Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed - 2026, 1

Skull Forest, Chapter 1

Hello, Happy New Year, and welcome to Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed. I am Lucas Mangum, an award-winning author, a dad, and a weirdo. 2025 was not a great year, but it did have some bright spots. Biggest of all is that I lived through it, and that’s worth celebrating.

With that in mind, let’s get 2026 kicked off the right way. My newsletter is called Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed? Fine. Here is some fiction. What follows is the first chapter of a novella called Skull Forest. A version of it was published by Thunderstorm Books in the collection Patterns of Chaos, which is now out-of-print and only available secondhand. The version you’ll find here has been heavily altered—because only a small audience saw the original text, I’ve no qualms about going back and making changes so that it more closely resembles the story I always wanted it to be.

It’s a tale of cursed images, of childhood, and coming-of-age. Since it only requires revisions, I’ll be serializing it here, a chapter at a time, every month. No paywalls, no gimmicks, no sales pitches. This is for you, just for subscribing. If you want to support me further, you can buy a book or commission a story. Otherwise, enjoy . . .

Chapter 1

I climbed the backyard fence and slipped into an opaque wall of fog to cut through the canyon on the way to school. All around me, the fog limited visibility but I knew the terrain well enough. I’d been down here many times with my mothers, with Donner and Haley, and sometimes by myself. I used to think of it as a magical place full of wolves and elves and maybe even a dragon or two. Now, I still sometimes imagined these creatures living among the squat trees, tufts of tall grass, and the clay-walled ravine the kids at school called Dead Man’s Ditch.

I stutter-stepped the last few paces down the slope and glanced around, still unable to see more than five feet in either direction. Donner and Haley weren’t here yet.

I dug my phone out of my pocket. It was 7:45. The first homeroom bell would ring soon, which meant I better get moving.

“Come on, guys, where are you?” I wondered out loud.

I squinted, hoping to see some sort of activity in the surrounding fog. No such luck. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and sighed. After fidgeting for another half-minute, I started in the direction of school. My friends would have to catch up.

As I walked, my backpack gently rocked against my lower back and pulled on my shoulders. It seemingly got heavier every year. After several paces, I saw a flashlight in the opaqueness ahead.

“Donner, that you?” I called. “Haley?”

The person with the flashlight came closer but didn’t answer.

“Ben?” I sighed and balled my hands into fists. “Guys, it’s not funny.”

I remembered a story from elementary school, an urban legend of sorts. Dead Man’s Ditch was haunted by someone named Pig-Man. He was a local who went crazy one day and roamed the canyon wearing a pig mask and looking for children to butcher. I no longer believed such silly stories, but now, the flashlight beam bouncing up and down but always shining in my face, I entertained the possibility.

A hand fell on my shoulder, and I screamed.

Benjamin guffawed at my fright. He doubled over and grabbed his knees. His laughs were high-pitched and squeaky. We tried not to make fun of him because he caught enough flak from the other kids. Now though, I wanted to punch him in his pudgy face. I turned to see who was holding the flashlight. Whoever it was had started to jog toward us. I hoped it wasn’t Haley.

Donner emerged out of the fog. He put the flashlight under his chin and contorted his face. When he saw me, his features softened.

“You okay, Nathan?”

I backhanded him in the chest.

“No, I’m not okay. You guys scared the hell out of me.”

Ben hadn’t stopped laughing.

“We were just having a little fun,” Donner said, now looking down and kicking at a few pebbles.

“Yeah, well… I’m surprised I didn’t hear Chubs sneaking up behind me.”

Ben stopped laughing and gave me a hard shove. “Hey, you take that back!”

I backhanded him. “You had it coming.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Hey, guys!” Haley’s voice came from somewhere up ahead. “What are you idiots doing? We’re gonna be late.”

Idiots. Does she really think I’m an idiot?

“We’re coming,” Donner said.

“Yeah, wait up,” I said.

“You hear Nathan scream like a girl?” Ben asked.

“No, but I heard you laughing like one.”

That shut him up. We came within sight of Haley. She was wearing a David Bowie shirt with a pink lightning bolt on it. She liked all those old rock star guys, even the dead ones.

“That was a low blow,” Ben said when we caught up to her.

“Yeah, well, maybe you should be nicer. Just a thought!”

“We should probably pick up the pace,” I said. “Otherwise Eldon will have a seizure.”

Nods all around. Ben took his Nintendo Switch out of his backpack and started playing something that sounded like Luigi’s Mansion 3. Donner took out his phone. Haley rolled her eyes and came up beside me.

“Don’t sweat Eldon,” she said. “I had him last year and he turned out not to be so bad by the end.”

“I dunno…”

“Just work hard and show up on time. You’ll get on his good side.”

“He has a good side?”

She laughed and gave me a light punch on the arm. It didn’t hurt, just kind of tingled.

When we reached Riveroll Middle School, we said bye to Haley and scooted into Eldon’s classroom right as the second bell rang. He flashed us a disapproving look but said nothing. He couldn’t say anything if we were in the classroom before the second bell, though he much preferred we be seated by that time. I remembered what Haley said and offered Eldon a sheepish grin. He narrowed his eyes.

After homeroom came algebra. I hated math at any time of day but especially before lunch. Then came social studies, then literature. After that, I had gym. I used to enjoy P.E. in elementary school because back then it was less structured and more conducive to free play. Ever since I started middle school that year, I got forced into team sports and mile-long runs. The runs were okay, but team sports were hard, especially since my friends had gym in different periods. After lunch I had home economics, computer science, and English—which was really just another literature course, but at least it assigned better books: adventure stories like The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time. Sometimes, I liked reading these books on the way home.

But on this first day after spring break, I walked home with Donner, Haley, and Benjamin. We said goodbye at the bottom of the slope behind my house where they met me that morning. Haley lingered for a few seconds, smiling at me, and I smiled back, feeling warm inside.

“See you around, Nathan,” she said.

“See you.”

I walked up the slope and hopped the fence into my backyard. Mom was already out in the garden. From the look of it, she was planting beets, squash, and cucumbers. She looked up, smiled, and waved.

“How was school?”

“It was okay.”

I went inside through the sliding glass door and entered the den where Mama did all her writing. She wasn’t at her desk, which was rare. I glanced around to see if maybe she was standing by one of her bookshelves. That was when I saw the painting.

It was hanging over one of the dusty bookshelves in an antique frame. Mama was always picking up things from antique shops—old lamps, mirrors, and grandfather clocks. She must have gotten this painting from one of those places.

I hated it right away. It looked like something Donner would like. Maybe it was innocuous enough, but when I looked more closely, dread sat heavy in my stomach. The painting depicted a forest with faces in the tree trunks, clusters of branches, and tufts of leaves. They all screamed without sound.

Mama entered and gasped when she saw me. “Oh, you’re home! How was school?”

“It was good,” I said.

She looked from me to the painting, simultaneously smiling and furrowing her brow. “What? You don’t like it?”

“Those faces are kinda creepy,” I said.

She tilted her head and asked, “What faces?”

Chapter Notes

Special thanks to Rae Glassford, Shelby Guthrie, and Ryan Harding for reading an earlier version of this story. Rae, especially, helped get the pacing of the chapter you just read into its current form.

The canyon described in this chapter is modeled after the one that was behind my childhood home. On foggy mornings, an optical illusion made it appear that our fence was the only thing separating my backyard from the end of the world. One day, I’ll try to paint what that looked like, as it’s difficult to put into words, even for a writer.

The idea of a cursed painting is hardly original, but I did try to put my own spin on it. My hope is that the originality shows with the characters and how the story develops in subsequent chapters.

As always, thanks for reading.