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Cover Art: Martin Blanco (http://www.martinblancoart.com/)

Art for History of the Necronomicon: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

ISSN DIGITAL 2693-5805

www.cosmic-horror.net

Greetings dear reader,

Thank you for joining us for our third issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly. We are glad to see you back. Or maybe this is your first foray into our special breed of cosmic terror. If so, welcome!

This month, the discovery of forbidden knowledge leads to insanity or perhaps something far more sinister in Old Leaves, then an airline trip for a father and his sons becomes truly hellish in No Day for a Family Man. A WWII deserter finds refuge near a mysterious pond, but things aren’t quite what they seem in The White Pond before we stumble upon an open letter to the human race in Hippo Blood. Finally, we descend to the crypt, where we find two works nearly forgotten but sure to keep you up late at night with The History of the Necronomicon and The Cone.

Gather your pillows and blankets. It may be sweltering outside but you will find chills in here. Light a black candle or two and give in to the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind.

C.R.

*~*~*

Old Leaves

By DJ Tyrer

“There’s something wrong with him.” Mum gave a nod back towards the house, to Dad’s library; we were standing in the back garden. It was lightly drizzling and my heels were slowly sinking into the damp earth.

She sighed, then went on: “He’s out here every night, staring up at the stars through that old telescope of his. And, each morning, I come out here and find these…”

I followed the twitch of Mum’s hand. A number of large white stones from the driveway had been scattered about on the lawn. One of them was smeared red, the drizzle spotting it white again. As I examined them, it was almost as if they’d been laid in a pattern, but I couldn’t say for sure.

“That,” Mum said, pointing at the stones by the reddened one, “is Taurus, I’m sure of it.”

“Constellations.” Yes, I could see it now. “Why?”

Mum shook her head. “Goodness knows what he’s up to! I really don’t know. He’s acting very strangely. And, he hardly sleeps: he spends his days holed up in that library of his, amongst all those mouldy old books—it can’t be good for him.”

She paused and fixed me with a glare. “You know he has a weak chest.” As if it were my fault! “All those spores—I don’t like to think about it.”

Not that she minded talking about it, going on at length about an article she’d read on the topic.

“I don’t think he sleeps at all,” she concluded, “not more than odd snatches, anyway.”

She fell silent and looked at me.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Come home. You can write here as easily as in London. We’ve got perfectly good broadband here.”

“But, what do you want me to do?”

“Talk to him. You’re his special girl; he might open up to you. He won’t speak to me.”

According to Mum, the most she’d had out of him in weeks was the occasional grunt when she banged on his door to announce she was leaving a tray for him. Mostly, the pots of tea and plates of sandwiches and snacks went untouched. She was right to be worried, but I doubted my presence would change anything. Dad had always been obsessive, a workaholic, and if he were working on some project, it would run its course soon enough. If not, then he needed professional help.

“Okay, Mum.”

A smile of relief brightened her wan features and she gave me a hug.

“I’ll see if he’ll pay attention to me.” Turning, I headed inside. I didn’t relish the task before me but was glad to get out of the damp.

I went straight to the door of his library and knocked.

“Dad? Dad, it’s me, Chrissie.”

There was no answer. I tried the door: It was locked. I knocked again, louder, but there was still only silence in reply.

I went into the kitchen where Mum was making two pots of tea. She looked at me, questioningly.

I hated to dash the hope I saw in her eyes, but told her I’d gotten no response.

She shook her head, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.

“Here, let me take him his elevenses; that might get his attention.”

She placed a few of his favourite chocolate digestives on a saucer and handed me the tray.

“Thank you, dear.”

I knocked again at my father’s door and announced what I’d brought. This time, there was, at least, a grunt in reply, indicating he was still alive.

Mum seemed satisfied, as if I’d achieved something, and I carried our tray of tea and biscuits into the living room. It looked just as it had in my childhood, too full of lace and chintz for my current tastes. Nothing much about the house had changed and, in an odd way, that made my father’s peculiar behavior all the more strange, as if someone were playing games with my memories.

We chatted for a while, about my writing career, the distressing (to Mum) fact I was still single, the recent referendum, everything except Dad. Then, having finished our tea and giving him a generous extra allowance of time, we stumbled to a halt.

With a sigh, I said, “I’ll go check.”

The tray was where I’d left it, the biscuits untouched and the pot full of cold tea. I took it back to the kitchen, then returned to Mum and shook my head.

I saw her blink away tears and gave her a hug.

“It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”

I wished I believed my words.

After a couple of minutes, I stood and said, “Well, I don’t think he’s coming out anytime soon and, if I’m going to stay a while, I’d better go get my laptop and some changes of clothes. I’ll grab something for lunch, then be back for supper. I’ll see you then.”

The drive gave me time to think, to process what was going on, but it didn’t help much.

The return journey caught the start of rush hour and took longer. I was feeling tired and frazzled by the time I arrived.

“I don’t know why you live in the city,” Mum said as she ushered me into the dining room for a proper roast dinner. She liked to spoil me when I visited, even if she knew I’d only eat about half of what she doled out onto my plate.

I sighed. I didn’t want a debate, let alone an argument. “It’s where everything and everyone I want access to are located. I can’t live my entire life online.”

I yawned.

“You’re worn out.” The realisation seemed to kill her need to argue. “An early night for you, madam.”

I wasn’t going to argue, especially if pinning Dad down meant tackling him the next night. I pushed my food around my plate, hardly eating anything, eliciting queries as to my health. I told Mum to reheat it tomorrow, then staggered up to bed.

Normally, when I returned home on a visit, I slept well. But, tonight, I tossed and turned and slipped in and out of a fitful sleep. I could hear sounds outside and, at one point, rose to look out the window.

A shadowy figure was in the garden, gazing heavenward through a telescope mounted on a tripod, occasionally stepping away from it to rearrange the white stones. Dad, of course, but, for a moment, my mind befuddled by tiredness, I thought it was a stranger: He seemed to move in a manner that wasn’t quite how I remembered Dad moving. He seemed more languid in his movements, his stride a little longer.

I didn’t watch him for long: The task was boring for a voyeur and I was just too tired to care much right then. It was odd, but merely one more element of strangeness.

I must have fallen asleep, as my eyes flickered open at the sound of Mum’s voice telling me it was lunchtime.

“Wake up, sleepyhead. Cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches are waiting for you.”

I stumbled downstairs, still feeling tired. Indeed, I was listless all afternoon. But, after an early-evening doze and devouring the previous-night’s reheated supper, I felt a lot better.

“I’ll catch Dad in the garden,” I said over dessert, “talk to him there.”

Mum nodded. She retired to bed a little later, leaving me to wait for him.

I was nodding slightly in front of the television when I heard the sound of the library door. A few soft footsteps followed and, then, I caught the click of the kitchen door being unlocked.

I pulled on a pair of flat shoes, better suited to the garden, and headed outside.

There was barely a sliver of moon, but the sky was clear and the stars were shining brightly. I could see Dad setting up his telescope.

I called out to him and he turned as I approached.

“Do I know you?”

“It’s Chrissie, Dad.” Was it just the darkness or was dementia setting in? Alzheimer’s could explain such a remark.

“Chrissie? The daughter? Pictures of a little girl in pigtails. You aren’t a little girl.”

“I guess I’ve grown up.” I tried to laugh.

He gave a curt nod and turned to finish putting the telescope together.

“What’re you doing?”

He didn’t turn, but said, “I must study the stars. The conjunction I seek is coming soon: then, the dark stars shall reveal themselves and…”

He trailed off and I asked, “And, what, Dad?”

He pressed his eye to the telescope and didn’t answer, ignoring my further attempts to get him talking.

I gave up an hour and went back inside, wondering if I ought to bring him with me. I didn’t want him catching a chill, but doubted he’d cooperate.

I went to bed and slept badly again. I remembered dreaming but couldn’t recall what about when Mum woke me.

“Did you speak to him?” Mum demanded before I’d even sat up in bed.

I acknowledged that I had and that nothing had come of it.

“It could be dementia.”

Mum shrugged. “Maybe. But, don’t people regress with that? What’s he doing with those stones?”

She paused to hand me a late-morning cup of tea, then said, “He’s added black ones to them, now. Lumps of coal. Goodness knows where he found lumps of coal.”

“Black ones?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dark stars,” I said.

“Sorry?” For a moment, I think Mum wondered if I were going mad, too. Maybe I was.

“The white stones represent stars, constellations, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, last night, Dad said something about looking for dark stars.”

“So, you think… this is coming to an end?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But, you’re right, it doesn’t sound like dementia.” I yawned. “I’ll do some research after lunch.”

While I couldn’t quite rule out Alzheimer’s or a similar condition, I wasn’t convinced. Something was nagging at me—something Mum had said, perhaps? Something I’d read? I couldn’t quite place it.

Then, I remembered: Email. Mum never emailed me, she still stuck tenaciously to the pen and to phone calls, but Dad sometimes did. I went into my Hotmail account. He hadn’t written since he’d started acting strangely, and his messages had been irregular before that.

I found the one I was looking for. He’d written it just after the death of my great-uncle Henry.

Dad had been pleased to receive a number of books from his uncle, ones he’d coveted for years. ‘I’m looking forward to studying the dusty old things,’ he’d written. ‘Shame Uncle Henry didn’t take better care of them. The old fool just bunged them in a shed and let them get mouldy.’

Mould! It didn’t take long to confirm what had been nagging at me. Some moulds can cause hallucinations and, locked in there with the windows shut tight, Dad was probably breathing in lungfuls of spores. It made perfect sense.

I told Mum.

“What do we do?” she asked.

It was the obvious question and I didn’t have an answer. I suppose, if mould was making someone hallucinate, you could have them locked up in a mental hospital for treatment, but that still seemed a bit drastic.

“I’ll try talking to him again. I’ll explain what’s wrong, see if I can persuade him to stay away from the books and get some help.”

Mum nodded, relieved.

I couldn’t settle that evening as I waited for Dad to exit his library. I tried watching an episode of Scandal, then gave up and flicked through a book, then tried to work on an article, but my mind was focused on my father and what I’d say to him.

It was almost a relief when the time grew near and I planted myself in the hallway outside his door.

Shifting uneasily from foot to foot, I fell still when I heard the lock turn.

The door opened and Dad stepped out. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him the night before and, while I knew he’d barely been eating or sleeping, it was still a shock to get a look at just how ill he was.

Dad’s skin was dry and cracked, papery with a sickly yellowish hue to it. His appearance was almost corpse-like. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.

But it was his eyes that made me step back: They were so wide and intense, quite unlike his used to be.

“Dad?” All thoughts of what I’d planned to say vanished from my mind. Something was very wrong.

“Yes, my dear?” His words were clearly intended to be soothing, but there was a rasp to his voice that made them sound almost menacing.

I shook my head. “Uh, nothing.”

He gave a smile and turned and headed outside.

I stared after him, then turned and headed up to my room, locking the door behind me.

I was trembling as I climbed into bed. The man in the hallway was Dad, yet I was utterly convinced it wasn’t him. Yes, the face was the same, but it was more like a parody of the face I knew so well. The eyes—the eyes were not my father’s; and that ‘reassuring smile’? It had been more a grotesque grin than a sign of parental affection. And, he never called me ‘dear’. Then, there was his gait and everything about the way he moved. It wasn’t my father, no matter what commonsense told me.

I didn’t sleep until the sun began to rise, as if its rays somehow offered me protection, and when I did slip down into dreams, they were full of his leering face, like a horrible mask with dark eyes like two dead stars.

When Mum woke me, all I was willing to admit was that he hadn’t stopped to listen.

In daylight, such thoughts as I’d had seemed ridiculous. I was certain I hadn’t dreamt the encounter, but I wondered if exhaustion had caused me to read more into his odd behaviour. After all, I was very anxious, and he’d looked so ill… Or, was it possible that a cloud of spores had escaped from the room as he stepped out, causing me to have a funny turn?

By lunchtime, I’d just about convinced myself I’d had a failure of nerve and that anything more was due to the effects of the same mould I was certain was to blame for Dad’s peculiar behaviour.

Still, that night I went straight to bed, too shaken to confront him again.

I couldn’t put it off past that as Mum was ready to call in the doctor to have him committed. I felt I owed Dad one last go at helping him to help himself.

Again, I waited for him to step out of the library, nervously pacing back and forth and wondering if I should just tell Mum to go ahead and call a doctor.

Then, the door opened and Dad stepped out. I was certain at that moment, despite an element in the back of my brain yelling that this wasn’t him, that it was my Dad and that he was quite insane and that, surely, the inhalation of mould spores was to blame.

Dad was wearing some sort of papier-mâché mask, a pale ivory in colour, while his body was covered in what must have been hundreds of yellowing, mould-flecked pages torn out of his uncle’s old books which he’d glued together into a sort of ridiculous robe that rustled as he stepped out into the hall.

“Dad?” For a moment, I couldn’t think of what to say. The sight was so outlandish and ridiculous—and a little intimidating. I was bemused, but also confident that madness was to blame.

“Beyond Aldebaran,” he said in a soft dry voice that sounded like the rustling of the old leaves he wore, “dead stars hang in darkness frozen, lighting the way for the chosen.”

“Dad, it’s me, Chrissie. Listen to me: You’ve been breathing the mould spores from those books and they’re making you hallucinate. Dammit, you’re wearing them now, breathing it in.”

“The time is here. Duncan has opened himself to the possibilities inherent in the Shroud of Yhtill. He dared to dream. And now, the dark stars shine their black light upon us, show us the way back to the City. He and I are one and soon we all shall be one as the shadows lengthen in dim—”

“Dad!” I interrupted. “Shut up! Listen to me! Take all that off: You’re hallucinating and you need help.”

Ignoring me, he started to turn, rustling.

“Dad, take that damn mask off.”

“I wear no mask.”

I should have listened to the churning in my tummy, to that part of my mind that was screaming at me to stop, to run. I should have accepted what my eyes had told me and his words had confirmed. But, I didn’t. I’d convinced myself. I was angry.

I reached out and grabbed the mask and pulled it free.

With barely the sound of a soft sigh and the shush of pages brushing against one another, the old leaves torn from mouldy books fell into a heap on the floor.

I clutched the papier-mâché mask and stared down in confusion at the pile, my mind reeling in a riot of bewilderment and horror. I dropped to my knees and sifted through the scattered pages as if I would locate my father hidden beneath them.

It was impossible, yet I’d seen it.

I looked in the library, hoping he would step out laughing, having played some conjurer’s trick, but it was empty. Dad was gone. Although, I suspected, he’d been gone for some time.

There were only two possibilities: Either what I’d just seen, as bizarre as it was, truly happened, or I too was infected by the mould spores and had gone just as mad as he. I’m not sure which of those two possibilities was the worse…

Regardless, I couldn’t face Mum. What could I say?

So, I gathered up the pages and the mask and laid them upon Dad’s desk and locked myself in his library.

Mum knocks occasionally and calls out to ask what’s wrong, but I never answer as I don’t know what to say and I’m too busy to think.

I’ve rearranged the pages in order and am reading them to understand where my father went and how. Already, I find myself thinking thoughts that aren’t my own. Am I mad? Or has He come for me, too? Will I be one with them in that dimly-lit city beyond Aldebaran?

Soon, I shall put on the mask and don my robes. It is nearly time. The conjunction is already here, so I need not wait as long as he did.

If you find this, you’ll know. If the library is empty, if Dad and I are missing, we’re far from this world, somewhere past Aldebaran where dead stars burn icily. If not, if you find our bodies, then it was the mould all along.

The time is here. Chrissie has opened herself to the possibilities inherent in the Shroud of Yhtill. She dared to dream. And, now, the dark stars shine their black light upon us, show us the way back to the City. She and I are one and soon we all shall be one as the shadows lengthen in dim Carcosa.

End.

No Day for a Family Man

By John Leahy

The plane began to move. Irving Whyte and his twin sons Josh and Casey waved at their sunshades-wearing mother who stood on the tarmac waving back at them. Regina Whyte was smiling broadly, looking every inch the Alusol Sherman executive in a dark power-suit. The best farewell her husband could manage in return was a faint grin. It was impossible to smile wholesomely at his wife with that asshole standing beside her.

Irving glanced sideways at Harvey Ackermann who was furiously swiping at his cell, his tie blowing in the wind. Ackermann lifted his head and said something to Regina and the last thing Irving saw before his wife slipped out of view behind him was her talking and then laughing with that bastard.

It hadn’t been much of a visit. Well, not for Irving and the boys anyway. The best part of a day and a half hopping down along the American continent from Houston to Mexico City, then onto Antofagasta and finally a propeller plane ride to San Pedro de Atacama. It had taken them a full day to recover after the ordeal. The boys hadn’t complained though. The trip to see their Mom had been their idea. They’d wanted to see where their mother had been working so hard for over two years. What they had complained to their Dad about had been the short amount of time that they’d spent with her. They’d been prepared for their mother’s long working days—but what they hadn’t been expecting was the huge amount of time she spent on her cell and conferencing on her iPad when she got home in the evening. Of course, most of that cell/iPad time had been spent in touch with him—Harvey asshole-Ackermann.

The kernel of the issue wasn’t even the fact that she spent so much time talking to the fucker— it was that she seemed to enjoy it so much. She smiled too much when she was at it. It was the smile of a woman who was lying in bed with a guy, the two of them naked under the covers, talking after sex. That was the bottom fucking line of it all.

Irving killed his dreadful train of thought and looked out the window as the small airport terminal sped past them. His blood was thumping in his ears. The plane began to rise into the air. His heart sank. Great he thought. A day and a half of exhausting flying and airport-ing ahead. Plenty of time to contemplate Ackermann screwing my wife. Plenty of time to contemplate how good he is in bed and how much she likes it.

And then after that, back to his rotten chef job in what felt like the busiest hotel in Houston, surrounded by incompetent kitchen staff, waiters and managers. Irving looked sideways at Josh and Casey. In the seat beside him, Casey was listening to music on his phone, his eyes closed. Beyond him, Josh was simply staring calmly toward the front of the plane.

Irving looked back out the window beside him and drew a deep breath. They were up high now, and in the distance, he could make out the Atacama salt flats where Alusol Sherman, Regina’s company, were busy extracting enormous amounts of lithium to use in the batteries of electric cars all over the world. Regina was an upper-level executive, liaising between three demanding entities: the bottomless money-appetite of head office back home in Houston, the red-tape bureaucrats of the Chilean government, and the demands of the workforce whose thirst for increased wages grew in line with the rise in the company’s share price. For keeping this delicate triangle from disintegrating, she was on a salary that was over three times her husband’s. It was how they could afford to send Josh and Casey to a private school—a good private school.

It was also the reason that Irving and the boys got to see Regina for no more than six weeks a year.

And it’s also the reason that Harvey Ackermann’s dick is where mine used to be.

Irving let out a long, stressed breath and took a book from his travel bag and started reading. A part of him was actually looking forward to getting back to work in his sweaty, noisy hotel kitchen with his lousy workmates. At least he’d be too busy there to be thinking all these fucking thoughts. No pun intended, a smartass voice in his head said.

*~*~*

About two hundred miles south of the Costa Rican coastline, something caught Captain Oscar DiForzio’s attention. It wasn’t anything in the sky—which was a perfectly normal, clear blue. The sun was an orthodox orange ball descending off to his left. No—what had caught his eye—or the bottom of his gaze, to be exact, was below him. Had been below him, at this stage. In the twenty or so seconds that he’d been pondering the strange event (if it had happened at all), the nose of the Airbus A330 had moved forward, obscuring the “occurrence” from view. He opened his mouth to ask his co-pilot Henry Tulswicke if he’d seen it, but then closed it again. Henry was busy checking some controls and Oscar didn’t want to interrupt him for something that he only thought he might have seen. Oscar blinked, a worm of concern tightening in his gut.

But I DID see it, a voice said in his head. I DID. Only for maybe a couple of seconds, but I DID see it. I DID see a piece of cloud detach itself from the blanket of white beneath us and begin to rise upward.

He scratched the side of his face. So, I saw something weird. This is my two hundred and thirty-eighth long haul flight and I’ve never seen anything that weird before. I saw a bit of a cloud do something freaky. Big deal.

*~*~*

“Hey Mom, look!”

Irving Whyte had been drifting pleasantly toward sleep and the sound of the girl’s exclamation now pulled him back into the land of wakefulness.

“Wow…that’s really strange.”

Irving opened his eyes. The girl in the window seat just ahead of him was staring out the window, as was her mother beside her. Irving turned to his left. What greeted his gaze was pretty odd, all right. About a hundred feet from the plane, a cloud, roughly circular in shape, was keeping pace with them. Irving looked downward. The thick blanket of cloud below them was maybe half a kilometer down. What was this straggler doing out on its own? And a bit more disconcertingly, what was it doing travelling alongside them at over five hundred miles per hour?

Irving looked in front of him again and saw that several people in the seats ahead were watching the extraordinary development. From beside him, Casey said:

“That is so weird.”

Irving saw that his son was looking intently beyond him at the cloud. Casey’s headphones were hanging loosely around his neck, tinny music coming from them. Irving turned back toward the window and a knot tied in his stomach when he saw that the cloud was moving toward the plane. It drew closer until it was near the wing, at which point it was sucked into the powerful Rolls Royce engine.

Irving looked ahead of him again. Almost every head that he could see was turned toward the window. Looking behind him, he saw likewise. He watched the cloud again. More than half of it had disappeared inside the engine now.

“What the hell?” he heard someone up ahead ask, concern in their voice.

Irving’s stomach was churning a little too. Was the cloud liable to damage the engine? It didn’t appear to be doing so. The plane was still powering on through the sky, the muted roar of its progress not sounding any different.

Eventually all the cloud was gone.

Irving stared at the engine. Its turbines were still a blur, no disturbance to be seen. There was no smoke coming from the contraption. And most reassuringly of all, there were no weird sounds or turbulence. So that was it. One weird cloud now done and dusted.

“Wow” Casey said softly beside him. “You ever see anything like that before, Dad?”

“No.”

“First time for everything, I guess” Casey added. “Even creepy clouds.”

“I guess.”

Irving was trying to sound light, but the event had unnerved him. He’d never heard of anything like this happening, and he was a big fan of the more unorthodox stuff on the documentary channels.

“Well” Casey said, lifting his hands to his headphones. “It’s history now”. He put his headphones back on, a slight look of concern on his features.

“Sure is” Irving added.

He noticed that Josh was asleep, oblivious to what had taken place. Good. Irving looked out the window again, at a mercifully normal sky. After a while he closed his eyes and waited for sleep to take him.

*~*~*

“What the hell is that?”

Irving’s eyes flew open at the sound of the voice. Feeling quite alert, he figured he’d only been asleep for a few minutes. There was a lot of mumbling going on. Looking up, he saw straight away what the exclamation had been about. At the flight attendant station up ahead, a white vapor was emanating from what Irving presumed was an air-conditioning duct. It stayed near the ceiling, making its way out of the station and along the cabin, between both aisles. It moved quickly and was quite thick. Irving couldn’t see the ceiling through it.

“Christ...it’s some kinda’ gas leak!” someone declared anxiously, causing the passengers’ mumbling to rise in volume to borderline panic level. A man got to his feet a little bit ahead of Irving. Irving presumed this was the gas leak theorist. It was only at that point that Irving realized Casey was gone from his seat. In the aisle seat, Josh was amazingly still asleep. As the white substance made its way past his seat row, Irving turned to watch its continued progress.

His stomach churned madly. He had a bad feeling about the white stuff. His heart pounded and his mind whirled. First, there had been the weird cloud. Now there was this. This stealthily sliding dry ice, or whatever it was.

“What IS it?” a woman cawed in fear. “Is it smoke? Are we on fire?”

Something deep inside Irving was calling for attention, calling for calm. Irving didn’t want to give it a soapbox, but he couldn’t shut it up.

It’s not some gas this deep presence spoke up calmly from within him. It’s not DRY ICE the voice added in an almost mocking tone. It’s not smoke. Part of you knows what it is, Irving, but you think you’re crazy to entertain the thought.

No, I’m not going to listen to this Irving said to himself, dimly aware that his hands were shaking. I’m not even going to THINK it—

It’s the CLOUD that awful calm voice interrupted. The cloud that was outside a few minutes ago.

The prospect hit him like a sledgehammer.

No, it’s not the fucking cloud, the part of his mind that was trying to squash this madness yammered frantically. Clouds don’t get sucked into airplane engines and get themselves pumped into the cabin like something out of a cheap horror movie.

The white stuff began to descend from the ceiling.

People began to make all manner of distressed sounds— cries, hollers, moans, shouts, the occasional shriek. When the white reached a height that was just below the base of the overhead luggage holders, it quickly snaked in over the seat rows.

“Jesus Christ!” a man exclaimed from ahead of Irving, terror in his voice. The man stood up from his window seat and pushed his way frantically past the two people in the row beside him. He got about three steps along the aisle when some of the white from the ceiling overhead puffed downward and encircled his torso just above the waist. He got one step further before letting out a primordial roar of pain and he collapsed to the floor, where his expressions of agony continued. From where he sat in Casey’s seat, Irving couldn’t see what was happening to the unfortunate soul, and even though part of him was screaming not to look, Irving got slowly to his feet. His head only a few inches from the bizarre white blanket above him, he gaped at the gruesome scene that greeted his eyes a few feet from the attendant station.

“Oh my God!!!” a woman screamed from near the fallen man.

The man had hardly been on the ground ten seconds and already his stomach and its environs were mostly gone. The white (the cloud, Irving, the cloud that horrible calm voice in his head reminded him) had—eaten his entire midriff. The white had divided itself in two upon the doomed form. One half of the dreadful substance was currently working its way upward through the soft tissue inside the man’s ribcage while the other half devoured the tops of the man’s thighs. Irving was barely cognizant of the smell— a faint cocktail of coppery blood, mixed with bile, urine and feces. He had a feeling that some of the constituent odors were not just coming from the carcass on the ground. The Dantean nightmare was getting the better of the bodily functions of some of the other passengers too.

The ravaged man’s fingers drummed mindlessly on the ground as his body continued to disappear before the progress of the white fog. Over the gibbering and panic in his own cabin, Irving could hear consternation in the neighboring first class cabin too. Presumably, the same ordeal was being endured there.

The door of the toilet near the flight attendant station cracked open and Irving saw Casey look out tentatively. Irving saw his son’s eyes frantically scan the cabin before resting in terror on the two-thirds eaten form on the ground not far from his feet.

“Get back inside!!!” Irving shouted over the racket, flapping an arm in the air. “Get back inside!”

Casey lifted his shocked gaze, his eyes locking on his father’s.

“Get back in the toilet!” Irving shouted, his legs rubbery with fear beneath him. A flight attendant dashed toward the open door, and pushed Casey inside before rushing in herself and locking it. Irving felt relief settle in his gut.

“Dad, what the hell is going on? WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT GUY???”

Irving looked down at Josh and his heart sank. His second son’s face was terror-stricken, his eyes and cheeks red with the sleep he’d just been yanked from by over a hundred panicking passengers. What a reality to return to from a dream! What if the kid had been dreaming of a pretty girl? From that to this—abomination? A man-eating mist that had turned a peaceful herd of passengers into a demented swarm, defecating itself with panic?

Irving’s mouth worked wordlessly. He wanted to say something to his boy. But there was nothing to say. At least, nothing he could think of. He looked around, his overloaded brain feeling as though it was independent of his body. He was the only person standing—well, half-standing. He looked up at the horrible white layer above him, less than a foot from his forehead.

Suddenly he could hardly hear the crying and terrified wailing that surrounded him. The cloud was swirling. Churning and weaving in and around itself like eerie clouds on some of those strange other-galaxy planets he’d seen on Discovery channel documentaries. Not taking his eyes from the ominous sight, Irving began to lower himself into the seat next to Josh.

“Dad, what’s that stuff doing?” Josh asked, almost crying.

“What the hell IS IT?” The level of hysteria in the cabin was creeping upward as passengers reacted to the latest development. It was clear from the even higher-pitched screams and barks of horror that no-one saw the new, roiling movement of the cloud as good.

Irving swallowed. It’s getting ready, a voice said from a dark pit in his mind.

“Dad!” Josh sobbed.

His gaze still fixed on the swirling, menacing enigma overhead, Irving thrust his hand out toward his son. Josh grasped it eagerly and they both squeezed tightly.

Some white puffed downward and engulfed Irving’s midriff. He stared at it. Suddenly his fear was numbed as he stared at the fog. It was almost beautiful, the pale, ghostly shroud. He roared in pain.

(Jesus! God!)

He’d never known pain like this could exist. It was like someone had thrown a bucket of particularly vicious acid on him. All he could do was feel this pain and roar. Everybody was screaming. He felt it was only a matter of time before the bellowing and shrieking burst his eardrums. He realized that beside him, Josh was screaming and that his son’s hand was no longer gripping his. Josh’s agony was more than Irving could bear. He couldn’t look to his right. He couldn’t watch his boy’s…devouring.

Irving lifted his hands to his ears and did his best to block out the sounds of torment all around him. He could feel himself growing weaker and his consciousness beginning to lessen. It felt almost ethereal, being suddenly inside a half-silent world. It was almost dreamlike.

(Maybe it is just a dream. Just a particularly bad nightmare. You’ll wake up any second now and Casey will be sitting beside you with his precious headphones on and Josh will be asleep and not roaring his lungs out while his guts are being eaten by some hell-fog.)

Irving’s legs slid off the seat and onto the ground where the mist continued to gorge itself on them. More of the white continued to tunnel its way through the upper half of his body. He knew that he only had a few seconds before he greyed out. Or died. Mercifully the dreadful pain was subsiding. The edge of his seat—where his legs had been—was dark and shiny with blood.

What a way to go, his darkening mind thought. You didn’t see this ahead of you when you got up this morning! It isn’t fair he thought bitterly. I don’t deserve this end! It should be Harvey fucking Ackermann sitting here, getting eaten alive. That’s what wife-fucking, corporate, obsessive cellphone-swipers deserved. Not decent family men like me...

Irving realized he couldn’t breathe anymore.

That’s because your lungs are being eaten now.

Then there was nothing.

*~*~*

A little over twenty minutes later, in the cockpit, Captain Oscar DiForzio spoke. There hadn’t been a sound from the first-class cabin behind them in over ten minutes.

“You—think it’s over?”

His frail voice sounded both terrified and defeated.

Co-pilot Henry Tulswicke didn’t answer immediately. He was gazing at the cabin door.

He drew a deep and shuddering breath. When the consternation had started in the cabin behind them, he and Oscar had opined that maybe a drunken passenger was having a meltdown. As they’d anxiously awaited a phone call from a flight attendant at the other end informing them that an airport diversion might be a wise course of action, Oscar had brought up the subject of the strange cloud he’d seen earlier. This had caused a bomb of nausea to go off in Henry’s gut. Only two days before, he had been on a night out with an Air Force friend, Travis Baird, in Honolulu. After a few too many beers, Travis had informed Henry of the fate of a cargo plane that had crashed into the ocean a few miles east of Oahu.

It had made the news—Henry could remember it himself. Fourteen military personnel had been on board—pilot, co-pilot and twelve marines including one Captain and one Major. What hadn’t made the news, and never would, Travis had informed him in a low voice, was the fact that the wreckage of the plane had been found in shallow water only a few hours after it had gone down. The bodies had all been on board, or at least what remained of them. Which had been very little aside from their skeletons. A friend of Travis’s had been on air traffic control on the morning that the flight had gone down and had taken the mayday message from the pilot on the plane.

The pilot had been barely coherent. He’d garbled about the co-pilot having gone into the cargo bay to see what was causing a major panic back there. The co-pilot had told him that what appeared to be a toxic gas had seeped into the plane and this gas was now eating the bodies of everyone in the cargo bay. The pilot’s alarmed voice had turned into a shriek as he’d informed Travis’s friend that the gas was now streaming in through the cockpit door. The pilot had then started screaming and a few seconds later the line had gone dead.

Henry lowered his head and turned away from the door. He figured that whatever had happened in the cabin behind them was over, all right. Everybody was dead now. It was strange. One minute, people are banging on your door, begging you to let them in, their voices full of tears. Begging you to let them away from the nightmare surrounding them. And then a little bit later...silence.

Henry looked out the window and a knot tightened in his nausea-tenderized stomach. Off ahead to the left was a cloud, all on its own in a clear blue sky, slowly banking away from the plane.

*~*~*

As Henry Tulswicke watched the cloud leave his field of vision, Casey Whyte put his hand on the toilet door latch. His fingers shook.

“Please. No. Not yet. Just...just a little while longer.”

Casey turned and looked at the flight attendant whose terrified form was pressed against the corner of the tiny cubicle. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

Casey slowly let his hand fall from the latch. In his mind’s eye, he could see himself and the attendant wandering aimlessly down the cabin-aisle, surveying the rows of death. What was the point? At least everyone was alive in here.

He’d held his composure fine until then, but abruptly, what strength he had left vanished like a puff of smoke and he began to sob. He shielded his eyes with his hand and lowered his head. He tried to shut out of his mind the sight of his father waving frantically at him to get back inside the toilet, Josh sitting beside him looking around in panic.

Casey cried freely. The flight attendant put her arms around him.

*~*~*

The throng was now much bigger than before it had found the jet. It had fed well, having eaten three hundred and fifty-five humans and that meant many of its members had acquired the strength to divide, their replicated selves now added to the collective.

The throng had come to Earth with its numbers depleted, having lost a huge swathe of its kind on a world not unlike this new one. It had been hovering over a bay, feeding on some airborne creatures when a vast entity emerged from the water beneath it and swallowed nearly two-thirds of the throng before crashing back into the blue. A huge splash of water had soared into the air upon the giant’s re-entry. It was the first time that the throng had encountered seawater and those of its members who were not drenched by it were horrified by the shrieks of agony they heard in their minds as their colleagues were burned to nothing by the horrible, dissolved salts of the water.

The survivors had risen high into the air, fearful of the monster emerging from the water again and seeking more of their number. The throng gazed at the water below. It could not see fifty feet beneath the surface where the beast’s stomach tore open, its wall having been devoured from the inside out by the swallowed members of the throng. The freed members screamed as they expressed their second of agony before blinking out of existence, melted to nothing by the saltwater.

The remnants of the throng had fled the planet in despair, reduced to a tenth of its original number. In desperation, it opened a wormhole in space and a few minutes later emerged randomly less than ten feet over another ocean of that accursed, all-consuming seawater! Initially the throng had surmised that the wormhole had failed and that it was back on the planet that it had only just left. It realized that the atmosphere here was much less dense, and the clouds high above it were white, not green. What dreadful odds, though! Two seawater-inundated worlds in succession!

Immediately the throng rose high into the sky. There was nothing but water for as far as it could see in any direction. It saw no sign of life until the following morning when it came across the cargo plane. It entered the primitive electro-mechanical device and ate the life-forms aboard leaving only the protective bones of the creatures behind. The meal had been small, with only a little bit of food for each member of the throng, none were capable of division afterward.

But the collective was impressed with the taste of these beings! Most pleasing indeed! The members couldn’t wait to encounter more of them. The throng had searched for two days but the wait had certainly been worth it! Three hundred and fifty-five of the delicious creatures packed tightly in one of their primitive flyers! All members had gorged themselves and all had divided, some twice.

A few hours later, with night falling, the throng spotted something moving through the water far below it. Curious, it descended. From a kilometer away, it could fully make out a large metal structure, its surface laden with other small flyers. The monstrosity was hopelessly primitive, crawling along slowly and weighed down with heavy, backward weaponry. As it drew closer to the craft a wave of elation surged through the throng. It could sense the huge number of humans scurrying about in the bowels of the simple beast! Thousands of them!

Even though it had feasted only a few hours earlier, the throng was still hungry. It was always hungry, truth be told. As the lumbering water-hulk loomed large below it, the throng sensed hundreds of ways it could access the feeding ground beneath its deck. They were so open and defenseless, these delicious humans! There were a few of them moving about on the surface of the contraption, tending to the ridiculous little flying devices. The throng would leave them till after the great feast below.

Yes! Time to dine.

End.

Artist: Toeken ( https://atoekeneffort.weebly.com/)

The White Pond

By D.K. Latta

Trees thrust up around him like mossy fingers, glimmering sunlight slanting intermittently through the verdant canopy lending the forest a dusky, dream like cast. The ground beneath his feet was a spongy carpet of warmly rotting leaves and decaying branches. Christian squeezed a thumb under the strap of his standard-issue backpack, trying to ease the digging pain of its dead weight.

He was tired. He was lost. He was scared.

No, not scared. Terrified was a better description.

Last night his unit had become embroiled in a firefight with some Jerries; it wasn't the first time he had exchanged gunfire, but it was definitely the worst time. Christian flinched as memories rushed back.

A soldier standing next to him had split in two, his guts erupting like one of those novelty jars that shot out a coiled snake when you opened it. Christian hadn't even liked the guy much. Maybe that made it worse. He didn't know.

Then everybody was shouting, running, even the Jerries (he didn't think it had been an ambush, so much as just two patrols bumping into each other and letting loose in their surprise and mutual panic).

In Christian's case—well, he had just kept running. Long after the Germans were no longer shooting at him, long after he should've begun circling back to camp. Long after he no longer had an excuse to run. His feet had just refused to stop.

All night he kept hearing ghosts of the gunfire popping in his ears like fireworks; kept seeing that guy split in two. He just wanted to get away from it all.

Now it was morning in a forest he didn't know, on which side of an invisible territorial line he couldn't be sure, and an ocean away from anything he could legitimately call home: terrified. Terrified the Germans would find him, and equally terrified the remnants of his unit would declare him a deserter. And he was a deserter—least he had been last night, in the heat of the battle.

But now? In the cold sober reality of day? He didn't know what he was. But the longer he stayed away, the harder it would be to argue he hadn't deserted—that he had just retreated, zealously. Unfortunately, he had no idea where he was.

It was quiet, he realized. You'd think that would be a good thing, given he had become conditioned over the last few weeks to jump at every breaking twig, to see in every bird taking flight a possible omen of an approaching enemy.

But it was too quiet. No sound of birds or bugs intruded upon this primordial womb. No rustle of leaves as an unseen chipmunk scurried about. It was as if even the animals instinctively gave these woods a wide berth. Not even a breeze teased the smaller branches. The forest was still. Breathless. Empty.

He shuddered.

There was a smell he suddenly noticed. Or rather: he suddenly realized he had been noticing it for a while, but it hadn't really pushed to the front of his brain past the fear, the recriminations, the exhaustion, before now. A strange scent underscoring the to-be-expected aromas of a forest. He sniffed, rubbing a knuckle under his nose. Not a pleasant odour.

Something rustled.

He jumped, whacking his head against a low branch. He froze, heart trampling in his chest like downtown rush hour pedestrians trying to beat the light. His gaze darted this way and that about the still, dense forest, seeking movement among the shadows. Looking for a shape, a flash of uniform that would tell him if he was about to feel the burning bite of a bullet or just the cold roughness of handcuffs. So he could prepare himself, either way.

Then he laughed; a short, breathless gasp, ridiculing his foolishness. A weasel peered at him from beneath a webwork of fallen branches, its wet eyes staring, its little nose twitching.

He was not alone after all. Another lost soul had braved this still and twilight land otherwise shunned by all other sensible beasts. Then he frowned. The weasel slipped from beneath its cover and loped away, revealing matted fur. A blistering red scar, obviously infected, ran along one emaciated side. One ear was missing, as was its tail. Not a voluntary pilgrim, he realized. But one driven from its customary grounds by age and infirmity, no doubt hunted by predators and rival weasels alike.

Just like him.

After a moment, he followed.

The weasel glanced back at him, then redoubled its awkward gait. It was old and frail and couldn't hope to out-pace him for long. Why he pursued it, though, he wasn't sure. A sense of solidarity perhaps? Or maybe it was just that one heading was as good as another to a man without direction.

It slipped under a rotted log and vanished into a thatch of interlocked ferns. Christian stopped, realizing by the time he reached the spot the weasel could be away in a dozen directions. His shoulders sagged, his knees ached, and he felt the breath wheeze out of his lungs like a ball with a slow leak. Just for a moment he hadn't felt so alone. And now he was. Again.

Squealing shattered the oppressive stillness.

He froze, startled by sound, any sound, in this deaf-mute world. Then he ran. Leaping over the log, branches clawing hungrily at his uniform, he burst through the greenery. A Godawful stench exploded in his nostrils and he jerked his head back, nose crinkling, eyes clenching instinctively. Coughing, he covered his nose and mouth and gingerly pried open his eyes.

A pool of milk spread before him.

No, he realized. Not milk. Less sheen, it was thick as though some sort of liquid chalk. Or bone. It truly resembled nothing he had ever seen before. And from it rolled a dense smell, soiling the very air. The same smell he had been noticing for a while, albeit in a less pungent form.

But even as he stared at the turgid pond, something grabbed his attention. Near the closest shore the liquid blurped and rippled as something writhed about. The weasel squealed plaintively, half its body submerged, its eyes brimming with feral panic. Christian hesitated, then spied a stick on the ground. Snatching it up, he extended it to the weasel, his brother-in-arms in this dark forest. He felt responsible, after all. If he had not pursued it on a whim, it wouldn't have stumbled blindly into the pond. The weasel flailed about, its primitive little brain not quite recognizing salvation. Christian pushed the tip of the stick under the weasel's chest. Finally comprehending, the weasel grabbed onto it with its slime slicked paws. A tenuous grip, but perhaps enough. Christian drew the stick closer, shocked by the resistance, by how firmly the guck gripped the weasel, like quicksand or tar.

Then the whiteness surged.

It curled around the stick with a revolting sucking sound and wrenched it from his hand. The stick sank beneath the white muck and, squealing, the weasel vanished with it. With a 'glub' sound, the whiteness closed over both as if neither had ever been.

Christian gawked. The pond now still and placid, offering no apologies, no explanation. He slumped against a tree.

What sort of mud or tar or water reached out and grabbed things from the air? That's what it had done, wasn't it? He asked himself this hoping a sensible voice in his brain would quickly fire back 'no, of course that's not what just happened, dummy.' But no inner-voice came forward to salvage his sanity. He rubbed callused palms over his face.

What's more, the pond had intentionally stopped him, as though wanting its… Its prey.

He gagged as the stench rolled over him again, stronger than before, like some god’s primordial fart. He pushed from the tree, retching. It had to have been a trick of the light, he told himself quickly. He had lost his grip, that was all. And the natural gravitational forces that had dragged down the weasel had claimed his stick as well. That had to be it.

The pond burped.

His eyes flared.

Near the opposite shore the liquid bubbled thickly, like reheated clam chowder. Another stench, altered slightly from before, washed past him as something clawed its way out of the guck. A little shape. He grinned. Whatever had occurred— whatever he imagined had occurred— it was with relief and not a little surprise that he watched the weasel climb onto dry land and shake itself like a wet dog, shucking the white stuff still clinging to its fur. It buried its face between its front paws and rubbed at its whiskers.

Slowly, after a moment, Christian's grin sagged. There was no sign of the scar that had marked the weasel. In fact, its coat, now that the muck had slithered off, appeared healthy and sheen. More: its missing ear and tail had grown back! He stepped forward, bewildered. A twig cracked beneath his boot.

The weasel jerked its head up and glared at him. Its eyes pinned him in mid stride. It stared—it actually stared, and not with the nervous, slightly glazed gaze of a wild animal. There was intelligence behind those black eyes, a canniness that did not belong, that should not. A comprehension that had not existed scant minutes before.

He felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck.

The weasel slowly bared its fangs.

He watched, not comprehending what he was seeing. In his heart he realized something had happened to the weasel, that it was not as it had been.

Healthier, yes. Stronger, yes. But also different. And as he observed it, one other adjective came to mind, unbidden: malevolent.

His gaze flickered to the opaque surface of the pond, then up again.

The weasel studied him for a second longer, fur bristling around its cheeks. Then it wheeled and scampered into the forest.

Acting without conscious thought, he started after it. He understood now why animals, even bugs, seemed to be avoiding this area of the forest. Never before had he peered into pools so dark and depthless as the eyes of the little weasel. He trembled uncontrollably as he ran, branches whipping at his face, as if conspiring with the pond to hold him back.

The pond waited for victims. Victims to be possessed, then spewed out. Why? He did not know, any more than he knew how old the pond was or from where it had come. Was it even of this earth? There had been a slight declivity as he entered this part of the forest, as though the area was possibly the remnant of some long-ago impact crater. Perhaps the thing was ancient, existing in this dark forest for millennia, waiting. It waited for the weak or the foolish to brave what the wiser denizens of the forest knew instinctively to avoid.

The how did not matter, nor the when. What mattered was the what. The what and the fact that he, a coward and a deserter, might very well be the only living human to have witnessed it.

And it knew he had seen.

Shoving aside a net of brittle branches, he gasped as a shrieking shape exploded toward him. Burning fangs plunged into his chest, rending soft flesh. He screamed, clawing at it, but paws far stronger than a weasel's held tenaciously as it gnawed into him. Frantically, he wrenched his army-issued axe from its loop on his backpack and slammed the blunt end into the thing, dislodging it.

The beast landed on all fours. Face matted with gleaming dark blood, his blood, its eyes sharp and hard, it looked at him gleefully. It pounced again. Christian struck it with the flat of the axe in mid-flight. As the weasel hit the mouldering ground, with all his strength Christian brought the blade down upon its head. He expected a spurt of blood, a surge of brains. Instead, from the smashed fragments of skull oozed white, rancid muck, and as he gawked, the body of fur and bones dissolved into liquid. A second, albeit much smaller pond, a puddle really, stood in the weasel's stead. It roiled and burped. Waiting.

He stumbled back, mouth flapping loose. How? How could living, animal tissue break down into, into— what? he wondered, mind reeling. Then he groaned as the fire in his chest flared up, his gnawed flesh unwilling to be ignored any longer. Grimacing, he turned and staggered away, stumbling over roots and dead sticks.

Breaking through the wall of branches, he stopped before the placid white surface. Even lacking eyes, the pond seemed to stare back at him, knowing that he knew. Knowing with the same eerie intelligence that had gripped the weasel.

Then his jaw sagged, his searing pain momentarily forgotten. On the shore, cast like flotsam from some great sea, was a small, white skeleton. The picked clean bones of a weasel, to be precise. He glanced back in the direction of the thing that he had assumed to be the weasel, albeit altered. Then he looked again at the little skeleton. He realized how truly wrong he had been.

The pond didn't possess creatures. It processed them, digested them, and then created its own vile imitations of them. It could even extrapolate from an incomplete creature, given its weasel had the ear and tail and unmarked skin the original lacked.

Horror lent unsteadiness to his limbs, and the wound in his chest burned angrily, his own blood soaking the front of his shirt. He wanted to flee. And what then? If the pond knew he knew, what might it do? Could it ooze away, seeking some new, more secret refuge before he could return with help? Then he stopped. What help? Who would believe him? He'd have enough trouble talking his way out of a court martial, let alone convince the brass there was something other than Nazis to fear in these old woods.

Last night he had fled in fear, deserted his duty. Was he going to do the same now? Or was this maybe a second chance to wrestle his cowardice to the mat? He touched his bloody shirt and winced. What could he, alone, hope to accomplish against the thing spread before him?

Then he noticed something else: it wasn't a weasel alone the pond had regurgitated. A brittle, bleached white stick also lay upon the shore—the desiccated husk of the stick with which he had attempted to rescue the weasel. Meanwhile, floating upon the pond's unmoving bosom, its pond-created duplicate languished. Inert. The mechanism by which the pond shaped doppelgängers apparently worked as well on the inanimate as the animate. His tongue worked over his teeth for a moment as he considered. Turning, he hurried back to the puddle formed from the remnants of the disintegrated weasel. He scanned about the brush, wincing at the painful tightness in his chest, then settled on a fallen branch. He hefted it, hesitated, then plunged it into the white liquid. The puddle bubbled around the stick, rolling, slowly sucking it down even as a duplicate instantly began emerging.

Halfway through the process, though, it ceased. The half-digested stick tumbled beside the half-formed imitation. The puddle was no more, having used all its matter to compose the stick.

Shuddering, he forced himself to reach down and retrieve the false branch. He flinched at the coldness, its unnatural aura. But slowly his distaste was replaced by grim satisfaction as nothing further happened. Indigenous people in his native Canada spoke of Manitous: the spirits that inhabit all things. But whether a stick had an evil, tainted Manitou, or a benevolent one, it was still just that: a stick.

Ignoring his chest pain, he lurched back toward the main pond, axe swinging almost jauntily in his hand. He stopped before an unhealthy, rot eaten tree sprouting near the white goo, and then grinned humourlessly at the pond. A ripple shivered across its opaque surface, as if sensing his intent.

Without a word, Christian set to work chopping down the tree. It was harder than he expected, his chest wound weakened him. But arms aching, sweat dribbling down his back, at last he sent the tree toppling over into the pond. The liquid seethed and surged, and a stench cascaded over him like sewer water. Unwilling to submit to his weakness, he immediately went to work hewing at another of the surrounding boles. It fell over in due course as well, as did the next and the next. The pond was now crisscrossed by a grid of bleached white, desiccated trees while belching up their vibrant, evil copies; copies unmoving and incapable of harm. The pond level had dropped considerably, its finite form being exhausted to fabricate the motionless trees.

Staggering just a little, panting, Christian drew the back of his hand across his drenched brow. It seemed to him one or two more would do the trick.

Cautiously he circled the pond toward another tree.

His foot snagged on a root.

In an instant, the world froze in place. For a moment he saw the whiteness, felt himself fall, and he knew utter and complete terror. Then he twisted in mid-air and landed with a grunt, centimetres from the grasping muck. He lay still, face pressed into the moist dirt, gasping, half sobbing with relief. He raised his head to stare at the still surface of the pond.

The whiteness surged.

He barely had time to scream before it curled warmly around his hand and yanked with the strength of ten men. His forearm vanished into the liquid, but a savage pain in his foot halted the rest of him from following. His boot was wedged under the very root that had tripped him.

He sprawled there in the preternatural stillness, stretching down the slope leading to the half-drained pond, his arm held by a constant, insistent pressure, subtly dragging the rest of him in. All that resisted was a bit of tree root and a size eleven army boot. The pain in his ankle was excruciating.

After its initial surge of effort, the pond seemed unhurried. It had him now. A piece of him at any rate. It was content to be slow and steady.

That was how the tortoise won, wasn't it?

A dull popping sound sent new agony lancing through his leg from the ankle as the bone dislocated. He screamed, but still the leg held.

His vision wavered in and out of focus as his body registered the incredible, agonizing pressure being exerted upon it, stretching his spine like the work of a mad chiropractor. He felt delirium eating away at his mind, could picture himself slipping into the whiteness, so warm and comforting to his arm, so inviting. And then he saw himself being deconstructed, analysed. He could imagine something that looked exactly like him, but was not, emerging. What would the pond do with the shape of a man, and not just that of a weasel? He shook, rousing himself from his momentary stupor. There was more at stake here than his life or death. Much more. An evil that swallowed normal beings and spat them out as soulless automatons. Like the fascism they were fighting elsewhere.

He squirmed. He tugged on his arm. But it was as if it were embedded in cement. He screamed, knowing no one would hear, but crying out just the same. Like the weasel before him.

Something more crunched in his ankle and he slipped a half centimetre. The pain was unbelievable. In another minute, or ten, or an hour, or however long it would take, his foot would give way and he would slip into the muck. He would be absorbed. Imitated. And then sent out. Different. He flailed about and his fingers struck something cold and hard. Slowly, numbly, he turned his head. Within his grasp lay the axe. His fingers pulled away, recoiling of their own volition.

There had to be another way.

His spine ached and his knee felt ready to pop. He sobbed in his agony, then grunted as his ankle shifted again and he slid another millimetre. With one watering eye he watched the axe. Haltingly, he reached for it. Fearfully, his fingers closed about the cold, smooth handle. Breathing heavily, desperately, he hefted the dead weight.

The pond seemed to sense his intent. He cried out as the pressure redoubled and whatever was left of the bone in his ankle gave. It was just skin and muscle holding his limb together. For a moment. With a scream of fury, he brought the axe down on his own arm. He snorted from the pain, bile rising up into his throat. He struck again and again. Blood spewed. So much blood.

The pond pulled harder, straining, seeking to draw him in.

The axe bounced as it struck bone. Barely conscious, he whacked again and again, like a macabre woodcutter, screaming in a kind of ritual unison with each blow. And still the pond pulled.

Something cracked. Something came free. He watched as the bloody stump of his arm vanished into the whiteness, leaving no trace, no streak of red. Not even a ripple.

He pulled back from the edge and flung aside his gore drenched axe. Shivering uncontrollably, he yanked off his belt and knotted it around the stump still spitting blood. It no longer hurt as badly, not the foot, not the arm. He supposed this was what shock felt like.

He tried to stand but collapsed instead into a limp heap upon the ground; his ankle would have none of it. Teeth gritted and half slithering, he crawled. What direction he didn't know. It didn't really matter. He wasn't convinced he would make it to any place where he could be found.

Without eyes, the pond watched him crawl into the brush.

*~*~*

The lieutenant waited restlessly outside the medical tent. As the canvas flap was pushed aside, she stepped quickly forward. "How's your patient, Bob?"

The medic slipped a cigarette between his teeth and offered the pack to the lieutenant who shook her head. "He's lost a lot of blood." He lit his cigarette and shook his head. "It could go either way, I'm afraid. What happened to him?"

"Not sure yet. He was found sprawled by the edge of some trees by a bike messenger. The arm doesn't look like a combat injury, though. My guess is he got pinned under a fallen tree or something and had to cut himself free. Damned way to lose an arm in the middle of a war," she added ruefully.

"Least he'll get to go home—if he survives," the medic said pragmatically. "He's pretty delirious though. Keeps muttering something about 'I did it' and 'not a coward'." He exhaled a smoke ring and squinted at the lieutenant. "What?"

The officer was looking perplexed. "Just something that doesn't add up—probably a miscommunication, the usual army SNAFU. But I made some calls, was able to locate his unit. Apparently, they were caught in an ambush the other night, and scattered, which must be how he came to be wandering on his own."

"Okay," said the medic, not seeing the problem.

"The thing is— the guy I talked to said that fellow in there has already turned up, reported for duty, and shipped out with his unit. And he had both his arms."

End.

Cthulhu Codex

Abandon all hope who enter here...

Our in house Non-euclidian scholar got could only discover the following clue before completely losing her mind. Best of luck.

A = T

The Song of the Monster: The Nightmare

By Alexis M Davis

As we swim deeper, the water seems alive around us.

Her siren song is no longer sweet, not romantic. Not hers.

She is no longer my dove. She is the Mother of Monsters

She is beyond my sight, hidden in layers of shifting ocean water, when

Shadows coalesce into a shape, clawed and hissing my name.

This no dream, no vision, surely!

She tears my skin, rips it free of my bones.

I always felt bare before the Monster Mother, since the day she birthed me.

Now I am truly opened to her fangs. My skin-

No, no longer. My sinew feels hot. Slick. Sharks swim around my dangerous waters.

It glows red hot, painful, strengthening.

This defiance is new, different. She sees it, and cackles her disapproval.

I reach for her as she scrapes for me, but she shrinks away.

Her darkness falters before my bleeding muscle. Her sharks scatter before the light.

I have… Power now. Now that I am bare before her.

I am now the fighter, the chaser, the hunter. The teeth.

Prey after predator, Mother runs. Minnow after shark, I chase.

I pursue her with my glow. I capture her in the trap of my bones.

In my jaws, I hold her writhing penumbras. She lashes out.

She is scared now. She has never had the prey fight back.

Mother has never had to fight her own demons.

Bite. Crack. The shadows race off to the edges of the fiend’s ocean.

The smoke clears my vision, but the Monster has weakness now.

My dove’s siren song taught me how to swim.

Hippo Blood

By N.M. Nichols

You see, here’s the thing. Are you ready?

You would have been left alone. I would’ve left you alone, and so would the rest of us. Hell, nobody even knew you still existed until a few days ago, but you just couldn’t let things go, could you?

Until recently, I’d always felt a little bad for you humans. I’d felt that maybe we could have coexisted once upon a time. I guess the detail that always tempered my feelings somewhat was the fact that you would never have stopped hunting us until we were all extinct.

Can you really blame us for doing what we did? Can you fault us for fighting back, for being tired of living fearfully in the shadows, of having our heads lopped off or being staked in our places of slumber during the day? You’re the reason we had to start turning people some two millennia ago. You know how it went. I mean, obviously, you would, or else you wouldn’t have come back at us all this time later.

I remember reading about your now-false extinction when I was growing up. (Yes, we actually grow up now, and you would know that if you’d bothered to check at all.) There were a lot of good things about humanity – poetry, music, art, literature, comics. Yes, I love comics. I’ve got every single Punisher comic ever written on my tablet down in my cabin, and it’s partly what’s kept me sane throughout this whole ordeal.

After you were all gone, it was a lot like being in a family that had been freed from the influence of an abusive patriarch. There was no tension. No walking on eggshells. No abuse. Sure, we had some infighting at first, but we got that under control before long. All we need to live is blood. That’s it. We don’t need fruits or vegetables or meat. Once you were eliminated, though, we couldn’t feed off each other, so we managed to find an alternate food source. That turned out to be the fauna roaming all over God’s green earth, but unlike you, we didn’t hunt most species to extinction for their meat or furs or ivory or heads to mount on our walls.

No, we tagged them, tracked them, took blood samples, and eventually, we developed pattern buffer technology. This allowed us to replicate the blood we collected over and over so we didn’t have to take so much of it and drain—no pun intended—the animal population. Some of us took to different kinds of animal blood more than others. That’s what led to the Palette Test. See, about five hundred years ago, we started having children naturally. Two vampires, male and female, fucked each other silly, which resulted in the female becoming pregnant. Or they’d do some form of in vitro. Either way, nine months later, you had a brand-new vampire baby to be breastfed and everything, just like a human.

Like human babies, they eventually had to be weaned off the tit, and that’s where the Palette Test came in. The babies were all fed different kinds of animal blood to see which ones they took to the best. The blood would sustain them, of course, but sometimes they’d develop an allergy to blood from a particular species. This was for the parents (or parent) to know which kinds of blood to keep their kid away from. Sometimes it took several hundred tries before a child’s pediatrician could determine which blood it liked best, and they could tell by how much the kid improved when it came to strength, speed, agility, et cetera. Some of us would take to deer blood. Others, wolf blood, or alligator blood, or polar bear blood. You had to get it right down to the species.

The animal population still must be kept under control. We had a whole industry devoted to tracking population sizes and keeping them under manageable levels. The other side of that industry was blood collection and replication. This kept our new, system-wide civilization going for over two thousand years. Can you imagine that? Two thousand years of peace.

Sure, we die. We don’t live for thousands of years, like it says in the lore. Our lifespan is about two hundred years – two fifty, if you really take care of yourself. We grow old and die, but we don’t need medicines. We don’t need the resources you humans endlessly fought and died for. The whole of that time was spent thinking. Writing, dreaming, building, communicating, teaching, loving and living. God, what sad, sad people you were. Guess that’s why you chose to do what you did to us.

There is a point I’m driving at. Trust me, it will all be worth it.

So, the reason I told you about the Palette Test and all the things that made up the civilization you destroyed is because it was what led to my relationship with Alexa. She was a hippo, and she was in my care aboard the warship Draconis, where I was a maintenance tech. When I took the Palette Test as a kid, I was fed hippo blood, and that turned out to be the gas which fueled my engines. Some of us have the option of adopting a member of the species which feeds us, and that’s what I did with Alexa. It was a lot like having a pet, except she had to be kept in an enclosure with the other animals who’d been adopted by other crew members. I’d go down there sometimes to talk to her when I got tired of dealing with my fellow crew members. She was a good listener, and because of her, life aboard the Draconis was a little less tiresome, a little less dreary.

And then the Dark Oil came.

That’s what we called it, anyway. We all saw it on the newsfeeds, spreading across Earth like the plague it was. Entire cities swallowed, billions of people dying as the Dark Oil dissolved and assimilated them. We saw the tears in the skies above Earth’s continents and oceans from which they dripped, puddled, and coalesced into the force of destruction it became.

The gates you opened.

An entire civilization, peaceful for two millennia, gone, just like that. But you couldn’t stop with Earth, could you? Oh, no, you had to move on to Mars, the Jovian moons, and even farther out into the solar system. Everywhere my kind flourished and spread, you brought your plague from beyond the stars, the Dark Oil you allowed to leak into our universe. After everything went to Hell, there weren’t many of us left, as you can imagine. Our little fleet started out with five ships, picking up survivors from other colonies. We eventually left the solar system with thirty-five ships, and some sixty thousand people.

And then one of those tears opened on the engineering deck of the Draconis.

Now that, I’m ashamed to admit, I was impressed by. That you apes were able to come up with the brainpower to figure out how to open tears in locations that specific from across the galaxy, like one of those ancient heat-seeking missiles homing in on a specialized target. I got over my awe pretty quickly when all that extradimensional black stuff started spreading throughout the ship, taking over its systems, killing my crewmates.

Killing Alexa.

I couldn’t get to her in time. I had a watch as a roomful of Dark Oil surged over her and the veterinary techs trying to save her. I think we may have even made eye contact before the creature that gave me life for so long was snuffed out forever.

It took three weeks of going through the ship with flamethrowers, decompressing the ship deck by deck and burning it out of existence once it had been rendered inert. We figured out that the Dark Oil doesn’t do well in a vacuum. I always thought this was weird, considering its properties, but by that point, my attitude consisted of a hearty whatever works.

All the other ships, however, had been destroyed from the inside out, their crew eaten alive by the Dark Oil. Most of the people on the Draconis were dead, so it was up to me to figure out how to arm the weapons systems and get to a point where I could safely nuke them all. After that, most of the surviving crew members either succumbed to their wounds or despair, taking their own lives.

I almost did the same. I lost hope. I kept the entire ship decompressed in order to prevent more tears from opening, and it worked. But there I was, me and the Draconis, the last vampire and the last warship. And I was so close, so damn close, to slapping the button that opened my helmet and letting myself float out through an open airlock.

And that, my friends, is when you made the biggest mistake of your pathetic little lives. You tried to open another tear on my ship. I guess you must’ve realized you hadn’t gotten everyone and tried to finish the job, and also, I assume you didn’t know that neither the Dark Oil nor the tears used to bring it into our dimension don’t function very well in a vacuum. It didn’t matter. Because the same time the tear opened, the navigation computers started pinging at me in the Draconis’ CIC.

I didn’t know what it meant at first. I was just a maintenance tech, not a bridge officer. But I figured it out. I realized that the navigation computers were picking up a signal, and it always boosted in strength whenever a tear tried to form. All I had to do was a little triangulating, and there you were. A lost human colony out in the far reaches of space, and from my current position, I could reach you in about three years, give or take, if I’m careful with the fuel reserves and don’t resort to making too many faster-than-light jumps.

Oh, don’t worry. I won’t kill all of you. I mean, if I’m going to re-start my species from scratch, I’m going to need some of you alive. I’ve got three years and plenty of blood to feed me, and as an added bonus, I get to sleep in the captain’s quarters, which is right across from the CIC. Never thought I’d get to do that. I’m not going to send out this little missive until I’m much, much closer, but you won’t find me. You won’t be able to detect me. You’ll never see me coming.

Do yourselves a favor. Take time with your loved ones. Spend as much time in the sunlight as you can, if the days on your world are long. Read your books. Listen to your music. Make love. Eat your food. Because when I get to you, I am going to tear it out of your hands and make you watch it all turn to ash as I drink your blood and turn your loved ones. You tore my life apart and killed the only friend I ever had in this universe, and in three years’ time, I’m going to take everything from you.

See you soon. This is going to be so much fun.

End.

History of the Necronomicon

By H.P. Lovecraft

Originally Published in 1938

Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.

Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’ surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice—once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish)—both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius’ time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy—which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550—has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem man’s library in 1692. An English translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript. Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres. Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumour credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R.U. Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.

Chronology

Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred

Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas

Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.

Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228

1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX

14... Black-letter printed edition (Germany)

15... Gr. text printed in Italy

16... Spanish reprint of Latin text

End.

The Cone

By H.G. Wells

Originally Published in 1895

The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas- lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in low tones.

"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.

"Not he," she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no poetry."

"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no hearts."

"He has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the cutting and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across the dim grey of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and sound in one abrupt gulp.

"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it is Gehenna. Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the face of heaven . . . . . But what does it matter? An end comes, an end to all this cruelty . . . . . to-morrow." He spoke the last word in a whisper.

"To-morrow," she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of the window.

"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.

She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers softened to his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so strange --that you should have come into my life like this--to open--" She paused.

"To open?" he said.

"All this wonderful world--" she hesitated, and spoke still more softly--"this world of love to me."

Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure--silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.

The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed interminable. "Well?" he said.

"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window, gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.

The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.

The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just possible you might come back," she said, in a voice that never quivered.

Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back to the woman.

By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another. Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.

It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.

"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.

Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie to the last.

"Yes," said Horrocks.

"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight and smoke."

"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke," repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.

"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the works," proceeded Raut, "and come with you."

There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they heard the door, their attitudes . . . . Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."

"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.

Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least," he said.

"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half-note too high. "That dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."

"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her suddenly. "But what I discover . . . . ." He stopped.

"Well?" she said.

"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.

"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big, clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"

"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.

There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of the dusk at the other two. Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's shoulder. Raut half fancied still that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in her mind took a vague shape of physical evil. "Very well", said Horrocks, and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.

"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.

"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in her mind, and the swift moment passed.

"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.

Raut stepped towards him. "Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks," said the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.

Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and their hands touched.

Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and her husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving slowly, and stood watching--leaning forward. The two men appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamp-light fell for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know. Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her eyes wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.

The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the cinder-made by-way that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.

A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gaslit window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank, or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted--a steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the steam hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.

"Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.

Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were thinking out some knotty problem.

Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward. "The moon is still smothered by the vestiges of daylight."

Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly awakened. "Vestiges of daylight? . . . . Of course, of course." He too looked up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said suddenly, and, gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the path that dropped from them to the railway.

Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that their eyes came near to say. Horrocks' hand tightened and then relaxed. He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in arm, and walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.

"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast, and tightening the grip of his elbow the while. " Little green lights and red and white lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It's a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of mine, how they rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I've a particular fancy for him. That line of red there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd call it, Raut--that's the puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures--did you see the white splash of the steam-hammer then?--that's the rolling mills. Come along! Clang, clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut, --amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch!--there goes the hammer again. Come along!"

He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut's with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards the railway as though he was possessed.

Raut had not spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks' pull with all his strength.

"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of snarl in his voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and dragging me along like this?"

At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking in that friendly way."

"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing artificially again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue."

Horrocks offered no apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight with their descent. Before them, by the stile rose a notice-board, bearing still dimly visible, the words, "Beware of the Trains," half hidden by splashes of coaly mud.

"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it, the melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to be finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."

"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"

"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to flare out of the open throats, great--what is it?--pillars of cloud by day, red and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night.

Now we run it off in pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone. You'll be interested in that cone."

"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke up there."

"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced by an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else, of course, there'd be no way of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips, and out comes the flare."

"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets brighter," he said.

"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful and reeling. Halfway across, Horrocks' hand suddenly clenched upon him like a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he looked up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage-windows telescoped swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow lights of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As he grasped what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed with all his strength against the arm that held him back between the rails. The struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was that Horrocks held him there, so certain was it that he had been violently lugged out of danger.

"Out of the way," said Horrocks, with a gasp, as the train came rattling by, and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.

"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still, even in spite of his own apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.

Horrocks answered with a grunt. "The cone," he said, and then, as one who recovers himself, "I thought you did not hear."

"I didn't," said Raut.

"I wouldn't have had you run over then for the world," said Horrocks.

"For a moment I lost my nerve," said Raut.

Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the ironworks again. "See how fine these great mounds of mine, these clinker-heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go sliding down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts the blast furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that way! This way, between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I want to show you the canal first." He came and took Raut by the elbow, and so they went along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he asked himself, had really happened on the line? Was he deluding himself with his own fancies, or had Horrocks actually held him back in the way of the train? Had he just been within an ace of being murdered?

Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything? For a minute or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood passed as he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing. At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time. His odd manner might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. "Eigh?" said Horrocks.

"What?" said Raut. "Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!"

"Our canal," said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. "Our canal by moonlight and firelight is an immense effect. You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle there. I tell you, for real florid effects--But you shall see. Boiling water . . . "

As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal and ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud, near, and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words, they passed into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres came into it, some fifty yards up-- a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower of the larger blast-furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the water, and watched Horrocks.

"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin; but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death."

Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his watch on Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about "white as death" and "red as sin?" Coincidence, perhaps?

They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels. "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear, and they went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime were raised to the top of the big cylinder.

And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace, Raut's doubts came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know--everything! Do what he would, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right under foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapor streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields towards Burslem.

"That's the cone I've been telling you of," shouted Horrocks; "and, below that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water."

Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The heat was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks' voice. But the thing had to be gone through now. Perhaps, after all . . .

"In the middle," bawled Horrocks, "temperature near a thousand degrees. If YOU were dropped into it . . . . flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his breath. Why, even up here I've seen the rain-water boiling off the trucks. And that cone there. It's a damned sight too hot for roasting cakes. The top side of it's three hundred degrees."

"Three hundred degrees!" said Raut.

"Three hundred centigrade, mind!" said Horrocks. "It will boil the blood out of you in no time."

"Eigh?" said Raut, and turned.

"Boil the blood out of you in . . . No, you don't!"

"Let me go!" screamed Raut. "Let go my arm!"

With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his foot went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone together.

He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within, flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet, and tried to climb up the chain, and then something struck his head. Black and shining with the moonlight, the throat of the furnace rose about him.

Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight, and shouting, "Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded hound! Boil! boil! boil!"

Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.

"Horrocks!" cried Raut. "Horrocks!"

He clung crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and glowed, and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of flame.

His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony--a cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing intermittent shriek.

Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him.

"God have mercy upon me!" he cried. "O God! what have I done?"

He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was already a dead man--that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud, and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.

Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.

Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.

End.

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