The following is a true story… even the names haven’t been changed.

It was the last week of autumn in West Philadelphia, and the wet, warm smell of falling leaves had just given way to the numbing chill of winter. The year was 1990, and my friends and I had just begun our senior year at Robert E. Lamberton, the same school most of us had attended since Kindergarten. We’d grown up together, and this was our last hurrah. Next year we’d be at distant colleges, carving pumpkins with new families of friends.

My mother went away for Halloween weekend and left me free run of her house. I hadn’t spent much time there in several years, since I lived with my father and my parents’ relationship was contentious. And the house had… other issues.

The neighborhood consisted of tightly-packed row homes, but my mother’s stone-faced house on Brookhaven Road was uncommonly large. It had more square footage because it positioned on a corner, and the basement that most families used for storage had been renovated into an apartment.

The house had a personality of its own, a sort of unwelcome melancholy. It’d never escaped the 70’s: the wood-paneled basement had a bar fronted with stained glass, and a faux-crystal chandelier on the second floor echoed through wall-to-wall mirrors. There was an organ pre-set with awful disco beats, and the couch cushions were imprisoned in loud and uncomfortable plastic covers.

There was more to the gloominess, though—a personal tragedy. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—had spent the last ten years of her life there. She even died in her bedroom on the third floor, in the back corner of the house. It was a slow and pitiful death: a particularly rough—even violent—manifestation of dementia.

I’ll never forget the day I first noticed it. I was twelve years old, and I’d come around the block from my other grandmother’s house to pick up some of my toys. Since I didn’t live with my mother, she insisted that I keep my toys at her house so I’d be compelled to come see her. My grandmother greeted me in the basement, right in front of the stained-glass bar, and asked me if I’d heard it.

“Heard what?”

“You don’t hear him?” she asked, leading me into my toy room.

This was my fortress of solitude, lined with shelves packed with toys: G.I. Joe, Micronauts, Buck Rogers, TRON, the Six Million Dollar Man, and, of course, Star Wars. I was instructed to keep floor and the ancient, dusty couch toy-free, so anyone could rush in and grab the rotary phone on the far end, but I often forgot to stow the wires from my ColecoVision.

Next to the phone on that far wall was a poster of Yoda, marked by folds and staple holes from the Empire Strikes Back magazine in which I’d found it. Yoda was framed in a close-up shot with an intense gaze, and his off-center eyes made him look particularly like a Muppet. Maybe Gonzo.

“You don’t hear him?” my grandmother asked again.

I laughed.

I thought she was playing a joke… although she wasn’t the joking type. She wasn’t particularly friendly at all. I’d named her “Bah” at a time when that was probably a big word for me. Bah didn’t get along with anyone; my father blamed her for my parents’ divorce, and my mother outright hated her. They only lived together because finances were an issue, and they’d taken to occupying separate floors of the house and interacting as little as possible.

But Bah was always nice to me. Maybe she was trying on a joke.

She didn’t respond to my laugh. In fact, she grew angry. “You don’t hear him?” she insisted. “He’s talking!”

“Bah, it’s a poster. It can’t talk.”

She grabbed me by the shoulder—hurting me—and pushed me toward Yoda. “Listen to him!” she cried.

Suddenly I saw her differently—I was forcibly reminded of things that a kid tries to forget. This wasn’t the Bah who was always nice to me, it was the Bah who’d gotten into physical, hair-pulling fights with my mother, who’d cursed out my father, who’d once even waved a knife to make her point.

Suddenly I wanted out of there. I wanted to run, and never come back.

I said something—I don’t remember what exactly, but it couldn’t have made any sense—and I escaped, leaving my toys behind. From that moment, I never felt safe with Bah safe again. She told us that her friends were secretly aliens, and they were watching her from on top of a radio tower across the street. She roamed the neighborhood, arguing with herself or other people. A few years later, she even wandered into my place of work, a video rental store. When I approached her, she spoke to me like we were strangers.

I don’t know why nobody helped her—why she wasn’t put into a home. You don’t ask questions like that when you’re a kid, you just adjust to reality because it’s the all you know. Her condition degenerated until the spring of 1988, when my mother found her in her bedroom in the corner of the third floor, several days dead. There was no funeral. Nothing. By then, it had no impact on me whatsoever. In my heart, she’d been dead for years.

And so, when my friends and I took over the house on Brookhaven Road in the fall of 1990, we weren’t walking in to an inviting place. There weren’t any strange whispers or slamming doors, no messages in steamed glass or blood dripping from the walls. The place was just… sad. Sad and cold.

We cut school on Friday and hit the supermarket for the makings for a big spaghetti dinner. And, of course, pumpkins. Once we got to the house, it was time to assign bedrooms for the couples. I called the spacious basement for some privacy with my girlfriend. My best friend, Derek, reserved my mother’s room upstairs for he and his girl. The others found corners or couches for themselves.

Saturday night, Derek gave up the third floor. He said he wanted to stay in the living room. So others moved upstairs: a new couple took my mother’s room, and another shacked up in my childhood room, which was still decorated with Underoos boxes and Black Hole sheets.

Nobody wanted the back room, my grandmother’s room. Everybody knew what had happened.

When we emerged in the morning, I noticed something strange: Everyone had moved downstairs. No particular incident had incited it, and it wasn’t a group decision. There’d simply been a trickle of traffic downstairs all night long. One guy said it was too cold, another said my old bed was too small. Tree said he felt funny “doing it” on my mother’s bed. Okay.

Sunday was move-out day. We gathered our stuff, cleaned up the place and even left a “thank you” jack o’lantern for my mother. I headed upstairs for a last pass at her bedroom, to make sure nobody had left any incriminating evidence. All clear.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I realized I had to go to the bathroom. The closest one was in the back of the house, next to my grandmother’s room. I didn’t give it a second thought; after all, I’d lived in this house for years, and that was where I took my semi-daily childhood baths.

I had to go and I knew my way around, so I didn’t bother to hit the lights. I lifted the lid and began to relieve myself, facing one of those ridiculous echoing mirrors that reflected back upon the shaving mirror over the sink.

There was my head, there was the back of my head. My head. The back of my head. My head. The back of my head…

And my grandmother looking at me.

I immediately looked away, and never looked back. But I know for sure that I saw her—I’ll never forget the image. And even after I looked away, I felt her. She was lonely. And angry.

My aim faltered and I sent a stream all over the ancient pink bathmat. I stumbled to my right, toward the hallway.

The door was wide open, but something was blocking me. The threshold felt tight. I had to squeeze through, shoulder first, and I felt her there. I smelled her.

I raced downstairs, as my throat tightened and heat rushed into my cheeks. I ushered everyone out, but I was lost inside my mind, still seeing that image. I didn’t want to talk about it; I just wanted to leave.

Weeks and months passed, and I put it out of my mind. Various jaunts through the neighborhood took me past the corner of Brookhaven Road, but I tried not to look at the house.

In fact, I only ever entered it one more time, the day after my mother passed away in her bedroom. The house had been left to my stepfather, and I had one day to collect my things.

My friends helped me take the last mementos from my room—the room on the third floor, sandwiched between my mother’s and my grandmother’s.

We took a few trips, and each time I came upstairs, I felt it.

Anger. The conflict between mother and daughter had manifested in tangible, choking hatred. Invisible and powerful. Toys that had stood in place for years had shifted in the dust. A lamp had fallen. The drapes were mussed. It’d begun before we’d gotten there, and it continued while we worked. A battlefield between graves.

As we drove away with a backseat full of my childhood toys, Derek said he was glad to be done with that place. He’d never wanted to go back since that last Halloween stay.

I asked him if he’d seen her.

He shrugged, staring out the window.

As I told him what I’d seen in that bathroom mirror, his eyes watered and his voice grew dry. He nodded. Finally, he whispered that he’d seen it too.

Twenty years later, I still drive past that house on Brookhaven Road. And I still try not to look.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Hugh Sterbakov is offering one copy of his book, City Under the Moon. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Two-time Emmy-nominated writer HUGH STERBAKOV has sold feature and television projects to Disney, Paramount, Fox, SyFy and AMC. He wrote the award-winning graphic novel Freshmen and the upcoming R-rated animated comedy Hell & Back, starring Danny McBride, Rob Riggle and Mila Kunis. He recently released his first horror novel, City Under the Moon, a highly-detailed technological, political and action thriller chronicling a werewolf epidemic in New York. For more information, visit CityUnderTheMoon.com.

Read An Excerpt From City Under the Moon: 

A thunderous vortex drowned out most of the noise as the Black Hawk helicopter descended between the Chrysler Building and the Hyatt Tower, blasting them with gun smoke. It hovered just a few feet off the ground, an incredible presence in the middle of a city street.

Tildascow lifted Lon by his belt and tossed him into the cabin. He bounced off the side-facing gunner’s seat and almost fell out before his foot found the rudder.

Hairy fingers latched onto the ledge on the far side of the aircraft. Then a wrist emerged, extending from a dirty, fuzzy sleeve.

Lon screamed, but he couldn’t hear himself over the helicopter’s roar.

It was a wolf man dressed as Santa Claus. And it wasn’t nearly as funny as it should’ve been.

The Black Hawk’s pilot swung around and fired his gun, hitting weresanta in the chest and slamming it against the side-facing seat.

Apparently they weren’t silver rounds. Weresanta sprang into the cockpit, and the helicopter rolled toward Lon, spilling him onto the street. He crashed onto his backpack and tumbled backward, pinching his neck and biting his motherhumping tongue again before ending up on his stomach. He rolled over—

—blink blink—

The Black Hawk was above him, rolled laterally so that he could see the sky straight through the cabin. And then the tail shaft whipped over like a gigantic windshield wiper. For half a breath, the Black Hawk was looking straight down at him. The cockpit window was covered in blood.

That… that couldn’t be good.

The blades cut into an armored personnel carrier—ching ching ching—bombarding soldiers and wolves with shrapnel.

And then it belly-flopped into the Hyatt Tower.

Shattering. A downpour of glass.

Lon curled up on his knees, letting his backpack take the brunt of it. His ass burned hot.

More screaming, howling, crashing. Endless gunfire. Liquid flames falling from the sky. Burning corpses in every direction. A gaping wound cut through the Hyatt, spitting flames so bright he could barely see the skeleton of the Black Hawk.

Men and wolves flickered through the curtains of swirling smoke. A werewolf woman emerged from the darkness, on her belly and dragging herself toward Lon. Blackened blood seeped from her broken nose, making her grunts sound like sniffles. She tried to lunge, but her legs had—oh man—

Her legs had been torn off at the knees.

Lon’s mind screamed, but his muscles froze and his throat misfired.

The werewolf grabbed his wrist—its palm felt like hot gravel—and it pulled him closer to those teeth—

Put-Put-Put!

The creature’s chin slammed into the asphalt. Tildascow’s black rifle was inches from its head. The sight of her made him want to cry, from relief or love or just because of his scorched ass.

Her eyes looked like flashlights behind her soot-covered face.  “Can you move?” she yelled, sounding like she was underwater. “Are you hurt?”

Lon tried, but he couldn’t answer.

She pulled him to unsteady feet and put a gun in his hand, maybe the same one she’d given him earlier. He couldn’t close his fingers on the grip.

“You’re in shock, it’s perfectly normal,” she said, calmly. How the fuck could she be calm? “Breathe deep and—“ A rabid wolf man hurtled their way and she fired twice, flipping him backward, never breaking her thought. “Breathe deep and stay with me.”

His eyes were heavy. The air was so thick, black and flickering orange.

“This will pass, Lon. You’re okay. Hey…” She looked deep into his eyes and repeated his own words. “We are going to win this.”

A massive figure surfaced through the smoke: Ilecko, blood-splattered and caked in soot. And then came Jaguar and Mantle, sidestepping toward them, eyes constantly shifting. The band was back together.

A thunderous groan came from the Hyatt, where the upside-down helicopter shell lost its grip and fell to the street.

“Get down!” Tildascow yelled.

She pushed him to the ground, but it made no difference. A blast wave of smoke belched from the crash, blinding Lon and ripping the air from his lungs, leaving him in pure suffocation.

 

My favorite Halloween (so far) was the one I spent in England.

I was researching a novel, and my research took me all over the United Kingdom, including to Northern Ireland.  My itinerary had me doing half car, half BritRail pass along this circuit, and once I’d crossed back over from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in Wales, I was driving to get to Stonehenge for Halloween.

The maps weren’t always precise, and I quickly learned ‘A’ or ‘M’ plus one number was a major highway, ‘A’ with two numbers after it was a pretty good-sized street, ‘A’ with three number was a local road, and ‘A’ with four numbers, or ‘B’ with four numbers was, essentially, a one-way cow path with an occasional widening of the road for turning around.

After getting lost once or twice, I approached Stonehenge near dusk, when the tourist facility was closing for the day.  Seeing the site is almost anti-climactic; you expect it to be lost in the middle of some vast plain, but in fact Stonehenge is in a field that splits the A303 into the A303 to the left and A344 to the right.  At the time, the only security barrier was a three-wire fence just off the road, presumably to keep cars from driving up and stealing the sarsen stones.

I pulled the car over near where I saw people leaving and asked where the entrance was.  A security guard came over and told me the grounds were closing for the day.  I was not amused.  I’d been driving like hell all day, but come up short.  I could have returned the next day, but come on: Stonehenge on Halloween.  Seeing my disappointment, he glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “Why don’t you come back later on?”

My eyes lit up.  “Really?”

“Sure,” he continued, more confident now.  “Come back after it gets dark, just stand over there and call my name.”  (He told me his name, which I withhold for obvious reasons.  Call him ‘Mal’)

“No problem,” I said, shaking his hand.  “I’ll come by later.”

I went and checked into my bed-and-breakfast, then had dinner at a pub in Amesbury, and at around nine o’clock I got back in my car and drove to Stonehenge.  I almost got lost, because by that time a nice, thick fog had rolled in.  In a weird way it made things a little lighter.  Fog is never as black as a moonless night in the country.  On the other hand, it really shrinks your world.  The right side of my brain thought this was the coolest thing ever, but the left side realized I was in a foreign country, driving to meet a total stranger in a foggy place reputed for human sacrifice.

In deference to my left brain, I decided night vision was better than headlights pointing in only one direction.  I turned off the headlights, and after a few moments I got out and started towards the fence.

“Mal!  Mal!”

Down the road, I saw a light approaching and heard some giggles.  I really didn’t believe it was anything to worry about, but just in case, I stood ready to do…whatever Donovan Graham (my protagonist) would do when faced with murderous cultists at a site of supernatural energy.

“Where are the big rocks at?”

A group of five teenagers came walking towards me like zombies, in make-up and with a Chinese lantern at the end of a long stick.  I was a little surprised; at that time, England didn’t really get into the commercialization of Halloween the way America does.

I pointed back the way they’d come.  “That way.  You already passed them.”

They turned with drunken humor and headed off.  I returned to the side of the road.  “Mal!”

From across the field of mist, a lone circle of light bounced towards me.  “Tom?”

“Yeah.”

The light drew closer—it was a flashlight in Mal’s hand.  “Come on, then.  Just hop the fence.”

The idea of doing this makes me laugh to this day.  I did, and he took me on a private tour of the site.  The highlight was when he brought me through the outer circle of sarsen stones, inside the bluestones, and to the heart of the circle, inside the horseshoe of sarsen trilithons.

“That’s where I take a nap when I get tired,” he indicated towards a sheltered hollow.

I was hardly listening.  Inside the circle, I felt an energy unlike any I’d ever felt.  It wasn’t invasive; in fact, what made it so noticeable was its utter passivity.  I felt a total calm that I hadn’t felt even just outside the stone circle.  Despite the suspicions of some scholars, I got no sense of violence or bloodshed, not even by the ‘Slaughter Stone’, named because when rainwater pools on it, it sometimes looks red like blood (or, red like infused with rusted iron ore).

When Stonehenge is open, visitors aren’t allowed within twenty or so yards of the stones.  Apparently, when people could go where I stood, too many wanted ‘just a little souvenir’ and would chip off a piece of sarsen or bluestone.  I didn’t want to be one of them, but I wanted something, so I scraped off a couple of branches of lichen growing on one of the trilithons.  It now sits on my shelf with my Loch Ness water, my water bottle from climbing the Snake Path to Masada, and various stones I’ve acquired on my travels.

Mal said nothing when I did this, and he escorted me back across the field to the road when I’d seen everything.  I thanked him, slipped him a few pounds, and returned to my B&B, driving slowly to fully enjoy my situation.

Strange postscript: the next morning, I read in the local paper that at around 3 AM, someone else had jumped the fence and knocked Mal unconscious.  He eventually called for help and was taken to a hospital, but I wonder to this day—was it those kids with the lantern?  If so, I may have dodged a sacrificial knife by misleading them…

Happy Halloween, everyone!

THOMAS MORRISSEY  is the creator of Donovan Graham, whose first adventure, FAUSTUS RESURRECTUS, was published in April 2012 by Night Shade Books.  His work has also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and in the award-winning anthology BROOKLYN NOIR.  He is currently residing in Hackensack, New Jersey, working on the next Donovan Graham thriller.

TODAY’S GIVEWAY: Thomas Morrissey is offering one paperback copy of Faustus Resurrectus. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Preview the cover to Faustus Resurrectus by Thomas Morrissey.

http://www.amazon.com/Faustus-Resurrectus-Donovan-Graham-Morrissey/dp/1597804053/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351379937&sr=8-1&keywords=faustus+resurrectus

A review of Faustus Resurrectus: http://violininavoid.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/review-of-faustus-resurrectus-by-thomas-morrissey/

Read an excerpt from Faustus Resurrectus:

PROLOGUE

AFTER THE CEREMONY

The sharpest tool we had was a bottle opener.

The big man blinked, uncomprehending.

How did this happen?

The full moon added to the light of the bonfire, illuminating bodies scattered where they tried to escape. None was in one piece.

The big man took one aimless step then another, refusing to absorb the meaning of his surroundings.

We were supposed to be giving thanks…

Business at the commune had been killer these past few months: personal care items were up, the microbrew had gained some popularity and, best of all, the summer’s crop of White Widow had topped out at twenty-three and a half percent THC. It was while he and Greta were smoking some of the fruits of that first harvest, lying naked in bed on a beautiful summer morning, that she’d come up with the idea.

Mother Gaia has shown us such bounty. We should offer our energy to Her, to give thanks and praise to Her glory.

Best energy I know, he’d replied, is sex.

When they’d set up that morning for the orgy, the sweet summer grass had tickled their ankles. Oak trees spread green-leafed shade over them, and even the moss coating the stone hollow where they’d set up the bonfire had been bright chartreuse. Greta had said the vitality was a good sign.

Someone expressed reservations about messing with weird religions.

This isn’t ‘weird’, Greta had said. We’re all about positive energy.

Now the green was gone, withered, freezer burned to death on the first of August. The foliage had shrunk to husks, trees twisted and gnarled. He tried to understand how this could be.

Coletun.

What happened to him?

He couldn’t stop shaking.

‘I’m gonna come back for you. Mister Fizz made me bigger and stronger than you.’

Beneath the bloody horror he saw Greta’s face. “Baby…” he whispered, extending a trembling hand.

Her head rolled to the side, exposing the jagged edge that nearly severed it from her body…

The next thing he knew he was fumbling through the pockets of the jeans he’d stripped off hours—years—ago. Drying blood made his grip sticky, but he managed to untangle his cell phone.

“9-1-1 Operator. What is the emergency?”

“You have to come! They’re all dead!”

“Calm down, sir. Who is dead? Where are you?”

“Blue Moon Bay. In a field, about a half mile northwest from the commune. The Churner’s Commune. You have to come now!”

The thing had burst from the heart of the black bonfire, an icy white lance that blinded him when it struck. His stomach had gone numb; he didn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, anything beyond that.

“The Churner’s Commune?”

“Hurry! I think…I think I killed them all.”

 

 

As a child, I’ve always loved Halloween, including the night before. The cool crisp autumn winds howling outside. The brisk air through my open windows. The colors of the changing leaves, a golden brown or bright red and orange, these reminders always seem to get me in that halloweenish mood. But above all, it’s the costumes, the candy, and the scary movies played over and over on the TV right around Halloween. These are the kinds of things that send chills up my spine, goose bumps all over my flesh, and make me love this holiday every times it comes around again.

When I was young, Halloween was the night when all my friends and I would dress up and head out to cause terror and mayhem in our town. We would gather our eggs and pick a few of the neighbors we despised all year long, and we’d send our eggs flying toward their windows, their doors, hell, whatever we could hit on their property was fair game for us.

Yes, we were twisted kids. We were out to cause trouble, but not only to our neighbors in town. There were the older kids, the seniors in our high school. Some of them were jocks, linebackers on the football team or wrestlers who would easily twist us like a pretzel if they got a hold of us. Of course, after a few Halloweens of tossing eggs at them, or using shaving cream to cover their bikes or cars, they caught onto us and found away to exact their revenge.

I can still remember that one Halloween night years ago, like it was just yesterday. You see, after finally catching on to our antics, they set a trap for us and unfortunately, we fell for it. Almost had my thirteen-year-old ass kicked by some really big boys that Halloween night. I’ll never forget. True fear of unknown proportions visited me in the dark woods that late evening.

They were successful in their trap because they armed themselves with walkie-talkies (hope I’m not showing my age here,) as part of their devilish idea. Dressed in their Halloween costumes and safely hidden behind masks, they strategically placed each other in different areas. Two were at one end of our block, an additional two at the other. Another was waiting on the opposite block for us. This was because many times we would jump over a neighbor’s fence, cross through the woods and come out on the next street over. Well, they knew all our secret paths by now. We were dead before we knew what was coming.

So, early this Halloween night we all left my parents house and headed on out to do some damage again in out neighborhood we always terrorized. We had our own costumes and our usual ammunition of eggs, shaving cream, and socks filled with baby powder. We were ready.

When we found a few of these high school seniors congregated at the local country store, we were already hidden in a section of the woods just a ways back. We came closer to them, still safe mind you behind large oaks and maple trees, and we tossed our eggs as far as our young arms could throw them before we ran through the woods to the other street, scared, excited, full of adrenaline. Yes the high from this chemical racing through our blood was addictive. And then the screams were heard. “We’re going to get you little punks this year. You’re ass is ours!”

I’ll never forget the fear that Halloween night when we saw them coming from everywhere. We backtracked to get to our street, but they were already in front of my house, and two others were walking down the block toward my friend’s house. We were blocked in. Trapped!

They caught a few of us that night and soaked the shit out of us in a mix of vinegar, oil, and I hate to say it, piss. Yep. They must have pissed in the large spray bottles and fire extinguishers they carried before waiting for us to arrive, because we smelled like piss and vinegar for the rest of the night. Now that I look back, I’m just glad they didn’t kick the living snot out of our scrawny bodies. I’m guessing now that they felt we were too young, and the concoction they made up would have a lasting effect. Well, It sure did.

Halloween’s after that experience were still fun mind you, still filled with candy, parties, getting drunk and scaring each other, but we did our best to hide whenever we saw the seniors roaming the neighborhood. I miss those days though. But now I get to relive these in my new YA horror novel, THE LEGEND OF THE PUMPKIN THIEF. The characters of my youth—both good and bad— are back to share their story again. But this time…I get to play God. And so I’ve added a new character, a supernatural, evil, Pumpkin Thief, who decides to rein terror on this small neighborhood and especially those seniors who once messed with me. Now I call the shots. Hehehe!

THE LEGEND OF PUMPKIN THIEF has to do with my troubled Halloween adventures when young. I just changed the names to protect the innocent, and to take care of the bullies. No piss and vinegar in my fictitious world. hehehehe!

Halloween is still fun for me today, although much safer in the confines of my own home. Well unless you consider some nights when I’ve heard strange noises from the basement or my attic. I guess that’s for next year’s Halloween blog.

Anyway, I still go out and trick-r-treat with my daughter, who this year will no doubt enjoy it more, being she’s four now. Last year she was amazed at all the different kids that came to the door in their masks and costumes.

Okay, I’m rambling on here with my blog post. I wish everyone a terrifying and fun Halloween. Boo!

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Charles Day is offering one copy each of The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief and Tales of Terror and Mayhem from Deep within the Box. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief

As the townsfolk sleep, something creeps into the neighborhood. Hidden in shadows, its presence is as old as time itself, its intent not born of goodness.

Nick, a teenager who fancies himself a detective, wakes to find his carved masterpiece missing. Now a mystery is afoot, and Nick has his first assignment, to find out who or what is snatching up the town’s pumpkins and why.

Unfortunately, as with all great detectives, obstacles stand in Nick’s way—the neighborhood bully and his cronies, and the strange old lady and her dog who share the run-down house at the end of Nick’s block. As Nick investigates, an urban legend unravels . . . .

…the Legend of the Pumpkin Thief.

Nick fears the legend as he embarks on the most dangerous adventure of his young life. Collecting clues, getting ever closer to the true nature of evil, he learns that curiosity comes with a high price.

If you have not had the chance to read this book, besides it being a great month to read an action-packed story all about Halloween.

Available in paperback and ebook at: http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Pumpkin-Thief-Charles/dp/1605923990/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1345422569&sr=1-4

And to celebrate my favorite holiday, for everyone and anyone who purchases a copy this month on Amazon, click the Facebook “I purchased this book,” and send it to my Facebook page, and you’ll have your choice of any e-book title from Evil Jester Press. Just let me know. Talking about Evil Jester Press, I have something else to share.

TALES OF TERROR AND MAYHEM FROM DEEP WITHIN THE BOX is A collection of terrifying stories from the rising stars of horror, including Jon Michael Kelley, Jeremy C. Shipp, Rebecca Besser, David C. Hayes, Bruce Turnbull, Chris Samson, Aaron J. French, Eric Dimbleby, Frank Endert, Mark Taylor, Suzanne Robb, Matt Kurtz, Charles Day, Gerry Huntman, D.G. Sutter, Scott H. Urban, Doug Rinaldi, Tara Sayers, Scott Taylor, Craig Saunders, Steven Gepp, Hollie Snider, and Gregory L. Norris.

“Here’s the difference between The Evil Jester and a regular jester: When a regular jester pops open his box, out come ribbons and hours of fun. When The Evil Jester’s box pops open, the ribbons will choke you and the hours will quickly reach dusk. A startling collection of smiling-nightmare mayhem.” -Eric Shapiro, author of The Devoted and director of Rule of Three

“With Tales of Terror and Mayhem from Deep within the Box, editors Day and Weiss have given us a diverse and entertaining bunch of stories by a selection of talented authors. The tales all involve those relics of childhood (dolls, balloons, clowns, the oh-so-sinister jack-in-the-box), but they are all wonderfully original and unpredictable.” -Mark Allan Gunnells, author of The Quarry

***Includes the premier never-before-told story of just how the evil little guy became so damn evil in the short story THE GIFT, written by the evil little Jester & Charles Day***

Click here for ebook or print book: http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Terror-Mayhem-Deep-within/dp/0615686524/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347040290&sr=1-1&keywords=tales+of+terror+and+mayhem

October/Halloween special: grab a copy of this new terrifying collection from Evil Jester Press this month and you’ll automatically be entered into a drawing for a hot new copy of EVIL JESTER PRESENTS, ISSUE#1 a six-part series that will premier with stories from Jack Ketchum, Jeremy Shipp, Jeff Strand, Gregory L. Norris, David C Hayes, James Chambers, and many more authors you know and love.

And of course, post your purchase on my facebook page, and you can choose any Evil Jester Press ebook title of your choosing!!

And a very, scary and blood-tingling Happy Halloween to each and everyone who’s passing on through.

Charles Day & Evil Little Jester

charlesdayauthor@gmail.com

charlesdayfictionwriter.blogspot.com

eviljesterpress.com

 

Halloween, and cemeteries, and nightmares, and zombies! Oh, my!

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of all of the above. Well, maybe not always the nightmares, though I can’t deny that they fascinate me and have often played a central role in my storytelling. Until I met others with the same leanings, I suspected (and was told) that my fondness for these things was odd, especially for an African-American girl. The strangeness was irrelevant, and while I’ve long since met multitudes of people from various cultures with the same fascinations, I’m happy to say that it is still strange by most standards, and deliciously so.

But Halloween is the one time of year where everyone indulges in the marvelously weird and wacky world of the dark. Now, I didn’t always go out every Halloween as a kid. Sometimes I would spend the time indoors, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show on VH1, or something hosted by Elvira, and/or giddily cheering at a B-movie flick on USA Up All Night. Some years I also spent the time going back and forth between goofing off around the house, or writing, watching a movie, and reading a book by one of my favorite authors when I was a kid – likely something by R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike or – yes – even Judy Bloom.

However, one year in particular stands out in my mind. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I’ll recount what I can as memory serves. I was in middle school, and a few other neighborhood kids/friends and I decided to go out on Halloween. We spent hours going from house to house in our neighborhood, sometimes doubling back and getting more candy from the same houses. Most residents didn’t care – they were just happy to be rid of their sugary stashes and were happy that we were safe.

At some point, it was decided that we’d gotten all that we could from that area. We moved on, walking blocks and blocks away from our own homes, and on our way we passed by an old cemetery. I stared at it in awe. Of course, I’d seen it before, been in there before – plenty of times. But never had it looked so luminous, so tempting, so magnificent. There were lights strewn about the gate, and a fog seemed to settle lightly over the grounds, giving it an eerie glow. Instead of stopping in right then and there, we continued on to houses and the candies that awaited us, vowing to go back later.

But as the night progressed we exhausted ourselves on candy and running around. It got late, and most of us had to head back home.

Some day after that – I don’t remember how long – I took another walk to that graveyard. There was a trail that I often liked to hike along that ran behind the cemetery, but there was no entrance that way due to the gate, trees and other vegetation. It was during the day, so I went through the main gate. I brought some flowers, and I spent some time examining the headstones and putting the flowers on the graves, wondering about the lives of the people buried there. I made up stories about them and talked out loud about what things might have been like in their time. As I mentioned before, it was an old cemetery, and many of the headstones were from the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was nice, quiet day.

But later that night – and I still remember this pretty clearly – I had a horrible, vivid nightmare. There I was, back in the cemetery. Only, I could see into the cold graves even as I floated above them. And the inhabitants were none too happy. I could see their rotted bodies and tattered, faded clothes; I could literally feel their anger. Some writhed, looked like zombies about to burst forth from the ground. They screamed at me. They wanted me to leave them alone and stop leaving flowers on their graves. They didn’t want them. They just wanted to be left in peace.

I was terrified when I woke up. And confused. I couldn’t understand why doing something that I thought was so nice – leaving flowers on the graves of people that maybe didn’t have any person left to remember them – could lead to such a horrific nightmare.

Did I go back to that cemetery again? Absolutely! Only … it took a while for that to happen. And, yeah, I left off putting flowers on any of the graves. I never had another nightmare about the place, but I do remember that incident as being one of my earliest nightmares about the undead (or similar). It probably wasn’t the first I’d had. (I was no stranger to the Night of the Living Dead movies.) And it certainly – thankfully – wasn’t the last. Because, while I haven’t yet published one of my tales centering on zombies, details from those dreams and nightmares have popped up in my other stories. A character name or plot-point here, a conversation or location there.

And, of course, I still enjoy visiting cemeteries a lot, as much as I enjoy Halloween. And sometimes I still put flowers on graves – but no other nightmares have resulted from that, as far as I can tell.

NANCY O. GREENE started writing at the age of nine. Her short story collection, Portraits in the Dark, received a brief mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007. Other works have appeared or will appear in ChiZine; Lovecraft eZine; Cemetery Dance; Tales of Blood and Roses; Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror; Shroud Publishing’s The Terror at Miskatonic Falls; Dark Recesses; Flames Rising; Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore!; and others. She has a BA in Cinema (Critical Studies) and a minor in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Southern California, and is a Film Independent: Project Involve Fellow.

Nancy is also raising funds for a pro-paying horror anthology. To find out more about In the Hour of Our Death, or to donate, visit http://www.indiegogo.com/hourofdeathantho

Buy a copy of Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror at http://www.drivethrufiction.com/product/95397/Haunted%3A-11-Tales-of-Ghostly-Horror

Excerpt from “The Vessels” by Nancy O. Greene. Published in Lovecraft eZine, January 201, http://lovecraftzine.com/issues/2012-2/issue-10-january-2012/the-vessels-by-nancy-o-greene/

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it … – H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

June 21, 1893

The walls of the old stone house are crumbling, their shells ripped apart by the tentacles of an ivy that reaches in to claim the support beams, the floors, the ceiling. It will all be gone soon.

Since I am the youngest—seventeen—it’s my job to prepare the vessels that will take us away from here. Four coffin-like shapes sitting amongst the debris, their glistening chrome-and-glass exteriors a stark contrast to the house in which they lay.

I tentatively stretch out my gloved hand, afraid that the inanimate object might shrink away from my touch, aware of what’s to come. My fingers land on the body of the first container and the chill of it stings even through the material. Fabric glides unencumbered across the surface, save for the few bumps and ruts of the bolts and seams that keep the vessel together. I lie my head down on it, inhale the waxy fragrance. The mechanisms inside churn, whoosh, and click. Everything in working order.

We each will be in one, all except for her.

“Are they ready?” Uncle Damien startles me as he walks into the room, his pale, lithe figure hidden in a bulky black and white suit, frills peeking out from the blouse collar, every strand of his hair in place.

“Yes,” I say. He carefully finds a path through the debris to where I stand.

“And they’re fit to take us to our destination?” I nod and he returns the gesture with a curt movement of his neck. His stern eyes evaluate my traveling attire, taking in the long traditional dress, the off-white collar up to my neck, the sleeves to my wrists. My clothes are the same color as the splintered walls. Something to remember them by.

Before he gives his opinion, I’m struck to my knees by the sensation of a sharp pressure in the back of my head. I bite my lip to keep from shouting. Damien feels the pain too, I can tell by the way his hand flies to his neck. He resists toppling, a look of disdain etched into his smooth features. Soon it passes and I stand. But still we hear her, feel her.

Colleen, my sister, stuck downstairs, her frustration reaching thinly into our minds in waves of nauseating heat. She doesn’t want us to go. She can’t leave and she doesn’t want to be left alone. But they are all alone in the end, whether it takes them in groups or on a lonely stretch of road turning dark even as the light still shines.

#

The streets are empty outside of our decaying walls. The sky is as clear as it is after a violent storm, the purity of the sun shining down on what remains. Light comes through broken windows, creating a pattern on fallen stones. We don’t know where the others have gone, if they are gone, or if they have been taken. All manner of human and animal noise has ceased. The only sounds now are the distant moans of the earth as it collapses under the weight of the thing that consumes on land, in water, and through tainted air. I think we may be among the last to leave, but it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to imagine that we may be the only ones remaining, the four—or rather, three—of us.

We don’t know for certain where they’ve all gone, but we do know where to go. I stand on tip-toes and try to see more out of the highest windows, try to pinpoint the exact location. It’s so far away, at night only a star that’s barely a glimmer. As I search, I shut my mind off to Colleen’s amplified cries. Though her body is dissolving, becoming nothing, her mind still works. She makes sure we know that . . .

#

 

 

The monsters come out at Halloween. It was the time when they didn’t have to hide and the adults could see them and not realize what they were. Some kids could, while others didn’t until it was too late. They blended in, until they pounced with eggs, shaving cream and fists.

I hate bullies. As a kid as far I was concerned they were real monsters. Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster  were fun compared to dealing with the real thing. I’m not talking kids picking on kids. I’m talking full out brutality.

One chilly October in fourth grade while playing a game of Ghost In The Graveyard (basically team hide and seek) I wouldn’t give up my hiding spot to a couple of eighth graders who were on my team.  I was threatened, but even outnumbered and outmuscled I never did well with someone telling me what to do. It’s a personality flaw. Since I wouldn’t vacate willingly, an extremely one-sided fight that was really more of a beating ensued. When it was done, I was on the ground screaming with a broken arm. That banshee-like wailing continued until I ran home. Ironically, my screams scared off the bully that did the bone-breaking. Pity I didn’t try that first. After that day, I didn’t see the arm-breaker much despite him living up the block and  was fine with that.

It’s fair to say that that encounter and a few less severe left their marks on me and it shows sometimes in my writing. Bullies don’t fare well for long in my stories.

Halloween makes bullies more brazen as if the masks somehow protected them.

Me, I liked Halloween, not as an excuse to cause destruction but to wear costumes and get candy. And scare people.

I made my own costumes. Of course back then to buy a costume usually meant getting a box with  a plastic poncho with a cartoon character painted on it with a matching mask held on to the face by elastic.  Not something many over the age of six wanted to be seen in.

Even as a kid I worked and had a paper route and had to deal with a few bullies.  Most of the time they used hit and run tactics, afraid to be caught in the act by a watchful parent and ratted out to their own folks. On Halloween they lost that fear. They’d be waiting for any kid without an adult.

I timed collecting money for the papers with trick-or-treating. Tips were good, but money and candy was far better.

I always went as a hero or monster. I’d been Zorro, Dracula, The Mummy, a werewolf. That year I made a superhero costume. I don’t think he had a name at first, but I ended up calling him The Comet because I made the mask myself. I couldn’t sew, so I used staples and they made the mask look like a meteor. I believed Spider-Man might have made his web shooters, but no way he made a costume that good without sewing powers. My Comet hero also had a plastic shield I rigged up. Both were strategic.  The mask would keep my hair clean and the shield could block chicken-based projectiles.

With the help of a friend of mine, we rigged up a bunch of shaving cream cans to shoot about 10 feet. Wasn’t really that hard, it just took a match and a pin. My friend who was several inches shorter than me and had his own share of bully issues, insisted on riding shotgun. Neither one of us was much of a fighter, but we knew something about watching each other’s backs. That and we were both a getting little too old to trick-or-treat so helping me collect was a good way to get some candy for himself.

I was at the end of my route before anything happened.  Four kids were lying in wait, but we knew they were there. Not because of any great recon efforts on our part mind you, but we’d passed a kid they had already gone after and covered with yolk and shaving cream. The punks had even taken his candy bag.

I’d hesitate to call us nerds, but it mightn’t be a totally inaccurate term.  Because of that, they figured us for easy targets. Most days maybe, but not on Halloween. They led off with the egg attack, but my plastic shield and my friend’s garbage can lid blocked them all until they ran out of ammo.

Next they came at us with shaving cream cans a blazing, but our cans shot further. We turned them into cream covered snow men before they got close enough hit us. Next they resorted to the classics – beating us up and taking our candy.

We beat the monsters back that Halloween. Whether it was the masks we wore or a psychological empowerment after beating them at their own game, it didn’t matter. We weren’t suddenly great fighters. We didn’t lay them out with a single punch to each jaw and put one leg on their unconscious bodies, while triumphantly waving our cans of shaving cream over our heads. But we did run them off with their figurative tails between their legs. One left in such a hurry he left his goodie bag behind. We kept it as spoils of war. Well, we were going to until we passed the kid whose bag they had taken. We gave it to him, minus a couple of candy bars we nicked for ourselves.

I wouldn’t say the whole thing rated as a Halloween miracle, but I didn’t end up with any broken bones that time, so I counted it as a win against the monsters.

Many years later there was an even bigger win and it involved the arm-beaker. It wasn’t one where I kicked his butt. It was even better.

I was home from college when a blast from the past walked down the street calling my name. I guess I’d always assumed he’d turned to a life of crime or took up killing kittens as a hobby. I knew a couple of other bullies who’d ended up in prison.

Maybe he was out on good behavior and visiting his folks. As he got closer I readjusted my mental image. Over ten years had passed and I was now bigger than him. I’d taken years of martial arts, so I wasn’t afraid although I may have subconsciously dropped into a fighting stance, assuming he was still the same bully as when we were kids.

Then things got weird. Instead of wanting to throw down, he apologized for breaking my arm.

Turns out fracturing my limb gave him years of guilt. Enough that all those years later he sought me out to ask for my forgiveness.

If it had been a cartoon, my jaw would’ve been scraping the floor. As much as that trauma shaped me, it may have shaped him more.

While I had been sitting in the emergency room waiting for an X-ray, his parents were ripping into him. He was grounded and ordered to avoid me. The fear of what his parents would do to him if he screwed up again or hurt another kid set him on the straight and narrow. His grades improved and he graduated.

Over the years, his parents had become very close with mine, as apparently they appreciated my folks not suing them over the broken arm incident. My parents just asked them to cover my medical bills and left it at that.

Turns out that even as a kid, he appreciated that too. It seems people appreciate not being kicked when they’re down, even if maybe they might have deserved it. And that kindness can be a catalyst.

The biggest shocker came when I found out what he did for a living. The arm-breaker was now one of New York City’s bravest—a firefighter. Turns out somewhere along the line the monster had become a hero.

That one of my personal monsters could grow up to be someone who risks his life to save others took some mental maneuvering to get around. I realized even for monsters, redemption was possible.

Real-life horror, like the fictional kind, is filled with all sorts of people who do nasty, evil things. But sometimes the good guys win. And sometimes the bad guys join the good guys and then everyone wins.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Patrick Thomas is offering one copy of his book, Lore and Dysorder. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

With over a million words in print, PATRICK THOMAS keeps busy writing the popular fantasy humor series Murphy’s Lore (Tales From Bulfinche’s Pub, Fools’ Day, Through The Drinking Glass, Shadow Of The Wolf, Redemption Road, Bartender Of The Gods, Nightcaps and Empty Graves) and the After Hours spin offs Fairy With A Gun, Fairy Rides The Lightning, Dead To Rites and Lore & Dysorder. His Mystic Investigators series has grown to include Bullets & Brimstone and From The Shadows both with John L. French and Once More Upon A Time. He co-edited Hear Them Roar and New Blood. Patrick’s humorous advice column Dear Cthulhu has been collected in Have A Dark Day and Good Advice For Bad People. A number of his books are part of the set and props department at the CSI television show. He is a member of HWA and was voted Preditors & Editors favorite author of 2010 and first runner up in 2011. Laurence Fishburne’s production company Cinema Gypsy Productions has taken a film and television option on Patrick Thomas’ urban fantasy Fairy With A Gun. A mockumentary about him has recently surfaced on Youtube. To learn more, drop by www.patthomas.net or like him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PatrickThomasAuthor

Read an excerpt From FAIRY RIDES THE LIGHTNING, a Terrorbelle novel, by Patrick Thomas:

(Available on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/FAIRY-RIDES-THE-LIGHTNING-Terrorbelle/dp/1890096504/ref=la_B003AUIUJK_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1341928018&sr=1-2)

The kitchen door was halfway open and Thor was looking out the window. “Oh no. The goats are over bothering Mr. Needles’ farm animals again.” Thor turned to me. “Terrorbelle, would you mind rounding them up? I don’t need to be upsetting the neighbors any more. And if I leave now, the hors d’oeuvres and dinner might be ruined.”

I have been to four and five star restaurants, as well as those that should get no stars. Thor’s cooking would rate at least a seven on any normal scale.

“Well, I certainly don’t want dinner ruined,” I said, my mouth watering at the smells wafting through the kitchen. I didn’t need to mention the antagonistic relationship between myself and the goats, because the thunder god knew it well from my last visit.

“Honestly, I think they do it because they like you, Terrorbelle,” Thor said. Obviously I didn’t hide the look of disbelief on my face very well. “I’m serious. The goats are foul tempered. They don’t get along with practically anyone, but when you come, they go out of their way to cause mischief. I think they enjoy playing with you.”

“I think they like messing with me. But as long as you’re going to feed me all weekend, I’ll put up with it and go get them.”

“Thank you,” Thor said, putting on an apron that said “Kiss The Cook.” In place of the normal crossed utensils, this one had a fork crossed over a hammer.

I put my hand on the doorknob and paused a moment longer than I should have before I went out.

A while back I won a bet with Thor and ended up with an amulet that controlled the wind for twenty-four hours. It was designed to give someone like me the ability to fly. Because Earth is so poor in natural magic and I was so big, flight was not an option for me on most parts of the planet. The best I could usually manage was a hover or to slow a fall. And a good wind could help me or send me crashing.

I was hoping that Thor would have made me another amulet. But none was forthcoming, so I finally opened the door, then stopped another moment to look at the coat rack.

I decided not to bother covering up my wings. First off, I could still jump while using the wings which gets me a lot further than using just leg power. Also attitude is helpful when trying to catch critters that can fly. And since Isabella didn’t seem the least bit put off at the sight of Thor plowing the fields without a tractor, I doubted the sight of me without a coat was going to upset her.

In fact, if the neighbors were used to flying goats buzzing their properties, I doubted the sight of a pink haired, pixie winged woman was going to cause too much commotion.

As soon as I got to the road, the goats spotted me. The troublemakers flew from Mr. Needles’ farm over to Isabella’s property, where she was working on her hands and knees in her garden with a big wide sunhat and dark glasses. The goats dove down like they were going to knock the poor lady over. Instead they stopped in front of her and she petted the two horned beasts. She reached into a box next to her and gave each of them what looked to be a dog biscuit. Each goat was bigger than a great dane, so maybe the snack made sense to her.

I knew they knew I was there, but I tried to sneak up on them anyway. As I made it to Isabella’s white picket fence, the pair simultaneously turned toward each other and then me. I swear the little monsters grinned. I leapt over the fence in an attempt to grab them, but they took off flying and I barely managed to touch Toothnasher’s tail.

I landed on my hands and knees next to Isabella.

“Come to help me with the gardening my dear?” she said with a grin.

“I’m not much of a gardener, but I prefer that to rounding up those two,” I said.

“Nasher and Grinder aren’t so bad. They are just looking for attention. And poor Nasher has a little limp,” she said. Isabella handed me the box of dog biscuits. “They love these. Maybe you can use these to entice the goats to go home.”

“I’m willing to try anything,” I said, filling my pockets with the treats. I would have taken the box, but needed my hands free if I had any chance of catching these two.

I leapt back over Isabella’s picket fence and tried to walk slow and determined down the street, like a gunfighter in a western. I knew I was beyond intimidating the goats, but it made me feel better to try.

The pair were dive bombing Mr. Needles’ livestock. The chickens were running and fluttering around the yard, not flying that much better than me. The pigs in their pen were squealing and trying to get out. The cows in the field had run to the far side, except for one bull that looked like he was hoping the goats would get low enough for him to get a shot at them. I admired the bull’s attitude.

I saw an older man, probably in his late sixties, run out of the house with a shotgun in his hands.

“Get off of my property, you flying varmints,” Needles said, punctuating his demand with a blast from his double barrel. The goats flew out of range.

This was getting ugly quickly.

“Mr. Needles, please put down the shotgun. I’ll take care of the goats,” I said.

“And who are you, little missy?” he said. I smiled. It had been a long time since someone called me little and at six feet, I was a good two inches taller than the farmer. “I’ll have you know that I shot those flying varmints dead more than once and the next day they show up again, good as new. That ain’t natural. What makes you think you can deal with these demon goats?”

“My name is Terrorbelle. My specialty is handling the unusual.”

I popped my wings up behind me and went into overdrive. My wings buzzed faster than a hummingbird and I slowly lifted off the ground. Needles had a wooden plank fence, the kind that had a post every ten feet or so with two boards lengthwise attached to each post. I went forward over the fence and lowered myself down onto the ground.

“That sure was impressive,” he said. I thought so too. Sadly that was about the upper limit of what I was going to do without a really good updraft. “I guess I could give ya your shot at rounding them up. How’s ten minutes sound? If you ain’t got ‘em by then, I’m gonna do me some skeet shooting. They come here so often, I stocked up on ammo.”

“Thank you for you indulgence, Mr. Needles,” I said.

The goats had been hovering nearby watching the exchange.

“Ya hear that ya blasted varmints, she’s gonna get ya,” Needles said, waving a fist in the air at the goats. As a team they flew over Needles’ sage green pickup truck and did their best pigeon imitation, covering his windshield in manure.

Needles pumped the shotgun and again emptied both barrels in the goat’s direction, but they were already flying away and escaped unscathed.

I put a hand on the shotgun and gently pushed it toward the ground. “Please Mr. Needles, I said I would get them.”

“Well, who’s gonna clean off my truck?” he said.

I sighed. “I’ll take care of it.”

I got a shovel from the shed and scooped the goat poop off the truck. Next I got the garden hose and sprayed it until the windshield and the truck were both clean.

As I was putting away the shovel, I walked in front of the open barn. There were a bunch of old tractor parts hanging from the rafters in a fish net.

“Sir, do you mind if I borrow your net and a few of those stakes?” I asked.

“I like the way you think, missy. Help yourself to whatever you need long as you put it back where you found it when you’re done,” Needles said.

I jumped up near the ceiling and used my wings to hover there as I unhooked the net from the hook it was hanging from. I carefully placed the tractor parts on the floor and got the feel of the net. Decent quality, although not anywhere near the strength of the nets folks used for catching game or people back in Faerie. Still, it would do.

“I wish you had two nets,” I said.

Needles grinned and went to another part of the barn that had a couple of saddles.

“Back in my day I did some rodeo work.” He likely did more than some. He sported a gaudy belt buckle that only a rodeo champion would want to wear. “These days I only keep the one horse, but I have a couple of these.” Needles held out a western style lasso. “You want to borrow one?”

I grinned. “Yes, I do.”

Needles put down his shotgun in the corner, clicked the safety, and handed me one lariat, taking the other for himself. “I think maybe I have been looking at these varmints all wrong. Instead of seeing them as nuisances, I should have been looking at them as a challenge. I use to be able to rope cattle with the best of them. I even won the national hog tying competition ’bout twenty seven years ago. I may be a little rusty, but I never tried to lasso something that could fly before. I trust you wouldn’t mind me lending a hand?”

“As long as the shotgun isn’t involved, I’d be happy to have the assistance.”

We walked out of the barn. I had the net laying across one shoulder, held the bulk of the rope in my left hand with the lasso part in the right. Needles went ahead. The goats floated mockingly in the air in front of us. I heard Needles laugh as he swung the lasso around a couple of times and threw once. To my amazement it went right around the neck of Grinder.

“You’re goin’ down, ya flyin’ varmint,” Needles said.

The old man pulled and the goat came down about two feet. Then the goat pulled back and started flying. Needles didn’t let go, instead dug his heals in. The problem is that a magical goat is a lot stronger than a horse or a bull. Needles was dragged through his yard, leaning back like he was waterskiing. Dust flew up around his boots. The old man wasn’t frightened. As a matter of fact, he was yelling yee haw as he bolted across his farm and was having a grand old time.

Despite his upbeat attitude, I didn’t want him to get hurt so I ran after both of them. They came to the end of a fence. Needles let go with one hand and looped the rope around the fence post as he went by. The goat got pulled backwards and jolted like a dog running fast and reaching the end of his leash.

The fact that the lasso was around the goat’s throat limited how hard he could pull. If it had been around his chest, I had no doubt he would have been able to yank the fence post right out of the ground. Even as it was, the fence post was rocking. I caught up to them and threw the lasso. I missed by about two feet.

“No missy, you got to use your hand on the inside of it to keep it open and use the movement of your arm to throw so the circle stays that way. As soon as you get it around you’ve got to pull it tight quick.”

I followed his advice and got Grinder on the second try. I yanked the rope tight quick, then started pulling down. So did Needles. Slowly, the goat descended, but it was like the two of us were trying to handle a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by ourselves.

When we got Grinder low enough, I was going to grab hold, but Needles beat me to it and hog tied the goat.

“Nice work,” I said.

“You too missy. We might make a rodeo gal out of you yet,” Needles said, then ducked as the brother goat dive bombed him.

I took the net off my shoulder and waited. It didn’t take but a couple of seconds before Nasher decided to dive bomb us again. Throwing a net is something I’d been trained to do repeatedly. Earth military tends to train soldiers in guns and knives. In Faerie there’s a much wider choice of weapons one has to be proficient in.

I caught goat number two on my first toss. I grabbed the ends of the net, closing it with him inside. He tried to fly off and pull me across the yard like his brother did Needles, but I pulled the net and swung it like a sack of potatoes until he hit the ground. Not hard enough to hurt him, just enough to knock the wind out of him. I thought about staking the net to the ground, but as he pulled against me, I realized it wouldn’t hold him. Instead I took one of the dog biscuits out of my pocket and gave it to him. He calmed down, so I tossed Grinder one. Both seemed content to nosh for the moment.

“Missy, you’ve got to be the most impressive gal I ever met. You’re welcome to come by my farm anytime. Hell, if I’d known these varmints could be this much fun, I’d have invited ‘em back sooner,” he said. “Can you manage to get ‘em back by yourself? We can put ‘em in the back of the pickup and take ‘em back to Thor’s.”

I slipped the troublemakers another biscuit each, then grabbed the netted goat with my left arm and the hog tied one with my right. They may have been the better fliers, but I was stronger.

“No thanks. I can manage them. I appreciate your help Mr. Needles,” I said.

“Happy to oblige. Most fun I had since I retired from the rodeo.”

“I’ll be back to clean up later,” I said.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. I’ll take care of it,” Needles said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I may have been stronger, but that didn’t negate their gravity defying magic. They may not have the muscle power to break my grip, but they could still fly. With me holding onto each of them they took off into the air. I could hear Mr. Needles below me yell, “You ride ‘em girl!”

I used my wings to try to slow us down, but that’s about all it did. I have four sets of razor sharp wings, two on either side. The joints where they attach to my back are extremely flexible. I put a wing on the back of the neck of either goat and dug it in a little.

“You know you’re not going to be able to throw me. You also know that I may not be able to fly as well as you around here, but I can certainly lower myself to the ground.” That was only a mild exaggeration. I could usually glide and slow my fall, but it depends on how high they went. If we got to parachute height, my wings wouldn’t be strong enough to stop me from hitting the ground like a pink haired meteor. “If you even try it, I’ll cut both of you through the neck and cook you up for dinner tonight myself.” Not that I was being cruel. Another part of the goats’ magic allowed them to be killed and eaten then brought back to life the next day so long as all their bones were put in a pile before sunrise. Thor did it on and off for centuries. Couldn’t be pleasant. I figured it was part of the reason they were so ornery. The reason Nasher had a limp was one time someone broke one of his bones while they were eating and he regenerated wrong. “Are we clear?”

Magical animals like the tooth brothers and Morningdour had enhanced intelligence. Some of them were smart, even smarter than people. The goats were bright enough to nod yes in unison.

Even when I wasn’t the driver, flying was a wonderful thing, once I got over my fear of falling. I was pretty sure I had the goats intimidated enough not to try anything. And despite our rough and tumble relationship, they had done nothing more than be mischievous, never doing me any actual harm. And killing them would only be a day’s inconvenience.

“How about we do a couple loop-de-loops before heading back? I bet Thor has those appetizers ready.”

I swear the goats smiled as they did a dozen loop-de-loops. It was enough to make even me nauseous. I learned a long time ago as a soldier in Faerie to never show signs of weakness, so I didn’t say anything as they flew down and into Thor’s yard.

But I didn’t let go of either of them until we were inside Thor’s kitchen and Rudy had locked the screen door behind us.

 

 

I arrived at the Javits Center in New York City for the BookExpo—an oversized, rolling suitcase in hand to tote back all of those advanced copies of my novel that I would surely fail to give away. Inside, the Javits Center was somewhat aesthetically pleasing in that express, faux-luxury-hotel kind of way. Yet, mainly it was a beehive of suited and badged industry folks, shuffling as quickly as possible through the aisles and offshoots lined with publishers and author’s associations—some of which by this time next year will have gone under.

But book-signings aren’t supposed to be a time for pessimism and jadedness. I was, in fact, heading toward the Horror Writers Association booth for perhaps my only chance to autograph books for a captive audience. I had written a bloody, despicable, hilarious, trashy and pseudo-philosophical horror novel. Or, that was what my pseudonym whispered into my ear every night when I fantasized about characters for some newfangled fiction. “Brilliant!” my pseudonym reassures me. “Maybe just a little pretentious and deplorable,” is what I tell him with my thoughts, but someone has to reassure you when your chosen obsession is to make things up.

I digress: the Expo. I arrived at the booth quite early and had the chance to chat with my fellow HWA members. They, too, seemed like well-mannered men—not the types who yearned to terrorize their audience. Secretly (or not so secretly) I am compelled to titillate and frighten you, but with oddly constructed sentences; a narrative voice you can’t get out of your head; and the surreal, starkly imagined settings where anything can happen. That person named “Leland” who, although not so brilliant, definitely has one foot inside a succubus’ netherworld where:

• The maps of a tormented cartographer erode physical reality
• A rambunctious thirteen-year-old girl dies simply from the terror of her mother’s disappearance, only to rise from the dead having contracted autism after suffering through the paralysis of nonexistence
• The conjoined-twin bloodsuckers who date back to the Civil War and—having forgone taking live victims—find redemption and God, form a Pentecostal church, and retrieve blood from their devoted congregants
• And, this newly devised character of mine: in love with her voyeuristic psychiatrist, this woman firmly believes she is Sharon Tate and that she’s been pregnant for more than forty years

I continued to chat with my horror writer compatriots. Nice men, humble. And then, droves of people hungry for free books strolled by our booth. “The Blood Poetry,” a woman commented. “I don’t really read poetry.”  I responded, “It’s actually a novel.”  I did, in fact, manage to autograph, give away, and pitch this small and murderous tale. I, too, didn’t look the part of the author of literary bloodletting: I normally go to hairstylists (no barber for this guy), wear those “skinny jeans,” blazers, a pleasant smile, and can chat up most girls’ mamas. “Don’t sign my name,” some of the would-be fans instructed. “Just sign your name.”  I thought this was odd, but someone told me that in the off-chance I would become an actual known—and recognized—human being, they’d be able to sell my identity on Ebay. I signed and signed. Was I even autographing the books in the correct place? I met a blogger; a publicist; a publisher who swore she’d read my novel and review it in her fabulous online magazine; a cinematographer attempting to drum-up business for authors dying to make book trailers; and a woman who was trying to pitch a “Do It Yourself” MFA program.

Finally, I managed to give away all of my books. It was an odd feeling: there were now dozens out in the ether, but I wasn’t sure anybody would bother to read them. “But that’s OK,” my pseudonym continued to reassure me, “at least that suitcase is empty, right?”  I’m not sure I yearn to be famous, per se. Well, that’s actually a complete lie. I’d like for you to be intrigued just enough to consider perusing the opening pages of The Blood Poetry—a novel for which I was hired to be a “ghost writer.”  The actual author is my pseudonym, that other Leland, who’s always around the corner in the back alley of my other brain—his bloody mouth agape and begging for me to “speak” for him. I do indulge him every-now-and-then. Yes, for the most part, BookExpo America 2012 was a success, and the other Leland thought so as well. Of course, I couldn’t compete with the other literary rock-stars at The Expo who, too, had written brilliant books to promote: Jimmy Fallon, Kirstie Alley, and Michael Bolton. I wondered if they had pseudonyms and doppelgangers who fed their delirious, mildly dangerous obsessions. I wondered what Michael Bolton’s doppelganger looked like. It’s probably just a replica of his younger self—twirls of long hair that draped past his shoulders, despite the bald spot on top. Did Kirstie Alley’s double run amok with her mouth agape, constructing the dazzling and red-hot phraseology of mad women?  The Javits Center and all of that expo mumbo-jumbo excited me for one afternoon. To the phenoms who traipsed through the catacombs of that edifice with great ambition on their sleeves: I was a literary compatriot with something big and bold to exclaim. They surely didn’t notice me—and may never discover The Blood Poetry—but for at least one stark moment while approaching sleep in the very near future, they’ll listen.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Leland Pitts=Gonzalez is offering one singed paperback copy of The Blood Poetry. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Leland studied Creative Writing and Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University where he discovered the enormous possibilities of poetry, experimentation, and critical theory. He eventually earned an MFA in Writing from Columbia University on a merit fellowship. He has published fiction in Open City, Fence, Dark Sky Magazine, Drunken Boat, and Monkey Bicycle, among other literary journals. He is also the project director of literary event series, Phantasmagoria: Language and Technology of Suffering,for which he received fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. His website is http://www.thebloodpoetry.com.

Where to buy The Blood Poetry: Amazon: amazon.com/author/lelandpittsgonzalez; Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-blood-poetry-leland-pitts-gonzalez/1112113242; Powell’s: http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781935738244-1;

 

Praise for The Blood Poetry

“If one new horror book out there embodies the intelligence of great literary fiction with the best elements of psychological horror, The Blood Poetry has to be it.”– Horror Talk

“A brilliant, brutal assault of a novel–raw, twisted, and compulsively readable.”– Shelf Unbound Magazine

 

The Blood Poetry: An Excerpt

It’s home and the desolate landscape: couch, remote control, the mother vampirism hair particles in the dryer, the intangibles (e.g., dead spermicidal ideas, living-or-not, the soul of the refrigerator with the imagined heads of my undead mother’s defiled, the lists, the watches that stopped working in my childhood, the britches, a humming that never goes away because I’m deaf to love, my wife’s ankles that I desire, my nightmares, memories of the pillow cases I came on, the other things and, oh yeah  , that).  Sylvia bobbles over to the kitchen table and lights a cigarette.  She smokes?  Since when?  Do I enable this behavior?

“Please don’t smoke in my house, daughter.”

She ashes into a flower pot with a dead plant in it.  Where, forever, there are dead things waiting to be revived.  I mean, the damned buds had souls too, you know!

“Did you guys stop having sex or something?” she asks.  “Did you cheat on her?”

Bang, bang, the upstairs vampire lurks like a debauched bed sheet, floating into the walls, into the door, listlessly armoring herself against the living.  Ah, the living.

I avoid her question and look at her.

“Just don’t smoke in my bedroom, OK?”

“I’d never go in there.  The place freaks me out.”  She nods her head like she’s falling asleep, but I see she’s got the phone next to her, waiting to call whomever will fetch the wished-for wife.  My Sylvia, the antidote for all things undead.

“Mom wouldn’t leave me, Papa.  I mean, she had her books and things, her fantasies.  You know what she used to tell me when I was little?”

“That I was a bad father.”

“No.  That she was royalty or something, but there’s no aristocracy in America, you know.”

I picture Abby in Sylvia’s bed, floating over the sleepy child, tumbling out fairy tales of her unknown life.  Abby had listless, brown hair and a puckery grin.  She mumbled when she spoke and everything sounded like cotton, but she made you laugh nonetheless.

I pace and pace.  I could go on like this for hours staring at the daughter, Sylvia, stammering for the right thing to say, what to wear to her funeral, to breathe the right air, to blemish her with a kiss.  It’s a stifling, hot beast in this house.  Maybe I should crash the car through the front window for some god damned ventilation.  My life needs a good airing.  The pieces of the puzzle are before you, my dears, you just need to connect the dots.  The dots!

“I swear she’ll come back, Sylvia,” I say, not meaning it at all.  “She loves you more than she loves the rest of us humanoids.  We are just place holders in her life, while you, well, you’re a whole friggin book.”

She picks up the phone, puts it down, looks around, sniffles, picks up the phone, dials, hangs up, sniffles, takes a drag on the cig, ashes it in the dead flower pot, looks up toward the vampire banging somewhere upstairs in flight, puts the phone down, dials, then dials.

“Shit,” I mutter.  “She’s done it.”

“Hello, yes, I’d like to report a missing person.”  She takes a stifling drag on the cig, etc., and penetrates the receiver with her womanly voice.  “It’s my mother.  She hasn’t come home since last night and it’s not like her . . . I haven’t seen her today . . . I don’t know how old she is, uh, maybe thirty-six or whatever . . . can’t you just send someone over here quick and get helicopters and horses and rile the troops to find my mother? . . . my dad thinks it’s drugs, but I think that’s a lie, but what does that have to do with anything? . . . it explains nothing, just come over, I’ll give you the address, my father is here, but he’s in some kind of trance . . . he’s always like that, like my whole life.”

She hangs up after giving the cops our address.  “They’re coming,” she says.

“For real?  Like real friggin cops?”

I pace, I stammer, my voice trembles on the femurs of the world, I punctuate a thought I want to deliver to the daughter, but I can’t remember what I’m about to tell her—my entire life story, it is.

We stare at each other.  I look at the floor.  I pick up a dirty pot on the stove, put it back down, pick it up again, I walk to the sink and turn on the faucet, off, then on, then check if the water is warm, then take a sip, then think, think!  “You’re mother was very sick, you see.”

“What are you saying?”  She hunkers as if this would get her closer to me.

“She had secretions.”

“Why are you speaking about her in the past tense?”

“Well, if she were here, I’d say is, but I choose to say was, for no purpose whatsoever but to . . . to, to just say some friggin thing!”

“Don’t get mad.”  She sucks on the last of her cig.  She stands up, walks over to me, to me, and hugs my torso.  She smells like female deodorant and smoke and I get squeamish, but I let her do it.  “What do you mean by secretions?”

“Well, you know, a female thing,” I say.

“You mean, a period?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Are you ten or something?”

“No, but,” and she doesn’t understand the lure of it all, the sampling of ooze that can drive a vampire insane, the blistering of the mind, “it was just secretions, OK?”

“I don’t get it,” she says.

“I just wish I could see her right now.”

She unhugs me and lights another cigarette.  “You don’t make any sense.”

She reaches in my back pocket, her palm up against my butt, and pulls out an apple core.  “Why do you have an apple core in your back pocket?”

“Your mother used to eat those apples.”

Sylvia puts the core in the garbage, then sits.

And then I remember the cops are coming.  “Friggin fucking mother humpers!  The cops’ll be here!  You get your poor dad all riled up with the cops coming to our house!  Do you realize what we’re hiding upstairs?”  Then I know I have said too much.

 

Joe McKinney is the recipient of the 2011 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Novel for Flesh Eaters.

1. How would you describe Flesh Eaters?

Flesh Eaters is sort of difficult to characterize.  It’s a zombie novel, for example, but it’s also a classic disaster tale and a crime story.  I didn’t intend for it to merge so many different genres, but that’s how it came out.  On another level, Flesh Eaters is part of my Dead World series, which so far includes Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Mutated, and a handful of short stories and novellas.  Within the series’ chronology Flesh Eaters comes first, even though it was the third book written.  So that’s clear as mud, right?

 2. Tell us about what inspired you to write Flesh Eaters?

I grew up in Clear Lake, a little suburb south of Houston.  As a kid, I lived through Hurricane Alicia, which flooded my entire neighborhood.  I remember huddling with my family in the hall closet as the storm rolled overhead, with my mom holding me so tightly that she left bruises on my skin.  The next morning I went out my front door to find nearly everything underwater.  It was literally lapping at our door.  And then my best friend came over with his canoe and we spent the day paddling around the neighborhood, the bottom of our boat scratching the roofs of the cars as we floated over them.  So that experience was a big part of the disaster element in Flesh Eaters.  The other part, the zombie part, was born that same summer, for it was shortly before Hurricane Alicia that I watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead for the first time.  I think they came together nicely in Flesh Eaters.

3. What most attracts you to writing horror?

I’ve wondered how to answer that question for a long time now.  I’ve read and watched horror since I was a kid, and it’s always just sort of clicked with me.  But that’s not really a satisfying answer, is it?  And it’s not entirely accurate either.  For example, I grew disillusioned with horror movies pretty early on.  There have been, and continue to be, great movies made in the horror genre, but most are absolutely abysmal.  Nothing is as frustrating as sitting down with a movie with a premise that seems totally cool, only to walk away in disgust after getting only twenty minutes into it.  I’ve had a similar experience with written horror.  There is a line in Joe Hill’s wonderful short story, “Best New Horror,” where the main character says that he feels something inside him go numb every time he reads another reference to “the elder gods.”  I know exactly where that comes from.  So much of the horror genre is gore and dark fantasies that lack any real substance.  There is no life to them, and so there is no real fear.  But every once in a while, somebody gets it right.  Somebody writes something, or acts something, and behind it is a need to exist, a purpose, a desperate longing to explore what makes us human.  Confronting that moment, that need, is the essence of horror.  I live for that moment of frisson, that discovery, that glorious connection with the real dark side of our natures.  And when I find it, it makes the oceans of trash through which I’ve swum worth it.

4. What are you writing now?

I’m in the middle of several long projects right now.  I’ve just finished a haunted house novel for Dark Regions Press called Crooked House and I expect to be working on the edits to that soon.  I’m currently finishing off three short stories I’ve promised to various anthologies, and after those are finished I’ll return to a zombie novel for Pinnacle, a novella for Nightscape Press, another novella for the Sam Truman series put out by Redrum Horror, a novella for Journalstone, and then a werewolf novel I’ve promised to Pinnacle for late in 2013.

5. What advice would you share with new horror writers?

Writing is a job.  Treat it like one.  What that means is that you put in your hours every day.  Not when you feel like it, but every day.  And like any job, when you turn something in, it needs to be a professional work product.  It needs to be your best effort.  Just because you can slap it up on Amazon doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished something great.  It has to feel great.  It has to have a reason for being there.  The book has to want to be written.  Think of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull crying, “I coulda been a contender!”  There’s real emotion there.  And, in the larger sense, there’s a movie that is screaming at you with its reason for being.  Your book needs to do that.  It needs to scream at us that it has a reason for being here.  Far too many authors out there seem to have forgotten that.  I think, if you keep that in mind, you’ll be pointed in the right direction, and that’s what really counts.  Oh, and when good things start to happen for you, make sure you never forget the value of a handwritten thank you note.  In our era of email and Twitter and Facebook posts, a simple card with a few lines of handwritten thanks will speak volumes about you as an individual.

6. What are three of your favorite horror stories?

Wow, there are so many.  I think I’d probably answer this question differently every time I’m asked, but for today, right now, I’d say:  “The Great Lover” by Dan Simmons, because I’ve always been moved by the writings of the World War I English poets; “Black Man With a Horn,” by T.E.D. Klein, because it is perhaps the finest story in the Lovecraftian tradition I have ever read, as well as being a first rate commentary on Lovecraft himself; and “The Yellow Sign,” by Robert Chambers, because it contains one of the most subtle, yet effective examples of character building I’ve seen in the horror genre.

7. What’s your favorite Halloween memory or tradition?

My favorite Halloween came four years ago, when I took my daughters out trick or treating for their first Halloween together.  My oldest was dressed as a Mermaid Princess Vampire Rock Star and my youngest as a Hershey’s Kiss.  I remember the look of wonder on their faces as they watched the older kids running and laughing in the streets.  It was one of those perfect nights, combining the all the chill and beauty that only comes in October with the proud dad feeling that his children are good and okay and having fun and all is right in the world.

8. Given a choice, trick? Or treat?

Oh definitely trick!  Nothing beats a good scare, after all!

JOE MCKINNEY has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a disaster mitigation specialist, homicide detective, administrator, patrol commander, and successful novelist. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, he is the author of the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World: The Complete Zombie Short Fiction. For more information visit his website at http://joemckinney.wordpress.com.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY:  Joe McKinney is offering one paperback set of his books, Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Flesh Eaters, and Mutated. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Read an excerpt from Joe McKinney’s novel, Inheritance, coming in November from Evil Jester Press.

PROLOGUE

Paul Henninger was eighteen, a senior in high school, when he saw his mother’s ghost for the first time.

It was early October, late in the afternoon, and he was sitting in the passenger seat of Steve Sullivan’s pickup truck, a bucket of KFC chicken in his lap, watching his house. All the big, commercial ranches around these parts had names—Double Js; Spriggs; Casa Navarro—but Paul’s house wasn’t one of those. Though it had been in his family for four generations, and was ostensibly a working commercial farm and ranch, he had never thought of it as anything more than a tired old farm, his father’s house, the place where he and his father lived and worked.

The house stood knee deep in cheatgrass, nestled far back from the road in the shade of enormous, two hundred year old Spanish oaks that hung thick with ball moss, and, sometimes, in the summer, with gauzelike colonies of web worms the size of lamp shades. The front porch was obscured behind a tangled screen of guajillo and chinaberry, so that from the driveway the place looked tumbledown, a derelict rotting in the weeds.  But neither Paul nor his father worried much about appearances. They didn’t use the front porch, and because it served no purpose in their daily lives, it got no attention. As long as Paul could remember it had been a graveyard of rusted machine parts and tools. Things went to the front of the house and were forgotten, like his mother. It was the back of the house, where the long, sloping metal roof was streaked with rust and the wood paneling had turned gray from decades of exposure to the harsh extremes of South Texas weather, where he and his father lived their lives.  Everything of significance happened back there, away from the road.

Steve Sullivan was saying something, but Paul’s mind was elsewhere.  He was looking beyond the house to the ruined shell of the barn where his mother had hanged herself six years before. The day he came home and found her there had been on his mind a lot lately, even though his memories of that time were cloudy.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

He waited.

“Paul?”

“I said I’m fine.”

“No you didn’t. You haven’t said a word.”

Paul grunted. He looked back toward the house, lost in a dusty golden haze settling down through the trees.

Steve drummed his fingers on top of the steering wheel. “Hey Paul, if you don’t want to go home, we could go driving around the lake. It might be fun, you know? Cut loose a little. It’s been a hell of a week.”

“Not tonight.”

Again, Steve waited.

Finally, he said, “But you’re still sitting here. What’s wrong with you?  Your dad’s pissed about you signing with UTSA, isn’t he? Christ, I told you he would be.”

Paul sighed. He didn’t want to explain this. He didn’t even think he could. The University of Texas at San Antonio had offered him a full ride to play football, and he’d accepted the offer, but what was going on here had nothing to do with that. Steve’s life revolved around football. And, for the most part, Paul’s did, too. Except lately. Lately, ever since he started having flashbacks to his mother’s death, football had faded into the background. But he couldn’t make Steve understand that. His decision to stay close to Smithson Valley, and his father’s farm, was tied to his mother’s death with a knot he didn’t feel smart enough to untangle. The problem was just too big. He couldn’t see it all. But he sensed a connection there. What had happened six years ago with his mother was affecting the decisions he was making now. He just didn’t see how. And that left him frustrated and bored with all the things that used to bring him such joy.

“Paul?” Steve said. “Dude, you okay?”

“I haven’t told him,” Paul admitted.

“You haven’t…?” Steve suddenly smiled. “Bullshit. You’re kidding, right?”

“No joke.”

The smile slid off Steve’s face.

“Dude, you’re serious?”

Paul nodded, then opened the door and got out.

Inside the truck, Steve looked stunned. “You passed up a chance to play for the Cornhuskers and you didn’t even talk to him about it?” Steve looked completely baffled. “We kind of all just assumed you’d…that’d he was making you…”

“No. He’s been pushing Nebraska for two years now.”

“Well, yeah. Christ, Paul, what are you gonna do?”

“It’s my problem,” Paul said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Paul walked away.

“Hey,” Steve called after him. “What about this weekend? You wanna get some beers and head up to the lake with the girls? I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, but all you’d have to do is look cross eyed at Jolene Arnold and she’d spread faster than—”

“Yeah, sure,” Paul said. He waved over his shoulder as he walked away. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Steve.”

***

Steve’s pickup pulled away from the driveway. Limestone pebbles popped beneath the truck’s oversized tires as he accelerated up to speed, leaving Paul in a cloud of settling white dust. Late season crickets jumped in the grass all around him. The metal roof of the house was a checkerboard of dappled light and shadows, and from somewhere behind the house, he could hear the goats bleating.

Paul headed around to the back, where a screen door opened into the kitchen. Through the door he could see his father sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, all the lights off and the shades drawn. Martin Henninger was rocking back and forth and murmuring to himself while he constructed another of his lattice-like stick structures. Clearly his dad had been at it for some time, for this particular stick structure was already huge, a good three feet tall.

Paul went into the kitchen and put the bucket of chicken on the table. He didn’t bother to announce himself. There wouldn’t be any point to it anyway. When his father got into one of his spells—that was what his mother had called his father’s meditative blackouts, during which he could sit for hours on the living room floor building his sculptures of sticks and baling wire—he was lost to the world. A train could crash through the house and he wouldn’t notice. Paul slipped out again and went to feed the goats.

A dirt road led down past the barn and out to the fallow land that they called the horse pasture, even though there hadn’t been horses to put there since before Paul was born. A haze of white dust hung over the road, depthless and still. The goats, big, dusky white Angoras, were not hungry, he could see that now. They were huddled together in a corner of the yard nearest the house, buzzing with a sort of mute agitation.

Rattlesnake, he thought tiredly. They were common enough here in the scrub brush of the Texas Hill Country.

“I’m coming,” he muttered to the goats, and took the lock blade knife from his back pocket. If the snake was a little one he’d carry it off to the horse pasture and dump it in the brush. They were good and aggressive, got rid of the rats. But if it was a big one, one of the six footers that sometimes made their way up this far, he’d cut off its head and hang its hide on the barn door, for luck. There were already five others there.

He hadn’t gone but a few steps towards the goats before movement out of the corner of his eye made him stop. His mother was standing by the corner of the barn in a yellow cotton sun dress that fit her rail-thin body like a potato sack on a pole. Strands of her long gray hair moved in the breeze across a face that was drawn and gray with sadness. Her eyes were sunken into her face, giving her a hollow, empty look that sent chills through him.

He had very few memories of her smiling when she was alive, and she wasn’t smiling now. From what his father told him, she’d battled with a double-barreled curse of depression and anorexia for most of her life, and most of Paul’s memories were of her sitting on the edge of the bed in the front room, huddled under a blanket, her eyes unfocused and vague.  She looked like that now, fogged over, sad.

Paul stared back at her from across the yard, and though his heart was beating against his ribs like a wild bird in a cage, he couldn’t move.  He couldn’t speak. He tried to lift a hand to do…he didn’t know what…maybe wave, maybe try to touch her. But he couldn’t even do that.  His fingers seemed to weigh a ton.

He knew she wanted him to speak to her. On some level, he sensed that she needed him to speak, that she couldn’t do whatever it was she wanted on her own. But he was too stricken to open his mouth. He couldn’t get the words out.

She lowered her eyes and turned away. Sparks of sunlight scattered off the side of the barn and seemed to shoot right through her. She took a few steps toward the corner that led to the front of the barn and he lost her there in the shadows.

Then his voice came to him all at once, and he blurted out: “Momma? Momma, wait.”

But she was gone.

Numb, Paul stumbled after her.

He rounded the corner of the barn and saw the front doors were open. The front doors of the barn were never open. His father was very particular about that, and a younger version of Paul had taken plenty of whippings to make sure the lesson took. But they were open now. Blades of grass came loose from the few bales of hay he and his father had stored up in the loft and fluttered down on the warm breeze that blew through the barn’s shadowy gloom. A large sheet of mud-stained plastic moved listlessly, like a drape in an open kitchen window, from a nail on the wall to his left. Watching it, he remembered the day he found her, his mother. He and Steve, two twelve year old boys walking up the driveway through a maze of Comal County Sheriff’s cars, wondering what in the hell was going on. There had been deputies everywhere. And here, in the barn, they’d seen his mother hanging by her neck from the rafters, the corpse stripped of the flesh from the waist down by wild hogs. A group of startled deputies who had been telling grim jokes near the body had come rushing forward to shoo them back outside, away from his mother and the flies that filled the barn’s darkened stillness with their murmuring, and as they pulled him from the barn he’d taken one last look over his shoulder at the horror his mother had become.

But the barn was empty now.

She was gone.

***

“What are you doing out here, boy?”

Paul turned and faced his father. Martin Henninger was in his mid-fifties, a lean and weathered man. His face was clean-shaven and severe, deeply lined around the mouth. His arms were knotted with muscle, toughened by a lifetime of farm labor. He dressed in black pants, a heavily starched white shirt that was always buttoned at the neck and at the cuffs, even in the hottest part of the summer, and an old black Stetson hat. His dark eyes glinted like motor oil in the sun. They were the black eyes of a man who looked on everything, whether it was another human being, or a cut on his finger, or a dead deer on the side of the road, or even a twenty dollar bill he’d found on the sidewalk, with equal indifference.

“Who were you talking to?” his father asked.

“I was thinking about Momma,” Paul said. He wanted to be defiant, like saying her name, her name to him anyway, somehow went out as a challenge, but he knew it was a fantasy and nothing more. His father was too strong, too…too much more than he could ever be. Though Paul was bigger than his father, faster, maybe even stronger, his father was infinitely more than he knew himself to be. The man was a force, a source of power, and Paul was only himself, a boy, a child, a thing that needed tending by this man, who knew better.

But if his father recognized the challenge, he showed no reaction, except to drive his hands down into his pockets and stare off at the deepening shadows spreading over the horse pasture. Paul felt suddenly dizzy and nauseous as his father probed his mind, trying to get into his head. Out of instinct, Paul cleared his thoughts and focused instead on nothingness. But his father’s mind was strong, disciplined, insistent.

“You miss her?” Martin Henninger said suddenly.

Reluctantly, Paul nodded again.

“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what. How about the next time you find yourself out here talking to her, you tell her I miss her, too, okay? And maybe, if we both miss her hard enough, she’ll climb up out of the ground and make us a fucking pot roast. I’d like that. Maybe she could clean the house while she’s at it.”

“Daddy, I—”

“Don’t say anything, Paul. If you do, you’ll just piss me off.”

His father looked away from him then, his eyes sweeping the yard, taking in the goats, the tidal motion of the yellow cheatgrass blowing in the breeze, the whole sweep of a land that was as lonely as it was vast.  Paul could feel his father’s hold on his mind slackening, and he sagged inward, as though he were a marionette whose strings had just been cut.

“Go feed the goats,” he said.

Paul did as he was told. He went back into the barn and filled two large plastic buckets with feed, and when he came back out, his father was gone.

Paul went to work, pouring out little piles of green feed pellets along the road, the herd following along a few feet behind him. Between the full grown goats and the new crop of kids born earlier that summer, they had ninety-six animals. But the king of the herd was a huge two hundred and fifty pound billy that Paul called Oscar. Oscar always had to have the first pile of food. None of the others were dumb enough to challenge him for it. If they tried, he’d piss on their heads, the typical way one goat asserts dominance over another. He’d probably piss on the food they were trying to eat, too. Then, likely as not, he’d ram them into the ground. He’d killed a young billy that way last February.

After that, Paul had developed a system for feeding time. The first pile was Oscar’s. He’d drop a mound of the green feed pellets up near the barn, then he’d head down the road a ways and drop most of the rest of the feed farther off. By the time he made it back to Oscar’s pile, the big billy was usually about done. He’d drop the last handful or so on Oscar’s pile and that was usually enough to keep him away while the others finished eating.

He went through his chores in a drowsy haze, still thinking of his mother. When he was done he walked back to the barn and hung the feed buckets up on the wall. He looked around. A part of him was hoping his mother would be there, waiting for him. But when he peered into the darkness of the barn’s hold, it was empty.

Confused, and still a little light-headed from his encounter with his father, Paul walked back to the house. His father was standing in the doorway, holding the screen door open, watching him, waiting for him.

***

They ate at a small wooden table in the kitchen, heavy cloth drapes over the windows. The living room beyond the kitchen was dark, the floor strewn with machine parts and tools and spools of baling wire. The latest stick sculpture his father had made was smashed to bits in the corner.  Sometimes he did that, smashed them right after he made them.

Martin Henninger ate methodically, turning each piece of chicken over and over in his hands, working every last strip of meat off the bone before discarding it and going on to the next. It was the same way he did everything, one thing at a time, painstakingly deliberate in every detail, however long it took.

Paul fished through the box, looking for a thigh. His father only ate the breasts and the drumsticks and Paul knew to avoid those.

“How’re those new kids doing?” his father asked.

Paul looked up. They hardly ever spoke at the dinner table.

“They’re fine, sir. They’re getting plenty to eat from what I can tell.”

His father grunted.

“That big son of a bitch isn’t muscling them out, is he?”

“No sir,” Paul said. That big son of a bitch was Oscar, but “that big son of a bitch” was as close as he’d ever get to a name from Paul’s father, who thought that people who gave names to animals were idiots.

Martin Henninger grunted again and chased a spoonful of mashed potatoes around his Dixie plate with a plastic Spork. Paul watched him furtively, trying to decide if this was the right time to bring up his decision about UTSA.

“You’re thinking about college,” his father said, and Paul felt like he shouldn’t have been surprised, even though he was, to find his thoughts so neatly laid out on the table, waiting to be stripped clean, like the chicken. “You made a decision, haven’t you?”

“That’s right,” Paul said. He was alarmed. He hadn’t even been aware of his father reaching into his head. Ordinarily, he knew it was happening, and sometimes he could withhold at least some of his thoughts. But this time his father had reached into his head without Paul even knowing.

“You have bad news. You’re afraid I’m going to be angry.”

“It’s not bad news,” Paul said, a little too hurriedly. “It’s good news. I got an offer to play for UTSA.”

Martin Henninger grunted, then took another bite of mashed potatoes. “You got a lot of offers, from what I hear.”

“Yes sir. That’s true.”

“UTSA is a brand new program. It’d be a waste of your time. You want to go to Nebraska. The Big Ten can get you the kind of exposure you need.”

“Well, yeah, Nebraska’s a great program, but…”

“But what? What are you trying to say?”

“I decided to take the offer. I’m going to UTSA.”

Martin Henninger dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin, pushed his chair back, and stared at him. “Come again?”

“Yes, sir. I’m gonna stay here. It’s a full ride. Everything’s paid for, same as Nebraska.”

“It’s not the same as Nebraska, Paul.”

“Yeah, I know, but Daddy, I want to stay here. In San Antonio. I want to stay with you.”

“Why in the hell would you want to do that?”

“The farm, Daddy. Our farm. I want to work this land. I feel connected to it. I’ve been feeling like that’s what I’m supposed to do, you know? Have you ever had that feeling? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. You know, really trying to get at what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and I think this is it. I want to be here with you. I want to be on this land.”

Paul stopped there and waited for his father to say something, anything. But it didn’t happen. Martin Henninger simply leaned over his plate again and started eating.

But between bites Paul heard him mutter, “Idiot.”

***

That night, up in his room, Paul’s eyes fluttered open in the dark, and the next moment he was wide awake. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, rising so suddenly from a deep, dreamless sleep. But still, something felt wrong.

He lay on his side in his metal-framed twin bed, his back against the wall, watching his desk and chair and a few posters on the wall slowly take shape as his eyes adjusted to the dark. The moon was a faint sliver just behind the roof of the barn, and its light gave the window glass a bluish glow. He took a slow breath and stared at the window—not through it, but at it, listening.

The house creaked in the wind like an old boat. It made noise all the time, but he usually only noticed it at times like this, when everything was quiet and he was deep in thought.

Paul got out of bed and walked to the window. The yard below was lost in shadows, the grass moving with the wind, the goats sleeping in clusters around the yard.

He watched the corner of the barn where he had seen his mother standing. She wasn’t there now, but of course he hadn’t expected her to be. Seeing her there, standing there, hugging herself like she was miserably cold, he’d felt like he had electricity moving through his skin. He wasn’t feeling that now. Now, all he felt was a deep, abiding emptiness.

He heard footsteps on the stairs, the old wood there creaking. Turning his head sharply towards his closed bedroom door, he listened to the steps coming closer to his door.

Daddy?

He moved quickly. Paul slipped on a pair of jeans and his tennis shoes, and when his father opened the bedroom door, Paul was standing there in the middle of the room, in the dark, fully dressed and waiting for him.

Martin Henninger’s eyes were overbright, lit with an almost fevered intensity. And there were three strange-looking markings on his forehead. They looked like they’d been written with a fingertip dipped in wet ash.

Paul pointed at the markings. “Daddy, what’s—”

“Come down to the barn with me,” he said. He seemed short of breath, excited. “You wanted to stay. It’s time you learned what there is to learn.”

He turned and walked down the stairs.

Paul followed him out the back door and across the lawn. Wind moved through the Spanish oaks above them and moonlight colored the dirt road leading down to the horse pasture a bluish-silver. Paul was trembling, but not from the cool night air. He wanted to ask what was happening, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. His father wouldn’t answer.

But the next instant, they rounded the corner of the barn and Paul found himself looking in on the cavernous space inside, and he couldn’t help himself.

“Daddy, what is…?”

“This is what it means to stay with me.”

They were standing side by side now, looking into the barn.

Paul glanced at his father, and then at the barn. A faint tinge of wood smoke filled the air. Oscar was tied to one of the barn’s support beams. One of the smaller males was standing beside him. The goats looked at Paul with black, glassy eyes. They made no noise, but Paul could see they were scared.

Arranged around the goats, in a half circle, were five of the strange, lattice-like stick sculptures his father had made. Each was different, each of them complex in their own strange architecture. Paul’s gaze moved from one to the next, too confused to ask questions.

It took him a moment longer to realize the walls were covered with writing. With his mouth agape he scanned the words, if that was even what they were. They weren’t in any language he could understand.

“Daddy, what is all this?”

“You wanted to stay, Paul. I tried to keep you away. I tried to get you to go as far away from here as possible. But you wouldn’t go. So this is what there is. This is the world I have to give you.”

Paul looked at his father. If what the man had said was meant as an apology, there was no trace of it in his expression. The same fevered intensity lit his eyes, and his skin was glistening with sweat. He looked crazed, and without thinking, Paul took a step back.

“I never got to prepare you, Paul. I’m sorry. When I went through this, I was more prepared than you are now. But the time is now. This won’t wait.”

“What…?”

“This is gonna terrify you. I know that. But you don’t need to be afraid. It won’t hurt. I promise. It’ll make you stronger.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Paul, I’m about to show you how to do things you’ve never imagined before. I can teach you how to control your world. I mean really control it, bend it to your will.”

Paul took another step back. The alarms in his head were screaming.

“Stop!” his father commanded.

And suddenly, he couldn’t move. His body felt numb, his legs weak. Something was in the barn with them. Something dark, focused, getting stronger. Paul felt it swirling all around him, moving up his spine like a cold shiver. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, but Paul was certain the presence was feeding off the lattice-like stick sculptures his father had arranged around the barn. Somehow, they were focusing whatever this was, helping it to take shape.

The presence wrapped itself around Paul’s chest. It was hard to breathe. The air smelled rich, intensely fragrant, like cedar. Paul felt nauseous, light-headed, and only at that moment did he realize the presence was trying to enter his head, trying to find a way inside his mind, though its grip was delicate, subtle, not at all like his father’s brutal assaults.

Paul gasped in fear, his eyes wide open and staring all about the barn for some way to escape.

“Don’t be frightened,” his father said. “You can feel it, can’t you? That’s power, Paul. Raw, primal power. I’m going to show you how to use it, how to channel it to do whatever you want.”

Martin Henninger closed his eyes, his lips parting.

“Daddy, let me go. Please.”

His father snapped his eyes open again.

“I tried this once before, Paul, but that was a mistake. You were only twelve. I made you forget because it was too much for you. You were too young to have so much power.” He pointed toward the stick lattices. “I was supposed to. The lenses told me to. But I couldn’t. I resisted. I told myself right then I’d drive you away before I gave you so much power, but now I see I was a fool. You’re meant for great things, Paul.” He spread his arms wide to include the stick lattices and the smoking bowl and the goats and the writing on the walls. “You were meant for this.”

He grabbed Paul by the shirt and pulled him deeper into the barn.

“Stand there. Don’t move.”

He let go of Paul’s shirt, but Paul was too stunned to notice. His father put a hand on each of the goats’ head.

The animals flinched, at first, and then calmed as though they’d been drugged. The smaller of the two sank to its knees and turned its head to expose its neck, its mouth open in a silent bleat.

The presence was stronger than ever now. The air had filled with an almost audible vibration. Paul could feel it sliding over his skin, and wanted to scream, to cry out, but couldn’t. He could barely breathe.

Martin Henninger reached behind his back and brought out a large hunting knife.

Paul’s eyes went wide, and still he couldn’t move.

His father grabbed the smaller billy by the throat and lifted him into the air one-handed. Then, without hesitation, he gutted the animal, creating a long, jagged gash from the top of the ribcage down to the rectum.

The goat’s guts spilled out on the floor, and Paul felt vomit rise in his throat.

He forced it back down.

After making the cut, Martin Henninger put the carcass on the ground at Paul’s feet. Then he reached inside and removed the heart. He carried it, blood dripping between his fingers, to a wide, shallow brass bowl in the middle of the barn. Wood shavings were still smoking inside it. He put the bleeding heart into the bowl, and Paul heard the hiss of liquid meeting heat.

He turned to Paul and pointed at the post where Oscar still stood.

“Stand there, next to that big son of a bitch.”

Whatever it was that held him loosened its grip. Paul could feel the blood running through his legs and arms again. He sensed his father’s mind pushing him toward the barn’s center support column.

“No,” Paul said.

His father squinted at him. “Stand there.”

“No way,” Paul said, shaking his head. He tried to run for the door, but his father was faster. He grabbed Paul by the back of his neck and spun him around.

“Get the hell off!” Paul said, and threw a punch at the same time. It landed solidly at the corner of his father’s jaw. But his father didn’t go down. Martin Henninger turned his head to one side and spit blood onto the floor, then squared his shoulders at Paul. Paul barely had time to think before his father balled his left hand into a fist and shot a jab into his face.

He felt like he’d been hit in the mouth with a cinder block. He staggered backwards, arms pin-wheeling for balance. His front tooth was loose. Martin Henninger grabbed him by the front of his shirt and threw him against the support post.

The whole barn shook with the impact, and Paul, unable to keep his feet, slid down onto his butt, eyes blinking stupidly up at his father.

Martin Henninger took off his belt.

Paul, his vision swimming, felt the belt tightening around his neck, and his head snapped back against the post. He groped at the leather, but couldn’t get his fingers under it.

His father twined the belt around his fist like a rodeo cowboy getting ready his ride, then reached into the shadows and came back with the wide, brass bowl. He dipped his thumb into the bowl of blood and ashes, tossed the bowl aside, and ran his thumb across Paul’s forehead, leaving three shapes there.

“This is the name of truth,” he said. “emet, emet, emet. It is my gift to you, Paul, and it marks you.” Martin Henninger touched the marks on his own forehead with his fingertips, then touched the marks on Paul’s forehead. “Wherever you go, this mark will be with you. As will I.”

“No,” Paul said, trying to shake his head. The word came out as a strangled pant. His vision was fuzzy at the edges, his fight to breathe a losing battle. He began to kick, trying to get a foot or a knee or anything between himself and his father.

“Be still, boy.”

Paul tightened the muscles in his neck and strained against the leather with every bit of strength he had. He arched his whole body up, looking like an epileptic in the midst of a seizure. His father moved to one side to better keep his hold on the belt, and suddenly Paul had enough room to kick. He brought his knee up sharply and caught Martin Henninger in the ribcage hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

His father’s grip on the belt loosened for just a moment, and Paul kicked him square in the chest, sending him tumbling backwards. Martin Henninger landed on his ass in front of their tractor’s aerating attachment, his eyes suddenly going wide with pain. A strangled sound escaped him as he looked down and saw the aerator’s tines poking through his chest.

The two of them sat there, looking at each other, the one dying, the other numbed by what he had just done.

“You aren’t gonna stop this from happening,” Martin Henninger said, wheezing, blood-veined bubbles forming on his lips. “I’ve marked you.”

“No.”

Martin Henninger coughed. Blood was filling his lungs. “You don’t choose this, Paul,” he said. “It chooses you.”

“I don’t want it,” Paul said.

“It’s already done. You’ve got a charge to keep.”

“Take it back. Daddy, please. I don’t want this.”

“This thing picks its own time and place. It’s my job to give this to you, to channel it into you. Death can’t stop me from doing that. You have a charge to keep, Paul, and so do I. Make sure you’re ready.”

And then he was dead, his chest sagging like a tire going flat, his sightless eyes still staring into Paul’s.

Sometimes horror writers have big egos. It goes with the territory: we are entrusted with the godlike power to instill fear, to make mere mortals quake with terror, or at the very least, be too afraid to sleep without the light on. It’s a noble profession stretching back to ancient days of bedtime tales by firelight while real terrors prowled around in the night. But sometimes, as a writer you find yourself faced with a greater calling. A chance to couple your talents with all those skills you’ve learned at conferences, classes and organizations like the HWA, to promote and publicize the fruits of your work in support of a different sort of venture.

This year, like every year around Halloween time since 1999, I like to go back to the scene of the crime – the one place in the world where I can actually say I experienced a ghost sighting. It’s a place that would consume a year of my life, thrusting me headlong into manic and obsessive research culminating in the uncovering of a great secret and righting a 100-year-old misconstruction.

At an overnight stay at the Belhurst Castle, a landmark hotel and restaurant in upstate New York, I saw an apparition. I won’t go into all the details, but this eerie woman in white made an impression. Apart from the sheer fright and ensuing sleeplessness I experienced, I also sensed something more – longing, sadness and tragedy all rolled into one. And in the next few weeks, as I learned more about the history of the castle, I found that people have been seeing this ghost for over a hundred years (along with many other supernatural events and sightings). There was even a legend about her – a fanciful yarn about doom-struck lovers fleeing from Spanish mercenaries, all the way across the ocean; they settled here for a time until they were found out, and the woman (an opera singer) tragically met her end in the tunnels beneath the hills as they tried to escape. Of course, they say her spirit still roams the grounds, seeking her lost lover.

However, this being the only sighting I’ve had in my otherwise-skeptical existence, and me being a writer of supernatural tales, I felt something stronger at work. I felt that the story everyone related about this opera singer didn’t feel right. And more, I wondered if perhaps the ghost had appeared to me for another reason; that maybe, like they say of many of those who refuse to move on, she had unfinished business here and needed some help from the living. And maybe (ego stirring), I was just the guy to do it.

Fast forward a year. A year of traveling back and forth 50 miles to my house. Many, many hours sifting through old land deeds, cemetery records, ship manifests, building permits and land grants, microfilm and newspaper articles… Interviewing workers and previous owners of the castle, learning that the land had a mysterious mansion on the property before the castle, one owned by a bitter and reclusive hermit, and before that the property had been a sacred Indian burial ground (of course). But then I turned my focus to the eccentric woman who had built the castle in 1888 and lived there until her death. Everything I discovered ultimately found its way into a book I felt I had to write. A book setting the record straight, an unraveling of this great mystery, revealing the former romanticized story to be a stark embellishment, a confused mixture of various half-truths. I believe that because I was a writer drawn to the supernatural and because I had the ability and the time (thanks to an obsessive and unhealthy lack of sleep), I was able to reveal who might really be haunting the castle. Sometimes, especially on these return visits, I believe I was meant to do this, to clear up the error so that the hundreds of thousands of people who visit annually can find out who it was that really loved the castle and made it her own – and who wishes to remain there at least in some way, if only in the minds of those who come to visit.

They’re selling the book now in the castle’s gift shop, and I’ve given many talks there and in the town, written follow-ups and done interviews. The word is getting out. And maybe, because I haven’t seen her since, I did what she wanted and she can be at peace, her story told.

At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. That way I can feel I didn’t completely waste a year where I could have been writing more fiction or watching a lot more TV. And every once in a while, when I go to an old house or pass an ancient graveyard, especially around Halloween, I wonder – what other secrets are out there, and are there other restless souls hoping for someone to make their stories known?

If so, maybe you’re the ones to write them. Stay open to the possibilities.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Dave Sakmyster is offering copies of four books: The Belhurst Story, Twilight of the Fifth Sun, Crescent Lake, and The Writers of the Future, Vol. 22, which features one of his short horror stories. To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

DAVID SAKMYSTER’S stories, screenplays and novels cross a range of genres and include the supernatural thriller Blindspots, the horrifying Crescent Lake, the historical epic, Silver and Gold, and The Morpheus Initiative – a series about psychic archaeologists (including The Pharos Objective, The Mongol Objective and The Cydonia Objective). With author Steven Savile, he’s co-writing a thrilling series about near death experiences called The Lazarus Initiative, and his screenplay, Nightwatchers, has just been optioned. His website is http://www.sakmyster.com.

I found something in a cemetery last Halloween season.

I want to tell you what it is. You know I want to, but we must stroll through this cemetery first.

Don’t worry. It will be nice. It’s a very pleasant spot, right around the corner from my childhood home. It’s quaint and understated, something less than an acre cradling the mortal remains of a few hundred souls.

The whole is bound on the south and west by an eight-foot brick wall and on the north and east by wrought iron fencing painted forest green. The whole is overarched by mature oaks festooned with Spanish moss and a host of opportunistic tropical epiphytes, eager newcomers blown in by Hurricane Katrina. The whole is carpeted in long, lush grasses that absorb every footfall, every birdcall, every insect’s wanton flitter.

Hushed and beautiful, a garden spot in a steaming subtropical paradise, it is nonetheless the scene of a dynamic struggle of remembrance versus nature. This earth has held our dead for nearly two centuries, but it is not what one would call tamed. It is not what one would call compliant. These rows of stones all but pitch and yaw atop warm, fecund soil ever on the cusp of urgent becoming, ever ready with vine and creeper and root to crush mausoleums and topple obelisks. IN ICTV OCCVLI is more than an inscribed legend in this place; were this cemetery abandoned by the hand of man, its gentle pathways and neat hedgerows would be impassable a decade hence. Even with careful and constant care, only a pitiful few of the 19^th Century tombs still stand. The topslabs of the remainder lie directly on the heaving loam, their red brick plinths and the departed thereunder long since returned to clay. This climate is not kind to that which tends toward decay.

I found this cemetery soon after I was allowed to walk home from school on my own. I wandered off the main road one day, and I came to a rusted stop sign overgrown by a giant oak. I had never seen such a thing. A giant, twisting oak, whose roots had pitched the pavement up in jutting shingles, stood frozen in the act of swallowing a stop sign some fool had planted within its reach. Pole and all. I edged around it, not yet willing to turn my back on such a bizarre and unexpected act.

As I turned away from the ravening oak, I first saw the cemetery.

Can I call it love at first sight? Is it too perverse to say that I loved the place that shaped the life of my imagination?

In memory, I see the meeting from above: the uniformed child inches toward the wrought iron, close enough to see but definitely, definitely not close enough to touch. He walks along the fence, peering between the bars—and in our cinematic imagining, must we not cut to a rolling shot from inside the cemetery? The boy’s tense little face appears in stroboscopic gaps in the wrought iron as the camera keeps pace with him. Then cut streetside to a static close-up of the boy, his brow furrowed as he leans forward, staring into the shadowed enclosure. Then back to a long shot from inside the cemetery, zooming in on the startled boy as if something rushes toward the fence…
Cut to a long boom shot of the boy running back to the main road (crossing the street to avoid that hungry oak).

I didn’t even step inside the gate until the third visit. There were stone angels whose gaze I avoided and a gated mausoleum whose entrance I dared not approach. That was simply thrilling. There were wooden markers rotted and green with moss and etched deeply with indecipherable legends. There were tombs whose slabs were cracked and split, allowing me to peek inside and run off gibbering when I convinced myself that I had glimpsed a skeletal hand.

I probably only visited half-a-dozen times, and we moved away from the Gulf Coast a few years later. Since then, I’ve seen graveyards aplenty, from Gettysburg to Mayan burial sites to the tomb of the Forty-seven Ronin. I’ve stood at the head of columns of soldiers’ headstones marching off to the horizon, and I’ve stood at the foot of stupas filling half the sky to house scraps of cloth or chips of bone. None of them compares to my first cemetery, that scant acre of sodden, mossy soil. That cemetery, for me, holds more than headstones. It holds that moment when I was first touched by the macabre, just as you have been, and it’s a living reminder that I’m still dedicated to recapturing and refining that moment, just as you are.

Ah, that moment! It’s what brought you here, that moment when you were not just frightened but thrilled by the macabre. Picture yourself as an awkward child (because even if you seemed perfect and poised on the outside, you were already a halftone off the rest of the choir, right?) and recall that beautiful and terrible moment when you first were pulled in four directions by fear, fascination, disgust and longing. Perhaps you were peeking between your fingers because you knew Frankenstein’s monster had to be lurking somewhere in the smoking ruins of that burned windmill. Perhaps you were in a bookstore gobsmacked by your first copy of Eerie. Perhaps you were unexpectedly split into two children, one sitting in a sunny classroom and the other locked in the midnight chamber with that “ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore.” Whether the spark was a volume of Poe, Tales from the Crypt, or that freaky Soundgarden video on your dad’s iPod, whether it was in 1931 or yesterday, that moment altered the course of your life.

My “beautiful and terrible moment” lies in that cemetery, as solid as a tombstone. Last year, I was lucky enough revisit that moment at any time I chose.

More than thirty-five years after my parents moved us away from the Gulf Coast, I took a house around the corner from the cemetery of my youth. Springhill Graveyard is still there, more beautiful than ever. The private association that cares for the cemetery has repaired cracked topslabs and replaced wooden markers. The stones are regularly righted and realigned as the roots of young giants run rampant through the soil.

The old sign-eating tree is gone, unfortunately. Indigestion, perhaps. In its place is a canopy cover for a BMW coupe. So mystery and wonder and savage beauty give place to the mundane.

I expected nothing more. I was just pleased the gravestones hadn’t been uprooted for condos. I spent the fall picking up the random cigarette butt or bottle top when I walked among my quietest neighbors.

My young son walked with me. I pointed out the names of prominent families for whom local businesses were named, and I pointed out the forebears of children with whom I went to school. One afternoon last fall, I spotted a name that stopped me in my tracks.

Inez Heenan, my kindergarten teacher, died at the age of ninety-seven, just a month after my son was born in Oregon. Her death came more than thirty years after she retired, but I doubt that her love for children let her stay out of the classroom for very long. She lies among family; one daughter who died during the Great Depression lies to her right, her husband lies to her left, and beyond him lies her younger daughter and her younger daughter’s husband. The fact that the son-in-law was willing to spend eternity so close to Mrs. Heenan doesn’t surprise me at all. She was a wonderful woman.

I had the opportunity that afternoon to lay my hand on her headstone and tell my son that she was the kindest woman I had ever known. I had the opportunity to tell my son of her compassion, her love for children, her love of learning, and her love of nonsense. I had the opportunity to tell him of her love for me despite my smacking Trey with the rest-time mat, despite my calling her Mrs. Canine on the first day, and despite the tall tales.

Tall tales—that’s when his ears pricked up. Most of this is hearsay (I remember more about Batman than I do about kindergarten), but my family has confirmed that Mrs. Heenan was deeply involved in my early love for the macabre and the surreal.

Without her, they might not have known so early that my peculiarities were coming out at school, so it was a bit of a mixed blessing. Her first report to my parents was unintentional; I took Mrs. Heenan in pretty easily with the tale of my elder sister’s shoes being permanently glued to her feet, and she called my mother immediately, deeply concerned for my sister’s health. She had my number by the time the other kids wanted a field trip to my house to sit on the screenless porch, where trained mantises would eat the mosquitoes, and watch while pet monkeys took out our garbage. She didn’t even have to ask who told Sid a mummy was lurking in the sandbox.

My son’s eyes were wild with laughter as I told him of these kindergarten scrapes. He gets me, just as Mrs. Heenan did. As I knelt in that hushed and holy place with one hand on my giggling son’s shoulder and the other on my kindergarten teacher’s headstone, we three shared another kind of beautiful and terrible moment, a moment when the macabre becomes the sublime.

The school where she nurtured the very young for most of her adult life was a quarter-mile away, and I found her while walking with my son, who was then the age I was when I first met her. It was a perfect circle of love and loss and reminiscence, our lives and deaths intertwined, our paths parting and crossing again like the roots of the oaks in that cemetery. Would it make sense in that place to reject the macabre? To pretend it isn’t integral to love and life? Don’t we love more dearly that which know we must give away?

It would be a good question for Inez Heenan, who said goodbye to her little darlings every spring for three generations. Right now, it’s a good question for me.

When my son was two years old, he was rushed into the pediatric intensive care unit twice in a few months. The first time, we did not know if he would make it through the night. I watched helplessly as he lay gray and listless, gasping like a fish.

That, my friends, is horror.

We did what parents do. We soothed him and laughed and played and kept his spirits up as best we could.

The second visit to the ICU was for “simple” pneumonia, and we were already in a different world. We had adapted. We had done what we had to, and we had adapted. As I watched his steady breathing, watched his oxygen levels, listened for any unaccustomed beeping, I knew all this would pass from his memory, and maybe even ours, perhaps lingering only as a story we told him when he grew up healthy and strong: “Yes, you gave us a couple of little scares back then when you were… what, two?”

During that second PICU visit, I relaxed enough to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a story of love, endurance, and sacrifice in one of literature’s bleakest post-apocalyptic worlds. The dying father shepherds his son through a hellscape of cannibalism and wanton violence, and the only hope he can offer the boy is “the flame,” the ideals that separate humanity from monstrosity.

After the last page, I lay watching the blinking lights almost till dawn.

I can’t pretend that I know what I’m doing, as a father or as a man, but I would be a much weaker specimen if I tried to turn away from the dreams that have shaped my life. The very fact that you have turned to this blog and that you have read this scrap of remembrance makes clear that you too are unwilling to give up on those dreams of the macabre and the surreal. In response to the nasty, tittering little voice in the backs of our minds insisting this is all somehow unworthy of our efforts, unworthy of the label literature, I can offer only what I found in that cemetery:

The macabre at its best is a refulgent mirror that allows us to greet the reflection of our mortality with a saucy wink. It’s good practice for the Big Show. Further, we can strive to recreate that beautiful and terrible moment such that our work transcends that moment. We aspire to nothing less than the transformation of the merely macabre into the sublime.

Tell me know when we get there, please.

We’ve since moved, and we’ll spend this Halloween season far from that beautiful cemetery, but I carry with me a sure knowledge that the wide-eyed boy within me still finds wonder in the macabre haunts of his youth and that his imaginary explorations were not futile, faltering missteps but his first forays into a rich and fulfilling world.

As for the craft, I stand unsteadily on the shoulders of giants, and I beg your indulgence.

Do not, however, doubt my commitment to recreating that beautiful and terrible moment, even if I never reach the sublime.

As for my son, he’s so like me that it hurts at times (would I wish him to be less … Kendleyish, even for his own good?), but he is his own boy with his own battles, a boy busy developing unique tastes and follies. He will have his own beautiful and terrible moment with the macabre, and it will have nothing to do with me.

If someone happened to leave a copy of The Bride of Frankenstein lying around soon after his tenth birthday, though, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Mrs. Heenan wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I am sure of that.

JAMES KENDLEY, a professional writer and editor for more than 30 years, began his fiction career in 2009. He is a new member of the HWA. Visit him at http://www.kendley.com

 

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY:  As a bonus giveaway, Curtis Lawson is offering one digital copy of his comic book, The Wrong House.  To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Halloween has always been one of my favourite holidays.

This is an oddity because, growing up, I was a particularly frightened child: the kind of kid who clings to cotton bedsheets at three in the morning as some kind of foolproof protection against the unknown, who would rather make a running leap onto the mattress than place a delicate foot within one meter of the dark space under the bed. The kind of kid who had learned the fine art of rationalizing away the inexplicable noises, the tricks of light and shadow. I couldn’t watch scary movies. Ghost stories left behind an indelibly deep and visceral fingerprint of fear — not that delicious, fluttering shiver that most of my friends got out of it.

So why Halloween?

The usual answers probably have to do with pageantry and costumes and candy and the like, and that might be part of it. I adored dressing up. I loved running around outside in a world that had suddenly turned crazy. Crazy, but not frightening. But I think that tiny spur of horror was still in Halloween for me, even then. Even with the candy, and the cold October rain that inevitably destroyed whatever costume preparations I had made, leaving me a soggy messy, unmasked, sweaty and freezing at the same time but still grinning like a Cheshire cat. Because it was fun to flirt with that otherworld that Halloween opens up to us: the kid world of demons and skeletons and chocolate bars and doors thrown open to you when you knock; but also that adult world bumping and colliding alongside it—that world of things waiting in dark alleys, smashed beer bottles and making out, high heels and getting up to no good.

Halloween is its own kind of Never Never Land. You grow out of it. You’re meant to grow out of it. It’s one of those strange threshold holidays designed to transmute into something else as you get older—if Santa dies when you reach your teens, then I’m pretty sure he’s got some sort of murder-suicide pact going on with the spirit of Halloween. They both go down together.

For some anyway. I remember my first Halloween as an undergrad: Will and I saying “Screw it!” as we dressed up and went out into the night (Will having the biggest challenge in that particular masquerade, built as he was like a cross between a Viking berserker and a grizzly bear thundering out, “Trick or treat!” whenever the door opened). We were supposed to be adults in an adult world, moved out, independent—but instead we were caught in that strange in-between of first year where professors condescended to us as if we were in kindergarten and I still couldn’t figure out the residence coin-operated laundry. We were grown up. We were kids. It was one of those freakishly warm October nights you get every seven years or so, red leaves splattered against dull gray sidewalks, children shrieking and whooping in the streets with plastic pumpkin bowls or garbage bags, and us passing a flask of something cheap and burning back and forth along with Kit-Kat bars and candy corn. And maybe it was the same then as it had been ten years earlier, but by that point I knew I was past the threshold and no amount of cheap liquor and stolen candy would make me eight years old again. Make me brave and wild and loved and safe as I had been back then.

I came late to the love of horror, but I found my way there eventually—because I discovered something. Sometimes it’s okay to be afraid. Sometimes it’s better to hold onto that fingerprint of fear. That slantwise way of looking at the world. That rush of adrenaline so powerful it makes your fingers shake and your heart stutter for just a moment. Just long enough to know the rules of the world are mutable. Things shift. Things change. But still there is joy.

Read the short story “Blessed” from Hair Side, Flesh Side by Helen Marshall.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: One paperback copy of Helen Marhsall’s book Hair Side, Flesh Side, North American shipping only.  To enter post a comment in the section below or e-mail memoutreach@horror.org and put HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail.

Aurora-winning poet HELEN MARSHALL (manuscriptgal.com) is an author, editor, and self-proclaimed bibliophile.

Her poetry has been published in The Chiaroscuro, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex and the long-running Tesseracts anthology series. She recently released a collection of poems entitled Skeleton Leaves from Kelp Queen Press and her collection of short stories Hair Side, Flesh Side is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2012.

Currently, she is pursuing a Ph. D in medieval studies at the University of Toronto, for which she spends a great deal of her time staring at fourteenth-century manuscripts. Unwisely. When you look into a book, who knows what might be looking back.