Tag Archives: Dead of Winter

Sinister Melody

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Dead of Winter ~ Third Place
David Pugh

Black and white photo of a cobblestone street. The cobblestones are wet, slick and shiny. Light shines down the center of the image, illuminating the pattern of the stones. The sides are in shadow.

Photo Credit: Andy Magee/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

It is early morning and lazily falling snow gathers in drifts at every windowsill, doorway, and curb of the city. Warped sheets of thin metal clank against the spouts of precarious brick chimneys. Iron horseshoes and wooden wheels, reinforced by steel, clatter along uneven cobblestone roads. Dense chunks of ice crash against the wooden piers of the harbor, sloshing in the frigid waters. In the harbor, a ship is being prepared for departure. Picture windows in stores fog with the discussion of price. Noses sniffle and mittened hands catch spontaneous sneezes. Wrapped in scarves, jackets, and woolen hats, residents of the city bustle in the narrow streets between towering grey buildings. No matter their destination, the residents pass each other and greet their neighbors, despite the cold.

A young woman hurries through the snow-covered streets. She hunches, her head down, clutching something to her chest, walking against the rending winds of the winter storm. Candles in windows guide her way. Their lights are faint, but enough to orientate her on the way home. She has walked these streets more times than she could count, but in the grey of the storm standing upright was a struggle all its own. Snow crunches under her boot and she slides off a patch of ice on the cobblestone street.

She stumbles, nearly dropping the something from her arms, and attracts glances of concern from a group of women conversing outside of a nearby shop. Their conversation changes instantly as they offer to help and draw near to her. She finds their presence reassuring, had the fall been worse, and smiles. However, now is not the time for attention so she shakes her head. She meets their gaze, returning their rehearsed smile with her own, and continues toward her destination.

Finally, a building with three candled windows all in a row guides the young woman around a corner to face an ancient brick building. She stops in front of its wooden door. Her feet feel unstable beneath her, and she wonders if anyone else is around. She struggles to balance herself as she removes an iron key from the pocket of her coat. She knows that if she falls again, someone will be there in a matter of seconds. Without looking up from the patch of ice beneath her feet, she slides the iron key into its lock. The lock clicks open, and she disappears inside the ancient brick building.

One mittened hand softly clicks the lock back into place. She gives the knob a twist and a slight pull to confirm that the door is locked. Flakes of snow that cling to her hair melt fast in the humidity of the house. For a moment she coughs, adjusting to the stark change in atmosphere, and she braces herself against the wooden door.

The young woman is short and slight, her face whipped red by the chilling winter air. Her woolen coat, mittens, and scarf are threadbare, and age worn. She sets the something down at her feet and, with considerable effort, she sheds her winter clothing. She piles them in a soggy heap on top of that something on the floor and stands, thinking, in a sweat drenched sundress.

Her name is Melody Geary, and she finds no comfort standing in the foyer of her home. Her mind races with thoughts of her husband, Daniel, and the condition she may find him in, in the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She hears the open window slamming against the side of the house. She shudders and lights a candle sitting in a ceramic dish on a small end table and moves into the dining room, turning her back on the staircase and the something buried by her winter clothing.

She still hears the words of Dr. Randolph.

How, exactly, has he been unwell? Has he been eating much? Has he slept through the night?

Today’s visit had been the third this week and each time his voice was calm and free of skepticism. His questions were specific and, usually, impersonal, but this time he had expressed interest clearly beyond professional in Daniel’s case. Melody smiles at the thought of preferential treatment. She had always found his presence comforting; he never failed to care for them.

Dr. Randolph had always been adamant about seeing his patients directly, but this had been different. In his cramped office, he kept a safe distance from Melody, listening intently as she described the rash that has developed across Daniel’s shoulders.

Judging by your description, I believe I am familiar with this ailment. Though I’ve never had the opportunity to catch it this early. Oh, no! Do not bring him! Give him this, it should stop the spread. Though its side effects will likely be… significant.

Melody shuts her eyes and tries to imagine the lives of her neighbors, blissfully unaware of Daniel’s current state. Faintly, she hears the city beyond the whipping winter storm. The light snap of a whip and the rhythmic clomp of horseshoes against the snow-covered stone streets. The idle chatter of the passengers, and the courteous greeting of the carriage driver to passersby. She hopes they have not noticed Daniel’s absence.

Are you okay, dear?

The face of Mrs. Sanderson, who she had passed only moments ago, flashes in her mind.

Be careful out here! You can’t see five feet in front of you, let alone ice covered in snow. I can take that package for you, come inside and warm up.

She had joined them for tea many times on her walks home. Mrs. Sanderson hosted bridge every afternoon. Melody had no idea how to play, but she would sit and chat with them. She spoke freely about Daniel, or work, or medication from Dr. Randolph, or any other topic that day had brought her. None of the women had thought much of Dr. Randolph. They all found his treatments dubious. Melody would laugh and give a noncommittal comment. She would continue to follow Dr. Randolph’s advice, though she wondered how those women stayed in such good health without it. Their days all seemed to pass so easily to Melody. All of them blissfully unaware of this affliction that may move to her, or any of them any day.

Melody hears the open window upstairs slam again and is brought back to her surroundings. In her dining room, a long table, dressed in a moth-eaten runner, is covered in a thick layer of dust. At one end of the table sits a plate of crumbs and a chair with its back to a window. She pulls the chair away from the table and moves to sit, hovering just above the seat. She sways like the sudden stop in motion is a surprise to her, before righting herself and moving with renewed purpose. She lifts the plate of crumbs, her hands linger on the plate, unsure if something may sit beneath it. After a moment’s consideration, she moves the plate to the nearby sink without a glance back at the table.

Cold water rushes into the disgusting, scum-ringed sink. She places the candle on the counter and painstakingly removes melted wax from the ceramic dish. She rinses the crumbs from yesterday’s dinner plate before dragging a mildewed rag across its surface several times. Melody continues this menial distraction, trying her best to ignore the sounds of breathing.

Deep panting and the sound of rustling leaves crash behind her, escaping the rusted vent cover, clawing at the stray hairs that curl around her ears. She scrapes away at the clean plate and speaks to the calling breath.

“Soon, Daniel, we will be free of this. We will both continue our work. The days of us barely seeing each other, me going to dinner at Barbara’s or you to play cards at Waldorf’s will return. And none of them shall know of this misstep. These days we’ve spent locked here together. Your degenerating health. Our lives will continue as though they had never stopped. No one ever needs to know of these days I have wasted here with you. Let us finally be rid of this.” And she hurries back to the staircase.

She tears through the heap of winter clothes until she finds the something, beneath them all. A large glass jar filled with amber stones. She stares into the pristine surfaces of the stones as she steps onto the first stair. The bare skin of her hands as they hold the glass jar tingles with anticipation with each step. The stones glow with a strong light that guides her up the stairs with a feeling of ease—a naïve hope that could only come to someone who has placed her full confidence in another, never noticing the tingling has spread up her arms, toward her elbows.

As she draws near the landing, she thinks back on Dr. Randolph’s instruction.

No, no! It would be best not to move him, in this state. I suggest you give him these. This medication is unique. All you must do is uncork the jar in the same room as Daniel and the effect will be instant. They produce a strong smell that should stop the spread of the rash in a matter of minutes. Just be sure that no one sees them! This is a foreign treatment and I suspect your neighbors may not appreciate the idea. It may ruin my reputation.

Melody swore she had seen a gleam in Dr. Randolph’s eye as though he had waited to hear her words. He spoke with a chuckle as he covered the jar in a sheet and sent her on her way. He insisted she take detailed notes of the results and leave them under his door the following morning. He was on his way out of town; an old patient of his living further up the coast had taken a poor turn and he was forced to tend to them. The situation seemed rather serious, but he had left in a state of elation, almost manically, reiterating his instructions until she was out the door.

For days, she had stopped at the third step from the top, only pushing a tray of food onto the landing. She would call to him and tell him to get it and the importance of keeping his strength up. Now, shrouded in the amber glow, she steps onto the landing. Scattered on the floor, the untouched sandwiches have turned blue and green with mold. From behind the door to her right, their bedroom door, she hears it all more clearly than downstairs. Rustling leaves, the slamming windowpane, and the breathing. That horrid breathing that has plagued her for nearly a week. The chill of the metal knob shocks her, but only enough to enliven her anticipation. With great effort, Melody opens the door to find her husband, Daniel, exactly as she had left him.

A rotten smell fills the air and the bed sheets and floorboards beneath Daniel are frozen solid. He sits, shoulders hunched forward, on the side of their bed facing the open window. What remains of Daniel’s hair, and the leaves that sprout from his scalp, blow in the winter air. His skin is so thin that the muscle and blood pumping within are visible. Snow blows in the open window, the flakes that land on Daniel melt instantly and soak into his waxy skin. The moisture absorbs into the network of veins that pulse rapidly.

With the horrible sound of snapping twigs, Daniel moves to face her. His neck bends straight backward, like a stem that is unable to support its bud, and he looks to Melody. His eyes protrude slightly, rolling in their sockets with the movement of his head. The waxy coating of his skin had tried, and failed, to form over his eyes only to dry up around his yellow eyeballs. The exposed irises turned a faded grey and cracked, pieces sloughing off in the frigid gusts.

Leaves sprout along the ridge of his collarbone like a ruff; they sway in the frigid air with a startling resilience. The thin skin cracks and falls away from his mouth exposing his brittle and yellow teeth. They chatter together senselessly; the muscles contracting on memory alone. His arms bend backward at the elbow and, his fingers growing like vines, reach out to her.

Along a vein in his shoulder, a clot forms before her eyes. Through his thin and waxy skin, the clot forces its way into the cold winter air, emerging as a fresh bud. It opens and thick petals of a vibrant blue unfurl. They flap before settling against the skin, appearing unbothered by their harsh environment.

This medication is unique; all you must do is uncork the jar in the same room as Daniel and the effect will be instant.

With a smile of assurance, Melody uncorks the glass jar.

They produce a strong smell that should stop the spread of the rash in a matter of minutes.

Melody inhales deeply.

Just be sure that no one sees them!

For a moment, both Melody and Daniel are still. She smells nothing.

Suddenly Daniel’s face contorts mournfully, his mouth opens as though to scream. The waxy luster of the skin fades as it shrivels, clinging to the withering muscle below. The blue petals shrivel and curl before falling to the frozen floorboards. Daniel’s whole body wilts into a silent heap on the bed.

This is the closest the two have been to each other in days. In his current state, she found it difficult to identify him. Despite the vegetation, most of Daniel’s features were still there. High cheekbones. Weak chin. Crooked teeth. Until this moment, she has not considered the details of this affliction.

I believe I am familiar with this ailment, though I’ve never had the opportunity to catch it this early.

Give him this; it should stop the spread. Though its side effects will likely be… significant.

Just be sure that no one sees them!

It may ruin my reputation.

She feels her face flush with guilt she had not felt since childhood. Surely, she could not be at fault; she had only followed Dr. Randolph’s orders. It was impossible for her to have known.

“Are you there, dear?” comes a familiar, but distorted, voice from the open window. The voice is a series of snaps and rustling, like the sound of wind moving through a lush forest. It sounds distant, from far beyond the threshold of the window, but fills the room. It is calm, even toned, and Melody grows tense. Still clutching the glass jar, she does not notice the glow of the stones fade. She moves to the window to see who is addressing her.

Outside Mrs. Sanderson and her neighbors, lying flat against the frozen stone, stare up at her. Through the violently whipping snow, she sees vibrant blue petals blossom from each torso. They sway as though the violent storm is nothing more than a spring breeze. Their mouths gape open as the strange voice comes once more.

“We came to have a word with Daniel. We heard his call.”

pencil

David Pugh studied film at Indiana University. Enjoys pizza, Tekken, and slasher films not exceeding 93 minutes.

Quiet Child

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Dead of Winter ~ Second Place
DJ Tyrer

Photo of a house fire at night. Most of the image is in darkness, as bright yellow-white flames shoot up from a house and smoke billows around the flames. In the foreground, the tops of other house and trees are silhouetted. Power lines bisect the image horizontally from the left disappearing into the smoke and flames.

Photo Credit: Peter Hill/Flickr (CC-by)

“Quiet, child,” said Uncle Andrew as he withdrew from the room and flicked the switch, plunging it back into darkness.

Nella closed her eyes tight and pulled herself deep down beneath her duvet. It was cold, but that wasn’t the reason why she sought its comfort.

She cried into it. Always the same, always the same two words.

“Quiet, child.”

She bit the duvet, filled her mouth with it till she almost choked, tried to stifle the shuddering sobs that shook her entire body.

Uncle Andrew never believed her.

As the sound she was making softened, Nella could hear the soft sounds that she tried to imagine were those of sleet dashing against the window panes, but weren’t. The sibilant whispers that sounded as if they came from all the corners of the room, as if there were many hidden people speaking too softly for her to hear, or a single sound that echoed quietly about her, again and again, moving ever closer…

She didn’t know what they were, where they came from, who made them—she had never dared open her eyes to see—but she knew that the whispers were bad.

Nella had first heard the sound the week before her parents died in the fire that had destroyed their home, left the beautiful old building a pile of charred rubble.

At first, the sound had been so soft she could barely hear it.

“Can you hear it, mummy,” she had asked, eyes wide with the mystery of it, and her mother had shaken her head and said, “What, dear?”

“That sound. It’s like a breeze in the walls.”

She had imagined that there might be something marvellous hidden within the walls of the house, a doorway to a world like Narnia, somewhere where she might have adventures, a place of dreams—not nightmares.

“I don’t hear anything, darling. It’s probably the wind blowing through the air bricks in the cellar. It’s nothing to be frightened of.”

Her mother had stroked her hair and Nella had quickly fallen into a deep and pleasant sleep. She hadn’t been frightened of the sound, not then. But, she should have been.

Slowly, the whispering sound had grown closer, as if she were hearing people having a quiet conversation in the hallway, moving closer to her door. At first, Nella had thought it was her parents. Then, she had begun to wonder if it was ghosts. Her best friend had told her the house was so old it ought to be haunted and she wondered if she was right and became a little frightened as the sound came nearer, as if the ghosts were drawing closer to her bedroom door, nearer to coming inside.

Her father had laughed good-naturedly when she told him and said, “There are no such things as ghosts, not outside of storybooks. When you die you’re dead and that’s the end of it, you don’t come back in a white sheet to scare people.”

Even now, as she trembled in her bed, that made Nella sad. She hoped her daddy was wrong and that she might see him again, one day, that he might even come back and save her from the whispers.

But, even as the sound grew louder and louder, her parents had been unable to hear it. It was as if the sound were one for her and her alone, a message she couldn’t understand, or a threat or taunt she couldn’t decipher.

Then, came the night of the fire.

The whispering sound had been louder than ever, and there was something in it, a deeper sound, a little like a chuckle that made her feel sick to her stomach—and then the smoke alarms had begun to shriek and she hadn’t been able to hear the whispers any more.

Nella had run from her bed and down the stairs to the telephone in the hall as her parents had always taught her and called the fire brigade, before running out of the house into the snowy night. As she went outside, she heard a crashing sound like the time her cousin booted his football through the side of the greenhouse and a moment later the smoke alarm died, to be replaced by a deeper, more terrifying sound.

Nella had been terrified. She didn’t want to be alone in the darkness with the twitching reddish shadows that danced across the lawn and the houses opposite. She wanted her mummy and daddy.

They would, she knew, be right behind her.

Only they hadn’t been.

Looking back at the house, Nella had seen the flames flailing through the shattered window of her parents’ bedroom, had watched as they danced further across the house, shattering more glass, causing the roof to collapse and the walls to fall in.

The fire engine had arrived with its blue, swirling lights, adding them to the dance of light that spun about her.

A policeman had taken her away. Later, a woman she didn’t know told her that her parents were dead. A fault in the wiring for the Christmas tree lights, she said.

She didn’t notice the holiday pass.

Nella had sobbed for what felt like years. Then, when her tears had run dry, she fell silent, too tired to speak or think. Too scared. For, behind the sadness, she knew that the whispers were somehow to blame.

Her Uncle Andrew and Auntie Susan had taken her in and she hadn’t heard the whispers in their home, had thought herself free of them, had maybe even come to believe they were nothing more than a bad dream.

Then, in the distance, as if far down in the cellar beneath the house, she heard them…

“Uncle Andrew! Uncle Andrew!” she had cried, running into his study. “Can you hear it?”

“What?” he had asked, testily. “I’m very busy, you know.”

“There’s a sort of whispering. I heard it at home. Before the fire.”

“Quiet, child,” he had said, for the first time. “You’ve just been having nightmares. It was a terrible thing you experienced and it is, I suppose, to be expected, but you need to move on and put the past behind you.”

“But—”

“Quiet, child. Now, go away and play. I’m busy.”

She had gone and tried to talk to her aunt, but Auntie Susan had been just as busy and said the same thing. It was the same every time she tried to tell them what she could hear—the strange whispering, growing louder every night.

Now, it was so loud, it seemed to be all around her, swirling about her bed.

How she wished it would go away!

She didn’t care that Uncle Andrew would be cross with her. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the night any more.

Nella threw back her duvet and opened her mouth to scream, but as she did so, she thought she caught a hint of movement in the darkness, like a figure stepping up to her bed, and heard a sibilant voice hiss, “Quiet, child.”

No sound came from her mouth.

Nella tried again. Nothing!

She pulled the duvet back up over her head and held it tight against her face, as if it would ward off whatever lurked about her bed. And, as she did so, she thought, for just a moment, she caught the sound of a deep and unpleasant chuckle.

*

Nella woke to the sound of Auntie Susan calling her name.

She threw back the duvet and saw grey morning light through her bedroom window. Somehow, she had survived the night. She shivered at the memory and tried to pretend it had all just been an unpleasant dream.

“Nella, it’s time for breakfast. Hurry up, you’ve got school.”

It was Monday. That meant she was starting at her new school.

Nella sniffed and blinked away tears. She was going to miss her friends. She didn’t want to go some place new.

But her aunt called again and she had to get out of bed.

She washed and dressed and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen.

“Good morning,” said her aunt with a smile as wide as necessary for the day.

Nella opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out.

Her aunt looked at her. Nella looked back, uncertain, tried to speak again, but still was unable to make a sound beyond the slightest rough hiss of air.

Panic began to well up inside her, the same terrifying panic she had begun to feel when her parents didn’t come to her from the burning house and the policeman swept her away. She tried to shout, to scream, but no sounds came, save an increasingly strangled hiss.

“Nella? Are you okay? Are you choking?”

Her aunt grabbed her and tried to look in her mouth, but Nella pushed her off and shook her head.

She tried again, but still there was no sound. She pointed at her throat.

“Sore throat?”

Nella screwed up her face in thought, then nodded. It was a little sore, now.

But she remembered the voice the night before, the one that wasn’t her uncle. “Quiet, child.”

She thought of one of the bad words her father said when he hit his hand with a hammer or banged his head, then put her hand up over her mouth. Only, she hadn’t really said it, her aunt hadn’t heard it.

“Don’t worry, I’ll call the doctor,” said Auntie Susan.

*

The doctor had said something about it being to do with her sadness about the fire and her parents dying and having to start a new school. There was a long word that began with ‘sigh’ and made her think of the sibilant whispers that explained it, but she didn’t understand it.

“It’s the time of year. Keep her home for a day or two and she’ll probably be fine. If not, I’ll arrange for her to see a specialist,” the doctor had said. There was a long word for that, too, that also began with ‘sigh’. It was probably because a sigh was the only sound she could make, now.

But, no matter what the doctor said, Nella knew it had nothing to do with sadness and that her voice wouldn’t be coming back. She also knew something bad was coming. She tried to draw it for her aunt, but she just shook her head sadly and seemed to think the pictures were do with Nella’s parents.

It was so frustrating!

That night, she went up the stairs like a princess being sent to face a dragon, only with no prospect of rescue. Her friend, Ali, always said princesses should rescue themselves, but Nella had no idea how she was supposed to do that.

Glumly, she climbed into bed and gestured to her aunt to leave the night light on beside her bedroom door.

“Is that why you’re so down?” she murmured. Nella was grateful that she didn’t turn it off.

The whispers were still there, but further away, in the passageway outside her room, or in the walls. The light, faint as it was, seemed to keep them at bay.

She almost relaxed. If she couldn’t hear them properly, then that had to mean they couldn’t hurt her or her aunt and uncle. As long as the light kept them away, they would all be safe.

The whispers continued to hiss softly in the distance, as if prowling about her room seeking a way in.

Go away and let me sleep, she thought, and she said a silent prayer.

Then, the night light died and, in a moment, her bedroom was dark as anything.

Nella sat straight up and screamed, but she couldn’t make a sound. Nobody would hear her. Nobody would come.

Quickly, she lay back down and pulled the covers over her head.

The whispers were all around her. She thought she heard sounds of movement, swishing and footsteps, but it may just have been the growing noise of almost-voices as they hissed and squawked all about the room.

She could almost make out words. And, amongst them, she could hear her own voice, whispering cruel, hateful things.

The whispers hadn’t just taken her voice away, they had stolen it for themselves.

There was a hissing and a sound like tuh-tuh and she could smell something burning.

She could hear the deep chuckling sound, a mocking laugh that was growing in noise.

“Tonight’s the night,” she heard her voice say. “Tonight’s your turn.”

She couldn’t breathe. She was choking.

She threw back the duvet.

Flames danced where her night light had been.

Nella tried to scream.

“Quiet, child,” said her voice. “It will all be over soon.”

“Soon,” hissed other voices, not calming, but cruel.

“Quiet, child. Quiet, child. Quiet, child.”

The flames drew nearer.

Nella thought she heard her father’s voice, her mother screaming.

Then there was a crash and the door burst open and her uncle was beside her bed, pulling her up into his arms.

She was screaming.

“Quiet, child,” he said, and he carried her through the flames.

pencil

DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines around the world, such as Chilling Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree), All The Petty Myths (18th Wall), Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), What Dwells Below (Sirens Call), The Horror Zine’s Book of Ghost Stories (Hellbound Books), and EOM: Equal Opportunity Madness (Otter Libris), and issues of Sirens Call, Hypnos, Occult Detective Magazine, parABnormal, and Weirdbook, and in addition, has a novella available in paperback and on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dunhams Manor). Facebook.

The Facilitator

Posted on by

Dead of Winter ~ First Place
Alex Grehy

Black and white photo of a London street looking up at walls of buildings, new and old, from the position of someone on the street. The perspective makes the buildings appear to lean in, blocking the sky except for a sliver in the distance, where low sun glints off the bottom floors of a tall, nondescript glass building. The image has a gloomy, foreboding atmosphere.

Photo Credit: It’s No Game/Flickr (CC-by)

“Don’t give them money, it only encourages them.”

Phoebe cursed under her breath as Simon, her work mentor, caught up with her. Their office culture was oppressive, nothing went unobserved, but she’d vainly hoped that out here, on the street, Simon might curb his acid tongue.

“Yah, they only spend it on booze and drugs. Better to give to a homeless charity instead,” drawled Reese, who’d walked up from the station with Simon.

Phoebe assumed their arriving together was a coincidence. There were only so many trains that got everyone to the office in time, though there was hot competition to be the first in and last out.

“Like you’ve ever given anything to charity.” Simon sneered.

“I put a few pennies into a collection tin when they were rattling outside Harrods. A posh store like that wouldn’t let any riff-raff organisations collect outside their doors,” Reese said, walking on towards the entrance of the looming glass and steel tower block where they all worked.

Phoebe hung back and turned to the shapeless heap of quilts that engulfed the homeless person sitting on the pavement.

“I’m sorry, I’m sure they don’t mean to be rude. Here…” Phoebe fumbled around in her bag and tucked a £5 note under the trailing edge of a duvet. As she turned away, a small, clean hand, a woman’s hand, flashed out from beneath the heap and snatched the note away.

Phoebe shivered. She’d not felt warm since moving to the city—even in the summer a keen breeze whistled through these streets. She’d read somewhere that the architects had unintentionally created wind tunnels when they crowded the skyscrapers together, making the most of the precious mile square of prime city centre real estate. Not that it would be any better inside—her building’s air conditioning was fierce and then there was her colleagues’ relentless sniping.

As she drifted through the door, she heard Reese’s shrill voice penetrate the open office floor like a rapier.

“Phoebe’s off daydreaming again!”

Phoebe saw people look up from their cubicles and laugh. She scuttled to her desk, her flaming cheeks hidden by a curtain of hair as she leaned forward to turn her computer on.

Phoebe had complained to Simon about the teasing, but he’d just laughed, calling it harmless banter; she needed to suck it up, grow a pair. Macho bullshit, she’d thought, but not said. Her company prized individual performance over team cohesion, believing that competition led to achievement. It had a sour reputation. Over the water cooler, in the company gym, in the in-house bar and restaurant, her colleagues whispered of staff pushed too far, driven to despair by pressure and stress. There were tales of self-harm, violence, suicides.

Yet it was a global leader in, well, it was hard to say what it led—marketing, public relations, sales, stock trading. Complex and compartmentalised, the company slithered through boom and bust like a snake in the jungle. Staff who survived the rigorous culture, who wriggled into executive positions, became wealthy.

*

“Hi there, how are you today?” Phoebe addressed the heap of quilts piled on the pavement as she tucked some cash under the corner of the nearest duvet. It had become her daily ritual, though she found it hard to explain why. She was doing well in work, the money was small change, but she didn’t give to any other street beggar. Maybe it was the proximity to her workplace, that she felt safe enough to open her purse and plant some money in this one anonymous heap camped in the shadow of her company’s edifice. She’d never seen the recipient’s face—just the incongruous clean hand, reaching for the money.

“It’s been noticed you know,” Reese called from the pavement behind her. They’d shared a commuter route for over a year now, but Reese was arriving later and later these days.

Phoebe straightened up as Reese approached.

“Hold this a second,” Reese instructed, handing Phoebe her bag. “Don’t let the hobo steal anything.” Reese slipped off her commuting flats and replaced them with high-heeled court shoes.

“What’s been noticed?” Phoebe asked.

“Your obsession with this pile of rags. If Simon doesn’t like the company you keep, he’ll demote you. Our firm has a reputation to maintain.”

“That’s not all they notice,” said Phoebe in a stage whisper, but Reese had already overtaken her and pushed through the building’s entrance.

I’ve seen Simon check his watch when you walk in. I’ve seen him check your productivity logs. I’ve also seen him turn his lusty little eyes onto the new intern—you’ve let your standards slip, Reese. Phoebe shook her head and smiled, allowing that it was ok to be a bitch in the silence of your own head. Except her head was rarely silent these days.

“You can hear, can’t you?”

Phoebe looked down. The voice had come from the heap of quilts.

“Hear who? You? I didn’t think you’d spoken before; I mean, I thought you were asleep…”

“Or passed out, from the drink and drugs your friend thinks I’ve imbibed.”

“Uh, she’s no friend of mine, we just share an office, and she was just generalising, I mean, a lot of people in your situation do give in to… stuff.” Phoebe waved her hands around vaguely, trying to explain in gestures the impossible relationships between her and the people she spent the most time with, yet knew the least about.

“Hmmmm, yes, you’re no friend to her. You, who can hear her thoughts, who can see her struggling and does nothing. Is that why you leave me a pittance every day? To prove to yourself that you’re still a real person, with values, even when your soul is being washed down the drain?”

“How dare you judge me? I felt sorry for you.”

“No, you didn’t. Everyone can feel them, but only you and I can hear them. We’ve got more in common than you know.”

Phoebe turned her back and stomped into her office building, her thoughts a maelstrom of confusion.

How dare she? Why do I have to be kind all the time? Why can’t I cope? She always looks so together, taking time to speak to homeless people when I don’t have time for anything? What am I even doing here?

Phoebe stopped abruptly, only halfway to her desk. Not all those thoughts belonged to her.

“Phoebe’s daydreaming again!”

Reese, shrill as ever, never missed an opportunity to heckle.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe this is all I’m good for, taking people down, so they don’t notice how useless I am.

Phoebe looked around; these were definitely not her thoughts.

She strode over to Reese’s cubicle. Reese ducked her head down below the partition. When Phoebe peered over, Reese was resting her head on her keyboard, but Phoebe noticed the tissue in her colleague’s hand, stained with mascara and tears. The two women didn’t say anything. Phoebe returned to her own cubicle and drowned the whispers in her head in a flood of work.

*

The next day, Phoebe emerged from the underground station and trembled as a cold wind bore down on her, sweeping discarded newspapers and takeaway boxes along the street. There was always a breeze between the buildings, but today it was a gale, though the air had been still enough in the suburbs where she lived.

She pulled her heavy winter coat around her and tucked her chin into the faux fur collar, which may be why she walked straight into a woman walking towards the station.

“Steady on there.”

Phoebe felt a hand grasp her arm, helping her to regain her balance.

“Thank you. I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“No, you didn’t, you’ve never looked, but you can see me now.”

Phoebe looked down. The hand still clutching her arm was clean and small, yet for all its delicacy, she couldn’t pull away; no, she didn’t want to pull away. She looked across, at the woman’s face.

“It’s you, the hob— tram— homeless person that lives by our building.”

“Oh no, I don’t live there. I have a nice apartment a couple of miles away, in one of those blocks they built at the start of the concrete revolution in the sixties, back when they thought living in high towers would bring us closer to heaven.”

Phoebe looked at the woman in disgust. “You mean you’re some sort of professional beggar. What sort of scam are you running? If you can afford an apartment, you don’t need my £5.”

“No scam. I inherited the apartment when my mother died. That’s not all I inherited; she was a medium. She said I should listen to the testimony of the dead and, lately, I’ve come here to wait for you.”

“For me? Why? Look, I’m fed up with your hustle. Let go of me and don’t let me see you round our building again or I’ll call security.”

The woman tightened her grip.

“No hustle. Look, if I’m not mistaken, today is your awakening. This wind, I’ve never known it so strong—the dead are being drawn here, towards the day of the long dark. You are drawing them.”

Phoebe shook her arm loose.

“I’ll be outside when you need me,” the woman called as Phoebe walked away briskly. She was shaking, annoyed that she’d fallen for some scam. Then she remembered to check her bag—the woman had been close enough to pick her pocket. Distracted, she barely noticed a police car and an ambulance, blue lights flashing, skidding to a halt in front of her building.

Over the hubbub, she heard Reese’s voice in her mind.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, up, up, is this high enough? Got to be sure. Oh shit, they’re here to stop me. Now! yes yes yes.

Phoebe looked around, she couldn’t see Reese anywhere, then she saw a flash of red fabric and heard a thudding crunch as an… object… hit the pavement in front of her. She looked down and saw Reese’s ruined body, her face strangely untouched, though it looked as if the back of her head had been caved in by the impact.

Phoebe heard Reese’s voice in her head again.

Yes… up… high enough? Here to stop me. Now! yes yes yes followed by the sound of the impact then Yes… up… high enough?

Reese’s last thoughts replayed in Phoebe’s mind.

Phoebe sat on the kerb, shaking her head, trying to quiet Reese’s voice. But there was no silence in her mind. Reese’s voice was replaced by that of a stranger. Got to get that train, can’t be late for the meeting, if I don’t seal this deal I’m… then the squeal of brakes. Then the voice looped around. She shook her head again and realised that there were hundreds of voices in her mind, clamouring for her attention.

A cold wind buffeted her as she lifted her head. All around she saw shadowy figures falling from buildings, being crushed by the impact, then rising from the pavements and floating up before falling again. Rushing shadow commuters were mowed down by the traffic, bodies horribly mangled, then they rose again to run endlessly toward meetings they would never attend. The urgency of their thoughts made her stomach clench with anxiety, even as she cried over the futility of their deaths. She buried her head in her hands, pressing the collar of her coat against her ears. But blocking the street noises only made the voices in her head even louder.

A voice, a real voice, addressed her.

“Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you alright? Are you able to stand up? We need to clear the area so that our emergency teams can get to work.”

Phoebe stumbled to her feet, leaning heavily on the paramedic’s arm. All around her, real people, solid people, went about their business as the shadow ghosts whirled around them. The breeze of their passing tugged at tightly-buttoned coats, sweeping scarves and hoods from commuters’ heads.

“I’m ok, I just need a cup of tea, or something.”

“Did you see the fall? Did you know the deceased?”

“Not very well, we just worked in the same building.” Phoebe wrung her hands; Reese’s last thoughts were playing on repeat in her mind again.

“Ok, may I take your name and contact details? I’m sure the police will be in touch when the scene’s been cleared. You look frozen, get that tea and warm up.” The paramedic took Phoebe’s business card and handed it to a nearby police constable.

As Phoebe headed for a coffee shop across the road, she felt an arm link in hers. She looked down, it was the homeless woman.

“That was a hard awakening. Let me buy you a cup of tea, and a cake, the sugar will do you good, and let’s talk,” the woman said.

“Shouldn’t I be buying you the tea; you’re meant to be broke.”

The woman laughed and held up a handful of crumpled £5 notes.

“I’d say you’ve already paid.”

*

Phoebe stirred a sachet of sugar into her tea while the woman sipped a hot chocolate festooned with double cream and marshmallows.

“How are the voices now?” the woman asked, her voice soft and soothing.

Phoebe listened for a moment. “They’ve quietened down, like they can’t get through the door.”

“They tend to stay around the place that they died. You chose a good spot to rest—no one suffered an untimely death in this building. A few heart attacks, the original owner literally died of old age when he took a break, but nothing violent. Don’t you think it’s time you drank that tea?”

Startled by the matter-of-fact tone of the woman’s voice, Phoebe stopped stirring her tea and took a sip.

“What’s your name? Who are you?” Phoebe asked.

“My name is Eadie and I’m a listener.”

“A listener?”

“Yes, one who hears the dead. Not all of them, just the ones who had too much on their minds when they jumped under a train, or off a building, or just died through not paying attention to their surroundings. They repeat themselves over and over, for all eternity, as far as I can tell.”

“Fine. But what do you actually do?”

“Do? I listen, that’s all I can do. You’ve heard them. They’re trapped in their last thoughts; I can’t move them.”

“And that’s my life now? I have to listen to them, for all eternity?”

“No, you’re something else. I can sense it. You can do more—you’re the Facilitator.”

*

Phoebe strode towards the office building, assailed by the chill wind of the dead, their last thoughts ringing in her mind, repeating their hopeless litanies over and over and over again. She walked quickly, pausing briefly to tuck a £5 note under Eadie’s heap of blankets. A wry chuckle drifted from the heart of the heap, but the hand still emerged to grab the money.

Phoebe swiped her ID card at her building’s door and stood for a moment, blinking. The company had spared no expense in festooning the foyer in Christmas lights. Tasteful, of course, and arranged with the artistic care of a professional PR specialist, down to the cutesy paper baubles painted by toddlers in the local school. Nonetheless, she savoured the brightness. Outside, the shortest day already seemed to be racing towards sunset, even though it was barely nine a.m.

At her desk, she cherished the silence in her mind and the warmth of her sheltered cubicle, but she couldn’t concentrate. She’d met with Eadie most evenings, trying to understand the woman’s strange gift, and her own. She recalled the conversation they’d had just a week ago.

“My mother said there was only one Facilitator born in every generation.”

“What happened to the last one?”

“Mother didn’t know; she felt the Facilitator awaken, far away, but before mother could find her, the Facilitator’s presence vanished.”

“Do you think the Facilitator could shut off the thoughts? Control what she was hearing?”

“I don’t know. Mother said we would just have to mind our business until the next one—you—came along and facilitated the Reckoning.”

“What is the Reckoning?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know?” Phoebe had snapped.

“I know that you can hear the dead as well as I can. Instead of opening your beak like a needy baby bird, why don’t you try to learn for yourself. Reach out to the previous Facilitator—she’s probably dead, given how old she’d be.”

“I can do that? No, don’t tell me, you don’t know.”

“You’re right, I don’t know much. The Reckoning has something to do with the living and the dead when the veil thins at sunset on the Winter Solstice. Which is coming soon, whether you’re ready or not.”

Phoebe had spent the week reaching out to the previous Facilitator. She knew that they’d been far away from London, and that they were likely to have been in a big city.

Phoebe was surprised. She thought ghosts would congregate around mystic or holy burial sites, or in spooky churches in the woods. Eadie had laughed out loud when she’d voiced that opinion. The explanation was simple—cities were simply where the most people were, and where the most people died, though Eadie sometimes heard echoes from farms in rural areas, where agricultural accidents were common enough. The weather’s going to break. If I don’t fix the blockage in the combine harvester blades the crop will be ruined. The round bales weigh a ton, there’s no way they’d roll and crush anyone.

The Facilitator had awoken in Liverpool with no one to guide her, Phoebe now knew. The previous Facilitator’s final thoughts swirled around her mind.

I can’t believe I’m talking to the fucking Liver Birds, but they protect Liverpool, so protect me, make them stop, stop, stop! Then Phoebe heard the scrabble and scream as the Facilitator lost her balance and fell. But instead of the immediate looping repeat that Phoebe had expected, she heard a strange echo…

Why did you abandon us? Who will listen to us if you do not? Why weren’t you more careful?

She’d done a few searches and found the Facilitator’s name in a small report in a local newspaper published fifty years before. If Judy Smith’s alleged suicide hadn’t caused travel chaos for Christmas shoppers flocking to the city centre, her death might have gone utterly unremarked.

Eadie had promised that Phoebe wouldn’t go mad, that, if all else failed, there was a way to manage the voices. Though she also said that Phoebe wouldn’t like the solution.

The day passed too quickly. By four p.m., Phoebe couldn’t pretend to work any longer. The news channels on the screens all around the office were broadcasting weather warnings—gale force winds, risk of structural damage, travel disruption, transport agencies advising people to return to their homes as soon as possible. She looked around—most of her colleagues had already left, but if they’d said goodbye, she’d never noticed.

She stood up. A chill breeze teased at her hair and followed her as she walked to the cloakroom. She wrapped her coat around her as the breeze strengthened, then she heard a voice, Simon’s voice, in her head.

Fucking idiot, why did you jump? You knew it was just a fling, you stupid tart. You could have just left, I’d have given you a great reference, oh yeah. But you had to go and kill yourself. You almost got me sacked.

Phoebe looked around. Simon wasn’t there, but the breeze fluttered around Reese’s old workstation, strong enough to shake the cubicle’s partition. Loose sheets of paper fluttered into the air. As Phoebe approached, the computer on Reese’s desk turned itself on. In the screen’s crepuscular light, Reese’s ghost straightened up then ran to the stairwell that led to the roof. Phoebe fancied that Simon’s voice followed her.

Phoebe ran from the office. What did it mean? Was Simon dead? He couldn’t be—she’d seen him just an hour before. She guessed he’d left with the others, though he was more likely to sit out a storm in a wine bar than at home, with his wife and children.

As she stepped into the street, she was assailed by voices in her head, but the looped laments of the dead were muted by other loud, piercing cries.

How could you have left us? Did you not love me? Did you not love our children?

Didn’t I tell you to be careful? I knew your obsession with work would kill you!

How could you be so selfish!

How could you be so greedy? Fat use all your money is to you now!

A gale howled between the buildings as the dead crowded the streets in the darkness of the longest night.

“Come here, quickly!”

Phoebe staggered to the heap of quilts and squirmed into a soft, warm cave created by Eadie’s outstretched arms.

“What do you hear, Facilitator?”

“You mean you can’t hear them?”

“I only hear the dead. What do you hear?”

“I hear voices berating the dead. They’re being horrible, asking questions, accusing. It’s maddening. How can you make it stop? How can I lay them all to rest?”

“Do you think the dead want to rest?” asked Eadie.

“The dead seem to be oblivious, as preoccupied in death as they were in life,” Phoebe replied. She wrapped her arms around her head, the voices were so loud, she was afraid her skull would shatter under the pressure.

“Listen,” said Eadie. “I think I understand. You’re the Facilitator.”

“Yeah, ‘one who makes easy’, according to the dictionary. But nothing’s been easy, or obvious, so far.”

“It didn’t make any sense until tonight. I think you’re hearing the living. They’re calling to their dead. You’re here to make it easy for them to reach their dead.”

“Isn’t that your job?” Phoebe replied through chattering teeth. The ghosts of the dead were passing through the quilts, threatening to tear their protection away and expose the two women.

“No, I’m a medium—the medium through which the dead talk to the living. I’m not a two-way radio. But maybe together we can achieve something.”

Eadie grabbed Phoebe’s hands.

“Open yourself to the living. I’ll reach out to the dead. Maybe this connection—” Eadie shook Phoebe’s hands. “—will let them reach each other.”

The women stared into each other’s eyes and concentrated. Around them, the swirling wind coalesced into a cyclone, ripping the quilts away. Phoebe didn’t even flinch.

I need to get to the meeting, this traffic’s such a pain, maybe if I just dodge between these buses… Eadie chanted a ghost’s last thoughts. Phoebe replied with words from the living.

Your meeting was nothing, even your boss said so. What about meeting with your kids? You never rushed for any of them, you stupid fuck.

I need to get to the meeting, this traffic’s such a pain, maybe if I just dodge between these buses…

Eadie’s eyes were wide and filled with tears. “He hears, but he’s not listening. He doesn’t want to listen.”

“Try another,” said Phoebe.

Yes… up… high enough? Here to stop me. Now! yes yes yes followed by the sound of the impact then Yes… up… high enough?

“Reese, oh no, Reese, I’m so sorry!” Phoebe shouted, struggling to raise her voice above the howling of the wind and the insistent whine of Simon’s rage.

Fucking idiot, why did you jump? You knew it was just a fling, you stupid tart. You could have just left, I’d have given you a great reference, oh yeah. But you had to go and kill yourself. You almost got me sacked.

“No, Simon, shut up, you’re being an arse, let her rest.” Phoebe shouted.

“It’s ok,” Eadie whispered. “Reese is not listening, none of them are listening.”

Phoebe pulled her hands free and threw her arms around Eadie’s shoulders. The living were not listening either. This might be a Reckoning, but it was not a reconciliation.

*

The police found them the following morning. Eadie was dead. Hypothermia, the coroner later reported.

The paramedics thought Phoebe was also dead, her body was cold to the touch. But in the warmth of the ambulance, she revived. She recalled the doctor’s quip—‘You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.’

She’d snorted then, little did he know—the dead were never truly dead. Eadie’s voice echoed through her head, her last pleas looping through her mind.

No! No! Why won’t you listen? Why won’t you hear their hurt and heal them?

A month later, Phoebe found that she had inherited all of Eadie’s possessions—a generous amount of money, enough to save Phoebe from the tyranny of work; Eadie’s modest apartment, one room filled with quilts; and a note.

Not all alcoholics are mediums, but all mediums are alcoholics. That’s the secret, get drunk, just enough to silence the voices, that’s the only way to get some rest. Be careful, don’t drink too much, death is not your friend, take it from me.

*

Phoebe peered out from her nest of quilts—the morning light hurt her eyes and her head was thumping from last night’s binge. It was safe to say that red wine was not the best way to drown the voices of the dead. Effective, yes, but not the best.

Commuters passed by, eyes sliding away from the heap of quilts, unwilling to see the apparent plight of the homeless person at their heart. No one left £5 notes for her, but she grabbed the few coins and bottle tops that were sometimes thrown at her feet. She saw Simon walk past, aiming a kick at her heap of quilts, his voice grating.

“I thought that the old biddy had died; honestly, poor people breed like rats, we’ll never be rid of them.”

She listened. On cue, Reese’s thoughts cut through her mind.

Yes… up… high enough? Here to stop me. Now! yes yes yes followed by the sound of the impact then Yes… up… high enough?

At dawn every day, Phoebe came to the city centre to listen to the dead. She felt she owed them, and Eadie, that much. At dusk, she returned to Eadie’s apartment, showered, ate, binged on alcohol. She experimented with different drinks, desperate to find the best blend to silence the hurricane of voices when the Reckoning came again, next winter.

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Alex Grehy’s (she/her) work has been published worldwide and she is a past winner of the Toasted Cheese Dead of Winter contest. She is a regular contributor to The Sirens Call and the Ladies of Horror Flash Project. Her essays on her experiences as a “Lady of Horror” have been published in the Horror Writers Association Newsletter and The Horror Tree blog. Her sweet life is filled with narrowboating, rescue greyhounds, singing and chocolate. Yet her vivid prose, thought-provoking poetry and original view of the world has led to her best friend to say ‘For someone so lovely, you’re very twisted!

Broken Bridge

Posted on by

Dead of Winter ~ Third Place
DJ Tyrer

Photo Credit: Neil Moralee/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

George blessed the storm. For most folk in Cumbria, it was a disaster, but for him and Bill it was a source of riches. The two of them sat in the cab of the rented van, wrapped up against the winter chill. Rain lashed against the windscreen, making visibility poor in the early-morning light.

The white van ploughed a furrow through the flooded lane, past the ‘Road Closed’ sign, sending waves sloshing over the hedgerows before the waters crashed back down behind them and rippled back into stillness. Overhead, the sky was a slate grey. Dark clouds glowered on the horizon, threatening worse: Most people were hoping they held snow that would fall upon the higher ground and offer the sodden county some respite, but they were hoping otherwise. The longer the rains fell, the more villages they could loot.

“Remember,” said George, glancing at Bill, “just take small things—jewellery, electronic gadgets, that sort of thing. Stuff you can hide in your clothes. If someone spots you hauling a widescreen TV down the street, they’ll know you’re up to something.”

“I ain’t stupid,” Bill replied.

George didn’t bother to correct him.

They were almost at their destination. The village had been evacuated after the bridge connecting its two halves had collapsed into the white, frothing torrent that had replaced its usually docile river.

“You sure it’s safe?” Bill asked, clutching the dashboard, as the van splashed down towards the cluster of houses, the water rising up its doors and dribbling in about their feet.

“’Course it is.” George slowed to a crawl, no longer able to discern what hazards the water might conceal.

“That’s odd,” Bill said, after a moment, pointing.

“What is?”

“The bridge.”

“What about it?” George was more concerned with keeping the van on the road.

“Look at it: it looks as if it exploded. There are chunks of it all over the shore.”

“That’s the force of the water for you,” George replied as he parked the van in a shallower area of water. “Right, let’s get out there and fill up. Come on.”

“Gah, it’s freezing,” Bill exclaimed as he climbed down into the water.

“Keep your mind on the prize.”

“Will do.”

They had to clamber over the sandbags that were piled up in the doorways of houses. While intended to keep homes dry, they had been overwhelmed by the rising waters and now served to dam the waters in. The various knickknacks and household items that made a house a home floated on the pooled waters. Even heavy pieces of furniture—tables and fallen shelving units—floated about like so much driftwood. There was a stink of sewage in the air.

They climbed the stairs. The homeowners had carried up as much as they could of value, conveniently laying the goods out for them to pick over. Finishing with them, they proceeded to grub through the bedroom drawers. Anything of worth was slipped into the many voluminous pockets of the coats they wore.

“Good haul,” George commented with a grin as they headed back down the stairs. Suddenly, he paused and put a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“I thought I heard…”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

They were silent a moment. It was unlikely any rescue workers would be about, but it paid to be careful.

“Nah, it was probably nothing,” decided George and they continued on their way.

After a few houses, having picked them clean of trinkets of any value, the two men trudged back to the van and divested themselves of the objects stuffed into their pockets. In the back were a number of plastic bins, allowing them to sort the items by type. Then, they waded off down the street to the next set of houses.

“Hey, this one looks as if something crashed into it,” Bill said, gesturing towards one building that had been halved in size.

“Probably the water caused it to collapse,” said George as they went inside and began to look about the ruins. He sighed, annoyed. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything here. It’s too much of a wreck. Let’s move onto the next one.”

They climbed back down the piled rubble and began to splash their way along the street.

Suddenly, they were bowled over as the building just ahead of them exploded apart as if it had been struck by an artillery shell. It happened so fast, they didn’t register whether it was the blast or the wave that caught them. They plunged beneath the filthy, frigid waters. Then, they broke the surface, spluttering in terror and confusion.

“Help!” shrieked Bill. “I can’t swim!”

“Shut it, you muppet. It’s not that deep; you can stand.” George helped him to his feet, then looked about and said, “What the hell just happened?”

Bill just shook his head.

“Houses collapse inwards,” said George. “They don’t explode outwards.”

“Didn’t the news say something about the risk of a gas explosion?”

“They’ve turned it off. I doubt it’s that.”

“Then what was it?”

They were interrupted by the splash of an oar and a voice demanding, “What are you doing here? Don’t you know it’s dangerous?” A man in a kayak was paddling towards them along the flooded street.

“Just checking on our house,” George lied, easily.

“You’re not from around here,” the man countered. If he were a local, he probably knew his neighbours by sight.

“I meant our aunt’s place. She got out ahead of the flood, so we thought we’d best check how it was.”

“Really?” The man was silent for a moment, then said, “Still, whatever you’re doing here, it’s dangerous. Especially if you’re motives aren’t entirely pure.”

George ignored that last jibe and said, “Sure, I can see that: That house just collapsed.”

The kayaker laughed. “Collapsed. Yeah.”

Soaked through and feeling frozen, George found the man’s tone irked him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just that it’s dangerous here.”

“No, come on, what do you mean?”

“Just that you really ought to get out of here, assuming you want to live.”

Although Bill shifted nervously, sending ripples out across the waist-deep water, George snorted and said, “Really? Is that meant to be a threat, or are you talking about the weather, ’cause the forecast says we won’t get another band of heavy rain till this evening. Things aren’t going to get any worse.”

“Floodwaters are the least of our concern.”

“Come on,” said George, turning to go and gesturing for Bill to follow him. “Man’s a loony.”

“Evil has been set free here,” the man called after them.

“Loony.”

There was the crash of another house being torn apart.

“Best get out of here,” George muttered. “The flood must be getting worse, after all.”

Then, they stopped dead, staring in horror. Something large and black loomed into view, having just crashed through another building. Brickwork tumbled off it as if shrugged away and water ran off it in rivulets. The size of a hill, they could barely comprehend its form: it had bulk and they had the impression of numerous legs, but beyond that it might have been a shapeless mass.

Bill swore. George gave a shriek.

“What is it?” Bill demanded as they continued to stare.

“Evil,” called the man in the kayak from behind them, maintaining his distance.

The thing began to turn towards them.

“Run!” shouted George, pulling at Bill’s shoulder.

The kayaker was already paddling swiftly away. Between waist and chest deep in the water, George and Bill could barely make much speed at all.

Behind them, the enormous bulk lumbered slowly but steadily after them. They attempted to pick up speed, but fear could only achieve so much.

“This way,” called the kayaker, turning down a side street. They followed as best they could.

“What is it?” George shouted after him.

“Evil—bound here for six-hundred winters within the bridge. When the floodwaters tore the bridge away, it was freed once more. You need to leave this place, if you want to live.”

“Back to the van,” said George.

Unfortunately, their only means of escape lay past the creature that threatened them.

There were more crashes, more houses being destroyed, as it headed towards them.

Clambering over rubble, they slipped around it and, finally, returned to the van. The man in the kayak was bobbing close by.

“You should hide,” he said. “If you leave now, it will follow your van. It might come for you, anyway—evil calls for evil. But, there is a chance: my grandmother taught me the old chants that bound it. I’ll try to bind it once again, if I can. You should be able to escape then, whatever happens. If I fail, perhaps the wind will change direction and blow in some truly-icy Siberian air. Maybe that will freeze it in the waters long enough that I can find a way to deal with it, or someone else can.”

“Well, I’m not hanging around to find out,” said George, climbing into the driver’s seat. He looked at Bill who was hesitating at the passenger door. “You okay?”

“I didn’t want to come,” he replied. “I’m going to find somewhere to hide.” With all the rubble about, there were plenty of options and he quickly jogged off to secrete himself. It was a wise move.

George decided not to wait. Leave the kayaker to his crazy plan, he decided; he turned the key. The van didn’t start. He swore.

The waters shook about him and he tried again, but still there was nothing.

Then, an enormous leg like a pillar of slick, black stone came down immediately in front of the van. A moment later, its twin crashed down upon its roof. George didn’t have the opportunity to register what had happened. He was dead.

Bill trembled where he hid. He was certain it was getting colder, that winter was here with a ferocity. He wasn’t sure where the man in the kayak had gone, but he could hear him declaiming loudly somewhere within the confines of the devastated village. Bill wondered if it were possible for the man to bind the thing as he said his ancestors had. He had a horrible feeling they would all die together in this godforsaken place.

Chill winds blew in and the voice of the man rose in pitch as he cried out again and again for the thing that had escaped the bridge to obey his words. But, wondered Bill, what was there to bind it within?

Maybe, Bill thought, if it followed the man, he might have a chance to get away.

Perhaps, with the temperature dropping, they would all die here of the chill. Bill certainly felt as if he might.

It was growing nearer.

Bill made up his mind. He started to run.

He might just make it, he thought.

He heard the pillar-like legs crash down into the water just behind him, sending up a spray that fell upon him like stinging darts of rain.

He didn’t make it.

Something seized him by the waist and he felt himself being raised up into the air. For a brief moment, Bill got a clear view of the devastation wrought upon the village. His final thought was to wonder if they had deserved their fate, as the man had implied: was this all some hideous punishment? Then, he ceased to wonder: He was dead.

The rain continued to fall and, slowly, the floodwaters continued to rise, the weather indifferent to the horror it had released.

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DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines around the world, such as Chilling Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree), All The Petty Myths (18th Wall), Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), What Dwells Below (Sirens Call), The Horror Zine’s Book of Ghost Stories (Hellbound Books), and EOM: Equal Opportunity Madness (Otter Libris), and issues of Sirens Call, Hypnos, Occult Detective Magazine, parABnormal, and Weirdbook, and in addition, has a novella available in paperback and on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dunhams Manor). Facebook. Email: djtyrer[at]hotmail.co.uk

Cutting Your Own

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Dead of Winter ~ Third Place
Bunny McFadden

Photo Credit: Robert Linsdell/Flickr (CC-by)

The red velvety rope steadied me as I trekked down the path, dragging my borrowed saw through the day-old snow. Through the perfect rows of tiny trees, I could see my children dashing. We’d never find the perfect tree in time, I worried, biting at my winter-chapped lips. And it had to be perfect this year since we’d be alone.

“Mama, that one’s so cute!” Valeria pointed excitedly at a hobbled tree, one even smaller than the rest of the miniatures. Her coat sleeve rode up on her wrist. They grew so fast. Next week marked halfway through kindergarten.

“Eww, that one’s ugly and short, just like you!” Aléjandro poked his head between the branches of the next row, his shaggy brown hair hanging over his eyes. A few sprinkles of snow began to gather on his cap.

“They’re all short, Alé!” Valeria snapped.

“Enough, I don’t want to hear it,” I could hear myself say. I sounded just like my mother. A shudder ran through me. I was beginning to think the miniature tree farm was a mistake. It sounded so picturesque when I saw the flyer sticking out of Valeria’s binder last week.

“Cut Your Own!” it read in mottled photocopied letters. A garish cartoon of an evergreen was crookedly drawn in the middle. At the bottom was an address on an unfamiliar road, but when I looked it up, it was only an hour from home.

“Let’s hurry up so we can get hot chocolate,” I called, but the kids were already past hearing distance. The rows of trees were neat, almost like desks in an empty classroom. If it weren’t for the snow that had begun to fall in earnest, I could see the end of the path and the little hut at the entrance. The conifers were just tall enough that I couldn’t see the kids, but I could hear them fighting. I stood alone in the row of miniatures.

I picked a rotten day to cut down a tree.

Last Christmas was so different. We took a plane to see Jeremy’s parents in Florida. It was the kids’ first time flying, and even on the tiny seats their little legs swung without touching the floor. I spent Christmas Day on the beach, reading for fun while the kids played with the waves. And then it was January and the bottles kept piling up and the conspiracies kept piling up and the snow kept piling up until I couldn’t take it anymore.

Substitute teachers don’t make a lot of money, and the district only paid me once a month, so when the eagle finally landed I bundled up Valeria and bribed Alé with screen time. The tree farm was in Edgewood, not too far of a drive. We didn’t really have the space for a full tree anyway, and most of our old Christmas stuff was in storage till I got the court things settled. “A mini tree will be perfect,” I kept saying to the kids. Small isn’t bad for now. Like I said about the rental. Like I said about the used car. Like I told Valeria when she complained her coat didn’t fit this morning.

Down the aisle, a hunched figure appeared. I turned my attention to the nearest pine, dabbing at the tear starting to chill my cheek. I wasn’t really in the cheerful spirit you have to be to say “Merry Christmas” without scaring someone half to death.

Each tree had a tag fluttering in the snowy wind. I reached out and turned this one over, trying to look busy. The tree was knee-high, so I had to crouch down to get a better look, leaning on the saw like a crutch. In blood red script on the tag was the word Noel. It was tied with a red thread. The name set off a dozen memories of late-night fights and printed police reports that Jeremy kept trying to get me to read. Common name, I told myself.

The stranger was beside me now, speaking. I straightened up, accidentally pulling the tag off. Embarrassed, I slipped it into my pocket.

“I said, did you find what you were looking for, mija?” the withered old lady smiled, revealing eggshell-white teeth. She gestured down at the tree from under her black wool cloak. The tree bent away in a gust of wind, brushing my leg.

“I think so,” I answered. The saw I’d borrowed from the neighbor down the hall suddenly felt heavy in my mittened hand. “Well, aren’t you going to cut it?” the crone said, almost urgently.

I bent down, reaching over the velvet ropes that separated the aisles, and put the saw to the bark, scraping it once. The sound made me wince. It hit me that I hadn’t seen my kids in a few minutes, but it would be rude to stop cutting the tree now…

“You know, I have to check with my daughter first. She’s the picky one,” I explained, setting down the handsaw against the rope. The withered woman frowned. Her black eyes narrowed at me.

“Better hurry before you get snowed in,” she warned.

I looked down at the ground. The snow at my feet was growing. She was right. I squeezed the tag in my pocket nervously.

The old lady began hobbling on stilted legs back toward the hut at the entrance. I couldn’t even see the headlights of cars on the road; the storm was getting worse. I looked down at the tree again.

“Mama!”

The shout sounded far off, muffled. I dropped the saw and spun, looking over the tops of the small trees. Something didn’t feel right. Maybe I needed something sweet; my blood sugar felt like it was dipping. “Valeria? Alé? Alejandro, you get back here right now,” I said, my voice rising. “Valeria?” These kids never listened to me.

The red velvet ropes along the aisle swung in the sharp wind. The strings of vintage Christmas bulbs above were unlit. Who puts together a Christmas tree farm and doesn’t even bother lighting the place? I ripped off my mitten and dug in my deep coat pocket for my phone or a snack, but I must have left everything in the car. Instead, I felt my fingers curl around paper. I pulled the tag out. It had gotten wet with snow; the red ink had bled and I could barely read it.

The kids were probably fed up with our adventure. The car was unlocked; they were probably in there, fighting over Alé’s phone. “He better not run out of data,” I thought to myself as the snow stung my face. This tree would have to do. I’d marked it, but I needed to do something about my blood sugar before I could finish.

It was getting darker by the minute, and they still hadn’t turned on the lights. I walked against the wind, holding the velvety ropes that separated the path from the trees. After what felt like forever, I was at the thin red door to the hut. It was the size of a garden shed; the window was on the other side, and I could see the edge of the chalkboard price sign. I knocked, mittens in hand.

“Mama,” I heard again. This time, the voice was much closer, and it was not one of mine. I could tell. Was there someone in the hut? I tried the handle; the brass was immovable but hot to the touch.

“Hello?” I shouted above the whistling wind. “Hello?”

Suddenly the door opened a crack and the crone’s black eye was there. I couldn’t see behind her; she filled the frame of the door completely. Had she grown taller?

“Have you chosen, then?” the woman asked, her wrinkled mouth almost immobile.

I nodded my head. “Do I pay first?” I asked, handing her the tag.

She snatched it from my hand, looking down at the lettering. “Yes, yes, whatever price you think is right,” she told me, her black eyes glittering. She reached inside and grabbed a ceramic piggy bank shaped like Santa. That was a little strange. I couldn’t remember the price of a tree. My brain felt sluggish. I needed to eat something, and soon. I dug out a twenty from my pocket.

“Is that enough?”

She gestured silently to the ceramic figure in her hands. Instead of the familiar suit with black and gold buttons, this Santa was wearing a red robe that draped over his face. His arms were crossed in front, the sleeves meeting at their opening, and the slot for coins was right below the tip of his pointed white beard. I folded the bill and slid it in. A dozen Christmas lights flickered on behind me, their vintage bulbs burning brightly and illuminating the woman’s face.

“Would you like to come in for a cup of cocoa,” the withered woman asked, and I could see a loneliness in her face that hadn’t been there before.

“Sure,” I said after a moment, stepping into the tiny hut. An ancient radiator was plugged into the wall, and there was no sink or microwave. Everything sat on a small green card table. In the same outlet, there was a cord that led to a single electric kettle that looked like it was straight from the eighties. The withered woman reached into a box under the little card table and set out two plain mugs. “Cold day, isn’t it,” she said. I nodded politely, rubbing my hands together. There was a metal folding chair leaning against the wall; I maneuvered over to it and pulled at its rusty hinges.

“So, where’s the husband,” the woman asked as she clattered an ancient-looking can of cocoa powder around on the card table.

“Oh, it’s just me these days,” I replied.

I lost myself in thought for a moment, remembering the way Jeremy used to fish out his marshmallows for the kids to share any time we had hot chocolate together. Before he started thinking the neighbors were kidnapping children. Before he drunkenly accused one as she dragged out her trash cans in the wee hours of the morning.

The kettle whistled and snapped me back to the little hut. I could almost feel my hands again.

“Thank you for the cocoa,” I said politely, smelling the watery mess in my mug. I took a sip and nearly choked. It was unexpectedly spicy but better than I’d expected.

“Of course. A bit of chile powder, like my mother used to use,” she said. “That’s how they would make it back in my day. A bit of chile powder. Since the Mayans, you know. That’s the secret.”

I took another sip.

“That, and the blood.”

I didn’t have a moment to react to this; someone under the table enveloped my legs and I screeched, jumping halfway out of my seat. It was Valeria. “Mom, can we go?” she said, looking up at me, her voice muffled from under the table. “I’m cold.”

“How did you even get in here? Go wait in the car,” I said. “It shouldn’t take too long. Maybe Alé will help me cut our tree.”

“No!” the woman shouted. I’d almost forgotten she was there. She hustled us out of the hut, slamming the door behind her. I hadn’t even had time to put my mittens back on. She gripped my elbow tightly, her fingers like claws locked around my flesh. “You must do it alone.” Valeria shrunk behind me, hugging my legs tight.

“Sorry, she’s a little shy around strangers,” I explained. The woman’s tone changed. She smiled down at my daughter, her white teeth glinting.

“Quiet as a Christmas tree,” she said, beaming down at Valeria.

I turned to my daughter and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be right there, I promise. It won’t take me long.” She pouted and silently turned toward the dark lot where our car was parked. It was annoying that I had to do it alone, but I understood. There were so many laws about child safety these days. That was something Jeremy never understood when he would go off on those long rants about stolen children. The world wasn’t like that anymore. Maybe when we were growing up, but everybody had phones these days. It was another thing we’d argued about, and he didn’t let up even after we got Alé his own cheap cell.

The snow and wind had stopped and the air was still. The sun wasn’t out anymore, but the Christmas lights illuminated the long aisles of miniature trees. I returned down the center path toward the one I’d chosen, the woman walking behind me. When we reached mine, she deftly lifted the red velvety rope to make the trunk accessible.

Even in the calm, the needles seemed to shimmy.

“What did I do with the saw?” I asked, searching around. I left it right here, but it must have gotten covered with snow. I couldn’t even see our footprints from earlier, just mine and the owner’s, stretching back to the hut at the entrance. I crouched to look under the tree and saw a puddle of something sticky.

“Mama,” someone screamed in my ear. The sound made me fall back, my unmittened palms pressing into the snow. With my head next to the tree, I could smell it now. Blood. A scream rose in my throat.

The saw mark I’d made in the little trunk was bleeding. The puddle grew, turning the snow around the tree sticky with black blood. The smell was unmistakable, even to my frozen nose.

“What the hell,” I whispered, pushing myself back into a seated position.

The woman was suddenly above me, her eyes glowing unnaturally. Her smile had turned to a strange grimace. The wind tore at her black wool coat. Through the flapping fabric, I could smell a rot that bit at my cold nose above the smell of fresh blood from the tree. The lights flickered above me.

“Don’t say that in vain,” she snapped, her eyes growing blacker. She stretched out above me, filling the sky. The scream that was lodged in my throat shook itself loose now.

The withered woman reached out her arms and I saw feathers under her coat. She was transforming in front of me, growing taller. Little black barbs ballooned under her skin, erupting into feathers that sprang out wet and reddish black. She shook in front of me, wagging the feathers and sprinkling me with her blood.

For a moment more, I was frozen in horror, trapped under the giant bird-woman.

“Mama!” I heard. Looking between the legs of the creature I saw Alé and Valeria there at the end of the aisle, screaming.

I kicked at the creature’s strange long legs, feeling guilty for a moment when I saw her falling, but it was too late. I turned and ran through the snow, away from the tree, away from the woman. The snow flurried around me, but I couldn’t stop. I yanked my children up, holding them under my arms as I skidded over the icy path to the car. Behind me, the snow flurried. A shadow lifted into the sky. The bird-woman rose into the air and flew at us with demonic speed. I reached the door of my car and threw the children in, clawing the door shut behind us. “Lock the doors!” I screeched, and my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. We scrambled around, snapping the locks into place.

The creature slammed on our hood, dragging her claws deep into the thick metal. I fumbled in my pocket for the keys. Alé and Valeria screamed, clutching each other in the passenger seat. In front of us, the creature screeched, her beak opening to reveal an endless throat.

I made the sign of the cross and turned on the ignition. The headlights flashed on, and she was gone. A flurry of white snow passed in front of us, covering the claw marks in the hood. The engine sputtered for a moment, then whined in submission.

When we got home, the marks were gone.

We went with a plastic tree that year, in the end.

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Dr. Bunny McFadden (she/they) is a Chicana mother who tinkers with words for a living. Email: bunny.the.bookworm[at]gmail.com

Rules

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Dead of Winter ~ Second Place
Gail A. Webber

Photo Credit: Adam Buzzo/Flickr (CC-by)

I looked down at my boots, trying not to shuffle while a cold wind blew between us.

My grandfather seemed like a giant standing over me, a giant who was shaking his finger at me. In his other hand, he held the rabbit that two minutes ago I was so proud to have shot. “We only hunt rabbits in winter, Narina.” He leaned closer, and though I couldn’t see him, I felt him get closer and imagined him drawing his grizzled eyebrows together. I’d seen it enough times before. “They carry a sickness in the warm months. It makes people real sick.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, registering the new rule: Wait until winter to kill rabbits. Rules had always made me feel safe, even if breaking them meant I’d get punished. But since punishments hadn’t lasted too long or hurt too much in the past, they just reminded me to be more careful. To think before I decided to do something. What scared me lately about rules was that the older I got, the worse punishments seemed to be getting for the same violations.

…like standing in the corner facing the wall for twenty-four whole hours with one of them always watching to make sure I didn’t move.

Rules. I’d learned some early: Don’t talk back. Never lie. Do your chores. Take your punishment. Others came later: Tell me if you see a strange person. Never go outside without your knife. Gut your kill in the field. Stay out the meat shed. I was eleven years old and had quite a long list to remember.

The first time Granddad gave me the rule about seeing a strange person, I was confused. From when I was really little, Gramma had read me stories about the long-ago-people in the Bible, but I’d never seen another human besides us. I thought we were the only people left, but the rule about strange people meant we weren’t. That was when I first started to wonder about other things I’d been told, whether they were true or not, but I trusted my grandparents then, and knew better than to ask for more information than they offered.

Even with my head down, I could tell Granddad was still looking at me funny. “Did you hear me, Narina?”

“Yes, sir.” I tried to be obedient—I liked how they treated me when I obeyed. But how could he expect me to obey the rule about killing rabbits when I didn’t know about it? It wasn’t fair. The whole concept of fair and not fair consequences was something I’d only recently thought up, but I knew it was right.

As for that day, I didn’t think I had done one thing wrong.

I had awakened before Gramma called me. That was unusual because I’d been having more trouble getting awake lately and Gramma said it was because I was growing up. That made no sense because Gramma and Granddad were already grown and they always got up really early.

Anyway, I’d been having a dream about running, racing a deer faster and farther than I’d ever been. When the deer jumped into a river, I followed it in, still chasing. The dizzy excited feeling the dream gave me didn’t fade like most dreams did when I sat up, and my excitement mounted as I thought about the river. I had been warned about the river.

I could go as far as I chose in three directions from our cabin. Only one direction was forbidden to me, and I was never to go that way. Not hunting, not hiking, and not for any other reason. Granddad said the river was in that direction, beyond our fields and beyond our forest, and that it was dangerous for me to even look at. He told me if I ever got lost and found myself near it, I was to close my eyes until I’d put my back to it and then hurry home as fast as I could.

I couldn’t help wondering if “beyond the river” might be where Granddad’s strange people lived, if they existed at all. I fantasized about what they might look like, made up reasons why we never tried to see them, and why I should be afraid.

But nobody said I couldn’t dream about them—a person can’t control her dreams—and maybe the dream would come back.

My insides felt all jumpy that morning. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t go slow. I needed to do something, so I got my knife from the table beside my bed, crept downstairs real quiet, and grabbed the .22 rifle by the back door. Then I ran to the place where our fields meet the woods.

After I shot a fat rabbit, I gutted it right away, just like I was supposed to, and ran back home fast. The proof was that blood was still dripping from the carcass Granddad had taken from me. I wanted to look at his face, but was afraid what I would see.

It’s not fair. I didn’t know.

I swallowed down a sigh and waited to find out what my punishment would be this time.

“So, this is the right thing done the right way.” I looked up to see him standing straight with a little smile curving his mouth. “Last week, we had our first hard frost, and this morning the ground is hard and there’s snow. Truth be told, it’s not much snow, but enough to call this winter. Well done, Narina.” Granddad always used my whole name instead of calling me Narry like Gramma did.

While I was still adjusting to the idea that everything was okay, he patted me once on my shoulder, the only way he had ever touched me. Gramma was another story. “And it’s a good shot too,” he said. “Right behind the front leg. I’ll hang it while you go help your grandmother.”

“Always hang your game for a few days” was another of his rules. He said it made the meat taste better and get tender, and we had a special outbuilding for that—the meat shed. Granddad did the butchering in there too. It seemed like it would have enough space inside to hang four gutted deer carcasses, but I didn’t know for sure. I wasn’t allowed to even look in there. “Don’t ask me why,” was another of Granddad’s rules.

He flicked his hand, the one holding the dead rabbit, and blood spattered in the snow. “Now git. You’re standing there like you been bewitched. Don’t let your grandmother do all the breakfast chores by herself.”

I ran to the cabin.

In the kitchen, I found Gramma bent over the woodstove, as tiny and neat a person as my Granddad was a huge one. She was lifting fresh cornbread from a covered pan onto a plate and didn’t look at me. “Where was you?” she asked.

“Hunting!” I leaned against the log wall and pulled off my boots. “I got a rabbit. With one shot!”

She looked at me with an odd expression and I wondered if she hadn’t quite heard me. As I was about to repeat myself, she said, “I am grateful for the food, Narry, and know your confidence comes from being well-taught and from practice. But avoid pride. No good comes of it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Gramma had rules too.

I never knew my mother. Granddad said she died, “going someplace she had no business going,” whatever that meant. It never sounded quite right to me, but the one time I’d pressed him for details, I got locked in the feed room for two days with a jar of water but no food. All I knew was my mom died and her parents—Granddad and Gramma—had raised me on their farm where they mostly followed the old ways. I learned to live that way too.

We cooked and heated with a woodstove, kept food cool in the summer in our spring house, and did without whatever we couldn’t grow, make for ourselves, or kill. Planting started in early spring with cool weather crops like kale, broccoli, and beets. The rest went in as the weather warmed, mainly from saved seed. Once some colorful little envelopes of new seed appeared along with old clothes Gramma would remake into things for the three of us. I never knew where either the seed or the clothes came from, and all Gramma would say was, “God provides.”

For seven months, there was always something growing or needing harvest, and weeds that needed pulling grew everywhere our food crops did. Whatever we didn’t eat fresh had to be “put up” for winter eating, a big job after harvest.

We kept chickens for eggs, goats for milk, and a few hogs for cleaning up scraps. Sometimes Granddad would kill a hog or a chicken if hunting was bad or if he wanted something different to eat. But most of the meat for our table was whatever he—and more recently he and I—could shoot. We ate rabbit and squirrel, venison, groundhog, and some other meat I couldn’t identify. Some creatures are hard to tell by just skinned pieces. It wasn’t an easy life. But whatever else we lacked, we always had plenty to eat.

Gramma looked me up and down. “Go change and wash up before you lay the table, Narry.” She shook her head at me and I took one step back. “You need to learn not to hug fresh kills, but that can’t be helped this time. Put your bloody clothes in the vinegar pail. We’ll launder them later.” She meant the pail on the back porch where Granddad always put his clothes after butchering.

I changed and did as I was told with the soiled clothes. When I came back to get out plates and utensils, I remembered my great shot that morning and couldn’t help smiling. Then my mind went to what Granddad was doing with my rabbit right then and a question came out all by itself.

“Why won’t Granddad let me in the meat shed?” I had never dared to ask that before. “He should know I’m not scared of dead things, and if he let me watch him butchering, I could learn. And help.”

Most of my questions didn’t make Gramma angry like they did Granddad. This time, she shrugged her shoulders while she put slices of fatback into the iron skillet and slid them around so they wouldn’t stick. “It’s his special place,” she said. “One of them, anyways. People got to have their own places.”

That made me wonder where my special place was… if I even had one. It felt like something in me moved sideways and I held my breath for a second. Finally, I asked the rest. “But why can’t he share his place with me?”

I wasn’t paying enough attention and had to skitter away at the last second before Gramma got to me. Usually, she only pinched me when I did something bad, but sometimes it felt like she did it for no reason. Either way, she pinched so hard it really hurt, and the black and purple bruises lasted for weeks. She hardly ever did it when I was little, but as I got older, I had two or three of those bruises all the time, no matter how hard I tried to follow the rules. As old as she was, she could move like a snake and she was brutal.

I kept the table between us until she went back to the bacon as if nothing had happened.

After a few minutes, she said, “Narry, sing us a song.”

We didn’t have electricity or a telephone then—I didn’t even know about those things—and we never went anywhere except hunting. The only music I had ever heard were the songs Granddad played on his mandolin, and one of my favorites was “On Springfield Mountain.” I liked the story, about a boy who got bit by a poisonous snake. A girl who tried to save him died because she had a rotten tooth and when she sucked out the poison, it got in her too.

So, I started singing that, but Gramma stopped me. “Heavens, girl! That’s a frightful song. Sing something more suited to the child you are.”

I wanted to tell her I was no child anymore, but decided that was a bad idea. So, I held my tongue and tried think of another song. “The Green Grass Grows All Around” was a silly piece Granddad taught me when I was about five, but it seemed exactly what she wanted to hear because once I got going, she bobbed her head in time.

The salty-fatty smell of bacon filled the kitchen, and the sizzling sound made it smell even better. As I was thinking about cornbread, bacon, and the eggs I knew Gramma would scramble to go with them, I heard footsteps on the front porch.

My grandmother’s head snapped up. “That ain’t your Granddad’s walk. I need to… No, you’re faster. Run out the back door and fetch him from the meat shed!”

If Gramma was right and it wasn’t Granddad, then who? While I was still wondering, a knock sounded on the door.

“Stop staring, girl! Be quick!”

“But I can’t go in…”

“Git!”

I ran out, sliding in the snow as I rounded the side of the cabin. Over my shoulder, I shot a look toward the front porch. A strange man stood there holding a little case. He wore clothes like I’d never seen, a kind of jacket that didn’t look at all warm. It matched his trousers, both blue, but not like blue jeans. Shocked to see an actual stranger, I tripped and stumbled the rest of the way to the meat shed, arriving in a rush. I hesitated only a second before I banged on the door.

“What in holy hell…” Granddad bellowed from inside and the door flew open. I got only a glance at the long stainless-steel tables inside before he gave me a hard look and slammed the door behind him.

“A man is here,” I choked out. “Gramma said come get you.”

I swear he growled and took off at a limping lope, getting up onto the porch faster than I thought he could. The strange man turned as if to say something, but Granddad didn’t give him a chance. He grabbed the man up by the shirtfront, punched him once in the face, and dragged him backwards down the porch steps toward me.

I had a million questions I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to ask.

Granddad seemed surprised to see me still standing in front of the shed and yelled for my grandmother. “Pearl! Get Narina back in the cabin and keep her there. I need to deal with this.”

I didn’t wait for Gramma to come get me, but ran inside on my own. What I found there puzzled me. Never in my life had I ever seen my grandmother shaken—not when a bear was tearing the chicken house apart, not when she shot a copperhead that had me cornered in the barn, and not when she thought a fever would take both me and Granddad. But this man… it seemed like seeing this man had made all her bones like jelly.

A couple of times while we waited, I tried to sneak a look out a window, but each time Gramma grabbed me away. I heard noise a little later—like a shout or a wail—but I figured it was one of the animals. Even back then, my mind sometimes turned one thing into another and I had learned to let strange thoughts be. Usually, they went away.

It was a long time before I heard a door slam outside. I peeked out before Gramma could tell me not to and saw Granddad padlocking the shed. There was no sign of the strange man.

Boot steps on the porch. Front door creaking open. My grandfather framed in the doorway. “I sent him on his way,” was all he said.

Gramma went to him. “A car?” I think her voice was louder than she thought it was, because I hear her clear as day. He shook his head.

“What’s a car?” I’d never heard that word before.

Both of them looked at me, but neither responded. “Then how?” Gramma asked him in a whisper, but I still heard her. “Walking the road?”

He shrugged and said, “Still so overgrown you can’t hardly find it.” Then he sat down at the table and waited for Gramma to fill his plate.

I knew what overgrown meant, like fallow fields and gardens gone to weeds, but “car” and “road” were two new words. Apparently, they had to do with the man. “What’s a car?” I asked again. “And what does ‘road’ mean?”

Nobody answered me that time either, and it was all I could do to keep from getting loud. But I knew that wouldn’t get me anything but punished and I still wouldn’t have an answer. There had to be a way to find out all the things I wanted to know. There had to be.

I buttered my cornbread and stole looks at them between bites. They both kept their eyes down, fastened on their plates until their food was gone.

I was still looking at Granddad when he cleared his throat and locked eyes with me. I jumped.

“We will speak no more of this incident. You are to forget it, Narina.”

My mind spun as all the things I thought I knew fought to rearrange themselves. I had every intention of keeping silent despite the questions tumbling over each other in my mind. But I couldn’t. “Forget it? How can I? This changes everything!”

Granddad scowled and his mouth twisted into an ugly frown. “Not one thing has changed for you.”

“But that man!” I felt like something had hold of my insides, and I didn’t care what they did to me. “They’re beyond the river, right? Those people. A lot or just a few?”

Gramma’s eyes were as big as two full moons and Granddad gripped the edge of the table. He pushed himself slowly back, his knuckles white.

I knew I had crossed some kind of line and was afraid again, not afraid enough to keep silent, but my voice came out squeaky. “What else haven’t you told me? What else have you lied about?”

Granddad lowered his chin and glared at me from under heavy eyebrows. When he finally spoke, it sounded like thunder. “Narina, stop. I mean it. Stop. We’ve kept you safe from them. From yourself. Like we tried to do for your mother. She wouldn’t listen, and look what happened to her.”

I felt my head tilt sideways like a dog hearing a strange noise. “What do you mean? You said…” Realization dawned. “You lied about that, too.”

“Bite your tongue, Narry!” Gramma snapped. “What do we have to do to make you behave? Maybe you’d listen if we put you in with the pigs. You don’t need all your toes, and you’d remember that lesson for the rest of your life!” She reached across the table for my arm, but I dodged her and jumped up, knocking my chair over backwards.

Granddad stood up too, his face red and his hands bunched into fists at his sides. I held my breath. Not once in my life had he ever struck me, but right then I thought he would. I wondered if his fists would kill me. Instead of striking out, he took a few steps back, seeming to shrink. He cracked his neck sideways and said in a low tone, “All you need to know is that the creature is gone.”

“Creature,” my grandmother repeated.

Granddad’s eyes bored into mine, now more with sadness than anger. “It’s gone. You won’t see it again.”

I opened my mouth to ask them why they called it a creature instead of what it was, a man. Then I closed my lips tight together, locking my words inside. I felt years older than when I’d shot that rabbit only hours earlier, and wondered if my questioning was a serious mistake. I was confronting the ones who had always had more power than I did, and wasn’t considering what might happen to me. I wasn’t careful…

Wait. Be silent now. Just wait.

A few days later, I woke to the smell of breakfast cooking—bacon, but not quite bacon—and Gramma calling my name. My bedroom window was foggy and wet with tiny drops on the inside. Granddad called it condensation and said it was from my warmth on the cold glass. Odd.

After dressing, I went downstairs and began to set the table without being asked. I could see that Gramma must have been up for a while because a pile of sewing lay on the side table beside her favorite chair. I didn’t understand how she could see well enough to sew by just the morning light coming in the windows, and wondered if she somehow did it by feel.

“Making something for Granddad?” I asked her.

She nodded without taking her attention from the skillet. “I was. A hunting vest, I thought. But that fabric isn’t sturdy enough for that and I may make something pretty for you instead. The fabric’s got a nice feel to it. Might be nice against your skin. God provides. Go over there and see if you like it.”

I couldn’t help smiling. It had been a while since she’d made anything for me, and I liked the idea of getting something new. But as I got close to her chair, I stopped, first puzzled and then suddenly understanding.

The fabric was blue, but not like denim, and there was enough for matching jacket and trousers, both now completely disassembled.

I went to the window and saw it had started to snow again, large flakes drifting down in the still air. My grandfather was just coming out of the meat shed, limping against the weight of the slop bucket he carried, presumably for the pigs. A couple of long bones stuck out the top. We hadn’t gotten a deer in a long while, and the bones were too long for anything else I could think of. Granddad closed the shed door, but didn’t lock it.

Even from a distance, I could see his hands and clothes were bloody, the way he always got from butchering. Head down, he headed for the hand pump where I knew he would wash himself. He did, and when he finished, he hoisted up the bucket again and disappeared behind the barn.

We had a rule about lying, but I knew they’d lied to me, and I had unanswered questions. Like how old clothes appeared again and again out of nowhere, what “creatures” Granddad hunted that had meat I couldn’t identify, and why my grandparents kept us so isolated.

I needed to know what had happened to the man whose blue clothes had become a pile of Gramma’s sewing, what bones Granddad was feeding to the hogs, and what the bacon/not bacon was that Gramma was cooking that morning. I thought all those answers, but wasn’t willing to admit to myself what I feared might be true. Not yet.

The answers were in the shed, and if I went out now, I’d have at least a few minutes before Granddad came back or Gramma came looking for me.

A few days ago, I’d felt like I didn’t care what they did to me, what the consequences for violating rules might be. Now it was time for me to act.

Without giving myself time to reconsider, I ran to the back door and pulled on my boots. Then I grabbed my coat and the .22 rifle—I might need both. I heard Gramma calling me back, but ignored her and ran all the way to the shed, my breath coming in white puffs that sent snowflakes whirling. It wouldn’t be long before Gramma came after me. Called Granddad. And I was sure that whatever happened after that wouldn’t be good, given the pile of rules I was in the process of breaking.

I yanked the open the meat shed door and looked inside.

The carcass was headless and gutted, hanging over a hole in the wood floor. It was minus one leg and a strip of belly muscle, the same place where pork bacon comes from. I recognized what—or rather who—this had been. Not a deer. On the stainless-steel table beside the carcass lay a boneless chunk of meat, rolled and tied as a roast. My throat clenched when it struck me that I might have eaten a fair amount of this kind of meat in my life.

In a rush, answers to all my questions tumbled over one another. It all made sense now. I heard Gramma’s shout to me and another to Granddad and turned to see her trying to hurry herself toward me. She wasn’t fast. Neither was Granddad. They would never catch me.

I didn’t have a chance to think about what was I going to do now that I knew the truth about life on this farm. The decision came fast and easy, and almost before I knew I had decided, I was running as fast as I could in the one direction I was never supposed to go.

I didn’t know exactly where the river was, but it had to be there or else why would Granddad make a rule about not going past it. I believed it was there. It had to be. And just like in my dream, I would jump in and cross it.

Running faster than I’d ever run, I scared up a young doe from the underbrush and we raced together, just like in my dream. When we got to the river, I knew she would jump in and I knew I would follow her. I felt dizzy with the wonder of it, and my insides vibrated with something more exciting than fear. Maybe the unknown. Maybe freedom.

On the other side of the river, I would find those other people wherever they were. After that, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to let my grandparents take me back to the farm.

I felt doubt crowding past the excited feeling. That water would be cold, winter cold, and if I made it to the other side, I’d be soaked. Maybe get sick. Maybe die from it.

“I’ll find another way over,” I told myself out loud.

Then I heard Gramma’s voice in my head. “God provides.”

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Gail A. Webber is a retired science teacher who lives and writes on a small farm in Maryland. Her stories have appeared in Fiftiness, The Tower Journal, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, and others), and in anthologies including 2016 Write Well Award, The Way You Walk Through Madness, and Writings to Stem Your Existential Dread. She has published three novels and a volume of short stories. Facebook. Email: gail_webber[at]hotmail.com

Fitting Room #3

Posted on by

Dead of Winter ~ First Place
Jason Porterfield

Photo Credit: Endless Studio/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Cashmere topcoats. Merino wool scarves. Gloves made from some kind of nanofiber so new that it hadn’t been properly named. All illuminated by a golden show window light that invited thoughts of blazing fireplaces and designer Irish setters, crystal tumblers and old Scotch.

The shop windows on Duvivier Street held wonders that Dimitri LaFitte knew were out of his grasp. Those tony things may as well have been on display in a lunar showroom as in the street-facing windows of Faberge Leaf. It was the kind of store that probably checked one’s references before admitting access.

“Don’t even think about going in that place,” His uncle Dansby had told him one long-ago December evening when he noticed the teenaged Dimitri peering in as they walked by on their way to the city’s annual tree lighting.

“They wouldn’t let you in. You don’t carry the right kind of cachet.” Dansby rubbed his thumb against his fingers, the universal sign for cash. Dimitri felt his cheeks flush at the thought of his wallet, empty in his back pocket except for a picture of his ex-girlfriend, a losing scratch-off lottery ticket he bought at a vending machine, and his learner’s permit. Why bother carrying a wallet at all?

He thought of Dansby every time he walked by the storefront. His uncle so casually dismissed the idea of going into a place that was frequented by people who made astronomical amounts of money, whose hourly earnings may well have topped what Dansby made in a month as an accountant.

Dimitri didn’t exactly promise himself that someday he would go into that store as a customer, but he never passed it without experiencing a deep yearning for the kind of life its stock of luxury goods represented and the income needed to attain them.

Yet somehow Dimitri had not risen to those economic heights when fire ravished his apartment building some fifteen years later. He had a steady job, a collection of furnishings and clothing—most of it purchased new but not at boutiques. There was a little credit card debt but not enough to make it hard to pay his bills.

The fire department’s inspection of the ruins of his former apartment building revealed multiple structural issues were to blame for the conflagration.They found evidence that the building’s owners bribed city officials for years to look the other way when safety issues with the wiring and heating systems arose. A settlement with the tenants was offered and rejected. When a jury found fault with both the building’s owners and the city, a significant sum of money was divided among the former residents and Dimitri suddenly found himself rather wealthy.

His first acts on receiving his portion of the damages awarded were to pay off his debt, buy an inexpensive condo in the same neighborhood and reinvest a sizable portion of his payment so that he could remain relatively comfortable for life.

Only then did he begin to fantasize about visiting Faberge Leaf. He visited the store’s website, a glitzy affair of high-definition images that didn’t actually feature any merchandise and certainly didn’t mention prices. Apart from a few basics, he had not replaced most of his wardrobe after the fire. The one exception he made was to pick up a nice suit, a tailored specimen from a noted label. It was expensive, but didn’t threaten to put any kind of dent in his bank account.

Dimitri took the day off for his trip downtown. His new suit, worn a time or two to break it in, was cleaned and pressed. He called Uncle Dansby before getting dressed and told him of his impending trip to Faberge Leaf.

“Oh Dimitri, don’t go to that store!” Dansby practically shouted. “Take that money and go back to the place where you bought your suit. They know you now and they treated you well. Give your money to someone who has earned it.”

“You know I’ve wanted to shop there since I was a kid,” Dimitri retorted. “Now I’m someone who can actually afford whatever it is they stock there and I’m going to go there and they are going to serve me like they would any customer.”

“Let me ask you a question.” Dansby paused for long enough that Dimitri wondered whether he was still on the phone. He was almost surprised when the older man spoke again. “Have you ever seen anyone coming out of that store looking happy that they’ve been shopping there? Or looking like they just had the time of their life? Have you?”

“Well, no.” Thinking back, Dimitri couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone coming out of the store at all. Nor could he remember ever seeing anyone go in. But who, apart from security guards, notices people going into shops?

“See? That store didn’t solve their problems or make their lives easier. It probably made them worse. Now they had a pricey jacket but none of their things matched it. They had to go back for new accessories, new shoes, new jewelry to set it off. And by the time they finished, the whole thing would be out of date by the standards of the Faberge Leaf.” Dansby practically spat the store’s name in Dimitri’s ear.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Dansby,” he said, now holding the earpiece a safe distance away. “I won’t lose my head, and I’ll be sure to give you a full report.” He hung up before the older man could say anything else and proceeded to get dressed.

Dimitri hired a car to take him downtown. It was too cold to walk. Besides, he intended to splurge and saw no reason to waste the experience by taking public transportation or a common rideshare. His charcoal-gray suit was immaculate beneath his black wool overcoat as he stepped onto the sidewalk. A storefront mirror reflected his neatly trimmed hair, the matching tie and pocket square the suit store helped him pick out, his shiny shoes and the silver glint of his wristwatch, an expensive piece he had inherited from his grandfather and kept in a safe deposit box.

He was pleased with what he saw. He strode down the sidewalk with purpose and crowds parted around him, some pedestrians even stepping into day-old banks of snow to get out of his way.

Faberge Leaf appeared uncrowded, though he could see employees inside. He made to grab the door handle and pull it toward him, but noticed the buzzer just in time to avoid the embarrassment of having the door catch in the latch. He smoothly changed the motion and pressed the buzzer with his index finger, allowing a small smile to play across this lips.

A moment later, the latch clicked and he went inside.

The store was bathed in golden light, the sort that illuminates favorite memories of family gatherings or good times spent with friends. A faint aroma of jasmine was in the air. Hidden speakers played the sound of breaking waves. He felt soothed, content.

An employee glided over. Dimitri caught the man’s glance flick up and down his body, his mind surely assessing the quality of everything from his shoes to his haircut. He gave Dimitri a warm smile.

“Welcome, Sir.” He held out his arm. “May I take your coat?”

Dimitri murmured his thanks and passed the overcoat to the employee, who promptly disappeared with it into an area behind the sales counter.

“Would Sir like a refreshment?” Another employee had popped up at his right elbow with a tray of beverages. To his surprise, the cups held cold drinks rather than the coffee or aged Scotch Dimitri expected. He chose one at random that tasted of lychees and summer afternoons. He couldn’t wait to tell Dansby about being addressed as “Sir” like a character in a 1930s British melodrama.

The employee accepted his empty cup with a nod and followed the one who had taken his jacket.

“Please, Sir, take your time with the merchandise.” Another employee had approached. “Simply come to the desk when you are ready to try something on. And do stay out of the third fitting room. It is in a ghastly state.” The man made a face. Dimitri had a hard time imagining what would cause an employee of such a fancy place to arrange his features into such a hideous mask.

“Must be a really big spider,” he thought to himself, making a mental note to investigate the third fitting room at the first opportunity.

He took his time, going over fine scarves, gloves, and shirts of such fine knit they might have been made by caterpillars. He was briefly hypnotized by a display of neckties with patterns so subtle and understated that they seemed to hold the key to infinity.

Eventually he chose another suit, a silk and poplin outfit in a subtle, blue-check pattern that would be ideal for warmer weather. He grabbed a tie and pair of shirts that would match the suit. Thinking about conditions outside, he also selected a fine scarf that could only be cashmere and an umbrella with gold embossing. Nothing was priced, but prices did not matter.

He approached the sales counter and an employee promptly appeared.

“Would Sir like to try on those items so that we can assure a proper fit?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The employee came around the counter and led him to the back. “Any of these fitting rooms should be fine, except the one on the end. Stay out of #3.”

The employee emphasized the point by scowling at the fitting room door in question. Whatever Fitting Room #3 had done to him, he wasn’t ready to forgive or forget.

“Why not use that one?” After being in the store essentially by himself for more than two hours, according to his watch, this was the first limitation anyone had placed on him.

“It’s not up to our standards,” the employee sniffed.

“So it’s closed or something.”

“No, it’s closed. It’s just not for a man of your—ah—discerning taste. Please, Sir, don’t go in there.”

Dimitri saw it, the moment the employee had sussed him out as someone who maybe had enough cash to afford to step into Faberge Leaf, but would never again have that sum. Windfall inheritances. Lucky nights at the casino. A winning lottery ticket. The employee’s eyes told him that he was still trying to sort Dimitri into one of those categories.

“Very good,” Dimitri responded, injecting as much ice into his words as possible. He strode toward Fitting Room #3.

“Sir, I must ask you to stay out of there.” The words were almost forceful.

“Thank you, but your assistance is no longer required.” Without another glance at the employee, he entered the fitting room and closed the door with a satisfying click.

There wasn’t anything special about this room, he thought. The light was subtle, designed to soften lines and flatter features and figures. Every wall was mirrored.

He took a long look at his reflection, dressed in the best suit that he had ever owned. Even in the flattering light, it looked like an off-rack discount model when compared to the items he had seen in the showroom. He looked at the blue suit he had chosen. Next to it, the one he was wearing resembled the sort of garment prisoners are given after their sentences are up. He hurried to change into the one he picked out.

He dressed with pleasure. Every piece of the suit seemed to banish a month of winter from his mind. He smelled the jasmine again. His mouth tasted lychee.

He perfected the knot in his tie and once again stepped into his shoes. A multitude of Dimitris looked back at him. He glanced at his footwear. The shoes would do, but it wouldn’t hurt to check the store for something more appropriate. At least his watch went well with the new outfit.

He moved his arms, bemusedly watching untold thousands of Dimitris do the same. Up, down, out, flapping up and down, crossing and uncrossing. He sat down and stood up, then tried walking in place. When that didn’t work, he paced the circumference of the fitting room. The other Dimitris followed. He thought about humming a John Philip Sousa march, then remembered that he was in the most exclusive store in the city.

After three of four turns around the fitting room, Dimitri decided he had seen enough. The suit would have to be modified, but not by much. The employees had implied that they could tailor items in-store, perhaps even as he waited. He could have another of those delicious lychee drinks, or perhaps ask for something hot. He was beginning to feel a chill despite the hint of jasmine in the air.

It was time to go, but he had gotten turned around in the fitting room. He scanned the walls for the door. He was beyond being amused by the other Dimitris also scanning their own mirrored walls, so he didn’t notice that some of the reflected Dimitris simply stood there, watching him.

He turned in a circle, but couldn’t spot the door. He put out his hands and felt around, but touched only cold glass. The smell of pine needles drifted in through the ventilation system. He did find the hook holding his old suit. Feeling chillier by the second, he draped the blazer over his shoulders. Under the hook he saw a small button marked “Ring For Assistance.” He pressed it and listened for a sound. He heard the tinkle of icicles hitting the ground and shattering.

“I need assistance!” he shouted, pressing the button so hard his finger ached.

“Assistance is unavailable at this time,” a chilly voice informed him.

By then his breath was fogging in the air and he was shivering. The mirrors remained unclouded. If anything, they were more clear than before. He watched one of the Dimitris shiver for a moment, then stop.

“But I’m still shivering,” he said to himself. “I’m still cold and getting colder.”

His body was shaking violently. Unable to stand any longer, he slumped to the floor. The other Dimitris remained upright. Some appeared to straighten their posture, towering and looming from his perspective. Still wearing their new blue suits, they stepped toward him, unbuttoning their jackets as they did. Some Dimitris offered him wolfish smiles full of teeth. Others were expressionless.

He heard the sound of ice shattering as they breached their barriers. The smell of freshly frozen snow was in the air as the Dimitris reached for him with their cold, cold hands.

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Jason Porterfield is an award-winning journalist and author living in Chicago, Illinois. Email: jporterfield99[at]gmail.com

Carriers

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Dead of Winter ~ Third Place
Matt Boyle

Photo Credit: ocegep/Flickr (CC-by)

“Congratulations,” said a tinny voice from David’s phone. He glanced at the screen and saw a spinning roulette wheel flashing quietly; it blinked, promising him Walmart gift cards and other riches. He sighed and restarted the phone.

“Fucking ads.”

He sat alone in the Colton Library stacks—nothing but books, quiet, and cold. He pulled his jacket tighter, breath pluming, and glanced out the window at the snow holding the campus in its grip. A single brave soul walked through the storm, head down against the snow, like a character from a silent film. David glanced at his phone again, then remembered it was still restarting and laughed at himself. He sat there, rather impotently, and shook his head.

“What the hell am I doing here?”

And then a young woman’s voice said, “Hey.”

David jerked around. The woman wore a muted grey sweater, a surgical mask, and studious glasses. She held up a hand nervously, and David grabbed for his own mask and fumbled it on.

“Um,” he managed to say. “Can I help you?”

She nodded at his phone. “Congratulations.”

“…for what?”

“You won an award, didn’t you? Didn’t your phone congratulate you?”

“Uh, no. It’s… just a malicious ad.”

She peered at him, not hearing him through his mask. “A what?”

He raised his voice. “A malicious ad. I probably went to some site I shouldn’t have. Just your garden-variety internet scam.”

“Oh, oh yes, I see. But… I still have to say congratulations. I, ehm…” She blushed, almost seeming to shrink on herself. “…you see, I navigated to some sites I shouldn’t have… and I picked up a virus too.”

He stared at her. “Miss, no offense, but that joke isn’t exactly in good taste these days.”

“God, I wish it was a joke. It’s not. I picked up a virus from my computer. Now whenever an ad pops up on someone’s device, I have to help advertise it.”

David blinked. He didn’t say anything. He was on a campus where almost everyone had decided to learn remotely. Those still on campus mostly hid in their rooms, or in corners of the library. He hadn’t seen his family or friends outside of a tiny box in a computer screen in six months. His mother had nearly died the month before, and he hadn’t even been able to leave the state. He didn’t know if he had the bandwidth to navigate this conversation.

Hell, he didn’t even know what this conversation was.

The grey woman pointed at his phone miserably and said, “Congratulations. You’ve won a free gift card to Walmart. There’s a message in there from Mary Stevens, from Omaha. She says, ‘I just got mine in the mail. Thanks!’”

David looked down at his phone again. Sure enough, the spinning roulette wheel was back, lights blinking silently. Mary Stevens from Omaha said the same words the grey woman had. He tried to hit the back button on his browser and the phone refused; it just refreshed the page and congratulated him again. The voice sounded exhausted, as if it could barely muster the energy.

“Congratulations,” the grey woman echoed.

David looked at his phone and then back at her. He did it one more time, then said, “I think I should go.”

“Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “I’m really sorry.”

“No, it’s ok,” he said, standing up. “I’m just… I’m tired. Why are we even studying here anyway, right? With this weather? We wouldn’t be if there weren’t a pandemic.”

“That’s the modern world,” she said sadly. “So easy to stay in touch nowadays. Can’t have a snow day if you can learn from anywhere.” She slung a book bag off her shoulder and sat at the other side of the table. “Do you mind? I have class and the network is better here.”

He shook his head. “No, you take it. I’m headed back to the dorms.”

She nodded. “Congratulations again.”

“Sure,” he said, and waved goodbye as the grey woman unfolded her laptop and booted it up. He walked along the stacks, his footfalls quiet and lonely, then he stopped before the elevator, blinking in confusion.

He felt an irrepressible need to… turn back. He had to…

“Congratulations,” he blurted out, almost a sneeze.

He stared down at his mask in confusion and something like horror, then realized that he was turning around and walking back to the grey woman. His silent footfalls followed him as he arrived back at her table, his eyes wide and confused. She looked up from her laptop screen, her face lit with colored lights of awards and ads that no doubt blinked at her from every link she clicked. He tried not to say anything, but… he couldn’t.

“Con… congratulations.”

She stared back, her eyes mournful. “I’m so sorry. Looks like you’ve caught it too.”

“Caught what? This doesn’t make any sense. You can’t catch a malicious ad. Human beings aren’t… aren’t…”

The grey woman didn’t say anything. She stared at him patiently.

He swallowed, feeling something coming up from his gut, like vomit. The words burst from his lips and he spat them out. “…congratulations,” he said again, feeling tears begin to form in his eyes, the words spitting from his mouth without his consent. “You’ve won a chance for a free PS5. You’re… the five-hundredth visitor to the site.”

The grey woman smiled behind her mask. “Thank you.”

“What the fuck is happening to me?”

The grey woman shook her head. “This is what we are now. Carriers. Of one virus or another. We can’t get away from either.”

David stared and looked up at the window. It had become dark in the past ten minutes, and all he saw was a silent snowstorm. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed as the grey woman tried to exit out of the ads on her computer and start her Zoom call. All around them, he realized, the library’s computers were turning on, connecting them to the world kept physically distant, cutting through the pain of the lost human touch, offering their weary reminders that they were all in this together in these uncertain times, and that if they would just sign up now, all the riches of the world could be at their fingertips.

“Congratulations,” said the grey woman to the people in her computer. “We’re all winners.”

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Matt Boyle works in instructional design at a university that allows students to choose how they want to learn during the pandemic. He doesn’t actually think flexible learning is like a malicious ad though, 🙂 Email: magicrat008[at]gmail.com

A Guiding Light

Posted on by

Dead of Winter ~ Second Place
H.B. Bendt

Photo Credit: Thomas Milne/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

The wind had shifted from a low murmur in the underbrush to a chilling howl racing around the steep drop of the cliffs. It carried an uncomfortable cold settling in one’s very bones, filling up the veins with ice, and freezing muscles until the skin turned blue and numb. The sparse grass beneath her shoes cracked with each step, stems frozen solid and glistening in the dim light coming from an overcast sky. Rain and snow mixed in a drizzle, settling in her hair and clothes, creeping into every exposed crack or corner it could find. She blinked, almost blinded by the curtain of flakes, some bright white, others translucent.

Despite the uproar of the storm, the cliffs themselves lay quiet and tranquil as ever. They flanked the bay on each side, reaching three hundred feet at the peak with slopes and jagged edges on the way down to the water. Dry bushes sat scattered along the path leading up, patiently enduring the cold. Enduring months of darkness and winter storms building up above the open sea and making their way landwards. Whatever hoped to survive up here wasn’t beautiful, but tough. Thick-skinned and rooted deep into the rock and black soil, not to be blown away whenever the wind violently shook the ground. The barren, dark sprigs of spring squill grabbed at her ankles as she walked on, scratching at the exposed skin shimmering pale from underneath the long button-up shirt reaching barely down to her thighs, and the open coat flapping in the wind. She passed through the shadows, across a patch of plain, frozen earth trampled flat by the stream of curious tourists venturing up here every now and then, and on towards the cliff’s edge. Moving billows of clouds overcast the sky, the sole sources of light being the dim, swallowed shine of the moon—and a slow, deliberate whoosh, whoosh, whoosh streaming from up above. On, off, on, off, again and again, at a comfortable, steady pace.

Grey waves crashed into the cliffs with a clangor, white foam riding along and dissolving into the many nooks and crannies buried in the hill. Rocks and earth crumbled, drizzling down the slopes underneath the tip of her shoes now peeking over the edge. She looked down at the dark water with its dancing crowns of foam.

Behind her, like a shining sentry, the lighthouse rose into the sky.

*

The door to the office creaked open at 3:47pm, seventeen minutes later than planned. Dr Lowes was a scrawny, balding man in a tweed jacket and glasses that sat at the very tip of his nose. The smile that slipped on his lips the moment he spotted her sitting in that olive corduroy armchair was genuine, broad, and warm. The whole room smelled strangely of liquorice. Books littered every available surface, including the floor, and on the windowsill, wedged between all sorts of potted plants, sat a model brain sporting a thin layer of dust. A Post-it pinned to it said I, too, can hurt in a shaky, cursive handwriting.

“You would have to be Francesca,” Dr Lowes said.

“Frankie is fine.”

“Frankie.” He sat down on a stool opposite her, looking her up and down for a moment. “So, Frankie. You believe you might be depressed.”

“Maybe.”

“How so?”

“Well,” Frankie inhaled. She had mentally jotted down a list on the way here. The list she had methodically put together in long hours surfing the internet, looking up all the common symptoms and signs. She wasn’t here to hear someone else tell her she was depressed—no, of that she was sure—but she needed professional chats to get her hands on prescription medication. “I feel a lack of energy and motivation. I sleep too much. I feel numb, occasionally. You know, just—empty. I’m not sad, but I do wonder about the point of, well, everything, really. I have noticed that I have recently started to neglect myself but I don’t have the energy to change anything about it. My diet is largely cuppas and Twix bars—”

“You have made it here today,” Dr Lowes interrupted her.

“Yeah, today is a good day apparently.” She smiled thinly.

Dr Lowes leaned back on his stool, his spine softly hitting the edge of the desk behind him. He crossed a leg over the other, looking at her over the rim of his glasses. “Tell me a bit about yourself. You are a student?”

“Yes.”

“What are you studying?”

“LLB. Torts. I’m not sure why.”

“Why do you think?”

Frankie paused. The go-to answer she had been telling everyone and their mother wouldn’t cut it anymore, would it? Therapy was all about honesty after all. “It seemed reasonable,” she said eventually. “Sensible. It’s not bad being a sensible person.”

“No, it isn’t. Being sensible can very well keep you out of trouble.”

“That is it, isn’t it? Being no trouble.”

“Being out of trouble or being no trouble?” Dr Lowes asked. Frankie didn’t reply. “You believe you are trouble to someone?”

Frankie inhaled sharply, blinking all of a sudden.

“I’m trying not to be. It’s just—well, I have this thing where I feel like I can do everything perfectly and it’s still not good enough.” She felt her face contort, nose scrunching up, chin quivering, cheeks rising. The dam broke.

Five minutes into her first therapy session she had believed she needed only for the meds and she sat bawling her eyes out. Dr Lowes looked at her for a while, the gentle, not quite but almost pitiful smile of an understanding old man on his lips, before he reached behind himself and held out a box of tissues to her.

*

The sessions that followed didn’t go any better and it wasn’t until the sixth one that she could sit through the entire hour without crying.

That same evening she stepped out of the office doors and into the cool, crisp November air. The winter storms had slowly begun to pick up, white clouds lazily moving across the sky until they would snow down somewhere above the Black Mountains. Leaves in desaturated hues of orange and brown danced across the sidewalk, illuminated by a sparse row of street lights, and the breeze from the sea smelled humid and salty. The walk from the university to town, down a rather steep hill and with no bus driving regularly enough to wait, for once didn’t appear all that daunting. Frankie thought of socialising. That by now uncomfortably familiar feeling of existential dread was still sitting in that corduroy chair in Dr Lowes’s office. A shapeless little form she could leave behind for the night.

She was halfway down the hill when she first noticed the pale beam of light coming in a short burst from the coast. A second one soon followed, then a third. Frankie stopped, looking ahead. A party was the thought that first crossed her mind, but the light hovered over the entire town for a moment and disappeared again. It didn’t come from the old, Victorian seafront promenade either but gleamed somewhere to the right, near Constitution Hill. Whoosh. Whoosh. Slowly, deliberately. No party lights were bright enough to illuminate the town and half the beachfront. Frankie stood wondering for a little while longer, before she shrugged and continued down the road.

By the time she had reached the bottom, snow had begun to drizzle down in thick flakes. It whirled around her head, dragged away by the wind coming from the sea, and Frankie popped up her collar and tightened her scarf against the cold. In a few weeks’ time the snow would turn back into rain and cover the entire coast in a grey, solid mist. The cold would linger however. As would the wind. And once Christmas came around, the town would be deserted until late January. Small wonder, she thought, that people became gloomy around here. Old, Victorian-style house fronts rose at each side of the road, wooden patterns gleaming with an orange shine from the street lamps. The Ghost of Christmas Present lingered around here, only it didn’t outright show itself, but instead crouched in the shadows, following her around.

Penglais Road turned into North Parade and Frankie cut right down Queen’s Road. Soon enough a familiar sign with a raven on it, hanging above a dark door, came into view, and she pushed inside, away from the snow and cold. The pub was packed. Not unusual for a Friday night. Some students liked to flock here for a game of pool or two before heading onwards to the pier or to whatever dates they had set up for the night.

Life could have been good, she figured. A sense of opportunity. New life. Start over. Get going. ‘You’re young, you have it all ahead of you. And remember, Frankie. Always remember: it’s not about your own personal happiness. It’s about their happiness.’

It had started when she had moved off campus and into a shared apartment with a friend, hadn’t it?

The fatigue. The sluggishness. That first spark of a little thought asking what’s the point? over and over again. It had been faint and quiet in the back of her head at first. Nothing but a murmur that came and ebbed away again. Truly bad days had been a long shot ahead into the future then, but it was when it began. Now, a little more than a year later, it was a good day when she managed to take a shower and brush her teeth.

“What’s it gonna be for you, luv?” The pub owner’s voice came slurred to her, words registering slowly and unevenly through the fog of noise in the pub.

“Cider and black, please.”

“Pint?”

“Yeah. Why not.”

“I’ve seen them, too, y’know. The lights,” another voice said. “They don’t come from the beachfront.”

Frankie jumped. At the bar next to her, apparently out of thin air, a boy had appeared. First year, from the looks of it. Fresh out of home, he should have been rosy-cheeked with an excited gleam in his eyes. Yet there was nothing. Dazed and hollow, a walking skeleton holding a glass of ale.

“Um—excuse me?”

“The lights. It’s not the seafront. It’s not the pier, y’know.”

Y’know. No, she didn’t know. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“It’s weird, nobody seems to know what they are. I asked, they don’t know any lights. But they’re there, right? All over town.”

“I’ve never seen them before,” Frankie admitted.

The boy stared out a large, dark window. The snowfall outside had grown thicker by the minute.

“First saw them maybe a month ago? Every second day or so, that’s how it started. Now they’re out there every day, shining when it gets dark. ‘S to let us know there’s the cliff there, y’know.”

“The cliff?”

“Yeah. Says there’s the cliff, right there.”

Frankie then involuntarily glanced out the high windows, too. Far across the village lay the seafront in quiet blackness, perhaps occasionally disturbed by students passing by, shouting and celebrating. There was nothing out there but cold and dark; nothing compared to the warmth and comfort and noise within the pub. The boy smiled at her. A strange, lopsided smile.

“You know what’s beyond that cliff?”

Frankie shook her head.

“Nothing,” the boy smiled. “Just peace and nothing.”

Said warmth and comfort of the pub suddenly pressed upon her like an iron-cast corset. It was as if the very air had been sucked out of the room all at once, leaving her suffocating on the bright lights and the dozens of voices shouting over the small, helpless whisper in the back of her mind praying for silence. Please. Just blissful silence for a change.

Let it be quiet, please, please, let it be quiet. Let it end. Let there be nothing.

The boy’s smile had turned strangely serene. The image appeared amusing enough and Frankie felt the corners of her own lips twitch involuntarily.

“I gotta go,” he said. “Y’know that feeling? That pull?”

Frankie shook her head.

“I’ll just go,” he said, the smile sitting on his face like a mask. “Get beyond that cliff, y’know.” He got up from his seat, his pint of ale still half full and left on the bar. Frankie followed his disappearing form with her eyes. She looked at the windows again. The bright whoosh, whoosh, whoosh then streamed into the pub brighter than it had before. Nobody seemed to notice.

*

In the darkness of her room, something whispered in her ear.

It began as a low murmur, rising and falling like the tide rolling towards the shore and back again. Quietly it crept into every pore and filled her veins up with a nightmarish restlessness. A low whoosh, whoosh, whoosh that her dreams turned into words she could understand. The whisper moved, a creature hidden in the dark, climbing on top of her bed until it sat quietly by her feet; glowing eyes staring at her. The voice in her mind rang soft and gentle.

Come now, Frankie. Come out. Let me show you where the cliff is.

*

The regular six o’clock evening lecture came and passed by without Frankie paying attention. Most of the lecture she had spent drumming her pen on the notepad, noticing vaguely that her brain was lagging behind. As usual, she had ignored questions she had known the answers to, her body too unmotivated and tired to raise first her arm, then her voice. That, too, had only gotten some vague attention. Like the clear, white snow outside, her thoughts had turned into grey slush ready to melt away for good at some point. The words ‘why bother’ repeated themselves in her head like a mantra.

When she stepped onto Penglais Road, the snowfall from the previous night had turned into a thicket, almost blocking her view. Ice caked the way down the hill and she stepped carefully, not feeling any rush anyways. It was the dark, she supposed. The never-ending wall of grey clouds that blocked out all sunlight and turned daytime into some kind of perpetual twilight before it would grow dark again. The bus passed her by, spraying slush and mud, followed by the first wave of whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The lights had never appeared this early before. Frankie looked around, studied the faces of students flocking down the hill left and right of her. None of them noticed. Or perhaps they did, but then nobody cared. She looked ahead at the lights flooding across the town in regular, slow circles, and wondered whether she perhaps had gone entirely mental.

She got down to the old campus, grabbed a sandwich from the gas station and bought a few chocolate bars to go with it. Something nagged her in the back of her mind. The same invisible whisper buried in her brain, pulling her towards the pier like a puppet on strings. Her feet moved at their own volition.

Frankie made it as far as the end of Pier Street, where the road was suddenly blocked with railings and yellow tape. The winter months brought storms and high tides with them with the waves often flooding the seafront entirely. Every now and then the town officials would declare it too dangerous for people and close off the entire seafront. Only this time there were the flashing lights of an ambulance and by the cliffs, far down to the right, stood a firetruck on the promenade. A few men in yellow uniforms hosed down the rocks. Frankie stood and watched. With all the rain and snow splattering against the cliffs one might think there was no need to clean them. No need whatsoever.

“Terrible, innit?” A police officer guarding the barrier appeared by her side, stuffing crisps into his mouth.

“What is?” Frankie asked.

“The thing about the kid.”

“What kid?”

“Some kid killed himself last night. Jumped off the cliff.”

Something froze. Whether it was time or Frankie’s entire body, she couldn’t tell. But things moved in slow motion, rolling past her like tumbleweed in an old black-and-white movie. Some kid.

“Do you know who?” she asked.

“Some freshman at the university. I heard a couple of people say the saw him at Scholars last night before he offed himself. Can you imagine? Going for a pint and then deciding to jump off a bloody cliff?”

Yes, she thought. Yes, I can imagine that. And she began to understand what he had meant when he had talked about that pull. To go beyond the cliff. Because the lights had showed him where it was, hadn’t they? The lights that still, lazily, drenched the town in a bright flash going in circles. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

“Guess he must have jumped from the spot where the lighthouse is.”

“Lighthouse?”

“Yeah. Y’know the old thing. Not been in use for ages but it’s a good jumping spot, I suppose? It’s high up, steep, nobody up there to stop you. Guess the way down’s not so good though. Cleaning up those rocks each time? Now that’s a bitch for you.”

Frankie felt something churn in her stomach, followed by a sudden urge to vomit.

*

In the deep of the night something knocked on her window. A sleep-addled, hazy brain told her it was impossible; a fourth-floor window wasn’t reachable without a ladder, but the soft graze of nails against glass continued on in a steady rhythm. The weight that had previously pressed down on her feet had disappeared. Big eyes now instead glowed from the window, lanterns in the darkness, searching the room for her shape. She couldn’t move. Stiff and frozen underneath her covers, all that Frankie did was stare back at the dark thing looking in.

A beam of light started from the right, dragging across the landscape outside.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Come now, Frankie. Let’s go.

When it hit the window, the creature disappeared. It returned once the beam moved past.

*

“Dr Lowes?” Frankie sat cross-legged in the corduroy armchair, her fingers curled around a cup of tea. She had not showered in four days. Dry shampoo and deodorant fixed whatever could be fixed, the oversized jumper sleeves covering her hands only so far to reveal chipped polish on her nails. She was here to get better. She wanted to get better. Didn’t she? “Do you know anything about the lighthouse?”

Dr Lowes had been taking notes, scribbling away on the yellowed writing pad sitting on the armrest of his chair. He looked at Frankie over the rim of his glasses again, brows arched.

“Lighthouse?” he asked. “The one further up from the train? Yes, as far as I know that thing has been out of order for a few decades now.”

“Why?” Frankie asked.

“Well, the story in town is that the lighthouse was closed off after the last keeper committed suicide. The door has been locked and it has been out of use since.”

“Committed suicide?”

“That is the story.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know for sure. Some people say he was a closed-off man that couldn’t quite fit in. You know what it’s like in small towns like this, people write you off as strange and shun you for it.”

“Was he bad?”

Dr Lowes shrugged. “I couldn’t say. Perhaps he was simply lonely. People do all sorts of horrible things when they feel lonely.”

“A boy killed himself up there two days ago,” Frankie said. She watched Dr Lowes scratch his neck with the end of his pen.

“Yes, well. I moved here about thirty years ago and the old lighthouse has been a popular spot for suicide even then. Three, perhaps four times a year someone would jump,” he paused. The look of minor discomfort on his face changed to what appeared to be concerned suspicion. “Frankie, you are not thinking about suicide, are you?”

From the corner of her eye, Frankie saw something shift in a darkened little spot somewhere behind Dr Lowes’s chair. It took no shape, but remained a vague, blurry outline of something that, at some point, may have had a body. Or might one day form a body again. A cold breeze reached for her neck, sending a shiver down her spine, and the whisper echoed softly in her ear. When the shapeless thing in the shadows turned, a pair of big, round eyes, bright as lanterns gaped at her.

“No,” Frankie said. In that very moment, the slow, rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh began again.

*

In broad daylight the lighthouse looked like nothing more than a crumbling ivory tower, removed from the rest of the world behind a solid layer of old age and isolation. A ‘No Trespassing’ sign in both English and Welsh was the only evidence of a human being ever having been up here. Other than that, the stone walls may have just grown out of the cliff by themselves one day. Low shrubs surrounded the once-white bricks and there was nothing eerie about the place other than the sharp howling of the wind coming from the sea. The entrance wasn’t as locked as Dr Lowes had suggested, but rather boarded up loosely. Little effort had gone into keeping people out. Frankie imagined the best repellent to be the story about the people who had killed themselves.

A few feet above her head something moved behind one of the dark windows of the lantern room. A cloud of mist that billowed behind the thick glass, roaming back and forth like a caged animal waiting for the opportune moment to break free. In the light snowfall it may have been nothing but a mirage; a trick her mind played on her to accompany the uneasy feeling creeping up from the rock below her feet, spreading through every fibre of her body until the hair at the back of her neck stood and gooseflesh crawled across her arms. Something whispered in her ear again. Frankie closed her eyes and when she opened them again, she stood in a round parlour within the tattered walls of the lighthouse.

High up, snug below the roof was the glassed lantern room, barely visible through the cracks in the floor boards. From there a stream of light illuminated the dim room in slow chants of whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. A shadow flitted across the cracks in a hurry, making no sound. Frankie cautiously stepped into the centre of the room, following the trail of whatever was rummaging around above her. She went where it went, the scurrying shadow a guide across the room, moving back and forth in seemingly random directions. Every now and then the bright stream of light blinded her, but soon enough she found the little shadow creature again and continued her invisible pursuit. It felt familiar. A soft, comforting presence luring her in, that turned the cold, damp room around her into a cozy dream where nothing bad could ever touch her again. Sadness had no home here. And most importantly, there was no corduroy armchair in the corner.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

Come now, Frankie. Come see what is beyond the cliff. Let it be quiet, let there be nothing.

The beam spilling through the floorboards turned the room into bright white. Frankie raised her arms, blinded again for a moment, stumbled backwards, and cold and ice grabbed at her ankles, biting into her flesh. She shrieked. The silent movement of the creature above her stopped; a pause so heavy, it dropped on her like a thick, suffocating blanket. The creature leapt forward. It sprinted across the boards, raced to the hatch leading down, and when she turned along with the noise, Frankie found those two glowing eyes stare at her from the top of the stairs. Bright as the oil lamp of the lighthouse itself did the eyes shine in the black around her, big and round, disappearing and reappearing with each circling motion of light.

The creature moved. Slowly, quietly, creeping down the stairs, the nothing that formed it coiled like springs, ready to pounce. It slipped across the floorboards, a clicking sound, guttural almost, coming from a set of teeth crunching away in an invisible jaw. With it crept the cold towards her, reaching for her ankles as if the creature itself extended its claws to gently grab her. The snapping mixed with a low purr.

Frankie. Frankiiiieeee. Here now, Frankie. Let’s go.

She turned and ran.

The whisper followed her through the dust and rot, a thundering, hollow sound of quick steps on the floor, while outside the wind howled around the lighthouse, chasing billows of snow in every direction. She broke through the boarded-up door, almost tripped, and fled down the path without once looking back.

*

Depression could manifest. Frankie had once read that in some esoteric article published on a mental health website. In dreams it might take shape, form a body that suddenly becomes palpable. Some experienced it in the form of a massive spider, others suddenly found themselves hunted by a pack of wolves in the darkened woods. For a while Frankie had believed her depression was merely her own face. Staring back at her in the mirror now, pale with dark circles under her eyes, the greasy, unkempt hair clinging to her cheeks. She knew her clothes stank. The steady rumble of her stomach had long stopped, hunger had turned into pain and cramps, but she could quench those with a cup of tea. The cup hadn’t been washed in two weeks.

The display of her phone lit up. 11:20 PM flashed, below the date that said Wednesday, 23 December. And a text message from her mother.

Not coming home for christmas is cowardly. I’m sorry but there is no other way to say it. If you are sick, then you need help. It is not an excuse to disappoint me or your father the way you did. I have never been more ashamed in my life.

That night Frankie slipped into her bed in a button-up shirt she had dug from the farthest corner of her closet. She pulled the covers over her head. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh came and went and came again. The steady flow that by now had grown so familiar. It soothed her mind, wrapped her fears into a warm cocoon. Darkness scurried over from the window and something heavy settled down on her chest. She didn’t need to lift the covers to see those lantern eyes staring down at her. To hear the soft clicking of teeth ringing close to her ears.

Come now, Frankie. We’ll let there be nothing. We’ll let there be quiet. We’ll go to the cliffs. We’ll let it end.

*

More bits and pieces of rock crumbled under the soles of her shoes, tumbling down the steep drop off the cliffs until they disappeared in the black below. The waves crashed a steady rhythm against the shore, beating on the glistening stone. Within the howling of the wind, she heard the whisper humming sweet nothings into her ears. There would be quiet soon. By her side crouched the little nothing, its glowing eyes gawking at the deep, deep drop. Frankie inhaled and stepped forward.

At the top of the deserted cliff, like a shining sentry, the lighthouse rose into the sky.

pencilHannah is a previously unpublished writer in her early thirties, finally taking the passion to the next level to turn it into a profession. She is a native German speaker with English as a second language, and anything suspense is her personal homebase. Email: bendthb[at]gmail.com

The Cold Face of the Mountain

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Dead of Winter ~ First Place
Karen Sheard

Photo Credit: Bureau of Land Management/Flickr (CC-by)

I came to Alaska in search of the wild bear but something else found me in the wilderness. I now need to get down from this mountain before I starve, or the winter storms set in. But the worst thing is, I’m still heading towards the top of the mountain. I know that, even if I were to turn around now, I might not make it back down. What drives me on? If only it were that simple to explain out loud.

It was a few weeks ago that I started to sense its presence. As I hiked across the mountain of the sleeping lady I began to think back to where I had left. When I had been at home, with my wife, my mind had been constantly wandering to the mountains here. I had pored over photos of this very range of hills—when seen from a distance they are shaped like a naked woman lying in the snow. Down here, though, on the hills themselves, there was no such comfort, no warmth—either from the wife I left behind—or from the cold lady that tempted me here. Here, the peaks that form her soft curves were sharp and hard on my feet. No other travelers but I braved the weather forecasts this winter. Even the bears have stayed away this year. My camera card is empty of any images but blank snow and the paw prints of animals too shy to show themselves. I had a sense, tingling the back of my shoulders, that there were living things watching me pass, just outside the range of my sight, hiding in the mounds of snow and scraps of trees. Maybe my footfalls scared them away, as there is no other sound here except the wind that comes at night and the deafening quiet of the snowy land that stretches on in every direction. Still, I walked on, hoping for a sight of something. I descended into a valley between the mountains. Here, a shadow swept over the path, like a descending fog of gloom.

At the basin of the valley, I came across—I would like to call it a camp, but in truth there was nothing there to see. Just a lingering smell—a familiar sweet-unpleasant fragrance—that gave me the feeling that someone had been there just before me. A certain change in temperature, as if the place had recently been occupied by another creature. In the world of society that I had left behind, such changes would go unnoticed, but here among this vast nothingness, they rang out to my senses as clearly as if I had seen some outward sign. Something had been here not moments ago—a sense of it still remained here among the tall pines. Had I thought that it might still be there watching me, I may have been less keen to stay, but as it was, I chose to camp there. I had taken this trip from an urge to be alone, but now the sense that there was another being in this vast alien expanse, comforted me.

I set up my tent to face the direction the aurora borealis could be seen over the dark mountains beyond. The nightly dance of turquoise and purple haze had become my only sense of the movement of time. I found it a comfort to know that the world still moved on out there somewhere, for me to rejoin if I chose.

As dusk fell, my fire was all I had beyond the writhing glow in the sky to light my meal. As I sucked all I could from the last of my over-ripe fish, I watched the wind blow out the dregs of the fire. The light show has slowed to the occasional flash of blue, before the deep darkness set in for the short night ahead. In darkness, other senses take over, you hear phantom footfalls outside your tent, the wind takes on strange tongues that seem to moan your name. The temperature drops at nightfall—it’s winter here. A cool breeze blows over everything.

I lay in my tent, staring into the darkness of my own thoughts. I could not sleep. My mind was still wandering over the facts that the food was running low, and my feet were covered with wounds and sores. Moisture from my own breath was collecting across the canvas of the tent coating everything in a cold sweat.

And then I felt, rather than heard, the motion of the zip of my tent-flap being drawn slowly open. I felt the cold begin to seep into the tent, stinging my clammy body. I listened, with held-in breath, and finally caught the quiet sound of the zipper begging dragged gradually upwards. I drew back in my sleeping bag instinctively, my throat paralyzed, regretting taking off my boots and outer clothes, that might have offered more protection against attack. For some incongruous reason, against my control, my stomach rumbled, the sound deafening in the darkness, making whatever it was outside stop in its tracks. I clenched my stomach, but it went on, and I felt my bowels push against my bladder in sudden fear.

The tent flap tore open.

Before I had time to register the shape of the intruder, it fell inside, landing heavily on top of me in a cold, pungent hard mass.

I cried out in shock.

It had the weight of dead flesh, pinning me down by its bulk. For a moment, I froze in fear, until instinct made me brave enough to feel the shape of my intruder for fur or fang. Not a bear. But an animal of some kind. This was a man. A man, emaciated and cold. He smelled of the toilet and the forest. An almost inhuman, dog-like smell, that made my stomach heave the taste of the rotten fish back into my throat. I pulled away from under him, and threw my blanket over him, more in distaste than charity.

“My God help me,” the man suddenly exclaimed, shivering next to me, as if my warmth had awakened him. They were the first words I had heard for weeks. His voice rasped and I finally understood what people meant when they say that a person’s breath rattles. The man was clearly ill.

“My God what are you?” I said. Getting tongue-tied my haste, I obviously meant to ask: Who are you?

“Arnold Clever,” he said. The name made me shiver, though I could not say why. Maybe it was the small voice in which he uttered it.

“How are you here? There’s no one being on these mountains for miles. I would have seen you.”

“I hardly know where I am, I have been wandering. Wandering for so long. I am so hungry.”

I had little food myself; I had recent knowledge of what it meant to fear hunger, and it would have pained me to watch, as it would to experience it myself. So, I said I would share with him what I had, but even then, I secretly hid a portion of what I had in the depths of the tent. The reason for this I can only put down to the selfish instinct of survival that dogs all men.

I could not see his face in the darkness, and there was something of wildness about his manner, but I was put somewhat at ease, when he explained he was an adventurer, heading out to conquer the mountains in the distance. Such men as he and I have a wildness in our hearts that can make us strange to company. To such I put down his wild air.

When he had eaten a little, I began to ask after his strange appearance in the middle of nowhere, with no tent or provisions.

“I have been running,” he said. “Running and jumping over river and forest. Running for so long my feet have been on fire, and may turn to hooves.”

He said all this so piteously, I resolved to help him back to health. I hoped his delirium may pass with food and sleep, so I told him to rest in the tent and we would talk more in the morning. But he was feverish and vocal throughout the night, so that neither of us slept much. He kept complaining of a strange voice in the wind. But not only could I hear no voice, I could hear no wind. I attempted to reassure him that the night was calm, but he kept complaining.

“It calls my name; oh God help me. Do not let me go. Do not let me go to him.”

I assured him that if he did not want to go outside the tent, then nothing could make him.

“You don’t know what it means to hear it call your name,” he argued. “God pray you never know what it means. I have seen him, and he wears my own face.”

After long hours, he wound himself into a fitful sleep. I dozed a bit, but felt a strange unease, and so sat up to watch over my new charge till daylight came.

But as I watched, and saw his face reveal itself in the shadows of the dawn, I was horrified to see that I had been sharing my tent with an imposter. The man looked half-starved, yes, but there was more than that, something almost indiscernible about his hard cheeks, and sharp frame that made me think that this man was not human… No even worse—that he was not quite human.

I recalled the first thing I had asked upon him entering my tent, not: “Who are you?” but: “What are you?” It was like, even in the dark, I had sensed something was not right about this stranger that I had let into my tent. I cannot say that I was terrified immediately, but the feeling of something uncanny being at stake here, spread until my body started to shake… until I could not bear to be in the same space as this unknown man.

I slipped from the tent, though not dressed for the outdoors. The thing about the mountains is that you camp in one place, but when you wake up, you never know what scenery awaits you when you step through the flap. The terrain changes as the weather desires. I ran out into a world of white snow, hardly knowing where I was, or where I was going. I ran into the woods, falling in the ice as I tore over thorns and through sharp fir trees. But I could not stray too far from my tent, or risk being lost forever in the white.

I waited long hours among the trees, desperately clinging onto one large trunk till my hands grew bloody with the bite of its sharp bark. Despite the cold, I had sweated through my clothes in my panic and now they froze against my skin. The thick canopy of trees blocked the sun, so I hardly knew how long I shivered there. I hid until the cold got too much, and then peered out to see if the intruder was still at my camp.

The place sounded and felt still.

I stepped back to my campsite cautiously, like a wild moose snuffling for food in wolf territory. I clenched my fingernails into my palms in dread as I approached the tent. I lifted up my tent flap to see… oh God.

The man was still there, but his shape had changed. He now looked healthier, though he was still fast asleep and still as marble. The man I now looked upon was me! In every detail the man had taken on my form. His clothes were still those he had worn last night, or I should have gone mad with fears I was no longer myself. In such wild times, anything seemed to be possible.

I ran. I ran and ran, hoping to get myself lost from this madness. But a man can only run for so long in the cold, before they must face the fact that to run further would be to die. So, I stood, petrified as to what to do. Until I heard a cry from the campsite, like that of an animal set upon by a beast. I ran back, to get my gun, when the man, his face now his own again, thank God, ran at me, wildly.

“He is here. He is here.”

“What is happening? Who?”

He looked behind, fearfully. But rather than running away, he ran towards the source of his own terror, into the dense trees, and beyond my sight. I heard a cry, and then the howl of a wild beast, though whether that sound was from the stranger, in his wild state, or from something else, I could never tell. When I rushed after him, he was gone. I traced his steps in the snow, but could find no sign of him in the woods, only long scratches in the trees around where he had been lost.

I gathered up my belongings, leaving many items at the camp in my haste to be gone. I ran wildly in any direction until my heart punched against my chest and I had to stop to gasp for air. As my breath returned in cold gulps, the sharp sting of cold air in my lungs brought me to my senses. In my calmer state, I went through the events of last night and made sense of much of what had happened. The tree scratches I had seen were clearly a trail blazed by past travelers to find their way back, by the traditional means of marking a tree with your axe. The stranger, after all, probably had belonged to some party of climbers. Climbers never travel alone.

I became regretful at my cowardice at running away. As I picked through my remaining belongings, I saw that in my haste, I had left behind the majority of my food. I grew indignant that my fear had induced me to abandon so much of what was mine. I had allowed myself to be terrorized by some stranger that had, somehow, taken on the form of my own face. I was struck by an unshakable idea that I must get back my face from this man, or be lost forever, running in fear from what I had seen. I would not return to my wife, a lesser man than I had been, but I would return home a taller man than before.

I eventually discerned, some distance away, that the snow had been disturbed by something traveling across its surface, leaving a mark across its smooth skin. On closer inspection, I found shoe tracks traveling north, towards the mountains; these were the tracks, I surmised, of this stranger. I was determined to follow them, to reach some conclusion of this strange ordeal. I resolved to be the hunter, not the hunted, across this great land, and conquer this terrible thing that had intruded upon my peace.

As time went on, the space between each footprint grew longer and longer as the stranger traveled, as if he had been striding in impossibly long bounds. After time the footprints started to become startlingly far apart from each other, at impossible lengths. I followed them, seeing that the prints became bloody as if he had worn out his shoes and ran on his bare feet to the point of drawing blood. Good, that would make him easier to track. Then, another set of prints started to appear alongside his, or in place of his—it was hard to tell. They appeared to be some kind of hoof-prints, like the feet of a moose but only in sets of two, as if a large-hoofed creature had run on its hind legs behind, or in front of, the man. The man’s footprints finally disappeared, as if he had been taken up by this large beast, and the beast’s prints carried on, bounding up the mountainside, like the hoofs of a large goat.

I knew I should turn around. Go back. But I was driven on by the urge to get my own face back. No, not just that, but to reach the mountain top. As if I had taken on my strange visitor’s obsession with conquering the mountain, I could not leave without solving this mystery of what this man had seen to drive him so wild.

As I climbed further up the mountain, the air seemed fresher. I was able to climb faster, leap higher. I could smell the scents more clearly up here. I could smell the moss underneath the snow. I could hear the heartbeats of the goats hiding in the rocks. I could hear the sound of the wind, that seemed to call my name, goading me onward.

I discarded my boots, I didn’t need them here, the snow here did not hurt my feet. Even when they began to bleed, I could feel nothing but a gnawing hunger that only resolution to this hunt could fill. The hoof prints drew me on, always one step ahead of my own. I ran on, knowing eventually, if I ran fast enough, I could catch up with this thing that I sought.

As I reached the final precipice of the mountain I could see the bodies of mountain goats frozen in the ice. My hungry stomach pleaded that I stop and eat, but I sped on. Their faces stared at me blankly as I bounded on. I would not freeze in this cold through all of my fur.

I scaled the last heights in one bound, falling on the ice in an ungainly flop, onto the top precipice. Here I saw at last the creature that I had been seeking, amidst the growing fog. I almost backed away and fell down the mountain in my awe. Here was a large, horned creature. Hoofed and upright like a faun. Furred like a moose but with a face so drawn and angry it looked like the devil itself. He turned to look at me—recognized me with its grey dead eyes, and I felt the hunger in my stomach turn to knots.

I heard a woman screaming beneath me, and looked down into my hands to see the face of my wife staring up at me, my hands on either side of her head. Blood poured from her ears as I crushed my hands together.

“What are you doing?” she screamed, and I realized that somehow I was back home, in the warmth of our kitchen, but I was still cold, and ravenous.

I looked at her lovingly, and hungrily.

“What are you doing?” she said again.

“I have been running for so long,” I told her gently, as I began to show her what that meant… to see the Wendigo.

pencilKaren lives in London, UK. She has written short horror stories for anthologies, and published a book of short stories, It’s Dark Inside, under the pen name Karen Heard. Karen also writes and directs fringe theater, and is working on a TV pilot. She is always open to discuss collaboration ideas or writing projects. Email: karendsheard[at]gmail.com