Orchard of Bones

June 28, 2023June 23, 2023 ~ Lee Andrew Forman ~ 5 Comments

A vast expanse lies before me. Its emptiness is broken only by ivory totems, arranged long ago by an unknown artist. Each one takes its own form; limitless shapes and arrangements construct the populace of bones. I follow the path without going astray. I know not to approach these structures. This land is cursed, forever soured by the evils it holds deep. A rumble sounds in the distant sky. The winds bring its inhuman voice to my ears. I hear it pure, unadulterated by the unnatural spires of mankind. It’s a calling, a welcome, an invitation. I must follow. The journey leaves my feet hot and blistered; my legs, weak and thin. But I know no choice existed. I come to meet the caretaker of this garden of death. And death, it is. My past is behind me. The present is here. My future, non-existent. I’ve arrived here not by folly, but by destiny. My life expired long before this trek. And this is but the final destination. My flesh dissolves, exposing the osseous frame which will be used to construct a new totem, my effigy, to be added to the growing garden of memories.

∼ Lee Andrew Forman

Grave of the Damned

June 21, 2023June 7, 2023 ~ afstewart ~ 6 Comments

A soft mist tangled through the trees past the haunting of midnight, as the wind rustled a few dead leaves still clinging to the branches. One crooked gravestone leaned under the shifting moonlight, its crumbling edges and rough surface slowly losing the fight against time and the elements. The winter-tinged breeze swirled the detritus on the ground in crinkles and crunches as if someone was walking across the grave, bent on disturbing the mouldering remains of one Jebediah Osbourne.
A rich man in life, the last of an ancient family, Jebediah embraced the esoteric and eccentric, shunning polite society. In death, society had abandoned him to a dark eternity alone in the woods, buried and forgotten.
Well, perhaps not entirely forgotten.
The box appeared with the full moon, on that October 31st in 1913, summoned by the rumblings of a war beginning across the ocean. The faint drum of a heartbeat reverberated from inside, inexplicably echoed by the corpse interred below the earth.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
A pulse vibrating along the earth, sinking its rhythm into the soil and intoning through the trees until they trembled with the cadence. Sensing the unnatural disturbance, an owl screeched in the distance, The forest screamed in response as the dirt quaked and shifted, as streams of blood poured from the deep bowels of nightmares.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
And then a click.
The box opened. Not with a shriek or a howl. With a soft, lingering chuckle.
And the hand of dead Jebediah Osbourne broke free of its grave, reaching for the night sky.

~ A. F. Stewart

Why Their Eyes

June 14, 2023June 7, 2023 ~ Miriam H. Harrison ~ 4 Comments

Evelyn hated that she couldn’t remember his eyes. All her memories were painted in broad strokes, leaving out the precious details. Some nights she could find him in her dreams. There, he’d be as he once was—still young, still innocent, still alive. She would pull him close, breathe in his scent, sob her joy and relief into his tousled hair. But always he would look up at her with two empty holes where his eyes should be.

“David,” she’d say, “what happened to your eyes?”

Each time she would wake without an answer, gazing into the dark of her too-empty home.

David, she wondered again, what happened to you?

***

It was now ten years since the boys had started disappearing. Their faces had been everywhere: nightly news, shop windows, church pinboards. They were impossible not to see, but even harder to look at. Each one had made Evelyn think of David, made her grateful for his safety, made her ashamed of her own selfishness.

Then the posters started coming down. That was even worse. In those posters there had been hope: the boys’ smiling faces captured in time, safe and whole. But one by dreadful one, those hopes disappeared. The town’s whispers said what the news could not: the bodies that were found were not safe, not whole.

“Why their eyes?” the neighbours had murmured.

Why their eyes? Evelyn wondered still.

***

Maybe the answer was there, in his childhood. She had searched her memories so many times that they were starting to fray, to unravel, to fall to pieces all around her. Evelyn tried to knit them back together, but she doubted herself more each time.

Those eyes that she could never remember, was there something there? Something she had ignored? Something she hadn’t bothered to see? There were too many questions she had never thought to ask until it was too late. Now they hung about her—heavy and unanswered.

She wondered what others had seen, looking at him. What he had seen, looking at them. In those eyes was the mystery, the truth.

Those boys, what had they seen with their missing eyes?

***

The eyes of the town were all around. She felt them every time she left her home, which wasn’t often. She tired of being seen, of the unheard but constant whispers that accompanied those eyes.

There had been a time when she was unseen. As a single mother, she had gone through the paces of work and home in quiet obscurity, leaving little to be seen.

David hadn’t been so lucky. He had told her he didn’t fit in. He had said the other kids picked on him, singled him out. He had felt all too seen.

A rite of passage, she had thought.

Now, she wondered.

***

She had tried to ask him once. That last time she had seen him alive.

“Why their eyes?”

David had met her gaze through the glass partition, those unknowable eyes creasing in a smile that chilled her more than the prison, more than his scarlet death row uniform.

He never did answer.

∼ Miriam H. Harrison

The Last Post

June 7, 2023May 29, 2023 ~ Richard Meldrum ~ 4 Comments

This happened in 1952. I was young, a boy of seventeen. A conscript, like so many of my friends. Some of them were unlucky enough to be sent off to fight in Korea. I was one of the lucky ones, posted to Norfolk on the east coast of England. It was a bleak and isolated place, but I didn’t mind; it was better than fighting. My service consisted of endless parade-ground drills, physical exercise and rifle training. I’m not sure what good I did for my country, but perhaps the boys fighting and dying in Korea felt the same.

I was heading back home on leave. I planned on catching a train passing through the local station at 9 p.m. Getting this train would allow me to catch the overnight mail express in Norwich. I would be at home first thing in the morning.

I headed out front gate of the camp. It was already dark and the country roads were unlit, but I knew the way to the station like the back of my hand. After a fifteen-minute walk, I arrived at the station, a small red-brick building. The platform was empty. The station building was dark and the waiting room was locked. I was alone.

I read the notices on the platform to pass the time. Having quickly exhausted this diversion, I stared without thinking at the other side of the railway line, across from the platform. I found myself looking into misty blackness. I knew in front of me were hectares of flat farmland. I checked my watch. Five minutes had passed, with ten to go. I looked up from my watch and glanced over to the other side of the railway tracks again. Shapes were moving in the dark fields in front of me, just beyond the reach of the platform lights. As I stood there, my mouth open and my heart racing, I could hear voices. British voices. I could hear words being spoken, words which were very familiar to me. They were orders, barked in an all too familiar military tone. Attention. At ease. Dress right. These were the commands I was used to obeying without question at the endless drill parades I endured. I could feel my muscles twitching to obey.

I wondered if a troop embarkation was scheduled, but I would have known. There are no real secrets on an army base. I also knew troops wouldn’t wait for a train in the darkness of a muddy field, not when there was a perfectly good platform. The noise from the fields beyond the railway line continued. In the darkness, in the muddy field in front of me, troops were on parade. I was terrified. Against all logic and reason, I knew there were dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers in the field opposite me. Soldiers I couldn’t see.

I heard a command. Attention! The troops were suddenly quiet. There was a pause, laden with tension, then a bugle sounded. It was the Last Post; the signal the military day had ended. It was also played when a soldier was laid to rest. The bugler stopped, the notes drifting across the field. There was one last command.

“Soldiers! You have done your duty. You are dismissed!”

The field opposite me was suddenly empty.

I jumped out of my skin as the train slid into the station. I took it to the next station and caught the mail train. I spent a week with my family then returned to Norfolk. I finished my time as a solider without firing a shot in anger and, my duty done, went home with a clear conscience. I only have one thing to add, something which might help with the solution to the mystery. Over the last few years I have done some investigating. The camp where I was stationed had been used as a disembarkation camp for troops in the First and Second World Wars. From the camp they were taken straight to the docks to board the ships to would carry them to Europe and beyond. Many of the men sent overseas never came back home. Perhaps it is of significance, perhaps not, but I will never forget what I witnessed in 1952.

∼ RJ Meldrum