Sooner or later it might have occurred to students to resurrect the Ghosts & Ghoulies club on their own, but it was a major donor to the university who made it happen. Harry got involved not because he believed in paranormal phenomena, but because it was the ostentatiously-named Carrington Quickenden whom the university chose to revive the club after twenty years of dormancy. Harry had developed a quick crush on Carrington the year before, when they both barely managed to pass Algebra I. “Fear not,” Carrington had told Harry during a group study session that only the two of them had bothered to show up for. “My father is the chief financial officer for this august institution, and if I fail the class, he’ll just zero the budget of the math department. I’ll tell old Professor What’s-His-Nuts you’re my best friend, and we’ll both be safe.”
Carrington was a good choice to lead a club that no student had yet requested because, for all his eccentricities (he dressed and spoke as if he had been plucked from 1890s London), fierce intelligence and zesty charisma made his popularity among the more bohemian crowd at the university uncontested. He was king of the regular denizens of local open mic nights in the village that was itself little more than an extension of the small liberal arts school’s campus. What Harry most appreciated was that, despite his obvious hunger for attention, Carrington was honest. Though he was well mannered, he would not pretend to enjoy things he did not, he would not feign friendship with people who did not interest him, and he never hid the motivations for the Ghost & Ghoulies group’s creation. During the first meeting, which was held in a a wood-paneled room in the school’s oldest and most venerated building (a place usually reserved for meetings of the upper administration), Carrington said, “This club exists because my father is convinced some codger will give the university a few million dollars if it does. And because I think it will be fun to chase ghosts.”
The club’s charter, a copy of which was provided by the donor, specified its purpose was psychical research, which Carrington explained meant anything paranormal, supernatural, inexplicable, or just plain weird. The university bought the club various gadgets common on ghost hunting TV shows and let the club members wander through the basements of the older buildings on campus, but it was always more a social club than anything, since none of the members actually knew what they were doing, and most were just there because it was always fun to hang out with Carrington, who would share all sorts of gossip he got from his father about people like the professor who fell asleep in class and the professor who one day forgot to wear shoes and the professor who nearly ran over the university president with an antique Studebaker (supposedly by accident). Harry had gotten tired of open mic nights and was happy to have the Ghosts & Ghoulies club as a new reason to spend time near Carrington, even if they rarely spoke to each other and Harry wasn’t entirely convinced that Carrington remembered his name.
Harry had recently taken a work-study job in the university library’s archives, where the archivist, Wanda Blake, after one glance at him smiled and welcomed him to the job. After a few weeks, Harry asked Wanda what she had seen in him, why she had hired him so quickly.
“We can see it in each other, Harry. Bright as a candle. The need for this place, for what’s here. Tell me, do you have a lot of friends? Do you roam from party to party and bed to bed, or do you spend so much time in your dorm room that sometimes you pretend to go out with friends when actually you’re just walking alone around campus or sitting here in the library until closing time?”
“Well, no, I, sometimes, I mean—”
“You have found your place, Harry. We’re delighted to have you here. Now, let me show you these absolutely astonishing diaries we just got from the great-granddaughter of an alumnus who spent his entire life trying to build a perpetual motion machine.”
Harry enjoyed looking through the diaries, filled as they were with diagrams that even he could see were delusional, but his thoughts kept drifting back to what Wanda had said. Her perceptions were frighteningly accurate. Early in the semester, he had overheard his roommate. Toby, talking to somebody in the hallway about how Harry never left their room except to go to classes. He rarely said much to Toby, but soon he found himself announcing events he had to go to, people he had to meet with, when, as Wanda had so accurately guessed, all he did was walk around campus or sit in the library, reading his way through all six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
One day, he asked Wanda what was in the large, ornate safe at the back of the her office. “Old books,” Wanda said. “They came with the safe in 1952, a bequest of one of the first women to become a full professor here, Henrietta Vittum.”
“What sort of books?” Harry asked.
“Weird stuff. Witches, magic, occult rituals. That sort of thing. Mostly eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also a few medieval manuscripts. One’s supposedly bound in human skin. But there are hardly any real human skin books.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it. Binding books well is no small task with regular leather. To prepare an esoteric kind, and to acquire enough of it, requires extraordinary skill, effort, and patience.”
“But in the safe—that safe—there . . . might . . . be a human skin book?”
“Unlikely. But possible.”
Harry wondered how someone could tell the difference between a book truly bound in human skin and one that simply looked the part. Perhaps there was a distinct odor. Does human leather smell different from cow leather? The question wasn’t exactly psychical, but nonetheless it might be an interesting topic for the club.
“We’ve started a paranormal club,” Harry told Wanda. “Or, rather, restarted. The Ghosts & Ghoulies. It used to be a thing back in the day. We should come to the archives and look at books.”
“I will not debate whether a book is bound in the remnants of a flayed person,” Wanda said. “Off limits.”
“Maybe the others, though? The, you know, occult stuff. Get in touch with our history.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing,” Wanda said.
“I didn’t either.” Harry smiled. Wanda cocked her head inquisitively. He could probably tell her about Carrington, about Carrington’s astonishing cheekbones and coal-black hair, about Carrington’s sense of humor, his tales of travel around the world—but it felt somehow childish to Harry, ridiculous even, because nothing could possibly come of it, not for him, Harry Reynolds, the shy and bookish scholarship kid with the ordinary name. Not with Carrington Quickenden.
He had never, in fact, told anybody anything about his desires. His parents didn’t understand why he wanted to go to college and waste his time reading stories; they still assumed he would come to his senses and marry Abigail Letourneau or maybe Dorcas Jones and work with his brothers on the farm. Abigail and Dorcas were his best friends in high school, but though they seemed to guess he wasn’t the marrying kind, they had their own priorities, and by the time they all graduated, Harry wasn’t among those priorities. He wasn’t sure they even knew that he’d left home. Toby didn’t care about anything in Harry’s life as long as he left the room frequently enough that Toby might have a chance to have sex with his girlfriend. Even if he wanted to talk about his feelings and infatuations, how would Harry initiate such a conversation?
Still, if he were to tell anybody, it would be Wanda. They had only known each other a brief while now, but he felt she understood him, cared about him, would not dismiss him as a foolish child, even if she seemed so sharpened by seriousness that her gaze might cut diamond. She was tall, thin, with wild white hair despite being, Harry was sure, younger than his mother. She rode a motorcycle and ended every day out in the parking lot, smoking a long, pungent cigarette imported, she said, by a tobacconist she knew in the city an hour away. “It’s a vile habit,” she said. “But the only way to survive the curse of living is to devote yourself to one—and only one—vile habit.”
A few days later, Wanda said, “You know, I’ve thought about it and I would be happy to prepare something for your ghost club. Maybe after hours on a Friday night? Or after hours on another night. But that would mean after midnight. Fridays, at least, we close at eight.”
“If you give them—us—the option of midnight, I bet we’ll take midnight,” Harry said.
“Yes, but next month is Friday the 13th. Isn’t that tempting?”
What he was sure was a goofy grin popped onto Harry’s face before he could quite suppress it. He coughed awkwardly, then said, “I’ll see what the other club members prefer.”
He was excited to have something to bring to the club, but nervous as well. After all, they mostly ignored him and he generally liked it that way, despite his fantasies of Carrington taking his hand or staring into his eyes for a little longer than might be comfortable. If they paid no attention to him, it meant they had no expectations of him, and if they had no expectations of him then he could not disappoint them. But what an opportunity they had here, to study some actual occult books, an opportunity he was proud to bring to them, and hoped they might appreciate.
“Books?” one of the club members said contemptuously after Harry proposed the idea.
“Old books,” Harry said. “From the archives. They’re kept in a safe.”
“But . . . books?” another member said. “Are they, like, haunted? Or just old and like smelly?”
After a pause he hoped might seemed dramatic, Harry said, “One might be made from human skin.”
Half the club members looked nauseated, the other half—Carrington, his roommate Lars, and a young woman named Dawn—were suddenly intrigued.
Carrington raised his hand to signal that all attention should go to him. He said, “Thank you, Harry. This is exactly the sort of thing the club ought to investigate. The occult history of this great institution.” His voice became oracular: “Do not scorn the written word, you provincial nincompoops. A true psychical researcher must be open to all experience. Let us go to this archive, let us peruse these quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.” He raised his arms as if invoking an ancient god from the heavens. “We are people of curiosity, psychonauts of adventure!”
Carrington lowered his arms and, in his regular speaking voice, said, “Ask the archivist if after midnight on Friday the 13th would be too inconvenient.”
“The whole point of Friday,” Harry said, “was it could be after eight and—”
Carrington stared at Harry, but not in any way Harry wanted. “I’ll ask,” Harry said.
To his surprise, Wanda said later than eight on Friday the 13th would be fine, but it must be half an hour before midnight. She thought that would be best for the séance.
“Séance?” Harry said.
“Yes, I’ve concluded a séance would be the most appropriate activity.”
“But I thought the books would be . . . ”
“Oh, I’ll show some books. Quite lovely ones. But a séance is what you really need.”
The club was thrilled when Harry told them of Wanda’s plans. Club members volunteered their own Ouija boards, but Harry said Wanda would provide any necessary tools.
At eleven o’clock on the night of Friday the 13th, Wanda let the assembled members of the Ghosts & Ghoulies club into the library through a back door. They descended to the sub-basement where the archives reading room sat illuminated by nothing but dozens of candles in an army of candelabra that Wanda had placed in the center of the oak table dominating the room. Three books lingered at the edge of the table, far from the candles, but nonetheless the idea of these apparently ancient bundles of paper being anywhere near candles seemed dangerous to Harry, even sacrilegious.
Wanda urged everyone to find seats around the table. “The three books I have brought here are items with which we will channel forces from beyond,” Wanda said in a voice lower and more serious than Harry had ever heard from her before. “The first book is a grimoire—a book of spells—written by an unnamed adept in the sixteenth century. The second is from the nineteenth century and claims to be a translation of an ancient Babylonian guide to necromancy—the magic of the dead. The third is the first yearbook of this university, at that time called a normal school, a place to cultivate—indeed, inflict—normality. Now, please join hands.”
Around the table, the students nervously took each others’ hands in theirs. Harry was holding Wanda’s hand to his right, and to his left he was holding Lars’s hand, which was almost as nice as holding Carrington’s hand would have been.
“Close your eyes,” Wanda said. “Make no sound.”
Someone coughed. Someone fidgeted. Someone giggled nervously. “Settle yourselves,” Wanda said.
Soon, the room was quiet. Wanda spoke: “Forces beyond us, join us here in the land of the living. We request you. We urge you to us. We open our hearts to you.”
The room seemed to grow colder. Harry shivered. There were no windows in the archive reading room, but it felt like a breeze blew through. The light beyond Harry’s closed eyelids flickered.
“You may open your eyes,” Wanda said.
Only one of the candelabra—holding three candlesticks at the center of the table—still burned. All the other candles had gone out, their wicks orange-tipped, smoke curling upward in the dim light.
“Forces from beyond, we beseech—” Wanda began, but her words were drowned out by a piercing howl like a pack of wolves trapped in the walls of the room.
People screamed, let go of each other’s hands, and Wanda’s voice then seemed to fill the room: “Sit down!” she bellowed. “Do not break the circle!”
It was Wanda’s tone as much as her words that commanded the room, making everyone forget their fear of whatever they were afraid of and to unite in fear of disobeying her.
“Close your eyes!” she commanded, and they did.
Harry shivered again. The room seemed to be getting even colder, cold as a January night. The silence felt material, artificial, like his ears had been stuffed with cotton.
Something touched his left leg. It must have been Lars twitching. (There it was again.) Something gripped him, like a hand around his ankle. Then the other ankle. Unintentionally, he whimpered.
Out of the silence floated a sound, a hollow voice like something from a distant radio: Please, it said.
Please don’t . . .
please don’t leave us . . .
please . . .
Wanda’s hand was still and warm, but Lars’s hand pulsed with fear and gripped Harry’s so tightly that his fingers ached.
A low growl, like a giant dog, came from the table. The distant voice continued.
Please don’t leave us.
Please . . .
The whisper faded like a final breath.
And then silence.
“Open your eyes,” Wanda said.
Harry didn’t know if he wanted to open his eyes. What might be there, what monster perched on the table, ready to claw and bite, what beast could make such growling sounds, what desiccated body might contain the pleading voice—
His eyes opened.
There was nothing.
The candles were all lit now. The room was bright and warm.
He had never felt so empty and alone; bereft, but unable to say what he had lost.
Wanda looked exhausted, hollowed out, and decades older than she had ever looked before. Everyone seemed to know not to talk to her. Slowly, they stood up, shuffled out of the room, and drifted into the night.
The Ghosts & Ghoulies club did not meet again. The members never spoke about the séance. Few of them even saw each other again, except for occasional awkward glances in shared classes or dormitory hallways.
Harry tried to follow Carrington to whatever club he joined next, but he could not find him. Harry went to a few of the open mic events downtown, but he did not see Carrington there. Occasionally, he would spot him when walking around campus, but he couldn’t think of a reason to approach, and he sensed that if he did, Carrington would have fled.
In a crowded anthropology course the next term, he noticed Dawn. He tried not to look at her, but she stared straight at him. He escaped at the end of class without her catching up, but she sat beside him at the next session. “Lars and Carrington broke up,” she said before class began. “Days after what happened. Lars is staying with friends of some sort at an off-campus apartment. Carrington’s planning to transfer to a different school. How are you doing?”
“Fine,” Harry said.
“Me, too,” Dawn said.
“What about the others?”
“Nobody talks to me.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dawn said.
“I know. I guess.”
“Everybody knew you had a crush on Carrington. He was kind of a shit to you.”
Harry mumbled something like assent.
“Good riddance.” Dawn chuckled. She ruffled his hair. “We’ll be okay,” she said.
Harry nodded and tried to smile.
Dawn didn’t return for the next class session. Soon, Harry stopped looking for her.
Wanda took a medical leave of absence and then retired. Harry had never returned to his work-study job, instead finding work at a grocery store on the outskirts of town, where he also soon found a tiny apartment that he could afford and did not need to share. While studying in the library, he noticed that a new archivist had appeared, a middle-aged woman who had, he knew, worked at the library for a while and had graduated from the university herself. He considered asking her about the books in the safe, but decided it was not worth the trouble.
Harry’s parents and brothers wanted to go to his graduation, but he saw no point in joining a ceremony surrounded by peers he had few interactions with. “Graduations here are really boring,” he told his mother. “It’s really not worth it.” She wanted to host a party at the farm, invite his friends, but he said no, that wouldn’t be necessary. He had gotten a job as a technical writer for a software company in Boston, and would need to be there for work soon, no need for a party, no need for anything, really.
The prospect of living and working in Boston excited him, but on the day he left—all his belongings fitting easily into the back of his little car—a terrible feeling of loss filled him as he crossed the town line and headed toward the highway. He could hardly see the road through his tears.
Technical writing wasn’t a bad career, Harry thought, but he hated Boston and soon found himself yearning to be back at the university. When he saw a job ad for a position doing marketing and public relations for the school, he applied and got hired. He’d had various chronic ailments ever since graduation, but once he was back on campus, he felt better, younger, more vital.
Lars was also back on campus, working as an administrative assistant for the Psychology Department. He and Harry started meeting for lunch, and after a few weeks of that they experimented a bit with meeting for dinner off campus, first at Lars’s house, then Harry’s apartment.
“You heard about Carrington, didn’t you?” Lars said as they lay together the first night.
“No, what?”
“Some sort of degenerative disease. Shortly after he left here. Terribly painful, I guess, and he just withered away, died in his early twenties. Really awful.”
Harry thought it was a grotesque thing to talk about in bed, but Lars didn’t seem to notice Harry’s discomfort.
“What was he like?” Harry asked. “I mean really. When he was just with you. No masks.”
“There were always masks. He always had to be different from whatever was around him. He lived life as a fairy tale. Or wanted to, at least. Carrington wasn’t even his name, you know. It was Charles. Charles Quickenden. He said with a last name like that, he couldn’t have some ordinary name like Charles. I bet if his last name was Smith, though, he still would’ve chosen to be Carrington.”
“He seemed to hide a lot of sadness. Or fear.”
Lars shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t we all?”
“I guess.”
“It’s too bad he didn’t return here like we did. I was terribly lost until I found my way back. Who would have thought that this place is all we really need?”
Harry kissed him on the cheek, hoping Lars might indicate that it wasn’t just the university he needed, the place of their employment, but also that he needed Harry—or if not needed him, exactly, was grateful he was there.
“You’re sweet,” Lars said. He smiled, then turned over and soon fell asleep.
Harry knew he should have said something more, should have asked Lars how he really felt about what they were doing together, asked whether there was some sort of future in it, but he wasn’t sure he knew his own answers to such questions. Soon enough, he, too, was asleep.
Though they enjoyed each other’s company, and over the next few months spent a few more nights together, they both agreed their work was good, their lives fulfilling, and they should really just be friends.
One day, Harry’s boss told him the university was requesting that Harry become the new archivist. Harry was as shocked as his boss was. “I don’t know anything about archives,” he said.
“Apparently, it was some sort of big donor request. You’ve got a secret admirer and they’ve got deep pockets. We’ll get a million dollars or something, so long as you’re the archivist. You worked in the archives as a student, right?”
“Yes, briefly. A long time ago.”
“Doesn’t matter,” his boss said. “The job’s yours. Came down from the highest levels. For the good of the institution, they said.”
As he prepared for his new job, Harry met with Susan, the archivist who was retiring, and one day after she had told him all about one or another cataloguing system, he said, “Did you ever happen to encounter Wanda, the archivist before you?”
“Wanda Blake? Oh yes, she was marvelous. A true friend of the university. A guardian of the institution. She served with great courage and commitment.”
“Courage?”
“The Vittum bequest requires courage, of course. You know that as well as anyone.”
“You mean what’s in the safe?”
“Terrifying stuff. I try not to touch it. Which is why I must retire. It will be twenty-one years soon, and every twenty-one years the Ghosts & Ghoulies must be reborn. You are so well suited to it. Here—” Susan took Harry by the arm and led him to her office at the back of the reading room. She opened an old desk drawer and withdrew a brass key. From a shelf above the desk, she took down an elaborately-carved wooden box, its surface contoured in a strange pattern that made Harry think of gnarled hands. She inserted the key into a lock hidden in the box’s carvings, then lifted the lid. The box was empty except for three gold coins.
“That’s the donation. I had to use it to make sure you got this job, but it will replenish in time. Strangest thing I ever saw. When it comes time, you will need to put a handful of coins in a silk purse—it must be silk—and you give them to the President of the university once the Ghosts & Ghoulies exists again. Don’t use it for anything else. The Quickenden man, the father, somehow he learned about it, and that did not turn out well for him, it did not at all, at all.”
“Wait, you’re saying Carrington’s father—”
“Don’t give a thought to that. Just do your job. The institution takes care of itself.”
“But what am I to do with—”
Susan fluttered her hands as if he was an annoying mosquito buzzing around her. “Prepare yourself, be ready, serve the institution with courage. That is your job. Within a month or so of the anniversary night, someone will be interested in a séance. The best thing you can do between now and then is to study, because after that, the real work begins, and you must start to make the book. The book of yourself.” She seemed to shiver, then sighed a sigh of the ages. She looked down at her feet, as if she were preparing to say something else, but she said nothing. After a moment, she looked up and smiled brightly at Harry. “I’m so glad you are here, I really am.”
And then she was gone, retired, living in a little house on the edge of the campus, but Harry never saw her again.
It was all rubbish, Harry thought. Perhaps some trick someone was playing on him. Was Carrington behind it? Perhaps Lars had been wrong about Carrington withering away in a terrible death, perhaps Carrington had gone off and had a fabulous career and made a fortune and was now a rich recluse. Or, if not a recluse, maybe he saw himself as using his wealth to stage-manage fairy tales. That would be just like him. Or perhaps Lars and Carrington were having some fun at Harry’s expense together. (No, Lars wasn’t ever malicious like that. Lars was Lars, doomed to contentment.)
It didn’t matter. Harry was now the archivist, and even though he didn’t really know quite how to be an archivist, it was the best job he’d ever had. He felt comfortable in the archives, a feeling of being at peace—at home—for the first time in years. Maybe it all was a big practical joke, but it was a joke he enjoyed.
Once he had days to himself to think about what had happened when he was an undergraduate, he found his daydreams infected by events he had no memory of having experienced—running through dorms when they were lit with gas, riding a horse-drawn sled through the snow, smoking a pipe while sitting in a classroom. He remembered friends he knew he never had, teachers he’d never seen, buildings that had been torn down long ago.
He paged through yearbooks and saw that what he remembered was chronicled there. He must have seen them before, their pictures slithering into his unconscious mind, settling into his dreams. He enjoyed looking through the old pages, seeing the old faces, reminiscing.
When he found the first yearbook, the one that Wanda had brought to the séance, he hesitated. He didn’t dare look through it. Not yet. One day he would. He knew it. The time was approaching.
He opened the box for the donation. It was half filled with gold coins.
Soon, he would open the strange old safe, the one that Henrietta Vittum had left as a bequest to the university so long ago. He remembered she was really a wonderful teacher, full of life, one of his favorites. He remembered her soft, freckled face and her ivory hands, so smooth she seemed to be wearing delicate silk gloves.
Her book would be in the safe, along with the older ones she had collected, the power she had brought together, the family she had assembled for herself. Harry wondered what it was about this particular place that had so attracted her, why she gave her life to this institution. He supposed he would find out soon enough.
He approached the safe. He let his hand rest on its handle. The handle warmed and softened at his touch. The dark matte metal of the door, tinged with oxidation, grew glossy, then shimmered as if brushed with oil. He stepped closer until his body pressed against the safe and felt its warmth and a gentle vibration. A rich, earthy odor emerged and then a low sound: deep, rhythmic: a heartbeat.
As much as he yearned to open the safe, to touch the leather of the volumes hidden there, to meet his old friends, he knew he must wait. There was much to do, and less time than he would have liked.
Putting the carved wooden box back on the shelf in his office, Harry had to move a small, brown book that he hadn’t noticed before. The cover was decorated with three icons that looked like fish or ears of corn, and above them in black letters the title Home Manufacture of Furs and Skins. (Not fish or corn, then, but pelts.) He opened the book and saw a subtitle: A Book of Practical Instructions Telling How to Tan, Dress, Color and Manufacture or Make Into Articles of Ornament, Wear and Use. The author was Albert B. Farnham, credited as a “Tanner and Taxidermist”, and the book was published by A.B. Harding in Columbus, Ohio in 1916.
An aged index card fell from the book’s pages. Harry picked it up and saw a note written in purple ink:
Welcome, Harry. I hope this little book will save you some time and pain. Practice as much as you can! Accustom yourself. We love you and welcome you.
—Wanda B.
Harry sat down at the desk and paged through the book. It seemed rich with information about tools and techniques. The many illustrations were plain and not gruesome, though Harry found himself a bit queasy when he thought about what the pictured skins had once enclosed, the living organs, muscles, and veins that had been so carefully separated so that the tanner could get to work. He would need to strengthen his tolerance. Had Wanda meant that he should practice on animals first? Reasonable as that suggestion might be, he had other plans. His was not a long or complex life story, it would not need hundreds and hundreds of large pages. His contributions to the history of this place were important, but small. A simple quarto volume, something the size of the little paperbacks he had in college. He could practice and still have plenty of material left for the final binding.
What he would need to accustom himself to was the pain. For much of his life, he had bitten his fingernails, and he knew from that that he could learn to find a certain familiarity in pain. Not a lessening—it still hurt to chew too deeply into a finger—but it felt ordinary, unsurprising, something to put up with. This would take longer, but he could do the same if he was careful, deliberate, systematic. He would need to stock up on rubbing alcohol, gauze, bandages. And blades.
He opened the desk drawer and took out a small knife. He rolled up his sleeve and pressed the knife into the skin. A little slice, a little blood. He cut a tiny square of flesh away. The pain was more than he had expected it would be. This was not going to be a fast process. Still, he had a few years. It ought to be enough.
He remembered how serious Wanda had seemed to him all those years ago. He wondered if it wasn’t so much seriousness as the focus required by pain and purpose. He remembered that she always wore clothes that covered most of her skin. And then he thought, too, of Henriette Vittum, her ivory hands in his dream memory. Perhaps toward the end she had, in fact, worn gloves.
The months and years ahead would not be easy. But he had been called to this work, and he would uphold the tradition and enter the history of the institution. This place brought great joy and satisfaction to many people, and his sacrifice would help it all continue. As he thought about eventually opening the safe and depositing his own contribution to it, Harry felt the embrace of all the spirits that had preceded him, felt the duty that was his call. As he once again pressed the knife into his skin to practice what he would need to do, he sensed, with more confidence than he had ever known before, that he was loved and not alone.
Matthew Cheney is the author of the collections Blood: Stories and The Last Vanishing Man, and his novella Changes in the Land will be published by Lethe Press this spring. His fiction has been published by The Dark previously, as well as by Nightmare, Weird Tales, Conjunctions, One Story, and elsewhere.