The crunch of fir needles behind me.
I turn, blood draining from my face.
A creature stands over me, tall and crooked. Hairless skin sagging over the bones. Its sick-looking eyes are distended like a toad’s throat and the nose is a fleshy pustule dripping with mucous. It shrieks, the mouth fanged and impossibly deep as if the jaw is unhinged.
I stumble back, fire off a round.
Then another.
The thing shrieks again and raises its arms, long fingers bent and clawed. I keep firing. The bullet wounds dot its chest, bloodless and puckered like corpse skin. It swipes and sends me backward into the dirt, the Maglight spinning from my hands.
I roll to my side and try to stand, but it pummels me again, this time hard enough to lift me into the air. The gun flies skyward and I crumple against a nearby fir tree. I brace myself against the trunk and spin into the darkness, staggering down a narrow trail. One hand on my aching ribs and the other batting branches from my face as I go.
No gun.
No light.
Just the moonlit trail winding through the firs.
I struggle to make sense of the thing that just attacked me, but I keep going, hoping the trail will loop back to the road. With any luck the kid was able to get a text to Judi. Maybe she came back for me. Maybe she’s driving up the road now.
It’s a big maybe.
There’s a flicker just ahead. Yellow lights throbbing in the dark. The trees thin and I’m now standing in a torchlit clearing. A halfcircle of flames. In the center of the clearing is a large stone carved with Celtic knots, three ears of wheat draped over the top as if by some ceremonial rite.
It’s a dead end.
I cough and my mouth fills with blood.
My ribs are badly broken.
I free a torch from the ground and head back the way I came, but I see the thing lumbering down the trail toward me. It’s eyes shine when it sees me and it picks up speed. I square off with the monster, torch held firmly between it and me. I jab its face, but it bats the torch from my hand with a screech.
It lunges and I stumble back.
The sick smell of compost wells over me.
The clawed hand rakes my face, hard enough to whiten my vision. I give it a hard kick and it swipes again.
This time the whiteness fades to black.
My eyes flutter and still.
• • •
I wake in complete darkness. My hands are bound above me as if from a tree branch and there is a furious ache deep inside my skull. I hear the crackle of fire, the smell of smoke. I turn my head and blink my eyes.
Nothing. Only darkness.
There’s a tacky wetness at my lashes.
My eyes are gone.
I struggle, but the restraints are too tight.
“Judi,” I scream. It’s the only name that could possibly come from my lips. The only name I want to hear.
“I’m here, Keeler.”
Judi’s voice. Judi’s voice.
“Judi, thank god,” my voice is just a pitiful croak. “Judi, it’s not safe up here. That thing you told me about is real. It attacked me. I must have shot it half a dozen times.”
There’s a long pause before she speaks. The sound of torches. Fir needles crunching underfoot. “I can’t do that, Keeler,” she says at last. Her voice is sad, apologetic. I feel her hand on my chest, fingers running gently down the length of me.
“Judi?” I don’t want to believe it. “Tell me what’s happening.”
There’s movement all around me.
A low murmur in a strange language.
The voices grow to a rambling chorus.
“You’re part of something you don’t understand,” says Judi. She’s touching my face, mouth close to mine. I can feel her breath. “Be brave for me, okay?”
I writhe against the restraints. Head full of razors.
“No, Judi. No. I don’t want to die like this.”
“It’s too late, Keeler.”
I hear the haunting wail of the bronach.
The smell of rotting leaves.
“Just let me go, Judi. Judi please.”
“I can’t do that, Keeler. The bronach needs three.”
“Three?”
“Three benefactions.”
“Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, we can fix it.”
“That’s exactly what Bill said. You and him. It was always you and him. Two sides of the same coin. The muscle and the mind. Two cold and unrighteous hearts. I’m sorry, Keeler. It all ends for you now.”
She joins the chorus. Chanting strange words.
I am suddenly enveloped by many hands. On my throat, forehead. Fingers in my mouth. I try to bite down but my jaws are pried open. A wooden block between my teeth. All I can do is scream. I scream Judi’s name over and over, even though it comes out as a lipless and incomprehensible howl. There is something in my throat now, a fibrous bindle that blocks my esophagus.
The root bag.
The wheatstalk.
They’re shoving it down my throat.
I scream, but there is no scream.
The chanting grows.
A swell of croons and whispers.
The crackle of torchflame.
The smell of blood
and smoke
and wheat
and death.
C.W. Blackwell
About the Author
C.W. Blackwell was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California where he still lives today. His passion is to blend poetic narratives with pulp dialogue to create strange and rhythmic genre fiction. He writes mostly crime fiction, dark fiction, and poetry. His recent work has appeared in Pulp Modern, Aphotic Realm, Econoclash Review, and Mystery Weekly Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
https://twitter.com/CW_Blackwell
Lazarus’ Respite
Michael Subjack
Walter Hopkins scurried out of school, doing his best to hide among the other children. He was eager to get home, and not just because he had a new Lego set to attend to (though he liked those a great deal). No, the name of the game for Walter was avoiding the ire of Jason Hansen, a bully with a special interest in Walter that dated all the way back to the beginning of the school year. This was hardly Walter’s first time dealing with a bully, but as it was now May his ordeal with Jason had been the longest.
Poor Walter was
