Candle in the Attic Window(75)

“Yes,” I said and from that moment on, I truly was. How could a mere mangled body bring on nausea? How could a simple wail of agony chill my nerves? How could mundane suffering and death quicken my pulse?

I heard Theary laughing beside me, smelled the sour smoke and shaved metal and burned meat and raw waste, and choked on my own revulsion. When I could again breathe without gagging, I turned toward my grandfather, but he had already dissipated into the fog. If not for the wet slurping noises of one monster eating the other, I would have convinced myself then and there that I had hallucinated the entire ordeal. A good doctor believes what she sees, however, and I had no choice in the matter.

I left the Dead Field without triggering another mine and returned to my childhood village of mangoes and rain puddles, and what I did from that night on is my own business. I try to help people and I try to keep my past where it belongs, and if I only succeed some of the time on both accounts, then that, too, is my own business.

I miss my grandparents. My grandmother joined my grandfather the year we finally had tribunals for the surviving officers of the Khmer Rouge. She passed quietly in the clinic. I will not say, “Too little too late,” but even with the last of those monsters banished through the medicine of the courts, I know their ghosts still thrive and lurk and maim and kill. I do all that is possible to set things right, but in my heart I suspect that my Cambodia is a country forever haunted.






Jesse Bullington is the author of the novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and The Enterprise of Death. His short fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in various magazines, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Chiaroscuro, Jabberwocky, and Brain Harvest, as well as in anthologies such as Running with the Pack, The Best of All Flesh, The New Hero II, Historical Lovecraft, and Future Lovecraft. He currently resides in Colorado and can be found online at http://www.jessebullington.com.





At the Doorstep





By Leanna Renee Hieber





From the desk of Mrs. Evelyn Northe





November 1, 1881





Day of All Saints. May every single one of those hallowed souls be with me now.

It is true that I live in a haunted house.

You wouldn’t know it to look at this fine, glorious Fifth Avenue town home filled with all the stained glass, marble, carved wood, and other opulence you might imagine of its prime Manhattan location. But the moment I trim my gas-lamps low, I am too aware of the chill, of the comings and goings of spirits. And never have they been as active as tonight. I can’t usually see them. But I always hear their steps.

Never one for letter writing, diaries, journals, or any of that nonsense, I haven’t had time for such sentiment. But considering I might be seized in death’s grip, I ought to have a record. If nothing else but for my friends, so that they might know what became of me when the footsteps got too close to ignore.

I hear the tread far off now, like a dull drum, one after another. Soon, they’ll creep up the stairs and stand upon my threshold. While I find the temperature of spirits uncomfortable, it’s nothing compared to the dread sound of those steps.

I wonder what my poor friends might do without me, they whom I’ve drawn into my madness. No. Not my madness. It began long before me. And it called me. It called my friends. It will soon cry out for the world.

Who can say when the spirit world split in two? Who can say when that in-between place of sleep and awake became a true battleground for the soul?

I will always blame the War. Once a country pits brothers against brothers, and has more mangled corpses than it knows what to do with, it’s hard not to think of humanity in terms of war.

At some point in history, men began to fracture their hearts, minds and souls. It wasn’t enough to simply send a dead spirit on to Heaven or to Hell. There was born a proving ground between, and a new breed of restless dead and restless living began to walk the land. It got worse, so much worse for the heart of New York when it lost so many twenty years ago, when our country lay in bloody tatters and hundreds of thousands of bodies lie in pieces in the dirt.

New York City, you gorgeous gorgon. You manifold monster. You have made the evil industrious. You have made the striving hungry. You are still broken and grieving for those bodies, and you have ignored your pain. I saw you when you were on your knees with manifold losses. Too many to fathom. You ignored your sorrow and you sewed patches onto yourself and stuffed all your empty parts with just so much meaningless straw, making rag dolls. With one strike of a match, this whole city would ignite like young girls incinerated in garment factories.

But how can I blame you, my fair city, when I have done the very same? I, too, have patched my grief over loved ones gone, over my husband taken from me – not in battle but in health that failed too soon. I wonder if I shall see Peter Northe yet this day, if he waits for me. No, his mind went; he wouldn’t remember whom to look for. Perhaps that’s best. To enter the passage without attachment. But I would like to hear him say, “Hello, old friend,” just once more, his greeting to me since our youth, when we looked into one another’s eyes and glimpsed inner life far elder than our years.

Society would have nothing to do with me had my husband not made an absurd amount of money on what could have been a failure. But his venture succeeded. Life is full of those two walks: the winners or losers, the broken or the triumphant, the beautiful or the ugly. And each of those paths wears deeper the tread of those who restlessly watch the results. Destiny is not preordained. Your walk is not writ for you. You make choices along the way.