IT’s vessel. nothing more. no way out . . .
every man she liked, wanted, gone. taken. every chance to love—Thomas; Sasha; Mark; Felix; Julian, to touch and hold and give. taken and taken. . . . and the black Unclean-thing, every black inch and ripple reeking of rotting paper and burnt flesh, came . . .
STRUCK
left.
in the darkness. carrying her covered reed baskets, each full of congested chatterings she doesn’t want to listen to, she drags her feet, staying in the darkest shadows. standing at the water’s edge again. the weight . . . stands there a long time. quivers, wishes she could fall into a final moment. knows it won’t let her. didn’t the other times unless echoed through the suicidal in her.
the weight.
eyelids closed.
no prayers.
punctured. cannot. cannot.
tears.
rouged by bitter wind she has walked—threaded to endless ache—7 blocks, passed paper soda containers and empty pint bottles and marquees, naked, clumps of red clinging to her thighs . . .
gasping,
gagging on decay . . .
and she fed the scuttling babies it filled her with to the black water of the canal
crawled—cold salt tears and shame in tow—home.to bed.
and pulled her arms tight about her. cried.
another round of cramps and fever. waits for the rough tide to go back out. . . .
pulled her arms tight about her
and
wept
[Miles “So What”, Mazzy Star “Fade Into You”, Lou Reed “Dirty Blvd.”, David Sylvian “The Devils’ Own” “Ride”, The Stooges “Down On The Street”, Jethro Tull “Witches Promise” “Said She Was a Dancer”, Iron Butterfly “Iron Butterfly Theme”, Sergio Mendes “So Many Stars”, Bat For Lashes “Daniel”, Nick Drake “At The Chime of A City Clock”, Various R.E.M. songs, Wynton Marsalis “Black Codes (From the Underground)”, various songs from the 1st Black Sabbath recording]
(c) 2011 Andrea Bonazzi
Joe Pulver is a writer and editor with two published novels to date, Nightmare’s Disciple (Chaosium 1999; intro Robert M. Price) and The Orphan Palace (Chomu Press 2011; intro Michael Cisco).He is currently editing 2 anthologies for Miskatonic River Press. A Season in Carcosaand The Grimscribe’s Puppets, both tribute anthologies will be released in 2012, and is also editing “Phantasmagorium” magazine, and Ed Morris’ series of “Crooked Man” novellas for Mercury Retrograde Press. He has two mixed genre collections out from Hippocampus Press, Blood Will Have Its Season (2009; intro S.T. Joshi) and SIN & ashes (2010; intro Laird Barron). His 3rd collection, Portraits of Ruins (intro Matt Cardin) will be released soon by Hippocampus. He’s written many short works that have appeared in magazines (including “Weird Fiction Review”, “Phantasmagorium”, “Strange Aeons”, “Crypt of Cthulhu”, “Nemonymous”) and anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Ross Lockhart’s Book of Cthulhu, and S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (PS Publishing) and A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (upcoming from Centipede Press 2013) and many anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. His work has been praised by Thomas Ligotti, Ellen Datlow, Laird Barron, Michael Cisco, S.T. Joshi, and many other notable writers and editors. Joe was born, raised, and lived in upstate NY for 55 years. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
You can find Joe on the net at the following: http://thisyellowmadness.blogspot.de/ http://www.facebook.com/jspulver https://twitter.com/ - !/JoePulver
Story illustration by Leslie Herzfeld.
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Station Waiting Room
by Simon Kurt Unsworth
GASKIN HATED HIS JOB.
It had seemed like such a great opportunity; promotion within the company and responsibility for restructuring the Administrative Records Section, an out-of-town department in Low Hold. Only, ‘restructuring’ in this case, Gaskin soon discovered, meant ‘closing in preparation for the company developing the offices into a new corporate headquarters’, and Low Hold was a dismal place somewhere in the hinterland between the coast and the inland farms, nestling miserably in the neck of a valley called Middle Fell Drop.
As much as he hated the job itself, Gaskin found the commute worse. Low Hold had its own train station, the last stop at the end of a decaying branch line, but to get to it, Gaskin needed to change trains three times. After each change, the train he went to was smaller, grimier and older than the last, the scenery outside the streaked windows flatter, greyer and more desolate. The third train was little more than a cattle truck, with seats too cramped and exhausted to be comfortable and isles whose narrowness forced him to move in a kind of crabwise shuffle. Handstraps dangled from the ceiling above the seats, anticipating (or perhaps pining for) a time when the carriage was full, but there was only ever Gaskin and one or two others using the service, and his fellow travellers got off at earlier stops. By the time the train reached the end of the line, Gaskin was alone in a carriage whose seats had been rubbed bare by countless buttocks and whose faded signs were dusty with old sunlight. Travelling into Low Hold felt like falling out of the world.
Evenings were worse. Instead of feeling happiness at going home, Gaskin was normally exhausted and miserable, and he found himself sometimes wondering if it wouldn’t be worth getting a flat in Low Hold and staying there. It would be convenient, and would mean he did not have to wait on the near-empty platform at the station for over an hour before the engine and its solitary carriage rattled into view and laboured to a stop. Most of his staff seemed to have done that; all lived within walking distance of the office, yet not one of them appeared to like Low Hold. When they spoke, they professed to hate its smallness, its lack of amenities, the weather, the way it made them feel, and yet they stayed. Gaskin didn’t want to spend his money to end up living in a place he hated with people he didn’t like, but could it be any worse than boarding that train each night?
It was the waiting as much as anything; uncomfortable, depressing and fiercely tiring. There was no waiting area on the station, just a wooden bench that fitted his body in all the wrong places and a ticket office that was never staffed and had a faded sign in the window that read, Closed – purchase tickets on the train. By his feet knots of weeds forced their way out from the grey cracks in the concrete apron of the platform and the painted line at its edge was faded and splintered. Down near the tracks, grasses sprouted around the rails and crept over the rough wooden sleepers in tangled whorls and the great, coiled springs of the buffers rusted disconsolately behind their metal pads. Litter staggered in ragged circles around his feet when the wind gusted.
There was another bench at the far edge of the platform, and most nights, an old man sat on it.
He never got on a train and Gaskin never saw him arrive or leave. He simply sat and looked around, staring at the line or across the tracks and sometimes at Gaskin himself. Gaskin did not attempt to talk to the man, and avoided making eye contact in the hope of sending out a clear message: I’m not interested. Leave me alone. Sometimes, the man stood at the edge of the platform, his head cocked as though listening for something or peering intently at some unseen item of interest. One day in summer, despite Gaskin’s fiercest body language, he walked over to Gaskin and said, “All this used to be houses.”
It was such an unexpected thing to say that Gaskin responded with a polite, “Pardon me?” before he could stop himself. The man sat down on the bench beside Gaskin and said again, “All this used to be houses.” As he spoke, he gestured around slowly, his hand sweeping around and taking in the flat scrubland beyond the station and the distant offices. “All of it. Low Hold was a village.”
Gaskin did not respond. His initial surprise had hardened into wariness, but it seemed he was too late; the man continued, unbidden.
“It was a farming village, really. Most of the men worked the farms that covered the valley, although there was some industry. Small quarries, local
stone, that kind of thing. It was never a very pretty place, and most of the people here had it hard, but they survived.”
“Really?” Noncommittal, disinterested, almost rude. Go away!
“By the time the second war started, most of the farms were struggling anyway, so the army requisitioned parts of the land and built an overflow camp here. I came in forty one to run it.”
Gaskin stayed silent.
“Listen!” said the man, his voice a sudden, fierce hiss. He leaned over and gripped Gaskin’s wrist hard, squeezing so that Gaskin could not pull away. “Listen!” he hissed again, “I have to tell someone. I have to tell you. Someone has to hear!”
“Get off me!” said Gaskin, pulling back but the old man held on, his fingers digging into Gaskin’s flesh and making him wince.
“Do you feel that grip? Do you feel? It’s nothing like the grip that this place has over people. Nothing!” The man finally let go of Gaskin’s arm and he yanked it back, rubbing at skin upon which crescent bruises were already flowering an angry red.
“Please,” said the old man. “Please, just listen to me. I have to tell someone.” His voice cracked as he spoke, and the strength that had given his hiss venom was gone. He sounded lost and ancient, a tremulous thing sagging into his heavy suit and crumpling like old branches back onto the bench. Gaskin said nothing; old and weak the man may be, but he clearly had the capacity for aggression and there was no one here to help if he turned nasty again. Gaskin waited, resigned, for his story.
“Back when this was a village, it was bigger. It had a two-line train track. If you look, you can still see what’s left of the other line. There was a waiting room on the other platform as well; it’s still there, can you see?”
Although there was only one set of tracks, Gaskin saw that the old man was right: the cutting was wide enough for two sets of rails. There were faint indentations where a second line had been, a sign of Low Hold’s more prosperous past. Beyond this second, lost, line a disused platform faced Gaskin. It had been seized by nature and now, at summer’s height, was thick with bushes and plants. Flowers bloomed, but their scent did not reach him even though he was barely twenty feet away. The blooms looked unhealthy and he wondered if the soil was sick with pollution from the long-gone trains; the petals seemed drab and sickly and the leaves curled downwards around their own discoloured edges. Thick shadows, made solid with the trunks of the growing plants, pooled behind the flowers. Gaskin could hear the wind hissing through the foliage and tiny animals skittering as they dashed back and forth through the roots and branches. When Gaskin looked more closely, he saw that the ground on the second platform was thick with rotting vegetation.
Buried in the shadows of the foliage was a darker, regular shape. Interested despite himself, he leant forward, staring hard. By God, the old man was right! It was a building, squat and stretching most of the platform’s length, now buried in the rough ocean of root and branch. He made out the dark maw of a doorway and of windows, choked with twisting plants. Alongside, there was a wall stained dark grey and even, he saw, a clock hanging above the door, wrapped in leaves and vines and dust.
“That’s not where it started,” said the old man, “not by a long shot, but it’s where it started for me, so I suppose I’ll start my story there as well. That waiting room was the first thing I saw as the train pulled out of the station after I was posted here in forty one, when the war was still relatively young. Back then, the waiting room was in use, but it looked old even then. The paint was peeling around the door and on the window frames, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t a very welcoming place.
“Low Hold was surrounded by farmland, and a great chunk of it had been requisitioned by the government to set up what was essentially a sorting station. All the soldiers that hadn’t got regiments, or who were delayed and needed to be sent after units that were already overseas, all the sickly ones and the troublemakers that no-one wanted, they all came here to wait while someone decided where they should go. Discipline was a nightmare; it was hard to keep track of the men because they came in by themselves or in small groups, and left in the same way as they got their postings. Most of them were draftees, and none of them wanted to be here. They either wanted to be fighting, or back at home, and no one knew anyone. We had officers, of course, but they’d change as often as the men did, so no one really had any authority. I was sent here as chief officer, but in reality I was a glorified paper pusher, filing this form and copying that one, sending this form on and making sure that one stayed. It was a terrible job.”
The old man stopped and looked across the quiet train line; on the other platform, the plants waved gently as though in greeting. He stared, squinting as though trying to focus in on something, although Gaskin had the impression it was something further away that the platform.
“The first job I did was a complete inventory of men and equipment. It took me over a week, sorting out the records of what we should have had, and there were discrepancies. Men that weren’t there, equipment missing, men here that we had no record of. Some of it was easily sorted out; there were black market trades going on with the people the surrounding areas, easy enough to stop, and the missing records were almost always in transit from some other base or headquarters, but the missing men were a problem. No one seemed to know where they’d gone. We checked posting records, troop carrier records, even followed through with the various regiments that they were supposed to have gone to, but very few turned up. We had to list them all as AWOL and turn their details over to the military and civilian police. Low Hold camp had the highest AWOL rate among the British military during wartime. It also had the highest rate of soldiers who never turned up anywhere.”
“Where were they all?” asked Gaskin.
“The next problem was the villagers,” said the old man, ignoring Gaskin’s question. “They looked … wrong. The joke in the camp was that family’d been fucking family, and we were seeing the result. The people were stunted and sullen, twisted and bent like wood that’s warped because of sun and rain. They had no energy, and never seemed to do anything. The state of the waiting room was my first sign of it, but I soon saw others. Shops were dusty, houses badly maintained, people didn’t talk or socialise. Of course, it doesn’t mean anything these days, but back then the sense of togetherness was strong in these kind of villages. It was what kept them going through the poverty, the unemployment, the fear; at least they had each other. And you didn’t feel that in Low Hold, not at all. And that was another thing! There were no damaged men in the village, and no missing ones.”
“What?” asked Gaskin, surreptitiously peering over the man’s shoulder to see if the train was in sight. Nothing.
“After the first war, entire generations were gone. You’d see places were there weren’t many middle aged men, because the previous generation had gone off to fight and died in the mud and the shit, and if there were men left after the end of the fighting, they were the cripples and the cowards, but in Low Hold? It was as though the first war had never happened. It was odd; it was almost as though they were ashamed of it but defensive. People here had a way of trudging and dragging their feet when they walked, like their heads were too heavy or their feet were numb, but ask them if they’d ever been anywhere, or what they’d done in the great War and they’d get aggressive.”
The man slumped back against the bench with a sigh. Gaskin hadn’t realised it, but the older man had become tense, hunched over and bent at his waist as he spoke, his shoulders shaking as though the words were being released from him like bile or vomit. And, much as Gaskin would have preferred to be alone, his story was interesting. In the old man’s descriptions of the Low Hold villagers, Gaskin could see echoes of his colleagues. His staff.
“We tried to get some of the villagers to work for us, building other camps and stores up in the valley or in other parts of the area, but none would do it. None. They refused, even though we were offering good money, money they needed.
&nbs
p; “I remember talking to one of my commanding officers about it and joking that it must have been a miracle that any of the Low Hold villagers volunteered to fight in the Great War, and he told me that they hadn’t. Not one.
“And then there was the farms. Most of the valley was farmland, mainly livestock but some crops on the lower slopes and around the village on the flatter areas, but I found that we were bringing food in from other villages and towns. When I asked why, Q took me to a local farm.” “Q?” asked Gaskin, thinking of James Bond and the enigmatic inventions of his science officer.
“Quartermaster,” replied the old man. “In charge of stocks and stores. Our Q was a veteran wheeler-dealer called Culley, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t using local produce – it had to be fresher and cheaper. The farm visit explained it all. What came out of the ground around here was awful, practically inedible. Potatoes that were shrivelled and tough, carrots that looked desiccated, plants that wilted and rotted even as they grew and tasted foul when they were harvested. The farmer didn’t seem to care, even though most of his crops ended up ploughed back into the ground as compost or used as feed for the animals. And the animals! Sheep that didn’t wander but stayed in the same place and starved because there was nothing near for them to eat, cows that produced milk that was bitter and sour, and meat that was tough and tasteless. I asked the Q why, and he said that all the local produce was like that. ‘Nothing grows healthy here’, he said, ‘it’s like the soil sucks life out instead of putting it in.’”
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 33