Twilight Children Episode 9
Vlad cares for Elaine and nurses her back to health after being found in the tunnels beneath Ghostwoods.
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, Vlad continues her search for Elaine and finds her with the help of the town and a new comer named, Ron.
Father Time and the Monstrous Children
In the land of ice and snow, the only thing that moves is Father Time. Like a glacier, he cuts away at the people and animals, makes waste of the trees, and carves a new home out of what was already there. His face is stained and mangled from an eternity of rubbing against the unwilling. Father Time calls to you in the reaches of the dark and dares you to look at him. Raise your head, lock eyes with your end and laugh if you can while Father Time begins licking and gnawing at the parts of you, you left buried in the past.
Father Time came from across the long black. Not the sea or the stars, but someplace hidden deep in the people who dared create Ghoul City. He sailed in between the memories of happy days and lost loves to find us all waiting here, ice-locked. When he found our ancestors, stuck and dying in the cold, he knew they’d give birth to both monsters and angels and gave them a shovel. Told them to do his work for them. Dig. Find the past and breathe life into it.
What they found locked just like them in the frozen soil were bodies, preserved by the cold and appearing as though they simply drifted off to sleep. Where did Father Time go, then? Did he run from the frightened children trapped beneath the snow, hungry for stories of the time they were forgotten?
How You Found Me
The Real and Unreal
RythHello! It is yours truly, Ryth—caster of tales, weaver of worlds, and delicacy of your dreams.
Song of the Day:
You may have realized I’ve been a bit absent around here. And it’s because I’m a bit in love. I’m that thing I would never wish on another person but wish everyone has someone like me watching their back, someone who loves without end like a spring unfrozen and filled to the brim.
In other more relevant news, no story today, folks. Sorry. I just can’t seem to create fictions when there are so many strange things happening in the very real world of Ghostwoods!
For any new readers, welcome to The Catacombs. My small corner of the internet for my fan fiction based around my little snowy town, Ghostwoods, New Jersey, or as my long-time readers know it: Ghoul City a place for the forgotten, gotten, and gone astray. And those who have gone astray are beginning to grow in numbers. For returning readers who have expressed concern about the missing Elaine, don’t worry. Vlad found her! Elaine is home and resting under her guard and care.
And honestly, Elaine or anyone couldn’t ask for a more patient or kind attendant. Can’t help but think I had a good influence on Vlad during her formative weeks??days??
IDK that girl is a mystery. But I love the shit out of her.
*deep sighs and haggard breaths*
OK back to those who have gone astray:
My legs and body are ragged from spending hours forcing my way through the snow on the tail of some predator, some new beast hunting these woods. It’s smart, quick, and good. I’ve walked every inch of Ghostwoods and I’m talking every inch. That includes The Brush where Jamilia and the other norms live and that new abomination of mega homes they are pretentiously calling, The Pines, and the fucking maze and scattered settlement where Elaine and Vlad live, yeah, the god damn Outer Limits, which, fun fact, is 10 miles of woods and a scattering of gun shooting, blood-drenched, antler stabbed homes.
Want to know what I found? Teens. Not people who lived out there, but young kids like 13 and 15-year-olds. They seemed like they were brought out there and left confused, near death. If it wasn’t for Nos—my heartthrob—and his slick wheels, I’d be updating y’all on deaths instead of attacks. We were able to bring all the kids we found back to town fast enough for Jamilia and Eddie to act.
Eddie Barlow, our dear sheriff and dentist, has ruled them accidents. Kids getting lost in the storm. Makes sense. Most of the people we find are new. Moved here with the B**k H*ulers. People like my sweet silly-faced Nos.
But riddle me this: if they’re accidents, then why haven’t we been able to stop them? We know where they’re happening and who is being targeted, but whenever we (me and Nos) try and see what’s causing these “accidents,” we’re either a little too late or are road blocked by Eddie. Like these accidents have a mind of their own, like they know someone is on to them, like they know there is reason to hide.
Silver lining here, surprisingly enough, Jamilia believes me.
The Days of Care
ElaineDon’t know how you found me or even how you came to be this thing before me, but you say you’re Vlad. You even look a little like the baby all hungry and strange I found so long ago lost in the snow. Maybe you found me the way I found it. Did you hear my screams? I had taken yelling on as a new language. Scream until you’re heard. Scream until you’re dead. Scream for the dead. Scream for the living. No matter what, scream. Scream like a bird. Scream like a fish—of which I’ve had many. Raw fish dripping out my mouth like pieces of paper. Ha! Hope that’s how you found me. Covered in shit and blood and mud, screaming like some monster of the wild searching for her home.
Tears are falling on the page. I am crying and drooling. It’s so hot in here.
“Can’t we turn off the heat?” I ask you.
“You don’t have heat or electricity,” you say as you cut my hair and pull the bird shit out of my locks. “You’re feverish.”
Your words are soft, but those brown eyes of yours are hard. I’m in trouble.
Problem/Need: I need to know you’re Vlad. I need to know you’re my family, that you’re here to help me not hurt me. Tell me you love me.
“I love you,” you say, reading over my shoulder.
More tears fell. I am lost in time. Is this now or then? Are we safe? I want to sleep, but you tell me I can’t until dark. But I want to now. I’m so very tired and it hurts everywhere. How’d I become a bruise, a broken bone? There was once a woman who knew what I needed to know to keep you safe, to protect you. That woman is somewhere inside me, but I can’t seem to find her. She’s slipping through my mind.
“I found you, Elaine, out there.” You point to the window and the falling snow.
“Home,” I say.
“No. This is your home. I am your home. Remember, we are a nest of worms together. Separate, we’re just wriggling grotesque things.”
“Home.”
“Yes, you’re home now,” you say, resting a hand on my shoulder.
“No. Home is dark. Home is in the ground.”
I remember fighting you in the doorway. I remember screaming for my home. I remember screaming a name I can no longer remember. I remember trying to bite you, trying to swallow you whole. I remember you held me. You took my slaps and punches and bites.
You took me and put me to bed with the sun, and I went running to the corner, wailing, “Who are you? Get out of my store? We’re not open.” I called for Ryth, for Vlad, for someone to come and save me from this tall hungry being in my home. “What do you want from me?!”
“Elaine, it’s all right. You’re safe. Vlad sent me to care for you.” It spoke in Vlad’s voice.
“No. No. No.” Screams are like crows; they murder what can’t be spoken. “Vlad is dead. I killed Vlad, left her in the dirt to rot.”
My head spins. I fell down but not here in the shop, back home. I fell down on my bedroom floor and tried to claw my way out of a hole in the wall. There was no hole but a spot that smelled so strong of urine, I cried. Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? Who are these people crowding my head?
I want fish guts and salamander tails. I want it to be time to sleep. Time to rest. Time to eat what stabs and slides down my throat. I want Vlad.
“I am Vlad,” the hungry creature says, standing in makeshift skin like a scarecrow. “I love you. Everything will be okay.”
It sits on the ground with me and smiles, baring its teeth at me. I want to cry for my child, but I don’t remember ever being pregnant. Only losing my teeth like leaves to the ground and burying them. What’s happening to me? What is happening to me?
“Everything will be okay. You can sleep now. I’ll watch over you.”
“Okay,” I say and let my eyes drift closed to memories I’m not sure are mine of a woman lost in the snow eating twigs and calling them snakes.
Elaine, you’re home with Vlad. Don’t be scared. It’s okay. You’re okay. She’s got you. Stay with her. Tell her the truth. Remind her who she is. Who you are.
I start a new page every day. I don’t want to watch what is left of me lost in what is left of me. You woke me up with my favorite meal of sausage and eggs. I thank you so much I spit food all over the table and on your face. It’s grown so old in such a short time.
“How are you like this?” I asked, rubbing my greasey hands across your skin.
You didn’t pull away but leaned into the touch. “You needed me. A bigger me. Someone who could take care of you.”
“And you think a teenager could do that?”
Problem/Need: Babies caring for twilight children—those of us late out of life but so fresh in the swim of memories.
Your smile is something for the ages. “I think a teenager has been doing that for two weeks now. A teenager picked you out of the dark and carried you home.”
Flashes of me in a truck swirled around me like bats chasing sticks in the dark. “No, you didn’t. Someone drove us in their duck … no, that’s not it.”
“Truck,” you corrected softly.
“Right! Truck. I know that. I know trucks. I’ve known things since before you popped out of the snow. He brought us bone in his truck.”
“But it was I who carried you in.”
The memories that came were of me carrying you into the house as a small bundle of cold pressed against my flesh.
“Okay,” I said, suddenly tired.
It becomes darker now. The morning’s gone and my sausages are cold and untouched.
“I ate this,” I say to no one.
A teenager came peeking out of Vlad’s room. “What was that?”
“I’m hungry,” I say again. “Why can’t I eat? You’re hiding my food.”
Problem/Need: the teenager living in my house is hiding my food and I’m starving. I can see my bones poking out and I’m wasting away.
“I’m sorry. I’ll heat them up over the fire for you now.” She comes out in a flash, making me dizzy.
“Once, a girl lived here and only ate the oddest things. Paper, rocks, silverware, stories, anything she could get her hands on. That’s what she was hungry for. Except I was the only one who knew she existed. I fed her what I could. Books, bones, bits of cardboard. Hate.”
The girl hums while cooking the sausages on pikes over the fire.
“She looked like you but was prettier and nicer. She didn’t hide my food like you do. Smart as a whip, that one. You wouldn’t know anything about that. Look at you. Dumb and dull like an ugly pig. I hate you.”
My words don’t stop her humming. She takes the sausages off the stick, steaming and bursting with juices, and places them back on the floral porcelain plate. We’re on the couch together now. She is cutting up the sausage into small bites, and I want to tell her to stop because when she slices into the red meat, it makes me think she’s going to cut me. Cut my skin down the length and place me in her mouth.
Instead of saying that, I scream and kick the plate out of her lap.
She sighs. “What’s wrong?”
I tried to slap you, didn’t I? I hope, I promise, I swear I didn’t mean it. I’m scared. There’s something in here with me I don’t recognize and I’m afraid it’s me.
If heaven existed, then you’d be their child. Here we are again, Vlad: on the couch with sausages. This time you let me eat them whole with my hands. I told you I’d wait till they cooled off, but I didn’t, and you either were too tired to see or didn’t mind how red my fingers turned as I gnawed on the soft snaps of meat. One leg over the other and a roaring fire beside you, Howl’s Moving Castle propped up on your knees, you read aloud of magic and mountains and moving homes and love and temperament and anger, and every now and then, you reached over to me and placed a hand on my trembling knee.
I know I’m okay. We’ll be okay.
Won’t we, Vlad?
Then everything changed, and a knock turned the room from amber to crimson. You answered, spoke in hushed tones, and next thing I knew, I was out in the sun, in the snow, with a man I didn’t know. He asked me how I was. He touched my bent back and bruised arms with a tenderness reserved for babies. I am not a child. I yelled it, I think. Spat the words at him until he let go. Though he stopped touching me, his words kept scratching at my cloth—that thick sheet inside my head I keep to hide the nasty things.
Come on, Elaine, he said like a faucet drip. Come on, like a growl.
Where was Vlad? Where was I? Who was this man?
Problem/Need: To put a name to a face and remember what the hell I am so afraid of. I can’t protect Vlad if I don’t know what brings the danger.
“I’m tired. Please, where is Vlad?” I remember saying to the man.
He didn’t answer but led me back to the worms’ nest and handed me off to a teenager who said she was you, but I haven’t seen you in so long I’m beginning to think you are just another shadow in my mind. Something I’ve forgotten to put away.
Next Time: Threats of love and time come for Vlad and Elaine.
Twilight Children Episode 10
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?