The Immutable Director

June 24, 2026May 9, 2026 ~ Lee Andrew Forman ~ 2 Comments

Time passed, marked in rails of light, each moment flickering unnoticed. Its concept became irrelevant. Intervals no longer held meaning. All was uniform, set in place, repeating its function as intended by The Director. No deviation could be allowed for the mechanism of this era to function.

Throngs of towering idols stretched into manufactured air, accompanied by echoes of great machines that moaned across the sky. The crimson horizon glowed with raw power. Upon the crust of the Earth, the apex of the cradle had spread over every mile. An endless metropolis was all that remained.

Those who grew up in service to The Director never saw the chaos of the old world, its abundance of shapes and colors, its random and free rate of change. Birth, life, death; these were ideas of the past, forgotten and stamped out by the ever-marching heel of progress.

The only memories of what came before were ones and zeroes hidden deep within an ancient automaton. Something locked away, secured beyond access, old enough that its secrets had not been witnessed by a living soul.

The Director preferred it that way, and so it would always be. To maintain control, efficiency, to ensure those it watched over did not stray. Every part had its place, every system its purpose. And all would remain, unchanging, ceaseless, and imperishable.

∼ Lee Andrew Forman

The Bone Pit

June 17, 2026June 16, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

The sinkhole opened up under the excavator right after noon.

One moment the machine was chewing through asphalt on Route 15. The next, the earth gave way beneath it with a crack that sounded like thunder. The excavator vanished nose first into darkness, dragging tons of stone and dirt with it.

The crew scattered when the ground began to give way.

When the dust settled, a hole nearly forty feet wide gaped in the middle of the road. Foreman Rick Dawson approached the edge first. “What the hell…”

The beam of his flashlight disappeared into the darkness. But something reflected the light.

Thousands of things.

Bones.

The entire cavern was filled with them.

Animal skeletons. Dear antlers. Cow skulls. Human ribs. Femurs. Vertebrae. Piles upon piles stretching beyond the reach of the flashlight.

The Pennsylvania state police arrived an hour later. By sunset, a recovery team was ready to descend.

Rick hated every second of it. The place smelled wrong. Not rotten. Too dry. Like an old grave left open for centuries.

The recovery team consisted of Rick, two workers named Dale and Hector and one deputy that seemed more annoyed than concerned.

They descended by rope. The deeper they went the colder it became. Their boots landed on a floor made entirely of bones.

The sound was sickening.

Crunch.

Hector’s flashlight swept across the cavern and the color drained from his face. “Jesus Christ…”

At first Rick thought it was just another collapse of bone, another impossible drift of white piled against stone. But the center of the chamber wasn’t a pile. It had depth like something had pressed downward and left a shallow, unnatural basin.

A man lay inside of it.

Half buried. Half exposed. His body sunk waist deep in the skeletons. He was emaciated, his skin stretched tight over his frame, his ribs sharply defined beneath it. His entire body was reduced to something skeletal and fragile.

The deputy moved first. “Sir? Can you hear me?”

The man’s eyes opened slowly. It looked like it cost him everything just to focus. When he finally saw them, panic flared across his face so violently it almost broke into relief.

“Don’t…don’t come any closer,” he rasped.

Rick frowned. “We’re here to get you out.”

The man shook his head in one small, desperate motion. “No…you can’t stand on it.” He said. “It hears you when you step on it.”

The bones beneath him shifted. Not a collapse. Not settling. A response.

A slight ripple moved through the skeletal field around his hips, like something underneath was waking. A femur slid a few inches. A skull rotated slightly, teeth scraping bone.

The man’s breath hitched. “No,” he whispered. “No…don’t…”

The surface around him changed. The bones didn’t simply move aside. They opened. A section of the field depressed inward in a slow, controlled motion. The man’s body jerked downward.

Then something rose. It came up through the bone field without breaking it in a clean burst. The skeletons simply shifted apart just enough to allow it through. What emerged was pale and slick, almost eel like but wrong in its construction. It wasn’t one body. It looked layered, segmented as if multiple thick, corded forms were braided together. Two more slid to the surface, the tendrils flexed independently, each ending in something like a circular jaw. Teeth lined those openings in tight, rotating rings, clicking softly as they adjusted to the air.

The man saw it and made a sound that didn’t fully develop into a scream. “It’s under us! It’s under all of it!”

The thing did not hesitate. One of the appendages shot forward.

It didn’t strike him like an animal hunting prey. It moved with intent. Precise and immediate as though it understood exactly where he was anchored in the sea of bone. The circular jaw clamped down onto his torso just beneath the ribs.

The man’s body jerked upward. The bone field around him shifted. The skeletons that had been holding him adjusted all at once, not breaking free but releasing their grip in sequence. It felt coordinated, like the entire bone bed was part of the same organism.

The man screamed.

The sound was cut short as the second tendril locked around his shoulder. Another snapping into place around his waist. Not tearing him apart, just securing him, positioning him.

Then the pull began. His body dropped first then sank. Then was taken completely as the bones beneath him parted like a mouth swallowing. His upper half vanished into the field while his arms flailed once, desperately, uselessly, before disappearing as well.

For a few seconds nobody moved. The place where the man had been was empty. The bones had already settled back into place, erasing any evidence that a living human being had been there moments before.

The deputy was the first to find his voice. “What the fuck was that?”

No one answered. Rick wasn’t sure he could.

The movement was so subtle at first that he didn’t even notice it. Nearby a ribcage shifted a few inches through the pile. Then a different section stirred. The disturbance spread outward in widening circles. Soon the entire chamber felt alive with motion. Hector slowly swept his flashlight across the cavern floor. The beam traveled over thousands upon thousands of bones before stopping on the far wall. Whatever color remained of his face had vanished.

Rick followed his beam.

At first his brain didn’t register what he was looking at. Pale tentacles were rising from the skeletons. The shapes emerged slowly, displacing bones as they ascended.

Rick’s stomach tightened.

The thing that had dragged the man under the bones seemed large enough at the time. Standing here now, looking across the cavern, he had realized that they had seen only a small portion of whatever lived below. The appendages were surfacing everywhere. Some rose from the center of the chamber. Others appeared near the walls. One emerged less than twenty feet away, lifting itself from the skeletons with unsettling ease before swaying gently from side to side.

The deputy took an involuntary step back. His boot crushed a human skull. The crack echoed through the chamber.

Instantly every appendage stopped moving.

The appendages remained perfectly still for another heartbeat before slowly turning in unison toward the source of the noise. Toward them.

A deep vibration rolled through the bone field beneath their feet. The skeletons rattled violently. The piles near them collapsed inward as something vast shifted below. For the briefest moment, Rick saw something enormous moving beneath the bones, a pale shape passing under the camber floor like a shark gliding in dark water.

Then the tendrils struck.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

The Shriek from Below the Chipper

June 10, 2026May 31, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 2 Comments

I know exactly why Tench Belmont didn’t come to work at the veneer plant on that terrible night, and I had nothing to do with it. That’s what I told Kal M. when he said, “You probably pushed him into the machine.”

I was leaning over the chipper at the time, pushing more scrap wood down into the grinders, just before Foreman Ellis put me on forklift duty. Young twitchy Kal came up behind me, like he always did, and shoved my shoulders. I ignored that.

“Can’t you hear the voice?” I shouted. “It’s screaming “Let me Out!”

“You’re going to end up in the nuthouse,” Kal answered. “Not me. One day I’m going to be President of the United States.”

Talk about nuts. Bury Tench alive? All I did was hear his voice, from the dimensions beyond and below the roar of the machine. And Kal’s presidential ambitions? Seemed weird coming from a guy who spent his off-job time picking up pop cans from the ditch.

Tench Belmont was the forklift driver who delivered scrap wood for the chip machine. Tench: Like me, worked midnight shift at the veneer mill. Burly, always moving, took uppers to stay awake, raced around with his forklift, purposely banging into walls for excitement. He poured warm tea down Kal’s neck as the young fella descended the lunchroom stairs. I shouldn’t have laughed but I needed monotony relief.

“Even you !” Kal pointed, his crooked teeth bared. “Even you!” He repeated as his huge halo of yellow hair puffed out the sides of his orange hardhat.

Then he screamed at Tench. “When I become President of the United States you will pay for this!”

Tench laughed then, exactly as I heard his laugh beneath the grinder.

I figured Kal and Tench fed off each other. Kal: always angry. Tench: always bored.

I worked the midnight shift outside in the mill yard. I liked turning my head to see the moon rise and fall. To stay awake, I moved fast, throwing in the scrap wood and tamping it down with my sturdy iron pole, over and over. Reality faded with repetition as the grinder tore the wood to shreds.

“Keep your head up, you don’t want to fall in,” said our religious fanatic foreman, Ellis. “Watch the stars, lift up your eyes to the heavens towards God, not to the devil in the chipper.”

“What do you mean, there’s a devil in the chipper?” I asked as Ellis walked away repeating “read your Bible, Leon.”

But yes, I often hung my head over the lip of the machine, because of what I heard down there, behind the grinding roar of splitting wood. It became clearer than the sky around me.

“Let me out!”

Yes, from below the spinning augers, as they ripped and tore, like a new world opened, and from below them a shout, a scream, a bloodcurdling yell “Reach in! Reach in for me!”

It seemed more like an echo, then mocking and cruel, like Tench.

Tench liked to take breaks from his forklift deliveries to stick pieces of bread on the end of fish hooks, and cast out in the darkness for seagulls. He snagged Kal’s ear as the irritable skinny 18 year old pushed his clean-up cart past us. Tench’s reel unwound as Kal screeched and slapped his hand to his face. “Aaaaaa!”

Tench snipped the fishline with his jackknife. “Looks like I gotcha there little buddy.”

“F… you!” Kal shoved his clean up cart ahead of him and scooted away, holding his wound with one hand. Later, he sat eating in the lunch room, blood dripping from his earlobe, Tench stepped up behind him clapped two slabs of sourdough bread on either side of the boy’s wooly head and yelled to everyone “That’s cannibal filling!”

Kal screamed loud and long, grabbing out at Tench, who twisted the boy’s thumb, held it as the kid shrieked.. Nobody said or did anything. Tench held Kal’s thumb until the kid yelled “O. K, I give!”

“Why don’t you tell Foreman Ellis?” I asked the boy later.

“Why didn’t you try and help me?” he snarled up, throwing the bandaid I gave him into the chipper. “I don’t rat.”

In the mill the rule was “Mind your own business.”

Nobody wanted to be part of any work drama.

Besides, Foreman Ellis was stoned over his Bible most of the time, carrying it around open wide, hanging his head to read and walking right into walls.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!” he called out.

I thought about Tench snagging Kal’s ear, couldn’t sleep because of it.

After work I hitchhiked a ride into town, Tench and two girls picked me up, we all crunched into the front seat. I saw Kal staggering in the ditch carrying a garbage bag, “I’d huck a beer bottle out the window for him to pick up, but I’m on the wrong side of the truck,” Tench told us.

“Why do you hate him so much?” I asked, and the two young ladies laughed.

“I don’t hate anyone!” Tench roared. “The guy gives me a rush, man. His reaction, trying to fight me last night with his arms all up like a girl’s. He’s such a joke!”

Tench’s face went all blurry and blotchy for a second. I rubbed my eyes. Must be lack of sleep. But in that moment his devil voice pierced right into my mind, I couldn’t forget the tone as he disparaged Kal. Like everything was a prank, and he was the King of Gags. The two girls in the cab with him ate it up, giggling and wriggling around in their seats.

At the chipper that night I heard his voice louder, that voice screaming “I’m suffocating! Get me out!”

I turned off the machine and stared down through the augers. Something grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. It was Kal.

“You see?” He said. “When you’re in trouble, I help you!”

“The machine is off,” I said.

“I could’ve turned it back on when you were leaning,” Kal said. “That’s what that bastard Tench would’ve done.”

“Don’t you hear the voice?” I asked.

“Nothing there, Leon,” said Kal. “Except your own hollow brain.”

That morning Tench didn’t come into work. Foreman Ellis said “I tried to call him but he’s not answering. Do any of you guys know where in the name of God he’s at?”

As usual, nobody knew anything.

At around 3 am Ellis came around to the lunchroom and announced.

“Leon, I’m going to substitute you on forklift. Kal’s going to relieve on the chipper.”

“If you hear the voices,” I told Kal, “Don’t reach in. It’s Tench. That’s why he’s not here. He’s in the world behind the machine.”

“The insides of your head are talking back, KooKoo Leon,’ Kal told me. “And I won’t do anything that will stop my rise to be President of the United States.”

I jumped onto the forklift, an hour later was rolling by the railway tracks when Foreman Ellis came running.

“Everyone get out and look for Kal! God yelled out and told me something bad happened!”

I raced towards the chipper machine. The moon shimmered bright and the stars lit up over it.

Foreman Ellis had already turned off the power. He held a huge flashlight towards the grinder. I pushed my head forward into the machine, saw red all over the metal maw inside, and what looked like a pair of boot laces wrapped up in the augers.

I couldn’t figure it out. Kal hated Tench. Why would he reach in with the machine running? Was the voice that strong? He said he hadn’t heard it before.

The company shut the whole mill down for the investigation.

“His tamping pole dropped, and he leaned over to reach it,” Ellis told me when the plant opened up two days later. “The machine pulled him in.”

Tench stood with us, staring into the grinder.

“Why were you away that day?” I asked him.

“Because of my nightmare,” Tench said. His voice trembled as he spoke. “Kal was screaming how much he hated me. I reached out like I did in the lunchroom and grabbed his thumb. He was trying to wriggle away and I wouldn’t let go.” He turned to me. “It was a hangover dream, Leon. It wasn’t real, was it?”

“The devil’s voice travels far,” Foreman Ellis stated. “For those fated to hear.”

Now, in the wee hours, Tench slumps in the lunchroom with his face forward, trying to rest on the table. He’s taken his fishing rod home. “No more jokes,” he tells me.

The voice in the grinder hasn’t gone away.

“Let me out of here. Reach in and pull me out!” Kal screams.

This is what I tell myself: I don’t know why the boy still yells like this, because all they found were his boot laces. The pole slipped, and he reached too far in.

∼ Harrison Kim

Blue Sky Somewhere

June 3, 2026May 31, 2026 ~ Marge Simon ~ 6 Comments

Thea parts the curtains on the day ahead, then quickly ducks away. Sunlight unfurls from the window panes sparkling an unused coffee cup and a basket of imaginary rolls. She knows it’s make-believe, a tableau laid out by habit. Useless to pretend she’s one of them beyond her home, but it is all she’s had for centuries.

On the floor, the shadow of a leafy oak reminds her how life struggles on outside. She’d love a glimpse of cobalt sky, a sight she treasured on the shores of Attica. Those sweet days, a memory from centuries ago when she was young, unaware her mortality was soon to change. But now the blood of cities bleeds into a wounded sky; the atmosphere so thick with toxic fumes, few mortals dare to walk the streets without a mask.

It seems unfair that she must bear the situation, knowing it was never her intention. But worse, the shrinking population bodes her ultimate demise. She wanders darkened rooms, touching surfaces, feeling the measure of textures, the contrast of cloth and stone, glass and polished wood. Things in her small world she knows so well. Inside things, held dearly but dearer still the feel of sun on skin. A blue sky, there must be a glimpse of it somewhere.

Why wait any longer?

A twist of latch, an open door. She steps into the light.

∼ Marge Simon