Horror - Novelette

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Howl Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE HOWL

Some of the students whispered about monsters in the mountains, while others whispered about demons that rose up through the volcanic bedrock. Neither were entirely wrong.

The pale walls of the school creaked and the winter winds keened through the gaps as if the knotty swirls in the wood whistled a tune. Ghosts of the classroom, the older students told the younger students—these, the same students talking about the monsters and demons. The only thing the unseen forces had in common was bloodlust.

What good monster did not crave that which gives life to humanity?

Ravijk, a valley town plopped into the center of the Keilkirk mountain range, had seventy-four residents, nineteen of these were children. Sixteen of those children sat in their coats, the two space heaters doing little to warm the classroom. It had been days since the weather permitted the delivery of anything into the valley. Without parts, Ferdinand could not repair the ancient furnace.

Spiders had gotten in and built a nest, apparently. Ms. Igne Dorthea didn’t understand why the janitor didn’t simply pull them out. They were only insects.

Ferdinand shook his head gently as he explained nesting, homing, growing over decades, and becoming poisonous. “No, this school, she was the owner of a spider farm. Meant I had to burn the insulating lining. I need to replace the bricks.”

Igne shivered internally. Spider farm.

“You don’t want to see those little buggers all growed-up. Folks say they work with the beasts of the howl,” Ferdinand said, grinning something sinister.

“Fine.” Igne had to accept it: the furnace would remain busted until the parts arrived.

At the back of the room, the Guild triplets sat bare armed and hot amid their shivering classmates. Igne spied them. Most avoided the triplets. Those girls were strange, but strange people were everywhere.

The weather in the valley town moved in a robotic clockwork. Every three weeks or so, the locals battened down against the gales. Howlers was what they called them. Winter, spring, summer, and autumn, the Howlers came when they wanted and stayed a night. It had been almost four weeks since a Howler last pushed through the valley. They were now overdue.

“Girls, did you finish your reports?” Inge said with a forced smile.

It was her first teaching position. She’d grown up in the connected world, not used to the seclusion, but she liked the idea of mountain living: fresh air, visits from caribou, reindeer, and mountain goats.

The Guild girls fanned their cheeks, glowing red, blood aflame in their veins. They nodded and all pushed single sheets of lined paper forward.

Was this normal, did triplets get ill together by nature?

Inge had let the students pick their own source books for their reports, so long as she had a chance to read the book beforehand. This kept the kids interested. Interested kids were productive, and she knew if she applied the right technique, she’d have a classroom of students excelling beyond the valley town. As nice as some points were, there was no future by way of career achievement in a place like Ravijk.

She looked at the tight, neat lettering on the pages before her. Shelley’s Frankenstein in three similar, yet different ways. “Are you girls all right?” she asked, frowning in wonderment at the burning girls.

“Fine,” Eila, Eisa, and Ericka said in unison.

They were perfect students and that made them all the stranger, as despite the efforts, Inge did not yet have a class of excelling students. Sparking their interest proved much harder than she imagined. She’d gone in thinking the secret to success was simple.

She took the pages to her desk. What could she say? It didn’t pay to dwell when she had so many grades to teach at once. Inge stood straight at the front of the room and addressed six of the students, six to ten in age, and was just about to ask what four multiplied by three equaled when the wind howled, muting the question.

The girls fanned their faces, arms jerking wildly as the wind blew through the cracks. That wind was sudden hot, hot against the accepted cold, cold.

A daytime Howler.

The typically nocturnal display of power threw the teacher from her game plan, and she stood dumbfounded, uncertain of how to progress. It was minutes to three and the classroom listened in silence to the screaming wind for twenty-minutes. Most students had removed their coats. The heat had jumped up the thermometer more than forty degrees—going from double digits below freezing to double digits above.

Sweat dripped down the pretty, red-tinted faces of the triplets.

Inge yelled against the caterwaul, but to no avail. She pointed at the clock and mouthed go home. The students understood immediately, as if they’d known before she had that they’d go home early. They packed up their bags.

Each howler’s warmth came down from the peaks of the Keilkirk mountain range, from the east, pushing volcanic steam into the snowy valley. Though unpleasant to work around and sleep through, it was another added point of interest. Igne thought that once she did go back to the real world, people would be amazed by the anecdote.

After the students stepped out, Inge locked the classroom. Hands over her ears, Igne walked to her home, a small cottage at the southern end of the village. All week, the town hall hosted free movies nightly and Igne’s plan prior to the wind was to partake. The film mattered none. Films were a gateway to other worlds, especially while living in seclusion. Of course, the raucous din put an axe to the option. Instead, she listened to a selection of Mozart through headphones that barely overstepped the howl.

Outside, the snow melted as if spring had sprung, creating great blue puddles. The heavy old trees danced and swayed. The space between the Earth and the stars was hazy with gaseous release.

Igne closed her eyes to drown out the noise and her boredom while Mozart’s symphonies roared into her ears. Eventually, the music had stopped, replaced by the ringing bells of her alarm clock. She sat up, frozen. The howling had ceased, and the valley was back into the regular swing of winter.

“Got your sacrifice,” Inge said, rubbing her arms.

The myth was that beasts from the mountain came down for a blood sacrifice, bringing with them the howling winds. A fun tale, and another thing she’d pocket as an anecdote whenever she returned to the modern world. Really, there was no surprise that those gales carried a legend. Ignorance bred fear and fascination. She’d never heard the scientific reasoning behind the winds but knew there had to be one. There was always a logical explanation. Likely, it was nothing more than volcanic send-off through a reedy gap in the rock.

The valley had become a thick sheet of ice. The regular frosty wind blew hard snow from the high mountains over the frozen surfaces. Igne arrived at school to find a room with only half of the student body. The triplets sat at the back, the bright red glow was now gone from their skin. Each wore the complexion of a full moon. So pale they appeared sickly, on the polar opposite spectrum from the day before.

The triplets wore short-sleeved blouses of a simple design, differentiating in hue only. Their collective, cold gaze stared forward, silently awaiting orders. Too good to be true, more like robots than students.

“Androids,” Inge whispered and put chalk to chalkboard. A history project, students’ choice, work in groups of three. “Think about it.” She tapped next to the assignment. “Until then, you all have things on the go.”

Igne treated the work time as she did most other days, the slim difference being that she veered toward the triplets more often. They looked much better today, despite the paleness. What could she say?

She looked at the clock. “Lunchtime!”

The students leapt from their seats, brown bags crinkled, homemade fruit snacks became airborne, and cracker dust was blown from mouths. The triplets were significantly less enthusiastic and moved slowly toward their bags. Ericka was in the lead and took three stumbling steps before she fell forward and landed with a thump.

“Oh goodness!” Igne ran to her aid.

The standing sisters appeared awestruck, tears tumbling down their cheeks and over their sharp jaw lines. Igne turned the fallen girl onto her back.

Eisa and Eila spoke a single word in unison, “Daddy,” and sprinted from the classroom.

“Wake up, Ericka, wake up,” Igne said.

The girl was like a ragdoll in her arms. The other students crowded in around them. A fainting child was a real event on a slow day with a lower than normal attendance count.

“I think that’s Eisa,” a boy said.

“No, Eila. Eisa wears the peach shirt,” a girl said.

“Back up…Ericka wears the white shirt. Eisa the cream one. Eila the peach shirt,” Igne said.

It had taken time to get the color scheme into her head, but now that she had it, she wasn’t going to be confused. Mainly because she couldn’t tell the girls apart otherwise and sometimes they all wore white. Identical girls with pale blonde hair, pretty round faces with firm jaws, and standing four feet even. Skinny. Usually speaking in accord, but only when directly addressed. Polite. Model students.

“Come on, Ericka,” Igne said.

Ericka’s eyes fluttered and an expression of terror overcame her features.

“Are you all right?”

Ericka nodded and attempted to sit forward. Igne gave her back a gentle nudge, eyes running along the smooth pale contours of Ericka’s arms. Scabby puncture wounds bloomed bright red from the inner corners of her elbows.

“What are these from?” Igne asked.

The schoolhouse door burst open.

“Ericka,” said a deep voice from atop a massive wide frame. The man wore wolf fur clothing and a hat of goat hide. “Give me my girl.” The man knelt over to scoop the weakened child.

“Are you her father?”

There was no response and Igne watched helplessly from the floor as the man carried Ericka away. The room fell into silence. Igne was down three more students.

“Was that Mr. Guild?” she asked.

“No, only the triplets is Guild. That’s Mr. Hanna, but he’s their dad. Never married the Guild mother and she died pushing the triplets, so my ma says,” Ivar said, a fifteen-year-old standing nearly as tall as Hanna, though he lacked the immensity.

“Hmm, well.” Igne stood, brushed off the seat of her pants, and returned to her desk. “Still lunch for thirty minutes. If you’re planning on going out, you’d best get a move.”

Mouths smacked and paper bags ruffled and smoothed. Coats went from hooks to backs. It was a sweater weather day in the classroom thanks to the lingering—though fleeting—heat brought down the mountainside. Igne sat at her desk, mulling over what had happened and noticed the three coats dangling four spots from her own hook. She then thought about the marks on Ericka’s arms.

Those marks were odd. Too big for insulin. Bug bites? No, it was winter, and besides, they were too perfectly centered near veins, too knowing.

The mental wheels turned until they spun with something nearing anger and she drafted a note to Mr. Hanna, requesting an interview. She was smart enough to masquerade her concerns, of course.

—

The triplets didn’t show the following morning. Nor the one after that.

There was no other choice: she had to deliver the coats, as well as the letter. She’d become paranoid about it, but no less firm. Something had to be said, even if it meant facing a very large, very strange man. It was after 4:00 PM when she finally built the nerve necessary to walk over to the mysterious home on the eastern corner of the village.

For the month of January, Ravijk saw sunrise at ten in the morning and sundown at two in the afternoon. Being after 4:00 PM, it was black aside from the sliver moon, and it was cold. The streets crunched and glittered shadowy white prismatic crystals beneath the streetlights. Mr. Hanna’s home appeared to stretch long into the sky, looming over the town like a haunted house. Igne stepped into its shadow, knocked on the door, and listened for motion inside. There was a screeching of wooden chairs on wooden floors. Her heart jumped and she wanted to turn back, wanted to run, wanted to leave the coats in a heap.

Hanna answered the door. He was as impressive and foreboding as he was upon their first meeting. The lights from within the home cast an ominous glow, playing a golden aura around his head and shoulders.

“Yes?” he asked, a curious turn of his neck.

“I have coats,” Igne said, barely, her legs weak as overcooked spaghetti.

She had a brief vision of Hanna peeking around the street, seeing the emptiness, and dragging her inside, dining on her flesh, chomping on thigh meat as if torn from a chicken bone. She pinched at her love handle through a coat pocket.

“From school, thank you.” He took the heap from Igne. The coats seemed so insignificant under his hand, wrist curled like a fishing hook.

The door began to close. Igne reached into her pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope.

“How are your girls?” she asked.

Hanna peered at the envelope as if it had come from another galaxy.

“Girls!” He turned his head and yelled over his shoulder.

The trio approached in a run. They all looked much healthier, proper color and moderate glow amid the shadowy atmosphere. They did not, however, look happy to see their teacher on the doorstep. Hanna handed over the note.

“No, no, that’s for you,” Igne said.

So badly, she wanted to run, but the best she could manage was to hinge her knees straight and avoid crumbling on the spot.

“Read it,” the man said.

Igne wasn’t certain which girl held the note thanks to a trick of light and shadows.

“It’s really for you,” she said.

Hanna glowered. Igne shrank further, wishing it was possible to blow away, become a snowflake on the breeze.

“Read it.”

A small voice from inside began to speak: “Dear Mr. Hanna, I wanted to take this time to tell you what great students your girls have been. It’s a real pleasure,” the girl read and then paused, the letter was about to move into troublesome territory. “Um, oh, I lost my place. The girls are lots of fun and I hope they continue to be good.”

Igne stared past the man, eyebrows raised. The note had been a bad idea and the triplets understood as much, despite that they were just children.

Another sister grabbed the sheet.

“I would also like to take this time to express concern,” Igne gulped down glass shards of terror as the second reader began into the actual content, “that the girls could be doing more. With work, they could be the smartest kids ever. Thank you for your time, Ms. Dorthea.”

Igne’s heart played a thunder roll but was slowing into something manageable. Her legs stiffened into al dente territory. The girls hadn’t read anything about the scabs, the peculiar behavior, or the general fear due to their collective oddity.

Hanna relaxed as well. “So what? They need to read more? I can’t help them, never learned, their mother was a smart one.”

Igne’s tongue twisted and stuck to the roof of her mouth. The wind whistled, she forced a smile, nodded, and turned around. The entire universe seemed frozen, yet a hot island paradise when compared to the man behind her.

“They’ll return on Monday,” Hanna said to Igne’s back.

The door closed and Igne moved on, in body, but not in mind. There was something off and the three young girls knew it.

—

It took time to get along in a new town. Igne belonged to no social groups. Not that many existed, most of the people in Ravijk are there because that’s where they were, it’s who they were, birth to death. The town survived on a barter system, work for food, food for food, and so on. Igne was one of only a few wage-earning citizens bringing outside dollars into the equation.

The money she spent in the community trickled down and out for foreign items. Lumber and grains mostly, but also into the entertainment sector.

Most nights, townsfolk met at the hall to watch the massive communal TVRO satellite dish, drink beer, eat soup and fresh bread, and to learn of civilizations beyond the valley walls. Rather than take a seat in the darkened room to watch the television with the majority, she took a stool at the bar. Whether for ambience or to save power, the bar existed in a gentle reddish wash of candlelight.

Igne ordered a beer and leaned toward a chubby woman on the stool next to her. The woman turned and revealed a smile of more dark spaces than bright teeth. There was no dentist in the valley and oral hygiene was not a high priority.

“You’re the teacher,” the woman said.

Igne nodded and sipped from her mug.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Mags, that’s Leif, and that’s Par.” Mags pointed down the bar to the men. They appeared to be twins.

Igne offered her name and then listened as the twins told stories of everyone that entered or left the hall as they did so. The bartender, a man with scruffy white hair covering most of his head and jaw—much like a lion’s mane—refilled the cups as they emptied.

During a lull, Igne brough the topic around to Hanna. The formally talkative trio grew silent. The twins quickly finished their drinks and stomped out of the hall.

“What did I say?”

“Isn’t your fault. Leif and Par miss their brother, they lived with Mr. Hanna’s father, maybe grandfather, I can’t recall. Had their childhoods in that place until their brother Randolph died. Old Hanna believed in the myth, made the boys spill blood during the Howl, put the three bowls out the back door. Come morning, the Howl was done and the blood was gone. Wolves drink blood, it’s like champagne to them,” Mags said.

“What happened to Hanna’s father, or grandfather, or…?”

“Died I reckon. Nobody ever saw him again, but there’s always at least one Hanna in the place. The boys moved out after their brother died.”

“They were triplets?” Igne was astonished, trying to fathom the mathematical likelihood of multiple sets of triplets alive in the same tiny village at the same time.

“Hanna blood’s good for triplets.”

“So how did Rudolph die?”

“Randolph,” Mags said. “Story is, he froze to death one night, after a Howler left off, but that’s just talk. Nobody knows for sure.” Mags stood. “Though some say he failed to offer sacrifice.” She offered a sly grin and left without another word.

—

Igne had spent the weekend playing different scenarios in her head as to how she’d get answers from the girls and, once getting the answers she expected, to save them from their father. Heroic teacher fantasies, the stuff she’d imagined a million times throughout college.

On Monday morning, the temperature shifted downwards to -43°C. It hurt to breathe. Lungs threatened to shatter like hollow ice. Nostril hairs became a single block of frost. Eyelids clung together as if glued.

Five students braved the weather. There were two teens near the front of the class, a lovey-dovey pair willing to face anything for matters of the heart, and at the back of the room, the triplets. The girls stared forward, and the two teens stared into each other’s eyes. It was sweet and utterly ridiculous.

“I can’t do much with these numbers,” Igne said. “How about we do story time?”

Nobody answered.

Although long due for an upgrade, the record player continued spinning every time called upon, ready for duty; the speakers crackling, the voices dull and lifeless. The class listened. Most had read the homey classics, Gunnarsson, Ibsen, Andersen, so learning a Russian classic was a change in focus. A soft mannish voice announced the unabridged version of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was the longest of any of the audiobooks in the school’s collection, twenty-two ninety-minute records.

Igne sat at her desk, mindlessly shuffling papers, glancing up now and then to catch the teens stealing kisses while the triplets stared forward.

“Knock it off or I’ll tell your mothers,” Igne said. The teens split, their chair legs squeaking as they parted.

Igne walked past them, offering a grave glance despite that she wanted to grin, and knelt to talk to the triplets. They all wore white. Impossible to tell apart. Replicas of one another.

Before she could speak, one of the girls whispered, “Ms. Dorthea, can we do our project on the Howl? On Ravijk Valley?”

It wasn’t how she’d expected to fall onto the topic. She’d almost forgotten about the project. Most children choose Egypt or Rome for their history project topic, as there was an abundance of information available and a Hollywood richness beyond the more reliable book focus.

“What do you mean?”

“We want to do a report about the myths and what people do,” one of the triplets said.

“Yeah,” the other two agreed.

“Okay.” Igne hunkered lower and leaned in. The girls smelled of minty bar soap. “Does your father hurt you?”

Eyes bulged and the girls gazed forward, silently listening to Dostoevsky. Their unwillingness to speak an answer of its own.

“You know, whatever he does, he shouldn’t. This is the modern world.” The sentence came out of her mouth like morning breath. It wasn’t the modern world, everywhere else, maybe, but not in the secluded valley. “He can’t do things to you and get away with it.”

The encouragement did nothing. The girls were rocks. Igne gave up for the time and moved back to her desk.

Igne sent the students home before sundown. It was better than ten degrees warmer than it was that morning, but the window for the balmy thirty below centigrade was a small one. Igne spent the evening and night fretting over the idea that the triplets faced real danger. How did one harm their own child? How did one still believe in such nonsense? Children, okay, but an adult?

—

Days became weeks, and the girls refused to speak. Igne couldn’t let it go, and finally the pre-Howl came, like an alarm of impending terror.

The triplets lined the back of the classroom, their faces aglow, red. Heat emanated from their bodies as if fires burned in their bellies. The ideas spun in Igne. They were like that last time before Ericka fell ill with scabby tracks about her arms. The girls were hardly there at all: heads swaying, drinking water from bottles, eating only dried elk hunks at lunch.

“I’ll see you all tomorrow,” Igne said at the end of class.

The girls burst forward showing their first spurts of energy all day. Eisa dropped two pages onto Igne’s desk before she passed the stalled students hoping to avoid contact with the girls.

Something had changed from the weeks prior. The two lovey-dovey students no longer held hands or made kissy faces. Instead, the boy had a new girl. A girl one year younger. It didn’t sit well with the foregone love. Claws came out. Taut under pressure, screams emitted from both sides, scalps withstanding tremendous strain from yanked hair. Right then, Igne forgot about the triplets and focused on the warring teens.

She separated them, seated them, sent lover-boy away, and called the girls’ homes from the bulky rotary phone on the wall behind her desk. Mothers laughed. Fathers shook their heads. The entire hubbub took an hour.

Igne finally picked up the report from her desk, just as the Howl began. She read and reread and again. Here was a detailed report of bloodletting and of appeasing mountain beasts. Beasts with voices like banshees, bodies of men, heads like goats, and hands of burning steel. The report explained everything their father had told them, the book where he showed drawings of the beasts, of the things he believed real, and great sacrifices that drew back into the annals of time. Someday, one of the girls would die for the sake of the village. It always was and always would be.

“My goodness,” Igne spoke without hearing her voice over the winds. She dropped the sheets, considered the chances of success, took her parka, and ran from the room.

A dark wall of hot air screamed into her face. It thumped into her ears. It came from the east, seemingly from right behind Hanna’s home. Her body angled against the wind, pushing through the invisible force. She’d never stayed out during a Howl and never noticed the subtle scents: metallic, sour and familiar, yet difficult to place.

The short walk took nearly twenty minutes. Sweat dripped down Igne’s face and slid along her arms and legs beneath her heavy coat. Her hair was a drenched mat and she felt as if she’d run a marathon: exhausted, sore, and greedy for the finish.

She pounded on the door. No answer so she pounded harder, catching her breath as the house sheltered against the gale force winds.

“Let me in!” she screamed.

Turning the handle, the door opened. The air inside was twice as hot. She neither saw nor heard anyone. The written report had described basement cells with cots, and archaic bloodletting needles and glass tubing that ran from their veins into copper urns. What they hadn’t described was the main floor or where to find the basement entry.

She discovered the kitchen beyond the dining area, but no door. She found the living room and a den of sorts. There was a door leading upstairs to what she assumed were bedrooms. The home was massive and dark. Many of the light bulbs were decades old, glowing orangey yellows rather than whites. She found the pantry and a door with several open padlocks and locked bolts.

She tugged, shouting in chorus with the Howling outside. She turned to look about the pantry, for something to breakdown the door, something that might master the locks. As she turned, a thump blackened her sight and the last vision she had was of a seven-foot goat.

—

Ivory bulbs dangled from the ceiling. Igne was slumped against a stone wall. A few feet away were three tight cells with heavy steel bars and the imprisoned girls. The glassy lines ran red with blood. The giant goat, or rather Mr. Hanna donning animal hides, worked on Eisa’s arm, removing a fat needle.

It was much cooler in the basement. The room was long, everything stone and steel. At the far end, away from Hanna, away from the girls, the cells and their running blood, there was a dusty workbench cluttered with tools. Spider webs draped lazily like tossed quilts long in years but short in remaining threads.

Igne crawled, quietly toward the workbench. The din outside was muffled by the home’s foundation and yet still offered enough noise to cover the drag of her boots against the floor. Aching all over, but mostly behind her eyes, through the top of her skull, and into her brain, she tasted the familiar scent. It was blood. Blood from inside, blood that never met the surface to mingle with the other scents of the world. Pure, untainted blood. An essence in bloom.

Igne swallowed a helping of deep red fluid and reached through the thick webs. Fat, furry-bodied spiders burst into action at the motion, scurrying onto her hand and up the sleeve of her coat before she had a chance to pull her arm away. She stifled a scream as she felt them inside her parka. She dropped the jacket and swatted frantically, knocking two spiders from her arms, unnoticing of the eight-legged monster nesting in her damp hair.

She grabbed a heavy wooden block hammer. Hanna had moved onto Ericka, was now closing her puncture wound. Igne saw her chance and swung back, her body screaming in agony from the knock to her head. Hanna turned at the last second and threw out an arm. He blocked the hammer, but his bones cracked and splintered in unnatural directions. Igne swung again. Hanna grimaced, dodged the strike, and slammed his fist into Igne’s nose. The soft layer of cartilage and bone burst into a fat red smear like a stomped grape.

The battered teacher slid backward, and Hanna returned his attention, finally getting to Eila’s arm. Blood had spilled over the lip of the copper urn.

The spider riding Igne’s head dug into her scalp. The pain was horrid but awakening. She scrambled to her knees and took to crawling. The hammer seemed years away, her eyes remained glued on the wide back of the enormous man. A spider ran along the floor and to Hanna’s boot, up his back, and onto his shoulder.

“What are you doing over here?” he asked, lifting his broken arm, the wide bone jutting from the torn flesh.

He turned in time to see the hammer’s block swipe across his jaw, cracking and separating with a heavy, wet thud. His consciousness gone long before three of his spat teeth landed. He toppled and flattened the spider riding him.

“Girls, girls!” Igne said, slumping and lurching toward the cells.

The girls leaned forward, weak and drained. The beleaguered woman tapped and fingered around Hanna’s body, feeling for pockets, looking for the hard edges of keys.

“The wall,” Ericka said from the central cell before she fell back, lightheaded.

Pain set aside, Igne dragged her unwilling body across the room. The keys dangled from a nail. They were long iron keys, archaic with two rabbit’s teeth dipping from the shaft. The cells used the same key, the girls sat up slowly, unable to move with the necessary urgency. Ericka and Eisa leaned against their swinging cell doors once they’d opened.

“Get up, come on.” Igne helped Eila. She kicked over a copper urn.

“I’m so tired,” Eila whispered, leaning, sapping much of Igne’s energy.

They pushed on toward the door. Locked. Igne panicked for a second before remembering the keys. The door opened with a heavy click and dark enveloped the light, devouring it as the steps began ascent. Into the blackness, dragging feet, kicking each step with slow nervous motion. They leaned on the curiously stiff, rippling walls.

“What’s on the walls?” Igne asked. The report hadn’t described the walls.

None answered the question. The dips were sharp at times, and Igne found her fingers travelling below the surface layers at others. The Howl grew louder with every step and was the only promise that they moved in the correct direction at all. Igne almost fell backward when she finally reached the top, bumping her agonized head against the door, sending a shockwave through her system. She felt for a handle, the girls pushed up against the harrowed woman.

“Stop, stop!” Igne said.

Nobody heard. The door handle spun but the door remained locked, she found a keyhole, blindly fingering. A key slid inside, too loose. A shove from behind pushed her hard against the door.

“Back!”

The next key entered the door, the lock clicked, and they all fell forward. Igne looked back to see Hanna groping along the wall from below and his bloodied face hanging loosely like a rubber half-mask. The light offered more information. The walls were of decayed flesh and aged bones, the rounded dips and craters: skulls, ribs, pelvic regions devoid of life, though brimming with horror. Igne screamed at understanding. Every bone matched a sacrificial child. And so many she’d touched just now, running her pained head and tired hands against their surfaces.

Hanna carried two urns of blood, slowing his chase to a crawl. The triplets stumbled behind Igne who bore a new energy, anything to escape the stairway walls. She staggered, woozy and failing. The door seemed miles away. They pushed along wailing their anguish, crying along with the winds.

Once outside, Igne glanced back. Hanna no longer followed. He couldn’t be far. Igne knew it, and she forced her distressed frame on and out into the dark streets of Ravijk. Lights shone from living room windows like lighthouse beacons, promising safety on the shore. Safety from a violent and insane father. Safety from a man living in a myth.

The Howl assisted their motion, a heavy hand moving them along their path. The closest home had light. Igne led the way. Trudging hand-in-hand-in-hand-in-hand. Eila dragged down on both arms. Igne and Ericka gripped tighter.

Fists slammed on the neighbor’s door, a face came to the window, and the light inside died.

“Please!” Igne said, moving back, watching as the lights next-door dimmed.

She pulled the girls further, she wasn’t certain she could make it all the way home, but she had to try. As they pushed on, every potential savior turned down their lights as if apologizing in advance.

On her scalp, the nesting spider scurried with pangs of homesickness. Panic overcame the creature. Igne stopped, screaming in agony. She couldn’t lift her arms as the girls held so, so tightly. Deeper and deeper the spider burrowed. It felt like acid burning behind her flesh. She fell, shaking her hands free to grasp her head. Hair came away in clumps. The spider beneath her skin continued its search, digging for peace, frantic for home.

Igne clawed her face, screaming as the spider dug out through her nose. The freed creature ran confusedly until the winds collected it and the Howl sent it further from its nest. Igne’s sinus oozed black poison. She blinked away blobs of ink pouring forth from her eyes like Arabian crude tears. Hot blood dripped down her throat.

Disoriented, the triplets attempted to stand her up. Their teacher’s head doubling and then tripling in size, bloated with intrusive poison secreted by the now gone interloper.

Eisa shook Ericka as Ericka shook Igne, who’d fallen back to the wet street. “Gone, she’s gone!” Eisa screamed, pointing back to where Eila once stood. Igne pushed aside the pain to look. There was not a trace of the missing child.

Ericka’s fingers slipped from Eisa’s. Eisa spun. Igne peered about her. Gone, two of the sisters now gone. Eisa hugged onto Igne; if the beasts of the Howlers should come for them, they would not go alone.

—

The winds ceased for a sixth time since the last proper sacrifice. Hanna looked out onto the yard he’d known for more than two thousand years, staring at the homes, the dwellings of terrified neighbors. Any one of them could be next. Missing the sacrifice doomed the town until he replenished the Guild blood supply.

He shook, thinking, feeling guilty that he’d spilled Ericka’s urn in his rush and had managed to get only Eisa’s outside. He loved every child of the Guild he’d raised. It hurt so much to lose them.

The Howl would take its sacrifices. Hanna fought against tears. He’d failed before and he’d fail again. A single drop betrayed his will.

“Supper! Where are you?” The voice whistled a hollow tune behind the words.

“In here, I’m coming,” Hanna said and wiped his eye.

The hungry faces of the beasts lingered in his head. One had received sacrifice, the other two ate the source of the flow, drinking the well, flesh, bone, and breath.

Moving from the window, Hanna walked to the kitchen. He smelled potatoes, goat, and the new Guild mother.

Already big in the middle, Igne held a palm at the small of her back. “I hadn’t really considered having children, not yet,” she said for the umpteenth time, feeling the curve of her belly.

“A miracle,” Hanna said.

She’d been bitten by a spider, and Hanna had convinced her that everything leading up to their pairing had been a fever dream. Particularly that she’d imagined a set of triplets.

Leaving her post at the school was wise. Hanna agreed. Staying would only feed her delusions about triplets and the truth about the mountain Howl. Besides, her deformity scared the students, and she didn’t want to scare anybody, did she?

Hanna kissed Igne’s bulbous, darkened, hairless brow. She was pregnant with triplets. He’d be a father again. Igne would die giving birth, as it was and always shall be. For now, the beasts of the Howl would cry and eat of the village until the agreed sacrifice resumed.

XX