As to the numberless books that were said to line every inch of the tower, naught remained. Even the few scraps of paper that did tumble along the bank like crippled birds were only newspapers.
Given the difference in our reactions, I wondered if Craig and I were looking upon the same site. My response was minimal, save perhaps for a feeling of general frustration over having chased a dragon through the cold, wet forests by Mount Selta only to discover a ruin whose stature was so tenuous a mere push might have caused it to topple. Craig must have seen something far different, for the sight of the eroded half-cylinder drove him to tears.
Naturally I was pained by seeing him so distraught, but because I was unable to wrap my head around its source, eventually Craig’s sorrow began to annoy, and eventually infuriate, me.
“It’s obvious that guy was pulling some kind of prank on us,” I called out, trying to lure Craig away from his compulsive act of overturning bricks and rubble.
“They have to be here!” was his shouted response.
“What has to be here?”
“The books! Simon’s books!”
Exasperated, cold, and plagued by boots sodden with river water, I began to shout. “Give it up, Craig! Don’t you see? There were no books. There probably wasn’t even a Simon Gregory Williams! Tell me, exactly how much of your life do you intend to waste on all this ghosts-and-goblins tripe?”
Craig was mum, but the withering over-the-shoulder glare he gave me spoke volumes. He looked away and resumed his search.
I stood for a few tense moments, listening to the lapping of the river and the frantic chinking of discarded rubble, before literally throwing up my hands.
“You can stay here and play if you want to. I’m hiking to the road and hitching a ride back to town.”
I don’t believe Craig ignored me so much as he was totally ignorant of me. I watched him scurrying about like an animal rummaging for sustenance in the moonlit woods. It was an almost atavistic scene. It frightened me, so I felt relief when I turned my back on it and began to walk.
My threat about heading back into town was an idle one. I hadn’t money enough to rent a motel room, and besides, I could never have left Craig out there alone. For all I knew that stranger could have lured us to the tower in order to mug or even murder us. It was unlikely because the place looked so abandoned, but still, it was not impossible. But I truly was well and tired of his foolish pursuits. I couldn’t help but feel hurt by the fanatical dedication he afforded them, because I wanted so badly to be the centre of his world. I loved him and I wished he would finally realize that these scraps of urban legend could never give him what I could.
So I resolved to teach him a lesson: a small one, but a lesson nonetheless.
I hiked about a half-mile downriver and then settled down onto the bank to wait. Craig would venture back this way, hopefully sooner rather than later, at which time we could reconcile.
Only he never came.
I cannot say how much time I spent squatting and shivering and watching the mist rising from the river like escaping wraiths. The moon didn’t seem to move and all I could think was that this must have been what the poets were referring to when they spoke of Night Eternal.
Finally, my discomfort and fear impelled me to rise and return to the remnants of the tower, where I hoped I’d find Craig still rummaging about.
When I couldn’t detect the sound of flung rubble, my fear thickened. I rounded the slight bend in the river to the small clearing where I expected to see the ruin.
But the ruin was no more. In its stead was a great column of darkness. Its blackness was so complete that it not only blotted out the moonlight, but seemed to digest it. It also cut a slice out of Mount Selta.
There was a musty stench that filled my nostrils and mouth and lingered unpleasantly there. Months later, while working on a sketch of that very column, I was reminded of what the smell was: the scent of ink. But this ink was old and potent. Given the intensity of the fragrance, there must have been an ocean of it.
Staggering over one of Craig’s bits of tossed stone, I inadvertently gained a different perspective of the column.
It was spinning. The vast tower-like thing was churning, with what I could not say, for it was to my naked eye little more than an upright abyss of varying textures.
I didn’t recognize the emerging hand as Craig’s, not immediately. At first the shock of those bone-pale fingers pushing outward like well-fed worms from a bed of rich soil caused me to shriek. And when the fingers became a hand, an arm, I came to see that the man I loved was somehow entangled in that dizzying cage of lampblack.
I might have shouted something, I cannot recall. What I do remember is seeing that the rushing column was formed of…living things.
They were black and bat-winged. I thought I saw a head here and there, but can’t be certain because the creatures had no faces at all.
Yet somehow they retained the power of speech, for I began to detect a faint, hissing babble. It was a sound I’d been listening to for hours, but had dismissed as forest sounds: the wind-bullied trees, the seaward-creeping river. But it was a chorus, a litany of countless inhuman voices.
A head suddenly jutted from the fluttering shadows. It was long and gaunt. For a heartbeat, I wondered if it somehow belonged to the strange man with whom we had dined earlier.
While this featureless black egg examined me, I stared into the cavity in that massing of the shades.
I saw Craig.
He was floating like a marionette on hidden wires. Something shimmering and black, like a tiny oil slick, masked his eyes. I saw it leaking down toward his grinning mouth. Craig extended his tongue to taste it.
I turned and I ran, my hands pressed against my head, trying to block out the awful whispering. Though, truth be told, I couldn’t tell which sounds were born of nature and which were the inorganic hissings of those creatures of aged ink.
At last I reached the railing that distinguished the ravine from the highway. A transport truck picked me up and drove me all the way to Seattle.
Craig was never found. And I never returned to Sesqua Valley. My lover had no one in the world besides me, so his disappearance would have only been commented on by our mutual friends on the opposite side of the country.
I remain in the Pacific Northwest. On clear days, which are rare in this part of the country, I can see Mount Selta. But there is never any sign of that whirling column.
More than once I tried to move on, but I found I cannot venture too far from Craig. At night I dream of him calling to me in that awful hiss-whisper voice. Perhaps it isn’t Craig at all that keeps me here, but Simon Gregory Williams, or the living books that taught him. Perhaps I’m held here by Sesqua Valley itself.
Of late, I’ve taken up all the annoying habits I used to chide Craig for engaging in. I research all manner of curious happenings in Sesqua Valley. The legends of Simon Gregory Williams persevere. Some nights I’m tempted to grant Craig the same form of immortality, but I’m afraid that doing so will bring him and his companions winging to me, to carry me off and teach me a lesson I cannot bear to learn.
-Dedicated to W.H. Pugmire-
Richard Gavin has been praised as a master of numinous horror fiction in the tradition of Machen, Blackwood, and Lovecraft. He has authored four collections, including THE DARKY SPLENDID REALM and AT FEAR'S ALTAR, as well as numerous essays of the macabre and the esoteric. Richard lives in Ontario, Canada. Visit him online at www.richardgavin.net
Story illustration by Nick Gucker
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The Storm Horses
by Scott Thomas
When Riane learned she was dying, she went to Sesqua Valley. She found a thin tree in the fat shadow of the twin mountains that perched above like great petrified wings. She ran her fingers over the lower branches, feeling for whispers. She made her choice and, in exchange for a small red libation from a slice in her palm, cut free a branch. The followin
g day she returned to her home in Innsmouth, Massachusetts.
It was a steep old house, the color of a rain-fed Atlantic, seated on a hill above a meadow. The bottom floor contained a potter’s shop, containing dusky paintings and strange creatures fashioned from painful twists of driftwood. The branch waited downstairs until the moon came up from the sea, abandoned in the sky like a shell on a beach.
Riane tied back her long, light hair, burned incense, removed her clothing, and then walked down the slow stairs. The branch leaned in a corner, pulsing with Sesqua darkness. With candles lit and tools readied, Riane sat upon a stool with the branch across her legs and set to work.
The dying woman shaped the branch into a staff – white, smooth, bearing at its top the head of a horse. The moon spun above the house, dimmed, descended westward as dawn made pink insinuations and, impatient, forced light onto the old sea-colored house. Trembling and chill in the darkness, Riane collapsed, exhausted, to the shaving-strewn floor.
Later that morning, Lauren came to the house and found her sister; she helped her up to bed. Riane was too weak to go downstairs; her potter’s wheel stood silent, her tubes of paint faded under dust, her carving tools never again to know the warmth of her hands.
The nights belonged to fever. Riane tossed in her sweat, told strange stories in her sleep, and made a curious alphabet of gestures with hypnagogic fingers. Lauren sat by the bed throughout, watching as death’s slow-sculpting hands shaped her sister into something fearful and sad.
One night, Riane freed herself from the bed. It had been a month since the moon rose dripping from the Atlantic. She moved past her sister who was slumped, sleeping, in a chair, leaving her to guard an empty bed. Riane moved quietly to the first floor where the staff awaited.
She walked out into the soft light. She walked down the hill into the meadow behind the house. The wind shared a secret of wild herbs and brine. She tapped the earth with the staff as if to wake a heart beneath the field. The staff thundered in the ant mazes below and echoed in the air where clouds wrapped the moon. Lightning thorned the sky.
A bolt found the staff, knocking it to the ground, burning it into the meadow.
The fevers were gone. Sleep seemed friendly enough: no more half-coherent mutterings, no more gnarled gesticulations. Riane grew thin and pale, her few spoken words like a mist. Lauren flitted between relief and terror, the lone witness to the process. The world had become a queer place as of late…
Lauren had seen the strange horse-shaped pattern of ashen white in the middle of the field, had witnessed lightning dance in the field alongside the pale horses that thundered about in the rain. How strange that they always vanished when the storms faded. How strange that the crows that pecked the horse-shaped mark turned white and hovered above it like gulls.
The night smelled like rain. Riane sat up in bed and stared at her sister. She told Lauren to go to the meadow and to bring some of the dust from the place where lightning had struck. Lauren assumed that the fevers were back, but her sister insisted, so she went.
Thunder mumbled in the distance, and something snorted in the close darkness when Lauren bent to dig at the chalk-white horse. She hurried back into the steep house and up the stairs to her sister’s room.
Riane smiled sweetly and whispered goodbye. She took the ash, touched it to her tears, and died. Lauren held her hand until it went cold. Thunder stampeded across the meadow, and wind flung the doors wide. Rainy white horses danced into the room, gathered about the bed and, grasping the shoulders of Riane’s nightgown in square teeth, carried her limp body down the stairs, down the hill, and into the field.
Lauren watched from the window as they dragged her limp and flopping sister about the wild grass, lightning spitting, rain hissing. White crows swirled above, calling, and Riane’s legs stirred, flexed under her soggy garment. The horses ran, skimming her feet over the damp earth until her feet stepped of their own accord, and she was upright, moving. The horses released her and she ran, laughing in the grey brine of the air, her mane behind her in the galloping storm.
Scott Thomas’ short story collections include URN AND WILLOW, QUILL AND CANDLE, MIDNIGHT IN NEW ENGLAND, WESTERMEAD, THE GARDEN OF GHOSTS, and OVER THE DARKENING FIELDS. His novel FELLENGREY is a fantastical nautical adventure set in an alternate 18th century Britain.
Thomas has seen print in numerous anthologies, such as THE YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR #15, THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR #22, THE GHOST IN THE GAZEBO, LEVIATHAN #3, OTHERWORLDLY MAINE, and THE SOLARIS BOOK OF NEW FANTASY. His work appears with that of his brother Jeffrey Thomas in PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY and THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH.
Thomas lives in Maine.
Blog: http://scottthomasotherworldlyfiction.blogspot.com/
Story illustrations by Dave Felton and Anthony Pearce
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Vyvyan’s Father
by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
A boy sleeps in a plane. He is flying west, to meet his father.
His eyes shut, he leans toward the window, dark hair falling over his face. If his eyes were open, they would startle you with their timeless, silvery-grey depth. If his hair was swept back from his face, his features would compound your bemusement with a slide of ice down your spine as you took in their distinctive mix of the lupine and the batrachian. A strange face, a striking face. Almost handsome, like a young Nick Cave. Only much younger.
He has never seen his father before.
A traveller from far away, his father wooed and won his mother over the course of a whirlwind summer romance in a seaside town down the coast from Goa, a retreat for pleasure-seekers who crave sun, sand and exotic stimulants without the accompaniment of crowds and touts. Once the traveller realised that his lover was pregnant, he consented to be wed and attempted to settle down to a life of domesticity. The young couple ran a shack restaurant in the town where they had met. Their evenings and nights were spent watching over others who disported themselves in much the same way as they themselves had in their first summer together, and their days were filled with the joys and pains of raising a child together. It seemed that the young traveller had completely absorbed himself in his new life, but his wife secretly counted the days they spent together, sensing that he would leave sooner or later.
In the boy's fourth year, the traveller took to wandering by himself on moonlit nights, gazing at the sea. One night, his wife followed him secretly and saw him walk all the way to the water's edge. There, a vast, indistinct form loomed up from the waters to commune with him, silently. A few weeks later, the traveller was gone. All he left his young wife and child were a stone amulet bearing the likeness of a face with wolf-frog features, very like his own, and a bag of gold coins depicting deities that were bizarre and strange, even in this land of ancient gods. The coins were worth more than their weight in gold, literally - the boy's mother sold one to an antique dealer every few years and the resulting profits allowed her to support herself and her son in comfort. The boy was sent to a good school. He was happy, healthy and clever and lacked for nothing, save a father.
Then, in his tenth year, his mother received a letter from the father's family. They wanted to see this child of their blood, to show him his other homeland and give him the choice of staying with them if he wanted. They knew that the boy's father had left his wife and child rather abruptly, but they hoped that she would see her way to respecting this request. In truth, the boy's mother felt no rancour towards her absent mate. She had known him too well to really believe he would stay, much though she had hoped he would. Indeed, she was grateful for the gift that had given her the financial independence to raise her son as she wished, despite the stigma of being a single mother - but she was beginning to worry about her son.
In school, he was almost precocious in his artistic abilities and his instinct for poetry. He was a natural actor and a gifted musician. However, he seemed possessed of a deeply unscientific temperament despite an instinctive understanding
of what little chemistry was taught in middle school. He had a wild enthusiasm for geometry which expressed itself in a predilection to draw figures that ran contrary to the sound, Euclidean principles his teachers tried to instill in him. He evinced no interest in history and geography - sometimes he could be heard scoffing at his lessons in these subjects, claiming they were ridiculously superficial. He had a sense of vast time and hidden lands that refused to be subjected to any sane course of instruction in universally acknowledged and verifiable facts. Despite his intense physical participation in theatre, he had no interest whatsoever in sports. All too often he could be found stealing into the art room to model strange chimeric figures in clay, into the music room to pick out tritone-laden melodies with unpredictable syncopations, to the library to pore over volumes of sonnets or, equally often, to any secluded spot to simply sink into his own thoughts and fancies.
Perhaps a father would set the boy right. But what father? Thinking back to the traveller's wayward, charming, tender ways, his weird spells and his poetic reveries, she doubted that he could ever have been the one to set his son on a more normal track. However, the boy might find a place where he fitted in, a family to which he truly belonged, if he responded to the invitation. She called her son to her. He came running in from the garden, covered in dirt and leaves. He had created a sort of shrine in the garden, complete with an idol made from mud, sticks and rags, which he garlanded with wreaths of leaves and flowers.
'What is it, Ma?'
'I've just received a letter from your father's family, Vyvyan.'
'From my father?' The boy reached for the amulet left behind by his father. He had claimed it from his mother a year back with an air of authority far beyond his years. He had worn it around his neck, tied on a simple black rope, ever since. He had decided that the face on the amulet was a likeness of his father, of whom he had very nebulous memories, and he would sometimes speak to it when he thought he would not be overheard.
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