To whom it may concern

At 3:33 a.m. on a wet Wednesday morning in June, every church bell in Eerie began to chime.

In the Eerie Cemetery, stiff-necked corpses rolled over in their coffins, moaning in protest and pressing skeletal hands over shrivelled ears while beneath Lake Eerie, things with tentacles and gills and other, less-easily described attributes clutched tight to crucifixes made from driftwood and barnacles. Janet Donner pulled her coverlet over her head, ears straining for the tell-tale clink of milk bottles, and Melanie Monroe awoke shrieking out a scream that only she could hear.

Mary B. Carter was getting married. Again.

Ongoing Verse: Andrea/Marisea

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Euclid

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Marshall Teller did not bolt upright when catapulted from sleep. His eyes opened, and he rolled onto his back to stare the dark grey spot above him that the rising sun would eventually resolve into the lumpy, inexpertly-applied paint job on his bedroom ceiling.

Not all dreams were prophetic. Every nightmare didn't come true. And of those he'd had that did hold some warning or hint for the future, most of them were jumbled images of things he'd already known, or suspected, or worked out on his own.

Marshall Teller lay in the pre-dawn darkness, and told himself these things.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The clock ticked, the minute hand moved, and eight-fifty-nine a.m came around again.

With sighs less of relief than of repletion, the ghouls who worked the night shift at Happy Brothers Mortuary peeled off bloodied gloves and spattered aprons, made one final check to ensure that the neatly hollowed-out cadavers of the previous day were neatly lined up on the rows of steel trolleys, and opened the hidden trap door that lead to the cellars, and beyond that, out to the cemetery.

Scant seconds after the door closed, hiding the tunnel from view, Bert and Ernie Wilson entered the room.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Euclid

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The centre of the large room was taken up by an enormous pile of bones, long stripped of their last vestige of meat and now pockmarked along the long axis by dozens of sets of canine teeth.

Around it sat the bulk of Eerie's canine population, ears up, tongues lolling, watching as a smaller group played a game of spillikins with the thighbones of various dogcatchers, cat lovers, and those children who had avoided death by milk-truck long enough to find themselves at the non-existent mercy of Fifi and her compatriots.

All tails thumped in anticipation, and the game progressed.

Ongoing Verse: CAT

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The sun was up and it was possible that the birds were singing, although Sara Bob Haversock wouldn't know since she couldn't hear much over the sound of her brothers yelling.

She turned over on her thin mattress, inhaling the familiar smells of washing powder and cinderblock, and squeezed her eyes shut.

A moment later she opened them again. No good. The dream was gone, her family's voices wiping it away like an eraser on pencil marks. Too bad; it had felt like a good one.

She sat up, running her fingers through her hair. Upstairs, someone screamed her name.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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It was cold, and the black denim jacket she wore was better for making her look cool than it was for keeping her warm.

Melanie Monroe shivered, drawing the stiff fabric tight about herself and wishing, not for the first time, that it was possible to wear a big coat in this town and not have everyone assume you were stealing Dash's look.

"Devon," she whispered, the word spoken more to the blood moving through her veins than the air outside her body.

She felt him stir in the quiet spaces between their shared heartbeats, and sudden warmth suffused her.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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"Oh," says the Harvest King, speaking through her ex-boyfriend's face, and if she needed proof that this isn't really Marshall - at least, not right now, and she tries not to think that it might not be ever again - it's in the smooth, even tone of his voice.

Marshall, who tensed up if he thought Melanie was playing pinfinger a little too fast, wouldn't be this calm after almost maiming her.

Although, given what the things in the lake have done in service of their "repairs", maybe it still counts as a maiming.

She flexes her hand, whole but still damaged.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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The Harvest King was waiting for her beneath the spreading canopy of an old oak tree. His crown of green was bright with gold leaves of almost-ripened corn and in the places where it's twisting vines grew straight out of his head, blood-bright berries clotted and clustered.

"You came," he said, and it's almost the voice that Janet remembers, undercut with the howl of a hunting wolf and the wind up on the mountain.

He holds out his hand, which is pale and pink and human, and when she reaches for it she touches the whirring blades of a thresher.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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The bonfire blazed, flames licking up two or three times the height of a man, bright against the darkening blue of the oncoming night.

It was midwinter, and the old year was burning away in twisting coils of red and orange and sometimes white in the places where someone (probably the Bobs) had poured petrol over the carefully-arranged layers of old pallets at the base of the pyre.

The ForeverWare Ladies stood nearby, heat-resistant cups empty and lidless in one hand, tight-fitting rubber seals in the other. Tonight they would catch the last sparks of the year, and preserve them.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Christmas

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Inside the tall iron gates of the Eerie Cemetery, the air was warm and the ground was dry.

Melanie slipped off the oversized black denim jacket, heavy with badges made from a home printing kit that took up most of the space in Tod McNulty's bedroom and plastered over with hand-sewn patches from the same source.

"Hey Devon," she said, addressing the greeting to both the stone cherub and the wisp of shadow that hung around it even on the brightest day. "How's things?"

The hazy patch of darkness said nothing. The statue too was silent.

Melanie stood there, waiting.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The lace curtains in the abandoned house up the street were moth-eaten, yellow with age where they weren't grey with dust, and wreathed around with a dozen years of cobwebs. The red lettering of the For Sale sign had long-since faded to washed-out pink, and it sagged on it's mildewed and rotting post.

Bertram Wilson did not get out of his car. He did not roll down the windows. He simply sat there, the engine running and the radio off, watching as the house where eternity had dwelled for so long succumbed to entropy.

After a while, he left again.


Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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"What-" Syndi groped for words, found none.

Janet nodded.

"Yeah," she said. "The circus said the photo was just a novelty souvenir, like the pictures you get on the ghost train where it looks like something's in the cart with you." She picked up the empty cup, fiddled with it. "Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if those weren't somehow real as well."

"But... nothing happened?" said Syndi. "There was nothing in the papers, nothing at school..."

"Nope," said Janet. "And nothing on the milk cartons either. Which in Eerie is how you know someone's really gone."


Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Syndi didn't scream when the clown clapped one oversized white-gloved hand on her shoulder. She would have liked to claim this was down to journalistic nerves of steel, but the truth was, she was all screamed out.

She did jump, though - bone-tired and terrified, her body offered up just enough adrenaline to jolt her out of the grinning thing's grasp before the machete came down right at the spot where her head would have been.

The clown gibbered, the red slash of it's mouth flapping open and shut in a movement too wide to have ever been human.

Syndi ran.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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The Michaels had clustered together at one small table near the emergency exit in one corner of Things Incorporated's employee lunch room. Marshall had half-feared the possibility that his Dad would show up and ask him to eat lunch together, but a quick scan of the room told him he was in the clear.

"Hey guys," he said, approaching his classmates. "Mind if I join you?"

"Saved you a seat," said once-small-now-tall-Michael.

Micheal-with-Glasses was eating a sandwich stuffed with small printed paper strips.

"Christmas cracker jokes," he explained, seeing Marshall's raised eyebrow. "After the whole Nurse Nancy thing..."

Marshall nodded.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Melanie set the plastic bucket of cleaning supplies down on the wet grass. There was a slight depression in the soil from all the times she'd left it there before, and it slid in neatly.

"Hey, Devon," she said, uncapping the Thermos of hot soapy water and using it to wet the edges of a soft cloth. "How's it going?"

The cherub over Devon Wilde's grave didn't answer, but stood still and silent as she cleaned the thin layer of grime from it's stone cheeks and ran a toothbrush over the lichen patches growing between it's fingers.

They both cried.

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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The man from the Eerie Dairy shuffled through the stacks of missing person reports, trying to pick the most photogenic presumed-runaway for that month's milk carton.

"Huh," he said. "Lot of people last seen near the Eerie Waste Processing Plant and Pizzeria."

Officer Derek chuckled.

"Yeah, the teens sure love hanging out there," he said. "We get a couple of calls a night from parents letting us know that their kids went out for a slice of pepperoni and never came back."

The man from the Eerie Dairy said nothing.

"Oh!" said Officer Derek. "Oh no!"

He ran out, sobbing.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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The house was dark and silent and all the tulips in the window boxes had died. In other circumstances, Bertram Wilson might have thought it was sad. Maybe even creepy, another building abandoned and falling to ruin, it's hallways walked only by sad ghosts slowly losing the shape they'd held in life.

Not an usual sight, at least in this town.

This house was different, though, and he whistled cheerfully as he checked the closed and bolted shutters and tested the lock on the back door. This house couldn't rot fast enough, and the memory of his mother with it.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Melanie is never sure, now, how much of her is really still her. She makes some clever remark and around her, her co-workers laugh and laugh, and she can't tell if this is just more of Devon's borrowed lustre, and she's the moon, shining in his stolen light.

He looks sad, trapped in the mirror, and the voice in her mind points out that he died never knowing what Excel was, much less how to make a pun about pivot tables and managers who change their mind between one meeting and the next.

She leaves the bathroom, avoiding her reflection.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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They were deep into the forest, and the rain falling on the leaves sounded like distant applause. Janet Donner heaved one last shovelful of clinging mud into the newly-occupied grave and wiped the sleeve of her already-ruined shirt across her forehead.

She turned, dappled light turning streaks of slime and scales to gold where it touched her face, moving shadows making the dried blood look almost black.

"Is it over?" she asked the squirming, squamous thing she'd carried there in a clear plastic bag filled with lake water.

It's thousand eyes were sad as it stared at her, signing "no".

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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It's getting colder, now. The sun is going down and outside the sky is cloudless and grey. There'll be frost overnight. The shadows, emboldened by the retreating light, are getting longer, slipping across the asphalt to brush the edges of the dead lawn.

Simon pushes the worn office chair back from his cramped desk and stands, rubbing warmth back into fingers grown cold on an unresponsive keyboard. His shoulder hurts as it always does, the ache reminding him that when it mattered most he was too late, too slow.

He shuts the computer down. Tomorrow, he'll try again.

And again.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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At dusk, where the shadows were strange and the light grew thick like treacle, the tracks of the Ghost Train were almost visible. Devon couldn't see them straight on, but they flickered at the edge of his vision, faintly luminous in the coming dark.

He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, crouching in the frozen dirt of the fallow field. One hand groped blindly behind him, searching for the tell-tale cold of spectral rails.

His fingers touched icy metal, and he smiled. Now he could hear it, the hum of an oncoming locomotive that spoke of finality, and peace.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Weather

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Winifred Swanson screamed, the kind of scream that scours the throat, empties the lungs, and strips away sanity as it goes.

The thing pulling itself inch by pitiful inch along the asphalt had been a little girl, once. A few strands of platinum-blonde hair still clung to the shrivelled skull and a pretty, lace-trimmed dress the rich green of pea soup swamped the withered, skeletal frame. It stretched out one shaking hand, arthritic fingers twisted into claws and topped by thick, yellow nails.

"Mommy," it gurgled around a mouthful of soft and rotten teeth. "Mommy. They broke my vacuum seal. Mommy..."

Winifred dropped to her knees, the high shine of her white patent boots scraping against the buckled sidewalk. Those scuffs would never come out.

"Freshness," she whimpered, almost too soft to hear above the ringing silence that echoed in the aftermath of her howl. "Oh, my little Freshness..."

She reached for her daughter, but the Garbage Men pressed down on her narrow shoulders and pinned her in place. Their faces, hidden beneath peaked caps and concealed behind mirrored sunglasses, never moved, but still the way they stood gave the impression of a smile.

The sole surviving ForeverWare lady wept.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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When the last barricade falls, Syndi can feel it. It's in the quality of the screams, the sounds of shifting debris. Something is coming to an end.

Her Miss Tornado Day sash, once a blinding satiny white any bride could be proud of, is fraying, grubby, and caked with gore. She slips out of it and unpicks the knot holding the two ends together.

Part of her is glad that Marshall can't see this, sure that he'd offer up some smart-alecky comment as she pushes sweat-damp hair off her face and keeps it there with a John Rambo-style bandana fashioned from a ribbon that once marked her out as a sacrifice for a sentient tornado.

Part of her wishes he was here anyway.

And another part of her wonders if she should have gone to Old Bob, when she was seventeen and her year was up, when the town chose a new Miss Tornado Day and she'd been sent out into the cyclone to die. Things might have turned out differently. For her, for the people she loved, even for Eerie.

If Marshall was here, she'd ask him about becoming the Harvest King. About the mountain and the wolf that howled in the night, and whether blood spilled under an October moon might have prevented all of this.

If he was here with her, hiding in the ruins of the Eerie Bingo Parlour, she would ask him whether it might have been worth it.

The tombola drum near the western windows begins to spin, slow at first, a handful of human teeth inside clicking against the rusting metal. Syndi reaches for the last remaining incendiary device - homemade hand grenades fashioned from stripped-down bingo dabbers and some sort of fruit cordial she'd discovered at the very back of the Parlour's walk-in refrigerator, covered in warning stickers and pulsating faintly.

Outside in the dark, something moves. The room she's in is three floors up, but the Garbage Men know how to climb. She'd seen them swarming like lizards over the surface of City Hall, the living surface of the building twitching and flinching at every touch.

She didn't blame it. In it's place, she'd have torn out her own foundations to avoid those clammy, grasping hands. Of course, in a very real way, the Garbage Men had already done that for her.

Syndi flicks open Janet's lighter and steps towards the glass.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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