They flew in the day after the summer solstice, riding on larksong. Gossamer shirts billowed, puffing up around their translucent bodies, the small designs burned red into the sheer fabric. Seeing them the first time, Doina finally understood why their existence was debated. Even up close, they were so delicate as to be almost incorporeal.

“Welcome,” she said to the first one that landed, whose ie1 bloomed with the Tree of Life. “I do not have bread or salt with me, but we’d be honoured to welcome you as guests in our village.”

“We accept,” Tree of Life spoke, her voice a sweet zephyr.

Doina’s little sister, Mioara, ran ahead to announce the cheerful news. Slower, shimmering in the dust perturbed by the little girl’s feet, the Billows walked in silence alongside Doina. Even the sheep seemed to understand the importance of the event for they didn’t stray as usual, but kept to the dirt road. Doina’s ciomag2 thunked periodically on the dirt, grinding the cracked soil into dust. Finally they’re here. Thunk. Finally we’ll have rain. Thunk.

She’d heard the legends from her great-grandmother, a woman who seemed to have been born old and blind for everyone remembered her as such. The crone would bring Doina and the other children in the village into her spacious yard and spun yarn while teaching them of life: “Welcome strangers with open arms, and give them salt and bread to show your friendship, lest you be struck by misfortune.”

If the crone was in good spirits, she would venture into the world of fairytale, too. Such as the Billows, the wisps of departed women who brought gifts to those they visited.

“They had to leave their homes behind. Family, husbands, children,” the crone spoke slowly, chewing her lips in moments of silence. “They need to be a complete set, the seven of them. Each wears an ie with red-threaded embroidery of their gifts. The Star brings hope. The bearer of the Quarrels keeps the world in balance. The Comb protects against evil. Wisdom comes from the Walnut, and fertility from Hands on Hips. The Bird is the bearer of joy. And the final one, dressed with the Tree of Life, connects Heaven and Earth.

The Billows would only pass through villages when in need of something. Otherwise, they’d stay in the sky, nestled in clouds and wrapped in summer breezes, watching over the lands below and bestowing gifts at will. If their three pleas were fulfilled, they’d give those that helped them a gift--usually 7 years of luck and abundance, which Doina’s village desperately needed.

Doina preferred to push the last part of the legend to the back of her mind. She needn’t think of what they’d do if their desires were not fulfilled. She tried not to look at the embroidered signs burning in their shirts.

When they stepped foot on the main street, people had already swarmed out, bearing wine and țuică and bowls of salt and crackling loaves of bread. Mioara grinned, red-faced and dusty, from behind their mother and brothers. She had fulfilled her duty, and the Billows could be welcomed properly. The first of three jobs was done.

Most men in the village had abandoned their work and took to raising a makeshift tent of branches and leaves in a clearing in the forest. The Billows preferred sleeping close to nature, and they needed somewhere they would have privacy and a fresh spring to wash in. Once they’d approve of their dwellings, the second job would be complete.

Then only the third would remain.

“Which one is missing?” Doina heard Mioara whisper to no one in particular, as the village teacher pointed the Billows to a richly decorated table waiting for them in the church yard.

It was the Comb, Doina had already noticed, and a knot had formed in her throat.

“We have a babe of one,” a voice rang over the chatter. “She hasn’t made the choice yet. Oh, mighty Billows, would you like to see?”

“We would,” said the Quarrels. “We would be honoured, and we’d thank you for the honour by gifting the babe a chest of gold.”

The babe’s mother, blushing with pride and greed, brought her apple-cheeked child, still dusty from rolling in the sand and placed her squarely in the middle of the church yard. The child’s eldest brother came running with the carved slices of wood, rubbed smooth by generations of tiny fingers. He arranged them in a circle around the smiling baby.

The little girl, unused to being the center of attention, clapped her hands and yelped with joy, then laughed when the entire village joined her. She rolled onto her stomach and crawled, deftly, to one of the rounds of wood. The baby looked intently at the symbol, then turned sharply and grabbed the one to the left. The Comb.

“The second Comb in our village in nearly a century,” thought Doina.

The symbol of the Comb burned in Doina’s Sunday ie, folded nearly in her dowry chest. The simple shirt, dusty and stained, she wore on normal days had protected her against the Billow’s scrutiny, but once she’d don her best clothes for the feast that night, the six would see she bore the symbol of their lost sister and bring Doina in their midst. They’d take her away, on rays of sun and linden smell, to their realm. Away from her sister, from her village. From her beloved sheep.

“How fortunate,” the Walnut spoke, her voice a ring of silver bells. “It is indeed the Comb we’re missing.”

The cheering in the church yard stopped. The baby tried to shove the piece of wood in her mouth, happy to play with a new toy. The mother picked her up and held her close.

“Our prior Comb has perished,” the Hands on Hips spoke next, her silver hair floating of its own accord. “Died in a flood. She was young, too, went before her time. So we urgently need a new one.”

“My baby is too young,” the mother choked, tears blooming in her eyes. Oh, how she regretted her excitement. If only she’d waited until the Billows left, her child wouldn’t have been in peril. She no longer cared about the gold the Billows would give the baby as thanks for the honour.

“She is too young,” the Star conceded. Barely more than a teenager herself, her voice flowed low and deep, like a mountain river. “There must be another Comb that can join us.”

The villagers turned, slow and deliberate, towards Doina. The only other Comb in a century.

“It is you,” an old man said, spitting. “You have the Comb, don’t you?”

Doina’s voice quivered. “Yes.”

The Bird smiled wide and brought Doina’s hands into hers. If Doina would join them, the Bird would be her sister, not her beloved Mioara. She tried to close her eyes and see if she felt any familiarity with the Billow, but there was none. How could there be?

“Will you relinquish your life as is now, and your earthly body, and your blood, and join us in our celestial plains? Will you give up the life of sorrow on earth and take on the gifts of benefaction?”

Doina took a deep breath, taking in the smell of wildflowers and wilted grass. The crone’s voice rang in her ears.

“If disobeyed once, the Billows take away the sight of all those who have seen them. Those so accursed shall never again receive good luck from them again. If disobeyed twice, they pluck the souls of those that refused them and spin them into thread for their shirts. The bodies are still alive until their natural end, but there is nothing left to ascend to Heaven afterwards.”

“What about the Billows?” Doina had asked as a young girl.

“Their souls are broken into gifts for those on earth. They never get to Heaven either.”

Doina looked at the little girl, the second Comb, now crying in her mother’s arms.

“It shall be my honour to join you,” she told the Billows, and the village erupted in cheers.

The third job was complete, and the clouds gathered at once, raining blessed water onto the dying crops.

Author’s note: There are multiple connections to Romanian folklore in the story.

1. The Billows do not exist, but they’re heavily inspired by Sânziene (s-uhn-zee-eh-neh), which are benevolent mythical beings akin to good fairies. The Sânziene are celebrated on the 24th of June, when the skies are said to open (that’s when the Billows came to Earth).

2. The symbols on the Billows’ shirts are actual symbols used in traditional Romanian embroidery, and the meaning are the actual meaning behind them. I’ve attached a drawing of what the symbols actually look like, and I’ll try to share a picture of some of my own traditional blouses that include these motifs.

   

3. The traditions mentioned (welcoming guests with salt and bread, 1 year olds choosing items from a tray to determine their fate) are real Romanian traditions.

4. Doina (meaning ballad) and Mioara (meaning sheep) also have deeper meanings: both are traditional names referencing the foundational Romanian folk poem, Miorița. In the poem, a shepherd hears from his magical ewe that two other shepherds plan to kill him. He resigns to his fate (like Doina resigned to hers) and instructs the ewe to tell his mother and the other sheep he has gone to marry a princess. If they think this is the truth, they will be less sad. In The Billows, Doina will also have to leave behind all she knows, although it is a much more whimsical alternative to death. In a way, her fate is similar the the one the shepherd in the ballad wanted everyone to think he had.

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

started this book club as a way to go through serialized fiction, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to keep up with multiple authors at once.

Previous reviews:
No Such Thing As Normal

Grumble and Gasp

The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors

The Nun Who Hacked Heaven

I tend to leave comments with more specific comments under the relevant chapters (if I do have them), so I won’t have them in here to keep this review mostly spoiler-free.

This month’s chosen subject: The Murder Coat by

Sass&Sage’s Substack

The Murder Coat -- All Chapters

The Murder Coat is a serialised mystery featuring Evie Harroway, a second-hand shop owner with a knack for finding trouble (and trouble finding her). Set in Wellington, it blends cold cases, dark humour, and one very opinionated cat named Horatio…

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10 months ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Wendy Russell

Synopsis (From the Author’s publication)

The Murder Coat is a serialised mystery featuring Evie Harroway, a second-hand shop owner with a knack for finding trouble (and trouble finding her). Set in Wellington, it blends cold cases, dark humour, and one very opinionated cat named Horatio.

General Impression

There is a reason cozy murder mysteries are popular: there’s something very attractive about combining a gruesome murder with slice-of-life moments and wacky characters. A bit like cuddling up under a thick duvet while blasting your AC. Sure, the outside is cold, but you’re nice and cozy and safe.

That’s what The Murder Coat feels like. Obviously a young girl’s death in a car accident is devastating, and the fact that there seems to be foul play is even worse. But the cast of characters solving her murder (and the ever-spreading mystery surrounding it) are so likeable, the atmosphere is so infused with fun little details that you can’t help but find yourself wishing this could case would stretch further and further, so you can be part of this world for just a bit longer.

Writing Style

Wendy Russell’s publication is named Sass and Sage. Guess what her writing style is like. Wendy is very funny, and her characters always have a quip ready. This helps dispell a lot of seriousness that would usually blanket a book about a murder and a secret crime syndicate (it gets weird). However, that isn’t to say there aren’t solemn or respectful moments when the timing is right!

There were a few moments that didn’t fully land for me, but I think this is more than normal given the quirkyness of the characters. By definition they’re not for everybody. Also, with the sheer amount of jokes per chapter, it’s always the risk that not all are absolute bangers (but most are).

Characters

Evie is a middle-aged woman who dances to the beat of her own drum. She’s spent too long worrying about others, and now she’s living her best life as owner of a delightful little second-hand store, bending to no one’s will but Horatio’s…

…which is her cat. Horatio is a leash-walked, judgemental cat who I would not be surprised to find out had a paw in the unfolding mystery.

Delores is Evie’s landlady and way more important to the plot than just rearranging Evie’s shop without permission (in ways I have yet to fully untangle). We also meet a sleuth gang (Bernadette, Frankie, Kate) comprised of Evie’s friends, who try to solve the murder behind that uptight detective Lila’s back.

It may sound simple, but that’s just a first impression. With The Murder Coat, there’s more then meets the eye.

World building

Evie has a supernatural power of being able to see past events when touching relevant objects. This is a drop of magical realism into an already magical world, a maximalist heaven of old things and unfolding mysteries. Stepping into one of The Murder Coat’s chapters is like visiting your grandma who once insinuated, while inebriated, that she killed a man when he got handsy and she got away with it for 50 years.

Quotes

Cozy mysteries don’t have a lot of flowery language, but I found myself marking some quotes regardless. Mostly because they paint such a vivid picture of the world you’re invited to inhabit for a few hours (and you feel welcome in this world, depite the, you know, murders).

Let them stare. If you hit fifty-four and haven’t started actively offending people by existing, what’s even the point?

Wellington was doing its usual winter thing – grey skies, a bitter wind that seemed to knife its way down your collar, and just enough drizzle to ruin your hair but not justify an umbrella. Still, I was in love with it. Messy but magnetic, windswept and sharp around the edges, with beauty tucked into alleyways and weirdness in the bones of the city.

“I didn’t bring her anywhere,” I snapped. “She just walked in. It’s called coincidence, Thax. Try not to have an aneurysm about it.”

“Are they gonna kiss or kill each other? Because honestly, I can’t tell.”

Horatio hacked up a furball on a vintage rug reminding me that peace is always temporary.

“Oh,” I said, straightening up. “Lila, hi. This is… not what it looks like.”

“It looks like two grown women sword fighting with baguettes as penises,” Lila said, tone flat. “In criminally bad French accents, I might add.”

“Well, then it’s exactly what it looks like,”

Te Arahi Bay wasn’t on any map I’d ever seen — a pocket of sea and bush that looked as if it had been keeping its own counsel for a long time.

Conclusion

This novel flies. Even if you don’t have time to sit down and read, Wendy went through the trouble of recording it and listening to her bring life to her characters is an absolute joy.

I have to admit that I am once again only at chapter 19/41. This is because I got too excited about too many things and didn’t plan appropriately. So while i can’t tell you about the end of the story, I can tell you it’s 100% worth it and I’ll be finish it tonight, under my duvet, while the AC is blasting.

You may have heard about Nikki’s recent diagnosis that comes at a hard-enough time in her life. We’re hoping to help with that.

A quick summary

She was recently diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder where the heart muscle takes longer than normal to recharge between beats. This can be life-threatening at worst, and extremely stressful and painful at the very best. And it’s almost as terrifying as anything Nikki has ever written.

So we’re doing a fundraiser/raffle, where donors get to win some pretty nifty prizes.

The rules

This is how it works:

1. Donate to Nikki’s Ko-Fi any time between now and June 13th.

Donate Here

or on paypal

2. After donating, send either or I a screenshot with the donation and tell us if you have any prize preference (we can’t guarantee you’ll get it, but we’ll do our best).

3. On June 14th, at 12:00 PM EST, we’ll choose the lucky winners by random selection. We’ll contact them by private message to discuss further details.

4. Give us a month to work on the prizes (unless otherwise discussed) and we’ll send your deliverable (sorry, it’s summer and we’re all swamped!)

The prizes

• A custom-made cover design for a short story of your choice1 by

• An author brand starter kit2 by

• An author landing page3 by

• A developmental edit on a story of 5000 words or less4 by

• A collage based on a short story/poem OR a review5 by

• A handwritten story in post cards OR a review OR a translation in German6 by

• Editing one short story of 5000 words or less7 by

• NEW: ‘The Shieldbreaker, Books One and Two’ as paperbacks by

• NEW: Custom poetry postcard for EVERYONE who donates and is willing to share their address8 by .

• If anyone else wants to donate their gifts for a good cause, please message! I’ll update the post to contain the newest information.

I know times are hard for all of us. If you can, 5$ or even 1$ is already so much. If not, spreading the word by interacting with this post or even sharing it is invaluable, too.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and helping in whatever way you can. You are a gem 💚

Disclaimer: this action is wholly independent from Nightingale press.

This was originally written for ’s first open mic night on March 29th, with the theme ‘Strangers’. It was not selected as one of the winners, but I still think it’s pretty fun.

Hopefully I’ll get to read for the second open mic, whenever that may happen.

“My sister set this up. I had no idea it was with you.”

Twisting the cuffs of her handknit sweater, Mirela looked down at her hands and thought, for a split second, that they looked a lot like a slice of Gouda forgotten on the kitchen counter. Sweaty cheese aside, she needed to say something. “I didn’t know either.”

Daniel rolled his shoulders back, relaxing into his sticky cafe chair. Mirela wondered why he didn’t just swap seats, but she wasn’t going to hike up the tension even more.

“So,” started Daniel, voice slow and raspy.

“I’m sorry,” said Mirela, her voice smeared with discomfort. “Last time we started on a bad note, I know. I’m super sorry. It was a really bad time for me, and I promise I’m actually a really nice person.”

Daniel squinted. “Really.”

“I really, really am.”

Another beat of silence, marked by a sort of lo-fi mix thumping slowly from behind the bar. Perhaps she should explain.

“I was genuinely super interested to get to know you,” she said, her words dripping out one at a time. “And I was actually looking forward to our date, you know?”

With a furtive glance, she dared to scan his face for a clue. Nope. Still unmoved and stony.

“But literally one hour before we were supposed to meet I got the greenlight results for my thesis…”

Daniel blinked slowly, like an old dog drifting to sleep.

“...and I’d failed. So I was in a horrid state and didn’t really feel like going out anymore.”

“You could have messaged.” His thick accent spread like molasses, cloying and slow, dragging her deeper into sticky, hot discomfort.

“I didn’t want to let you down, and I genuinely wanted to meet you! Like I said on Bumble, I think you’re really cute. And I think we have lots in common! But when I got there, I don’t know, something just came over me. I tried to push it down and ignore it, but I just couldn’t.”

Her words came out faster now, spilling onto the table between them like sloshes of curdled milk.

“You ordered the goat cheese salad for us to share, which is super sweet of you…” A shaky breath, rattling in her throat like pouring sugar. “...but my thesis focused on the role of goat milk caseins in the longevity of isolated shepherding communities and I just lost it. I went to the bathroom to calm down and I guess I was in there for super long because by the time I came out you’d left. And you’d blocked me.”

Daniel stared at her, eyes the size of onions and arms folded on his chest. “You were still in the bathroom? I thought you’d escaped out back.”

Mirela allowed herself a grin for the first time. “We’re not in the movies, there’s no ‘out back’.” She fussed a little more with the cuffs of her sweater, then finally sat down. “Let’s start over, alright? We’re still practically strangers, we can just pretend we met for the first time.”

“Sure,” he said, and the building pressure collapsed like a poorly baked Pavlova. “Let’s start over. Daniel,” and he extended a short, muscular hand to shake hers.

“Mirela. Hi,” she grinned.

“So you’re studying food science, huh?”

“Well, not anymore. I did manage to graduate! I have a Master’s now. But I don’t really use it, I decided I liked the food part more than the sciencey bit and I’m working at a bakery now.”

“Sweet gig,” he drawled.

“Literally!” she squealed, a bit too fast. “Hey, how about I get us some drinks? I owe you for the goat cheese salad, so it’s on me.”

“Sounds good. Black coffee please.”

“Righty-oh!”

Jumping back to her feet, Mirela grabbed her phone and dashed to the counter.

Daniel waited until Mirela was busy ordering their drinks. Eyes glued to the back of her head, he reached for the purse slumped on her seat. Just before she went to tap her phone to the POS machine, he found her wallet and extracted a 20 euro bill from inside.

He slipped out undetected, hidden by a group of highschoolers that had just blasted through the door.

“Sucker,” he mumbled and ducked down a side street.

Author’s note: Normally I spend a lot of time on a short story and sometimes I feel like I overthink them. This year I’m trying my hand at being a little more free with what I write, and this is one of the first results of that experiment. Hope you enjoy!

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

started this book club as a way to go through serialized fiction, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to keep up with multiple authors at once.

Previous reviews:
No Such Thing As Normal

Grumble and Gasp

The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors

I tend to leave comments with more specific comments under the relevant chapters (if I do have them), so I won’t have them in here to keep this review mostly spoiler-free.

This month’s chosen subject: The Nun Who Hacked Heaven by M Sekara

Noir and Nonsense

Start Reading Here! [Sci-fi Chapter Guide]

A tale about faith, code, and rebellion in a convent nestled in the dystopian ruins of 2099…

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a year ago · 33 likes · 11 comments · M Sekara

Synopsis (From the Author’s publication)

In the blistered remnants of a dystopian 2099, the world authority has been replaced by algorithmic decree. Sister Lucia, a devout member of the Faith of the Bound Word, a holy order propagating the analog past, spends her days tending to dying men and keeping order within convent walls.

But when a new recruit arrives, bearing a striking resemblance to someone Lucia once knew, she finds herself pulled into whispers of rebellion and drawn toward the Node: the central system that governs reality, worshipped by some, obeyed by all.

As power shifts and buried memories resurface, Lucia is forced to confront a question she’s long feared:

If silence kept her safe, why does breaking it feel like waking up?

General Impression

If you like dystopian novels centered around technology, faith, and rebellion, you’re probably going to love M. Sekara’s The Nun Who Hacked Heaven.

Very character driven, this is an easy novel to fly through, whether you like it or not (you’ll probably like it though). M. Sekara did a phenomenal job in making this serial easy to follow, easy to read, and difficult to put down.

I would like to take a moment to praise them for the sheer amount of effort in making the presentation absolutely pristine. Chapter guide with reading time estimates for each chapter? Check. Header image? Check. Recaps of what happened in the previous chapter? Check. Quick, relatively bite-sized chapters? Check. Every single chapter ending in a cliffhanger? Double-check.

If there is ever a serial specifically designed to read in one go, it’s probably this one.

Writing Style

Like I mentioned, it’s very easy to read. The story is dialogue-heavy and, while not action-packed in the traditional sense, it keeps moving. I am personally the type to prefer a more description-heavy style, so I would have prefered slightly more time dedicated to world-building, setting the scene, descriptions in general, but I am aware this is a personal preference.

Characters

Lucia, the main character, is a nun torn between her past and her present. This torture within her is what makes her relatable and what keeps you guessing as to what she’ll end up doing. She an feel a little one-note at times, and rather an observer of the events around her. The myserious V is, in my opinion, much more enticing: she’s spunky, relentless, and deeply passionate. Regardless if you prefer go-getters or more calculated characters, you’ll find something to like.

A critique I do have is that I feel there are too many nuns introduced in the beginning. I found it difficult to keep track of all of them, even though they each have distinct personalities and roles to play. Or perhaps I was just a bit tired when reading!

World building

Loved the idea of an analogue faith. Nowadays, there’s so much discussion about going analogue and avoiding technology, it’s really cool to see these ideas taken almost to the extreme as having a full on faith built around them. I wish there was a bit more world building. Yes, we all hate info dumps. But a steady trickle of information between sections of dialogue would be pretty nice.

Quotes

To be honest, I didn’t really save quotes from this serial. The writing is very utilitarian, serves the purpose of the scene and the book but isn’t necessarily breathtaking. This is, of course, also due to the genre. A fast-paced thriller is less likely to include thought-provoking metaphors.

Conclusion

I have to admit I have only read the first part. Life got busy, especially with Nightingale Press. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book. I really did, and like I mentioned before it’s really easy to go through! I would have prefered more meat on the bones, so to speak: more descriptions of settings, more world building. But the narrative is really exciting, the characters are likeable, and the time you invest in reading this will be well-spent.

Willem waited, as always, for everyone else to leave the church before he turned to Lotte. “It’s time to go home, schatje1. Are you ready?”

His voice trebled softly, warm like a sunny spring day. Or like a stroopwafel placed over a cup of tea, its thin sliver of caramel melting just so before the first delicious bite. Lotte always liked to have a stroopwafel with her tea after church, but she hadn’t been able to eat one in weeks. Not even when Willem broke off tiny bits and fed them to her like she was a baby bird.

Lotte didn’t reply-she couldn’t-and Willem had asked out of habit rather than truly awaiting a response. He held out his hand so she could use it to get up. Then he gently crowned her with her bonnet, the lace falling into place all around her. A beautiful walking corpse, draped in ghostly white.

The pristine white church walls radiated a welcome coolness back to them as they walked. Willem was thankful for it, for a cool breeze soothed Lotte’s skin, but only a very gentle one. Anything stronger than a child blowing a birthday candle dug fissures into her papery skin, tearing pained moans from between her lips. This is why he’d draped fine lace over an old, traditional bonnet he’d inherited from a long-passed relative. Lotte would receive the welcome respite of coolness, but the lace tamed the force of the harsh Dutch winds, the starched wings holding the lace away from her skin.

When they stepped over the threshold, the congregation cheered and clapped. Willem smiled meekly, Lotte turned down her gaze. If a stranger stumbled upon the scene, they might have thought it a wedding: : him, dressed in his best suit, delicately supporting her figure, shrouded in ivory.

A little detail might have seemed out of place, however: rather than an elegant dress, with a bone-white train trailing behind them, Lotte’s supple body was wrapped, mummy-like, in a flaming orange bandage dress, barely reaching mid-thigh.

Willem nodded graciously to encouragement whispered to him from one person or another, as he passed them.

“How long has it been, Willem?” asked an old woman, forcing her blushing face upward, so she wouldn’t see Lotte’s sinful bare legs.

“Around two months, hoor.”

A murmur of appreciation: most sufferers died within three weeks, four at most. A young woman reached out for Willem’s hand to squeeze it, but he brushed it aside.

“I need to take my wife home,” he said, and the crowd parted to let them pass.

Part 2: Lotte

In the car, Lotte whimpered as the bumps in the road jolted her. Willem was a gentle driver, he always had been, but some things could not be avoided. She could not just lay in bed all day, sunk in the silky bedsheets, watching some random Kdrama on her laptop, the air conditioning maintaining a pleasant nineteen degrees.

Willem had insisted that rotting in bed would deteriorate her condition faster. She needed something to live for, otherwise she could not live. She needed to go to church and pray, needed to go out with friends. needed to maintain roughly the same routine she’d had for the majority of her adult life. She couldn’t argue with him: speech was one of the first things to go. So she forced herself to tolerate the painful car rides, the long sermons, the uncomfortable silences on dates with friends that were mourning a living corpse.

After church, Willem usually propped her in a large armchair, then gently took off her shoes and washed her legs. With how tight the dress was, taking it off meant flaying her fragile skin.

He tried, once, on the night she’d come home infected, before she’d lost her voice. The shriek that burst out of her may have been drowned in the night for the outside world, but inside their little house it reverberated still. So the dress stayed on, and the flesh underneath rotted, the skin cracked like paper, releasing fat maggots to find their way out from behind the orange fabric.

Her legs, her arms, her decolletage were exposed, though, and Willem went over them every day with a soft chenille rag, moistened in rose water. The rose water might have seemed romantic, if they wouldn’t both have been aware the fragrance was there to mask the rot, rather than for relaxation.

After her bath, Lotte was left to air dry, as a towel would only tear at her skin. Splayed out like a fabric doll, she watched him tidy up, peel vegetables, make stamppot, blend it into a grisly peanut-brown smoothie and bring it to her in a tall glass with a straw. While she slurped, he sang to her. His voice had always been good. He’d sang in the church choir before her infection, but he gave it up to look after her around the clock. Like a loving husband would do.

At night, he whispered in her ear. He told her she was still beautiful, more beautiful than anybody else in the world. When he’d first told her that, when they were sixteen, she’d felt butterflies flutter in her stomach. The feeling now was similar, bur rather than butterflies, she felt the maggots writhe around her collapsing organs.

She’d fall asleep to the sound of memories long past, of their dates, their wedding. In the morning she’d wake up to him shoving a cheese sandwich and a hard boiled egg into the blender with just enough coffee to make a drinkable paste.

For the past two months, or sixtyone days to be precise, this had been their routine. At times she wondered if it was easier to handle the sickness because it was warm, and she didn’t have to wear thick, rough clothes, endure harsh winds.

Or if she’d have been allowed to stay indoors during the winter. Probably not.

Willem would insist on taking her to church at the very least, probably leaving her legs bare most of the time, like a beacon of sin in the holiest of places. He would say he didn’t cover her dress to protect whatever remained intact of her skin. Lotte wondered if part of the reason was to signal to everyone how he stayed with her, devoted and meek, despite her sickness, despite what he thought had happened.

It had started as a small Koningsdag2 party with a handful of her old university friends.

The other girls, all single, convinced her to dress up, to put on make up, to pre-game with some cheap vodka. When they crowded in the back of the taxi, warm with the buzz of alcohol in the air, cheeks smeared with Dutch flags, matching orange dresses riding up constantly, the plan had been to go to a club, dance for a few hours and go back home. Willem’s calls went to voicemail not because she was ignoring him, but because the vibrations of the booming music drowned anything else.

When the shot she took with her friends made her drowsy, she thought it was lack of practice. The others would go out almost weekly, but not her, not anymore. Usually she’d be in bed by ten, after putting the house in order. But it was Koningsdag today, and her friend Anneke was going to turn twentyfive soon, so both occasions fused into a mammoth rave with the girls. She couldn’t have refused again, even if Willem had been disappointed with her decision to go.

Head spinning with the shot, Lotte went to the bathroom, flanked by Emma and Maaike. When she came out, she was infected, and she was still not entirely sure what happened.

It had ben to disorienting, with flashes of orange and the flickering lights of a dingy club bathroom, and people coming in and out, some acknowledging her briefly, others ignoring her completely. What was certain, was that at some point while she was slumped on the filthy floor, a tall, red-headed woman approached her and forced something slimy and dark down her throat. Her stomach began to roil and twist in pain, and all the alcohol that she’d forced down for her friends fought its way back up.

When she told her friends what had happened, they screamed in excitement: “You took drugs from a stranger? And we thought you were a good girl!”

Soon, it was clear to everyone that she was genuinely sick. Anneke and Emma took her home, smudged mascara and tousled hairstyles the only hints of their wild night.

They stood up to Willem’s scrutiny and mentioned their bike ride from Lekkerkerk3 to Rotterdam at the beginning of the night was a reason for the out-of-place hair. Coming back they’d obviously Ubered, but with Lotte so sick they wouldn’t have had time to fix their hair.

Willem would have probably believed them, if it weren’t for his wife, green-faced and moaning, that couldn’t even stand by herself.

“She’s feeling a bit off, she’ll be better by morning,” Anneke said matter-of-factly.

But she didn’t get better by morning. In fact, Lotte never got better, and instead became one of the first corpse-women cropping up all over Europe. Most died withing weeks of infection, but she didn’t. She had lived to see her own decay over weeks on end, unable to defend herself against the judgy glare of the churchgoers, against the pained expression of her husband who told her he loved her no matter what happened to her. No matter what she did, and with whom.

By month three, Lotte’s rot reached the last corners of her body. Worms slivered out of her mouth, drenched in the brown slime of her evening meal, then into her blinded eyes.

“I heard Anneke’s got what you have,” Willem told her one night, as he carefully plucked maggots out of her face with tweezers. “She’s been sick for a few days now, but her mother doesn’t think she’ll last much longer.”

Lotte’s body shuddered with an attempted whimper, but instead a fat maggot flew out from between her lips.

“Got it, schatje.” said Willem, patiently, and squelched the creature under his heel.

Anneke’s body, or what remained of it, was cremated the day after her passing. Willem guessed correctly that Lotte would have wanted to be present so he brought her in a wheelchair, draped in lace, surrounded by fresh roses to hide her putrid stench.

“You’re taking such good care of her,” whispered a passer-by to him. “She looks so good for two months.”

Lotte would have laughed, if the worms hadn’t gotten to her diaphragm. Instead, her impulse jostled the maggots slightly, before they cradled back into her ribs. Of course, the woman didn’t see that. All she could see was the rough, jittering shape of a woman with a crown of black hair bejeweled with maggots, with fingers that still twitched and whose beautifully painted fingernails poked gently from behind the veil.

“Three and a half,” corrected Willem gently. “She’s a fighter.”

“Three and a half, hè!” exclaimed the woman and crossed herself.

Willem pushed Lotte further, so his beloved wife could say goodbye to her friend one last time.

By four months, her hearing, her last existing sense, melted into the darkness that had surrounded her for so long. It was a blessing, not hearing the maggots eat at her insides anymore. She suspected that Willem continued to tell her she was beautiful, and that he loved her. That he washed her feet with the cloth, slipped the straw between her lips, draped the lace around her and carried her to church, so her soul would be saved, even if the body was already damned.

And when she finally died, almost peacefully, for there were no more nerves to shoot pain, for there was no more brain to understand misery, for there was no more heart to beat despite her best effort, Willem didn’t notice at first.

For Lotte’s last trip to church, shrouded in soft lace and almost hidden behind flowers, she was a corpse, and blessedly, no longer a living one.

Part 3: Willem

After the cremation, Willem returned to the empty house, hand useless without a wheelchair to push, without a veil to adjust. Instead, he stroked the polished surface of the urn, almost as if insisting enough would reveal his wife’s beautiful face.

The sun eventually set into the balmy September evening, hiding the dried up corpses of the flowers into darkness. Hunched over, Willem got up, turned on the light and began writing in his diary, a notebook he hadn’t touched in years: “My beloved is gone and I wish I was happy she’s no longer suffering, but I selfishly wish she was here, to brighten up the starless night that chokes my heart.”

The next day, he rode his bike to a Kringloopwinkel4 and bought a delightful little vanity with a large mirror and elegantly curved legs. Lotte had mentioned in the past she wanted one, and they kept postponing it. Their house was quite small, after all, so there wasn’t a good place for now.

Now that she was gone, however, Willem was determined to strap the vanity to the back of his bike and bring it home for her. If he hadn’t been able to fulfill her wish while she was alive, he could at least do it once she was dead.

The vanity found its place on Lotte’s side of the bed, and in the following weeks and months got covered in more and more pictures and little keepsakes, as Willem found them around the house, or as bereaved friends and family brought them over. Her urn took center stage, in front of the mirror, next to a colourful IKEA vase Willem kept stocked at all times with bright yellow tulips: Lotte’s favourite.

Life continued just as quietly for Willem. Days turned to weeks turned to months. The quick snippet of balmy autumn turned to cold rain, then frost, then light spring showers and finally the warmth of sun again. The inside of their house remained unchanged, however: the vanity still bedecked with flowers, Willem still dressed in black.

Ten months after Lotte’s passing, however, he went out with a friend. Bram had gotten engaged and wanted to celebrate with Willem.

“Just one drink. That’s it,” spoke Willem in the same hushed tone he’d used for over a year now.

“Just one,” Bram conceded.

“And just us two.”

“Just us.”

But Willem himself was the one to break his own rule. He got a beer, then another. In the life before, he didn’t drink much, but he enjoyed a Hertog Jan every now and then, especially in warm nights such as this. The Netherlands had been under a heat wave for the past three weeks and the grief and pain had finally ground Willem down enough to crack.

“I think you should take it easy,” suggested Bram and Willem drank his fourth beer in less than two hours. “You’re no longer used to it.”

“Whatzz the point?” slurred Willem. “I did everything right, I still am. I needa drink.”

“You had a really tough year, Willem.”

“I did, didn’t I? So tough!”

Energized by his friend’s confirmation, Willem leaned in conspiratorially. “But I’m so relieved it’s over. That she’s dead. God, that was a rough few months, ya now?”

Bram scooted his chair back a little, just enough to allow Willem’s alcohol-ridden breath to disperse in the air, rather than right in front of his nose. “She no longer suffers,” he said slowly, formally.

Willem let out a harsh laugh. “Yeah, yeah. She’s resting now, huh? Not me, though. Not yet. I had to look after her when she was rotting and stinking up the place, and I have to be strong and brave even now.”

“You’re not alone, Willem. If you need my support with anything at all...”

“Pshht.” Willem waved Bram off. “I need to do this by myself. Right? Like a man! Alone! Suffer alone!”

“That’s not true...”

“Hey,” Willem leaned in closer and Bram could smell his friend’s rancid breath once more, but was too bewildered to attempt moving away again. “Hey, how was the cremation, hè?”

“It was a beautiful ceremony, Willem. Everyone cried, we were all touched by your the speech. I’m sure Lotte would have appreciated what you did for her...”

“Lotte’s dead now. She won’t care.”

“She looks down on you with love and devotion, I’m sure.”

“She’s looking up, Bram. That whore’s gone to hell.”

The silence between them stretched like a shroud, only interrupted by Willem downing his glass and ordering another. “She’s in hell, Bram, for what she’s done. But I won’t be. I’m a good man.”

“Everyone knows you’re a good man,” whispered Bram. “Look, I should take you home. I think you’ve had enough.”

But Willem didn’t seem to have heard the last part: “I am a good man, aren’t I? Everyone knows that.”

“Everybody knows that,” echoed Bram, hollowly.

“I didn’t cause her illness, she did it herself. By whoring herself out.”

“Willem...”

“I really didn’t want people to think I did it, hoor. Because I had nothing to do with it.”

“Everybody knows that. But...”

“You know, my neighbour’s wife had the same thing. She died after only three weeks and he mourned for a year. Less than a year, actually. She died in March and he asked out a new woman in February next year.” Willem wrinkled his nose. “Less than a year. I’m going for three, Bram. Three whole years of mourning over a whore.”

Bram watched, mouth agape, as Willem downed the newly topped up beer.

“And I sure as hell hope nobody in the village will think to go for five.”

Author’s note: Inspired by this drawing I made a few years ago and the song Guleh by Ghost, this story is set in the Netherlands for no other reason than the fact that I live in the Netherlands and not one of my stories so far have been set here.

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

You know the drill. Part 1. Part 2.

Content warning for general Reddit stuff. Pinky-promise there’s nothing TOO vile.

Ever since my Creepypasta went absolutely viral, I’ve been loving the attention and adoration from my fans. The popularity came and went over the years, of course, but there was always a good level of attention.

Actually, for the first time since I died, I truly felt alive, which is weird because I’m dead. I’ve been trying my hand at writing some other ones, but none have been so popular. Yet! I hope my story about Jeff the Killer will end up taking off. I spent a very long time working on it and I think it may be my masterpiece.

I managed to get my hand on a Motorola Razr WITH Internet to keep track of my comments and stuff. Deathchanger.

In the meantime, I got asked to show some rookies around, like when the Bride told me what was what.

The first was Willie. Willie died in a vending machine accident. No, he wasn’t crushed. He stuck his hand through the slot at the bottom to grab some chips, the machine had a short circuit, and he was electrocuted to death.

“I didn’t even get my chips,” he whined.

“You don’t need food in the afterlife,” I told him.

“You don’t understand.” He came closer, towering over me with his entire bulking 170 cm frame. “I just spent all my food money for the month on Jack Daniels and weed and I have the munchies.”

Back when I was alive, I would’ve been intimidated. But not now. Here, I was a badass. “Well, you tell this Jack Daniels to give you your money back. Not steal from a vending machine.”

“Technically it’s not stealing.” He backed away, started rummaging through his pockets for something. “I pay tuition for the school, and that includes the vending machines, right? So I was just taking back what I paid for.”

I checked my clipboard. I still needed to talk to another person AND finish my weekly killing quota. “I don’t think that’s how it works but whatever. Just try to kill a bunch of people, okay?”

Willie slumped on the floor. “I think I’m too baked for that.”

“Then you’ll be dragged to hell where you’ll be tortured for eternity.”

“Do I have to pay for that?”

“...no?”

“Then it sounds pretty good to me.”

My next person to instruct was Princess. She was an absolute psycho.

“How did you die?” I asked her nicely because I’m nice and friendly and cool.

“Why do you care, loser?” Princess spat back in a raspy smoker’s voice. She patted herself down, as if looking for something, but all she managed was to make her pink ruffles rustle and, oddly, clang. “Ya got a cig?”

“No, I don’t smoke.”

“Knew ya were a tightass.” She shook her head so vigurously, her tight curls lashed through the air. “I need a cig or I’ll fuckin’ lose it on you.”

“I’m your guide. You’ll need me to explain stuff around here so...”

“Alright, alright.” She coughed, spat a black loogie on the floor. “I did too much killin’ in an enclosed area and got intoxicated by my chainsaw’s fumes. Got so dizzy I even dropped my pack of smokes, can ya believe it? If I recall from before I died, the last loser from the group even freaking survived.”

Princess raised her hands to her angelic face, morphing her expression into one of fear. “Please, miss, please! Don’t kill me! I have a family!” Then back to her grouchy self. “Fuckin’ loser.”

“Well,” I started again, patiently, “I guess you’ll have an easy time here. You need to kill a bunch of people so you get Horns and go to Hell as a torturer.”

“No, I don’t.” Princess managed to find a cigarette hidden in one of her luscious coils of hair and lit it with plain determination. “Daddy is negotiating with Big Boss to either send me back up or to make me a manager or something.”

My night had been pretty annoying, but this perked me up. “Your dad knows Big Boss?”

Princess snorted and spat again. I’m sure she didn’t mean to get my shoes.

“Hell yeah. They like to hunt together. I’ve met Big Boss many times before, he gets me Amazon shares for my birthday. I call him Uncle. When him and Daddy have a hunt, they send me ahead with my chainsaw to scare the shit out of the fuckers we’re chasin’. Then they come in and pretend to save ‘em. It’s really funny, seeing them think they’re saved. But then we torture and kill ‘em.”

Princess drew in a long breath, sucking the last of the cigarette smoke in her dead lungs. “Ya got a cig?”

“No, Princess, I don’t smoke.”

“Oh yeah, I remember now. Tightass.”

“You do smoke a lot.”

“Yeah. I freaking love chains. Chainsmoking, chainsaws. I even wear chainmail under my dress.” A hit to the chest resulted in metal rattling. “Freaking love chains.”

“I used to do all my killing with chain emails,” I offered politely.

“Oh yeah,” Princess said, for the first time looking straight at me. “Heard about that from Uncle. He said he had some big plans for you.”

“He did?” My heart was hammering in my chest. Big Boss knew about me?

“Yeah. He’ll come up soon to get me and he’ll probably get the new assets as well. So we’re probably going to go down on the same elevator. Anyway,” Princess checked her thin gold watch. “I think I’ll go have a look around. See if I find a decent chainsaw. Or some smokes.”

The rest of my night was a haze. Big Boss was coming soon! He would take me with him as a torturer! I’d get my Horns and spend the rest of my afterlife adored and revered. This was genuinely all I ever wanted.

Ideally, I would have taken a night off to rest on my laurels, but I didn’t want Big Boss to think I’d be lazy as a torturer. Until I got my permanent contract sorted, I still needed to prove myself. Which shouldn’t be HARD, anyway.

So here I was, crawling from under yet another dusty bed, pushing pink ponies out of the way. Was this a little girl’s room? I’d never killed a child before. Everyone knows there aren’t any children on the internet.

Luckily, no. It was a big man with a sweat-stained tank barely hiding his back acne. His left hairy shoulder was covered with a long, greasy ponytail while the other was shaved and revealed a lilac pony dressed in a bikini.

And they called ME a psycho.

Anyway, I crawled from underneath, dodging pizza boxes and old socks. He couldn’t even hear me, too busy deleting pending posts on Reddit.

I snipped the air with my shears. Shhhriiik.

He turned around frighteningly quickly for his bulk. He tipped his fedora at me. “M’lady. Not often do I get the ultimate pleasure of such a distinguished specimen of the fairer sex entering the Cave of Doom.”

I stepped back, nearly slipping on a sock. “I’m Bloody Mary.”

He began to get up from the sticky gaming chair. “I am lord Smithington the third,” he said, pointing to a frame on his desk. “I have a certificate.”

Recovering my composure, I shoved my shears in his direction. “I’m here to KILL YOU!”

He stepped forward, trembling with what I could only assume was anger. “You females are all the same. You never want to give a nice guy a chance!” then, softening, but still approaching: “But I shall allow a pulchritudinous and delicate creature such as yourself another chance. Mayhaps you would enjoy a splendid walk under the stars? I believe my superior intellect will seduce your soul by the end of the night and you’ll agree to become my waifu. We shall feast on Doritos and watch the entirety of One Piece1 and you shall massage my weary shoulders.”

For the first time, I felt I was in danger. “Dude, I’m 12. I mean I was, when I died.”

He stopped in his tracks. “How long ago did you die?”

“In 2002. 9 years ago.”

He pressed his index fingers onto his temples, leaving Cheeto dust behind. “M’lady, but thou art 21 years of age by my humblest calculations! Thou art like my waifu, Sachiko, who might look like a child but in actuality is thousands of years old.”

“I don’t want to date you,” I told him, backing away even more.

He scoffed. “Well, you’re ugly anyway.”

“I’m here to kill you,” I reiterated, lifting my shears.

“You already stabbed my heart and trampled it into a thousand pieces.” He reached behind him and, to my shock, pulled out a katana. “And now it is my turn to do the same!”

At the same time, my phone pinged with a message. A new admirer? I was only distracted for a second, but when I looked up, both him and the katana were gone. Not under the bed. Not in the kitchen. Only the bathroom was left, and that was the one room I couldn’t enter uninvited. Ghosts have SOME standards, after all.

“I’ll return LATER,” I shouted through the door, stepping away from the daylight creeping through the dusty blinds. “You can’t stay in there forever!”

“Actually,” he said, his voice muffled, “I have a generous stash of bathroom Doritos and Mountain Dew.”

My first failure since I became a ghost. It didn’t matter. All I needed was one more night and I would kill him dead, and Big Boss would never find out my perfect record was tainted.

But as I stepped back in my dirty staircase, I saw that I’d gotten a package from HIM. Not the band. Big Boss.

Excited, I snipped the clam-shell packaging with my shears and extracted the thin envelope:

Before rushing to cook my dish (grilled salmon, because fish doesn’t count as meat), I opened up Razr and went on Reddit. The internet surcharge was going to kill me, but not only was I already dead, I was going to leave soon anyway.

The perfect location. r/twosentencehorror.

Time for my final masterpiece:

“WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING TO BRUSH ALL MY TEETH AND KEEP GOING WITH MY DAY,” THE GREASY WEIRDO SAID.

“THINK AGAIN,” SAID BLOODY MARY SHOWING UP IN YOU’RE MIRROR AND KILLING YOU DEAD WITH HER BIG SHEARS THAT SHE USES TO CUT YOUR HEAD OFF AND STUFF IT IN THE TOILET AND FLUSH.

The man surely would comment on the story, which would give me an entry point. And once everyone at the potluck would be busy with whatever synergyzing is, I would sneak up, kill him, and come back. The perfect plan.

Well, except it wasn’t. Every time we were finished with an icebreaker, we were directed to go back for another one. We didn’t even get to eat anything!

At some point I felt my phone vibrate and saw he DID reply: “Actually, it’s *your.”

I wished I could go and kill him nice and quick. But my hands were tied. Sometimes literally.

“This is exhausting,” I told Tiffany as soon as my round of Two Truths and a Lie was finished.

“Honk. Honk. Honk.” Buddy sneezed out his three lines. It was obvious the middle one was the lie. He definitely didn’t know how to tie balloon animals.

“Have anywhere better to be?” Tiffany rolled her eyes. “You can do your stupid nerd stuff later.”

“I wanted to sneak in one more kill,” I half-confessed.

“Show off,” grumbled Michael.

Finally, after 15 straight hours of synergetic activities, Big Boss stepped up to the microphone to make an announcement:

Blushing up to my ears, I couldn’t even hear the rest of his speech. I made it. I would get my Horns! As through a fog, I heard Princess holler. More names were called after that, but I was too drunk on my success to register any of them.

It was all so amazing!

My phone vibrated, and when I checked it I saw a new comment on Jeff the Killer: “OMG so scarie.”

Big Boss’s voice floated through the stuffy tent air.

My fans would be left behind. My last would-be victim was still alive. Was all my business truly finished?

A person who said they were a corporate governance and board support affiliate instructed me to head over to a nice, shiny elevator that appeared right in the middle of the parking lot.

Big Boss, me, and the other 10 or so new torturers stepped inside.

My dream was coming true. Finally, I was appreciated.

“Big Boss?” I started meekly. “Can I ask you something?”

“I’m actually a very admired writer here on Earth. Could I work as a freelance horror writer in hell as well? I’ve got plenty of ideas.”

“I see,” I said.

The elevator reached Hell in 6 hours and 66 minutes.

Not that I would know.

I’m hiding in the creep’s mirror. His phone battery is almost dead. He will soon get off the toilet and absolutely wash his hands. Then, I’ll reach out and kill him dead.

Then I’ll write a new story.

Because this is who I am. Both a killer and a writer, and not one without the other.

Author’s note: The two sentence horror story is, believe it or not, my own creation. Big Boss is the most difficult character I’ve ever written. I got a headache after writing his dialogue parts and I hope you enjoy them as much as i hated writing them.

There is the last part in the Bloody Mary trilogy.

Man, thanks for reading so far! I never expected part 1 to be so popular, and I never planned to write more. I hope I did the pulchritudinous Vascular-fluid Maria justice.

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

Afterlife, with nights filled with horrified screams and moans, when I lived in constant fear of eternal damnation, when I was tortured and mocked almost daily, was the most peaceful time of my life.

So peaceful, in fact, that it was bordering on boring.

Just to recap from the last time:

When I died back in 2002, the Bride told me I needed to torture and kill as many people as I could so I could get my Horns and go down to Hell to be promoted to torturer forever. Basically, my afterlife until then is kind of an unpaid internship where I do a bunch of work (torturing people) and don’t get feedback on how well I did until the Big Boss comes to drag me to hell, either to be promoted or let go (into a vat of boiling frogs).

During my alive years I was bullied a lot. Mostly by my brother, who also killed me. Well, technically he punched me and I got a blood clot that killed me.

During my time in the afterlife, I started to get bullied by a bunch of mean ghosts, Michael-the-last-victim-of-a-serial-killer, Buddy the clown, and Tiffany-man-door-hand-hook-car-door. But I proved them wrong by creating a SICK brand: Bloody Mary, who kills people who ignore her chain emails.

So you’re probably wondering what I’ve been up to since.

Well. I made a MySpace. I thought I’d make some friends so I made an account, XxScaRRyMaryRawrxX (look me up plz).

If you’re curious, my song was Give ‘Em Hell, Kid, by My Chemical Romance. Because that’s what I want to do. Give ‘Em Hell so I can get my Horns!!

Then I wanted to add my friends in my Top 8, so I added Michael, Buddy, Tiffany, the Bride, and a couple of the people I killed. While their corpses were swelling with putrefaction, I quickly went on their computers and added my profile as the number one on their friend list.

Also, the Bride’s account is inactive because she was offered Horns soon after. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. It looks good on my profile.

Soon after I made my account, I ran into Michael on the dirty staircase I called home.

“Shut up, nerd,” he began.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“I SAID SHUT UP!” He grabbed me by the perpetually wet collar of my dress and swung me back and forth. “Why did you add me to your top list?”

“You.. accepted… my friend… request!” I pleaded, choking. Wiggling my legs, I tried to kick him in the shins, but managed only to graze him. Still, he set me back on the ground.

“Only because he felt BAD for YOU,” added Tiffancy, materializing from behind him.

“Honk!” clarified Buddy.

“You should be grateful I added you to my list,” I whined. “I have more kills than any of you.”

Tiffany snorted and shoved me with her perfectly manicured finger, the only one on her hand that wasn’t broken and hanging by a string of skin.

“You used to have more kills than us. But that’s long gone, and now you try to leech off of us.”

“Honk,” spat Buddy.

“That’s not true! And I’m not a skank!”

Fizzing with rage, I fully freed myself from Michael’s grip and punched Buddy in the face. He grabbed his now shrinking nose and gasped in pain. When he got back up, he spat a red handkerchief and got in position to attack me.

‘I’m just TAKING IT EASY,” I roared, and Buddy took a step back. “I’m TIRED from all the KILLING. Geez.”

“So this has nothing to do with how nobody shares chain emails anymore?” growled Michael. “You’re just taking it easy when you don’t even know when the Big Boss will come to give out the Horns?”

“Well, BUCKO,” I retorted, winding up to deliver a fatal blow, “it’s not like YOU need to worry about ever getting Horns. You just talk a big game but barely finished the job a handful of times.”

Tiffany and Buddy both honked in shock. Nobody wanted to bring up Michael’s inability to finish, although it was pretty well-known.

“It’s a medical condition,” Michael retorted, voice shaky. “My hands just cramp right at the end.”

“You tell yourself that. I’m going to go now, and KILL a bunch of people. Until they’re DEAD.”

Despite my triumphant exit (I slid down the banister and nobody even noticed when I fell at the end), my heart was still with worry. Well, it was still with death and worms, but also worry. Tiffany was right. I had tried to snoop on their massive friend lists to find my next victims because nobody was even opening chain emails anymore. Kind of funny how the most prolific killer of all of us couldn’t get victims, while a bid doodoo head like Michael had so many options and couldn’t finish the job. If he wasn’t such a MEANIE we could have helped each other and we could ALL have gotten Horns and hung out and went to haunt a Hot Topic together or something.

It didn’t matter. I got successful once, I could do it again. And while chain e-mails were almost as dead as me, I’d heard of a cool new thing: Creepypasta.

So I went into my latest’s victim’s house (she’d been rotting through the ceiling for a week. She had a fight with her boyfriend just before I killed her because he was tired of her sending him stupid emails, so he hadn’t come to visit) and booted up her computer.

My mind was reeling with possibilities. Should I create a cryptid? A game with a puzzle to solve, where the prize was DEATH?

No, it had to be something very quick so it would be read a lot. Something punchy. Something bloody.

“THIS IS THE STORY OF A DAY WHERE THERE WAS ALL THIS BLOOD. A MAN WAS WALKING AROUND AND BLOOD STARTED COMING OUT OF HIM EVERYWHERE. THERE WAS SO MUCH BLOOD THAT IT FILLED UP AN ELEVATOR. HE WENT TO THE STORE AND THERE WAS JUST BLOOD ALL OVER THE PLACE! PEOPLE WERE SLIPPING IN IT AND THEY WERE ALL GROSSED OUT. HE TRIED TO GO SWIMMING AND ALL OF THE SHARKS WENT NUTS AND BITTENED EVERYBODY. HE GOT CHASED BY ALL THE VAMPIRES EVER. ONE TIME THE BLOOD GOT A KID AND A DOG. AT THE END OF THE DAY EVERYONE DECIDED THEY WOULD SEND HIM TO SPACE SO THAT HE WOULD STOP GETTING BLOOD EVERY WHERE. THE SCARIEST PART IS THAT THE MAN WAS YOU!!! (OR HE WAS A LADY IF YOU ARE A LADY) AND YOU FORGOT THAT THIS HAPPENED.

RATE THIS 10 STARS OR BLOODY MARY WILL COME AND KILL YOU DEAD AND DRAG YOUR DEAD CORPSE THROUGH THE CEILING.”

Perfect.

“If I say so myself, it’s even better than the chain email,” I chortled. “Very clear, very scary.”

Soon after posting, I got a rating of 1 star and a comment saying “What the fuck.” With a period and everything.

So I quickly grabbed a bunch of weapons (I’ve been really liking using fabric shears lately, they make a really fun shhhhrik sound when I open and close them) and crept up under the bed of the person who commented.

It was a 30-year-old middle aged lady that wrote a lot of comments on a bunch of random stuff online while her husband snored in bed. They were never nice comments either. Just a big grump who thought she knew better than everyone what deserved to be on the internet like she was the internet police.

“Uuuh, it’s you’re, not your.”

“Uuuh, the video is fake, you can see her hand moving the string. There’s no ghost.”

Like shut UP, lady. It’s so easy to critique others’ work when you don’t do anything useful all day.

Broiling with anger more than the happiness of finally having a new victim, I opened my shears. Shhhhrik. Shhhhrik shhhhrik.

“Robert, I thought you were asleep,” the old lady grumbled.

Shhhhrik. My shears closed once more, this time just behind her.

“Robert, you have a big meeting tomorrow. Just go to sleep.”

Should I kill him too? No. Best to leave him alive, so he can spread the news of what happens when you’re mean to someone online.

Shhhhrik. I cut a bit of her hair off, letting it fall on the hand wiggling the mouse.

“What the…?”

Years of killing have taught me people don’t take me very seriously when I use my scary warble, for some reason. So now I’m mostly silent, except for a quick one liner I drop when it’s the most dramatic. With a quick snip, I severed her disgusting fingers.

The woman’s screams pierced through the walls, loud enough to make her husband roll over in his sleep.

“Why are you doing this?” she wailed, clutching her mangled hand.

With quick snips, I drew blood from her face, her neck, her flabby belly. She fell to the floor, screaming in agony.

“Robert, help!” she whelped when I descended upon her again, shears wide open, going straight for her neck.

Robert finally opened his eyes, just in time to see me snip his wife’s head off.

“What the fuck?” he blurted.

“Always believe what you read on the internet,” I boomed. “Or else you die.”

And with that, I dragged the woman’s lifeless body down through the ceiling.

I left their apartment floating on cloud nine. It was so nice to feel the rush of the kill again. I’d really missed the sticky feeling of blood pooling around my fingers, hearing the snap of bones. From that moment on, I’d have a steady stream of kills once more. With such a terrifying post, so full of blood and with such a clever psychological twist, how can it NOT be shared? It was just too good!

But there was an unexpected issue with my plan. Something I didn’t foresee, but should have.

My Creepypasta was TOO good.

So good, that soon after I posted, I started getting an influx of 10-star ratings and comments such as “This is the best thing I’ve read all day.” and “No fucking way, this is awesome!!!!”

And to be honest, it felt amazing.

After a whole life and afterlife of being brought down by others, it was really sweet to see people genuinely love my writing. I’d poured my heart and soul into crafting the perfect hook, and people were loving it.

Maybe it was an even better feeling than killing. Even more worth it than Horns.

Author’s note: The Creepypasta I used is The Day of all the Blood, written by Jonathan Wojcik (Bogleech). Read it here: https://www.creepypasta.com/day-of-all-the-blood/

The ending paragraph is my only addition.

There is one more part in the Bloody Mary trilogy.

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

The air trembled in the midday heat, warbling the foliage from which she came. She stepped slowly, carefully, more than a figment of one’s imagination, but less than a corporeal form. One could have thought, at a glance, that she was translucent before this erroneous judgment was corrected by a second, longer look. Everyone looked twice when they met her for the first time and everyone then blushed under her unmoving stare back at them.

Children running around the carnival saw her first. Street urchins, that had slipped in unnoticed, children of the carnival workers, and even some that did odd jobs around the tents themselves, stopped in the middle of playing and stared at her approaching form, mouths agape. Her eyes, cold and green and toad-like, met theirs, scattering them back to their tents with just a stare. Yet even from afar, half-hidden in the folds of the tents, the children couldn’t help but follow her with their gaze, as did most of the adults around.

From the tip of her pine-colored headscarf to the bottom of the heavy, auburn braids brushing her ankles, her figure spoke of mystery, passion, magic. Be it the tattered emerald dress revealing slivers of copper skin, or the belts and the cheap strings of dark beads, charms, and ivory teeth slung around her body, every choice she had made regarding her ensemble seemed deliberate. Every step came with a jingle of golden bracelets and a hint of accordion music nobody noticed until it stopped along with her, in front of Monsieur L’Argent’s tent.

Her mouth opened, without perturbing any other of her features, and spoke in a harsh, cold accent towards the open flap of the tent: “I hear you need new fortune teller, yes? I come here to tell the future. Very good tellings, the best in the country.”

All movement stopped for what seemed like centuries. The horses, the dogs, the ratty, underfed lion held their breaths along with the people, waiting for Monsieur L’Argent’s answer.

“Is that so?” Monsieur L’Argent stepped out of the tent, drying his wrinkled hands on a dirty towel, a smirk trembling on his lips. “Lemme look at you, then.”

He waited for her to twirl for him and, when she didn’t, stepped quickly around her, dragging his watery gaze up and down her body. “Tall as a townhouse and twice as broad.” His fingers pinched her hip, too quickly to make an accurate assessment, as if ashamed by her lack of reaction. “Would do you good to skip a couple of meals, but you’re easy enough on the eyes.”

His conclusion was met with stunned silence, which hadn’t happened before. Usually, the crowd would howl with laughter, or protest a too-severe appraisal. Yet nobody said anything now, and Monsieur L’Argent had to giggle awkwardly to himself as he motioned for her to follow him to the former fortune teller’s tent. He knew well enough that he has spoken more for the sake of having said something than to communicate an honest opinion.

She should have been ugly, he thought. Too tall, with small, wide-set eyes and lips that looked as if they’d never smiled. Yet she was as beautiful as a fire in the winter, as a heavy sleep after a long day.

They stepped through the curtain of feathers Mizz Pauline had left behind and the woman sat at the low table, as naturally as if she had done so all her life. Monsieur L’Argent let himself drop on the ottoman reserved for the clients, trying to ignore the worker’s murmur from outside the tent and the furtive peeks inside.

The woman fished a thick pack of cards from the tatters of her dress and threw them on the table, letting them slide freely on the silk tablecloth. Little charms adorning her wrists clinked gently with her every move: a little rose surrounded by thorns, a bird with folded wings, a medieval tower. Monsieur L’Argent turned one of the cards over: were it not for the large VII at the top, he could have never guessed the foggy watercolor in greens and browns was a card with meaning.

“Are all your cards so ugly?” he said, belly trembling with laughter as he looked for approval from the rest of the workers. Yet they were all silent, watching her intently.

“Do not disrespect card. And do not touch.” The fortune-teller snatched the card from between his fingers and slid it among the rest in the pile. “Now,” she spoke in a lower tone, “ask question and cards will answer.”

Monsieur L’Argent thought for a second, shifting uncomfortably in his seat: “So you only do card reading? No palm readings, no magic orbs or whatnots? Let me tell you, lambkin, I’m not very convinced so far. Half of the people coming here to get their fortunes read like the atmosphere, right? The old books, and orbs, and bottles of potions, and whatever silly magic things you people bring along. You’ve got the looks, but you gotta make the space feel spooky too, ey? That’s how you bring in the money. If you can’t convince them, they go someplace else.”

“Ask question,” she repeated. “I cannot read future if you don’t ask question.”

“Well, then. Tell me ‘bout myself. What’s in my future?”

The woman looked down at the messy pile of cards, murmuring a spell only she could understand. After a few moments, she pulled out three cards, which she carefully spread in front of him.

“Left is past. Middle is present. Right is future.” Her deft fingers flipped the first one, revealing a figure holding two cups. Although the figure was lost in the same painted fog as the card Monsier L’Argent had flipped over before, the cups were beautifully clear, with stunning arabesques carved in gold leaf. “Temperance. You were religious man, from family of many children. Your family was poor and you had to survive so you come here many years ago to make money for them. Since you come here, you lost faith and never returned home. You married for love but she ran away and now you are alone.”

The carnival master’s mouth hung open when she finished speaking, but he quickly closed it. “You read up on me, didn’t you, lambkin? This is what everyone here knows already.”

The woman bent forward, drilling her eyes into his: “I am respectable woman. I don’t say personal secrets when people can hear.” The feather curtain fluttered as the workers stepped back as if to give the two more privacy.

Monsieur L’Argent coughed a cheerless laugh. “We’re all family here, aren’t we, lads? Whatever you say about my past, they can hear.”

“As you wish.” The woman took a deep breath. “Your wife is dead, with your child in her womb. After she ran, you found her. You brought her back. You had big fight. You pushed her and she hit head on metal box. She died and you buried her at night under the willow.”

The silence stretched, uncomfortable, heavy. Monsieur L’Argent pestered the corners of his lips into a smile. “Funny one, aren’t you?” and then he laughed. From outside, broken, awkward laughs joined his until the woman revealed her teeth into a pale imitation of a grin.

“Of course, I joke,” she spoke slowly. “I will now tell you the present,” and she flipped the middle card. “World. Changes happen now in carnival. People leave and people come. Mizz Pauline left and you lost much money because of it. Now I come and the carnival is balanced again.”

Monsieur L’Argent nodded, his throat dry: “And the future?”

The fortune-teller lifted the last card so only she could see, grinned her toothy grin again, and turned it around, rotating it so the top of the card was towards her: “Good news! Strength. You will have much success. I see you in future surrounded by gold and amber. There is much dancing. Spirits are high.”

For the first time since he stepped into the fortune-telling tent, Monsieur L’Argent relaxed his shoulders with a deep exhale. “Well then, lambkin. You’d better make us rich, then. Welcome to the family!”

“I am not lambkin,” she spoke, her voice softer than before. “I am Salome.”

The spectacle that night was the best they’d had in years. Transfixed by an invisible spell, the carnies performed with reckless passion, not once stopping to catch their breath or drink or eat. The Great Osiris, the strongman, invited visitor after visitor to step on the small wooden platform on his back, grinning like a madman through the heavy beads of sweat glistening on his almond skin as he lifted them, or danced, or jumped like a horse. Hilda and Julie swung wildly on the trapeze, crawling on top of each other, jumping and landing with the speed of patas monkeys. Salome’s tent swarmed with visitors. Even those that had gotten used to Mizz Pauline’s grandmotherly demeanor and initially complained about Salome’s harsher aura were quickly won over by her clean, precise answers. Even Herbie, the old lion, seemed to have swollen to twice his size, every hidden muscle bulging out as he jumped through the fiery circles. The spectators were wild with excitement, running from one performer to the next, trampling over discarded caramel apples and long-forgotten paper schedules. Monsieur L’Argent spun around and around, like a statuette on top of a broken music box, grabbing money from the eager visitors without even bothering to count it.

Long after midnight, when even the most persistent of carnival-goers had gone home and the carnies slept on the ground or the lunch benches, wherever they had happened to fall asleep, Monsieur L’Argent was too exhilarated to sleep. Nestled on his bed, wrapped in a blanket despite the torrid summer night, he stacked the bills and coins carefully, counting out loud, dividing the sums between his workers and himself.

“We’d never made so much money,” he spoke out loud and quickly put the money into the padlocked metal box. “A couple more nights like this and we can pay all our debts.”

Eyes glinting with unshed tears, he got up and opened the tent’s flap. The night air, heavy with heat and deep, melancholic sighs, brushed his face, pressing his eyelids down.

“Have we ever had cicadas here?” he wondered, half-awake. He couldn’t recall and didn’t try too hard to. Dropping the tent’s flap, he returned to his bed and, lulled by the cries of the cicadas, fell into a dreamless sleep.

The morning came with rain. Fat, cold drops fell on the carnies’ faces, startling them from sleep. However, nobody complained. Drunk on the previous night’s success, they jumped to their feet and ran laughing into the large, kitchen tent. Salome was the last to enter, and her arrival was met with ear-splitting cheers.

“She was right about the future, she was,” yelled Osiris as she sat down in a corner. “We’re swimming in gold!”

Monsieur L’Argent clapped him on the back: “I’d say we’re swimming in green rather than gold, lad!”

Everyone laughed, cheered, and clinked their chipped mugs of tea, covering the thunderous sound of rain and the softer one of muffled crying.

Come evening, the excitement that had permeated the carnival grounds all day exploded more and more often into cheers. The carnies and visitors alike trembled with anticipation, so much so that Monsieur L’Argent allowed their entrance nearly a full hour before the normal time. Hordes of people with red cheeks and bright eyes filled the tents in minutes. They’d known of The Great Osiris, Hilda and Julie, and Jellyfish the Clown, they’d seen Herbie the lion, François the sword swallower, and Rita the charming armless dancer, yes, but they had ever wanted so much to see them once more. They confessed to one another that they had an overwhelming desire to see the shows, to meet the carnies, to get their futures told. So they came, rushing to leave work or homes, after obsessing over it the entire day.

Monsieur L’Argent listened to the fervent chatter, smiling under his oiled mustache and dashing in and out of tents to make sure all the artists were ready. He yelled their names aloud, half to check if they were ready and half to introduce them to the frenzied crowd, which seemed too taken by the sights to even notice he spoke.

“Hilda, Julie, our delightful trapeze artists from Germany!” he yelled into the large tent in the middle of the grounds and dashed out to the following act before he could see the two delicate frames in sparkling clothes.

However, not even his frenzied dash from one performance to the next could stop him from hearing the loud thud that reduced the audience to a stunned silence. Monsieur L’Argent turned slowly, as if too afraid to confirm his suspicions. He saw Hilda, motionless on the floor, the sawdust around her figure swept aside as if she wanted to make snow angels.

“Geht es dir gut? Kannst du mich hören, Hilda? Bitte antworte mir!”1 Julie’s whimpering pleas reverberated in the solemn tent, sneaking around the few patrons that stayed behind to watch despite the carnies’ best attempts to kick them out.

“Step back, we need to give her space,” spoke Jellyfish the Clown, his face paint smudged and grimy with sweat.

They all took a step back. Nobody spoke, the silence only interrupted by Julie’s cries, then, after what felt like hours, by the rapidly approaching sound of an ambulance.

“Sei geduldig, Hilly, sie werden dich im Handumdrehen reparieren,” 2 whispered Julie softly, yet loud enough for everyone to hear.

Two men carrying a gurney ran inside the tent and stooped next to Hilda, touching her thin neck with their fingers, whispering among themselves. Through a gap between their hunched bodies, Monsieur L’Argent saw the trapeze artist open her eyes slowly.

“Ich bin etwas gestolpert, Julie. Habe ich die Show vermasselt?3” groaned Hilda.

Julie yelped, leaping to hug her sister, to cover her in kisses. “Oh Gott, du lebst! Gott sei Dank geht es dir gut.”4

“Entschuldige, dass ich dich erschrecken muss. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, was passiert ist. Es ist, als hätte ich das Springen komplett vergessen, als hätte ich meine Gabe verloren. Ich fühle mich, als könnte ich nie wieder ein Akrobat sein.”5

“Blöd, das ist jetzt nicht wichtig.”6

The sisters spat out pained laughter and left with the doctors, one carried on the gurney and the other following on foot.

Squeezed next to each other on Salome’s tent, Monsier L’Argent and Osiris waited patiently for her to shuffle her cards. Despite the men’s significant height, Salome towered above them. Even Osiris, the strongman, looked like a small child waiting to be admonished by a teacher. His red-eyed, unfocused stare, his tear-stained face, his fidgeting hands further cemented this impression.

Monsieur L’Argent coughed gently and spoke in a whispered tone: “Could you tell us what will happen with our Hilda? Will she be alright?”

Salome tossed the cards haphazardly on the table, picking those that nearly fell off and shoving them back in the middle of the pile. Her murmurs sent shivers down Monsieur L’Argent’s spine and he could swear faint moans escaped every time the cards moved. His thoughts were interrupted before he could organize them coherently.

“She will live,” Salome’s voice boomed in the tent, and Osiris’ face lifted, a flicker of light in his eyes. “She will never work on trapeze again. Too broken now. But she can do other job.”

This time she hadn’t shown them the cards. Her long, copper fingers had kept them facing herself, with the men left to admire the maze of lines on the back.

“I see, I see,” Monsieur L’Argent repeated. “Can you tell us when she will get out of the hospital? Will she be in pain?”

Salome puffed, her lips drawing together tightly. “For new reading, I have to shuffle again.”

The men nodded mechanically, keeping their eyes on the pile of cards. As Salome’s fingers flipped and tossed the cards, one flew from the pile and onto the floor, next to Monsieur L’Argent’s feet. He bent over to pick it up. It was Temperance, the foggy card of a figure holding two cups that had exposed his past. Only now the shape of a person was clearer than before, with a beautiful face pained in gold ink having appeared on the faded watercolor. Before he could examine it further, however, Salome snatched it from his hand and tossed it back into the pile.

“Only I am allowed to touch cards,” she snarled. “ You make them dirty with your hands.”

“I’m sorry, I just-”

“Get out! Get out!”

The two men stumbled out of the cramped tent before they could get another word out. Salome pulled the tent flap closed over the feather curtain, yelling curses at them in her strange, cold language.

“Get some sleep, lad. We’ll go see Hilda tomorrow at sunrise,” said Monsieur L’Argent.

Osiris nodded and headed for his tent on the other side of the grounds, while the carnival master waved him off. He sighed deeply, and an echo of smaller sighs followed from inside the tent.

They did not see the sunrise. Instead, when the sky was still dark as the inside of a coffin, the carnies awoke to the smell of burning rope and the thin, pathetic cries of Herbie. Monsieur L’Argent ran out of his tent to see tens of small fires all around the grounds. Growing, vicious flames lapped hungrily at the colorful fabric of the tents, exposing the metal skeletons underneath.

“Everyone, out!” he yelled. “Leave everything and run!”

Gabrielle, the lion tamer, released Herbie and the horses. Osiris scooped crying child after crying child in his arms and with them huddled at his chest ran out of the flaming inferno and back in to grab more. Mateo, the cook, and Rita, the dancer, and François, the sword swallower, managed to grab a few belongings each, but Monsieur L’Argent stopped them from returning for more. Old and new faces, scared or hardened with resolve spun around each other, disoriented, clashing, falling, in a mad, deadly tango.

The carnival master dove in and out of tents, screaming himself hoarse until he was certain there was nobody left to escape. He’d tried to pull Jellyfish the clown’s lumbering body from under the rubble, but it was too late. With tears digging trenches in his soot-covered face, he spoke his last goodbye to his old friend and sprinted out.

“We were supposed to turn on a new leaf,” he spoke to himself as he ran out of the last tent. “We were supposed to be comfortable now. Rich! And now we have nothing.”

He looked out from between the flames to his artists, his family waiting for him at a safe distance. He was supposed to be their protector, and now their livelihood went up in flames.

“There is still time,” a voice spoke and he couldn’t be certain if that voice was his or not.

With one last glance thrown towards the waiting faces, he turned and ran to his tent, to the metal box that had enough money for all of them to survive off for a few weeks. The one thing they had left.

Inside his flaming tent, with hands wrapped in rags so his hands wouldn’t blister on the metal box before he got it out, Monsieur L’Argent screamed with pain and strain. The box budged slightly and, with renewed forces, he pulled again and again and again.

He couldn’t take the box out of the tent. His lungs, filled with smoke and soot forced him to the floor, a heaving mess. Flaming fabric peeled away from the poles and fell on top of him, a painful shroud that silenced the final words floating in his mind: “I see you in future surrounded by gold and amber...“

The morning light shone sadly on the fractured glass sprinkled through the carnival grounds. A small boy passing by pointed to the reflection and spoke loudly to his mother: “Look mommy, diamonds!” But she pulled hard on his hand and hurried off, not daring to face the dark faces of the carnies looking for the last time at their former home.

“What do we do now?” asked Rita.

Nobody answered. Osiris stepped over the ash-covered cordon, which had survived, mockingly.

“There’s nothing left,” François half-yelled after him, but Osiris continued his dejected trek through the rubble.

“At least Julie and Hilda were not here,” said Mateo. “Terrible luck we’ve had lately.”

“Has anyone seen Salome?” said François.

The question floated, unanswered, for a few seconds.

“Do you think she...” whispered Rita.

“No.” Osiris returned and lay down next to her. “There’s nothing in her tent. Not a body, not her cards, nothing.”

“She must have escaped then, no?” said François.

“Or she’s the one that set the place on fire,” grumbled Mateo.

“I don’t think she-” began François before a gentle voice interrupted him.

“I think she did.” Mizz Pauline hobbled towards them, a walking stick in one hand and a tattered bag in the other.

The carnies huddled around her, wrapping their arms around her haggard shape, asking her a thousand questions, offering her a place to sit. Mizz Pauline smiled, exposing the few teeth she still had.

“Why did you leave? Where did you go?” asked Rita.

The old woman shrunk into herself, eyes pointed at her feet. When she finally spoke, her words came out slowly, as if she had trouble translating her thoughts into speech: “One night, during the show, a woman came to me. She said she wanted her fortune read. After I did a reading for her, she asked if she could do one for me. I refused, but she insisted, she said she’d pay me to listen. She didn’t look like the type to beg: tall, straight back, clean-cut features. I don’t know what came over me... I accepted and she pulled a pack of cards from her dress. After that, I don’t remember much - not what she’d said, what I thought of her reading or anything else that happened that night. When I came to, I was in a strange place, miles away from here, with nothing but the clothes on my back. I tried to read some fortunes, to make enough to eat, but as soon as I began to speak, all words escaped me. It was like I’d lost my gift. Like she’d stolen it from me. I tried to come back as soon as I could, but”—she looked back at the burned tents—”it was too late.”

Rita lowered her head onto the old woman’s knees. “We’re glad to have you back. We’re a bit more complete now.”

Mizz Pauline dragged her knotted fingers through Rita’s golden hair. “I suppose fate has a way of catching up to you when you do bad things.”

They turned to look at the old willow, the glum reminder of the night they tried to forget. Osiris grumbled: “We did what we had to do. It was the only way.”

Miss Pauline sighed. “A seed of death sprouts into more. Destruction yields destruction.”

Nobody replied. All the artists gazed back at the burned grounds, where a small, silver charm in the shape of a tower glinted in the sun, half-hidden between mounds of ash and rubble.7

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

He then challenged me to write a story about it:

Laura ran like her life depended on it, because it did. Normally she would have thought of a less clichéd simile, but her mind was preoccupied with something more important: how could she escape the Melway?

The day started as most Saturdays did: in the car with her dad, en route to her Grandad’s house. What was unlike most Saturdays was the road itself, for the car soon stopped in front of a bright red-and-white “Road Closed” sign.

“There’s been an accident,” her Father concluded without any proof whatsoever. “We need to go around. Get the Melway out of the glovebox and tell me where we need to turn.”

With a lot less confidence than her Father had in the glovebox when he’d stuffed the tome inside, Laura extracted the Melway out of its tomb and flicked the pages tentatively.

“Where should—”

The honk of the car behind them came only a fraction of a second before her Father’s thunderous demand: “Move it, girl, we’re holding up traffic!”

“I’m trying!”

Her despair growing with every second and every honk, Laura flipped through the pages, trying to find her spot.

“What’s holding you?” a voice screamed from outside. Another Father.

“Be patient, asshole!” Laura’s own paternal figure gently reminded the other one. Then towards his own progeny: “What’s holding you?”

“Please, just a second…!” squeaked the girl, attempting an amiable glance at her loving Father.

“We’re holding out traffic!” he boomed in response.

For everyone that has met a Father, especially those of a nervous disposition, it will come at no surprise that their boom can shift realities. Which is what happened, and Laura found herself percolating into the book.

“Dad, stop yelling, I’m trying!”

But her pleas were only met with more honks and booms from outside. “Faster, faster,” the Fathers chanted, boomed, howled into the balmy Saturday air. “Faster, girl, we have things to do!”

And so, Laura dripped fully into the open Melway, cornered by honks, chased by the booms.

                                   ❀•······················•❀•······················•❀

A thick blue border rose like fortress walls into the distance. Inside their towering embrace, streets winded and twisted, turned into themselves and disappeared into nothing. Perhaps this was not entirely correct, but Laura had never been good at reading maps.

“Faster, girl!”

Laura turned on her heels, leaving a smudge on the thin paper of the Melway, and saw a snore of Fathers encroaching on her.

With baseball caps and sensible sports shoes, plain-coloured polos, and what they and only they considered “cool” sunglasses, the Fathers growled in unison: “Find the route!”

She didn’t want to wait around for them to reach her. With another quick turn that tore a small hole in the paper, Laura dashed away from the LIF (League of Impatient Fathers) and towards what felt like a familiar street.

They might have had the numbers and the sheer determination, but she had the fear of an incompetent child and the energy of youth, and so she managed to escape their clutches.

Numbers and street names and coordinates floated around her like particularly unpleasant-looking species of bluebottles, and she swatted them away and back towards the LIF. Perhaps they could be slowed down!

But she wouldn’t have such luck! The Fathers made quick work of the floating letters and numbers and soon were back on her tail. However, she did gain something from the minor impediment: a few precious seconds to orient herself, enough to see where the Gate was: straight forward, then to the left, where a great big sign marked “E15” would lead her to the location they were at in real-life.

“We’re holding traffic!” the Fathers coughed and the book shook with their sheer power. Laura held herself steady by the green edge of a park, then jumped… into the wrong Gate. The dreaded E14.

E14, bearing the beer-yellow borders of a Crematorium, boiled with the threat of a longer delay. If the Fathers were not tempered soon, they would implode into their next evolution: the Disappointeds. A Disappointed, with an endless supply of acquaintances with better children than their own to compare one to, with an iron-clad Bible of privileges to revoke, with the sour disposition that poisoned the domestic air were not easy to wrangle back into Fathers. Laura wanted to avoid that as much as possible, so she had to think of a solution, fast.

“The Crematorium is close to a roundabout,” she rattled, frenzied. The pages of the Melway fluttered once, and settled. The fathers were close. “The roundabout goes to the motorway, and from the motorway we can continue to Grandad’s without a problem. All we have to do is go towards the Crematorium.”

Enlivened by her revelation, Laura turned to share her findings with her own Father, who could hopefully pacify the rest of the LIF with a witty joke and a finger-crunching handshake.

“Dad, I think we…”

Alas, she was too late. Exploding through the E14 Gate like overcooked sausages, the Fathers emerged, red-faced and yelling: “I should’ve asked your cousin to help,” they deboned her loudly. “Is this how I raised you? I’m so—”

Oh no, she thought. They’re about to transform!

But they didn’t get a chance to finish their incantation.

The pages fluttered once more around them, more aggressively this time. An even more powerful being was near. They could smell it in the air, over the dustiness of the Melway, over Laura’s panic-sweat, over the Fathers’ faint cigarette smell (they quit a long time ago, they swear, but the smell lingers): freshly. Baked. Bread.

“Did any of you,” the eldritch horror scoured through the dozens of belt-buckled Nokia 3310s, “take the FUCKING CHICKEN OUT OF THE FREEZER?”

© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries. (Text taken from ’s publication)

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This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. You’re welcome to join by posting about your day on your pub. Check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

The sound rips me from the embrace of sleep: my baby demands to be held, and so I abandon my bed and go to her. My baby smiles and giggles when she sees me and I abandon all the resentment I felt over being so brutally awakened. The day has just begun, and so has my symphony of Abandoned Things.

On a normal day, I need to work at my corporate job, so I leave my home, leaving in my wake dozens of discarded little Selves: my Mother-self, my Wife-self, my Writer-self, my Knitting-self. I glance at them through the window that would perhaps need a cleaning (my Cleaning-self is not my favourite to call out for). Through a quick trot to the car, I promise myself I will collect them all in my arms tonight, and show them love and attention as they deserve. The reality is always different.

During the day, I abandon my Corporate Self as often as I can. She and I are on speaking terms, but barely. We need to coexist to pay the bills, and at times we’re even getting along quite well, but in my heart I always resent her for keeping me from the others.

In between two meetings, I pick up my phone and see a picture of my daughter, sent by the childminder. My Mother-Self beams.

After I finish a pressing project, I open up Substack and read some of the articles I’ve been collecting in my saved file. My Reader self gets lost in the worlds others have spun.

On my lunch break, the Writer-self claws at me. I open an empty file and start typing of a life abandoned and found again, of a deserted home at holidays, of an astronaut left behind by everyone else, of a little ghost left alone in the afterlife, of miners left to die underground. There’s a beauty in abandonment, I feel, for a space, or person, or Self left alone has space to germinate and develop, like a fungus after rain. The fire at the root of each of my Selves burns brighter for having been given oxygen, and space, and when I pick each Self back up, they feel fresher, after abandonment.

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

j̵o̷h̴a̶n̸n̸a̵ started this book club as a way to go through serialized fiction, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to keep up with multiple authors at once. I thought that’s a fantastic idea and wanted in. The previous work (still ongoing!) we looked at in December is No Such Thing as Normal. You can find my review of it here. Johanna’s review of No Such Thing as Normal is here.

Authors who do publish serials might want some general feedback, which I imagine can be hard to get in a frankly fast-paced environment such as Substack. Readers might be intimidated to start a serial when there’s so many good short stories, or articles that they can read a lot faster. So hopefully this helps multiple parties: authors, with some honest feedback, readers, with a review that might help them choose their next longer read, and me, to structure my thoughts and discover new stories to read.

I tend to leave comments with more specific comments under the relevant chapters (if I do have them), so I won’t have them in here to keep this review mostly spoiler-free.

This month’s chosen subject: The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors by Labyrinthia Mythweaver

Tales from the Labyrinth

A Note Before You Enter the Garden

Author’s Note…

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5 months ago · 80 likes · 26 comments · Labyrinthia Mythweaver

Synopsis (From the Author’s publication)

The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors is a serialized novel blending dark fantasy and psychological horror. It explores grief, identity, and the monsters we create in order to survive.

Growing up, [the author] used fantasy as an escape. [She] wrote this book as a trauma-informed Alice in Wonderland for survivors of complex PTSD—a labor of love and a tool for [her] own healing. [She’s] putting it into the world today in the hope that it finds the people who need it most.

(And from me, a bit more narratively-focused)

Wisteria Thorne is a young woman from an eccentric family that returns to her childhood home after her mother’s passing. Having inherited her mother’s melancholic disposition, Wisteria is deeply affected--both by the loss and by returning to the stifling atmosphere to the house. However, soon she starts to see ghostly apparitions, including Kit, a stuffed fox cub gifted to her when she was a child. While following Kit, Wisteria finds herself trapped in a supernaturally-beautiful labyrinth, populated with creatures angelic and monstrous alike. Will she be able to heal her trauma and return home?

General Impression

The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors is not an easy read, in more ways than one. First of all, the themes are heavy since the focus lies on traumas, especially generational. Second of all, the pages are rife with symbolism: this book is one that would be best read with a Dictionary of Symbols by the side, as it is very obvious that a lot of thought had gone into the smallest details. And third, the atmosphere itself is the dusty, stifling, stale air of an old Victorian mansion. If you’re looking for levity, this book is not that.

But if you’re looking for a gothic, thorny, atemporal novel about one’s inner world and its clockwork, you’re in the right place.

Writing Style

The first chapter was a bit too slow paced, I felt. The action started amping up a little soon after, but the story itself takes its time. This is not a critique, per se. It’s an observation, since the action does not lend itself to speed. The themes, the symbols, they need to linger with the reader. Like a proper Victorian novel, The Labyrinth of Broken Mirrors is mostly atmospheric, psychologic, and never lies about what it is.

There are moments when a brief interlude would be welcome (in a way, they come along with a certain foxy gentleman), just to let the reader better absorb the topics discussed. Personally, I would love Wisteria to be able to just sit and enjoy the labyrinth every now and then, without the tense expectation that a creature will soon come.

What is a critique from me, is the predominance of the content notes. I understand their purpose and importance (although I personally have never used them), but I feel having them at the beginning of the book would be sufficient. Seeing the content warnings at the beginning of each chapter can be either a little unneeded (e.g. disturbing imagery, which I think we come to expect in this book, and is to be expected in a horror gothic novel) and take away from the impact of the action (since they become spoilers at times).

Characters

The story focuses on Wisteria, and she is the only character that we see significantly of. However, I don’t feel I have a good grasp on her. She feels like she blends into the background (which makes sense since she is mostly an observant of the Labyrinth), and things happen to her; wish she would have more of a say, although this does improve as the story progresses (and it’s a feature, not a bug, as confirmed by the author).

The monsters are, so far, a little one-note. But this is to be expected from characters that show only briefly. I specifically liked Bloom and Blight, I thought their duality was very well represented.

World building

The world-building is viscerally visual, beautiful, atmospheric. I would compare the atmosphere to Shirley Jackson, especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Or even Coraline, when it comes to a female protagonist exploring her inner torment through an eerie representation of her own reality.

A lot of people love the drawings, and I can see why: they’re visually very striking, helping the reader immerse themselves more into the world. However, I personally found them distracting. I suspect they are AI (which for me is always a bit disappointing), and I think the story and the writing themselves are strong enough to stand on their own without the extra help.

Emotional Impact

As I mentioned before, this is a very heavy book. But some moments fall flat for me, because I feel I’m being told what Wisteria experienced, instead of seeing it first hand. Everything is centered around Wisteria, but since I don’t know her past very well, I find it difficult to relate. To avoid spoilers, I will give an example based on Coraline: in the real world, Coraline feels ignored by her parents, and we see this (when she tells her mother she nearly fell into a well, her mother replies absent-mindedly, “That’s nice.”) So when she goes through the portal into the other world, when the Other Mother showers Coraline with attention, we rejoice with her, since we were witnesses to this event.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a powerful book. But I feel there is some untapped potential in us not knowing more about the sources of her trauma, about how specifically this trauma manifests for Wisteria, about her raw feelings and how they influence her behaviour.

Quotes

One of the most quotable books I’ve read recently. Some of my favourites:

My name is Wisteria Thorne. If you remember nothing else, please remember that. Names have power, and mine is all I have left.

Pretty freaking tight, don’t you think?

My father, a psychiatrist, saw patients in our sprawling Victorian home. People always commented on the architecture—some with awe, others in quiet distaste. The house [...] was something out of a Grimm fairy tale: both ominous and oddly charming.

Very good sense of place.

Stained glass fractured the light into kaleidoscopic bruises on the floor.

To him, I think, she was a perilous landscape: beautiful and treacherous. And he was the intrepid cartographer, sketching her contours in reverent ink.

Fog curled low across the mossy ground, whispering around my ankles like a warning.

You are the one who sees the truth, who doesn’t shy away from the ugliness. You prune the rot, cut deep to save the whole. It’s never easy, being the cruel hand of mercy, is it?”

And I stood in the cathedral of ruin, alone with the ghost of who I’d been.

I feel this would be a lyric in a 2010s nu metal song.

The Library spat me out like a memory too shameful to bear

His eyes were the color of cooling amber, and they reflected me like a flaw.

Do you know how many versions of you I’ve destroyed in the name of perfection? I’ve built a graveyard of your discarded selves beneath the forge.

Conclusion

As the novel is still ongoing, some of the criticism I mentioned might be redundant by the end. I do think it’s a very strong book, and I feel strongly that it can be elevated even more.

I also love the symbolism hidden within; I’d even dare say I would love a guide at the end of every chapter with all the symbolism hidden within if this becomes published, maybe an appendix?

But if you’re in the market to read a strong psychological horror with trauma painted with a gothic brush, you’re definitely in the right place. The question remains, though: will you be able to escape?

​“Can I move into the light?” I asked in a voice I hoped came off as more confident than I felt. My glasses, forever bent out of shape, kept slipping on my blood-stained nose, but I resisted the urge to fix them.

​The Bride chortled. ​“There’s no light for us. You either stay here and hope you’re cruel enough to mortals to become a demon later on, or you wail and lament and stay here until the Big Guy with horns pulls you down to torture you forever.”

​I shivered. “When is that?”​

“Nobody knows. For some, it’s a century, for some it’s 7 days. Depends on his mood. You just gotta make sure you make the most of time here if you wanna get upgraded to a demon. It’s torture or be tortured.”

​“I don’t know how to do that.”

​I tried to keep my voice from shaking, but I failed. I always failed, even in life. Part of me had hoped that in death I would be more confident, but it turned out it wasn’t the case, and I could almost hear the mocking tone of my brother calling me Scary Mary every time I tried to stand up for myself.

​“Tough luck, kid.” The Bride slid open her phone to check the time. “Right, that’s all you need to know. I gotta bounce, there’s some groomsmen I want to disembowel tonight.”

​Desperate not to be left alone again, I clung to her arm and tried to stretch the conversation by even a few more minutes: “Can you only kill people related to how you died? Like groomsmen, wedding planners?”

​Her hoarse laughter bounced off the flaky walls. “What? No! I was run over by a semi when I stumbled drunk out of my car. I never even got married.”

​She brushed broken fingers lovingly over her dress. “This is just my brand. People LOVE a good brand. Like a cool death story, or kind of knowing when they will get attacked. Raises the stakes, and they actively seek you out more. So you get to have more freaks to torture and higher chances to get your Horns. So I suggest you find yourself a brand or shtick or something. Anyway, gotta run. Toodles!”​

And with a wink (can it be called a wink when only one of your eyes is still in its socket?), she vanished in a puff of acrid red smoke.​

Looking around, I tried to formulate a plan. What could my brand be in a dirty, rundown apartment building?

“You could be the stupid nerd that BORES everyone to death,” I heard a voice behind me. When I turned, I saw a tall, lanky boy, probably around fifteen or sixteen. A bit difficult to gauge, given his face was busted in.

​“I’m Michael,” he said, puffing his chest. “Last victim of a serial killer that was never caught. And these are Buddy the insane clown”—a short fat man with a painted face honked his nose at me—“and Tiffany”—a pretty blonde with a punctured neck looked me up and down with disgust.​

“How did you die, Tiffany?” I ask meekly, hoping to make myself agreeable to the trio.

Tiffany inspected her nails and groaned. “Man door hand hook car door.”​

“My brother punched me in the face and I got a blood clot that travelled to my brain and killed me,” I offered in return. “Pretty grim, right?”​

The three looked at each other and burst out laughing. Michael came closer and crouched to my level. I felt myself stepping back without thinking. “Your whole life was pretty grim, doofus.”

He raised his hand and brought his fist down on my head, like in an old cartoon. The instant his hand made contact with my head, blood burst through my nostrils, drenching the front of my dress in slimy red.

​“Please leave me alone,” I mumbled, spitting blood between words. “I didn’t do anything to you!”

​“Bloody Mary thinks she’s scary, boys.” Tiffany sneered, and they all burst into eerie laughter, a laughter that echoed in the empty stairwell. I felt myself shrink even more.

​“Stay out of our way, dork. You won’t make it to Horns anyway.” Michael grabbed my hair and pulled it back. The blood flowing from my nose started flooding my face, and I struggled to breathe.

​“...so you best not make it more difficult for us, alright?”

​I nodded meekly, as much as my aching head allowed, and waited for them to leave.

But he was wrong. I had had enough.

Not only would I get my Horns, I would do it before any of them did. I had a plan.

​                                            ❀•······················•❀•······················•❀

Slithering along a wall - a bad habit from when I used to live and wanted to move unobserved - I scouted any apartments with sleeping residents. Most of them were either vacant or still awake, and for my plan, I needed to be unobserved. For now.

​Finally, I found a ratty place with a computer. The owner had fallen asleep on the couch, a half-drunk beer slowly dripping from his slack hand and flies circling the rancid breath escaping his lips.

​Silently, because I didn’t know how much noise I made in my current state, I brushed off the mound of dirty clothes off the stool and sat down in front of the monitor, and fired up Hotmail. Time to start my brand.

I was very pleased with the text. The time read 02:57 a.m. 13-09-2002. If I waited a little, I could send it at exactly 3 am, on Friday the 13th. Finally, a lucky break!

​                                             ❀•······················•❀•······················•❀

The rest of the day, I was on pins and needles, waiting for my email to be discovered by the greasy man’s contacts. Finally, I felt a tingle in my arms, like a spider crawling on my skin, when someone opened it, laughed, and promptly deleted it. My chance to make my move.

​At midnight, dressed in the bloodiest rags I could find, I crawled from under my victim’s messy bed, eager to claim my first life. I’d strapped three cleavers on my belt and savoured the scraping noise they made when I moved against the wood floor.

​“Wh-who’s there?” my victim pleaded, still bleary-eyed and shrinking himself further into his bed. He was a man in his early twenties, unshaven and with mousy brown hair, which he had to keep brushing from his face.

​“It is IIiiiiiiiiii…”, my voice rattled ominously as I ascended from the floor. “Bloooooody Maaaaaary! And I have come to DRAG YOU TO HELL!”

​But as I paused for effect, allowing him to notice my cleavers and feel the fear in its full glory, I was surprised to see him blurt out laughing instead.

​“Dude, are you 12? You certainly look it. A bit early for a Halloween costume, though, don’t you think?”

​“No!” I yelled, forgetting to use my terrifying warble, and stomping my foot in frustration. “I am the true Bloody Mary, and I have come to slit your wrists and take your eye out with a fork!”

​The victim looked at me, amused, head cocked to the side. “I have a spoon, is that ok?”

​Before I could think of a scary answer, he handed me a sticky spoon. “Sorry it’s dirty, I ate some cereal for dinner.”

​I thought I’d been angry before, when my brother would dunk water on me in bed, or when Dad pushed me out of his way, not even looking at me. I thought I’d been angry when Michel, Buddy, and Tiffany mocked me. But nothing had come close to being treated like a child by my would-be victim when I was, for once, the tormentor.

​“I am just small-boned,” I hissed. “Not a child.”

​The rest of my visit was a blur.

I remembered lunging at him, biting his neck, struggling to take chunks out. But my teeth were not strong enough, so instead I clawed at his eyes, those disgusting eyes that dared glimmer with amusement at my threats. He finally realized I was serious and pushed me off, which he managed.

​“Jesus,” he gasped, rubbing his neck, his face. “What the–”

​Bloody Mary was not done. A cleaver in each hand, I lunged at him, swinging wildly at every body part that entered my field of vision. I growled, I bared my teeth. I stuck a cleaver in his abdomen and pulled it out, uncorking him like a bottle of red. Juice, I never drank wine.

The man collapsed on the floor, and I slashed at his tendons, at his back, at the soft skin behind his knees. Sputtering his last unknown words in the pool of blood on the floor, the teasing glimmer went out of his eyes, and I finally stood up, shaking with effort.

​Yet even now, it wasn’t enough. A bloody corpse was not enough as a calling card. Even a human could have done this, and whoever found him needed to know it was not a coincidence that he ignored my email just before he perished.

​I dragged him towards the middle of his room, his bubbling blood drenching the discarded clothes and plastic bottles on the floor, and shoved his legs through the floor. The people downstairs would wake up with fresh, warm drops of cloying blood on their faces.

​And, just to really drive home the point, I slashed his duvet open and stuck handfuls of wool stuffing over his bloody, sticky body. Mary’s first little lamb.

​                                           ❀•······················•❀•······················•❀

When I was done, I stepped back and observed my masterpiece. A corpse slumped over, with his legs dangling in the apartment below, his face barely visible from clouds of wool around him. Nobody would mess with Mary now.

​When I returned home, tired and aching, the gang of goons hurled new insults at me, calling me useless and weak, mocking the “fake” blood trailing behind me. I smiled, meekly as I always did, but even they realized something about me had changed.

​Because I had claimed my first victim, and all I had to do for my next was wait until someone new decided to ignore a silly little email.​

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

started this book club as a way to go through serialized fiction, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to keep up with multiple authors at once. I thought that’s a fantastic idea and wanted in. The previous work (still ongoing!) we looked at in December is No Such Thing as Normal. You can find my review of it here. Johanna’s review of No Such Thing as Normal is here.

Authors who do publish serials might want some general feedback, which I imagine can be hard to get in a frankly fast-paced environment such as Substack. Readers might be intimidated to start a serial when there’s so many good short stories, or articles that they can read a lot faster. So hopefully this helps multiple parties: authors, with some honest feedback, readers, with a review that might help them choose their next longer read, and me, to structure my thoughts and discover new stories to read.

I tend to leave comments with more specific comments under the relevant chapters (if I do have them), so I won’t have them in here to keep this review mostly spoiler-free.

This month’s chosen subject: Grumble and Gasp: Of Crowns and Carrion Birds, by by Brude Bowyer from Whimsy and Woe

Synopsis (written by me, couldn’t find the author’s)

The royal captain of the guard, Cornelius Grumle, is fiercely loyal to the Queen he’s served most of his career, close to retirement, and quite severely underapprecited at the court. A week before he and his war dog, Doorstop (who, true to her name, does her absolute best to always block the doorway to their shared room) will begin their retirement at the lake cottage they’ve been promised, the Queen is found dead in her chambers. Looming over her poisoned body is the Royal Assassin, Gasp, an anthropomorphic crow with the eerie ability to mimic others’ voices. There is no love lost between Grumle and Gasp, but when the assassin insists he did not kill the queen and is insulted that he would be attributed such a surgical, boring execution, the captain believes him. Ditching their retirement plans, Grumle and Doorstop rescue Gasp from the executioner’s block and flee, hoping to figure out who poisoned the Queen before the bounty on their heads catches up with them.

General Impression

To be honest, I was slightly skeptikal when I saw the art for the first chapter, which is AI generated (the rest aren’t). Although I don’t always avoid stories with AI art, I do not gravitate towards them and I look at them with a more critical eye sine I tend to assume the writer used AI for more than just the picture.

HOWEVER, this story is a freaking riot. AI couldn’t have done this. The concept of a world that exists in the margins of a medieval manuscript (with all those crazy snails and butts and cats that look like they’ve seen the devil incarnate) is so cool, I was immediately hooked. The story is alive with animated characters, with a great sense of place, and with lots of laugh. If our impression of the Middle Ages is painted by movies, it’s probably a sludge-brown and depressing sight. “Grumble and Gasp” is full of all the colour and kookyness you see in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

Writing Style

The first chapter had a lot of similes to the point of being slightly too much. This is the author’s style, and done on purpose. But, to use a simile of my own: if literary devices are chocolate bonbons, it’s nice to have a few at a time, but too many and they lose the delicious flavour little by little. The rest of the novel is a lot better when it comes to balancing the action with literary devices, and to great effect. In my opinion (that nobody asked for), if the first chapter or two get another look over to fit the style at the end of the book, it will be much better. The action scenes are really well-written and engaging, but there are also plenty of heart-warming or suspenseful moments too. It all strikes a good balance.

Characters

The main two characters, the titular Grum(b)le and Gasp, are well-written, well-rounded characters.

Grumble is a relatable, tired Captain of the guard. He reminds me a bit of a medieval Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, but with a lot more passion for what’s right. His dog, the mighty Doorstop, is a lovely goofball of a war dog that I wish we got a full novel about.

And Gasp—Gasp is a hoot and a half. He takes offense when accused of a nearly-untraceable, clean murder, because he is always messy and proud of it. His talent for voice mimickry is used for good and evil alike. His knowledge of pop culture media traverses centuries. The only critique I have of him is that he takes over the spotlight a lot more than the other character the novel is named after. But perhaps Grumle prefers to stay in the shadows.

Other characters are also well-made, but describing them will rob you of the joy of discovering them yourselves.

Without giving any spoilers, please see some of the characters you will encounter (I hope I found the correct illuminations to go with them). By the way, finding the corresponding images was the most fun I’ve had in a while, I freaking love hunting down clues like this:

Meet Henry:

And Bone Mother/Madame Marrow:

Magnus, perhaps (not telling you which one he is):

A fierce assassin:

A poor creature jailed for no good reason:

And not from his book, but a prequel hopefully in the works:

The mighty rabbit wars:

So bloody:

And the diresnail horde invasion:

World building

It’s very vivid: we read mentions of rabbit wars, the diresnail horde invasion, a Pierced God/the God that bleeds, the Mad Monk, who is another god etc.

We have a good sense of place and lore, especially since “the lore” is the multitude of illuminated drawings that we’ve all seen floating online, so they feel familiar and warm (crazy skeletons, people riding snails etc) without the author having to take the time to info dump. It works really well, and it makes you curious about all the weird little things our ancestors apparently had to deal with on a daily basis.

Emotional Impact

While being funny and light, Grumble and Gasp has its fair share of tender or sad moments. They lend very well because of how funny and light everything is until those moments arise. When they do, they’re given the full gravitas they require.

Quotes

In a chronological order, some of my favourites:

They say history was penned by a mad monk who cared little for facts, and that we are nothing more than the idle sketches he scrawled in the margins.

This is the beginning line, and what a line it is! It perfectly encapsulates the feel of the story.

That something wore black feathers and blood, smeared in ribbons from beak to clavicle. It looked like a crow torn from the pages of a storybook and hammered into man-shape.

This quote represents so well the funny and oh-so-visual writing style that doesn’t let at all.

He’d stood beside her during both rabbit wars, the diresnail horde invasion, and three assassination attempts.

Doesn’t this make you want to learn more about the world this novel is set in?

the echo of a dozen voices rotting in a crow’s throat.

Just a nice line.

“Have you ever tried checking a pulse with feathers?”

Once you read the novel, this one hits hard! Still, it shows the realism that shows unexpectedly in such a crazy, kooky world.

The third time, the dagger slipped under the rim of his pauldron, biting flesh, not deep, but enough to draw blood and doubt.

[Redacted] was big, even sitting down. Human by birth, but not by inclination […] His hands were folded on his knee, the left one a masterwork of steel and leather where his real fingers had been pruned by fate.

After the second night, the sewer no longer smelled of rot and runoff; those weak and cowardly scents had long since fled, vanquished by the tyrant stench of wet dog.

A pair of snail-riding priests dressed in oilskins picked their way through the throng, their mounts’ shells painted in concentric blessings, each swirl catching the torchlight in slow, hypnotic turns.

Here in this hallowed hall, it was clear the Mad Monk himself revered the Pierced God. And who was more worthy of a man’s devotion than a god’s God?

A God’s God!! What a cool concept!! I love it.

Grumle tried on a smile. It didn’t fit right. Too tight in the cheeks, too loose on the lips. He dropped it and pulled on his favorite scowl, the one that wore in easy and never pinched.

Across the hall, Gasp saw it all, and grinned the wide grin of a bird about to throw himself headlong into the chaos that was his art.

Conclusion

This story is fun fun fun. A fun concept, fun characters, fun writing style. It is both short, with no drawn out scenes (well, some of the chase scenes might be long BUT they’re really fun to read) and flows really well. And especially if you like digging deeper for little hints and nods to popular media, this will be right up your alley.

Reviews

Earlier this month I posted my first review of a Substack serial, which you can find here:

It was a lot of fun to delve deep into a story and truly give it the time it deserved. I left more specific comments on the story itself, so the review is spoiler-free. Actually, I already wrote another review that will come up on the 2nd of February, for Grumble and Gasp:

For the foreseeable future, I would love to read and lightly critique one serial a month, with the review coming up on the first Monday of the month.

Novel

My novel, Herbarium, is currently at part 8 out of 30. More parts will be coming out every two weeks until the end of the novel (which is around the end of the year).

An overview of the chapters is here, along with a description of the plot, themes, and inspiration:

This is a novel I wrote a few years ago, and it’s not my most recent one (more on that later). This novel will probably not get published, so it will stay free for the foreseeable future.

Short stories

While I do my best to write short stories consistently, mine tend to be on the longer side so they take a while to write and edit.

Curious which are my best? In my opinion, here are the top five as of today:

1. Tenebronaut: An astronaut struggles with feelings of isolation as a strange sickness takes over the crew he’s part of.

2. Mother mole: A song-loving mole collective watches as the miners they’ve been observing get trapped underground.

3. Creatura Iterum Resurgit: A humanoid, manic creature gets reborn every few centuries and is eager to experience life as much as possible before its next death.

4. 12 Days of Christmas Gothic: A short, 12-part Christmas-themed horror serial following an old woman in search of her missing family.

5. The Man Outside the Tent: Two girls camping in an isolated area are being watched intently.

I will post a short story a month, in between novel parts and the reviews. This is a pace I can handle at the moment between various responsibilities, reviews and other plans. Which brings me to…

Future plans

Writing a novel

I am currently working on a novel, which, knowing me, will take at least 2 to 3 years to finish. It’s a multi-perspective story of a reclusive man, hardened by childhood neglect and a life of survival, who slowly relearns connection, peace, and emotional presence through restoring a sentient house. The house itself once vain and pretentious, slowly discovers the value of humility, care, and community as it struggles with abandonment and the fear of being forgotten.

Self-publishing a novel

I’m planning on self-publishing another novel, which is already finished. Triptych is an ergodic folk horror novel where a story collector tries to expose the truth of his family’s history while constrained by a witch’s curse, which forbids him from changing her words.

Once I finish illustrating and formatting the pages to my liking, I’ll publish it and link it on my Substack. I’ll make it free for a limited time for those interested and make a quick announcement about it when the time comes (probably in the second half of the year).

Short stories to come

I loved writing 12 Days of Christmas Gothic and releasing a short section every day. I think I will work on another piece that follows the same structure.

Other short stories include a child turned tree, a woman wearing a lampshade as a hat, a girl dreaming of a romantic escapade weaved in her wall tapestry, and a series of stories centered around a tarot-card reader that may be more powerful than she lets on.

Novel swap or beta-reading

I’m always looking to improve. If you like to write horror (especially folk, atmospheric, slow-burn, gothic), thrillers, literary, and soft sci-fi novels and you enjoy my work, I’d love to talk about a novel swap where we critique each other’s work a bit more in depth than is possible on Substack. If you’re interested, let me know via a comment below or a private message.

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𝕬 plume of sandy water obscures my vision and I have to dive blindly. It’s silent. On soil, there’s almost always a sound, however small. Yet here I can feel the pressure of the silence, the blackness of the abyss mocking my inexperience. You can’t do it, the sea whispers. But I have to. So I push myself deeper and soon it almost feels like I’ve always done this. Has there been a time before I started descending? Is there a place other than the inky expanse around me? The only proof of that is the flashlight I grip in my left hand.

𝕽ock formations in the distance, looking strangely like buildings, call for me to explore them. Schools of fish dash past me, silver, green, and blue. They head upwards, towards the sun, towards warmth. Algae float lazily around my body, like an old dog. My body continues to descend.

𝕿ime passes slowly, the calmness almost lulls me to sleep. A soft voice inside my head reminds me of my mission, the sole purpose of my descent, but the sea washes it away little by little. Soon, I don’t remember why I jumped from the boat, what life above is like. Is it as dark and silent as it is here? It doesn’t matter either way. I am at peace now.

𝕳owever, the peace doesn’t last for long. Eventually, my lungs begin to struggle to draw oxygen from the tank on my back. My vision blurs, my brain fogs with disorientation. I am no longer diving but sinking. Vague images flash through my mind, slivers of memories. A row of colorful dresses, neatly hanging along the walls of a shop. A cramped apartment, transversed by a fat, calico cat. A handsome man smiling, giving me a thumbs up just before he jumps in the sea. My eyes flutter open, even if there is nothing they can see here. For a second, the reason lingers in my mind, like the tingle on your tongue after drinking sparkling water. It fizzles out before I can make sense of it. It doesn’t matter anymore.

𝕷ungs burn, filling with salty water as I try to breathe. Ribcage, crushed slowly by building pressure. The flashlight falls from my grasp, as my hands go to my neck, trying to soothe the pain of the water flowing in.

𝕴’m drowning. I’m going to die. Part of me tries to fight it, another part has already given up.

𝕹ever thought I would die like this, I think. I open my eyes one last time, desperately hoping to get saved at the last second. For a second, I believe I see a set of amber eyes staring at me from a distance, but water chokes out my scream for help.

𝕲olden eyes get closer as my mind melts into darkness. Help me.

𝖂hen he came to us, he was almost dead. We rescued him, turned him into one of us. He still has sunkissed skin, a shade which he taught us was called copper. His eyes, once greener and deeper than the sea, turned yellow, like ours. Gills bloomed out of his strong neck once I gave him the kiss of life, fins sprouted out his back, his hands and feet grew into flippers. He was handsome before, but he is breathtaking now.

𝕬lmost as soon as he woke up, he asked about her. About the girl he left up there, on the boat. He told us she was his bride, the one he loved the most. He told us many things about her.

𝕿he way her hair shone in the sun. The way she covered her body with fabrics in colors none of us had seen before. The way she made him feel like he was the only man on Earth. He might not have been the only man on Earth, but he is the only man here. If he likes being the only one of his kind, he will like it here more than up there.

𝕰arthlings that came to us before him died soon after, despite the kiss of life. Yet he survived for days now, and he gets stronger each day. He is special to us, important. We treat him like a king, and he is kind to us in return.

𝕽obbing us of our earthling would be cruel and selfish, but she tried to do it anyway. A few days after he came to us, she dove in too. We hoped she would give up soon when she would figure there is no way to get him back.

𝕭ut she didn’t. She swam deeper and deeper, even when the darkness muddled her mind, even when she couldn’t breathe.

𝕺ur earthling didn’t see her, fortunately. He might have tried to save her, take her to the surface, give her the kiss of life. I saw her instead, as she struggled to breathe. She saw me too.

𝕽ound, dark eyes, scared and begging for salvation. Instead, I pick up a rock and crush the last flicker of light from her eyes. I did what needed to get done.

𝕹ow, our earthling will forget her. It will take time, but eventually, he will. With every trip he takes to the surface, to try to find her, with every disappointing return, with every warm embrace we welcome him back, he will forget about her and realize his place is here, with us.

❀What do you feel you needed to leave behind or lose when you made a significant life change?❀

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

started this book club as a way to go through serialized fiction, which is difficult to do when you’re trying to keep up with multiple authors at once (which is what everyone on Substack does, I imagine). I think that’s a fantastic idea and wanted in. While I didn’t manage to read the previous serial before the review for the new one came up, I’ve managed to give this one a read.

Authors who do publish serials might want some general feedback, which I imagine can be hard to get in a frankly fast-paced environment such as Substack. Readers might be intimidated to start a serial when there’s so many good short stories, or articles that they can read a lot faster. So hopefully this helps multiple parties: authors, with some honest feedback, readers, with a review that might help them choose their next longer read, and me, to structure my thoughts and discover new stories to read.

While I assume I can create my own layout for the review, I actually really like the structure and level of detail that Johanna showed so far in hers. So, I’ll just use the same template, at least for now. I tend to leave comments with more specific comments under the relevant chapters (if I do have them), so I won’t have them in here to keep this review mostly spoiler-free. I also kept myself from reading Johanna’s review until now, so her opinions wouldn’t influence mine.

Johanna already published a review in December, here. Her review of No Such Thing as Normal is here.

This month’s chosen subject: No such Thing as Normal by Nikki, the Nocturnal Narrator

Speculative Fiction and Dark Tales | Nocturnal Narrator

No Such Thing As Normal | Part 1 [Ch. 1]

Author’s Note: I’m actively seeking literary representation for No Such Thing As Normal, and am open to film/TV and other rights discussions. For inquiries, please email me at SOMNUSseries@gmail.com, or shoot me a DM on Substack…

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7 months ago · 44 likes · 19 comments · Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator

Synopsis (From the Author’s publication)

No Such Thing As Normal is a dark, dual-narrative thriller that pairs a psychopathic researcher who can predict violence with a combat-hardened soldier who’s spent years carrying it out. Their lives collide when a quiet Midwest town becomes the staging ground for a very personal hunt. As Olivia turns data into a weapon and Ben wrestles with the ghosts of missions that made him both hero and monster, each is forced to decide whether the other is salvation, temptation, or a threat.

General Impression

If I bought this as a book in a library, I would feel like I got my money’s worth. To describe it in one word, it would be tight.

No such Thing as Normal doesn’t seem to waste words, lines, moments. The information (and there is a lot of technical information!) is delivered in a manageable way, without patronizing the reader or bloating their mind with unnecessary fluff. That is such a hard skill to manage, and I think Nikki nailed it. The narrative is snappy, action-packed. pushing you to learn more. The characters are engaging and while their motivations are relatively straightforward, they’re so complex and they bounce off each other so much, you don’t know what to expect.

I understand this is a story derived from two others, Olivia and Ben. I did not read those, just to keep myself spoiler-free for the time being. I want to see how No Such Thing As Normal intertwines both narrative lines, how it balances the main characters’ past and present, how their motivations influence their actions without having the background of the other stories. After this is finished, I’ll probably go back to those two as well, though.

Writing Style

Very direct, punchy, dynamic. What you would expect from a thriller, with the added pizzaz of great one-liners and exciting references to behavioural studies.

It’s very easy to read, and the pacing flows so well that you don’t notice the chapters flying by. While there aren’t a lot of slow moments, there are just enough to let the plot breathe and to allow the author space for longer, more psychologically-charged sentences.

Given that one of the main characters, Olivia, dabbles in data collection, statistics, analytics, and so on, one might think her sections would be dry and factual, like a university lecture. The reality is completely different. While Olivia and Ben have very different voices and styles, they’re both almost as engaging as the other (I frankly love Olivia’s more, but that is personal preference).

Nikki also tends to write the same scene from different perspectives. This isn’t tedious, like it could have been, but rather pretty exciting. Olivia and Ben focus on different things, remember events in different ways. Rather than wasted space, I think this helps characterize both really well. Also, when noticing minor inconsistencies, given that Olivia brags about having an impecable memory, I wonder if it’s done purposefully i.e. is one of them lying or if Ben’s memory is just a little less perfect.

Characters

I love thrillers and have read a bunch of them over the years. Simultaneously, one of their biggest downfalls and selling points is their propensity to rely on formulas, both in story beats and characters. I lost count of the number of meek women who are actually unhinged or perfect husbands who cheat on their wives that I’ve encountered.

So it’s nice to see something new: a cold and calculated woman that decided her contribution to humanity is to make the most statistical good by disposing of predators (not a completely new idea, of course, because there aren’t really new ideas, right? But it feels fresh and exciting, in a terrifying sort of way) and a highly prepared and intelligent soldier that needs to come to term with his past, his future, his motivations, his loyalties.

Neither is perfect nor one-dimensional. They’re just as messy as the writing itself is crisp. They’re intrigued by each other, they observe, analyse, catalogue each other like they’re both researchers and subjects at the same time. They assist and hinder each other, and you never know which one will come next.

World building

I don’t have too much to say about this other than that everything is so well-researched I am in awe that this book isn’t published yet. From the extensive data that Olivia processes at all times (and can explain the direct consequences of each of her human-mimicking choices, and quote the paper where the information comes from) to the specific lingo each character uses to the dizzying amount of military information condensed in the 14 chapters that are out so far… it’s very clear Nikki has done her homework.

Emotional Impact

So far, I didn’t consider this story very emotional. The characters themselves don’t dwell too much on their respective traumas, but there are hints that things will overflow at some point (such as Olivia’s “don’t call me Liv” outburst, for the ones that have read the story so far).

However, there are tender moments of vulnerability, that feel all the more real since they’re so few and far between. I’ll give a couple of examples in the Quotes section.

It’s also pretty nice to see predators or creeps being the victims for once. It’s quite energizing in a way, and quite validating.

Quotes

In a roughly chronological order:

Before a man even had the chance to offend, I could estimate the statistical likelihood that he would.

To be judged by the statistical probability that you’re a bad person is a horrifying concept to me. I am an immigrant from a country that doesn’t the have the best reputation. I have had plenty of experiences with people assuming I would behave in a certain way (steal, be disruptive, etc) based on these statistics, sometimes before they even met me. Yes, Olivia collects real data on people before “pouncing” but this line has such a threatening potential in the wrong hands (not the Olivia’s are necessarily right, mind you), that it sent shivers down my spine.

I felt like a machine in a world of people, attempting to pass a Turing test.

Ironically, this line humanized Olivia a lot to me. It speaks of her motivations, fears, and personality so much more than entire paragraphs of cold, hard data ever could.

I raised my voice 1.5 octaves—just enough to trigger the auditory cues associated with submission and approachability—2015 University of Sussex study. Men feel more in control. They don’t even know why.

See what I mean? It should be a dry, tedious line, but it isn’t. Crazy!

If any of us were considering blowing our brains out, we’d call each other. Not on some “it’ll get better” bullshit, just—we were all gonna do it together.

Technically, my first “date” with Benjamin lasted longer than the first and second shortest wars in history, combined.

But paranoia’s just pattern recognition accelerated.

Not from the story itself, but a great quote regardless:

“Write for the people who love the way you tell stories, not the ones who need convincing.”

Jackson was the Sledgehammer. […] Garcia was the Scalpel. […] And me—I was the Shield. […] We were one lethal organism with three different heads.

Conclusion

I really, really liked this story so far and will continue to follow along. Nikki has obviously poured her heart and soul into researching, writing, perfecting this story and the result is beautiful.

If this review sparked your interest, please go to Nikki’s page and read yourself. It’s well worth your time.

The men talk talk talk between them but we can’t understand what they say. We move closer, our snouts sniffing the rich air. We squirm, running over each other, running to the front to hear better. We hope hope hope we didn’t miss the beginning of the song. We love the song. We do do do.

His voice rings above the others. He has started started started. The ones of us at the bottom squeak for the ones at the top to rush and get closer and we dig dig dig a little faster. We hear the song but not the words words words. Usually we find a good spot quicker. Some of us squeak the words we know by heart heart heart so we don’t lose the trail of song. Our voices are not nice, and we don’t like to sing, but we can sing just this one time time time.

When we have a good spot, he is singing the second part part part, but we love it nonetheless. We slither and curl and disperse and come back together. We’re trying to get comfy comfy comfy. His voice rings through the ground and it’s nice and soft soft soft like wormy dirt.

We hum and sway sway sway with his voice. The words in the song are so strange to us and we wonder what they mean mean mean: what is a bread? What is an egg? We imagine they wiggle and jiggle jiggle jiggle like a worm. We hope the men like to eat the bread and gritty egg, just like we like the worms. Yum yum yum.

The man sings and the diggers chop chop chop into the walls above. It sounds nice, we like the rhythm. Chop chop chop. Hit hit hit. We wiggle wiggle wiggle because we like it so much.

It’s a shame shame shame we were late today. We never are. But we still like to hear the song, and tomorrow we won’t be late again. The little ones we keep in the middle squeak and sniff the air. They don’t know the words yet yet yet, but will learn them soon. The older of us have heard it for a long time, so we know the words well well well.

We were late because we heard a rumble rumble rumble. The belly of the ground was hungry and it rumbled and we rushed to collect worms and buggies to eat later, because when the ground is hungry the worms and buggies go up to the top top top and we don’t like to go out. Outside is too bright and we like it in the dark and damp. It’s cosy cosy cosy.

When the ground rumbles, we like to go deep down, when we don’t feel the shakes as much. But we really like the song. After the song is done, we burrow down down down. And the song is almost finished, so we’re getting ready ready ready.

It is finished. Let’s go go go. The little ones are scared and squeak. This is their first rumble. The old ones know what to do, and we get ready to go down down down into our cosy holes.

The men scream. They don’t usually scream. Don’t they know to come down with us, get cosy in the warm ground?

The rumble gets stronger stronger stronger. The men sound like they’re in pain. We squirm and run around. Why are they still there? Are they hungry? Should we bring them some worms worms worms? Do they want to come with us us us?

Large sounds from above, like crash and snap, and then more noises. Crash crash crash. Boom boom boom. We want to leave, it hurts our ears. We want to go down in the cosy cosy cosy dirt.

But the men are still there. We think they can’t leave. Every day they come from above and come down. What if they can’t go up up up again? Are they trapped? We wrestle and squirm and run around, and the rumble gets worse worse worse.

We have to help them, we decide decide decide. They are diggers, like us. But maybe they can’t dig now. We have to help help help.

We slither and curl and crawl crawl crawl. We stick together like we’re only one big big big mole. The little ones stay in the belly, so they’re safe and warm warm warm. The old ones stay in the back. The fastest diggers go in front. Some of us rub soil in the cracks between our bodies so we don’t fall apart. A big mole is stronger against the rumble than us many small small small moles.

We dig dig dig to the top and we break free through the ground. We sniff the men. They smell sour, like fear, but they still whimper with aliveness. Their heads blink with light and we hiss in surprise. The big mole that is all of us crawls out of the hole, and the men scream and move move move to the back. The little ones in the belly squeak to let them know we’re friends, but the men don’t understand. They cry and yell “Help help help”.

All of us are out of the hole. The rumble stopped, but it will start again soon. The old ones that are the feet of the big mole tell us it will rumble again soon soon soon. The men need to get out now now now, or else they will get buried and won’t be able to sing and eat egg again.

The large mole that is us starts to dig again. Quickly quickly quickly. We push the ground to the sides, we’re throwing rocks away from the men. We think they understand now that we help help help.

“This must be the mother of all moles,” we hear a voice between clawfuls of dirt dirt dirt. “Look at the size of it!”

We snicker with laughter, because the big mole is all of us, but the men don’t know. We dig dig dig. The rumble gets closer. We dig dig dig and we break through the ground. Our snout, that is all our snouts, feels the dry air of outside. We think this is enough for the men, men, men.

We turn around and dive back down in our tunnel. The men can leave now, so we can go down and get cosy cosy cosy before the second rumble comes.

“Thank you, Mother Mole,” the voice of the singer says, and we hear the men climb out of the hole. We dive dive dive and disperse. We make it to our cosy holes just in time before the rumble comes.

                                        ❀•······················•❀•······················•❀

The men didn’t come again to dig and sing, not after the rumble. They must be scared and we understand, but we are sad. We heard no more song song song. We sang it to ourselves, but our voices aren’t good. We try to keep busy busy busy, but we miss the men and the song. It’s too quiet quiet quiet.

But one day we hear steps, and we know it’s the singer. We dig ourselves up, so we’re just under the surface. This is where we hear the best. We snicker with joy joy joy, and he begins to sing. We hum with his voice and wiggle and jiggle. But at the end of the song, there are new words. These words didn’t exist before, so we sit very still to listen listen listen.

❀What would your idea of an earth-bound cryptid would be?❀

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© 2026 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

Back downstairs, Barbara burst through the front room door, heaving with exertion.

It was still snowing in the room, a thick blanket covering the furniture and the tree. In front of the fireplace, though, the cat had melted it all away in her chase of the yarn ball, which now lay to the side, significantly smaller and having strung its entrails in a chaotic maze all over the carpet. The cat itself stood smoultering on one armrest of the sofa, a melted circle of snow around her, watching Barbara intently.

Now that the room was glowing with both the ethereal white of snow and the amber warmth of the fire, Barbara could see a long garland of bows hooked from the ceiling. Despite her rush and Henry’s continued whimpers, she couldn’t help but stop at the sight of it. Rather than lovely, shiny ribbon, the bows were tattered, varying wildly in size, colour, and pattern, almost as if made from torn scraps of old clothes. And this in itself wouldn’t have shocked Barbara anymore, not after the locks of hair, the skeletons in the baubels, the horrid wrapping paper... if it weren’t for the last bow in the garland, a bright yellow bow, drooping wistfully. A fabric that wasn’t stiff enough to hold its shape, a fabric that once belonged to a loose dress a nineteen-year-old girl was naive enough to think would hide her pregnant belly.

“Oh, Imogen, dear,” croaked Barbara and permitted herself to let one painful shriek out, just one, before she wiped her tearstained face with her free hand and turned her attention back to the Advent calendar clutched in her hand.

“Right,” she trembled, “the needles.”

Under the cat’s watchful eye, Barbara approached the sofa, first rummaging through the snow beside it to find her bag, then in the bag to find her knitting needles. With a silver, sharp glint, the needles once used to clothe those dear to her became weapons meant to save them.

Straining to keep her hand steady for once this god-forsaken night, Barbara poked a needle through the little door, rattling it around to coax the creature out, or at least bring it closer.

With an aggravated snort, the creature first tried to swipe at the needle, then dropped on all fours and charged towards the entrance, growing bigger as it approached. No longer upright, the monster looked even more terrifying, galloping wildly, staring Barbara straight in the eye. His ribs had opened like a bone flower, and Henry had managed to stretch his arms outwards, grasping at something to help pull him out.

“Push yourself up!” yelled Barbara at her nephew. “Try to jump!”

But before Henry managed to position himself to make any significant progress in his escape, the creature reached the little door and straightened himself back up, shutting down any hope the boy had of escaping.

The creature stared at Barbara and grunted loudly, making the final few steps on two hooves. Through the little door, Barbara could see him grow more and more until the only thing visible through the little opening was one of its wild, sunken eyes. Barbara stepped back instinctively, trying to put distance between herself and the monster. But, as she still held the calendar in her hand, the monster’s eye followed. As if mocking her attempt to escape, the creature tilted its head this way and that, scraping its antlers on either side of the box, and the creepy sound of bells twinkled in the room.

“Give me back my Henry!”

With a grunt of her own and a sharp push, Barbara shoved her knitting needle into the creature’s eye. The reindeer creature moaned loudly and pulled its head back, inadvertently turning the needle into a pivot, which popped its eye out. The eye rolled out of the calendar and onto a patch of burned-down carpet. Glistening and inky, it twirled onto the exposed wooden floor with a suspiciously marble-like sound .

Having just observed until that moment, the cat jumped off the armrest and onto the floor, observing the eye’s motion curiously. As the creature’s moans morphed into screams of pain, the cat began making some noises of its own. Noises that could perhaps be interpreted as purring, but which sounded more like whines and were no less unnerving than the monster’s.

Slightly settled, the monster squeezed a large, hairy, human arm through the hole and swung it blindly in hopes of finding its eye. Barbara, destabilised by the creature’s movements, dropped the calendar face down onto the floor.

Like a horrifying hermit crab, the arm hoisted itself up on its middle knuckles and began to shuffle blindly towards the sound of the rolling eye-marble. When the hand was close to getting hold of it, the cat pawed it away, whining loudly, tail alert. With another scream, echoed weakly by Henry’s whimpers, the creature pushed down and propelled the calendar upwards, flipping it so the little door faced towards the room’s ceiling.

Barbara could only watch from where she’d fallen on the floor as the creature started to ascend from the cardboard Advent, like an eldritch monster of twisted Christmas. With a cacophonous mix of jingling from its antlers, the cat’s aberrant purring, Henry’s cries, and those never-ending carols, the creature gave a mighty moan and managed to free its antlers from the Advent calendar. Then, slowly, it crawled out, ribs wide apart, opening and closing with its every breath.

The reindeer approached the cat in almost complete silence, its motions only punctuated by a weak jingling and the soft tap of its palms and hooves on the carpet. The cat, fully focused on the eye, smouldered softly, its tiny solar explosions subdued.

Faster than she’s been in years, Barbara grabbed the Teddy from where it had fallen on the floor a few carols ago. Then, in the same motion, she pulled Henry out of the ribs and shoved Teddy in his place. Too focused on retrieving its eye, the monster didn’t seem to notice the switch and continued prowling, inching closer to the flint-cat.

“Stay put,” hissed Barbara at Henry and shoved him behind the sofa, in a pile of snow, doing her best to smooth out the surface above him. Then she crouched too, knees popping loudly.

The monster finally looked up, alerted by the noise. It scanned the room, jingling its perusal, but when nothing appeared strange, it returned to its mission. The cat pawed the eye once more, pushing it towards the creature, then jumped roughly on the sofa, melting its way to the armrest she’d originally lain on. The reindeer scrambled to gather its eye back, then popped it back in its socket, grunting and heaving as the eye slithered back in its normal position.

The creature looked down at its ribcage and saw the shape of the toy, silent but roughly Henry-sized. It appeared satisfied and, jingling away, crawled back into the calendar.

When its last hoof disappeared through the little door, Barbara scrambled to close it, lock it with the key still sticking from the cardboard lock, and tossed it in the fire lapping quietly in the fireplace. Leaving behind increasingly weaker tortured shrieks, the calendar burned away, taking the monster with it. After only a couple of minutes, the only recognisable thing left in the fireplace was the silver glint of a malformed, melted key. A plume of dark smoke filled the room, and Barbara had to cover her face and burning eyes with a scarf to escape the smell of burnt fur and flesh.

“Henry, come,” she said, shaking herself to reality. They had to leave, immediately.

The boy lifted himself slowly from his snowy hiding place and crawled obediently towards the door. Face streaked with soot and tears, clothes torn, feet bare and bloody and finishing in fewer toes than normal, he didn’t seem to have any power left to cry and mourn and argue.

“I’ll take you, sweetie. Come on.” Barbara braced herself and hoisted the boy up in her arms, where he immediately curled into a little ball. He was still so small, barely older than a toddler.

“The monster ate mummy,” Henry whispered into her chest. “He locked her inside and ate her little by little.”

“Shush, baby, keep your strength. You’ll tell me later. I’ll take you out now,” whispered Barbara, traversing the room, the hallway, the mudroom with as large steps as she could handle.

Once at the door, she wrapped Henry tighter with her scarf and pushed the door handle down. But, like her first attempt to leave the house, it was unsuccessful.

“And I’ve burned the key...” she whispered, the realisation slashing at her like a knife. “Oh, I’ve been so stupid.”

Gasping softly, Henry curled himself even closer to her chest. “I’m so cold, Auntie.”

“I’ll get you warm. We’ll figure this out. I’ll get you warm, then we’ll find a way to leave, alright?”

The boy was too weak to respond.

Barbara marched back into the room to bring the boy closer to the fire.

“There must be a key to that bleeding door somewhere in this house. It has to be.”

But despite her best efforts, she couldn’t figure out where to look. Henry was too heavy to get upstairs anyway, not with her quickly draining strength, and she couldn’t leave him alone. Never again.

“At least I can keep the fire going for a bit,” she murmured, eyeing the slowly dying embers.

“Perhaps the cat...?”

But the cat had vanished. The armrest she’d previously occupied was slowly filling up with fresh snow, hiding any clue she’d ever been there.

With no kindling in sight and books covered under a moist blanket of snow, Barbara reached for the only thing in the room that might have worked as kindling, although she wasn’t sure how potent: the gingerbread house.

Barbara ripped a side of its roof and tossed it in the fire. Then, some of the second-floor walls, and then the upstairs floor. As she struggled to rip the baked slab, crumbs of mortar began to rain around her, mixing with the snow. When the floor came loose and was tossed in the flames, so did the front room ceiling, smouldering slowly, beginning to reveal patches of the night sky above. The house she was locked in followed the lead of the gingerbread one.

“So we can escape!” she gasped to a dozing Henry. “I can just rip the front of the house off!”

The woman turned with renewed vigour towards the gingerbread ruins resting by her side and began to rip the front of the house off, but stopped with a new realisation. “If I burn it, the fire around us and the smoke might kill us before we manage to escape.”

Carefully, she broke smaller pieces off to better contain the fire around them. She tossed in a piece of the front of the gingerbread house, and only when it was fully consumed, and the smouldering on the real house had ceased, did she throw in another small piece. By the time the front of the house had all been torn and thrown in the fire, Henry had fallen into a deep sleep.

“We should go now,” whispered Barbara to herself. But as she gazed into the flames, she saw the gingerbread door intact, unbothered by the flames lapping at its edges. She knew, instinctively, that they wouldn’t be able to get out unless the door was consumed by fire, or unless...

“I found the key.”

Shining weakly, a little wire poked from the gingerbread fireplace. Barbara scraped around it with her fingers until she managed to dig it out, minuscule and silver. The key. And, looking back up, she saw the real one shining through the ash, waiting to be picked up, miraculously back to its normal shape.

Barbara lifted Henry in her arms again, resting his head on her shoulder. With heavy steps, she approached the door one final time, this time through a smoky shadow of where the walls used to be. With her free hand, she pushed the key in the door, twisted, and finally, the door clicked open.

As she stepped out into the snowy street, now surrounded by people hurrying to finish the last Christmas preparations, Barbara heard the final lines of the carol before the unseen singer was swallowed by eternal silence:

Author’s note: In January I will start a new serial finishing up the tale, in which I will go in excruciating detail over the legal paperwork and bureaucratic hoops Barbara has to jump through to obtain guardianship over her nephew.

In all seriousness, some remarks: the carol for this part was originally meant to be Silent Night. However, my husband mentioned his favourite as a child was Good King Wenceslas so I wanted to include it for him. Frankly, I think the lyrics go, thematically, so much better with the way the story ends. For each part, I tried to fit the carol to the themes or symbols applicable, and to make each part roughly as long to read as the carol would take to play fully (except this last part, which needed a little bit more room to breathe).

The theme of devoration central to the story’s monster is a little dig at my own country’s weirdest Christmas “tradition”: in Romania, it is customary to fast for around 6 weeks before Christmas. For us, this means no animal products at all. More conservative Romanians love to brag about avoiding soy products and other meat replacements because they’re not “traditional” enough, so come Christmas time they’re famished. Then they gorge themselves on our traditional, meat-heavy Christmas dishes and end up in the hospital. Of course, it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s a yearly thing to hear on the news about at least some people who follow this route.

Another little thing is that the last line of Good King Wenceslas (“You who now will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing“) hints at the ways Barbara helped Imogen and Henry throughout the story (whether financial or by literally saving Henry) and will soon find help herself, in whatever shape that may arise. I am quite fond of slightly open endings, because I myself love turning over unanswered questions in works I read. Please let me know if this was too esoteric and unclear: I’m still working on finding a good balance.

If you reached the end, I would love to thank you from the bottom of my heart. This story was a labour of love and it has received a lot more attention than I anticipated. As all my stories, the motivation was my sheer joy of thinking up plotlines, but this joy is multiplied when other people enjoy them. And with that, thank you again and have a lovely, spooky Christmas!

Find the list of parts here.

Read the first part, about a lit candle in the window of an empty house.

Read the previous part, about an Advent calendar that has a lock of hair hidden behind every door.

This is the final part of the story.

© 2025 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

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Barbara swung open the door of the wardrobe she’d just smashed the box on, looking for an old shirt she could use to stop the bleeding. With the finger tightly wrapped in a pyjama top, she went to close the door but stopped short. While not the strangest thing of the night by far, it was still quite odd to see a large cardboard Advent calendar hanging on the inside of the door. Something Imogen must have made for Henry and filled with goodies.

“If the little slots are empty, it means Henry was here,” thought Barbara out loud. “If they’re still full...” She didn’t finish her sentence.

Slowly, as if taking her time would delay the inevitable, she started opening each little door. The first one already had something inside, and her heart dropped to her knees. Had he been missing that long, and she didn’t notice? But no, it couldn’t be. Just a few days ago, she’d talked on the phone with Imogen to settle the final details regarding her arrival. He came to the phone to say hello, so she knew for certain he’d been fine then.

But still, the first slot was full of something silky and fine, so she scooped out the contents to see better what it was. Before she even got it fully out, she recognised it as a lock of hair, curled into a tidy wreath and tied with a red bow.

“What the hell is going on with this house!” yelled Barbara, almost angry at herself for still being surprised at the horrors revealed to her.

One by one, she pulled the locks of hair from each little chamber of the Advent. All had red bows, but the hair itself differed in colour and texture. Heart hammering, she sorted them on Henry’s side table into “could be Henry or Imogen’s” and “definitely not theirs”. Not that finding a stranger’s hair lock in her nephew’s room would be much better, but at least she could maintain a sliver of hope that the two people she loved most were still alright.

By the time she reached the final door, twenty-four, she’d only found one silky blond lock that could perhaps be Imogen’s. Henry’s pin-straight hair had been luckily nowhere in the Advent calendar. But she still had one to open. Hands shaking, stiff with nerves and the cold that had been creeping deeper into her bones all evening, she went to pull open the final door but found it shut.

“Come on, come on,” she groaned, rattling the little pull, but the calendar stubbornly kept its final secret.

Barbara pulled the calendar off its hook and rattled it gently, hoping the sound would help answer her questions. But instead of the soft slide of a lock of hair and even with the caroler continuing to sing unperturbed, she heard the indistinguishable sound of Henry’s scream.

“Dear me, Henry, can you hear me?”

The boy didn’t reply. Barbara replaced the Advent calendar on its hook (”of course I can’t smash it if Henry’s in there”) and looked desperately around the room in search of a tool to help jimmy the lock open. Instead, her searching hands found the key she’d slipped in her pocket, what felt like decades ago. Without a second thought, she pulled out the key and inserted it in the image of a lock that had materialised on the front of the last chamber.

“Was that there from the beginning?”

To her surprise and relief, the lock clicked, and the door opened with a tiny creak to reveal a miniature monster, identical to the one that had twirled in the music box. The creature seemed far away, at the end of a long, white hallway that defied the slight dimensions of the Advent calendar itself.

The monster swayed slowly from side to side, antlers jingling softly with its every move. But neither the jingle of its antlers nor the carols that played from beyond the walls could cover Henry’s soft whimpers from between the creature’s cage of ribs.

“Henry!”

The little boy, barely larger than a holly berry, turned his face towards her and tried to stretch his hand out from between the ribs.

“Help me, Antie! Help!”

Just as his faraway words came out, squeaky and shaking, the creature turned a quarter circle to face Barbara. She flinched, expecting some kind of attack, but the monster blinked, unfazed, then turned around again and resumed his silent swaying.

“I’ll get you out, love,” shouted Barabar through the little door and tried cramming her fingers through. However, even if her fingers weren’t riddled with bulging arthritic nodules, the door was much too small for them to fit through. She needed something long and thin to coax the monster out. Something like a knitting needle, perhaps.

“Hang on, Henry!” she shouted again. “I’ve a plan to get you out!”

With a quick, definite movement, Barbara grabbed the calendar off the hook and ran out of the room and down the stairs, her heart hammering thrice for each word of the carol finishing.

Find the list of parts here.

Read the first part, about a lit candle in the window of an empty house.

Read the previous part, about a music box with a spinning ballerina. Every time the song is played, the ballerina gets covered in more and more hair until the top opens to reveal a fur-covered antlered creature.

Read the next part, about ragged bows seemingly made out of clothing scraps.

© 2025 Laura Teodorescu. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

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