Candle in the Attic Window(16)

Mister Harvey does not stop chanting, but I feel different. I feel like I can move. His hands move over top of me, move over top as if they are about to undress me. I can move. I scream and kick him in his balls. He howls in pain.

Nogitsune walks forward. He has a table leg in his hands. He swings it in circles. Geoff is nowhere to be seen. “That’s not nice,” he says, walking up to Mister Harvey, who lies on the ground, clutching himself. I walk past him.

“Casting that spell on such a little girl. And that book – such a clever trap! But I am stronger than you. I am older than you.”

Crack! The table leg breaks glasses.

Mister Harvey’s body, curled up like a seashell.

Whimpering. “You don’t scare me, Fox Boy. I have followers. Wolves from my world.” Mr. Harvey turns and looks at me. “They are here, understand? They are here to feed. We will feed and feed and all of you will be dry husks. Empty things.”

Crack! Table leg into the stomach. A howl of pain.

I leave. Quickly.

Without saying a word.





Friday: Roof and Snowlands





I have to see for myself.

I walk up the long steps. Walk up through the shadows. Walk up past the uncounted classrooms. Everyone is gone. Everyone else is in the gymnasium. Probably f*cking. They won’t miss the Invisible Girl. They didn’t even notice I was there, not even when I was being rubbed against and humped against.

The roof is large and wide. I can see no one else up here. Only crows, who dot the landscape like feathered dreams. I want to see the sun. But the sun is gone. I want to see the stars. But the stars are gone.

The sky is a hole.

Nogitsune was right. There is only white, flat snow. A long range of snow plains. As far as I can see. And the only objects in the plain are the giants. They walk, I see them from here. Walk, walk, walk. Their tremendous bodies stomping into the ground, thick hands pounding at their sides.

Their skin is like rubber sewn together. Their eyes are fires burnt into their heads. Their hair is like wire, tangled and broken and strung up on their heads.

They dress in rags.

And they are hungry.

The sight of them makes my blood run cold.

Foxes prance between them, their red bodies like fuzzy fires against the snow. Riding on the back of one is my art teacher, sword in hand. Over her back, I see our sculptures in a brown satchel. I see Fear of Mice and feel hope.

From behind, I hear a kicking of a pebble. I turn and see Nogitsune. Walking calmly, swinging the table leg. I see that it is covered in blood and I hate that it has come to that.

It is so cold up here.

“I had to see,” I say. I am crying. I need to be the girl who cries. Not invisible. Not to him. “I had to see for myself.”

He nods and walks towards me. “I know. They are there. And they wait. My brothers hold them off and my sisters hold off the wolves. But it is only a matter of time before we are outnumbered.”

I walk up and put my head on his chest. I feel his arms around me. I cry against his shirt. “Thank you. For earlier.”

He runs his fingers through my hair. I feel something against my ear. Like a breast. Like a breast in his shirt. I wonder where it came from. And I look up and he is a she.

“I can be whatever you want,” she says. “I can be whoever you want. But I need you now. I need you to want me. I am vague here, flickering. Soon, I will be gone. Geoff was not enough to keep me here. He is barely real, himself. But you – you can keep me whole. You can keep me real.”

I say nothing. Only lean my head against the chest. It feels like my mother’s breast, and I remember being small and tiny, and sleeping on my mother’s breast while she rocked back and forth, rocked back and forth.

He doesn’t speak again.

We just stand there and watch a war unfold.






Paul Jessup is a critically acclaimed writer of fantastical fiction. He’s been published in a slew of magazines(in print & online) and a mess of anthologies. He has a short story collection out (Glass Coffin Girls) published in the UK by PS Publishing. He has a novella published by Apex Books (Open Your Eyes) and a graphic novel published by Chronicle Books.

He was also a Recipient of KSU’s Virginia Perryman Award for excellence in freshman short story writing in 2000.

You can check out his crazy stuff at: http://pauljessup.com.





The City of Melted Iron





By Bobby Cranestone





Concerning the events in Komplex 5, the industrial part ....





Essen: hundreds of smoking chimneys, factories, melting pots, and steaming iron. Here, where all four elements are centred and put into a new creation. A physically dangerous place, but this is nothing compared to the mental pressure. Decades of hardship, deaths and fears have formed something traceable, as if all those feelings have become manifested into a new form.

There is something out here that lives off your very soul, the guy next to me muttered while munching on his lunch. Not that one actually saw it. But sometimes, if you’re turning round a dark corner, there’s a light creeping over the walls, and if you’re checking the temperatures on one of the kettles, it might happen that you encounter a dark shape leering at you. It changes all the time; it’s different, but you know it, anyway, when you meet it. Whatever it is, it’s most times faithful. Like the Banshee in the old Celtic tales, it seems to be a foreboding of doom. Those who meet it have little time to speak of this encounter before they die. Yet, the tale spreads, anyway, as tales always do.