Focussing on too many things at once, the footsteps, his follower, the encroaching storm, Morris lost his footing.
It wasn’t like before, when he’d cracked his ribs. He had slid then, on his haunches. Though he’d been unable to stop himself, a protruding outcrop had saved him. This time he fell more awkwardly. His left knee turned in an unnatural direction, sideways and outwards. The pain was instantaneous. He felt something tear inside it and give way. He felt bone gnaw against bone. He dropped in such a manner that his weight, supplemented by his backpack, shifted onto the other leg. It wasn’t strong enough to support him. He tumbled off the side of the ridge and fell through open air. For a brief second he felt weightless, without burden, and then there was impact.
He woke to the realisation that the injury was a bad one. A furtive glance at his legs confirmed his fears. Both were crumpled underneath him, impossibly so. He tried to put the image out of his mind. Curiously there wasn’t much pain, but then there wasn’t much feeling either. His ribs were worse. Each time he tried to move, a searing jolt shot through them. The very act of breathing was agony enough. He’d fallen six or seven meters, vertically, with nothing to break his fall but his backpack. He understood he would need help very quickly if he were to have any chance of survival. He stared upwards along the ridge, through the mist, into the white orb that was the sun, then in the direction of his follower. Surely it was only a matter of time before the man appeared behind him. Relief surged through him, and he basked in the irony of it. His relentless tormentor would become his saviour.
But time seemed to stretch as Morris lay stricken on the ledge. What could be stalling his follower’s climb? What had become of those incessant footfalls? A cold chill came over him. What if the man had turned back, perturbed by the encroaching mist, the gathering cloud? And then another thought. Might the fall have knocked him unconscious? If so, how long had he been out? Might his follower have already passed while Morris lay prone on the ledge? Passed without glancing in his direction, eyes focussed solely on his next step, as Morris should have done.
When the fog loosened he tilted his head back and looked at the inverted horizon, at the clouds amassing beneath it. He saw what they were, their purple hue, the weight of them. Even without the fall, those clouds were a threat. If he’d made it to the summit, and immediately headed back towards the bothy, would he have completed his return before the snow started to fall? For it would fall, there was no doubt about it. It would come up the side of the mountain, blowing and scudding, and it would bury him. He had to pray that the man who had been closing in on him all morning was almost to the ridge, that somehow he would discover him there.
It was much later when Morris thought he heard the steady crump and clack of boots on rock. He looked up at the ridge, hoping to catch a sight of the man in the ebbing mist. For a time there was nothing, just the grey shroud and the sound of the footfalls crushing the shale, but then a shape appeared on the edge of the ridge. A hunched form, the shadow of a man’s body angled against the slope.
Morris called out. “Hello!”
The figure continued up the ridge.
Morris called again, mustering what little strength he had. “HELLO!”
Pain exploded from his ribs.
Did the figure check his stride for an instant? Did he look about himself? Or was he just drawing breath before heaving himself on again?
“Down here. I need help,” gasped Morris, but his voice was weak and feeble now.
The man was almost to the point where Morris had fallen. In another few seconds he’d pass by. Morris reached for a rock, fighting the burning, agonised protests of his broken ribs and flung it in the direction of the man’s feet. It came up short and bounced away down the mountainside. Morris made to shout one last time, but because of what his eyes beheld, the words never escaped his lips. Instead, he shrieked, his broken body reverberating in pain.
“Gnnnnrrrrr.”
The thing appeared to him through a momentary thinning of the mist. It stood there perched on the escarpment above. He noticed the man’s clothing, its age; the sheep skin jacket, the heavy boots, the threadbare ropes around the man’s middle. And when the man turned to look at the congealing clouds Morris caught a brief sight of the face inside the hood.
Neither the cutting wind, nor the wet mist were what caused his weakening body to shudder.
The gaunt face, dried out and mummified, its skin stretched tight, its eye sockets empty, the lips drawn back, revealing sparse teeth loosely held at odd angles by gums that looked like petrified rubber. The nostrils spread wide, where the skin had stretched and torn them open…
The thing that had once been a man turned and shuffled onward along the ridge. It scaled the shale another few meters. And then something happened. Its boots dislodged a rock, which tumbled away and down the mountain. Morris’s follower, the thing that had haunted him since the previous afternoon, tumbled after it. With the fall came a high-pitched scream, one that contained more than the fear of falling, and a sound far beyond a mortal cry of terror. There was desperation and frustration in the cry, which could only come after years of torment, of having something coveted within one’s grasp but letting it slip. The dark shape dropped past him over the ledge, down the mountain and out of sight, to be replaced by an even more terrifying entity.
Silence.
Morris closed his eyes. He tried to tell himself he’d imagined all that had occurred, that he was losing his senses, going into shock. He tried to tell himself he was hallucinating. But he knew he wasn’t suffering from any of those things.
Not yet.
Night fell quickly on the mountain. The angry clouds brought their snow. Trapped on the ledge, unable to move, Morris scraped away at the rocks beneath his shattered legs and rolled himself into the indentation. He tucked himself up in a ball in that place and tried not to think about the freezing wind. But it was futile. The gusts whistled through the cuts of rock and came at him from all angles. He felt parts of himself, exposed extremities, turning numb.
He dragged his rucksack from underneath him and took out the flask of tea. There wasn’t much left. He remembered tipping a good three mouthfuls away during his rest stop, and he wondered how many hours three mouthfuls of cold tea might add to a man’s life in a crisis such as this. Well, he’d wasted those hours as he’d wasted almost all of his life, achieving nothing, going nowhere. At least if he were to die here on the mountain he would be remembered for it. In some perverted way he found solace in that. He imagined the message boards brimming with life as the news broke, the furious conversation, the sympathetic obituaries, the “I told you so” admonishments.
Morris meandered through the eventualities, his mind playing tricks. He saw images in the mist, curious forms approaching from beyond the ledge, things floating there and fading again, things without faces, things that were not human.
For a while he was in the bothy again, lying in the darkness, his jacket hanging off the top bunk, creating the wall he hid behind. But he wasn’t alone. There was something in the bothy with him. The sound of scraping and shuffling on the floorboards, the sound of laboured breathing, the acrid smell of tobacco, the clink of a brandy glass, the rustle of a map, a cough. Even in his mesmerised state, Morris felt the blood run cold in his veins at those sounds.
The pain came in waves. He was free of it one moment and then ravaged by it the next. It was all-encompassing. He screamed against the mountain, agony echoing through his broken body as his voice echoed off the surrounding walls. When the pain gave him respite, he tried to close his mind to his fears, to remember where he was and think of a future spent in a place other than this. But all he could think of were mountains, bigger and bigger mountains with higher and higher peaks.
He wasn’t ready to die.
He woke intermittently throughout the night, once to see the clouds had moved away, and the night full of stars. He felt as though he could reach out and touch them. Later, he roused to see
the sun rising from behind the mountain. He turned to look along the ridge and there they were, all of them, each and every member of the climbing forum. They had come to save him. Ahead of them, striding purposefully towards him, was the mountain rescue team, the lead climber making his way steadily along the precarious section of ridge, turning to look in his direction, but changing form, losing colour, becoming an eyeless man in one hundred-year-old clothing, stopping above Morris, exposing that drawn, taut face, walking on, stumbling, falling off the side of the mountain to indeterminable depths.
Again and again and again.
For a century.
Forever.
IV.
Morris couldn’t feel his legs at all. His fingers were useless appendages. Clarity was cracked and splintered ice. Pain ebbed and flowed, emanating from his ribs. As he succumbed to it, he tried to cling to the knowledge that he’d be remembered, that his name would live on. It was all he had left, the hope of leaving a legacy.
He grinned at the thought, imagining a photograph of himself to accompany the dedications on the message boards: one knee raised, his boot planted on a rock, his hands on his hips, the vista of a mountain range behind, sunglasses, bronzed skin…a confident, life affirming smile. He was Steven Morris, a legend in his own right, the first man to complete the ‘Fifty Peak Challenge’ in a single season.
Almost.
It was only at the end, as he slipped towards unconsciousness for the last time, that Morris endured the final realisation. The thought crashed into his mind like a dislodged boulder.
He didn’t know his follower.
Then came the terrifying understanding. Perhaps they would never find him. There would be no epitaph, no shrine to remember him by. He was a faceless name on an impersonal message board. He would be forgotten as his follower had surely been forgotten, plunged into damnation, forced to clamber up Fell’s Edge in freezing November mists while a man from the past pursued a similar folly behind him, forced to endure this fate day after day, for all eternity.
Contributors’ Notes
Colleen Anderson
Colleen Anderson has published nearly 200 pieces of fiction and poetry in such places as Chilling Tales, Evolve, Horror Library and Cemetery Dance. She has been poetry editor for the Chizine, host of the Vancouver ChiSeries, co-editor for Tesseracts 17 and The Playground of Lost Toys, as well as a freelance copyeditor. She has been twice nominated for the Aurora Award, longlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, received honorable mentions in the Year’s Best anthologies and been reprinted in Imaginarium. New works for 2015 are in Nameless, Second Contact, Our World of Horror, “OnSpec,” “Polu Texni” and Exile Book of New Canadian Noir. See more at colleenanderson.wordpress.com or facebook.com/colleen. anderson.9699
• Exegesis was conceived when I attended the Center for the Study of Speculative Fiction novel writing workshop in Lawrence, Kansas. While we were all workshopping our novels, Kij Johnson mentioned an exegesis several times, which means the critical study of a text, especially referring to scripture. Other stories we talked about had apocryphal tropes and styles. These are big words with a lot of meat behind them. I had this image in my mind of a woman standing in a field, her arms out, covered in a myriad of insects. I’m also disturbed by and intrigued by a sociopathic mind. To be so alien in a human body—it’s what I explore here—is she sociopathic or is she an insect in a human body? Insects (as far as we know) have no emotions. They don’t worry about biting us. They do it to survive, mindless yet single-minded.
Michael A. Arnzen
Michael Arnzen loves to experiment on the dark side. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for a serial killer novel, a monster story collection, a mutant poetry collection and even an email newsletter. His writing has been adapted to film, music and refrigerator magnets. His Stoker-winning novel, Grave Markings, was recently re-released by Raw Dog Screaming Press, in a special 20th Anniversary Edition. Mike currently teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. You can find him on Twitter @MikeArnzen or gorelets.com
• As you might guess, the concept for Guarded was sparked while I was waiting in the security line at the airport. I saw the TSA guards going back into a secret room. They were probably just taking an innocuous break, but I, of course, began to imagine the worst. It’s a little weird having a dark fantasy while standing in such a policed position—you start to get a little paranoid. I think those feelings really came out when I wrote the story, shivering on the plane ride home.
Rick J. Brown
Rick J. Brown is a horror and science fiction writer whose work appeared in the horror anthologies Horror Library Volume 1, and Butcher Shop Quartet II, both by Cutting Block Press. He has received two Honorable Mentions from Writers of the Future, the top international writing contest for science fiction and fantasy writers, and has written screenplays in professional workshops with Hollywood writer/producer Glenn Benest, an ex-collaborator of Wes Craven. Rick’s screenplay, BLOOD BROTHERS, was deemed “masterfully written” by Twilight/Protagonist Pictures. He is a professor of psychology at Citrus College in Southern California. Updates on his work can be found at rickjbrown.com, and you can connect with him on Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rickjbrownwriter.
• History is replete with the darkest horror, but only a few of us have felt its suffocating grip. When writing The Puppet Show, I asked the following question: “What is one of the worst possible scenarios that one might have to endure?” We live in a universe over which we have very little control. And while there is often a yearning for understanding why we suffer, the answer never comes.
Kealan Patrick Burke
Born and raised in Dungarvan, Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of six novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and editor of four acclaimed anthologies. Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band and, most recently, a fraud investigator. When not writing, Kealan designs covers for print and digital books through his company Elderlemon Design (elderlemondesign.com). To date he has designed covers for books by Richard Laymon, Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Bentley Little, J. Carson Black, and Hugh Howey, to name a few. A movie based on his short story “Peekers” is currently in development as a major motion picture through Lionsgate Entertainment. You can find him on the web at kealanpatrickburke.com and Twitter @KealanBurke.
• I’m always fascinated by the after-effects of trauma, how memory (or the corruption of memory) affects us, and how insanity manifests itself as an alteration of perspective. At the time, the theme of school shootings was a topical one. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed in the intervening years.
Michael Louis Calvillo
Practically born with a book in his hand, Michael Louis Calvillo had an obsessive love affair with books—mostly of the horror and science-fiction persuasion. From an early age, he constantly read, recounted movie and book plotlines to anyone who would listen, and wrote with equally unbounded excitement—even publishing a post-apocalyptic short story at the ripe old age of 12.
His true love, however, was his family, which served as the inspiration for his writing. In spite of the gruesome content threaded throughout his work, Michael’s family life, with his wife Michelle and daughter Deja, was remarkably sweet in an unbelievably ‘80s family sitcom fashion. This probably explains why, if you look beneath the gory surface, all of his works are dripping with relentlessly schmoopy expressions of love. In addition to his true love affair with books, Michael was also passionate about teaching high school English, infusing pop culture and rap music into his lessons to infect the next generation with the same deep appreciation he had for literature.
If you want to know more about the author, he is revealed subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, in each of his works, which you can check out at michaellouiscalvillo.com. As a
prolific author who wrote faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, he has left us with an amazing repertoire. These include his first novel, I Will Rise, a collection of short stories, Blood & Gristle, and a novella, 7 Brains, all of which received nominations for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Other works include his novels, Lambs, As Fate Would Have It, Death and Desire in the Age of Women, a novella, Bleed For You, several poems, an autobiographic blog, and a feature-length screenplay, Athena, which is currently in production.
(Ed. note: Michael Louis Calvillo passed away in 2012 and his story, Consumed, appears courtesy of his widow, Michelle Stockdale.)
Jeff Cercone
Jeff Cercone is a writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared in the Late Late Show webzine and he is the former editor of the Down in the Cellar webzine. He has worked in journalism for 25 years and currently works as a digital editor for the Chicago Tribune. You can follow him on Twitter @jeffcercone.
• Working in media is like having your own weird-story idea generator. I came to Chicago in 2003, and a couple years later the Tribune reported on people flocking to a see a salt stain on a Kennedy Expressway underpass that they thought looked like the Virgin Mary. I guess it did if you squinted hard enough, but dozens of people were quite convinced and crowds visited for weeks.
So I wondered what if it were something masquerading as the Virgin Mary, sent not to inspire the faithful but to punish the sinners? At the time I was writing the story, anger over the Iraq War was at its peak and I wanted to write about that, so those two ideas merged into the story here. The stain on the underpass isn’t really visible anymore but people still leave flowers there and somehow it has its own Yelp page.
Charles Colyott
Charles Colyott lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere (Illinois) with his wife, two daughters, cats, and a herd of llamas and alpacas. He is surrounded by so much cuteness it’s very difficult for him to develop any street cred as a dark and gritty writer. Nevertheless, he has appeared in Read by Dawn II, Dark Recesses Press, Withersin Magazine, Horror Library Volumes III, IV, & V, and Zippered Flesh 1 & 2, among other places. He also teaches a beginner level Tai Chi Ch’uan class in which no one has died (yet) of the death touch. You can get in touch with him on Twitter @charlescolyott or email him at [email protected]. Unlike his llamas, he does not spit.
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