The Lanternman flashed his badge before putting it back into his trenchcoat, rough fabric worn and dusty from too many years walking the frayed edges of the world.
The bartender grunted, spilling much of his beer as he slammed it down on the grimy counter.
"Ain't you a bit out of your jurisdiction. Stranger?" He made the last word sound like a slur.
"I don't have a particular area of jurisdiction." Not technically true. He did in fact have very particular areas of jurisdiction, just not geographical ones.
He reached into the breast pocket of his gray suit, feeling the rough edges of the photographs provided to him. "I just want you to look at these pictures. Tell me if you recognize any of them". He pulled them out and started placing them on the counter, avoiding the beer stains.
"Ain't got much to say to the police." The bartender swept the photographs aside, rubbing his crooked nose with a bloated finger. "Unless you're planning on bringing me down to the station." He gave a yellow-toothed, mirthless laugh.
"Not for the moment." Even had he been with the police, he wouldn't be bringing anybody hundreds of miles to a proper police station. The bartender knew it.
"Then drink up and be on your way. Stranger." The bartender left to scrub at an empty greasy table with an equally greasy rag. The air was thick with sweat, puke and alcohol. It had probably seeped into the wood. Even a clean cloth wouldn't get it out.
He sighed and sat down at the counter, gathered up the photographs and placed his hat beside him. On his other side, a woman was eating a steak so rare it might have been raw. She glanced at him with utmost contempt, then returned to her meal. He stared deep into his beer as he began chugging down what the barkeeper hadn't already spilled.
He had driven through the suffocating forest since early morning, more than half a day, and by the time the trees finally gave way, his car had felt claustrophobic, like a coffin. He had had to get out, and now here he was in a cesspool of a bar in what promised to be just another cesspool of a town. Tired. So tired. Not just from the drive but from everything.
A hot wind of sweat and alcohol was all the warning he received. Reflexes dulled with age failed him as a large, meaty hand trapped his wiry arm in a painful vise grip.
"Time for you to leave." A drunken voice growled.
He turned to look at the speaker, a huge man with a face no mother could love. Grasping at the hand he recoiled; it had two little fingers.
Momentarily shocked, he stared as another hand fell on his shoulder, pulling him off balance, stool tumbling beneath him. Turning to face this new assailant, he saw the steak woman flashing a bloody-toothed snarl.
Before he could reach for his gun, a third set of hands grabbed him under the armpits, effortlessly hoisting his gaunt frame. Together, the three patrons carried him to the door, throwing him onto the coarse asphalt outside.
Still crumbled on the ground, he looked back at the bar. The door was blocked by the bigger of the three, six-fingered hand gripping his meaty bicep as he crossed his arms. Behind him the steak woman appeared, throwing the Lanternan's hat at his feet.
The misshapen giant gave a loud hark and spat on the ground, missing the hat by inches, then had nothing further to say.
The Lanternman crawled to his hat and brushed it off before rising to his feet with a pained groan. He straightened his coat and held the hat in mock salute, then placed it on his head and went around the back to his car.
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A large man was perched on the mismatched hood of the rusty vehicle, suspension heaving and groaning as he got up.
"People around here aren't very friendly to strangers." He was well-kempt and cleanly dressed, his features plain and coarse, but pleasant.
"Doesn't seem like it." He reached into his coat pocket for his badge.
"Not here!" The man shouldered past. Smell of aftershave violating his nose as meaty fingers grasped his hand, then closed it around a coarse piece of paper.
He turned to look at the man as he disappeared into the dirty street, then returned to his car. Slamming the door shut, he unfolded the note:
"The Cottage. 1PM tomorrow"
He refolded the note and placed it in his breast pocket, then turned the ignition key. The engine chugged and then gave up the ghost. He tried again.
On the third try it started, spitting in protest.
Now he needed a place to stay the night.
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The woman at the counter had taken his money and pushed his room key over the dirty counter without looking at him, slack-jawed gaze fixed on the old cathode-ray television. She had erupted in soulless laughter just as he closed the door behind him.
The motel room he now found himself in was almost perfect in its stereotypical appearance.
Sounds of plumbing wheezing just beneath the grinding noise of the air conditioning unit. Smell of grime, bodily fluids and animal waste, built up over years, only intensified by the attempts to mask it with detergents and air freshener. Crude oil paintings made by unskilled artists hung askew on peeling wall paper, rotted boards and yellowing plaster exposed underneath. Dust and cobwebs in all but the most accessible corners.
He dropped his suitcase on the floor.
His life, working for the Department almost as long as he could remember, had been an endless series of motels, hotels, hostels. Recently rarely better than this, sometimes much worse, sometimes folded up in the back seat of his car. The battered suitcase was his closest thing to a point of stability.
He inspected the bed, half expecting sheets smelling of sweat, cum, piss or worse. They smelled clean though, in an overly sterile way. He would be able to rest here, if barely.
But not yet.
The door creaked its protest as he left, the lock struggling to turn on the first attempt.
There were hours left of the day and he had nowhere to be until tomorrow. He would continue his investigation.
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He spent the rest of the day walking what passed for streets in this nowhere place. The town was a reflection of its inhabitants, or perhaps they of it. Gutted carcasses of buildings, original purpose lost to the decay, sometimes inhabited still by squatters, scrambling to the corners as the Lanternman entered, most often completely empty. Even those who were still put to their original use were twisted and grimy. Roofs sagging under its own weight on rotted supports.
A fetid smell permeated everything. Black-brown liquid seeping into drainages from garbage left to rot in the street. Alleyways or even storefronts sometimes overpowered by the pungent smell of piss.
And the encroaching forest. At the outskirts he would look between the trunks only to see the skeletal remains of buildings, swallowed whole and left to die.
Everywhere he saw the same vacant faces, some looking like they might have been the people he met at the bar, or their inbred relatives. Most walked away as he approached them, like hyenas keeping their distance, snarling at a larger predator.
And the deformities: mismatched ears, missing nostrils, too many or too few fingers, features crooked or asymmetrical. There was a general sense that whatever had molded these people hadn't finished its work.
He tried flashing his badge, he tried not flashing his badge. The results were the same. Nobody would talk to him. He had many doors not open as he knocked, and many more slammed shut in his face.
Several times he tried showing the crumbled photos the Department had given him, only to have people spitting on the ground before walking away.
It was no surprise people disappeared here, of course. The forest was ever-present, suffocating. Once it took somebody, he didn't think it often gave them back. But these were not normal disappearances. Sometimes, not often, people had returned. Empty husks. Raving incoherently or completely mute, staring into the distance. They never lived long.
At length, the sun set behind the trees and he returned to the motel.
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The door groaned shut while he hung up his coat and unbuttoned his grey suit, shrugging it off into a pile on the floor, before sliding beneath the covers.
The walls were paper thin. He could hear the sounds of doors closing, of pissing and flushing. In one room, the TV was on, and on the other side of the wall, behind his pillow someone was obviously fucking. Not loudly, perhaps not even pleasurably as far as he could tell. But Incessantly.
He felt lonely.
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He woke up to find it past noon and the room now reduced to its earlier soundscape of plumbing and dying air conditioning.
The couple had finally tired of each other around dawn. Until then, he had been given ample opportunity to ponder just how unerotic the sounds of unscripted sex were; animal grunts, laboured breathing and creaking bedsprings. Repeating.
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He was a light sleeper. almost all Lanternmen were, eventually. Because of the nightmares.
His back ached as he got out of bed and entered the small bathroom, every porcelain surface yellowing, mould growing between the sickly green tiles, linoleum floor peeling away to blackness.
Trying to ignore the lingering smell of human waste, he brushed his teeth in chlorine-tasting water. Staring into the cracked mirror he saw his own gaunt face on bony shoulders, his own tired gaze daring him to give up. To stop roaming. Find a place to rest and wait to die.
He spat, watching the white foam against the yellowing porcelain as it circled down the drain, then he went back out, picked his clothes off the floor and got dressed.
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The neighbouring door opened while he was struggling with his own lock. Instinctively, he turned to get a better look at the lustful creatures who had tormented him through the night. Dirty clothes over bodies they were not made for. His shirt straining over his bloated gut, her dress bulky over a withered frame. Then the Lanternman looked at their faces.
And froze.
He opened his trenchcoat and pulled the crumbled photograph out of his breast pocket, looked at the picture, then back up at the woman. It was not the same person, but the likeness was startling. Except this looked like a poorly rendered copy; nose crooked, yellowing teeth stuck at odd angles in a mouth that ended in a gash on one side. Skin hung in asymmetric folds as if melting.
And the eyes with that vacant stare, as if from an inside that was simply hollow.
"Do you mind, pal?" The man grunted as he elbowed past, reeking of sweat and fucking and god knew what else, tugging his date behind him even as she flashed a snarl like a cornered animal.
The Lanternman stood, still frozen to the spot unable to do anything but watch them disappear down the stairs.
Then he shook himself and walked down to his car.
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The Cottage was the other bar in town, he had seen it while walking the streets yesterday, one of the many buildings on the outskirts slowly being devoured by the forest.
As he pushed the wooden door open he was met by the warm smell of beer and roasting meat. Melancholic music was playing, possibly from a record player.
Nature paintings decorated dark wood paneled walls in the dim room. The hardwood tables and counter were scratched but otherwise clean.
"Welcome. They'll be expecting you." The bartender's toothy grin threatened to split his face in two as he motioned towards the only occupied table.
The Lanternman ordered a beer and moved towards the back. The man from yesterday was waving at him, surrounded by four others. Two men and two women, each equally well-kempt and cleanly dressed and each raising their own foaming glass. He drew out an empty chair and sat down.
Five large smiles greeted him, waiting for him to speak.
"Not a busy day?"
"Oh, there's almost never anybody here but us regulars." Smiled one of the women, her face somehow familiar. "But it seems to be enough to keep he lights on, and for that we are thankful."
He nodded. "As your friend may have told you," he said while withdrawing his badge from his coat pocket, "I am investigating a series of disappearances that have been taking place in this area irregularly over the past few years."
They looked at his badge in unison, nodding.
He once again reached into the breast pocket of his gray suit and withdrew the ten photographs he had been given, laying them out on the table as if dealing cards. "Do you know any of these people?" He looked at each of his interlocutors in turn. They were studying the photographs ponderously, while the instrumental music gave way to a woman singing, voice achingly sad.
"I recognize many of them." Said one of the men. "This one," he grabbed the newest and least refolded photograph off the table, passing it around, everyone looking at it, nodding, faces somber. "This one came only a few days ago. She is probably still here."
"You know where she is then?" He could not keep the excitement out of his voice.
"Everybody knows." said the second woman, her face a parody of concern, "but people here don't much want to get involved in the affairs of outsiders." The others nodded.
"Where is she then?"
"She would be in the forest." This time the man from yesterday.
"Alone?"
"No... She would have been taken there."
"By who?"
"By the one who always takes them," said the concerned woman, "most pay them no mind as they tend to leave us alone." She leaned forward and lowered her voice in a way that sounded practiced. "They prey on the outsiders, you see." The others once again nodded, faces solemn.
"We can show you!" said the last man, who had not yet spoken, his voice booming. "We can at least take you to the place, even if we can't confront them with you."
"Who are *them*?"
"Nobodies." The familiar woman said.
"Predators preying on the weak and unwary." Added the concerned woman.
"Nobody here cares to interfere," the booming man continued "but if you are armed..." he gave a huge, toothy grin at everyone in turn "...these cowards will pose no threat to you!" He laughed, slamming his beer on the table. The others did the same in unison and for a moment the entire table was roaring with face-splitting laughter.
It died as soon as it had begun, replaced once more by the mellow music.
The Lanternman leaned back as the recorded woman finished her song. "Very well, when can you take me?"
"As soon as you want, " said a voice from beside him. A fourth man had appeared while he wasn't looking.
"Can we go right away?" He desperately wanted to leave this town behind. Even if it only meant moving on to the next festering wound of a place. Lanternmen were not sent to nice places. A nice place, by its very nature, would have no need for one.
They rose almost in unison, smiling identical toothy smiles down at him.
He scrambled up, chair making a nails-on-chalkboard sound on the wood floor, and together they left the bar, nodding goodbye at the bartender, getting another face-splitting grin in return.
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Of course there were warning signals. Red flags. Blaring sirens in his mind. Any child knew better than to follow a group of strangers into the forest.
However, the Department was understaffed and underfunded, spread too thin. It was only after this latest high-profile disappearance that they had decided to send even one Lanternman. And if he went back with his work unfinished, best case scenario would be that he was sent right back again.
The Department would use him up, same as it did everyone.
And so he followed them into the oppressive forest, too dense to see more than a few feet from the path. A path always in danger of being swallowed by the branches and roots clawing their way towards them.
Minutes upon entering, the town was no longer visible, displaced by the sounds of the forest. The wind, barely distinguishable from the animal howls and bird screeches. The slithering and buzzing of insects.
At times he would look around and find that his companions had grown in number, and as they walked they started to sing. Songs without words, sung to the rhythm of the noises around them.
As the sun sank, the forest decayed before his eyes, the animal sounds slowly snuffed out. Rotten fruit, swollen, lay strewn across the path. Animal carcasses too, buzzing with flies or bloated, bursting at a touch with putrid gas and crawling insects.
The trees themselves grew sickly, soft and bloated, sagging under their own weight, finally reduced to little more than putrid undergrowth. An unnatural clearing born of its own corruption.
The sweet, sickly, stench was almost unbearable. Air so thick with rot it seemed suffocating to breathe.
At the edge of this clearing, the Lanternman's companions, now over two dozen, stopped their singing. With no animal noises, the silence now absolute.
Before him, in its middle stood a tree, swollen and leafless, bearing unnatural fruit; large, pulsing and fleshy, skin translucent and veiny. Beneath stood five people. One, a woman, kneeling on the ground, facing him. Four facing away, standing, wearing dirty rags. Clothes that might have been jeans, shirts, jackets, now torn and dirtied beyond recognition.
The Lanternman's companions urged him forwards. His footfalls making wet sounds as they sunk into the fetid ground. Almost obscenely loud in the silence.
The kneeling woman looked up at him as he approached with his gun drawn. Like he had hoped, she was the one he thought he had seen this morning, the one on that most recent photograph, only this was not a malformed imitation. The resemblance was nearly perfect.
The four standing shapes turned, following her gaze towards him, and in their faces he saw the same dull, vacant stares he had seen all around the town. When they saw his gun, they let out an inhuman screech, mouths open in a mockery of human anatomy, phlegm and saliva flying.
As his warning shot rung out in the silence, the empty expressions instantly turned to grimaces of primal fear. They fell over themselves as they clawed their way across the sodden ground, disappearing into the forest.
Holstering his gun, he looked down on the woman, grabbing her extended hand.
Pain erupted in his forearm, suddenly engulfed in twisted, pulsing branches extending from her fingers. Digging into his skin. Drawing blood.
Looking down he now saw that she wasn't kneeling on the ground. She was growing out of the tree roots, like a pustule.
The singing returned as a hundred people slowly emerged from the forest.
Her other hand grasped him before he could react, thorns tearing into his shoulder, rending his trenchcoat. Dragging him to his knees.
Before him the tree and the woman were both pulsing in rhythm with the singing. At this close distance, he could make out embryonic shapes inside the fruits hanging from the sagging branches.
Then her body burst, like a swollen tick, blood seeping into the rancid ground, her insides crawling with gory tendril-like branches. Struggling against his restraints even as they dug deeper into his flesh, he could only watch as the branches rose up before him. Pulsing in time to the almost deafening song reverberating through his body.
They held still in front of his face for just a moment, frozen in time. Writhing. Dripping with blood and mucus.
Then the song reached its crescendo and they snapped shut around his face, plying open his struggling jaws as he involuntarily gasped for breath. His mouth filled with the taste of blood and rot as they forced their way down his throat.
While he convulsed in attempts to vomit, he felt himself drained.
The world faded.
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The Lanternman awoke. Naked. In fetal position on the forest floor.
He rose. So did the others.
His body was covered in mucus and burst membrane. Like webbing between his fingers.
After the draining sensation, he remembered nothing. All he knew was hunger. He was so very hungry.
They made their way back through the forest, branches scratching his skin. Where they drew blood, he lapped it up in panicked hunger.
After an indeterminate time they left the forest, walking down the main street. Some of them collapsing from hunger or weariness only to be fell upon and devoured by others. The streets were empty, shadows cast by the sodium lamps impossibly black. Absolute silence except for the shuffling of their own bare feet.
They walked up the stairs to his motel room door, gathering around it. His mouth watered at the sounds of sleep from behind it, driving him insane with hunger. Hunger like an aching, gutting hollow.
First they clawed at the door, then they started pushing, then pounding, shaking, tearing, pulling, gnawing.
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The Lanternman awoke. Fully clothed. On top of the bed, only vaguely remembering how he got here. He remembered the branches forcing themselves into him and how it was over as quickly as it had begun. The singing stopping, mid-crescendo and everyone walking away, leaving him gasping for putrid air as he sat on the fetid ground, blood seeping from myriad wounds, spitting from the taste of blood and rot.
Then a great tiredness had come over him and he had wandered, almost somnambulant, back to the motel and collapsed into dreamless sleep. How long he had slept he could not tell. It might have been mere minutes, or hours. Or days.
And now he was being woken by the sounds of pounding and animal noises. At first he thought the neighbours were fucking again, but this was too loud.
And it wasn't coming from the next room.
He stood up, drew his gun, aiming at the shaking door. Hinges and handle coming loose as the cheap wood cracked around them. From the other side he heard screams, grunts, snarls. Sounds of pain and rage.
It was not long before the door fell into the room, animal stench rushing in with it. As he saw the faces on the other side he froze, finger forgotten on the trigger.
They were his own face. His own gaunt face and body, repeated a dozen times over. Each an imperfect copy in its own way.
But the eyes. Where until now he had only seen the vacant dullness of a mute beast, he saw pure animal hunger. Teeth bared in inhuman grimaces.
Struggling to keep his hands steady, he fired his gun as they threw themselves at him. The shot went wide, only grazing a creature's temple, yet its head burst open like an overripe melon from the point of impact. Immediately two of its companions pulled it down until it was hidden from view by the advancing mass of misshapen flesh.
In the next moment they were upon him. Dragging him to the floor, clawing, gnawing, rending as they tore him apart.
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He stood over the carcass, while blood slowly seeped into the carpet. Taste of flesh still raw in his mouth. Around him, a dozen hands and mouths still wet from their meal.
His belly was filled to bursting. The hunger was gone. And what was more, he had finally found a place where he belonged.
He was home.
All was right.