To whom it may concern

The man from the Lost City of Atlantis Underwater Themed Mini Golf Extravaganza was wide-eyed, pale-faced, and soaked to the skin. Janet handed him a stack of paper towels, along with the key to the restroom and a spare Eerie Baitshop and Sushi Bar shirt.

"We can always deliver to you instead," she told him. "Probably safer."

The man mopped ineffectually at his dripping, tear-streaked face.

"My boss won't pay the delivery fee," he said. "And I don't think he believes me about the things in the lake mistaking golf course employees for their Messiah coming to take them home."


Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The water spouts had been turned off a week ago, but nobody had thought to drain the basins of the ornamental fountain. Now they were a nightmare of stagnancy and rot, black-green algae layered thick over cloudy depths where many-limbed things scuttled and fed and multiplied.

Marshall Teller stood down-wind, gulping deep breaths of clean air before he had to go in. He held a glass jar in one hand, his mother's favourite sieve clumsily duct-taped to a long handle in the other.

Nobody had seen the lights in the fountain since the shut down, and he had to know...

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Plastic lawn furniture had been set out at the edge of every lawn. At each round, white table, four figures sat in four identical chairs. Colourful parasols cast a shadow over their faces, and over the thing they were eating, which was probably a mercy.

It was a warm day in April, and Edgar had the car windows down as he drove. That's why he'd noticed the silence, broken only by the clink and scrape of metal utensils on ceramic plates.

Afterwards, when the nightmares came, that was the worst part. Metal cutlery. China plates. No radio, no conversation.

Nothing.


Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Some idiot - probably several idiots, really - had built a series of dolmens that ran along the edges of Deadwood Park.

Some other idiots - or very likely the original idiots - had then walked underneath them, ignoring fairly basic safety precautions that said things like, "don't walk under precariously-leaning slabs of rock" and "anything that stays in Deadwood Park is going to get blood on it" and "don't go under randomly-appearing monoliths when the blood on their capstone is still wet are you stupid or something?!"

Most of these idiots ended up being him from other realities, and now Marshall was annoyed.

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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All the fossils in the Eerie Museum of Unnatural History had come to life.

The pterodactyl was welcomed into the eaves of the Mark Twain Boarding House by it's flesh-and-blood brethren, and the plesiosaur had slipped beneath the water of Lake Eerie to the sound of triumphal piping from the Mackerell Soldier's Marching Band.

The trilobites were less lucky. Segmented crawling things the size of a man's fist were unsettling to most of Eerie's human population, and those few mad scientists and rot-worshipping cults that might have been interested had mostly been swallowed whole by their own creations.

Ah, well.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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All six of the jackalope kittens had hatched. Simon had left a message for the Lady of the Spring buried in a clump of daffodils, but so far, he hadn't heard back.

"I guess until I can get word to the Jackalope Queen, I'll be your mommy," he told the kittens. The kittens did not reply.

Simon propped his elbows on the tired composite of their thrift-store kitchen table and peered into the makeshift nest he'd made for them out of a shoe box and every candy wrapper in the apartment.

How exactly did one raise an Easter Bunny, anyway?

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Easter Weekend

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The Eerie Bingo Parlour burned behind her, and Syndi Teller did not look back.

Her rucksack clanked and jangled with a thousand nasty things and tiny zephyrs scoured blood and soot and tears from her exposed skin. Her Miss Tornado Day sash hung in tatters, the white satin streaked and stained with gore, not all of it her own.

There was a roar as the Bingo Parlour roof collapsed, flames licking the sky that remained night-black since the day the Garbage Men launched that first attack. The fire cast her shadow long and jagged before her, and Syndi walked on.

Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The sun was setting, and in Deadwood Park the night things were on the move.

A trio of joggers ran three abreast beneath an overhanging canopy of winter-bare branches, and only two emerged. A young couple packed up the remains of a romantic picnic, only to find the red and white gingham print of their blanket had become a sucking morass that wrapped around their linked hands and dragged them beneath the innocent green of the summer grass. Fresh shoots and new blooms snagged the ankles of the slow and red-gold leaf-fall grew teeth that crunched unwary bones.

Night fell.


Ongoing Verse: The Children

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