The Sumi
There are beings not of this world. They call themselves “The Sumi”. Now that you know - they also know of you.
During WW2, Nazi medium Maria Orsitsch made the first (recorded) successful telepathic contact with them. After years of communication at the behest of her SS superiors she was abruptly taken in 1945 and never seen or heard from since. It has become clear that they view us as little more than lab rats to be studied from afar through means unknown to us, possibly powerful psychic abilities or technology unheard of to date. Anyone who knows about them is now considered a threat to their “tests” and someone or something will be sent after you.
In less than a day, you’ll start experiencing the sensation of not being alone anymore, anywhere. As it gradually homes in on your location through time and space you’ll start to catch its reflection or see its blurred outline becoming gradually clearer over the course of a week. After that it’ll start making physical entry into our reality and in less than a month it’ll grab you and you’ll never be heard from or seen again.
I write this so that someone might find a way to stop them, if only as a last desperate act. God help us all!
My Fear of Water
I’ve always had a terrible fear of being submerged completely in water. Not that I can’t swim or anything. My dad made me learn; he said I almost drowned when I was really young.
I was afraid of it because, for as long as I can remember, whenever I am under water and look up at the surface I see a woman reaching down to me with a warm smile, with glowing golden hair and dark blue eyes. Even if its just in a bathtub. It always happened, it was just normal for me, but i never got used to it.
It was unnerving, but also soothing at the same time. She always made me feel like it was okay. I still avoided it, though, because I was just a kid and it was really freaky.
I never told my dad about it as a kid, but I did ask him about my mom. He never wanted to talk about her. Sometimes he even got mad at me for trying too hard to bring it up.
It was only recently that I described this apparition to him. He nearly drove into a telephone pole; obviously he knew something. I asked him, again, about my mom. He still would say much, except that she died when I was very young, and that she loved me very much. He also admitted that her hair and eyes were those colors, just like mine.
So I did some research on my own, looking up her name for myself on my birth certificate and trying to find any references I could, any news clips about a boy nearly drowning, any thing. I mostly wanted a picture, something I could match to my guardian angel.
Today, buried in our town library, I found it.
WINCHESTER: Marie Withie, 28, drowned to death yesterday evening after climbing a razerwire fence and fleeing to a nearby resevoir. A funeral is scheduled by her family for the 25th. Marie was institutionalized just six months ago, after being found “not guilty” of attempted murder on grounds of insanity. Her husband Daniel Withie had acted quickly enough to rescue their infant child when she was found trying to drown him in a bathtub.
The Wrong CD
Alone at work late one night, you are putting in a CD to install a program on your computer. The CD is unlabeled though you remember it being labeled like any other mass produced CD.
You put it into the drive, and find it to have no data on it either. Instead of the normal CD spinning sound, it almost sounded like screaming. It’s obviously the wrong CD and you find the real one soon, and continue your work.
Alone again on another night you need to back-up your hard drive on a blank CD, so you put one in. You hear the vaguely familiar screaming noise, but this time your computer screen goes blank for a few seconds, before the entire floor goes dark.
Now the screaming you hear is not coming from a computer drive, it’s coming from down the hall… and it’s getting closer.
The Black and White Slide
My grandma fell down last year and had to spend time in a nursing home. While she was gone, I was cleaning up old shit she had accumulated around the house so she could get around better, and mom and I could find any important papers.
I found an old (not really old, like 80’s or 90’s) black and white slide. It was of some guy laying in a coffin. Dead, of course. I thought it was creepy because he looked like me.
I asked my mom if she knew who it was. She said “It’s you.” (she was joking) Then she looked at it and her eyes got huge and she started crying and hugged me and said she was sorry she made that joke. I said “It doesn’t look like anyone BUT me, does it?” and she said “no, it really doesn’t.”
Gramma doesn’t remember anything about the slide. I still have it. I shit you not….it looks like me. Just like me.
The Missing Village
In November 1930, Joe Labelle, a Canadian fur trapper, snowshoed into a thriving Eskimo fishing village situated on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in Canada. Labelle was greeted with an eerie silence. He thought this was very strange because the fishing village was a noisy settlement with 2,000 Eskimos milling back and forth to their kayaks. But there wasn’t a soul about. Labelle visited each of the Eskimo huts and fish storehouses but none of the villagers was anywhere to be seen. Labelle saw a flickering fire in the distance and approached it gingerly, sensing something evil was afoot on this moonlit night. Upon the fire was a smoldering pot of blackened stew. To make matters more mysterious, Labelle saw that not a single human track had left the settlement.
Labelle knew something bizarre had happened to the 2,000 people, and so he ran non-stop to the nearest telegraph office and sent a message about his findings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties turned up hours later, and they too were baffled by the mass vanishing act. An enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers, but they were never found, and the search party unearthed some strange findings. All the sleigh dogs that had belonged to the Eskimos were found buried 12 feet under a snowdrift at the perimeter of the camp. All of them had starved to death. The search party also established that all the Eskimos’ provisions and food had been left in their huts, which didn’t make any sense at all. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves were empty. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as iron.
Later on that unearthly silent night, the Mounties watched in awe as a strange blue glow lit up the horizon. The eerie radiance was not the northern lights, but seemed steady and artificial. As the Mounties watched, the light pulsated then faded. All the newspapers of the world reported the baffling disappearance of the 2,000 Eskimos, although many believed that a rational explanation would eventually come to light, but the Anjikuni mass disappearance is still unsolved.
The Ever Burning Bulb
In a fire station in California, there is a light bulb that is always on and has never, ever burned out. If you read Numbers 16:41-45 from a King James Bible (other versions don’t work) in the same room as this light bulb, the light bulb will dim significantly. If you keep reading until Numbers 16:48, the light bulb goes back to its original brightness.
The trick is, if you hesitate too long while the lights are dim, you start seeing a weird lightshow in front of your eyes, it is most similar to what happens when you rub your eyes for a long time while they are closed.
If you wait for still longer, the lightshow starts forming patterns, like circles and triangles. Still longer, and the lightshow starts to form words. The people that have read these words are reluctant to talk about it, but are often obsessed with the year 2112 and are very interested in what countries are producing biological weapons…
A Child's Eyes
Every child fears under their bed. If they don’t, they fear the closet, or maybe that little crack in the almost closed door.
Scientists know that children are more perceptive, they see things adults don’t. They aren’t yet tethered into only accepting what society wants them to accept. They see what is truly there.
They see the monsters.
If you were to borrow a child’s eyes and see through them for a night, you would go insane. To be able to see what you only dimly remember, burrowing into your covers while wearing those train pajamas, hoping to a God you can barely comprehend that “it” doesn’t see you back…would drive an adult crazy. Because Adults forget the rules.
1) Cover yourself. If you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Even if it makes it harder to breathe.
2) Don’t make a noise. Every whimper can lead to destruction.
3) Don’t move. It attracts their attention.
4) Only light can make them go away. Bright light. Flashlights make it worse.
Teens are caught in the middle. They still feel what’s there, but they cannot see… and they forget the rules….
Why do you think there are so many insomniacs typing at their computers, subconsciously praying the light from their monitor will be enough to keep them away?
It’s not. Now look behind you with a child’s eyes and try not to scream.
The Tracing
Next time when you’re lying in bed and the moon is new, when you’re at the moment where you’re almost asleep and your eyes are closed…try listening for the sounds. More specifically, sounds that shouldn’t exist in our realm. At this point, you’ll notice the world around you change, but don’t you dare open your eyes or make any movements.
If you lay right where you are, with your eyes closed, you’ll feel something trace a finger, a claw, or perhaps something even worse, across your forehead. The moment it stops tracing, you’ll wake up and it will be morning. Within that new week, you will die.
However, depending on what was traced on your head, you’ll either enter a paradise of a world, or you’ll enter an evil world of torture.
So…do you want to find out what’s on the other side?
Now what was I just doing?
You don’t know it, but someone has been removed from your life. They haven’t died, they haven’t moved, they have simply ceased to be from present future and history. However you still know they were there, you faintly recall broken memories of someone else there, someone who should have been there but you think you’re crazy. You go to do something, but you can’t remember what …
It was them, they wanted to talk to you.
The Cabinet
Every family in every town in every country on every continent has one. It’s a cabinet, not particularly odd, not out of place. The paint was peeling a bit on the corners and the knob was a bit loose. The inside smelled like dust and the paint wasn’t the same as the kitchen walls.
You hid in there once during a game of hide ‘n’ seek.
No one told you it doesn’t open back into your reality. Don’t worry, you can’t tell the difference.
But everyone misses you.
The Letters
You were out of town for the weekend. When you came back to your apartment, your mailbox was stuffed full. At least 30 letters. Letters with no return address, several of them felt soggy and heavy, as though they were recently wet, or perhaps contained a liquid. All of the letters have your name and address written on them, and many of them had your name scratched all over them in red in. They don’t smell nice, they smell like rotting meat and old garbage and you’re reluctant to take them back to your room, but curiosity gets the better of you. You manage to cart them all back to your room, you dump them in your kitchenette sink because you don’t want them smelling up the rest of the apartment.
You grab one that doesn’t seem damp and isn’t covered with writing, and open it up. There’s pictures inside. Pictures of people you don’t know, with their eyes torn out, teeth missing, unhinged jaws hanging open, throats ripped out. You’re horrified and yet you can’t help but wonder what’s in the rest of the letters. You open more, and more to discover increasingly gruesome photos of dead people. Piles of bodies with limps missing, splayed open corpses on operating tables with their vital organs removed, hanged bodies that have been gutted and bled dry. Some of the soggy letters had blood and other fluids in them.
The more letters you open, the more you notice that not all of the people are strangers. Some of them were people you see at work, others people you went to high school with. By the time you get to the last few letters, the pictures are of the mutilated bodies of your close friends and family members.
Eventually you reach the last letter. You don’t want to know what’s in it, but it’s not like you have a choice now. You peel the letter open, and it’s a picture of yourself. Not dead, eyes intact, no limbs missing. It’s a picture of you entering your apartment building earlier that day, shortly before you collected your disgusting letters.
As you hear a door elsewhere in your apartment open, you black out.
The Belgian Tribe
My grandfather served in the European Theater of Operations during WWII, an experience he rarely talks much about. I’ve only managed to coax one story out of him.
He and a low-ranking officer (granddad was an enlisted man) were travelling by jeep somewhere in Belgium with a cache of much-needed ammunition. Taking a wrong turn on an unpaved road they first became lost, then began to run low on fuel. They sought to ask some locals for help, as the Belgians were highly sympathetic to the Allied effort.
They spied a small hamlet, made up of fewer than a dozen thatched huts, and began walking towards it. They were met halfway by a group of three men dressed mostly in animal skins, all of whom spoke angrily in a language neither of them understood (not French, not German, and certainly not English).
Negotiations proved futile, and one of the three drew a small rusty knife. The Lieutenant drew his .45 sidearm in return and killed the man when he rushed at them as if to attack. This act scared the other two off.
Eventually they repaired the jeep themselves and found their way back to base by the next day. A report was filed, but not much made of it. The following winter the Lieutenant was killed in an artillery barrage, making my grandfather the only known living witness to the event.
Now what’s interesting is what reminded him of the story: we were watching a documentary on the development of language, this one specifically about the Saxon tongue, which thousands of years ago developed into languages like German and English. Granddad remarked how much it sounded like the words he’d heard that day.
One of Them
Any night, around 10 or 11 pm, take yourself to a flat, open area where you can walk in a straight line for two minutes or so without running into anything. Once there, face in the direction you plan to walk, with your arms at your sides and your hands relaxed. Close your eyes, and take a deep breath. At precisely 11:09 and 20 seconds, start walking. Be sure to take one step every second, no more, no less. Do not open your eyes, and do not hesitate. Count your steps in your head as you go. On the one hundred and eleventh step, say the word “One” out loud, and stop. Your breath will catch in your throat, and your hair will stand on end. For the next ten seconds, you will be unable to move a single muscle in your body, no matter how hard you try. After these ten seconds, you will be able to move and breathe again – however, you will then start to feel the sensation of cold metal claws seizing each of your fingers by the base and plucking them clean off of your hand. It will not hurt. You will surely be horrified, but do not open your eyes, and do not move. If you move or open your eyes, all that anyone will ever find of you is your two fingerless hands, severed cleanly at the wrist. Once the claws have stopped, and all of your fingers have been plucked off, stay still for another ten seconds. It may help to count. After these ten seconds have passed, you may open your eyes. You will find that your fingers are still quite firmly attached to your hands. Go home immediately, and go directly to bed. Speak to no one for the rest of the night, and enter no building that you do not consider your home.
The next day, you will have become One of Them. Once per day, as long as there is even a sliver of sunlight, you may point at someone and speak the word “One.” That night, he will face the same trial that you faced. If you see that person the next day, you will know that he, too, has become One of Them. If not, then do not be alarmed if you do not feel hungry the rest of the day.
The Mission
There are exactly 17 people on this earth fated to kill you. If you somehow manage to avoid these 17 people during your lifetime, you are taken to a place of monumental beauty where you are stripped of all clothing and branded on the space just above your navel with a name. When you are sent back to earth, it’s your mission to kill the person branded on you.
Polybius
In Portland, Oregon in 1981, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs, something of a rarity at the time. This game was called “Polybius”. The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and queues formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects — amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and suicide appearing as having been caused by the game in various versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist.
The Antarctic Bar
At the bottom of a 50-meter high glacier, exactly two kilometers from Antarctica, lies the frozen remains of a long-forgotten civilization. The exact location of the glacier is unknown, only that it is two kilometers from the shore of Antarctica. Upon finding said glacier, one is to approach it on the snowbank and touch the side of the ice with the palm of their hand. The important thing here is to touch it with your bare skin. If you hold your hand on the ice for 5 minutes then speak the words, “I see and believe.” you will seemingly disappear from existence, your whole life erased from memory and transcripts. What happens next, you are in a rather swanky 80s cocktail bar, but there are a few stipulations: You must live the next 50 years in this bar; you are granted 5 free drinks from the bartender, no more. If you attempt to break the quota of drinks, you are immediately executed on the spot by the rather brawny bouncers. If you manage to wait the whole 50 years, you will reappear in your original life, and granted one single wish, which you must take immediately on your return. Needless to say, very few have actually waited the 50 years.
The Med Student
An unpopular young med. student had been particularly annoying one day and some of her classmates decided to play a trick on her. They snuck into her room after she’d gone to bed and placed an amputated arm into bed with her. The next morning they anxiously awaited her reaction but got none. Eventually they went up to check on her and found her sitting on the bed, moaning and gurgling as she gnawed on the arm.
The Man at the Crossroads
There is a certain road near the Everglades in Florida, which, if you drive down it alone in the rain, day or night, you will suddenly have a very real feeling of being completely lost. Your radio will turn to static, your CDs will skip, and your tapes will play slower than normal. If you try to find a map in your car, it will have mysteriously vanished. If you continue forward down the road for more than a minute, you will find that you can’t turn around, and everything behind you is pitch dark. There are no other roads and no other cars. Continuing down the road, you will come upon a fork with no signposts. In the middle of the fork, there will be a man, covered head to foot in various pieces of clothing. The only skin visible will be around his eyes, which will be bright green. You must get out of your car, but do not turn it off or close the door after you. You must approach the man, but stop at least three feet away. You must stand there silently, waiting for him to speak first. If you break the silence first, you will find yourself back on a main road, but you will die within 24 hours. If he speaks first, he will ask you what you require. Tell him that you need to know which road will take you to your destination. He will then ask you what you will offer him in exchange for his assistance.
If you offer him a ride, he and your car will disappear, and you will become the new guardian of the crossroad. If you offer him an umbrella, he will take it and stab you through the chest. If you offer him your love, he will take your heart still beating from your chest and eat it, condemning you to walk the earth without a heart, insane from the pain and loss. You must offer him your loyalty and kneel before him. If you do this, he will close his eyes and bow in return, extending a hand to whichever path will lead you back to safety. If you try to run from him, you will be dead before you reach your car, and your body will be found back in your car in some random location.
The Classified Ad
Every year, for an unknown number of years, an ad is published in the New York Times Classifieds section. The advertisement is short and lists a seemingly mundane household appliance: a refrigerator, a vacuum, a piece of furniture. A select number of people in the U.S., and indeed the world, search for this advertisement, which contains three keywords seemingly unusual for a simple ad. Once found, these people wait exactly one week for a second ad in the NY Times, also ostensibly a normal–if strangely worded–ad, but combined with the first, provide both a code key and message.
The code, when completed, is a series of numbers, which correspond to the Washington, D.C. Yellow Pages, and page number, column, letter number, etc., and this in turn creates a text message. The text of the message is vague, but contains the following information: soon, a gathering will be held in Washington, D.C. The searchers are instructed to bring a fellow guest to accompany him/her to the gathering. The destination is a very old hotel in Georgetown, a establishment dating back to the time of the founding fathers.
Sometimes searchers are instructed to bring a scientist, such as a physicist or biologist. Other years the instructions are to bring along an engineer or a doctor; the requested person is always a professional of some kind.
The seekers and their guests are admitted to the restaurant on the appointed night only after giving a password, also in the message, to the masked maitre’d waiting at the entrance. What follows after that is unclear and there are conflicting accounts. The general consensus is that the seekers are rewarded for solving the puzzle, and are made wealthy for the rest of their lives, provided they remain silent about what they discovered. The fate of the professionals is unknown.
The House of Mirrors
In the heart of Washington, there’s a house that used to be owned by a family of five. Nobody really knows what happened to them. Their neighbors at the time say that there were no signs of weirdness or fear in the family. The common testimony is that one day there was nothing wrong. The night that followed, there were very loud noises coming from the house, and although people in the area came to investigate what was keeping them up, the windows were blocked by millions of post-it notes, and the windows would not break. The following day, the house was empty.
Nobody has lived in that house since. But people have gone inside. In every bedroom, there is a mirror facing the corner of the room. If you turn it around, it won’t show your reflection. The area you’ll be standing in will be empty. They say that on the rare occasion, you’ll see the person who used to sleep in that room, mutilated and bandaged from head to toe.
The Black Stone
In 1653, Spanish explorers found the ruins of what appeared to be a Mesoamerican step pyramid in what is modern South Carolina. Though the site was far beyond the borders of any known American indigenous populations, it was also of a smaller size than existing Mesoamerican structures and bore an unrecognized form of glyphic decoration. Local natives were familiar with the structure but knew nothing about it.
The Spaniards sought to disassemble the building as a heathen relic and did so, brick by brick, salvaging the materials to construct their own nearby settlement. Deconstruction halted, however, when one brick was uncovered at the core of the structure, carved entirely of black glass. The stone, approximately two feet by three, was impossible to move or even budge by any man or animal.
Attempts were made to dig the stone out from beneath, but excavation revealed that it extended indefinitely into the earth. In frustration, the captain of the explorers fired a glancing blow off of the surface of the stone. The obsidian block was undamaged, but moments after the blow had struck, it silently retracted downwards, sliding downward into a hole that quickly collapsed inward on itself, burying the retreating obsidian column.
The Spaniards interpreted this as an evil omen and abandoned the site, never to return.
Childhood Superstitions
When I was 8, I stayed up late at night watching television. My mother always told me never to turn on the television exactly at 4:44 am. If you ever did, you would hear clicks and heavy breathing in the next room; If you do check, a black shadow with red eyes will glare at you.
They also told me if I wore another person’s glasses, I will see that person’s death. It’s true. I put on my mother’s glasses, and since then I’ve always been a little fearful of my father.
What's in the Darkness?
You might be getting yourself ready for bed, hopping out of the shower at night, or running to grab something before a date when you inadvertently find yourself descending a flight of darkened stairs. About halfway down said flight, the urge to go that much faster jolts into your mind and you immediately obey.
What are we running from that dwells in the darkness up the stairs? Is it simply the thought of darkness that causes us to want to leave the situation as soon as possible? Or is there something else? A darker, more sinister force awaiting us to take our time going down the stairs to nab us and take us with them to their hell-hole? Or perhaps is it a force of good, attempting to protect us from the things in the darkness?
Could it be that every time we feel that urge to move faster the very hands of an evil force are grabbing our back, and because of our sudden speed we slip out of its grasp? Who knows. Just remember, next time that you’re going down that flight of stairs, don’t look back and skip some stairs if necessary!
The Day Everything Clicked
The great geniuses throughout history had one startling thing in common, they all went through a day where everything clicked, everything seemed to make sense, and everything they did from that day on was perfect. This is a very rare phenomenon, but cherish it if it happens to you.
There is an opposite side to this coin, however, where one will have a day that is so devoid of feeling, so depraved, that every day from that point on they will be slowly deteriorating into a physical manifestation of pure insanity. If you start to have one of these days, kill yourself immediately, for after 24 hours you won’t be able to die. You’ll just roam the world getting worse and worse…
The Believers
Belief is a powerful thing. Well, not your belief: your opinions couldn’t be less important. But there is someone, and there always has been someone, who can control the universe by his powers of belief. You see, at any given moment the universe is controlled by what one particular man believes. All things, right down to the laws of physics, are subject to instantaneous change as soon as one dies and another is chosen.
Amelia Earheart?
Disappeared when the new Believer couldn’t fathom a female aviator. Ever wonder why Newton’s seemingly obvious laws of motion took so long to come around? Well, for thousands of years all the Believer’s put their stock in Aristotle’s physics. Believers don’t even know about their powers, and it is flat out impossible to tell who is one.
The Reanimated Corpse
Somewhere in the middle of the Desert in Nevada, there’s a place where, if you look to the west at sunset you’ll be able to make out a tiny, house-shaped structure in the far distance, Wait for the sun to set completely and then you must WALK straight towards that structure without deviating.
As the night wears on, you will hear groans and cries of pain in the distance. Ignore them. You must continue to move towards where you saw the building. The night will seem much longer than any normal night, but if you continue walking until the sun comes up again behind you, you’ll find yourself suddenly in front of a battered, dusty shack. Inside, you will find no windows or doors (including the one you just came though) and in the center of the room will be a body. Reports of the decay vary from recently dead to a skeleton with clothes.
You might recognize the clothes or possibly the face. This body is yours. You can inspect it for as long as you dare. Check it for wounds or clues to your death… check its pockets for clues about your future if you wish. But you must figure out how to leave the room and do it before your corpse awakens. If you make it out of the room, you’ll find yourself back at the edge of the desert where you started. But if your corpse stirs before you can find the way out, you’ll be trapped in that room for eternity while your corpse is allowed to roam free. What does a corpse do with a second chance at life, you ask?
Well, remember those groans and cries you heard crossing the desert? A reanimated corpse has to eat, too…
The Devil's Circle
There exists a spot in all forests, called “The Devil’s Circle” which is ubiquitous and yet nowhere at the same time. You may find it one day, for it to be gone the next. The spot is nothing more than a circle of evenly spaced stones, however, nothing lives inside of these stones-it is just barren dirt. During the day, it’s OK to touch it, and even stand within the circle. If you plant something in it, the next day it will be dead.
The real secret to the circle is if you put someone’s hair within it. Then the next day, they will die. Perhaps they die mysteriously in their sleep, or maybe even a car accident. However, in doing so, you give up your soul to the devil.
You ask yourself now “Is this true?”, but the more important question you must ask is, “Is it worth it?”
The Meteor
In 1990, a small meteorite was sighted in the night sky by the Hubble telescope. It appeared to be on a collision course with earth, but calculations showed that it was far too small and moving far too slowly to be a threat to our home planet.
In 1997, the long-forgotten meteorite entered the atmosphere.
It did not burn away, as scientists predicted; it barely even grew warm. Even so, it landed without drawing much attention on the outskirts of a village in the middle of Africa, on the edge of the Sahara.
Three months later, a safari expedition vanished while en route through the jungle. They never reached their checkpoint, within walking distance from the desert.
A research team in 1998 happened on the impact crater of the meteorite by chance. They detected high levels of radiation in the crater, though they could not identify what element had caused it. They drove to the nearby village to warn the locals of the danger, but the settlement was completely empty.
Not a soul nor a body could be found for miles around. The only evidence of life left, current or past, were the long-abandoned grass huts, and a great number of footprints leading into the sands of the Sahara. None of the footprints could be matched against any living creature on record.
The Army of the Dead
A laundress, newly moved to Charleston following the Civil War, found herself awakened at the stroke of twelve each night by the rumble of heavy wheels passing in the street. But she lived on a dead end street, and had no explanation for the noise. Her husband would not allow her to look out the window when she heard the sounds, telling her to leave well enough alone.
Finally, she asked the woman who washed at the tub next to hers. The woman said: “What you are hearing is the Army of the Dead. They are Confederate soldiers who died in hospital without knowing that the war was over. Each night, they rise from their graves and go to reinforce Lee in Virginia to strengthen the weakened Southern forces.”
The next night, the laundress slipped out of bed to watch the Army of the Dead pass. She stood spell-bound by the window as a Gray fog rolled passed. Within the fog, she could see the shapes of horses, and could hear gruff human voices and the rumble of canons being dragged through the street, followed by the sound of marching feet. Foot soldiers, horsemen, ambulances, wagons and canons passed before her eyes, all shrouded in Gray. After what seemed like hours, she heard a far off bugle blast, and then silence.
When the laundress came out of her daze, she found one of her arms was paralyzed. She has never done a full days washing since.
Pregnancy
Since before I could remember, I’ve wanted to be a mother. It seemed my whole childhood and teenager years were spent yearning for a child of my own. By the time I was nine, I had names–and color schemes for the nursery–picked out. All I needed was someone to make them with. But college was disappointing. I went through a whole string of bad boyfriends and bad father material. Getting on with my career didn’t seem to help much. I realized, though–when I was twenty-seven, and there were no suitable prospects on the line–that, technically, I did not need a man to have a child with. Just a very particular product of his. I found a sperm donor bank, chose the best prospect they had, got out my turkey baster and… well… hoped for the best.
I was overjoyed when my first pregnancy test came out positive. My doctor was surprised to see me coming in sooner than he’d expected. Before I was four weeks along, I had the nursery painted, and the furniture set up. Toys and diapers, bottles and books, bibs and coveralls. I had everything a new mother would need.
I couldn’t explain all the weight I was losing. I kept getting thinner–everything except for my belly. My friends all joked that it had to be at least twins. Or the biggest baby they’d ever seen.
I got weary of the kicking somewhere in the third trimester. And the scratching.
Just one more week until my due date.
I just wish it would stop gnawing.
