Library Amnesty Day

One rainy spring afternoon in Baltimore, a man walked into one of the city’s smaller libraries. He drew a little attention to himself since he was wearing a burnouse. It was Library Amnesty Day, which meant that patrons could return overdue library books and have the fines for those books waived. He explained that he wanted to take advantage of this amnesty. The librarian asked him for his library card but he said, “I have none.” The librarian tried to get more information, but he fled. He was in and out of the library in under five minutes, but he did leave a plastic tube on the counter of the librarian’s station. This tube was discovered to contain an ancient papyrus. Obviously, this had not been borrowed from the small library in Baltimore. It was forwarded to one university and thence onward to several others. Eventually, it was determined that the origin of the papyrus scroll was the Library at Alexandria, burned when Caesar himself strategically set fire to his own ships during the siege of that city. The fire spread from the ships to the docks and then reached the vaunted library and consumed much of it, Plutarch informs us. Other historians insist the fire (or multiple fires) happened earlier or later. But all agree that the library and its precious volumes perished by fire. Had the Library at Alexandria ever collected such penalties, the overdue fee the mystery man was seeking to have discharged would have been astronomical. Even a modern robber baron would have difficulty paying such a fine. The scroll the mysterious man dropped off contained text in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. The title of the work, when translated, was revealed to be How to Live Forever.

Helping Hands Daycare

I can’t remember Jake. I mean I can, but I won’t. Because Em and I have two other children now. And we want them to have a normal life. They don’t even know they might have an older brother somewhere. But since you asked, I’ll tell you. I can’t talk at length about this, so I’m going to be very brief. Just the basic facts. We don’t know any more than those few “basic facts.” Probably we never will.

I told Em from very nearly the beginning there was something different about that daycare. Helping Hands Daycare. Well, you know it’s gone now. The building burnt to the ground. There’s a Goodwill store in that lot. You’d never guess there had been anything else there. There’s no trace of it left.

When we first encountered it? Well, sure, it looked fine if you took a quick glance. Fingerpaintings hung proudly on the walls. There was up-to-date and safe playground equipment and stringent supervision at boisterous playtime. A current license. Healthy food. A strict sick-child policy to protect everyone. The staff was friendly and, most importantly, they interacted beautifully with the kids. Perhaps too beautifully. I just felt something was off with “Miss Marsha.” It was her business. You know they never found her. That was some other woman’s body in the fire. They said there had been an attempt to make it appear that it was Miss Marsha’s body. Well, DNA testing put that to rest.

How it began? Jake began coming home with dirt under his fingernails. I would ask him to explain and he used to shrug me off. He’d get that nervous look. I told him it was okay, tried to turn it into a joke. So eventually he said that disturbing thing, he just came out and said, “We have to feed them.”

My wife thought it was nothing at first. She said it was typical fantasy, a story sprung up between Jake and his playmates at Helping Hands. When he told us that the things lived under the daycare, in a sort of tunnel, that Miss Marsha would take them down there and they would feed these creatures, she laughed. She just snorted and whinnied and told her friends. She thought it was hilarious. “The monsters that live under Helping Hands Daycare.” I heard her mother and her laughing on the phone about it. I distinctly remember that. They hooted.

Em actually liked to hear Jake tell the stories. She’d encourage him. Even at the dinner table. Then she would correct him, but oh so nicely. She would say that she liked to hear him tell stories, that it was good he had an imagination.That someday he could write books and tell others these stories and they would enjoy them as much as his mother did. She said imagination was something about which Jake should be proud. He would nod at her and finish combining his mashed potatoes and peas. But I saw in his eyes that he thought she was crazy.

It all happened very quickly after that. The fire at the daycare. Miss Marsha presumed dead. Everyone wondered at the time why she would have been at the daycare in the middle of the night anyway, which is when the fire broke out. They still haven’t identified that young woman whose body was found in the fire. Maybe they never will. They did determine she died by a gunshot to the head and not from the fire itself.

Obviously, no children perished in that middle of the night blaze. But four of the children, the oldest enrollees, did disappear shortly after that fire.

“Abducted” is what the media report. In a sense, that’s true. But in another sense it isn’t.

I began waking suddenly at night in the period immediately after the fire. I’d often find Jake awake and creeping around the house. At three or four in the morning. Often, I’d catch him at the windows peering out into the night. My wife thought he had become a sleepwalker because of the trauma from the fire. We didn’t enroll him in a new daycare. It was all too disturbing and we wanted to keep him close to us. Em’s sister would watch him in the daytime. In our house.

I’d always ask Jake what he was doing up and what he was looking for out the window. He told me he missed his “special friend.” I was terrified there might have been sexual abuse going on and that Jake was turning it all into some sort of surreal fantasy narrative. I really only thought this after the fire. That’s what made me think the conflagration was used as a cover-up for some serious shit at Helping Hands. But, thinking back, I remember the strange fur we would find on his clothes. We knew animals, even pets, were not allowed in the daycare. We’d drop him off there and pick him up. He didn’t go anywhere else. So where was he getting that? And what sort of animal was it? My God, when I think back at how I just shook off so many anomalies, I want to go back in time and shake the shit out of myself, and that “normalcy narrative” to which I kept clinging.

Anyway, you know the end of the story. Or what I told the police. There is no real end to the story. I say I don’t remember, but I do. In the middle of the night, when I’m lying in bed, I think of Jake. And I listen. I leave the windows open in spring, summer, even late into autumn. I listen for the sound of that…beast. If it came once, it might come again. Jake might ride it back here. The way I saw him riding it that night.

My only consolation is knowing this: that beast would not harm Jake. Even with its incredible size (where does a creature like that even hide on earth? under the earth, of course, they must be under the earth!) and even with its monstrous tusks and that barbed tail, I could see it was tame to him. I saw him run to it in the backyard. It had been patiently waiting for him. I saw the beast lay its head to the earth, in submission. I watched as Jake scrambled up its back and took its reins in hand. And then the thing let out a weird guttural cry and they were off. I chased it. I chased them in my bare feet, in my underwear. But they were swallowed up by the forest behind our house. I heard Jake calling out commands to the thing.

The police didn’t know what to make of the tracks. They said I had been hallucinating. Ambien is known to have that effect. And I had been taking that drug at the time. I won’t deny that. The wouldn’t even put that in the police report. About the tracks. The only way it got in later was when I accused the police of covering it up, of trying to make me look crazier and more like a suspect.

But then, in their hearts, the cops knew I hadn’t done anything to harm Jake. Because he was one fourth of the “Ravenswood Four,” the kids who disappeared that night. All Jake’s age. And all former enrollees of Helping Hands daycare.

Who knows who Miss Marsha really was. And who knows where those four kids are now. I think Jake still has his mount. And I think he’s still riding that beast even as he becomes a young man. If I tell you I think he’s down there, under our feet, you’ll think I’m crazy. Far, far under our feet. But I know it’s true.

The White Cat

An old man began seeing a white cat in the mirrors throughout his apartment. He had collected antique mirrors for most of his adult life, so there were plenty of opportunities for sightings in every room.

The man owned no pets. Often in these antique mirrors the cat could be seen cleaning itself or perched on a windowsill enjoying a view of the city. The old man would swing around and look, but of course there was no cat on the windowsill, no cat daintily licking its paw as in the mirror.

One day, the man awoke and looked at a large bureau mirror across the room and saw a white paw protruding from its surface. “Get away!” he yelled, and the paw retreated. He saw the image of the cat fleeing into the backwards recesses of the mirror. It hid behind the reflection of his bed, although there was no cat behind his bed itself. He had checked.

The man began worrying that he had suffered a stroke, but the medical tests he underwent all came back negative. He was in good health, despite his age.

He visited a psychic who told him that the cat was a harbinger of death. He asked if this meant his death. She said she did not know. She urged him to paint the surface of all the mirrors with black paint. She explained that if the cat did indeed come over to “our side,” it would mean death.

The man defaced all his mirrors, ruefully. He sealed them with black paint. And then he covered them with sheets. He realized he was ruining a valuable collection, and his apartment looked ridiculous to him, but the seer had told him that it was his only option. She explained that he could not simply discard the mirrors. That would be too dangerous.

One afternoon shortly after that, the man woke from a nap to see the white cat curled up at the foot of his bed, fast asleep. He screamed, but it was a muffled sort of cry and he felt his heart seize at that moment. His head fell back upon his pillow for the last time.

As the man was being zipped into a black body bag, his upstairs neighbor, a redhead actress of twenty-four, poked her head in his open apartment door. She was holding a white cat against her breast. A breeze played through the white sheer curtains of the living room. These wraiths were lifting and falling in the dead man’s open window.

“Sorry. She comes down the fire escape sometimes. I’m afraid she’s a bit of a nosy parker. I think she liked him. He seemed a nice old man. If a bit odd.”

Angela tsk-tsked the cat in her arms as she walked upstairs, saying a little prayer for the dead man under her breath.

When she got inside her apartment, she released the cat, who jumped up on her bed at the same time she sat down there. She felt a strange little sense of loss, although she had never known the man. She shuddered when she thought about the mirrors in his apartment, how they had all been painted black. Who knows what happens in the minds of the aged, the lonely. She looked across the room at a mirror hanging on her wall and saw her white cat lying behind her on the bed, already curled up, eyes squinted shut. But she also saw another white cat. It was sitting on the bed next to her pet. It was not interested in her cat. This reflected cat was making eye contact with Angela via the mirror. The young woman spun her head around fast at the jolt of that intense stare. But, of course, there was only one cat there.

I Had an Evil Doll Once

I had an evil doll once. It strangled my best friend’s dog. It was with Katie when she disappeared on the hiking trail. They haven’t found her bones yet, but soon the heavy snows will melt away from the woods. It’s almost spring. She should come up fresh as wintergreen.

My parents started to get suspicious after Katie. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when the doll killed them. I was surprised anyway. He made the fire look like an accident. He woke me where I had just enough time to escape, but where I could do nothing to save my parents. Or my little brother. I opened my bedroom door and the house was just a total conflagration. I had no choice but to escape out my window.

The doll’s, I mean the killer’s, name is Vlad. This horrible homunculus was given to me by my creepy Russian grandfather, just before he choked to death on a bunch of sardines. Go figure. Of course, the doll was there when he died. We found it sitting on his chest. I can still hear my mom screaming when she found them that way.

The doll looks like a little well-dressed banker. He looks like a little guilty man pretending to be innocent. I was so happy when he disappeared. I didn’t care if the police had him or even if he had gone and thrown himself into the river or even burnt himself up. Good riddance! I was so happy. Past tense.

Because just Tuesday I saw him again. I saw him in the park. I don’t think he noticed that I spied him. He was hiding in some shrubs. But I saw what he was doing.

I know exactly what he was doing, what he is planning. He’s watching my new family. Anybody that likes me, he’ll come for them. Sooner or later.

My one uncle is really starting to get on my nerves. He keeps calling me and bugging me with questions about my parents’ deaths.

I think he’s gone senile. Because whenever I mention Vlad or my Russian grandfather, he gets upset. He keeps insisting there never was any doll in our house and that I don’t even have a Russian grandfather.

I wish someone would help that poor guy get his head checked.

Her Boyfriend Went MIssing

Her boyfriend had gone missing. Lovable, nerdy Adam. She had gotten a dog right afterwards. She’d take him with her everywhere. Even in the car. Really, can you blame a girl for wanting to feel safe? But here’s the weird thing. You’d only see her walking the dog or taking him out to the car with her at night. I guess night is the scariest time. But we all wondered: wasn’t she afraid to be out at night like that after her boyfriend had just vanished?

Many people thought it had been a drug hit or the work of the mafia. You know how people always talk that crap. It’s natural to want to blame the victim. He must have been doing something wrong. It gives one a smug feeling of safety to say that and try to believe it.

You must have seen the MISSING posters put up all over this apartment complex and half of the city by Adam’s parents, siblings, friends and coworkers. It was like the dude had just walked off the planet. At twenty-eight. And most of his friends kept saying they were sure he was dead. Because he wasn’t the type to just thoughtlessly vanish like that. Grace didn’t seem to care, wouldn’t participate in the searches for him. She told the police and the media he had just up and left her. She wished him all the best. But she didn’t really care anymore where he was. It was no longer her business. That’s all she’d say to people when they asked. She seemed to believe he was fine.and just living a new life somewhere else. A few gullible people bought this explanation. Most didn’t.

Everyone said they had had a really weird relationship. What people whispered on the grapevine was that she was a crazy domme. They said that was extremely dominant to the point where Adam’s friends believed he had been swallowed up by her. They were sure it was an unhealthy relationship. They even felt he might be in danger. But Adam always told those friends to let him live his life. He said he could handle it. We’d see him with black eyes. His left arm was in a cast for a while. The BDSM lifestyle is one thing. This was another thing altogether. But Adam always told his friends he was getting what he wanted from Grace. He didn’t mind, he said, if people thought he was a freak for enjoying the abuse she inflicted on him.

Yeah, she was a beauty. Grace was. No denying that. Amy Winehouse goddesss hair. Those ridiculously long legs of hers were usually in the sexiest boots. I’d see her smoking a cigarette at night while she walked that dog in one of her short little skirts. I live in that complex too. The one where Adam used to live with her. Some people say she killed him. Or that one of her lovers did. That they’ll find his body in the bay, if they ever find him at all. She always did look like trouble to me. I won’t deny that.

But last night I learned that she’s much worse than that. And he’s not dead at al.. Killing him would have been much kinder.

I was getting back to my apartment from a night jog. She was walking her dog, that big muscular beast we all thought she had bought for protection. I had always wondered what breed it was. I glanced their way to see, since Grace and the animal reached the streetlight at the corner nearest our apartment building at the same time as me. She hadn’t seen me coming up the shadowy side street. She gasped and pulled on the dog’s chain to hurry him away from me. It was one of those long, retractable leashes. I realized then what had happened to her boyfriend. I knew what had happened to Adam.

Wow.

Talk about the ultimate sub. I wondered how many surgeries it had taken to make him look like that. And what sort of doctor could bring himself to do something like that to a human being? How did they get the fur to grow all over his body like that? He even had a tail. God only knows where that tail flesh came from. Or how those paws had been constructed from what had been Adam’s hands and knees. Now I knew why Grace only took the dog out at night. All I know is that when she whistled, he went running after her, tongue hanging out.

Tongue hanging out.

I really hate to admit this. But he looked like a very happy dog.

The Creatures on the Roof

When our mother died in that terrible spring, the one with the record level flooding, my sister Rosalie and I inherited our crazy aunt Esther from her.

Mother had warned us that the responsibility for Aunt Esther’s care would devolve upon my sister and me. She let us know that her older sister certainly had her “peculiarities.” She had wanted us to be familiarized with Aunt Esther’s crotchets before we began helping the octogenarian in the ways mother had outlined for us before she lost her bravely-fought battle with cancer.

Of course, we knew Aunt Esther. We had known her all our lives. It’s just that we rarely saw her, except at the occasional family gathering. So we didn’t really know her all that well, notwithstanding the blood relation. Truth be told, Esther had always been a bit of a recluse.

She lived in the house she had inherited from our maternal grandparents. All her life. Since she had had no children, she had no heirs, mother explained, so we would inherit the house upon Esther’s death. We didn’t have to do much by way of actual personal care. Mother had arranged for two neighborhood girls, Meg and Aurora, to act as personal care assistants (and also perform light housekeeping functions) in morning and evening shifts. We simply had to make sure the house bills and the girls were getting paid. We had to make sure the little bit of yard work (lawn mowing in summer, shoveling in winter) got done. This we could either do ourselves or delegate. And we had to be there for Aunt Esther when she called, which initially was not often.

Mother had made us promise not to send Esther to a nursing home unless it became “absolutely necessary.” She had told us that many people had insisted our aunt was suffering from dementia. But mother insisted that Esther always did just fine with a little bit of help. It couldn’t be real dementia, she promised. It was just the fogginess of age. We had nodded our acquiescence to this wish, just before mother died. So it was a sacred vow. We felt duty-bound to honor it. Rosalie and I would come to regret this. By the next summer, we become convinced that our mother could not possibly have had a real conception of how poor Esther’s mental faculties had become.

Both my sister and I began receiving barrages of phone calls from our frantic aunt, at all hours of the night. She would rant about “the creatures on the roof.” She insisted there were some unidentifiable little beasties scrambling over her roof at night. It had been going on for quite some time, years in fact, but she hadn’t trusted us enough to tell us. At first.

As soon as caregiver Megan went home, it would begin. The creatures would seek her roof then. And then she would make those terrified phone calls to us. Rosalie told her that it must be squirrels. Or some larger species of bird. Turkey vultures were known to perch on roofs in our area.

“They have huge claws to match their ridiculous wingspans,” Rosalie explained to her.

“No, no, no!” Esther would shout at us through her old landline (she didn’t even know what a cell phone was). “These are different things altogether! I’ve seen them more than once. In darkness, yes, but I saw their forms. They were little creatures, like little men, like children…but not quite that. Their faces are unformed. They can draw their faces with their fingers. I saw one of them do that once. Just drew itself a human face while I stared at it through a window. It gave itself a child’s face. A little girl’s face.”

We had gone through the mythological catalog together, Rosalie and I, to get a little humor out of the situation. Gremlins? Trolls? Elves? Evil sprites? What magical beings could crazy Aunt Esther be entertaining on her roof? Should we show her an encyclopedia of magical beings and ask her to select the critters that most resembled her nocturnal visitors? (We would never actually be so cruel.)

But Aunt Esther’s phone calls really began to get under my skin. I hate to confess that I went and talked to someone on my own. Without even consulting Rosalie. I sat down with a social worker and we had a serious discussion. It was decided that an evaluation should be done on our aunt. Her mental faculties should be checked and we could decide where to go from there.

Rosalie was angry at me for going behind her back on this, but I also sensed a bit of a relief. We knew something had to give. We were getting phone calls all night long from Aunt Esther. Almost every night. She had begged both of us to leave our homes and families and come over in the middle of the night. She wanted us to bring guns. To shoot the creatures off the roof! Imagine. Save that story up for the competency hearing, I thought.

“You don’t understand,” her frail voice would explain through the wires. “They come and steal your memory. When you sleep! Once I woke up and there were wires going into my head! Into my brain! Do you understand? They steal your memories. That’s why I am the way I am now. That’s why I forget things. If you would just kill them, I’d get better. They did the same thing to Norma across the street. She saw them on her roof too. And then she just lost her mind altogether. She’s in a home now. I told father when I was a child I heard them on the roof and he admitted to me he knew they existed.”

“Wait? Are you saying Grandpa Lutz saw these creatures, Esther?”

“Yes, they came for his sister back in those days. Don’t you remember? She lost her memory before she was forty. Don’t you remember what happened to your great aunt Melissa? They steal your memories to help them pass. They pretend they’re children. People even adopt them. I’m not the only one in this family who knows the secrets. I was taught as a child. They follow our family for some strange reason. For heaven’s sake, I’ve thought of burning the house down. I told Father he built the house too close to those woods. When Reuben was alive, he would keep a gun trained on the woods at night. He even killed a few of them. But they’d pick up their dead and run with them. You have no idea how fast they are. You don’t know these family stories. You see how close the woods are to the house. They come out of there at night. They live in the trees. They travel from the trees right onto the roof. They just sail right over…”

I had to hang up. It was making me nauseous to hear what an insane hell the poor woman lived in. Medication could help her. It could calm her down, even if it couldn’t restore her grip on reality. It was time to move on a new plan. Rosalie agreed. We had honored our promise to our mother. It was now “absolutely necessary” that Esther live in a structured, safe environment.

It was a little difficult legally, and emotionally difficult as well, but we did get Aunt Esther into a very nice nursing home. She had tried to fight us a little, at first, but ultimately she capitulated. She said she wanted to get away from the creatures. “Maybe I will get my mind back now,” she said, pitifully, as they took her away.

Rosalie and I were going through my Aunt’s things, preparing the house for an autumn sale, when we came upon something surprising. We hadn’t expected our Luddite aunt to own a digital camera, but there was a small one resting on the writing desk in her bedroom. Rosalie turned it on and showed me the photos our aunt had taken of the flowers in her garden. We both got a little teary-eyed at that. She had always loved her garden. It was still beautiful. I looked at this year’s sunflowers from her bedroom window. It could be a Monet postcard, that garden.

Rosalie made a strange sound then. A sort of raspy, choking sound that made me swivel around, fast.

“My God, please tell me what this is?” she whispered throatily.

When I looked at the sequence of photos which Rosalie had just thumbed through, I wondered briefly if we had been pranked for the strangest reality t.v. show ever. But I knew it really wasn’t so.

The photos which had caused Rosalie to choke were of Aunt Esther’s roof, clearly taken from the backyard of the house at night. The flash didn’t illuminate all that well, but one could see pale forms, pale bodies turning away, fleeing across the roof. These were bidpedal….things. The worst photo was the one where you could see the blurry outline of one of those things silhouetted against the window, inside the house.

Aunt Esther later made a miraculous recovery. She did not have dementia. She had suffered some memory loss, but her cognitive function overall was very good. We managed to get her upgraded to a very nice retirement community with the sale of her house. We found her demeanor changed with time, much better, although she still wanted to talk of her experience with the creatures. She told us that a few days before she had been forcibly removed from her home she had finally killed one of them (with a bronze bookend!) and had managed to hide it quickly under her bed before the others saw it and had a chance to collect its body on their retreat. She had buried it in her garden. She paid a neighbor boy five dollars to dig a hole. She told him it was for a dead pet. He never saw what she buried. She said it had “no face at all.”

We asked her why she didn’t tell us that. Why didn’t she call us over to show us the proof that she had been telling the truth all the time. Esther said she had become resigned to leaving the family home, that she was exhausted, and she hoped the things would just leave her in peace, not follow her.

“Anyway,” she explained, “the corpse began to shrivel up immediately after death. By morning the thing had flattened out like an old balloon and looked more like a miniature scarecrow made of rags than any real creature. It looked nothing like it did when it was alive. Most people who would have looked at what I pulled out from under my bed the next morning would think it was just a pile of dirty old rags sewed together by a crazy old woman. So I just buried it.”

Rosalie and I still dare each other (three years later) to go over there and dig it up. Maybe science should have it. Wouldn’t DNA testing tell us much? If the thing even has DNA in it, that is. But the house has a new owner now. Should we have made full horrid “disclosure” before finalizing the sale?. Anyway, it would be awfully hard to explain to that family what we were doing in their backyard with a shovel.

Rosalie and I often wonder if she was right about how they move among us later, after they have absorbed enough faux human memories to pass as human children. And we often wonder what “lucky parents” are adopting these children who grew up in the cold, night trees?

Most of all, we wonder if Esther was right about these things having formed an attachment to our family. We wonder whether we will ever wake in the night to hear the sounds of those things coming for our memories. And neither one of us lives next to the woods. Nor will we ever. I promise you that.

The Goinz (Rhymes with "Coins")

I remember the day our young neighbor Rob came running through our backdoor as if he was being chased by the Devil himself. He was trampling snow everywhere, his cheeks bright red and his face a study in terror.

“Oh. Mr. and Mrs. Geddes, I’m sorry to barge right into your home like this, but my parents aren’t home right now, and I think maybe you should call the police!”

We asked the boy what he had seen as we locked the door behind him.

“Oh, it was so weird! We were all done sledding on Bancroft Hill, and just as we were walking home along the edge of the woods by the cemetery, we heard the weirdest sound ever in there. In the woods. It wasn’t like any animal we had ever heard before, any of us, and it wasn’t a man. At least, I don’t think it was a man.”

My wife shuddered.

“What did it sound like, boy?” she asked.

“Oh, terrible. Like a wolf and a lion and a man all at once. But not quite that. I can’t explain it. But that wasn’t the worst part. You see, we looked into the woods and there was a snowman in there. None of us had made it. Nobody knew who had built it. It was just there. And then when that sound came, some sort of creature came out of the snowman! It was all just some sort of camouflage. What sort of person could stand the cold, being in there like that, or who could even breathe inside a snowman?”

I didn’t want to have to explain to Rob about The Goinz. But I knew I must. For his safety. I made the boy swear that he would not tell anyone I was the one who had told him. Because I knew the sort of fightback he (and I) would get. But I figured he deserved an explanation. And a warning.
I told Rob that The Goinz live in the woods. And that they hunt in packs in the winter. That’s when they store up their meats for the rest of the year. It’s believed they lead a subterranean existence, but no one is really sure. We only have a few citations down the centuries in the folklore of this community.

I told Rob that The Goinz (rhymes with “coins”) select one of their number to pack the others up in snow to make them look like snowmen. They set these up all around the forest. Usually, they’ll use stones for noses. They’ll never have carrots, because they’re The Goinz. That’s one way to tell a Goinz snowman.

When a child (or sometimes even a solitary adult) gets close enough to one of the snowmen, they spring out and take their prey and run with it through the forest to the opening of their den. They’re unbelievably powerful and wicked fast.

“Then what was that noise I heard?” Rob asked, wide-eyed.

“That was the call to let the others know that that they had found food. They had their prize, their victim. They were all convening for the preparation ceremony. It’s a good thing you didn’t get too close to that snowman you saw.”

Rob stayed with us until his parents arrived home and came to pick him up. The boy didn’t talk much after I explained to him what had happened. Probably he was processing his close call. The three of us told Rob’s parents that the boy had been spooked by what we all thought might have been a stray dog. Just a little white lie that kept things tidy for all of us.

Rob shared his new knowledge selectively with friends and thereafter the kids knew to stay away from snowmen in the forest that seemed to spring up on their own. In fact, the next year one of Rob’s friends shot several arrows from his bow into one of the snowmen, one of the creatures he had identified in the woods after the first heavy snow that next year. He saw it go loping off. It left a blood trail in the snow but the blood was blue.

According to the news media, no one knows what happened to the boy who went missing that day. Half the town remained convinced he was a runaway. He had had a bit of a history. The rest figured it was a horror story that might go forever unexplained. It will always sadden me to say that I know that darker-minded half of town got the story right.

Somebody's Birthday

Rob was getting shin splints after less than forty minutes on the road. He had only resumed his daily running a few weeks back. It had been many years since his cross-country days in high school, more years than he cared to admit. So he babied himself a little. He reverted to walking instead of jogging. He was nursing the shin splints. He planned to get some ice on them as soon as he got home.

It was a sunny July afternoon, so he was enjoying his stroll down a pleasant little street in a neighborhood he knew only vaguely, though it was less than a mile from the apartment he shared with his fiancee. Rosebushes were in bloom before picture windows. Sprinklers spattered abstract art on sidewalks. Little dogs yapped at the happy stranger from behind fences as he passed. 

Rob reached a part of the street where the houses became sparser, with more distance between each dwelling. There were even a few vacant lots overgrown with summer weeds and wildflowers. Rob lamented the wasted real estate. As he was approaching a strange old house that wouldn't be out of place in one of Edward Hopper's Gothic paintings, he noticed a cardboard box sitting out in the street, just past its driveway. The house had to be abandoned. The grass had grown knee-high and yes, sure enough, there was a white piece of paper with large black lettering tacked to the front door.

Rob figured the box was just a leftover from the move out. Kids had probably kicked it into the street.

But as he drew alongside the box, he saw there was a big red bow on a side of the box which had been hidden from him. And there were strange symbols drawn in magic marker all over the box. Goth kid? Rob was sure he had seen those symbols, or some very much like them, in books and movies. On the box's top, on the cardboard flaps  which were only loosely closed, someone had written (in what seemed to Rob a feminine hand) "Happy Birthday, Sister!"

Curiosity got the better of him. After a quick look up and down the street, Rob reached down and pulled back the flaps to see if there truly was a birthday present inside there. He suspected the writing was just a red herring on an old, repurposed box.

As soon as he turned the flaps back, a warm cluster of flies flew into Rob's face. Some even entered his nostrils. Disgusted, he snorted them out. The scent  coming from the box was strangely pleasant for something so horrible. For at the bottom of the cardboard box lay a heart. It was not even desiccated. It looked moist, juicy.  Rob had watched enough medical documentaries and e.r. themed shows to know it had all the appearances of a human heart. He felt his stomach pitching. The worst part was that he didn't have his phone on him. He knew he needed to dial 911 as soon as possible. Should he stop at the nearest house, knock on a stranger's door? No. This was too weird to inflict on a stranger. He would be home in a half hour or less. Probably less. Because Rob was running again, splints be damned. 

Rob could not imagine any possible explanation for what he had just seen. After only a few blocks of running, after his shin splints had kicked back in, he returned to meditative walking and began telling himself that he must have erred. It had to have been an animal's heart. Some other animal's heart. Not a human's. It was some sort of sick prank. What does a pig's heart look like? Does it look anything like a human's? He thought it might. Where was his phone, his Google, when he needed a vital question like this answered? Maybe he had just run too long. Maybe he was dehydrated. Dehydration can make you hallucinate.

Rob was now taking a shortcut road that ran somewhat rural. There were fields on one side that were sometimes planted, but sometimes left fallow. This year they were fallow. Sporadic, modest split levels with much space between their yards lined the other side of the road. Rob saw something out of the corner of his right eye. He turned and looked directly into the field and saw the shadow of a human figure on a haystack about forty feet from where he was standing. The shadow started moving towards him. Rob waited until the distance between them had closed a little further and then he ran. He must be dehydrated, he thought again. Or he had eaten something bad. Something foul. Maybe it was much hotter than he realized. Maybe he had heatstroke. 

Still running, Rob swiveled around and began to jog backwards. He was looking for the shadow. But it was gone. It never appeared in the street.

The road took a big dip down towards an area where there were patches of forest on either side of it. Rob often saw deer crossing there, when he was out running, or in his headlights when he was driving through there. The deer would often cross the road in full daylight, unabashed, unafraid. They had grown less timid through interactions with humans. Rob had often seen them noshing on birdseed fallen from backyard feeders. 

But it wasn't a deer that came out of the forest and started walking towards him on  the other side of the road. This time it was a beautiful young woman with long black hair. She was wearing a white dress, a sort of lace sheath that nearly touched the asphalt of the street as she walked. She carried in her dainty right hand a white parasol that shielded her from the sun. She smiled at Rob and he nearly forgot about the horror he had just experienced. It was like seeing a woman walk out of a Monet painting and into the world.

"Good afternoon," the beautiful stranger chimed from the other side of the street as she passed him, going the opposite direction.

"Good afternoon." Rob felt how dry his tongue had become.

And that was the extent of their exchange.

Rob stole glances at the beautiful stranger over his shoulder several times as he ascended one side of that dip in the road while she ascended the other. Then she was gone around the street corner at the top, lost to view. Rob wondered what sort of get-up that had been. Was she attending a wedding? A lady's high tea? It was not everyday apparel. And why had she stepped out of the woods, anyway? What had she been doing in there dressed like that? Hadn't she heard about Lyme disease? The deer ticks were everywhere. It was a crazy day all around.

Rob was only a few blocks from home when he saw a shadow on a white wall. It was drawn plain as day. There was no figure there to cast the shadow. It was the white wall of a small garage which had gone out of business. He realized the shadow was that of a woman with a shapely figure holding a parasol. He watched as the shadow "walked" across the wall of the garage and vanished into the unsupporting air. 

After that, Rob wondered if he should seriously entertain the possibility that someone might have slipped him L.S.D. earlier in the day. What else could so tidily explain away all this madness?

By the time Rob reached his front door, he felt like a basket case and seriously wondered if he was one. He trotted up a short flight of steps and opened the front door of his apartment and nearly jumped out of his skin. His fiancee Lisa was unexpectedly standing there in the doorway. It gave him a jolt.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she laughed.

"You have no idea. I need to make a call."

The police went immediately to the address Rob had given them. Some fifteen minutes after that, an officer had called Rob to ask him a few more questions and get some particulars he could add to his report. They had located the empty house. They explained to him that there had been no box in the street before the house. In fact, they had searched all around the house. Nothing.  He could hear the skepticism in the officer's voice. 

"Sir, I don't want you to take this the wrong way. But are you alright?"

Rob had thanked the officer for doing his job and then hung up before the officer had a chance to ask even more condescending or insulting questions.

Lisa had seemed strangely nonchalant about the whole story. He wondered whether she believed him. Though they would be husband and wife in a matter of months, she was still largely a mystery to him. He knew so little about her, really. He liked women like that. He liked the idea that he knew so little of her past or even the sorts of things she did when she was out of his sight. 

"Listen, I have to go out, hon. There's a roast for you in the slow cooker."

"Where are you going?"

"One of the girls has a birthday today. We're celebrating. It's girls' night out. I may be out a bit late. I know I'm just terrible. Forgive me?"

"How come I never meet your friends. You're like a guy with that. You know all my friends. Are you ashamed of me or something?"

"You're ridiculous. Maybe I'm worried you'll marry one of them instead of me. Don't worry. I have a special date planned for you to meet everybody. Kiss me, I'm already late. I'm so sorry you had that crazy experience. We can talk more about it when I get home, if you'd like. It sounds freaking traumatic!"

Because Lisa was so beautiful and strange, he kissed her and let her have her way. 

Minutes later, she was out the front door and warming up her car in the driveway. It seemed that whenever an argument might be possibly brewing, Lisa would uncannily head it off at the pass by leaving.

The roast smelled good. He went to give it a stir and have a little taste.

And that's when his life changed.

He had gathered up all the personal possessions he could fit into his SUV and was several states away by the time Lisa was to have been home that evening. 

In fact, he never spoke to her again. He prayed he never would. He never even called the police. Why not? Well, it wasn't because he thought they wouldn't believe him. Oh no, he was sure they would have believed him. This time. But he knew that somehow he would have ended up dead. There might have been prison in there somewhere before death. But he just knew death was what waited for him. If he told on her. And he knew, somehow, that everything which had happened to him that day on his run had been connected to her. To Lisa. He just couldn't say how.

He knew all this mere seconds after he had lifted the crock-pot lid. 

He knew after he had given that cabbagey liquid in there a good couple of stirs with the big plastic spoon, and had seen something he was sure Lisa had never intended him to see.

There are so many different types of roast you can buy in the meat department at the grocery store. So many.  But none of them you find there will ever be quite like the roast Lisa had so thoughtfully left simmering for Rob that day. 

None of them you find there will have a Guns N' Roses tattoo.

Warm

Jim was hunting with his two older brothers on what the locals called Jawdrop Mountain. Though he was only sixteen, he had convinced his brothers to let him go it alone, at least for a few hours at a stretch. The guys had gotten a late start that day, so it was around one o’clock when the three brothers set out hunting in different directions. This was to have been a separation of two hours before a final rendezvous at a marker tree on the path which the three young men had used to ascend the mountain. And then the brothers would head back down, deer or no deer.

It was a severely overcast day in midwinter. Several inches of snow lay on the ground from recent storms. No significant snowfall had been predicted for that day. But the weatherman had been wrong and a surprise storm brewed up on the mountain. It began as a squall, near white-out conditions. Jim panicked and stumbled around until he realized he could walk right off a precipice. This thought scared him so badly he froze in place under a sheltering stand of trees until the squall degenerated into a normal snowfall.

Then the boy realized he was lost. He had sprinted and walked much further than he had realized in his panic.

He looked at his cell phone, but without hope. He knew there would be no reception. Ridiculous even to look. He cursed himself for having wandered so far in his initial panic. He had lost all his “mental markers” in the landscape. He was calling out to his brothers, to anyone really, at the top of his voice. But no one replied. And the terrain already looked totally unfamiliar. All the trees looked the same in any direction. The snow continued to fall.

Just as it was getting dark, the boy saw a form in the woods which gave him hope. There was a cabin in its own little clearing deep in these woods of the tallest trees. He raced to it, realizing it was his salvation.

As soon as he arrived at the front door and knocked, he knew it was empty. It just felt that way. He looked in the windows, which were actually very dusty, and knew then that the cabin had probably been empty for a long time. He did a cursory inspection walking around the small structure, and saw it was intact. This was a secure place to hole up until help arrived. Though he had his rifle, he did not want to be out in the night. He realized it was hypothermia he should fear, but a primal part of him feared the other things too.

He couldn’t believe his luck in finding an unlocked window in the rear of the cabin and squeezed his svelte body through. He actually ended up falling to the floor and that was the scariest moment, when he felt most vulnerable. Lying there on the floor in the dark cabin. He froze and waited for whatever horror lay hidden in the cabin to fall upon him. He breathed a sigh of relief, right there on the floor, when he realized it was silent throughout the rooms. He could actually hear the sound of the snow falling outside through the still open window. But he wouldn’t close his exit behind him. Not before he really saw the whole cabin and knew he was safe.

“Hello?” he called out. “If you can hear me, I’m not an intruder. I’m a hunter. I’ve gotten separated from my brothers and I’m lost. Don’t be afraid.”

No fearing soul answered him or came forward to greet him.

Jim ran to the front door and undid the locks. He threw open the door and this let in a little more light. It was the wan light of snowfall which was cast into the living room of the cabin. Jim discovered that there were two other bedrooms and a small bathroom. These bedrooms were the scariest rooms to enter, since they were the darkest rooms, windowless. His eyes adjusted, but he could not be sure that he was seeing everything in those rooms. He saw enough to realize no one could be in those rooms. Not unless they were hiding under one of the beds. This was just a little too much of a risk to check right now. He could smell the dust in the cabin. Jim took it on faith that he was the only occupant of the cabin. It had surely been empty a few years, at least.

He ran out the front door and couldn’t believe his luck in finding a woodpile under an old, wind-torn blue tarp. He loaded up the fireplace and had never been so happy to be a smoker in his life. His Bic served him nicely. He prayed the chimney wasn’t blocked or sooted up beyond use. But the fire roared up and he slammed the front door shut and locked it again.

He felt terribly guilty when he thought that his brothers might be risking their own lives looking for him. He worried about them. But he figured they would descend the mountain and return with a search party. They sure would be pissed though. What more could he do but sit and wait until the morning. At dawn, he would try to find his way back to the path and maybe even be able to meet any searchers on their way up the mountain.

He decided to keep the window by which he had entered cracked open just a little bit, in case he could hear his brothers’ voices. He wondered if he should listen for search helicopters flying overhead. Or was that unrealistic? If only he could tell everybody he was alright, sitting now in front of a toasty fire as the sun died off the mountain.

Jim made a bed on the floor in front of the crackling fire. He had taken the pillows and blankets off the rather ramshackle couch that occupied the center of the room. In no time, the exhausted boy had fallen deeply asleep, grateful for the fire and the roof over his head.

When he was suddenly awakened, he had no idea at first where he was, what time of day or night it was, or what the sound that had awakened him had actually been. He thought it had been a knocking. A hard, insistent, series of fast knocks. Had he been dreaming?

Then he remembered his circumstances and he called out his brothers’s names, each one in turn. Had they miraculously found him? He sprang up and ran to the front door. But something in him told him not to open it. Not just yet.

“Hello? Who’s there?” he asked hopefully.

No answer. Only the sound of the wind. The storm had grown emboldened after night fell. He could hear its shrieking on the other side of the door.

“Okay, no one then,” Jim laughed to himself. “Of course, it’s no one. I was dreaming.”

Jim turned to return to his bed. This was just as more knocks sounded on the door: three times more. But this time, they were loud beyond belief. They sounded like the worst type of threat. It couldn’t have been a fist that had done that. It had to be some sort of board or log or….

Jim looked at the open window at the rear of the dwelling. It was still cracked open a few inches. The boy ran to it and slammed it shut. He was grateful there was a swivel lock on the sash. He shot it clockwise tight. He let the thick curtains close on the window, hiding it. But he knew that was only a thin pane of glass separating him from whoever or whatever was out there in the night. And there were two other windows in the cabin.

Panicked, he searched for a weapon. He was so grateful to realize the fireplace’s poker was there. He approached the front door again, weapon in hand, and listened.

His mind began to play tricks on him. What if that was one of his brothers, half-frozen to death, on the other side of that door, unable to speak, trying to let Jim know that he was a human icicle. It seemed improbable. But it was not impossible. He had to know.

Jim counted to three, but silently, in his mind. And then he threw open the door.

No one.

Only the snow innocently falling.

But looking down, Jim saw there was a line of tracks in the snow leading to the front door! Bipedal tracks. The snow had gotten rather deep and the wind was blowing, so there was no way to tell what sort of boots or shoes the visitor was wearing. Yet the weirdest thing was that these tracks stopped right there at the door. Jim looked left, right. No one. The snow was its own light source, so it was easy to see into the night. But there was no one, nothing there to be seen.

“Where in the hell did you go?” Jim whispered under his breath.

And that’s when he heard the sounds above him. Someone was walking on the goddamn roof!

This freaked the boy out. His thoughts ran madly. How did the visitor climb up there. Was it his brother, after all, hallucinating while freezing to death?

Jim couldn’t take the wondering anymore and stepped through the open door, ran out into the deepening snow. He looked up onto the roof, but there was no one. There was a tall pine tree, however, that grew close by the roof. It dangled branches down over it. He saw little miniature avalanches of glittery snow come sparkling down from the tall tree’s branches. Because something was stirring in those branches. He couldn’t see it in the darkness of the tree, but he could see it was climbing. Then the tree grew still.

“Who in the hell are you?” Jim screamed up at the tree.

He waited in a terror he felt was skinning his heart.

Now there was only the sound of the snow, the gusts of the wind picking up and then dying off.

Just as he was ready to run back into the house, feeling all his danger sensors shrilling alarms, he heard a voice come from the darkness of the tree.

“Waaaarm,” the voice hissed out at him. The boy was shocked at how well this loud whisper (for it was a sort of creepy whisper) carried.

“You want to get warm?” Jim asked.

“Waaaarm…..” the voice sighed again ten seconds later.

Before Jim could respond, a black form flew out of the tree, and it was larger than any man, whatever it was, and came sailing down right over Jim’s head, and something touched him there, on the top of his head, as the boy screamed.

But the thing had sailed past and up into another tall tree behind Jim.

So Jim bolted inside the cabin and locked the door in triplicate.

Mere seconds later another knock came on the door. This one sounded much more polite. It sounded almost like a human knocking. Almost. But it was a dragging sort of knock.

“What are you?” Jim couldn’t stop himself asking.

“Waaaarm?” the voice hissed beseechingly.

“What do you want?”

“Waaaarm!”

“You want to be warm?” Jim asked, shaking now.

“Waaaarm meeeeal,” the voice whispered loudly.

“Listen. To. Me. Now. I have a poker and I’m going to beat your brains in if you don’t go away. I’m going to beat your brains in, and then I’m going to eat you. I don’t care what you are. I’m going to skin you and eat you and cook you in this fire. Then tomorrow I’ll shit you out and flush you down a toilet. So consider that before you ask for anything again.”

There came the sound of claws scratching on the other side of the door. This was a very angry sound.

Then Jim was sure he heard wings flapping, flapping away.

He returned to his makeshift bed and he stared at all parts of the cabin over and over, all night long. He paid particular attention to the windows.

Morning came. Morning finally came after that endless night of snow and winds and the unspeakable. Jim looked out the dusty windows. He saw a beautiful sunny morning.

He stared out several of the windows for another hour and then he finally decided it was time to head back out and find the path home.

He held the poker tight in his fist and his breath tight in his chest as he opened the front door.

Four raw scratch marks had gouged the wood. There was a claw stuck in the fourth raking. It was no claw or talon that Jim could recognize. It looked like the sort of claw you saw on dinosaurs in the museum reproductions of those creatures.

Three hours later, Jim heard a member of the search party calling his name. He was reunited with his brothers an hour after that.

He couldn’t say why he never showed the claw to anyone, not even his brothers. Maybe the shame of having gotten lost, of causing so much worry for everyone, was enough embarrassment to shoulder. The story he had to tell would have made it even worse.

But he kept the claw in a drawer in his bedroom for many years, right next to a pistol that he always kept with him anytime he found himself having to enter the woods, whether it was hunting season or not.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”

Fiction

Single


1.

Julia had begun taking long walks in the evening. She would take a turn through a sprawling, attractive cemetery near the apartment complex where she had recently taken up temporary residence for work. The large acreage of this necropolis probably exceeded a mile square. There was no way to see the entirety of the burial grounds at once, since the terrain was so varied, unless one cheated and counted aerial views. A surprisingly large number of narrow roads crisscrossed the graveyard’s hills and dales. The little avenues and culs-de-sac all had their own names and weathered street signs. Julia found it a charming place to walk, this city of the quietest citizens.

She had once joked with a co-worker that cemeteries were her Prozac. She liked the way the wild birds serenaded the peaceful dead, even if they did, immediately afterwards, despoil the dignity of their monuments with those paint-bombs dropped from beneath their tail feathers.

One spring evening, Julia was out on one of her regular roundabouts, walking in that zone between the newer burials and the truly old parts of the cemetery that included some rough-hewn settler graves. She found herself drawn, for some indiscernible reason, to the grave of a dead youth. Julia would occasionally read some of the tombstones closest to the path. She realized how little could be gleaned of the lives of those that lay hidden beneath six feet of worm’s playground, a full fathom of earth. 

His was a low, brown stone. Nothing ornate or special. He had died just over a century ago. That was the period when the town had just begun finding its way, industrializing and coming to national prominence (a position which it had later lost through the vagaries of economy and history). This poor unfortunate had died at the age of fifteen or sixteen, depending on whether he had reached his birthday before his death day in that long ago year. The tombstone didn’t specify.

Julia felt a twinge for him. To have died without having known any of the major joys of life! Had he loved? Or, rather, had he thought he had loved? And why was his grave isolated? Usually, when a child dies, the parents later join him or her. Perhaps they had moved away to another city or another state? It just made the young man’s grave seem all the more forlorn.

Julia felt herself standing there beaming love at the poor waif. She stood there alone on a spring evening in a cemetery on the outskirts of a town largely new to her (she had relocated as a high-level trainer in the banking industry) and pined for a boy who had been dead for over a century. She giggled at herself. How could she not laugh at her own silly pathos. But she did try to speak to the dead boy. She did not speak aloud. She spoke in her mind the name she had read on the tombstone, asked Reginald if he could hear her. She “told” him a few facts about herself and wondered at what sort of person he might have been. What were his likes, dislikes? Would he care to tell her?

Then she shook her head at herself and moved on.

2.

Julia had not expected her initial attempt at “conversation” with the dead youth to turn into any sort of ritual.

But she surprised herself by making a regular stop at his tombstone every time she took a turn through the cemetery. And this was at least five times a week, sometimes six.

She found herself looking forward to telling the lost boy about her day at work, the particulars of her life and history. She didn’t spend long at his grave, maybe five or sometimes ten minutes. And she would still ask him questions about his own life. She had new questions every time.

“I have been single too long,” she said aloud one day as she walked away from the young man’s grave, after giving the stone a caress.

She had caressed the tombstone as if it had been a young man’s cheek.

3.

It was in the third week of Julia’s visits to Reginald’s grave that the young woman had her first shock.

As she sauntered towards his modest monument one unseasonably warm evening in mid-spring, she saw the flower. A purple iris! It was tall and perfectly formed. Right there on the boy’s grave. Alive as anything.

“I must be seeing things.” Julia found herself speaking aloud, although she was the only one in the cemetery, as far as she knew or could see.

She sped up and dropped to her knees on the young man’s grave. She wanted to examine the colorful flags of the gorgeous flower more closely. Such a display of purples! Tyrian and wine petals and some lighter lavendar blushes all composed a flower so splendid she thought of stealing it. She really wanted to take the thing home. But she would not harm its growing. You don’t rip magic out at the root.

“Surely someone planted this here?” she thought. But the weird thing about it was, she noted, that the ground had not been disturbed. The iris had not been transplanted. The flower had not been growing there the previous evening. About that shocking fact, Julia had no doubt.

Julia had seen no other irises blooming yet, purple or otherwise. And she walked for miles each evening. Don’t they not appear later in spring or, more properly, in early summer? She tried to remember.

But had she not told Reginald last week that it was her favorite flower?

The purple iris.

Yes.

A good partner listens.

3.

It was in the fourth week that Julia told Reginald the saddest stories of her life. It was their month anniversary, so she figured it was safe to broach those things now, the poisons of life which had made the flower wilt.

He seemed to take it well. Certainly, he did not run away.

As Julia was talking to him, sometimes in her mind, but more and more now aloud, she noticed a shape in the grass before the grave.

She could see there was the shape of a body that had lain there. On the bed of the grave. The grass, now long and luxuriant from the rampant growth of spring rains, appeared to have been pressed down. Julia stared and realized it looked like the figure of a young man.

Maybe the wind did this, she thought.

The wind must have done this, she reassured herself.

But she went to the form and lay down within it. Like an embrace.

It was so warm and comfortable that she wanted to fall asleep there.

4.

In the second month, Julia began to feel the first stirrings of fear.

She had begun seeing a figure in the distance when she was on her evening walks. It was clearly a young man who was stalking her. She changed the direction of her walks but he always appeared. He kept back many blocks when she was in the city and sometimes she would see him behind trees when she was walking in the suburbs. Julia carried mace and a screech alarm and often held her cell phone tightly in her hand, at the ready. She could never make out his features. But she knew it was no coincidence. It was always the same figure. He had to be stalking her.

All she knew is that he had dark hair and was not very tall. Maybe five feet six or seven at most. Slender. He always seemed to be dressed in grey clothing. She thought it appeared to be professional attire, perhaps even a suit. (So strange on a teenager! For he did appear to be a teenager.) But her shadower was always so far away and dodgy. He was always so quick to hide. She didn’t feel that he was physically all that intimidating, for she knew how to defend herself. And he seemed more of a boy than a man, her shadower. But it was disquieting and disturbing to her. One read and heard more and more of savage attacks on adults by children. 

Oddly enough, she did not report her stalker to the police or anyone else. She felt she would sound like a madwoman. Surely, she would have to wait for some sort of true interaction. So she didn’t tell anyone. Who was there to tell, anyway? Julia led a solitary existence and had drifted away from virtually everyone who was not a professional contact. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. Her friends had married and moved on. She didn’t even have a pet. The apartment complex where she lived didn’t allow them. Her work kept her very busy. She was as disciplined as any general in an overseas war zone. And perhaps as lonely.

5.

One evening in early summer, Julia found herself trapped in a teaching seminar because some of the company’s newest employees had arrived a few hours late due to a missed connection on the East Coast.

She decided not to take her evening walk. Though the days were growing longer, she did not want to risk being outside when darkness fell. And by the time she reached her apartment, the sun was sinking fast.

After arriving home, she went into her bedroom to change out of her stiff business suit and saw immediately that her bedclothes had been disturbed. She fumbled for her phone and made the 911 call within seconds of the observation. The operator stayed on the line with her while Julia checked her entire dwelling, against the advice of the dispatcher actually, who had wanted her to vacate the apartment immediately and wait for police to arrive. But she searched her dwelling, mace in hand. And there was no intruder.

While she had been on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, she had  pulled back the covers of her bed and saw what appeared to be a retained impression, the outline of a body which had recently lain there. Julia reached out, almost reluctantly, and touched it. It was still warm. She said nothing of this to the dispatcher. She couldn't quite explain to herself in her head why she had remained silent on this discovery.

Nothing had been stolen or moved about. The windows and doors were locked. Still, Julia did not feel abashed. Her key had turned in the lock. She hadn’t left open any window or door, any means of entrance to the dwelling. Someone had been there. There was the distinct possibility an employee of the apartment complex who held a key had entered the dwelling. There could be a stalker in the employ of the complex, she thought. A maintenance man or someone who was showing the apartments to prospective renters. 

She called the apartment manager’s office, but it was after hours. Nevertheless, her alarmed voice mail resulted in a callback within the half hour. Mrs. Garrity assured Julia that she would check the surveillance system the next day, as soon as she got into the office, and let her know immediately whether anyone could be seen on the recording entering her apartment. The older woman was grave, respectful, and to the degree she could manage, reassuring.

Julia did not sleep well that night. She had a chair propped against the front door of the apartment and her cell phone lying under the palm of her hand below her pillow.

Mrs Garrity, true to her word, called Julia even before the worried young woman had left for work the next morning. The apartment manager had come into work early to review the surveillance recordings. She confirmed that no one could possibly have entered Julia’s apartment by the front door. While she didn’t have a camera watching Julia’s front door, she did have one trained on the stairwells which any intruder would have needed to access to reach Julia’s hallway. And a window breach was clearly impossible since all the windows were locked when Julia arrived home. Julia’s balcony faced the front of the building and a ridiculously tall ladder would have been required to enter the apartment in that manner, in plain sight of countless people. There was no other means of access to Julia’s apartment.

The only conclusion was that no one had entered Julia’s apartment.

She was perfectly safe.

“Thank you,” Julia had said.

And had stared at her bed.

6.

Julia was standing on an old iron truss bridge that dated to Reginald’s day.

The dark river below was so pretty. Was it always this pretty in the middle of the night?

“But why am I barefoot?” Julia wondered. She was staring at her naked feet. Where had her shoes gone?

She had started taking night walks. She realized, by now, that it was easier for him to follow her at night. In the daytime, it was only fleeting glimpses.

In the middle of the night, he would sometimes stand for a long time under a streetlight, letting her stare right at him. She could get close enough now to see that he had a beautiful face. Seraphic. Pale skin and the nobility of an aquiline nose. She thought his eyes might be blue or green, but that was pure fantasy at this point. She had never gotten close enough to know that. At least not yet.

She stood on the bridge and looked down into the moving blackness. She found the sound of the tiny river waves comforting. That odd sort of little chuckling they do.

Night river sounds. Darkness telling other darkness little jokes.

If she climbed over this little bit of barrier, so easy to do, she would have more choices. Once there, if she stepped forward only one foot more, into the unsupporting air, it might all be easier. The distance might close just like that.

It was possible, after all. Wasn’t it?

She looked back towards where the bridge met the land. He was standing there. Smiling now.

“But what about the age difference?” she beamed at him.

He smiled even brighter.

“We are all the same age here,” was the answer he had beamed back.