Merlin’s Bane

by G.W. Thomas

She wasn’t nervous. She didn’t have a gun. Just a smile.

“You want the book, right?”

“Yup.”

“You won’t get it.” She waved a tantalizing finger at me. I tried to ignore the digit but for some reason it wouldn’t leave my eyes.

“I’ve heard that one before,” I said, pretending to be all ice.

“You think you’re a great sorcerer, a mage of the ancient knowledge, but it won’t make any difference.”

“Why not?” I should have thrown the glass dagger that was up my sleeve. Then and there. And there was that damned “Burning Desert Glyph” I never quite got around to.

“Because you are a man.”

Tumble

by Trent Jamieson

“My Daniel’s out there.” Mother Beet crossed her stick-thin legs, lit a cigarillo, then offered me one. I shook my head, staring into the black hollows where her eyes should be. Black hollows that held my measure, nonetheless, and stared back. Tiny brown cockroaches nested in the right orbit. They bubbled and hissed, irritated by the smoke perhaps. “I can feel him, sure’s the memory of spittin’ the bastard, bloody and blind-eyed, out of me womb.”

I sat, and her smoke-bound mutterings washed against me. Folk like that, their words are weighty. You listen and not without fear.

The Intrusion

by Joel Arnold

Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Confession time. The night I cheated on my wife –

No – let’s save that for later.

The night Mary wakes up and screams “I can hear him! Make him stop!”

“Honey, it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

She sits up staring blindly as I turn on the bedside lamp, “No, I heard him. I saw him. His shadow – like he was over me, breathing.”

“Settle down. You were having a bad dream.”

“No,” she insists. The bed shakes with her tremors. “No.”

“You were dreaming.”

She starts to cry.