So Oskar looked around for smaller branches he might use like the rungs of a ladder, in order to climb higher into the fog. He didn’t find any, and the nearest bough was quite a ways above him. At last, though the thought of touching it with his bare skin initially repulsed him, he reached out and found handholds in the sloughing/reforming bark. Hoisting himself up, he dug the toes of his shoes into the bark as well. He pulled himself upward, one hand over the other. At one point, a wound in the bark began closing on his hand, tightening around his fingers like a mouth, so that he had to jerk his hand away violently lest it become trapped. He crawled up, up, until at last he reached that higher bough, and he threw a leg over it, swung himself up and straddled it, huffing from his efforts.
When he lifted his head to survey his immediate surroundings, he saw that he was not alone on this titanic tree branch.
A naked woman crouched on her haunches further away from the trunk than he. All around where she was hunkered, smaller limbs branched off from the bough like capillaries from a major artery, but none of them bore leaves. She held onto one of these thin branches with one fist to help support herself in her perch. The woman’s head was lowered so that her long, inky hair fell in curtains to obscure her face. The skin of her body was not just pale, but white as paper. Yet little black veins appeared and disappeared on her bare skin, looking like fleeting swarms of centipedes. Oskar realized it was a phenomenon like the tree bark: tiny cracks opening and just as quickly healing in the whiteness of her skin.
“You are lost,” the woman spoke from behind her obscuring hair.
“I’m following the music,” Oskar stammered, trying not to sound afraid.
“You must go that way,” the woman replied, pointing downward...back the way he had come.
“But what’s up that way?” Oskar asked, motioning at the mists above them.
She lifted her head, and the hair slid away from her face to reveal a beautifully formed nose and mouth, the latter with blue lips, but there was only blank skin where eyes should have been. Yet even as Oskar took this in, eyes did open in her face -- not as if eyelids were parting, but more as if entirely black orbs had surfaced in a bowl of milk. There were three of them, the third obsidian eye forming in the center of her forehead.
“That is one way to Sesqua Valley.”
“One way?”
The sphinx answered him only with cryptic silence.
“Who are you to tell me which way to go?” Oskar asked, trying to sound challenging to bolster his courage. “Which way are you going?”
“Neither way,” she replied, staring unblinking with her three black eyes. “I am an In-Betweener.”
“Why shouldn’t I keep climbing?”
“It isn’t for you.”
“Maybe my daughter has gone up there.”
“She hasn’t. I’d have seen her.”
“Did you see Julian go that way?”
She tilted back her head to gaze upward. The shifting mists cleared somewhat between Oskar and the woman, and he realized that behind her white body two great wings were folded against her back, layered in feathers the same glossy black as her hair.
“I know that boy...but he went back to the Valley another way.” She fixed him with her eyes again. “You must return now.”
“Why?” he demanded.
The woman’s three eyes sank back into the bowl of milk. She lowered her chin to her chest, and the hair fell in front of her face. She answered, “Because the air returns to your lungs. The blood returns to your brain. Your eyes open to your world.”
Oskar’s eyes opened to see the terrible and tragic visage of the burned shop owner, hovering directly above his own face. Staring intently into Oskar’s eyes, the man asked, “Are you all right?”
“My God,” Oskar croaked.
“Mm,” the scarred man said, nodding in satisfaction. “You saw. You know it wasn’t just some drugged vision...you know it in your gut. Now you believe me.”
He moved back to allow Oskar to sit up. Oskar found himself on a narrow twin bed, in a room in back of the antiques and curios shop. It had the looks of being the shop owner’s own apartment.
Oskar lowered his head into his hands -- his palms pressed into both eye sockets, his elbows propped on his knees -- and sat that way for long minutes while the burned man silently watched him.
At last, Oskar said, “I never believed there was anything beyond here.”
“Make no mistake...there is no heaven, there is no hell. Not the way we were taught. It’s nothing like that.”
“But beyond here...” Oskar said again.
“Oh yes. Beyond here there’s so very much.”
“It’s where she wanted to go, to be with him. But she didn’t know the way. Or...or she knew the way, but that one taste you gave her...like the taste you gave me...it wasn’t enough to get there.”
“I’m sorry,” the shopkeeper moaned, spreading his hands. “If I’d have known what she was going to do to herself, I would have given her the entire jar -- free of charge. I swear it!”
At last, Oskar sat up straight, removing his hands from his eyes. “How much do you want for it?”
“Well, I...” It appeared as though the man now regretted having said he would have given away the mason jar for free.
“Just tell me,” Oskar said firmly.
“Uh...so rare a treasure...”
“I said tell me.”
“Three thousand?” the burned man whimpered, cringing back a little as if he expected Oskar to explode in wrath.
Instead, Oskar only nodded thoughtfully and murmured to himself, “She never even thought she could ask me for the money.”
His sister and his niece did most of the work decorating the funeral parlor for the wake, mounting many of the photos Oskar had found on boards supported by tripods. Aliza as a baby in her dead mother’s arms. Aliza on a tricycle. A bicycle. Proudly leaning on her first car. Oskar ached to see how few of these photos included himself.
They had also mounted some of Aliza’s sketches and oil paintings. One of these showed a vast black tree, swathed in gauzy mauve mist, with a group of diminutive satyr-like beings clambering up its flaying/mending bark. Another painting was a portrait of a young man who was both handsome and odd-looking at once, in an indefinable way. When Oskar had first seen this in Aliza’s apartment, he had thought it was unfinished because of the boy’s seemingly empty eyes. Now he realized the eyes were not unfinished: they were meant to appear as bright silver.
With his own hands, Oskar had added only three items to the mementos present in the room. On a small table near the head of the casket he had placed a flute made from slender lengths of bone, a red pinecone, and an odd greenish-stained statuette.
Oskar and his sister wept in each other’s embrace. His sister, a Catholic, whispered in his ear, “She’s in a better place now.”
Years ago when his wife had taken her own life, his sister had tried to console him with these same words. At that time he had muttered back to her, “All is nothing.”
This time, he replied gently, “Not yet.”
When the viewing hours came to a close, Oskar told the funeral director that he needed a few minutes absolutely alone with his daughter, so he could say his personal goodbye. Of course, his wish was respected.
Alone in the room, Oskar stood over the open coffin, gazing down into his daughter’s face with some expectation he couldn’t fully define. As if she might yet open her eyes. She didn’t look as unnatural as some corpses he had seen at wakes. Those had been mostly old people who had succumbed to wasting diseases, their faces unnaturally packed and painted. Aliza didn’t appear joyful -- which was what her name meant -- but she did seem to be smiling in a very subtle and enigmatic way.
Oskar produced the glass mason jar from a pocket of his overcoat, and began unscrewing its rubber-sealed lid. As he did so, he said to her softly, “I don’t know where you are right now, my baby. But I know where you wanted to be.”
The mauve gas billowed out eagerly, like a genie released from its bottle at long last. The mist obscured Aliza’s face entirely for several moments, like the caul sometimes found covering a baby’s head at birth, before it began to disperse. Oskar held the jar at arm’s length, and he held his breath until the mist finally thinned out and mostly vanished from sight. When he could no longer hold his breath, however, he gulped in a deep swallow of air.
Opening his eyes, Oskar found he was already situated on that higher branch upon which the In-Betweener squatted, as if he had earned a more advanced starting position as a return explorer.
“You again,” the woman said, her three eyes materializing out of blankness. “Lost again.”
“Not as lost this time,” he replied.
The entity nodded, as if she could see this. “A few moments ago I saw the woman you asked after last time.” She pointed into the swirling mists above their heads. “She was climbing in that direction.”
Oskar smiled. “Thank you,” he told her. “That’s all I needed to know.”
This time he knew better than to try climbing up in pursuit of that constant, distant piping. Instead, he sat on the bough to keep the In-Betweener company for a short time, until his lungs were clear, and the blood flowed back into his brain.
Curious about the long silence, the funeral director returned to the room fifteen minutes later to find Oskar slumped unconscious on one of the room’s leather-padded chairs.
“Sir?” the director asked, patting Oskar’s arm. “Sir? Are you all right?” He sounded increasingly frantic. “Should I call you an ambulance?”
Finally opening his eyes, from which tears had flowed down the sides of his face, Oskar looked up at the man and his lips spread in a tremulous smile.
“It’s okay now,” Aliza’s father told the man. “She’s found her better place.”
Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN, and PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (with his brother Scott Thomas). Novels in that setting include DEADSTOCK, BLUE WAR, MONSTROCITY, HEALTH AGENT, and EVERYBODY SCREAM!. Thomas's other short story collections include WORSHIP THE NIGHT, THIRTEEN SPECIMENS, NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS, UNHOLY DIMENSIONS, and ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels include LETTERS FROM HADES, THE FALL OF HADES, BONELAND, BEYOND THE DOOR, SUBJECT 11, THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH (with his brother Scott Thomas), and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS. Thomas lives in Massachusetts. His website is http://punktalk.punktowner.com.
Story illustration by Steve Santiago
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(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror . . .
by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
{for my dear brother, a certain Mr. Hopfrog, Esq.}
(then)(by the light of an East Coast moon…)
after the beans.
after coffee.
after the day’s vigorous adventure in sunlight, the walk, enjoying the blue. a pen in silver hands, prizing. dreaming—‘wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.’—from (and laced with) mathematics, and physics, and hints… ‘Subterranean region beneath placid New England village, inhabited by (living or extinct) creatures of prehistoric antiquity and strangeness’ . . . ‘Lonely bleak islands off N.E. coast. Horrors they harbour—outpost of cosmic influences’ . . . ‘A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone—no man hath seen it’ . . . words, aware—of history and science, and ancient fruits (and the embrace of Eternity) . . . ‘There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers – the “Black Man” of the witch cult’ . . . astonished words. of cellars and cobwebs, of the inquiries of a madman. the hunger of the engine in the fountain burns in the nest. winter. telling farther. shaking with the moments when the clock faces the stars. the race to the gate. leaping with fast dreams. today. yesterday. a cold year (wrapped in beauty and loneliness) that disappears in a stream of years. words. dreams. words. words, lost and found… and melted.
dreaming (dusk)(shadows)(dark corners) . . . revising.
in the tomb. dreaming. and other tales of terror . . .
(now)(by the light of a West Coast moon…)
after coffee.
after Thai food.
after singing along with the new Streisand cd—twice. the hungry hands (of the poet) at the keyboard. mining (commitment). deeper and deeper to emerge with landmarks. words. each dreaming of the master… each in sorrow and ecstasy, formed by heart. words. no make-up today. {ashton}ished WORDS—rising, leaping (soon to be thrust into the hands of The Editor), fast as midnight explored. fingers in the unwound mists of a woodland asylum, eyes in the master’s Commonplace Book. more words—‘He kissed the instrument, then held it to the moon, that globe of dead refraction’ . . . , more phrases—‘Autumn is my favorite time of year; it heralds absolutely the death of torturous summer’ . . . ‘She placed her hands together in a semblance of prayer’ . . . more (legions of deliberateness, each raindrop-tongue pulsing) grow (in Sesqua Valley)(and other haunts). words, stitching blight on the doorways of abandoned streets. blue-veined words, caging the empty-handed prayers of the garden. carved words that must weight in. sign and sentence, lamps in the witch-house! (tearswept) words. choirs of words, gut and reflexes that won’t hide, or stop… the stain of dark blossoms covering the page. words, plucked (from the master’s territories) by the velocity of his nets, and piled high on his altar of Lovecraftian dreams . . .
face pressed to words, roots (of death and decay and dark black earth) and raven stars. briars—burdens, shaking with burdens. the movement (every knot and gesture lit) of association and choice. words.
flares.
bells.
bells. and smoke fermenting. bells. thrust into technique, banging on the strictures the stars possess.
bells.
bells. the luminous baptism—cooking genesis in the decomposition of apocalypse.
words.
wild. decadent.
falling. shedding restraint. dancing…
dancing—
FASTER.
words. nouns and periods, and the commas (that map caves, and understand night infused with crossings), all—the recipe of every leaf, all—loaded with dread. italics diagnosing the rent of blood and butcher’s bill. gang & timber! south, all the way to “There!” with claws in the game. wordshed—strata-phrase, uncork the tears. wordshed—lifting dauntless verbs. words! that light the doom felt last night in Sesqua, to prowl the warrens of Kingsport with kisses of corruption. witness words from hands that reek of smoke. a swirl of thorns hunting marrow . . . words. gathered. the mirrors and thunder of unshuttered words (glowing and trembling)(each a drum and blade and portal), at the threshold with their avid flint harvesting observations of moor and orbit and afflicted memory. words (explorations and ecstasies… built for whomever listens)… and tangled, uncommon yesterdays (wrapped in beauty… and loneliness) (like those of the master) that cannot disappear in the stream of years.
dreaming (dusk)(shadows)(dark corners). . . revising . . .
in the tomb of the master. dreaming. and other tales of terror.
{Jon Hassell “Last Night the Moon Came”}
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., is the author of the novels, The Orphan Palace (Chomu Press 2010) and Nightmare’s Disciple (Chaosium 1999), and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including “Weird Fiction Review”, “Crypt of Cthulhu”, and “Lovecraft eZine”, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (I and III; PS Publishing) and A Mountain Walked (Centipede Press 2014), Ross Lockhart's Book of Cthulhu (Night Shade), and many anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. His highly–acclaimed short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season,
SIN & ashes, and Portraits of Ruin, were published by Hippocampus Press in 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively.
He edited A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets (Miskatonic River Press), and collections by Ann K. Schwader (The Worms Remember) and John B. Ford.
He is at work on two new collections of weird fiction, Stained Translations, and The Protocols of Ugliness, both edited by Jeffrey Thomas.
You can find his blog at: http://thisyellowmadness.blogspot.com/
Story illustration by Dominic Black
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The Deep Black Pit
by Jessica Salmonson
(to Wilum from Jessica)
To exist in this world is no fun for me and I would
Rather fall into a deep black pit where there are no
Answers because there are no questions and
No purpose whatsoever and therefore no reason to
Struggle for a purpose or a rhyme or a
Meaning to existence when there is none, none, none,
Other than to dream of blind bliss…but O
God, I am already here.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a recipient of the Lambda Award and World Fantasy Award. Among her novels is the expressionist horror yarn "ANTHONY SHRIEK: His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm," set in the streets of his and Wilum's city of Seattle and featuring characters based on people they both have known. It's soon to be re-released by Centipede Press as part of a huge omnibus.
Story illustration by Mike Dominic
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