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


      Sooner or later, memory will catch you. I am not certain if ghosts are real or not, but what I am sure of is that memory is the ultimate phantasm, the thing inside your closet, the voice calling you from downstairs, the shadow of the newel post against the wall. My childhood was not so much a linear progression of events as much as a parade of sensations, ebbing and flowing like an itch.
    For a kid who got scared so often, my trajectory seems weird—I write horror. In its own way, it’s a form of healing. Horror movies are hard for me to stomach. I have to pace myself when reading a book. Terror is not so much a boost of adrenaline as it is therapy.
    I began thinking about this, and a series of similar events when I gave a talk at a bar in Brooklyn. I have always grown up in Brooklyn and as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to die here. This city is my bones, it is the veins underneath my skin. From every bodega to every time a subway station breaks down. Although I live on my own now, I’m still out of the regular vicinity for book events. People my age tend to congregate in Bushwick, a place I can only get to if I swing by Manhattan first.
    Today was no exception, I gave a talk at Madwoman Books, a space right off the L-train. Bushwick is an odd case because it is living proof of a different kind of haunting, gentrification. It’s sad to see all the local Puerto Rican businesses get replaced with overpriced coffeehouses and bars that look like they double as office space. It’s all so clean, so well-oiled.
    I was glad to see Madwoman Books retained the quiet edge of eccentricity that I had grown accustomed to. The smell of weathered pages from Austen to Zola lingered in the air as I stepped up to the Mic. My moderator was another girl with short hair. Before I got ready to present, she remarked how we looked like doubles. And I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a while, that sense of fear that comes at you when you realize you’re truly helpless. Even if I was a published author I became afraid that life was nothing but an illusion. It came without instructions, so why should I be expected to play the game?
    I was still nervous as guests started to pour in. Not many people will turn up on a Thursday at 6:30 PM for a C-List horror author, but I have an appreciation for those who do. The general makeup of guests ranged from their late twenties to early thirties. Queer women with bright and colorful hair, socializing amongst themselves; “horror maniacs” with widow’s peaks and scholarly beards; matronly women with an investment in the psychological and in the furthest corner a woman with long black hair. It almost seemed done up in ringlets. Her blouse was green with lace surrounding her chest. Her blush bloodred, her foundation pale as a corpse. She looked as if an oil painting crawled out and came to life.
    The moderator introduced me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “Madwoman books is pleased to present Shauna Birchbaum. The author of half a dozen novels and short story collections, her latest anthology Elysian Fields is a collection of ghoulish yarns.”
    This was followed by applause—I couldn’t tell if they were humoring me or genuinely happy. It’s difficult to guage how hard someone is clapping.
    “Shauna,” the moderator continued, “would you like to read?”
    This came as a shock, but I had a captive audience, “sure,” I said, “I don’t often get a chance to read out loud,” I started to rifle through the book looking for a good story, “here’s one of my favorites; The Abandoned House on Verne Street.” I began to read.
                                                                    #
The Abandoned House on Verne Street
    The candle resting on a golden holder in the corner flickered against the chipped walls and splintered hardwood floor. It was the only room in the house with any source of light, fluttering in the freezing winter breeze. In the corner, Dana contemplated if she could light her cigarette with the flame. She reclined against the wall and cocked her head over her hand, thinking she conveyed an air of mystery.
    Across the room Lia tromped, panting, out of breath. “Is this the place?” Her voice was starting to give. Her oversized hoodie was sliding off her body.
    “I’m guessing.” Said Dana, fiddling with her cigarette.
    “What was it that you got?” Lia said, “A letter or something?”
    “A letter in the mail. Written in red ink, smeared all over the page. Said meet me in the abandoned house on Verne Street. As far as I’m concerned, this is the only abandoned house.”
    “I got that letter too,” Lia said, “but why are you here?”
    “Beats me.” Dana swooped down and sparked her cigarette with the candle flame. “Why?” She took a puff, “Are you?”
    “I’ve just been really down lately. Nothing but work, bills, family reunions, then I hang out with friends who don’t even give a shit. Figured if I got stabbed by a murderer in an abandoned building; it would be an interesting way to end my life.”
    “Want a drag?” Asked Dana, offering her cigarette.
    “Nah,” Said Lia, “I wanna die quickly, not slowly.”
     “Me? I just wanna die.”
    Thwack! A sound of a heavy object slamming against a wall came from the entrance. Alice scurried in. “Oh hey ladies!” she said, “Did you get the letter?”
    “Yes.” Lia and Dana said in unison.
    “Me too! Oh my god!” Alice walked closer. Her black blouse shone in the candlelight, like it was slicked with some sort of substance. “So… what are your names?”
    Dana bent down, lit her cigarette and took a drag. “I’m Dana, I guess.”
    “I’m Lia, who the hell are you?”
    “Oh,” said Alice, “You might say your name is Bart Simpson?”
    “Huh?” Said Lia.
    “Oh you know, one of Bart Simpson’s lesser used catchphrases was ‘I’m Bart Simpson who the hell are you.’”
    “Huh.” Said Lia.”Who’s Bart Simpson?”
    “Never mind.”
    Dana bent down and re-lit her cigarette. It erupted in another bloom of flame. She took a deep drag in and exhaled, sending a pall of smoke to Alice’s face.
    “Oh I’m sorry, so sorry, just forget it.” said Alice. “I’m Alice by the way. It’s so nice to meet you.”
    “Why are you here?” Lia raised an eyebrow, tapping her toe on the hardwood floor. “You seem chipper enough.”
    “It’s just, none of my friends wanted to hang out with me and I got this letter written in the mail and I thought it was written in blood and if it was I mean that would be so cool. I dressed goth for the occasion! So, I decided to go to the house on Verne Street because I thought it would be a cool little Halloween-y thing to do, even though Halloween was months ago, you know?”
    “Could you say the whole thing again, but slower?” Said Lia. “It wasn’t torturous enough the first time.” In the corner, Dana took another drag, escaping into the curtain of cigarette smoke.
    “Well,” said Alice, “To tell you the truth, I thought y’all would be nicer people. It’s just,” —she leaned in closer—”I don’t think anyone loves me anymore. Love is such a short thing in this world and,”—she scooted down to the candle, watching it dance in the endless darkness—”I don’t know if I can love anymore. It’s like my mind is full of flies and my stomach’s full of maggots.”
    Dana squatted down, procuring a cigarette from her flannel shirt pocket. “Want a drag?”
    “Yeah sure, why not?” Alice said, taking the cigarette and baptizing it in the candle flame. “I’m not gonna live much longer.” She brought it up to her lips, took a drag, and blew it in Dana’s face.
    “Lia?” Dana said. You sure you don’t wanna smoke?”
    “”Oh, am I being peer pressured here, or something?” Said Lia, grabbing the cigarette, “I’m down.”
    For the next hour, the abandoned house on Verne street was alive with laughter and coughing fits. Smoke escaped through the window sills and into the cold winter air.
    And then there was another knock. Three raps in succession. “Hello?” said the voice, raspy and androgynous. “Did any of you ladies get the letter?” In the moonlight, the blade of their knife glistened.
                                                                    #
Light applause followed. I kept staring at the woman in the green dress in the far back. Out of the entire cohort she seemed the most enthused. The expression on her face inviting me to tell more about my world. But I couldn’t shake that feeling of anxiety, that omnipresent dread that I was in fact, a hack.
    The moderator slowly turned to me and asked, “what amazing imagination. What  inspired you to write this story?”
    I never thought I’d get put on the spot so many times in rapid succession, “It was based on the houses in my neighborhood,” I said, “I’m from Victorian Flatbush, and as such grew in the shadow of massive manses. I can’t believe people can still afford it. But on some side streets houses lie abandoned, and I thought, ‘what if I get people not dissimilar from those I usually talk to and have them complain in a haunted house?”
    The interview continued on, relatively smoothly for something I was so embarrassed for, until the question of influences came up.
    “Shauna, your work is so scary, what influences you?”
    “Truth be told,” I said, “I find it hard to read or watch horror. Writing is a therapeutic process for me. I used to get scared a lot as a kid. Usually at stuff that seems trivial in hindsight, but still stuff which is difficult for me to think about today. If we’re being honest—I’m kinda scared right now.”
    “We don’t have to continue this conversation if you don’t want to,”
    “No I want to,” I said, “I’m just so sorry.”
    “It’s okay,”
    The conversation continued, and soon we opened up the floor. We talked about the writing process, finding motivation to write, standard boilerplate writing stuff. A man asked what book I wanted to be made into a movie and I said my novel Imperium; a retelling of the life of Caligula that imagines the Roman emperor as fundamentally haunted. Of course, I doubt any studio would have the budget for a movie of that caliber. Aren’t epics about the Roman Empire kind of dated?
    I started signing books. The eerie woman in the green dress was in the back of the room and getting closer. I kept small talk with the people presenting their books for me to mark. Overthinking was a way of life for me, did they not think I was worthy after signing these books? Was I not thinking highly enough of my work? And I kept getting distracted by the woman in the back. She seemed like she had something to say. Something important.
    Most of the guests had either left or were mingling amongst the aisles by the time she came to talk to me.
    “Hi,” she said, “I loved your reading.”
    “Thank you! I’m sorry I came across as so scared.”
    “You’re literally perfect,” she said, “my name’s Vivianne by the way,”
    How suitably crawled-out-of-an-antique-painting of her, I thought, but kept that to myself.
    “I’m Shauna,” I said, “But you already knew that, I’m sorry.”
    “Stop apologizing.”
    “I’m—oh, wait.” I chuckled a little, “do you have a book for me to sign?”
    “Now I guess it’s my turn to say sorry. I don’t. But I am curious. I didn’t want to raise the question because I didn’t want to embarrass you up on the stage, but you mentioned being scared a lot. Is there something specific?”
    How did she know? “There is, actually,” I said, “and if you have time—”
    “I do,”
    “If you have time, I’ll tell you about my haunted childhood.”

     Brooklyn is not just bars, clubs and bodegas, it’s a vast collection of neighborhoods, many where transplants fear to tread. I grew up in Victorian Flatbush, where brownstones and storefronts give way to detached colonial houses, with yards, backyards, porches and dogwood trees reaching up into the heavens. I think it’s common for transplants to think of it as a world of podcasters and novelists. Indeed, gentrification has encroached like kudzu on crimson houses. Even today when I visit my parents, I go to Coney Island Avenue to check out the Pakistani restaurants and Jewish delis.
     Growing up here, I always took Flatbush for granted. That this was how children celebrated Halloween—going door to door trick-or-treating, then going into the local bodega and doing the same. Native New Yorkers are in a bubble. It wasn’t until I went to college when I fully understood that people need to drive everywhere. If I had to pinpoint a proper place to start, I’ll start with the tea party I had in the guest bedroom.
     My parents didn’t bother to rennovate the wallpaper. It was yellow, the color of aging teeth, the same kind of wallpaper that would make Charlotte Perkins Gilman go mad. My parents were never keen on teaching me how to be a kid. They gave me a bear they found at a yard sale, a soft brown eyeless thing, the color of coffee with cream. It was late autumn, the trees almost fully stripped of leaves, branches outside the window like withered fingers, reaching into god knows where. I took Eyeless bear and sat him down against an empty platter. It was around the time my memories were starting to develop, where I grew cognizant of the world around me. In the dim light of the now LED sconce behind me, Eyeless Bear loomed a massive shadow on the wallpaper.
 “Sure is a fine day to have a tea party, eh Eyeless bear?”
 A beat.
 “No response,” I said, “Typical.”
 The tea party commenced in the way all 6-year-old tea parties do—with utter mayhem.
 “Bunny, we have to go.”
 I froze. My Mom is standing at my door holding my coat and a couple of bags for carrying groceries. 
 “Sorry eyeless bear,” I said, “We’ll have to complete this tea party some other time.”
 “you sure will,” Said Mom, “we gotta go to the Co-op.
     We march downstairs, Mom helps me into my coat. The late autumn sky is dark, it’s been getting darker and darker as of late. We hold hands, I in my tiny bear jacket, and Mom in her long coat that swoops down onto the ground. The trees in Ditmas Park were quiet, even at such an early time for me, there was stillness in the air. Wrought iron lamps dropped their light upon the sidewalk.
     We rounded the corner. A pitch-black car swoops by, the windows completely dark, obscuring whoever may be the rider. A macabre thought crossed my mind—what if there was no one driving? What if the only person that was driving was a skeleton, a ghoul? Or worse. I started shivering, waiting, just waiting for the light to change.
     “Bunny, what’s wrong?” Mom asks,
     “Nothing.” I said, “Are we there yet?”
     “We’ll get there when we get there.”
     “I hope we get there soon.”
     “We will.”
     Distances are much larger when you’re a kid. What could be a 15 minute walk as an adult feels like a marathon for a kid. We kept walking, the detached Victorians giving way to brick apartments, cold and mechanical things. My Dad took me to see a kid there once, and he kept harping on and on about breaking rules. I never cared for breaking rules. Even today as an adult, I write horror because it allows me to stay grounded, to make sure that no one idea can take over. You know life is cruel; life is never kind. As a kid, imagine that but magnified times a billion—you hardly even know what life is, you just started to remember where you are in the world, what your place and ideas are. And anything new that strikes your fancy is an alien. A thing to be reviled.
     The houses became Victorian again. On the other side of the street, was a squat green house with two stone lions outside. It reminded me a little of the New York Public Library, only in miniature. I laughed a little.
     “Look,” I said to Mom, “It’s like the library.”
     “You wanna go back huh?”
     “Can we?”
     “Well not tonight, Bunny. We gotta shop til we drop.”
     I stifled some laughter. My feet began to tire.
     Each house in Victorian Flatbush is different from the rest. In the dark, they lose their bright striped colors and become looming specters, places where you assume that their lives are about the same, only different in such a way that it rubs you just the wrong way. Then, I saw something in a window. Even for a scardey-cat like me, I don’t think it would scare me during the day.
     But now, my teeth chattered, I tried glancing away but I just kept staring.
    On the third-floor window of a lime-green house, was a stuffed bear, the color of cream and coffee, much like my beloved Eyeless Bear. It looked out onto the masses, a hulking figure, far too big for anyone but grown-ups to pick up. Its fur was smooth, hairy, and its face was round—as if it was trying to imitate being a human. All of the lights were out in this house except the very top, which was a perfect place for the bear to glare at me.  I sensed that there was a mirror version of me in that room—one who carried out her life in a way almost the same but…
     At last, we rounded the corner. My body was still tense as we made our way to Cortelyou Road, a more commercial street. People were shambling about like characters in a Noir movie, a man sat against a post at the train station, smoking a cigarette. The smoke wafted up, I slowed, entranced by such a thing.
 “Come on, come on.” Mom says, “We’re almost there.”
 Finally. We entered the co-op, and my energy returned. We darted through aisles and aisles of fluorescent lighting—my eyes were fixed on a box of cereal with a wise Gorilla on the front. It was airbrushed, looking like it belonged more on a van or a picture-book than a supermarket.
     “Mommy,” I said, “Can I get this?”
     “I don’t know.” She said, “Is it salubrious?” My parents liked to use big words on me so they could raise me to be their little genius. I never thought of myself as an only child. Wordplay was my sister.
     “I am positively certain it is salubrious.” I said, rocking back and forth on the tiled floor. “positively!”
     “You are one precocious tot aren’t you,” Said my Mom, “Well, just this once.”
     “Yay!”
     Soon, our shopping cart ranneth over, bulging to the brim with goodies, and a couple of foods with names like Holy Basil or Thousand Island Dressing that sent me to mystical realms, places I never quite dreamed of. Who knew that food could be so preternatural?
     After we reached the checkout, Mom gave me a couple of bags to carry. They sagged in my hand, but they were manageable—the whole lower half of my body struggled, urging itself to accomplish the task. We started walking down Cortelyou again. Those same storefronts, that felt like they were part of a city bigger than I could handle hung against the frigid november sky, now drained of any color it may have once had. The white plastic bags were digging into my side. Thumping against me like a pendulum. We had crossed the bridge where the train was, and the man was still smoking a cigarette. Did he have a proper home? All of his clothes were tattered, and a melange of bags was scattered across the sidewalk.
     “Mommy, that man was—“
     “Just keep going.”
     “Mommy, are we going back home?”
     “Yes sweetie.”
     “Are we going back the way we came?”
     “Of course.”
     “I don’t want to go back this way.”
     “Why not?”
     As a 6 year old, I felt too mature to tell my Mom that there was a bear in the window that was scary. Even at the time, it sounded dumb, just think of what the kids at school would think about it.     
     “I just don’t like it.” I said. None of those words were wrong.
     “Bunny, growing up is realizing that you have to deal with things that make us uncomfortable. I deal with uncomfortable things at work all the time.” Mom said, “Besides, we’ll be home soon.”
     “Okay,”
     We were walking down the same street where the bear was. I was sure my Mom noticed me looking away, trying to focus on the other houses, putting all of my effort into heaving the bags home at every step. Yet my eyes were drawn to it. I stared. I stared back at it.
     That night, I huddled in my bedroom, clutching Eyeless bear tight and firm, making sure that he would never leave me. I think my parents were confused why I was so quiet at dinner, not answering a thing that they would say. When you’re younger, you scare easily, things affect you in ways that you can’t quite process as an adult. The world is vast, scary. Kierkegaard once said that anxiety is the buzzing of possibilities. If that is true, being a kid is anxiety manifest. As I tried to go to sleep that night, vast shadows lurched around my room. The Dr. Seuss Books taking on an eerie orange hue in the shade of the night-light.
     I wanted to think that it was all make-believe. But when you sit in the darkness of your room, you keep thinking about the worst possible outcomes for what would happen. Just who was the kind of person who would have a bear outside the window of their house? Was their life like mine in any capacity? Or worse, maybe they were a lot like me, only different in the slightest way. I shuddered at the thought that that girl—let’s call her Laura--might come to my school, sit next to me in class and we would became close friends, finding out that we had so much in common, and then to find out that she liked to torture her pets and feed them to the bear on her third floor window.

     It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, instead that gross miasma of anxiety began to fester in my soul. When I finally fell asleep, I caught a glimpse of that bear, its black button eyes with a fresh sheen, as slick as oil, glistening in the inky darkness, beckoning me to fall to their thrall.

    Vivianne gave a chuckle and I worried she was being overly mirthful after I just bared my sorrows. The moderator gave us a look that seemed to signify she just wanted to go home already so I said,
    “Thank you for listening to me, I appreciate it.”
    Viviane smiled, “It’s no problem, I hope you don’t mind that I laughed.”
    “Not really, no,”
    “No,” she said, “it’s just, I grew up in Flatbush too.”
    “Oh,” my body was starting to break out in gooseflesh. I knew it would have been ridiculous for her to have been from the exact house with a bear in it, but there was something uncanny, something I understood that things weren’t quite right,”
    “And it’s funny you mentioned that story. I had a huge stuffed animal which I placed on my window.”
    “Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t demonize you or anything.”
    “Stop apologizing,”
    The moderator and other staff of the bookstore gave us an icy stare,
    “I should probably be heading home soon,” Vivianne continued. “It was great meeting you.”
    “Same, I think.”
    “Do you want a hug?”
    “I’d love a hug,”
     Vivianne and I embraced each other. It must have been the wind outside because her skin was cold to the touch. A thought crept in, when she departs into the night I’ll be all alone, with more questions than answers.
    “Thank you,” Vivianne opened the door, which jingled before she stole away into the darkness, “I’ll see you soon.”
    I supposed it was time for me to start packing up. I was paralyzed for a second before reaching towards my stuff.
    “Hey,” said the moderator, “everything alright?”
    “Why? Why wouldn’t it be?”
    The moderator went on, “I didn’t want to interrupt you or anything because you seemed to be deep in your element, but I saw you talking to yourself.”
    “What do you mean, I was talking to one of the people here,”
    “Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”
    “No, there was a woman... with a green dress here, she looked like she came from a portrait, you saw her right?”
    The moderator looked at the guest list of people who had rsvp’d for the talk. “What was her name?”
    “Vivianne.”
    “Huh, I don’t see anyone named Vivianne on this list, Ms. Birchbaum.”
    A beat.
    “Ms. Birchbaum, are you sure you’re feeling alright? You’re shaking.”

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Mave Goren is an author, radio host and musician from the hinterlands of Brooklyn. A lifelong writer of the weird and fantastical, her work has appeared in Ode to Dionysus and the queer indie award horror anthology Trans Rites. She is a prospective MFA student in St Joseph’s University in Brooklyn. You can find her on Instagram as yon_wizardmeistress

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



    The man spots me standing in the deep, rain-soaked shadows of the car park. He is reluctant, looking around nervously. He is as afraid of me as he is of the police. He has probably heard rumors, about me killing customers on a whim, because of a bad mood, or because I just didn’t like them. And he is right to be afraid - as all of those rumors are true.

Still, he advances. 

He stands by me in a way he deems inconspicuous. 

“Are you… him?” he says, anxiously, and clears his throat. Scrawny, desperate-looking creature. Most of them are. “Mr… Quicksilver?”

I nod. No theatrics, just business.

Mr Quicksilver. I took his name. And why not? I took his name as I took his boon. 

He took everything from me.

                                                                ***

The gravel of the path crunched and glistened beneath our steps. Even past midnight, the stretch of the land was bright as noon under the miraculously luminous pale shine of the full moon. The air was damp, fragrant and brisk this close to the river.

We walked in silence for a while. Then Ronan started talking again.

It was his idea, us coming there that night. 

Ronan’s family is a strange one. All of them are strange. I’m pretty good at reading people, but I could never get heads nor tails of his folks. They are smart, but erratic somehow, eccentric, acting like aristocracy one moment then like paupers the next. I know that Ronan’s father once wrote some big scientific paper. He got rich and popular for a while, constantly swarmed by news crews, and then just gave it all up one day to open a quail farm. Ronan’s mother made potions and poultices from local herbs and sold them to women at the town market. She made “witch” potions, like the ones that made girls get rid of their unwanted babies. She also sold hand-crafted Jesus-figurines. Ronan’s sister was a pole-dancer in the local strip-joint, even though she was ugly as sin and cold as ice, until she gave it all up and left for a Christian mission in Africa. 

Ronan himself was no less of an enigma. He left high-school, and then came back again several years later, offering no explanation. He liked comic books and philosophy, but was also the captain of the local rugby team. After high-school, he got hooked on smack, only to get completely clean a year later, claiming he “got bored with it”. 

Ronan was my friend, because we shared something in common: we were both outcasts, and we both disliked being at our homes. So we hung out, catching dreams in the dreamless nights.

That night, Ronan took me to perform some kind of folk ritual. Sure, why not, I answered. It's not like I had anything better to do that evening, anyway. Not in our Culchie town. All the pubs were closed, all the tarts taken, and all the bottles emptied. Reenacting a folk custom sounded as a good of an idea as any.

Actually, it was the story of it that got my attention. I was in no way a local history buff, but I heard my share of town legends and stories from my Nana and other old wives, and I was pretty sure I have never heard the one Ronan told me about that night.

“What is this... Mr Silver?” I asked.

“I believe he is some kind of a demon,” Ronan answered matter-of-factly, as I was inquiring about a particular bird species.

“’Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!’ that’s what you need to say. It’s very important that you focus…”

I stopped listening to him immediately, immersed in my own fantasy.

A local legend, not commonly known? One could write a scientific paper about this! One being me! I could write a book about it! Or, it could be a doctorate thesis, or maybe just an article for the papers, those pay good, don’t they? I slipped into my fantasies of ever-diminishing effort, not listening to his prattle about clear intent or what not. In the end, I paid dearly for my lack of attention.

I will always remember that night. The silvery shine that bathed all around us in surreal bright gray light. The crunch of the gravel: Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! The smell of the river, of watery decay and damp shoots and foliage. I have never seen moonlight so bright, I remember myself saying. 

“It’s special moonlight,” Ronan answered, cryptically. “Comes around only once in a decade.”

We stopped at White Rock. White Rock already had its share of well-known legends circulating around it: A boy once drowned here. There were mammoth catfish prowling its depths. There was a whirlpool that sometimes appeared and sucked even the craftiest swimmers to the bottom.

I never heard the story of Mr Silver, though. Nor of anything like it.

Apparently, the trick was that, on a special night, in a special year, when the stars are right, one could stand by the bank, throw some old silver into the depths and chant “Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!”, and then the titular Mr Silver would appear and present you with ten times the weight in silver of what you threw in the water.

 It was all ridiculous, of course, but hey, it beat late night television.

I threw an old silver pin in the murky waters. Ronan threw something much larger and heavier, judging by the splash.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!” chanted Ronan.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!” I chanted too, between cigarette drags. I was getting cold suddenly, I noticed by the goosebumps on my arms.

I was deep in thought that whole day. I thought about home, about my sick Ma, and the fact that she was dying slowly. About my Pa, coming home from work drunk and going after the bottle as soon as he had his boots off. My girlfriend, who I hated because she wasn’t kinky in bed, even though she was a cracker in every other way imaginable. I was deep in those same thoughts that evening, too. I must have been, to lose the grip on reality as easy as I did. 

It all… melted, around me. The moon, the river, the fields… It all flowed and ebbed, not so much as silver as… Quicksilver. Mercury. 

It was like a dream, like a fantasy frozen in time. The stars stopped. Ronan was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear his voice, nor did I care.

There was a third person with us now. I didn’t know who it was, but his presence was equal part strange and comforting. At that time, I thought it was some passerby, a friend stopping to say hello. He gave something to Ronan, something he put in his burlap sack. Then, he turned to me. Looking at him was kind of hazy, like looking at the sun. I found it easier to look at his reflection in the water instead. A silvery gleam, running down the waters. Quicksilver, I thought, like a drip from a broken thermometer. He gave me something, too, a cigarette, or a cigarette case, or perhaps a Zippo lighter.

“Mr Silver, Mr Silver, give us your boon!”

“Mr Silver, Mr Quicksilver, give us your boon!”

It was a daze. I felt high, or perhaps drunk, much more than I was before coming to the place.

And then it was over, as abruptly as it began.  

Ronan said something more to me, tied the threads of his sack, and declared that he must return home now. We walked back towards the town together, but he paced faster, and soon I found myself walking alone.

I unlocked the door and crept inside, not wanting to wake up anyone. Pa was snoring loudly and Ma was sobbing quietly, and I ignored both sounds, as usual. A peculiar gleam shone from every which way, silvery remains of my night by the river: inside my water glass, on the window pane, on the hands of the old clock. I ignored them all and went to sleep.

In hindsight, I recollect seeing the first clues of my oncoming curse even in those early days. A silvery bead rolling away and hiding behind a piece of food on my plate. A gleam, like from a misplaced confetti, shining from the corners and cracks in the floorboards. Metallic bubbles in my water bottle that stood out from the others. I see them all clearly now, but back then, they were less than a flight of fancy.

It wasn’t before the first demise that I noticed something was amiss. The first victim of the curse was my sort-of-girlfriend, Marilyn. It was our date night, or, in truth, our fuck night, when we would meet in the stables of her homestead for a hurried clandestine bout of lovemaking.

“You can finish inside,” she said, spreading her legs in the hay. “I’m on a pill.”

I didn’t need any further convincing. Those words by themselves made me finish even quicker than usual. Right now, I’m wondering if it would even have helped if I had used a condom. 

I didn’t know that something was wrong until the next week. When she wouldn’t answer her cell, I called her land-line and got her father on the wire.

“Marry is ill,” the old man said. He sounded genuinely concerned, so much that he didn’t even express his usual displeasure of my ringing his daughter. “They drove her to the community hospital yesterday. She’s twitching and turning… You didn’t do any drugs, by any chance? You can tell me, I won’t even get mad. I just want her to get well.”

I told him that we didn’t, which was the truth. But truth, no-truth, Marilyn Rose passed away the very next day. The diagnosis was high-dose mercury poisoning. At that time, I thought of it just as of a sad, freakish accident. People died of sillier things in our burg. Like being kicked by a mule, or drowning in their own vomit.

The event that made me think that there might be something more nefarious afoot happened a couple of days after Marilyn Rose’s death. 

I’ve often heard stories of sleep paralysis demons, but I always dismissed them as pure attention-seeking bollocks. Until it happened to me. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling squashed. I dreamed that some fat bloke was sitting on my chest, and when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anybody, but the crushing feeling remained. I couldn’t get a lungful of air, and my limbs were pinned to the mattress. The only part of my body that I could move were my eyeballs, and, once pointed upwards, they spotted something odd: a large, shimmering, metallic bubble, floating near the ceiling, with several smaller ones orbiting around it. The ball projected a strong force which pinned me to the bed, and suddenly, for the first time in my life, I thought of Jesus, and made a prayer to him, to move that demon away from me so I could breathe. The last thing I remember of that night was the mirror-surfaced ball floating along the ceiling towards my mother’s room, and that all that I thought in that moment was: “Thank you, God! Thank God!” 

My mother died the very next day.

It came as no huge surprise to anyone, as she was very sick and on the brink of death for quite a few times now. The medics came quietly, covered her, and wheeled her away, as if already prepared for this exact moment. We phoned some cousins and friends of hers, and some phoned us back.

 I didn’t know how to react, so I did as my father: I got piss-drunk on whiskey. As we were drinking at the pub, drowning in tides of sappy loud music and cigarette smoke, a thought kept popping into my head: I didn’t deserve this. It was all my Pa’s fault. It was he that was responsible for Ma dying. At that moment, I hated him, even more than usual. He was blind-drunk, singing and swaying with his crowd. “He’s grieving in his own way”, a friend of his said, detecting my judgmental stare, but to me, he looked like he did every other day in the pub.

The morning after, I woke up with a killer hangover. Pa didn’t wake up at all.
If you would to inquire around town, all the gossipers would say that he died from alcohol abuse. “He drank too much. The booze got him at the end”. But I knew my Pa. What he drank that night was about half his maximal capacity. And when, almost a month later, I read the coroner’s report about mercury poisoning, I started to put two and two together.

I never was a superstitious person. I wasn’t exactly a man of science, but I was pretty grounded about what was real and what was only make-believe. The idea of a quicksilver man was definitely outside my boundaries of believable before.
 
I was alone now, an orphan, in the house haunted by memories, both bad and good. There were times, before, especially bad times, when Ma was very sick and Pa was very drunk and violent, when I wished for this: for them to die and leave the house to me. I daydreamed about what I’d do, about the parties I’d throw, the girls I’d bring… But now, all those thoughts felt childish and crass. So I moped around, trying to do some sorting and cleaning, but never actually putting any effort into any of it. It all felt pointless. My muscles slackened and my thoughts escaped, stopping me dead in my work. 

“Mr Quicksilver, Mr Quicksilver, give me your boon”. These words echoed in my head in such moments, feeling strange, foreign, as if not mine at all. They would make me stop and stare at nothing, catching metallic glimpses in the corners of my eyes, which would promptly dispense at the slightest attempt of scrutiny.  

Not knowing what to do with myself, I called Ronan, for the first time since our excursion that strange moonlit night.

“Ronan ain’t here,” his father replied.

“Where is he?”

“He went to his girlfriend’s. He said that he got some money and that he was going to help her with her lavender plantation.”

I had a notion about where that money came from.

“That’s funny, I don’t remember him mentioning any girlfriends.”

I could hear the old man scribbling with an old-fashioned pen on a piece of paper in the background.

“Neither have I, but, you know our Ronan…”

“Alright, did he leave an address, or...” 

    “Oh, I believe he said something about Serbia…”

    “Serbia? Where the fuck is that?”

    More scribbling. 

    “I believe it’s in the Balkans. Now, Steve, was it?”
    “Martin!”

    “Listen, Martin, I’m kind of in the middle of something. I’ve just had a breakthrough idea.

 I’ll… If Ronan calls, I’ll say that you were asking for him, alright?”

    “Right,” I almost sighed into the receiver. “Oh, Mr McCormick,” I stammered, “Do you perchance know anything about… Mr Silver?”

    “And who is Mr Silver?” the man asked, with exactly one ounce of interest.
    “Oh, no one. Just forget it. Bye.”

    It was a stupid idea, but it was also the only one on my mind. I asked around some more. No one had ever heard of this Mr Silver. It seemed that Ronan had made the whole thing up.

    I even went back to the same spot at White Rock, twice, once during the day, once at midnight, but there was nothing there. The magical silvery glow was absent, and the place looked like any other up and down the river. I tried throwing a silver earring into the water, tried calling both Mr Silver and Mr Quicksilver’s names, but the only response I got was the murring of the waters.
 
    The idea that it was all in my head also crossed my mind. I was in shock, I thought to myself. There had happened a series of unfortunate, bizarre accidents, and my mind was in overdrive, making up stories to make sense of all of it. It was only natural that I would make a connection between that strange night and all the terrible things that happened afterwards, that’s the way human brain worked. It was all logical.

    And I didn’t believe one bit of it.

    I started drinking. I was always drinking, even before, but not like this. Now, I drank like Pa used to. I drank until I was no longer conscious. In the few moments of sobriety between my binges, I tried making sense of it all, but thoughts kept escaping, like the small mercury drops I sometimes spotted in my delirious states.

    One night, I awoke at the pub table. The place was closed. Old Mr Smith left me sleeping in my chair, not wanting to throw me out in the cold winter night, or more probably, not wanting to deal with my plastered ass. Across the table from me was Finley, the town drunk, who often kept me company in my benders. And between me and him, there were two strands of thin silvery moonlight. At least, that was what I thought they were, until I wiped my nose and smeared one of it. 

    In an instant, I was at my feet. I realized momentarily that the metallic stripes on the table weren’t beams of light, but streams of liquid. Liquid metal.

    I pushed the table, making it crash on the floor loudly. Finley grunted and turned, falling right back to sleep. The mercury strings were severed. I vomited profusely, forced open the door, and got out of the pub, and then out of town.

    I never returned.

    The years following were pure hell. I was on the brink of insanity and famine, traveling all the way from Galway to Dover, hitchhiking, sleeping on the streets, eating out of the rubbish bins. And avoiding people. But, no matter how much I steered clear, some died, and that drove me further away from the society, and deeper into madness. 

    I tried getting rid of the curse, don’t think I haven’t. I tried prayers and meditations, exorcisms and incantations, and even living healthy, but nothing worked. I even tried tracking Ronan down, but it turned out to be even less fruitful than tracking the curse he brought into my life. Eventually, I gave up and decided to make friends with my demons, or demon. 

    For many nights, I wondered if I deserved this fate. And eventually, I accepted that I had. I took all of my life for granted, never once paying attention or trying to understand the people and the world around me. It all existed just as a backdrop for my existence. That was my sin, and I accepted it.  

    Gradually, I learned to control my manifestations. And I learned how to use them. Turns out, there actually was a practical purpose for my boon.

                                                                       ***

    I walked behind the young yuppie, hunting for a cab in the rain. He sipped on his overpriced coffee, not giving me a second glance as he entered the vehicle. What he didn’t know was that he had enemies, people who hated him enough to sick an urban legend assassin on his trail. And that he had just ingested a lethal amount of liquid mercury. 

    He would die, and no clues to his poisoning would be found. The whole case would be written off as a freak accident. And for all that, I was fifty thousand pounds richer. I, Mr Quicksilver. The walking modern fable. The walking death.

    One might ask, how did I live with myself, for all that I’ve done? And I’d answer, easy. I had a lot of dosh now, to cushion up my life. Life is much more bearable with luxury and copious amounts of drugs, booze, and easy women. And for the rest, the everlasting feeling of gnawing guilt, well, there was a solution to that, too. My control over my powers was good now, but not total. It could never be total. The demon was in the driver’s seat this whole time. I wonder if Ronan was paying some kind of price for his boon, too. 
​
    The mercury was slowly entering my bloodstream, a smidge more every day. I didn’t have long, and I welcomed the sweet release. 

                                                            💀💀💀

Nenad Pavlovic was born in 1983. in a mid-sized city in Eastern Europe. He majored in English language and literature and eventually moved to the north of Norway, where he still resides, working as a teacher and scribbling away every Friday night with a pint of ale at his side. His short fiction (mostly fantasy, sci-fi and horror, with a few exception) was featured in many magazines and short story collections published throughout the Balkans, and a few of them even managed to get published abroad (Jersey Devil Press, Piker Press, Schlock!, Lovecraftiana, Kaidankai, Dark Horses, Underside Stories...). His first novel, Hokus Lokvud, won the Mali Nemo Best Novel Award in 2013, and his latest novel, Salvation on Peril Island, published under a pen-name Nash Knight, is currently available on Amazon. ​

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



Many people believe you see a white light when you die—or you don’t. And then you follow it to a better place—or get tossed into the other place. But that’s Hollywood. The truth is, you don’t go anywhere without a reaper. And it’s a myth there’s only one reaper who magically appears like Santa Claus of the Dead. Oh, now, that’s a movie I’d watch: Santa Claus of the Dead.

When you die, a reaper from the appropriate team ferries you either Upstairs or Downstairs, depending. That’s my job, and there are lots of us—more every day with Earth’s exploding population. And as long as we’re myth-busting, no matter what Charles Dickens says, reapers don’t know the future. We don’t know when you’re going to die. If you glimpse us hanging around your bed, it’s because we’re guessing it won’t be long. But until you’re near death, you’ll never see us. The living aren’t allowed.

Here's how it works. A person passes and becomes the freshly dead. The freshly dead glow purple. It’s as if they have four purple glow sticks glued to them, one on each side of the rib cage and one on each thigh, acting as a flashing neon sign to a reaper. To us, the glow distinguishes an Upstairs dead versus one tagged for Downstairs. 

I’m on Team Downstairs. Don’t read anything into that. According to the Company, the entity that organizes and regulates our activities, we’re assigned teams based upon statistical need and not prior acts. So, if you’ve got a Downstairs aura, and I’m the first reaper on the scene, then you and I will journey together to your final destination. 

Want to know what that looks like? First, the idea that the dead free fall into a pit of fire is overly dramatic and completely inaccurate. The truth is, you have to wait to get into eternal damnation. Yup, they may say the path to Hell is wide, but I’m telling you the entrance is a single-file line. Imagine a theme park. You’re standing on rickety planks with wooden railings on either side. The railings spiral around with a line so long you can’t tell where it ends, and a never-ending stream of souls has filed in behind you. Nothing to do but wait your turn. There’s no escaping this ride, and no one cuts in line. As torment goes, it’s ingenious. What was worse as a kid, getting a spanking or waiting to get a spanking? Downstairs dead have ample time to worry over what lies ahead and to ruminate on why they’re here. But they do have one thing that reapers don’t. They can remember.

How do you become a reaper? It’s not like you sign up. You live, you die, and then you’re here. You know nothing. Memories of your former life are gone. But not to worry. The Company is there with open arms. They scoop you up and take you to what we call Reaper Academy, where you’re indoctrinated into the Company religion: who we are, what we do, and our role in the cosmos. Most importantly, this is where you learn the rules. And there are many. When you have a grasp on things, you get assigned to Team Upstairs or Downstairs and put with an experienced partner.

One of the first things you realize, disappointingly, is that we are not Santa Claus of the Dead. We can’t magically teleport, and we can’t walk through walls. If we’re coming for a soul, we have to break in. If you’ve ever heard a sound when you’re alone and blamed it on the wind or the house settling, odds are, that was us. You might think we roam in some bleak plane of existence with jagged rocks surrounded by fire and sand, but again, that’s Hollywood. We live in your world. After all, this is where we work.

While we’re on the topic, let’s put to bed the notion of a black robe over a skeleton Hell-bent on harvesting. That image came from a reaper named Maurice. Around 1620, Maurice bet he could scare a dude to death. So, he puts on this black hoody, grabs a scythe, and stands at the foot of the man’s bed, pointing at him. Being nearly dead already, the man sees him and screams about the Grim Reaper to anyone who’ll listen over the next three days before he dies. And that’s all it took. Forever after, that’s how you see us. Thanks, Maurice.

It’s also important to know that we don’t ferry souls for free. Once we drop you off at Hell like a kid on the first day of school, we get a gold coin. We live for coins. Every reaper has a leather pouch sewn to their belt. The Company teaches that reapers move on to a better place once we collect enough coins. The catch is, the required number isn’t known. But the coin purse is only so big, so it must be reachable.    

You might be thinking, “Easy enough. Hang out in intensive care units, ferry a few a day, then, Bob’s-your-uncle, you move on.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it goes. The Company has been around since the dawn of humanity, and most reapers are employees. We’re only allowed to reap as assigned. Choice locations, such as hospitals, nursing homes, maximum security prisons, and the entire state of Florida, are reaped exclusively by Company executives. If you set foot in any of these places, you get shredded. Yes, the dead can die again. No one knows where shredded reapers go, and no one wants to find out.  

Not all reapers work for the Company. Freelancers live on the street, hoping to find freshly dead by chance. This is a hand-to-mouth existence, getting a coin maybe once a decade and taking an eternity to move on. Thus, many freelancers join gangs. Gangs are the worst. They sometimes ferry souls, but these reapers mainly lie in wait to beat and rob other reapers for coins. 

It’s better to work for the Company where we’re enrolled in profit sharing. Coins you collect after a ferry are submitted to the Company for distribution up the chain. Employees are credited a small fraction of the coin and given a whole coin when a full fraction is reached. Sounds like a raw deal, but at least you get paid. Plus, gang members know that Company reapers are off-limits. Mugging us will get you shredded. 

Another rule is never to ferry a freshly dead to the wrong destination. You will get shredded. Fail to complete a Company assignment, and you get banished to live off scraps with other freelancers. 

When I became a reaper, I was teamed with Randy, who died in the '70s—1870s, to be exact. Randy is never happy. He complains incessantly about the Company and regards Company rules as mere suggestions. Randy also claims to have seen me die in a car wreck in 1994. With no memory, that’s all I know about my prior life, and he may be yanking my chain. I doubt the Company would pair me with someone with that information. They stress that memories are dangerous and would distract us from our duty. I can see their point.

Randy also says the Company’s wrong about who becomes a reaper. The Company claims we were people who straddled the fence in life, not fully committing to good or evil. Randy believes reapers were life-takers, people who killed or committed suicide. According to him, humankind wasn’t meant to dictate the time of death. And for that transgression, we serve Death until our debt is repaid. In my thirty short years of reaping, I’d have to say that Randy is the grimmest damn reaper I know.

Today, we got an assignment to reap a man in a condo. Based on Company intel, he’s headed Downstairs. Outside the man’s building, Randy reminds me, once again, that it’s the junior partner’s job to break in. 

I scale the outside of the building because, of course, he lives on the fourth floor. Once I finally make it up there, it takes me forever to jimmy the window. Why not ride the elevator and pick the lock on the front door? Because after thirty years of trying, I still can’t pick locks. Randy finds this hilarious and never lets me hear the end of it when we hit the bars. Yes, reapers hang out at bars. We can’t drink, but we love eavesdropping on the intoxicated. Plus, accidents happen to drunks all the time.

We were at a bar called McKeen’s just after the condo thing. I didn’t get the ferry because the cheating bastard repented in his final moments, punching his ticket Upstairs. This meant I had to wait for an Upstairs Team member to arrive while protecting the soul from gangs and freelancers. And who did the Company send? Francis, the arrogant prick. All Upstairs reapers have that better-than-you, entitled attitude, but Francis is the worst. He strolls through the front door I’ve unlocked for him, barely acknowledges my existence, then makes a big song and dance to the freshly dead about how he’s here to save him from my clutches. And right before he whisks him away, he turns to me and divulges that Team Upstairs gets a bigger cut of the coin than Downstairs. He wants me to think about that after he’s moved on, and I’m stuck here doing grunt work. What a dick.

While I’m complaining about Francis to Randy in the bar, he’s ogling some living redhead—like it matters. We can’t touch the living. It’s a myth that a reaper’s touch kills you. We’re not allowed until after you’re dead. Touch a living, and you get shredded—instantly. Hence, Randy’s hoping she has a tree-nut allergy as he invisibly nudges the bowl a little closer. Then, Emily floats in. 
Emily is an apparition. Apparitions are the lowest rung of sentient beings—if you even consider them on the ladder. Unlike us, they can’t interact with the world. They float through walls and moan like in the movies, but mostly, they complain—about everything. I turn my head and ignore her. This was the first thing Randy taught me. Never make eye contact, speak to, or otherwise acknowledge apparitions. All they do is lie and manipulate and are to be ignored. 

Here’s why. Ideally, a person dies, and a friendly neighborhood reaper ferries the purple-glowing freshly dead to where they should go. But the glow fades if we don’t find them in time. Without a glow, we can’t read the destination. The odds are fifty-fifty, but if we’re wrong, we’re shredded. Even if we guess correctly, no one pays for ferrying glowless dead. Thus, no glow equals no go. Reapers won’t touch them. The dead eventually disintegrate into apparitions, destined to roam the Earth in torment as a misplaced soul. 

And apparitions love to bitch about it. If they think there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell you’ll ferry them, they’ll swarm you with every sob story you can imagine. Usually, I can blow them off by mentioning I’m Team Downstairs. But sometimes, even that doesn’t work. For apparitions, anywhere is better than here. Grim Randy’s right. Apparitions lie, beg, and manipulate your emotions.

Emily floats around to where I’m facing. I turn away. She doesn’t mind talking to the back of my head, though. She’s used to it. For some reason, she’s sought me out from Day One. I wave my hand backward and right through her, hoping she’ll get the hint. But she blathers on with the same crap she always dishes. She claims we were in love, and she died in the crash with me. She points out that apparitions keep their memories. Like I didn’t know. But Randy swears she wasn’t there, that she’s just another lying ghost, floating around for centuries searching for a sap.

But something’s different about Emily’s voice tonight. She’s more persistent than usual. She tells stories of my little brother, how my parents are still alive, and how they miss me. As much as I’d like to know about all that, I don’t encourage her. It’s all a ploy.

She floats around to face me and claims she can prove it. She has a plan. I ignore her. I’m still a relatively young reaper, but I’m no fool.

Emily insists she’s not here for a ferry. She only wants to help me because we were once in love. This raised an eyebrow. I’ve never heard an apparition use this tactic. She claims she purposely hid from reapers after the crash because she couldn’t bear to leave me. She says her torment here is worth it—that I’m worth it. All she wants is to be seen by me, to be noticed, and spoken to. In return, she’ll take me to my family. Then, Emily launches her nuclear option. She claims she can get my memories back.

Memories are as precious to reapers as coins. We ache at the loss and déjà vu like crazy. The Company promises our memories will be restored when we pass on. That promise is all we have. 

But Emily asks if I’ve ever seen a reaper move on. I pause and stare at her absent-mindedly. It’s the first time I’ve ever looked directly at her. She’s absolutely beautiful, and the joy in her eyes at being seen melts my heart.

Randy grabs the back of my jacket, drags me to the far side of the room, and slams me against the wall. “This is treason talk,” he says, inches from my face. Spit flies with his words, and I wonder how his breath could be this bad. Reapers don’t eat. We don’t have bacteria. We don’t even breathe.

Randy slaps my face. “Wake up. Do you know what the Company will do if you go with her on this little fantasy? You won’t just be banished.” He gives me his grimmest frown. “They’ll shred you just for spreading the idea we can get our memories back. Don’t be an idiot. Walk away.”

My surprised eyebrows lower into a frown, and I push him off. “You’re worried. Why?” I study his eyes. “You think there’s a chance it could work. But that would mean—” My eyes widen. “Emily was in that crash with me, wasn’t she? You bastard. You lied to me. And now you’re quoting the rulebook after I’ve watched you break them for thirty years? What are you now, a Company man?”

Randy drives his finger into my chest. “They told me the magic number, kid. They called me into the office and told me. I’m three coins from moving on. And nobody, especially some snot-nose from the 1990s, is keeping me from my reward.”

I shrug him off, nod to Emily, and head out. She floats through the wall while I wait at the door for a living to open it. As I go, Randy yells, “They’ll be coming for you, kid. Watch your back.”

Emily and I take empty seats on a city bus. I can tell she wants to hold my hand. I let her try. “You were my girlfriend, huh? So, what’s the plan? How does this work?”

She points out it’s October 28th, and I get it. All Hallow’s Eve is a time when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest. Movies make it out to be only on Halloween, but it’s also the days around it. Reapers take extra care not to be seen during this time. Apparitions, on the other hand, love it and do everything they can to get noticed.

We head deep into suburbia. Emily leads me through manicured streets all gussied up for Halloween. We stop at a two-story gray house with a large porch decorated in orange lights, cobwebs, and witches on brooms hung from the roof. The yard sports a blow-up of Linus and Sally waiting for the Great Pumpkin. And in the rocking chair on the porch is the pièce de résistance, a life-sized hooded Grim Reaper and scythe.

As we near the porch, the Grim Reaper stands and points a bony finger at us.
Emily and I stop dead in our tracks. I give a what’s up head nod. It was a thing in the 90s. “Hi, Maurice. How’s it hanging?”

In a foreboding voice, Maurice replies, “Last chance. Go now or be shredded.”

I look at Emily. She’s searching my eyes and likes what she finds. I turn back to Maurice. “You died in the 1400s, right? In all that time reaping, why haven’t you passed on?”

Maurice’s outstretched arm drops. “Gangs stole my coins.”

I nodded. “But you had time to earn more. How many times did you get mugged?”

He held up seven bony fingers.

“Seven?” I asked. “But the Company’s supposed to protect us. Tell me, Maurice, were you out on assignment all seven times?”

The hooded figure nodded slowly.

“So, every time you had enough coins to pass on, the Company sent you on assignment, knowing where you’d be, and gangs found you every time? Did you think that was just bad luck?”

Maurice said nothing.

“Consider this,” I said. “Have you ever personally seen anyone move on? Or ever seen anyone get shredded? The Company execs get big cuts of every coin. Ever known any of them to pass on?”

Two tiny fires appeared in Maurice’s eyes. He straightened his posture and did what no reaper had ever done. He knocked on the door of the living.

A woman in her fifties opened to an empty porch. She called out threats to neighborhood kids and closed the door, but I was already inside.

She returned to her TV in the living room as Emily fluttered about nervously. I wandered around, touching objects, hoping to jar a memory. “I’m getting nothing. Maybe I grew up here, but it’s not working.” I entered the living room.

“And who’s the lady? Is she my mother? Honestly, she looks more like you than me.” Then, I saw a picture of Emily on the fireplace mantle.

“This wasn’t my house. This was yours.”

Emily nodded.

“How is this going to bring back my memories?”

She led me to a bedroom door. With no livings nearby, I quietly nudged it open. It belonged to the woman. I saw another picture of Emily on the dresser. She had her arm around the woman. They looked about the same age.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded.

Emily sheepishly pointed to the dresser drawer. “There’s a diary inside,” she said. “I need you to pull it out and write a message to my sister, Susie. I need to tell her that I’m sorry.”

My eyes caught reaper fire, and my voice deepened. “That’s what this is? Some message from beyond the grave bullshit?” 

She streamed tears. “I can’t do this without you. You owe it to her. You owe it to me!”

“Randy was right. All you do is lie and manipulate. You weren’t in the crash.” 

Her tears stopped, and she screamed, “Yes, I was, Tony. That’s your real name, by the way. Not the stupid one the Company gave you. Want proof? There’s a green box in that closet with your picture in it. Heaven knows why Susie kept it.”

I looked. Sure enough, it was there. The back read: Tony Manchester, 1994. “I don’t get it,” I said softly. “Your sister held onto a picture of your boyfriend?”

“That’s her boyfriend, a week before you died.”

“But you were in the car with me that night.”

She wiped a tear. “Yeah, I was. Think about it.”

Things became clear as I stared at her. Emily hadn’t skipped going to her destination for me. She’d done it for Susie. She owed her for what we’d done. We owed her. I pulled out the diary, wrote her message, and lay it open on the bed.

I looked up to Emily, expecting relief in her eyes, but fear stared back. I spun around just as Randy grabbed my throat and hoisted me into the air.

“Sorry, kid. End of the line.”

I held up three coins from my pouch. 

Randy body-slammed me to the floor. “A bribe? You think that will save you?”

I shook my head, and he allowed me to stand. I picked my precious coins off the rug. “Not a bribe,” I said. “You’re three coins short. Whether you kill me or not, I freely give them to you. I want you to pass on, to be happy.”

Randy stared at them. I grabbed his wrist and placed the coins in his palm. “Yours now. Do what you will.”

Randy blinked as he stared at the three pieces of gold that punched his ticket. He dropped them one at a time into his pouch, listening to the clink of each deposit. He closed his eyes, turned his face to the Heavens, and outstretched his arms.

“Can you see a light?” I asked.
“No, but they say it’s not instant.” Randy sniffed. “Everyone knows it takes a day or two to pass on. There’s processing to be done.”

I nodded. “Yeah, of course.”

He put a hand on my shoulder, the closest thing to a thank you I’d ever seen him give or ever would. And then he was gone. By that, I mean he walked out. It takes a while to pass on—processing and all.

I walked into the living room, took a deep breath, bent down, and ever-so-lightly kissed Susie’s lips as she watched an episode of Dr. Who. Emily cried as Susie smiled and gently touched her lips with a finger in remembrance. I smiled, too—happy for Susie, but mostly that I wasn’t instantly shredded.

I hovered my hands over Emily’s shoulders and then touched her. She was an apparition no more and radiated a fresh purple glow. I ferried her Upstairs. Why not? As a freelancer, I can do whatever the Hell I want.

Randy never passed on. He was mugged the next day and lost all his coins. Bad luck, I suppose.

I continue to convert and ferry apparitions to their destination. There are hundreds of thousands, and I am the only one on Earth willing to help. I no longer accept coins for my ferries. I don’t need pointless placations. I never regained my memories, but at least I know my real name. And I never told other reapers what I’d learned. There’s a role for what the Company does, but my silence was not for them. It’s for the reapers. Hope is all they have. 
​
That’s my story. Believe what you will. Sooner or later, your time will come, and you’ll see that it’s true. And on the day you glow purple, just relax, and ask for Tony. Until then, we’ll be watching.

                                                                 💀💀💀

MN Wiggins is an internationally published author, surgeon, voice actor, and humorist from the American South. His recently released novel, Physician’s Guide to Homicide, completes the Arkansas Traveler trilogy, featuring Wiggins's most well-known character, Dr. Melvin Napier. 
Dr. Wiggins’s short stories have been featured in The Hooghly Review, Black Petals, Medicine and Meaning, and read on the podcasts Creepy and Frightening Tales. He has forthcoming stories in The Horror Zine, Symphonies of Imagination, Close to the Bone, Flunk magazine, AcademFic, Thirteen, and The Night’s End podcast. Dr. Wiggins’s complete works may be found at www.MNWiggins.com 

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


“Any of you ever heard of Deadeye?” Glen asked the group of teenagers lounging in the bleachers.

“Stop it, Glen,” Jane said.

It was a Saturday night in October of 1959. Halloween was just around the corner, but already the air felt ripe with the promise of football, Thanksgiving, and more football. It was like a religion in the town of Bellhaven. Once the season started, there was no escaping it.

The four friends in the bleachers—Glen, Jane, Steve, and Linda—couldn’t care less about football. They hung out next to the field at night because it was far from the prying eye of authority. They weren’t supposed to be there after dark, but if they got caught, they knew they could outrun any parent, teacher, or police officer in town.

Especially Glen. Glen was a born runner. He was also the unspoken leader of the group. His motorcycle jacket hung off his bony frame, the buckle clanging against the metal seats whenever he changed positions. The distant lights of town reflected dimly in the pomade he used to slick back his thick, dark hair.

“Who’s Deadeye?” Steve asked.

“Where’ve you been living?” Glen asked. “He’s Bellhaven’s only ghost. Only real one, anyway.”

“I said knock it off,” Jane said. She fidgeted, and the skirt of her floral dress swished around her penny loafers.

“Wait a minute, I want to hear this,” Steve said. “How am I the only one who doesn’t know about him?”

“Beats me,” Glen said. “My uncle told me about him a while ago. Matter of fact, we’re on Deadeye’s turf right now. He hangs around this very football field, especially during the season.”

“Come on, Glen,” Linda interrupted. “Jane asked you to stop.”

“Why?” Glen asked with a grin. “It’s just a story, right, Jane?”

“I just don’t like it, that’s all,” Jane said. “It isn’t nice to make fun of things like this.”

“Who’s making fun?” Glen asked, raising his hands and looking around at the others.

“Alright, you’ve got me going,” Steve said. “Get on with it.”

Steve looked at Glen, waiting. Linda rolled her eyes. Jane stared at the tips of her shoes with her lips pursed. In the silence, music crackled from a transistor radio sitting a few feet away.

Glen relished the moment. He cleared his throat, cracked his knuckles, and began.

“OK, it’s like this. Back in the thirties, Bellhaven High had a big football rivalry with Pinecrest.”

“Pinecrest?” Steve cut in. “They don’t even have a football team.”

“If you shut up for a second, you’ll find out why,” Glen snapped. “Anyway, it was the day of the big Thanksgiving game. Bellhaven was hosting, right here on this field. Team banners hung from the telephone poles, the pep band was getting everyone geared up, all that garbage. So the game got going. It was really neck and neck.”

Here, Glen chuckled to himself before continuing.

“By halftime, there was still no score. Then, in the third quarter, the Pinecrest wide receiver started running for a touchdown. I guess they called him Deadeye because he never missed a pass. Just before he made it over the line, two or three of our guys tackled him—as it turned out, a little harder than they should have. Everyone went nuts. Our side was cheering, their side was booing, but eventually, the field got quiet once people noticed Deadeye hadn’t gotten up. Actually, he wasn’t moving at all. When the medics rushed over to him, they found—”

Jane covered her mouth with one hand and closed her eyes.

“They found him dead,” Glen finished. “But it’s not like he just whacked his head or something. His neck was broken, and his head was turned all…the way…around.”

For effect, Glen grasped his chin with one hand, the top of his head with the other, and pretended to twist his head like a cork, making cracking sounds at the back of his throat.

“Like I said, the game was really neck and neck.”

“That’s enough, Glen,” Linda said.

“Alright, gross,” Steve said. “But what does all that have to do with a ghost?”

“I’m getting there,” Glen said. “After the accident, the Pinecrest parents got together and voted to get rid of football as a school sport. They figured it was too dangerous. That’s why Pinecrest doesn’t have a football team anymore. There was one player, though, who didn’t get the memo.”

“Deadeye,” Steve said.

“You got it. They say if you stand on Deadeye’s turf—right there in front of us—and challenge him to a race to Bellhaven’s endzone, he just might take you up on it. And if he takes you up on it, you’ll be dead before you reach the other side. But you won’t just be dead. Your head will be turned all the way—”

“Stop it!” Jane shouted.

“That’s nice, Glen. You’re a real charmer,” Linda said. “Can we forget it now?”

“I don’t know, Steve. Can we?” Glen asked, a wicked grin spreading across his face.

“W-what do you mean?” Steve asked, his eyes widening.

“You were the one who wanted to know about Deadeye,” Glen said. “Now you know. Are you going to leave him hanging? Or are you going to challenge him to a race?”

“Oh, brother,” Linda groaned. “Seriously, guys? How old are we?”

Glen ignored her.

“What’s it gonna be, Steve?”

Steve dropped his eyes.

“I… I’m not much of a runner,” he stammered.

“That sounds like an excuse to me,” Glen said, his tone mocking.

“Why don’t you do it, Glen?” Linda demanded, standing.

“Me?” Glen asked.

“Sure, if you’re so tough. He’s your ghost. You race him.”

“Linda, no,” Jane said. “Everyone just stop.”

But Linda soldiered on.

“Unless you’re chicken,” she said, sitting back down and pretending to examine her nail polish.

Glen’s cheeks reddened. His eyes blazed.

“Chicken?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Linda said. “It’s easy to tell other people what to do. Why don’t you do it yourself?”

For a full minute, no one spoke. A rock and roll song whined from the transistor’s tinny speaker:

I’m feelin’ stronger than a grizzly bear
Soarin’ like an eagle flyin’ through the air
When I get you in my arms, you’d better beware
I go insane ’cause I can’t be tamed

Glen stood up, took off his leather jacket, and held it out to Jane. When she didn’t take it, he shrugged and draped it over one of the bleachers. After a few calf stretches, he trotted down the aluminum steps to the field.

“Glen, wait,” Jane called after him.

He waved her away.

“Don’t worry, Jane,” he called back. “This won’t take long.”

Once on the sidelines, Glen whistled through his fingers. The piercing sound carried across the field on the breezy October air.

“Hey, Deadeye!” Glen shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “C’mon, I’ll race you! You know the drill… Last one to the Bellhaven endzone’s a rotten egg!”
With that, Glen was on his way.

His friends watched as he shot toward Bellhaven’s side of the field. His lean arms and legs pumped with the effort. The thud of his motorcycle boots faded the farther he got from the bleachers. On the radio, the verse repeated as the song neared its end:

I’m feelin’ stronger than a grizzly bear

Glen ran. 

He had thirty yards to go.

Soarin’ like an eagle flyin’ through the air

Twenty yards. 

Fifteen.

When I get you in my arms, you’d better beware

As Glen receded into the darkness at the far end of the field, Jane, Steve, and Linda could just make out his white t-shirt rippling in the wind.

I go insane ’cause I can’t be tamed

When he was only a few yards from the Bellhaven endzone, Glen pitched forward, face first, and lay motionless on the turf.

Jane took the steps two at a time and ran toward Glen, following the same route he had taken across the field. Steve and Linda called after her.

“Jane, wait!”

She ignored them. They charged after her.

Glen lay a few feet short of the touchdown line. When Jane reached him, she froze, then sank to her knees, trembling. Steve and Linda came up behind her, panting. As soon as they looked down at Glen, they turned away in horror.

​Deadeye had won the race.

                                                              💀💀💀

Daniel Gene Barlekamp is the author of fiction and poetry for young readers and adults. His middle-grade ghost story “The Curse of the Cat Man” appears in the anthology The Haunted States of America (Godwin Books/Macmillan, 2024), and his poetry has been translated into Mandarin by Poetry Hall. Originally from New Jersey, Daniel now lives with his wife and son in Massachusetts, where he works in immigration law by day and attends law school by night. Find him at dgbarlekamp.com and on Twitter @dgbarlekamp.