The four o’clock-in-the-afternoon sun fell upon a Jeep Wrangler thundering down a long and winding road flanked by tall pines, baking the back and shoulders of its two passengers, one bearing the crows feet of middle age, the other youthful, strong, and blossoming from the latter stages of puberty.

“This Jeep is the best investment I’ve ever made.” The middle-aged man, Jim, said this with a smile on his face and the wind combing the sides of his greying head.

“Yeah, it is Dad.” The son grinned and set his elbow on the rim of the door. “It’s so beautiful here. It’s hard to believe that this place without buildings exists so near home. It’s just so beautiful. I wish we could do this every evening.”

Jim nodded and pressed the accelerator to keep their speed up as they crested a hill. “Yeah, we should, Park. You’re out of school for the summer so there’s no reason why we couldn’t.”

They came to a fork in the road and decelerated, obeying all traffic laws, as they approached a stop sign.

“Which way now, Park?”

Parker pondered and pointed to the right-most road.

Jim flashed his left blinker, though there was no one in sight behind or in front of them, and took the left-most road. Parker made a pained look.

“I was just asking to be nice. I went this way last week and took the right fork. I figured we could take the left one this evening, just to vary it.”

Parker opened his mouth wide and harrumphed mock-angrily.

A shiver crawled up his spine and diffused down his arms. “Should have brought a jacket,” said Parker. “Ooo—take that path.” He gesticulated toward a narrow dirt road on the right. Jim decelerated and took it, speeding up to splash through a large mud puddle made in the tracks of some other Jeep. To their left was a small roundabout where chopped wood was piled in neat rows, so Jim turned around there and headed back to the main road, not twenty feet away.

“Oh, come on, Dad! Be adventurous! Let’s see what’s down here!”

“No, no, no, this is someone’s property.” He flashed his blinker, turned, cruised back onto the paved road.

“I didn’t see a sign,” argued Parker.

Jim looked at him incredulously, like looking at a stranger. “Parkie? Is that you? Has some alien infested your body?” He took his right hand off the wheel and prodded his son in the arm. “Parker would never want me to illegally drive into someone’s property.”

Parker folded his arms over his chest and glared at his Dad. “I didn’t see a sign,” he reiterated. “Did you?”

“Nope,” Jim admitted.

Silence except for the roar of the wind as it froze their ears; goose bumps prickled all over their arms.

“What the hell,” said Jim, and made u-turn.

“There’s the Dad I know!” Parker gleefully punched his father on the arm and pointed out the dirt path, now on their left.

Tentatively, Jim took it, craning his head all around, looking for “No Trespassing” signs. He told Parker to look out for them, too.

Right as the main road left their view from the rearview mirror, Parker spotted it.

“There!” he said, and pointed.

“What does it say? I don’t have my glasses on me.”

Parker took out his phone and zoomed in. “Oh,” he giggled. “’No Photography.’ And here I am zooming in on it with my camera phone, ha-ha.”

“We should turn back, the road’s well-driven over, so someone probably lives here,” said Jim, concerned.

“I still don’t see any ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and there’s no fence. Clearly they don’t mind. Maybe it’s some celebrity, some country singer.”

“Fine, but not too much further.”

They drove on, with Jim frequently saying they should turn back, though never acting on his proclamations, and Parker cajoling him onward.

The dirt road finally ended, no fences, no signs, just spilled out into the ruins of a house—well, there was really no house at all, just the decrepit foundations of one.

“Cool,” whispered Parker huskily, a natural way of speaking in places like this. “It’s starting to rain,” he remarked quietly, looking up at the sunny sky. “Weird.”

“We’ll put the top up.”

They exited the Jeep, which still rumbled and grumbled with life, and worked together to pull the cover over their heads.

“Well, while we’re here…” said Parker, greedily rubbing his hands together and eyeing the intact cellar.

“No,” admonished Jim. “Let’s get in the Jeep and go back home. I don’t want the seats to get wet.”

“Oh, Dad, it’s just a light, light drizzle. It’ll end in five minutes. The sun’s still out.”

Jim didn’t feel good about trespassing, even if it was remote and abandoned. He ran his long, deft fingers through his grey hair and alternated his gaze between the cellar, the sky, his Chuck’s, the dirt road behind them where the main road was about a mile back, and some indistinct spot in the trees.

“Okay, just a peek for adventure’s sake. I haven’t had quite enough peril yet for the day.”

Parker gave his Dad a thumbs-up and advanced on the cellar doors. They were weathered but secure, and the lock keeping them closed was opened but in place on the ring.

“It probably doesn’t even work anymore,” Parker told his Dad who was coming back from turning off the Jeep, as he discarded the lock in the dirt. “It’s probably just where kids hang out to smoke and drink, Dad.” He gestured toward empty beer bottles scattered around. “Nothing to worry about.”

Parker opened one side of the cellar door, and a whoosh of stale air tinged with something rotten filled his nostrils, leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

“Awful smell,” he remarked. “That’s what happens when rats get trapped and die,” he told his Dad as if Jim needed to be told.

“Be careful, Park,” Jim ordered. “Those stairs don’t look at all trustworthy.” He sniffled as the smells greeted him, too, and exhaled them into his shirt tail.

Parker carefully picked his way down, poking his nose around for anything interesting because his eyes were useless in this dark. He thought he could hear sounds, not quite what he expected from rats and other cellar-dwellers, but nothing that might deter his sense of adventure.

“You all right, Dad?” he called behind him.

“I’m good. Just… whoops—gross. Stepped in something, but I’ll be fine.” Whatever that stench was clouded his head, made mere walking difficult. It was the smell of a cellar, stale and cooped up; but it was also something dead and rotting, like a rat corpse or something bigger, like a deer that had somehow found its way down and not been able to escape. Such a fate made Jim blanch—starving to death in the darkness, alone, that was no way for anything to die.

“I’ve found bottom!” shouted Parker.

“You don’t have to shout, I’m right behind you.”

“Wha—ouch!” Parker had walked backwards right into Jim. “Sorry, didn’t see ya.”

“It’s fine. Now that we’re down here, satisfied with what you see?” Jim passed a hand in front of his face, couldn’t see it in the dark, even with the light streaming in from the opened half of the cellar door at the top of the stairs. “Who needs such a deep cellar anyway?”

“Whoever used to live here. How old do you think this is?”

“No idea.”

“Let me find a light switch.”

“Park, it won’t work, no one’s lived here i—“

Parker’s hand found the switch and fumbled to flip it up, to on. Lights extending from the ceiling, like the kind you might see in a dungeon in an old movie, flickered on dully.

“That’s odd, someone must have put in some generator or—“

When Jim actually looked around, his jaw dropped, his hand went straight to his heart, and he stepped back a pace, bumping into the grimy wall behind him.

All around the room, which was extremely spacious, were littered bodies, dozens of them, but not quite corpses—yet. They were the source of the sound Parker had first heard, not the skittering of prowling rats but the tossing and turning and muffled moaning of the bodies as the light hit them and as they heard unfamiliar voices—the ones that could see or hear, that is. They were all horribly disfigured, scarred irreparably; some missing limbs—they were the lucky ones; others moaned without tongues, saw through empty sockets or gashed eyeballs, heard through bloody holes on the sides of their heads where ears once sat.

“Oh God, oh shit.” Jim clutched at his chest, feeling his heart thud! thud! thud! to bursting point.

In their horror, neither Parker nor Jim heard another Jeep park near theirs, nor the shadow quietly creep in through the opened cellar door. The harsh afterglow of shock receded and left Parker and Jim empty with untold grief and horror and disgust.

“We’ve—“ Parker gulped and futilely tried to find his center of calm. He was at the verge of hysterical tears—his voice betrayed him. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

“But what about these people?”

“We’ll call the police when we get back to the road. We’ve—Dad—let’s—“

Jim about-faced—

—and found himself face-to-face with a broad grin and terrible, gleeful eyes.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” said the grin.

Parker started, and staggered backwards, his heel tripping over an extended half-leg, and he fell on top of the wriggling bag of flesh—it was no longer a man, it had lost its humanity when nothing remained but its torso and head. Parker lay sprawled over it, struggling to get away; it struggling to cling to him. Parker cried out and crawled away, dripping with horror, swallowing the strong urge to vomit.

Jim remained upright, perhaps more upright than before. His muscles tensed, and he lost all ability to move as paralyzing enzymes flooded into his body. Everything froze, except for his eyes. They rolled around helplessly in their sockets. His tongue wagged in his mouth, incapable of speech—lost in a cataclysmic torrent of instinctive, raw fear.

“Imagine my surprise,” said the grinning stranger with a sinister air. “When I returned to find someone had taken my parking spot. O! how thrilled I am to have visitors, I have so few of them. And my playmates—“ he did not need to gesture to the inhabitants of the cellar “don’t provide much conversation for my sparkling intellect. It’s like talking to a sack of yodeling potatoes, ha-ha.”

Parker regained his wits first, pleading with the grinning stranger. “W-we don’t want any trouble. P-please don’t kill us. We’ll just leave.”

The grinning stranger advanced on Parker. “Do you not need to eat to live? Breathe? Drink? Sleep? We all have our… needs. Mine take a particularly creative avenue. I am no more a killer than you are, more a survivalist.”

“I don’t murder other humans,” braved Parker.

“’A man lusts to become a god… and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?’” The killer paused, as if waiting for an answer to his question. “David Zindell,” he hinted. “The Broken God.” His second hint. “No? You animals are so illiterate.”

Jim looked helplessly on in as much a pitiable state of uselessness and hopelessness as the half-humans discarded around the cellar.

“Do you believe in fate?” The killer dug into his breast pocket and withdrew a quarter, which he played with in his hands. “Some scientists have theorized that there are an infinite number of universes. Every tiniest choice, even your most nominal decision, spawns one more universe. And in that universe, another choice is made, and another, and another, and so on and so forth, until the number of universes explodes exponentially. The number is practically infinite. Think, in one universe, you didn’t drive down my road. In another, you didn’t discover the bottom of my cellar. But—“ at this part, he smiled playfully “in this one, you’re here.” His dark gaze drifted between the two, his words soaking in and inspiring terror. “And now what do we do? I’m a fair man.” The quarter flipped between his knuckles like magic. “I did not expect your company, I’ll be honest, so it will only be a trifling loss if you ‘escape.’ I’m a busy man, I don’t have time to chop up everyone I meet, so I’ll leave your fate up to this universe.”

The dark eyes of the serial killer flashed and landed on Jim. “You first.”

The coin flipped, flipped, flipped—landed on his left palm, then became hidden on top of his right hand.

“Call it.”

Jim stared at his fate, ready to be revealed at the sound of one word. He swallowed and looked hollowly into the face of the killer. It was a good-looking face, not the grotesque face of Count Orlock or hiding behind a mask, but a normal, handsome face, the kind of one with which, without having knowledge of what was behind it, Jim might want to go drinking. Except for those dark eyes and those sinister, brooding eyebrows, he thought. Except for those, a fine face.

“Call it,” reiterated the one holding fate in his hand.

“Heads,” gulped Jim.

The left hand lifted and revealed the profile of George Washington.

“You’re a lucky man. This universe smiles kindly upon you, but if you breathe one word to anyone—“ the killer lingered on that word “—I will find you, I will gut your mother, your father, your wife, every single fucking member of your family—and you will watch as I bleed the life out of them.” The promise resounded far away within Jim. He was numb, almost brain-dead, and incapable of nothing more than a slow nod. “Now—“ Parker suddenly became the center of attention. “You, boy.” The process repeated itself. “Call it.”

Parker stared at him with dull but resolute eyes. “No.”

“You have to call it,” said the killer, his tone dark and quiet as one eyebrow arched to reveal slight mystification.

“No, I’m not calling it.”

The killer sighed. “Then I’ll call it for you—heads.” He unveiled the boy’s fate: George Washington peeked back. “I’m sorry, but you—oof!”

Jim rebounded, stars twinkling in his eyes, from the headbutt to the killer’s stomach. The killer lay surprised and only slightly stunned, and his reflexes were kicking in. He deftly stood up, but crashed into the wall as Jim leaped at him, grabbed him around the abdomen and hurled the two of them away from Parker. The killer recovered quickly and bore down on Jim with menace, but exhaled a surprised “Gah!” when one of the mutilated creatures grabbed his leg with an unyielding grip that was a surprise to all. Adrenaline pumped into its veins as it saw its only chance at vastly improbable escape.

“Run, Dad! Get up!” Parker was pulling on his Dad’s arm, yanking him dazed to his feet, and practically carrying him up the stairs, two steps at a time. The killer bellowed from cellar, grappling with his victim.

Parker and Jim emerged into the light of dusk and barreled into the Jeep. They could see another Jeep Wrangler parked nearby, but not quite blocking their escape. Jim haphazardly jerked the manual into reverse and flew down the dirt road at an alarming speed, swinging onto the main road and narrowly missing another car.

Neither of them spoke a single word, nor did they really take any breath more than shallow ones bringing in just enough oxygen to keep them alive, their hearts thumping, thumping, thumping.

Back in civilization, they rolled to a stop at a BP station.

Jim looked to Parker, hollow, changed eyes.

“We can never talk about this.”

Parker knew it to be true; he also knew that nothing would ever be the same again. This would haunt them until the day they were both dead and buried, with their secrets gorging the worms alongside their corporeal bodies. If there was such a thing as a soul, maybe they could finally be free from the torment after death when there was no body or mind to bear the horror.

The killer did not pursue them. He kept true to his word, that only going to the police would trigger the murders of their loved ones. They escaped, fate was in their favor, and who was anyone to argue with her? They never saw the man in the cellar again or the half-alive bodies that writhed and moaned, alone… in the dark, except in sleep when their eyes had grown too tired to stay open, they entered, gnawing at air and speaking without tongues, reaching… grasping, pulling them under, into the darkness... and the mad cackling and the dark, haunting eyes of the man who had doomed them as he lowered his blade into their mouths… only in nightmares.