The Deep Hours of the Night and Other Stories

Jonathan Schlosser

Contents

The Deep Hours of the Night

Originally published in Red Blood, Black Sky.

The Train

Previously unpublished.

To Bury the Dead

Originally published in the Tainted Horror Anthology.

The Work of Clocks

Originally published in House of Horror.

The Lighthouse on Torch Lake

Originally published in The Willows.

Candles

Originally published in Necrography.

Sarah

Originally published in Arkham Tales.

Shards of Glass

Originally published in Art and Prose Magazine.

Goat Island

Originally published in Sonar4.

Necessary Death

Originally published in The Monsters Next Door and For the Love of Monsters.

Genesis 6

Originally published in Alien Skin.

Crashing Stolen Cars

Originally published by Dunesteef Audio Fiction.

The Deep Hours of the Night

I can’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep in the last fifty-six hours, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Not as long as Scott is around. Scott and his lies and his talk of faces, faces of people who weren’t dead three days ago, but who are now.

I walk across the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. The faucet sputters at first, then catches, like a lawn mower with dirty spark plugs. I wonder how a faucet can do that, but decide I don’t care and walk back to the window. The street outside is dark save for the moonlight, as it has been for every one of my fifty-six hours of wakefulness, and there are no cars going by. Not now that Scott has had his fun.

“Do you like it, David?” He’s at my elbow, just like that, with no warning.

This time I don’t even jump. I take a sip of the water, which tastes like rust. “Love it like I loved my own mother, Scott. You know that.”

Scott chuckles, and then he’s at my other elbow. “Don’t be sarcastic with me or I’ll tear out your throat.”

I raise an eyebrow. “That so?”

“You know it, Buckaroo.”

He calls me that when he thinks he’s being friendly. I don’t have the slightest clue why, nor do I want to. “Wouldn’t matter if you did, Scott, so just forget it. The only reason you’re even here is because you can’t kill me, and you don’t know why. So drop the act.”

Scott grimaces and looks at the floor. His red eyes seem to dim a bit; but then, I’m not looking directly at him. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him at first – the black, chapped skin that makes him look like he just walked out of a forest fire, the thin strands of hair that remind me of my grandfather just before he died. I’ve become very used to that over the last two and a half days, but somehow I still find his eyes unnerving. They remind me of coals in a dying campfire, after the guitar and marshmallows have been put away and it’s almost time to break out the bourbon and the ghost stories.

I take another drink and continue to watch the street. Trees wave in the breeze, still alive for now even without the sun. I watch a small bird dart off of a branch, turn a circle, and drop back into its nest as if it has no idea where it should go or what it should be doing. I can sympathize. It has to be hungry, but it isn’t sure when or how it should eat in the constant night.

That’s one other thing I’m not, besides tired: hungry. I’ve eaten a frozen pizza just to while away the time, but I never felt as if I needed it.

Scott grunts and folds his arms. “You’re remarkable. Most people would have tried to kill themselves by now.”

I flip my wrist over, showing him the angry lacerations. Six of them in all, running straight for the first few and then getting jagged and haphazard as I found they had no effect. And, to make matters extraordinarily worse, that they didn’t hurt.

I touch them. They still don’t.

“When did you do that?” Scott – why he chose that name for himself, I will never know – runs a claw across the cuts, then licks his talons. “I must not have been paying attention.”

“It was near the beginning, when you were killing the McMasters.” My neighbors’ bodies are visible across the street, lined up in their lawn as if they are for sale at some twisted roadside market.

“Ah; we hadn’t met yet.”

“Not in life, anyway.”

“True.” Scott taps a talon against his chin. “At least that’s a plus you can take from all this, David. You won’t have the dreams anymore. I know how you hated those.”

He’s right; I hated the dreams. I could remember soaking my bed many times as a child, and waking up with an iron cage of terror crushing my chest. The bowel-related accidents ceased as I got older, but the dreams didn’t. And the fear felt as fresh the last time I slept as it did the first time I experienced it.

I look sideways at him. “I think I prefer nightmares about demons to the real thing. Maybe it’s just me.”

“Technically, it has to be just you. You’re the only one left.” Scott laughs, waving a hand out at the dark, silent neighborhood. “But I see your point. I guess I’m not much of a conversationalist, am I? You have to realize I haven’t had much practice.”

“You didn’t join any of the fraternities, huh?”

“The Pit isn’t exactly like that, David. It’s more…secluded. I know there are others there, but there’s no point in talking to them. They don’t need anything from me; I don’t need anything from them. Conversation is more or less a human invention.”

“So what about the humans there?”

“The ones who are already dead?” Scott purses his thin lips; one cracks but doesn’t bleed. “They make a lot of noise, but none of it’s coherent. Some of them pray, as if they don’t realize they’re past that point, and some just scream. It’s entertainment, but it’s rather one-way.”

I walk over to the kitchen table and sit down. The house around me even seems to be falling apart, though I know it has been like this since I bought it. Yellow paint flakes from the walls, coming off in small pieces – like dandruff from an infected scalp – and in long runs. Three of the four lights on the chandelier actually work, and they flicker with effort. Green mold spreads from the corners and decay eats away at the floorboards.

I used to care, but that seems pointless now.

Scott hops up on the table, crouching. “We have a problem, you and me.”

“You’re telling me.”

“So what do we do about this?”

“How should I know?” I empty the water glass and toss it across the room; it explodes against the far wall and glass showers to the floor. I consider leaping onto it, rubbing my face against the pieces until they tear my skin into hundreds of strips. Until my eyes pop and run down my face. Then I could pick up a few of the larger pieces and shove them through my empty sockets and into my brain. But I fight the idea off, knowing even that wouldn’t do any good. Like it or not, I am what I am.

Scott grins. “Try it, though. It might feel good.”

I think about punching him in the chest hard enough to knock him from the table, then grabbing one of the long knives on the kitchen counter and running it between his ribs.

“Afraid you’re not thinking grand enough, David.” Scott touches his side. “It would take more than that to kill me. More than anything you’ve got here, in fact. Much more.” He reaches out with a talon and lifts my chin so that our eyes meet – my blue against his blazing red. “I have a solution for you. It hasn’t changed.”

He’s offered it before. I told him, in language that would have made my dead mother blush, what he could do with his offer. He laughed, said it would stand for as long as I needed, and didn’t mention it again.

“Choose, David.”

Not for the first time, I feel a pressure behind my eyes. I wipe the first escaping tears away and glare at him. “This isn’t fair. I was never warned. I was never told I would have to make this choice.”

“But it’s upon you now. So you must.”

He has a point, whether I want to hear it or not. I stand, shoving my chair back hard enough that it tips over and pressing my palms against the table. “Can I try, one more time? Will you at least give me that?”

“False hope is nothing but a broken crutch, David.”

“I don’t care. I need this.” I press my teeth together, catching the end of my tongue. I can feel the flesh part, the same way I can feel my hair move when I shake my head: without any pain at all. I don’t taste blood.

“Fine. But this time I’ll watch. Not like there’s anything else left to do.”

I grunt and walk to the bookshelf near the window. I run my eyes over titles that I’ve seen hundreds, even thousands of times. I’ve read them all at least once, save for the last book. That one I started and never finished, though I wish now that I had. I pull it out, feeling the soft leather between my fingers and letting my gaze linger on the little golden cross on the spine.

Walking back to the table, I flip the book open. Second Kings. I thumb through and realize that I’m hesitating. I know what I want is at the back of the book; I could have opened there to start. But a cold sweat beads on my forehead as my heartbeat increases, and I take my time, flipping one page at a time until I get to the beginning of the end.

Scott steps off the table and sits in the chair opposite me, still grinning.

I begin to read, slowly at first but gaining speed as I go. Jars, Seals, Trumpets. Beasts and prostitutes. It’s all here just as I remember it from the last time I tried to read through, a little over an hour ago. I scan the words again, looking for the loophole, the catch. Anything to show me that my predicament is not what it seems. To show me that I just have to do one thing, one little thing, and I’ll be off. Soaring away, hopefully, but out of this everlasting existence regardless.

And, just like the last time, I find nothing. My heart actually slows as I reach the end, the very end, and realize I’m not there. I’m not mentioned – not by name or by generalization. Nothing about me, David Anders of Harrison, Michigan, stands out on the page. David Anders who doesn’t think he can stand to spend eternity alone in a world of rotting corpses.

I swallow and let the book fall slowly back on the table.

Scott leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Satisfied, David?”

“Hardly.”

“But at least resigned?”

I swallow again; my throat feels like grains of sand have been glued to the edges, and from the way my head is spinning I guess that whoever did it used modeling glue. Every time I put together a plastic plane or car or whatever I got dizzy and stumbled out of the room with a headache to rival a hangover.

Scott shakes his head, clicking his forked tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Face it, Buckaroo, you’ve been left. The sheep were sorted from the goats and you were forgotten. Neglected. Left to rot after your God had everyone he wanted safely tucked away. The good are wearing their crowns and the rest…well, you saw. They were left to be slaughtered. But not you, David. You got neither.”

“It’s impossible, though.” I run a hand through my hair. “Impossible.”

“But here we are.”

Again, he has a point. I swear under my breath. “So you can’t take me, you son of a bitch? Like you took the rest?”

“It doesn’t look that way.” Scott leans back. “As you’ve noticed, you can’t die. You don’t need food, sleep, or anything else now that your world has ended. So, technically speaking, I’m not even sure you’re alive. And from the dreams, I wonder if you ever were.”

I snort; a bit of snot actually blasts down onto my lower lip, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand. “Of course I was. I was born in Gaviston, at the hospital.”

“Oh, I know. I know all about you. I was the one in those dreams, after all.” He stands, stretching. “But maybe you were a mistake, David. Life had to be breathed into Adam, after all. My guess is that you somehow missed that breath. Or maybe got half of it – enough to make you seem alive, to grow, but not enough to truly make you mortal. And it’s just been a matter of time until it caught up with you.”

“You’re insane.”

“I can’t be. I don’t even have the capacity to be sane, as you understand it.”

I hesitate before asking the next question, the one he’s been waiting for. Though I’m sure he hears me thinking it, mulling it over, he keeps his mouth shut. I do see his lips quiver as the grin spreads, and I decide I’ve procrastinated enough. “How do I do it?”

Scott spreads his arms wide. He’s smiling so broadly it looks like it will split his face. “It’s simple, David. Just say you want it, and mean it. It’s a lot like your religion, really, except this time you’ll get results. That much I promise you.”

So there it is.

I stand, my heart racing again. I let my eyes wander around the kitchen, from the peeling paint to the shards of glass on the floor, and finally to the window. I can still see the McMasters, their bodies like black shadows against the gray lawn. Moonlight touches their pale skin, and I realize I could have done it. I could have killed them – would have if it would have saved me from this solitary life. I turn back to Scott and nod.

“I want it.”

The change feels as if my skin is being ripped off, stripped away like the runs of paint on the walls. My headache dissipates, but what replaces it is something akin to a charge of electricity funneled directly into my head. My back arches as the muscles spasm, and a scream tears through my lips. Scott’s laughter, joyous laughter, echoes all around me. The pain shoots for a crescendo, like I’m being roasted alive in a pit of molten tar, and then cuts off as abruptly as if a switch has been flipped.

Everything is the same. I gasp, sucking in huge gulps of air as Scott walks around the table to pat me on the back. The cold night air feels like pure bliss – and yet, at the same time, I find I desire the pain. I want it back. Or, if not that, to inflict as much as I can.

“Welcome.” Scott runs his talons along the nape of my neck. “I think you’ll find you enjoy it.”

I raise a hand to shove him away, and freeze. My fingers are gone, as is the pale white skin that used to cover them. Instead, my hand ends in five hooked talons two inches longer than my fingers have ever been. The skin is black and chapped, as if I just walked out of a forest fire.

“My Master wants to meet you,” Scott says, “And we shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

The Train

1

We came across the crashed train in the night, a hulking, smoldering ruin like a huge backbone stretching across the desert. It was a freight, a long line of black, steel-ribbed cars with flames licking at its surfaces and twisted metal lying all around. The train had buckled and the cars near the middle were all bunched together, smashed into each other with doors hanging open on runners. The engine was overturned farther up, and we could see that it was burning brighter than the rest, but it was a long way off and the horses were too skittish to get closer.

Alan slid out of the saddle and stood in the dark sand. Watching. Not saying a word, but his hand was on his revolver and I knew it wasn’t good. You could taste it in the air. Not just the foul, bitter taste of the smoke, but something else as well. Something like copper or bronze or maybe even garlic.

Rachel leaned over toward me, but her eyes were on Alan. “What is this?”

I shrugged, realizing now that my hand was on my gun as well. “Maybe the freight from Kansas City,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t. “Or St. Louis.”

“Without any markings?”

She was right, of course. There was nothing on the sides of the cars, no white letters depicting the company’s name, no graffiti. They were just black, solid black that almost blended into the night. If we’d have been a bit farther north, we never would have seen it.

Alan looked up. “Be quiet,” he said. His bandana was red, around his neck, but the rest of him disappeared save for the whites of his eyes.

And I was quiet.

We sat and watched and waited. I didn’t know what for, but if Alan said we should, then we should. He’d saved us more times than I could count, and it wasn’t time to start crossing him. But, knowing this or not, a part of me wanted to. A part of me wanted to walk down into the burning boxcars and see what was there. The pull was so strong it was almost physical, and I could see that Rachel felt it too. I imagined that Alan did, though nothing like that would ever show on his face. And the horses, of course, were terrified.

“Get down,” Alan said. He motioned to me, and I saw that his gun was in his hand.

I did, but Rachel was faster. She dropped out of the saddle without a sound and was at Alan's side, her bandana tugging in the breeze. Her face was beautiful, backlit with orange from the flames, and she tipped her face up to Alan with her lips slightly parted. I didn’t know if it was awe or adoration, but I’d seen it before.

Alan didn’t notice. “This isn’t the Kansas City,” he said, “or the St. Louis. This is nothing. This is a train that shouldn’t be here.”

I frowned. “How can you know that? Maybe it’s just unmarked.”

“No. It’s unmarked because it belongs to no one. No one around here, anyway.” The way he said it was sharp, hard, final. No argument would work, and I knew it.

So I said: “Then what is it?”

I wanted Alan to tell me. I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time and I hate to now, but, considering what happened, it seems only fair. Considering how horrible that night was, how I still have nightmares so stark and real that I wake up drenched in sweat and shivering all at the same time. It’s only fair to say that I wanted Alan to give me a solid answer, to tell me what it was, to settle the matter. Because as much as I felt pulled toward that train, I also felt afraid of it. Terrified. Like a man walking to the gallows or falling on a stick of dynamite. Like it was a storm just waiting to break.

But Alan didn’t. “I don’t know,” he said. “And that’s what makes me nervous.”

Rachel was still staring up at him, her fingers hooked on the edge of his coat, near his hand, but I could see in her gaze that she liked that answer about as much as I did.

2

We walked down the sweeping hill together, with Rachel and I flanking Alan. We all had our hands near our guns, but none of us had drawn. That was something you didn’t do unless you were prepared to shoot, and you didn’t do that unless you were prepared to take someone’s life. Since we’d seen nothing moving, nothing that even looked alive enough to need killing, we kept the guns holstered. But that taste of copper and bronze and garlic had me on edge, and we were ready. It never hurt to be careful.

The train was farther away than it looked, and it swelled up before us as we crossed the desert. I could hear the fire popping, and the groan of broken metal sinking into the sand, settling, but I could also hear our footsteps. I could hear the way Alan’s were sure, solid steps, and the way Rachel’s mimicked his. I could also hear how mine were not, how they twisted as I stepped with slightly weaker knees than I would have admitted.

But the pull was getting stronger. It was something like being caught in a rip. I’d been to the ocean once, out in San Francisco, and I knew what that was like. How the current nipped at your toes and then wrapped itself around your legs and then took you out to sea like so much driftwood. How you’d just tire yourself out if you struggled, because once the rip wanted you to go somewhere, you were going. The train was like that and more. It was an emotional pull as well, as if I not only wanted but needed to go to it. As if I wouldn’t be complete, wouldn't be satisfied, until I did.

Rachel licked her lips, an audible sound in the stillness. “What if it’s going to blow up?”

“If it’s loaded with dynamite?” Alan didn’t look at her, but shook his head. “It would have already. Look how hot it is in places. The metal is red. Any explosions are well behind us.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

They were blasting, out in the mountains. Laying a new track. Supplies had been running along with almost daily regularity, shipments from the east to the workers in the west. Most of it was food, clothing, pickaxes, and the like. But a lot of it was also dynamite, because you couldn’t blast without it. There had been at least one accident so far, with a freight train ripping itself to pieces and flinging metal shards in a wide radius, so Rachel’s fear wasn’t totally unfounded. It would explain the wreck, anyway.

I swallowed; my throat was dry and it hurt and I knew everything couldn’t be explained so easily. I’d seen the other train, how it had been scattered across the sand. How it had been torn to ribbons. This wasn’t like that, though it was burning. This looked like it had hit a snag in the line and tipped. There was a long groove behind it, wide and deep with walls of sand, where the train had plowed along on its side before coming to rest.

“Alan,” I said.

“What?”

“Should we?”

Now, for the first time, Alan looked back. He stopped in mid step and I was horrified to see that he was grinning. His teeth were two lines of white. “Do we have any other choice?”

“No,” Rachel breathed.

“But the horses.”

“Forget them. This is bigger than that. Can’t you feel it?” He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and pulling air through his lips. When he opened his eyes again, the grin hadn’t faded. “Can’t you taste it?”

And I could. It was there and it couldn’t be left alone. No matter that there were people behind us, people with badges and papers for our arrest. People who had seen how we’d shot up the tavern, how we’d left half a dozen bodies in the street so we could make off with little more than pocket change from the bank. People with guns who would not leave them holstered long enough to take us alive, unless some miracle intervened.

I looked back at the train, still thinking it looked like a backbone. The cars were the vertebrae, the long spine of some creature that had been torn out and tossed to the desert in front of us. But there were no creatures like that, not in the world I knew, and I wondered if that wasn’t why I had gooseflesh crawling down my arms and legs. But, at the same time, I also wondered if this train wasn’t, somehow, the very miracle we’d been looking for.

“Come on,” Alan said.

3

The boxcar was hot. The heat rolled off in waves, like breakers crashing over our bodies. The door hung open, a yawning mouth with no teeth. The darkness inside was absolute, an inky blackness that consumed even the light of the fires. Whatever had made it this hot had burned itself out, but the heat was residual. It still lived, though the cold night air had to be taking it quickly.

Alan walked up to it, his bandana now pulled up to protect his face. He leaned close, looking in, but didn’t touch anything. Whether he didn’t dare or just hadn’t gotten that far yet, I didn’t know. He looked back, just a mask of red, and waved us forward. “I don’t think there’s anything here.”

We both came up, Rachel and I, to opposite sides. Rachel’s hand fell to the small of Alan’s back, both protective and asking for protection, and I tried to ignore it. But I’d been trying that since she’d joined us, and it didn’t work now any better than it had been. I leaned in, like Alan had done, hoping that would help.

It did.

Putting my head inside the boxcar was like sticking it into a pit of quicksand. The darkness seemed to pull at me, to suffocate me, to close in around me like a living thing. But, even as I felt it, I also felt the draw stronger than ever. I wanted to step up into the car – this one wasn't canted at an angle; walking inside would be tough, like walking on a ship at sea, but not impossible – and see what there was. Gun in hand or otherwise. In that moment, I didn’t care.

Then I felt fingers grab the spine of my shirt, gently pull me back. I hoped it was Rachel, but it was Alan. “Hold on there,” he said. “We’ll go in a minute.”

I spun, anger flaring up like a fire when you toss on a pine branch. “Let go.”

“James, not yet.” So calm, so sure of himself.

“Yes.” I jerked out of his grasp. Maybe he’d led us this far, but I’d take us the rest of the way. Maybe then Rachel would watch me, would look up at me all beautiful in the firelight and see that I existed, as well. Or maybe not. Either way, I had to go inside. My chest was screaming for it with every beat of my heart.

I stepped up onto the boxcar’s lip without touching it. I still wasn’t sure how hot it was, though it was just bearable in the air. Still, the metal could be worse. I heard Alan say something behind me, but I ignored him. The quicksand deepened, thickened, and I took a step forward, into the heart of the car.

Then I was sliding. My feet were out from under me and I was sliding down the car’s tilted surface like it was ice. And, the strange thing was, it felt like it. I threw my hands down in reflex and the floor of the car was so cold it burned. It was like ice in the winters I’d spent up north as a kid, the same ice that had broken beneath my father and pulled him out of sight forever. I never forgot that feeling, the way that cold was all-consuming.

Rachel was screaming and then my feet hit the far wall. I let my legs buckle with the impact and had the sudden image of myself breaking right through the other side. Crashing through the wall and tumbling into the sand. And, in this version of it, the splintered wood had slashed my face and arms and legs to ribbons just like the train I’d seen destroyed by dynamite.

I blinked, and the vision was gone. I was still propped against the wall, the darkness all around me, and I could hardly breathe. I rolled over, pulling myself up onto my knees against that ice-cold floor, and felt for my gun. It was still there. “Alan,” I said.

Nothing.

I couldn’t hear myself speak, not at all. It was as if I’d said nothing, as if the darkness were made of tar that held the sound back. It wasn’t even like talking underwater, where you can hear a low, distorted version of your voice. It was like I wasn’t talking at all.

My heart missed a beat and I wanted nothing more than to be out of the boxcar. I scrambled on the floor, but it was as slick as it was cold and I couldn’t get any grip. I could still hear Rachel outside, saying something in a high, shrill voice that was edged with fear, and Alan saying something back. Trying to come in after me, no doubt, and Rachel not wanting to be left alone in the night. I didn’t blame her, but then, she didn’t know what it was like inside.

The pull was still there, the want. That part of my mind just wanted to lie down and go to sleep, to tuck my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them and sleep. In here, with the darkness and the silence, I could sleep for days without ever waking and it sounded like pure bliss.

For a moment, I almost did it. Just for a moment. Then I heard Rachel speak again, and I remembered the outside. It sounds strange, that I’d have to remember something that I’d been in less than a minute before, but that’s how it was. Like the desert and the tracks and the people behind us were part of another life that I had lived centuries ago.

But I’d remembered now, and I began to climb. I stood and could balance against the walls and that’s when I found out where the heat was. It was on the outside, in patches where it must have been on fire behind that wall. I nearly stuck my hand in the middle of one as I got up, and it would have seared of my fingerprints if I had. But some age-old instinct warned me, warned me that heat was coming and that meant pain, and I moved my hand to the side at the last second. It struck metal that was warm, hot even, but not so bad that I couldn’t stand it.

I began to walk, still bracing myself and feeling out those patches, and found that the car was empty. There was nothing but the wide floor beneath my feet, and I was as far inside as one could get. I wondered if the car had been left that way on accident, or if perhaps it was just there for a return shipment. For all I knew, they’d found gold in the mountains. There’d certainly been rumors of it, though none that I would have called trustworthy.

Alan was standing on the lip now, and I could barely see him. He was peering inside, leaning forward with Rachel to keep him from falling. He called my name, looking all directions like a blind man who has become disoriented in an unfamiliar room.

“Alan,” I said. “I’m here. Hang on.” But there was that same stifling silence, that all-encompassing blanket of nothing. The sound didn’t even travel up to my ears, though I could feel it in my throat.

Panic is a barely-tamed beast. It’s a starved and vicious dog that we’re often able to leave chained up and forgotten. But that chain is thin, weak, and it breaks easily. I could feel it fighting beneath my skin, wrenching at the chain and almost loose.

That’s when I reached the side wall, started to pull myself up, and found that the boxcar wasn’t so empty after all.

4

It was a feather, matted in what was either tar or blood, and it was stuck to the side of the car. It felt coarse and stiff and it was far too big, almost as long as my arm from the fingertips to the elbow. From the feel, I thought it was a raven’s feather. But the ends were sharper, harder, and there was the size.

I jerked my hand away, screaming without a sound. It was impossible, but that hadn’t even hit me yet. The shock of coming across it was enough. My vision swam for a second, and I couldn’t see Alan or the door or the dark sand outside. Then I grabbed something metal – I don’t know what it was, only that it was there and I could use it as a handle – and hauled myself forward. Halfway up the car. My heart was racing so hard it hurt. Worse almost than the feather had been the way my scream, as loud as I could force it, had been dead quiet. I imagined that’s how I’d scream if they ever thought I was dead when I wasn’t and buried me alive.

The handle was enough to get me close, and I lunged for the edge, got my fingers around it. Rachel yelled again and then her hands clamped down on mine; Alan jumped back out of the car, took hold of my elbow, and pulled. Heaved. I slid up the icy floor and over the far edge, where I tumbled to the sand.

For a moment, I just concentrated on breathing. I lay on my back, the grit of the sand as real as ever, the sound of my breath more welcome than a pardon from the President. Just that sound, the thin rasp of air over my throat, my tongue, was all I needed.

Alan leaned in, dark creases drawn across his face. The question was all over it, written there as if with paint, before he even asked it. “What just happened?”

I sat up, swallowed, remembered the feather. “I don’t know. It was like being buried or something. I could hear you, but not myself. And there was something in there. Or, maybe, something was in there before the crash.” I held up my fingers; something dark and tacky and looking all too much like half-dried blood was smeared across the ends. “I found a feather.”

“A feather,” Rachel asked, and she was looking at me.

“I know.” I shook my head. “But it was sharp, and as long as my arm. I swear to God. This wasn’t a normal feather. And whatever left it behind…”

“Is still out here,” Alan said. “You’re serious about this? It couldn’t have been something else, something you mistook for a feather in the dark?”

“No; I’m sure.” I showed him the blood. “See that?”

Alan nodded. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to get it.”

Rachel was away from me and had her arms around his arm so fast I could hardly believe it. “No. No. You stay right here. Let’s go get the horses and ride off.”

Alan gently pushed her away, then laughed. It was a dark sound, but there was a bit of real humor in it. He hadn’t been fully inside yet. “It’s not a big deal. Let’s just check this out. We’ve got a day’s ride on the others; a few more minutes won’t make a difference.”

“I don’t,” Rachel said, and stumbled over the words. “I don’t want you in there.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“But–”

Alan leaned in and did something I’d never seen before: he kissed Rachel on the forehead. It was tender and soft and so unlike him that I almost thought I’d imagined it. Jealousy rearing its head, or something like that. But it had been real, and when he drew back he slipped out of her arms and hopped up onto the boxcar. He bent down, smiling at her. “Only for a second, Rache.” Then he disappeared, and the blackness swallowed him.

5

We waited, and the night seemed endless. Rachel sat just a bit away from me, starting into the boxcar as if her life had almost ended. She was fingering her revolver with her hand, absently, perhaps thinking about charging in after Alan. I knew she wouldn’t need the gun, not in that car anyway, but I didn’t say anything. It was better to let her brew on it, because then, at least, she wasn’t doing it.

I looked down the line. The next car was closed, its door barred like the stone before a tomb. So was the next. But three down from us, and tipped back and not burning at all, was an open car. The door lay in the sand, wedged down deep with a little grove behind it where it had pushed up the desert. It must have fallen off right before the train came to a stop, maybe thrown off by the jar as those middle cars all came together.

I wondered if there was blood in there, blood and feathers. And I wondered if I really wanted to know.

There was a grunt, and heavy step, and Alan jumped back out of the boxcar. He landed in front of me, knees bent, breathing heavily. But he was smiling, madly, and in his right hand was the feather. That hand was bleeding, and the blood was draining down toward his elbow, but he didn’t appear to notice.

It was more horrible in the moonlight, with orange and red accents from the fire. The edge, what had cut Alan, looked as sharp as a razor and glinted brightly. It was mostly black, but not straight through. There was a tint to it, a blue or purple, that lay just beneath the surface. It did look like it came from a raven, though it looked even bigger in Alan’s hand than it had felt plastered against the front of the car.

“You were right,” Alan said.

I didn’t have any response to that. I was, and I wished I wasn’t. Something about that feather was deadly, no doubt about it, but something about the gleam in Alan’s eyes was worse. Like he was just getting started, just getting warmed up. Like there was so much more to do and he couldn’t wait to get to it.

“What is it?” Rachel asked.

Alan didn’t even look at her. He looked at me. “This train isn’t from Kansas City.”

“I know,” I said. Though he’d known the whole time.

“I don’t even think it’s from here at all.”

“From here?” I sat up; my back was already sore.

“From this world.” Alan held the feather up like a trophy. Which, I thought, it was. “Just look at this. Have you ever seen something with feathers like this? Or think about the car, the way it’s been calling us. Or the way it feels when you go inside, like taking a bath in tar. Have you ever seen something like that before?”

“No,” I said.

“I think it’s from the other side.”

Rachel let out a little whimpering sound that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Maybe because that was the moment that I realized the truth, or maybe because it was the last sound she would make before everything fell to pieces. Either way, it hit me then and it’s still with me now. It was like a scared dog being thrown into the ring. Maybe with another dog who was both starving and vicious.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “The other side of what?”

Alan just shrugged, but his gaze was locked on the feather. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe the other side of the air.”

6

He was off and running before I could get up. He held the feather in his right hand, clutching it even though it was cutting him, and it looked like a sword. Or a butcher’s knife. He yelled something over his shoulder about needing to find it, needing to find out if there were more, and he was running toward the other boxcar. The one with its door off and sitting in a little groove of sand.

I got up and went after him, falling once in the loose sand before I could get my feet under me, Rachel was running too, running hard, her hair blowing back behind her. I’d always thought her hair was her best feature, so smooth and brown and perfect, but now it looked like a black spider web wrapped around her scalp. It was tangled and knotted and she didn’t even seem to notice. I ran after her, both because the train was calling me forward and because I didn’t want her to go in alone.

And Alan, it seemed, was lost to us.

I could lie and say I knew what was coming. That I was running to protect them because I had my head straight on my shoulders. That I’d read all the signs and figured it out and taken it upon myself to save us. But that wouldn’t get me anywhere because what’s done is done and the past is the past and the dead are dead. So I’ll just say I ran, with my gun on my hip. I ran.

Alan reached the boxcar ahead of us. One moment he was on the sand, skidding to a stop and digging his own grooves in the desert. Then he was leaping. He’d always been nimble, far more so than I was, and strong. One leap was all it took, and he balanced on the edge for a moment. I heard someone yelling his name, and I thought it was Rachel until I realized it was me. Then he plunged inside and was gone.

I got there after him, yelling into the dark void. I knew he could hear me, but I wouldn’t hear him even if he was yelling back. Rachel stood beside me, silent, just staring into the boxcar. It was like the last time, only somehow worse. I could see it in her eyes.

“Rache,” I said.

She didn’t say anything, but her gun was in her hand. That was enough. I drew my own, then grabbed the edge of the car and hoisted myself up. The metal was solid and thick even after the crash. And this car, unlike so many, wasn’t burning.

It took a moment. Again, I could lie and say I went right in after him, but I didn’t. I stood there, working up the nerve. I’d jumped from cliffs before, into the ocean, but that had been easier to work myself up for. Even with the gun in hand – what was usually a comforting, reassuring weight – I couldn’t do it.

Then I looked at Rachel. She wasn’t coming up, couldn’t bring herself to it. Even with the inherent draw of the train, she couldn’t. But she needed someone to, and I was the only one left.

So I went in.

7

It was dark like tar and midnight and moonless desert. It was so dark, and the floor was cold. It wasn’t slanted so badly that I fell, this time, but I staggered forward and it was an effort to keep my feet. I thought about calling out, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. And breath was too hard to get in the car to waste.

That’s when I heard it, the first noise I’d heard in the car and the only one I would. It was the rustle of feathers rubbing against each other. It was the scrape of a claw against the floor. It was the click of a beak, a huge beak, coming together. Then apart. Then together.

Eating.

I tried to move and couldn’t. The skeletal dog was loose and ravaging my gut, but I couldn’t take even a step. I managed to bring the gun up, shaking, and aimed it forward. I couldn’t see a thing, like shooting in a vat of ink, but I aimed all the same. Because sometimes it’s all you can do.

The scraping came again. Oh so close. It was like a nail being dragged across stone. Like a match trying to strike and failing. Close, it was so close. I heard the feathers rustle again, not two feet from my face, and I felt my bladder let go. The warmth ran down my legs, but I hardly noticed.

Then it opened, right in front of me. Not off to the side, not in the back of the car, but right in front of me and on level with my head. It was that tall, and when that red eye blinked open, the pupil a huge dot of black the size of my fist, I was staring straight into it.

I screamed. There was no sound in here – maybe to lull these things to sleep, the same as the draw, the pull, was there to make them stay with the train – but I screamed. The gun was still up and must have been just about in the thing's ribs, and I pulled the trigger. All other light was banished from here, but the gunfire was harsh enough to cut the blackness. And in the flash, I saw it.

It was a raven, but it was a child. It had that rounded body and the soft features of a young bird, and the wide eye was as curious as it was infuriated. It saw me and wondered what I was and hated me all at once. In that moment of flash, its beak opened and closed once, and I saw it swallow a string of intestines like it was drawing a worm from the earth. A string of blood-soaked guts that had once been inside Alan but were now being sucked from him.

I fell backward as the gun went off. The bird shrieked, and I could hear that too, even though I couldn’t hear the gunfire. Because this was their world, this train that had come from the other side of something, maybe slipped through the wall accidentally and crashed in the desert. And in their world, they could still be heard. The shriek was huge, coming from everywhere, and I knew I hadn’t killed it. No, I’d only angered it. And, of course, let it know exactly where I was.

My head slammed into the flooring, and my vision flashed white. I fired again, frantically pushing myself backward but finding no grip. The floor was like ice and it was less forgiving than the ice that had killed my father. I scraped twice, then hit something. Part of me, the rational part, realized it was the bird's claw. The other part didn’t care and just thrust backward.

That claw came up as I slid, then hammered back down. I felt pain blossom in the side of my leg and I knew I was caught. The talon was through my thigh and now it would pin me and eat me when it was done with Alan. But I was still sliding. I moved the leg, pushed, and found it was just grazed along the edge. I fired the gun again, and the thing's scream alone could have killed me. Then I was tumbling back over the far edge, just like I’d done the first time, and I landed hard in the sand.

Rachel was saying something, a lot of things, but I couldn’t hear her. I just got up on my hands and knees and crawled. All I could see was Alan’s body, the red rope stretching up from it, and I didn’t want that to be me. The pull of the train was gone now, stripped away by terror. Rachel was next to me, crying under her tangled hair, and I grabbed her arm. Got to my feet. Started to run.

8

Two things have stayed with me through the years. The first is that the bird was young, only a baby, not even close to full-grown. The second is what Alan said outside of the first boxcar. The way he’d stood under that wide open sky and said that the rest of the birds, the ones gone from the boxcars, were still out there.

To Bury the Dead

1

Sammy’s wife died giving birth to his second child, who also died. It seemed like a tremendous waste to Sammy, and if he’d lived near enough to town he may have gone to church and asked what end it served in the grand scheme, the big picture, the higher purpose. But as it was, twenty-nine miles out and with no faith that his old truck would make it, he settled for staying home and finishing off the bottle of scotch that he’d started the night before. That had always worked just as well as religion, at least in Sammy’s experience.

Northern Michigan was cold in November, with plenty of frost on the ground and a bitter taste in the air that was like iron and mint mixed together. They’d even had a bout of heavy snowfall two weeks ago, which had slowly melted until the ground was again bare and brown and dead. On the whole, Sammy preferred the snow. He could feel it coming again, though, building in the atmosphere like an electrical charge getting ready to go off. Any day now, Sammy thought as he put his wife’s body in the back shed, where it was cold enough to keep. He laid the body of the child next to her, both of them on a small pallet of hay. The child was wrinkled and gray and its face was scrunched up; the forty seconds of life it had endued had not been to its liking.

His wife, Sammy couldn’t bring himself to look at. He covered them both in an old sheet and closed the shed. There was no lock, but that hardly mattered. There were no neighbors, either.

Sammy sat at his kitchen table, staring out into the forest. It was thick after the small yard he’d cleared for them, a wall of trees that spread their arms together and interwove their needles. He’d made a living for the past five years selling logs to the sawmill in town, and he knew the forest as well as he knew the inside of the three-room cabin. That, he’d made from logs he’d cut himself. His wife had lied and said she’d loved it, and then lied and said she loved him. That was back when she could talk, before she was dead.

He’d brewed a pot of coffee on the stove, and Sammy drank slowly as he smoked a cigarette and thought. He hadn’t smoked in seventeen years, but here he was now. His wife had smoked as long as he’d known her, and this cigarette had been hers. He’d stolen it, but he doubted anyone would catch him, just like they wouldn’t find the bodies.

The problem was, he didn’t know what to do with them. He’d grown up a Catholic, back in North Dakota and another life, and he figured maybe something religious needed to happen. Why it needed to happen now that they were dead, when it was too late, was beyond him. But the feeling was there, like a scratch on the roof of his mouth or a tickle so far in his ear that he couldn’t reach it. There was something he had to do, some rite or ceremony, and he hadn’t the slightest clue what it was.

From the shadows in the far corner, Buckner drifted up to the table and called softly. Buckner was a mutt of a cat, all black and brown and white and generally unattractive. But Sammy figured that suited him well enough. He picked Buckner up and set him on the table with a little grunt.

Buckner mewed again, sniffed the steaming coffee, and looked up at Sammy. The way his head tilted to the side made him look almost comical with curiosity.

Sammy laughed and scratched Buckner’s neck. “You’re hungry, hey?”

Buckner arched his back and said nothing.

“Well, you don’t want that,” Sammy said, looking at the coffee. He walked over to the fridge, pulled out the half-gallon of milk (smelling it to make sure it hadn’t turned) and poured some into a dish. Buckner heard all this, watching from the tabletop with rapt attention. Sammy carried it back over and resumed his seat; Buckner began lapping the milk up with a casual pleasure, as if two of the house’s three inhabitants hadn’t died hours before.

“I just can’t bury them yet,” Sammy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to do it all wrong. And I’m sure I’ll remember what I’m supposed to do in time, you know? Ain’t that always how it works?”

Buckner, who knew how to get milk, get his back scratched, and get some sleep in the dark parts of the cabin, just lapped away.

“S’pose I’ll have to drive into town tomorrow,” Sammy said, glancing at the truck. It was huge and red and mostly rust by now, and he didn’t like the looks of it. One tire was so flat it looked like it was resting on the rim. With the road just a two-track for half the distance, shot through with rocks and potholes, that promised to give him anything but a smooth ride.

But there was a church in town. There was a church and there was a priest, a man named Father Pearson. Sammy had met him before and hadn’t liked him much. He tended to talk down the end of his nose, when his finger wasn’t lodged in it, and he smelled like rotten vegetables. Sammy knew those were rather superficial reasons to dislike someone, especially a man of the cloth, but they were his reasons all the same.

Sammy sighed. Likeable or not, Pearson would be able to tell him what to do to bury his wife. And, hopefully, the priest could also tell him if he was going to go to hell for being so happy that his wife was dead.

2

Night fell, and Sammy didn’t move. He just sat at the table, smoking the entire pack of cigarettes, drinking the entire pot of coffee (chasing down that scotch), and feeding the entire bottle of milk to Buckner. From time to time the cat would become restless and pace in little circles around the top of the table, but mostly he just lay where Sammy could gently scratch his neck or rub his back, and together they thought.

Sammy had grown up in North Dakota, on a farm, and hated it. He’d moved to Michigan when his parents died, at the age of forty-two, and that was when he’d met Karen. She’d worked downtown, at the hardware store, and their first exchange had been when he’d asked her where the sandpaper was. It had been in the back aisle, low down and still packed in the thin cardboard boxes that it came in, and she’d walked him over there. They’d selected 100 grit as what he needed, and Sammy had left the store.

That had been the first time, and it hadn’t hit him right off. It hadn’t been love at first sight, there had been no thunder of trumpets, and there had certainly been no beam of light falling golden on her hair and illuminating her face and the red apron with the word ACE across the front. No, there had just been the casual suggestion of something. A bit of attraction, and bit of companionship, a bit of that vibe that seems to color the air but which you can’t quite put your finger on. He’d felt it, and he’d wondered.

Two days later, he’d gone back for a screwdriver he didn’t need. Then a saw which he already owned. Then a shovel that he really did need, to fix up some of the worst potholes in front of his house. As he was working with it later, the new grip smooth against the calluses on his hands, he knew. He filled in yet another pothole in a sea of them, and he knew he wanted to marry Karen.

The reason was, her father had money. She’d mentioned it after he bought the saw, and he’d managed to bring it up again while they were admiring the rack of shovels and deciding which one would most appropriately suit his needs. It had felt forced to him, because he knew it was, but Karen had taken it in stride and run with it. Explained to him about the money that was rightfully hers, that her father had set up for her. Sort of an inheritance before he died. It was all hers and it was all stocked away and untouched.

Sammy had asked her why she didn’t use it. There was enough to live on, easily, without having to work at the hardware. It had seemed to Sammy like a great idea, but Karen had shot it down. She’d said something about not wanting to feel like the prodigal son (daughter, he’d joked, and she’d laughed). Something about not wanting to have so much and have done nothing for it, because she was afraid she’d waste it, squander it, and have to come crawling back. Sammy had never paid much attention to his religion (unless one counted the scotch, to which he paid quite a lot of attention indeed), so most of it was wasted on him. But he got the basic idea down just fine, and that settled it.

They went out for coffee twice, then they went out for dinner. Then they went back to Karen’s place and Karen got pregnant.

Sammy smiled and poked Buckner in the ribs. The cat rolled over lazily, full of milk, and eyed him like he was an annoying child that couldn’t quite be gotten rid of.

“Wasn’t an accident that time, was it?” Sammy asked. Buckner put his head back down on his paws and closed his eyes. “Wasn’t an accident even though that’s what she thought. That’s what I wanted her to think. But oh no. I knew the whole time.”

He hadn’t been sure it would work, much less on the first try, but Luck had smiled and things had fallen into place. Things that had made Karen sit on the floor, her back against the wall, and sob until her eyes were bloodshot and her throat was raw. Things that had made her angry and scared and frustrated. Things that had made Sammy smile in the night, as he sat at home and drank and waited for her to make up her mind. When she finally had, they’d been married.

It had been a small ceremony, one worth forgetting, and the child had been stillborn.

3

Sammy walked out back to check on the bodies. They were still on the hay, still in the shack, and still dead. The light had gone and he only had a kerosene lantern, but it was enough. The child was small and gray and wrinkled. His wife was small and pinkish-white and smooth. The sweat that had coated her face and darkened the neck of her dress had dried. He’d closed her eyes and she looked peaceful. He wondered how long until she was as gray as the child and didn’t think it would be that long after all. The blood had to be pooling by now, draining toward the low areas. The ankles, maybe. Soon they would be full and bloated, stretching the skin so that it would pop if you poked it. Pop like a blister or a pimple or a water balloon.

They’d died here. His second child and his wife, who had been trying to have the second child. Trying to have one that was alive. And, for a brief moment, she had. But by then, of course, she had been dead. It was all a tremendous waste, but it could be turned into something good. He grinned and thought about that and left her in the shed.

4

The first child had served its purpose, Sammy saw. Looking back it all had a reason, a place where it fit. The first one had died so that his wife wouldn’t trust the doctors and the hospital. It had died so that she’d have a fear of the sterile white halls and the smell of disinfectant. That way, when she got pregnant again these years later, she would tell Sammy that she wanted to have it at the cabin. Just the two of them. She’d read up on how it worked, how to do it, and was confident they could pull it off.

Sammy had agreed. By now he knew all about how the inheritance worked, and he’d weaseled his way closer to her father every chance he got. He even liked to think of it that way, as weaseling. It made him feel powerful, like he had a plan that no one knew about that he was carrying out to perfection. Which, of course, he did. And he was.

“But I didn’t kill her, did I?” Sammy asked Buckner. This time Buckner didn’t even look; he was asleep. “I just let her do exactly what she wanted. Just let it happen.”

That had been more than enough. The birthing had gone badly from the very beginning. The labor had been short and intense, bursts of pain that had caused Karen to scream and wrench her body around and remember the one thing she’d forgotten: Hospitals were able to give you painkillers. Sammy had given her a handful of aspirin, but that was hardly the same thing.

Next had been the bleeding. Sammy had little idea how a birth was supposed to work, besides what she’d made him learn. But Karen was bleeding out, whether that was normal or not. Sammy had done what he could, but he didn’t have a lot of options. He’d shrugged and smiled and held her hand, telling her it was going to be all right and thinking about his bank account.

In the end, getting the child out had been like pulling up the roots of an extremely large and ancient tree. A tree whose roots probably extended further into the earth than you could dig in one day. Sammy had pulled and Karen had pushed and the child had finally come out with a scream and then died. Karen was already dead, and Sammy couldn’t say if she ever knew he’d gotten the little, screeching thing out of her at all.

And now he had to bury them both, but he wasn’t sure what to do. Sammy rubbed his temples; his head was swimming with the scotch now, a feeling he usually loved but which was at times a bit annoying. Like now, as he mulled over the proper proceedings and procedures of a religion he had never followed. He’d grown up with it, but that was far different than following it.

So why did he care? That was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Sammy rubbed faster, harder, but it didn’t help. He wasn’t sure why he cared, except that maybe he wanted to save himself. Maybe some deep, secret part of his heart knew that he’d done wrong. Or, at least, knew that he felt good about it, desired it, when he should have been crushed by grief. Maybe that corner of his heart knew and wanted absolution. So that when he died, if he joined them, they wouldn’t be on such unpleasant terms.

The marriage had been full of enough of those, hadn’t it? Karen had liked him, but not nearly enough to marry him. But he’d snagged her, pulled her in, and that had been malicious in itself. Another thing she didn’t know. But she’d resented her situation; of that fact, he was and always had been brutally aware.

Sammy stood, flipping the scotch bottle from hand to hand. Of course, all that was over now. He could travel, if he wanted, maybe to someplace where the winter didn’t last for six months and range from a sickly black slush to bitter temperatures that would freeze you in bed. If nothing else, he could buy a bigger, better house in town. One with three stories and a tower on one corner and rocks around the baseboards. One with a sweeping yard and a mailbox on the street and a television in every room. And then he could drink scotch all day, maybe even eighteen-year, and he could never work and talk to Buckner and forget all about North Dakota. It would be heaven, but it would be on earth and it would be all his.

He’d done it. He’d been wanting to do it since the shovel, since he’d bought it to fill in the potholes, and he finally had. Amazing.

Sammy flipped the bottle over one more time, then threw it against the wall. It shattered with a huge explosion of glass, shards flying like shrapnel from a hand grenade. Buckner was up off the table and screaming and running first under the table and then under the couch and then back under the table again. Sammy, his grin as wide as ever, just watched. He would never have to pick up that glass now; he’d simply move out and burn this place to the ground.

5

The truck wouldn’t make it. Just looking at the tire, the way the rim sat on the ground, Sammy knew it wouldn’t. He cast a glance over at the shed. The window was boarded up so that he couldn’t see in; the glass had blown out in a storm one night and he’d never cared to replace it. But, boards or not, he knew what he’d find. He wondered briefly if she’d care about being buried with the proper ceremony, then decided it didn’t really matter. Some people had funerals and graveyards. Some just burned the bodies. Others stacked them up on platforms and left them out to grow bloated and rot under the sun. But when you got right down to the bottom line, they were all dead. So it didn’t really matter.

He began digging the grave. He went around behind the shed to do it, so it would be somewhat out of the way. The forest was thick out there, and the ground was hard with the cold, and he had to be at least that close to the little clearing so that he’d be able to dig at all. The shovel was sharp and solid, even after all this time (the rest of Karen’s lifetime, as it was) and Sammy dug through like a soldier into a foxhole. He moved with strong, deliberate swings, never exerting himself too much, but keeping a steady pace. The moon was bright overhead, and he could see well enough.

Sammy hit rocks below the surface, and his progress slowed. He pulled them out by hand – it was easier that way, when they were so big. He piled them next to the grave, to the side of the dirt, and saved them. They’d do well keeping scavengers from digging up the bodies while he wasn’t watching. He at least owed Karen that much, Sammy figured.

They would only get one grave. The child was small enough to fit on top, and they were practically the same person anyway. Hadn’t the child been inside her not a day before, inside her swollen stomach? Of course it had, and so in that way it was almost fitting. The scotch was making it hard to dig, and Sammy really couldn’t stand the thought of having to do it twice.

When he finished the grave, he sat down to rest. Part of him wanted to get her, right now, and throw her in. To pile on the child and then the rocks and then the dirt. But he knew, no matter how strong that desire to act now, that it would happen even if he didn’t. It would happen tonight, if not this very moment. And so he sat down to rest and to think and to dream about the life that was ahead of him.

Buckner came up, having slipped out the little door Sammy had cut for him in the cabin, and sat by his side. The cat’s hair was ruffled up a bit, matted down on one side, but he looked like he’d gotten over his fear. Sammy scratched his neck, and Buckner purred.

The night was cold, but Sammy wasn’t. Not now. He was too keyed up to think about something like the temperature.

“This is it,” he told Buckner. “This is when we finally make it.”

Buckner didn’t say anything.

The money would be his now. Karen had put that in her will, and he’d read it. The money was hers, given by her father, more or less, and it was to become his when and if she died. But that if had become an after, and the when had a specific time, down to the minute, attached to it. All of that wasted money, just lying around in some account somewhere, would soon be his. And he would not ignore it; no, sir. He would take it and use it and not care a bit about being the prodigal son or any other son at all. He’d just be Sammy, and he’d still have Buckner, and things would be better than he could even dream.

Finally, the cold began to leech into his skin. He stood up, flexed the knots out of his hands, and walked over to the shed. He eyed the boarded-up window for a moment; it looked like it was looking back. Like it was a giant eye that saw all, one that he’d tried to cover and hadn’t been able to. Then he shook the feeling and went inside.

He decided to do the child first, because it was small and looked unhappy and weighed less. Dead weight was more than live weight, a fact that had always made no sense to him but could not be denied. So he grabbed the child, holding it by one leg (its skin was clammy and loose and didn’t fit the body right) and carried it to the grave. When he dropped it in, there was a soft thud and it was gone.

He went back. His wife lay there and it really sunk in. She was gone; she was dead. Knowing it, intellectually, was not the same as seeing it. He slid his arms under her, scooped her up, and carried her out to the grave. Buckner trailed at his ankles, watching. The moonlight reflected bright off of his eyes, slanted little eyes like balls of fire.

Sammy stopped, looking at her face. At the way her hair fell over her brow, something he’d thought was cute back when he’d needed sandpaper and she’d known where to find it. At the way her dress clung to her perfectly, because she’d prided herself on that and fitted it with a needle and thread until it was exactly how she’d wanted. At the way the foot of that dress was stained in blood, her blood and the blood of a dying child clawing its way into the world.

He thought about kissing her, but didn’t. He tipped his arms forward and she rolled off and into the hole. She spun once and landed on her back, on top of the child. Her skin looked as white as paper now, contrasted with the dirt and the night. But not yet that sickly gray.

“That’s it,” Sammy said, looking for Buckner. He scooped up the shovel, dipped it in the pile of dirt, and then he saw the cat. Buckner was crouched on the far side of the hole, the hair on his back standing straight on end, and he was hissing. He looked like he’d cornered a snake, or like he’d been cornered by one.

Sammy ignored him. The cat was probably just unnerved, on edge from such a strange and eventful night. Or maybe he’d forgotten that Karen had died, but now he remembered because he saw her body. Sammy tipped the shovelful of dirt down onto Karen’s chest. It pattered softly in, darkening her dress in patches. The grave was shallow, not six feet at all, but it was what he’d been able to manage. He wouldn’t live here long, anyway. He got another shovelful of dirt, opting to give her a layer of cushion before he threw on the rocks. He was about to dump it in, this time onto her face, when Buckner leapt.

The distance was short, and Buckner landed right where Sammy’s dirt would have. His claws were extended and he cut large furrows into her cheeks, crying out like he had when the scotch bottle had broken. He raked his claws down her face, blood swelling up in the cuts, and Sammy was too stunned to move.

Then her mouth opened.

Her teeth came together, clamped on Buckner’s foot.

The cat was trying to run now, trying and unable. Karen hadn’t moved save for her jaw, but she had him. Buckner writhed back and forth, scratching away with his other three feet. Then he must have done something to her tongue, because she let go and Buckner scrambled away. There was a small spray of blood from her mouth, a fine mist of thin red.

Sammy still hadn’t moved. The shovelful of dirt sat poised above her, ready to seal his new life.

“Water,” Karen said. It was a choked word, a barely-rasped request, but he could understand it. “Water.”

Sammy’s first thought was that he should get her the cup of water, and his second was that he should drive the blade of the shovel down through her throat. That was the one he settled on.

The Work of Clocks

1

Alexander Peyton O’Callaghan went missing on the same day that the Great War ended, back in the lake country where the fire had gone through a year before and cleared out the underbrush. We found his boots, just off the road, lying on their sides in the half-frozen mud of early November. The laces were untied and the mud had splattered up onto the toes, presumably from his dismounting his horse in a hurry. Of the horse, there was no sign. We took the boots, covered them in a blanket on the floor of the car, and drove back to Harrison as dawn cracked the sky.

We didn’t speak, Gamble or I, as we drove. Gamble just stared out the front window, his eyes sharp and lined with tiny creases like crows’ feet. His lips were set into such a tight line that the blood was forced from them, turning them white and pallid. I imagine I looked the same; I know for a fact that I was squeezing my notebook so tightly that it was bowed in the center for the next month. It looked like a tiny boat, one that would sink immediately for the open ends, and I still think of that day every time I see it. The day we knew that something Alexander had said, at least, had been true.

The shop was locked when we arrived, and Gamble let us in with his key. I didn’t have one, being sixteen and an apprentice. I’d always thought my age a benefit before, my not being sent to the front because of it, but on that day I found myself wondering. The war had ended, after all; I could have survived it. And some things were more dangerous than German bullets, more dangerous and less avoidable. Of course, hindsight now taints my perception to such an extent that I’ll never be sure how I truly feel, which is an odd phenomenon indeed.

Perhaps, I think every now and then, I would have been better off hunkered down somewhere near the Hindenburg Line. Or even going over the top, though I’d never fired a rifle in my life.

Gamble set a pot of coffee on to brew. It smelled rich and black, filling the shop with its scent in minutes; the shop was not large, and thus clustered with tables and cabinets and benches, all of them covered in what looked to be – had I not known the vast importance of everything, at least in Alexander’s mind – a lot of junk. There were gears from clocks, electrical wires of all colors and lengths, countless books with diagrams and maps, and a great lot of other mechanical pieces. I took the boots, still wrapped, and set them under a table layered in such junk, where they would not be noticed.

Officially, we were a clock repair shop. We specialized in foreign pieces – which we hoped would be brought back from the front by the soldiers, now that the war was done with – but did most of our actual work with domestic ones. That was the reality of it: clocks died and people needed to have them fixed. Exotic or not. But saying we enjoyed such foreign work gave us reason to have some very peculiar things, which provided sufficient cover if wandering eyes began probing into our business.

“He’s done it,” Gamble said at last, coming into the main room. He stood there, the sun falling through the windows and turning the shoulders of his suit a dark orange, holding a coffee mug. He looked past me, but didn’t really seem to be looking at anything.

“Do you think so?” I asked. I couldn’t get my head around that, not at all. “Really?”

“Yes,” Gamble replied, as if that should set my mind at ease. He crossed the room and sat in one of the three chairs that faced our largest windows. That glass gave a superb view of the river, winding its way through town not so much like a serpent but a worm, sluggish and mostly straight. Usually the sunrise off those waves was worth watching, but I could tell that Gamble wasn’t seeing that, either.

I got my own coffee and joined him. I wanted to ask a hundred questions, perhaps more, but I let him think instead. He was a full partner, had been working with Alexander since before I was born. If he could reason it out, he could do it without help.

Myself, I had my own ideas. Alexander, you see, had been fairly obsessed with something he called the “other side.” He didn’t seem entirely clear on what this meant, and was closed-off about it even when talking to Gamble and I. As if he believed that to give voice to everything he believed in would jinx it. Or maybe curse him. But he’d dropped hints, and we’d seen his work.

For the most part, we were inventors. Or fancied ourselves to be such, anyway. Alexander, I knew, had been more than a head and shoulders above his peers in every school he’d attended, and his résumé was impressive. Gamble had been of a like mind, though not possessed of the brilliance that Alexander had. I, of course, had actually thought I was applying for apprenticeship at a clock-repair shop.

We had invented almost nothing. Gamble’s coffee pot would turn itself on and then pour the coffee into separate mugs, which was convenient but hardly groundbreaking. Alexander had a car that could set its own speed and hold it and even decelerate on its own with the push of a button. I had been attempting to create a blanket that would warm itself in the winter – my family was far from rich and the cold was oppressive in the deepest months – but so far I had only succeeded in causing a number of small fires. But still we kept on, repairing clocks only to pay the bills, because something about the process of inventing called to us. There was more out there, more we could do; the feeling was so thick in the shop’s dusty confines that one could almost taste it.

And Alexander, as I’ve said, had his “other side.” It was something spectral, of a supernatural nature, and it was, in essence, his religion. He attended church, as we all did, mainly to keep up appearances. In the small business world, that is of the utmost importance. And, to some extent, the Bible played into his thinking. But it was his own version, Gamble and I knew, his own version in which something or someplace lay just on the other side of the air.

And it was to this place that he had been trying to go for the past eleven years.

“He’s done it,” Gamble said again. “He’s finally done it.”

This time, I said nothing.

2

We stayed in the entire day, waiting for the cover of night, and then drove back to the lake country. No one came by the shop, which was no small miracle since we were both too perplexed to have appeared normal. Had someone come to talk to us, I’m sure they would have taken one look at our glassy eyes, our tight brows, our pursed lips. They would have taken one look at the way we wandered about with our shoulders hunched and our fingers clawed and declared us mentally insane. I know I wondered it as I watched Gamble load his pistol. I wondered because of the way we looked into the shadows, as if expecting to see Alexander’s face peering back, and the way we jumped every hour as the clocks rose in an uproar.

“Why here?” I asked Gamble as we came to a halt. The place where Alexander’s boots had been lay just to our right; we were deep in the woods and there hadn’t been another car for miles, or even a horse and rider. It was desolate area, secluded and tucked away and forgotten.

“He always thought he’d want to do it somewhere unpopulated,” Gamble said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “So that there’d be less interference. And less of a chance that someone would come across him.”

I wished I had more coffee, and maybe some bourbon to go along. My head was pounding and swimming as if I’d taken a good blow to the temple. “What did his machine do? Did you see it?”

“No,” Gamble said. It was hard and short and immediate. His eyes darted out the window, played across the rows upon rows of pines that stood at attention like ranks of soldiers across the sea. “No, I did not. Not in use.”

We’d both seen it sitting idle; it was impossible not to, with how often Alexander had brought it out to tinker with it. To adjust the knobs on the faceplate that did indeed look like a clock or to add new wires to the colorful web of them exploding from the thing’s back. Or maybe to change out the cylinders that looked like huge metal pills, or to add another switch, another gauge, another dial. He was always working, refining, making sure it was ready before he even attempted to turn it on.

Once, I’d seen him carry it. He meant to cross over, that much he’d frankly told us, but he wanted to have the machine with him when he did. So he could be sure to come back. He’d designed a strap that went both around his shoulders and around his waist. The wires poked out on all sides, crushed up against his stomach; the knobs and dials were all in easy reach for either of his hands. It had looked almost comical, but the dark gleam in his eyes as he tried it on had stripped any humor from the sight. From the entire shop, in fact.

We got out of the car and stood on the edge of the woods. “Do you think he went in?” I asked. “Or did he stand here? Perhaps when he used it, his boots were simply left behind.”

“No,” Gamble said softly. “He went in. Alexander was obsessed with keeping his secrets, at least until he knew for sure. He walked into the trees, probably for quite a ways, before he turned it on.”

“Then why the boots?” I knelt and looked under the tree branches. There were impressions, what might have been footprints, where the fire had cleared away the underbrush. “Why did he leave his boots?”

For a long moment, Gamble was silent. Then he knelt as well and began unlacing his own shoes. The gun was a bulge under his coat. “Because,” he said as he worked, “even Moses had to remove his sandals when he approached the burning bush. When he approached his God.”

3

The woods were dark and cold and somewhere ahead I could hear the crash of the waves on the lake. It was a distant sound, like the low rumble of thunder in the mountains, just ambience and little more. But, along with the whistle of the wind through the trees, it was enough to layer the forest in odd sounds and strange noises. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stiffen, my spine tingle.

We walked without our shoes and the ground was hard. Pine needles lay scattered across it, sharp little barbs that cut through my socks and then stuck, sending jolts of pain with every step. I bent and pulled them out as we went; next to me, Gamble did the same. But we kept walking, following those slight impressions that may have been footprints.

When I first saw the movement, the flicker of something passing ahead of us, deep within the forest, I thought it was a trick of the moonlight. I thought it was mist, perhaps, drifting on the wind. It was far ahead, and we stopped to watch it even though it was mostly distorted by the branches. It hurried across, floating a bit off the ground, and disappeared from sight. It felt odd, just somehow off, but I couldn’t place it. Not then, anyway.

Gamble looked at me, his lips in that familiar little white line. “Be careful,” he said. “Keep listening.”

I nodded my agreement, though I can’t say his words helped me. Because if he was scared, when he had a gun, then I had a right to be terrified.

It’s a universal truth that the fears of our childhood stick with us longer than we care to admit, and that had something to do with the way my nerves were jumping. The way I felt on edge like a cliff-diver about to leap. It was dark and quiet and there were no other people around. It was the dead of night, and in the deep black of the forest that meant we were fairly shrouded in it. The dark is the one thing you can’t run from, the thing that only time and the rising of the sun can erase, and I will say that prompted us to be more frightened than we would have been otherwise. But I will also say that the darkness wasn’t the whole of it.

Alexander, after all, was gone. Completely vanished without a trace. That it was by his own hand only made it worse.

We saw the fog-like thing again a few minutes later, this time off to the left. I noticed it over Gamble’s shoulder; he was already stopped and staring. As I watched, it also drew to a stop. In that brief second, I realized what had been bothering me about it. I’d assumed it was mist moving on the wind, but it was going the wrong way. It was moving against the breeze.

It stopped, hesitated. I held my breath, my throat so tight that I couldn’t get air. It was as if I’d swallowed something, some bit of food, whole. And I was choking on it. But there was nothing in my throat besides fear, fear and a scream that was clawing its way up toward my lips.

The thing looked at us. The top part of it, where its head would have been, swiveled around and gazed directly at me. I thought I saw the face of a woman, sleek and beautiful and looking like porcelain in the moonlight. Her lips were curved, her skin fine like ivory. But her eyes were dark, jet black, two holes drilled into her face. I was filled with lust and terror, both at the same time, both equally as strong, and I couldn’t move.

Then she was gone. She didn’t turn and drift away on the wind, but simply broke up and dissipated like true fog. One minute her dark eyes were on mine, the next I was staring at an empty piece of the forest, a backdrop of green branches.

We stood, and we didn’t run. The scream chopped away at my throat, as urgent as the need to vomit, and I swallowed it down. Again and again I swallowed it. I could see Gamble doing the same, his Adam’s apple bouncing.

Finally, he turned to me. His gun was still in his coat, but his hand lay near it. “Let’s go,” he said. “We have to find him. We have to.”

4

It was then that I realized why Alexander had come to the woods. It was a desire for seclusion, to be sure, but that wasn’t all. He’d known, somehow, that this place was important. That the wall, or the barrier, or whatever it was, came to its thinnest in the heart of the woods. How he’d discovered it, I didn’t know. But he’d been doing this for eleven years, according to Gamble, and he’d surely had enough time. So he’d come here, to the place where the other side allowed itself to be crossed into.

Or out of.

I didn’t know if she was a ghost or a spirit or maybe another human, just like Alexander. Maybe someone from that side, trying to come over. Or maybe that side was like the heaven and hell and purgatory the church was always talking about. That had been Alexander’s main belief, the few times he’d mentioned it, and I clung to it as we walked with the forest all around us. I needed something, and while believing that I’d seen a ghost may seem like an insane way to find it, it worked. It gave the woman, and her unworldly beauty, a reason to exist. A reason to be.

With that thought, that rationale, I was able to keep going. I was able to follow Gamble and follow the footprints. I was able to blot out all the sermons I’d heard on the fire and brimstone of hell and latch onto the ones about the glory of heaven. About sitting at the right hand of God and dining at His table. The woman hadn’t given me that impression – she’d looked more like a vagabond, a wanderer – but if I pretended that I believed the things I’d heard in church, I was able to keep my fear under control.

We walked for some time; I couldn’t tell how much then and I can’t now. It may have been ten minutes; it may have been five hours. The moon lit our path, falling in pieces through the trees, and we followed the footprints. The lake was still out there, so far away, the waves pounding their hollow beat against the shore. Then, just as I was beginning to remember the bitter cold, the path ended.

Gamble drew to a stop, kneeling to make sure we weren’t just missing the rest of Alexander’s footprints in the shadows. I let my gaze drift further along, but saw nothing. It wasn’t that we’d lost the trail, it was that there was no more trail to be found.

“This is where he turned it on,” Gamble said.

I licked my lips; they refused to be wetted. “So now what do we do?”

For the first time I could remember, Gamble looked hopeless. His cheeks drew back and he exhaled a long breath slowly through his teeth. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think we call for him.”

“Call?”

“Yes.” He raised his hands, cupped them around his mouth, and yelled Alexander’s name. The cry was loud in the dead quiet, so loud and sharp that I gasped in surprise even though I knew it was coming. I took a step back, my eyes darting everywhere, and Gamble yelled again.

In the next breath, I expected something. It sounds unreasonable, but I believed it would work. If Gamble thought it would, I did as well. I expected Alexander to step out from behind the trees, grinning, arms upraised in triumph.

But, of course, that didn’t happen. We stood in the forest, November cold all around us, and waited. I imagined the soldiers had felt the same way on the front as they awaited the German assaults. I felt on the cusp of something; the air seemed to be crackling with it. The wind blew softly, though there was no more fog, and we waited.

It was too late. I looked at Gamble and I could see he thought it to. We’d come this far, to the end of the line, and it was too late. Alexander was gone. We could hide his boots, but eventually people would start asking. We’d have to have a story, some sort of cover. Anything at all to tell the public so that they wouldn’t know. Because if we told them what we suspected, they’d think we were crazy. And then it would be cells for us both, cells and locks and doctors and the end of life.

I started to turn, to spin on my heel. Pine needles crunched beneath my feet. I even opened my mouth to say something, anything that would perhaps put Gamble at ease. Some words of consolation. But I neither made it even halfway around nor spoke a single word.

There was a sharp crack and a flash, like lightning striking not ten feet away. A pocket of mist sprang into existence, like the woman dissipating except in reverse, and sparks shot from it. They showered up and streamed into the branches, sending the shadows off at all angles. I heard a high-pitched whine, a shriek, like gas escaping from some enclosed container. Then there was an even brighter flash, and a figure appeared. A dark figure, like a skeleton, standing between the branches. I screamed, at last, grabbing at Gamble’s arm for support and trying to run all at the same time.

But I couldn’t; of course I couldn’t. Because my eyes wouldn’t turn from it, were drawn to it like it was a vortex with all the power in the universe. And as it took a step toward us, staggering, I knew. I didn’t want to know, wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. Because sometimes things are just what they are, horrible as that is, and there is nothing that can be done to change them. Nothing in this world or in any other.

5

It was Alexander, but it was Alexander as a mummy. As a corpse. As a naked, living thing, but one that had rotted and decomposed and withered away even while it still lived. His once broad chest was now a sunken cavity, every rib standing out against his skin, his machine hanging loosely below. His arms were just bones with that skin stretched white over them. His eyes were huge, bulging in their sockets, and his hair was pure white. It was the color of the snowfall that was coming in the near months, long and hanging into his eyes.

Gamble let out a cry, like a dog that has been shot, and stumbled backward. I found myself doing the same, moving without being able to tear my eyes away, and the only thing that kept me from falling was the trunk of a tree that I happened to run up against. My head was pounding like a pendulum clock at midnight, like the sound of bombs walking across a European field.

“It’s there,” the thing that had been Alexander croaked. “It’s all there.”

I stared, chewing the inside of my mouth, my breath coming in dry rasps. He was swaying on his feet, his legs barely strong enough to hold himself erect. He looked so brittle, like his bones were now made of glass. But the worst thing, by far, was his eyes. They’d always been so strong before, dark like a storm over the sea, and now they were glassy and white and bloodshot. They looked like the eyes of a blind man.

“It’s there,” he said again. “But it’s not the same.”

Next to me, I could see Gamble trying to pull his gun from his pocket. Trying to get it out and bring it to bear. But something had snagged, and the gun refused to come free.

“It’s the time,” Alexander said. “God forgive me, it’s the time. It runs, you see, but oh so fast. Because they’re all dead, and they don’t need it anymore.”

All I could think of, in that moment, were the clocks. We had hundreds of them, scattered all about the shop and looking like so much junk. I could see them all now, but the hands were wrong. They spun and spun and spun, so fast that they were just blurs of black or gold or white. Just blurs of shadow as the hours flew by. And reflected in the glass of each clock was Alexander’s face, ravaged by age and grinning madly.

“So fast,” Alexander said again, and Gamble got his gun free. But he had no need to use it, because at that moment Alexander pitched forward and fell facedown in the dirt. We could see the little wires poking out all around him. I stood stock still, thinking he would get up, wretched and laughing, alive but not alive and coming at us. But he didn’t. He just lay there, withered and stiff and dead, in the dirt where the fire had gone through a year before and cleared out the underbrush.

The Lighthouse on Torch Lake

1

The lighthouse was a spire of whitewashed stone stretching ramrod-straight into the bitter December air. It rose from the dark eddies of Torch Lake, the light on its pinnacle that of a brightly burning star. Only the full moon, hanging overhead with wisps of cloud moving across its face, could come close to contesting that light. It flashed across the surface of the lake, reaching to the forested banks of the near shore and dropping a globe of luminescence around the lighthouse itself. That globe exposed the base of the tower, not much smaller than the island it sat on, where waves had crashed up to form sheets of ice.

A tall, dark house lurked on the cliff-edged shoreline, empty save for the flickering light of a fireplace and the silhouette of a man in the window.

Standing in the warmth of his fire, listening to the logs crackle and smelling the tinge of smoke that only a true hearth could produce, Adam Daniels sighed. He clutched his steaming mug of coffee in both hands and stared out the front windows at the lighthouse, that lone sentinel in a vast sea of night. The sigh wasn’t brought on by the loneliness eating at his heart since Kalie died, or from the thought of another day spent in the middle of nowhere. The sigh came from something deeper, something he couldn’t ignore no matter how unbelievable it was. It came because Adam Daniels felt he was losing his mind.

He stared for a moment more, unable to take his eyes away, and watched as the beam of light swept over the near shore. Rows of evergreens, capped in light snowfall, stood against the howling wind. They came up to the edge of the lake, to the point where the land fell away into a sheer cliff studded with stone. The drop was fifteen feet and then the lake claimed its own, unrelenting. Finally, with what felt to be a monstrous effort, Adam ripped his gaze away.

“Impossible.” He lowered himself into the chair before the fireplace, letting its cushions enfold him and taking care not to spill coffee on his hands. He managed, for the most part, and found the few drops he did spill to be cooler than he’d expected. He sipped the coffee, letting the rich, dark flavor pool on his tongue, and listened to the wind.

The house groaned. Age, Adam had learned, would do that to a house like nothing else. The building’s distinctly gothic lines remained unchanged by renovation. This, according to his grandfather, was because no one had lived in it for roughly a century and a half.

Adam rested the coffee cup on his leg and tried to keep his eyes on the fire. “This can’t be happening.”

Beside him, Sara said:  “But it is.”

Adam jumped; this time coffee splashed over his hands like the waves against the lighthouse’s foundations. He glared up at her, but kept a slight smirk in the corners of his mouth. “Is a warning too much to ask for?”

Sara smiled. Her skin was almost as white as the clothing she wore, though with a touch of red that ran deep into her flesh. She’d pulled her light hair back over one shoulder. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to remember that, to you, I am not always here.”

Letting his glare soften, Adam shrugged. “Watching me, were you? Watching me stare for twenty minutes at a lighthouse that has never existed?”

“It was more like an hour, but who’s counting?” Sara sat on the arm of the chair, crossing her legs. “Are you all right? You looked…troubled.”

“That’s hardly a surprise, all things considered.”

“But you’ve been doing so well.”

“I know, and I owe you all the thanks for that. For trying to help me understand this.” Adam shifted the coffee to his left hand and reached up to take Sara’s with the other. He slid his fingers between hers and squeezed. “You’ve done far more than you needed to.”

Sara returned the squeeze and let their clasped hands rest in her lap. “I’m glad it’s been a help, but it’s hardly out of my way.”

“Still, it’s appreciated.” She felt so real, which sent a brief tingle through Adam like it always did. She wasn’t, just as the lighthouse wasn’t, but the illusion was as solid as the bedrock under the house. When they talked, he knew he was actually hearing the words. When they touched, it was skin he felt, not some trick of the light.

“Adam, the time is close.”

He grit his teeth. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.” Sara tipped her head toward the winding flight of stairs that led up, away from the sitting room. “He is so close to coming through that I can hear him in the walls, raking his claws across the beams and pulling out nails with his teeth. You must do this, and soon.”

“How will I know where to look?”

Sara smiled, her eyes hazy with distance, and looked out toward the lighthouse. “You will be shown.”

2

There was a dark chain that stretched from Sara’s chest and passed through the wall as if made of smoke. It rattled in the wind, though Adam knew he was the only one who heard the sound, and disappeared into the shroud of night before he could see the end. Still, judging from the direction it took, Adam knew it was connected to the lighthouse. He couldn’t see the woman whose body it enslaved, not at the moment, but instead saw the steel links end abruptly, floating in midair.

“Sara?” He stood. She’d sat with him for an hour, watching as he tried to read a novel in the firelight to calm his nerves. She’d even brought him a second cup of coffee, this one hot almost to the point of boiling, and he’d poured in a liberal shot of whiskey from the flask in his jacket. That had helped more than the novel, though not enough.

I can hear him in the walls, raking his claws across the beams and pulling out nails with his teeth.

It was too much. Adam held the now-empty coffee cup loosely, dangling it from his index finger by the handle, and wondered if he still had time to run.

He’d moved into the house in late June, taking a job at the marina in town. He worked on engines in the winter and the lake brought in a decent amount of tourists during the summer; Adam spend most of those humid months scrubbing algae from the hulls of boats worth more than everything he owned and wishing he hadn’t quit his job when Kalie died. But he’d needed the change. And, of course his grandfather had left him the house.

Sara had shown up two weeks after he’d arrived, but Adam hadn’t known it at the time. He’d heard the movements late at night, the little creaks and moans, and written it off as an old house behaving as an old house will. As the building still settling, never quite at rest.

He smirked. In some ways, he’d been completely right. In some, he couldn’t have been more wrong. For it had nothing to do with the building at all.

“Walk to the window, Adam.” Sara’s voice floated through the room, disconnected like an echo jumping from a canyon wall. She was there – she was always there – but not fully present. Adam didn’t know exactly what held her back, only that she couldn’t control it.

The lighthouse stood as strong as ever, so starkly white it was almost part of the snow and ice that surrounded it. The beam of light began to drift in Adam’s direction, the movement looking casual, random, and yet completely deliberate – something like a man trying to be inconspicuous, but trying too hard.

Then Sara was by his side. “Do you see the moon, Adam?”

Adam pressed the fingertips of one hand against the cold glass. He shook his head. “No.” The stars gleamed and flickered with not a trace of cloud to obscure them, but the moon had disappeared.

“Then things are perfect.” She smiled. “All but the lighthouse has been removed. It will make for a clearer view of what you really need to see.”

“Removed?” With everything else he’d seen, Adam was hardly surprised that something like the moon could simply be taken away. Still, it stirred up that lingering bit of doubt, that piece of his mind that said that none of this could possibly be real. That it was either an elaborate hoax or that he was, in fact, insane.

But he didn’t feel insane (of course, he doubted the really crazy ones ever did) and it was an impossible hoax. He slid an arm around Sara’s waist, pulling her against him and feeling the warmth of her body. She nestled her head against the base of his neck. And that was all Adam needed to know it was real.

“What does he want?”

“Me, Adam. Nothing more.” Sara’s lips moved against his throat, her breath warm. “I may be dead, but I haven’t been claimed. He’s been sent to drag me from this…I guess you would call it purgatory.”

“But that’s not really what it is, is it?”

“Not in the accepted sense of it, no.” Sara’s shoulders moved up and down slightly. “This purgatory isn’t somewhere I’ve chosen, or even somewhere I was meant to go. It’s more like a mistake. Have you ever seen a rope break, Adam?”

“Of course. It comes apart in separate strands unless you burn the ends.”

“Exactly. It frays.” Sara’s hand found his, and it was shaking. “That’s what my life did, Adam. When I died, I left my daughter behind. My death was slow enough, long enough, for me to dwell on that. And ‘rest in peace’ is more than a slogan for headstones, as it turns out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My life frayed. Part of me died, trapped beneath that same lake you’re staring at. But part of me refused to let go.” She tipped her head up, her eyes wide and brimmed with tears. “That part of me stayed here, trying to cling to what I’d lost. Now I can’t put it all together again, not on my own. I can’t leave this house.”

“You were the last one to live here.”

Sara nodded. “Yes, before your family bought it. But none of them took to it, not the way you have. I don’t know what the difference is. But you just…you connect with this place. That’s why you’ve been able to see what they couldn’t, and why you stay here when they abandoned it. It’s more like home to you than it ever could be for them.”

“So what do you need me to do?”

“Burn the ends, Adam.” Sara slid her arms up behind Adam’s neck, lacing her fingers together. He pulled her closer, bringing her up on the tips of her toes. His mind flickered for a brief, heart-wrenching moment to the thing within the walls, ripping out nails with its teeth, but then he brought her to him, and he knew he would do whatever it took.

3

Adam stood on the edge of the cliff, his heart racing inside his chest, and zipped his coat up to his chin. The wind was just as cold as he had expected, pulling the dusting of snow from the ground and sending it swirling through the air. He clicked on the flashlight in his right hand (four D-batteries had been hard to find, but he’d managed) and waved it back at the house. He couldn’t see Sara anymore, but he could see the dark chain. The chain that tied Sara to the lighthouse, the one thing that could show him what he needed to find if he wanted to save her.

Forces were at play. Adam had never been more sure of anything in his life. If the thing in the walls wanted Sara’s soul for hell, then whatever had created the lighthouse (Adam wasn’t quite ready to use the term God yet, but an Opposing Being nonetheless) wanted her to be at peace. To move on to whatever the afterlife held without torment.

Adam shook his head, wondering why this Opposing Being hadn’t cut out the middleman. Why a lighthouse instead of an army of angels with flaming swords? Surely that would have been easier, and he wouldn’t have had to leave the warmth of the fire, let alone wander through thick forest in the dead of night. But then, that was just the old free-will argument rearing its head. Maybe the Forces, such as they were, didn’t want to interfere too directly with the lives of the people below them. Well, some of the Forces anyway. He had no doubt that if the thing in the walls got through, it would rip him into bloody strips before carrying Sara off to its hell.

The lighthouse beam had stopped. They’d watched it happen even as Adam had tugged on his old boots, tearing the worn lining with his urgency to get going. The shaft of light had swung on its slow path until a point not far west of the house. It rested there, unflinching as the stone of the tower.

Adam began walking. The forest sloped gently away from the house, and he paralleled the cliff – making sure to keep a fair distance from it and the frigid water below. His feet crunched against frozen grass that snapped like dry straw; puffs of snow burst up around his boots. The forest was thick, the evergreens not losing any bulk to the season, and Adam pushed branches out of the way as he went. Pine needles cut between his glove and coat sleeve, prickling his skin and sending a shower of snow down his arm in their wake. He cursed under his breath and pulled the sleeve tighter toward his hand.

A trickle of fear ran down his spine. No matter how old he got, the forest at night always held a bit of terror. His imagination, honed by countless novels over the years, took the clawed thing from the house and put it ten feet to his left. The wind rattling the branches wasn’t the wind at all, and the branches were the creature’s skeletal arms bouncing against its ribs as it walked. Or its claws, clicking together in anticipation of slicing through Adam’s flesh. Or its teeth, tired of pulling six-penny nails and ready to move on to something else, perhaps something like fingernails–

Adam stopped and closed his eyes. He imagined Sara, her soft smile, her wide eyes. He thought of the feel of her body as he pulled her close, the taste of her lips. When he opened his eyes again, the creature was back in the house, and the forest was safe.

Of course, he told himself, it wouldn’t be trapped in the house for long. He pushed faster, covering more distance. The lighthouse’s glow, uncontested by the moon, told him his destination was close. He tripped, almost running now, and twisted his wrist as he caught himself on a stump. He thrust his body back up, staggering forward, and then fell into a clearing. The flashlight hit the ground, shattered, and went out with a hiss.

As he lifted his head, Adam saw the break in trees was far more than a simple clearing. A headstone, modest and cut in a simple square, sat at the far end. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years. He could see no paths to this place and the forests around Torch Lake were dense so far from town. The grave could have sat undisturbed for another century and a half if the lighthouse hadn’t led him to it.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Adam stood, brushing the snow from his legs. Part of him still wanted to turn and run; another part felt like he was walking on holy ground and needed to remove his shoes. But then he glanced over his shoulder, at the lighthouse, and all that changed.

The lighthouse looked bigger than ever, a massive, grand structure more striking than any he’d seen. The stonework was perfect, mortar holding each chiseled rock in place. Windows ran up the tower, trimmed in deep blue with shutters to match. Those shutters were open, revealing a circular staircase that twisted up the center of the spire. But the pinnacle, that was what did it. The metal dome was untarnished, not damaged by age or the elements. It was made of out blackened steel, but trimmed in gold. The glasswork had designs playing though it (somehow Adam found he could see them all the way from the ground, as if the tower had drawn closer; the light, in all its brilliance, still wasn’t so bright as to force him to look away). The edging of this artwork was cut into the glass, but the rest looked like fog. And, as he watched, the designs changed. They began as pines brushed with winter, then shifted to what appeared to be falling snowflakes, then shifted again to resemble a face. Adam shivered and grinned at the same time as he recognized Sara looking back at him, her soft smile pulling her lips upward. The beam of light appeared to shine directly through her eyes.

“What do I need to do?” Adam asked the question aloud, sure now that the lighthouse, or the Being responsible for it, could hear him. Could direct him once more.

He didn’t hear the reply, not audibly like he heard Sara, but a voice spoke inside his head – a deep, distant voice, yet warm and welcoming all at the same time.

You already know.

“No.” Adam shook his head and his eyes dropped to the headstone. The years had worn off any writing, but that didn’t shake his faith that it was Sara’s grave. If anything, it strengthened it. “What now?”

Think. Remember.

Adam swallowed hard. He walked to the grave, careful not to actually walk on top of it, and knelt. Sara wanted him to fix things, needed him to release her from her guilt and horror at abandoning her daughter. Needed him to let her rest in peace. Needed him to–

–burn the ends.

Grinning, Adam reached into his pocket. He still had the small box of matches from lighting the fire. He brought the box out and thumbed it open; three matches sat inside, rolling against each other with the motion.

Now he just needed something to burn. Her life was frayed, Sara had said, frayed like a broken rope. And if there was any place that rope would come from, it would be her grave. He suddenly wondered if beside the chain holding her to the lighthouse – holding her to her final chance at escape – was a lone strand of rope.

The woods were littered with brush and fallen branches. They were a bit wet from the snow, but not thoroughly soaked. Adam gathered a small heap and began to arrange them on top of the grave. It felt almost wrong, like he was violating the place, but he pushed the sentiment aside. Sara wouldn’t be offended; she’d be grateful. He piled the smallest sticks first, then the driest of the larger ones. Paper would have been nice, but he no longer had time to go back to the house.

Somewhere, a window shattered. Adam gasped and looked instinctively at the lighthouse, but the misted glass stood unbroken. He saw Sara’s face, still smiling, but then the shapes changed. They drifted, forming a scene he knew all too well – the sitting room, near the fireplace. Sara crouched in the middle of the room, one hand raised, her eyes wide now with fear. Her mouth curled back in a scream, a scream that Adam heard on the wind. Broken glass lay around her feet.

A shadow moved, stepped into the picture. It was a gaunt thing, vaguely human, with a hunched back and hands that hooked into claws. Ribs stood out against its skin like a cage covered in wallpaper. It was the kind of creature that tore nails out with its teeth. Sunken eyes glared with a hatred that was older than any of the trees in the forest, older than Torch Lake itself. It threw its head back and howled, a sound that covered the entire spectrum of sound, from the low growl of rage to the piercing scream of something both dying and infuriated.

Adam went for the matches, dropped them, then got one out. He dragged it along the rough strip on the side of the box. Nothing. He tried again, harder, and the match snapped in half.

Glancing up, his hands working at the matchbox without aid from his eyes, Adam watched as the demon-thing stepped to loom over Sara. She turned his way and looked like she was standing before a firing squad.

The next match was in his hand before he knew it, and he scraped it against the side of the box one, two, three times. Nothing. The head peeled back, red flaking off in chunks. Adam threw it away. He fumbled out the last one, his fingers holding it so tightly his knuckles turned white, and pulled it across the side of the box. Again, nothing happened.

They were wet. Suddenly, he knew. He’d fallen over and the matches had gotten wet in the snow. But they didn’t feel wet. They felt fine. Still, they must have taken enough water that they would never light.

In desperation, tears running down his cheeks unnoticed, Adam tried one last time. It looked as useless as before; the match made half the trip without reacting. Then, at the last second possible, it lit.

With a scream that was half surprise and half pure joy, Adam shoved the match into the fire. He almost did it too hard, snuffing it out against the damp wood. But the flame stayed strong and, after an agonizing moment, the smallest of the branches caught. The fire spread, slowly at first but gaining speed as it went. Gaining urgency, maybe. Adam blew lightly on the flames, fueling them. They grew brighter, more robust, and Adam heard the creature shriek again. This time, it was in pain.

He saw Sara standing now, the creature in front of her. She had her hands out, but not to fend off an attack. She held the chain in her hands, and it was covered entirely in fire. The metal burning and twisting and melting. She’d wrapped it around the creature’s neck and its skin seemed to be melting off. It tried to slash the chain with its claws; the fingers fell away with a burst of black smoke. The beast howled a final time, raggedly, and the chain cut through its neck. There was no blood, just another burst of smoke, and Sara was alone.

At his feet, the fire roared with new life, and Adam thought he smelled something other than burning wood. Something foul, deep and horribly decayed, like a swamp or a mass grave rapidly combusting. He stumbled backward, covering his face, but the smell was gone as quickly as it had come.

Sara’s chain began to burn brighter and Adam had to shield his eyes. Her form flickered, becoming less solid, more like smoke itself. Adam peered between his fingers, feeling his heart ache with sorrow and elation meshed together. Then the chain turned to smoke in Sara’s hands, and she was gone.

Adam dropped back to his knees, his hands falling from his face as the glow from the lighthouse became bearable again. He realized he was crying now and made no effort to stop himself. Wind froze his cheeks. The lighthouse began to shrink, to fall back.

Wiping his eyes, Adam tried to force his sorrow down a notch. He was alone, again, but things were set right. Whatever – whoever – had picked this as a battleground had been beaten back, at least for now.

Softly, like distant thunder, Adam heard Sara’s voice on the air. “I’ll find Kalie,” the voice said. “I’m sure she’s here, and this is a wonderful place.”

“I know,” Adam said, pulling himself to his feet. He could still see the lighthouse, smaller for the moment but no less beautiful, and it seemed to him that maybe that beauty was a fragment of the world Sara had gone to. A glimmer, like stars in the blanket of night.

Candles

1

“The Bible says that the dead walked,” Caitlyn said. “It’s right there after Jesus dies. I remember. It says that the temple curtain tore in two and the dead walked in the streets.”

“I know,” Father Gannon replied. The light flickered off his face, throwing shadows over his eyes and turning his thin white hair into a halo. His skin, usually like paper with blood barely held beneath, looked translucent. “Why is that important?”

Caitlyn felt her fingers digging into the backs of her hands; the nails were long and ragged, but they’d lost their last nail file and no one dared go out to look for another. “Because of how they are, out there.”

“No,” Gannon said.

“What?”

“I mean then. Why is it important then?”

“When Matthew wrote it?”

“The time he wrote it about, yes. There is a difference there.”

Caitlyn bit her lip. Outside, she could hear the crowd moving. Growing. Swelling. They would have packed the main yard by now and would be pressing up against the houses. There were less these days, but still so many, and all together they sounded like they could fill the canyon. But none of that mattered, not here. Only Father Gannon had any authority inside his church, and he was waiting.

Finally, she said: “I don’t know.” It was backing out, and they both knew it.

But Gannon didn’t let it go. As they’d both known he wouldn’t. “Are you reading it? Every word?”

Caitlyn thought about telling him that she wasn’t reading it at all, that the last Bible had been lost fifteen years ago and she’d never read it. That he may have it down, but that she wasn’t old enough to have the word-of-mouth version committed to memory. Hadn’t had the time. But she’d said it all before, and rehashing the ground wouldn’t change a thing. “I may be forgetting some.”

“You are.”

And she waited. That was better than guessing, though not by much.

“It says the bodies of the saints rose,” Gannon said, leaning back and smiling. “The saints. The holy people who had died.”

Caitlyn thought. Gannon would give her time, if she needed it. If there was one thing he valued, it was time. Maybe because they all lived with the knowledge that time was forever short. That, any night, their time could end. That their whole way of life could be swept under. So any time spent, used at all, was a treasure.

Outside, the crowd was a low din like an engine on idle. The talk was quiet and subdued, but it pulsed like a heartbeat. It was the talk of anticipation building. And now she could smell the smoke. Faint traces of it, little gray fingers, rose from the candles and filled Gannon’s church. His sanctuary.

“Only the holy ones were given second life,” Caitlyn said. “God let them rise from the dead. The saints.”

“Exactly,” Gannon said. The candles flickered, the only light they had now. Running the generator wasn’t worth it unless a storm hit or it looked like…well, like things were about to end. Then they had to have power to run the electric grids and the guns and the computer screens that blinked green in the control center. “So why did you come here?”

“To ask you.”

“Of course, my child. But why did you want to know?”

“Because,” she said, and that was all. She couldn’t voice the rest, couldn’t bring the accusations down. So she stopped, because then Gannon might know, but he might not. And that was enough difference to keep him from talking to her parents.

Gannon sighed, his translucent cheeks puffing and his translucent lips bulging out. “Go to your mother, Child. And think.”

“I will, Father.” The air felt thick; maybe the smoke was heavier than it appeared. It tasted bitter and sharp and dried the roof of her mouth, and Caitlyn didn’t like it.

“Peace be with you.”

“And also with you.” And then she was ducking out the door, not daring to glance back like Lot’s wife, the pillar of salt, and the crowd was all around her.

2

The walls rose up on every side, sheer cliffs of stone that encircled the town. Trees dotted the surface, struggling to grow under the harsh glare of the desert, struggling to grow even though the box canyon held them all in with its borders and its walls and its safety. A small stream fell from the eastern cliff face, the only reason any of them were alive, looking like a river of silver in the moonlight. It splashed into a pond at that end, where it drained and disappeared. Caitlyn had no idea where it went, or where it came from; she’d never been outside the canyon.

The air was cold, like it always was at night, but the crowd was warm and moving like a living thing, like one huge organism shivering to keep itself alive. The smell was like mud and dirt and sweat and stagnant water and spoiled food. There were so many, Caitlyn thought, sliding through them, between them, around them. People were talking, whispering, glancing but trying not to glance at the small hut on the fringe of the houses. Or at least trying to disguise their glances as something else, something other than morbid curiosity and a desire to see the condemned.

To see those who were almost dead.

Caitlyn shivered, from more than the air alone, looking past a young couple (their hands clasped together, tight, her eyes on him and his eyes on the cliff) and finding her mother. Her father would be close, she knew, probably with his eyes where the boy’s were: On the ridge. Looking at that bank of sand-colored stone where it formed a hard edge under the stars.

She moved quickly, slipping to her mother’s side. Caitlyn had known these crowds for all of her life, but they still held something that chilled her. It wasn’t the way they talked, not exactly, but the way they acted. The way their shoulders were hunched, their backs taught, their eyes wary and tinged with fear. The way they swallowed more than they needed to, fidgeted more than usual, and tried to avoid talking about it as if that would make it somehow less real.

Caitlyn’s mother looked down, tried to smile and came up short. She held two candles in her right hand, between the fingers like claws. They were white and half-melted and she held one out to Caitlyn. “Where did you go?”

“To talk to Father Gannon.” Caitlyn took the candle; the wax was melted back and reminded her of dead skin.

“About?” That’s the way it always was with her: to the point. Don’t tell a story, don’t give a whole account, just get to the end and explain yourself.

“Them,” Caitlyn said, because she didn’t need to say anything else.

Her mother went stiff; her lips locked into a thin line that looked as hard as the stone and as unforgiving as the desert sand. For a moment she just stared, her eyes vacant and not seeing anything, and then she took a deep breath. Caitlyn could see her breasts rise and fall, slowly, getting ready. “You have to stop this, Caitlyn. Your father told you. Just accept it for what it is.”

“I’m sorry,” Caitlyn said, because that was best. But she wasn’t, no matter what Gannon taught. “I just…it doesn’t seem like the right thing. That’s all. I just wanted to know more.”

“And did he tell you?”

“No. Well, sort of.” He’d told her the same as Caitlyn’s mother, though in more words and with longer sentences. And, of course, with his Bible to back him up. That hadn’t been what she’d wanted, but it had been what she got.

And sometimes that’s all you had.

“Then you should be happy,” Caitlyn’s mother said.

To that, there was no answer. Caitlyn fingered the candle, carving a groove in it with her nail. The wax stuck to her skin, soft and pliable and somehow just wrong. She pulled her finger away, holding the candle as lightly as she could without dropping it.

Somewhere on the edge of the crowd, a light flared up. Died. Flared again. And then the candles were being lit, coming like a storm across the sand, a slow wave as the flame was passed. Caitlyn saw the young couple, the two who were holding hands, move it between them. The boy got it first, hesitated to make sure his was lit, and then passed it to the girl. She tipped her candle into his, so as not to drip the melting wax, and then hers was lit as well.

Caitlyn watched it come, finding she didn’t like it at all. The way the lights moved, a dancing sea of them now, like fireflies. The people’s faces were washed in orange, in amber, with shadows falling in all directions. She thought of Gannon’s eyes, dark with those shadows, and her mother shook her arm.

“Caitlyn,” she said. “Light yours.” She was holding her own low, the burning lick of flame barely wavering in the still air.

But Caitlyn couldn’t. She could see only Gannon’s eyes, like empty black sockets, and the hut on the edge of the makeshift town. The hut they’d thrown together just after they’d run here, if the history she’d been told was true. They’d fled here after the dead rose, after the tombs were opened, after the remains of both the saints and the devils walked the streets.

“Caitlyn,” her mother said. “Come on.”

Now, a dozen stooped figures came out of that hut. A path cleared before them like sea waters splitting before Moses. There were guards all around, guards with guns and the precious few bullets they had left, pushing them along. The prisoners walked with their heads down, their hands bound behind them, and to Caitlyn they looked like ghosts. They were naked and white in the moonlight.

They’re walking, Caitlyn thought. They’re actually walking. Going to it.

Her mother reached down, grabbed Caitlyn’s wrist. Her fingers felt like steel, cold and strong and mostly bone. “You have to worship. Light your candle.” She twisted Caitlyn’s wrist, bringing the wicks together.

“We shouldn’t,” Caitlyn said. Her throat felt thick, like she’d swallowed the sand she was standing on. Or, maybe, like it was made of wax and melting in on itself.

“We have to.” Both candles were burning now.

“No. The Father and the Son and…” She couldn’t get any farther. The sea of lights was all around her, thousands of pinpoints against the black. Thousands, yes, but less by far than she remembered. Less than last year even, or last month. And the crowd was always shrinking.

Caitlyn’s mother knelt beside her, eyes narrow and hard and every bit like Gannon’s. “They’re the past. Let that go. Isn’t that what Gannon says in church?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen to him, if you won’t listen to me.”

Caitlyn felt a hotness in the corners of her eyes, a wet heat that threatened to stream its way down her cheeks and drip to the sand, where it would sink away forever. “I do. By why them?” Because that’s what she had asked Gannon, and he hadn’t given her what she wanted. Because it ate at her like a cancer. “Why them?”

In the dark, Caitlyn’s mother was silent. She licked her lips, slowly, her tongue thin and white and shriveled and sitting on her lips for a moment before she sucked it back in. Her grip on Caitlyn’s wrist loosened, slightly, and then she said: “Look. They’re here.”

Caitlyn didn’t want to look; she’d seen it before. On the first of every month, when this always happened. She had seen it and she never wanted to again, though that was as impossible as it was to leave the canyon, where the walls and the guns kept them safe. Where the candles kept them safe.

But Caitlyn’s mother was looking, unaware that her daughter wasn’t. “We worship them, now,” she said. Her voice was low and hollow and she raised her candle above her head so it could be seen. “We worship them because they’re the only gods we have left.”

3

They slowly came into view, lumbering and staggering and lining the ridge until the canyon was ringed in bodies. They looked like sentries on a castle wall or mourners around a deep grave. Torches gleamed in the night, bolder and brighter and stronger than the candles, showing their faces. Faces that were white with blood-loss and green with mold and yellow with rot. And, of course, red with blood, smeared and caked on like makeup. Some of the faces were only partial, missing pieces and chunks of flesh and all of their teeth. Those sometimes rotted and fell out, even if the bodies lived.

Even if the dead walked.

When they had discovered torches, when they had learned the use of fire, Caitlyn didn’t know. It had been some time when she was young, and she had vague memories of fear sweeping across the town like the candles had moved across the crowd. Because if the things had torches, then they were learning. Adapting. Evolving. But the basket came next, and the horror of the torches was forgotten.

The basket dropped down now, Caitlyn saw as she finally looked. It was impossible not to. It came over the edge, lowered on ropes down the face of the cliff. The group of prisoners, of ghosts, had stopped below it. The guards watched it come; the others just looked at the ground. A few were shaking softly, sobbing. She didn't know them, and that somehow made it worse; they were faceless things, corpses not yet dead.

“We can’t,” Caitlyn said. “They’re part of us.”

“Not anymore,” her mother said.

But they were. They had been picked at random, victims of the drawings that took place each month, before this. Caitlyn hadn’t gone to those, hadn’t been allowed, but she knew she could be picked. And if her name came out of the jar, she would be stripped naked and sent to the basket. Whether she wanted to worship them or not.

Above and on all sides, she could hear them talking. They were bodies, corpses, given back their life through an event Caitlyn hadn’t been born for. She’d heard rumors of military secrets, an escaped biological weapon, something about a vaccine that had backfired terribly. But mostly that topic was avoided, ignored. This was life now, all she’d known and all anyone expected to know. Because outside of the canyon there was a whole world of them, a dead and yet thriving world, where the pockets of survivors were slowly dwindling toward extinction.

Their talk wasn’t normal, wasn’t real. It was the mindless babble of children, the mumbled, slurred words of old men. It was excited, guttural grunting that showed emotion and little else. They jostled each other, shifting from foot to foot in anticipation. They knew, with the basket down and the candles lit, that their meal was coming. Pavlov would have been grinning madly, proud as hell, had he been there.

The first two prisoners were put into the basket. Their bare skin shone, white and pallid and stretched over their bones. Food was scarce and rationed and these were half-starved skeletons being given up. But they would do. They would satisfy the mob on the ridge, give them enough to live on until the next month, when it all happened again. The dead had grown smart enough, had adapted enough, to know that much. They could get food without a fight, without the risk of a second death, one that would be permanent. But if the food wasn’t sent up, Caitlyn knew, the canyon would be overrun. The world was full of them, after all.

The basket began its accent, and Caitlyn watched. The crowd seemed to be holding its breath. It was awful, but it was human nature. Hadn’t people once watched hangings, and burnings, and clapped as heads fell away from guillotines? Caitlyn hated it but had to watch, because this was the life she had.

In the basket, the prisoners began to move. They always did, trying to leap over the side and kill themselves on the floor below. The desert was merciless, and would be a faster, more painless death than the one that waited above. Even if the fall did seem to take an eternity. But they’d been tied in, tightly, and they wouldn’t get out. They would try, Caitlyn knew, but they wouldn’t. They never did.

It wasn’t so bad, she thought, that they were all trapped. That they were forced to live inside the canyon, scraping by on a tiny garden and whatever wildlife managed to fall over the sides. It wasn’t much, but it was life. And it was all she’d ever known. The stories of cities and highways and airplanes were just that: Stories. She didn’t doubt that they were true, but it was impossible to miss something you’d never had.

What she hated was what they’d become. Selling their own to save themselves, whittling their number down as the wax candles shrunk. Waving their lights in the air, telling the things up above that they revered them, worshiped them, respected them. And then sending people, real people with lives and hopes and desires and emotions. Sending them to die like the animal scarifies in some of Gannon’s sermons. Just flesh and blood to get what they wanted: a little more time.

The basket reached the top. Decaying hands grabbed the ropes and dragged it over, and the torches began to converge. To move together. The basket was thrown back down, thrown back for the ones still left, and for a moment Caitlyn could see the prisoners at the top. They stood silhouetted against the lights, against the moon, for the first time seeing the world outside of the canyon. And then the dead fell upon them.

4

“The Bible is God’s gift to us,” Gannon said. “It can explain everything.”

“But,” Caitlyn said, and that was all. She looked down, at her bare feet, her ragged toenails, her calloused skin.

“But what, my child?”

“It just can’t be. It can’t be what God wants.”

“No?” Gannon leaned forward; he smelled musty and rotted and old. Like them, almost, but barely clinging to life. “And what if they are God, Caitlyn?”

“They can’t be,” she said, knowing that she was just repeating herself but not knowing what else to do.

She had watched the whole ceremony, watched her candle burn lower and lower as the sacrifices were sent up the wall. She’d heard them screaming as they were torn apart, heard the snarls and growls of the others. Heard the screams strangled off, wet and sharp and final.

“The Bible is full of the signs, you know.” Gannon leaned back, closing his eyes. “The dead walked when the veil was torn. Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, was raised from the dead. A sick girl died, and her parents ran to Jesus. He smiled, said she was only sleeping, and took her hand. She woke up, her life returned to her.”

Caitlyn couldn’t speak. It was too much and her throat was so thick now, worse than it had ever been. It was fear, she knew, fear that was choking her. Not only fear that she would be picked, that her name would be drawn, but of something else. Something far worse.

Fear that Gannon was right.

Reaching over to light another of his own candles, Gannon looked away from her. But as he spoke, she could see his smile. It was thin and dying and completely without hope. “Jesus himself rose from the grave,” Gannon said. “He threw off his robes and pushed the stone aside like it was nothing.”

Caitlyn felt the tears, now, on her cheeks. They tasted like salt as they reached her lips, like salt and water that had been ruined by it. Tainted. It couldn’t be.

“This is the end, Caitlyn, that all the signs were pointing too. God has resurrected his saints, those that he loves.”

It couldn’t be.

“This is the end of times. The sinners have been separated from the lambs.”

“No,” Caitlyn breathed. “Please, no.”

Gannon looked back to her, the shadows on his face like patches of night. The candles flickered, just two now in lonely worship. The smoke was thicker than it should have been, like burning tar, filling the room. “Yes,” Gannon said. “Yes.”

And he was still smiling.

Sarah

1

Sarah’s teeth fell out in her sleep. It wasn’t one of those things where she knew. She didn’t wake up, screaming and clawing at her mouth. She didn’t feel a burst of pain or even a tingle – nothing so much as a jolt of electricity from a 9-volt battery, if one was to lick the prongs. She didn’t have any feeling that it had happened at all, save for the light pressure of the teeth, all five of them, lying on her tongue.

Her face, of course, was covered in blood. She could feel that, too, like week-old makeup left to dry and clog all her pores.

She spit the teeth out into her hand. They were small and white and didn’t weigh very much. She stared at them for a moment, that longest of moments between breaths, and it felt like the entire house fell all around her. Those teeth, perfectly white and perfectly out of place. They looked like popcorn, she thought, very small pieces of popcorn. Then she began to scream.

2

There are always secrets; it’s the heart of everything that is wrong with the world. Sarah’s secret was that she was disobedient, which wasn’t so uncommon after all. But it was more complicated than that. Her other secret, her real secret, was that she had found her grandmother’s body in the attic. That secret was so huge, so dark, so all-encompassing that she didn’t even know how to put it into words. So she didn’t, and that solved everything.

Until her teeth fell out, that was.

No one was home, a fact that at first felt horrific and then so very fortunate. Because if someone had come to find her, caked in blood and holding her own teeth and talking about finding a body, they would have taken her in. Whether to the Carson Police Department or the Gaviston Insane Asylum hardly made any difference. She would have ended up in both places eventually, in whatever order, and she would have spilled the whole story. About her grandmother, about the eyes, and about the tiny rip in the air. And that would have been enough to have her locked away, if whatever was behind those eyes didn’t kill her first.

She screamed for an hour or so before she passed out. It was a combination of shock and dread and a lack of oxygen (screaming drains one’s lungs like nothing else) and it did the trick. When she awoke, a bit later, she was able to keep the screams down. She had to swallow them and it was like swallowing glue, but she was able.

Barely.

She folded her fingers around the teeth, carried them into the bathroom, and looked at herself. She stood like that, seeing those burning eyes in her mind. And seeing the blood, but that was secondary. Then she shook both off (washing the blood) and put the teeth in the little glass that she’d always used for her toothbrush before. This was a similar purpose, she thought, and fitting.

It was then, with everything taken care of, that she began to plan. To think. Because all secrets come with plans, whether we know it or not. We make them alone, in the dark, as we try to fall asleep. Most of them involve lies, some of them involve running, and a very small amount involve further action. Action such as burning down a house without first leaving it. Sarah’s plan contained all three.

3

In 1998, just after the football season closed and all those people died in the snowstorm in the mountain’s foothills, Sarah’s grandmother had disappeared. It wasn’t said where she’d gone, but it was assumed. Sarah had been seven and not interested in asking further questions. Her parents told her that her grandmother had left, and she’d accepted it for what it was. Accepted it as a white lie from her father and the death of someone she loved.

Most people think children forget, and this is not at all true. They remember, it seems, better than anyone else. Their memories can be mixed up in the early years, a jumbled package of thoughts that are interwoven and separate all at the same time, but they do remember.

That was how, when Sarah found her grandmother’s body in the attic, she knew who she was. It was an intellectual knowing, the kind where one doesn’t doubt, even for a moment. She knew and she wasn’t able to breathe both for the fear and the dust. She just stared, lips apart, teeth still fully in her mouth and yawning away from each other like the edges of a violent fault line.

The body was white, bloodless. Embalmed and rotten. She could see it though what looked like a rip in the very air. It was as if the air had become a tent, the kind to hold circuses beneath. The canvas had been torn and what lay behind was a vast, deep darkness like the void between stars. The body floated there, standing on something Sarah couldn’t see, and it was her grandmother.

And then she’d seen the eyes. Too old to believe such things and yet too young to discredit them, she’d blinked. Then again. Then rubbed at her contacts (perhaps it was a trick of the light, that dim bulb hanging on a string; perhaps she’d gotten dust on the lenses). But the eyes had stared, burning in her grandmother’s face like the wicks of candles lit around Christmas.

They had spoken, and yet they hadn’t. No words, no verbal communication, had been exchanged. And yet Sarah had heard her grandmother all the same, speaking in her mind. It sounded like she was at the bottom of a well, the words echoing their way up the ancient stone walls and finally breaking to the surface. But Sarah could understand them just fine.

Sarah’s father had killed her. That was what her grandmother had said in that rasping voice of the very old. Her own son. Killed her by switching her medication, knowing she was too blind to really see it. He’d killed her because the hospital was the next step and the insurance wasn’t enough. Not with the economy sloping ever downward and the job market following closely. Not with all the ailments she had contracted, all the pills she needed to take. He, Sarah’s father, hadn’t wanted to shell out money just to string his mother along until her inevitable death. It had seemed a waste; just prolonging a life of lying in bed, watching reruns and eating baby food. So he’d accepted her death, switched her pills, and made it happen.

Belief is hardest when things are true. It’s a fact that, in itself, is hard to swallow. But a fact nonetheless. And Sarah knew – knew – that what her grandmother said was true. It had that ring, that feel. And, of course, her corpse was speaking it, with her eyes burning like candles. That was something that had never happened to Sarah before, and she was inclined to believe the story for that alone.

Kill him, her grandmother had said.

Kill her own father.

And Sarah, believing or otherwise, had disobeyed.

4

Oedipus killed his father in order to marry his mother. Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, with an axe. Dipendra killed most of his family, including his father, at a royal dinner in 2001, in Nepal. But Sarah, despite her instructions, could not kill hers.

So she kept the secret. She swallowed it just like she would later swallow her screams, holding it in and holding it down. She stayed out of the attic and inside her room, usually with the door locked. Her family thought it was a phase; they waited for it to pass.

Sometimes, at night, she thought she saw those eyes in the darkness. She thought she saw the rip in the air, darker even than the night, with her grandmother crouching just beyond it. In another world that looked nothing like the heaven and hell painted on the walls of Sarah’s church. She thought she heard her grandmother’s voice working its way up out of that well, asking her, pleading with her.

She closed her eyes. She turned on the radio. She forced herself to forget it and to go back to sleep. It worked, for a time. Most things are that way, and most things fail in the end.

The threats began with her death, which was too far. Her grandmother cursed her, told Sarah she would come for her, told Sarah she would kill her. But it was empty and they both knew it, because her grandmother still needed her. And, Sarah reasoned, her grandmother couldn’t kill, not on her own. Her father, after all, was still very much alive.

So she ignored it. She was growing ever better at that, and for a time she thought it had worked.

Then the threats changed. Because she couldn’t kill Sarah, her grandmother had said, but she could hurt her. Oh yes. She could do things from the other side, things that would be so much worse than death. This too, Sarah had ignored. If one threat had been empty, logic ran that they all would be. That one statement would match the other.

Then, on a morning when no one was home, Sarah’s teeth fell out.

5

Sarah was able to keep from screaming again only because she was trying to keep her nerves from snapping. She could feel them going like an old rope, an anchor line in a storm. Strand by strand, they were breaking away. Five at a time, even, one for each tooth. But she couldn’t let them all go yet. No; that wouldn’t do. Because there was one thing left. Her plans contained all three: the lies, the running, and the further action. The burning.

She wrote an email, then sent it to her father. His computer would be destroyed in the fire, so he wouldn’t get it for at least a day. By then it would be too late. The letter was short, to the point, and a complete lie. It told him that she’d gone down to the lake for a day with her friends. It told him that they would be camping that night. It told him that she loved him.

The next two blurred together. Because the action would be a sort of running, the only sort she could do if she wanted to get anywhere. If she wanted to be safe. So she got the gasoline from the garage, the matches from the kitchen, and the rope from the shed out back. There was rope in the attic, as well, but she wouldn’t so much as look at it. Not now. Not there.

The teeth had been white, she remembered, the blood licked off of them while she slept. White like little pieces of popcorn. She wanted to forget and couldn’t and the anchor line lost a few more strands.

She tied herself to the bed. The rope was strong and wouldn’t break no matter how hard she threw herself against it. She tied the knots so that she couldn’t get them apart, running across the room to pull them tight. She ran until there was no room left; the rope around her ankles took her feet out and the rope around her wrists flipped her onto her back hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. But the knots were tight, and that was what mattered.

The gasoline was easier. She poured it all across the bed, then the walls. To make sure that the fire spread, that it climbed up that yellow wallpaper and got to the ceiling and got through the walls and into the other rooms. And the attic, of course; she did it to make sure it got to the attic.

Her teeth had fallen out in a neat little row, all five right from the front. Just fallen out, and they wouldn’t be the last. If her teeth could go, her arms could be next. Or her eyes, perhaps. Her grandmother had some power here; that much, Sarah knew. And it was more than the power of speech. She could take any part, and Sarah couldn’t stand any more. Any more and she really would snap, and then she’d be just like Oedipus or Lizzie or Dipendra.

She sat down on the bed. It wouldn’t be the glorious death of monks, burning in the streets. It wouldn’t be the remembered death of martyrs, burning on poles in Europe for all to see. But it would be the greatest death, because it would save another. And that should be worth it, would be worth it, had to be worth it.

The gasoline would be enough, Sarah thought. This much, all around her. Especially if her father had the email and didn’t expect her to be inside. The gas would burn hot and fast and consume all of her and all of the ropes and no one would ever know. The secret would be kept, the secret too horrible to put into words, and things would work out. Wasn’t that what her father had always preached? That things worked out, one way or another, for good?

She could have hated him, she knew. But the truth is hardest to accept when one knows it is the truth, and she wouldn’t do it. She believed her grandmother and yet wouldn’t let herself believe. Because her father was her father, and he couldn’t have done something so terrible.

Couldn’t have.

Couldn’t have.

Could.

Sarah lit a match. The anchor line was so thin now, so thin it was almost breaking. And she was almost believing, almost believing her grandmother. The gas fumes were around her, thick like fog rolling in across the lake. They were thick like syrup when the year grew late and the air grew cold. Thick like the steam from a shower that has been turned on and forgotten.

Thick enough, Sarah thought.

Thick enough.

The match fell, and the smoke was thicker still. Sarah’s screams, this time, were not alone. They were accompanied by a perfect twin, a perfect harmonic, that seemed to come from the attic as the flames lapped at the walls, and rose.

Shards of Glass

Jackson watched the blood run over his hands, feeling his pulse beat weakly at the wrists, and wished he had never met Gerald Bonderman.

Of course, when you got down to it, he never really had.

November latched onto upstate Michigan with bitter teeth, bringing early snows and colds winds harsh enough to burn the skin. Jackson had watched most of the storm from indoors, not venturing out unless he had to. Which he rarely did. He’d moved to the small town of Harrison just two months before, with a little over two million in the bank and no friends or family members to speak of. He’d bought the old house on the corner of Elm and Mason with hard cash, much to the surprise of the real estate agent, and had the money to have most things shipped directly to his door. Fresh food was the only exception, but he managed to do his shopping in the early morning, when no one was around. The packaged stuff, he had the UPS driver drop off at the door, buying it in small enough amounts that he would never need to sign.

He slumped against the wall, his head leaning back just under the third-story window. He could hear a snowplow ambling down Elm, its blade scrapping against hard-packed snow and breaking through to the pavement. Wind whistled through the cracks in the front of the house; a cold draft knifed at Jackson’s ankles.

In the shadows, he knew he’d find Gerald. Jackson cursed and sucked in a weak breath. “Why? Can I at least ask you why?”

The hall he sat in ran along the front wall from one end of the house to the other, and the rooms across from him lay silent and shrouded in darkness. Jackson saw a dim shape floating within the nearest one, something like the head and shoulders of a person, and heard faint laughter drift out on the air. “You can.” The words crossed his mind, though he didn’t hear them in the usual sense. An audio recorder would have picked up nothing more than the wind, had he thought to have one running.

“Then give me an answer!”

“You won’t like it.” The shape shimmered across the doorway again, disappearing into the deeper shadows in the corner of the room.

“As if I like this.” Jackson’s eyes dropped to the jagged glass at his feet. A minute ago the pieces had been full, together, and filled with water. But the glass had been plucked from his hands as he watched the snowplow come up the street and smashed itself to pieces against the wall. And then those pieces, oh those pieces.

His throat still hurt from his own screams. Jackson shifted his hands to wrap his fingers more tightly around his wrists. The blood poured out, strangely warm in the crisp air, without abating in the least.

“Jackson?” The voice sounded concerned, almost frightened.

“What?”

“You won’t hate me, will you? Don’t you understand? I had to. I had to.”

Jackson grunted and let his head fall to the side. He felt weaker than he had since taking a shotgun blast to the calf while small game hunting with his brother. They’d been ten, his brother had still been alive, and it had been purely an accident. Thomas had thought he’d seen a rabbit, spun, and fired. The pellets shredded Jackson’s muscle and tore his skin away like wrapping paper. He’d lost a lot of blood, but Tommy had pulled him out of the woods in time for the doctors to save Jackson’s life.

He closed his eyes. But a car crash had taken Tommy, not two hours after a faulty electrical socket had burned down his parents’ house with them still inside. Jackson, twelve years old, found himself completely and utterly alone.

“You won’t hate me?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Promise? Give me an eye-clench.”

Sighing and wondering how long he had left, Jackson winked at the room. An eye-clench, their own personal jargon. Jackson had said that the wink looked like the eye clenching as if it were a fist instead. Gerald, trapped forever in his child’s mindset, had loved it.

“You couldn’t have waited?” Jackson pushed with his feet, propelling himself a bit further upright; he’d begun to slide to the floor. He figured he’d end up there eventually, but not yet. “I’m seventy-three, Gerald, and I eat nothing but frozen pizzas and cans of Budweiser. I couldn’t have lasted much longer.”

The shape in the far room froze, though it seemed to shift as if with nervous anticipation. It wavered slightly, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s so long. Too long. And I thought–”

Jackson swallowed, barely getting the mouthful of saliva down his throat. “You thought what, Gerald?”

“I thought you might leave.”

With a laugh, Jackson held one of his hands up to look at the cut on the wrist. He wiped some of the blood away; the meat below was a darker shade of red, a deep shade that reminded him of uncooked steak. “No chance of that now.”

Gerald’s form dissolved, shrinking as it did so. “I’m sorry.”

Jackson had met Gerald – or had an encounter that came as close to truly meeting him as Jackson figured was possible – nearly two months after he’d moved in. He’d been getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth in the upstairs bathroom. He typically used the downstairs one for such things, though he’d outfitted all three with enough accessories that they could be used. This particular night he hadn’t been able to find his toothbrush in the lower washroom, so he’d wandered up both flights of stairs in search of another.

Gerald had met him there (he liked the third floor better; as Jackson would eventually find out, it had been his). Jackson had thought he'd spotted a strange shift in the shadows as he mounted the stairs, and a chill had run down his spine. He’d pushed the feeling aside, chiding himself for giving in to such childish fears. Then he had seen it again, in the mirror, as he brushed his teeth. He’d spun around as fast as his knees – not having their best day, as they rarely did at his age – would let him. He’d seen nothing.

But he’d heard. Not much, just a lone word that came to being in his mind as clearly as if it had been spoken audibly.

“Hello.”

Now, looking back, Jackson wished he had just skipped brushing his teeth and gone to bed. He knew deep within himself that it wouldn’t have made a difference – Gerald would have found another time, another place – but he couldn’t help but wonder if that one act had been his undoing.

He shrugged his shoulders, trying to get some feeling back into his forearms besides the dull throb that came with every beat of his heart. “You still haven’t told me, Gerald. Don’t you think I at least deserve to know?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Not much of an answer for a dying man’s last wish.”

“I’m tough.”

Jackson frowned. “What?”

“I’m tough.” A cold blast of air flew down the hall. “Mom says I have to be tough, so I am. It’s the only way.”

Jackson cleared his throat, considering his next words carefully. As he’d gotten to know Gerald, or whatever Gerald was, he’d learned a number of things. First and foremost, he knew Gerald was a child. Or had been, at least. He also knew, as evidenced by the precise cuts on his wrists that the broken glass had seemed to inflict on its own, that Gerald could be ruthlessly violent. Maybe that also was tied to his age, a lack of inhibitions. But Jackson had questions he wanted to ask, and he figured he was done for anyway. “How did you die, Gerald?”

For a moment, there was silence. Then the wind screamed. It had been blowing, whistling, before, but now it lashed out with a frenzy like Jackson had never heard. It tugged at his clothes and flung the glass fragments down the hall. They shattered against the end wall in a shower of crystal.

In the room across the hall, Gerald’s shadow took on a dense form. It could be made out easily against the dark backdrop of the room, a cluster of dark that looked like a man – only much too short. “I don’t want to think about that.” Gerald’s voice was as cold as the November air.

Jackson took a deep breath. “Then I’ll leave.”

“What?” Gerald came closer. “You can’t. I killed you here; you’re trapped, just like me.”

“No, you’re wrong.” Jackson shook his head. “I can leave if I want to, when I die. The Church promises me heaven.”

“I went to Church.”

“Then why are you still here?” Jackson smiled, faintly. “You don’t have to tell me; I already know.”

“I just want it.” Gerald straightened; he rose to higher than a child’s height, floating on the air. Eyes and a mouth became roughly visible, like shapes in the clouds. “No. I’m fine. I’m tough.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“I am! I swear I am!” The blast of wind came again, but lacking in power. It faltered quickly and died out. “I am.” This time, Gerald’s voice cracked.

Jackson threw all his cards down on the table, feeling himself begin to slip toward unconsciousness. The blood around him could have filled a half-gallon milk jug. “You stayed here because you didn’t want to let go. You didn’t want to let this life end. Now it’s too late and you can’t leave, can you? And you hate it.”

Gerald slid lower, toward the ground. “Yes. Once you choose, you can’t choose again.”

“Were you murdered, Gerald? Is that why you didn’t want to leave? Because it didn’t seem fair?”

“He came here to take our money – at least that’s what he told Mommy, before he killed her. But we heard him, and we woke up. He said we’d identify him to the police, so he had to kill us.” Gerald’s feet met the floorboards. “He shot Mommy in the chest, but she didn’t die. She was bleeding, and she told me to be tough. Then he shot me.”

“When was this? What year?”

“Nineteen thirty-one.”

Jackson whistled. “So you’ve been here for all these years, dead but not allowed to rest.”

“Yes.”

“But why did you think killing me would help?”

Gerald came forward for the first time, past the boundary of the doorway. His shape began to form hard edges, and Jackson wondered if it was because he – Jackson – was dying. “I’m just not as tough, not as tough as she wanted me to be. And I was lonely.” He held out a hand. “You know what I mean?”

Jackson nodded, thinking back to the moment he’d heard all of his family – his brother and both parents – were dead. He’d felt like the floor had dropped out from under him, throwing him into a fall that would never end. “And you wanted me to join you?” Red touched the edges of his vision.

“I did. I’m sorry. It’s just so hard.”

“But didn’t you realize I have to choose?” Jackson let go of his wrists; it didn’t matter anymore. “I have to choose which path I’ll take. The heaven the Church told me about is out there, if I want it.”

“Not if you die here. This house is mine now; anyone who dies here stays with me – though no one has, so far.” Gerald shrugged. “Plus, I hoped you’d choose to stay.”

Jackson couldn’t fault that; it was a childish hope, perhaps, but Gerald was a child. He grinned again, knowing it would be his last time, and hoping Gerald would interpret it as something it wasn’t: Submission. “So if I did die in here, inside this house, what would that mean? I could never leave? Never see anyone else?”

Gerald’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes. Unless someone else joined us.”

Jackson cringed. “I can’t do that.” Summoning all of the strength he had left, he pushed himself to his feet. The plaster dug into his back as he slid up the wall, but he hardly felt it. “My family is still waiting for me, Gerald. I have to go to them. I want to go to them. I’ve cut myself off from everyone, for all these years, because I was afraid. But this is like going home for me; this is the one thing I’m not afraid of.”

Gerald stiffened. “It’s too late. You’re dead.”

Blood slid under his foot, and Jackson almost fell. He caught his balance, glancing out the window behind him. Snow lay like a thick layer of cotton across the earth, piled where the plow had pushed it aside. “Not yet.” He drew his arms forward, then slammed them back against the frozen, brittle glass.

With a scream, Gerald lunged forward. Wind tore at the glass, sucking pieces of it in through the window; they cut long furrows in Jackson’s flesh. Gerald’s face contorted into a mask of rage, a twisted, howling vision of anger. But, even without his flesh-and-blood body to slow him down, he couldn’t get there in time.

Jackson knew it; the grin never left his face, even as he threw himself from the third-story window.

Goat Island

The dead man stood in the corner, holding his head in his hands.

Sara willed herself not to look. She stared into the flames of the open hearth, wishing he had put her close enough to feel the warmth. But of course he hadn’t. He wouldn’t do anything to make her more comfortable, to ease her situation. Then she wouldn’t be, as he so delicately put it, pliable.

“You son of a bitch.” Sara clenched her fists behind her back, feeling the tape pull at the hairs on her arms and tighten across her chest. Tying someone up with tape seemed almost laughable in thought, but all the humor drained out when it actually happened. You couldn’t untie tape, after all.               Gerald had met her two months ago, in January. She’d been watching a football game in Carl’s, more trying to catch the eyes of single men than taking in the action on the screen. She’d downed a few beers with the rest of them (even though she hated the stuff) and ended up talking to Gerald long after the place cleared out. He’d had black hair then, not white, and he’d offered her a ride home when Carl closed up. She’d accepted without a second thought.

Sara grinned, though it twisted her lip up into more of a grimace than anything. She’d had plenty of second thoughts over the last week, but they were all far too late to matter.

Things had started out well. Gerald hadn’t tried to get in her pants that first night, not in the car or when she’d invited him to come up to her apartment. He hadn’t even stayed, allowing her no more than a kiss on the cheek to send her off. Sara had thought it was romantic – that he was a real gentleman – and she’d written her number on the back of his hand. He’d promised to call and driven off into the night shrouding Highway 37.

Sara twisted against the pole as an itch ran up her back. The support beam for the cabin’s main room was made of wood, as was everything else, and it hadn’t been polished at all. The rough bark still clinging. She’d spent the last half-hour trying not to hurt herself on a long, jagged knot behind her head. It looked like the branch had been snapped off but never sanded down.

The entire cabin couldn’t have been more than twenty feet on a side, a rough square hashed together from the trunks of trees native to Goat Island. Sara let her eyes drift over the patched blue curtains, drawn tight over windows that faced nothing but water. She’d thought the place quaint and rustic when she’d first visited, but that opinion had been shattered as completely as the bones in her right ankle.

“Are you going to leave me here until I starve?” Sara waited, half-expecting an answer, but none came. Outside, the wind howled against the cabin’s frame like someone blowing over the opening of an enormous bottle. A storm was coming up, and coming up hard.

Sara’s eyes shifted back to the dead man. He stood as straight and ridged as a British Royal Guard, and the blood sprayed across his chest even reminded Sara of their overcoats. He wore simple clothes – jeans and a gray t-shirt, with a white (well, it had been white, at one point) Nike swoosh on the breast. His hands formed a cradle near his groin, the fingers laced together to support the weight of his head.

With macabre fascination, Sara couldn’t draw her gaze away. The man’s (she couldn’t bring herself to think of him as Gerald, not when he looked like that) eyes gazed back at her, unblinking but not as dull as they should have been. Instead, they almost seemed to shine, to be alert. To be watching her every move.

A pulse of pain shot through her ankle, and Sara glanced down with a grimace. She’d unconsciously shifted her legs to the right, as if trying to walk away from the horror in the room, and trapped her broken ankle under her opposite calf. She extracted it, finding another wave of pain to be her reward. If she hadn’t tried to run, Gerald never would have broken it. But something inside her hadn’t been able to stand taking this sort of treatment without putting up a fight, no matter how little that fight might have accomplished.

Swallowing the urge to cry, again, Sara bit down on her lower lip. She’d cried enough the first day that her face had hurt from the effort, but she couldn’t seem to run out of tears. And Gerald did so love her tears.

The man’s arm moved.

Sara should have been expecting it; she’d seen this happen a dozen times already, but she still flinched. Her head snapped back against the aborted branch, distracting her. But only for a moment.

She watched out of the corner of her eye as the man lifted his head and set it back on his shoulders. There was a wet, sucking sound like a hand being plunged into a bowl of noodles. The red line of gore around the neck retreated, gaining speed until it was nothing more than a slender band of scar tissue. The hands fell away, and Gerald blinked.

“Glad to see you haven’t tried anything stupid, my dear.” Gerald stepped away from the wall, wiping a bit of blood from his forehead. It had dripped from the collar of his shirt. “You worried me with your antics before. Spitting on me and screaming, all that bit.”

Sara glowered, trying to focus her fear into anger. That’s what they always said to do, wasn’t it? It worked half as well as she would have liked. “You’re going to be caught, you know. You can’t hide out here forever, and there are people looking for me.”

“I’m sure there are.” Gerald waved a hand, walking around her to pluck a novel off the coffee table. “But you’re wrong. They’re never going to find you.” He grinned. “But then, you knew that.”

“My father has money. He won’t stop at anything.”

“Money alone won’t do it.” Gerald stepped up to her, running his fingers down her cheek. “Don’t you want to know who it was?”

Sara jerked her head away. “I told you, I don’t care.”

“Are you so sure?”

“I am.”

Gerald laughed, then cross the room and dropped into the easy chair near the fire. It flared up as he sat, and Sara could finally feel some of the heat. Gerald’s gaze stole most of that, but not all.

They’d gone to dinner seven times in the two weeks after she’d met him. Gerald was ever the gentleman, holding doors and picking up checks like he had nothing he’d rather do. He took her to the theater – not the cinema where the high school kids went to eat popcorn and make out in the second row, but the actual theater with live performances every Tuesday and Friday – and the beach at night. They wished on stars and drank expensive champagne. It had been everything Sara had wanted and so much more. She’d noticed his aging then, accelerated as it was, but chalked it up to her mind playing games with her.

One night, after a rather liberal amount of champagne, Sara had been sure he would ask to stay the night. And she’d been more than ready to let him – and not solely because of the alcohol. She’d made all the advances she’d deemed prudent, and then a few more besides. Gerald had taken none of them.

Sara had finally just asked him, strait up, if he wanted to go upstairs. Gerald had sat up (they’d been lying on the ugly green couch in her living room) and told her that he was sorry, very sorry, but he couldn’t. She’d grown angry at the time, and embarrassed considering the circumstances, and told him that he might as well go home and call her when he felt like being a man. He’d told her that he would stop by the following day, and gone. When he left, his wallet had been lying on her couch. Sara hadn’t noticed it until the following morning.

Part of her, probably the part her father worked hardest to form as she grew up, was naturally suspicious. And if not suspicious, then at least curious. She’d immediately begun digging through his abandoned wallet and had been surprised at what she found.

Which was, namely, nothing.

“Snap to it, babe.” Gerald clapped his hands together, the sound harsh in the otherwise silent cabin. As if in answer, the wind cracked a few tree branches against the cabin’s exterior walls. Goat Island had under a square mile of landmass, but it was big enough to be covered in cedar trees just as heavily as the mainland.

Sara took a deep breath. “What do you want?”

“When are we talking? Right now? Ten years from now?” Gerald’s grin flashed back, a grin Sara remembered thinking was so charming just a few weeks before. The wrinkles now lining his face made it sinister rather than handsome. “I think you know.”

“I think you’re insane.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

Gerald stood, cracking his neck. “Well, you have to believe me by now. About not being a part of this world, I mean.” He gestured to the scar. “This isn’t the sort of thing than can be explained away by science.”

Sara had to give him that, and the thought sent a tremor through her spine. She’d wondered at the wallet, empty of everything but the credit card he’d been using to pay for their dates. No driver’s license, no social security card, not even an expired student ID from college. Nothing at all.

But she’d never asked him. She’d meant to, of course; it was too strange to let lie. When she’d given the wallet back, the words had been on the tip of her tongue. As if anticipating just that, Gerald had kissed her quickly, almost violently, and informed her that he had plans for the evening that would blow her away. He’d seemed so excited that her questions had fled her mind.

“So what do you think, dearest Sara?” Gerald walked over again, stepping close until his face was an inch from hers. His hand slid to her waist, the fingers working in and out in a gentle massage that Sara hated. “You know I need your consent for this, or you’ll die. Do you think you can ever agree?”

“I think you can rot in hell.”

“I probably will, soon enough.” Gerald shrugged and stepped back. “I killed the chief of police. He was getting too close.”

Sara wrenched forward, ripping out a new patch of arm hair and jolting her destroyed ankle into a fury. “You’re a liar!”

“Am I?” Gerald shook his head. “I told you money wouldn’t be enough, Sara. And your father paid a good deal of it to Chief Mason to enlarge the search area after they found your car. Mason started looking to the islands, and it was only a matter of time.”

“You’re just giving them more lines to trace back to you.”

“Not really. When I leave this body, it’s not as if I take on another.” Gerald tapped his chest with two fingers. “Bodies are worthless. What I become without it isn’t something you could even see, let alone follow. And when they find Mason, it’ll look for all the world like he choked to death on that chicken bone I shoved down his throat.”

“You’re sick.”

“But you’re jealous. I can see it.” Gerald’s eyes narrowed. “Come on, Sara. Convert. Let me remake you. Then you can get what you know you want.”

Sara tipped her chin back. “You have no idea what I want.”

“Of course I do; you asked for it.” With a flourish, Gerald waved a hand at himself. “You want me. And I’ll give it to you, as much as you desire. But you have to convert to what I am.”

“I would never sleep with you.”

Gerald chuckled. “I don’t think sleep was ever the issue.” He waved a hand at the fire, and it roared even stronger. “Look at the power I have over this world, Sara. I want to share that with you. Our offspring will be even more adapt, even more perfect for this world. Perfect enough to inherit it, to rule it.”

“Get away from me.”

“Fine. But you’ll be begging soon. Just wait until I decide to break more than your ankle.”

Gerald retreated to the only other room the cabin held – his bedroom. He needed to rest after his excursions, to rest both his stolen body and whatever passed for his soul. Sara had discovered that fairly quickly, after seeing him leave the first time. That had been to kill some investigators working under the chief, he’d said, and that time he’d just left the body in one piece. He’d only started removing the head in order to unnerve her, to torture her. And, she suspected, just because he could.

An hour slipped by as Gerald slept, and Sara spent it trying to undo the tape. She got nowhere but angry, and she tore one fingernail almost completely off before she gave up. The nail fell away, the size of a dime, leaving a stinging patch of cool flesh in its wake. She heard the flesh tear as it gave way, like thick, wet paper. Somehow she kept her cry of pain behind her lips.

That straw proved the last. Slowly, gently, Sara began to wiggle her upper body forward. She wouldn’t need much room to do what she had in mind.

Gerald couldn’t live forever; of that she was certain. In fact, guessing by his aging, he couldn’t hang on in this world much longer at all. He said he didn’t need the body – but if that were true, why did he keep using it at all? She set her jaw. No, he did need it. He was tethered to it, and that tether was also killing it. When it died, so would he. If she could get away from him, he wouldn’t have enough time left.

The branch was behind her head, sharp as ever. With a little more room to swing her torso out and then slam it back, she figured she could drive that spike far enough into her brain to make any sort of breeding with the monster in the next room impossible.

“Don’t even think about it, babe.” Gerald stood before her, a machete in his right hand. He raised it, letting the fire’s light glint off the blade. “How about I cut off your arms? How would you like that? Should hurt like nothing you’ve ever imagined; maybe it’ll even be enough to keep you from getting any more stupid ideas.”

Sara watched Gerald’s eyes. A hard edge lined them; he would do what he threatened. She leaned forward as far as she could – not far enough, it felt, but it would have to do. She held for a second, unable to go through with it, then swallowed hard and swung her head back.

Her skull connected with the beam with a snap that sent torrents of pain rushing down her neck. The world went completely white in a flash and then came back into focus. It looked like everything was underwater. She could see Gerald bringing the machete down, and realized in that moment that she’d missed. All this, and she’d missed the branch. She could feel a small river of fire where it had skimmed the side of her head, but she was as alive as ever.

The machete connected with her shoulder, tearing through the tape as if it didn’t exist and continuing down through the flesh. Sara felt herself screaming, her cry ravaging the back of her throat, but found she still couldn’t hear anything. The machete caught on the bone, and Gerald pulled it out to hack down again. And again. On the fourth strike, her arm fell away.

He’d been right – it was more pain than she’d ever cared to imagine. It felt like someone had doused her whole side in gasoline and tossed on a lit cigarette. The fingers of torment running from her shoulder cut into every portion of her body, leaving nothing untouched.

She began to fall sideways. With the tape and her arm severed, nothing held her to the post. At least not there. The tape on her left held fast, acting like a hinge to fling her outward. Though red lined her vision, Sara saw Gerald step forward. He stood where she had a moment before, sideways and next to the beam, giving him the perfect angle to hack off her left arm as well.

In a moment, Sara knew. She had one chance left to end it. If not, she’d be too weak to resist Gerald. And then all would be lost.

Trying to fight back the pain, Sara shoved down on her good ankle. She pushed back, using the hinge to propel her around. Her spine collided with Gerald’s side, and his aged knees gave out. He fell toward the post, dropping as he went, and the broken stem of the branch plunged deep into his ear. She could hear the wet sound of it and a sharp crack as it broke off. His eyes went very wide, then slowly turn to glass. Blood trickling out of his ear, the corner of his mouth. Running down the side of his quivering neck.

Then Sara fell, the tape ripping away from her body, and Gerald fell lifeless next to her.

She was still alive. Sara dragged her damaged body toward the cabin’s door. The effort caused more pain, but she hardly noticed it now. She just knew she had to get help, had to get medical help before she lost much more blood. As she pushed the door open, however, and saw the storm falling on her with terrible beauty, that dream died as swiftly as Gerald a moment before.

Goat Island was, after all, an island.

Necessary Death

1

Willis poured two shots of whiskey into his coffee and sat down next to the body. The smell was horrible, and the dead man’s face had begun to turn a pallid shade of gray. Six days would do that to you. Willis sipped his drink and stared out the double windows in front of him.

Windows were the only part of his house that provided light. The rising sun glared through like a police spotlight, orange and huge as it clawed its way up over the horizon. Willis squinted – at sixty-eight, his eyes weren’t what they used to be – but didn’t turn away from the show. It took that light to wake him up every morning.

“No luck, Johnny-Boy?” Willis didn’t turn to look at the body as he spoke, but he could see the man – his ragged, unkempt beard, bushy eyebrows, and gaunt face – out of the corner of his eye. “I really had faith in you, you know? I thought you were the one.” Willis took another drink and licked his lips with an audible smack. “Thought you were the one.”

He’d found Johnny at the bus stop, curled up on a bench with his hands clasping an empty bottle of gin. A bottle that hadn’t been empty long, judging from the smell of Johnny’s breath and the glassy look in his eyes. Willis had shaken him awake, appropriated the bottle, and made his proposal. Johnny had taken it up in a drunken stupor, though Willis figured he would have accepted just as quickly had he been stone cold sober. After all, Johnny had nothing else to do.

Just write what I tell you, Willis had said. My hands shake too much, my eyes blur the letters on the page. I’ll dictate and you write. Just like the Romans and their scribes. And I’ll give you all the gin you can drink.

Johnny hadn’t looked like much of a writer, but that had been just fine with Willis. Better, even. Willis picked up the remote from where he’d set it on Johnny’s knee the night before and flipped on the ancient television at the end of the living room. Luckily the room wasn’t that long, or he wouldn’t have been able to see it. The television came on with a small snap of electricity.

“…traffic accident on the Montieth Overpass, on the outskirts of Gaviston,” the announcer said in monotone. “The bus, full of fifth-grade students, plummeted into the valley below…”

Willis scowled. They were already dead; they wouldn’t do him any good.

“…Meanwhile, a fire in Hale broke out and ravaged an apartment building…”

At least you could count on the news services to report disasters. There had been a movement lately to bring out the more upbeat stories (to make the news more like the damned Reader's Digest, Willis thought). It hadn’t caught on yet, and Willis hoped it never did. Hearing about cats being rescued out of trees and Boy Scouts assisting old women across the road wouldn’t help him in the least.

“…and, as our final story for the day, a young boy has gone missing in the forest north of Gaviston. He was last seen on a camping trip with his parents, David and Judith Breaston, but wandered off while they were taking photographs of Gearing Rock.” The screen switched from the greasy-haired newscaster to a grainy black-and-white of a smiling boy in a collared shirt. Willis took him to be about seven. “His name is Gage Alan Breaston, and he has now been missing for forty-seven hours. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts…”

Willis sat back in the battered brown couch, sinking into the cushion. A grin played across his craggy features; skin pulled tight against his cheekbones. Gage Alan Breaston. A child. Of course.

“Well, time’s up Johnny-Boy.” Willis reached over and patted the dead man’s cheek; the cold flesh felt like a sponge. “Thanks for the effort, anyway.” He finished his coffee and whiskey in one gulp and stared at the rising sun.

2

He buried Johnny in the backyard. His house, though technically boasting a Gaviston mailing address, could hardly be said to be within the city limits. His nearest neighbors – Robert and Deny Warton – lived almost a half a mile away, and acres of pine and cedar trees covered the distance. The Bristol River split the two properties on its way to Chelson Bay – though that bay sat a few hours’ drive away on the coast of the big lake. And even if the Wartons decided to make the drive over, his two-story house blocked the view from the long, winding driveway.

Digging the shallow grave took three hours and all of the energy that Willis had. He took breaks every half an hour, punctuating them with more whiskey and coffee or with water, depending how he felt. As the day drew on and the August sun became hot, he more frequently turned to water. When he finally got the hole finished, he dragged Johnny outside. The man hadn’t weighed much before and weighed even less now, but the task still proved difficult. Johnny’s limbs thumped against the wooden steps as Willis dragged him down. Willis pulled him across the yard (one shoe fell off, revealing twisted, yellowed toenails) and dumped him on his face in the hole. He then pushed the loose dirt back over the top, patted it down, and went inside to take a nap.

3

He woke up four hours later, feeling much better. The smell of rotting flesh had somewhat left the living room, and he made a ham and cheese sandwich. He ate it at the small kitchen table, reading a newspaper without turning on the lights. It wasn’t that he couldn’t turn them on, just that he didn’t.

Gage Alan Breaston had made the paper as well as the news. He was eight, a student at Gaviston Elementary, and apparently very bright. His parents were distraught over his loss (no surprise there) and begging for anyone to help them find their son. The police had been combing the forest around Gearing Rock with no success and few leads.

Willis looked up at the clock that hung over his kitchen with a scowl. His nap had cost him precious time; it was now just after two o’clock in the afternoon. Not too late to find the Breaston boy, not considering the way Willis knew the backcountry around Gaviston, but too late for anything to go wrong, lest he give the police a chance to find Gage first. Then Willis would have to start all over from scratch. He didn’t want that at all.

His scowl turned to a grin that only tugged at one side of his upper lip. “But you do,” he whispered, looking from the clock to the shadows deeper within the house. “You want that more than anything, don’t you?”

A slight hiss answered him. Anyone else would have assumed it to be the breeze, maybe a draft. Only Willis knew the truth.

4

Gearing Rock had been named for the Englishman Travis Gearing, one of the first settlers to the area over two hundred years previous. He hadn’t done much more than establish the little trapping and logging settlement that had evolved into the town of Gaviston, and even that had been no feat to boast of. Gaviston had remained an insignificant town as long as Gearing had lived, emerging only later when the farming community began to encroach on the surrounding land.

As Willis leaned against the rock, panting and relishing the shadow, he wondered what its significance had been. Perhaps the Gearing homestead had been nearby. Perhaps the ruins still were, or the graves. He chuckled under his breath. Not that he needed any more graves in his life. Except for two, of course, and he figured he still had a few years left in him.

“Gage Alan Breaston, where have you gone?” Willis knelt, wincing as his knees popped. He’d been here as a boy more times than he could remember, but never had the trip been as hard. He pulled a flask from his hip pocket, took a drink, and felt the fire burn down his throat. “Where have you gone?”

The forest had been more entertainment than anything as Willis grew up. He looked out through the trees and underbrush, remembering hours of hiking through those same woods, searching for hideouts or running down rabbits and pheasants with a twenty-gauge. He still remembered every inch of the land; his eyes might be going, but his memory was not. The Bristol wound through like a serpent half a mile west; a bog lay in the opposite direction. He swallowed hard, stood, and headed for the river. He could hear it crashing along, ice-cold water churned white over the rocks.

He’d camped along the banks at least thirty times a summer, often with other boys his age. Mac Johnson and Billy Tennison, mostly. Sometimes Fritz Gordon, but no one liked him; he wet the bed even at thirteen and had a tendency to chicken out and run for home as the sun went down. Still, Willis knew the lure of the river. And if it had appealed to him as a boy, he would have put money on its appealing to Gage Alan Breaston.

A good deal of money.

As he walked along at his slow, laborious pace, his mind drifted. The summers had been carefree and fun. Until July of ‘45, the that summer childhood as he knew it had ended.

He’d been fourteen, the oldest out of his group of friends (that group being dictated by proximity in the rural community rather than any active choice on his part) and the self-proclaimed ringleader. School had ended in June as it always did, and the first month had been spent running amuck with the joy of freedom. The Fourth had come and passed with fireworks and barbecues, and life could not have been better. Willis’s one complaint had been his brother, Danny, all of eight years old and eager to tag along with his older sibling on every mission and adventure he could. Willis’s parents both worked, sticking Willis with the occupation of babysitter more times than he cared for.

July twenty-ninth had started out just like any other camping trip on the Bristol. They’d packed plenty of sandwiches, matches, marshmallows, and sleeping bags. The bags were heavy and awkward to carry, but necessary if the nights got cold. Danny had begged to come along, something Willis couldn’t get out of – seeing as how his parents were both on night shifts (his father as a cop and his mother at Rabner Hospital as a receptionist) and they’d told him to take care of Danny. The group set out at eight o’clock, late by their standards, and got to the Bristol as the shadows grew long.

What happened then had happened so quickly Willis couldn’t even remember the rest of the trip. He knew they’d been there long enough to set down their gear – he could still picture himself, standing near the trees as he watched Danny fall, empty-handed – but not long enough even to build a fire for the marshmallows.

Willis reached the Bristol and stopped at the treeline. He could hear the river but not see it. The embankment before him dropped away at a ninety degree angle, descending ten feet or so before hitting the water. Willis made his way over to the bank, lowered himself to one knee, and leaned over the edge.

It looked exactly like he remembered it. A trail of sand ran along the edge of the river, cut through with clay and gravel. Thin bushes struggled to grow out of the side of the bank. And there, alone and taunting, stood a looming boulder. The gray surface shot through with black and shadows. So large it looked unreal. Taller than he stood now and twice the height Danny had been that day, all those years ago. Nestled around its base were smaller stones, half submerged in the clay and the mud. One of them stained red from the iron in the water.

How Danny had tripped and fallen, Willis figured he would never know. Willis had heard the yelp of fright and turned in time to see his brother’s arms pinwheel as he plummeted over the side. Danny’s eyes had been as huge as the rising moon, and he’d locked gazes with Willis for a split second before he dropped out of sight.

On the Fourth of July, Willis had been carrying a watermelon out back to give to his mother. He’d tripped on his own shoelace, which he’d neglected to tie, and the watermelon had lurched out of his hands. It spun in slow motion and then smashed down on the sidewalk with a sickening crunch.

The sound of Danny’s head hitting the stones had been exactly the same as that watermelon hitting the sidewalk.

Willis had carried him home in sheer terror, trying to stop the bleeding with his shirt. Danny had been breathing – shallow, wheezing breaths that sounded as if they were being drawn through a straw. He stayed conscious, a curse from whatever gods there were, but only spoke in broken sentences that alluded to pain and little else.

No one had been home; Mac and Billy had made excuses and run off as soon as they could, their eyes wild. Willis had carried Danny upstairs and laid him on his bed, sobbing, with no idea what else to do. By the time he’d remembered to call the police, Danny’s breathing had stopped.

Willis ran his eyes along the bank, half expecting to see Gage Alan Breaston in the same situation, sprawled on the ground with dark blood pooled around his crushed skull. But he saw nothing. He sighed and turned around.

The small boy stood a few feet from Willis, his hands clasped in front of him. He was hiding behind a stand of trees, but his white skin was visible through the branches. He had dirt and sap smeared across his face; his upper lip trembled like a brewing earthquake. He wore jeans and a green blazer, zipped up all the way to his neck. His eyes were red and the dirt on his face was streaked with the remnants of tears.

Smiling, Willis knelt. “Hi. And what are you doing out here?”

The boy tucked his chin to his chest and said nothing.

“Lost?” Willis held out a hand. “What is your name?” Not that it mattered; even if the boy was somehow not Gage, Willis had found his target. Any boy would work.

The boy’s lip trembled even more, and his voice cracked when he spoke. “Gage. I was with Mom and Dad, but…” He sniffled and looked at the ground.

“But you ran off to see the river and you got lost, didn’t you?” Willis’s smile grew; he’d been right, after all. “It’s really a beautiful river. But you must be careful, you know.”

A new tear ran down Gage’s left cheek. “Can you take me home?”

“Of course, my boy.” Willis nodded and motioned Gage forward with a finger. “Come with me. I’ll get you home safe and sound.”

5

Willis boiled tomato soup and wondered how the police had not found the boy. Gage had confided in Willis that he’d fallen asleep at one point, tucking himself under a pile of leaves and branches. Willis assumed the police line had walked through during that interlude, fortunately not loud enough to wake the exhausted child. If Gaviston had been larger, they would have already had dogs out and Gage would have been found whether he’d been dead asleep or as awake as Willis had him now. As it was, those dogs hadn’t been called up immediately and, according to the news, would be shortly. Willis grinned. But too late.

“Your house smells bad.” Gage sat on the couch, swinging his legs and looking better already. Willis had helped him wash his hands and face, though he hadn’t been able to give him any new clothes. “Like bad milk.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.” Willis chuckled. “An old man like me doesn’t take the time to clean as well as he should.”

“How old are you?”

Willis poured half of the soup into a bowl and carried it to the living room. He set it on the low table next to Gage. “Old enough to be your dad’s dad. How’s that?” He shrugged. “And let that soup sit for a minute before you eat it; it’s hot.”

“Okay.” Gage looked at the bowl longingly. “When do I get to go home?”

“Soon, very soon.” Willis sat next to Gage – exactly where Johnny-Boy had sat hours before – and patted him on the knee. “You wouldn’t want to run out before you’ve eaten, would you?”

“No.” Gage shook his head hard; his hair flicked back and forth across his forehead.

“I didn’t think so.” Willis stood. “I need to get something. Will you be all right on your own?”

Gage nodded. “Yeah. Can I watch television?”

“Sure; I don’t get many channels, I’m afraid, but you can watch whatever you like.” Willis walked back into the kitchen and around the corner. Behind him, he heard the television snap to life.

He crossed to the doorway and stopped, leaning against the jam. The hall in front of him led to the laundry room and the bathroom. It branched to the left, where a set of stairs – pitch black without the lights – ran up to the bedrooms and another bathroom on the second floor. Willis had inherited the house upon his parents’ deaths, and he was well acquainted with it, well acquainted with everything that had happened there.

Including Danny’s death.

He mounted the stairs slowly, pausing on every step to make sure that his legs felt up to it. They did, barely. He got to the top, turned right, and stepped into Danny’s old room.

It still smelled like death. Fifty-four years later, and he could still see Danny’s form lying on the bed, his hair matted with blood, eyes closed. Dying. Willis raised a hand to his face, rubbing his eyes with his index finger and his thumb. He looked up, staring at the far wall. “Are you in here? I’m doing what you want.”

The hissing sound came again, somewhere between laughter and a growl. Willis didn’t know if that was an affirmative or not. As much assurance as the sound gave him that Danny still lived, after a fashion, he never could tell if his brother was trying to talk to him or mocking his feeble attempts to please him.

Willis shook his head. But he knew, at least, knew that Danny was in the room. He had been ever since Willis had let him die on that bed, in agony.

Sometimes Willis could feel him. It wasn’t the same as any other sense, but he could just tell that Danny was there, his spirit lurking in every shadow, every corner, behind every piece of furniture. Watching Willis, Willis who had failed him and allowed him to die, and waiting for his moment. Danny wanted revenge, retribution, but he liked to see Willis agonize over it, and so he let him live.

Willis had began killing fifteen years ago. It had been an accident, that first one. A workman had come over to inspect the electricity, which had been shorting out. He’d turned off the breaker and taken apart an electrical panel, looking for the problem. He’d been up to his elbows in wiring when Willis had bumped the switch and flipped the power back on. The smell of burning flesh had taken three days to leave the house.

But in that moment, as he stared in horror (the man’s feet had been doing a little dance, a jig, against the kitchen floor as he fried, his mouth locked open in a silent scream with smoke pouring out of his ears and his hair burning), Willis had felt Danny consider leaving.

Consideration was all the farther it got. Willis could feel the conflict, as if it were in his own heart instead of his brother’s. But then, for whatever reason, Danny changed his mind. A chill washed over Willis’s chest, but he knew what he had to do.

He made his second killing two months later. This time it was a traveling salesman who made the mistake of thinking the rural community would be interested in further health insurance. Willis invited him inside for coffee and then blew off half his face with two barrels full of buckshot.

Again, Danny had considered leaving. And decided to stay.

Willis had grown frantic. If he didn’t get rid of Danny, his brother would tire of waiting. He would take his revenge, take Willis’s life. If Willis hadn’t been so careless as to let him fall, or so stupid as to procrastinate calling the authorities, everything would have been all right. But he had been, and Danny wouldn’t let that lie. He wouldn't let Willis forget it. The skeletons were dancing.

The third and fourth killings had been a Girl Scout and her mother, selling cookies. Willis had claimed he had to leave, and climbed into his pickup. As the disheartened pair walked back to their minivan, he’d popped the clutch and ran them both over. The girl’s head hit the grill hard enough to break out all of her teeth and she’d gone down under the tires. The mother had been propelled forward and pinned between the van and the truck, breaking most of her ribs and (Willis assumed) puncturing her lungs. The sound she’d made breathing could have meant nothing else. He’d left her there while he watched television, and she’d been dead two hours later.

Still, Danny had stayed. Willis had hoped the double sacrifice would be enough, but he’d been wrong. Maybe because he’d done it outside, and not in the house that Danny still clung to.

The rest of the killings had become a blur. Cheerleaders raising money for the football team. UPS men dropping off packages. A tourist who’d gotten lost after he took the wrong exit on I-75. It didn’t matter. For one reason or another they’d all been wrong. As Willis stared into the bedroom, he began to smile. They’d all been wrong until now. A boy sat downstairs, a lost boy that no one could find. A boy the same age Danny had been when he’d died.

Willis picked up the hammer from the bed and turned back to the stairs. “Gage!”

“Huh?” He heard the patter of running feet, and Gage appeared at the bottom of the stairs. From the red splattered on his shirt, he’d grown impatient and finished his soup in a hurry. “What, Mr. Willis?”

“I want to show you something.” Willis motioned with a hand. “Come up here.” To the very room where it happened. You can’t reject this one, can you Danny?

“What is it?” For the first time, doubt flickered across Gage’s face.

“Just a little something I want to give you. I think you’re perfect for it.”

“Like a present?”

Willis smiled. “Yes, exactly like a present.”

“Sure!” Gage clambered up the stairs, eyes bright. Even the total darkness didn’t hinder his speed. Light from a bedroom window was all that shone.

Willis tightened his grip on the hammer. A single blow to the temple ought to do it. A blow to the skull, just like Danny’s. Maybe Gage wouldn’t even die, and Willis would be able to let him spend his last hours on Danny’s bed, slipping away. He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t count on it. He would just have to strike, hard and fast so that Gage couldn’t run, and hope for the best.

Gage stepped into the room and stopped just at the top of the stairs. He grinned upward. “What is it, Mr. Willis?”

“Thank you, Gage,” Willis said, and swung the hammer.

His legs, overworked by far for a man his age, finally gave out. As the hammer came around, both knees buckled at once. Willis fell to the side and forward with a yelp; his swing went wide and the hammer flew from his grasp. The room spun, and then he was on the stairs, tumbling, head over heels. He felt an ankle snap, then a knee, then a wrist. Pain lanced through his entire body as he rolled. The hammer clattered past and he saw it come to rest, lying claw-up at the bottom of the stairs, and then he cart-wheeled one last time. Bright lights exploded behind his eyes as something sharp slammed through the back of his skull, where his spine ended, and his fall came to a screeching halt.

He lay at the bottom of the stairs, blood pooling around his head, and heard Danny’s laughter fade.

Genesis 6

Kenneth David Marian was born with wings in a dirty basement in Larson, Ohio, on November 27th, 1998. The basement smelled like cabbage and stale air and there was no one in it but Susan, and then, all at once, Kenneth. They went from one to two in a span of hours, and it was something unprecedented in Susan’s mind. She was eighteen and had never had a child before, let alone one with wings.

Kenneth was pink and wrinkled and cried as he tried to use his wings. Those wings not fully developed yet, only thin membranes that looked like wet paper. They fluttered around with a sound like mucus on the tongue, and Kenneth cried.

His mother, Susan, cried as well. She cried because she understood and she cried because she knew what had to happen. She cried because the only book she had was the Bible and she’d read it plenty of times. She’d read and read and read Genesis 6, when the angels, the Sons of God, lusted after human women. How they came and took them and how the race they created was terrifying until the flood wiped everything from the face of the earth.

Susan stroked Kenneth’s face and watched his wings flap. He was small, slight, but already growing. It had been two hours since he’d arrived in the dirty little basement, two hours and he weighted probably three pounds more. It was remarkable, since they’d eaten nothing.

The house belonged to her, had been left to her when her parents died in an auto accident out on the freeway. They’d been doing maybe sixty and ambling along in the right lane when a pickup doing maybe ninety-five jumped the median and rolled right over them. The driver was drunk enough that he didn’t even know what he’d done. Didn’t realize it until the police pulled him out of his truck and drove him away.

She’d locked herself in the house. It wasn’t much, but she couldn’t leave. The pavement reminded her of her parents; the sound of engines reminded her of death. Every time she saw a white line or a yellow dash she thought of the pickup crossing both and crushing her mother under the glove compartment and her father behind the steering wheel. The column had gone right through him, the police report had said. She'd read it only once, but you only need to read something like that once.

Kenneth whimpered, and Susan shushed him. He didn’t have long to live, and she didn’t want him to do it in sorrow. She gave him a piece of old bread; he chewed it for a moment before spitting it back out. He chewed it with teeth that had already grown in.

The neighbors had tried to come by, but she’d put locks on the doors. She’d boarded the windows (save for the small ones around the basement, red with the falling sun) and nailed them shut. She’d even boarded up the chimney. Neighbors weren’t the issue, then; there were worse things that could come down the chimney. Could come down and crawl inside and slink along the walls and the floor until they found her.

Susan thought about Genesis 6 and shivered.

They’d come to her, once, and it had been enough. They’d found her alone and scared and without anyone to see. They’d found her with her head uncovered – they’d seen her and lusted after her and come to her.

She couldn’t remember it now. She only knew that it had been terrible and that she had become pregnant. The first weeks had been spent in denial and the last weeks in horror. Desperately hoping for a flood to wipe her, at least, from the face of the earth.

But none had come. God had not heard her pleas, or had not cared, or had been otherwise occupied. And now she had this child, Kenneth David Marian, and he had wings.

“I’m sorry,” Susan said, not knowing to whom she was speaking. It may have been God. It may have been Kenneth. It may even, in some way, have been her parents. Because they’d always had such expectations for her, expectations that she’d all but forgotten.

She had a knife, and she took it out. It was rusty and dull and would do what it had to. She looked at Kenneth, at his pink, wrinkled body and his translucent wings. She set the blade of the knife against his throat.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Wait,” Kenneth said.

He was only hours old. He could not talk, half-breed or otherwise. This much, Susan knew.

“Please,” Kenneth said.

Susan set the knife down on the concrete, remembering how she had been all alone before him. Before he’d just been there, with her. It had been amazing and wonderful and she wondered now if she was dying. There had been a lot of blood, and it hadn’t fully stopped coming.

“Let me leave,” Kenneth said. He pointed at the little windows; his arms shook with effort. “Let me go. I can help you.”

“Will you?” Susan looked at the blood on the floor, at the little basement windows that she hadn’t boarded over because they were too small for anything to come through.

“Yes,” Kenneth said. He flapped his wings again, this time with something like strength. Like power. As if they almost worked, but not quite.

“Then go,” Susan said, and set him on the floor.

For the first time, Kenneth smiled. It was not the smile of a boy, however, but of something else. The teeth were too long and the eyes too red and the lips pulled too far back. But he was her son, and Susan found that she loved him. Loved him so much. He began crawling toward those little windows, clenching his fists and preparing to break the glass, and Susan began to sob.

This time there would be no flood to sweep him away.

Crashing Stolen Cars

The car was rust and steel and rotting leather and the smell of gasoline. It crouched in the shadows, overhung by sweeping branches, the dust slowly settling. Two jagged tracks split off from the pavement, breaking free and into the gravel of the shoulder, and came to termination perfectly behind the car’s rear tires. The wind blew through the trees, whistling and dropping a shower of leaves onto the exposed seats and the young man behind the convertible’s wheel.

Adam licked his lips. He hadn’t yet pried his hands away from the leather wheel. Or set them in his lap. Or reached back to feel skin already cooling over a nonexistent pulse.

“Kels?”

The girl said nothing. She just sat in the back, her head lolling against the window, her eyes closed. Adam looked at her in the mirror; his tongue tasted like cotton, or polyester. Amazing how stress dried one’s mouth out. A cosmic mistake of the vaunted fight-or-flight syndrome.

The roadway was desolate. Not just empty, not just abandoned, but as barren as a graveyard. This far toward the middle of nothing, there weren’t many people to happen along, especially not at three in the morning. Of course, that was why they’d come.

Somewhere, far off and lonely, a raven spat out a call at the deep night. Why it was even awake, Adam had no idea. Not nocturnal, surely. Perhaps just restless. He couldn’t fault it for that.

“Come on, Kels. If you’re playing with me, that’s enough.”

Nothing. Not even a flicker of movement as if the girl were trying to wake up, trying to talk. Her half-unbuttoned blouse fluttered, tugged to one side by the wind, but that was all.

Adam swore and got out of the car. The gravel crunched beneath his feet like grinding bones and a forgotten relic of a childhood song played through his head: Fee fi fo fum. He raked a hand through his hair, staring at the forest and wishing he could pinch himself hard enough. He grabbed the corner of his lips and squeezed until a thin trail of blood ran down his jaw, but the world stayed as it was.

Funny how ten minutes could change the course of everything. Well, not funny, not really. Not in the causal sense. But surprising, all the same.

The car was steel and rust and part of it flaked away as Adam stepped up to the back seat and laid his hands on the edge. The rear window was up. He leaned around it, close to her. Close enough to see where her skin had split in a tear across her brow; cracked white bone lurked beneath. It wasn’t bleeding as hard anymore, but it had been. Oh, it had been.

“Please, Kelsey.”

Nothing.

Adam sat in the dirt, leaning back against the car. It was stolen. He didn’t know whose it was except that it had been parked in the driveway and the keys had been in the ignition. And it hadn’t been blocked in by the others. He’d wondered when he got in who it belonged to, but now he didn’t care at all.

He dropped his head and massaged his fingers in little circles against his temples. Things didn’t spin, or lurch, and the contents of his stomach seemed fairly determined not to come rushing up his throat. The alcohol was wearing off. At least there was that.

Thirsty Thursday, they called it. Or Freedom Friday. Or Smashed Saturday. Or Slammed Sunday. It didn’t really matter; all it meant was that each day of the week had its own little title that made it all right to drink until you couldn’t see. Or think. Or consider what you were doing when you led your girlfriend out of the hallway where you’d been making out so contentedly. Or drive, when you were taking her somewhere the two of you could be a bit more alone.

“It wasn’t my fault.” Adam spoke softly, but the words sounded huge and ominous in the night. Even the raven had fallen silent. “Just a deer, you know? A damned deer.”

They were everywhere. If Hazard Number One was state cops with quotas to fill, Number Two was deer. And the margin was close. This one had come out of the brush at a dead run, muscles moving beneath its smooth coat like pistons. Adam hadn’t seen it, hadn’t slowed, hadn’t even had time to think about which side the brake pedal was on before the car had been bucking forward, throwing him against his belt and Kelsey against the back of his seat.

The car was more rust than steel and had crumpled beneath the weight of the suicide. Adam had jammed the wheel to the left, slamming his foot into the floorboards twice before he found the brake. He’d felt Kelsey hit behind him and heard the crunch as her head connected with something hard, like a watermelon being struck with an axe. She’d hit a support, probably, the ribs of the driver’s seat. It should have been padded over, but the padding had long-since rotted away to expose the metal.

Then he hadn’t felt her anymore. Just that initial contact, then she’d rebounded away. Landed on the back seat and not fallen off again even when he found the brakes and slewed the car onto the shoulder.

She shouldn’t even have been back there. If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t have. He remembered she’d laughed about it, almost falling over (more from the alcohol than any true humor), saying she’d be in the back getting ready. All he had to do was drive somewhere safe as fast as he could. She’d draped her coat over the back of the passenger’s seat, making a show of it, then begun working at the buttons of her blouse.

Adam swore again, slamming his hand against his knee. He knew he should be crying, by all rights, but he wasn’t. A voice way back in his mind said something about trauma and shock and how he’d cry later. He shook his head, and far off the raven cawed once more.

So what now? That was the question of the ages, wasn’t it? Surely John Wilkes Booth thought the same thing after he shot Lincoln, or Timothy Mcveigh after he blew up the Murrah Federal Building. What now?

Adam stood, staying back from the car, and stared down at Kelsey. Her blonde hair fell across her face in a way that was almost attractive, but streaks of blood ran through it. Her blouse had been unbuttoned to the middle of her stomach, and he could see that her chest wasn’t rising and falling beneath it, not even shallowly. Her eyes were closed, so he couldn’t tell if they’d rolled back in their sockets or not, but he knew they had. He knew.

Lights. Adam jerked his head around, staring down the black snake of pavement. A car was coming, not fast but very definitely coming. And there was nowhere else to turn out here; they’d drive past him, see the wreck of the vehicle, the blood-soaked, mangled corpse of the deer, and stop. Even if they weren’t the cops, he’d have no choice but to report it. And the next blood-soaked corpse wouldn’t be quite so innocent.

Or this car, this very one, was the cops. He hadn’t exactly been subtle – hadn’t been thinking straight enough to be – when he stole the convertible, and there was a good chance it had already been reported.

Biting his lip, Adam climbed back into the driver’s seat. He touched the keys; his hand was shaking. He lowered his head for a moment, until he had himself under control. He was in the middle of nowhere in a stolen car with his dead girlfriend in the back seat. And, though he no longer felt drunk, he would blow quite a number if the police decided to give him a breath test.

He drove slowly this time, watching the trees. The line of them looked like a wall of soldiers hemming him in. Finally he spotted a break, a small dirt road winding its way to the north. The area had been logging country, once upon a time, and there were hundreds of these abandoned roads, only used now by hunters in the fall or snowmobilers in the winter.

The lights were closer. Adam couldn’t make out anything behind the glare, but the approaching car seemed to be slowing. Any moment now and the red and blues would slash the darkness, tearing it apart and dragging him away in chains.

Adam pulled down the two-track. The road curved back and forth as it cut between the trees, avoiding those blockages that would have been too much trouble to remove. The trees rose up, spikes stabbing into the soft underbelly of the sky. Their shadows fell in long, hard lines that reminded Adam of fangs. Incisors. Teeth made for cutting and ripping things to pieces. Teeth made to do the same job as the unprotected back of his seat: Rip away lives.

The gully wasn’t much. Adam almost didn’t see it, but suddenly the car was right on the edge, crumbling the clay and earth down over the side. He pulled to a stop – further over, where it was safe – and got out under the moonlight. It looked like there had been a small stream once, maybe even a river. Too small for the loggers to float their trees down, but maybe something for them to bathe in. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. The dry bed lay fifteen feet below, covered in brush and dead leaves.

“Kels, babe, this is your last chance. If you can hear me, say something.”

He worked the car through a quarter turn so it was facing away from the drop, backing up until the ground felt soft beneath the rear tires.

Headlight beams filtered through the trees behind him, broken into fragments by the trunks and branches. The light bounced out over the gully, throwing weird shadows across the breach.

Adam shifted the car into neutral. He got out and walked around front; the ground was a soft clay that tried to rise up around his boots. His feet pulled out with a sucking sound behind each step. He slipped once on the way to the front, then set his hands on the broken hood and pushed.

A sharp beam of light fell over him. The voice that followed came from a megaphone, deep and full of authority. “Hold it right there. Step away from the–”

Adam shoved, and the car fell. He’d expected it to take longer, but the bank just gave away behind the rear wheels and the vehicle pitched back. There was a screech as the underbody slid across rocks and the axel twisted and stuck, and then the front end swung up and caught Adam under the chin. His vision exploded and he fell back with a cry. Mud and clay leeched up into his pants, coated his hands as they plunged in. He shook his head, clearing it, just in time to see the car slide from view.

Footsteps ran up behind him, chased by shouts that sounded as if they were from another world. His ears were ringing and he couldn’t make out the words. The tone, however, was unmistakable. Someone grabbed his arms and yanked him to his feet; another man stepped over to the edge of the gully, glared down into it for a moment, and then whirled to face Adam with both shock and dismay registered on his face. He shone his flashlight on Adam’s eyes, and that look changed.

“I should have known.” The officer shook his head. “Who’s was it this time?”

Adam swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It just came out, a reflex, even with the car right there, probably half-buried in muck and underbrush.

“You think I’m an idiot, Adam?” The officer sighed, then looked at his partner. “This his third time?”

The man holding Adam’s arms grunted. “Fourth.”

“Fourth.” The first officer cocked his head to the side. “You’re as crazy as they get, aren’t you? I told them to lock you up after all that talk last time. All that nonsense about a dead girl and how you didn’t mean to kill her or steal the car. They should have thrown you in Cedar Ridge, that’s what I told them. This time, I bet they listen.”

Adam felt his eyes grow hot. “I hit a deer. She was in the back, getting changed, and it came out of nowhere.” He looked at the gully, wishing he hadn’t pushed the car after all. “Look, maybe she’s not dead. Go check. We can still save her.” His voice broke on the last word.

The officer stepped forward, his face inches from Adam’s. “Listen to me. There’s no one else in that car. It’s a convertible, Adam; I can see right in the top from here. It’s just as empty as the others. You hear me?”

“That can’t be true.” Adam pulled to the side; hands held him tight. “She must have fallen out. She’s down there right now, dying. I swear to you.”

The officer looked past Adam, at his partner. “You’ve heard his story, haven’t you?”

“Rumors.”

“They’re probably true, as sick as they sound. He got drunk and killed his girlfriend in a car wreck back in, oh, ninety-nine.” The officer tapped Adam on the forehead. “Isn’t that right? Got in a serious crash that time. The car burned, the whole deal. Wasn’t much left when it was over. Since then, he’s been stealing cars and wrecking ‘em, just the same, then babbling on about how she’s inside. Reliving the same accident over and over, I guess.”

Adam glared. “Listen to me–”

“We have, Adam. We’ve listened to your story for over eight years, and it never changes.” He walked past, back toward the idling squad car. “This time maybe they’ll lock you up for good. No driving allowed over at Cedar Ridge. That would be a merciful thing for you, I bet.”

The cop pulled him away, radioing in for a wrecker, and Adam let the tears go. They streamed down his face like the blood had down Kelsey’s, hot and violent. Adam yanked at his hands, but the cop’s grip was iron. Pain lanced through his shoulders. He twisted and thrashed until they snapped a pair of cuffs onto his wrists and shoved him into the back seat of the squad car. Then his protests died into a whisper.

There, head lolling against the opposite window, a vicious, blood-filled cut marring her forehead, was Kelsey. She sat opposite of him, her hands also cuffed, her blouse falling open to reveal the black bra over breasts that would never again rise and fall with respiration or passion. As he watched, her eyes snapped open. They were rolled back, glazed balls of pure white. Her lips twitched, pulling upward in a smile.

And Adam screamed.