The Friendly Horror
& Other Weird Tales
By Jessica Burke & Anthony Burdge
Illustrated by Luke Spooner
Copyright Myth Ink Books, 2015
Staten Island, New York
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Dedication
For Mama and Papa Burke,
our Beloved Aged Ps.
For all the dreamers who came before,
and all those who come after.
For Luna & Sage,
our sibilant muses.
In memory of Anne Petty,
who believed in us enough to give us a chance.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this collection are those of the authors, regardless of how creepy. If you do not have eerie and shattered dreams after reading this collection, we are not responsible. Void where Prohibited. Watch the Gap. And, remember, maps never have true boundaries, cats were once worshipped as gods, and not every lock has a key. Hail Cthulhu. Hail Magna Mater.
Contents
Foreword
An Introduction
The Odor
Pockets
A Guide to Acclimating New Felines to their New Home—Best done with Kittens under the age of 10 months, Can be Adapted with Ease
A Daddy & Me Day
Hungry Snow
Keepsakes
Concerning the Storm
The Friendly Horror
Afterword
About the Contributors
Foreword
Horror is, by definition, not very friendly.
A really good horror story takes you in its clutches, squeezes the breath out of you, pounds your face against the wall, gets your heart spasmodically pumping faster than the whirring blades of a demonically-possessed harvest combine, and liquefies you into an emotional puddle on the floor of an abandoned insane asylum for a twitchy clown to mop up with his mop made of human hair.
As I said —not friendly.
But as terrifying as horror can be, it generally wears its evil grin with pride. Horror is the bad boy or bad girl at school. You know they’ll break your gf’thothu heart, but you don’t care. And they know you don’t care. So they’re going to really break your heart and you’re going to love it.
Because you have issues.
When you turn the pages of a story titled something like “The Three-Headed Monster That Ate People,” you’re good and ready to read about a three-headed monster who eats people. Any characters you meet along the way are processed in your ravenous, ai’ai brain in terms of how long before they are eaten by the three-headed monster, and what will they taste like? You’re spooked, you’re creeped, you’re vish’ngath’ptha grossed-out, but you’re not truly concerned. Of course the pretty little girl in the blue dress had her head bitten off, the story is about a three-headed monster who eats people. No big whoop.
But what really gets under your skin, churns your insides, and erases all hope in the world is when horror smiles at you. There’s a reason people are afraid of kor-a’y’gyzth clowns. Clowns are supposed to be nice. When nice things turn evil, it defies our worldview. We’re no longer safe and secure in our little corner of the universe. If nice things can be evil, then anything is possible. Take this forward. You’re reading it thinking that it’s going to simply say nice things about the stories you’re about to read. You’re expecting it to be nice. But how do you know there’s isn’t a diabolical code hidden within the m’mnum’ words? How do you know that you aren’t, at this very moment, inadvertently summoning an eldritch v’thn horror from beyond time and space into your living room? How do you know this entire collection of stories hasn’t been put together to bring forth an unholy abomination that will devour mankind whole? Starting with you?
You don’t.
Friendly horror is the nastiest horror of all. Friendly horror soothes your pain, eases your fears, and burrows into your gut to plant countless seed pods that will eventually hatch and consume you from the inside. The ghn’uthpl’wg stories in this collection are like the cute little bunny rabbit you bring home one day from the pet store who grows up to gouge out your eyeballs with its claws and then sucks out your brain through the now-empty eye sockets with a hollow, tentacle-like appendage. The authors take things that are good and wholesome and make them mean and cruel and horrific and terrifying and oh my God you’re going to die!!!!!
Things like snow. Everybody loves snow. And kitties. How can you not love kitties? And ice cream. Good God, people, they made ice cream scary! Have they no shame?
Reading this collection, you find yourself doubting your sanity, which is as much an homage as it is a compliment. It’s all well and good to toss around terms like “Lovecraftian” and “fhtagn” and make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. Heck, you got a monster with a tentacle? Must be Lovecraftian! But these authors, they like their Lovecraftian themes well-developed and mythos-mired. Jessica and Anthony are so Lovecraftian, they have tentacles coming out of their eye sockets. Hell, Jessica has an umbrella with a tentacle handle! Now that’s devotion! I’m insanely jealous.
This is the point of the forward where I go through the stories one by one and explain why they are each so great. Except I’m not going to do that. You’re about to read them, you’ll find out for yourself soon enough. So instead, I want to just tease your horror palette with a couple of thoughts and musings from my diseased and disturbed mind.
Let’s start at the end. The final and largest story in the collection, “The Friendly Horror” (which I’m told may have had something to do with the name of the entire collection), is a peek inside good old H.P.’s world which we’ve all wanted to take, but never had the guts. Jessica and Anthony have the guts. Yes, they scooped them off the floor after their character from “Keepsakes” had dropped by for a visit, but they took those guts and laid them bare, giving us a chance to glimpse inside the thoughts and cares of the people of Innsmouth. Consider your mind blown.
Working backwards, “Concerning the Storm” tosses all your FEMA conspiracy stories into the shredder and shines a very calm, cool, and collected light on the real horrors existing within so-called ‘natural’ disasters —in this case Hurricane Sandy. For me, these two stories highlight yet another disturbing gift owned by Jessica and Anthony— their ability to slip their sweet little evils into our very real world. These stories don’t take place in some unnamed location on the globe, they take place in very specific locations near and dear to the authors’ twisted hearts. They turn their home into the settings of nightmares, and through their words, we are transported into those nightmares and encouraged to scream like little babies. And really, isn’t that all we can ask from an author?
Jessica and Anthony are very nice people. Very —dare I say— friendly people. That they have such gut-wrenching abominations buried inside their collective hive-mind (they are one, you know) is both a testament to how good they are at making everyone think they are such nice people and not the blood-sucking, multi-tentacled, five-eyed horrors lurking in the darkest corners of your mind
that they truly are. Like their stories, they offer a welcoming smile, a friendly hand-shake, and a descent into madness unimaginable. Jessica and Anthony are an experience like no other, and you would do well to spend just a few minutes in their presence. But since you can’t bring them home and put them on your bed-side table (unless you have a great deal of money), then this collection of stories will have to do.
You’ve been warned.
I’m going to go have some ice cream.
By the way, there’s something seriously evil in your living room right now.
—David Neilsen
Author/Storyteller/Damaged Soul
October 30, 2014
An Introduction
As writers, we are drawn to the darkly lit borders just beyond humanity’s mundane, “normal” vision, into eldritch landscapes. Beyond these borders dwell creatures and events that constantly infiltrate the imagination. A few of our stories here, in our first fiction collection, deal with events that we all take for granted. The weird can be found in an abundance in snow storms, hurricanes, icicles hanging from the roof, the tide rushing the beach, even the jarring presence of an ice cream truck coasting along the neighborhood.
Our collection of Weird Tales opens with two poems, “The Odor” and “Pockets,” independently composed. The first, is an odiferous exploration that literally came to me one day where I currently work— a local hospital— and helped me to move past an experience, rather an odor, that is an all-too-familiar one at my job. Jessie’s piece, “Pockets,” was written in a gelato-induced high on the Staten Island Ferry after we attended a reading from one of our favorite authors. The remaining tales were written in tandem.
As you, the reader, progress through our stories, consider each tale a step further into the bordering realms of the unknown— while being grounded within the everyday. “A Guide to Acclimating New Felines to their New Home” may answer the questions every new (and experienced) cat guardian has— where do kitties go when I can’t find them and what are they looking at? “A Daddy & Me Day” shows us that some routine concerns (like is my child normal and should I bring him to work) aren’t just human exclusive. “Hungry Snow” and “Concerning the Storm” put an eldritch spin on Mother Nature. “Keepsakes” is a whimsically horrific nod to ‘paranormal investigation.’ Our final story, “The Friendly Horror” is an homage to the man himself, H.P. Lovecraft, and that ever bizarre place we call home, Staten Island.
The immediate environment (real or imagined), neighborhoods and hometowns of writers we are inspired by — Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe, George R.R. Martin, and Douglas Adams— have played a key role in their work. For us, it is no different. As residents of Staten Island, we have educated ourselves on the rich history of our hometown and borough of New York City. More recently, however, after acquiring Lovecraft’s Letters from New York, we were struck speechless by a diminutive mention in Letter 14, addressed to Lillian and dated September 29th 1924:
Saturday...was a home day... but on Sunday I made up for this undue domesticity by taking an all-day jaunt to elder regions. Whoopee! The past for me! I embarked on the Staten Island ferry, and was soon in a land of quaint villages that might have been five hundred miles from any metropolis. ...And there I took a wheezy accommodation train for Tottenville, on the far tip of the island, which when reached savoured of Pascoag. A short walk out of Tottenville, embowered among antique pines on the south shore and now in a state of vast decrepitude, is the old Billop house.... both impressive and terrible in its steep and hoary gable— one could write a story about it.1
In a way, we have. Not that we realized the connection when we were writing. This same “wheezy accommodation train” is what Jessica and I have taken to work. The park around this “impressive and terrible” house is where we spent many an afternoon volunteering. This same house is where we got our first EVP. This same neighborhood lined with trees is where we’ve set our stories— moments that were written ages before we read those lines. As a writer, an admirer of HPL and someone infinitely fascinated at the conjunction of reality and story, to find out that the same stretch of dead-end road where in our story “The Friendly Horror” our friend Silas parks his ice cream truck to have his lunch was the same stretch of dead-end road that HP Lovecraft once walked. This knowledge, chilling and captivating, changes how we view our neighborhood. It is our hope that you, our friends, will look upon your history and your surroundings a bit differently after reading our stories.
Staten Island is no longer a quaint village embowered with antique pines. The Old Billop House, now called the Conference House, is not in the state of decrepitude that HPL saw it in. Instead, Staten Island itself has become a kind of paradox, the old seen beneath the new, itself a kind of mundane magic, a skewed vision of reality. We invite you to seek for that in your hometown. You don’t need to look far. Ponder the wonders, the horrors, the creeping fears lurking in that patch of woods down the block from where you sleep at night, dwelling upon your beaches, washing in from the bay, or looking down upon you from the trees. It may entice you, stun you, lure you into the unknown.
—Anthony S. Burdge
Aquehonga Monacnong, July 2013
_____________________________
H.P. Lovecraft. Letters from New York. S.T. Joshi & David E. Schultz, ed. Night Shade Books: San Francisco, 2005. 68-69.
The Odor
—A. Burdge
The bright rapturous volumes
of fragrant garden incenses gently
encapsulate our olfactory senses,
wafting delicately,
from rose to rose,
honeysuckle to lavender,
transporting our understory experience to heavenly realms.
Our Divine prescriptions of ritualistic scents,
whether frankincense or myrrh, jasmine or cedar,
elevate us through the corridors of Spirit.
Many Priests walk the cathedral aisle
blessing congregants with their perfumed censors
offering prayer-filled ascendance.
The Shaman, Witch and Occultist gather
ceremonial bits of resiny desert sage and tall sweetgrass
to smudge away the negative ions
eliciting safe visionary travel.
What greater a Sight than
the expression of a loved one
wrapped in the delicate joy
of a sensuous red rose in a tender moment?
A rose so sweet,
tinged with a sharp fruitful earthy aroma,
which illuminates the heart and mind,
filling love’s center with blissful romance.
We adore the pleasurable Sencha,
and the citrus notes of Earl Grey
or the ambrosial Red Roobios.
One does not forget the bouquet of a morning Java,
especially when the nervous system
is coupled with its caffeinated foment.
Each of these moments are recorded
on the mental plains of the Self.
Each new experience
enriches the memory
with every repeated indulgence.
Our odiferous landscape
enlightens and educates
the waking and unconscious
Awareness,
whether the scent is
manmade or natural.
However, there is one
malodorous discharge that educates
while offering Nothing,
but mental, spiritual and physical discontent.
From the very first inhalation
does it send immediate tremors
up and down our backbone.
Our fibrous gray matter bursts
with electrifying neurons,
wave after wave
of racing synaptic beads of light
are taken Over,
by the dank putrescence
of parasitic disgust.
&n
bsp; Our innards quake
with a lightning warmth
that churns our repugnant stomach juices.
Many a wounded soldier endures
as Brother and Sister
lie in the dirt,
after campaigns against foreign enemies.
The fœtor
of raw ripe meat
emanates across
the battlefield.
In poor
third world countries
where villagers have not the benefit
of modern healthcare,
many the fly congregate
upon the untended gangrenous wounds,
where tribal conflict and
animal attack have
opened the body in odd places.
A foul emission
from the bacterial mucous
of drying untreated stumps,
where limbs once hung
travels upon even a slight breeze,
with the tang
of organic secretions gone vile.
How do We reconcile
prior rapturous moments
of beauty,
with a smell
that grips our nasal passages
with a fetid zest?
Whether on the field of battle
or forgotten third world zones,
the burnt copper
of spilled blood is
a bitter trail yet manageable.
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