Asylum Cake

~ Eric Witchey

I was the last ghost hunter in the haunted asylum. My three-person crew, Garret, Lindon, and Svetlana, had all bolted by one a.m.

Garret first.

We had just put several dozen organic eggs, a monster tub of real butter, and a few gallons of whole milk in the abandoned asylum kitchen. Any real ghostly presence would spoil the eggs, curdle the milk, and make the butter go rancid. I didn’t like the low-tech ghost detectors, but enough self-appointed expert viewers had left us follower comments that high-tech tools fritzed when real ghosts made an appearance. We added backup to make them happy.

Garret checked the eggs and sniffed the dairy. Into his lapel mic, he said, “1:00:00 a.m. The eggs and dairy are fine.”

As if his words were an incantation, the disconnected industrial dispose-all started up on its own.

I got a five second, wide-eyed night-vision selfie from his head-mounted GoPro before my equipment man turned to me and said, “Screw this shit. I didn’t sign up for real ghosts.”

He bolted. His custom Electromagnetic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) detector and hand-held infrared camera hit the slick tile floor. To my amazement, neither one shattered. Unfortunately, his night-vision headset went with him.

The equipment in my van caught his footage, but I never saw him or the headset again.

Lindon, my roving cameraman, abandoned us second.

He had just arrived to see what was up with Garret when the double doors to the walk-in pantry opened like jaws. Rusted can, rotted label, and spoiled bean stink poured out on a column of cold air just before an ectoplasmic hand grabbed his loose shirt and pulled him toward the pantry maw.

Static from the EVP on the floor died, and a man’s clear, midwestern-accented words sounded out. “Turn on the lights! Turn them on!”

Lindon spun faster than an Olympic diver to break the gooey grip then sprinted even faster than Garret, leaving nothing behind except the echo of his girly scream.

Svetlana, my medium, was made of strong Romani stuff. After watching the tail end of Lindon’s encounter and hearing the EVP, she cursed the ghost and me in Russian then took a flask from a hip holster she had worn since I first met her. We had all joked about her belt having more pockets and better stuff than Batman’s utility belt.

I thought, Good. holy water. She came prepared.

She had come prepared, and I suppose she might have thought she had brought holy water.

“Vodka,” she said. She popped the cap and slammed back a deep swallow like the Ruska Roma she was. She then handed it to me. “Is good. Is for nerves.”

After what I experienced in my hour in the Willamette Hills Out-Patient Retreat and Asylum, you bet I hit that flask. For nerves, you know?

I was in the reality YouTuber and general streaming game as a way of sharing my quest to find real ghosts and crowd-sourcing research, but I was the only true believer in my crew. The two guys joined me because hey, reality TV, TikTok Followers, Instagram, and YouTube. For them, identity relevance meant being seen doing things other people hoped were real.

Svetlana hadn’t joined us to build a community of channel monkeys feeding on content. In her interview, she said, “I come here because Prababushka . . . How you say?”

“Grandmother?”

“Ah. No. Great Grandmother says to me, ‘Go there with that boy.’”

I figured she was either adlibbing script to impress her maybe new boss or coming on to me. I’d had influencer groupies before, and she was kind of hot in an “I’ll kick your ass if you piss me off tattooed Russian ninja chick sort of way.”

I liked her and her story. I liked her because, well… Because I liked her. I liked her story because the Great Grandmother who told her to interview for the job had been dead for five decades. Combining her hot vibe and the story, I didn’t care what her real reasons were.

Even so, when the ancient tank of an industrial cake mixer started up on its own, she calmly handed me her vodka and said, “You nice boy. Not so smart American, but nice. I hope you live.” Then, she turned and calmly walked out of the building without another word.

Which put me in the middle of a 1 a.m. dark asylum kitchen listening to rustling in the pantry, a spinning industrial cake mixer, a grinding dispose-all, and, unexpectedly, a never before absolutely clear-voiced EVP monitor.

“Turn on the fucking lights!” the EVP screamed. “Turn on the God-damned LIGHTS!”

Precedents that tell you what to do when encountering real ghosts don’t exist. I mean, most of the shit you hear about or see on social media is just made up. Ninety percent is scripted to gain followers.

In the olden days before social media, there was that Hans Holzer guy and his friends. In the 1950s and 60s, they did their best to investigate and document. Back in Hans’s day, ghost hunters had to be dead serious because they were going to have to live with ridicule and ignominy. Today, all the online and channel-show ghost hunters pretend to use his discovery and documentation methods modified with a few tech updates. A bored population craves the adrenaline boost of a scream in the dark. Visuals and suspense for media feeds are more important than meeting actual ghosts.

Don’t get me wrong. No way I was above a boost in “Like, Subscribe, and Click on the Bell.” I had my silver YouTube plaque, and my Insta had 100k followers, and I figured my crew bolting one-by-one would send my Night in the Asylum video viral. From the garnering sponsors perspective, the shoot was already done, but there was no way I could leave without learning more. Like I said, I got into it for real ghosts.

By phone flashlight, I found the light switches next to the swinging metal double doors from the kitchen to the asylum’s cafeteria. I tossed the switches—all six of them. The place had been abandoned for over a decade, and Garret and Lindon had assured me the whole facility was completely disconnected from the grid. I didn’t expect lights, but I did hope for a response from the ghost/poltergeist/whatever the hell was living out its afterlife in the kitchen and giving such a clear EVP signal.

The lights came on.

Like, there’s no power in the building, but the lights came on.

Like, all the lights.

The kitchen lights, the pantry lights, the cafeteria lights, the patient room corridor access lights, and probably all the office and dormitory and rec room lights, too, though I couldn’t see them from the kitchen.

In an EVP digital voice I swear sounded profoundly relieved, the box said, “Oh, thank fucking god.”

Corny, and a little late, I know, but I was scared, so I fell back on my lame scripted patter. “If there is any presence in this place, any spirit with unfinished business, please make yourself known to—”

The mixer stopped. The dispose-all stopped. The noise in the pantry stopped.

My ears strained for anything reassuring in the silence.

The EVP spoke. “Thanks!”

That made me jump and think it would be a really good time to return Svetlana’s flask.

Before I followed my crew, the thing went on. “I’ve been trying to get someone to turn on those lights for twelve years. Twelve years! I thought I’d go insane. Every damned night, living in terror.”

Hand on the flask and eye on the doors, I said, “Uh, okay.” My script was scrap. Bravely adlibbing, I asked, “Why?”

The EVP, still on the floor, had a QLED touchscreen. It flashed as the apparition spoke. “You know this is an asylum, right?”

“Uh, yes.”

“And you came her to find ghosts because you figured there would be disturbed spirits?”

“Yeah . . . ?”

“Maybe some real nut jobs? Serial killers? Sociopaths? Psychopaths?”

“Maybe. I suppose.”

“Idiots. They all come here for that, but it isn’t that kind of asylum.”

The giant mixer snapped on again, spun the massive twisting, off-center mixing blades through one revolution, and stopped.

A little stunned, I mean I was talking to some kind of disembodied spirit, I asked, “What kind of asylum is it?”

“For rich folks. Phobias, mostly. A few low-intensity personality disorders.”

Grasping for some sense of who I was talking to, I asked, “Were you a doctor?”

“Cook.”

“You were the cook?”

“Didn’t I just say that? Look around, ghost hunter. You’re standing in a kitchen. Did you come here because the volleyball court was haunted? The tennis court? The patient rooms?”

“You had a volleyball court here?”

“No.” Static squawked from the EVP. “Catch up, man. I made that up to make a point.”

I felt silly. The ghost was right. We had packed up the van and driven four hours from Vancouver WA to the middle of nowhere coastal foothills Oregon forest to check out the haunted kitchen stories about the Willamette Hills Out-Patient Retreat and Asylum. “Yeah,” I said. “We came to check out the stories about the kitchen.”

“It’s not rocket science. Kitchen ghost. Cook.”

“And the thing with the lights?

“Nyctophobia. Perk of the job. Free therapy. I’m afraid of the dark.”

God, I hoped the Wi-Fi tethered recorders in the truck were storing all this. My mic was on. So was my head strapped GoPro. The EVP had been online when Garret bolted, but you never knew if what you believed you were hearing was the same as what the equipment picked up. “Did you die here?”

“Well, duh. Are you a ghost hunter?”

Trying to calm the spirit and get past his snark, I asked, “How?”

“Hobart.” The mixer clicked and spun up to a pretty good whining, twisting mix pace.

“Was Hobart a patient?”

The mixer stopped. “Hobart is the company that built the mixer.”

I checked out the massive machine bolted to the floor. The metal bowl had wheels and was big enough for me and Svetlana to hide in. The metal paddles that mixed whatever went in that bowl looked like two multi-tined forks the size of tennis rackets spinning and twisting in and out of one another’s orbits. “How the hell did that thing kill you?”

“It was installed in the 60s. No safety features.”

“You would have had to climb in the bowl. Why would you do that?”

“It was the week we were closing. I still needed therapy, and I was pretty bummed about losing my free appointments.”

The reason the ghost was stuck on the mortal plane seemed to be coming into focus. “You suicided.”

“Hell, no!”

My plan to calm the spirit wasn’t going well. “I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“I’m interested. I want to know what happened.”

“You’d be the first.”

“I turned on the lights.”

The EVP went silent for three of my exploding heartbeats before the cook said, “Baking a goodbye cake for all the staff and patients meant using the big mixer, but I wasn’t happy about it.”

“An afraid of the dark cook who died baking a cake—that’s your story?”

“You wanted a ghost. You found one. Now, you want what? Napoleon? Hitler? Maybe Marie Curie glowing in the dark and cackling?” The mixer stopped. “Selfish much?”

“I’m sorry.” And I was. I mean, talking to that ghost was everything I’d hoped for, and everything I said seemed to upset it.

The ghost seemed to sense my sincerity. “Technically,” it said, “I died mixing the batter. Gordo Tenston, who called himself The Prankster Orderly, stuck a hand in from the cafeteria and flipped the lights off. He thought that kind of thing was funny, and they couldn’t exactly fire him in the last week of operations. The asshole had Borderline Personality Disorder and loved triggering phobias because he had decided they were all faked.”

“So the sudden dark scared you to death?”

“I told you. Hobart. Mixer. I was startled. I jumped enough that my hand got caught between the mixer blades. By the time anybody showed up, I was pulled into the batter and beaten into red dye number 2.”

That was a little more graphic than I wanted. YouTube might demonetize me if I didn’t cut that part, but the cook who died making a goodbye cake was brilliant quirky stuff. Nobody had done anything like it, and I had a real ghost talking to me. Finally. In that moment, I wished Svetlana were still with me. She’d have at least pretended to understand my excitement.

“Fear of the dark, then,” I said, “and a goodbye cake.”

“Look,” the ghost said, “Do you mind if I work while we talk?”

“No.”

The pantry started to rattle. The doors opened again, and ingredients started to file out of the closet in a silent Sorcerer’s Apprentice sort of floating dance.

I was thinking, I’m so totally going to be rolling in sponsors.

The giant Hobart mixer spun up. A spray hose from the sink stretched out and poured water into the giant metal mixing bowl.

“A cake?” I asked.

“Unfinished business,” the cook said. “Twelve years of night terror gives a ghost a craving for a calming ritual. Baking is sort of my thing.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“Bake in the light? Not how it works. I can’t haunt in the daytime, and I’m too scared to bake in the dark. Hell, I can’t even move.”

“But you rattled the cupboards and touched people and stuff.”

“I hid in the pantry, shook in my ectoplasmic skin, and tried to get people to help me.”

I supposed that made some sense. “And nobody would turn on the lights?”

“You saw what happened when I tried to get your friends’ attention.”

“Oh.”

I watched the ingredients, including all the eggs, milk, and butter we had brought, mixing for a while then kicked myself for not thinking of setting up more coverage.

While the ghost mixed and baked, I went to the van and brought in extra cameras to catch all the footage I could.

Several bowls of different colored icing made themselves while the batter in huge cake pans baked. About three a.m., the layers of a massive cake came out of the oven, floated across the kitchen to a counter, and stacked themselves. A spreading spatula rose from a drawer, dipped into icing bowls, and spread sweet goo over the layers.

“The asylum is empty,” I said. “Who’s going to eat all this?”

“You,” the cook said, “for one. Others will show up. Bake a cake, people show up to eat it. Of course, I’ve never gotten this far before, so maybe not.”

I checked my cameras and recorders.

“As thanks for the eggs and dairy, here’s some advice,” the ghost said, “Set up a couple cameras in the cafeteria.”

I did. If you’re a ghost hunter, you don’t argue when a ghost gives you ghost hunting advice.

The finished cake, a gorgeous thing decorated with marbled swirls of brilliant colors and a single sparkling red calligraphy word, “Goodbye,” rose from the counter and floated to the cafeteria doors.

Instinctively, I pushed the doors open.

“Thanks,” the cook said.

“No problem.”

The cake passed through and settled itself on a table. A moment later, a cake knife the size of my arm floated out of the kitchen and poised over the cake.

As soon as the blade touched icing, the entire cafeteria filled with ghostly forms: amorphous spectral wraiths, transparent shambling people in hospital gowns, white-coated doctors and nurses, a couple of janitors, and a handful of casually dressed ghosts who might have just walked in off the street.

“They all died here?”

The cook said, “No, but they all know how important it is to celebrate healing.”

Trying to make sense of the confusing gathering of specters, I said, “Your intention in the baking determined who showed up?”

“You’re trying too hard,” the cook said. “Just enjoy the party. Have some cake.”

The cake sliced itself. The assembled ghosts ate and chatted and clapped. As the cake disappeared, they even sang oldie ‘80s disco and ‘90s alternative rock songs like bored old people on a European tour bus.

I caught every detail in glorious 4k digital.

When the last ghost finished the last piece of cake, all the apparitions disappeared. A loud, metallic clank shook the walls of the asylum, and the building went dark.

In that first moment of absolute darkness and silence, I discovered my own loneliness in my lost connection to the nyctophobic baker. “Cook?” I asked the silent darkness.

No response.

By the light of my phone, I made my way back to the kitchen. “Cook?”

The EVP monitor cast a low, silent glow on a few floor tiles.

Behind me, a door squeaked.

I jumped and turned.

Svetlana strode in, her hand-held utility belt flashlight burning a white, high-intensity LED beam through the darkness.

Grateful for her stoic company, I said, “They’re gone.”

“They?”

“The cook, the doctors, the patients.”

“For decade,” she said.

“They were here. I talked to them. Filmed them.”

“Great Grandmother say ghosts only can talk at night.”

“It is night. They were just here.”

“Is dawn,” she said. “Sun up now. No window here.”

“Oh.”

She swept her light around the kitchen. The beam stopped on a top hat-sized triple-layered cake bearing a calligraphy message. “Thank you. Fill the darkness with light.”

Svetlana asked, “You bake?”

I said, “No.”

“Ah,” she said. “Outside, Svetlana is walking on road. Great Grandmama appears. She says to me, ‘You go share boy’s cake.’”

“Really?”

She smiled, nodded, and crossed to the cake.

As morning light filtered through the windows of the asylum and a diffuse glow reflected into the kitchen, Svetlana and I enjoyed the ghost cook’s gift. After the last delicious bite, she said, “We are done here?”

“Yeah. They’re not coming back.”

“Okay.” She holstered her flashlight and gave me a sweet, icing-covered peck on the cheek.

A week later, Svetlana and I argued over whether to let Great Grandmother take the night shift driving, agreed to try it, set the GPS destination to our next investigation, and posted the asylum video.

Comments poured in, as they do . . .

Eric Witchey has sold stories under several names and in 12 genres. His tales have been translated into multiple languages, and his credits include over 160 stories, including 5 novels and two collections. He has taught over 200 conference seminars and classes at 2 universities and a community college. His work has received recognition from New Century Writers, Writers of the Future, Writer’s Digest, Independent Publisher Book Awards, International Book Awards, The Eric Hoffer Prose Award Program, Short Story America, the Irish Aeon Awards, and other organizations.

Eric Witchey’s How-to articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer’s Digest Magazine, and other print and online magazines.

[ issue 9 : spring 2023 ]

Bones Placed in Apposition

~ A. P. Howell

Featherstonhaugh glanced upward at the old State House. Lukens’s new four-sided clock was an impressive feat of engineering, but there was something to the criticism of its legibility at a distance, especially when the sun was bright and the viewer’s eyes less sharp than a young man’s. The steeple’s white paint stood out brilliantly against a cloudless sky, and the clock confirmed Featherstonehaugh was on time for his appointment. He crossed Chestnut Street, avoiding horse droppings with an ease borne of extended periods of urban living.

He stood now in the heart of Philadelphia, which was—or at least had been—the heart of the new country. On the corner, City Hall bustled with the thousand and one tasks necessary to maintain a city of eighty thousand souls. When Featherstonhaugh had first arrived in the city, the Supreme Court had but lately relocated to the new capital, and the locals had often lapsed into calling the building the “old courthouse” or “new city hall.” Across Fifth Street sat the Library Company of Philadelphia, soon to be celebrating its centennial.

Featherstonhaugh’s destination was a brick building standing proudly beside City Hall on Fifth Street: Philosophical Hall. One of many noble institutions shepherded into existence by Franklin and like-minded contemporaries, the American Philosophical Society was a jewel of American intellectual life. It was devoted not merely to the acquisition of learned volumes, in the manner of the Library Company, but to expanding knowledge on all manner of subjects.

This was a worthy goal in general, but particularly necessary in America. An entire continent of mysteries laid waiting for discovery and documentation. As rich as European intellectual society might be, correspondence could go only so far. Home-grown intellectuals were needed to advance knowledge, solve problems particular to the United States, and make use of its natural resources.

“Good afternoon!” Hays called as Featherstonhaugh stepped inside. He waited on the second floor, leaning against the banister and looking entirely comfortable in this temple of learning.

“I am most happy we found a mutually agreeable time.” Featherstonhaugh did not whisper as he ascended, but pitched his voice politely low. A murmur of voices from behind closed doors indicated a university class in session or some other consultation. The other man had not precisely been rude—especially if he happened to know the other conversation was of little consequence—but Featherstonhaugh chose to err on the side of propriety.

Hays was a medical man in his thirties. Featherstonhaugh understood he had formerly been involved in his family’s East India trade, but had apparently found himself ill-suited to the work. He had developed something of a name as a natural scientist and had literary ambitions, having already produced writing in the medical field. He was unmarried, a fact Featherstonhaugh could not help but look upon with a hint of suspicion and pity. He wondered a bit at the temperament of a man who had not yet settled into matrimony.

By Hays’s age, Featherstonhaugh had been a new father, married for half a decade. Memories of Sally still pained him. Thoughts of his boys brought forth painful details of the girls’ final days. Instead, he considered Charlotte, her genteel upbringing and charming Virginia accent.

Languages had always been among Featherstonehaugh’s interests. If not for his fascination in the subject, he would not have come to America, would not have settled here (settled: that was true, and infinitely safer than met Sally). He would not have met Charlotte with her charming accent and the youth that was lost to him, and would have neither needed nor found a second chance at domestic life.

Thoughts of mortality brought him round to the reason it was Hays ushering him into a second floor room, and not the author of the article that had caught his interest.

“I am sorry to have missed Godman’s lecture, and sorrier for his passing,” Featherstonhaugh said. “He had been ill for some time, I believe?”

Hays nodded. “But though it did not come as a surprise, he still passed too young. He will be missed. His mind is a great loss to the medical community, and to America’s natural historians.”

“His Transactions paper piqued my interest. A new genus and species of elephant . . . it is a bold claim.”

“So Harlan says,” Hays noted. “He also believed he described Lewis and Clark’s Iowa fossil adequately, before I corrected his work with my Saurodon. He cannot be said to understand reptiles, for all the words he writes on the subject, much less mammals. And were Godman here, I am certain he would remind you of the man’s plagiarism.”

Featherstonhaugh shrugged, suspecting that Godman would have a good deal more to say on the subject of Harlan. Philadelphia’s natural historians’ opinions about one another were no less passionate than their opinions on scientific matters. “That is why I wish to see the specimen myself. As masterful as Peale’s illustrations may be, there is something to be said for direct observation.”

Hays unlocked a cabinet. “The vertebrae, ribs, and bones of the limbs are available for your examination as well, and may be of interest since illustrations did not accompany Godman’s article. But you are no doubt here for these.” Hays carefully transferred the skull and jaw fragments to a table.

The largest intact section of the upper jawbone was seventeen inches in length. Five inches of upper tusk rested within their sockets, with another twelve inches exposed on the right side and ten on the left. A good seven and a half inches in circumference where they emerged from the socket, the tusks did not begin to narrow to a point until the final four inches of their length. The patterns of wear had been represented to a fair degree of accuracy in Peale’s illustrations.

Featherstonhaugh paid particular attention to the lower jaw, the formation of which had so strongly captured Godman’s attention. It was indeed dramatically elongated at the extremity, the angles more rectangular than the curvature he had observed in other mastodon specimens. A full three inches of tusk rested in the socket; the exposed portion, about one inch in length, was covered with black enamel and ended with a spiral twist. He pressed a thumbnail into dry, grayish bone of the tusk and felt it yield.

“It is similar to the mastodon,” Featherstonhaugh said, “as Godman himself noted. The wear upon the milk teeth reveals only surface enamel, as in the mastodon, not the elephant . . .”

“Not any elephant heretofore known,” Hays said.

Featherstonhaugh continued to examine the lower jaw. “They are, without doubt, milk teeth. Godman is certainly correct in his assertion that this is a juvenile animal.”

“Yes, that is quite clear.”

Featherstonhaugh frowned, more at the prickliness creeping into the other man’s tone than at any feature of the long-dead animal before him, and squinted at the sockets of the tusks. “The elongation of the jaw is indeed interesting.”

“If I may.” Hays reached into a pocket to produce a pair of spectacles. “These may be of some use.”

Featherstone set the jawbone carefully upon the table. “Do you mean to insult my observations? Or have you invented lenses to ease the work of natural scientists?”

“More the latter,” Hays said, in pale imitation of Featherstonhaugh’s attempted jocularity. “I seek to work at the forefront of ophthalmology. Our eyes fail, whether through disease or age or mischance. But with research, skill, and the proper diagnosis and intervention, what has gone wrong may be put right.”

Featherstonhaugh took the spectacles, always interested in the state of scientific advances. The frames were wire, functional, and sturdy; though hardly fashionable, neither were they unnecessarily unattractive. The lenses themselves appeared well-made, which was unsurprising with the resources at Hays’s disposal. With a casual examination, Featherstonhaugh could not discern the lenses’ intent; there was none of the distortion one might expect in a pair of spectacles made to correct either far-sightedness or myopia.

He hooked them over his ears, expecting the blurriness of wearing another’s spectacles, but his vision remained unchanged. If not for the visible wire of the frames within his field of view, he would not have known he wore them. He wondered if this was some joke of Hays’s, or if the man’s skill did not extend to lens-grinding. But Featherstonehaugh’s concern about politic statements were rendered moot.

Hays lifted the upper and lower jaws, one in each hand. This seemed unnecessarily cavalier: though the lower jaw was only one foot in length, the upper jaw was half again as long and further unbalanced by twelve inches of tusk. Featherstonhaugh wondered if he was to play witness to a careless loss to natural history and a strike to Hays’s reputation.

But Hays proved dexterous and settled the jaws together as they would have met in life. The right side of the head was, as promised in Godman’s text and Peale’s plates, in excellent condition. Held together, Featherstonhaugh could see the animal as it would have been in life, a youngster more kin to elephants than mastodons, and utterly (if subtly) distinct from all other known species. Tetracauldodon mastodontoideum.

He imagined layers of muscle and flesh and fur, tendons snaking between bones, those jaws opening and closing. He extrapolated the rest of the body, and after that the effects of maturity. But for whatever mischance had killed the beast, it would have grown to adulthood. He could picture it striding across the continent with its fellows. This one had died in Orange County, and why would it not have roamed Featherstonehaugh’s old estate? Tromping over hills and fields yet to be planted, a place where one day a house would be built, sheep imported, fields tilled . . .

Featherstonhaugh blinked hard at an incipient headache. He removed the spectacles and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, his vision was doubled. Two identical sets of bones, one belonging to an elephant and one to a mastodon, were superimposed upon one another.

He blinked again. His eyes began to focus properly, as though a film had been removed. Hays still held the bones, but they were only that: the bones of a long-dead creature, shattered and incomplete. They told a story to those who knew how to look at them, but not nearly so interesting or vibrant a story as the one he had just seen.

He folded the spectacles closed and placed them on the table. Though dizzy, he did not fall.

Hays watched him with evident concern, but Featherstonhaugh was not prepared to assume the other man had his best interests at heart. “The right side of the head is, indeed, beautifully preserved.” There was a tremor in his voice. He swallowed and the action or the pause proved helpful.

Hays set the bones down once more. “Do you wish to continue your examination?”

Featherstonhaugh followed the other man’s gaze, not to the bones but to the spectacles. He had the inkling that Hays cared little for his opinions of the ancient animal. “No, thank you.” His voice was steadier, at least. “Having seen the specimen, I will look at others to compare. Perhaps I will return later.”

“Viewing evidence with fresh eyes is valuable,” Hays said.

With an effort, Featherstonhaugh refrained from shuddering and beat a passably dignified retreat. He kept one hand on the curving banister. He was lightheaded, as though untethered. He feared that he might slip and smash open his skull, or that he might float away entirely.

Hays, chatting politely, seemed infinitely more embedded—in his body, in this city, in this reality. It was a preposterous illusion, of course. Featherstonhaugh was no less real than the man beside him. And though he had been born across the ocean, though his family was not part of Philadelphia society, though he was only part of New York society by virtue of his marriage, he had no less right to occupy this place than Hays.

And yet it was Hays who remained within Philosophical Hall, and Featherstonhaugh who walked away.

The State House clock showed how little time had passed, how little time was necessary to shake the foundations of one’s world. But the clock also served as a reminder of its maker, Lukens, and his crusade against Redheffer’s spurious perpetual motion machine. It had taken time and effort for Lukens to build a machine that proved Redheffer’s a fraud, but prove it he did, and in this very city.

Featherstonhaugh took a steadying breath. He did not know what Hays had done—yet. But he had some guesses as to why he had done it. The cliques of Philadelphia’s intellectual community were well-known, and those alliances could be stronger than the allegiance to truth which every man of science ought to hold dear. Misguided loyalty was bad enough; engaging in fraud was far less forgivable. Featherstonhaugh was not by nature a particularly forgiving man, and he had no intention of letting Hays win the game he played.

It was not merely an affront to natural history, but to Featherstonhaugh personally. To conjure forth a nonexistent creature, to suggest that it had walked the same hillsides as Featherstonaugh himself . . . The image was, suddenly, quite unbearable. He could almost feel the erasure of some essential, if hitherto unknown, aspect of his old estate. A juvenile mastodon, that was right and proper. That belonged to the far-distant past of the place where he had raised children and imported the best agricultural products.

Featherstonhaugh meant to prove that elephants had never meandered across his old estate, or any other part of the continent. The days of Tetracauldodon mastodontoideum were numbered. He was a geologist, well-positioned to argue the truth of the matter.

As he walked, his determination and confidence grew. He had no destination in mind, but took great comfort from the cobblestones beneath his feet. No matter what he had seen—or thought he had seen, or been forced to see—the stones were real. The very bones of the continent were real, and he meant to understand their true shape.

A. P. Howell lives with her spouse and their two kids, sometimes near a lake and always near trees. She has a master’s degree in history and her jobs have spanned the alphabet from archivist to webmaster.

Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of places, including Daily Science Fiction, Little Blue Marble, Martian: The Magazine of Science Fiction Drabbles, Translunar Travelers Lounge, In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror (Tenebrous Press), and Los Suelos, CA (Surface Dweller Studios). She can be found online at aphowell.com or tweeting @APHowell.

 [ issue 7 : summer 2022 ]