Free Terror Incognita by Jeffrey Thomas

they had lit a bonfire. The light of its flames illuminated the silent procession...and their terrible activities at the megaliths they had erected. Each of these was a brother to the stone in Robert’s pasture...
    The flames seemed to glow inside pink eyes set on jagged, hooded projections of bone. And mouths gaped wide, soundlessly. Mouths that gaped vertically in hideous faces...fangs that flashed back the colors of fire and blood.
    And what they were doing. What they were doing...God help her that she ever should have seen. The Great Ones had banished them for just such practices...
    And there was something more horrible yet...
    ...and that was that the creatures seemed to be aware she was observing them. First one, then another, then all turned to gaze directly at her invisible dreamer’s form, amongst them, spying on them.
    It was then that the first of the Gugs started toward her.
    It was then that Judith awoke with a gasp.
    As her breathing slowed, she reached out shakily for a light. At first, she half-expected to find Ian beside her. But this was her ex-husband’s bed, and the spot beside her gaped empty. Robert slept on his sofa, in the other room. He had insisted she sleep in his bed. His pillows smelled subtly of his shampoo, his aftershave. She had wept into them.
    The rain had stopped, the night lay still. No sound of city traffic, no sound even of rustling trees. Judith heard only one sound, and she had no idea what it was.
    A scraping? A scratching? She was reminded of their former apartment together, on the second floor of an old house in Victoria. The branches of a tree, on windy nights, would scratch against the kitchen window like nails on a blackboard. It was just like that. Only...only it seemed to be coming up from the floor. Up from the cellar she knew lay below, though she had never gone down there herself.
    She sat up in bed listening to the scraping. While she did so, her distracted gaze took in a gun rack on the wall, in which a shotgun and two rifles rested, and it vaguely disturbed her, as she knew Robert abhorred hunting. She was fully awake now; it was more the nightmare than the sound that kept her from slipping back beneath the covers, but now that she was awake, the sound tugged at her. At last, giving in to it, she slipped out of bed and stole out into the living room. For some reason, the sound made her afraid...as if it were the creak of a rope from which Robert dangled, unable to bear the fear of losing her a second time...
    But he lay asleep on the sofa, curled against the pain that held his jaw tense and brows knitted intensely even in sleep. Standing over him, Judith wanted to gently smooth that brow, soothe it, but she did not touch him. Instead, barefoot, she continued on past him, into the kitchen where the door to the basement stood double-bolted.
    She slipped both bolts, threw a switch against the wall. A breeze so chill it made her shudder was exhaled up at her, like a kiss from dead lips. Judith began to descend rough wooden steps that creaked and sagged even under her slight weight. At their foot, the darkness branched off into two directions. On her right, she heard the hiss of a water heater, saw the shadowy hunched forms of a washer and dryer. Prosaic enough. But the high-pitched scratching came from the left, from a room of the cellar into which only the dregs of light reached.
    Boxes of books, of tools, bundled newspapers and old furniture were piled against the walls, but at its center there was one thing only—a great, rounded hump covered completely by a tarp large enough to cover a car. The squealing scratches came from this mound, from under that heavy tarp...
    Bricks weighed the corners of the tarp, and Judith stooped to remove several of them. For a moment she hesitated to go further. Then, curling her fingers around the tarp, she threw its edge up over the top of the mound. She didn’t know what she would find, and when she found it, didn’t know what it