"Do you think he'll be okay?" I asked.
"Hard to say. Every time he goes in we think he ain't coming out this time and he always does. Spent his life cheatin' death, that one."
I nodded and started to walk back to my car, but he grabbed my arm. "Give 'em their names back," Patrick Reilly said. "When they come to you. Those things."
His pale eyes pinned me, and I knew he wasn't talking about his companions. My blood went cold.
"How?"
He smiled. "Talk to them. Them things you see were people once." He disappeared into the food line.
In front of me is a young boy, dark-eyed, in a green tunic and pants. I know he is my son. But his eyes are distant and cold like the landscape around him. We're separated by mist and rain and everything is barren and muddy. He reaches into his bag for a drink of water, but when he holds it to his mouth, the dirty, yellow rain gets in and he pours it out. He keeps trying.
I call to him; he looks at me and doesn't answer. He makes sounds, but cannot speak, not even to tell me he's okay. He isn't. Around him, shifting through the air, are disturbing creatures cruel and alien, denizens of no genetic tree I ever saw on Earth.
I gasped as I woke. Great. The first of many nightmares I was sure I'd be having about my kid, not the least of which would be when he learned to drive. Then I'd never sleep again.
But now, still a baby, Tom had stopped feeding and looked at me. His eyes held none of the roaming lack of focus characteristic of infants. Old Crystal's story mixed with the nightmare of my son crawled through my mind. True Thomas cursed by the Faery Queen, who disappeared from the world of Men, to return when everyone he knew was gone. I cuddled my son as he made a reassuring burbling sound, and blew a bubble with his spit.
When Bill came home, I asked him if he had found any records of Old Crystal at the clinic or hospital.
He shook his head, eyes darting around the room. "I know you asked me to check. He wasn't my patient, but I know the doctor who treated him. And he told me that there are no records for anyone with his identity."
"What about medical charts?"
"Nothing."
"Could the computer have lost it?"
"At that place? It's possible. Their system is archaic."
"So it's like, what, three years old?"
He flashed a computer-geek grin. "Bite me, Neo-Luddite."
"Well, what else did he say about Old Crystal?"
Bill shrugged, apologetic. "Not much; his recollection of him was a bit hazy. Docs can get burned out at that hospital. Remember, they take everyone. Which means it's crowded and busy all the time."
A chill went up my spine in the arid heat. "Or maybe more than his file disappeared." And then I sighed as I sat down into a chair. "You look like shit."
His smile faded. "These guys at the clinic are really tragic. I saw a guy a couple weeks ago, complained of pain in his foot. Well, when we pulled his boot off, it came off with a sucking sound because his foot was rotten. And I don't mean he just had stinky toes. I mean he had gangrene that was never even seen, let alone treated. He lost his leg up to his knee. And he doesn't have the money for a prosthetic. We can get him a chair, but not much else."
He stared into space for a second.
"There's something I want to tell you…" I said slowly. "I've been seeing weird things."
He glanced at me warily. "Weird like what?"
"Like shadows, doing things they oughtn't." I told him what I had seen. Or thought I had seen.
"Listen," Bill said, "I'm a doctor, or at least an intern, and the laws of physics say that your shadow is just a silhouette in a light stream. And a mirror is just a coating of silver covered by glass. But things have gone wonky around here. I've seen those things too."
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Many Native Americans do. We know there are spirits."
"What about you?"
"Maybe," he said, "but I never believed that I would see one." He let out a nervous breath. "Well, what do you want to do about this?"
"Let's call your mom. You know, don't you have that Enemy Ghost Way?"
He burst into a laugh, and rolled his eyes. "That's Navajo. Wrong tribe."
"Does that matter for ghosts?"
"It does because Mom doesn't know how to do it. That's like asking an electrician to fix a water main. Do you know any Navajos?"
"No."
"Me neither."
I ran for the phone. There had been lovely calm for a few weeks, barring the routine feeding of Tom The Black Hole. The phone rang, and at first I thought it was a crank call. Panting was all I could hear for a couple seconds.
"Schmuck!" I yelled. "Move out of your Mommy's basement!" I almost hung up.
"Wait, you there?" Bill caught his breath.
"Bill? What's up?"
"Remember when you asked about Old Crystal's records?"
"Yeah."
"Well, there are others that I recalled. Their records have all vanished too, and they all have something in common. They all had trouble either remembering who they were, or some psychosis where they lost a chunk of time."
I shivered and said nothing.
"The Russian girl, you know, Nuke Girl, believed she was displaced in our century, and that she was pursued by an ancient weather figure. Old Crystal believed the fairies stole years of his life. Christ, I think there's probably more." His voice echoed on the connection. "But I can't report this, because there's no way to prove it. No one seems to remember the files, much less the people. I can't prove they existed. I don't know what to do."
The room was cold and my brain raced. How many of these people drifted through time, bumping into other people only occasionally in a brief moment of contact? They were dark figures flashing by on a corner holding signs for passersby. How long had some of them been there? Some of them had been there for years. Decades? And where did they go, and why didn't anyone besides Bill and I remember them?
But I said none of my thoughts out loud. "Please come home." I hung up.
It's started again. And now it has involved both of us. The shadows shift and move even when we stare straight at them. They reach for us and brush dark fingers toward our bodies, but never quite touch us. Sometimes they separate into multiples of shadows.
There are no mirrors in the house. Bill smashed them earlier and threw them away after his image in the cabinet mirror put its hands on the surface when he was brushing his teeth, as though it would come right through.
They never rest. Not for a second. The edges of the silhouettes are like bacteria in Brownian motion, cilia rippling. Bill calls in sick, and hasn't slept for days on top of the sleep deprivation he was already suffering. But we must stay alert.
I can't stay awake much longer, but I won't let them get to Tom. He's crying most of the time, unable to sleep because I always shift and jerk, and we won't set him down in his crib alone. I remember what happened to him in my dream, when he is older.
Finally, Bill gets that science-guy look on his face and runs to the garage. He drags every single lamp he can find into the large walk-in closet. Then he tosses everything in the closet out onto the main room floor. His hands are shaking with fatigue.
"If we use a smaller space with no obstacles, it will be easier to illuminate the place bright enough so that there won't be shadows. Dammit, that won't work! It would have to be directly overhead, and then it would only work if we never moved."
"What about total darkness?" As soon as the words leave my mouth we both shake our heads. Our fear of the dark has voted logic off the island. The only place that we aren't haunted by the shadows is in the closet.
I stockpile formula and diaper-changing stuff, ice packs and a cell phone, and hold Tom close as we sit against the wall in the closet. The retina-searing light banishes most of the shadows. We avoid looking at the ones that remain and simmer in the corners of our vision. We call Bill's mom, but she isn't answering.
After two hours, it becomes clear tha
t our refuge isn't going to work. It's stifling in our small prison. It was ninety degrees in the house before we turned every lamp on in the suffocating closet. The funk of dirty diaper only adds to the lack of breathable air. Tom is sweating and crying again. Most of the formula is gone.
I say, "Give them back their names."
"What?" Bill's face is drawn. There are hollows under his eyes.
"Patrick Reilly said to give them back their names when they came to me."
"That's helpful. What the hell does that mean?"
"I don't know. I've tried talking to them, but they don't speak. Maybe I don't know how to listen to them, or maybe they don't even realize that I'm trying to listen. Maybe it's because they're used to no one hearing them, even when they were alive. And I don't know how we can name them if we don't know who they are."
"We can't stay in here with the baby like this."
"I know!" I yell. "But what else are we going to do? Now I know how Anne Frank felt."
"At least you could kill a Nazi."
The white, blind air is more and more putrid and hotter every minute. All three of us are soaked in sweat. Suddenly Tom stops sweating.
This is it. He needs water. We have to leave the closet. Now.
Bill and I look at each other.
I take a deep breath. "You said no one remembered Old Crystal. I think they don't even remember themselves. They've lost their names."
He reaches over and turns off the lights, all but one. The shadows come in, flood in from the corners and from under the door. There are dozens and they keep coming. The shadows crowd in, splitting and multiplying until they are legion, searching for someone to help them remember.
About Rachel Coles
Rachel Coles is a medical anthropologist living and working on public health in Denver, Colorado. She lives with her husband Adam and young daughter Rosa. She started writing horror stories because her daughter loves scary stories. Orphans of Lethe is dedicated to Rosa, and to Hobo Jim. http://www.rachelcoles.wordpress.com
BONFIRE NIGHT
by Chris Castle
They went to find the kite three days after the man was arrested. Until then, their parents had not allowed them back into the forest.
The kite's ribbon ran from the branches of a tree. The tail was red, decorated with small cloth triangles. The boy found it and pulled on his sister's shirt with one hand, pointing with the other. The two of them looked at it, and both silently understood that they would never give this discovery to the adults.
"He owned this kite," she said. She was aware that even though she whispered, her voice carried throughout the forest, just like the voices in the barn did. She sometimes sat in the barn's loft, up amongst the rafters and heard the men and women who met in secret there talking in whispers just as she was doing now. They feasted on the rumors, amongst their quiet, nervous laughter.
"He flew it on top of Bear Hill," she went on, and she enjoyed watching her brother pale, his skin sheen with sweat. "After each one, he flew it."
And right beyond the tree line, fireworks exploded into the sky. Somewhere close by, children sang 'remember, remember, the fifth of November.' The fire had not been lit, not yet, but the townsfolk were getting ready. She could feel it in the air, almost like a low, humming vibration.
"A kite," she said after a long while. "He made a kite out of their skin. He made the wood into the shape of a crucifix and then he sewed their faces right onto it." She looked over to her brother and saw him looking down into the dirt. She knew he was imagining dried red blood amongst the grains.
"He weaved the teeth into the trail to catch the wind better. Then he used their hair for the ribbons to make it glide. He really made it soar. The string he used was the same one that he finished them off with, around the throat." She touched her own neck without thinking. "If you held it up to the light, you could see it was red with blood, but otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell the difference."
"How do you know these things? You couldn't know!" His voice was high and cracking. He stared at her, the rims of his eyes red, like he was almost about to cry. She pointed upwards, to remind him of where she sat in the barn's roof sometimes. Once, she had led her brother up there and he had sat, opened-mouthed at the things he saw adults do, and the things they said when they thought no one was listening.
"All things flying," she said in a sing-song voice, knowing that the sweeter she made her voice, the sicker her brother would become. She could tell it was working, because her brother looked up to the sky, beyond the trail and past the tree line, trying to imagine the kite high in the air, the red of the material turning darker with other things.
Then the boy turned to study their find once again. "You don't know all these things," he repeated flatly, trying to keep his voice level to appear strong. He put his hands on his hips to steady himself, but he knew he wasn't strong at all.
"You don't know that I don't," she said calmly, undercutting her brother's bravado with a sense of fact, or even boredom. She watched him swallow down her words, and then she was about to say something else and was surprised when nothing came out.
Overhead there were more explosions; and through the trees they could see the flickers of dying rockets. Something screeched without exploding and made him flinch. There were not all that many trees to block their view of the events taking place in the town.
They stared at each other until she made a sudden movement; with a gentleness that surprised him, she pulled the kite from the branch, leaving it to softly drop at her feet. The boy waited for her to scoop it up into her hands, but instead she edged away, until she was further from it than him. The boy stepped forward and seized it in both hands, surprised at how eager he was to claim it.
"Check your fingers," she said, looking down from his face to his hands. Without thinking, he looked to the tips of each one, waiting to see if any of them were blemished red. There was nothing to see, save for the smile that grew and grew on her lips. Slowly, she licked each one of her fingertips, just to make him squirm even more before her. He clutched the kite to his chest and looked back to the town.
"We should get back. It'll be starting soon," she said to her brother, and he looked over to her and nodded. The humming in the air had risen, crackling the way the sky did just before a storm. The town's children had stopped singing, although there was still something like a murmur in the air. The pitch was different now, lower, and she realized it was the adults making the noise; not singing, not quite, but something like it; was it chanting? It was something like the ethereal sounds when they made love or whispered a secret. She knew it should have scared her, hearing grown-ups acting not quite as they should, but instead it excited her. It gave her the same sensations she experienced in the barn when voices slipped away into grunts and the speech broke away into pants of need.
"Are you ready to see?" she asked her brother, genuinely curious for his answer. It was the one thing she didn't know about him. For a long second he stood still, looking to her, then coughed gently.
"I'm ready," the boy finally said, and he clutched the malevolent kite to his chest, as if to prove the point. And so the two of them began the walk back to the town. The forest ran out almost immediately and soon they were on the path.
The kite grew heavy in his hands because he kept his fists clenched and his breathing grew labored. She listened to his wheezing until she could stand it no longer and seized the thing off him. He wanted to object, but he couldn't summon up his voice.
She taunted her brother with the sight of the kite now in her capable hands and flaunted how easily she walked with it. But something else too; she wondered if the sounds her little brother made were close to what they had made underneath the killer at the end. What sounds had their throats made just before he had drawn the kite string down over them? She wondered if what she heard was close to dying.
They reached the end of the path and stepped into the town. Everywhere was filled with hazy smoke now, firewor
ks either roaring into life or dying out on the ground around them. As she stepped through the mists, she became aware of a fire being lit, the crackle of the torches being brought into life. The earth was upside down; the ground was covered in clouds while the sky burned bright. She smiled at the feeling of confusion this brought, smiled so hard she almost burst out laughing. This is what chaos feels like, she thought happily, looking all around and seeing her brother's hands shake by his side amongst all the confusion.
She made out the shadow figures of the adults, all of them making their way to the barn where she saw them come alive at night. The first torch exploded into life, becoming a beacon for the rest to follow; slowly the shadows fell into a sort of order behind the fire and the townspeople marched into the barn. She followed them in, her brother by the door, so she could see just enough of what was about to happen. Some of the adults stepped out of the shadows, as if to shoo them away; and then they saw the kite in her hands, but they knew that she kept their secrets and so they looked away, pretending to ignore what she held as best as they could.
The man was at the center of the barn, tied to the cross with straw at his feet. His mouth was gagged, but he was not trying to scream. Instead, he simply looked from one face to the next, taking them all in. There was dried blood on his forehead, one eye was blackened and swollen, and his ear was torn. The sheriff had spent three days with him and had left his mark.
The sister looked around amongst the mists to see who was now in the barn for justice: the sheriff was there, as was the judge, all of those who had sat in that cold, grey room to bring forth a sentence, and so were all of their families.
The man who held the torch made his way to the heart of the barn. Three others stepped into the center, each clutching torches. The first torch-man turned and carefully lit each oiled rag that was stuffed into the kindling wood, the flames making the expression on the condemned man's face clearer. As the killer on the crucifix bit down on the gag, every twitch was clear to see, even as the fires kept the crowd hidden in the half-light.
What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine Page 18