Samuel Singer's Babysitting Service

  

My name is Sam Singer, and while I usually introduce myself as a small-town reporter for the Habitsville Gazette, or the guy who has narrowly avoided all sorts. of slow and agonizing deaths, today I bear a title that is far more challenging than anything I’ve faced before.

Today, I am a babysitter.

My niece is in town staying with me while my sister and her husband take the first vacation they’ve had since Ellie was born five years ago. And since I live, work, eat, and watch mindless TV alone, I was kind of excited to have some company. Even if that company is five years old, and not much of a conversationalist.

So, there we were, in my apartment living room, watching something called “Teddy’s Big Day,” which as far as I could tell was a program devoted to showing a large cartoon bear walking through a grocery store and making smart food decisions. Ellie was sitting on the floor in front of me, eyes glued to the screen, eating every bit of it up.

Sure, I didn’t love the show, and sure Ellie’s hands had red SpaghettiOs sauce that she was getting into the carpet, but it wasn’t a half-bad way to spend a Saturday morning in Habitsville.

“This a good episode, El?” I asked, but the kid was far too engrossed in Teddy’s activities in the checkout line to answer. She sat hunched, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, definitely too close to the screen for her health.

I leaned forward to pick up my cup of coffee from the living room table. I had tried to clean up for Ellie, not that she’d notice as long as the television stayed on, but I still had a bit of debris littered around the place. My mug left a ring of brown on a missing poster for my neighbor’s cat, an orange tabby unfortunately named Mr. Fluff that I meant to try to keep an eye out for.

But as my grip closed around the mug handle, I felt something strange. It was an odd sort of pressure, as though my finger was swollen. Sure, there’s a lot of salt in SpaghettiOs’s, but this seemed weird, so I put down my coffee and examined my hand.

What I saw was oddly simple, and yet entirely inexplicable.

It was a thin red thread tied around my right pointer finger, a small bow just above the knuckle.

Needless to say, I didn’t put it there. I held it up to the little girl on the carpet. “Ellie? Did you tie this around my finger when I wasn’t looking?” She didn’t even turn to look—the bear was loading the groceries into his station wagon—but of course it wasn’t her. My niece couldn’t even tie her own shoes, let alone do some sort of slight-of-hand trick.

The knot came undone with a gentle pull. I examined the thread, but it seemed ordinary. I let it fall to the floor and tried to stop thinking about it.

But of course, I couldn’t.

I recalled some sort of old wives’ tale, or something I’d seen on television—a person might tie a red thread around their finger to remind them of something they’re afraid they’ll forget. And though I had no recollection of tying the thread on my own finger, something about this idea struck me, and I found myself trying to run through anything I might have forgotten that morning.

It was when I tried mentally retracing my steps that I heard it.

It was a strange sort of high-pitched buzzing. At first, I thought it was something on the television—maybe the bear had bought a can opener—but as it droned louder and even higher, I realized something. I have one deaf ear, that on any ordinary day, doesn’t hear a single thing. And yet, it picked up this sound perfectly, on the same level as my working one. That was when the sound began to feel wholly unnatural.

“Do you hear that El?” I asked, but my niece still didn’t answer, her attention still glued to the screen.

I looked around, but my apartment seemed as normal as it ever had. Still, the noise grew, and I got up to see if I could find the source. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and ventured towards the kitchen.

The squealing was so strong in the kitchen it actually made me wince. I checked the fridge, the appliances, but even though the sound was sort of mechanical, it didn’t seem to have an electrical source.

The noise was rising even more as I checked the cabinets, at such a volume that my eyes began to water, and I opened the pantry with blurred vision. The screeching rose a few decibels as I opened the pantry door, and I tried to scan the contents for something that could emit such a sound.

That was when I saw something. Something that filled me with a cold feeling of horror and dread, the sensation of which was only drowned out by the screeching that grew even louder, so loud I pressed my hands hard against either side of my aching head, my eyes shut tight—

“That’s right, Teddy!”

I was so relieved I could have cried. The sound had ended, not in a slow fade, but rather a sharp silence like a speaker cord being cut. The quiet felt so blissful that I actually smiled.

And then, I saw where I was.

Though I had just been standing, a hand on Ellie’s shoulder, half turned towards the door, I now found myself seated on the sofa. Ellie was still frozen in front of the screen. All was as it had been before I had heard the sound—except for two things.

One, was that Teddy had made it out of the supermarket and was now loading groceries into his car.

The second was a strange sensation around my ears. It was an odd sort of warmth and coolness, and as I brought my hand to my head, my fingers came away bloody.

I quickly felt around the other side, and that hand returned trembling and scarlet. So the sound had happened—I hadn’t dozed off into a nightmare—and it really had been loud enough to make my ears bleed. And I supposed to make me black out while I found my way back onto the couch?

“Are you okay, El?” I asked, but I could see that her ears under her pigtails were fine, and her pink shirt was unstained.

I picked up a napkin, already red from SpaghettiOs’s, and started dabbing at the blood on my head and neck. I was in somewhat of a daze, trying to understand what the hell had happened. El seemed to not have noticed anything, and I was beginning to fear I had some sort of stroke or brain aneurysm.

But then, I felt it.

An uncomfortable snugness on my left pointer finger, which had grown sticky with half-dried blood. I spat on the tattered napkin and wiped. As soon as the red of the blood had been scraped away, something else crimson remained.

A thread, tied in a neat little bow around my finger.

My mouth tasted of rust and my stomach felt sour as I stared at the string, the glow of the television flickering just behind it. There was only one meaning that felt right, even if it didn’t make sense.

I was forgetting something.

“Ellie. We need to go,” I said, the deep instinctual desire to flee taking root in a deep pit formed in my chest.

She still wasn’t answering. Teddy the bear was now helping his neighbor, an elderly pigeon, cross the road. I leaned forward to shake Elli’s shoulder, break her from the trance the children’s show had her in—or else to just pick her up and escape whatever was happening inside my apartment.

The moment I shifted my weight towards my niece, it started again. The terrible droning.

My panic rose with the volume, but still I reached for my niece. Even if the sound killed me, or drove me mad, I wouldn’t let the same happen to her.

A hand touched her shoulder—a shoulder that was warm, far too warm. Her skin wasn’t still, but it didn’t pulse with blood coursing through her veins—it was vibrating slightly, like there was a deep whirring somewhere under her skin that was generating a heat, like when I leave my laptop on a blanket for too long.

When I made that contact with Ellie, the noise became literally earsplitting, and I felt a warm trick make its way from the side of my head and down my neck.

Still, I turned her towards me, and prepared to take her and run.

I pulled her away from the television, opened my mouth to shout over the din—but when I looked into the little girl’s face, I stopped cold. There was a sight there, one so terrible it shook me to my core. It was the worst sight I had ever seen, and as the sound screamed in my head, I shut my eyes tight—

“Way to go, Teddy!”

I blinked. It was quiet.

My heart was still hammering in my chest from the horror I had seen just a moment before—and yet, the sight before me was a familiar and mundane one. I was sitting on the couch. Teddy the bear was on the television learning basic addition from a cartoon rabbit. And my niece, Ellie, was seated on the floor, her back to me.

Only, there was something… not right about all of this.

I could remember the feeling of being scared, but when I tried to remember what of, there was nothing. I grabbed Ellie’s shoulder, turned her around—and now here I was. My hands were sticky and scarlet.

I could recall the sound, the pain, the two times before I had found myself back on this couch without a memory of sitting down. And yet, that last sight, as well as whatever I had seen inside the pantry, had been wiped from my memory.

My breathing was shallow with fear, and this time, I didn’t call out to Ellie. Instead, I slowly and quietly looked down at my hand, right at the center of my left pointer finger, just above the knuckle.

There it was: a red thread, tied into a neat bow.

I was forgetting something.

I was frozen in my seat. I didn’t dare move, in case the sound started up again, and I found myself waking up to the same cursed sight.

I was racking my brain, trying to remember what I had seen—it was just there in the corner of my mind, but it was just out of reach.

Teddy was on the screen again, eating lunch. It was a sandwich. I couldn’t stay there forever. I risked some movement, inching along the sofa cushion. As I did, I could almost see Ellie’s face—the last thing I remembered looking at before I found myself on the couch again.

And as I shuffled, terrified of giving myself away to whatever mysterious force was making the screech, the glow of Teddy’s Big Day making my stomach turn, I had a curious thought.

It wasn’t just what I had seen when I had turned Ellie towards me that I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember what Ellie looked like at all.

Sure, I knew the back of her head, I’d been staring at it all morning. I knew she had her hair in pigtails, and she had on a pink shirt.

But her face was nowhere in my memory.

My heartbeat faster with fear. The sound had made me black out the moments when I got back onto the couch each time, but I didn’t think it could be taking more memories from me. I stopped moving on the couch.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember Ellie’s face this morning—I couldn’t remember it from last night, either. In fact, I couldn’t recall the moment she arrived at my apartment. My sister dropping her off, tucking her in, none of it, like it had never happened.

It was then, on the edge of the sofa, in the instant that I could make out the front of Ellie’s face, that I remembered what I had seen in the pantry.

It had been two untouched cans of Spaghettio’s, and the mangled remains of something small and meaty, all that was left of which was bits of fat and splintered bone—and a few tufts of orange fur stuck to a collar that read “Mr. Fluff”, sticky from blood thick and red as tomato sauce.

The sound struck me for only a moment, and then I was gone.

“Good night, Teddy!”

I was sitting in the center of the couch. On the screen, a bird with a monocle was tucking Teddy the bear into bed, the moon grinning outside his window. I could feel the thread around my finger without even looking at it. The shape of Ellie sat in front of me, attention rapt on the screen, until the moment Teddy’s lights went out.

Then, without anyone touching the remote, the TV went black.

I sat in terrified silence as the creature stayed on the floor. Then, as my heart hammered in my aching ears, the shape slowly stood up and turned to face me.

It looked like little girl in every way but one. The face. There, framed by dark pigtails and connected to an ordinary neck, was a concave circle of metal. It bit deep into the creature’s skull, as though the original contents had been scooped out, and a chunk of machinery was installed.

The circle in the center was webbed and soft, and after a moment I recognized what it was. A speaker.

I sat and stared into the metal shape as it seemed to stare back. Then, as though speaking, it whirred slightly, the smallest hint of the metallic scream that had made my ears bleed playing through, making me wince. And then with a sound like a record scratch, a new sound came out:

“Hi Boys and Girls, it’s time for Teddy’s Big Day—”

The rest of the audio from the episode continued to play back as the creature faced me—at one point in the recording, there was some meowing that made it difficult to hear some of the dialogue, but after a sharp animalistic scream, it was gone—I could hear myself becoming increasingly panicked, and then silenced—and over the course of a half an hour, I was forced to relive the previous confusing, terrifying minutes of my existence.

It was somewhere in that replay that a single, terrifying thought was allowed to enter my mind.

I do not have a niece.

And then, the recording ended.

The creature went silent. We looked at one another, or rather, I stared into the webbing of the speaker. And then, clumsily, as though its head was very heavy, it began to walk. It tottered across my apartment floor, towards the door. It reached upwards, with much effort, turned the handle with little chubby fingered hands, and walked out.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My head and ears ached, and I was dizzy. I could only stare at my reflection in the black screen of my television, sweating and nauseous.

And then, I saw something on the carpet.

Right where the creature had been sitting, were left two objects.

One, a pair of children’s safety scissors.

And two, a small spool of scarlet thread.

---

Credits

 

At The Center of Krook Park, There Is A Game

My name is Samuel Singer, and I only have one ear.

I’ve written before about how I lost it in a previous article—it’s a mysterious tale of intrigue, mystery, and religious mania—but that isn’t what has brought my pen to paper today. How I lost my ear, however strange the circumstances, isn’t important right now.

What’s important is how it came back.

It happened quite literally overnight. It had been months with the ear gone, and I had gotten used to the way the world sounded, only using one earbud at a time, and the strange smoothness of my head against a pillow. I actually preferred to lay on the earless side. It was pretty comfortable.

Usually, it takes me a bit to fall asleep. I’ve seen some…things during my time as a journalist for my local newspaper, the Habitsville Gazette—things that like to make a reappearance in my memory when I close my eyes at night. But that particular evening, I felt different. Peaceful. And so, when I got in bed and laid down, flat side against my pillow, I fell quickly and blissfully into slumber’s soft embrace.

And then, I woke up screaming.

It was a terrible pain in my head that radiated down my neck and shoulders– a horrendous feeling, the brutal splitting of tender skin. I sat up in bed and brought my fingers to the side of my face. When they came back scarlet and sticky, I ran to my bathroom mirror.

My eyes were watering and blurry, and my fingers gripped the bathroom sink with tight knuckles. What I saw in the mirror was a horror film I could only watch out of the corner of my eye.

A wound had opened in the side of my head, two flaps of skin pushed aside by a flesh-colored nub. It was burrowing its way out like a baby bird from its shell, and the pain wrenched another cry from my throat. As I shouted out and watched, the nub forced its way out from somewhere beneath my skin, wriggling and clawing– then, as the tension finally broke, the nub unfolded.

And there, fused to my skull as though it had never left, was an ear.

I stared at it in shock. It was bloodied from its birth and looked odd in a place I was so used to seeing only flat flesh. But the pain was gone, and there was no doubt about it. That was my ear.

I rinsed the blood off and took a closer look. Once I got past the initial shock, I really should have been grateful. Not many people who lose an appendage wake up with it magically returned.

And yet, everything about this felt wrong.

The first issue—of which there would be many—was obvious from the start.

This ear, unlike my last one, couldn’t hear.

It didn’t pick up my last few anguished whimpers, nor the splash of the water as I cleaned the wound it made. It just sat on the side of my head like a prop, making my silhouette more balanced, but not much more than that.

But as I stood in front of the sink, heart beating fast, staring at myself in the mirror, I came to realize something. This new ear couldn’t hear, but it wasn’t completely silent, either. I had spent quite a while with no ear at all on that side of my head, so I was used to the feeling of dead, dull silence. But now, there was something there—some sort of white noise in the background, like when your television goes to static. I strained to make something out of it, or if the ear would start to hear normally after it adjusted to being on my head—but neither happened.

It took a few weeks for the novelty of my homegrown ear to wear off. After the initial shock and alarm, most people settled on the assumption that I had pulled some elaborate prank, although I don’t have a reputation as much of a trickster. I went to the doctor a few different times, was put on countless waitlists for specialists, but in the end, none of them believed the ear’s origin story, and none of them could get it to hear. Eventually, my dummy ear became nothing more than a party anecdote that no one would believe. And after even more time passed, even I began to forget about its strange origin story.

Until it switched on.

It happened while I was sitting on a bench.

I had soured on my usual haunt, the Sage Diner, so I elected instead to try writing my next Habitsville Gazette article somewhere new, somewhere I wouldn’t be disturbed—The Alan Krook Memorial Nature Center—or, as us home towners call it, Krook Park.

I had been working on a piece that was actually interesting—a few local young men had gone missing: Parker Hewitt, James Seymour, Greg Clark, and Tommy Ross. They were upper-middle class, respectable, and the case had been the talk of the town since the second guy, James Seymour had gone missing a few weeks ago. He had been a Habitsville High legend, captain of the football team, baseball team, the whole cliché. And now he was just gone. And while that sucks for James, it’s great for a journalist.

But there hadn’t been any new developments since the last one went missing, and I was having trouble figuring out just how much more I could milk out of this small-town scandal. So, I did what I usually do when I have writer’s block. Look around aimlessly until a story comes to me.

A neighborhood park might sound quaint, but Krook Park isn’t. There’s no rampant crime or shady characters lurking. It just has sort of an eerie vibe—a fog that tends to collect low in the thicket of trees, and an empty playground that kids are never taken to, and teenagers never make out on at night. Even dogs steer their owners away from the park’s damp path. Needless to say, Krook Park is always empty.

Which is how I knew the sound my new ear picked up was coming from somewhere else.

It started as a few blips in the static I had grown used to—it could have been chalked up to a bit of ear wax—but then something cut through that couldn’t be explained away.

“Th—is –it folks, the---op of the----eighth--!”

The crackling voice made me jump, my pen falling away from my notebook and onto the ground. I looked around for the source, some sort of forgotten radio or pick-up sports game—but I still seemed to be completely and utterly alone.

Then, a sound like the ocean came through, cutting in and out—and I realized I was hearing the boisterous cheering of some distant crowd.

“That’s—trike one------ strike---oo-- !”

The buzzing of the crowd grew louder inside my head. Then the announcer exclaimed, “STRIKE THREE!” and the crowd went wild.

It was a curious thing-- I was alone on the bench, alone in the park, so I didn't feel odd about experimenting. If I turned my head a certain way, the sound seemed to come through a bit better. In fact, when I held my ear facing towards the thicker portion of trees in Krook park, the crackles lessened, and I could hear the announcer call the next batter. 

"And next up to the plate, James Seymour"

I sat frozen. That name was familiar, mostly because I had just finished scribbling some notes about that very person, along with a few others: James Seymour, Greg Clark, Tommy Ross-- the young Habitsville men who had been reported missing. 

It had to be a fluke, simply a case of two people with the same name. But, was it possible... the missing boys were all out playing baseball?

I kept my head cocked at an angle, grabbed my pen and notebook, and stood up. And, looking like a person with a terrible neck injury, I began walking, stutter-step, towards the thicket of the woods. 

I changed direction every so often, as the frequency floated into my new ear with newfound strength. I didn't bother to entertain how bizarre the situation was, how strange that I would listen to the demands of an appendage that abruptly grew on the side of my head. 

I just kept walking. 

Eventually, as I weaved between darkened trunks and over gnarled roots, the sound changed.  It wasn't just the staticy sound of a radio-- now, overlapping with just the slightest delay, I could hear the sounds of the game with my other ear. I was getting close. 

I could smell popcorn and hot dogs and stale beer, and soon I could spy a break in the tree line. I had to be a few miles towards the heart of Krook Park, farther than I or anyone I knew in Habitsville had ever gone. 

And yet, when I broke through the trees, I found a set of bleachers, packed to the brim. 

I recognized a few of them, older men from the rotary club, my new mail carrier-- there were a few families there as well, the parents chatting together, the children sticky with red candy apples. 

It was odd enough to make me want to stay undercover, and I moved just along the tree line, careful to stay out of sight. I moved until I was between two sets of bleachers, with a gap between that I could peer through. 

It took a split second for my mind to catch up with my eyes, but when it did, a deep shudder of dread ripped through me. 

The men were so severely bruised, bloodied, and emaciated they were almost inhuman. They wore uniforms in tatters and covered in dark stains, as though they had been wearing the same pants and jersey for weeks. The skin that shone through were lacerated with open wounds, dark purple and blue hematomas, or blazing red and blistered from severe sun burns. 

And then there was a sound-- not over the radio my new ear was still picking up, but one that was traveling through the air in the moment. Though I don't consider myself much of an athlete, I did play a bit of baseball in middle school, and the most satisfying bit of an otherwise traumatic ordeal for a scrawny kid was the sound the bat made when it finally connected with the ball. If it was a metal bat, it would make a sharp ding, or a wooden one would make a nice vintage crack. 

And yet, the sound I heard coming from where home plate was, on the baseball field in the center of Krook Park, can only be described as a dull thud. 

Even from my distance, I began to smell it. The acrid stench of fear, pain, and despair wafted through the holes in the chain link fence towards me. And as I watched, my feet rooted into the sand-speckled dirt, the next batter stepped up to the plate. 

Ba--ba-tt-tt-ee-rr--u-up-p-!" I was still hearing the announcer both on a delay and, unfortunately, in reality, and the echoing effect was causing my head to ache and my stomach to turn. I could see a man stagger up to home, where another man squatted behind the plate. I couldn't see their faces as they turned towards the rest of the field, but there was something so defeated about the way they moved, like beaten dogs. 

They waited there, and the crowd's chatter quieted as they waited for the pitch. But, something wasn't right. Well, many things weren't right, but there was one in particular that I hadn't spotted at first. But once I did, it heightened my confusion even farther. 

There was no equipment. 

This wasn't just some negligent pick up game where the guys didn't wear helmets. There were no gloves on any of the players hands, and the batter stood at the plate, knees bent, but there was no bat raised over his shoulder. It was bizarre, like watching a courtroom reenactment of a baseball game. 

And then, the player on the worn down mound threw the first pitch. 

thud. 

The ball went surprisingly far—at least, for an object hit by the forceful swing of a human arm.

The man who had swung didn’t cry out, didn’t so much as whimper—he just began to run. His welted arms pumped as fast as they could, but his legs staggered and swayed down the chalk line. The other players scrambled for the ball, dust flying up and into their noses and throats, but they chased after the ball as they choked in the haze.

Finally, the second baseman got the baseball in his grip, and as he straightened up, he hurled it towards the first baseman, who unbelievably, caught it in his bare hands with the sharp crack of already broken finger bones fracturing even more.

The batter’s foot hit the bag just after the baseman caught the ball. The running man collapsed in the dirt, making a terrible strangled noise of pain amidst the dust. The other players stared at the ground, unmoving, as the crowd’s cheers roared unsynchronized between my two ears.

Then, as the screams faded, there was a sound—some sort of scraping against asphalt. As it reverberated against the trunks of the surrounding trees, the spectators went completely silent.

As I watched, a huge bucket was dragged out of the home field dugout by the third baseman. With a resigned push, he tipped it over, and out spilled about thirty baseballs that rolled in a wave across the field. They hit the shoes of the players, and some picked them up immediately, while others stared a long time at the spheres before painfully bending over and grasping them.

As a solemn group, they shuffled over to the batter, who had sat up in the dirt, but had been too weak to stand.

“No…”

His voice came out in a raspy whimper.

The men circled around, their faces long and shadowed. Then, one by one, they raised their arms.

“N-no, p—p-leas-se-!” the man’s agonized scream echoed in my head.

The cry continued after the first nine balls pummeled into his soft flesh—but one particularly hard crunch to his head, and the rest of the throws fell quiet and dull.

Eventually, the last ball was thrown, and all the white leather was stained red.

Then, the announcer’s voice resounded across my ears.

“H-E-E’S O-O-U-U-T-T-T-!-!-!”

The crowd went wild.

I began to run.

The insatiable need to escape overpowered me as my feet found the ground and I dove into the thick wall of trees, hoping it was the way I had arrived. I could still hear the demented cheers in my head as I weaved between mossy trunks.

“Th—a—t’s the b-all gam-e fo—olk-ss-!” I heard on only one side as I traveled farther and farther away from the bloodshed I had witnessed. And then, just as I broke through the wall of trees, back into that blissfully misleading section of ordinary park, it went silent.

The game was over, and my ear switched off.

I haven’t heard anything from it since, and though I tried to let authorities know about the missing young men in the center of the woods, it was no use. Most of them thought I was insane. A nice deputy offered to take me to the local shelter.

Though I haven’t gone back to look for myself, I heard that the few officers that actually went to the center of Krook Park only found a wide clearing in the center of the forest, covered with fresh, moist dirt.

 

---

Credits

The Sage Diner's Television Was Watching Me

  

When I first saw it, I thought I simply needed a cup of coffee.

I had been to a wedding the night before, my old school friend Angie was getting hitched, and to be honest, I hit the open bar a little too hard, especially when I had plans to finish a story early the next day. Though they are rarely read, the Habitsville Gazette articles don’t write themselves, and my boss would have my neck if he gets another ‘sorry I’m late’ e-mail from his least punctual small-town reporter, Sam Singer. That’s me.

So I went to the Sage Diner. I like the Sage because it’s a hidden gem, tucked between a laundromat and a tattoo parlor. The coffee machine in my apartment had been broken for a while now, and though I had ordered a new one, it had yet to be delivered—so getting my caffeine fix required an outside excursion.

I opened the door with a quaint little jingle, and took my usual seat in the back corner, away from the scattered elderly couples having brunch, past the yawning truckers having dinner, and across from the television so I could watch the local news.

I hate the local news in Habitsville. Not just because they don’t ever report on the strangeness of our small town, or because digital news is putting print media out of business—but because they’re so good. They’ve got this new field reporter, Meg Carlisle, and she puts my work to shame. So quick-witted, well-spoken, a real professional—nothing like me, still buzzed on a Sunday morning, trying to wave over a waitress for some coffee before I write my next piece.

Meg was on that day, reporting from Western Habitsville—apparently a huge sinkhole had opened up by the post office—and she was standing on the sidewalk, her forehead creased as she motioned to the disaster.

“—the sink hole has overtaken the eastern corner of the Habitsville post office parking lot now. Citizens are advised to stay clear of the area until government resources can be dispatched and damages can be assessed—”

Her voice came through, tinny and faint over the clinking of dishes and chatter of the diner, but my eyes were glued to the image on the screen. The sinkhole was enormous, and quite unusual. In fact, it might have been the first sinkhole we had in Habitsville in decades. I wondered what caused it, whether it was truly a natural disaster, or something more up my ally—but amongst all of this thinking, there was a distraction.

Past Meg Carlisle and her gesturing hands, behind the gaping sinkhole full of debris, there was a man, on the front sidewalk of the Habitsville Post Office.

It was hard to see his face, but he clearly wasn’t part of the police nor clean-up crew. I could. Just make out his shape—of medium size and build, standing perfectly still, looking in the direction of the news crew.

“Cup of joe for you today, Sam?”

I jumped slightly as Pam, my favorite waitress at the Sage Diner, spoke behind me. “You know me well, Pam,” I answered, laughing nervously. She smiled, and nodded, then looked to the TV.

“Can you believe that?” she said, as her grin fell and she shook her head. “Thank goodness no one was hurt.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, looking back to the screen. I could still see him, the shape of the man in the background. “They say nobody’s allowed on the premises. Do you think anybody’s noticed that guy?” I asked, motioning towards the man.

“What guy?, Pam asked, leaning forward and squinting.

“The man,” I answered pointing this time. “Right over Meg’s left shoulder, right in front of the post office on the other side of the hole. He’s even inside the caution tape.”

Pam furrowed her brows and peered into the screen for a few more seconds, then laughed. “You’re a strange one Singer. It’s too early in the morning to play jokes on me.” I opened my mouth to say that wasn’t the case, but Pam walked away to take the next table’s order.

I turned my attention back to the screen, but Meg Carlisle, the sinkhole, and the strange man within the caution tape were gone. Instead there was a commercial for laundry detergent.

Eventually, Pam brought me my coffee, and as the first few sips warmed me, I took out my little red notebook to start piecing together my next story for the paper. Though the caffeine made my head a little less foggy, I have to admit, I was fresh out of ideas. Habitsville had been quiet for about a month, and there wasn’t much material to work with. I could write about the sinkhole, but with the news covering it 24/7, I doubted my boss would want me to put in my two-cents—he tends not to trust me with the big stories.

I let my eyes drift away from the empty note page in front of me and back to the television. Meg Carlise had come back on and repeated much of the same facts about the sinkhole she had shared before; and then it was a commercial for a blood pressure medication—some picturesque, perfectly gray old man playing with his grandkids at the park, successfully staying alive to do so with the help of a little white pill.

I had my coffee cup halfway to my mouth when I saw it.

I blinked one, twice, three times, but the image wouldn’t go away—there, on the park bench behind the old guy and his grandkids frolicking in the grass, was the man.

It seemed impossible—it was impossible. And yet, there he was.

The man on the bench—the man by the sinkhole—was middle-aged, in a beige windbreaker and navy pants. He had close-cropped hair, sensible shoes, and an ordinary face. He had those big square glasses, the one’s from the 80’s that reflect so much light you can’t see the wearer’s eyes.

This much I had already been able to gather from seeing him within the caution tape on the live news. But what I hadn’t been able to see before, was what he was saying.

By the position of his head, I could tell that his gaze didn’t linger on the children, nor the old man on blood pressure medication. Instead, he stared directly into the camera. As the voiceover droned on about side effects and ‘asking your doctor is blah blah blah is right for you”, I could see the man’s mouth moving, though I could not hear his voice.

His lips twisting silently, I could have sworn the man was saying, “you.”

My spine prickled once I recognized the word, and a deep sense of dread crept its way into the very marrow of my bones. I should have felt silly. Like I said, the man was average looking—it was entirely likely that he merely shared a passing resemblance to the man on the sinkhole footage. And perhaps my eyes were playing tricks—maybe what I thought was ‘you’ was actually an attempt by a commercial extra to suppress a sneeze.

Realizing I had been holding my cup halfway to my open mouth for about forty-five seconds, I placed the ceramic back onto the saucer, and tried to shake myself out of whatever had taken hold of me. Perhaps I was still drunk from the night before.

Eventually, Pam came back and refilled my cup. I thanked her, then asked, as politely and normally as I could, “Can we possibly change the channel on the TV?”

She raised her eyebrows and rested the coffee pot on her hip. “Sure, hon’, if you want.” Then she fished into her apron and pulled out an ancient remote, stained with coffee and sticky with decades of maple syrup.

I was embarrassed when hand that accepted the remote shook, but Pam didn’t seem to notice that, just as she hadn’t noticed the odd specter inside the caution tape. I switched channels quickly—the TV was one of those old, chunky ones with antenna protruding from the top, so it didn’t pick up much. Eventually I settled on a sit-com from the early 90’s with some mundane, but harmless plot. A teenage girl doesn’t like her new stepmom. Perfect. “You’re not my real mom,” the girl was saying, crossing her arms.

I turned back to the page in front of me, the one that hadn’t yet been kissed by my pen. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to write about, whether my head was clear or not. I could try to put together something about the sinkhole—maybe my boss wouldn’t turn it down if I had it ready Monday morning, a fresh article about fresh news, placed on his desk first thing.

“You’re not my—real—mom.”

Something wasn’t right. That line—the girl had already said it.

“You’re not my—real”

“You’re not—real”

“You’re n—”

“You—”

“You—”

I looked up.

There was the teenager, arms still crossed, and the stepmom, botox-forehead just barely creased, standing in the middle of the living room. The girl was saying her line over and over as the TV skipped, and between the glitches of static as the tape rewound, I could see him.

There, sitting on the couch in a late 90’s living room, was the man.

My mind told me I was being ridiculous, but the surge of fear that instinctually raced through me told me otherwise. It was the same man. He wasn’t partaking in the argument, nor milling about like an extra. As the footage continued to skip and the girl’s mouth opened and closed, the man stared ahead, directly into the camera. Directly at me, sitting in the diner.

As the girl’s voice repeated itself, so too did the movement of the man’s lips. “You” he was mouthing, as the actresses voice echoed the same statement. “You, you, you.”

He continued like this, and I continued to watch. The remote felt cold and heavy in my sweating hand. Trembling, I tried to hit the power button, to shut the machine off entirely—but it wouldn’t work. I pressed it again, and again, and again, but whether it was stuck due to a lifetime of hash brown grease or something far more sinister, the television would not turn off.

I changed the channel, and for a blissful moment, the torturous repetition of that terrible word ceased, and I could breathe. It was a game show, one of those trivia ones. A math teacher from Ohio was trying to name a hit song from 2010, but he wasn’t coming up with anything.

“You can do it,” the host said with a plastic grin. The camera cut to the audience, a crowd of smiling, entertained people. I felt my shoulders relax, the pain in my chest lessen.

“You can do—”

The air stopped dead in my throat.

“You can—”

“You—"

“You—”

I lifted my gaze. Third row, sixth seat, between a Midwestern family of four and an old woman doing a crossword, was the man. His mouth was moving, gray grainy lips fixating on that same word as the same few frames replayed over, and over again.

Finally, with a deep pit of dread in my stomach still hot from my coffee, I did something incredibly odd, and immensely disturbing.

I raised my shaking hand, and slowly, pointed a finger towards my chest.

“Me?” I asked out loud.

At first, nothing happened.

Then, the man raised his own hand, and pointed at the camera.

“You” he mouthed again.

Then, the television changed its own channel. We were back to the local news, with Meg Carlisle talking about the sinkhole. The huge, cavernous thing was still in the background, framed by bright yellow tape.

And there, in the very back, was the man, just as I had seen him before.

Waiting.

It’s hard to explain why I went to the sink hole.

Perhaps it was a compulsory need to satiate my own curiosity, or maybe it was just plain masochism. Truthfully, I was a little afraid of what would happen if I didn’t show up, to that spot just outside of the Habitsville post office, where I knew he would be.

It was easy to get past the police, since they were used to me creeping around news spots with my little red notebook. I could see Meg Carlisle holding her microphone, speaking to the camera. I ducked around the side of the post office, and approached the sectioned off area.

Up close, the sink hole was terrifying.

It had that great, ancient feeling that humans often live their entire lives without experiencing—the same sensation of staring into the inky abyss of an underwater trench, or the center of a black hole sucking up asteroids, stars—entire worlds.

But the sight of the sink hole was nothing compared to seeing the man from the television, in the flesh.

But disturbingly enough, he wasn’t flesh—the man looked exactly the same as he had on the screen, not just in terms of his beige windbreaker and ambiguous expression, but in the physiological make-up of his body. He was… grainy. The edges of him were unclear, constantly moving, and as I stared, I could see one of the frames of his glasses glitch in and out of existence. I would have said he was some sort of hologram, but there were no projectors, no hidden devices, and the wood underneath him creaked as he shifted his weight on the bench.

We stared at each other for a moment, the TV man and I could feel each of the pretenses, that of the great sinkhole just in the corner of my eye, and of the man. Though he was much smaller than the gaping hole in the Earth, they had similar sensations—powerful, gravitational pulls, as though coaxing the minds of mortals to wander a bit closer to their edges.

And then, the man spoke. Or rather, he mouthed a word, but after hearing him borrow voices to say it so many times, I knew what it was.

“You—” he said silently, pointing a hand towards me.

I didn’t know what else to do but nod.

Then, he did something he had never done before.

He pointed away from himself, the tip of his grainy finger directing my eyes towards the very center of the sinkhole.

A surge of fear ripped through my body. “You want me to… what, to look at the sink hole?” The man kept pointing, his expression difficult to read, his face flat and expressionless. The more I looked, the more I could see there were no signs of maliciousness on his face, no threats—he just simply watched me, pointing.

I took a few more steps towards the sink hole to appease him. “Like this?”

I breathed in sharply as the man stood up. He took a few steps towards me and pointed again, as though trying to make his point clearer. “I don’t—I don’t want to—” I started to say, my feet shuffling only inches closer to the crevasses’ edge. I didn’t know what he wanted, or whether he wished me harm. I turned my head over to the news crew, to the shape of Meg Carlisle in the distance, but no one seemed to notice me, or the creature of static commanding me.

I looked back at the man, his face flat, with sparks of white glitching through on his cheek. A gust of wind came, seemingly up from the center of the sink hole, and it brushed against my skin, warm and earthy like animal’s breath. The air tussled the man’s hair, even blew open his windbreaker a bit—

And then, I saw what the T.V. man was wearing.

Underneath the beige windbreaker was a pale blue shirt, carefully pressed and buttoned to the chin. It was tucked into his navy pants, cinched with a belt. It all looked very neat, very official.

And there, right on the left shirt pocket, was a logo. A blue eagle, framed by gold stars—and words, between thick red and blue line: U.S. Mail.

He wasn’t a TV man at all.

He was a Mail Man.

I tore my eyes away from him and peered over the edge of the sink hole, towards where he was pointing. My heart was beating fast and hard in my chest, and my head swam with the sheer height of it, but even despite my anxiety, I could see it. There was something small, white, and square down in the pit of the sinkhole. It was smudged with dark, wet dirt, but even so, I could deduce what it was.

A package.

I looked from the Mail Man, to the package, then back. “Are—are you serious?” I asked, not bothering to hide the disbelief in my voice.

The entity said nothing, only continued his steadfast gesture.

I thought about leaving, in fact, I even took a step back, away from the sinkhole. But when I did, a new feeling of dread surged through me—the waviness around the man’s edges quickened, as though he was vibrating. It seemed as though his image stretched outwards, expanding, and though his face didn’t change, nor could I see the expression behind his glasses, I could guess what that meant—if I tried to leave, he was going to get angry.

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up in defeat. “I’m going.”

The descent into the sinkhole was treacherous and frightening. Gusts of humid wind kept coming up from the dark pit below, and my knuckles were white and aching from handing on to any handholds I could find as I stumbled farther and farther down.

Eventually, I made it down to the white box.

I looked up, to see the Mail Man, now pointing down at me, still vibrating slightly at the edges, as though he was growing impatient.

I picked up the box quickly, and half tucked it under my shirt in order to free up my hands for the climb back to the surface. I reached the top huffing and puffing, dirt caked under my fingernails—I blinked the sweat from my eyes, and I could see the image of the Mail Man in front of me, his arm finally down, no longer pointing.

I retrieved the package from the inside of my shirt, and catiously held it out to him.

“Here,” I said.

He didn’t say anything, but I saw his lips move. One last “you—”

And then, with a flash like a television turning off, the Mail Man collapsed in on himself, and blinked out of existence.

I sat down on the ground. I could still hear the voice of Meg Carlise, somewhere over my shoulder, describing for at least the 15th time about how the sinkhole came to be, where it was, and what was being done about it.

I used my dirt-stained shirt to brush the soil away from the label, to read the name and address that was printed there—though the street was smudged, I could read the name.

“Samuel Singer.”

I opened the box, right there, outside of the post office.

It was my new coffee maker.

But that wasn’t all—inside, on a brightly colored piece of paper, was a coupon. Five dollars off my next purchase for late delivery.

 

---

Credits

The MicMillan Family Circle

  

I’ve been writing about my hometown for a while now, and though many of you may know the name Samuel Singer, and have roamed the streets of Habitsville vicariously through my stories, there’s one special spot in town that I’ve never written about.

The cemetery.

It’s a little cliché, don’t you think? Of all the horror sand oddities that exist in Habitsville in broad daylight, it seems like overkill to go looking for trouble in a place already so haunted by death. Besides, dying in Habitsville and having a body to be buried—well, that made you one of the lucky ones.

The only visitors the cemetery saw was the occasional mourner placing flowers on a headstone, or, this time of year, groups of giggling teens ducking through the scattered trees. There were signs posted telling the latter to keep out, but, being kids, they never did. They’d leave behind beer bottles and candy wrappers, the groundkeepers would clean them up in the morning, grumbling all the way, and that would be that. A graveyard, after all, is nothing to be afraid of, and every midnight truth or dare session would come and go without much incident for Habitsville’s adolescents.

Because, for the most part, they all knew better than to go near the MicMillan Family Circle.

It was made with love. Or, at least, that was what was carved into the large limestone table that sat in the center. The structure was in the very heart of the cemetery, and the headstones surrounded the display like planets around the sun. It was a huge slab, kept rugged around the edges, carved deeply by hand the words “credula res amor est”—a credulous thing is love.

Around the table, heavy and cold, with vines climbing up their legs, were four chairs, one for each of the members of the MicMillan family: John & Louella and their two children, a son and a daughter, Paul and Dorothy.

John MicMillan commissioned the monument in 1910, when the entire family was alive and healthy—it was assumed that John, who had made his fortune in the highly meticulous business of limestone mining and trade, was simply a man who liked to be prepared.

That assumption was proved false, of course, when the entire MicMillan family died, in one fell swoop.

As the story goes, John MicMillan had found out Louella had been seeing another man behind his back, and in a fit of rage, had murdered his entire family one Halloween night. Their ashes were poured into the hollow backs of each of the chairs around the stone slab, just as Mr. MicMillan had prepared just three years prior, and death dates were carved into the bases of each one, all the same exact one: October 31, 1913.

The townspeople of Habitsville each took turns trying to put blame on each of the family members—it was John’s fault for being so impulsive, or Louella’s for cheating, or perhaps it was one of the children that had revealed the affair.

But one compelling piece of evidence suggested it wasn’t a spur of the moment massacre after all. The setting: John MicMillan had murdered his family as they sat around the dinner table. Though the specifics of the murders had never been disclosed to the public, John was an avid collector of pistols, and it was believed that he had used one of his prized weapons to put a bullet in each member of his family.

Back in 1913 the massacre was full of speculation, but in today’s Habitsville, this was nothing more than an urban legend. Details rarely travel over a hundred years intact, and so the MicMillan Massacre became a story to tell around campfires, rather than a chilling example of true crime. People didn’t take it seriously.

That is, until last Halloween.

Though we were both there at the same, time, we were there for different reasons. I saw the group of teenagers through the lens of my camera. I was out that Halloween night taking pictures for the Habitsville Gazette, a task I am not a fan of—I would much rather write for my column, Bad Habit, than take some crappy pictures of ten different Spidermen. Needless to say, I was bored.

So when I saw the gaggle of teenagers making their way through the graveyard, towards the MicMillan Family Circle, I had an odd mix of fear and excitement flow through me. I decided to follow them.

They were reading the graves and laughing at the names, each trying to impress each other in that way kids do. I followed behind silently, occasionally picking up my camera and snapping a picture of the far side of the graveyard—if I was caught, at least I could say I was working.

I thought they would stop before they got to The MicMillan Family Circle—even if they were making light of all the bodies that were buried beneath their feet on the main cemetery path, most everyone instinctively knows better than to approach the limestone furniture.

In fact, they all automatically stopped, their feet stuck in the grass, about ten yards away from the monument.

“What, are you scared?” the boy, tall and blonde, said mockingly to the other three, although he too had stopped walking towards the mass grave.

“Shut up Dylan,” the closest girl, with brown eyes and freckles retorted.

“You shut up Lyla,” Dylan responded. A witty comeback.

“You’ve heard the stories about this place, right?” The other, shorter boy said. He seemed younger than the rest, but I think he was just the naiveté in his voice and his slight frame.

“The McDonald’s Massacre,” Dylan said spookily, wringing his hands mockingly.

“It’s MicMillan,” Lyla corrected, rolling her eyes but smiling anyway.

“Charlie, I want to go home,” the tiny girl who was with the shorter boy grabbed onto his sleeve. “This place is weirding me out.”

Charlie took the girls hand, an uneasy smile on his face. He looked to Dylan hopefully, but the other boy crossed his arms. The message was clear—they were supposed to stay, and anyone who left would be deemed weak.

“Come on Steph,” Charlie said unconvincingly, “It’s not that bad. Those stories aren’t true anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Dylan said, beginning to walk towards the table, “It looks pretty real to me.” The other three hesitated, but as the gap continued to close between their leader and the grave, they began to follow behind him.

I crept behind, careful to remain in the shadows. I had to admit, I was curious—despite the stories, I’d never actually visited The MicMillan Family Circle. I told myself it was because I didn’t believe the legends, or I had too much on my plate—but actually, it might have been because I knew there was something deeply wrong with that place.

And, as I found out, that night, I was right.

Approaching the limestone table was like sinking deeper and deeper into an underwater trench. There was a certain heaviness in the air, and though that October night had started out unseasonably warm, a chill was building on the breeze with every step that I took.

The kids felt it too, at least, the reluctant ones. They exchanged worried looks as Dylan led them around the table, eyeing each chair. “They really do all say the same date,” he said absentmindedly.

“That doesn’t mean the stories are true,” Charlie said, seeming to be talking to himself more than anyone else.

“Stop being so lame, Charlie,” Dylan said, and Charlie seemed to get even smaller when he said it. I was starting to not like this guy.

“Okay, we came, we saw the table,” the small girl, Steph, said quickly, “now can we go?”

“What is this? A big rock?” The brown-eyed girl, Lyla, was bending over the table. In the center, above the inscription, was a large stone, one I had never heard of being there before. In fact, in the few pictures of the MicMillan Family Circle I had seen before that night, I couldn’t recall ever seeing anything in the center besides the Latin phrase.

I was sure it was limestone too, though it didn’t look like it. While the tables and chairs were carved roughly, with jagged edges and crumbling corners, this stone was polished. It shone brightly in the moonlight, a bright pearlescent greenish white, as though it emitted a glow from the inside.

I figured it was another feature John MicMillan had requested when designing his family’s resting place—a testament to the success he found in the stone trading business.

“This whole thing is a big rock,” Dylan said dismissively, and Lyla backed away from the center stone. “Ah, here it is,” the boy said, and before anyone could stop him, Dylan did something that seemed unthinkable.

He sat in John MicMillan’s chair.

Charlie winced, and Steph closed her eyes tight, as though the entire thing might explode. Lyla simply looked annoyed. “You really shouldn’t sit on a grave, Dylan.”

“They shouldn’t have made it a chair, then.” he shot back. “Come on guys, have a seat.” He motioned around the table. “Unless, of course, I’m here with a bunch of babies.”

Lyla rolled her eyes again but walked over to Dylan’s side and took Louella’s seat. Charlie looked from Steph, who was trembling from fear and cold, to the couple who waited for him at the grave. Then, he silently made his choice, sitting in little Paul MicMillan’s chair.

Steph stared at the three other kids, a look of betrayal on her face.

“If I sit down…” she said cautiously, “then do you promise we can go home?”

“Straight home,” Charlie nodded, “I promise.”

I watched through the trees as Steph sat in Dorothy MicMillan’s chair.

As soon as her flesh touched the cold limestone, everything changed.

The Habitsville cemetery disappeared, slipped out from underneath my feet, and the scene that replaced it was entirely unfamiliar.

It was a green wallpapered room, with heavy violet curtains. The sunlight that filtered through was a deep orange, as though the world outside was at the tail end of sunset. It wasn’t an unpleasant place to be on ordinary circumstances, but my pulse raced and my chest tightened with dread as I saw what waited in the center of this new room.

A large, round table, surrounded by four chairs.

This time, the furniture was wooden, and three of the chairs were full. A woman with tied back hair, a long skirt, and a high-collared blouse sat, head bent, praying. Clasping each of her hands were two children, a boy and a girl, the boy in linen shorts and a sweater, the girl in an aproned dress. While the woman was bowing her head, the boy and girl were exchanging disgruntled glances.

“Mama,” the boy said timidly when the woman’s head raised. “May we eat now?”

It was strange. He was only a child, perhaps ten or eleven, but he sounded much older.

The woman put a hand on the boy’s head, smoothing his hair tenderly. What she said next stopped my breath in my throat.

“Not yet, Paul. Not until your father gets home.”

It was horrible for two reasons. It wasn’t difficult to tell where I was, no matter how impossible it seemed. The fashion, the furniture, the table—and sealing the deal, the little boy’s name.

Somehow, I was standing in the middle of the MicMillan’s dining room.

But the second thing, as perplexing and terrifying as the first, was that just as the little boy’s voice hadn’t sounded like it matched his body, the woman’s didn’t seem right either. It took only a matter of seconds for me to realize why.

They were speaking with the voices of the teenagers.

“Lyla? Steph?” I asked aloud, but no one so much as turned in my direction. Wherever I was, whatever I was experiencing, it was clear that I was only an observer, not given a seat at the table.

“When will Father be home?” the little girl, speaking with the voice of Steph, asked. “I’m hungry.”

The woman, who I assumed to be Louella, speaking with the voice of Lyla, smiled. “Any moment now.”

As if on cue, a man entered the room, coming from the space behind me as though from an entrance, though when I turned, only a thick blackness was visible around the scene’s edges. He strolled into the dining room whistling, carrying a large tweed bag.

“Hello, little ones,” the man said. It was Dylan’s voice.

The two children scrambled to his side, hugging him around the waist. His wife smiled, but it was a terse expression. “You’re late,” she said tiredly.

“I know, I know,” her husband, John MicMillan, replied, “But for good reason Lou, I swear.”

He walked over to the table, setting his bag on the tablecloth as his wife grimaced. It made a heavy sound as it touched the wood, and as he opened it and removed its contents, I could see why. He unwound the cloth that covered it, and as the rest of the MicMillans and myself watched in awe, he revealed that huge, gleaming piece of limestone. The same mysterious shard that the group of teenagers had found in the center of the MicMillan Family Circle.

“It’s beautiful,” the little girl said. “Can I hold it?”

“I don’t think so Dot---” Louella started to say, but John was already handing it to the child.

“Be careful with it darling,” he said. The rock was huge in the girl’s tiny hands, and though it must have been heavy, she lifted it right up to her face, staring at her reflection in its smooth surface.

“My turn, my turn,” the impatient boy said with the voice of Charlie. The little girl handed the stone off to her brother.

“Wow,” he said, before nearly dropped it.

John caught it quickly and brought it over to his wife. “The boys found it near the site today, down in some cave by the docks. We think its lime, but we’re having some of the specialists take a look tomorrow. If it is, it’s the clearest naturally occurring hunk of limestone we’ve ever seen. Worth a fortune.”

Louella tentatively took the stone from her husband and held it gingerly. “It’s truly lovely,” she said quietly, staring deep into its milky surface. Then she blinked, as though breaking from its spell. “But don’t think this makes you being late to dinner alright.”

Dylan—well, John MicMillan—laughed, and kissed his wife on the cheek. He took the large stone and put it in the center of the table. “There—a centerpiece fit for a king.”

Once the children and her husband were seated, Mrs. MicMillan brought out the dinner they had been waiting for—a hefty roast chicken, stewed potatoes and carrots, and a rich cabbage soup. I could smell it from where I stood, and my mouth began to water.

And yet, the MicMillans, even the children, didn’t seem to want to eat.

They pushed their food around their plates, but never wanted to bring any to their mouths, as though they had been served an entirely unappetizing meal.

They didn’t say anything either, each one looking up only to steal glances at the stone that had been put in the center of the table.

It was quiet in the dining room, an eerie, unnatural quiet. And then, for seemingly no reason at all, John MicMillan began to laugh.

“John?” Louella said, smiling.

“I’m sorry,” her husband replied between chuckles, “I just had the oddest idea.”

“Well go ahead and share it,” his wife replied, strangely eager.

He laughed a few more times. “Well, alright.”

There was a moments hesitation. Then, John MicMillan picked up his fork with his right hand, and without so much as a second-thought, plunged the prongs into his left.

I jumped violently where I stood, but it seemed that none of his family were as horrified as I was. They watched as their family’s patriarch pulled on his fork, skin stretching until it reached a breaking point. He lifted up his utensil with a morsel of flesh on the end, dripping with blood down onto the tablecloth and his clothes.

John MicMillan let out another small, childlike giggle. And then, he put the fork in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

He smiled at his family, teeth pink with a thin sheen of blood, and they smiled back. The children seated at his side soon scooted closer, sticking their forks into their father’s legs, ripping the material of his trousers and the skin beneath them. Their cheeks grew slick with blood and fat as they ate.

Louella got up and casually walked over to join them, standing over her husband and taking a fork and knife and slicing him up like a roast, like she would have done to the chicken, which sat untouched on the table.

The MicMillans ate John for what felt like hours, though it could have only been a few minutes. John himself kept consuming more and more of his own body, long after his eyes had been eaten by his children like cherry tomatoes, and the bones of his legs shone through what flesh was left.

He grew weaker and weaker, and bloodier and bloodier, until finally, his hand fell limp at his side, and his fork hit the ground.

The sound of metal on the hardwood floor seemed to startle everyone for a moment.

Then, Louella sat back down in her seat, took her fork to her hand, and took her first forbidden bite.

Her children circled her, their hunger seemingly endless, as they ate their mother to the bone. There were no cries of pain, no hesitation, only the wet grunts of consumption, like pigs at the trough. And soon, Louella’s hand stopped moving, and the children stopped eating.

It was the boy who sat in his chair next, and helped his sister tear his flesh from his bones, even cutting his sweater like a knife, vivisecting his stomach to each the morsels of his parents that waited within.

But eventually, even Paul stopped moving, and Dorothy was left alone. Silently, a sweet scarlet smile on her lips, she sat down in her chair.

She began to feast.

The little girl didn’t even look at the gory bodies of her family as she ate, starting on her forearm. I could hear her chew through shallow breathing, swallowing joint, fat, and sinew as easily as if it was ice cream.

She slowed down, her eyes half closed, and her fork lazily bit into the side of her cheek, ripping it from her skull. I could see her teeth gnashing the pink taffy together through the hole she had created.

Then she swallowed. And then, it was done.

I saw the scene laid out before me, a massacre of the strangest kind. The MicMillans were missing huge holes out of their bodies, their bellies all distended and bloated with the meat of their kin.

And then I blinked, and as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

I was standing in the middle of Habitsville cemetery, looking at The MicMillan Family Circle, the table and chairs no longer wooden, the glow of sunset fading back into the dead of night. The giant shard of mysterious, luminescent limestone had disappeared from the center of the table, and only that phrase, credula res amor est, remained.

Seated around the limestone table were the teenagers—and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, my stomach turned violently. There they were, missing huge holes out of their bodies, their bellies full to the brim. All of them, dead.

Or, so I thought.

I leaned over to vomit into the cool dew grass, but when I brought my head up, I saw a shocking sight—one of the shapes was moving, ever so slightly.

It was Steph, her bloodied hand, the one she hadn’t eaten, tugging on the tattered sleeve of Charlie, slumped and vacant next to her, his one remaining eye staring blankly ahead.

I could see Steph’s tongue flick in her mouth as she spoke, slipping through the hole in her cheek, her speech garbled and choked.

“Can we go home now, Charlie? You promised.”

 

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Credits