Sam Zwick

This short story was an entry for the 2023 Chilling Pen Award. The theme for this year’s competition was Betrayal with a word limit set at 1,000. Unfortunately, my entry was not selected as a winner, but it was a fun story to write. Enjoy!

Gravel crunched under the tires. The radio had faded from an old country station to a sheet of static.

The lights of town were gone, leaving only the dingy headlights of the old Buick to provide any illumination in a deep sea of darkness. That was fine. This wasn’t something he wanted to be seen doing. Even the yellow moon felt intrusive, like an enormous eye watching, waiting. 

He reached his destination and turned off the car. A lone tree creaked in a gentle breeze. A warning, perhaps, to leave before it was too late. 

But it was already too late. He was here, and that alone was unforgivable.

Days earlier, he had been assigned a special case. It wasn’t his first, but it was the first in a long time. 

He prepared his things and placed them in the leather bag his daughter had bought him. It was the perfect size and had his initials engraved on the front. On the inside pocket, she had added a secret message. 

“Your little daisy until the world stops spinning.”

Nowadays, he didn’t even need to read it; he just ran his hand over the letters and knew what every edge, slope, and curve meant. 

He drove to a house with a brown front door that gave way to a modest living room.

“This way,” the girl’s mother instructed.

The woman was a shell. Her eyes were hollow and sunken, her skin a sickly grey that hadn’t seen the sun in weeks.

“How is she?” he asked. 

The woman shook her head, slow at first but then faster and faster until it looked like she was seizing. She stopped before a door. A heavy padlock hung on a latch that had been pounded into the frame, destroying the wood below. The mother unlocked it and threw open the door with shocking ferocity. 

This room was darker than the entryway. The windows had been hastily boarded up with sheets of plywood. A lamp sat in the corner, casting shadows on the blank walls. A lone twin bed occupied the center of the room.

On the bed sat a young girl wearing a dirty white t-shirt that went past her knees. Her blonde hair was pulled into crude pigtails held together by knots and twists in the hair.

“Elizabeth?” he asked as he entered. 

The girl cocked her head to the side, a wide, toothless grin sliding across her face. 

“I’m…” he began. 

“I know who you are,” she interrupted. 

He placed his bag on the ground and nodded to the girl’s mother, who quickly closed the door. 

“You know why I’m here?” he asked as he pulled the small book from his bag. 

“Of course!” the girl exclaimed. Her wide eyes followed him as he stepped to the foot of the bed. 

“I’m here to help you,” he said, opening the book to a marked page. 

The girl laughed. It began as a giggle before it became hysterical laughter that then evolved into one long scream. She never blinked, and she never paused to take a breath, though her chest was heaving wildly. Then, as suddenly as she had started, she stopped. 

“She’s going to die,” the girl said in a voice entirely different than her own. It was deep and rough and full of gravel, scraping metal, and acid. 

“Elizabeth will be just fine,” he said in a tone that betrayed his brave face.

Again, the girl laughed a horrible, painful laugh. She reached up, grabbed her pigtails, and began to violently pull on them, snapping her head side to side. 

“Not her, you ingrate,” she sneered. “Your girl is going to die.”

He curled his fingers around the pendant at his neck. 

“Veni in auxilium hominum…” he began, reading from the book. 

“Toooooo lateeeee!” the girl shreiked. She began bouncing her body up and down on the bed as she tossed her head left and right. “You made two vows, and now you must break one,” she cackled. 

“Enough!” he bellowed. The outburst made the girl freeze. “You know nothing about my daughter.” 

“Ooo, but I do,” the girl said, her voice again sweet. “She’s your little daisy until the world stops spinning.” 

He froze. Only they knew those words, his daughter and him. 

The girl on the bed smiled a haunting smile. Every tooth was on display as her lips curled around her gums. 

She began to sing, 

“Let me go, and let me be, I’ll see you where the crossroads meet. 

Man above or love below, such are the vows that you must toe. 

She will die, and she will burn, if you do not make a turn. 

Him your light or Her your heart, where shall your first betrayal start?”

The girl cackled again and then went limp. She woke an hour later with no memory of what happened. Her mother cried with joy.

He returned home and found his daughter on the floor. The doctors had no explanation. They said it would take a miracle for her to wake. Surely, he, a holy man, could pray for such a thing. 

He opened the car door and stepped out as the memory began to fade.

But god could not fix this. 

Two days after he left Elizabeth’s house, the little girl disappeared, and her mother cried again.

As he walked to the place where the two roads intersected, he pulled off the white collar he had worn so proudly. The one he had taken up after his wife passed away, after he had promised to protect their daughter.

From the inky black emerged a figure. It was a girl in an oversized t-shirt stained with all manner of muck and grime. 

“Here to save your daisy,” she sang. The girl stopped before him and rolled her eyes to the sky. 

“It takes a bad father to be a good father,” she growled as her eyes continued to spin, leaving nothing but the whites staring back at him.