Trembling With Fear 3-3-24
Greetings, children of the dark. I’m writing this on 29 February, that day which only happens once every four years. Today, I’m struggling. I am so fatigued I can barely function. I wish I could blame the extra day, but I fear it’s just chronic health issues rearing their ugly heads. So, to inspire—and mainly to distract—I’ve been pondering the folklore around leap years. I jumped on Tradfolk.co to see what they said.
There is, of course, the well-known tradition around leap day proposals. Back in the day, 29 February was designated as the day when women could propose to men—according to Irish legend, it was declared so by St Patrick himself. While it’s generally considered a myth, I quite like the idea that men who turned the lady down had to respond by giving her a gift of a frock or some nice gloves. Staying with the Celts, Scottish tradition says babies born in a leap year would only experience a life of hardship; there’s similar beliefs in Germany and Greece. Marriages that happen in a leap year are said to end in divorce or the death of a spouse in those same countries. And finally, they say in English folklore that a leap year causes broad beans to grow “the wrong way”. Whatever that might mean!
The question, dear reader, is what strangely dark and speculative stories you could be telling based around leap year lore? It feels ripe for the picking.
This week’s TWF menu doesn’t feature much by way of leap year-infused delectations, but it does seem to have formed a consumption theme. Purely coincidental, I promise. First, Joelle Killian’s all-consuming client has a certain need. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:
- Íde Hennessy’s webs,
- Bruce Buchanan’s tea, and
- AW Voelkel’s infestation.
Over to you, Stuart.
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Joelle Killian
Treatment of the All-Consuming Client, by Joelle Killian
Maddy white-knuckled the worn arms of the chair and stifled a yawn as her client monologued about his engineering firm’s HR policies. The wall clock ticked; only two minutes had passed since she’d last checked. Either Nolan was feeding off her life essence, or she was the most incompetent therapist on the planet.
She rolled her shoulders, the gravel under her scapula clicking and popping, then chugged the dregs of her lukewarm vanilla latte. “Nolan, maybe we can come back to the concerns your boss mentioned in your referral to our clinic?”
He fixed his vacant blue eyes on her. “As I mentioned to my lawyer, the referral form 2139a does not provide space for employee rebuttal to the manager’s comments, a discriminatory process which I intend on…”
Fail. Maddy’s gaze locked onto the generic therapy-office photo of a lotus flower above his head as her consciousness detached from her body and floated away like a balloon. Not enough caffeine in the world to keep her anchored.
“I’m listening for the emotions behind his wall of words,” Maddy confessed two days later in supervision, her head throbbing with the onset of a migraine. “But I’m struggling to get through to him, and I leave our sessions feeling drained and depleted.” She also hadn’t heard half of what Nolan had said last time, which might be next-level unprofessional.
“It sounds like he’s regressed to an oral-sadistic stage of infantile development.” Her clinical supervisor peered over the tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her nose. “So it’s only a matter of time till he projects the role of his persecutor onto you and retaliates. But surviving his attempts to consume you will help him internalize the consistency absent from his childhood.”
Maddy scribbled these incantations in her notebook: survive destruction, earn his trust. But the spell of her supervisor’s brilliance evaporated by the time she read them over at her desk, right before Nolan’s next session, rendering these suggestions incomprehensible. What therapeutic sorcery would demonstrate her supportive presence, that she was here for him? She tossed the notebook into her desk drawer.
“Yes, I see.” She nodded along to Nolan’s stories like a bobblehead, scrunching her eyebrows in a simulacrum of sympathy. “But I’m curious how you felt about your performance improvement plan.”
“Being compelled to speak with a therapist who is willfully ignorant about our annual review process is tantamount to harassment. Which I have documented in my most recent grievance to the board…” His jaw moved mechanically, his stony face unchanging as Maddy sensed herself being drained by dozens of hungry little mouths, each of them sucking her vitality through a straw. A sensation that nothing in her training had prepared her for.
Maybe she was just having a hypoglycemic moment. She inhaled and clutched both her thighs, willing herself to stay present. Which is when she noticed her elbow skin flaking, a honeycomb-patterned rash spreading over her forearms.
Nolan, however, looked more substantial and solid. Well-fed.
Stumbling to her desk afterwards, her joints ached and bones creaked like she’d aged a decade in the last hour. She crawled home from work, pale with dark half-moons carved under her eyes, and called her doctor’s office from a puddle of Maddy-shaped goo on the floor.
#
Maddy’s doctor flipped through her chart during their appointment, her eyebrows furrowed. “Did you donate a lot of blood recently?”
Maddy shook her head, clutching the paper gown tight around her. “Why?
“Your hemoglobin is very low.” Her doctor tapped one manicured finger at the normal ranges on her labs, then Maddy’s scores. “You’re acutely anemic right now.”
“Yikes.” Maddy’s eyes watered, overpowered by the antiseptic stink of the office. “So what should I do?”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be hospitalized if you don’t get your iron stores up. Let’s book you for an infusion on Tuesday.” Her doctor handed her a referral slip. “In the meantime: go eat a steak dinner tonight, OK?”
“I don’t know what it is about him,” Maddy told her colleagues at happy hour that evening. “I’ve had angry clients scream at me, needy clients stalk me, and paranoid clients accuse me of manipulating their dreams. But I’m not sure I can survive this one.” Her eyes watered as she stared down at the hunk of meat on her plate, charred on the outside with an oozing pink center. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Try visualizing an energy shield for psychic protection.” Her co-worker nearly knocked over her margarita as she waved her arms around in a circle, dispersing the scent of amber patchouli through the air. “Smudge the room before he arrives, then open the windows after to release the toxins.”
Maddy suppressed a grimace: so predictable. But maybe it was worth a try this time.
#
Maddy imagined a translucent white bubble of light surrounding her body as she fetched Nolan from the waiting room, his blond hair neatly parted and his shoes shining. Did his skin have a rosy glow now?
She shut her office door with a soft click, the white noise machine roaring just outside in the hallway. “Welcome,” she began. “Where would you like to start?”
“Hello, Maddy.” He perched on the couch across from her, his mouth in a smug twist. “You don’t look so well today.”
“Oh.” She tugged at her shirt sleeves, trying to cover her flaky elbows, the fading rash. “Interesting, tell me more about why you think I don’t look so well today.” Since when did Nolan notice her existence? But maybe her therapeutic mask was slipping. Or maybe he was the only one who could see what was happening to her.
“Your supervisor would be very disappointed with your unprofessional comportment, Maddy.” His eyes glittered with parasitic hunger. “As I clearly stated in my all-staff memo about proper office attire…”
Jesus, not this again. Maddy felt herself collapsing, then refocused her attention, breathing sunbeams into her bubble. Psychic protection: check.
And then Nolan launched into a twenty-minute rant about line changes in the employee handbook that shattered her defenses, her bones dissolving with each microscopic detail. He inflated, engorged like a tick on her misery.
She reached out for her bubble, tried to cling to her corporeal form, but those hungry mouths echoing his invocations siphoned her essence. Her heart shuddered in her chest like the tick of the wall clock; the floor dropped out from under her, the white noise fading as she was sucked into a shivering void, silent and empty. All that remained were his words, multiplying and expanding into infinity.
Maddy wasn’t here for him.
Because she wasn’t anywhere anymore.
Walls Become Webs
When I found her in my kitchen—gravid belly and icicle legs, on a picture-perfect web—I ripped down all the flypaper. I turned off the lights, lest they distract a juicy moth.
It was the unkindest season, and her sisters had already curled into themselves in a futile attempt to implode away from the cold. But I kept the heat on, and she tiptoed out each morning to greet me.
Soon, she left me alone—protector of a cottony nest.
My walls came down easily.
The creatures of the dirt scurried in, where they had long ago been home.
Íde Hennessy
Íde Hennessy (she/they) lives in rural Northern California with her partner and three special needs cats who can see ghosts. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Apex’s Strange Machines anthology, Dark Matter INK’s The Off-Season anthology, King Ludd’s Rag, and more. She also writes lyrics for and performs with sci-fi-themed darkwave band Control Voltage. You can find her at idehennessy.com, on Bluesky as ideofmarch, and on Instagram and Twitter as ahennessyvsop.
Tea Party
The young girl serving my tea had drowned—I was sure. Water dripped from her lacy sleeve as she handed me my cup and saucer.
“Care for sugar?” she asked.
“No,” I replied over the rattling chinoiserie in my shaking hands. I sipped the tea. Oolong, my wife’s favorite. Where is she…?
“Are you dead?” I asked.
“Of course!” the girl laughed through a bloated, gray smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Then I remembered the accident. My wife’s scream when our car broke the safety rail. I touched my abdomen and felt the yawning hole where my intestines should be.
Bruce Buchanan
Bruce has written professionally for over 25 years, as both an Associated Press award-winning newspaper reporter and, currently, the senior communications writer for an international law firm. He is the author of two previously published books: Turnover at the Top: Superintendent Vacancies and the Urban School (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and The Three Musketeers: The Graphic Novel (Campfire Graphic Novels, 2011). In 2024, he’ll have a horror short story appearing in the anthology Tenpenny Dreadfuls: Tales as Hard as Nails (Wild Ink Publishing). He lives in Greensboro, N.C. with his wife (an author of six books) and their teenage son. Follow Bruce on Twitter: @BBuchananWomble
One by One
They marched their dirty feet across her counters. They crawled and writhed into her food. She cleaned until her hands cracked and bled. Her kitchen scrubbed to perfection. Not a crumb. Mice would starve in this house, but not ants.
She put her eyes level to the counter. Her nose against the hard surface. With each firm press of her thumb a shiver of pleasure went up her spine. She destroyed them one by one, breaking their marching lines, stopping their scuttling legs, and rupturing their bloated abdomens. With shaking hands, she gathered the bodies. Her kitchen clean once again.
AW Voelkel
I am a writer, an avid reader and a nontraditional university student (which means I’m much older than my classmates.) My instagram page is @aw_voelkel.
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Lauren McMenemy wears many hats: Editor-in-Chief at Trembling With Fear for horrortree.com; PR and marketing for the British Fantasy Society; founder of the Society of Ink Slingers; curator of the Writing the Occult virtual events; writers hour host at London Writers Salon. With 25+ years as a professional writer across journalism, marketing, and communications, Lauren also works as a coach and mentor to writers looking to achieve goals, get accountability, or get support with their marketing efforts. She writes gothic and folk horror stories for her own amusement, and is currently working on a novel set in the world of the Victorian occult. You’ll find Lauren haunting south London, where she lives with her Doctor Who-obsessed husband, the ghost of their aged black house rabbit, and the entity that lives in the walls.
