The Grim Keepers

by CW Publishing House

  His house is foreign to me. This is only my second time here and he never advocated exploring. He didn't expressly forbid it either. I grope the wall but the light switch evades me. Maybe there are no light switches in this house, just like there are no rugs. I shuffle forward, comforted by the back and forth sound of my bare foot then my socked foot across tile. I'm tempted to whistle, to fully drive away the silence, but the ridiculous notion that the evil goo hitched a ride on my shoulder makes me hesitate. Better to keep my lips closed. I rationalize my action by thinking there could be a fly or a dangling spider inches from my mouth at this very second.

  Pain rips up my calf, originating from my right big toe. I gasp, wide-mouthed, in shock. I clamp my lips shut. Crying out over a little thing like stubbing my toe would not be a good enough reason for waking up the neighborhood, according to him. In brighter news, I've found the steps.

  I start with my left, then lift my right. The long and cold nail of Mr. Goblin slides down my ankle, hooking my last sock, tracing my arch, and kissing my throbbing toe. I freeze. I dare not turn and look for the sock. I choose to believe it is at the bottom of the stairs. Fleet steps with high knees carry me to the top of the stairs. On this level the street lights leak in through the blinds, throwing shaking lines of light onto his stacks of medical books. I grab a small throw from the end of the couch and curl up next to the window. Branches and power lines dance a frantic tango in the violent wind.

  The storm reminds me of a night over a decade ago. The raging winds took the power out in the whole block. A neighborhood boy two grades above me had crawled through my window, said he knew I'd be scared and too stubborn to tell. He promised to protect me from the dark if I would just hold still.

  ‘What's that tugging at my clothes and tracing up and down?’ I'd asked.

  ‘Why, just Mr. Squid,’ he'd said. ‘Stay quiet.’

  ‘What's that pulling at my hair and pinching here and there?’ I'd asked.

  ‘Why, just Mr. Goblin,’ he'd said. ‘Stay still.’

  ‘What's that oozing about, cold now like evil goo?’ I'd asked. He didn't answer. I reached out to him.

  He was cold.

  ‘Don't worry,’ they said through the dark. ‘We've taken care of it. Now off to sleep with you.’

  A chill jolts me awake. I pull the throw back onto me and dip back into the memory.

  Gramps found him dead in my bed in the morning. Auntie said God struck him down. The police said he got what he deserved and didn't press the issue. No one believed the darkness got him. I'm not a complete fool. A few semesters into college it suddenly dawned on me what Ned would have done had he not died, but no amount of psychotherapy would convince me the dark had nothing to do with his convenient end.

  The only school-provided counselor that I didn't think was a complete idiot had told me “the incident” is only as much of an issue as I feel it is. At the time, I wondered if this advice delegitimizes the experiences of those who are more traumatized by such incidents, but for me it clicked. I didn't have to worry that I wasn't reacting to the incident properly and, darkness aside, that was that.

  Other counselors insisted my blank dating history is a direct impact of the incident. In part, finally saying yes to a date was a means to prove them wrong—just in part.

  Speaking of him, I should get back in bed before I fall asleep here. That would be hard to explain in the morning. With extreme reluctance I poke my bare feet out from the throw and lower them onto the cold, cold—warm and fuzzy? I reach down to the floor and find my socks, fuzzy as always, a bit warm, and ever so slightly damp.

  When such things happen—when my keys return themselves to my purse, when the front door locks behind me, when my teacup is fuller than I remember—I find it best not to dwell.

  I slip on my socks and shuffle over to the pit of darkness lapping at the top of the stairs. Step by step, Mr. Goblin and Mr. Squid guide me deeper into the dark, the evil goo watching my back. At the base of the steps, my fingertips trace loops and dips along the smooth wall until the door frame dumps my hand into the open doorway. I shuffle forward, nudging the twisted towel out of the way, expecting to bump into the door any second. My knees hit the edge of his mattress.

  I gently reenter my side of his bed and pull up the covers. It's still warm.

  A cozy tunnel forms between us. His warmth wraps around my torso and nuzzles the back of my neck.

  “Love you,” I say, just to say. And in the moment, it may have been true.

  The blanket collapses tight against me. Silence blares, coldness grips me, and the immovable dark leans in. I reach out into his territory, my knuckles crack against his cold, still arm. I snuggle in closer, my guilt leaking onto him.

  ‘Why have you done this?’ I ask my friends in the dark.

  ‘He would have hurt you in the end. Don't worry. We'll take care of everything.’

  I can't see a thing, but I know what they're doing. Mr. Squid drags the twisted, taut, frayed towel outside and into the trash. Mr. Goblin picks bits of fuzzy sock out of the dead man's mouth. The evil goo slithers up my neck, licks my earlobe, and slides in through my nose—finally snuggling up inside my brain where it was born.

  About Charlotte Rose Lange

  Charlotte Rose Lange is a freelance editor and writer, who obtained her undergraduate degree in Communications/Social Influence at Edgewood College. She is open to projects in technical writing, specifically board game rulebooks. She is currently working on her young adult novel ‘Ascendant’: When a young witch harbors a newly ascended being who broke the rules, she’s thrust into a world of high magics and higher consequences.

  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/charlotte-rose-lange/78/b19/511

  Evil Eye

  By AJ Millen

  Georgia breathed a sigh of exhausted relief as she laid her beautiful baby girl gently in the cot. Big blue eyes blinked sleepily up at her then closed as the child finally settled into the deep rhythms of sleep. Georgia fingered the gaudy stone at her throat and said a prayer to the god she didn’t believe in that her daughter would never know humiliation like she had when growing up.

  The necklace had been placed around her neck by her superstitious Greek grandmother, Yiayia Gogo, on her twelfth birthday. It was, she had said, to protect her from the Evil Eye—the mati—but also carried a special charm that would protect others, too.

  “I know you think this is all Greek stupidity, my darling,” she had said. “But I know. You have your Aunt Voula’s eyes, powerful eyes, and there lies the danger.”

  Georgia had laughed as she thought of her sweet great-aunt in the village of Gogo’s island home. Her tired, benevolent gaze through rheumy blue eyes seemed anything but powerful or dangerous to her.

  “Go on, you laugh,” her grandmother had said. “But even if you don’t believe, wear it always. Please, as a favor to your granny.”

  Years of living abroad since coming to England as a young bride in the 1960s had done nothing to erase Gogo’s stubborn village upbringing. Her belief in the Evil Eye—a curse thought to be cast by those with blue eyes, intentionally or innocently—was unshakable. So, too, was her conviction that the gaudy talisman would neutralize the evil as long as the sender or receiver of the mati kept it close to their heart.

  In spite of her Mediterranean genes, Georgia was born and bred in suburban Britain and not given to such superstition. But she loved her eccentric Greek grandmother and hated to see disappointment in her eyes.

  So she had promised.

  Every day, she wore the pea-sized stone, the color of a blue Lego brick with a creepy-looking eyeball crudely painted on it. Even when the mean girls at school, who never missed the chance to mock her for her weight, her lack of grace, her love of books, and lack of boyfriends spotted the bauble hidden beneath her shirt as they changed for gym. Mercilessly, they had honed in on something new, something different, something distinctly odd that could be used to torment their victim. Then one day, in a hissy f
it of teenage rebellion, Georgia slipped it off and hid it with the broken nibs and old shavings at the bottom of her pencil case.

  Lucy and the other girls had waited for her at the school gates that afternoon. Faster and stronger than her, it was nothing for them to take her bag and empty the contents onto the muddy verge in a fit of cackling glee, trampling Georgia’s drawings underfoot. They found her necklace, drawing it out of the pencil case like it was a piece of snot on a string and screeching with laughter at its primitive gaze. Hot shame and anger flushed Georgia’s cheeks, and she felt a shock, like a bolt of unseen lightning, as she glared at Lucy strutting along the side of the road and pretending to model the eye pendant like it was the crown jewels.

  Something shifted inside Georgia’s mind. A faint smell of singed hair stained the air. Her eyes burned with frustration and hatred as she glared at her tormentors.

  Lucy tripped and fell back into the path of a speeding lorry. A scream, the screech of brakes, a sickening thud, and a tinkle on the pavement resounded as Georgia’s necklace landed on the cement next to her. A slick stream of red trickled into the gutter.

  It had been the last time Georgia ever took her necklace off.

  She shook herself away from her childhood memory, again burying the horror of what she knew she had done, although everyone insisted it was just an awful freak accident. It had been years since she allowed herself to think of that day. The tiredness that came with being a new mother must have let her defenses down.

  Tonight had been particularly tough. Sam was working a double shift, and Georgia’s mum had refused to come anywhere near the baby until she had shaken her latest bout of flu. So, of course, the baby had screamed the house down for five solid hours. Nothing Georgia did calmed her. Not hugs, not milk, not bouncing up and down or singing every lullaby in the bilingual book. She felt like an utter failure as a mother until suddenly, without warning, the scarlet-faced infant stopped her bawling and surrendered abruptly to an exhausted sleep, deep, regular breathing interrupted only by the occasional shudder of leftover sobs.

  Finally, a chance to breathe and to wipe the baby sick off her blouse.

  She stripped to her bra in the bathroom and wet a flannel to wipe her chest clean. There was semi-digested milk caught on her pendant, clogging up the link connecting the stone to the chain. Carefully, she pulled it over her matted hair. Just as she was about to run it under the tap, a piercing squeal rang out from the baby’s room.

  Georgia dropped everything, curling into a ball and banging her head repeatedly against the wall behind her as she slapping her hands over her ears. The screaming continued.

  “What? What now?” she screamed. “What the hell is wrong now? Can’t you please—for the love of God—please, just stop?”

  With a shock of electricity, she spied the blue bead blurred through her desperate tears, dangling over the edge of the sink. She scrambled to her feet, reaching for the talisman like a drowning woman clutching at a buoyancy aid. But too late.

  Horror ran through her veins like ice as the baby’s crying suddenly stopped.

  She knew, with absolute certainty, that her prayer had been answered. Her daughter never would suffer the humiliation she had known as a teenager.

  She would never do anything at all.

  About AJ Millen

  Words have been AJ Millen’s friends since she was a child growing up in England. She started telling her own stories young, and she’s still at it. After school, she became a news reporter and later went into press and public relations. Everything changed in 1989 when she took a six-month working holiday in Greece. That was the plan—until a brown-eyed boy in Samos persuaded her to stay. Today, he is her husband and father to their 18-year-old son.

  AJ Millen lives in Athens, works in Corporate Communications, and writes short stories and general burblings for her blog:

  http://shemeanswellbut.blogspot.com

  Lethal

  By Jason Pere

  “Just one more,” Steven said as he shut the door to his locker and slipped the combination lock back into place. His working day was done and it was time for him to go home. He lingered there for a considerable length of time, unable to move. Steven tried to keep from shaking. He was jittery. He had killed a man today. Steven had killed many men. It was part of his job as a correctional officer for the great state of Texas to kill men who had been sentenced to die.

  At first it didn’t bother him. There was even a certain mystique about being on the Death Team. There were a few sick cases that put in for the job because they wanted to get away with ending the life of another human being. Steven was not one of those; he was just looking for the pay grade bump for a C.O Class Three to a C.O Class Four. Getting Death Team certified was the fastest way he’d been able to achieve that next step in his career. He could stomach the duty and carry the weight of it for years, seemingly unburdened. He practiced a sort of ignorance when he was called to end the life of an inmate. Steven’s body was present in the Death Room and his hands did their assigned task each time, but his mind was always miles away. This was how he lived with what he had to do. He just kept the reality of his actions from conscious thought. It was how he had made it nineteen years as a Correctional Officer and it was how he planned to make it to his twentieth year and then finally retire.

  Steven may have been able to keep what he did locked away during the daylight hours, but when he slept, his dreams would not spare him. They forced him to remember the images he suppressed and to recall the torment that took place in the Death Room. The weight weighing Steven down had begun to take its toll, whether the man would acknowledge it or not. For months now he had fought the shaking in his body that gripped him each time an inmate was sent up the row. He told himself, “Just one more. Just one more,” under his breath. It was the mantra he had begun to recite after flipping the switches on the machines today. He was only scheduled for one more execution before retirement. Steven clung to that fact as a light at the end of the tunnel.

  The dreams were beginning to feel so genuine. Steven was not sure how much more he could take. He had tried everything to help get a restful night’s sleep—alcohol to black him out, caffeine to keep him awake, even pills from the doctor, but nothing worked. His last hope was that leaving this place behind him for good would be enough to make the dreams stop once and for all. Steven couldn’t spend the rest of his days seeing the faces of the men he had killed every time he closed his eyes.

  He zipped up his jacket and grabbed his duffel bag as he left the locker room behind. Steven quickly walked through the corridors of the prison and avoided any interaction with the other guards there. He just wanted to get home and be done with the day. He was able to quickly check out through each of the security stations and get to his jeep. Once inside his vehicle, the familiar smell of the pine air freshener and feel of the seat helped to calm him. The greatest comfort to the man was the promise of home and a proper meal before bed. “Just one more,” Steven said as he turned the key in the ignition.

  He was grateful for the lack of traffic on the way home. There hardly seemed to be any other cars on the road at all, and he made every green light on the way, to boot. He started to feel pretty good about his chances at a nice, relaxing evening when he remembered his refrigerator and pantry were absolutely bare. This upset him, because the knowledge that he had no worthwhile sustenance at home only served to remind him just how hungry he really was. Steven could hear his belly rumbling with its demand for food. He thought for a moment to pull off at the supermarket and grab something out of the freezer section like he normally would in this situation, but today had been a hard day and he needed something more than a spartanly topped pizza.

  Steven counted his blessings that his belly had made its desires known before he got too much further down the road. He could still make a small detour and stop in at his favorite bar and grill, Jack’s Lone Star. The beer there was cold and always had a nice head on it, and the kitchen fare was surp
risingly tasty for a place that looked like a dive bar on the outside. Steven about kicked himself for not thinking to stop at Jack’s from the start. He knew he would be able to get the kind of meal he needed to put the day behind him. It would be worth the extra twenty minutes out of the way.

  The jeep pulled up into a premium parking space right next to the Lone Star’s front door. Steven stepped out of his ride and took a moment to feel the cool breeze blowing in off of the range. He regarded the overly tacky neon sign and its humongous blinking yellow star. It was so tasteless it was wonderful. Steven made his way inside the bar. Jack’s was fairly calm for a Friday night. It looked like they were doing good business but the ambiance was not nearly the blaring country jukebox, mechanical bull flinging frat boys left and right, off-key karaoke, and drunken foolery Steven had anticipated.

  He honed in on a desirable seat at the corner of the bar furthest from the restrooms and proceeded to stake his claim. He sat and all his aches and pains of the day seemed to fade away into the bar stool beneath him. He had not felt this good in a long time. Clearly, coming to Jack’s had been the right call. Steven allowed himself a mental pat on the back for his wisdom.

  Not more than a minute after sitting down the bartender came to serve him. The Corrections Officer marveled at how fast the service was tonight. He could not ever recall being taken care of so quickly in twenty years of frequenting Jack’s Lone Star. It looked to be more and more his night every second. Perhaps I’ll get a good night’s sleep after all, Steven thought.

  “What can I get you, buddy?” asked the bartender. Steven was surprised. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but the man behind the bar was not Jack. Jack always worked on a Friday.