call me Bliss

It appeared on my fifth birthday.

It wasn’t given to me, exactly. On my fifth birthday, of course, my parents had a party and there was cake and there were present and the children my parents invited to play with me loved the pinnate we all got to whack at. And at some point amidst the streamers and blowing out the candles and playing tag in the yard, Bear appeared.

My parents insist that Bear must have been a gift from someone at the party, but everyone’s gifts were neatly wrapped and labelled to me from TimmyMaryJoeySusieMarkusDevoneMumnDad. Bear was just sort of sitting in the middle of the pile with no wrapping, no ribbon bow. No tag. I opened everything else I could before finally picking it up and looking it over.

Bear was just that, a teddy bear. But unlike most bears, it wasn’t fuzzy, it didn’t have shining button eyes, and it didn’t feel squishy. At least, not squishy with proper fluff. Bear’s exterior was a strange honey-colored leather, worn smooth to almost shining, and it was constructed in oblong, almost awkward pieces that were stitched together along the edges with big dark thread like they use on coats and couches. The arms were almost like paddles. The ears stuck up near enough like Mickey Mouse’s and yet still different as to seem wrong. There was no mouth, no nose, no eyes; the stitches ran from the back of the head under the ears, over the top, to meet at the front in a point along with the seam that ran up from under the chin.

Nobody claimed credit for bringing me bear, and even though my parents finally decided that either someone was embarrassed at giving it in comparison to all the other toys I had been given, I knew better. When I picked up Bear, it was warm. There was almost a sensation of pulse underneath that smooth, tough leather, and I hugged it close. Bear had come to me on its own. Bear had picked me to be with, and I was glad.

The monsters under my bed had been getting bold, you see.

They had begun slow, when I was a little smaller, just before I turned four. There would be a tiny creak from the wardrobe, or the shadows would move on the wall even though there was no wind moving the tree outside my window. Little things, and easily explained away by my parents when finally I did start calling for them.Then the little creaks became scrapes and groans, from the wardrobe and from under my bed. The moving shadows became more deliberate, becoming terrible leering grins and huge alien eyes upon the wall. Something was beginning to snake out from under my bed and move my toys; it was getting very good at flinging things up onto my bed to make me shriek, so that mom or dad would come running and trip over the truck the monster put just inside the bedroom door.

Mom and dad yelled at me for playing with toys instead of sleeping. They started taking things away that they found on my bed. They even talked about sending me to a counselor when they started coming in to find me curled up under the blankets and crying. “Big girls don’t cry at nothing,” they told me. “Don’t you want to be a big girl?”

I did want to be a big girl. But I wasn’t big yet, and there were monsters, and they WERE big.

That night I went to bed with the new toys still stacked up against the wall waiting to get fully unpacked, and I brought Bear to bed with me. It was warm, and if it squished kind of funny when I hugged it close, well, that was just what Bear was, wasn’t it? My parents kissed me good night, and turned on the nightlight in the hall for me, and mom tugged on Bear until I finally let go, and she set it on the shelf above my bed.

When she shut the door, I turned around and knelt to grab Bear, but it was already moving. Its head tilted slightly to one side, one of those wrong ears cocked as if listening for something, and I didn’t even have to hold my breath yet before I heard a scrape from under the bed. It pushed outward as I huddled down onto the pillow, hugging my knees, and this time I saw it. It was like a snake, but the back end of a snake, long and scaly and wriggling across the rug until the slender end of it was able to curl around the new dump truck I’d been given from Joey so that I could bring it to his house and make castles and forts in his sandbox. The snake-end slid under it and dragged the truck halfway across the room, and then it went tight and the truck crunched, the middle buckling in half and something snapping and a wheel rolling off across the room.

My new truck was broken, and it went slithering back across the carpet to grab another thing; the tutu from Timmy, or maybe it was from Susie (they were twins and they gave me both their presents together). As it dragged back across the carpet, another snake-end pushed out from under the bed to meet it near the broken truck, and I reached for my blanket to pull it tight around me. They didn’t usually make faces or throw things unless they knew I was awake and watching them.

As I watched, the end of one of the tentacles split open, yawning a nasty hiss over several rows of conical teeth, and it snapped shut on the tutu. The first one did the same, and wrenching sharply away from each other, they ripped the tutu in two. The sound of tearing tulle was loud in my bedroom, and I couldn’t help a little gasp. They dropped the tutu and went quite still. I knew they’d heard me, I knew it, and gathered my blanket around me like cotton candy, wanting something, anything to protect me.

The eyes appeared over the end of my bed and the blanket muffled my scream. There were three of them, all different sizes and on long stalks, all fixing firmly upon my face which was the only part of me sticking out of the blanket. I saw one of the tentacles rear up behind the eyes, and it was diving for me as I rolled face-down to bury myself under my blanket entirely. I felt something thud against the blanket on my back and roll down, halting by my hip. It was way too small to be a tentacle, and holding my breath, I dared to peek. From under the folds of cloth, I watched Bear slowly right itself to sitting with a little shake of its head. Then it reached up one of those weird paddle-like arms and, ever so delicately, picked loose a thread where the three seams joined at the point where its nose should have been. With a tug, it started to unravel, the three smooth points of leather starting to curl away, and one arm stretched out to thrust the thread in my direction.

Mutely, I dared stick an arm out from the blanket to pinch the thread, trying to look at and yet unable to quite understand the wet, red pulsating mass that I was seeing under the curled-back leather. It shifted a little, revealing a wee length of tiny, gleaming white needle-teeth that curved into an impossibly white grin at me. Then Bear pushed to its feet and, with me holding the thread so that the stitches unraveled as it walked, it tootled toward the end of the bed, toward the hissing horror that I could not see.

At the end of the bed, Bear shrugged out of its skin and dove, even as one of the tentacles darted at me again. I could not see what happened, only hear the hissing and the thumps and feel how my whole mattress shifted and rocked, and then there was a hiss worse than all the others, long and angry and ragged. It cut off abruptly into a gurgling, and then there was no more struggle. After a minute, I could hear a sound, a wet and meaty chewing like when I was having steak right before mom would tell me to stop being gross and close my mouth. It went on for a long, long time, and I held onto the thread while I watched the tentacle that had fallen upon the corner of my bed get pulled down to the carpet, and then inch by inch out of sight under the bed.

Eventually, there was silence – and then a tugging on my covers that made me burrow back under my blankets again, still clinging desperately to the dark thread connecting me to the limp pile of leather down by the foot of my bed. The thing that dragged itself up onto my bed was more disgusting than any of the yuck Devone had brought out of the swamp that was behind our back yard; it looked red and wet all over and had way too many arms and legs, more than a crab. Its head sat on top of it like a lump. It pulled itself up on top of the rumpled sheet, and then rolled upright in a movement that I abruptly realized was just like when Bear went to sit up.

As if knowing that I new it for what it was, it bared those teeth at me, grinning again. Then one of its weird limbs went to its mouth to curl around one of those teeth and yank it out with a sucking sound, just like when I pulled out one of my own teeth two months ago even though it wasn’t really ready because I wanted the quarter from the tooth fairy. It pushed upright and toddled toward me, and when it tugged on the thread I let it take it. It tied the end of the string around the wide end of the tooth, and placed it back between my outstretched fingers. Down the length of the bed it went, to climb back into the discarded skin; too many arms and too many legs it pushed itself inside the skin, filling out the shape again, and then waddled back with leather flapping to sit itself down in front of me. One paddle-arm guided my hand to slide the needle through the holes in the leather and pull the thread tight, until I had the rhythm of it and sewed bit by bit and stitch by stitch. Big, shaky child stitches, just like it’d had before, slowly closing the leather over it until all I could see was a gleam of that sharp smile.

Then I tucked the last little twitch in and pulled out the needle, left with Bear again.

I hid the needle in a little ledge under my shelf and straightened out my blankets, and nestled down under them to sleep with Bear in my arms. It was warm, and I could feel it pulsing in my arms like the beat of my own heart.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, artist unknown.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

Three of us went into the woods that day. There was still so much woods back then, blanketing the hills and ravines that have since been delved into, flattened, filled in. Now you have to go somewhere to be able to wander into the woods and lose yourself all day, but not back then.

We did it a lot, and had our favorite spots; where the stream that split off from some river went trickling down over a bunch of boulders, where a lot of trees had fallen in a near-circle making a sort of clearing that protected from the Fall wind… we loved finding these strange little spots and making them our own.

This one day we went exploring in a direction we had wandered before, but we had never seen what we found then; there was a turnstile, sitting there in the middle of the underbrush. It was red with silver trimming, and there was a bar curving up out of the ground and back down again, making it look like… well, like a turnstile looks when you’re going into a place, this little path with bars across that you have to push against. Danny banged on it with a stick, but nothing came scurrying out, so it wasn’t playing host to any critters. It was Mike that found the coin half-buried in the dirt, and we all crowded in to look at it as he brushed it off. It shined up nice, like gold, and it felt heavy when he passed it around. There weren’t any words, but there was an etching of a roller coaster car on one side of it, and a top hat on the other.

Off in the trees there were large curving shapes that looked sort of like roller coaster tracks, but they looked ancient, rusting and broken and leaning against the trees like they’d been ridden so many times and now they were just tired and wanted to fall down. They made me feel uneasy, in that same sort of way that old people always made me uneasy when I was that age; I felt like I was looking at something that should have been strong and vital and instead here it was needing help just to keep its feet.

Since Mike found the coin, he went to the turnstile and jostled the metal arms once more, but they didn’t turn. Not until he stuck the coin in and pushed his stomach against the bar – it turned then, and smoothly, silently as if the hidden gears inside had been freshly oiled out here in the middle of nowhere. The bar in front of him moved, angling toward a slot in the side of the dirty red turnstile, while another emerged and slid up into place behind Mike with a soft click.

When he got to the other side, he just stopped dead, looking around at the trees and the rotting roller coaster track.

“Oh wow!” he burst out, startling us, “really? Thanks, mister!” I looked at Danny, and he looked at me, and we shrugged.

Mike took a few steps then stopped, turning to look in our direction as he called out, “Come on, guys, we get to-” He frowned, staring at us over the turnstile, except that he wasn’t really staring at us. His gaze was distant, like he was looking beyond us, but when I looked there was nothing behind us. “Guys?” He sounded uncertain, taken a step toward the turnstile.

Then his head whipped around, and with a whoop he broke into a run, dashing through the trees. I don’t mean running between them; Mike actually ran right through the trunks of the trees as if they weren’t really there.

Danny cursed, and I could feel myself going pale before we broke into a run after him. Feeling daring I tried to run through one of the trees like Mike did. Man, bark hurts like hell when you do something like that. I had a lumpy bruise on my forehead for almost a week.

We followed Mike, but we hit a point where there was a big patch of blackberry bushes, chest-high, and we couldn’t get past them. We could see, though, as Mike settled down into a round-nosed coaster cart that looked just like the one on the coin, except that it had big patches of rust, and looked like it should have collapsed under him. I wouldn’t have sat in it for fifty bucks, but Mike hopped right in like it was shining new. With a creak and a groan and a tick-tick-tick-tick-tick the cart started to move, and I could see Mike’s face for a moment as the cart started up the first unsteady rise of the track. He didn’t look terrified. He looked excited, like he had when his folks and mine took us all to the lakeside park in the next county and we got to ride the coaster there. He was looking all around him, as if he was seeing open space around a solid track, not like he was lurching upward past oaks and aspen on a track that was barely on its last legs.

Danny punched me in the arm and pointed further down the track and started yelling, and then I did too. “Mike!” we shrieked, “MIKE!” and shoved at the blackberry bushes. Danny grabbed a stick to try to beat them down as we pushed toward the track, screaming for our friend – wanting to get him off the cart, but he never even turned to look down at us. The cart crested that first hill, pushing up past branches into the sun, and there was a sickening dirty red gleam to it that made my stomach turn with a visceral recognition. Then it took off down the track, and it sounded like it was shrieking back at us as all of us were screaming, Danny and I almost incoherently and Mike with sheer delight as the cart thundered down, screed through the dip and rocketed back up.

Then it was still going, even though the track was gone, a big section of it fallen down into the underbrush. Maybe it was then that I’d started crying, watching the cart arc up and hang in the sun again just for a moment. Then it fell like it was being inhaled to the earth, and Danny and I weren’t screaming words any more, we were just screaming. Way too long it took us to get through all the bushes, running for the cart. There was nothing to find. I mean, it was there, in the same condition it had been when Mike got in, except for a new splash of red across the nose of it. I thought it was blood, it had to be blood, but I crept a little closer while Danny turned away to be sick against the bottom of an oak. It was just paint. Fresh, bright, red paint where before it had been a big dirtied patch of rust. And the cart was empty.

There was a flickering of shadow, and I looked up at the broken end of the track Mike had gone off of. It wasn’t the same though. It went higher now, becoming the crest of a hill where before it was broken off at an uphill, and looking around, the whole track looked a lot more… alert. More upright.

“Jordan,” Danny’s voice wobbled dangerously, and when I went to him he was pointing toward the dirt; something was glinting at the base of the tree next to the remains of his breakfast. Brushing at the dirt with my fingers, I got far enough to see the round edges of the gold coins and part of the etching of the coaster cart, and I uttered a curse that my dad would have whalloped me for even knowing, let alone saying. Jordan and I looked at each other, and the cart, and I grabbed the two coins, both of us dashing back toward the turnstile.

It hadn’t changed at all, and the bars still didn’t do anything more than clunk heavily inside the casing when I pushed at it. But Mike had gone through. Mike had used one of the coins.

Danny and I crouched together in front of the turnstile, and I reached up to drop in a coin. Together we reached out and pushed at the turnstile bar, slowly, and it slid forward. It wasn’t as noiseless as it had been when Mike went through. There was a thin squeal. It did not distract us from peering through, watching the woods beyond waver and disappear. It became a flat expanse of pavement, painfully bright and sunny, and arching over it was a roller coaster. It had the same hills and valleys as the one we saw, but it was pristine, nails and struts shining in the sun. There was a fence separating it from the pavement, painted gaily green with a dark design like a fruited vine climbing along it.

Abruptly the rail slid from our grasp and disappeared, the new one clicking into place, and the vision of the beautiful ride was gone, the forest firmly in place again with the roller coaster yawing dissolutely through it.

Danny and I stood up and turn to jog for home, glancing nervously backward occasionally. When Mike’s parents reported him missing we were grilled from everybody – our parents, his parents, even a police detective – but all we could really tell them was that we last saw Mike in the woods, that he went off without us, that we don’t know where he was going or if he was going to see anybody.

That last bit was a lie though, for me at least. Danny was blocked by where he had been crouching, but while we’d been pushing the turnstile and looking through at that weird, bright roller coaster, I had been able to see a man walking across the pavement. He was wearing a top hat and a dark suit, and just before the bar had clicked into place, he had turned and looked straight at me.

I’ve still got the other coin.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, artist unknown.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

I am waiting.

So much work I did to bring the end of days about, unearthing old texts and translating them, then gathering to me those who could do my bidding. There was not a joy in it, really, but it was something that had to be done. It has all gone on far too long for all of us, this world, this existence, and I could not bear to pass my way through it and let it decline irritably in on itself, biting its own ankles like a tiny dog impotently furious at it’s physical stature. No, this world deserved an end of true greatness.

So much to gather, so many to have slain – not only the ones that were required for the rituals, the removing of their hearts, the feeding of their small intestines into their own mouths as they were made to swallow and swallow and swallow, but the ones who did not realize the beauty of what I meant to do. the ones who came in with guns and fire and thought to stop me. I was warned. I marked the entirety of the old inn in which I had been working with the symbols, and filled the basement with the powder – carefully, so carefully! They became so many sweet pieces of offering, sizzling as they fell into the sea.

So far to travel, carrying my notes with me to scribe the bloody sigils into the foundations of those false and stupid churches, full of pompous assbiters preaching asceticism and forgiveness and love and don’t forget the bake sale next Saturday, as if that would make any difference in the great and dark Beyond, beyond the here and now of their knowing.

So many graveyards to seed with the powders on the headstones and the ichorous salves smeared into the graves fresh and old, and the crypts and mausolea with their heavily sealed preservations of ancient meat, all of them a forgotten meal waiting for the right words, waiting for the smoke, and the blood, and the maddening song to call them forth and vomit them out.

So many driven forth from their plastic and wood houses, when finally the sky began to crack and the winged horrors fell through, when the ground cleaved and the terrible beasts burst forth, flesh and claw and screaming hunger and far too many eyes. One by one and then many by many they fell to be food, or to the madness, or both. Theirs was the sacrifice, the last sacrifice needed.

So much death scents the air now, the slaughterhouse smell of blood and meat and shit and ash overcoming even the rotting salt of the ocean by which I stand. It is enough now. He will smell it, it will waken Him like some of the madboys once woke for bacon clocks, and He will rise. The sea shall boil forth around His great and unknowable visage, and I will greet Him, and He shall reward my by consuming me first before taking the world bit by bit and bite by bite into that unfathomable maw. I will fall into his gullet and no more be this meatwoman in this black dress of mourning for the world that once was, and there will be peace.

I am waiting.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture by Shapovalov on DeviantArt, shared with permission.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

We knew the bees were dying.

Scientists first reported it in the mid… whatever it is that people decided to call that decade between the 90s and the teens. Every year there were fewer and fewer bees, whole colonies just biting the dust, and nobody could figure out why.

Oh, we theorized, certainly. Someone came up with a really fantastic theory called Spontaneous Colony Collapse that made it seem as if these abrupt, catastrophic disappearances of entire hives, entire colonies were something that just sort of whoops! happened and there wasn’t that much we could do about it. That theory kind of slid out into the common consciousness, and we stopped worrying about it, because we had to worry about not losing our houses and what was that crazy Snooki girl going to get up to this week.

So we stopped paying attention to the bees, we stopped worrying about where they might be going, and hey wasn’t it nice that it seemed like maybe we weren’t getting stung as much in the spring and summer because there weren’t so damn many of them any more?

It was a little more than ten years later when the bees actually made it onto the endangered species list. I remember reading about it, and being disturbed and sort of horrified – I mean, BEES, you know? They’re just one of those critters that are always everywhere, like ants. Yet right after I read it, I didn’t really think about it.

Till I went to the park. I do that sometimes, just to get out somewhere that’s sort of nature and sort of a museum and there’s people and squirrels and flowers. It’s a whole bunch of niceness all together, and in this one park that I really like I’ve found this spot where there is an old stone bench around behind a wall, and it’s almost surrounded by flowers. Nobody really sits in it, because it’s in the shade a lot of the day and the stone is always cold, but it feels good to me, especially after all the walking. I can still hear people playing, but I get that little haven all to myself.

I was sitting there when I saw, so soon after reading that article, a bee. I didn’t quite notice it, because like I said. Bees are everywhere – except that now they’re not. When it clicked over in my head what I was looking at, I sat up, and went fumbling in my pocket for my mobile to take a picture of it. I was able to get the camera up, and zoomed in on the buzzing wings I could see as it hovered over the daylilies. That was when I realized there wasn’t just one, there were TWO! One was darting around after the other, and I know well and good that bees don’t pair off and mate or anything like that, but if there were two, maybe there were more. Maybe there was a colony in the park!

I followed them with my camera, which was a little awkward on zoom, until abruptly one overtook the other and they stopped dead in the air, hovering. I focused, and nearly dropped the phone.

One of them was a bee. One was not.

The bee was hanging nearly upside down in the air, kicking and twitching while it was held by one back leg in the hand of what looked like nothing so much as a tiny human skeleton with bee wings. And I don’t mean tiny like the size of a baby, I mean the thing was probably no longer than my pinky, dark and undeniably made of slender bones. In its other hand it held what looked like a bird or chipmunk’s legion, snapped in half. It poised above the thing’s head like a hammer, and then crashed down against the bee, dashing open its small dark head and spattering some fluid upon the lily below them. I couldn’t stop watching as the skeletal fairy-like creature landed them heavily upon the flower, tossing the bone aside. I couldn’t hear anything but the buzzing of its wings, though watching its jaw work rapidly I fancied I could hear a chitter as it rubbed one hand up and one hand down the body of the fallen bee.

Then it plunged its face down toward the dead insect, biting hard and wrenching a huge chunk out of the fuzzy black and yellow hide. It chewed and chewed and then bent to do it again, decimating the bee’s form in slow, methodical, utterly ferocious chunks. Soon there was nothing left but the legs, which got shoved haphazardly down into the bell of the flower, which was smeared with the same dark juice of which there had been a spatter from the death blow.

Apparently sated, the skeletal… fairy isn’t the right word for it, but good goddamn if that isn’t exactly what it looked like! It jumped aloft, wings beating their quiet, steady thrum, and it circled the lilies once before flying away, in search of I presume some new prey.

How in the hell was I going to report this? Worse yet – when those things ran out of bees, what would they turn to for food next?

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture by estherase on Flickr, under Creative Commons license.

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.

In late evening Vienna, which was also early morning Vienna, candles and lanterns still burned in many windows along streets and canalways, red wax dripping down candleshafts onto the aging marble of softly arching bridges. Soft wafts of music drifted here and there from various balls both private and public that had not yet called it a night, though the horizon was beginning to faintly lighten in the east.

It was through this perfumed, pre-dawn fairyland that I and Lucia were walking, hanging on to each other as the heady whirl of the waltz and the spin of a cup too much of good wine unbalanced our steps just a touch. Not that we needed it, but it all gave us a rather fine excuse to have out arms about each other as we turned to cross a canal and paused in the middle of one of the bridges, leaning upon the solid stone rail. From here, it was a wonderful bit of ancient beauty, to see the unearthly casts of lights and shadows from the various balls playing across the buildings, and the candles and lanterns flickering by the flowing water.

“What are those?” Lucia asked, pointing at one of the decorated floats drifting down the canal, and I smiled, pleased to be able to share the tale I had learned only a few days before about the thick candles on the round, heavily decorated little floats, like strange fey flower blossoms more than a foot across. “They’re meant to be beautiful, like everything – like you, bella – but they are also said to be a memorium. The carnival of Vienna is full of delights and enticements, but every year there are tragedies. Too much fun, too much drink, and in the canals folk have fallen. Each of these is said to represent one of those who have lost their life into the Carnival, and is supposedly decorated in the colors of what they were wearing when they were lost – though how folk would know that is beyond me..”

I leaned closer, trailing my fingertips up her bare arm, my lips nearly brushing her ear as I whispered, “And it is said that, if you call out to them, one of the lost spirits will rise to rejoin the Carnival.” I could feel the shiver thrill down her arm, goosebumps rising on the skin, and smiled, shifting my hand to rest against the warm gathered blue satin at her lower back. Arousal tinged with fear, I had found, was all the more delectable.

Despite the thrill I had given her, though, she suddenly laughed, and leaned away to wrest a candle loose from the stone railing, while the float drifted ever closer; its candle was stark white in comparison to the thick garners of orange and russet silk and organza surrounding it. “Come, o lost spirit!” Lucia cried out gaily, and she leaned out over the water, my hand steadying her (and, I must admit, slipping a bit from her back to her bottom; who could resist such a sweet swell, even covered by bustled cloth as it was?) as she stretched out and tilted the candle, letting the molten wax stream from it onto the surface of the canal, and into the path of which the orangey float gently bobbed. The red wax dribbled across the folds of cloth and the silk flowers, and then a few drops fell right into the pool of heat-clarified white wax atop the candle.

Without warning, the lot of it tilted and lifted, water running off the sides to reveal a white porcelain mask underneath. The float was abruptly no mere float, but was in fact a broad and elaborate hat for someone who peered up at us, the eyeholes pinched down at the nose and up at the outer ends like cat-eyes. There was kohl or makeup around their eyes, darkening all of it, and Lucia’s laughter cut off in a yelp of surprise. Orange cloth dipped down from the broad hat to tie under the shin, and seemed to meet more cloth at the neck, though it was difficult to see from that distance, in the dark.

Difficult to see until, with no assistance, the figure rose straight up from the water to float before the bridge, and then drifted close, reaching out gloved hands for Lucia’s, covering them around the candle. There was silence, although I think my mouth was working, trying to put word to any one of the impossible explanations my mind threw up, turned over, and discarded. Over the rail it floated, and then turned, swooping around Lucia in a circle but still holding her hands in a very definite beat that I realized after several paired turnings was a waltz.

“Nih- Nico?” she stammered as she was pulled in the lilting rhythm across the bridge, and then brought to a halt by the far rail.

“I’m… It must be a trick,” I managed, and my voice was unconvincing even to myself. I should have dashed forward, stopped it from raising Lucia’s hands and the candle; I winced as it forced it to tilt, pouring wax upon Lucia’s piled-up hair, and she yelped, I hope more in outrage than as pain. Then the straightened candle was settled upon it – and Lucia released, before being abruptly shoved over the railing on that side of the bridge by the thing swathed in the elaborate orange costume. I heard her cry out, and the splash, and then I ran for the railing, past the thing which was standing there looking down.

As I came alongside, it swept away, dancing toward the street I’d just left in time to a strain of violins I could barely hear before I screamed out for Lucia, calling her name, and again.

Then the round float, piled high with blue gathered satin and dark ribbons the color of Lucia’s curls, floated up out of the water, and the red candle was in the center. Before it even made it to the air, it was burning.

~~~

This piece of Nightmare Fuel was inspired by this picture, artist unknown:

For more info on the Nightmare Fuel project, click here.