Twilight Children Episode 10
The big corporate bookstore manager delivers a speech and Vlad meets someone that changes her.
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
Writing Skins is a reader supporter author newsletter that shares excerpts from Aigner Loren Wilson’s writing journal. Aigner is an award winning and nominated author of literary speculative fiction and nonfiction.
Previously On: In last week’s episode, Ryth starts finding teens lost and confused in the woods surrounding town and Vlad tries to nurse Elaine back to health after finding her lost in the snow.
Wolf Man in the Sleepy Hollow
On a full night, covered in white, the tale of The Wolf Man in the Sleepy Hollow comes to find you. Beware its bite.
Mighty, strong bent legs support this half-man, half-wolf creature. If you were a fan of the horror files, you’d mistake it for a werewolf, some sort of wolftaur. And you’d be wrong. No, this beast is worse than both of those monsters combined.
Dressed in the skin of a man with the eyes of a vulture, he hunts. Only one thing captures his interest, and he’ll do anything to get it. Love a young lass, hold her tight, for the wolf man is out for a bite. You’ll know him by his hands, rough and covered in blood, and his teeth, long and sharp from all the bones he’s cut them on. Don’t get caught or you’ll end up lost among the pines without a name or a shirt or a reason why you’re crying, but you’ll know you’ll never stop.
Never again.
Thanks to the wolf man.
Take me for a liar? Just go out into the pines past the Outer Limits and see what you can see stumbling around in the snow.
Does their blood make yours run cold and thin?
New Email: You're Not Alone (12/17/21)
Stephanie
Hey, Ryth,
Stephanie here, faithful reader and soon to be neighbor.
I know saying I feel you isn’t enough. But I do. I feel all your frustration. Hell, I double it.
My dad is one of the top managers in the company. He’s the one who pushed for the company to set up a store in your town.
It’s messed.
Absolutely fucked.
But we’re moving next week. Everything’s packed. I’ve even been to Elaine’s and Ghostwoods a few times. Maybe you’ve seen me, I’ve seen you, which sounds creepy, but it’s not.
I’m not a creep. Just a friend you haven’t met yet.
The Day You Saw Your Future
ElaineIt all happened so fast and yet so slow, like a pipe about to burst. You saw her and she saw you. While it’s here and clear, I’ll tell it the best I can because this is the moment when I lost you forever. The last time I think it was you held my hand and said:
“I love you.”
“I Love You.”
I. Love. You.
“I love you, Elaine.”
After today, all your love will go to her, and all I will get is that acid hate you call care.
That bitch mayor Jamilia called a town meeting right before the opening of the Book Haulers. You told me to stay home. You told me:
“Ryth and I will make sure everyone in there knows how you feel.” You wrapped yourself in my old clothes.
“Gothed out with only one place to go,” I spat. “If I wasn’t busy making a new world out of screams, I would have made sure that damn fucking store would never have gotten built.”
You sigh. “We did what we could while you were gone.”
“Yeah, right. I’m not letting this go the way of the past. I’m going to be there front and center with my say.”
“Elaine,” you hissed. Then you grinned and rolled your eyes before taking my hand. “I love you. Let’s get you ready.”
Ever since I ran away, you don’t let me go out into the snow. A young man and Ryth came to pick us up in a truck with big-toothed tires. I didn’t like not being out in the storm, but the boy could drive. He took snow drifts like a fish swimming upstream. Nothing could stop him, and we bounced around giggling all the way to the school and town hall.
It was packed when we got there, and the first betrayal started. The boy who drove us was one of them. A Book Hauler. And the rest of them were there, too. There was a tall, dark-skinned man with a pearly white grin and deep dark eyes that made me shiver with a tinge of a memory. It was awful, Vlad, but you didn’t see any of it.
Beside the group of khaki and blue shirt Book Haulers was a young woman only a few years older than you. She sat at a piano, plucking the keys with a sweet ginger melody. You two locked eyes, and you became a ghost.
A shell of the thing I once brought in from the cold, you had found your fire.
Tripping over your feet and watching the girl play, you don’t hear a damn thing I say as we take a seat among the other Ghostwoods folk.
“I’m scared.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I want to go home.”
“Vlad, please.”
Then he took the podium—
Beware the man with the pearl teeth.
Teeth like bats.But she didn’t stop playing that melody, and you didn’t stop watching her. Every moment or so, she’d glance away or close her eyes only to return them to you. As if to say, Do I have your attention? And you, promptly and without hesitation, replied, Yes. Forever.
“I am beyond joyous to have you guys welcome me to your small town.” His words venom with that girl’s poison. “This here is my daughter, Carmen—fresh from her second year at college. She’ll be joining me at the bookstore.” His smile grew into a cave. “And that is my other daughter, Stephanie. She’ll be starting at your fine community school in the fall. Some of you may remember us. We’ve come to your town now for months and have admired it for even longer.”
“No one cares!” Ryth’s voice cut up like a rug.
Jamilia stood from her seat on the other side of the front row. “Ryth, please!”
“It’s all right,” the man said, flashing those bats he called teeth at Ryth and licking his lips. “Young lady—”
Shouts and murmurs rang out while that bitch at the keys kicked up another tune and played furiously to your wonderment. Jamilia stepped up to the front and whispered in the man’s ear.
He raised a hand to quiet the small auditorium. And those bastards listened. “My apologies,” he said, unsmiling. “I misheard your name as Ruth and assumed.”
Ryth laughed loud and without mirth. “Right.”
“Ryth, please,” Jamilia said, moving toward them.
“No, Mayor, it’s okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. I know me and my family coming here with the Book Haulers isn’t the best situation—or at least, that’s not how it feels at the moment. But trust me, we are here to help. Let me tell you a story—a story I am sure you can all relate to.”
“If it’s more of your bullshit,” Von said from his seat in the back with his pack of kids. “Then you can save it, Ron. We’ve read the press release you nailed on the fucking door.”
More shouts. Someone even threw a shoe. I would have done something, but I was too busy gripping your hand and crying.
The man and Von exchanged long looks like a tree starring at a rock. Then the man at the podium said, “We are here to revive and add to your town. Ghostwoods reminds me of a place I once read about in a book I bought right here at Elaine’s—” He gestures at me and winks. “—It spoke of a town lost in the woods just like Ghostwoods, except the people weren’t lost. They had each other. They had a family. Sound familiar?
“Whether lost in the snow or woods or time, you are never really lost when you are with your kind, your family. But then something came to change everything for them. Instead of fighting against it, they accepted the change, welcomed it even. And you know what happened?
“They died. They all died.”
I hated everything about him, about his words, how they slipped so easily, so deadly out of his mouth. Even though people started murmuring, he kept on with his veiled threats and his razor promises.
“Just like we will all die someday, but that day is not today. Book Haulers is committed to our pledge of keeping alive towns like Ghostwoods, but not just the town itself, we want to keep you all alive and well, too. That’s why we are giving every Ghostwoods town member 20% of our monthly revenue. What we get, we give back to you. And that money is all yours. You can do whatever you want with it. Every month, you’ll get a check in the mail—”
Laughter and shouts and murmurs broke out somewhere.
“Ron,” Jamilia said. “A lot of the people living in the Outer Banks don’t use the postal service.”
“Well, then,” he said. “We’ll figure out another way of getting you your money. But rest assured, no one is dying on my watch. Ghostwoods is a thriving town, we just want to give you more to thrive on.”
I knew then it was too late. You were gone. Ghostwoods was gone. We were all gone. There was nothing left to thrive on but the corpses we call our bodies, our desires taken form.
Blue Velvet
Ready, Able
VladAfter wrangling Elaine into Nos’ truck with Ryth, Vlad sat quietly at the window, staring out into the falling snow. Shapes began to take form in the white, but they all came to the same end. Carmen. Carmen, like caramel, seeped through Vlad’s brain. There were things she saw in her mind that didn’t make sense. Bodies couldn’t fit together like that. Bodies couldn’t run against each other like that.
Like a curse, Carmen put the impossible in Vlad’s mind.
“Bitches. Hog, pig bitches. Ugly,” Elaine said beside Vlad, squeezing her hand. “I want to go home.”
“Home, yes.” Vlad didn’t take her eyes off the forms in her mind or the ones materializing on the street.
It was like her eyes were finally able to see all the world she was too busy to see before. Before Carmen Like Caramel, the world was filled with the stories and histories of times Vlad only knew through her chewing and swallowing the pages, pencils, and objects she secretly ate. Now, the world spun around her into existence.
Elaine fidgeted and thrashed slightly beside Vlad. Though the teenager could feel it, sense the building tantrum, she didn’t care. She didn’t squeeze Elaine’s hand in reassurance because what was there to reassure? The world wasn’t what Vlad thought it was. Vlad didn’t know anything, let alone something to calm Elaine.
Change was coming, and it wouldn’t leave Vlad behind.
Her stomach gnashed with painful teeth.
“Don’t worry, ladies,” Nos said at the wheel like a demon behind a soul. “I’ll get y’all home in no time.”
Ryth sat in the covered back of the truck, where blankets and a mattress kept them comfy.
“Ladies?” Vlad repeated.
“Yeah,” Nos said. “The fairer sex. The second sex. The sex with two beasts on her back.” He grinned and Vlad could see the handsome boy behind the obnoxious man. “Okay, that last one I just made up.”
“Sex?”
Nos grew rigid. “Shouldn’t said that. Sorry, Elaine.”
“What!” Elaine yelled, startled by the mention of her name. “Where are we? I want to go home.”
“Almost there, my sweet las.” Nos pressed on the gas and blew the snow up into the air around the large red truck.
Like Carmen, out of the storm, their house appeared. It took Vlad longer than it should have to help Elaine out of the truck, but there was something eating away at Vlad’s insides. What was she becoming in this short time? Like so many weeks ago, a voice rose from deep within Vlad and answered:
You’re becoming what she needs you to be.
And out loud, like a birthday wish, Vlad said, “Carmen.”
“Who?” Elaine asked as the two shoved their way into the house. “My name is Elaine, dear, and it is my lunchtime. You shouldn’t have kept me out so late.”
A cavern of pain, a hunger for growth, ripped through Vlad, forcing her to her knees.
“Watch your step,” Elaine said, leaving Vlad where she lay cradled on the floor. “It can be tricky coming into the cabin. Now, what did you say your name was? Carmen?”
Grasping her stomach and inching to her knees, Vlad spat through gritted teeth, “Vlad, my name is Vlad.”
Elaine laughed pleasantly while she went to bring the embers back to life in the fire. “Vlad’s the name of a vampire, sweetie, not a young woman such as yourself. Once upon a time, long ago, I knew a Vlad. She was just a scarp of a girl. 15 and full of her bridges. You could be her older sister, except you’re bigger. Nothing scrap about you.”
It was happening. That change Vlad couldn’t control.
Without another word, Vlad stumbled, crawled, rolled, and inched like a worm cut in half toward her bedroom. Using every ounce of strength she had, which turned out to be more and more—growing like a wave inside of her large form—Vlad went to the one window by her bed. The heat on her bones felt like tipping to boiling, and Vlad wrenched open the window and flung her scream out to the snow. Cold came in, fresh air to her lungs, and the last few seams holding her outfit together burst with the force of her awakening.
When it was done and Vlad had caught her breath, she rose to her feet, felt the new height and weight on her bones and spun in the snow blowing in from the storm.
“Try and look away now,” Vlad said, running her hands down her curvy Black body. “I dare you.”
Next Time: Vlad and Carmen meet.
Twilight Children Episode 11
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
What did you think? I’m trying things out and everything is an experiment. I’d love to know your thoughts? Love it. Hate it. Absolutely indifferent and confused?