When I was seventeen, I lost a sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was up watching over them, as I always did, every year, since I’d been twelve and old enough to lift the oversized shepherd’s crook my father gave me.
I didn’t see it happen. I hadn’t heard it in the night. All I found the following morning was blood and fleece, leftover from the attack.  It was scattered over the rocks at the forest’s edge. One of the sheep had wandered off, all the way there, and been taken, presumably by a wolf.
This wasn’t how wolves hunted. I stayed up late and made sure the sheep were within my sight the next few nights.
That was it. I kept a closer eye over them that year and lost no others. “It happens,” my father told me. “Don’t let it happen again.”
When I was eighteen, I lost four sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was not careful enough, and every morning I found their blood and their fleece scattered over the edges of the trees. Flung into the branches, spattered over the trunks.
I asked for help. I asked for someone to hunt the beast. But no one ever came up to the high pastures, because they were haunted.
My father was angry. But he couldn’t afford someone else to watch over them; he couldn’t pay a hunter to search the alpine slopes for a lone wolf, and he couldn’t pay a stonemason and his apprentices to build a fence that would stop the wilds from coming for his flock. So he had to settle for me, alone, with a shepherd’s crook still too large for my hands and an oil lantern that sputtered when I swung it too hard out towards the dark.
There were sounds in the hills. I told myself it was the wolf, out there, somewhere. It had to be. A wolf, alone, screaming in the night.
When I was nineteen, I lost six sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. My father did not notice. Five people went missing from the tiny village nestled between the sheer shale slopes, and the town huddled in on itself. I only knew because a messenger came to tell me, far up in the mountains, that my father wanted me to stay there, for it was too dangerous to return to the valley.
“But,” I said to the messenger, “there is a wolf up here.”
“There’s worse down there,” she said, and nothing else. She watched me carefully, through the corners of her eyes. She knew who I was. She knew of my past. She was frightened of me. She knew I was bad luck.
Two nights after that, I lost three sheep in one attack.
I gathered the remainder of the flock and tried to keep them safe, hidden from the wolf. But you can’t escape the eyes in the dark, the nose of a wolf, not alone in the mountains. That is its home, and you are a trespasser, no matter how long you’ve been there.
I lost two more sheep. I had no choice. I had to find the wolf myself, and kill it, or it would devour my father’s livelihood, piece by piece.
What worried me most was their behaviour. Even as their number dwindled, the sheep were not afraid. Whatever was killing them did not frighten them. Something had to be luring them away without scaring the rest of the flock.
This was no wolf. It was far too intelligent and long-lived to be a single beast, flesh and blood and teeth.
I waited, putting out the lanterns, to see it, know it. It did not come while I watched.
The messenger returned. Three more people had gone missing from the town. Two bodies had been found, skulls caved in. She did not look at me as she spoke. She kept her eyes down and twisted her hands together and never got too close.
I did not make her stay.
This was not the hunger of an animal. This was wanting, hunger, unceasing, unsatisfied by the warm blood of my father’s flock.
It never came while I was watching. But it stole three more sheep away in the night, under my watch; once I even chased after a shape in the dark to find a dead trail, and when I returned to the flock I found another one of them missing.
The messenger came back a third time, to tell me my father had vanished along with three others. Four were found, all killed the same way, crushed. Faces battered, bones broken. Beaten to death as though by stones, even though they were found on a grassy hill.
I returned to the flock, and wrapped myself in my cloak, and gripped the crook in my hands until I could no longer feel my fingertips pressing into the smooth wood.
No one else pastured their sheep up here, in the high valleys. No one was willing to do so; these places were sacred, and evil, and haunted. All of these, and more, and I, already cursed, was the only one who could walk this desecrated ground, because I could do no more harm to it – but more importantly, it could do no more harm to me.
The spire-spines of the mountains could not tear me apart. The unhallowed wilds held no sway over me; I, a tainted soul, could not be pulled away from truth, from good. I have already fallen, and will never be able to rise. The closest I can get is to stand on the peaks.
When I was fourteen, I killed my only friend in a narrow valley, scree-rock slopes and precariously balanced boulders on the slipping mudstone. He fell into the ravine, and could not escape, for the sides were too slippery.
He was not friendly, but he was all I had. He gave me marks of his affection - bruises on my arms, shoulders, sometimes on my face. But it was only ever in good fun.
In the ravine, he begged me for help. He said to go and fetch a rope and call his father, who would pull him out. Instead I walked along the edge and pushed the rocks in, one by one, and eventually he could not dodge them swiftly enough, and they broke him to pieces and buried him.
I told the village he had disappeared. I told them he had fallen into the stones and vanished. They found him, and they never forgave me.
There are no wolves up in the mountains this high, up at the summer pasture. Even they fear to tread the unhallowed ground. They do not walk this grass; only the sheep are stupid enough to follow me up past the watching-stones that guard the path.
These places are haunted, and so am I.
I waited until I could see him. He had always been able to play tricks on people, stealing things from them, setting little traps. When he appeared, at the edge of the woods, I only watched.
He touched a sheep, and it followed him away from the flock to the edge of the trees. He ripped it to pieces with his hands - fingers like claws, stronger than any beast, tore the legs from the body and hurled them into the trees. He shoved the flesh down his throat, and he had to move his jaw with one hand, for his skull was too broken and misshapen for him to close his mouth without it.
When he had finished shoving fistfuls of raw, steaming mutton down his throat, he let his jaw hang slack again from his lumpy head, points of bone poking through the gray skin – falling open all the way, so I could see where his tongue hung limp and dry, and his teeth gleamed slick with blood in the moonlight – and used both hands to haul the corpse away into the trees.
It is vengeance that he seeks, a repayment in blood. Not the blood of the animals. It never was. It is mine he wants, mine he needs. He cannot rest while I walk. Where he steps, the grass crumbles to dust, like the dust that coats his hair and rests on his glazed eyes.
If I do not follow him into the woods, he will break my father’s skull to pieces, and take those from the village until they are all gone and only I remain, alone. Either I will join him, or he will leave me but take everyone else. As if I am not already alone because of him.
I have driven the sheep down towards the valley. They will go, as I have sent them; this pasture is no longer safe. It is too cursed even for them. It holds only death.
As it will for me. I have left my father’s shepherd’s crook planted between the watching-stones as a warning. Do not follow. Do not come this way.
There is nothing for you here. There is nothing for anyone here.
Now I go back up to the pasture, to the tiny wooden hut where I would sleep, and I will blow the oil lantern out, and leave it on the window-sill, next to the glass, and I will close the door and make sure it will not blow open, and I will turn, and I will follow him into the dark.

                                                                  💀💀💀

K. D. P. Wildwood is a trans Midwestern author living in Ohio with his husband and their cat. He enjoys tabletop games, observing the weather, gardening, and horror media.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.


On this late-spring morning, galaxies of dandelions waved in the grass as our motley gang of ghosts waited in the graveyard for our visitor to arrive.

Missus Norris sat primly on her marble headstone, knees together. The drowned boy Teddy crawled in the dirt, observing a line of marching ants. Strangle-Pete, the mute guy from the ancient part of the cemetery, leaned against an ash tree and fiddled with the ratty hemp noose cinched tight around his neck. 

I squatted in the grass, watching the sky. I’m the newest ghost. Once, my name was Tim Rankin, a doctor in our little village of New Bohemia. I passed in a car accident in 1948 after downing a fifth of bourbon.  The gang tells me that half my face is blue-black from where I smashed into the steering wheel. 

My curiosity must have survived my cross-over to the spirit-land because I’ve spent many decades here mingling with the dead and studying what it means to be a ghost. It’s a mystery why we four ordinary souls were marooned as spooks in this boneyard when most folks fly straight on to the real aftershow. Missus Norris thinks we have unfinished business that nails us to this world. But who the hell really knows?

We heard hard breathing and footsteps crunching through leaf-litter. Soon, a familiar figure emerged from the trees—a blonde, matronly woman dressed in a quilted jacket, slacks, boots, and a floppy sunhat. The woman carried a camp chair and notebook, with a picnic bag over her shoulder.

As she stepped over a low iron border fence and entered our graveyard, I felt a pang of envy. The living can move at will across the landscape. But we ghosts cannot travel one step beyond the boundary of this abandoned cemetery. 

The woman opened her chair, put her picnic bag on the ground and spread her hands like a priest: “Welcome, spirits! It’s me, Amelia, back for another visit. My blessings be upon you!”

We surrounded her in a loose circle.

Amelia fancied herself a medium. This was her fourth visit to our graveyard in as many weeks. We ghosts have been away from the living for so long that none of us knew her, but she radiated friendliness.

Her only drawback was that she was a crank. She was completely blind to our presence.
Amelia settled into her chair and declared, “I feel the presence of a Civil War soldier. Come to me, spirit!” She waved a hand and looked intently past us ghosts at some imaginary target.

“Reveal, phantasm!”

As Amelia spoke to the air, Missus Norris sniggered, Strangle-Pete snorted, and Teddy the drowned boy had a big grin plastered across his blue face.

 I laughed too. But I also felt a twinge of regret—that I could not share with Amelia my fascinating insights about the ghostly life.

Did you know, I imagined lecturing this foolish woman, that living humans carry within them the spectral energy that can later become a ghost? Yet, breathers notice it no more than their own skeletons. To the living, this ghost-plasm is invisible, intermixed with the other elements that make up the human body. But occasionally, we ghosts can spot tiny phosphorescent flares in the auras of the living, a sign of their inhabiting inner ghosts. 

And were you also aware, I could tell the clueless Amelia, that spirits fade over time? Fact! Every year, we ghosts leak a bit of energy, like color leaching from cloth in sunlight…

But I waste my time. The self-absorbed world of the living does not care about the dead.

Through most of the morning, Amelia held court in our graveyard, interrogating fictitious spirits: “Little girl, tell me of life on your celestial plane!” Eventually, though, she was rummaging through her picnic bag. We pressed around Amelia with hungry stares as she took large bites from a sandwich.

Then, an event occurred that I had prayed for during every one of Amelia’s visits. A random flare of ghost-energy, of greater length than usual, unexpectedly shot out from Amelia’s aura, near her neck. I pounced, grabbing it. Because both the flare and I were made from ghost stuff, I was able to yank it hard like a fluttering handle.

Though she couldn’t see me, a look of panic crossed Amelia’s face. She cried out, dropped her sandwich, and put a hand to her throat. 

At first, her tattered bit of plasm resisted my tugging but gradually, it stretched into a longer, tongue-shaped scrap. Strangle-Pete stepped forward to help me pull. As the flare extended, Missus Norris and even Teddy laid hold and hauled with all their might. 
Amelia flailed her arms and struggled to breathe. But the flare stubbornly withstood our tug-of-war.

Then, as we heaved with our last strength, Amelia’s full spectral form spilled from her body and tumbled onto the ground. Like a newly hatched pupa, the ghost thing wriggled, a soft mass. We watched as it immediately began to harden and imprint with the shape and face of Amelia. Nearby, her physical body sagged dead in her chair.

Missus Norris attacked first, cackling as she plunged both hands into the sticky ghost-plasm. She crammed a great clot of it into her mouth. The rest of us followed, racing to gobble up the spirit image before it toughened and became inedible for ghosts. As we tore out chunks of Amelia’s ghostly body, its still-forming face made hideous meeping sounds. 

At last, our feeding frenzy ended. Nothing remained of our prey but a sheen of goo on the grass.

The rest of the day, we lay in the shade, full and satisfied, knowing that devouring Amelia’s ghost had probably added at least a century to our gang’s flickering existence. 

In the early evening, a passing hiker discovered Amelia’s body. As medics removed her amid the flashing lights of an ambulance, Strangle-Pete smacked his lips and croaked the first words I had ever heard him say:
​
“Yummy picnic!”

                                                                      💀💀💀
​

Jim Wright lives in central New York State, USA. He writes short stories when he can and works as a school psychologist when he must. He is a past member of the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse, NY.

Click here to listen this story on the Kaidankai podcast



Mist crawled over the lumbering surf, coiling itself around the base of the lighthouse on Oak Island and slithering through the gently sloping sand dunes. Along with the encroaching twilight, it skimmed across the glassy surface of the inlet, lapped at pilings in the harbor, and washed over the wharves in downtown Rocky Point. Gulls noisily scuffled over meager scraps near the fish house, while one lone shrimp boat crept across the horizon. The distant crew carefully skirted the ragged coastline on the Atlantic heading further north to another port, either Smithville or Waite’s Inlet. 

Standing on a bluff overlooking the seaside village, a solitary figure inventoried the shadows haunting the somber streets of Rocky Point. Beneath the arching limbs of a live oak once used to lynch pirates, Bryant Monroe stroked his silvery whiskers and scowled. The chill in the air off the water made brittle his aging bones. Even as a young man, he had felt the icy sting of October dusk heralding winter on this gentle rise set above the Carolina shore. Nothing ever changed in Rocky Point.

Bryant Monroe had not come home for many years. The burden that had kept him in exile for decades stemmed from both grief and regret – and had transformed him into a bitter, bleak, and lonely soul. 

Tonight, he swallowed his guilt to find an old acquaintance.

He descended the cobblestone steps and tramped through a weedy meadow while the moon gradually scaled the twilight summit. The moonglow exiled some sinister shadows, but lent depth to others even more menacing. Bryant negotiated the narrow, winding lanes beneath the serpentine, sable limbs of the live oak canopy. He examined ancient mansions and their crumbling gables, the raised porches cloaked in darkness, the shuttered windows and uninviting doorways and ethereal gardens of the centuries-old fishing community. 

As he passed the Old Burying Ground, he reluctantly skirted the wrought iron fence encircling it. His gnarled fingers squirmed nervously around the bars of the gate as he struggled to recognize names on the closest tombstones. He wondered how many people he had known had come to rest in this forgotten field, ultimately abandoned by mourning survivors, allowed to drift into vague and formless memory until they existed as little more than indistinct faces in boxes of photographs or unfamiliar names in family trees. 

They were all here: Friends, family, fellow fisher-folk and their kin. Generations of people whose lives were governed by the whims of the sea rested beneath his feet. In the cold, callous Carolina ground, they disclosed their final secrets, confessed a lifetime of sins, and recounted the highlights of their lives to swarms of apathetic worms.

Bryant Monroe brushed a tear aside. He could not find the stone he sought amidst the beguiling shadows. He wished he had visited it at least once before this night, out of respect, or grief, or regret. Still, he had not come to mourn her now.

He shambled through the vacant streets downtown, wary of shuffling indistinct forms down on the docks. Midnight fast approached, and he had little time to spend chasing echoes of former shipmates, or reminiscing over a pint in the tavern with the barkeep whose tales had surely grown as stagnant as his ale. Shop windows blackened, street lamps dimmed, this effigy of Rocky Point seemed suddenly lifeless and distressing. He half-imagined children playing in the empty schoolyard, young couples walking hand in hand along the waterfront.

Around each corner and down each avenue, he found nothing more than hazy memories superimposed upon the cruel backdrop of reality.

Moving slowly down Howe Street, he recognized immediately the two-story house at the end of the lane. The latticework framing the three steps to the front door glistened in the moonlight. He had kissed her on those very steps when he was only seventeen. 
Out back, he saw her sitting in the gazebo, staring innocently at the constellations, waiting for him to return after all these years and teach her the names of familiar stars. Unlike him, she had not aged a single day – unlike him, the years had not ground down her features and bowed her frame and made frail her slender limbs.

Unlike him, rampant cancer had not riddled her with tumors.

“Bryant?” She called to him across the lawn. Her smile sent a host of shadows scrambling for more melancholy venues. “Bryant, is that you?”

He had not seen her for forty years. He left her right there, in the gazebo, promising her he would return – promising her they would make a life together, and raise a family. The lure of steady work in the Everglades had beckoned him. Laborers from towns all along the Eastern Seaboard flocked to Florida to make miniature fortunes constructing a road across the vast River of Grass. Bryant swore he would save every penny, return to Rocky Point, and settle down with her.

Late that summer, a pack of thunderclouds drifted off Africa’s western coast and raced across the Atlantic. The heat of the ocean fueled the cyclone; the whims of the sea guided it. When the hurricane reached the Carolina coast, the seaside village of Rocky Point virtually disappeared overnight. Rescuers waded through marsh and forest for days trying to reach the town. They found not a single building left standing, not a single boat afloat in the harbor, not a single living inhabitant. 

They found corpses, and debris, and tragedy. Authorities faced the grisly task of recovering the bodies, identifying as many as possible, and laying them all to rest in the Old Burying Ground – one of the few recognizable landmarks to have survived the storm.

After the final memorial service, Rocky Point subsided into the pages of history. 

Bryant Monroe learned about the disaster months later when he returned to Wilmington. He squandered the money he had earned in Florida trying to drown memories of Rocky Point in whisky. He scuttled his dreams, and resigned himself to misery. He made a living doing the only thing he knew how to do: He signed up to work the shrimp boats out of Smithville.

Over the years, he had heard the tales. Fisherman probing the coves and creeks near Oak Island swore that they had seen the village of Rocky Point as though it had never vanished. When the moon swung low over the Atlantic, and sea fog caressed the coastline, they swore that a ghostly likeness of the village would materialize. They spoke of shadows in the form of men, and voices whispered on the sea breeze.

Bryant had listened to sailors spin the stories time after time, rewarding them both with fascination and with beer. Still, he could not return to Rocky Point. Not until now.

Bryant Monroe gazed upon his first and only love. He climbed the steps and sat next to her in the gazebo, watching the moonlight pierce her vaporous form. 

“It is you, Bryant,” she said, leaning against him. 

“Yes, Lydia – I’ve come home.” He could smell her perfume, and her hair tickled his neck. Had she any misgivings about his tardiness, she forgave him instantly. She knew why he had finally returned to her.

“Everything will be fine, sweetheart.” She kissed his forehead gently. “You’ll be safe now that you’re home in Rocky Point.” 

                                                                        💀💀💀


Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his bachelor’s in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Publication credits include World War Cthulhu and The Children of Gla'aki from Dark Regions Press; Through a Mythos Darkly from PS Publishing; Children of Lovecraft Country and Shadows of an Inner Darkness from Golden Goblin Press; and Corridors and The Pickman Papers from Innsmouth Gold. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter.
 
Lee’s inclination toward horror manifested itself early in his childhood when he began flipping through the pages of Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland and reading Gold Key Comic classics like Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and Grimm’s Ghost Stories. In his teenage years, he discovered Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Richard Matheson and other masters of the genre. Lee’s work often focuses on character interaction set against a pervading sense of cosmic dread and high strangeness.