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The golden grains glistened in pale man’s disheveled hair; his clothes were tattered and brown with sweat. His wrists bore red welts from the ropes that bound him.  The long rope that trailed from Tasfin’s horse to the man’s wrists would not have chaffed so badly if the man had only walked faster. As the man struggled to stand, Tasfin tugged the rope forward. He had hoped to spur the man on, but instead his prisoner tumbled in the sand once again.  Tasfin shook his head in disappointment.

The pale man was slow, but Tasfin was not in a hurry.  They still had time.

Two men on camels chuckled from atop a nearby dune as they passed.  “Your livestock looks sickly, Tasfin!” one laughed. “How will you ever sell it on the market?”

Such a man would have fetched a large price, an engineer. His cousin had told him the jihadis sold a similar British man back to the company with the seashell on their cars for one million dollars! Tasfin had searched long and hard for a phone, but he had no number, and the ignorant Westerners did not speak his language.  No, this was the best course.

The passing men knew very well Tasfin did not march to the market. He wore the blood-red turban.

His prisoner cried out again in his language, quaking and crying.  Tasfin wondered if he would need to dismount and stuff a rag in the man’s mouth once again.

“Alsahabar!!!”  What was he saying?  “Ala!! Ala!!!”

“Al– Allahu akbar–” the man sputtered, his voice shaking as much as his hands. “Allahu akbar!”  he whispered through tears. Tasfin scoffed.  The pale man had somehow learned the words, but how could “God is great” have meaning to a godless heathen?  Even if the words weren’t hollow, where they were going, God would be nowhere to be found.

Tasfin remembered the day the Imam had forbidden feeding the creature.  It was blasphemy to appease a devil.  Tasfin had been but a child. And now, thirty years later, the grazing routes his people had traveled for centuries were gone. The desert had grown hungry. It ate their grass. It turned their livestock– and their children– to bones.

His wives had disagreed, but Tasfin had watched the last of his children die this year. His daughter’s hair had turned a burnt and brittle orange, her voice cracking in a dry rasp as she tried and failed to cry. Her desiccated husk now littered the desert with that of so many other children.

The old ways were the only way to survive.

In the old days, it was his father who donned the blood-turban and fed the dragon every year.  They fed it killers, thieves, adulterers. This Englishman’s crimes made the others pale in comparison.

The Englishman and his shiny car with the seashell painted on it had come to work on the oil wells, steel spires that pulled the black liquid from deep in the ground.  His cousin said it was this oil that had made the sun hotter, made desert grow, that was killing their people. The English were powerful, but Tasfin didn’t know for sure if even they could control the weather. He did know one thing, however; those wells were poison.

Less than a year after the drilling began, the waterwells ran black–the water tasted harsh, metallic. They dug a new well, the depth of 20 men, but the water there was even worse. The first to die was his brother’s daughter, vomiting blood. He had never before seen cancer in his life, but the chief’s sixteen year old daughter now had it. In the years since the water ran black, his sister birthed only stillborns.  Six.

This Englishman had brought death to his village.  Now he would bring life.

In the dead of night, Tasfin had said the ancient words and let the man’s blood drip in the sacred place where the sands stood still. A promise to feed the dragon.

Azi-Dahaka would take his terrible price, and in exchange he would bring them rain.

“Name!” the prisoner’s voice was raspy, his lips cracked.  He pointed at himself, gesturing in frantic spasms.  “Name! Brian!”

The man scrambled up to the side of Tasfin’s horse.  He pulled a photograph from inside his shirt, offering it with trembling hands.

Tasfin took the photograph, a serene image of the pale man locked in a loving embrace with his family.  The pale man’s homeland was lush and green. Nothing like this dead place.  Tasfin had been one of the few left with the strength to deliver the Englishman. His two wives were so weak they could barely stand.  Without water, how many more daughters would die? Tasfin squinted at the photograph.  The pale man’s daughter fat and full of life. Tasfin’s lips trembled. This man had everything, and still he had come here to take the last bit of life from a starving people in the desert.  The photograph slipped between Tasfin’s fingers, whipped away by the unforgiving winds.

Gold bled to red; the sparkling sands of the desert gleamed a deep orange as the sun lowered in the sky. A dry ocean with patient waves that moved in months, not seconds.  The men on the camels were long gone.  They wouldn’t have come this way.  No one came to this part of the desert.

A dune loomed before the pair, atop it an enormous post shot high into the sky.  White and tapered at the top, gently curved and smooth as bone,  it’s base was deep beneath the sands.  The post had always been there and always would be, tall and impervious to harsh winds of time.  Some said it was the rib of a long-dead monster.

Tasfin dismounted and dragged his prisoner up the sandy crest.

The Englishman’s skin had blistered in the sun, and his eyes were red, perhaps from the dryness of the desert, perhaps from tears.  Tasifn pressed the man against the ivory post wrapping the long rope around the Englishman’s chest and waist, binding him to the stake.

“No–” the man wailed. His struggles, like his cries, were weak.  His eyes betrayed desperation, but his body could no longer fight, worn to the brink by thirst and exhaustion.

A thunderclap echoed behind them.  A chill wind brushed across Tasfin’s face.  In the west, the sun had begun to set.  In the east, an unnatural darkness spread across the sky.  It was coming.

Tasfin studied his prisoner. His body sagged.  Had he passed out?  Tasfin touched the man’s chest.  It wasn’t moving.

Tasfin looked to the east in terror. His turban whipped in the rising winds.  Dark clouds billowed on the horizon, flashes of lighting weaving in and out.

His eyes wandered back to the man, held limply by the rope. Zephyrs of sand whipped around them, and the wind howled.

“Wake up!” Tasfin slapped the man’s face in desperation, but he did not move. He untied the rope and the Englishman fell lifelessly to the ground. The pale man was dead.

In the sky above, the billowing darkness advanced.  Silver scales slid in and out of the soupy clouds, black talons long and wicked tore at the air.  Tasfin had performed the rites, and the Great Serpent had come.

Tasfin’s heart sunk. If the dragon found no offering at the stake, what would happen?

Desert winds hissed their wicked warning.  Air buffeted his robes, tore his turban from his head. The red turban, the promise of rain to his people, spun away, a red snake dancing in the wind. Darkness closed around them. He heard his horse shrieking in terror. Lightning forked in tightening circles, an anaconda circling its prey.

Even as the wind deafened his ears, he heard the beating of powerful wings. Above, silver scales reflected each flash. One of Azi-Dahaka’s heads slid out of the black clouds, it’s cavernous maw great and terrible. What monstrous thing had he called to this place?

Rain, and the lives it would save, demanded a trade. Tasfin wrapped the rope around his own waist, lashing himself to the stake.

“Allahu akbar,” he whispered, and wondered if God would forgive him.

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Mike stirred the chicken in the skillet. It had been decomposing in the refrigerator for over a week, but if he just cooked it long enough it should kill all of the bacteria. Right?

“Do I look fat?” Mike mused to his roommate, pinching his abs self-consciously.

Joe looked at his friend flatly. “Do you even own a penis?”

“I’m seeing Alicia–“

“Tomorrow.”

“Wait, how did you–“

“I hear all your phone conversations.”

“That’s creepy, dude.”

“Trust me, if I could get a lobotomy to make the voices stop, I would. You’re on the phone in the fucking living room. And the kitchen. And in the goddamn bathroom.”

“She likes to talk–“

“Six times a day.” Joe pitched his voice in his best whiny falsetto, “Oh baby, you’re too beautiful for that job. Fuck the office work. They’re lucky to have you.”

“You wouldn’t understand. Long distance relationships are hard.”

“She’s cheating on you.”

“What?”

“I said she’s cheating on you.”

“You haven’t even met her.”

“High-maintenance girls always cheat. They’re never satisfied. It’s like a psychological defense mechanism so they can tell themselves you deserved to be cheated on when they’re boning some jackass they met at the grocery store.”

“I’m not taking relationship advice from a loser with no girlfriend.”

“Trust me, I’d be single till the end of time if it meant I never had to be in a relationship with your girlfriend. I’m traumatized just overhearing it on the phone.”

“Luckily, I could give a shit about your opinion. In fifteen minutes, I’m going to be on the road and on the way to see my boo.”

“Your boo?” Joe made a face at the word. “Wait– in fifteen minutes? It’s almost 10 PM, and it’s an eight-hour drive to LA.”

Mike slid the chicken off of the skillet and onto his plate. “This is the only three-day weekend I’ve had since I moved here, and she wants me there right away.” He shoveled a forkful of chicken into his mouth.

“Jesus,” Joe rolled his eyes as he walked out of the kitchen in disgust. “You’re not taking the 10 freeway, are you?” he called from the living room.

“What do you mean?” Mike followed his roommate in curiosity, plate in hand. “Of course I’m taking the 10. The 8 takes two hours longer.”

“Jesus. At night? Aren’t you afraid of the Killer 10?”

“The what?”

Joe looked at his friend incredulously. “The serial killer. Do you live in a cave?”

“That sounds like a swimsuit calendar, not the name for a serial killer.” Mike took another bite of chicken.

“There’s twelve months in a calendar not ten, dipshit. He’s named ‘the Killer 10’ after the freeway. The I-10.”

“That’s a lot of ground for a serial killer to cover.”

“At rest stops, gas stations, anywhere dark and secluded off of the 10, he bludgeons his victims to death, cuts out their tongue, then cuts their ears off and puts them in their mouth.”

“Why?”

“Fuck if I know, he’s a serial killer. Don’t ask why. He’s crazy. When he’s done, he scrawls a number in his victim’s blood, on a building or asphalt or wherever.”

“A number?”

“A tally. The last one was number eleven.”

“I was thinking he’d stop at ten….”

“This is serious, Mike. I’m urging you as a friend. Take the 8.”

“I like to think of you less as a friend and more like a jackass I live with who has no idea what he’s talking about. If this serial killer you invented was real, I would have seen something on the news.”

Joe guffawed. “Who the hell watches the news anymore? Everyone’s talking about it on Facebook.”

Mike raised an eyebrow.  “Betty White’s funeral has been trending on Facebook more times than I can count. The first time I believed it and almost cried.”

Joe winced. “Betty White? You really don’t own a penis.”

“I’m not making a decision based upon ‘news’ you got from status updates sandwiched between cat memes.” Mike stuffed the last bit of chicken into his mouth and set his plate on the living room coffee table. It really didn’t taste rotten at all with enough ketchup. He grabbed his duffel bag off the couch.

“You’re just going to leave that there?” Joe said, motioning at the plate.

“I’ll wash it when I get back.”

“In three days?”

Mike smiled at his roommate’s irritation as he let himself out the door.

His hair stood on end as the night’s chill ran its invisible fingers over his skin.  The streetlight outside their house had long been broken, as was the light inside his car. Darkness was as thick as soup, the moon hidden behind clouds crisscrossed by the gnarled silhouettes of dead trees. Shadows upon shadows gave the street an eerie depth.

A low grumble faintly registered in Mike’s ears, but he paid it no mind. Popping the back door of his car open, he tossed his bag in without a second thought. He shuddered. He would definitely need to use the heater tonight.

The roads were empty as he found his way to the 10 freeway. Not a soul in sight. Even for late at night, the freeway was oddly empty. Maybe Joe had been telling the truth and there really was a serial killer. Mike shrugged. Less traffic wasn’t a bad thing.

It wasn’t long before Mike found himself missing the traffic. He was driving alone. For hours. Nothing but black existed beyond the halo of his headlights. Empty monotonous darkness. Mike shook his head, catching himself– had he just blacked out? He was still in his lane at least. This was going to be a long drive. A low grumble whispered in his ears once again. If he was going to survive this ride, he was really going to need some coffee. The lights of Phoenix appeared in the distance. Had he already driven two hours?

Phoenix. What a shithole. Did he really want coffee from Phoenix? A gas station French Vanilla cappuccino would probably mean oily dregs in heated vats that got cleaned once a year, refilled by a crusty old woman who didn’t wash her hands. Mike cringed. Phoenix.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head once again; this time he nearly swerved off the road. He was going to need coffee fast. The grumble returned, slightly louder than before.

Mike made his way to the nearest exit. A stretch and coffee. That was exactly what he needed.

His headlights revealed concrete, dirt and chain-link fences– the lifeless Phoenix landscape Mike reviled. Where the hell was a gas station?

The grumble was getting louder. Mike’s eyes lit up in alarm. That noise had come from his stomach. Oh god. The chicken!

Coffee faded from his mind as the all-consuming urge to shit took over.

Fuck! Where the fuck is a gas station! He cursed himself for cooking rotten meat. He was such an idiot! Oh god, it hurts.

A gas station appeared on the left side of the street, on the other side of a median. Damn!  With a rapid jerk of the wheel, he whipped across the road, grinding the bottom of his car with a loud scrape in the process.

Accelerator to the floor, he tore into the gas station and screeched to a halt beside the entrance to the QwikieMart. Leaping out of his car, he rushed to the doors. With a loud bang, they resisted his attempt to pull them open. He tried again. The doors were locked shut.

Peering inside, past the candy bars and coffee, he could see the restroom sign, teasing him with the false promise of release. To the right was a counter with a woman behind it, looking extremely displeased. She rolled her eyes motioning to the window.

Mike hobbled over, using every ounce of his will to clench his anus. He put his face to the steel mesh hole in the bulletproof glass. “Thank god you’re here, I really need to–“

“Just a minute,” she held up her left hand as her right hand finished a text message on her phone. “Okay, go ahead.”

“I just really need to use the restroom. I think I’m going to die.”

She looked at him flatly, as if disgusted he had the audacity to ask to use the toilet. “M-mn.”

“M-mn?” Mike asked in confusion.

“No.”

“Please, I’m begging you.”

“Beg away. The restrooms are closed to the public.”

“There’s a sign, I can see it from right here.”

“There’s another sign on the bathroom door. It says ‘CLOSED’.”

“Please, I’ll buy something… or I can just give you some money or something.”

“Are you trying to bribe me, asshole? Who do I look like to you? I ain’t opening that door for no one.“

“I swear I’m not a robber. I’m not a serial killer. I just really need to shit.”

“We don’t let people use the toilets when there isn’t a serial killer on the lose. No. Public. Restrooms.” The woman pulled a firearm out from under the counter.

“Jesus!” Mike begged, “Please! I’ll do anything you want, just let me use the toilet.”

The woman hefted her gun. “Get out of here before I call the police.”

Phoenix. Police state of paranoid assholes with guns. The city made the national news on a regular basis for abuses committed by its police.

Mike wobbled to his car, his stomach feeling like it might explode. How was he going to bend? “Jesus, I hate this city,” he murmured.

Peeling off as fast as he could go, Mike found his way back to the freeway. He pressed his left foot against the floor of the car as hard as it would go, his face contorted in an agonized wince. He clutched his seat belt in his mouth, biting it and screaming at the same time. His stomach grumbled again, like a volcano threatening to explode.

With a violent turn of the steering wheel, he pulled off into the next exit. He barely remembered pulling into the gas station and parking; the agony in his stomach obliterated all other thought.

“I… I need to use the restroom,” he gasped into the bulletproof window.

“I’m really sorry,” the man on the other side said. “We don’t have a public restroom here.”

“For fuck’s sake, is there any public restroom in all of Phoenix?”

“The police told us not to let people in the bathrooms. Too many drug addicts. And terrorists.”

“You’re worried that a terrorist is going to take a shit. In Phoenix. Why the fuck would a terrorist come to Ari-fucking-zona to take a shit?”

“I don’t know. Terrorists is crazy. You never know where they want to shit.”

Mike closed his eyes and put his hand over his face in agonized frustration.

“Look,” the attendant continued, “there’s a Mexican restaurant across the street that’s open late. They’ve got a restroom if you buy some tacos.”

Mike didn’t even wait to say thanks. In a strange combination of a wobble and a sprint, he rushed in the direction of the Mexican restaurant. He couldn’t risk trying to sit in the car again. If he bent like that, he’d soil himself for sure.

As he approached the restaurant, his heart began to sink. The place was completely empty. It had to be closed. He shook the locked door with all his strength, tears rolling from his eyes. “Please! For the love of god!” he shouted to no one in particular.

His body couldn’t take any more. There was no way this was going to end well. He didn’t think he could even make it to his car. Mike wobble-sprinted his way to the back of the restaurant.

His stomach grumbled again, Mother Nature’s guttural call.

Jesusfuck! Oh god, Jesusfuck! Is that a new word? If it’s not, it should be. I think I invented a new word. Mike made a mental note to look up “Jesusfuck” in the urban dictionary when he got to Alicia’s house.

Thoughts of the urban dictionary vanished as the deadly storm brewing in his stomach churned once again. It was coming. It was coming now.

Mike ripped the shoe off of his right foot and pulled his right leg up through his pants and underpants.  The bundle hung wrapped around his left leg as Mike dropped into a squat.

In a moment it was over. His clothes gripped in one hand, his other hand gripping his hair, he hovered over a pile of shit as his bladder emptied itself. He moaned, then panted in relief. He could feel the urine seeping into his right sock, but he didn’t care. “Thank god,” he whispered to himself.

A disturbing thought interrupted his moment of Zen. How was he going to wipe? Looking around, Mike saw nothing but concrete and dirt. “Fuck.”

Easing the clothes off of his leg, he eyed the bundle sadly. He was going to have to sacrifice his favorite pair of underwear. The pair he always wore to impress Alicia.

With a determined face he wadded up his underwear and began to clean himself. “Fuck you, Phoenix,” Mike murmured.

Suddenly, he froze in mid-wipe.

A shadow moved.

Mike’s mind filled with horrific thoughts of being bludgeoned to death pants-less and in his own feces. Something crept closer, the sound of its wheezing breath loud, deep and unnerving.

He looked around frantically for something to defend himself with. He had nothing but his soiled underpants. The dark figure approached.

An unkempt man with a ratty beard and crazed eyes crept out of the darkness. The man’s chest heaved rapidly as he breathed at a breakneck pace. He reached into his oversized coat. Mike whimpered. He cringed, turning his face away.

“S-sorry. I-I just… I had a napkin.”

Mike opened his eyes. The stranger was gripping his frizzy, unwashed hair with one hand, while offering a napkin with the other. He motioned to Mike’s underwear, brown with his own feces.

“Uh, thanks, I think I got it handled.”

“S-sorry. I-I didn’t mean to scare you.” The homeless man backed away, retreating like a beaten dog, embarrassed that he’d interrupted Mike’s shit.

“No, it’s okay. That army jacket. Are you a vet?”

The man didn’t say anything. He clutched his jacket till his hands went white.

“Why… why are you out here?” Mike continued.

“I’ve seen… things. The things I’ve seen. Horrible. Horrible things.”

“In the war?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

“Not… not in the war.”

Mike shrugged; he wasn’t going to get an answer. Clearly, the man was traumatized. He looked down. Perhaps it was his exposed genitals that had made the homeless guy uncomfortable. Mike slid his pants back on and dug into his pocket. All he had was a twenty. “Fuck it. Here.” He held out the bill.

“I didn’t ask for your money.”

“Take it. Buy a forty. Wipe your ass with it. I don’t care. Let’s just say I have a new appreciation for what it’s like to be stuck out here surrounded by assholes with no place to shit. At least I get to drive my way out of here. You’re stuck.”

The homeless man reached his hand out and took the bill, looking away shyly. He held it close, gingerly, like a girl who had just been given a stuffed bear and a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day.

“Look, I know that’s pretty much nothing. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to you. For whatever it was that you saw.”

A darkness touched the homeless man’s eyes. “I’ll see it again.”

“I don’t underst–“

“Nhuh.”

“What?”

“NHUH!”  Spittle spewed out of the indigent’s mouth.  Thick snot dripped from his nose.  “NHUUUUH!” His eyes rolled back into his head.

Mike jumped back involuntarily.

“I see it! I can see it! There are no birds. Just me. Tweet! Tweet-tweet!”

“Holy fuck, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

“You’re not scared yet. Not yet.” The man picked at his hair, like a tweaker with a nervous twitch. “I see it. I see it before it happens. I see it all.” He slapped his hand against this head, as if trying to bang the images out of his ears.

“Are you… having a seizure?”  Mike took another step back, unsure of what to do.

“Jesusfuck!” the homeless man shouted.

Jesusfuck? I must have said it out loud. He must have heard me say Jesusfuck. Mike wrung his hands.

“Jesusfuck! Three times! Jesusfuck!”

Mike opened his mouth to say something, but his thoughts seemed caught in his mouth.

“The first time, pain. The second time, fear! Jesusfuck! JESUSFUCK! The third time!” The homeless man punched his temple, thick white globs hanging from his nose, froth dripping out the side of his mouth.

“And… the third time?” Mike asked, unable to resist.

“The third time!  The third time! The third time!”

“Uh…”

“The third time… dread.“

The homeless man stood silent for a moment. Mike watched, unable to move.

The man gripped his hair tight in his hand, and looked Mike straight in the face with those eyes rolled back in his head. “Tweet-tweet! Tweet-tweet! I am not a bird. I AM NOT A BIRD!!!” he shrieked.

Suddenly he stiffened, then crumpled to his knees like a lifeless doll. He knelt there for a moment, his head hung low, breathing.

“Th… thank you for the twenty,” he said softly.

“I, uh…. You’re welcome. I gotta… uh, go.”

“Just… try to get back to Alicia. Try.”

Mike’s blood ran cold. How did he know her name? Mike must have mentioned her and just forgot. He must have.

Mike made his way back to his car. He hadn’t found coffee, but his adrenaline was pumping.

Speeding on the freeway, he was relieved to see the lights of Phoenix disappear behind him. That had to be the creepiest homeless man he’d ever met in his life. That was actually the only homeless man Mike had ever met, but he felt confident that, had he met any others, they would have been less creepy.

A blue sign appeared in the darkness.

“ENTERING DESERT. NO SERVICES FOR 60 MILES.”

They need a sign like that when entering Phoenix, Mike mused.

He attempted to take his mind off of Phoenix and the creepy homeless man by turning on the radio. The harsh sound of static filled his car. He pushed a button and the radio searched for signal, cycling thorough numbers until it landed, at last, on a working station.

Christian rock. Mike winced. At least it wasn’t country music. Actually, it was kind of catchy. “Keep on, keep on. You’re not alone!” He sang along in the car. Until the music stopped and the radio announcer, a woman with a thick twang, came on.

“Now that’s such a nice song about turnin’ the other cheek, but when Jesus said all that, it was in a time before there was terrorists. I can guarantee that if Jesus were born again today, he’d be a proud member of the NRA. Let me–“

Mike turned off the radio, wincing once again. He had a headache. He had forgotten why he always kept the radio off on these trips. There was no quicker way to remind himself why he was an atheist than to listen to Christian radio.

The quiet of the drive was interrupted by a low grumble. Oh no.

His eyes scanned desperately for some sign of an exit.

“REST AREA, 25 MILES”

Thank god. A rest stop. No gas station attendants with guns. Just toilets.

Mike pushed the accelerator as far down as it would go. He couldn’t spare any more underwear to use as toilet paper– if he even made it out of the car. He could feel his insides tremble as his stomach rumbled once again. He had to make it to that rest stop!

The world exploded in agony, and he clenched his jaw in strain. Could he burst a blood vessel this way? His eyes scanned the side of the road for another sign.

“REST AREA, 15 MILES”

Fifteen miles? He’d only driven ten miles! It felt like an hour had passed! What the fuck! Mike gripped the steering wheel so hard he feared it might break, and shrieked into the air.

“Count. I need to count,” he told himself.  “Like counting sheep. I’ll count the seconds of each minute until I get there.”

Fifteen miles, fifteen minutes. Well, at this speed, more like ten minutes.

“One. Two. THREE!” Mike shouted as every muscle in his body clenched, trying to hold the diseased chicken in his intestines. “F-f-fooooouuuuurrrr! OH GOD!” Mike’s face twisted until the road blurred, but the car stayed in its lane. “Five! Five-Five-FIVE!” He punched the dashboard in an attempt to distract himself from his pain. He rocked back and forth in his seat. How many seconds are there in ten minutes? “Six! Seven! Oh fuck, SEVEN!” Six hundred. Fuck. Me. SIX HUNDRED. “Eight! Motherfucking eight!”

The empty road stared impassively back at him. Mike screamed the numbers, calling upon every reserve of strength he had. “What? You want a piece of me, you piece of shit freeway? Nine! That’s right! Nine!” Sweat dripped down Mike’s flushed face. If he bit his lip any harder, he’d draw blood.

“Ten.” The Killer 10.

“Eleven.” Eleven victims.

“FUCK COUNTING!” Mike punched the dashboard again, with a cry of rage.  “For the love of god let me exit!“

“REST AREA, 5 MILES”

How had that happened? The counting worked! He was almost there.

Five more miles. Five more miles. He could do this.

“EXIT 60, REST AREA”

Four! Four more miles!

Mike’s tears of pain turned to tears of joy. He might not shit his pants after all!

Euphoria sunk into Mike’s very bones as he sped his car down the exit ramp to the unlit rest area. He parked his car between a Jetta and a beat-up old truck.  The only cars he’d seen all night. He didn’t pay them much mind– he was focused on one thing and one thing only: the toilet.

Mike felt like an athlete finishing a marathon. Fuck runners. My sphincter could probably compete in the Olympics after all this. He sprinted to his finish line: the Men’s Room. Swinging the door open, he was met with impenetrable blackness and the smell of piss and shit. Mike stumbled through the darkness as fast as he could wobble. Of course the lights would be out. Just my luck.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet. It sounded like some sort of strange, nasal birdcall. A bird must be trapped in the bathroom.

A loud grumble shook his stomach once again. There was no time to grab his phone. He had to find the toilet now.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

Mike felt his way to the nearest stall, tearing the door open and reaching for the wall. He grabbed a support bar. Good. He was in the handicapped bathroom. Those were his favorite toilets. They were the most spacious.

“Ew.” Mike winced. The floor was wet and sticky.

He didn’t have the luxury of hesitating. Forcing his pants down, he threw his ass in the direction of the toilet just in time to launch a burning stream of high-velocity shit into the toilet bowl. Gross. The toilet seat was sticky and wet too. And it was warm. The piss must be fresh. Mike shuddered.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet. What a weird sounding bird. It was so close. Maybe even in the stall with him.

His bowels released, Mike sighed in relief. He reached into his pocket for his phone. He would need a light to find the toilet paper. He flicked the light on.

A face! Inches to his right was a girl crouched over something. Her face was red with a coat of fresh, glistening blood. A bloody finger to her lips. “Shh!”

Mike let out a high-pitched shriek and leapt off the toilet, his dick flopping in the chilly air. His phone tumbled to the ground with an unpleasant crack. “Jesusfuck!”

His pants still at his ankles, he dropped to the ground. The sticky wet ground. Slick. Slick with… blood. Like the toilet. He had been sitting on blood. He had seen something behind the girl, on the wall of the stall…  Oh god. It had been a number… Twelve, scrawled in blood. Oh. God.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

Shaking, his hands and knees wet with blood, he felt along the floor for his phone. He felt… something slimy. A slug? He reached next to it and found his phone. The screen felt cracked. Fuck. He pushed the button on the side of the phone, and a spider web of shattered glass lit up. That hadn’t been a slug. In the puddle of blood before him was a severed tongue.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

Mike’s eyes lifted slowly. A girl, drenched in blood crouched over a man.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

His face… what was left of his face, was unrecognizable. Blood oozed from the side of his torn mouth, his teeth scattered around him. His nose… where was his nose? Bashed in, perhaps. His jaw hung, dislocated, twisted into an unnatural shape. His ears had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

The man’s chest heaved up and down, hyperventilating, his mangled, tongue-less face making the only sound it could: Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

That was not a bird.

“Holy fuck,” Mike breathed.

The girl pointed at his phone in alarm.

“I’m not getting any reception out here. Besides, I think it’s broken.”

“No,” the girl hissed in an alarmed whisper, “turn it off! He’ll see!” She pointed at his exposed manhood. “And for Christ’s sake pull your pants up.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” Mike pulled his trousers up, slipping his phone into his pocket.

“Him,” her voice trembled. “Oh god, he’s going to kill us all.”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

“Please tell me you have a gun,” she whispered in desperation. “We have to kill him.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not from Arizona.”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

Suddenly he felt a bloody hand over his mouth. “He’s coming,” he heard her whisper in his ear. He could taste the blood on her hand, feel the blood from the toilet sticking to the back of his legs. His heart pounded like a drum about to explode.

The door to the restroom creaked open, and the sound of sluggish footsteps filled the room. There was the clank of something metal. Something metal in his hand.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

The footsteps approached, then stopped just in front of the stall door.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

The locked stall creaked as the killer leaned softly against it. A ragged breath escaped his lips. Something in his hands was dripping… with blood?

What the hell is he doing? Mike wondered. He wanted to stand, but his legs were shaking. The girl’s hand was over his mouth, but Mike didn’t dare breathe.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

On the other side of the door, the killer’s breath seemed to catch, and an agonized moan escaped his lips. Shuddered, rapid breaths escaped the killer’s heaving lungs. Was he… crying? Sadness turned to rage, and the killer let out a shriek. Something metal struck the wall. Debris rained on the sticky bathroom floor.

Mike jumped involuntarily. His lungs ached from holding his breath.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

The moaning whimper returned, but the killer turned away from the door. He slowly shuffled out of the bathroom.

Mike released his breath, then immediately inhaled, his lungs thirsty for air. “Holy shit,” he gasped. If he hadn’t just used the toilet, he would without question want to piss himself in fear. “We just… we just need to get to my car. We’ll get out of here without him seeing us.”

“Your car won’t start.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s the first thing he does. He cuts the wires to your car. That’s what he did to me. What he did to… him.”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

“We’re fucked. Oh god, we’re fucked.” Mike gripped his hair with his hands.

“I have a baseball bat. In my car.”

“And… how is that going to start my car?”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

“You have to kill him. You have to take the bat and kill him.”

“I can’t! I don’t even know how to play baseball! I do… back squats… and bench press…. These muscles are just for show!”

Thwack! The girl slapped Mike across the face. She had a solid slap for a girl that size. Her hand left a sticky trail, the other man’s blood smeared across his face. “Pull it together. If you don’t, we are both going to die!”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

“Okay,” Mike took a deep breath.

“Are you ready?”

“No.”

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

“Do you want to end up like him?” He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was motioning to the mangled man on the stall floor.

Mike didn’t think he could do this, but it was now or never. He stood, his legs shaking uncontrollably. He opened the stall door and felt his way across the dark bathroom. The girl followed, gripping his left hand tightly.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

He found the restroom door. Gently pressing it forward, he peeked through the crack. He could see the killer, seven hundred feet away. The murderer stood facing the beat-up truck, its hood popped. His head was shaved, and his bloodstained wife-beater revealed the rippling muscles of his back. He stood a hulking six-foot-two. In his hand was a giant monkey wrench, perhaps a foot long, red with fresh blood.

“How are we going to get to the car? He’s right there!” Mike hissed.

“We can get closer, hide by the vending machines. When he moves away from the cars, we make a run for my trunk.” She pressed her keys in his hand.

Mike’s heart was in his throat as he left the bathrooms. He hadn’t been on a treadmill in ages. Oh god, we’re going to die.

The killer seemed absorbed with the truck, tinkering around under the hood as Mike and the girl slid carefully out of the Men’s Room. A second building would provide shelter, if they could get to it. Mike crept forward on his shaking legs, trying to quell the panic inside. Soon, they were hidden from view once again. Sliding around the back of the second building brought them to the vending machines. Their low hum grew louder as Mike and his companion approached them. He looked at the girl, her face glowing in the neon light of the machines. He could feel them vibrate as he pressed against them, peeking around ever so slowly. The killer was right there, less than 30 feet away.

The muscle-bound behemoth set his blood-coated wrench on the ground as he reached into the hood.

The girl nudged Mike, mouthing the word “now.”

Mike shook his head in horror.

The girl nudged again.

The muscular man pulled himself out from under the hood. Whatever opportunity had been was lost. Wiping his hands on his pants, the man walked to the back of the truck.

The girl shoved Mike forward.

Mike could barely hear the sound of the killer rummaging through the back of his truck over the pounding of his heart. After what seemed like an eternity, they were crouched on the far side of the girl’s car. She motioned toward the trunk. But Mike’s eyes were in the opposite direction. The bloody wrench lay unattended on the sidewalk at the front of the nearby truck.

Before he could stop himself, Mike leapt forward.

The killer froze, perking his ears, then raced to the front of the truck. The hulking shadow approached, but with a cry Mike dove onto the ground. He grabbed the wrench, his body scraping against concrete.

The killer lifted his arm to strike, but Mike swept the wrench with all his strength, snapping the killer’s forearm with a loud crack. The bald man howled in agony, clutching his arm. Mike took a second swipe to the man’s face, teeth spraying onto the ground.

Blood flowed from the man’s broken lips. “Ghuh-hu-huh…” he moaned.

He didn’t… he didn’t have a tongue. Was that why he cut his victims’ tongues out? Because he didn’t have a tongue of his own? Mike winced at the hideous monster before him. A hulking mute creature, driven to madness.  The savage monstrosity fell to his knees, a defeated look on his face. Like he wanted to die.

“Kill him!” the girl shrieked from behind him.

“He’s not… he’s not fighting!”

“Quick! Before he changes his mind!”

Mike swung the wrench into the man’s face, and it hit with a sickening crunch. Mike did it again and again, as hard and fast as he could. Bone cracked and blood splattered as Mike demolished the man’s face. The killer fell to the ground, but Mike didn’t stop, shrieking as he bludgeoned his victim to death.

Chest heaving for breath, Mike looked at his handiwork in disgust. What was left of the man’s face was unrecognizable. Blood oozed from the side of his torn mouth, his teeth scattered around him. His nose… where was his nose? Bashed in, perhaps. His jaw hung, dislocated, twisted into an unnatural shape. But the man was still alive, in agony, breathing rapidly.

Heet. Heet. Heet. Heet.

The girl pushed past Mike and knelt over the killer.

“I wouldn’t–“

She pulled a pocketknife out of her pocket, and began to saw off the man’s ears.

“What… what are you doing?”

Ignoring Mike, she stuffed the ears in the man’s motionless mouth. “It never takes much,” she said casually. She plunged the knife into his midsection, cutting enough of a space to reach her hand in, soaking it with blood. “When men are afraid, violence always follows.” On the sidewalk beside the man, she scrawled the number thirteen with the dead man’s innards.

Jesusfuck.

“You’re… the Killer 10,” Mike said, backing away in horror. The bloody wrench fell to the ground with a clatter.

“No.” The girl offered a wicked smile. “You are.”

“The Killer 10” appeared in Gifts from the Dark: A Miscellany of Dread. All proceeds from the book are donated to an organization helping homeless people with mental illness. If you’d like to purchase the anthology you can do it here.

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Rick forced his eyes open. Everything was red.

“Daddy!”

He gasped, choking on nothing. His brain fumbled with thoughts.  There was nothing.  There was no air! He clawed helplessly at the crash jelly, his arms leaden in the thick substance. How could he feel for the emergency latch when his fingers could barely move? His hands tried to claw desperately to no avail, his body an animal acting on its own. Air! I need air!

“In case of an emergency, remain calm,” the instructional video had said. Rick tried to take a deep breath and failed. Fuck calm. Smiling, the actress dressed as a space explorer had waved her hands in a useless pantomime: “Find the emergency release lever…”

Where?! Where?!

“…three feet from the foot of the pod, near your right hip…”

His fingers found metal, beautiful cold metal.

“…and pull.”

With a hiss the lid of the crash pod slid open, and Rick clawed his way out. He fell to his knees, gasping for air.

Everything was red.

“Oh no,” Rick whispered.

The dim crimson emergency lights cast deep shadows on the other crash pods, occupants still, heart monitors flat. Without oxygen they had blacked out, and suffocated in their sleep.  But something had woken him.

“Daddy!” It was his daughter’s voice, begging him to stay, her arms and legs wrapped around his leg.

Rick shook his head to clear it. Hypoxia could cause hallucinations, and he needed a clear head  now more than ever.

“An emergency has occured, but stay calm. Please enter your assigned crash pod in a quick, orderly fashion.” It was an automated message, the voice of the woman from the instructional video. Rick eyed his dead companions in their crash pods uncomfortably. Laura, Paul, Peter, Hooch…  Systems chief, atmospheric specialist, pilot and biologist.  He was a mathematician pretending to be an engineer! How was he going to fix the ship?

“Daddy!”

“No!” Rick slapped himself. “Stay alert–”

“Daddy!” His daughter clung to his leg. “Please! Let me go with you!”

Rick picked the little girl up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You’ll make a brave explorer one day. When you’re old enough. But for now–”

He had to go. His launch was in ten minutes. Xerxes-9, first and only space station in sector 85.42.10.07 was out of air, and if his team did not succeed they would all die.

Rick set his daughter down. “When you’re scared, close your eyes and breathe, honey, and imagine me walking through that door. Hold that thought in your mind, and I promise, you’ll see me again.”

She fell to the ground cross legged and threw her hands to her eyes. He kissed her on the forehead and walked away, but she did not move her hands.

“Bye honey,” he whispered.

“An emergency has occured, but stay calm.”

Rick snapped to.  He had to figure out what was wrong with the ship. It was an emergency shuttle, not meant for these speeds and distances. He tried to remember the list of possible disasters Laura had outlined before the launch.

“Please enter your assigned crash pod–”

Hooch’s pod! The monitor was flat, but the pod was empty!

“–in a quick, orderly fashion.”

Rick raced to the door forcing it open as the ship shuddered. To his left, the red rimmed airlock remained intact: a yellow button to seal the passageway, and a red button to open the door into the dead coldness of space. To his right, flames licked the ceiling of the tiny passage beyond. A charred welding device slid down the hallway as the ship lurched, as did Hooch’s charred body. Rick’s heart sank.

He racked his brains… “In case of a fire–” the actress in the instructional video had said.

“In the control booth!” Rick murmured. Pulling his shirt over his nose, he plunged into the burning passage.  Smoke and sweat burned his eyes, the heated door to the control booth burned his hands. The fire extinguisher!

“Daddy!”

“Not now!” he mumbled to himself. Coughing uncontrollably, his eyes shut, he sprayed the flame retardant wildly into the passage.  He heaved and hacked on the floor, relieved to feel the sweat cooling on his ash-covered face. So little air, and most of it smoke.

A soft hiss made his heart sink even further, and suddenly Rick understood what had happened. “The biggest danger,” Laura had explained, “is that we have no debris shields.” A tiny piece of space trash had cut through the hull blocking the lines that supplied the crash pods. And Hooch…. “The welding device is located here,” Laura had said, “but never use it to patch leaking oxygen or fuel.”

“You idiot.” Rick wanted to cry. He knew in a panic he might have made the same mistake. He frowned as a gentle hiss signaled the air leaking from the shuttle’s cabin. There was no need to fix the oxygen lines to the crash pods now.  But what had Laura said about oxygen leaks? He fumbled his way back to the control booth and found the resin gun. Within moments the patch was sealed.

He took a deep breath. A deep, smoke-filled, low-pressure breath. Dread returned. How much oxygen was left?

Rick was nearly blind with panic as stumbled his way into the pilot’s chair in the control booth. He flipped through screens until he got the oxygen monitor.  Mumbling under his breath he did the math. Rick breathed a sigh of relief.  Barely.  Just barely.  Any less and….

“Daddy!”

There was enough air, for now.  Why was he still hallucinating?

“Daddy!”

Rick frowned. The others had remained asleep but something had woken him up…. He counted his breaths per second, calculated the oxygen depletion over the last minute and–

“Honey!” Rick shrieked, leaping out of his chair.

“Daddy!”

The vents. Her voice was coming through the vents. “Honey!” he shouted. “Honey where are you!”

“Daddy!”

Rick was back where he started, eyes high and low searching for the air vents. Tiny fingers stuck out, near the floor in the wall behind his pod. He grabbed a the screwdriver from the kit frantically removed the grate. He pulled his daughter into his arms, bawling as he did it.  He delicately brushed a strand of her hair out of her eyes, careful not to touch the bruise on her cheek.

“Please don’t be angry daddy!”

His daughter had stowed away during the launch. She must have snuck in before Paul sealed the vents. Outside of a crash pod, the turbulence could have killed her! Rick’s eyes fell on the crash pods, acutely aware of the irony. No, she had saved his life. Maybe all of their lives.

Rick kissed his daughter, silently crunching figures in his head. “I’m not upset, baby.  I’m just… so happy to see you.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Rick set his daughter down.  “I need to show you something.” He walked her to the control booth and sat her down in the captain’s chair. “This is where an explorer sits.”

Her eyes widened.

“And you, sweetie,” he gently tapped her nose, “are old enough to be the bravest explorer of them all!” If his calculations were correct, they only had a few minutes, but he kept his voice clear and steady.

Delight flashed across her face.

“In just two hours, when the shuttle lands on Ceali-7, this screen is going to tell you what kind of air the planet has.” His hand trembled ever so slightly as he pointed.

“Really?” she gasped in amazement.

“And when you push this button, you can send a message back home to Xerxes-9 and tell them all about it!”

“Me? I can do that?”

“Absolutely. But there’s one more thing.”

Rick’s daughter nodded attentively.

The automated message repeated once again. “An emergency has occurred, but stay calm….”

“Daddy… has to go somewhere.” I’m sorry honey. I did the math.

“No, Daddy!” she shouted, clinging to him. “No!”

“…Please enter your assigned crash pod in a quick, orderly fashion.”

Rick carried her with him out of the control booth and down the tiny passageway.

“You’re the bravest explorer I know. But when you’re scared, close your eyes and breathe, honey…” He set her down near the end of the passageway. “…and imagine me walking through this door.” His eyes fell on the buttons: one yellow, one red.

She fell to the ground cross-legged and threw her hands to her eyes. He kissed her on the forehead and walked away, but she did not move her hands.  He stepped over the red line, into the airlock chamber.

“Hold that thought in your mind, and I promise, you’ll see me again.”

He watched her nod, eyes closed, and he pushed the yellow button. A door slid between them, sealing the passageway from the airlock. Everything was red.

“Bye honey,” he whispered.

Rick pushed the red button.

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Cameron Johnston is living the dream, having signed his first book contract with Angry Robot. He’s a Scottish writer with an interest it all things sharp and pointy and metal and medieval, ancient places and archaeology, RPGS and board games. I got the chance to ask him a few questions right around the time his new book, The Traitor God, was released. The sequel God of Broken Things is coming just around the corner too!

NE: Wow Cameron, I’m really excited for your book release! It’s a huge accomplishment to become a published author. How did you get here?

CJ: Thanks! It’s been a long journey to get here. Over the years I wrote a number of novel beginnings that ended up being abandoned. Mostly because I had no clue what I was doing and found it getting bogged down with my own frustrations. Then I put in the hard work and completed a novel, and then another. But the writing was just not of the sort of quality I would read in, say, a Robin Hobb book. So I decided to get good, and joined a local science fiction writers’ group. I held off on novel writing for a year or two and focused on writing a bunch of short stories – which don’t hurt as much as a whole novel when you realise it’s garbage and you have to bin it. I learned to critique other people’s work, tried writing new things in new ways, learned editing skills, became a better writer, and then it was time to get back to writing another novel! It seems to have worked out well.

NE: When you first started writing, what inspired you to do it?

CJ: It’s all down to the story. Even when I was little and playing with Transformers toys and LEGO I used to create elaborate sprawling stories, and usually a tragic heroic death to go with it. I loved comics and books and discovering the wealth of imagination and adventure contained within those pages – authors were small gods creating amazing worlds to me, and I was far more interested in that than, say, sports. Eventually I thought I could probably write down some of my own fantasies. In some ways the feeling of imaginative invention and discovery has not changed at all, it just takes far longer to put it all down on those blank pages. Instead of discovering new worlds written by others I am voyaging through my own imagination.

CJ: Immensely. I’ve always loved castles, stone circles, old bridges and churches. Ancient places have that thin feeling that makes you feel you can almost reach through and touch the other. That magical, mysterious feeling of wonder has never left me and most certainly influences how I write about such places in my fiction. History and archaeology make me think about and imagine life in the past, and if you are writing about pre-modern fantasy worlds that offers a wealth of information to draw from: from how tanning works to ancient medicine and arms and armour.

NE: There’s a lot of ideas out there about what reading is– it can be anything from pure entertainment to deep and thought-provoking, an emotional outlet to cutting social commentary. Is there anything specific you hope your readers will get out of your books? What kind of goal did you have in writing The Traitor God?

CJ: What goal did I have? Honestly, it was because I thought it would be fun to write. It’s common writing advice to write the story that you want to read, so that’s exactly what I did. I think on one level it’s a slightly unusual beast of a novel, a dark and gritty second world urban fantasy with huge influence from old pulp swords and sorcery stories and I hope the mix feels fresh and new in some ways. One thing I also wanted to include in this novel was as a reaction to all the gritty low-magic settings – the world of The Traitor God is high magic with awesome magical might and horrifying monsters between the pages. It was tremendous fun to write, so I hope it’s just as much fun to read. There’s also a social and mental exploration of Edrin Walker’s magic as well, which I feel is something very cool about fantasy novels in that they allow us to explore these kind of ‘what ifs’.

NE: Where did you get your inspiration for Edrin Walker in the Traitor God?

CJ: The whole book originally started off as a short story. I wanted to write a second-world film-noir inspired fantasy story about a (sort of) detective with magic. Something like John Constantine from Hellblazer crossed with a pulp swords and sorcery setting of dark magic and monsters. I wanted some unusual powers that would be fun to explore, and something to make him feared, and I came up with the idea of a mage who specialises in manipulating the human mind.

NE: I’m about half way through the book, and the magic you’ve invented is definitely a cool hook! I’m sad to say, I think that wraps up our interview. Do you have any parting advice for young people thinking about trying to break into writing?

CJ: Writing does not have to be a lonely business, especially online. Join forums and groups, read other people’s writing and help them improve it, have them read yours and offer suggestions. Read, research and try and get better. It’s a marathon not a sprint, but if you are anything like me and put in the effort to become a better writer, the day will come when you look back at your old writing and see just how far you have come. That is a wonderful feeling.

NE: Thanks Cameron! Cameron’s website is here and his book the Traitor God is available here on Amazon. If you want even more of Cameron’s Age of Tyranny series, check out the God of Broken Things.

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I have a confession: I will devour any show, good or bad, with even a drop of magic in it. But after watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Satanic Christmas special on Netflix, I decided I needed to take a step back and look at the origins of magic and what happens when it grips the popular imagination.

It’s fair to say that magic is never written on a blank slate. When writers decide how to imagine their mages, they’re drawing on ideas that have not only a history of their own, but present-day consequences. Magic has been alive and well as an idea for a very long time, and its past has more than a few skeletons, especially in the West.

Like elsewhere in the world, Europe has always been rich with magical beliefs. Legends of powerful sorceresses like Circe and Medea predate Christianity, but magic was and still is a part of everyday life. Tales of untrustworthy fae, told to children at night for centuries, continue today in shows and books like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. But magic has always been more than just tales. Centuries ago, Westerners practiced their own lesser magics: agricultural rituals, amulets to protect from the evil eye, and in some places they relied on the counsel of druids, depicted dramatically in Amazon’s exciting Britannia about the Roman conquest of the British Isles.

Eventually Christianity made its way across Europe often via missionaries targeting the nobility. As monarchs violently expanded their domain, Christianity spread, trickling down to the rest of society and fusing itself with folk beliefs. The Christmas tree, for example, has pagan origins, rooted in Nordic legends featuring a pine tree. The pentagram and pentacle, ancient Sumerian symbols, made their appearance in Christian texts as a representation of the five senses, the five wounds of Christ and the five joys that Mary had of Jesus. Magic still remained, with the poor often holding on to their old traditions, using both Christian and non-Christian explanations for their spells, incantations, medicines and herbs. Even monks practiced “natural magic” recording the magical uses of herbs in folk traditions and making monasteries centers of healing.

The Arthurian legends capture this relationship well. While the legend of Arthur may have arisen from a 5th century Roman-affiliated military leader, it is the wizard Merlin who set the mold for what most of us in the West think of as “magic.” Some say he might have been a Welsh bard, others hypothesize that Merlin was a title, not his name. A merlin, according to these historians, was a wise man who knew magic and lived in the woods as a hermit… very much like a druid. Merlin is typically celebrated as a magical aid to Arthur’s Christian rulership. Perhaps the most disturbing re-imagining of the Arthurian legends is the BBC’s Merlin, in which a young Merlin happily aids a Christian monarch’s persecution of magical creatures, a proxy for the pre-existing culture of the British Isles subdued by Christian “civilization”.

Several centuries later, the persecution of magic became very real and very violent. By the 14th century, charges of “witchcraft” were at the forefront of a cultural war against European folk traditions and Romano-Persian science. Priests who practiced folk healing traditions were among those accused of witchcraft (one might see echoes of this in the plotline of Netflix’s Castlevania).  By the 15th century, the European witch hunts were in full force, heralding 200 years of torture and murder. People of all stripes were accused of witchcraft, the witch hunts often inflected with sexism and personal conflicts, but in broad strokes it was an act of cultural genocide. Everything non-Christian was viewed as Satanic–an idea some people still hold today–and dehumanized to the point that it was acceptable to torture and kill people in the most brutal ways.

In 1486 Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer Against Witches) used as sort of a witch hunting guide, heavily relied upon by the Inquisition. Kramer took existing traditions and perverted them into descriptions of Satanism. “It is always necessary,” Kramer insisted repeatedly: “for the demons to cooperate with sorcerers.” Magic, previously derived from nature, was increasingly thought of as demonic. Some of his assertions are lesser known (Kramer concluded from Egyptian fertility rites that male redheads were considered vampires with voracious sexual appetites that should be burned at the stake), but many popular conceptions of witchcraft derive from this document, making their way into stories by the Brothers’ Grimm and Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Stories of the Black Sabbath and the Malum Malus (the evil apple of knowledge) were most likely inventions of Christian extremists to rationalize the persecution of people practicing folk traditions. Today they are key story elements in TV witch stories like Salem and the new Netflix adaptation of Sabrina.

A far cry from the Archie spinoff comic of the 70s and the cute sitcom of the 90s, Sabrina was recently rebooted both as a graphic novel and as a Netflix show… depicting Sabrina as a Satanist. Throughout The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, nature is the domain of witches and Satan, while mining is the centerpiece of the mortal town and symbolic of its dominion over nature. In the Christmas special, Sabrina’s family celebrates the winter solstice and lights the Yule log to keep out evil spirits, while praying to Satan in the same breath. The problem here is that people who practiced the tradition of the Yule log were most certainly not Satanists, and I’m not sure but I doubt that Satanists would ever light a Yule log. Only the people responsible for the witch trials and the Inquisition would actually conflate these practices. And that’s where Netflix’s rendition of Sabrina (and the graphic novel upon which it’s based) becomes troubling.

As the show goes on, it’s revealed that witches are archaic and highly patriarchal, and Sabrina, the modernist half-mortal, is an iconoclast feminist icon. But what if the older power structures were actually more matriarchal than their Christian successors? In Ireland and Wales, it may have been female power among the Celts, especially as druids, that Christians found reprehensible. Moreover, historians view Christian accusations of witchcraft as an instrument of patriarchy: during the Salem witch trials, sixteen women were accused, thirteen of whom were past child-bearing age, largely in an attempt to seize their property and influence. That’s why it’s so troubling that Sabrina re-casts witches as agents of patriarchy instead of its victims.

In contrast, the Showtime period piece Penny Dreadful handled magic in a very different way. From the Renaissance through the Victorian era, there had been a strong interest in re-discovering ancient knowledge.The rediscovery of Greek philosophers brought about the Enlightenment and the advent of science, but with it came a parallel interest in re-discovering the Occult. In Penny Dreadful, the central character Vanessa Ives struggles with her own powers, and the ethics that surrounds them. The story is very much an example of the Victorian fascination with the occult, prominently featuring vampires, the devil and inner struggles with evil.  But the show breaks from the mold of the Malleus Maleficarum and the genocide of the Inquisition in Vanessa’s backstory, where she studied under a hedge witch who practiced “natural magic”, modeling magic as a tool for good in the right hands, a key element of Vanessa’s inner struggle to use mystical powers for good or evil. In the magic of Penny Dreadful, Christian and non-Christian mythologies and moralities interact, instead of one subjugating the other.

Much like Vanessa Ives and perhaps the occult aficionados of the Enlightenment, today self-described neo-pagans, wiccans, and witches seek to reconnect with long-lost traditions. Some find Sabrina‘s latest incarnation all in good fun, but others are disurbed by the way that the victims of witch hunts and inquisitions of the past are now re-imagined as perpetrators. It’s only been a few decades since the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and 90s, with three Wiccan high school students in Memphis, Arkansas being not only wrongfully conflated with Satanists, but convicted of murder with questionable evidence.

“They weren’t witches!” Tim Robbins’s character in the Hulu show Castle Rock insists as people in a bar tell ghost stories of dark deeds done in the past. “They were Satanists.” With a single line, Castle Rock is much more mindful of the distinctions, and to a lot of people that tiny bit of effort makes a huge difference.

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#1 The WikiHow Method

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a WikiHow article on how to play roleplaying games with yourself. It’s aimed primarily at six-year-olds however, so if you’re older than that you might want to move on to the other options.

#2 Play with an AI

Latitude has developed something called the “AI dungeon.” Type in actions to interact with a completely unpredictable text-based dungeonmaster in settings ranging from mystery to fantasy to cyberpunk. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like trying to play DnD by with your phone’s Google Assistant and the AI is more of a random word generator, which can sometimes break the immersion.

If the base AI isn’t working for you, one of the cooler features is community generated dungeons, like these:

#3 Play Beyond Zork: Coconut of Quendor

Alright, maybe it’s not DnD, but I swear, this game is just as fun as when I played it when I was twelve. Best of all, the folks at dosvideogames have put it online with an emulator and you can play it for free! And if you need a soundtrack, try this one from MC Frontalot:

#4 Play Baldur’s Gate 3

Okay, you gotta wait a while– early access isn’t even until September 30th–but Baldur’s Gate 3 will use DnD’s 5e rules and it looks like a blast. Developed by Larian Studios, some of you might recognize some game mechanics and features from Divinity: Original Sin 2, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. I’m crossing my fingers hoping that they’ll have a Dungeon Master mode like they did in Divinity so that you can play your own virtual campaigns with those pesky friends who are too busy or too far to meet in person!

If none of these work for you, you can always do what I usually do and procrastinate by re-playing Skyrim for the 100th time write fantasy novels and short stories. Whether you’ve got dice, a computer, or just some paper and a pen, adventure awaits!

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Inky shadows and the eerie blue light of night seemed to paint the picture of a turbulent sea, frozen in time. Perfectly still. His girlfriend lay in that motionless ocean, tangled in the sheets on her side of the bed.

Tabatha.

Her pillow was likely wet with tears. Most nights he held her as she cried. He remembered running his fingers along the scars on her forearms, from all the times she cut herself. She said cutting made the pain feel real. It made it into something she could touch, she could understand. The tears… those were more difficult to comprehend. He stopped asking what was wrong long ago. Her answer was always the same: I don’t know.

Most nights he held her. But not tonight.

He eyed the plane ticket on the nightstand. Seven days ago he bought that ticket. Seven days ago the nightmares began. He took a deep breath. He would need his rest if he wanted to catch his flight.

He crawled into bed, soothed by its softness. Sleep seduced him into her seductive embrace, as she always did. The bliss of darkness never lasted long however. It was only a moment before the visions began.

He was at the airport.

Again.

7:10AM flight to San Francisco.

Again.

Some nights he got on the plane. He knew the terror of falling from the sky. The passengers screaming. The painful crack of his bones as the metal behemoth collided with the earth.

Most nights he fled. Running back home.

She held *him* on those nights. “I told you,” she always said soothingly. “You never need to get on that plane. Just stay in my arms.”

But days would pass and her arms would grow tired. The tears would come again, a dangerous deluge in a tempest of pain. And one day he wouldn’t be there to hold her. Maybe he was at work. Maybe he was at the store. And he would find her lying on that bed, in a tangle of sheets, sprawled on her stomach like she always slept. But the ocean-colored sheets she slept in would be black, not blue. Soaked, wet, dripping.

The cuts too deep this time.

He’d hold her body, screaming, oblivious to the blood seeping into his clothes.

He was at the airport.

Again.

7:10AM flight to San Francisco.

Again.

“I’d like to upgrade to First Class.” This was a dream. It wasn’t real money.

The seats were more comfortable than he’d imagined. Why had he never flown First Class before? He looked around at the passengers, a man with a shrewd face reading Newsweek. A mother trying to get her two children to be quiet. An awkward student reading a book.

We’re all going to die, he thought.

There was no turbulence. There never was. Only a loud pop. Rick never knew what it was that made them fall from the sky. But he never got used to that weightless feeling in his stomach, his insides floating as his body plummeted. Shrieks, children crying, something loud banging around in the cabin. Rick closed his eyes waiting for the inevitable…

Crunch. The world was agony. Blood filling his lungs. His broken ribs tore through his stomach.

It didn’t go fast. It never did.

They would have a closed casket.

Tabatha would wear black. Her tears were different, not the soft leaking and whimpering wail he knew. No, her face was twisted and red, and her sobs were guttural and choked. Snot would come from her nose. It was agonizing to watch.

He wouldn’t be there to hold her.

But Ben would be.

She’d cry in his arms this time. And soon, perhaps uncomfortably soon, she’d cry herself to sleep in his bed.

When the tears stopped and she had a moment to rest, she would say this: “I think, seeing someone I love die… I think I appreciate life in a way I never did before.”

They’d hold each other every night after that. They’d have two children. She’d love them dearly. And she’d never cut herself again.

Rick opened his eyes. It was 5:15AM. His alarm would go off in 15 minutes. He disabled the alarm and crept out of bed.

If he kissed her goodbye, she would wake up. She would say what she always says. “You don’t have to go!” She would beg him to stay. If he woke her, he would crawl back into bed and spend the day there.

He pulled on a shirt and slid his pants on. He didn’t bother packing a suitcase. He knew he wasn’t going to need it.

Rick picked the ticket off of the nightstand. He had a plane to catch.

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