Then someone screamed.
Laura oh God Laura—!
Patricia sprang up from her sleep. “What was that?” she said, to which Marcus rasped an “I don’t know” as he wrestled with the stubborn stuck flap zipper. He shook it, pulled at it. It was caught on a chunk of canvas.
“Mom! Dad!” Laura blubbered. Marcus had never heard his daughter so scared, not even when as a small child she would empty her lungs at some night terror. “Help!” she cried. Her voice reverberated through the woods, chasing her scream. “Help!”
Marcus opened the flap enough that he could crawl through. Patricia, uttering a chilled “My God my baby oh my God”, threw off her sleeping bag and emerged close behind him. Voices of other campers—”Hey!”, “What’s going on?”—echoed back in mixtures of concern and irritation.
Laura stood across the campsite, past the pulsing of the waning fire. Her flashlight trained quivering on the forest.
“Jesus Christ!” Patricia cried.
Illumined in the beam was a man, if he could be called a man.
For the first time since being in a child’s seat, Marcus wet himself. He could not process the sight before him, let alone believe it.
No.
The man should have been dead or lying near-dead somewhere, gasping out his last breath. Blood drenched him, a stark glaze over his yellow-white flesh, having poured exclusively from the orifices in his head, coagulated in gummy drool around his mouth, streamed from two stumpy memorials to his ears. Most horrifying were the throbbing red slits of an exposed skeletal nose, a goddamn nose-less nose, and two emptied eye sockets.
Despite such utter mutilation, the man could clearly tell—maybe by the heat of the dying fire, or some other intuition—that he was not alone, that others were present. He staggered forward, arms out and reaching blindly and fulfilling for Marcus every childhood terror inspired by those Living Dead horror films.
Yet while the man stumbled and moaned like a walking corpse, he was certainly alive, his humanity and intelligence evident and sealed up in a windowless cranium. In struggling to speak, he managed only wet grunts and groans, but Marcus could feel the desperate clarity behind them. Then he realized: the man’s tongue was missing.
Someone’s cut them all out, he thought.
Cut out almost all his fucking senses.
“Is everything okay?” called a neighboring camper. Other flashlights poxed the dark, getting closer.
Laura, shivering violently, had not moved. Marcus would later think that he saw again in that moment something much older in her, as he had that afternoon in the truck. Except it was not a wistful or wiser-looking Laura but one immersed in the atavistic terror which at their center all creatures, mosquitoes to men, shared equally.
The man pitched forward and fell. In the tiny ray of compassion poking through his fear, Marcus felt guilty for not helping the man, who, judging by his bald scalp, the frayed silver hair behind his ears and the bloody skin beginning to sag, appeared older. Maybe his own father’s age.
“Oh God,” Patricia whimpered, “look.”
Marcus saw it the moment she did. In pitching over, the man had exposed his back, and the symbol carved there in a rain of blood:
—-End of Special Sneak Preview—-
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ENIGMA OF TWILIGHT FALLS Series at Evolved Publishing
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About the Author
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A writer since age six and a professional one since nineteen, Mike Robinson has published nine novels and over twenty pieces of short fiction. In addition to the “Twilight Falls” series, he is the author of The Prince of Earth; Skunk Ape Semester; The Atheist; Dreamshores: Monster Island; Dishonor Thy Father (with M.J. Richards), and Too Much Dark Matter, Too Little Gray: A Collection of Weird Fiction.
A native of Los Angeles, he is also an independent producer and screenwriter, with a feature supernatural thriller debuting in 2021. In between, he is a literary editor, hiker, swimmer, traveler, and amateur human.
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Horror Books from Evolved Publishing
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Special Sneak Preview
Something evil stalks the citizens of Rose Valley—not for the first time, but hopefully for the last.
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CHAPTER 1
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Jake Rollins had never seen an animal turned inside-out. A lifetime of horror movies had led him to expect a heaping mass of fake, syrupy goo. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath through his mouth to avoid the rotten stench, and knelt by the carcass, surprised at the sadness the lamb’s horror-frozen face provoked in him. A gruesome reminder—not like he needed one—of life’s fragility.
He expected to vomit, but nothing came up. He just stood there, staring with morbid curiosity at the lamb’s two meaty red halves. It didn’t seem possible or natural.
Surely, this was just a terrible prank.
Tall and lean, Steve Witmer stood beside Jake, easily exuding physical strength without the unnecessary bulk of large muscles. He wore Wrangler Jeans, an old t-shirt, and well-loved, scuffed-up cowboy boots. His maroon Texas A&M baseball cap tilted low. The colors and the logos changed sometimes, but Steve looked pretty much the same every day. Keeping up a ranch left no time for fancy fashion.
“You boys do this for publicity, did ya?” Sheriff Cam
