Fire. Last Day. Home. Dinner. Change. The Thing. The Monster. Dead. Gone. I’m Sorry. The End.
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She’s sitting there with him on the couch, snug under his arm. This is symmetry: perfect, burning bright. What’s on the television doesn’t matter, and it very seldom does unless it’s one of her programs. On the table is her celebrated roasted beet salad. She still uses the recipe her babushka brought from the old country, and it certainly looks lovely, but that doesn’t make the prospects of its taste or smell any more appealing to him. Gerwyn hated beets as a child, and age has not damaged his palate significantly enough to make them acceptable cuisine now. So he’ll nibble enough and then claim to be full with all the conviction of a child swearing to his principal that his grandmother had passed that morning and he was in no way ditching school to go to a baseball game. He fears that eventually, if she hasn’t already, she will realize that he is running out of babushkas to sacrifice to the cause of skipping dinner, and he’s going to have to bite that bullet. Because she will make that damned roasted beet salad as long as she’s living, and he can like it or love it.
He excuses himself and takes a shower. He spends what feels like too long standing under the faucet, letting the water rush over him, thinking about whether he’s ready to make the step. They’d joked about having children, she had always said she wanted two so that she could name them Broom and Sticks so that their little unit could be called Bedbows and Broom Sticks, because that joke just never got old. He is satisfied with how he will broach the subject as he towels off. Honey, I think tonight you should eat my beet salad. I think it’s time you started eating for two. Yeah, that’s a line he is quite positive she can be proud to take with her to break the news to her co-workers. And it saves him another night of self-imposed guilt looking at the nearly untouched plate and thinking that if he loves her — and does he ever, something fierce — he should eat it, and realizing that no love short of salvation in the kingdom of heaven could get him to wolf it down, though he thinks if Jesus loves him as much as those bumper stickers say he does, then he can shovel that stuff down himself.
It doesn’t dawn on him the moment he reaches the bottom of the stairs, and it doesn’t land when he takes it in for the first time. It’s a slow climb to comprehension, like analyzing a room and realizing something small is amiss, like a teakettle moved from the table to the counter. But the change in front of him is anything but small. Gerwyn and Beatrice watched plenty of horror films together on that very couch, and in each and every one, the lighting is dim or non-existent or alien, always altogether unnatural. Nothing bad ever takes place in a well-lit living room on the shaggy carpet of the floor next to a comfortable old sofa and a shiny new coffee table with one plate full of undisturbed beet salad on it.
Beatrice’s symmetry is now fearful. She is twisted, her hands seized around its head like thick palsied clubs, trying to pull it away. There is red all around her, and though he can’t see her face, Gerwyn hears her frenzied gasps and gurgles over the animalistic gnawing. He can’t find words, not even one, so he yelps, and he is almost instantly angry with himself for not being stronger for her. But it’s loud enough that it stops and turns its head and Beatrice’s hands fall away limply.
Its face is slate, like the rest of its body, its features shrunken, almost crumpled like paper. The knot that it calls a mouth is open enough to reveal teeth, each a jagged red spike, and it rears back and lets forth a shrill, piercing cry. It turns, slowly, painfully, toward Gerwyn. Beneath the gray translucence of its flesh, he can see bones and muscles moving and the sluice of rot and his wife’s blood coursing through its veins. He thinks he will try to fight it. He knows that he won’t run. And his fate be damned, every impending and surreal second of it, so long as he can just make it over there to her and tell her, even with his dying gasps, that she’s not alone and she never will be again.
The front door flies open and from the darkness outside comes a man Gerwyn has never seen before. He’s older than him, maybe in his fifties, bearded and gray. He’s hunched low like a savage, a sharp point of wood in one hand and a machete in the other. He says something that Gerwyn can’t hear over the roar of his own adrenaline, and the creature moves, no longer agonizing each inch, but faster than anything he’s ever seen this close. The man chases after him, shooting a quick glance over his shoulder at Gerwyn, who is already bounding down toward the landing.
Her hand doesn’t move in his. He already knows what everything is telling him not to believe. And there, as he curls her fingers between his, squeezing, hoping that some kind of transitive property will give her his warmth or give him her cooling, empty feeling, he remembers weeping. So he weeps. And when he’s wept until there feels like there’s nothing left, he screams.
The man reappears, his face angry and flushed. He closes the front door and turns to Gerwin, looking him over, something like pity registering on his face, but only slightly. He takes a second, measuring his words, then selects them: “I assume you’re a smart man. I’m guessing you’ve seen a movie or read a book in your lifetime. I know this hurts you deeper than I could ever presume to know. But you know what that was.” His eyes shift from Gerwyn to Beatrice, and he raises his instruments. “And you know what I have to do now.
“You don’t have a choice, and I’m not going to ask you to do it yourself, even if you want to. That’s not something you want following you around. Besides, you won’t know how to do it right. Not yet. We won’t have time for the tutorial, either.
“I’ll give you five minutes to do what you need to do. Then make yourself sparse. Get as many things as you think you’ll need. I’ll tell you when we’re leaving.”
Fifteen minutes later, Gerwyn emerges from his home with two large duffel bags and a backpack. The man is leaning against the tail of a Jeep smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He looks up at Gerwyn, takes a deep draw, and after a long pause where only smoke passes between them, he says, “I will have plenty of time to explain this to you later. All of it. Right now, we have time for the basics. The fact is, you’ve seen something tonight that you know shouldn’t exist. But it does. And it’s out there now. So I’m going to find it. And I’m going to kill it. That much I know for sure.
“But here is my offer to you, and it’s about the best offer I’ve ever given anyone: come with me. That thing is going to be a hundred miles from here by sun up, and a man gets awfully lonely driving that far by himself. I can tell you exactly what you will need to do, and I will do my best to get you ready so that when the moment comes, you can be the one to put a stake in that fucker’s black heart. If you show some promise, I can help you make sure that nothing like what happened to you here happens to anyone so long as you have a say.
“That thing travels fast both ways, fella. And if I can’t find it by tomorrow night, it’s going to come back here and see to it that it finishes what it started. It knows you now. And if I don’t find it first, it will find you.”
The man’s words register only slightly with Gerwyn, who can feel himself leaving his body, floating, off somewhere in the night sky among the stars. But the body that he leaves behind culls enough from what he has heard to nod in agreement. The man takes his bags and places them in the back among his things and several empty red gas cans. The man approaches the front door of the house and opens it, leans inside and hangs there for a moment before closing the door, walking back calmly, and climbing into the driver’s seat. Gerwyn is strapped in next to him and they are already moving when he notices the bright orange flames licking at the bay window from the living room.
“A necessary evil.” The man says nonchalantly while fiddling with his rear view mirror. In the side view, Gerwyn can see the house being swallowed from the inside, the smoke starting to plume out from every available crevice. “The name’s Burt, in case you’re wondering.”
They make it to the end of his neighborhood when Gerwyn collides with reality head on. It takes him a half an hour before he
’s worked out that he is gone. That he died in his home on the floor next to Beatrice, and that the person looking back at him in the windshield’s reflection is a non-person. And he realizes that every inch that leads to a foot that leads to a mile that leads to a new and frightening world put him that much further away from what he was before he got out of that much too long shower.
It takes little more than a week of Burt’s stories of woe and danger and unreality plopping happily into the halcyon life and just what is going to be required of Gerwyn if he chooses to follow this path when he can start to feel the last remaining strands of himself disappearing. He’s finding flaws in Burt’s logic, thinking of ways to be more efficient, questioning him, seeming a little too eager for his liking. He sees himself as a block of ice carved into a swan, now being shaved down into something unrecognizable. And he won’t stand for it. He needs to remember the oranges and the blues and all of that horrible red, every bit of it, because it will bring him back from the brink and remind him of what he was. Change, he knows now, is like a great fire, and a simple accelerant can render even the sturdiest of foundations to ash with just a spark.
So when Burt has huffed off for supplies after another argument where Gerwin suggests again that it wasn’t remotely practical to burn down what might have been their best strategic stronghold and that they should have just waited for the thing to show up and taken it then and there instead of driving all over the state tracking the thing like they were hunting some common animal, when he has a moment to himself and disgust with himself rises so quickly to the surface — It was my home, goddammit, not a chess piece, my home, my home, my — he digs through his backpack and finds one of the things that he knew he would never tell Burt he had: a picture of he and his wife on the day of their wedding, shoving cake into each other’s face.
And after crying tears that he feared long gone, he pulls out his notebook and opens it to the first blank page. He writes the word fire and crosses it out just as quickly. He fills ten more lines with words that he knows will lead him back to that night just fine, but none of them work, none of them are right, and he knows it. He knows there is only one thing that fits, one word that will push him in what he has to do going forward and what will call him back to that moment in time. One word, like looking for a lost key, retracing every step, before understanding the old adage that it’s always in the last place you look and quite often right under your nose, landing on a face tucked away safe and sound under his arm. He steadies his hand and writes her name. Beatrice.
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The warmth of the afternoon sun crawls across Gerwyn’s face as Burt returns down the path and meets him at the edge of the old train trestle. Gerwyn had gotten stage fright, chalking it up to some combination of the coppery smell of rust, the quality of the air, the days without sleep. So he took his leave, knowing full well that he had to leave because he was exhilarated. Something about the hunt, the chase, how he could see himself kicking in an ancient door, see himself smiling satisfactorily down on a coffin, prying the lid, staring into that face, twisted and wretched. But that wasn’t the breaking point for him. It was the look on his face, uncanny but far too real. And it followed him into sleep and chased him through dreams, reaching out to him, wanting to take him into its mouth and make them one.
Burt takes a dirty cloth to his face and hands before lighting a cigarette and handing it to Gerwyn. He takes a couple of breaths, looking off over Gerwyn’s shoulder. “I found him.” All Gerwyn can do is nod and do his best to look somewhere between pleased and reflective like a child getting the gift he wanted so badly on Christmas morning after having already found it on the top shelf of the hall closet before Thanksgiving. He knew, despite his doubts, that the day would come.
“He’s on the first floor behind some machinery. I can take you to him or I can tell you where to find him. Your choice. I assume you’ll want to be alone in there?”
“Yeah, I think that would be for the best, Burt. Thanks.”
“Not a problem, kid.” He hands him a notebook with detailed directions. “You’re going to be looking for a tag that says, appropriately enough, KILLER DWB. If you get lost in there, holler for me.”
“Of course.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m…yeah, I’m ready. As ready as I’ll ever be. So I’m going to get to it.”
Gerwyn walks away reading the instructions, and when he instinctively thumbs the pages, an old tic from a traveled reader, just like that, he has Burt’s dirty little secret. There are pages filled with long scribbled letters, lines written, scratched out, rewritten, crossed out, thrice written, a perfect display of agony in reaching for the right words. Each of them is addressed To: My Little Ryan, From: Dad.
He pauses, just long enough to play his hand, and from over his shoulder: “You know, you will never outrun it. There are going to be days where it chases you to the end of sanity, and you’re going to wonder the whole way if you should just stop and let it catch you. Don’t. Keep running. You can’t go back. It will never change. But that doesn’t mean you have to let them die. The memories. They’re yours to keep. So keep them. Not just to use them, either. Keep them, because when that’s gone, you’re gone.”
Gerwyn looks back at Burt, nods, and smiles a little. And Burt blows the dust off of an old tome, cracks the spine, and returns the favor.
“Good luck, Ger.”
Before Gerwyn reaches the entrance, staring down inevitability in the shadow of the industrial tomb that is Concrete-Central, he sets down the weapons in his hands and accesses the ones in his head. Pointed and dangerous, but with adequate skill to wield them, he begins to build a bridge. He understands now that, like looking for lost keys, it’s always in the last place you look. That in order to keep touch with the man he was, he has to know that person intimately and leave no stone unturned. That he must retrace every step, no matter how painful the coals burn beneath his feet. He retrieves his notebook and opens to the latest filled page. And he turns back. He comes to the page with so many discarded words and the only one that truly matters. And he turns back one more page, aims his pen at the bottom line, and writes: roasted beet salad.
THE EXCAVATION
Stephen Zimmer
Stephen Zimmer is an award-winning author of speculative fiction, whose works include the Fires in Eden Series (Epic Fantasy), the Rising Dawn Saga (epic-scale Urban Fantasy), the Harvey and Solomon tales (Steampunk), the Hellscapes tales (Horror), and the Rayden Valkyrie tales (Sword and Sorcery). Stephen is also a writer-director in moviemaking, with feature and short film credits such as Shadows Light, The Sirens, and Swordbearer. Further information on Stephen can be found at www.stephenzimmer.com
In the realms of Vampire Literature, Stephen has a particular liking for Brian Lumley’s Necroscope novels, with a special affection for the Vampire World trilogy beginning with Blood Brothers. Inventive, visceral, and epic in scope, Lumley delivers a very engaging and fresh take on vampires. As a whole, the Necroscope books constitute of those rare series in the genre that is as horrific as it is thought-provoking, the latter element including a particularly intriguing concept of the afterlife.
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Gazing into the star-speckled sky, feeling the frosty touch of night air upon his face, Jacob ruminated on the nature of the light he beheld. The starlight had begun its journey vast ages ago, long before the remains in the pit were living, breathing men.
Unearthed in a moment of happenstance, the find had been a stunning revelation to the construction crew laboring to strip earth away for a new road. The area was now a secure excavation site, promising to bring a strange, macabre tale to the pages of academic journals.
Twenty-three skeletons, their heads violently severed from their bodies, had been identified in the pile of bones. All would soon be cataloged, and prepared for the trip back to the museum in London.
Their identities were clear once a few tooth samples had been a
nalyzed. The skeletons belonged to men from far northern climates, dating back over a thousand years, almost certainly Vikings. Saxon justice had been meted out harshly, following a raid gone terribly awry in pre-Norman England. The signs were there to be read, as heavy blades wielded in clumsy fashion left their telltale marks upon jaws and collarbones alike. Furrows carved into hand bones showed where men in desperation grabbed at the implements of their execution, clutching double-edged swords with their bare hands as honed iron was driven through their flesh.
The killings had not been done gracefully, and Jacob could only imagine the bloody scene as it unfolded. Captives, looking into the face of death, had been made to pay the ultimate price for their transgression of Saxon lands.
Skulls were piled neatly to one side of the elongated pit, the rest of the bones lumped haphazardly in another. There were three fewer skulls than there were bodies, indicating some of the doomed Vikings’ heads had likely been stuck on the ends of spears; the impaled, decaying heads serving as gruesome trophies, and warnings to others contemplating raids into Anglo-Saxon England during the tenth century.
Jacob shivered, bringing his jacket in closer to his body, with his hands buried in the outer pockets. The thoughts of what transpired over a thousand years ago were sobering, but it was an incredible find nonetheless. It catalyzed the encampment now encircling the pit.
Most of the team had taken to more modern accommodations for the night, but Jacob, and a few others, including the leader of the excavation, preferred to keep a close watch on the site.
The dig had an air of adventure, and Jacob was thoroughly enjoying every moment. It was his first major expedition since gaining his Ph.D. He was conducting it alongside his closest friends, one of whom was his mentor in the academic world.
“I’d say that there’s a very good chance those piles aren’t all there’s to find around here … just like you thought,” Brenda stated, breaking the silence. She cast a glance towards the excavation pit, with the hint of a smile dancing about her lips.