Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you…?”

  “I don’t know,” he turned to me, “I’m sorry, son. I ain’t got no answers.”

  “How long has this been happening?” I asked anyway.

  “Granddad first showed me.” Dad said “For all I know his dad may have shown him. Maybe seeing it runs in the family? I don’t know.”

  “And you’ve been coming here ever since?”

  “Someone has to,” Dad said, “I think we owe ‘em that much. Sometimes, things just sort of turn up. Like the shoes. I keep ‘em if I find ‘em cause, well…better I find ‘em than their parents, yeah?”

  “What are they? The shoes, I mean.”

  My father shrugged. “Echoes, I reckon.”

  I nodded as though I understood.

  “What happened to them?”

  His answer was a mere three words, and seemed to explain everything and nothing at the same time.

  “The rain blush.”

  We stood in silence for a few minutes, as I tried to stifle the terrible pounding of my heart. My skin was rough, and strange with goose bumps and each breath was an effort, like I was breathing through a handkerchief. After a few minutes, Dad put his hand on my shoulder and motioned for us to leave. I took a step backward and stepped on a twig. It cracked like a pistol shot and the children’s heads snapped towards us with animal speed. Their eyes were white, like spider’s eggs, and not for seeing anymore. And they smiled, privy to a joke I couldn’t see, hear, or understand. I’ll never forget the sight for as long as I live.

  That was fifteen years ago. I’m married now, with children of my own. Every few years, the rain blush comes and I walk around with my heart thumping in my throat. I used to talk to my wife about leaving, but the conversations just ended in arguments. She has roots here, and couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to. And when I took her to the forest on a pretext, she saw nothing.

  Besides, it hardly matters anymore. In recent years, the rain blush has become a global phenomenon, baffling meteorologists and ministers alike. It descends like a shroud, covering the whole world, sometimes for only a few days, sometimes for longer. Global Warming, the television says. Only my father and I know different.

  I used to believe in God. Now I believe only in an afterlife. I see it in the forest, one world spilling into another. My friends make fun of me, how I worry. They call me a helicopter parent, always hovering. And my kids certainly resent my constant interference. I can see them now, playing in the garden, and I don’t dare turn my back, even for a second. Because the skies are whitening, the wind is turning cold and cruel, and the air is rich with the tang of the sea. The rain blush is come.

  I can never keep them safe.

  Neil Murrell is a longtime H.P. Lovecraft fan from Essex, England. This is his first short story. His other passions include cooking, card tricks, writing music, and playing with matches. He is currently working on his first novel.

  Story illustration by Adam Baker.

  Return to the table of contents

  Song in the Dark

  by Andrew Jack

  Sara wedged herself between two old steam pipes. She’d layered her spot with old blankets and scraps of the clothes she’d once stolen out of a charity bin. It smelled musty and dirty, but she didn’t mind. In fact, she wouldn’t know what to do with clean clothes. Maybe she’d try selling them to Raleigh.

  That would mean going back Upside though. Just the thought of it made Sara’s eyes hurt.

  She shifted herself until the bundle covered her feet. It was winter Upside, she knew because she’d started being able to see her breath fogging in the air in front of her, even on the upper levels. Some part of her that remembered being in a school room knew that she shouldn’t be able to see three stories underground in an abandoned hospital sub-basement, but she wasn’t prepared to look that particular gift horse in the mouth. She could see in a way that stripped her world of all but blues and blacks, but she could see in the blackness far better than she could on the Upside.

  One of the pipes shivered. It wasn’t much, just a tiny vibration, but to Sara it was enough to catapult her out of her half-sleep. She rotated herself onto her feet and then swung from one pipe to another across the room. When she was clear of the steam room floor she dropped down into a crouch and listened.

  For a long minute she thought it might have been a false alarm, a rat falling onto a pipe somewhere, but the vibration came through the pipe again.

  Too big for a rat.

  Walking on her toes, she followed the vibrations along the corridors. She avoided the metal skeletons of ancient hospital beds and went around the piles of rubbish strewn over the floor.

  Where she could, she used the pipes on the ceilings and the walls to avoid the floor altogether – no chance of getting stuck by a lurking needle that way, or falling down the rift.

  Sara didn’t know what was at the bottom of the rift. It had been there when she’d first found the sub-basement, a huge rend in the fabric of the floor that plunged down so far even Sara couldn’t see where it ended. She sometimes wondered what had caused such a deep rend in the concrete floor, but no answer had ever presented itself.

  There was another thump from the pipes, something heavy.

  She wondered if a person from Upside had fallen down an elevator shaft again. A while back, a man in almost clean clothes had dropped onto his head in the main shaft. She’d taken the sweatshirt; there hadn’t even been that much blood on it. The jeans were too big for her, but they made good lining for her sleeping spot. And they’d had a pair of sunglasses in one of the pockets.

  She loved the sunglasses. When she met Raleigh in the upper basements they made everything dark enough to see.

  Sara felt a little bad for the man, not that he’d died – falling on your head was as good and quick a death as you could get – but that he was still there in the shaft. She checked on him sometimes to see if rot had set in, but it was so cold in the shaft that he still looked as good as he had on the day he’d fallen in. Well, most of him did. The rats had had a good go at the soft meat on his throat and cheeks.

  She’d found a cellphone on him, and inside one of his shoes was a little square bit of plastic. She didn’t have much plastic, and so she’d kept it as a good luck charm. The cellphone had been broken, and who would she have called anyway? The only person she ever spoke to was Raleigh and even he liked it too bright for her. Still, she brought him things from underground and he brought her food, so it sort of worked out. She’d given him the broken cellphone for a loaf of bread. It had been a good trade.

  Her stomach grumbled at the thought. It had been a long time since she’d had the bread.

  The vibrations were getting stronger. Coming from the morgue. She liked the morgue, even if one of the drawers for the bodies was always jammed shut. She’d had her sleeping spot there for a while, but it always gave her weird dreams so she’d moved to the steam room.

  She used a protruding sprinkler head as a handhold and flung herself around the corner to catch the broken pipe, the one that jutted out from the wall where the sign said MORGUE.

  The pipe was gone.

  Sara snatched at cold air, then smacked into the floor. She rolled with the momentum of her movement, and it carried her into the morgue itself.

  She stopped six inches away from the cause of the vibrations. It stood shorter than her, and hunched over like an ape. Its arms were long and skinny offset by what looked like too-short legs.

  “Eh,” said the creature. It bared its teeth at her. The teeth belonged in that creature face, long and sharp and strangely canine.

  Sara took a stumbling step back, a scream stuck in her throat. A second creature, much smaller than the first, loped out from behind an open morgue drawer. It cocked its head at Sarah.

  “Eh?” said the little one. It shuffled forwards.

  The bigger of the creatures stopped the little one with its hand. Its fingers were very long.
The extra distance allowed Sara to take in the fact that both creatures were wearing clothes, layered up like hers were. The little one was wearing a wool hat.

  “I…I…” She couldn’t get any words out of her mouth. She’d seen some strange things in the Downside, but this was something different.

  The big creature made a soft hooting sound. A moment later the little one repeated the sound. From somewhere back in the morgue, from the now open drawer that Sara had always assumed wouldn’t open, came more hooting.

  The little one pulled on the big one’s arm. It pointed at Sara. “Eee,” it said. “Eee.” Then it licked its lips.

  The big one shook its head. It blinked its big black eyes at her, then pointed to the empty drawers jutting out of the wall. “Wh…”

  Sara stopped backpedaling.

  “Whr?” said the creature.

  “Where?” said Sara. “Where are what? The bodies?”

  The creature nodded.

  “All gone. No more bodies.” She started backing away again.

  The creature hung its head and for the first time she noticed how scrawny it looked. It hooted at the smaller one. The little one gave a squeak of alarm and tugged hard at the big one’s arm.

  The big one looked hard at her, and she saw saliva pooling at the edges of its mouth. It took a step towards her. Sara had to force herself not to run. When she’d been a little girl, when she’d still lived on the Upside, a dog had attacked her. She’d been walking home from school, trying to think of a good reason to be late home when the dog had wandered out of an alley in front of her. She’d been too surprised to run at first, and the dog had just looked at her. Then she’d turned and run, and the dog hadn’t been able to resist chasing.

  Her mother, never kind, had cleaned out the wound with vodka and told Sara never to run from a dog. Not ever.

  “Just back away,” said Sara to herself, echoing her mother’s advice.

  The big creature carefully moved the little one back beside the open drawer. It hooted something and the little one nodded. Then without warning the thing snarled and leapt for her. It was fast, incredibly so, but Sara had already been coiled to jump away and the creature’s long fingers caught empty air.

  Sara used the wall to push herself back towards the pipes she’d used to swing into the morgue.

  The creature came after her, matching her movements. It made no noise, but she could feel the vibrations along the pipes as they moved.

  Sara tried a rapid switch in direction, but it followed her flawlessly. She was leading the thing deeper and deeper underground, but she didn’t know where she was going to go once she’d reached the sub-basement. Raleigh had once said to her that the prospect of being shot focused the mind like nothing else. Sara had never faced a bullet but she reckoned being eaten by a slavering monster in the darkness was at least on a par with being blown away by Raleigh’s druggie friends as a motivation for deep thinking.

  An idea dawned on her in the dark. She took a sudden left, and felt fingers brush her cheeks. Now that she knew where to go she felt herself moving faster, using as much strength as she could force from her tired muscles to stay ahead of the silent monster behind her.

  The elevator shaft loomed ahead of her.

  Too close, too close. She slammed into the closed doors.

  She got her fingers in place to prise the doors apart and heaved, expecting at any moment to feel the monster’s breath on the back of her neck. The doors stayed closed.

  Sara let out a little sob and pulled with every ounce of her strength, but the doors held fast. She felt a hand on her shoulder and saw the long sharp claws that adorned the tip of each finger.

  She closed her eyes and waited. The hand moved, but didn’t attack her. She cracked open an eye and saw that the creature had inserted its fingers into the doors. It grinned at her and tore the elevator doors open with a squealing of stuck metal.

  The man who had fallen on his head was still there, still preserved by the cold even though he’d gone a funny color.

  The monster turned to her and hooted softly. It pointed to the body.

  “Eeh?” it said. “Yrs?”

  “Yrs?” said Sara, mimicking the creature. “Are you asking if this is mine?”

  The creature nodded. “Yrs.” It pointed to the bite marks on the body of the dead man.

  Sara put up her hands. “No, not mine. Rats.”

  The creature cleared its throat. “Not. Rats.” It spoke each word slowly, forcing its mouth around the words. Each word barked out of its throat in a rough burst of sound.

  She shook her head. She hadn’t tried to eat the man…had she? No! It was the rats, the rats in the walls of the hospital. Not that she’d actually seen a rat in forever.

  Sara gulped. Please let it have been the rats. She pointed at the creature. “Yours. Yours now.”

  The creature bobbed its head. “Thank,” it said. It gripped the dead man’s wrist and pulled the whole body out in one smooth movement.

  It started dragging the body down the hallway.

  Sara followed, not sure what to do next. “What…are you?”

  The creature looked over its shoulder and gave her a huge toothy smile. “Ghul.”

  “Gull?”

  “Ghul.”

  “Ah, ghoul.”

  The creature gave a shrug as if to say that was close enough.

  Sara stared at it and, still grinning, the monster stared back. “You weren’t chasing me were you? You were following me.”

  The ghoul grunted, but it was still smiling. It reached out and touched her on the shoulder; the wicked claws had retracted back into its fingers. Sara saw the glint of a grubby wedding band on its finger.

  “Srry,” said the ghoul. “Hungry.”

  She reached up and patted the ghoul’s hand. It was cool and covered in fine hairs.

  It led her back through the corridors the way they’d come. It wasn’t the fastest way back to the morgue, but it was an exact reversal of the way she’d led it to the dead man.

  She contemplated the idea that she’d eaten pieces of the body. She’d been in the dark for so long, it was possible she’d gotten hungry enough. She waited for a wave of revulsion to wash over her, but discovered that she felt oddly detached. A dead human was just meat, after all.

  “Do you have a name?”

  The ghoul stopped dead and held up a hand. Sara heard the noise half a moment later, the shuffling vibration of someone trying to walk quietly and failing.

  The ghoul started moving quickly, and Sara found herself lifting the dead man’s feet of off the floor so they could get the body quickly and quietly back to the morgue. The ghoul gave her a curt nod when it noticed what she was doing.

  Ahead of them the door that separated her level from the second sub-basement banged open. “Sara!” Raleigh’s voice split and echoed down the pipes.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Dammit, Sara, this is important!” Raleigh’s voice was higher than normal.

  A second voice came through the gloom. It was deeper the Raleigh’s, angrier. “This girl better not be a figment of your imagination.”

  “She’s here, Caleb, I swear, she’s just doesn’t like strangers.”

  Caleb grunted by way of a response.

  They almost made it. Sara and the ghoul rounded the corner to the morgue itself when a beam of light sliced through the darkness. The ghoul howled and leapt away into the shadows.

  Pain spiked through her eyes, gouging its way into her brain. She screamed and fell to the floor, trying to block out the light, but it felt like a living thing twisting behind her eyelids.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. Raleigh. “Sara, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Heavy footsteps followed behind the light and stood next to Raleigh. A big boot prodded her in the ribs. “Where’d your friend go?” The voice was full of cigarettes and late night whiskey.

  This must be Caleb, she thought.

  Sara fe
lt herself shaking as she clamped down on the nausea in her gut. Little spots of light danced in the darkness behind her eyelids, but even those were too bright. She said nothing.

  The boot nudged her again, harder this time.

  “I don’t have friends,” said Sara.

  “Yeah I’ll bet, you little freak, but I saw someone else. Where are they?”

  “Turn off the lights, I can’t think,” said Sara.

  Raleigh clicked off his torch and a moment later so did Caleb. They sat there in the dark and quiet until Sara could just about see the shapes of the two big men against the wall.

  She forced herself to stop shaking, clenching her hands until her fingernails punched into her palm.

  Leaning on Raleigh, she levered herself back to her feet. “There’s no one else here.” She felt better once she was standing, but she still couldn’t see properly and the pain had taken up residence in the back of her head, thumping in time with her heartbeat. “Must’ve been a shadow.”

  Caleb stepped forward and smashed her in the face with the butt of his torch. The world slid sideways and suddenly she was looking up at the two men from the floor.

  “I don’t have time for this,” said Caleb.

  Raleigh placed a hand on the big man’s chest “Jesus man, let me ask her, okay?”

  Caleb snorted, but he didn’t cock his arm for another blow.

  Raleigh crouched down next to Sara. “I’m sorry, Sara, but we really need to know what you’re doing with Eddie.” He waved a hand at the corpse. “He had something on him that we need.” He waited until Sara nodded. “Why’d you move him?”

  Sara didn’t say anything.

  Caleb shone his torch down into her eyes. She squealed and tried to shield her face, but Raleigh held her arms flat.

  “I was just going to get you to show us how to get us to the shaft, Sara. Then you could have just gone and I’d have brought you some new clothes. Everyone would’ve been happy,” said Raleigh. “Now I see you moving Eddie with some guy I’ve never seen before and you won’t even tell me who he is?”