Horror Library, Volume 7

By Dark Moon Books

The +Horror Library+ anthologies are internationally praised as a groundbreaking source of contemporary horror short fiction stories--relevant to the moment and stunning in impact--from leading authors of the macabr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Moon Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781949491401

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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IN MEMORIAM TO PATRICK BELTRAN: A POEM

by Sara Beltran

INTRODUCTION TO +HORROR LIBRARY+ VOLUME 7

by Eric J. Guignard

HER. HOUSE.

by Jo Kaplan

PRETTIES/SERPENT

by Baba Jide Low

NEVER BETTER

by Michael Harris Cohen

THE KID IN THE AMBULANCE

by Suki Litchfield

DISCOVERY OF BLANKS

by Darren O. Godfrey

HOLDER CITY

by Garick Cooke

IN THE VALLEY

by Bentley Little

DEATH REPUBLIC

by H. Pueyo

NEON SHOWGIRL

by Brady Golden

ABANDON

by Alex Woodroe

RING RUST

by Gene O’Neill

JUST KEEP WALKING

by David Afsharirad

SKANDALOPETRA

by Rex Burrows

HAND OF GLORY

by Cody Goodfellow

THE RIVERMAN

by Charlie Hughes

THE MOUTH

by Natalia Theodoridou

GATEWAY TO OBLIVION

by William Meikle

IN THE DEVIL’S FOOTSTEPS

by Liam Hogan

LIKE OLD ROPE

by Trevor James Zaple

GIANT AND CHILD: A FUGUE

by Scotty Milder

FEBRUARY THAW

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

THE APARTMENT

by Christi Nogle

THE BURNING HEART

by Colin Leonard

IF YOU TOUCH ME, I CAN CRY

by Lucy Taylor

THE TEST

by Zoe Kaplan

RING ROAD

by Matt Thompson

THE TOOTH BUTCHER

by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

8-BALL

by Darren Todd

ATTENTION

by Michael James

THE KEY TO MABELLA

by Terry Dowling

SPECIAL GUEST-ARTIST’S GALLERY OF ALLEN KOSZOWSKI

ABOUT GUEST ARTIST ALLEN KOSZOWSKI

EDITOR’S REQUEST

ABOUT EDITOR ERIC J. GUIGNARD

IN MEMORIAM TO PATRICK BELTRAN: A POEM

by Sara Beltran

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Opposites

Beneath dark tohubohu

murky blue finds form

Ethereal in nature,

such exquisite storm

Make haste, my friend, to safer shores

where words are borne

He left, I write.

—August 17, 2021

INTRODUCTION TO +HORROR LIBRARY+ VOLUME 7

by Eric J. Guignard

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I WAS SITTING AT MY desk reviewing the ARC (Advance Reader Copy) pages of this book you hold in hand (or view onscreen) and thinking what a remarkable journey the +Horror Library+ anthology series has undergone so far.

Volume 1 was published in 2006 by founding editor R.J. Cavender through an Austin-based start-up, Cutting Block Press (under the helm of Boyd E. Harris), which represents sixteen years since of anthology publications. But the history goes back even further to a fervent writers’ collective sharing a dream of horror fiction named the Terrible Twelve Authors. They’d already been collaborating for years in an online forum called Zoetrope Virtual Studio (AKA: Zoetrope All-Story Workshop), launched in 1997 by none other than the Godfather of films, Francis Ford Coppola. All-Story and Virtual Studio are still around as highly-esteemed indie literary and film venues respectively, although any remaining online collaboration forums and tools are not as they were.

Hard truth, but usually writers’ dreams feel like crumbling chaff skidding across barren plains. In the dark. In a blizzard. On another planet. Little chance to find purchase, lesser still for anything to actually take root and grow. But the original Terrible Twelve authors, and those forming the core of Horror Library Volume 1, created something special. They put out to the world not only their collective voice and vision, but founded a treasured series, a venue, a tradition of showcasing original and macabre short fiction. Counting the stories in this volume, +Horror Library+ has published over two hundred original pieces in addition to those reprints in 2015’s Best Of volume. Some of H.L.’s authors have gone on to become Big-5 Publisher best-sellers. Some of the authors never published again. But what is constant is that each shared a remarkable tale at the moment.

For my own journey, I didn’t pursue writing for the sake of publication until 2011. At that time I’d been laid off from work, was looking to reinvent myself, and decided to start writing again in my spare time (something I’d loved doing in childhood, but had given up during college in order to pursue business and at-the-time-believed serious-minded life necessities). Not having any exposure to publishing, I cracked open the prevalent search engine of the era (Dogpile? Ask Jeeves? Google?) and typed in Where to publish Horror short stories? One of the top results was regarding the acclaim of +Horror Library+, so I looked up the website and saw there was an open call for Volume 5 ending soon. I dashed off a story (Footprints Fading in the Desert), and the following January I received acceptance! Unless you’ve gone through it, it’s hard to convey the validation of early acceptances in a young writer’s career. R.J. later told me he’d received about 1,000 submissions and had meant to end the call early as he’d already had a full book before my story came in, but he liked my piece so much, he added me to the roster at the last moment. Heart be stilled, indeed.

Anyway, forgive the rambling down ol’ memory lane, but I’ve a point to this reminiscence: Like all firsts in our lives, I remember well the first editors I worked with, the first publications I wrote for. Things I published six months ago may be forgotten, but that which got me started a decade past feels like yesterday. Although not my first publication credit, +Horror Library+ counts as one of my Writing-Firsts I was proud of, being a physical book that other authors I admired had been part of. And which leads to another individual with H.L. who is the point of this introduction: Patrick Beltran.

Patrick started off as a slush reader for R.J., and then went on to assist with proofing and editing the books. R.J. retired in 2016, and Patrick bought out Cutting Block Press, rebranding it as Cutting Block Books under his own flagship enterprise, Farolight Publishing. Along with that came the +Horror Library+ series. So another of my firsts was unexpectedly being hired by Patrick to become the new editor and face of H.L. I promptly went about putting together Volume 6 (published 2017), an experience then that was certainly a career highlight, and both a massive labor and a love.

Patrick was wonderful to work for, unfailingly scrupulous, and always open to talk. We discussed doing future H.L. volumes, but it was something to push off for another time, as we each were running indie presses, in addition to writing, working day jobs, and caring for families.

Tragically in 2020—the year of COVID and global shut-down—Patrick was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He underwent treatment and fought a courageous battle, holding onto high hopes of beating it, but also knew to do so he’d need to scale back on life responsibilities. One of those was shuttering indie publishing.

He and I had a meeting, and he confided that he dearly wanted to know the +Horror Library+ series would continue, so he offered, and I bought rights to it, rebranding the H.L. series under Dark Moon Books.

Unfortunately the cancer spread, and Patrick passed away June 21, 2021. His memory lives on however, in his family, this series, and all else that he touched.

Thus became another first for me, owning and running an anthology series, of which I am thankful and indebted to Patrick Beltran for allowing me to do. Ultimately, I couldn’t be prouder to carry on this venerable torch; I grew up on horror anthology books such as Borderlands (ed. Thomas Monteleone); Whispers (ed. Stuart David Schiff); Shadows (ed. Charles Grant); Masques (ed. J.N. Williamson); Shivers (ed. Richard Chizmar), etc., and want nothing more than for +Horror Library+ to continue those traditions, promoting progressive and literary horror short fiction.

To that end, you bear witness to the latest incarnation, and I hope you approve. Included within are thirty new stories, thirty visions of the spooky, the bizarre, the wonderful, the compelling. Stories of ghosts and monsters, curses, shadows, and the dark and fleeting omens slipping amongst our days.

In addition to masterful writing, I decided to add a new section to this and future volumes, a special Guest-Artist’s gallery, as visual imagery has always meant as much to me as the written. This year’s showcase selection is by Allen Koszowski, an award-winning artist, producing since 1973.

In closing, I hope to keep this series running for a long time. I hope to continue to find and publish incredible stories. I hope to never stop experiencing firsts, and I hope lastly you’ll continue coming back here for more.

Midnight cheers,

Signature

—Eric J. Guignard

Chino Hills, California

November 24, 2021

HER. HOUSE.

by Jo Kaplan

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MY MOTHER USED TO TELL me that drinking, for people like her brother, was all about chasing the demon. It starts with one drink, a nice little buzz; but once they’ve gotten the taste, they grow convinced there’s a better buzz out there, one for which they search with great zeal. Pretty soon they’re sloshed, but they keep drinking anyway, always convinced a better buzz is hiding just beneath the next bottle. Always chasing the demon.

I never really understood what she meant by that until I started visiting haunted houses for the thrill of it. Not your tacky Halloween haunts, I mean—real haunted houses.

At first it was every other month or so, whenever I got the itch. Then it turned into every week. I devoted my weekends to hunting down urban legends and crumbling sanitoriums. Spending the night in abandoned factories and defunct bookstores. Breaking into long-empty houses ripe with the refuse of squatters. I never brought any of that silly equipment you see on ghost-hunting shows, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually work. Anyway, I didn’t care to catch a blip on an EMF detector. I was after the full sensory experience, eyes and ears.

"I never see you, Paula, my sort-of-girlfriend told me on the phone as I packed my things on Friday. Do you have to go spend the night in some festering basement? Wouldn’t you rather . . . I don’t know. Go grab a drink? I’ll buy."

Kate was endearing. A genuinely kindhearted soul. I have no idea how she ended up with the likes of me, or why; when I had finally found something good, I had to keep pulling away. Yet neither could I explain why I felt compelled to go haunted-house diving. I was addicted to the search for ghosts, for a morsel of the afterlife.

When I told her maybe we could grab a drink next weekend, she said, Fine. Then I’m coming with. Where is this place?

I really don’t think you want to.

Why? Because it’s haunted?

Because it’s decrepit. Full of spiders. You’ll hate it.

I won’t hate it, because you’ll be there.

The house stood at the end of a dirt road—overgrown, too narrow to drive through. We parked at its end to walk the rest of the way. Thistle and crabgrass tangled over the road’s edges. Defective streetlamps issued uncertain light. My shadow split, doubled, and merged again as I passed beneath. Closer to the house, the lights were all burnt out, mute.

What’s the story of this place? asked Kate.

I turned on my flashlight and shone it at the two-story colonial ahead. Vines crawled up the house’s face, scabbed and scarred as it was. Not sure. Some of these places have really specific legends, but some are just described as ‘haunted.’ At least on Reddit.

Kate hid her nervousness well, but there was a pallor in her face that belied her quick march up the steps. Though I reminded her she could take the car and pick me up in the morning, secretly I was glad she had decided to stay, to join me in the darkest places.

We crossed the dilapidated porch, where wisteria wept purple tears, and entered.

Rotting wood groaned and sagged where we tread. We gazed up the staircase from the foyer, crosshatched by spiderwebs. A spray of graffiti decorated one wall.

Guess we’re not the first explorers, said Kate with a gentle laugh. She took out her own flashlight and lit it up, commenting on the pervasive darkness. It’s so quiet and lonely out here, like— She coughed on the stagnant air, infected with a diffusion of dust. —like we’ve stepped out of reality.

Maybe that’s why I come, I said as we moved around the first floor, taking note of the clouded windows and broken furniture. A way of stepping out of reality. For a while.

I don’t know, I kind of like reality.

I did not tell her I found normal life somewhat mundane, even repulsive. I did not tell her that my own childhood home had been persistently clean, organized, and removed of any semblance of humanity, not even a family portrait on the blank walls; that my mother constantly disparaged her drunk of a brother and refused to offer him a bed when he was at his lowest, instead pitching him out onto the street, where he eventually disappeared into the anonymous, homeless dead; that I had pretended to be smooth as glass, unemotional, alien in my bland perfection simply to appease her; that I knew if I ever divulged my sexuality she would pitch me out onto the street, too, where I might eventually disappear into the anonymous, homeless dead; that even in my ownership of my adult reality, I still did not quite trust my apartment as home, a thing for which I had no intrinsic familiarity.

Instead I said, Then why do you binge so many hospital dramas?

Kate laughed. "Okay, I guess sometimes we all need a break from reality. But wouldn’t it be nice if doctors were really as attractive as the ones on TV?"

Then they’d all be too busy boinking each other to diagnose the patients.

Not without a team of writers somewhere pulling the strings.

Carefully, we made our way up the dubious staircase, pushing away sticky webs. One step disintegrated beneath my foot like the skin of a rotten apple. Kate caught me from behind before I lost my balance; she was skinny, almost skeletal, but stronger than she appeared. What little meat clung to her bones was mostly muscle. She practiced Muay Thai, could probably kick my ass to kingdom come.

Upstairs, bits of roof lay scattered on the floor, fallen rafters making a maze of the hall.

This place should be condemned, said Kate. Is it safe to be up here?

Probably not.

We entered a bedroom, which still bore a moldering bed and dresser. Corroded nails jutted crooked from the doorframe, which Kate carefully sidestepped. I was hoping to be unsettled by ghosts, not by the possibility of tetanus.

Maybe you’ll get a hot doctor to cure your lockjaw.

My flashlight flickered. This was not an uncommon occurrence at the places I frequented, and I always kept a pocket full of spare batteries, so this did not disturb me. Kate, on the other hand, gave a little shriek. One can’t exactly take down a ghost with a roundhouse kick.

Have you ever seen a ghost? she asked, leaning back in a fighting move before loosening her shoulders, pretending she hadn’t just been about to clock anything that moved.

I considered the question. "I’ve seen lights flicker, heard knocking on the walls. Footsteps, too. And I’ve seen strange shapes and shadows. But I don’t know if I can actually say I’ve seen a ghost. I just know there’s something out there." I shined my light around the peeling wallpaper patterned in forest green fleurs-de-lis.

Is that what you’re searching for? Evidence of the afterlife?

It’s not that simple.

But that is what you’re doing, right?

I wasn’t sure I could answer. Was that what I was doing? It wasn’t as if I cared whether I could prove to the world ghosts were real.

I was just . . . chasing the demon.

Finding nothing of interest here, Kate turned to leave the room. Yet the room would not let her go so easily.

On her way out, despite her keen sense of balance honed by years of martial arts, she stumbled over the uneven floor, fell against the doorframe. Her palm sank onto a protruding nail. She cried out.

Let me see, I said.

A red puncture made an angry mark on her hand. I need to clean this, she said.

I’ve got some band-aids here. Hold on.

But as I dug through my backpack, she scoffed. "No, I need to actually clean it, or it might get infected. I need running water and antiseptic. Come on."

What? Go?

She gave me a look that stung. Of course, go. I told you, I don’t particularly want tetanus.

"And I told you, I’m staying the night."

Kate’s eyes widened. You can’t be serious? Look around—there’s nothing here! It’s not haunted, just dilapidated.

I didn’t ask you to come. I said you could take the car.

Seriously?

I followed Kate down the stairs, trying to get her to understand that I couldn’t leave, not yet, not when so much of the night stretched ahead of me, when the ghosts had not yet peeked out from the woodwork to reveal themselves. There was so much haunting yet to be discovered.

Ignoring my arguments, Kate stomped across the foyer to the front door and grabbed the handle. Pulled. Pushed. Turned around.

Is this a joke?

What?

It won’t open.

I leapt down the rest of the steps and tried it myself. The door held fast, grimed shut, as if it had never opened in the first place.

"This isn’t funny," said Kate, going from window to window, trying in vain to slide up the gray panes of glass. She disappeared into the shadows of the dining room.

I could not help but smile. It doesn’t want us to leave. I told you it was haunted.

The second floor beckoned me again, and I climbed the steps, investigating corners that smelled of decay, curtained rooms full-dark. Surely the haunting was up here somewhere. When I found my way back to the bedroom with the nails in the doorframe, I discovered that Kate had come back up too, and now stood looking out the window to the star-studded sky beyond. The circle of my light found her back, and I was initially surprised, then pleased, to see her there.

How’s your hand?

Instead of answering or turning around, she said, It’s kind of lovely, isn’t it?

I came up beside her. The lack of city lights made the sky both darker and brighter: black, flecked with hectic vibrance.

It is.

She pushed my flashlight away from her face and leaned in, pressing her cool rough lips against mine. We fell together onto the musty bed, which squealed beneath our combined weight. We giggled, kissed again, lips and tongues hungry, and my body went hot, feeling delicious with love in this strange darkness.

She pulled away, and I ached for the return of her mouth. When it did not return, I opened my eyes to the dark, fumbled for my flashlight. Found myself alone on the bed.

Kate?

There was no one else in the room.

I followed my beam of light to the hallway, around the blockade of rafters, back to the stairs. Down. A little annoyed that she had run off like this, had tantalized and then left me.

When I found her again, it was in the kitchen, where she was trying to open the backdoor with a rusty knife stuck between the door and jamb. She wiggled it this way and that to loosen the long-stuck wood. I came up behind her, encircling her hips with my hands, hoping to continue where we’d left off. She shook me off irritably, kept working the blade.

What’s going on? I asked.

I’m trying to get out of here. What do you think?

My heart shriveled like a prune. How long have you been trying to open this door?

She shrugged. Uh, since I tried the windows and they wouldn’t open? Have you even been looking for a way out?

I stepped back from her, heart thudding as I wondered who had been in the room with me. It had been dark. I tried to remember if I’d seen her face.

Who had I kissed upstairs?

The back of my neck prickled. In that moment, I didn’t know where reality ended and the house began.

The blade snapped against the door, clattered away. Kate held the empty handle for a moment before dropping it. She hissed and pulled her wounded hand to her chest.

How is it? I asked.

She turned and held out her hand. I shined my light on it. The wound seemed to have spread—was now a blackened, concave abyss like a patch of rotten wood. I sucked in a breath between my teeth, raised the light so I could see her face. I wanted to apologize for not taking her concerns seriously, for not being as worried as she was that the house had locked us in, for I had assumed it was just a harmless element of the haunting, that by daylight it would release us. But the infection would spread faster than the sun would rise, that much was clear.

When the light found her face, I froze.

Kate’s rich brown eyes had been replaced.

Where they had once looked out with tenderness and a hint of mischief were now two dull, dirty windows.

What’s happening? I asked, my voice small.

She took a step in my direction and opened her mouth, her jaw the rusty hinge of a groaning door. Her feet clattered like loose floorboards.

I thought this is not Kate. I thought the real Kate was the woman who had kissed me in the dark upstairs, not this monstrosity whose hair had crusted to shingles, whose face had hardened into scabby wooden planks, whose eyelids were like shutters beating in the wind.

Kate? I shouted, turning to find the real one.

Where I stepped, the sagging floor seemed to chuckle. My flashlight threw ever-changing shapes that skittered against the walls. All the while, the thing that had once looked like Kate followed after me, lurching on legs that were now unwieldy studs.

I tried the front door, found it still stuck. Raced up the stairs instead.

But she wasn’t in any of the rooms I searched. The dusty bed lurked in my flashlight beam, the imprint of our bodies echoing on its surface. Or only one body. My body.

Cornered, I turned around.

She was there. The black wound on her hand had spread over her arm, the skin peeling away in splinters.

All at once, I knew my days of chasing the demon were over. I had found it; or it had found me. I had never thought what might happen if, or when, I finally caught it.

She opened her mouth and beyond that doorway I saw the foyer in her skull, inviting me inside where it was light, where it was warm. I stopped running and went to her. The door opened wider for me.

She was so beautiful.

She was home.

---

JO KAPLAN is a Los Angeles based writer and professor. She is the author of the haunted house novel It Will Just Be Us and the forthcoming gothic western When the Night Bells Ring. She also writes under the name JOANNA PARYPINSKI. Her work has appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, and Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College.

PRETTIES/SERPENT

by Baba Jide Low

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I

YOU KNOW, FLOYD EILEEN WAS once a church girl.

That good soul still wants to shine through her, which is why her skirts never rise above the knee, and her teeth are always minty fresh after she gets off her knees from praying to Him. She wears lipstick now that she works here, and she pays attention to the sunburn of her gold jewelry, the choke of her own scent.

Floyd is a Secretary to the Boss, who has a hundred and one Secretaries stalking the halls of the Office of Inflammations, long-limbed and supple, their fishnets lacerating like untethered tongues, their pastel and leather suits impeccable, choice jewelry sparkling and clinking small small.

The impact of their heels against the clean marble is like gunshots, as the ones not active with Him inside the Head Office laugh and scream with themselves. Playing wild pulling-and-chasing games, their bodies echoing across the immense ceilings and halls of the Office.

The Secretaries’ tables flank the aisle that leads to His Tomb.

Each table has a vintage typewriter at its center.

The tables’ clean planes of albino wood are covered in cuboids of neat paper and dumb cacti and pictures from before they met the Boss, and stopped seeing themselves in that girl in the frames on the desks.

There is the opolopoopoloolopololopolopo (hidden in a platinum seashell that sticks to the scalp like a hungry limpet) for listening to and transcribing inflammations into the Big Red Books.

Beside the opolopo is the buzzer that sounds a hollow gong when it’s time to go into the Tomb, or Main Office, to see Him again.

There is often a girl rushing up the immense sweep of stairs with freshly typed papers in her arms. Carefully-measured hair blowing aloft in the deep air cooling system. Thighs tense and neck blushing as she climbs to the top to meet the heft of the black-oak door which is alive inside with the fossil of a huge reptile.

When she lifts a chip of its skull and drops it, it is like trapped thunder, and the halls of the Office of Inflammation go pin silent.

***

EVERY MORNING BEFORE dawn, long black cars come sheathed in silence to take the Secretaries from their houses across Lagos, through the freer morning roads up Third Mainland to Broad Street, where the Office is obscured in clear sight.

Most of them live in one-room apartments and don’t seem worried about finding better spaces to stay ever since they got these rare jobs, typing up declarations of apathy and walking up the aisle to see Him again and again and again.

Working for the Boss is a thing of the soul, you know.

How much time are those-who-would-become-Secretary willing to spend at the typewriter, collecting days-long rants and truth-cut angers into thick red volumes?

Listening to the violent dreams of tested men, and the final frightened whispers of the women who were unfortunate enough to have been latched onto them by some mortal law?

Are they free to be cut away from their families and loved ones and friends for indefinite amounts of time, visiting Hells unpronounceable in the human tongue as emissaries of the Boss?

How long are the to-be-Secretaries willing to sit at a desk, listening to these moments, until the silence before last breaths is drilled into the sides of their heads?

Hours? Days? Weeks?

The cushions are soft, of course, so you don’t notice all your circulation is cut off until it’s time to walk up to Main Office.

Then, you’re floating.

***

ON THE DAY Floyd Eileen came for her Interview at the Office, it had rained in Yaba, and Makoko was flooded. She sat near the windows of the danfo bus, and the rain beat her life so bad she was shivering in her mint mini-skirt suit, with gloves and imitation pearls that she wore to impress.

The storm was thunderous too. Sky-shaking and photo-flashing and setting hearts to scurrying for nothing.

The danfo swam through the sea as it flowed over the roads, across the bridge near Adeniji before shooting off for Third Mainland Bridge and the Island.

Moving blind across slippery roads, splashing water everywhere.

When they rode the Bridge over the ocean, there was a darkness hanging over Lagos Island. The dangerous singular motion of the danfo across wet asphalt, mere centimeters from a drop to a drowning below, felt supercharged, like the stormfront still breaking in the distance was pulling them in.

Everyone held tight to something and let go into the panic.

Floyd Eileen (not real name) sat in the leaking danfo with the broken window as it arrowed toward the upper-class-parts of the city. She didn’t look into the danfo, at people in their raincoats who listened to their phones and radios.

Instead, she decided to watch that rushing storm approach and surround the world unperturbed, even as her clothes darkened and her hair sagged from its up-coif.

She was still, watching, altogether more shadowed and distant than the stormy city they approached so fast.

This rain was salvation.

Floyd Eileen was sure of it. She had brought salvation to herself and her siblings last night, and she now imagined this rain washing the blood of yesterday off her wrists. Rinsing the knife clean from where she had pulled it out of him a final time.

Washing off the streak from Kero and Ify’s faces, where it had spurt like a blade of its own after she had realized, as the knife buzzed in her fist, that she was not just threatening him, she was going to do it.

Obalende!

They alighted from the danfo at the Central Roundabout Station in Ikoyi.

The air was dry, but the people and the world were wet. Floyd Eileen didn’t bother opening her collapsed umbrella, bound like a small skirt inside her handbag. She just called the sturdiest okada she saw next and told him she was going to Broad Street.

In the VACANCY: GIRLS NEEDED posted anonymously online, they had said something to the tune of, Location will be communicated to applicants who can make it to Broad Street, then they’d added a phone number for the applicant to call when they reached Broad Street.

Floyd Eileen called when she stood firm enough on the empty strip, surrounded by the glass and height of business architecture, and as she slipped her phone back into her bag, she saw a long black car cruising the day-night street.

Its headlights flashed and caught her blind for a moment, it continued to move closer to where she stood as her body tried to decide on flight or fight. She waited a second longer, before the door opened and she felt as if someone pulled her inside.

***

THEY GATHERED IN the aisle, drying off in the warmed air system as they walked down a very long table, picking up snacks and spicy bites while looking at each other from the sides of their eyes.

Some of the girls were already getting friendly when a tall bald man dressed in an impeccable green three-piece suit appeared at the top of the stairs, in front of the tall skeleton-circled door, to address them all smooth and charm.

His voice echoed and poured down the stairs.

"Ladies, ladies, ladies. How lovely to see so many of you here. It’s always good to meet just one of you. Now we have close to one hundred?! Can you imagine how I feel? How we feel? The Boss is amazed at this turn-out and tells me to congratulate you all for making it this far. However, He’s already made His decision and picked His choices . . . He’s watching you right now, you know . . . "

Several girls stopped eating at once.

They turned their braided and shining heads around, looking for a hint of some camera or eye.  . . . you’ll get the messages on your phones and know if you’re in or out. Those who are out must exit the premises immediately, down this corridor to your left and around the statue of the Fire. Those who are in, for the next stage, must form a line leading up these stairs that will stop right where I’m standing, here.

He stood up there and looked down at them. A shy creature rose near his waist, a sleek wheat hound.

What followed was a cacophony of message tones and beeps, followed by a swift reduction as the losers left, overflowing with envy (some of the girls created take-away packages from the long table for themselves and their hungry families at home).

While waiting, Floyd Eileen didn’t eat more than a cracker and some cured meat and cheese. She sat at the long table, looking to the serpentine skeleton bending through the doors above, and the detailed pillars and whorls and dents that fringed the hiding corners of the huge space.

It seemed like an ordinary warehouse with so much shadow but she was sure it would have been a more intentional space (a temple? an art gallery?) at some point in the distant past.

Her phone beeped with the other girls’ and in the messages she saw Congratulations, Secretary! under a red logo of the snake’s skeleton, framed in a red circle (with OI repeated in white three times along its rim.)

She felt herself prepared to burst as the few remaining girls made their long way around the long table to line up before the seventy-five stairs that led to where the suave man stood. His eyes hooded as if shy of his own fineness, although the occasional biting of his lower lip and constant beard stroke said otherwise.

Floyd Eileen stood on the line seeing Ify and Kero’s bodies as they worked the ground of their compound with hoe and hand, while she had scrubbed the aged rug with bleach.

If she didn’t get this job, which promised the best pay she had seen in her life, they would be homeless and dead in one week tops, and if the small house and compound went out of their hands, someone might find the place where they’d dug the earth to hide him.

His wicked body still standing tall beneath the ground . . .

Floyd Eileen reached the top of the stairs, where the man and his hound stood in the wide rhombus of the landing whispering sweet nothings to the girls before they walked forward and slipped behind the smooth opening of the massive doors. Her ankle ligaments were wobbling rubbers of pain. No one had dared take their heels off and so they all walked up the stairs, intensifying