The young woman was reluctant to obey, and once she found herself facing the glassy-eyed hag with her tea-stained teeth, her marionette-like body, her frumpy floral gown, her black-soled feet with their thick yellow toenails, her voice refused to come. Rhiannon knew the feeling well. Seeing the girl in this familiar helpless state, that of nightmare, that of her very existence since the night in the crawlspace, made Rhiannon pity the girl. She did her best to show empathy through her unfailingly vacant gaze.

“Can you tell us,” the girl began pausing to clear her throat, “will our baby be a healthy one?”

The power inside Rhiannon, over which she had no agency, shared its prophecy.

Iain smiled. His young lover began to cry. He helped her to her feet, and they escaped the room together, like some awkward three-legged hybrid joined at the hip.

Twenty-three weeks after their consultation in the stone cottage, the last of which were filled with punishing nausea, the word was made flesh.

Wriggling, its tiny limbs twitching as though being prodded with an electrical charge, the child’s first mewling cry was distorted from the mucous that sealed its mouth like fine stretched fabric. Iain swaddled its body, still greasy with the fluids of the womb, and carefully lifted it from the bed. The cord was still connecting the baby to its host. Iain could feel the lump growing in his throat, could feel himself tearing up, yet he still managed a smile. For and from this child, great things had been predicted.

After the Final

After the Final

Are you out there, Professor Nobody?

I’m hopeful that these words will somehow reach you, wherever you might be, whatever you might be.

In my starker moments I find myself questioning whether you were ever really here at all, whether those sermons that spilled from your dusty throat were not simply the vestiges of one of my lavish nightmares.

But if you did truly grace a classroom with your singular presence, if the trances you evoked were indeed real, then I cannot help but cling to the hope that you might return to your most dedicated pupil, one who you left behind on this shadow-encrusted planet.

Do your thoughts ever stray to me, Professor? Rarely, I would wager; rarely, if at all.

I have roamed many roads, exhausted so many different methods, all in the hope of finding you. Every one of my efforts has come to nothing. But how could it be otherwise? After all, how does one even begin questing after a man known only as Nobody, a man whose vocation is that of a secret shepherd to what he calls “the true macabrists”?

Macabrist. It was your phrase, yet it rang so true to me that I cannot help but regard it as a grand truth, every bit as immutable as love or fear or pain.