Damned Words 63

August 12, 2026August 10, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

The Harvest
Kathleen McCluskey

The Pillar was our world.

Its white bark fed us. Its roots gave us water. Its branches held our villages high above the dark earth below. The elders taught us that beyond the crown was only The Empty Blue, where no living thing could survive.

When the Pillar began to die, I was chosen to climb.

The trunk stretched farther than any man had ever dared. My hands bled. The air grew thin. At last I reached its highest branches.

The elders had lied. There was no endless forest of Pillars. There was only ours in a vast field beneath an impossibly blue sky.

The ground shook and a shadow blotted out the sun. Something enormous began descending from the sky.

Five gigantic shapes cascaded down from the blue, their pale flesh creased and lined like living canyons. Dark pores gaped like caves. Fine hair, thick as tree trunks bent in the wind of their approach. They wrapped around the crown. The branches groaned beneath their grip. Our homes splintered. People clung to the bark, screaming as our world was torn free.

I was lifted higher and for one impossible moment, I looked beyond.

A polished wooden table, a crystal bowl. Countless other Pillars with shriveled, purple worlds.

The sky began to split apart, but it wasn’t a sky. It was a mouth.

The first bite shattered half of the villagers. Mountains of teeth crushed wood, stone and flesh all together. Our mauve worlds popped and oozed. The air filled with a thousand screams before they were swallowed into the darkness.

As the jaws closed around what was left of my world, I finally understood why the Pillar had given us everything we needed.

We had never been its children, we had been its fruit.

The Last Tree
Richard Meldrum

In the wind torn desert it was a fixed point, like the stars and rocks the tribe used to find their way across the featureless landscape. It stood thirty feet high, with arms spreading out from the main trunk. The tribe never considered its origin or that it had once been a living organism. In this blasted world, bereft of vegetation and animals larger than a mouse, it was unique.

The tribespeople had no sense this world had ever looked any different. That food was once abundant and water fell in unending cascades from the sky. That buildings once stood hundreds of feet high and machines flew in the blue sky. There were legends of the old ones, but no-one took them seriously.

The outsider arrived uninvited. He claimed to have found the secrets of the ancient ones and wanted to spread this truth to the desert tribes. He spoke of untold wealth and knowledge in a faraway place, where he had seen the remnants of the ancient world with his own eyes. He spoke of something he called forests, where living objects called trees extended green arms towards the sun. He told them the object they used for navigation was a tree, long dead.

Fearing heresy, the tribespeople honored their own gods by tying him to the object he called a tree and burning him. Afterwards, they gathered round the corpse. No one believed the object he was tied to had ever been alive.

Broken Bough
Elaine Pascale

The climb was always the best part.

Roy felt guilty that his job entailed installing environmentally detrimental teleports. He knew that humanity should have learned its lesson when they forcibly evacuated Earth, but they were simply repeating the same old patterns.

He could quit but he needed the job. When he wasn’t causing climate catastrophes, he enjoyed the scenery. And the wildlife was starkly different than that of Earth. For instance, the avian creature that was observing him as he ascended the smoothly barked tree. The creature appeared to be on a nest and Roy hoped it was not guarding eggs as that would make the installation more of a battle than a job.

“Hey bird,” he called cheerfully, knowing that “bird” was not the correct label, but not having a better term to use.

“Hey Earthling,” the creature responded, shocking Roy enough that he lost his grip and slipped down a few feet before righting himself.

Roy realized that the bird, as he now thought of it, was communicating telepathically. It showed him images of the history of its planet; it showed him of the destruction to come in a very short timespan due to the activities of Roy’s species. The devastation was heart wrenching.

“Now you understand. And now I hope you will forgive me.” The creature left its nest and swooped on massive wings toward Roy. It attached its scissor-like beak to the ropes that held Roy aloft and sliced through them as if they were made of paper instead of thick cables.

As Roy fell, he realized there was no need for forgiveness, and he enjoyed the last few seconds of scenery.

Earthbound
Lee Andrew Forman

When the tower grew to its full height each lobe unfurled itself into reaching extremities, a network of points that would work in unison. Its design was born of life, of hope, of the vast loneliness endured by great thinkers. Their theories would finally be put to work; their ideas would soon find truth…or nothing. No one could predict what answers, if any, it might discover. Only that it would perform its function with the precision it was meant to achieve. It would seek the above, the endless abyss that until that day had been unreachable by all who tried before. The sky would either open, or come crashing down on them with disastrous despair.

When the device had fully formed, it stood ready to serve its designers. A new life, created to search elsewhere for that very thing. It listened to the points of light in the dark to see if they would speak, or whether their bodies were cold and silent. It employed the many senses it had been given to look for another voice in the cosmos, another world where consciousness existed.

As far as it could see, near into eternity, it found only one. A small world busy with noise of all kinds.

The travelers had already been prepared, and their vessels ready to launch. They would soon meet their only neighbors in the boundless darkness, whoever they may be.

The Tree of Life
Charles Gramlich

My eyes opened. I lay on my back looking up at a tree with strange, fractal limbs embedded in an achingly blue sky. The tree had no leaves, though it wasn’t cold so it didn’t seem to be winter. I didn’t remember what time of year it was. I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. I tried to sit up and failed. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I strained every muscle but couldn’t even turn my head.

Scream! No sound came from my mouth, but I heard something—a slithering. Needle-sharp stabs pierced my back and legs. Roots gone rogue? My mind went nova; I struggled as I’d never struggled before. My eyes were the only things to respond, roiling wildly. Fluid began to burble, began to drain. From me!

My cheeks grew hollow; my belly shrank until it touched my spine. The trunk of the tree flushed pink; the pink spread upward. Muscles and organs inside me began to liquify. Like a tire with a slow leak, I deflated, while the tree unfurled healthy leaves and beautiful blooms. The leaves were a wet, fresh green but the blooms were red, red, red—the color of a man’s life being leached away.

Under the Fractal Tree
Miriam H. Harrison

Angering the gods was always dangerous. Cliffs and eagles, hills and boulders—their punishments were known to be equally cruel and creative.

He pondered this as he sat in his place, chained to the fractal tree. Each thought led to another, churning on and on with anxieties and uncertainties. His restless mind had brought him here; his ceaseless questions of the gods had forged his chains.

And so he sat here—as he did each day, as he would forever—watching the branches of the fractal tree grow out above him, reaching like unending questions, like racing thoughts, like a restless mind that knew no peace.

Big Stick Chapter One
Harrison Kim

A giant vegetable stick grows from my stomach and everywhere I go I yell “Stay back!” because I don’t want to hit a stranger with my protruding organic matter.

My local grocery clerk and amateur naturopath Jilly Van Loon says the plant is a delusional consequence of my diet. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she says. “You’re a truly green guy.”

That’s for sure, I’ve been eating only salads for years.

Jilly insists I need protein “eat more beans” but look at me now, a healthy companion veggie stick always with me. If it keeps growing, I won’t ever have to search for shade. The main trouble is the measurement. Just a foot last week, now it’s four and I keep it covered with a blanket and carry it about in a wheelbarrow. At the health food store, I transfer it to a shopping cart, and use another one for the groceries.

The security guard approaches and I tell him why I need so many wheels.

“There’s no veggie stick there, man, nothing there at all,” says the big guy.

I understand his concern, but I’m not a crazy person.

“You can’t see it because you don’t feel it,” I tell him. “I know from my lived experience what is real.”
“Well, if it’s real and getting that big, don’t you think it’s almost time to harvest?” he says.

Good point. This thing is becoming truly cumbersome.

Tonight I will stand in the shower, with a knife in my hand. I’ll strike down, slice into my veggie stick, and feel the weight drop.

But the more I think, to really cut it out, I’ll have to go into the roots.

I’ll let you know the results in Chapter 2.

Each piece of fiction is the copyright of its respective author and may not be reproduced without prior consent. © Copyright 2026

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

The Ash Riders

April 1, 2026March 28, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 2 Comments

The first rider did not emerge from the dark so much as separate from it, the outline of horse and man moving undeniably slow as though the night itself was reluctant to release them. At a distance, there was nothing immediately unnatural about the shape. Just a mounted soldier moving at an unhurried pace. But the longer Elias, the night watchman, watched the more the details refused to settle on anything living. The horse’s gait was steady, too steady, each step placed with certainty and there was no sound of breath, no shift of muscle under the skin, no life in the movement beyond the function of moving.

When it passed into what light remained, the truth of it came forward all at once.

The horse was dead.

Not freshly fallen, not blood soaked or torn, but long gone to ruin. Its hide had dried and tightened over its frame, pulling back in places where the flesh had receded entirely, exposing bone along the ribs in pale, splintered ridges. Its eyes were gone, the sockets hollow and dark. They were packed with the same dry ash that covered the ground and with each step the ash lifted slightly, spilling in faint, silent drifts down the length of its face. Its lips had shrunk back from its teeth, leaving them exposed in a permanent stiffness that was not quite a snarl and not quite empty.

The rider sat in the saddle. Back straight.

His uniform had once been gray, though now it hung in strips and stiffened folds. The fabric was eaten through in places where time and fire had taken their toll. What remained clung to him as though it had fused there, not by heat but by years of stillness. Beneath it, there was no proper flesh left, only the suggestion of it. It was dried down against bone so tightly that the shape of his ribs pressed visibly through the remnants of cloth. His gloves were still on his hands, though the fingers inside them had long since withered, leaving the leather collapsed and empty in places yet still wrapped around the reins as if nothing would ever loosen his grip.

His head turned.

The movement was slow, deliberate. It was accompanied by a faint, brittle sound like wood flexing right before splintering. When his face came full into view, Elias felt cold settle into his chest.

There was almost nothing left of it. The skin had receded unevenly, drawn tight across parts and peeling away in others, leaving exposed bone with dark stains that at one time may have been blood. One eye remained, sunken deep into its socket, clouded and dry. It was fixed in a stare that did not quite land on anything but felt deliberate. The other side of his face had collapsed inward, the cheek gone. The teeth beneath it were bared in a silent, permanent grimace.

Ash clung to him.

Not resting on him, but caught in him. Packed into the hollows of his eyes, settled in places where flesh had eroded away and threaded through tatters of uniform. When he moved, it shifted slightly as though something inside of him had been reduced to the same fine dust that stirred with every motion.

He did not stop. He did not acknowledge Elias.

But as he passed the air changed, carrying with it a dry suffocating stench and Elias became aware of a new sound beneath the slow rhythm of hooves. A faint, intermitted rattle – bones.

More riders followed, each with the illusion of order stripped away. Some were little more than skeletons draped in the remains of a uniform. Their skulls were tilted at odd angles, jaws hanging slack as if whatever held them together had long forgotten the proper shape of a man. Others remained more of themselves, though not in any way that made them seem alive. Patches of blackened flesh clung stubbornly to bone, stretched thin and tight, splitting at the edges with each subtle movement. In places, it had pulled away altogether, leaving it too dry, curling into strips that brushed against the saddle or the horse’s flank they rode upon.

The horses were no better.

They came in a steady line. Elias did not step out of the doorway of the old saloon. He remained where he was, half shadowed in the doorway. The beam of his flashlight fixed outward as figures entered its reach, one by one. The light caught them gradually, intermittently, revealing fragments that settled into something whole only when passing him. A horse’s head, a slope of a shoulder beneath a gray uniform that no longer moved like fabric.

None of them looked at him.

None of them seemed aware of anything but the path in front of them. The street around them no longer matched the one from their lives, but it made no difference. They rode as if it existed in its original form, as though the buildings were lit and occupied. As though the night offered something other than loneliness.

Their line did not break and it stretched longer than it should have. They simply rode past him and continued down the street.

The last of them emerged more slowly than the others, the darkness behind him seemed to have taken longer to give him shape. Elias followed with his light, watching as they moved farther away. There was no clear point where they disappeared. Their forms faded gradually, losing definition with each step until they became little more than movement, then shadow, then nothing at all.

Elias stood there, still half in the doorway of the old saloon, slack jawed. His flashlight fixed on the darkness long after they had gone. The buildings around him, false fronts and carefully restored interiors, sat unchanged. By morning the streets would be filled with visitors walking the street, stepping in and out of the saloon, the general store, the chapel, treating it like a preserved piece of history.

A town left for people to look at. A version of the past, arranged and maintained, cleaned up and toured.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

My Rationale Regarding the Virtues of Arbitrary Consequences for Rule Breaking

March 25, 2026March 8, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

Speaking from my own learned experience, a man doesn’t usually think about being a thief. He goes ahead and steals because the opportunity is there. Last week I left my cell phone in the bathroom of a restaurant, on the hand dryer. I realized my loss a few minutes later, went back to the bathroom, and the phone was gone. Do you think the thief thought about the morality of what he did before he took the phone? He thought of the money. Someone else would have turned it in to the receptionist. It would be easy. If the thief knew who he was stealing from, he might have thought differently.

My Mom kept an inventory of all the food. You couldn’t take more than what was allotted. I remember eating noodles with butter and milk. Day after day, the same meals. I wanted a lot of stuff people told me I couldn’t have, like a dozen pairs of pants with fashionable logos on the ass, or tickets for a multimedia Pink Floyd exhibition. So, I stole from the collection plate. I stole from my mother’s purse, from the neighbor who fed me oranges, from the cousins who gave me a job. I had no concept of capitalism or socialism; I knew people had a lot of stuff and I wanted some. When my uncle fired me because I was skimming money from his store’s cash payments, I told him I’d only stolen once or twice, but really, I’d been doing it for months. At the same time, every morning I woke up I cried. I cried because I lived as a thief, I was showing a false self to everybody I knew. I cried because I was sorry for myself, and the rotten cards I’d been given. I felt happiest alone, drinking a bottle of wine down in my secret place, the cemetery where they buried my dad. I drank a lot of wine in that peaceful graveyard. I cried afterwards, and every day that I awakened, from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-five. I figured out I had to change, or I’d be drowning in tears my entire life. I’d be alone, drinking, ripping people off and pretending I was a Saint, then bawling all night like a stupid baby. I didn’t see any future; I saw day by day sorrow.

When I stopped crying, I stopped stealing. Those were two of the best things I ever did. How did I facilitate this accomplishment?

Well, I ceased feeling guilty about everything I did. Life dealt me a lot of bad cards, and one good one. Strategic intelligence. It’s the factor that’s helped me succeed to who I am today. I became rich and wise all on my own, with no academic qualifications. I did what I had to do. I convinced people to trust me.

If you want me to find you something, I’ll obtain it. You don’t ask how I do it, you just pay the price. I’ll get what you want. I don’t feel bad about any of it. Most people are prisoners of their emotions. I’m worse than that. I have no emotions.

Oh, I feel for humanity. We could blow ourselves up at any time. That’s poignant. I have empathy, too much empathy, for the world. But empathy for all is different from love of another. Love demands everything. I don’t have time for the romantic kind. It’s a waste of energy, a distraction. For me, one-night stands do the trick. For the world, all I can do is watch it go by, feel despair from time to time, and keep my business going. If people want to buy my services, it’s their choice. They create their own reality; make their own choices like I’ve made mine. At my job, I do my best, because I have a reputation to consider. If someone crosses me, I am precise and clear. People need to know what to expect. That’s the framework of my reputation and stability.

So, now I hear that you’ve been doing a sales job for me, but you’ve been skimming off cash. I asked for 60 per cent of the profits, and what I’m receiving is 48 per cent. That’s a precise twenty per cent deficit.

You know, if I found that thief who stole my phone, and he confessed, I wouldn’t have done anything to him. I would have given him some tips in strategic decisions, maybe even hired the guy. His flaw was in not thinking before he acted, not considering that it might be more advantageous to him to turn the phone in, to play by the rules. If he knew whose phone it was, then gave it back, he’d be well rewarded for his altruistic actions. You, on the other hand, knew who you were crossing. I’m pretty sure you’ve stolen way more from me than what you confess.

Stealing means you’re breaking my rules. If I get caught breaking society’s rules, I’ll accept the consequences. But in this situation, I’m the judge. According to the facts, you had intent to defraud. Now, what to do about that? Is there a procedure I must follow? No, I do it all on the fly, and I will make a few mistakes, yet with each method come closer to the truth. To learn from experience for next time. I have decided on arbitrary consequences, taken from my self-created moral system, which we explored earlier along with my personal history.

You say I should do nothing? You will pay the money back? That’s good of you to offer, but it’s far too late. I understand your motive, you want to avoid economic and personal pain, and now of course, you are crying, just like I used to. As I understand your sad situation, in return, you will soon understand a bit more about my personal truths. A return of the stolen money, plus a fairly wide hole, drilled through the side of your head, should suffice. All that is required, at least for success with the first step, is that when my associate holds your head still, you spill your banking information forthwith, so we can make a timely withdrawal. As you can see, the drill has a one-inch-wide bit, and as you can hear, a powerful motor.

Excuse me a minute. The thief needs some tissues, and some dry pants. Well, maybe the pants aren’t necessary, he won’t be wearing any at all where he’s going.

Yes, you swindler, I’m glad we’ve connected, in this small way, with candor and honesty. After the repayment of my lost funds, and the small drilling operation, I will consider the matter closed, and I will not pursue your wife and family for further compensation. As a further act of mercy, because of our method of thief disposal, they won’t have any funeral bills.

∼ Harrison Kim

Damned Words 62

March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 ~ TheDamned ~ 4 Comments

The Followed Man
Marge Simon

Upon meeting him, you knew he had something you needed. You were convinced of it. Though he barely spoke, his eyes shone with universal secrets. So you sold your earthly possessions and followed him to a land where it rained continuously, and every meal tasted like mud. But he wasn’t there long.

Soon he was off to the ends of the earth, where all was ice and forever gray, and people lived in strange caves by the sea. You spent the rest of your money on warm furs and boots and traced his footsteps to a hole in the ice. To your dismay, he’d plugged it from inside with debris and fashioned a stone cross at the opening.

For a time, you felt alone, abandoned. Without meaningful purpose, you hunkered there by the entrance in a daze until you realized someone had been following you. When he drew close, you saw that like you, he was very thin. Unlike you, he was very strong and very hungry.

The Worst Thing
Elaine Pascale

The smell was not the worst thing, but it was a close second.

The odor of burnt flesh and hair infiltrated the scorched soil, taking root so that there was no place far enough away to escape the smell.

“Everything is ok,” the Regents announced, “those people were terminal.” Not dying. The Regents never spoke of dying, and all involved with making announcements were forbidden from using words like die, kill, murder, or genocide. “The disease originated with the children, as so many do. And the disease is constantly evolving, incubating inside each new group of youth.” The Regents were the only ones with access to science; they controlled the data.

They explained that it was for the best that the bombs had eradicated the infected.

The Regents monitored those hearing their broadcasts. They had ways of tracking their believability. They had ways of dealing with non-believers.

The smell, being the second worst thing, was inescapable.

It was sulfuric, due to the hot springs that had returned to the surface after the bombs and the floods wiped away centuries of the Earth’s crust.

Nothing grew except for bacteria and parasites. And a few children, including the little girl who sat with her feet elevated, propped on a rusty piece of metal she had been given as a toy. Since children were scarce, games were few and far between and frivolity was highly discouraged. She made the most of her toy, using it to hoist her blistered feet which never healed from the constant moisture.

The smell was the second worst thing on earth, right behind the fact that, despite common sense telling them the Regents were lying, the people still believed.

The Beginning of the End
Lee Andrew Forman

Dark. Cold. Sounds that rang strange to these new ears. That was my beginning. I drifted inert until it was time to feed. The desire to taste, to chew, to swallow what I could catch was all-consuming. Once I’d had my fill, I began to explore. The depths seemed endless, the waterways stretched as far as I dared travel. I found sustenance along the way. There was always a lesser creature to consume. My limbs agile, my mind sharp, I could catch anything.

An ethereal light drew me to a tunnel I’d not traversed before. Intrigued, I broke the surface and found the rest of it devoid of water. I paused a moment, unsure, but the scent.

A scent like no other intrigued me—flesh I’d not tasted. It was different. As I neared a new world, the odor grew stronger. I inhaled its aroma deeply and decided to climb, the grumble in my gut driving me onward…

The Weight of Silence
Charles Gramlich

Sadie barks wildly. She’s looking in the well. I see her backlit by the sun but don’t know if she can see me at the bottom. I know she can smell me. I’m bleeding; my leg is broken. Like a fool, I ventured too close to the edge of the abandoned well and the lip gave way. Now I’m in it. Thank God for Sadie, my border collie.

“Sadie!” I shout. “Get help!”

She’s a smart dog. She understands my meaning. She barks twice, then races away. The closest house is a few miles off. I know the farmer who lives there. He’ll understand what Sadie wants. Help will be here soon. I just have to hold out against the pain.

Sadie barks as she runs. Until a sudden squeal of brakes, I forget that she’ll have to cross the road. A yelp follows, a loud, horrible, terrifying yelp. A vehicle door slams. A human cries out, though I can’t make out the words.

I shout. I shout! I scream! But the well is deep and the earth muffles all. A few minutes pass while I shriek my voice hoarse. The vehicle drives on. Now there’s no barking. And my throat is too raw for sound. I’m alone with silence, a profound and heavy silence.

Immurement
Harrison Kim

We have immured Agrippo the monk into this dry well. He broke his promise of chastity and must pay the price. Take a look, people, at what happens to those who transgress against their holy vows. Agrippo stands naked and alone and will remain forever down this well, secured with bars of iron in the shape of a cross. No food, no water for this betrayer. His body will thin out, and as he falls the maggots will eat his corpse, and his bones will sink into the ground. He deserves this fate.

Several of our wives came to him for counselling and advice. He let sin possess him, then drew our women in to his sphere of lust. These female victims – not only of Agrippo himself but of their own temptations, have been scourged, including our own Amelia. Tomorrow, for their weakness, they will be cast out into the desert. We do this with sorrow. We must follow the holy law. If we do not, we risk the wrath of the gods.

For Agrippo, the monk, he must suffer and by his suffering save us all. Hear him now, weeping at the dark bottom of the well, pleading for water. Let his cries be a message to anyone else who might transgress. We must warn you, do not help him on pain of suffering the same fate.

We have no bad intent. In fact, this immurement is the best prescription for his soul. We have placed the iron cross above him, and he will decline and dry out beneath it until he redeems his own spirit through his suffering and death. With all due respect, it’s for his own undamned good.

Trapped
Richard Meldrum

Bullies always target the weakness of their victims. Mine is claustrophobia.

I was taking the long way home, when I felt hands grab me from behind. I was suddenly powerless, lifted off my feet. Their grins were cruel, eyes wide with excitement.

All I could hear was the panting of their breath and my own heart pounding. I was pushed towards an abandoned industrial site, strewn with bricks and twisted metal.

I was shoved into a large pipe that lay half buried in the ground. The exposed end rose about three feet. I slid to the bottom, stopped by a rusty metal fan. The sunlight was blotted out by the grinning heads of my tormentors. The light was restored when their heads moved away and I heard their voices fading into the distance.

The pipe was filthy with mud, rust and grease. I was coated in it. Panic rose in my chest as the sides and the darkness closed in.

I tried to clamber back up the pipe to freedom, but the angle was too high and there were no handholds. I made it a few feet each time, but I always slid back down to the bottom.

I slowed my breath to try to calm myself, but it wasn’t working. There was nothing for it, I reached for my phone and made the only call I could. My dad.

The rescue was easy and my father insisted on escorting me home. My humiliation was complete. Inside I was burning with rage. A decision was made on that long, muddy walk home. I realized I now knew what the bullies’ weakness was, or at least what it was going to be. Me.

New World
A.F. Stewart

Where am I?

The comforting void vanished. I am not surrounded by the endless dark.

Now there is something else. Something bright that hurts my eyes. My body no longer drifts; the world is solid. A hard scratchy surface pricks against my scales and skin.

I flex my claws and test its hardness. It scrapes, but does not give way.

I shift forward, blinking against the illumination. The second set of membranes drop over my eyes and it becomes easier to see. I think I am enclosed within a rocky substance, open at one end.

Movement. I freeze, watching. Large pinkish blobs appear, bipeds within the radiance, making sounds, flapping limbs.

I am not in my world anymore, but one that lies beyond our realm.

So many strange things, so many questions.

I do know one thing.

I am hungry.

And those pinkish blobs smell delicious.

Once a Year
Miriam H. Harrison

There it was: the sunbeam. Once a year, when the sun and earth aligned just right, that sunbeam would reach her. It would fill the space around her with light, and she would remember what colour was. The reds of oxidizing rocks, the greens of creeping mosses, the rainbows captured in the fragile drops of her cold, wet world. All other days, these things were vague shadows in dim light or unseen textures in blackness.

Such was her punishment for angering gods whose names were no longer spoken, her dark damnation since time immemorial. In the eons that passed, she had wept, she had raged, she had raved, but she did not repent. Even in the longest, coldest months, she knew the darkness would pass. Once a year the sunbeam would come, and it was enough.

The Templar Seal
Kathleen McCluskey

The tunnel was never on any map.

Brother Matthew found it while tracing the crumbling foundations beneath the old abbey. The stone throat dropped steeply, brick lined and ancient, older than the monastery above it. The air that breathed from it was stale and cold, carrying a stench like damp earth and extinguished candles.

He descended alone.

The shaft narrowed until the world became a circle of stone, slick with moisture, pressing in close enough to scrape his shoulders. At the bottom, a crude wooden cross had been wedged into the mortar, its beams darkened with age and something soaked deep into the grain. It stood against the distant darkness like a guardian.

Not a symbol of faith. A seal.

The Knights Templar had built this abbey centuries ago, and they buried more than treasure. Matthew bent, touching the wood. It was warm.

The darkness answered.

A violent gust exploded upward, tearing at his robes as a scream ripped through the shaft. Raw. Inhuman and full of agony. The bricks trembled. Dust fell like snow. The cross burned beneath his hand.

Something struck the other side. Once. Then again.

The beams bowed inward, cracking at the edges as dark fluid seeped from the cracks. A shape pressed against the wood from below. Fingers, a distorted face, a mouth opened too wide to be anything holy.

The seal held.

Then the wind reversed, slamming into Matthew and hurling him against the wall. As he crumbled to the stone, the scream faded into a whisper that coiled through the shaft.

The seal held. It had not escaped. It had only awakened.

Blue in the Blacklight

January 14, 2026November 30, 2025 ~ TheDamned ~ 5 Comments

Rory Dane pretended he never needed the audience. But the truth was that he measured his worth in the glow of the comment bubbles and the rising counter in the corner of his screen. He hiked for the views, sure. The mountains, the cliffs, the overgrown forests but he hiked mostly for the views. The ones that come with emojis and subscriptions or the occasional sponsorship offer. Tonight, after weeks of declining, he intended to climb out of the algorithm tomb the internet had tossed him in.

“Alright, people,” he said as he adjusted his phone and the chest mounted camera. “We are officially entering the Blue Ravine, home of the legendary Black Annis. Hag of the hollow. Eater of children. The blue skinned menace of the Midlands. Or, more accurately, home of bored locals who need a hobby.”

The chat fluttered with laughing emojis and mock warnings. Watch your back.

She hates influencers.

Ask her to like and subscribe.

Rory grinned as he walked the narrow trail between the ancient oaks. The evening was warm and strangely still, as though the forest was holding its breath. He narrated every footstep turning folklore into comedy and fear into currency. The viewer count ticked up, three hundred, then five, then seven. Not great but better than the cliffside camping disaster last week.

“See? Total normal forest,” he said. “No blue witches, no skin harvesting crones. Just trees that probably have more followers than I do.”

As he walked, he noticed the chat beginning to shift. Not the tone, still playful, but the pace. Messages cascaded faster than he could read them. Then the viewer number jumped suddenly, doubling, then doubling again. Fourteen hundred, twenty eight hundred. Four thousand.

He frowned. “Did somebody hack me? What is happening?”

A comment fixed itself on the screen a little longer than the rest. Why is your breath fogging? Rory exhaled deeply. His breath plumed white, curling from his mouth like cigarette smoke.

“Okay, that’s new,” he said with a nervous chuckle. “It’s like eighty degrees out.”

New comments now flood in.

Your skin looks weird Rory.

Is your face stretched?

There’s something behind you..

He spun around too fast, nearly falling over a root. Nothing but trees and gathering darkness.

“Nice try,” he said, shaking his head. “You guys are leaning into the theme a little too hard.”

But the cold didn’t go away. It seeped through the fabric of his shirt. Sank into his arms and washed over his neck like a sudden shadow of a passing cloud. The forest seemed unchanged but something in it felt off, as if a layer of the world had been peeled back.

The GPS pinged an error, then another. The map flickered, showing him in two different locations miles apart before snapping back to normal.

“Okay, I’ll admit, that was creepy.” He was breathing harder than he should. “Probably a glitch. Probably.”

He walked on, determined to keep the stream entertaining but the atmosphere had shifted. The forest around him had darkened, though the sun wasn’t fully down yet. It was as if the ravine had swallowed the light before it could reach the ground.

Chat erupted again. Warnings, desperate ones began flooding in faster than he could comprehend.

Don’t go in there, Rory.

STOP.

Something is wrong with the shadows.

You’re not alone.

He swallowed hard, the cold intensified, like the breath of something standing too close. But he saw nothing unusual, only the half hidden hollow before him. It was a bowl shaped depression beneath a tangle of roots. The sort of natural pocket he’d crawled into a hundred times for dramatic effect.

“Relax.” He told his audience with a shaky grin. “I’ll go check it out and show you it’s empty. This is classic Blair Witch misdirection. I know the playbook.”

The chat exploded with NOs.

He ducked and crawled into the hollow anyway.

Inside, the air felt like the deep interior of a freezer. His breath fogged so deeply that he had to wipe at the phone’s lens, but frost reformed at the edges of the frame. He crouched low, the roots overhead formed a sort of ribbed ceiling that pressed down in the darkness. Something about the space felt wrong. The shadows didn’t simply exist, they layered, like folds of fabric hung too thickly over a window.

His laugh came out brittle.”See? Just dirt and…”

A second voice repeated him, a fraction of a second later, “…and…”

He froze. His muscles locked all at once. He turned slowly. A long, blue hand rested on his shoulder.

The fingers were as thin as bones, ending in curved, iron-black talons. Veins like dark threads pulsed beneath blue skin the color of deep bruises. The hand squeezed. Slightly at first then with a dreadful familiarity as if it had found him before. It held him firmly but not necessarily aggressive, like it remembered him from long ago.

Rory didn’t scream. He just inhaled rapidly, breath rattling into the cold. “Who’s there?”

The chat feed went berserk.

RORY RUN!

GET OUT!

OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD.

It’s her! It’s Black Annis!

She’s right behind you!”

He stumbled and bolted forward, scrambling on all fours as the thing behind him shifted. The roots overhead groaned as something too large to be in that hollow moved through it. Rory scrambled out onto the forest floor, the chest mounted camera catching jagged angles of dirt and leaves as he rolled to his feet.

He ran.

Behind him something crawled, no scraped, across the ground, its limbs dragging like sticks over wet stone. He heard breathing that did not match his panting, it was a low rasp that carried the sound of hunger.

The view count shot up by ten thousand, then twenty. He didn’t know it but this is exactly what she wanted. New watchers gave her direction, new pulses to track.

“Please, somebody…” he panted. “Call the police…please…God…”

His foot caught on a stone, launching him, cartwheeling into a clearing. He crashed to the ground. The camera mount cracked, sending the phone tumbling several feet away. It came to rest at an angle upward, catching Rory’s legs and the huge arc of the valley behind him. He clawed at the earth trying to rise but something seized him by the ankles and dragged him back. His scream shredded the air.

The chat became a wall of horror:

STOP THE STREAM!

Get away!

DON’T WATCH! YOU’RE FEEDING HER!

It’s Black Annis! It’s really her!

TURN IT OFF!

Rory’s legs kicked wildly as he was dragged across the dirt. His jeans tore open at the thigh. Then came a wet, ripping sound, unmistakably real, accompanied by a dark splatter of liquid on the leaves. The cracking sound was short, sharp, snaps like frozen twigs breaking. He screamed, his throat raw. “Somebody help me…God…dear God…” The legs in the frame twitched one, twice and then stilled.

Chat messages blurred in a furious, useless avalanche, thousands of people typing and none could look away. They had become part of the ritual without evening knowing the rules.

The camera lay untouched for nearly a minute, pointed at Rory’s unmoving legs. Then, softly, footsteps circled the device. Slow. Deliberate. Too soft to be human, accompanied by the scrape of a claw on stone.

The viewer count plummeted. Ten thousand. Five thousand. Five hundred. Ten. One.

Just one.

The final message scrolled up.

I have seen all of you.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

The Vengeance of His Evil

January 7, 2026December 28, 2025 ~ TheDamned ~ 2 Comments

Ted visited psychic surgeon Dr. Munstre Croon after relentless daily pressure headaches pounded the side and top of his head. Tad’s own doctor diagnosed stress and tension with possible depression and hypochondria “you don’t need a specialist,” she said.

“If you won’t help me,” Tad responded, “I’ll find my own cure. Pills aren’t the answer here.”

Sally, the janitor at Ellis and Company Insurance where Tad worked as supervisor, gave him Croon’s name. “This man’s a unique psychic healer.” she told him, “He will charge five thousand dollars cash, but he will solve all your ills.”

Tad wondered for a moment why Sally was being so nice. He always criticized her cleaning because she kept leaving half full wastebaskets all over the office and never scrubbed under the fridge. Tad gave her a written reprimand and announced that the next time she forgot to thoroughly sanitize the wall behind the couch she’d lose her job. “But thanks for the doctor tip,” he told her, “I haven’t tried the psychic angle, but I’ll do anything to get rid of this pain.”

Ellis and Company had hired Tad to get rid of all its unproductive employees so it could cut costs, and he’d been firing a lot of people. Nan, the old boss’s secretary was three months from retirement, but Tad dismissed her anyway, “you’re too set in your ways,” he said.

She pleaded and cried “I’ll lose my pension,” but Tad explained that the company couldn’t keep “dead wood.” She picked up all her family photos and ran crying from the room. Sally gave her a long hug and they whispered together. Tad thought “I’ll keep an eye on that janitor.”

Tad’s headache drilled into him as he sat in Dr. Croon’s office waiting for the healer. Eventually, the Doctor appeared, a very short round faced fellow with big sad eyes. “Sally said you have bad pain in the cranium,” he said, in a low and barely perceptible voice. “I’m sure she told you my cost.”

“I don’t care,” said Tad. “No one else will help me.” He was raking in the dough in his new position as assistant to the executive director, so had no problem passing the doctor five thousand dollars in small bills. “Cheap compared to the regular rip off artists,” he said.

“Let’s begin our assessment,” nodded the Doctor, as he carefully placed the bills in a paper bag, and then carefully placed both his hands on the sides of Tad’s head, as gently as he’d handled the money.

“Hmmm,” he whispered. “Please put on these glasses.”

He stepped back and handed his patient some fake-jewel encrusted specs from a gold case. Tad pulled them on.

“Jeezus,” he said. “What the hell is that?”

“Most glasses look out. These are looking in,” Dr. Croon said. “What do you see?”
“A giant grey and brown blob!”

“That’s your brain. What else do you perceive?”

“Wow, it’s pulsating… and there’s something on it!”

“Hmmm” Dr. Croon put his hand up to his client’s ear. “Now what?”
Tad peered closer with his reverse glasses and exclaimed “Something’s climbing around in there! It’s got suckers!” Tad gasped.

“Hah!” nodded Croon. “I knew it! Does it look like a devil?”

“Well, it’s got spines and omigod, it’s staring back at me… it’s got no eyes!” Tad ripped the glasses off as his head pounded.

“Yes,” said Dr. Croon. “You’re possessed with an extraordinary type of cancer.”

“Omigod, Doctor, how did that happen?”

“Well,” Croon took out a huge pair of curved forceps, at least two feet long. “Everyone’s born with a seed of evil, and while some extinguish that seed with good acts, others feed it with bad ones.” He clicked the forceps. “Do you want me to take the demon out?”

“Oh, indeed!”

“The tumour has grown very large,” Dr. Croon concluded. “You must have done a lot of bad things.”

Tad thought of all the hard decisions he had to make in his life. “A man needs to be tough to succeed,” he thought. “Sometimes he has to be ruthless.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have disowned my son,” Tad told the doctor, “but he did marry trash.” As if in response, needle like agony squeezed its way through his eyeballs, and Tad thought of the demon sucking his brain. “Doctor,” he moaned. “I want this to stop.”

“Well,” replied Dr. Croon. “Then we should go ahead with the operation?”

“Certainly,” Tad nodded as enthusiastically as he could.

“Sit right there.”

Dr. Croon took his giant forceps and stuck the ends inside each of Tad’s ears. The forceps fitted neatly over Tad’s head, and Croon moved the points further in. “Hmmm,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen such a huge devil tumour.” He adjusted his tool and tapped the forceps on the table to remove the ear wax. “In order for this method to succeed,” he explained, “You must tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done; get it out there, and the demon will show itself”

Tad thought of all the rotten lies he’d told, all the firings, all the foreclosures and property seizures he’d ordered when he ran a loan company, but those weren’t the worst things. Tad wasn’t sure he should tell Dr. Croon, but he wanted the pain to end.

“I killed a man,” Tad said. “In the South African jungle, when I served in the army twenty-five years ago; he was injured, and his wound became badly infected.”

“He was one of yours?”

“Yes. I was the patrol sergeant when this stupid guy was holding us back from getting out of there, moaning and crying, he acted like such a pussy. It was gangrene, sure, but he endangered everybody with his noise.”

“So you killed him?”

“I strangled him in secret away from the others. It had to be done. The enemy might hear him and discover our position. Also, we were out of morphine.”

“Well,” the Doctor frowned and rubbed his round stubbly chin. “That fellow is the main demon in your head right now; it’s your worst sin, fed huge by all the others.”

He adjusted the forceps and commanded “Put on the glasses.”

Tad lifted his specs.

“See how fat that sin is.” Dr. Croon insisted.

Tad gasped, witnessing the living tumour behind his eyes, and perceiving the demon’s attached suckers pulsating on his brain. The devil twisted its horny head, showing hollow skull bones and the demon face like the soldier Tad killed, mouth slack jawed in the moment of death. Tad saw huge growths and lumps pulsating all over the demon, and the being’s huge gut “all your other sins are stuffed into it,” said Dr. Croon. “It’s feeding now. A good time to pull him out.”

“Get it outta me!” Tad yelled. “This thing’s a f….. parasite!”

“We will,” said Dr. Croon. “Hang on, Tad!”

The forceps moved in, and through the reverse specs, Tad saw the steel pushing; he screamed as the force points jerked and pierced the devil in his brain. He screamed again and the devil screamed too as liquid and chunks of rancid meat poured out of Tad’s ears. He felt the gushing and pouring, an overwhelming sulphur stench, and an immense immediate pain free relief, like the lancing of a boil. He yanked off the glasses. “What in the name of God?” he yelled.

In front of him, a demon formed from the liquid rushing from Tad’s ears. It twisted and molded itself into human shape right there in Croon’s office, and it looked exactly like Tad.

“There’s your devil,” said Dr. Croon, as the coal-eyed stinking demon snarled and leaped towards Tad’s throat. “And it’s coming for you.”

Tad writhed as the demon pushed into him completely, forcing all its matter back inside Tad’s body. Tad convulsed for the last time and his features shimmered back to normal, as if nothing had ever been cast out.

Dr. Croon pulled out his smart phone and called Sally the janitor.

“Hey, Sally,” he announced. “This Tad guy seems to have had a stroke or something like that in my office.” He looked at the paper bag full of money on his desk and said “I’m giving you a discount. You don’t have to pay for the removal of the body, the police will do that for free. I’m calling them now.”

Dr. Croon knew it was a bit of a risk, having the police involved, but Tad looked peaceful there lying with one hand over his heart; the Coroner’s report would diagnose a burst aneurism. Croon picked the jewel encrusted spectacles off the floor, carefully examined the lenses under the office’s fluorescent lights, and secured them back in the gold box.

∼ Harrison Kim

The 6,666th Circle Rotation

October 29, 2025August 30, 2025 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

They still scream. Even after centuries, they never stop. The flesh rots, grows back, rots again. Their throats tear anew. It’s almost musical now, like a choir stripped of harmony. All bound to one shrill note of agony.

I should be tired of it. But, honestly? The pain stains me awake.

Today I was assigned three new arrivals. All of them preachers in life, they swore their souls were flameproof. I enjoyed peeling that arrogance like parchment off of wet bone. Their tongues, once full of sermon, hung in silence from my molten iron. I keep them in the ash pits where the smoke claws the lungs until coughing turns to bleeding.

One tried to beg for mercy. I reminded him of every unanswered prayer, every molested child that never saw justice. I showed him those memories while I shoved his face into the coals and watched his face melt, again and again. Mercy tastes like ash here.

What unnerves me, what I do not record lightly, is the sound I hear when my duties are done. When the halls are quiet and only the cinders whisper, I hear…laughter. Not the shrieks of the damned, but something deeper, older. A sinister chuckle that vibrates through the stone.

We are supposed to be the tormentors, not the tormented. Yet when the laughter rises, even I feel the itch under my skin, like claws testing the limits of my sanity. Perhaps it is Hell itself, amused at us all, kings, demons and sinners alike. I end the entry here…the laughter grows closer.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

Limits

October 22, 2025October 12, 2025 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

Others decide things for me, because whatever I decide turns out wrong. It’s all about knowing limits, and I can’t stop at the edges. I associate mainly with other sullied, stigmatized transgressors. I spent two years at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane, for trying to burn down the Austrian Club. I had a reason – they wouldn’t let me in. I told them I was Hitler’s grandson; they sent me to the street, and I turned incendiary. I splashed a can of gas up against their front door in broad daylight, then lit it on fire. That’s what got me committed “not criminally responsible by reason of a mental disorder.”

Now I’m out on a conditional discharge. My parents pay for my apartment rent. They’re my heroic supporters. I’ve stayed away from illegal drugs and taken my medications. Now I must test myself yet again. Sitting across my kitchen table is escaped Forensic Hospital patient Jared Morriseau. He’s shivering and squirrelling down from a cocaine high. “You’re my only friend out here,” he says.

His face is all over the T. V. after he didn’t return to the hospital from his “Back to Work Program” day job. The stupid staff trusted him. He took his wages and taxied downtown to get high. The hospital notified the police. The police told the press. Jared, who hammered his two room mates to death in their sleep to prevent the end of the world, drinks the coffee I pour and asks “can I stay here a few days til the heat goes down?” His voice shakes. “I’m so scared, Luke. The police are gonna shoot me.”

I’m surprised they’re not watching right now. My biggest fear is that they’re going to burst in with their guns drawn, Jared’s going to freak out and bang bang bang someone’s dead. Even if I’m not hurt, it’ll ruin my progress. I’ll be sent back to the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital or worse.

I have to act cool. Underneath I want to stampede away and abandon Jared to his fate, but he’s my Forensic friend, and there’s an inmate code among us, ”Do not rat.”

“You need to go back to the hospital,” I say.

He raises his fluttering fingers to his face. “I’m sick of being out here.” His eyeballs resemble pinpoints. His hand jerks and he spills his coffee. “Shit,” he says.

I mop up the coffee mess with my foot, using an old shirt I had lying on the floor. “Call a taxi,” I tell him. “Get the driver to drop you at Forensic. Then walk to the gate and ask to be let in.” I take the shirt and throw it in the sink. “I’m gonna go for a walk,” I say. “So that the police won’t get suspicious. They’ll be following me if they’re out there.”

“Thanks,” Jared says.

“No problem,” I tell him. “I don’t mind being a decoy.”

“Who’s gonna pay the taxi fare?” he asks. “I blew all my money.”

“The hospital will. Go to the security guards and tell them the driver needs a big tip.”

“You can’t lend me twenty?”

“I’m broke,” I tell him, and it’s true. I spent my last money on the pack of cigarettes I’m about to smoke on my walk away from Jared.

I hand him a spare cancer stick and he grabs it, fumbles the thing into his mouth.

“I’ll think about what you said,” Jared says. “Can I use your phone?”

“Sure.”

I leave it on the table. It’s another gift from my heroic parents. I’m humbled by my failures, yet Mom and Dad stick by me. All I can do now is give advice to an escaped psychotic killer. They’d want me to run out to the park and call the cops.

I walk down the apartment stairs and into the fresh air. No sign of the police. I smoke cigarette after cigarette and hike along the edge of the river. I stand and hear the sound of the flow over the rocks. A couple of rusted shopping carts stick out of the water. I keep walking, out to the highway and all the way to the airport. It’s two hours of slogging, but it’s a distraction to hear the planes soar overhead, and more relief yet to be in the terminal, to watch them take off and land. I cadge some money for bus fare and coffee off a backpacker waiting for a flight to L. A., then make my long way back.

I hike up the apartment stairs and open the door. My phone sits on the table and there’s no sign of Jared. I hear a knock and its my neighbour Gillian. “The police came by,” she says. “They were looking for you.”

“Thanks,” I tell her, and close the door on her inquisitive face.

I turn on the T. V., with the sound off, and wait for the news. At six, I see Jared’s sallow, black whiskered mug and the subtitles for the hearing impaired running along the bottom. “The hammer killer is back in custody,” say the words. “He arrived in a taxi.”

I’ve done my part. Maybe paid back some of my debt to society. I handled the situation with mercy, without being a rat and calling the cops.

I miss my highs, the rush of feeling omnipotent, the way I did when I thought I could raze the houses of those who dissed me. I take my medication because it brings down my thinking. Normal is drab, grey, and gaining weight. I’m living within these limits because I don’t want to hurt anyone else.

“Don’t let today get to your head” I tell myself over and over.

There might be a meaning beyond my sick existence, perhaps this coolness in the face of crisis, that I can reach and touch and know, and be absorbed by. I will keep it close.

∼ Harrison Kim