FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales

by Burke, Jessica

  Before blowing the next blasts, the priestesses waited several moments for the triad to finish their meal and drift back to the line of still chanting fish-frogs who had risen from the deep and remained in the waters. This time the waters roiled, bubbled, and swirled as though a vast maelstrom began to open in the deeper waves. In excruciatingly slow moments, tentacles and claws rose, a mammoth head crowned with a ridge of spines broke above the water. Aunt Julia ascended as another of the priests laid his bundle at the edge of the dais, within reach of her massive tentacles.

  This time, the priest himself unwrapped his bundle to reveal the distorted face of Ms. Tilden and her youngest child. Despite Ms. Tilden’s drastic change that included full fish scales across her face and head, the woman certainly appeared to retain all of her personality. The bony ridges Silas had observed earlier had extended over the top of the woman’s head and down the length of her body. Unlike the previous offerings, Ms. Tilden was fully alert, though her hands were bound with a kind of seaweed rope. When she saw Silas, she began to cry. He smiled and nodded toward her, so very much wishing that it would be Tommy the Terror instead of her youngest child accompanying her to the great gullet of Aunt Julia as Lilith. Silas marveled at how radically the baby’s face also had changed. Instead of one lonely tentacle waving from the infant’s nostril, there were several sprouting from the center of her face where her nose had been. More tentacles had freed themselves from the center of her chest in an almost singular bunch and competed with the one massive tentacle writhing from between what had been the baby’s legs. The child’s eyes were blank and expressionless; she did not struggle nor cry like her mother. The infant simply moved her head with the rhythm from the drums and the chanting still emitted by scores of Silas’ people The baby’s mouth distended queerly as four thicker, broader tentacles, with tiny suckers and pincers waved at him, extending down to slap against the child’s chest as tiny gurgles were heard from deep within her throat. The child was lifted carefully by Aunt Julia and handed to one priestess. Silas understood. This was no ordinary change. Could this child be our Lord Reborn? Silas laughed as the child was taken away from its moaning mother and placed to one side of the altar.

  The priestesses blew a second blast and Aunt Julia as Lilith snatched up her remaining prize in long, pincered tentacles. Her meal was punctured by the rising screams from Ms. Tilden, whose legs, Silas now saw as she was lifted high above his head, ended mermaid-like in a singular flipper. Aunt Julia retreated as had his other female kin, as again, the waters rose, fumed, boiled and parted to reveal a rising black, green and yellow mound as another set of blasts were sounded by the priestesses.

  The chanting crescendoed as the priestesses began another dance, faster, louder, punctuated with piercing ululations. Three priests came forward each depositing white bundles larger than the others at the edge of the dais. Silas slithered a short pace back, leaning his head back even farther to take in the immensity of the being rising before him. In her presence his sisters, grandmother, and great aunt looked like mice, the rest of his kindred like swarming beetles. Her form dwarfed even the ample form of Aunt Julia, making Julia seem no bigger than a dog. Silas’ mind buzzed and hummed as a smaller mound rose before the larger one, the latter mound crested with four spiked fins that each rose and folded simultaneously. After so long, and with such anticipation, Silas finally beheld his Mother as Magna Mater, Mother Hydra. She sat for a long moment, gazing at her children, three rows of eyes just above the sea, water streaming beside them before she rose again, sending waves over Silas’ chanting cousins, over the dancing priestesses and the drumming priests. Her gills vibrated and did her massive claw-like hands; Silas lost count at twelve sets of them atop long tentacle-like arms, reached forward to brush gingerly across the top of her son’s head. Silas was overwhelmed with the delicate caresses just as another set of blasts punched the air and those same claws ripped into the white bundles, revealing almost a score of transformed primate children and the walrus-like form of the man from Silas’ route.

  As Silas’ mother devoured her offering, the priestesses began anointing the late Ms. Tilden’s tentacled child from one of the altar’s silver bowls, with a reddish, phosphorescent liquid. Another of the priestesses began feeding the baby from another bowl, entrails and globs of mucousy green matter as the child’s mouth tentacles spread apart wide to reveal a small beak which snapped as it was being fed.

  After Silas’ mother finished her meal, as the child still greedily ate, a trilling, triumphant sound reverberated across the beach. The soldiers all turned as a unit toward the tunnel entrance from the looming eroded cliff of clay and earth overlooking the beach. A rolling, growling bark resounded from the tunnel as the undulating form of Silas’ Father emerged.

  Like his kindred, Silas’ Father had left all humanoid clothing behind, and simply donned the twisted circular symbol of his office upon a knotted golden chain about his neck. His thickly armored yellow chest puffed out in pride and in his arms he carried a large box wrought of silvery shell. The priests relieved him of the box as he wound his way along the beach and to the edge of the dais. Silas’ Mother’s tentacles rose, caressing her mate as she had caressed her son. His Father turned to Silas with an expression of pure pride and love, and their minds opened to each other in a wave of joy and expectation.

  The priests placed the shell box upon the altar and carefully lifted the lid to reveal a glowing crown resembling molten drips of silvery gold, frozen in place. The air crackled with energy flowing from the crown in an aura, as the chants, dancing, drumming, and occasional barks and cries from the onlookers filled the night. As the crown was placed on Silas’ head by the High Priestess, all sound ceased together. Silas raised his arms, his head and his eyes to the Moon watching over all and barked into sky in a voice deeper and wider than the ocean before him:

  “Iä! Iä! Hail Dagon, dreamer and Father.

  Hail Cthulhu, sleeper and Priest.

  Hail Magna Mater.

  Death brings Birth. Life renews through Her.

  “I swim now to my cousins and kingdom. I follow You Mother Hydra and Father Dagon to our kingly halls in Y’ha-nthlei.”

  Silas lifted the small, tentacled child from the arms of the priestess. “I offer our sleeping Lord a daughter! I offer Lilith a priestess! I come and even death may die. Iä! Iä!”

  “The Friendly Horror” is available in audio, read by Mars Homeworld at Bandcamp.

  Afterword

  I hate labels. I don’t like saying I write Fantasy or Horror or shock slash flash sci-fi. But, we live in a world that thrives on labels. I do like saying that publishing created the labels. Writers write. It’s the publishers who have to figure out where to sell what’s written... which is a really shitty way to do things from a writer’s perspective, especially when your writing doesn’t fit into a neat little cubby hole.

  As a writer, you’re always told “write what you know.” As a writing instructor, I tell my students the same, but with a small twist since many of them don’t consider themselves writers, “write what you’re comfortable with.” At the various writing workshops I’ve attended and articles on writing I’ve read, writers invariably tell each other, “write and write and keep writing even if it doesn’t make sense, it will eventually: that’s what the rewrite is for.” That’s all well and good.

  But what happens if you absolutely MUST write about what you don’t know, what you’re not comfortable with, and what if even when you’re done, some of it doesn’t make sense, in a conventional sort of way? I’d say then you’re writing Weird Fiction. And we have the inevitable ourobouros— and a wretched label.

  I have to confess, I never heard of Weird Fiction before I started delving full tilt into Lovecraft and I never realized that 95% of what I love to read would be considered Weird Fiction even if it isn’t strictly Lovecraftian in nature. (The other 5% consists of really well written articles with a point, DIY and recipe books). When I was a kid, reading Tolkien
for the umpteenth time, I would spend hours gazing on the maps in my Barbara Remington editions of LotR given to me by my aunt. The maps in those editions quite literally extended off the margins of the page. I spent years dreaming about what happened off those margins. For me, that space beyond, that realm of pure fantasy, is wyrd.

  As readers of Fantasy know— fantasy is just another of those fluff and nonsense labels. What is Fantasy after all but Weird Fiction? I firmly consider the work of Tolkien, and good Fantasy writers like like G.R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, to be a within the realm of Weird Fiction because there’s an innate darkness, a mirror version of reality, and a grounded applicability in their bent on Fantasy that I don’t personally find in other genres. Weird is wyrd after all.

  What do these labels mean, for writers— especially new writers or writers who want to try to sell their work? Going to a pillar in the world of Weird Fiction, Fantasy, plain old good storytelling, Neil Gaiman may shed a little light on this whole concept of labels when he combines the concept of stories and storytelling with notions of Fantasy and fairy tales:

  Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.

  Fantasy—and all fiction is fantasy of one kind of another— is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated).1

  The minute I understood what the label Weird Fiction consisted of, I realized that’s what I’ve been writing my whole life. I also realized that along with J.R.R. Tolkien, the first authors that I read (though I was too young to really comprehend who I was reading) were Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and H.P. Lovecraft, quite literally the Elders of Wyrd. I realized, much more recently however, that the kind of Weird Fiction Anthony and I write, is unfortunately too wyrd for the places that publish Weird Fiction.

  Hence Myth Ink Books, which Anthony and I hope will become a platform to help writers of really Weird Fiction showcase work which would otherwise be considered just too weird because it sits in the storied margins just outside of the label, beyond the edges of the map, within the proper realm of the wyrd.

  —Jessica Burke

  The Wilder Lands of Tottenville, July 2013

  _____________________________

  1. Gaiman, Neil. “An Introduction.” Smoke and Mirrors: Short Stories and Illusions. Avon Books: New York, 1998. print. 2.

  About the Contributors

  Anthony S. Burdge, an independent scholar, was first introduced to the existence of Secondary Worlds via the work of J.R.R Tolkien at an early age. Since taking that first journey out of Bag End with Bilbo, he has traveled with the Doctor, hitchhiked with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, been a crew member aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, walked under an eldritch moon toward R’yleh, and dreamed in Y’ha-nthlei many times. In addition to his academic articles on various topics ranging from Mythopoeic fiction to local lore and legend, Anthony is grateful to be a part of collections such as The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, Translating Tolkien, The Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, You and WHO 2, in addition to working with authors across the planet for the Mythological Dimensions series, The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who and The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman. Anthony contributed to and co-edited Dark Tales from Elder Regions: New York, a collection of weird fiction centered on New York City. Anthony is a Hoopy Frood blogging on this and that on Comfy Chair at comfychairzine.blogspot.com.

  Jessica Burke is teacher by trade and a self-professed Geek by nature. She’s an avid bibliophile, self-taught herbalist, a fan of cats, songs about Cthulhu, Doctor Who rock, and sushi. Jessica has published on a range of topics from J.R.R. Tolkien to Beowulf to Doctor Who. Currently Jessica warps fragile Freshmen minds at the College of Staten Island. With Anthony, she co-edited The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who, The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman, and Dark Tales from Elder Regions: New York. Jessica is co-founder of Myth Ink Books. When not reading, writing, collecting scarves, or practicing kitchen witchery, Jessica blogs at green-and-growing.com.

  Luke Spooner studied illustration and graduated with First class honors from Portsmouth University. He tends to create works that deal with the macabre, the melancholy and the generally dark but that’s not to say he does not diversify. Luke is now a full time illustrator working under two aliases: ‘Carrion House’ for his darker work and ‘Hoodwink House’ for his work aimed at a younger audience. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures. He actively seek out projects that force him out of his comfort zone and he enjoys having a constant stream of challenges, since he sees them as opportunities to grow as an artist. For his full range of his work visit: www.carrionhouse.com and www.hoodwinkhouse.com

  David Neilsen is a slightly unhinged individual who has written a number of mildly disturbing short stories. Before lurking in the darker recesses of the New York metropolitan area, he spent ten years begging in Hollywood, culminating in a television pilot optioned to 20th Century FOX and the straight-to-DVD feature film, The Eliminator (go on and rent it, he dares you). A classically-trained actor, David can often be found roaming Westchester County and nearby environs working as a storyteller, specializing in the twisted and macabre. His one-man show, H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, has sent audience members into madness throughout greater New England and he would dearly love to bring it to your neck of the woods and drive you utterly insane as well. Attend David’s party at neilsenparty.wordpress.com.

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