CHM March 2023
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-02-21 05:00:00+00:00

Copyright © 2023 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: Quinten Castel

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome to another edition of Cosmic Horror Monthly. March 2023 marks one hundred years of weird fiction. An entire century since the first issue of Weird Tales was published back in March 1923. I grew up utterly enamored by the genre and the magazine responsible for discovering so many of cosmic horror’s early heavy hitters. Without Weird Tales, you wouldn’t be holding this magazine in your hands! This month we’ve put together as terrifying an issue as possible to pay tribute. So, light a black candle and hold on tight.

It’s an issue packed with cosmic horror starting with a tiff between neighbors that turns otherworldly in “At the Bottom of the Burlap.” Then we are delighted to present a new original story, a delightful fit of psychological torture in “Slow Burn” by Mike Allen followed by a brief, liberating escape from the corporate hellscape of reality in “Stag in Winter.” We will keep to the theme of classic cosmic horror with “Strange Blooms in the Sky” followed by a true classic in “The Other Names” by one of the greatest living writers of horror: Ramsey Campbell.

We offer a second intermission by way of a flash fiction piece in which a video game becomes a little too immersive in “Squid Nose.” At last, we will wind down this issue with tales of strange astronomical patterns and an unveiling of a bizarre cult in “A Star Eating Darkness” and “Anachronisms” respectively.

Enjoy.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age upon first reading the story: Dagon by HPL.

Resides in the flatland that is Oklahoma City.

Carson Winter: Co-Editor | Social Media

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

Featured artists this month

After graduating with a degree in fine art, Quentin spent a year as a freelance illustrator, then got hired as a concept artist at art studio Atomhawk Design for 6 years. Today, he’s working as a senior concept artist in a french video game studio named Wolcen Studio.

Andrew is a concept artist whose work has appeared in various independent publications over the years. He is motivated by an eternal fascination with mythology, nature, and the opportunity to create something weird.

Maxwell Marais is an illustrator and author of all things horror currently living in Montreal, Canada. Their work is often featured in the pages of CHM, and their stories can be found in such publications as Thuggish Itch and The NoSleep podcast. Find their art at www.instagram.com/insanity_inc/

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

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

At the Bottom of the Burlap

By Christopher O’Halloran

You watched Dad in the floodlit backyard, standing beside the swing set you didn’t really use anymore. He would look over at the neighbour’s; look up at the sky. The burlap sack at his feet stood open, ready to be filled. Hungry.

“Go tell Dad dinner’s ready.” Mom hovered above the pot of beef chunks. Boiling them. Feeding you all the meat one night, the water the next. Cheap meat—the kind sold just before closing—needed to be boiled, according to Mom. The germs in them, the little bugs, needed murdering.

You hated the meat but stopped whining about it after pushing Mom a step too far. Apparently, they had enough to worry about. They didn’t need your bullshit on top of it.

The meat took forever to chew. At least the next day’s water went down smooth, filled with hunks of potato and carrot soft as mud.

“Go,” snapped Mom. “I won’t tell you again.”

The kitchen door banged against the outside wall as you pushed through to the backyard. Mom would have something to say about that, but if you stayed out long enough, she might forget about your “attitude”.

The grass was soft beneath your bare feet but grew in sparse patches. You had to jump from one to another to avoid stepping on the baked dirt ground.

“Dad,” you said. You kept your eyes on each consecutive patch. Always looking at the next step. Looking too far ahead was dangerous. And depressing.

“Dad,” you repeated when he didn’t answer. You looked up to see if you had his attention, but his eyes were fixed over the three-foot picket fence and firmly on the back of the neighbour’s house. A sharp-edged toy bulldozer sat on the trampoline there. Ready to roar to life and make rubble of anything in its path. Jake’s favourite.

Your next jump landed you on the hard dirt. Pebbles dug into the soles of your dirty feet, but you didn’t cry.

Something glimmered in Dad’s hand. Something metal. A tool about six inches long.

“Mom says dinner’s ready.” Your voice was smaller than you meant it to be, but you didn’t want to risk making Dad upset. He’d been in a funk since losing his job, so you kept your words chocolate-smooth. The way teachers spoke when you got hurt. “What are you looking at?”

He glanced down at you, then over the fence again. He stretched his foot out and knocked down a bottle so that the grass covered it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a damn thing.”

You peered over the short fence to the neighbour’s house just as Jake’s dad opened the door.

His eyes scanned the backyard, locked onto Jake’s toy, then met Dad’s. Something flickered between them. A weird energy. Jake’s dad retreated, pushing Jake back inside the house.

Jake’s whines became squeals as the lock turned hard. He wouldn’t get his truck that night.

You wanted to ask Dad if he was mad at Jake’s family but thought better of it. It was bad enough that Mom was annoyed with you. Best to just keep your mouth shut.

“I’ll be in soon,” said Dad. “You start without me.”

You reached out and squeezed his hand. He didn’t squeeze back.

“Okay,” you whispered. You returned, ashamed at leaving your father alone, but silently preferring Mom’s sniping to his strange stillness.

“I’ll be in soon,” he said, under his breath.

You looked over your shoulder one last time to see him reach up with the metal instrument. In the light, you recognized it.

The ice cream scoop. The one you had begged Mom to get, in the good times. So you wouldn’t keep bending the spoons trying to dig slivers of vanilla out of the freezer-bitten pail.

The scoop had one of those thumb pieces. A little flipper that kicked out the ball of ice cream into your bowl.

Dad scooped at the air then brought it down and used the flipper to kick a ball of sky into the open bag at his feet.

* * *

Dad spent most nights in the backyard. You didn’t visit him often. You didn’t play with Jake anymore.

Eventually, you started to miss Mom’s boiled beef. You started to grow tired of saltines, of stale cereal, of microwaved potatoes with margarine.

A week after Mom never came back from bingo, your aching stomach made you brave the backyard again. Night fell, and dinner was still only an idea. You waited until the hunger pangs were too loud to ignore.

The grass in the yard was all dead now. Dad stopped hiding his bottles. Without Mom there to yell at him, he had no reason.

His bag was swollen with whatever he had been scooping out of the night sky. Bugs? Was the burlap filled with bugs? You were afraid to ask.

You were afraid to even say his name.

“Dad?”

He pressed the trigger on the ice cream scoop and dumped another load into the bag.

“Dad?”

“What?”

You didn’t want to ask. He wouldn’t get mad, but something about his task seemed important. To him, at least. You didn’t want to interrupt him collecting his bugs. Maybe he would sell them. Maybe this was his new job.

Turned out you didn’t have to say anything. Dad must have seen something in your face. A certain gauntness. Maybe he saw your shrivelled belly or heard the growling that crawled up and out of your throat.

“Probably hungry, eh?” His eyes softened. There was a bit of your old dad in them. The dad who would order pizza every Sunday. Who would take you swimming even when it wasn’t Toonie Tuesday. Who kept the pantry stocked and the cable bill paid.

You nodded and tried not to cry.

“I’ll scrounge up some grub.” He dropped the scoop and picked up the burlap sack, cinching shut the drawstring at the top. Then he walked away, dirty feet grinding pebbles and dead grass down to their molecules.

After he left, you picked up the ice cream scoop. As far as you knew, he didn’t ever wash it. You expected to find it caked with bug guts, but it was spotless. It reflected the stars in its concave cup. Amplified them somehow, cutting through the light pollution and making them brighter as a reflection.

You were about to touch one when Jake spoke.

“You’re not allowed to jump on my tramp anymore,” he said. His arms were crossed, and his mouth was screwed up in a scowl. “My dad says so.”

“You’re not allowed to swing on my swings,” came your retort. “I says so.”

“I don’t even want to. They’re rusty.”

“Shut up. They are not.”

He sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve. Jake’s nose was always runny.

“Your dad doesn’t ride to work with mine anymore,” Jake said. “Do you think they had a fight?”

“My dad doesn’t work with yours anymore, dummy.” You wanted to take the words back right away. Whatever troubles your family went through were not for Jake’s ears, but you were surprised that Jake didn’t know.

“My dad won’t let me play back here anymore,” said Jake, ignoring the insult. “Not when your dad is out. He watches your dad. He’s in your yard every night.”

“No he isn’t. Shut up.” He was, but you weren’t going to let Jake be right. The thought that you two had been friends once upon a time made you sick. Made your stomach growl even louder.

“He is,” Jake said. “He’s out there drinking.”

You made to throw the ice cream scoop at Jake. He yelped and ran away. His door slammed shut. Nobody would yell at him about the noise.

Nobody yelled at you anymore. Nobody talked to you anymore. The plans you had made for the summer—the wild dreams of moving from one grade into the next—were as dead as the backyard. You couldn’t ask Dad to take you to the movies. To go camping.

He had all the time in the world, but none for you.

You thought about bringing the ice cream scoop inside but decided not to. Dad would need it, anyway. For whatever he was doing back there.

You stooped to gently place it in the spot where the bag had been and noticed the ground there was burned. Not black and charred like the inside of your barbecue, but noticeably browner than the surrounding dirt.

Crispier.

* * *

Dad went to the bathroom a few days later and never came out. He ran the bath so hot that condensation sneaked around the thin cracks where the door met the frame. You knocked—so gently, trying not to set him off—but received no answer. You shuffled away, patient as ever.

In the kitchen, mail was piled up on the chipped, round table the three of you painted together. One night for the table, one night for the chairs. A summer project that left you with two paint-flecked shirts and a pair of sweats with a white handprint on the butt.

Many of the envelopes said “PAST DUE.” A few said “FINAL NOTICE.”

Dad was losing the house. You were going to have to move out east to live with Grandpa in his stuffy apartment. You thought you’d be going back to school in a week, back to your friends. Back to the things you could control.

You sat on the painted chair and picked at the flakes, making your own pile next to the letters.

Your stomach woke you up from a nap you didn’t remember choosing to take. You jiggled the knob to the bathroom. It had been a long time. Was Dad still in the bath? It would have been cold by then. Maybe he ran the hot water again while you were in the kitchen looking for something to eat.

He’d be out soon. All you needed to do was kill time. Maybe hop on the swing set again, just like the old days. There was nobody to push you, but big kids didn’t need pushes.

The sun was just over the horizon when you stepped into the backyard. It set the sky on fire, but only to a certain point. Above that, it was dark. Smokey black, stars barely distinguishable behind shifting clouds.

Dad’s burlap sack was propped against the neighbour’s fence. The drawstring wasn’t fully cinched.

The bugs were going to get out; you had to act.

You hurried to the bag, swing set once more pushed to the underground of your mind where childish memories lived. A small animal behind your fence sprinted off. The sun continued burning up the future.

When you reached the bag, you stopped. You never had the chance to look inside, but now that you did, you didn’t know what to make of it. There were no bugs within. Instead, there was a dark substance. A black as deep as the void of space. Flecks of white-hot plasma swirling in nebulous drifts of cosmic smoke. The finger of creation, poking stars and birthing worlds.

“Hey.”

Dad?

You looked up, but the man’s voice was Jake’s dad’s. You were left holding the bag, and he had his eyes on it.

“Hello.” You closed the mouth of the bag.

“Is everything okay?” He leaned against the fence and looked toward your house. Trying to get a glimpse inside, past the drawn curtains. “I saw a notice on your front door.”

“We’re fine,” you said, face hardened.

“Okay.” Jake’s dad sighed, looking around. “If you need anything—”

“Did you tell on my dad?” You couldn’t help the question. According to Dad, this was the man responsible for all the bad in your life. The hunger, the loneliness, the silence. Mom leaving. All because of this man.

“Is that what he says?” Jake’s dad ran his fingers through thinning hair. He had a shadow of a beard, hair running down his neck to his open collar. “It’s not like that.”

All you did was look at him, gritting your teeth and holding the bag.

“It’s complicated. There was...an accident at work. Your dad was driving a forklift and—I couldn’t lie for him. It’s not like I told on him, I just couldn’t lie!” Jake’s dad’s mouth hung open, showing off silver fillings in his molars. “You know how he is. What he does. If I lied, I’d have gotten in trouble.”

You wanted him gone. More than anything, you wanted him to disappear. Fall into the earth and just stop talking. He was an adult, so you couldn’t tell him to shut up, but you wanted to so bad.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked. “Is it drugs? Booze?”

Wouldn’t he like to know.

“If your dad is doing that stuff now, if he’s getting worse...” Jake’s dad shook his head, eyes darting to your house. “Why don’t you give me that bag.”

You wanted to hurt him. Make him stop his lies.

“Give me—”

You opened the mouth of the bag and hurled its contents at him.

Inky blackness spilled out and through the air, an amorphous puddle like black paint. Jake’s dad held his hands up to protect his face, but the darkness consumed his upper half entirely. It slid over his arms, his head, down his hairy neck and down his chubby body. It burned him up like the sun, wholly devouring him up to the hips. It left behind nothing. No smoke, no ash.

His feet stumbled on the ground, shaking legs running up to half a pelvis. The legs trembled once and tipped. They hit the grass—there was still grass on Jake’s side of the fence—and gave a couple more twitches. His hip bones gleamed in the light of his backyard. Pale white in raspberry jam. A cartoon cut of meat that would have looked straight out of Tom and Jerry.

The smell of popcorn hung in the air, making you hungry. Was Dad making popcorn? Had he hidden some away as a treat for the two of you?

“Dad?”

Jake came sprinting out of his house. He slid to his knees and wrapped his arms around his dad’s legs. He could barely move them. They must have been heavier than they looked.

“No, no, no...” He squeezed his eyes shut. His face was a mess of wrinkles, his sobs making him ugly. “Please, no.” His keening needled your ears like a smoke alarm.

You looked into the bag. Most of the sky had poured out onto Jake’s dad, but there was still a smidge of tar at the bottom of the burlap. A single star bounced around like a happy child. Ready to begin its new life.

You picked up the ice cream scoop. The metal was cold and solid in your hand. A universal tool. It was time to make up for a lost Summer.

End.

CHRISTOPHER O‘HALLORAN is a milk-slinging, Canadian actor-turned-author with work published or forthcoming from Kaleidotrope, No Sleep Podcast, Tales to Terrify, The Dread Machine, and others. His novelettes are in anthologies Howls from Hell and Bloodlines: Four Tales of Familial Fear. He is Reviews Editor-in-Chief, Social Media Co-Manager, and Discord Mod for the most active horror book club on the web, HOWL Society. Follow him on Twitter @BurgleInfernal or visit COauthor.ca for stories, reviews, and updates on upcoming novels.

Slow Burn

By Mike Allen

Aaron Friedrich, publisher, editor and sole journalist of the online-only Owlswick County Observer, leaned close and squinted as the grainy security camera footage flashed to white.

The woman whose shoulder he leaned over, Della Wright, clicked her mouse, freezing the image, a capture of a raging white explosion. “Did you see that?”

Aaron frowned. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“I’ll play it back slower.”

His arms crossed atop the back of her chair, he hunkered forward, his ear close enough to hers that if she tipped her head they would touch, which she did briefly, the pleasant caress not one of flirtation but of acknowledgement, permission granted to be in her space. Aaron caught a whiff of coconut-scented shampoo. Thankfully, the angle was such that their matching scars did not make contact.

Her computer’s monitor and the dim desk lamp beside it combined to generate a faint light, one that wouldn’t be detected through the drawn curtains. Though the time displayed on the monitor approached 1 a.m., both understood the possibility and dangers of surveillance without needing to give voice to the concern.

Della tapped the screen, indicating where Aaron should fix his gaze. “Watch there.”

Aaron regarded the view from the camera installed over the front door of the gas station on Orion Street, a tiny, once-white shack ancient enough not to have a rain shelter installed over the gas pumps. Not to mention, instead of a digital readout, these pumps displayed prices the old-fashioned way, with numbers printed on wheels spun by gears.

Della let the player proceed, slower this time.

A pale figure careened out of the night, stumbled over a curb and onto the station parking lot, lurching toward the pumps. The slowed motion drew out every awkward flailing that at normal speed discharged in a frenzied blur.

Huge black blotches streaked her knee-length white nightgown. As she approached the door, despite the poor image quality, her expression became clear, eyes wide and unblinking, mouth stretched open to the maximum, all teeth bared, an unending shriek of animal terror or animal rage. The footage had no sound.

“That’s Annaliza?” Aaron already knew the answer but couldn’t help whispering the question. He also knew that the black stains were blood, that the blood belonged to Annaliza Griffith’s daughters, five-year-old Marcy and three-year-old Natalie.

“Watch close.” Della tapped her screen again.

Her face frozen in that gut-wrenching silent scream, Annaliza floundered toward the camera. An arc welder-bright glow bloomed between her breasts at about the spot where Della tapped her finger, made even more distinct by the deep black bloodstain over Annaliza’s heart.

Della stopped the playback. “See it?”

“I see . . . something. Is it . . . she holding a sparkler?” He could plainly see that Annaliza had nothing in her hands.

“Keep watching.”

As the time-elapsed bar at the bottom of the video crawled slowly forward, more of those bright, focused flares appeared, all over Annaliza’s torso, even in her open mouth.

In the next frame her flesh erupted in a column of white flame.

Aaron shuddered, rocking Della’s chair. “My God, she set herself on fire.”

Della inclined her head ever so slightly. Her eyes, reflected in the monitor, regarded Aaron’s face. “Is that what you’d say that was?”

“What else could it have been?”

“Aaron.” Her pronunciation of his name rolled You know better and You’re kidding me and Don’t lie to me or yourself into one unspoken admonishment. “Watch it again and then you tell me how she could have done this to herself.”

He complied, and he had to concede he had no explanation for what happened to Annaliza Griffith.

He had some information, though, about what she’d been up to in the hours before her death. “A monster met a bad end,” he said. “Maybe it was God showing Himself.”

Della turned her head to regard him directly this time. “In Grandy Springs?”

She had him there. Not a joke, just the truth, the divine had no truck with this town.

He needed time to process, to examine the impossible thing she was suggesting, without her trying to wrestle the point home, so he shifted the subject by a hair. “Does the Sheriff’s Office know you have this?”

“They won’t know unless you tell them,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not like I’m going to post this on the Book of Face.”

“Who gave this to you?”

“Not going to share that, not even with you, sweetie.”

Della used to work for the Sheriff’s Office—had essentially risen to second-in-command, without the title or the pay. Being a woman, and this being Grandy Springs, nothing short of an armed revolution would have granted her those things.

Here and now, so far as the town was aware, she was a shut-in collecting disability. Aaron could have pursued the same arrangement, had he chosen, as the same hell that swallowed her had consumed him, too.

The bond Aaron and Della shared would be immediately obvious to anyone who saw them together. Even in the wan illumination from her desk, the scars that framed her features caught the light, hyphens of pink tissue that laddered symmetrically up the sides of her face, from the corners of her jaw to her temples, an effect like Frankenstein stitching, if the doctor had used coarse bootlaces to hold his monster together. Aaron resisted for the umpteenth time the urge to let his fingers wonder up his own Frankenstein stitches, laddering from jaw to temple, identical to Della’s.

Neither of them could remember who or what gave them those scars. The one person left in Grandy Springs who could know insisted over and over again to Aaron that he should never ask.

John Hairston had seen a lot of awful things serving in an all-black regiment during the Korean War, and even more in Grandy Springs, where he inexplicably chose to take up residence mere weeks after a white mob lynched an innocent black man.

If Hairston could be convinced to watch Della’s videos—well, his insights might be of genuine value, or they could be even more unhinged than the notion that Annaliza Griffith spontaneously combusted after brutally slaughtering her own daughters.

Aaron and Della might as well have been telepathically linked. She asked, “When did you see John last?”

“Weeks ago, when I stopped in the bookstore. Haven’t seen him in the park lately.” In his battle to keep local journalism alive after the demise of the Owlswick Messenger, Aaron still made trips out by car or by bicycle, to interviews, to government meetings, to browse the filings in the Circuit Court Clerk’s Office. He often passed Hairston perched on the same bench in Bowen Park, hands resting on the cane propped upright between his legs, his white hair an Einsteinian corona. Occasionally Aaron waved. Even less frequently, Hairston waved back.

Arrived at sidewise, the phrase repeated: spontaneous combustion. In his mind, Hairston’s gravely voice proclaimed the words, finished with a mocking laugh. Even conjuring the thought of Hairston speaking, somehow, inside his ahead, gave Aaron an unpleasant case of the willies, not unlike the shuddery disorientation of déjà vu.

Plenty to shudder about. The Sheriff’s Office had yet to release a cause of death for Annaliza Griffith—yet, based on that footage, there was little left of her to autopsy.

Della’s stare reminded Aaron that she still awaited his answer. “You think John knows something.”

“If anyone would . . .”

“I’ll stop in at the store.” Even as he said that, anxiety sped his heartbeat, worries that he might not find the old man—Hairston used no phone or computer, stayed unreachable unless he wanted to be reached. And a sharper worry that he might find Hairston right there amid the shelves, and have to withstand the heat of Hairston’s pitiless glower.

* * *

Calf-high grass rustled against Aaron’s sneakers as he trod toward the bookshop’s front porch.

The unmowed lawn wasn’t unusual. Neither was the absence of a sign on the door stating whether the store was open or closed. Hairston had not done much in the way of maintenance to Pollard’s Antiquarian Bookshop since he reopened it for business.

The store’s original owner, Bob Pollard, had fought side by side with Hairston in Korea. Pollard’s whereabouts were an unsolved mystery, one of many in Grandy Springs. The consensus of the amateur historians willing to speak at all about the town’s repulsive history of discrimination was that Pollard likely was murdered by the Klan for being too friendly with black Americans, perhaps for daring to decry the lynching, as Pollard went missing not long after. Hairston came to Owlswick County in search of his friend, and what was most astonishing was that he stayed, given that Grandy Springs was practically a sundown town.

Aaron had never gotten Hairston to share the details, but whatever happened on his arrival, the ugly element among the townsfolk steered clear of him afterward, setting a precedent that others like him would also be, for the most part, left alone.

Even in the 21st century, with Grandy Springs integrated after a fashion, Hairston wasn’t known as a friendly sort, which made his decision to dust out and unlock his late friend’s store all the more perplexing. Especially as that “dusting off” he gave the place and its extensive inventory of obscure, musty books was mostly metaphorical.

The lack of answer to Aaron’s knock offered no surprise. He peered through the windows to either side of the door. Nothing disturbed the stillness between the shelves.

He waited on the chipped cement stoop, under the tattered awning, listening for any signs of motion. The creaky floors always announced Hairston’s progress through the shop.

This time, nada. Uneasiness stirred in Aaron’s belly.

From the street, a man shouted, “He open today?”

Jolted, Aaron spun to behold a couple crossing the overgrown lawn to join him at the door.

Not that he knew everyone in Grandy Springs, but he did recognize scores of his fellow townies on sight, and he’d never seen this pair before. The man who called to him wore a too-tight polo shirt made from a clingy silver fabric, and jeans, easily a size too small, that looked like they’d just come off the department store rack. He was tall and wiry enough that, given looser garments, Aaron might never have known the fellow had a protruding gut. The man’s hair, parted in the middle and trimmed just below his earlobes, was silver as his shirt. The woman with him looked older, her face heavily seamed beneath a mound of hair dyed an unnatural shade of black—and as with her man, her clothes matched her hair, loose black blouse and black leggings. In a final visual punchline, they wore identical snakeskin boots.

“The owner’s not answering,” Aaron said, keeping his voice and expression noncommittal.

“Hard of hearing, for sure,” the man said as he reached Aaron. “I mean, mixed blessing if he’s out, his selections suck, but hope springs eternal. Might be a gold nugget in those stacks of shit.” He grinned. The woman smirked, her gaze all over Aaron.

Aaron could not imagine this creep saying something like this to Hairston’s face and escaping the store in one piece. Hairston did not turn the other cheek. He struck back with metaphorical brass knuckles.

“Really though, he needs to throw all that old shit out and get stuff people actually want,” the man went on.

Aaron really did not want to engage. He grunted in feigned disappointment. “I guess he’s not in.”

“You’re being too harsh,” the woman said. “You can’t expect someone of his background to know anything about valuable books.”

Heat rose in Aaron’s neck. He recognized bait when he heard it but could not help himself. “What do you mean, ‘his background’? You mean that he’s a veteran? A war hero?”

His heightening blood pressure made the scars on his face itch ferociously. The last thing he wanted to do was claw at them in front of this awful pair.

“If he’s a veteran,” the man said, “he should dress like he has some self-respect.”

Stay calm, Aaron told himself. Make your getaway. “Were you in the service?”

The man grinned, fox-like. “Didn’t need to do that. I’m already all that I can be.”

Despite Aaron’s urgent desire to disengage, it occurred to him that if this couple had indeed made Hairston’s acquaintance, he ought to learn when and why. “Did you travel a long way to get here? To visit this store?”

The woman stepped closer still, her large eyes, further offset by thick mascara, wet with concern. “Forgive me for being rude,” she raised a finger and made a U-gesture, “but who did that to you? Cut up your face like that?”

Sadly, Aaron has faced such obnoxiousness often enough to have a snappy answer handy. I cut myself shaving.

But to his own shock, the deflection snagged in his throat. “I don’t remember.”

The man barked a laugh. “You are full of shit. I’m sorry, but you are. How could you not remember that?”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Aaron growled, furious at himself. He hot-footed around them toward his car, a 1992 beater parked half on the street, half in the unmowed grass.

The man called after him, glee in his voice, “Sorry if I offended you, snowflake.”

As Aaron reached his car, he noticed there were no other vehicles parked on this stretch of road. He turned, bracing himself for a continuation of the confrontation. Except, his tormentors were nowhere in sight. Had they gone into the back yard? Gone inside the store somehow? Aaron couldn’t imagine Hairston opening the door to them, especially if he had overheard them talking.

Where the hell had they come from in the first place?

Overcome by an abrupt wave of nausea, Aaron sank to his knees. It took herculean effort to regain his feet and clamber into the driver’s seat. The knots in his gut did not loosen till he was over halfway home.

* * *

Deadlines dominated the rest of his day. He had a story that took a week’s worth of interviews and research, that he had to post in advance of the next evening’s town council debate over whether or not to purchase an empty feed store and convert it into a “business incubator.” Because the takes were so low, tempers had reached fever pitch. He kept his nose to his laptop until he’d finished proofing. He fed his cats, scarfed his own dinner, read the story one more time before posting, then messaged Della through an encrypted app. No sign of John. Met a creepy couple that claimed to know him. I don’t believe them.

She wrote back, I have more video.

The words filled him with anticipation and dread.

The apartment he rented was small, a mere four rooms. Between bouts of agitated pacing, he killed the hours until the rendezvous with Della by reviewing his notes on the Griffith case.

The details of Annaliza Griffith’s crimes were nauseating. The bodies of her young daughters were missing . . . mostly. What information Aaron had came from Della’s mole within the Sheriff’s Office, as Sheriff Hargrave himself had shared next to nothing in press conferences or in private. Aaron liked Hargrave, with a respect that went all the way back to Hargrave’s days as a soft-spoken, hulking deputy.

Hargrave had emerged unscathed from the cataclysm that left Aaron and Della scarred and tallied so many members of the Sheriff’s Office among the missing. Hargrave too had confessed to Aaron, off the record, that he could not remember what happened, even though he had been in the building when the disaster that claimed his colleagues unfolded.

(Ask anyone in the town what they could recall of that catastrophic summer weekend, their eyes would lose focus, their voices lost volume and they shook their heads in denial. The improbable explanation espoused by state and federal officials and parroted by national media stank of cover-your-ass-up, an enormous, previously undetected underground bubble of toxic gas brought to the surface by a small earthquake and subsequent cave-ins, that caused delirium, suffocation, and multiple fires and explosions as it flowed into the natural bowl of Grandy Springs’ topography. Even more suspicious, the collapse of the local newspaper industry alone, with its closures and severe staff reductions, could not sufficiently explain the jaw-dropping absence of curiosity demonstrated by government and news agencies. Aaron, however, refused to entertain conspiracy theories.)

Given the poor quality of the gas station footage, had Annaliza not been a frequent flyer with social services, investigators might never have identified her. In her unfinished basement they found the remains of Natalie and Marcy. Four days after the announcement, Della showed Aaron a download of digital photos.

Pitiless flash bulbs revealed all that was left of those poor children: red heaps that resembled pale, coiled snakes drenched in syrup. The bodies of the snakes were entrails. The heads of the snakes were tongues, attached by strips of flesh. The meticulous symmetry of the arrangements bespoke hands-on attention.

Nothing mundane explained it. Even among the catalog of horrors historical and recent that wove into the history of Grandy Springs, this took depravity to a new level.

At least, so far as Aaron could recall.

The hour arrived to go see Della and Aaron set about the necessary routine, stuffing his backpack with notebooks and pens, filling a small handheld cooler with beer and cheese from his fridge as an offering and bribe, donning a dark jacket with a hood, not for the weather but to make him harder to identify if anyone was spying. Phone turned off and left in his apartment.

A block before the turn into her driveway, he killed his headlights.

Once again peering over Della’s shoulder, Aaron watched the new clip with jaw clenched. This time, there was sound.

“How did they find this? Do they know who shot it?”

A hollowness, a forced dispassion, dulled Della’s words. “Annaliza’s half-sister in Hillcrest received this as an e-mail attachment from an anonymous sender. The sender’s address was just a bunch of numbers. It was sent the morning after it all happened, supposedly, but she didn’t check her account until a couple weeks later.”

“God damn.” Aaron swallowed.

There were two men in the video, their heads covered with hoods, otherwise naked. Annaliza was present, naked, possibly high or drugged. Her children present, hogtied. The person holding the camera or phone or whatever had been used to record this atrocity had been a woman. Though unseen, more than once she had responded in monosyllabic affirmatives when given instruction by the only man who spoke—elderly, or at least well past his prime, based on the shape of his physique and the rasp in his voice.

“Can we . . . without having to watch any of that again . . . can we go back to a point where the camerawoman talks?”

“Why?”

“Her voice. I want to hear her voice again. I think I met her this morning, when I went to John’s shop.”

* * *

Aaron should have called ahead, but his early morning hours had been consumed with news updates and website problems, duties carried out while distracted by his confrontation with that racist couple and by the horrible video he’d seen at Della’s. The only mercies had been the poor lighting and the female videographer’s lack of skill.

Even as he parked along the curb across from Vanissa Carter’s townhouse, Aaron couldn’t stop himself from imagining the retorts he wished he’d fired at that couple. ‘His background?’ Gee, racist much?

The woman had asked him, ‘Who did that to you? Cut up your face like that?’ In the video, she never said more than ‘Yes’ or ‘Okay’ as she moved the camera where the older hooded man directed, yet Aaron remained convinced that the voice was the same. Maybe her man was in the video too, if so he had been cast in the non-speaking role.

As he reached Vanissa’s front step, finger aimed at the doorbell, the door opened inward. Blue eyes glared, their confrontational yet curious stare made fiercer by heavy black eyeliner and a dozen silver rings in place of eyebrows.

Athenea Nichols acknowledged Aaron with a flat-voiced, “Friedrich.”

Aaron couldn’t repress a half-smile. “Nichols. Vanissa here?” He knew she was.

Vanissa Carter’s fiancee sized up Vanissa’s former boyfriend a moment longer, then called back into the townhouse, “You have a visitor.”

“Who is it?” Not Vanissa; a lighter, sweeter voice. Vanissa’s younger sister Janelle thumped into the foyer, her grin instantly brightening the cramped scene. “Aaron!”

He grinned back. “Hi there, sweet pea.”

Athenea offered a half-smile of her own. “Guess I have to let you in now.”

Aaron didn’t take the half-serious hostility personally. They had all been through too much.

Despite the commotion, Vanissa had not emerged from her home office, so they paraded up the stars, Janelle scampering ahead even though she was perhaps a bit too old for scampering now, giving Aaron a glimpse of the star-shaped scar on the back of her neck, right at the base of her skull, pink against her light brown skin but still easier to hide than his and Della’s scars. Like them, Janelle had no memory of how she got it.

Athenea ascended last. Aaron imagined her bright blue gaze boring holes in his back.

The walls of Vanissa’s office were covered with quirky pieces of framed embroidery that she ordered online. Often the stitches spelled out oddball quotes: Keep Clam and Oyster On. My other car is Dragula.

Vanissa didn’t stand up from her computer station. “You should have called first, or texted.”

Janelle hopped over to Vanissa’s chair and put her chin on her sister’s shoulder. Though Vanissa was about fifteen years older, they were height and weight-wise the same size.

“Sorry,” Aaron said, “too freaked out, wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Looks boring,” Janelle said, passing judgement upon the windows open on Vanissa’s monitor. Aaron recognized them as the undersides of two of Vanissa’s social media accounts.

Vanissa was, so far as he was aware, the only person in Grandy Springs taking full advantage of the broadband network brought to the town by tobacco indemnification grants. She made her living as an influencer—though not in the commonly understood sense. She did not flood feeds with attractive photos of herself, though she could have done so if she wanted. Her methods involved opening dozens of profiles, using them to post pithy aphorisms and memes that generated hearts and shares in the thousands (her instinct for it was uncanny) and utilizing those audience numbers to recruit sponsors, all accomplished without ever leaving her desk.

Aaron was the only person outside her immediate household entrusted with this knowledge. Though it could have made for a delightful Owlswick Observer profile, he was sworn to secrecy.

In exchange for his silence, she sometimes deployed her expertise on his behalf.

She regarded him with a concern that softened her brown-eyed gaze. “What has you freaked out?”

He told them all about the disturbing encounter in front of Hairston’s store. He didn’t censor for Janelle’s sake, she could handle it, but omitted any mention of the Griffith case. “I have to wonder, people this obnoxious arriving in town, maybe there’d be chatter somewhere. Some hint who they are.”

“This already rings bells for me,” Vanissa said, not yet turning to her keyboard. “And you say John’s missing?”

“He wasn’t at the store. He hasn’t been in touch. Hard to say if that constitutes ‘missing.’”

“I hope he’s all right,” she said, and fingers clicked on keys. Aaron wasn’t clear on how Vanissa and Hairston had become acquainted, but the old veteran could be congenial when it suited him.

“Yeah,” she went on, “I remember thinking this was odd when I first read it. This is a private group for real estate agents in our corner of Virginia. This woman posted a couple weeks ago, warning her colleagues about this weird couple who asked her to show them a house.”

“Really?”

“Listen to this. ‘I got scared about being alone in the house with them. The guy was telling me everything he thought was wrong with my clothes and makeup. The woman asked me some rude personal questions. They kept touching me.” Aaron could see that ‘RUDE’ and ‘TOUCHING’ were capitalized.

“That has to be them,” he said. “Does she give names?”

“Yes. Cecil Stauph. S-T-A-U-P-H, and Beth Anne Werner, like that film director with the funny voice . . . oh.”

“What?”

“They told her they were buyer’s agents for Jefferson Dalton.”

Aaron and Athenea made sounds of disgust in unison. Janelle glanced back and forth between them.

“Not a nice man,” Aaron told her.

Athenea bent her lanky frame to whisper in Janelle’s ear. When the girl nodded assent, Athenea announced, “We’re going to go make snacks if you want some.”

“Thank you.” Aaron hoped his voice conveyed the multiple meanings he intended.

Dalton hadn’t shown his too-tanned face, framed above by dyed hair plugs and below by surgery-stretched lips, since well before the “environmental disaster” that robbed so many in Grandy Springs of patches of their memories at best and their lives at worst.

That was because the consensus about what that filthy rich motherfucker had gotten away with—knifing an eighteen-year-old beauty who tried to fend off his advances, pinning her murder on a Honduran farmhand who “killed himself” soon after he was jailed—had not been erased from the town’s collective consciousness, even though the real story had never bubbled up in any official, on-the-record channel.

The assumption was that he had chosen to relocate. He had the money to live anywhere in the world.

“Takes some brass balls or some fried brains to casually drop that name,” Vanissa said.

Given the bluntly smarmy encounter at the bookstore, “These two have both,” Aaron said. “My encounter with them was unforgettable. They were unrepentantly horrible.”

“They really knew John?”

“That’s what they claimed.”

Now that they were alone, if she had asked, he would have explained about the murdered girls, how they were butchered, their mother’s bizarre death, the three unidentified people in the video and how he suspected he’d met two of them. Maybe he’d just learned the identity of the third. The notion that Hairston had some connection to it all weighted him with dread.

She didn’t ask. “I’ll keep looking. Maybe there’s more.”

Neither of them said, Be careful, because they didn’t need to.

* * *

His gut instinct told him it could be useful to seek out the agent who posted about her close encounter with Stauph and Werner. What else might they have said to her while they were all alone together?

Most everyone in the county who could read knew who Aaron was, whether or not they subscribed to his newsletter. He had contacted Cate Wasselman with a proposal to write a business profile. He wasn’t lying about his purpose. He would interview her for the profile, and he would write and publish it. If they happened to sidetrack into another topic during the interview, that didn’t need to be part of the profile. Should the resulting material prove useful later—well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

When Wasselman responded to his request, she had asked if they could meet at one of the houses she was showing. That made him cringe inside, because obviously she had hopes that nice photos of the home would appear with the profile, native advertising assistance. The possibility made him feel a little gross, but as he would be the one taking the photos and selecting which ones saw publication, he agreed.

The address she gave him was up in the north of the county. He wondered if it was the same house she’d shown to Stauph and Werner. Asking her directly, though, would give the game away.

Accessed by a private road that switched back and forth up a mountainside for nearly a mile, the house turned out not to look anything like Aaron expected, given the lingering presence in Owlswick County of multistory farmhouses still standing from pre-Civil War days.

The structure was latter-twentieth century modern, no taller and apparently no deeper than a simple brick ranch house but nearly five times as long. Its existence should have been nigh impossible in the Appalachian hills, but this old mountain had a level peak and that’s where the house and surrounding grounds lay. At one end Aaron spied a double—nay, triple—garage and at the other end a wing with walls that were ninety percent plate glass. His hunch: that glassed-in wing held an indoor pool.

He wondered who could have lived here—maybe a 1970s-era strip mining executive? The roof tiles had moss growing on them, but the curving driveway was debris-free despite the property’s many trees, and the front porch light glowed in neighborly invitation, even though the sun blazed bright above cirrus cloud streaks. A white SUV hulked in the circle at the end of the driveway, Successful Realtor Vehicle 101.

When he knocked, a woman yelled, “Come in!” from deep inside the house. The door was unlocked.

No furniture occupied the front room, save an electric lamp incongruously aglow in the middle of the carpeted floor. Beside its squat, shaded form, citrus-scented smoke streamed upward from a bronze incense holder. Doors at either end of the room opened onto hallways. “Mrs. Wasselman, I’m here. Do you want me to wait for you?”

“Come back to the kitchen,” she called, from off to Aaron’s left, toward the wing with the pool.

An odor of cooking filled the hall, akin to barbecued pork left on the grill too long. Aaron wrinkled his nose. Wasselman had said nothing to him about preparing a meal, what an odd thing to do.

Past about half a dozen shut doors, the hallway opened into an unusual architectural configuration. The way forward became a balcony, with more shut doors to Aaron’s left and railing to the right. About midway across this balcony the rail parted to allow access to spiral stairs that corkscrewed downward into a dim-lit lower level.

The smell of something roasted had grown thick. “How far to the kitchen?” Aaron called. “This place is huge!”

“Keep coming,” Wasselman shouted.

Aaron did not. A noise distracted him. The hiss and creak of weight shifting on a bed or couch, somewhere in the darkness below this incongruous balcony.

“Hello?”

When no answer came, he dug his cellphone out of his pants pocket and tapped on the flashlight. Shadows slashed across the cavernous den revealed below. All the furniture, love seats, pool table, chairs, had been shoved to the far end, exposing hardwood floor. His phone’s light reflected in a black pool that glistened at the foot of the stairs.

“Hello?” Aaron repeated.

Up ahead, Wasselman muttered something unintelligible. A pale coil that resembled a snake skin stood out within that the dark puddle. Even as his hunch sunk in, Aaron descended the stair. The closer he got, the more sickeningly familiar the spiral of tissue appeared. Like a length of intestines twisting toward a tongue in the center.

“Not good at following directions, are you?”

Even with heart in throat, the dispassionate journalist that managed Aaron’s mind wasn’t a bit surprised to spy the creepy couple at the top of the stairs.

“The stupidest thing you could have done, you went and did it. It’s pretty obvious you’re mentally challenged,” Cecil Stauph said. “Why else would you be dumb enough to work in print news in 2022?”

Aaron had heard worse insults. “Where’s Mrs. Wasselman?”

“Yep, you’re slow.”

Werner added, “No wonder you keep company with that . . . negro freak.”

“Okay, fuck you,” Aaron said, stomping angrily up the steps. A cord wrapped his ankles and yanked his feet out from under him.

A flash of ropey intestine, rearing in a cobra-strike pose, in the instant before Aaron’s head bounced on the hardwood. As consciousness escaped his grip he heard Stauph chuckle, “That was easy.”

* * *

As Aaron regained awareness, and his eyes strove to bring blurs into focus, a cacophony of disjointed sensory input and pain informed him that he lay on a hard object, which rested on the floor of the mansion’s emptied swimming pool.

Stones ground in the back of his skull where he’d hit the hardwood. He could wiggle his head slightly side to side but he could not lift it. Straps restrained him, tightened across his throat and brow. His limbs, too, were secured.

“His eyes are moving,” purred Werner. “I think he’s back with us.”

“Good,” drawled a man with a raspy, familiar voice.

Stauph leaned in to meet Aaron’s gaze. “For this to work, you gotta be awake to feel everything we’re going to do to you before you die.”

“I did not give you permission to share that,” rasped the man who had to be Jefferson Dalton III.

Stauph straightened. “Sorry, sir.” He didn’t sound sorry.

Aaron wanted to tell them, even though it wasn’t true, that he had told others where he was and they would soon come looking. His uncooperative lips and tongue managed only a mushy gurgle.

Dalton went on, “I’m glad you found us, Aaron Friedrich. Your connection to my source will help us carry this forward the proper way.”

Connection to my source? For a topsy-turvy moment Aaron thought his captor was chatting with him about journalism.

Again Aaron tried to talk. I told my publisher where I am. They’ll come looking for me. His tongue flapped uselessly.

“You are your own publisher,” Dalton chortled. “And you didn’t tell a soul because you had no idea this would be dangerous.”

Aaron gasped.

“I can hear you, Aaron Friedrich, hear everything that you are really thinking, because my source can hear you. It’s proof of your connection, and I’m glad for it.”

Dalton’s ravings plunged Aaron into heart-thumping distress, exponentially multiplied as an auditory hallucination began, more real than the agony wracking him.

Aaron, my God, is that you?

John Hairston’s deep, gravely voice, Aaron could not mistake. Where it came from, he could not pinpoint. He couldn’t be hearing it, yet hope overwhelmed his skepticism. Before he could call out, Hairston interrupted. He thinks he smashed my wards but he ain’t got them all. He can’t hear me, but he can hear you. Stop trying to talk or we’ll never be able to end this.

Knowledge separate from consciousness, deeper than intuition, drenched in stomach-flipping déjà vu, instructed Aaron not to question. He accepted that either he was having a psychotic break, his own mind yammering nonsense in Hairston’s voice, or the real Hairston was captive nearby, somehow, and demonstrating telepathy. Aaron had—he had been through—

“That’s right, Aaron Friedrich,” Dalton said. “You’ve been a prisoner of magic before. Do you remember yet where your scars came from?”

With immense difficulty, the strap abrading his forehead, Aaron lolled his head to one side, bringing into view a man in a white hood who was otherwise naked, standing atop a sarcophagus-sized box placed in the deepest end of the pool. Ornate patterns adorned the sides of the box. Though Aaron could not clearly make them out, looking at them layered a sensation like motion sickness atop his other torments.

I’m in here, Hairston breathed in Aaron’s mind. Dalton tricked me, like he tricked you. He figured out things about me that no one ever has. Did his fucking homework. I can’t get out unless we trick him back. But I am going to need you to remember.

“I think you need a reminder,” the hooded man said.

Terror bubbled hot in Aaron’s empty spaces, escaping his throat in a feeble shriek of denial. The way Dalton’s words echoed Hairston’s echoed Dalton’s—was he facing two sadistic mind games or one speaking in two voices?

Stauph squatted beside him, a square object gripped between his fingers that turned out to be a razor blade. “Don’t cry now, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” He used his free hand to clamp down Aaron’s head down, mashing his ear against the hard wooden surface upon which he lay. The broken rocks in his head ground together.

Don’t fight him, Hairston said. Let him do this.

Stauph used the razor to slice into Aaron’s scars, panting has he worked. At first Aaron only felt a tugging in his flesh, followed by a kindling of heat.

Hairston again. Keep it together, boy, this is going to hurt.

Aaron’s torturer forced his head to turn the other way and cut again. Stauph wore nothing, not even a hood, and Aaron could not avoid the sight of the man becoming aroused.

“It’s okay if you scream during this part,” Dalton said. “Everyone does. For you it might be even worse than usual.”

Werner’s hands came into view, covered with a mucus-like sludge. Stauph chuckled as she reached for Aaron’s groin.

Her touch burned. Aaron couldn’t escape, could do no more than twitch and buck. He provided his captors with the screams they sought, even before Werner brought her hands to his face, rubbed the scorching salve into his fresh wounds, his nostrils, his eyes.

Look at me, Aaron. Look. At. Me.

Agony burned into every surface, wrapped every object in an aurora glow. The cement of the pool, the steel and wood of the ceiling, the cloth of Dalton’s hood, Werner’s sagging breasts, Stauph’s erect member.

Their colors dulled in comparison to the astonishing patterns woven around the sarcophagus, intricate as mazes, baffling as optical illusions. Yet those patterns faded to a grayness as the figure contained inside them occupied more and more of Aaron’s focus. That figure blazed, burning hotter than the magma searing between Aaron’s thighs and into the meat of his face.

Look at me.

“When you can see him, he can feel you,” Dalton said.

Aaron’s viscera squirmed within his body cavities. The burning man in the sarcophagus thrashed in response.

Don’t think, Aaron, Hairston said. It was Hairston inside the sarcophagus. Every inch of Hairston was on fire. Keep your eyes on me and don’t think. The order was easy to obey, Aaron could not string a single thought together, except for two words: “Help me.”

“Aaron Friedrich, I need to make a long story short. When your friend John Hairston first came to Grandy Springs those sixty-some years ago, the good citizens tried to feed him to something ancient and full of power. But he got lose and turned the tables and found unholy salvation underground, and now he’s more magic than man. But the thing that’s fused inside him, it’s going to be mine. This is how it ends. This is how he ends. It’s long overdue. I’m fixing this abomination, and helping me is how you make the pain go away.”

I can help you and you can help me, Hairston said, but first you have to remember.

Aaron’s innards writhed of their own accord.

Two white hot pinpoints within the cage-pattern of the sarcophagus. They were eyes. Hairston’s eyes. Even in his torment and confusion, Aaron feared to meet them, convinced they’d ignite him. Yet the death that obliterated Annaliza Griffith would at least be relief.

He met that starfire gaze.

He did ignite, but not in the way he had imagined. His mind erupted.

He remembered impossible things, things he never understood even as they happened to him.

He remembered: human forms made of twining black worms.

He remembered: pitch darkness; a painful, immovable restraint pinching his neck; his face burned and bleeding; Della whimpering beside him, a stranger to his other side, his face mashed against theirs; their flesh sown together through the cheeks and temples.

He remembered: a pool of blood at the bottom of a well, erupting in white hot fire, the flesh of his face tearing away from his fellow captives.

He remembered—but the memory was not his own—crawling through a cavern tunnel, its ceiling so low he could not lift up onto all fours, the only light coming from the fungus-like tendrils sprouting all over his skin.

He remembered—but the memory belonged to Hairston, not him—peering into a pit deep as a universe, filled with beings that churned like star plasma, flowed like amoebae, surged hungrily toward him. How the matter-altering befoulment from the otherworldly infection spreading through him caused a reaction that neither he nor his would-be killers expected.

Aaron remembered even more gut-shredding things, excavated from his own mind, from Hairston’s, from the lifespans of beings not part of any existence Aaron knew. They affected his brain the way fangs puncture skin. The pain setting his nerve endings afire hung distant as a white dwarf in another galaxy.

His physical vision still perceived two white-bright eye spots within the space of the sarcophagus. Driven by the demand they conveyed, he turned against the straps to stare straight up, the neck-spraining effort akin to shoving a boulder up a mountain.

“How is he doing that?” Dalton shouted. “Don’t let him look away!”

The white eyespots held their place within Aaron’s vision, so that now they glared down at him from the ceiling. The outline of a face formed around them, expanding from that seed to sketch a body.

Werner and Stauph grabbed Aaron by chin and hair, shrieked as they jerked their hands away.

Hairston’s form fleshed out. He hung above them all, arms outstretched in a crucifix pose. His unmistakable laugh boomed.

The couple’s hands were on fire. Squealing, they beat their fists against whatever surface they could, trying to extinguish Hairston’s magic. Dalton tore his hood off as the fabric ignited.

“Guess you haven’t figured out everything,” Hairston chuckled, and floated up through the ceiling and out of sight. His words, “I’ll be back to finish this,” faded into the stratosphere.

Dalton howled with the frustrated energy of a much younger man.

Stauph bawled like a baby. “It burns!”

Aaron, in the corner of his eye, perceived that the light that corresponded to Hairston’s presence inside the trap had gone out. He lay abandoned, shivering, his mind overwhelmed by horror after horror. He hardly registered the developments that followed, as Dalton screamed at his lackeys, as the trio unsealed the trap, as a pillar of fire blasted the sarcophagus apart. Hairston was still inside, after all.

The tricked had become the trickster.

One more grotesquerie to add to all the others: Dalton, Stauph, and Werner screaming at impossible pitches, their heads, their lungs somehow still intact as fires enveloped them from foot to shoulder.

A sun blazed in Hairston’s eyes. For what you did to those children, he boomed. For what you made me do.

* * *

When Aaron could once again concentrate on his surroundings, he discovered with a sinking heart that he still lay in the empty pool. None of it had been a dream.

Warm hands under his bare shoulders helped him sit up. He at last beheld the the awful crate of iron and wood he had been placed upon, about the size of a coffin, etched with occult patterns.

Nearby, three intact heads lay in a pile of black char.

The more awake he grew, the more the nightmares cascaded behind his eyes.

The hands helping him sit up belonged to Hairston, who radiated concern beneath the white bushes of his eyebrows and his lion’s mane of white hair.

Aaron fought to breathe. His heart lurched and pounded.

When Hairston spoke, he sounded ordinary. Human. “You remember everything now, don’t you? Every awful thing that happened in this awful town.”

Tears coursed down Aaron’s cheeks. He nodded.

“Would you like to forget again?”

Aaron’s shuddering grew more and more uncontrollable, his teeth chattering, his balance teetering. Somewhere in those spasms, he managed to shape words. Yes. Please. God.

Hairston spoke in a language that, up until this day, Aaron would have sworn he had never heard before in his life.

Soon he slipped into a blissful slumber, even though he remained wide awake.

End.

Mike Allen edits and publishes Mythic Delirium Books in Roanoke, Virginia. His short stories have been gathered in three collections: Unseaming; The Spider Tapestries; and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Publisher Broken Eye Books plans to release his dark fantasy novel Trail of Shadows later this year. A two-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, Mike has also been a Nebula Award nominee and a three-time Rhysling Award winner for poetry.

Art by Andrew DeFelice

Stag In Winter

By Rajiv Moté

The man who would be Stag found the camp in the spring, when green shoots erupted from the forest floor and tender new leaves embraced the sun. His mandated therapy encouraged him to find new ways to live, and measures of success that came from within. The world he inhabited, built of vaporware and sales pitches, was a castle of clouds: alluring but volatile, subject to change or annihilation by a shifting wind. His therapists encouraged him to seek stability: work he believed in, relationships that nurtured him, and a faith in something bigger than himself. They didn’t stop watching him until he sought in earnest. He was sure the camp was not what they had in mind.

He entered the woods with only what he could carry to survive. He’d heard stories. Somewhere, away from the office campuses and cellular towers, people had found truth in nature. It wasn’t just him. The Great Resignation had awakened a greater urge to escape: from meaningless toil and pointless accomplishment, algorithmic mind-control, and a society completely interconnected, but offering no real community. He felt hollowed-out and hungry for something true.

He recognized something in the faces that met him, hidden away in the wilderness: a hunger so deeply rooted and so long unsatisfied that it had become an identity. These were his people, kin in disillusionment, from youthful to gray-haired. The commune was led by the Circle. The women of the Circle worshiped an unnamed Goddess and conducted psychedelic rites he suspected they’d invented. But when he tasted their herbs and listened to their chanting, staring up through the branches at the liquid flow of stars, he felt a profound connection with the commune, the forest, and the Earth itself. It filled his hollow. It fed that ineffable hunger. He believed it saved his life. His therapists would have to see the good in that.

A priestess who had paid him special attention, a woman with apple-pink cheeks and winter-blue eyes who cupped his face with summer-warm hands, whispered that he should declare himself Stag. Only the strongest could be Stag. He asked her what it meant, and listened, growing troubled yet excited. It was a sacred role, as they reckoned. Nothing in his life had been sacred. Looking around the pine-scented campfire at the scrawny, desultory people who had come to escape what they were, but had no idea what to become, he knew he could be what was needed.

On the night of the Pink Moon, he ate the Circle’s herbs and, as instructed, strode to the edge of the fire. His vision swam as he looked into the faces of the commune. They were all lean from the previous winter, hollow-eyed and shivering in the night air. He shed his human garments and spoke the words the Circle had whispered, the warmth of the flames setting his naked skin aglow.

“I am Stag,” he said. “Who would challenge me?”

The commune looked up at him with relief, hope, and fear. But no challenge.

“It is done,” said a priestess, and her sisters anointed his body with oils of heady fragrance, making him sacred. They clothed him in buckskin, and settled a crown on his head adorned with antlers that seemed to root to his skull. “All hail the Stag!”

His people repeated her words. Some began to weep. He had never been at the center of such emotion. His soul swelled with the nourishment.

Stag became stronger. It felt honest, pure, to put his body to work in service of his people. He ran every morning, faster and farther, pushing himself. He returned with new places for his people to forage. He carried water, strengthening his arms, shoulders, and back. He led hunts, moving quickly and quietly through the trees—though he was forbidden to carry spear and bow, and took no part if deer were the game. Stag was the first to eat at the meals around the fire, though his portion of meat was small. The Circle had many such rules. But their rules brought him ritual honor among the commune. The antlers had indeed taken root. He was transformed. The crown belonged on his brow.

He was given herbs every evening, draping his nights in ecstatic haze. The Circle fawned on him, exalted him, and gave him a special bed that allowed him to rest his head despite his massive rack of horn.

Stag was happy. He seldom thought about his old name and life. When he did, he saw it as a shadow of the life he lived now. His daily trips to the gym were a mockery of the way he now pushed his body. His friends at work were poor substitutes for the hunters, the brothers who ran with him through the wilderness. Dating was achingly banal compared to the holy union between the Circle’s priestesses and their Stag.

He understood it wouldn’t last. The Circle taught him their lore as he consumed their herbs. The Stag’s reign was only for the seasons of plenty, until he relinquished his strength for the sake of his people: freely taken, freely yielded. But such glorious seasons. To burn bright was to burn fast, a truth in both his old life and new.

On Cold Moon night, snow fell unceasingly, landing silent on the white-blanketed earth. One by one, the Circle kissed Stag and told him it was time to grant the last, greatest gift to his people: survival. The apple-cheeked priestess who first named him gazed down with eyes of blue ice, and in them Stag saw the long, empty winter ahead. What he had taken he now must restore. There was honor in that. Eight months in the commune had taught him something his old life never had: to put his people before himself. Through service, he could live forever. He was Stag, and he was ready.

With effortless grace he leaped through the forest over snow-covered roots and brambles. His long, lean muscles flexed beneath the buckhide that fit like skin. His hide-wrapped feet were callous-hard and immune to the cold. Breath steamed from his nostrils. The weight of his antlered crown didn’t hinder him at all. The hunters donned their wolfskins. Hefting their spears and bows, they loped after him one last time.

The last time I faced death I was used up without purpose, Stag realized as arrows whizzed past his ear. Purpose makes all the difference. Being used was inevitable, but his use had deep meaning here. He was holy, synchronized with the seasons of feast and famine. The gift he offered, the strength of his body to survive the winter, was made sacred. He was Stag, reveling in how he was remade, and would be again.

End.

Rajiv Moté is a writer and software engineering director living in Chicago with his wife, daughter, and a tiny dog. He writes an ongoing epic fantasy column on Dragonmount.com and his stories can be found in Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror vol 5, and other publications. He scrapes off excess words on Twitter @RajivMote and indexes his published work on his blog: https://rajivmote.wordpress.com/published

Strange Blooms in the Sky

By Paul D Coombs

My Space Vehicle touched-down on Earth’s sickly soil, aligned itself and scuttled over crushed ore and chemical residue. Through the oval-shaped window I observed sporadically scattered bones—human carcasses for imaginary crows. Ten earth-minutes was all I had been afforded by my colleagues back on our settlement on Mars. Ten meagre minutes to look for signs of life.

I didn’t expect much. I didn’t expect anything at all. Why would I? All about me, a dry-crusted wasteland bathed in an eerie orange haze, burned by the strange and crimson sun set sad on the horizon. The heat would be unbearable but it was the filthy air that could kill me, and so I clutched the metal mask in my hands clinging to it like the life-saver that it was. But that wasn’t all—the last human to return from their expedition to Earth had turned insane, she talked of rains of bombs dropping from the sky, dead birds flocking in the sulphuric sky, the land shifting beneath her feet, dragging her under. She had survived but I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it would have been better she didn’t.

Cara’s traumatized condition had unsettled our camp, and so I had offered to make this last expedition to our dead planet, to put an end to unsettling conjecture. Being a biochemist, I could assess the chemical and physical principles of living things and their biological processes, if any were to be found. A gleaming spec of white dust, the SV slowed its speed as it cut across the scorched and lonely land, settling to a cruise. Among the weather-torn ruins I recognized the playground where my children used to play, and pressing my forehead against the window I felt saddened to see the stiff-rusted swings, their chains corroded by decades of acid rain. I remembered happy times spent with my family there, the children begging for just five more minutes to play—which always led to at least thirty minutes more. I smiled ruefully at the memory. It was all I had of them.

The SV decelerated, preparing to stop, the hum of the machine quieting and the silence from outside leaking in. For a moment I thought I heard a cry, a happy cry. I strained to listen. The cry turned to a scream, something terrible.

The SV turned and angled itself so the playground was out of sight. And yet… yet it was no good, I had seen them. I had glimpsed both my children, James and Violet, eyes bright and wild, dashing between derelict slide and see-saw. Happy. Laughing. Dead.

My heart raced, a pain stinging its core like a barbed hook had embedded itself there. I squeezed my fingertips against the mask’s black-metallic surface. I had been mistaken, foolish, they had been dead a long while, the nuclear skies had seen to that. I rubbed my eyes, tears wiped away until my thoughts were harmless again and I felt calmer. I couldn’t afford to be frivolous, this wasn’t supposed to be a personal journey, it was a mission only to establish if Earth remained a dead planet. Cold logic was all that was required of me.

The Space Vehicle had stopped. The dashboard beeped. A slave to the alchemy of the machine’s artificial intelligence, the soft-power that directed and maintained the last of human life, I pulled the mask over my face, my last ten minutes on Earth about to commence. More than ten minutes on this fried planet was unthinkable.

The door slid open and I left the safety of the SV, the generous tug of Earth’s gravity promptly securing my boots to its bare broken rock. All was quiet and still, including the playground, nothing more than dust-coated constructions of hot metal and sun-bleached polymers.

Drowned in the tidal wave of heat, I sucked gratefully on the cool-filtered air provided by my mask, and began to walk, slow at first, stumbling here and there until I gained confidence and got used to my solid new weight. Nothing but desolation for miles; crumbled houses, their exposed screaming steel foundations warped and reaching like arthritic fingers for a sky that killed. Nothing but the sound of silence and the shape of stillness. No birds. No butterflies. No flowers. No life. I could scream and scream and scream, and no one would hear me. Nothing but dust and dry-cracked clay.

My mission should be easy enough, unless I got distracted and time ran out—I dared not think of that. Through my mask’s visor, my eyes adjusted to the smoldering soup of rising vapors that caused the ragged horizon to oscillate as if the Earth itself was shaking, gasping with outrage at what we had done to it. I walked on, thinking of the photos on the walls of my cramped module within the far-off Martian settlement, one of my wife looking back at me over her shoulder as she tended the roses in our garden, another of James and Violet suspended in mid-air, holding hands mid-bounce on their trampoline. Happiness remembered in dreams. I had erased the digital videos of us. Listened for hours to thumping music. I wanted to forget, but the more I tried, the more I remembered.

Remnants of lives lived lay scattered everywhere; a child’s shoe, a hair brush, a football. I reached down and picked up the ball, rubbing away the orange dust with gloved hands, revealing faded blue and green patterned hexagons. A rush of adrenalin spilled through me and I remembered. Surrounded by seventy-thousand humans singing and cheering in symbiotic support of our team, the rush and roar of pure energy a force greater than the sum of its parts… something almost spiritual. Slices of cold crept up the skin on my arms, I could hear the chants drifting on the suspended dust particles floating in the air, the singing of You’ll never walk alone, and yet there I was, never more alone.

The ball slipped from my grasp. I blinked hard, admonishing myself for letting sentimentality leak in. Frustrated, I lashed out at the ball, kicking it hard and long where it thudded off the gold-gilded door of a nearby church. The door rattled fiercely, the taught silence buffeted by the sound, but instead of gradually subsiding, the rumble increased in ferocity, the racket becoming louder, deafening, and wildly out of proportion with the ball’s slight impact, so much so, I thought the door might explode open at any moment.

My heart thudded, matching the frantic metronomic reverberation of the door. I approached the church, half-expecting Satan and his hounds to burst forth but just as I neared, it steadied, all noise ceased. I ran my gloved fingers over the ornate latticed metalwork and lifted the heavy iron ring at its center, pulling hard. Nothing. I pressed my body against the door and pushed but again it didn’t give an inch, immovable. I couldn’t fathom how it had generated such a clamor.

I caught my breath; a sudden clanking had started from within, significant in the holy silence. I followed what would have been the path that led around the church, now a hard-baked groove, only to discover nothing more than a ruin, all walls apart from the front that encased the door, toppled. The clanking stopped. I strained my eyes in search of movement, life, anything to explain.

The back of my throat stiff and my chest heaving, I left the ruined church and stumbled on, the road barely distinguishable from the dry earth all around. Safely on my way, up ahead I saw my house—my home, the garden gate swinging on its hinge despite there being no wind and nothing to move it. The house itself was pitted with dried mud, dirt and dust; but the gate – it continued to swing back and forth. I picked up my pace and with sweat drenching my skin, I reached the gate, striking out a gloved-hand and stopping it dead.

The old house with its smashed windows like bruise-blackened eyes and roof torn like a cracked skull, stared back at me. I had to enter, I felt it wanted me to. The front door opened with ease, its hinges weak and rotten. Within, the air was cold, dead and breathless. I thought of my wife and children, imagined them turning to see me, their faces relieved and welcoming after twenty years of waiting. I tried to dismiss the thoughts no sooner than they arrived, I had to conquer my fears by facing them pragmatically, and yet I was not a machine, nor was I a Martian, I was a human, vulnerable and uncertain.

A candle-flame suddenly burst into life on the kitchen table and sharp shadows flared to life and gulping greedily on the cool, clean air provided by my mask, I noticed something glinting on the table, something irresistible. Slow, hesitant steps, I approached the table, my mouth swollen and dry. Amid the collected years of dust, golden-metallic sheen untarnished by age, a ring. I knew. I knew immediately, and unable to explain, I picked up the ring, already haunted by the words I knew I would see engraved on the underside:

H & Win – together forever

Clutching my wife’s wedding ring in my balled up fist, far away I thought I heard the sound of birds flocking. It wasn’t long before the clatter was drowned out by the boom and rattle of small explosions in the sky – a rain of bombs.

My mask beeped. Time was short. I emerged into the same desolate landscape and silent sky that had existed before I entered the old house. Tired and emotional, a wave of relief washed over me. I told myself that when I became removed from the emotional centre of the experience, things would become easily explained.

I tasted the atmosphere’s toxic tang and swallowed. My gut burned. Just as I wondered if my mask had started to leak, stones scuffled up to my boots as if tossed across the bare ground at me. I searched for the instigator but there seemed to be no one and nothing. All still and silent. Inexplicable. My head filled with a million impossibilities, and so I made a great effort to be rational again, to be professional. I would investigate, discover a simple answer and leave the planet. Heart and legs heavy, each step placed on the polluted soil a drain on my energy, I wandered, the dust and dirt kicking up and clinging to me like soft-clutching fingers. Walking in silent stupor, my eyes glazed over like melted mirrors and I imagined a memory of a memory of Earth: Settled seasons; green fields and tall trees; fast flowing rivers; land and sea leaking with life; micro-organisms pulsing with the desire to survive; flesh, blood and bone, thoughts of a future.

My mask beeped again, stirring me from my trance—a reminder to hurry. Time, although in many ways an illusion, was still an important simplification of one’s relative speed and proximity to mass, a concept that would keep me alive. A sudden soft-curved wind caught me, swinging me around so I faced towards the fear and horror of the wasteland, the rusted roof of a half-buried car where the crossroads used to be. It was our car, and it was the spot where my family had fallen when the end came.

Standing at the intersection, I looked up at the sky, through the haze and thought of the billions of stars hidden beyond, and among them, Mars. And at my feet, my family. Dead. Dead. Dead beneath the stagnant soil, their bones beneath my bones.

It was as if the ground shifted beneath my feet and I fell to my knees. As if my legs had been kicked away from beneath me. The desire to be closer to them overwhelmed me and, little more than a Martian ghost, I leaned forward and pressed my masked face into the hot-crusted dirt, gone where the silence goes.

All at once I felt heavy and floating, both alive and dead. Far off in the universe, I heard a dying star explode. Like a punch thrown from space, I remembered a meteor striking Earth, the planet plunging into darkness. Volcanic fire belched impenetrable black plumes into a radiation ravaged atmosphere. Tsunamis drowned continents. Earthquakes buckled crust. Dopamine-deprived dinosaurs fell, crushed in the velvet clay, brittle bones snapped like twigs. Then, freezing and struggling for breath, Earth fell to dark dormancy. Sixty-five million years. New life. Scraped and torn from Earth’s deep well of soil and stone, new scurrying flesh stole forth; reason, blood and soul screaming to be noticed, strange blooms screaming to be heard. Humans. It seemed Earth remembered. It seemed it was telling me.

My mask beeped, waking me from the dead dream. Time, whatever it was, was nearly up. I really had to leave. I squinted beyond the land to the far-off hard flat river, fruitless, devoid of life. A strange yet familiar sound drifted up from the dark depths, from the Earth’s core, rippling through its brittle crust, a deep driven drumbeat of tribal longing. I thought we had murdered the music but the percussive sound permeated my body, pulsing through brain, blood and bones, a sonic umbilical cord. I realized it was a part of me, it always had been. My mask beeped ten times, signaling the final ten seconds of safety.

I dragged myself away, footprints left as a reminder to no one and nothing, my family buried under gasoline dreams. With every last ounce of energy I could muster, I ran back to the SV, commanded the vehicle door to open and jumped into the cabin, collapsing into my seat. The mask buzzed for the last time and the door of the only SV on Earth slid closed.

I instructed the vehicle to leave, to return to Mars, where one thousand downhearted humans awaited me in the joyless solitary bubble of an artificial spec on the Martian landscape.

The SV did not move.

I held my breath, listening for the whir of technology. My lungs nearly bursting, surrounded by an overwhelming silence, I thought I might die, stranded on Earth. So little time on the old planet and now perhaps forever… the soft-whir of the vehicle purred to life. I exhaled. The Space Vehicle aligned itself and accelerated, searching for an appropriate spot to take-off. The fear and dread that I had felt dispersed, but the agony of mind remained.

As I was driven through the grasping dust, I stared out of the window at the old planet. For three-hundred-thousand years, Earth had cultivated, sustained and nurtured such bold bi-peds as we. Compared to the diverse dinosaurs before, our weight had been light and insignificant on its cool, brittle crust. Not just us, but other creatures too, their difference of mind, one of degree and not of kind. We had all we needed, such wild and swollen fruits as those gifted us by the nutritious soil. But with every breath stolen from Earth’s lungs we had poisoned our own. We choked seas, air and life so all struggled to breathe; the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon trashed; chemical catastrophe undeniable; every place poisoned.

My mission unsuccessful, the vehicle left the land for the cold red desert of Mars, where we drew our water from the icy dirt condensed on dust particles, where humans would be organizing, analyzing and controlling as if their lives depended on it—because they did. Forced reproduction, synthetic sustenance, deep despair.

Through the oval window, I looked back at our home, the charred garden of Eden, the last human on Earth and leaving. A fragment of life tearing through Earth’s blue atmosphere, I considered the deep vastness of space, diamond-clustered stars shining their lonely lights, doing little but magnifying the loneliness within me. Still, the inescapable human urge to leave our mark inherent within me, I spoke out loud, the story of my visit to Earth a data-driven gift to the memory of the machine.

Thrust into the dark sea of space, I stared back at Earth like a child ripped from the desperate embrace of its parents. What I wanted suddenly dawned on me. I was destined for an afterlife I didn’t want. I wanted to go home… to Earth… to my family. I clutched my chest with both hands as if holding on to my memories, a lifetime held in my hands. Enough.

Nothing but the hum of the machine for background noise, I wished there was something I could say for the machine to record other than the words I speak now, something logical, something… I reached for my mask. It wouldn’t have recharged more than a minute but I didn’t care.

“Eject,” I say to the machine.

“Confirm,” it replies.

“Confirmed,” I state, the agony slowly fading and my veins running free.

Catapulted into space, I whirl weightlessly, rolling like driftwood in pure silence while Earth’s soft gravitational pull, tows me home. The hard vacuum of space sucks my body tight against my spacesuit, flesh feeling as if on fire through pressure and pain. I feel increasingly lightheaded and comfortably removed from my body. Oxygen diminishing, I drift happily past defunct satellites, human space junk suspended in our planet’s orbit. Earth; darker and blacker, but still our blue planet, still home, looms larger, my gaze locked on the its cloud-swirled terrain, its indelible map woven through my blood and bones. I feel new again. I feel wonderful. I think I hear soft sparks of sounds, the voices of my wife and children calling me.

Here ends my final recording, my final transmission. My oxygen is all but depleted. I’m entering Earth’s atmosphere, falling through the blue, about to burn like strange blooms in the sky.

End.

Paul D Coombs is a writer of stories mired in either one or all of the strange, the gothic, the dark, and the beautifully tragic. He lives in the sepulchral North-west of England and can be found or lost on Twitter at @Coombsy101010. Discover more about Paul, his published stories, and what he is currently working on at www.pauldcoombs.com.

Art by Maxwell Marais

The Other Names

By Ramsey Campbell

Originally published in Interzone #137 Nov 1998

They were past the top of Brichester and nearly at the twisted house when Arnold started. ‘What’s the sign say, Sylly? What’s it say?’

‘It says BEWARE OF KILLER DOG,’ Bruce suggested, raising his fists as he did whenever he spoke.

‘No, it says TRESPASSERS. WILL. BE. CASTARATED,’ Denzil said, pointing the fattest finger of his right hand at each bunch of marks on the signboard.

‘Shut up, you. And you and all. I’ll tell you what it says,’ Arnold said, and rubbed his scalp as if to conjure hair out of the grey shaved skin. ‘It says SYLLY’S TURN NOW WE’VE ALL BEEN IN OR HE’S A WIMP.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Sylvester told him. ‘It doesn’t, either.’

‘Go on then.’ Arnold shoved his blotchy face and broken eleven-year-old nose at him. ‘You say what it says.’

A wind blustered down from the dark Cotswold hills and tried to find its way under Sylvester’s leather jacket. While he didn’t shiver, everything around the abandoned house did: the tall scrawny trees like charred bones hanging from the black sky, the knee-high grass and shrivelled weeds that sprawled over the cracked mossy path beyond the fallen gate, the segments of rotted fence leaning away from one another on top of the crumbling wall. Even the board shook as though impatient, but the marks on it conveyed no more to him. ‘It says JUST AN OLD HOUSE WITH NOTHING IN,’ he muttered.

If that was true, it hadn’t been. He remembered the items the others had brought back to show they’d gone all the way in. Bruce had run out carrying a mask that couldn’t have been meant to be worn, since it had only one eye-hole and far too big a grinning face – he’d run so fast that he’d dropped it to smash on the path. Denzil had found a bowl that seemed to have been used to grow fungus in, but when he’d felt underneath it he’d thought it was somebody’s skull cut in half down the middle and had thrown it over the fence. And Arnold had returned with a screw-topped jar so grimy it had been impossible to tell whether its contents were a little hand or a spider with not enough legs, particularly once he’d tipped it out and they had all trampled on it when it had appeared to try to crawl away. Perhaps Arnold was recalling this as he said into Sylvester’s face ‘If there’s nothing in it, why aren’t you going?’

‘Give us the light and I will.’

Arnold handed him the club of a flashlight so readily that Sylvester demanded: ‘Have you messed with it?’

‘You’ll find out,’ Arnold said in a tone that left him no other choice.

Sylvester poked the beam of Bruce’s stolen flashlight through the gateway with dried-up rasping weeds for gates. The light found the mouldering front of the house, but that was as far as it reached. Six windows showed him darkness which appeared to go back farther than it should. The way the pairs of windows shrank as they went higher was not the only reason why he saw the house tilting backwards, tipping the unhinged front door into the dark. As he and the others had swaggered along the lane with no other houses in it he’d seen how the rear of the building was at least a foot lower than the front, and twisted to the left as though it was trying to drag the rest of the house with it. Now that the wind was holding its breath he saw that all the grass and weeds leaned towards the house, suggesting that it was stronger than sunlight. He fancied that the path was sloping downwards underfoot, though his eyes told him otherwise. He slashed at weeds with the flashlight and wished he could feel like an explorer in the jungle as the dark beyond the windows lurched at him.

It was only a house that was falling down, and it wasn’t going to fall on him. The owner who’d died in it while it was starting to collapse had just been a crazy old man who used to shout and sing at night in a language nobody could understand. No wonder the people who lived nearest had told stories about him when he’d kept wakening them at all hours – how on the night he died they’d heard a voice joining in with his, and then the old man trying to shout it down, maybe because it had been much bigger than his and had seemed not to need to breathe, until his voice had come apart as if the other one had been tearing him open. Could his mouth really have been wider than the hands with which he’d tried to shut it? Only the police who had found him would know. Sylvester was a very few steps from the house now, yet the flashlight was making no appreciable difference to the dark beyond the fallen door. ‘Don’t come out till you’ve got something,’ Arnold called along the path, so that Sylvester couldn’t hesitate for being watched, even though the doorstep seemed to tilt slyly inwards as he trod on it and aimed the flashlight beam into the house.

At first the light slid over the darkness, which only gradually admitted to containing walls and bare floorboards and, when he raised the beam, the lofty ceiling of a hall. Every surface was as black as the sky between the stars. Although doors were open in both walls, the darkness of the openings was virtually indistinguishable from the walls themselves.

‘There’s nothing left down there,’ Bruce advised from the safety of the pavement. ‘You’ll have to go up.’

Sylvester showed him a vicious finger and stepped over the skewed door, and felt himself being tilted down into the house. Perhaps it was the way the light seemed unable to keep hold of the surfaces of the interior – crept over them even when he gripped the flashlight with both hands – that made him feel in danger of sliding all the way down the hall, past a fallen chandelier like a translucent stranded deep-sea creature, to the point where the house was most warped. A spasm of panic sent him onto the stairs which the darkness to his left had abruptly produced. At least their angles caught more of the light than the hall did. He’d go as far as the first window from which he would be visible, and then the others would have to admit he’d ventured farther than they had.

The creak of each stair echoed into the distance, enlarging the darkness and sounding as though the house was continuing to warp. He had to believe that the black underside of the roof was coming closer only because he was climbing towards it, not lowering itself, but he was beginning to feel as though he was being trapped under a stone with whatever might live there unseen. He was wishing he’d hidden some object in a pocket before leaving home so that he could say he’d found it in the house when all at once there were no more stairs between him and the middle floor.

At least he was able to see outside the house. Beyond a doorway to his left the hole of a window showed him the highest streetlamps of Mercy Hill leading down into Brichester. He took a step towards the room, and was unable to halt. Whatever had taken place in the house had warped this corridor even more steeply than the ground floor, and he seemed to have no option other than to stagger into the room, flailing the air with his fists and the cone of light, unless he wanted to be carried helplessly deeper into the house.

The room was almost bare. A bedstead off which a mattress lolled had been dragged away from the window, leaving deep scratches in the floorboards. The mattress had been torn open, and its dangling innards were unpleasantly suggestive of withered dusty entrails. Protruding from beneath the heap of them as though it had been concealed within the mattress was a book whose covers were as black as the inside of the house. His sense of how useless a book would be to him was so overwhelming that he almost forgot he could take it to show. He ran across the room, pursued by footsteps that must be his, and grabbing the book by a corner, snatched it out of the clinging mass. The cover fell open, and he saw the first page.

Except the book, which was bound like a real one but had lines ruled on its pages, didn’t just fall open. It twisted in his hand, and he had an impression of its warping exactly as the house had, a notion which overwhelmed him so powerfully he thought he felt his mind change shape. Before he could grasp the impression it vanished, and the book was straightened out. It was just a book, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and nothing else mattered. He could read the page.

Charles Horus, his book so long as he shall live. Copied under the protection of Nyarlathotep, Stalker in the Shadows. Written from memory of the Necronomicon, British Museum, 1985 – 1995 …

Each shakily handwritten word in the midst of the shrinking island of light seemed to be forming itself especially for him. He squatted to turn the page, then considered perching on the edge of the bedstead, at which point his awareness of his surroundings returned to him. That didn’t cow him, not when he suddenly had so much more of a mind. He ran to the window and saw the three boys throwing chunks of the wall at streetlamps, having lost interest in watching for him. He’d show them a prize that was worth all of theirs, one they wouldn’t believe until he proved it. Hugging the book with both arms, he bore it from the room.

The tilted corridor didn’t bother him. He only had to walk uphill to the stairs, and he did. The stairs themselves were worse – as he clattered down them he had a sense of climbing towards the secretive darkness beneath the roof, and grabbing the banister was like trying to hold onto a dead eel – but by telling himself he was on his way out he managed to keep going. His heels struck the canted floor of the hall at last. Three upward strides took him past the torn-off door and onto the path, whose roughness prevented him from sliding back. He was almost at the gateway before the others saw him.

Denzil pointed so wildly that Sylvester thought there was something at his back until he realised the subject of the gesture was himself. ‘Look at him,’ Denzil scoffed, and when he’d finished laughing at that ‘Look what he’s got.’

Bruce told the joke a different way. ‘Sylly’s got a book.’

‘Let’s see it,’ Arnold demanded as if the sight of it wasn’t convincing enough.

Sylvester thrust the flashlight into his hand before opening the middle of the book. ‘It’s only wrote in,’ Bruce complained.

Denzil gave the pages twice as much of a look while he dragged his finger along the air in front of them. ‘Isn’t even a diary,’ he decided as soon as he could.

‘Give us a look, I said.’ Arnold shoved the flashlight under his arm and slammed his hands on top of Sylvester’s on the edges of the book. When Sylvester refused to let go, Arnold wrested the book towards the light of a surviving streetlamp. ‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘It’s just mad stuff. Let’s tear it up.’

‘Don’t.’ Sylvester backed away, taking the book with him, and could have imagined he felt it helping him, nudging its edges into his grip like a creature settling into its lair. ‘I found it. I want to keep it. It’s mine.’

‘Reckon he’s going to try and make out he can read.’

‘Bet his dad’ll give him a kicking if he does,’ Bruce exulted.

‘Couldn’t even read that sign,’ said Denzil.

Sylvester closed the book and clutched it to himself, and looked at the signboard above the fence. ‘Well, I can,’ he said as the letters instantly fitted themselves to his mind. ‘It says BUILDING PLOT FOR SALE.’

‘He’s guessing,’ said Arnold, then glared at the others. ‘Or somebody told him.’

‘I never,’ Bruce said, shaking his fists at the idea.

‘Wasn’t me,’ protested Denzil.

Sylvester wished he hadn’t revealed his new ability until he’d seen what he could do by hiding it. ‘Wasn’t any of you,’ he said, ‘but I’m not saying who.’

‘See, I told you someone did,’ said Arnold, and considered punching him in the face, but contented himself with leading a fresh bout of derision. ‘Let’s do something down the hill,’ he said at last and strutted off, pausing only to shatter the undamaged lamp.

Sylvester looked back from the slope. The twisted house was sinking out of view beyond the crest of the hill, as if it was collapsing for want of a support he’d taken away with him. He had little time to reflect on this, because once they’d marched down the steeply terraced street he was too busy trying to outdo the others in causing a row outside the hospital, playing the railings with a bit of someone’s fence and yelling the worst words he knew. He couldn’t let on that he knew the sign said PLEASE BE QUIET NEAR HOSPITAL. Soon a guard with a truncheon that whooped through the air chased the boys down past the graveyard, and Sylvester glimpsed a few of the inscriptions on the stones. He would have liked to read more until he grasped how the reduction of lives to hyphenated dates affected him. Shortly, however, he and his companions were in central Brichester, and there was much to read.

The pedestrianised streets were plates of neon, and the night crowds were out – children sharing bottles they’d persuaded someone to buy or to sell them, young couples pretending they could afford everything they wanted, people buying commodities in doorways, gangs in search of a pub and a fight – but all Sylvester could see were signs. LATEST FASHIONS. 20 KING SIZE. INSTANT PRIZES. SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. BEER OF THE MONTH. ALL DAMAGE MUST BE PAID FOR. EVERYTHING HALF PRICE OR LESS. 24 HOUR SECURITY. ADULT BOOKS … In particular his understanding that the sign he’d always thought said SHOP in nearly every window was SALE came as a revelation, yet the more he deciphered, the more he seemed to sense the yearning of the book in his embrace to be read. When his companions began looking for burglar alarms to set off or, better still, that were already triggered so that the boys could break in, he said ‘I have to go now.’

‘He’s going home to read,’ shouted Denzil, jabbing the book with his favourite finger.

‘Going to show his book to his dad,’ Bruce crowed between his fists.

‘Hide it from him, more like,’ Arnold said, and lowered his head in case it was required for butting.

Sylvester hurried to the bus station full of sleeping people being woken up by guards. A bus not much larger than his father’s van was about to leave for Lower Brichester. It smelled at the very least of booze and tobacco, but he hardly noticed once he turned to the book. Perhaps it was the lurch of the bus as it raced to overtake one from a different company which made the book open itself.

Daoloth is truth. Before the eyes and minds of men shrank from all about them and within themselves was Daoloth. Daoloth knows all names and is all names, and all names are Its name. All things within the universe, and all which are beyond and so are part thereof, must yield their true names to the power of Daoloth. He who utters the name of Daoloth shall hear Its voice in all things and so learn their names. As those names are called in Its name, so must those called shed the cloak which men have draped about them and reveal their veritable aspect in Daoloth …

Though Sylvester couldn’t have paraphrased any of this, he felt it settling into the depths of himself. He seemed hardly to have started reading when he grew aware that he was about to be carried past his stop. Ordinarily he would have seen how far he could travel beyond his fare before he was thrown off, but now he wanted to give himself up to the miracle of reading. He depressed the bell until the infuriated driver stopped the bus and came for him, at which point Sylvester dodged around him to haul on the lever that released the doors and sprint into the nearest back alley which led home.

His father’s van, which he saw at last said BENNY BENTLEY BUILDER, was parked mostly on the pavement in front of the house, and casting its shadow across the sliver of a garden as though to cover up some of the work his father had done – the yellow paint outlines too large for the windows, the plastic gutter sagging from the roof, the cracked pebbledash. The bespectacled old woman who always complained about any children in sight was dragging her wheezing tartan-lagged dog out of the house opposite. ‘Don’t you be looking at me, Sylvester Bentley,’ she said at once, ‘or I’ll set him on you.’

Sylvester turned away without speaking, which gave her a reason to start an extended complaint, and let himself into the house. He was hoping to sneak upstairs now that the front door didn’t stick, since his father had been at too much of it with a plane. Besides, in the front room he could hear a video making the kinds of noises his parents sometimes emitted when they thought he was asleep. He was halfway up the stairs, and just had time to sit on the book, when his father came out glowering and stuffing his shirt into his jeans. ‘Where’ve you been? How long have you been hanging round there?’

‘He’s not been pinching,’ Sylvester’s mother called or groaned.

‘You heard your ma. Have you?’

‘I’ve just been with Arn and them.’

‘I hope you didn’t let them take advantage of you,’ his invisible mother said.

‘You want to get yourself some decent mates.’ Having dealt with that, his father withdrew. ‘Don’t come in here,’ he said, and slammed the door.

Sylvester might have listened outside if he hadn’t been eager to return to his book. He ran up the stairs, above which the highest of a trio of plaster ducks had begun an inadvertent nose-dive, and into his room, where he set the book down on the bed while he leafed through his computer manual. Although he could read it at last, it told him nothing he hadn’t been shown at school. He threw it on top of the bookcase stuffed with computer games and sat down with the book from the twisted house.

It skewed itself open at the page he’d read. He went through the sentences again and felt them slither between his thoughts. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand them until he had obeyed them. He carried the book to the window and stared along the concertinaed terrace, and had an inkling of how long the book had occupied him when he saw the old woman already dragging her dog homeward from its lavatorial quest. ‘Miss Whittle,’ he whispered, and added what the book seemed to want him to say. ‘Day oh loth.’

The dog insisted on halting at the streetlamp closest to home, and the old woman saw Sylvester. He almost flinched back as she raised her face into the white glare of the lamp, but she couldn’t know what he’d done when he didn’t know himself. Despite the promise of the book, he didn’t quite hear a voice, unless that included the one in his head. It was more as though he glimpsed, or had a memory of glimpsing, shapes that were hidden by Miss Whittle and her dog – that were hiding either behind or within them or, somehow, both. However nearly indefinable it was, the glimpse suggested words to him, words that would help him see it. Old Bones That Crawl,’ he said like answering at school. ‘Day oh loth says.’

The dog lowered its leg, and the old woman’s spectacles aimed the glare at Sylvester’s window as if her eyes had grown white and blind before she and the dog waddled up their path. It seemed to him that a bit of the world had twisted in the instant he’d ceased to speak. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to see the outcome, but he watched while Miss Whittle appeared to have some trouble with wielding her key in her door. As the dog yanked her into the unlit house the door swung closed, so that Sylvester couldn’t be certain whether he saw her fall or be pulled to all fours, and her spectacles fly off. Perhaps it was only the darkness that made her seem to shrink. He observed how the house remained dark, and listened until he began to nod, which put him in danger of dropping the book. He slid it under his quilt for safety while he prepared to join it in bed.

Sleep was unwilling to come near him. Whenever he drifted towards it he was pulled up short by a fear of talking in it, not that he was aware of ever having done so. The possibility that he might change things without knowing, or of dreaming he had only to find it was true, unnerved him. When at last he slept he dreamed of going to the window to shout ‘Old Bones That Crawl.’ He watched Miss Whittle’s door falter open, and a crouched shape begin to grope into the light before he managed to awaken. He had to venture to the window to confirm her door was shut and her house dark, at which point he realised that he hadn’t heard the wheezy yapping of the dog since they’d vanished into her house.

In bed again, he was awakened by his mother’s morning screech. ‘What do you think you’re up to, Sylvester?’ He thought she’d found him out until she added ‘Never mind trying to be late for school.’ While he was in the bathroom she shouted upstairs three times that his breakfast was going cold, though he knew it wouldn’t be on the table yet, and when he stumbled downstairs she kept telling him not to eat so fast or he would make himself ill. His father confined himself to saying to do as she said. No wonder Sylvester was glad to leave the house, though not for school. Nevertheless he headed for it, to confirm what he already knew.

The narrow streets lined with failed trees were full of second-hand cars and people to go with them, and puddles doubling both. All the activity around him was infinitely less meaningful than the words of the book in his bed. Opposite the school he hid in the bus shelter, or rather under it since its glass sides had been smashed. He saw some of his classmates being led into the schoolyard by their parents, and expelling the noises they were supposed to try not to make in class: Kevin sounding like a seal, Jimmy like a megaphone forgetting how to talk. Their special teacher was representing order in the yard, and greeted them in his tone of telling a joke at which nobody was expected to laugh. ‘And how are we this inclement day?’ Mr Westle said, and Sylvester saw the joke was on the teacher – felt as though the words he had read in his book were sharing this secret with him. By including himself with the people he addressed Mr Westle meant to appear sympathetic, but in truth there wasn’t much to choose between their minds and his, which was smaller than his head. Before Sylvester could be noticed he turned away from the school and all its Mr Westles for ever. He wanted to be where he could read as much as he liked without having to explain his ability.

The central library was one of the largest buildings in Brichester, and so heavy with books it needed six pillars to hold up its front. Once he’d climbed the wide steps and passed beyond the giant doors, he felt as he imagined you were supposed to feel in church. Everybody kept their voices down, yet the murmurs rose to have their own mysterious conversations under the dome where the sun was starting to appear. He walked beneath the echoes of his footsteps to the History section and pulled an armful of thick volumes off a shelf to set down gently on a table. At last he was going to learn what books had to offer.

Those he’d selected were histories of the world, and they didn’t detain him for long. He had a go at the Religion shelves, then went to Science, his reading of which only affected him the same way. The more he read, the more he knew that the secret which the book from the twisted house had lodged in his brain rendered every other book untrue. Books were lies the world told about itself, he saw, and went to the window in case the spectacle beyond it might seem more real.

Groups of people were crossing the pedestrianised street from every direction. Their only function appeared to be to form meaningless patterns, just as the rain drying on the pavement had to. He watched until a librarian tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school, son? If you don’t want to read, you’re distracting folk who are, and we’ll have to ask you to make yourself scarce.’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ Sylvester said to her fat reflection infested by the herd.

‘Then go and do your nothing somewhere else like a good boy before I have to call security.’

She was trying to patronise him into insignificance, but he knew whom to call to demonstrate his power. ‘Daoloth says,’ he muttered, and trailed off before words for her had time to suggest themselves; he wasn’t certain that he wanted all the readers to see what would happen then, especially if he got the blame. He shouldered his way through her heavy perfume, which he couldn’t help thinking was meant to disguise her true nature that he had almost revealed, and let the clamour of his footsteps crowd him out. He was trying to escape the words he’d muttered, but they came with him.

They paced him as he wandered home. They lurked behind everyone he met and everything he passed, so that all this seemed to be trying to hold onto its appearance for fear that by completing his sentence he would change it into its true self. ‘Faces that slide over the earth … cells that store the night … hands that swarm … eyes worming in the earth … leaves that suck the dead … windows of the buried … rotting brains …’ He had no idea where all this came from; he was afraid that simply thinking it might cause it to emerge from the concealment of itself. Once he was home he could read his book, which perhaps would calm his thoughts down. But as he returned to his street he couldn’t avoid realising that he’d spent the day so far in staying clear of seeing what he might have done to the old woman.

He shut the front door and fled to his room. His father was out damaging somebody’s property with a view to mending it, and his mother had gone to call Bingo for the afternoon, leaving a premonitory smell of her stew which never tasted as good as that promise. He could do what he wanted, but he discovered that wasn’t reading the book while he didn’t know how the old woman had lived up to his words. He stood at his window and gazed at her silent darkening house.

The sight focused his sense of a presence hidden by the world, and he no longer felt urged to finish his sentence; in her case, after all, he already had. He was prompting himself to call her when people began to appear in the street, mothers wheeling babies home or rather couples that looked like that and then, as the streetlamps produced their flutter, older children walking. Sylvester had become preoccupied with the gathering of darkness in the old woman’s house when he saw his mother at the end of the street. He retreated and sat on the bed, clutching his book, but all too soon she and his father summoned him down for dinner. He hadn’t taken a mouthful from the plate that had been laden to await him when the questions began with his father pointing a fork at him. ‘Good day at school?’

‘Fair.’

That was usually sufficient, and Sylvester tried to say it in his habitual manner, but his father persisted in staring at him. Sylvester would have been grateful to his mother for interrupting except for her question. ‘Have you seen Miss Whittle today?’

‘Who,’ Sylvester blurted, ‘me?’

‘Why, what’s up with her?’ his father said.

Sylvester fed himself a mouthful of stew while he braced himself for the reply. ‘That’s what I want to know,’ his mother said, however. ‘She wasn’t in her seat at the Bingo where she always is.’

‘Maybe the kids have scared her off the streets at last.’

‘So long as it wasn’t you, Sylvester.’

‘It wouldn’t be him, would it? He’s not capable of anything.’

That sounded as patronising as the librarian had, and Sylvester was keeping his mouth full so as to be unable to disprove the statement when his mother said ‘When we’ve finished I’ll go over and see how she is.’

Sylvester almost emptied the tasteless mouthful outward before he could swallow. ‘No,’ he spluttered. ‘I mean, she’s gone away to stay. I heard.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Heard her saying to some friend of hers about going away for a week. When I was going to school. And,’ he gabbled once the necessity occurred to him, ‘taking her dog.’

His mother gazed at him for so long he thought his haste had betrayed him. ‘Peculiar nobody at the Bingo said,’ she eventually revealed herself to have been thinking. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you like my stew any more? It’s the same stew you’ve always had.’

That aggravated his sudden fear of how the food might taste if he even thought of words for it. ‘I’m a bit sick,’ he wailed.

‘Maybe he’d better go up and lie down,’ his father said.

‘He can have it tomorrow if you don’t finish it.’

Sylvester didn’t know which of them that was intended to threaten, but managed to stifle the idea of food as he hurried to his room – to his window. The house in the midst of the terrace opposite was unlit, and seemed to be holding itself still in anticipation of his voice. He eased the wobbly sash up and poked his head out to survey the deserted street, and drew a breath which tasted of the chilly night, and spoke. ‘Daoloth says you have to come out now, Old Bones That Crawl.’

In the white glare of the streetlamp the door of the house resembled the entrance to a tomb – a marble entrance which he realised he was dreading to see opened from within. When it appeared to shift, he thought that was because his eyes were nervous. Then the glare slid off the door as it faltered ajar, revealing darkness and a dim shape that was hunched within it. Just as he guessed that the door was moving awkwardly because its opener was, the tenant of the house sidled into the pitiless light, and Sylvester saw its difficulty in managing so many limbs. It raised its face, or more accurately the front of its head, towards him, and he ground his elbows against the windowsill as if the pain could anchor him in the world whose reality he used to take for granted. Then the misshapen figure robbed of flesh crouched even lower, veiling its head with the material that sprouted from it, and scuttled into the concealment of the garden wall. The hedge between the wall and the house quivered, and Sylvester understood that the thing had writhed through.

He wanted to see where it went and what it did. It couldn’t touch him or come closer than he liked if he told it Daoloth said not to; in any case, it seemed anxious to conceal itself from view. He leaned on the sash to lower it and rubbed his bruised elbows; then, pausing only to hide the book in his bed and grab a jacket, he tiptoed quickly downstairs. He might as well not have bothered with stealth, since as he reached the hall his mother turned from pegging her rubber gloves above the gargling kitchen sink. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Out.’

‘I can see that all by myself. I thought you were meant to be ill.’

‘I’m better,’ Sylvester said, and felt it – no longer needing to eat, filled up and energised by the words from the book.

‘Your mother still wants to know where you’re going,’ his father said, draping a dish-towel next to the gloves.

‘To see –’ Sylvester was suddenly afraid that if he didn’t escape at once he would give in to the temptation to release himself by using his secret on his parents, not least because their banality felt like a weight they were loading onto his head. ‘To see Arn and them,’ he blurted.

‘Just you make sure you’re back by ten. By half past nine.’ As Sylvester sprinted for freedom, having agreed to both of her stipulations, he heard her say rather defensively ‘Fresh air ought to do him good if anything will.’

Sylvester dashed across the whitened glaring road and slammed the door of Miss Whittle’s house before anyone could wonder why it was open. His haste was such that only then did he think to peer at the hedge, beneath which he made out a dim twisted shape. By straining his eyes he was able to distinguish that it was a tangle of roots and branches which looked not unlike the object he was searching for. He raised his eyes to the rest of the blocks of stained marble foliage dividing the cramped gardens, and saw the farthest hedge shudder as though with loathing of whatever had just crawled through it. ‘I see you,’ he cried and ran to the corner.

Fewer houses were occupied in the cross street, which was even narrower than his. Some of the windows had been walled up, and quite a number of the cars parked on the pavement between the destroyed streetlamps looked abandoned. All the same, the street wasn’t as deserted as Sylvester would have wished. He was watching hedges twitch and creak one after the other along the left side of the road when the three boys emerged jostling and yelling from Bruce’s house on the right. They saw Sylvester, but not the surreptitious activity that had passed beyond them. ‘Look who it isn’t,’ Denzil shouted.

‘It isn’t Sylly,’ Bruce agreed, and looked to Arnold to top his wit, which Arnold did: ‘It’s Building Plot For Sale.’

‘Read us something if you’re not Sylly,’ Bruce yelled, raising his fists while he scowled around him in search of an appropriate task for Sylvester.

‘Read us that,’ said Denzil, jabbing a finger at the plaque on the wall at the alley entrance halfway down the street.

‘You heard, let’s see you read it,’ Arnold said and rubbed his scalp as if to increase its baldness.

Sylvester was tired of skulking inside himself and besides, he needed to distract them from the movements that had nearly reached the alley. ‘It says DOMESTIC ACCESS ONLY and NO CYCLING OR TIPPING.’

‘Does not,’ Denzil scoffed, then jerked his finger along the first line of the plaque across the street, and frowned hard. ‘Doesn’t, does it?’

‘If it does someone told him,’ Bruce said, readying his fists for the culprit.

‘This time you just tell us who did,’ Arnold warned Sylvester, and led the advance towards him.

Sylvester glimpsed movement in the nearer of the gardens bordering the alley – a shape that clambered rapidly over the low wall between the garden and its neighbour and huddled in the shadows, awaiting its chance. ‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘I read it myself.’

By the time the others had done jeering at him they were around him, so that he could smell their sweat and their breaths. Arnold took hold of his left upper arm and began to roll the flesh and muscles of it in his grip. ‘Thinks we’re stupid.’

‘Stupid like him,’ said Denzil, and poked him in the chest.

‘Must be stupid to think that,’ Bruce said, and was in the process of selecting which area of him to punch first when there was a clatter in the alley, and a dustbin fell out, spilling its meagre contents. ‘Hey,’ Bruce threatened, spinning round so fast that he almost punched Arnold.

‘Cat,’ said Denzil, though his finger seemed less sure of it.

‘Dog,’ Arnold said without looking, and intensified his treatment of Sylvester’s arm.

Sylvester kept his gaze on the passage leading to the dark between the back yards. ‘Wasn’t either.’

‘Who says?’ Arnold demanded, and when that produced no response, pinched Sylvester’s muscle. ‘What was it then, eh, Sylly?’

‘Ow. Something you’d be scared of.’

‘Me, right.’ Arnold let go in order to rub his scalp, kindling the glower in his eyes. ‘Like you were scared to go in the house up the hill. You’ll be dead before you see me scared.’

‘Go on then, go and look.’

‘Right, so you can get away.’ Arnold grabbed his arm again, but only while he said ‘You two hold him and I’ll look. And tell him he’d better be scared of me when I come back.’

‘You’d better be scared,’ said Bruce, having seized Sylvester’s bruised arm, and dug his knuckles into it. Denzil contented himself with digging Sylvester in various ribs. The boy succeeded in ignoring the discomfort, which after all would soon be over. He watched as Arnold stalked into the passage and stared both ways into the dark at the end. ‘Can’t see a thing,’ Arnold declared.

It would try to hide from him unless it was called, Sylvester realised. ‘Daoloth says go to him, Old Bones That Crawl.’

Denzil pointed violently at him. ‘What’d he say?’

‘Sounded like he was telling something something,’ Bruce said, and shoved his face at Sylvester. Before he could enact the proffered butt, Arnold disappeared into the alley. ‘Hang on, there’s …’

Sylvester couldn’t quite contain a grin. Denzil stared at it, then at the entrance to the alley. ‘What’s he done?’ he muttered, and raised his voice. ‘Arn, wait. He –’

Arnold’s response, or at least the noise he uttered, cut him off. It sounded as though Arnold was trying to scream while being sick. Deeply satisfying though Sylvester found it, he couldn’t have it attracting attention. ‘Daoloth says you’re not Arn now,’ he murmured. ‘Daoloth says you’re Scalp For A Face.’

He felt the world twist a little more, and his mind too. Arnold’s noise ceased instantly as if a gag had been applied to its source. Denzil was at the mouth of the passage, having shouted to Arnold that he was coming. He wavered there and glanced back furiously at the other boys, and fished in the air for them with his finger as he dared another step. It was time, thought Sylvester, to continue what he’d started. ‘Daoloth says stop being Denzil, Worms For Bones.’

He didn’t see the result – he was busy dodging a punch Bruce threw at him – but Bruce did. His face clenched like a fist, then opened to release a howl as Bruce fled along the street, waving his splayed fingers to ward off everything around him. Sylvester let him almost reach the crossroads before addressing him. ‘Daoloth says goodbye to Bruce and hello to Living Inside Out.’

He had to look away at once, and to turn his back as he heard the new thing flounder through the shadows of the walls to join its companions. The sounds they made in the alley, blundering and slithering and slopping about, were enough for now, in fact rather too much before long. ‘Daoloth says go to the house on the hill where the book was,’ he called. ‘Daoloth says not to let anyone see you and when you get there go under the floor.’

He was able to bear the ungainly confusion of their retreat. Quite soon with distance they sounded more like insects than anything else remotely familiar, and then they were gone. He’d done enough for one night. Tomorrow he would go to the twisted house and call them out and have some fun. As he turned homeward, it occurred to him that he mightn’t live there for much longer. Perhaps soon he would know, and call himself by, his name.

End.

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes him as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. PS Publishing recently brought out Phantasmagorical Stories, a sixty-year retrospective of his short fiction. His latest novel is Somebody’s Voice from Flame Tree Press, who are in the process of publishing his Brichester Mythos trilogy.

Squid Nose

By J.B. Kish

“What’s worse than the worst video game ever created? The BETA version of the worst video game ever created…AND I’VE GOT IT! Tune into my #livestream now and let’s see if we can identify where it all went wrong. I’ll see YOU in the catacombs!”

Ashley’s tweet whistled out the door and he nervously chewed his fingernails.

One like.

Twelve likes.

Seventy likes. His phone coughed to life as a once loyal fanbase returned from the dead. He’d nearly forgotten how good this felt. Invigorated, Ashley spun up his stream and pinned a comment atop the chat:

“Contacted about private storage auction of Saul Summer’s personal possessions. Included disc titled: Chanting Catacombs - SCRAPPED BETA. DO NOT SHIP.”

Within seconds, the chat flooded with typical internet fodder:

Bullshit! Ashley is a #Squidnose!

Yaaas! Chanting Catacombs was an EPIC FAIL!

Made your career talking trash…Integrity much?

That last one stung. True, Ashley had made a modest living vlogging about Catacombs, but Saul Summer was the greatest video game developer in history. It wasn’t Ashley’s fault Saul admitted to being a reformed occultist days before releasing the worst game of all time. That kind of surreal PR lends itself to criticism. Not to mention that, to his dying day, Saul Summer insisted the launched version of Catacombs was “code complete,” which was sort of like arguing a bag full of groceries is a sandwich. Ashley yearned to understand the man’s rationale, and he considered it his consumer right to livestream whatever disfigured brainchild was on that disc. Any viewers gained along the way was a perk.

“Welcome back, everyone.” Ashley grinned into the camera. His face was bathed in the emerald glow of the Catacombs load screen. “I’ve missed you.”

Inhaling deeply, he started a one player game and prepared to wade through a rotten swamp of cringeworthy code. Instead, he watched as a dungeon loaded that was a near-pristine assembly of 90s-era polygons. His skin prickled and the smile slipped from his face. On screen, a familiar bat dove for his character and leeched three life. Ashley hurriedly killed it with a torch, but not before losing a stamina potion.

That couldn’t be right.

The bat never attacked.

Abruptly, an unfamiliar line of text appeared on the screen. “Bring congregation…”

As his view-count topped three hundred, Ashley took a few timid steps down an opulent corridor. His confusion only deepened. Where was Saul’s kludgy code? The broken sprites and incomplete level design? Where was the game awarded the internet’s Digital Rash ten years running? For five hours, Ashley navigated through a story so frightening and polished, it was nearly unrecognizable. Yet this was clearly Chanting Catacombs, or rather what Chanting Catacombs was meant to be. Directional lighting, balanced enemies, genuine fun; had Saul secretly finished the game?

The chat was explosive! Four-thousand new subscribers were losing their minds or bleating hoax. Ashley was getting cash offers for a copy, but he was too focused on reaching the final boss—a squid-nosed demon that was so broken at launch it became the internet’s go-to meme for describing something perfectly useless. It’s inability to actually do anything also meant no one had finished the game before, and Ashley was quickly realizing he was about to make history. He was going to reach the Catacombs end screen live!

Glistening with sweat, he stepped through a doorway and was transported. Instantly, Squid Nose was floating above him. Tendrils of smoke emanated from three bewitching eyes as he tracked Ashley left and right. His tentacled nostrils switched restlessly. The design was…breathtaking. He almost regretted taking a swipe at the demon, but Ashley wasn’t about to lose viewers now. He clicked his mouse. Nothing happened. “Wait,” he whispered, smashing it again, but suddenly the game was unresponsive. With a violent groan, he fell back into his chair. Then a line of text appeared on the screen. Ashley leaned forward and obediently read it aloud: “Bring offerings...?”

* * *

Ashley paid the clerk and climbed into his car with a loaf of bread. It just didn’t make any sense. Why would Saul scuttle his own game and publish a broken version? All he had to do was fix some bugs with the final boss. It was almost as if he was ashamed of what he’d created.

Back in his bedroom, Ashley unsleeved the bread and placed it in front of the demon. The monster nodded, its nasal pads expanding and contracting with pleasure. To Ashley’s surprise, nearly nine thousand people were posting their own images of bread in the chat.

Then Squid Nose spoke again. “Bring devotion.”

Ashley felt the blood drain from his face.

Then he slapped himself.

Photos appeared of viewers doing the same. New subscriptions rang out as Ashley slapped himself again, leaving a red print on his cheek. The demon seethed with approval.

Ashley was confused.

No one had analyzed Catacombs more than he had. Compared to the beta, what launched wasn’t just sloppy code. Saul must have intentionally regressed his work, created broken loops, dead ends. He had to have purposefully hacked Squid Nose into complete submission. Why? He was so close to perfection. Ashley slapped himself a third time. It actually hurt.

All the while, the demon pulsed with ecstasy. “Now,” it spoke, “bring sacrifice.”

Sacrifice! his viewers chanted.

Ashley wiped spittle from the corner of his mouth and tried to process what was happening. The game would have been an instant blockbuster, without a doubt. Millions of copies sold. Billions, even. Was Saul overwhelmed by his own creation? That kind of pressure could make anyone second guess themselves, Ashley supposed. It really was a magnificent game though. A mesmerizing final boss. All it needed was a proper ending.

Sacrifice, the chat demanded. Sacrifice!

With a sigh, Ashley wrote BRB and watched as nearly three-hundred thousand viewers typed the same. Then, holding his cheek, Ashley walked to the kitchen. He grabbed a knife, his jacket, and headed out into the night.

End.

Originally from the Southwest, J.B. Kish moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012. He is currently working on his second novel. Read his fiction in Metaphorosis Magazine and Unsettling Read’s Still of Winter Anthology.

A Star Eating Darkness

By Evelyn Freeling

Each time Gal closed her eyes, she heard in the bend of trees the creaking of a burdened noose, so she kept them open instead. She focused on the swaying night sky above her, the flitting tail of Scorpius, but out of habit her gaze drifted to the surrounding woods and the shadows which lurked beyond the first crooked, moss-drenched branches. Eating a palmful of magic mushrooms was a mistake, it turned the stark isolation of the cabin into a physical sensation, like a pair of cold fingers walking down her spine. But she was out here for her brother. Because he insisted they needed closure. Or, whatever.

“Can you sense Dad?” Kirk asked. He lay sprawled on the grass next to her, hands tucked under his head, eyes closed. “I think I feel him.”

Gal pursed her lips. Their dad would’ve clicked his tongue at Kirk and reminded him that humans were walking bags of decaying matter. Even if Dad had been wrong and humans did have souls, Gal doubted that Dad was the type to hang around. But they’d come because Kirk wanted closure, so she hummed, “Mmhmm. I think so.”

“Really?” Kirk examined her through a squint. She nodded and he sat up. “Do you think we should have, like, a seance or something?”

Gal laughed. “Why would we do that?”

“Because,” he said, voice softening. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

She sighed. “Knowing won’t bring him back.”

“Yeah but…” He turned to her, his blue eyes wet. “Dad didn’t say anything to you?”

Gal turned away, sickened by how Kirk’s eyes matched Dad’s exactly, especially when he cried. “No. We’ve been over this.”

“Not so much as a letter,” he murmured, voice hitching. “I’ve never understood that.”

Gal ignored him and clambered to her feet, the world spinning around her. She swayed and silently cursed ever agreeing to this private memorial. She didn’t even like shrooms. “All he cared about was work.” And his stupid society, she thought, unable to bear mentioning it aloud. She craned her head at the sky to blink back the tears heating her vision. “Do you see that?”

He stood. “What?”

“There,” she said, pointing and shaking her head in confusion. It was a clear summer night, not a clot of cloud anywhere to be seen, but where Scorpius should’ve been, where it was moments ago, there was now only darkness. Silence rippled around them as they stared.

“It’s just the shrooms,” Gal said, scanning for the bow and arrow of Libra, but they too were gone, a hole where the five stars should’ve been.

The bright blue star of Virgo glowed nearby. Gal rubbed her eyes. She could’ve sworn the blue light was flickering, a bulb losing its juice. Then, exactly like that, the star plunged out. She gasped and gripped her brother’s arm. One by one, the stars of Virgo disappeared, as though some cosmic darkness had awakened with a gnawing hunger and was gorging itself upon the night sky. They watched as the constellations Dad had spent summers burning into their memories blotted away, not so much as a trace left behind.

Kirk sprinted to the cabin. It was a derelict thing with wood siding dilapidated by time and rain so that the planks looked perpetually wet even after a hot day like this. On top of its roof was a massive satellite Dad had built himself. Gal was amazed it hadn’t yet brought the place down to its foundations. It had to weigh a ton, at least.

“Where are you going?” she shouted after Kirk, but he disappeared inside without an explanation and, moments later, reappeared with Dad’s telescope.

Kirk propped the telescope on its three legs and aimed its black eye at the spot where Virgo should’ve been. She waited for him to say something, anything, and hugged herself as a cold breeze picked up. The dry grass and pine needle forest rustled. Movement in the shadows caught her eye, but she glanced away as quickly as she had looked.

“Gal,” Kirk called, voice hitching. “You have to see this.”

She didn’t want to, but her feet carried her anyway. She squinted into the eyepiece, fingers barely touching the focusing knob as though it might burn. Up there in the black sheet of sky was a mass, a darker shade of darkness, amorphous and ever-shifting.

When she pulled away, every constellation had disappeared. Only the moon grinned down at them. Gal shivered. All alone, that smile looked sinister, knowing. A cheshire god. She glanced at her brother, hoping he might say something comforting or funny. Kirk had turned twenty not long ago, but now with his brow bent and lips puckered in drug-fueled fear, he looked like a boy again.

Gal wrapped her arm around him. Before she could reassure him once more that they were simply having a bad trip, he shook his head. “Galaxy, shrooms don’t make stars disappear.”

“Yeah, well, stars don’t just disappear.”

“Why not?” he asked, unblinking, pupils the size of dimes. “All we’re seeing is light from billions of miles away. For all we know, they’re all dead and…” He swallowed. “We just witnessed their deaths.”

“You’re suggesting that all of the stars in the entire universe died at approximately the same time,” she pointed out. “All of them, except our sun?”

He glanced at the moon, still reflecting the sun’s light at them. “At least not yet.”

He spun and raced back into the cabin, leaving her to chase. Gal hesitated, glancing again at the perimeter of the forest where shadows seemed to take shape. Six figures in hoods emerged from the trees. The drugs, she reasoned with herself. It had to be the drugs. There was nobody out here. They were thirty minutes from the nearest gas station.

Gal swallowed dryly and raced after Kirk. She found him bent over their old boxy television with an antenna set on top, muttering something about the news. Their dad never liked them watching TV when they came. What’s the point of a cabin if all you do is park your butts in front of that thing? The television was thanks to Mom.

She spun back to the open field and gasped. The figures were still there, stalking towards the cabin, dark silhouettes. She was sure she was imagining it, but closed the door and spun the deadbolt anyway.

The television buzzed to life, but instead of static, Dad filled the screen. His skin was almost gray and draped down his jowls in folds, cheeks sunken. His hair hung in his eyes, coils of brown grease. His face was covered in months old growth, but it was his eyes that made Gal’s stomach drop. Hollow, haunted, a pair of bottomless lakes. The eyes of a man who thought he had nothing to live for. How had she not seen it before?

“Hey kids,” he said. Hearing his voice after all those months liquified her knees. She fell, numb to the shock of the hardwood floors against her bones. Numb to everything but that gruff, scratchy tenor. “If you’re watching this, I’m sorry. There’s so much I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t know how. I’ve unleashed something that can’t be put back. All the destruction to unfold… It’s all my fault.” He sniffed, mouth trembling and tears streaming freely. “I want you to know I love you and if you want to understand, just remember: if you ever meet your antiself, don’t shake hands.”

The screen filled with static, the electric buzz loud and grating. A videotape ejected out of the player. Kirk turned the television off and for a long silence Gal watched him stare at his reflection in the darkened screen.

“Dad said that to me before. ‘I’ve unleashed something that can’t be put back.’ I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I always thought, if I had, that maybe—”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Gal said, firmly. “He was sick. And you’re his kid. It wasn’t your job. It was his job to help himself, to get treatment. He failed us.”

Kirk’s chin fell to his chest. “What did he mean ‘if you ever meet your antiself?’”

She clicked her tongue, annoyed that she knew. “It’s a reference to Stephen Hawking’s book. A Brief History of Time.” Kirk stared at her, eyes blank. “Didn’t Dad make you read it? I read it every summer in high school.”

Gal stood and wandered past the taupe couch, its cushions stained and flattened, to the overflowing bookshelf Dad had collected over the years. All of the shelves were stacks of organized chaos, books piled atop each other so that it would take forever to find anything, except for one shelf with a neat row. It was there she found the title, its spine new and without the creases she was sure she had worn into it over the years.

She pulled, but it snagged. She pulled again and the entire wall came with it.

“Wicked,” Kirk said.

Whatever lay beyond hid in shadows. The door ajar—any door ajar—transported her back to the day she had come to the cabin, nudged his bedroom door fully open, and found his lifeless body swinging from a light fixture.

Kirk marched past her into the dark. All was quiet for a too-long second. An ocean murmured in the whirling of blood between her ears.

Urine-yellow light leaked from a bare bulb overhead. Gal staggered in and spun a slow circle. Dad had curated a science-fiction movie set. Black paneled computers were stacked floor-to-ceiling along one wall, together bearing thousands of small square cut outs behind which emeralds and rubies winked. Next to it, Gal blinked back at herself. Grass braided into her blonde hair. A mirror, she realized, and next to it a coat rack from which draped a long black robe embroidered with strange symbols—the letter P but with jagged points, a triangle made of three diamonds, a half-circle with lines jutting out from the edges.

A table sat against another wall topped by four monitors, some sort of frequency machine with the same strange symbols written around the dials, and a printer with a long needle similar to ones Gal had seen on lie detector tests in films. All of them were powered off.

“What is it?” Kirk asked as she picked up the scroll of paper that hung from the printer in a long, curling tongue. Gal scanned the jagged black lines.

“Weird,” she said, tracing a finger over the peaks and valleys. He looked over her shoulder as she scanned. “It’s a radio satellite. The printer recorded the signals, but see how even the spikes are? The quiet between, they’re all exactly spaced apart and the signals…” She shook her head. “It’s like it’s a message.”

Kirk fingered a button on one of the monitors and they all burst to life. The room filled with a groan that sounded as though a hundred different people—no, not people, things—were howling from somewhere out in the deep of space. The needle on the printer sprung into action, scratching over the white tongue of paper. No longer were the patterns constant, measured, like a message being repeated again and again. The needle burst up and down in erratic explosions.

“Shut it off,” Gal cried, sweat beading on her brow.

Kirk punched the monitors back off. His voice a whisper, he asked, “What does it mean?”

“I… I don’t know. But something’s happening.”

Something about all of this unsettled her, snaking her organs into knots. She noticed for the first time a strange leatherbound book resting on the chair tucked under the table. Someone had carved the leather on the cover to look like a face, its mouth contorted with pain.

She flipped through the pages, past brutal drawings of bizarre creatures that twisted on the page, the shrooms bringing them to life—twirling tendrils of what looked like a mutant octopus, a pair of battered wings mid-flight bleeding down the page.

“This is a bad trip,” Kirk whined.

Gal nodded at the printer’s readings while she flipped through the book. “Radio satellites pick up electromagnetic radiation in space and transform the radiation into signals that we can hear. The printer was recording the events by the gigahertz.”

He stared at her with five blank eyes. She had been the one who wanted to be a rocket scientist as a kid. Just like Daddy. Gal could practically hear her ten-year-old self saying it.

“Nuclear bombs emit almost two hundred and fifty megahertz of radiation when they detonate. I don’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, it’s at least four times more powerful,” she explained.

“What could do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “A sun going supernova, maybe. Or annihilation.”

“Annihilation?”

“Antimatter and matter collisions.”

And as though he was reading her mind, he murmured, “If you ever meet your antiself, don’t shake hands. Do you think any of this has to do with Dad’s society?”

Gal flinched at the mention. The society had been the catalyst that destroyed their parents’ marriage. Dad had become obsessed, attending secret meetings and refusing to speak of them or what they did. At first, Mom thought he was cheating on her. That probably would’ve been an easier problem to solve. In truth, they still to this day didn’t understand what had happened, only that he threw his life away for the society—his career, his family, himself.

Mom had tried to reason with him, to get him help for what she thought was a descent into mental illness. At his funeral, it was just the three of them and a few of his old co-workers. Not one member of his “society” had bothered.

Gal stopped. At the very end of the book was an illustration—a charcoal cloud, smudged by fingers—and beneath the cloud in Dad’s handwriting, it read THE STAR EATER. The next pages were filled with tables of electromagnetic radiation readings, frequencies, measurements of photons, and strange symbols that looked sort of like runes, including the ones on the frequency machine. Dad had written a line of them—the triangle, the P, a circle with a dot in the center, the open circle with lines.

Gal set the book on the table and thumbed the frequency machine power button. She spun the dial in the same order that Dad had written the four symbols in and waited. Nothing seemed to happen. She stepped back and glanced at Kirk. He was still, staring at her. Too still, she realized.

She glanced up. Above the monitors was a clock. The second hand stuttered, fighting to tick forward. Something caught Gal’s eye, movement in the full length mirror that hung on the wall. It was her as a girl, thirteen or fourteen by the pink streaks in her blonde hair, two years before Dad had joined his society and recluded to this cabin to be seen by Gal and Kirk only a few weeks each summer.

Thirteen-year-old Gal stood bent over a tall glass of water. Now Gal glanced from the mirror to the table and there the glass was, where it wasn’t only a second ago, empty. Water pooled from the bottom, rose fast and furious then stopped just before spilling over. The surface rippled in reverse, moving inward and disappearing at the center. Dad’s voice echoed, in her head or in the room she couldn’t be certain.

“Time is in entropy,” he explained and she could still remember that day. “The big bang sent out matter, which formed and continues to form every possible variation of matter’s existence: suns, planets, and moons. Life. As time continues forward, the universe necessarily becomes more diverse. Every new variation has its own ripple effect. Diversity is chaos, it leads to greater unpredictability. That is the essence of entropy. Understand?”

Gal turned to her brother in search of a sign that he was hearing this too, but he was still frozen in place, eyes oozing down his face like a pair of undercooked eggs, skin dripping from his cheeks and splattering to the floor in waxy globs.

Dad’s voice slurred. The words no longer made any sense in the air but instead formed meaning inside her head. In an antimatter universe, time is in negentropy. Everything is moving from chaos towards order. Instead of a big bang, where matter is scattered across an infinite universe, sent out to form into the infinite variations that can possibly exist, matter collects at a singular point, forming into greater and greater homogeneity.

The second hand spun counterclockwise circles. Gal’s legs felt weak. Kirk’s melted skin defied gravity, flying up from its spots on the floor back to his face, eyes back into his sockets. He walked backwards, out the door they entered through. Faster and faster, the second hand spun. Gal’s head ached, she tried to clutch it, tried to collapse to her knees, but invisible forces pinned her in place.

That cosmic groaning filled her skull, reverberated in her bones, and she gasped. There was Dad sitting at his desk. Sweat beaded his gray skin and was reabsorbed by his pores. He fiddled the dials of the frequency machine with its strange shapes and symbols, the angular P, the triangle made of three diamonds. The needle of the printer scratched away, erasing the black ink as the paper re-furled. The black speakers trembled, words forming from the myriad howling voices, Star. Eater. Brings...

Something darted in the tail of her eye, but still Gal couldn’t move. She could only swivel her eyes, use her peripheries to see and, fuck, how she wished she hadn’t. Her thirteen-year-old self faced the mirror—eyes a pair of black canvases, tar running down her cheeks. Her mouth unhinged and black mist poured out until it swallowed her whole. A pink shock of electricity erupted from inside the cloud and disappeared, then a yellow, a green, each one bursting to life then dying.

Or…der… The voices whispered in her head.

Gal fought against the gravity that glued her in place. Fire-hot pain licked up her muscles. She moved centimeter by centimeter, body screaming, reaching for the frequency machine for what felt like eons. Finally, she thumbed the machine off and time came slamming back. She fell to her knees. Sweat slicked her face, dripping from her chin fat as raindrops. Something squeezed her shoulder, shook.

“Galaxy,” Kirk’s voice said, sounding faraway, as if he was still tucked in some other dimension of space and time. “Galaxy.”

Her head was filled with helium. She held onto it so it wouldn’t float away. “Get… me out… of here,” she murmured, tongue heavy and coarse with sand.

Kirk draped her over his shoulder and grabbed the leatherbound book. “What happened? You were totally out of it.”

He set her on the couch, placed the book in her lap. The television lit up. Kirk played with the antennas as he flipped through the channels until one connected. A news anchor sat, skin turned to stone, the banner underneath a crimson alarm: ASTRONOMERS REPORT SUNS DISAPPEARING FROM THE UNIVERSE. MILKY WAY ALONE?

The possibility that they were the last solar system left in the universe made Gal’s throat ache. She remembered the night she lay in the grass field by their cabin, staring up at the constellations, and understood for the first time that the balls of gas she peered at were suns with planets rotating around them. And probably, she believed, somewhere on one of those planets was a little being, completely unlike her in every way except that they too were laying on the floor of their planet, looking at their sky, wondering if anyone was looking back.

Gal flipped to the last page. Swirling over the top was Dad’s handwriting. She squinted, trying to get it to stay in place. For every particle there is an antiparticle. For every big bang, there is a great vanishing. The Star Eater awakens.

And at the bottom: I’m so sorry.

Gal slammed the book shut. Dad was a scientist, an atheist. He believed humans were walking bags of decaying matter, that there were no gods or souls, only matter and energy.

“What?” Kirk asked.

Once or twice Dad had suggested that the universe would be better off without humanity, but never did that mean he would do something about it.

She swallowed and rose, fear filling her with new strength. The book fell to the floor with a clunk. Her knees wobbled as she moved to the window and pressed her face to it, cupping her eyes. The moon had disappeared.

“Some kind of antimatter lifeform sent those signals. And Dad sent signals back.”

“Like, he was talking with whatever’s out there?” Kirk asked. “That’s crazy. Dad wouldn’t kill himself and leave us to deal with this. He… No.”

Kirk trailed off, shaking his head.

“We wanted to know what happened.”

Knock knock knock.

Gal shuddered, gaze turning from the blank sky to the field where half a dozen hooded silhouettes stood. Two more loomed on the porch. “Don’t!” she shouted, too late.

Kirk threw the door open. “What do…”

He trailed off. Gal hurried to his side. The two figures before them had their heads bowed so the hoods of their robes—the same ones that hung in Dad’s lab—cast shadows over their faces. Together, they peeled their hoods away and lifted their chins, revealing a pair of too-big grins.

It was like looking into a mirror, the semblances were so exact, except the versions of Gal and Kirk that stood before them had black holes for eyes. They each reached out a hand, then the sky filled with a hot, blinding light.

End.

Evelyn Freeling is an author of speculative fiction with short stories published and forthcoming from The Arcanist, Tales to Terrify, and Dark Void Magazine. She’s an associate editor for Haven Spec magazine and resides in Dubai with her husband and toddler. You can find her at www.evelynfreeling.com or through her Twitter handle @Evelyn_Freeling.

Anachronisms

By Íde Hennessy

Every January, I stayed up late, watching for weird transactions in the crypto markets while the East Coast slept. It was a little after ten here in northern California, usually prime time for the AI-coordinated pump and dump parties I don’t get invited to. Millions of dollars in tokens flowed back and forth in quick bursts on my hover screen, flashes of Christmas light red and green mirrored by the raggedy tree we still had lit up in the corner.

If I let my gaze unfocus, I could start to pick up panic amid the automated buys and sells—the sour scent of uncertainty, faraway fingers trembling over touchscreens. A hint of a real person here and there, making a decision in the moment. They were in the minority these days, making my skills as archaic as proper spelling, but there were no real jobs out there for people like me. It was either put on a velvet turban and pretend to read palms via video chat, collect disability for my other rare “disorder,” or work for myself pushing tokenized carbon credits around.

My boyfriend Owen, who was gently snoring next to me on the couch, had a sensible job. People needed him, more than ever, to install and repair air conditioners as SoCal weather crept its way up to the Bay.

I took a sip of lukewarm coffee as the price of kolcoin dropped one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, far too quickly. Time to check the BBC, just in case there was some rational explanation for this as people on the day-lit side of the Earth looked at their phones. I sensed nothing out of the ordinary tonight, but I didn’t entirely trust my senses. Trusting one’s senses, my mother had told me cryptically one day when I was five, was a sure way to end up in a mental ward. “In this house, we trust science,” she liked to remind us, in defiance of mamó’s Old-World, New Age beliefs.

As I scrolled through news that was no worse than usual—unemployment, floods, transhumanist cults, celebrity scandals—I sank further into the plump brown sectional that took up most of the room. When my weight shifted unexpectedly to one side, I glanced up to see that Owen had lunged off the couch and staggered forward. He was going for the big bay window this time, but all the windows in the house had been painted shut by some previous owner, most likely trying to keep out the drafts these Victorians were infamous for.

“Owen! Wake up!” I knew as I said it that it was more for myself than for him, like yelling at a moth to get away from a lamp. He swung around at my shouting, but his eyes were still unnaturally blue, the pupils just a pinpoint. Against that strange turquoise shade, the whites of his eyes looked so red and tired.

“You’re asleep,” I said. “Go up to bed.”

He tucked his chin back and made a small scoffing sound. The cracked, bleeding hands he was too stubborn to put lotion on twitched at his sides. “I was just going to measure—”

“You’re not at work, you’re at home, and that window doesn’t open.” I looked back at my screen just in time to see a thirty-nine kolcoin sale flash past in danger red. Goddamn bots.

Owen wandered to the front door and opened that instead, letting in the thick drumming sound of the rain and letting out the cat, who took the gleeful opportunity to dash between his legs. For a cat who had adopted us and not the other way around, she spent a surprising amount of time trying to escape to the streets of San Francisco again. “Why do we keep you around,” I’d often ask as she pawed at the blinds, smacked the chihuabot we’d paid hundreds for, or yowled the plaintive song of her people at five am. “Even more useless than I am, aren’t you?”

“Dammit.” I tried to unfold myself to get up, but I’d stayed in one position a little too long. Why was it called pins and needles when it felt more like tiny jolts of electricity, an invisible Dr. Frankenstein bringing my leg back to life?

Chico the chihuabot sat up next to me, gently picked up my wrist in his mouth, and released it. “Ninety over fifty-four. Drink water,” he said cheerfully, wagging his tail.

“Shut up, Chico. Other way, Owen. Go up to bed.”

“I’m just gonna pee first.” I dreaded these words, but Owen shuffled off in the right direction this time down the hall, and I could hear the door to the bathroom close behind him. I’m pretty sure he once used the cat’s litter box.

I knew after years of living together there was no use in trying to wake Owen—I could only guide him through the house. Sometimes I envied him, as a light sleeper, but more often I was fascinated by our differences. His problem was that his body wouldn’t sleep—a hazard of productivity implants—and mine was that my mind wouldn’t. Several nights a week I would find myself awake, wandering through strangely vivid landscapes that didn’t exist.

The night before, I’d been at some kind of seaside festival in a vaguely foreign country. Good-looking young people brushed past me on cobblestones towards a stage where a band was setting up. I flinched instinctively at their touch, but the lack of pain from being jostled made me realize I was dreaming.

Why a festival? I hated festivals. The careless crowds, the retro fringe and flower crowns, the thirty-dollar bottles of water, the lines for steaming outhouses. I hadn’t been to one in years, on purpose.

Besides the usual annoyances, I knew there would be danger for me there. Small, shifting shapes would start to form in the shadows, anywhere I stayed too long. I had come to understand it as sending out some accidental signal, when I realized I was dreaming, to others who were able to do the same. Some were “helpers,” and others I couldn’t describe—nor did I want to be able to.

My hearing was still in that murky dream state in which sounds near and far fused together in a thick soup of noise, but I was able to determine that what I had thought was a foreign language was merely Australian accents. “I guess that explains why it’s summer,” I said aloud to no one in particular.

An older woman in white linen walked past me, and something about her made me follow her towards the stage despite my even greater fear of getting trapped in the audience, forced to listen to whatever people in their twenties were listening to now. As I weaved past a group of pushy teens to catch up, I saw it—a large scar splitting her ear, her fluffy gray hair tucked behind it. Imperfection.

“How do I wake up?” I blurted out, ignoring the amused snorts of everyone in earshot.

She jumped a little at the question, and I could feel my face reddening. I’d made a mistake. The other people around me shook their heads in wonder at my sanity and continued on their way. I don’t know why I cared—they were all imaginary. Like being embarrassed by an AI opponent in a chess app.

The woman I’d accosted hung back with me and watched the stage, or was she looking under it? There were hints of movement in the patches where the sun couldn’t reach, black cobblestones bubbling to life behind a tangle of aluminum crossbeams. Like beads of ink blistering to the surface and spreading into restless pools. The hair on my arms started to prick up despite the sticky warmth of the bodies pressed around me. Soon the shadow things would start to emerge from those oily pools.

A whisper in my ear made me stumble backwards and nearly lose my balance.

“You spotted me, banfháidh,” the scarred woman said, amber eyes laughing, and there was something familiar and reassuring about her then. “But I can’t tell you how to wake up.”

Luckily, I didn’t need her to, because I’d been woken shortly by ten pounds of cat launching off my stomach onto the nightstand.

* * *

When Owen finally stumbled up the stairs, I waited for the creak of the bedroom door. Satisfied he hadn’t gotten stuck in the closet, I was about to get back to work when the frantic meowing at the back door began.

I stood up too quickly, seeing static, and Chico barked a warning. “Sit!” he said, “Remember to get up slowly. Hold onto handrails.”

I managed to half-limp to the back of the house, steadying myself with the tall wainscoting in the hallway, which was desperately in need of a duster. A familiar guilt twisted its way through me, that we’d let this grand “fixer” crumble around us, cobwebs in every corner accusing that we kept ourselves too busy to restore it. That I’d grown too frail and Owen too exhausted to live up to youthful ambitions.

It was one of the few old houses on our street that hadn’t been bulldozed yet. We had been closed in on all sides by those 3D-printed faux stucco boxes that were impervious to human intruders, but with windows too small to keep the coastal mold from creeping in. Our house was all unnecessary angles, unfashionable colors, and strange sounds in the walls at night, but from sunrise to sunset it was bathed in a soft light that infused itself into every corner when the blinds were up. They truly didn’t make them like this anymore.

“For the current weather outside, a light raincoat is recommended.” Chico had followed me to the back door, tail wagging furiously. I gently kicked him aside, now that my legs had regained enough feeling to do so. And then I froze. There was something here that didn’t belong. Something that could harm me.

The narrow kitchen and its eternally half-finished tile counters looked the same as it had an hour ago. Take-out boxes were still lined up on the vintage stove we’d never hooked up, the calendar on the wall was still a month behind. I tried to convince myself I had imagined whatever was causing the lump in my throat.

As I opened the back door and stepped out onto the covered porch, my foot in its thin sock landed next to something wet and warm. Shuddering, I sprang back and fumbled for the light switch. I regretted it immediately.

Inches away, on the doormat, I was confronted with what must have been the most enormous black rat that had walked the earth since humans began to paint what they hunted on cave walls. There was no visible blood on the fur of this Jurassic horror, but it was gasping for air, its round eyes bulging. Its greasy belly covered the entire doormat, its tail dangling off the top step. Paws like tiny, narrow hands grasped at me while its heart visibly fluttered in its chest.

I knew it most likely had only moments left, so not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a soft rag from the laundry basket and placed it like a little blanket on the rodent.

“For the current weather outside, a light raincoat is recommended,” Chico repeated.

The thought briefly crossed my mind that I should get my phone and take a photo, because no one would otherwise believe me about the size of this rat. But I knew that I couldn’t. There was something powerful—primeval—about this creature in front of me. I thought about how much respect this rat must command among other rats, about how ancient it must be to have reached such a size. To take a photo seemed disrespectful. To speak of it seemed disrespectful. I wouldn’t tell anyone but Owen, as I hadn’t told anyone else about my intuitions and dreams.

I wondered if I should leave the light on for the creature in its final moments, or turn it off. Which is worse to a rat—the harsh fluorescence, or being alone in the dark? Its eyes were an all-encompassing, liquid black, the opposite of my boyfriend’s pale eyes when he walks in this world but sees in another. Hand frozen on the light switch, I couldn’t turn away.

I saw the rat crawling through stone-paved Roman sewers, climbing over swollen bodies in plague pits, lunging at a woman in puffed sleeves and bustle where I stood right now. I saw the crumbled structures of this city, overrun with coils of bindweed. Rats everywhere.

“Market alert!” Chico barked, and I tore my gaze away. I had spent a lot for that mod, and now I was relieved to hear it for once. “Flash crash and recovery as Anachronisma bomb plot foiled at Sydney concert.” He cocked his head. “Would you like me to read more?”

Australia. The stage, I thought with a shiver. “Chico. Who is Anachronisma?”

“Summary downloading. Formed six years ago as a splinter group of the Countdown Cult, Anachronisma members believe that the Singularity has already happened and that humans are irrelevant. They interpret data from randomized bots as the word of their god.”

Something brushed against my leg and I banged my hip on the stove, then let out a deep breath as I saw that the cat had slipped back inside. Her soft gray fur was glittering with rain. She had the chin of a little lioness, which she rubbed against my calf possessively, but she was no bigger than the now-dead rat she’d brought us.

I’d read somewhere that cats bring us injured prey to try to teach us to hunt. As if we’re big, naked kittens who don’t know the ways of the world yet. Maybe we don’t.

“I don’t need any giant rats, cat.” Grateful for her company anyways as the significance of the headline sank in, I bent down to scratch her chin, but pulled my hand back when I saw her ear. The cartilage was split and curled backwards near the base, dark and sticky with blood.

A word came back to me, what the scarred woman had called me in my dream. “Chico, what is banfháidh?”

“Banfháidh. Noun. Irish.” Chico pranced from paw to paw, looking pleased. “A female seer or sage. Cunningwoman. Witch.”

I looked back at the cat. Her amber eyes met mine, and in her widening pupils I saw shadows assemble on cobblestones. The gathering Darkness. Rats. Unknowable old gods and uncaring new ones. Things that could take on many forms, gnawing away at the edges of civilization.

Things my mother’s mother had warned me about so long ago.

I decided to finally name her then, my little gray huntress, knowing the name would come to me in a dream. I never asked her again why we kept her around.

End.

Íde Hennessy lives in the beautiful, post-apocalyptic wasteland of Northern California, with her partner and three special needs cats who can see ghosts. She occasionally writes lyrics for and performs with a sci-fi-themed synthwave band. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @ahennessyVSOP.

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

- At the Bottom of the Burlap
- Slow Burn
- Stag In Winter
- Strange Blooms in the Sky
- The Other Names
- Squid Nose
- A Star Eating Darkness
- Anachronisms