Issue Three

Nobody heard him, not even Cassie
who stood twenty feet away, trying to
stifle a scream.
Janie Sanders charged into the house
like a burglar, and then decided she
wasn’t so tough when the lights went out
once again and stayed that way for too
long. Well, that solves that, she
thought. She would have walked out
had she not seen from the tail of her eye
the light begin to flash on her right
side. She considered her options for a
moment. If she went home right now,
no doubt she would spend hours and
hours crying herself to sleep. If she
stayed here to investigate, she could
distract herself for a while at least; she
could take all her anger at being stood
up out on whoever was screwing with
these lights. Janie Sanders may have
had a rotten fruit for a brain, but she still
made the right choices for herself. Or at
least, so she thought.
Janie took off toward the light with her
heels thundering in the dank space, her
eyes fluttering against the helter-skelter
on-off, her hair dishevelled and her
makeup smeared all over a face that
quivered on the brink of lunacy. Nobody
stood up Janie Sanders. Nobody.
When at last Eli Sykes passed over the
threshold, the door swung shut behind
him in a rush of cool dusty air, triggering
the steady darkness yet once
more. Frozen in place, Eli clutched the
baseball bat in a sweaty grip, hopelessly
clinging to the courage that’d fled him at
the very last instant and finding there
was nothing left of it, not even the tiniest
dreg. The darkness seemed infinite,
and the silence was so dense that he
felt it squeezing all around him, making
his ears thrum like swollen veins. The
air was peppered with dust particles that
felt gritty in his open, wheezing mouth
and tasted like stale crumbs. It was so
utterly still that he felt the whole rigid
structure around him was not a house at
all, but a living creature holding its
breath. He loathed himself for not
bringing a flashlight. His pajamas were
already saturated with the sweat of
sheer terror and his eyes were bulging
from the sockets, desperate for just a
pinprick of light.
Like divine revelation, his prayers were
answered. He could see a beam of light
splashing and fading over the wall in
front of him, the source of which he
projected to be in the far right corner of
the house. Eli spun the bat slowly in his
hands, watching through his mask the
diseased light as it danced and flirted
with him upon the wall, scores of
unspeakably large black bugs scuttling
away in its glaring wake. The heart,
whatever it may be, was there in that
light, waiting for him. There was no
turning back now. Armed with nothing
but a wooden bat, Eli Sykes of 32
Orchid Street stumbled momentarily
over the foot of a staircase, regained his
balance and marched onward into the
Uglylights.
The lights went out when Cassie May
entered, to prevent her from seeing the
room, and when they came back on she
was presented with a carnival funhouse.
The room was full of concave
THE UGLYLIGHTS