If she’d had a clearer mind, Gina would have instantly recognized her son’s behavior as eccentric, or even alarming. But her mind had not been clear; they had both been dealing with overwhelming grief, but in entirely separate ways. For instance, she had taken to spending about twenty hours a day in bed. Between periods of staring blankly at the television and thumbing through photo albums, Gina would sob into her pillow uncontrollably, often to the point of hyperventilating.

On the rare occasions that she managed to pull herself out of bed, she would check on Mark. He was nine years old and was handling the death of his father as well as he could. It was a precarious age; at nine, you still danced upon that razor-thin line of not fully understanding death and being naïve enough to believe that those lost to you went to some better place.

Honestly, Gina didn’t know which side of that line Mark was favoring. She had not seen him cry a single time since the funeral. Finding out that his father had been killed in a car accident while bringing home their weekly Friday Night Pizza had shocked Mark into baffled silence for a few hours. That silence had eventually led to a powerful and touching moment in the bathroom floor where he had wept with his mother for the better part of an hour.

But after that, there had been nothing. It had been six days since Peter’s funeral service and Mark had spoken exactly twelve words since then. He apparently didn’t see how talking about his feelings was going to help the unnamable pain that would undoubtedly take a few years off of his youth.

Instead of going to his mother for answers or taking the advice of his grandparents and their pastor, Mark had gone another route. Gina noticed it for the first time four days after the funeral. She awoke to the sounds of a light rain falling, pinging from the oil drum outside of her bedroom window.

She rolled out of bed and searched the house for Mark. This in itself was painful because in every room she entered, part of her still expected to see Peter sitting there. Maybe he’d be reading a book in the den, or shaving in front of the sink in the downstairs bathroom, or drinking a beer at the kitchen table. But of course, he wasn’t there. And neither was Mark; nor were his shoes by the back door as usual.

Gina looked out of the kitchen window and saw him in the center of the back yard. He sat directly in the middle of the newly landscaped area where Peter had promised to have a pool installed this summer. She watched Mark sitting in that cool May rain, running his hands effortlessly through the wet dirt.

She thought about calling out, to demand that he come inside out of the rain. Instead she watched him a bit longer. If the rain started to come down harder, she’d call him in. For now, she didn’t see the harm in letting him sit out there, no doubt recalling memories of his father. Until he harmed himself or behaved irrationally, she’d let him have his time alone.

Gina exited the kitchen and walked into the living room. As hard as she tried, she couldn't keep from looking at the urn, that oddly golden shape on the mantel. She frowned as she stared at it for a moment. She had no idea where Peter would want his ashes to be scattered. And while she felt that it was rather morbid to have his ashes perched on the mantel as the centerpiece of the living room—hell, of the entire house, basically—she also saw a great symbolism in it. Until she decided where to scatter the ashes, he would serve as the center of the house as well as the shattered lives of his wife and son.

She ended up staring at the urn without moving for several minutes. When she finally tore her gaze away, she returned to the kitchen window. She was relieved to see that Mark was now walking back to the house. His clothes had gotten soaked, but he seemed okay otherwise.

As he rounded the corner, Gina looked out to landscaped area where her son had been sitting. It appeared that he had made a mound of dirt on the ground. The shape of it was peculiar, but it was still too close to some sort of burial ritual for Gina’s comfort. When Mark came in through the back door, his hair dripping, she almost commented on this.

But when Mark actually spoke to her, she let it go. When he went so far as to smile at her when they made eye contact, she dropped the idea completely.

“Hi, mom.”

Those were the first words he’d spoken in over two days. And it was the first time there had been anything on his face other than a frown or a scowl since finding out that his father had died.

***

The rain continued to fall for the next few days, mostly in light showers but on occasion in significant downpours. It became something of an ambient soundtrack for Gina’s coping. She would listen to it dance from the oil drum and drip from the gutters as she tried to get used to sleeping in a bed that, for twelve years, had been occupied by two. She had stacked her photo albums neatly on her bedside table and did her best to distract herself with one of Peter’s old Tom Clancy novels. Thirty pages into it she'd started weeping uncontrollably, going back to the photo albums to see his face, his smile, what her life had been like before he had been taken.

Her heart ached when she thought of getting out of bed. She still performed her motherly duty and as far as she was concerned, that was all that could be expected of her. She made Mark lunches and dinners and tried at least twice a day to get him to open up to her. Her mother, who had insisted on staying with them until things were “back to normal”, called three times a day to check on them. Gina assured her that she and Mark would be fine; she truly did believe that she and her son would benefit from some alone-time together rather than dealing with a house packed with over-supportive relatives. The fact that her mother had never liked Peter at all didn’t help matters, either.

On the eighth day after the funeral, the house was unnervingly quiet as she made herself get out of bed. The rain fell lightly outside and she was somehow certain that she’d find Mark in the back yard again. She went to the kitchen window and sure enough, he was sitting in the same spot, playing in the mud. It was caked on his pants and splattered on his shirt. He was making some sort of a structure again—it looked like a very intricate sand castle from where Gina stood, or maybe the beginnings of the mud version of a snowman.

When Mark stood up and walked back towards the house several moments later, his face was almost gleeful. He wore a wide smile that she had not seen in a long time. It tugged at her heart, as if that single smile alone was enough to let her know that they were going to be okay—that some sort of healing had begun.

When he came in, Mark tracked mud onto the kitchen floor. He grimaced. “Sorry, mom. I’ll clean it up.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get it.”

As he took his shoes off, Gina ran her hands through his wet hair. It was a lighter shade of brown than his father’s, but the resemblance was still uncanny, especially when it fell lazily across his brow.

“How are you doing, Mark?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Dad seemed really excited about getting the pool, you know? I just like being somewhere that I know made him happy.”

The unexpected sweetness of his comment nearly had her crying. But she held it together, leaned down and kissed him on his wet head. “I love you, kiddo. You let me know if you need to talk about anything, okay?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Mark nodded. “I love you, too. And I will.”

“Okay. Now how about some lunch?”

Mark only nodded and took a seat at the table.

***

The next day, Gina slept in until nine thirty. She would have probably slept later if the pouring rain hadn’t have woken her up. Amazingly, it was the first morning where she had opened her eyes and hadn’t wanted to start weeping right away. She felt refreshed. There was energy inside of her again. She wanted a shower. She wanted to exercise. She wanted to take Mark into town and watch a movie.

Thinking of Mark, she rolled out of bed and went into the living room. The television was on, broadcasting to an empty room. She then checked Mark’s room only to find that he was not there, either. There’s no way he’s outside again, she thought to herself. It’s pouring out there!

Still, when she went to the kitchen, his shoes weren’t by the back door. She went to the window and realized for the first time that there was something very wrong with whatever Mark was doing out there. The rain came in sheets and from the kitchen window, Mark’s shape was only a fuzzy outline.

She got her shoes out of the coat closet in the hall, grabbed her coat and slipped out the back door. The rain pounded her right away, but she was surprised at how refreshing it felt. She took a few steps into it and saw Mark clearer; the scene was even more alarming than before.

Mark stood shirtless, throwing mud in a frenzy. Only, he wasn’t throwing it, exactly. He was adding clumps of it to the structure he'd amassed over the last few days. At some point, he had taken her gardening spade from the basement to help with his sculpting. Whatever it was that he was building, it was taller than he was now.

“Mark?” she shouted into the rain.

He paused, slightly turning his head towards her voice. But his arms kept moving, his mud-caked hands throwing more onto the pile.

Gina took one more step, and that’s when she saw the shape at his feet. In the rain, its golden hue looked sick somehow, distorted and alien.

“Mark!” she shouted, sprinting into the yard. Mud splashed up her clothes and arms with each stride and it made her shiver. It was only mud, but felt sinister somehow. On her bare arms, it felt disgusting; it could very well have been blood or shit.

“Mark! What are you doing?”

He turned around fully this time; his skin was pale and his eyes sunken. As she approached, her eyes went to the urn. Her heart seemed to stop beating when she saw that it was open. When she observed the faint gray dust around the lip of it and more of it dissolving into the mud, her guts clenched painfully and she doubled over. She went to her knees, wailing, but all she heard was the rain falling around them and a ghastly sound as the mud took her weight, as if it were trying to swallow her.

She finally managed to look up to her son and made no attempt to hide what she knew was an expression laced with sorrow and rage. She looked at him for only a moment, however. Beyond the rain and Mark’s face, there was the shape in the mud behind him—the thing he had been sculpting.

It was the perfect shape of a man.

There was an odd color to it in some areas, a color that tore Gina to her core. It was the fresh gray powder of ash.

Trembling, she watched the ash grow fluid in the rain. It dripped down the shape Mark had made, pooling around its base.

***

She knew that it was wrong, but she didn't speak to Mark for the rest of the day. She had screamed at him in the rain for what seemed to her like an eternity, struggling against the urge to strike him. She'd turned away before the urge claimed her and stumbled back to the house, to the bathroom. As she sobbed in the shower, the steam sinking into her, she felt the energy and will from earlier in the morning trying to reassert itself, but she pushed it stubbornly away.

After drying off and returning to bed, she looked at the phone on the bedside table and considered calling her mother. She needed help. Mark needed help. There was no way to reject that there was something wrong with her son. She should have brought him inside after the debacle in the rain, but there was a hatred for Mark now, an unbelievable resentment that only grew stronger when she recalled the urn, turned on its side and emptied in the mud.

Later. She’d go to him later.

For now, there was just her and her grief. It had managed to get her through the last nine days. What was one day more?

At some point, the rain lulled her to sleep.

She awoke to a light knock at her door. She opened on eye and craned her neck. Mark stood in the doorway, uncertain.

“Mom?”

She hesitated, letting the events from the morning sink in. Finally, she allowed her heart access and spoke to him. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

She almost said, It’s okay. Instead, she said, “We need to talk about this later, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Can we do it tomorrow? I’m tired right now. Over breakfast maybe?”

She considered this for a moment, realizing that the horrible scene in the back yard had somehow broken him. He was ready to talk now. That, at least, was good.

“That’s fine,” she answered softly.

Mark took a few steps out of the room, closing the door behind him. Before he shut it completely, he said, “And mom?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“It’s going to be okay.”

She was glad he shut the door after that, because she didn’t know how to respond.

She glanced at the clock on the bedside table and saw that she had slept until four in the afternoon. She considered getting out of bed, but closed her eyes again. The rain had tapered off a bit outside but it still fell steadily, ricocheting from the window and the oil drum.

Peter had loved that sound, too.

She reached out to that empty side of the bed and fell asleep again.

At some point during the night, she dreamed that Peter was sleeping beside her, curled against her with his hand resting on her hip. It was pleasant at first, but when she realized that his body was cold and still dead, she shuddered in her sleep and gasped his name into her pillow.

***

From his room upstairs, Mark looked down to the back yard. The moon shined down on the pools of standing rainwater in the back yard, glistening in the mud like fallen stars. He looked out to the spot where he had spent the last few days building the man out of mud. He was filled with an emotion that he was too young to recognize as longing.

After all of his work, that space was now empty.

All that remained of the figure he had created was a trail of footprints leading towards the back door.

— MI CASA ES SU CASA —

When they cut the body open, slicing from neck to navel with expert precision, they found a house.

It was tucked neatly away by the turns and folds of the small intestine; the digestive tract might as well have been a suburb or a glistening countryside.

Being doctors, they needed a reason, a cause. They spent several hours extracting the house from its foundation of tissue and muscle. They carefully pulled the tiny gutters away from the pancreas and eventually removed the entire structure from the side streets and cul-de-sacs of the man’s intestines.

They sat it on an examination table and stared at it in awe. As they moved it, they heard the tiny clattering of plumbing within the thin walls. The house was slightly larger than a paperback book. There were microscopic shingles on the roof. Rain gutters traced its edges.

There were porch steps, wet vinyl siding (slightly smeared with blood) and a tiny doorbell.

Several windows ran along the length of the house, including a large picture window that looked in onto a den. The den was connected to a white kitchen, separated only by a countertop. A miniscule bowl of fruit sat on the counter along with a newspaper and a small sparkling thing that may have been a set of keys.

One of the doctors stepped forward. He removed the latex gloves from his hand and touched the roof.

“Real shingle,” he said.

With a pair of tongs, he opened the tiny door. He then reached inside with the instrument and grabbed the newspaper from the countertop. He held it up to the lights and read the headlines. The paper rustled like the buzzing of a dying fly’s wings.

“This is yesterday’s paper,” he announced.

He set the paper down as his team watched, fascinated. He then wiped the smears of blood from its vinyl siding with a sponge, not because he wanted to but because it seemed like the only thing to do.

It was then that they saw a small man walk out of one of the tiny bedrooms and into the kitchen. He looked around the living room as if the house seemed brighter than usual. There was a tired frustrated look on his tiny face. The expression was somehow far more menacing than normal on his infinitesimal features.

The men in the operating room looked at the man’s face and saw themselves.

The tiny man turned to grab his keys from the counter when a woman came out of the bedroom as well. Her small face looked like a dull pearl. She was sleepy and her hair was askew, like wafting pollen atop her head.

When they saw her, each woman in the operating room felt as if they were looking into a mirror.

The little woman opened her mouth and said something that no one in the operating room could hear. Her voice was as tiny as the frame that expelled it.

The man responded to whatever she said and it was obvious that he was angry.

They had no clue that they were being spied upon by giants with scalpels, credit cards, skin conditions and larger houses. So they went on arguing.

Frustrated, the little man grabbed his keys, walked to the front door and left the house. When he closed the door behind him, he stepped onto the porch and walked slowly down the porch steps. When he reached the yard that was no longer there, he simply disappeared.

Inside, the woman voiced a soundless scream. She looked sad, forlorn, as if she didn’t belong there. She glanced around the empty house and retreated back to the bedroom. With another soundless cry, she slammed the door behind her.

The doctors had not heard their tiny voices, but the clamor of the doors had reached them. Two thumps in the midst of silence.

Then stillness.

It was the beating of a heart and, with two final thuds, they had heard it die.

With glances that were both sick and saddened, the doctors turned back to the cadaver. Its torso remained pulled open, yawning as if it were bored now that its treasures had been revealed.

They all wondered collectively what resided within their own bodies.

Perhaps, despite their degrees and advanced surgical procedures, life was nothing more than the slamming of doors, the beating of hearts. And in the dusty corners of it all, they stood as small broken people, screaming voiceless words into a place that no longer cared to listen.

— A COLLECTION OF TRUE EVILS —

They had been searching for the book for so long that it was hard to accept the fact that it was now sitting on the table directly in front of them. Five minutes ago, when the book had still been in its cardboard packaging, it had still seemed distant somehow; the two of them had convinced themselves in the backs of their minds that there had been a mistake and that the book in front of them was either a hoax or had been misidentified.

“There’s no way it’s real,” Alex said.

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Theo responded quickly. “I mean, just look at it.” It made sense that Theo would be so quick in trying to extinguish the doubt of his friend. He had been the one that had found the book on an on-line auction and had eventually purchased it for sixty-one dollars, so he was overly protective of his find.

Alex looked at the book as if he were trying to see through its faded cover and to the fabled text beneath it. They had placed the book perfectly in the center of the table, as if the book itself were the very core of not only the table, but the basement they sat in as well. The dim glow of the single lamp within the basement somehow added to the book’s faded appearance and seemed to make it appear more authentic.

Alex, a Gothic Lit professor popular with the horror-fiction crowd, stared at the book as if he had seen it somewhere long ago but had forgotten its appearance. Theo sat across from him, staring intently at the book with a sheet of sweat on his brow although the basement was unnaturally cool. He was obviously proud of the fact that after all their searching, it had been one of his random trips to an on-line auction site that had brought the book to them.

“I say we open it,” Alex said finally, his voice like that of a child on Christmas Eve.

Theo smiled nervously, realizing perhaps for the first time how momentous this night could be for them. They gathered here, in the basement of the city library, twice a week to discuss literature concerning the occult. They had been doing this for five years, allowed to do so by the key that the library’s janitor hid behind the library’s garden shed; he did this in exchange for a bottle of Jack Daniels that Theo delivered to him once a month. This gathering had always been their little secret, known only by them and the janitor whom had been sworn to secrecy. And now as their holy of holies sat before them, its cover dusted with age and its binding gnawed at by some small animal over the course of its one hundred and fifty years of existence, all of those midnight meetings to dabble in the darker things seemed to have paid off.

Before Alex could reach out for it, Theo seemed to back away from the table a bit. “But what about the stories?” he asked. “What if everything we’ve heard about it is true?”

“All the better,” Alex said. “That is why we’ve spent so long looking for it, right?”

Theo knew he wouldn’t win this argument, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hell, he wanted to open the book just as bad as Alex. But from just looking at its cover and worn binding, Theo knew that this was the real thing and he could feel its history like some invisible force in the basement with them.

With an unspoken final agreement, Alex finally reached out for it and lightly threw open the cover. While the cover had not held the book’s title, the first page did. It was a title that was known to few and, in those few learned circles, was whispered about with legendary respect and awe. The title page stared up at them and it was then that they truly realized their victory and their dread.

The book was called A Collection of True Evils. As the story went, it had been written between the years of 1856 and 1907. Several demented and disturbed authors had contributed to it, but most of it had come from a man named Harold Nesmith. The book had been in Nesmith’s possession when he hung himself from an attic rafter in 1908 after killing his wife and writing down the book’s final line.

As Alex and Theo slowly thumbed through the pages, the layout of the text retold the legends of the book to them; some of it was typed and put together in a somewhat disarrayed binding while portions of it had simply been handwritten from an ordinary pen. It was the only copy of the book in the world and as they turned each page with elegant caution, they reminded themselves of this.

They huddled closely together like a pair of preteen boys having just discovered their first Playboy. Their eyes and mouths were wide with wonder. The look of the pages and the very bold and off-centered fashion of the type gave further proof that this was indeed the real thing: A Collection of True Evils had been dismissed as rumor by many small groups similar to their own but here it was right in front of them, smelling like the forgotten corners of bookstores and cellars.

Every time Alex turned one of the pages, the smell wafted up in a brief breeze of musty air. There was a very faint trace of tobacco in the dusty scent of the book and Alex wondered if it was from the pipe that Harold Nesmith had been known to smoke from time to time.

“It’s incredible,” Theo said, running his finger along the bottom of one of the handwritten pages, as if willing the ink to smudge against his finger. Even the sound his finger made against the paper seemed eerily real, almost too authentic for the confines of the library basement.

“Hey,” Alex said, so abruptly that it made Theo jump a bit. “What are those?”

He was pointing towards the center of the page, to three columns of oddly sketched shapes that had been placed on the page with painstaking care.

“I think they’re inscriptions,” Theo said, taking the time to read the writing above the sketches. “Yeah, it says they’re inscriptions found above the door to Agatha Redden’s cottage.”

“Agatha Redden,” Alex said, sighing heavily. As beautiful and sacred as the book might be, the fact remained that it had a sordid history. Agatha Redden was a confessed witch from the early 1800s. She had caused turmoil in a small town in Virginia, killing eight children and supposedly cursing two families. Both of those families—all of them, every single member right down to the pets—died in identical fires in the course of two months, long after Agatha had been burned at the stake.

A Collection of True Evils was full of well-documented accounts like this. It was full of accurate histories centered around serial killers, witches, members of satanic cults and all other sorts of undesirables. And the icing on the cake was the fact that Harold Nesmith had also dabbled in the occult and it was believed that every sick soul he had written about had claimed the book as their own; the book was allegedly haunted by more than a dozen such souls.

“I’m starting to get chills,” Theo admitted with a nervous laugh.

Alex nodded. He didn’t say that he felt the same way, but it was evident in the fact that he didn’t argue. He was also vaguely aware of the fact that his stomach seemed to be doing cartwheels. He stopped turning the pages and the two of them simply looked down to the page with Agatha Redden’s markings on it.

“Are we in agreement that this is authentic?” Alex asked. He tried to hide it, but his voice was trembling. Theo would have normally been shocked at this, but he was also in a pretty shaken state. They had all heard the stories about the book and now that they actually had it—had actually opened it, at that—it was hard to ignore them even if they were just rumors. Besides that, the seemingly synchronous queasy feeling that had overtaken them within the last few moments was a testament of the book’s authority.

“Yeah,” Theo said without hesitation. “It’s definitely the real thing.”

Alex nodded and finally managed to look away from the book. He looked the floor and spoke as if he were speaking to his shoes. “Well, I think we have a decision to make, then,” he said.

“To read or not to read,” Theo said, attempting to be funny. But as he spoke, he thought he understood why Alex wasn’t able to look him in the eye at that moment. They had been meeting to discuss the darker things—some downright evil things from time to time—for over five years, always speaking of it under the assumption that true evil probably didn’t exist. It had been their belief that writers, especially ones as troubled as Harold Nesmith, tended to sensationalize evil and the people that were attracted to it. But now that they had put their hands upon the almost legendary A Collection of True Evils, their views had been drastically altered.

Theo felt this but could not explain it. But he knew that it was why Alex could not look at him; all of the knowledge they had accumulated over the years, all of the theories that they had pieced together…it had all just been crushed by the proven existence of this book.

Now the only thing left to be discovered was whether or not the book’s alleged curse was true. As if reading his mind, Alex voiced this and Theo was thankful for his honesty. No matter how much it plagued his mind, Theo wasn’t sure if he could have found the voice to mention it.

“If the legend is true, we might already be dead,” Alex said. It sounded clichéd, but Theo still felt as if he had swallowed a chunk of ice that refused to melt in his stomach.

“We don’t know that,” Theo said weakly. “Are we to assume that a bunch of ghosts should have jumped out at us when we opened it?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Alex said. “The rumors are silly. Are we really supposed to believe that every person who has ever come into contact with this book has died before finishing it?”

“It does sound dumb,” Theo said.

“And even if it is true,” Alex said, “I think the solution is obvious. We simply don’t read it.”

“Then what was the point of looking for the damned thing for so long?” Theo asked.

Alex had no answer. He now glanced around the basement nervously, bothered by the fact that they were being forced to make such a decision.

“Maybe we should take some time,” Theo said. “Let’s leave the book here, just to be safe. We’ll hide it here in the basement and take a few days to think about what we want to do.”

“Why are we going to leave it here?” Alex asked.

Theo gave another nervous smile before he spoke. “This thing made me feel weird the moment we opened it,” he said. “There’s no way I’m keeping it in my house.”

Alex chuckled a bit but nodded in response. He saw that there was a look of hurt on Theo’s face and Alex assumed that it was a hurt that stemmed from the fact that they didn’t feel safe in touching their treasure. He briefly thought about how a bank robber must feel when they root through their money and constantly fear that the bills are either marked or equipped with an ink bomb.

“Yeah, let’s do that,” Alex said. “Hide it here, take a few days to think about it and then come back. Either we’re going to read it and store it away, or keep it until the legend spreads and sell it for much more than you paid for it.”

And that decided it. They hid the book beneath an old writing desk and, despite the fact that they usually spent two hours or more on their meetings, they shut the lamp off less than forty minutes after they had arrived.

They stepped back out into a night that felt heavier with the weight of the decision to be made. Alex returned the basement key to the garden shed and then they pulled away from the library, pretending that the night didn’t seem darker than usual.

***

The next morning, Alex woke up feeling groggy. He felt as if he had a hangover although he had not had a drink in almost a week. Outside his window, a bird was chirping in a lively manner to any other birds that might be listening. As Alex sat up in bed and wiped the last remnants of sleep away from his eyes, he noticed an itch on his right arm. He scratched absently at it at first, but then he looked down and saw what was there.

There was a phrase scrawled on his arm, written out in a handwriting that was not his own. Not only that, it looked as if the writing had been there for a long time, almost like a faded tattoo that the owner had regretted very soon after having it put there. The phrase made no sense to him and that bothered him almost as much as the fact that he had no idea how it had gotten there. He rubbed at it, but it didn’t smear. And the more he looked at it, the more intense the itch became.

The bird outside his window continued to sing, willing him to get out of bed and get to work. Still scratching at the phrase on his arm, Alex started to feel a cold spike in his gut. He looked at the writing on his arm and remembered a friend of his in college that had gotten a tattoo of Yosemite Sam while stinking drunk and had barely been able to remember the trip to the tattoo parlor.

Confused and growing a bit frightened, Alex got into the shower and scrubbed furiously at the phrase. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the six words on his arm did not go away. In fact, the harder he tried to clean it, the worse the itch became.

Out of the shower, Alex got a cotton swab and soaked it in rubbing alcohol. He rubbed at the writing but this did nothing but irritate the itch even worse. Frustrated and afraid, Alex threw the bottle of alcohol across the bathroom where it bounced from the wall and spilled to the floor.

“Damn,” he said, and bent down to clean the mess up.

Behind him, the bird at his window continued to sing. The noise was pleasant enough, but it irritated the hell out of Alex as the smell of spilled rubbing alcohol filled his head. He peered back into his bedroom and saw that the bird was actually hopping about and singing on the window’s small ledge. Alex almost expected it to tap out some sort of message on the glass…perhaps the inane phrase on his arm.

Alex turned away from the jubilant bird and finished up cleaning the spill. As he stopped to scratch at the mysterious words on his arm, he actually read them aloud for the first time. He’d looked at the words a hundred times in the twenty minutes he’d been awake and read them silently to himself each time. But this was the first time he had spoken the words aloud.

Strangely, it felt good. Even more peculiar, the itching came to a sudden stop. Rubbing at the spot on his arm, Alex saw that the words were fading away slowly, dissolving harmlessly into his skin. He watched the words disappear in amazement and then, on shaky legs, stood up and walked into his bedroom. He felt a bit dizzy and as he made his way back into his room, the sound of his voice speaking those words seemed to bounce around in his head.

As he approached his closet to get out the day’s clothes, he noticed the silence of the room. It took him only a moment to realize that everything seemed so quiet because the bird had finally stopped singing. Alex grinned, glad that the little nuisance had decided to fly away. Yet when he looked to the window where it had been hopping and singing, he saw that it was still there.

The bird hadn’t flown away. It was leaning against the glass, not moving. The bird was dead.

***

Alex had never had a soft spot for animals, but he kept thinking about the bird for the entire morning. He thought about the unfortunate creature as often as he tried to rationalize the appearance and sudden disappearance of the phrase on his arm. It really wasn’t such a sudden thing, though, he told himself. It was there when you woke up and it went away when you read it out loud.

And as staggering as that whole episode had been, he found himself testing it out throughout the day. When he was at work, sitting behind his desk during a two hour break between classes, he peered out of his window and watched two squirrels running back and forth between the student commons and the park. Alex spoke that phrase again and waited for the squirrels to stop dead in their tracks. When it didn’t work, Alex wasn’t really surprised. He watched the squirrels at play for a bit longer and the mix of relief and disappointment made his head hurt. He had somehow known that the words would be meaningless because they weren’t on his skin anymore. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did.

He thought about faking sick, posting a notice on the door to his two and four o’ clock classes and going home. He tried to block it all out—the words that had been on his arm and the fate of the bird at his window—but it would not go away. No matter how badly he wanted to believe that it had been some vivid dream, his skin still seemed to crawl with the itch of the words.

As he waited for his next class to begin, he continued working on a speech he had to give at a horror convention over the weekend concerning the sudden resurgence of vampire folklore. He hated speaking in front of people, so he wanted to make sure he got the speech exactly right. It was something that should have only taken a few hours at the most, but he had been obsessing over it for almost two weeks now, editing and revising the ten page speech numerous times.

For a while, the nervousness of the upcoming speech preoccupied him enough so that he nearly forgot about the morning’s weirdness for a whole ten minutes. This might have lasted longer if the phone had not rung and broken his concentration.

He answered the phone on the first ring because it had startled him a bit and he didn’t want to hear the absurdly loud ringing again. “Hello,” he said with a slight waver in his voice.

“Alex, we might have a problem.” It was Theo’s voice on the other end and he sounded very tired.

“What do you mean? Theo, are you okay?”

There was a brief pause and then Theo finally answered, “I don’t know. But this whole thing with the book…I think we need to get rid of it.” He was talking fast and although Alex wasn’t sure, he thought he heard a subtle hint of physical pain in his friend’s voice.

“Slow down,” Alex said. “What problem are you talking about?”

He clearly heard a tremor in Theo’s voice now and Alex was instantly afraid again. He thought of the phrase that had been written on his arm, the dead bird and the way the book had made them feel last night as they had first opened it.

“Look,” Theo said. “Has anything happened to you since last night? Anything strange?”

“No,” Alex lied, not sure why he was hiding the morning’s events from Theo.

“We should meet at the library tonight,” Theo said. “We opened it together, so I think we both need to be there when we make any sort of decision about it.”

“Theo, you sound crazy. Are you sure you’re—”

“I have to go,” Theo interrupted. “But meet me there tonight, okay? Midnight.” And then without waiting for an answer, Theo hung up.

Alex sat there for a moment, staring at his computer and the last paragraph of his speech. He tried typing some more but wasn’t able to keep focus. He left his office and went to his classroom almost half an hour before his students arrived. He made it through the two o’ clock class but ended up posting a cancellation notice on the door of his four o’ clock Gothic Studies class.

As he drove home, he tried once again to logically do away with any connection between his utterance of the phrase that had been on his arm and the death of the bird on his windowsill. Naturally, there was a chance, no matter how slim, that the two things had been entirely coincidental. But then he also took into account that the instant he had spoken the words, the itch on his arm and the text itself had vanished.

As Alex parked his car in front of his building, he felt a peculiar sensation on his shoulder. He wondered if a bug had bitten him, but only for a moment. As the sensation began to sink in and became more prominent, Alex knew what it signified. Getting out of his car, he quickened his pace when he realized that his shoulder was beginning to itch.

***

He hurried into his apartment and was unbuttoning his shirt before the door closed behind him. He ran through his bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom where it still smelled like rubbing alcohol. He took his shirt off and stared at himself in the mirror. As he looked his body over, searching for whatever words might be there this time, his mind swayed from fear to excitement at a frantic pace.

The itch seemed to worsen when it was exposed to the air and as he looked at himself in the mirror, Alex wasn’t at all surprised to see something written on his left shoulder. He read the words silently to himself and as he did, he thought he felt the itch beginning to subside.

The words were written in the same faded tone and in the same script-like text that had been on his arm that morning. He ran his fingers across these new words and found that the skin was not raised; if this was done with some sort of spectral ink, it had sunk into the skin without disturbing the surface.

With a guilty feeling in his stomach, Alex turned away from the mirror and walked into his bedroom. He looked out of the window, hoping to see another bird out there. But the ledge’s only occupant was the bird from this morning, stiff and motionless with its dead eyes pointed towards the street as if it were hoping to fall. Alex reached slowly out to the glass as if he intended to resurrect the bird and saw that his hands were trembling.

Behind him, someone knocked on his front door. He gasped and jumped a bit, nearly falling onto his bed as he stumbled backwards. He then sighed in embarrassment, realizing that a simple knock on his door had just scared the hell out of him. Get a grip, he told himself as he walked into the living room and approached the door.

He looked through the peephole, expecting to see Theo standing there. But it was only his landlord, coming to check up on the leaky pipes under the kitchen sink that Alex had reported last week, no doubt. Alex smiled wanly and reached out for the door knob.

But then he stopped. As his shaking fingers grazed the doorknob, the itch on his shoulder seemed to intensify. He peered back out of the peephole at his landlord who stood there waiting with a look of impatience. As Alex watched, the man raised his hand and knocked again.

Alex swallowed hard and leaned closer towards the door. He then opened his mouth and spoke the words that were etched across his shoulder. He spoke softly, whispering the words so quietly that he could hardly even hear them himself. His own voice managed to raise gooseflesh on his arms and as he listened to himself, he wondered if this was what the voice of a ghost might sound like. Thinking of ghosts made him think of Harold Nesmith and Agatha Redden. In that moment he felt certain that they were there with him, that their spirits had latched on to him when he and Theo had opened A Collection of True Evils. He could literally feel their dead eyes on him as he spied on his landlord through the peephole.

Out in the hallway, the landlord did nothing except stand his ground and knock once more, louder this time. Frowning, Alex stepped closer to the door with his forehead now pressed against the wood. He spoke the words again, louder this time so that anyone on the other side of the door would hear.

Almost instantly, a queer look came across the landlord’s face, as if he were trying to understand the words he had just heard. For Alex, watching everything through the peephole seemed to occur in slow-motion. He watched as his landlord’s face went through several expressions within the space of three seconds, none of them pleasant. The man then took a hesitant step away from Alex’s door and stumbled to his knees, clutching at the empty air around him for support as he fell.

Alex watched intently, not sure if the man was having trouble breathing or if there was something wrong with his heart. The entire process took no more than ten seconds. When it was all done, the landlord was lying on his side and staring blankly towards the other end of the hall with dead, wide eyes.

He stepped away from the door as the realization of what he had just done began to sink in. And while he felt morally ashamed of the ease in which he had killed the man, the fact still remained that once again, the reading of the words had resulted in the disappearance of the peculiar itch and the inscribed text that had caused it. Alex rubbed at the now blank spot where the words had been and then bit his bottom lip tenderly as he felt tears welling up in his eyes. But before the tears could take him, he picked up the phone and dialed 911. He then sat on his sofa and stared at the walls until he heard sirens approaching.

***

Night took it’s time in claiming the world. Alex sat in his apartment after the paramedics had pronounced his landlord dead of severe cardiac arrest and waited for midnight to approach. He wondered if Theo was feeling this same anxiousness or if his insistence on meeting right away was due to Theo also experiencing some sort of weirdness since opening A Collection of True Evils.

As he sat and waited, Alex feared that the itch would come again and that he would find more words written on his body. He had already killed a bird and a human being with the power that came with those ghost-phrases, so what else would he be capable of?

The thought bothered him horribly. He tidied up his coffee table, checked his e-mail and watched some TV to help pass the time. He eventually found himself working on his speech for the horror convention and it was this work that seemed to speed the clock along.

He left his house at 11:15 although the library was only a twenty minute trip from his house. He drove down darkened blocks, thinking of the bird, his landlord and the phrases he had spoken that had somehow ended their lives. It was baffling and even a bit ridiculous, but there was no denying that it was really happening. He thought about Agatha Redden and wondered what sort of hex she had placed on the inscriptions within the book. He also found himself thinking about Harold Nesmith, the author of A Collection of True Evils, and what sorts of dark talents he might have acquired in writing down such cursed material.

Driving through the night as midnight approached, Alex truly felt afraid for the first time since discovering the phrase on his arm that morning. To somehow have found himself entwined in the horrors that Harold Nesmith had researched and written about made him feel cold and defenseless. Several times on the way to the library, Alex thought that he could feel itching sensations all over his body but these ended up being nothing more than tricks of his scrambling mind.

He arrived at the library fifteen minutes early and saw no sign of Theo. Alex circled the block twice, driving slowly and wondering exactly what they had gotten themselves into. As he made the circle around the block the second time, he saw that Theo had finally arrived. Usually, the first to arrive would retrieve the key and unlock the basement door but Theo remained in his car, electing to not wander into the darkness alone.

Alex parked his car behind Theo’s and the two of them met on the sidewalk in front of the library. It seemed almost forbidden to be here again, less than twenty-four hours after cracking open A Collection of True Evils, creeping through the night like ghouls hiding from the inevitable dawn.

As they came together on the sidewalk, Alex noticed that Theo was walking with his back arched at an awkward angle. Theo tried to nod and grin at him, but it was obvious that he was in pain.

“Did you hurt your back today?” Alex asked him as they started towards the garden shed for the key.

Theo snickered, a sound that came out like a mixture of a grunt and defeated laughter. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Alex didn’t say anything else although he desperately wanted to say something…to say anything. But to mention anything about the book in the open and dark spaces of the night seemed dangerous now. Alex slipped into the garden shed to retrieve the key and then they walked through the too-quiet night and into the library’s basement.

***

They pulled A Collection of True Evils from its hiding place beneath the writing desk and set it on the large table in the center of the room. Alex took a seat at the table, as he had done countless times since he and Theo had started meeting here, but Theo remained on his feet. He leaned against the table, grimacing in pain.

“You lied to me on the phone today,” Theo said. “I can see it in your face: something happened to you today. What was it?”

“Well, what about you?” Alex asked. “Yes, something happened to me, but it’s obviously not as bad as whatever happened to you…you look like you’re in terrible pain.”

“I am,” Theo said. “It’s mainly my stomach; it feels like there’s razorblades in there and every time I move, it gets worse. I’ve also been coughing up blood all day and I don’t know why. My back is killing me and the last two times I took a piss, there was blood in it.” As he spoke, a thin trickle of blood ran over his bottom lip. His voice was wavering and came in fragments, as if he were on the verge of tears.

“What about you?” he asked Alex as he wiped the blood away from his mouth.

Alex thought that it would be hard to convey what had happened to him but once he started talking, the course of events actually came out easy and he was relieved to find that Theo was nodding as he listened. If the stern look on his face was any indication, he didn’t doubt a word of it.

“That settles it then,” Theo said when Alex was done. “We have to get rid of the book. And I don’t mean sell it off to someone else. I think we have to destroy it. We could burn it or send it through a wood chipper. Something…I don’t…I don’t know…”

“Stop talking,” Alex said. “You’re getting pale. I really think you need to see a doctor.” This was an understatement; not only was Theo pale, he was also shaking and there was a glistening sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Alex looked at the book, still sitting on the table as if it had always belonged there. With something very similar to anger in his voice, Alex said, “Let’s do it, then. We’ll take it outside right now and burn it.”

Theo nodded, holding his stomach as he tried to stay upright against the table. Alex picked the book up from the table and as he did, he felt that familiar itching sensation crawling along his back. Only now it burned like fire and he nearly dropped the book on the floor in trying to scratch the itch. The sensation was so strong that it took his breath and he suddenly knew that the book and the powers that haunted it somehow knew what they intended to do.

“We’ve got to be quick,” Alex said. “It knows something is up.”

Theo only nodded again, not wanting to waste any breath on speaking. He hobbled to the door bent over in pain and he ended up having to lean on Alex as they left the basement and headed back out into the night.

They made their way to the back of the library where a few picnic tables sat around a swing set for members of the children’s library.

Theo fell to the ground with a grunt, still holding his stomach. As he sat up, he coughed up a thick gob of blood and mucus. He spat it to the ground in weary disgust and then looked to Alex. “There’s a lighter in my glove box. A Zippo.”

Alex ran to Theo’s car in a hurry, opened the passenger side door and grabbed the lighter from its place among fast food napkins and registration forms. The night around him seemed intensely quiet, as if the night were anticipating something to happen. The streetlights seemed to be fading out and the solid structures of things around him seemed to waver in and out of focus.

He blinked his eyes furiously, gripped Theo’s lighter as tightly as he could in order to anchor himself to reality, and headed back to the rear of the library.

When he returned to the small picnic area behind the library, Theo looked even paler than he had in the basement. He was still coughing violently and as Alex knelt by him with the lighter, he saw that Theo had coughed up more blood while he had been gone. Alex had never seen so much blood and it would have taken him aback if he were not afflicted by the now aching itch that continued to spread across his back.

Alex struggled with the lighter, surprised to find that he was also was shaking. He didn’t know if it was a result of frazzled nerves or the sudden fear that seemed to seize him. He could feel a thickness in the air, a weight that seemed to settle on to him like heat on a miserably humid day. He suddenly knew without a doubt that the supposed ghosts within the book were here with them now and they did not want to allow them to destroy their link to the world of the living. The painful itch across his back was proof of this, as was his pale and bleeding friend.

Alex finally managed to get a flame from the lighter, a wavering flicker in the night with the tremors in his hands. Theo opened the book to a random page to expose the paper to the flame. This simple act had him gasping, still sprawled out on the ground and in pain.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked as he put the flame to the page. It was then that he noticed that the page the book had been opened to was the same one he had touched last night, the page with Agatha Redden’s symbols scrawled along the center.

Theo opened his mouth to respond but could only get out a wet moan. Finally, through a mouthful of blood, he was able to get out a few garbled words: “Go….get out of here…” His eyes appeared to be suddenly alarmed, as if he knew something Alex didn’t.

Alex seemed confused at first because the pain at his back was now more than an unreachable itch, but a searing heat that seemed to boil his skin. But then he saw Theo bend into a fetal position as he let out a cry of pain that chilled Alex’s heart. Alex held the flame steady and could smell the smoke that wafted up from the burnt and curling corner of the exposed page.

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— TABLE OF CONTENTS —

— FIRMAMENT —

— MI CASA ES SU CASA —

— A COLLECTION OF TRUE EVILS —