Copyright © 2020 by CHM LLC

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Cover Art: Joseph Diaz (www.artstation.com/josephdiaz)

Art for Fermi’s Prism: Toeken (www.atoekeneffort.weebly.com)

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmic-horror.net

Greetings dear reader,

The sixth issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly is here. Time certainly flies when you’re scared out of your mind.

We start things off jolly as can be with a winding tale of unwelcomed guests called The Funeral. Then a crew of astronauts put their mission on hold to answer a distress signal only to find an inhuman construction older than time in Fermi’s Prism. Returning to Earth, we witness the ultimate horror fan get far more than he bargained for when a strange, beautiful woman takes a seat beside him at the midnight showing of a cult horror classic in Don’t You Just Love Horror? At last, a man with strange, otherworldly power helps the owners of a sandwich shop in Dondo before we descend deep into the Crypt for a personal favorite of mine by H.G. Wells called The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.

So, keep the hot cocoa flowing and the shudders locked tight. That might not be eight tiny reindeer you hear clamoring in the night. As always, we are so glad you’re here and we hope you enjoy this month’s cosmic horror.

C.R.

*~*~*

The Funeral

By K.M. McKenzie

Drive east and take a left, spoke the GPS assistant.

I was already driving east. Traffic was a disaster of concrete slabs, construction, congested narrow streets, and too many people. Mount Pleasant wasn’t a neighborhood I knew well. A left turn brought me onto a quiet avenue of neatly stacked houses with yards covered in the yellow shedding leaves of autumn.

A drive slowly sign was painted on a speed bump in the road.

My Honda was already dragging at twenty miles per hour. I eased off the gas and allowed it to drift at just below ten. The bouquet of flowers and my reticule jerked upward on the passenger seat when the car rolled over the speed bump. I repositioned them, more concerned about the flowers than the purse—the hydrangeas and lilies were fragile, shedding petals from the moment I’d picked them earlier that morning. I prayed they wouldn’t fall apart before I got to the memorial.

The florist had dubbed the freshly arranged bouquet, beautiful spirit. The name sounded right for the deceased.

She and I had crossed paths just briefly. She’d been shy and dejected, wearing a heavy coat thrown over a loose sweater with a hood that covered nearly her entire face. I had read into her appearance for what it was—someone hiding from the world. I had been there when I was younger. I’d once been the miserable young woman, lost, and hiding in my own oversized clothes. That had been a different me, someone who hated everything about myself. It was hard to remember how I’d gotten here from there. It had been a cold transformation.

Though requesting my services as a counselor, the deceased had been stand-offish. That I’d never get that chance to peel away all those layers and bring out her beautiful spirit now bothered me. She’d died a day before our first real appointment. The suddenness had cut deep into my skin.

The funeral home was an orange brick monument sitting at the end of a crescent and occupying an outsized yard, with a garden of tall, flowering plants flourishing at one end, battered by the strong winds of early fall. Behind it was the cemetery—a small gathering of people clustered near a headstone, what I assumed was an interment.

Finding a place to park proved difficult. I ended up a block down. I pulled on my angora wool coat, fluffed my hair in the car mirror, and applied a second layer of dark red lipstick before reaching for my handbag and the flowers.

Stepping out of the car, I scanned the neatly stacked family houses. Pricey-looking. The deceased must have been raised here, or had been somehow affiliated with the neighborhood.

What would I say to this young woman’s family should the topic of our acquaintance come up? It had become a practice of mine to attend events for former clients, especially those without family or friends. The deceased had loved ones, evident by this gathering. I wasn’t certain her family knew she had sought my services, or if it wouldn’t be a violation of the professional code of ethics to tell them.

Attending her funeral seemed a natural closure to our minutes-long relationship.

I settled on telling the family I was simply a friend.

The low-rising black gate was ajar. I pushed through the narrow opening. Somehow, the steps to the stone building seemed farther away from where I stood. As I approached, an eerie feeling of nostalgia stirred to life, warping my thoughts. My vision blurred, and my mind flooded with low echoes, distant bits of memories, jumbled words from the day I’d met the deceased. She’d murmured into my ear, or rather, I’d leaned into her, unable to hear what she was saying.

What had she told me? It felt important to remember somehow.

The silver handle of the glass door waited for my touch. I only stared at it, nerves unraveling. The sensation was surprising, coming out of nowhere. My palm turned sticky. A creak. The door opened. A swift breeze fluttered outward, accompanied by a distraught older woman, whimpering into her handkerchief. She knocked into my shoulder but kept her head down as she hurriedly descended the steps into the yard.

At the gate, she glanced over her shoulder in my direction, face clear in the daylight. I knew who she was—Kathy Jeffrey, my colleague. This confused me. Had she known this young woman? I thought for a moment Kathy must have recognized me. The look over her shoulder lasted no longer than a second and she exited from the yard.

Maybe the deceased had been Kathy’s client.

My mind returned to the memory of the girl whispering into my ear. Jumbled words.

The open door of the funeral home creaked to a close. I stepped into the warmth of the lobby, admired the paintings adorning the walls. The spacious room was drenched in dim lighting, concentrated mainly in the front area, leaving the back in shadows. In the front, heads dipped, and shoulders trembled. About ten mourners sat in single-seat chairs forming a semi-circle, the open casket visible between them.

An older woman wailed loudly, rushing to and flinging herself at the casket, draping her whole body over it. She whimpered, nearly collapsing into the coffin, before a thin young man and a small-boned young woman rushed to her side.

“Ma, it’s okay,” said the young woman.

“My baby. Not my baby!” cried the older woman.

Déjà vu ribbed through me, as I pushed closer, determined to pay my respects to the deceased. Beads of sweat began forming on my face. I was suddenly too hot. The moment was slowing down, dogged by unease. I began to tremble, gripped by a sensation I could only describe as a stomach-churning detachment from self.

My mind shattered into a million shards of thoughts, memories, words and images.

Still, I staggered forward, pushing against the dizziness trying to topple me.

The tearful gaze of the mourning young woman found me, widening in horror. Her face shifted in and out of focus, but I knew who she was—the sister who’d answered the phone when I’d called to inquire about the deceased. Steeped in a surreal moment, I sought out the young man helping the mother to her feet. I had seen his photo, in our shared home, and the mother’s too. In those images, alive in my memory, the woman’s eyes weren’t swollen and red with tears. Happy memories of family life that was distant and familiar at the same time.

The mother’s eyes widened. She and the two young people parted as I pushed through their mix, slumping toward the coffin. The body, the deceased, the girl who’d walked into my office, hoodie-covered face, and eyes to the floor, requesting my services, whispering into my ear.

Those words—hisses that had stung my flesh, now rung in my eardrums like bells.

What had I done? I shouldn’t have come.

The sister screamed.

The room’s inhabitants broke into chaos, whispers, and yells of “what is going on?”

These things weren’t always understood. The old man had warned of confusion in the first few days; temporary memory loss. He had said to stay clear of one’s old life. Those who knew me would recognize me.

The muttered words of the dejected girl in the office arranged themselves with meaning in my consciousness. Aramaic words. A sacred phrase. An ancient ritual. The tongue was never my own but the borrowed gibberish of the old man I’d met at the shelter. Ill-fitted words, memorized without meaning over and over until they were just right in pronunciation. Nerves had gotten to me that day. The counselor in the office I had admired from afar, day in and day out. She’d leaned forward. There was a mistake in the utterance, a faulty brain … wrongness.

The cold, hard face in the casket. A new life meant the death of one’s old life and everything in it. My hands shook. Two petals fluttered from my bouquet into the casket. Maybe it was just one. Double vision set in. Sweating through my clothes, I began to convulse, a violent shake coming from deep within me. The bouquet slipped from my trembling hand, vase smashing against the hardwood floor. Shards of glass and petals scattered.

I gasped.

The layers of my skin began to flake and fall, fluttering up into the vacuum of the room.

The woman in the coffin began to break apart. Only one could exist in the same space.

I dashed for the exit, desperate to salvage the new life I’d stolen. My legs peeled as if made of dried, brittle leaves. There wasn’t an ache, not like the searing pain of broken limbs, or even burning. The tingling quickly evaporated into numbness, weightlessness. My last breath, a choked squeal, scooped up into the atmosphere, disappeared into the screams and horror of family and friends.

End.

*~*~*

K.M. McKenzie is a writer from Toronto, Canada whose short stories have been published in Strange Economics, Shoreline of Infinity, Polar Borealis, and Scare Street.

Find K.M. on:

Twitter: @kmmauthor

Fermi's Prism

By David F. Shultz

Captain Eev scraped a curling layer of ice from the sphere in her bowl, thought about the endless depths of space, and wondered which possibility was more frightening—that we were alone in all this blackness, or that we weren't. It was cold on her teeth, something like how milk might taste, melting with the smell of nutritive paste. She sighed—the macros are what mattered anyway—and stared at countless stars through the porthole, all of them silent and lifeless, as far as anyone knew. Except for the few we'd colonised, and of course Earth. And four of its errant lifeforms were out here, sitting in this cramped mess of a salvage vessel, eating some approximation of ice cream.

“They got the ice part down.” Mason smacked on a spoonful of the stuff. “You can really taste the frost burn.”

“I don't think supply cares much about your discriminating palette,” Eev said.

“I wouldn't be complaining if they just got the fuckin' shipments in on time. There's only so much of this 'ice-cream' shit a man can take.”

“Maybe if cap'n ever finds some aliens,” Harley said, “we can see what they're cooking, huh?”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Or maybe we could eat them.”

Mason laughed hardest at his own joke, as usual. But he even got a smile out of Deacon.

They joked about Eev's hobby now and then. They didn't get it, but she didn't need them to. The appeal was in the collecting. Not collecting things, but coordinates, silent places, and each one meant they were a step closer to finding the one that wasn't. Eev had mostly given up hope, for the same reason her squad was always on her case about it. How many asteroids mined? How many relay probes warped into lifeless star systems? How much time spent listening to dead silence in space, before we would admit we're in this alone? Meeting ET was looking about as likely now as the return of Jesus. And yet, there was still that pinprick of hope, like our own star surrounded by blackness. With so many stars, there had to be something else out there.

“Shipments take time,” Eev said. “Maybe the jump relay's down.”

“You got word from Comm?” Mason asked Harley.

“If I'd've gotten word, don't you think I would've fuckin' told you?”

“So, what's the problem, then?”

“Listen for yourself.”

Harley tapped her pad, and speakers hissed to life. A gurgling, underwater noise, broken static. Jagged spikes of sound, metal scraping, ripping fabric. Something like groaning, distorted voices through a broken relay. A shiver crossed Eev's spine.

“That's creepy,” Mason said. “Turn that shit off.”

She did, and they sat in the eerie silence, a lingering echo of that tortured audio signal. Mason sawed through another mound of ice cream, clinked his spoon to the bottom of his bowl.

“You ever heard anything like that?” Deacon looked up from his own bowl.

“Some kinda signal interference,” Harley said.

“You gonna fix it, or what?” Mason said.

“The shit do you care? It's not your department.”

“I'd just like to have some idea 'bout when I can stop eating this fuckin' ice cream.”

“You can stop right now,” she said, reaching across the table. “I'll take yours.”

As much as their bickering amused Eev, they still had work to do. “If you all are done, we can talk about our Op.”

She laid it out for them, and they were all ears. Intel had located a ghost facility out here—maybe an old mine—thanks to old requisitions. Abandoned decades ago—another economic casualty of the war.

Eev uploaded the specs and her orders, sat back while the crew went over the details. It would play like a straightforward recon and sweep. She asked if they had questions. They didn't. Chairs screeched as they backed from the table. Mason joked about something, and Mason laughed. They shuffled out.

*~*~*

They were stuffed like rations inside the pod, equipment strapped wherever it would fit. Insulation deadened sound, adding to the claustrophobia. The safety straps didn't help either, tugging across waist and chest. One shipment of humans, packed and ready to ship.

The launcher clunked and whirred, the pod shook. Loss of gravity, lurching pull of the inner sphere. Streaming hiss of thrusters, constant acceleration. Then the return of gravity—an induced approximation, at any rate.

“You think we're going to war or something?” Harley said, eyeing Mason's combat gear.

“Like I'd go to war with you fuckin' pussies.”

“Tough guy over here,” Harley said to Deacon, who gave a slight half-smile. “But really. What's with the gun?”

“You want me to explain the fuckin' security analysis?” Mason said.

“I didn't say I wanted your analysis, dipshit. I just want to know why you need an assault rifle to recon a ghost mine. It's a normal fucking question.”

“Did you read the same report I did?” Mason said. “That place dates back to the war. Who knows what kind of shit they left for us in there.”

Someone didn't read their report carefully enough. “He's right,” Eev said. “Could be automated security. Drones.”

“I'd love to remote hack it,” Mason said, “but the signal's screwy, so I'll have to wire-in, manual. And that means we might run into some rusted-ass robots with bad attitudes.”

After Mason brought Harley up to speed, they were quiet.

Gravity faded and positional thrusters hissed. The locking mechanism boomed and clanged. Stillness and silence. By now, their pod had docked inside the mine's bay.

“All right, everyone,” Mason said, grinning at Harley and hefting his assault rifle. “Lock and load.”

They clicked on headgear. Helmets hissed up from the spines of their suits, translucent semi-globes blinking into place.

“Y'all ready?” she said. They nodded, and she hit the button releasing the door.

Eev took the lead from the pod, and they floated after her, weightless, into the bay. Spinning head-over-foot, she aimed to land on the closest surface, snapping magboots down with a clang, and the odd sensation of all of her body weight in the soles of her feet. The others landed all around, magnets snapping on metal panels with reverberating bangs.

They were standing on the ceiling.

Four headlamps swept through the darkness, dense particulate glinting in the beams, flecks of white, like the inside of a snowglobe. Eev traced lamplight across enormous shapes cluttering the floor above. A bunch of crates. Some vehicles. Mining machinery. A few shuttles. And, untethered like the rest of this old junk, handheld gear drifted through the air, glinting and sparkling in the beams. Like stars—a galaxy of abandoned equipment inside the bay, kicked into a slow swirl by their pod's landing thrusters. The old owners long-since gone. Maybe dead.

“They really left in a hurry,” Eev said.

“How you figure that?” Harley said.

“They didn't pack up any of their shit,” Mason said. “We get paid for all of it, right?”

“A bit,” Eev said. Operations manager gets point-two on salvage. Her team would split a quarter of that. “You really need to read your contract.”

“Scan that shit and let's go,” Mason said to Deacon. “That's my paycheck you're lookin' at.”

“Scan it later,” Eev said. “Let's get the lights on first.”

“Don't you mean turn off security?” Harley said.

“'Course that's what she meant,” Mason said.

They clanged their way across the ceiling to the far door, walked down the wall to the door panel, where Mason took a knee, holstered his rifle, pulled out his tapkit.

He wedged the panel open and plugged a spike. Diagnostic lights blinked while gloved fingers worked the kit. The door clunked, whirred, struggled open, grinding and creaking.

“You got system access from there?” Harley said.

“You a production failure?” Mason said. “What's with the stupid questions?”

“Chill out, dickhole. I'm just filling the air.”

“Fill it with something useful,” Mason said. “If I had sys I would've done more than open the fuckin' door.”

“Let's go,” Eev said.

She peered down the opening, like a deep well, standing on the wall at its side. Darkness extended past the edge of her headlamp, unknown depth. She climbed over the lip, walked down the wall on the other side. The detritus of station decay glittered in lamplight—worse in a mine than your run-of-the-mill salvage op. Dirt, rock, rust.

Eev grabbed a handful of the stuff, white flecks, pressed it between her fingers and thumb. It crumbled and squished—snow and ice, swirling around, coating the walls.

“Looks like we've got some EC,” Eev said. “Water and ventilation, at least.”

They marched ahead, lamplights criss-crossing over metal plating, protruding pipes and cables, ventilation grates, rusted rivets, long seams where panels had popped loose, jagged corners, exposed wiring. All of it powdered with snow, glistening with ice crystals. Boots scraped through the accumulated particles, traced their footsteps across the station walls.

A three-way intersection. Eev reached out, dusted snow from the wall at her side—or the floor—and tore through a crumbling sheet of ice crystals. The paint was still there. Faded blue, red, yellow lines indicating station paths. SE standard, yellow for control.

“That way,” she said, pointing across the hall.

Deacon walked around the ceiling, Harley walked the floor. Mason and Eev pushed off to hop the gap, clamping back down when they'd cleared the long pit of the upended hallway. And they continued together for control.

Mason signalled a stop, raised his rifle. “Something ahead.”

Looked like someone in a hazard suit. Like they were walking away. Except slow and jittery, floating just a bit off the ground, the way someone runs in a dream, unable to move or escape, feet slowly, feebly pressing against nothing.

“A lot of those mining suits have muscle assist,” Harley said. “Could be malfunctioning or something. Walkin' itself around.”

“Go check it out,” Eev said.

“You got it, boss.” Mason stomped towards the shambling hazard suit, slow and plodding steps, kicking up clouds of snow with each magnetic stomp. Ahead of him, the suit twitched in zero-g, arms and legs swinging in unnerving, robotic imitations of walking.

Mason put a hand on the suit's shoulder, spun it around. A corpse stared back. Mason screamed, pushed it back. The suit drifted, caromed off a wall, clunked on the ceiling, twitching and jerking.

“Jesus,” Mason said. “What the fuck.”

“They didn't abandon this place,” Eev said. “They were killed.”

But how?

“Are we safe?” Deacon asked.

“Whatever happened here,” Eev said, “it was decades ago. Let's go.”

They passed the corpse, twitching in the glass-faced coffin of his hazard suit.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Deacon grumbled.

They passed two more bodies on the way to control. Mason hacked in, but the door only opened quarter-way. He muscled it open, grunting and heaving, just enough to squeeze through.

A long room. The whole right side was a sheet of glass—a few steel beams in intervals— giving view to a stone cavern in the heart of the asteroid. Four bodies in the room: two in slowly drifting office chairs, one on the wall, one crumpled in the far-corner ceiling.

Mason went to work, tapping into the main control board. Panels blinked to life.

“What you got from there?” Eev said.

“I got everything,” Mason said with a grin. “You expect any less?”

He was an arrogant S-O-B sometimes. But maybe he’d earned it.

“Step one—”

“—deactivate security,” Mason said. “I know. We're clear.”

“Good. Before you do anything else, let's figure out what the hell happened here.”

“Working on it.” He tapped the console. “This is interesting. Some kind of signal coming from inside the asteroid.”

“What kind of a signal?”

“I don't know. Old distress signal that got left on, maybe. You want me to put it through audio?”

“Let's hear it.”

There was broken static. Groaning, distorted voices. Shards of sound, fluctuating, snapping, gurgling—same noise from back on the ship. A shiver crawled along Eev's spine…

Mason cut the speakers.

“That signal's what was distorting our comms,” Harley remarked.

“Prob'ly what was screwing with my shit, too,” Mason said. “Must be some type of jamming system.”

“Can you turn it off?” Eev asked.

“I'll see what I can do.” The room was silent while Mason tapped at the console, except for the hum and beep of computers, and whimpering ventilation systems. Mason looked like he was struggling with a math problem, getting frustrated.

“Something wrong?”

“Can't find the controls for the jammer. Maybe it's not on the same grid. I think you should take a look at this.”

A map splashed across the display. No mining tunnels. No refinery, storage, or shipping. Just a long tunnel leading to an object embedded in the asteroid. A perfect pyramid, half-a-klick across.

“This isn't a mine,” Eev said.

“Yeah. But what is it?”

Eev eyed the mapped outlines of the pyramid, perfectly wedged into the body of the asteroid. One entryway—a tunnel—carved straight to its edge. Whatever it was, they wanted it hidden, disguised it as a mining op. A secret military base maybe, or some kind of weapon. Damned if she knew.

“Let's find out,” Eev said, pushing a corpse out of its chair to clear room at the console. “Everyone grab a station. Mason, load up whatever docs you can find.”

They took spots along the bank of consoles, sitting across from their reflections in the glass wall. In the adjoining cavern, an inclined corpse drifted past in a slow-motion pirouette.

“We got a shit-ton of docs here,” Mason said. “You really want us to read all this?”

“You take engineering and security,” Eev said to Mason. “Deacon, you've got medical and personnel. Harley, you can take comms and signals.”

And it seemed natural that Eev would take command and management docs. She loaded up the logs of the station manager, captain Archibald. Skimmed the documents, looking for the interesting bits, any clues about what they were doing here.

...was found fully-encased within the body of the asteroid where the signal originated...

...opinion of myself and most of the research team that it is not a natural phenomenon. (Two others, Ramirez and Johansen maintain that it could be a fractal phenomenon, akin to, perhaps, columnar jointing in rocks, or bismuth crystals.) But how it came to be so perfectly encased in a five-billion-years old asteroid remains a mystery. As does the signal emanating from the artifact...

...no bio-markers, no secondary signs of life...

...anomalous readings suggest age of over 100 billion years, obviously erroneous...

...the thrilling possibility that this artifact may be the work of an ancient, alien civilisation...

...appears to be some kind of alien technology, although its purpose remains pure conjecture... may be a beacon of some kind, a communication device, some form of spacecraft... is concerned that the artifact may be some form of weapon...

Jesus. Eev had come here expecting an abandoned mine. But she might have stumbled on the most important discovery in the history of humankind, alien technology. Proof they weren't alone in the universe. And it had been kept secret. Probably because of the war. Some higher-up thinking of military potential—of new weapons technology. But something must have gone wrong.

She looked at her team. Wide eyes locked on their screens, flipping through logs.

Harley looked up. “This is big,” she said. Understatement of the century.

They shared what they'd read, and Eev made sure they were all on the same page. Fucking alien technology. Eev was pretty sure that contingency wasn't covered in their contract.

“We've gotta tell command,” Deacon said.

“No can do,” Mason answered. “That interference isn't coming from the station. It's coming from the object.”

“Then we leave. Take our ship outside the range of interference.”

“Then we get squat,” Mason said without looking away from his screen. “You think they won’t send us back once they know what they've got here?”

“That's exactly why we should leave. This isn't the job they sent us for.”

Mason finally looked over at him. “I don't know about you, but I don't plan on pickin' at wrecks the rest of my life. We got a chance here to make some real money.”

“What're you saying, exactly? We don't have a right to anything here. We're on contract.”

“I'm saying this is the biggest haul we're ever gonna find. No way I'm ducking out.”

“How you gonna justify that to command?” Deacon demanded. “Besides, it's not your call.”

They both looked at Eev. Yeah—it was her call. But what the hell were they supposed to do? Just go home? She could guess what would happen then. They'd all get reminded about their NDA and be sent somewhere else. Then they'd send in the big guns. Lock down the asteroid, keep the coordinates secret. Eev would be dead of old age before any of it was released, if it ever was. Hell, this thing had already been discovered—and forgotten—decades ago.

This was what she’d spent here life looking for. Evidence of life in the stars, that they were'nt alone. Was she supposed to just leave it here, forget she ever saw it? No-friggin-way. There were firsthand research reports here. Meticulous notes from engineers and scientists. An alien artifact. They were staying. At least for long enough to read more of the docs. It could be her only chance.

But there was still the problem of justifying the decision to command, when the time came. She'd need a plausible reason for sticking around.

“You said the object is causing the interference?” Eev asked Mason.

“That's right.”

“So maybe there's a way to turn it off,” she said. “And if we do that, then we can contact command from here. That seems to be a reasonable way to proceed.”

“Gotcha, boss.” Mason winked, and turned back to the docs. “I'm on it.”

“To be clear,” Deacon said, “Our orders are to figure out how to turn that thing off?”

“Your orders are to keep reading medical and personnel docs. We're sticking around to turn it off, but while we're here, it makes sense to get more info about what we're dealing with. Tell me if you find anything. And Harley, you're still on comms and signals.”

Eev turned back to the documents.

... discovered an open tunnel leading into the object. We arranged a team of four to explore the interior. They returned without incident...

... reports of visual distortions and gravitational effects inside the object, which we have taken to calling the 'prism.' There is discussion that it might be some form of long-range viewing device, since the visual phenomena appear to be distant galaxies. But there is no evidence that these scenes are anything more than recorded images...

... that Johansen is apparently suffering adverse psychological side effects from the prism. I've volunteered to take her place...

... went into the prism. After initial disorientation from the gravitational effects, I found I could alter the vantage of the prism, something like the way one might alter their dreams; not a complete, deliberate control, but a sort of manifestation of imagery. With some practice, I could aim the window, zoom into distant galaxies, even locate our present star system, and this lonely asteroid. My hypothesis: that this prism was not a simulation, but a viewing station of some kind. My experiment: directing the prism towards ourselves. The result: seeing the station we have built here, viewed from within the prism, confirmed that it is some kind of intergalactic alien telescope...

“I think I might've figured out what happened here,” Deacon said.

“Don't keep us waiting,” Eev said.

“One of the crew—Johansen—had some psych issues. Medical docs list paranoia, delusions, violent intentions. So, I checked her personal logs.”

“And?”

“A lot of rambling, mostly incoherent. I can see why they took her off duty. Said she was going to kill everyone. That's around when all the other files stop getting updates.”

“How does one person kill everyone on a station?” Eev said.

“I checked the engineering logs,” Mason said. “No signs of catastrophic failure. But it turns out the system had to do an EC flush around that time.”

“Meaning what?” Eev said.

“Maybe there was a radiation leak or a chemical leak, or something. Something serious enough to kickstart the automated flush. All we can say for sure is there was some kind of station-wide EC failure—the kind that kills you—without system damage.”

Signs were pointing to sabotage. It was enough for Eev to set that mystery aside, for now, and focus on more important matters. She went back to the logs, but Captain Archibald's reports stopped abruptly. Eve wasn't ready to leave. The alien technology—the intergalactic telescope—was just a short walk, through the asteroid.

“I'm gonna go check it out,” Eev said.

Deacon voiced his apprehension, muttered about how it wasn't safe. But there was no reason to think the prism was a danger, now that they knew it was Johansen that killed the station crew. Besides, even if there was some risk, the opportunity was too big to pass up.

Mason led the way down the corridor, deeper into the station, past more bodies in hazard suits. They walked over a corner into a wide hall, big enough for vehicles, stopping at a blast door. Mason went to work on the control panel.

The blast doors slid open, revealing the cavern. Rock floor, smoothed out enough for vehicles, bodies scattered here and there. Rock ceiling, about six meters up. Rough cut stone, jagged. And across the full length of the cavern there was a smooth wall, black like a pool of oil.

Their steps echoed. Mason was first to reach the black wall, Eev just a step behind.

The black material—whatever it was—sucked up the light from their headlamps. No glare, no reflection. Like a hole cut in space itself. Standing this close, it was almost like her eyes were closed. Eev looked overhead, checking that she could still see. The cavern wall extended alongside the edge of the black sheet. The asteroid was carved out more here—a larger, secondary cavern just for the pyramid—leaving a few meters of space along the edge. The whole pyramid shape, this side of it anyways, rose high inside the asteroid.

“What's it made of?” Deacon said.

Mason held his palm up to the wall. “Something magnetic,” he said. “Good enough for me.” He stepped on the edge, with a clang, and he marched up the side of the pyramid.

Eev followed. A few paces along she passed the ceiling of the adjoining cavern. She was walking inside the secondary cavern now, with Mason, along the blackness. Jagged rocks were uncomfortably close. She weaved around them, left, right, ducked her head. Behind her, Harley tentatively stepped on to the edge, and Deacon peered up from the base of the pyramid.

“You two coming, or what?” Eev called.

They followed.

“Getting screwy readings,” Mason said. “Says this thing's more than 100 billion years old.”

“That's impossible,” Eev said.

“Yup.”

They marched a few minutes, ducking and weaving from hanging shards of rock, Eve pausing now and then to make sure her team was keeping pace. Mason had stopped, maybe halfway to the top. Eyeballing the cavern walls, they were about dead-center on the face of the pyramid.

“Check this out,” Mason said, pointing at the floor.

Eev didn't see a thing. Then she walked closer. A hole in the pyramid. She wouldn't have seen it if it weren't for the beam of the headlamp, dropping down into the hole instead of stopping at its edge. She ran her headlamp around, tracing the edge of the opening, a circular hole about two meters across.

“Why would they put the door all the way up here?” Mason said.

“Why do you think that's a door?” Deacon said.

“The hell else you think it is?” Mason retorted. Then he pulled his cable and snapped it at the edge, just on the lip of the opening.

“You're not going in, are you?”

Mason gestured incredulously at Deacon. “Course I'm going in. Hell, maybe I'll pick up a souvenir while I'm down there.”

“But we don't even know what this thing is.”

“Sure, we do,” Mason said. “Some kinda alien, walk-in-telescope.” He stepped into the opening, rotating maybe ninety-degrees, facing straight down into the black depths of the thing. Then he walked.

Eev pulled her own cable and hooked it the floor. She stepped in after Mason.

“Be careful,” Deacon said.

Yeah, Eev thought. No shit. “Just keep an eye from there.”

“For what?”

“I don't know.”

The air was dense, like stepping into oil. Behind her, Harley and Deacon peered down. Mason walked ahead, slowly, deliberately, shrinking into the blackness. If she just kept her eyes on him, she wouldn't lose her bearings. She marched, step by plodding step.

A noise grew from all around. The strange, groaning she'd heard before, gurgling, and a low, ringing sound, like a distant alarm inside a giant steel drum.

Mason wobbled in the distance, like a mirage. The disc of the overhead cavern distorted and flexed, like looking through a fisheye lens. Just stay calm, Eev told herself. You knew this would be weird. The logs said visual distortions. No reason to panic. But there was a creeping feeling of dread, like she was in a black ocean with who-knows-what staring up at her dangling feet. Enough to give her second thoughts.

“I'm coming back,” Eev said. She took a step, and it was like walking towards a curved mirror. The sphere warped as she moved, stretched out to the edges, pulled apart in the middle, and shrank—shrinking with each step, instead of getting closer.

She grabbed the cable and pulled. Still tightly secured. That was something, at least. Something to hold on to. She followed it, hand over fist, watching her hands on the cable instead of the warping sphere of the cavern. Reach, grab, pull. Heavy hands. Not like pulling through zero-g. More like pulling through mud.

She was breathing hard, muscles burning. How long have I been climbing? The cable's only fifty meters. She stopped to rest her arms, get her breath back. It was black all around, except for the long metallic line of her cable in the lamplight, hanging from the blackness, and Mason's line, threaded through the blackness at both ends. But Mason was nowhere. How far down had he gone?

Then there was melting light. Smears of pink and blue and purple, all around, thousands of pinpricks of white. The Orion Nebula. A frozen fog of coloured gas, forty lightyears across. There was Betelgeuse and Rigel. There was Orion's Sword.

Captain Archibald's logs had said he could control the telescope, kind of like a dream. How did he do it? Eev relaxed, looked around—like she was floating in deep space—and thought about the Orion Nebula. Was it true, what astronomers had said, that there was a blackhole at its heart?

She was moving now, towards the nebula, slowly at first, then tearing through space so that everything was a blur—how many times faster than light? Then it stopped. There it was, surrounded by the pink breath of the nebula. The circular distortion of a black hole, warping starlight in a disc around its edge, swallowing the light at its black core.

All she had to do was think to get here. To guide the telescope with her intentions. Could it answer the question she always wanted to know, whenever she had stared out into the stars? Could it show her life, beyond her own?

Stars rushed by, and stopped, and she was in orbit around a red planet. Not Mars. The constellations were different, and there were two suns here, both blue, spinning in a tight orbit. Why had the prism brought her here, when she’d thought of life? Was there anything on that dusty rock below?

Life, she thought again. Life. Show me life.

She flashed to another sphere. An ice planet. Blue and white. As apparently lifeless as any she’d ever seen. But what was she expecting? The green of vegetation? The forests of Earth? There was a flash of motion. And there was Earth. Swirling white clouds over the blue oceans. Green forests of Antarctica. The fat desert belt along the equator. That was home, alright. But where did they live? The people who made the prism?

Eev felt something on her shoulder. She gasped and turned. Mason dangled in space beside her.

“There’s something in here with us,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Let’s go. I mean right now.”

They marched up the hall as stars faded to black, making their way for the expanding disc of the cavern. A low groan followed their footsteps, deep within the pyramid. Something flickered across her periphery. A black mass writhing inside the walls. Larger than the pyramid, somehow, but contained within it, oozing and morphing across the strange geometry, walls no longer black, but glowing a subtle gray.

Eev climbed from the pyramid. Harley and Deacon floated in the air, against the rocks of the cavern. Burn marks on their suits, right through to the other side. Dead.

“Look out,” Mason shouted, pushing Eev hard from the side. She careened through the air, watching Mason shrink away. A flash lit the cavern, a burst of particles past where she’d been standing. Her head clunked against rock. She winced and scanned the area. There was Mason, scurrying into the rocks for cover. She followed his lead, grabbed a big shard of rock and pulled herself behind.

Someone in a hazard suit—one of the mining suits—scrambled across the pyramid. No magboots. And holding a particle gun.

He turned for Eev, aimed his gun. Eev ducked behind a rock pillar, just as the weapon fired—a crack of thunder, a spray of fizzing blue particles all around. She didn’t have a weapon. Shit! Mason? Where the hell are you?

There he was. Taking careful aim from behind his cover. His rifle flashed. The red beam split the air, a glowing line through the cavern that burnt its fading after-image into Eev’s retina. She blinked. Waited for her vision to return.

Mason was scaling the pyramid towards the body. Clutching its chest and spinning in open air, floating some distance from their particle weapon. Eev pushed off the rock, sailed to intercept Mason near their assailant. She snapped down on the prism, just as Mason pulled the body from the air, slamming it on its back.

An old woman grimaced through the glass-face of her helmet. She was covered in grime. Wiry hair, dirty and tangled. Skin looked like it was infected with something, or burnt—red patches, some of it flaking off. A survivor from the mine? No. The killer. There was the name tag on her suit. Johansen.

“Why’d you do it?” Eev shouted, as if it mattered.

Johansen looked up. “I saw what it wants,” she said, struggling to get the words out. The laser shot likely punctured a lung. “Don’t tell it where Earth is,” she groaned.

And that was it. Glassy eyes. Dead. Another corpse in the mine.

Eev went with Mason to check Harley and Deacon. They were dead, all right. Blasted through, half-a-dozen holes each, at least. Particle buckshot.

“Goddammit,” Eev said.

“So, she was hiding here this whole time?” Mason said. “Her whole life? I never heard anything so crazy. And what did she say about Earth? Jee-sus. Have you ever—”

Groaning noise boomed into the cavern. Something rippled across the surface of the pyramid, climbing out. Organic. Rubbery, like some deep-sea creature. The fleshy mass spilled through the walls of the pyramid. Not out of the hole, but out of the blackness itself somehow. Crawling out in all dimensions, expanding, bubbling and writhing from the pyramid.

“Let's go!” Eev said. “Back to the pod. Go, go!”

She hurled herself for the base of the cavern, crashed down, scrambled for the station. Cracks spread across the floor, ceiling, and walls.

A booming shockwave rocked the cavern, blasted Eev from her feet, and everything was spinning. A blur. Something snagged her, halting most of her momentum.

She dangled in open space—stars around her instead of rock—tethered on the end of Mason's cable. And he was there on what was left of the asteroid and the station, secured to the blast door. The rest of the asteroid—the secondary cavern, the prism—had broken away into empty space. And where it used to be, there was that alien thing. Writhing tentacles hanging from its face. Dead black eyes, a head larger than their spacecraft. And it was still—impossibly—expanding outwards, the pyramid hidden somewhere inside its unfurling flesh. A body and arms came into views. Legs. It was a bipedal creature.

It reached for the chunk of broken asteroid, the hollow husk that had contained the prism. With a clawed hand, it scraped inside the cavern, shattering bits of rock, scooped the bodies of Harley, Deacon, and Johansen, stuffed them in its waiting maw.

Then it reached for the other half of the asteroid—for the station, in Eev's direction. She dangled like bait on the end of a fishing line.

“Reel me in! Mason! Hurry up!”

The cable jerked, and she accelerated to Mason. She crashed down, then raced through the open blast doors. Sprinting down the hall with Mason, she looked back as the creature's hand scraped across the open cavern, outside the blast door. A half dozen corpses floated there, old station crew, long dead. Balled up in the thing's massive palm, a handful of corpses, stuffed below the folds of its tendrils, crunched in its cavernous beak.

Through the slit of the open door, she saw its face draw near, fish-like. One enormous eye, bigger than the open crack of the blast door, peered in.

Eev stopped, grabbed Mason's rifle, and aimed. The giant orb stared back. She fired. Dead center, straight into its pupil.

An ear-splitting screech filled the air. Then Eev was thrown to the wall. Stuck there by something a little weaker than gravity, pulling oblique to the wall. Through the blast door, the stars were curving streaks.

“We're spinning,” Mason said. “It chucked us.”

“That's good.” Better that than eaten.

Eev stumbled for the door. Was it still coming for them? She saw the creature, deforming, shrinking away, slithering its whole body back through the pyramid, down to its whipping tail. Then the pyramid shrank to nothing.

“What the hell do we do now?” Mason said.

This wasn't in the SOP—steps to take if you happen to make first contact with alien life, and it wasn't the greeting she’d always dreamt of.

“We need to get a message to command,” Eev said. But what to tell them. A space monster just crawled from an intergalactic, mind-reading telescope. But it wasn't a telescope. That creature—monster, alien, whatever it was—it was fishing. The prism was bait. And Eev had taken it. Don't tell it where Earth is, Johansen had said. Don't show it, she meant. Don't show it Earth. That's what she was trying to stop. Too late. Eev had taken the prism to Earth, pointed right to it. And that thing was watching her do it, learning the way.

“We need to tell them something's coming for Earth,” Eev said. "And it's hungry."

They spun in silence. So long she'd spent searching the darkness for coordinates of some life-bearing star, only to find that black prism—placed there by an ancient, interstellar sentience, maybe older than the universe itself. Eve thought again about Earth, about coordinates. She thought about the black prism, and what left it, and the sticky sweetness of nutritive paste. She understood at once why the stars were so quiet.

End.

*~*~*

David F. Shultz writes from Toronto, Canada, where he organizes the 700-member Toronto Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers, and is lead editor at Speculative North magazine. His over-seventy published works are featured or forthcoming through publishers such as Augur, Diabolical Plots, and Third Flatiron.

Find David on:

The Web: www.davidfshultz.com;

Twitter:@davidfshultz.com

Artist: Josh Holton (@JHoltonWriter)

Don’t You Just Love Horror?

By R W Goldsmith

“Don’t you just love horror?”

Caught off guard, I nearly dropped my popcorn. As close as the girl’s voice was to my ear, she had to be speaking to me. I turned to the seat beside me and gazed into the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. The rest of her wasn’t too bad either. Strange how I hadn’t noticed her before. Only seconds ago, I’d glanced down the aisle from my favorite center seat to see I had the back row to myself. There’d been plenty of light. The coming attractions hadn’t even started yet.

But as my mom likes to tell me, when opportunity knocks, answer the door. “Fava beans and liver, I didn’t know they even made eyes that green.”

“They’re freakish, I know.”

Freakishly awesome, I thought. “They’re not so bad. I could probably get used to them.”

“You’d be the first. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“What question?” I was sure I’d heard her say something before I saw those eyes, but skin me if I remembered what.

“Don’t you just love horror?”

No wonder I hadn’t remembered. That had to be the stupidest question I’d ever heard. Everyone in this theater was here for the midnight showing of the ‘80s Italian cult classic, Cannibal Vampire Zombies from the Comet of Blood. Who would be here who didn’t love horror? Not that I was foolish enough to say so. “Love it? Are you kidding? I live for horror.”

“Oh, me too. You could almost say I…” She paused and gave me a mischievous grin. “Want to hear something funny?”

That wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for. With her freckles and her long strawberry-blonde hair and her Macy’s young-miss style clothing, she had that innocent girl-next-door look I so enjoyed. Nothing compared to the white-picket-fence girls who cringed and shrieked and clung at every creeping shadow and surprise knock at the door before the first drop of blood even splashed onto the screen. But those weren’t the girls who typically loved horror. Still, could be she was lying to impress me. She wouldn’t be the first nice girl to come to a midnight horror showing for a late-night taste of how the wild side lived. After all, she was the only movie-goer in the room not wearing the theater’s special-edition Comet of Blood t-shirt. “Sure, tell me.”

She leaned in, cupped her mouth, and said in a secretive voice, “There are people who’d tell you I am horror.” She leaned away and smirked as though daring me to believe her.

I am horror. Good one. First chance that came up, I’d use it myself. She was a lot cooler than I initially gave her credit for. “That’s pretty okay, I guess, but I’ve watched, like, every horror movie ever made. No one knows horror like I do. I have Comet of Blood on DVD. I’ve watched it a zillion times.”

“Really? You’ve seen every one there is? Why, that must make you the King of Horror.”

“The King of Horror.” I liked the sound of that. “Yeah, I guess maybe I am.”

“That’s perfect. A premiere like this needs a king. When I first saw you, I just knew it would be you.”

“You know, you’re all right. I’ll bet you’ve seen a lot of horror flicks too.”

“Me? Geez, I’m practically a virgin compared to you. But then, neither of us has seen what’s premiering here tonight.”

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “I just told you I’ve watched it a zillion times.”

“The old version. Not this one.”

“Uh—I’m pretty sure there’s just the one version.”

“You don’t know? What we’re watching tonight has a brand-new ending. I got the inside scoop. Trust me. You’re going to love it.”

A new ending and I hadn’t heard about it? Impossible. “If you say so.” What did I care if the girl was nuts? As far as I was concerned, they all were. It was just a matter of degree.

The lights dimmed, and the screen brightened with coming attractions for future midnight shows. A large portion of the audience—mostly kids, no doubt—whooped and whistled. Me, I was way to cool for that. I’d wait for the feature to begin.

I ignored the girl beside me through the preview of another ‘80s classic, Bikini Bake Sale Massacre. I thought it best to pretend I was only moderately interested in her, to play it cool.

Midway through the trailer for Attack of the Invisible Brain, I leaned toward her. Time to get the obligatory name business over with before the movie started. She wriggled toward me, close enough that by peeking down I could see the subtle curve of her breasts through the open neck of her blouse.

She smiled. The green of her eyes seemed almost to glow in the trailer’s faint light. For a moment, I wondered just who was working whom.

“By the way, I’m Tim.”

“Hello, Tim. I’m Morticia.”

“Yeah, sure you are.” First, she’d fed me that nonsense about a new ending to the movie, and now she’d moved on to making up names. I just wished I’d thought of it, myself. I’d probably have gone with Ash. So much cooler than Tim.

She pouted her lower lip like no one named Morticia would. “You don’t like it?”

“Love it. Only there’s no way that’s your name.”

“All right, how about Medusa?”

“Nope.”

“Maleficent?”

“Get real.”

“Then I suppose Bellatrix is out too?”

“Uh—yeah.”

She held up her hand and extended her slender fingers in succession. “Circe? Lilith? Morrigan? Kali? Sekhmet?”

“Wait. Back up. Does Morrigan have red hair?”

“She can if you want.”

“No, wait. I think I have it.” The perfect name for her had been staring me in the face. Strange I hadn’t noticed before. With her pale almond-shaped face and reddish-blonde locks, this girl could pass for the Blood Comet Queen Depravia herself, if she were only twenty-years older. “Depravia. You’re definitely a Depravia.”

She clapped her hands in front of her beaming face. “Oh, I am most definitely Depravia.”

So what if she was weird?

“Nice to meet you, Depravia.” I raised my drink and shook my popcorn tub in front of her. “Coke? Popcorn?” Mom always said the best way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach—or something like that.

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her voice and adding a thick Lugosi accent, “but I have already dined, and I never drink… soda. Muhahaha.”

“What did my mom know anyway?

The theater went dark. The screen brightened upon a window looking out on a sunny Mediterranean coastline. The silence broke with a woman’s scream. A splash of blood splattered the panes. The camera panned in until the white letters of the film’s title oozed from a field of red amid a blast of discordant horn notes.

My young Depravia reached over the armrest and squeezed my wrist. “Will you hold my hand, so I don’t get too scared?”

Sure, she was putting on an act. So what? There’s a process to everything. If this was how she wanted to play the game, why would I object? All I had to do was play along, and she’d be mine.

I set the tub on my lap and took her hand in mine. “How can I say no to you?”

“You can’t, of course. The King of Horror lives only to please his Queen of Blood. You will never deny me.”

“As you command,” I said, quoting the Queen’s army of Earth-invading zombies. I knew the entire movie by heart. Why was that the only line I could remember?

She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “Good. This is going to be so much fun. Sit up and put your arm around me. Treat me like I’m your special girl.”

“As you command.” I sat up straight, draped my arm across her shoulders, and pulled her close. My popcorn fell to the floor. Didn’t matter. I actually had my arm around a girl!

The Queen made her first appearance on screen. Her black-robed minister of war raised his arms and screeched, “All hail the Queen of the Comet of Blood.

Some guy near the stage called out, “More like, ‘All hail the dried-up porno queen.’” Much of the audience rewarded the jerk with laughter.

Sure, the Queen’s fiery-red latex clothes barely restrained her large breasts, but since when did guys make fun of that? Not me. Not ever.

Seated as I was at the back of the theater I could speak without the jerk hearing. “I’d teach that guy some manners, but I can’t on account of my hands being registered as lethal weapons.” It was a much better story than the one where I sit at the back of the theater to avoid guys like that.

“You’re the king of Horror. He is nothing. Stay here with me. I am what matters.”

“As you command.”

Why did I keep saying that? And when had she changed her clothes? Not that I minded how her own large breasts pressed against the red latex top she now wore. In fact, she didn’t just remind me of Depravia, she was Depravia. A greater interpretation even than the actress. Only a blind man could mistake the woman under my arm with the hag on the screen.

The movie played on. I tried to reposition my arm across her shoulders, but my arm wouldn’t budge. It must have fallen asleep, though it didn’t feel that way.

She peered up at me with her emerald eyes. “The ending is almost here. It’s a special showing, restricted to all but the Blood Queen and her King of Horror. Promise me you won’t look away.”

“As you command.” The immovable weight of my arm had spread throughout my body. My head alone could move. It didn’t matter, not as long as she was near.

“You’re going to love it. I just know you will.”

The music swelled, and Depravia’s army of cannibal vampire zombies descended upon a beach full of Italian Riviera sunbathers. Topless hotties and hairy men in speedos ran for their lives as the ravenous horde soaked the sands red with blood.

Professor Hellsinger, the hero, arrived with his band of cannibal-vampire-zombie hunters, and the carnage ramped up to the bloodiest scene in cinema history, with enough severed body parts to fill the Colosseum.

Screams came from the front of the theater, and young Depravia giggled with glee and shouted, “Action!”

Several people in the audience shot from their seats and mimicked the victims on screen by screaming, dodging, and ducking as they bolted for the exits. I laughed at the antics along with my queen. This had to be what she’d been so excited about. A flashmob was acting out the end of the film for a sense of realism beyond anything current filmmakers could accomplish with all their CGI chicanery.

Something thudded against the wall behind my head and landed in my lap. I laughed at the severed arm lying there. The torn flesh with its seeping blood and the protruding head of a humerus bone was crafted with such a high degree of detail I could almost believe the silicone prop was real. The cell phone clenched in the hand made the perfect finishing touch.

People continued to scream and wail as they ran and scrambled about, many of them spurting blood from stumps left by missing limbs. I laughed until my sides ached. Old-style special effects were the absolute best, no matter how fake they looked. And these actors, they were amazing, especially the ones screeching, “There’s no way out!” I could almost believe there wasn’t.

Depravia flipped the arm over on my lap so the phone faced up. She tittered with delight at the sight of Comet of Blood playing upon its tiny screen. But this wasn’t the version of the movie I knew, not with its dozens of running, screaming victims wearing Comet of Blood t-shirts. It was pure cinema magic. This had to be the most elaborate flashmob production of all time!

Young Depravia squealed with excitement and pointed to the phone. “Oh look, what’s that?”

As I looked, the camera zoomed into an image of Depravia and me sitting in our theater seats on the movie-set beach amid the ongoing carnage. Beside me, Depravia waved as though to the phone. The tiny Depravia on the screen smiled at us and waved back.

And it hit me. No flashmob on Earth could’ve pull this off. I doubted even Hollywood could. Something was seriously wrong. I wanted to go home.

“Don’t you just love it?” Depravia said between giggly shrieks of horror.

I scrunched my eyes closed against a sudden blaze of bright warm light. Prying them open, I squinted against the glare of a sweltering sun upon the sands of a beach. Nothing of the theater remained but for Depravia’s seat and mine. The world had gone mad. Everywhere I looked, groaning cannibal vampire zombies munched on topless beauties, speedo creepies, and people in Comet of Blood t-shirts. Missiles of anything and everything detachable from a human body soared through the air. The Blood Comet invaders swarmed over Professor Hellsinger’s forces like locusts through a salad bar. Everywhere I looked, screaming people raced aimlessly around a beach that extended beneath the flamingo pink foam of breaking waves. Body parts littered the sands. So vast was the slaughter, blood rained from the sky. I tried to stand, but my muscles refused. I wanted to turn away, to close my eyes to the horror. But I couldn’t. Depravia had seen to that. All I could do was sit there and watch.

“I can see it in your face.” She smiled and snuggled her head against my chest. “You do love it. I knew you would.”

I discovered then I could do more than sit and watch. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

*~*~*

“Yeah, that’s right, everything. All my movies, posters, collectables, everything that has to do with horror, it’s yours if you want them.” Seated at a bus-stop bench, I kept my gaze fixed to my cell phone, ready to smash it on the pavement and run should anything strange appear on the screen. “Just come over and take them.”

“Of course I want them,” Carl said. “So… uh, I guess it really did a number on your head, what happened to you and all, huh?”

“Yeah, my shrink says that watching a hundred-plus people get butchered and thinking you’re next has a way of doing that to a person.” I’d stopped hanging out with Carl when he and his parents moved across town after we graduated from high school. Lucky for me Carl was still as obsessed with horror.

“You’re seeing a shrink? Wow, that’s nuts. Is that the reason you’re getting rid of everything?”

Somehow, it felt good to talk about things with someone other than my shrink, exactly as my shrink said it would. “Partially. Mostly it’s because I can’t stand the sight of blood anymore. I saw everything that happened that night. It was like being strapped in a chair and undergoing the Ludivico Technique. The trauma left me with what’s called hemophobia, which basically means I’m afraid of blood. All my horror stuff’s in my room down in my mom’s basement, and I can’t even force myself to go there now. I’ve moved back upstairs to my old room.”

“Scared of blood? Man, that sucks.”

“There’s an upside, though. I’m losing weight, and I’ve started working out, and it turns out people aren’t as bad as I thought. As soon as the Feds reported I’d been the victim of a biological terrorist attack, people I’d never met began offering to help me get back on my feet. Right now, I’m on my way home from accepting a sweet job as a cashier in one of those upscale coffee shops. After a couple of months, I should have enough money saved to move out of my mom’s house and get my own apartment. Terrible as it was what happened to all those people in the theater, my life feels like it’s made a turn for the better. I just have to stay away from blood.”

“They said on the news it was some kind of psycho gas that made those people kill anything that moved, including themselves. They said you escaped because you had a different reaction to the gas, that it paralyzed you instead. Is that really what happened?”

My bus pulled up to the stop. I remembered feeling as though my entire body had been asleep with that girl under my arm. “Yeah, pretty much. Listen, I have to go. Come over on Saturday, and we’ll talk price.”

The bus was nearly empty. I walked toward the rear where a few of the seats faced each other with their backs to the windows. Before sitting, I glanced outside. An advertisement for In The Night Of Day, a new horror movie about a flesh-consuming plague, glared from the backrest of the bench on which I’d been sitting. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d been awaiting the movie’s release for months, but I couldn’t watch it now if you held a gun to my head. Instead, I’d save my money and put it toward buying myself a car. Life was looking up. I turned my back to the window and sat.

A boney, saggy-skinned woman in a shapeless brown dress boarded the bus and hobbled down the aisle. Wrapped in a loose-knit shawl, she sat across from me. I would’ve smiled at her, but the graying black-haired woman didn’t look up from a blanketed and partially concealed bundle she clutched to her chest. Nevertheless, it felt good just knowing that I was willing to smile at a stranger on a bus. The old me would have been buried in a social media horror page and would never have noticed the woman. I’d wasted so many years with my macabre obsession, missing out on what life was really about. I swore I was done with horror forever.

The old woman coughed. I hoped she didn’t have a cold. I didn’t want to be out sick on my first day of work.

The woman released her shawl and pulled the blanket from the bundle to reveal a naked infant cradled to her wrinkled breast. My gut reaction was to look away, but instead I stared. Something was off with what I was seeing, and it wasn’t me.

The woman sucked in a phlegmy breath and blew upon the child. The infant twisted around and faced me. The pink skin sprouted black pustules, then darkened to a purplish-gray and sagged loose as the flesh beneath withered away. The eyes darkened, shrank in their sockets, and shriveled to deflated husks. Blood leaked from the ears, nose, and empty eye sockets.

“Run! Get away!” screamed the voice in my head, but the sight of the blood lashed me to my seat.

The baby’s desiccated arm broke free from the body, fell to the woman’s lap, and crumbled into a purplish-gray dust. The rest of the child followed suit.

Unable to move, I sat there as the bus braked at the next stop. The door folded open. People exited and entered. I screamed a warning, but my voice made no sound.

The old woman inhaled once again and blew upon her lap. With a force far beyond the strength of her breath, the powdery remains swirled into the air, snaked throughout the bus, and out the door.

Across from me, the woman’s brown dress swelled with voluptuous curves. Her skin grew taut and shone with youth. As she raised her head, her raven-black hair parted to reveal her face.

“Don’t you just love horror?” she said, and with eyes of a terribly familiar shade of green, she winked at me.

End.

*~*~*

R W Goldsmith spent a decade and a half as the scriptwriter for an award-winning Southern California wild-west gunfighter troupe. Following a heart attack, he hung up his gun belt and began writing dark sff novels with an occasional short story thrown in for good measure. In 2020, he served as president of the San Diego chapter of the Horror Writers Association. His post-apocalyptic dark-fantasy novel, The Serpents of Eden, is scheduled for publication in 2021.

Find RW on:

The Web: www.richardwgoldsmith.com

The Song of Carcosa

By Samuel Thomas Fraser

Shadows lengthen as sunlight dies,

And thick clouds curl in starless skies.

The night comes early

In Carcosa.

Black waters break against the rocks

And a western wind sweeps the docks.

Ships shun the port of

Dark Carcosa.

No livestock graze on Hali’s plain,

No guards patrol those streets profane!

The stones are silent

Carcosa.

The outer gates are locked up fast.

Lo! Nigh a century has passed

Since men knew the truth

Of Carcosa!

The great moons alone—skyborne twins—

Can speak of nameless, pagan sins

Wrought in the blood of

Grim Carcosa.

But I myself in dreams have seen

The Yellow banner of the King

Who holds his court in

Lost Carcosa.

Each night, an envoy of that land,

On wings as black as Hastur’s hand,

Carries me thither

To Carcosa.

Six horns! Nine tails! No face it hath,

That trav’ler of the Yellow Path,

Who makes his nest in

Dead Carcosa.

It lifts me up in talons dark

Above the towers still and stark,

And I see it all:

Bleak Carcosa!

That Gargoyle brings me to the throne

Of he who calls that mad land ‘home’.

Tall stands the King of

All Carcosa.

Blood-red of eye and black of tooth,

With waxen face (to say the truth):

Such is the Monarch

Of Carcosa.

Night after night I see that place

And its Sovereign’s jaundiced face!

I dream ever of

High Carcosa.

From this dream I shall never wake.

O! star-kissed spires! O! lifeless lake!

O! Yellow fever

Of Carcosa.

So I shall dream, and I shall sing

Of that mad, pallid, maskless King

Who wears the crown of

Dread Carcosa.

Cries for mercy and pleas for rest

Shall die unvoicèd in my breast

And unheeded by

Deaf Carcosa.

Is there no calm? No last release?

Can Death itself not bring me peace?

No! Never! Not in

Mad Carcosa!

*~*~*

Samuel Thomas Fraser is an author and actor from the rainy mountains of Vancouver, Canada. Sam is a big fan of literature both medieval and mysterious and is currently working toward an MA in English at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Sam’s short work has previously appeared in outlets like The Macabre Museum and Unleashed: Monsters Vs. Zombies Vol. 1, and he has a piece forthcoming in an anthology from Scare Street Publishing. His first novel, Abby Normal, is now available on Amazon.

Find Sam on:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/STFupperlip

Twitter : @STFupperlip

The web: www.samuelthomasfraser.com

Dondo

By Michael A. Clark

The sandwich shop looked like every other franchise outlet, nestled in a small strip mall shared by a nail salon, a drycleaner and a recently shuttered golf shop. The gray Wednesday morning threatened rain before noon. I eased my ’98 Camaro into the nearly vacant parking lot. It was time for me to confront the unknown.

Again.

“I don’t hunt ghosts,” I told Mr. Patel after introducing myself. “It’s more like they hunt me.”

“Fine, fine,” the owner replied. “I need help.”

I looked around. A rack of chips was next to the fountain drink machine. Yellow plastic booths were being wiped down with white cloths by Mr. Patel’s two teenaged kids. A cardboard cutout of the chain’s years-disgraced spokes geek still stood by the door, face to the wall. A narrow hallway led past the glass fronted service counter, behind which Mr. Patel’s wife was filling metal tubs with cut vegetables & pre-sliced cheeses. A ceiling fan gently circulated the air, as elevator music quietly played over the shop’s sound system.

“I don’t know if we got a ghost or a demon or what,” said Mr. Patel, “but it has been crazy around here.”

Mrs. Patel quickly finished stocking the produce for the day’s sales. She hustled into the back room while I watched the two kids cleaning the booths. Mr. Patel ran a clean shop; the tabletops were already hospital sterile. His son was a lanky teen who performed his chores with the zeal of a convict. The daughter was younger, plump, and the unhappiest-looking girl I’d ever seen. She rubbed the plastic tables diligently. The siblings didn’t acknowledge each other’s existence.

“Look, Mr. Dildo,” said Mr. Patel. The son snickered.

“Dondo.”

“My apologies. Mr. Dildo, I must tell you up front, as one businessman to another, I have a problem here. But I cannot afford to pay much for a solution…”

“We can discuss that later,” I said. “What I do is based on feel. Talking about money throws the feel off.”

“I can give you free sandwich coupons, good at any…”

“We’ll talk about that later, okay?” I said, wanting to absorb the surroundings. Yellows and browns and gleaming metal, under fluorescent lights. I’ve eaten in places like this dozens of times.

“When did it start?” I asked.

“About a month ago,” said Mr. Patel. “Weird little things, like an empty bin of tomatoes filling up by itself.”

“Uh huh.”

“The light in the hallway would turn off and on again,” continued Mr. Patel. “The commode in the ladies’ room would flush by itself. In the middle of the day, with no one in it.” He spoke deliberately. “Then, strange—sounds we’d hear. Scratchings, like something trying to…”

His kids had both been pretending not to listen, but the girl froze. The son kept working, but I guessed he’d heard the noises too.

“Well, it’s not too bad during the day,” said Mr. Patel. “But sometimes at night, I leave the children to close up and…”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you have a security camera here?”

“Oh yes. Worthless piece of crap. But Corporate makes all franchise owners install one. And we must pay for it, and can’t write it off on our taxes. Corporate takes the insurance deduction themselves!”

“Where can I see it?”

“Right up there!” He pointed to the camera mounted over the doorway to the back room. It looked like it would cover most of the store.

“Piece of crap,” said Mr. Patel. “They charge me $73 a month, plus an internet connection fee! I don’t have robbers here! What do I need a stupid camera for? They are the robbers!”

“I mean, where can I see the pictures?” I asked. I hoped he could access the stored video records.

Mr. Patel was a typical small businessman. He had a problem. It might be an unusual problem, but he needed a quick (and cheap) solution.

The Patel kids wound up their chores as a phone rang in the back room. Mrs. Patel called out in Bengali, and the owner quickly walked back behind the counter.

The kids both looked at me.

“So, what are you?” asked the son. “A ghost-buster?”

“Maybe,” I said. I’m not good with kids. “About what your father was saying…”

“You won’t get much money out of him. He’s cheap.”

“Thanks for the tip. I mean, have you seen anything weird going on around here?”

“Only when her boyfriend used to stop by,” said the son. “But that’s been awhile.”

The girl gripped her rag tightly.

Great. The kids didn’t get along, and for all I knew, the daughter was pregnant. The old man seemed to drive them hard, and weird things have been happening when they are all in the shop together.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jon.”

“Jon?”

“Like in ‘Jon Stewart’.” He paused. “It’s Jonobhisi. Don’t try pronouncing it. Everyone normally just calls me ‘Jon’.”

“And what’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Dani,” she said, in a soft but husky voice.

“You couldn’t pronounce hers, either,” said Jon.

“So, have you seen anything unusual here?”

Young people are often at the center of paranormal occurrences. The spirit world, or whatever it was, seems to channel better through children. Maybe that’s why I’m not the biggest fan of them. I’ve seen the consequences when it leaks through them into the “real” world.

“Yeah.” Dani remained silent.

“Can you be a little more specific?” I asked. The timer for the bread oven went off behind the counter.

“It’s like Pop said. Lights turning on and off and the bowl flushing by itself.” Jon ran his slim fingers through his dark hair. “And the tomato tray filling up. THAT was weird. I just turned away for a second. Empty. Then I look back, and it’s full. Of good tomatoes, too. Not the crappy ones Corporate sells us.” He felt in his pocket for the cigarette pack I knew was there. “Wish I could get my wallet to do that with money.”

“Did you eat any of the tomatoes?” I asked.

“Yeah, I tried one,” said Jon. “Like I said, they were pretty good, not pale and bland and shit. Pop said, ‘why waste’, so we made sandwiches with them.”

“Practical,” I said. “What about you, Dani? Have you seen any of this?”

“Yes.”

“She’s heard… the noises—more than anybody,” said Jon. Dani glared at him.

“What do they sound like?” I asked.

She shivered slightly.

“It’s okay.”

“No.” Dani said. “It’s horrible. I try to not think about it. But I have to come HERE, and I don’t know if it…” A bead of sweat arose and slid down her forehead. “I just don’t want to BE here…” She breathed deeply.

“Okay,” I said.

“Like Pop said, it sounds like scratching,” said Jon. “Like something trying to crawl out of a hole. Something… big.” He crossed his arms. “So, is there some ‘X-Files’ reason for all this shit?” he asked. He really wanted to light up a cigarette.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. There hadn’t been a customer through the front door since I arrived. “How’s business been lately?”

“Bad,” said Jon, and Dani nodded. “It’s been really bad since we got back from The Old Country.” Another burst of Bengali erupted from the back room.

“We’re not doing so well,” Dani said softly.

“You went to India?” I asked. When he’d said The Old Country, I had a fleeting image of peasant women in babushkas selling turnips in the farmer’s market.

“Got back about three months ago,” said Jon. “Missed the first couple weeks of school. Man, I had to bust ass to catch up. No way I letter in soccer this year.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

Dani shook her head.

“Sucked,” said Jon. “You ever been to Hell, mister?”

I didn’t answer.

“We have family in Calcutta. Pop’s brother died, and he HAD to go see them,” said Jon. “The flight cost a ton of cash— that we didn’t have. And once we got there, everybody wanted US to give THEM money. Chicks wear too many clothes. Millions of people begging in the streets, and fucking cows everywhere.” Jon sounded like a typical American teenager. “They thought WE were rich, because we lived in America.” He snorted. “I’m never going back there.”

“And things started occurring about, what, two months after you returned?”

“Um, yeah, about that,” said Jon.

“No,” said Dani.

“Huh?” Her brother sounded surprised.

I wasn’t.

“Right after we got back home, I started hearing…it.”

“Why didn’t you…?”

“Hold on,” I said to Jon. “Dani, you said you started hearing something. What did it sound like?”

“It sounds like its… groping.” Dani stared past us, at the window to the outside. “Like it wants to… come through.”

“That’s wacked!” said Jon. “You were as freaked as Mom and Pop and me when this shit started happening. You should have said…”

“Said what?” Dani looked at us both. “That I was hearing something clawing its way out of a grave?”

“Woah.” Jon really needed that cigarette now.

“Anything else weird happen to you before the rest of your family noticed?” I asked. More Bengali from the backroom, and a phone slammed down hard. Mr. and Mrs. Patel struggled to keep their voices low. The kids both glanced towards the back room.

“The shadows,” said Dani, breathing deeply.

Jon’s lean jaw jumped.

“I’d see them, just out of the corner of my eye. When I was cleaning tables or stacking drink cups. At first, I don’t know, I didn’t think about them and the… scratching… together.” She locked her fingers tightly. “I’d turn around, and nothing was there. I would keep working, thinking about other things. When you look for them, they aren’t there.”

“What do the shadows look like?” I asked.

“Black. Like lines crossing a blank piece of paper. There and gone.”

“I’ve seen a couple on the camera,” said Jon. “At first, I just thought it was the crappy video setup. Then I saw a…line, too. I checked the feed. It’s freaking weird, man.”

“So, you know how to access and playback the video?” Good. He could help me with the camera.

“Yeah,” said Jon with a smile. “I use it to check out the hot chicks that come in.”

“Have your mother or father seen these shadows?”

“I—don’t think so.”

“No,” said Dani. “They’re too busy talking about money all the time.”

The icemaker above the soda machine clicked on.

“A shadow crossed right between them while they were arguing after the last meeting with the bank.” She closed her large dark eyes. “They don’t see. And they don’t hear it, like I do...”

“Has one of the…lines…ever come close to you?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Did you feel anything? Like maybe cold or static electricity or…?”

Mr. Patel burst out of the back room. He was sweating, and Mrs. Patel remained at the door behind the counter. “I am sorry, Mr. Dildo…”

“Pop, his name’s Dondo,” said Jon.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Mr. Patel. “I have important business I must attend to. Is there a chance you can return later tonight? I really must attend to matters of great importance. We close at ten on Wednesdays.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come back around closing time. I have a few more questions to ask of your son and daughter, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yes, yes, fine,” he said, as if urging me toward the door. “Would you like a sandwich? Turkey and cheese? Jon, make him a sandwich to go. Give him a bag of chips and a drink, too.”

*~*~*

The light from the shop cast a sad glow through the drizzle when I returned. The cassette deck had eaten my last Blue Oyster Cult tape, so I was listening to NPR. A local theatre group was performing “The Turn of the Screw,” and the actors were talking about the supernatural aspects of Henry James’ story.

Oh Henry, I thought… so ambiguous. Raindrops splattered on my fogged windshield.

The Feeling, with all its sick certainty, was loitering inside me.

I finished my hazelnut/Irish Cream fake-a-chino and went inside the Patel’s shop.

The teenaged Patels were both behind the counter, and their father was shaking his head as I walked in.

“This is crazy, crazy!” said Mr. Patel. “I do not have time for this!’

My worn sneakers squeaked across the not-quite-dry tiled floor.

“It happened again,” said Jon. “Onions this time.”

Dani was putting away plastic bottles of condiments, her face strained.

“Crazy. Crazy!” Mr. Patel repeated. “Mr. Dondo, I do not have time for this crazy stuff! Important matters to attend to, and then the empty tray fills! With onions!” He pointed to a metal bin overflowing with what looked like albino spider legs. “Why does it not do this with money in the cash register?”

“That’s what I said,” replied Jon, as he stoically pushed a broom.

“I hate onions,” murmured Dani.

“Well, we wrap them up, ghosts and all, and see if they are fresh enough to use tomorrow,” said Mr. Patel. “There are important matters, and I must go. The children will do what you ask to help rid my business of this craziness. Do you understand?” he barked at his children. And then he was off, slamming the door shut behind him. I watched him hurry through the rain to the driver’s of the only other vehicle in the parking lot.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

“Important matters,” said Jon. “You heard Pop.” He leaned the broom against the door to the back room. “I think they’re going to lose this place.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Should I leave?”

“No.” said Dani, wrinkling her nose as she covered the onion tray with Saran Wrap.

“Okay, how long ago did these pop up?” The aroma of fresh cut onions was obvious even on the other side of the glass barrier.

“Right before you got here,” said Jon. “Look, Mister. Pop’s really stressed about the bank and shit, and this… other stuff, ain’t helping.”

He walked to the front door, opened it and whipped out his pack of Kools. “There’s not a lot going our way right now.” Jon looked like he’d aged in the last few hours. He turned towards me. “Anything you can do, man…”

“Then let’s take a look at those videos of the lines,” I said. “And can you both try remembering what you were thinking about when you first saw them?”

“What do you mean?” asked Dani. “I was scared.”

“After you first saw them, right?” I said. “But you had to be thinking about something before you saw them. Try and remember what that was.”

“Hell, I was probably thinking about some chick,” said Jon.

“No doubt,” I said.

The back room was surrounded by business clutter. Papers and forms, and half-opened boxes of plastic silverware. A picture of the Patels, years-old, leaned against a cream-colored pot filled with pens, letter openers and a pair of scissors. A filing cabinet festooned with refrigerator magnets stood against a wall, next to a desk and a long low table on top of which sat a computer, a printer and an old boxy monitors.

“The camera records onto this,” said Jon. He turned on the first monitor and fished through a pile of USB drives under the table.

“I thought these company surveillance systems were supposed to be secure?” I asked.

“Yeah, right,” said Jon. “I think there’s something on this one.” He slapped the USB into the pc, then smacked it on the side. “Piece of shit,” he said.

The picture came on, haltingly.

“Some hot Latino chick came in, right before. She got a bunch of subs for some kids’ volleyball game.” Jon expertly worked the video controls. “I think there’s a line right around here.”

The camera showed a monochrome view of the front part of the store. A time signature read “14:37.” Mrs. Patel bounced in and out of sight below, cleaning something.

“I’d just got out of school,” said Jon. “It was only me and Mom. Right about—here.”

A sharp black rope danced across the front of the counter. Dani stiffened.

“Play that again,” I said. “And slow it down if you can.”

“Sure,” said Jon.

The black figure reappeared, crossing the camera’s eye from left to right. In slow motion it did look like a rope, twisting subtly. Like there was an unseen weight causing it to unwind. The spectral strand meandered around the corner of the counter, and then out of sight into the hallway leading to the restrooms.

Jon replayed the tape again.

Dani was breathing heavy.

“Is that what it looks like, when you see one… live?” I asked. She nodded.

“Yeah,” said Jon. “It’s fucking weird, huh?”

“I mean, the actual way it looks,” I said, trailing off. “Play it again.”

Jon replayed the tape. He glanced at his sister.

Dani bundled her arms around her waist.

“Look at the way it’s oriented,” I said. The black line turned the corner to the bathroom. “That camera is angled down from about eight feet off the floor, right? So why does this thing look square on to the picture? Shouldn’t it be moving along level to the floor?”

“Huh?” said Jon.

“Yeah,” Dani said. “That’s exactly how it looks when I see it. It’s like it knows we’re...”

“Watching it?” I said. “Do the sounds come along at the same time?” I was starting to get somewhere. Hell, if I knew where it was going.

“The sounds made me look. And that’s when I saw...”

“The sounds. Below it, above it, around it?” I asked.

“I—I can’t tell,” replied Dani softly. “I kind of feel them, more than hear them.”

I turned to her brother. “What about you? Do you hear the scratching when you see these things, too?”

I should be more careful about asking leading questions. I should separate them, so they don’t feed off each other’s responses. I should do a lot of things. But there’s no real rulebook to follow.

The Feeling was rising.

“I don’t know,” said Jon. “Usually I just catch a line out of the corner of my eye. The sounds… well maybe, yeah, that’s when I hear them. They’re louder when she’s around.”

“And it sounds like something pushing to get through,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess,” said Jon. Dani nodded.

“Not like something trying to get away?” I said.

“Get away? Get away from what?”

Outside, rain lashed the now empty parking lot. The soft drink machine gently hummed.

“From you,” I said, looking to Dani. The Feeling… damn it to Hell.

“What were you thinking about, right before you first saw it? When you heard those grinding, gnawing sounds?”

“I wanted to go home,” she said, sadly.

“Home? From here?”

A moth, entrapped, fluttered above in the light.

“No! From over there!” She said.

“You heard it in India, first?”

“Holy shit,” said Jon. “You brought this fucking thing over here with you?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Dani cried.

“Damn, I heard of people picking up tapeworms there, but…”

“Shut up, Jon!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“What do you mean? She’s fuckin’ carried this—”

“I said shut up!” yelled Dani. She was torn between being furious and bursting into tears. I looked around to make sure there weren’t any sharp objects within reach.

The Feeling was coming. Soon, very soon…

“Oh shit, Dani,” said Jon. “Mom and Pop are going to lose the store because you fuckin’ haunted it!”

“You don’t care about them! All you care about is yourself!”

“No, I care about not sleeping out in the street like some kind of bum,” said Jon.

“Will you both please calm down?” I said.

“Aren’t you going to do something, mister?” said Jon. “That’s what you’re here for, right?”

A chair behind us scraped across the floor.

I looked around. None of the chairs had moved.

Dani moaned.

“Ah, shit,” sighed Jon.

Something, not a chair, scraped again.

Closer.

And the Feeling. Like static electricity trapped in Jello.

The kids wanted me to do something. Like I had much of a choice.

We all saw it at the same time. A thin black rope, twisting like a gaunt tornado right before us. It spun with unearthly grace, seemingly ignorant of its audience. But the twirling ebony twine was familiar.

Like home. The place from where you want to escape.

I took a step towards the line. A louder groaning, like a sick bear’s bowel movement enveloped the store.

Jon and Dani froze.

The line slid towards me.

“Holy shit, mister—”

The frozen shock ripped my breath away as I sank below the electric lights and lunchmeat smells of the little store. It was the helpless Feeling of being shredded like wrappings on a spoiled child’s spurned birthday present, so alien but also familiar. Brief visions flashed in my mind, of ancient deities and smoggy subcontinental skies, cell phones and masses of sweating, naked people pressing toward a unified, sacred goal.

Modern humanity ignores the incredible age of the forces surrounding us. There are so many of us now. Perhaps we’ve become the interloper in their reality. Perhaps sometimes, those forces just want to get away from us.

And a scared, unhappy young girl can provide the passageway out.

*~*~*

“Mister Dondo! Hey, Mister Dondo!”

I could sense the lights overhead through my closed eyelids.

“Jon, we have to call 911!”

The floor of the store was cold.

“Mister Dondo! Are you all right?”

A breath of air would be nice about now.

“He’s breathing!”

“I can see that, stupid.”

Dani mumbled a response under her breath.

I can feel my toes in my shoes, my back on the linoleum, and my tongue in my mouth.

A fleeting sense of mammoth worked stones stretching toward an azure sky, and low murmurs, guttural and wild. The flapping of leathery wings. A distant echo of a closing door, as an uninvited guest finally leaves.

I was back on the floor of the sandwich shop, feeling like elephants had just finished playing kickball with me.

“What the hell just happened?” said Jon. I heard the faucet run, and Dani’s footsteps returning with a cup of water.

“You tell me,” I said, weakly. “What did you see?”

“That line—thing appeared, and the sounds came back. Loud.”

“And it lurched towards you,” said Dani. “And you walked right into it.”

“And then?”

“Ah, I don’t know, man,” said Jon. “It was like I blinked, and you were on your ass on the floor. And that thing had vanished. Just like that.”

Dani knelt and I drank the water. “Is it gone?” she asked.

“Hopefully,” I said, as I sat myself up. The back of my head was throbbing.

“Mister, there’s gotta be easier ways for you to make a living,” said Jon. “I mean, Quiznos makes better subs then we do.”

I smiled wanly and let them clumsily help me to my feet. They were good kids.

I needed to leave and try forgetting the unraveling brush with what I’d just touched.

Dani made me a pair of meatball subs. “Thank you,” she said demurely.

Jon piled half a dozen bags of Baked Lays chips in the bag atop them. “You got a free meal here anytime, Mister” he said. “As long as we’re open.”

“You’ll stay open,” I said.

And then I walked out into the receding rain and drove away. Again.

End.

*~*~*

Michael A. Clark’s stories have been published in Liquid Imagination, Mystery Weekly Magazine, and Gypsum Sound Tales anthologies Colp and Thuggish Itch, as well as the benefit anthology Burning Love and Bleeding Hearts. His short story “Thin Skinned” appeared in the January 2020 issue of Galaxy’s Edge, and “Abominable” appears in the July 17 issue of Tales from the Moonlit Path.

Clark lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and works in industrial automation and CNC machining, while spending as much time as he can outdoors. Baseball is his sport of choice.

The Flowering of the Strange Orchid

By H.G. Wells

Originally Published in 1894

The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good luck, as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps--for the thing has happened again and again--there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "John-smithia"! There have been worse names.

It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made Winter Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales--that hope, and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.

"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to happen to me to-day." He spoke--as he moved and thought--slowly.

"Oh, don't say that!" said his housekeeper--who was also his remote cousin. For "something happening" was a euphemism that meant only one thing to her.

"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant... though what I do mean I scarcely know.

"To-day," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a batch of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they have. It may be I shall buy something good unawares. That may be it."

He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.

"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of the other day?" asked his cousin, as she filled his cup.

"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.

"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to think aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There is Harvey. Only the other week; on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of excitement!--compared to me."

"I think I would rather be without so much excitement," said his housekeeper. "It can't be good for you."

"I suppose it's troublesome. Still... you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never married... I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something really remarkable.

"That orchid-collector was only thirty-six--twenty years younger than myself--when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very troublesome, but then it must have been very interesting, you know--except, perhaps, the leeches."

"I am sure it was not good for him," said the lady with conviction.

"Perhaps not." And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. "Twenty-three minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket--it is quite warm enough--and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose--"

He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and then nervously at his cousin's face.

"I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London," she said in a voice that admitted of no denial. "There's all between here and the station coming back."

When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a purchase. It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy, but this time he had done so.

"There are Vandas," he said, "and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonophis." He surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for her and his own entertainment.

"I knew something would happen to-day. And I have bought all these. Some of them--some of them--I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will be remarkable. I don't know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if someone had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable.

"That one "--he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome--"was not identified. It may be a Palaeonophis--or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected."

"I don't like the look of it," said his housekeeper. "It's such an ugly shape."

"To me it scarcely seems to have a shape."

"I don't like those things that stick out," said his housekeeper.

"It shall be put away in a pot to-morrow."

"It looks," said the housekeeper, "like a spider shamming dead."

Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. "It is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful orchid indeed. How busy I shall be to-morrow! I must see to-night just exactly what to do with these things, and to-morrow I shall set to work."

"They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp—I forget which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain."

"I think none the better of it for that."

"Men must work though women may weep," said Wedderburn with profound gravity.

"Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine--if men were left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine--and no one round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most disgusting wretches--and, anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have orchids!"

"I don't suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that kind of thing," said Wedderburn. "Anyhow, the natives of his party were sufficiently civilised to take care of all his collection until his colleague, who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they could not tell the species of the orchid, and had let it wither. And it makes these things more interesting."

"It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat another mouthful of dinner."

"I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the window-seat. I can see them just as well there."

The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little hothouse, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new orchids to his friends, and over and over again he reverted to his expectation of something strange.

Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted, and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once, directly he made the discovery.

"That is a bud," he said, "and presently there will be a lot of leaves there, and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets."

"They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown," said his housekeeper. "I don't like them."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can't help my likes and dislikes."

"I don't know for certain, but I don't think there are any orchids I know that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You see they are a little flattened at the ends."

"I don't like 'em," said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning away. "I know it's very silly of me--and I'm very sorry, particularly as you like the thing so much. But I can't help thinking of that corpse."

"But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of mine."

His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. "Anyhow I don't like it," she said.

Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in particular, whenever he felt inclined.

"There are such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been found with seed."

"But how do they form new plants?"

"By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?

"Very likely," he added. “My orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish you would come and see them!"

But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache. She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams, growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to her entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary broad form, and a deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red towards the base He knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant was placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange plant.

And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little glass house he knew that the spike had burst out, although his great Paloeonophis Lowii hid the corner where his new darling stood. There was a new odour in the air, a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse. Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And, behold! the trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom, from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped before them in an ecstasy of admiration.

The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes.

He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the floor were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green leaves behind them, the whole greenhouse, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in a curve upward.

*~*~*

At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable custom. But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea.

"He is worshipping that horrid orchid," she told herself, and waited ten minutes. "His watch must have stopped. I will go and call him."

She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name. There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hot-water pipes.

For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.

He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands.

She did not understand. Then she saw from under one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their sap dripped red.

Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel.

How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not. She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and, after she had panted for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn's motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.

Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and in another minute she had released him and was dragging him away from the horror.

He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.

The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.

"Bring some water!" she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When, with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping with excitement, and with Wedderburn's head upon her knee, wiping the blood from his face.

"What's the matter?" said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and closing them again at once.

"Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Dr. Haddon at once," she said to the odd-job man so soon as he brought the water; and added, seeing he hesitated, "I will tell you all about it when you come back."

Presently Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and, seeing that he was troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, "You fainted in the hothouse."

"And the orchid?"

"I will see to that," she said.

Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. "Come to the orchid-house and see," she said.

The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and hesitated.

The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn's orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his strange adventure.

End.

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