Horror Library, Volume 8

By Eric J. Guignard

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 macabre and darkly imaginative.

Filled with Fears and Fantasy. Death and Dark Dreams. Monsters and Mayhem

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Moon Books
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949491524

Eric J. Guignard

ERIC J. GUIGNARD is a writer and editor of dark and speculative fiction, operating from the shadowy outskirts of Los Angeles, where he also runs the small press, Dark Moon Books. He's twice won the Bram Stoker Award, won the Shirley Jackson Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and International Thriller Writers Award. He has over one hundred stories and non-fiction author credits appearing in publications around the world. As editor, Eric's published multiple fiction anthologies, including his most recent, PROFESSOR CHARLATAN BARDOT'S TRAVEL ANTHOLOGY TO THE MOST (FICTIONAL) HAUNTED BUILDINGS IN THE WEIRD, WILD WORLD and A WORLD OF HORROR, each a showcase of international horror short fiction. His latest books are LAST CASE AT A BAGGAGE AUCTION and the short story collection THAT WHICH GROWS WILD: 16 TALES OF DARK FICTION (Cemetery Dance). Outside the glamorous and jet-setting world of indie fiction, Eric's a technical writer and college professor, and he stumbles home each day to a wife, children, dogs, and a terrarium filled with mischievous beetles. Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com, his blog: ericjguignard.blogspot.com, or Twitter: @ericjguignard.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION TO +HORROR LIBRARY+ VOLUME 8

by Eric J. Guignard

RIDES

by Eric Del Carlo

ONLY THE STONES WILL HEAR YOU SCREAM

by R.A. Busby

POOR MAD ISAAC

by Don Raymond

MR. HUNICUTT

by Bentley Little

LISE MEITNER SPEAKS TO THE LIVING

by Octavia Cade

LINES

by Lauren O’Donoghue

BLOCKCHAIN

by Dexter McLeod

ON THE CORDUROY ROAD

by Bryson Richard

UNDER THE PALE MOTHER MOON

by Garick Cooke

SOLACE

by Anna Ziegelhof

SAVING THE WORLD

by Eric Nash

THE OLD TIP ROAD

by C.M. Saunders

LULLABY

by Lorne Dixon

STORY OF HER LIFE

by Tom Johnstone

H IS FOR THE HUNT

by Steve Rasnic Tem

MAZU–GODDESS OF THE SEA

by Ai Jiang

HYMNS IN THE DARK

by Gordon Grice

HOLLER BRIDGE

by J.L. Hoy

THE REST CURE

by Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

ZIPPER BACK

by Thersa Matsuura

FISHERS OF ___

by Frances Ogamba

THE BLIND

by James Owens

UNWIND

by Christopher O’Halloran

GIRLSKIN

by Clara Madrigano

A DORMANT CONCERN

by Charles Wilkinson

CLAY

by Colin Leonard

BROODMARE

by Jo Kaplan

IN FEAR AS DARK AS COAL (A POEM)

by Ron Perovich

THE YEARNING POOL

by Thomas P. Balázs

WE CAN’T LET GO

by Sheldon Higdon

FELL MILL

by Charlie Hughes

SPECIAL GUEST-ARTIST’S GALLERY OF JANA HEIDERSDORF

ABOUT GUEST ARTIST, JANA HEIDERSDORF

EDITOR’S REQUEST

ABOUT EDITOR, ERIC J. GUIGNARD

INTRODUCTION TO +HORROR LIBRARY+ VOLUME 8

BY ERIC J. GUIGNARD

---

WELCOME TO THE EIGHTH VOLUME of the +Horror Library+ series! This is the third volume I’ve been responsible for (Vol. 6 and upward), and it’s beginning to feel like a very comfortable home to visit. A strange and bookish dwelling, to be sure, filled with whispers, shadows, and great secrets. Ghosts and legends, and hidden passages, and trapdoors that open beneath your feet. Something, perhaps, along the line of the Palais Garnier from The Phantom of the Opera or perhaps a bit more quaint, such as Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. Poe’s House of Usher? King’s Overlook Hotel? Mitchell’s time-warping Slade House? Or even, perhaps the towering, gothic castle of Stoker’s eminent Count Dracula? For what warmer reception can one receive than from this most gracious host as he clasps your hand and hails: Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!

So hear the great doors of this tome swing forth, and welcome to an assemblage of short stories that promises to inspire horror, thrills, and wonder. And although I quote Dracula and reference the haunted tropes of literature, I bring to your attention, oh intrepid reader, that such common fare will not be found within these pages. I love zombies and vampires and serial killers running amuck, but what I love more is fiction that innovates, tales that bring fresh perspectives, that explore lore with surreal or provocative twists, that latch onto ideas and transform them into something ominously alluring.

Besides +Horror Library+, I’ve edited a number of other anthologies. The difference is that those others have been themed, meaning the authors write to a shared idea, whether it be ghosts, global mythology, or even hot rod monsters of the ’50s (a personal favorite!). And I cherish each of those books in different ways, but inherently they have limits, labelling and organizing narratives collectively. +Horror Library+ has no such limits. Granted, I ensure there’s a sense of cohesion in the publication. The tone certainly is not chaotic—I put writing together that is dark and dreamy, progressive in its way, and compelling. But it’s the subject matter that shines forth, the freedom to explore material unfettered. To imagine and to go forth into unchartered realms; for in few other places can readers find together in the same collection such fare as: a historic mountain vengeful against those who sully and plunder from it (Clay by Colin Leonard); a family that feed their captive devil the sorrows of neighbors (Saving the World by Eric Nash); the profound introspection of a nuclear scientist faced with the ghosts of those killed by her work; (Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living by Octavia Cade); a welfare check by a child services worker that proves not all in life is as expected (We Can’t Let Go by Sheldon Higdon); lodgers who meet a petulant neighbor made of walnuts (Mr. Hunicutt by Bentley Little); and more and more and such more!

Naturally (presumably) I am a fan of all the contained stories; I selected them and could sing their praises for another hundred pages. To that end, I hope you will agree and amplify the acclaim of each.

For some background of what went into this anthology, I held an open call in which hopeful authors sent in their work for consideration. As in the past, the amount evolved into a mind-numbing mountain of nearly 1,200 submissions to track, read, and respond to. I had enough quality, unique, polished tales to fill a dozen volumes. Yet I can only include a limited number herein.

Besides my personal adoration for selections, there are other objective measures that go into the acquisitions process. Years ago I developed criteria to assist me in evaluating submissions, with the goal to blend stories that not only work well together but can also be enjoyed by broad audiences around the world. I try to amplify voices that are underpublished, and I also give preference to stories that are experimental, innovative, or progressive; but at the heart of each is most importantly a marvelous tale that not only do I enjoy, but I believe other readers will too. In sum, I make considerations for what I think the average horror reader will enjoy or, at least by the book’s aggregate, will find entertainment and contemplation in.

And as with the last volume, I’ve included a special Guest-Artist’s gallery at the end. I received immense positive feedback from the last book (showcasing Allen Koszowski) in this regard so decided to continue to promote remarkable illustrations that pair well with the fiction. This volume features German artist Jana Heidersdorf, whose work radiates a quality that is as entrancing as it is disturbing, suggesting a sense of viewing the world through the lens of a child’s nightmares, or else cautioning against phantasms that reach for us when our backs are turned. Or perhaps both . . .

So as it is, I hope this latest addition to the +Horror Library+ series provides as much delight for you, dear reader, as it does for me. I feel that each anthology I produce is the best, until the next one comes along to displace that ranking. Please feel free to share your thoughts about that with me at any time. In the meanwhile, once again I bid you welcome to this home . . .

Midnight cheers,

Signature

—Eric J. Guignard

Chino Hills, California

April 15, 2023

RIDES

BY ERIC DEL CARLO

---

BENJAMIN FORSYTHE FELT THE HEATED asphalt of the supermarket parking lot through the soles of his Oxfords, and yet stood transfixed by the sight of this ghost from his past. Ghost was overstating it, he knew. But he had once owned this 2008 Buick LaCrosse. Not just this model, but this very car.

The vehicle started and the brake lights came on, and he was still standing there behind it, blocking it into its diagonal slot. He held a loaf of garlic sourdough.

The driver’s side window came down, and a head of strawberry blonde hair poked out. Excuse me, the woman called.

It snapped Benjamin out of his paralysis. He stepped out of the way, stepped around to her side. He wore a striped blue shirt, tie, and slacks. His not quite middle-aged face was cleanly shaven and his hair neatly kept. He looked like a respectable citizen, not any kind of threat.

He approached the driver’s open window. She looked wary in a neutral way but not outright apprehensive. Once upon a time, Benjamin Forsythe had presented a much more menacing aspect. He was glad those days were gone.

Sorry, he said. I wasn’t trying to be underfoot. It’s just . . . well, I used to have this car.

She was younger than him, in a sweater with embroidered dragonflies. Canvas grocery bags were arrayed across the LaCrosse’s back seat. No one else was in the car with her. What, a Buick? These were the suburbs, verging on rural environs. People didn’t respond with knee-jerk urban hostility to strangers.

He smiled. It was his business smile, quite effective. Against all early dubious life projections, he had turned out to be a productive man of business. No, no. This very auto. I know the plate. I sold it last year.

When he named the dealership, her eyes lit with amusement. Well, I’ll be, she said. Coincidences were fun. They made one feel like a kid for no good reason.

He stood right by her door now. Left turn signal still stick? he asked.

Got to give it an extra jiggle.

You’ll get used to it.

I already have. She smiled back.

She wore a ring on her finger, same as he did. The brief trappings of meet-cute and flirtation were already slipping away, and he let them go without regret. He was happily married. Any further conversation with the strawberry blonde woman would require the broaching of some other topic.

He stepped back, waved. She waved back, pulled out, and drove off in the car which had once belonged to him. It was very curious seeing another person at the wheel. There should probably be a name for the phenomenon that now put a curl of distress into his stomach.

He went to his car, his current vehicle. He had traded in the LaCrosse, feeling no pang of separation at the time. He had definitely been trading up. He could afford better things now. He had built a life of true middle-class comfort, an achievement he would have thought unreachable when he was a wild young buck. When he had much trashier rides. When he had thought life cheap.

He got into his Lexus, tossed the garlic loaf onto the passenger seat, and left the supermarket parking lot. He didn’t know why there should be cold sweat on the back of his neck.

***

I’M PRACTICALLY IN the sticks, hon.

Did you meet your guy?

I met my guy.

How did it go?

Benjamin waited before he spoke. There was a language of pauses between him and his wife, nothing uncomfortable, just a means of emphasizing. If he paused long enough, then answered her question with a bland generic statement, it meant it had gone very well indeed. Which it had.

It was favorable.

Bonnie squealed through his cell phone’s headset with unabashed pleasure. They could always be happy for one another. He had told her that coming out to Simón Rodrigo’s country estate would be the first major step in a three-point financial deal for his firm.

He slowly negotiated the two-lane blacktop, beech woods on one side, fallow pastures on the other. Something—he almost said unsettling—funny happened out here. I saw my old car in a supermarket parking lot. The LaCrosse. He didn’t mention the strawberry blonde, not that Bonnie was a jealous type or had any cause to be.

That’s funny. It must be Old Home Week for you, up in your youthful stomping grounds.

I’m on memory lane right now, and it needs repaving.

Bonnie was right. He was from these parts, but not like Simón Rodrigo’s affluent slice of the countryside. Benjamin had come up poor and dumb and luckless. He had been on a sociopathic trajectory leading to a dead-end future.

Instead he had ended up with a responsible life, a superb marriage, and security which guaranteed he would never revert to his former wicked ways.

Yet even so, he was taking the long way back to the city where they lived, cruising this backwood strip of weather-abused tarmac that had felt the endless kiss of midnight tires, death-defying stunt racing, adolescent high jinks waiting to go terribly wrong.

And at that, this wasn’t even the road. The route branded into his soul and poured over with blood-soaked dirt. To get to that road he would have to take many a detour off even this lesser byway. He had no intention of doing that. It had been twenty-two years since he last had seen that particular road. It needed no revisiting from him.

You’re heading back, then? Bonnie asked.

The first hint of gold touched the afternoon. I am.

They said pleasant goodbyes. He tugged off the headset. Two minutes later, a car came the other way along Mill Line Road. It was a Toyota Camry with a half-crumpled hood and dusty windows. It had a heavy metal band’s decal on the driver’s door, just under the handle. The sticker was visible as the two vehicles passed. The driver was only a pair of hands on the wheel.

Benjamin Forsythe had bought that car from his meth-addled cousin Ricky and driven it for fourteen months before he made enough money to buy the LaCrosse, which was what he still considered to be his first respectable automobile.

***

HE WANTED TO dry the sweat suddenly oozing from his body; his perspiration was still inexplicably cold, and so the Lexus’s very fine air-conditioning was giving him a serious case of the chills.

Goosing the brake, he eased into a gravely turnout. His rearview was an empty rectangle. But he had seen the Camry—his Camry. Too many identifying marks for it to be anything else. He’d been twenty-seven when he had given the car to his aunt Ida. She had posted bail for him more than once, and he felt—once he was in the way of feeling such things—that he’d never done a damn thing to repay her. Ida didn’t want the Camry, but the wise old woman had seen what it meant to grown-up Benny to make the gesture, and so she accepted graciously.

She must have unloaded it since. Or maybe she had passed on. Benjamin hadn’t kept close ties to his family. Too many triggers there, too many reminders of past bad behavior.

But what was that Camry doing out here on Mill Line Road? Easily answered, and he knew it. Bonnie had said it on the phone: these were his old stomping grounds. Aunt Ida lived—had lived?—about ten miles from this very spot. Naturally the detritus of his younger life was strewn about the vicinity. If he hunted about with any zeal, he would surely be able to dig up past acquaintances, past accomplices, old girlfriends grown stringy and toothless in the way of such impoverished places.

He shuddered. He wasn’t going to stay in the area, not for any longer. Bearings. He would get his bearings. Then get the hell out of here. Suddenly that seemed like something he needed to urgently accomplish.

Turning back out onto Mill Line, he drove with precision. He was far enough down this two-lane that it was smarter to keep going and pick up the Babinski Bridge, which would run him into the frontage road and eventually let him onto the highway heading back to the city, back to Bonnie. He had already phoned the good news to his company’s chairwoman. A portion of Simón Rodrigo’s considerable wealth would be edging toward their firm. Others could handle the secondary and tertiary stages of the deal. He had successfully closed out his bit.

He would jubilate about that later, he promised. Right now he wanted away from this broken-down rural scenery. Derelict farm equipment started to decorate the roadsides. Skeins of litter tangled the brush. These were the poor, countrified reaches. Various dirt turnoffs would lead to ramshackle houses and trailers, to squalid families, redneck enclaves, methamphetamine labs waiting to go up in balls of fire.

The cold clammy familiarity closed tighter around him.

As he came out of a curve in Mill Line Road, he touched the Lexus’s power brakes and came to a smooth decisive halt. Behind him, abruptly, there rose a squealing, an awful mechanical sound, distressed. Bad brakes. His eyes flashed again to the rearview and saw this time the dilapidated looming of a truck. It was an ancient panel job, gray with age, and it was trying to stop before it collided with his back end.

Benjamin tensed. There was nothing he could do. The way ahead was blocked. For three suddenly accelerated heartbeats he awaited an impact.

It didn’t come.

The truck rested almost flush with his rear bumper. He saw this when he got out of his car, because there wasn’t any reason to stay in it. The wreck ahead had the two-lane thoroughly obstructed, and the deputies on the scene waved him back when he tried to approach. A young man held a bloodied rag to his head, but he stood upright without help and appeared to be answering the officers’ questions.

Benjamin wasn’t one to gawk at the scene of an accident, so he turned the other way and noted that the seedy panel truck hadn’t quite tapped his bumper. But the truck was making new agonized noises. The driver was trying to restart it, without luck.

Unhealthy teeth appeared in a stubbly face as the man at the truck’s wheel grinned down at Benjamin. Won’t start after it stalls like that. Not till I wring it senseless. He sounded curiously proud of this flaw.

It meant the truck couldn’t back up. It meant Benjamin wouldn’t have space to turn around. It left him stuck here with the wreck in front of him until it got cleared.

He tried to be resigned. He tried to be mature about the inconvenience, significant though it was. An ambulance hadn’t yet arrived, much less the wrecker which would remove the auto. Idly Benjamin puzzled out what had happened. Obvious enough. The car had flipped, the driver taking the curve too hard. The fresh black stripes on the asphalt were just the latest set of reckless automotive pawprints to mark this road.

At least the driver had climbed out of the wreck alive. Benjamin finally gave the vehicle itself a real look. It was corroded silver and black, resting on a crushed roof, surrounded by countless beads of shattered glass. The right front wheel was bent at an alarming angle, like a leg jammed back the wrong way over a knee.

Benjamin shivered a little, unsure why he would anthropomorphize the vehicle so. Then he realized. You did that with pets. You even did that with cars you owned, investing them with personality and human-like traits.

In his early twenties he had from time to time been allowed to drive his mom’s ’83 Camaro, old even then. It was a year before his mother finally signed it over to him. This was the only vehicle he had access to during that time. His dad had been against ever letting their son drive again. The car turned out to be his bequeathment. Mom had died two months later from a pulmonary embolism. Benjamin kept up the past-its-prime Camaro as best he could, until maintenance got beyond his abilities and finances. He remembered patting the hood a last time before leaving it with its new owner.

Perhaps the aging, ailing beast had traded hands several more times before ending up overturned and crippled on Mill Line Road.

***

BENJAMIN FORSYTHE THUMBED another gouge out of the sourdough loaf on the passenger seat beside him. He’d stopped at that supermarket for bread on a whim. Bonnie did most of the grocery shopping; he did most of the cooking in their home.

If he hadn’t succumbed to that look-honey-I’m-helping marital impulse, he never would have stumbled on his old LaCrosse in the lot, maybe wouldn’t have taken Mill Line Road, wouldn’t have seen his Camry and now his Camaro. Wouldn’t have started this impossible fluke chain of events that could lead, might lead, must lead—

No. No, goddamnit, no! There was impossible, and then there was no-fucking-way unthinkable.

But now he had a new problem . . . He’d gotten lost. He had taken the turnoff for the Babinski Bridge, a trestle affair out of the 1930s. Old or not, it would deliver him from these awful hinterlands. Only, he must not have taken the proper exit, and in trying to correct his error he had made several other turns and slipped somehow onto the local mazy back roads.

He didn’t have any water in the Lexus and the bread was drying out his mouth, but hunger gnawed. His head pounded. It was night and much cooler, but he’d removed his tie and unbuttoned his sweat-stained shirt. Hours had passed before the ruined car had been cleared from the road, before the deputies at last waved the file of vehicles on to their destinations through the hissing raspberry light of road flares.

He couldn’t find enough bars on his phone to call Bonnie again. Trees caged him on either side of whatever semi-paved road he was on. It amazed him that a mere forty minutes on the highway separated him from his clean-cut current life. His sordid past should be much farther away than that. Should be in another state, another world.

At this point he would gladly settle for getting back to Mill Line Road. It was a minor vein but one which still belonged to civilization’s extremity. He sped up some, despite the meanness of this little lane and the pure darkness of these woods. He peered through the windshield, spattered now with bugs. If he ever had to come to these parts again, he would map the way back beforehand and stick to a rigorous travel schedule. No damned sightseeing. What was there to see, anyway—

What had he just passed? A structure on his left, something that had flashed in his lights, a moldering pile of dark worm-eaten planks. The Gunderson house, abandoned for generations.

Which gave him his bearings.

Told him where he was.

And memory told him where he had been.

In his lifetime Benjamin Forsythe had owned five cars. He was driving his fifth. Today he had come across his fourth, third, and second, respectively. In reverse order. There was only one left. His first car, his first ride . . . that one was gone. He had made sure of it.

He hit the power brakes, and again the Lexus obediently stopped on a hypothetical dime. He knew what lay forward, knew this particular segment of lonely rural roadway. Once, when he was nineteen, when he had drunk a six-pack of beer by himself and felt quite manly, he had ventured out in the car his father had got him because fathers bought their sons cars in his family, even if that family was a pack of hillbilly goons. Young Benny was already of that stamp of arrogant loser.

On his night cruise he’d felt one with the machine, mechanical, sexualized, belligerent. He would later remember hoping he would find trouble.

He did find trouble. But it wasn’t any kind of exciting trouble. It was no test of manhood, no challenge to any skills he might possess. He had opened up the ’73 Impala—an absolute rust bucket, but it was his ride and he loved it—on the isolated stretch, knowing even full of beer that he wasn’t yet ready for dragging on Mill Line, much less the occasional games of chicken the older local kids got into.

His car thrust ahead. The needle climbed, and the wheel shook in his hands. He howled with pointless glee. Wooded darkness rushed by on both sides.

He shot past the old Gunderson place and tore deeper into the night.

Something—someone—appeared so very briefly in his headlights’ cone of whiteness. Then the impact punched the Impala. It was barely enough to make him swerve, and for the few seconds before he pumped the brake he recited the possibilities—raccoon, ’possum, coyote. Then he did bring the car to a stop, got out, walked back on shaking legs, and saw by the blood-glow of taillights the crushed body of Hermit Harry. Harry wasn’t really a hermit, but neither was he a socially adjusted human being. Benny recognized him by the oversized windbreaker he always wore. His face was smashed, as though he’d been leaning down into the path of the car when Benny hit him.

Hit him he had. Benny Forsythe. Nineteen. Beered up. All set for his first major criminal offense. Manslaughter. Vehicular homicide. Whatever the legal system would decide on. He was fucked, from here on. This would seal him into a dire cycle of life, the go-nowhere variety so common around here.

He stood over the corpse and listened to the strained rumbling from his beloved Impala. The engine seemed to speak to him there in the darkness, advising him, counseling him as to a way out. But it would require more than the mere disposal of this body. Nobody would miss Harry especially, but his absence from his deep woods cabin would eventually be noticed.

No, Benny would have to do more. He would need to sacrifice his car. Because it had a bloodied front end, and even if he cleaned it and pounded out the dent, the cops—if they came to him with the least suspicion—would find a way to detect tonight’s fatal impact between man and machine. The cops were tricky, and they’d been dealing with dumbasses like him for forever.

And Benny would need to do even more. A new life was necessitated. He wouldn’t run away or change his name. Instead, he would face down a damn-near-impossible challenge. He would fight his way out of this backwoods stalemate of drugs, poverty, and stupidity. He would get smart. He would better himself. He would find a way.

So he piled Harry in the trunk and scooped up the bloody leaves as well, and drove two counties over and ran the Impala off the precipice above Guadalupe’s Bog and watched it sink into syrupy blackness. He had a hell of a time getting home. He didn’t dare hitch. When he arrived, his parents wanted to know where the hell he’d got to. He offered no explanations, which give his mother fits. But it was his dad who wanted to know about the car, who stared at him and into him and seemed to perceive some shadow of that night’s grim events. After that, there was no more trust between him and his father.

But Benny had become Benjamin, refusing to answer to anything else. He begged for a job at a mechanic’s in Wilitz and worked harder and more purposefully than anyone at the garage, including the people who knew what they were doing. He saved money, paid for school, applied himself just as exhaustingly on the intellectual level. And thus he made of himself a new man. Indeed a better one.

The ’73 Impala stayed in Guadalupe’s Bog. That had been an all or nothing gambit. With Harry in the trunk, any discovery would lead very quickly back to Benjamin. But that auto had served as a formidable coffin. Hermit Harry was long gone. Benjamin hadn’t driven again until his mother decided to trust him with the keys to the Camaro.

This was that same road, of course, the one he had vowed never to return to. He sat idling on it, headlights spearing into the nighttime. He felt a sudden inexplicable hankering for a beer, even though he’d never touched alcohol as an adult. Maybe—maybe—he could manage to back his way out of here, if he went at, say, two miles an hour in reverse and found a place to turn around somewhere past the Gunderson ruin.

Ahead lay a curiously inviting straight stretch of empty road, wide enough for only one vehicle.

Far down it now, twin spots of light came on. Headlights.

They started to move toward him.

Chicken. A game of chicken. You didn’t back down from such a thing. So his primitive back-brain juvenile instincts told him, impulses he’d thought he had long since successfully exorcised.

A defiant grin pulled on Benjamin’s lips. His knuckles tautened over the steering wheel. His foot dropped, hard, and the Lexus hurtled forward, spraying dirt. Backing away at two miles an hour wouldn’t do him any good now.

He let out a barbaric yowl as the two cars closed toward each other. Marshy glop was falling off the sides of the Impala, revealing its rusty body. He had expected the car. At this point, he could expect such an inconceivable thing. In these past few seconds he had even come to figure that Hermit Harry would be at the wheel and that Benjamin would get a glimpse of his smashed-in face one final time before the massive collision.

But he was wrong about that.

It was his nineteen-year-old self doing the driving. Grinning ear to ear.

---

ERIC DEL CARLO’s fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and other venues. He resides in his native California.

ONLY THE STONES WILL HEAR YOU SCREAM

BY R.A. BUSBY

---

IT WAS A TIGHT SQUEEZE, that was all. in a moment, Pete would work his hand free, and like Superman flying below the breathing earth, he would stretch until his fingers found a way through this crack in the rock. Ahead lay a larger cave chamber where he could turn around and head back to the light.

There had to be.

Kevin had explained it all to him the night before. Here it is. They call this passage Daddy’s Home.

They’d been in Kevin’s jeep in the warm Nevada dusk, neither willing to go inside yet. Pete had taken the phone, keenly aware of Kevin’s fingers, and stared at the cave map, unsure what he was seeing. It looked like a bird’s claw with bends and tubes branching from a central tunnel.

Like an ant farm, Pete murmured. I thought caves were—well, chambers with stalactites. Hating how foolish he sounded, he added, Sorry. Not many geology classes for . . . for business. For a moment, he had forgotten his own major. Over dinner, Kevin’s dad had casually asked about Pete’s plans after graduation—that adult variation of What do you want to be when you grow up?—and Pete had been stuck. Again. It was unsettling.

Kevin gave an easy laugh. "Well, some caves really are big chambers, stalactites included. Others look like—what’d you say? Ant farms? He nodded. That’s perfect, Pete. Ever think about majoring in English?"

Pete shot him a sharp glance, but Kevin’s eyes held only interested kindness. No. My dad would never . . .  Pete shook his head, unsure if he should continue. Then he did. When I was applying to colleges before Dad got cancer, he told me I’d be majoring in business or food stamps. My choice.

Jesus. What’d you say back?

Pete chuckled grimly. "You didn’t. My dad—well, he was basically the opposite of your dad. All at once, he found himself telling Kevin everything. The thing is, I’m failing everything except English. If I go back, it’ll be on academic probation. He sighed. I’m such an asshole."

Hey. Kevin turned to him. Don’t you do that to yourself. You may need to step back to move forward, Pete. Happens to everyone.

Pete stared at his fingers. Good thing my dad’s too dead to appreciate it.

Was he always like that even before your mom . . . ?

I don’t know. I just know he blamed me for it.

Not your fault, man, said Kevin. You were just trying to be born.

Pete opened his mouth, and for another horrible second, he had no idea what would come out.

When I was a kid, he said, my dad would come in after work, plant himself in his recliner, and nurse his Scotch, getting more and more pissed off. I could tell by how he tapped his fingers against the chair. When that happened, I’d squirm into this crack between my bed and the wall. I didn’t mind the closeness. It made me feel secure. Like being held. You know?

Anyway, Pete continued, I thought I was being real smart, finding a place he couldn’t get me. One night, though, he came into my room. Said he was going to tuck me in. I should mention he never did that.

What happened?

Pete sighed. "He sat down and calmly told me about the boogeyman living in little children’s rooms. How it loved places dark and secret and small. How it waited for kids to fall asleep so it could drag them underneath the bed and eat them. Then he put his hand on my neck and whispered, ‘It’s the bad children that are the tastiest, Petey. The baaaad ones.’"

Jesus, Pete.

Forget it. Just tell me about the cave, all right?

Big Daddy was a great beginner cave, Kevin explained. Still, there had been a few accidents. Six experienced women in 2005. Two Boy Scouts in ’08. After that, the site had fallen into disuse.

On YouTube, they watched drone footage. Though Pete had expected a vast archway halfway up a mountain, he saw instead a limitless expanse of red-brown scabland where no plants grew but thin beige grass stretching for miles, barren and sere, till it met distant ridges sugar-topped with snow.

Then Pete spotted it. A sudden interruption in the desert floor, a gaping mouth of chert with graying limestone teeth. In its rocks were buried bones from creatures fallen to the shallow seafloor it had been.

So, said Kevin, glasses shining like twin moons. You up for this? One last hurrah before we go back?

The image of the cave entrance came again, stark and sere, the distant escarpment