapitated the fowl she sketchec until the paper came in half.

            The first thing she saw when she woke up was the pet cemetary out the window. She recalled waking up at 5am every morning as a child to study, walking to school in the rain, turning in everything early no matter how much sleep she lost. Passing every test, perfecting every essay, earning every scholarship. Her feet still wore calluses from the crumbling shoes. Her body still rose at 5am, no matter when she fell asleep or intended to wake up. Summer Rubbed her forehead until memories emerged of coming home after school to see her mother on the floor lapping spilled wine until she passed out on the floor. Those days she liked the most- no fighting, no screaming, so she relaxed in her sanctuary, stuffed her head full of texts from the library, and watched her window for the black bird. It visited on every good day.

           When she went to school boys and girls bullied her for the habits she practiced, she lost hair, lost weight that never reaccumulated, and as years grew by she spent her vitality on the institution until one day she she noticed the color draining from her hair and the wild, sweet, magical, loving emotions that once touched her so vividly became mere mythos of human experience. Not even the old music she once loved inspired her blood to work as she once did. The corvidae that she watched from her bedroom window pecking at the pet graveyard in the back lawn. No matter what memories dissolved in the swamps of lost recollection- every morning the raven pecking at the dirt of her dead pets awoke with her.

             Summers drank more whiskey until the bottle crashed on the floor. The jackdaw on the page stretched its wings before her eyes and ripped free from the page. With its wings dripping ink it peel its head from the page and belted it back on with more ink. Summers collapsed back on her seat,  headlights along the walls, drew circles with the spinning shadow of dark birds around her desk. She heard the flocking of wings as the lights eclipsed. Around the shadows in the room appeared hundreds of beady eyes that started out black but glowed red like hot nail heads. In her light she saw each bird suffered from broken beaks, some with broken talons, even broken necks.

The jackdaw swelled past the page, shoving notebooks and codex’s to the floor with its wings, talons bolted to the edge. Its wiped milky fluid deluging from its eyes with the twitch of its nape. “Grawk… grawk...” it growled with each breath.

             Summers kicked her seat back, and hit the cold glass. The blinds snapped from the ceiling and tangled onto her. Someone bricked off the window.

              Her eyes dilated as the room darkened around her. The hush of falling snow and burning consumed the depths of the room. The digital appliances sparked and projectiled chips and wires to the stacks of unread books that ignited like oil soaked rags. Flames climbed the material. The bird remained perched as the odor of burning meat flooded the space. The reeking smoke thickened until Summers saw only saw the Jackdaw’s heaving outline/ They chirped with malnourished craving as the flames reached under her desk. The melting rubber on the soles burned away the calluses. The manuscript lit up like dry grass.

The jackdaw plucked a feather from its wing and stuck it in her curls. Some cold ink ran down her face, and down her neck. She felt no pain, nor cold- nothing at all. Her fingers  felt around her head, tracing roots sprouting across her scalp into her eye sockets. When she reached to pluck the intrusion, her hands and arms chilled, her shoulders relaxed. She twisted around looking for her her arms. When she looked down she saw them smoking on the floor. Instead she rose long vectors with comb thin bones hanging down connected by a layer of cartilage riveted lifted from her shoulders. Her jaw and nose grew cold next ,then a beak the size of a pickaxe head protruded at the bottom of her vision.

        The jacksaw rubbed the liquid from its eyes. Smoke filled the room, and the by the time the fires died  the next morning all emergency services found  uncovered was a smoldering heap.

         The night before the championship Lordstone didn’t sleep. Not only because the prostitutes sent to him in a brand new car kept him awake with cocaine and sexual advances, nor the ringing that drove spikes into his brain under every bright light, but because his dreams came close to being fulfilled. He fantasized about this day since boyhood crushing skulls in the playground much to his parents adornment.

          The bus ride to Orlando came like a dream. He sealed in all his excitement and hid behind oversized headphones and listened. But he played no music. No one bothered him or disturbed the rhythm of birds chanting to him over rainfall. The way he liked it.

They crossed the Missouri river and went through the hills of Arkansas then across the swamps of Louisiana to the marshes of the deep south, then at last they crossed into the jungle of Florida. A road block took them across a bridge. The bird calls grinded with the sand like scratches. He removed the gear from his head, but he still heard the scratching, and pecking. Strobes of paine shot down his ears to the back of his head wings battered, and beat. He rapsed his ears until his ear drums went numb- but the stinging didn’t migrate, nor did the rustling splatter of untame fowl sirening within his skull. Stinging escalated to aches. He grinded his teeth. One front tooth chipped. Drool dripped down his lips. He held his ears certain he’d see blood and pus ran between his fingers if he took his hands away.

          Stonelord called for the trainer. Heads turned around. The trainer stood up and took the isle. He checked shined a light down his ears and nose and grew pale at what he saw- but under the coach’s supervision, he deemed Stonelord healthy. despite the cries to stop the bus. Agony pressed against both his temples and the back of his eyes. The coach asked for someone to administer a shot. The staff looked through a case of syringes and vials. Stonelord ran his head against the window until hands took hold of him and for a moment he calmed until a brush of wet feather ejected from his nostrils. His companions drew their hands away, their eyes isolated on the convulsing stock, his arms trembling like the tendons being peeled from his forearms. A bloodless crevice pulled apart his flesh and spread from each ear over his scalp, like an opening eye.

         Stonelord kept screaming until talon nails pierced his throat and dug towards the terrified passengers. A beak shaped like a fountain pen popped out from behind his eye. Wings rose from the splitting halves and showered the window fog with steaming carnage.  It took flight across the bus, slammed into the windshield and kicked away into the driver's lap, flapping and squawking as the hornet beak struck his hand between two fingers.

The bus crossed onto a narrow bridge, and swerved through the barrier. It spun twice before landing upside down into the river filled with dumped sewage. The bus bobbed up and down before filling with stinking dark water and plummeting to the river floor. Bubbles followed the sinking machine  and burst at the surface.

The ripples shockwaved to the shore, strobing slower and slower, until peace fell across the current. Then up the surface broke again as the coach reached out with lost luggage, and paddled to the rocky shore where he gasped for breath like he hadn’t breathed in forty years. He groaned and wept as he saw floating jerseys dance in the water. Then he heard something that made his blood vessels curl. “Grawk… grawk….” he turned around to see a large bird perched on bending branch. It fluttered its wings and landed before him. It reeked like skunk and milk. It wiped liquid from its bead smooth eyes, growling with each approaching step of its killer talons, drinking the drenched expression of absent penance like summer wine. He tried to back away but the rocks compressed around his rings of fat. The bird dove its beak into his face and tore out both eyes. The coach screamed and bled on the rocks as he listened to its juicy gnashing. The shore of putrid water rose around him. He felt sharp hooks take his shoulders, and the weight of his body lift from the wet rocks.

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.