With a final accursed syllable, I completed the ritual and doomed us all. A vast whirlpool formed that would claim us, body and soul, and from its center bobbed and rose a massive log of wood and flesh and eyes. The waterlogged corpse of the world tree, rotten and putrefied by the thing beneath. It would claim us, and we would nestle in its womb like eggs, forever waiting in exquisite agony to become the stillborn children of the abyss.

“Deadhead! Deadhead!” a crewman shouted, the words his last before he turned to scale and slime.

The cursed book that had guided me here fell from the formless appendages that had been my hands, disappearing beneath the waves. Like the crew, I had gazed upon the thing in the water, and now that thing was inside me. I could feel it twitching and slithering, writhing beneath the surface of both the sea and my skin.

I glanced across the ship with eyes rapidly encrusting with salt, taking in the final fate of the crew I’d hired. A seaman tripped over a rope as our vessel lurched, breaking against the surface of the deck like a wave against the rocks. Blood and foam. The captain was carving pieces off himself with grim determination, each chunk of flesh another crab. His mate assisted with needlepoint teeth, loyal to the end.

My actions had inflicted this malice upon the world, and in return, I would have my fondest wish.

Unable to wait, I heaved myself over the edge on boneless limbs. The instant I touched the water, my pain ended and my suffering became eternal.

And in that infinite mire beyond the reach of time and death, I reunited with my son.

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I awoke to find it sitting on the foot of my bed. It had seven limbs and a crown of eyes that stared past my physical form and into the core of my being. No doubt it could see my sins written large across my soul. A terrible fear came over me as it leaned in, and it took every bit of courage I had to keep looking directly at it. To flinch away would mean my end.

Softly, it began to sing in the voice it had stolen from the sacrifice I’d used to arrange its presence in my bedroom.

“All Hallows greet, All Hallows meet.

You brought me something good to eat.

Left me some candy young and sweet,

so now one wish you may entreat.”

It sounded amused, and I could swear I heard a chorus of a thousand other children’s voices as a faint echo. For a moment, I thought I recognized one of them.

My voice broke as I tried to speak the question I’d killed to ask.

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“My son—please,” I choked, but the creature seemed to understand my meaning.

The thing grinned, its teeth gleaming red in the light of the full moon.

“All Hallows east, All Hallows west.

Brings wand’ring spirits to their rest.

To claim your child back to your breast,

is quite a task, no easy quest.”

“Anything. I’ll do anything!” I glanced aside at the bloody pile in the corner; there were no longer any limits to my determination.

“All Hallows eve, All Hallows day.

You’ll bring your son back come what may.

To mankind’s terrible dismay,

their ending lies ‘neath sea’s salt spray.”

I frowned, uncomprehending. “What does that mean? What do I need to do?”

It told me.

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With bleary eyes, I worked to translate the pages of that crimson tome. Every night, I sacrificed sleep on the altar of knowledge. Slowly but surely, I consumed the book even as it consumed me in turn. Nightmares were nothing new to me, but their flavor changed under its maleficent influence, and they began to plague me no less during the day.

The words, when parsed, were despicable, and the images instilled in me a fear for my own sanity. Still, I persevered, and in time, a meaning revealed itself. Incantations most foul. Rituals of such deep depravity, they couldn’t possibly be worth the cost, not even for my deepest desire. For example, the granting of a true wish required summoning a fey horror by dismembering a child and boiling the organs in liquid sugar. The candied remains were to be placed in a circle painted in their blood on the night before Allhallowtide. The mere concept was beyond the pale.

While the rewards they promised were tantalizing, I could not imagine performing the blackest of these arts. There were less terrible avenues to walk. Here, instructions on the contacting of the dead. If they proved true, I could talk to my son. To see him again, even for a moment, would put my heart at ease.

It would have to be enough.

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I’d been a man of class once, but in the years since my son’s death, everything I’d worked to build came undone. I spent every cent I’d saved; first on doctors and men of science, then on conjurors and charlatans, and eventually on secrets whispered by those who called themselves seekers of truth.

Finally, in the most unlikely of places, at the bottom of a glass and the end of a rope, I found my answers. As my consciousness faded, that hideous voice in the back of my mind whispered them to me.

I recognized the feeling of that particular madness. Until this moment, I’d always fought it. The days where it won left scars. Right now, its scars were all I had left. With nothing left to lose, I let it in, and so it came to me in a flash of pain, like something great and terrible had sliced open my skull and stuffed the information directly into my brain.

Given what had happened the last time I’d heard that voice, I didn’t want to look for what I now knew how to find.

But guilt is a powerful thing.

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“Daddy, you’re hurting me! Please, stop!”