Banana Tree Boulevard

"I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.”

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

1

When Ellie and Elijah moved into the house on Prescott Lane a few weeks after they were married, Ellie felt as if her life lay before her, full of promise. For the first time in a long time, she felt whole. They’d passed it on a drive almost a year before, and she fell in love with it immediately. That love was intensified by the FOR SALE sign in the front yard. She begged Eli to call the realtor listed on the sign. He took some reminding, but finally did it. They met with the realtor and were pleased to find that they could afford the house and the several acres of land. It would take some scrimping, some careful planning, but it was worth it. It wasn't a palace, or even that remarkable as houses went, but Elijah liked that Ellie liked it, so they started the process of buying it.

As they signed papers, the realtor—a slightly overbearing woman in a bright pink pants suit and too much makeup—nervously mentioned a series of disappearances in the area over the last few months.

It brought the signing to a standstill. Eli asked several pointed questions.

Two high school girls from up the road near Glen Lake disappeared one after another. One of the girls lived a few properties down Prescott on the other side. The other was from four or five miles further into the country. After some investigation, though, the police designated them as runaways, based on considerable evidence of terrible home lives.

Ellie and Eli stepped outside the realtor's office and chatted quietly about safety. Ellie’s love of the house and property burned brighter than her fear. They went back inside and finished signing.

2

Although not officially moving into the house on Prescott Lane until after the wedding and honeymoon, Ellie and Elijah started moving furniture and belongings in so that, when they returned home, it would be ready. Ellie also felt it would be good to get her pet ducks, Maddison and Bill, used to their new surroundings.

After a small but lovely wedding and a blissful honeymoon, they moved in and started their new life together, and everything felt as close to perfect as Ellie could imagine. She loved the house, the property, the little stream, and the space they had away from their neighbors. It wasn’t special. Plenty of people had big backyards, Ellie knew, but this chunk of land was hers and Eli’s to do with as they wished. They could spend their lives making it their own. She looked forward to that process intensely.

Only one part of their new property seemed strangely out of place. Behind the house, the ground gently sloped away to where the stream cut across the yard. The previous owners had carefully widened the otherwise deeply cut banks of this stream, and the water flowed into a wide, shallow riffle that both Madison and Bill had already claimed. On the other side of that shallow spot was a grove of tall, thickly planted banana trees that seemed to Ellie, vaguely menacing. When they visited the house in the winter, the trees had been brown and drooping, squashed by frost and cold, and the field and woods beyond could be easily seen.

Now, the banana trees were full and hugely tall and radiant green. Their wide palm-like leaves rustled together hypnotically, even when there was no breeze. 

Ellie, standing at the kitchen window and staring at the strange patch of tropical green, decided to walk down and visit with her ducks and get a closer look at the banana trees.

3

Tuesday morning, Elijah drove to Virginia to meet his cousin, who had an eight-hour layover before being deployed overseas. Ellie wanted to stay home and paint the guest room and get more acquainted with her new home and property. By eleven, she had completed the first coat but was developing a roaring headache from the paint fumes and so walked down into the backyard to see Bill and Madison.

Bill, a mallard, Ellie had raised from a duckling. Wherever she went on the property, Bill followed her around quacking contentedly. He even let Ellie pick him up and cuddle him, which she did often. Madison, a white duck, was more aloof. She hung around but was less fond of being touched or handled. She also sometimes bullied Bill, and Ellie tried to separate them when those disagreements occurred. Despite their quirks (Eli called them “quacks”) Ellie loved them both like her own children.

In the late morning light, the banana trees radiated a luminous, shimmering green. She stood and stared at them and wondered why they were there and why there were so many and what was on the other side of them. It was the only part of the property that she and Eli hadn’t yet explored. She wondered why she felt so unsettled by the thick boles. She felt that eyes were staring back at her as she gazed at them. A tiny but firm voice sounded inside her head. These were her banana trees; this was her property. She slipped off her sandals and walked through the ice-cold shallow stream and climbed up on the other side. The banana trees were so much taller up close, and their spreading palms created thick shade within their verdant stalks.

She glanced back at her house and felt a flush of happiness and joy as she reminded herself again that it all belonged to her and Elijah. That reassured her again that these banana trees were her property, too, and she stepped into their midst.

4

As a girl, Ellie had often played in the cornfields around her childhood home. She was used to the way space felt in the tight stems and waving leaves. She learned early on that it was important to keep a sense of where the sun was, so she didn’t get disoriented.

In the dense, leafy depths under the banana trees, there was space to walk and even stand up straight, but she had trouble keeping track of her position. It didn’t worry her too much, though, because she knew, eventually, she would come out the other side. The rest of the county wasn’t populated with banana trees, the internal voice said.

The air was thick with their odd perfume. Thin grass, tall but pale, grew between the boles. Ellie’s head felt strangely heavy, but she blamed the paint fumes.

She kept going forward, and as she did, a sense of unease grew in her chest. She wasn’t lost, but she felt as if she was trespassing on someone else’s land. She knew that this was her property, but it didn’t assuage the feeling of wavering displacement.

Finally, after a meandering walk, she could see grass beyond the palms and trunks. As Ellie stepped clear of the banana trees, she was startled to see that directly in front of her was her house, sitting on the other side of the wide spot in the stream and up a gentle rise, by Prescott Lane. Once again, Ellie had the strong feeling that something was off, but she couldn’t place what it was. Maybe, she thought, it was just the sensation of having gotten turned around in the banana trees.

She was across the riffle and moving back toward the house when she noticed that her sandals, which she had placed on the grassy bank opposite the banana trees, were gone. She didn’t see Madison anywhere either, but Bill was wandering in the grass to her left. She called out to him, but he didn’t move toward her. Frowning at this, she went toward him. He waddled away, quacking discontentedly.

5

Bill was her baby. Other people had dogs or cats and called them fur-babies, a term she hated, but understood. Ellie had her ducks. Bill from the egg had bonded with Ellie. Madison, they had rescued her from a trailer park when she was still young, but old enough to have been traumatized by hordes of unsupervised kids and dogs running at full tilt around the junky neighborhood. It had taken months for the white duck to get used to her new, quieter surroundings. Bill had helped with this, proudly waddling around his new friend and being mouthy at anything that upset Madison. They were friends, or whatever the analog to friendship was in duckworld. The trust Madison had in Bill didn’t extend to anyone else. The only reason that she sometimes let Ellie pick her up was that Bill seemed to think it was safe and okay. His gentle mallard personality and chivalrous heart made Ellie love him even more.

Yet, now he was as aloof as Madison. He continued to waddle away from her, and when she finally gave up, upset and hurt, she turned back toward her house. As she walked up the hill, she noticed a strange car in the driveway.

When she’d walked out into the backyard, only her small, spunky car was parked there. Eli had taken his pickup. Now, her car was gone and something immense—it looked to her like a hearse—was in her spot. As she got closer, she slowed and moved left, so that she was hidden behind the house. With Eli away, and Ellie still unfamiliar with their new surroundings and neighbors, she didn’t want to be seen just yet.

From the vantage of the back corner, though, she could see that the vehicle was a very old station wagon. It had to be twenty feet long, at least and a deep metallic blue with wood panels. Her father once told her that there was a term for antique cars and trucks with wooden panels, but she couldn’t think of it just then.

As she was considering what to do next, Ellie heard a strange sound coming from the front yard. It was as if someone was dragging or scraping something heavy along the cement driveway. She peeked around the corner and patted her jeans to ensure she had her phone. With a shock, she understood that she had left it on the kitchen table. Silently cursing her carelessness, Ellie leaned back around and gazed up toward the front of the house. The sound continued and she had a sudden realization of what it was. Someone was stealing their newly purchased porch furniture, and she was the dummy who left the house open, thinking it would be a safe way out here in the country. 

Her moment of passionate rage was doused by an icy stab of fear. At the front corner of the house was a person, back turned to her, dragging a large black trash bag on a furniture dolly toward the open tailgate of the wagon. 

They had a weird familiarity that she couldn’t place in that moment, and yet that she felt she knew them; the narrow shoulders, the particular stoop of the back, the hair tied back, but with a halo of flyaways wafting in the breeze. When the man stood and turned, she caught his profile and felt a swelling of nausea. Cold sweat broke out on her skin.

It was Elijah.

6

Her head filled with a thousand bitter and burning curses. The first thing that she wanted to do was run out and welcome him home and ask what he was doing. The scene before her didn’t make sense, but why shouldn’t she give her husband the benefit of the doubt? He was very pragmatic, and she knew he rarely did anything without good reason. He was never one to lie to her. If he said he was going to Virginia, then that’s what he would do, unless something else came up.

But then her mind swerved into other potent possibilities. Whose station wagon was this and what was he moving and why? Sudden and irrational questions filled her head. Was he robbing her? Maybe he had decided to leave her, fed up already with her and the ducks. She took a shuddering breath and tried to calm herself. She hadn’t given herself over to this kind of unmoored thinking in a long time. She put her hand on the back wall of the house and tried to still her suddenly rambling and unsettled thinking. It took a moment, but she started to calm down and quieter, more reasonable questions slowly suffused her thoughts.

She was almost ready to walk around the house and confront him, when she heard Eli curse. There was an icy tinge of brutal rage in his voice that she had never heard before. Ellie peeped around the corner again. As she looked on, what she saw dashed her newly found calm against sharp rocks of true horror. While trying to lift one of the plastic bags into the station wagon, part of the thin plastic had caught on the corner of the tailgate and torn open. As she stood there gaping at the scene, the contents of the bag spilled out. She clasped her hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek and sprinted back down toward the stream. Animal panic filled her and she could only think to run as fast and as far away from that torn bag as she could.

Forgetting her sandals, her ducks, and her own mind, she splashed across the riffle and up the other bank and into the banana trees. She was only a few steps under them before she bent double and vomited her breakfast into the thin grass beneath the waving, deep green palm fronds.

7

Ellie was no coward. She was also not prone to hallucinations. She didn’t drink alcohol, and she didn’t smoke weed. She didn’t do anything that altered her mind because she knew that the mind could be bad enough without all those added misdemeanors. As a child, she suffered realistic night terrors and learned the hard way that the brain could be a hateful place. To prove that the night terrors were not true, she had to dissect them in her mind by the cold light of what she knew was real and true.

She sat huddled under the banana trees, trying to get her very upset brain to replay the whole thing. Elijah, or someone who looked frighteningly similar to him, was lifting bags of something (she now knew what) into the back of a classic station wagon she had never seen before. One of those bags tore and spilled open, and she had seen the contents. At first, she thought that it was the arm and bare torso of a mannequin as they use in dress shops. The gentle bow and curvature of the bicep, the bending wrist past the forearm. The hand in the limp posture of sleep. The sweeping arch of a bare back. Mannequin arms looked like that, she knew, but mannequin arms weren’t that flexible. They didn’t bend like that, and their connective tissues were round and mechanical, not sheer red joints with the cut ends of bones and ligaments showing like she had seen when her butcher cut joints of meat. 

And mannequins didn’t have tattoos or acne scars.

Her heart thudded harder in her chest, but she forced it to settle with deep breaths. Why would Elijah be lifting human body parts into a car he didn’t own? Most importantly, though, why would he do it in the middle of the day, when he knew that she would be home? None of it made sense, and slowly, the urge to understand overwhelmed the fear and disgust, and slowly, carefully, she rose to her feet and wandered out of the banana trees and down to the riffle and across to her backyard. 

Oddly, her sandals were on the grass by the bank, where she had left them. Bill and Madison walked over to her and quacked affectionately. She picked Bill up and snuggled his feathery head to her cheek and scolded him gently for being so hard to get along with earlier. His calm, comfortable demeanor soothed her, and she took another deep breath and then, setting the mallard down, walked back toward the house with the intent of accosting Elijah, no matter what happened.

As she neared the house, she saw her car was in the driveway, not the station wagon. There was no sign of the nightmare contents of those bags, anywhere. No sign of anything that she had just seen, gazing around the back corner of her house.

How long was she in her daze under the banana trees, freaked out, upset, crying, wondering what her husband was doing? An idea came to her then. What if she had wandered through the banana trees and onto someone else’s property? What if she had stumbled on some horrible human who lived on the other side of her property? Maybe there was a killer chopping up women’s bodies across the stream and through the banana trees. That idea didn’t last long.

The man had looked too much like Elijah to quibble. She knew his profile anywhere, and better than anyone, except his mother. No, as reassuring as it might be to believe it, that wasn’t some other property, because everything had been too perfectly the same. The house was her house, the property was her property, and that had been her little mallard, Bill, too. If she knew Elijah’s face, she also knew that little duck’s waddle. True, she hadn’t seen his “bill”, because he’d been moving away from her the whole time, but that was her duck.

Then what, she asked herself, had she seen? Had she had a dream? Was it one of those weird seizures she’d read about? Would her reaction have been so sudden, so severe, so legitimate if it had been just in her head? And what did that say about her, if she was seeing such things?

She got to her back door and went inside and the tension, unease, and terror that she’d felt before washed out of her immediately. This was her house. Her home. She went in and saw a notification on her phone. It was a text from Elijah. 

Made it to VA. Miss you.

She started to text him back, but then thought better of it. She would make an excuse later, if she needed to, but she had to check some things first. She went out the front door and looked for any sign that what she had seen was real. As she suspected, there were no body parts, no shredded black bags, no sign of a struggle. She checked every room in the house, but there wasn’t a hint that there had been anything at all amiss from when she had gone to the creek and into the banana trees.

8

It was almost four o’clock when Ellie finally landed on the only explanation that fit. It was a stupid explanation, of course, and she knew it, but it was also the only one that made sense. She had gone into her bedroom to lay down, trying to get her mind off of what she had seen. As she lay staring at the ceiling, the revelation erupted in her head with startling clarity.

 It was so simple, so elegant, so perfect that she knew there was no argument against it.

She replayed the entire experience of that morning. She left her sandals on the bank by the riffle and waded across through the cold, shallow water. Up on the other side, she had wandered into the banana trees. How long had she been in there? She couldn't say, but she had walked for a while, marveling at them, wondering why they were there. She had been surprised to come out right back where she had gone in, even though she had no memory of turning.

On the other side of the stream, her sandals were gone. Bill had run from her, and a strange car was in her driveway. A lot of that was enough to confirm her theory, but there was more. The stranger who looked like Elijah. The bags of (her mind skipped thinking the words, but showed a picture of that pale arm, severed cleanly at the shoulder flopping onto the ground) an unspeakable horror being shoved into the back of a station wagon that she had never seen before. Everything, the house, the land, the property, looked the same.

What finally confirmed her theory was the simple question that kept circling in her head above all the others: Why would Elijah lie about going to Virginia, then move bags (full of body parts) in broad daylight when he knew that she would be home?

The only explanation was the one that made the least sense. And yet had to be the answer. She got up off her bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were clear. The young woman in the mirror looked back at her and mouthed three words.

The banana trees. 

9

By dinner time, she had made up her mind. She slipped out of her sandals and put on heavy wool socks and her waterproof hiking boots. She took off her flowing frontier-style dress and put on jeans, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a flannel over top, tucked in. It was mid-June and very warm for the time of year, but she didn’t want to risk anything. 

She put the pale-handled pocket knife that her work friend had given her on her last day before the wedding into her front hip pocket, and then took the cut-down baseball bat that Ellijah kept from when he tended bar in Greely, back before they had been more than friends. Burned into its side, the former bar owner had etched “The Mind Changer” in large, block letters. 

Then, tucking her phone in her back pocket, she went out the back door and, taking a deep breath of late afternoon summer air, she went down the hill, across the riffle, and up into the banana trees and into the longest evening of her life.

She wandered through the deeper shade under the banana trees and came back out, as she suspected, on the bank of the stream, facing the back of her house, or, this version of her house. She crossed the riffle and mounted the opposite bank. Bill waddled toward her. She looked down at him and nearly fell back into the shallow water. 

This was not her Bill. The duck's left eye was completely missing. Scar tissue covered where the eye had been, and streaks of scar tissue radiated out from the center like rays from the sun in a child’s drawing. 

Who, or what, could have done this to a duck as loving as Bill? More strangely, she wondered how tough this little mallard was to survive such mistreatment. Though she knew this wasn't her Bill, her heart filled with maternal rage, and she regained her footing, burbled something soothing at the duck, and moved toward the house, grasping the cut-down bat tightly.

10

The day was fading into dull grey, here, and the air hung still and flat around her. Ellie felt a sudden, powerful urge to turn back and run to the banana trees and to the version of home she knew and loved. Maybe, once Eli was home, they could cut them down, dig up their roots, and make that part of their property into a garden or a patio. Then, the feeling passed, and with it, the thoughts of damaging the trees. Something about it felt horribly wrong, as though she had contemplated burning down an orphanage or ancient cathedral.

The blue station wagon was parked in the driveway by the house. She moved against the back wall and leaned there, trying to form the motivation to run around to the front, catch the Evil Eli, as she now thought of him, and beat him to a pulp for the murder of the young woman in that bag and for cutting her into pieces and for mutilating the face of the duck, Bill.

Fury boiling in her chest, she raised the bat and walked up the slope along the side of the house.

11

Evil Eli was there, sitting in a folding lawn chair, smoking a cigarette. The station wagon was open, the bags on the tailgate. The one that had been torn was closed with silvery duct tape, but part of the tear was still open, and Ellie could see the pinkish blue skin of a body part inside

“Hey!” Ellie shouted. Evil Eli jumped up and threw the cigarette into the grass. He spun and looked her full in the face. Again, she nearly fell backward.  Before she had seen him in the periphery, and the shape of his head, the arch of his back, the way he wore his clothes and hair had all seemed like him. But this wasn’t her Elijah. Just like Bill, this man’s left eye was missing, and streaks of scar tissue streaked out from the vacant cavity in jagged whitish rays.

The look of surprise on his face faded to a smile that crinkled the scars and made him look even more sinister.

“Well,” he said. “You found your way through. We wondered how long it would take.”

Somewhere in her mind, Ellie heard the word ‘we’ and that part of her that remained calm even when she was at the edge of hysteria, understood what it meant. This version of her husband knew what she did about the banana trees. The rage that had kindled when she saw the contents of the bag flared and filled her. She stepped forward and thrust the bat straight into Evil Eli’s solar plexus. He made a whooshing sound as the air left his lungs and collapsed backward into the grass. She advanced, raising the bat over her head like a samurai. She intended to bring it down on his horrible, female-killing, scarred face.

“You’re prettier than I expected.”

The voice stopped her dead. It sounded more than familiar. It was as if she had spoken the words herself, but from somewhere else. She turned her head toward the sound and stared at her own face looking back at her.

12

What happened next happened too quickly for Ellie to properly manage. The other (Evil) Ellie stood there, wearing a faded denim jumper over a red-stained t-shirt and tall Wellington boots very much the same as what Ellie had in her own mud room. In one hand, she held a huge blood-coated cleaver, and in the other, she held a limp white duck by its webbed feet. 

Ellie, moving before her mind had made a solid decision, swung around hard with the bat, stepping toward her doppelganger as she did. The cut-down bat was too short for a solid impact, but Ellie wanted only to disorient her and get away. 

The edge of the bat collided with the other Ellie’s jaw. There was a sickening crack and the woman fell back from the blow, throwing both the white duck and the cleaver into the air as she collapsed. Ellie dove to catch the body of what must have been this world’s Madison, dropping the bat as she did. She caught the duck, but as she turned it over to look at the poor thing, she saw that its left eye had been removed too, and bloody streaks radiated around it, just like Bill.

“She didn’t survive the transformation,” she heard Evil Ellie say. Her voice was muffled, as though she was speaking through cotton, and when Ellie turned to look at the woman, she saw that her jaw was askew, jutting out where it had been dislocated by the blow.

Evil Eli screamed, “NOOOOOOOO! Don’t you touch her!” and pushed Ellie out of the way as he ran toward the woman laying against the front of the house. Ellie stumbled away clutching the dead white duck to her, and tried to regain her standing position. As she balanced and straightened, she felt Evil Eli looming up behind her with the cleaver that he’d caught up from where it had fallen from his wife’s hand.  Evil Ellie pushed herself up, clutching at her face, eyes bright with bloodlust.

“She’s going to be my very special friend, Elijah,” she said. “We will help her to transform after we have some newlywed fun with her.” She laughed, but it was a coughing, wracking sound through her mismatched teeth.

Evil Eli stepped back and raised the giant cleaver, point-first, into the air. Ellie scrabbled back, trying to get away from the encroaching psychopathic versions of herself and Eli. Panic displaced rage in her heart, and she felt this world settle down over her. Here, everything was painfully, overwhelmingly silent. Like the grave, she thought.

Evil Eli was coming toward her, the cleaver gleaming in the grey light. Evil Ellie tried to follow him, but she wobbled and threw out her arm to steady herself against the station wagon. Blood was coursing from her nose and tears streamed from her eyes, which she dashed at to clear her vision. She hacked, then, and her face turned sullen purple. Blood gouted from her ruined mouth and she collapsed back against the wagon, eyes rolling up. Evil Eli stopped, dropped the cleaver into the grass and raced back toward his battered wife.

Ellie took the opportunity to look at the mutilated corpse of Madison clutched to her chest. Tears streamed from her own eyes, as she stroked the white feathers. Who would do this to a creature, she asked the heavenless skies above her. Then her mind filled with images of the young woman in the torn bag. It was someone from her world, she knew. One of the girls that had gone missing. She set the duck down gently and grabbed the cleaver out of the grass. It was heavy, clearly meant to be used with two hands to cut large pieces of meat. Exactly what this nightmare duplicate couple had used it for, she knew.

She turned to face them, laying against the side of the station wagon. Evil Eli was clutching his wife to his chest and weeping and saying strange words Ellie didn't understand. She didn't care. Her mind went blank under a cloud of sullen, smoldering fury. There was only one thing to do, now. She raised the cleaver, hefted it...

13

...and heard a sound like maniacal quacking coming from around the side of the house. Her heart was so blackened with rage, with the dreadful things that these people had obviously done, with the mutilated body of Madison the duck, that she only thought about cutting them to shreds as they cowered there. They both deserved to die. She had that power here in her hands, and she fully intended to use it. Death was what they were owed. And here she was, fittingly, a non-evil version of one of them, ready to mete out that justice. She felt her heart turning black with longing to destroy these evil, filthy, maniac versions of her own life, her own family. She stood over them and brought the cleaver over her head. Evil Eli tried to cover his now unconscious wife and raised his arms to ward off her blow. Ellie tensed her midsection to bring the cleaver down, to cut, to kill, to...

14

...rend them...

15

The ceaseless quacking came closer on her right.

She stopped and stepped back. Ellie turned around and saw Bill—this version of Bill, with the scarred face—flapping and waddling toward her. He was looking right at her with his good eye, not moving toward the two people against the car, but right at Ellie.

She realized, in that moment, with a profound shock, that she had been bent on murdering them. Bill waddled between her and them and flapped his wings at her and charged, hissing. She was forced back and away from him. Her foot caught on the edge of the driveway and it snapped her sharply out of her trance. 

Bill turned away from her and waddled over to the people he saw as his family, now quacking gently. She crumpled, legs bending, until she was sitting in the brown grass of the front yard, almost weeping with the sudden force of her realization that she was about to commit murder. She flung the cleaver toward the road. It clanged and broke in two pieces on the macadam.

“Oh Jesus,” she said and felt herself shuddering. Bill waddled around the couple protectively, occasionally turning his scarred head to look at her accusingly.

She forced herself to her feet and ran across the driveway past the house and into the back yard.

16

When she crossed the stream, the daylight had almost drained from the dull sky above her, but the banana trees still glowed as if they were in full sun.

17

The sun hovered over the horizon, casting long, warm shadows across her backyard. Bill and Madison were waddling around near the riffle, hunting for bugs in the grass. Ellie walked over and cooed at them. Bill came over, and she scooped him up and nuzzled his feathery head. He made snuggly duck noises. She set him down and scooped up Madison, who fussed but then succumbed. Ellie felt tears slide down her face into the white feathers. 

Then she walked up to the house, dug around in their stuff, and found a wooden stake and some cardboard. She popped open a can of paint and carefully wrote a message on it, then stapled it to the stake, and went back out and down and across the riffle and up to where the banana trees stood. She pushed the stake down into the soft dirt and came back across the stream and turned to look at her handiwork.

18

As the sun set, she cleaned up the painting supplies and changed out of her adventuring gear, put on her pjs, and nestled down into her bed. A text from Elijah informed her that he would be home within the hour.

As she lay there, sleep slowly settled on her, and the world faded. She drifted into sleep. In her now peaceful dreams, she heard the distinct sound of the night wind ruffling banana tree leaves.

Flies

“There came great swarms of flies into the house of Pharaoh and into his servants' houses. Throughout all the land of Egypt, the land was ruined by the swarms of flies.”

—Exodus, Chapter 8, Verse 24; The Hebrew Bible

The first time Samuel noticed the flies, he was in his cellar, checking the water heater. The pilot had gone out, he thought. When he turned the lights on, down there, he was shocked by how many flies there were. Huge, heavy, buzzing black flies. Perhaps a hundred of them. All careening psychotically at the sudden appearance of light. He wavered as he meandered through the boxes and other stacked items. The flies bombarded him, bashing drunkenly into every surface. He was startled by how beefy and slow they seemed, like flying black jelly beans.

Something must have died, he thought. Somewhere in all this mess was a dead mouse or, worse, a rat, and a fly laid its eggs in the carrion. First maggots and then these massive flies. He might not be so grossed out, except that there were so many of them. His mind automatically filled with images of roadkill and the landmine-sized droppings of really big dogs, like the Great Dane Barney, who belonged to the Coggins family, next door.

After he got the water heater sorted, he drove to Lane's Hardware over on Lancaster Street. He bought two packs of ten-each fly ribbon tubes in bright red packaging. Bill Lane, owner and operator of Lane's Hardware, said he swore by them in his horse barn. “They have some kind of flymone smell. Drives flies crazy. They land and get stuck. No fuss. Just don't get stuck to them, yourself.”

Samuel knew that Bill meant pheromone, but he just smiled and thanked him. You kept men who had access to power tools and shovels on your good side.

He drove home and, following the too-fine print on the box, deployed several of the curling ribbons from the ceiling joists in the cellar. As he went back upstairs, he noticed that there seemed to be more than before. The air was full of them. The few windows were coated with them.

Later that afternoon, Samuel decided to sit outside. The spring had been cool and wet, but that day had warmed with a promise of summer to come. He positioned a folding lawn chair by his garden, where the sun beat relentlessly on the south side of the house. He set his cooler down, popped open a can of Budweiser, and read that day's paper. 

He realized that he had dozed off when the can of Bud smacked onto the brick walkway, spilling beer across his shoes.

The sun was low over the horizon, but keenly bright on his face. He stood to chase the spilled beer, turning to lean on the chair as he did. Something caught his eye, and he glanced up. 

He nearly screamed. He also nearly fell back as he craned his head up. The entire side of his house was covered in huge, fat black flies. They just seemed to be soaking in the sun, but the side of his house was nearly black with them.

When Samuel was a boy, he went hunting with his Grandpa Willis on weekends in the fall. The old man had a ramshackle cabin up near Foggy Ridge road, out in the wild parts of the county. He used plastic tarps to make a covered area outside the cabin, over a rotting picnic table. Mounted on long stakes, the blaze orange and bright blue tarps provided some shade and turned the world beneath them intolerably blue or orange.

One trip, it rained the whole weekend, and his grandpa laid the tarps out to dry on the last day before they left after the clouds cleared.

Samuel and his grandpa had both been horrified to see that millions of large, black flies coated the blue tarp. Grandpa shook it, wafted his arms, shouted, and stomped the ground. The flies refused to leave.

This reverie came flashing back to him when Samuel looked at the side of his house, coated with flies. He assumed that they landed on the house to warm themselves in the sun. When he moved back toward the house, intending to go inside, the flies exploded in a black cloud until all but a handful were gone.

He went in and hurriedly closed the door behind him. One or two fat flies trundled around or bombarded the lights in his kitchen. He resolved to get fly spray in the morning.

When he woke, Samuel came out of a dream in which he was lying on a forest floor, facing the sky, and dead leaves were blown across his body by a cool wind. It was at once peaceful and unsettling. He lay there in his bed for a moment, letting wakefulness flow into his mind. As he stared at the ceiling, he saw two large flies buzzing around the room. He sighed and sat up.

The room erupted. At first, he thought that maybe he was still dreaming. Uncountable black dots bounced off of every surface, bombarding Samuel, the walls, the windows, and the furniture. He took a breath to scream, and flies filled his mouth, nose, and clambered over his blinking, flinching eyes. Something heavy landed on his bare forearm. He strained through the humming madness of the clouds of black flies and saw a massive red-eyed fly the size of a mouse skittering toward his elbow. He spat and, clenching his mouth and eyes shut and waving his hands about his face, threw back the covers and managed to stand. 

Flies squished under his bare feet. By the time he made it to the door, he was slipping in a stinking gunk that caked up between his toes. 

He slid and fell twice, once smashing down against the door jamb. He heard himself making tiny grunting noises as he flailed. The flies wouldn't stop. They couldn't be deterred. They kept buzzing, kept smacking into him, kept crawling with their filthy feet across every bare section of his skin. They flew up his boxer shorts and his shirt sleeves. They hammered at his ears and eyes, they scrambled to get into his nose. 

Two feet from the back door, Samuel heard something that defied his ability to understand. None of this made sense, but some part of him knew that it was still part of the natural order. He had seen big flies as a kid. Horseflies could definitely cover a quarter. These hairy monsters, red eyes glaring as they swarmed, at least seemed mindless. The sound that vibrated behind him seemed to have an unholy sentience. 

A coarse whine rose from the direction of his living room. As it did, the swarm of feral insects calmed, and for the first time, Samuel exhaled, realizing that he hadn't taken a breath since before he could remember. The room turned black as the flies settled on every surface.

At first, he thought that there was a large predator of flies in there. A massive bullfrog or toad. He felt a real stab of joy at the idea. Big flies needed big fly eaters. The shadow cast by the thing lay across the floor. Samuel took a squelching step toward the room and stopped. Here and there, rogue flies jumped and zoomed nervously before settling again.

Samuel told his grandmother about the blue tarp and the millions of flies. She never smiled and never laughed. She was what his father called a hardcore zealot. Samuel didn't know what that meant, but he assumed that it must mean she didn't like jokes. The story of the flies broke her stern countenance, however. She smiled. Not a joyful or mirthful smile, though young Samuel wouldn't have known those words, he certainly understood the concept.

Grandma's smile was grim. The light of vengeance was in her glinting, deep brown eyes. “The Lord sent a million times a million flies against the Pharaoh,” she said. “They was biting flies. More than anyone could ever count. The sky was black with the wrath of God.” She pinched his arm. “Imagine that times a billion and you're gonna know that vengeance is the Lord's.”

Samuel absently brushed at his arm where the memory of Grandma's pinch resided. At least these weren't biting flies, he thought, though, as he thought it, his mind reeled back. The thing in the living room took back his whole attention. The early morning light barely penetrated the windows, obscured as they were with flies. Yet, the sun shone outside, and it sent enough light through the fly-speckled windows to cast a massive shadow on the carpet. It jerked and moved, jumping just beyond sight.

As Samuel watched, he felt his heart bang against the inside of his chest. Then, an unspeakably horrible thing appeared. 

A long, angular leg, iron-black, sprouting coarse hair at the joints, set its obscene claw on the carpet in view. Samuel knew what this was. He heard the whine of veined, transparent wings. The horror of realization leapt up from his darkest nightmares. The smell of it was like all the dead things he had ever scented. 

He gasped, and a cloud of flies excitedly left their many surfaces and buzzed triumphantly as their nightmare deity slowly stepped into view. Samuel tried to scream. He tried to understand what it was he was seeing. He felt his sanity teeter and begin to topple.

The thing was easily the size of a wheelbarrow. Smaller flies—far bigger than any Samuel had ever seen—coated and hopped on its segmented body and legs and red multifaceted eyes.

As he watched, the front legs frenetically scraped and cleaned those eyes, then rubbed together like a hungry man looking at a plate of food he cannot wait to eat. 

Samuel vomited, though he hadn't eaten anything and as the pale contents of his stomach hit the floor, he was horrified to see bits of black flies and tiny wriggling maggots in his sick. Flies leapt off walls and furniture, coating the puddle. Seeing this, he retched again, squealing as his sanity finally crashed. He turned, his last thought to escape, to get to fresh air, to run. He got to the door before a wicked buzzing screamed in his ears. He felt something hit his back. He fell into the back door. Clouds of flies swarmed around him. He tried to pull himself up, to get away.

He felt wetness on his back and wondered if he was bleeding from where the thing had hit him, but then he felt the searing, burning agony.

The thing on his back seemed to be speaking. It chittered with mad, starving glee. In the final moments of his life as flies of all sizes coated him, Samuel thought he knew what it was saying. 

Billy Coggins heard screaming and ... something else. Something like buzzing. He went to the fence between his house and Mr. Sam's house next door. His baseball landed near the man's bird bath, and Billy knew that Mr. Sam didn't mind if he came to get the occasional fly ball that went over the fence.

He walked to the gate, slid up the hasp, and went through. Flies buzzed him, and he swept his hand through the air around his head, dashing at them. It was going to be a bad year for flies, his mom told him.

He got his ball and then went to the back door to see if Mr. Sam was okay. He knocked, but it sounded muffled.

He called. No answer. Something heavy and rough banged and scraped on the other side of the door, and Billy stepped back, frightened. 

A very bad feeling filled him, then he turned to go. On a whim, he glanced back up at Mr. Sam's house.

At first, Billy thought it was black smoke pouring from the man's chimney, but as he gazed up into the morning blue sky, he understood what he was seeing.

Flies poured out of the throat of the chimney. Millions, maybe billions of them. Slowly, the clouds of buzzing flies turned that azure sky black.

Thinking of Flannery O'Connor and Arthur Machen.

End Times Tango

"The apocalypse is always scheduled for next Tuesday."

— James Randi

 Wally Kennet woke up and was aware that before him was nothing that he had ever seen before. Unspeakably massive, unknowably vast, was a throne of sorts, rendered in the radioactive gas of a nebula that was as wide across as the Milky Way itself. Seated in the throne was a being beyond anything his feeble human mind could describe. Its eyes glowed like protostars, but it was anything but human in shape. Rather, it appeared to be some sort of massive column or obelisk, but with appendages vaguely like arms and legs. There were other beings around it, and behind the throne itself were things that hid in the absence of light. They filled him with horror, and he chose not to look at them. 

 That this incredible spectacle lay before him was the doing of his neighbor, Ted Beacon, who was beside him, cowering in spirit. Neither of them had bodies in the traditional sense anymore. They were both stripped bare and floated like grains of sand before the magnificence of the sun, perhaps kept from coming apart into atoms by the power of those glowing eyes, which burrowed into their minds and saw all.

 Wally Kennet, like many Americans, had a problem with his neighbors. The Beacons were, at first glance, when they moved in, a very nice and typical family. A mom, a dad, two kids, and the family dog. When Ted and Marti moved in on Juniper Avenue, they were welcomed by the Kennets and the other neighbors, too, as was expected. For a short time, after the Beacons arrived and were getting settled, the Kennets maintained their usual, somewhat busy daily routine and waved when they saw their new neighbors, but kept to themselves.

It was Timmy Kennet who started all this, though inadvertently. He was kicking his soccer ball in the backyard when Randy Beacon asked if he wanted someone to kick around with. Timmy couldn’t know that he was opening the floodgates, but then, how could anyone blame such a sweet-natured kid for what happened next, especially when it had innocuous beginnings like two similarly aged boys playing outside.

 Ted came out one day, while the boys were playing one-on-one, and called Randy inside. “They’re delivering the shed, and I don’t want you getting in the way.” The boy nodded and ran in to get a drink. Wally stood from pulling weeds in the garden, interested as any neighbor, when someone had something big and unwieldy delivered. He called Timmy in and then took a moment to step across to the fence their properties shared and get—as Diane’s father Hank would say—lightly acquainted.

 Ted smiled and moved across his own side yard and reached a hand across the fence. Nothing after that was the same.

 The thing in the monstrous throne spoke in both their heads. Wally Kennet decided that he was probably dead and all that remained was his spirit or something, but other than the immensity of the view before him, he wasn’t all that impressed. He guessed that, without his human sensory organs to freak out at the scale, he was pretty much impervious. He understood what this was, at least in part. Early on, he had attended Sunday school and knew about God. Before he reached age nine, he had decided that “God” was a way to make people feel guilty for the things they did wrong. It was a means to control people. He never guessed that it could be a real thing, but then, life hadn’t introduced him to Ted Beacon until just before the end. Ted, for whom everything anyone of a religious bent said, was absolutely and unalteringly infallible and true, had probably expected this. If Wally had eyes, he would have rolled them.

 “TELL YOUR TALE.” The voice from the throne said in their heads. It brooked no refusal, and so, Wally Kennet recounted the last story of his conscious life.

 “It all started with a handshake,” he told the entity. Ted floated nearby, silent and contrite.

 They had hardly unclasped hands when Ted Beacon asked the first of many annoying questions. 

 “If you died today, neighbor, would you go to Heaven or Hell?” 

 Aside from the preposterous problems associated with people who actually thought Heaven and Hell were real places, Wally truthfully thought that such a question was a horrible invasion of a person’s (his) internal and private life. The Kennets were not church people, it was true, but what they thought, believed, or who they worshipped was no one else’s business. As Wally described the incident to the thing in the throne nebula and the shapes that surrounded it, though, he considered that he may have been a little wrong.

 Wally was tempted in the moment to tell Ted exactly what he was thinking, he admitted, but decided that was not a good way to start being neighbors. And anyway, maybe Ted Beacon was joking. They lived in the Bible Belt, and such things were common and commonly mocked.

 “We really don’t think about the world in that way,” Wally said, trying to find a polite and noncommittal response. It was then that Ted Beacon had unloaded, as if from a script, with all the relevant references from both Old and New Testaments, all the reasons that Wally and his family were doomed and destined for the fiery pit of hell. He then invited them to the church that the Beacon family attended regularly on every Sunday morning and evening, Wednesday (for Bible and Prayer meeting), Thursday for the family fellowship, and every other Saturday for worship and praise singing.

 After quite a long invitation, during which Wally really did think that Ted Beacon might ask him to kneel in prayer, Wally just smiled and blew past it all and said, “What do you do for a living, Ted?”

 Diane later told him that it wasn’t the wrong thing to do, entirely, but he ought to have been a little more thoughtful about it. Saying something like, “I appreciate the invite, we’ll consider it,” would have been more polite and taken the pressure off. He hadn’t argued with her, but if Diane had been talking to Marti Beacon across the fence, maybe things would have been different.

 “I pray for my life,” Ted Beacon had responded. “And with the End Times coming, you had better pray for yours and your family’s.”

 “IS THIS CORRECT?” The entity didn’t visibly move—didn’t appear to have anything like a mouth—but Wally felt the force of its gaze move from his spirit or whatever was left of him to Ted.

 “Yes, Father!” he cried. “I tried to save him from your oncoming wrath!”

 There was a moment of silence, and then Wally felt the gaze return onto him, and he continued his tale.

 So, the next few weeks were a little tense. The boys played in the yard sometimes, but the Kennets made sure that they weren’t available on Sundays or the other days that the Beacons might try to invite them to church.

 It was a month or two into their new, strange arrangement that Ted came over and knocked on the front door. Wally was home on his lunch break, eating a sandwich in the living room and reading through the newspaper, which showed that the Midwest was under attack by huge locusts.

 “It’s time! It’s happening!” Ted was yelling through the door when Wally went to it and opened it. 

“What are you talking about?” Wally was perturbed, but some of it was actually about the locusts more than Ted.

 Ted, visibly sweating and shaking, but with a look of rapture on his face, said, “It’s time, it’s happening, as St. John prophesied in the Book of Revelation!” He was so excited that he could hardly calm himself to speak coherently. Wally felt somewhat worried by the man’s state and invited Ted inside, offered him a glass of water, and a seat at the dining room table. Ted took a few sips, coughed, and then started ranting again.

 “It’s as the Bible says. Signs of the End Times. The asteroid, the volcano, the locusts. They’re not attacking the fields or the grass, they’re attacking the people!”

 It was true, too, at least fundamentally. An asteroid the size of a Volkswagen Beetle had impacted in Wyoming, near Yellowstone, and appeared to cause the supervolcano to erupt. It wasn’t a profound, continent-ending blast, but a burble, but it had filled the sky with a massive, dark, and smoky column that was rapidly covering the earth with the help of prevailing winds. That’s when the locusts had come, and yes, it was being said that they were huge and that they were biting people.

 “The Fifth Trumpet!” Ted took another sip of water and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

 “WAS IT?” The entity in the chair turned to Ted again. 

 “No.”

 Wally knew that science could—and had—explained all of this, of course, which is to say that there were scientific explanations that accounted for each event separately. That they had all happened in rapid succession seemed to cause some uproar in the groups that focused on eschatological themes, but Wally wasn’t given to that kind of thinking.

 In fact, it wasn’t ever quite the End Times, Wally knew. Always predicted, always imminent, never quite fulfilled. Rational people knew this well, and Wally had lived with the quiet assumption that most people were, in fact, generally rational. He had long assumed that rational people were immune to the fiery potency of blind belief, though it now seemed as though he was wrong about that. It didn’t help that, as he and Ted spoke, Wally heard something large hit the front window, which shook his own certainty for just a moment.

Later that day, while he was weeding in the garden, he saw something large on his grill. It took him several seconds to understand what he was seeing. The creature had the basic silhouette of a grasshopper, but it was the size of a crow and was dark, olive green. It gave him quite a shock, and he briefly wondered what it would be like if the skies were full of these monsters. When he got closer to it, hoping to snap a photo, it flew away without attacking him.

 Ted, though, continued to maintain that this was the fifth trumpet and that the seals were being opened by the angels and that the tribulations were happening now and that the Rapture, in which all the believers would be sucked up into heaven in an event that made Wally think of a giant Hoover in the sky, would begin any moment. 

 Once again, Wally seemed to have some memory of his childhood, or perhaps a class he took in college, in which the entirety of the Revelation of Saint John was totted up to a man in exile, eating magic mushrooms and writing about the persecution of Christians by Emperor Nero. These apocalyptic “revelations” were yet to happen in his time. They were vengeful prophecies that were going to happen, at least in the writer’s mind, very soon in his own life. Even if it actually was somehow the End Times right now, Wally reflected, the Rapture was supposed to happen long before any of the tribulations began, assuming that the book was taken literally. This was enough to cast the whole thing into doubt, for Wally and he never believed it to begin with. It seemed to fill Ted with the brittle fear of having been left out of the plans.

 Once Ted was calm again, they spoke for a while, but Wally used needing to get back to work as an excuse to cut the chat short. Once in his office, he did some research online. He found a graphic that had been put together by some church or another, but that was, for all its touching inefficacy, nevertheless quite readable. The first event, as he thought, was the Rapture, which, if it had happened already, didn’t cause a fuss at all. It also made him wonder about Ted and people like the Beacons, who were desperate, almost salivating, excited for the epoch of terror to begin. 

 The events, as proclaimed in this graphic, happened in this order: The Rapture (a subtitle said, ‘believers taken to heaven.’); then the judgement seat of Christ, which happened in Heaven, amongst those raptured, (he assumed); then the tribulation, in which the AntiChrist rises to power and there are seven years of horror on Earth. Then, the Millennium. Christ returns to earth with all his assorted (and pre-sorted) believers and rules the world for a thousand years. Then, the Great White Throne of Judgement.

 That last part, Wally reflected, might have something to it. He felt the sun-like eyes of the entity on the throne grow more intense on his spirit, and so he continued.

 It wasn’t that he wanted to argue with Ted. He genuinely felt bad about the stress that the man had heaped on himself (or that had been heaped on him by his church). Yes, the world did seem to have some issues that looked like what was written in the Bible, but also, it was all out of order, and Wally felt that he owed it to Ted, to his family, to try to help ease the tension. Diane said it was futile. She maintained that people like the Beacons were dyed-in-the-wool and had likely been indoctrinated to take all this literally from a very young age. She implied that it was a job of Sisyphus-like proportions. Wally argued that one of the Beacon children might actually need and benefit from a broader worldview. So Wally called on Ted in a strange reversal of the kind of door-knocking, let’s-talk-about-God behavior, the irony of which he was still feeling keenly in this new, spiritual form.

 The being on the throne again looked at Ted’s spirit. Wally could sense, if he could not exactly see, Ted assent to the truth of the story so far. Then it gazed back at Wally, and he started the last part of his tale.

 He had gone next door with what he felt were good intentions. He knew that it was futile from the outset. Diane was always right about these things, but he felt he could not ignore his conscience on the matter. 

Ted was receptive, at least in that he welcomed Wally and listened, or appeared to listen intently. But Wally soon got the idea that nothing he was saying, none of the research, none of the thought and intention, was making a dent. Ted had gotten up in the middle of this effort, made a call, and stayed on the phone for a long time. Wally overheard Ted speaking with someone he called Pastor Judd. Then he came back, looking sweaty and peaked and not altogether well. He was wearing a coat, too heavy and thick for the time of year.

 Ted said, “I’m sorry.” He opened his coat, and Wally saw a complex series of wires and sticks of what looked like explosives. He suddenly realized that the rest of the Beacons were standing around him. Young Randy was holding a soccer ball that Wally recognized as his own son’s. They all had strange, sad, but determined faces. Marti was holding her children close, and all of them were weeping openly. When the flash happened, Wally understood that he needed to get away fast.

 And then, they were here, floating in front of this unbearably huge being.

 “MURDER.” It said and turned its gaze back on Ted’s spirit. Ted did something that Wally understood was the emotional equivalent of sobbing, as done without a corporeal form. “Yes,” he squeaked.

 Wally suddenly had the sense that behind them—whatever behind meant in this scenario—was a crushing press of other spirits, jostling to see the forthcoming verdict. The dark things that moved behind the throne moved in excited anticipation, too, and he suddenly understood that they were this reality’s version of bailiffs, here to drag away the one who was judged guilty. Ted, whether by his own volition, such as it was, or by the immense glare of those sun-like eyes, had corroborated Wally’s story. He was so desperate, so eager for the End Times, for the Rapture, and so enthralled by Pastor Judd (whoever that was, Wally still didn’t know), that he had engaged in suicide bombing.

 Whatever allowed him to see the event, Wally had watched from outside and above Ted’s house, and he could see through the roof of the Beacon home. Ted engaged the bomb and was blown apart by fire and pressure. His wife, Marti, his son Randy, their older daughter, and their family dog, Butchy, were all vaporized in that moment. As was Wally. The Kennet house was partially destroyed by the blast, but somehow, miraculously (though not in the literal sense of that word, he assumed), Diane and Timmy were not hurt. 

 The verdict came quickly and with little fanfare. Ted turned toward Wally, and Wally felt a genuine, sincere rush of regret and remorse from him. Some of that might have been from the loss (murder) of his own family, but Wally accepted it. Then the things made of darkness beyond the throne sent deep black tendrils and drew Ted’s spirit toward their gaping, light-swallowing maws. Wally felt a stab of panic as he witnessed this. This meant that Ted Beacon was about to be ingested by the universe for his crimes. He knew that this would involve, among other things, crushing gravity and being stretched out into light-years-long tendrils before it was over. 

 Then the being on the throne looked back at Wally. There was no word, now. The glance was so potent, and yet he had a sense that had he physical eyes, there would always be two spots in his vision from those burning orbs. 

 Wally Kennet woke up in one of the red plastic Adirondack chairs by the garden in his side yard. Timmy was sitting with a little boy whom Wally didn’t immediately recognize. The boy had straight black hair and a smiling face. 

“You know what I mean?”

 Wally glanced over at the man in the other chair beside him. He was caught for a moment without knowing who the man was or what it was that he had been saying. He glanced around nervously, expecting to see that a blast had demolished most of his house. It was fine. Diane walked through the garden with another woman, laughing together at a private joke. She gave him an affectionate wink as they went by. Both were sipping from tall glasses of something that looked frosty and delicious to Wally.

 ‘You okay, Wal?” He looked over at Andy Kuang and had to shake his head a bit to get the glaring, sun-like eyes out of his mind. 

“Yeah. I’m so sorry, Andy. I think I dozed off there.”

 “All good,” Andy said. “That’s why I said we ought to go sit in the shade and have a few beers to cool off. It’s going to be a hot one, I think.”

As they walked around to the shady part of the backyard, they passed Wally’s grill. Andy didn’t see the absurdly large, dark green grasshopper-like thing sitting on it, preening itself. 

Wally did see it, but he pretended not to notice and followed his neighbor to the backyard.

Blood and Monsters

"A fiend out of hell / began to work his evil in the world."

—From Beowulf

When the Foster place burned down, no one knew that I was the last person to leave there alive. Back then, people knew that the place at 1836 Bowers Street was odd, but they attributed it to the reclusive author who lived there, and people left it and its sole resident alone. I went there for help with a college paper. Little did I know what awaited me. Now, as I stare at the ashes and charred remains of the house, standing like blackened teeth against the winter light, I know how close I came to my own end.

In Medieval English Literature 214, we all got assigned a midterm project. Dr. Hoskins assigned me Beowulf. I’d read it—or, well, parts of it—in high school, and I remember thinking that it was a pretty silly thing to call an ‘epic poem’. It didn’t rhyme, for one thing, and despite the rhythm, it felt more like fantasy literature than anything else. I sort of liked all the apparent Viking stuff, but that was before Vikings got really cool because of that TV show. Until the assignment for medieval literature, I hadn’t thought about it at all, really. To help with understanding the Anglo-Saxon or Old English references, Dr. Hoskins said to read a ‘glossed copy’ if I could find one. Then I had to write up a ten-page paper about why the epic was still important today. He offered some popular commentaries and said that the school bookstore might have the glossed copy, as he always told them to keep an edition or two on hand.

I went to the bookstore, but they didn’t have any copies, so I went to the local big book wholesale club. They also didn’t have it, but could order it for me. It would take seven to ten days, which was how long I had to read the poem and write the paper for Hoskins, before we moved on to Chaucer, so I decided to check the public library.

When I was a kid, we went to the library all the time, and I knew the folks who worked there pretty well, especially Mrs. Kaplan, the head children’s librarian. When I walked in for the first time in fifteen years, though, I was surprised to see that the place had changed a lot. The service desk was like a big donut, and the lady behind it was about a thousand years old. She wore a green polyester blazer with a magnetic tag on it that said ‘patron services’, but she looked like she hadn’t bathed in years. Her hair was stringy and greasy. I asked her where I could find a glossed copy of Beowulf, and she stared at me like I was speaking another language. Without speaking, she picked up a phone, dialed a number, and stared at me while she waited for the other end to pick up. She said, “Medieval literature, Beowulf.” She stared at me for a long time, until I understood she was waiting for me to say more. So I said, “Glossed text copy,” and she repeated me, sighed, listened, and then slammed the phone down and said, “Third floor, nonfiction.” 

I looked around to see where the steps or an elevator were, and the woman continued to stare at me balefully until I finally saw a sign directing foot traffic to an elevator down a side corridor. I was happy to get away from her. Not only was she incredibly rude, but she smelled a little ripe, too. I wondered whose idea it had been to put her up front.

When I got to the top floor, an older woman was waiting nearby and hustled over to me and asked, “Are you Beowulf?” Then she laughed and said, “Probably not who you are, but what you want?” I laughed and nodded, and she took me to the electronic card catalog and looked up Beowulf, and then I followed her to a spot where it was supposed to be on the stack shelves. Their copy was not there. At least this particular library lady had some idea about personal cleanliness.

“Is it for a paper?” She asked me this with the twinkle of knowledge that only librarians have.
“Yes,” I said. She frowned and asked me a few other questions to see if there was a way to find a workaround. When I told her that I needed that glossed copy and that I didn’t really know what that meant, she nodded knowingly.

“It means that the original language is on the facing page and modern English is on the other. That original language is also English, but called Old English, or, more correctly, Anglo-Saxon English.”

“Thank you!” I was thrilled that someone had explained it to me in terms that I could understand. 

“Oh, you’re welcome, my dear,” she said and smiled, and then her face darkened. “Will you wait here? I may know where you can find a copy, if you can wait?”

I agreed and wandered to a group of tables near the stacks and sat down. Before I realized, the librarian lady came back to me with a slip of paper.

“Do you live in town?”

“I do.”

“Well, there’s a collector here in town who may have the book you’re looking for. I’ve left a message, but he’s a bit of a night owl. I let him know that a student was looking for a glossed text copy of Beowulf and that you would be reaching out to him about it.”

“Well,” I said, starting to feel that this had gone too far and that I might be able to find it on Amazon. She shook her head and smiled cheerfully.

“Not a problem. We refer people to him all the time. Have you heard of Michael Foster?”

“The author?”

“Well, yes, he’s an author. Or, he was.”

“I have. I have a copy of Death by Starlight.”

“He’s your man. Just give him a call later tonight, and you’ll be invited to see one of the best personal collections of rare books in town. Maybe the only one.” Then she lowered her voice and looked around somewhat conspiratorially, I thought. “Also, just so you’re aware, Mr. Foster is an odd duck. I said he’s a bit of a night owl, but the truth is, he’s never up during the day. This time of year, it shouldn’t be an issue, but it can be a little off-putting for some folks.”

This was late in the fall semester, so I waited until after five that day, when I knew it would be dark, and I called the number on the sheet of paper that she had given me. I fully expected to get voicemail, but when someone picked up on the other line, I felt a distinct sense that this was a mistake. I forced it down and went on to ask the voice if it had a copy of a glossed text of Beowulf.

“I can do you one better than that,” said the voice of Michael Foster. “Can you wander by sometime this week, and I’ll show you what I’ve got?”

“I can, if it wouldn’t be an imposition or anything,” I felt another strange pang at the idea of going to his house.

“I wouldn’t have invited you if it were.” His voice was dry, clipped, and there was a tinge of something, possibly a European or English accent, at the edges of his words. “What are you doing tonight?”

I had to admit that I didn’t have anything planned, and he laughed. “Got to get a head start on this paper, eh?”

I said that I did.

“Who is your instructor? Hoskins?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah, yes. I’m familiar with Jim. Well, come on by, and I think we can manage to get you something close to an A. Hoskins is a notoriously hard grader. 1836 Bowers Street. Come up the driveway. I’ll wait for you at the front door. Be here by eight.”

Once again, a pang rose in my chest, and as I hung up, I felt a strong urge to go home, crawl under my bed, and never come out. I fought down the reaction, though, and put the address into my phone.

I followed the directions to the address that Michael Foster had given me. I grew up here and knew the town and how to find my way around well enough, but sometimes habits make us slaves to technology. Bowers Street was on the western perimeter of town, down by what the kids I grew up with used to call Black Wood Acres. These thickly wooded hills were leftover from when the town charter cut the boundaries into the heavily wooded county land. On the western side of Bowers Street, dark pine trees rose high on Bowers Mountain. On the other side, set back off the road in leafy, tree-strewn yards were the ritzy homes of some of the more rich members of our town. The houses were all large and only accessible by long lanes from the street. 

1836 was the last house before the woods took over at the city boundary. I turned right into the driveway, which wound through a big front yard and then climbed toward the house. It sat just past a grove of towering magnolia trees. The house wasn’t a mansion or anything. Sitting against the backdrop of pine-covered hills behind it, I felt a stupidly childish unease. 

It was obvious to me that Foster kept to himself and didn’t have many visitors. There were no flowers in the beds, no hanging plants on the wide porch, no furniture. The house was dark, except for a dusk-til-dawn light over the attached two-car garage, which shed a sickly, bluish light on the driveway. I got out of my car and stood thinking about which way I ought to approach the house, and decided that it would be smart just to go to the front door.

I’d read several of Foster’s books when I was in high school. I went through a phase when crime fiction really stirred me up, and Game of Knives, Foster’s first book in the Hal Wender detective series, was all the rage. Foster had done a book talk and signing at Graves’ Rare Books downtown, around that time, and I had gone to hear him speak and get my copy of Game of Knives signed, but the book signing part of the event never happened. After his talk and the reading, Foster went into the ‘staff only’ area of the bookshop, and though his local fans waited anxiously for his return, he never came back out.

Tom Graves, son of the owner and a friend of mine from school, told me later that Foster had gotten very sick and that he had ordered his driver to take him home. That made me feel a bit better. I’d seen other authors caught by their sudden fame turn into snobs or treat their adoring fans like they were stupid jerks, but Foster didn’t seem like that to me. Also, it was pretty clear that anyone who could write a character like Hal Wender understood that the people who read his books were real, thinking beings who cared about justice.

Wender, a man stuck in a wheelchair because of a terrible accident that was a failed attempt on his life, was one of the most compassionate and caring investigators in modern fiction. He solved crimes, but he also empathized (where possible) with the bad guys, making them more relatable than most literary detectives. It also made him really good at finding them, with the help of his dashing and fearless female associate, Blair Carson. 

The subsequent Wender novels were all excellent, except that Foster had killed Wender off in the last novel, End of Light, when the detective was diagnosed with a fatal infection and solved his last mystery from a hospital bed. Many of Foster’s fans were angry at this rather sudden end to their favorite detective, but the book’s publication coincided with Foster’s own descent into anonymity. There were rumors that he was writing a masterpiece set before the other books, before Wender was injured, when he and Blair had a brief but torrid love affair, which was the impetus for Wender’s wife to have him killed. It was never released.

Now a famous recluse, Michael Foster stopped doing public appearances, readings, even podcasts or videos shortly before End of Light was published. His fans speculated why this might be, especially with all the rumors about the prequel and books being made into streaming series. His disappearance was upsetting, but it happens to authors sometimes.

That I had been given access to Foster after his very sharp disappearance from public life seemed too good to be true, and also, a bit like a trap as I stood by his front door. It reminded me of the story of the woman—Betty Eppes—who had gotten J.D. Salinger to agree to meet her under the pretense that she wanted to be a better writer, but had secreted a tape recorder under her clothes to capture Salinger’s voice. I’d left my phone in the car, just to be sure that I didn’t trespass on some taboo of weird reclusive writers, as Eppes had done. I did bring my old, ratty messenger bag with my notes from class and my laptop in it. I wondered if Foster would get fed up and angry with me the way Salinger had become angry with Eppes. 

Dull light shone through the front door, but otherwise, everything was dark. I pushed the lit doorbell and waited, but nothing happened. Steeling myself, I knocked three times on the door, and before I could let my hand fall to my side, the door opened inward, and the porch light flashed on.

I saw Foster in person once before, so I thought that I knew what to expect. The man before me was Foster, but the change was not good. His skin was bone-white, and his eyes were sunken into dark hollows. They gleamed with almost feverish light, so that it looked like tiny points of fire were reflected in his pupils. He was dressed somewhat formally in charcoal grey trousers and a sports coat, over a heavy turtleneck sweater. His hair, once wheat-brown and worn long, was now close-cropped and iron grey. A thick mustache sat over his mouth, which added a lean-jawed look to his sharp, pallid features.

He asked me my name, and I told him. ‘Please, come in,’ he said. In that moment, I felt panic welling in me again. Some part of my brain screamed for me to get in my car and drive away. I steadied myself with a deep breath and reached out my hand to greet Foster appropriately. I didn’t want him to think I was some overly emotional fan, especially if he could help with my Beowulf research. He took my hand in his, and I hoped he couldn’t feel my suddenly shuddering body. It was ice-cold, as if he’d just that moment been plunging them into ice water. The fingers of his right hand were long, thin, and the nails were cut almost to points. All of this reminded me of something in the moment, but I couldn’t call to mind what exactly that was.

‘Thank you,’ I replied, as he drew me inside and closed the door.

The house had a strangely cold feel that countered what I had been expecting. The foyer, where we stood, stretched back into the house on the left, but on the right, stairs ran up into darkness. There was a room on the right, closed off by tall wooden doors, and to the left, a large sitting room with built-in shelves around all the walls. Everything was pristine; no dust, no musty scent of books, no old house smells. It felt museum-like to me. I even looked to see if red velvet ropes were cordoning off certain areas.

‘Delia at the library tells me you’re looking for a glossed copy of Beowulf.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. And I started to say how much I loved the Wender books, but he seemed to sense it was coming and cut me off.

‘Come right this way,’ he said, and gestured for me to go into the library. ‘You can set your things anywhere,’ he said. I took off my laptop bag, but kept my jacket on. 

‘Have a seat. Can I offer you a drink? Tea, or something stronger?’

‘Oh,’ I said, caught off guard. ‘Um, thank you, tea, please if it isn’t too much?’

‘Not at all.’ Foster looked at his watch and then walked to the wall and tapped what looked like a tablet mounted at eye-level. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but Foster said, ‘Hot tea for our guest, Otto.’ Then he came back and sat on the settee across from me.

‘So tell me about your project.’

I told him about the assignment, and how Hoskins had suggested a glossed copy of Beowulf, and how the librarian had offered Foster’s help. He listened patiently, saying nothing, but all the time, there was a strange, knowing look in his eyes. About the time I finished my side of things, a man came in with a tray and set it on the coffee table between us. The man was apparently younger than Foster, but broader, almost like a bouncer in his build. He was balding on the back of his head, but wore his hair long despite this. I remember being surprised that Foster had a butler—but what else could this man be? It must have shown on my face.

‘This is Otto. He does a little of everything for me.’ The man stood. Otto nodded at me and then left the room through a swinging door that seemed to lead to the back of the house, maybe a kitchen.

‘I’m not like a lord, or anything, but sometimes being a high-profile writer causes problems. When I was actively writing, we had some problems on the property. Otto sees to my meager wants, but he’s also as fierce as a Doberman when the need arises.’

‘Please,’ he said, gesturing to the tea. Then, crossing one leg over the other, he said, ‘So. Where were we?’

‘Beowulf,’ I said. 

‘Beowulf. Right.’

The tea was good. Something fragrant, almost fruity. As I sipped it, some of the tension that had coiled in my neck and shoulders released. I’m not sure how long we spoke, but Foster warmed to the subject, and I found myself truly engaged. The glossed copy he supposedly had remained on the shelf, and he made no move to bring it down.

Beowulf wasn’t just an epic poem, he said. It was a miracle of literary proportions. It was a holdover from a period when stories, usually told orally, were starting to be written down. In the case of the epic poem, the story had probably taken place hundreds of years before it was recorded on paper, and might have even been based on real events that were, to use Foster’s word, embroidered as time went by. Then, Christianity started to take hold in the region, and some monk or friar had the rare prescience to write the tale down when he heard it. ‘Like any outsider,’ Foster said, ‘He did so in the idiom of his own belief, which is why the poem has aspects of both heathen and pagan beliefs, but also the Christian worldview.’

‘It is not about Beowulf, though one reading might convince the reader that he is the hero of the tale, but no! You’ve heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who is rightly famed for his Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit books. Tolkien was a Beowulf fanatic, and he wrote a title called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. 

‘It was a lecture that he had given several times in the 1930s, when Beowulf was being used as a means to collect data about the era in which the story takes place, or when it was written.’ Here Foster jumped up and went to a table near the wall, plucked a skinny book from a pile, and handed it to me. Again, I noticed how sharp his fingernails appeared to be.

‘That book is actually the original. In it, Tolkien argues that Beowulf isn’t about history or sociological data, but that it must be understood, first and foremost, as a work of art. The critics he refers to in the title are the people who wanted to reduce the monsters in the poem to unhappy aspects of folklore, just bad guys that the hero has to deal with that detract from the brave and wonderful Viking-age heroics of Beowulf.

‘Tolkien said that, looking at Beowulf as it was intended, as a piece of art, the monsters function as the most important aspect of the entire tale, because the monsters aren’t just bad guys in the folkloric sense, but they represent the challenges that all of us face. Grendel, his mother, the dragon at the end, represent chaos, death, loss, the unpredictable evils of a world that is still partially shrouded in darkness.’

I sipped my tea as he spoke, and it seemed to me that Foster changed. His eyes glowed. He paced back and forth as he spoke. He gestured and smacked the back of one hand into the other for emphasis. This was a far better lecture than any I had ever sat through in my college courses. I had a fleeting hope that, after tonight, I could convince Dr. Hoskins to let Michael Foster come and speak to the whole class about Beowulf.

As he spoke, Foster started to dwell more and more on Grendel and his mother. 

‘The text of the poem says that Grendel and his mother were leftovers of offspring from Cain, who slew his brother out of jealousy and who God cursed,’ he said. ‘It is from Cain that the legacy of all monsters arises. “From Cain all wicked offspring were born: giants and elves, and evil demon‑creatures, and gigantic monsters—those who fought God, time beyond time.” 

‘Elves is a funny word,’ Foster said. ‘It doesn’t mean elves like Tolkien had in his stories, or even those little creatures that Santa Claus uses in his workshops. He means creatures of the night. Things that dwell in darkness. Things that feast on humanity.’

Here, he stopped pacing and turned to face me. In the low light of the room, his eyes seemed to be made of fire, and I noted that as he smiled, his teeth grew to distinct points. A look of almost demonic joy danced across his features, and I felt that sense of fear rising in my chest again.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’d better leave, it’s getting very late. Thank you for helping with this.’

Foster stopped and stood stock still. He didn’t seem to breathe. ‘Yes, it is getting very late.’ 

He moved so quickly that I didn’t see it. Before I knew what was happening, he’d grabbed me by the lapels of my jacket and lifted me from a seated position and held me up. As I watched, his face elongated, the brows grew more prominent, the nose sharper, the ears lengthened to points. I could feel the cold pressure of his fists against my chest. He opened his mouth, and I shuddered to see that his teeth were all long and sharp; it hadn’t been a trick of the light. His eyes danced. 

As I dangled there, a thing limp with fear, I realized that I had no strength in me at all. Something, maybe the tea was to blame, left me powerless against this sudden attack. Then, like the rushing of memories when someone is about to die, my mind recounted the events that led me to this moment. Hoskins assigned me the stupid paper, the greasy, staring woman at the library, the nice librarian, and the after-hours visit to one of my favorite authors. I felt as though this had all been intended. I’d been selected for this fate, it seemed, but why the conspiracy?

‘Why me?’ I grunted. 

Foster smiled a sinister, vicious smile and set me back on the floor and stepped away as I collapsed back onto the settee, trying to catch my breath.

‘A good question, and one I’m happy to answer as a final wish.’

He looked at me, and his face lost the shadows and lines and became more the Foster I remembered from his mug shot in the back of his books.

‘Orphan,’ he said and smiled.

‘Hoskins owes me,’ he said. ‘He’s the reason why I am like this, now. He and his fascination with monsters.’

I noticed that the room was not reeling as it had been before, and that I felt much less disoriented. I tried to slow my breathing, and I focused my gaze on Foster, who was warming to this new story.

‘We were at school together, and in our senior year, Hoskins had a chance to go to Europe and asked me if I would come along. I foolishly said yes. I loved him, then. Hoskins was like the older brother I never had. He was brash, daring, courageous, and generous of spirit. He never flirted with a girl without making sure that there was another girl for me. He was the strong one, but I was always weak. My upbringing, my overbearing father. Nothing was ever good enough, so I thought that if I could just demonstrate that I was even a little like Hoskins, I might prove my father wrong. I was deluded.

‘We took a train east from Germany, just like Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s book, and eventually we wound up on the other side of the Danube. Here, the women were pale, dark-haired, rich,h and luxuriant, and they were far more promiscuous than any women we had ever known. Hoskins was the lover, not me, but he wouldn’t leave me alone in my room. I had to go along with him. The Soviet Union had just fallen, so there was new commerce with the West, and I spent my time in the libraries and bookshops, looking through tomes that had been hidden for generations. Some of my collection here comes from that trip.’ He gestured to the many book-covered shelves in the room.

‘Hoskins was drinking and whoring himself into an early grave. I was hunting for something more substantial. Then one night, there was a major party. Some magyars, made fantastically rich by his association with the Soviets, decided to have a party. Did you know that there are Hungarians in Romania, even now? Of course not. You’ve never traveled. You’re just a poor orphan.’

His words stung, and I felt a keen pain of indignation as he said it, but I knew that this was a signal that his toxic tea was wearing off. My head hurt, I felt sick, but I took all of this to mean that I was regaining my strength.

‘We went to the party. I hoped to find a collection of books in the castle where it was held, but Hoskins, as usual, had other appetites and other plans for me.’

Foster went silent and moved over to the fireplace. He stooped and turned on the gas logs. Bright orange flames danced on his face as he silently remembered his experience.

‘Boys will be boys. You understand,’ he said and looked at me, but not with the hate that had kindled his eyes before, but now something like remorse. 

‘A girl, dusky, beautiful, shy, voluptuous,’ he said the last word as if he was savoring its feel in his mouth. ‘She spoke some English, and she promised to take me to the library in the castle. We wandered into the depths of the old place. She had some kind of strong drink, possibly tulca, and she kept putting the bottle to my lips for me to drink. By the time we made it to the collection of books, I was very drunk.

‘The room was small. Not at all the hall of books I had imagined, not even as many books as I have here, and this is just a small part of my whole collection. She drew me into a small alcove and down a winding metal staircase. By now, I was feeling more than amorous; the tulca was doing its work, I guess. I thought maybe she would bring me to some room with a bed, and I wondered secretly if I would find Hoskins there already in some orgiastic defilement of himself in there, too.’

The flames flashed and flickered, and the room grew warm.

‘What I found instead was the monsters that Hoskins had been searching for. Some offspring of ancient evil; call it Cain’s child. Call it Grendel. The girl, naked and smirking, eyes glowing in the darkness, vanished into the darkness and left me with him—with it.’

Again, Foster was silent, staring at the flames. I slowly slid my butt toward the edge of the settee. I was feeling much better now,w and I felt that, while he was busy reminiscing, I could try to make a break for the front door before he could reach me, or call Otto.

‘You haven’t known real horror,’ Foster said, his voice thick, as though he was sobbing. ‘Until tonight, you didn’t think monsters were real. But they are. The thing in that basement was real, and it was old and malevolent, because until only recently before we arrived, it had starved in silent agony in that place. When it fed on me, I learned of its ageless menace, saw it hiding, wandering in the catacombs and hidden places, feeding on rats and snakes and other crawling things until it felt a turn of tide in the world coming and it saved its strength and when the castle was opened by the magyar for parties, the thing set its teeth into the partygoers and found itself slaked with humanity as it had rarely been before. It made slaves of the young women there, and they brought many victims to its dark lair in the bowels of the castle. It fed and fed, and no one seemed to notice that those it devoured were not missed or sought. Their folktales had long told of a creature that supped on the living in those parts, and knew not to go looking for it or the people that became its food. There I was, an American college student, thousands of miles from home and safety and the recipient of the thing’s infernal disease.’

Foster turned to look at me, and I saw that tears of blood streamed down his cheeks into his iron-grey mustache.

‘It was Hoskins who found me and rescued me, though I was nearly dead. He wrestled me away from the thing and set fire to the castle and brought me to a hospital, where I was treated for malnutrition and other diseases of the blood. 

‘I died. But in the darkness, I awoke and I was no longer Michael Foster. I was now part of that ancient horror in the smoking castle. Hoskins came to mourn over me, but the night after my quiet burial, I showed him the truth of it. 

‘I leapt from the street to the window of the hostel that we stayed in and opened it easily. I woke him and then fed on one of the coeds that stayed there to show him what I had become. It was at that moment that his guilt overwhelmed him. After some persuading, he vowed to take care of me, to get me home, to help me, because he knew that he was to blame.’

I listened intently, now, not just hoping for a moment to escape, but for some reason, hearing the tale, filled me with desperation, dread, and sadness. It wasn’t a story of fear, so much as true pity. Foster hadn’t chosen this, whatever it was.

‘Through infinite cleverness, Hoskins got me home. I came back here and slowly settled into my new life. He was the one who finally understood what I was, what I needed to survive. He was also the one who encouraged me to write and even helped me with the novelizations. If it hadn't been for him, my books would never have been published. When the money started coming in, he got me a body double to cover signings and readings.’

‘And he fed you,’ I said, snapping Foster from his reverie.

‘Yes,’ he said and took a dark handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at the streaks of blood on his face, then turned back to the fire. ‘Yes. At first, a homeless person or some other poor soul, but the police were taking note of the missing people. That was when we enlisted the help of Vanessa Jones and Della Kingman.’

Vanessa Jones was the woman at the desk, I thought. The one with greasy hair and a sour stench. I said as much to Foster, who barked a laugh.

‘Yes. That awful Jones woman has a cousin who works at the crematorium. She moonlights there. Every month, all the unclaimed bodies in town go there. She fudges the numbers. Ms. Kingman does the research, finding people who have no family, no one to miss them. Otto deals with the apartments and the vehicles. And Hoskins assigns them Beowulf, and then sends them here to me.’

It was a conspiracy, then. I understood too late that I ought to have trusted my instincts a little more.

He sobbed again, but I felt nothing, now. This complex conspiracy made me the next meal for this animal in human shape. Whether his story was true or not, he could have allowed himself to starve or burned his house down rather than be responsible for so many murders. At that moment, I felt like a rat caught in a trap and my only feeling was the urge to run, to get free, to kill Foster if needed.

When I was a boy, I read up a lot on monsters, especially vampires. I knew all the mythology and especially how to kill them, or, should I say, how the heroes always managed to kill them. I didn't know if Foster was a vampire for real, but my circumstances left me with little time to debate with myself. I looked around for something that I could stab him through the heart with, or, if nothing like that presented itself, I might try to kick him into the fire. In Foster’s story, Jim Hoskins had set the castle on fire and that had killed the thing that lived in there.

I stood, clutching my laptop bag and started to back toward the door. Foster didn’t turn to face me, but said, ‘There’s no way out. Many have tried to escape, but your car is gone and the gates are closed. You could prolong your end with a diverting game of hide and seek with Otto on the grounds, but he’s quite adept at such things. You might manage to add a few moments to your life, but you won’t escape.’

‘Where’s my car, you asshole,’ I asked, now far more angry than afraid.

‘Otto will drive it out onto the curvy part of Bowers Road and put your body in it in a creative way that will make it look like you left here and fell asleep at the wheel. We’ll have all the proof needed to verify what happened, I’m afraid,’ he said and gestured at the tablet mounted to the wall. ‘We’ve been doing this for years now and we’re very good at it.’

‘Fuck you,’ I shouted and hurled my laptop at him after whirling it over my head.

What happened next I have gone over again and again in the intervening months.

My laptop bag struck Foster and fell into the fire. Something in the bag caught fire and then exploded. I can only guess that it was the lithium battery. The blast hurled Foster like a rag doll across the room and against the wall with the control panel on it. His suit was burning and he brushed at it as the flames licked up. Otto came bounding into the room and looked around in horror. Books were catching and falling onto the floor. An end table caught and sparked against the curtains which also lit. The room was filling with smoke. Otto ran toward Foster, who scrambled as his clothes caught fire.

Despite this, he stood, turned toward me, arms outstretched like some flaming mockery of classic monster movies, and started to move toward me. The room was so full of smoke that I was momentarily disoriented. When Foster reached me, I thought I was done. He reached out and grabbed me and picked me up. I had a fleeting moment when all the memories of my life sped past my mind’s eye, but then I was flying.

Foster hurled me through the front window and onto the porch. My clothes were smoking, now, and in desperation to get away, to run, to get clear, I leapt over the railing and into the grass, where I rolled to stop from catching and burning. I had to pull off my jacket, which smoldered in the grass. 

It was then that I looked back up at the house. Flames were now licking out the broken front window against the porch roof. I could hear glass breaking. A huge column of black smoke rose against the star-filled night. I looked at the window that Foster had flung me through, and saw a shape there. Then I heard a pain-filled wail and wondered if that was Otto, or if he had abandoned his master and escaped. 

The thought woke me from my daze, and I turned to see if my car was there. Thankfully, it was. Otto hadn’t gotten to work on that part of the plan yet. I reached into my pocket, hoping that my keys were not in my now incinerated laptop bag. I coughed, then tried to take a deep breath when I felt them in my hip pocket and ran to the car, started it, swung it around, and departed. As I turned left out of the driveway toward town, I could hear fire sirens howling over the town.

News must have reached the other members of the conspiracy. Two days later, I showed up to Hoskins’ class, only to find a note on the door that said that it was cancelled and to see student services. I went to the school library, logged onto the student computers, and found an article about the Foster place burning. There were whispers among my classmates that Hoskins had been found dead in his apartment, but I never verified it. The fire, meanwhile, had caused quite a stir in the literary fan community across the nation.

Whatever happened to the smelly library lady, I never knew, but I steered clear of the public library, too. In fact, I started to feel unsafe everywhere in town. I had no idea if Otto was alive or if one of the others would realize that I had killed their master and seek revenge on me.

I waited and waited for the fire investigators to call me about why burned remains of my laptop were found at the Foster house, and I toyed with many practice excuses and alibis, but no one ever came to see me. After the fall semester ended, I broke my lease, packed up my belongings, and drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where a distant cousin of mine still lived and worked. Twenty-five hundred miles was a good start at being well away from Foster’s memory.

The only things that remain to me of the night I met a real monster are my dreams of Foster’s thin and ravenous face coming toward me through pillars of roiling, choking black smoke and the unshakable memory that always follows the nightmares. I wake with the vision of the burned timbers of his house, standing like sharp, blackened teeth against the dark hills beyond.

Thinking of Bram Stoker and J.R.R. Tolkien