“Terrible news!” announced Cody via our old roommate group text, and dropped a link informing us of the disaster; the discontinuation of the American childhood classic, the Choco Taco.

       “I can only blame myself,” he continued. “Haven’t had one of these since Nemmers and I slurped them down daily during our open campus lunch, senior year. Man did we have some ironman metabolism back then.”

       “Might have to go scour some gas stations and buy up the last stock,” responded Nemmers, a renowned and unbiased advocate for sweets of all flavors. “I just hope they’re extra stale, for old time’s sake.”

       In my mind, I envisioned Nemmers, cash in hand, chasing after every ice cream truck and hollering in his child’s voice, "Wait, WAIT!", panting, collapsing, his youthful pleas drowned out by the rhythmic hum, the siren song of our childhood - the sound of the ice cream truck fading into the distance.

       Here we are, decades later and on the cusp of middle age, longing for something that was never that good to begin with. What is it about the past that so captures us, and the icons we associate with it? Perhaps it’s not the relics of our childhood, but what they represent, and to lose them is like letting a part of ourselves go in the act.

       Is that why we write stories about our history, and the events pertaining to it, be they fact, fiction, or some twisted hybrid? The quintessential good, bad, and ugly? If you stop and think about it - of all the crime, all the horror, all the things that go bump in the night that can drag us back into the cold, bleak darkness - perhaps the thing that haunts us most is the past.

      

       Did you know that Story Unlikely is run by an all-volunteer crew? It's true. All of our revenue goes into paying the bills, the writers, and the illustrators. Someday we hope to generate enough cash to reimburse the good folk who do all the things to make this happen, but in the words of Aragorn, “It is not this day!”

       Anyway, we're always looking for altruistic folk who are willing to roll up their sleeves and help out, be it reading submissions, story formatting, marketing, or whatever random tasks we're engaged in. Did we mention it's a great way to get your foot in the door, build a little street cred, and learn how this whole thing operates? Maybe even meet some other great readers and writers along the way - really, the best people are the ones who volunteer, who regularly put the needs of others ahead of their own. And believe us when we say that in this industry, that's rare.

       So if you're interested in helping out in some way, shape, or form, send an email to storyunlikely@mailbox.org. And tell 'em Nick Cage sent ya.

By Mack Mani

 

 

     The last three sentences of the chapter had been sloppily underlined with a blue pen, and the word NO was scribbled in all caps in the faded yellow margin of the page. The book was titled The Whiteout Murders: An Analysis of the Most Disturbing Unsolved Homicides in American History by Damien Magalhäes & Harper Kinnaman. Noel had bought it partly because of its lurid cover: a hulking figure in a bulky winter coat, seen from behind. He stands in front of a row of perfect houses, shrouded in a snowstorm. From his right hand dangles a long-handled axe, dripping blood onto the ice below. As a screenwriter, it was the kind of imagery that Noel always tried (and often failed) to inject into his scripts. But the larger factor that drew him in was the smell. The smell of old paperbacks, the kind mass-produced in the 1970s, held a musky nostalgia for him, conjuring images of his grandfather's little attic library stuffed with hundreds of old westerns and spy novels. Even the quote at the beginning of the volume seemed to echo this:

“Nostalgia cannot exist at a single point in time.”

 

     The Whiteout Murders had been out of print for nearly forty years and was not considered the definitive work written about the killings that took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota (January–February, 1973). In fact, the very small number of true crime lovers who had read and remembered the book considered it to be a particularly shameless cash grab, hastily written after the crimes in order to be stocked in bookstores and airports in time for summer vacation reading. But standing in the dry heat of an L.A. summer, in the shade of the giant oak that presided over a quaint suburban home, the ice on the cover had enticed him. Throat parched, chest sweaty, little wet patches forming under his armpits, the book’s scent whisked him back to cool, air-conditioned afternoons spent reading, sometimes entire volumes in one go, at his grandpa's farmhouse, lazily scratching the head of their collie, Pepper.

     “All them books in there is fifty cents a piece,” the woman in the wheelchair rasped, clutching her cigarette. She had a way of speaking where every word ran into the next, forgoing pauses or emphasis. “But I’ll give you the whole box for five dollars if you want to take ’em all.”

     It was the last day of the garage sale and everything had been picked over by the church-going early birds who hopped from yard to garage to estate after services, hunting for treasures. All that was left were old clothes, shoes, vinyl records scratched to hell, and several cardboard boxes of books.

     “I don't even know where they come from probably been in the house there since my Reggie bought it for us after he got back from the Desert Storm God rest his soul.”

     She made a little cross in the air with her cigarette over her ample chest. Her wheelchair was too small for her by far, and the way she perched in it, it seemed like she might tip out onto the concrete driveway at any moment. “I found them I mean my nurse did up in the attic there, I never went up there even when I could, I haven’t walked right since the accident, flat tire had us parked on the side of the freeway and a pickup truck come and just clipped the back side of the car like the devil I tell you what.”

     The book was well read. Many of the pages were dog-eared and the text was extensively marked up; whole passages had been underlined and notes scribbled in the margins. In the back, opposite a mail-order form for more true crime titles, a shopping list had been written and partially crossed out. Noel was usually too respectful of his own books to doctor them up, but he found a lurid pleasure in reading novels that others had annotated. It was voyeuristic in a safe kind of way. He paid for the book with a five-dollar bill (it was the only cash he had on him) and told the woman that she could keep the change. She stashed the bill into a small metal box on a folding table next to her chair.

     “You sure you don’t want the rest of ’em? There’s all kinds of other creepy things in there, Stephen King and Kootz and I think I saw something about that man who killed them people ’cause of his neighbor’s dog I remember back when—”

     The woman entered into a violent, wet coughing fit, her whole body wracking with every shudder. Noel asked if she was okay, if she needed water, but she waved him off and, SPLAT, hacked a black wad of phlegm onto the hot white concrete of the driveway. He could almost hear it sizzle.

     “I sounded like this for the last ten years my mama she used to sneeze something awful seven or eight times in a row like a banshee on a tear. Lord I miss her now but back then it’d ’bout drive us all to swearing she’d wake us up in the night, even get the dog to barking!”

     Noel read the book in three sittings over the next week. There was another unprecedented heatwave and all he had in his little apartment above the liquor store were two box fans which he positioned on each side of the sofa, creating a wind tunnel where he sat in just his boxers and five day’s worth of stubble, sipping cold beer and reading about the deaths of six families and one maid in suburban Minnesota, long before he was born.

 

 

     The words “unknown means” had been circled and a question mark placed in the margin nearby with a note: “Missed the broken latch.” The word “brutally” had been crossed out and a straight line connected it to “in their sleep” with three question marks; “relatively” had been scratched out entirely.

     Noel could not have told anyone when he began to suspect that the person who had marked up the book was The Mangler himself. Some seed of the idea had been planted in his brain from the beginning of the second chapter, where the murder of the Pascals had been described, but that notion was malformed and inchoate—a tingling sensation at the back of his throat, barely noticed and ill-defined. He’d had a handful of similar intuitions throughout his life but had never been much good at recognizing them. However, as he continued to digest the words, the idea settled in his stomach like something rancid.

     The end of the book concluded that, while the investigation was ongoing and authorities were confident that the killer would soon be brought to justice, The Minnesota Mangler was still at large, that while he might likely be satisfied with his work—for now—it was still possible that his successful evasion of police would embolden him, that he would soon hunger for more.

     A new search revealed that little had changed with the situation. Despite hundreds of man hours, endless theories, and the arrest of a transient in the summer of 1974 (who was exonerated first by alibi, and later by DNA testing), The Mangler had never been apprehended. Nor had he killed in the same fashion again. There were currently no other crimes connected, directly or indirectly, with the events of the winter of 1973. The prevailing theory, at least on true crime podcasts, was that he had been apprehended, but for some other offense, and likely died in prison or a mental hospital.

     Turning back to the book, Noel tried to discern the contents of the shopping list:

 

 

     There was a phone number written down about halfway through the book (it was a slender 275 pages) right next to the title in the header. The area code was local to L.A.. Probably whoever had owned the book had lived here or visited here or....

     Noel had a complicated relationship with his phone. Not having it around gave him a sort of existential anxiety. But when it rang, particularly with an unknown number, it brought on waves of dread. He hadn’t written any scripts worth reading since before the pandemic and there had been no requests to doctor up anyone else’s work either. Even when he’d briefly been a commodity among the smaller studios, those types of calls had been infrequent and stomach-churning. The idea of cold calling someone that he didn’t know to get work was almost unfathomable. He let his fingers move over the text below instead. It was another heavily doctored page.

 

          There is an oft-quoted, yet true statistic that you are less likely to be the victim of a murder on a rainy night. The idea being that everyone is staying out of the foul weather, even criminals. Why then would The Mangler choose to leave the comfort of his own home during the coldest nights of the year? He would presumably have no trouble entering these homes on any other night. It would have been easier for him to move between his lair (?) and the happy homes of these families (trying to hit word count!). What about the subzero temperature appealed to him?

 

     At dusk, when the day began to cool some, Noel wandered his neighborhood looking for a payphone. For reasons he couldn’t quite pin down, he kept the book with him, fearful of leaving it alone in his apartment. He had a romantic image of himself in a phone booth (lit by the orange setting sun and a cool blue interior light, the receiver hugged tightly to his ear and a stack of quarters piled on top of the phone), somehow solving a cold-case mystery. There could be a screenplay in this or even a book. That might be better—start with the book and then adapt it himself. He could see the headline now: Screenwriter Solves Decades-Old Murder Mystery, Sells Novel/Script Bundle in Six-Figure Deal After a Fierce Bidding War. The prospect filled him with excitement, hunger, and fear. But whoever committed these atrocities would be geriatric, or long dead. There was no danger of drowning while investigating an empty well.

     He could not find a payphone, let alone a phone booth. In the end, he settled for a burner phone he picked up at a bodega next to an empty Chinese restaurant. He wouldn’t have been able to tell you why he didn’t use his own phone—maybe the same reason he hadn’t left the book at home and instead tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans.

     In the alley behind the bodega, in the shade of the building, between two empty dumpsters, he dialed the number from the book. It rang once. His heart was thudding in his chest. Then there was a CLICK, followed by a recording of a woman with a thick Mexican accent.

     Noel stood for a moment, perplexed and somewhat disappointed. He pulled the book from his back pocket and opened it to the beginning of Chapter three. On the blank page opposite was a list of four names he had ignored on his first pass, being eager to meet the next family and discover how they had met their end. The names were:

     Suzanne R.  √

     Connor C. √

     Aziz F.    √

     April V.    √

     There were neat check marks next to each name, two in pencil, one in black ink, and the other in blue. The churning returned to his stomach, burrowing lower, curling in tightly near his groin.

     The burner phone in his pocket rang loudly, making him jump. He looked around, embarrassed, but there was no one nearby. Not even any cars on the streets at the end of the alley.

     The number was the same one he’d just called, but the name was listed as UNKNOWN.

     His fingers trembled as he thumbed the button and lifted the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

     A low hum reached him, followed by a soft click, and then a cacophony of noise. A mix of dial-up internet garble and static. Noel pulled the phone away from his ear but he could still hear the discord as it began to twist around itself, screeching. After a few seconds, it died down before quieting into a murmur and finally an almost whisper. Cautiously, he brought the phone back towards his ear. There was something on the other end of the line, a subsonic hum like someone speaking on a faraway radio. It sounded like they were reciting something: numbers, or possibly a poem. He pressed the receiver tightly to his ear.

     “Who’s there?” he whispered.

     A stream of hot liquid spewed out of the speaker, directly into his ear, rupturing something inside. In pain, he yanked the device away, but it continued to gush out, slathering the side of his face in noxious waves, its rank, metallic odor of pennies and gasoline making him gag. He flung the phone away. It skittered beneath a dumpster where it landed inert. But the blood on his face and inside his ear was still there. He stood lost for a moment, then prayed for a passerby to come down the alley to scream and call someone and take control.

     But there was no one but himself and The Mangler, burning a hole in the back of his jeans. Noel stumbled out of the alley, around to the bodega. The man behind the counter would help. He was always friendly.

     A cartoon CLOSED sign hung lopsided in the front window with a caricature of a fat pizza chef napping in a chair. He stumbled towards the Chinese restaurant next door. He could almost feel the AC inside; the neatly stacked menus and the ritual of ordering and being served would calm him. It was still almost 90 degrees and the blood had instantly begun to cake on his facial hair. Thick droplets worked down his cheek to his neck and beneath the collar of his shirt. He felt like he was suffocating.

     Inside the restaurant, the hostess—a diminutive young woman in a checkered black and white apron—saw him coming and quickly locked the door. He tried it anyway. What to do? What to say?

     “Help,” he managed.

     The woman shook her head. “I’m calling the police!”

     “Please!” he begged. “I need ...” What did he need? “Help!”

     Through the glass, he saw her expression of fear and confusion and, upon the glass, his reflection. He looked like an extra in a low-budget zombie movie. He wouldn’t have opened the door for him either. He shook his head and smacked the side of his skull, trying to clear the blood from his eardrum. It stuck inside like swimmer’s ear. He lowered his head and ran, retreating back to his apartment.

 

 

     After Noel cleaned himself up, which took much longer than expected, he sat in his living room and stared at the book. He could just throw it in the trash can behind the liquor store, he knew. Or burn it in one of the empty dumpsters in the alley where he’d made the call. But that would put him near the phone, which seemed like an unbearable task. He still felt a tickling in his ear, though he’d thoroughly cleaned it with Q-tips and isopropyl. Instead, he tucked the book in the freezer, next to the frozen pizzas and long-forgotten chicken breasts. But his heart wouldn’t slow and his brain wouldn’t stop going over what had happened, like the tip of a tongue running over a cold sore.

     To calm down, he closed his eyes and pictured himself sitting in a quiet room, far away. His grandfather’s attic. This was a game he often played as a child. He would close his eyes and imagine a room. Sometimes it was a place he had been before, other times it was somewhere new. In his mind, he would move around the room, slowly and methodically cataloguing every object and detail inside: the books on the shelves, the texture of the worn leather chair, the smell of recent rain wafting in through the open window, the way the light spilled around the curtains, the dust on the thick maroon rug. When he was younger, he would sometimes lose himself for hours inside his mind. He stopped playing the game during his teens when he realized that the spaces he invented felt more real to him than some locations in his actual life. He rarely visited these rooms anymore, save for in his dreams, though he still knew many of them by heart. Now, he was imagining sitting once more in his grandfather’s chair and counting the books on the shelves until he felt like himself again. This allowed him some measure of comfort and even a few hours of troubled sleep.

     Around 3:00 a.m., he woke in a cold sweat and began investigating the names in the Mangler book. Searching them individually led nowhere, but putting any three of them together led to an instant hit. All four were residents of the Los Angeles metro area who had gone missing in a two-month span in the winter of 1979. They were never seen again. Two adults, a man and woman, two children—a boy and a girl:

     Suzanne Russo (38)

     Conner Crosby (41)

     Aziz Fulci (8)

     April Villanueva (5)

     These disappearances were not connected by anything that he could find. No one had ever thought about these missing individuals together, other than Noel and whoever had owned the book before him.

     Before dawn, he resolved to go back to the house where he bought the book. The day was as hot as any that had come before it and the bus to La Morriña was packed for half the ride. But out of the hustle of the real city, into the endless dead-grass neighborhoods of brightly colored houses and tall fences, the bus emptied until he was the only one onboard. In his left pocket he kept the book, and in his right, one of the towels he used to clean himself up, the dark red stains a physical reminder that what he had experienced was real. Before he left, he peeked into the alley where he’d lost the phone, but it must have skittered too deep under the dumpster. He imagined it ringing under there in the middle of the night, transmitting a call from The Mangler and spewing its toxins again.

     He researched the property before he left. It was currently owned by a Margret Jean Bianca, the woman he’d met at the garage sale. It had been purchased by her late husband Robert in July of 1991. The only previous owner was one John Thomas Nelson, who’d built the place himself in 1970. There wasn’t much to be found regarding Mr. Nelson, though his name, three generic first names, made it difficult to narrow down the results.

     Noel rang the doorbell to the Bianca residence seven or eight times before the next-door neighbor called out from the edge of the yard, “You looking for Margot?”

     The neighbor was an incredibly pale older man. His head was mostly bald save for some grey whisps horseshoeing along the back of his skull. He had a pencil-thin mustache and wore a red, white, and blue striped polo hung like a tarp over his slender frame. In one hand he held the head of a garden hose, the other was pushing back the wisteria branches that hung between the properties.

     “I suppose so,” Noel answered.

     But the old man shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

     Noel cleared his throat. “I’m not?”

     “No,” he chuckled, “you are not. Mrs. Bianca is,” he slowly raised his hand and pointed a quivering finger towards the street, the neighborhood, the distant purple Sierra sunset. “Over the mountains and through the woods.”

     “What do you—”

     “To Grandmother’s house she goes.”

     “She’s gone? Like gone, gone?”

     “Her lungs,” he said with a sigh. “You know she used to sing?”

     “Really?”

     He looked up to the sky as though inspecting it. “We all gotta wake up from the dream sometime, kid. I’ve seen so many people pass through this old neighborhood. Margot was one of the better ones. She used to sing ‘Blue Velvet.’ ” He spoke with genuine love, like he was talking about his own child. “Can you imagine?”

     Noel pictured her as he’d seen her, hacking lung butter onto hot concrete. He realized he couldn’t even remember her face.

     “Me neither,” the neighbor said softly. As he looked Noel up and down, a slight grimace overtook his lips. “If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

     Noel pulled out the paperback. “Actually, I bought this book from her the other day—”

     “But then again,” he continued. “I’m not you. Am I?”

     A long pause then, before his hand withdrew from the branches, closing the foliage between the yards. Noel thought he heard the man hobbling away, but he couldn’t be sure.

     “Okay … sorry to bother you … I guess.”

 

#

 

     Noel waited almost an hour for a bus that never came. But as the sun sank and the traffic thinned, he realized he didn’t want to go home. That if he did, it would only be a matter of time before he read the names again and found himself back in La Morriña. Almost wistfully, he moved from the bus stop to a small diner just down the road, sipping on stale decaf and watching the afternoon drift by from a corner booth.

     That night, he broke into the Bianca residence through a back basement window.

     The sickle moon drifted lazily over the city, offering plenty of light to see by. The backyard was ample and surrounded by a high wooden fence. He smashed the glass with a rubber mallet he’d found in the garden shed, which was unlocked and full of old tools. When the glass shattered, he expected a flood light to flash on or a neighbor to start screaming, or an unseen, vicious guard dog to snarl and howl. But there was nothing except the sound of the freeway a half mile off, traffic crashing like an endless wave. He used the bloody towel to clear the wooden frame of glass then hesitated for a moment, staring at the black abyss that was the basement. The moonlight did not seem to penetrate the interior of the house. Eventually, he lowered himself onto his stomach and slid inside backward, dropping to his feet in the dank basement.

     The power had already been turned off, so he used his phone flashlight to see. The basement was refreshingly cool but reeked of mold. Piles of old newspapers lined the walls and dozens of folding chairs had been lined up in the corner and forgotten. The main floor was well lived-in and evidence of Margot’s life was everywhere, angels all over, ceramic, wood, and plastic totems on shelves and in glass cases. One larger than a tombstone was tucked behind a dead spider plant. The couch in front of the television had a depression in the far, left seat. The remote was still askew on the coffee table next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Unopened mail sat in a sloppy stack on the dining room table. There was a machine built into the stairs to help haul her up to the second floor where the bedrooms were. The stairs were creaky and Noel cringed at every wooden squeal. One bedroom was empty save for a bare queen mattress in a simple frame. Another was sparsely decorated, perhaps for the live-in nurse.

     He didn’t enter Margot’s bedroom but stood in the doorway for some time. Her bed was unmade and he could tell which side she preferred to sleep on. Why he took so long to survey each room he did not know, only that it seemed inappropriate somehow to rush right up to the attic where she’d claimed the book was found. But Noel wasn’t looking for books anymore. He was chasing something that he could not define, only feel. A tug of longing from the past to the present, like a rope tied around his waist. The other end was pulled taut, disappearing into the shadows of the hallway, yanking him up towards the final story.

     The second-floor hallway ended at a thick door that opened onto a steep set of stairs. The musky scent of old books wafted down from above. These steps did not creak, they moaned. Every board felt it might collapse beneath him. He pressed a palm against the wood-paneled wall to steady himself. Despite their protests, the stairs held and he soon found himself in the dusty confines of the attic. It was a smaller space than he’d expected, and largely empty. There were a few more boxes of books and a steamer trunk full of white, moth-eaten fabric. At one end of the room was a small lattice window which looked down on the front lawn. Nothing moved in the sweltering night. After a minute a car drove by, bass thudding, but did not stop or slow down. The wall on the opposite end was decorated in bright paisley wallpaper, and a slender, full-body mirror hung on its surface. Noel approached his reflection. He’d lost weight; his face looked a bit gaunt. He lifted the mirror, but there was nothing behind it. He knocked on the wall. Completely solid. He turned around and let out a slow breath. What had he expected?

     A tingling sensation blossomed from the back of his head, starting the size of a pinprick and growing to cover his head and then his entire body. It felt like he was being watched.

     He sat down cross-legged on the attic floor, facing the mirror, sending dust flying up around him. He laid out the bloody hand towel and set The Whiteout Murders on top of it. He opened the book at random, both surprised and not to feel the pages warm beneath his hand, almost too hot to touch. His gaze landed on the list of missing people. Of course it did. He felt close to them, somehow. Haunted. He felt like he might throw up. Distantly, he heard a dog barking, then silence.

     He spoke each of the four names out loud, their full names. His voice trembled, but held, “Suzanne Russo, Conner Crosby, Aziz Fulci, April Villanueva.”

     The mirror slowly tipped towards him and fell to the floor with a bang,  landing on the floorboards and shattering into a thousand pieces—tiny shards reflecting like the night sky in his phone’s glow. Where the mirror had been there was now a small passageway. He blinked, thinking it must be a trick of the dark, but the corridor remained as real as the wall that had been there moments before.

     He had to stoop to enter this new hallway and squeeze his arms in close. He held his phone in both hands and crept inside. Both the walls and the floor here were lined with the same yellow wallpaper. The corridor went on straight ahead. The farther he went, the colder it became until Noel thought that it must be near freezing. Partway in he realized three things that disturbed him, each more than the last. The first was that he had told no one where he was going. Second, that there was not enough room to turn around. Should he need to exit, he would have to shuffle awkwardly backward into the attic. And last, that he had walked far beyond what should have been the confines of the house’s interior.

     Eventually, the hallway opened into an enormous room covered in the same yellowish wallpaper. At the far end, taking up the breadth of the space was the front of a ranch style house.      Noel’s phone could only illuminate the scene in pieces: the floorboards outside laid over with artificial turf that crackled beneath his feet, evergreen, spotless, and dust-free. A set of neat wooden steps led up to the columned porch. The walls were painted an off-color teal, the front door eggshell white. Windows on each side, curtains drawn. The front of the house rose up to where it met the high ceiling of the room, a network of thick dark beams.

     Noel looked behind him. Down the narrow passage, impossibly, he could still see the attic proper, the broken mirror, the bloody towel and the book, straight back to the tiny lattice window where the moonlight poured in like tallow. The rest of the world so near, so far. The victims’ names rang in his ears.

     Back to the house in front of him. The impossible house. There were no lights he could see, inside or out, and the surreal façade appeared pale in the light of his phone. It looked like something from a movie set, a fake haunted house. As he mounted the steps, Noel’s heart became a thumping rabbit snared inside his chest. He touched the door, just to make sure it was real, and if so, how real it was.

     As solid and real as a dream from which one cannot wake.

     He rang the bell. In response, the door swung softly inward, without a sound. Inside was a pristine 1950s domicile, complete with an orange shag carpet, mid-century modern chairs, and a funky, rounded, futuristic coffee table. There were four bodies in total, but it took him several minutes to discover them all. The corpses of the adults were huddled together on the lime-colored sofa, skeletal arms embracing one another. Their bodies had long since rotted into dried husks.

     The kitchen was a mess, empty cans strewn over the black-and-white checkered linoleum. The ice box stood with its door open, full of empty food containers. Some of the cupboards were open too. All empty. The bodies of the two children were beneath the dining room table, hidden at first under the red gingham tablecloth. One sat with its knees pulled up to its chest, its back against a table leg. The other lay in a fetal position. Their eyes were hollow, their cheeks nonexistent. All four were dressed the same in white shorts and blue polos draped over their bodies like suburban funeral shrouds. They were barefoot. Noel dropped the tablecloth and rushed across the room to vomit in the sink. Without thinking, he turned on the tap and with a groan, water began to flow through the faucet. They’d had water, then. But they’d run out of food.

     The Mangler had let them starve.

     Noel ran back to the living room to the exit, trying not to look at the bodies, but found that the walls of the house had grown. Now they extended left and right, across where the door and windows had been. In their place were three pastoral paintings, one of a cow trying to cross a stream, another of pigs in a sty before a storm, and the last, a portrait of a rooster, proud and sure at the break of dawn, sunrise streaking orange behind his beak.

     There was no way out.

     Noel pounded where the door had disappeared, but the wall was as thick as it had been next to the mirror. His hand flew to his pocket and for a moment he panicked when he didn’t feel his phone there. But it was already in his hand. He’d been using it as a light.

Thank God. Now he could call for help. Call anyone. He dialed 911.

     He swore and almost threw the phone away, but managed to stop himself. However awful it was to be stuck here, it would be infinitely worse in the dark. He tried again, this time calling his mother.

     “No, no, no!” he shouted, trying to keep his panic from boiling over. He began to pace the room but thought better of it; he couldn’t be near the bodies. The smell. He hadn’t noticed it when he first arrived, but since the door had vanished the room had filled with a stale meaty stench, like rancid jerky. He hazarded a glance at the couple. They still had their arms around each other, but they had a different look to them now. Had they been positioned exactly like that before? Hadn’t they been staring at each other?

     No.

     No, he had to get away. Get out. He tried to calm down. To think it through.

     “I’m inside a house. And I need to find a way out. That’s all. It’s just an empty house.”

     But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. That place, behind the attic mirror, held the feeling of a memory or a nightmare. No, it felt like the rooms he used to visit in his mind. That was it. The Mangler may have built the house below with his hands, but he had crafted this place with his mind. He’d found a little crawlspace between the walls and made something out of it, cared for it, nurtured it until it no longer existed solely inside his mind. Whatever imaginative ability Noel possessed, The Mangler had tenfold. If he could conjure a place like this … what else had The Mangler been capable of?

     Noel turned to the back of the house. It was a simple nuclear tomb: down the hallway, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Nothing stirred in the back of the house, not in the parents’ bedroom with its queen bed, or the children’s room adorned with colorful animal print wallpaper, giraffes cavorting with elephants, lions and cheetahs. The floors of both were littered with toys, but neither room had any windows. Imagining those people in their final days, in those unsettling rooms made Noel feel sick again. He plowed into the bathroom at the end of the hall. He flipped the switch but, of course, it did nothing. He almost closed the door but stopped himself. What if it too were to disappear?

     He stood at the threshold, looking back at the living room, not knowing what to do. He felt the urge to scream, like he was losing his mind. His eyes flicked upward. In the center of the hallway ceiling was the entrance to an attic. The house inside the attic had an attic inside of it. His hand trembled as he reached for the loop to lower the stairs. They offered no resistance to his tug and swung smoothly down, well-oiled. The stairs led up into still more darkness.

     These risers did not creak, groan, or protest, but Noel felt a shortness of breath as he ascended, as though the attic’s attic was a high-altitude peak to be summited. He felt another twinge of nausea as he set foot in the upper reaches of the house within the house. The top floor was different from the rest; this place, it seemed, had no limit. No walls or boundaries. No ceiling. Only infinite floorboards and an endless expanse of darkness. The only feature sat a few feet from the stairs. An old, brown shoebox lay in the light of Noel’s phone like an actor onstage in a spotlight. He bent down and gently opened it. Inside were dozens of Polaroids, images of torture committed against innocent families in the winter of 1973:

Some sort of circular saw.

     A blurry face.

     A woman, face caved in above the jaw, her lower teeth intact, her bare chest pockmarked with needle wounds.

     An assortment of dismembered fingers organized by size, placed in a neat row.

     Someone’s father, still alive at the time, gagged at the mouth, eyes clenched against the camera flash.

     A little doggy in a dimly lit attic, mid-bark, his face not clearly captured.

     These images brought Noel to tears, but it was the photo of the dog that made him sob. Images of his grandpa and his dog, Pepper, tore through his mind. He wished more than anything that he were with him, but his grandfather had been dead for a decade (and Pepper even longer) and their house torn down to the foundation besides. So instead, he wished to be with Auggie, the doggy in the photo, in another attic in another house, far from the nightmare he found himself in.

     An icy gale blew from an unseen corner of the abattoir, whirling as he lingered on the image of the beagle. Behind him the attic stairs lifted silently, sealing him in. He tried to move towards them, but found that his feet were rooted in place. The space moved around him and he was hit with a wave of dizziness. He looked down to find some point of focus, but the world kept turning and despite his best effort, he vomited right onto his sneakers and fell back away from his own sick, the attic’s attic floorboards beneath him were smooth and polished beyond measure. When the sensation stopped, he realized he was no longer where he’d been. He was inside of another attic, a real one.

     This one had white sheets draped over old furniture and boxes marked in neat script: kitchen, garage, bedroom. It was not the same as the Bianca residence. He found a set of stairs and barreled down to the lower floor, every step along the way solid and uncreaking. The house below was modestly decorated, filled with light and doors and windows. So normal that Noel was stunned. He started to laugh. He was free.

     A woman’s head peeked out from around a corner and then pulled back, out of sight.

     “Hello?” he said. “I— I need help.”

     “What the hell are you doing in my house?” she demanded.

     “No, you don’t understand. …” Then he said a very stupid thing, “I’m not in your house!”

     “You’re one of those murder freaks, aren’t you? The Pascals do not live here anymore. They are gone.”

     “Wait, what did you say?”

He heard a shotgun rack a round into place.

     “I don’t know how you got in, but you are trespassing in Minnesota! And we have stand-your-ground laws, motherfucker. I’m giving you ’til the count of three! One! Two …”

Noel ran down the stairs and out of the house, pounding down the driveway and onto the sidewalk. He didn’t realize that he was carrying the box of Polaroids until he was two blocks away, heaving great gulps of the fresh, warm summer air.

 

 

     “Are you his grandson?” the nurse asked Noel, while he waited.

     He nodded and smiled, but didn’t say anything. He’d been doing this a lot lately. He found that the less you said, the more people spoke themselves, and the more they projected onto you. It also helped to keep the terror at bay. Prevented him from slipping up and asking anyone if they had ever heard of The Whiteout Murders or read a book by Magalhäes & Kinnaman. He had left his copy in the first attic and was glad to be rid of it. Still, sometimes at night, he would catch himself longing to leaf through the pages and reread some scrap or note. This hunger scared him more than he could express.

     He’d taken the bus from Minnesota back to L.A. and then shortly on to Oregon, which had taken over a week of transfers and waiting at stations. He didn’t mind though, surrounded by people, always moving like that, the constant drone of the engine. All of it was so different from the attic and the house it held.

     “He doesn't get many visitors. Once he wakes up, I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.”

     “Mmhm.”

     “... I know it’s not easy to see someone like this, but it was good of you to come.”

     “No problem.”

     That was a lie. Working his way from looking up the deed to the house, it had taken Noel almost a week to track down John Thomas Nelson. Eventually, after sifting through endless public records and making dozens of phone calls, he traced him to the end.

     After Nelson sold the house, he’d relocated to Humboldt where he worked as a safety manager for a company called Geller & Sons Construction until he retired right on time at sixty-five. Noel had discovered almost nothing about his life before this. Nelson had been an only child. Had never married. Had no record of ever having any children. In 2008, at the age of eighty-one, he moved again, this time into a private, fully assisted living facility in Ashland, Oregon. The kind of place that’s nice enough to visit, but as you leave you silently hope that you never wind up somewhere like that yourself. The kind of place that smelled of wilting flowers.

     “You wouldn’t happen to have an exact date of birth for him, would you?”

     Noel cocked his head.

     “If not, that’s perfectly fine. There’s no problem. It’s just ... we keep better records now than when he joined us, but we hardly know anything about him.” She laughed a little. “Other than that, he’s a very nice man. From what I’ve seen.”

     “Hm.”

     The nurse seemed embarrassed. “Like I said, it’s no problem. I’ll check on him again, okay?”

     He smiled. “That’s fine.”

     Nelson’s room was not large, but he had it to himself. A hospital bed sat in the middle of the wall, facing a television where a religious program played low. There was a window, but the curtains were drawn. The nurse had closed the door behind him, but once Noel heard her footsteps heading down the corridor, he inched it open and slid the doorstop between it and the frame. Since his escape from that attic, he’d become paranoid about closed doors.

     The man himself was nothing but skin and bones and hair. He’d grown a beard almost down to his waist and sported a head full of grey. The nurse told him that Mr. Nelson refused to let the staff cut either. She had also said that he was awake, or as awake as he got these days.

     “He has good times and bad. Sometimes he speaks, but not often,” she’d said. “But people and images from the past can have a very powerful effect.”

     Noel was counting on it.

     When he threw open the curtains and let in the grey light of a drizzly day, the old man’s eyes squinted. But otherwise, he didn’t react to Noel’s presence. His face was a swathe of wrinkles and aged crevices, the surface of an inhospitable planet. When Noel spoke, the old man’s gaze fluttered between him and the TV, but there didn’t seem to be any comprehension. No, the only thing that got through to him were the photos. Faded Polaroids of the families. Evidence of what he’d done. Crimes he could not be connected with. When The Minnesota Mangler saw these, his eyes filled with life and he reached out his liver-spotted hands to take the stack. His lips trembled as he flipped through them.

     “Oh, yes …” he said with a wheezing gasp. “My families …”

     His gentle fingertip traced the outline of a teenage boy’s lifeless face. The image seemed to imbue him with energy and his tongue flitted out to suckle the front of his teeth.

     “I see them every night …”

     When he reached the photo of Auggie, the beagle, he snorted.

     “The dog! I’d almost forgotten … I very much wanted him, but he wouldn’t come.…”

     Next were the photos of the L.A. missing: Conner, Suzanne, Aziz, and April. He had visited them infrequently it seemed, but on every visit had taken a photo of the four of them together on the sofa, all in a line. They were thinner and more wretched looking in each progressive portrait. The Mangler set the other photos aside and poured over these with the eye of an artist scrutinizing his work for flaws. Noel couldn’t bear to look at the four of them degrading by degrees with each snapshot, so he turned to The Mangler instead.

     He was smiling.

     “There they are ...” his wrinkled fingers stroked their faces, the children first and then the adults. “The others in the snow ... they were never real to me. Whenever I traveled ... it felt like ... like reading a book. I needed my family to be near me, forever. Do you understand?”

     Noel nodded. The old man’s whole body seemed to be shaking.

     “Are you cold?” Noel asked.

     The Mangler looked up at him gratefully. “Yes! Would you?” He gestured towards a cubby in the corner. Inside were extra blankets and pillows. The Mangler kept flipping through the photos, faster and faster.

     “These … you found them? My lovelies?”

     “Yes,” Noel said, “behind the attic wall.”

     The Mangler peered up at him and nodded. “Mm. I can see it now. You ... and me. We can see them, can’t we? The places between places. How is it? My Attic ... of Any-Attic? And my family … ohhhh, oh how we had such wonderful fun together! You must have seen them! But … but …”

     Noel returned to the bedside. In both hands he clutched a thick down pillow. He raised it over the old man’s head.

     The Mangler looked up at him, tears welling in his eyes.

     “You didn’t let them out, did you?”

 

~~~

About the author:

       Mack W. Mani is a Pacific Northwest based author, poet, and filmmaker. His work has appeared in NewMyths, Neon, and Dark Horses Magazine. In 2018 he won Best Screenplay at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. He currently lives with his husband in Portland, Oregon. 

 

 

Too many times in life, we do something for the sheer joy of it and then, because we love it so much, we ponder making it something else—a source of income, a way of being known, etc. And when we do that, we face the very real risk of losing the love and replacing it with worry, want, fear and shame.

 

Sound familiar?

 

I’m guessing this might be true about writing for you, especially if you ponder publishing. What that shift can bring is a worry of failure, a fear of judgment, a sense of competition with other writers and more. I can tell you that there is and always has been enough room for everyone in the writing and publishing space. If you want to write, you will have readers who appreciate you. If you want to publish, people will buy what you have to sell. Sure, there will always be people for whom you are not the ticket. But rather than take this as a commentary on you and your talent, I’d strongly encourage you to consider understanding this as a simple truth: they are not your readers and you are not writing for them.

 

What if writing could just be FUN? Remember when it was?

 

Let’s stop for a moment and actually remember it. Spend the next 5 minutes taking a walk down memory lane and identifying one time in your life when writing was fun. Write a little bit about what you remember, and what it felt like.

 

Now, how do you feel? Did something shift when you recalled that earlier you?

 

So, what has changed?

 

The best writing comes from the core of who we are, unabridged by judgment, fear or other intrusive emotions. So how do we get there? How can we separate the surface-self in the real world from the creative-self?

 

 

I always encourage writers to set aside time to generate new writing separate from the time to edit drafts of existing writing. Likewise, I suggest making a different time to work on submissions for publication, separate from any writing time. Why? Because these are different energies that need to live separately, and we will be more successful at our endeavors if we respect this truth.

 

The best way to rediscover the joy of writing is to make a definite and deliberate separation between the everyday-you and the creative-you. How can we do this?…

 

Sign up for my weekly newsletter on writing

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Dear Editors,

       I heard about Story Unlikely after entering the rabbit hole in search of writer's submission guidelines. The guidelines are actually a fun read unto themselves; clear, not dry, shaken, not stirred.

       Then I got sucked into some of your stories...Last Words hit a little too close to home given my mom's recent final exhalation, so I ventured forth to the story of the reluctant dog lover - Dog Years - and thought maybe it was a story about my husband. So, I signed up for the monthly story, and the membership. Luckily, I got in before David Wallace increased the price. Sounds like you need to watch that guy....skimming already?! Pfft.

 

Cheers,

MaryLee Blackwell

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