Now Crospinal managed to grin.
“I’m sorry, sir, if I’ve let you down. You had just two orphans with you? You were taking them somewhere? I don’t claim to understand. The child’s death was painless, I assure you.”
“Light,” Crospinal said, able to speak at last, and figuring out how to do so: ambients flared up the walls, then brightened, and brightened further, illuminating the area.
He was lying naked in a composite alcove.
Blinking, he got up onto his elbows.
The controller—concerned, unsure—stayed directly over the living child, who seemed pale, but peaceful, and suffused, like himself, with traces of life.
The other child was blue and cool.
So, this living child was a boy? Their bodies, in life and death, were identical. A very small food dispenser, which must have come up through the floor while they slept, gently rubbed the tiny lips of the boy with a milky pale pellet; the child responded.
Behind the dispenser, a water spigot craned its neck to watch.
And behind these devices, a porthole had opened in the wall, but he could see, even from here, that the view was opaque, uncertain.
“Are you ready, sir? The world has, well, stopped. On the other side of, uh, fuck, beyond these panels—”
Toluene was already seeping through. Polymers ran in darker rivulets, reconfiguring, recycling, as the controller hung there over the nursing baby.
“I’m ready,” Crospinal said, and as these words came from his mouth, he believed them. Of course he was ready. One hand on the warm infant by his hip—the boy, chest softly lifting Crospinal’s palm—and the fingers of his right hand around the small calf of the dead one, he cradled the bodies closer against his sides, and held them there so they lay full-length along his flanks.
The composite panel was almost fully dissolved now. Slanted columns of warm light fell across them, and breezes coming through brought scents that stirred his growing wonder.
Out there, the sounds of activity—
Creatures would have to wait.
Against his hip, the living child murmured, and gurgled, and swallowed.
The dead child, of course, was still.
Crospinal rose carefully and took a deep breath. He would name both, first thing, when he got outside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brent Hayward’s shorter fiction has appeared in several publications. He is the author of the novels Filaria and The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter. Born in London, raised in Montreal, he currently lives in Toronto.
COPYRIGHT
Head Full of Mountains © 2014 by Brent Hayward
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2014 by Samantha Beiko
Interior design © 2014 by Vince Haig
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition JULY 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-182-3
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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
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Edited by Brett Savory
Proofread by Stephen Michell
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
FILARIA
BRENT HAYWARD
Four inhabitants of a crumbling world:
A drug-addled boy, living in dank recesses, sets out in an ancient car to find his ex, who has mysteriously vanished overnight;
A privileged girl, obsessed with the past, and exiled by her esteemed father, learns more about her long-vanished ancestors than she ever could have wished for;
An old man, on his hundredth birthday, deserts his quiet post as an elevator operator, climbing the great shaft in hopes of seeing the fabled topmost level before he dies;
And a fisherman, seeking answers to why his once-vibrant wife is now chronically ailing and wasting away, begins a quest to find and confront the god of all gods.
AVAILABLE NOW
978-1-92685-173-0
THE FECUND’S MELANCHOLY DAUGHTER
BRENT HAYWARD
Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake.
AVAILABLE NOW
978-1-9268-5196-9
DAWN SONG
MICHAEL MARANO
A modern dark fantasy classic returns with this new, Special Edition of Dawn Song, the soul-haunting novel from a Bram Stoker Award-winning author with a deeply powerful—and prescient—vision. Set in Boston at the start of the First Gulf War, a larger, supernatural battle for Supremacy in Hell takes shape . . . but plays out on a personal scale as unassuming humans careen into the path of a beautiful, terrible Succubus who has come to Earth to do her Father’s bidding.
In the iconic horror tradition of Clive Barker and Anne Rice, as well as of newer fantasy voices like Mike Carey and Tim Powers, Dawn Song is a dark meditation on Salvation, full of terror and tenderness.
AVAILABLE JULY 2014
978-1-77148-180-9
THE FAMILY UNIT AND OTHER FANTASIES
LAURENCE KLAVAN
The Family Unit and Other Fantasies is the debut collection of acclaimed Edgar Award-winning author Laurence Klavan. A superb group of darkly comic, deeply compassionate, largely fantastical stories set in our jittery, polarized, increasingly impersonal age. Whether it’s the tale of a corporation that buys a man’s family; two supposed survivors of a super-storm who are given shelter by a gullible couple; an erotic adventure set during an urban terrorist alert; or a nightmare in which a man sees his neighbourhood developed and disappearing at a truly alarming speed, these stories are by turn funny and frightening, odd and arousing, uncanny and unnerving.
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2014
978-1-77148-204-2
WE WILL ALL GO DOWN TOGETHER
GEMMA FILES
In the woods outside Overdeere, Ontario, there are trees that speak, a village that doesn’t appear on any map and a hill that opens wide, entrapping unwary travellers. Music drifts up from deep underground, while dreams—and nightmares—take on solid shape, flitting through the darkness. It’s a place most people usually know better than to go, at least locally—until tonight, at least, when five bloodlines mired in ancient strife will finally converge once more.
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2014
978-1-77148-202-8
THEY DO THE SAME THINGS DIFFERENT THERE
ROBERT
SHEARMAN
Robert Shearman visits worlds that are unsettling and strange. Sometimes they are just like ours—except landlocked countries may disappear overnight, marriages to camels are the norm, and the dead turn into musical instruments. Sometimes they are quite alien—where children carve their own tongues from trees, and magic shows are performed to amuse the troops in the war between demons and angels. There is horror, and dreams fulfilled and squandered, of true love. They do the same things different there.
Robert Shearman has written four previous collections of short stories, and they have collectively won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and three British Fantasy Awards. He is probably best known as a writer on the BBC TV series Doctor Who, and his work on the show gave him a Hugo Award nomination.
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 2014
978-1-77148-301-8
GIFTS FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER
HELEN MARSHALL
Ghost thumbs. Miniature dogs. One very sad can of tomato soup . . . British Fantasy Award-winner Helen Marshall’s second collection offers a series of twisted surrealities that explore the legacies we pass on to our children. A son seeks to reconnect with his father through a telescope that sees into the past. A young girl discovers what lies on the other side of her mother’s bellybutton. Death’s wife prepares for a very special funeral. In Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Marshall delivers eighteen tales of love and loss that cement her as a powerful voice in dark fantasy and the New Weird. Dazzling, disturbing, and deeply moving.
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 2014
978-1-77148-303-2
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