Patreon LogoYour support makes Blue Moon possible (Patreon)

SEASON 1 - 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙉𝙏: The Whiteout | November 8th, 2021 | The Mothlight

Character: Frank
Time/Location: Downtown Dawn Chorus
Scene Status: Closed
Tagging: N/A


By the time Yaya grabbed Frank by the scruff and hauled him off like a kitten between its mother's teeth, he was at the peak of a mountain named 'Trippin' Balls'. The whole wide world was a kaleidoscope, a candy colored dreamland where fractals spun off other fractals and faces melted like Dali paintings and every step felt like a thousand years or more. He didn't fight it. He didn't argue or flail or cuss or say an unkind word. Instead, he went calmly and peacefully, taking his untimely exit in stride.

Just kidding.

The first words out of Frank's mouth when he felt the strong arm of the Ya pull him up from the depths of his own delirium was, to quote, "YOU PIGFUCKIN' FASCIST!" and those words a whole cacophony of insults followed ranging from the obscene to the absurd. Like, what the hell is a 'cockalorum', Frank? Where'd you pull that one from? A Google search for rare insults or something? His arms gripped and grabbed at people, places, and things. His feet dragged across The Mothlight's wooden floors so hard that they left two twin scuff marks in their wake. He was foaming from the mouth, screaming for lawyers, guns, and money, and telling the entire bar that he hoped that they'd get fist fucked by the very ghosts he was trying to protect them from.

In other words, it was an ordeal.

A closed door means very little, but a slammed door means quite a lot. Contempt, possibly. Anger, assuredly. Annoyance, definitely. Frank had experienced a veritable carpenter's shop worth of slammed doors in his lifetime, but never one with all the sound and fury that Yaya brought with hers. Out of the bar and into the white, Frank struggled to his feet on the ice ridden sidewalk, dusted off the snow, screamed one more flaccid insult in Yaya's general direction, sighed the longest sigh that's ever been sighed.

Despite his state and despite himself, Frank could still walk on his own two feet. Echoes of the mushrooms still pounded against his brain, reverberating through his skull, shaking his very being. Endless, endless, endless streaks of light beamed across the sky; stars gone shooting, shooting, shooting in all that clear, dark, boundless night. Zephyrs blew by, stroking his hair, caressing his skin. "Not another living soul," Frank thought. Useless as it was, Frank endured. Tough as nails, even if those nails were corroding. Slipping feet on icy sidewalks meant nothing to a man like that.

Strange thoughts on a night like that, with a headful of drugs and a heartful of hopelessness. The shivers found him before the sniffles, but they both came in time. Dawn Chorus, the only place he ever knew, looked beautiful buried beneath the snow. It was an otherworldly beauty, all ragged static and lengthened shadows on silent streets, a whole town beneath Mother Nature's thumb, flickering street lights and tangled telephone wires and every crevice of every brick dyed white, white, immaculate white. "I wonder if there's other worlds like this," Frank thought. "Or if this is the only one." Down Netherland Avenue and up Pebble Street, a temporary apocalypse, and a cold wind blew off Gordon Lake, and long idle chimneys wisped smoke into the night, and Frank's arms crossed over his chest, and his back hunched, and his lips trembled. Far away and further still, beyond where bonfires bloomed in chaff strewn fields and where brooding mountains nestled the Earth in their shadows, Frank's mind waltzed through prickly pears and brambles, bur clover and honey locust, until it found a forgotten memory there among all those old dreams waiting to be realized.

It was the first snow of the winter, some ageless year decades before. He couldn't remember how old they had been, but they were both still in the thickets of youth; learning the way the world works, the whys, the hows, and the howevers. Frank remembered his arm was in a bright blue cast, graffitied with signed names and inside jokes from thumb to forearm. He had a black eye and a bowl cut, but you couldn't see it under his toboggan. Charlie was younger by six years and Frank felt like that meant something more than it really did, as if he needed to protect her, as if he needed to teach her what he already knew, as if he was her flashlight in the darkness. They were in their backyard, a cowfield transformed by frostbite, and they laid there side by side in the snow, arms and legs moving in unison to carve their shapes, their figures, their selves.

"This's how you make a snow angel," Frank told her. "See, Charlie? It looks like'uh angel."

Their house was made of splinters, peeling paint, creaking floorboards, broken glass. Loose shingles pitter pattered the roof, dislodged by the snow with no hope for the rusty nails that held them in place. A gas heater hummed, the basement flooded whenever it rained, and phantoms stalked the halls at night, watching you while you slept and shaping your dreams into nightmares or terrors or the great, chasming void from which all your worst fears materialize. Beyond the yellow drapes that wreathed the kitchen window, you could see their mother at the table, tears tracing lines down her cheeks; she'd never told either of her children, but she wished she'd left Dawn Chorus when she had the chance. That chance never came. She was born there, and she died there, and she was buried there; six feet beneath the soil, her body riddled with cancer, her eyes taken by glaucoma, her pies in the sky taking flight and flocking further away than any set of arms could reach. Their father, gone and ensuring his sins would be inherited by his son; all those necessary proclivities leaping the generational gap in uncorked bottles, crushed beer cans, and flasks filled with ruin.

"It's pretty!" Charlie said, and she meant it. "Can we make an'other?"

"Let's do somethin' else," Frank told her. "Wanna see somethin' cool?"

He spoke conspiratorially, like it was the biggest secret in the world. They started off through the snow with two telltale grins and a pair of shared winks; she still couldn't wink with just one eye, but it was close enough. The worst of the storm was over, a few stray flakes still falling. A paling light cast through hoary clouds cobwebbed the world, severing familiarity, replacing it with something foreign and vague. They trudged headlong toward the treeline where their yard ended and the forest began, stumbling in the snow and giggling and then stumbling some more. Between the leafless trees, Frank weaved a story from thin air.

"Me and Little Ricky Richards found it 'fore school last week," he said. "We were walkin' the woods, y'know? Lookin' for somethin' to do. So, we was walkin' and Ricky tripped on an ol' tree branch. He went fallin' down a embankment an–"

"Wassa em-bank-ment, Frankie?" Charlie asked.

"It's like a… a little hill," Frankie told her, patiently. "So, Ricky fell down this little hill, and he's layin' there at the bottom of it all thinkin' he's done went and died. I went clamberin' down to check on him and… well, we're almost there. I'll let y'see for yourself."

When they got to the embankment, Frank slid down first and helped Charlie follow after him. They dusted the snow off of their hinds and then Frank smiled, pointing towards a cave opening a few feet away. "There it is," Frank said. "C'mon. This's so cool."

"It's dark in there," Charlie said, biting at her lower lip. "And scary."

"Nothin' in there's gonna get ya," Frank said, pulling a lighter out from his back pocket. "I won't let 'em."

With that tiny bit of assurance, they walked into the cave. Charlie stood close to her brother, one hand gripping his jacket and the other at her face in case she needed to cover her eyes. It was colder there, the water from melted snow dripping down the rock walls in small streams, forming blackened puddles there on the floor. The ceiling was made of soda straws. The cave was only a small corridor, narrowing the further they went inside, but they didn't go far before they reached a dead end. There, carved into the wall at the back of the cave, an ornate red door stood out of place and out of time. A faint music played from behind the wood, distant but familiar. Four letters were carved into the wood: J x M x G x C.

"Whas'that?" Charlie asked.

"I don't know," Frank said.

"Whas'inside?"

"I don't know that either," Frank said. "There ain't no doorknob. It's hot to the touch, though."

"I don't wanna touch it."

"You don't hafta."

For a long time, they stood there and listened to the music. It swelled and warbled, a thousand violins and a million harps, anxious trumpets and weeping clarinets; enough to make your eyes well up, enough to make your heart ache. Neither of them asked questions, they didn't even speak. The lighter's flame sparked and spun, dancing deliriously as the percussion joined in. It was an intestate moment, stillborn and barely even there, shared by no one else but them, a secret that wasn't meant to be told. After a while, the melody became anemic, vague, sleepy. It lulled and rocked them both like babes in a cradle until the lighter flickered sparks and all that dark closed in and then they went home.

Strange thoughts on a night like that. Frank staggered between buildings and through alleyways, humming that music from all those years ago beneath breath that materialized in the air, through chattering teeth, with snow in his hair, with aches in his joints, with regret on his mind, with nothing to his name. He wandered between parked cars that wouldn't move until the melt. He wandered by the darkened storefronts, all but abandoned, their faucets left running to keep the pipes from freezing. He wandered, out of space and out of time, sleepwalking through his only life, a vagrant to the world, purposeless, listless, hemstitched by hands that weren't his own.

He wandered and he wandered and he wandered.
 
Character: Virgil McCormick
Time/Location: The Mothlight
Scene Status: Closed


This is the song and the song goes like this.

He dressed himself in a burgundy suit, gold cufflinks, a velvet tie, but left himself barefoot. He pricked the tip of every finger and used the blood to paint words on the white walls above his bed: Beneath these stars, the mind wanders and wanes. Old words. Ancient words. Words that weren't his own. He powdered his face with his father's ashes, streaks of white from forehead to chin. He pulled his thoughts from fevered dreams, mind alight with cruel new visions, visions like violence and words like death, the echoing dirge against all man and all beast and all things, and the sea raged and the sky stormed and Virgil McCormick lost himself in all of that, all of that beauty, all of that depth. At the head of the stairs, he listened to friends and family and neighbors and their laughter, detaching themselves from all the sleeping horrors of a waking life, burying themselves beneath the lie that everything would be okay in the end, pretending that the order of the soul hadn't been overturned and vandalized and left stripped of any real meaning it had left. He walked down the steps with a helter-skelter sway, shoulders rising and falling before rising and falling again. No one noticed him. No one noticed the way he lurched and sagged across the floor, limbs moving like a marionette. No one noticed how he whisked himself through the crowd, slipping between bodies like they weren't even there. No one noticed the pistol that hung limp in his right hand, waiting and waiting and waiting for its reason to be realized.

He pushed his way through the patrons gathered on their barstools and climbed up to the top, finally catching Yaya's attention through furrowed brows and an expression of bewilderment. She didn't try to stop him because she didn't know what she was really seeing. Shuffled feet and confused stares, muttered expletives and spilled beer. "Under the Cherry Moon" played through the jukebox and, for a moment, Virgil stood there on the bar and swirled and swayed to the music until he turned and stared at all those curious eyes staring back at him.

"You've sinned," he said. "Each and everyone of you good-hearted people; a blackness in your souls."

There were murmurs and whispers and then Virgil held up the gun and there was screaming and shouting instead until finally his voice lifted above all that noise to demand their attention. "Nobody move! Nobody! Shut the fuck up and listen to me!" He pointed the gun out into the crowd, his arm pivoting back and forth. His aim held no bias, passing over one and all, and the look on his face told more than any threat ever could.

"It's been weeks," Virgil said. "Weeks! And where is she? While you drink and dance and ignore the fact that someone among us, someone we've trusted, someone we've known for years has betrayed us all, where is my fucking daughter? With blinded eyes and hollow hearts, you feign ignorance, you bury yourselves in bliss. While you pretend everything is just fine and dandy, where's my daughter? Where's Carla?! Is she alone out there in all that snow, freezing to death? Is she even alive…? Is she rotting at the bottom of a ditch or in one of your basements or in a field, bathed in moonlight? You all should be ashamed of yourselves. Each and everyone of you good-hearted people.."

As he spoke, his eyes scanned the room for his target. He must have looked at every face a hundred times or more, his voice becoming more unhinged when he didn't see Quentin Severin there among them. By the time the realization dawned on Virgil that Severin wasn't there, he spoke through sharpened teeth, poison on his tongue, his grip on the gun tightening until his knuckles went white and his eyes went bloodshot.

"Where is he?" he asked. "Where the fuck is Quentin Severin?!"

Bloodthirsty as in eager, eager as in wanting. Virgil leapt down from the bar and approached the crowd even as they backed away from him, scrambling to make more distance, to give him the room he so desperately craved. The first shot was in the air, puncturing floorboard and plaster with a whip-like crack, punctuated by scattering feet and muffled screams. The entire world gone red. "Where the fuck is Quentin Severin?!" Virgil asked again. "Where the fuck is he?! I know he's here!"

He wasn't there. He hadn't been there in an hour or more, slipping out like a thief in the night and tucking himself away, safe and sound, as though he caught a premonition of things to come. A darkness had descended on Dawn Chorus and it wasn't hard to see. A match was struck, a countdown had begun, there was no driver at the wheel.

Another shot in the air, this one somehow louder, somehow brighter, all blinding light and white noise, the sound of static and war, a hollow tone that rang and rang and rang and rang. Blinding as in overwhelming, overwhelming as in all-consuming, all-consuming as in everything. The world became a trembling thing, gone anxious, scatterbrained, impending doom, racing thoughts, numb and tingling.

"I'm not a violent man," Virgil said. "We're all just trying to look through each other's keyholes, aren't we? Trying to hear each other through our bedroom walls and gain a better appreciation for who we are, what we are, our souls laid bare. We're all friends here! Friends and neighbors! That's why I'm telling you, as your good friend and your good neighbor: I'll fuckin' kill all of you if you don't tell m–

It went like this: First, the sound of a bottle falling from behind the bar. Glasses shattering on the wooden floor, a scrambling panic, a hissed "shit!", and a moment of silence before what came next. It happened so fast, but for anyone watching, it was all in slow motion, a moment stuck in time, eternity given shape. Virgil turned on a heel and the gun turned with him,, his right index finger pushing down on the trigger and that trigger began a chain of events. The firing pin released and flew forward. It struck a tiny explosive charge at the bullet's base. That explosion ignited the gunpowder. The pressure change forced the bullet out of its casing. The bullet left its chamber, traveling down the barrel like a rocket or a spark, cutting the air. Her eyes went wide, her mouth went ajar, and the bullet carved through muscle and flesh with no regard for the half-shouted 'No!' that left her lips.

Yaya's hand clutched over her chest. Thin trickles of blood leaked from between her fingers, down her knuckles, dripping towards the floor. For a moment, she stood there in all that disbelief, lower lip trembling, the first few tears forming at the corners of her eyes, fear giving way to shock giving way to acceptance… and then she fell to the floor.

There was more screaming, more shouting, a whole cacophony of panic and distress and outright terror. People rushed towards the door and poured out into the cold, winter night. Yancey Klump, tucked away in his booth, ran to where Yaya lay on the floor, stroking at her hair and gripping at her bloodstained hand, whispering encouragement through his own limitless, endless, immeasurable horror. The Mothlight, a place of peace and a place of companionship, fell into a frenzy, a fever, a nightmare.

Virgil McCormick had never been a violent man.

Virgil McCormick had never been a vengeful man.

Virgil McCormick had never been a bloodthirsty man.

Virgil McCormick stood, his hands shaking as his mind became wrapped in realization, dread, regret, and all those other tattered emotions reserved for only the worst moments of your life. He dropped the gun and it clattered on the floor. He didn't say a word because there were no words worth saying. He walked towards the front door and then down the street and then out into that black, black night.
 
ZjdcMeZ.png


1. THE SONG BEGINS by Barding

In dreams and on screens you've seen screens like this, and through the nighttime windows that show in two-way-mirror secrecy into the lives and living rooms of others. Dark room, bright rectangle of an image, spilling blue cruelty to touch your heart and change your mind. This room is dark, this screen is bright, but its light is the colour of morning. Then man who speaks is, in every way, the colour of newsprint, of wallpaper, of mixed load laundry, of a sky yet to make up its mind. The screen is a screen. It finds you in the place you left it. Aren't we all just watching, even as we work to make something we all can watch? Witnesses? So — witness.​

[THE MESSAGE] All the world's a storm, and we its teeth,
In blindness whirling, sharp to other, sharp to self,
We build our shelters, blunt our edges, leave
Our faith to shelter in what fictions it infests:
Free market salvation, meritocratic myth,
The paper faces of our forebears, green
As pity, spending worse with every year
This shared dirt ball sings happy birthday to
Itself, unheard, but for the absurd stars,
Who watch a billion strangers climb into strangers' cars.
And yet not every world can be so vast.
The smaller the world, the myth, the hometown,
The skinnier the truth that can raze it all down.
gapStones against glass houses' walls sound almost
Like young love, but truth knocks much the same.
An act of fear, a violent time, a wire
That cleaves and binds alike, this coin stays prized,
On truckstop counters or the new dead's eyes.
Red gold, and older than music, its promise
Has seen far worse things done — but not to her.
gapUnhere and here, asleep, the boundaries blur,
And, permeable, let slip what slips through.
gapHim first — his spurs have purred where silence reigns;
His songs have wooed the West herself until
The bitch laid down, and wifed a while, and changed
Forever. No gold, no glory. His myth
Remains, a bowlegged fairness, whose vengeance
Stands the sling-gun guarantor of this,
The game that plays over our purposelessness.
gapHim next — when faced with motive where none should be,
The eyefilled, secret, everwatching dark,
The waterweight of a voice in the womb dark,
The whipcrack weight of a father's rage dark,
And the dark that dances, laughs, beyond the outer dark,
There is no courage. Yet if there could be,
It would be his: to keep faith in chaos,
And die each night in its quantum absent arms,
And say, This spiral's spokes, though empty, are mine,
When faced with the dark, and its alien designs.
gapBut back… These times belong to future days;
Tonight's warm gun trigger's barely pulled,
But stand the cordite on its breath and oh,
The late late show has not a patch on this.
gapSee it — in each beginning, a kind of bullet,
Single, frangible, hollowfaced, heartseeking,
An exit-wound so seldom makes an exit.
The mind dreams colours fit to drown in,
Yet it takes a hand to paint the walls.
gapA hand is found, two more half-lost, a third
Makes even the odds again, unthundering,
But with the moon's throat in his grasp
Asks, What wine sweeter than madness?
What better quenches a thirsty soul than blood?

The page, like snow, hides the self from itself,
And biting death makes bit-parts of us all.
gapTune in, drop out, bare your hungry eyes and ask:
What light through sundered windows breaks?

2. THE THINGS YOU NOTICE... by Praxis

The world is full of little things to get your attention. Even looking around you – yes, you, the reader, of which I hope there are a few – you can probably pick out a few things that'd snag your attention if you'd only let them. Maybe it's a momento; a painted shotglass, from a city you visited. A piece of mail you forgot to add to the rest of the pile, in the little platter you bought, specifically for the mail, that seems to go specifically unused for that purpose. A bottlecap. A doo-dad. A piece of curios that would hold significance to you, and only you. There's a story in it. And, sure as it's carved of walnut or etched in glass, only you really know the intimate details of it. Even the poor schmuck who made it might not be able to pick it out from a lineup, but to you ...it might be unlike anything else in the whole, wide world.

Now look bigger. Look around the room at how many, many things could wrangle up your mind if you let your guard down for long enough. Is it a crooked light fixture, that might've never been screwed in properly? Is it a chip, in the window, where something hard and small had left enough of its own mark for you to notice, now? Can you guess the story there? Can you invent one that seems real enough, and true enough, and, yes, even ugly enough to fool yourself? To fool someone else? Can you picture the rock, or the bird's beak, or the hailstone that travelled all across the universe to dent – but not crack – this pane of glass? To arrive, albeit days or weeks or years or generations later, here in your life so that you could contextualize it?

The world is full of little things, just begging for your attention. Some scream. Others whisper. Some sing, and dance (picture a gathering of swallow, taking flight or the swarming of Monarchs in October). They're so bright, and loud that it'd take a blind, deaf-mute to not at least take note. While those others, those whispers and murmurs, those snickers and thrown-voices, always seem to creep up. In an empty building after a long day. In a basement with a flickering light. After you've turned the corner and you swear you heard your name, shaped by tongues you don't know. Those crooked light fixtures, and squeaky stairs, those unshut doors and loose doorknobs. They're always there too.

Maybe you just didn't notice.

For Charlie, it was difficult not to. She was the one who stayed, after hours, standing on a step-ladder that someone had managed to misplace all the way in the equipment shed, doing her best to fix that crooked light. Cheap plaster and the best excuse for a phillips-head she could find got the job done, but left more than a little to be desired when she finally stepped back down onto the old, stained linoleum of the police station to study her work. Everyone had gone; McCann having been the last to leave for the evening. He'd been the one who left the freezer door ajar and a chocolate covered spoon on the counter. Charlie had closed the fridge, opting to leave the spoon overnight. Though she couldn't say why, touching anything that'd been that close to McCann's mouth seemed like a bad way to end a Monday.

Mr. Mcdougall had gone too, sometime during the late afternoon, she guessed. Leaving only a slight impression in the pillow and bedding, and the wrappings of the granola bar. She'd picked that up too, naturally, and had thrown the bedding in a wash with the rest of cell's furnishings. She could still hear the dryer, humming away in the utility room when there was a splash of headlights on the front wall; illuminating the massive, if not a tad worn down, 10-point rack that'd been mounted behind reception sometime before or during the Nixon administration. Folding the ladder and tucking it under her arm, Charlie delayed her walk just long enough to catch a shadow approaching the station's unlocked, front door. She knew, in some small, crooked-light-fixture sort of way, that it was the sheriff. Why he was here, this late, was beyond her. He seemed not to notice her, near the kitchenette, when he hurried along to his office, where the door slammed and it was quiet again.

She glanced at the small cubicle, near the stairwell. Hers, and decorated only minimally with a pink, tinsel boa and a paperweight shaped like a cat. The monitor had timed out, but she knew that it'd only take the nudge of the mouse to bring up the screen she'd very purposefully walked away from. The laundry had been a great distraction. Then the freezer door and a tv dinner perhaps forgotten there also during the Nixon administration. Then the light. That one had been bothering her for a while. The world was full of things to grab your attention. Things that'll take your hand, and lead you someplace where purpose and reason still come first. Where a little elbow grease and some determination will fix a problem; turn a wrong, right. Away from all of those other, hideous things that had been harrying Charlie's attention since she'd watched Morris die.

It was recognition. In his face, and in his eyes, when he'd grabbed her and spat out his final words. Not the delirious ramblings of a man who'd been torn nearly to pieces by wolves. It wasn't dehydration, or fear or exposure that looked Charlie back in the eye a few moments before he was gone. That had snagged her attention. Grabbed ahold of it so fiercely and with such blistering determination that she could still feel the sting of it. Exhaustion would eventually let her sleep, but it wouldn't answer a question. Time, like it did, could even make her forget, provided the universe kept supplying flat tires and peeling paint. Whichever story she told herself -- that they all told themselves -- could eventually replace the ugly, harsh truth of it.

Except...

Except there she was, step-ladder still clutched under her arm, staring dumbly at her dark, blank monitor. Wondering. Considering. Weighing her options and circling back again, and again to the stubborn little snags on her mind.

Morris had seen her. He'd gathered what shreds had been left to him, and used them the only way he'd been able. Her talk with the sheriff having gone nowhere, she'd almost as quickly diverted that energy to the next place her mind went: higher up the chain. Who then, she'd thought. The Governor's office? Write a letter that sang to the tune of "We're in over our heads here, and bodies might start piling up. S.O.S"? And then? Wait a week, or two, or a five until it came back around that she'd made such a bold move? Tack the accomplishment on the wall, next to her pink slip and a copy of the handbook she'd actually taken the time to read. She'd only met the governor but once, in passing, and her clearest takeaway from that was how similar the man and the sheriff had looked while they posed for a picture. The same stubble. The same gait. The same basic height and manner of presentation that always made Charlie feel invisible. She'd noticed all of those things, and had tucked them away to be used at some nebulous point down the line.

She suspected that time was now. When a hunch and her own bad habit for noticing things was all she had in her pocket.

And what came after the state? Well, the country, of course. The United States of America and the men and women whose interest and drive supersede things like small towns, their reputation and what all remained of god and country out where both exist in ample supply. She remembered a bulletin that'd been added to the breakroom corkboard some years ago. She remembered, and she noticed, the weblink at the bottom. She'd tucked that away too. For later. For when she needed it.

Though she couldn't say why, she'd expected more from the FBI. Something a touch more elaborate than a simple, navy and white webpage with three fields to be filled out:

Name:
Location:
Concern:


She'd stared at the empty fields for the better part of an hour while the sun had been setting behind a heavy sheet of snowclouds.

When she'd finished, it was well after dark. Distraction -- and trepidation -- forced her to her feet where she'd stood, hands clasped over mouth, nearly hyperventilating over what she'd almost done. A click on the submit button, and her version of the story would be whisked away to whomever dealt with things that couldn't be dealt with easily. She waited, counted to ninety, and had paced all the way to the basement before the laundry had appeared like a life raft.

The dryer had finally stopped and Charlie could see the sheriff's shadow, through the beveled glass, making to exit his office. When he did, he moved quickly; head down, an air of tension wafting after him, back toward reception and the exit.

"Sheriff." She said.

He slowed, exhaled, and half turned over a shoulder to look back at her.

"I..."

"Jesus Christ, Liddle, it's late. Save it 'til tomor--"

"Sheriff, I ...we can't just ignore what happened. It wasn't wolves or, or, or ...coyotes that did that to Mr. Blevins. Someone hurt him. Bad. Killed him, and ...we can't ju--"

"God damn it, Liddle. I am so tired of hearin' this from you!" He turned, eyes looking both very tired and very stern. "All fuckin' day with it, I got the coroner's office, breathin' down my neck. I got that nosey bitch from the paper, leavin' me voicemails every half hour. Last thing I need is you, gawkin' at me with those fuckin' bug-eyes uh'yours, tellin' me what we can and can't do." His voice had climbed quickly to something like a bellow, and he had lumbered well into Charlie's space. "You see that?" He asked, tapping at the place on his chest where his badge would've been, had he been in uniform. "That means I'm the boss man. The head honcho. If I say a man went and got his'self lost in the woods, then he did. If I say a man got torn up 'n was babblin' like a fuckin' loon; he was!" He paused. Perhaps for effect, or perhaps to let his words sink in before he went on. Charlie, still holding the step-ladder, had nearly shrank into nothingness.

"Now, I don't wanna hear this shit, anymore, from you." Another pause. Charlie swore she could hear her pulse. "If you can't control yourself; if you can't get it together, then we'll get someone else in here who can. Got it?"

She nodded.

"Got it?"

"Yes," she replied through tight lips.

"Good."

He went, in a stomping of muddy boots and another splash of headlights, leaving Charlie alone again. She sat, long enough for the numbness in her fingers to wear away, staring at where her monitor had come to life again.

She re-read, edited twice, and clicked submit.​

3 LABYRINTHINE by Lydia

Will Whitford had no idea where he was going.

Slowing his stride, he glanced backward, still seeing only the door from which he emerged. He stopped. Looked ahead. Nothing there either, except three walls joining in a featureless conclusion of hallway.

- or?

He advanced again, acknowledging with a huff that the gray-blue shadows were more mischievous than he had previously realized. They concealed a right-angle turn to the left, further into darkness, something he'd never seen before. Since when were there turns? Since now. He'd also hit a staircase earlier - only a dozen steps, but new nonetheless. A hallway meticulously lined with candles, lit, freshly replaced, very long. He must have wandered farther than they did last time, even though it didn't feel like he'd been walking long.

Last time it was hot. Tonight it was pleasantly cool. Vest and long-sleeves cool. Winter, he supposed, had finally infiltrated this liminal space. Whatever climate control system - if any - was functioning here, he imagined it was as archaic as half his surroundings, perhaps just the residual influence of whatever buildings flanked these forgotten spaces.

Will - well, he had answered the call of these forgotten spaces. There was no way to ignore it; he couldn’t shake his new awareness of the in-between. It followed him from room to room, wherever he went.

What lingers past that wall? Is it just the room next door, or did we forget a few feet here and there?

What’s through this door? Maybe we should’ve been paying more attention to where we put these things.

The strangeness drew him in, spirit and body.

Will had been given a roadmap at birth. His destination was comfortable but inflexible, which had suited him fine. Just peachy. This path was well-defined and well-supplied and well-regarded. Country clubs and varsity football and law school and marriage and firm partnership: open doors as far as the eye could see.

Here, in this labyrinth, in these forgotten spaces, some doors locked, or fled when you turned your back. You couldn’t be sure. There were no maps, no guides, no certainty, and no clear paths.

Will smiled. He'd finally make his own.​

4. THE LONE PRAIRIE by chap

It went like this.
xc0P6u6.png

A bleeding spark and a crackling light. Trees bending and swaying. Melting snow and the sound of a million chirping birds. A hole there in the Earth and arms reaching through, reaching up into new realities, new worlds, new places that folded and flustered at his will. A ring on every finger, claw-claw-clawing into the dirt and the weeds to pull himself through. At first, he's a shapeless thing, blue-vinnied through alabaster skin, barely human, just a facsimile of what a human might be. Clothless and vague, unburdened by gender or age or mortal restraints, his toothless maw gaping like a fish on dry land while his eyeless sockets strain to see anything at all.

He lay there on his side in the snow, curled fetal and all a-tremble not from the cold, but from his own sudden existence. The dirt around the hole fills in and then there's no going back, not until his purpose is realized. Slowly, he comes into focus, his flesh sprouting rhinestones there in the darkness as his body convulses and shakes. Teeth grow from their gums. Eyes appear in their sockets. Fingernails, muscles, sinew, blood. Flowers fall from above to engarland him where he lay, bright red and brighter still.

When he finally stands, he stands tall and narrow, a silhouette of a dream given life. There’s a gun in the holster at his hip and diamonds encrusted on his collar, eyes full of moonlight and a mask to hide his face. He stretches and his bones crack so loud they can be heard from miles away. He bends at the waist to reach down, picking up an old stetson hat from where it lay half buried in the snow. He places it on his head like a crown and then starts to walk, boot marks left behind to trace a trail from the place of his birth.

He knows how this ends.​

5. RABBITS by sky.



giphy.gif

Earth. Cold, damp soil surrounded a sprawled-out Theo. Her eyes didn't have to open to know that is where she lay. The rich smell filled her nose with each soft inhale. How long have I been here?

Of course the question of where came next. A dull ache at the back of her head played as a reminder of the events at the Mothlight, where she ultimately drank at least half of her own body weight in shots and whatever else was shoved into her direction. After pushing a highly fucked up Frank at that poor bartender - things became .. hazy. Pieces formed as she kept still, too embarrassed to see where she ended up. It came in incomplete doses, images of herself dancing to whatever music played in her head by that point. The girl had treated the place like a damn LA nightclub, twisting and twirling in drunken stupor. Anyone within proximity was potential prey to her loud ramblings, mostly aimless and about the money she inherited from Gran.

"I'm gonna turn that backyard into a real garden. Really really real .. full of toomoto plants. Far as the eye can see,” was unfortunately the last thing she remembered slurring to an elderly couple offering them a over the top, sloppy wink. “I’ll give you the senior discount-“

Tomato plants? Fucking Seriously.

Theo didn't want to think of the fool she made out of herself, that could be saved for later. The courage to push herself up from the ground was still building. In a perfect world, she hoped the entire place ended up hammered beyond belief or at least on a similar to level as Frank was when she left ....
if such a level existed.

Her hands sank deeper almost as if the ground didn't want to let her go. No coat? A gentle breeze pushed through her inky waves. Air that should have been cold. Freezing if anything. Wasn’t, nor did she feel the sensation of snow beneath her. Squeezing her eyes tighter Theo expected this to be nothing but another one of her night terrors. Some children grow out of that phase, some simply don't.

Waking up half strangled inside her bedsheets, coated in sweat, limbs sore from the thrashing had all become routine. Coming and going as they pleased - the monsters who visited her at her most vulnerable. Teenage years introduced her to pills and drinking, seeking out anything that could subside them.

It worked. For awhile.

Hiding behind a false smile had been plethora of secret addictions.

Since moving to Dawn Chorus, Theo learned to face them head-on instead of masking it. Much to her surprise, relocating practically stopped the dreams on its own. Only now when they did come.... they morphed into reality (as it surely did now). Deciding the ungodly amount of alcohol was to blame she perched on her knees, giving her neck a lengthy set of rolls. Before her eyes could open an unexpected gust passed over the top of her lap, causing her to fall onto her backside. Theo’s stomach knotted as her eyes flung open, seeing nothing but the evidence of a dissipating dirt cloud.


STVdWSh.jpg


She narrowed her lapis hues at the ground seeing the smallest of animal tracks. What the hell? Her head whipped around, searching for the animal responsible.


A dream or not - if she played into it there was no turning back.

Once more the feeling of something brushed against her back, this time her eyes caught the back end of something light in color and fast. Theo tilted her head to one side, wide eyed and curious. In an odd way, she wanted to laugh feeling like a lost Alice in her tales of following the white rabbit. After all, this was only a dream ... just like Alice had been in the entire time. Her head arched upwards, finally taking in the scenery. The enjoyable feeling melted the more she gazed on, meeting a thick layer of surrounding forest.

Such as Alice had done, Theo’s gaze landed on a single white rabbit. However, not in a waistcoat or holding a ticking pocket watch to a whimsical ear. Glasses didn’t sit upon it’s nose as the one did in her childhood memories did, She had watched that damn movie at least a hundred times, enough to where her mother had to hide it. Keeping a steady hand on the ground she rubbed a single eye to wash away what wasn’t really there.

When her eyes opened, the rabbit stayed unmoving. Very much there and very much watching her. Sitting on the edge of the perfectly circular patch of lush grass she sat in. Theo focused on a rapidly twitching nose. The thought to make a sudden move - to startle the creature entered her mind quickly. However, a compulsion held her back.

This isn’t a dream.

It has to be.

This is a dream.

This isn’t a dream….

Her chest tightened driving herself to look away. Eyes black as polished marbles didn’t budge from the woman, continuing to gaze unblinkingly onward. She parted her lips to speak but was interrupted by a third breeze rushing past her leg. She knew a scream escaped, a echo which carried far longer than normal. Hearing her own voice carry for miles until bouncing back made her shudder - was it mocking me?


Are you frightened?

A voice not belonging to her asked abruptly. Distortion and multiple tones rang in her ears as Theo shuffled in the direction on the rabbit. Expecting to see a human standing her smile faded. All around her sat dozens of them. All looking upon her with the same unnerving dark gaze. Anywhere, everywhere she turned … sat another and another. Emerging in small groups from the dense tree lines.

Yes. She admitted.

Theo nodded, bringing a hand to cusp her mouth knowing she was entirely awake.



giphy.gif

6. ...THE THINGS YOU DON'T by Praxis

Thirteen hours later, Charlie wasn't feeling any better about her decision.

For every one thing you notice, let's say there's just shy of ten billion that you don't. This is a rough estimate, based on nothing, and only used to illustrate the purposes of a point.

Imagine that. Ten billion things, whizzing through the world around you, while you're futzing with that shoelace. While you're rearranging the living room. While you're still, still, still on hold with the furniture company that charged you, but never delivered. While you were hunkered over, swearing at yourself, god, his creation and everything therein, trying to fix that flat tire, ten billion things escaped you. And who could blame you? It's stressful, even on the best days, being alive. Experiencing. Fixing those crooked light fixtures and convincing yourself there isn't some sort of murderous psychopath on the loose. Let ye is who is among us, who is without the sin of distraction, cast the first email to your would-be betters

...or something.

Still, those ten billion things you missed went on to cross the paths of ten, twenty, hell, a hundred billion other things. You're a clever reader, so you can imagine just how messy that could get, and quick! So, while Charlene Rae Liddle -- deputy, daughter, sister, and amateur whistleblower -- cast that email -- heavy and copious with all of that bloodshed, denial and probable coverup -- there were more than a few things that slipped by her.

And who could blame her?

Firstly, she hadn't realized how bad the weather had turned. That early morning chill, that'd threatened to bring in something worse, had gone and done just that. Swirling and blustering in a slick, drab blanket that gave the prowler more than a few false starts. She'd made it home, but failed still to find any real rest. She'd sat in the glow of the television, through dawn, until hunger forced her up to eat in front of the family room window.

She noticed the creaky floorboard leading to the kitchen.

She didn't, the burgundy SUV parked a block up.

She thought of Yancey, probably at home, worrying himself into a stomach ache over getting to the station in this weather. Of Mr. McDougall, and all of his -- rather, his wife's -- cats. Of the hidden driveway, East of town, that she sometimes included in her patrols when time allowed for it. She thought of her father, and the new weatherproofing on the downstairs windows. Of the receipt she'd slipped into a drawer, and how he'd have insisted she collate it with the rest of her important documents. She thought of her message that she'd sent. Of the words she'd chosen, the weight they carried and the damage they could do. She wondered what he'd have said.

She noticed the first stuttering of her lights, just after 10am.

She didn't, the flick of a lighter, and only sign of life, that sparked up, briefly, from inside the burgundy SUV.

Closer to noon, Charlie realized the prowler wasn't going to start. Shortly after that, her power had gone, and it was a neighbour -- bundled in a coat and boots -- that told her of Virgil's open doors and working lights. She noticed he seemed to be in a hurry. That the storm, instead of passing, seemed to be settling in. That every other house on the street sat dark.

She didn't, the figure, slumped in the driver's seat, watching her.

Dean Taber, who'd worked at the plant with she and Frank's father, who'd lived up the street for longer than her lifetime, had given her a ride into town. In his retirement -- and mounting boredom -- he'd attached a plow to the front of his old Chevy. One of many hobbies, fascinations and duties he and so many like him had adopted to distract themselves. He'd opted for a Van Morrison tape in lieu of any deep conversation. Something that sat just fine with Charlie.

She noticed the snowdrift, and how it'd buried every West-facing driveway they passed. She noticed the black ribbons, tied around a row of birch trees down Netherland Ave. Memorials for Morris. Who'd tied them, and when, Charlie could only guess. She noticed they were mismatched; t-shirt scraps, leftover wrapping paper and the like.

She didn't the burgundy SUV, following, but not too closely.

Taking her all the way to the Mothlight would've made Dean double back over his route. Something Charlie wouldn't hear of. Insisting that he drop her a block up, she didn't think the short walk, down Pebble St. would do any real harm. She wondered who else had braved the weather to be in the warmth. She wondered -- hoped not, really -- that Frank hadn't caught wind of the offer and was still sleeping one off in that shabby motel he stayed in. She'd offered, countless times, to put him up in his old, childhood room. Just until he "got back on his feet". Whenever that might be. She noticed the light, and music, and sound and voices from the Mothlight well before she could truly see it through the wind and the snowdrift.

She didn't, the figure, stalking behind her, moving through the snow with a reckless, shoddy abandon until it was close enough to grab her.

It was hands, first. One at her neck, and another, easily gripping her bicep to wrench her up, and off the ground. Feet kicking, free arm thrashing, she yelped a sharp, horrified sound a moment before she was being choked. The panic that had set in flared into outright terror, and she was kicking; fast and hard, back toward her assailant, thrashing in an attempt to unbalance a figure that, admittedly, seemed far bigger than anyone that'd ever put hands on her. She twisted, wrenching her hips left and, for a moment, seemed to succeed in breaking the figure's footing. It stumbled back, skidded in the mud and snow and loose asphalt before gripping, again, more firmly to thrust her to the ground.

Instinct forced her free arm out. She felt something snap, and cried out at the sharp, blinding pain that shot through her wrist, elbow and shoulder.

Beyond that, things were getting dark.

What remained of her effort surged in a last-ditch effort to scramble free.

A hand -- the one around her throat -- lifted her, briefly, to slam her, head first, into the snow and asphalt.

Her last clear memory was of her frames breaking.

Of the wind and snow snarling.

Of everything going dim.​

7. LOST IN THE WORLD by Lydia

Grace met eyes with unsteady eyes.

These eyes were wide, unfocused above slack-moving mouths spewing noises that weren't quite words. Cries. The eyes moved fast - one pair of eyes became another, one after the other. A whole stream of eyes, a stampede of eyes, fixed on the wild faces of creatures very much like herself.

"Solojos," she exhaled. The word sounded foreign, distant. Had she said it, or heard it? Her tongue felt numb, strange in her mouth. Her throat, too, could only be confirmed as present when she touched it, and swallowed, and felt the gesture in faraway fingers.

In her other hand, a drink, nearly empty. How many had she had? Last count it was three, or four perhaps, and that was before, but how long before? The table in front of her bore an array of discarded glasses and bottles, none of them familiar.

"Run!" someone shouted at her, too close and too loud, and she flinched, and blinked, and she understood.



"When do you feel like you're being watched, Grace?"

Her eyes wandered around the small, drab-colored office. There was nothing personal here, nothing to indicate that it belonged to anyone. A scuffed-surface desk tucked itself against the wall, bearing only a stray pen and an empty clipboard. A clock on the wall, in stark black-and-white, stated 2:37.

The doctor peered at her expectantly.

"Here?" Grace asked, brows lifted, a smile endeavored. She felt safe right now, ashamed of the fuss. "Basically all the time. That's the point, right?"

The doctor said nothing, her thin lips tightening in disapproval. She made a note on the clipboard balanced in her lap (identical to the one on the desk - they must be hospital issued and not anything this woman purchased herself).

"No, I mean-" Grace sighed and leaned back on the hard, impersonal couch. "I was kidding. I mean, I feel watched here - but it's, you know, you guys."

"This isn't a joke Grace. You've been here for three weeks. Just because you feel better right now doesn't mean everything's fine. Are you willing to take this seriously?"

Being here, in this place, precluded one from any attempt at humor, or normalcy.

Grace looked past the woman to the austere bookshelves lining the back wall. Uniform leather-bound reference editions occupied half, the others were empty. The existing books appeared unopened. A metaphor for the unknown and ignored within the mind, she concluded, but she didn't dare mention it. It would become a note, something of significance - a wry observation now inextricably attached to her identity as Grace Letts, patient. She had arrived desperate for help, but as the days ticked by (2:39 now, so slowly), her moods began to oscillate between frustration and doubt and fear, varying hour by hour, moment by moment.

"Yes, I am," Grace said.

The thing about fear, about being very afraid, is that once the danger passes, it becomes flimsy, almost absurd in memory. Without the immediate sensation, it's hard to explain, especially when the subject of fear is outlandish. Being watched by some incorporeal entity, or some owl, or a whole flock of owls, or some strange old man. She was painfully aware of the absurdity.

"Mostly when I'm alone," she continued. "When it's quiet and I start to notice the little things I miss when I'm busy, or with other people. It's not really like it goes away and comes back - it's always there. I just don't always notice."

"Do you feel like you're being watched here? Beyond our clinical observation? Are you afraid?"

Grace was quiet. She looked down at her folded hands, bare of jewelry or adornment, save the identification bracelet on her left wrist. Her legs looked scrawny in their too-large sweatpants, her posture pulled in on itself. She knew the answer, but she didn't want to say it. To say it would be to open that door again, to let the fear back in and give it power by virtue of simple acknowledgment.

And yet:

"Yes."




The sharp pop of a gunshot split the chaos. Suddenly she was whole, the disparate parts of her body harmonizing once more, allowing her to join the crowd fleeing the Mothlight. Shoulders and backs and hair and hats (no eyes, not now, they were turned away) loomed in front of her, and she was swept outside with the current on stumbling feet.

The cold air was sobering. Grace stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, looking back at the bar, attempting to understand. Her hands were empty. Her bag was presumably still inside, but there was no hope of returning at the moment. Had she drunkenly dreamed that strange hallway, that room, that message?

Doubt emerged easily, but she couldn't hold on to it.

She knew she hadn't.

And now someone had been shot, only a couple days after Blevins's murder. Rumors crawled spider-like across the crowd, picking past her without acknowledgment. A dark sedan stopped on the street only a few feet in front of where she stood, icy snow crackling beneath the tires, it's shining side smeared with the same. She hadn't noticed the snow had stopped. To her surprise, the main thoroughfare of Netherland Avenue had been preliminarily plowed, though this was the only functioning car in sight. There was a feeling of finality in the air, the end of the evening.

The dark-tinted backseat window of the sedan slid downward, revealing a face she knew, but had never met. A familiar one, not unlike the one that shaped her childhood - the songs and stories, the food, the hugs and other comforts. She could see her mother in those eyes, the sharp cheeks. Not smiling, but neither was it unkind.

Ephraim Ryan. Her uncle.

"Hello Grace," he said.

She took a step toward the car, her distorted reflection looming on the dark surface of the vehicle.

"It's time we had a little chat, isn't it?" he asked.​

8. AND THE CHORUS SWELLS by p r i s m

I wish I could tell you this message has a happy ending.

Maybe it does? Who's to say there isn't someone out there happy with the way these events went down? Someone surely is, because someone started this.

Someone wanted this.​



At first he was a shadow. Shapeless and black. Darkness personified as he slinked through the streets. A flicker in the peripheral, a double-take, a question of sanity. Gideon was, and wasn't. A singular focus drove him forward, a deep path carved into the snow in his wake as he glared forward. Fixated on a point in the distance. A name twisted his tongue and pulled his lips as if they were attached to string, dark eyes burning as grunted in time with the effort of his steps.

Quen-tin Sever-in, Quen-tin Sever-in, Quen-tin Sever-in…

A pendulum. A metronome. The tick-tick-ticking of a timebomb.

At first he was a shadow.

Then he was a beast.

By the time Quentin heard the thundering footfalls, it was too late.



The rhythmic echo reverberating off the walls was starting to slow. The irregular taps timed the decreasing minutes Quentin Severin had left alive.

In the corner Gideon crouched, illuminated by the shaky light of a single lantern, staring at his hands painted red, with dark brown lines starting to flake in his palms. Ragged, raspy inhales, like metal scraping against rock, came from the center of the room. He listened instead to his own breathing, his own heartbeat. Slow. Steady. Perfectly content.

He smiled.

"Peh-pa-plee-"

There wasn't any life to beg for. No possibility of survival beyond what it's tormentor allowed. The lump of twisted sinew and broken bone in the center of the room knew its only mercy was Death. And oh, how desperately it wept for her.

Gideon pulled a moth-eaten curtain aside and stared out to the white wonderland beyond. Moonlight reflected off the mounds of snow, nearly blinding those who had acclimated to the bare excuse of illumination from the oil lamp hanging from the rafters. Behind him, the tumor coughed a fountain of spittle and blood, ragged breaths shuddering and shaking its gnarled edges until it stilled in woeful agony. Gideon inhaled deeply, absorbing the sharp aroma of metal and blood, the salt of sweat, and the putrid stench the loss of bowel control the pile that was once Quentin Severin once held.

He stepped back from the window and turned, the floor of the remote cabin creaking under his boot, lowering just a little further than the rest of the platform as he came to stand over the slab of thick oak wood his masterpiece laid upon. Gideon paid no mind to the details of the room in which he stood. His focus was entirely upon the knot of muscle and bone before him.

Flesh stretched tight where the body had been bent too far in the wrong direction, causing the ball joints of the hips and shoulders to strain against the thin flesh of the body like baseballs trying to escape from a balloon. Wrists and ankles crossed elegantly in the hollow divet in the center of the trunk, right below the end of the sternum. The fingers were laced, palms out, or at least they were designed to appear as such. Gideon's canvas had come to him already disfigured, but he did his best with what he had been given. What mattered was appearances, and he believed he had hidden the imperfections well for how out of practice he had become.

It was time to finish what he had started.



Just off of State Route 480, well within sight but tucked away just far enough to make it a struggle to get to, what was once Quentin Severin hung for all to see.

His arms and legs had been twisted and bent inward to create an outward shell of a five-point star. Shoulders and hips protruding just far enough from their previous sockets to separate their outline from the trunk of his carcass. His head, twisted three-hundred-sixty degrees and fastened to the tree by a noose of intestine, tongue and tendon, stared blindly into the horizon. His eyes would be nowhere to be found. Between his blue lips the shriveled, mottled head of his cock peeked. His testicles lodged in the bulge of his throat. Just beneath the base of his sternum his palms and soles of his feet cradled his heart as if it were the most precious thing. Beneath the cross of his ankles his stomach was sliced open in a crooked smile, spilling his innards out onto the snowy landscape. Any close inspection would reveal the disembowelment had occurred here, and the final moments of Quentin's life had been spent swaying blindly above the highway.

Miles away, in a small glass of saline, on a small bedside table, tucked into the corner of a small, moth-ridden hotel room. Quentin's eyes watched as Gideon Huxley, freshly showered, shaved, and scrubbed, slept soundly.​

 
Last edited:
u9v8AH2.png


. PROLOGUE by Lydia

Greta Ryan blinked in the bright Caribbean sun, a gracious smile beamed up to the waiter as she accepted her frozen drink. She stretched bronzed legs on the lounger and sighed in contentment. Sparkling waves lapped lazily against the snow-white shore, and a long-traveled, leisurely breeze cooled her skin.

Screw Dawn Chorus, she thought happily, and screw Stanley. She was never going back to that miserable little town, to that miserable man and his miserable family.

Here it was warm in November. Here she could be Greta, rather than Mrs. Ryan, and she could do whatever the fuck she wanted. Here she had her escape.

Did they miss her? Were they looking for her?

Of course.

Greta smiled again and sipped her drink, gazing long across the serene sea.​

1. SEE NO EVIL by chap

givBLC8.png
Pontius Foxworthy sat on his porch a few hours after nightfall with midnight just around the bend, smoking his last Marlboro of the evening and looking out over the snowfields draped in darkness and all that might have been lurking within. Pontius had never minded the cold; he liked the way it nipped at his whiskers and sent shivers down his spine, like a lover might if a lover could. It had been a peaceful day on Foxworthy Farm, laidback and languid with nary a worry in the world. At his age, Pontius took as many of those peaceful days as he could get.

He ashed his cigarette in the tray beside his rocking chair and smiled as Waylon and Willie crooned from a nearby radio. If this ain't nice, he thought. I don't know what is.

'Nice' is a fleeting thing, though. Pontius knew that better than most. 'Nice' is quick to get replaced by 'unpleasant' and 'unpleasant' has an on-ramp to 'bad' and 'bad' sticks around way longer than most people might like. Pontius knew that, too. Pontius knew a lot of things.

For example, Pontius knew when shit was about to get real.

It started when he smelled cinnamon in the air, just a hint teasing at his nostrils, mixed with gasoline and the faintest whiff of ozone. Then there was a pressure change and a ringing in his ears as if his blood pressure had just dropped like an elevator with a loose cable. His breath caught in his chest mid-inhale, eyes going wide before rolling back into his skull. The chair kept rocking as his body shook, fingers gripping at the armrests for dear life as his half-smoked cigarette fell to his feet, rolling off the edge of the porch, and out into the snow.

He came back with a gasp, catching his breath even as his heart started beating against his chest like it was trying to escape. "Tarnation," he muttered before his voice gave way to shouting. "Gilbert! Gilbert, come out here for a minute!"

Hell on fire, Pontius thought. It's finally time.

2. INTO A WHITE AND SOUNDLESS PLACE by chap

This is a story about the right place and the right time. This is a story about an unlikely man at the very bottom of the world, struggling to get his footing before he slipped even further into his own personal abyss. This is a story about redemption, second chances, and making amends. This is a story about all of those things, but mostly, this is a story about love.

Strange thoughts on a night like that. The Saint of Lost Causes with chattering teeth and chapped lips, arms crossed over his chest to muster even a little bit of warmth against the cold. Directionless, wandering, snow up to just below his knees, his eyes bobbing in their sockets, his liar's mouth pulled taut against his jaw, his mind racing through empty neural pathways, his whole and his all so full of nothing, just emptiness, pointlessness, meaninglessness. He's kissing the void, he's fingering oblivion. He has nowhere to go and no one to be with. See him now. We've been here before. You know all of this. You know he's out there in winter's fray, freezing himself to death, walking the streets with that stray dog strut, measuring his id while his ego turns to dust. You know he's carved his brain with hallucinatory splendor and opened his mind to new tenants, visions from the past and visions from the future all intermingling in some great, cosmic rush where time reverses and then speeds forward too fast, too far, too much.

You know that he's a failing and aching thing, not just now, but always, a high speed car crash you can't help but watch. You know he's mankind's worst qualities realized, but torn from a Tex Avery cartoon, dressed up in jokes and slapstick, passed along as a caricature of what not to be, the embodiment of purposelessness seeking purpose. You know. You know all of this. You know it, so see him now. See his breath in the air. See the way he trembles and shakes, each step forward more painful on frozen feet. See how he looks up at that grayscale sky and those last few stars pinholing the gloom and how you can hear his words even though he doesn't speak, he doesn't make a sound: God, if not now, when?

Hopeless. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. That's the word that comes to mind, isn't it? Say it out loud and make it real: Frank Liddle was a hopeless, forlorn thing, lounging in the sliver of light between life and death, just another sad story to be told as a cautionary tale. A statistic. A blip on the radar. Grist for the mill. You know all this and you let it happen, so what does that say about you?

And so, Frank wandered. He wandered the streets he knew and all of their arterial alleyways, past where Pebble Street met Chilhowie Ave, past where a shuttered bakery reminded him of simpler times and his first taste of red velvet cake, past tumble-down buildings that only act as evidence that nothing lasts forever, past the boat launch at Gideon Lake where he once dove off the dock to swim for Summerland Isle in younger years with stronger arms and a purer heart, past the movie theater where he first touched a girl's inner thigh and got his first hand job in exchange, past the brick-locked brownstones that lined Pilsner Street where marijuana plumes still spilled from the upper windows even now, past the looming dogwood trees with their leafless limbs like rungs that once acted as ladders to the clouds, past the park benches where he'd slept off to the whispering frenzy of a thousand excessive nights, past where his mother was buried and his father would be buried and where he'd be buried in time, past all these places that he knew and all these places that delineated his life and all these places that summed up his existence in ways where words would never do.

He sank inward in all of that, his conscious catching flame as those first few tears found new channels on creased skin. The first tears he'd cried in years, streaming down his face, congregating until he was openly weeping while he thought about his life. There was no starting over, he knew that much for certain. Every step forward was a meandering march into forever. The chisel had touched the stone. That's the hell of regret and regret is a hell of a thing; it eats at you until kingdom come, curtailing your best intentions and filling you full with a thousand doubts until you burst. Frank was bursting alright. That's what was happening. He was bursting at the seams, the glue and duct tape that held him together finally giving way, the levees breaking, and that sudden rush of waves swallowing his little world.

And yet…

They say every life is defined by just a few fleeting moments, those brief instances where you find out who you are and what you're willing to become. Frank came out of a soggy alley, returned to Pebble Street with no recollection of how he got there. It was still a long time before morning and he was still huddled beneath his own arms, a fuzziness like television static filling his vision, a howling in his ears. A fleeting thought escaped the briars and brambles in his brain and went whizzing through, faster than light but with the weight of a freight train: Love is a form of constancy. It begins and ends with loving one's self. Frank hadn't loved himself in years and, as sad as that was, it was as true as a blue sky or the sun setting to the west. He knew exactly how deep he'd fallen into languor and how much ground his demons had gained; he'd given it to them like a gift or a song, surrendering the yoke so that they could pilot him to bright new lows. Even in denial, the somber reality of how loose his grip had become was as plain as day and as obvious as a punch to the jaw. He could measure it in his countless mistakes, his multitudes of disappointments, his harm done to others, sometimes on purpose and sometimes with no intention at all. It was the intentionless pain that was the worst of the two. There was never a second thought and the regret came after the fact, after it was already too late, after the damage was done.

That sobering thought, delicate and frail and born premature, was interrupted by and punctuated with a scream that Frank would have recognized from across the road or across the sea. It was the same scream that she had let out years before on a brisk Fall day with dead leaves on the ground in piles and Summer's ghost still haunting their memories, just a few weeks into October, when he leapt out of her bedroom closet wearing his Halloween mask; a snaggle-toothed beast with blood leaking in painted lines and eyes full of malice. She didn't forgive him for months.

It was that same scream that echoed from the passenger seat of his old Thunderbird as he drove a little too fast on roads too narrow through Dead Horse Gulch, late at night and beneath those stars, Van Halen blaring and the recklessness of youth at the wheel. She told him to slow down, but he didn't then and he wouldn't for years to come.

It was that same scream from their ancestral porch when he refused to come inside, to do what was expected of him, to lift their father's albatross from around her neck and mend what had already been broken. That was one of their last showdowns, her gun made of desperation and his made of indifference, the last time she asked him for anything at all.

It was the same scream from when he poured a beer on her by mistake on the same night Morris Blevins died beneath a garland of circus lights just a few streets away.

Through flurrying snow and beneath a streetlight's halo, Frank saw his sister lifted by her throat and slammed into the ground by a man twice her size. He saw her land with a sound like thunder and her body ragdoll as it ricocheted off the pavement, arms outstretched to either side. He saw the man start to drag her across the ice and that was all Frank needed before he had seen enough. He'd never run so fast, not in football or in fear. His hands balled themselves into two twin fists. He crossed Pebble Street with no regard for his own wellbeing, ignoring his slipshod boots on the frozen ground, hazarding his own life for the sake of hers. By the time he reached Charlie and her assailant, he was foaming from the mouth and half-growling obscenities, a spew of crackling curses leaving his lips like his anger given form and shape. Frank threw his entire weight against the man, tackling him to the ground, and struggled there for a moment before he was on top of him, one fist raised while the other wrapped itself around an anonymous throat. Frank didn't hesitate. He didn't second guess himself or leave any room for his doubts to stand. Instead, he lost himself, the blood in his veins boiling as his fist fell in wanton abandon.

The first fist crushed through the cartilage of his nose, leaving it bent and broke. It came accompanied by a satisfying crunch that echoed in the air. The second blackened an eye and the third shattered teeth. After that, Frank stopped counting. His knuckles became raw and torn, pummeling the man's head into the concrete until red soaked through the ski mask and droplets of the stuff went flying in every direction. With every punch, the mask shifted and ripped and the man's voice went guttural, grasping at Frank's forearm with weak fingers curling around on their own accord. Frank didn't feel the kidney punch to his side or the scraping nails across his torso. He didn't feel the grasping hands at the hem of his shirt or the warmth of the blood as it splattered across his skin. He only felt that cathartic viciousness, ancient violence, a meanness reserved for the beasts of the land and not much else.

See him gouge at the man's eyes as he howls and screams. See the puddle of imbrued teeth thrown to the side like an omen or an effigy to malice. See Frank snarl and hiss, gone feral, waylaying the silence of the night with fist against flesh and bone. See how he wagers anything and all for the sake of something other than himself until that something wraps her slender arms around his back and pulls him away, barking his name into the ether until he finally comes back to reality, back to that parking lot off Pebble Street, back to the town where they had both been born and raised.

They sit like that for a while on asphalt, wordless and just breathing, her arms wrapped around from behind while he lingers on his haunches. With his hands buried in the snow, he can't feel how much of his own skin has been raked away from his knuckles. She's dizzy and cooing, both their hearts beating the same quickened beat, until they both slow and their breaths are lassoed and he finally looks over his shoulder to speak.

"Well, shit," Frank said. "You okay, sis?"

Before she can speak, before she can even register the question, he's turned and he's wrapped his arms around her. He's pulled her in close, one hand at her back while the other buries itself in her hair. He tucks her head against his shoulder and he holds her like that, a wavering, crackling voice coming out in stifled waves. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so fuckin' sorry." For once, he means it.

They say every life is defined by just a few fleeting moments; those grandiose examples of who you are and who you're willing to become. If that's the truth, and there's no reason to believe that it isn't, this was one of those moments for Frank. There on the ground, hugging his estranged sister, whispering a whole barrage of apologies, a whole list of mistakes finally consecrated and put to words.

Strange thoughts on a night like that. Strange, strange thoughts.​

3. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN by Praxis

From: Elizabeth Pratt <e.pratt@pinnacle-group.com>
To: Acquisition Helpdesk <acquisition.helpdesk@pinnacle-group.com>
RE: Richard Dermott <r.dermott@pinnacle-group.com>, FWD@11jm01@htintrd.osc
Subject: Ryan Estate Acquisition | HOLD | Update



Everyone,

Per our previous conversation:

The answer is No.

Rather, the answer is a tentative No, with too many variables to consider for there to be a Yes in this equation. Yet.

Requesting another week at current rate. Provided this storm lets up, as they expect it will, and my new friend isn't only blowing hot air, that should be enough time to secure a foothold. I'll be attaching a quick dossier I've put together for the aforementioned contact; I'll need all the typicals -- be thorough; ink and paper are concerned.


Richard,
Oscar should be about three now, yes? How high can he count?

Be in touch,


Elizabeth Pratt
Procurement & Acquisition Lead - Pinnacle Group USA
014-14
011-02
014-17
047-22


4. HEAR NO EVIL by chap

arYZi2I.png
Gilbert Foxworthy had been lounging on the couch in their living room, tucked beneath a blanket, somewhere between awake and asleep as the fireplace roared and the television played an old nature documentary about the life and times of lemmings. Upon hearing Pontius’ voice, his eyes snapped open in a flash and he threw off the blanket, nearly tripping over his own feet as he came to stand.

“I’ma comin’, Ponty!” he shouted. “Be right out!”

Gilbert hated the cold almost as much as he hated broccoli and mosquitos and the way sweet tea tasted after brushing his teeth. He’d spent the day in his long johns, bundled up tight, far away from any windows or doors, buried beneath a whole motherload of sheets and blankets and quilts and duvets. He pulled on his Carhartt jacket and his boots, bracing himself before he even approached the front door. Man alive, even through the screen, the wind and the frost bit at his skin enough to make his teeth chatter. Out on the porch, he found Ponty pacing back and forth, his last cigarette of the night replaced by a different last cigarette of the night.

“Y'all right, Ponty?” Gilbert asked, crossing his arms over his wide chest. “You’re lookin’ like you seen a ghost.”

“Ain’t no ghost,” Ponty told him, still pacing. “More like a premonition.”

“A premo-what?” Gilbert asked. “Don’t go speakin’ in tongues, Ponty.”

“I ain’t speakin’ in no tongues,” Ponty told him. “Listen, Gilbert: Go and fetch Julius from the barn. Tell ‘im it’s happenin’ and that Quentin Severin’s dead.”

“Now, how in the high heavens would you know that, Ponty?” Gilbert asked. “And I think July is… well, eatin’ a preoccu pie.”

“Gilbert, you’re about as sweet as honey and curious as the day is long,” Ponty told him, stopping to take a long draw from his cigarette. “But right now, I need you to stop being so full of wonder and mind what I say. Go on and fetch your brother now.”

Gilbert sighed. He didn’t want to go out in all that snow and all that dark. He was scared of wolves and he just knew the world between their front door and the barn was full of them. Even so, when Ponty needed something done, he wasn’t one to repeat himself more than twice. With those arms crossed over his chest and his chin tucking itself down below his collar, Gilbert set off across the front yard, following the boot marks in the snow towards the barn.



6mum8d4.png
Gilbert could see the lights shining through the cracks in the barn’s wood as he approached. He could hear the sound of music from within, Barry Manilow’s voice echoing out into the night as deep as the night itself. As he came to stand at the double barn doors, he covered his eyes with one hand and he knocked against the frame.

“July!” he called. “Y’all still in there?”

A voice called out from within, interspersing with Barry Manilow’s soulful words. “C’mon in, Gilbert!” it said. “Door’s unlocked!”

Gilbert pulled the door open just wide enough to squeeze through. The barn was as warm as a summer’s day and the air smelled sweet like lilacs. Even though Gilbert kept his hand covering his eyes, he’d walked this path enough times to know which way he was going, avoiding the rusted old tools nailed up on the walls and the tractor parts littered across the floor.

Gilbert stopped when he knew he was close enough. The music stopped with the sound of a needle scraping across vinyl. For a few excruciating seconds, there was silence and the shuffling of sheets and then Julius spoke again. “Alright, Gilbert,” he said. “You can look now.”

Gilbert uncovered his eyes and there was Julius in all his glory, laid in a heart-shaped bed with the blankets pulled up just below his chest. Either of his arms stretched out from left to right and, wrapped beneath those arms was not one, but two women that very well could have been the most gorgeous creatures Gilbert had ever laid eyes on. The blonde smoked a cigarette demurely while the brunette buried her face in Julius’ shoulder, a secret smile curling at the edges of her lips.

“To what do we owe the pleasure, brother of mine?” Julius asked.

“P-P-Ponty sent for y-y-ya, July,” Gilbert sputtered, turned beet red as he crossed his hands behind his back, trying his best to divert his eyes from the bed.

“Now, why in the world would he do a silly thing like that?” Julius asked, smiling wide and kind with teeth as white as a cumulus cloud.

“Well, he… he said it’s happenin’,” Gilbert said. “He said Quentin Severin’s d-e-a-d: dead.”

That smile on Julius’ face slowly morphed into a frown, his arms uncoiling from around the women as he sat up straight in the bed. “Aw, hell’s bells,” he muttered. “Alright. Alright. Ladies,I hate to be an inconvenience, but I’ve got some business to attend to. Y’all feel free to stay for as long as you need and help yourselves to the rest of the wine, alright? You’ve both been just swell.”

Julius turned his attention back to Gilbert, pointing towards him with one finger outstretched. “Gilbert, you go on back to the house. I’ll meet y’all there as soon as I get dressed.”

“July,” Gilbert started. “What… What’s happenin’?”

Julius let out a long sigh in response. “Well, Gilbert,” he said. “The Foxworthys are about to go to war.”​

5. STRANGE NIGHTS by Barding

j8wMKfz.png
Strange nights with thoughts like these. A head like a rented room, marked with the memories of others before you, and immured by the knowledge that, after you're gone, someone else would take up the lease. (Spread yourself thin enough for light to pass through and you can feel them: the past respeaking itself, and the future like a half-recalled dream.) Strange nights; strange thoughts, but not unfamiliar.

Foster Therese Silky wasn't a man much given to adventure anymore. (Foster Silky wasn't a man much given to. Foster Silky wasn't a man, much. Foster Silky wasn't. Foster Silky was. Peel and peel, layer by layer, and the first glimpse of nothing is your first sign to stop — so: let's stop.) Foster Silky wasn't a man much given to adventure anymore, but when he thought of that word, and let come what images came, this is what he saw:

The sky's jaw is unhinged so far as to be hingeless. Dark throat behind it, echoing with stars: a single yellow tusk of moon. The infinite ground, infinitely small; smaller still, the road's skinny ribbon. A car capsized on the shoulder – its skin is still feverish under his palms – and all around him the meadow is an ocean, is hungry as the ocean, is loud as the ocean, and colourless as the ocean, and flat as the ocean except for the texture its movement makes in the wind that gives it voice. (He's never seen the ocean. Not with his own eyes. He could've changed that, simple as turning right instead of left when the moment came.) Loud as it is, huge as it is, it's enough to drown him and drown him out. Loud as it is, huge as it is, it's still not enough to do what he hoped it would. He can still hear the long way home. Its faintness hurts like thirst. He has never felt more ashamed.

To call him brave would have been a stretch even back then, but to say that once he was braver wouldn't be wrong.

Strange nights with thoughts like these. Tonight, and lately, and maybe forever, they crowded in and swaddled him. (Even a straightjacket is primarily an instrument of safety.) He leaned into them; surrounded, let himself sleepwalk.

See him, then: by himself and unaware and never quite alone. Watch.

While Foster Silky tried, with a lavender coloured towel, to make it show him his face, the bathroom mirror was still trying to fog. Old wooden frame all curlicues and carving; tarnished so anyone's face would look freckled; flaking paint, and joins gone to warp with generations of damp. Deep clawfoot bath and light like an underfunded subway. He frowned at himself, pulled pointlessly at the skin under one eye with the pad of a middle finger. Behind his closed lips, his tongue ran visibly over the fronts of his teeth, tasting peppermint and baking soda. He pulled at a stray coil of hair that fell too much into his face's midline to be told it ought to do any different. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone else had spoken, telling him he looked fine, to stop fussing. Around him, and seeping out into the wider and the deeper house, the smell of steam and soap.

In the house's stomach, Foster Silky stood at the kitchen table – an old slab of a thing, scarred like a goblinshark, immortal but not invulnerable, designed before the dawn of time – and hunched over it like something with its wings furled. He ate a disappointing sandwich, no idea of its contents. No thoughts showed on his face, except halfway through, when the shape of a mistake appeared. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone had told him they'd told him it was a god damn stupid idea in the first dumb place to brush his teeth before dinner. Dead pot of coffee on the wirecoil stove; a half-eaten gallon of peach cobbler ice cream, entirely alone in the mumbling freezer that stood in one corner. Around him, the house stretched, in the same maybe-infinity that all houses possess at night when only one room is lit and the rest lies dark and sleepless.

"Is it getting worse?" Foster said, with one hand pressed to the black window like maybe he could tell by the cold of the glass whether or not the snow had stopped. He put the hand to his brow – hot, furrowed, more than just worried – and shadowed his eyes while he looked out. Only night, nothing more. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone had told him that they could have told him that.

In a room emptied by darkness, Bobby Darin sang that someone like you makes it hard to live without somebody else, and that someone like you makes it easy to give and never think of myself. When the needle reached the record's center, the player sounded like a woodfire remembering itself. Like the house breathing, alone.

In three sweaters, a waxed parka the colour of a pumpkin, and a paisley silk-blend scarf – moth-holed, smelling of someone else's perfume, wrapped round his head like Lawrence of Arabia, or an old woman taking beets to market in a wheelbarrow too big for her old joke of a body – Foster creaked through the nightsnow in shoes he was fast realising were a damn fool's idea of a foolish idea. The snow was knee-deep in places, thick and soft enough he had to kick through it, wet enough that it would have felt like wading if he'd had any feeling left in his legs. He knew, but only abstractly, that they were soaked to the skin; more concrete was his knowledge they were cold to the bone.

The snow helped, at least, with one thing: muffling sound and shrinking space. The bare-armed oaks that hooded the long drive up to the house were just a kind of corridor: long, but not the longest he'd ever walked in the dark. Strange thoughts, but not unfamiliar; he was fine until he wasn't.

It wasn't so much the owlcall that got him as the echo, or the reply maybe. Space rushed him and overwhelmed him. Arms round himself and head bowed, chin on chest, the flashlight he carried dropped its beam: just a pool of white on the bright-white ground, then, and the sound of a grown man, stood in a hole in the broken snow, and breathing like people breathe when they've been crying or laughing already for a long, long time.

(She tells him he ought to come out of his shell a little. Maybe not right now, things being how they are, but maybe in Spring. And he asks, Would she stop coming to him if he did? And she doesn't have a good answer. And he thinks how he ought to've known better than to ask. So he says the only thing left in his head: You know who wants a turtle to come out its shell? Cooks. And he remembers to smile, but maybe too late to make clear it was mostly a joke.)

Krenshaw Trailer Park, and six different dogs were barking. A bad joke getting worse, one twisted off into pealing howls. Sound, somewhere, of a chainlink fence complaining as a small body crashed against it with a rhythm like waves.

Foster hugged the trailer wall, and didn't look up. He picked, with a careful fingernail, at the duct-tape winterproofing a window; stopped, realising he was teasing it loose. He made his mind go as blank as it ever did. Listened to his body, the chilled flutter of his breathing, until he wasn't really in it anymore.

(To call him brave, ten years ago, would've been a few degrees too kind. To call him braver then than now, though? Biggest bandaid in the world over a wound that knows only how to bleed, and he'd tried to pull it off — what'd you call that if not brave? Stupid? Maybe. Maybe, yeah.)

Foster followed his hand round the trailer's body, watching rather than feeling its progress. He found the door in the moonscape snowlight, knocked with the first knuckle of one numb finger.

A rattling cough inside, and motion a few scant feet away from it. The coughing continued; the door opened. 3:04 AM on the storm night's hollow end. Watch.

"My name's Foster Silky." The kind of monotone that comes with having practiced the words till they turn colourless. "Carlos said your name's Tupoc Emiliano Tlacaelel Solis?" His pronunciation was slow, deliberate, and almost right. "He said if someone needed help with something 'round here, that you were The Guy? Help me with something?"​

. INTERMISSION by chap

Scene. A solitary room where a single lightbulb hangs from the ceiling. The walls are cold concrete. There are no windows. There are no doors. There is a wooden chair and a wooden table in the center and there's Frank sat with either hand placed on the surface. He looks calm. An unseen voice speaks. This isn't real. This isn't happening.

"State your name."

"Frank Liddle."

"Mr. Liddle. May I call you Frank?"

"Sure, I don't see why not."

"Thanks, Frank. Tell us about yourself."

"Well… alright, whaddaya want to know?"

"About you. Just talk. There's no wrong answer."

"Well… shit, okay. I'm Frank. I've said that already, but y'know, for posterity. I guess I was born under a bad moon. That's what my mom always said; born under a bad moon, under a bad sign. I dunno what that means. Hocus pocus. Hoodoo. Superstition, you know? But that's where this begins: Under a bad moon. It's all been downhill from there, if we're being honest. I'm naturally unlucky; I think that oughta be put on record."

"Don't worry. This is all going on record."

"Well, thank the big man upstairs for that. So, luck. Hell of a concept, ain't it? That you can be born with it good or with it bad. It ain't your choice. If you have it good, it's all smooth sailin' and no fears, I reckon. You're a made man. You're set for life. If it goes the other way, well, here we are. But you know what? I read this one time, I don't remember where: You don't know what worse luck your bad luck's saved you from. That's my motto. That's the code I live by, right there in a nutshell."

"That's an interesting thought, Frank. What's your greatest fear?"

"I don't like heights."

"Is that your greatest fear, though?"

"No."

"Then tell me. You can be honest."

"Dying alone, I guess. Running off everyone who gives enough of a shit to care about me. I don't mean to do it. I really don't. I think one thing and my mouth says the other. There's probably a word for that, ain't there?"

"Probably. Tell me about the last dream you had."

"All right, well… I'm dancing, okay? I'm dancing out in this field and this field, it's on fire. There's flames whippin' at the sky, all cinder and smoke and ash. It's just around dusk and the sky is all Halloween orange and candy apple red. So, I'm dancin' and, when I say dancin', I mean I'm really cutting a rug. My legs are moving like this and my arms are moving like that, but I'm alone and I know, I just know, there's no one around for miles and miles and miles in any direction. So, these flames, they're getting closer and they're kickin' at my heels, but I don't really care. Boy, the sweat is pourin'. I'm soakin' in it. Just as all that fire clings onto my ankles and starts climbin' up my shins, I look up and the clouds part and the rain pours down. I'm talkin' big, golf ball sized drops. The fires get put out and I'm no worse for wear, so I just keep on dancin' and dancin' until I wake up."

"Is that a good dream or a bad dream?"

"I don't rightly know."

"Thank you for your time, Frank."​

6. SMASH 'N GRAB by Praxis

Jvz68IB.png
He'd blown out of town like a bad habit. In a town full of them, nobody really noticed. His parole officer would get wise. After a day or two of no-call/no-shows at that shit job he'd set up for him. Maybe then he'd make another call. This one to his father. You see, everyone's someone's lackey, somewhere up the chain. And in a town full of bad habits, junkies, low-lifes, double-crossers and money-makers, even the clean brass has a few scuffs. Even the straights, with nine-to-five jobs and wives they can't stand at home, are looking for a little extra something. In a town like that, even the parole officers would roll over on you. Not to the judge - though, that'd come too - but to whatever bigger fish was looking to take a bite. And old man Prescott was always hungry. Old man Prescott would've loved a reason to get rid of his baby boy. With Trevor gone six months in Chino, he'd gotten a taste for what it could be like, not having a blood-related liability, sucking around. Getting into jams. Getting brought in on small-time, smackhead type shit, like possession of fourteen stolen televisions and a half-ounce of mushrooms.

"The fuck you need that many tv's for?" Henry, his parole officer/non-blood uncle had asked.

"Just tryin' to make a little extra. On the side."

Henry scoffed. "Side'a what, kid?"

So, he'd left town. Packed a duffel, what was left of the three hundred in his feed account; twenties and fives mostly and helped himself to one of the old man's go-homes from Prescott Motors. He'd notice anything missing from the safe, so that was out. Cash advances, lines of credit, friends who hadn't learned better than to lend, all non-options too. The old man had put a mark on his baby boy's head, and whether he'd intended it or not, that mark spelled out one, simple word: D E A D. If his options were stocking copy paper, eight hours a day, five days a week, while 60% of his take-home went to the state, and trying his luck somewhere – anywhere – else, then fuck it. Fuck Vegas, fuck his old man, fuck the casinos, fuck the plans for California, and, most of all, fuck any of them that'd told him to let her go.

Theo.

It still made his blood boil to think about her. Six months in Chino, no call, no letter. Blocked on every social there was. Her apartment, empty, her stuck-up, nosey-bitch friends a brick wall of information on where she'd went. The distance he could handle. Love made you do all kinds of crazy shit. Love made you crazy, if it was powerful enough, and true enough. And with Theo ...god, it was powerful. The silence, however, was asking too much. He'd scared her, sure, he knew that. His temper got away from him - always had - and he'd gone and said something that put the real fear into her. So, she ran. To cool down. She was smarter than he was about that kind of thing. Always knew when to back off. Give him a few days. Let him realize how crazy his world really was without her in it.

But six months without a word? What the fuck, Theo?

The money ran out a quarter of the way through Kansas, and Trevor had to get creative.

At close to 2 AM, off interstate 70, he'd pulled the pickup into the northern corner of a Pilot fuel-up, and waited. Smoking, pacing, watching as the semis fed in and out of the lot. Biding his time until someone fit the bill for what he and his buddy Chewy had called a 'Smash 'n Grab'. Six bucks to his name, half a pack of Camel's burned down to the filter, seeing an older man pull an early-model Mercedes into the lot, park, and hurriedly shuffle himself to the outdoor bathrooms was going to have to do. It was getting cold, and it was getting late. If he hoped to make it the rest of the way across the country, he was going to need whatever the old man had. Probably more. He followed him in, keeping his distance, eyes twitching back to the door, waiting for it to swing open. The old man was in hurry, humming something to himself, leaning against a urinal, and paying no attention to Trevor who stepped once, twice, and finally a third time, too close into the man's space for him to not notice. He got what sounded like half of a word out; one hand still clutching his cock, before Trevor smashed, with force, the man's head into the tile wall. The initial blow dazed the old man. The second, third, fourth and fifth sent blood and piss spraying, and afforded the old man with enough adrenaline to push back from the wall, nearly toppling the both of them. The old man cried out, not fighting back but dropping to the floor and curling fetal, while Trevor kicked repeatedly at his ribs, neck and back; shifting to stomp when that seemed ineffective in quieting him. Rolling the old man to his back, Trevor's fist fouled on a blow, hitting instead the tile floor where he'd meant for the man's face.

"God ...fuck!" He seethed, further misplacing his rage and kicking again at the man's head, landing with sickening accuracy and leaving him to whimper before going quiet.

"Shut the fuck up!" He snarled, and began rifling through the man's back, hip and coat pockets. Wallet. Keys. An ancient cell phone. Printed MapQuest directions? Who the fuck printed anything anymore? Trevor tossed the phone, and the unfolded piece of paper, pocketing the keys and the wallet, leaving the man in a silent, bloody, piss-covered heap. He washed where blood had gotten on his hands and forearms in the sink, left the bathroom and hurried toward the pickup before reconsidering. The Mercedes hadn't been pulled to the pumps. The old man only needed to take a leak; not gas. Still sucking air, shirt clinging to where his entire body was bathed in sweat, he looked between the keys, the car, and another lifted pickup truck approaching from the interstate. Avoiding their headlights, he got in the Mercedes and started the engine.

Almost full.

Plus what'd looked to be about two hundred in folding cash from the old man's wallet. It wouldn't last the remaining thousand or so miles to Tennessee. He'd need to hunt again. He'd need to get lucky. He'd need to outrun the storm, further east.​

7. SPEAK NO EVIL by chap

The three brothers convened around their kitchen table, surrounded by the ephemera of their entire lives; family portraits, trinkets from their travels, mementos from the past. They all sat in solemn silence, hands folded on the same table where they ate their morning breakfasts and their mid-day suppers and their evening dinners.

“So,” Julius said. “What’s the plan, Ponty? You’re the brains of this outfit.”

“Suppose we better start makin’ preparations,” Pontius said. “We’ve got to turn the farm into a fortress. If Severin’s dead, that means The Elder’s made his move…”

“...and if The Elder’s made his move, that means The Cowboy’s arrived,” Julius finished. “God fucking dammit motherfucker.”

“Watch your language,” Gilbert reminded him. “No cussin’ at the dinner table.”

“Sorry, Gilbert,” Julius said. “I lost my tongue. I’ll drop a dime in the curse jar.”

“You take that dime and put it towards wood in the mornin’,” Pontius said. “We’ll have to build up some barricades ‘round the perimeter. I’ll get the guns out of the safe tonight and get ‘em cleaned ‘fore the snow melts.”

“Whaddaya want me to do, Ponty?” Gilbert asked.

“Gilbert, you just stay sweet and don’t worry a hair on your pretty little head,” he said. “You’re a treasure to the world of man and you ain’t got nothin’ to fear.”

“Aw shucks, Ponty,” Gilbert said. “Thank yuns.”

“Welp,” Julius said, leaning back in his chair as he folded his arms behind his head. “I’ve been itchin’ for a good fight. Guess this’ll have to do.”

“Just remember, this ain’t just any old fight,” Pontius said, sipping from his coffee cup before he finished his thought. “This here is the end of the whole damn world we’re talkin’ about.”

“Language,” Gilbert said. “Y’all know better, Ponty.”

“Sorry, Gilbert,” Ponty said. “Let’s tuck in for the night. Tomorrow’s a big ol’ day.”

8 THE ABSURD by chap

fmRr33o.pngg
Ernest Jansen was a simple man.

He worked as a late night cashier at the Texaco off I-26 in Erwin, Tennessee. It was an undemanding job that didn't call for too much movement, which came as a small blessing given his bum knee and his aching back. He spent most nights leaning up behind the counter, phone in hand, watching the latest show or browsing porn or counting the minutes before he could sneak out back to catch a quick smoke break. An underachiever by trade, his goal in life was to be an echo of a person, but he'd never have described himself so poetically.

The snow hadn't reached Erwin, but the cold sure enough did. That kept most people indoors for the evening, cuddled up tight beneath a blanket with a good book and a glass of wine. Ernest didn't read, but he imagined most people did. His ex-girlfriend did. He missed her sometimes, but only sometimes.

In his line of work, Ernest had seen one too many strange, bizarre, or otherwise off-kilter characters come in at the witching hours. In a town as small as Erwin, right off the interstate, you saw all types come through. Midnight vultures, Ernest called 'em. Picking the meat off the bone of the night. Most weren't too terribly awful unless their drug addictions were showing. Most of the time, you could tell exactly what you were fixing to reckon with the second they came through the door. They always had an aura about them, some call from the uncanny valley, something to say that they lived on the fringes of this American life and it thrilled them to be there. They lived their absurd truth. That caused a mild amount of envy for Ernest sometimes, but only sometimes.

And then… there was this guy.

He came in about a half hour past midnight dressed in a full suit and an overcoat. He'd spent a solid chunk of time wandering the aisles back and forth like he was looking for something specific, picking up items and then putting them back. For the last five minutes, he stood spinning the sunglasses display and stopping occasionally to pick up a pair, looking down into the lenses without ever putting them on. He looked out of place and hadn't said a goddamn word. Ernest leaned against the counter, looking back and forth between his phone and this… well, this weirdo who'd wandered in from the periphery.

When he finally came to the counter, he had a bag of Blue Heat Takis, one of those hysterically gigantic bottles of water that'd have him wishing for a rest stop in thirty minutes, a pair of circular sunglasses, and a license plate key-chain emblazoned with the name 'RAY'.

"Hey man," Ray apparently said. "Can I ask you a question? It's been bothering me."

"Uh…" Ernest sputtered as he rang up the assortment of items laid out on the counter. "Y-Yeah? I guess?"

"Mm. Alright so," he reached for the bag of Takis after Ernest scanned them, opening them up and reaching inside. He spoke with a mouthful. "What if we're wrong?"

"I'm… I'm sorry?" Ernest said. "Wrong about… what?"

"About this," Ray said, looking around as he gestured wildly. "All of this. This whole life thing. What if we're wrong about it?"

"I'm sorry, sir," Ernest said. "I… I don't think I follow?"

"Look, man. We're all out here living, right?" Ray said. "We don't know jack shit about jack shit; we're just making it up as we go, reading the tea leaves, trying to make things make sense. So, what if we're wrong? What if none of this actually matters? What if we're just manifestations of a dying mind? What if we're made up? What if everything we see and everything we touch is just a simulation of a simulation of a simulation? We're all looking for the meaning of life, right? What if there ain't a meaning? Shit, even worse, what if that meaning is just inaccessible to us? It's there, but it's not for us to know. What if we're wrong and just wasting our time?"

"I…" Ernest started.

"I mean, the most logical thing to do would be to kill ourselves, right? Suicide, you know? Philosophical euthanasia," Ray said. "If life has no real meaning, then it stands to reason that we ought to just cut to the chase and get it out of the way. See what's next, yeah? Not a lot, I imagine, but still. I'm… I'm sorry. Ernest, right? That's your name? It's been a weird night, Ernest. It's a world of dogs out there."

For a long time, they were both quiet save for the sound of rolled tortillas crunching in this peculiar man's mouth. They stared across the counter at each other, Ernest unsure of what to say and the man seemingly waiting for a reply. "...I mean," Ernest finally said. "I guess we've… just got to make up our own meaning…?"

Ray stared at Ernest, pulling the last Taki from the bag. By then, Ernest imagined his mouth must have been on fire, but he didn't show it. Ray's eyes went narrow. His brows furrowed. His forehead creased. His lips pursed, his jaw clenched, his nostrils flared. Finally, he nodded his head, pointing at Ernest with the blue-dyed, rolled tortilla chip pinched between his thumb and index finger.

"Shit, man. Yeah," Ray said. "Yeah, I guess we do. Embrace that meaningless and create our own meaning, ex nihilo. That's the ultimate act of rebellion against an indifferent universe, ain't it? Shit. I was so far out in the weeds, I wasn't even looking at the big picture. You're heuristic as fuck, Ernest. You're a book of matches in an otherwise dark cave. Has anyone ever told you that before?"

"...um. No, they haven't, sir," Ernest said. "That'll… That'll be $12.39."

"Oh yeah, right," Ray said, popping the last Taki in his mouth before reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. "The wheel of capitalism keeps on spinnin', brother."

Ernest stared after the man as he walked towards the door, water bottle in one hand, key-chain in the other, and the glasses sat on the top of his head like a crown. The crumpled Takis bag sat on the counter, discarded like so many things. Bewilderment, Ernest thought. That's the only word that could sum up what he was feeling. The man pushed open the glass door, but didn't leave without looking back over his shoulder, a toothy grin spreading across his face.

"You've been a blessing, Ernest. Shine on, you crazy diamond."

Raymond Mulholland walked across the moonlight parking lot and climbed back into the driver seat of his jet black sedan. He yawned out loud before taking a swig from his water bottle. "Just a few miles to go, Raymond," he told himself. "Go make your own meaning."

He sat the key-chain down in the passenger seat, right next to his FBI badge.

He set his GPS for Dawn Chorus, Tennessee.

He drove.​

9. THE THINGS YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW by chap

By the time Frank let go, the collar of Charlie's jacket was stained with tears. He sniffled and shook like a rattle, wiping the wetness from his eyes with the back of his hand as he looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in years. They didn't say much else until both their eyes settled on the same body just a few feet away, lying supine with arms outstretched, one leg tangled beneath the other, the snow beneath his head dyed a darkening shade of red. Charlie wasn't as bad off, but that didn't mean she was okay. Her eyes were glazed over, one wrist hung limp and broken, her glasses disappeared and were likely crushed in the scuffle.

"Alright. Let's talk about the elephant in the parking lot," Frank said. "Who the hell is that sonuvabitch and what the hell did he want with you?"

"I… don't know," Charlie said, woozy as she rubbed at her head. "He just… he grabbed me, Frank. He ain't… he ain't dead, is he?"

"I don't think so," Frank said. "Looks like he's still breathin', but I guess we better make sure."

Frank walked towards the man with a long, beleaguered sigh. He dreaded what was about to happen, fingers already quaking as he prepared himself for what came next. It felt like a can of worms was about to be opened up wide and Frank didn't want to deal with all the slithering things that were going to pour out, but he knew he had to. He knelt down and, with a deep breath catching in his dirt black lungs, he reached to pull back the ski mask. The face was a crimson soaked visage, but it was still recognizable enough to see who it was and the sight of it made Frank do several double takes. This was how Scooby Doo and the Mystery Gang must have felt at the end of every caper, but this wasn't Old Man Jenkins trying to scare the Harlem Globetrotters off his family's ancestral oil field. No, this was something far, far more malevolent and far, far more gut wrenching.

"I'll be goddamned," Frank said. "That's the sheriff, ain't it?"

It was. There was no question about it and no doubt either. There, half breathing through a gurgling throat, out cold with a body that couldn't stop convulsing, was Sheriff Stanley Ryan. You hear that, don't you? That's the sound of the other shoe dropping, the hammer falling, the world turning upside down, of things getting almost hysterically messy. That's the universe coming unfurled and revealing the colossal, gaping chasm beneath and that chasm is full of teeth and those teeth have every intention of eating you alive, chewing you whole, letting you fall down a throat black as pitch. That's it: the order of the soul overturned to reveal the monster lurking underneath, like a colony of spiders beneath a log, the skeleton in your closet, the last thing you'd ever expect.

Charlie looked at him through blurry eyes before one hand clutched itself over her mouth to keep from yelping out loud. She didn't even know how to respond, turning her gaze away as the sight and the concussion she probably had made the world go dizzy. One hand placed itself on Frank's shoulder as he moved to stand, using him for balance as she pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger.

"This ain't good, Frank," she said. "This ain't… this ain't good at all."

"Pretty much as far as good as you're gonna get," Frank admitted, looking from the body back to his sister. "I guess we ought to get him out of sight, huh? 'Fore someone sees him and gets the wrong idea."

"Frank, I…" she paused, clenching her jaw as the spins gave way to a lightheadedness, a shooting pain rushing through her forearm. "...Frank, I'm hurt. Real bad. I think you… You gotta take care of this for me, Frank. I gotta… I gotta find a doctor…"

"Shitfire, Charlie, he get'cha that bad?" Frank said, genuine concern in his voice. "Alright. Let's get you to a doct–"

"No," she said. "No, you take care of this and I'll take care of myself. Alright? I need you to do this, Frank. Please."

Frank tried to words to say as she let go of his shoulder. Instead, he nodded his head and took a deep breath. Charlie began walking off towards Netherland Avenue, a wobble in her step, one arm hung limp while the other reached up to put pressure against her head. As she got further away, Frank called out. "Hey!"

She looked back over her shoulder as he called out again. "It's gonna be alright!" he said. "I promise!"

She nodded her head and turned away. Frank watched her until she disappeared around a corner and then he sighed, turning his attention back to the sheriff. "Alright, Sheriff Dicknose," he said. "Let's get you figured out. Sonuvabitch."

Frank knelt back down and started rummaging through Sheriff Ryan's pockets, pulling out zip-ties, a folded knife, his wallet, and finally with a jingle and a jangle, a set of car keys. When Frank pressed the lock button, a burgundy SUV across the street honked twice. Frank tucked the keys in his pocket and grabbed stood, hands placed against the small of his back as he leaned backwards with a satisfying crack. "Alright, buddy," Frank said. "You ain't gonna like this much, but I sure as hell am. Sonuvabitch."

Frank grabbed hold of either of the sheriff's heels and started dragging him across the parking lot. The snow made it slightly easier than it would have been otherwise. "I ain't never done this before," Frank muttered. "Pretty sure I'm breakin' a whole mess of laws, so I guess we're just about even, ain't we?" The back of the sheriff's head bounced off the curb as Frank dragged him over, but he didn't seem to mind so Frank kept on dragging.

At the SUV, Frank popped the trunk and hoisted the sheriff up. "Oof. You're a biggin, ain'tcha?" Frank said. "Sonuvabitch."

With the body successfully tossed into the trunk, Frank looked down at the sheriff and reared his arm back again, punching the unconscious body across the jaw just one more time for good measure. "Sorry, pal," Frank said. "Can't have you wakin' up while I'm drivin'. Sonuvabitch."

Frank climbed into the driver's seat and buckled himself in. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been behind the wheel of a car and he sure as hell didn't have a license to drive, but some things are more important than the laws of man. The key was in the ignition. The radio was playing some stale 80s new wave pop song. The last few flakes of snow were falling on Dawn Chorus.

"Huh, would you look at that?" Frank asked. "It quit snowin'. Small blessing, huh? You sonuvabitch."

And just like that, Frank drove off into the night.​

10. UNTITLED by Lydia

A human wave surged through the Mothlight doors, limbs tangled and bodies pressed, its collective panic thrust into cold and diffused on the open plain of Netherland Avenue. Alarmed voices found their volume dwarfed by the sheer height of an empty sky, humbled by the impossibility of ever filling this infinite space. The night was still, the storm passed.

Everything cooled.

Julia wasn't victim to the heat of panic, nor the cold of snow. She'd been among the crowd until she wasn't; where they stopped walking, she continued.

She continued through the intersection, past the park, crossing street after street without bothering to pause. There weren't any cars. Piles of snow absorbed any errant sound, and the city was dark. Darker than she'd ever seen it. Here and there, an emergency light flickered a faint glow of illumination, but otherwise, she had merely the moon by mercy of parting clouds. It was enough. She felt the cold on her cheeks and hands, icy sensations that dripped heat away, but continuous movement insulated the warmth at her center. The rhythm of her heart was steady, swift but even, purposeful. She passed Ouroboros too, then the city buildings thinned into wider-lawned neighborhoods and finally forest, dense trees blanketed deeply with white.

Where the street stopped, Julia continued. The snow lay undisturbed between trees, its smooth surface disguising the unpredictable depths of drifts. It came to her ankles, shins, knees. She waded, refusing to acknowledge her fatigue. Her jeans soaked through, her boots failed. Thick wool socks persevered, though they too would eventually become damp through and through.

It was quiet in the woods, her breath and stride the lone disruption.

She sensed the proximity before she saw it - the clearing - moonlight casting blue on an undisturbed circle of snow, ringed by watchful trees.

p48zQIa.png
And here Julia saw Her, pale and angular and crowned with a mass of red curls, otherworldly and desperately familiar. Here a smile rested upon serene lips, arms outstretched in beckon to Julia, who had, in reverence, paused at the threshold of the clearing. Here her emotions swelled, swallowing the focused ambition of her journey.

Here crushing fatigue descended on the reporter as she stumbled toward this waiting embrace, falling into slender arms (bare despite the snow, warm as they wrapped around her) with childlike abandon. Here sobs welled in her throat by virtue of relief. Here she found peace and safety, the love she lacked, ease to the pain of her own perpetual, perfect emptiness. Here she was whole and complete.

"Virgil-" Julia managed as her breath began to calm, "He shot his niece. He was looking for Severin, he thought Severin had Carla. No one's seen her, no one at all. He didn't mean to do it - he seemed strange - very strange, not himself. His niece said he’d been like that all day."

"Yes, I see."

Julia felt gentle fingers comb through her hair, no more insistent than a breeze.

"No one knows anything. I never saw Ephraim, or anyone. I fear Severin’s support of our cause has made him a target, but he eluded danger tonight - unless there are others hunting him. I wish I knew more -"

There was anguish in her voice, the voice of dedication in pursuit of the perilous, the mysterious, the fabled prize that existed on the farthest horizon of reality.

"Oh, dear child," the ageless woman soothed, "don’t despair, you've done so well. Just as I asked. We wait and watch. We let them play their games while we bide our time. This is our way, to be quiet and careful and clever; it has always been. This land has been ours for so long, we've nothing to fear. They will not take it from us."

Here Julia was calmed, here appeased both fear and doubt. Here she smiled and closed her eyes, content in the embrace of The Mother.​

. EPILOGUE

4DiYLMm.png



Transcript

Good evening, Dawn Chorus, and thank you for tuning in to 95.9… The Mountain. I'm your host Dr. Feelgood and I've got a prescription to cure what ails you.

It's been a day, hasn't it? Full of frost and Mother Winter in full regalia. I hope you've stayed warm babies, all bundled up to keep from catching a cold. The night might be long, but tomorrow is a new day. The snow will melt and only then will we see what was buried underneath; the secrets hidden and the knowledge gained. Are you okay with that, Dawn Chorus? How do you reckon with the things you don't know? How do you sleep not knowing what tomorrow will bring? Does that scare you? Does that fill your heart with dread? If it doesn't, it should. We are all tied to the same train track, waiting and waiting while we hear the whistle blow in the distance. Breathe. Just breathe and know that you are not in control. You are a prisoner of fate and fate makes for one helluva warden. Nobody gets a reprieve, my babies. Just breathe. Just breathe. Just breathe.

One more lullaby, Dawn Chorus. One more song to get your through the night. Sleep tight, Dawn Chorus. Don't let the bed bugs bite.

Lyrics

Green Valley by Puscifer

Hello stranger, can you tell us where you've been?
More importantly, how ever did you come to be here?
Though a stranger, you can rest here for a while
But save your energy, your journey here is far from over
Come the sunrise we'll descend through Judgement Valley
And weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River

No direction, but to follow what you know
No direction, but a faith in her decision
No direction, but to never fight her flow
No direction, but to trust the final destination
You're a stranger till she whispers you can stay
You're a stranger till she whispers that your journey's over

Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River

No direction, but to follow what you know
No direction, but a faith in her decision
No direction, but to never fight her flow
No direction, but to trust the final destination
You're a stranger till she whispers you can stay
You're a stranger till she whispers that your journey's over

Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River
Weigh your worth before her majesty, the Verde River



 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom