The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

    Mathis met my eyes, an embarrassed smile flickering across his face. “I know how this sounds. I do. But as my hands brushed against them, I could feel the tips…the roots…of thousands or millions of teeth stacked on their sides like tiny bricks, all facing outward like a mouth turned inside out. I could see more now—it wasn’t bright in there, but there was a kind of glow in the air, or maybe my eyes just got used to the dark.” “Then there was light…real light…crawling through the gaps in the teeth, coming in from something outside that was getting closer. I put my eyes up to different holes, but I couldn’t see anything more than moving shadows. So I put my ear against the wall instead, and I could hear someone talking. The air was so thick in that place, it was like it made the words slow to travel, and even those that reached me seemed distorted and strange. But there were two voices I think. And they were talking about killing an

  My hands were wet and clammy as I looked through the binoculars ( field glasses , my mother used to call them), making the subtly curved view of my house jump and shift as I tried to hold on. It was inside with them, watching t.v. in the living room. I could only see their silhouettes through the sheer curtain Amy had hung up years before, but I’d been watching for half an hour. Long enough to see the thing passing by an open window. Long enough to know it looked just like me. I kept waiting for some reaction from my family. For Amy to recoil in horror or Julie to run screaming through the house as she realized that something had replaced her daddy. But there was no sign of disturbance or discord, fear or worry. The shadow family I saw through the flickering lights of the t.v. looked normal, if far from whole. And I needed to remember that, didn’t I? Why I was doing this. Why I was taking the risk and putting my family in

  It was the smell of gasoline that first woke me up. I jerked at the twisting smell of future fire in my nostrils and blinked against the dark of my bedroom. I was still in my house, in my bed. But unlike when I’d gone to sleep, I was no longer alone. “I’m sorry to wake you, Mischa. But you have to see it.” My heart was pounding, but the sharp fear that had come with being startled by the looming shadow next to my bed was dulled now by familiarity and confusion. “Rollo? Is that you?” I saw the shadow’s shoulders give a shudder, but that was all. “What’re you doing here? Is something wrong? Why do you smell like petrol?” His voice was rough with emotion when he spoke, and I had a moment where I thought he might’ve been drinking. But his words weren’t slurred or imprecise, just thick with a kind of dread and sadness that made my pulse quicken as I reached for my bedside lamp. His hand caught my gesture, wet and slic

    I heard about it through a guy at work. I worked as a college intern at a medium-sized brokerage firm at the time, and one of the junior executives—Tommy—had taken me under his wing as a gopher and goof-off buddy when he wanted to take a break and blow off steam. One day we were talking about stupid games we’d played as a kid. I’d told him about playing Mercy and Rock Duel (which was basically Mercy with thrown rocks). He told me about a game his cousins had gotten him to try one time when he was staying with them. It was called Billy the Bouncing Butcher. He said it involved mirrors and saying some chant until something “scary” happened. When I pointed out that it sounded like a rip-off of Bloody Mary, he’d just shrugged and gave a weird laugh. He told me he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think it was like that. You weren’t supposed to see a ghost or anything. It was something worse. When I asked him what was supposed to happen