Arcane

by Nathan Shumate

  When the child finished she crept into the eviscerated torso, curled into a ball, pulled the flaps of flesh over herself like a blanket, and slept. She didn’t have to sleep long.

  In the dark hours of the morning the child emerged. When her arm slid out of the corpse it was still pale and small, but her hands were bigger, her fingers thicker and capped with long black claws. Her head emerged, a blood-mottled clump of black hair that now fell over round yellow eyes and tangled in an oversized mouth of sharp teeth. The child stepped out of the body and knelt beside the pile of organs. Each slipped into her mouth and down her throat. Her body responded, rippling with growth. Not much, but by the time she chewed and swallowed the last bits of her mother’s heart, she was a few inches taller. Her muscles made a hard outline under her thin, veined skin.

  She went back to the town and saw two men standing at the spot where her mother had been hanging. They were whispering to each other about the missing body. The first one, a fat man with a dirty brown beard, said, “Wolves.” The second, a fat man with a dirty black beard, shook his head and said, “The last one. The bitch. The demon.”

  The child was a stark white blur erupting from shadow. She dug her claws into Brown Beard’s legs, opening rents as she hit his midsection. He yelped and tried to bat her away with his gun, but by the time he got the butt around she had raked open his belly and jumped sideways. Brown Beard dropped his gun and fell to his knees, clutching insides that poured out over his hands. He gasped, tried to call out, but his voice hitched up. He flopped onto his back and tried to stuff his intestines back into his belly.

  The child landed on Black Beard’s face. She slashed his neck open and he too dropped his gun. He fell backward, and the child landed with him, her teeth already burrowing into Black Beard’s face. She licked his eyes, popped them with her fangs. Bit deeper, crunching through his nose, up into his brain, to the sweet meat she found waiting there.

  When she was done she jumped back onto Brown Beard. She blinked large eyes at him as he wheezed and tried to push her away, but in the end she had his eyes and brain as well.

  She was about to begin carving out hearts when the smell hit her. A scent drifting on the wind. It excited her. Drew her up the stairs of the building with the large wooden cross over its doors. She moved inside, past rows of benches, to the dark space beyond. She crept up stairs lit by candlelight, to the balcony. At the back was a long hallway, and at the end a door was wide open, beckoning her. She eased inside.

  A gray man lay on a bed. Behind him, cradling the old man’s head, was another man. A tall, thin man in black wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. The knife in his hand was sawing into the neck of the older man, who was flailing and jetting blood.

  “Die, Cranston,” said the man with the hat. “Die with the rest of your bastards.”

  The older man struggled, but the fight was already lost. The tall man’s knife continued its path, and more blood poured onto the sheets, sprayed onto the wall across from the bed.

  The child growled and tensed. But a shadow from behind the door took form. Hands gripped her shoulders. Hot, clawed hands. A piece of the shadow bent to her and whispered, “Don’t interfere. Bear witness.” The child recognized the shadow’s scent. She stood still.

  The old man sighed, and his arms fell limp. He spasmed on the bed, then went still. The tall man looked up, and saw the child.

  “Now,” said the voice from behind her. She leapt forward, planted clawed fingers into the tall man’s eyes, and ripped downward. The tall man’s face came off in her hands. He fell beside the bed and the child tore into his head. Her muscles rippled again, her body grew. She heard a thump as the tall man’s leg kicked at the bed, but she ignored it. Just dug her claws into his belly and began to rip at what she found.

  A voice sang out. The shadow had detached itself from the wall behind the door and had moved into the room, singing. Though the child didn’t know the song “Amazing Grace,” she stopped and lifted her head. The shadow’s voice was beautiful. She lowered her head to the ground and cooed.

  The shadow approached. It was steaming as it sang, its flesh sizzling and dropping off in charred bits. When it reached her it held out a dark hand for a kiss. She nuzzled it, licked it.

  The song ended. The shadow’s flesh stopped burning. The child crept gently up his leg. Clambered onto the bed. She eyed the dead gray man, readied her claws. But a hand held her back.

  “Not this one,” said the shadow. He lifted her. In the darkness, eyes opened and stared at her. Yellow slits against the black. “You are beautiful—my first thrice-born child.” He nodded towards the dead man. “I told him it was only a matter of time. I told him his end would come from those around him and not from me or mine. But he had faith. He truly believed.”

  The shadow ran smoky fingers through the child’s hair. “He took your brothers and sisters in. He loved them. He taught them. It was a… surprise. I’ve never been beaten, child. But this one, he held me off longer than most. You will not touch him.”

  He set her down and walked over to the bed. Stood over the dead man, lifted old gray hands, and folded them over the man’s chest. He cupped them. Whispered, “It is my right. But this time… I think I will not.” When he stepped away the girl saw that the dead man was now holding a roll of paper under his hands. She blinked her yellow eyes, looked up at the shadow.

  The shadow chuckled. “Come now. We’re going to do something fun together, my daughter. We’re going to take back what I gave him.”

  ***

  They walked out of the church and into town. Every door unlocked at the shadow’s touch. Each time the child crept inside. She found townsfolk asleep. She found them pacing. She found them poring over documents, making lists. All of them purposely ignoring the thirteen bodies hanging outside of the church, and the one inside it, as well. The one who had given them a town of their own.

  Old and young, men and women, the child found them all. She slit their throats, tore open their bellies, shattered their skulls. She ate what she found, growing slowly with every piece of meat that slid down her throat. When she emerged from the final house she was no longer a child. Six feet of shadow, almost the size of her father.

  He took her by the hand, and together they walked to the edge of town. He smiled at her, white fangs against deep shadow, and said, “You are truly my firstborn, daughter.” He leaned in and whispered something into her ear. Then he pulled back and said, “It will hurt, but only for a moment.”

  The girl, now a woman, looked back at the town. She inhaled, held a breath, and then said a word. Her first word. She said, “Hallelujah.”

  Every building in town burst into flame. The woman staggered as her own flesh erupted and scorched. But as her father had said, the pain faded quickly.

  They watched it burn together. The woman glanced over, saw her father staring as the church was eaten by fire. She felt the crack more than she heard it, and knew that the dead man inside had been consumed by the flames, the roll of paper with him.

  Her father sighed put his arm around her. They turned and walked into the woods, her father singing “Amazing Grace,” her humming along. Both of them burning along with the fire at their backs.

  IT’S NOT THE BOYS IN THIS FAMILY THAT HAVE TO WORRY

  Brady Golden

  Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, surrounded by tilting stacks of her clothing—patch-kneed jeans and bright t-shirts, mostly—Margaret informs her brother that at midnight tonight, she is running away. A hollow space opens up inside of him.

  “Where are you going to go?” he says.

  “I've got a… friend. In town.”

  She is sixteen, Kris twelve. More and more often, when he looks at her, he sees an adult, strong, severe and unknowable, but he can’t figure out what has changed. She’s marionette-thin, no taller or stronger than she’s been for years. Her breasts—as much as he hates to consider them—have developed, but not nearly as much as some of their cousins�
�. Her skin is a sun-blasted brown, only a few shades lighter than her shoulder-length, perpetually tangled hair. Freckles on her cheeks look like ink spots dispersed by a leaky pen.

  She reaches under her bed and slides out a green canvas duffel bag. She yanks down its zipper and begins to place her folded clothing inside.

  “I’m not going to let them get me like they got Mom,” she says.

  “But that’s a long ways off. You won’t change till you’re older.” He considers this, and adds, “Probably.”

  “Jesus Christ, there is no change.” She socks the duffel with a fist for emphasis. “This isn’t the fucking Middle Ages. It’s the twenty-first century. Change? Are you kidding me? These people are nothing but a pack of women-hating psychos.”

  “They’re our family.”

  “Yeah, well, our family’s fucked,” she says. “A few months ago, I went to talk to the police. To tell them what goes on up here.”

  She looks up at him, her eyes wet and hard, demanding a response. He tries not to let the shock register on his face. Don’t talk to outsiders. Of all their rules, it sits on top, sacrosanct, immutable. Not even Margaret should be able to violate it.

  When he doesn’t say anything, she goes on. “They brought me into the sheriff’s office and closed the door. You know what this guy said to me? He said that as a favor, he wasn’t going to tell Uncle Reggie that I’d been to see him, but that he didn’t want me coming around again.” Her voice trembles. “A couple weeks later, I went down to the high school to talk to the principal. I don’t know why. I guess I thought, he works with kids, I’m a kid, maybe he could help. First thing he did was call that same sheriff. I begged him not to, but that’s what he did. And this time, the sheriff did tell Uncle Reggie. He came and picked me up. The whole ride home, he only said one thing. ‘Test my patience, girl, and see just how soon you end up down in the dark.’”

  She is quiet for a moment. In a sudden burst, she snatches up her bag and flings it at the wall. Underwear and t-shirts fly out.

  “Can I come with you?” he says.

  “I don’t even know how I’m going to take care of myself. I’ve got to get a job, but who the hell’s going to hire me? I can’t take care of you too. I’m sorry.”

  “So you’re leaving me alone.”

  “You’ll have Dad. You and Dad will have each other.”

  Is she joking? For the past three years, the two of them might as well have lived alone. Their father is more like a fixture in their house than a parent, more like an aging, indolent pet cat than a human being.

  “Anyway, you’ll be fine,” she says. “You happen to have been born with a dick. Congratulations. It’s not the boys in this family that have to worry about what’s going to happen to them.”

  He’s not sure how true that is.

  She leaves him a phone number where she can be reached in case of “absolute, dire-as-hell emergency,” and a promise that as soon as she’s ready, he can come live with her, although she repeats several times that she has no idea when that will be. That night, as he lies awake in bed, he hears the front door open and close, and the soft scuffle of footsteps on the dirt road that leads out to Highway 175. With a cough and a grumble, a truck engine comes to life. He’s seen this friend. At least, he thinks he has. A few weeks ago, she brought Kris into town to run errands. In front of the Safeway, she handed him a grocery list and a plastic basket, and set him loose in the store with instructions to meet her by the cash registers when he’d found everything. As he paced the aisles, enjoying the air conditioning and the crowd, he spotted his sister in the produce section with a boy about her age in a white polo shirt and a backwards baseball cap. They stood close, not quite toe-to-toe, with their hands joined between them. Kris wondered then, and he wonders now, as the sound of the engine recedes, how she ever came to meet this friend. How does anyone meet anyone?

  ***

  Their house matches the six others that ring the lawn in layout and décor—one and a half stories, white clapboard, pointed tarpaper roof—and stands out only because of its condition. A hardened crust of dirt and dust coats it, making the paint look gray, the color of old meat. Cracks run in lightning bolts across the entire structure. Desiccated mosquitoes and moths hang from the window screens, embedded in the loose mesh. Kris’s aunts, uncles and cousins all maintain their houses, and none is so well maintained as the main house where Uncle Reggie lives with his wife and kids. Three stories, eight bedrooms, all turrets and balconies, spires and gables, it towers over the others, catching a brighter sunlight in its white gloss and reflecting it back like snow.

  Everyone calls the property a ranch, but there’s no livestock to speak of. The houses sit at the bottom of a small valley, surrounded by wooded hills crisscrossed with animal trails and fire roads. Kris has no idea how deep into the wilderness their property reaches. Somewhere, a fence runs through the trees and brambles, but he’s never seen it. Somewhere, at the end of one of those roads, a hole with a metal lid clamped on top of it plunges deep into the ground. He’s seen that once, and it was enough.

  When he was younger, he and his cousins used to play in the hills. Margaret was too old to play along, but not too old to come with them. She would follow the pack of kids from clearing to tree fort to creek, always around, rarely participating. She opted to stand just to the side, beyond the lines of fire, with a look of slight disapproval etched on her face. When she spoke, it was either to instruct them in the rules of whatever game they were playing, despite the fact that the games were of their own design and had no rules beyond the ones they invented, or to chastise them when they were doing something that the grownups down in the valley might disapprove of—climbing too high in trees, swearing, flinging clods of dirt and mud at one another. As his cousins shrank away, Kris would stand up to her. He would tell her that no one liked her or wanted her there. It was an act. He didn’t mean it. He knew how intimidated his cousins were by his sister’s age, and he liked knowing that she was his, that their relationship was private, a portal to an older, wiser world to which only he had access.

  All that came to an end when their mother changed. Kris and Margaret stopped getting invitations to their cousins’ games. At school each day, even the aunts who taught their lessons avoided looking at them, and at the big Sunday dinners at the main house, they—just the two of them; their father no longer bothered attending—were seated in a corner and ignored by all thirty-four members of their extended family. It was stupid. It was unfair. What had happened wasn’t their fault. It could—it would—happen to any of them.

  Under their own roof, things were not much better. Kris’s memories of his father before are vague, more like feelings than actual remembrances, but those feelings are warm. “Not strong, but stronger, at least,” is how Margaret describes the way he used to be. Now he doesn’t make it out of bed until noon when everyone else has been up since dawn, and he spends the rest of the day on his own, pacing the halls, wandering from room to room, purposeless, accomplishing nothing. At dusk, he posts himself on the living room sofa and sets to work building a wall of empty Bud Light cans on the coffee table; No alcohol is another one of the family rules, but when it comes to him, no one bothers to enforce it. A few hours after that, he’s snoring in his bedroom. Margaret took over for their mother when it came to keeping the cupboards stocked and the family fed. Their father never cooks. Kris isn’t even sure when he eats. It’s been years since they all sat down to a meal together. Once in a while, Uncle Reggie stops by to berate him for not contributing more to the family—adults and kids alike participate in the ranch’s upkeep—but nothing ever comes of it.

  After Margaret leaves, Kris stops going to school. He skips Sunday dinner. If people see him without his sister, they might wonder about her, and he fears the questions they’ll ask. He stays in his bedroom, only venturing out when he knows his father is asleep. Occasionally they pass each other in the hall on a trip to the bathroom or the kitchen, but that’s the ex
tent of their contact. If his father notices Margaret’s absence, he says nothing. The contents of the refrigerator and the cupboards dwindle. Kris doesn’t know what he will do for food when it runs out. His sister’s bedroom door stands closed, and each time he walks by it, it reminds him of the emptiness on the other side. All his life, grownups have been telling him how lucky he is to live on the ranch. The rest of the world, they say, has forgotten the importance of family. Out past the gate, down Highway 175, lonely people fend for themselves, but here they care for and about one another. He thinks of this when he goes his third, then his fourth straight day without saying a word to anyone.

  ***

  It takes Uncle Reggie a week to figure out what has happened. Kris sits on the floor of his room, his back against the foot of his bed, and listens to the yelling downstairs. Beyond the occasional shouted profanity, he can’t make out individual words, just the sustained warble of Reggie’s fury. When his father breaks in, it’s with a much quieter voice, one easily shouted over. Periodically, the house jumps with the bang of a slammed door or a kicked-over piece of furniture. He hears stomping on the staircase and lifts his face to the door. The voices grow louder.

  “Leave him alone, Reg. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “He knows. If anyone has a clue what’s going on in this goddamned house of yours, it’s him. It sure as hell ain’t you, anyway.”

  The door bursts inward. The knob hits the wall with a soft crunch. Reggie looms in the doorway. Patches stand out in his black beard. The flesh under his eyes droops like wet fabric.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know.”

  Kris opens his mouth in the hope that an ingenious lie might come spilling out. Under the sustained pressure of his uncle’s small eyes, his mind stumbles and sputters.