“A local feature,” Lexi said.
It looked like a cabin. “Lead me to it. Hiking mode,” he said, then tucked his phone back into his pocket.
What had happened at the Highway Patrol? Had the entire thing been a premonition, somehow leaving him with one out of three wounds? A hiccup in time that had only mostly reset the damage from the gunshots? Something else? And why did he keep having these horrific visions?
No answers. Only questions.
Sounds of pursuit rose behind him, men shouting back and forth, feet crashing through underbrush. Carlin pushed forward, moving more quickly through the bushes. After a moment he found a trail and started along it. He’d be harder to track on the packed earth than crashing through pristine bushes, right?
His heart pounded. The slow leak of his life’s blood down his arm left him dizzy and slightly nauseated. He could taste terror like copper and bile on his tongue. They were going to kill him. He didn’t stand a chance. They would shoot him to death and they’d rip out his entrails and if he were really lucky, they’d wait for him to die first. The image of that hooked knife rose in his mind’s eye, piercing his tanned abs, plucking his still glistening bowels from his belly in a moment of exquisite agony.
No, Carlin. Stop being the man who can’t survive this. Become the man who can.
The sun set as he stumbled ahead of his pursuers, their sounds like hounds on his heels. He tore off a strip of shirt and tried to make it into a makeshift bandage, but he didn’t think that it did much good. Heat bled away and the cold, the sweat, and the blood loss left him shivering in the night.
Don’t die. Keep moving. You aren’t going to freeze to death. You are going to get out of this.
His stomach plummeted as he approached the cabin, with its dark windows and foul stains, reaching up the log walls like grasping fingers, clawing at the ceiling. The windows gaped and there was a smell, like something in the woods had started to go rotten. There was something wrong with that cabin. His skin turned to ice. If he entered that cabin, all of this ended. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he fought the urge to vomit.
“Carlin!” someone shouted, distant in the darkness. Carlin looked around, but in the now-black wood the sound bounced around. A woman’s voice. She continued, “So fitting that it ends here, isn’t it?”
The cabin sat in a clearing of rotting leaves scattered with a few fallen branches. He could smell something else now, under the rot. Something metallic.
“The others are coming, Carlin, but I knew this was where you’d come. This cabin’s been in my family for generations.”
The windows stared at him like gouged-out eyes. Lifeless. Hollow. Grotesque.
“I’ve radioed for them, Carlin. They are converging on this spot. Give up. It could all be over. Do the right thing. Let go.”
Why did the woman’s voice sound familiar? Ah. Yes. The waitress from the diner. It was all so clear now. The men in the diner hadn’t been wishing she’d leave. They’d been looking to her, not Raymond. Waiting for the signal to attack. The woman with the load-bearing makeup. The mastermind.
She was trying to get into his head. He needed to stay calm. If he dashed out into the clearing, he’d be shot.
A gunshot sounded in the night. A bullet bounced off a tree, but not close to him. She fired at shadows.
“I’ve lived here my whole life, and you come here, try to ruin everything. My grandmother used to take me to this cabin. I would sing as she cleared the traps and skinned the animals. As she taught me the old magic. As she told me about the Grand Old Ones and the Ancient Gods and the ways of the primal wood. I’d help her sort guts and eyes and brains, scoop them two-handed into the waste bin.” Her voice turned wistful. “I used to sing.”
Carlin circled the cabin quietly. If he kept moving, maybe he could nail down her location, but the cabin pulled at him, like a chain, and he a good dog, circling. Testing the range of his leash.
Her voice rose, strangely beautiful, a ponderous, slow tune, like a dirge.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…”
Gunshot. A bullet ricocheted off a tree about thirty feet away. Carlin cringed and froze as her voice, haunting with its subtle southern drawl, echoed around the woods. It shifted slightly as she sang. She was circling as well, looking for that angle that would bring Carlin into full view.
“…He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…”
Carlin had almost made it around the building now. A bat flew overhead, too-tight skin drawn over a skein of bones and gristle, beating into the night. The dread of the cabin pulled at him, like a fishhook in the deep-body fascia of his torso. He had to see the raincoat. He didn’t know what raincoat that was, but he knew it would make sense when he saw the front of the building. He needed to know if the raincoat were hung up or spread out. What did that mean?
“…He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword…”
The wound in his arm stopped hurting now. The cold no longer touched him. The corner of the building rotated slowly in his view. He could almost see the front. Almost. The dread rose in him. His throat clenched. What was he going to see?
Another gunshot—this one far away. “…His truth is marching on…”
The door slid into view, half in, half out of shadow in the pitiless moonlight. Black… gaping… hungry. But closed. The yellow raincoat hung on the frame, and for some reason, the sight filled him with rage.
The bleeding had stopped on his arm. The door was his world, drawing him forward, implacable. Undeniable. Irresistible. He took a step toward the door. Another. She kept singing. He didn’t care.
A bullet crashed into his leg, and he ignored it. Another shattered rib and tore lung, but it was inconsequential. Another bullet and another.
Then the gunshots stopped for the moment, lyrics echoing down through the forest as woman presumably reloaded.
The yellow raincoat. What did it mean? Why did the cabin call to him? He could smell death and metallic stink. He looked at the door below the tape, no, not tape, a raincoat. No, tape. His mind changed the tape into a rain slicker, but he could force himself to see the truth. The black and yellow tape, hanging from the frame. The stain. Blood. Something had been slaughtered here, staining the bottom of the door and the stoop.
And for some reason, he thought, Good.
“Carlin,” Lexi said, “you have returned to this location. Would you like to add it to your favorites?”
Returned? He’d never—
He looked at the tape. No, raincoat. No. Yellow police crime scene tape. It hung, torn where it was attached to one side of the door, a fragment of yellow on the opposing side of the frame. Once sealing the world away from what was inside, someone had clawed the tape away to try to get through that door. To the crime scene. He looked at it…
…And saw the door, clean in the daylight on some other day.
And he saw the diner, but different patrons, him eating a different lunch.
And he saw the diner again, Raymond in his Highway Patrol uniform, watching him suspiciously, the woman with the load-bearing makeup staring, whispering a charm of protection. The magic resonated in his chest, but it was so weak, he couldn’t do anything but laugh, their fear pounding as a headache burned in his skull…
And he saw these woods during the night as he moved through, dragging a thrashing victim by the hair, almost to this cabin.
He understood now. He hadn’t imagined the events at the Highway Patrol. Time hadn’t reset. He’d merely… willed the two worse wounds away. He’d been too weak to do the third, and his mind couldn’t handle it. He hadn’t understood.
Carlin gasped and he was back in the now. “Lexi, how many times have I been here?”
“Seven times.”
The gunshots started again, ripping through his body, but he was too close to his source of power now. He ignored them like so many flies, drunk and bloated on corpses. His h
eadache raged.
“Lexi, what day is it?”
“February sixth.”
No, that wasn’t right. He’d left his house in January. He should have arrived in Chicago on the 27th. He had business there. Business. He had just stopped at the diner for a meal. He hadn’t been here a week…
No. He’d walked out of his job. He’d come here. Why would he even be in Oklahoma on a trip from New York to Chicago? He didn’t understand. It was as if he were sleepwalking, drawn to the perfect place. The place for his real work to begin.
He touched the door and the protection magic sensed him, began to rally to tear him in two like whoever had been the source of the bloodstain, the person who had torn aside the crime scene tape, desperate to get inside. And then the magic of the door recognized him. It withdrew.
Ah. Yes. That’s why they needed his entrails. To undo the ward on the door. To disturb his work inside.
“He’s entering the cabin!” he heard Jimbo scream in the distance. The rest had arrived. Their fear pounded like a migraine in his head.
The woman still sang, the lyrics punctuated by the shots. “…He died to make men holy, we must die to make men free…”
“We need his entrails!” Raymond screamed.
“I’m out of rounds! I need a bigger gun!”
“Oh, God. Oh, God, he’s going to do it. He’s going to finish it!”
Carlin frowned. He looked down at his bullet-ridden body, but already the wounds had closed. He looked back at the woods. He could feel their terror, pounding in his skull. Ah. Yes. He’d forgotten. That was the last ingredient of the ritual.
Years ago, he hid under his abusive mother’s bed as the dark voices whispered to him that if he just waited for his father to beat her, he could use her terror to cast a control spell. Then it would just be a matter of forcing her into an affair with that neighbor who always leered at her. He’d catch them and get the proof, so his father would divorce her. Or beat her to death. He was good either way. His father only beat whores, after all.
A year later, standing over those goddamn Southern stepbrothers with their fucking hick accents, the baseball bat rising and falling until their terror pounded in Carlin’s head hard enough to split his skull, then listening to the dark voices again as they explained how to use the boys’ blood and fear to bind them in a spell that would never allow them to speak of this to anyone.
As an adult, hiring black thugs to attack a coworker at night, then watching from the shadow, a tissue with the coworker’s DNA in one hand as he waited for the sweet headache as he sensed their fear, ready to cast a spell of ill fortune.
Today the fear, not his own, just feeling like his own, flowing off the men who attacked him in the diner, giving him strength. More fear, from the Highway Patrol, just enough to heal the gunshot wounds…
And his entire life, the whispered voice, always in and out of his mind, his constant companion, forgotten moments after it had spoken. “The stars were right at the time and place of your birth,” it said. “You will be my vessel, and one day, when the stars are right again, my door. You will be the man I need you to be.”
Oh. Right. He was opening a door.
He pushed the door to the cabin open.
His spell had worked, keeping these low-born hicks out of the ritual area over the week he’d spent hunting victims. He’d made just enough mistakes that the townspeople figured out it was him, so he could lead them back here for the end.
He stared at the bodies inside the cabin, bloated with rot, their organs dark and glistening, the effluvia of their seeping wounds used to draw symbols that twisted and wriggled, taunting him, whispering terrible things. Dirty things. Horrible things. He giggled. Right. Raymond was so right. He should have seen it all along. Just so very right.
This was all much easier if he just let go.
“You don’t have to be crazy to work here!” he called out to the hicks as they charged his position, fear rolling off them in great, delicious, head-pounding torrents. “But it helps!”
Then he became the man he needed to be. A moment after that he became the Thing with No Name. A moment after that he roared.
And then he devoured them all.
A BROWN AND DISMAL HORROR
Jaleta Clegg
“There she is, Cletus. Ain’t she a beauty?” Skipper waved his hand over the top of the battered steering wheel. In the distance, a ramshackle cabin crouched on the side of a hill as if it expected to slide into the gully below at any moment. The accompanying outhouse looked much sturdier and more securely positioned, straight and tall on a flat spot of ground surrounded by shaggy pines. Skipper gunned the engine, ground the gears, and let the pickup roll down the rutted dirt road.
“You sure the still is up there?” Cletus sucked the gap where his left bottom bicuspid used to sit.
Skipper bounced the truck through a series of potholes before answering. “Sure as shootin’. Got me a batch of ’shine just last month from it. We got us enough corn to cook up a double batch this time. My granpappy knew what he was doing when he built it. It’ll last ’til Judgment Day and then some.”
The truck slalomed through the gully at the bottom, spewing sand from beneath its tires before lurching up the bank on the far side. A plastic grocery bag slid under Cletus’s foot.
“What’s this, Skip?” Cletus hefted the bag and its load. “A book? This don’t look like your usual reading material.” The book was thick, bound in strangely delicate pale leather. Arcane lettering flowed across the front, penned by hand in dark brown ink. Discoloration from an old water splotch spread like leprosy from the bottom corner.
“It’s for the outhouse. Feel that paper. Ain’t that the softest you ever felt? I grabbed that from a dumpster behind that university what done closed last winter. They had a whole pile of old books just tossed back there. I got more in the back, but that book’s got enough pages to last us the whole season.”
Cletus flipped the cover back. A faint odor of decay and rot clung to the pages. He ran his fingers over the title page. The letters were strangely shaped, square and full of odd angles, as if the person who had penned them suffered from some strange affliction of the musculature system that caused bizarre twitches. Almost as if terror were infused in every pen stroke.
Cletus whistled. “That is the softest I ever felt. Better than that Charmin paper Lucie Mae is always after me to buy.”
“We’re living like kings this weekend. No women, no rules, and plenty of ’shine to keep us warm.” Skipper pulled the truck to a stop in front of the cabin.
Rosebud, the hound who had patiently waited out the bumpy ride in the back of the truck with the bags of feed corn, bounded out before the dust had time to settle. She woofed once before relieving herself on the nearest patch of meadow grass.
Skipper and Cletus banged their way out of the truck, doors slamming and shedding more dust from the rusted body of the vehicle. They grabbed the bags of corn, hefting them over their shoulders as they headed behind the cabin to the hidden shed half-buried in the hill.
“Let’s get her fired up,” Skipper said as he pulled the door open on the shed. “We’ll get the ’shine cooking then do us some hunting. Steak for dinner?”
“Long as it ain’t possum or squirrel again.” Cletus dropped his bag on the floor of the shed. “I got to go test out that new paper, if you catch my drift.”
Cletus headed back for the truck where he pulled the book from the front seat. He crunched his way across the loose grit to the door of the stately outhouse. Rosebud bounded up to him, wagging her tail until she caught a whiff of the book. She backed away, a whine building in her throat.
“Just an old book, girl. Don’t you worry none.” Cletus waved the book at the dog.
Rosebud broke into a long howl before disappearing into the underbrush next to the porch of the cabin.
Cletus studied the hole where the hound had fled. “Huh. Just old paper full of dusty old words. Nothing to be scared of
.” He stared a moment longer before answering the increasingly urgent call of nature. The outhouse door banged shut on his heels.
He checked for spiders before sitting on the wooden seat, polished by several generations of bottoms. Sunlight drifted through the obligatory crescent moon cutout in the door. Dust motes danced in the beam. The light shone on the ancient text. The lettering on the cover beckoned, tempting Cletus to explore the pages within. He hefted it into his lap. His fingers strayed over the odd words. His lips moved as he attempted to sound out the name scrawled beneath the title.
“‘Mis-ka-tonic.’ Huh. Sounds like an imported beer.”
He flipped to a random page. His fingers picked out words as he stumbled his way through the unfamiliar lettering. The syllables fell from his mouth, awkward and angular and unfamiliar. The afternoon air stilled in the outhouse, as if a giant beast held its breath. Though the autumn sunshine was bright and warm, a chill slithered up through the hole beneath.
Cletus finished the final syllable. The invisible presence loosed a sigh, a breath of frigid air that stirred the dusty motes and set them dancing. Cletus gave a final grunt before ripping the page from the book. He slammed the book shut, then shoved it onto the ledge beside the seat before he put the soft page to good use, dropping that into the hole when he finished.
The door banged shut behind him leaving nothing but a lingering odor to indicate his recent visit. The dust motes settled to a slow drift. An icy chill rose from the dank hole beneath the seat. The words had been spoken. A portion of the man had been given to the Elder Gods. Not the most desirable portion, but it had been many long years since their slumber had been disturbed by anything mortal. Any sacrifice was better than no sacrifice.
The darkness beneath the seat swirled into life. A strange light grew deep in the hole, a glow of darkness that sucked in joy and warmth and radiated desolation and the chill of the nether worlds. The dust motes drifted into the strange not-light where they joined the whirling blackness in a spinning dance. The fetid smell of freshly used outhouse rose on the icy column of air generated by the swirling mist.
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