"More is demanded of you. Continue studying the Grimoire. You must be able to recite these incantations from memory."
My father’s expression often flared into anger, and his lips constricted as if to speak, but he held silent for all but routine questions, as if his shrunken role was normal. But I knew the man prone to belt whippings must be seething. We spoke only of small things, and then briefly. I still washed his clothes and cooked his meals, but we both knew that would end.
The villagers were increasingly nasty to me, trying to up their prices, and cursing me as I left their shops. When I mentioned this to Miriam, she didn't seem surprised.
"We encourage hatred of all kinds, child, and that includes hatred of you. But we must move more quickly. One of our sisters will eventually let slip that we're here, and we should not be martyred just yet."
She had me sit at the Formica table, the symbols covered over with a bed sheet. "Child, it is time for you to become a missionary like Esther and me."
"What does that mean?"
"You will sacrifice family and mate with Her prince consort. You will be a descendent of the thirteen, preaching revolution and invoking demons."
I sat in silence, but knew I could not go back to who I was. "I want to be like you. Do I have to kill him?”
“In a way.”
“Will it hurt?"
"Yes, but the pleasure overwhelms and binds the pain to produce an ecstasy."
"And I can join you?"
"Not Esther and me, but a partner who will help your flower to grow. The mob is already clotting together, and we must act now. Would you do anything to join us?"
I couldn't imagine not being with them. "Yes," I said.
"Very well. You will perform the sacrifice and receive the consort this evening, while in coven."
That afternoon my thoughts were so jumbled, I could barely do chores. Just before dusk, Miriam brought me a potion to drink.
"What is it?" I asked.
"A love potion that will enhance what you will be feeling. And something that will give you courage."
I drank and prepared the room for the coven. The women arrived after dark and circled the table. I noticed that Esther wasn't there.
"Miriam, where's Esther? We need our thirteenth."
"She's coming, ah here she is."
Esther walked into the room leading my father, who was blindfolded. She backed him up against the table and leaned his torso onto it, face up, his legs dangling toward the floor. Miriam handed me her knife.
"Miriam, I can't do this!"
"The sacrificial lamb is willing, child. Ask him."
"F-father?" I stuttered.
His voice was harsh but slurred, he'd drunk something. "Naomi, do as you're told. Esther has explained things to me. Don't cross me!"
I held the knife in two hands, staring at the expressionless faces around the table, trying to control myself. And then I felt the pure burn of hate, and began to chant.
The next morning I was staggering from pain- the potion I'd drunk made my forehead feel as if it were cleaved, and my vagina and anus were torn. But twined into the pain was pride, and remembered pleasure and clouded memory of dark majesty.
Miriam and Esther left that afternoon. I hugged Miriam before she left. "Take me with you."
"We go two by two. When your partner comes, begin your mission. If you are martyred, your remains will be gathered, consecrated, and used. You will always be of service to the One. Goodbye, child."
For two days, I lived off the remaining food, but on the third day, I knew I would have to go into the village for provisions and face people who might want to kill me. As I was gathering up coins, there was a rap at the front door.
The peephole revealed a teenaged girl, skinny, with frizzy red hair. When I opened the door, I noticed her eyes. They were old, ageless, like Miriam's had been. And I knew mine looked the same. "Yes?" I asked.
"I am from who am for you. I am Rachel, your partner."
“Yes,” I said. “I have what I can carry.”
I turned and looked back into the house. “Goodbye, father.”
He shuffled toward the door, back bent, eyes cloudy. “That’s nice, dear. Goodbye.”
There was nothing more to say. I had given his essence as sacrifice for Her, and the husk in the doorway held neither love nor hate.
THE END.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had a hundred forty stories and poems published so far. His collected fairy and folk tales, The Witch Made Me Do It was published by Gypsy Shadow Press. His novella The Witches’ Bane was published by World Castle Publishing, and his collected fantasy and horror stories, Capricious Visions was published by Gnome on Pig Press. Ed’s currently working on a paranormal/thriller novel tentatively titled The Rule of Chaos. He works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of five review editors.
PITTER by Sara Green
A pitter-patter.
A flapping of a curtain.
A slow drip from a faucet…?
It couldn’t have been all of these things, yet it wasn’t a foreign sound. It was familiar. But that did me little good in discerning just where it originated.
Of course, there had been mouse droppings found in the spare room earlier in the week. The weather was growing colder every day, so it wasn’t unexpected that little rodents would seek out warmth in my home. I moved poison into the spare room, and gave it no more thought, until today—when the little ticks of sound broke the steady beat of the large hall clock.
Again, I couldn’t quite place what I was hearing, nor where it came from. In one instance, I was even sure it was the mail being dropped on my welcome mat. But I checked, eager to make sure any package might be brought inside before the thieves that persisted during the holiday season got wind of our online shopping, and there was nothing.
Not even a leaf or a breeze.
Most of the other times, the sound seemed to come from just overhead, or just behind me, in the other room, just after I closed a door, or when I was about to fall asleep—for it should’ve been a lazy Saturday.
For hours, I resolved to let the poison work its magic rather than chase little mice and obsess over the invasion. But the longer I waited the more I certain I became.
Mice were not in my home. Not live ones.
Recounting the night before, it was an atypical Friday. I stayed out late, meeting an old friend for Happy Hour, though my intention was a bit more nefarious. He had been fighting with his wife for some time, a long time—since they were married. Though, I’d fancied him a time or two before then, we had always been mere colleagues who shared a moral fiber or two—perhaps then, that is what had me convinced that he had lusted as much as I.
He ordered a beer, and I ordered us both a shot.
He said, “Getting frisky tonight.”
And I agreed, planting an invitation—a seed.
We drank together, complaining about co-workers, procedure, politics, religion, and more. The more we talked, the more I believed he was just waiting for me to suggest something. So I began.
Then his wife texted him. He lamented the time and without drinking a water, he tore off in his SUV throwing pleasantries as if they were sticky candy wrappers.
“We should do this again some time…”
My horniness turned dark. I looked up and down the bar for someone to fuck. But everyone was paired and well drowned in conversation. There wasn’t a loner among the groups. I would’ve needed to stay much later, which meant more drinks, more fries, and more money spent—obviously.
I asked for a glass of water. I drank it quickly and called for a second, and slowed down this time, sobering up and remembering how awful a person I must truly have been to make a man want to cheat on his wife. What gave me the right to take whatever I wanted?
Sobering has never been a fun event, so I rushed the pr
ocess and skipped out into my compact car. It rattled.
Knowing a little about cars, I knew it was likely time for a new timing belt, but I didn’t care—not on a lonely Friday night. I drove home with the intention of picking up a bottle of wine to really close the door on my evening, except I drove straight past the turn to the grocery store, because the flashing blue lights of the local police department seemed like the thing I should avoid the most as street signs doubled from my lingering intoxication.
Most of my drive home, I couldn’t recall. But I sobered up enough once home to brush my teeth and sleep in pajamas. Regret weighed on my morning mind. Tossing and turning, fighting to sleep in—useless. I force fed myself eggs and coffee at the not-quite-ripe-Saturday-hour of 6:00 A.M.
That is when I first started hearing the sounds.
But something in the way my coffee failed to invigorate me led me to believe, I’d heard them all night long, triggering the primitive survival instincts that hoped to warn me of nearby dangers.
The sound again.
The sound came just as the fan kicked on to blow warm air through the ducts. Perhaps that was all it was, the shrinking and expanding of the house’s frame as it grew colder outside. That’s all creaks were. A simple change in temperature.
But something, deep within started to pick up on the intricacies of the sound.
It wasn’t wood cracking.
A wetness—not soaked—finalized the very end of the sound. Like a sweaty foot peeling off a floor. Or a kiss.
Certain, now, I jumped up and inspected both bathrooms. Real horror struck me as I imagined an unseen leak, behind the walls, in the ceiling perhaps. I scurried around the house, hoping to catch the sound again.
I noticed I had let things become obsessive.
I stopped. I made myself an early supper—having skipped lunch with a bag of potato chips.
That is, if one can considered boiling hot water and throwing dried noodles into it making supper. The sound greeted me as I sat to watch television.
I raised to volume, a pitiful attempt at drowning out the sound.
It seemed to resent my efforts.
Feeling more than just taunted. I slammed my bowl of noodles, spilling them on my lap. Searing pain lifted me from the couch with the max ferocity of a steroid induced rage. It ended when I stubbed my toe on the end table.
Then the television made sounds.
Obviously, that is what it does. But the sounds were in the form of words, spoken in advertisement for the evening news program.
The promised to tell us more about last night’s drunk driving incident that claimed the life of the drunk driver—“thankfully the passengers in the car he struck have only minor injuries.”
A pair of lips popped.
They did not belong to me.
Mine were agape as I refused to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
It put itself together, until I could not shake the dread of my friend, my co-worked—the man I tried to seduce—had died last night.
That was his turn to head back home to his wife.
Did I recall an ambulance, or was it being painted back into my fragmented memory?
Night came before the evening news. My whole house darkened as I refused to leave the couch and miss a second of the newscaster’s promised report. As it came on there was no denying that I could care little about foreign events, or lottery winners, or cute dogs and their blind benefactors.
Just as the report began, I heard the sound again.
The house went completely dark, and I realized it wasn’t the same sound. It was the pop of the loss of electricity.
No storm outside had caused it.
I tried the remote several times.
And then heard the sound.
“You’re dead…”
“How do you know?”
“The news? That was you? I know it was?”
He raised his cheeks, his lips forming what might otherwise be qualified as a smile.
“I wanted to finish what you started last night.”
“I must be losing my mind. Are you really here?” I asked.
He nodded. Though, as he stood there, turning his head and analyzing me, I couldn’t help but believe he had agreed that I had lost my mind.
“Here on the couch?” he asked.
“What?” But I knew what and I looked the couch, and the cushions that had snuck out of their proper crevices.
“On the kitchen counter?”
“What about your wife?” I asked, hoping that my real friend would suddenly forget my advances and register them as all misinterpreted. But as I mentioned before—something was changed about him.
“Remember, she’s angry at me anyway. You’re the one that wants me?”
“Are you drunk?” I asked.
He nodded. “Just as you made me.”
“Please just go home. Get out of my house.”
He smiled and edged around the couch until I had no choice but to back down, down the hallway. He followed, directing me with the slightest of movements that dictated my retreat until I found myself in the doorway to my bedroom.
“Maybe some other time,” I said. “I’m not feeling well tonight.”
“I don’t have all the time in the world anymore,” he said.
I backed away from him, not realizing I went exactly where he wanted me to go—where I wanted to go. I bumped into the foot of the bed, and braced myself against it. He stopped in the doorway, and undressed himself. There was a shuffling as he did.
In that moment, I tried to shake away my fears. I tried to embrace the moment as I wanted to.
Then he said, “You wanted this. I died because you wanted this.”
“No, no, I’m so sorry,” I pleaded, tasting my own tears as I repeated over and over again.
“Lay down,” he said. “And I will give you what you wanted.”
I did as he said—as I wanted, knowing somewhere my mind had fractured, and this could not possibly be happening.
He stood above me, staring at my panties. I removed them, scooting further up on the bed, until my headrest against the headboard.
I expected a cold hand, but something warm brushed against my thighs, directing them to part. Goosebumps covered my legs, and I blushed—knowing I had not shaven that recently enough to hide the start of stubble.
He didn’t seem to care. I felt the top of his head brush against me and I bit my lips.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
I ran my hands through his hair.
“Ouch!”
He pinched me… or was it a tiny bite.
My flinch was enough for him to return to his gentler approach.
“Ouch!” I screamed. He had bit me again.
And again.
“Stop!”
He bit my thighs, my calves, his fingers running up my stomach. I swatted them away.
“No!”
The power came back
Every light in the house came back on.
A sound like a train passing, gone in an instant.
But I had seen them. I could hear their little feet.
Pitter-patter.
There was one still inside of me.
It had suffocated.
I pulled it from between my legs. And puked.
Vomit sat on the sheets between my legs and refused to move—just as did I.
I could hear them again. That sound of a wretched kiss, just waiting for the lights to go out.
THE END.
SMILE by Alison Whewell
Madonna’s voice echoed throughout Megan Smith’s room until she turned her radio off, placing the Ouija board on the carpet. She turned her head, nodding towards Cindy Law, her best friend to turn off the light switch. Candlelight now illuminating her collection of hair rollers and teen magazines.
“Are you sure this is a clever idea?”
Megan rolled her eyes, “It’s just a game, relax, nothing has every gone wrong by playing a game before
.”
If Megan had to be honest she was more afraid of burning the house down, but Audrey Myers had explicitly told her that she needed candles for it to work. Megan sat crossed legged in front of the board, soon followed by Cindy. Luckily, Megan’s parents had gone out to Mr Oliver’s pool party and wouldn’t be back until late, so she didn’t have to worry about them.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Megan’s and Cindy touched the planchette, making circles around the board with it repeating together the words, “As friends we gather, hearts are true, spirits near, we call to you.”
The wind now howled outside forcing the large tree branch that sat inches away from Megan’s window to scrape against the glass.
Megan smiled at Cindy, clearing her throat before speaking, “Is there anybody here with us?”
Slowly the planchette moved towards YES.
“Stop it Megan.”
“I’m not doing it, I swear. You could be moving it for all I know.”
“Well I’m not,” she said, gulping.
“Ask it something else.”
“What’s your name?”
The tips of both their index finger lightly grazed the planchette when it started to move quickly. Megan and Cindy speaking the letters together out loud, “E…D….”
BANG.
Both girls head darted towards the source of the noise, Megan’s cupboard. Cindy’s mouth now dry.
“Are you here?” Megan asked.
The wind had even silenced, listening for the slightest inkling of what could be interpreted as a response. Minutes passed.
“Ask it…” Cindy stopped mid-sentence.
Her attention was drawn towards a soft yet distinguishable knocking sound coming from the cupboard. Megan moved towards it. Her hands steady. She had always been the braver one out of the two friends. Turning back to look at Cindy who had gone as white as a sheet.
“Knock twice if you’re in the cupboard.”
Ignoring the whispers of the wind outside both girls strained their ears listening. KNOCK KNOCK. Cindy couldn’t help but stare as Megan edged closer to the cupboard her hands now slightly shaking.
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