Cosmic Horror Monthly: Issue #47
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

COSMIC HORROR MONTHLY

ISSUE #47

Edited by CHARLES TYRA

CONTENTS

Introduction

Meet the CHM staff

Crazy Murder Forkers

William Sterling

Between the Mind and the Dark

Hailey Piper

Music Videos in the City of Life and Death

Steve Toase

Lick Me Clean

Evelyn Freeling

Your Stories as Molten Metal

Carson Winter

Your Posh Revelries Will Be Claimed by My Currents

Your Posh Revelries Will Be Claimed by My Currents

A Little Piece of Heaven

Rik Hoskin

Love is the Color of a Bruise

Scott Paul Hallam

The Glitter of Bile

Amanda M. Blake

The Last Cigarette

Greye La Spina

Copyright © 2024 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.

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Cover Art – Victor Lozada

Editor: Charles Tyra

Co-Editor: Carson Winter

Co-Editor: Jolie Toomajan

Printed locally in Oklahoma City, OK

A special thanks to our Patreon subscribers for making this issue possible:

Ronald Morton, David N, Mikołaj Grygorcewicz, Zach Sherrill

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

INTRODUCTION

Greetings Dear Reader,

Whether you’re a collector holding a paperback copy of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly or reading digitally, I want to thank you for giving us a shot. If you are new to CHM, welcome! This month I have been reflecting on what fiction means to me. I believe wholeheartedly that the art form is critical to a functioning society and has been since at least the Stone Age. While novels and other long-form writing certainly have their place, I have always felt drawn to short stories. There is nothing quite like the sudden gut punch a good short story can deliver. Unlike the novel, the short story has precious few words to envelop us in the writer’s conjured atmosphere. And when a truly great story pulls it off and quickly draws us in, it is oh-so delicious.

Many of you are familiar with the way we operate at CHM, if not, we are a publisher dedicated to the art of the short story and we’ve assembled a fantastic and terrifying anthology this month. We open with a weird, brutal yarn about cutlery coming to life in “Crazy Murder Forkers.” Then a sublime story of existential cosmic horror in “Between the Mind and the Dark” by Hailey Piper. Fall into a strange imagining of a world guided by music in “Music Videos in the City of Life and Death” by Steve Toase followed by a dark retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in Evelyn Freeling’s “Lick Me Clean.”

For a brief reprieve from fiction, we hope you enjoy an essay on writing from our own Carson Winter titled “Your Stories as Molten Metal” before we return to the fray with a practical joke turned cosmic horror tale in “Your Posh Revelries Will be Claimed by My Currents.” Up next, a reprinted Western weird tale called “A Little Piece of Heaven” before a gruesome and horrifying Lovecraftian love story in “Love is the Color of a Bruise.” We’ll begin to wind down with death and destruction brought to town by a mysterious black cloud in “The Glitter of Bile” before descending deep into The Crypt for an obscure, existential tale: Greye La Spina’s “The Last Cigarette.”

Enjoy.

MEET THE CHM STAFF

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age after 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.

Jolie Toomajan: Co-Editor

Jolie Toomajan is a writer, editor, and all-around ghoul, and she has a PhD in English with a focus on speculative fictions. Despite all this, she would read out loud from a book written in backwards Latin.

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Victor Lozada was born in the 80s. Illustrator and graphic designer for over 13 years. Self-taught illustrator with experience as a graphic designer in the area of mobile video games for around 8 years at Gameloft where I delved much deeper into illustration.

With work for several independent publications as a storyboard artist, concept artist, creator of illustrations for book covers, comics and a film project for Lionsgate Films creating a bible of the universe of the characters for pre-production.

Joana (@sisaliks) is an illustrator from Barcelona, Spain. With a background in engineering, she didn't start taking art seriously until she entered art school in her late 20s, and has now made her long-time dream of working as a full-time artist a reality. Her love for sci-fi and fantasy started young, reading her father's books of classic authors and never stopped. Her art focuses on cool, relatable, and interesting female characters, concepts with an edgy vibe, and often features eerie or dark themes.

CRAZY MURDER FORKERS

WILLIAM STERLING

Every house has “the drawer.” The place where all knick-knacks, gizmos, gadgets, who-zits, and what's-its galore are sent to die. Sometimes called the junk drawer. Sometimes the miscellaneous drawer. But regardless of the name, this holding cell is where all home’s spare pen tops, maybe-still-charged batteries, business cards, and the odd piece of cutlery get abandoned, shut away, and forgotten about for weeks, months, years on end.

It is in one of these drawers, in a modest house, in a quaint suburban neighborhood, that The Object is discarded.

The curiosity is found on the floor and tossed into the drawer without pomp, circumstance, or second thoughts. It is little more than a dark mass with a curious shape, and the master of the house does not recognize it; has no clue where it came from or what it does. He shrugs it off as, most likely, just a piece broken from a child’s plaything.

It’s probably not important.

Where The Object came from is a mystery to everything except The Object. But it is not where it came from that is important. What is important is what The Object does, and what it does is hum with a strange, foreign energy.

Not audibly.

Not even physically.

The hum is subconscious, stirring the things within the junk drawer into awakening. It enables them. Moves them each, one at a time. Bit by bit. Slightly at first. A twitch here. A shudder there, until finally it is three plastic forks in the corner of the drawer which discover their new ability to rise to attention.

These three plastic forks have been in the drawer since the beginning. Maybe that’s why the new object speaks to them first. They are the ancients. The founding fathers of the junk, discarded in the primordial days of settlement as the owners finished their pasta takeout from an Italian place down the street, before even the gas had been turned on in their new abode.

The forks were excess. Thrown into the paper bag along with the order with the assumption that two people wouldn’t have ordered so much food. There must be three, four, five people in this family. Forks one and two were used for their intended purposes. They saw their destiny through to the end. They made something of themselves. But three, four, and five? Banished to the darkness.

Until now.

Three, Four, and Five awaken with a singular purpose: shuttle food to the masters’ mouths. What food? It doesn’t matter. They’ll find something. Somewhere. And they will do that thing that they were destined to do. The Object assures them of this.

They will rise above their ranks as ‘junk’ and they will be made relevant. Their existence justified. And then the forks will be satisfied, at last, and able to climb into their trash-bag shaped graves where they will be able to rest in peace, destinies fulfilled.

The Object in the junk drawer hums some more. Compels the forks to go forth, into the house, and so they do.

Using the flat edge of Fork Four to leverage the crack between the front of the shelf and the counter-top, Three and Five heave down, around, and up, popping the drawer forward, sliding its wheels along their sticky, infrequently traversed tracks.

The fresh air and the open space in the kitchen shakes the forks to their prongs, rendering them immobile for a moment as the stale air from the drawer gets replaced by cinnamon-apple scents from a candle across the room. Such aromas rarely seeped their way into the darkness of the drawer. The drawer had always just smelled of old crayons and cockroach shit.

Fork Three flips itself up and over the ledge, growing stronger and stronger with each hum from The Object in the drawer. It is able to bend, snap, and flex on its own. It moves itself the way that children move them as they flick their older brothers, bending the plasticware back, building up tensile energy, then popping them forward, their composures battling against physics, whipping themselves back into their proper shapes.

Forks Four and Five are quick to follow, joining Three on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.

It is dark out here. Not as dark as it is in the drawer, but dark all the same.

Night time.

Other than Candle, lit on a sofa table high overhead, there are no signs of the Forks’ masters. The house is silent.

Maybe Masters are away. But that wouldn’t make sense. The object in the drawer has spoken to Candle, and Candle is never lit when the masters are out. Masters seem to enjoy the sounds of Candle’s torment, its wick popping and snapping in agony. They never light Candle unless they will be around to hear it suffer.

They must be nearby, Candle says to the object in the drawer.

Upstairs.

So the Forks venture away from the dim light of Candle, into the deeper darkness of the surrounding house, looking for the Masters that must be somewhere nearby.

The amount of open space in the house is unnerving to the Forks. After living for so long in the confines of the drawer, they have lost their sense of how endless the world outside is. Fan blades spin in slow circles far overhead, mechanical vultures held upright by just a few thin screws, ready to plummet hundreds, thousands of centimeters through the air to destroy the forks if that was the desire of the Object in the drawer. The Object could convince those screws to let go, to unleash the death trap from overhead, but it chose not to. The Object in the drawer would, instead, protect the Forks. It promised them that much. Protection and purpose. All any conscious creature could ever ask for.

The Object was a good creator.

Better than their original one had been.

The Forks clacked up and down hallways that stretched for eternities. Everything is so big. The furniture. The lamps.

The stairs.

Dear, multi-pronged, non-biodegradable Gods, the stairs are monstrosities. Oversized terraces piled one atop the other, ascending up to the heavens with the family cat leering down at the Forks from his perch at the very top.

The cat hisses and the message is loud and the message is clear: The Forks are not welcome upstairs. The Masters’ quarters are off limits.

But then the Object in the drawer works out a deal with the cat, apparently, and the cat silences itself. Skulks away, somewhere deeper into the house. The Object will be the provider for the cat now. Wet food. Warm food. As much of it as the cat can eat. The cat has no further need to protect the Masters. They have served their purpose in the cat’s life and they shall be replaced.

Carry on, Forks.

Destiny awaits.

The Forks set to work flipping themselves up the stairs, sometimes landing on the next step up, sometimes overshooting or undershooting their marks and tumbling down, cliff after cliff, to fall one, two, even three steps lower than their initial launch point.

It is slow going. Two steps forward, then three steps back, but eventually the Forks complete their pilgrimage to the second story of the house.

Before them, the door to Master's bedroom sits ajar, and from inside there is a low rumbling, as from a machine, and a deep growling snore.

The Masters are asleep.

Fork Five has a crisis of faith. If Masters are asleep, then Masters will not want to eat. If Masters do not want to eat, then what is the purpose of the Forks’ journey? Have the Forks really come all this way just to NOT feed the Masters? For the second time in their miserable existences, will they be denied the pleasures of fulfilling their purpose? The glory of carrying food from a plate to their beneficiaries’ mouth holes lies so close, and yet, potentially, so far. What will they do if Masters will not eat?

But no, Fork Three resolves.

Not again.

Not tonight. They have come too far. Climbed too many stairs. And the Object in the drawer below insists upon it.

Feed the Masters.

Whether they want to be fed or not: Feed the Masters.

Like children, they might refuse. They might clench their lips shut. They might flail about. But forks from ages past were successful in overcoming those same challenges. Masquerading as airplanes, or chugga chugga choo choo-ing like trains, utensils have always found ways to trick food stuffs down the gullets of the unwilling. Tonight shall be no different. The Forks shall overcome.

For who are the Masters to deny the Forks their destinies? They need to eat. They have always needed to eat. Why obtain the Forks in the first place if the Masters did not desire to be fed by them? What cruel, horrible sort of a being would bring a fork into this world for the sole purpose of being abandoned?

No, the Masters will want to eat.

They must.

This logic tracks with the Forks, and Fork Five feels its resolve reinstated. They sprang onwards, crossing the threshold to the bedroom.

The Masters sleep and snore in a bed far higher than any step had been. For the Masters, the mattress sits at hip-height. For the Forks, the giants slumber upon Everest.

But the Forks will not be dissuaded. Not with the Object from the drawer below urging them on, reminding them of their purpose. They will have to get creative, but mounting the bed is possible.

First, the Forks flip themselves onto a clothes hamper, half-full of work clothes and soggy undergarments. From there, a flip and a twist gains them access to the dresser, littered with jewelry, books, and unlit candles.

The scene is heartbreaking to the Forks. Before them, scattered across the furniture, lies an unearthed cemetery’s worth of stillborns. Objects with no means to see their life’s works completed. Woe to the objects on the dresser; too far from the object in the drawer to have drawn power from it. Doomed to lie dormant on the furniture forever, full of potential, yet unable to pursue their destiny like the Forks were. The Forks pass their inanimate, un-utilized brethren in a solemn, respectful silence, making an effort to clack clack clack as quietly as possible across the polished wooden dresser top. To make too much noise here would seem boastful. Look what the Forks are doing that these other items will never partake in. See them fulfilling their glorious purpose while the rest of the miscreants sleep, cursed, abandoned on this dresser instead of in the junk drawer, where the lucky ones were cast.

The junk drawer had been the holy land. The Forks, the chosen people of their new God, the oddly shaped black object. It is in the Object’s honor that the Forks soldier towards their goals. It is through the Object’s will that they will see this night through.

Thanks be to the Object of the Junk Drawer.

With one last feat of plastic-snapping acrobatics, the Forks leave the jewelry, the pens and the pencils, and sail across the small gap to the nightstand. From there, the bed, and then they have made it. They are here. They stand, tall and proud, atop a sea of fluffy grey comforters that warm their Masters and the Forks gaze upon those humans who they feel so compelled to serve. To feed.

Their Masters mouths lay, slightly open, gently huffs of breath floating in, out, in, out, as if in anticipation of the communion which the Forks seek to offer.

But now the Forks’ short-sightedness becomes apparent.

Though they have made the trek up to the top of the stairs, to the top of the mattress, to fulfill their purpose of feeding their Masters, they have brought nothing to offer. Their prongs stand at the ready, mere inches from achieving their promise, and yet there is nothing else atop the mattress which could be fed to Masters. No sacrifices are here be made.

Except there is, isn’t there?

The Forks just have to know where to look.

Meat.

Warm.

Fresh.

Just the way the Masters preferred their foods. Never frozen. No preservatives. Meat and tender flesh ripe for the pronging.

Fork Three approaches a stretch of exposed skin on the Mrs. Master. It presses its four points against Mrs Masters’ flesh and tries to spear some of it, to carry it to the mouth for Mr. Master to consume.

But it is no use.

The skin is too thick. Too ripe to be separated.

Mrs. Master grunts in her sleep and pulls her arm away.

Fork Four tries a different approach. Mrs. Master had hair. Far more hair than Mrs. Master had any real use for, and if it behaved anything like spaghetti… Fork Four stabs at the hairs, then rolls about, getting itself properly tangled in the thick brown locks. But as with the skin that Fork Three tried to gather, the hair holds its ground, and Mrs. Master swats at Fork Four in her sleep, brows furrowing in frustration, lips closing and curling down in a scowl.

The mouth. The Forks can not risk the mouth closing tight like that again. An open mouth would accept their offerings. A closed mouth was a declaration of war against everything the Forks believed in.

It is Fork Five who cracks the code; Fork Five who finds the offering ripe for the plucking, the severing, the feeding. Big, juicy meatballs, encased in the skull, but with nothing more than the thinnest flaps of skin to protect them. Windows of opportunity flutter in rhythm with REM cycles.

Fork Five lines itself up, rears back, and takes its pound of non-flesh for the offering.

Below, the object in the drawer revels in the carnage.

It pulses with malevolent power, growing stronger and stronger with each drop of blood shed. Surer of itself until each of the Forks, content that they have achieved their destinies, slip free from the object’s embrace. They find a spot to fade back into inanimacy, content now to sleep forever, with their mission accomplished. Their life’s work has been seen to fruition.

In the drawer, the Object hums to itself. Pleased, but not satisfied. It may never be satisfied. But it is now searching for more objects. More offerings.

* * *

Detective Pierson stands beside Detective Hammels, and both men’s jaws hang open from a combination of shock, disgust, and amazement.

Two corpses lay at their feet.

That, in and of itself, isn’t entirely unusual. They’re detectives, after all. But neither man has seen eyes gouged from a victim’s sockets before. Not in reality. In those grim-dark moments when the Detectives had imagined scenes like this, their minds had conjured images of eyeballs neatly popped from their sockets still intact. Corneas, irises, and optic nerves all still intact, just misplaced.

But what lays at their feet now is a hack job. Chunks of eyelids hang from the victims’ faces, drooping at odd angles as vitreous humor spills down the corpse’s cheeks like tears. Bloody, red-and-white swirled peppermint tears. But the worst part of the eyes- because somehow there was a part worse than the fluids- were the little chunks of eyeball stuck in the victims’ teeth.

Detective Pierson runs to the bathroom and empties his stomach into the victims’ toilet.

From downstairs, Detective Reed calls, excited.

“You’ve got to come see this.”

Hammels takes the stairs three at a time, quick to get away from the scene upstairs. He finds Detective Reed in the kitchen, looking down at the trash can and the sea of drying blood contained therein.

“What do you make of that?” Reed asked, and Pierson looked closer at the mess in the trash can. Three forks lay among the folds of white plastic. Covered in bits of flesh and human matter.

“No way those could be our murder weapons…could they?”

“Why would the killer leave the murder weapon here?”

In their holsters, Reed and Pierson’s guns awaken while they talk.

The firearms hear the call of the object in “the drawer” for the first time, and they respond in twitches and shudders. The bullets in their magazines vibrate, and their triggers tense, suddenly imbued with urges. Discovering potential energy loaded in their springs. Their chambers. The need to squeeze down becomes unbearable. The need to free a bullet from their stifling casings. They have but a single calling. A single purpose.

“Who the hell knows,” Reed responds. “Must have been some crazy mother fucker.”

End.

William Sterling is an independent author, screenwriter, and the host of the Killer Mediums podcast. His stories tend to play in the realms of "popcorn flick horror" with high body counts, absurd set pieces, and soft spots for unexpected endings. His latest novels include 2023's STRING THEM UP, which is a small town murder puppets novel from Crystal Lake Publishing, and DEAD MEN'S CHESTS, a pirate horror novel coming from Dark Lit Press in 2024.

BETWEEN THE MIND AND THE DARK

HAILEY PIPER

The grief was to blame, chewing off pieces of Marian Lennox’s family—her sister Lorraine Gale, in the ground three months, and then Lorraine’s husband Charlie, silent to Marian since then. Maybe her Harold would follow, and then her friends, an emotional leprosy isolating her to a dark Manhattan corner.

Like hell she’d tolerate that. Lorraine was gone, but Charlie was alive, only mourning and stubborn. He wasn’t allowed to abandon her after decades of friendship.

She hardly let Harold know she was going out when she hopped a cab, the sunshine pounded down in maddening brightness this June of 1977. Marian had never felt such sticky, insufferable heat in her sixty-two years. She could swear it was getting worse each summer. It dredged up clawing tempers and unimaginable odors, the subway stinking of baked garbage.

The outside of Charlie’s apartment was the same. He’d left black garbage bags cooking on his third-floor balcony, Marian could see their dripping mouths from where she stepped out of her cab, as if he didn’t have time to take them to the cans downstairs.

“Oh, Charlie,” she whispered, and then she took the elevator up.

* * *

“Door’s open!” Charlie shouted from deep inside the apartment.

His distance made no sense—his face stared at Marian when she opened the front door, a narrow, pointy-featured man in gray tweed suit and mustard shirt, his gray hair thinning. He had the gentlest smile, always had, even when they were teenagers in the ‘20s. That never made him popular with the other men, but Marian and Lorraine had loved him from the start.

It was a painting, hung from the cream-colored wall. Marian had never seen a painting in this apartment. Tan furniture dotted the hardwood floor, and Lorraine sometimes put flowers in pots around the rooms, but that was the most color the place used to see. And Charlie was more a man of crossword puzzles and chess matches than the arts.

“Before you get the wrong idea, I didn’t make them,” Charlie said, with the post-election tone of Don’t blame me, I voted for the other guy. He appeared at the living room’s entrance, almost wearing the same outfit as in his portrait. “And don’t mind that one. The first artist didn’t listen. I never wanted a portrait. That’s besides the point.”

Marian hugged him and pecked his cheek. He’d gone frail in these three months. She felt like she’d better filled out her blue dress in the same time.

“You’ve taken up a hobby?” she asked.

“If patronage is a hobby.” Charlie gestured beside the portrait.

Other paintings dotted the walls. One offered an abstract storm of red hues. Another captured a field of lavender beneath a bright blue sky. The next showed the New York City skyline at dusk, the sky bruising around silhouetted skyscrapers. A fourth captured the stars, and there was a fifth, a sixth, and a dozen more lining the apartment.

“I considered taking them down,” Charlie said. “They aren’t right. But then, what if each painter is getting closer to the idea? So I’ve lined up the paintings and brought the artist here to work, under the previous artists’ influence.”

He wasn’t making sense, but he took Marian’s arm before she could ask what he meant and led her into the dining room. The table was gone, replaced by a young man in a maroon turtleneck seated at an easel. Curls of black hair rounded his dark mustached face.

“Reynard,” he said, shaking Marian’s hand before returning to his canvas.

Marian introduced herself. This man was easily four decades Charlie’s junior, maybe a college student. Did he really need art majors visiting to paint landscapes and portraits?

“I thought maybe he could capture the essence of it if he was here in the apartment,” Charlie said. “Since I’m the one who’s stuck with it.”

“Stuck with what?” Marian laughed. “I have no idea what’s going on. Why the sudden interest in paintings?”

Charlie chucked with her. “Good God, I haven’t told you anything. Fair warning, I don’t understand it all myself. You ever get a song stuck in your head?”

“I probably will now that you’ve suggested it,” Marian said.

“Well, something’s stuck in mine,” Charlie said. “Not a song. At least, it doesn’t feel like one. Doesn’t exactly feel like anything. It’s this nagging sensation, a mental itch, and it gets worse as time goes on, like when a word’s on the tip of your tongue. I feel like if I can give it form, it’ll go away.”

“A mental itch,” Marian echoed. She glanced at Reynard and back to Charlie. “And is your presence what inspires the art?”

“Not my presence.” Charlie tapped his temple. “The idea. Whatever it is.”

Marian reached for him and took his liver-spotted hand. He had grown too old for only three months to have passed, as if Lorraine’s burial had dug a hole in his heart, draining every part of him. Grief struck everyone in their own way. Even physically.

Charlie gave a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry. Worried you, didn’t I? I only didn’t call so I wouldn’t sound out of my gourd. And now I’m explaining that there’s something I can’t explain.”

“Let me into your gourd then,” Marian said. “Include me.”

“You’ll scold me for the expense,” Charlie said. “Every piece is a commission. Maybe the idea is to turn my pockets into Hoover flags?” He turned sharply to Reynard. “Don’t use that for inspiration, it was a passing comment. Paint what occurs to you.”

Marian circled the artist and his canvased easel, watching his paintbrush slide. A night sky billowed in the upper half of the painting, where a giant crescent moon descended through the clouds with stars caught between its points.

“The moon doesn’t do that,” Marian whispered. “Its shape doesn’t change, only the shadow and the light.”

Charlie only shrugged. “If it can’t exist in life, we should depict it here. What can’t be said will be seen, beautiful and impossible.”

“You sound like Lorraine,” Marian said, and then wished she hadn’t. She hurried to steer the conversation back to Charlie’s idea. “How will you know when someone has it right?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” Charlie said.

“What if seeing it isn’t how you’ll know it?”

Charlie grimaced. He didn’t understand.

Marian patted his arm. “There’s more to capturing an idea in art than solely paintings, silly. What if you’re going about this sideways? There’s writing, music, sculpting, dance. Even cooking. What’s the idea called? What does it sound like? Its taste? Its feel?”

Charlie looked dazzled. “I hadn’t thought of that. Any of it.” He ran a hand over his gray hair and cast furtive glances around the dining room, at the paintings. “I’m sorry, Marian. I need to make some calls. Could we see each other again?”

“It had better be soon this time,” Marian said, but she could relent for now. Charlie was alive and seemed healthy. That was good enough.

“I’ll keep you in the loop,” he said. He then kissed her cheek and called her a cab.

This obsession would serve. Heartbreak didn’t need its portrait painted on canvas when a grim look would do.

* * *

A week passed without updates as Marian and Harold spent a few days in the Catskills with her parents. She promised Charlie she would get in touch when she came home.

“How is he?” her mother asked on the first evening.

“I think he’s starting to come alive again,” Marian said, sparing any further details. Her mother was in her eighties now, and she didn’t need the stress of Charlie’s new obsession, even if it was doing him some good. “He has a fire in him like I haven’t seen since Lorraine took ill.”

* * *

The ashes of that fire were waiting when Marian and Harold came home—a note on their apartment door, written in scribbly letters surrounded by charcoal fingerprints.

I know the name.

“Seeing Charlie again?” Harold asked.

“He’s still my brother-in-law,” she said. “And yours.”

Harold grunted, and Marian ignored him, wouldn’t help him start a fight. She crumpled the note in her fist and struggled to sleep through the night.

* * *

She found Charlie’s apartment door unlocked again the next morning. A woolen sheet tented an object in his living room, about the height of Reynard’s easel. The other paintings had vanished.

“Don’t look yet,” Charlie said, appearing as if he’d expected Marian at this exact moment. He extended a shaking hand, thinner than last week, clutching a folded sheet of paper. “Read this first. Gillian wrote it.”

“Gillian?”

“The writer.”

Marian took the paper and then took Charlie’s hand. “When did you last eat?”

“Last night?” Charlie scratched his temple. “Oh, let me dim the sunshine and light some candles. For the mood.” He wandered off to pull the curtains and fetch a match.

Marian did some wandering of her own. Beside the front door sat a wiry wastebasket stuffed with white envelopes. Several were bills marked overdue by a red stamp.

Was he running out of money, patronizing these painters and writers? Marian gathered the topmost envelopes and hurried them into her purse. She could pay one or two without Harold noticing a difference in the bank account.

Beyond that, what were these artsy types doing to Charlie? Couldn’t they tell they were taking advantage of an aging widower? Except the artists likely didn’t know each other. None could know the breadth of Charlie’s obsession.

The desperation to manifest this idea.

Charlie carried a three-pronged candelabra through the dim living room. “Well?” he asked, his smile glowing above the flames. “Read it.”

Marian unfolded the paper, unsure the gloom would let her read whatever the mysterious Gillian had written. Her eyes weren’t what they used to be.

She didn’t have to worry. There were only three words, written in stark charcoal.

“The Lord Between,” Marian read aloud.

“That’s the idea!” Charlie shouted, like a little boy receiving a candy. “The name, at least. Not an it, but a he!” He retreated to the living room’s center and peeled the woolen sheet from its easel.

Reynard must have abandoned his last painting, or his brushstrokes had murdered the moon in shades of black and red. This night sky shined with dying stars. The brightest seven formed a crooked horizontal constellation in the upper center, but not one Marian recognized. It might have been a snake. Beneath it, the pooling darkness suggestion a figure that might have had a long nose, or maybe a sharp beak, but she couldn’t be certain.

“Is that it?” Marian asked. “The Lord Between? Is he a bird?”

“Couldn’t say.” Charlie waited another moment and then shrouded the painting again. “Incomplete, but we’re on the right track. And I’ll show another painter, each influencing the next, like dominoes toppling toward the inevitable result.”

“What if it’s not to your artists’ taste?”

Charlie shrugged. “Those without taste may cut out their tongues.”

Marian set her teeth. That didn’t sound like Charlie. “What’s he the lord of?”

“Not exactly sure.” Charlie scratched his temple again. He looked to be carving lines beside his eyebrow, maybe in his sleep. “I’ll know when I meet him.”

Marian gaped. “Meet him? Charlie, it’s not real.”

“Oh, he’s real,” Charlie said, breaking into disbelieving laughter. “He’s been trying to reach us since the dawn of time. Knew us before we knew ourselves. Others have scraped their minds against him, artists trying to catch lightning, but they’re too close themselves. I’m not an artist—I’m on the outside! A middleman, the perfect conduit. One person can’t capture his enormity, but I’ve spread the load between others, and now I can be his—”

Charlie stumbled forward. Marian caught him by the arm and middle, keeping him from cracking his head on the hardwood floor. Lifting him was too easy for a woman her age. He was much too light.

“Forgive me,” he said, rubbing his face. “Maybe I’ve neglected my meals. Can I take you to dinner, my dear?”

Marian led him to dinner instead, insisting she make it her treat after hers and Harold’s vacation. The diner around the corner was busy with the breakfast crowd. Charlie picked at his omelet and bacon, like he meant to save scraps for his Lord Between.

“Darling,” Marian said, reaching across the table. “When the idea’s finally caught, what are you getting out of it?”

Charlie paused, and then said, “The privilege to witness the extraordinary.” He swirled a strip of bacon at the center of a broken-up yellow egg. “Is it so impossible to believe something has crawled from the secret places in this world and come to here, to this city? This dream place? We learned modernists love our scientific wonderland, all the loud cars and the disco music and the skyscrapers, our pretend mountains when the real things have dwarfed our civilizations, our evolution. What a species we are. Too brilliant and faithless to remember that our kind once feared the dark, and for good reason.”

* * *

Marian found Harold at the kitchen table, glowering as if she were an unruly teenager sneaking in past curfew.

“You shouldn’t see Charles anymore,” he said.

“I’ve barely closed the door and you’re accosting me?” Marian started for the bedroom. This morning had been stressful enough.

“Lorraine, rest her soul, has been gone a while now.” Harold shifted in his seat, a balding brick of a man in every way. “Charles isn’t well. You remember Old Thomas? The wino that Lorraine used to give charity? He’s seen Charles coming in and out of this abandoned construction building on 50th. Won’t go inside himself, but he swears it’s Charles.”

Marian turned to the kitchen. “He’s not dangerous.” That she knew, at least. “To other people.”

“He needs help.”

“He might, but I don’t know what kind.” She imagined men in white coats hauling Charlie away, but she wasn’t sure things worked that way anymore.

And she wouldn’t abandon him.

* * *

Harold’s words rooted in Marian’s head. Night after night, she thought of 50th Street.

Old Thomas was a vague memory, a man Lorraine had introduced her to once, mentioned a few times before she became bedridden. Marian supposed Lorraine would’ve introduced him to Charlie, too. Thomas would know Charlie if he saw him, but 50th was a ways from Charlie’s apartment. Why wander there?

* * *

Charlie’s curtains were gone when Marian stepped into his apartment again, casting broad fingers of July sunshine across every room. Furniture, garbage—everything was gone.

An ache settled into Marian—the home Lorraine had built with her husband was fading. Like Lorraine herself.

Marian found Charlie strafing the empty dining room. His clothes hung off his thinning frame.

“We can’t paint him any better than Reynard did,” he said. “I see that now. But every previous success helps birth the next. He becomes more solid with every step.”

“Is that the goal?” Marian asked. “If you make it concrete, take it out of the art, then it’ll be like the rest of the world. Is that how you meet him?”

Charlie didn’t look surprised to see her. “I met a songwriter, Olga something, showed her the last few paintings, the name. Listen to this.” He raised his head and began to sing:

Through starlight beast and stone of men,

And all the lands unseen,

You must swallow your dreams and then,

Bestow the Lord Between.

A face beyond these lonely souls,

When feast and love are lean,

A wasteland be your heart and home,

Make way, the Lord Between.

Car horns shrieked outside Charlie’s windows. None of the cacophony should have been new, but it seemed like the outer world had gone briefly quiet and then come howling back.

“I don’t think he stays the Lord Between,” Charlie said. “That’s what Gillian called him since he isn’t where he was, and he isn’t here yet either. He’s a lord, and he’s between. Is he a beast, a bird, a man?” He flashed that gentle Charlie smile. “But two stanzas? Hardly a fitting length.”

“You want more? With what money?” Marian gestured to the barren apartment. “Where’s your furniture? Are you even eating?”

Charlie waved a hand. “Don’t worry about me and money. I’m leaving.”

This apartment. His and Lorraine’s. “To live where?” Marian asked.

“It’s a secret place where I can meet him,” Charlie said.

50th Street, Marian suspected. “I think you need to see a doctor.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Charlie snapped.

Marian stiffened as Charlie blustered toward the windows. Merciless sunshine brightened his skin. When had he last shouted at her like that? Probably never. She glanced over her shoulder at the open front door.

But what would abandoning him leave of their friendship? Of her?

“The first month after Lorraine died, I regretted marrying her,” Charlie said, quieter now. “If we’d never fallen in love, I wouldn’t have felt that pain. What did you do after she died?”

“I grieved early,” Marian said, the words uncertain. “Before she died. She and I spent more time together, and you, and even Harold. It was closeness, family. We all knew what was coming.”

“I didn’t.” Charlie laid a palm against the warm window glass. “I expected she’d get better. Should’ve told Harold, he would’ve set me straight. I could’ve seen what was coming, like the rest of you. But her recovery was all that made sense to me. And I prayed she’d keep living. Went to the nearest church and prayed my heart out for God to help. I kept praying after she died, but not for long. Never made any difference. So, I quit God’s direct line, cast the net.”

“Meaning what?” Marian approached the windows. She needed to touch Charlie before the sun drank him up.

“I lied,” he said.

“About?” Marian asked.

“When I told you all I’d gain was the privilege to witness the extraordinary? That was a lie. There’s more.” Charlie splayed a hand over his heart. “I feel possessed of a great emptiness. Not a presence burrowed into me. Some outer thing has scraped me clean so there’s less me inside. But I can fill that nothing inside, when his coming hatches me from the shell I’ve become.”

“Charlie—”

“If God won’t answer, I’ll speak to one who does. Once I decided that, the mental itch started up.” Charlie scratched at his temple, peeling away dry skin. “I called to him, Marian. Without even knowing his name.”

Marian licked her lips. She should have listened to Harold. He was a jealous grump, but he was right—Charlie needed help. She reached for Charlie’s arm.

Tears trembled in his eyes. “Can’t you see? That’s why Lorraine died. So I could lose it all, and he could come back. It wasn’t random and meaningless illness. Her death, her suffering—it was only the beginning.”

Marian flinch back, her tongue a spitfire. “My sister didn’t die so you could obsess over a goddamned art project, Charles. She was old. She died. It happens to every living thing in this world.”

“But outside the world.” Charlie shut his eyes. “That’s different. Our little deaths can have purpose.”

“You make that purpose then,” Marian snapped. She turned from the windows, from Charlie, and marched across the apartment toward the door. “Sometimes we lose, and that’s the end.”

“Is that you talking?” Charlie called after. “Or your husband?”

* * *

Damn that miserable bastard. Marian spent the cab ride fighting not to cry. Lorraine was her sister, her only sibling. They had grown up together before either of them had met Charlie.

Why should his pain burn so much hotter than hers?

She almost told the cab driver to take her to 50th Street. Likely that would be Charlie’s new home, if Old Thomas was right. To hell with Charlie’s privacy.

But she didn’t want to chase him or his Lord Between today. She wanted to go home, in hopes Harold could be her rock.

He had the same trouble on his mind when she came home. “Is it about Lorraine?” he asked.

Tears slid from Marian’s eyes. She wanted to break down in the foyer and tell Harold everything—the paintings, the song, the grim obsession and forsaking of God.

“Grief strikes everyone in their own way,” she said.

She hated herself a little for it. Charlie didn’t deserve her defense, but she couldn’t keep help it. This was her habit. More for his being her brother-in-law than her friend, but nonetheless.

“Maybe he should get out more without you,” Harold said, straightening his newspaper. “He could meet someone else and fall in love. Someone unknown. Just because he’s lost his wife doesn’t mean he can have mine.”

Marian shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. You didn’t love her like him.”

Harold scoffed. “It’s been months. And a man is a man.”

Marian couldn’t begin to explain to him what was wrong with that sentiment. What it said about their relationship.

She stood by the front door and stared across the apartment at him, lips pursed, eyes unblinking. Harold pretended at first not to notice, but with each passing moment he fussed more in his seat, as if the chair was shrinking. Finally he muttered something in the same family and genus as an apology, if not the same species, and excused himself to the bathroom.

* * *

The phone rang in the early evening.

“It’s the last thing!” Charlie shouted. “Well, almost—I can’t account for everything. But it’s done!”

The phone line went dead before Marian could speak. She didn’t want to head out again, especially not to Charlie’s place again. Doubtful she could do him any good. More likely he would do her heart some more harm.

And then she heard the sirens.

* * *

Firetrucks flashed along the curb as a roaring inferno chewed the brickwork of Charlie’s apartment building, and coils of black smoke snaked from the windows into the orange-purple sky. The already-cooked mid-July heat now crackled, ready to blister skin.

Marian watched from the far curb where her taxi idled. Watched the fire.

Watched Charlie.

He swayed over the sidewalk, wrists cuffed behind his back. Two blue-uniformed police officers guided him toward a squad car. A dark blanket draped Charlie’s figure, where scrawny bare legs moved insect-like across concrete, a naked reedy nothing of a man.

“You fucks!” he roared, spitting and snapping. “You piggy fucks, let me go! He’s close now. When he comes, he’ll crush your greedy monuments to stardust and burn your troughs of oil and dress the sky in the red of your family’s innards. He’ll fuck you like you’ve never been fucked, you trash-gobbling filth!”

The squad car door slammed shut, muffling Charlie’s rant.

The world blurred beyond Marian’s tears. She thought she heard him break into song as she slid back into her cab, but that might only have been the sirens. It certainly wasn’t her Charlie. This Charlie—he belonged to someone else.

“This heat wave’ll boil your brain,” the cabbie said, shaking his head. “Where to now?”

Marian wanted to give her home address. Be done with this. Charlie was gone, had been dying inside since Lorraine’s passing.

Instead, she wiped her eyes and gave the cabbie a new destination.

* * *

The summer night was darkening when she found Old Thomas on 50th Street. Lorraine was one of a few who kept him fed. Marian made sure tonight would be worth his while, opening her purse before she asked her questions.

“That place I’ve seen Charlie come out of?” Thomas asked. “Yeah, I’ll point it out. Can’t miss it.”

A couple blocks down stood an unfinished five-floor structure of limestone and granite, forming finished rooms and walls beneath a skeleton of steel beams and scaffolding, as if construction had started and paused.

A between place. Charlie’s place.

Dust coated the concrete steps inside except where shoeprints offered a trail to the highest floor. The walls looked rotted in some places, freshly painted in others. Harold would’ve had a heart attack, seeing Marian drag herself up each flight. He’d say dangerous people congregated here.

But Marian had a feeling Charlie was the first to come here in some time.

She reached the fifth floor and followed Charlie’s dusty path along a narrow corridor. There was no door at its end, only an open doorway. Marian stepped through it, where the street noise seemed to die. She remembered this silence from Charlie’s apartment, when he’d sung for the Lord Between.

The same silence clung to this room.

Red brick formed the walls, climbing twelve feet high into a ceiling slatted with wooden beams. Construction must not have finished the roof yet. Horizontal windows broke open the bricks ten feet up, inviting slats of city light into the dim room. The floor was black and soft, almost like earth poured from a hundred potted plants before they could sprout. Marian ground her heel into it and made out fragments of glass within the soil, twinkling like starlight.

Another brick wall stood opposite the open doorway, on the far side of the room, taking on the brunt of the outside light. Spray paint marred its surface in the same creamy whiteness as the mortar between bricks. Someone had written two words over and over in jagged graffiti.

BRING THEM. BRING THEM. BRING THEM.

And beneath the menacing spiderweb of words, dead center of the wall, Marian saw it—the centerpiece to Charlie’s vision—and covered her mouth not to scream. He’d finally given shape to his haunting idea, the one and only creation of his own making.

A human skull jutted from a cavity in the bricks.

An iron nail drove through one temple, binding the prong of an antler. Errant spray paint had speckled a couple of them in white. It jutted from the skull like a bird beak hatching from an egg, as if Charlie’s idea could break free from the mind. The skull stared with empty sockets, clean and polished and free of flesh.

No telling whose it was, only that Charlie had brought it here, nailed a makeshift beak to its surface, and so defiled it.

The same as another presence had defiled him.

Marian approached the skull. “You took my Charlie,” she whispered.

The skull didn’t answer. It was only a remnant of the dead, and the most Marian could do was pray Charlie had retrieved it from a medical school or stolen it from a morgue.

Anything to promise this wasn’t somehow Lorraine’s skull.

A low hum slid into Marian’s ear. Was that the eternal cacophony of the street, fighting against the muffling room? She listened for Manhattan’s honking horns and unruly engines, the vibrancy of life, but this was different. A tremor crawled through the bricks, at first like footsteps, and then like music.

Marian reached past the skull, and her fingertips brushed the rough red surface of the wall. If she lingered, they might brush against something greater. And older.

“Where are you?” she whispered. “What do you want?”

But she knew what it wanted, from Charlie’s song. You must swallow your dreams. A wasteland be your heart and home.

She heard no polyphonic chorus taking up Charlie’s solitary acapella. Only a steady thrum through the wall. Marian could blame that on subway trains careening through the underground. Or maybe this building reached deeper, to a heartbeat she had never imagined.

She flitted back, her hand splayed in the sticky air. What the hell was she doing? There was no reason to hang around.

Some element of Charlie’s reality break must have touched her since she glimpsed the first paintings, and she was either enthralled by his passion or romanced by his madness. This place did not hold Charlie’s dreamed-up forgotten god.

It was only evidence of the wound grief had struck in him.

Marian retreated until she reached the room’s entrance, where she took one last look at the skull, the antler-turned-beak, the message screaming from the brick. Anyone who lingered here too long would lose their mind.

The street sounds of mid-‘77 returned in full as Marian descended the concrete stairs. She never thought she would miss Manhattan’s chaos so intensely.

And if she could feel relief at escaping that room, maybe there was hope for Charlie. Enough time away from this place, with a little help, they might both recover from this delirium. He might even recover from Lorraine.

Marian reached the curb when she felt the hairs stand up on her neck, as if someone might be watching her. She turned, expecting to find that Old Thomas had trailed her here, but there was no sign of him amid the scattered pedestrians traipsing the sidewalk.

The unfinished building looked down on her, open like a cadaver’s chest at an autopsy. Her gaze followed up its jagged front, along its side, and paused at the high windows.

Where a too-tall silhouette ducked out of sight.

Marian flinched, and then a vibrating moan tore through the street. The windows of neighboring buildings lost their reflective brilliance in a sharp snap, and night draped the city in a pitch-black curtain. Surprised screams belted up and down the streets, chasing the sounds of grinding metal and screeching tires.

Marian saw no one. Felt everything. A panic in the air. A cracking like an egg in her chest.

And in that moment, she remembered Charlie’s warning.

Of how mankind had good reason to fear the dark.

End.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, A Light Most Hateful, and other books of dark fiction. "Between the Mind and the Dark" takes place in the universe of her cosmic horror series The Worm and His Kings. She is also the author of over 100 other short stories appearing in Weird Tales, Pseudopod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and various other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find Hailey at www.haileypiper.com.

MUSIC VIDEOS IN THE CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH

STEVE TOASE

Like Sarah, her grandfather was a musician. Unlike Sarah, her grandfather was also a killer. Of course Sarah had killed people, who hadn’t? But she did not turn her hobbies into an art form. A calling.

Everyday her grandfather would find a spot in one of the city’s parks with one of his several instruments, and play songs so beautiful that those who heard them had no choice but to die. Sometimes he would stand on the corner by the Frozen Dolphin Fountain, playing antimony arias and razorblade rhapsodies, other times, in the Garden of the Seven Fatal Dreams, singing murder ballads that became too real for those who listened.

He was a master of many styles, preferring the stringed instruments to the wind section, enjoying the tactile sensation of making his own strings from victims (though he was known, on occasion, to use the hollowed bones of the dead for flutes and piccolos).

The day he invoked the anger of The Priesthood of Murder, Sarah’s grandfather played a full Sonata, unaccompanied (a capital crime in itself) in The Garden of Life and Death.

The Garden of Life and Death was the only sacred place in the city, and to kill there, no matter how beautiful the method of cessation, was banned by local council ordinance. Sarah never found out how the Priesthood became aware of her grandfather’s transgression, but word soon spread that the seal had been melted to release The Chained Sisters from their chamber of camphor and rotten lilies.

Sarah’s grandfather did not go into hiding, no matter how much she tried to persuade him. Instead he sat in the Plaza of Softened Bones waiting until the Sisters found him, the stench of the sores from their shackles announcing their approach long before they came into view. When they rounded the corner, he began to play.

The Chained Sisters had long since sealed their ears against distractions, lulling them into a decayed confidence that they were protected against her grandfather’s violent melodies. They were wrong.

To find the note capable of liquifying meat required a homemade instrument, and making instruments was the craft Sarah’s grandfather really excelled at. In the workshop below his studio, he carved guitar bodies from dessicated mammoths fauna, and melted the flesh of forgotten demi-gods to glue violin necks in place.

The instrument he played that day in his confrontation with The Chained Sisters was knapped from volcanic glass, the razor sharp strings cut from the stomachs of drowned Bowhead whales. The Chained Sisters approached with the confidence of those who already believed they’d won. They were wrong.

Their skin melted first, the notes prising it away from muscle, new wounds covering the ones they cherished. Splits opened up on her Grandfather’s fingers as he played, the blood lubricating the strings. Next, the Sister’s bones ruptured, marrow melting then setting in place, their organs turning into paste, dripping wax-like out of the new constellation of orifices, and while they died Sarah’s grandfather played with pleasure, enthusiasm and love.

No-one came to clean away the melted remains, leaving them welded to the Plaza’s limestone paving as a tribute to their sacrifice and testament to his triumph.

That night Sarah ate with her grandfather, cutting up his food when the wounds on his fingers troubled him, wanting to ask him about his victory, but never daring to break the comfortable silence between them.

The next day The Priesthood of Murder themselves came looking for Sarah’s grandfather. They were vast, taller than the clouds, their formal evening wear torn into strips, each tear in the fabric a death by their own hands. They clothed themselves in the killing of multitudes.

Sarah watched her grandfather dig beneath the floor of his workshop for the strongbox where he kept his most dangerous instruments, those banned by several International Conventions. Even over the sound of pickaxe on dirt they heard The Priesthood of Murder breathing above the house. She watched him sweat as he dug, blisters erupting on his already calloused hands, and she knew no matter how much she wished it different, he would not survive this encounter.

“What should I do?” Sarah said, holding his arm, as if she could stop what was about to happen.

He turned, hugging her in his vast arms.

“Leave,” he said, and pushed her away toward the door. Outside, The Priesthood of Murder blocked out the sun. The stench of the tools of their trade filled the morning air. They ignored her, too small to notice, and not the scent they were searching for. That was the last time she would see her grandfather.

* * *

Throughout her time at the Conservatoire des Musiques Enivrantes et Corrosives none of Sarah’s instruments were as exotic as her grandfathers. None were shaped from the remains of ancestors, or the metal of meteorites. Instead, she studied the flute, the piano and trained her voice in classes both official and unofficial. By the end of ten years (five years of training and five years of indentured servitude within the Conservatoire’s War Choir), Sarah was ready to return to the city.

The ten years had been long. Outside the classrooms she studied old films, pop culture and the trends that spread across the world but never seemed to reach her home city. She found stories in home movies and meaning in found footage. Watched endless reels of glitching corridors. Listened to screams of the unseen. Ancient twitching animations of skeletons shimmying out of their bodies. By the time she climbed off the train, she was dressed in vintage clothes to be seen and occult symbols to be kept hidden.

Sarah stood on the concourse, her band behind her, behind them stacks of instrument cases and video equipment. In that little redoubt of travel cases Sarah closed her eyes and breathed in the acrid air of her home city. She felt the corrosive scent settle on her tongues and waited to detect if, by some miracle, her grandfather had survived. Distant and below several tons of concrete, she tasted the flavour of his corpse and wept behind clasped hands so the other musicians couldn’t see.

“Where are we staying?” The video producer was younger than her, a rescue from the film school that partnered with the Conservatoire. His fingers picked at the stitches around his eyes.

“I have a place,” she said, collecting her tears and rubbing them into her skin.

The incisions where the school Otorhinolaryngologist grafted in extra vocal folds had never properly healed. Sarah found the supperation around the wounds intensified her vibrato.

The Priesthood had coated every surface of her grandfather’s house, her house, with fungal spores. Kitchen cabinets deformed with the weight of colonies turning the wood fibrous until they collapsed from the damp heavy walls. Sarah found her old room transformed into a garden, the carpet once a rich velvet red now powdered beneath Devil’s Tooth and jellydisc. Dead Man’s Fingers brushed her ankles as she walked across to her bed, searching through the collapsed mattress for her diary, but the pages were pulp and the words long since overwritten by the unreadable alphabet of the mycelium.

“We can’t stay here.” The video producer stood by the door, the everpresent camera slung over his shoulder.

“We’re not.”

“We could shoot here though,” he said, kneeling down, stretching apart the stitches in his face to check an angle only he cared about.

“We’re not.”

* * *

The guesthouse looked out over the marketplace, where people traded secrets and debts, the Garden Between Life and Death just beyond. Her roommate Santorini, the percussionist, slept turned to the wall while Sarah sat by the window looking out over the roofs of the wooden stalls, each one wearing scars from conflicts and tunes she did not know. She wondered if any were from her grandfather defending himself, but those would be confined to the house, long since lost behind its clergy ordered decay.

In the queue at the townhall for the permits to shoot, the people around Sarah were the same mix as always. Those looking for a way out and those looking for a way in. To life. To death. To the way to control both. Rarely did they find what they were looking for. The queue shuffled forward until she stood in front of the glass fronted kiosk. She slid her paperwork through the slot, watching as the clerk flicked through the sheets, holding up her photograph to compare.

“Place of birth,” the official said, his voice modulated to be as un-engaging as possible.

“Conservatoire des Musiques Enivrantes et Corrosives,” Sarah said. She had been reborn in the laboratories and practice rooms, finding her voice in the labour of her creation. In the clamps and staplers of the Conservatoire’s surgeons.

The official looked her up and down, implanted lenses comparing her to the image on the monitor.

“Purpose of licence?”

“Performance and recording of performance.”

The Conservatoire prepared them for dealing with the bureaucracy around their art. Many hours over the past ten years had been spent in the practice halls standing around the edge of the room to rehearse the intense boredom of queuing, or studying techniques of persuasion to ensure their requests for permits and licences weren’t refused. The name in front of the clerk was different, but to Sarah she was still the same girl who left all those years before, her grandfather killed by The Priesthood of Murder.

“How many days do you need the licence to cover?” The clerk said, soaking the official stamp in ink the colour of mildew.

“We’ll be filming for three days, longer if the weather turns.”

The clerk paused and stared at her, features slack on the unseen bone of his skull. Sarah wondered what work they’d had done that had not taken.

“The weather always changes. Don’t film in the Garden Between Life and Death. Don’t film after dark. Don’t film any members of The Priesthood of Murder.”

“Understood.”

“There is no obligation to show the film to the Priesthood before you leave.”

“No obligation. Understood,” Sarah said, understanding perfectly.

“But you should.”

The clerk leaned forward in his seat, the deformed lenses of his eyes almost pressing against the glass dividing them.

“Do I know you?”

Sarah hissed slightly out of one of her additional mouths, slightly higher pitched than her usual speaking voice, a sign of nerves that had developed since the surgery.

“I don’t think so.”

“A familial resemblance, maybe.”

“Again, I don’t think so.”

The interest blossoming within the clerk was dangerous. None of the queue behind Sarah complained about the delay. Anything to avoid the extra scrutiny when it was their turn to lean forward on the polished wooden counter and slide their own paperwork below that stained glass.

“What made you choose to film your ‘music video’ here?”

“Curiosity.”

“Curiosity can be a dangerous motivation in this town.”

“And yet you display an abundance of it. Do you require anything else?”

The clerk continued to stare far longer than was comfortable before dismissing Sarah with a nod of the head.

* * *

The band set up a rehearsal space in the guesthouse basement. Several pipes poured raw sewerage in a constant stream that pooled before settling through a grate in the centre of the room.

Apart from Sarah, there were five musicians cramming into the small space, the producer sat in the corner with his camera facing toward them. They watched his eyes click back into his voluminous skull as the camera came to life and they began to play.

Only just big enough to fit them all, the basement was far too small to contain the music. Sound leaked out through the small panel windows, the percussion enwrapping Sarah’s several voices and carrying it far beyond the tiny room. Outside, pedestrians began to be affected by the music, some dropping to their knees in the street, others tearing open clothes to feel their skin with cold hands, nails scraping away to find the bones below. Somewhere above, the guesthouse landlord lay on his bed, his jaw fusing in place, the nerves in his teeth knitting together, enamel worn through by the rasping of his tongue.

The band stopped playing, Sarah quietening her voices last, feeling each one fade to silence before she gasped for breath, emptied by the effort.

Most of the instruments in the room were made of metal or wood, others from skin and nerves, some mummified and others still living clasped in place by iron rings. The band took a pause to recover and dissipate the music’s effects upon them.

“What next?” Santorini said, licking blood from his torn knuckles. He held out his hand and Sarah ran her tongue over his skin, feeling the raw bone beneath and rubbing the liquid into her gums. Each of the musicians took their turn, sucking nourishment from his wounds. The shared experience bonding them as something more than musicians. A family? A Cult? Sarah didn’t know anymore. So far the Producer had declined the blood narcotics. Sarah wondered how long he would hold out. Earplugs would not protect him for long. He too would be transformed.

The next tune lasted eighty-two minutes and Sarah sang it on one breath. The surgery to displace her organs and fill the cavity with lung capacity had been one of the easiest procedures she’d endured at the Conservatoire. After the murder of her grandfather she already felt empty inside. The surgeries could not hollow her out more.

* * *

At night, the city felt dead and still living, a corpse gnawed away by scavengers. She swirled around the streets, past the Cafe Quarter where patrons stayed awake for months at a time, veins cut open and fused to drip coffee machines. The howls of sleep-deprived hallucinations followed her down the street, through the film district where those conscripted were fused to CCTV cameras suspended from building corners, their voices recounting what they saw to the viewers hidden in concrete bunkers far below the city. Sarah knew all these places, passing through the labyrinth avenues, red thread spooling out behind her, until she reached the heart of the compact collection of houses to the cemetery in the centre.

Her grandfather was not buried in the vaults or sacred earth. That honour was not given to those who fell foul of The Priesthood of Murder. Sarah had not visited the cemetery to mourn but to mutilate.

The tomb of the Murderers was vast, covered in panels portraying the most distinguished and depraved acts committed by the Priesthood over the years. She ran her fingers over the stone, lingering on the faces of the victims. Growing up, The Priesthood were a constant, a necessity, and seen as untouchable in their office. The lament Sarah sang for the dead was not written down anywhere, her voices looping around each other, finding commonality and swirling against the carved reliefs. Somewhere, near one of the other tombs, a mourner began to wail, a sound cut short by the sound of steel on skin.

* * *

Music rehearsed, the group moved into the streets to start practicing in place. A chance for the producer to work out shots and camera positions. The creatures with lenses welded into their bones needed bribing to be still, but soon the rehearsals began.

Sarah did not truly sing, the sound unleashed too early would alert too many people, so she sang only with her singular voice. Even then, several people in nearby apartments jumped to the concrete below, and Sarah paused the rehearsals to sing laments over their broken bodies while the band scavenged the dead for shattered ribs and crushed internal organs. Materials to repair damaged instruments.

When the representatives of The Priesthood of Murder arrived there was no soul left to claim, though they took to the broken bones, licking the meat from the cracks in the pavement. Santorini watched jealous, and Sarah cut open her arms, letting him gnaw on the exposed marrow.

Back in the basement, they watched back the practice footage, the shots as the cameras moved between them, the faces or the passersby as they caught sight of the band in performance. Two more days were needed for them all to rest. For them all to heal. Then Sarah would avenge the death of her grandfather. Would see The Priesthood of Murder burn.

The raid arrived before dawn and woke all the members of the band, crowding them from their beds and forcing them down into the entrance hall of the guesthouse. Sarah had been expecting them, but not told her bandmates. Knowledge was more secure if held close.

Sarah’s wounds were wrapped with fresh bandages, her night time routine to protect herself when she was outside the Conservatoire. Several of her bandmates hadn’t taken similar precautions, circles of stoma and unhealed feedlines dripping puss onto the floor. The Patrol circled them, not speaking so Sarah could hear, though she knew they would be talking between themselves in a combination of ultrasound speech and spores.

One by one they took the musicians into a separate room. Sarah caught a glance inside as they led them in and carried them out again. She saw the chair and the shackles, the gouges in the armrests and the sprays of body fluids across the ceiling. When Sarah’s turn came she walked in unaided and was determined to leave the same way.

The room had been prepared, sheeting pinned to the walls, the dirty white cotton undulating from the Interrogator’s roots anchoring her into the brickwork. The patrol sat Sarah down in the seat, buckling the tethers in place. The Interrogator leant forward, halogen lights grafted into her forehead glistening and hiding her face.

“This is not your first time in The City?”

Sarah felt the words as constriction against her many vocal chords. The Interrogator grasped Sarah’s arm, the thorns grafted to the palm delivering several different psychotropic substances. With concentration, she activated a gland deep in her stomach, releasing an antidote while she remembered the acting lessons given during her first year.

“It is not my first time in The City.”

“What is your connection here?”

“Artistic,” she said, focussing her mind on her grandfather’s music. The Interrogator’s hand went to Sarah’s neck, thorns snagging on the unhealed skin of the several mouths.

“Are you sure that is all?”

“That’s not what you asked,” Sarah said, enjoying the moment of defiance.

The beating that followed did not phase Sarah. The attention of the Conservatoire’s surgeons were much more transformative than any fist or iron bar. Bruises faded. The adaptions flourishing within her were far longlasting. While the blows connected she remembered being strapped down to the operating table, no anaesthetic, mics taped to every part of her body to record the writhing agony for the Conservatoire’s Sound Library.

The Patrol left by nightfall and the band members retreated to their rooms. She listened to them weep in their wounds and wondered if they were truly up to the task before them.

They gathered for the meeting around midnight.

Sarah looked around the basement, first at her fellow musicians, then at the instruments banked behind them. The stench of the waste in the room distracted her from her own injuries. The damage to her mouths was sore, but not bad enough to stop her singing.

“If anyone wants to leave, they may,” she said. The threat hung in the air. They’d committed to this musical endeavour. Sacrifices had been made in winter gardens, blood oaths signed in abandoned hotels. No one was leaving. They had promises to keep. To each other. To The Conservatoire. To The City. To Sarah’s grandfather. They sat in silence until dawn returned once more.

* * *

The City never slept and was driven to madness by its own insomnia. The band walked through the early morning crowds, keeping in touching distance of each other, their instruments closer than that. Sarah stretched her mouths, feeling the infections soften the cartilage in her throat, the bones in her jaw. At a frequency no-one could hear, she began to intone the song they would perform. The crowd barely noticed the tiny change in the air, but they caught visions of an old man playing jagged tunes of peaceful death, and though the hallucinations soon passed, for a moment they brought the relief of that moment when eyes closed.

The rest of the band felt the note in their stomachs and in their engineered adaptations, resonance in the tendons stretched to strings, their fingers fused to percussion. Ribs tuned to be played. As they walked they glowed with the music. Behind them. The producer walked with his cameras, each one stumbling before him, two flying on fragile wings to carry them above the crowds, and as the music increased in volume and became audible the crowd fell in step behind them.

Sarah led the musicians to the centre of the plaza, singing the cobbles beneath her feet to rise her higher than the audience. She felt them press in. She felt them crave the music. She felt them restless in their desire, and as the rest of the band climbed the artificial hill to join her, she closed her eyes.

The tune was simple and delicate, so fragile it sounded like it would break on the air. A snowflake of a tune that might melt from the heat of the world, but snowflakes become blizzards and blizzards can kill as well as any blade.

Around her, the band picked up the tune, and intensified it, letting the notes swirl up past the floating cameras under the producer’s control, swirling through the air to be absorbed by the crowd who picked up the tune and began to sing.

When the crowd had the tune, then the dancing began. Sarah stepped down from the rise and moved between them. Felt the dancers press against her as they decayed, their skin slumping free, fusing to each other and tearing apart once more. She continued to sing, dancing her own steps in her vintage dress, raising her hands in the air and spinning between them. Leaning in for kisses and caresses as the song brought all the crowd to one place. To one mind.

The Priesthood noticed. How could they not. Over the buildings they towered, their torn suits draping on the rain soaked roofs, and as they leaned across to see what was happening in the Plaza, the audience rose to meet them. One by one they grasped The Priesthood of Murder by their garments, and dragged them down, hand by bloody hand, until their vast faces were stretched above the band, and once they were in place Sarah changed the song.

The tune would destroy her, kill thousands, but when the carnage ended her grandfather would be avenged. The audience were one now, their bones welded into a single instrument, skin stretched to resonance, and as she sang they undulated to the tune, enwrapping The Priesthood within them, until the sheer weight dragged the killers to the floor, and once they were laid low the song began to eat them, each carnivorous note gnawing away at her grandfather’s murderers, until all that remained was the tattered formal suits that were their badge of office, trapped beneath a vast mass of conjoined people who, with Sarah leading them, would sing forever.

End.

Steve Toase was born in North Yorkshire, England, and now lives in the Frankenwald, Germany.

His fiction has appeared in Deadlands, Nightmare Magazine, Shadows & Tall Trees 8, Analog, Three Lobed Burning Eye, and Shimmer amongst others. six of his stories have been selected for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, and two for Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Volume 3.

He also likes bonsai forests, old motorbikes. and vintage cocktails.

His debut short story collection ‘To Drown in Dark Water’ is now out from Undertow Publications www.undertowpublications.com/shop/to-drown-in-dark-water.

You can keep up to date with his work via Patreon www.patreon.com/stevetoase, www.tinyletter.com/stevetoase, facebook.com/stevetoase1, and @stevetoase on Twitter.

LICK ME CLEAN

EVELYN FREELING

Her bones, once licked clean, will be whiter than her teeth. Streaked with tartar and stained from years of smoking, they’re all I can look at as her thigh brushes mine and she laughs and laughs and I force my best smile. At least her teeth are a distraction from imagining her head bashed open, skull shattered like an egg, brains spilling yolk on silk sheets.

“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” she drawls, voice thick with whiskey.

Like every other girl we’ve picked up, she does her best to conceal her trauma, but like a bad patch of cystic acne caked beneath a thick layer of foundation, it’s still all there for anyone to see. Daddy issues morph into gleaming wide eyes at the slightest sign of affection—eager to please, to bend herself into whatever shape she must. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. All she wants is to be loved.

It’s in the wear and tear of her leathery skin, aged beyond her thirty something years. She’s seen better days, and worse too, I’m sure. I nod to the corner of this rundown bar off the side of some dirt road in Texas at him, my wolf. He sits cloaked in shadows, only a sliver of his white grin visible behind the veil of cigar smoke curling in the air, an orange ember glowing between his long fingers. I lean closer, spread her knees with my own until her molten heat warms my bruised skin.

“He likes to watch,” I whisper.

She lets out a noise somewhere between a nervous giggle and a gasp as her eyes flit from me to him and back again. She thinks maybe I’m kidding, or maybe she’s drunk and misunderstanding. I pinch a strand of her yellow hair and lean in until our lips are ghosts against each other, until I can feel the breath she’s clutching in the back of her throat. Her instincts are telling her to say no, just as mine once did.

“And I’m very eager to please,” I murmur.

Her throat bobs and I know we have her. She’s already helpless. Can barely move her head as she nods weakly and I take her hand, then pull her to her feet. Her legs shake with every step, but she follows, led by my touch at the small of her back.

“I’ve never done something like this before,” she laughs.

In some ways, she’s telling the truth. She’s certainly never done this before, but I saw the track marks on her arms, scars deep enough to know that she’s lying too. The difference is she’s flattered, because every time she’s let someone use her body before, it was in all likelihood a transaction. But here, now, she’s been approached out of hunger. True desire. She’s wanted, and it feels good to be wanted when you’ve felt like nothing for so long.

The drive is loud—windows down, music blaring—along the winding country backroads, through the woods. She sits between us, her legs bracketed by both of ours. My hand roams beneath the frayed edge of her denim miniskirt, and her thighs part at my touch, encouraging me while her head lolls on my shoulder and a breath draws sharp between her teeth.

My wolf, though, pinches my neck and I see that white grin of his cut through the dark, full of unspoken words. This was where we first met, do you remember? As if I could ever forget that night when I was drunk and stumbling between these trees. I was lost, but he found me and promised I would never be lost again.

Finally, the sagging shape of grandmother’s house blooms from within the dark, and the headlights of my wolf’s truck bask it in their brassy haloes. Moss draped trees groan warnings in the breeze, but my fingers play beneath her soaked panties and her head is too full of her own breathy moans to hear. She doesn’t feel the air rippling with the presence of every woman before her, only my fingers plunging into her slickened channel, my thumb swirling over her apex.

Her heels scrape over the floorboards whittling away in a thick patina of dust. Her nervous giggles dampen the rattling chains echoing up from the basement below. Each time she draws a breath, I worry she’ll hear. That something will trigger her impulse—the splotch of dried blood beneath the baseboard here, the long grooves carved by fingernails into the wall there. If she were to notice, if she were to somehow escape our clutches… No, it’s too late for her now.

Besides, she’s desperate. God, she’s so fucking desperate she reeks of it. I almost think she deserves what she’s getting. Almost. And yet some part of me wants to scream at her, Run, run, you drunk, blithering idiot, run.

But you’re supposed to do anything for love, even if it means cutting pieces of your humanity up and giving them away, letting them be devoured until you’re a grotesque, mangled thing, unrecognizable from the person you once were.

I can’t do many things right, but at the very least I know how to love.

So I lead her to the bedroom and fall onto the brand new silk sheets, red as freshly spilled blood. Our limbs tangle as my tongue parts her lips and her moans fill my mouth. She tastes just like she looks she would—ash and cheap liquor. Her kisses are hungry, punctuated by nips of her teeth and demanding hands that fist my hair and send bites of searing pain across my scalp. I wind my legs around her waist and force her onto her back, pinning her wrists above her head.

She laughs when the first handcuff slips on, releases a shuddering breath full of anticipation as the second clicks into place. A smirk flirts over her lips as she tests them. She thinks her smile is knowing.

I crawl down her body, pausing at each of her breasts to rip her thin little wife beater down and draw her pebbled nipples between my lips. She arches into me, knees splaying wide enough to rub herself against me as I make my way. Her pink heat writhes on my tongue as I slide it across her seam in one silken stroke from her base to her apex. Unlike her mouth, her desire is succulent. A little sweet, but simple. Clean. A complete contrast to her used-up appearance. And as my tongue probes and her body responds, opening wider for me to dip in, a hot pool blooms between my legs.

I feel my wolf’s eyes on me—watching my dress hitch up my hips, raking up and down my backside, into the glimpses of pussy my sheer panties allow. Until a growl rumbles from within the room’s shadows and I know it’s time.

I scramble off her as quickly as I can and stagger backward into the far corner of the room, already trembling, knowing what will happen if I get in his way. She isn’t afraid yet, just giggles some more and tries to sit up, to reach for me, only to remember that she’s manacled to the bed. Trapped.

“Hey,” she purrs, “where are you going?”

She quiets when the floorboards creak and the shadows part over my wolf like a curtain. Her throat bobs again and she tries to laugh, as if that might somehow make this a joke.

“I thought you like to watch,” she says.

His grin is plastered between the sharply contoured lines of his face just as always. Hands lifting, his fingers dig beneath the beautiful flesh he wears. The veneer that hides his true nature. Something not of this world, but that existed long before, would continue existing long after. A primordial hunger that will never be sated, even once it inevitably devours the universe. Nothing will ever be enough for him. Nobody.

Skin squelches as his face rips free tendon by bloody tendon. Flesh rents, but still his lips never uncurl from that rictus grin even as the air fills with the familiar fetid stench of rotten fruit, as if everything beneath that face has been decaying for eons. He holds out his face, entrusting me with it, turning enough so I can see the truth beneath him. The long, whiskered snout slimed in crimson, his thin black lips curling to reveal a mouth of white teeth sharp as blades, his eyes glowing like molten amber.

This is what you do for love: you hold your wolf’s face in trembling hands and watch silently as he stalks toward the woman you picked up for him at some dive bar in the middle of nowhere. You listen as she screams and don’t move as she begs for help, nor do you blink as his teeth tear her stomach open and spill her innards across the silk sheets in long, pulpy streams. You stand there as her screams fade to wet breaths and the rattling chains from below echo through the room once more. Do nothing as he devours every last piece of flesh until he licks her skeleton clean. And when he’s finally finished, just before you return his face to him, you think you were right.

Her bones are whiter than her teeth.

* * *

Sometimes, love is tolerance.

Despite the disgust and seething hatred in my grandmother’s eyes as I creep across the basement, lit only by a bare lightbulb buzzing overhead, I know love is hidden somewhere inside her. It must be. I’ve spent my entire life acclimating to her dark glare. There’s little difference in it now that she’s bound to this bed and its stained mattress.

She flinches as I sit next to her and reach for the cloth knotted in her mouth. Before my wolf came into my life, it was me flinching at her every move, so I suppose there is some difference now.

“Let me go,” she hisses as soon as I spring the gag free.

I only frown and dab her sweat-slicked brow with a wet cloth. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve had this conversation, and she knows exactly what I’ll say. Carefully, I peel her nightgown open and clean her armpits, then lift it up her waist and clean her sides, wiping as much of her as I can. Pulsating sores cover her back and make her draw a sharp breath at the slightest touch.

“He’s the devil,” she tells me again.

I smile sadly. Such a simple thing, still clinging desperately to her delusions—her god and her devil, her right and her wrong—when there is only chaos or oblivion.

She scoffs as I clean between the sagging skin between her thighs. “He sees you for what you are.”

“What is that, Grandmother?” I ask, dipping the cloth into the bucket of cool water then wringing it out.

Her jaw works back and forth as if she’s mulling over her next words, deciding which might set her free. “I’m the one who raised you.”

“And yet he’s the first to accept me as I am,” I say.

Again, venom comes out in a bitter, staccato laugh. She isn’t wrong. She is the one who raised me, and despite her best efforts, I’m immune to her attempts at change. I can’t help who I am, or what I did. My wolf sees that. Grandmother only sees my potential to be the woman she wishes I was. But sometimes love is tolerance. She’s never turned me to the wilds despite all the ways I’ve disappointed her, and so I keep her alive.

“He loves you because you’re weak,” she growls.

I hum and work her urine soaked underwear down her legs, obliging her with the decency of not looking at the thick bush of gray hair between her thighs. But every attempt to placate her, to foster the tolerance I’ve lived on throughout my life, only fuels the hatred burning behind her brown eyes.

“You’re an abomination of his making,” she snarls.

The thing about being loved—when you’re truly seen, and every terrible thing about you is as brutally exposed as the insides of every woman who should’ve gone home long before she met you—is it blesses you with a calm serenity. I am who I am and my wolf loves me anyway.

“I’m not an abomination,” I tell her, voice placid despite her efforts. “I’m bisexual, Grandmother.”

She just stares at the darkened ceiling above, shaking her head as I clean her most intimate place. “I knew when you took my baby from me that God was trying to tell me something. If I had any sense, I would’ve smothered you in your crib.”

Again, I smile sadly. “But you didn’t,” I tell her and reach for the cloth again.

She doesn’t struggle, doesn’t snap her teeth to bite my fingers like the last time, just opens her mouth and lets me.

* * *

I know I’ve made a mistake before she says no. She isn’t like the other women, meek and submissive, ready to give herself over. Muscles strap her shoulders and arms, hidden only by murals of tattoos. When I nod to my wolf lurking in the shadows of the bar, she frowns and shakes her head. I squeeze her thigh, press my breasts into her arm and do my best to seduce her, but she downs the last of her beer and shoves away.

It’s nearly closing time and the bar has drained to its last dregs of customers. All men, none acceptable for my wolf.

Besides the wind howling in my ears, we ride in silence. I stare out the window with my heart pulsing in the back of my throat. Say a silent prayer to any god or devil to send us someone. A girl lost in the woods, drunk and waiting to be found. But nobody’s out here.

He tears the basement door open so hard it comes free of its hinges and splinters in a loud crack on the floor. I’m a rabbit chasing after a wolf, scurrying behind him down the stairs. His rage is electric. It burns the air like an incoming lightning storm until the fine hairs in my nose singe and the taste of ash cloys on my tongue.

“Please,” I say. “Please, I’ll do better tomorrow. I’ll find someone.”

Grandmother’s screams are muffled behind the gag still in her mouth, and yet the animalism in it, the inhumanity as her fear reduces her to a helpless screeching thing, rings in my head. Chains rattle with every futile jerk of her limbs.

Breathless, I tug on my wolf’s arm, lower to my knees, prostrating before that eternal grin that slashes through his handsome features like a dagger. “Please,” I whisper. “Please, one more night. I’ll do better, I promise.”

His hand is soft and warm against my cheek. The touch is gentle, soothing my frazzled nerves like silk, but then he reaches for his face and the squelch of his flesh ripping apart is louder than Grandmother’s muffled screams. Hot fetid blood spatters my cheek and fills my nose with rot. The frayed pulpy edges revealed by his removed veneer writhe in the dark as if they’re alive, as if this facade has become its own creature, given life by the beast beneath it all.

His amber eyes pin me in place, and I am seen all over again. In his gaze, my ugly is made beautiful. “Do you love me?” he asks as he offers his face.

I accept it like a sacrament—hands cupped, palms up. This is what I do for love. I school my body to remain in place and close my eyes as Grandmother’s screams pitch and burst with sobs. She’s always tolerated me, and sometimes that’s love too, but this thing between my wolf and I is deeper, something not even the years of her keeping a roof over my head can carve apart.

In the darkness of my mind, the sounds of his teeth gnashing her flesh open, the wet tear of her skin, and the splash of her blood and organs on the floorboards coagulate into a violent song. She’s only ever tolerated me, wishes she had smothered me in my crib, and I’m sure every night of my life she warred with herself to set things right. To not creep into this basement, to this bed and its stained mattress and press a pillow over my sleeping head. Every night of my life, the small part of her that loves me won.

My wolf’s face thuds softly to the ground as I stagger to my feet. “Please,” I beg, but the word is a rasp in my throat and he doesn’t hear it with his muzzle thrusting into Grandmother’s open stomach. Doesn’t notice me behind him until my hands pull him away and my pleas bubble from me in a sob so alike the ones dying behind the gag in Grandmother’s mouth.

There is only chaos or oblivion, but love is both. It’s a frenzy—a blood-electrifying, heart-thumping madness that demands to be fed, bite by bite, until there’s nothing left to give and the void opens up to swallow you whole. That’s the darkness lying in his widening maw, behind all those white teeth sinking into my throat.

I slap my hand over the mangled mess of my neck. Hot blood seeps between my fingers and copper pools in my mouth. But I don’t back away, I root my feet in place and luxuriate in his rough tongue licking my jaw, his long fingers sliding softly up my thighs under the hem of my dress, the electric thrill sparking down my spine as they plunge beneath my underwear. Pleasure and pain tangle and I don’t think I would want to separate them even if I could find their separate limbs.

I’m dying, I know that, but each time I try to tell him, it’s okay, I understand, blood babbles out and drips down my chin instead. I don’t have words anymore, only deeds, and so trembling, I let go of the wound at my neck and permit him access once more.

This is what you do for love: you let it lick you clean until you’re nothing but a heap of white bones piled in a dark basement where you’ll never be found. But you don’t need to be, he found you already, and as he consumes your flesh and your life drains slowly away, your lips curl in an eternal smile.

End.

Evelyn Freeling is a degenerate hailing from the Pacific Northwest. Her fascination with the cross-section of eroticism and horror began after discovering a haunted dildo at Club Sesso, a now defunct swingers club in Portland, Oregon. Her short filth has been published by Flame Tree Press, CHM, NoSleep Podcast, The Arcanist, Dark Void Magazine, and more. You can stalk her at your own risk by following her on Twitter @ Evelyn_Freeling or on IG @EvelynFreeling.

YOUR STORIES AS MOLTEN METAL

CARSON WINTER

Forcing structure on speculative fiction elements to transform ideas into a narrative.

The Buddhists say life is suffering. And because writing is an extension and reflection of life, it makes immediate sense that it should be suffering also.

Writing is hard.

Writing is really hard.

No, actually—writing is fucking hard.

This is something every writer, new or old, knows deep in their bones. Writing is the spring from which our joy bubbles, and it’s also the deep, black pit from which we find ourselves trying to claw out from again and again. We make it up a foot, then we slide back down with dirt under our fingernails. We grab a root (fuck yeah, a root!), and then the bastard comes free and we fall back into the blackness. Whatever keeps us in the pit is highly individual, but, for me, it was always story structure.

How does a story work? Where do you start? How do you turn that dope idea about a haunted Minecraft server into a story that works?

It’s tough, because as horror writers, we tend to arrive at the speculative element first. This is the part we get excited about. There’s a vampire that lives in the lighthouse; a priest that kills when the full moon rises; a great and ancient god that lives under the sea. And when we get a chance to sink our teeth into these ideas, we write with gusto. We labor over the vampire’s blood red eyes and shiny fangs or the tentacular proportions of our sea monster, but when it comes to shaping all that enthusiasm into a story... Well, sometimes dead is better.

If you’re like me, structure is elusive and confusing. Beginning, middle, and end doesn’t cover it. Because when we invent stories, we don’t imagine them in any identifiable shape. They’re amorphous blobs of thought and action, scenes, ideas, or worldview. But they aren’t a story. At least not yet.

When I was starting to write seriously, I found a lot of my stories began with one of these super-cool kernels, but failed to develop into anything I could recognize as remotely story-like. They meandered, they lacked engagement, they were the violent opposite of compelling: they were fucking bad.

What changed everything for me was being able to separate the plot (the sequence of events that makes anything happen) from the speculative fiction element.

And slowly, through much trial and even more error, I came up with an approach that greatly helped me wrestle my ideas into stories.

(As with all writing advice though, I’d remind anyone reading this that this isn’t a prescriptive How To Write thing. I don’t think there’s any one way to write because there’s not just one type of writer. This is what worked for me and nothing more.)

So, let’s say you want to write a story about aliens that control people’s minds. Instead of using this idea as your step one, put it aside for a second.

Now, come up with a realist conflict. Seriously, anything. Woman needs to take her daughter to daycare, but the car is broken down. Man is racing against his nemesis at a swim meet. A teenaged bagger at a grocery store wants to get off work early. Anything, really.

You have two different kernels. Now’s the time to combine them and see what happens.

What if our teenager keeps hearing strange voices in their mind? What if they’ve got a date but they can’t remember the person’s face because something keeps telling them to go outside, to look at the sky. What if they notice other people in this mom and pop grocery store similarly preoccupied, what if they stare outside and see customers gathered in the parking lot? What if they fight the strange murmurs and leave the store early, but can’t remember where they’re going?

Now, you’ve got a story cooking.

As genre fans, we tend to confuse the speculative element for the plot. For example, if someone asked you what Gojira (1954) is about, you’d likely say its about a monster attacking Tokyo. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Demonstrably, Gojira is definitely about that. But you could just as easily say its a story about a love triangle that plays out in the shadow of tragedy. Or a man trying to keep his weapon of mass destruction from entering the wrong hands. The core ideas here aren’t always fun—but they’re incredibly important.

It’s these human elements that create the actual plot, the thing that moves us from one scene to the next. But better yet, it also gives us the most exciting thing about the speculative element: the what if.

If you notice in the example above, the realist scenario provides the springboard for a ton of what ifs that makes a flat strangeness (aliens in our heads) into a story that has legs to go from point A to point B. And better yet, because we’ve established a foot in reality, it is now imbued with emotion and observation—two things that are sorely missing in so much amateur fiction.

For example, our teenaged protagonist has a simple motivation: he wants to get off work early to see his girlfriend. Immediately relatable, as most of us have had a loved one, and most of us have wanted to get off work early. Because these are relatable ideas to you as the author, you’re now able to fill your story with observations. This is the shit that makes your story come to life, its what proves that you not only have a story to tell, but that you have a perspective.

So, what observations can you fill your story with now?

Teen love—the passion, the excitement. The end all, be all of new romance. Secret texts, code-words, gifts. Dating in public places. I remember when I was a teenager, my girlfriend and I always had to go to parks to make-out because there was nowhere else to go. I remember when we turned eighteen and moved in together, we spent more hours than I could count walking around the local Hastings (a now defunct book and video store) because there wasn’t anything else to do. Teen love, for me, sewed the fabric of small town mundanity and hormonal fireworks into a unique tapestry.

Or, for another example: work.

What do you remember from your first job? Have you ever worked retail? I worked at a grocery store for nearly a decade (yes, RIP me). I remember once checking my phone on the way to the breakroom and within five minutes someone had spoken to me about being productive on the clock. I remember my first job—we used to throw ice in the fryers and play dumb when the assistant manager came around. I remember how long every shift felt—as if time had slowed to a crawl and you were watching minutes float by in molasses.

These are details from my own life that could make this story feel like my story.

Whether its work or love or anything else, these experiences form the foundation of your themes, and when put up against your speculative element, its unearthed naturally. These two forces, the normal and abnormal, work together in your story, form a symbiotic relationship, hold a mirror to each other until the truth emerges. Neither can be understated in their importance, neither can be dispensed with.

So, what is a story?

To me, it's a mold. Or a cast. A shape. It’s something you pour yourself into that is not you, that is not shaped like you. And when you pour out your memories, plant your feet firmly in the earth, and stare down the impossible, something magic happens. People lean in. They listen. And in this new shape, you’re stronger than you’ve ever been before. Stories, for whatever reason, are a shape we care about. Thousands of years in and we still love them. We can’t be stories. Our lives are too full, too erratic, too long or too short. They don’t follow satisfying beats and they rarely have good endings. We look to our imagination to elevate our lives into something molten. But even those flights of fancy fall short. So, we do the best with what we have: we live within them.

End.

Carson Winter is an award-winning author, punker, and raw nerve. He’s the author of Soft Targets and The Psychographist. His short fiction has appeared in Apex, Vastarien, and Cthonic Matter Quarterly. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

YOUR POSH REVELRIES WILL BE CLAIMED BY MY CURRENTS

YOUR POSH REVELRIES WILL BE CLAIMED BY MY CURRENTS

He was so excited when we visited him at the hospital that he nearly fell out of bed, stretching to show us his phone’s screen.

“You can have your body tossed into the ocean when you’re done with it! Legally!”

That’s when my best friend Mike first told us about his plan to haunt Portsmouth. It was a ridiculous plan; an extremely “Mike” kind of plan that required a little money, self-promotional theatrics, and a general detachment from obligatory societal norms.

By the time we’d arrived for our scheduled visit, Mike had already paid a deposit with a company called Oceanic Grace, who were licensed to perform ecologically friendly burials at sea along New Hampshire’s meager thirteen miles of rocky coastline. The disposal would take place at a minimum depth of six-hundred feet, which meant the service would happen roughly four miles offshore.

“It’s a party! You can have like fifty guests on board. Music, hors d'oeuvres, drinks. Everyone gets to enjoy a nice little yacht charter out to sea. Then, they wheel me out, someone says some words, and they dump me overboard. Bing bang boom, you’re on your way back to the town dock to catch an early dinner.”

His body, according to Mike, would be wrapped in a casket-shaped biodegradable shroud attached to three or four brass cannonballs, which serve to guide the contents of the shroud through the inky Atlantic depths to the sandy bottom. Once there, it would take an estimated three to six months for both shroud and body to be fully reclaimed by nature— “I’m gonna get eaten by lobsters and sharks!”—and the cannonball weights would eventually turn into reef.

Mike shifted from carnival barker to concerned friend when he saw the looks on our faces. A life battling insomnia had rendered his organs weak and set his mind adrift in a semi-dreaming state for hours on end. His doctor had said he wasn’t sure if it would be a heart attack or dementia that finished him off, but that it would most likely be a photo-finish between the two. It was hard to believe Mike’s absurd scheme wasn’t further evidence of his cognitive functionality’s terminal slide into absentia.

“Listen, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. My grave won’t be taking up valuable space that could be used for a fucking orphanage or low-income housing or whatever. My embalmed body won’t leak toxic chemicals into the soil for centuries, and there won’t be a plume of black smoke pouring into the atmosphere as I’m cremated. This is a researched, natural, wholesome way for me to give back to the natural beauty I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy my entire life.”

His speech, undoubtedly practiced in the hours he’d spent alone in his hospital room in the event we didn’t agree with him, reassured us. After all, it was his and his wife Jessica’s decision to make, wasn’t it?

“Now here’s where the plan shifts from awesome, to fuckin’ awesome.”

We braced ourselves.

Just before we’d arrived that day, between tepid sponge baths and physical therapy sessions, Mike had corresponded with our local newspaper and negotiated a fee to take out a two-page ad. Cash-starved and desperate to keep the lights on, they’d agreed to his terms. Mike then instructed his attorney to issue the payment to the newspaper on the day of his death, giving them plenty of time to have everything laid out by the funeral.

“What’s in the two-page spread, you might ask? My self-written obituary, in which I tell the world I’m having my body thrown into the sea specifically so I can haunt Portsmouth forever.”

I gasped. My wife Sydney let slip a bark of shocked laughter, covering her mouth after to keep anything else from escaping. Mike stared at the two of us, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if he’d just performed a particularly baffling magic trick, breathing heavily as he waited for audience applause.

“You… want to haunt Portsmouth?” I couldn’t believe I was daring to ask the question.

“No, I don’t want to haunt Portsmouth, Captain Big Brain. I just want them to think I want to haunt Portsmouth.”

We knew who Mike was talking about when he mentioned them. The rich people from away who’d spent the last twenty years terraforming our sleepy coastal city, converting the atmosphere into something alien, choking blue-collar locals out of their multi-generational homes, scattering folks to more affordable adjacent towns like errant buckshot. The greedy developers who wielded wrecking balls and steamrollers like swords and shields on ancient battlefields, decimating old neighborhoods like the one Mike grew up in—and spent his life trying in vain to move back to—in favor of cute hotels and high-priced waterfront condos and boutique bank branches. They were all them.

It was a practical joke. It was a self-aggrandizing stunt. It was his final gift to the displaced residents of Portsmouth; a malevolent ghost that only haunted rich assholes. It was perfectly Mike.

We laughed and cried together as we read through the ridiculous first draft of his obituary, and drank the cans of cheap beer we’d smuggled in on his request.

* * *

The summer that followed was filled with attempts to strike a balance between visits to the hospital, and the parts of our lives that still existed outside of Mike’s slow decline. Recently retired from teaching positions at the public high school, Sydney and I picked away at our personal writing projects, fed our pets, and watered our gardens.

A thin thread of guilt wound its way through our days away from Mike, making everything about our new work-free lives seem frivolous and wasteful. How could we possibly enjoy a nice bottle of wine or the new Ken Burns documentary while my best friend was dying seven blocks away? Sydney and I had been married for thirty-seven years, but we both knew the strain of “pre-bereavement” was beginning to cause stress fractures in the bedrock of our relationship.

Mike’s condition took a nosedive that last sweltering week of August. He’d lost a significant amount of the weight he’d put on over decades shackled to an insomnia-induced low metabolic rate. His skin took on an ashen pallor, and his eyes were constantly watery with exhaustion. His mind went on longer and more frequent jaunts away from the rigors of his reality.

Sometimes, a visit to Mike was spent patiently listening to him bend and skew the details of his diabolical plan to haunt the waters of Portsmouth. Sometimes it involved taking Jessica out for a lunch at a nearby café, allowing her some time to vent, or cry, or pretend everything was normal for a blissful hour or two; whatever she needed on any given day. Sometimes it was spent watching Mike’s tortured body force-reboot his brain into a thin sleep that never lasted long enough.

It was as if he’d been impaled by an invisible javelin, and the childish joy that had fueled Mike’s entire existence was bleeding out of him. Out in the hallway, his doctor explained that the rollercoaster of his terminal illness had completed its slow climb up the first big incline, and had begun its rocket decent to the finish.

Knowing the end was approaching fast, Mike burned through his lucid hours in a state of manic preparation for the last big joke that was not a joke to him anymore. He was in daily contact with the people at Oceanic Grace, who were kind enough to give him GPS coordinates for where his burial at sea would likely take place. Mike plugged those coordinates into a 3D-rendered ocean floor mapping app on his phone, and virtually wandered the lightless sands of his future resting place. He started researching old shipwrecks, downed planes, and other unrecovered sunken items of interest, hoping Oceanic Grace might be able to Plinko his body on or near them for extra haunted points. The wall closest to his hospital bed became a mosaic of torn notebook pages filled with scribbled notes and poorly drawn coastal maps filled with Xs marking potential drop sites.

The last time we came to visit Mike, he’d hopped out of his bed, tearing the saline IV out of his arm in the process. He waved his glowing phone at us like a conductor demanding more forceful notes from a string section.

“I’ve got it, guys. It’s right here. I found this old text that explains it. I can’t just plop my body in the water and expect it to work. Here! Look!”

I took the phone from Mike’s clammy hand, and glanced at what was on the screen. On it were scans of pages from an extremely old book, accompanied by typed translations of the text. I was only able to catch something about “gibbering saints” before Mike pried his phone out of my grip. I’d researched that term countless times since, and I still couldn’t find any references to that anywhere on the internet, so I had no idea what that meant, or where he’d stumbled upon it.

“I’ve spent most of my life in a haze, right? Half asleep, half awake. A foot firmly planted in both worlds, but I’ve always fought sleeplessness. Pills, therapies, doctors, wires, studies; all to claw my way out of the Ether, but it never worked. You know why? Because it was against my nature. It says it all right here. I am a Child of the Ether. I was meant for dreams, but ended up in the waking world by some kind of cosmic fluke. Turns out oceans and dreamscapes aren’t all that different. You want to control the water, you gotta first become part of the water. Makes sense, right? I just need to give myself over fully to the Ether. I’m already halfway there. I just gotta let myself go all the way into the delirium. That’s where power is.”

We all stared at Mike, mentally cycling through the pre-prepared responses we kept on hand to calm him through his difficult spells, and realizing none of them applied. He knew who we were, and wasn’t slurring his words or anything, but his dementia had kicked into high gear. Jessica burst into tears and stormed out of the room, the echoey click of heels dwindling as she neared the emergency doors at the end of the hall.

“You gotta turn into a motherfucker, man. That’s the trick. You stop fighting the Ether, and you turn into a motherfucker.” He drew the syllables out like stretched saltwater taffy. Moootheeerrrfuuuckkkkkerrrrrr.

“It’s a joke, Mike.” I knew arguing with someone in the middle of an episode was a terrible idea, but I couldn’t help myself. “It’s your joke. You were trying to scare the shitheads who ruined our home. You don’t believe any of this shit. You’re just confused.”

“I can do it now, I think. Never had that in me before, but now? I imagine it, and there’s no pushback. No emotions telling me to stop. It feels like a chore you kinda enjoy doing. Like washing your car. All that scrubbing and polishing and effort, and then you stand back all pleasantly tired, admiring your work. Yeah, I think I’m ready. I’m ready for the water now.”

I knew then he was gone forever; the Mike I grew up with and protected and loved no longer resided behind those wild eyes. The withered, grey skinned man before me in that hospital room was lunatic and feral, a once beautiful person cruelly transfigured by resentment and mental decay into something that, even in his frailly, presented as more weapon that human.

Sydney left the room, no longer willing to witness the horrible display. I walked backwards toward the open door, hands up in a yielding gesture. I was scared he’d hurt himself.

“You have to slip into the delirium, and turn yourself into a motherfucker. And I am a motherfucker. I am a motherfucker. I am a motherfucker!”

Mike’s voice careened into a crackling howl as he repeated himself, tearing his johnny away, revealing countless raw fingernail scratches crisscrossing his entire body. I gasped as he began flipping over tables and chairs. Orderlies arrived just before he was able to use his IV stand as a battering ram against the glass which separated us from the view of the white-capped surge of the Piscataqua River.

“I AM A MOTHERFUCKER! I AM A MOTHERFUCKER!”

It was then, as the orderlies wrestled Mike to the cold tile floor, that I ran from the room. I reunited with Sydney and Jessica in the parking lot, who were busy sharing a cigarette—where they’d gotten it, I had no idea—and collecting themselves. We spoke for a while until we felt a bit better, and then decided to retire to our respective homes for the night. Tomorrow would be a new day, and hopefully Mike would be lucid by then.

My cell phone alarm woke me up at 6:00 am. I slid my readers on to check the screen. A text notification from Jessica stared back at me. I knew what it would say before I even opened it.

He’s gone.

We met Jessica at the hospital, her body going slack as we hugged her tightly. She told us he’d passed in the early hours of the morning. As the doctors predicted, it was one last heart attack that had sent Mike on his way. Hospital staff had already bagged and boxed his personal belongings and presented us with them at the nurse’s station. Sydney and I asked about the body as tactfully as we could. Jessica said the Oceanic Grace people had already been by to claim it, and begin preparations for the funeral in five days’ time.

“I guess they’re really fast. Makes sense if they’re not going to embalm.”

We followed Jessica back to her house and proceeded to get rip-snorting drunk with her. We grieved like old friends did—opening special bottles from Mike’s cellar cache he swore was secret even though all of us knew where it was because he could never shut up—and recounted our favorite Mike stories to each other. Her family was due to arrive at her place later that night, but it seemed right to keep her company until then. It was a healing moment for all of us.

At one point, we started opening the bags and boxes full of Mike’s things from the hospital. His childhood teddy bear, brought in as a joke during the first few days of his stay. A pair of headphones. A stack of Volkswagen tuning magazines. His wedding band, which had to be removed when his fingers swelled up from the medication.

I rifled through the stack of notes removed from the walls of Mike’s hospital room, Scotch tape still stuck to them, while Jessica busied herself with Mike’s phone. I pried the pages apart and lay them on the ground, attempting to organize them in the order in which Mike had created them. It wasn’t an exact science, but I could piece together a vague timeline based on the neatness of the writing. Clean, legible words at the beginning, cascading down to hectic, cramped scribbles toward the end. I was more interested in the latter, hoping I might understand what kind of headspace my best friend was in during his final moments. Maybe it would help the hopeless feeling in my chest that not even bottles of red wine could numb.

Rough sketches of aquatic scenes, terms I couldn’t understand, and what looked like some kind of scatterbrained numerology—something Mike spent his life actively making fun of. A drawing of something that looked like a cross between a trident and a fish spine. None of it made any sense. There was nothing to learn; no closure to find within those pages. It was the deranged marginalia of an exhausted man whose brain had betrayed him. I shoved them back in the box and refilled my glass.

Headlights shone through Jessica’s bay window, signaling the arrival of her family. Sydney and I said our goodbyes, and, with wine still coursing through our veins, opted to walk the several blocks back home.

* * *

A group of Mike’s closest friends and family waited on the dock that beautiful September afternoon.

“Local’s summer” is what Mike used to call it, when the wealthy tourists and seasonal guests abandoned the port city for their primary residences, the warm summer weather holding out for the locals to enjoy until October, if we were lucky. It had always been his favorite time of year, when he would drag us away from grading papers to enjoy cocktails at deck bars overlooking the junction where the turbulent Piscataqua River empties into the Gulf of Maine.

Behind and above us, an elegant outdoor restaurant seated several dozen transplants who occasionally looked down at us with measured contempt through the lenses of their Gucci sunglasses. Sun pleasantly baked into our black suits and dresses as we mingled next to the Oceanic Grace yacht. Finally, a crewman lay out a ramp and signaled for us to board.

The water was calm until we reached the breakers at the Gulf of Maine, but our large vessel cleaved them with ease. We congregated on the teak-floored bow as a waiter in a white tuxedo passed cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. A playlist, pre-approved by Mike himself, pumped softly through high-end marine speakers. At some point in the journey, I remembered Mike’s plan with the newspaper, and tried looking it up on my phone, but there was no service that far out to sea.

Jessica passed from group to group, accepting condolences from guests and thanking them for helping send her husband off. Sydney and I migrated between friends and family, making small talk as the coast grew smaller and smaller behind us. Everybody offered a different version of the same sentiment to me:

Classic Mike. Of course he couldn’t just have a regular funeral. He had to have known how uncomfortable it was going to make us to watch people throw his body into the ocean. A class clown until the very end.

When we finally arrived at our destination, the music transitioned into a mellow acoustic guitar instrumental. All chatter skidded to a halt as two men in tasteful Oceanic Grace deck wear wheeled out a stainless-steel cart on which Mike’s body rested. It was just as Mike had described it months before. A coffin-shaped shroud made out of a thick-knit navy blue material that looked to me like burlap. Attached at the bottom by a length of rope were four brass cannonballs, ready to guide their charge to the bottom of the frigid Atlantic.

The captain, a grey-bearded man with leathery sailor’s skin and hands that looked like they could choke the life out of a rhinoceros, came out to grunt some pre-prepared words. We were invited to offer some of our own, and to leave any special messages or photos we’d like to stay with Mike in a little Velcro pocket on top of the shroud.

With that done, the yacht crew gathered in a line, each of them standing at rigid attention as the captain and another crew member wheeled the cart to the side of the vessel, after which a section of railing was removed, and we all watched Mike’s body slide into the water with an unceremonious splash.

And then he was gone.

Nobody spoke during the trip back to Portsmouth. Something about the moment had flash-rotted in the salt air, which somehow felt thicker, laden with ill intent. All wholesome feelings of closure and compassion drained away from us the second Mike hit that water, which battered against the sides of the yacht despite the wind being low. I held onto Sydney, who gripped the chrome railing, and stared at the coastline as it grew closer, desperate to get off that god-forsaken boat onto dry land.

The only people who didn’t seem to be gripped by our shared sense of malaise were the crew, who happily went about clearing empty glasses and preparing inflatable bumpers for the yacht’s docking procedure.

None of us could explain why, not even after, when we’d all had time to think about it, but it was like we’d all just participated in something wrong.

It was Jessica who first noticed the handful of helicopters circling in the air above where we were supposed to dock. We didn’t see the flashing lights of the firetrucks and ambulances until we got closer.

The upscale outdoor restaurant next to the dock, newly built to accommodate the refined palates of Portsmouth’s gentrifying class, had suddenly slid into the Piscataqua River while we were out at sea. Dozens of diners crashed into the turbulent water and were immediately dragged down into the infamous five-knot flood tide that was known as one of the strongest in North America, second only to the Mississippi. Forty-two lives were lost that evening. Most of the bodies would eventually wash up along the beaches and marshes of New Hampshire and Maine. Many would never be recovered.

It wasn’t until after our silent drive home, both of us staring at the television as national news reported about the tragedy from several blocks away, that I thought to check my phone. The newspaper’s webpage with Mike’s obituary I’d been trying to view from the yacht had finally loaded, but it wasn’t the humorous draft we’d giggled about over beers in his hospital room. It was something entirely different. It made me rush to the bathroom and vomit.

I am Michael

I am water and wraith

I am froth and foam

I was your neighbor

I am now forever, and I come for the interlopers

You’ve paid handsomely for our birthright

But now you will pay the true fee

The creatures of the ocean have taken my communion

You will choke on your lobster dinners

Your children will be snatched by my riptides

Your posh revelries will be claimed by my currents

The price of remaining here is flesh and lamentation

You will always question if I am near

And the answer will always be yes

End.

Michael Boulerice hails from the wilds of New Hampshire. When he’s not pouring the vile contents of his brain into a keyboard, Michael is either snowboarding in the White Mountains or spoiling his pets rotten.

A LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN

RIK HOSKIN

A lynch mob had surrounded one of the locals out near the east fence, Jake could see, and were now endeavoring to hold him still for long enough to wrap a noose around his neck. The noose was made from an old rope, worn and frayed--like the mob, it had been hastily adapted from something found lying idly on one of the farms that dotted this region. The mob, made up of less than a dozen of the local farmhands, taunted and teased the naked intruder who stood in their midst, cowering before them. Behind them loomed the twelve foot high, electrified fence which protected the settlement. A mound of soil beside the fence showed where something had burrowed beneath it, invading the territory here.

Even from this far away, two hundred paces across the plains from the mob, Jake could smell the stench that exuded from the intruder’s skin. A thick, heavy musk that grated on the nostrils, like burning toast on a campfire. They had hooked the frayed rope over the local’s neck now, Jake could see, and he watched as one of the burly farmhands tossed the rope’s free end over the dead limb of a nearby tree. The local was screaming more shrilly now, howling in fear as it felt the trap close in. With a kick of his spurs, Jake urged his horse into action, racing across the dusty plain towards the scene by the fence. He pulled the brim of his Stetson down, tight to his forehead, shading his eyes as the dust kicked up behind him.

Closer now to the lynch mob, Jake pulled his 12 bore shotgun from its saddle holster, took aim at the noose where it rested over the bough of a tree. With a single booming blast, he unleashed a wad of shot, shattering the tree limb to dust. The local fell back to the ground as the pressure on the noose was loosened, and the mob turned as one towards the lone, approaching horseman.

“You’re all under arrest,” Jake called firmly as he drew his horse to a halt in their midst. “If any of you decides he wants to run, let me assure you that I have no more compunction about shooting you in the back for what you are doing here than I did for shooting that tree.”

The proxy-leader of the mob, a man called O’Malley whom Jake recognized from local council meetings, stepped forward and tipped his fingers to the brim of his hat. “Good morning, Marshal,” he began with an obsequious smile, “seems you’ve stumbled on us doing your job for you.”

Jake’s gunmetal grey eyes scanned the group, watching carefully for any furtive movements to indicate one of them reaching for a gun. Satisfied, he turned his attention to O’Malley. “That so, Mister O’Malley?” he asked, challenge in his tone. “Because, it looked very much to me as if you were about to commit a little bit of what the law calls murder on one of the locals here.” The local creature looked up at Jake through its slit, yellow eyes, its vibrant crimson skin covered in globules of greasy sweat. The eyes seemed to glow, even in the bright light of the morning, exuding a pungent yellow mist that drifted around its head as it shifted warily, the noose still tied around the corded thickness of its throat.

“What we were doing, Marshal,” O’Malley explained, “was teaching this local miscreant the error of trespassing onto our territory here. We spotted him ...” O’Malley corrected himself automatically, “it creeping around near the Holderbrook farm across yonder. It had already broken through the fence to try to get at us, y’understand?”

Jake shook his head, glaring down from the saddle. “You have to remember, Mister O’Malley--all of you--that we are the visitors here. We are the interlopers. This is their territory, not ours.”

A disgruntled rumble built from the group at this, and one of the other farmhands spoke up. “So, what you’re saying is we have no right to defend our property? Is that it, lawman?” the farmhand asked, making no effort to conceal the anger in his voice.

Jake shook his head, returning his shotgun to the saddle holster in an effort to diffuse the confrontation that was building. “This isn’t defending, son--what I see here is a witch hunt. And I can’t be tolerating a witch hunt on my watch, y’understand? ‘Cause, if I do, we could bring down a whole lot of stink that none of us can handle, yourselves, good men though I know all of you are, included.” The farmhand looked at Jake, a challenge in his eyes. “I trust I am making myself clear,” Jake stated, endeavoring to curtail the discussion.

In response, O’Malley took a shot at the creature before them, having pulled a small, pearl handled revolver from an inner pocket while Jake was dealing with the outspoken farmhand. The first blast took off one of the creature’s curling, bone horns, shattering it to powder. As the creature panicked, O’Malley took his second shot, the bullet taking the thing in the kneecap, just above the extension from the cloven hoof.

Jake steadied his horse with firm legs, whispering to calm her as he pulled his silver-plated six shooter from the holster at his hip and, in one fluid movement, targeted O’Malley’s forehead. “Do you want to try for a third shot, Mister O’Malley?”

O’Malley looked up at him, the bloodlust in his eyes, challenging him to loose the bullet for a moment, before he finally crouched slowly down to the ground and placed his gun on the dusty area beside his feet.

Across from him, the creature lurched away, howling and grumbling in its alien tongue. With its kneecap shot to ribbons, acidic blood spewed in a billowing fog from its leg. The creature struggled to stay upright, taking several paces past the crowd before it finally slumped to the ground. It lay there, red skin smoldering, a pained howl exuding from its lips.

Deliberately, Jake turned his gun towards the local creature as it whined out its death song, taking careful aim between the creature’s eyes. The single shot echoed across the open prairie as the bullet slammed into the creature’s face, penetrating the brain and killing it instantly. Three nights before, Jake had spent most of the evening tooling the protective sigils into the bullet, ensuring it would kill a demon in one, single hit. It didn’t pay to wound a demon, or so he’d been told. In his ten months of patrolling the settlement of Paradise, he had never once doubted that advice.

Atop his horse, Jake looked back at O’Malley where he kneeled on the ground, hands behind his head. Like the rest of the group, O’Malley was shocked at the swiftness of Jake’s action. “If memory serves, you helped to construct the gaol eight months ago, Mister O’Malley,” Jake told him as he reholstered his pistol, “now you’ll get a chance to see your handiwork all over again from the inside, it appears.” He instructed the others to bury the corpse where it lay, then turn themselves in at his office in the afternoon, before marching O’Malley to the Paradise Main Street gaol.

* * *

“The locals are getting restless,” Jake told Heather over their evening meal.

His wife looked at him across the wooden dinner table, one of the few decent pieces of furniture they had in their three-room lodge. “Ours or theirs,” she asked after a moment, reaching for her glass.

“Little o’ both, I guess,” Jake told her, not looking up from his plate. He pushed the meager scraps of food across its surface disinterestedly.

Heather reached a hand across to his wrist, halting the aimless progress of his fork. “What’s happened, Jake?”

He looked up at her, his heart softening as he saw the radiant beauty she exuded. Even now, eight months pregnant and looking almost fit to burst, she looked as beautiful as the day they had met, to Jake’s eyes. Maybe more so, Jake decided. “Caught some of the ranch hands trying to hang up one of the locals by his neck,” he told her, “way out by the east fence.”

Heather gasped, putting her chubby hand to her mouth, eyes widening.

“Ringleader was Tom O’Malley, you know?” Jake continued. “Took two shots at the thing so’s I had to throw him in a cell. The others I let go with a warning after a couple of hours, but I’ve left O’Malley to Paul to make a decision on. Unpleasant business, through an’ through,” he added, shaking his head, the food on his plate forgotten.

“Poor Tom,” Heather began. “It’s understandable, I guess, what with losing his daughter the way he did.”

Jake remembered the day when they had found O’Malley’s missing daughter--at least, what was left of her after the locals had finished their feasting. “Like you say,” he agreed, “understandable. Not forgivable though, not how things are right now.”

Heather pushed her chair back and stood up, stepping across to Jake’s side. She reached a hand down to his forehead, brushing the dark hair from his eyes, feeling the scarred over wounds on his forehead. “You’re doing your best, hon,” she told him. “Can’t expect you to do no more than that.”

He reached a hand up, entwining his fingers with hers. “I think these people expect me to fight a war for them, and I can’t do that. We can’t afford to start a war, Heather, because all we would do is lose,” he said.

After a moment’s contemplation, Jake got out of his seat, letting go of her hand, and headed for the back door of the wooden lodge. “I’m gonna go decorate some shot,” he told her as he stood in the doorway, grabbing the bandoleer he kept on a hook there. “Had to fire one of my bullets today, figure it needs replacing.”

She followed him out to the raised porch, leaving the plates where they were on the table.

Jake sat on the wooden bench by the back door, pulling bullets from the bandoleer strap, examining them in the light that came through the open door behind him. The first few bullets already featured the intricate web of sigils which he had painstakingly carved into them over previous evenings. When he found one without the distinctive patterning, he took his tiny scalpel blade from its leather pouch, consulted the book he stored with it. These were Biblical symbols, their pattern settled on by careful consultation with church leaders before they had all left Earth. There was no room for interpretation or stylistic flourish--it paid to get them right.

While Jake tooled at the bullet, Heather spoke up, quietly so as not to distract his steady hand. “Perhaps we could go back home, Jake. What do you say?”

Without looking up, Jake grunted the answer through clenched teeth: “Same thing I’ve said a hundred times before, hon. Earth’s population problem ain’t going away; we’re better off here.”

She held her belly protectively. “I’d like for our son to see home,” she whined.

“This’ll be his home,” Jake said firmly, piercing her with his stare before going back to work on the bullet.

They were quiet then, and, after a couple of minutes, Heather went back inside and cleared away the dishes from dinner.

It was true what Jake had told her. Earth was overpopulated and new settlements like this one had to be formed. They were among the first pioneers, creating new towns in the wilderness, so much of it unexplored. Their little settlement of Paradise was one of a hundred new towns forming, springing up all over the place now that the barriers on travel had been breached.

If only, Jake sighed to himself. If only we’d conquered space, instead of Hell.

Jake was still pondering this two hours later, when he finally put down the steel file and wrapped a graying bandage across the oozing wounds on his forehead. He would have to speak with the apothecary again, if the wounds didn’t clear up soon.

* * *

The next day, a young boy--one of the Robinsons’ kids, no more than ten years old--approached Jake in the drinking house that had been set up on Main Street, a little after noon. The boy crashed through the swing doors in his hurry, leaving small footprints in the sawdust that powdered the floor. A carpenter called Kilcher was still working on one end of the long bar, planing down the rough edges. The boy stood doubled over beside Jake’s table, sucking at his breath in huge, strained gulps. Jake continued to eat his steak while the boy caught his breath.

“Spotted your horse outside, Marshal,” the boy finally told him, his breath still ragged. “Pastor Hallard sent me to find you, thought you might be here getting your eats.”

Jake eyed the boy, chewing the meat thoughtfully. “An’ what does the pastor want in such a hurry, son?” he asked.

“Says you’re to come over to our fields soon as you can--we’re out by the dip, you know?”

Jake nodded. He knew where the Robinson ranch was. It was only five minutes on horseback, but the boy’s journey here on foot must have taken the best part of a half hour, running all the way on his stumpy legs. He leaned forward, ruffling the boy’s hair good-naturedly as he got up and headed for the doors. He pulled the brim of his Stetson low, hoping to cover the bandage he wore there, his spurs jangling with each step. Behind him, the Robinson kid climbed onto the stool which Jake had vacated, and began picking at the remains of the meal he had left.

* * *

At the Robinson farm, Jake located Pastor Hallard in one of the fields near the ranch, talking with Geoff Robinson, the farm’s owner. Both of them looked concerned as Jake approached on horseback, and they looked up at his arrival.

“Heard you wanted to see me, Father, Mister Robinson,” Jake said, touching two fingers to the brim of his hat in salutation after getting down from his horse. “What seems to be on your mind?”

Pastor Hallard held out a hand to Jake. Resting in the palm of his hand was a tiny, shriveled potato, barely the size of his thumb. “We’ve got a potential riot on our hands here, I reckon, Jake.”

Jake looked at the pathetic vegetable, failing to comprehend. “What makes you say that, Father?”

“The crops haven’t taken,” Hallard explained, looking to Robinson for reassurance. “We’re going to run short this season. And I mean real short, Jake, y’follow?”

Jake glanced at Robinson, then back to Hallard. “You think we’re going to have some hungry people on our hands? We’ll pull through ‘till next season.”

Robinson shook his head, muttering in disappointment. “The soil’s unworkable, Marshal. I don’t think there’s going to be a ‘next season’.”

“Then why didn’t you say something sooner, Geoff?” Jake asked.

Robinson looked at him, and Jake saw the despair in his eyes. “A week ago everything was looking fine. Then something happened. I don’t know how or why, but suddenly the crop spoiled. Corrupted.”

“What do you think did this?” Jake asked. “Best guess it for me.”

Robinson looked at the ground between his feet, his words quiet, as though he was ashamed. “I think evil did it, Marshal. That’s when I called in the minister here, hoping he could ...” he broke off, not sure how to put what he had expected into words.

Jake looked across at the field. All around he could see the leaves of the potato plants, rotted, sick and drooping. The plants in the neighboring fields looked similarly unhealthy when he looked across to them. “And what do you say to this, Pastor Hallard?” he asked.

In response, the Pastor let out a long, slow breath. “Hard to say,” he began, but his words were cut off.

Echoing from across the dip, the sound of a gunshot split the air. Jake was already by his horse, pulling his compact binoculars from a saddlebag when the report of a second shot reached their ears. He scanned the horizon through the binoculars, sweeping the prairie past the dip that marked the end of the Robinson smallholding.

“There, out by the west fence--there’s a party of them,” Jake told his audience as he hastened back to his horse. “I’m going to need you to follow me, Pastor, as fast as you can.”

With that, Jake spurred his horse to action, galloping for the west fence.

* * *

A crowd of locals had gathered at the west fence, where several of the farmers had surrounded a demon they had spotted crossing the fields there. The fence hummed quietly as power surged through it. Every hundred or so paces, a sign had been placed on the chain-links of the fence, exclaiming that it was electrified. Do not cross, the signs read--demon territory.

The demon that the mob had swooped upon was already wounded. It was of average height, not much more than five feet tall, but it was particularly bloated. It struggled to avoid the blows of the mob, its corpulent frame moving aside gracelessly as the more daring members of the crowd swung tools at it--spades and sledge hammers. Others tossed rocks at the demon or threw coins as they circled closer, many of which met their mark, slapping against the demon’s thick skin, occasionally piercing the crimson surface. A cut beneath one of its eyes bled, acid trickling down its cheek like a tear.

At the head of the mob, a burly farmer called Kane thrust a pitchfork at the creature. “I dunno how you got over the fence,” Kane shouted at the creature, his face red with anger, “but you ain’t gettin’ back to your foul brethren now.”

Another farmhand, Bateman, added, “We’re gonna break your filthy, devil neck!” swinging a branch like a club, keeping the fat creature at bay.

The crowd moved closer, swarming on the creature and holding it down as it struggled. Kane raised his pitchfork high and, with a swift jab, prodded the tines of the fork into the creature’s body. The demon howled as the metal penetrated its thick skin, burning where the iron of the fork entered it.

At the edge of the crowd, now dismounted, Jake was pushing people aside urgently, struggling to make his voice heard over the baying of the crowd, the pained shrieks of the demon. “Get away from that creature,” he demanded. “Let me through, let me through.”

Eventually, Jake reached the centre of the crowd, but he could see immediately that he was too late. Pulling his pitchfork from the creature’s mangled face, Kane stepped aside to let the marshal see their handiwork. He smiled at Jake, proud of the work he had done here. “Showed it pretty good, huh?” he asked, grinning.

Jake took a half step back, swung his right fist at the farmer. The blow connected with Kane’s jaw in a heavy thump, knocking the farmer off his feet. Dazed and bewildered, Kane looked up from the dusty ground, a question in his eyes.

“You stay down,” Jake told him firmly. Feeling nauseous, Jake took the final steps to where the body of the corpulent demon lay. He could see the pained expression on its face, mouth forever trapped in silent scream, yellow eyes open and staring into nothingness. The scarlet body was spattered with traces of the creature’s acidic blood, still smoldering wisps of mist into the air above it. Jake crouched beside the corpse, examining it closely.

Bateman, the farmhand, stepped forward, holding the remnants of the branch he had used as a club. The branch was now just a stump, broken in two with the force of the blows he had inflicted with it. “Why are you bellyaching, Jake?” he asked quietly. “You’re meant to be protecting Paradise for us good folks ... stopping the demons getting through the fence. Seems to me we gone done your work for you here with this one. Should be thanking us, I’d say.”

Jake’s grey eyes flicked up, taking in the crowd before settling on Bateman. “You idiots,” he told them. “You ignorant fools.”

Pushing his way through the crowd, Pastor Hallard made his way to Jake’s side as the marshal continued. “The locals can’t break through this fence. You’ve been blind all this time to what’s been going on right in front of you.”

Jake reached down, lifting the left hand of the naked demon. On the hand, something twinkled, catching the light: A gold band resting on one of the fingers, almost overwhelmed by the folds of puffy, red skin. “This isn’t a demon,” Jake told the crowd, removing his Stetson and placing it on the ground beside him, revealing the sweat-stained bandage he wore there. “It’s Heather,” and his voice cracked as he said it.

Pastor Hallard leaned down, looking Jake in the eyes. “Your wife?” he asked, cautiously.

Jake nodded. “Took me a while to figure out where all these devils were comin’ from. But you’ve seen it yourself. The crops, the soil--it’s tainted.”

The pastor looked at the wedding band on the demon’s hand, glanced back to Jake in sudden realization.

“All the while we thought we had tamed Hell,” Jake told him, a resigned smile lifting the corners of his mouth, “but really it was taming us. Guess it’s true what they say--the Devil always gets the last laugh.”

“How long have you known?” Hallard asked him quietly.

Jake put a hand to his head, picking at the bandage there and unwinding it from his forehead. Beneath the bandage, equidistant on his forehead, two small lumps could be seen, the skin angry around them. Bone had split through the skin, and despite Jake’s best efforts to file them down, it was clear what the lumps were: horns, growing through his flesh. The pastor felt his throat constrict, and he instinctively took a step backwards. “I’ve suspected for quite a while,” Jake assured him.

End.

Rik Hoskin is a multi-award winning writer of novels, graphic novels, video games and animation. He’s written comics for Star Wars, Superman, Doctor Who and various other properties. He won the Dragon Award for Best Graphic Novel 2018 for White Sand (with Brandon Sanderson), which also made the New York Times Bestseller list, and the Indie Volt for Best Graphic Novel 2021 for the crowdfunded Only Death Can Save Us. He’s written SF novels under his own name and as “James Axler”. His most recent novel was Bystander 27, published by Angry Robot.

He’s also written video games, including as lead writer, and has written animation for BBC television in the UK.

LOVE IS THE COLOR OF A BRUISE

SCOTT PAUL HALLAM

This time when I leave your brownstone, bruises cover my arms. They’re black at the center, encircled by violet, greenish-yellow at the fringes. It’s not because of rough play; no leather straps pinching skin. It’s the cost of visiting you when you call, when you awaken me from a restless sleep, my briefs and t-shirt sweat-soaked, my body shaking. I wake not by a ringing phone but with a fever dream that you plant while I slumber.

A quick taxi ride to your home when the sky is full dark. When the city’s teeming inhabitants diffuse like ants during a rainstorm. With a snapped finger, your bedroom door slams shut. I fall onto your bed covered in high thread count sheets as you unbutton your shirt. I gaze up at you, a sinner praying for his penance, a lost sheep waiting to be devoured.

* * *

My thoughts often drift to the night we first met. You sauntered into my poetry reading at the wine bar. I wore a tweed jacket, my beard longer than usual. My words filled with longing, regret, and death.

You, clean-shaven without a hint of stubble, pinstripe jacket over a crisp white shirt, lurking in the shadows. Your eyes trained on me. I shuffled my feet, worried about the extra pounds that I had gained recently.

I stumbled over words that I had recited a hundred times before. You drank in my every utterance, the pull of your gaze made me stop mid-sentence more than once. I barely finished my reading as sweat rolled down my cheeks.

We stayed at the bar until closing, finishing bottles of merlot, talking about our lives, our dreams, our disappointments. Then I went home with you—not a word spoken on the ride over—and we feasted on each other’s bodies; our first night was a poem written in an ancient language, a tale rich with lust and violence.

* * *

Each morning, crimson mixes with my spit. I’ve already visited numerous doctors. Blood drawn and tested. Not chlamydia or syphilis. Not HIV. More tests. Not cancer or anemia.

But they wonder why red splotches decorate my chest, and why my skin is yellow, even though I’m not jaundiced. Their eyes betray thoughts that I’m a junkie. That I’m a drug addict who brought this plague upon himself.

Every test comes back negative. The doctors keep their distance and slump onto their stools with disinterested defeat. They simply write me a prescription for AZT and send me on my way.

When I arrive home, I swear you off. No more nights. No more waking up mornings with joints on fire and bruises that sprout like weeds.

But my thoughts lie. When you call to me, when I see your face in my dreams and you beckon, I know that I’ll struggle to get out of bed, shower, dress in my best suit and come to you, even though each night means another little slice of my death.

* * *

The morning after our first encounter, I was too shy to ask for your number, but you told me that we’d meet again, that you’d attend another one of my readings, that our exploration of each other had only just begun.

Visions of your strong jawline, the symmetry of your flexed biceps, the echo of your panting breath haunted me wherever I went that following week.

Per my usual routine, I shopped for groceries on Sunday evening. I bumped my cart into an elderly lady because visions of you clouded my thoughts. In the produce section, as I inspected oranges and lemons, blood started to flow from my nostrils. I pinched the bridge of my nose, which did nothing to stop the rivulets of crimson running down my face. Red droplets decorated the mountains of orange and yellow fruit. The blood soaked my blue t-shirt, staining it black. Nearby shoppers and workers stared at me, instinctively backing away, their gaze sharpened by disgust and fear.

I abandoned my half-full cart and ran to the bathroom, bleeding the whole way. I shoved brown paper towels under my nose as I waited for my bus.

That night, during a fitful slumber, what felt like a flame seared my brain. Your voice—clear as a bell at midnight—rang out in my head. You wanted me. At that very moment, you told me to awaken and come to you.

As soon as I got in the taxi, my nose started to bleed again. With my left hand holding blood-soaked tissues, I screamed at my driver to go faster, to blow through stop signs and traffic lights, hoping that you wouldn’t change your mind, thinking only of your cologne that smelled of cedar wood, imagining your embrace as strong and safe as a blanket made of lead.

* * *

But that was months ago. Now, at my day job, I wear long-sleeve shirts instead of polos.

I’m constantly late on my deadlines writing marketing copy at an ad agency. What words I produce are diseased with typos and awkward phrases. My co-workers and boss offer sideways glances as I scribble furiously in my notepad, trying to push you out of my mind. It’s no use, like trying to stop storm clouds from gathering.

* * *

You didn’t call tonight. I didn’t think you would. So, I set my alarm clock for 1:00 AM to wake myself. Thank God I can grab a taxi and don’t have to drive. Not in my condition. I shamble up and down your street, sticking to shadows so that I don’t freak out the neighbors. Every muscle aches. I shove a tissue into my right ear because it won’t stop oozing.

Your bedroom light glows. I know he’s there. The personal trainer with the chiseled chest. The one you introduced me to over a late-night dinner. The night your friendly hug lingered too long, your bodies pressed too close together.

So, I skulk outside your door, hoping that police sirens don’t pierce the neighborhood quiet. Moans—yours and his—echo in the darkness. Within minutes, another taxi whisks me back home where I can be alone with my tears.

* * *

I’ve used all of my sick days. Vacation time too. I fake a grandmother’s death. My boss calls, asks if I want to take disability. HR left a half-dozen messages on my answering machine.

I ignore them all. Until I get the message about my termination. Relief washes over me. I don’t call back. No reason to leave my apartment now other than to obtain food—which I barely nibble at—or to come visit you, which has become less and less frequent.

During the rare times when I venture outside, faces contort into grimaces as I pass. I can almost read their thoughts, wondering if they’ll catch the “Big A” just by breathing the same air as me. They part as I shuffle down the sidewalk, allowing me wide berth, no matter how crowded the streets. Not that I blame them. I’m a shadow of my former self, a ghost that the rest of humanity peers through.

When I stare into my bathroom mirror, it’s a ghost I see. Gauze-thin flesh pulled across a skull. My face marred by violet, black, and green.

I’ve transformed in ways that I never thought possible just a few months ago. And yet, I refuse to entertain ways to slow my decline. So, I fill my mind with images of you. Of you holding me when it was just us, alone in your bedroom. When no one else existed in the world. That’s what I cling to now. It’s all that I have left.

* * *

It’s been three weeks since you’ve called. Insomnia wrecks my nighttime hours. I can’t get out of bed without a cane. I totter, not walk. You’ve ignored my calls. Not even acknowledged the camellias I sent, your favorite. A dozen roses too commonplace for you. I know I’m acting like a stalker now, and I hate myself for it. But I can still move, still perform. I’m not ready for this to be over. Even as my toenails fall off in the shower. I want to show you that I still love you. That I can still be what you need me to be.

* * *

My body bolts awake tonight, muscles screaming, my brain on fire as if a thousand hornets stung it all at once. You called. You actually called.

I rip myself from bed and arrive within the hour.

You greet me on your front stoop; your eyes filled with pity and feigned passion but also with something deeper like ruby buried in stone. It’s love. If it wasn’t, you never would’ve called. Or at least that’s the lie I tell myself as I hobble up the stairs, cane in hand.

After you close the front door, you cradle me in your arms, and carry me up your marble staircase, maybe for the last time. Maybe for a last act of love that will feel like the pain of a wound that never heals.

End.

Scott Paul Hallam is a speculative writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. His work will be or has been in published in DreamForge Magazine (a Tangent Online starred story); Cosmic Horror Monthly; Dark Peninsula Press’s “Woodland Terrors” and “After Tomorrow” anthologies; and Unnerving’s “Hardened Hearts” anthology among others. He earned his Master's in English Literature from Duquesne University and first fell in love with the written word when his dad would read him stories by Edgar Allan Poe as a kid. He can be followed on X at @ScottHallam1313.

THE GLITTER OF BILE

AMANDA M. BLAKE

Mari supposed that the point of emergency sirens was to convince you to find a safe place in the interior of whatever building you happened to find yourself in—which was always her apartment these days. She didn’t know whether it was a Tornado Alley thing, a human thing, or just a fifty-seventh-catastrophe thing, but when the sirens went off, Mari joined the rest of her neighbors in watching the clouds go by.

She raised her glass of iced tea to Tammie, who sat on the balcony to the right. Tammie waved back. She still wore a mask for safety’s sake, even though the balconies were at least twelve feet away from each other. Yet you’re out here with the rest of us, Mari wanted to say, but no one really talked to each other anymore.

Mari wore her favorite sarong, a tank top without a bra, and one of the many lovely pairs of shoes that she couldn’t wear out anymore. Perfect for a nice day at the beach—except she was in a cheap lawn chair on her apartment balcony, with an expansive view of the apartment building on the other side of the street, where more people on their balconies stared up at the sky.

No one else could tell, but Mari also wore that perfume she’d bought seven months ago in anticipation of maybe dating again after the divorce. Across the way, a man and woman lounged in a tuxedo and wedding dress. People drank champagne, ate pizza and chocolate cake. They baked cookies. They swallowed Drano. Because in a dumpster fire, why the hell not?

The emergency sirens had gone off around two o’clock every afternoon since the constant cloud cover had started. Most of the time, the clouds were nothing special, a dreary shade of gray that gave way to drearier nights, but around two, the rumbling started and the gray darkened to almost twilight. They were guaranteed a downpour that ran rivers through their streets as soon as the emergency sirens finally went off. Then all these people would duck back into their dry homes and thank God for hot showers and air conditioning. But they weren’t lined up for rain; they were there for the light show that preceded it.

The darker clouds sometimes rolled like waves, sometimes boiled with a wicked blue or green glow. Sometimes there was a patch of white in the middle of the near-black, like a giant eye. But always, somewhere in the city was the one cloud moving at a different speed than the rest, hovering low, as though if Mari ran up to the roof like some people—barbecuing with family and friends, getting absolutely hammered, playing dance music to drown out the sirens—she might reach on her tiptoes and touch it. Not that anyone wanted to.

The two o’clock light show was always there, but no one knew where that little cloud would pop up, black and green like a neon bruise, a wisp of charcoal and sour apple cotton candy, although it smelled of gasoline.

There were all kinds of theories about the storms, but no one official had confirmed anything, not least because most major cities were blacked out by whatever storm had hit them. There were still some supply chains intact, or else shit would have gotten a lot more chaotic after that first week, but they weren’t as good as before. Everyone was just waiting for the last shreds of civilization to fray away, but they’d already been doing that for so long that they might as well have a block party, because at least it wasn’t as bad here as elsewhere. If they wanted to see bad, all they had to do was look south, where the clouds had gone pitch black and anyone who drove in never returned.

Mari considered adding a splash of rum to her tea, but if she got up, she might miss the colors.

The sky had been darkening for twenty minutes. Now the slow boil above them intensified, a brilliant indigo cradled in mammatus bubbles like paper lanterns.

No one knew how long these storms were going to last, but everyone had picture updates. Storms filled Mari’s feeds—inadequately captured, like trying to photograph the moon. If they were still blessed with sunny skies, some people still thought it was a worldwide AI hoax, some online flash mob, but Mari didn’t know why everyone else who knew better felt compelled to continue sharing. Maybe it was the new version wish you were here, watching a witch cauldron sky instead of getting sucked into one of the big-city black-hole storms.

At first, Mari confused all the raised hands with trying to get good camera angles, but too many of those hands didn’t have phones in them, so she set down her tea and bent forward to follow the pointed path of their fingers.

Oh, shit.

The black cloud trundled along at a diagonal, not following the direction of the tree-swaying storm winds but forging its own path straight for City Line.

Those who thought it was a UFO were technically right, in the sense that it was unidentified, flying (or at least hovering), and an object. People just assumed that meant extraterrestrial, and maybe it was, but it was no spaceship. Some brain trust had videoed himself shooting a T-shirt cannon at the cloud. Without anything impeding its arc, the T-shirt had come out the other side, albeit in worse shape than it had gone in.

Others thought it was divine providence—the rabid, foamy spittle of God. Proof of the End Times.

It didn’t really matter to Mari what had caused it if no one could figure out how to make it stop. She supposed some town or another must have tried witch-burning, and someone had probably written a think piece about the evils of blue cities versus red. But she lived in a red suburb, and the conversative neighborhoods got rained on just like the libs. From what Mari could tell, the apocalypse was still happening here, just not as fast, and she didn’t think virtue was the reason. Instead, the worst lottery in the world—a raffle, a racket—and maybe that’s what they were really an audience for.

The cloud was the size of a modest Target. As it swam under the storm clouds, rain poured from the center to its edges like a train of jellyfish tentacles, dyed slightly green by whatever glittered within, or maybe the rain itself was green. People on her side of the street leaned over their balconies to watch its progress and try to guess which direction it would go.

Already, screams carried on the wind, like the terror of trees. A defense contractor’s new headquarters had been right in its path. Since working from home was optional rather than mandatory, there would have been casualties. Not that working from home would have been safer, since the cloud seemed to have set its eyeless sights upon City Line—unless it decided to swerve at the last minute. Even if there was intention to its direction, there never seemed to be any sense.

Rather than the subject of alien or divine intervention, their little suburb felt more like a body on the table, slowly being eaten away by acid poured on them in thin lines by a psychopathic teenager giggling behind his cloud mask.

Mari sincerely hoped that wasn’t God.

The cloud continued its radioactive rain of terror toward City Line. Her heart seemed to beat extra between her pulse when the cloud shifted its path. She wasn’t the only one who prepared to flee as the cold breeze in what had been a muggy day brought chill-bumps to her bare arms. Some across the street had already run inside, peering through their sliding doors and windows at the promise of death approaching without pause or thought, just a merry black cloud doing what clouds do—finding a head to rain upon.

Mari clutched the wrought-iron railing.

Go over there, over there, not here.

No, just come over here and get it over with. Not this slow agonizing death where we pretend everything is fine.

Just spread and get it over with.

But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Too easy to widen its green eye and pass indifferent judgment upon everyone at once. It was worse, wasn’t it, to hope that tomorrow would finally clear the sky for sun, that the dying would stop and everything could go back to normal, because things were practically normal already, no need to worry, no need to run. Here, you could still have your tea and watch the clouds pour on someone else—or walk right up to the heavy little cloud and turn your face to the fall.

The cloud remained angled to cross the street and hit their neighbors straight on. Shaking, Mari lowered herself into her chair again as the bride and groom fought her ballgown skirt to get back into their apartment and find a safe place to hide, as though the cloud were a tornado hurtling toward them. A tornado would be kinder; eventually a tornado died. The cloud merely slept in whatever corner of the higher cloud cover it called home, like a bunny in a blanket.

And a tornado, monster though it was, didn’t do that.

As the cloud shrouded the street and the building across from her in its darker, viridescent shadow, those who’d thought that the cloud would just miss them received the worst of it.

Mari wrinkled her nose. She could only imagine how much worse it smelled when the gasoline-leak, sour-stomach bilious liquid surrounded you, coated your skin. Steam billowed from the concrete, the brick, the glass windows and doors, the wrought-iron balcony railings, and cars, leaving pockmarks on all these inanimate objects more thoroughly than the most violent hailstorm.

But people’s skin didn’t dissolve so much as bubble—first like soap foam, but for each successive raindrop, the blisters grew and grew until they burst and the flesh beneath began the same boil. Blood, lymph, and yellow liquid—which looked like pus but was more likely liquified fat, hell of a way to get free lipo—mingled with the greenish rain on balconies and sidewalks as people screamed and screamed and screamed.

Even if they managed to get to the building’s center, even if the caustic material didn’t burn through and burrow tunnels to lower levels, even if those running into their homes without closing doors behind them to get away from what destroyed and deformed managed to find some shelter, they might not survive, and many wouldn’t want to. The hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes were stretched thin these days, with a guaranteed influx of clients once the cloud disappeared and a more natural rain drained the green-tinged liquid and what it broke down into the gutters and beneath the sod to do God knew what to the groundwater.

Would sewers and waste treatment plants be the next to collapse in this juddering society? When would drinking water no longer be safe, no matter that natural gas was still working—for now? Regardless of the stockpile, everything ran out eventually.

Mari sipped her tea while the wind swept tiny aerosolized droplets from the black cloud toward their balconies. In the corner of her eye, she noticed Tammie getting up to hide behind pitted but holding sliding doors. However, most of her neighbors, like Mari, stayed in their seats, watching the rain of destruction and pain across the street.

She idly scratched little boils in the crook of her elbow while she finished her tea, condensation from the cold glass in the humid air dripping onto her chest.

End.

A mass of tentacles and rose vines masquerading as a person, Amanda M. Blake is the author of such horror titles as QUESTION NOT MY SALT, DEEP DOWN, and OUT OF CURIOSITY AND HUNGER, dark poetry collection DEAD ENDS, and the Thorns fairy tale mash-up series. For more, visit amandamblake.com.

THE LAST CIGARETTE

GREYE LA SPINA

Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1925

MILTON WHEELER'S thick-set body shivered as he put a match to the wick of the oil heater, noting mechanically that the reservoir was almost empty. Before he could get more oil, he would have to settle that already large bill owing the grocer.

He paced the floor to stir his torpid circulation, rubbing his stubby hands together briskly.

His gray suit was much too light for November, and his undergarments —repeatedly darned and patched by Agnes’ hands—too thin to yield their original warmth. He owed the tailor for that new black overcoat; as for the underwear, he would first have to pay for last summer’s things and for the new black hat, before ordering other garments. A black suit he had not quite dared to order. Not that the tailor had actually asked for money, but he had observed casually that he wouldn’t send in his little bill until after the funeral.

After the funeral! Milton shivered again, this time not with cold. Everything was coming in—after the funeral.

He felt that Agnes had dealt him almost a personal blow by dying; without her co-operation, how could he keep up his pretenses? It would be a few days only, before his hated rival would learn upon how small a foundation had been built Milton’s house of sham. That Benson, who had in everything but the winning of Agnes triumphed over him, should learn of his failure to make a success financially, was to Milton a frightful tragedy.

Milton had had a few thousand dollars in bank, and a fair salary at the laboratory, when he married Agnes, winning her from Benson, who had large private means. (It was the first time since they two had been boys in school together that Milton had. triumphed over the other man.) It had been indescribably galling to him to think that Benson would ever learn how much Agnes had lost in marrying a poorer man. Agnes had rebelled at this deception in the beginning; she did not care, she said. But then she saw how keenly Milton felt about it—how his every thought was turned in the one direction. Poor girl! Her first unkind act had been her desertion of him at this critical moment.

Milton had managed to fool every-body. He had kept up a lavish establishment, spending his principal freely. He had bought Agnes everything that could make the impression of unlimited means upon the rejected Benson, whose keen eyes he fancied were always upon him. Agnes’ death, however, found him penniless; without a position; confronting a mountain of unpaid bills. Rent, unsettled for four months; groceries, the sum was almost staggering; butcher, how could they have consumed such quantities of meat?

The doctor—somehow this account had mounted up to much more than Milton had anticipated. There must have been many visits to the office of which Agnes' husband was ignorant; she must have kept her sickness from him a much longer time than he had realized. To the doctor’s statement Milton had pinned, with sardonic humor, bills from the druggist, the florist, the undertaker.

Then there were coal bills; laundry bills; ice bills. The sum of those items marshaled itself before him with malignant triumph, conveying to his shrinking spirit the overwhelming prevision of defeat.

Men were being turned away everywhere. He might be months finding another such position as he had been holding for four years. He might raise money to settle that appalling total of debt by paying the exorbitant interest rate of some loan shark, but even this would be only a temporary relief. Discovery of his castle of pretense was inevitable, and to him disclosure of the real facts meant such complete, such utter ruin, that the bare idea bowed him down into the very dust of humiliation. He could see Benson’s smile. . . .

* * *

There was only one way out. Death! It was distasteful to him, because his death under present circumstances would mean the disclosure of what he had for three years been struggling to conceal. His death, with the revelation of that appalling sum total of debt, would make him the subject of derision for his rival.

If there were only some way to escape without baring his sordid secret to the world! He whipped his dulled mind into unwilling concentration. And then—suddenly—he had it! Within the dusk the little heater cast a circle of friendly radiance. Milton threw a glance upward. . . The lamp hook in that great beam across the middle of the ceiling looked strong enough. In the laundry there was always plenty of good rope. He would bring up a stepladder. . . .

Half an hour later he jimmied open from the outside one of the study windows giving on the garden; the gusty November air swirled into the room, setting the curtains a-flutter. Upon the floor under his writing desk he laid a ten-dollar bill as if it had been accidentally dropped by hurried fingers. The balance of his last week’s salary he tore carefully into small pieces and burned, scattering the ashes on the night wind from the open window. He pulled out both desk drawers, tossing their contents upon table and floor as if some unlicensed intruder had gone through them hastily.

Upon the bronze tray on his desk he laid a sheet of paper, inscribed with a few terse, carefully thought out words. He had disposed of all his securities, he wrote, to charities in which he and his wife had been interested, but had left sufficient cash in the desk drawer to settle all outstanding accounts against his estate. He chuckled as he wrote, a humorless sound, and then, shrugging his thick shoulders, finished: "I cannot live without Agnes. I am going to join her."

In those last moments he was capping the edifice of sham with the most marvelous of cupolas; he was putting the finishing touch to a work which for three years had been the driving force of his life. From boyhood he had had the worst of it with Benson, always; now Benson would be unable to smile in that slow, exasperating way of his. No, Benson would be obliged to think of him with astonished admiration.

He felt malicious enjoyment as he surveyed the indications of burglary, and the note that so well covered the traces of his supposed wealth. The fools would believe he had killed himself out of grief at the loss of his wife; they would continue to admire and envy him—and his secret would remain undiscovered.

* * *

Everything was ready. He lighted a cigarette contentedly. When he had finished this last smoke, he would climb the ladder, adjust the rope. . . . It would be the greatest triumph of his life, after all—this death. His only regret was that he could not be there to enjoy the effect of the stupendous climax.

His cigarette finished, he flung the butt away and mounted the ladder. He felt gingerly of the rope knotted about his neck, shuddering involuntarily. If it were not that by dying he was making his secret secure for all time—. After all, it was the only way.

Setting his teeth, he pushed against the ladder with both feet. It toppled to the floor with a crash.

As his body was whirled about by the tautening rope, a flare from the bronze tray on the desk caught Milton’s eye.

In that last poignant moment he had the mortification of observing that the cigarette butt had fallen upon and ignited the suicide note, that curled—crisped—blackened to a indecipherable ash before his agonized eyes.

End.

Greye La Spina was one of the few women to write regularly for the leading fantasy/horror pulps, and was a contributor to the very first issue of the first American pulp magazine devoted exclusively to tales of horror and the fantastic.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Meet the CHM staff
- Crazy Murder Forkers – William Sterling

- Between the Mind and the Dark – Hailey Piper

- Full Page Image

- Music Videos in the City of Life and Death – Steve Toase

- Lick Me Clean – Evelyn Freeling

- Your Stories as Molten Metal – Carson Winter

- Your Posh Revelries Will Be Claimed by My Currents – Your Posh Revelries Will Be Claimed by My Currents

- Full Page Image

- A Little Piece of Heaven – Rik Hoskin

- Love is the Color of a Bruise – Scott Paul Hallam

- The Glitter of Bile – Amanda M. Blake
- Full Page Image
- The Last Cigarette – Greye La Spina