I’m in need of someone big and scary tonight, so I can do something mildly unsafe. Nothing illegal. Message me if interested.
That was the post on /rbridalveillake, where I’ve lived for about six years.
I was interested. I needed money, and I am both big and scary. Telling you exactly how tall I am, my weight, and whether or not I can throw a punch seems like a good way to prove I’m a weak, pathetic loser.
I definitely am a loser.
But I’m also big and scary.
i’m going down to the industry park near the shitty part of the river. Abandoned for like 70 years. Weird stuff going down there. I’m a journalist kind of. I want to get a closer look. Afraid to go alone
might be safer going alone than with a stranger on the internet, I messaged back.
you want the job or not?
yeah
meet at the old casino.
Where’s that?
jeese, new in town?
kind of
She - Helga - explained the old casino meant the small one, the first Canadian attempt at gambling like the Americans.
The industry park she mentioned was like a separate and forgotten part of Bridal Veil Lake’s history. Cars and steel used to be made there before the town went full tourist trap. Miles of weeds cracked the tarmac and pulled at rusted shut factories and warehouses.
She picked me up in a shitbox van and we drove to the southern peninsula of Bridal Veil Lake. The roads weren’t maintained and parts had crumbled completely into muddy holes framed by small, twisted trees reclaiming the land.
We pulled up to a busted section of chain link fence folded down on a small hill. The headlights revealed the passage of many feet in the sucking mud. We got out of the van.
Helga turned out to be pretty big and scary too. She’s definitely the tallest woman I’ve ever met and certainly not shy of the weightroom. Her leather jacket couldn’t hide the muscles underneath. A camera dangled from her shoulder.
“We’re here for pictures?”
“Good thing I didn’t ask for smart too,” she said, grinning and extending her hand. “Thormund, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Is that your real name?”
I didn’t reply.
“You’re not that scary.”
“You’re scarier than expected,” I said. “You look like you can take care of yourself. Why the need for a hired goon?”
Her smile vanished. “Because nobody can watch their own back.” In a surprise move, she gave me the cash in an envelope upfront.
“Awfully trusting,” I said, tucking the envelope into my jacket.
“I can take care of myself,” she quipped. “Besides, we’re past the point of mistrust. If you wanted to take the money and run, you could.”
Or worse, I thought.
This was a dangerous idea for anyone. Inviting a stranger that was both big and theoretically scary would attract the biggest assholes on the internet, I imagine.
Helga gave me a heavy-duty flashlight and strapped on a headband with a light clipped to the front. We sprang up and down as we walked over the wrecked fence. The muddy ground held onto a few sneakers.
“Looks like we’re not the only visitors,” I said to Helga’s back. Her makeshift headlamp blinded me when she turned around. I pulled a child size shoe from the half-frozen muck.
“Keep going. Come on,” she urged.
“What the fuck goes on here?”
Helga sighed and I could only see the plume of frosted air spout from her lips. “It’s a bad place, Thormund.”
“Is that why you’re here? You want to see bad stuff?”
“Something like that,” she said. “If I can get some evidence, then they’ll have to listen to me, and they’ll have to do something.”
“Who will have to listen?”
“Chatty for a hired goon,” she said, walking to the rusted corner of a sheet metal building. “Let’s go.”
I followed and did my best to be as quiet as her. Where we’d entered was filled with similar low ceilinged structures stuffed with old tires and trash. Something had died nearby. I could smell it.
She moved deliberately; she knew where she was going. A garage once used for large vehicles loomed beyond a row of tightly packed dumpsters. We squeezed through one of the narrow passages. A door had been propped open with a broken cinder block.
Someone had put that there.
I began to feel uneasy. There were too many blindspots, places to ambush two idiots with flashlights.
Helga pointed to a service ladder bolted to the side of the garage. I shook my head. Her headlamp bobbed up and down as she nodded. Then she shut off her light and mounted the first rung.
Damn it. I turned off the chunky flashlight and tucked it behind the ladder. Screw climbing with one hand. I hadn’t worn gloves. Cold rust flakes dug into my palms as I followed Helga to a sagging, tar paper roof.
“Don’t walk in the center,” she whispered, pointing to a small pond gravity had made on the roof.
I gave her a thumbs up she probably couldn’t see.
She stuck close to the edge, practically using the steel flashing like a tightrope. I had more faith in the rotting surface than my balance and chose a middle ground between the rainwater pool and the possibly fatal drop off the side.
When we’d worked our way around to the back of the building, Helga sprawled out and peered into a hole. A dim light illuminated her sharp features. She snapped a few photos before gesturing for me to come and have a look.
I shook my head.
She jabbed her index finger against the tar paper. I felt like a dog being summoned. So why did I obey? I admit feeling instant attraction to Helga.
Are you starting to see how I’m a loser yet?
Yeah, I crawled beside her, not because I wanted to look in the hole, but for other, obvious reasons not appropriate to our circumstances.
And it only got worse.
It took a few moments to understand what we were looking at. A fire burned in a cinder block fire pit. Surrounding the flames were tightly packed ranks of children. Less than a dozen held out their hands to the flames for warmth. Hundreds more squatted and hugged their knees in the dark behind them.
As far as I could see, every square foot of the garage interior had a child in it. Their squeezed together bodies provided a sweaty warmth I could smell.
“What the fuck?” I whispered to Helga.
“Sh,” she cautioned because of a rippling movement amongst the bodies below. They were so quiet. Too quiet for children their age.
I thought I saw the reason emerge from the kids closest to the fire. An adult in a hooded bathrobe, or a white cloak maybe, removed a bbq cover from something definitely not a bbq.
“What the fuck,” Helga said softly.
An iron sarcophagus had been revealed. Sarcophagus might be the wrong word. I only use it because it had the vague shape of a human body and looked made to fit a person inside, albeit a small one. There were no ornaments or paintings of an Egyptian kind or anything.
That’s because it’s a tool, and its purpose is utilitarian.
The white cloaked person pushed the table over the fire; it moved smoothly as if on wheels.
All the kids stirred and held out bowls and cups if they had them; some put their hands together. They began to beg, “Carn? Carn?” It was a question in a language I didn’t know, and it filled the humid garage, a discordant choir of despair.
The cloaked figure threw back his hood, revealing an ancient, bearded man with dark eyes. He lifted his hand and the children went silent.
“Homoni,” he answered a moment before a horrid scream erupted from within the sarcophagus The fire had begun to heat the iron. What was inside, animal or human, I couldn’t say.
Helga snapped more pictures while I thought of calling the cops.
She read my mind and touched my arm. “Don’t,” she whispered. “I already tried. They won’t come. That’s why we’re here.”
“You’ve seen this before?”
Helga stopped taking photos to consider me. I’ve no doubt she wondered if I would run after hearing what she said next. “I’ve seen what carn is. I saw what comes out of that barbecue coffin. It’s meat, and I’m afraid I can guess what kind.”
Homoni.
The tortured screams faded and another silence was observed. Bowls and cups and hands were lowered; no meat tonight. Working a sliding rod, the old man released a trap door beneath the sarcophagus. Out fell a gelatinous figure the approximate size of a child.
“It’s… is it fat?”
Helga didn’t answer but I think she knew. It was fat accumulated from a number of these cookouts. When they had enough, the time to create another Homoni had arrived.
The children watched the fire and some crept forward, but any that got too close were rebuked by the wizard and kicked if they didn’t listen.
He opened the top of the sarcophagus next to a dark tangle of charred bones. From the pile, he selected several, including a small ribcage, before bending over the fire and fat. These he arranged on the fat and as it melted, the bones were absorbed.
From his cloak, he produced a bottle and poured the contents onto his creation. A plume of black smoke rose to the hole we spied from. Both of us pulled away to avoid breathing in the unholy vapour.
“Helga, let’s go,” I told her. “This is clearly fucked.”
She nodded, took a step, and dropped right through a soft spot. I reacted fast enough to grab the collar of her coat but her weight pulled me down too, and then a section of roof stripped inward like rotted fabric. We swung high over the ritual and fell together.
Helga broke my fall and saved my life. Too bad it killed her. She’d landed on a pile of scrap metal and old car parts. One look at her spilled skull and I knew. There was no point in checking for signs of life.
I had no time anyway.
Hundreds of sparkling eyes looked at me with childish delight.
“Carn?” said one, and then the rest joined in with certainty.
“Carn! Carn!” They shrieked and raged and poured across the floor like vermin. I leapt backward over Helga and the steel, but they came too fast, scratching with filthy long fingernails and snapping with jagged teeth.
I had no choice.
How many children do you think you could take in a fight?
I discovered the answer that night, and will never be the same. The things I did to survive are too horrible to write. By the end, dozens of them were smashed and killed at my feet. There were many more behind the piles of the dead, but they held off. The wizard had lifted his hand.
The children made way for him as he approached the corner I had wedged myself into. I couldn’t stop shaking. There was blood in my eyes but whose?
He smiled as he presented his empty hands. Then, before I could stop him, he pressed his thumb and nail into my forehead. It burned. I seized his wrist but he was already backing away and smiling almost compassionately.
There was movement over his shoulder. From the fire, another child - the homoni - emerged, naked except for a coating of dark liquid dripping off him like sweat. He pointed at me but looked at the wizard.
“Carn?”
The old man nodded. “Carn.”
And the children came again, more ferocious and determined than before. I pushed and killed and felt my body weakening as their little hands tore away skin and hair.
Somehow, I made a way through to a door and then I was running.
“Carn!” the children called after me. “Carn! Carn!”
I didn’t slow until it became a question again.
“Carn? Carn?”
Only when I’d reached the interior of the tourist district in Bridal Veil Lake did I stop completely. I vomited onto the sidewalk and someone called the police. I didn’t stick around. Helga had told them what she’d seen, and they hadn’t helped.
I went home, showered, and checked my injuries.
While I could never forget that awful night, I thought at least the ordeal was over.
I was wrong.
The first one knocked on my door a few nights later.
“Carn?” he said like some fucked up trick-or treater. I shut the door but he wouldn’t go away. I had no choice. They aren’t real kids anyway, right? Homoni.
The next one got in while I was sleeping. I dreamt of ants biting my toes. I’m sure you can guess what I woke up to gnawing on me; lost a baby toe.
“Carn?” it asked after swallowing a piece of me. It’s the only fucking word they seem to know.
“Carn?” five asked a few days later as I showered. I got them. I killed them, I mean, but there are teeth marks and a deep grooving gash on the side of my neck that won’t heal right.
They kept coming. They keep coming.
I tried staying in a hotel. I even left Bridal Veil Lake for a week.
But nothing has worked.
They come hungry.
They want their meat.
They know how to find me.
What the fuck do I do?
“Oh hello, police? Hordes of cannibal children are hunting me. I’ve managed to kill them all so far, but I don’t know how long I can keep this up. Their bodies?”
Don’t ask me about the bodies.
I can’t keep them. I can’t risk taking them out the front door or burying them in the yard.
They’re not human.
Homoni.
Carn.
What’s the difference?
They don’t see one.
Why should I?
As I write these last words, there are rapid knocks on the door. It’s 3:24 AM. There are a dozen, maybe more, on the lawn. Children with empty eyes, underdressed for the cold, and dirty from neglect. This could be it, and I am afraid. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to know what it’ll be like to die this way. They feast before they kill. It seems to be their way, and it’s probably why I’m still alive.
I kill first.
But I’m not winning.
“Carn?” I’ll ask them and they will ask the same.
Then we’ll see who’s right.