by Shane Staley
Clay gripped his rifle. He shifted it in his hands, realization slowly coming to him that he could win, he could destroy them, if only he could get himself to move. He swallowed. His finger slipped around the trigger.
Deputy Dale’s shining black eyes showed no emotion as Clay held the rifle at his side.
Mac Weller stepped forward. He moved like a liquid dream, his own black eyes wide and bulging, too large for the sockets, no whites in his eyes. “Join us, Clayton.”
Clay found his voice. “Who…are you?”
“We are the Regulars.”
“Where do you come from?”
“We have always been here,” said the Sheriff and Reverend Fleming in unison.
Clay swallowed hard and took a limping step back toward the door. His previously numb fingers began to tingle on the stock of the rifle. He slid his hand up into the grip. He knew what they were. He knew it. It was them. Those things from the woods. He didn’t know how and he didn’t know why, but they’d changed, and they were here now.
“You killed my wife.”
“She was next,” the Mac Weller-thing said. “She was overdue.”
“Our women feed the Earth with spirit,” said the Reverend-thing.
“And feed us with virility,” Mac Weller went on. “Jim Bourne kept her protected too long. She had to die, to sacrifice his brood, to repay the Earth.”
“Sacrifice. Bleed. Feed.” They all said in unison.
“Join us,” Mac said, black eyes shining, “and be whole.”
“Be one with the Earth,” said the Reverend.
“Be honored,” Mac went on. “You are an outsider, but we welcome you into our fold. Come into the circle. Be complete.”
Clay tightened his grip on the rifle. He looked at them, their vacant stares and gaunt faces, and shuddered at the thought of what he knew they really were…devils from some pagan abyss that fed on the last of what he’d known and loved. He may have been broken, but he wasn’t defeated. Not yet.
Clay mustered a sneer for the gathering of beings. He said a brief prayer to his distant God, quickly leveled the rifle at the one nearest him, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil of his rifle was too violent—more than recoil, it was a surge of jarring power. He reeled backward. An avalanche of gamey smelling bodies piled atop him. He felt a sudden blow to the head, saw a smattering of stars in the fading dark of his mind, a syrupy drowsiness overcame him…and just like that, he was fading, going, gone.
* * *
He awoke bitterly cold, far beyond hurting from his shattered leg and hip. Instead, numbness ebbed through him. He was dropped and his body landed in a heap. Breath huffed from his lungs with the impact. He batted his eyes and they adjusted to the amber glow of the moon.
Outside, he thought. I’m outside again.
The feet of those who’d carried him stepped away. They were only the normal feet of men—strange vacant men, but men just the same. He blinked and wondered if he’d been dreaming, but no, he knew far too well, had lived here long enough to know better. The town was damned. The valley, damned. The land…ruled by dark magic.
He blinked. As his eyes adjusted, he could see he was in a grove. The snow here was not as deep as it was in other wards of the forest. The grove they were in was not the same one he’d happened across during their ritual. This grove was hemmed in by natural stone walls, a rock formation that encircled the trees like a bowl of stone rising twelve or more feet around the area. As he focused, he waited for some form of violence to be visited upon him, but the beings continued to stand back.
He pushed himself to a seated position with a groan.
Clay slowly forgot his pain as he stared at the trees.
The stone circle was composed of twelve strange trees. Their roots were fat and gnarled like the tentacles of some mossy cephalopod sucking earthblood from the core of the world. Their trunks were thick and slightly curved. Their branches split in multitudes and reached to the moonlit, cloud-tattered skies.
Then Clay saw the trees move. He saw what they really were.
They were women.
Or used to be women.
Their feminine forms were embedded in the gnarled trunks as if those serpentine coils had made them one with the wood. Their flesh was gray like the wood, their skin knotted and swirling with patterns of wood grain, and yet…their forms remained feminine, lovely. Each woman was a tree of her own, unique and lovely and dreadful. Naked and enmeshed in the trunks of these stalwart trees, their shapely legs branched out into roots instead of feet. Their torsos stood out in immaculate relief, breasts supple and dripping with shining sap. Lovely faces stared out in vacant repose, stark with beauty, eyes black as cold cinders. Their hair reached up into the branches, became the branches, stretched out to the sky.
Clay took it all in, looked at each one of the tree women, mouth agape, processing the impossible horror. His mind wasn’t sharp enough now. Too clouded by the ebbing numbness and the onset of frostbite.
That was when he saw her.
Leigh.
She was one of them.
The vision of beauty that once danced in his dreams, that he’d caressed with his own calloused hands, now stood upright before him as part of this demonic forest of abominations. Enwrapped as the others in the coils of the tree, her body grayed and wooden, she was beautiful and horrific. Her breasts the breasts he’d tasted as warm flesh with his own tongue, her legs the legs he’d felt gripped about him in some of his finest moments alive. Her mouth upturned, her lips pursed to receive him.
He knew not how, but he found himself standing before her, staring up at her, admiring the way her shapely, slender arms now stretched above her head and became branches, joining with the veined tangles of her hair to drink the darkness from the night. His cheeks were wet with tears as he touched her. Wooden grooves beneath his numbed fingertips were all that remained of the woman’s flesh he’d once so intimately known.
Clay looked up at her through a film of stinging pain and blinked away the fog. Pain stung his throat. All other parts of his body seemed to have lost their sense of feeling. He was numb everywhere but his heart, which hurt like all the wounds of Christ.
“L-Leigh?” It came out a whisper. Disbelieving. Hopeful. Reverent.
With creaks like the planks of an ancient ship upon the sea, her head embedded in the trunk seemed to tilt downward and focus its black soulless eyes on him. He should have felt fury, he knew. He should have felt rage, and anger, and all kinds of hell, but he felt hollow, empty. All he needed was here before him, but he could not have her. Not like this. Not ever again.
“Leigh.” He sobbed.
The beings came up behind him. The men with their cold flesh and their empty eyes supported him and moved him closer to her, and God help him, he found his mouth at her teat as it leaked a honeyed sap onto his tongue and it was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. Her nipple was pliable, earthy, but it was her. And he clutched her and they held him there, and forced him to drink until it was deep in his veins and he was drunk with her lactants.
When the men’s hands pulled him away from her, he screamed to the night. Clay struggled to get away, but they forced him to the ground before her. Ultimately, he didn’t have enough fight in him left to do anything but succumb.
The Leigh-tree spread its legs before him. Joints snapped, wood creaked. Her vertex of womanhood was displayed, her folds spread wide as something pushed out—something was birthed from her loins. The tree cracked, the lips of her once beautiful sex snapping open and falling away like brittle, peeled bark, the legs of his former wife forced open with torpid birth pains. A greasy black form, like a two-foot long centipedal roach-slug with pincers and antennae and proboscis, slid from inside her. It scuttled to the ground and slithered toward Clay.
He’d been so enrapt by the fantastic vision, so awed by the beauty and horror of the phantasm before him, as well as so drunk with the power of the sap that he’d taken onto his tongue fro
m her breast, that he did not realize until he tried to escape that he was trapped by the men’s hands, pressed to the ground. Clay felt the effects of the elixir course through him like a powerful anesthesia. It numbed his body to the punctures as the creature found his orifices, gagged him, filled him, penetrated him, burrowed deep inside him.
His last conscious thought, before he was gone to the Earth, made a minion of nature—an elemental of the forest—was how lovely she looked that way, even in death. Or what passed for death in Sky Valley.
* * *
He rose from the floor of the grove like them. One of them. He sniffed the air and felt bathed in the light of the solstice moon. He felt its power like a fragrant wind, like a thrill of ecstasy.
He looked around with new eyes. The eyes of the others were upon him. They were to perpetuate the cycle. The Earth should live. More had to die, to sacrifice their brood, to repay the Earth.
Sacrifice. Bleed. Feed.
About the Authors
William Meikle
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with eighteen novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. His novels, novellas and short story collections have been published by DarkFuse and Dark Regions Press among others and his stories have appeared in a number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he dreams of fortune and glory.
Michael Penkas
Michael Penkas has lived in Chicago since 2004 and has had over a dozen stories published. He’s worked as an editor and a librarian. He frequently attends open mic events in the Chicago area and maintains a blog at michaelpenkas.blogspot.com.
William R. Eakin
William R. Eakin has published some 100 stories, many Nebula-recommended, in pro places like Analog, F&SF, Amazing Stories, Ellen Datlow’s scifi.com (after Omni closed), Fantastic Stories, and more times in Realms of Fantasy than just a handful of other authors. He has been pleased to see his horror appear in numerous zines like City Slab, Black October and Apex. Reprints of his stories have been collected in 5 book volumes. He lives on a cliff not unlike the one in the story featured here, with a giant boulder in his living room. And yes, he often does spread his wings to fly.
E. G. Smith
E. G. Smith is a graduate of the University of Washington’s creative writing program, with a lifelong passion for horror fiction and film. He lives on a small farm in rural Southwest Idaho with his wife, son, dogs, cat, goats, horse, chickens and flies. When he’s not knee-deep in manure, he’s reading, writing, or reading about writing. Visit his website at: www.ericgsmith.com.
Gary McMahon
Gary McMahon is the acclaimed author of nine novels and several short story collections. His latest novel releases are Beyond Here Lies Nothing (the third in the Concrete Grove series, published by Solaris), The End (an apocalyptic drama published by NewCon Press) and The Bones of You (a supernatural mystery published by Earthling Publications), and his short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes.
Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.
Visit his website at: www.garymcmahon.com.
Christopher Fulbright
Christopher Fulbright is the author of numerous published short stories, novellas, and novels written alone and in collaboration with Angeline Hawkes. His short stories have received honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy and Best Horror of the Year. He lives in North Texas with his wife and their four children. Find him on the web at www.christopherfulbright.com and www.fulbrightandhawkes.com.