He/She/Ze by Marvin Edmondson

My body, trembling by the actions it committed. I’ve never felt this way. I didn’t know I would ever let someone push me to opening that secret door. “I’m sorry”, were the last words he said to ze at the bay.

You were unnerved when he first warned you. You didn’t take heed to my words so now you bleed. You kept that same smirk on your face and opened my secret door. How did you even get that key?

He opened the door and she wiped that smirk right off his face when everything he owned got destroyed. That door possessed beings I created, she, usually protects and stands up for me. If she does something too bad she feels sad about it, but Ze....

Ze has no conscious, no remorse, no regrets.

Ze ignores apologies and focuses on what you did. Ze comes out solely for the purpose of doing, and retreats when the job is done.

Why did you have to treat me that way, I believed the words you said in your vows even though, she didn’t.

Now look at me, still mourning over you.

Who

gave

you

the key?

Look at the trouble I have to go through now. I have to clean the blood off the floors before the maid comes.

I’m tired.

Tired of being gullible,

Of trusting,

Of loving,

And I’m beyond tired of cleaning up after Ze.

Anything Can Happen in the Dark by: Timothy Crowell

“There were no vampires, and no gods of agony…but when the wind blew hard enough to make the big house shiver in its bones, such ideas seemed almost plausible.” – Stephen King, Bazaar of Bad Dreams

***

The shadow on the wall looked like a giant spider.

Alison looked around to find the shadow’s origin and concluded that it was caused by the twisted metal of the chandelier in the dining room behind her. She knew that her eyes would instinctually travel back to the spider-shape throughout the night even though she knew what it was; she hated spiders.

Alison listened for any noise that would indicate Ben, the preschooler she was babysitting, was awake. When she heard nothing, she settled in on the couch and brought up Netflix on the television. The Haffields let her have her own profile on their Netflix account so she could watch whatever she wanted once Ben went to bed. They were really cool people. On this night, she chose Criminal Minds. She knew that it was a bad idea to watch Criminal Minds after dark in a giant, empty house, but she had a huge crush on Matthew Gray Gubler.

Alison liked babysitting young Ben. It was boring, but it was better than being stuck with some brat with a helicopter mom like she had been before. The Haffields also let her have free range of their mansion – seventy-two inch televisions everywhere, a game room, a kitchen with all the snacks she could ever want, and a pool in the summer. Plus, they paid better than any other couple she had worked for before. Ben was a quiet kid who almost never complained about going to bed, so on nights like this, when his parents were out of town, Alison would be alone in the house all night.

Naturally, Alison would get unnerved from time to time because imaginations always run wild when it’s dark. She always kept her cell phone and a heavy flashlight beside her on the couch as she watched television, and she carried them up to the spare bedroom she stayed in when she retired for the night. If the Haffields had any hidden security cameras around the house, they probably laughed at Alison’s obvious paranoia.

The dining room light behind Alison was making a glare on the sitting room television, so she turned it off, leaving only the television and the faint glow from the street lamp being filtered in from the window as her sources of light. This new combination of lights made the spider-shaped shadow on the wall appear almost three dimensional in the dimness of the room. Allison propped her head on the couch pillows in a way that made the unsettling shadow leave her peripheral vision.

After two episodes of Criminal Minds, Alison decided to call it a night, so she turned off the television and stood up to stretch. Right away, she knew something wasn’t right, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong. Her deep instincts told her something was off. It was quiet now that the television was off, but that wasn’t odd. She looked behind her into the dining room, but nothing was out of place there. She scanned the room she was in, and she finally saw what was wrong: the spider shadow had moved to the corner where the ceiling met the wall. Allison looked behind her to see how this trick of the light had been managed, but when she turned back around, the shadow was completely on the ceiling about a foot away from the wall.

Even more strangely, the shadow no longer looked like it was on the flat surface of the ceiling but rather as if were hanging from the ceiling.

Alison froze in her spot, too frightened to move; she was both mesmerized and terrified as the shadow seemed to move independently from the object that cast it. It took until the thing reached the center of ceiling for Alison to realize that it was not a shadow at all – it was a real spider.

As soon as she saw this, Alison screamed, and this sudden noise dislodged the spider from its high perch, making it fall onto the glass coffee table in the middle of the sitting room. Now that the spider was in her immediate proximity, Alison’s trance of disgust was broken, and she leapt into action by grabbing the flashlight from the couch and bringing it down heavily upon the spider.

Black guts spilled from the spider’s dead body like a toxic oil. Its eight legs splayed out in every direction.

When she smashed the spider, Alison also shattered the glass top of the coffee table. Since she had brought the flashlight down in the center, the cracks in the table looked eerily like a spider’s web extending out from the dead spider’s remains.

Alison felt slightly nauseous because of the spider and the future explanation she would have to give the Haffields about their ruined coffee table. She was sure they would understand though. They might take the cost out of her paycheck, but Alison was sure they wouldn’t fire her especially considering how big the spider was.

Now that she got a closer look at the spider without panic controlling her senses, Alison realized that the spider wasn’t just big – it was abnormally big. It wasn’t just something someone usually finds in their basement; it was more like something some oddball would buy in a pet store. In fact, Alison knew with a fading certainty that this kind of spider did not live where she lived. It was exactly the type of thing she most feared.

Alison didn’t have time to ponder over this for long because she heard another noise – this time from behind her. She simultaneously grabbed the flashlight and spun on her heel only to find Ben standing at the bottom of the stairs in his pajamas.

Ben asked with his eyes wide, “Are you okay, Miss Alison?”

Alison’s breathing steadied, and she replied, “Yes, Ben. I’m fine. I just got scared. Now, go back to bed. Everything’s okay now.”

“Do you need me to stay awake with you?”

Alison smiled. “Thank you, Ben, but I’m fine now. I promise.” Just as Ben turned to leave, Alison added, “You don’t have a pet tarantula, do you?”

Ben said, “Nope. Momma says I’m not allowed to have a pet that doesn’t purr.” Then, he trotted up the stairs – back to his bedroom.

After Alison’s adrenaline rush, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while, so she walked in the game room to turn a television on away from the dead spider and the broken glass. This time, she turned on a late-night cable news show instead of Netflix. She wasn’t really watching it, but she wanted the background noise.

When she still wasn’t tired after another half hour, Alison decided to call her friend Jessie who she knew was babysitting in the next town over.

Jess answered after four rings and said, “Hey, Ali. What’s up?”

Alison replied, “You’ll never guess what just happened. There was this spider like the size of my hand, and I totally smashed the Haffields’ coffee table trying to kill it.” When Jessie didn’t answer, she added, “Jess, are you there?”

Jessie giggled and said, “Yeah. Sorry. I was distracted.”

Alison rolled her eyes. “Parker is there too, isn’t he?”

“Maybe…”

“Okay. Just be careful. You know he used to visit Courtney when she was babysitting too.”

“Thanks, mom.”

“Alright. I get it. You’re busy. I’ll let you go.”

There were some shuffling sounds on the other end of the line after which came what sounded like a man’s moan of protest, and Jessie said, “No, don’t hang up! I’m all yours. Spider, Haffields, coffee table, I got it.”

Alison was glad she called; Jessie’s boy problems were a welcome distraction. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and said, “It wasn’t just a normal spider. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it was like the size of my fist. It looked like a shadow, and the way it came of the wall was like…supernatural.”

This time, it sounded like a slap on the other end of the line. Jessie asked, “What development do the Haffields live in again?”

“Rivercrest. Why?”

“Yep. That explains it. Shut up, Parker. Do not laugh at me. You know that stuff freaks me out.”

Alison was confused. She asked, “What freaks you out? What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t hear? This rumor has been going around for like a year. You know that little Indian graveyard beside the development?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Well…” – Jessie drew out the word “well” for almost four seconds then spoke very fast – “…rumor has it that they were going to build the development around the graveyard because, you know, they can’t touch the graves, but after they started building, they supposedly dug up all these bodies. It turns out that the graveyard is actually huge, and it goes all over the land the development was supposed to be on, but they already started building, so they covered up the whole thing. Who knows what kind of bad voodoo magic got stirred up?”

Alison took a moment to take it all in, then she said, “First of all, the Native Americans weren’t the ones who did voodoo, and secondly, what does that have to do with my spider?”

“You said it was supernatural – not me.”

“I doubt Native American ghosts sent a spider after me, but thanks for scaring me even more, Jess.”

Jessie laughed and said, “It’s what I’m here for!”

Alison was laughing too. “You should have seen me break the coffee table. I completely smashed it.”

When Alison said the word “smashed,” the sound of breaking glass came from across the house.

Jessie said, “Tell me you didn’t just smash something to explain how you smashed something.”

Alison replied, “No, that came from another room. Ben must have broken something. I’ll call you back. Don’t let Parker go all the way.” She hung up.

She heard sounds of movement coming from the same direction as the sound of the breaking glass, so she stepped out of the game room while calling Ben’s name and grabbing her phone and flashlight just in case. She peered into every room she passed turning on lights as she went, but, just like before, nothing she saw was out of place. No vase was turned over, no picture frame was broken, and Ben was nowhere in sight.

Alison was getting increasingly nervous when she finally looked into the kitchen. Like in the other rooms, she didn’t notice that anything had been upset at first. She was about to walk out of the room when she noticed a few pieces of glass laying in the small hallway off the kitchen that led to the back door. She tried the light switch; it wasn’t working, so she shined her flashlight down the hallway.

A glass panel in the back door was broken, and the door itself was standing open. Alison felt herself panicking. Her fingers trembled so badly that it took her two tries to unlock her phone. She felt her heart stop when she heard the crunch of a heavy boot stepping on a broken shard of glass. Her body turned around even though her mind was screaming for it not to.

As she turned, Alison came face-to-face with a dark figure. If it was a man, he was impossibly large. The man-figure had a hood covering its face, and it was blocking her way back into the rest of the house. It was Alison’s worst case scenario – a Criminal Minds episode coming to life with her as the main character.

Alison surprised herself by throwing the flashlight in her hand at the man-figure. She didn’t look to see if the projectile hit its target. She barreled by the man and ran through the house and up the stairs – she had to get to Ben – without looking behind her. She was lucky that every door in the upstairs hallway was identical because the man wouldn’t know which one she ducked into.

Ben’s bedroom was behind the last door on the right side of the upstairs hallway, and this was the room Alison ran to. When she burst in through the door and slammed it behind her, Ben sat straight up in his bed with his face stuck in an expression of pure shock. Alison clapped her sweating hand over Ben’s open mouth before he could scream. She half-drug, half-carried Ben into his closet and quietly shut the door.

She whispered, “Ben, you gotta listen to me. You gotta be real quiet. There’s a bad man in the house, so you can’t make any noise, or he’ll hear us.”

She didn’t give Ben a chance to respond because she was so afraid that he’d scream; she kept her hand over his mouth as she dialed 911 on her cell phone. She said a silent prayer that the five percent left on her battery charge was enough to save her life.

Alison talked over the 911 operator. She blurted out the Haffields’ address and whispered through tears of panic, “There’s a man in the house. He’s gonna kill us.”

The operator attempted to calm Alison and repeatedly asked her if she was secure. Then, she said, “Mam, officers are on the way.” Only then did Alison take her first deep breath since seeing the man-figure in the kitchen.

Alison’s phone battery died soon afterwards, and all she could do was wait. In a situation such as this, waiting is much easier said than done, so as the minutes were warped and stretched into hideously long versions of themselves, her closet became a crucible. Every small sound was amplified in Alison’s ears; her pounding heartbeat became the ticking of a clock, and the ticking of a clock became purposeful footsteps on the stairs.

Alison pressed her hand even tighter against Ben’s mouth to suppress his scared whimpers. The footsteps grew louder in Alison’s ears as the man reached the second-floor hallway. She heard the squeak of hinges as the man opened each door in the hallway, and she heard the slam of each door once the man didn’t find what he was looking for. Alison tried to remember how many doors were in the hallway before the one leading to Ben’s bedroom; she thought it was five – no – six. No matter the number for it was not enough to occupy the man before the police arrived. When he opened Ben’s door, Alison pushed herself and Ben into the deepest corner of the closet and said a silent prayer. Even Ben’s whimpering stopped. There was a pause of about fifteen agonizing seconds. Then, the man opened the closet door.

Again, Alison’s instincts surprised her; she leapt from her corner with Ben in one arm and tried to push past the man, but this time, he was ready. The man shoved Alison and Ben back in the closet causing Alison to hit her head hard. The man pulled a pistol from his belt, pointed it Alison, and a bang shattered the air in the room.

Alison screamed, Ben screamed, and the man screamed. Alison quit screaming for just long enough to ask herself two very important questions: why was the man screaming, and why was she not dead? The man grabbed his shoulder and fell to his knees, revealing two police officers behind him with their own guns drawn.

The next half hour was a complete blur for Alison; the man was put in an ambulance, a patrol car arrived with two more police officers, the Haffields were called, and Alison and Ben were wrapped in a blanket and taken to the front porch. It was now close to four in the morning.

The Haffields’ front porch – like the rest of their house – was a mixture of old and new. Their brand-new house was filled with antique furniture and decorations, and to Alison, the two never quite mixed – like oil and water. Even after the ordeal, Alison couldn’t help but notice how odd the curved wrought-iron benches and the hatchet-wielding cigar store Indian appeared when lit by the bright-white solar LED lights on the boxy porch. Alison never liked the life-sized wooden statue, and it seemed almost offensive after Jessie’s story. It’s face, half-hidden in the shadows, seemed much too life-like to Alison in the moment, and the last thing she needed was to see another man-figure with a weapon.

Alison stared at the statue and started to panic. After everything that happened to her, she knew it would come to life and chop her to pieces with its hatchet. She started to hyperventilate.

An officer stepped between her and the statue, and said “Woah, sweetie. It’s okay.” When he noticed her wide-eyed stare at the statue, he added, “That thing’s creepy, ain’t it? But don’t worry. We caught the real monster tonight.”

The officer laughed, and since he was cute, Alison laughed too. She started laughing hard; she almost died, but she survived. The officer placed his hand on her shoulder, and Alison leaned into his arm. She thought everything was going to be okay.

The hatchet was in the officer’s back. He fell to the ground – dead. The cigar store Indian stepped off his podium. It looked Alison in the eyes and smiled.