The First Bonecutter

It all started when I went to a party my friend was having. Well, I use the word ‘party’ loosely. My friend was only a bit better off, socially, than I was; so that meant he was having his friends and his roommate’s friends over to get drunk. I qualify for the categories ‘friend’ and ‘likes to get drunk’ so I thought, what the Hell? It’s not like I have anything else to do, right?

I’d never met his roommate. We only knew each other through School – he had just finished his Associate’s, so he was halfway done. I’d be going back for my Psychology Master’s after two and a half years of working night shift at a gas station and living with two roommates of mine, one of whom was my brother.

I didn’t know my friend’s roommate had just hit thirty. But he had, and that meant the other group was mostly older people – there were eleven in total though, so I was able to take my usual course of action. That is, I hung back and got drunk, watching everyone else fumble through the awkward smalltalk and introductions that I gave up even trying years ago. I kinda felt like a zoologist, studying animals. I suppose if I were a few screws looser or a few cans shorter of a six-pack I’d make a great stalker. Honestly this story would be much, much less unpleasant if that were the case.

I was nursing beer number three when she came up to me, and just started talking. Yes, that actually happens. Not often enough, but it does.

Let’s call her Karen. It’s a solid name, not very common in younger girls anymore.

Karen was older. I found out later she was thirty-three, but her fashion sense was either behind, or she didn’t have a career that had very strict dress codes. She had a few tattoos on both arms – the one on her right bicep looked like barbed-wire digging into her skin, the one on her was a gold-and-black seven-pointed star. She was actually an inch taller than me, with long, flowing black hair she’d streaked red. She had blue-black eyeshadow and the same color lipstick, and I noticed she had a tongue piercing when she spoke.

Before she started talking to me she stood there and smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I just smiled back, probably looking nervous as all hell. There wasn’t a lot going through my head, but of all the things racing through my inebriated mind I can definitely assure you that not one of them was that she could be interested in me.

“Hi!” She said. “You have really nice hair!”

Girls – or women – complimenting me was very foreign. How does one respond to that? Is she just being nice? I hadn’t seen this woman around ‘till just now and she didn’t look like she belonged to either groups. My friend was twenty-three and most of his friends were already totally shitfaced, twenty-somethings in sports jerseys and jeans; and his roommate’s friends all looked clean-cut and wealthy. This…alternative looking woman seemed just as out of place as, well, me.

“Thanks, I like your tattoos.” I said. It was the first thing that stood out about her and the first thing that sprang to mind, so I thought it’d be nice to say.

I really did like it about her, too.

We talked more, and once we started we couldn’t stop. We talked about everything, from movies to music to books. Everything I liked, she liked too. And she had something interesting to say about everything. I found out she was a painter, and she regularly painted houses and rooms in her spare time to help expenses in her house, which she’d inherited from her parents. She hung paintings of her own, unrestrained by anyone else’s demands. She said it was too much to describe in one sitting, but she compared it to cave paintings and rock carvings; she wanted to paint the things she saw in her dreams.

So, yeah. She seemed a little out-there. But she liked me and was interested in what I had to say.

So now there were three groups – my friend’s social circle, his roommate’s, and me and Karen’s. Karen, I found out, was a Med School dropout. She’d been an aspiring surgeon and then, one day, she finally cracked under the pressure. She normally didn’t tell people, but she said she felt very, very comfortable around me. She was now working odd jobs and would be for a while, but she was looking for a roommate. Like any other lonely twenty-something I jumped at the chance and wound up going back to what I assumed was her to check it out.

Turns out, she had a house – not an apartment. She’d been able to hold out on insurance money from her mother’s death, but she didn’t want to lose the house she’d grown up in. I might not have taken her up on it given what the house looked like, but the prospect of not being alone anymore was too tempting.

It was an old one, this one. Single story, not including a tiny attic with a single, circular window in the front of it. That part jutted out over the porch, which had ornately designed metal railings instead of simple, wooden ones. It looked like it had been constructed sometime in the early 20th century and while not dilapidated was at least worn and pastel looking, its age apparent from just a cursory glance.

Once inside I saw that it had been lived in very thoroughly since it was built, as the paintings, furniture and technology varied wildly from a hand-made antique chair to modernist paintings on the walls to brand new VCR. This was back when VCRs were still new and cutting-edge technology so, needless to say, if I wasn’t already impressed by this woman’s beauty than I was definitely impressed by her – soon to be, our – home.

What struck me the most were her paintings.

There were six in the living room alone, all depictions of humanoid forms in vary levels of…I wanted to say decay, but that wasn’t right. A better word might be reshaped, or reformed. One was a portrait, a stylized black skull against a bright red background, with grey-blue webbing coming out from back of the head.

Her biggest one, three feet tall and two feet wide, depicted a group of children or small people encircling something, something that might once have been human. A human woman, specifically. She was close-eyed and had her arms stretching out, holding all of the children up on strings. She emerged from a fire-pit and her body was serpentine, lean. Her hair was the color of the flames and seemed to blend into them while behind them was a landscape of stars, alone in a cold, black universe.

I stood there and stared with my mouth agape. Here I was, a pale and skeletal twenty-something about to start college again who felt out-of-place for having a penchant for Punk Rock and Star Trek, and here was a woman at least three times creepier than me. As you can guess I jumped on that shit like a Kangaroo on…y’know, the ground and shit. I asked the obvious and she reacted like I was a mental retard. And compared to her, I was – artistically at least.

“Are those yours?” I asked, stupidly pointing at her grand masterpiece (or what I assumed was such).

She looked at me, smirking.

“Yes, Jim. Yes. Those are my paintings.” She nodded slowly like I was a child describing riding a bicycle for the first time. And of course, my name isn’t Jim or James or any variation thereof, for the record. But it’s the most common name there is in America so we’re going with it for my anonymity’s sake.

“They’re so amazing,” I said. “They jump out at you so vividly. It’s like something Clive Barker would write up, Jesus Christ.”

She laughed.

“I’m smarter with my hands than my head,” she said. “It’s why I wanted to be a Doctor. Didn’t work out but hey, I’ve got this right? Who could resist being a starving artist.”

As a failed guitarist and sculptor, this stunned me. The talents I’d always wished I’d had were all contained here. She could calculate the human form perfectly; she could capture just enough detail to catch your eye and not so much that it ever felt like something trying to be real. It was stylized and primitive like what she’d compared it to before: A Cave Painting. She called this painting the “Mother of Abominations,” after a goddess from some obscure theology. I told her it was beautiful, and I think she blushed. It was so ridiculous to see given how dignified and, for lack of a better word, badass she’d seemed. But it was something I’d done that made her feel good. This was the first time a girl’d ever blushed at me. She played with her hair and muttered “Thanks, kid,” and it took me a second to realize she wasn’t nervous because of something I did wrong, but because – it seemed like, anyways – she liked me.

We sat and we talked about everything. Our lives, our dreams, and the people we’d known. I explained how I’d finished my bachelor’s and had to drop out because I couldn’t pay for college and work at the same time. I told her about how my parents did nothing but give me shit for it, telling me I’d be a failure; I’d be nothing. In my spare time I’d taken up playing guitar and sculpting which both time and money limited my ability to advance in. I promised next time we hung out I’d show her my guitar and play some of the things I knew and she promised to draw me something – not something of me, of course, but something for me.

Falling in love for the first time is a very strange thing, especially when you’re as late to the punch as I was. But for a brief while, it was beautiful – the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced, in fact. I could never have thought something this amazing or fantastic could ever have happened to me. We both were night owls, we both were weirdoes; we could both say anything to each other and never fear of alienating the other one, unlike with most of our previous love interests.

I found out she’d been engaged, once upon a time. Her husband-to-be had been killed in a car accident, and she had been out of the dating scene until recently. Like me, she’d found it barren – after trying for a few years she just gave up when she was thirty. And well, when she found me, it was three years later.

In that time, she’d gotten the tattoos I saw, started experimenting with makeups and changing herself. She said that the power of being able to alter your appearance is the best reminder that you have some control of your situation. Even if it’s only a little bit, it’s a reminder that things can change, and if things can change, there’s always hope.

From there it’s your typical love story – supplanting whatever popular actor and actress stars in romance flicks nowadays with Jim and Karen, already described. We dated for four or five months, with me sometimes staying at her house for up to a week. She’d have met my parents, if they would’ve approved. They were from a different time; I doubt they’d understand a nine-year-age difference. I told them I was moving in with a roommate. I was planning never to speak to them again, given how they’d been treating me. Back then it was easier to ditch people, and Karen lived at least an hour and twenty minutes away. The College I was planning to attend was forty-five minutes away from that, so it worked out in both directions.

I’d have met Karen’s parents, too – if they were still alive. She said her dad would’ve loved me. We were both musicians, apparently, though he played the harp and not the guitar. I asked if he had left anything of his in the house and she said everything of her parents was down in the basement. It was so cluttered she hadn’t been down there in almost a year. Everything was boxed up, but she couldn’t afford storage so it would have to do for now. I didn’t have much of anything to begin with, so when I moved an acoustic guitar, a few dozen books with a bookshelf and my dresser full of clothes into her house she barely noticed a difference. My parents wondered why I didn’t bring my bed and I almost told them I was sharing one with Karen – thankfully I saved it at the last minute by telling them my ‘roommate’ had a pull-out couch, which technically wasn’t a lie. She did have a pull-out couch. We spent many, many nights on it, curled up together and looking up to the stars; shining down on us from a skylight in the ceiling while we whispered to each other about dreams and ideas and all the possibilities our future together might bring.

So things went on for about a year. I didn’t just have the money saved up for school, but for rent too. Splitting it with Karen I was able to live pretty nicely and we were able to build something together, instead of me being carried like I’d been for all of my life before and instead of Karen having to carry somebody like (she said) she’d had to do with her fiancée.

Eventually, the topic of kids and marriage came up. I told her I wasn’t ready. When I needed to convince her I explained that I hadn’t finished school yet and supporting a baby on my already meager savings would prevent me from ever getting my Master’s. I doubted minimum wage – even then – would let us bring up a kid in any kind of healthy environment. Marriage? That’d come later. After I was finished with school.

We settled on a compromise: a dog. Of course, it was impossible for her to teach a dog about her philosophy; the idea that changing yourself can change the world. It was also impossible for her to hope that the dog might, someday, become a surgeon like she’d wanted to be. But it was something to take care of for now, something sweet and loving and nice to come home to after a hard night’s work for either of us. We treated it like it was our own, like it was a baby or a child. I’m pretty sure this is why pets appeal so much to those who choose not to have children or can’t; a dog or a cat are babies that don’t grow up, even if you’re in for a brutally dark couple of months ten or fifteen years down the road. Plus, a dog doesn’t have to go to school, so adjusting it to the night shifts we both worked was much easier than it would be for a child.

He was a white bulldog she named Fleischer, and for a while it held her off. We loved him, we spent lots of time on him; you know how childless couples are with dogs, right? That’s how we were. Baby talk, buying expensive collars, the whole nine yards.

So you can imagine how tragic it was when Fleischer went missing.

Karen was distraught, though I’d hate to admit she held it together much, much better than me. We’d spend long nights out there, calling his name – once getting the police called on us. We drove through town, asking people if they’d seen him. We had a few false leads and once even caught a dog that wasn’t ours – it turned out to be a girl. After about three months me and Karen had given up, and we stayed up all night, holding each other. I cried like a baby and she just sort of shut down, becoming sluggish and numb. For a while I never saw her except for before and after she left for work, and I could rarely sleep and had most of the house to myself.

A few more months went by and as I came one year closer to finishing my master’s degree we both moved on, accepting that we were never going to see our best little buddy again.

In the Summer between my fifth and sixth year of College, Karen had taken up doing charity work to help fill the void left by our lost companion. She started reading to children with disabilities, and while I was working she would tell me all about it so I would be prepared when I became a Psychologist myself; I even gave her some advice regarding ADD and ADHD disorders. At the time these were suddenly skyrocketing in diagnoses, so it was the one I was becoming most familiar with. She and I both talked about how so many parents and adults go about the differently abled with the wrong mentalities; they see them as people with problems to fix, and not people with a different set of skills. She wanted them to change, to enhance their best skills and downplay the ones that didn’t fit in our society.

Eventually she took up one of those charity programs where you spend time with a disenfranchised kid, one-on-one. The boy’s name was Jacob, and he was still allowed to see his parents on weekends – or, rather, they were still allowed to see him. She would come back home and tell me all about him, silly things like his favorite animals and his favorite candies; like she was five. I entertained her because it kept her drive to have kids down for a time and, honestly, it was pretty adorable to see how happy she got from it. Seeing her so happy was infectious, and it was much needed after Fleischer’s loss.

Because of Karen, this kid – Jacob – wanted to be a Surgeon when he grew up. She found out from the charity’s coordinators that he had inherited cystic fibrosis, a then very lethal genetic disorder, from his mother. They didn’t know when it would begin to show, but it would likely happen in his teen years. He knew his mother had it, but they didn’t want to alarm him – he was ten.

So Karen simply talked about “when he was all grown up” as something that would inevitably happen, unimpeded by any and all kinds of foreseeable disasters. She came home happy that he was alright every day that she did, but soon enough another wave of depression had begun to set in. This one was more maneagable and easier for me to pull her out of – I assured her she was doing the right thing in making his time here, however long it would be, as good as possible.

And then it happened.

While visiting with his parents, Jacob’s house had burned down.

It had been on a Saturday, and the police blamed the fire on an oven that had been left on along with lit candles in every room of the house. I was at School that day, and Karen was at home – she got the news. They didn’t know who else to call, so they told her what had happened. She called me and I came home to find her crying hysterically, rocking back and forth on the kitchen floor. It took many, many hours for me to get her together; holding her and stroking her hair and telling her the only thing that anyone can say in that situation. “It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright.” The same mantra somebody probably heard in a gas oven, a few decades earlier.

I spent every minute I was home taking care of her, making her soup and tea and picking up the household tasks that this sudden blow had made it very hard for her to do. I bought her books on her favorite subjects – surrealism, the human body, doctoral studies – and I even got her a painting kit and watched her paint pictures of people with ruined, violated forms. She said she was releasing her pain, and given how agonizing and how violently eye-catching her artwork was, I believed her.

Karen fell into another depressive fit and said she needed lots of alone time. I had nowhere else to go, of course – having not spoken to my parents in almost a year it seemed very unethical for me to go back to them and it likely would’ve been unsuccessful. So she decided, in addition to the painting she normally did in her spare room, she was going to start going through her parent’s stuff. In the Basement. She said she wanted to clear that place out and renovate it, make it a room for her painting and my guitar and for us just to relax or unwind when either of us was upset. As a person who’d spent most of his life disconnected from the rest of humanity, I wholeheartedly agreed. She said after she was done with the very personal tasks of going through her parents possessions and some of her old fiancee's, she’d get back to me and ask for my input on how to renovate the place.

In the meantime, I kept working and eventually started school again, for my final year and, hopefully, the degree that would land me the safe, steady job I’d been working towards for most of my adult life.

At night, when I was studying, sometimes I would hear crying creeping up the basement stairs; I assumed that Karen was being very nostalgic over some lost toy or some kind of photograph of her when she was a little girl. I ignored it but sometimes, strangely, it became very high-pitched. Sometimes it became whines and whimpers.

Eventually a terrible thought came across my mind, one night after she’d gone very, very quiet.

What if she had a gun down there? Or a knife? What if one day she didn’t come back up and I went down the stairs to find the only person who’s ever truly loved me, warts and all, dead on the ground in a puddle of blood?

That night she came back up. She came up looking ruined and exhausted and that night in bed I held her for a long, long time before I could go sleep. Feeling how soft her skin was under her thin, silk pajamas. How fragile she was. How somehow such a beautiful thing had not been broken by the tragedies that this cold, awful world had inflicted upon her over and over again.

So, one of these days, I’d be taking a sick day from School. Right after a test. I’d be taking a sick day and while Karen was out working I would go into the basement and I would search it out to see if she had anything she could kill herself with down there. Any razors, and guns, any pills. People who are suicidal can be very unsettlingly good at hiding it.

I, a therapist-to-be, was going to make sure my girlfriend wasn’t hiding it from me.

One evening Karen was out, buying paints for her job. She’d have to do somebody’s room the next day so she said she’d be out for a while.

I was just getting home, but instead of leaving for the evening class I had I was going to take a nap and then, after a fresh cup of coffee, do some investigating.

It didn’t even take that long.

I woke up around six or seven, I think. It was pitch black, but Karen wasn’t home yet, thank God.

Something scratched at the door of the basement and then seemed to scamper back down the stairs.

I had to stay awake in the darkness a little longer. Waited for maybe seven minutes. Had to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

It happened again. Something seemed to move gently up the stairs and then claw or tap at the basement door, waiting until I made a noise to go stumbling or jumping back down.

Did dogs have a hard time coming up stairs but an easy time going down? It was like that for some animal but I couldn’t remember which. Maybe our dog had found its way in through a basement window and was trying to get my attention now.

I went to the pale, white basement door and waited. When I heard the animal coming back up again I unlocked the door and then heard a brief creaking.

And then silence.

I opened up the basement door and a cold, wet draft hit me. I reached out for a chain hanging from the ceiling and yanked it down, suddenly bathing myself in clear, yellow light from a bare bulb hanging from the top of the stairwell.

It took a little bit to focus but I saw something at the base of the stairs. It was pale white against the cracked, grey-black cement floor so I assumed it was the dog. He must’ve found a way back in and starting look for us. Weird he didn’t make any noise – he’d been so vocal before.

I went down, trying to make as little noise as possible. The left side of the stairs were up against the wall but the right had a railing that gave a full view of the basement.

The animal that had sprinted from the base of the stairs was still on the ground, rocking silently. I didn’t get a great view of it but I could see it was not our dog. Its front limbs were lean and hairless, diseased-looking and ending in long, black fingers. Its hair was matted and unkempt. It continued to rock, silently, penting up energy for…what? Was it a drug addict? It wasn’t twitching, but it seemed very jittery.

I hit a very, very creaky step on the way down and the thing sprinted over to a dark corner so fast I gasped and hit my back to the wall.

I stood there for I dunno how long, but eventually after not being able to see anything else I just kept my eyes in the direction the person had gone in and slowly, silently, made my way to the floor of the Basement.

I felt around and eventually I found a few light switches. I needed to corner this druggie before he ransacked any of Karen’s personal things, maybe subdue him and call the police. He’d looked pretty small to begin with – was he starved, small, young? I had to find out.

I hit one of the light switches and it revealed a basement huge and open, maybe ten feet from floor to ceiling. It was cold and bitter in there.

But I saw it, crouching in the corner and shaking. Its stiff, frostbitten black fingers slid numbly down the grey, brick walls of either wall in the corner. It shifted and panted and from the way it sounded I think it might have been drooling or about to throw up.

It was a child. No older than nine. He was dressed in filthy, torn clothes I could smell from here. They were very, very light looking; it may have once been a T-Shirt. But it was torn enough that I could see his ribs, exposed under a tear in the shirt on his left side. Was he homeless?

“Hey? Buddy? You doin’ oka…”

He turned to me.

His lips looked very chapped. Split and infected in a lot of places, with discolorations spreading upwards through his entire face. When he bared his teeth I saw mucus seep through the gaps. They were unusually wide – until I noticed there were many missing, the remaining ones jagged, grey and set into dark blue, oxygen-deprived gums. His cheekbones jutted out and I realized he’d been violently starved. His hair, filthy and greasy and tanged, must’ve come down to his neck where it ended it jagged edges like he’d tried to cut it himself. He reached up to scratch his head and I saw lumps of it falling out in his hands.

Though he seemed not to notice, just shaking and drooling and gurgling what might’ve been words to him and nothing to me.

It was his eyes, though. His eyes told me he wasn’t homeless, or drug-addled, or delinquent.

His eyes were blackened lumps of flesh. Like he’d been lobotomized.

He couldn’t see me, because his head kept jerking from one direction to another, his mouth trailing discolored mucus. He panted through his ruined teeth, and occasionally he would put his hands together like he was praying or begging. It almost reminded me of a fly keeping its front legs in front of it, as he pressed his teeth into his rubbery, dead skin and let mucus seep through his skeletal claws; crouched as if ready to leap towards me and try to touch me with his stiff, inhuman fingers.

I moved towards him as quietly as I could. Nothing went through my mind. Nothing in my entire life had prepared me for something like this. I could never have imagined such a thing could ever have come into existence through any modifications or alterations known to God or humanity.

A breeze hit one of the basement windows – there were two of them, each about a foot high and two feet long. They were both closed and unopenable…

This thing had not come down here that way.

It jerked its head towards the straining glass and I realized then it was operating my hearing. It literally twitched its head in the direction of the sound, blubbering something senseless and incomprehensible.

I came closer to it, putting my arm over my mouth and nose to hide that disgusting, awful smell like rotting meat and stale, moldy air. I finally got close enough to see its eyes, and I will never, ever forget what I saw there.

Stitches.

His eyes had been stitched shut.

The blackness was Necrosis. Infection. His eyelids were dying ahead of him.

I only whispered but it must’ve heard me – it hissed and spat bloody phlegm, showing me its teeth and swinging its claws at me, still crouched on its skinny, discolored legs.

“Jesus!” I screamed, and that was when it backed up against the wall, licking its chappend and broken lips and gurgling something that was almost intelligible.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked in reflex, unable to think of anything else to say.

It hissed something dryly, shaking and drooling. It took one of its moist hands and stroked back its hair from its ravaged face and spoke it again.

“Ay-kogh.”

I swallowed hard and was backing up when it spoke again.

“Ay-kogh. Ay-kopp!”

Ay-kopp?

Oh, God.

“Jacob?” I asked.

It smiled, cracking its chapped lips and exposing graying teeth with numerous, black cavities.

“Aykob.” It – no, he – said, smiling and nodding like his head was being pulled on a string. He stood up and his shirt was open enough that I could see something like inputs in his sides. Metal rings, two in his chest and one on each side between the ribs.

Something for his lungs?


I backed up and accidentally hit the rest of the light switches, illuminating the whole of the basement.

Jacob, or what had once been Jacob, was not alone here.

Over in one corner was something much older than him – or me.

This one had sagging skin, from age. No hair, and furthermore no sensory organs. Its ears were gone, ragged and ruined holes with tubing going directly into the openings. Its eyes were hollow sockets, the darkness within visible through translucent lenses. Its cheeks did not exist, giving the awful look of an impossibly wide grin. Even if this one was in agony its look insisted upon insane delight, its teeth unable to meet through the tube going directly into its mouth and down his throat.

There were other tubes, too – ones connected to glass bottled and jars of varying colors and sizes. All of them were inserted in metal rings in the flesh, just like the ones in Jacob’s chest.

I couldn’t look away. It had stopped being horrifying and become like a dream. Like a nightmare I was destined to awaken from, if only I analyzed it enough. If only I could see the impossibilities here I could force myself free from it, couldn’t I?

The jars and bottles rattled. Not because the thing attached to them moved – no, it had no limbs. It was covered in gauze, caked in dried blood and internal fluids. The jars rattled on their own.

I moved towards it, gently, ignoring Jacob’s whimpering and spitting for help, and moved closer to the second one.

They were organs. This…thing had its organs in glass bottles, pulsating with life while separated from his still living torso.

It coughed and gagged in its tube and I saw an empty jar hanging from the ceiling on a chain. This one was connected to its stomach, just under the sternum.

A feeding tube.

I became numb. Senseless. Just taking it in, taking it in so I could tell somebody. Anybody.

I spun and saw another one in the corner, next to a table. The table had a small lamp and an open book with a few pens and pencils nearby. I needed to look at the book. It might give me some idea of what was happening here. Of what impossible disasters had happened to these things, had…

The third thing snapped at me. I saw it was chained down and when it snapped and made an awful, screeching noise like tearing steel. It was some kind of non-human mammal. Its forelimbs ended in what looked like retractable, rusted claws and its lips and nose had been torn away to reveal a poorly-implanted maw of misshapen, metal teeth. Its eyes, too, were gone; but they were replaced by some kind of implanted lenses that could protrude and recede at will. In its back were numerous inputs like in Jacob’s chest and the other's disconnected organs, along with what appeared to be – what? Knobs? Buttons? I could tell they were controls of some kind. Something to orchestrate its movement manually.

I went over to the book, trying not to upset it, and saw a familiar pair of black spots on its side.

Fleischer.

This is what had become of him.

I turned to the first page of the book and began to read, turning on the light. I could still hear Jacob’s whimpers and wet crying as he crouched in the corner and the rattling of the jars pierced my nerves and sent chills through me at even, pulsing intervals.

Inside the book, I recognized Karen’s handwriting.

The first was a few lines of text next to a diagram – one like one of her paintings. Her same drawing style.

“This isn’t happening,” I said to myself. But the jerks and sounds I got from the other living things in the cellar reassured me that it was.

The book’s first lines read,

“Hunter One.
Status: failed.
Reasons: infection, respiratory. Brain damage and nervous system malfunction.
Any parts salvageable: No.
Body destroyed by burning.”
The rest of them were all like that, pictures of other…experiments…ravaged and altered things restructured in too many horrible ways, sometimes with bones, veins and flesh rearranged in ways that should not have been biologically possible.

I skipped to the end and saw long journal entries starting to take the place of just the dry, factual statements of the impossible.

For brevity’s sake I will only indulge one here – the one that was most important to me.

This is what it said.

“The human body can be reconstructed. Changed into new forms to fit new conditions and new environments. People have infested the earth from the hottest deserts to the coldest arctic wastelands, and the human immune system has let our species grow to over four and a half billion strong. The physical aspect of Homo Sapiens is the perfect tool for new lands and new skills. In just a few years I have devised a thousand new morphs, all of which can be patented and sold or mass-manufactured. Where metal rusts, cells regenerate. Where fuel burns, from blood flows blood flows blood. Evolution fashions Homo Sapiens from Cromagnons and Australopithecines, but now my hands will take that power away from God or Nature or whatever willed us to this point. What it took evolution millions of years to do with blind hands, it will take me only ten with hands unlimited by environment and genetics. Machines are machines whether they are meat or metal and those who only want to build cars from cars and men from men are holding us all back. Imagine the new lands we could conquer with the right surgeries. Imagine the new wars we could fight with men who do not think or feel or stop when bullets pierce them. With the hands of God we can build new races and peoples and make the future our own. Me and Jim will be the first to build a colony. We will make for ourselves a legion of things we design at will, building entire worlds for ourselves. Darwin called evolution the creation of endless forms most beautiful and wonderful but now I will take those same words to my own babies. I have released three already, none of which have been found. Soon, soon they shall be everywhere. Programmed by me, for me. And for Jimmy.”

I turned the page.

“Oh, how beautiful our Kingdom shall be. I can’t wait to see him when I finally show all of it to him.”

From upstairs I heard the front door open.

She was home.

“Sweetness, I’m…” She stopped.

The basement door was still wide open.

My memory breaks up here. It might’ve been clearer, long ago, when I this was all fresh in my mind, but I remember her scream.

It was the longest, most anguished howl of grieving suffering that I have ever, ever heard. Even now I hear it clear as a bell, all these decades later. It started at a high-pitched wail and descended into hysterical sobbing, the kind I was all too familiar with in the many bouts of misery and depression that had descended upon Karen; one after another.

I didn’t fight her off. In fact, I never even saw her in person again.

I saw a thick, heavy door from the basement out into the backyard; sealed by a heavy lock. I grabbed the book and sprinted over to the door, slamming the lock open just as I heard her sprinting down the stairs; the heavy creaks making Jacob cry hysterically while the other ones tubes rattled as it writhed helplessly. The mechanical whine of what used to be our dog started up, and in all of it I think – just before I slammed the door open with a thick, thudding noise – I think I hear her screaming my name. Screaming and asking, like a mourning parent: “Why? Why? WHY?”

I ran into the woods and the freezing night as the outside light turned on.

I remember feeling my stomach lurch and my heart nearly explode with terror, because I heard something behind me.

I remember realizing that what I heard wasn’t moving with two legs through the underbrush – but four. It was too light to be Karen.

I remember waking up in a hospital, the book gone and my whole body aching. I remember spending time in a hospital for a nervous breakdown.

I remember Karen’s house, once ours, being totally deserted when the police got there. As if nobody had ever lived there at all.

In time, I had managed to convince myself that I had imagined it all. That somebody had killed Karen, and that I fled in terror and escape before they could catch me. I managed to convince myself of all of this until I was in my mid-thirties and had gotten married. I never told her about Karen – but on my wedding day I came home to find a letter in the mail.

“Hello, James.
I’m glad your life has recovered from our unfortunate incident. I know you must be happier now. Happier with somebody who will breed normal, perfect children and live a normal, perfect life with you. Somebody who will let you grow old and fat and die forgotten, unknown to history and leaving humanity, more or less, unchanged.
I still think of you, you know. You stole my book and I’m fairly certain that if you hadn’t lost it the police would have it right now, licking their lips and tapping their fingers together as they attempted to hunt down a menace to their dying, broken society.
I will not trouble you any further. I will take the next step whether you or anyone else knows; and if I must do it alone, then so be it. It is not my fault or my concern what happens to people like you. You are not, in my eyes, people.
You are meat.
So this shall be the last you hear from me. I sometimes dream of what we might have done together, had you not been so foolish. Had you simply waited until you were ready for what the whole world must eventually know.
Goodnight, my Angel. I will always remember you, even if I never see you again.
But of course, if one of my friends might, then I can’t really be held responsible, now can I?
With all the love and respect in the world,
- Karen.”

I took that letter out to the trash can, burned it, and took a cold shower for the longest hour of my life before I touched or spoke to my wife again.

That was a long, long time ago. I eventually had a beautiful daughter who just went off for college, fulfilling what life had stopped me from doing. I love her and she is my world and every time we speak I tell her how proud I am of her for making a real difference – one that really matters.

And then, after doing that, I sleep a little easier. But never perfectly.

In the days since what happened, there have been animal maulings that can’t be placed upon any known species. Throats rended to pieces. Not many, but enough.

Twenty thousand children go missing each year. Children make for great targets, if somebody wants to keep Karen’s work up and running. Children make for great targets if one of Karen’s…friends…has ill intentions.

It doesn’t take a lot, nowadays, to find reports of strange humanoids. Almost every conceivable kind can be discovered in some paperback book on the paranormal or unusual happenings. Of course, many of them are just hallucinations or misidentifications of known animals or phenomenon. But as the years go by, they just keep piling up. And piling up. And piling up.

Even if only one in a thousand were valid…that’s more than enough to make me very badly frightened.

Sometimes I go out to smoke at night and I wonder how many of the howls and shrieks are just coyotes and night-birds. I’ve gone camping since then, always on high ground and always getting very, very little sleep. I’ve bought dozens of books over the years on the sounds animals make, familiarizing myself with each and every one to the best of my abilities. I can place a scientific name to just about every sound you can think of with pretty constant accuracy.

But sometimes, I hear something new, and I put out my cigarette and go inside immediately. I try to count up how many times it happens. And it happens just a little too often.

There is a shotgun in my room. Loaded at all times. We live in a very rural area nowadays. On one hand, it would be hard for anything to find us, if they had any method of tracking me.

On the other, if something were to happen to us, it could be weeks or even months before somebody finds out about it. My job is hours away and I have to drive very, very far to get to work. On those long drives, no matter how loud the radio is or how much coffee I’ve forced myself to drink I think back to my house. To my wife. How she’s doing, alone there now that she’s retired.

I think of my daughter. A Med Student, of course. Sometimes I want to ask her if what I saw was possible. If any of the things that Karen did could be replicated.

But what answer would be worse? Yes or no?

Be careful out there. Anyone and everyone listening, be careful out there. Please, for the love of God.

I have a feeling what I saw was only the beginning.

And I have a feeling the next time, they won’t be so easily brought down.

Night is coming.

And the night is always a haven for the people and things that want to remain unknown.