by Jw Schnarr
Caleb crawled into the room, then offered a hand to Laci.
“Make sure you don’t look into the lantern, whatever you do,” he said. “The light’s bright enough to burn the eyes outta your head.”
Laci climbed into the room with Caleb’s help, then squinted her eyes as the beam of light went by. Even with her eyes clamped shut, the lantern washed her eyelids with white hot light, sending pain through the side of her head. She grabbed for her skull, then stopped.
A sound floated across the threshold of pain, a soft dry sound.
Chittering.
“Jed? Jerry?” Caleb called, swinging around. “It’s me, boys. Poppa’s come back.”
The chittering grew louder on the opposite side of the lamp mechanism, near the front of the lighthouse. Now that she could see again, Laci saw the small door that led out onto the balcony.
Caleb stepped around the side of the lantern.
“Boys?” he asked again, cautiously. The chittering noise stopped. All they could hear was the steady, monstrous THRUM…THRUM…THRUM of the lantern machinery. It came around again, and Laci turned her head away.
THRUM…THRUM…THRUM…
Caleb disappeared around the side of the light, leaving Laci alone. The shadows up here, such as they were, were in constant motion due to the shifting light source. It was difficult to judge where anything was.
“Jedidiah!” Caleb barked. “Jeremiah!”
Outside, the frenzied wind beat fat heavy raindrops like bullets against the glass wall of the room.
Inside, Laci scanned the living shadows for movement. It had gotten hideously quiet all of the sudden, which unnerved her.
“Caleb?” she asked. She took a step around the side of the lantern. The beam blasted the far wall, away from her. She took another step.
“Caleb?” she asked again.
As she rounded the machine to the front of the lighthouse, she saw Caleb standing there quietly, his face in his hands. He looked as though he wept.
She took another step toward the man.
Jed and Jerry were there, arms waving horribly above their heads. They stood before Caleb, but they paid no attention to him.
They stared at Laci.
One of the boys raised a hand toward her, pointing a long gnarled finger in her direction. It took Laci a moment to realize the finger dripped with blood.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
The light struck the twins then, lighting them up against the glass of the windows. Blood covered them. It was on their hands and arms; it flowed across their faces in crimson runnels. One of the boys chewed something slowly. Blood rimmed his mouth.
“Caleb!” Laci screamed.
The old man turned toward the sound of her voice, and she saw that he bled horribly through his fingers. When he raised his head, she had a brief moment of clarity.
The twins had taken his eyes.
“GET OUUUUUT!” he screamed at her, reaching out blindly. Blood poured from the claw marks on his face, the black pits where his eyes had been.
The twins reacted to the noise by reaching out and grabbing Caleb around the chest and throat. Using all four of their arms, they easily lifted the old man off the ground.
He struggled against his sons, but weakened as he was by blood loss and shock, it was all he could do to kick feebly at them.
The twins’ large black eyes bored across the beam of light at Laci. Contemptuously, easily, they flung the old man against the windows. He let out an agonized gasp and collapsed in a heap.
Laci gaped at them. They had resumed the slow, rhythmic waving of their arms over their heads, and they rocked back and forth. One of them opened his mouth, revealing jagged, uneven teeth.
And then the chittering began again in earnest.
They began to move toward Laci just as the beam of lantern light hit her full on the face. She’d been so paralyzed by the sight of the boys she’d forgotten to cover her eyes.
She was remembering now.
The beam blasted her face like a bludgeon and there was a terrible moment of excruciating white brilliance followed by a clear blue after-image of the scene before her. Laci staggered under the blow, clutching at her eyes and falling back against the wall. The intense heat of the beam bathed her as it passed.
The chittering grew louder, more excited.
Laci dug at her eyes with the palms of her hands. They itched horribly. The blue after-image began to fade, leaving only the malformed faces of the twins. She needed to get up and moving.
She opened her eyes, and amid the shifting, ever-changing shadows she saw grainy black spots. Somewhere amidst all that confusion and movement Jedidiah and Jeremiah were coming for her.
Laci rolled over to her side. The shock of the lantern light had brought on a staggering pain in her temple, but she tried to blink through it and crawl to her feet. She fell back against the wall, shuffling along it one step at a time. She was nearly blind and her head pounded with a nuclear throb.
The chittering grew louder yet. The twins were somewhere off to her right.
“Stay away from me!” she screamed, lashing out futilely with her fists.
“You don’t belong here,” came a leathery, insectile voice out of the shadows.
She stopped dead where she stood.
“Keep back,” she said.
“We are here for you,” came the reply. “You called us, and we came.”
“What?” Laci stumbled against the wall again. She came to a point where the wall suddenly became very cold, and it took her a moment to realize that she had come all the way around to the front of the building.
“We were not here for him,” another voice said. It was softer than the first, but just as rough, just as buzzing, just as alien.
The lantern mechanism grumbled as the light once again passed by Laci. When she opened her eyes, she could barely make out the form of the twins before her.
Lightning crashed outside in the maelstrom and for one moment the room was lit up in electric blue light. The twins had resumed their waving, but they made no further moves toward Laci.
“Come with us,” they said together, their voices one.
“Where?” whispered Laci. She backed several steps away from them and nearly fell over a soft obstacle resting against the window.
It was Caleb. He hadn’t moved from where his sons had hurled him. His eye sockets oozed slow, thick blood onto the metal floor.
Laci bit her lip to keep from screaming.
“Come with us,” they chanted again.
“I’m not going anywhere with you!” she shouted. “Just leave me alone!”
“You don’t belong here, Laci,” one of them said, and the other said: “They wait for you on the other side. We saw your light. We followed your light.”
“Fuck you,” she said, sobbing, her brain reeling with what they had said. Could it be true? Had they come back, come from whatever realm of shadow and darkness they’d been lost in for so many decades, to collect her? What exactly had that Tachyon laser done? She looked down, sidestepped Caleb’s body and resumed her slow shuffle along the wall. She saw the balcony door only feet away and decided that was going to be her exit.
She took three quick steps then, grabbing the handle of the door. The twins hissed at the sudden movement. Arms raised like an angry tarantula, they scuttled toward Laci.
She turned the knob and yanked hard.
It didn’t budge.
“Come on, you bastard!” she shrieked. She pulled again, even harder.
Nothing. The door was stuck fast.
Jedidiah and Jeremiah stepped over Caleb’s body, only a few feet from her. They chittered to each other, their faces contorted in rage.
And then Caleb came alive. He reached up and grabbed the boys by the hank of flesh that joined them at the waist, and threw his chest hard against the backs of their legs. Surprised by the movement, the twins stumbled and fell to their knees against the wall, the old man riding them down.
“Get the fuck out of here, Laci!” he yelled, trying manfully to pin the boys down.
Laci looked at the doorknob in her hands. She could make a run for the trapdoor on the other side of the room, but there was no certainty that she’d make it before the boys got to her. Conversely, she could waste time trying to open this door, and if she got it open it would lead…where? To the balcony? Then what? Where would she go from there?
There simply wasn’t time to think this through. Already the boys were untangling themselves from their father. He put up a valiant fight, but he was losing badly. The children were impossibly strong and they began to pummel the old man where he lay, their four fists like pistons.
There was a click then, at the door, and it opened freely in her hand.
The balcony.
The door had been jammed shut a moment before, but now it swung open easily. She could feel the wind of the storm pushing against it.
But was that all?
For the briefest moment, hadn’t she felt something else there? Something familiar?
Caleb had finally stopped moving. The boys stood up, fresh blood on their faces. There was no time left.
Laci closed her eyes and stepped outside onto the balcony.
The wind whipped heavy rain like beads of glass at her, stinging her with every strike. She reached out and grabbed the railing. She stood exactly where the twins had when she’d discovered them the night before.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw the lantern room as it truly was - a place of brightness and shade, of sunlight and shadows. It was the space between the light and the darkness where the twins had gone that day so many years ago.
They had slipped between the two extremes, into the churning gray light behind the lantern machine as it thrummed along its revolutions. Somehow, in all that swirling mass, they had found their way home.
But now they are back, Laci thought. They are back because an experimental laser had burned a tumor out of my head. But maybe it had also reached back across time like a beacon, calling to the children just like this lighthouse called ships in from the dangerous dark. Telling them the shore was looming, and they could come collect their prize, just as they had all those years ago in Corpse Cove.
She had cheated Death four times. Now Death had come to collect his due.
They looked at each other through the thick dirty glass of the lighthouse wall. Far below, the rocky cliffs of Frenchman’s Head took a beating from the ocean surf. Lightning struck off in the distance, somewhere in the town, and the roar was deafening even twenty miles away.
Laci backed away from the door.
The balcony was slick with rain and birdshit. She would have to move slower if she wanted to keep her footing.
But where to go? In circles around the top of the lighthouse like some idiot child’s game?
Round and round and round they go…
Except Laci knew where they were going to go. And she decided that, given the choice, she’d jump onto the rocks just like Sally had.
Some things were worse than death. And in the black, pitiless eyes of the Siamese twins, she saw something a lot worse.
“I’m up here!” she screamed into the wind, the storm. “HELP ME!”
The twins smiled at her, their teeth jagged and bloody.
“There is no help,” they said in unison. “There is no help and no hope for you.”
Laci put her hand up. The lantern beam appeared on the other side of the glass wall.
THRUMM…THRUMM…THRUMM…
The boys opened their arms wide, making a half circle around them. They stepped toward Laci, long gnarled fingers reaching and scrabbling horribly in the rain and wind.
The lantern beam cut across the storm-blackened sky, through the sheets of water of the storm. It reached the center of the glass wall.
Laci stopped, the scream dead on her lips.
As the light moved toward the twins, it illuminated the form of a young woman. She wore a yellow dress, her hair back in a smart tie. She looked as though she had stepped out of a portrait.
Laci’s heart froze.
The woman had the features of the children. Same jaw, same nose and cheek line. On the boys, they were malformed and ghastly. On her they were delicate. They were beautiful.
“Sally,” Laci whispered.
The twins stopped as the light engulfed them.
Sally moved impossibly fast. She reached out and wrapped her slender arms around her children, embracing them one final time.
The boys’ looks of rage quickly changed to terror.
Sally looked at Laci for a moment and smiled. Caleb had been right - she was beautiful.
And then the world exploded as lightning struck the lighthouse.
The blast nearly knocked Laci off the balcony. She clutched at the rail and fell to her knees on the hard steel grating.
The wall exploded outward, pluming shards of glass out over the ocean in a white spray. The lantern beam died and for a second after the shockwave knocked Laci off her feet, the world went completely black.
And the twins screamed.
Laci opened her eyes and saw them clinging to the side of the balcony. They had been knocked over the rail and now hung a hundred feet above the jagged cliffs of Frenchman’s Head.
She could see their fingers slipping.
“No!” the boys cried. “No, please! We don’t want to gooo!”
Laci felt it then, the creeping cold so familiar from her years in the dark places of the world. The ghost places. It floated up her spine and caressed her neck with cold, dead hands.
The feeling that the dead were nearby.
“NO, MOTHER!” the boys shrieked. Their fingers began to peel away from the balcony railing.
They looked to Laci, and for one brief instant they weren’t malformed monsters. They hadn’t killed anyone, nor come back from a plane of shadow.
They were simply scared little boys, trying to cling to life.
And then the instant passed.
They slipped from the railing, screaming as they fell.
Laci arose, ran to the side of the lighthouse and watched them fall through space, reaching for the railing still and holding each other with their other arms.
They fell into the jagged, broken rocks below.
Laci watched them carefully, straining her eyes to see any movement.
As she watched, the surf crashed into their bodies and a lonely, broken form crawled out of the water. It dragged itself along the rocks, its legs horribly shattered and angled out away from its body. It wore a pale yellow dress, shredded and blackened with rot from its many years in the ocean.
Sally reached her sons, grabbed them by one arm. Then she turned and slowly began to drag them into the sea.
Laci covered her eyes.
The lighthouse was completely black inside. There was no way she would be able to make it to the ground floor without killing herself.
Suddenly, thinking of something, her hand went to the pocket of her jacket.
Or would she?
She felt around for a moment, then pulled out a small black camera flashlight.
She smiled then, as a thin pale beam of light cut into the inky darkness of the lantern room.
It was time to go home.
“You sure you’re going to be all right?” Sheriff Danton asked as he took the last of Laci’s luggage to the car.
“Thank you, but yes, I’m going to be fine,” she said. She leaned against the hood and smiled, feeling warm sunshine on her face for the first time in what seemed like forever.
Danton shut the trunk and smiled.
“That’s the last of it,” he said. “Listen, Laci, maybe you’d like to stick around for another day or two? I could show you the sights, maybe buy you dinner…”
He smiled at her, that same well-rehearsed, winning smile. Perfect teeth. For a moment, Laci considered it.
“Thank you,” she said again, “but I’m afraid I have to get g
oing. Thank you for everything, Sheriff. Really.”
She opened the car door and got in.
Sheriff Danton leaned into the open window.
“You want to be real careful on these roads now, girl,” he said. “Never know, it could rain again.”
Laci smiled and started the car.
“Not where I’m going,” she said.
XMAS
by Douglas Hutcheson
The little pale creatures peered out from dank holes in rusty slagheaps, their beady pink eyes almost blind in the daylight, though the sky stood thick and dark with gun-metal grey clouds and splotchy green smoke churning from tall factory towers that scraped at the horizon where the yellow sun sank like a fetid yolk spilled into stagnant pond scum. The whir of great engines grew louder. The thin creatures popped their balding heads up to risk a glance and confirmed the approach of a sleek silver car hovering above the scorched earth.
Inside, the whole family sang a familiar carol: “Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells!” Mom and Pop and their son and daughter with faces all lit up pumped their arms into the air and then clapped their hands together. The hovercar steered itself along the narrow path that its program required to get the family home again with what should be their utmost safety.
“It’s more of them,” said a hissing voice from one of the scampering creatures. Others around it hissed back in reply and then bared their stained and broken teeth.
“Load the rocket launcher! Make ready to fire!” shouted a creature some feet behind them. He crawled further atop the heap, scraping himself on jagged rocks and crushing long-discarded cans of soda and candy bars and Styrofoam dinner boxes with logos of secret and once-powerful organizations whose true purposes, along with their actual existences, had long passed into the shadows of myth. “They’re almost upon us!” The creature shouted and then spat at the earth. He drew from a twisted leather belt a sword he had fashioned from an old copper pipe–-he had beaten the metal down until it stood almost flat but it sported sharp serrated edges where the pipe had split under the makeshift working. “Let your hatred speak through your weapons, my brave comrades! We shall settle for nothing less than total annihilation of the enemy of our kind! Fire! Fire! Fire!”