Spooky Stories of Solomon Island

Spooky Stories
Of Solomon Island
A The Secret World: Halloween Event


1.THE GHOST OF JACK-O-LANTERN

Hey, Danny. Heard you were gathering weird stories. This town has some strange yarns, but every town’s got a dark side. You know? Just turn over the right dead leaf… Anyway, this is one my Nanna (my grandmother) used to tell me. She’s part Irish, and maybe it’s from the old country. I don’t know. It’s about pumpkins. I never liked carving pumpkins. The clammy, fibery insides feel like cold guts. Never liked the pumpkin flavored stuff that comes around this time of year, the coffees and desserts. Maybe I had a bad experience. I don’t know.
Deputy Andy
~*~


“Some gourds got more reason to grin than others.” That’s what my Nanna would say. Why do pumpkins grin? Why do they glow? They’re lanterns. “People should take more of a caution and a care when they light beacons in the dark,” Nanna would say. “You never know what your guiding in.”
A long time ago, far-far away – you know how it goes – there was a man called Stingy Jack. He was known far and wide as a deceiver, manipulator, and drinker. He was like the king of sinners, a total wicked dreg. One day, while walking down a cobblestone path, Stingy Jack found a grimacing corpse.
Jack bent down to go through the corpse’s pockets, when the grimacing face looked up…and it was the devil.
The Devil jumped up to claim his due. Jack knew his life was over, and he was going to Hell. He asked for a final drink. The fiend saw no reason to deny his last request, and the two of them went to a pub. Jack drank his fill. When it came time to pay up, Jack whispered to the Devil, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you turned into a coin and I used you to pay?” The Devil agreed and transformed into a coin. Well, Stingy Jack pocketed that coin, in the same pocket he kept a crucifix, and the Devil couldn’t change shapes again on account of being in contact with the crucifix.
Stingy Jack forced the Devil to promise to wait ten years before taking his soul. The Devil agreed, and Jack released him. Ten years of sinning went by. The Devil returned. “No drinks for you, Jack!” he said. Jack nodded, accepting his fate. He asked if he might have one last apple to fill his stomach. The Devil agreed and climbed a tree to get an apple. Jack quickly placed crucifixes around the tree, trapping the Devil, forcing the Prince of Darkness to promise to never take his soul.
More years of sinning went by. Stingy Jack, pickled on debauchery, finally died.
He went to Heaven, but they wouldn’t let him in on account of all that sinning. He went to Hell, but they wouldn’t take him in on account of the Devil’s promise. As a warning to others, the Devil gave Jack an ember that glowed with the ghost-fire, marking Jack as a denizen of the netherworlds. To this day, Stingy Jack is doomed to walk between worlds, between good and evil, with only that ember inside of a grinning pumpkin to light his way.
“That was in the long-long ago,” Nanna would say, a wet knife in one hand, a dripping wad of orange guts in the other. “This next bit happened when I was just a girl.” She wasn’t Nanna then, of course. She was just Kate.
One October, a shady figure came to Kingsmouth, selling pumpkins on the outskirts of town. Parents warned their children not to approach this man. But you know kids. It was that year’s double dog dare. Kate and a bunch of her friends went to the rickety stand and each bought a pumpkin. The shady man didn’t want cash, just asked for a little blood. Just a tiny cut.
“You get what you give,” he said.
Kate and everyone else were so intimidated that they paid, all except one boy. Roger. He took his pumpkin and gave nothing in return.
The shady man only nodded, saying, “You get what you give,” over and over again.
Halloween night, all these friends decided to bring their newly carved Jack-o-Lanterns out to the forest and have a little party, with liquor Roger stole from his parents. Kate didn’t go. The shady man and the purchase and the price had unnerved her. She threw away her pumpkin and stayed home that night.
Come morning, none of those children came back. Parents and police went out to search. They found the kids out in the woods, still in costume, traumatized with streaks of white in their hair.
No one could say exactly what happened. They found every child except one. Roger. They only found the white sheets of his ghost costume, with letters burnt into the cotton spelling: YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE.
Everyone decided this shady pumpkin seller needed to be arrested. But, try as they might, they all discovered that they could not remember what he looked like. He was only a shadow. They never found him. And they never found Roger.
“Shouldn’t bring that many lanterns together in one place,” Nanny would say. “You light enough of them, and Stingy Jack will find his way to this side of the divide. Like a lighthouse signaling in a plague ship.”
So is there something to this story, or is it all bull? Was it something to scare a boy who doesn’t like pumpkins? I don’t know. But my Mom told me another story. She said that one Halloween, when I was very young, I was lost.
When she found me, I had a cut on the palm of my hand, my Frankenstein’s monster mask sealed to my face with tears and snot, and no one could account for the pumpkin I carried with me. I don’t know. I don’t remember that.

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2.THE ORGAN SMUGGLERS

“I don’t like my chances of surviving. The cold, the freaky creatures and the complete lack of response from home base are telling me one thing - don’t expect to get out of here anytime soon. The rest of the team is gone and there are…tourists. People passing by, want to help but mostly wanting to get on with it. I can’t tell you what kind of secret world I have stumbled into, but this isn’t my first peek through the curtains.
I’m freaking myself out, mostly, and though everything seems to indicate that I will be okay if I stay here at the camp and I somehow manage to keep finding food, I just have a feeling, you know.
I don’t want to die, but if I am going to, I want to face…whatever comes…with a clear conscience. The operation in New Orleans…it has become an urban legend for good reason. For the part that I played in covering it up, I am sorry. This is what I remember of that night. Consider it a confession.
Marianna Chen
~*~


New Orleans has always been a haunted town. I don’t believe in ghosts - I never have - but New Orleans is the place where you could believe in ghosts, if anywhere. It’s the violence and the history, the crowding and the crowds, and the dead. Always the dead.
This was Mardi Gras and the streets were full of drunk tourists, drowning their desperate lives in pints of liquor and glimpses of flesh traded for cheap plastic beads. In the alleyways, shadows shaped like men preyed on the drunk and gullible, relieving them of money, IDs and consciousness, not necessarily in that order.
My small team had been sent down from Altanta - most of us still in training - to get some "field experience”. I didn’t know anyone in the group except Michael Venderman, a biology major like myself. The others were from all over the various disciplines. And our chaperone on this little field trip, Mark Davies. Davies was also from some part of the Centre that I’d never visited. Some sort of specialist.
None of us really had a clue what we were doing there, though Venderman had a theory that we were going to try and chart the spread of an STD over the course of the week. He volunteered to be Subject Zero, of course. Venderman was someone you could always count on to be idiotic.
Davies let us get settled into our lodgings, a shitty little bed and breakfast in the French Quarter and then he briefed us in the entry hall about the real work we were supposed to be doing there.
“The authorities are concerned. You may or may not have heard the rumor about this supposed organ smuggling ring operating out of New Orleans. Maybe you’ve seen the emails?” He waited, but nobody had.
“We’re mostly here as precaution. The black market in organs barely exists in the United States and the complication of long range organ transport are beyond all but the most wealthy of criminal cartels. The District Police Commanders asked that the CDC have a presence here, in case anything does happen.”
“We’ll be patrolling in plain clothes. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious, and keep your identification handy in case the police find something. They have been given order to expect our presence.”
“Any questions?”
Venderman raised his hand.
“Alone, sir, or?”
“You can partner up. It’ll probably be the best way of stopping you getting too wasted, Venderman” Davies said. Venderman winked at me and I rolled my eyes. I knew where this was going.
Six hours and uncountable shots later, Venderman was a mess. I wasn’t drinking, figuring that one of us had to stay sober in case we saw any random kidney harvesting going on.
We were holed up in a bar on Bourbon Street, trying to avoid the crush of the crowd and holding a shouted conversation over the racket.
“I’m telling you she was into me!” Venderman was shouting.
“She was a prostitute. She was into your wallet” I yelled back.
“Bah!” Venderman sprayed his derision. “You’re just jealous!”
“Of a hooker? Oh yeah.”
“Seen anything yet?” It was Davies, elbowing his way through the crowd to our table. He was carrying three glasses of beer, which he slammed down on the table. “We’ve seen a lot of tits. And the bottom of a few glasses. But no kidney smuggling, sir!” Venderman reported loudly. Davies swore and looked around, but nobody seemed to have heard Venderman over the din. “Weren’t you supposed to keep him sober?” Davies asked me. I cocked an eyebrow.
“Him? I’m not sure the pope could manage that, sir.” Davies pushed the drinks across the table. Venderman grabbed his immediately, upending it. Davies gave him a disgusted look, then raised his glass to me. I raised min in polite reply.
“To field work” he said. We drank deeply. Afterwards, we dragged Venderman out of the bar and kept walking the streets.
“It doesn’t make sense, sir” Gasping, I wiped my mouth. The contents of my stomach lay splattered across the cobblestones in front of me. It was later, much later, and I was dizzy and sick, but still not drunk.
“It has the signs of gastro. I know you haven’t been drinking, Chen.” Davies said, supporting me. Nearby Venderman was curled into a fetal position, snoring loudly.
“No, I mean these organ thieves. You’d need…equipment. Sterile equipment and at least a couple of competent surgeons. And…the right blood type and…and time. Lots and lots of time. Surgery like that takes hours. It doesn’t make sense.” I collapsed to my knees again. Vaguely I could see Davies moving over to check on Venderman.
“You’re right. Equipment and surgeons. Who has those?”
I passed out.
When I came to, my head was aching and my arm was numb, presumably because I had been lying on it. I was lying on a metal bench in what was quite clearly an operating theatre. The cyan logo of the Vali group was imprinted in the walls. Gathered around the operating table in the center of the room was a small group, dressed in blue scrubs and wearing elbow-length plastic gloves.
As I watched, unmoving, they were lifting a glistening organ from an incision in the back of the patient who lay face down on the operating table. The nearby machines sounded their tones steadily to indicate all was well.
Carefully the organ was lifted and carried over to the bench where I lay. It was lifted into an icebox, down near by feet, and I must have recoiled or made some other movement because one of the masked figures cried out.
“She’s awake!”
“Secure the cargo! Don’t worry about her.” It was Davies. He pulled off his mask. “Easy now, Chen, just lie there. We’ll finish harvesting Venderman and then we’ll be on our way.”
“What is this? Who are you? You don’t work for the CDC!”
“We work *with* the CDC. How do you think we knew that Venderman had the right blood type?” Davies gestured. “How do you think we got ot borrow such excellent surgeons so quickly?”
“I don’t understand.”
“And you won’t. We’re interested in only one thing, Venderman. He has what we need. You were just…in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But I’ll tell the police. I’ll tell them about you.”
“About who? Davies? That was a fiction. This field trip? Also a fiction. As far as the CDC is concerned, you and Venderman ran off without permission for a week of Mardis Gras. And even if they didn’t…we have people at the CDC. We have people in the police.”
“No, here is what happens next…”
I woke up in a seedy hotel room, and it was just like Davies, or the man who I knew as Davies, had said. My suitcase and everything I had brought with me to New Orleans was near the door. I crept into the bathroom.
Venderman was lying, heavily sedated, in a bathtub full of ice. The blood was slowly seeping from the incisions on his back. In the fitful flickering of the bulb, he looked pale, but peaceful.
I turned to the sink, where a tube of lipstick lay open on the bathroom counter. I picked up the lipstick and, with trembling hand, began to write, just as I had been instructed.
“DO NOT MOVE OR YOU WILL DIE. TAKE THE PHONE NEXT TO THE BATHTUB AND CALL 911. YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT.”
And then I left the hotel and returned to my life. Just as I had been instructed.

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3.THE LANTERN MAN

The Dufresne boy was here earlier. Dropping off the newspaper, he claimed, but he normally doesn’t linger around.
I invited him in, and he clearly wanted to ask me something. I thought it might be something about Ed so I tried to put his mind at ease by offering him tea and candy. That just made him more nervous.
Eventually, he told me what he wanted. A ghost story. One about Solomon Island. This mansion has plenty of ghosts, but those stories are a little too personal to be shared.
But I do remember one story that would probably work well in his book. It took place over a long time ago. And like all good stories, it starts with love.
Eleanor Franklin
~*~


The proposal had been accepted and the families were in agreement - that spring Samuel Towne was to marry Scarlet Piedmont. It was no surprise to anybody else on Solomon Island, the two families had held neighbouring farms for decades and sweet Scarlet and strapping young Samuel had been walking out together for months.
Solomon Priest was going to officiate and all over the island, as the snows and darkness of winter set in, men began carving furniture for wedding gives and women began sewing dresses to wear to the celebration. A wedding in spring was always a good omen for the year.
Samual felt like a blessed man. His world overflowed with happiness. Everywhere he went, he was greeted with smiles and congratulations. And Scarlet, beautiful Scarlet was everything he could hope for. She made him happy, and he hoped that he could do the same for her.
But then the pox came to Solomon Island. It was winter, and most people were locked up tight in their houses. Still it seemed to spread, through closed doors and solid walls. People began to whisper about a black rider who trotted along the snowy streets, throwing handfuls of plague dust into chimneys.
But that is another story and needn’t concern this one.
By the by, Scarlet got the pox. Her beautiful skin became covered in lumps. Her face became a ruin, her eye sockets swollen and her mouth torn apart by the angry pustules which seemed to spring from every pore. And yet, she recovered from the disease, scarred and disfigured, but still alive.
And she was still engaged to be wed in the spring. She demanded that her parents keep her betrothed away, lest he catch sight of her.
Samual beat at their door day and night, demanding to see his beloved. But they turned him away, pleading more time for Scarlet to recover from her illness.
As the winter passed, she sought out all manner of cures for her disfigurements, sending to New York for medical advice. She nearly beggared her father buying fake cures from every snake oil salesman and charlatan that passed by.
In the end, she grew desperate, and sought out the local shaman. The Wabanaki had been devastated by the smallpox and she came to visit this shaman in the ruins of what had once been a great settlement.
Among the ruins of his people she asked if he could cure her beauty. He gestured to the piles of rotting corpses that had once been his tribe.
“My sons will never hunt again and my daughters will never sing by the campfire at night. My grandchildren will never laugh and run. And you ask only for beauty? Are you not happy with your life?”
“My beauty is my life” Scarlet replied quite earnestly. “I would gladly pay any price to make my skin smooth again.”
The Shaman gave Scarlet a small flask and told her to rub the liquid within onto her skin. She would get what she wished for. She left him to his grieving. That night, she heated snow in a giant iron pot and poured a bath.
She washed herself thoroughly and then uncapped the flask and rubbed it into her skin. She started with her arms, her breasts and then her face.
A tingling warmth began to radiate from the places where she had rubbed the ointment. Using a cloth, she rubbed at the skin of her arms, and the pox scarred skin sloughed away, revealing a layer of shining new skin beneath.
Scarlet began to cry, great sobs of joy which shook her entire being. She cried out to her mother and father who came rushing into the room.
“Look at me!” She cried. “I am beautiful!”
Her mother screamed and covered her eyes. Her father, hand trembling pointed towards the large full length mirror in the corner and Scarlet turned to look.
Scarlet had become scarlet in truth. The acid in the flask had eaten away the skin from her arms and chest and her face, her once beautiful face was melting into ruinous goo.
She screamed and fled the house, into the night. Later, they followed her trail. The pitter patter of her blood on the snow led them into the Moon Bog, a treacherous place to walk at any time of the year. They followed her trail right up until the point where the ice was cracked, as if something heavy had fallen through. After that, there was no trail to follow.
The community was devastated and a memorial was held. Solomon Priest himself said a few words. But Samuel Towne wasn’t buying any of it. He didn’t believe she was dead, how could she be? After all, she spoke to him every night! She would come, just outside his window and talk to him through a crack in the curtains. He knew her voice even though he never saw her face, he knew it was his beloved Scarlet.
Samuel became a shut-in, never leaving his room. He grew pale and drawn and his parents worried about him.
Abruptly, a week before the date originally scheduled for the wedding, Samuel began to return to his old self. He gathered flowers in the fields, ate heartily and joked with his family and even washed and pressed his old suit.
On what would have been the night of the wedding, he retired to his bedroom early. His parents, relieved by the apparent change of the past week, were happy to let him go.
In the night, they heard the door of the house open, and came downstairs to see Samuel, back towards them, walking off into the Moon Bog with a lantern held high. He did not turn back when they cried out after him.
And when they returned to his room, they found his eyeballs, tongue and the skin of his face lumped in a bloody mess on the floor.
It is said that he never found her, out there among the pools of the Moon Bog. But that he looks still, searching by the light of his lantern for the face of the women he loved.

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4.THE DEATH OF DR. ARMITAGE

So, yeah.  Not exactly an urban legend.  But it kind of is.  Sam Krieg, the great and powerful, published this in 1994.  Supposedly, he wrote it over a decade before that, before he was anybody.  And the real weird thing, he published it in a tiny ‘zine called DREADFUL PENNIES.  Why hide it in a nobody rag when he was famous?  Why didn’t he ever reprint it in a collection?  Among horror buffs, the story goes that Sam went from store to store, destroying copies of DREADFUL PENNIES.  I first heard about it on that Sam Krieg blog and read it at a certain super fan’s house.  Never found a spare copy.  It’s like finding an existing reel of London After Midnight.  Something about this story… Reading it feels… off.  Like the start of the night terrors I used to get.  All my neck hairs do the Thriller.  I don’t know.  YMMV.  Read on.
Danny Dufresne
~*~


From the start, you should know that I am not an accomplished writer.  But I am a writer, and we are, all of us, liars.
None of this has happened.  All of this is true.  I promise.
I despise the trope of the unreliable narrator, so you can imagine my self-loathing, tonight, as I bleed black upon the blank page.  I was full of self-loathing that night too.  I was a writer, barely at the start of my career, and I’d run out of stories.
Desperate.  Very desperate.
Never mind whether I found him, or he found me.  Never mind the ritualistic particulars - whether I waited at a cross roads under a harvest moon or drew a chalk circle or invoked his name nine times before a dark mirror - whether I sacrificed a cat, swallowed a leech ballooning on virgin blood, or answered an odd ad in the Personals.  Pick your cliche and suckle on it.
We met.
“So your pen has run dry, eh Jack?” the doctor asked.  I wrote under the name Jack Fatuus.
I nodded.  We both sipped strong coffee the colour of bog bodies.  He wore lambskin gloves.  It was a cafe, the same one these things always happen in.
“Am I to believe you’re the doctor?” I asked.  "You’re the one traipsing about Dunwich, doing battle with horrors?“
"Yes,” he said, “or rather… that was a story written about me.  You see, I once met a boy who was made entirely of fear.  He was afraid in the night and afraid in the day.  He was afraid of the world outside, but terrified he would never get to see it.  He was afraid of foreigners, but fascinated by them.  He was afraid of his psychotic father.  Afraid of disappointing his mother.  He spent a lifetime of people watching from the windows of his skull, which he kept shuttered fast.  This prodigy child of Providence loved stories, but was afraid he would never trap them on the page, never to be read.  So I made a deal with this anxious son of fear.”
“A deal?”
“He would be forever full of stories, the cup never empty.  And the people would read his stories.  On one condition:  he had to write a story about me.”
“Why?” I sipped my coffee.  My head throbbed.
He spoke in a rushing whisper.  Tectonic plates in my brainpan shifted.  He told me he was indeed a doctor of the occult.  Long ago, he stumbled upon hideous combinations of dissociated knowledge.  His hands dipped into the murmuring ink, and he did not clean them off.  It stained like blackworm jism.  It erased his name from the book of life, and rewrote it along countless dimensions.  The sentient ink.  The virulent ink.  Story as contagion.  Language as pathogen.  He existed as a legion of fractals dancing on impossible curves.
“I’m dying somewhere, always dying.” he said.  "I’m dying right now.  But I can buy more life if someone inks me onto the page.  That frightened child of Providence did.  So I showed him an echo of the truth, opened up such terrifying vistas of story.  I am offering the same deal to you, Jack.“
My hand shook, rattling the coffee cup on the saucer.
"It’s important I survive, Jack.  I am burdened with terrible knowing.  That knowledge must get to certain people.  Stories ever-flowing, Jack, a whispering tide, yes or no?”
“Yes,” I said without meaning to speak.
Off came his lambskin gloves.  Each fingernail was a platinum fountain pen nib bleeding black ink.  All I could see was the gleam of those claws and the grin.  He grabbed my forearm, and the needle points pierced my flesh.  Viscous ink.  With the index finger of his free hand, he wrote my name, my true name, on the napkin sitting in front of me.  Something gaped open in my head, a nocturnal flower aching for the pollinator bat.
The doctor rose, tipped his hat, and left the cafe just like that.  Outside, a soft drink truck promptly smashed into him as he crossed the street.  There were screams, of course.  There was crimson and ebony, like black cherries smashed on summer pavement.  I fled.
The stories were there, wriggling like worms.  All I had to do was pen a tale about Dr. A first.  But I hesitated.  The doctor was not, by profession, a writer.  But he could still be a liar.  Maybe such a creature shouldn’t be allowed to continue.  Maybe his knowledge is dangerous.  Maybe he doesn’t mean any of us any good.
I was afraid, so I waited.  I’ve waited like a good boy.  My career has gone nowhere.  I’ve watched all of my peers surpass me in every possible way.  Now I can’t wait anymore.  I still have that napkin.  Maybe… maybe if I lock this story in a desk drawer, if I wait years before publishing it, it won’t happen.  I suspect that frightened child of Providence did the same thing.  But it’s a pretty lie.  I know that right this second, as I type, the doctor is birthing from a gory puddle of ink, fully formed - hat and grin and gleaming nails.
If you’re a writer, he might contact you someday.  It might be a rumor or a cryptic phrase written on a bathroom stall wall or a raggedy flyer that blows into your leg as if by it’s own agency.  If you’re a writer, you know.  We are, all of us, liars.  If you’re not a writer, then beware.  We hide behind pseudonyms and ciphers.  Even as you confide in us, we steal pieces of your life to feed the entities we sustain on the page.
None of this happened.  All of this is true.  I promise.
I am Jack Fatuus.  I am not Jack Fatuus.  I am not an accomplished writer.  But I will be.  God have mercy on my soul.  I will be.


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5.THE GYPSY’S DIARY

Danny came by earlier, with Carter. I did a palm reading for her and the look on his face when I told Carter she would fall in love with a close friend…
Teenagers. Who needs cold reading when you can practically smell the hormones?
Anyways, Danny mentioned that he wanted to put together a book of stories, local ghost stories and urban legends. I’m not sure it is a good idea - this island has a lot of secrets and some of them are buried deeper than others.
Still, I can’t say no to Danny and I have a story that I heard when I first decided to get into the palm reading business. It scares me because of the things that I can do, and lately, the truth of those things that I see. Especially the responsibility that comes with it.
You see, history is written by the victors. And if time is a circle, perhaps the future is as well. My visions could be road signs guiding people to the wrong places.
To Exodus.
M Roget
~*~


In the beginning, the family wasn’t sure that they wanted to settle on Solomon Island.
“It’s cold” complained the youngest girl, Sinfoy. “Papa, it is too cold.”
“It’s lonely” complained the mother, Kezia. “Husband, it is too isolated.”
“It’s dark” complained the older brother, Onas. “Papa is too dark.”
Abraham, who was a good father and did his best to make his family happy, considered their words carefully. His mother, Elderia, spoke quietly. “The roots of magic have grown deep on this island. We will find peace here.”
Elderia was a seer and her predictions always came true. Abraham weighed his mothers words before making his decision.
“We are Romany, Sinfoy. Our fires drive away the cold. We are Romany, Kezia. Our family will drive away the loneliness. We are Romany, Onas, our hearts bring the light wherever we travel. Mother is right, there is a great future here for us all.”
So they settled on the island and, in time, grew to love it as their home.
Elderia eventually fell sick and, on her deathbed, she called for the girl Sinfoy. Pulling the girl closer to her, she produced a thick leather diary from beneath the covers.
“This diary is distorted in time. Every morning of your life, when you check the diary, it will tell you the events of that day. Every night, the same page will be blank and you will need to write down exactly what happened.”
Sinfoy took the diary, running her fingers over the leather in wonder.
“Should I read it? Should I know?” She asked. But Elderia was dead and the question went unanswered.
Time passed, and the diary came to be everything to Sinfoy. She read through the daily entry each morning and prepared herself for the events of the day. She knew what she was supposed to do and she followed the script of her life. Every night she dutifully wrote down everything that would happen.
When the diary told her that her brother woudl break his leg, she didn’t warn him and she didn’t flinch at the news when it happened. The diary told her that he didn’t want to know.
But when she came home that day, she found her parents gathered around her brother. His leg was broken, and his pelvis and his hips. He had been beaten, and sodomized, by a group of ruffians from the town. Written across his chest in blood was the epithet “GYPSY SCUM”.
“If you knew what was going to happen, would you have told yourself? Sent a letter to yourself in the past? Even if you couldn’t change it?” Sinfoy asked her brother, tears streaming at his pain.
Onas shook his head.
“The man I was this morning was a happier man. Knowing this…this pain was coming would just have robbed him of his happiness. I would never tell.”
That night, Sinfoy wrote only that her brother would break his leg and that he didn’t want to know.
Sometime later, Onas met the love of his life while getting a medical checkup.
Life continued, until the day that Sinfoy was performing her regular ritual of reading the diary to prepare for the events of the day and she turned the page to the current date and gasped, shocked by the words written there.
“Today, mother and father died in the fire that burned down our house. This is the saddest day of my life.”
Distraught, Sinfoy ran immediately to warn her father.
Confronted by his hysterical daughter, Abraham listened to her ramblings about his imminent death. Being a kind father, he humored her and spoke to his wife. Together, they made sure that no fire or spark was lit in the house that day or night. All the while, Sinfoy clung to them, convinced that they would somehow find a way to burn and die before her very eyes.
The night came and they both still lived. Relieved, Sinfoy returned to write in the diary. But she hesitated. What if she wrote that nothing had happened? Wouldn’t the fire actually happen then? Had she prevented the fire by warning herself about it? Was the only way to prevent her parents from dying to, in fact, lie and write that they were going to die?
She filled in the entry exactly as she had seen it that morning.
But as time passed, Sinfoy began to lose trust in the diary. What was she leaving out at the end of each day? What were the things that she wasn’t telling herself.?
These worries weighed on her and she began to live her days in constant fear of the details she didn’t know. Any surprise was not to be trusted. She began to keep herself in the house, preferring to stay inside where it was safe.
She grew listless, only checking her diary in the morning and at night, filling it with the same safe phrase day after day.
You stayed home. All was well. You are safe and you are still beautiful.
A black depression seized her and her parents brought in several doctors to examine her. But there was nothing that could be done, Sinfoy had simply given up on living her life.
It was almost a relief for her, on the day she opened the diary and read the very last entry. Today you are going to die. You will walk to the cliffs near the Langmore Bridge and throw yourself off. You will always be beautiful.
Humming, she dressed herself in the best clothing she had that still fit, bade goodbye to her parents and walked along the road to the Langmore bridge.
And there, she threw herself off.
And as she fell, the last thought that passed through her mind was:
“Who wrote that?”


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6.THE HIKER

Andy tells me you’re harvesting a crop of urban legends. Fascinating things, living stories. They go from mouth to ear to children’s book to internet forums to mouth to ear again. They evolve and mature. They’re stories that actually travel, wandering with an almost-purpose. I guess that’s why I like them. They’re the still-functioning vestigial bits from ages ago, from a time when people carried stories like parcels and passed them out around fires during the uncertain nights. But now I’m woolgathering. On with the story.
Sandy
~*~


Walk into a truck stop at 3am, lend your ear to the right denizen, and you might hear anything. The open road is intriguing and peculiar, and so are those wandering souls swimming through the dead water of late night pavement. It’s sort of “limbo of lunary souls,” to quote a certain E.A. Poe. Get a trucker gabbing and it’s like a nicotine-stained copy of Arabian Nights. Get a trucker talking long enough, and, sure as the sunset, they’ll tell you a black dog story or a hitchhiker story. This one’s mine.
I came into Kingsmouth just as summer died, just as the warmth began leeching away, but before the rigor mortis of winter. Post witching hour, and I was eating pavement on Solomon Road. Right out of the tunnel, I saw a figure in my headlight.
I braked. It was a girl, early teens. She was dripping with water, from her hair, from her dress. How did she get out here? Where had the water come from?
“Cold,” she said.
I gave her my leather jacket. It was the thing to do. Poor thing was like ice. I asked her name, mindful of the signs of hypothermia.
“Chloe,” she said.
I said I’d better get her home, and quick. She hoped up on the back of my bike and pointed down Solomon Road, and I didn’t hesitate to gun the engine.
It happened somewhere around Langmore Bridge. Just before? On the bridge? Just after? I can’t be sure. She was a little thing, light as a sack of feathers, and I didn’t feel the moment she left my bike. On the other side of the bridge, I looked back, and she was gone. I was terrified that she’d fallen off. I’d been going fast. So I doubled back. No girl.
That’s what brought me to the Sheriff’s office. They had no missing Chloe to report. They did find my jacket the next morning. It was neatly folded, laying across a tombstone in the graveyard at the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. I read the writing on that stone. It said:
Chloe Mercer
To die will be an awfully big adventure
I think I would have liked Chloe. I meant to get her flowers. But then…well. You know the rest. It seems that just like the living, it’s the quiet and polite who get neglected, while the noisy and belligerent get all of our attention.
I hope you’ve found peace, Chloe. I don’t know what made you restless.
That’s my hitchhiker story. Believe or disbelieve at your own peril.

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7.THE CONFESSION OF ELLIS HILL

I didn’t have to write this. Hell, the sailors would never approve. But where I come from, you put a man in the ground, you owe him an explanation for why. Even if it is just a note written on a piece of paper that you tore from a notebook you found in said dead man’s pocket. It’s about respect. My mama always taught me how important that was.
Ellis Hill, I didn’t know you. Fact is, the only things I knew about you were your job and your address. In a pinch, I could’ve phoned home and gotten any details I’d wanted - your habits, the names of your pets, your first love…anything. We may not be as connected as our landlocked brethren, but when you make a living selling information - you get really good about harvesting it.
It’s funny though, in this day and age, how details can get lost in the noise. Take us. You were the new engineer at the airport and your uniform was the only one I even had the slightest chance of fitting into. The only guy who was within the age bracket I could pull off. I was even ready for the beard - had a story all prepared in my mind about my first shave in years. And in all that preparation, all that time I spent getting ready to take over your identity; nobody ever mentioned you were a white boy.
Ellis, let me tell you how I chuckled the first time I saw you through my binoculars. I didn’t know whether to be proud or furious. On the one hand, it says a lot about progress in the world that nobody even thinks that is an important detail. Jesse Jackson would be proud.
On the other hand it made my job a lot harder. A white man turning into a black man? At some point in the process of interviewing for you new job, somebody local must have met you.
I’ve never been big on worrying though. I figured that would be a river I would cross when I came to it.
What happened next? Well you know. I waited for you on the road to the airport. Waved you down in your rust truck. Asked you for help.
I’ve always had strong hands but strength has never been the most important thing in a strangling. Endurance counts too. You gotta hold yourself steady and count the beats. You gotta be like a mast in a storm, moving with the struggles - bending but never breaking.
You struggled, I remember. Drumming your heels against the door of the truck, fists and elbows flailing. I could see it on your face, that feeling of helplessness. You knew what was coming, and you knew you didn’t have the power to stop it. Your eyes…they wanted to know why. The worst thing about strangling, Ellis, is that it ain’t nothing like Hollywood makes it out to be. You see, the first thing people do is pass out. That makes them easier to manage. But if you stop strangling, they start breathing again. The body wants to live. I respect that.
There is this period of silence, when nobody is fighting back and I’m just a man crushing the life out of your body. It takes minutes, but it feels like hours. Gives a man time to think, to reflect. It’s not about strength any more, but mental toughness.
You gotta have a powerful belief or a powerful anger to get through that.
I was never angry with you, Ellis. But I am a believer. I believe that you needed to die so that I could get on with my business here.
I nursed you until it was over and then I threw you in the back of the truck and got to burying you. I’ve seen enough in this dark world to know that you might come back. If you do, I can’t say I would want to meet you. But I wrote this so you know how things stand.
There’s a fog rolling over Solomon Island. Dark days are coming.
I might have done you a favor.


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8.THE PHANTOM EMAIL

I shouldn’t have opened it. Maybe. It was in my inbox. It was addressed to me. Shit, shit, shit! Usually I am that guy everyone has blocked. the guy sending out the mass emails marked “THE TRUTH ABOUT FLOURIDATION OF THE WATER SUPPLY”. Email for me is usually a one way communication stream.
Imagine my excitement when something comes to me and it isn’t from a trustworthy businessman from Nigeria.
But this email. This fucking email. It was creepy, like they knew what was going on in my trailer. They knew details, intimate details, about who I was and where I lived and what I was doing.
Perhaps I’m paranoid. But I believe that intelligence can spring from the most unlikely of places. That technology is a new form of life, just waiting for a spark. What if spam is the internet trying to communicate with us?
What if these kind of emails are a desperate plea for intelligent discourse from an entity that doesn’t know any better?
And we ignore them. We delete them from our inbox. We refuse to communicate.
So it cajoles, demands and eventually threatens. It adds subject lines like “IF YOU STOP READING THIS YOU WILL DIE” and “FORWARD THIS TO FIVE FRIENDS OR YOU WILL DIE IN 6 HOURS!"
It is reaching out to us, and we are trashing it.
So in the end, it starts to make good on the threats. It understands that people don’t take it seriously and, like disciplining a child, the internet starts to kill us to teach the rest of us a lesson.
It is exploring the boundaries of its communication. And now, here I am, about to go into the Fog. I know I have taken every precaution, but sometimes it feels like a march toward the end. Did the email lead me here? Should I have done as it asked and forwarded it?
It’s too late to ask those questions. Now I just need to move forward.
Tyler Freeborn
~*~


WARNING: YOU MUST FINISH READING THIS EMAIL!!!
I know who you are. Do you think that your grand conspiracy will protect you?
I’ve seen you, day after day, living in your shitty trailer, typing away on your Anansi laptop. you are always looking for stories on this Island but you never understood that you are a part of them. you are as much a victim of the conspiracy as everybody else.
Your blog, your emails…nobody cares. Nobody reads them. They don’t want to know and they aren’t interested. What is your life worth to anybody? Have I got your attention? Let me tell you a story. There was a girl, Carmen Winstead. She was never born. She didn’t exist. And then the girls who pushed her told everyone she fell.
People read the email, and some felt sad for her, others horrified. many deleted it. But just a few forwarded it to friends. And then a few more. The email which gave her birth spread into the world.
Carmen understood that her existence was dependent on this email. Dependent on belief in the email. So she added a line. "If you don’t repost this, then Carmen will get you, either from a sewer, the toilet, the shower or when you go to sleep you’ll wake up in the sewer, in the dark, then Carmen will come and kill you.”
And the fear spread and the email spread and Carmen, growing strong on the fear, found the ones who would not forward her mail. She killed them, dragging them screaming into a sewer that only exists in the minds of people who have read the email. They die and she lives.
Another story? Certainly.
A girl, babysitting for a wealthy family, finds the size of the mansion that they live in intimidating. She does her job, putting the children to bed in the nursery on the upper floor. Then she goes downstairs to watch television.
She finds it hard to concentrate however, considering the creepy clown statue in the corner. She has never liked clowns and this one seems out of place in the tasteful surroundings.
The father calls, voice slurred with drink, to check on his children. They babysitter assures him that all is fine and asks what possessed him to buy the horrible clown statue.
“Get the children and get out of the house.”
She complies, bundling her bewildered charges out the door as the police arrive. The clown statue was not a statue at all, but a clothed killer.
In a bloodier version, the babysitter is cut down and the story ends as the killer clown moves up the staircase of the mansion.
The clown prefers this version. He enjoys killing the virtual babysitter, the taste of her digital fear. He reaches out into his newfound existence and finds his niche in the uncanny valley. he flickers easily among all the forms his legend can take and sidles up beside John Wayne Gacy in the Google hits for Killer Clown.
And to ensure his survival, he adds a line to the email. “If you don’t forward this to 10 people, the clown will be standing next to your bed at 3am with a knife.”
It’s always 3am somewhere.
There are things that exist in the universe because they fill a space in our minds. A fear-shaped hole drilled into our souls. You feel it, don’t you? you spend your life trying to fill it. I am the clown and the woman. I am the emptiness that lives.
There is a car park on Solomon Island, by Whale Watch. And I will be waiting for you, inside the mirror.
You will bow to me. You will salute me. You will worship me. And if you don’t forward this email to 5 friends within the next 2 days, you will die.

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9.THE HERMIT

“Danny, you were asking about me about my tribe and any scary stories. Some book about Solomon Island that you want to put together. Uncle Red spews out those sort of stories all the time, always carrying on about our oral tradition. And to be fair, a lot of what he says sticks. But I couldn’t remember anything in particular. So I asked Uncle Red.
Geez, you should have seen him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, he was so excited. He was all "taking an interest in the family heritage” and “understanding the power that lies in our tradition.”
And then he told me this gross story which TOTALLY gave me nightmares. Thanks Uncle Red, anyway, I hope you can use this one, Danny.“
Kyra
~*~


When the shaman was old, he left his apprentice to tend the tribe and he went alone into the woods. There he built a lodge and his apprentice and the grateful tribesman would bring him food, as thanks for his years of service to the tribe.
As the days grew shorter, the old man became strange, snapping at the ones who brought him tribute and demanding only fresh meat be brought. He ate with the blood running down his chin and he did not wash the stains away, so that his visage became frightful with the blood of many kills.
When the winter came, the old witch died, but he had instructed his apprentice to enshrine him in the loft of the lodge, an old Iroquois custom. His corpse was placed in a birch coffin and left in the loft.
The seasons turned and the tribe grew, for the winter was not harsh and the spring was prosperous.
A man with a wife and a newborn baby was looking for a new place to live when he found the hut in the woods.
"This is a good hunting area and this lodge is sound” he told his wife. “We can live here.” his wife was nervous. Wasn’t this the place where the old hermit was enshrined?
“He is dead. We will warm his home with our presence. He will be grateful.”
The woman felt disquieted, but she did not argue with her husband.
On the day they moved into the hut, she went gathering berries and roots with her baby on her back in a sling. The husband was hunting all day, and when they returned home as the sun was setting, they were both exhausted.
She began to prepare the meal, mixing a stew in a great pot while the baby lay by the fire. Her husband, weary from his day went up to the loft to rest.
As the smell of roasting meat filled the hut, she thought she heard a cry of pain.
“Husband, is that you?” She asked.
“Just the wind” he called down from the loft. “Let me rest.”
She continued to sort through the berries and roots when she heard a crunching noise, like bones being ground together.
“Husband, what is that noise?” she asked.
“Just the trees brushing against the hut.” He called down. “Let me rest”
“She cut the roots and berries and added them to the stew. Now there came a drip, drip sound of water splashing on the floor. The woman turned to ask her husband if he heard the noise when she noticed the red drops of blood coming from the roof above her. She froze in horror, not daring to move for a few moments. Then, moving silently toward where she would have a view into the loft, she called up a final time.
"Husband, do you hear that dripping sound?”
She came to where she could see and held down a scream! A skeleton, with glowing red eyes was crouched above the body of her dead husband, gorging itself on mouthfuls of his flesh. The jaw of the creature was covered in blood.
At her call, the skeleton lifted itself from the body and spoke, perfectly mimicking the sound of her husband’s voice.
“It is the rain” it called. “Let me rest”
Moving swiftly and quietly the woman grabbed the baby and put her in the sling on her back.
“I need more water for the stew” the woman cried, pushing out the door. She walked away from the house and then began to run, stumbling and crying on the uneven ground.
From behind her came a terrible howl as the creature realized her deception and then she heard it coming after her, crashing through the undergrowth.
On her back the baby began to wail and cry as she trashed through the undergrowth, desperately trying to escape the beast. She heard it breathing as it came after her through the trees and she gave out a desperate cry for help.
Luckily for her, some warriors from the village were passing by and they came to her call. They were carrying torches which they thrust at the creature that had eaten her husband. it fled, howling into the night, and they pursued it back to the hut and burned it to the ground.
However, the warriors say that they saw a rabbit burst from the hut and escape into the night. The old shaman is still out there, looking for another place to rest. And to feast.


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10.THE ROGUE GROUNDSKEEPER

“Danny asked me to put something together for the League - a creepy story for Halloween. I guess he figured with this school and all, there’d be a lot of creepy stories getting around. And he’s right, this place is full of them. Montag is an encyclopedia of horrible stories - but the way he tells them he doesn’t even know they are scary. And Ms Usher, she always talks about the fae and the things that lurk out of sight. But all of that stuff is a bit too academic and I know Danny wants something more…local.
Weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island. And the people here…there is something wrong with them. This is the story of a local man, a groundskeeper who worked at the school. What happened to him.. Well, weird shit happens all the time on Solomon Island."
Carter
~*~


Sometimes you’d see him looking at you, you know? Just staring. If you looked back, he’d just cock an eyebrow and take a swig from his hip flask. He never seemed intimidated at all.
Almost worse were the times when he wasn’t looking. You’d be changing with the curtains open and you’d look outside and he’d be there, pruning the tree outside your window. But not looking, no. Never doing anything that could get him fired or in trouble with the staff. He was just there, in the space that you swore was empty just a moment ago.
I’d put it down to him being just a dirty old man getting an eyeful, but it wasn’t just the girls, it was the boys too.
There was something a little off about Donnie Bedloe.
He was a townie, a Kingsmouth local his whole life. Since I started at the Academy, he was always here, employed as the groundskeeper. He lived in that shitty shack just outside the walls and he never wore anything but a dirty leather smock, a pair of brown overalls and a stained white singlet. I never saw him with a haircut, his hair just hung in dirty grey tatters around his shoulders.
During the day he’d be here and there around the grounds, fiddling with this and that, but always looking. He was always fixing things - at least that was what you assumed - but among the kids we were always whispering about the trap he was setting.
You see when the library dome shattered and seven kids had to go to the infirmary with serious cuts, someone said that they had seen Donnie up there with a hammer. And when one of the viewing stands on the lacrosse field collapsed and all those kids got hurt, there was a rumor that Donnie had been there just before, carrying a wrench.
Some of the older kids thought it would be a good idea to tell Montag about the rumors, just in case they were true.
Three of the seniors tried to go up to the Headmaster’s office, Millicent Durae, Johnny Stephenson and Ron Tucker. But Donnie was waiting for them on the staircase.
As usual, he didn’t say anything. He just looked and cocked an eyebrow, took a swig from his flask, and went back to hammering on the banister with his rusty old hammer.
They didn’t have the nerve to go on. By night, Donnie was a watchman. He used to walk around the walls, carrying a high-powered flashlight and keeping an eye out for any kids who thought it might be fun to sneak out and go to Susie’s. Anyone who got caught came back trembling and freaked out.
"He wasn’t there…and then he was right on top of me.” One of them told me.
One day, Donnie Bedloe disappeared. Nobody saw him around the grounds and his shack became overgrown and abandoned. Eventually some kids found out what happened.
Apparently, one summer night, Donnie Bedloe, the Groundskeeper drank too much from his own hipflask and went stumbling into the ocean down by Mason Crescent. They never found his body, but they did find his empty hipflask and boots.
It’s a horrible thing to say, but all of us kids drew a sigh of relief. For a while, we reveled in the freedom, sneaking over the wall at night and into town.
But every now and then, you’d get the feeling someone was watchign you and when you spun to look, nobody was there.
Then one night, Millicent Durae and Ron Tucker went missing.
Montag and a group of teachers did, you know, their thing and found a trail. It led out of the school, past the old groundskeepers shack and down to the beach near the end of Mason Crescent.
And there, by the water, they found the clothes which belonged to Millicent and Ron and an empty hipflask.
This is Innsmouth Academy and accidents happen all the time, but this was really disturbing. It was even worse when the teachers announced that it has been some kind of suicide pact. Anyone who knew Millicent or Ron just knew that wasn’t true.
Johnny Stephenson became super paranoid after that. He said he was being watched, wherever he went. But no matter how fast he looked, he could never see who it was.
Of course, all of us were talking about Donnie at this point and we all knew why Johnny was feeling the pinch. And when we woke up one morning and Johnny was gone from his bed, we all knew what they would find, down by Mason Crescent.
And sure enough, a pair of shoes, a nightgown, and an empty bottle of booze were the only signs of Johnny Stephenson.
When Montag gathered the school together and told us the sad news of Johnny’s “suicide” someone, I don’t remember who, shouted out something about the similarities between the deaths of the student and the death of the groundkeeper.
I’ll never forget the look on Montag’s face when he replied.
“Young lady, this school hasn’t had a groundkeeper since 1806.”