After the headache of a conversation with Beth, Hunter spent the whole day bsting through the list of chores Dad had sent him. Desperately in need of a shower, he came back to his room, only to find Marcie passed out with Texas Chainsaw Massacre still pying on the TV. As soon as he switched it off, a notification on his phone screen seared its blinding blue light into his pupils.

  “Basil! Hey!” He picked up quickly and spoke in hushed excitement.

  “Hey neighbor,” the voice from the other end of the line called. “How’s the corpse bride?”

  Hunter peeked over at Marcie who was still motionless and soundless. He’d told her earlier of Beth’s demands to meet up with Marty Gillman and get her weed, to which Marcie insisted she come as ‘backup’. They came to the compromise that she could come as long as she didn’t make any direct contact unless she had to. What constituted a ‘must intervene’ situation was still up for debate, but there was little time to hash that out before Dad came knocking to ask why the wn hadn’t been mowed.

  “She’s sleeping,” Hunter replied.

  Basil snorted and gave a sly cackle. “Like the dead?”

  “Yes. Like the dead. Ha–ha, very funny,” Hunter sassed.

  Basil wrapped up their prolonged ughing fit. “I’ll catch her next time. It’ll be nice to finally get to talk to her in real life. I’ll be in css in ten minutes, but I have something important to tell you. I have a vision. At a crossroads, the right path is paved with danger. What lights your way is consumed by darkness. The rest of it isn’t super clear but what I know is that someone is trying to steal the book tonight. Please, be careful.”

  When they first met, Hunter and Basil went back and forth figuring out what to call this power they possessed and what to call them. Seer or fortune teller gave way too much of the ‘old dy with a bunch of jingly tassels in a dark room’ vibe, though their obsession with incense was fitting and they weren’t opposed to a crystal ball for the fre. They nded on Oracle, like the ancient Greeks.

  Their power was never wrong. It led Basil to Hunter. It led Hunter to the book and consequently to Marcie. So someone was for sure going to try to steal the book.

  “Uh–Okay. Thanks for the heads up,” Hunter said, trying to process.

  Basil clicked off with a quick, “I gotta go.”

  Watching Marcie wake from absolute stillness would never cease to be somewhat uncanny. Hunter wasn’t sure he’d ever get over his fear that he’d shake her body and she wouldn’t open her eye.

  This time it only took a couple pushes before her body sprung upright like Regan from the Exorcist. In the recoil of her violent rising, she fell back towards Hunter, knocking the wind out of him. He wrapped her in his arms anyway.

  “Ugh, is it already time?” Marcie said, muffled with her face buried into the clean shirt he’d put on after his shower.

  Lamplight shone faintly out the guest house window. Night had fallen.

  Hunter squeezed Marcie tight. “Well, I think we could be fashionably te to a drug deal. Take your time getting ready to go. I have to figure out what I'm going to do about the book.”

  “What’s up with the book?” asked Marcie.

  Hunter walked over to his dresser. “I got a call from Basil. They said that someone’s going to try to steal it.”

  “Shit,” Marcie responded aptly.

  A top yer of socks and underwear covered the Necronomicon. Red light no longer glowed through them. Maybe the book had to cool down after being used? For as many incantations as Hunter transted throughout the st year, the book held very little information about itself. No author was ascribed to it. There was no foreword or acknowledgements, no index or glossary. It was as if someone very deranged had bound together looseleaf notes and nothing else. All to say, the Necronomicon was wholly enigmatic.

  To add credence to this cim, when Hunter riffled through his socks, he found the book had grown fleshy tendrils into the drawer. The sticky-note transtions he had stuffed the book full of were now ballooning out the sides and stuck onto the tendrils. The odd snaking things were the color of vitiligo-affected skin and it warped the wood of his drawer like tree roots splitting the concrete of a sidewalk.

  Hunter reeled back with a startled, “eugh!”

  The tendrils pulsated like they were pumping blood. Marcie leapt to her feet and joined Hunter as they both stared down at the Necronomicon, embedded into the structure of his dresser.

  She began to reach down with hesitation. Hunter, purely on instinct, smacked Marcie’s hand away. Marcie, in return, looked downright offended.

  “Don’t touch it. I don’t want it to fuck with your zombie-ness,” Hunter cautioned, then reached for it himself.

  “You don’t touch it!” Marcie argued, pushing Hunter’s hands away. “What if it zombifies you?”

  Hunter reached for it again, grabbing the book in both hands. “I think I already grazed it when I was digging through the drawer. I’ll be fine.”

  Just as he reassured her, the patchy tendrils of the book tore apart his dresser drawer, cracking straight through the holes they bored. They wrapped around Hunter’s arms and as he was yanked forward, the pages flipped open and he heard something like the gurgling of deep sea bubbles.

  Marcie pounced on the book, tearing the tendrils off of Hunter as they writhed and began to bubble and mutate. What used to be fleshy and soft grew tough with a segmented exoskeleton. As Marcie ripped the book off of Hunter, the ends of these hardened filing tubes grew serrated jaws and tore through the skin on her arm. She screamed, though only out of fear and not pain.

  Wrenching her arms back to grab hold of the worms, Marcie smmed the book and its demonic arms straight down. The exoskeletons crunched loudly from the impact and flesh and blood spttered onto the floor. All the tentacles fell limp and the gurgling sound fizzled out.

  The pieces the worms had taken out of Marcie’s arms were already healing over. Hunter and her were both fear-frozen, but at the very least physically unharmed. The book y still on the floor.

  “What the fuck was that?” Marcie asked, wide-eyed and shaking.

  Hunter had no answer for her.

  “Maybe it's better for someone else to take this,” she offered.

  “No,” Hunter said. “I still need it in case anything happens to you. There’s a lot of valuable information.”

  Marcie groaned, “Okay, but do we have to bring it with us?”

  “If another Lovecraftian horror starts leaking out the pages, I’d rather keep it far away from my family,” Hunter reasoned.

  “Good point,” Marcie agreed, still shell-shocked.

  It was nearly impossible to convince himself that this was the best pn he could hastily put together when its structural integrity was making him more uneasy by the second. Marcie demanded she come along, promising to stay out of sight. He had some suspicions on who they would be meeting that night, and while Martin Gillman wasn’t particurly dangerous, they weren’t exactly on the best terms. That tension was only going to be complicated by the wild monstrosity the Necronomicon was turning out to be and Hunter would have to handle the whole mess piece by piece as it unfolded.

  Marcie bound the book in a roll of duct tape she’d found half used in his closet. Then for extra measure, pat the cover in a nurturing way as if to convey to it ‘there, there, be a good little Necronomicon’.

  “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Hunter assured her, while attempting to assure himself.

  The night air of the wharf held the thick stench of seafood in all its variable states from fresh to rotted. Its alleyways and roads were bare of working men and quiet, save for the soft rocking of waves. Any fishermen that were on their boats at this time of night were still far from the dock. That’s where Marty operated, in the liminal window when the docks were entirely deserted

  As Hunter walked through the misty fog with Marcie trailing behind, he noted that Marty’s jig might soon be up. As of his return to town, it seemed every corner of Redwood Cove was being systematically outfitted with cloud-based, AI-powered, surveilnce cameras, generously provided by the Lovett estate. The fact that Mr. Lovett was the primary shareholder of Starlight Technologies wasn’t noted as a conflict of interest by anyone else, apparently. Silver lining, Marty wouldn’t be able to use the docks for much longer. Then, Beth would have no choice but to quit for good.

  Hunter couldn't help but swivel every now and again to check on Marcie. They had packed the bound Necronomicon in Hunter’s book-bag and Marcie was in charge of carrying it until the meeting was over. Something told him that duct tape was not the demonic-incident repellent they hoped it’d be. The fog made it easy for Marcie to step in and out of sight like a stalking ghost. Hunter’s choice of vintage clothing only served to add to the feeling like she was something out of time. Their eyes met and he swept his hands to tell her to get lost. Marcie quickly darted behind a trash bin, then stuck her arm out with a big thumbs up.

  Up ahead, Hunter saw exactly who he expected.

  Marty Gillman was hunched in a bck hoodie down the alleyway between the canoe shack and another warehouse. His hair looked visibly greasy and was slicked to the side like he was about to break into the Jet Song from West Side Story. Though, remembering when the two of them were pced in the tenor section in concert choir for their one year of required arts css, it’d be a rather shit rendition.

  When Marty noticed Hunter, his expression turned from neutral to sour. He said something Hunter couldn’t make out for certain, but it most likely included the words what, the, and fuck, in that particur order.

  Hunter stepped forward. “I come in peace.”

  I come in peace? What was he? An alien?

  “What are you doing here? Where’s your sister?” Marty asked with slurred words.

  “I’m just here to buy for her and then I’ll get out of your hair,” Hunter said.

  Marty looked puzzled. “Why would you be in my hair? How would that even work?”

  “No dude. It’s just a common idiom–”

  “–Don't call me an idiot!”

  Hunter grunted. “Look, I’ll just take the bag and go.”

  Marty seemed to find no fault in the prospect of a quick job. “Alright.”

  He fished a small crumpled-up ziplock bag out of his pocket. Its contents were small enough to rest on a quarter. The amount was a relief, at least for Beth’s sake.

  “How much?” Hunter asked, rifling through the loose change and random bills in his wallet.

  “Forty-five,” said Marty.

  “Forty-five!? You were gonna charge my sister forty-five dolrs for a quarter of an ounce?” It was unbelievable. Marty was more of a scumbag than he ever could have imagined.

  “No, Hunter. I’m charging you forty-five.”

  That made more sense. Hunter had no choice but to fork over the cash and get the hell out of there. They made the exchange. Marty tossed him the bag and Hunter handed him a wad of tens and all the dimes and quarters he’d found.

  Holding the bag in his hands brought to mind something Grant had told him in the supermarket. He’d stormed off in such a huff and hated the spiral he’d gone down the moment he saw him that he almost forgot anything more than the essential details.

  Marty had turned to walk away, but Hunter stopped him with a question. “What did you give her that night?”

  He turned. “What?”

  “The night that Marcie died,” Hunter pressed, “What did you give her?”

  “So, it was you!” Marty accused. Of what, Hunter didn’t know and couldn’t give a damn.

  “You were there. I know you were there. What did she have in her system?”

  Panic rose amongst the tension. Marty looked like he wanted to break down with the insistent questioning, but Hunter couldn’t find it in his heart to care about that either. Now that he was here, now that he was starting to see the strings, the red lines that led to the truth of Marcie’s death, he felt it too. That feeling Marcie talked about. The need to know.

  “I don’t know dude! We were all smoking the normal shit,” Marty frantically admitted.

  Hunter was about to interrogate him more but something made him jump out of his skin.

  “Who’s we?” Marcie said behind him. Her voice was midway between a whisper and a feral growl.

  Marty was speechless for many moments. Fog passed between them and Marcie took strides forward past Hunter. He put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off easily.

  “I’ll get to you after,” she whispered to him.

  A terrifying edge was overtaking her. She got very close to Marty, who had reappeared from the fog, completely frozen in fear.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Marcie pushed herself up on her toes to stare at him eye to eye.

  “Look closely,” she demanded. She slipped off her eyepatch revealing her uncovered face and the empty socket underneath.

  Marty’s pale face turned paler. He did the only sensible thing one would do in the face of a zombie girl who died in front of them, and ran. His immediate action shook Marcie out of her anger and she looked back at Hunter for a moment sort of lost and dumbfounded.

  Then she bolted after him, faster than any human should be without intense training.

  Screams rang through the wharf. Hunter wasn’t so lucky. Even in a full sprint, he trailed behind, unable to see clearly through the thickening fog. He lost track of them for stretches of time between Marty’s shrieks of terror. The path they made turned left, then right, and all which way around boat shacks and cannery buildings. They were headed for the main road.

  Finally, he caught up. Marty had stumbled just before the road and was sprawled on the ground, half his body hanging off the sidewalk. Marcie towered over him. Her face held a menacing gre.

  “Please don’t kill me!” Marty repeated in varying volumes of distress. “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

  Hunter stepped forward to diffuse the situation. It was getting way out of hand. He wasn’t handling his pieces. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

  Marty looked Hunter’s way, like his words were his only anchor left on his sanity. He was jerked back into a nightmare when Marcie crouched to meet him at his level, cracking her joints while she sank down.

  “What happened to me, Martin?” she interrogated. “What did you all do to me?”

  “N–nothing. I swear,” he shook out.

  Marcie’s stare intensified. “You must have done something? I can’t remember that night. Did you roofie me? Give me something ced?”

  Her words had so much bite, so much ferocity, it was like a beast had taken over.

  Marty froze again, trying to parcel together anything to say.

  “ANSWER ME!” Marcie screeched.

  And that got him to move. Marty threw himself upright to escape and broke into a full sprint into the road. That’s when the lights came. Two bright lights barrelling down the street right into Martin Gillman.

  A sptter of blood that looked bck in the shadow of night and bright red in the streaming of headlights, spewed across the vague shape of a car and all over the street.

  Marty’s body tumbled down the road, a broken mess of limbs and a torso. It reminded Hunter of how Marcie packed herself into his suitcase. Except when he id there on the concrete, crumpled, he did not move. He did not speak. There wasn’t even a minute twitch of his eye.

  Whatever odd trance Marcie was in was abruptly halted when Hunter let out his own scream. It came from deep within his lungs and heart, which he had lost all control over.

  It wasn’t until the door of the sedan, which had stopped in its tracks, opened that the two of them could get enough of their bearings together. Marcie’s demeanor had returned to normal and Hunter’s heart was finally beating at a regur pace inside his chest.

  What walked out from the car nearly made his heart repse into full arrhythmia. The figure was wrapped in shadow, made of darkness, and seemed to eat the light around it. The only reason why Hunter thought it might be a person at all was because all the light it ate and shadow it exhaled created an event horizon in the vague shape of a body.

  The Void started to speak. Its voice sounded like the low moaning of creaking wood mixed with the hiss of a snake. And somewhere, deep under those dark noises, was the faintest of human speech.

  Hunter parsed out the words and horror took hold of him.

  “Give me the book.”

  The oppressive darkness of the creature swallowed Hunter. Why couldn’t he get his legs moving? He wanted to bolt, but it felt so futile.

  “Give me the book, child.” The Void stepped forwards.

  “Marcie. Run.” Hunter said

  She looked at him conflicted. It was obvious she’d heard its words too. “What? I’m not leaving you with this thing. You take the book and run.”

  “No. You can run way faster than I can. Just go.”

  “No!”

  “Cease your bickering.”

  A bck mass of darkness, the Void’s emanating aura separated and rushed forward like an attack dog.

  Without time to react, Marcie turned to bolt away from the road. But she was too te. The bck mass enveloped her in pitch darkness and she vanished.

  “Hunter!” She cried.

  Marcie was terrified, but she was fighting. For a moment, her hand thrust out of the mass of writhing dark. Another moment, the book-bag, still in her arms, was briefly visible.

  Hunter knew had to act, but the shaking in his legs and the muffled blood curdling screams from within this creature were chains against his control. He cursed his fear.

  “Hunter.”

  “Hunter.”

  “Hunter.”

  She was sinking. She was drowning. She sounded like someone took a pillow to her airways to suffocate her.

  He broke the chains of his self-preservation, threw himself at this unscable wall of terror, and grabbed a hold of Marcie as she was lost in nothing.

  Marcie’s arm emerged from the void once more and he pulled. He pulled and pulled until he could see the light of her one hazel eye. And then he pulled harder. She clung to him, trying to kick herself free of the darkness.

  Hunter saw more of her body. Torn skin revealed the flesh underneath her nails. Scrapes against the concrete had shaved yers from her. Several of her fingers were cracking back into pce. The Void hadn’t just wrapped its darkness around her, it was tearing her apart.

  “It really is such a shame. She made a delicious meal and now she has to sully my memory of it. As. I have what I need,” It said to Hunter. He couldn’t make sense of the meaning.

  From behind them, the book-bag floated up towards The Void’s hand. It threw the bag aside, then tore the duct tape off the Necronomicon in one cwing swipe. The moment the book was freed of that bck binding, the tendrils exploded from it. They filed in furious vitriol, grasping and sshing the air.

  “Shhhhhh,” the Void comforted the book. The tendrils rexed and began to slither back into the pages.

  His hold on Marcie was slipping. The book had been taken from them.

  Frantic spirals of thought were overtaken by a refusal to fall prey to his freeze instinct. Marcie had asked him to trust her more. Not in those words, but she was no longer destructible. She had the strength of a superhero and more resilience than he could have ever imagined. But, without the book, there was no Marcie. He’d have to have faith that she could handle herself.

  He gave one st reassuring look to her and then let go.

  Pushing through the fatigue and exhaustion, he pounced for the Necronomicon.

  Shadows cwed at him as he got closer and closer to the Void’s body. It was trying to swallow him too. It first grasped at his ankle, and the wash of dark removed all warmth from his veins. Hunter stumbled.

  Before the shadows swallowed him further, they retreated. And when he turned he saw it wasn’t by choice Marcie had somehow found purchase on the darkness. She held the absence of light in her grasp and was pinning it down with her.

  The momentum of Hunter’s leap and stumble had unexpectedly brought him crashing into something solid. The Void wasn’t just person shaped. Someone was in there, tangible and real. They had discernible clothes and skin that was as chilled as the shadows.

  He’d caught The Void off guard and grabbed for the Necronomicon but was barely too slow as The Void yanked it out of reach.

  “Well if you'd like so much to volunteer, my brother needs a host. I’d prefer someone less INSOLENT, but you’re practically THROWING yourself at me.” There was a vile glee that emanated from this creature's voice.

  The Void caught Hunter’s arm in its offhand and pulled him close. Its touch was so cold. A chill ran through his nervous system, through his bloodstream, and fatigue overtook his entire body. Sleep washed over him like the slow creeping of high tide. And he saw visions.

  Pure darkness. But not darkness like an empty room at night or even what he imagined was the vacuum of space. This bckness was dense and crushing like the bottom of the ocean. He was pulled towards the surface and came face to face with an abomination.

  A disgusting sphere of organic material. Anemones and barnacles attached to a writhing mass of aquatic limbs. Octopus and squid tentacles protruded out of shark torsos and whale blubber. Part of the mass seemed to be a school of decaying fish. All kinds of fish in different states of death. All of them still circling rapidly, despite their decomposition.

  As he was presented before it, all of the limbs and heads jerked towards him. And then he was pulled further up until he surfaced in the waking world.

  It took Hunter moments to regain his senses as he slowly grasped what had happened. The Void no longer had its fingers wrapped around his arm. Had seconds or minutes passed? He couldn’t tell.

  Marcie had broken free of the dark aura and was wrestling with the Void. The Necronomicon’s tentacles still had a loose grip on his shoulder, which Marcie ripped off as well. As soon as the figure was put off kilter, she threw herself back, standing in front of Hunter in a defensive stance.

  Hunter tried to stand to meet her, but found that he couldn't find the strength. Whatever the Void or the book had done to him had left his legs badly bruised. Patches of epidermis all over his body had been scraped off. Throbbing aches reverberated through his nervous system. And so all he could do was watch.

  The Void rose in a disturbingly human way. “Very well.”

  It creeped slowly down the street, Necronomicon returned to its hand, towards Marty’s motionless body. Hunter couldn't help himself from starting after it, but Marcie held him back.

  Marcie should have known how much he needed that book. How much they needed that book.

  She gripped his arm harder than the Void had. She was cutting his circution. He tried to pull his arm away swiftly by instinct, but she held tight, knowing that he wouldn’t back down. He kept fighting it, but it only made her squeeze her fingers tighter around him. Hunter yelped in pain.

  When he looked at Marcie, she looked horrified at what she'd done. Hunter realized the look of terror he must have had on his face. He was scared, not just of the Void, but in that moment, Marcie too.

  The Void crouched down, tilting its head down towards Marty. Hunter could still hear its awful voice. “Barely alive,” it said to the poor boy, “But you can feel yourself slipping, can’t you. Oh, you must be so scared. Fear not. We’ll make do with you”

  Using its bck mass, it lifted Marty’s body. He was limp, but his eyes still held a light, faint as it was. The Void shoved him into the car it’d struck him with and then they were gone. The engine roared away like the bellowing of a beast.

  Marcie let go of Hunter’s arm. An unsettling calm returned to the back streets of the Wharf. Crickets began their chirping again, and distant howls of a boat horn sounded in the distance. In an instant, it was just like any other night. It was as if the pick-up had ended and Marty had merely gone home. All the traces of the monster that remained were the asphalt stained red under their feet.

  Hunter met Marcie’s eye, careful not to portray any of the fear that still shook him.

  He didn’t even remember how he ended up flopping onto the side of the road, out of the way of any on-coming traffic. Sandy dirt crunched under both of them as they let their bodies crash to the ground.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Hunter said, the question slipping from his mind in a shell-shocked stupor.

  Marcie was holding a staring contest with a stream of blood that trickled towards her. No sound passed her lips. They both just sat with the question lingering.

  There were no sirens in the distance. Nobody lived close enough to have heard the violent altercation. And no one else was around to witness the horrific things they had.

  He considered trying to move. The anxiety in his chest was screaming at him to run back to the car and speed home. But, he couldn't connect that urge to his muscles. Despite how little he wanted to, Hunter felt like he could y on the side of that road until morning, through tomorrow, and maybe forever.

  “Why did you go for the book, Hunter?” This new question rang out like a gunshot and then it too, lingered in the air.

  “Because,” Hunter answered slowly, piecing his words together, “If something happens to you, that's the only way I'll know how to fix it.”

  “You don't have to fix me. I pretty much fix myself,” Marcie said. Despite an even tone, Hunter could feel the frustration from her.

  “That's not what I meant. You know that's not what I meant. I knew you would be okay. Or at least if you weren't I'd have the book so I could figure it out,” Hunter responded, attempting to keep his voice level as well. He wasn't sure how well he was doing at that.

  Marcie was whimpering quietly by then and Hunter had to push his body to its shallow limits to move over to cradle her. Her body was rigid, the limp corpse-like nature of it repced with something akin to rigor mortis. It seemed she was caught between two opposing desires, one of which wanted to push Hunter away. But as her arms stretched out to do so, Hunter closed the gap, allowing her to sob into his shoulder.

  The pent up fear, confusion, and adrenaline was beginning to wear off. It left Hunter feeling empty. With a soft hand he pet Marcie’s hair. He could feel the shaved stubble on the back of her neck where he’d trimmed a little too much off. Where her long hair used to weigh down his palm was now empty space.

  “I gotta go,” Marcie said like she was ending a brunch meeting or about to board an airpne.

  The intent of her statement hit Hunter. “What?”

  “I’m gonna take a walk. I need to clear my head.”

  Hunter worried when she started to sound like this. Her evenness portrayed none of her deeper emotions, leaving him guessing to where her mind was. “You can’t–”

  “–I can’t?” She repeated.

  “What if that thing is still out there? What if someone sees you?”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Marcie said with eerie pcidity. “I’ll be okay.”

  She pushed herself away from him and despite any efforts to hold on to her, to get her to stay, to stop her from abandoning him there alone, she walked into the distance.

  Hunter spent all his strength trying to stand so he could run after her. Instead, he faltered, pcing too much pressure on his bruised arm and crumpled to the ground. His consciousness slipped. It would be horrible to be found here. With his battered body and fading awareness, he didn’t think he’d catch up to Marcie, much less find his way back to his car. He couldn’t remember when he stopped crawling to reach after her and a different darkness clouded his eyes. He colpsed.

  He woke to a hand on his shoulder and a rancid scent that clung to the inside of his nostrils. A man was shaking him. Day had not broken, and so it took Hunter time to adjust his vision and focus on who or what may be in front of him. Hunter looked up to find a sunken face outlined by a wiry beard. The man from Vinny’s market looked down at him dispassionately.

  “Come on satanist, let’s get you home.”

  The man took a pocketbook, no rger than his palm, from his dusty coat and began reading something in Latin. Hunter recognized the nguage by the sylbles but could barely pick out the words. The blood that had spttered across the road shifted with his speech,moving rapidly towards the two of them before enveloping them in a coaguted cocoon.

  When the blood thinned and released Hunter from the mass, he found himself in his car, blood staining the seats and dashboard.

  Moments ter the man spoke the spell again, though it sounded slightly different this time. Blood washed over the vehicle, and by the time it cleared, the scenery outside the windows had changed. The two of them—along with the entire car—had been transported to the road outside his private drive.

  “How did you–” Hunter began to ask. But with another repetition of the spell, the man was gone, along with all the blood of Martin Gillman.

  And for the first time since he spread Marcie’s ashes over the carousel, Hunter found himself in his room alone.