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Almost Infamous: Unwanted

3/4/2016

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Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

These are Almost Infamous: Origins.

Previously on Almost Infamous: Origins: Prospects



Almost Infamous: Unwanted
 
By Matt Carter
 
 
Felix
 
Montevideo, Uruguay
We went to the beach at night because it was comfortable to sleep on, and because if you chose the right stretch at the right time, the police wouldn’t even bother you until morning. When you’re lacking for places to sleep, you could do worse, and god knows all of us had seen enough worse to know what it was like.

We weren’t a family, not really, just a group of fair acquaintances who banded together for protection, sharing what we spent the days begging, borrowing and stealing (with a smile as charming and innocent as mine, I was quite good at the stealing part). There was usually liquor to go around, but I was more than satisfied with just enough food not to go to sleep hungry.

Our numbers fluctuated, from around six at our smallest to fourteen at our largest, people coming and going as they found jobs, a couch to sleep on, or in truly fortunate cases, love. Some of us had been on the streets all our lives, some of us just a matter of months (I was in between, going on a good year). Most of us were young, though some were old. There were men and women, humans and not (including a handful of gene-jobs who were always there, and two Atlanteans at different intervals). Some, like me, had powers, most did not.

If there was one thing we did all have in common, it was that we were unwanted. We’d all been thrown out by family, or society, or our governments in the cases of the Atlanteans. Uruguay was a paradise, and there were programs to help people like us, but we could never truly feel like we belonged. The streets were the only places that wouldn’t reject us, and so long as we played it safe and stuck together, we would survive. It was not an easy life, but like I said, we could do worse.
It was a warm summer night when worse finally found me.

There were twelve of us then. As usual, Jorge was our walking bonfire, using his powers to swirl flames around himself, making for a good show and letting us cook meat when he’d stop moving. I was sitting, tuning my guitar and trying not to notice how cute Jorge was, because I knew he strictly liked girls. Some of the other guys were tossing around a ball and were likely to start a game of rugby soon. While I did not mind them having their fun, I knew they would try to talk me into playing, which I probably would, and then they would try to talk me into using my powers, which I certainly would not.

If that happened, people would get hurt.

I couldn’t let that happen.

A little ball of energy named Jisela sat down next to me, all smiles, and as usual my evening felt a little brighter.

“You got the guitar working yet, Felix?” she asked.

“Patience,” I said. “I could play it now, but you wouldn’t like what it’d do to your ears.”

“I know. I just like it when you play,” she said.

“Because I make money when I play?” I joked, slipping her a bag of hard candies from my guitar case. She had a sweet tooth and always had a way of talking me into getting her some candies with the money I earned playing.

She took the candies gratefully, though she didn’t meet my eyes as she tore into them, “Because it feels like what you’d think a good home feels like when you play.”

I didn’t feel like joking after that. Jisela couldn’t have been more than eleven, and though she never told any of us why she’d run away, the way she reacted whenever anyone mentioned her father, we all had our theories, none of them good.

Him I wouldn’t mind hurting.

It was just a fantasy, but an appealing one. I would never actually go so far as to hunt her father down and use my powers to break him into small pieces, great though the fantasy might be. Mostly because I’m not a very violent person, but partly… partly because it just feels unheroic.

When I was little, before I found my powers and before father found me with my boyfriend and put me onto the street, I idolized the superheroes. I watched their movies, I read their comics. When I was eight, father even flew all of us to Buenos Aires to see El Capitán at a public appearance, and I was lucky enough to get to meet him for a moment, shaking his hand and getting an autographed poster.

It was, and still is, the happiest day of my life, and from that day forward I wanted nothing more than to be a superhero.

That wasn’t going to happen, not anymore. Nobody wanted a homeless hero. They just saw us as-

“Hello, friends!” The voices were harsh, speaking in English with British accents. There were four of them. The capes they wore said they were heroes, or at least wanted us to think they were. They tried to sound pleasant, but their smiles were wolfish. Jorge let the flames die around him, a look of pure fear on his face.

“If you could all gather around for a moment, we’d like to talk to you, ask a few questions!”

Jisela looked up at me, half curious, half frightened, “Who are they?”

“I don’t know. Be ready to run,” I said.

I tried to keep Jisela behind me, but her curiosity got the better of her fear and she kept peeking out as we joined the rest of the group.

One of the capes smiled and said, “I want to apologize for interrupting the wonderful evening you good people are having, so we’ll keep this brief. First, so I’m not crazy, does everyone here speak English?”

“I do, but I am the only one,” I said. It was a lie; close to half the group, including Jisela and two of the three gene-jobs did, but I wasn’t going to reveal them. I kept one hand on Jisela’s shoulder to make sure she would not say anything foolish.

The cape who spoke pinched the skin between his brows, but kept smiling, “Very well. Then will you relay to them the message I’m about to give?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“We’re running a program, right now, seeking potential superheroes from people who’ve had a rough go of things in life. We’re looking for anyone here who’s got superpowers, or been genetically altered, as I can see from the couple-few gene-jobs you’ve got here. If you’d consider joining us for the evening, hearing what we have to say, there’s a warm bed and a hot meal in it for you. If you, however, aren’t super, but know of anyone here who is, well, that offer of a warm bed and hot meal still stands as something of a finder’s fee. Will you translate?” the cape said.

I didn’t need to, but I did for appearances. Even to those of us who didn’t speak English, the capes’ intentions were clear.

No offer like this ever comes without serious strings.

What a time to feel wanted.

Everyone started talking very fast, low, hushed, fearful. Though we kept our words in Spanish (or in a couple cases, Portuguese), I had this sick feeling the capes knew everything we were saying. They spread out slightly, not quite surrounding us, but looking like they meant to.

They know what they’re doing. They know what we are. They won’t take no for an answer.

This I knew for sure. What I didn’t know was what to do about it.

The safest path would be to do exactly what they said. Superheroes would have no problem killing, or worse, anyone who resisted.

And if I did that, half of us would be taken god knows where, and since they were heroes doing what heroes did, they would probably send Jisela home.

The less safe path? It would be suicide, but I was sure it would be enough to give the others a chance to run.

A chance is better than no chance, yes?

Calmly I stepped away from Jisela. I planted my feet firmly on the ground and balled my fists, willing my power to surround me and embrace me with greater strength than it ever had before. The crystals surrounded me, bonding to me, becoming me. Soon I was no longer myself, but a giant beast made of jagged crystal shards, twice the height of the tallest men here and with the strength of hundreds.

The four capes activated their powers, ready for a fight, and in kind I raised my arms and roared, “RUN!!!”

I didn’t know if that command was more to my friends or to the heroes, but before I could figure that out, the fight had already begun.

Picture
Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Almost Infamous will be released on April 19th, 2016, from Talos Press. Find it wherever books are sold (including the Amazon link I so helpfully put in the cover above).

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Almost Infamous: Prospects

2/29/2016

0 Comments

 
Superheroes have been a part of everyday life for more than a hundred years. They star in movies, grace advertisements, walk the red carpet, and occasionally save a life or two. Empires have risen and fallen because of them, and time after time they have saved Earth from certain annihilation.

And they have become irrelevant.

With supervillains effectively extinct, superheroes have become idle and are in danger of losing their funding and their livelihoods. Fearing this, a team of heroes have come up with a drastic plan: to create a team of supervillains who answer only to them, staging crimes so they will have someone to fight.

These are the stories of the men, women and monsters who take part in this dangerous program.

These are Almost Infamous: Origins.

Almost Infamous: Prospects
 
By Matt Carter
 
 
Blackjack
 
Tampa, Florida, USA


Retirement suits a lot of people.
.
The bitch of it is, I’m not one of ‘em.

God knows if anyone’s earned a good long stretch of peace, it’s me. Spend four decades as a superhero, and a century and change before then as a supervillain, and you’ve earned one in my book. This life ain’t easy on anyone, let alone the immortals, or near-immortals in my case.

And I was honestly considerin’ a good retirement anyway. Maybe write my memoirs. Maybe even give my powers a rest and just let nature do what it does to everyone else and let me age until I’m too feeble to move and my mind’s mush and sweet lady death just comes around and takes me into her embrace. There’d be statues and speeches and maybe even a national day of mourning for the loss of such a great (former) hero. I’d probably go to Hell (who’m I kidding, of course I’m goin’ to Hell), but having been there a fair few times before and made some friends, I can say it’s not as bad as everyone says.

If they’d just let retirement choose me, things’d be square.

But they didn’t.

They chose retirement for me.

Budget cuts, they said.

Times are changing, they said.

We thank you for your service, they said.

No, I doubt forced retirement suits anyone.

I’d saved up a lot from my legitimate endeavors (and some accounts squirreled away from my days of less legitimate endeavors), and they even offered me a generous severance package, so my life wouldn’t be hurtin’. The person they got to break the news, some polite little twat from the Protectors’ human resources department, really meant well. She screeched and squalled when I flipped her desk and stormed out. She looked right fearful when I took her wrist and said some most unkind things to her. She’ll likely even wonder why she’s feelin’ sicker than usual ever since I touched her.
And maybe I might laugh, like I always done when people like her try and cheat me.

When I’m sober enough to remember, at least.

The power’s fun as much as a curse. I touch her, she takes my age, my sick, my pain. I get drunk, she gets the liver problems. At least until some other poor bastard comes along and decides he needs my touch instead. Which in places like this means sooner rather than later.

Truth be told, with what I’ve been doin’ lately, I can’t say whether or not she’s still got my touch. I couldn’t tell you if I’ve been retired a couple months or a couple years. I know I’ve seen a lot of road on my bike, and as long as I can find a cheap bar, some cigars, and a place to rest my head every now and then, I’m pretty good.

Besides, if I sober up, I’m liable to do a whole lot of stupid.

Nothing good comes of me doin’ stupid.

Which is probably why everything changed in a bar where they watered down the liquor somethin’ fierce.

It was a dim little place, no dimmer than your average dive and maybe a little quieter, though that probably had to do with it bein’ 2 in the afternoon. I was goin’ incognito, no hat, no jacket, no six-shooters, hair down, just me in a t-shirt I could swear fit better when I took it off that clothesline and some blue jeans that might hold together another couple hundred miles if trouble didn’t find me. I was waving for the bartender (all right, maybe less waving and more like cussin’ him out for what he was doing with the drinks) and wondering where the hell he’d disappeared to when I heard that familiar voice behind me.

“Jill Winchester. You know, I think you get shorter every time I see you,” he said.

“Short enough to kick your ass,” I said, thinking myself especially clever. I took the stub of my cigarette from the ash tray and spun my barstool around to face Fifty-Fifty.

He was still ugly as sin, at least the right half of him, pale Gray alien, featureless and vaguely damp, unlike his left half, which might’ve been handsome if it weren’t for the right half.

Doesn’t mean we didn’t screw around for a while once some years back.

“And don’t call me Jill, Franz,” I said, putting the cigar back in my mouth.

“Sorry, sorry, Blackjack,” he said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. He tried looking casual, but I could tell he was afraid. Not too afraid, not with the group of other superheroes he had the place surrounded with.

He motioned with his four-fingered alien hand to a stool next to me. Curious what the hell he was doin’ out here, I gave him a half-nod, and he took the seat.

“You’re looking well,” he said, his words sounding weird as ever with his half-human, half-Gray tongue.

“Tell this sumbitch bartender to stop watering down his drinks, let me down a few, and I might say the same for you,” I said.

“You wound me, J- Blackjack. Besides, I come with good tidings,” he said.

“Figured as much,” I said. Fifty-Fifty wasn’t a bigwig in the Protectors, but he could’ve been, in time. He was ambitious, and much more of a shark than a lot of the people on the Protectors with shark-based powers.

“What are your prospects like these days?” he asked me. “Aside from intoxicating.”

I wanted to say not so great, but they weren’t. I was still famous, not like El Capitán or the Gamemaster, but close. I could get product endorsements and speaking engagements, find myself on the board of directors of pretty much any company I wanted, but I didn’t.

I wasn’t ready to leave the life yet.

I wanted to do that on my terms.

“Yeah, I thought as much,” he said.

Fucking Gray brain half. Reading my mind?

“Only a little,” he responded. “I thought you used to like me inside you.”

“Let me go out to my bike and grab my guns, I could put somethin’ inside of you,” I said. Sweet, beautiful drunken superhero flirting. It’d been a while.

“I come with an opportunity. One right up your alley. One last hurrah, you might say,” he said.

That got my attention. “Go on.”

“Let’s be honest, what do you miss more: being a hero or being a villain?” he asked.

There was no question, “A villain.”

“Glad to hear it. Want to be one again?” he asked.

This was a trap. It had to be. The Protectors didn’t want me making them look bad on my bender, were looking to entrap me with one of my ex’s so they could quietly kill me, or worse, send me to The Tower.

I could give him the touch, fight my way through his backup outside. I’d done it before, no sweat.

But something told me I had to listen to this. Maybe it was his telepathy prodding things along, or maybe there was just enough liquor in my body to screw with my judgment, but I said, “What’s the catch?”

“Who says there’s a catch?”

“You’re asking me to be a supervillain and you’re telling me there’s no catch?”

“Point,” he said. “You know better than any of us that things haven’t been good since the War on Villainy ended. No villains mean less need for heroes, less need for heroes means less funding, less funding means downsizing.”

“So you want me to be a bad guy again just to pad your paychecks? They’ll catch me in a second, and you know it. I ain’t that stupid,” I said.

“No, you’re not, which is why we’re going to do this smart. Some of the other guys and me-”

“Names?”

“Similarly minded folks to us. Heroes who have to worry about their heroing careers, not like the big boys. You get names if you say yes,” he said.

I glowered, but he held strong.

“Fine.”

“We’ve got something in the works. We call it Project Kayfabe,” he said.

“Kayfabe?”

“It’s a wrestling term. It’d take a while to explain. But the long and the short is, some of us are going to make a new team of villains. Hand-picked, superpowered kids, mostly ones too stupid to know what’s good for them, and answering entirely to us. We train them, we mold them, we make them the kind of villains we need. We tell them where to go and what to do, and we fight them, and we put on a good show, and the people remember how much they need us. We get money, the people feel safe, everybody wins,” he said.

“Almost everybody,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Your villains,” I said.

Most of the people folk call villains these days aren’t really the bad guys, but idiot kids who try something illegal, or just plain stupid with their powers, and need to be arrested for it. They make one mistake and get themselves a one-way, non-refundable ticket to The Tower. Sure, a lot of ‘em got what’s coming to ‘em, but it ain’t always as right as it oughta be. Don’t get me wrong, like any respectable superhero, I’ve killed myself a fair few villains.

It’s just that, knowing what it’s like on the other side, I feel bad about it sometimes.

The other heroes don’t even have themselves a sometimes.

“Yeah, well, there need to be some losers in life sometimes for the rest of the world to sleep at night. You’d rather they be people that matter? You’d rather they be you?” he asked.

“You always did know how to charm a girl. What do you want me to do?”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a maybe. What do you want?”

“Well, you know we’re good at being heroes, but we don’t have much experience being villains. You do. We want you to be the drill sergeant for these kids. We want you to keep them in line and keep an eye on them. Mold them as you’d mold any other villain. Teach them to be… every bit as charming as you.”

I laughed, sharp and loud, enough to make Fifty-Fifty jump.

I laughed, but I was tempted. It wasn’t field work, but it was something.

And it was dangerous, much more exciting than hero work had become.

“You got any kids in mind?” I asked.

Though the two halves of his mouth raised unevenly, he smiled at that, pulling a small holographic projector from his pocket, “We’ve got some prospects. Mostly local or from the Empire or Soviet, some from elsewhere.”

Was I really ready to do this?

Yeah. Yeah I was.

“Let’s see ‘em then…”


Picture
Eighteen-year-old Aidan Salt isn’t a superhero. With his powerful (and unpredictable) telekinetic abilities he could be one if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s unambitious, selfish, and cowardly, and he doesn’t want to have to deal with all the paperwork required to become a professional superhero. But since the money, fame, and women that come with wearing the cape are appealing, he decides to become the first supervillain the world has seen in more than twenty years: Apex Strike.

However, he soon finds villainy in a world where the heroes have long since defeated all the supervillains. While half the world’s heroes seem to want him dead, the other half want to hire him as their own personal villain to keep them relevant. Choosing the latter course, Aidan enters a world of fame, fortune, and staged superhero fights that is seemingly everything he ever dreamed of . . . at least until he sees what truly hides behind the cape-and-mask lifestyle.

Almost Infamous will be released on April 19th, 2016, from Talos Press. Find it wherever books are sold (including the Amazon link I so helpfully put in the cover above).

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Holiday Horrors: From Your Secret Santa

12/20/2015

0 Comments

 
It's that time of year again, that joyful time when the ghoulies and ghosties begin to feel just a wee bit neglected, and once again, Fiona and I have taken it upon ourselves to bring a few holiday chills to those who seek them!

Check back with us throughout the season for more bite-sized holiday horrors. Or, if you can't wait for more, check out last year's entries.

Previously on Holiday Horrors: Season's Greetings, The Man Who Loved Christmas Specials

For this week, we bring you...

Picture
Holiday Horrors:
 
From Your Secret Santa
 
By F.J.R. Titchenell

Erica tried not to be disappointed when she opened the filing cabinet and found the second gift labeled, “To: Erica. From: Your Secret Santa.” It was obvious at a glance that this one was a book.

It wasn’t that Erica didn’t like books. Idiots didn’t like books. The problem was that people who didn’t like books also tended to assume that books were like chocolate bars, all alike and guaranteed to make her happy if they came in promisingly shiny wrappers.

Books were more like lingerie. Personal and transformative, with fickle and unpredictable ways of fitting.

No one here at work knew her well enough to buy either of those things for her. At best it would be something she’d already read, at worst, some boring or insulting knockoff of something she’d already read that the giver would expect her to give an opinion on when the thrill of keeping the name drawing secret wore off in January.

The first gift, a heavenly soft scarf with candy cane stripes, wasn’t the kind of thing Erica would ever have bought for herself, but that was exactly why she liked it so much. It was the kind of thing she would have given a passing, wanting glance as she passed it in a storefront and then told herself to stop being silly.

This one time, it was hers.

Deciding that she could always steer the conversation to how spot-on that gift had been if the giver ever asked her for a review of this one, she tore the wrapping paper back from the cover of the book and gasped.

This was perfect. Whoever had given it couldn’t possibly know how perfect it was, with the fairy on the cover, her dragonfly wings held at just the angle Erica remembered, ready to take flight.

It had been Erica’s favorite as a kid, her one loyal friend back in the bad days when everyone had avoided her, always waiting for her in the seldom-frequented middle school library, ready to whisk her away to fairyland for a stolen hour.

It was only after she’d left the school that she’d realized she didn’t know the book’s name. She could recite plenty of the passages within word for word, but that hadn’t been any help in her attempts to track down a copy of her own.

Once she’d gone so far as to go back to the school and ask to be let into the library, so she could check what combination of words she’d gotten wrong in the title. Some half-listening administrator had brushed her off with a quoted rule about who had access to the familiar old building and a small, superior smile for each admission of what this children’s book meant to her.

Erica flipped open the cover, hoping to savor a paragraph or two before anyone discovered her not working, and her excitement turned cold.

Oakville Middle School, said the label inside the flap. She turned to page twenty, where the Geranium Elf was introduced for the first time, and knew before she saw it that the little heart she’d covertly added to the margin would still be there.
This wasn’t just the same book she’d been missing for the past decade. It was the same copy.

“Don!” Erica shouted, dashing around to the boss’s office. She stopped in the doorway, book held out in front of her, deciding how to justify her panic. “I need to know who my Secret Santa is,” she said.

Don’s look of weary expectation turned to impatience. When she didn’t retract the question, he chuckled, “Did you miss the ‘secret’ part of the concept?”

“Mine is creeping me out,” said Erica. “I need to know.”

“You got something threatening?” he asked, with a small trace of concern, probably for what legal liability he might have if she said yes.

“...Not exactly,” Erica had to admit.

“Something obscene?” Don guessed.

“No.”

Don relaxed into his chair, his over-gelled hair making a scratching noise against the headrest, and Erica knew she’d never recapture his attention now.

“Monica has the names,” he said with a shrug, and Erica resisted the urge to curse. Monica had called in sick that morning. “You can see if she’s willing to let you cheat tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t,” said Erica immediately. “I’m gone tomorrow.” The guardedly confrontational look on Don’s face made her suddenly nauseated. “I am gone tomorrow,” she repeated.

“Chris is gone tomorrow,” Don corrected her. “He was the first to get his plans to me.”

That was a flat-out lie, Erica knew, but knew better than to say so.

“I have a flight tomorrow,” she protested.

“I’m sorry,” said Don with more irritation than sorrow. “I’m going to need you to stick out the week, get us through the rush.”

“I don’t even know what it would cost to change my flight!” she said, beginning to approach pleading. “And that’s if I can get another flight this late before Christmas!”

Don held her gaze. “I’m sure it would cost enough to make you glad to have a job,” he said.
 
#
 
There was nothing for it. Erica arrived at work the next morning, fuming, at around the same time she should have been lifting off toward home. She’d brought along the book to show Monica, in the hope that it would help convince her to reveal the list, but that hardly seemed important now. She had considered taking the opportunity to give another Secret Santa gift of her own before she left, but thinking about giving Secret Santa gifts had reminded her of the bad days for some reason, so she stopped.

She was vaguely aware that she’d put in more than the expected effort already, and it was better not to give unnecessary thought to things that upset her once they were done. Even the doctors had said so.

When Erica stormed into the office, Monica was already at her desk, frozen pale and holding her phone in front of her as if undecided on what she wanted to do with it.

Erica followed her gaze to a round bundle of wrapping paper hanging from a huge Mylar balloon bouquet. Something reddish-brown and noxious-smelling was dripping from it onto the carpet.

“To: Erica. From: Your Secret Santa,” said the tag.

“Don’t touch it!” said Monica when Erica reached out.

“It’s got my name on it,” Erica said dimly, though what she meant was, It can’t be what it looks like.

But it was. Erica knew the moment her fingers tore through the paper and into stiff, over-gelled hair, before the rest of the wrapping split open and Don’s head rolled under a shrieking Monica’s chair.

“Who was my Secret Santa?” Erica asked urgently.

It still couldn’t be what it looked like. It was Don’s head, yes, but the thing from the bad days couldn’t be back. Erica had gotten rid of it, with talking and pills, and with holy water and spells, and it was gone from inside her.

“I was checking,” said Monica’s quavering voice, “but I must have made a mistake when I made the list.”

She turned her monitor, the better to crush any denial.

Chris’s name next to Jennifer’s.

Monica’s next to Lance’s.

Erica’s next to her own.

For more horrors from F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or check out our other works!

FJR: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
Matt: Facebook, Twitter, Books.

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Holiday Horrors: The Man Who Loved Christmas Specials

12/13/2015

0 Comments

 
It's that time of year again, that joyful time when the ghoulies and ghosties begin to feel just a wee bit neglected, and once again, Fiona and I have taken it upon ourselves to bring a few holiday chills to those who seek them!

Check back with us throughout the season for more bite-sized holiday horrors. Or, if you can't wait for more, check out last year's entries.

Previously on Holiday Horrors: Season's Greetings

For this week, we bring you...
Picture
The Man Who Loved Christmas Specials
 
By Matt Carter


The man loved Christmas, even if it didn’t particularly love him back. Even though it always came with memories of his parents’ death (a car crash while picking up a Christmas tree when he was seven, very fiery, very bloody), it was the one thing he looked forward to most every year. There was joy, there was laughter, and most importantly, there was family.
No real family, no blood family, but an even better kind, because while he may not have had family, he had his Christmas specials.

On TV, everyone was perfect. Everyone was happy. Nobody would call him creepy, or weird, or ignore him. They would let him into their homes welcomingly, and he could pretend, if just for a little while, that he was one of them. Laugh at their jokes, listen to their stories, and life would be good for a little while.

He had a full calendar of them, nearly one every night for the last half of December. He would decorate his living room to match each one, every detail, every ornament, every dish using the same recipes as the family on TV. The rest of his three-bedroom house may have lacked any color, or even furniture save for necessities in the bathroom and kitchen, but as long as he had his specials, none of that mattered.

The kitchen timer dinged. He cooed enthusiastically, pulling out his ham and slicing off a few good pieces onto his plate that already was piled high with mashed potatoes with gravy and butter, squash and green beans.
He checked the time on the microwave, even though he didn’t need to.

He had this down to the second.

Right on time.

Slowly, carefully, he brought his plate into the living room and set it on the TV tray next to his recliner. The flute of apple cider he’d set out earlier still bubbled, while the crackle of the fireplace filled the room with a nice, warm smell.

After doing a quick once-over of the room to make sure the decorations were perfect and the presents were properly placed beneath the tree he’d chosen for the night (Noble Fir, almost tall enough to touch the ceiling, star on top, hand-made popcorn strings, classical ornaments), he went into the closet behind the recliner and pulled out the sweater with the ‘TAYLOR’ tag pinned to it. It was a crazy, ugly sweater, but the fun kind of crazy and ugly, the ironic kind that everyone loved these days.

Especially the Taylors.

The Taylor Family Christmas Dinner was one of the specials he looked forward to the most. The Taylors were all-American. Father Chad and mother Diana with three grandparents between them (two hers, one his) and four kids, teenagers Nikki and Rudy (adopted), ten-year-old Hayden and four-year-old Brenda. They were perfect, and loving, always with warm smiles and great stories and even cheesy jokes from Chad that’d be perfect in any dad joke book.

Smiling giddily, the man pulled his TV tray forward, took a sip from his cider, and turned on the television.

It was everything he hoped for. Dinner had just started, and as always the man got lost in it. He could hear himself congratulating Nikki for finally making the cheerleading squad and Rudy for being in the running for a prestigious scholarship. Brenda tried telling some jokes her dad taught her, and though she rarely remembered the punchlines, everyone oohed and aahed appropriately, as you should to a girl as cute as her. Hayden, mischievous as ever, threw a green bean at Grandpa John, but with a smile, Chad was able to firmly and politely stop the boy and get him to apologize. Everyone laughed at their silly sweaters, though the man knew his was probably the best. Soon they would bust out some party games, and Chad would show off his stuff at the piano while they all warbled Christmas songs, and the night would end sublimely.

The only thing the man hadn’t accounted for was the empty chair, but it was a surprise he didn’t mind in the slightest. He knew the seat was for him, and he knew just how he’d see the family, and he knew-

The doorbell was ringing. This was a surprise. Who the heck interrupts Christmas dinner like this? No, no, it’s ok, this can still work, this can-

The man who the empty chair was for finally showed up. Almost an hour late.

Uncle Ned.

Tattooed and swaying and clearly drunk with some bleached-blonde strumpet on his arm who might’ve been the only thing holding him up straight. He wasn’t supposed to be here, he was disowned, this wasn’t a very special episode about reconciliation, this was a Christmas Special, and he would ruin everything.

It’s ok, it’s ok, they can still fix this, maybe this is one of those kinds of specials, where the holidays bring everyone together, he hasn’t ruined anything yet…

Then he ruined everything. Not when he dragged a chair across the hardwood of the dining room, scratching it up, so his strumpet could sit with him. Not when his strumpet lit up a cigarette and started using inappropriate language. Not even when he accidentally spilled a bottle of cider across the ham, or when he asked if Nikki would show off her cheerleading outfit.

No. It was when the man realized that he clearly hadn’t brought a present.

That was too much.

The man felt ill. The food tasted like ash in his mouth. The plate, the sumptuous feast he’d cooked to be like the Taylors, it might as well have been writhing with maggots.

In a disgust flavored with fury, he grabbed it and threw it into the fireplace. His breathing became ragged and his vision blurry.

No, no, you can fix it. This isn’t over. This holiday can still be saved.

Thinking fast, the man grabbed a burlap sack from his closet and shoved all the presents beneath the tree into it. Then he grabbed a couple spare crazy sweaters from the closet and tossed them in the sack. They were his size, too big for the plan, but they would do.

Then he grabbed his kit.

Mustn’t forget the kit.

Stepping outside, the man trudged down the sidewalk, snow crunching beneath his feet, the icy air chilling his scalp through his thinning hair, thinking with every step:

You can fix this. You can fix this. You can fix this.

Two houses down and across the street. The pocket knife from his kit opened the latch to the side gate easily. He checked his phone, watching the feed of the special, knowing where everyone was. Ned had left, but was still in the house, the back guest bathroom, cleaning gravy off his tank top.

Disabling the security system with the press of a button on his phone, the man silently entered the back of the house, quiet as Santa Claus himself. Pulling the cheap plastic Santa mask that fit uncomfortably against his glasses and thin moustache and the collapsible baton from his kit, the man covered his face and entered the guest bedroom, his bag of gifts trailing behind him.

Uncle Ned didn’t see him at first, too focused on cleaning his top, but when he did, he nearly screamed.

A baton strike to the back of the legs quickly silenced him.

“Be like the mouse. Don’t stir, don’t stir…” the man whispered soothingly.

Ned didn’t want to be silent. He wanted to fight. He wanted to keep ruining the evening. The man showed him the error of his ways with a strike to the ribs. Another between his shoulders, then two more to his lower back, nothing that would leave marks, nothing that would ruin the evening, but enough to take him to the floor, gasping and moaning in pain.

The man spoke, sternly but politely, “This is a special night. A beautiful night. And you and your lady-friend are ruining it. I’d tell you to leave, but that would ruin it even more, so I am going to give you a chance to fix things.”

He pulled out the bag so Ned could see, “In this bag are two sweaters. I apologize for the ill fit, but you gave me little time to improvise. You and your lady-friend will wear them like everyone else. You will go back to dinner. You will make amends and apologize for your rudeness. You will make this evening special and wholesome as it is supposed to be. You will then give out the gifts in this bag to everyone in the family. They are nice gifts, things they want, things you can’t afford, so it will do much to mend this evening. You will be a hero, and this will be a magical celebration of Christmas. Do everything I’ve said, and you can leave this dinner in peace when the night is over. Don’t, and I will find you no matter how far you may travel and I will start cutting pieces off of you and feeding them to your lady-friend until no one would ever want you at a Christmas dinner again. Do you understand?”

Fearfully, Ned nodded, rooting through the bag and pulling out a sweater.

“Good boy. Now remember, smile, and be jolly. It’s Christmas time!” the man said, quickly exiting the bathroom. He could hear Ned weeping, which he took for a good sign, because that meant Ned would play ball.

On his way out, the man quickly checked the batteries in the cameras he’d planted in the guest bedroom and back hall. The back hall ones would need a refill soon, but should last the night, long enough for him to come back and put in more before Christmas morning.

The thought of them opening the presents he’d given Ned brought a tear to the man’s eye. They were supposed to be from him (though they all said From Santa Claus on the labels), dropped off on Christmas Eve. They would confuse the family, but they would be a Christmas miracle all the same. Now they would be from Ned, but with luck they would be enough to buy his way back into their hearts.

Quickly, the man ran back to his living room. Out of breath and wheezing, he turned the TV back on in time to see Ned, now clad in a sweater (and handing one to his strumpet), reenter the dining room. He apologized for his behavior, and started handing out gifts to everyone. Chad hugged him, and the kids cheered appreciatively at their new toys and electronics. Everyone started eating again, and soon there were games and songs and everyone, even Ned and his strumpet, were all smiles.

The man breathed a sigh of relief, heating up some leftovers and enjoying their taste again. The night was saved, and the Christmas special ended as they all should, with everyone hugging and expressing their love for one another, making the man cry.

He only turned off the TV when they all went to bed for the night, and with that, he started putting everything away in the boxes marked TAYLOR.

It would have been a bittersweet experience, if it weren’t for the boxes marked MARTINEZ the man knew would come out tomorrow.

They really knew how to put on a special.





For more horrors from F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or check out our other works!

FJR: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
Matt: Facebook, Twitter, Books.

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Holiday Horrors: Season's Greetings

12/6/2015

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It's that time of year again, that joyful time when the ghoulies and ghosties begin to feel just a wee bit neglected, and once again, Fiona and I have taken it upon ourselves to bring a few holiday chills to those who seek them!

Check back with us throughout the season for more bite-sized holiday horrors. Or, if you can't wait for more, check out last year's entries.

For this week, we bring you...
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Holiday Horrors: Season's Greetings

By F.J.R. Titchenell

The card and gift shop overflowed with holiday spirit, hung all over with green tinsel and red velvet bows, with battery powered dancing snowmen and reindeer up front to welcome customers, demo versions of the ones in the boxes artfully arranged under the two sparkling synthetic Christmas trees, framed with tufts of kaleidoscopic paper, as though they had just been gleefully unwrapped.

Beyond were the aisles of cards for all different occasions, relationships and tones, though presently more than half were a medley of seasonal color.

Delia had spent the last month and a half hoping to be struck by some perfect inspiration for what to get her dad and sisters for this first Christmas when she would finally be able to buy presents with her own money.

This inspiration had, with a week left to go, so far failed to materialize. Nothing she’d found had said “dad” to her, or “Leslie,” or “Bree,” but she thought it would be difficult to leave this store without something that at least said, “Merry Christmas.”

The only employee present was a woman a little older than Delia, who stood leaning against the checkout counter, glaring listlessly at the floor. She didn’t look up when Delia entered. Delia likewise ignored her and wandered down one of the warm, inviting aisles that made it hard to imagine that either glaring or listlessness could be possible within them.

She pulled out the first card that caught her eye, a glitter-encrusted one in the shape of an ornament that seemed likely for Leslie.

“You decorate my life,” said the inside.

Not quite.

The next one contained a generic “Happy Holidays.”

A dirty version of the lyrics of Jingle Bells in the following one made her giggle, but it couldn’t be read aloud over a family breakfast.

When she moved to put it back, it hit against something that must have fallen into the card rack from the shelf above.

She pulled the cards forward to look at the little wind-up elf figure. It was also dusted with glitter, though of a finer texture and in less intentional-looking patches than the cards. With a mechanical jerk, a last bit of wind-up energy let loose by the disturbance, it raised one plastic arm and puffed out a cloud of the glitter over the card Delia had been trying to replace.

Delia moved the elf to the top of the display and tried to shake off the card. The glitter spreading across the surface changed the colors, until hidden letters became discernible, between the re-written lines of Jingle Bells.

“I want you to think I’m cool.”

The elf moved with another clockwork noise, and Delia looked up at it. It moved again, half a jolting step, and the noise it made sounded curiously like a word.

“Run.”

When Delia made no move, the elf raised its arms in the closest thing to a gesture of exasperation that its stiff little joints could manage, and shot a cloud of its glitter into her face.

Through her coughing, blinking, rubbing efforts to clear her eyes and throat, the groaning steps of the elf along the top of the rack toward the door unmistakably sounded out,
“The sparkle may save you.”

When Delia’s eyes grudgingly opened, everything was iridescent and tinged with peach and purple. She steadied herself against the rack, knocking a few cards to the floor. Similar hidden text on them was clearer now than the unhidden as she gathered them up.

“I don’t know you well enough to know how not to offend you,” said one.

“I’m hoping you’ll ask me for spiritual advice,” said another.

“I hope everyone likes cats,” said the next.

Another said simply, “This card is shiny.”

In spite of the burning in her eyes, Delia smiled at the thought of how much Leslie would like the hidden text version of that one, and then watched, transfixed, as more words formed. The more she thought about her sister, the clearer they became.

“I love you.”

Whatever the elf had blasted her with was making it possible to see, at a glance, what the cards were saying, and therefore the perfect card for anyone.

Delia flicked excitedly through the racks, searching for the next card that would reveal exactly what she meant to say when she held it and thought of either of the others.

“I’m masking my contempt for you,” she quickly put aside.

“I don’t remember your face.”

“You’re just another bank client.”

“I hate you.”

“I hate this.”

“My soul is dry.”

“I’ve been fed on by a thousand sheets of cheap cardstock and I can’t do it anymore.”

“Let me die.”

Delia looked warily up at where the elf had run off from, frozen in place. “The sparkle may save you,” it had said.

A few of the dancing snowmen, still in their boxes, were scattered in the aisle behind her. They had definitely not been there before. The purple-peach tinge of her vision made them look unsettlingly unlike snowmen.

With a few off-tempo notes of Carol of the Bells, the nearest snowman did not dance, but picked up the card she had set aside at the front of the rack, the one with “I love you” in fading letters on the front. It looked up at Delia, and its sewn-on coal mouth widened its smile.

She took a panicked step backward, away from that smile, tripping over the boxed reindeer that had taken its place behind her.

Before she could get her weight onto her hands to sit up, the deer clamped its mechanical jaws onto her sweater sleeve and the thin skin of her wrist and forced her hand flat against the rack of cards. The fear brought on more thoughts of her family, and the words spread out over the fronts of the cards across the rack, radiating out from her hand.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Possibly the elf’s glitter had gotten into her ears, because dimly Delia could understand the lyrics hidden in the tinkling notes of the dancing snowmen’s version of the carol, playing endlessly for the passing foot traffic outside.

“Love for sale here, love for sale here.”

Delia looked across the store at the lone clerk who still had not moved from her post, at the lifeless, joyless expression on her face, and understood that it would, in a matter of seconds, match her own.


For more horrors from F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or check out our other works!

FJR: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 3: Let's Scare the Babysitter to Death

5/25/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 2: Heroes

For today's story, we return to Prospero of the 1980's, when fear was real and imaginations ran wild...
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Let's Scare the Babysitter to Death

By Matt Carter

Diana - 1986
Stephanie Kim was one of my best friends, but tonight we were going to make her pay.

Simple as that.

“Where is she?” I asked Sam.

He didn’t pick up his binoculars to look, “You know, there’s a ten o’clock showing of Deadly Friend down at the Canterbury. If we leave now-”

“We’re not leaving now,” I said. “We’ve put too much work into this to back out now.”

“-I mean, they say it’s a pretty crappy movie, but it’s got this basketball scene-”

“Where is she?” I asked again.

Sam sighed, lifting his binoculars to look at the Kim house. “Still in the living room. Still talking on the phone. If I could read lips I could tell you who with, but since I can’t I’ll probably just wind up making something up that would make the best story.”

“Probably Myra Denning or Harvey Kessler,” I said. They were Stephanie’s best friend and boyfriend respectively and were the most likely ones you’d find her talking to for hours on end on a Friday night when she was supposed to be grounded and babysitting her twin little brothers.

“They’re likely, but not fun,” Sam said, setting down his binoculars and checking his bag of walkie-talkies. “If I’m going to imagine something, I’d prefer to imagine something more sordid. I’m going to imagine that she’s talking to… Jack Keamy.”

“Jack Keamy?” I said, holding back a laugh. Jack Keamy was a blowhard rich kid with dreams of being an athlete that didn’t even come close to matching reality. Stephanie might not have had the greatest taste in boyfriends (as her dating of surly prick Harvey and the many arguments we had over him could attest), but she had a little more self-respect than to spend her nights talking to Keamy.

“Oh yeah,” Sam said, winding up for what I could tell would be another of his stories. “Haven’t you heard? The two of them are having an illicit affair. Sneaking off behind Harvey’s back to make out at Kirby Ridge, roof of his convertible down, Stairway to Heaven blasting on his eight-track. She wants to have sex with him, and he wants to wait-”

Now I did burst out laughing, having to clamp a hand over my mouth so nobody would hear us laughing in the bush we’d been hiding in.

“Jack Keamy? Wants to wait?”

Sam simply smiled, continuing, “It may seem a ludicrous notion to you and me, but at his core Jack Keamy is a truly spiritual man. He dreams of one day removing himself from the unfortunate shackles of his upper-class idiot, cheerleader-seducing ways and becoming an honest, faithful man.”

“By making out with Stephanie Kim?”

Sam shrugged, “I never said my imagination was particularly cohesive, just very vivid.”

As always, Sam Todd could make me laugh. It was the main reason I’d dated him longer than, well, pretty much every other boy I’d gone out with. He might not have been as good-looking as most of the other boys, but he was honest and was basically the only person in the world who could regularly make me laugh. Did we have a future? I didn’t know. It was as possible as anything else in this town, I guessed. Sure, he had a ways to grow up still, he still had to get past all his toys and comics and gadgets and puzzles, but when he did that he stood every chance of being a respectable boyfriend.

Assuming, of course, that he never got too close a glimpse at this town’s dark side.

I wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle that.

He picked up his binoculars again, “She’s off the phone.”

“Cool,” I said, grabbing the binoculars from his hands so I could see for sure. He made a mock strangling noise as the strap drew tight across his neck, but I knew enough from dating Sam to ignore it.

She was sitting alone in her family’s living room, looking disgruntled (from the call or from having to babysit on a Friday night, I couldn’t tell you). It was the only lit room in the Kims’ massive house. There was lots of empty space, lots of dark rooms (like the one her brothers slept in upstairs), and like Sam, Stephanie also had more imagination than she knew what to do with.

Which was the problem, really. If she had less imagination, we wouldn’t have to be here tonight, doing this. We could be out, having a fun Friday night, and maybe I’d have even let Sam talk me into seeing his terrible horror movie with that basketball scene he kept trying to work into every mention of it.

Instead we were hiding in these bushes, looking to scare the ever-loving crap out of one of my best friends, because she just had to go and make a joke out of them.

 

#

 

My name is Diana Wilson, and in Prospero I might as well be royalty. My family’s been a part of this town since the late 1800’s and has held seats on the Town Council almost as long. My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father all have held lifelong seats on the Council (sure, they’re technically elected, but the way this town is run, the elections are dramatically worse than our high school’s plays), and if I had a brother who didn’t die a crib death I’m sure he’d have been expected to do the same.

Instead, all my father had was me, and though I’m sure he was looking for me to marry right one day so I’d have a good strong husband to take over the job in his stead, I had no intention of doing any such thing.

If he wanted to keep the Council in the family, his seat would be mine.

Not that I had any serious interest in small town politics, because Prospero was about as pointless a town as it got. If the town were any less important, I’d have run in a heartbeat. Just take my college fund, go to school and never come back, becoming a big city lawyer in San Francisco or Los Angeles or even Portland if I really wanted to run far away. I could pull it off, and God knew the money was there.

But the thing was, Prospero was important, and my place in it was almost as important too.

Because I knew about them.

They were the family business, after all.

If you believed their stories, and I knew better than to take them at their word, they came to Prospero just after its founding. They could have taken us over, just absorbed everyone and made this a town of not-people, but they didn’t. Instead they struck up an accord with the town’s most affluent citizens to make Prospero one of their “probationary colonies”, a place where they could send their citizens who were either too raw or too tired of life but didn’t want to live on their home world. In exchange for their assistance and collaboration in covering up their nefarious deeds (including the occasional kidnapping and replacement of random townsfolk), the affluent would stay affluent and safe.

I hated them, as any sane person would, but I also knew I wasn’t in any position to do anything about them yet. One day, with that Council seat, maybe I could do something, but until then, all I could do was wait and hold my tongue and play my part as the loyal collaborator.

A big part of this, unfortunately, meant keeping the people I liked most in the dark.

Sam knew nothing, and I meant to keep him that way. Though he really loved science fiction and would get this better than anyone, he was also a gentle soul and would probably never forgive me for knowing everything that I knew about this. Sure, he would joke about our town’s strange quirks and history of UFO and monster sightings, but he kept it at just that, jokes. He would never cross any lines that would draw undue attention to himself.

Stephanie was another matter.

More popular than but slightly less beautiful than me, she was also deceptively smart and had a wicked sense of humor; a wicked sense of humor that she loved to push the envelope with. She delighted in elaborate pranks and for the most part everyone thought she was so cool for them.

Then she crossed the line from harmless jokes to jokes that would get their attention.

It was lunchtime about a week ago when she ran into the cafeteria claiming that the Freeling Farm Monster had attacked her and was chasing after her. The bright red slashes across her chest kept people from laughing. The grotesque monster that burst through the doors and tackled her to the ground made people scream.

It was all fake, of course. The slashes were makeup and the monster was one of her friends, Cindy Brooks (who, incidentally, was one of them, who got a good laugh out of this) in a heavily altered Halloween costume, but the fear they instilled wasn’t fake.

Everybody knew about the horrible deaths of those kids from Braiwood two years back up at the Freeling Farm. The official report claimed it was a bear, while the two survivors of the massacre claimed it was a monster. The truth was somewhere in between, where one of them had broken free from their world, bonded with a bear and failed at being a human, but not at being a monster. One of the survivors had killed it, and the Council and them did their best to cover the incident up, but there were still jokes and rumors and scary stories about the Freeling Farm Monster, stories that Stephanie just wanted to take advantage of for a stupid joke.

According to dad, they dealt with Cindy in their own way, but they were still furious with Stephanie for everything she had done and wanted her punished.

Knowing what their punishment usually meant, I told dad that I could take care of the Stephanie problem. I could scare her, make her never want to play any stupid jokes like this again, and he agreed.

For me, it was a win all around, for three reasons:

1)      I could save a friend from being replaced by a shapeshifting alien.

2)      I could punish a friend who did something unbelievably stupid and (hopefully) scare them so silly they wouldn’t consider doing something like it again.

3)      I would look like a hero to dad, and maybe get him to start thinking that me taking up his Council seat after he’d inevitably retire wouldn’t be such a stupid idea.

Now to put my money where my mouth was.

 

#

 

It helped that Stephanie loved horror movies and was absolutely freaked out by them.

With an imagination as vivid as hers, it wouldn’t take much to frighten her.

We’d borrowed most of the equipment we’d needed from one of Sam’s friends in the school AV club, and begged and borrowed for the rest, though dad’s under-the-table funding of our venture made this part a lot easier.

With that, it was all a matter of following the script.

Act 1: Disconnect the phone line outside the house.

Act 2: Using some of the walkie-talkies I’d hidden in her house while visiting her earlier in the day, start making her hear voices. Maybe even tap on the windows some for good measure.

Act 3: Shut off the electricity outside the house.

Act 4: While she’s freaked out and in the dark, turn on the slide projectors we’d rigged outside her windows. They were angled in such a way and full of enough shock imagery (care of one of Sam’s creepier friends on the AV club) that it’d look like her house was being besieged by some of the scariest ghosts in the world.

Act 5: Using the keys stashed under the front and back door mats, we’d provide some up-close and personal ghosts. While our makeup and costumes were cheap, in the dark with only the lights of the projectors, they would be creepy enough.

Her house was isolated enough that neighbors wouldn’t be an issue, and dad said that he would use what sway he had to keep the police and Stephanie’s parents occupied for the night. If I had any regrets, it was doing this while her little brothers were upstairs, but she always used to boast that they could sleep through a hurricane, which made this a chance worth taking.

It was finally dark enough to do what I had to do.

“Showtime,” I told Sam, sneaking through the bushes to the box that connected her house to the city’s phone lines. I quickly unscrewed the base and pulled out the necessary line before sneaking back to Sam.

“You did it?” he asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“You want to check?” he asked.

“No, I am not going to sneak over to someone’s house, dressed like this and ask to use their phone just so we could see if our prank on Stephanie’s going to work,” I said.

“It was worth asking,” he said.

“I know…” I said, planting a quick kiss on his lips. “And thank you for checking. And being so responsible. And for being so irresponsible to help me do something like this.”

“What else are boyfriends for?” he said, pumping out his chest proudly.

“Seeing if those walkies you gave me still have enough battery in them to make her think her house is haunted?” I proposed, taking the binoculars from him so I could get a good look at Stephanie.

“That’s another good thing, yes,” he said, pulling a walkie marked “LIVING ROOM 2” in masking tape, and holding onto one of the buttons on the end.

“Heeeelllloooo?” he rasped.

She jumped, her head darting around as she tried to look for the voice. I was pretty sure I could see her saying, ‘Who’s there?’

You see, Stephanie, this is why you don’t tell anyone the scariest movie you’ve ever seen is Poltergeist.

Sam and I took turns with the various walkie-talkies, doing our best scary voices and making her look around the living room, looking more freaked out with each passing minute. At one point I nearly shouted at her, “SIT DOWN!”, and she cowered onto the couch again quickly, near tears. She picked up the phone, trying to call out, then tossed it down when she couldn’t get anyone.

Now there were tears.

I didn’t like causing a friend pain, but like it or not I had to remind myself that this was for her own good. She had to know what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a prank like this, and she had to know that she could never do anything like this in this town again.

She was curled up on the couch, pulling some ancient afghan from the corner tight around her shoulders.

“Ready for Act 3?” Sam asked.

“That sounds about right,” I said. I took only one step toward the house, however, before the power cut out on its own.

“What the hell?” I muttered, lifting the binoculars to my eyes again. It took a moment to adjust to the new darkness, but the moon was bright, bright enough to let me see the hunched over, inhuman shape by the power box, stretched out and malformed. Bright enough to see it break out a window and slither inside.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Sam said.

The lie came quickly, “Someone’s breaking into the house.”

“Really?” Sam asked.

“Well, you didn’t cut the power, did you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Someone with the same idea as you?”

“Maybe,” I said, knowing the lie. “But it could be a burglar. I need you to run down to the nearest house and call for the police, tell them what’s going on and that I’m inside too.”

“What? Why are you going inside?” Sam asked.

“Because I’m faster than you and know her house better and might be able to get to her before whoever else is there can,” I said, trying quickly to find a weapon. Sam had an extra tripod for one of the projectors we didn’t wind up using. Though it wasn’t particularly heavy, it would do in a pinch.

“I can’t let you do this,” he said.

“You can and you will because you’re an awesome boyfriend who understands and respects me and who doesn’t want to get Stephanie hurt anymore than I do, right?” I said.

“Damn your logic,” he said, pulling me close and giving me a kiss. I kissed him back fiercely, knowing what I would have to do soon and hating every moment of it.

“Send help,” I repeated, getting only a nod from Sam as he ran to the nearest lit house down the road.

That would buy me some time.

I ran to the front door, scooping the key from under the doormat and let myself in.

Three steps inside the house, Stephanie finally screamed, though she was cut off quickly as a slithering hand closed over her mouth.

I ran to them, ready to fight if this was one of their more irrational citizens who might try to make a fight out of this.

Finally seeing the two of them, Stephanie fearful, her feet kicking off the floor, and her captor a swirling mass of mismatched, bony limbs and tentacles, I cleared my throat.

Stephanie looked at me like I was an angel sent from above.

The creature just smiled several of its mismatched mouths at me.

“Oh, hello Diiiiiana!” three of its mouths drawled, no two of them in proper sync with each other.

I relaxed my shoulders.

This wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

“Hi, Alexei,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much of my story I should fake for Stephanie’s visit, but I figured on honesty being the better policy with Alexei involved. He was one of the most ancient of their members in Prospero, having jumped from body to body since the formation of the town. Recently he had been in the body of Horace Gondrell, an elderly man with too many cats, and there had been talk that he’d be looking for a new body soon. Given her youth and the trouble she might cause them, I could see why he might have chosen Stephanie.

“Didn’t my dad tell you that I was taking care of this?” I said.

“He did, but we didn’t know if we could trust, so I decided to take my part instead. Besides, she’s got the beautiful black hair I like to have,” he said, stroking her hair and getting a muffled scream.

“She does, really, but I don’t think-”

There was a crash of glass from the rear of the house. Alexei and I turned to see what was going on.

Sam, you better not have-

No, there were multiple voices, sets of footsteps. An older man’s voice saying, “It’s in here.”

I put together, far faster than Alexei, what was going on. Before he could move, I darted between Alexei and the voices before they could make the living room.

There were four of them. An older man with a fedora and a hook for hand, a middle-aged woman, and two boys, one barely hitting puberty, the other a teenager maybe a year older than me. They were all very well armed, and very eager-looking.

Hunters.

Dad had told me about them, a bunch of misguided gun nuts who gathered on the fringes of town, hunting them down without any concern of what it might mean for the town itself. They’d mostly been able to kill only those creatures that had been taken over by them, but they’d made strides in the past few years to kill a number of their human copies.

Though I might have agreed with their ideas, I knew their tactics made them little better than terrorists.

“Step aside, girlie,” the older man with the hook said, pointing the lit tip of an old, World War II flamethrower at Alexei and Stephanie.

“I’d rather not,” I said, trying to think quickly.

The teenaged-boy said, “I think you really ought to do what he said, you don’t know what-”

“Don’t you dare tell her anything! She’s with the splinters. A collaborator,” the older man hissed with particular disgust. “I’ll spare you for your humanity, but don’t think I won’t end you if you try anything stupid.”

I wasn’t planning on trying anything stupid, not with a bunch of guns and sharp objects and a flamethrower pointed at me. Alexei, on the other hand, he was not one you could rely on not doing anything stupid. He might be one of the oldest known of his people, but he’d gotten pretty fried with his old age and was apt to do pretty much anything that came to mind.

“I know who you are and I know what you’re doing, but I’m asking you, right now, to reconsider and back the hell off before anyone gets hurt,” I said quickly.

“Last chance, girlie, I’m gonna count to three…”

“My boyfriend ran out-”

“ONE!”

“-he’s getting the cops and he’s going to-”

“TWO!”

“-and you know who makes up the cops and what they’ll do-”

“THR-”

“KILL HIM AND YOU’LL BE SORRY!” I yelled.

The man with the hook looked surprised, dropping the tip of his flamethrower a few inches. The other hunters looked at him, nonplussed.

“Continue,” Hook said.

Think fast, think fast, think fast.

“Do you know who you’re about to kill?” I asked.

“A splinter,” he said.

 That was a weird as hell name for them, but I wouldn’t stop him from calling them that.

“Do you know which one he is, though?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” he said. “They eat our lives and they die when we burn them.”

“Yeah, not quite,” I said. “Some of them are better than others and the one you’re about to burn’s one of the best of them. Alexei here, he’s one of the oldest and most influential in the world.”

“She’s right, you know,” Alexei said, smiling with most of his mouths.

“Shut up,” I said to him.

“So far you’re not making a good case for why we ought not kill him,” Hook said.

“Yeah, well, think of it this way. You kill someone as important as him, and there’ll be hell to pay. It’s not like he’s one of your animal monsters out there in the woods, burned and forgotten, people will miss him, they will mourn for him, and they will take revenge upon those who killed him. They will make fire rain down from the sky and they will make it rain on you, and unless you run and never stop running, they will find you and they will kill you,” I said.

“We know what we’re doing. We can take that kind of fight,” Hook said.

“Maybe, but have you considered that taking a risk as stupid as this now and dying like this means you won’t be able to keep your fight going, that you won’t be able to keep killing more of them? Kill him now and you’ll all die soon with no more victims to your name. Let him live, and your killing will only be limited by how many splinters you can get your hands on,” I said, forcing the word out and just not liking the fit.

Hook just fixed me with his gaze (impossible to see behind his sunglasses), and waved the others back. Quickly, they all ran from the house.

“Girlie, I’ll just say now you’re good at talking. And stalling for time for the police to arrive. We’ll back off, for now, but only because I think you got a future and I don’t want to end it for you right now. Just know this: you’re backing the bad guys,” he said, turning on his heels and running from the house.

“Believe me, I know,” I said under my breath.

“Diana, thank you soooooooo much,” Alexei said.

Right. Still have to deal with him.

“If there’s ever anything, anything at all I can do for you, just let me know and it is done. I’m owing you my life tonight!” he said.

“Good. I’ll call that favor now,” I said. “Let Stephanie go and never come back.”

His dozens of eyes fixed me curiously, some of them soon breaking open into laughing mouths, “What a funny joke, Diana!”

“No joke. You let her go, right now, and you never touch her again, she’s off-limits,” I said. “I think she’s been sufficiently scared tonight, and I will make sure that she is never a problem to you or your people again.”

“That is nice and all, but that is not sufficient, I think, because I am still needing a new body, you see. So, I really am needing Stephanie,” he said.

“Look. Alexei. You know you talk a little strange, right?” I said.

“A little, perhaps, but only to you. My people-”

I cut him off, something dad would hate me for, but he wasn’t around, was he?

“And you also know that Stephanie doesn’t talk like you do, right?” I said.

Clearly, he hadn’t thought of that.

“You need a body?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you like the long black hair look?” I said.

“Of course. It is the greatest look, don’t you think?” he asked.

“I honestly don’t care. There’s a vagrant who’s been hanging out under the highway bridge just south of town. He’s been harassing some of the kids from school, trying to sell them drugs,” I said.

“He sounds like a baaad man,” Alexei said.

“Probably. Anyway, he’s got long black hair, and if you cleaned him up some he might look respectable to the point where nobody would notice he’s the guy from the bridge. And since he’s a nobody who nobody knows, you could even use your real name. Wouldn’t you like every human to call you Alexei for once?” I said, trying to sell the point hard. While I didn’t like selling a human life away, it was better a stranger than a friend, especially a potentially dangerous stranger.

Alexei still didn’t look sold. Here’s where I’d have to go in for the kill.

“And you know Ms. Montoya, the drama teacher at the high school, is taking a better job in Sacramento, right? We’ll need a new drama teacher, and my dad says there’s no better dramatist than you,” I said.

That was a lie, but a pretty good one. Dad had told me about Alexei just like he’d told me about the rest of them as prominent as him in town, and how he’d always dreamed of being one of the world’s greatest stars and had known Shakespeare back in the day, but was really more weird than anything else.

Still, it was the right bait to use on Alexei.

He dropped Stephanie to the ground, too hard.

“Oh, so sorry, Stephanie girl,” Alexei said, patting her head and stepping back. There were sirens outside, and I knew the police cars would be here soon.

“So, you’re going for the drama teacher position?” I asked.

“I cannot think of anyone better. Thank you for the idea, Diiiiiiiiana!” he said, tipping one of his heads at me before darting for the back of the house.

Two problems down. Now just for number three…

Finally, I gave Stephanie my full attention. She was a mess, tears streaked down her face, shirt torn.

“Let me guess, you’re at that stage where words aren’t coming easy and you’re wondering just what the hell is going on in the world. You’re wondering if this is all just some nightmare or if you really were just attacked by some monster who wanted to steal your body because it liked your hair,” I said, calmly.

She nodded.

“Well then, I got bad news for you: it’s all real,” I said. She shuddered, pulling herself into a ball again.

“But with all bad news, there’s good news. You can prevent this from ever happening again. Just keep your head low, keep your pranks harmless, no more monsters, don’t tell anyone what you saw here tonight, and you’ll be fine,” I said. Quickly, I added, “And check in on your brothers, they might be waking up soon, when the cops come in, and you’re still their babysitter.”

She continued looking up at me, stunned, frightened and confused, finally saying, “Who are you?”

I grinned, “I’m your friend. I’m a collaborator. And who knows, I may yet be this town’s best hope.”

Do I have a future in politics or what?


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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
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When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 2: Heroes

5/10/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

For today's story, we look back on some of Prospero's finest...
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Heroes

By Matt Carter

Roy - 1942
The calendar outside the gas station read, December 8th, 1942.

It had been one year. One year to the day, actually. I remembered it well, President Roosevelt’s voice echoing over the radio, talking about the dastardly, unprovoked attack by the Empire of Japan. Everyone I knew seemed to remember it for his opening line, speaking of December 7th, 1941 being a date that would live in infamy, but the line that stuck with me the most was right at the end.

“Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.”

It was hard to listen to what he, no, what the president had to say and give it no weight, much as my father might have wanted to think it nothing and impress on me the same. Seeing it in the newsreels, remembering the president’s words, I knew only one thing for sure:

I was going to be a hero.

I just wouldn’t be the town’s first hero.

Odds were that honor would go to my best friend, Dwight Matheson.

“You think they got Dr. Pepper in Tunisia?” he asked, popping the cap off his bottle with the gas station’s wall-mounted bottle opener.

“I wouldn’t imagine so, not with the war,” I said.

“Well, shit,” he said. “Guess I should make them count while I can, then.”

He took a long sip, tilted his head back, and belched loudly. He looked around, as embarrassed as I’d ever seen them (which is to say, not very) and seeing only the station’s proprietor on hand, he tipped his uniform hat and said, “Sorry, Mr. Brundle.”

“It’s okay, son. It’s on the house for our town hero!” Harold Brundle said, laughing and reaching into a nearby icebox, tossing two more bottles our way. Dwight missed his, but I was able to catch them both, which with the open bottle already in my hand gave me three bottles of awful tasting soda that I’d probably wind up drinking all of on the walk home because, well, any soda’s better than no soda.

“Thanks!” Dwight waved to Harold as we walked off. He hadn’t gotten tired of being called a hero yet. Sure, no fewer than thirty-eight young (and perhaps not so young) men from Prospero had enlisted and were either going off or had already gone off to war, but everyone called Dwight the hero because he looked the part. Handsome, tall and muscular in a way that made him look real smart in his uniform (even with a coat covering up much of it) with jet-black hair, pale blue eyes, and a chin that looked like it belonged on a movie star, or some ancient statue. If I didn’t like him so much, I’d have hated him.

But I did, so I didn’t. Not that he lacked flaws.

“You need better taste in soda,” I said.

“And you need to stop giving shit to the town hero,” he said dramatically.

“Do you even know where Tunisia is?” I asked.

He shrugged, “I’ll write you an answer when I get there. All I know is there’s Nazi’s there just asking me to put a few hundred bullets in ‘em. I mean, I’d have preferred it be the Japs, but leave that for the marines. Just means I’ll be sending people home Lugers instead of swords. You wanna be on my Luger list?”

“No,” I said, eyes cast at the ground.

“You don’t want a Luger? Okay, fine, if you don’t want yourself a gun you don’t need a gun, how about a good Nazi flag? Or a knife? Everybody loves knives…” he said.

The next part was hard to say, one I’d been building up to for a long time but wasn’t sure I’d be able to say to anyone. Dwight was about as safe as anyone to test the words on. I just hoped he wouldn’t laugh too loudly at me.

“I do want a Luger,” I said. “I just think… I think I’d like to get one myself.”

“What, like from the back of a comic book?” Dwight asked.

“No. I want to enlist,” I said. There, I said it. I braced for the laughter that was sure to come.

No, the laughter that ought to come, the laughter that the very idea of Roy Potts going to war was meant to bring on. Skinny, short Roy Potts who had glasses and a bum knee and was still pretty good at running, mostly because he’d spent a lot of his life running away.

Everyone knew Roy Potts couldn’t be a hero.

Well, almost everyone.

Dwight broke into a wide smile, a real smile I was one of the lucky few to know, not the one he used to get under girls’ skirts. He clapped me on the back, hard, nearly sending me off my feet.

“It’s about damn time!” he exclaimed. I couldn’t have hoped for a better answer, not with what my father was sure to say on the topic.

“You really think so?”

“Hell yeah! You and me on the front lines, can you see it? Shootin’ bad guys, skinning krauts!”

“Skinning?”

“Well, whatever you do, I mean they themselves are a part of an evil army bent on taking over the world, why not treat them as cruelly as they deserve?” he said.

“You’re a true humanist,” I said.

“Mayhaps I am, mayhaps I’m not, but who cares? You and me, Prospero’s finest sons, fighting together and dying together…”

“I’d rather not do the dying together part,” I said.

“Me neither, I mean, I plan on living forever, but if the situation requires and we find the need to fight and die for something bigger than us, at least we’ll die true American heroes,” he said.

I wasn’t sure we needed to die to be heroes. Superman never died, and he was a hero. I’d always thought that being a hero meant doing something great when nobody expected you to, and since nobody had ever expected much from me, it didn’t seem like it would be all that difficult, especially with such a righteous cause providing ample opportunity for someone with a form as pitiful as mine.

I smiled, trying to get him to think more positively, “Naw, you can’t even think of dying. I mean, your folks-”

“They’d be proud,” he interjected.

“-and Trudy?”

He almost dropped his bottle at the mention of her name, his smile almost gone. Very unlike him when talking about the most recent girl he called his greatest conquest.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” he said, pulling the collar of his coat higher against the cold.

“What?” I asked again.

“I said it’s nothing, just leave it at that, okay?” he said, agitation riding higher in his voice.

My memories of Dwight go back long enough to know that this was one of those moments where he’d need prodding to open up, where he’d get angry, maybe even hostile, but would then be open for discussion and honesty.

“Dwight,” I said, putting my free hand on his arm.

He grabbed me by the lapels of my coat, forcing me to face him and almost lifting me from the ground, our bottles of Dr. Pepper going flying and exploding on the road.

“I SAID-” he roared, then realizing what he was doing, his face showed nothing but shame.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, setting me back down. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

“It’s just what?” I asked.

“I don’t… I’m not supposed to,” he muttered.

I put my hand on his shoulder, “You’re my best friend, and I like to hope I am yours too.”

“You are,” he said.

“Then trust me. What’s happening between you and Trudy? Did she break up with you?” I asked.

He laughed, an unpleasant, high laugh, “If only it were that easy. She’s… she’s pregnant.”

This wasn’t nearly as shocking as I think he hoped it to be to me. Whenever Dwight and Trudy were together, they took every opportunity to sneak out from under her father’s watchful eye and screw like rabbits. I always told him that if they weren’t careful something like this would happen, and he would just brush me off and say that was something that only happened to poor people and Catholics.

I could have said “I told you so”, but I doubted that would help things at the time.

“When we talked, when she told me… she was crying, but happy crying, and she said she means to keep it, and I… I got angry, I said she was doing this to try to keep me here, and that that wouldn’t work, because I’m a man and I’ve got my duties,” he said.

Now it was my turn to laugh. Trudy Carmichael was a lot of things, but the kind of woman who would let someone say that to her was not one of them.

“How hard did she slap you for that?” I asked.

“Not as hard as I wanted to slap her back after,” he said.

“But you didn’t,” I said.

“No. I didn’t,” he said.

“Because…” I said.

“Don’t make me say it,” he said.

“Aww, come on, that’s half the fun,” I taunted.

“I didn’t because I love her. There, you happy?” he said.

“Quite,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Dwight had ever said those words out loud to anyone who wasn’t his family or in his proximity whenever he was listening to his favorite boxer win on the radio.

“I just, I don’t know. I get this going right now, right here before I’m supposed to go to war, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I want to be the hero everybody wants me to be, I want to make the town, hell, my country proud, but I don’t know if I can do that with this. If I’m worried about making it home to a wife and kid, what if it makes me make the wrong choices over there?” he said.

“You won’t make the wrong choices,” I said.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because I know you,” I said. “Because you take every situation seriously. Because I can tell you take her seriously. If you love her like you say-”

“I do.”

“-then you’ll do everything you have to do to make it home to her and your child. It’s true, maybe you’ll stay your hand, maybe you won’t do what everyone thinks would make you a hero, but if you make it home and treat her right, you’ll be a hero to the only people it really matters to,” I finished.

He looked me up and down like I might’ve been an escapee from an asylum, but he didn’t say anything.

“When did you get so smart?” he asked.

“What can I say, I was born this way,” I said.

“No, you were born weird,” he said.

“A man can be smart and weird,” I said, trying to puff out my chest and sound terribly important, even if I didn’t entirely feel like a man yet.

“Maybe a man can be both of those and hero enough for both of us?” he said.

“Maybe he can,” I said, trying not to think about what had to happen next.

As if reading my mind, Dwight said, “So… have you told your father yet?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You know what he’s going to say, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

“And what are you going to say when he does?” he asked.

I straightened myself up, trying to look and feel as strong as I wanted to be, “That I’m a man, and that I’m of age, and that he couldn’t stop me if he wanted to, though his blessing would be nice.”

Some of that was even the truth.

Dwight laughed, “Well, let me know how it goes. And, well, if you have to run, you have to run. Don’t let him stop you from following your destiny. Don’t let him keep you from being a hero too.”

I smiled, though his sentiment was easier said than done.

 

#

 

It was night by the time I got home.

Father, Mother and my little, thirteen-year-old sister, Ruby, were decorating a Christmas tree that he’d cut down from the forest this morning. It was every bit as lopsided and stunted as most trees from the deeper depths of this forest were, but with some lights and glass ornaments it almost looked respectable.

I tried to bring some of Dwight’s strength and arrogance to my proposal to Father. I made my case as persuasively as I could and vowed that I would stay strong. For his part, Father remained quiet through my entire speech, continuing to help the others with the tree, even allowing me to finish. When I had, he calmly walked over to his favorite chair, put his favorite pipe between his lips and lit it up.

“I am impressed that you have put a lot of thought into this matter, and glad that you decided to ask me before doing anything, because you must know how obvious the answer is, son,” he said.

“But-”

He raised a hand, “You’re still too inexperienced and fragile to go to war, and we would be irresponsible guardians if we just let you go making a mistake like that.”

“He’s right, dear,” Mother said.

“But I, I want…”

“You want to be a hero?” Father asked.

Ruby laughed.

“You don’t think I can be a hero?” I challenged her.

“Anyone can be a hero, I just think that’s a piss-poor reason to want to go to war,” she said.

“Language, dear,” Mother chided, before turning back to me. “Though your sister is right.”

“If she wanted to go, you’d let her,” I challenged Father.

He didn’t argue this, “We would, but only because she is more mature than you and has more common sense, but this is not a world that appreciates someone of her condition and standing and so she would never be allowed to do what she could. You, on the other hand, are still young and foolish. We have put too much work and too much time into raising you and training you to let you die in some foolish border skirmish.”

“Some foolish border skirmish? They think this may be the greatest war in human history! Bigger even than the last!”

Father shook his head, “All wars are some foolish border skirmish, or some silly tiff about an ideology. You may not have been around to remember any, but try actually reading some of those books they gave you in school and you may get a better understanding of the matter.”

“But, this is against evil!”

“Says who?” Father proposed.

“Says-”

“Says propaganda,” Father said, enunciating the last word as if slowing it down would give it ample weight. “While I won’t deny that there are some particularly cruel monsters in this conflict, they are hardly anything new. Monsters, like wars, come and go, and it is up to the rest of us to keep our heads low and enjoy our lives while we have them.”

“So you would let them just waltz all over us? You’d just let them take all of our freedom and everything we’ve fought for?” I ask.

“I didn’t say that. If these villains do indeed prove themselves more capable than those of the past have proven, the necessary authorities will see that they get what is coming to them so that the status quo may be maintained,” Father said.

“Don’t you see, though? Those necessary authorities need all the help they can get, and I can help them! You know I could!”

“You could,” Father admitted. “But you also run every risk of dying. Or worse, you could show-”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said, cutting him off before he could say the unspeakable.

“You wouldn’t dare, you wouldn’t want to, but until you mature you run that risk of losing focus and doing something regrettable,” he said.

“I won’t lose focus,” I said.

“You’ve lost it before,” he said. He was right, but it had been a long time. I was better now.

“I’m a man. I can handle it,” I said.

“No, you’re a boy with dreams of being a man, like all of us were once upon a time. One day you will be a man, and it is my job to make sure you get there. Until then, I cannot let you engage in such a dangerous folly,” he said, completely dismissive.

My strength began to leave. I tried to imagine Dwight by my side, a brother in arms, what he would say, what he would do. Truth be told, he would never find himself in this situation. If he wanted something, he would take it without caring what anyone else would say.

In this situation, that was impossible. Father was an immovable object, and I was hardly an unstoppable force, not like Dwight would be.

“You’re young still,” Father continued. “And if mankind has proven anything, it’s the tendency for war. Another will come along in your time, once you have matured and gained the necessary perspective that will help keep you from getting killed. Then, maybe we’ll talk about you going on one of these heroic crusades. Now are you going to help your mother and sister with the tree, or are you just going to stand there gawking?”

And like that, the argument was done. No raised voices, no raised passions, just his decision finished and over with and no consideration for what I wanted, no, what I needed.

That was it. Roy Potts would never be a hero with a father like this.

No, if Roy Potts wanted to be a hero, he’d have to take Dwight’s advice.

Run.

Politely, I excused myself and went to my room. Once there, though, I was a man possessed. I grabbed the suitcase from beneath my bed, emptying it of all the junk that had collected in it over time, and started packing it with all the clothes from my dresser I could fit. I emptied the cigar box full of coins and wadded up bills I’d earned doing yardwork for the neighbors this past summer, at least thirty dollars, and put it at the bottom of my case.

Sneaking into Father’s room, I also stole one of his revolvers, as well as a handful of bullets. For protection.

I figured that if I started running now, I could make the road and hitch a ride over to Braiwood or Milton’s Mill. In either of those towns I could pick up a bus to Sacramento, where I could enlist. When I got there I would send a package back home with Father’s gun and a note explaining just why I did what I did, and that I was sorry but that this was my destiny. It was possible I would be disowned, or perhaps he would even hunt me down, but I was certain that if I was just given the chance, if he could just see what I was capable of, that everything would be all right, and I would be accepted for what I knew myself to truly be.

A hero.

I snuck out of my window, pulling my coat tight against the bracing cold, and with my suitcase in hand took off running into the forest.

There were clouds enough I knew it would storm soon. Soon enough to make my walk a nightmare, perhaps, but also enough to cover my trail too, I hoped. Fear gripped my heart; this was something I never would have done before, something I never would have dreamed of, but I had never really dreamed before, had I? Never wanted.

This was my time now, and I would make of it what I wanted.

The forest was dark, but unlike most I held no fear of it. The tales of monsters and strange happenings within these woods didn’t scare me. I’d always found them comforting and peaceful in their own, beautiful way. I would keep to these woods, edge my way around the town until I got to the road, and from there, with a little luck, my destiny would await.

I would be a hero.

I could see the lights of nearby houses, and in their way they called to me. They reminded me of what I had back at home, what I could have if I just turned back and listened to my Father. I hadn’t done anything unforgivable yet, I had just given into an impetuous desire.

I could still fix this.

I could still make things as they were.

The home. The warmth of a fireplace. I could practically smell it…

No, that’s not a fireplace.

There was something wrong. A harsh, bad burning smell in the air. Smoke, but not from leaves in someone’s backyard. The forest seemed to know it too, the normally sleeping birds and rodents clearly sensing that something was amiss not too far away. I looked around, stretching my senses, trying to identify its source.

Then I could hear the faint screams.

Changing course, I ran out of the forest to the homes nearby.

It did not take long to find what I was looking for.

It was a two story house, belching smoke into the night sky. The first floor was nearly consumed in flames. Neighbors stood around, baling on water from buckets and hoses, but it was not doing much good. The fire department was nowhere to be seen, but the way people were running in to town told me that they would not get here soon enough. I did not know which family lived here, but I could see them waving a white sheet out of the second floor window as smoke poured out around them. A woman, two children.

They would not last long.

I wanted to laugh. I should have laughed.

It was just too perfect. I wanted to be a hero. I ran off to be a hero. I ran all the way over here, I followed the screams, and the perfect opportunity to be a hero presented itself.

And it had to be with fire!

Fire, the one thing I’d hated and feared as long as I could remember, the one thing that just brings out that primal, animal side of me that I hate to admit still lives inside of me. Of course my opportunity to be a hero would be a fire.

Their screams became more desperate, and I was the only one who could save them.

I ran around the back of the house and found it shy of onlookers, setting my suitcase down at the base of a backyard swing set and putting my coat and shoes with it so nothing bad would happen to them.

Then, as Father said I would, I lost focus.

My body stretched and deformed, arms splitting in half forming four sets of stunted, clawed hands. My body lengthened and expanded, muscles and extra limbs bursting outward as needed, my legs now powerful and bent back at the knees. I twisted my face into some grotesquely monstrous visage that nobody would rightly believe rescued these people.

Stalking over to the house, I leapt up on to the second floor’s sloped roof and broke in a window.

Flame and smoke exploded around me, my skin feeling as if it were on fire, which, for once, it actually was. The smoke singed my lungs, and to compensate I just cut them off for now.

Getting by without breathing was never easy, but I could keep it up for at least ten minutes.

Ten minutes and I’d be out of here, or dead.

Flames licked at my clothing and skin, burning off the former and peeling the latter. Some of the extra limbs I’d grown for protection had already begun to burn through and slough off.

Run away. Get out. Flee. You’re not a hero. You’ll never be a hero. You just run like you always have, run away back home and do what you knew you were going to do the moment you left that house. Go home to Father and apologize and hopefully let all be forgiven. Be what you’ve always been.

I roared in frustration, destroying a flaming chair in the hallway before me.

I have always been a coward. Now I was a hero.

I tore down the hallway, not minding the flames and trying to grow more skin and bone to keep my body safe. I found the room where the screams came from, a towel stuffed under the doorframe to keep the smoke out. The door kicked in easily under one of my powerful legs.

In addition to the woman and the two young girls, there was a father and a younger boy, clearly passed out from the smoke. Those that could looked at me, confused for a moment, then screamed, scrabbling to get out the window that would just drop them into the flames.

There was no time for this.

I made five tentacles with hooked ends burst from my back, wrapping around each of the five. Dropping down onto all my arms and legs, I bounded back down the flaming hall, the family trailing behind me and out the window. We all landed in the backyard in a heap, but aside from some smoke and burns and a few broken bones from our rough landing, they all looked like they would make it.

Clearing my lungs for speech, I croaked, “Get them to Doctor Fallon.”

As an afterthought, I added, “And forget my face.”

The mother looked like she didn’t know what to make of me, other than a charred monster, but the smallest of the little girls looked up at me and smiled.

“Thank you Mr. Monster,” she said, wiping soot-blackened snot from her nose.

I couldn’t drop the monstrous voice, but I did give something of a horrible, toothy smile and said, “You’re welcome…”

“Lois. Lois Todd!” she piped up, barely affected by seeing me.

“You’re welcome, Lois Todd,” I said, patting her on her head despite her mother trying to hold her back. “Stay as strong as you are today, and there’s no telling where life will take you.”

Trying to look strong for the little girl, I walked back to the swing set and gathered my effects, bounding back off into the woods.

Sure I was out of sight, I finally pitched over onto the ground, coughing and vomiting up vile things. I tried sloughing off more of my burned skin, but it may have been too much this time. I was burned bad, inside and out, and what was it Father had always said? Too much fire can kill even us? Was this too much fire, this time?

I coughed violently, curling up at the base of the tree.

This was my first time away from Home, Roy Potts my first human body. If I’d played my cards right, I could get millennia out in this world, going from human body to human body, living dozens, hundreds of lives, experiencing everything this beautiful world had to offer.

But to do that, I had to play things safe. I couldn’t be a hero. I couldn’t take risks, I’d just have to go with the flow and never interfere.

And if that had happened, five people would have died tonight, instead of just one monster with no true body from another world that nobody would miss.

The world wouldn’t miss Roy Potts, and it would miss me even less (though Mother, Father, Ruby and the rest of our kind would mourn me, briefly), but as I watched my body deteriorate into the gray slime that would soon be gray dust that meant my oblivion, I realized none of that mattered.

I was a hero.


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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
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When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

5/3/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

To kick things off, we’re going back to the very beginning.
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Miracle Fever

By F.J.R. Titchenell

Clarence - 1851
Mama didn’t cry until they pulled Edgar out of the rocks and he coughed out a breath of that glittering quartz and gold dust.

We didn’t come out west for the gold, she’d kept on saying, all the while he was down there, working to blast through the rock, all the while he was trapped there by the rocks that got blasted wrong, waiting to be dug out.

We came for the opportunity.

A lady alone could have a respectable business out west, same as a man, she’d heard. Nobody could tell her she couldn’t, no more than they could tell all those men, women and children from all over the world from digging in the riverbeds. The west was free for the taking, for everyone.

The riverbeds had been all but picked clean before she could plan our escape, most of the gold left worth finding buried deep in the rock. That wouldn’t matter, she promised us. Let the fools and the madmen and the big, rich mining companies with their blasting equipment go dig up the gold. We’d give them a nice comfortable place to spend as much as they could find.

Best of all, Pa would need a blessed divining rod to find us.

Edgar and I had no complaints with that plan. We got out of Kansas in the night with five horses, all the cash from the box under Pa and Mama’s bed, and all the good lace and china from grandma. We sold everything to join a guided party out to California, and when we settled in Prosperous, we were able to buy an old farmhouse for less than the cost of the boards it was made out of. There wasn’t so much as a trickle of water running through the wooded hills of Prosperous unless it was raining, which was often, but there was quartz, jagged cliffs of it, and quartz meant gold. The prospectors were just beginning to be starved out of the goldfields and had started founding towns like Prosperous around the quartz hills, making it harder for the farmers in what had been unnamed wilderness to keep a claim on their land and livestock, but for the hospitality business, we were right on time.

Miners were so desperate for a warm, dry place to sleep and so ready to throw their money into their ventures to make it back later that we hardly had to fix the place up before we started making our investment back. She put Edgar and me to work on building extra rooms, and by summer we had the biggest, busiest boarding house in town and twenty-odd of the wives and children of the miners working for us as maids, cooks and bartenders.

The Golden Featherbed, Mama named the place, and liked to joke that a featherbed made of gold wouldn’t do much of a job of keeping you warm at night, but people flocked to mention of gold just the same.

Only problem was those miners. That is, the stories they brought in with them.

Edgar was older, with two years between us, almost nineteen, and like Mama, he always had his eye on the horizon, only for him the horizon was down the dress of a particular maid named Edith.

The gold wasn’t going to last forever, he told Mama, not even in the hills, and the miners weren’t either. Maybe Prosperous would keep on thriving enough from all the folks putting down roots there to keep the Golden Featherbed alive, but it wouldn’t be the way it was now. He needed to build a life for himself, and he couldn’t spend it shingling roofs, making beds, and breaking up bar fights in his Mama’s place. He had to get all the start-up money of his own that could be gotten while the getting was good, and that meant going down in those mines himself.

The miners would boast to each other in the dining room about unearthing nuggets as big as their fists, about how they were going to make enough in a year to retire for two lifetimes. Edgar was going to dig up his and Edith’s retirement, and there was nothing Mama could say to talk him out of it.

The day we heard the news about the cave-in, Mama called him a damn fool, sent me to watch the bar, and didn’t leave her office and her ledgers all day except to check on the kitchen staff.

Her face looked harder than the cliffs in the woods, the way Pa could make it unbreakable to spite him. It was like Prosperous itself, our glittering refuge, had snapped its belt across her cheek.

For two weeks, we waited that way. No, I waited. Mama already knew he was gone, and after the first week, I should have known it to.

Now the rescue teams that gave up hope of finding anything but bodies after a few days, and could only be persuaded to keep searching for those for so long because it was the shortest route back to the vein of gold the trapped miners had been cutting into, were running through the streets shouting about magic and angels in the Prosperous forests, and Mama was crying streams of dust-blackened tears and hugging Edgar, kneeling in the mounds of loose rock.

Other parents, wives, children and friends were stumbling through the mounds to the miners, shrieking, crying, laughing. The word “witchcraft” passed between a few bystanders, and a pair of women, someone’s sisters or daughters, held each other by the hands, sobbing and exclaiming to each other and everyone passing, “Miracle! Praise God, it’s a miracle!”

Edith was at work cleaning the rooms when it happened and didn’t catch up until the commotion of the people running down the trails from the mines to the town proper shouting the news became too much for the dead to ignore.

The crowd of people stumbling across the rocks was so much that I knew I couldn’t get close to Edgar and Mama if I tried, so I was standing by the outcroppings on the other side of the trail, watching, numb from the sudden good news I’d been hanging on hearing. Edith called out to Edgar and Mama when she couldn’t reach them, and Mama turned Edgar’s head toward her to show he was regaining consciousness.

Edith found her father among the rescuing diggers, pushed through the lines of people waiting to shake their hands, and threw her arms around him in a shower of thanks.

Edgar himself hardly seemed to understand what was happening. He rested in Mama’s arms more like a child pretending to sleep than a person who had been without food, water or fresh air for a fortnight. Sometimes he would lift his head straight up and open his eyes, fresher than the morning, and look around with a grin of wonder.

The sun and trees must look beautiful after long enough in the ground.

As some of the miners’ families began to shepherd them down the trail toward homes, beds, water, Dr. Anderson’s office, there was room to get closer.

Edgar’s wondering eyes found me and widened with delighted recognition, as though I had grown a foot since he’d last seen me. When they found Edith, he got up and stumbled to her through the rocks, falling and getting up like a baby deer, held her so tightly it looked painful, and kissed her in front of half the town.

Most were in such a celebrating mood that they cheered like at a wedding, especially when Edith’s father embraced them both. I watched with Mama, who wiped at her tears before she let me help her up.

Far under her breath, “miracle” was the word she chose too.

#

“Are you going back down?”

I waited until after Edgar’s turn being checked over by Dr. Anderson. I waited until Edith and her father had gone to their room for the night, later than usual under the joking pretense of Edith finishing the work she’d left to witness the miracle.

I was willing to wait for Edgar to get a good night’s sleep as well, but even when we dressed for bed at nearly eleven at night, exhaustion didn’t seem to be making any claim on him, and I needed to know.

Mama and Edith had asked him already, but they had only been able to in front of all the other miners, curious neighbors, and even a man from the California Star who was in Prosperous to report on the progress of the mining and soon began interviewing as many of the survivors and witnesses of the cave-in rescue as would let him get a word in.

Edgar had told them no. He also told them he didn’t think he’d ever be able to blow his lantern out at night again, with a big smile at the reporter. I’d been the one living with Mama’s silence while we waited to know he was dead, I’d been the one telling the staff that the Golden Featherbed and all of them would survive either way, and I’d be the one doing it again if it came to that. I needed to know if he was serious.

After washing off the dirt, Edgar looked as though he’d never been gone. He had hardly wasted at all and looked as strong as ever, stronger than I was by half, and he didn’t have a scratch or bruise from the falling rocks. Not even his fingernails were broken. He stretched out on his cot in our room as though he had never felt anything so soft and ran his hands back and forth endlessly over the seams of the quilt.

“Are you?” I repeated when I began to wonder if he had heard me.

“What am I?” Edgar lifted his attention to me.

“Are you going back into the mines?”

“Never.” Edgar sat straight upright, looking as close to as frightened as that cave-in should have made him as he had since being rescued. 

More than the relief of not having to worry about another harrowing wait like the last two weeks, it was a relief to see a response out of him at all other than his giddiness over being back in the world. The day had been stranger than the days before it, and it hardly felt real.

“Promise?” I asked.

“Clarence, I scarcely know why I wanted to be there in the first place.”

I might have thought this a comforting thing to hear if I’d imagined it. Hearing it aloud didn’t convince me of his honesty.

“Did you realize Edith might prefer you alive than dead with a king’s ransom of a homestead to your name?” I tried convince myself that was all there was to know.

Edgar didn’t smile until I did. Then he laughed too hard.

“She did say something like that,” he agreed when his breath returned.

There was a soft, hurried knock at the door from our small common living space, connected to Mama’s room.

“Boys, are you awake?”

She had to know by Edgar’s braying.

“Come in,” I answered her.

If he was lying, another argument like the ones they were having before the cave-in would at least goad the truth out of him.

Mama swept into the room in her dressing gown, her frizzy brown hair flying loose, and sat cross-legged between our cots.

“I have a clever plan,” she announced.

The trials of the day and the weeks before it were already rolling off her as everything always did. This was the Mama we knew and liked best, the one who found us reasons to be away from the house when we were small, the one who told us everything would be good someday whether Pa liked it or not, the one who always knew what to do.

“It’s a plan for you and Edith,” she turned to Edgar. “And for all of us, I won’t lie. I know you wanted to do this on your own, but hear me out.”

She added these words from recent experience, not because Edgar was showing her anything less than earnest interest now.

“You would only have to stay a few years. Maybe months would be enough, but you could set yourself up best if you get everything you can out of the rush while it lasts. You said it yourself. You can marry her when things settle down, or sooner if you want. There’ll be a room for the two of you here as long as you want it. And you won’t have to go back in the mines to make a bigger fortune than any of them risking their necks.”

She paused and looked to me for hints to explain Edgar’s lack of resistance. I shrugged, and she went on to meat of her proposal.

“Honey, from now on, you can be the gold mine.”

#
 
It was a surprise to no one that Mama’s plan turned out to be exactly as clever as she promised.

By morning, she’d re-lettered every sign with her own hands, and the Golden Featherbed became Miracle Manor, and by a week after the rescue teams broke through, more reporters followed the lucky first one from the Star. Miner families from towns twenty miles away made the trek to see what the papers had dubbed The Miracle Mine. And every one of them came to Miracle Manor first. The ones we had room for stayed their nights, and the ones who didn’t stayed long enough to hear Edgar tell his story (for an extra dollar a head and the cost of drinks besides), and pick up a pamphlet on the wonders of the mine and how to find it (fifty cents), or follow one of the tour groups Edgar led personally to the mouth of the mine, but no further, to touch the rocks and whisper to each other of the power they could feel (five dollars).

A few of the other miners who’d survived the cave-in started trying to make a buck off their stories too, from anyone who would listen, but the other miners didn’t have Mama.

She had us all working on the flyers for Miracle Manor’s new rates and amenities and littering the town with them, the prettiest and handsomest maids and barkeeps handing them out wherever there was choked traffic. The Experience Lounge, the room she repurposed for Edgar’s performances recounting his survival story was curtained to be dark as a mineshaft even during noon matinees, except for Edgar’s lantern, and people left exclaiming that they could hear the picking of the faraway rescue team. She sat in on one show a day to give Edgar suggestions on embellishments, and she once had to pay Sheriff Auklee a fifteen dollar fine when she tried to nail a plaque for the Miracle Manor onto the town welcome sign, accidentally knocked the last two letters off of “Prosperous,” and they had to be patched back on with a plank of wood that would probably blow down in the next storm.

We made the fine back twenty times over that night.

Edgar got to keep ninety percent of the profits from the show and the tours to save up, the other ten and the extra business he brought the boarding house itself would let Mama die a rich woman even if Prosperous was mined clean and abandoned within a month, and give me a solid start whenever I was ready to move on as well.

When or how that would happen, I didn’t know. I wasn’t the one who knew how to make things happen, like Mama, or the one things always happened for, like Edgar. Even if I were ever lucky enough to have a story about a miracle to tell, I wouldn’t be able to tell it the way he could, with a voice that could fill a saloon, a steady smile when the time was right, and a breathless pause just the right length when a smile wouldn’t fit.

No pretty girl was ever going to beg her father to dig me out of a rockslide for her.

There was more worrying me than the fact that all the money in the world wouldn’t buy me the first idea about what to do with it, though.

It started with three patrons, a man so old it looked like it was taking a small miracle of his own to keep him on his feet, a woman who could have been his granddaughter with smooth hair and hands that definitely had not been working any job in a mining town for long, and a man with hair longer and skin paler than hers, whose age I couldn’t guess any better than somewhere between forty and seventy.

They crowded around the front desk together while I was checking people in and selling tickets.

“We need to speak with Edgar Hopkins,” the woman began sweetly, pushing one of the Miracle Manor flyers across the desk.

“Three dollars for the three of you for the eight o’clock Miracle Mine Experience,” I rang them up. “Will you be staying in the Manor?”

“No,” she giggled. “I mean we need to see him privately.”

“We haaave some questions,” the black-haired man said in an accent so strange I wasn’t sure at the first that he was speaking English, “about his escaaaaping.”

Prosperous was full of immigrants, looking for the gold same as folk from back East. He didn’t look or sound like he could be family to anyone I’d ever seen before, but Mama always said that one person’s money was just as good as another, so I didn’t take too much time trying to figure where he was from. The routine was the same.

“The Experience includes his whole story,” I assured them, “but private Experiences are fifty dollars for groups of less than that. Unless you’re with one of the papers?”

“Yes,” said the woman immediately. “We’re with the Prosperous Chronicle. We’d like an interview with Edgar to headline our first issue.”

Oh. A startup local paper. Represented by three people I’d never seen before in this very small town. It could have been be a great opportunity or a clear scam, and I knew Mama wouldn’t trust me to handle telling the difference.

No, that wasn’t true. Worse than that, she would trust me to handle it, and I’d find a way to handle it wrong, no question about it.

“I see. You’re going to have to talk to the owner. I’ll get someone to find her.”

“Is this soooo necessary?” the foreign man asked.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “We’ll wait.”

The elderly man nodded dreamily beside her.

I picked up the cowbell we’d repurposed from the Manor’s farmhouse days and shook it to signal for assistance.

Edith burst in from the dining room doors before the bell’s hammer had struck twice, worrying her apron with both hands and sweating in spite of the cool mist outside. The kitchen must have been in chaos.

“Take the register?” I asked. It was hardly a break, with the line newly growing for the evening performance, but it had to be more peaceful than whatever she had just come from. I gestured to the line with the three strangers at the head of it, and her already wide eyes widened further at the sight of them. “I need to find-”

“I have to talk to you.” She let go of her apron to clutch my elbow instead and pull, meaning to drag me into the first story office behind the desk then and there.

Her tone was so startlingly desperate that I wanted nothing more than to follow wherever she wanted to drag me and hear exactly what I could do to help her, but family business was a hard habit to fight.

“We have a line,” I whispered back, nodding at them.

“Rose!” Edith shouted toward the dining room without letting go of my arm. “Rose!” she took the bell from me and shook it hard. “Reception!”

Rose answered the call, calmly bewildered and wiping butter off her fingers, not an escapee from a short-staffed kitchen at all.

“Thank you!” Edith exclaimed, handing Rose the bell and pulling me farther away from the desk.

“We’ll be back in a moment,” I told the three strangers and Rose as apologetically as I could while following Edith, without stopping to worry until the office door was latched behind us how many talkative neighbors had now seen me retreating someplace private with my brother’s fiancée in a peculiar manner.

Too late to be helped now.

“What’s the matter?”

Edith let go of me to light the office lantern and held it close in front of her like a shield against the long shadows it cast behind the furniture.

“What did those people want?” she asked.

“Edgar, same as everybody,” I answered, more bitterly than I meant it.

“Same as everybody, or different?”

There was no denying their strangeness.

“They wanted a private interview,” I said. “Or a private something. Why?”

She put her eye close against the crack in the door, trying to watch the strangers’ dealings with Rose.

“Edith, why?”

She looked at me.

“Edgar isn’t himself.”

I’d been having similar thoughts in what time I’d spent with Edgar since the cave-in, which hadn’t been much. Between shows and tours, he was either walking or playing cards with Edith or drinking until he couldn’t do either.

“He nearly died,” I told her what I’d told myself. “He was buried alive. He’s good at pretending it’s all a show now, but he’ll need time to feel safe again.”

“No,” said Edith with a firm shake of her head. “I mean he isn’t Edgar Hopkins. He isn’t your brother. He isn’t the same person who went into that mine.”

I almost called her hysterical. There was little else that talk could be. But I wanted to know if she could tell me a reason for how the understanding Edgar and I had always had since we were children no longer seemed to exist.

A reason other than that she had taken up the time he had for me before.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“When we’re alone, he...” she looked over both shoulders as if eavesdroppers might have materialized in the dark office since we’d been there. “He didn’t used to be this way. We did things before, some things, when we could get privacy enough, but...” she was fighting tears and winning, barely. “It’s all he wants to do now, and it’s different. When I try to talk to him... he hates me. He hides it, but I know.”

She had more to go on than I had of late, but I had been hoping for something solid. She saw my disappointment and shook her head, the hints of tears disappearing.

“It’s not only how he acts. His body, it isn’t human. Sometimes I see him bend in ways people can’t, and once I saw him cut himself on a glass he broke, he didn’t know I was looking, and I saw the blood flow back into him!”

She peered back through the crack in the door, and I looked over her head at slits of the silhouettes of the strangers still haggling with Rose.

“I went to see Mr. Arkham,” Edith said. “I used to help tutor his daughter, and he was in that mine with Edgar for two weeks. I thought he could help me understand what happened to him there, but I haven’t been able to find him anywhere, not for days, and when I first went to his house, those three were just leaving it!” she pointed past the closed door at the strangers. “Have you seen any of the men who were rescued today? Because I can’t find any of them!”

I thought hard and suddenly couldn’t remember running into any of them all morning, not Mr. Cartwright or Mr. Hardwick, who always broke their fast at the Manor.

“No,” I said. I said, uncomfortable. “You think those reporters have been doing something to them?”

“I’m certain,” said Edith.

“And they’re looking for my brother right now!” I finished.

The strangers had left the desk by the time I ran back out of the office, Edith rushing to keep up with me.

“I told you,” she whispered, “that’s not your brother.”

“Where did the reporters go?” I asked Rose.

“They’re in the Experience Lounge.” She pointed. “With Mrs. Hopkins.”

I followed her direction.

“You told me he’s different,” I said to Edith along the way. “That doesn’t mean he’s not my brother. If those people are looking for all the survivors of the mine, they might know what happened. And if they know what happened, they might know how to fix it, but it’s not by letting him disappear, if that’s what happens to the ones they find!”

“I want him back too!” Edith reproached me. “I only wanted you to understand, if we can’t fix this, your mother wants to make the wedding a public event, she wants to do it as one of the Experiences, and I can’t, I can’t do it, but I don’t know what I’ll-”

I stopped long enough to turn to look at her.

“My mother will understand,” I promised. “I know she wouldn’t have suggested it if she didn’t think the wedding was going to happen anyway. Nobody will make you stay with him if you don’t want to, and no one will threaten your job. Not her.”

I opened the door to the Experience Lounge too late to stop when Edith said, softly,

“She’s not what I’m afraid of.”

Mama and Edgar sat at the edge of the stage where he told his story twice a day, speaking with the three strangers who shared one of the small tables closest to it.

I turned back toward the front desk. There was no way to keep everyone in the Experience Lounge from hearing without backing suspiciously out of the room again, but I said it only as loudly as I had to for Rose to hear me over the line in front of her.

“Have someone fetch Sheriff Auklee.”

The three strangers turned to look at us, though without acknowledging my words.

“You are the younger Mr. Hopkins?” the foreign man greeted me cheerfully. “Why did you not say? And am I meeting the younger Mrs. Hopkins to be? We were just to discuss an opportunity for your Edgar!”

“An opportunity for this bunch to steal him away,” Mama corrected with the friendly shit-rejecting way she kept for negotiations. “But we’ll see if they have any ideas worth considering.”

Edgar smiled and nodded, without that easy way he had in his shows, looking as if he would have preferred to be anywhere else, which was strange even by recent standards. Ever since the mine, he’d had nothing but patience for all Mama’s arrangements for his success.

“If you could just give us a few more minutes to work out the details,” said the woman, “Perhaps we’ll all be celebrating by dinnertime.”

My stomach was making uncomfortable rotations. I had never done anything like this before, almost accusing three people of murder, while asking them for help, never mind while Mama was trying to have a business meeting with them. Maybe I’d barged in too quickly. What was I planning to say?

“A matter of fact,” I started, “we had some questions about-”

That was when Edith picked up a glass from one of the tables and threw it at Edgar.

The glass shattered against his skull, leaving a red web of cuts on his forehead, but only for a few seconds.

Exactly the way Edith had described, the blood only dribbled a few inches down his face before retreating back under his skin, which healed over as if it had never been broken.

Edgar stood up from the stage and stepped sideways toward the exit, with a shrug for the three strangers, the shrug of a child caught stealing cookies, but with even more than Edgar’s grown up cockiness.

“Do you believe me?” Edith turned to me and demanded. She didn’t wait for my answer before throwing the next glass at the foreign man, producing the same unbleeding result.

I couldn’t disbelieve any of what she’d said she’d seen, anything about how strange a thing was happening, but Edgar gone completely, that I couldn’t believe. He was changed, but he was right before us, and these people meant to hurt him.

The elderly man stood.

“Julia,” he addressed Edgar in a voice too clear for his body’s feebleness, and Edgar acknowledged him with a half-bow as though he recognized the name.

“Abner,” he answered, in a voice made by Edgar’s throat, but with a woman’s lilt.

“Julia,” repeated the old man, Abner, “we can still do this quietly. There’s no reason to disturb this poor town.”

Edgar laughed, a feminine laugh, taking another step toward the door.

Edith was still throwing glasses.

“Where is the real Edgar?” she shouted between throws. “Tell me how to find him!”

The strangers ignored her as if she were an irritating downpour of rain.

Soon she worked her way to a bottle that was only half empty of whiskey. It broke against the table the strangers had been sharing, splashing all three. She picked up one of the kerosene lanterns next, lit for the occasion of the meeting, and held it high.

This caught their attention, causing all three to raise their hands defensively, and the foreign man to swing the back of his fist at her.

She was too far from him to reach, but his arm stretched after her like taffy and wrapped around her wrist, shaking her until the lantern slipped to the floor.

“You understand noooothing!” he scolded her, dragging his vowels even longer than his odd usual manner in anger. “You will make us act in too much rush now!”

His expression changed to confusion and then concern while he held her wrist, as though the feel of it was something unexpected. She tried to pull away from him, and I reached to pull her by the shoulders to help, but the foreign man dragged her past my reach and close enough for him to put his unstretched hand on her belly.

“It is from after,” he said. It didn’t sound like a question.

“What was?” Edith asked, defensive.

“Your child is from after the mine,” said the foreign man. “For this I am sorry.”

His unstretched hand changed, sharpened to the shape of an enormous straight razor, and cut her once across the belly, once across the throat, before he dropped her on the floor, her blood flowing endlessly outward and never back.

Mama was across the room and back with her shotgun from under the Experience Lounge bar before Edith hit the ground, and put a shell of buckshot in the foreign man.

The insides of his brain were only slightly slower to go back where they belonged than his trickles of blood had been.

And then started again, when the second shell struck the same target.

Abner stepped over Edith’s body and broke into a run, not at Mama, who was hurrying to reload, but at Edgar, who sprinted for the door, faster than I’d ever seen Edgar move.

Abner’s decrepit body was keeping pace with him somehow, weaving through and over the tables, limbs stretching and twisting into whatever shapes would bring him closer to Edgar with the dry sound of breaking wood, shapes no person could take, and I had to do something.

I had to do something.

I picked up the nearest lantern and threw it at Abner.

The glass shattered and the kerosene spilled in a blazing stream down one of his legs.

He fell and screamed, the flesh under his charring trouser leg melting like a combination of burning pork rinds and tallow.

“Thank you, little brother!” Edgar laughed in that strange, female tone, before escaping out the door.

When the foreign man’s face returned to its oddly angled usual shape, it searched the room and took a horrified expression.

“Where is Juuulia?”

Abner shook his head gravely from where he had fallen. His leg was regrowing as well, though slowly.

“There will be nooooo telling what she will be when we are next finding her!”

“No, there won’t,” said the woman, patting the foreign man’s arm soothingly with the beginning of a smile. “But at least we know who Abner will be.”

She grinned at the man newly entering the room, stepping sideways to block his view of Edith’s body.

“Good afternoon, Sheriff Auklee,” she said.

Abner struggled to his feet.

“Yes, good afternoon,” he shook the Sheriff’s hand, his trouser leg still smoking. “We’re so glad you’re here. Something terrible has happened at the Miracle Mine.”

“Wait!” Mama and I protested at once.

The Sheriff looked back at us, but when the woman smiled at him again, he seemed to forget why he had looked back at all and followed Abner out toward the tour trail.

“You do not know what you have unleashed on this poor nowhere.” The foreign man shook his head at me.

“And they never will, Alexei,” said the woman.

She was wresting the gun from Mama’s hands, and Mama was hardly stopping her. Her face had gone empty and faraway, and when she shook herself out of whatever daydream had taken her, she ran to wrap her arms around me, without looking at the gun or the strangers, as if she had forgotten every danger they had shown themselves to pose.

“My boy, my only boy,” Mama muttered near my ear. “I was so worried about you.”

Before I could correct her, the woman looked at me, and nothing existed but her sweet smile.

When I could see the broken glass and the dead woman on the floor, I could not for the life of me say how they had gotten there.


Picture
There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
Picture
When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Holiday Horrors: The Stroke of Midnight

12/30/2014

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In this season of warm and fuzzy good cheer, we year-round-Halloween folk feel a certain responsibility to offer a few winter chills to those like us who seek them.

After all the fun we had bringing you scares from Prospero all October long, we couldn't resist concocting this series of festive flash fics of fear.

So check back with us throughout the season for fresh, bite-sized of holiday horrors!

Previously On... Holiday Horrors: Black Friday, What the Movies Don't Show, What's Eating Mall Santa, Where Gran Hides Her Presents
, Bindley
Picture
The Stroke of Midnight

By F.J.R. Titchenell

My family’s business isn’t so terrible, really.

I get that I’m going to be doing it forever. I can live with that.

It’s only the pressure that sometimes gets to me, and the overprotectiveness, having to be around that all the time.

That’s why I’m here, at a New Year’s Eve “party” in some club I’ve never been to, full of people I don’t know, after a three drink equivalent cover charge, watching the clock run down, trying to decide how close I’m going to let it get before I call Ester.

We work New Year’s, every year. That’s why they were all so against my getting out to celebrate it even for a couple hours, and probably why I’ve always wanted to.

I didn’t have much of a plan when I got here. A few fantasies about meeting Prince Charming’s eyes across the crowded room, dancing until I almost lose track of time (but not quite), and getting to see those eyes turn disappointed and determined to find me again somehow when I tell him I have to run.

Instead I’ve spent most of the night sharing a table with a woman who might be named Cheryl or Sharon or Sherry, it’s hard to tell through the music, who’s been doing her best to help me understand with the help of gestures exactly how she got stood up here.

She’s probably the person here I have the most in common with, except she had a date at the beginning of the night.

I’m not sorry when a new Prince Charming (well, maybe not prince, more a Duke or Marquis Charming), graciously allows her to whisk him onto the dance floor and I steal the nearly untouched glass of champagne he brought her to seal the proposition.

I’m almost at the bottom of the glass when I realize something’s wrong.

This isn’t the steady increase in the warm dizziness the other drinks have been compounding. All at once, the club begins to swirl in luminous molten lava shapes.

Shit.

I’m barely tethered to my body by long elastic bands, but I manage to maneuver it onto its high-heeled feet and toward the nearest door. The lights are a thick, near-solid that I can barely swim through but which fails to support me, and the music coaxes me in deafening sparkles to just dance, just dance.

I consider for a moment trying to warn Cher-something about the man she’s dancing with, but I can’t see them anywhere in the magic eye kaleidoscope of the dance floor, and if I don’t find Ester while I’m as conscious as I am, he’ll be the least of anyone’s worries.

Somehow I get myself through a door, by guessing that the middle one I can see is the real one, end up in a gossamer white bathroom and check my phone.

When did it pass eleven thirty?

After three tries chasing down the pulsating symbols with my thumb, I unlock the screen and return the most recent call. Ester answers on the first ring.

“Where the hell are you?”

It’s 11:40 before I can answer, and I’m pretty sure the echoes of her question aren’t all in my head.

“At the glitter pony. I need you to meet me.”

I have the name of the place wrong but close enough for her to get it right.

“I’ll be right there,” she says. “Be out front.”

“I’ll try.”

My voice seems to take forever to reach the phone.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘YOU’LL TRY’?” she demands.

I start describing my symptoms and the circumstances that led to them, and she identifies the drug by its scientific name, which sounds like it starts with a K, but it’s hard to tell between her more familiar cursing.

“You do understand what happens if we don’t complete the ritual and line the next year into place?” she rants. “You do realize there won’t be any more new years, or any more parties for anyone, including you?”

Of course I realize it. It is my one stupid job in the whole universe, the one that only requires two seconds of blinding agony a year and ends existence as we know it if it’s not done.

Needless to say, it’s not a job I applied for.

Ester says something about her and Edgar coming to find me so we can all join hands by midnight, and I don’t know if it’s my senses or the way time itself unravels toward the edges that make her words run parallel to the phone being back in my pocket.

There’s a window set high in the ceiling. My body does that elastic thing again, and it’s 11:48 when I start standing and already 11:54 when I reach the wall and determine that the window both painted shut and not adjacent to the outside.

It’s probably about 11:58 when Cher bursts in, leaning so heavily on Viceroy Charming that her feet drag along the floor.

My knees launch the rest of me away from the source of the K-champagne, fingers scrabbling at the top of the nearest stall wall for a place to hide and toppling headfirst over it. My jaw collides with the tiles, and I realize dimly that I would hurt tomorrow, if there were a tomorrow.

Beyond the half open bathroom door, the partygoers cheer to a clock that must be slightly fast but not fast enough, “Happy New Year!”



For more horrors from F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or check out our other works!

FJR: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
Matt: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
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Holiday Horrors: Bindley

12/28/2014

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In this season of warm and fuzzy good cheer, we year-round-Halloween folk feel a certain responsibility to offer a few winter chills to those like us who seek them.

After all the fun we had bringing you scares from Prospero all October long, we couldn't resist concocting this series of festive flash fics of fear.

So check back with us throughout the season for fresh, bite-sized of holiday horrors!

Previously On... Holiday Horrors: Black Friday, What the Movies Don't Show, What's Eating Mall Santa
, Where Gran Hides Her Presents
Picture
Bindley

By Matt Carter
My wife and I had an agreement when it came to Christmas. She would do all the shopping, I would do all the decoration and cleanup. It worked out for everyone this way, really. She was insanely competitive and knew how to find good deals. I knew how to put things in and out of cardboard boxes and garbage bags. Win-win really.

It’s not that I didn’t take any pride in what I did. I made sure everything looked good. Our door had a wreath, our fireplace had its stockings hung with care, our mantle decorated with greens and lights. The first floor had been taken over by Christmas decorations, all centered around the six-and-a-half-foot Noble Fir tree that took place of pride in the middle of our living room. Decked out in ornaments, lights, strings of popcorn and about ten boxes of tinsel, it was a sight to behold if I must say so myself.

The kids loved it, of course, not that they wouldn’t have been happy with whatever I put up because it was Christmas, but I tried to make it right for them. We never really did much for Christmas when I was a kid, so I guess you could say that I was trying to overcompensate and make sure they had the most Christmasy Christmas possible.

Christmas morning was great. They woke up at four-thirty, hyper and jumping up and down on our bed, telling us that Santa had come. They practically dragged us downstairs to show us the mountain of presents beneath the tree and the bites that Santa had taken out of the Oreos they left on the coffee table. Presents were torn open, there was much cheer and pictures taken of fond holiday memories. They played for a few hours, then passed out (because hey, that’s what happens when six and seven year olds wake up at four in the morning), and while my wife brewed another pot of coffee I cleaned up all the boxes and torn wrapping paper.

If only that were the last of the cleanup necessary.

See, that’s the problem they never tell you about going all-out on decorating, that eventually you’re going to have to take it all back down.

I think I did that pretty responsibly too. Every night after the kids went to sleep, I’d take a little bit down, box it up and hide it back in the attic or the garage. It got to the point that they barely noticed a thing was missing until all I had left to take down was the tree.

We knew they’d be despondent if they saw the tree go down, so my wife took them out to the mall for some post-holiday clothes shopping and left me to take it down and out to the recycling center.

It was kind of sad, taking it down. It was that one last bit of the holiday that we still had to hold onto before getting back to the real world. When I pulled down that first handful of tinsel and tossed it into the trash, however, I realized one thing I wouldn’t miss about this season.

Bindley.

Bindley was a six-inch tall wooden gnome, with a jaunty red and green pointed hat, a high collared, furry suit, and a beard that reached down beneath his ample belly. His smile was wide and his blue eyes sparkled, and his one outstretched arm pointed out to his side at nothing in particular.

And I absolutely hated him.

My kids wanted an Elf on the Shelf this year, but since we couldn’t find one, I got a deal from one of my neighbors on Bindley, who was supposed to be some new equivalent made by one of those companies specializing in handmade toys. Since I needed it on short notice, I said sure, why not.

And from that moment on, I hated it.

According to the instructions, Bindley was supposed to move around your house, always pointing out to kids reminders that Christmas was on the way, and at first, I played along. I’d ignore his smirk, his eyes that seemed to follow me everywhere, that pointing finger always drawing attention to what I’d set up and how it didn’t match up to what other, better, dads could do.

But the kids loved him and searching for him, so I did my duty and moved him around.

Well, most of the time at least.

Bindley had a bad habit of popping up in weird places that I know I didn’t put him, like in the medicine cabinet, or in my glove compartment. Always pointing at me, always staring. My wife or kids had to be moving him, like some kind of joke, and I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t want to break the illusion of the holiday.

But I was looking forward to packing him away for the season.

I pulled him out of the tree and set him down on a nearby bookcase. I should’ve thrown him out, but the kids would remember next year. Maybe say you just lost him…

After taking down a few more ornaments and packing them away, I looked back to Bindley.

He was pointing at me and the tree. Staring. Smiling like there was some private joke that I wasn’t in on. I knew I must’ve just set him down that way, but it still gave me a start.

“What’re you laughing at?” I joked, trying to smile it off.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He was just a toy gnome. But still he pointed, and for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I felt compelled to look at what he was pointing at.

I pulled away a handful of tinsel, revealing a surprisingly empty section of the tree. It had been full when I bought it, and I’d kept it really hydrated, so this shouldn’t have been a problem. Pulling more tinsel aside, I probed deeper.

Then I saw it.

There was a bulge in the trunk, about the size of a softball, looking almost like a wooden tumor with a glossy sheen over it.

I looked back at Bindley, “So this is what you’re laughing at? That I got a funky tree?”

Still no answer, just staring and pointing and laughing.

Reaching inside, I made to tap the bulge. My fingernail barely scratched its glossy surface when it softly ruptured. Thousands of tiny, writhing insects poured out, scuttling down the tree and my arm. All at once they seemed to start biting me.

I screamed, pulling away from the tree, watching as my blood started to drip onto the ground. I pulled at the bugs, trying to scrape them free and only succeeded in covering my other hand.

I stumbled, falling to the ground. Looking close in one last moment of lucidity before they started burrowing deeper and climbing further up my arms, I could see that they weren’t insects, not quite.

They were miniature gnomes, all with tiny, pointed hats and even tinier, sharper, teeth and claws.

Bindley looked down at me from the bookshelf, pointing down at me and smiling down at us like any proud father would.

Before blood loss and their teeth took me for good, I couldn’t help but have one last, crazy, thought.

Guess I’m not going to have to clean up the tree after all.


For more horrors from F.J.R. Titchenell and Matt Carter, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or check out our other works!

FJR: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
Matt: Facebook, Twitter, Books.
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    Author

    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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