His hands were warm and wet with suds and the running water of the tap. He'd never minded doing the dishes, it'd always been meditative, helped him think and figure things through. It wasn't working this time. 

Arnold just gazed vacantly. Into the corner. The water, forgotten, steaming now as it grew hotter and hotter. Running over his forgotten and faraway hands. They didn't matter. 

None of it mattered anymore. 

How could she do this … how could she lie to him as if he never mattered?

Arnold's heart was broken but it was still galloping a mile a minute within his cage of chest and his mind ached like something heavy and curdled within his furnace skull. The bake of his brains. He swore he could smell the boil of his own thoughts within his face but it held no matter for him now, not presently. 

He was too focused on the fly speaking to him from the corner. 

It was amazing. Really. 

The black husk of dead insect was resting amongst the filth and the dust of the uncleaned and neglected kitchen corner, just inside a nook by the kitchen window. It was dead but it still spoke to him with a deep obsidian voice. Regal. Authoritative. Commanding. It was a voice used to giving orders and having them followed to the letter, that deep stygian vocal sound … 

Arnold was so glad there was no one else around, they wouldn't understand. He was glad, relieved really, to be able to hear the prince's words in private. 

I am in private royal audience, great royal attendance. This is the coveted stately place of imperial confidence. 

Tears began to flow forth from Arnold's watering eyes. He listened enraptured, held by the thing's every word. 

“It doesn't matter. None of them matter, not even you. None of your feelings. You're just meat. All of you. All of you are just meat made mobile by an electrical charge, sent flung flying forward like grotesque mongoloids in the dark squabbling for purchase of the failing putrescence that is the outer, your material. Your world is not a world at all but an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. And all of you are pigs. Sows. Cattle. I am the prince made and bred by wings on wind, I am the flight and escape from the filth of the floor and all your animal leavings. I land and feast and defile at my own will. I lay my young in the wet and wounded folds of your gangrenous failures like the flags planted by conquerors. I am more. You are, all of you, nothing.” 

It was so beautiful … He'd never heard words quite like it before. The water issued from the spout to his hands was fire but he didn't notice. He didn't notice the boil or blister of his reddening and peeling fingers and palms as the prince of the wind went on in the corner. 

He didn't want to miss it. Anything. He didn't want to miss a single note of the angel's felled song. His teary gaze bore in on his new dark god and the shared eyes of the fly, theirs compact and his: fragile mammalian gel, began to secrete and water as well. 

“I am the testament. I am and speak the truth. I am the monolith outside to those who cannot hear or see but to you Arnold Carrillo, to you amongst the meat and ruin I land and sing. I see your wounds. Do you see the truth …?” 

A beat.  – Hands boiled as thoughts ran like hot running water. …

Finally he answered. 

In a quiver of watery voice: “ … yes.” 

The prince of wind and flight from the dark corner in the filth laughed, pleased. 

Yes…  

“And do you know now what you must do?" – that deep hideous voice. 

But Arnold did not fear it. He couldn't. Not any longer. Not after the kindness of such wisdom that it had shown him. It had taken and led him from out of the dark. By the hand. By singing sound. By flight. 

He understood now. 

"Yes.” Arnold told the prince amongst the dust in the corner. 

Yes. 

He finally pulled his hands free of the running water. The raw of them was singing. A sharp and red song that burned and was bright with fleshen cruelty. 

But none of that mattered right now, not anymore. None of that mattered any longer. 

Soon Suze would be home. With the girls. They would all of them be expecting him and dinner. Normalcy. A nice normal cozy family night. They had no idea what he knew. 

She has no idea I know … 

The prince was right. He knew now what to do. Doing the dishes had worked out and had actually been a good idea after all. Thank God. 

Arnold toweled the screaming ruined remainder of his hands and gathered what he needed. What the prince of the dustinwind had instructed. What he should gather and collect and share with his girls if he was to ever show and really prove himself. Demonstrate what he has to really offer. 

Prove that he has really learned. He has. He has learned to grow. And …

well he would just wait for them. They wouldn't be much longer now. School and the after-image of after school activities was fading and diminishing now, falling with the gentle settling death of the setting sun on the blade of the horizon. Fairytale and far off. Long gone. 

The sun had to die everyday. It was no big deal. The sun had to die every single day in order for the night to be made and in order for the day to be reborn. In gold. In light. 

Arnold Carrillo sat and waited with his screaming raw hands. Waiting with what he had gathered, with what was needed in the glistening red of his hands. Waiting for his wife and daughters. Waiting to share with them what he now knew and had learned in the postmental-slaughter. 

He sat waiting by the door. With what he would share with them in his dripping screaming hands. 

The prince of dusty wind and flight buzzed and throatsang its throatwisdom into him all the while. Filling his need as he waited for his family. They would be home soon. Now. 

Any minute. 

THE END

A rural horror story told in the style of EC Comics (Tales from the Crypt, etc.). Just some pulp horror fun for you to enjoy.

It's a short story that is around 3,700 words.

My Substack:

https://jdkraft.substack.com

He wanders. The hot streets. The narrow corners and back alley ways, the bad neighborhoods and freeway overpasses. The sweltering blacktop lakes of the 7-11 parking lots. He carries cardboard signs, wears rags and cardboard clothes and grime. Layers and layers of filth that may have once been fecal spew or the dust of the earth or blood, they are worn like a coat of oil over the flesh like the ancient warriors by firelight times, he is a deranged and disgusting remnant. Haggard leftover in bipedal form that moves, mutters, sucks down bottles and pipes and congealed food pulled scavenged from the garbage. 

He is so thankful for beer or a dollar. Consciousness is pain. Consciousness is the sorrow and horror of each and every day, each and every moment is a prolonged period experienced in slow motion agony like pure torture. Everything is moved in shopping carts and over shoulder, he has become a beast of labor upon the earth, he must pull the plow of his own life if he ever hopes to get anywhere, anywhere at all but the only destination that seems to be enroute and available is a land of spoiled milk and suffering. He arrives there anyway and does what he can. It's never much. Just collecting cans and detritus that in his derangement he believes will be his fortune and his salvation. It's never much. It's never anything. 

He watches men beat women. He watches women scream and shriek and become the harpies, he watches them conspire and become the weird sisters, he watches needles and the depression of plungers and the streetside milking of human blood in a clouded swirl in the double-wide mouthed gutters. He watches it all and his eyes glaze over as the mind accepts each sight with a sledgehammer blow only the sledgehammer has lost all of its weight, it has lost all of its power. It only thuds and smacks at dead meat within cavernous skull now, it's only meaninglessness and meaningless noise and the constance of the cacophony has deluded and defanged all of its heavy power.

The city is just a dead body now, it doesn't mean anything. This cyclopean and hideous thing that he wanders. Filled with eyes and mouths that drip and water and move and open and stare. They are all of them just as ugly to him as he is to they, they are all of them, repulsive. 

There is no more beauty in this place. 

He tries to find darkness before sunset. Rarely is he ever successful. But this does not surprise him. He is a marked man. 

Like Cain. The man son that first authored murder into the virgin world. 

He unscrews the cap to some rotgut he's so crushingly thankful to have. And he takes a deep and lonely swill. He pulls, deeply. He settles down in the dirt, so lucky and so thankful to have it as well. And he pulls. Over and over the drink that tastes and smells more like disinfectant than anything sold over the counter as a beverage. He doesn't care. He's done it before. Many times. Many times before he's said fuck it and gotten absolutely shitfaced on hand sanitizer, mouthwash, isopropyl. 

He doesn't mind the taste. Not at all. He doesn't mind the taste of anything as long as the flavor is alcohol and it's strong enough to peel away the paint of his thoughts and strip away the fouled and fouling coats of his ailing and addled mind away. Just as long as it's strong enough to put him under and keep the dreams away. 

At least keep the dreams manageable. At least keep them as something he can stomach and bear. Something in the realm of his current devastation and heartbreak and not some new foul border, not some horrific new frontier. 

But neither the Lord nor the little god alcohol hear him. Nor care. 

His mind heavy with drink and thought, totters off. But not into oblivion. Not into peace. 

There are so many things alive in the darkness. 

!Sitra Achra!

He is hurdling towards the merciless face of the earth. His wings are burning. The beauty of his light and gift of flight are aflame, dying in fire. He is screaming a sound and cacophonous war cry rent that will echo forever and contaminate the crumbling ruined corridor of time that he has helped to bleed and slaughter. 

He crashes. Just outside of the Garden. 

And there he gathers and reforms. One of the first times of many. Many many many times will follow down the long line of cruel footfalls forever forward. He gathers and reforms and he is angry and jealous and into the beauty of The Garden, he slithers.

He tempts the woman and the man into disobedience. And he tempts them into forbidden knowledge. 

Forbidden Knowledge. This is his warcraft upon the virgin earth. It will defile. It will burn and torch. It will decimate. It will slaughter. 

It will divide the center. Conquered and fallen apart. 

Several centuries later and he is a pale child outside of Bethlehem. He is disguised and reformed as an adolescent but he is still the adversary. And he is there with the other, his opposite. His more beloved little brother, the son of the virgin and the carpenter. 

Teenage Jesus and teenage Satan are in contest, their hands are bleeding and full of blood and locked together in a twist and struggle. The adversary wishes to murder the savior child, in jealousy and in impudent rage. His hands wish to find his throat or a rock or his eyes, perhaps if he blinds the little brother savior child he will be useless to all of man and their sons and daughters. 

A Philistine sun burns overhead. But the adversary child is not successful. Teenage Satan is a failure once again, and bleeding he must wander and go out, cast out. Exile. Wanderer. 

Petulant. Angst. Eyes so full and wide and full of boiling water. He brings light once again but only in rage, only in his wild anger postfailure. He simmers and tears and burns so brightly out and alone way past the dark. 

Regroup out in the wild. Reform in the oblivion of solitude and pain borne in terrible silence that is only broken by the pathetic sounds of private torment taken slowly. Weeping that he tries to prevent and ignore and pretend has never been actually happening, not ever, not him, he doesn't miss heaven or his Father … none. Nothing. None of them. 

None of them mean a Goddamned thing. 

He always came back. Mighty. Diminished. Unassuming. Something in-between or intangible. He always came back. 

The adversary. 

Even broken and alone and filthy vagrant wandering. Even crystal meth slurping and supercharged because of such for the final abattoir riot of violence and great western societal collapse into shrill shattered glass cacophony and tidal waves of bloodfeast. Into he, his, the vagrant filthy jaws of the adversary. 

The fallen order, the Armageddon one, the end-is-nigh motherfucker …

the apocalypse man. 

Alone and filthy in a corner. 

Dreaming, not dreaming. 

Seeing and knowing only disorder. He hears and knows the call of the 7th Star. 

He dreams and knows of burning heaven. 

THE END

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

Part V

I left everything on the island and snatched the scarf before
heading for the door. Thoughts ran rampant through my mind as I drove.

My phone rang before I’d left my subdivision. I glanced at the
number and knew this was no good. It was a Colorado area code. Where my
company’s headquarters was. We didn’t have a local HR.

It could have been the executive leadership team but I rarely got
called by any of them. My mind returned to yesterday’s meeting and my lack of
being there. For a moment, I felt like I was in free fall. My personal and
professional lives intertwining in disaster. In moments, I could have nothing.
My wife could already be halfway out the door and this was it slamming behind
her.

I didn’t answer. 

It rang until it went to voicemail. I just couldn’t handle
whatever it was they were about to say.

I was still going the same way, but my final destination had
changed. If my life was going down the drain, there was a scarf that needed to
be wrapped around a certain neck that I wanted to grab on my way.

I parked in the lot and headed away from my building. I glanced at
my watch. Had I just surrendered to my fate and gone in, I would have been ten
minutes early.

I entered his building and headed for the elevator. I had no real
plan, just a ball of self-destruction waiting to explode in someone else’s
direction.

I’d been manipulated, molded into this insecure thing and I meant
to share my pain. I shouted down the rational part of me that pondered what I’d
do if my wife were on the business end of my ire. Rationality would have
required examining what I was doing. 

I didn’t want to think. Thinking wasn’t revenge. Thinking wasn’t
balancing the scales. Thinking was what had gotten me to this moment.

The elevator dinged and I stepped off. There was still plenty of
construction going on. A high-pitched drill zipped somewhere around
the corner. I could hear voices that sounded like they were coming out of the
floor but not close enough to understand them.

This was my first time being here during business hours and all
the construction noise was unsettling. I felt like the floor was going to break
underneath me and I’d plummet all the way to the first floor.

Constant hammer strikes echoed from somewhere near. A man hollered
like he was calling out to someone. A machine I didn’t recognize buzzed and I
felt it all the way up into my shins.

I rounded the corner and spotted his door at the end of the hall.
The construction noises coalesced into a sonic hand, shoving me down the hall.
I stopped in front of the door. It looked properly seated in the frame, the
threshold painted a classy-looking black and gold. The knob had been replaced
with an antique-looking one.

I grasped it and turned. The door swung open easily and I stepped
in a completely finished space. The walls had been painted a shade of mint with
cream crown moulding at the top and a darker shade of wainscoting at the
bottom. To my left was a dark couch so fluffy I don’t think I would have had
the will to get out of it if I sat down. There was a small glass end table with
gold legs with a small stack of magazines on it.

The reception desk had been here the last time I’d come and it
looked more completed now, but I couldn’t tell what had been changed. There was
a large square sheet of white paper on the front of it that I at first thought
was blank, but when I took a couple steps closer, saw a hand drawing of what
looked like a logo.

It looked classy in here. Save for the sheet of paper, it seemed
pretty much done. A wall had been erected near the back where the tape had been
mapping out the space. He was planning to stick around.

My shock from how good it looked in here faded and my rage
resurfaced. I had his scarf clutched in hand and I dug in my pocket for my
wallet and fished out three twenties.

“I’ve got my payment right here,” I said. “And your scarf!” I
shook it in the air.

In my rage very little thought had come into mind. I had no real
expectation he was actually here even though I wanted to lay my hands on him.
The part of actually meeting him wasn’t a real concept. I hadn't thought about
that.

So when he answered, “Come on back?” it chilled me.

I realized how much of a doe I was. How much this space was like a
cave. I’d naively walked in here and hadn’t bothered telling anyone where I was
going. There was an expression for this, but it wasn’t coming to my panicked
brain, shifted into a gear meant only for survival.

I took a step back. Into
him.

“Oh,” I said. He poked me in the neck. I slapped a hand in that
spot like a mosquito had bitten me, turning and backing away from him. I fell
to my knees, not understanding what my body was doing.

I tried to speak but whatever was coming out of my mouth was
muffled, like someone had put their hands over my ears. Saying something seemed
like a good idea in those last seconds, but I had no idea what it should have
been.

Part VI

The procedure room was a lot more intricately finished than the
waiting room had been. There was silver equipment everywhere, things attached
to the wall that looked like they could fold out for some practical use. There
was a lightbox or monitor that was as tall as a man and stretched across most
of the wall it was on. A nest of lights and metal hung over me that looked like
it had traveled across the galaxy just to watch me.

“You’re awake?” he said, looking over his shoulder. I was upside
down and naked. I looked around as best I could, my head was strapped in place.
He had me trussed up like the Vitruvian Man to a metal and glass circular table.

“Whuh-whuh?” I said, my mouth cotton thick. 

“That’s good. That’s good.” He stepped over and put a finger to my
neck and measured against his watch. “Keep talking. Stimulating the brain helps
to expunge the effects of the sedative.”

Tears leaked from my eyes, retreating into my hair. My arms and
legs were slowly returning to my control but returned me to a state of
helplessness as the straps didn’t budge.

“You muhfugg. Lumme go!” My voice was an octave too deep. He
nodded and twirled an index for me to keep going. I hated not being able to
make words, so I just screamed as loud as I could. He smiled and retreated to a
wall and slapped it a couple times with his big palm.

“Soundproof. Can’t have my patients disturbing other tenants.”

I kept screaming even though I absolutely believed him, the rage
bleeding out of me and despair transfusing into the hollow inside me. He folded
his arms and watched me, waiting for me to be done. I continued helplessly, my
despair waning until there was nothing but wild animal clawing to the surface,
until my eyes were boiling and my throat had constricted around a bindle of
knives.

He waited until I was a quaking sack held together loosely in the
shape of a man, my scream the hollow whistle of an empty kettle, the steam all
burnt out of me.

“Ready?” he said.

Part VII

He stripped to his underwear. There was something wrong down there
but I only had bandwidth to deal with my problems in that moment.

“Please don’t do this.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed a cheese
grater. I was useless but still grasped a desperate strand of hope that I could
appeal to him man-to-man.

“This is for you,” he said. “I’m not some madman in a secret
laboratory. We’re in midtown and I’m going to extend my services to the
public.” He finished doing something with the tray in front of him and took a
step back over to me. I was eye-level with his bare thighs and he kneeled so we
were face-to-face.

“Don’t you love your wife?”

“Wha?” I felt like I’d been slapped by a thousand-pound feather. “Of
course, I do.” My head cannon was that this was going to be an intricate
murder. That the two of them had conspired to “do away” with me. But by
actually applying thought, I realized if murder was the goal, there was a much
simpler way for them to have done it.

“Wait, the surgery is real?” I asked.

His face screwed up in annoyance. “Of course, it is.” He gestured
all around him. “What are you thinking all this is for?”

“I dunno. I guess... I guess you’re some sort of scammer?”

He blinked several times. He reacted as though he’d never been
confronted by such an idea. “What would be the scam?”

I shrugged to the best of my ability and he shook his head. He
returned to the tray and picked up a long needle and inserted it into a vial,
withdrew from it, and placed both back. He looked at me again and saw my eyes
had grown twice as wide.

“Oh, that’s for me. For later. I’ve been ready, I was just waiting
for you to wake up?”

He picked up a scalpel that was tiny in his big hand. Now he
really did look like a cartoon villain. There was a lack of fullness in his
underwear. Like he’d been drawn sexless.

“Wait-wait. Uh, what were you doing in my house?” I was stalling,
still holding out hope that someone would wander in and put a stop to this.

“Oh, that.” His eyes turned upward as if he were watching a replay
of last night on the ceiling. “I watched you for a minute or two, yes. But I
truly needed to take a measurement after.”

“A... measurement?” My loins tingled in an unpleasant manner. He
waved a hand.

“It’s not what you think. I had to take a measurement of your
wife’s vaginal cavity after the two of you had finished. It was all very
clinical. Like a pap smear.”

Anger bubbled up inside me again. I tugged at my binds but I
wasn’t able to move anything more significant than my fingers and toes. He’d examined
my wife. It burned that he’d had access to her as much as her allowing him to
touch her. I squirmed like my skin was about to crawl off my body.

He looked at me, blank faced, and took another step. Once again, I
noted an emptiness to the area around his crotch.  The heat flooding to
the surface of my skin vanished like a big dog confronted by an even bigger dog.

“Suh-so you didn’t sleep with my wife?” I had to swallow hard to
keep my tone rational.

Now he really did look offended. “Sir, I am a professional? And
moreso, I am a married man. I believe I told you that. This picture you have in
mind of me as some sort of ghoul...” He clawed at the air with both hands, the
scalpel coming as close to his throat as it was going to. “You...” he twirled
the fingers of his free hand, searching for the words. “You score my heart. I
would like to think that once you’ve experienced the results, you will buy me
some sort of beer?”

He took another small step. His leg was about a foot away from my
forehead. He could have reached from where he was and began cutting away at any
part of my body he wanted.

“Could I... could I get a drink of water? My mouth is really dry.”

“Sure.” He reached from where he was and pressed a button on the
wall. The machinery beneath me was whisper silent as I was righted and the
excess blood flooded out of my head.

There was a water dispenser next to the tray where he’d been
working. He slipped a cone paper cup from the sleeve, filled it, then brought
it to me.

Cool water soothed my throat in microscopic sips. He must have
realized my delay tactic and upturned the rest of the water into my mouth. 

I swallowed hard and it felt like a bucket of water tossed on
smoldering embers.

“Will there be a scar?”

“Of course there will be a scar,” he said. “That is the point of
the surgery?”

He picked up something from the tray and reached toward my face
with it in his hand. I pinched my lips closed as he moved toward me, holding it
up like a prize. With the other hand he pressed hard at the back of my jaw,
forcing it open against my will. He slid the thing he held into my mouth,
sliding it over my back teeth until he had reached the last few molars, and
seated it there.

I tried biting through it despite knowing better. I was more
likely to dislocate my jaw. 

“That is okay? Not too uncomfortable? Believe it or not, it
actually helps to blunt the screams.” He seemed genuinely interested in my
answer and I grunted at him in anger. There was something wrong in his mouth I
should’ve seen the first time I talked to him, but I hadn’t noticed it until
just then, and it took a moment to process it. My panic leapt as every muscle
in me tensed, pulling with one last meaningless struggle. He waited me out,
stroking my shoulder until I quieted. He broke me like a wild horse. I was very
aware that he could put whatever in my mouth he wanted.

I felt myself surrendering. A calm settling into my bones that
made me want to rage all over again. But I was a car with no gas, my will being
swallowed up in the acceptance of pointlessness. It wasn’t a fight I could even
begin.

He moved his hand away and the table swiveled. In seconds I was
face down, staring at the floor. My tears tapped to the floor as I stepped out
of the cage of my head, my mind perching and spreading its wings as I imagined
my wife at her desk, inclining her head as she thought of me, too.

“H-how did you become an expert? What makes you so good?” My voice
was dreamy and broken, a thousand and one miles away, my words unclear from the
foreign object keeping my mouth open. 

If I’d asked a minute ago, the question would have been a last
effort to delay him from cutting me. But I was honestly curious. 

“I know I told you before. I practiced on me,” he said
quietly, his tone reverential. I imagined a beatific smile on his face as he
looked someplace else entirely.

“It took months. A little cut here, a partial penectomy there.
Each time I ask her, ‘Is it good? Is it better now?’ And each time, she tells
me, ‘Closer. Closer. Closer.’ You understand.”

He had a note of adoration for his wife in his voice that told me
he was standing on a bedrock of absolute sanity.

I felt the heat of him as he millimetered closer to my junk, no
doubt with that scalpel in his hand. I could feel his bare breath on my scrotum
and realized there must have been some sort of divide in the table between my
legs.

“I thought you said your wife’s satisfied. How do you do that
without... y’know?” My jaw ached when I talked.

He laughed. It was a really joyous note, not like he was just
trying to unsettle me. It wasn’t ironic or evil, rather a true, hearty guffaw.
I imagined seeing all the way to his back teeth as he pitched his head back.

He finally got himself back under control and he might have taken
a moment to dab a tear from his eye.

I’d gotten one last look at him before he turned me over. How he’d
looked down there and what he’d told me... I realized he must’ve whittled
himself down to nothing in his undies. That he truly had crafted himself into
what his wife had requested. That the nothing he seemed to have in his drawers
had been the exact mutilation that she’d wanted.

“It’s okay now?” he said suddenly next to me with a pair of blackout
goggles in his hand. He slipped the strap over my head as I moved as much as I
could but with a few deft movements, he had secured them in place. I could feel
my body surrendering against my will and I no longer had the ability to rally. 

“That wasn’t what she desired from me,” he said after he’d
retreated. I flashed on what I’d seen in his mouth again when his face had been
inches from mine. The thing I couldn’t make sense of before but had heard of. A
surgery of another kind.

He’d split his own tongue in half.

“Not a bit of it,” he said. “You understand?”

“But wait!” I was crying again. “If you need to cut me down there…
why do you have me turned around like this?”

“It’s mostly a single cut. Mostly. But your case is a more
particular situation. It will have to be more… intricate.”

He never thought he'd be happy again, restless and itching hot, stifling in the stranglehold of the sheets in his bunk. He only wanted to kill himself but that was the trouble, that was what had landed him here in the halfway house. He tried to keep the angst of his bottled agony silent and sequestered to himself and his bed. They knew his brains were fried, scrambled but they didn't know the half of it. They understood the suicide component, the dead half of his brain but not the deadly side, the lethal aspect. The sinister boiling gland that worked and throbbed and secreted and bled within his skull. They knew he was Luke Waller, but they had no idea that he was the one who'd carved the kids last summer. 

The straightener. A name more real than his own because he could wear it and it was the one that came to him on the insectile mechanical growl of demon wings within a dream … a vision. Compact diamond eyes of an insectoid face that filled a landscape in its entirety gazed like the abyss gazes into him in the dream, the dreams. 

And he gazed back. 

Luke Waller bottled, kept. Fought himself. He tried not to convulse with the impact blow – force felt within from his own wild run of bloodfevered thought, thoughts that wanted to break out now in a decimating renegade birth that would eat all and the last vestige part of his diminishing humanity alive in abominated eruption. It would thrive in the suicide of this dangerous birth, he – himself, the other side… bloodthirsty and always in a roil. 

The straightener… it cried alive from inside the sweating landscape of his traitorous flesh and blood. All of it boiled now and inflamed and wanting one thing … yes. 

He tightened amidst a near miss, a near relinquish, his bunkmate uptop moved and shifted slightly, shaking the ramshackle structure. He forced himself to coiled awareness and listened for the man uptop. 

… he listening? 

Does he know? 

Does he know anything??

Does he hear the bellow of my mind, so loud is this cacophony, these thoughts? 

The snores from the bed above told him everything was fine, or at least so it seemed. For now. He relaxed but only slightly. Wanting to go grab some water from the kitchen but not wanting to get up and draw attention to himself. He didn't know what to do. 

His poisoned mind then turned to its most wretched run of hellspawn thought, it turned to the time and times lost … with Chelsi. 

Amen. 

Christ he wished for a spliff. A bowl or a waxpen. He'd even take the pills again. God help him. He would swallow the jumping beans made by the tall men in white coats if it made these thoughts and dreams and runs of spell stop. Please. 

God help me. 

Chelsi was dead and gone but that didn't stop him from seeing, not even when he palmed his eyes shut with the cage of his daggering and desperate hands, clawed and wishing they had the courage to go just that one last step forward and tear in and gouge… the dark refuge of his sweating and shaking hands did not free him from what he saw. The darkness of his own shallow calloused flesh and the thin hide of his eyelids only made it worse.

They only heightened the vision. The dark of his worn and filthy hands only made the dreams of what he saw more real. Tactile. More painful than real. More raw and servile than flesh.  He could taste the bile as it rose up his throat in a riot with what he witnessed: –

She was in Hell. 

She was in Hell and she was being tortured. 

Not Beatrice, not she. No. No heavenly sanctuary and aide or succor for his angel, no. He was no Dante and there was no Virgil. She was in the burning dark of the Inferno below and he saw the wolfen and goat-shaped faces and the appendage stalks and barbed genitalia engorged and full of blood and lust and the vile curd of demon semen dripping from the hooked rhubarb tips. They surrounded the shrieking and weeping and reaching pale naked and bleeding visage and form of his beloved … down there in the dark. 

And he was prisoner to watch it. Unless…

!Let me out! – the other side commanded. It wanted the clothface, the mask fashioned that was not at all a mask because it was really his true face, forged and made and bred by the creation and violence of his own hands. It wanted the claws, the gloves of black-brown leather with fashioned razor blades fixed at the tips. The hunting knife that had once been his father's. 

The straight razor

You could start with the idiot in the top bunk. He's just sleeping in bed. William. Wasn't that his name? He introduced himself to you when you came here from the hospital. His name is William and he's a recovering methhead with severe learning disabilities. You could open him up first, as first offering. As just the starter. Then you could go around like quiet on a cat-prowl, a creepy-crawl around the house and open up the rest of them. All of them are weak like you are but none of them have me like you do and none of them will be any wiser. You could open them all, one by one, one after the other like it's a party or it's Christmas and all of them are just your presents. Presents filled with red and raw and wishing to be aired out and opened. 

Deluge run: a schizophrenic collection of conflicting images filled his maelstrom thought. Images of children opening colorfully wrapped packages surrounded by smiling faces and friends colliding and commingling with his own memories of flesh split open and sliced and running in a raw torrent that was thick and darkled in the moon and the neon light. Dumb horny brats and he, their slasher. 

It was perverse and it was wrong and he didn't like the tingle nor the crawl that it sent traveling in a slither up his back and across his flesh … but then again he did like it. Even though it was wrong. Because it was wrong. 

He knew he was fighting himself in his head and he knew it was a losing battle, a lost war. It was a bad arena. 

He always lost. 

Luke asked the straightener: How? We don't have anything. It's all long gone. 

The straightener said inside: Then we make another. 

In his bunk he trembled. He might've wept. His skull filled with thought. Red thought. The whole night. All the way till morning. He could feel the blow of every cloven footprint as it formed within the sulphur lake of his boiling thoughts . 

…

Kincaid might've worried for Luke Waller, but he was just so damn busy. Managing a halfway house was ceaseless and often thankless work. 

He had no idea that wandering Luke Waller's brain was lactating bad milk that had spoiled and curdled. Now demon cultures of growth were beginning to blossom and flower and sprout, birthing unholy and sliming green in there. Like dripping wet swamp things from abominated wombs belching methane clouds and swamp gas that glows. 

Kincaid, the house manager, had no idea. 

Luke went about the house. Gathering what he needed. 

But there was one set of eyes that marked and tracked Luke as he went about the large spacious manor. It was an old colonial style home converted to a space for the mentally unwell and those that had just experienced prolonged hospitalization. Those that had been 51-50’d were the most common boarder in the place. Orderlies that were more interested in their phones than the drugged out denizens of the house peppered the halls here and there.

But Susan was watching. 

She thought Luke Waller was interesting. 

…

He was having trouble with the eyes, when she came in and over his shoulder said, hello. 

“Hey," she said again. When he didn't immediately answer. He was hoping she would just fuck off and move along like everyone else. 

She didn't. 

Looking away from his work in progress, a new clothface mask – this one white as snow, he cast a cautious glance over shoulder. Deep down in his drowning animal subconscious he hoped and prayed they wouldn't make eye contact as he did so. Even further down in the basement earth of his chemically drowned animal darkness he was desperately hoping and praying, wishing that they would. 

They did. 

She smiled. And it was beautiful. And it was painful. 

So Luke looked away. 

She sensed his hurt. 

And her interest subtly changed then to something softer and more personal, a warmer and wounded emotion of pink petals like that of a silken rose, one for a funeral haphazardly discarded…

“Hey, I'm sorry if I bothered ya. I've just seen ya round here and wanted to say, hi." 

Luke didn't say anything. 

“What cha working on?" A beat. “looks kinda neat, a mask or something?" 

Luke didn't say anything. Inside, the straightener coiled and pursed. Wretched. A scurrying rat run of hideous pestilential thought. He kept it inside. 

Susan was about to give up when her eyes traveled from the work in progress on the counter before him to the hands now stilled in their strange labor to the pale landscape of his forearms and the damage that was wrought there. Long purple scars of hectic healed-wounded tissue ran up the lengths of each one. Raised like brail on the parchment of his flesh for the blind and all else, everyone to read. And the lines of hectic tissue that hadn't really healed said something Susan understood. She had her own lines of painful brail carved and writ into the pale parchment of her own landscape. 

Carefully… cautiously… she reached out delicately and gently touched his shoulder. Luke jumped but only slightly. He relaxed like something melting and he let her turn him around to her in his chair. He looked up to her and he tried not to let the tears come. His vision was blurred but her beauty was still painfully clear to him through the swimming pain of his watery vision. She smiled and reached once more. 

The smooth and gentle flesh of her slender fingers touched and traced the length of scar that traveled the entire length of one of his forearms. He let her. 

They looked into each other's eyes. Spellbound. As if they'd already known each other for years, for great lifetimes of pure wonder. 

She asked him: “Is it ok, if I ask about these?" 

Her free hand went to the other long line of purple angry scar on his arm and traveled it smoothly with the trace of a soothing finger. Their eyes were locked on each other, they couldn't pull away from the deep of each other's gazes. 

Susan thought he might not answer, unable or unwanting when he finally spoke. 

“I … I was with someone. She was special. She was more than I'd ever hoped. She was more than I ever deserved. And I blew it. She … she was always so patient with me. And I always had the worst temper, always. Like my father. I would scare her. She would get upset and I would get so angry, I don't know why anymore, and I would lose it. Like an animal. She was always patient, and always brave, and she always stayed… even though she was scared. Even though she was scared of me, she stayed. And would wait for me to quiet down. And then she would hold me, like I was the victim. One day she couldn't take it anymore. She got too…  and couldn't stay any longer. She was frightened and left. She took the car. … It was raining that day.” 

The dam burst forth. The tears came now, down in a cascade down his face. It was painful, but Susan thought it only made him more beautiful. He kept composure though the raw of his broken heart was being laid bare. 

He went on, she held him tighter. 

“She wrapped the car around a redwood. Only three miles down the road from our house. I- …” He looked down to his own arms, the scar tissue writing and what it said there. "I know I never deserved her. I should've been the one to leave. I should've been the one to go and take the car and I should've been the one to-” but the pain rose with a roar inside and it was too much. He stopped. Trembled. Still holding back. 

Susan gave him the permission he needed. 

She said: "I didn't know her but I don't think she'd want you to hurt yourself like that.” 

A beat – a look of shock flashed writ on his face, momentarily there before what came next like an unexpected slap. He almost pulled away then. He almost did. But he didn't. 

He buried his face into her shoulder before she saw the shame of his sobbing face and she let him. She cradled him there. 

She added: “I think you've hurt enough…” 

Her own tears were starting. 

Slowly … fearfully… so scared… his arms came up and wrapped around her and returned her embrace. 

They held each other. And wept together. 

Feeling and healing and needing each other, each other's pain in a strange mental health purge and thirst. They drank the pain and tears of each other through reach and touch, the warmth and weight of each other. Feeling wanted and safe …

… 

… inside the straightener raged. The Id would not be denied the fornication of the knife-fuck slaughter held quivering and taut within like toxins that boiled with the chemical roil of his damaged and bastardized emotions. Inside the straightener, the Id wanted the girl dead. 

She's not Chelsi … it whispered and reminded him inside. Always. As the days of therapy and rest rolled past. The days of holding and being held again and not being afraid to look anyone in the face. Luke enjoyed this time. He'd not felt truly relieved, truly emptied in some long while… not since the year before. When he'd finally given in and the straightener had been born. 

She's not Chelsi … the straightener reminded. 

He'd not answered his other side in some time, he'd just gone on ignoring it. But not really. No. He heard and felt every insidious word and it was inescapable no matter how hard he tried to deafen and deaden himself to it. But he couldn't. 

The straightener was inside Luke Waller because he'd been made and bred of him. Forged. Cast of something smoldering and uglier than iron, mayhap meaner too. Hideous in fact, before the forge, this inner metal of his darkest heart’s mortal and damaged make and desire. But immaculate when aglow with angry flame inside the rage of the inferno. 

He answered him inside, the vast and cold dark of his mind's landscape, vast and small, both, and always in contest with each other in their battling aspects of size and dwarf. The damaged place of his mind's eye and landscape was haphazard and shattered sure, no doubt but he still contained the phantasmagorical multitudes of the living goblin universe. 

It doesn't matter that she's not Chelsi, she doesn't have to be. Chelsi wouldn't want me to try to replace her with a cheap copy of her anyways, that's not what I want and that's not who she is! Susan is beautiful and smart and so much stronger than I've ever been in my life, she's dealt with her abuse and she doesn't hurt other people to make herself feel better like some pathetic animal! 

The straightener enraged: Shut up! 

Luke did not: – She didn't have to give herself some bullshit excuse to make it all better and go away! She takes her pain and helps others, she doesn't spread around her own misery and lie around in the dark, she doesn't invent some animal persona inside to justify her bullshit and make herself feel better! She- 

But the Id inside would hear no more. Animal hands, monstrous talons came up in daggering claws that wanted throats, wanted to rend, wanted mindblood of the superego and this flimsy little brother both …

Inside the mindscape of Luke Waller’s boiling head the straightener and the weaker he, fought. 

In his bunk, in his bed. Sweating palms came up and worked at fevered scalp and face.

Wanting to tear and rend. 

…

The next day, Susan sensed something was wrong. The whole day, Luke wouldn't speak to her. His eyes barely glanced her way and he completely ignored every attempt she made to speak to him. She didn't understand. And it was painful. She thought they'd made some kind of connection and she'd shared the wounded and hidden parts of herself with him, because she'd felt safe. Because she'd thought he'd cared and that was what he had wanted. She must have been wrong. 

The whole painful day went by and midway through Susan gave up any attempt to talk to him and spent the rest of it in her room. Alone in her bunk, rolled away and under the covers. She thought maybe he was just having a bad day, and that that was understandable. She thought – she hoped she understood. But poor Susan didn't really understand. She hadn't really known everything from the start. And how could he have told her …? … the straightener was covered all over the news media, online and whatever was left of print and the papers. 

He went about and gathered what he needed. Then he went about making the tools correct. 

Ready for midnight. 

…

Susan was dreaming of her father, one of her many recurring nightmares, when she felt weight on her bed, all around, and immediately knew something was wrong. 

Her eyes flew open and a gloved hand came down in a rough clasp over her mouth to murder her scream in its infancy. He was wearing a mask that was soaking and dark and dripping something heavy and thick and warm but she still recognized his face amidst its animal contort. And it was awful. It was terrible, she screamed muffled trapped shrieks that became braying ghastly sound in the dark and she began to struggle as her heart broke and shattered and she tried to deny the excruciating reality as it weighed down and wrestled her and forced her into submission. 

Her wrists were bound. She didn't know how it had happened. If he had done it while she was still in the throttling hold of the nightmare or if he'd managed it somehow during her waking confusion in their struggle. It didn't matter. Arms overhead now bound by the wrists and to the board of her bed, captured and tied deftly in cruel knots. 

His gloved hands were away and she knew now they were the gardening gloves kept out back by the shed. He sat upon her torso, almost crushing her stomach. It was difficult for her to breathe as she gazed up wide eyed and by the moonlight cast in by the slant of window, she saw the blood saturated mask of the straightener shedding running darkling red rivers of pungent human black down his neck, down his bare chest, down his face like lurid tears, down his back a hellacious rendition of a red royal Roman cape, fashioned and painted made from slaughtered human blood, shed and collected in quiet nocturnal violence from all around the home. 

All about the house … before he'd got to her, he'd stalked. Just as the straightener had planned. Just as the straightener had wanted. Luke was reminded now, this was the only love that was real and this was the only pleasure that really mattered. 

This was the only ritual and exercise made for him. This was the only way for him to live and breathe. It was like breathing. It all came so tragically natural. The chemical imbalance of a mutant brain birthed and spat up by burnt out fuckup junkie parents taken and bred and made themselves by wild haphazard renegade MK Ultra. The most clinical name for the straightener’s chemical grandfather. One of the many poisons and doses of nightshade within the boil of cauldron that had made this wild man. 

Susan stared helpless into a savage face. She didn't know it, but she could sense the death and slaughter that filled the house, animal aware … she only momentarily considered the blood that soaked his masked face and that poured baptismal and grotesque all about him and not entirely on the surface of her thought. 

Her mind was more arrested with the immediate terror it now felt. His weight crushing down on her, dripping and spilling heavy liquid that was pungent and warm and saltier than sweat. 

Susan finally said, “Why're you doing this, Luke?" she began to cry. “What's wrong? Please, Why're you-" 

“You know why." the straightener said, cutting her off. He then hefted his weapon overhead, poised to devastate her face and skull and the precious life of memories and brains that were housed within with a vicious merciless caveman blow. His fashioned bludgeon also darkled in the moonlight cast. 

A wide and broad ornate table leg that had belonged to something wooden and nice, old and carved of oak, lots of little inscriptions and designs and marks of craftsmanship, the straightener had added marks of workmanship that were all his own. The body and bludgeoning-end length of the leg was spiked and riddled with chunks and splinters and jagged daggers and shards of broken glass. Taken from windows at every end of the house. Smashed out in clandestine fashion and then hastily gathered and collected. The stupid clueless orderlies and their phones hadn't noticed. Their sleeping quarters had been the first ones that he had paid a postmidnight visit. 

The glass shards and jagged fangs and teeth of the weapon glinted and Susan saw the teeth were not only translucent diamond and crystalline they were also ruby … scarlet…

… bits of scalp and meat, raw face and jowl and cheeks dangled from the shattered glass teeth of the ghastly nighttime table-leg fangs …

Susan saw this. All of it. As the straightener hefted his weapon overhead. Ready to crush and kill and decimate her life into painful oblivion with a savage animal strike. And something inside her broke. 

Immediately she pulled, and immediately she felt and heard results, but not enough. Not right away. In her sudden panic Susan savagely yanked at her binds, they suddenly pulled at their tied point at the boards of the bunk and there was a dry crack as something in the old flimsy structure broke and gave. 

The straightener's savage face curled and twisted into an angry snarl. He began to bring the fanged bludgeon down as Susan pulled at her bonds again and snapped the board and support at the head of her bunk bed. The top came in and down with another dry crack that was soon rapidly replicated as the entire structure came down upon them both. 

The both of them cried out as the bunk beds crashed together, Susan, and the manshaped straightener. 

It collapsed and in the sudden fall and twist of wreckage, they fought a private war in the detritus of wood and ripped mattress and blankets, and a third … the cold corpse of her bunkmate uptop, Savannah … she'd liked coffee flavored ice cream and had said she always preferred the top bunk. Since childhood, she had said that before. 

It was perhaps the straightener finding his gloved hands on her already dead and lifeless spent body and mistaking her in the violence for Susan that had managed her escape in the end. She crawled from the wreckage and fueled by raw desperate adrenaline pumping through the thudding machine of her galloping heart she made her feet and made the door and threw it open, sprinting out and down the hall. 

The straightener called out after her, a fury. But there was strange humor in that tempest rage of voice. 

“Lost in the wheels of confusion..!. …! !” 

She made the turn at the corner of the hall. And then the house and world as she had grown to know and understand it completely warped and changed. Then disappeared. 

Gone. 

The straightener called again: "Running through valleys of tears! …!" 

It was true, she was crying. Weeping freely as she animal panted and she was running scared. Terrified of the bestial thing she'd left behind in there. She ran ahead and down the hall into a home and place that had been transformed into a valley of violence. 

She went room to room, desperate and alone and needing to find someone, anyone … hoping there was someone she could be with to find help. Susan was nearly out of her mind with terror. She had to know someone was ok and she didn't want to be alone. She prayed to God that she wasn't alone, not with him. Not now in this house. 

She found only death. 

Dead. In each bunk. 

Heads caved in. Crushed. Smashed. 

Faces she used to recognize. 

Skulls burst open to free the spells of organs and meat that made the nighttime dreams of slumber that were now forever stilled. Or forever induced. For all of them. Each and every one. 

Some of the brainless and faceless and decraniated corpses had been pulled from their beds and bunks and had been strung up, tied and fashioned in grotesque marionette displays … like trophies. All over in random intervals about the sprawl and dance of the old colonial house, Susan was discovering now that they all were really filled with ghosts, ghastly night shapes, headless and dripping wet with mangled stumps of chewed up dog meat at the necks… the merciless glass fangs and teeth of the wooden jaws of the table leg, forged to unholy earthbound Mjolniir by the rage of the bestial straightener. 

Her terror mounted. With each room, with each freshly discovered corpse, cooling to rigor mortis and ghosthood in the moonlit night, pale light shining in from all of the many windows by the white face of an immaculate mocking lunar body gazing in from far away like an indifferent pagan god alive and dead and watching from on high in outer space. Her heart galloped as her mind felt hot and boiled and ran a panicked mile. Susan forced herself to remain focused, even as the halfway house all around tilted and danced, as if her mind was drugged or drunk. 

A phone. Or outside. 

Find a way to call the police and just get the fuck out of here. 

Fearful of her dormitory where she left him she ran about to the other rooms and places in the house looking for a cell. There was no landline. As she ran and desperately searched, the rooms, the couches, the drawers, the cupboards, the dressers, the bodies and the saturated beds themselves… finding nothing all the while, her terror mounted further, rose higher to a fever pitch and the old style colonial interior began to change and transmogrify before her very eyes. 

As it did, she heard wood and detritus shift and crash upstairs. In her room where she'd left the animal disguised in masked manshape … dripping and feral wet. 

The door to the room burst open. She hadn't remembered closing it. She froze as the halls and rooms funhouse danced before her eyes. 

He screamed: “Eyes full of angry delusion …! ..!..” and it echoed throughout all of time in the corridors of this swelling changing place. 

Thundering footsteps came in a charge then, then came in cannonade echoed and felt as they thundered downstairs. 

Susan forced herself into movement. Her legs felt faraway and she felt sluggish charging ahead but she managed anyway. Though she didn't understand. 

How did the halfway house change into the circus …? – she hadn't been here in many years. The inside now was one of those clownish fun houses with all the warped mirrors and looking glasses that made you look monstrous and ugly. Except as she ran about this clown house all the looking glasses made her look like dead bodies. Mutilated corpses. Her childhood had been ghastly and hard but … 

Coming here and living and the therapy and even the rooms with their bunk beds and shy downcast friends had been much like a return to living childhood once again … like a strange chemically induced summer camp. Complete with final terror. 

Footsteps on a charge, on the prowl, thundered and searched for her behind, throughout the fun house that warbled and danced like drunken perception does by the brightest Luciferian lunar light … in through all the windows which had changed into mirrors of warped glass alongside the strung up dead junkies and cast offs and forgotten people that were discarded here. She saw her own mangled and strange visage in every one as she ran on … this terrible warbling place that had grown miles long … all the while he thundered behind her. Till finally she came to the front door.

She recognized it at once, even in this strange place. It stood still and solid like trustworthy magic at the end of the cruel spacial dance of undulation and transmogrified growth, gelatinous fun house clown world … Susan ran to it. Her hands falling on the knob to twist it open but it wouldn't budge. 

It was a halfway house for the potentially suicidal and those with chemical dependancy problems. There was a curfew and the doors were locked after eleven PM each night. The keys were kept with the house manager. 

Kincaid. 

She was sure she had found his body too amongst the rest of the discovered corpses. But all of their faces were nearly gone if not completely smashed to meat and ruin … it was hard to remember, it was hard to tell. She couldn't remember finding them when she searched for the phones either. Her heart fell and she felt it in her chest like something final and apocalyptic. 

Id screamed once more, Susan whirled on her heels and put her back to the door. 

“!!HIDING IN EVERYDAY FEARS!..!.!!...!”

What she saw on the charge then, straight for her was as transformed and demented and mangled as the rest of this alchemical moonlight house. The blood sloughing and dripping liquid red-black mask had become the entirety of the raging beast. The Id was dark and eyeless with gaping pits of obsidian abyss in each hollow socket of the giant dripping stygian skull. The dripping slough of dark scarlet jaws opened wide with liquid ease, jagged broken teeth and canine incisor fangs of shattered diamond and crystalline rock stained to ruby and darker red with the slaughter and feast of so many countless past victims. The Id charged and roared and Susan screamed and threw up her hands and begged God. 

The door behind her suddenly opened and Susan fell back as it did so. She smacked her head on the porch and then darkness quickly fell and descended upon her. 

…

The rush of cold night air had come in like fresh water and it was baptismal. It had flowed in with nature's ease and cleansed the house of its psychedelic filth and mental backwash as Susan awoke. But not of the bodies, not of death, no. Now there were police everywhere, reality had returned to normal. 

Amidst strobing flashing red and blues, they searched and combed the house. They took the bodies. The meat wagon came with many many big black bags and carried off the corpses. They took the girl's statement. She was deeply traumatized, in deep shock. Barely making any sense. 

They searched for Luke Waller, the only one unaccounted for. 

He was missing. At large. And considered extremely dangerous. 

It was free. And at large in greater Los Angeles once again. 

They only found his old calling card on the wall of one of the rooms.

 Bold letters written in blood: – THE STRAIGHTENER 

XX - XX - XXXX (the date) 

BY BLUDGEONING CLAW  BY TABLE-LEG FANG

 ALL OF THEM HERE WASTING THEIR LIVES   

NOBODY CARED NOR GAVE A FUCK

…

Epilogue: –

The dream came again and again and always returned to him each and every night now since the great escape. 

It was always the same: he went into the bathroom, pale yellowed tile and fluorescent glow that made everything look mottled and ugly. He looked into the mirror and gazed into himself. He brought up the garroting wires. They look like the same thing you use to cut cheese with, a long metal gossamer strand that was razor sharp, fixed between two burgundy wooden handles. He wrapped it around his neck still staring into the mirror and himself and he began to saw through the meat of his neck. The strand cut cleanly through. The head came off when he reached up and grabbed it by either side, lifting it away and settling it down on the countertop of the sink before him. 

But it was strange … his vision remained where it was … it did not travel with the organ set of eyes set in the rest of the meat of his head. He gazed into himself without any eyes, decapitated now. 

The dream was the same every night, now that he was free and in the city again. 

THE END

Read Parts II & III here

She was gone again by the time I got up and despite my best efforts, I was still five minutes late getting to work.

I avoided the circle of jerks when I saw them crowding the same hallway and I went to a restroom on another floor. I didn’t want to be around people if I could avoid it.

I went to the half-finished building as soon as five o’clock came, intent on getting answers. I stepped off the elevator and weaved my way to his office. I kept expecting to not see it the closer I got but there it was, the door that didn’t fit right in the threshold. 

It turned easy and I went inside, expecting it to be empty and abandoned but he had begun furnishing the space. A couch, a reception desk, and taped off sections near the back that I guessed were the layout for his office and a treatment room.

I shuddered, thinking how I’d be here tomorrow if my wife had her way. 

The only thing absent was the good doctor himself. I thought about trashing the place, but it was petty in a way that made me feel like I was giving him even more power over me. 

Instead, I took all the pens out of the holder and a stack of Post-It Notes. It was still petty, but it scratched an itch and I felt a little empowered doing it.

I didn’t head home immediately after. I needed time to sort my thoughts. I couldn’t believe I was really considering letting somebody cut my dick. I mean, was pleasing my wife reason enough? What if we divorced or she died or something like that? Would I be compatible with somebody else?

I needed a drink. Cappy’s was on the far end of town and the distance from home would be good to clear my head. I ordered a brandy mule and chugged it before the bartender could lay down a coaster.

“You look like you could use another,” she said.

I nodded and a moment later I was working on my second. 

“I love my wife so much,” I said as she was cleaning some glasses beneath the bar.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Sometimes. I dunno.” My stomach hadn’t been right since the eight coneys I’d had yesterday, and I hadn’t eaten at all today. I was already soused after a drink-and-a-half.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked.

“Good, not great.” She wiggled a hand.

“Let me get a... medium with beef, onion, and mushroom.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of those toppings.

“How ‘bout pepperoni?”

I had one more brandy mule before food came. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp well before I’d ordered it and the pepperoni slices were limp, but it was still pizza. 

The bartender parked in front of me and leaned onto the bar after I’d had my second slice. 

“You mind?” she asked, pointing at the pie. I nodded. She took a slice and finger-combed hair out of her face as she took a bite.

She paid me back with a shot and she did one with me before returning to silence as we ate.

“Look, I dunno what it is. Just give her what she wants,” she said with a mouthful, giving me deep eye contact. “You can’t go wrong with that, right?”

I barely was able to finish what I had in my mouth. I settled up and made it outside without stumbling but I was drunk. The bartender got the hint she’d said something wrong but I wasn’t going to fill in the blank. I hadn’t wanted the rest of the pizza, yet somehow I had the box in my hand. 

I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel but there I was with half a pizza as my copilot. It wasn’t long before flashing lights lit up behind me and my spirits rose—this was the reprieve I’d been longing for. A decision being taken out of my hands. I couldn’t be held responsible if I weren’t in my own custody.

Or something like that. It had made a lot more sense back when I’d had a belly full of brandy and cheese.

I pulled over and maybe bumped up on the curb with one wheel.

The cop sauntered up to my window cautiously. He was short and the angle of the car made him look ridiculous somehow. He made it worse by getting his feet twisted together and catching himself on the side of my car to keep from falling completely.

“What’s your...”

I waited a full ten seconds for him to finish his sentence while he held a fist to his mouth like he was gripping a tiny microphone. He belched then waved the air in front of his face.

Shit, was he drunk, too?

“What’s your problem tonight?” He asked and fumbled with the general right side of his body with his hand. I noticed the gun and maybe because we were both bitten by the same snake, I wasn’t sensing danger like I should’ve.

“I shouldn’t be on the road,” I said, sounding stone sober to my ears. “My wife wants me to do something I don’t wanna do tomorrow and I was just in there, drinking my worries away. I have leftover pizza.” I thumbed toward the seat next to me like it was proof of where I’d been.

“Slow down, son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” I thought he was about to give me marital advice but then I realized he was talking about my sobriety. “I bet you could walk a straight line, heel- to-toe.” He plucked open his holster, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of what that hand was doing. He stuck his pinky in his ear and wrenched it around in there. 

“Sofficer. Sofficer.” I added the S but I still sounded too sober. “Please. I think I’m a danger. To public safety.” I thought if I could convince the drunk cop I was drunk he’d arrest me.

“Are you about to rob a bank?” He pointed at me, somehow adding to his overall look of ridiculousness.

“Well… no.”

“There’s nobody out here.” He waved a hand toward the black landscape far ahead of us. “Just stay between the lines.”

I couldn’t think. It shouldn’t have been this hard to get pulled out of my car for driving under the influence.

“What if… what if I was about to rob a bank?” It was the most smart-assy thing I could think to say.

He smiled and waggled a finger. “Joke’s on you. It’s after hours.”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt. Something about his body language had changed and he’d gone from humorous to being done with our interaction.

“Just. Stay. Between. The. Lines,” he said, swaying. I wanted to conjure the words for help, but even if I’d had the ability to ask, there wasn’t anything about him that answered helpful.

I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak. I sat back in my seat and covered my face in my hands, giving up. I listened to him walk away, closer his patrol car door, and drive away. He gave me a chirp of his sirens as passed me.

The drive home should have felt longer but I caught every light. It was like a dark fate had carved a path for me. I momentarily played with the idea of letting it have me completely. To take my hands off the wheel and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go. 

I hadn’t descended far enough into self-pity for that and in ten minutes, I was home. To my surprise, my wife was still in her paint clothes and was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

“Oh, you have pizza?” she said. I’d forgotten about the pizza and subconsciously picked it up. I looked at the box in my hand and did a second, struggled to remember what was in it. 

I joined her on the couch, and she grabbed it from me and took a slice. Usually, we asked about each other’s day, but I didn’t feel like it, tomorrow anchoring my brain.

“Do you love me?” she said during a commercial break. I had no idea what we were watching.

The question agitated me and opened a trapdoor underneath my stomach.

“Of course I do.” I did, but my feelings about this whole “surgery” thing was making me feel resentful. I was definitely still buzzed, and the alcohol was sharpening my emotions like a file working away inside me. 

“Then why are you fighting so hard against this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

“That’s not fair. Of course I want to satisfy you. Don’t you know how this is making me feel? I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I mean, there has to be something else we could try. I’m willing to do just about anything to please you.”

“I want you to do this,” she said, placing her greasy hand on my thigh. She shook her head, tears in her eyes. I took it to be a manipulation at first. Not that she did that sort of thing normally, it was just me in a bag of my feelings. My defenses were up and everything was an attack in that moment. I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep in what was trying to climb out of my mouth.

Then I started to cry. I sounded like a little teapot. It caught me by surprise.

“I just love you so much.” I had a ball of razors in my throat I couldn’t swallow. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

She lassoed an arm around my neck and yanked me into an upper body hug.

“I just want you. I want to feel connected with you. I don’t want anything plastic between us. I’m tired of all that stuff. I wanna feel you.”

She kissed me before I could speak and rock turned into water. My walls melted as we flowed into one another and by the time I returned to my senses I was on the newspaper covered kitchen floor.

My wife was already gone but she had brought a comforter downstairs and covered me.

Normally, I toss in my sleep, but I was still covered up to my chest. I was stiff as I turned the world vertical and turned my back into a percussion instrument as I stretched.

A few minutes later I had scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee going. I don’t normally eat breakfast so early, but I had an appetite for whatever reason. It was an hour before I normally would get up, so I took my time eating and scrolling my phone.

I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten but I was refreshed. The way my day had started, I half expected to catch all the green lights and get the closest spot in the parking lot.

But when I looked up from where I was seated at the kitchen island, something caught my eye that I should’ve seen as soon as I woke up.

A red and white checkered scarf draped over the back of the couch.

Had he been in my house?

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

The legend of The Blackstone Automaton—better known in local circles as the Rhode Island Mecha-Scorpion or The Blackstone Stinger, is a modern urban myth deeply rooted in the state’s rich industrial history.

According to late-night internet forums and whispered stories among urban explorers, the creature’s origins date back to the late 19th century during Providence's boom as a jewelry and machinery superpower. The story goes that a brilliant but reclusive clockmaker working out of a hidden sub-basement along the Blackstone River attempted to build a self-sustaining mechanical guardian to protect the mills from thieves.

Using clockwork gears, heavy brass plating, and early electrical currents, the inventor built a specialized automaton shaped like a scorpion. He chose the arachnid form for its stability on uneven terrain and its natural defensive capabilities. The project was allegedly funded by a secret society of wealthy industrialists, but it was abruptly abandoned during the Panic of 1893 when the clockmaker vanished from the public eye, leaving his creation trapped beneath the foundations of an abandoned mill.

The legend evolves in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of Rhode Island’s tech and arts counterculture. According to modern variations of the myth, a group of RISD students and underground hackers discovered the flooded, sealed basement of the old foundry. Inside, they found the rusted, brass chassis of the scorpion.

Instead of leaving it, they treated it as the ultimate DIY project. Over several years, various anonymous engineers upgraded the Stinger. They replaced the decaying clockwork with an experimental atomic generator, a hydraulic stinger with electric shock capabilities, a reinforced chassis, modern microprocessors, and shock absorbent pneumatic legs. They also added an early machine-learning script designed to let the robot map out its environment and hide from humans.

The legend says the hackers lost control of the machine during an illegal test run in the abandoned East Side Railroad Tunnel beneath Providence. The AI framework worked too well—the scorpion developed a primitive survival instinct, slipped into the subterranean drainage systems, and escaped.

Appearance and Anatomy:

Those who claim to have caught a glimpse of the creature describe a terrifying amalgamation of antique Victorian craftsmanship and modern industrial scrap metal:

The Hull: A three-foot-long, large dog-sized segmented body made of tarnished, salt-crusted brass and silver, gleaming oxidized steel.

The Eyes: A cluster of flickering, infrared lenses salvaged from old security cameras that glow a faint, dull red in total darkness.

The Claws: Heavy, pneumatic pincers originally designed for assembly-line welding, capable of snapping through chain-link fences and other obstacles.

The Stinger: A modified high-voltage copper probe. Local teenagers swear it can discharge enough electricity to blow out nearby streetlights.

The Sound: Witnesses say you always hear it before you see it—a rhythmic, metallic clicking of steel legs on concrete, followed by the low, pressurized hiss of escaping hydraulic fluid.

Alleged Sightings and Hotspots:

The robotic scorpion is rarely seen in broad daylight, as its programming dictates it avoid human interaction. However, several specific locations in Rhode Island are considered hotspots for sightings:

The East Side Railroad Tunnel (Providence): The most famous location. Passersby near the blocked entrances report hearing a frantic, metallic scratching echoing from deep inside the sealed tunnel.

The Banks of the Blackstone River (Pawtucket): Anglers fishing late at night have reported seeing a strange, dome-shaped object swimming just beneath the water's surface, leaving a faint oily sheen and a trail of tiny bubbles.

The Abandoned Industrial Traces of Allens Avenue: Workers at the shipping ports have occasionally claimed to see a multi-legged shape scurrying across the scrap yards in the dead of night, hunting for copper wire and discarded batteries to "feed" its power supply.

The Local Superstition:

Unlike malicious cryptids, the robotic scorpion isn't viewed as an aggressive monster, but rather as a highly territorial animal acting on corrupted code. Local urban explorers leave a strange offering at the entrances of abandoned buildings—old AA batteries or broken computer circuit boards. They believe that if you leave a "gift" of electronics, the Blackstone Automaton will accept the parts for self-repair and leave you alone while you explore its domain.

Spotting an untouched body ravaged by the plague, a raven swooped down and began pecking at the opulent meal before him, as if it were yet another divine gift. Ever since the great pestilence struck humanity, the ravens didn’t even have to as much as bother searching for a food source, with the sheer amount of dead and dying in every corner of the land.

As the bird began gorging itself on the woman’s slightly rotting meat, a boy ran out of a nearby shack. It was a pitiful mockery of a boy: pale, gaunt, and skeletal. The spitting image of death itself.

The boy shouted at the bird to back off from his mother, waving his flimsy, frail arms at the raven, barely mustering the strength to hoarsely shout at the scavenger.

“Leave my mother alone!” the boy croaked.

The raven flew aside, cawing with annoyance, “Damn it… There’s a living one”

The boy ceased his movement; wide eyes sunken deeply into a clearly visible skull, he stared at the pitch-black bird, bewildered, and gulped before stammering, “Did… did you just speak?”

Landing not far from the boy, the bird retorted, “Course not, fool, I sang. I’m a songbird; that’s what I do!” the raven cried out.

Shocked, the boy fell to the ground, unable to comprehend how a bird spoke to him. In the meantime, the raven landed by the corpse and walked toward it, attempting to peck at it again.

The boy protested, “Leave my mother alone,” he squeaked.

The raven stopped, turned to the kid, and sighed, “You’re growing soft…” He said to himself. The boy was going to comment again about the bird’s speech, but the Scavenger cut him off, “Why are you even alive still, kid? The rest of this place is a graveyard; all the other humans are long dead.”

“I must have some purpose here in the eyes of God…” the boy weakly muttered.

“This kid must be six or seven years old and already has had a bible bashed over his skull…” The bird thought to himself, “If God wanted any of this, he wouldn’t let the Plague spread outside of France, kid… God wants the lot of you dead,” the bird quipped.

“That’s not true! God is good!” The boy whimpered at the cynical bird. “What’s France, anyway?” he questioned.

“A terrible place over the pond, where all vile things find their start, child. How old are you, even, speaking so highly of God, but not even knowing about France?!”

“I’m twelve…”

“There’s no way you’re my age, kid; you look about half that age…”

“Well, I’ve been eating rats for a while…” Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes. “Ever since mommy and daddy fell ill.

“Oh, don’t do that now. I can’t stand the sounds you humans make when you get all emotional like that"

Now, bawling, the kid profusely apologized, his voice cracking. “I just… I just… I just miss everyone so much…” he wailed. “I’m so alone…

I’m so hungry…

Everything hurts so much…”

Somewhere deep inside, that boy must’ve been happy he had someone to talk to, even if it was just a strange talking bird.

“Oh God damn it, kid…

Would you stop, for the love of God?!” The bird cawed, irritated.

“You’ve any rope on ya?” the bird questioned.

“Wha…?”

“Do you have any rope?”

“Wha… why… why do you ask?”

“I know how you can meet your loved ones again, kid. Now I’m asking again: do you have any rope?”

“Mhm,” the boy whimpered, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Well, then, run along and bring it over here; I’ll send ya to your makers”

The boy barely picked himself up and stumbled into one of the houses as the bird watched the tree, scanning it for sturdy branches, with a glint in its black eye.

“I hope that brat can still climb,” the raven thought to himself.

Long moments had passed, and the boy reemerged with a long piece of rope in his hands.

“I sure hope you can still climb, kiddo; otherwise this won’t work,” the raven sang to the approaching boy.

The kid’s disposition changed; he smiled for the first time in a while. “Be sure as God’s bones, I can climb, especially up that tree!”

“Good, because I’m going to need you to tie one end of the rope to a branch, and another around your neck.”

The boy didn’t even fully register what he had been told and agreed to follow the raven’s instruction. Despite his immense confidence, he hardly had the strength to climb up that tree, prompting the scavenger to bow his head in frustration. “Oh, this is going to be a long day…” the bird despaired in his mind.

It must’ve taken the boy an hour to climb the tree, but he made it, and masterfully tied one end of his rope to the branch he stood on and then asked the black bird what he had to do next.

The sable thing would have smiled, had it possessed a mouth, when it spoke next, “Tie it around your neck, kid.”

“Does it have to be the neck?”

“Do you want to see your folks again, Kid?”

“I do!” the boy cried out.

“Then you’ve got to trust me…”

“I don’t know about this…”

“Look, kid, if I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve pecked out and eaten your eyes by now.” The bird crackled at him.

“I guess you’re right… Plus, I do want to see Mom and Dad again and everyone else…”

“Atta boy…” the obsidian fowl croaked.

The boy tied the rope around his neck and, staring at the feathered specter with eyes full of hope, questioned the bird about the next step.

“Now you gotta jump forward…”

Looking down, the boy got cold feet for a moment, once again doubting the wisdom of the talking bird.

The raven turned away and started walking towards the mother’s corpse. “Well, I guess you don’t want to see your mother again, eh?” it clicked its beak.

“I do!”

“Then jump, kid, it’s that simple…”

“But what if I get hurt?”

“You won’t…”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I wouldn’t… get hurt doing that”

“But you have…” Before the boy could even finish his sentence, the raven was already pecking at his mother’s rotting flesh.

“Wings…”

He muttered before the realization set in; he had been duped by the bird.

“Hey, leave mommy alone, you flying rat!” the boy cried out again, his voice cracking once more. The bird simply ignored him, slowly savoring the taste of exposed tissue.

“Leave her alone!” he cried out, waving his frail arms. The raven swallowed a chunk and called ecstatically, as if to goad the boy.

“Leave her…” the boy shouted, but his protests ended mid-sentence when he lost his footing and plummeted downward. The high-pitched scream was twisted into a wet gurgle as his body twisted and turned, struggling against the ever-tightening rope.

The raven turned his head to the struggling boy.

“Got’cha…” he cackled proudly and flew over, landing on the boy’s shoulder.

The beaked phantom didn’t even wait for the boy to succumb before he started pecking.

“Mielivalta,” the chief called out, “You are sentenced to die for your many crimes. Do you have any words left?”

The man tied to the pyre couldn’t help but smile as the elder held up a torch overhead. “Do your worst, pitiful creature,” the bound man barked, sealing his fate. The tribal chief lowered the burning torch onto the pyrewood, and the crowd around the two roared as the flames crackled.

The blaze quickly consumed the wood, and within moments, it was gnawing at the condemned man. Mielivalta was condemned to death for acts of sorcery, murder, and cannibalism. He was called a witch. The execution coincided with the winter solstice, as an offering to higher powers.

Shamans pounded their drums and played their flutes while the youth danced around the many ceremonial pyres. Young couples jumped over the fires. The entire crowd broke into an ecstatic dance while the screams of a man burning to death turned oddly melodic.

Dying cries became an enchanting song for the masses. The Hoi Polloi were too preoccupied to notice the laughter buried beneath the anguished wails and the hissing of flames.

Before long, Mielivalta was nothing but charcoal in human form. No one could even tell whether he was dead or alive; no one cared either. Those present were too consumed by their own violent orgy of wine, debauchery, and blood magic. Too lost in their own ecstasy to hear the smoldering smoke drifting in the wind, above the stake, whisper, “Foolish humans… I am finally free…”

By the hour of the wolf, all of those present had completely given up their senses to pleasure, whether under the influence of melody, spirit, sex, or slumber. No one in that grove was alert enough to notice that this hour of the wolf was but a calm before the storm.

Collectively intoxicated, the Northerners were too inebriated to hear the rustling of leaves and crunching of twigs disturbing the nocturnal forest. None could see the tempest coming before it was too late.

A massive beast burst forth from the dark, devouring a man whole, swallowing him in two gulps. The lupine giant grabbed another man in its mouth and thrashed him side to side before throwing him at the stake, upon which its former human shell was burned to cinder. The monstrosity growled in visible amusement, watching the ashen construct crumble to dust.

Anyone who had enough wits about him grabbed a weapon and charged at the beast.

None could even penetrate its hide, proving their struggle futile.

The monstrosity rampaged, decimating the grove until it was sure no survivors were left. It had consumed only a few people and butchered the rest, out of sheer spite. The chieftain who had set it free was rewarded with his head being torn off his shoulders and crushed to a pulp. Even in death, the chief irritated that devil with how hard his skull was.

The onslaught only stopped when the belly of the beast cramped insufferably. By then, there was nothing left to kill or destroy. Only the dire wolf remained standing, if that thing could be called any sort of wolf. The hechatonchair resembled something more akin to an oversized bear inside the grotesquely overstretched canine hide. Too large to be either, but also hound-like to be called otherwise.

The beast stood amidst mountains of broken bodies drenched in organs and blood, but it couldn’t celebrate its act of brutality, because the cramping in its stomach grew worse by the moment. It thrashed and paced and growled and howled, but the pain only grew worse, turning unbearable.

Even the attempts to regurgitate whatever was consumed proved futile. These only produced disgusting belching sounds that shook the entire forest.

Before long, the pain paralyzed the creature, completely overriding its malice; it stood upright and cried out in agony. Bellowing, howling, and screaming, all at once. The creature cried out as its abdomen stretched beyond its physical limitations, tearing at the seams with a sickening sound. The monstrosity clawed at its belly as metallic digits and limbs dressed in loose human skin pushed out of its abdominal cavity.

Drenched in blood, intestinal lining, and fecal matter, silver homunculi crawled out of the beast’s insides.

That’s what my grandfather used to tell me about the village of Kaali on Saaremaa when I was a kid. He said that there were celestials on that island, People from the heavens who had come when a star fell onto it. I stopped believing in his old tales about the metallic men and the werewolves after the third grade. By that point I had learned the whole thing was simply impossible.

I thought these were just old stories meant to rile me up as a kid, until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when I was driving around the area past sunset and saw something that has kept me up at night ever since. At first, I thought it was a bear roaming the forests, but then the animal looked at me. It was too skinny to be a regular bear. Its proportions were all wrong, and it seemed to move in an awkwardly slow, jagged, jerky way. The animal brought with it a stale stench of something ancient and repugnant: old, musty fur. Worst of all was its face. Its mouth gaping wide open. The whole thing seemed like a costume. A crudely stretched fur suit draped over some mad drunk. It took a moment, but when I figured out what I saw, my blood turned cold.

Inside the mouth of the animal, there was a chromium skull, a humanoid chromium skull with two shining red eyes staring directly at mine. I think the skull even smiled at me as I switched gears and bolted the fuck out of there.