So where the fuck was he?
He walked along the corridor, even though the voice in his head that normally kicked in at time like this, the voice he thought of as Sensible Alan, started to protest.
Are you out of your fucking mind? it said. Whatever this place is, it’s gone bad. It’s sour. There is nothing good here, get out, go home, close the door and forget you ever stepped foot here.
But If Alan spent his life listening to his sensible voice, he’d never have gotten anywhere. Sensible Alan had warned him not to ask Debbie Selznik to the senior prom in case she said no, and if he had listened he wouldn’t have discovered to his delight that Debbie never said no to anything. He’d warned Alan not to blow a whole summer’s wages from working at the burger joint on a snazzy suit just so he could impress during interviews in the fall—and impress Alan most certainly did. If he’d listened to Mr. Sensible he would never have risked half the investments that made such a name for himself and brought him enough wealth that he could take a “career break” at the age of thirty-five that would likely stretch until he was eighty. If Sensible Alan had his way, he’d probably still be at the burger joint flipping patties like half his graduating class. There was a little box inside his head where he locked Sensible Alan at times like these, so he shut the lid down and threw back the bolt.
Alan opened the door that should have been Number Eighteen. Something was messing up his ceiling, after all. If it was coming from in here and he could find it, then maybe he could have his perfect home back.
The room was a dark echo of his own apartment; the dimensions were the same, but somehow it felt larger, and certainly colder. He had a moment of disorientation; the space was so similar, like this really was his home—like he had fallen asleep and woken up a hundred years in the future after the apocalypse had come and gone. The walls were gray and sometimes green; the plaster was bloated and bubbled in a dozen places. All the surfaces were covered in a white film of greasy sludge; what mold became when it grew up. The floor was bare and felt sticky beneath Alan’s sneakers. And the smell . . . it was like being under the blankets with a gorilla who farted. It made his eyes water and bile rise in his throat.
Alan peered through the gloom into the far corner, the spot where the uplighter stood in his own apartment. Where there was a full length window downstairs, here there was just a boarded up void through which rancid air was whistling. There was indeed something there, filling the corner. It was a pile of . . . something. From this distance it looked like rags; a heap of old discarded clothing made into compost heap. So he wandered over, ignoring the entreaties of Sensible Alan as he rattled at the bolts of his cell.
Upon closer inspection, he could see that it wasn’t simply rags. It was a sac of some kind, almost like a clumsy wasp’s nest. Alan had seen plenty of them growing up; his father would remove them carefully from the rafters after the occupants had been gassed into oblivion, then let Alan poke around with the newly emptied home. That nest had felt like paper; brittle and hard. He poked a finger at this specimen, and the surface yielded—it was moist and spongy. Sticky. The surface was as gray as the walls, but the stickiness came from a yellowing ichor that coated the skin of the sac, and was now smeared on Alan’s finger. It stung—burned almost—and he rubbed the finger down his slacks, hoping it wouldn’t leave a stain.
Alan got to his knees and looked at the base of the sac. Yup, the ichor or whatever the fuck it was had pooled around the base, was seeping into the exposed floorboards, and was no doubt dripping slowly but surely through the wood and onto Alan’s otherwise perfect ceiling.
“So much for Grandpa Mario and his fucking rats,” Alan said louder than he had intended.
The sac started to thrash. Alan let out an involuntary yelp and fell backwards onto his ass.
There was something inside it, pushing at the skin. It pulsed, the surface rippling. From within came a muted groan. Whatever had made that sound was no fucking wasp.
Alan crept back closer, making sure he wasn’t too close. “Hey, anyone in there?” he whispered, and felt like a tool for doing so.
But there came an answer. Nothing discernible, just another sighing moan.
Sensible Alan was having a fit inside his box, but his keeper ignored every instinct that screamed at him to run and keep running until this room was nothing but an unreliable memory. He reached in his pocket, pulled out the key to his apartment and used it as a makeshift knife, pushing it into the skin of the sac. The sac was thicker than it looked; the texture and strength of a cotton sheet rather than the paper Alan had expected. But he pressed the key in, straining with the effort, using it to saw the surface until it tore. Then he pulled the key out and ripped open the sac with his fingers, forgetting the stinging effect of the ichor until it began to kick in and his hands started to burn. But by then, his attention was so captured but what he had uncovered that he barely even noticed.
There was someone inside the sac. At least, they had been someone once. What was left was only human in the same way that a hamburger was still a cow. The shape was still vaguely that of a man, but the thing was twisted; parts of the body ran into each other as though it had been made of wax and left on a radiator. Bone protruded though skin, and it was impossible to tell which bone was which as they were all in the wrong places, surely. But what was left was a face—even though it was longer than a face would normally be, the features spread out as though their maker’s hand had squeezed the clay of their construction into new and hideous shapes. The mouth hung down, past the point at which you would expect the chest to be, drooping open. Above it were only hollows where the eyes should have been, voids that even in their emptiness still managed to express the agony of this tortured creature.
Alan said something, but it was unintelligible. He knew that this was the guy who had lived in his apartment before him. The guy with an eight track in the closet and a penchant for a peculiar shade of porn. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he was certain he was right. This was who had written those words on the door. He’d come up looking for a dog, just like Alan had. But there was no dog to be found, not up here. And he had gotten very, very lost.
“Hey, pal! How the fuck did you get in there?” Alan asked.
The previous occupant of Apartment Fifteen twitched, and a reddish-black fluid ran out of his mouth and down the elongated chin. There were no teeth in there, nothing that could still be a tongue. This poor guy looked like he’d been liquidized from the inside out.
“Don’t worry,” Alan said pointlessly. “Just hang tough, I’ll get you some help.” And then for no sane reason he added, “You made a real mess of my ceiling, you know?”
The ruined man started to thrash, and the sounds he made as he moved should never have come from a human mouth. Alan gave him the kind of sympathetic smile he reserved for situations when he didn’t have the first fucking clue what you could possibly say and got back to his feet. He noticed that his hands were itching, and when he looked at them he saw that the ichor had burned into the skin and his fingertips were a livid red.
“Better get some antiseptic on these babies,” he said to his predecessor, and started to back away.
The resident of this twisted apartment had lowered itself down from the ceiling while Alan’s attention had been focused on its larder. It had learned to be furtive on the rare occasions when prey ventured into its territory. When Alan turned back to the doorway, he finally saw it—and his already challenged mind struggled to process what he saw.
“You’re not a dog,” he said, but he didn’t even realize that he had spoken.
It landed on the floor and scuttled toward him, eight segmented legs clattering across the boards, a sound that nobody could mistake for a pet, not now, not when the thing that made that sound was facing you. It had a lot of eyes: they were all black and they all reflected Alan’s face back at him, showed him his terror eightfold. The thing’s maw opened outwards, a drooling hole in an arachnid face that parted to all
ow its tongue, sharp-tipped and lined with razor hairs, to slither out with a hungry hiss.
Alan’s bowels voided. His sanity fled to the box at the back of his mind intent on hiding away, but Sensible Alan wouldn’t let it in. This is all your fault, he reminded him, and kept the lid firmly closed.
The resident spat a thick glob of something vile at Alan. It hit him in the chest, and began to spread, encasing his upper body, arms, and shoulders. A web. Not a sac after all . . . it was a bloated spider’s web. Within moments it had stiffened into a vice-like grip. The resident loomed up above Alan with four of its legs pulled back. Then it pounced, wrapping those sharp legs around him. Alan was lost in its embrace, and it plunged its teeth into him, acidic drool passing through Alan’s skin and beginning a slow mission to melt his insides so that he could be drunk at the spider’s leisure.
And as he gradually melted, in the prolonged and inconceivable agony of his death, Alan felt himself dripping away through the floorboards, running through the frame of the building and becoming a smudge on the ceiling that used to be his.
He often wondered if there was anyone looking up at him, at the smudge he now was.
But no one ever came.
Jonathan Templar lives in Cheshire, UK. He copes with the constant, constant rainfall by writing in a variety of genres, from horror and fantasy to children’s bedtime tales. Jonathan’s recent acclaimed work includes the story “The Meat Man” in the charity collection Horror for Good and “Basher” for the shared world anthology World’s Collider. His novella The Angel of Shadwell, the first in a series of stories for steam-punk detective Inspector Noridel, is available from Nightscape Press, and Jonathan recently published his first collection of short stories, The Geometry of Hell. He has an author site with a full bibliography at jonathantemplar.com.
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Beneath black cathedrals of forest, the wattle-and-daub grotto of the Oblivion Shrine writhed amid an umber gloaming cast by hexagrammic arrangements of weeping candelabras. Their guttering flames served only to push the night back far enough to create a suffocating hemisphere of shadow, entombing the open-air shrine in a layer of intangible, onyx masonry. Unto the crooked altar, fretted with all thirteen runes of the other-god Xethogga, Bethany Eves reverently laid the rotting body of an infant boy, his puffy arms, legs and face still coated in the grime of afterbirth. From the other side of the altar, Caleb St. Draco, Patriarch of the Death Clan, stared down at the tiny figure. Candlelight illuminated his goat-head from below, casting it in a ruddy pallor and further enhancing the already disturbing quality of his yellow eyes and rectangular pupils.
Bethany took a step back, then spoke. “On the eve of the Autumnal Equinox, Lady Gretel of House Jericho declared my coven heretics. We are protected by Imperial Edict, but this far from the capitol the Emperor’s words carry little weight. Her soldiers slaughtered each one of my Sisters and burned our sacred groves to ashes. I alone managed to escape.”
Caleb thumped the butt of his baroque long-rifle against the ground and shook his head so that the array of finger bones and vertebrae hanging from his horns clacked together. He touched the infant’s brow with the ungues of his thick fingers, muttering a prayer.
Bethany continued. “I had been with child for twenty-six weeks when Lady Gretel’s forces butchered my coven. After my initial escape, I hid in the jagged maw of a ravine; there, amidst the damp stone and moss, the strain of my flight brought birth upon me early. My son emerged into this world, but he never drew breath. Lady Gretel murdered him as surely as if she had wrung his neck herself.”
Echoing from all directions, Bethany could hear the brays and howls of the rest of the Death Clan as they chanted praises to Xethogga, the hermaphroditic, sightless, mindless deity of the outer spheres—a deity which the Death Clan grotesquely considered mother of all creation.
Uuah! Uuah-Xethogga! As if in response to the chanting, a whippoorwill called mournfully from somewhere far away.
Bethany continued. “Long ago, the Death Clan swore blood oaths to the founding sisters of my coven. As sole remaining representative, I am here to beseech you to honor our ancient pacts. Aid me in hunting down and killing Lady Gretel.”
The whippoorwill cried out again. A third figure loped out of the shadows encompassing the altar. Tall and muscular, it possessed of the bestial features and grey-on-gold pelt of a wolf. In the saffron glare of the candelabras, his fangs blazed like molten daggers—and his frost-colored irises, bisected by vertical pupils, shone like mirrors in the manner of cats.
“Bethany Eves,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”
She noticed fresh scars cutting like knotted furrows through the fur on his left shoulder, and the rows of gleaming studs newly pierced into the left side of his muzzle. The ritualistic body modification meant he’d defeated Darius St. El Nath, his rival, and been promoted to Spirit-Caller since Bethany saw him last.
“Ardan St. Cygnus. I knew you would defeat Darius.”
He smiled, displaying far more teeth than cheer. Around his digitigrade legs, a long brush of a tail curled and uncurled slowly. He regarded her, the massive thews of his arms folded over his broad chest.
He flicked an ear, then said, “I accept and honor the ancient blood pact. Nothing would please me more than visiting death upon Lady Gretel and her entire House.”
Despite his wedge-shaped, canine jaws, Ardan spoke perfect English without a hint of slur or accent. His voice was gravelly, deep, and almost deceptively soothing. To Bethany he sounded exactly the way she imagined a wolf would sound if it could talk.
Ardan’s agreement made Bethany’s breath come a little more easily. But she scarce had time to feel relief when Caleb struck a cloven hoof against the ground; at Ardan, he snorted a clear dissension and lowered his horns as though preparing a charge. In response, Ardan flicked his wrist to reveal a wicked set of retractable claws. Across the altar, across the pale body of Bethany’s son, they eyed each other. The array of fetishes dangling from Caleb’s horns rattled osseous music; Ardan’s claws gleamed like brass razorblades. They argued in a thick, guttural language until, eventually, Caleb raised his head and Ardan’s claws slid silently back into their sheaths.
“Caleb may be Patriarch,” Ardan said, “but in this matter, he cannot overrule me. The Death Clan will join you against House Jericho.”
Without another word, Caleb pushed his way past Bethany and clomped down the long flight of wooden stairs leading up to the shrine. Ardan padded over to her, then knelt down on his haunches so that they were eye level.
“Thank you for siding with me,” she forced herself to say.
“You lied to Caleb, Bethany,” he said. “Lady Gretel has always respected your coven’s religious practices. She is too pragmatic to have attacked for solely ideological reasons.” Softly, with his breath misting in the cold night, air Ardan asked, “How did she find out what we did to her sister?”
Bethany’s jaw tightened. A year ago, a torrent of nightmares had invaded her every restful hour. The nightmares brought with them images of a cyclopean black castle or fortress, flung up against blacker mountains and glimpsed always beneath a boiling, glacial sky. The castle’s jagged tiers piled atop one another: terrace upon terrace, battlement upon battlement, until its highest spires and minarets clutched at the very heavens themselves. In a manner possible only through the logic of dreams, she knew somewhere within the abyssal vaults and oubliettes of that horrid edifice, ensconced upon a titan throne of obsidian and jet, there sat the unlimited loathsomeness of Siosotep, High Priest of Xethogga.
The dreams persisted until one night, during the veritable peak of their horror, Bethany was awakened by the gummy, grasping hands of a cadre of pale, rubbery abominations. They were the servants of the High Priest, and they stared at her from her bedside with wide, rheumy eyes set in faces that were not faces but pulsating masses of gristle and jagged bone. In screaming, shrieking voices, they told her the H
igh Priest knew of the life-long barrenness afflicting her womb and the unbearable anguish she’d suffered as a result. Because it pleased Him to do so, the High Priest offered her a trade. In order to complete his monstrous harem, He required a further three females. The first—Bethany was told in no uncertain terms—had to be Lady Fiona, sister to Lady Gretel of House Jericho. If Bethany delivered Lady Fiona to the High Priest’s servants, He would remove her barrenness long enough for her to conceive and give birth to a child.
Bethany swiftly tracked down Lady Fiona: she was kept jealously by her husband in a fortified manor, defended by a legion of soldiers. Realizing she would need help, Bethany used her coven’s close ties to the Death Clan to secure the aid of Ardan St. Cygnus. Together, beneath a bloated, fungoid moon, they abducted Lady Fiona from her tower and traded her to the servants of the High Priest.
For his role in procuring Lady Fiona, the High Priest’s servants bequeathed Ardan a large, coffin-shaped box, heavy with ominous contents. To Bethany, they bequeathed nothing, but assured her that a child was forthcoming.
Yet afterward, Bethany felt no different. She thought at first the High Priest had deceived her, and after several desperate trysts with rustic paramours, she grew increasingly certain her womb remained as unviable as ever.
Then one somber afternoon whilst traveling, Bethany met a bearded, filthy man at a crossroads. He shook her by the shoulders, and screamed and screamed with the shrill wail of the mad. Through cracked lips he described terrible dreams wherein a voice boomed amidst the halls of a cyclopean, black castle—a voice that told him to wait for a woman at a certain crossroads—a voice that told him he should lay with that woman. Bethany let him take her, as repugnant as he was, and over the following weeks grew overjoyed when she found herself with child.
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