CHM April 2022
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2022-03-24 05:00:00+00:00

Copyright © 2022 by CHM LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover art: Toeken

Oculus illustration: Desmon Rhae Harris
mid-mag Cthulhu: Pietro Rotelli

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Life long lover of pulp, horror, and fine cheeses. Resides in Oklahoma City.

Carson Winter: Social Media Manager

Horror fan and author with works featured in Vastarien and the No Sleep podcast. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Featured artists this month

Cover Art: Toeken is an artist currently living in Spain. He has had work published in various publications, to wit: Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Archive of the Odd, Lovecraftiana, The Weird and Whatnot and more. He has painted book covers for authors such as Bryan Smith, Tim Meyer, and Cemetery Gates Media, among others.

Pietro Rotelli works as a freelance graphic designer, as a comic book writer and illustrator for Panini (as well as cover artist for CHM, Lovecraftian Studies, Delos Digital, Watson Edizioni and others). My hobby is stop motion and 2D animation with 3D contamination.

www.instagram.com/pietro_rotelli/

Desmond Rhae Harris works as a freelance writer/artist alongside writing his sci-fi novel and working as Editor/Illustrator at Starward Shadows eZine. His pieces have appeared in publications like Novel Noctule and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. You can find out more at www.theinksphere.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

April has seen the release of many great pieces of weird fiction including Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (Weird Tales, 1929) and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Coming of the White Worm” (Stirring Science Stories, 1941). More notably, in my opinion, is the birth of legendary character actor, Lon Chaney Sr. on April 1, 1883. Chaney was a master of makeup, famous for gruesome portrayals like Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Alonso the Armless in The Unknown. What a name, right? Though in perhaps his most famous portrayal, Chaney is responsible for what has been considered the most terrifying scene ever put on film, the unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Here at CHM, we are ready to stake our own claim and perhaps take a run at April horror history with a strong line-up this month. We start with a story of pure cosmic horror in “Oculus.” Then we witness a truly frightening tale of a world hidden within our own in “Matres Lachrymarum” by Mike Allen, acclaimed author of Unseaming. We experience a speculative vision of the afterlife depicted on this month’s cover in “Strands,” before a descent into madness portends an even greater calamity in “The Horrors Unseen.”

Stick around for a unique and strange examination of horror in “The Figure, The Fingers, and the Fiend: Dr. Gloon’s Lesson in Anatomy” followed by a cleverly deceptive mythos tale in “Side Effects May Vary.” We’ll get a reminder of why never to talk to strangers in the reprinted “Behind His Smile, a Frown” before descending down to the crypt for the first part of “The Diamond Lens” by Fitz-James O’Brien, one of the greatest to ever put pen to paper.

Enjoy.

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

A monthly tome of terrifying tales, lovecraftian, cosmic, and weird.

Oculus

By Ed Burkley

They say eyes are the windows to the soul. This axiom is truer then most people can scarcely conceive. It is also the reason why I took the damnable act of gouging mine out.

Given the want, have you ever looked, I mean really looked, into the eyes of another? People don’t simply have blue, brown or green eyes. No, there are striations, patterns, and maelstroms of hidden worlds—like the great sandstorm eye of Jupiter, the deep-space God’s Eye Nebula—residing within our sockets. Eyes even provide clues as to the health of a person. They are no less than a mirror, reflecting our inner essence, as they say, our soul.

The woman I loved most in this god-forsaken world, my fiancé Sarah, had the most beautiful soul. And by that I mean the most beautiful eyes. I’ll never forget those mercurial azure orbs of hers, or what was left of them.

It was those eyes that brought me to my present confinement. To where I sit now, blind and imprisoned in Arkham Sanitarium. Only I see now more clearly than ever before. And more importantly, I am ever free in the knowledge that it can never get me; my soul is my own.

It all began simply enough, as I was unaware of the doorway that I would soon open unto that unspeakable cosmic horror. I awoke like I had on any other day, save one exception. This was the day I would be proposing to Sarah. I had been planning the moment for some time, constrained by my timidity and overburdening work schedule. But tonight, I thought as I eyed the small velvet box on the table, she will come over and I will finally pose the question I’ve wanted to ask her since the day her eyes met mine.

With Earl Grey warming my hands in my favorite mug, I opened the front door to let my cat, Mr. Pabodie, out for his early morning business. As he rushed passed my feet I looked down and on my doormat was a small wooden crate. It was addressed to me, Professor Arthur Sullivan.

A package such as this was not particularly unusual, as I work on the restoration of many ancient archaeological pieces for my department at Miskatonic University. I had received containers like these before, often filled with wondrous things from old and forgotten civilizations. Only they had always come to me at work. Never had a shipment been sent to my home address.

illustration by Desmond Rhae Harris

Curious, I brought the container inside and placed it on the kitchen table. Using a screwdriver, I pried it open. Inside, seated within a nest of wood wool, were a linen-wrapped item and a piece of aged parchment. I lifted the paper, noting the stiffness of the antediluvian material between my fingertips, and read the phrase written in a most unusual eldritch script of India ink: A doorway to see all things.

Intrigued, I carefully unwrapped the artifact to reveal a stout-shaped obelisk caked in mud. It was carved from what I suspected to be basalt rock of a most luxurious ebon hue, and had several symbols etched around its base. Upon further inspection I recognized these hieroglyphs to be those linked to the worship of the Outer Gods. On more than one occasion, while playing poker and over much drinking with my colleague Professor Wingate from the archeology department, and having been subjected to his outlandish theories regarding some of the more outré history and artifacts housed in the vaults of the university, many quite similar to the one I held before me, I gained a tacit knowledge of numerous veiled histories of man, those long before his kind as well as other unspeakable things beyond this sphere. I usually scoffed at Wingate’s stories, but lamentably I laugh no more.

The piece was in pretty poor condition, still coated with dirt, sand and the decay that comes from a lifetime spent buried. I gathered my tools and began working on freeing the object from its earthen patina. A chunk here, a clump there, the debris slowly fell away to reveal a carved out niche within the obelisk. Seated within was a large tritriacontahedron crystal. Etched around the edge of the recess were twisted vines, or perhaps they were tentacles, along with a curious inscription.

I read the strange words under my breath. “Y’ai ‘Ng’ngah, Yog-Sothoth H’ee.” And as that unknown language passed my lips, I could have sworn the crystal sparkled, just momentarily, with an uncanny phosphorescent light.

I slid the crystal center under my binocular scope to get a better view of its structure and any inclusions. What I saw next took my breath away. I am now convinced that anyone who laid eyes on that unutterable horror would have gone mad. If only I had never unearthed that damned accursed artifact. If only I had looked away.

Even now, I struggle to find the words to describe what I saw. The sounds of human speech fall upon the ear with only a flat, unidimensional ability to describe, failing to capture the immensity and complexity of what I saw. To truly translate what lie within my scope, all the senses would have to work together. But the closest way I can put it is to say that there in the center of the crystal, swirled what only could be understood as a world beyond our own. It had its own luminescence, its own physics. And worst of all, its own inhabitants, for as I peered deeper into this new world, something peered back.

An eye, gigantic, grotesque and bulging yellow, blinked with the same surprise as my own.

I begged my eyes to close, to turn away from this cyclopean orb, but they refused my command.

The great sphere’s gaze turned from surprise to anger, then finally to a hunger I’ve only seen in the eyes of predators before they commit a deathblow upon their prey.

I tried to pull away but something held me tight. The eye had gravity about it and I could not escape. Then the burning started. An unholy scorching of my optic nerves. A searing pain like none other. At first I didn’t know what was happening. Then I felt the pressure building behind my eyes. Much like the way you can feel your ears pop when flying in an airplane. My eyes widen, but not of their own accord, as a great panic seized its deadly grip around my heart. Crimson stained the periphery of my vision.

I dared not believe it. The thing was taking out my eyes.

I tugged and reeled at the scope with my hands. It did not move. I kicked the table out from under me. I heard items strike the ground and skittered across the floor, but the scope remained stuck to my face like some cosmic alien intent on impregnating me with its progenitor. Try as I might, I was trapped.

My vision blurred, turned red, swallowed up by the flow of blood. My blood.

Desperate, I threw myself against the wall. A loud crash, a sharp pain. Then darkness flooded in and dragged my consciousness down to the frozen plane of sleep.

* * *

I woke on the floor, my scope next to me. The relic was nowhere to be found. The only evidence of its existence was a pile of burnt blue ash next to my scope.

I struggled to my feet, my head spinning, and thought, Maybe it was just a bad dream. But a quick glance in the mirror dashed that hope. Scarlet tears streamed down my face.

I cleaned myself off and straightened up the mess I made. I picked the velvet box with Sarah’s ring off the floor. In my stupor I had completely forgot that Sarah would be over soon and I didn’t want her to see me, or my place, like that. What would she think? I wasn’t sure what to think myself. Was I mad? Was it all just a hallucination, strained nerves, conjured by my overwrought mind? Maybe the proposal had me wound tighter than I thought.

I slipped the box into my pocket for safekeeping and turned on the television to calm my nerves while I straightened up. I was hoping to catch the morning news, but for some reason my remote was acting strangely. It kept flipping through random stations.

I saw a group of people voting on a proposition, then the leader declaring, “And…the I’s have it.”

I saw a music video from the 1980s. Bad clothing, an eerie synthesizer, and a man singing, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”

I saw scenes from a black-and-white movie, with an announcer declaring, “Next up on classic movie station, Eyes Without a Face.”

Then the screen went dark. I pushed the buttons of the remote with no effect, then threw it on my couch in frustration.

A knock at the front door… Sarah? She’s come early.

“Let me in already,” a man’s voice cried impatiently from behind the door.

“Who’s there?” I asked, feeling suddenly paranoid. When there was no answer, I looking through the peephole in the door. Nothing at first. Then a large eye came into view, filling up the entire porthole, blinked madly. I couldn’t make out any other figure than that damned, crazed eye. I was reminded of my morning’s disturbing event or hallucination or whatever it was and felt an icy cold fission travel down my back as if cold water was cascading through my spine.

“Who’s there!” I cried out, more loudly this time.

“It’s me,” the voice replied. “Your only friend in the world. I’ve come to check on you. Warm those cold feet of yours.”

Thank god. It was Ethan, my best man and colleague, not some stranger and more importantly not Sarah.

“Quit fooling around and sticking your eyeball so close to the peephole,” I growled as I turned the lock.

“Whatever, Arthur. Just let me in already.”

I opened the door. Ethan stood alone in the hallway, several feet away from the doorway. I craned my neck around and eyed the other side of the peephole. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

“What are you doing?” Ethan asked. “You feeling alright? You seem odd?”

I shook my head. “Having a strange morning, that’s all,” I said and retreated back into the house.

Ethan followed. “Strange as in a beautiful woman is likely going to agree to latch herself to your sorry ass for the rest of her life?”

I closed the door with force. “No, and that’s not funny.”

“I know,” he nodded. “I still find no humor in why God seems fit to pair a girl like that with a guy like you.”

“Ha, ha, really funny.” I took a seat at the kitchen island.

“You look a little peaked. You’re not freakin’ out are you? About the proposal?”

“I just, I was examining an artifact,” I mumbled, more to myself than him. “And I saw something… an eye I think. I don’t know. Then I blacked out.” I looked around the room nervously. “I keep getting this sense that something’s watching me.”

Ethan patted my back a little too forceful; the way friends do when the conversation veers into emotional waters. “Okay, no worries. You probably had a little too much to drink last night. Celebrating your end of singledom and all. Maybe you even hit your head in a drunk stupor. Lord knows I’ve done that once or twice myself.”

“I haven’t been drinking.”

He eyed me top to bottom. “You sure? Maybe you just don’t remember. You know what you need? Something to eat. Food always helps my hangover. And I’m starving myself.”

He opened the pantry, pulled out a box of Cheerios, and then poured two bowls. He added a glug of milk to each and started shoveling spoonfuls into his mouth.

I wasn’t hungry, my stomach was still doing summersaults after this morning’s occurrences. I played the events over in my mind. Finding the crate on the doorstep, discovering the artifact, seeing that awful eye in my scope. With its angry blinking and jaundice hue, it looked like… like the eye I saw in the peephole!

A slight twitch of movement in my periphery. Then another. Coming from Ethan’s spoon of all places. I squinted and there it was again. It was the Cheerios. They were moving, only that wasn’t quite right. No, they were blinking! There, where the void in the center of the Cheerio should be, was an eye. It blinked wildly as Ethan brought the morsel up to his mouth, then crunched firmly.

My jaw went slack as my gaze landed on the bowl. Looking back from within each hollowed ring were hundreds of golden eyes, each a little repugnance darting and blinking in search of something…or someone. As I took in the full spectacle of horror, the multitudinal-eyed abomination in the bowl glared hotly, singularly, at me. I was so transfixed by the sheer absurdity of it all that I almost didn’t notice Ethan about to take his next bite.

“Don’t eat that!” I cried as my mind broke free, then I swatted the spoon from his hands.

“What the hell!”

I grabbed the bowl and ran to the sink.

“Wow. If you don’t like me eating your stuff just say so.”

“You don’t see that!” I pointed a shaky finger at the bowl of blinking beasts.

“My breakfast being stolen? Yes, I see that. Now if you aren’t going to finish it may I?”

I couldn’t believe he didn’t see them. My stomach lurched as I watched those eyes twitching and scowling at me. “Filth!” I cried and upended the bowl into the sink.

“Well that’s great,” Ethan huffed. “Guess I’m done eating then.”

I turned on the faucet and watched the stream of eyes swirl and plunge into the drain. Then I flipped on the disposal, ensuring there would be no survivors. After a good long while, I flicked off the switch and peered down into the gullet of the sink. I held my breath, listening. A final satisfying gurgle, then silence.

I leaned forward, gazing into the drain and was just about to turn away. Then from within the cavity, an eye snapped open.

I stumbled back, grabbed the sink stopper and jammed it into the drain, covering the atrocity.

“Arthur?”

I turned to see Ethan eyeing me with concern.

“I think I should let you get some rest. You look tired.” He gathered his coat and headed for the door, then stopped and turned back. “It’s all going to be fine.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Just a little pre-proposal nerves, that’s all.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, my voice as tight as a violin string. “I think I’m going crazy. I’m seeing eyes staring back at me, everywhere I look.”

I expected him to laugh or crack a joke. He didn’t. Instead, he gripped both my arms and looked intently into my weary eyes. “You’re not crazy. Many guys go through this before they pop the question. It’s totally normal.”

“Seeing eyes? That’s normal?”

“Well, okay, that’s a little weird. But nothing that hasn’t been seen before. I’ve got a colleague in the psychology department who studies phobias. I remember him telling me about a client with a similar experience. Now what was that called?”

He pulled out his phone, tapped the screen a few times, then showed me a page from a medical website.

“Bingo. See? You have ommetaphobia. That’s all this is.”

I read the description: Ommetaphobia. Fear of eyes.

“See?” he said. “Your cold feet must be manifesting itself as a fear of eyeballs.”

“Okay, Freud,” I sighed. “You’ve been a big help.” I meant it sarcastically, but maybe he was right. Maybe that’s all this was. Nerves. After all, my life as I knew it was going to change forever once I asked Sarah the question, for good or for bad.

“Just do your best to relax. Take a shower, straighten up the house. Once you propose, the phobic symptoms will go away.”

As Ethan opened the door and stepped through, I was already starting to feel a bit better.

“Thanks,” I said. “You’re the best.”

Ethan flashed me a wide grin. “Of course I am. That’s why you made me your best man.”

* * *

I heeded Ethan’s advice and took a long shower. I half-expected to see an eye in the shower drain or one peering up at me from the toilet, but all was as it should be. Then I got to work on cleaning up the house. I straightened up the living room, set the table, and even lit a few candles. Lastly, I placed a plate of pastel macarons—Sarah’s favorite—onto the table and took a step back. Everything looked perfect. All my anxieties had vanished. I was ready to do this.

A knock at the door just as the clock showed 6 pm. Sarah was always so punctual; it was one of the many qualities I loved about her.

I opened the door and was greeted by her smiling face and those radiant cyan eyes.

“Hey, there handsome. So what super fun evening do you have planned for me tonight?” She handed me a bottle of Pinot as she stepped inside. “What’s all this?” she added as her eyes landed on the lit candles and macarons.

I took her hand in mine and lead her to the couch. “I’ve been planning this for some time. I was going to wait until your parents came in next week, but decided it’s really just about the two of us.” I got down on one knee.

“Oh my god. This is really happening.” She clutched her hand over her smile.

“Sarah Anne Daube,” I said as I pulled the velvet box from my pocket and pried it open. “You’ve made me the happiest man on the planet since the day I met you. Would you let me spend the rest of my life trying to make you the happiest woman and marry me?”

Her lips curved into a wide smile. Her eyes sent forth a torrent from within their turbulent oceans, going glassy with tears. “Yes! A thousand times, yes!”

Warmth spread across my chest as I removed the blue diamond ring from the box and slid it onto her finger. “It’s modeled after the Nassak Diamond. The one they call the Eye of Shiva.”

“Oh Arthur, it’s amazing!” She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, then returned her admiring gaze to the ring.

“When I saw it,” I said, “all sparkling blue, I immediately felt like I was staring into your eyes. And I got the diamond itself engraved. I remembered you once told me how cool you thought that would be.”

“Really? What does it say?”

“I think you know.” It started when we were first dating. I would say “I only have eyes for you” as a tease. Overtime, it became our little saying to each other.

“Oh I have to see!” she exclaimed, and reached for my binocular scope on the table.

“Wait!”

But I was too slow and she too eager. She had the ring under the scope before I could stop her.

“Sarah, step away from that,” I said, my voice shaking.

“It’s even prettier up close,” she said as if she hadn’t heard me. “I don’t see, oh wait, there it is!”

I winced. My eyes screwed tight in anticipation of something awful. A scream, a cry of pain, I don’t know what I was expecting.

But there was nothing.

Ethan was right, I thought as I opened my eyes. It was all in my head.

She read the inscription aloud. “I only have eyes for—”

Her words cut off in a gasp. “What the? Arthur! There’s an eye staring back at me. How the?”

Dear god no! It was happening again. I hadn’t dreamt it, nor was it in my damn head. That fucking eye was back and Sarah was now seeing it too.

“Look away Sarah!”

She wrenched her head back. The scope lifted up with her. “Arthur! I’m stuck!”

Blood was pooling around the eyepieces and dripping down her cheeks. She cried out with a soul-sickening scream. The kind of horrific sound an animal makes when its foot is caught in a trap.

A transfiguring panic seized my chest. I had to get that Stygian thing off of her. I grabbed the scope with both hands, trying to steady her as she wailed and writhed in agony.

“Get it off! Get it OFF!”

“I’m trying!” I first attempted to gingerly separate Sarah from the scope, but it was sealed to her face. So I start tugging, gently at first and then harder.

“It hurts, Arthur. Oh god it hurts! The burning, its inside my head now!”

It let go on the forth tug. Between raucous, gut wrenching screams of pain, I heard an unholy guttural wail escape from the lips of my Sarah, followed by a popping sound like a cork escaping a bottle. She fell free from the scope and landed on the couch.

“Oh thank god,” I cried, but my relief turned sour when I saw Sarah’s face. Blood was smeared across her cheeks, but it was more than just that. There was something different about her. I couldn’t figure it out at first. I think in that moment, my mind refused to witness what my eyes were seeing.

It was her eyes. Her beautiful blue eyes. They were gone. In place of them were two empty, gapping sockets.

“Oh god, Sarah!” I howled as I crouched by her side.

Those gapping red holes screamed at me like two open mouths, seeming to shout “you failed me” over and over.

“Sarah, my sweet Sarah,” I cried as I took her hand in mine. She was as cold as the grave. No pulse, no breath. Her mouth hung open and inside I could have sworn I saw movement.

I tried to look away, every fiber of my body screamed for me to, but I couldn’t wrench my gaze. From deep within her black throat, a monstrous eye snapped open.

“NO!” I scampered away, my feet kicking wildly until my back hit the wall. Hands shaking, I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed. 9, 1 ¬—. But I couldn’t finish. What would the police think of my call? Mad is what they’d say. Crazy. And who could blame them?

I couldn’t call the police. So instead I dialed the only person I thought who’d possibly believe me.

He picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Ethan, sh-shit,” I stammered into the phone. “Sarah, she’s dead! That damnable thing got her, Ethan.” Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. “It took her eyes right out of her sockets—”

“Calm down,” Ethan cut in. “Whatever’s going on, we’ll find a solution. Now take a deep breath and tell me what’s happening.”

I took in a deep, wet gulp of air. “Sarah. Her fucking eyes, they’re gone. That thing, that eye I was telling you I saw earlier. It’s real. Not in my head or something created from stress. It’s in my scope, it came from that cursed obelisk, and it just plucked her eyes out!”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Ethan said, but his calm tone indicated he didn’t hear. Not really. “You’re in shock. I’m coming over. Just don’t do anything. Stay as calm as you can and I’ll bring help to sort this whole thing out. Okay?”

I tried to say “hurry,” but only a long, pained groan escaped my throat.

“Just wait for me,” he said. “I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there soon.” The phone went silent.

I sat there listening to the dead space in my ear, the silence deafening. I’m not sure how long I waited there on the floor—A few minutes? A half hour? All I know is I still had the phone pressed to my ear when I heard Ethan pounding on the door. I let the phone slip from my grip as I struggled to my feet. I looked at the door and even though it was only a few feet away, ten at most, it appeared to exist down a long, dark corridor. I took a step toward it and the lights above began to flicker and wane.

That’s when I knew it. Something did not want me to reach the safety of Ethan.

I forced another step forward and the lights went dim. Thick abysmal blackness settled into every corner and crevice of my apartment. And within those dark recesses, a thousand eyes flicked open, their gaze bearing down on me like a physical presence.

I tried to run for the door but my foot slipped on something and I dropped to the ground with a thud. Between the slats of hardwood boards, eyes stared up at me. An upended shoe peered out from under an armchair. Its laceless tongue lined by eyelets, each one of them blinking. I turned away and pushed myself up from the floor and saw the face of my watch had been replaced by a great daemoniac eye. “No!” I screamed as I pulled it from my wrist and tossed it at the wall.

“Arthur! Let me in,” Ethan yelled as he pounded on the door.

As I righted myself I saw what I had slipped on. My screwdriver. The one I’d used to pry open the crate. It must have fallen when I upended the table this morning. I snatched it up and started stabbing at anything that blinked. All the while I could hear Ethan pounding, saying he’d brought help and to let him in.

I was too preoccupied with poking and popping eyes to obey.

Sweat poured down the back of my neck and soaked my collar as I finally made my way to the door. I reached for the handle and saw the malignant eye looking at me from the peephole. Only it wasn’t the same as before. Something was different.

It took me a second to grasp what had changed, for my mind to digest the cruelty of the situation. There perched in the center of my door was the most beautiful azure eye.

Sarah’s eye.

It was that grotesque orb’s final attempt to stop me from opening the door. To use the thing I loved most against me. I refused to stand for it.

“You can’t have her you fucking beast!” I stabbed at the door, wedging the screwdriver into the peephole. I wrestled and dug until I finally pried the blessed blue orb free. That thing would never keep any part of her. She was mine.

A loud crack, then the door burst open and Ethan stumbled through. His face held a countenance of transfixed horror as he took in the macabre spectacle before him. Sarah sprawled on the couch, eyes plucked out, mouth slack, and me with screwdriver in one hand and Sarah’s disembodied eye in the other.

“She’s mine now,” I mumbled as I looked up at Ethan.

Beyond him, I caught sight of the “help” Ethan had brought me. Five uniformed police officers, each with pistols drawn. They barked at me with their orders. I heard none of it. What I did take in was my friend’s look of horror transforming to heartbreak, then I slammed face first into the wall as cuffs were locked tight around my wrists.

The full impact of the situation finally reached the inner sanctum of my soul. Its crippling weight strangled my heart and I cried. I cried over the otherworldly door I had opened. I cried over the horror I had seen within. I cried at the loss of my sweet Sarah and I cried in relief that it was finally over. Or so I thought.

* * *

That night they put me in a padded cell in Arkham Sanitarium and turned off the lights. The only rays to penetrate the darkness came from the hallway. Its luminous beam poured through the circular window in the door and pooled onto the concrete floor.

The room was empty except for a bed pressed against the far wall. Suddenly I felt excruciatingly tired. As I approached, I noticed a peculiar sensation underfoot, something akin to walking on wet sand. A squishing, slurping noise emitted with each step. I peered into the shadowed corners of my cell and as my vision adjusted to the dark, I saw a thousand eyes gawking at me from all sides, mouthless orbs glistening with hunger. From somewhere beyond the veil of this world and that of another, within the gulf of Tartarian darkness I heard a rising chant. Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth!

It was then that I knew it would never release me.

My pulse quickened. I scanned my room for any means of escape. There was none save for the pool of light coming through the window, a circular island of protection within the terrifying dark; the only means to keep the terror at bay.

I wanted so badly to run to that cyclopean window, to look through that glass oculus and cry for help. But I knew what awaited me there. What would be staring back ready to claim from me my sight as well as my soul.

I knew then what I had to do.

I waited in that island of light for an infernal length of time until finally its boundary expanded as my cell door opened. Two orderlies stepped through. One held me fast while the other placed a dinner tray on the floor.

I waited until they left, then sat down on the hard slab floor and pulled the tray close. At the center was some brown, gelatinous glob. The unsavory malodorous smell made me almost toss it aside. But then I saw my salvation: a plastic spoon.

I looked longingly one last time at the window bathing me in light. All around I could feel the eyes upon me, peering at me from their dark perch, inching closer. It was now or never.

The pain was horrendous, my cries lamentable. But no one came. I guess the orderlies had grown complacent of my screams. They thought of me as a mad man who had killed his fiancé by taking out her eyes. And I know that when they eventually return and find me with my scooped-out sockets, a crimson spoon in one hand and two detached eyes in the other, they won’t be surprised. They will feel confident in having locked me away.

But I no longer care. Even if I am imprisoned in this cell for the rest of my life, I am still free. Free from it.

So here I sit in the vast darkness of my own creation, with only my mind’s eye to witness over and over the horrors that plague my thoughts. And through the blood and darkness I can still see Sarah’s azure eyes. They keep me company.

But one thought haunts me still: What became of that artifact that started this whole thing. Where did it go? Is it arriving on the doorstep of someone else as I sit here? Will they look into the void and see that cosmic horror, the multitudinous eyes of Yog-Sothoth looking back?

Sometimes I wake in my padded cell drenched in sweat, calling out, “Look away, dear god just shut your eyes to the horror!” Hoping whoever now has the artifact will listen. Hoping they will be quicker to turn away than was my poor sweet Sarah.

End.

* * *

Ed Burkley is a psychologist and author who lives on the outskirts of Saint Louis, Missouri. His short fiction has appeared in Weirdbook, Year’s Best Body Horror Anthology, Spooky Isles Book of Horror V1, and Strange Lands (Flame Tree Publishing). He does his best work with a cup of chai to refresh, a Norwich Terrier on his lap for comfort, and the much-needed support from his far better writer wife. More information can be found at www.edwardburkley.com

Matres Lachrymarum

By Mike Allen

One

The steel surface of the table distorts my face.

I’ve glimpsed my reflection before, in pools of water illuminated by streetlights, in the glass of nighttime shop windows, in the blades from my tool kit once they’ve been cleaned and polished.

My features don’t really skew so lopsided, I am sure. My supervisor shaped me to mingle unnoticed among my former cohorts, not to trigger shrieks of revulsion.

The tabletop captures the sweat on my hollow cheeks and too-tall forehead, the wet wisps of hair plastered to my scalp. It’s no surprise I’m sweating so profusely.

Beside me on the concrete floor lies the creation, still wrapped inside the tarp that I used to drag it here, moving in a muscle-tearing crouch stooped through the tunnels where my supervisor dwells. Though the creation is light for its size, it still weighs at least four times what I do.

The warmth of my body, flush with exertion, floods the examination room despite its high ceiling and subterranean chill. Or perhaps the heat comes from the intensity of my supervisor’s many-eyed gaze.

“Seal the door and place my gift upon the table.” Her voice, sounded from a hundred mouths, carries the authority of a chorus in an ancient play. “Demonstrate care and skill.”

The dimensions of the examination room seem cramped only because the table in its center could accommodate the dissection of a horse. My supervisor fills the opposite half of the room, her malleable form allowing her to curve around the table’s corners. Her eyestalks bloom like long-stemmed flowers all along the squirming, bristling flesh of her core.

I turn the valve to seal the vault door. The wheel creaks with rust. I squat and gather the fabric of the tarp, making certain I have secure leverage. I cannot simply heave the creation carelessly, although I have confidence my craftsmanship has made its joints and grafts durable.

I lift, I gasp, I slowly lower the creation onto the table. Just as cautiously, I circle the room, pealing back the tarp’s flaps. The creation’s mass unfurls until it blankets the surface of the tabletop.

My supervisor also circles the table, mirroring my progress, the hooves at the tips of her myriad legs click-clacking on the hard floor. Most of her eyes engage in inspection of my handiwork, which still spares about a dozen to fixate upon me without blinking.

I maintain an expression flat as a razor blade. The longer my supervisor goes without speaking, the harsher her critique will be. The worst of her reprimands burned curlicue scars down the inside of my left arm -- though she has only once subjected me to a punishment that extreme.

My mind willed blank, still a perverse impulse proceeds with an insubordinate mental count, marking the minutes, the seconds as they pass, my breath keeping time.

The creation, inert, glistens with oil and lymph, the grafts that bind bone to steel and viscera to circuitry all sturdy despite the long drag to reach this subterranean lair. This small subtle miracle further evidences my supervisor’s place in the divine order, for she is the one who granted me these skills. The matrices of physics and mathematics as chronicled by human science do not restrict her, nor do they tether the work she assigns me.

A forbidden thought shimmies deep in the murk of my brain, an idle speculation at the might my supervisor’s sistren must possess, what awesome heights their undisgraced powers must scale. I bury this notion in darkness, lest my supervisor detect my rebellion and unmake me, or worse, further remake me.

Thirteen limbs stretch from her body, their double-dozen joints straightening well over two and a half meters in length. Each limb terminates in a flower-like hand that spirals open to point at junctures in the creation where organic parts fuse with mechanical.

“Work without flaw,” she says in her one-and-many voice. “You have proven equal to the task I set for you.”

Emoting in response to her praise could prove as grave a mistake as displaying fear. “Thank you, Mother, for permitting me to serve you.” Another unwelcome thought bubbled from below, an imagining of how her sistren might respond to hear this outcast addressed as Mother.

“Your duties to me require another step,” she says. Every inspection that has gone well ends with that phrase.

Her flower-like hands engulf my head, impart new instructions.

* * *

Two

The others she has shaped to serve her, none look like me. They could not survive for long among the humans proper, and worse, were they to draw the attention of the Mothers who govern the boroughs, unwelcome questions would instantly arise as to who owned and animated them.

The creation, too, might raise similar questions, if those who do the bidding of the Mothers were to discover my workshop.

Dragging the carefully folded and wrapped creation back to that very workshop, I pass other servitors of my supervisor as they labor at their tasks. They stink of a rot that does not afflict me, perhaps because I was still among the living when my supervisor’s minions abducted me.

This city had accumulated centuries of history and detritus before the Mothers emerged from their dimension to conquer ours. Subway and sewage systems abandoned and sealed shut, secret bunkers and munitions factories commissioned and neglected, shoddily-constructed apartment towers collapsed and paved over.

My supervisor’s lair nestles in these grottoes. I deny the temptation that bubbles, the infernal, suicidal impulse to indulge terms such as fallen, such as fugitive, such as pariah avoiding the eyes of her own kind.

Within the cavernous gloom, servants that partially resemble dogs and partially resemble lobsters stir vats of a substance akin to concrete, laced with an element extracted in trace amounts from my supervisor’s demesne. Servants that partly resemble bats and partly resemble spiders take insignificant scoops of the substance and apply it to walls, floors, ceilings in a process of gradual fortification. Shielding against attack from the other Mothers.

Servants that partially resemble mantids and partly resemble mandrills assemble pikes and hammers. For now all efforts must remain primitive, my supervisor has said many times, her tongues warm and wet in my ears. Tasks must stay incremental. Caution overrides all.

She once and only once said to me, The most daring project I ever undertook was shaping you to suit our need.

She does not address me by a name. I cannot, no matter how deeply I dredge, call back the name I bore during my human lifetime.

She made me sturdy enough to heft many times my weight without assistance, a human insect, a mathematical impossibility. At times I wonder if some portion of me exists in a higher dimension than my senses can perceive. My supervisor is capable of such hyperspatial witchcraft.

My sense of sight also revised, I navigate the lightless passages without difficulty, all surfaces a pale gray, the same way that a cat perceives the nighttime world.

Thus I tow the creation behind me in its tarp with little more effort than a human might use to push a wheelbarrow laden with topsoil, even as I stoop to navigate low-ceilinged crawlspaces.

The immense hollow cylinder of concrete that serves as my workshop might once have sloshed full of poisonous chemicals, given the permanent reek of rotten eggs and spoiled apples.

I loosen the tarp and unfurl the creation to its full diameter. With its hodgepodge of mismatched parts, an ignorant human that happened upon it might well mistake it for a trash heap. I presume my supervisor intended this subterfuge.

Along the sliver of floor left uncovered, I spread a single blanket folded over on itself. Hours remain before nightfall in the city, so I lie down.

The hospital bed where I lay when the servitors came for me was even less comfortable than this blanket wadded on chemical-drenched concrete. Wires prodded my sores. Bedbugs and lice danced on my flaking skin and drank my cancerous blood. In my delirium the claws that scooped me from the mattress seemed only one more pain-born hallucination.

The descent into the tunnels, more of the same, a pain-hazed dream that continued until my supervisor enfolded me in her limbs. Her unearthly shape, her turpentine smell, shocked me fully awake—one can never forget the Mothers, and any notion that my ordeal was delusion imploded. She stifled my screams, stuffing her hands in my mouth, seizing my tongue, corking my throat, the taste of her extradimensional flesh like burnt fruit peel and searing pepper mush.

She banished the old agonies, replaced them with her intentions.

I had, when I was human, for the brief time that I was valued, been a maker, a sculptor in stone and clay, a woodworker, a programmer who designed objects to be printed in three dimensions, an artisan who had experimented with media of many controversial sorts. Those urges, those skills, were the pieces of my old life that she allowed to carry over into the new.

She funneled them toward her purposes, welded in blinders that forbade deviances in direction, amputating all memory of my former self.

Almost all.

Dreams bubble, sometimes, deep below the surface, out of reach. Like Tantalus, I grasp, fingers closing on nothing.

* * *

Three

The water in the buried canal might well be toxic to an ordinary animal, something I no longer am. Nor am I a fool: To pass among the humans, first I must bathe, and afterward, dress. Clothes taken from those who will never again have need of them suit me adequately enough.

A sinkhole in a neglected parking garage has collapsed in convenient stages through the decades, the random process of decay creating a series of ledges that form a functional stairway—one could be forgiven for concluding that the hole was deliberately designed. I ascend to the surface, give my eyes time to adjust to the present of light, however minimal. My toolkit weighs heavy within a concealed pocket of my long gray coat.

Those who guard the doors to the nightclub, if they searched my person and found the tools, immediately would drag me before the Mother that presides there. Fortunately, I know other ways inside.

Under the governance of the Mothers, the disappearance of a single human inspires far less curiosity from the authorities than such incidents once did—nonetheless investigations occur, prosecutions proceed, authorities make a spectacle of punishment.

I must take care who I choose.

Illumination that strobed between dark and blinding, rampant consumption of sense-altering drugs, brain-deceiving holograms, the pulse of artificial heartbeats combined to make the nightclub a perfect place for scouting and snatching sources for components. Dozens of easy marks dance before me, weak and slender souls who will offer scant resistance, even wide awake, while I mine them for sinew and innards. I am but one of many with backs pressed to the walls, watching the young and nimble things as they cavort. I could not hope for greater anonymity.

“You smell like their garbage,” he shouts.

At first, I do not comprehend who he’s shouting at or about.

“You’re the worst kind of scum.” He leans down so his gaze meets mine. His breath reeks of whiskey sours. “Get out of here or I’ll gut you.”

My fearful glance is not aimed at him. I need to see if the Mother on her throne has turned eyes in our direction. Even one focused on me could mean the worst.

She sprawls across a padded furnishing in the shape of a titanic scallop shell, hinged open. Her dozens of hooved limbs and clusters of eyestalks spill over the sides, a living fringe. She basks in the energy of the revelers. The massed psychic auras of humanity serve as nectar to her kind.

The flesh of humanity, too, provides nourishment for them. After cementing their conquest, the Mothers have tended to refrain from that indulgence, reserving that treatment for those foolish enough to rebel -- which in turn has made those allowed to continue their lives more or less as usual convinced that they are recipients of a kindness.

Those that dance closest to the throne reach high to brush their fingers across the cleft curves of the Mother’s dangling hooves.

The man threatening me observes the direction of my glance. “You traitor! You sick bastard! You let her make you into… that!” A switchblade slides into his hand from beneath the cuff of his sleeve. “She won’t have time to save you!”

I could laugh, a booming bray right from the belly, if I had a second more to spare. He detects, somehow, what I really am, and presumes I belong full-body to the Mother of the club, and out of a rage loosed by suicidal inebriation he wants to kill me for it. He, like me, has snuck a forbidden weapon past the Mother’s security. The irony stabs deep.

His blade does not. I catch his wrist. I could crush his bones, but that would give me away, and the Mother would not mistake me for one of her own, as he has.

“Filth!” He tries to twist his wrist loose, swings his free fist at me. I stagger drunkenly though I’ve not had a drop, and I pull him off balance. He swings again, and I let his fist connect. Skin splits along my cheekbone. The pain of flesh parting stings more than I expected.

“Monster!” he cries.

“Monster!” I slur back at him. Around us, dancers spy his blade and shriek. I pull him to the floor as bouncers bear down on us.

They eject us both, the best possible outcome, except that I can never again use those hunting grounds, because the risk of recognition will be too great. I will need to find a new one. The risks of that quest might be greater by an order of magnitude. My supervisor might burn new scars in me once I disclose these events to her.

We both end up sprawled on the concrete of a moonlit alley. The gate permitting exit from the club has shut behind us, the seal airtight, muffling rhythmic thunder. We are no longer the staff’s problem. The far end of the alley opens into a populated street. He could walk toward it, not that I would let him get far, but his obsession with me has not relented.

The bouncers took his knife. I thank the benevolence of my supervisor, for granting me enough self-possession to play the part of a bewildered, befuddled addict, such that the Mother’s minions did not bother to search my coat. I still need parts for the creation.

“I know,” he mutters. “I know you’re one of them. You let her shape you. Dog!”

I sway and slow my words. “What makes you... think that?”

I genuinely desire to know what gave me away.

Instead of answering, he charges me. I drop all pretense, slam his blundering weight into the bricks behind me. When he attempts to stand, I knock him flat with one blow, snap his knees under my boots. His neck squeezed in the crook of my arm, I cut off the blood to his brain long enough to render him unconscious.

A security camera records as I sling him over my shoulder. Truly, I can never come back here.

I take him to the abandoned parking garage and carry him down the sinkhole.

In my workshop, I extract the answers I need.

* * *

Four

Once again I spread my creation across the examination table and still myself as my supervisor inspects its newest features. One of her eyes pivots toward me while the others scour the contours of this gift I have made in her image, the resemblance more evident now than it has ever been.

One might argue that a thing cannot be a gift when presented in response to demands that cannot be refused, but my gratitude that she permits me to live and considers me useful, that is genuine. Mentally I repeat assertions of gratitude, a mantra of submission and genuflection, as she straightens the double-dozen joints of a limb, lowers a flower-like hand to my side of the table.

She draws my attention to a juncture where a round metal clamp joins a graphite-gray cylinder to the hairy, muscular flesh of a human thigh.

“The edge here is not smooth,” she says from multiple mouths. “The tools I provide operate with perfect precision. An incision this uneven can only come about from deliberate choice.”

I cannot suppress a nervous swallow, even though I expected this question. “This element was still mobile when I made the separation.”

That flowery hand floats toward my face, hesitates mere inches away. I successfully stave off the urge to flinch. Her chorus speaks a conclusion: “It wasn’t dead.”

I inhale slowly, deeply. “I didn’t kill it first. I was angry at an insult. I caused suffering.”

The deceptive softness of her hand alights on my forehead. From the center of her palm comes a sensation like the swift peck of a kiss. I recall a flurry of similar kisses before she burned the scars into the flesh under my arm.

“Your indulgence is permissible, unless this creation fails to function as it should.” She extends more tendrils and pedipalps, exploring every surface.

I mentally track the time. At twenty-seven minutes and fifty-four seconds, she withdrew her limbs. “Activate it.”

Never before has she given that order. I’m caught between a gasp of relief and a spurt of panic.

I remind myself that I’ve long since accepted the consequences of failure.

I engineered the creation to activate with a recitation of certain words of my choosing. I move to a corner of the table, near which lies a nodule of the creature arrayed with human, canine and rodent ears. “All the eyes that ever closed,” I whisper, “peel their papery lids apart.”

Nothing on the table stirs. I should not be surprised. Still, my terror that the creation will stay inert floods every nook of my physical and mental self. I scan the mounds of the creation’s assemblages and grafts, hunting amid the blood-caked circuit boards, the strips of hairy skin stretched to maximum tension, the polygonal cuts of meat wedged into plastic vessels, the bones fused to gears and crankshafts, vainly seeking the flaw that blocks activation.

Atop the creation’s central conglomeration, a flat black monitor lights up, its pixels painting an impressionistic sketch of an eye. At the crest of the monitor, a smaller blue light switches on, indicating the built-in camera has also done so.

I recover enough to speak the next words in the sequence. “You the dead who have returned, sing the pain that maims your heart.”

Like my supervisor, my creation has many other makeshift eyes, some machine, some fleshy, and also in tribute to my supervisor, the creation has multiple mouths, which all babble at once. I recognize no words among the layering of vowels, consonants, screeches and brays.

I shout over the commotion. “Give your flesh to fill the Mother! Rend your souls to shape her art!”

The entire mass of the creation shudders. Its many eyes swivel their gazes in a single direction, first observing me as I back away, then bending, sweeping, twisting, hinging to take in my supervisor’s teeming expanse.

The creation speaks again, choosing only one mouth, the fanged muzzle of a raccoon, its childlike voice devoid of guile. “What do you require of us?” it says.

The many bands of my supervisor’s voice soften to something like warmth, a tone I’ve never before heard from her throats. “Nothing, for the moment, my child, other than the pleasure of your existence.”

“We hurt,” the creation bleats.

“Yes. The imperfection of your origin makes this inevitable.”

* * *

Five

Asking my supervisor if she is pleased with my labor seems unwise, though some pathetic piece of me yearns for words of praise. I enforce stillness and silence within and project the same without. At this novel stage, I cannot guess what my supervisor will require of me next.

The creation’s body erupts with rustlings and tremors as my supervisor commands, “Rise.”

My anxiety spikes sharp as I picture this mass of machinery and mutilations ripping itself to pieces. Yet as the configuration of parts lifts, unfolds, expands, its topmost antennae brushing the high metal ceiling, the creation blooms into architecture that I had not consciously planned as I went about the work of assembly.

Evidence of my supervisor’s subconscious guidance dazzles me, as mechanical, animal and human parts hinge into place with the mathematically engineered precision of a complex pop-up book. The creation’s multiple crowns possess the contours of an arresting metropolitan skyline. The placement of eyes and mouths throughout its body mirror my supervisor’s physiognomy. Gristle and rust transmute to glory, the stench of copper and oil ascending into otherworldly musk.

“You have absorbed your instructions well,” my supervisor purrs. Several of her eyes regard me, the rest focus on the gift. “I sense potential for great purpose.”

Though made of terrestrial garbage rather than extradimensional protoplasm, the creation truly reflects the Mother’s image. More and more of my supervisor’s eyes meet those of her inferior double. The eyes of a Mother cannot be read for emotion the way a human’s can, but even so trickster neurons in my brain read longing, hope, and eagerness in the tensions evident in my supervisor’s demeanor.

A large amplifier embedded in the guts of the creation squawks with a tiny voice. “We wish an end to pain.” Right after, the voice box of a dog stretches and thrums, raspy and basso. “What do you wish of us?” Several more mouths and vocal instruments join in to emphasize the “you.”

My own voice croaks. “Do not question the Mother unless she allows it!”

Oh, my unwise tongue. Instantly I regret this impulse. If the creation speaks so rashly, surely the Mother willed it so. Fright grinds between my shoulder blades.

My creation’s monitor eye finds me. “You smell like garbage,” it hisses from many mouths. Its racoon muzzle bears fangs. “Get out of here or I’ll gut you.”

I suck in a breath, recognizing the threats of the man who attacked me in the nightclub. A notion washes through me that I wish I could wave away, that the creation remembers, that the aggression of my assailant has transferred to this new being.

This cannot be so. I used no part of his brain in its building.

The creation tests its legs of metal and weeping flesh, more mirroring of my supervisor’s forest of knobby joints and goat hooves. The creation’s equivalent of hooves clank, ping and thump on the surface of the table. The nearest dangle off the edge, bobbing as if seeking further footholds.

Even more of my supervisor’s eyestalks bend, aiming their attention on me, monitoring how I will respond to the creation’s aggression.

“You may be too fragile to lower yourself without assistance,” I tell the creation. “If the Mother permits, I will help you.”

The creation shifted gazes toward my supervisor, who says, “I wish to see how far it will walk on its own.”

I crouch on all fours at the foot of the table, so my broad back will serve the creation as a step from tabletop to floor. Its feet tear my already ragged coat and jab the meat beneath. My body does not break under its weight; after all, I was strong enough to drag it here repeatedly.

A nagging doubt will not be squelched, its mutters punctuated with the bruises from the creation’s makeshift hooves. What will I do if my supervisor allows the creation to carry out its threat?

I wonder if my supervisor can see into the pulsing monstrosity that serves as my heart, sense the heresy brewing there. She is perhaps too preoccupied by her offspring to sense how my answer buds, my anger flowers.

I will do everything within the limits of my strength to take the creation with me into oblivion.

* * *

Six

The creation fills the side of the room that my supervisor does not occupy. Its wet machinery surrounds me, prods me. I barely have room to straighten and stand, the edge of the table pressed into my belly.

The eyes that swarm to either side of me seek to lock gazes with mine the way a dog gives challenge before a fight. To avoid engaging, I regard my supervisor’s enigmatic forest of limbs and tendrils. The creation applies bristly pressure to my legs and back, contacts that cannot be accidental, that display all the overbearing brashness of its final human component.

The creation speaks from a single mouth that hovers beside my right ear, syllables stretched with accusation. “I hurt. My existence hurts. Why do I exist?”

“You will understand when you are elevated,” my supervisor hums.

In my former life I heard many rumors about the ways one Mother begets another, all unprovable and most lost in the haze of my remaking. But that word, elevate, drags a bow across a nerve. Whispers that when proto-Mothers first bud from the multi-limbed masses of their extradimensional parents, they are mindless, all blind appetite. They require elevation. The devouring of another intelligence, to develop their own.

“The next stage,” my supervisor says, “requires consumption and absorption of your creator.”

What can I lose now if I let my treacherous rage spill forth? That half-buried part of me must have anticipated my supervisor’s intentions, for the words come easy. “She is your creator. You exist because she commanded it.”

Humans have never understood the Mothers in any fashion but the most rudimentary, one of the reasons they beguiled and conquered us with such ease, and why one foolish coup attempt after another has ended with geysers of blood, the rebels pulled inside out or preserved in the higher-dimensional equivalent of amber to endure even worse suffering.

Yet the Mothers are one and many, this I know, and no Mother that is one with the whole would have need of slaves shaped from an inferior species to produce an offspring. I made her a child, a ramshackle mockery of a disciple, because she cannot produce one herself.

She seizes me with twenty limbs. More long-submerged thoughts escape as I scream, “You live in blasphemy!”

The creation, too, assaults me, stabbing into my flesh from all sides.

My warring heart brightens into ecstasy in anticipation of death’s release and shrieks in terror that my existence will continue in some new and even more degraded form.

I tumble to the floor, the impact disproportion to the distance, my breath whooshing out in a gasp of bruising pain that bursts through my wriggling confusion.

I crawl under the table, a temporary shelter from the creation’s flailing legs. My supervisor’s howl of rage sounds like the roof of Hell torn away, drowning out the many squeals and shrieks and roars of her betrayed, turncoat child.

A marvel. My supervisor lost her grip on me because the creation has attacked her.

Its half-mechanical limbs tangle in her alien ones, the many varieties of claws and blades I incorporated into its design severing an astonishing number of my supervisor’s tendrils, leg segments and eyestalks. They flop and thrash where they land.

But my supervisor has many more where those grew from. Whatever scant safety I’ve gained from cowering under the examination table evaporated as the jointed stems of my supervisor’s arms and the grasping flowers of her hands surge toward me.

I upend the table and shove it at my supervisor and her rebellious child, who have melded in a single seething tangle. She made me strong, and I use that strength. The table is almost as wide as the room is tall, and I savor the sensation of both monsters squashed behind it. My supervisor shrieks at eardrum-shredding pitch from all her mouths, the noise unbearable in this sealed room.

One or both of the creatures on the other side push back with the force of a locomotive. Only chance spares me, that the angle of force hurls the table toward a front corner of the lab rather than straight into the wall behind me. The table legs crumple with the force of the impact but the table wedges in place and spares me a crushing.

I cannot be certain my death in this room would bring relief. There are stories, perhaps spread by the Mothers themselves, of trapped consciousnesses preserved past the most violent of drawn-out deaths, playthings tortured for unending sport.

My creation’s monitor eye smashes beside my head, against the edge of the door. Yet the creation remains intact enough that the fight continues, the din thick as a mudslide.

A further stroke of luck, that my supervisor and her child aren’t between me and the exit, incontrovertible evidence that her will has limits.

I seize the valve that seals the lab. As the wheel creaks and the vault door hisses open, the darkness beyond holds deeper shadows, hunched low to the ground.

Enhanced by the designs of my supervisor, my eyes adjust.

The passageway is filled with other former humans like myself, those that this exiled Mother conscripted into her delusional quest to restore her status.

Unlike me, their bodies are modeled after crustaceans and arthropods, squat and many-limbed, They could never climb to the city streets and pass among their former kin unnoticed. Nor, even had my supervisor wished it—and I believe she did—could they serve as an effective army of rebels against her sistren. Their numbers are far too few. She has not yet made enough.

Nonetheless, they can grip weapons in their pincers and claws: long metal pipes, tools mounted with blades. Their faces, or the equivalent that remains to them, expose a condition with I’m well familiar, uncertainty about what our supervisor might want for them and dread of what the cost will be.

Her embattled state disorients them. Her instructions channeled through me must have had more success in duplicating a creation with a Mother’s characteristics than was evident during my labors. Her sorcery backfires. My supervisor still shrieks, the creation still fights, long past when it should have been ripped into a thousand pieces.

And yet it is not indestructible. A piece of my creation, torn free in the melee, lands between my feet. A heavy axle, massive gears like barbels welded to either end.

I pick it up. None of my associates try to stop me.

The being in the forefront, long and flat like a silverfish, flinches as I brandish my potential weapon, their own grips on a pair of wrist-thick drill bits tremulous.

The screams of our supervisor, the torment of multitudes, incinerate the air behind me. Her screams called them to her, surely, but the ongoing distraction prevents her from exerting her will, from providing direction.

If I attack, they might on their own find the will to defend. If I simply stride into them, they might not let me pass. Strong as they may be, I am practiced, they are not. In the prospect of the death I could bring, they may find relief, or cause for even greater fear. If so, I sympathize.

The ability to end my life, on my own terms: I will lay waste to salvage this right.

I can no longer afford to wait for hints as to what any of them will do. I advance, club at the ready. They will have to make their own choices, as I have at last made mine.

End.

* * *

Strands

By Mark Mills

Sometimes I count the days I walk the strands.

I tell myself that by doing this I can get some idea of how long the strands actually are. But no matter how determined I am when I start, I always quit by the thousandth day. I remember counting to a thousand something like thirty times (which I think is about a tenth of the time I’ve been walking) and, considering I average ten miles a day, I figure the strands go up just a little less than forever.

Of course I do not always walk up the strands. Sometimes I walk on a strand that dead-ends and I have to walk miles back down until I find a new route. And sometimes I fall.

I’ve fallen six times. Twice strands broke beneath my feet, three times I’ve slipped or stepped into space, and once I was pushed. I always fell until I landed on a strand miles below. By the laws of chance, I think that no matter what direction you go—including down—you will eventually come to strand. One time after I fell, I started counting as I climbed back up, and in time I found my way to the place I had fallen from. By my count, it took four hundred and seventy-two days to get back. Maybe that was a long fall or maybe it was a short one. But anyway, with nothing else to go on, I guess that an average fall is about five thousand miles. Or more. Or less.

I’m not the only one that falls. I’ve seen other walkers fall past me on my way up. Some fall very fast and burn, but some fall slow. Once I saw a walker made of rock floating in the black space about twenty feet away from the strand I was on. He was falling so slowly, you couldn’t tell he was moving unless you watched him a long time. He was trying very hard to get to my strand but couldn’t do anything but just bob. I could not reach him but shouted that I hoped he ended up okay. It doesn’t hurt when you land, not even if you come down on a strand made of steel after falling a very long time. Even walkers made of glass, who break if you fight them, can fall off a strand without getting hurt.

I tried to help that walker–the falling one of rock–but there are a lot of walkers that I wouldn’t help. I like walkers of rock and steel and other metals and they usually like me. But there are some walkers–those made of wood and glass and sand–that I don’t like. I hate walkers made of coal. It was one of them that pushed me off the strand that one time. I never met another walker made of clay like me but hope to someday.

Most walkers I talk to think that we came out of the strands. This could be right–there are as many kinds of strands, of rock, metal, sand and glass, clay, wood, and other substance, as there are walkers. One walker I met said that the strands grow, and the walkers’ bodies form out of them like fruit from a tree. I asked him what “fruit” and “trees” were. He said they were things in his memory.

Once I found a strand made of chocolate. I ate most of it before I realized what I was doing. Because of my gluttony, any other walker that came after me might fall through. I felt horrible and walked on. The only other thing that hurts the strands is a kind of dog with six slashing tongues that cut into the strands for no reason.

All strands are different. Some are so narrow that it’s hard not to fall off them, while others are so wide that you can’t see their edges. Some are so steep that you can barely climb and on some you can’t even tell you’re going up. Sometimes there are lots of strands so close together that you can jump from one to another. Sometimes a strand splits into many branches all going different ways. Other times a strand will go on for miles and you’ll never see another one no matter how hard you look. The walker that talked about trees and fruit said that he was making a map but I don’t think that’s possible.

Strands are usually a couple miles long, but some seem to never end, and some are just a few feet long. They are all joined together by a black strip. So you can be on one strand, say one of glass, come to a black strip, walk over it and be on a new strand, say one made of clay. I hope this has clarified things well enough.

Most strands branch out into more strands which branch out into even more, but a lot of them dead end. A walker who isn’t paying attention might just walk off the end of one and fall into the black space. Anymore, I pay attention.

The map-maker said that while our bodies might come from the strands, our souls must come from someplace else, that this might be a kind of afterlife for spirits from other worlds who were either good or bad or had no place else to go.

“What is another world?” I asked him.

“A place unlike this. With no strands and no walking. Sometimes I think I can remember. I can’t tell you for sure but I think my name there was Sam.”

“What does ‘Sam’ mean? Something to do with mapping?”

He stared at me for a long time. “I’m not sure.”

After that I wondered what my name was or if I ever had one.

I walked with him for days until we split on a branching strand of brass.

“Perhaps we’ll see each other again. In this world or another.”

“Perhaps,” I said. What can you say to such talk?

* * *

It was lonely walking alone until I came up on a bunch of glass walkers ambling in front of me. Then I wished I was alone again.

“Stay three paces behind glass walkers, you clay scum,” called one of them as I was passing.

That was the wrong thing to say. “I’ll walk where I want, you stupid see-through skulker.”

They rushed me and tried to push me off the strand. It wasn’t very wide and I was only about a yard from the edge.

“Get your hands off me!”

They must have thought that because I wasn’t stone or metal that I couldn’t hurt them.

Wrong.

Their leader stood directly before me, shoving and straining. I brought down both my fists on his shoulders and there was a sharp crack. The others froze and I brought my knee up to his stomach. His lower half remained largely intact but his top shattered.

The others began to flail at me, breaking off fingers and feet. I grabbed one by the wrist and slammed it into another. An explosion, a cloud of sparkling shards.

The last one tried to run but I was quicker than it thought. I sometimes feel bad about breaking that one, it wasn’t trying to hurt me at the time, only trying to get away. I wonder if glass walkers stay broken forever or if eventually they come back together.

After I looked over their shards, feeling a little proud, a little ashamed. It was a strand made of sand and their splinters sank into it. Glass and sand always went together, I knew. Maybe it was for the best.

I walked back to the brass strand where the map-maker and I had parted and tried to follow his trail. I never found him. Maybe he fell or was pushed. Maybe he took a path I never tried. There’s no way of knowing now and there was much I wanted to ask him.

It would be only fair because he asked many questions of me:

“How did I know how long a mile was?”

“How did I know what gold and silver and clay were?”

“How did you learn to speak and think and walk?”

The map-maker wondered if we were born knowing or if we had died knowing or if our ideas come from a different place entirely.

All I know is what I see. I know when it is day and when it is night. The strands glow and give out light during the day but are cold and dark in the night. On the strand made of chocolate during the day, the chocolate was warm and easy to eat but at night it was too hard to bite. I think knowing about day and night is self-evident.

Before we started, Sam and I met a bunch of bronze walkers who were huddled in a circle.

“What’s the point of going on?” one asked when Sam stopped to talk. “There’s never been a point.”

One of the walkers called the strands “a ladder,” another said they were “a road to a higher place,” but the rest of them were depressed.

“This is our eternal damnation,” and “We have been denied even the knowledge of what transgressions we have committed to earn our place here.”

“No, no, no,” said one of the least despondent. “This is the cleansing before Paradise. But only for those deemed worthy.”

“Isn’t it worth a chance to see?” Sam asked them. “What would it hurt to go on?”

But they were tired of trying. They would walk no more.

Afterwards I wondered if they were right but now I think of them as only strands. I have come to think the strands are all that is.

But everybody believes in the high place, the place where all strands come together and end. That’s where we all are walking to. No one has ever seen the high place because if you see it, you are supposed to go to it and quit walking. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t walk.

There are walkers, like the one that pushed me, that just give up and sit and try to push everyone else off their strand into space. They don’t care about the high place or walking but instead get mean and change into spiders or six-tongued dogs or other things and try to stop any other walker from getting by.

Not just by pushing. They trap and eat walkers too. Once I talked to a walker made of silver who was being eaten by a spider. I tried to help but could only talk to him until it was over. He said not to get eaten if possible. The walker that pushed me was turning into a snake.

* * *

Like I said I’ve been walking for a long time. A few days ago I walked over a strand made of diamond and then one of gold. There were strands all over the place, every color, every substance, and after a while I noticed that they never stopped glowing. It was never night.

I kept walking. Pretty soon I saw a door. I came up to it and opened it up. There was a lot of light and I stepped over the threshold. That was six days ago.

I’ve been falling ever since. I’ve never fallen before for more than a few hours. I’m not sure if that was the high place and now I’m going to the other world or if I’ll just fall forever. But I’ve been thinking this whole while. When I land—if I ever land—I’ll count the whole way going back. Perhaps it’s the counting that’s the key. Perhaps all that really matters is the counting.

End.

* * *

A Cincinnati resident, Mark Mills teaches composition, literature, cinema studies, philosophy, music appreciation, and basic Noa robotic programming. He has published work in Tor.com, Short Story America, Grievous Angel, and many other publications. He has worked on and appeared in several low budget movies, including Satanic Yuppies, Live Nude Shakespeare, Chickboxin’ Underground, Zombie Cult Massacre, and Uberzombiefrau. He currently is occupied with a large number of pets and unpublished stories. Visit his blog www.cinrambler.wordpress.com for his thoughts on old weird tales, cancer, and parakeets.

The Horrors Unseen

By Alexander Hay

My best friend’s descent into madness was most unseemly. He had bitten orderlies, attacked doctors and developed a taste for insects. Now, he was trussed up in a straightjacket and his mouth gagged, as he snarled like a mad dog.

“So, Ridley, now we have departed London”, the Right Reverend Peter Grimshaw harrumphed on the first class seat facing mine, “perhaps you may attempt to explain as to why my brother has lost his mind?”

I handed the starched old fool the letter and leant back as the steam train roared through the countryside. Watching its progress with some interest, I was disheartened to see the landscape rendered into a blur. This age of machines stripped all things away...

“My goodness!” the Reverend growled. “The blasted fool has finally lost his wits! Mother always said that Father shouldn’t have indulged his...”

The Reverend’s face curled into a look of disapproval.

“...Mechanical interests.”

Unlike his brother, I was no friend of the Reverend. Having followed, or perhaps, pursued his father into the House of God, he had become even more intolerable over the years.

But Howard was different, drawn moth-like to the crackling blue light of devices by Faraday and his peers. Having constructed his own meager copy of the homopolar generator by the middle of his youth, he was quickly accepted by one of the great Polytechnics on the continent, mastering engineering and the sciences in equal measure. He then returned home, his mind full of ideas, and proceeded to make his fortune through civil works. Freed from the need to work, he had retired to his townhouse in Manchester where he worked on electrical experiments.

At least, that was what he told me in his last letter, before he went mad.

* * *

We arrived at Manchester some hours later, the looming overgrowth of a large, dirty, grey city enveloping us as the train drew into the station.

The Reverend muttered to himself as he got off the train. “Filthy air!” he remarked. “And look at the state of some of them!”

He gestured at the workers who milled about the station as part of the crowd.

“The machine has granted nothing to them, nothing!” he pouted. “They labour by day, sleep fleetingly at night and then repeat until they die! I much prefer the countryside myself, but what choice do these poor devils have?”

“Malthus proclaimed that this excess would ruin us”, I replied. “I cannot imagine how such cities may survive when filled with so many hungry mouths. Why, Manchester will have starved to death in a century’s time at the rate the working classes proliferates!”

“Spoken like an accountant”, the Reverend sniffed, bluntly, before hailing us a cab to the asylum, next to Manchester Infirmary and, in turn, its mortuary.

* * *

“I’m afraid he’s got worse since my letter”, Doctor Maltby confessed as he led us down the corridor to the cell where poor Howard was now contained. “He has periods of lucidity but they grow rarer and shorter as time goes by. Much of the time, he rants and raves. Occasionally, he draws these...”

The Doctor handed the Reverend and I some rough sheets of paper. Scrawled over in charcoal were an impossible juxtaposition of equations, mechanical diagrams, curious phrases in ineligible script, repeated time and again, and long writhing, leering, venous things that seemed to envelop the rest of the text and the drawings.

“Is he... violent?” the Reverend asked with surprising hesitancy.

“Not to anyone he sees as human...” the Doctor said.

“I beg your pardon?” the Reverend said, bemused.

Approaching the cell door, Maltby flipped aside the peep hole cover and gazed within. He looked back at us, saddened.

“Well, now you can see for yourself”, the Doctor said, as he opened the flap for us to see as well. “He was a dear friend of mine too.”

The wretched figure was kneeling in the centre of the cell, his arms bound by a restraining jacket. He was looking down, so I was forced to instead look at his scalp, scabbed over, bleeding and torn, with much of the hair seemingly pulled out. He seemed to be shaking, though I did not know if it was fear or rage that made him do this.

Slowly, gradually, he raised his head towards his brother and I. His face was a tortured maze of symmetrical cuts, still pink with ruin and about to scar. He had gnawed through his gag, which revealed a swollen and bloody mouth with several missing teeth.

The stench was terrible. It was plain he had soiled himself many times. The Reverend gasped in disgust at first, but then looked away, ashamed.

“Shall we discuss this further in your office, Doctor Maltby?” he asked, gravely.

The Doctor nodded and sealed the slit and covered the peephole, turning briskly on his feet towards his office, with us following in his wake. No words were needed—we had seen enough.

As we walked away, however, I suddenly heard a loud, familiar voice echo through the corridor.

“I CAN FEEL THEM, RIDLEY, THEIR GRASP FOREVER CARESSING! I CANNOT ESCAPE THEIR TOUCH, NOR CAN YOU! THERE IS NO HOPE, NO SALVATION, NO GLORY. ONLY THE WRITHING, CREEPING, FONDLING TOUCH! OH, HOW IT ENVELOPES ME, AND HOW IT ENVELOPES US ALL!”

I saw the Reverend’s face briefly harden with anger, but then concern took over and he looked across to the doctor.

“Can he ever retrieve his wits?”

Maltby shook his head. “His condition has worsened since he first arrived here. It was only a few days ago that I could have a lucid conversation with him. He may, in fact, be irretrievable.”

Neither I nor the Reverend could muster a reply.

* * *

“...As you can see, Howard was most prolific before his, err, decline”, Maltby apologised, as he dropped a thick volume of papers on his desk.

“These are not the work of a madman,” the Reverend frowned as he leafed through the papers. “While I cannot account for the quality of the equations or the outlandishness of my brother’s claims, I cannot condemn his rigour.” The forced compliment rolled off his tongue like a bitter torment.

“Not being one of those engineering types, I’m not sure what Howard was up to,” Maltby furthered. “Though as you can see, the recurring theme of aetherics becomes increasingly common. I would hazard a guess and propose he was trying to harness the invisible energies that surround us, to render manifest the unseen.”

“Why couldn’t he just find an easier way to boil an egg?” the Reverend tutted.

“Your brother lays in a cell, quite out of his mind!” I found myself erupting. “It would do you well not to make light of this situation!”

“May I remind you that I suffer your presence and not the other way around?” the Reverend roared. “You have no business lecturing me on the plight of my brother, you - !”

“Erm, perhaps we should all have a nice cup of tea?” Maltby proposed.

* * *

Before we left, Maltby granted us one last look at my friend. He was slumped in the spot we last saw him in, head bowed, with long and deep inhalations being the only sign of his remaining alive.

“Mother prays for you,” the Reverend murmured gently through the grate. But his brother did not respond.

“He is lost to us...” the Reverend said, morosely, turning from the cell door. “Let us be gone.”

* * *

“Why do you hurry so?” I protested as our carriage headed towards Howard’s town house.

“I refuse to accept that my brother’s decline, as sudden as it was, can simply be attributed to overwork!” the Reverend exclaimed. “My brother has always been eccentric, but given to mania? Never.”

“You still presume it was his work that drove him out of his wits?” I asked.

“No, but what he found. As I say, the nature of God’s works are not meant to be so readily understood. To gaze upon it is to condemn our minds to the infinite, and no mind can bear such a burden.”

“Perhaps he tried to bear the burden of this rabble,” I said, as our carriage went past the teaming hordes of Manchester. I could see nothing to love or value. One can endure only so much of one’s failings, let alone those of others.

“And by such a yardstick, the charity of my parish drives my flock around the bend?” the Reverend said, tartly.

I resisted the temptation to say what I thought of his mutton head congregation.

* * *

We met Howard’s housekeeper outside his townhouse. A dun woman, squat and round, with keys and a lamp in her hands. She looked most concerned.

“Would you know if Master Grimshaw will be returning soon?” she muttered, darting around us as we went up the path. “Though I have kept his keys and articulations...”

“Artefacts”, the Reverend corrected her with the mildly annoyed resignation of a schoolmaster.

“Well, erm, yes... But I haven’t ventured in since he...” She scowled. “...Had his turn.”

Her pretensions dropped, the housekeeper looked surprisingly ugly.

“Oh, just give me the sodding keys!” the Reverend exclaimed.

“Will I keep my job?” the housekeeper asked as the Reverend snatched the keys from her hands.

“All things in good time”, he growled and proceeded to the door. I glanced back at her as I followed the Reverend. Her gaze narrowed and then she walked slowly away.

“So what brought that unvicarly outburst of language on?” I smirked as the Reverend opened the door.

“Oh, I preach all my life to people who bow their heads and say they will love their neighbours, then the following Friday, they’re smashing each other’s faces in with tankards and whoring into the early hours, casting the first stone and pretending they’re the only ones God owes any justice to...” the Reverend said, irritated by my flippant tone.

“So, the Good Book doesn’t inspire as it should?” I replied.

“Oh, how fine it would be to emulate you” the Reverend said, his teeth gritted. “You haven’t even tried to find common cause with your fellow man. You’ve already divided the world up into masters and servants.”

“Through such means we will bring your faith to the heathens abroad...” I said.

“What about heathens like you?”

I pressed the matter no further as we entered the hallway. It was dark and dusty but otherwise empty. We knew all the windows at the front of the house had been boarded up, and we could now also see this was the case with the window at the end of the corridor, next to the stairs.

“This is most perturbing”, the Reverend noted, “I cannot find the means whereby my brother ignited the gas, or for that matter, whether he used it at all.” He paused for a moment to find a match, and then he lit the lamp. It emitted a weak orange light into the darkness.

I looked around and saw no gas lights. “Well, didn’t he use electricity for everything?” I said.

“Indeed”, the Reverend said, pointing his cane at the long glass tubes mounted along the walls, wreathed in copper wires. “But I have no means to ascertain quite how he operated them.”

I slowly opened one of the doors and peeked inside.

“What are you doing?” the Reverend protested.

“Well, if you look”, I said, “you’ll notice the wires lead in through a hole above this doorway. Whatever provides the power for the lights must surely be in here.”

“Well, let us proceed, the Reverend grunted as he followed me in.

It was the library. Tall pine bookcases lined the walls, over-stacked with books and covered in dust, while bare wooden floors suggested not so much a place to read as a place to work.

In the centre was a large conglomeration of devices; brass, iron, wood, strange glass tubes containing what appeared to be thin wires, tubes, cogs... I could smell faint traces of ethanol, coal tar and burnt ozone. At first I assumed it was a pile of refuse, of abandoned devices, but as my eyes adjusted to the contours and vague symmetry of the mass, I realised it had once been an orderly structure, latterly added to without purpose and aim, once an engineer’s work, now a mad man’s folly.

“So this is what the wires lead to”, the Reverend said, sadly. “I wonder what purpose it served, before my brother’s wits left him?”

The Reverend roamed about the room, shining the lamp around and looking at the books on the shelves.

“Texts and codices...” he murmured. “Mathematics, engineering, metallurgy, astronomy... Nothing particularly mind-bending.”

“Tedious”, he added, looking over to me. “But not mind-bending.”

“What about his notes?” I asked. “Might they shed some light?”

“They don’t seem to be here, but may surely help. More than this thing will...” the Reverend said, kicking the mass in the centre of the room.

“Let’s at least examine it”, I said, mildly irritated. The Reverend raised his eyebrows but demurred. Gradually, we probed the device, seeking and fixing loose connections, moving parts aside or even pulling them away. While no engineers ourselves, we began to see the brilliance of Howard, who created devices of elegant simplicity, so simple even a journeyman classicist and rigid clergymen could comprehend them, and yet capable of so much. At least before he went mad.

“I must assume this device powered the cylinders outside?” the Reverend observed.

“Perhaps”, I said. It occurred to me that Howard had constructed a dynamo of far greater sophistication than anything I had seen elsewhere. And yet it seemed excessive for simply powering lights, even when stripped of the redundancies and inadvertent follies an increasingly erratic engineer had added. What else did it do, I wondered, or had my friend simply created power without purpose? I set these thoughts aside and pulled what we concluded was the lever which would activate the device.

With a sudden bang, it lurched to life, and we had to take a step back as blasts of smoke were emitted. I realised the dust in this room was as much due to particles from the device as anything else. Suddenly the glass cylinders in the room began to smoothly emit dim light until eventually radiating a soft orange patina.

It was the first time I saw the Reverend look impressed. “My, it is a sight to behold!” he exclaimed. “It has such... ease to it. Such warmth. None of the flicker one gets from gas lights, nor that gnawing, unending hiss.”

For the first time, I too began to grasp why Howard had always found wonder in such phenomena.

“We won’t be needing this”, the Reverend then smiled as he turned the lamp off. Now fully illuminated, we could see how utterly sparse the room was, beyond the books and the dynamo we had managed to salvage.

“It seems Howard needed as little distraction as possible in his work”, I said.

“‘Twas ever thus”, the Reverend sighed. Shall we look elsewhere now?

We ventured back into the hallway, and explored the other rooms on the ground floor. The study had been converted into a mere storeroom, where Howard had stacked dozens of crates of varying sizes. Examining one, I found more wires, brass, valves, cogs and cylinders.

“Curious that one can create so much from such simple means”, the Reverend observed, casually swaying from side to side to see how loose the bare floorboards underneath were. His gazed narrowed. “And yet I find no cause for madness here.”

“Perhaps Howard’s spartan surroundings contributed to his madness?” I mused.

“To have such focus and ambition requires a strong mind, even a stubborn one...” the Reverend said, a slight hint of old animosities surfacing. “No, there is something more here.”

The kitchen was surprisingly commonplace, by contrast, looking much like any other, being filled as it was with the necessary means and utensils of a regular cook. All the food, of course, had gone.

“This must have been his housekeeper’s domain?” I asked.

“Where else would that old bag hold court?” the Reverend said. “Shall we proceed to the drawing room?”

Such a term, of course, was applied in the loosest of terms. The room had become Howard’s workshop, filled with a myriad of tools, half-finished devices and a thin film of soot that seemed to cover the room’s walls. The tools themselves were relatively clean, though dust and dirt had begun to accumulate.

On a workbench was a pile of notes, some written with due care and others scrawled with abandon. They were in no particular order, and I had to wonder which were the products of an unhinged mind and which were those of a scientist’s enthusiasm. Most were of an overly impenetrable and mechanical nature for me to comprehend, yet others were only too lucid. On close inspection, I found myself forced to read again for I could scarcely believe what my friend had written:

* * *

...The world we see around us is not the world as it truly is, but rather all that is available to us via the filtered limits of our senses. Nonetheless, the curious structures of the human mind are such that they may nonetheless visualise that which is abstract, or improbable. How else to explain our passion for the fantastic and the imaginary? Could our minds therefore be induced to see that which was hitherto invisible? I propose that such a thing is possible; moreover I would state in the boldest of fashions that the mind can be stimulated through aetheric manipulation to perceive what was once unperceivable...

* * *

Another extract, still written in a cogent hand and manner suggested that Howard had begun to explore other areas. And yet I could not believe what I was reading:

* * *

Having summoned it, I felt inclined to interact. Mindful of the dangers, I used a combination of heat and electricity to contain the phantom, and then began to train it in a similar vein. It has become most biddable, though I have bound it to the smallest bed chamber whenever Mrs. Parsloe comes to perform her chores. The sight would doubtless cause her to keel over dead of fright!

* * *

“Well, I think it is safe to say he had gone mad at that point!” the Reverend quipped as he read the notes for himself. “But look”, he added. “Here he has surely lost his mind!”

* * *
all gone no purpose no being it swirls with impatience and yet I will not free the thing slow and cold oh let it be off its leash parsloe has relieved me of my pantry and fled as I expected soon the carriage will come such horror such fear god has shunned or is not there at all let me descend away from this
descends
gone
the horrors
unseen

* * *

“He seems to have lost his sense of punctuation too”, I added.

“I suppose that was the last thing my brother wrote before he was committed,” the Reverend said. He seemed forlorn.

The Reverend sighed as he put down the papers.

“Shall we inspect upstairs?” I said.

“Well, I suppose we ought to see what else may have contributed to my brother’s decline”, the Reverend agreed. “Let’s go upstairs and inspect this Djinn of his!”

I wanted to laugh, but found myself unable. Even the Reverend seemed not to find humour in his own wit.

I felt a prickling on the back of my hand as static electricity began to tug at my hairs, but the hallway had now begun to acquire an altogether more sinister aspect. The low, deep throb of the electric tubes seemed to imply a growing menace, and the stark white light it produced began to feel oppressive.

“I must admit to feeling some trepidation at this point myself”, the Reverend said, noting my visible unease before I did, and he raised the light of the lamp he still carried with him.

“Haven’t we got enough light already?” I asked.

“In case the lights upstairs fail, or if they do not illuminate every room”, he added as way of explanation, but I sensed a deeper, more primal need at play.

Slowly, we ascended up the stairs, again bare but for a thin layer of dust. The Reverend led the way with his lamp. But at least some of his fears had proven groundless, as the electric lighting system provided at least some coverage upstairs.

The Reverend dimmed his lamp but did not extinguish it entirely.

“I suppose we shall start with this room first?” he announced, turning the handle on the first door on the left.

We entered and looked around. The room was again bare and the windows concealed behind shutters. The electric lights, meanwhile, illuminated a most lurid sight. The Reverend gasped as he saw the intricate patterns and geometric follies his brother had covered every wall in the room with, plus parts of the ceiling and most of the floor.

I was at first impressed by their detail and thoroughness, their intense detail and what seemed like endless complexity, as I studied the illustrations further, I grew to be repulsed by them, their jutting into strange angles, and the faint suggestiveness of the more abstract drawings seemed to me to be both rotten and obscene, like over-ripe fruit, or the maggot-riddled spectacle of rotting meat.

“I can’t for the life of me understand why Howard developed such an aversion to furniture,” the Reverend sniffed. I couldn’t help but laugh; his sarcasm was a welcome distraction from the inscriptions that seemed to me to be ever more corrupt and hateful by the second.

The Reverend had seen enough. Turning away, he vowed to leave the room that very instance.

“I have seen these grotesque drawings before”, the Reverend noted as he proceeded from the room, “in the maddened drawings Dr. Maltby showed me. Come on, we’ve seen enough here!”

But then I heard a gasp and, following the Reverend out of the room, I witnessed what it was that Howard had dared summon and, for a while, bind as a servant.

It was a writhing mist, red in colour, that had poured itself through the cracks in the attic door like viscous liquid... Like blood, I shuddered. As it coalesced a foot or two above the ground, its swirling mass slowly pulsed and ebbed, the faint intimation of grotesque leering faces and shapes manifesting in its amorphous form.

Despite its colour, I could sense intense chill, as the vapour from our mouths became visible and condensation had begun to form in the electric tubes nearby. And then there was the noise, the deep sibilant hiss that seemed to suggest a thousand fork-tongued voices probing into my ears, until I felt almost overcome. As it moved slowly toward us, I found myself transfixed, and so I was unable to dodge a tendril of blood-smoke that suddenly lashed out and grasped my right forearm.

In shock, I could feel intense cold stabbing through the fabric of my jacket and shirt and deep into my skin. Shrieking with pain, I felt a sensation that could only be described as burning.

But the Reverend seized me by the collar and pulled me away from the monstrosity, the connection with its tendril pulled away and the burning red smoke dissipating in its wake. Pushing me towards the stairs, the Reverend turned towards the mist, which was now probing towards us like a vast, phantasmagoric tadpole, even as ever more of its mass continued to ooze out of the attic and -

“FUCKING RUN!” the Reverend cried in a most unvicarly fashion, as he shoved me downwards.

I looked down at my arm, “but...”

“Frostbite! The thing is a living corrosive, of the kind that freezes rather than burns!” the Reverend said. “And it must fear flame!”

As we descended quickly, I saw the Reverend raise the heat in his lamp and hurl it into the mass that was perilously close as it followed us. The thing repulsed suddenly and the air was full of what could only be described as a howling shriek as the heat from the lamp caused the creature great pain.

“That should hold it enough for now...” the Reverend said as he hurried me towards the front door. “Let us get out of here!”

But the thing rallied, and we barely made it to the library before it was upon us once more.

Running in, we barely had enough time to slam the door shut. The Reverend took off his coat and threw it down in front of the door, jamming it into the gap underneath and stopping the thing from surging in via that route.

Still, the coat immediately began to freeze with absurd speed. Soon the barrier would crystallise and shatter, and the thing would be able to flood in and engulf us. For a brief moment, I visualized the terrible death that awaited—entrapped within like an amoeba’s prey, frozen from the inside out and devoured slowly, unable to move or scream.

I found myself scrabbling towards the shutters covering the library windows and clawing at them desperately. But they were firmly locked in place. There was no way out.

The Reverend seized me by the arms and pulled me away. I dimly felt a dull thud as he wrestled me to the ground and restrained me with a surprising gentleness until my mania had passed.

“Ridley”, he grunted as I continued to faintly struggle, “I believe it is possible to eliminate this thing!”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I began to descend into despair, sobbing.

The Reverend relaxed his grip and took to his feet. We could both see that the coat was on the brink of shattering and the wisps had begun to form a small red ball in front of the door.

“We must turn off this machine”, he said looking towards me as he approached the generator. “I must assume that my brother imprisoned this thing in the attic and sealed it there when he turned off the electricity in this house. It feeds on it, you see, that and the flesh of the living.”

Suddenly, I made my own realisation. “NO!” I cried as the Reverend took the lever and pulled it down. The lights spluttered out and the smoke-thing screamed in pain as its conduit was destroyed and it screamed in its death throes.

And it was this, I now understood, that had driven Howard mad. Having tried to tame the thing, he concluded it could only be contained. Binding it in a circle of bronze and copper wire in the attic, he then cut off the electricity in the house. This would have killed the beast, but for the interaction between its innate current and the copper, which trapped it in a bare, limited existence, screaming in rage. But Howard had not reckoned on the arcane effects of its scream on any human mind that heard it, and how that scream in turn would open the gateways of his mind.

And how do I know this? For it happened to me too, and the first mind in the vast city I connected with was Howard, whose memories explained to me the grim roots of his madness, and then I felt another mind, then another, then many others, and then an entire city and all its pain, misery, despair, fury and delusion.

The Reverend had me committed soon after.

* * *

My mind slips away, relentlessly. I write this only during the rare moments of lucidity I seem to grant myself, and take care to hide the pages I write upon before my madness returns and I begin to scream, and rant, and draw obscene intricacies on the walls of my cell. I dimly remember the weight of orderlies crushing me as I am restrained for consultations with Dr. Maltby, but these grow less and less frequent over time. Instead I am left to delight in my own filth, my arms restrained in place.

I can only recount one event of note, and that was emerging from a drugged stupor on the bare floor, trussed up as was often the case, to find the Reverend sitting in front of me on a bare, simple stool. He looked older, tired and the colour in his cheeks had gone. He was much diminished. I couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t wearing his priests’ collar anymore.

“Hello, Ridley?” he said gently. I gurgled a greeting with as much clarity as I could muster.

“I’m sorry it has come to this”, the Reverend apologised. “I truly am.”

“Well, I suppose I am together with Howard now...” I said, fighting the curious urge to giggle and soil myself.

“Indeed”, the Reverend sighed. “I made sure you were put in adjacent cells. At least that way, you can be with your old chum again, like boyhood, yes?”

“He is gone now, isn’t he?” I said, flatly.

The Reverend nodded. “Yes, his mind has finally degenerated to nothingness. He simply sits... and stares. One of the great minds of his generation, and now he is barely there at all.”

“His own doing”, I rasped. “He looked where no man should look.”

“No, Ridley”, the Reverend sighed. “We were wrong. To live in fear of the world is to deny it. Howard tried to seize the Promethean fire. It consumed him. Others may yet prevail in turn.”

“And end up like us, Reverend?” I said, making a noise that was neither a cackle nor a sob.

“How else will the poor devils in the slums outside elevate themselves from their piteous state?” the Reverend replied. “We must aspire.”

“Where does God fit in this?” I find myself sneering.

The Reverend lamented. “In a sense you and my poor brother are the lucky ones. To lose your minds seems a blessing to the alternative. I felt and experienced everything you did, but it did not drive me mad...”

He paused.

“A crisis of faith, Priest?” I spat, and the chaos began to bubble up. “Are you sorry for believing fairy tales?”

“It did something far worse”, the Reverend said, ignoring me. “It broke my heart. Don’t you see, Ridley? I felt all those lives for a brief moment, and all their pain and sorrow, and yet I remain as impotent to help as I was before. And I glimpsed the true nature of things as you did. But where you and my brother found solace in madness, all I discovered was how utterly small I was, how inconsequential. All my efforts, all my belief. It means nothing.”

“Oh little man...” I smirked. “At last you know.”

The Reverend stood up and made to leave. I swore at him, but he simply looked back, alone and forlorn.

“I have left the Church”, he confessed. “I lost my faith, Ridley, and my purpose. I cannot even begin... Ah, what does it matter? I’m just the son of a country parson, who claimed to do good, yet I no longer feel God, only shame.”

The Reverend leant forward suddenly, and grasped my shoulder.

“Oh, to have our youth, again, Ridley! To be away from all this truth!”

I laughed and wept as he said this, and my ecstatic despair grew in strength as he relaxed his grip.

He turned to leave, rapping the door with his hand and the guard acknowledging by unlocking the door. “I will visit, Ridley, but¬—I fear this will be the last time you will recognise me”, he said, turning back. “The madness is growing in you as swiftly as it grew in Howard. My condolences. I... have informed your Mother and Father.”

* * *

And I laugh, oh how I laugh, even as he is lead out by the guard and the cell door slams shut. And I scream, and I spit, and sob and rant and mourn.

Oh Reverend-No-More, how I wish you could join us, and let the screaming, sobbing depravity take you!

Ah, but I am not alone in this cell. I draw such handsome, pretty pictures of all the wonders I have seen. Sometimes I use charcoal, other times, my own filth. Ultimately, I see no difference. And I see such sights in my dreams, as they grow ever larger, and the day ever smaller!

The nightmares made flesh!

And I see them, oh how I see them. The hidden ones who grow ever closer. Soon they will take me into the bright darkness and into the burning frost. The endless nothingness awaits me.

And in it the tendrils sprout and take root. Sometimes I can feel their touch, and revel in the fear and revulsion. I can feel them touching and probing every part of me.

Soon, I will be theirs forever more, and what joy, what anguish I feel on that glorious, hideous day! I can already feel them envelop me, and I—

I?

I...

End.

* * *

Alexander Hay is a writer and researcher from the UK, with a particular interest in horror, science fiction and fantasy. He can also be found on Twitter: @Alexand40457338.”

illustration by Pietro Rotelli

Starfall

By DJ Tyrer

The day after the star fell in the woods, Stanley saw something moving in the shadows between the trees, dark, fast and small. The next day, it was bigger, like a charcoal spider the size of a dog. The following day, it was bigger still and Stanley never returned home.

End.

* * *

DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines around the world, such as Chilling Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree), All The Petty Myths (18th Wall), Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), What Dwells Below (Sirens Call), The Horror Zine’s Book of Ghost Stories (Hellbound Books), and EOM: Equal Opportunity Madness (Otter Libris), and issues of Sirens Call, Hypnos, Occult Detective Magazine, parABnormal, and Weirdbook, and in addition, has a novella available in paperback and on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dunhams Manor).

The Figure, The Fingers, and the Fiend: Dr. Gloon’s LEsson in Anatomy

By Luke Flaherty

I
incapable of enduring the unimaginable truths which pour out of the black gutters between the stars and swirl into the sewers of existence. Despite the endless philosophical attempts to forge meaning out of cosmic finality through the reading and evaluation of supernatural horror fiction, it has long been suggested within more erudite circles of the macabre that this is the ultimate truth for your ilk. Reflective impotence notwithstanding, a greater share of litterateurs positioned within these circles concede it is, for the purpose of arriving at this most pessimistic verdict, first necessary to understand the anatomical structure of the horror tale itself. I am Dr. Gloon, one such litterateur of the macabre, so to speak, and I am delighted to provide you a lesson in anatomy.

First and foremost, you should be aware that that any effective horror tale which has ever beckoned you below to its subterranean slums may be divided into three foundational components, each serving a uniquely strange function to service the unnatural whole. The first of these three components may be classified as a signpost, defaced by blooded letters and disfigured by entropy, of the arcanely heinous things which lie ahead. It’s that first occasion in the story where you suspect that something is perhaps very off; the moment in your darkened bedroom where you posit that on the periphery of your gaze you may have detected the haziest trace of a figure examining you from your closet. The second component is not so much a moment in time as it is an experience of fathomless dread which materializes when you know beyond the bounds of ambiguity that something is very off and that a confrontation with this inexorable something is forthcoming, though you do not know when. It’s the corrosive idea that squirms inside your stomach after you’ve confirmed the existence of the aforementioned figure in the closet and imagine its fingers reaching out for you in the dark. And thirdly, the final component of the horror tale is the foretold collision between you and the phantasmal something itself, the stretch of occurrences containing the shocking emergence of nefarious forces and your subsequent duel unto death with them, be it of flesh or soul. This component transpires when you make a break for your bedroom door but those fingers take hold of your ankle, and as you look down to your feet to get a glimpse of the inconceivable, you acquire the morbid comprehension that those fingers belong to a fiend with grotesquely undulating lineaments.

For the sake of this essay, it is appropriate to identify these three components as the figure, the fingers, and the fiend. And as a reader who must confront these components when your eyes meet them on the page, you may find it more apt to identify these components as incontrovertible truths which you must move through in the same way that you move through trauma, like a celestial corpse drifting through an infernal field of shooting stars.

Now that I have briefly summarized those three basic truths which exist in every yarn of the supernatural ever spun from the cobwebs of horror canon, I will sketch out each truth in greater detail so that you may behold firsthand how they convene into an eerie disharmony constituting the basic short horror story. Accordingly, a conventional horror short penned by Dr. Gloon would go something like this.

Truth no. 1: The Figure. You may be sat upon an armchair in the corner of your quarters or ensconced beneath a comforter on your mattress, reading a chilling short fiction of horrors from the beyond, certain that the words on the page before you are nothing more than letters assembled in such a way that they build an artificial composite of dread and suspense; the words aren’t real. But you’re not certain that the sagging shape barely visible from the annals of your half-opened closet isn’t your hanging overcoat, but a nameless loon inside of your overcoat. You’re not certain that, within the fuzzy margins of your purview, you can’t detect the faintest flicker of its pupils, watching you with great patience in as it waits for you to turn out the lights and close your eyes.

Truth no. 2: The Fingers. You’ve awakened from a frightening dream. A dream in which you were unable to move the entirety of your body; a dream in which you were paralyzed with a reasonless terror while you listened to the heap of clothes rustle behind your closet door. So maimed you were by that dreaming paralysis, you found yourself unable to move even your eyelids, forced to gaze into the afterlight of oblivion while something slithered out of your closet and crawled to you in the dark. And now that you’ve awakened, having reclaimed authority over your faculties in a puddle of perspiration, your mind becomes very much au courant with the punishing knowledge that you aren’t alone in the room and that a particular shape with sagging skin really did embark on the brief trek out of your closet to your bedside while you slept rather unsoundly. But perhaps, you surmise, that should you furnish your immediate surroundings with the glow of the bedside lamp, you may dispatch the shape back into hiding. So, you reach out into the abyss that is a quieted room in the nethermost hour of night, blindly fingering for your lamp on the night table. But it is not your lantern that your fingers graze; rather, it’s another set of fingers, thin and decaying to the touch, intertwining with your own.

Truth no. 3: The Fiend. You cannot sleep. Specifically, you’ve not moved a muscle, lifted a ligament, nor twitched a tendon since you instinctively recoiled from the soft, papery touch of decomposing fingers and swathed yourself inside of the goose down womb that is your comforter. It happened in a distinct setting at an indistinct time; your understanding is such that your hair-raising interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam likely occurred two hours ago but could very well have occurred two centuries ago. It’s only when you’ve deduced that the shining hours of ante meridiem must be in the offing that you’re willing to emerge from your blanketed cocoon. So you do, rolling onto your back and peeling the duvet from your face and then sitting up to the altogether excruciating realization that the tenebrous witching hours of night are still to a considerable degree at their height. All too wary of those fingers that felt like the wilting pages of an out-of-print-paperback, you conclude for a second time that the panacea for dark is light, and that the quickest way to cast light within your bedroom is to switch on your bedside lamp. Back into the black your hands go, and indeed, your fingers do fondle a certain object lingering in these dark hours, and to your allayment, that object is a metal chain dangling from the lamp on your nightstand. With a rather expeditious sequence of movements, you pull the chain hellward, supplanting your blackened chasm with the dimmest glint of pale light. At last, you can now accurately make out the contents of your room, taking solace in the fact that the bedside miscreation with the thin fingers and the flickering eyes and the drooping exterior appears to be gone. But as is the case for every short form narrative of the horror classification, solace is but an ephemeral flash inside a black hole from which light cannot escape. By way of explanation, your short-lived sense of solace instantly returns to a state of abject dread when you hear a subtle, nigh inaudible squeak from the floorboards beneath your bed.

Having once and for all elected to flee, your feet hit the floor posthaste and you take a step for the doorway in an equally breakneck fashion. But you cannot take your second step. Try as you might, it’s no use, as if the very floorboard you’re standing on had absorbed the density of a stellar remnant which precluded the creation of dimensions long departed. As your cognitive state returns to that wretched mode of abject dread, you discover that something has coiled itself around your ankle. Something whose altogether inextricable grip coupled with its loose-fitting skin arouses the feeling of melting wax serrating your limb, a sensation so malevolent it necessitates the immediate attention of those two bloodshot orbs within your eye sockets. And what you see manifesting at your feet is truly a horror beyond words, for you can only respond with unintelligible screams and incomprehensible utterances, as if you were trying to describe demonic shapes of an ancient geometry with unknowably sinister dimensions.

Were one to be an objective witness of this phenomenon rather than, say, a reader, one would observe that the unpleasant events befalling you are nothing more than the fiend’s rotting fingers melting like butchered animal lard and melding into—perhaps even swallowing—your leg.

II

By chronicling such a frightful tale in which you find yourself in great peril, the author of the horror short story—be it Dr. Gloon or another—may more accurately be labeled an empiricist of the uncanny, studying its subject with watchful eye and recording its findings in a black and white composition book. And while your ankle is being fused into those boney fingers with the hideously drooping flesh, an empiricist of the uncanny may urge you to recall that, as discussed above and as you are currently appreciating, you decode the components of the horror tale much the same as you do traumatic encounters. An empiricist of the uncanny may even suggest that you have suffered three especially traumatic encounters which behave as a sort of reflector to the truths perpetuated in the oeuvre of the unknowable and which to that end amalgamate into your very own grand spell of short fiction. More precisely, said empiricist would assuredly declare that in order for you to arrive at the pessimistic conclusion hereinbefore cited regarding the ineffectuality of humankind, you would be obligated to recall these encounters in accordance with the three escalating components of the horror tale. Simply put, I am asking you to harvest the figure, the fingers, and the fiend from the sanguine fields of your unhallowed history so that I may compose a comprehensive short horror story, as I did in section I. And as you recall the infestation of ill-natured reminiscences which have burrowed tunnels into your brain and consider them in relation to the nightmarish decalogues outlined herein, the consummations of an entire genre will crystallize. So, without further ado, were your life a horror tale constructed from a predestined triumvirate of traumas written by Dr. Gloon, it may begin in the following manner: Over the course of the human odyssey which links the starry abyss of prebirth and death, there are a chosen few who are doomed to be followed by unrelenting wretches from worlds unbound by universal laws or temporal constructs. Up until this very moment, they have visited you three times.

Now, by employing this relatively basic setup, I will cull your three traumas—or, in this case, visitations—from dreary days long gone and arrange them as if they were the three truths of a horror tale. The rest of the tale can be told as follows.

Visit no. 1: The Figure in the Closet. The phrase itself no doubt conjures unmistakable moving images which dance all their own in the catacombs beneath your daydreams. Images of your babysitter, that tenantless vessel of flesh with the hollow, expressionless mask which passed for a human face to your mother and father. Oh, how its eyes shined onto your parents a deadening luster while it sang to them on sofa, convincing them that it possessed a constitution befitting of a provisional guardian for the evening. How that stomach-turning wave of disquietude washed over your body and spilled out of your pores when your parents bid you a perfunctory farewell and shut the door behind them.

It was in the den on tufted carpet that the sitter ordered you to sit cross-legged at its elbow and gaze upon the fuzzy television screen, flickering with violent static. Fearful of the hungered organism behind the sitter’s mask, drooling with malignant appetites, you did as you were told, and this was how you spent the totality of your epoch under its wardship. Those rapidly fluctuating patterns of random dot pixels infected your eyes with astral microwaves that you were certain rendered you powerless to move, powerless to close your eyes, even. For hours you watched those frenetic pixels, hours that stretched out like eons across the decaying cosmos of your psyche, until your entire consciousness, your entire perception of stimuli both internal and external, was reduced to the singularly grim experience of anarchic dots emanating from a black void beyond reach on the other side of the screen. It was in this inescapably fuzzy netherworld that your parents found you, crippled by the television’s translation of ancient energies released by cosmogenesis, cross-legged on tufted carpet.

In the mystifying moments following the point in time your parents emancipated you from the meat hooks of catatonia, you came to realize your sitter was no longer at arm’s reach. And in the moments following this realization, after scrupulous inspections of the property—high and low and with eagle-eyed vigilance—you and your progenitors came to realize that your sitter was no longer in the house. Of course, this did not preclude them from contacting the provincial authorities via corded telephone, nor did it extinguish your very real, very justifiable fear that it was still out there. When the inevitable juncture arrived in which your parents deemed it necessary you suspend your consciousness for the remainder of sundown, you begged your mother and father not to surrender you to the bunk within your quarters, where light was scarce and which was therefore host to all manner of unseeable frights. You begged them in the same manner you wished you had begged them not to surrender you to the extraterrestrial whims of the sitter. Alas, they would not entertain your pleas. When they turned the lights out and sealed you inside your keep, you found yourself swallowed by the unquenchable shadows of an unlit bedroom at nightfall. Apropos of the televised fuzz which once cocooned your field of vision, your eyeballs became two captives of the unmitigated blackness that besieged you. Except, after a protracted spell of tossing and turning, you recognized that the room wasn’t wholly devoid of light anymore, was it? As a matter of fact, weren’t there two miniscule flaws in that perfect dark otherwise unblemished by light? Two observant orbs shining from your closet? Flickering, even?

Visit no. 2: The Fingers in the Dark. No day on the academic calendar comes as easy for learning adolescents as the one on which a substitute schoolteacher looks after the class. But for you, there is only one who comes to mind when the appellation “substitute schoolteacher” is invoked, and your psychic illustrations of its gangling, inhuman features have not been so easy to erase. You remember the day that long-limbed schoolteacher shambled into the classroom without speaking and chiseled the words “PLEESE REED” into the chalkboard, its unblinking, narcotizing eyes imparting upon you the appalling understanding that the consequences for insubordination were indescribably merciless acts of abasement which would result in the degeneration of your mental faculties to the point of bodily necrosis. Your classmates undoubtedly shared this same understanding, as evidenced by the swifthanded contemporaneousness with which you all retrieved your books from your book bags, opened your books, and dropped your heads to read. For a number of odd, measureless minutes, you wouldn’t dare lift your eyes from the text before you, even as the glutinous, vulgar rustling noises oozing from the front of the classroom captured your ears like a beguiling earworm of annihilation you can’t get out of your head.

But those vulgar noises did eventually get the better of your curiosities, and when you lifted your gaze to meet the source of discord, you intuited forthwith that doing so was an irreversible act of self-condemnation. Because your eyes ascertained that the schoolteacher was the begetter of those viscous noises; the vulgar rustling was the sound of a repeating duology of gruesome events which started with the schoolteacher’s perversely loose skin slowly drooping from its body and ended with the schoolteacher aggressively pulling the skin back into place. In point of fact, its skin was so perversely loose it was as if its flesh was tender meat which could fall off its bones at any moment, leaving before the classroom a skeleton, marrowless yet still very much alive. And in observing this repetitious succession of unnatural events, of drooping and pulling, with morbid fascination, your eyelids became quite heavy, didn’t they? There was something malignantly hypnotic about the manner in which its skin would unhurriedly sink from the bone and be promptly yanked into starting position ad nauseam, and though your insides screamed for your descending eyelids to retreat back into your brow, for your failing body to shake you from the mushrooming plume of bodily inertia, you could not stave off the outright collapse into a state of sleeping paralysis. But this was no routine slip into dreaming dormancy or restful slumber; on the contrary, your visit from the sandman was considerably more malicious than past appointments, for your while your body was slumped over your desk, dogged in its languor, your mind remained remarkably lucid. By way of illustration, despite being locked inside the starless void within your body, you were keenly aware of the goings-on in your immediate vicinity—the ticking of the wall clock, the turning of book pages, the rustling of papery skin. You were particularly concerned with the minute hand on that wall clock, tallying its every undeviating tick as it approached the time which would trigger the ringing of the school bell, thereby putting an end to the period and releasing you and your classmates from the schoolteacher’s custody.

Eventually—mercifully, your classmates likely surmised—the school bell did ring. Nevertheless, that bell did not ring loud enough to liberate your corrupted joints from anatomic imprisonment, and neither did the sounds of your classmates hastily collecting their belongings and skittering out of the room. With your skeletal components outright incapacitated, your ears were taunted by the sounds of the schoolteacher’s perverse movements, its skin emanating gnarled, gelatinous noises while it rose from its chair and shambled towards your desk. With each jelly-like step that the schoolteacher took, dragging its mangled form across the floor with painstaking sluggishness, you became increasingly certain that its arrival promised your delivery to the gallows. When the degenerate did finally arrive, you could feel its wicked gaze piercing into your petrified form as it admired you in your concluding moments the way a butcher would a prime cut. You could hear it inhaling your dread into its infested lungs with a blackhearted glee. And you could smell its breath, the death-mulch scent like the grounds of a condemned graveyard overflowing with the cadavers of those whose souls are so contaminated, so impossibly damned, they provide the soil no nourishment for new life. Before any more of your senses could be tainted by its ghoulish attributes, the schoolteacher reached down and positioned its hand over the back of your head, wheezing with weighted breath while the skin sank from its boney fingertips and meandered towards your neck. Your flesh instinctively mutated into gooseflesh when that drooping skin which dangled from its fingertips gently grazed the nape of your neck and fondled your hair. “WAKE UP!” it exclaimed.

Visit no. 3: The Fiend Beneath Your Feet. As if torn from the very pages of grim fables, this particular episode commenced when you resolved to embark on shortcut through a forest your parents warned you never to take for fear of the stoned madmen who surely danced around satanic bonfires within its inner reaches, and the fresh corpses which surely fertilized the soil beneath their dancing feet. But it was not frolicking junkies or human remains you happened upon when you decided to walk as the crow flies from the movie theatre to your home on an evening when you were out past curfew. It was something altogether less humane. And by the time the thought came into being that a sundown stroll through primeval woodland powered by hellish currents was perhaps as ill-informed as your parents forewarned, so did too did the thought that you had taken far too many steps on your journey to justifiably turn back now. You were arriving at the innermost sanctum of the forest—situated almost perfectly between two halves of haunted land—when you began to notice that the trees which surrounded you were so much more gaunt, so much more sickly than the strong oak of the woods’ perimeter. In fact, so emaciated were these trees that they seemingly could not support the weight of even their leaves, all of which had fallen from the branches that grew high overhead into towering shapes of rotting wood. As a result, your path was teeming with leaves which were so dry they cracked like the bones of small rodents underfoot. And it was perhaps in response to the clattery sounds of rodent bone-trampling that the canine was drawn out onto the leaves ahead of you from the sea of cadaverous trees.

At first blush, the appearance of a feral quadruped whose physical features were made indiscernible by the disfiguring hours between dusk and dawn lifted the hairs on your neck, but the sound of the critter’s benign panting bordering on pleasant indicated to you that this creature was conceivably a harmless dog and therefore posed no risk of imperilment. If anything, the arrival of a companionable hound during the dark half of day in this altar of crooked trees was a welcome sight, and to this welcome sight you squatted down onto the leaves and called out to the beast so that it may come closer. With measured stride, the hound trudged towards you on all fours, its visual form but a moving shape delineated by contorted shadows cast down from incongruous branches. As the hound drew closer, the leaves snapped loudly under its paws and its monstrous shape became clearer to your eyes, and you conceded that this animal was much, much bigger than you had first estimated.

When the beast arrived at a point where it was close enough to touch and yet still obscured by palpable darkness, it halted its gait and ceased its panting. Heedful of this motionless hound which may have been born of hell, whose countenance was inscrutable but whose unnervingly massive stature was very much tangible, you postulated that submission was the only feasible stratagem at such close range. So, against those vehement impulses which beseeched you to withdraw from the grounds straight away and to do so at a considerable pace, you put forth your arm and outstretched your fingers to the mongrel in the hopes that it would let you stroke its mangy fur or scratch its misshapen head or that perchance it would but inhale the scent of your hand and leave off. The mongrel carried out none of these functions. What it did do was lean forward and lower its skull so that you and it were face to face, and so that the faded moonlight which shone through the tangled shadows above revealed a physiognomy so revolting, your body’s instinctive rebuttal was the arrestation of all physical movement. For that hound, that mongrel which stood on four legs and whose eyes at that very instant were only inches from yours, had the face of a grinning human, the contours of which were askew with impossible angles and whose smile betrayed that of a fiend for whom acts of atrocity bring unadulterated ecstasy. A fiend. Up until that moment in time, you had chanced upon a host of rogues from Mephistophelian regions such as the ageless little devil who wore the mask of a babysitter and the hollowed-out skeleton who wore the gangly skin suit of a schoolteacher, but this was the first entity you had ever diagnosed as being unequivocally fiendish. Once the stasis of shock was eclipsed by the overwhelming desire for survival, you turned from the fiend and made a mad dash in the opposing direction. In short order, the carnivorous fiend took off in pursuit.

Like a galloping white horse crushing the skulls of the dead under its hooves, the mongrel announced its murderous intent by vociferously trampling over those dried leaves, and it was assuredly a matter of seconds before it was not leaves, but your quivering organs and ripped out entrails spluttering under the weight of its paws. With these repeating images of extinction playing out over and over in your head, desperation became your only impetus to remain among the living. And so you leapt up off of the leaves and latched onto one of those emaciated trees which, by some necromantic enchantment innate to the forest, supported the weight of a desperate human facing corporeal terminus. As you climbed up that tree which sprouted out of wicked grounds and grew crookedly into the night sky like the fluttering legs of a dying arachnid, you managed to leave behind that mongrel, its primitive mechanisms still formulating a way off of the ground. Each time you reached a new assemblage of branches you deemed suitable for a breather, you looked down to the earth below and, to your relief, found the beast still circling the base of the tree, still seeking a way to scale such heights. When you determined that you had climbed high enough—so high, in fact, that you could no longer see earth nor hound beneath you—to safely discontinue your ascent, you crawled over to a cluster of tree limbs and sat atop the doddering wood. Though this cessation of activity supplied you respite from exertions which devoured your physical energy, it offered you no respite from the disturbing thoughts which devoured your emotional energy. Because while you were stuck several stories above the forest’s terrain and cradled by that bed of feeble branches, you were unsure which thought was more horrifying: that the wood felt so weak and decrepit it could feasibly fracture at any moment and thus send you plummeting into a grave of your own making, or that the hound was no longer visible to the eye and in this fashion could very well be insidiously clawing its way to you.

There was no further room for unearthly neurosis by the time a branch beneath you snapped, forcing you to redistribute your weight more evenly across the wavering platform and to grasp a tree limb hanging above you to alleviate some of the burden. Then, without announcement, the mongrel lunged out of the obscure depths below and sank its dull, human teeth into your foot. The eardrum-severing volume of your terrified shriek was matched only by the promptitude with which you frantically kicked out your leg, shaking loose your shoe from your foot and, correspondingly, the hellhound as well. As it fell into the fathoms of midnight from a height which was decidedly fatal, you heard that mongrel giggling in hysterical tones at erratic cadences, as if it were elated to be en voyage to a grisly rearrangement of its own bones and viscera. You never heard it hit the ground.

III

To walk into the psychogenic graveyard of your own torment and weave through its crumbling headstones, to dig up dirt desecrated by unholy memories until you reach those festering caskets which hold traumas and uncover their lids is, well, no walk in the park. In all likelihood, you’re feeling what can very nearly be described as relief in that, in lieu of floating amongst those tombstones of the past, you’re now thoroughly anchored to the bedchamber of your present, even if that present is in one way or another your own abhorrent swan song. Which brings us to our ending.

As disclosed in the setup to this tale, you’ve encountered and escaped the haggard wretches of everlasting fire on three occasions, making this your fourth meeting with such a being. Seeing that the ravenous fiend with the hanging flesh which had previously absorbed your ankle into its curled, skinny fingers, has by this time ingested both of your legs into its presently mutating form, you’ve forthwith uncovered that from this meeting, there will be no escape. And you’ve doubtlessly gleaned that the fiend which has softened into a convulsing goop of veins and meat assimilating your body is, in truth, none other than Dr. Gloon himself. That is to say, your skin will soon be my skin, your bones will soon be my bones, your thoughts will soon be my thoughts. As for your soul, an empiricist of the uncanny can only speculate.

Remember, at your root, dearest reader, at your fundamental essence, you are and have always been

End.

* * *

Luke Flaherty is a writer of strange media and stranger fiction. He lives with his fiancé and their pup in Los Angeles. Find him on Twitter @lukeyhorror.

Side Effects May Vary

By Alexandr Bond

They would kill her. Natalia knew it with such certainty her heart threatened to stop. She was so close, so close to achieving what They wanted. Then her boss informed her that a man was coming to see her today, a man with questions. She stood in the facility’s second floor bathroom and stared at her own reflection.

“Stop it!” she chastised herself. “It will be fine. The man knows nothing.”

Doubt nagged at her. At this stage of development, questions were expected but visitors... She dug her fingers into the hard porcelain of the shiny white sink until her manicured red nails almost cracked. Serving two masters had its price. Would she pay it today?

Her phone vibrated telling her the man was here. Sighing, she quickly composed herself. Her blond hair sat almost perfectly; her navy blue pant suit, bereft of a single crease, formed to her skin as though it was made for her. Of course it was. Everything about her appearance sent a message: To reassure, to command. Sparring one more glance, Natalia turned away from the mirror and quit the fluorescent glow of the bathroom for the florescent glow of the hall, the click of her black heels heralding her approach.

Robert Lucerne, her assistant though more secretary than anything else, gestured toward her office. He mouthed “He is waiting for you.” With a phone in one hand, Robert tapped a cell phone lying on his desk. She nodded. Visitors’ cell phones were confiscated during their time in the research facility. More than once she had to see people escorted out due to noncompliance. Leaks were grounds for expulsion or termination.

She gave a slight wave of dismissal toward Robert before heading into her office.

The man was sitting in one of the chairs in front of her desk, completely consumed with his own thoughts. He was dressed professionally, a well-made black suit over a white dress shirt. With one leg over the other, she could see his dark brown shoes, shiny in the bright light of her office. A thin black tie made the appearance complete. Even from where she stood, she could tell he was a tall man. He could have been an athlete in college. He wasn’t, of course. She knew everything about him, everything and nothing. And that scared her.

“Mr. White.” She startled him though he tried to hide it. As he turned to face her, she caught a slight glimpse of his surprise. That one moment eased her considerably. He took her in, his eyes appraising her. She did the same, noting his strong jaw and sharp features, both attractive. He smiled, genuinely, and offered his hand.

“Ms. Hall, it is a pleasure.” He spoke without much of an accent, his New England roots almost completely obliterated. An unbidden smile touched her maroon painted lips but she quickly reminded herself that he couldn’t be trusted.

“Natalia, please. May I call you Charles?” Informality would lower his guard. She needed the advantage. He nodded and she urged him to sit down as she took her own seat behind her desk, a bland modern affair with a glass table that matched the rest of the room. She preferred vintage 50s décor, bright crimson and turquoise framed in shiny white, or a strong, thick wooden desk like her grandfather had, but the sterile approach was better for business.

She let her hands fall to her lap and waited for him to start.

“I trust you know why I am here,” he said.

She inclined her head. To spy. She wouldn’t say that. She had no proof, just her gut. “You are a reassurer.”

He smirked at her term. Someone needed to be reassured, she just wasn’t certain if it was her bosses, the public, or...

“So to speak.” He leaned back in his chair.

She tried to remain outwardly calm, but her leg refused to stop moving.

Charles continued. “You must have seen this coming. What you offer... Well... It seems—”

“Too good to be true?” she finished for him and he nodded. Pushing away her doubts, she smiled then set her hands upon the cold glass surface of her desk. Natalia was proud of the work she did, proud of what they were doing, what They offered. She focused on the man sitting in front of her. “Charles, that is just it. What we offer is too good. That’s why it’s true.” Before he could respond, she took out a file from the small cabinet behind her and set it in front of him. “That is the medical file of subject 395-B1. When he came to us, he had a brain tumor. Given six months to live. After two months,” she said and tapped the second page. “Well, look at the CT and MRI scans.”

She knew what the file would show, knew there was no glimmer of the cancer that had devoured subject 395. She could see uncertainty in Charles’ face and wanted more. Retrieving more files from the cabinet, she set each one down as she spoke.

“Heart disease. MS. HIV. All of it gone.”

He wasn’t as surprised as she hoped but a part of her knew gossip was spreading. The key was to spread just enough. Too much information could get you killed.

“So it’s a miracle pill,” he replied, his tone less than impressed.

A hard case, she mused to herself then chuckled.

“The boys in the lab wanted to call it ‘The Great Cure All’ but I don’t like it.” It was too banal, too... human.

“This all looks promising but I will need to see everything. Including a tour of the lab and reports on side effects.”

Natalia twitched. She didn’t mean to but at the words “side effects” she could feel Them in her mind. Love and fear were not mutually exclusive. The air seemed to thin while she lost herself in her own thoughts but after a few moments, she smiled then stood.

“Follow me.”

She led him out of her office, sparing a glance at Robert before heading down an immaculate white hall to an elevator locked by a keypad.

“Security is a top priority.” She told him as she typed in a code quickly. “Fear of espionage or the media poking around.” Her tone was matter-of-fact but inside she hoped it made him squirm.

“I’m sure.” Charles sounded calm, almost completely nonplused.

She would expect that of a man of his profession. So far she hadn’t noticed anything that revealed the man to be anything other than what the file said but her gut still twisted in knots. The nervousness she felt radiated through her and she continued to speak as the elevator doors opened and they stepped in.

“We have a very thorough vetting process. Triple background checks, FBI, medical, even school records.” She hit B1 and the doors shut.

“Still leaks are always possible.”

Standing to her left, slightly behind her, she watched his blurry reflection in the polished silver of the elevator’s door. She stiffened for a moment then took a breath. Natalia was a bit taller than him, thanks to her heels, even so, she needed to gain more control of the situation.

Nodding, she spoke. “We don’t let anyone in here without checking them. Even you.” Before he could comment, she continued. “Charles Edward White. Thirty-one years old. Born in New Braintree, Massachusetts on October 8th at 6:14 in the evening. Lived with your parents until you went to college. You switched from journalism to law. Quite drastic.” The journalism worried her but there was nothing to suggest any old ties to that field still existed for him based on the background check. Still… “My condolences about your father.”

Natalia chuckled to herself at his reaction. He kept his face blank but she could have sworn she saw him jerk. Was there worry in his eyes? Before he could say anything, the doors opened.

She led him through a corridor flanked by examination rooms and work stations. Men and women in lab coats typed at computers, poured over charts and computer screens, and some were with the subjects. A number nodded politely at her. Most ignored her. They were used to her presence by now. She made it a point to observe their work.

“As you know, clinical trials offer the best results and so far what we have been getting is nothing short of miraculous.” They stopped in front of one of the exam rooms. Inside, Dr. Wen conversed with Subject 574-B1. “She just joined the study. But soon she’ll show signs of improvement.”

The woman was severely burned and using an oxygen tank. Natalia had yet to decide if the woman should be given the higher dose or not. Would They want her? She doubted it. Besides 574 had family and would be noticed.

“How long does the process normally take?” Charles watched Dr. Wen and Subject 574.

Dr. Wen looked over the burned sections of her skin. He was one of the brightest of the team, handpicked by Dr. Gordon, the lead on the project and the force behind everything they were doing.

“Each subject is a bit different but so far it has been within a few days of taking the medication. I can get you a spreadsheet of the numbers if you haven’t seen it already.” Natalia had been making periodic reports to the higher ups since the trial had started, careful to keep everything appearing routine.

“I’ve seen it,” he said as he moved over to one of the clusters of terminals currently in use. Dr. Aminu, who was at the station, eyed him suspiciously. He ignored her. “I would like to speak with Dr. Gordon at some point as well.”

Natalia moved to the other side of Dr. Aminu who shot her an annoyed glance.

“Unfortunately, Dr. Gordon is unavailable. Being the voice of the project, he is currently speaking with potential distributors as well as investors for Arlok Pharmaceuticals.” She smiled apologetically. “They like having him there to explain the science.”

Dr. Aminu cleared her voice loudly, her glare split between Natalia and Charles.

“There is more to see,” She gestured for him to follow. “Besides, I am perfectly able to answer all of your questions.”

For the next forty-six minutes, she showed him the rest of the facility, passing more examination rooms as well as the distribution lab where the components of the drug were put together. He spoke to a number of the subjects, a few of which had been a part of the trial for nearly six months.

Subject 282 chatted with Dr. Bishop when they approached. The 64 year old man, riddled with throat cancer when he came to them four months ago, barked a laugh as he tried to make Dr. Bishop blush.

“I swear, it was as thick as—”

“More wild stories?” Natalia asked, interrupting the man and earning a thankful glance from Dr. Bishop.

“It ain’t wild if it’s true,” he replied with his thick southern drawl before eying Charles.

“Well, I am sure my... associate here would love to hear them as well as ask you a few questions.”

Natalia trusted Subject 282 to praise their drug since it saved his life. The two men spoke, with Charles asking his questions. Pretty much the same to nearly all the subjects he spoke to: How long have you been in the trial? What was your condition before entering the trial? What side effects have you experienced? And so on. They were routine questions.

“So who is the tall drink of water?” Dr. Bishop asked, moving in close.

“Sent by Arlok to get an outside view of the project,” Natalia said, keeping her voice low.

“And?”

“So far, so good.”

“You sound disappointed,” Dr. Bishop said with a shake of her red hair. “Where you hoping for another spy like that security guard three months ago?”

Natalia pursed her lips and shook her head. Watching Charles closely, nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary. And nothing he had been told disputed what she sent to her boss.

“Can’t be too careful,” she finally added.

“I don’t envy your job.” Dr. Bishop said then moved to where the two men were speaking.

“If there is nothing more, I still have some tests to run.”

“Oh, no. I am satisfied,” Charles said then turned to Subject 282. “Thank you for... being so candid, Walter.”

“Ain’t nothin’, you might want to loosen up a bit yourself though.” Subject 282 laughed while Charles offered an awkward smile.

He rejoined Natalia and the two started heading back toward the elevator.

“I hope that meets everything you need,” she said.

“All that remains is to see a compound list.”

She hesitated. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise but she felt a territorial pride in this creation.

He noticed her delay and added “Is that a problem?”

Sighing, Natalia reluctantly shrugged then walked into one of the adjoining offices to retrieve the official list of compounds. He was glancing around the hall when she returned, his posture as stiff as concrete. She handed him the documents which he checked thoroughly.

“This seems almost like a protease inhibitor,” he remarked after a few minutes. “What is it inhibiting?”

She smiled internally, both impressed and surprised.

“You are right. You know more than I pegged you for.” He hadn’t been the first to be curious though he was the first to understand it. Even her bosses knew little of what she and Dr. Gordon had done. Perhaps she was right to be worried about Charles Edward White. Just not in the way she first thought.

“I took chemistry in college,” he said dryly.

She grinned. She knew he did but it had been an introductory course, nothing to account for what those pages contained. Her smile deepened.

“Not me. I took archeology.”

He blinked at her. She knew that would throw him. It threw many people, even the doctors that reported to her. Her official title was Research Site Manager but what she did was so much more, for the company and for Them.

“How did that work out for you?” It was her turn to smirk. She had worked herself to the bone in a field that was growing archaic. As the world expanded, the past grew less and less mysterious. But it had been her dream, a dream she would do anything to fulfill. In Dr. Gordon she found a kindred soul, someone who would help her achieve her desires. If he only knew where that would lead them.

“Rather well actually. Got me this job.” And so much more. She didn’t care what the cost was. The end would be the same for them all regardless.

“Back to my question,” Charles said a moment later drawing Natalia out of her own musings.

“Of course.” She smiled and watched Dr. Wen exit a nearby examination room. He nodded at her, tapped the file in his hand then moved to the next room, making his rounds. “As I said, you are right. It is an inhibitor. It simply inhibits anything malignant to the human body.”

How intricate, how glorious the process was. She couldn’t help it but she started to talk about Dr. Gordon, the man who would help bring about everything. It was his face that sold it but it was Their conviction, Their desires behind it all. Dr. Gordon had secured the deal with Arlok Pharmaceuticals, had proven the worth of the ideas to their shareholders, and had given operational control to Natalia when the time was right.

Though she only told him the official story, Charles rifled through the pages in his hands, barely paying attention.

“What about compound M15?” he asked abruptly.

She was in mid-sentence but her words died on her lips like ancient stars in forgotten galaxies. She blinked and stared at him.

“Excuse me?” She tried to hide her disbelief. Natalia hoped she heard him wrong.

“M15-KA-TN-1C.” Charles peered at her expectantly and she went as still as the void in her heart.

How does he know? It wasn’t on the books. Not even the higher ups knew about it. Not even her boss. Did someone in the government find out? He did go for journalism before switching to law. The media? We cleaned up those messes.

Her pulse hammered in her brain like the ticking of a clock. With every second, her world wound down, minutes to midnight. But only a few others knew… Blinking, she smiled as a new thought occurred to her.

“Come with me.”

Without glancing back to see if he would follow, she walked back to the elevator and after unlocking a hidden call button, they began to descend. As the car silently drifted far below street level, to the bowels of the facility, she considered her options but more importantly, who was playing her. She knew her gut was right. Ever since she met Them, her insight had grown; a gift, a side effect of seeing Them. She wanted more no matter the cost. Watching the man in the blurry reflection of the silver door, she decided his questions didn’t matter.

When they finally reached the lowest level, the expected scent of bleach accosted them. She had grown indifferent to it but Charles nearly gagged.

They walked down another bright hallway similar to the one they had just left. There were more examination rooms but here the subjects were quite different.

“Earlier you asked about side effects,” she said as she moved to the nearest exam room. “There have been some.” Natalia gestured.

Charles peered inside then after a moment let out a gasp and shrank away from the poor soul on the other side of the thick glass. She eyed the white growths covering half the subject’s face. Each were lined with purple veins and pulsed discordantly with the man’s heartbeat as though they had their own. The various monitors hooked to Subject 419 displayed only elevated breathing and pulse. That would change given time.

“My god! What is that?”

Natalia delighted in his disgust and horror. She had never felt anything for those afflicted. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge cauterizes.

“Fungal growths as near as we can tell,” she replied calmly. “So far stage one is treatable and reversible.” She turned away and motioned for him to follow. “Stage two we can delay but we haven’t stopped it yet.” She neglected to tell him that stage one lasted only a few days before stage two took hold. It would be irrelevant to mention it.

As they moved past more and more examination rooms, she watched as he grew more and more horrified. The careful composure he had displayed earlier stripped away with every step, with every glimpse of the work she and Dr. Gordon had done. His revulsion laid bare as he took in the complete loss of humanity the subjects suffered. Natalia almost chuckled but bit it back at the last second.

Each subject was from a different point in the progression of the growths, men and women slowly consumed by something with a purpose. Walking passed them was like a study of that purpose, like watching bacteria grow in a petri dish. She often came down here at night to watch the growths advance across the subjects’ flesh, like an army crossing an empty field.

“Is it fatal?” he asked, the plea in his voice.

She shook her head. Far from it.

“What is causing it?” He was transfixed on the last subject they passed, a stage four. Almost nothing human left, the body devoured by the alien growths.

“M15-KA-TN-1C,” she said. “But it is also the core of the medicine. It is responsible for curing . . .” she gestured to the formerly human creature beyond the thick glass, “everything.” Disease, weakness, humanity. All of it.

“The FDA will never approve this.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help herself this time.

“You’d be surprised. There are a number of drugs already on the market that have terrible side effects, some fatal.” She stopped and turned to face him. “Out of the five hundred subjects, only five percent have been affected. And so long as they don’t reach stage two, they will make a full recovery. Of course, they can never take the medicine ever again.” It wasn’t a lie but an omission. Of the five hundred subjects, only five percent were chosen for the larger dose. That would change once worldwide distribution was approved.

He gaped at her then asked, “Where did this even come from?” He glanced back at the rows of examination rooms.

She smiled deeply as the memory filled her. She remembered the cold; it had bit deep into her bones. When she had still been an archeologist, she and Dr. Gordon had ventured to Siberia to explore the craters. What they found changed them both. Deep in the dark, heavy earth she had found Them. As indifferent as a virus, They showed her Their plan. It wasn’t like some clichéd villain. This was inevitable, final, a conclusion authored at the beginning. For Natalia, it was simply a chance to study the secrets of the universe, ancient and unforgiving. To learn the truth of everything before the end came.

“The compound was found in Siberia, in one of those craters. Though we think it originated in space.” She was certain of it but telling him was pointless. She typed on a keypad quickly just as he turned to look at her.

“Space—” He didn’t get a chance to finish. Moving swiftly, she pushed him through the now open door. He stumbled to his knees. He was just turning to look back as the door shut

Turning on the intercom, she spoke. “I’m sorry, Charles. But only a select few now about M15. That means someone talked. And we can’t have that.” He screamed at her and pounded on the glass. She almost felt bad but she had seen eternity in Them, a human’s life was just a blip whether they lived a day or a hundred years. “I would be more concerned about the stage five. They can be violent.”

At her words, he turned just in time to see the creature shamble toward him. Nothing human remained of Subject 36; just those alien grows in a humanoid shape, faceless, mouthless.

Natalia didn’t bother to watch. She had seen what a stage five could do. As his muffled screams echoed throughout the corridor, she made her way to the final examination room. Behind the glass stood Dr. Gordon, or at least his body which housed a part of the being that had taken the man all those years ago back in Siberia. She had found Them first, had loved Them then. When her mentor found them, she had known what to do.

“Don’t worry. I will deal with any leaks.” They said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was decided long ago. She merely chose to advance the time table. Her devotion was unrequited, her love ignored but it was hers to give while the knowledge They let drip off Them was the balm for her empty soul. She smiled then turned away. As she made her way back down the hall, she thought of the drug’s tag line marketing was testing and laughed.

“One pill that will change your life.”

End.

* * *

Alexandr Bond has been writing since he was nine years old and has a love for the supernatural and cosmic horror ever since he first was introduced to H. P. Lovecraft. His work has been published in Cosmic Horror Monthly as well as a number of anthologies and more can be found on his blog alexandrbond.wordpress.com. When not writing, he spends his time reading and learning; most recently, he is learning how to speak Deutsch. He currently resides in North Carolina with his family.

Behind His Smile, a Frown

By Adrian Ludens

Originally published in The Mothman Files, Woodland Press, 2011

There are only three of us staying in this dilapidated little roadside motel. It’s a sad indicator of the shortened attention spans of people today. There was a time when—thanks to the Mothman legend—this motel would be flashing their ‘no vacancy’ sign for most of the year.

The man in number twelve interests me a great deal. Twice now, we’ve passed each other crunching across the motel’s dusty parking lot. He glanced down at me and offered a tentative smile as we passed and I nodded cordially in return, but that was all. His overall appearance was rather off-putting, but I’ve decided I would like to visit with the fellow. His presence in this lackluster place interests me. The only other guest is an elderly woman, who is staying in room six. With me staying in room two, it makes me wonder if the clerk made a conscious decision to keep us as far apart as possible. Could the walls be that thin?

Perhaps they are; I’ve made frequent trips to the soda machine that bakes in the sun on the far side of the motel, and every time I’ve passed the closed door of number twelve, I can hear the tall man speaking. He says things that I can’t quite grasp; poses questions I have no answers for. It’s like trying to follow a conversation with an astrophysicist who barely has a handle on the English language. I wonder if he’s crazy.

But what if the man in twelve is here for the same reason I am? He might also be marking the anniversary of the first sighting of the Mothman. Plenty of people have heard about the mysterious creature, but precious few seem to be interested this year.

I mentioned the man’s incessant muttered questions, but I suppose his eccentric appearance is what most people would remember. He’s deeply tanned and quite tall; my opposite in these respects. His long dark hair is combed back and he wears a glittering green full-length trench coat. I’ve never seen him without it. He wears a wide black belt that matches his deep-set eyes. Now that I think about it, when he smiled at me that first time, I thought he rather looked like an aging shock rocker. The man’s clothing and demeanor are terrifying and ridiculous in equal parts.

The motel is a throwback to the heyday of Route 66 when men still wore hats. The rooms form an ‘L’ shape. The office squats apart, close to the curb. My room is shabby and exudes a musty odor that I imagine spans back decades. It’s the type of place one imagines has seen better days, but even those days weren’t much to celebrate. The prices are quite reasonable however, and the sweaty, morbidly obese man who tends the motel office was quick to volunteer directions to the nearest ‘gentlemen’s club’, which I understood was meant as a friendly gesture. I asked the clerk, who introduced himself as Dewey, about the Mothman but he only shrugged the rolling hills that were his shoulders.

“Just moved here about a month ago. Never heard of no ‘Moss Man’.”

He seemed sincere so I didn’t bother to correct him.

A vacant strip mall molders next to the motel on one side and a decrepit warehouse leans in from the other. Drive a few miles north of here on Route 62 and you’ll encounter the abandoned remnants of the West Virginia Ordnance Works. Travel a mite farther and lose yourself in the McClintic Wildlife Area. I suppose it’s not a typical tourist destination. But I’m not a typical tourist. Nor, I would wager, is the man in twelve.

Perhaps we are kindred spirits; pilgrims still searching for the truth about the Mothman. If I could devise a way to ‘accidentally’ encounter the grinning man, perhaps I could engage him in conversation. If I turned the topic of conversation to the Mothman, we might share our experiences and anecdotes with each other.

* * *

I’ve been here over a week and still haven’t met a friendly or talkative person besides the corpulent motel clerk. The servers and store clerks pretend not to hear my questions concerning the Mothman. I find their collective silence rather perplexing. Much to my surprise, the statue depicting a rather sensationalized artist’s rendition of the Mothman has been removed, perhaps even demolished. Gone are all the souvenirs. The fact is I can find no trace of the legend, though I know it exists. I wonder at this sudden change.

I drive my car around town and the surrounding area; wandering and exploring each day until late into the evenings. The cherished notion that I might miraculously encounter the Mothman is never far from my mind.

In fact, as I turned into the motel parking lot after another disappointing and uneventful day, a strange figure froze in the glare of my headlights. My heart leapt into my throat. There it was!

My eyes had deceived me. I hit the brakes and stopped only inches short of the tall man from room twelve. Despite the close call, he grinned when he recognized me. His green duster sparkled in the illumination and billowed behind him in the breeze like wings. No wonder I’d been fooled. The dark man nodded at me and, still grinning, strode across the lot. My radio erupted with crackling bursts of feedback from several stations; all talk radio programs by the sounds of it. I fumbled with the volume knob but the sounds seemed to diminish of their own accord. I glanced up in time to see the tall man push open the door to room ten and disappear inside the rectangle of darkness. Surprised, I drove the last few yards in uneasy silence.

* * *

I wonder if the man in the green duster is here without transportation. I have yet to run into him at any of the diners or convenience stores around town. I’ve described him to people. I assumed a fellow that eccentric looking was bound to get local tongues wagging, but all I got were blank stares in return.

He must not have been satisfied with room ten either. I could hear him running through the litany of his incessant questions as I passed room eight this afternoon on my way to the soda machine. I felt half-tempted to simply knock on his door and use his room hopping as an excuse to start a conversation but I chickened out again and kept moving. Headaches arise with each trip to the vending machines but I can’t decide if it’s more or less caffeine my body craves.

* * *

This is strange; the man with the perpetual grin now occupies room six.

An ambulance arrived early this morning and a pair of sleepy attendants wheeled the old woman out on a collapsible gurney and hoisted her body into the back of the vehicle. I say ‘body’, because if she were alive they certainly wouldn’t have zipped her into that telltale black bag for the trip.

The motel clerk didn’t know the cause of her passing, even after I had offered him a ten-dollar bill for his trouble, so I again took him at his word.

As I climbed into my car the next morning, I sensed someone watching me and looked up. The new occupant of room six stood in the window parting the curtains and grinning at me. He acted as if he and I shared some ghoulish secret and I felt my heart start to race. I backed out and sped away down Route 62.

* * *

Today while hiking in the McClintic Wildlife Area I had a chance encounter with a park ranger. The fresh air cleared my head and I felt great, as I often did during my time away from the motel. I’d been wandering along a nature trail and the ranger marched in my direction from deeper in the brush. We exchanged greetings and mild pleasantries. His name, he said, was Simon. He explained that part of his job included insuring the deer hunters followed the appropriate laws.

“Need a special permit to hunt out here,” Simon said. “Only bucks with an antler span of fourteen inches or greater can be kilt.”

How he pronounced ‘killed’ somehow put me at ease. Whatever coldness had infected most of the town hadn’t affected the park ranger; at least as far as I could tell. I broached the subject of the Mothman.

“Wasn’t a moth, wasn’t a man,” Simon announced. He hitched up his belt in a way that reminded me of Barney Fife. “It was a bird.”

“I’ll be darned,” I commented, lapsing into a folksy delivery that matched his. “Must’ve been awful big.” I still had my own ideas about the creature.

“Oh, it was,” Simon agreed. He leaned in and lowered his voice though we were alone. “My daddy was a park ranger here in the sixties and seventies. He passed on in ‘82 but he told me the truth about the Mothman a few days before he died.” I held his gaze and waited for the second-generation park ranger to continue.

“The Mothman was just a mutated bird. Looked like a giant Sandhill crane. The damned thing had two necks and two heads! My daddy swore to the fact on his deathbed. Said the thing had a wingspan of thirteen feet. He thinks the red foreheads accounted for the red glowing eyes folks claim they saw.”

“How’d a giant two-headed crane disappear like it did?” I had started to think there might be something to Simon’s story.

“Just a few days after some folks saw it roosting on the Silver Bridge, it flew into a power line. Blew out the ‘lectricity in Point Pleasant and burnt itself into a crispy critter. Animal control called in the Park Service to have a look-see. What was left of the bird stunk to high heaven and was barely recognizable. The feathers had melted together like wax. My father said they’d kept the bird spread out on the concrete floor of one of the old ordnance buildings at the TNT factory for just a day before it decomposed into ash.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Happened so fast that no one ever got a picture of it, but it was a bird. I’d swear on my daddy’s grave.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said. “Nice chatting with you.” We shook hands and parted.

* * *

I arrived back at the motel to discover the grinning mystery man had turned the corner and now occupied room four.

Not that this should have surprised me. I would have been more astonished had he not moved. I’ve given up on understanding his eccentric actions. Now I simply accept them. Given the grand scheme of things, switching rooms at a seedy motel isn’t unheard of. Maybe he’s just bored. Or he could be trying to find a cleaner room. I haven’t seen a maid or housekeeper since I checked in.

Still, his manner is decidedly strange. Take his odd clothing for instance, or the unceasing stream of questions I hear every time I pass his room. What would a face-to-face conversation with the grinning man entail?

* * *

I feel hung over though I didn’t do any drinking last night. This morning I awoke face down on the worn and musty fibers that pass as carpet here and staggered to the bathroom sink to splash my face. I tossed and turned all night. The noise from room four had me gritting my teeth and wrapping the lumpy pillow around my ears. When I did manage to drift away my sleep was plagued with nightmares.

“Drovizel! Where is you?” The voice had sounded like it belonged to a chain-smoking caveman filtered through an old drive-in movie speaker. The sound had scrambled my brain like a relentless fever dream. “They bolted. I lost them. Drovizel, where is you?” If the sound had gotten any louder, I thought the grimy mirror in the bathroom would shatter. That; or my eardrums would burst. The motel room door had burst open and a sparkling green figure towered in the doorway.

The mysterious man’s dark eyes dragged around the room. Never in my life have I seen such a haunted, ghastly face. “Drovizel! Is you here?” he cried out as he raked his long fingers through inky black hair.

I realized two things in quick succession; first, that the man’s lips did not move as he spoke.

Then I realized I wasn’t asleep.

* * *

I’ve stayed in bed all day today. I’m not by nature a hypochondriac, but right now, I believe something must be wrong with me. Perhaps lack of sleep makes me paranoid. Dewey somehow squeezed through his office door and waddled across the parking lot to check on me. Sweat droplets jettisoned off my shaking body and pattered onto the carpet as I stood leaning against the doorframe, listening to what he had to say. He wanted me to seek medical attention. I told him that I simply had a bug and would be right again in no time. I felt guilty for lying. He probably feared having a second guest die at his motel in less than a week. I, meanwhile, feared leaving before I could unravel the mystery of the motels’ only other occupant.

* * *

The rest of the morning, the grinning man in the sparkling green duster subjected me to a barrage of questions that my mind could not grasp. My nose bleeds intermittently and my head hurts so badly a migraine would be an improvement. The man has introduced himself to me several hundred times over. His name is Indrid Cold.

Around noon, I gave up trying to rest and summoned all of my strength. I hoisted myself out of bed. Indrid Cold’s voice reverberated in my head as I staggered across the gravel to the motel office. Dewey looked up in surprise and reached for his old wall-mounted phone. I held up a hand.

“You can call an ambulance after you answer a couple questions for me.” I paused to catch my breath. Indrid wasn’t as audible here. The motel clerk nodded.

“You hear that television blasting all the time?”

“Nossir.”

“Hear anyone yelling or talking?”

The clerk shook his head.

“Dewey, did you ever serve in the military? Were you ever injured in combat?”

The obese man just looked at me as if I was crazy.

“I’m wondering if you happen to have a metal plate in your head.”

Dewey’s eyes popped open in a mix of delight and dismay, like I’d just offered him a box of chocolate-covered cockroaches. “I was in a bad car wreck two years ago,” he said. Dewey rapped his knuckles on the back of his skull and produced a flat yet metallic tone.

I nodded. “Second question. What do you know about the man in room four?”

The clerk stared at me blankly. “Four is vacant.”

I shook my head. “Mr. Cold is in there now. He occupied room twelve when I first checked in but he’s been making his way—”

Dewey furrowed his brows. “You’re the motel’s only guest.”

“I’ve seen him on several occasions! I hear him rambling on like a lunatic every day!” I leaned against the counter. “He’s been changing rooms and getting closer to mine!”

The clerk threw up his chubby hands. “You’re crazy, man! You prob’ly got hallucinations from your fever or something.”

I spun around and tottered out of the office. My walk back to my room felt like climbing a mountain in the face of a storm but I pushed on despite the pain. I needed closure.

I know Indrid Cold does not intend harm. I feel his sorrow and his confusion. I believe he may have gone mad. Cold is a stranger in this world. I believe he lost something of great sentimental value a long time ago. I visualize a beloved and cherished pet scampering away from a station wagon during a family vacation in a remote wilderness. I believe something similar happened here all those years ago.

The mood of the townies makes more sense to me now. As Indrid Cold rambles about, he inundates minds with endless headache-inducing questions. The locals—some consciously, others perhaps unconsciously—have developed a Pavlovian response to him. By denying the Mothman’s existence and shutting it out of their thoughts, I bet that Cold tends to leave them alone. Yet I think about the Mothman often. It’s possible the old woman in six died of a brain hemorrhage when Cold got too close for too long. I blame myself. My interest in the Mothman somehow drew Cold to me and she paid the ultimate price as a result.

Why he chose to approach me room by room down the length of this dilapidated motel I cannot explain. Moreover, does he realize the damage he is capable of when he tries to communicate? If Cold sees me as a kindred spirit and has the urge to confide in me, I will not deny him. A frown of anguish hides behind his perpetual smile and I believe I understand why. I try to remember the details Simon, the park ranger, shared with me. Indrid Cold will want to know them. Perhaps he’ll finally find some measure of peace.

I stand at the door of room two. My room. My brain feels like it wants to boil out of every orifice in my head. During the brief time that I was gone, Indrid Cold has moved in. I am his ultimate goal. I steel myself and turn the knob. When the door swings open I hope I will be able summon enough strength to return his trademark grin.

End.

* * *

Adrian Ludens is a full time librarian and the public address announcer for a two hockey teams. He lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with his family.

Adrian is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association with fiction sold to several dozen anthologies, including stories recently published in Generation X-ed (Dark Ink), The Lost Librarian’s Grave (Redwood Press), and Under Twin Suns (Hippocampus). His new story collection, “Bottled Spirits” (Lycan Valley Press Publications) is now available in print, eBook and audiobook.

Online presence: https://linktr.ee/AdrianLudensAuthor

The Diamond Lens: Part I

By Fitz-James O’Brien

Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly: 1858

I

FROM a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been toward microscopic investigations.

When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime, I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as “bull’s-eyes” were ruthlessly destroyed in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha’s spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field’s simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope—its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt toward my companions as the seer might feel toward the ordinary masses of men. I held conversations with nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders such as they never imagined in their wildest visions, I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam-pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green and silver and gold.

It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night, poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantage of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or, if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favorite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.

As I grew up, my parents, who saw but little likelihood of anything practical resulting from the examination of bits of moss and drops of water through a brass tube and a piece of glass, were anxious that I should choose a profession.

It was their desire that I should enter the counting-house of my uncle, Ethan Blake, a prosperous merchant, who carried on business in New York. This suggestion I decisively combated. I had no taste for trade; I should only make a failure; in short, I refused to become a merchant.

But it was necessary for me to select some pursuit. My parents were staid New England people, who insisted on the necessity of labor, and therefore, although, thanks to the bequest of my poor Aunt Agatha, I should, on coming of age, inherit a small fortune sufficient to place me above want, it was decided that, instead of waiting for this, I should act the nobler part, and employ the intervening years in rendering myself independent.

After much cogitation, I complied with the wishes of my family, and selected a profession. I determined to study medicine at the New York Academy. This disposition of my future suited me. A removal from my relatives would enable me to dispose of my time as I pleased without fear of detection. As long as I paid my Academy fees, I might shirk attending the lectures if I chose; and, as I never had the remotest intention of standing an examination, there was no danger of my being “plucked.” Besides, a metropolis was the place for me. There I could obtain excellent instruments, the newest publications, intimacy with men of pursuits kindred with my own—in short, all things necessary to ensure a profitable devotion of my life to my beloved science. I had an abundance of money, few desires that were not bounded by my illuminating mirror on one side and my object-glass on the other; what, therefore, was to prevent my becoming an illustrious investigator of the veiled worlds? It was with the most buoyant hope that I left my New England home and established myself in New York.

II

My first step, of course, was to find suitable apartments. These I obtained, after a couple of days’ search, in Fourth Avenue; a very pretty second floor, unfurnished, containing sitting-room, bedroom, and a smaller apartment which I intended to fit up as a laboratory. I furnished my lodgings simply, but rather elegantly, and then devoted all my energies to the adornment of the temple of my worship. I visited Pike, the celebrated optician, and passed in review his splendid collection of microscopes—Field’s Compound, Hingham’s, Spencer’s, Nachet’s Binocular (that founded on the principles of the stereoscope), and at length fixed upon that form known as Spencer’s Trunnion Microscope, as combining the greatest number of improvements with an almost perfect freedom from tremor. Along with this I purchased every possible accessory—draw-tubes, micrometers, a camera lucida, lever-stage, achromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms, parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes, fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I afterward discovered, were not of the slightest present value to me. It takes years of practice to know how to use a complicated microscope. The optician looked suspiciously at me as I made these valuable purchases. He evidently was uncertain whether to set me down as some scientific celebrity or a madman. I think he was inclined to the latter belief. I suppose I was mad. Every great genius is mad upon the subject in which he is greatest. The unsuccessful madman is disgraced and called a lunatic.

Mad or not, I set myself to work with a zeal which few scientific students have ever equaled. I had everything to learn relative to the delicate study upon which I had embarked—a study involving the most earnest patience, the most rigid analytic powers, the steadiest hand, the most untiring eye, the most refined and subtle manipulation.

For a long time half my apparatus lay inactively on the shelves of my laboratory, which was now most amply furnished with every possible contrivance for facilitating my investigations. The fact was that I did not know how to use some of my scientific implements—never having been taught microscopies—and those whose use I understood theoretically were of little avail until by practice I could attain the necessary delicacy of handling. Still, such was the fury of my ambition, such the untiring perseverance of my experiments, that, difficult of credit as it may be, in the course of one year I became theoretically and practically an accomplished microscopist.

During this period of my labors, in which I submitted specimens of every substance that came under my observation to the action of my lenses, I became a discoverer—in a small way, it is true, for I was very young, but still a discoverer. It was I who destroyed Ehrenberg’s theory that the Volvox globator was an animal, and proved that his “monads” with stomachs and eyes were merely phases of the formation of a vegetable cell, and were, when they reached their mature state, incapable of the act of conjugation, or any true generative act, without which no organism rising to any stage of life higher than vegetable can be said to be complete. It was I who resolved the singular problem of rotation in the cells and hairs of plants into ciliary attraction, in spite of the assertions of Wenham and others that my explanation was the result of an optical illusion.

But notwithstanding these discoveries, laboriously and painfully made as they were, I felt horribly dissatisfied. At every step I found myself stopped by the imperfections of my instruments. Like all active microscopists, I gave my imagination full play. Indeed, it is a common complaint against many such that they supply the defects of their instruments with the creations of their brains. I imagined depths beyond depths in nature which the limited power of my lenses prohibited me from exploring. I lay awake at night constructing imaginary micro-scopes of immeasurable power, with which I seemed to pierce through all the envelopes of matter down to its original atom. How I cursed those imperfect mediums which necessity through ignorance compelled me to use! How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens, whose magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations—in short, from all the obstacles over which the poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling! I felt convinced that the simple microscope, composed of a single lens of such vast yet perfect power, was possible of construction. To attempt to bring the compound microscope up to such a pitch would have been commencing at the wrong end; this latter being simply a partially successful endeavor to remedy those very defects of the simplest instrument which, if conquered, would leave nothing to be desired.

It was in this mood of mind that I became a constructive microscopist. After another year passed in this new pursuit, experimenting on every imaginable substance—glass, gems, flints, crystals, artificial crystals formed of the alloy of various vitreous materials—in short, having constructed as many varieties of lenses as Argus had eyes—I found myself precisely where I started, with nothing gained save an extensive knowledge of glass-making. I was almost dead with despair. My parents were surprised at my apparent want of progress in my medical studies (I had not attended one lecture since my arrival in the city), and the expenses of my mad pursuit had been so great as to embarrass me very seriously.

I was in this frame of mind one day, experimenting in my laboratory on a small diamond—that stone, from its great refracting power, having always occupied my attention more than any other—when a young Frenchman who lived on the floor above me, and who was in the habit of occasionally visiting me, entered the room.

I think that Jules Simon was a Jew. He had many traits of the Hebrew character: a love of jewelry, of dress, and of good living. There was something mysterious about him. He always had something to sell, and yet went into excellent society. When I say sell, I should perhaps have said peddle; for his operations were generally confined to the disposal of single articles—a picture, for instance, or a rare carving in ivory, or a pair of duelling-pistols, or the dress of a Mexican caballero. When I was first furnishing my rooms, he paid me a visit, which ended in my purchasing an antique silver lamp, which he assured me was a Cellini—it was handsome enough even for that—and some other knick-knacks for my sitting-room. Why Simon should pursue this petty trade I never could imagine. He apparently had plenty of money, and had the entrée of the best houses in the city—taking care, however, I suppose, to drive no bargains within the enchanted circle of the Upper Ten. I came at length to the conclusion that this peddling was but a mask to cover some greater object, and even went so far as to believe my young acquaintance to be implicated in the slave-trade. That, however, was none of my affair.

On the present occasion, Simon entered my room in a state of considerable excitement.

“Ah! mon ami!” he cried, before I could even offer him the ordinary salutation, “it has occurred to me to be the witness of the most astonishing things in the world. I promenade myself to the house of Madame ———. How does the little animal—le renard—name himself in the Latin?”

“Vulpes,” I answered.

“Ah! yes—Vulpes. I promenade myself to the house of Madame Vulpes.”

“The spirit medium?”

“Yes, the great medium. Great heavens! what a woman! I write on a slip of paper many of questions concerning affairs of the most secret—affairs that conceal themselves in the abysses of my heart the most profound; and behold, by example, what occurs? This devil of a woman makes me replies the most truthful to all of them. She talks to me of things that I do not love to talk of to myself. What am I to think? I am fixed to the earth!”

“Am I to understand you, M. Simon, that this Mrs. Vulpes replied to questions secretly written by you, which questions related to events known only to yourself?”

“Ah! more than that, more than that,” he answered, with an air of some alarm. “She related to me things—But,” he added after a pause, and suddenly changing his manner, “why occupy ourselves with these follies? It was all the biology, without doubt. It goes without saying that it has not my credence. But why are we here, mon ami? It has occurred to me to discover the most beautiful thing as you can imagine—a vase with green lizards on it, composed by the great Bernard Palissy. It is in my apartment; let us mount. I go to show it to you.”

I followed Simon mechanically; but my thoughts were far from Palissy and his enameled ware, although I, like him, was seeking in the dark a great discovery. This casual mention of the spiritualist, Madame Vulpes, set me on a new track. What if, through communication with more subtle organisms than my own, I could reach at a single bound the goal which perhaps a life, of agonizing mental toil would never enable me to attain?

While purchasing the Palissy vase from my friend Simon, I was mentally arranging a visit to Madame Vulpes.

III

Two evenings after this, thanks to an arrangement by letter and the promise of an ample fee, I found Madame Vulpes awaiting me at her residence alone. She was a coarse-featured woman, with keen and rather cruel dark eyes, and an exceedingly sensual expression about her mouth and under jaw. She received me in perfect silence, in an apartment on the ground floor, very sparsely furnished. In the centre of the room, close to where Mrs. Vulpes sat, there was a common round mahogany table. If I had come for the purpose of sweeping her chimney, the woman could not have looked more indifferent to my appearance. There was no attempt to inspire the visitor with awe. Everything bore a simple and practical aspect. This intercourse with the spiritual world was evidently as familiar an occupation with Mrs. Vulpes as eating her dinner or riding in an omnibus.

“You come for a communication, Mr. Linley?” said the medium, in a dry, businesslike tone of voice.

“By appointment—yes.”

“What sort of communication do you want—a written one?”

“Yes, I wish for a written one.”

“From any particular spirit?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever known this spirit on this earth?”

“Never. He died long before I was born. I wish merely to obtain from him some information which he ought to be able to give better than any other.”

“Will you seat yourself at the table, Mr. Lin-ley,” said the medium, “and place your hands upon it?”

I obeyed, Mrs. Vulpes being seated opposite to me, with her hands also on the table. We remained thus for about a minute and a half, when a violent succession of raps came on the table, on the back of my chair, on the floor immediately under my feet, and even on the window-panes. Mrs. Vulpes smiled composedly.

“They are very strong to-night,” she remarked. “You are fortunate.” She then continued, “Will the spirits communicate with this gentleman?”

Vigorous affirmative.

“Will the particular spirit he desires to speak with communicate?”

A very confused rapping followed this question.

“I know what they mean,” said Mrs. Vulpes, addressing herself to me; “they wish you to write down the name of the particular spirit that you desire to converse with. Is that so?” she added, speaking to her invisible guests.

That it was so was evident from the numerous affirmatory responses. While this was going on, I tore a slip from my pocket-book and scribbled a name under the table.

“Will this spirit communicate in writing with this gentleman?” asked the medium once more.

After a moment’s pause, her hand seemed to be seized with a violent tremor, shaking so forcibly that the table vibrated. She said that a spirit had seized her hand and would write. I handed her some sheets of paper that were on the table and a pencil. The latter she held loosely in her hand, which presently began to move over the paper with a singular and seemingly involuntary motion. After a few moments had elapsed, she handed me the paper, on which I found written, in a large, uncultivated hand, the words, “He is not here, but has been sent for.” A pause of a minute or so ensued, during which Mrs. Vulpes remained perfectly silent, but the raps continued at regular intervals. When the short period I mention had elapsed, the hand of the medium was again seized with its convulsive tremor, and she wrote, under this strange influence, a few words on the paper, which she handed to me. They were as follows:

“I am here. Question me.

“Leeuwenhoek.”

I was astounded. The name was identical with that I had written beneath the table, and carefully kept concealed. Neither was it at all probable that an uncultivated woman like Mrs. Vulpes should know even the name of the great father of microscopies. It may have been biology; but this theory was soon doomed to be destroyed. I wrote on my slip—still concealing it from Mrs. Vulpes—a series of questions which, to avoid tediousness, I shall place with the responses, in the order in which they occurred:

I.—Can the microscope be brought to perfection?

Spirit—Yes.

I.—Am I destined to accomplish this great task?

Spirit.—You are.

I.—I wish to know how to proceed to attain this end. For the love which you bear to science, help me!

Spirit—A diamond of one hundred and forty carats, submitted to electro-magnetic currents for a long period, will experience a rearrangement of its atoms inter se and from that stone you will form the universal lens.

I.—Will great discoveries result from the use of such a lens?

Spirit—So great that all that has gone before is as nothing.

I.—But the refractive power of the diamond is so immense that the image will be formed within the lens. How is that difficulty to be surmounted?

Spirit—Pierce the lens through its axis, and the difficulty is obviated. The image will be formed in the pierced space, which will itself serve as a tube to look through. Now I am called. Good-night.

I can not at all describe the effect that these extraordinary communications had upon me. I felt completely bewildered. No biological theory could account for the discovery of the lens. The medium might, by means of biological rapport with my mind, have gone so far as to read my questions and reply to them coherently. But biology could not enable her to discover that magnetic currents would so alter the crystals of the diamond as to remedy its previous defects and admit of its being polished into a perfect lens. Some such theory may have passed through my head, it is true; but if so, I had forgotten it. In my excited condition of mind there was no course left but to become a convert, and it was in a state of the most painful nervous exaltation that I left the medium’s house that evening. She accompanied me to the door, hoping that I was satisfied. The raps followed us as we went through the hall, sounding on the balusters, the flooring, and even the lintels of the door. I hastily expressed my satisfaction, and escaped hurriedly into the cool night air. I walked home with but one thought possessing me—how to obtain a diamond of the immense size required. My entire means multiplied a hundred times over would have been inadequate to its purchase. Besides, such stones are rare, and become historical. I could find such only in the regalia of Eastern or European monarchs.

* * *

Catch the remainder of The Diamond Lens in next month’s edition of Cosmic Horror Monthly!

Dear beloved reader,

I hope you found the chills you were looking for. Perhaps while entrenched in the pages of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, you questioned both your own sanity and your place amongst the malevolent whims of our cold universe. If so, let not your thirst for more cosmic terror go unquenched. Simply visit COSMICHORRORMONTHLY.COM/SUBSCRIBE and offer your tribute to the old ones at a reduced rate!

Again, thank you for taking the time to read our fiction. I hope we meet again soon.

Charles Tyra

Editor

Table of Contents

- Oculus
- Matres Lachrymarum
- Strands
- The Horrors Unseen
- Starfall

- The Figure, The Fingers, and the Fiend: Dr. Gloon’s LEsson in Anatomy

- Side Effects May Vary
- Behind His Smile, a Frown
- The Diamond Lens: Part I