in wells, scorched with their fat run out of them and bubbling in flickering pools of hot blood. If any of their victims were found alive, it was not a life worth living. Townspeople reported devils in their dreams and woke up raked with red, inflamed marks up and down their backs and along the soft flanks of their sides. Between the Red Devils and those fleeing the flooded valleys, the towns closed down and walled up. The whole of Lith went dark and quiet. As for the valley, the refugees spoke of the waters doing strange things, and those who forged the rising tide on foot to try and scavenge the remains of civilization in that place showed their skin had become waxy and plastic and void of warmth. With society largely shut down, the forests infested with bandit camps. Cannibalism became rampant. Kate took on what able-bodied workers she could to toil and defend the property, and Endor set out a perimeter of cursed sigils to afflict trespassers with devouring insects, tumors, wasting diseases, sepsis, derangements and hallucinations, and, in the case of theft, even visited them herself in dreams asking politely to have property returned. Kate, seated at the head of the table in the kitchen, told them one day that the world went through phases, and now was a dark time, and that one day she might not be recognizable to them, but would take on an evil form and live among the shadows just as she had taken on a beautiful form now and lived with them in the light. A mostly good form, she corrected, after they eyed her dubiously. Mostly good, anyhow. Some time after, Endor was taking a piss in the upstairs bathroom, or feeling she had to pee because of some toxic microdosing Victory and Valorie had talked her, and the drugs they preferred had an effective dose narrowly similar to its toxic dosage. And, anyhow, she was looking out the window at the lovely patterns of nausea warping her field of vision when she saw a dark figure in the trees with inhuman, hollow eyes. She waved timidly to the apparition, uncertain if were real or hallucinated, feeling it were due some decorum either way. The crimson woman receded into the dark layers of kudzu and Endor slotted shut the irregular old window which stuck on its painted edges at intervals on the way down. She told Heathcliff who sprang up and plastered herself up against the wall, aiming to be out of the sight of the two windows, certain they had come for her. They arranged with Kate to have Heathcliff smuggled down into the cellar. Carried her down below in a carpet, to live among the daddy-long-legs. There Kate handed off the broom. Heathcliff thanked her and asked about the black cauldron, looking to affirm its origins. Kate said it did indeed belong to Astaroth. “Cool,” said Endor, still in the clutches of recreational poison. She yawned and said goodnight and went back upstairs to bed, easily forgetting the events of the day to flounder in a pallid green nausea.
