Monthly archives: September 2015

Jordan Hofer pulls no punches in this unsettling story. It’s horrible, viscerally repulsive, and all too real. Enjoy!

Poverty was to blame. For it was only a child, lonesome and the victim of parental and societal neglect. Its parents were permanently unemployed and suffered from maladies psychological, purely physical, and self-inflicted. Its mother drank wood alcohol and the father huffed petrol.

A meager inheritance from the deceased Harold Shappel, entrepreneur of witch trial tourism, fed and housed his debased son and sole heir. Harold Junior and his wife Martha née Corey, clothed the Shappel boy in rags and smothered the rags in a lumpy gray overcoat to keep it warm, even in spring and summer months. The child seemed to produce very little heat of its own metabolism. It smelled of black mold and horridly sour body odor.

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A surgical strike at your amygdala, where fear is produced.

The Stygian Walkers approach.

First hear the rumblings, the chthonic quakes that shake shelves and spires alike. Heads rush out to the street, tilting backwards to squint up through the haze—to see pinpricks burning red, outshining the obscured sun. A single spindly limb plunges through the distant mountain, shattering sand and stone and soil. The crimson eyes sway, and grow.

Bang: the alarm’s thin reverberation. Final few feet scamper down stairs to join the valley church ex tempore. A wave of birds flee shrieking overhead. The ground shudders once more, another closer step. For a moment reigns oppressive silence, broken only by the wail of an inconsolable infant in its mother’s unsteady arms. The minister, raising trembling hands to the sky, shrieks:

Not upon us, oh King! Not upon us!

The cry echoes, unnoticed.

The foot raises.