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Kevin Crisp

The November Editor's Pick Writer is Kevin Crisp

Please feel free to email Kevin at: kevincrispwriter@gmail.com

Kevin

THE THING FROM AFAR
by Kevin Crisp

Through the blur of cold water, I made out a floating halo of dark hair and a pink face. With a rubber-gloved hand, I swept away the ice cubes floating over her. They clanged against the side of the metal tank like dull bells, over and over. It was a pretty face, symmetric and heart-shaped. Her nose was petite, her chin a small, soft point beneath full lips that might once have been red and ripe with life. She had a mild widow’s peak and high cheek bones. Her eyes were closed, and that was a good thing, because underneath the caved-in lids I could the eyes were hollow—gone.

I was getting frustrated. “You know, all of the girls you've shown me so far died of radiation burns or improvised explosives. This one has no eyes.”

“I have many girls, all in very good condition. The other girl—”

“The other girl was missing an arm, Dr. Abdi.”

His cheeks tinged a little. “Then I just borrow an arm from a different girl. It’s no problem.”

“But it wouldn’t fit though, right? It would be too long or too short or the color or freckles wouldn’t match. One would have fine hair, the other more pronounced—”

He lowered his voice, confidential-like. “Look, I tell you the truth. Intact girls are very, very expensive. My partner, he wouldn’t be happy with me showing you one particular girl.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.

“Why? How much is this one particular girl? I’d like to see her.”

Dr. Abdi led me to a corner of the room, where a plastic tarp was draped over a vat. “I tell you what. I like you. Let me go make a phone call and see what I can do.” He slipped his sat phone from his coat pocket and zig-zagged through the tanks until he was some distance away. Then, with his back to me, he made a call.

The harsh electric lights were giving me a headache. It had been since grade school since I was in a room with so many fluorescent bulbs, and that had been before the troubles. Hesitantly, I slipped the plastic tarp off of the young woman and was surprised to find her looking almost alive, bathed in ice.

Even under the harsh lights, she was beautiful, all the more so since complete specimens were in short supply. She looked the pinnacle of youth, pale and frozen in time. More ice clanked against the tank and I examined her legs. They were slender, long and shapely. On the inside of one ankle was a small tattoo of two butterflies.

Dr. Abdi returned. “Okay, my friend. I’m doing you a big favor. My partner, he does not like.  We’re losing money on this. But for you, it’s a lucky day.”

He wrote a number on the pad on his clip board. I studied the number. It was almost as much money as I had, hidden inside a radiator. 

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay? That’s all you can say for such a beauty?” He looked me straight in the eyes, as though judging whether or not I was serious, then slipped the clipboard under his arm and shook my hand vigorously.

“So what happens next?” I asked.

“For you, nothing. For me, a very late night. I can have her delivered tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’m going to be out tomorrow.” I needed supplies: kerosene, potatoes, soap, tins of beans…

“Someone needs to be home when she arrives.”

“Can you make it tomorrow night?"

He laughed, and waved an arm toward the tank. “She’s not a couch, my friend. She’s a woman! You don’t keep a woman waiting.”

“How long does the process take to thaw her?"

“Eighteen hours. Sometimes more. But again you’re lucky, because I’m squeezing this job in before I leave town on a long trip. May not be back for weeks, months maybe.”

“Okay, I’ll be home tomorrow, then. Can I watch you get started?”

“No, I never allow that,” he said, shaking his head. “But trust me; it is not so very interesting. I flush the bodily fluids and replace with synthetics. Then I reanimate the electrically excitable tissues by entraining the heart and the brainstem with targeted electromagnetic radiation.”

“I don't know what any of that means.”

He smiled. “It means that tomorrow night, this young lady will be keeping your bed warm.”

*****

I moved away from my last shelter in the populated part of the city during the previous winter. There had been another cholera outbreak, and I wanted out. There were houses still intact around the University, though many had fallen into severe disrepair or had caved in completely. They had all been looted of course, and many burned to their foundations. 

In the end, I settled on Ravenna House, a small, abandoned and reasonably intact cottage on the edge of the park that had served as a rental for students prior to the troubles. It was in such good condition when I found it that I had worried for several weeks that other squatters had been living there and would soon return. But in six months of living with a baseball bat within easy reach by the door, I had not had any visitors.

The loneliness was not something I had counted on. I figured it would be one thing to live in a cabin in the middle of the pristine wilderness up on Mount Rainier or somewhere like that. It is quite another, though, to live amidst the abandoned and destroyed homes of the uninhabited zones, where all is silent and still and all day long only the shadows ever move.

It was early evening, still light, when they came to drop her off. I heard the car coming when it was still a ways off. In the quiet, abandoned neighborhood, it was a loud sound that did not belong. 

The driver pulled around a burned out vehicle and up to the curb. He got out of the car, opened her door, tugged her out of the passenger door into a standing position. She was dressed in a hospital gown and a robe. She wobbled on unsteady feet. The driver threw an arm around her waist and carried her up the steps to Ravenna House.

“Hi,” I said, feeling my cheeks hot with rising flush. I felt unreasonably embarrassed and awkward. She squinted at me, shielded her eyes slightly from the daylight, and looked confused.

“Where do you want her?” the driver asked gruffly.

“Uh, help her in here, to the dining room,” I said, and showed the way. “Doesn’t she talk?”

“Didn’t know you were such a great conversationalist.” He dumped her unceremoniously onto a wicker chair. “Hand it over.”

I thrust an envelope into his outstretched palm. He took out the bills, counted them, and tucked them in his pocket. “Receipt,” he said, pulling a crumpled yellow paper from his back pocket.

“Thanks,” I said, and tossed it on top of the key bowl. I watched him get into the car and leave. Relief flooded me. Yet, there was still this unknown girl to get to know. She hadn’t moved even a millimeter when I returned to the dining room.

I sat across from her. Her eyes seemed fixated through the glass table top at something on the floor. There were blue bottle flies lying dead all over the table, I saw. No matter how much I tried to keep the place clean, the sheer volume of the dead in this city always brought out the flies. I wouldn't have even noticed them if a woman wasn’t sitting there. 

“I’m Ian,” I tried. “What’s your name?”

Slowly, she lifted her face to look at me. Her look was puzzled, as though trying to tap into a distant memory. After a moment, she spoke. “Jenny?” It was more of a question than a statement.

I smiled, trying to make her feel more comfortable. “I was just going to guess Jenny.” I laughed awkwardly. I could feel my cheeks turning red once again. “I mean you look like a Jenny. Are you hungry?”

She nodded, and a drip of blood leaked out of her nose and on to her pale lip. “Here,” I said, “let me get that.” I grabbed a towel from the kitchen, held it to her nose and helped her tip her head back.

“There. I think it’s stopped now,” I said.

She was quiet.

“I’ll see about making you a sandwich,” I told her. I had quickly made a run for supplies in the middle of the night, so there was fresh bread in the kitchen, and cheese. I poured two glasses of water from the carboy. I set a plate in front of her, and took my seat once again across from her.

She was staring out the window toward the thick green foliage of the park. “Jenny? Here’s a sandwich.” 

She took a bite and started making a chewing motion with her jaw, and then swallowed. From my viewpoint, her actions seemed mechanical, without emotion.

“It’s just cheese and bread, but it’s fresh,” I stammered. “Do you like it?”

She looked down at the sandwich, picked it up, took another bite, and placed it back on the plate. She was very pretty, and the setting sun’s rays lighted her hair to a golden hue. There was color in her cheeks, and she looked very much a living woman. 
She sighed deeply.

It was then I noticed all the blue bottle flies were gone.

“How’s the sandwich?” I tried again.

She ignored the question and had one of her own. “Where am I?”

“This place was once called Ravenna House. I’ve been squatting here for half a year. Before that, I was in the peopled area. If you don’t like it here, there are plenty of abandoned homes nearby.”

“Ian?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry…I don’t remember you.”

“What do you remember?”

She looked thoughtful. “I remember—I remember floating through the darkness. I was cold. And I remember doctors. They were doing things to me.” She shuddered. “And I remember a humming noise. It was always there. It’s all black, black…” 

Suddenly, she looked to the window, and then over her shoulder through the other window. “Can you close the windows? Please?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, and I drew the moth-eaten drapes shut.

“I can’t remember you.”

“Well, we’ll just have to make a whole bunch of new memories then.”

I realized this wasn’t going to be easy. Had I actually thought she’d be brought back and throw herself at me with devoted, passionate companionship after we’d only just met? 

In the back of my mind, I wondered if something was wrong. What if she was broken? What if her brain was damaged, at death, in a way that wasn’t resolved by the reanimation process? What if all I could expect was a cold, distant, emotionless body living in Ravenna House, a girl who moved and breathed and had a beating heart, but was still in all other aspects dead?

“Are you done with your sandwich?”

She looked at the sandwich sitting on the plate with a single bite out of it. “Yes.”

“Come downstairs, and I’ll show you where the washroom is.”

I helped her down the steps, but could tell her feet were getting steadier beneath her. She smelled strange, sort of fishy, probably from all that time in storage. I hoped the smell would disappear once she bathed.

“The rain barrel is just outside this basement window, so this is the only part of the house with running water. Just use it sparingly, and don’t drink it. The boiled water is upstairs in the carboy.” 

I didn’t know how to suggest that she bathe.

She sniffed the air, obviously not smelling herself. “I’d like to look around. By myself.”

Disappointed, I said, “Be my guest.”

She disappeared around the corner to the spare bedroom. “You find anything interesting?” I called to her.

There was no answer. “Jenny?” Still no answer.

I stepped out into the hall. The sun was setting, and the hall was dim. At the end of the hall was the guestroom with its two twin bed-frames. The mattresses had long since rotted through. “Jenny?”

I stepped into the room, tripped over her and fell headlong on the floor. “Sorry, are you all right?” I asked, regaining my feet.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“What were you doing on the floor?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Let’s get up to the bedroom. I don’t have any candles down here. The only electric lights are in the kitchen. There’s giant house spiders down here. You probably don’t want to be crawling around on the floor.”

We passed into the cold, fluorescent lighting of the kitchen, which was powered by solar panels on the roof. These were fairly effective at providing light during the less rainy months of the year, but the kitchen was the only room with lights. The copper thieves had missed it somehow and left it wired. I lit a candle, and then we ascended the loudly creaking stairs to the upper level.  She seemed to walk especially quickly past the darkened window as we rounded the bend in the stairs a few steps beneath the landing.

The upper level consisted only of a bedroom and a now useless bathroom, as water had long since ceased to run in any portion of the city. It seemed so decadent now, but I remembered baths and running water when I was a kid growing up in Seattle. Of course I remembered many things from before the troubles, but dwelling on them only brought on the dark moods.

We entered the bedroom.

“Is this where we sleep?” Jenny asked, in a nervous school girl’s voice.

“Yes,” I said, and for the first time this all felt very real. I wasn’t alone anymore. This girl was my companion now. I looked at her as she glanced around the sparsely decorated room. Her hair was tussled and uncombed, but she looked beautiful all the same, especially in this formerly lonely place.

I remembered that she had been dead—actually, physically dead—just a day before, and shuddered. What an abomination of nature death is, I thought. Perhaps to cheat it is the only way to put things right. 

“I want to sleep near the wall.”

“Okay, sure.” I turned out the lights and tucked her into bed and kissed her on the forehead, relieved to find it warm, as though somehow I'd been expecting the cold, clamminess of dead flesh. Then, I walked around the bed and climbed in on the other side, and lay for several long moments in awkward silence, staring in the darkness at the ceiling.

“I’d like to touch you,” I told her. I inched closer toward her.

“I’m sorry,” she protested. “I really don’t even remember you, Ian. How long have we been…together?”

“Don’t worry, Jenny,” I heard myself saying as I backed off. “It’ll all come back to you, and until then we’ll take it slow.” 

At some point, I would have to tell her the truth. I’d have to tell her that she’d been killed by a large scale chemical attack on the University. That she’d been lucky, because it was followed by a weaponized germ that had damn near wiped out the northwest. That when there were no longer enough survivors to bury all the corpses, people like Dr. Abdi got creative with storage and usage. 

But how to explain it? How could I tell her that she’d been dead and floating in a vat from before I was born, up until the time I bought her? 

“Good night,” she said, and rolled over toward the wall.

“Right,” I said, with a sigh. “Goodnight.”

I lay there for a long while, and at some point I finally dozed off. It was a fitful rest, one that was haunted by visions of the Jenny under the floating ice. And then I awoke, and it was still dark and I felt very alone.

“Jenny?”

I lit the candle. The hall was dark beyond the doorway in spite of the candle. I saw a form there, deep in the shadows. 

She ran into the room, stood at the edge of the bed, tears streaming down her cheeks, a look of desperation in her eyes. “The thing from outside! It’s in the basement! Help me, please, help!”

I bolted out of bed. “Stay here,” I said, and I ran down the stairs to the kitchen. 

I grabbed the baseball bat by the door and tucked it under my arm. I hastily grabbed the candle and plunged down the steps into the dank, dark basement. On the last step, I paused. I heard a pig-like grunting, and something rubbing about on the floor.

Holding the bat in one hand, the heaviest part over my shoulder ready to swing down in a killing blow, I stepped carefully through the hall toward the noise. I saw something move in the guest room. I saw the glimmer of eyes near the floor.

And in the weak, flickering candle light, I saw hair, long golden hair, dragging on the floor.

“Jenny?” I said. There was no way she could have gotten down there, no way she could have passed me or snuck around some other way. Jenny was up in the bedroom.

She looked up. It was Jenny, all right. There could be no doubt. And she had three legs of a giant house spider hanging out of her mouth. The juices of several more were dripping down her chin. 

I almost puked. “What the hell are you doing?”

Go raibh an diabhal ghearradh an ceann tú,” she said

“What?” I asked.

And then she seized. She fell prostrate, her back tightened and arched. Her shoulders trembled, and I could hear her teeth grinding.

“Jenny!”

Her neck was taught and corded, and a pink froth bubbled form the corner of her mouth. “Shit!  Jenny, wake up!”

A sound like a growl came from deep within her, unearthly and inhuman. The candle flame dimmed and then burned all the brighter. The flames glowed pale green, then scarlet, casting a strange red glow across the room.

It was then that I noticed the mist. It was a thin fog, like a faint haze or blurring of the wall of the room beyond her. I thought maybe it was gas, leaking from the ancient manes or sewers beneath the house. But that couldn't be; wouldn't the candle have ignited the gasses? 

The wall seemed to dim, and then I realized I wasn’t looking at the fog, but rather through it into a strange and barren starlit landscape. Great forms dotted the panorama, black silhouettes that I first took for large rock formations, but their shapes seemed so unnatural as to be impossibly accidental. As I gazed they grew closer, and one of the nearest had an odd symmetry, as though of a crouching thing with great, bat-like wings.

I heard a gasping noise and the stars were gone and in its place was the wall. Jenny’s breath was raspy in irregular. I took her hand in mine and rubbed it, trying to reinvigorate her. Her tremors had stopped, though her eyes were rolled back so far in her head that only the whites showed and I knew consciousness was yet some ways off. “Jenny? Jenny, can you wake up?”

Gradually she came to consciousness. “What happened?” she asked. “Where am I?”

“In the basement. You must have been sleepwalking.” And I must have been sleepwalking too, I thought. I didn’t see what I thought I saw.

“My mouth tastes bloody.”

“You may have bit your tongue. I’ll get you a drink of water.”

I crept carefully up the stairs and around the corner until the lights from the kitchen were visible, not wanting to leave her without the candle. I set the bat back in its place by the door. As I crossed the kitchen to the carboy, and yelped as a jabbing pain stabbed my heel. Looking down, I saw that the drawers were hanging open and kitchen implements had been strewn across the floor.

No, not strewn, but rather placed neatly and orderly, very intentionally, in a large triangle, with a line through it just above the middle such that it somewhat resembled the letter A. “What the hell?” 

I spun round as I heard her voice behind me. I saw her shape, deep in the shadows of the dining room. “The thing from outside!” she pleaded. “It’s in the basement. Help me, please help!”

I stepped toward her, but the dining room was empty. I knelt down and looked under the table, but there was nothing there. I pushed my hand through each of the curtains. She was gone.

Baffled, I returned to the kitchen. My foot collided with the utensils and sent them skittering across the floor. I turned to the top of the basement stairs, and through the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a ghostly white face looking in through the window in the back door and my heart skipped a beat. 

I stared at the window. The face was still there. It was a bearded face, a young face. Our eyes met, and then it darted away from the window.

I snatched up the bat again and flung the back door open, to see a guy in a hooded sweatshirt slipping around the corner of the house. “Hey!” I shouted, and I took after him.

The guy stumbled on the loose steps down to the garden gate and careened into a bush, rolled to his knees and took off again. But in that time, I gained considerably upon him. I overtook him as he tried to dodge between two burned out cars. I grabbed his ankle as it swung back midstride and he tumbled across the cracked pavement. 

I leaped upon him, straddled him, my knees clutching his arms tightly to his sides, my baseball bat posed ready to crush his skull. “What the hell are you up to sneaking around my house, scaring people?”

“Don’t hurt me,” he pleaded. “I know about her, man!”

“You’ve been spying on my girl?”

“The one you bought, the resurrected one. Yeah, I know.”

“You keep the hell away from her. She’s mine. You hear me?”

“I don't want her for myself. Damn, you really hurt me, man!”

I lowered the bat. “You come around here again, and you’ll leave with more than a headache; you understand me?” I got off him and let him up.

“You don’t wanna get rid of me, man,” he said. “You need me.”

“How do you figure?”

He stood up. “Because I know what’s wrong with her.”

“What makes you think something’s wrong with Jenny—with any of them?”

“Weird stuff’s happening in your house, right? Since yesterday, when the big guy dropped her off? I’m guessing she eats weird stuff—gross stuff, right?”

I thought of the spider legs sprouting from her mouth, and then remembered the disappearance of the blue bottle flies.

The man continued, “And she goes into trances from time to time. There’s visions, too. You’ve seen them. Other places. Other worlds. I can put it right. I can make it stop.”

I didn’t trust this guy, not worth a damn. But he sure seemed to know a lot. “Who are you?”

“I’m Brent, man. I’m a spiritual healer. I’ve been watching that Dr. Abdi for a while now.”

I paused. I didn’t know how much I should say, but perhaps Brent could help after all. “It was like she was in two places at once. Up in the bedroom. Then again, in the dining room. It’s freaking me out. She was dead just yesterday. Now she’s alive again, but it’s like her ghost is haunting her body or something.”

Brent shook his head. “You got it all wrong, man.” He took a joint out of his pocket, lit it and inhaled deeply. He offered it to me, but I shook my head. “It’s not her ghost that haunts you, man,” he wheezed, and then blew out the smoke. “It’s her soul.”

“Soul? You mean like God and Heaven and all that?”

“Her soul, man! Her animating principle. It’s freaking Aristotle, man! Don’t you read?”

“You think her soul is haunting me?”

He took another long, gurgling inhale from the hooka, looked at me with blood-shot eyes, shook his head and exhaled. “Just think about it, man. What manner of being do you think is in there?”

I scoffed. “Thanks, man. That’s all a very big help. Nice story. But I gotta go check on my new girlfriend, see if any of the spiders she’s been eating have caused her to have another seizure.”

As I turned and headed back for the house, he called after me. “I could do an exorcism.”

I stopped in my tracks. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“I can’t guarantee anything, of course. But maybe if I cast out whatever’s living in that girl-flesh of yours, maybe her soul’ll go back home to roost.”

“You really think there’s something living in her body?”

“Dr. Abdi shouldn’t be doing this shit, man. Very bad karma, reanimating a dead girl like that.”

I felt shocked. “So you’re telling me Dr. Abdi's re-animated girls are zombies?”

“Nature abhors a vacuum, man. She’s technically alive, but a living body without a soul won’t go uninhabited for long. Something from outside will come and squat in it.”

I thought of the fear in Jenny’s eyes—the ones I saw in the vision or ghost or soul or whatever the hell it was that woke me up. And I thought of that beautiful girl sucking spiders up off the floor in the basement.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let’s do it.”

He took a deep drag on his joint, held it for a very long time while he pulled a weathered old book from the pocket in the front of his sweatshirt. Then, in a smoke-hardened voice, he said, “All right, man. All right. Now, just lead me to her.”

Jenny was sitting on the floor of the basement when we got down stairs. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“This is Brent. He’s sort of a spiritual healer.”

“Is something wrong with me?” she asked.

“No, Jenny. Nothing’s wrong with you.”

“Jessica,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“My name's Jessica. I remember now.”

“We’re going to help you, Jen—Jessica,” I said. 

“Stop talking to it,” Brent said. “It's messing with you. They always try to mess with you.”

Jenny—or Jessica—whipped her head toward Brent and snarled.

He cleared his throat. “Teacht ar ár glaoch chun cabhair a fháil—Agus a ghlacadh ó scrios...”

“What language is that?” I asked.

“Something long dead. Now shut up. Don't interrupt again. Agus ó shealbhú an diabhal rith an lae an duine á dhéanamh i do íomhá...”

She let out a moan, deep, guttural, of self-loathing pain. Her moans changed in urgency. They became sharp, painful to hear. A small trickle of blood flowed down her nostril. Another red line dripped down from her ear.

Brent’s voice became a loud, stern command. “Líon isteach do chuid seirbhíseach a bhfuil misneach chun troid cosúil le fir i gcoinne nathair!”

The girl flew back hard on the thinly carpeted floor and writhed like a worm on a hook. Her back arched, her neck bent way too far.

She screamed. It was not a scream of agony or terror, but one of blood-curdling, hell-spawned rage. And then she collapsed limply to the ground.

There was a rush of air in the room and a sound like that of huge, leathery wings flapping and the candle blew out. There was a strange odor permeating; musty and animal and dank and old. From the faint glow of the candle, I saw Brent lifted off his feet and tossed clear across the room, where he careened headfirst into the concrete wall. The candle was smuffed out and I grabbed matches and lit it again.

I rushed to where Brent lay on the floor, broken, his skull caved in and a puddle of brains and sticky, thick blood pooling on the carpet beneath his head

Then I ran to the girl, and took her head in my hands. “Jenny? Jessica? Are you alright?”

She gasped sharply and opened her eyes. “The thing, the thing from outside!  It's here, in the basement. Help me, please help!”

I looked over at Brent. One of his arms moved. It must be just a muscle twitch. There was no way he could have survived that type of trauma to the head.

“I’m going to get you out of here, Jenny,” I told her. She was all I had in the world, and I wanted her.

“My name… my name’s Jessica.”

I swallowed. “Right, Jessica. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Brent’s other arm flopped forward in our direction. Then, in a coordinated motion, they flexed and lugged his corpse a foot or two toward us.

I pulled Jessica to her feet. The Brent thing was dragging across the floor toward us, arm over arm pulling, a bloody smear trailing behind. As we rounded the stair case, I saw his leg flop out and give a kick, propelling him along a bit faster.

We rushed up the stairs to the kitchen. I grabbed a towel and shoved half of it in a bottle of moonshine. I could hear the Brent-thing rubbing up the steps one at a time. I held the moonshine upside down so that the towel filled with alcohol. I lit it with a match and hurled it hard at the wall where the steps turned. 

Flames splattered all over the steps and the Brent thing writhed and flames licked up the walls and we ran like hell out of the back door and into the street.

By two blocks of pushing/carrying Jessica, I was panting. We stopped on the corner to catch our breath. I looked back. 

Through foliage, I could see flickering light in the windows as flames spread through the Ravenna House. I smelled smoke in the air, not the smell of wood smoke, but of man-made things burning.

I looked toward Jessica. “You okay?” 

“I feel like I just woke up from a very bad dream,” she said. “My roommate’s gonna be worried sick, what with the poison gas scare and all…wait, whose house is burning?”

“Don’t worry, it’s an abandoned house. No one lives there anymore.”

“Why is it so quiet? Shouldn’t the fire department be coming or something? Where’s my phone? It must have fallen out of my pocket. Can I use your phone to dial 911?”

“Hold on, Jessica. Let me explain.”

“Where is everyone? Where are all the people? That house is all boarded up. And that one.  That one, too!”

“Jessica, it’s gonna be okay. Let’s start walking back to…umm…back to your dorm. I’ll, uh, I’ll explain on the way.” 

I glanced down the street toward the Ravenna House. The moon had come out from behind the clouds, and the middle of the street was dimly lit, encroached upon by darkness on both sides.

Was that a movement in the shadows? A low, crawling sort of thing following us? I couldn’t be sure. We had to get moving.

I took her arm and started her quickly down the dark street toward the last populated part of the city. I could only hope that Brent’s exorcism had worked.

Kevin Crisp is an anatomy instructor from Minnesota who writes horror and western fiction. His short stories have been published in The Lovecraft eZine, Frontier Tales eZine, and a few anthologies. His novels Guns of the Prairie and Trouble at Timber Ridge were published by Western Trail Blazer. 

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