“Why did you name her that?”
“I didn’t, my father did.” The mystic winced as she started walking for home, leaning heavily on her staff. “He has an obnoxious tendency to name everything after himself.” Tura raised a finger toward the heavens and shouted, “Onward to strawberries!”
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
PROMPT STORIES
The following stories were written by the Board members of Deep Magic magazine in response to prompts submitted by the magazine's readers.
GRAVE SECRETS
By Charlie N. Holmberg
2,200 Words
Prompt: Bagpipes on fire.
THE CREATURE IN the basement was moving again.
Layne cringed with the shifting of the chains, the subtle press of weight on the floorboards. The boards had been set right over the concrete, without any cushioning in between. Several of them were cracked. Probably more, now.
She held her breath, hands submerged in the half-full kitchen sink, listening. Too late she noticed the water pouring from the faucet was scalding hot. She ripped her hands from the dirty dishes, staring at her fingers like they weren’t her own. The skin was red, and she could see her pulse in the fat tissue at the top of her palm. Coming to herself, she turned the handle of the faucet until the water ran cool, then held her hands beneath it until the sting lessened. She scraped her lunch, not even half eaten, into the trash and added the plate to the water. She didn’t have much of an appetite anymore. Layne washed the dishes despite the burns, her skin feeling too tight for her hands. There wasn’t much to clean, besides. Not since Henry’s passing.
She dried her hands on the threadbare dish towel left over from her wedding; the rooster on it was barely discernable, and there was a hole where its comb should be. Then she paused, and the house sat quiet, more still than the ice hanging from the eaves outside the cracked kitchen window. Layne waited a moment, listening. The silence continued, not even punctuated by the titmice.
She walked carefully, having memorized where to step to avoid her own creaks, to avoid stirring the thing in the basement. Her small bedroom was safe, its floor mounted on solid earth, with no room for anything to stir below. The full-sized bed took up almost the entire space, the mattress lumpy and bent from where two bodies used to fit themselves on it, pulled close together to keep from falling off the edges. She fit just fine on it, now.
Somewhere behind and below, chains rattled. Layne stepped over the pile of clean laundry at the foot of the bed, still not folded despite her having taken it off the line two days ago. There was the twenty-four-inch TV on the dresser, the remote long since lost. A little clay pot full of paper flowers rested on the windowsill, given to her on her first wedding anniversary. Henry’s guitar and Scottish pipes had been shoved into the corner, collecting dust. If she could make the trip to the library, she might be able to sell those online. Earn a few extra dollars for a new dress, or a haircut. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The drive wasn’t terrible, but she could still hear his fingertips on those strings, his elbow pumping air through the chanter. A silly thing, really. He’d stopped playing them years before his death. But Henry had never tried to sell them, either.
Layne pressed the base of her hand against a sudden pain in her chest. The house rattled. She sucked in a breath that seared her throat on the way down. The creature was awake, and angry. The following thud was it throwing itself against the north wall hard enough that the bedroom door opened another inch. When had it gotten large enough to do that?
She clasped her trembling hands together, moving closer to the window. She could run, if she needed to. How far she’d get, she couldn’t be certain. No neighbors for miles. And she didn’t know how fast the monster was. If it knew her scent. If it could see in the dark.
The house pulsed a third time, and this time the doorknob slammed into the wall. Chains rattled to the floor, and for a terrifying moment Layne was sure the thing had broken free. Her age-spotted hands flew to the rusted lock on the pane. Spit dried on her tongue. Tears wet her eyes.
A fourth, quieter thump sounded, followed by stillness. She waited, listening for the creaking of the stairs, the creaking of the hinges on the basement door. But the noises didn’t come, and slowly, so slowly, she pulled one finger at a time from the lock.
The monster had leapt—it must have. Leapt at the ceiling—the kitchen floor—and then fallen back to the ground. It was growing. How could it grow? Beasts like this one were supposed to shrink with time, like a pimple, or a goose egg. That’s what Oprah had said. The creature hadn’t thrashed so violently last month. Layne was sure it hadn’t.
She studied the yard outside her window, untended and shriveled with the winter. Cattle wire marked its edges, barely visible in the dim, cloud-choked light. Spikes of grass poked up through a thin layer of snow. Patches of dirt were half mud, half ice. The forest’s thick tree line carpeted the distance. Could she make it to those trees on her own? She had so little energy these days . . . if she left now, would she make it by dark?
Pressing her cheek to the cold glass, breath puffing across it, Layne saw the small, snowy mound near the corner of the house, with an unpainted cross stabbed into its head. She’d had to dig it herself. Cover it herself. Cut the wood herself, from leftover basement floorboards. Even now, she was sure it wasn’t deep enough. Was certain starving animals would come and dig him up, eat him, and carry him away in their bellies if she didn’t keep vigil.
She couldn’t leave Henry. She couldn’t leave home.
The thing below slithered up the stairs, then back down again.
“Go away,” she whispered, peeling herself from the glass. “Go away.”
The creature didn’t respond. And so Layne shut and locked her bedroom door and turned on the television using the tiny buttons beneath the screen. She only got three channels out here, and one was in Spanish, so she settled on a second-rate news show located in a city she’d only visited twice. Then she perched on the bed and began folding her laundry. She had nothing in her drawers, and she hated empty spaces. A breeze caused the leafless dogwood outside the kitchen window to scrape across the glass, making a whining sound like a hurt dog, so Layne stopped to turn the television up, then folded, folded, folded. Anything to keep her busy. Anything to stop her from thinking.
Anything to make her chest stop hurting, and distract her from the monster.
The creature below was always silent at night, so when it wasn’t, Layne woke in a cold sweat, despite the baseboard heaters being turned to high. It was only her eyelids that moved at first—her eyelids and her heart, which started thrumming in her chest like injured wasps. Her lungs followed, heaving like the bag to those Scottish pipes in the corner. She stared at her ceiling, seeing the shapes of spiders along it until her mind snapped into place and pulled the shadows from the soffits. Then she just stared, waiting, praying it was a dream.
But two heartbeats later, a thud shook the house, rattling the hinges on the bedroom door. The strings of Henry’s guitar chirped in earnest.
The monster never stirred at night. Layne always felt the safest when she slept. When she could shut her thoughts, her sorrows, and her pains off for a few hours.
But not now.
She bolted upright in bed. The kitchen floor creaked from pressure beneath it, like the whole house had turned over and struggled to hold the weight of something unbearably heavy. But worst of all was the absence of clinks—no chains. The chains didn’t drag, didn’t drop. Which meant the beast was no longer bound by them.