Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells' the Time Machine is out now!

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells' The Time Machine
Paperback: 286 pages
Publisher: Northern Frights Publishing (September 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0973483733
ISBN-13: 978-0973483734
Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm
Shipping Weight: 431 g

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away...

These words marked the passing of the man known only as The Time Traveler as he sailed across the span of Earth's timeline and into its final years.

First published in 1895, The Time Machine by Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is a blueprint for science fiction and horror that persists to this day: underneath the science and the theories that attract a reader's mind, there is an underlying story of a person who struggles with the question that burns in the heart of every man: what does it all mean?

Now is your chance to find out.

In an anthology spanning the entire human history and reaching far into its future, witness bold new visions of man's quest to conquer the fourth dimension. Including:

A man enters a virtual past and discovers his future...A historian rewriting a new history will find a way to restore the fragmented past...The Time Traveler witnesses the end of the universe with a companion who may not be altogether human...Find out what happens when Time Travel technology falls into the wrong hands...A man shows just how much damage to the past a single bullet can do if the target is the right one.

Looking for great horror and science fiction?

Take a Trip Through Terror!

Wells Unleashed: Book 2.

A selection from "Kelmscott Manor: In the Attics" by Lyn C.A. Gardner

Kelmscott Manor: In the Attics

by Lyn C.A. Gardner

G

eorgiana Burne-Jones sat beside the great bed, holding Topsy’s hand while he slept. Georgie had seen this room many times: the whole of Kelmscott Manor was a work of art. The top panel of the bed-curtains bore a verse that Topsy had written, embroidered by his younger daughter in medieval script. The house held furnishings both medieval and modern; he and his friends and family, including Georgie, had created many of the tiles and tapestries.

But Jane, his wife, had only been interested in his vision in the early years, when he still tried to paint her in oils or verse, before her boredom had grown to disgust and led her to the arms of the lovers that her adoring husband chose not to begrudge her. Though they never spoke of it in such vulgar terms, Georgie knew that her friend had spent his time in this wonderful bed alone.

His face looked so worn, so lined—shockingly old. Too much for sixty-two. The unruly dark hair and beard had all gone white. So many marks of care about his mouth; even while he slept, a muscle ticked on his cheek, as if he couldn’t rest. It was his energetic spirit—his need to do everything—that was killing him.

Since 1883, he’d worn himself down, committing heart and soul to the Cause: his form of Socialism, which aimed to bring beauty and happiness to daily life through the revival of handicraft, care for the earth, and the elimination of class disparities. Though he had sacrificed his poetry on this altar years ago, in the end, he’d despaired of the politics. These last few years, he’d turned his hope inward, crafting beautiful books to fuel the imagination and give courage to the soul. But he hadn’t stopped his grueling lectures soon enough to save his health.

She stroked his hand, so large, so talented—so often stained deep blue from the dye vats. His elder daughter had dubbed him “Old Proosian Blue.” Now the hands had grown thin, spotted, striped with the paler blue of ropy veins.

The great man, William Morris, opened his eyes.

“Georgie,” he murmured. “You came at last. How I’ve wanted a sight of your dear face.”

“Topsy,” she said fondly. “We’ll be walking through your gardens before you know it. Kelmscott is beautiful in the fall, with all the leaves aflame.”

He grunted, but he smiled. She could see what an effort he made for her. Both of them knew that he would never see Kelmscott in autumn again.

“How I’ve missed you. Our talks.” He lifted a trembling hand toward her face. She pressed it to her cheek.

“Ned should be here in a few hours.” She faltered. Her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, would be devastated when Topsy died. Topsy had sunk so fast in eight months. Gout, diabetes, congestion of the left lung, tuberculosis. Topsy had lost so much weight that he might be another man.

“I don’t have much time left, Georgie.” He squeezed her palm weakly. “There’s something I must tell you.”

Her chest tightened. Here it was—the words they’d never spoken. What had always been understood, in silence and verse. They were dear friends, drawn closer by the fact that both their spouses had broken their hearts—and they themselves were too bound by love and honor to do anything. They’d taken comfort in the warmth of friendship, when they might have thrown themselves into the fire. Both Ned and Janey had entangled themselves in disastrous, painful affairs; but it was Georgie and Topsy who loved too much to cause further grief by finding their own happiness together.

He managed another smile. “You know I love you, dear heart. I can’t tell you,” and his voice trembled, “how glad I am to have you here with me, at the end.”

She kissed his hand. She kissed his brow, as a friend might. Then she sat back and watched him with wide eyes as he told her other things. Painful things. Things she could scarcely believe.

And yet it was her Topsy who said them. It was easy to fill the room with the memory of his booming voice—a whisper now, as he mentioned days that had not yet been. Days that would never be. He reached into the bed-curtains and drew out a letter. “Please, Georgie. Sit here by me and read it now. I could not give it to you before. . . .” And as she read, she began to understand. Why he had waited to tell her, until it was too late.

He knew, if there were still a chance for him to live, she might have changed his mind.

My dear, my life of late has not been what it seems. There is a reason why I grew so listless toward politics in 1894, and it has nothing to do with my health. Or rather, everything, as you shall soon see.

I suppose you remember that young writer, H.G. Wells—Bertie, we called him—who used to come to Hammersmith for the meetings of the old Socialist League. He seemed quite taken with News from Nowhere, my vision of the future. He called it The Dream of Socialism Fulfilled. But he seemed equally fascinated by that damned-dull machine age of Edward Bellamy and the philosophic science of T.H. Huxley, with whom he’d studied at the Normal School of Science.

As we became friends, he would slip round odd evenings to the meetings and stay on afterwards to talk of the future, developments in science, and how things might change—how they must change, if the fate of humanity is to be anything but dismal. We talked utopia and time travel, amidst our Socialism, our hopes and fears for the future. Bertie told me he wanted to explore the future in quite a new rational and scientific way. In 1890, he showed me a few exploratory pieces. But it wasn’t until 1894 that I realized the full genius—and danger—of the man.

Bertie came around one evening, agitated. He beckoned me outside. As we stood in the gardens, he thrust some numbers of Henley’s National Observer at me, with his work.

“Here. You must read this first. Then come to my chambers as quick as you can.”

“The Chronic Argonauts?”

“Henley got his hands into it,” Bertie said with disgust. “I’ll have it out by itself in the spring as The Time Machine, the way it’s meant to be.”

“Congratulations!” I pumped his hand.

“Just read it,” Bertie muttered. “You may think differently then.”

I read all through the evening, in growing disquiet. It was indeed a “utopia” to counter mine—but what a horrifying future. Bertie’s vision presented the ultimate dissolution of society, with humankind deprived of useful work and any ability for intellectual or artistic endeavors.

In those days, Bertie lived in rented rooms with his paramour and her mother, always under threat of eviction. With the awful vision of his hopeless future before my eyes, I knocked in the dead of night. He let me in at once.

And there it was. The vision made flesh.

Wedged in the clutter of a young man’s work sat something that looked like a new form of conveyance. The saddle rested amid twisted crystal bars in a contrivance that looked at once delicate, yet permanent. The metallic framework shone in the low light of the lamp, the bars and levers canted at such angles that they seemed built to withstand speed. But such beautiful lines! Such rich workmanship! Quartz and ivory, ebony and obsidian, steel and transparent bars that seemed to glow from within. I had never expected to see such beauty in the form of a machine.

“You don’t need to ask me what this is,” he said in a low voice.

I maintained my silence a moment longer, in respect for the artistry of the thing. But even if I had not read his tale, there could be only one answer. “I’m growing old, Bertie.”

“Not too old. You want to see if there’s any hope, any chance. So do I.”

“You’re only 28.”

He gripped my hands. “Now that you’ve read my little nightmare, how can you refuse? All I can see ahead is darkness.” He frowned. “But you may have better luck. You can find the right path for us, if anyone can. No matter what’s happened, you’ve never lost hope. When one vision fails, you create a better one.”

“Perhaps,” I murmured. But my mind had already begun to churn over the days ahead. What might I do, beyond my efforts now? The laborers embraced my ideals, drank in all I could teach them; but those with the power to improve the lives of the working class refused to step beyond their own concerns and alleviate that terrible poverty—the slavery of man to machine.

“You need some time to mull things over,” Bertie said.

But I knew already. Just the sight of the thing had set a hunger howling within me. “I’m your man.” I gripped his hand, and shook it, hard—and found there all the strength of my own conviction, despite his slight frame.

He laughed shakily. “Good. Because you might be our best chance. So much hinges on the next few years, and I can’t do anything. I’m still alive through too much of what goes wrong. But you—”

“Yes?” I asked tightly.

He looked away. “You died in October of 1896.”

I stood silent. The weight of that choked me like a millstone. Two more years. I forced myself to say, “Well, we still have some time, then!”

We packed the machine, dismantling and bundling the pieces. Finally, curiosity won over dread. “How did I die?”

“Too many things. No one was sure, at first—you drove yourself so hard. One doctor said, ‘The disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.’ By the time they diagnosed anything, it was already too late.”

I grunted in disbelief. I’d had the gout for years, and there were bad spells, I admit; but I could not reconcile the health and energy I still felt with my death in two years. It didn’t seem possible.

After we settled the last pieces, Bertie touched my arm. “I could hardly believe it myself. But I’ve read of my own death, too. That’s the curse of having a time machine.”

We drove to Kelmscott under cover of night, the machine wrapped in horse blankets. We hid it in the stables while I watched the house. Then we brought it up to the attics, piece by delicate piece.

The attics at Kelmscott—you may not have been up there, Georgie, since you were a child and Kelmscott was your father’s house. I’ve kept them bare. They’re so beautiful, in their open, clean lines, spare and sparkling when the morning sun drifts through the windows. Sometimes I’ve climbed up there just to think, amid the rafters. In the attics, I would never be disturbed; and Kelmscott Manor had existed for so many goodly years—since 1570—that its limestone garrets would doubtless exist still, to afford me a measure of comfort and safety.

 Bertie parted from me with a fierce embrace.

I waited until daybreak. From the height of the attic windows, I took my last look at the beloved slopes and meadows, the gardens, the stand of trees, the little haven I’d found here at Kelmscott. Then I sat and gently pressed the lever forward, precisely as Bertie had instructed.

The machine shuddered under me. It shook in a most alarming way. I felt for a moment as though I’d been tossed into the ocean, sick as if I were battered down by waves.

As I looked toward the attic windows, light and dark passed over me in a dizzying spiral. In the flash of leaves and sky, night and moon, I felt I would go blind. But I did not lose my nerve. I pulled back on the lever when the dials indicated the proper moment. I had decided to make my first test at a safe distance.

The machine bucked to a stop. As I climbed gingerly from the saddle, the dials told me that I was setting foot in the attics of 1925—a nice, round quarter-century. Perhaps I should have set to work at once. But I wanted to see the future first. Thoughts of my death gave way to sheer wonder—

—such joy as I felt when I was young and everything was new; when my friends and I stood against the world, determined to bring beauty back into every life.

I rushed to the attic windows and peered out. And what did I see? A line of trees along the walk. The profusion of flowers, red and blue and lavender. The same meadows, golden with morning’s light. The sheltering stretch of wood, untroubled by the passage of years. The winding lane that led to Kelmscott Village, still clear and well-kept.

I crept down through the house, but heard no one stirring. Yet the place was clean, and our furniture and decorations remained. What if Janey and our daughters still lived here? I froze on the stairs, wanting desperately to see them; our firstborn Jenny had been so sick since childhood, and May, the younger, had followed me so enthusiastically in everything. They would have taken my death hard. I wanted to tell them I loved them; but something held me back. Not just the thought of who might be up there with Jane right now. The fear tormented me—what harm I might do them, appearing like a ghost. Then, too, it might jeopardize our hope for the future, before I had fairly begun. I clung to the banister, tormented by the choice. And then I heard a footstep from above.

I could not let them find me here. I snuck out of the house and down into the sunshine. I followed the lane to Kelmscott Village, which looked much the same—a clean, pretty place, a refuge from the dinginess of London. I nodded to the residents, many of them young. They were not flying to the cities for the trap of mindless toil. Some of the older folk looked vaguely familiar. One old man started up, pointing a trembling finger as if he recognized a ghost—but when I drew near, his fear faded to uncertainty, then confusion, and he sat down again.

I took a boat down the Thames to London, wearing a great straw hat to conceal my face. London seemed already less gray, more green, the Thames itself less murky.

And there, at a newsstand, I had my first shock. From the front page, I gazed back at myself—but so much older! The masthead proclaimed it to be March 24, 1925. I had chosen my birthday, since one date was as good as any other.

I stared at the paper in consternation. I have never enjoyed having my portrait taken. Despite the lines of care, the parchment skin and thinning snow-white beard, it was a good likeness. The headlines lauded my life and offered an issue of commemoration for the man who had been “the peacekeeper of our times.” The article referenced many great achievements.

The world spun through my head as I read that paper. The Boer War had ceased—so had our aggressions in Egypt. Conditions for the working class had improved so much that that all enjoyed a level of comfort, if not luxury. Women could vote at the same age as men. Britain maintained its might, but extended the hand of benevolence to its subjects, soliciting their participation.

And the article laid much of the praise for this at my own door.

The blood pounded in my temples, and my leg ached as if in warning of the gout. But I stood firm. I found a library and began to explore the past—my future.

A selection from "Time's Cruel Geometry" by Mark Onspaugh

Time’s Cruel Geometry

by Mark Onspaugh

“At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

 —H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

T

he Time Traveler saw his friend enter the laboratory and stare where the Time Machine had entered its state of flux, rendering both conveyance and passenger a spectral blur. The Time Traveler made to wave to his friend, but by the then all was growing dark and then rapidly light as the traversing of the time stream gathered momentum and day and night alternated with sickening speed.

Again he saw the laboratory disappear; leaving only the small green hill that had been its location. Other buildings and structures were built, occupied and crumbled as he sat watching, and then there was a violent shaking and he was surrounded by a cataclysmic whirlpool of swirling colors and what might be sparks or suns coming quickly to life and just as quickly dying out.

The Time Machine plunged down the center of the whirlpool, like Alice down the rabbit hole, though he suspected there were dangers and oddities to be found in the time stream never dreamt of in Wonderland.

It had been his intention to journey to the past and collect various artifacts and photos as evidence he had been there, then perhaps travel to the future to retrieve some scientific wonder, perhaps a bladeless scalpel or an apparatus that defied the laws of gravity.

The Time Traveler felt a tremendous jolt, as if the Time Machine had struck an enormous swell and then had plummeted several feet before finding its “footing” again.

Worried that something might be wrong with the delicate central mechanism, he moved to slow the Time Machine to a halt when it suddenly pitched sideways and he was thrown from the saddle. The Time Traveler struck his head on one of the brass rails and his vision blurred and filled with stars. The pain combined with the nausea peculiar to time travel made him retch, and he was glad he had foregone Mrs. Watchett’s offer of lunch before he had made this journey.

Shaking, his head pounding, The Time Traveler grabbed the saddle and hoisted himself up, careful not to misalign the controls.

The machine stopped with a lurch and he saw with mounting horror that he was sinking in one of the shallow seas that had once covered much of Britain. The base of the Time Machine gave it a temporary buoyancy, but The Time Traveler knew it would be taking on water and he would die either by drowning or as a refugee of time in this hostile place.

Water began to lap over the floor of the machine, and he worked quickly to remove the brass housing protecting the crystalline heart of the Time Machine. Though every instinct was urging him to panic, he willed himself to be calm, to proceed with deliberation and scientific detachment.

He saw now that the housing was bent, and that two of the screws had been stripped, as if someone had tried to pry off the housing and then bent it back into place.

Morlocks.

Obviously they had examined the machine while it had been in their possession, but had been unable to discern either its purpose or the manner in which it operated.

Thanking the fates the creatures had not breached its casing; The Time Traveler removed the remaining screws.

Beneath the cylindrical brass shield was an emerald, nearly fifteen centimeters in length and precision-cut into an orthorhombic dipyramidal crystal. It was this shape, combined with the high-energy potentiality of this particular variant of beryl that made time travel possible. It had taken him ten years and most of his inheritance to find and modify the emerald.

He saw now that the network of gold rods that held the emerald in place were bent, just enough that the emerald had become misaligned. It was further evidence that the Morlocks had tried to remove the crystal, their crude investigation resulting in damage to the delicate mechanisms.

The gold rods formed a sort of Chinese puzzle box, both holding the emerald in place and preventing its removal by anyone who did not possess the knowledge of the pattern of its release. 

The Time Machine began to sink in the sea covering what would one day be London, and The Time Traveler’s pants became soaked with cold sea water.

With the deliberation of practice he carefully slid the rods in sequence and removed the crystal. He placed it in his coat pocket with care, not daring to think of his fate should it drop to the bottom of the primordial sea. Thinking of Weena calmed him, and he bent the damaged rods back into true, taking care not to damage either the amber lens or the obsidian mirror.

The water was up to The Time Traveler’s waist now, and the great bubbling disturbance the machine caused in sinking was attracting the attention of the large marine predators that were indigenous to the period.

A creature looking much like a cross between and crocodile and an eel leaped into the open air dolphin-like, one horrible red eye focused on him, its teeth plentiful and razor-sharp. It was a mosasaur, if his memory of paleontology was accurate. Another of the creatures was trying to gain access through the portion of the machine now submerged, but the narrower apertures available at the poles of the spherical machine denied it access. Once the mid-section was submerged, however, The Time Traveler would be at the mercy of the creature.

The machine suddenly sunk like a stone, its swift descent causing one of the charging mosasaurs to miss the Time Machine by inches. The creature was terribly fast, though, and it was circling him, looking for its most advantageous avenue of attack.

Now holding his breath, The Time Traveler reseated the emerald and slid the gold rods back into position.

As two smaller mosasaurs feinted at the Time Machine, The Traveler set the controls for his laboratory and engaged the machine.

The machine vibrated slowly, then more rapidly, inducing an unpleasant buzzing in his head and the profound nausea he had come to dread. Now that he was submerged, holding his breath in agony, the departure of the Time Machine seemed to take minutes rather than seconds. As day and night alternated with greater and greater speed, his chest burned and spasmed with a pain unlike anything he had ever experienced. The largest mosasaur was speeding toward him. It stuck its scaly head into the largest aperture and snapped at his face. The Time Traveler screamed as he threw up his hands, and felt a sharp pain in his left forearm, then the ocean and its denizens were no more.

The Time Machine again stopped with a lurch, then rolled slightly, settling into a depression atop a grassy knoll. The Time Traveler recognized the countryside immediately. He was sitting in the spot where either his laboratory had been or would be.

There was an Army issue medical bag stowed in the storage compartment, a souvenir of his grandfather’s stint as a doctor in the Crimean War. The Traveler rolled up his tattered sleeve to see the mosasaur had left two gashes in his arm, each approximately three inches long and bleeding freely.

If the machine had tarried in that primordial sea one second longer he would have lost the arm and probably bled to death before reaching his destination.

Fearing sepsis, he cleaned the wound with water and then carbolic acid, hissing through gritted teeth as it burned his skin. He then bandaged the wounds as efficiently as he could and tied them off. Exhausted from his experience, he slumped to the floor of the machine in exhaustion and caught his breath.

He knew he could not tarry, he had no idea just when he was.

After his encounter with the Morlocks, he was loathe to leave his machine unattended for any length of time. He had tried to return to his own time, but that clearly was not the case.

It was early morning, judging by the sun’s position, and he spent an anxious thirty minutes examining the emerald, its housing and the controls of the Time Machine. Nothing seemed amiss, and he concluded that the delicate workings of the device had been affected by exposure to salt water. It was reasonable to assume that cleaning the parts and drying them would allow the machine to return to its former peak efficiency.

There was a small stream just beyond the knoll, something that had existed in his time, albeit not as active or as cold as this one. He filled a canteen with water and returned to his machine.

There was a notable lack of sound here, and he realized he had not heard any birds or insects. The air was fresh and clear, but the only life seemed to be vegetation.

Examining the main panel he saw that the controls for determining the temporal destination of the machine had slipped, and that he was some fifty thousand years beyond the time of the Eloi and the Morlocks.

The seclusion of the place obviated his need for modesty, and he stripped and laid his clothes out to dry in the soft grass.

The Time Traveler then laid the components of the control panel out to dry on his coat. Having nothing to do but wait, and still feeling self-conscious about his nakedness, The Traveler sat with his back against the base of the machine and luxuriated in the sun’s warmth. As he did, he thought of Weena and how she had been lost in the fire he had set to escape the Morlocks.

It was curious. He had initially thought of her as nothing more than a child, but Weena had shown a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge that rivaled his own. He found he missed her lilting laugh, and the way her hair shone in the bright sunlight.

“Careful, old boy,’ he chided himself, “you sound like a man in love.”

But was it such a ridiculous notion? She was no child, that had been his own intellectual bigotry talking, not an honest assessment of her. He wished now he had had more time with her, even if just to hear her delight in discovering and learning new things.

She’s dead, he thought sadly.

But you have a Time Machine.

Of course! He could go back just before she was lost and rescue her.

It was obvious they couldn’t stay in her time. The Morlocks would never give them a moment’s peace. His own time was also out of the question. How would he explain her? How would she adjust to such a radically different world?

There was a mountain to the south that would give him a splendid view of the terrain. Once the machine was reassembled and hidden under some brush, he took a canteen and field glasses and made the climb.

His hike was eerily silent, with only the occasional breeze through trees or a burbling stream to break the silence. Were he not more disciplined, he might have talked to himself, just to hear something.

Climbing the peak took half a day, the way always more difficult and treacherous than it looked from the ground. Fortunately he was in excellent shape and soon stood astride a large flat rock on the summit.

As near as he could determine, this region of Britain was currently uninhabited. Further, as night drew on he saw no signs of light or campfires. He returned to the place by the river and slept fitfully, anxious to be on his way but knowing that he was in need of rest.

He knew there was no place for Weena in his world, or for either of them in hers.

But here, here they might find peace, a peace The Time Traveler realized he had been longing for. He knew what lay at both ends of time for the Earth, and now thought he might devote his days to developing some sort of ethical philosophy for the uses of his device. Once this was complete, he could present it to the Royal Academy. With the machine he could make the trip and arrive back before Weena even realized he was gone.

He made a list of supplies they would need and journeyed back to his laboratory.

It took him ten trips and the better part of a day, but he was able to bring everything he needed, including a variety of seeds and cuttings for growing vegetables, and several chickens that would supply both eggs and meat. Later, if he felt it was necessary, they might also bring in sheep and pigs.

The machine continued to act erratically at times, sometimes bringing him back smoothly, other times rematerializing with a lurch or a bone-rattling shake, as if it were a rat caught in the jaws of an enormous cat.

He checked the machine carefully, and could find nothing wrong. Later he would wish that he had brought along even a simple magnifying glass to examine the crystal.

Not that it would have mattered.

He had no record of the temporal or spatial coordinates when and where Weena had been taken by the fire. He would have to approximate both and refine his jumps through trial and error. Fortunately, his travels to the dying Earth had given him practice in quick, precise jumps.

What might happen if his past self were to witness his arrival? Might the knowledge that he would appear affect his actions in the past? Although a nested set of paradoxes might indeed result, he intuited that Time was rather like a river, with any number of tributaries issuing from the main flow. While he was on Tributary A, his past self might be shunted over to Tributary A-1, or even Tributary B. His travels had demonstrated that Time and its events seemed resilient, and that his peregrinations along its courses were no more bothersome than that of a fly amongst elephants.

By disengaging the main lens, he could move over the landscape without traveling through time. In a series of mile-long “hops” he was able to find the main dwelling-place of the Morlocks. There was no trace of either race, but he recognized a pattern of boulders that had once hidden one of their hateful hatches.

Weary, The Time Traveler rested and ate some bread and cheese he had brought with him. Fortified, he set the controls and made his first jump.

A selection from "Xmas" by Douglas Hutcheson

XMAS

by Douglas Hutcheson



T

he little pale creatures peered out from dank holes in rusty slagheaps, their beady pink eyes almost blind in the daylight, though the sky stood thick and dark with gun-metal grey clouds and splotchy green smoke churning from tall factory towers that scraped at the horizon where the yellow sun sank like a fetid yolk spilled into stagnant pond scum. The whir of great engines grew louder. The thin creatures popped their balding heads up to risk a glance and confirmed the approach of a sleek silver car hovering above the scorched earth.

Inside, the whole family sang a familiar carol:  “Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells!”  Mom and Pop and their son and daughter with faces all lit up pumped their arms into the air and then clapped their hands together. The hovercar steered itself along the narrow path that its program required to get the family home again with what should be their utmost safety.

“It’s more of them,” said a hissing voice from one of the scampering creatures. Others around it hissed back in reply and then bared their stained and broken teeth.

“Load the rocket launcher! Make ready to fire!” shouted a creature some feet behind them. He crawled further atop the heap, scraping himself on jagged rocks and crushing long-discarded cans of soda and candy bars and Styrofoam dinner boxes with logos of secret and once-powerful organizations whose true purposes, along with their actual existences, had long passed into the shadows of myth. “They’re almost upon us!” The creature shouted and then spat at the earth. He drew from a twisted leather belt a sword he had fashioned from an old copper pipe–-he had beaten the metal down until it stood almost flat but it sported sharp serrated edges where the pipe had split under the makeshift working. “Let your hatred speak through your weapons, my brave comrades! We shall settle for nothing less than total annihilation of the enemy of our kind! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Scarred and dented rifle barrels blazed and barked, their tiny fires flashing from all around and within the slag heaps. The bullets struck the hovercar and sparked and pinged the air, but did little else to the armored body of the vehicle.

“What was that, Father?” the daughter asked.

“Honey?” said the wife.

The father stopped his singing and swivelled to face the sparkling dashboard. It glowed phosphorescent for a moment as its digital readout bars shot up and down. “Computer, status report,” he said to it.

A pink face emitted from a heads-up display and smiled at the family. “Sensors have detected small-arms fire. There is no damage to the hull. The situation is under control. Your vehicle is proceeding on course.”  The face beamed at them for a moment and then disappeared.

The father beamed back, and then turned to the children. “See. Nothing to worry about. I designed this old girl to stand up to almost anything!”

The face popped back up. It was still smiling and speaking in a calm tone, but what it said was:  “Warning. Sensors have detected a surface-to-surface missile. Your vehicle is taking evasive action.”

“Show me!” yelled the father.

The car windows shifted from displaying a false pastoral scene of a flowery meadow full of colorful butterflies and brisk noon sunlight to revealing the dense junkyards and heaving factories that were looming outside. In the immediate vicinity, a missile flew toward the hovercar, its nose cone displaying an angry toothy grin and bloodshot eyes that the creatures had scrawled in sloppy homemade paints.

The family screamed almost as one. At the last moment of what seemed surely their doom, the computer pulled the hovercar skyward and the projectile passed beneath them without touching the vehicle; it struck the ancient broken hull of a rusted-out ice-cream truck. The truck exploded into raging balls of fire and spinning shards of shrapnel.

The car’s face leapt into view again, still grinning. “Your vehicle has avoided the threat,” it said. “Your vehicle is resuming its original course.”

The destruction and desolation outside disappeared from the family’s view and the marigolds and monarchs and dappled light greeted them once more on the hovercar’s windows.

“Whew! That was a close one!” said the son.

“Too close,” said the mother. She glared at the father.

“I am sending a report in for the authorities now,” said the father, pretending not to notice her distraught looks as he typed on the keys in the dashboard. “They will sort out this lot of ruffians soon enough.”  When he had finished with the message, he leaned back against his seat and tapped his fingers on the armrest. “I cannot fathom why these terrorists still clamber up and try to attack decent citizens, especially during holiday season—the holiday season—of all times! Can you believe it?  What utterly astounding gall they have developed of late!”

The daughter, littlest of the bunch, banged her heels back against the bottom of her car seat. She crossed her arms, stared up at her parents and repeated the oft-heard refrain:  “Are we there yet?”

“No, not yet, dear. You know we have five miles still to go before we reach home,” her mother answered.

“But I am bored!” she responded.

“Me too,” said the son, who started poking his finger into his sister’s side and giggling at himself.

“Father! Make him stop!”

“Son, stop poking your sister. We need to act civilized, especially in these barbaric times.”

The son crossed his arms. “Aw, she just likes to whine!”

“Look, can we all just try to act like a proper family for just a few hours maybe, at least for today?” the mother scolded.

“Listen to your mother, children. This is a holy time, after all, is it not?  We should endeavor to make the most of it. Besides, if the two of you will not play nice, your mother and I might have to consider withholding your presents.”

The son scoffed. “But that is the only really cool part of all of this holiday junk!”

The father turned to face him. “My son, you should not speak like that about this holy time! Not ever! Never let me hear you refer to the sacred period as ‘junk’ again, or I will see to it you receive real punishment for blasphemy.”

A selection from "Sunlight and Shadows" by JW Schnarr and John Sunseri

Sunlight and Shadows

by JW Schnarr & John Sunseri

L

aci had come to the ocean looking for ghosts, and the old lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head was the perfect place to start.

The car was back a few hundred yards, alone on the roadside turnoff. She’d dragged herself over the guardrail, climbed down into the low forest and fought her way through the muddy earth, cold rainwater hitting her in huge drops as it fell from the branches. The sun was still clawing its way toward the ocean, bloating as it grew lower and larger, and she’d only have another half-hour of light to play with. There was little time to look for a better vantage.

She wrestled her way up the tallest spruce she could find, filthying her clothes in the process. Her head throbbed, and she stopped fifteen feet up to dry-swallow another couple of Advil. They hadn’t been helping much, but she didn’t want to think about the pain that would result if she stopped taking them altogether. She sucked the water from her lips, grimaced, and fought upwards ten more feet before settling into a sturdy crotch.

There was the lighthouse, all right. She’d found her clear shot.

A promontory of rocky land stretched northward and out into the choppy gray of the sea. The lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head stood on its tip, stark and sentinel. The building caught the dying light of the falling sun, but only on its western flank—the other side was shadowed and hidden.

Perfect.

She snapped a couple of quick shots to capture the chiaroscuro, using the spruce needles around her to frame the pictures. Whoever viewed them would sense the surrounding flora, would feel like a lurker in the woods peering out at the half-shadowed building as if in ambush.

She slowed down and started playing with the digital settings. The machine was the closest thing she had to a lover, and she touched it with knowledge born of long experience, caressing and coaxing and prodding all the right places. Like a lover, she knew how to produce what she wanted from the Canon, and the two of them moved in perfect, primal rhythm.

Lightning flared in the distance over the ocean and Laci cursed. Halfway up the tallest tree in the short forest wasn’t where she wanted to be if the storm hit in earnest. She started to inch her sneaker down to the next branch. Her head throbbed as a roll of thunder swept in over the beach, over her. Rain fell harder, hitting her exposed face like the sting of a wet towel. Looking out over the water, she decided she had time for one more shot before it was time to pack it in.

She raised the Canon to her eyes, scrolling back over the pictures she had just taken. At frame seven she stopped.

She squinted through the mist. Another explosion of lightning out at sea, and then a sweep of thunder. She ignored the flash and the shadowed darkness that followed, peering intently at the little view screen on her camera.

Something—someone—stood there, on her screen. Atop the empty lighthouse, half a mile distant. A black silhouette.

She pressed closer to the slick bark of the spruce’s trunk and started pushing the zoom buttons. She enlarged, enlarged again, clicked on the upper-right quadrant to focus; enlarged again.

Two faces, not one. Young faces, grainy with distance and low resolution. Black eyes moist, peering across the rocks, over the trees.

Four arms, two of them lightly grasping the rail outside the lamp chamber, two held in the air at odd angles. Wind whipped their hair into a spiderweb around them. Their clothes were strange, archaic.

The two boys were joined at the hip.

They stared straight at her, solid black eyes making the hundreds of yards of space disappear.

They hadn’t been in the previous frame, taken only a second before.

She managed to get to the ground and shook the water from her hair. When she did, pain hit her with stiletto sharpness, and an involuntary cry left her mouth as she whipped her hand up to the side of her head, cradling the small scar above her ear. She massaged the bulge, born of scar tissue and healing bone, and forced her breath into controlled bursts until the light behind her eyes receded.

Eventually, she opened her eyes. She could see the lighthouse through the trees, but it was still dim February and whoever was in charge of the historic lighthouses of the coast hadn’t started the season yet. The distant building was now fully shrouded in gloom as the sun shimmered weakly on the horizon, an old man going to bed. She moved through the slick leaves and greedy, slurping mud of the little forest toward Frenchman’s Head.

There were two young boys atop the lighthouse in the storm. They might need help.

But that wasn’t it—not really. She was sensitive to phenomena, and she knew a little about the spirit world. It was why she was on this trip, after all—she normally photographed auras and haunts, and she’d only stopped to shoot the lighthouse on a whim. And in her deep places, she knew that the boys weren’t going to need help when she got there.

But she needed help, all right. She needed this, whatever it was. She moved a little faster. If she hurried, she could make it there in twenty minutes.

The lighthouse was monolithic; a great pale erection jabbing out of the earth and thrusting toward the sky. It loomed over Laci as she struggled through the wet tangle of trees and brush that covered the gorge below the cliffs. Far below, the ocean surf spasmed and released onto the rocks.

As Laci approached the sentinel, her stomach churned. There was energy here. It danced along her spine and tickled the back of her neck.

“Hello?” she called, blocking the rain from her eyes with her hand. She held her camera in her other hand and as she rounded the side of the building she instinctively pulled it close, like a shield.

The children loomed over her, not speaking, barely breathing.

The two boys, identical twins, watched as Laci approached. Their black hollow eyes stared down at her from the promenade of the lamp room. They were attached at the hip, their old-fashioned schoolboy uniforms perfectly stitched to allow for the disfiguration.

Their black hair shone like kerosene dripping from their pale brows. They barely moved as they clutched the guard rail. The wind tugged at their clothes, but if the driving February rain was cold on them their faces didn’t register it.

“Hello?” Laci said again, but more quietly, more hesitantly. Acting on instinct, she drew the camera to her face and pressed the trigger. The Canon fluttered, snapping off a flurry of shots.

The boys said nothing.

She framed her shots and bled the last bit of light from the sky. Then she opened her cell phone and called 911.

The Sheriff’s car was quickly followed by a camera crew from the local news station, and when Laci saw it coming she looked at Officer Danton.

He shrugged. “They scan the police band.” He wore his rain slicks and had his Maglite out. Adjusting his hat, he clicked the light on and flipped it toward the third level of the lighthouse.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, taking a half-step back toward his car.

Two pairs of black eyes shone down at him. The boys stared at Laci, ignoring the cop. They were soaked to their pale skin.

“Conjoined twins,” Laci said, snapping a slow-shutter picture in Danton’s light. ‘I have no idea where they came from. They weren’t there—then they were.”

“Hello?” Danton asked. He kept the light on their faces. The stark, bright beam elongated the shadows on their cheeks, under their eyes. “You…kids all right?”

The boys said nothing. They briefly swiveled their heads, looked at the source of the light, then turned back in tandem to stare again at Laci.

“I think they could be deaf,” she said, shuddering in the chill rain. “They don’t respond to me. I don’t know that they can hear us.”

The television crew parked their van several meters back from the squad car. Laci watched as a young woman got out and unloaded some camera gear while a man checked himself in a side mirror.

“Can you hear me?” Danton suddenly yelled. “How did you get up there?”

“The door on the side is locked,” Laci said. “I already tried it.”

“Maybe they locked it when they went up there?”

“Doubt it,” said Laci. “It’s a big old padlock. Looks like it’s been there a while.”

Danton turned to Laci. “Guess you thought of everything, then, didn’t you?”

“Sorry,” Laci said. “I’ll let you do your job.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” said Danton. “Since you’re so eager to help, you want to hold this flash for me while I grab some my lock tools out of my trunk?” He smiled disarmingly at her, showing perfect teeth. No hard feelings, the smile said.

“Glad to, Sheriff.” She took the Maglite from him and held it on the boys.

They said nothing. They did nothing.

All along the coast, windows were shuttered and doors locked as the wind picked up and the rain intensified. A storm was on the way, and there was no telling what it was going to bring with it.

Eventually they got the children off the balcony, and Sheriff Danton called an ambulance to come get them. Aside from their bizarre condition, they appeared to be physically fine. They were pale and thin, but the medics announced that their hearts were healthy and all their vital signs stable.

The children refused to speak, however, and because they hadn’t appeared in any missing person reports, the sheriff decided that they would go to the children’s hospital in Calamity Falls until the proper authorities could be determined and contacted.

Laci, meanwhile, spoke to the local TV crew about finding the boys and what she had been doing in the woods. They offered her five hundred dollars for her photos, which she accepted, and then the Sheriff gave her a ride back to her car.

She checked into a Motel 6 with strict instructions that she was not to leave town until the Sheriff had talked to her again, and the police department paid for her room. She waved as the Sheriff drove away, but as soon as he was out of the parking lot she ducked behind her car and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach.

She was exhausted from her exertions and the miserable weather, and her head pounded flashes of blinding light behind her eyes with every beat of her pulse. She massaged the tender flesh behind her ear and it relieved a bit of the pressure, but not as much as some Percocet and a hot shower would.

The Percocet she had in her handbag. The shower was waiting for her in her rented room. She stood there for another few seconds, in the antiseptic glare of the vapor lights of the parking lot, then slowly began to walk toward the motel and warmth.

She awoke to the sound of knocking, and for a few moments was disoriented—she wasn’t in her bed, she wasn’t in her apartment, and she couldn’t hear the normal morning noises of traffic and the upstairs neighbors arguing about money.

And then it came back to her—the boys on the balcony. That strange silhouette, the gently waving arms, the spiderweb hair.

Those black, black eyes.

She heard the knock again, and looked toward the door of her room. It would be Sheriff Danton, she was sure, ready to continue the interrogation of the night before.

“Just a minute,” she called, and frowned at the sound of her own voice. Before the operation and all the treatments, she had sounded like a robust young woman. Now her voice was that of a much older person—a frail person, a weak person.

“Just gotta put some clothes on,” she told the door, and she forced herself to put some strength into it. She rolled off the bed and looked for her slacks and shirt, found them in a crumpled heap and shrugged into them. She checked the night table, saw the camera and her keys, nodded, and dragged herself over to the door. In some odd way she was looking forward to this, the questions and answers. Her attention, her imagination, had been completely captured by the twins at the lighthouse, and maybe she could learn more about them from the policeman.

But when she opened the door, it wasn’t Sheriff Danton standing there on the other side. It was an old man, seventy or eighty maybe, with a face lined like ancient parchment, hands gnarled by arthritis and a shock of white hair over each ear.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, his voice hesitant, his posture uncertain. “You don’t know me, but I got your name from the folks at the newspaper, and I figured you’d be staying here, so I thought…”

They both stood there for a moment, the man holding one hand in the other, not looking straight at her, Laci confused and feeling rumpled in her already-worn clothes. Then he spoke again.

“You took those pictures of the boys at Frenchman’s Head yesterday,” he said, “and I’d be obliged if I could ask you a few questions about them.”

“You—who are you?” she asked finally.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “No manners at all! My name’s Caleb Mears, and I’m from here in Calamity Falls. I used to be the keeper at the lighthouse, back in the fifties, after the war.”

“Oh my,” she said, a rush of interest shooting through her. “Absolutely you can come in—sorry I look like this, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I was too tired to get my stuff out of the trunk…”

“Oh, no need to apologize,” said Mears, smiling. And now he looked at her, and she felt a frisson as she saw his eyes—they were clear and black, and for a moment she had a vertiginous sense that it was the twins standing there before her, in their schoolboy outfits and mussed hair—but the moment quickly passed as she stood aside and let the old man enter. “I’ve been married to three women, and they were none of ‘em fashion models straight out of bed. You look a damn sight better than most early risers.”

“Thank you,” she said, and motioned toward the chair next to the bed. Then she laughed.

“Something funny?” he asked, his smile slipping. She could see his teeth white and strong - dentures, probably.

“Oh, I was just going to ask you if you wanted something to drink,” she said. “Forgot I wasn’t home. All I can offer you is water.”

“Never drink the stuff,” he said somberly. “Takes years off your life.”

Instantly, the smile returned to his face.

“All right, then,” she said, dropping to sit on the side of the bed, looking at her guest. “What can I do for you, Mr. Mears?”

“Caleb,” he said. “You can call me Caleb, if you want.”

“Caleb, then,” she said. “You said you had some questions?”

“Yep,” he said. “Just a few. But the most important one is—can I look at those pictures you took yesterday? They ran one of ‘em on the news last night, but it was only on the TV for a second, and when the paper came out this morning they only had a picture of the boys being taken away in the ambulance. I’d…I’d like to see those boys, if I may.”

Laci sat there motionless for a moment, then nodded her head. “I suppose that’d be okay,” she said, leaning over and reaching for the Canon. “Mind if I ask why you’re so interested?”

“If I could just look at them for a minute,” he said, “I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise—on my honor.”

“All right,” she said, bemused. “Here, lean over a little so you can see the screen.” He complied, and she could smell the old man’s cologne - something cheap and manly, something a grandchild would give him for Christmas, maybe. Old Spice.

“These are all just shots of the lighthouse from that little forest down by the viewpoint…”

“Right above Corpse Cove,” murmured the old man. “I know exactly where you were.”

“Corpse Cove?” she asked. “It’s not called that on the map.”

“Bodies used to wash up there,” he said. “Every time a ship wrecked, you’d get half the dead sailors washed up on the beach a few days later. The ones the sharks didn’t get, that is. And, no. The official name is Beaulieu’s Cove, named after the same French fellow the cape is. Nice pictures, by the way—pretty enough to be in a book.”

“I’ve had my stuff in books,” she murmured, clicking the finder forward. “But not this kind of stuff.”

“You a, whaddyacallit, photojournalist?” he asked.

“I take pictures of auras and spirits,” she said. She used to be self-conscious when she told people what she did, but she eventually grew a shell. Mostly, people just nodded and changed the subject, or asked asinine questions, but occasionally she got sarcasm or hostility. None of that mattered anymore, though—after all the suffering she’d been through, she could handle idiocy from the Philistines.

But Caleb just nodded, intently peering at the view screen. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

She was going to ask him what he meant, but then they got to the money shot, and he gasped and stiffened beside her. Alarmed, she whipped her head around, fearing that the old man was suffering a heart attack next to her, and what she saw didn’t comfort her at all - Caleb had gone completely pale, his black eyes were open so wide she could see the little veins on their sides, and he shook silently.

“Mr. Mears?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“My Lord,” he breathed, and she sensed those two words were more prayer than ejaculation. “They’ve come back.”

“Who?” she asked, fear warring with excitement in her brain. Whatever was coming, whatever had come with the storm, was going to reveal itself to her. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was meant to be here right now, in a cheap room at the Motel 6 next to this old lighthouse keeper. “Who’s come back?”

“My sons,” he whispered, and tears began to roll down that ancient face.

“My first wife’s name was Sarah,” he said after they’d ordered down for whiskey and soda, “but everyone called her Sally. I married her before I went off to Europe in forty-three, and when I got back we bumped around Oregon for a while before we decided to settle back on the coast. They were lighting the lighthouses up again - you know a Japanese sub got all the way over here, once? Happened in ‘42, and the Lighthouse Service shut ‘em all off for the duration of the war, but in ‘45 they needed families to run the things again, and there I was, looking for work.” He smiled. “It was a dream, young lady. We had a nice little house, plenty of privacy, and it wasn’t too far to town in case Sally wanted to shop or something. And every nine months or so, the USLS would drop off another tank full of coal oil and boxes of books for us to read.”

“Sounds…maybe a little boring?” said Laci.

“Sometimes it was,” said Mears. “Sometimes it was indeed. But we were young and in love, and Sally and I weren’t really all that sociable a couple, anyway. It’s why we were vagabonding around in the first place. I got my fill of people during the war in Italy—don’t like being too close to anyone, you know? Foxholes and such…”

His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes momentarily, lost in memory. But he soon reopened them and looked again at the picture on the view screen, the twins standing there in the gloom, their hair whipped by the wind and rain.

“And Sally came from a big Eye-talian family up in Portland, and they had about a thousand kids, you know? She loved the idea of having her own bathroom, having her own clothes without having three older sisters wearing ‘em first. It was a stroke of luck, this job was.”

“And you had kids?” Laci prompted.

“And we had two sons,” he said quietly, nodding as he looked at the camera. “We didn’t know we was having twins when she caught pregnant, nor during the pregnancy itself. Sally was huge, all right, but what did we know? Tom Foster came out from town every month or so, make sure Sally was eating enough, check her blood and such, but they didn’t have them ultrasounds or anything back then, and Doc Foster was a bit of a drunk anyway, so we never knew. Not ‘til they came, anyway…”

“The twins,” said Laci. “The boys on the balcony.”

“We never let ‘em up there,” said Mears. “Too dangerous. The house is only about fifty feet tall, but the winds you get up there will whip you right off, you’re not careful. And Jed and Jerry weren’t all that coordinated sometimes.”

“Those are their names?” she asked softly. She was enrapt in the tale, and her questions were all lubricant for the story, meant to oil it along. It was working, too.

“Jedidiah and Jeremiah,” he said. “Lucky they have names at all, you know. I ended up delivering ‘em myself—they came a few weeks early, and we couldn’t get to town for the birth. I had an old Packard, and it wouldn’t run half the time without you took apart the whole engine and put it back together, and when the twins came it was dead on the drive, so there we were. There was a storm going, just like there is right now, and they hadn’t electrified all the way out to Frenchman’s head, so we were in the dark, there in the Keeper’s house.” He stopped for a second, and wiped his eyes.

“You know, I’d fought at Monte Cassino and Rome in the Big One, I’d had a ship torpedoed from under me and had to swim for six hours to get to land. But that night—well, it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Sally—poor, beautiful Sally—had a hell of a time with the birth. She was a small woman, and we were both little more than kids, you know? We didn’t know what we was doing at all, and when Jed’s head came out, I was so scared I think I would’ve rather faced a whole squadron of Krauts right at that moment.”

A knock came on the door. Laci took a second to come out of her entranced state, gave Mears an apologetic look and stood.

“You wanted room service?” asked the man at the door, his look signaling what he thought of customers who wanted whiskey at ten in the morning. Laci ignored him, signed for the booze and shut the door.

“Soda?” she asked Mears.

“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “If you’re gonna drink good whiskey, I see no point in watering it down.”

“How about if you throw up easily?” she asked, moving to the bathroom to get the plastic cup that was there.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he said, standing to join her as she unwrapped the sanitary protection on the glass. “I appreciate the whiskey, and you letting me look at the pictures, Miss Powell. You don’t need to drink with me.”

“I’m alive right now when I should be dead, Mr. Mears,” she said, setting the cup down so that she could unscrew the cap on the Maker’s Mark (a forty-dollar extra on the police department’s hotel room tab). She poured herself a couple of fingers, handed the bottle to Caleb and opened the soda water. “I’m not going to worry about what I should and shouldn’t do anymore.”

He looked at her curiously. “You’ve got a story, too, don’t you?”

“A boring one,” she said, pouring club soda into her drink. “Cancer’s not nearly as exciting as delivering conjoined twins in the dark in a rainstorm.”

“Exciting,” he snorted. “Yeah, it was exciting, all right. You got a glass for me?”

“Just take the bottle,” Laci said. “What I’ve got should do me fine.”

He shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips, drank. He swallowed, the Adam’s apple on his neck jiggling as the fiery liquid went down, set the whiskey on the bed table and sighed contentedly.

“I almost killed them right then,” he said.

Laci looked at him.

“I stood there in the flickering candlelight, looking at Sally, who was near unconscious by then, been ripped apart and was bleeding so strongly that I thought I’d never be able to stop the flow. And in my hands, covered with blood and slime, I had…I had this thing, this freakish spidery-looking tangle of limbs and heads and squalling screams, and my first impulse was to take them and throw them as hard as I could against the wall. You believe that?”

Laci took a long pull of her drink and didn’t speak. She moved past Mears, back to the bed, and sat down. He stayed in the doorway of the bathroom, looking at her with his black eyes. Finally, she answered.

“I think that’s natural,” she said. “Last night, when I saw them up there on the lighthouse, saw them staring down at me, I wanted to…I wanted them to be gone. I didn’t want them to exist. They scare me, Mr. Mears, and even though they’re at the hospital right now, they scare me still. And I don’t know why.”

“They went to that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally killed herself.”

Laci looked up at him.

“They were nine, just like they are in those pictures you showed me,” he said. “We kept them at the lighthouse because people were scared of ‘em, and because they were odd.” He used the word carefully, as if he’d said it before a million times in reference to his sons. “They didn’t talk much. Not to us, anyway. When they were alone, and they thought we couldn’t hear ‘em, they’d chitter like jaybirds in a cornfield - but as soon as they saw their mother or I coming, they’d clam up again. And you know what? It was scary, Miss Powell. Those children scared the living Jesus out of me. And Sally felt the same way—we’d be in our room at the Keeper’s house, and the twins were in the next room over, and it would be pitch black. I’d be lying there next to my wife, both of us awake though it was the middle of the night, neither of us saying a word but both of us knowing we were still conscious. And the boys never cried, never screamed, were always perfectly quiet throughout the night…

“Except sometimes, every few nights, they’d make a noise.”

“What noise?” asked Laci, gripping the plastic cup in her palms so tightly the material was bent.

“A scrabbling noise,” said Mears. “A noise like they was slowly, carefully crawling out of their crib in the middle of the night. A noise like one of them maybe slipped a little on the way down to the floor, had to grab for one of the slats real quick, and then it would be silent—me and Sally lying still and quiet in our bed, Sally crying without making any noise, and Jed and Jerry hanging there in the blackness, waiting to see if I’d get up, light a lantern and come see what they were doing. Sometimes, that stillness would go on for hours.”

“Did you ever go check?” Laci asked.

“No,” whispered Mears. “No, I never did. But I thought about it all the time. I’d be in the lantern room, changing the wick, and that image would come to me. And I’m sure Sally thought about it, too—she’d be back in the house with the boys, feeding ‘em, changing ‘em, watching ‘em grow up into what you saw last night—and they never talked to her. Never told her they loved her. When they got old enough, they’d start to just disappear, go rambling in the woods for hours, come back all burrs and smudges and skinned knees, never say a word.

“Once, they disappeared all day. I got back to the house, Sally was frantic. She hadn’t seen them since breakfast, and she was about ready to bust a gut, she was so incoherent and terrified.

“Well, we went looking, and guess where we found them?”

Laci was startled. As if she would know…

But she did. Somehow, she did.

“Corpse Cove,” she said.

“Bingo,” whispered Caleb, and took another long pull from the bottle. “There’d been a wreck that I didn’t know about—some pleasure boat on a long fishing trip from Astoria. They hadn’t bothered to let anyone know where they were going, so none of us were on the lookout for ‘em or anything. But they wrecked, all right, and the five people on board all washed up in the cove that day. And Jed and Jerry—they were there.”

“What were they doing?” asked Laci querulously. Her weak voice was back, and she didn’t care.

“Standing over those poor men, chittering,” said Caleb. “Standing over them, waving their arms, gabbling to each other in that language they had. I didn’t find ‘em—Sally did. I just heard all about it that night, in bed. How they would sometimes kneel down, stroke the bloated skin of the dead men, smile and chant, and how Sally screamed at them while she spent ten minutes picking her way down the slope to get to ‘em. But they never heard her, or just plain ignored her.”

He stopped again. Looked at Laci.

“You haven’t asked me how it’s possible,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.