Bargain With The Black by James Meyer

Bargain With The Black by James Meyer

It kills me. Not the sharp brutality of the winter wind, nor the dense fog that takes my eyes away, but that damned stare. The way she looks at me with such a false sense of security, and I haven’t the bravery to tell her she is so deathly wrong. My love, my Lilah, I love her tenderly, totally, and tragically. I cannot save her, not from what I deep down know awaits us.

Her eyes dart away from mine and return to the task at hand, ensuring our cold steel padlock gives us the safety we dearly hope for. Lilah locks the padlock and leans into the door with all her weight. It doesn’t budge. She smiles like that proves something.

Illuminated with only weak firelight, she looks at me with that innocent smile, a smile that begs for one in return, a smile that seeks to be told that all in the world will be okay. I smile back, but hers quickly fades.

“If it can get through that, what’s next?” She hushes out, facing the door again with intense seriousness.

“No man can surpass that, not one. Rest, my love. The morning will come, and so shall its peace.” I say, hoping to ease the worry.

She looks back, not yet satisfied. “A tripwire?”

“My love—” I blurt back.

“Thomas, please. To put my mind and my heart at ease.”

I remain composed. While I do not think the threat she believes exists, I have worries of my own, worries that she shall never hear. And so, I nod. To put hers and my own mind at ease.

She smiles and walks from the door to our fireplace, only a few steps away, and I follow. The blaze’s gentle glow reveals shadows of our home we both wish to ignore. Our crooked floorboards catch light from the dancing flames, giving us a show of shadows on our aged wooden walls. Firelight catches dust and splinters raining down from our decrepit ceiling. However, the flickering red flames also reveal a world of vibrant colors. The jagged floor draped in countless hand-stitched rugs of all colors, and silk drapery covering our windows. We’ve really made a home of this decayed space, or at least she has.

My Lilah grabs a servant’s bell from the mantle, a remnant from the last who called these aged wooden walls their home. We had smiled and joked that when things were good and settled, we might afford a servant of our own and put this bell to good use instead of collecting dust. For now, though, it shall serve a purpose.

Standing in front of the flames next to our mantle, I feel my skin to the point of blistering as if I were standing in front of the great gates of hell itself, a terrifyingly comforting feeling as I had long forgotten I couldn’t feel my face.

“What else is out there? Who could’ve taken them?” I hear beside me, with hushed horror in her sweet and soft voice.

 “They could’ve been restless souls, with ripe hearts that yearn for the greater glories this world holds.“ I reply, attempting my very best to softly hide a little white lie. Lilah’s eyes stare into the flames, and I hope my words ring true.

 “It isn’t out of the realm of possibility they have grown weary of us all. Souls that seek to change the world could not achieve that here.” I say, still trying to make the white lie believable.

“They wouldn’t have wandered off, Thomas. Not after what has happened, what we promised.”

I, too, stare into the fiery flames. Trying to find words that are not there.

“We shall have to make do with string. For the trap.” I tell my love.

Lilah wanders from the warmth of our fireplace and into the cold depths of our humble home. Her words, unfortunately, ring true; they wouldn’t have left us alone. Not after everything.

We live in a mist-veiled village of only a few dozen families, countless miles from any civilized city. The Black Forest surrounds us, broken only by a thin, ragged trail that vanishes with any passing storm. Anyone who enters those woods alone off of the beaten path, is never found. It’s too vast, too unexplored, too mysterious.

We all know this truth and live by it, yet bodies still vanish. Ripped from their beds without a trace, no footprints in the snow, clothes still left in their closets, all that’s left of them is the grief of those that loved them.

I deeply mourned for those damned to that black abyss. But even more than that, I feared for what came next.

Lilah returns, ready to face the world armed only with a long thread of thin string curled in her hands. “And what next?” She asks.

Arm to arm, we walk towards our door. I can feel her eyes intensely staring at mine as I piece together what will be our home’s simple defense. I tie the humble string to the servant’s bell, and it begins to take form.

“It can’t be mere coincidence anymore.”

“My love, of course, it isn’t a coincidence. There has to be a reason, but that reason can’t rely upon radical, unproven folktale.”

I test the trip alarm by lightly pushing the string with my finger. A gentle jingle hums through our house. I feel proud, hoping my last-second invention will ensure Lilah peacefully closes her eyes and dreams the world away tonight. I look at her, still staring at me, to see a clear face of disappointment.

“It could be louder, but time seems to have taken much of its charm.” I proclaim as she walks away with intense sadness.

The wind’s harsh howl rips through the jagged cracks of the old cabin, a noise that quietly but forcefully gets under your skin. It’s the same wind that had howled that awful night this all started, the night the first child went missing. It feels like it’s been more than a lifetime, but it was merely months ago.

It began with sweet little Annis Scott, who vanished from her bed without a trace in the middle of a snowy night. We all awoke from our deep sleep to the horrid shrieks of a mother desperate and afraid to find an answer for her lost child. We all had our doubts; kids wander, they find themselves in horrific situations you desperately wish they wouldn’t. I had my sympathies for the family, but nothing less and nothing more. We all gathered, searching for her, combing through the encroaching darkness that swallowed the woods, our voices rising in a chorus of her name, with Mrs. Scott’s desperate calls far louder than ours. But night fell, and with it, the flickering hope of finding her.

In the following days, unease swept through our tight-knit community. Some said little Annis had simply wandered off, drawn into the depths of the Black Forest not by a malevolent force, but by mere childhood curiosity. I, unfortunately, found that extraordinarily unlikely. The forest has always held a certain darkness, and kids are taught from the time they can walk of its immense danger. What happened to her? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

Days later, little Annis Scott’s family, too, into thin air. We shook this off as mentally vulnerable parents wandering into the unknown against all that they knew, desperate to find the poor soul they brought into this world and failed. We knew their fate before even attempting to look for them; we knew the Black Forest and its vastness would swallow them whole. It was remarkably tragic; we wept for them, cherished who they were to us, and yet, life went on. Another haunting reminder to never stray too far off the beaten path, and another cautionary tale our children would grow up hearing.

But yet again, another child. Silas, a three-year-old. Without a trace. His giggles had once been a joyful light to our village in spite of its challenges, but his absence now echoed through us all. I’ll never forget the way his mother’s eyes looked, two sunken voids, already mourning a body she hadn’t found. She tore through the woods like something dying, her voice cracking through the trees in ragged pleas that clung to the air like smoke from something still burning. Until we no longer heard the pleas.

Some of the elders had already fled by then, those who claimed they saw signs, omens, things they wouldn’t dare speak aloud. They left at the first whisper of trouble. We desperately warned them to stay. Told them the snows would trap them, that they’d die out there, and no one would dare come for them. But they would hear none of it, instead they urged us to follow, begged us even. But we stood firm. We thought we knew better.

Clearly, these were desperate times for those cursed with the burden of bringing new life into such a cruel and horrific world, which is why when my sweet Percy was born amid the terror, Lilah and I didn’t know how to react. On one hand, he became something to us that no word could ever hope to express. He was the best of me, he was the best of Lilah, he was the best of our world. I know it sounds strange, speaking this way of a child who has yet to take his first steps or utter his first words, but he wasn’t touched by darkness yet. He wasn’t yet corrupted by the gruesome weight of our village’s doom. In him, I saw a future.

As days dragged to weeks, disappearances escalated. One child, one family after another, pulled from their homes as if snatched by nothingness. The village, once brimming with life, now stood as a graveyard of decayed and empty houses. We no longer knew who would be taken next; one day a child, the next an entire household ripped from our mortal plane. We whispered about the woods, about some shadowy figment of our vision lurking just beyond the tree line, some thing that stalked us and pounced when we dared to stray too far. People began talking of figures seen at the darkest hour of dusk, shadows that moved too swiftly, and seemingly human cries for help that were not at all intelligible. At this point, I feared not only for the families who would eventually disappear, but the effects mass hysteria could hold over us all. Even I began to question my senses, what I thought I saw.

It was then we knew this was more than just a few kids straying too far from the beaten path. Instead of a unified cry for a single missing child, the village began to ring with a chaos of names, one shouted here, another there, and always another name, always another voice that joined the growing list of the lost. We couldn’t keep up. There were too many.

Those of us who eventually remained formed a pact. No… a desperate agreement to stay together, to watch over one another with the hope that our numbers would somehow win against fate itself. We boarded up windows, piled furniture against doors, created makeshift alarms of pots and bells, anything to keep the darkness far away. We hoped, clung to the belief that if we stayed strong, if we stayed vigilant, if we followed newly set rules, we could protect what was left of us and flee once the snows melted. For a brief moment, there was hope. An uplifting triumph against the horrific blackness. A fragile triumph, but one nonetheless.

We told ourselves the worst had passed, that we could get through it all. We lit our fires brighter, ensuring not a spot in the village ever reigned in darkness, and looked to each other for courage. I, as one of the only men in the village with experience in warfare, was the source of most of that courage. In all honesty, I had no idea what I was doing. I put on a stiff upper lip, acted as if I had been through this all a million and one times over.

 I gaze out of the frosted window, with the once hopeful thought of a village-wide pact fresh in my mind, and see the terrible outcome of that awful, misplaced hope we all fell for.

Nothingness.

A wasteland. Once vibrant houses filled with happy souls now stand as ruins, swallowed by the relentless force of Mother Nature’s indifference. Roofs sag under the massive weight of snow, chimneys and fireplaces extinguished, just like the lives that once tended to their flames. There resides no other soul in this godforsaken part of the world apart from us. Save, seemingly, for the house next to us. But I know better, and I will never say a word to Lilah about what I believe I know.

The cabin next to ours stands just a few feet away, yet in the howling storm, it’s barely visible, only a smudged outline against a fierce wall of white. Still, its fire burns. Day and night, without fail, the orange glow pulses behind frostbitten windows, casting flickers of movement I can’t quite trust. No footprints in the snow, no sound of life. Just the constant blaze, as if someone inside wants me to know it’s in there. In a village gone silent, that fire feels like a warning.

The last of the village, apart from us, was William. He’d watched his granddaughter vanish into thin air at the start of this madness, his daughter disappear a day later, and his wife flee into the Black Forest in a fit of madness, never to return. But William remained, stubbornly devoted to the pact. Like us, he had agreed to keep the fires burning, to send smoke signals if trouble arose, to knock twice each morning and let us know he was still clinging to life. But it had been days now, no signals, no knocks. And yet every night, thick smoke curled from his long chimney, and the orange glow of his hearth burned steadily behind iced-over windows. Someone was tending that fire. Someone was inside. But it wasn’t William.

I hadn’t told Lilah. I couldn’t. Not when her smile, however dimmed, was the only thing keeping me anchored to what little hope we had left. But I knew in my gut: the thing in the woods had finally taken all but us. It had taken the old man William.

And it hadn’t left.

I stood at the edge of our window, wiping away the condensation with my sleeve. My eyes locked on to William’s cabin.

And behind the frozen glass of their window, a black silhouette stared right back at me.

Still. Perfectly still. As if it had been waiting for me to look.

Not swaying, not blinking. Just… watching. A silhouette of something vaguely human on the surface, yet undeniably wrong. Too slender. Too tall. Too, other. Its limbs dangled strangely at its sides, slack and limp like a puppet waiting for strings.

The fire behind it crackled bright, but the shadow it cast never decided to flicker.

I didn’t move. I barely even breathed. The frost on our window began to form new lines as I stared, as if the cold itself was trying to erase what I’d seen.

But it didn’t move. It didn’t go.

It only watched.

I didn’t know the game it played. Whether it knew that I knew, or if it was attempting to comfort me by making me think old man William wasn’t yet gone.

“He’s still burning all that he has, isn’t he?” Lilah joyfully says,.

I look back, my feet refusing to unlock. “I suppose so.”

As I begin to gaze back out, I already know what my eyes will see. I already know that the malevolent shadow will vanish.

I don’t know what’s worse, it finally being gone or knowing where it’ll come next.

There was no one else. No one left to take.

I swallowed the bitter truth. It sat heavy in my gut, a stone with teeth. The hours we lost, the moments I wasn’t there, the times I chose hope over action, they were all poison feeding the hunger now clawing at the edges of our home.

I failed Lilah. I failed Percy. I failed us all.

The silence stretched between us like a noose tightening. I could feel it, dragging me down deeper with every heartbeat. No lies left to spin. No stalling. It was coming.

Lilah’s breath caught. She wanted something from me, hope, maybe. I had none to give.

“I’m so very sorry, my love.” I desperately said. She nodded, like she already knew.

Hours of dreadful waiting passed. I moved to the table and began to take my rifle apart, methodically, mechanically. Not because I trusted it. Not because I believed it’d save us. But because I needed the ritual, something to steady the tremble in my hands, something to hold onto while the rest of the world fell apart.

I couldn’t sleep, so I cleaned.

The act itself meant nothing. The barrel wasn’t rusted. No dust in the chamber. I’d gone over it a hundred times since the cold set in. It was a ritual. A ward against thinking. Against remembering the shape of things.

Lilah had gone quiet beside me, her breath soft as a feather. We’d said goodnight, or something like it, tender and tired. The kind of words you only say when you think they might be the last. She rose soon after, said she was going to check on Percy. “Just to see,” like it was nothing.

I nodded without looking. I was already bent over the table, cloth in hand, the rifle in pieces like a broken animal. It comforted me to have it open. Incomplete things felt safer, somehow. Less likely to go off in your hands.

The wind tapped at the windows. The roaring fire crackled. Nothing out of place.

Then it finally came.

It started low. Barely there. A whisper caught in the timber of the walls. A sound that seemed to rise from the ground itself. At first, I hoped it was the raging storm.

But it wasn’t.

A lullaby, maybe. Something that might’ve once been sweet if not for how sour and strained it was now. Each note bent, broken, stretched out too long. Like something trying to remember how it was meant to sound.

I stood up before I knew I was moving. The cloth fell from my hand. The rifle remained disassembled on the table and a small part of the barrel remained trapped in my tightly wrapped fingers.

The humming swelled. High and wet and warbling. A thread pulled too tight.

I stepped into the hall. Everything was shadows, except the crooked spill of firelight leaking out from Percy’s door. The rest of the house had gone dim. Silent. As though it were waiting for something to end.

The humming didn’t stop.

I moved forward. Slowly. Heel to toe. My feet made no sound on the old wood, but then I felt my body die inside as I saw her.

She was crouched beside the cradle, arms wrapped around my sweet Percy. Rocking him. The motion was too fast, too rhythmic. Like a machine mimicking love. Percy’s face was red, mouth wide open in a scream that didn’t match the silence in my ears. It looked like he couldn’t breathe.

Her back was to me. But the humming came from her mouth. I could see her jaw working, too wide, too loose. Like something that hadn’t been hinged right.

I dropped the barrel, completely against my will. Her head turned.

Not all the way. Just enough.

I don’t know what I saw in the face. It wasn’t Lilah’s. The eyes were wrong. Too flat. Like glass eyes set in a long-dead corpse, reflective, but empty.

She smiled.

And then, gently, lovingly, she placed Percy on the floor.

He stopped crying.

I wish I could say it was fear that kept me frozen. That something ancient and terrible had paralyzed my body, ripped the scream from my throat, and locked my limbs in place. But it wasn’t that. It was something worse.

It was acceptance. And then, she smiled.

Not a real smile. It started like one, soft, familiar. But then it stretched. And stretched. And stretched. Too wide. Too long. A grotesque mask peeling across her face like skin pulled tight over bone.

I heard it before I saw it.

The sound came sharp and wrong: cartilage grinding, tendons snapping like dry twigs soaked in oil. Each movement forced a pop, a crack, a wet shearing noise that echoed in my chest like breaking ribs. Her spine arched with a sick lurch, vertebrae clunking into new, impossible positions. Shoulders buckled, rotated backward, inward, like something was rewiring her from the inside out.

Her skin bubbled. Swelled. Split. A slow, drooling pulse of dark blood spat from the corners of her mouth.

Her very face began to crack from the inside, as if hit by a sledgehammer. Hairline splits raced across her cheekbones. Flesh sloughed in strips, hanging loose like wax dripping from a candle left before the gates of hell.

And then the limbs began.

Long, spindly, insectile things, jointed like broken fingers and crawling out from the wreckage of her arms and shoulders. They spasmed and twisted, birthing themselves from beneath her skin, slick and raw, leaving trails of black fluid that hissed when they hit the floor.

What stood in front of me wasn’t a woman.

It was a half-formed nightmare, a swollen, twitching heap of meat caught mid-metamorphosis. A thing with no fixed shape, forever melting and reshaping itself in slow, deliberate torment.

It wasn’t Lilah, it was the thing that had swallowed her whole and decided to wear her, all rotted and wrong.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Frozen in the dark cabin doorway, the monster wore Lilah’s skin and smiled. And I knew then, with every piece of me screaming against it—

It broke the pact.

I was already mourning her. Mourning the way her laugh would catch deep in her throat when she was desperately trying not to cry. The way she touched our son, fingertips trembling just above his skin, like she thought even love itself might bruise him. The way she hummed under her breath while she cleaned, never realizing she was doing it. The way she walked, light and deliberate, her footsteps so distinct across the floorboards, a sound I’ll never hear again. The way she cradled her tea in both hands like it was something sacred. I’ll never make a cup for her again. The way she looked at me, in those rare moments when the fear faded, like maybe we could survive all of this.

All of her, gone. Stolen. Torn from the world like it was never meant to last.

I wanted to remember her holding Percy in the blue light of morning, whispering lullabies into his hair. I wanted to remember her fingers brushing mine in the dark when she thought I was asleep. I wanted to remember the way she said my name when she was too tired to be strong.

Instead, I was being forced to remember her last.

That’s what broke me.

That this is the final image I’ll have of her. Not Lilah smiling in the garden, not Lilah singing while she swept the floor, not Lilah half-asleep with our sweet Percy curled against her chest. No, this. This ruin. This crawling, spasming thing, still wet with what used to be her.

It should’ve been me. If there was any justice in this godforsaken world, it would’ve been me.

The thing in front of me had desecrated her. Hollowed her out and made her a puppet of black bile. I wanted to scream, to run, to charge forward and tear her free from whatever had taken root, but there was nothing left to save. The woman I loved had been devoured in front of me, piece by sacred piece, and now I stood in the ash of what we built, watching it twitch.

And God help me, I almost called out her name.

But then, beneath my feet. Like a twisted gift given back to me by this ancient primordial fiend.

Lilah. Put back together and thrown on the cold hard ground.

She hit the floor with a sick thud, like a dropped doll, and for one harrowing second, I believed it was her. Really her. There was no bile, no twitching limbs, no insectile horror gnashing inside her bones. Just Lilah, whole again. Her skin pale but smooth, her lips parted like she was about to speak, her chest rising shallow and slow like something asleep. But then the horror set in, it can’t be her.

The thing had made her perfect. Too perfect. Like it had studied her face through my eyes and rebuilt it from memory. Every freckle, every tiny imperfection, every strand of hair draped exactly the way I had remembered. I dropped to my knees before I could think, hands shaking as I reached toward her

Her body was warm.

Not hot, not cold, warm. The exact temperature she’d be after coming in from the garden. I could smell the old perfume she used on special occasions, but it was off, like someone had tried to replicate it but didn’t get it quite right.

I wept then. I broke. Everything inside me collapsed under the weight of that almost. I clutched her like a child with a broken toy, knowing she’s probably all lost but needing this last moment with her anyway. I buried my face in her neck and whispered her name over and over, hoping she’d answer.

She opened her eyes with that glint, sharp and soft all at once, that said it could only be her. Not a copy. Not some mockery. Her. Lilah.

This wasn’t mercy. This was torment. It wasn’t resurrection, it was a demonstration. A performance of power from whatever horror puppeted this moment. It was saying: Look at what I could have done. Look what I chose not to do.

She was so still. Gently laid there like a broken doll someone didn’t want to discard just yet. She wasn’t taken, not yet. Just used.

And what remained of the fiend stood there.

A hellborn mockery of a man, its body half-formed and sagging. Skin like runny tar, peeling in wet sheets from bone that wasn’t quite bone. One arm too long, the other half-formed, dragging behind it like a broken limb. Its chest collapsed and swelled with each breath, but it didn’t sound human. It didn’t even sound alive.

And now it wanted me to see it. To know what it had made from her.

It just existed.

It didn’t howl or lunge. It didn’t bare its teeth. It didn’t need to.

Percy was quiet now. Too quiet. Being cradled again like a rag doll between the creature’s hands, swallowed whole in them. It lifted him, slowly, like it was handling something precious. Something it had waited a long time for. And I—

I just watched.

Lilah stirred, regained whatever form of consciousness the earth would allow at a moment like this. She looked at Percy in hushed horror and attempted to scream, but desperately couldn’t.

The creature turned its face toward her, what was left of one. The skin sloughed off in folds, half-hanging like it had forgotten what it was supposed to look like. No eyes, just dim, wet hollow holes.

It moved toward us.

It held its arms out to either side of the narrow hallway, dragging jagged fingernails against the walls as it walked forward, slow and deliberate. It’s nails tore off slowly one by one, splintering at the base, leaving behind streaks of black and red. With each step, it ripped its own fingers open, skin peeling back like wet paper. Bones cracked. Arms snapped out of their sockets. One elbow bent the wrong way with a sickening pop, and still, it advanced. It didn’t care what broke. It was built to break and keep coming

It reached for a desperate Lilah, one who refused to let her child be taken. And it struck.

Her body hit the wall with a thud I’ll hear in dreams I’ll never wake from. She fell hard, a moan curling out of her like the breath was being torn from her ribs. She didn’t move again.

Then it turned back.

With the child.

It walked back to the child’s bedroom, footsteps like wet slaps against the boards, and I watched it vanish into the red flicker of the firelight, with the child getting picked up in its arms.

And then, it closed the door. Like it took pleasure in having its own private moment with the child. Because it could.

Slowly. Meticulously. It didn’t slam the door, didn’t rush. It closed it like a man closing the lid of a casket. A ritual. A rite.

The house became black.

I stood there for a long time, longer than I will ever admit to anyone. Long after Lilah awoke and began to wail. Long after the child stopped making noise. Long after I’d run out of any excuse.

This is what the others feared. This is what the old songs warned about, the whispers that made the old women flee at dawn, clutching their children close with hands that somehow remembered stories that had never been passed down. They didn’t need to know why. They just knew when it was time to go.

And I didn’t.

I stayed. I made the deal in the dead of night when all seemed lost. I gave the thing what it asked for, in return for Lilah’s safety, and it kept its awful word.

No one else in the village had the stomach for it. The cowardice. The honesty. Whatever you want to call it. They loved their children more than they loved their own survival. Not me. Not when it came to ensuring she survived.

Lilah would never have made that choice. That’s the truth of it, and maybe that’s why I decided to make sure she still breathed.

What is life, if not the slow, gritted effort to delay death just one more day? And isn’t that what I bought us? One more day? One more sunrise?

I don’t know what’s left now. I only know what I’ve done. And what it will take to keep going. Because we will live, Lilah will see another day. No matter what it takes.

Today, I have bought us silence.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright James Meyer 2025