By accident, I read one of the pages I'd knocked a notebook open to, as I sat there staring. You know how it is, you just absorb writing sometimes, like that. It looked familiar, but not like the doc's scrawl, which I'd seen often enough. It was a drawing of a finger being, well, reattached is the word, I suppose.

  I remembered, then, that this was Dr. Addario's—as in a medical man of science's home. Of course he had some scientific items that struck me as ghoulish. Why, that was probably a cow eyeball, and the rest might've just been donations—there was a big stink in some of the cities back east about times being so dire that medical students had taken to robbing graves for materials to practice on. Maybe the doc just kept what he could find, and all that, for his sciencing.

  I shook off the shivers and made my way out of the room, but didn't look back at the wall of jars. Just in case.

  Was only two more rooms in the upstairs, and one of 'em was obviously the doc's. The other—well, I tried not to let it bother me none, but it was more wings. This time they were moths, though, full ones, some big as my own head. Butterflies too, in every color of the rainbow and some I wasn't even convinced could be natural, papering the wall. I threw back the curtains to let the dust dance in sunshine, and the walls flickered like the infernal bugs were still alive, twitching and flickering bright sapphire, emerald, and ruby.

  Just a collection, I told myself, like all these strange educated types liked. But as I settled my hand on a door—I thought it'd be a closet—I couldn't set my heart at ease. I gripped the lamp hard enough I was worried I'd crush it, and pulled the door open.

  Stairs. I'd found the attic. Almost done with that uneasy house, and I still hadn't seen hide nor hair of the doc. When my footstep creaked on the first stair, a whispering sound drifted down, soft and gentle. “Doc?” I called up. “Dr. Addario? You up there?”

  Floorboards creaked over my head, and I knew he must be. I forgot everything, all my fears and misgivings, imagining the poor doc alone upstairs for two days after some terrible accident, and ran up to the attic full tilt.

  The first thing I saw was—well, it looked like some thick, elaborate spider-web in the near corner. The window was old and gray and thick with grime, but the midday sun filtered through and landed directly on the mess of webbing, lighting it up with white sparkles like tiny diamonds. I stepped nearer and reached out to touch it. Reminded me of caterpillars in spring, but the size of a man.

  Reminded me of that room downstairs, with all the butterflies.

  Something creaked in the far corner, and the knot in my stomach tightened. On unsteady feet, I got myself turned around and lifted the lamp, so the shadows seemed to squat.

  A low, fat shadow shifted in the corner. I stepped around the stairs and toward it, swallowing a lump to say, “Doc? Dr. Addario? You okay, sir?”

  There was a gurgling sound, followed by that whisper. This time, so close, I knew it for the sound of wings. Not feathered ones, but more delicate, fragile.

  I stepped nearer, lamp still held high. Two more steps, and the light sent the shadow running.

  Dr. Addario was there, prone on the ground, clothes ripped to shreds, pale as a corpse—which he was. The creature that crouched over him, though, was something else. Black eyes like an insect in its human head, a fine mustache, and long, fine limbs.

  That, I suppose people believe just fine.

  It's the wings they don't believe. The wings, far too large for a butterfly, but far too small for a man, like the biggest of all monarchs, thrashing gently behind the creature. I didn't need to get close to know they burst from between his shoulderblades—who would want to anyhow? I do remember that, thought he colors were monarch, like, they were softer—and the underside of the wings was a sickening iridescent purple.

  Beneath the mustache was the real horror, though—or maybe it was above. The creature had one of them long things, a proboscis, sticking out, like some kind of long tube. And it was inserted just into Dr. Addario's pale chest. Right where his heart should've been.

  The creature's wings fluttered, causing the room to buzz, and I lost myself. I must've thrown the lamp, for fire exploded in the corner and I raced down the stairs on tripping feet, desperate and howling.

  They put out the fire soon enough it didn't destroy all the notebooks, but Dr. Addario and his cohort—Dr. Gage, some guessed, were pretty well burned to a crisp. For a while, seemed like I'd be hung for murder, but with all the ghoulish surgeries, reattaching limbs and bits and pieces, plus the testimony of Matt Tabler that the doc had him bring live game most every week—birds and insects, mostly, supposed to be undamaged...

  Well, I came out looking less sinister for disposing of the doc than he looked for the kind of things he got up to. Anyone who argued just had to look in that room of jars to think otherwise. And if they could stomach that, the notebooks would turn them right around.

  You want to know my personal theory, I'll tell you: Man wasn't meant to fly. Da Vinci tried it with his machines and failed. Dr. Addario tried it by making some kind of flying Sphinx, and I damn near had my juices sucked out by it. Nobody talks about it nowadays, and that's why I don't, either—but there's no fear in me anymore, not since that day.

  Except, I don't much care for butterflies, anymore.

  B is for Butterfly

  Marge Simon

  He is dreaming …

  A beautiful woman stands at a window overlooking the ocean. She is wearing a gossamer fabric that ripples along her contours like ascending smoke. She is eating a peach. Her skin is flawless. Her golden curls are swept off her neck in a pearly net.

  Once I was young like you, Robert._ She takes a bite. _My body got the best of me. My loss. You can't fill the empty spirit with food, Robert.

  You're very quiet, Robert. Why?

  His eyes follow the tip of her tongue as she licks the fruit.

  Three times she asks her question. Three times he can't answer. She finishes the peach.

  Flings the pit at him. Disappears.

  He is dreaming...

  He stands before a rolling mansion. A beautiful woman in a red cape much darker than her hair walks toward him. She says something he can't understand, and motions for him to come through the courtyard gates.

  The woman seems happy to see him. She wants him to play with her pets, one is gray and one white. They are Great Danes, but he has never seen one before, and thinks they are ponies. The gray one comes up to lick his hand. He tries to feed it some grass, but it runs off.

  She brings him tea and sugared apricots. They make a picnic by an indigo stream. She says it is immortal, this stream. He doesn't know what to say. He smiles, touches her hand. It is a soft hand, but strong. Her nails are immaculate. He likes this. He likes to look at her.

  Once I was young like you, Robert. She takes an apricot, holds it between thumb and forefinger.

  Once before, my body got the best of me. My loss. You can't fill the empty spirit with food, Robert. You're very quiet, Robert. Why?

  He watches her tongue flick juice from the fruit.

  Three times she asks her question. Three times he can't answer. She finishes the apricot. Flings the pit at him. Disappears.

  He is dreaming....

  Sunlight flickers in and out of the dense foliage as he runs through a forest. A clearing forms ahead. As he draws closer, he sees a beautiful woman bathing in a pond. There is an aura over the pond and the air is alive with pebbled light.

  The woman nods his way and ,smiling, rises from the water At last you've found me, she says. I've been waiting so very long. Before he can speak, she is in his arms. Her hair smells like golden apples.

  Once I was young like you, Robert. It is a whisper. She plucks an apple from the air, nestles it under her chin. Once before, my body got the best of me—

  Her lips tease the apple. Her teeth are so white, so sharp.

  You're very quiet, Robert. Why?

  He watches her teeth dig into the apple and tells himself this is a wondrous thing, this woman, this apple.

  Three times she asks the question. Three times he cannot answer.

  She frowns. I'm sad for you, Robert She opens her mouth. It is a very large mouth that becomes wider as he stares.

  In this forest, he could see no horizon until now. It is lined with razor teeth. In his nostrils, the smell of decaying fruit.

  Once again, my body gets the best of me, Robert...

  C is for Captive

  Pete Aldin

  Alec broke the surface of troubled dreams with a snort, jerking upright in bed as sleep’s soft threads fell away like torn gossamer.

  To his right, Jen snored on, her rumpled hair discernible in the light of the streetlamp outside their apartment. To his left...

  The Intruder was huge, head bowed beneath the ceiling, features hidden within what looked like a long hoodie, shoulders wide enough to belong to a running back. Strangely, Alec felt no shock at the sight of this hulking home invader, only whispered, “Well, shit.”

  The blur’s massive shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “I so hate it when they wake up,” it said, its voice distorted, like three throats speaking at once: one hissing; one grating like a low-budget BBC monster; one a cultured, professorial murmur. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you going back to sleep like a good boy, before... ”

  “Before what?”

  “Well, I’m not going to say it out loud. That would be indecorous.”

  The Intruder raised a hand to toy with his hood. In the low light, Alec caught a glimpse of rail-thin arm and pencil-thin fingers. He rubbed at his eyes, gritty with sleep.

  “I’m still dreaming.”

  “Ah!” The Intruder coiled his fist in a thumbs-up gesture. “Yes! Precisely. Go with that. So lie down, dear boy, and let the dream, er, take you.”

  The arm lowered slowly, forefinger tracking toward Alec. As it neared his forehead, he felt a chill: cold radiated from that hand the way heat might radiate from a grill.

  Finally alarmed–and thinking it was about frickin’ time he was–Alec scooted sideways from the refrigerated digit and bumped against Jen who snored on. He shook her quickly without taking his eyes from the home invader but she did not respond. He’d always said she’d sleep through anything.

  The Intruder bent at the middle and the finger closed the distance. Tangling in blankets, Alec made an undignified exit down the center of the bed and struck his toe on the wheel of Jen’s chair on his way to the doorway.

  Gargling curses, he limp-ran into the kitchen and wrapped his fingers around the biggest handle poking from the knife-block. Intending to return to the bedroom before Coldfinger—he barked a hysterical laugh at the wisecrack—could molest Jen, he whirled around.

  He pulled up just short of crashing into the giant. The hunched freak towered over the fridge and reeked like wet earth.

  He pressed back against the bench, knife up, robbed of the ability to speak. There was more light in the kitchen, what with Jen’s laptop still on and the blue LED microwave clock but the light was making things worse, not better. The Intruder’s hoodie was, in fact, a cloak. And the cloak was rippling–a crawling mass of earthworms, roaches, earwigs and some specks too tiny to identify in the gloom. Worse even than this horror was the face revealed within the cowl—a melted mask, a lump of potter’s clay—shimmering and flickering as if revealed by capricious candlelight, the human features of eyes and nose and mouth a suggestion, as if someone had referenced humanity and with irony.

  Alec managed a kind of strangled squeak. “What are you?”

  The shoulders rose and fell again, sending bugs scuttling and writhing. “This is the problem with them waking–they always want conversation. You’ll be bargaining next.”

  Alec slid sideways along the bench, sweeping a cereal packet to the floor as he went. The Intruder kept pace, silent on the linoleum floor. Alec glanced down. The creature’s feet were as odd as its face. One was a human foot but skeletal and gaunt with nails that appeared to have faces and tiny mouths opening and closing without sound. The other was shaped like a bird’s with three talons. One talon–a snake–writhed and wriggled. The middle one was gnarled and cracked, a tree branch or root. And the last resembled the head of an eel—it snapped at him and he slipped in the Sugar-O’s on the floor, had to catch himself on the bench.

  “What are you?” he repeated, righting himself. He slashed the air with what he hoped was gangsta gravitas.

  “Alec,” the creature chided gently. “You know me.”

  “I…?”

  He saw it then in a flash of insight–or was memory? The one never far below the surface–all he had to do at any given time was scratch the veneer of Now and the images and sounds and smells and emotions would come screaming into center-camera as if it was happening all over again. The wreck. The flames. The blood. The screaming.

  Nineteen years old and just having fun, out driving with Mike. Stupid drunk Mike who never should have been behind the wheel even when sober. Mike driving without lights while Alec cranked up the stereo and hollered in testosterone-inspired glossolalia. The little Toyota appearing from nowhere at the intersection, the pickup hammering into it and sending it spinning spinning spinning until the telephone pole arrested its dance. Mike bleeding from the forehead and nose, slumped back in his seat, groaning…

  Alec sobbing no no no as he stumbled on bruised legs toward the other car. Fire leaping from under the hood. Inside the driver enmeshed in metal, his brains leaking from his head and his clothes dyed red; the front passenger crying and jiggling her door which wouldn’t budge even when Alec reached it and used all his strength against it; and the girl in the backseat–a girl named Jen–unconscious, slumped against her seatbelt. Her door worked, so–

  He growled, blinked it away and put his head in his hands. “Stop it! You’re making my life flash before my eyes, you goddamn cliché!”

  “I’m not, I assure you.” The Intruder had been begun sliding closer, but it stopped and put a finger to its approximation of a mouth. “Although when I say I, I really should say we. But it’s just so complex speaking in multiple composite identities. The pronoun we doesn’t really do it justice. Another problem with conversation. Another reason to avoid it.”

  “Multiple...”

  “My boy, as the story goes, we are many.” Coldfinger’s fingers scraped the chest, parting the cloak, revealing a second swirling mass beneath the creepy crawlies. Across this pale phantasm, faces boiled and swam, climbing over each other as if surfacing for air. Alec saw the tiny heads of lizards and Neanderthals, lions and lambs, marsupials and mammoths, a Native American in battle headdress, a bearded Mongol, a woman peppered with pustules, a serene face in a nun’s habit, a raven.

  He reached deep inside him for every swearword he’d ever heard and found them all, spewing them out in what must have been a full minute of invective.

  “Inventive,” said the Intruder. “I hadn’t heard some of those combined that way.”

  Alec leaned on the bench, panting—all that swearing had winded him.

  “Of course, vulgarity does nothing to prevent the inevitable.”

  With one foot coated in Sugar-O’s and the other throbbing like a bastard where he’d cracked it on the wheelchair, he replied, “If you have to kill me, can you at least stop talking like that?”

  “You mean like an aged theatrical actor?”

  “…Exactly.”

  “Actually, I prefer it. Helps the gravitas, you see.”

  The roach-and-worm cloak fell back into place, covering the ribcage of heads. That cold-radiating finger stretched toward him.

  “Wait, I have more questions.”

  The Intruder dropped the hand and sagged against the bench. “Here we go.”

  “What’s actually wrong with me? What am I, you know, suffering from?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, it matters!”

  “The result’s the same.”

  “I have a right to know.”

  It shrugged. “Aneurism. You worry too much, eat too many saturated fats. Is that your only question?”

  “No. I have more. So you’re… you. Okay. Freaking me out, but…you came here, specifically for me. What’s so special about me?”

  “Nothing. Why would there be?”

  “It’s just that I didn’t expect, well, you.”

  “I visit everyone.”

  “What, like Santa Claus or something?”

  “If you’re asking whether or not I’m omnipresent, then the answer is yes. Certainly. Name me a place where things don’t die. Where I’m not required.”

  Alec shifted and cereal crunched.

  “You’re evil.”

  The Intruder regarded him with forced patience. “I’m evil. I’m good. I’m value-neutral. I’m mediocre. I’m everything and everyone that ever was. You think I’m here out of cruelty? Perhaps I am. We certainly have enough of that wriggling around under here.” He tapped his cloak.

  “Well, if there’s good in you, then let me go.”

  “Bargaining. I knew it.”

  “I’m not bargaining, I’m asking you to be compassionate and let me go.”

  “Go where?”