J0nas Nagera: No one. Just a name I made up as a joke.

Eteru42: I usually try to rate stories M if they have graphic sexual content, like "My Lincoln." If this story were a movie or a video game, it would be rated R, which means 17 and over. And of course, people under 17 would be right there to watch/play it, so rating it T seemed to make sense.

Dinner that night was beans and franks cooked over an open fire. It tasted just like the beans and franks back home, which greatly disappointed Lincoln. He expected them to be somehow different, more rustic, maybe, or fresher tasting. It struck him as strange to have the same food on vacation that you have once or twice a week at home, but it';s not like they could order a pizza. The nearest town, per Lisa's calculations, was fifteen miles away, and its only restaurant was a diner that had probably never even heard of the concept of delivery. There was a double-barrel shotgun mounted over the couch and Lincoln joked that they could use it to hunt, but Dad was appalled at the idea. He and Mom were what you might call "liberal" and didn't believe in owning guns or shooting animals. Hey, it was just a suggestion, venison is good stuff and would make a nice treat. Where do you think those hotdogs you love so much come from? Animals. Just because you don't kill them yourself doesn't mean they aren't dying to fill your stomach.

But whatever. No pizza, no venison, no problem, Lincoln was used to eating slop. Dad was a decent cook but when you have to feed thirteen people, you gotta make things stretch. That meant soup, pasta, chilli, and casseroles every night. On the rare occasions that Dad made chicken or burgers, there were only enough for everyone to have one apiece. So really, in the Loud house, it was eat shitty food or starve.

That first night in the cabin, Lincoln ate his beans and franks like a good little boy while sitting in the living room. The deep, impenetrable darkness of night in the boondocks pressed insistently against the window panes like a vampire seeking ingress and the chirping of crickets was so loud and total that it almost grated on his nerves. He forked a piece of hotdog and shoved it into his mouth and tracked Luan as she walked back and forth along the far wall spitting every lame dad joke she knew. She told pretty decent dirty jokes when Mom and Dad weren't around, but in front of them, she had to be squeaky clean or else their butts would burn to a crisp. She didn't mind one way or the other, though; to Luan, the jokes were inconsequential, what she really liked was the attention. She claimed to enjoy bringing a smile to people's faces, and maybe that was true, Lincoln didn't know. Whatever her motivations might be, she was just as happy telling G-rated knock knock jokes as she was telling racist jokes. Whatever got the crowd going. Lincoln jammed a forkful of beans into his mouth and swallowed. Beside him, Lucy stared at the trapdoor, her bowl sitting forgotten in her lap. "I'm going down there," she said.

Oh, right, there was a spooky skelton living in the basement and Lucy wanted to talk death with him. Sometimes Lincoln got really sick of Lucy's macabre self. Seriously, all she did, said, watched, liked, and listened to was creepy horror shit. She was always gorging herself on gross 80s slasher movies, trashy John Saul and James Herbert novels, and blasting her Halloween Sounds CD. If you walked by Luna's room, you'd hear "Its Only Rock and Roll" at full volume. If you walked by Lola's, it would be Katy Perry. Lucy? Rattling chains and moan ghosts. "This is my jam," she would say if you called her out on it. During fall and winter, she wore a long leather trench coat, a black wide-brim hat, and black leather gloves, looking for all the world like a pasty-faced nerckbeard on his way to white knight some e-thot in the hopes of being noticed. She said she did it "to look like a giallo killer." Lincoln didn't know wtf a giallo killer was but who seriously wants to walk around dressed as a murderer?

In the dead of night, Lucy performed black magic rituals in the back yard, trying to contact the other side. In the morning, you'd walk up to find strange rock formations, half-burned candles, pentagrams made of salt, and plastic skulls. The first time it happened, Mom and Dad sent her to therapy and banned her from watching horror movies. That was when she began reading horror novels. She'd got to the library, get two books (one horror, onre young adult), and switch out the covers. If you walked by it would look like she was reading Stuart Little when she was actually reading Clive Barker.

Lucy claimed to have a connection to the ghosts and demons that populated the shadow realm between life and death. She held seances and had long chats with Aunt Harriet, a long-dead member of the clan who, admittedly, no one but Mom and Dad knew about before she started mentioning her. How did Lucy find out about their dearly departed relative? Did she really reach across the great divide and get in touch with a spirit? Lincoln found that extremely hard to believe but he was just open-minded enough to admit that it was technically possible. People acted like they knew everything but there were still tons of mysteries out there. Human hubris rejected the notion of ghosts, sea monsters, and the living dead because, hey, it's 1721, 1821, 1921, 2021, we know it all now. No, you don't, stop acting like every previous generation. God, don't people ever learn?

As possible as the existence of ghosts and cryptids was, it wasn't likely, so there was that. Lincoln could accept that those things might be real, but he only embraced things he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Lucy, on the other hand, embraced rumors, myths, and half-remembered legends, and got butt blasted if you challenged them.

Whatever. You do you, Luce.

She looked at him, and then back at the trap door. "Don't you feel it? Don't you feel its presence?"

Actually, Lincoln felt...well, something. The strange vibe in the air when they first arrived had only gotten stronger. Lincoln, never the bookish type, lacked the descriptive capabilities to articulate it, but it was almost like…

Have you ever put two magnets together? You know how they repel each other and if you put your hand in-between them you can feel this force? It was kind of like that only...well, not exactly. Lisa had noticed it too and even said something about there likely being some sort of warped magnetic field nearby. There were apparently places around the world where natural elements caused bizarre things to happen. Compasses going haywire, electrical equipment dying, the sun failing to cast shadows, really wild stuff that had a logical explanation but were pure nightmare fuel to past, dumber generations. Lincoln didn't understand why there was an eerie feeling in the air, but he understood that it was probably caused by something completely natural.

When dinner was over, Mom and Dad went outside to get water from the old hand pump out back for dish washing. Unobserved, Lucy popped the trap door and disappeared in a swish of black hair. Lincoln's stomach knotted and he called her name, but she didn't hear him or ignored him if she had. Lincoln did not think there were monsters down there, honest, but there probably were rats, giant spiders, and other things that could be bad for an eight year old girl's health. Lincoln wasn't the simpering cuck he was a few months ago, but he still loved his sisters and didn't want to see one of them get eaten by a six foot tall cellar rat. He grimaced, looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, and sighed. It was up to him.

He walked over to the hatch, bent at the waist, and lifted it. Below, the cellar was a bubbling pit of darkness; he squinted but his vision could not cut through the shadows. "Lucy," he hissed. He expected his voice to echo but instead, the blackness seemed to absorb it like a thick blanket of snow. He swallowed and leaned over farther, bracing his legs so that he didn't tumble in headfirst. "Luce? Lucy?"

He was aware of someone standing next to him and turned. Luan, hands clasped to her knees, peered down into the basement, her brow furrowed. "What's up, Doc?" she asked.

"Lucy went down there," Lincoln said. "She was talking about ghosts and shit. I think she's gonna hurt herself."

A look of worry flashed across Luan's face. "Like...intentionally?"

"No," Lincoln said and opened the trap door all the way. "I'm gonna get her." He spun around, got down on one knee, and stuck one leg into the darkness. He didn't believe in ghosts or monsters, but he was so sure that something was going to reach up and grab his foot that he broke out in goosebumps. He swung his leg around looking for the stairs, found a ladder, and gently lowered himself down. The rungs were splintered and dry, the air musky and still. Luan's face hovered over the hatch for a moment, then she came down after. "Wait for me," she said, "you're gonna need some humor down there."

God, no, I'd rather just get killed by a monster.

The ladder creaked and shook, and for a terrible moment, Lincoln thought it was going to collapse under his and Luan's combined weight. Thankfully, it held, and he reached the bottom without meeting with calamity. The floor was soft and shifted beneath his feet.

Dirt.

He suddenly realized that the darkness wasn't so total anymore, and he turned around. The cellar was roughly fifty feet long by fifty feet across, two support beams in the middle of the space holding up the floor. The walls were made of earth and stone and rotted timbers crisscrossed the ceiling like old bones. A confused jumble of junk and refuse littered the cellar like the wreckage of a trailer park following a tornado. A stale draft blew from where Lincoln didn't know, and cobwebs danced in the corners. On the other side fo the dungeon, Lucy knelt at a steamer trunk, an old fashion oil lamp nearby casting a circle of feeble, flickering light. Luan stood next to Lincoln and looked around, her eyes sweeping the ceiling in a slow arc. "This place is spooky."

Boy, was she right. If the optics weren't enough, that queer magnetic feeling was stronger down here. A low hum raced through Lincoln's body, and his fillings ached. His brain vibrated in his skull and a faint but distinctive buzzing emanated from the center of his skull, making his bones thrum like high tension wires. Luan's features crinkled slightly and she gingerly touched her braces with her fingertips, clearly feeling the same thing he was. "Do you feel that?" she asked, perhaps reading his mind.

"I think my fillings are coming out," he remarked.

"My braces hurt," she said. "And my braces never hurt."

"Your jokes do."

Luan knitted her brow. "You're one to talk. Seeing you in your underwear is enough to turn a girl gay. That's what happened to Luna. She liked guys until she got a load of you."

For that, Lincoln didn't have a snappy response, so he waved her off. She brushed past him and started toward Lucy, and he followed, looking left and right to make sure nothing was crouched in the shadows, waiting to attack and feast on their sweet, sweet innards. His eyes fell on an assortment of artifacts hanging from the wall like paintings in a gallery. A giant chainsaw with THE SAW IS FAMILY engraved in the blade; a cracked and charred hockey mask; a glove with knives for fingers; a sawed-off shotgun. Lincoln couldn't help but wondering what kind of shitty tastes his relative had.

When he and Luan reached Lucy, they stood on either side of her, Luan hugging herself and looking nervous and Lincoln with his hands sternly on his hips. If he could have seen himself in a mirror, he would have been so reminded of his own mother that he would fear for his masculinity. Lucy was bent over a book bound in cracked brown leather. On the cover was what looked like a face twisted and frozen in agony, mouth open, eyes gaping. "Necronomicon," Lucy read softly to herself.

Lincoln's face fell a little and Luan gave a shiver. "Uh,. Luce, I don't think you should be touching that," Luan said. "That binding looks like human skin."

Binding? Lincoln didn't even notice. He was fixated on the face. It was raised, like braille, and the more he stared at it, the less certain he became that it was ornamental. His first thought on seeing it was that it was some kind of macabre decoration. Now, he was beginning to think that it was actually a face...a small, evil, malformed face. "That thing's creepy," he said.

"Right?" Luan asked. "That face looks familiar." She leaned over Lucy's shoulder and studied it. "It looks kind of like you."

Lincoln squinted his eyes but he didn't see the resemblance. What was she talking about, it didn't even look human. "It looks like him because the book is family," Lucy declared. She opened the cover and pointed to a name written on the inside.

Ezra Loud.

"Who's that?" Lincoln asked.

"I don't know," Lucy said, "but whoever he was, he owned this book." She went to the inside back cover, and there were more names, these divided into two neat columns. Each one had a date in front of it, denoting (probably) when they came into possession of the book. The earliest date Lincoln saw was 1451 and the most recent 1804.

That couldn't be true.

There was no way that there was a six hundred year old book in the root cellar of a cabin in Kentucky, no way at all. "That's one old book," Luan said. "What's in it?"

Lucy flipped through it. The pages were old and brittle and made a dry crunching sound when she turned them. The text, written in black ink, was flowery and cryptic. It looked like chicken scratch, which told him it was either Chinese or Arabic.

Creepy.

But even worse were the drawings. On every page, there were sketches of creatures, alien landscapes, death, violence, tentacles, and screaming men, women, and children being flayed, cut up, and devoured by nameless monstrosities. Lincoln's nose crinkled in disgust and Luan pressed her hand to her open mouth, looking for all the world like she was going to be sick. The pages rustled as Lucy turned them, the sound filling the basement. She stopped to appreciate a picture of a naked man being sawed down the middle by two grinning demons. For some reason, Lincoln thought of the chainsaw on the wall behind him. The book is family, Lucy said, and so too, he thought, was the saw.

"What's it say?" Luan asked curiously.

"I'm not sure," Lucy said. "It looks like Latin."

While she tried to decipher the book's secrets, Lincoln walked around with his hands in his pockets. He still didn't believe in ghosts but he had to admit, this shit was crazy. A book with a face? Like wat. The shotgun, chainsaw, mask, and other stuff at least made sense. You were going to find a shotgun and a chainsaw on a homestead, both were valuable tools. The hockey mask...Ezra or whoever probably wore it when they cut brush or something. Speaking of cutting brush, that's probably what the claw glove was for. Why heft around an unwieldy machete when you can just put razor sharp knives on a glove and go to town?

Turning mid step, Lincoln walked over to the display and stood before it, looking up at the saw and the glove. He pushed up on his tippy toes, reached out his arm, and grabbed the glove. It was heavy and slimy in his hand. The glove itself was tattered and ripped, a brass plate screwed onto the back and affixed to hinged metal bits that covered each finger. There was no telling how long it had been down here, but aside from the tattered fabric, it looked brand new, as if it had been minted only yesterday. A strange electric charge ran through Lincoln's body and he jumped, dropping the glove to the dirt. It lay there, fingers splayed like a giant metal spider, and a chill dropped down his spine. "Hey, Linc," Luan called, "check it out."

Lincoln stared down at the glove for a moment, suddenly loathe to turn his back on it, and then walked over to where Luan stood. She held a small pocket-sized notebook in her hands. "What is it?" Lincoln asked.

"It's a diary," she said. "It's really old."

Taking it from her, Lincoln flipped through it. The first entry was dated August 2, 1934 and the last November 15, 1981. It belonged to a man named Parker Loud and recounted his life on the homestead...and the strange things that took place there.

Lincoln scanned the first couple entries and furrowed his brow. Luan tucked her hair behind her ear and bent to read over his shoulder. "What does it say?"

"Here," he said and handed it to her.

Together, they read.

On October 5, 1938, a cousin of Parker's named Fred came in from Louisville for a week of hunting and fishing. He and Parker left the cabin at five in the morning and went in different directions. Parker climbed into a tree on the extreme west end of the property and settled in for a long morning. Less than fifteen minutes later, a bloodcurdling scream rang out, startling him. It was a sound of pure dread and terror and chilled Parker to the bone. He jumped down from the tree and ran in the direction from which the scream came, his rifle at the ready. He searched the property high and low for his cousin but found only his rifle and a patch of bloody grass. Alarmed, he ran back to the cabin and alerted other family members. In the budding morning light, they formed a search party and went out looking for Fred. It was extremely misty that morning and as Parker and his Uncle Jimmy moved through the fog, they heard strange noises coming from the woods: Panting, growling, and twigs snapped as if under the weight of some great beast. They caught brief flashes of dark shapes through the fog, and were both scared out of their wits. Without warning, an unearthly, high pitched cry came from right in front of them, and they ran away screaming like little girls.

Fred's body was never found even though Parker spent decades looking for it. The closest he ever came was when the pond drained in 1962 but there was nothing there. Even so, Parker believed that something lived in the pond. Over the years, he and other family members had glimpsed tentacles slithering through the murk.

The next dozen years were fairly quiet. People occasionally saw strange lights on the property and heard unexplainable noises like mad, hitching laughter and ghostly sobbing, but that was all.

Until March 1951.

A friend of Parker's father, a Native American iterrant from California called Chief (it was a different time, lol), came to stay at the cabin. One day, he and Parker were hiking through a stand of forest on the southeast corner of the property when an inexplicable fog bank rolled in. The weather had been clear and unseasonably warm, so the very presence of the fog was freakish and unnatural. The atmosphere changed, becoming heavy and oppressive, and the babbling of a thousand whispers swirled around them. The color drained from Chief's face, and Parker could have sworn he glimpsed phantom hands grasping at them from the mist. The whispers cut out like throwing a switch and branches began to snap off to their left. Parker saw a long, misshapen outline through the fog and his first thought was of a giant snake. The fog lifted a little, and he and Chief ran screaming back to the house. "I don't know what that was," Chief said shakily later on, "but this land is cursed."

That struck Parker. Chief was not a superstitious man and disbelieved in all the myths and legends of his people. He recounted them because they made for good stories, but he did not think they were true; he was a practical man who believed only in what he could see and touch. Even so, he left that very day in a panic and refused to come back. Five years later, as Chief lay dying in Nevada, Parker went to visit him. One of the last things Chief said before he died was "We were lucky to survive that day." Parker pressed him for what exactly they were lucky to survive, but Chief refused to elaborate.

Strange things continued to happen over the next couple decades, but none as dramatic as the previous two incidents.

In 1979, Parker's wife Miranda died, and Parker was heartbroken. She was buried in the family cemetery on the property and Parker began to adjust to not having her. He had a hard time and missed her terribly. One night in November 1980, he had a dream that she clawed her way out of the ground and came back to him. Clad in a dirty burial dress, she was gaunt, shrunken, and terrifying, her eyes black and soulless. He woke with a start and went to the grave before first light, fully expecting it to be disturbed, but it wasn't.

That night, as he was sitting down to dinner, he caught a flash of something moving outsider the window. He got up and peered out just in time to see a dark form disappear into the distant forest. He couldn't see very well, but he was certain that it was human,

For the next few weeks, he would find human footprints in the mud around the cabin and hear things scratching at the window after dark. One morning, he woke to find a trail of dirt leading from the front door right up to his bedside. There were also leaves, twigs, and bugs. Whoever it was, they had come in while he was sleeping and stood over him.

One night in January 1981, he was reading by the fire when he became aware of a strange noise. He looked up from his book but couldn't find the source. Then he realized that it was the door: Someone was trying to open the latch.

Parker's heart dropped into his stomach and his hands tightened on the book. The knob rattled and twisted. It occurred to him that the door was unlocked and his blood ran cold.

Just as the handle was about to turn, Parker leapt to his feet and flew across the room, throwing his shoulder against the door and slamming it closed. He locked the handle, ran the bolt home, and took a series of deep, gasping breaths. Before he could recover, a light scratching came at the door. He listened and swore he could hear a raspy whisper.

It sounded like his wife.

He pressed his ear to the door and listened, but couldn't make out any words. A low, bone-trembling buzz struck up in his head, and he could hear something in the middle of his brain.

Open the door.

Come out.

I'm so cold.

I'm so hungry.

For a long time, he was frozen in fear, listening to the buzz and chatter. Finally, his paralysis broke and he fetched his shotgun from the hall closet. He sat in a chair facing the door all night, but his wife - if that's who it was - never came in.

The last entry was dated November 15, 1981. Parker had gone to his wife's grave and dug it up. The earth was packed and undisturbed, and her coffin showed no signs of having been open. Even so, she wasn't inside.

He planned to go out one night with his shotgun and look for her...and that was where the diary ended. There were no further entries, and the fate of Parker Loud was uncertain.

By the time they read the final words, Lincoln and Luan were both shaking and cold all over. They exchanged a nervous glance and then turned to Lucy, who was reading the book, her lips moving but producing no sound. "Did he say anything about that book?" Luan asked worriedly.

"I don't think so," Lincoln said after a pause. The story of Parker Loud was pretty straightforward. The man didn't beat around the bush or employ stupid literary cliches to keep his audoience guessing. He never mentioned or alluded to the book, so he likely didn't know about it or didn't think a book with a freaking face on it was worth writing about. It definitely belonged to a Loud, though. Parker didn't say anything about someone named Ezra, so Lincoln assumed that Ezra was a great-great grandfather or something, the kind of gut you might be aware of hanging out in your family tree, but don't know personally because he's been dead your whole life.

Luan opened her mouth to reply, but Lucy began to speak in a high, icy monotone. The flat tone of her voice and the otherworldly character of the words on her lips sent shivers down Lincoln's spine. Luan's face was drawn and haggard in the anemic glow of the lamp, and the look in her eye almost scared Lincoln.

She was scared.

Totally and completely 100 percent scared.

Like him, Luan was a practical person. Well, practical enough. She didn't believe in Blair Witch Project bullshit anymore than Lincoln did. There was no mistaking the deep dread masking her features, however, and the goosebumps racing up the slope of her neck was too big to ignore. His eyes darted to her knobby knees and they clacked lightly together with fear. Seeing her that way scared him in turn. No, he didn't believe in the supernormal or the paranatural, but after reading Parker Loud's account, and hearing the dead inflection of Lucy's voice, he was ready to freak out like his name was Chic. He was rooted in place, however, unable to move or even to breathe. Lucy's voice rose, getting louder, but her tone stayed the same. He couldn't even begin to reconize what language she was speaking, but it sounded odd, the words nonsensical and clumsy, as though they were never meant to be uttered by a human throat. " Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

As she spoke each word, the air grew denser and darker/; the atmosphere crackled with electricity and the hairs on the backs of Lincoln's arms stood straight up. Luan's mouth fell open in a perfect O of surprise and she clutched the front of her blouse in one white knuckled hand. The flame in the lamp flickered as if in a brisk wind, and moments later, a stale tomb wind swept through the cellar, making Luan yelp. Lincoln's heart slammed steadily into his ribs and his brain swelled against his skull as dark and terrible knowledge filled it. It was real...all of it. The monsters, the tentacles in the pond, the dead woman creeping around the cabin at night. The paranorman and the superspooky, both of which he had so foolishly dismissed, were real.

Lincoln had never had his mind blown before, and honestly, he couldn't say he liked it.

Lucy's voice rose higher and higher until she was shouting. The earth lurched beneath Lincoln's feet and the cellar jerked to one side, knocking him into Luan. Dirt and dust fell from the ceiling in a shower and the lamp snuffed out. The cellar was not dark, however, as a helpful beam of ghostly blue light shot out of the book and spread through the space, infusing everything with its corpsy glow. A loud roar, like the wail of a passing hurricane, rose up, and Lincoln and Luan hugged each other.

Finally, Lucy's voice reached a crescendo, amplified by the forces of darkness, then cut out. The flame winked back on and the blue light was sucked back into the book with an obscene slurping sound. The book slammed closed and fpr a moment., Lucy knelt there...then fell over and started to seize.

"Lucy!" Lincoln cried.