Tag Archives: dark fantasy

Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

From Whence You Cannot Awake

He could not get comfortable. He wasn’t in pain, just slightly uncomfortable. The cushions were soft and the couch was spacious but he kept shifting his weight, unsuccessfully trying to find a spot where he could relax. His neck hurt and he felt fat. His shoes were too tight but the floor was cold and he didn’t want to take them off. The TV was blaring on about some horrific war and his moronic team losing again while the market kept falling and inflation kept rising.

Perhaps it was the stressful, unfulfilling day at work cramping his neck and back into painful spasms. Maybe he had drunk too much coffee trying to motivate himself to be productive during the day? Maybe he’d just snacked on too many nuts and chocolates just now trying to make himself feel good?

Maybe it was just a shit world and he hated being alive?

“Shall we get some takeout?” he asked his wife next to him on the couch, “Maybe a pizza?” As he said it, he regretted saying the words. They really should be trying to eat healthily. And they spent too much money on takeaways. They should really be trying to save money as the cost of everything just kept rising but his salary stayed flat.

His wife barely acknowledged him, she was staring transfixed at the TV. Why was she so interested in the rubbish on that box, he wondered?

“Sure, honey,” she mumbled, “Whatever you want.”

He nodded, wholly unsatisfied at the answer. The moment he started ordering, she would change her mind. He knew this as it always happened.

“OK, Dominos’ has a special on–” he started before she interrupted him.

“Why don’t we pop to the shop and get some healthy stuff? Maybe we cook tonight?”

He nodded, knowing that this was the right thing to do. He too tired to argue. God, he really did not feel like cooking. Or leaving this couch, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

“I’ll drive,” he said, standing up and moving to get his car keys, “Let’s be quick. I have an early day tomorrow. Breakfast meeting across town. God, why do people organize such things? Fucking hate breakfast meetings.”

All he wanted to do was relax. Or get comfortable. He was so tired he could sleep right then and there, but he knew the moment bedtime came he would lie awake, tossing and turning, as he worried about work and bills and this nightmare that he was trapped in…

***

“And that’s how it works, really,” said the shimmering being of light, “Good ones transcend and bad descend, locked in The Physical.”

There was an audience of light around the shimmering being that was speaking. The light rippled in celestial colors so beautiful the angels themselves would weep if they saw them.

“Yes,” the Shimmering Being said, its voice pure heavenly music that blessed the very air it traveled through, “I’ll take one more question and then we really need to be getting on to the next cosmic lesson.”

“What exactly is The Physical?” asked a swirling essence of pure light, glimmering dreams whirling in its infinite depths, “You keep saying that the bad ones get sent down to The Physical, but what exactly is it and why is it so bad?”

The Shimmering Being glowed. Perhaps it was smiling or laughing but the process was so breathtakingly beautiful that civilizations would have gladly died for the mere privilege to glimpse such a thing.

“Good question,” it began, picking it words carefully, “The Physical is a lower Plane than ours. It is most horrific in torturing those stuck in it. Not only does it fix their forms into heavy, slow, painful dark-material, but it also offers just enough good to make the bad that much worse. There is only one escape from The Physical, but its trap is so complete that its victims almost never escape. They keep clinging to the good while the bad keeps torturing them.”

***

His phone’s alarm cut through his dreams and, groggily, he flicked the snooze and rolled over. Then he remembered his breakfast meeting.

Fuck, he thought, I really do have to get up. Traffic was going to be horrendous. His wife was asleep next to him and he leaned over the kissed her, mildly jealous that she got to sleep in and slightly horny because they had not had sex in weeks.

Sighing, he rolled out of bed and moved to the bathroom. He had a headache and his neck and back ached. Actually, he felt worse than when he had gone to bed last night. How was that possible? Wasn’t he suppose to feel better after a good night’s sleep?

Fucking bullshit, he thought to himself.

At that point, a strange, fuzzy memory popped into his mind. Had he dreamt about shimmering beings and clouds of infinitely beautiful light? Some cosmic eternity? He could not remember what they had told him? Or had he actually been one of them? It is was agonizingly beautiful and, strangely, his soul ached and longed for whatever it was that he had glimpsed in his dreams…

What the fuck, he thought, as he flushed the toilet and wandered downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee. He felt terrible. He wished he was dead, or, at least, still asleep.

Fucking bullshit, he thought to himself again.

Sighing, he put the kettle on. His dog trotted up, muzzling him gently with her snout. He leaned down and patted her. She gazed up at him, pure love in her eyes, and he smiled.

Life wasn’t that bad. Surely, work would get better and his wife did love him, he was sure. Maybe tonight they would make love? Life wasn’t that bad, he just had to get through this rough patch and things would get better. He was sure of it.

Blackpool Bay, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Benjamin Tree

“Oh, the tree comes with the apartment,” the Estate Agent mentioned waving at it as they moved through the lounge area, “The previous owner considers it part of 307’s furnishings.”

The tree was small–head-height–and had a trunk that was made up of what looked like thick, gray, twirling vines that held a clump of large, bright-green, oblong leaves. It sat in a knee-high pot decorated with intricate carvings and strange oriental-looking letters cut finely into it.

“It’s called a Benjamin Tree,” he said, “It’s the official tree of Bangkok, actually.”

“Oh,” the Estate Agent paused in her sales pitch, “I thought it was a Weeping Fig?”

“Yes,” he nodded before moving on with her, “That’s another name for it. I prefer the former name. Say, why is the previous owner selling here? Ocean View seems so quaint.”

“Oh, he used to work at the docks. Import-export or something, I believe. He won the lottery last week so he is returning to his family in New York,” the Estate Agent said, “It’s a pity the money doesn’t ever stay in Blackpool Bay, really. We could use it here. Why are you moving all the way out here?”

The furnished apartment was not massive. They had walked through most of it and were standing back in the lounge by now. It had a window that overlooked the gray ocean with the dingy docks below. He could see a twitchy-looking man loading what looked like diving gear into a small fishing boat and he watched intently for a moment wondering what this man was doing.

“I’m a writer,” he muttered back and then turned and faced the Estate Agent, “I’m a writer and I need a place to disappear to and write. This one looks perfect. The Benajim Tree can stay.”

***

A year and a bit later, he was sipping his morning coffee and staring out of the lounge window. The local morning newspaper lay on his lap. The ocean in Blackpool Bay never changed; it was always gray and stormy with dark, distrusting waters under a brooding near-storm sky. It all just reflected this town’s forgotten place and constantly surprising secrets.

They had even tried to build a highway through the mountains to connect Blackpool Bay to civilization, but a worker had died under questionable circumstances and the funders had pulled out.

The writing had gone brilliantly and his new book had only just been published. He remained here, though, as he liked the solitude of the place. Although he considered himself a city person, something about Blackpool Bay made it hard to leave.

Perhaps born out curiosity or a little boredom, he had begun researching the previous owner. Talking to the neighbors he had found a full name and the Internet had provided the rest: born in New York, Nathan Midlane had moved out to Blackpool Bay for work and then won the lottery and moved back.

It was a simple story, but the newspaper in his lap told a darker ending than he would have expected. He would never have guessed that Nathan Midlane’s story was a tragedy but the newspaper loudly declared it: “Blackpool Bay Man Wins Lottery & Dies“.

It had happened a week ago but only been reported here this morning. Time moved differently out here in Blackpool Bay. The line in the story that surprised him was the opening line: “Another former-resident in Apartment 307, Ocean View, has met a tragic end…”

He found himself looking at the Benjamin Tree deep in thought. The spidery oriental writing on its pot looked faintly sinister. He wondered when Nathan Midlane had acquired the thing? He wondered from whom he had done so? He wondered what the strange language or symbols on its pot meant?

Just then his phone rang. He snapped out of it and finished his coffee. It was now cold but he gulped it down, stood up and walked across to his phone.

“Hello?” he answered, not looking at who was calling.

“How’s the writing?” his Agent’s familiar voice crackled on the other side of the line. It sounded really far away. The reception was not great out here in Blackpool Bay and it just added to this place’s isolation. Sometimes the phones all just went dead and no one knew why.

“Uh, it’s fine, I suppose,” he mumbled, unsure how to respond, “What else is up?”

“That’s not why I am calling,” his Agent started talking, the sheer excitement audible in his faint, crackling voice, “Some major blogger read your book. She wrote about it and tweeted. A bunch more picked up on this and did the same. It’s trending. Your book is trending. They love it. They all love it! Your book is now front shelf and ranked in top ten on Amazon. Go check it out! Rolling Stones want an interview and the BBC has asked for a quote…”

***

He put down the phone and leaned back on the couch in Apartment 307, Ocean View. Even the name had started sounding ominous to him. The twisted trunk of the Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot cover with spidery runes looked back at him. The ocean remained gray under the foreboding sky.

All the rest was silence. It was so quiet out here. It was like man and the entirety of his little civilization was just a brief flicker of light in a cosmic darkness that reached across time and space in crushing size and scope and, far out here, Blackpool Bay was surrounded by endless amounts of it…

While his book continued to reach highs out there in the world, he felt a million miles away from it. Perhaps he was a million miles away living out here in eerie Blackpool Bay.

But none of this consumed his thoughts these days. He had been investigating Apartment 307, Ocean View. He had been digging for the truth and it was far darker than he had ever imagined.

He had reached out to the journalist at the local paper. The journalist had sent him a number of other clippings going back some years.

A couple year ago, before Nathan Midlane had moved into Apartment 307, the previous owners–a certain, Miley and Marc Cohen–had died shortly after moving into a fancy house in Main Road here. Speaking to some locals down at the pub, the best he could piece together was that the Cohens had made a large amount of money from investments. Unfortunately, a strange fire in their new house in Main Road had seen them burnt to death. Strangely, most of the house had escaped unscathed.

Before the Cohen’s, though, a lesser known, Catherine McDougle, had lived a quiet, spinster life here for many decades. Little seemed to be known about her, except that she had died shortly after moving to live with family in Washington. She was old and the coroner had ruled her death natural, or so the article had claimed.

Upon her death, though, to the Blackpool Bay residents’ surprise, McDougle’s fortune had been donated to the Masonic Museum in London. It had been the largest public donation ever on record. The Museum had gone on record thanking her for it. Everyone was flabbergasted at the fortune McDougle had quietly amassed while living in the modest Apartment 307, Ocean View.

He could not find any older records of any earlier owners of Apartment 307, Ocean View. But what he did find in one of the earliest articles of McDougle was quite disturbing: “We will all fondly remember McDougle. My personal memory will always be her sitting in her favorite seat next to her special Weeping Fig tree and recounting her days in the Society abroad where she collected many such wonders…”

He had sat upright when he had read that. He found himself looking more and more at the inconspicuous Benjamin Tree and its sinister pot that quietly stood in the corner of his modest lounge.

***

“So you can interpret it then?” he asked, trying to sound calm, but instead a near-feverish eagerness came through in his voice, “Can you understand it then?”

An old, scholarly Chinese man was in Apartment 307, Ocean View, and looking at the Benjamin Tree. More specifically, the man was bending down and attempting to read the spidery runes cut finely into its pot.

“The writing is a version of Archaic Mandarin from the First or Second Imperial Dynasty. Yes, probably from the Han Dynasty. It is strangely phrased with ambiguity,” the scholar paused, chuckling to himself, “It is actually quite witty if I am correct.”

With that, the scholar stood up and turned to him. He felt his heart pounding and his palms sweaty. Within his clenched fists at his side, he dug his nails into his palms. It was all he could do to stay calm. Outside the gray, foreboding sky and its ominous clouds seemed to be holding their breath as they peered inside the gloomy Apartment 307.

“Could–could you please,” he took a deep breath and tried to continue calmly, “please tell me what you read?”

The scholar smiled and motioned at the pot and its twisted, green Benjamin Tree.

“Old Chinese folktales talk of a Money Tree,” the scholar began slowly, picking up the pace as he spoke, the tree and its pot just sat there listening, “Literally, a tree on which money grows. A woodcutter once tricked a village into cutting down a tree that he wanted. He did this by sticking money on it. But, once the tree had been cut down and taken back to the village, it had regrown, twisting its hacked stem back and pushing out its sickly green leaves. The woodcutter had been angry and had tried to cut down the tree but the villages–still believing the tree to magical–attacked and killed the woodcutter. The village was prosperous for years thereafter, until a stranger had stolen it in the night. Shortly after then, a plague had wiped out all the villagers. It is said that this Money Tree brought luck to those that had it and misfortune to those that lost it.”

The scholar finished his tale with a smile, seeming quite satisfied with himself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly, feeling anger and frustration rising inside himself, “But what does the writing say?”

The scholar nodded and pointed at the pot again, moving his finger as he read it out loud.

“I believe that this is an old Hang Dynasty artifact–probably worth a tidy sum of money!–but it seems to keep referencing the Money Tree folktale with a simple palindrome that repeats across the design here and here and over there too. It simply says: ‘Dead lucky or lucky dead‘.”

Far away, he could almost hear the noise of civilization and his book shooting up the rankings with the steady clink of money flowing in. And, trapped all the way out in Blackpool Bay that distant metallic sound just sounded like chains being tightened around him. One by one, inch by inch and moment by moment, he was suffocating in Apartment 307, Ocean View.

The Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot with spidery runes carried on standing there. It was taunting him, its prisoner, and just daring him to leave…

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

Field of Corpses

The air had a honey-glow to it as the dry dirt permeated his nose. In the distance, the Sun was setting as half-pregnant clouds drifted teasingly by him.

“We need rain, ” he said, dejectedly chewing the tip of a blade of wheat, “We need rain or we are not going to make it.”

His only audience was his old tractor. It was silent, parked in the corner of the field and he was leaning against it surveying what he would lose this season. Despite the weather forecast, he had planted. He had had to. This was his last chance. His fields should be rolling with golden acres of wheat by now. They were not, and he could feel the creditors and the bankers growling and scratching at his door like hungry wolves.

He sighed, clambered back up into the tractor and turned the ignition. The desperate silence of the moment passed as its diesel engine spluttered to life and he rolled away on his way back to the farmhouse. Much like his fields, it was empty. His wife had taken the children and moved to the town a season ago and his old dog had died shortly thereafter.

“I need rain,” he muttered, feeling powerless as the clouds floated by him, “Or I might not make it.”

***

The next morning he awoke to a thousand-small-sounds of water hitting the farmhouse’s metal roof. It sounded like heaven. He shook his head. He had had strange dreams that night. A very strange dream. A dark, familiar man had woken him from his sleep and offered him a good harvest, but it would cost others blood. Or something. The dream was a bit foggy.

He felt exhausted like he had not slept a wink, but the rain overhead brought a smile to his face. He had taken a risk planting this season and it was looking like it was going to pay-off.

He walked out of the farmhouse and felt the cool, splashes of hope hitting him. It was starting to rain harder and his lifted his face up to the heavens. He laughed and raised his arms. His fields were being soaked. His dams were being filled. He was going to make it.

In the distance, a lone ambulance’s wail reached him as it screeched down the national road that intersected his fields. He barely paid attention to it while he let the joy soak through him.

***

After the funeral, the townsfolk all said their condolences as they walked passed him. The priest was the last to go and then he was alone looking down the graves of his wife and two children. At least the medics had said that they had died instantly in the car. No pain. No suffering.

Those were all his and his alone now.

Time felt like it was stretching out as he drove his old, beaten-up Ford down the national road that intersected his fields. Their golden acres spread out before promising a good harvest. In fact, because the rain had only fallen over his fields, the price of wheat was rising by the second and his fields promised both volumes of harvest and a high price to go with them.

Far from bankrupt, he was soon going to be a very rich man.

As he turned down the dirt road that led off the national road and towards his empty farmhouse, he felt the guilt again. He fought back a tear and swallowed hard as his throat tightened. He reached for the half-empty hipflask of bourbon in the passenger seat and took a large swig of it. The fire helped, but the numbness that followed helped more. It kept the demons inside from taking over, for now.

Why should he get all the rain? Why was his family in that car at that exact time? Why could he not forget that dream of the dark, familiar man offering him the harvest that now packed his fields all around him?

Why did he feel like he had made a pact with the devil?

***

Later that night and a bottle of bourbon more, he was screaming at the night sky in his field. His shotgun in hand and tears rolling down his cheeks. The demons were fully in control now.

“Why! Why take them from me!” he screamed at the heaven, locked on a twinkling star and fired a blast from his shotgun before dropping to the ground. Tears were falling from him, watering the ground.

“It was the terms of the deal,” said a familiar voice right in front of him, “But I can offer you another one?”

He looked up and, through the foggy haze of bourbon, he recognized the dark, familiar man from his dreams. He was standing, smiling before him.

“A-a, another deal?” he said, confused, trying to stand up, “W-what, I–”

The dark man smiled and extended his hand to help him to his feet.

“Yes, I can reunite you with your family. In fact, I can do so tonight.”

***

 

“That’s him,” the young man said, “that’s definitely my uncle.”

“Are you sure,” the overweight cop said, narrowing his eyes, “The shotgun never left much of his face behind. For the record, can you state how you are certain it is your uncle?”

The young man nearly gagged and turned around. The cop replaced the sheet over the body in the morgue and stepped back.

Once the young man had recovered, he turned around and nodded: “Definitely him, sir. It’s the tattoo. It has all of our names worked into it. But, of course, there aren’t any of us left now.”

The cop nodded, satisfied and guided the young man out of the morgue.

“Yes, in fact,” the cop began with a strange inclination of his voice, “None of you left, except you. You do stand to inherit the farm, don’t you? Not just the farm, but its coming harvest that, by all accounts, is likely to be very, very profitable this year…”

The young man nodded, “Yes, you cannot suspect me, surely? I was miles away in another city! Besides, didn’t the forensic say it was a suicide?”

Once outside the morgue, the cop stopped and positioned his large frame in front of the young man, “Yes, but another set of footprints were found in the field. We may have your alibi and it may check out and the forensic may still have concluded the shotgun was pulled by your uncle himself, but I would not leave town if I were you. We will find out who that other set of footprints belongs to…”

***

“Don’t worry, I’ve sold the harvest forward in the futures market and the money will be in your bank account by tomorrow,” the young man growled into his mobile phone, “Use what you need to settle the money I owe you and take the rest to never contact me again. I never want to hear your voice again, or I’ll call the cops.”

He never waited for a reply, hung up the phone and threw it on the passenger seat. A half-drunk bottle of bourbon lay there, which he reached for and took a swig from.

He was driving down the national road surveying his new farm and its rolling fields of golden wheat. The Sun was setting in the background. It’s golden licks curling into blood-red fire that seeped across the horizon and these endlessly rolling fields in which his uncle had killed himself a week after his family had died in a car accident.

“Other footprints?” he mused aloud as the car slowed and turned down the dirt road to the farmhouse, “Who the hell else was there when–”

He slammed on the breaks!

Standing in the middle of the dirt road in front of the car was a dark, familiar stranger. The same one that he had spoken with a few nights ago when he thought his gambling debts were going to be the death of him.

The dark, familiar stranger was grinning and, for some reason, that terrified the young man.

Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Jefferson

He struggled forward–one step after the next–as he absentmindedly wiped his hand on his spacesuit’s pants. The blood had long since wiped off and the bodies were far behind him but all he saw was his goal. It was just in front of him. At this altitude, distance from the starship and without backup equipment, he doubted he would make it home anyway, not that this mattered much to him.

After Jefferson had proved the theoretical existence of inter-dimensional wormholes, he had sought to recreate them in the laboratory. Unfortunately, they required such vast amounts of energy that he could not achieve quantum states of sufficient mass.

That is what led him to search for these enigmas in the cosmos. Theoretically, under just the right conditions where there was a Newtonian Equilibrium between two Black Holes’ Event Horizons, space would be thin enough and the energy dense enough to potentially open such a wormhole.

He could feel his blood thinning as his heart struggled against the lack of gravity. His suit protected him from the worst of the environment but prolonged exposure meant that enough had gotten through. Micro-tears in the fabric were beginning to risk the suit’s integrity, anyway. Behind him, there were piles of bodies. Some team members had died on the voyage out. Others had died traversing this super-large asteroid–megatroid–left spinning on its own axis in space-time.

The landscape was harsh red with shimmering dust as space bent slightly like ripples in a pond. He could not feel it bending but its effects were everywhere. From the aggressive hyper-cancer that had consumed his last few team members and was eating at his own body to the fractal dust from a shaken reality that slipped through his suit and clogged his lungs.

It had taken billions of dollars of funding and teams of scientists and supercomputers all scanning through every know data point in known reality to locate only one such potential site. It had taken inventing cryogenic stasis to traverse the distance between the populated cosmos and this older, darker part of the cosmos. It had taken three hundred and fifteen scientists and a full engineering crew with a military-grade starship and cutting-edge equipment to arrive at the megatroid.

But Jefferson felt it had all been worth it.

Despite being ravaged with cancer and struggling to breathe while on his last round of equipment and with three-hundred and fourteen bodies behind him, he was smiling. His face was lit up with wonder and his eyes sparkled.

He pulled himself up the last ledge onto the pinnacle of the megatroid’s largest mountain range. And, as his head cleared it and his vision stopped swimming, he stood and focussed on the swirling light before him.

It was beautiful.

Before him, on a parabolic-Cartesian plane, spinning between two equidistant black holes on their event horizion’s, floated a small tear in space-time that pierced into our nearest parallel dimensions. It had a peculiar golden glow, perhaps a side-effect of the cold fusion occurring at atomic-level, Jefferson thought?

He blinked and his eyes adjusted slowly to what he was seeing. Beyond the golden swirling form that silently rippled space around it, he was sure he saw something.

Could it be? Could he be looking through into another dimension? Could light from that other dimension be penetrating ours?

He had fantasized about this moment his whole adult life. What wonders would he see? Was there life or alternate geometry? Did new, undiscovered colours exist in that dimension? Would he peer through and see God? What incredible wonders would he see there?

His hands were shaking as he strained to see what lay beyond the golden swirling form. Something was definitely there. It was small and dark but the longer he looked at it, the clearer it became.

His oxygen tank’s warning light had been flashing for a while, but it began to beep. He was on his last breathes. This did not matter much, as the cancer was metastasizing in real-time and his lungs began to collapse as micro-tears in his inner-suit began to equalize with the vacuum of space and the blood in his veins began to heat in the dropping pressure.

Jefferson fell to his knees but kept his vision straightforward. Even if he could never tell another living soul, he was going to be first to actually see into the next dimension. He had lived his entire life for this moment and he was not going to die before he got to see it.

The black shape was solidifying in the rippling golden light, but his vision began to blur. Oxygen deprivation and dropping pressure in his suit were converging, and he began to fall forward slowly in the low gravity of the megatroid.

Just before his vision slipped, his head fell forward and the last ounce of life left him, the black shape solidified and Jefferson saw what–or who!–was peering at him from another dimension.

It was a middle-aged man, pale-faced and wild-eyed, dressed in a military-grade deep-space cosmonaut’s suit with blood down the left leg and micro-tears releasing precious oxygen and pressure into space. The man was on his knees and collapsing forward in the final moments of his life. Partially faded, and splattered with blood and space-dust, a small name tag across the man’s chest said something quite familiar: “JEFFERSON”.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Conversation

“How did you think it was going to end?”

“I–I don’t know, I thought maybe–”

“Well, it ended badly.”

A silence hangs between the two for a moment. The first speaker is dressed in black with few other details that stick in your mind. Even your eyes tend to wander off him and look elsewhere. The second speaker is a late-to-middle-aged man with unremarkable features and a clueless expression on his face.

“It ended badly?” the Second Speaker asks tentatively.

“Yes,” the Speaker in Black nods, “After all, it started with you naked, covered in blood, and kicking and screaming, so why would you think it ended any different?”

The Second Speaker nods. He is still trying to process all of this.

“Well, let me remind you,” the Speaker in Black sighs. Lots of his clients were slow to understand the contract’s terms.

***

Light. Cold. Pain. Noise…

The baby bursts out into the world screaming. It’s first sound piercing the veil between unborn and born, as its eyes open and the world’s harsh light blinds it.

The baby falls quiet and blinks, taking all of this in. A silence hangs in the air for a moment before it starts screaming again.

“It is naked, covered in blood, and kicking and screaming,” the Speaker in Black points out the obvious, “and it is you.”

The Second Speaker nods, absorbing this. It is strange to watch your own birth.

***

“Mummy,” the little boy asks, just before his mother turns the lights off, “please don’t turn the light off. I don’t like the dark.”

His mother smiles. The boy does not see it, but she has a strange expression on her face.

“My love, don’t be scared,” she reassures her child, “The darkness can be your friend too, if you let it.”

A silence hangs between the two for a moment.

“Besides, I’m in the other room and I’ll never let anything happen to you,” she quickly adds, strengthening her argument.

The door closes. The darkness surrounds them and the boy rolls over.

“That was the night before your parents divorced,” the Speaker in Black notes as a fact, “And it was the last time you were afraid of the darkness.”

The Second Speaker turns and is about to say something, but then the scene changes.

***

The young couple are half dressed as they join in the back seat of a drive-through. The windows are half-steamed up as the cosmos twinkles far above the carnal scene.

“I remember this,” the Second Speaker says, “This was when I lost my virginity.”

An awkward moment hangs between them where they try not to make eye contact. The young man’s naked bottom is partly visible through the steamy car window as the car gently rocks up and down.

“I regret bringing us here,” the Speaker in Black mumbles, looking away sheepishly, “But you never married her and that is kinda of the–you know, whatever.”

***

A young man is dancing wildly while laughing. And then he is screaming. Before this, the snow is gently falling as they walk under the night sky towards the hidden cave. He is naked dancing wildly there.

The scene blurs and the Second Speaker turns around, still perplexed, and asks, “Why did you show me that? It makes no sense. I lived those moments, and I did not need reminding.”

The Speaker in Black shakes his head slowly. Some of his clients needed more reminding than others.

“Watch it closely again,” he says, and the scenes start up again.

***

Light. Cold. Pain. Noise…

The baby bursts out into the world screaming. It’s first sound piercing the veil between unborn and born, as its eyes open and the world’s harsh light blinds it.

The baby falls quiet and blinks, taking all of this in. A black-robed man holds the baby above him as the wicked congregation mutters incantations around them. The candles flicker and the darkness creeps a little closer.

And then mother returns from tucking in her young boy in the next door room. She drops her loose clothing as she walks to the middle of the circle where the High Priest is waiting for her. The other witches all creep forward full of lust, just as the front door opens and her husband walks in early from work.

The car rocks gently back and forth as the young man takes advantage of the drugged girl. Her head rolls limply back and forth as he unleashes his carnal desire on her innocent form.

The Second Speaker gasps. He knows that the girl gets dropped off in a field outside a bar, but he wonders why he could not remember that before. He knows what comes next, or–more terrifying–he is now starting to remember how this ended.

“It ended badly,” he whispers.

“Yes,” the Speaker in Black agrees, “It ended badly.”

In the hidden cave, he is naked and dancing wildly before a flickering fire. The drugs all flowing through his body. He is smeared with the blood of the crumpled body in the corner–some hitchhiker they picked up–and is laughing at the power he feels in his mind. His naked, wicked girlfriend stalks up lithely behind him, silver glinting in her hands.

He does not see the knife slip into his back, but he sees his blood as it pumps his life into the ground at his feet.

She is stabbing him again and again, as he falls down, screaming, naked and covered in blood.

***

“It ended badly,” the Second Speaker repeats, a look of comprehension setting across his face, “because how else could that end? How else could my life have ended? It was terrible.”

“Exactly,” says the Speaker in Black, “But it isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault. It just is. Life and then death. That is the contract.”

The Second Speaker looks up and narrows his eyes, “And that’s it? That’s all? You live and then you die?”

“Yes,” says the Speaker in Black, nodding, “By its very nature, life is finite. You did not choose to be born, nor to die. All you got was the time between those events.”

There is a silence between the two of them. Eventually, the Second Speaker sighs and nods.

And they both disappear.

***

“How did you think it was going to end?”

“I–I just thought that–”

“Well, it ended beautifully.”

The first speaker is dressed in black with few other details that stick in your mind. Even your eyes tend to wander off him and look elsewhere. The second speaker is an elderly woman with greying hair and caring eyes.

“It ended beautifully?” the Elderly Woman asks tentatively.

“Yes,” the Speaker in Black nods, “After all, it started surrounded by those that love and care for you, how else did you think it would end?”

The Elderly Woman nods. She is still trying to process all of this.

“Let me remind you,” the Speaker in Black sighs. Lots of his clients were slow to understand the contract’s terms.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Beast

Lucifer had no real plan. He was curious, and a bit arrogant. But, mostly, he was bored. God had created the world. It was beautiful and harmonious. The fish swam, the birds flew, the animals ran through the green lands with rivers flowing and oceans full of life. All things great and small lived together.

But in its harmony, the world was boring. God’s world was boring. Its perfection was static.

God was nowhere to be found. Lucifer did not know where he had gone. He was probably off working on his next project, building infinity or coming up with an eighth colour. Lucifer was all alone. All alone looking down at God’s awfully boring creation.

And then Lucifer had a thought. Well, it started out as a thought, but then expanded to an idea and eventually became a plan that he began to act on.

The design was not hard. Lucifer stole many ideas from God’s creatures and then tweaked them a bit to make them his own. He began to call it ‘the Beast’. He made the Beast flexible, agile and strong, but not too much of any of these. He wanted the Beast to have to fight–just a bit–to survive.

With the form finished, Lucifer turned his mind to the trickier meta-physical. He gave the Beast all the basic senses and equal parts of hunger, passion, greed, pride, sorrow, rage and love. He made the Beast smart–very smart–but not smart enough to overcome any of these disparate emotions. He made the Beast conscious and self-aware, but–once again–not smart enough to know what to do with this. Finally, he made the Beast curious with a thirst to know and conquer everything it sees.

Eventually, after tweaking the Beast here and there for ages, Lucifer stood back and looked at his creation. The time had flown and he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was very happy with what he saw before him, but something was missing.

The Beast needed a mate. All of God’s base creations procreated. Why should the Beast not do so too, thought Lucifer.

He shaped the Mate’s form as a sleek and sexy form of the Beast. Where the Beast was all squares, straight lines and sharp corners, the Mate was all soft curves and smooth, warm flesh. He made the Mate slightly smarter than the Beast, but also weaker than it. With the same set of diverging emotions and intellect as the Beast, Lucifer could not wait to see what elaborate mating dance these two creatures would come up with.

Finally, Lucifer was done.

He took the Beast and its Mate, and he led them from his dark lair into the bright, brilliant world that he had promised them. And there, just before he let them loose on the world, the Beast turned around and asked him a question.

“What are we?”

Lucifer smiled, hiding his fangs, “You are human. You are a man, and she is a woman.”

Frowning, the Beast stood there trying to understand this. Lucifer looked on in amusement. He had specifically built the Beast to never quite understand what that meant. In the background, its Mate was already looking hungrily around at the world. Lucifer could not wait to see what his dynamic creations got up to in this static, boring world.

Then the Beast asked a final question. It was the question that Lucifer had been waiting for.

“What are you?”

Lucifer’s smile expanded into a wicked grin so wide that he could not hide his fangs anymore.

“Me? Oh, I am God.”

God will be so pissed when he gets back, thought Lucifer. He could not wait.

Horror & Dark Fiction

The Mad Moors of Calum

There are the numerous locals stories of wee people and spirits, talk about the curse of a dying witch, and then there is my story. I will not indulge the former stories, but the latter I will explain as best as I can.

I was shuffled off to Scotland for a period of a couple of months. It was initially for work, but then when our company went under I was stuck over there for a while as various things played themselves out back home. I was in no rush to drive this process, as I had started seeing a local girl and I enjoyed the free time to wander the countryside exploring all the old lochs, moors and castles that dot the magical land.

It was precisely on one of these extended wanderings that I came across a mad dog. I was cutting through a particularly wild portion of the moor when the beast stumbled out from some bushes. At first, I was taken aback. It had a gaunt countenance and wild eyes, but it barely acknowledged my existence. Then I became intrigued–perhaps morbidly so–and, despite keeping my distance and holding on my walking stick tightly, I stood and quietly by observing the poor beast.

The dog was shaking slightly. As I looked closer at it, I realised that it seemed terrified. There was no foam at its mouth to indicate rabies, but its eyes darted here, there and everywhere never focussing on anything while it skittishly sniffed the air. Then, in a high pitched deathly tone, it began to howl.

That was when the other dogs across this strange part of the moor began to howl too. Given the wildness of that part of the moor, I was not surprised that I could not see any of the other dogs out there. There were plenty of bushes, tall grass and wild heather to hide in. Still, their tortured howls floated back to me from all over the moor. There must have been a good dozen howls that joined that mad dog’s howls. It was like I was suddenly surrounded by a hidden wolf pack.

And then it was done. As quickly as the howling had started, it stopped. The mad dog’s darting eyes locked with mine for an eery second, and then it darted off into the brush and thicket. Suddenly, I was alone on that moor. I realised that I was clutching my walking stick tightly, my heart racing. Shaking my head, I chuckled to myself and I loosened my grip on the stick.

“Aye, John,” the girl I was seeing shook her head when I told her about the surreal encounter, “Strange things happen in that part of the moors. Me mum told me to stay away, and I will tell you to stay away too.”

I promised to stay away, but, of course, I broke that promise. In fact, I began wandering over that part of the moor repeatedly. I would ask local shopkeepers and barmen about it. Slowly, a wild collection of stories began to appear. I was not the only one that had had a strange encounter in that little corner of the moor. From getting lost in sudden thick mist and reappearing hundreds of miles away in that moor; to watching birds hurling themselves into the sides of the hills there; from hearing screams of women and children lost there in the Jacobite Wars to pregnant mothers stumbling out there to have their births there (and, with no recollection why they had done so).

It was like there was a different tale for each person I spoke to. So many strange tales about the ‘Mad Moors of Calum’, as the locals had come to call that place.

But, I could not get the moor out of my mind. I began to dream of that desolate strip of land with cracked shale rock crunching under each step; the dark earth where scratchy bushes and heather, filled in between by long, whipping grass, and covered in a soft mist that the cold breeze in the air barely moves. Deep below ground, I knew it was there. It was the land. It was older than the land and it shaped it in its image. I would walk for miles in these dreams, howling dogs everywhere but in sight, and thick, cool mist covering me as babies screamed somewhere…

I always woke up from these dreams sweating with my heart racing.

One night, I could not sleep. My girlfriend had long since gone to bed and, although I was tired, I felt nervous. I felt tense. I felt like something was going to happen. I caught myself strolling back and forth across the room, so I threw on my jacket, grabbed my walking stick, kissed my sleeping girl goodbye, and left for a midnight stroll down our road.

Now, I had no intention of going there. It was too late and it was too far. But, the road somehow slipped by and the mist grew thicker as I slipped more and more into my own thoughts while walking. And I was just somehow suddenly there. I would like to blame the “mist” for stealing me there, but I am honestly not certain that I did not just subconsciously want to wander to that haunted strip of land.

That is right: I was standing on the Mad Moors of Calum at midnight. The mist was gone. It was absolutely silent with the most incredible cosmically-bejewelled night sky above emphasising my puniness in all the near-infinite space.

I gripped my stick and wandered deeper into the Mad Moors. I almost expected the gaunt dog to jump out at any moment or howling to commence, but neither of these happened. What did happen, though, was that I found my way up a hill overlooking the moor. I had no plan here. I just wanted to see the moors on such a clear night and I thought the view would be good from up there.

But the moment I looked, I knew something was different. It was almost like the moors–or parts of it–were moving. Something was alive. I rubbed my eyes and continued looking down from that hill. Many bushes and heather were shaking in a non-existent wind, but plenty were still too. Some of the shaking bushes even began to rise slowly from the ground.

I stood, transfixed, staring at this bizarre, silent phenomenon, and then the first of them broke into the open. It was buried off to my right at the bottom of the hill. The mound of grass and bush that was shaking lifted up. It pushed it aside as its tentacles grasped for the cosmos above it. Its form was mostly scaled, with leathery skin between warped appendages. The single picture that I can never forget is its faceless face: here instead of a human face, there were constantly moving tentacles writhing from some primordial nightmare. Its tentacled-face lifted upwards as its clawed itself from the hole in the ground, and a high-pitched, eerie sound–a scream? Maybe a call or cry?–began to emit from it.

Suddenly, distant dogs started howling. Something returned its call from high above, also a high-pitched, horrific sound by much more powerful, sounding like it was coming from a much larger source. This detail only came to me much later. At the time, I was transfixed witnessing these horrors pulling themselves from out of the ground all over the Mad Moor of Calum below me. Tentacles writhing everywhere as scaled nightmarish monsters rose from the very ground that I had walked on so many times.

And then the high-pitched shriek came again from the dark night sky. I caught myself whimper in fear like some primitive caveman hearing howling wolves in the night, but then the chorus below took my breath away. Each horror below lifted its tentacles face to the sky and shrieked its high-pitched response. Distant dog howls rose in feverish sympathy to this hellish choir. And then it was over. There was silence. And, slowly–like some dark sorcery–each nightmarish being unfolded a dark, leathery set of wings behind them and began to fly upwards.

One by one by one, they and all their scales and tentacles left that moor, myself and I suspect our world behind to join whatever it was that had shrieked back at them from the night sky or the dark, inhuman cosmos beyond it.

I stood there for hours before I even realised that time had passed. The dogs howling had died down and it was just another quiet night out in the moor by the time I had descended. I found one of the holes in the moor. While being surprisingly small with erosion already crumbling shale rocks and dry dirt in on itself, I could not see the bottom of it. How deep had these demonic seeds buried themselves below our mortal feet? For how long had they slept there?

And then I had the thought that will haunt me for the rest of my life: How long since these tentacled, nightmares had been laid there to birth to whatever horrific mother being waited for them in the cosmic sky above? Our planet had been the egg and little more than a waystation for an unnatural cycle of reproductive of horror. Like flies laying their eggs in dung to hatch, some cosmic nightmare was using our planet to hatch its ungodly breed of tentacled-young.

I left Scotland shortly thereafter, and I have never returned. I sense it has little to do with the country. Whatever it was that I witnessed could well have been in any desolate place anywhere on–or in–this planet (or perhaps even other planets). But, I just needed to get as far away from the memory of those faceless, tentacles writhing as they pulled themselves from our ground.

Fantasy, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

Me, Myself and the Fae

As a child, I had a best friend. He was mischievous and funny. His smile sparkled and his eyes twinkled as we ran through the grass down the bottom of our garden. It was our secret time in our secret world, but he had to leave.

Or was it me that had to leave?

The fog of age clouds the memories of a child. The banality of modern life smothers us under its bills and bustle. All the noise, but none of the music. All of the colours, but none of them sparkle.

I grew up. I finished my studies and got a job in a big city. I moved there and fought through the traffic for eternity. I met a man. He was a good man, then. We married. We were content for a time. But, when the children came, eventually I could not even remember what my best friend looked like anymore.

One evening, after the children had grown up, the parties had finished and work had ended, I sat on our balcony overlooking the twinkling lights of the city below. My bones ached, or was it my heart? My hands looked so old that I did not recognise them anymore. How was I this person now? Suddenly, I remembered him. I suddenly remembered how real he made me feel in my secret world. Our secret world.

I stood on the edge of the balcony. Far below, I could feel the long, cool grass and all the mysteries it contained. My man was out with another woman. He was not my man anymore. My house was empty and my home was far, far away. The children had their own lives and I was not included. We were all strangers to each other. The people who called themselves friends all wanted to talk about men and money, and shoes and celebrities. They all wanted to stay young, but they had lost it too. They did not talk about it, but I knew that they could not see the colours anymore either.

Far, far below me, I could feel him. He was calling to me. The secret, magical world was still there. I just had to find it. He wanted me to come play. Come dance with him. Come home. He wanted me to see all the colours I had forgotten. He wanted me to touch the sky and breathe in the infinite air. I could see his pale, thin hand stretching out like a wispy twig from the old tree we used to climb.

“Just a step away. Just a step will take you home. Just a wee lil’ step, and you won’t be alone…”

And I stepped towards him. I stepped back to the long, cool, uncut grass at the shady, bottom of the garden. I could feel the infinite air rushing passed me with that single step… I was going home.

“It has been a long, long time, child,” he quietly chuckled, his musical voice sending sheer joy down my spine as his eyes sparkled green and all the colours exploded around me, “Welcome home, child, welcome home.“

Horror & Dark Fiction

Little Lily White

grave

In the woods, there is a small, overgrown path. This path leads to a small, overgrown clearing. In this small, overgrown clearing lies a weathered, moss-covered gravestone. There is no name chiselled onto it nor any flowers or gifts on the grave.

Only after a few drinks will farmers in that land speak about it. They will lean in close, so you can smell the manure and the booze on them and see all the cracks that the Sun and the wind have carved into them over the years. And then they will hoarsely whisper that that is where Lily White is buried.

If you ask them anything more, they will bumblingly excuse themselves and leave. You can try asking someone else at the bar. You can try, but in places like this with simple people like this, darkness is all the more terrifying. Not even all the airs and graces of the royal court itself could hide the stink that wafts through the crowd here when you ask about Lily White.

This is because she had grown up with all the other labourers in the lower fields of one of the medium-size farms around these woods. Even as a child she was pretty, but as a young lady she was particularly ravishing. She had black hair falling around her smooth skin and enchantingly dark eyes as her graceful curves suggested much, much more.

She was so beautiful that the farmer asked her father for his son’s hand in marriage to her. We know little about Lily White’s parents, but we can assume that they agreed and so it was that Lily White got married to the farmer’s son.

That did not last long, for soon it was the farmer himself sneaking into Lily White’s room at night. And then his son turned up dead one day after a farming accident while the farmer’s wife killed herself in her grief.

The farming community was shocked, but the farmer was a respectable man–reasonably wealthy, in fact–and so he did the right thing by the customs of the day: he married Lily White, so that she would be taken care of.

Unfortunately, three days after the handfasting ceremony when the awaited period of waiting had passed, the farmer’s heart stopped beating over his oats and tea in the morning.

Three funerals in as little months at the same farm. This was enough to start the town talking. The Mayor himself stepped in and visited the farm. Lily White was living there with a handful of servants and the old labourers on the fields. The Mayor spent a whole day there talking to her, but eventually came back to the town and went straight to bed early. Apparently, the conversations had been exhausting, such was the pressure and stresses of his job.

The next morning, the Mayor announced to those that would listen–and he would repeat to anyone that subsequently asked–that he was satisfied that Lily White was comfortable and managing the farm well. He further believed that this was all just a series of unfortunate events, and any dark rumours against the character of Mrs White would be dealt with swiftly and harshly. He would have to go and check-in on her, as was his civic duty as mayor, you know, just to make sure things were going well over there. But he had every confidence in her managing the farm.

And so, just to be sure, the Mayor started visiting Lily White regularly. At first, he would ride out there on his fancy white horse once in a while. But then it became once a week and, before long it was almost once a day. Eventually, he just asked her to move into his home at the centre of town. His wife was old and bed-ridden, but he had plenty of servants that would look after Lily White’s needs and she could go shopping in the fancy shops down the Main Road.

The next thing the townsfolk knew, Lily White was living at the Mayor’s house and appearing on his arm as he strolled through the town. He would gaze hungrily at her beautiful form whenever he thought no one was looking, but answer any questions about the arrangement as him just doing his civic duty. Besides, women cannot be left alone out on remote farms when the dark woods are just there and bandits could come raiding at any time.

And then the Mayor’s wife–already poor of health–drew her last breath a few month’s after Lily White moved into their home. Now, the Mayor’s wife was already old and sick with consumption, so this–like some of the other events–could well have been pure coincidence. But, as some of the more cynical townsfolk and farmers liked to point out, it was funny how often coincidence happened around Lily White.

The Mayor, though, did not suddenly die. No, he kept living quite well and, in fact, got more active in the town. He started imposing a tax on merchants trading there. Then taxed the farmers that came into the town. Eventually, with a royal letter that he had secured, he rode out to each farm to individually tax on the harvest for the town’s coffers.

Perhaps not unusual, right? Taxes tend to be imposed by the lazy and the powerful, right?

Except that clothes began to arrive at the Mayor’s house. Packages of all manner of fancy thing, from hats to dresses. Dressmakers from out of town would appear in sparkling carriages before riding off quickly. Each time Lily White would step out of that house, she was dressed head-to-toe like some court princess. More and more gold and jewels began to glitter from her form as the number of servants that followed her expanded.

And then one day a royal carriage appeared at the Mayor’s house. A whole regalia of soldiers with bright muskets and snappy horses followed it. Out of the intimidating carriage stepped a prince briefly before disappearing into that mysterious house.

All fell quiet in the town. Everyone was waiting and holding their breath. No one knew quite why, but they were all nervous for what would come from this visit by the prince.

They were not disappointed: when Lily White left the Mayor’s house with the Prince, the Mayor stood howling, red-faced with snot and tears streaking down his chubby face. But the Prince’s soldiers stood with their muskets ready before the carriage. Not even the bewitched Mayor was silly enough to try anything here.

And so Lily White rode out of town and never looked back. Some say she is consort to the King now, the Prince having died in a riding accident? Some say she slipped off to a foreign land where she married an Emperor after his first wife passed away? Some say, though, that she eventually grew old and her hold over men weakened, so she had to settle for an old, fat noble marriage where could at least live in comfort wearing her way through the former wife’s cupboard?

Who knows where such people end up. All that we do know is three days after Lily White left with the Prince, the Mayor strung himself up by his neck from his balcony overlooking the square in town. He was very much dead by the time the locals woke up and found him; his face purple and his limbs cold and stiff.

After all the taxes and the abuse, the locals did not care much for his final resting place. But, as were customs of the day, he was buried in a box in the ground with a gravestone to his name. Only, his name was not on it and the box was put in the ground far away in a little clearing at the end of an old hunter’s path in the woods.

Then the locals appointed a new mayor. They made sure he had a young, healthy wife. They made sure he had a small farm too, and got rid of all those unfortunate taxes.

And then the locals went back to the fields and tried to forget about the dark days of Little Lily White.

But, somewhere far away, she is out there wrapping her merciless tentacles around some powerless man’s heart and squeezing every drop of gold from his doomed existence.

Fantasy, Horror & Dark Fiction

Hands in the Woods

Leave a comment

hands-in-the-forest

“Don’t go down to the woods tonight, little girl,” said the grizzled, old man while sucking on his half-lit pipe, “The Sleepers there will be waking from their dark, ageless slumber to dance in the bloodless moonlight like wild dogs. They will drain you of your virgin blood, little girl, because no one has ever come back alive.”

The younger, less-grizzled man next to him chuckled loudly, “No, no, old man! Are you saying that we are a village with only virgins wandering around in our woods? We won’t last this generation if that is true. It has nothing to do with virgins or blood. No, the Sleepers don’t dance and they couldn’t care less about the moon or your sexual proclivities,” the man leaned forward, looking intensely at the young girl, “Sweety, the Sleepers rise from where they once fell on their ancient battlefield to haunt the old willow trees that grew over their graves. They climb the boughs to scout the battlefield. Our woods are a battlefield just as real to them now as it was to them back all those ages ago in whatever ancient kingdom they were once part of. Today is the anniversary of their great, forgotten battle, and so, Sweety, we all huddle up in this warm, cozy bar with everyone and drink until dawn before going back out. The Sleepers will be sleeping once again and all will be fine in this world of ours then.”

“W-what do the Sleepers look like?” the wide-eyed little girl managed to ask the two men before her mother found her and dragged her away to sit with her family. But, this question sparked a heated debate amongst the two men. Soon enough a number of men from other tables joined the debate.

“Dark, twisted, hairy forms with bloated hands that float in front of them,” one medium-grizzled man piped up, “My Cuz told me he once saw them across the river late one night. They float all ghastly-like out there–”

Another man laughed, slamming his tankard on the worn, wooden table, “And how would your drunken Cuz know such things? He was probably pissed and saw your mother fetching water!”

This was met with an uproar of loud laughter and manly back-slapping. Another round of ale was ordered for everyone. The inside of the inn was warm and packed. Most of the villagers were in there that evening. They were all laughing and joking amongst themselves. There was flirting amongst the young and tale-telling amongst the old, but no one was in the mood for anything more.

Outside the night was cold and the woods were dark.

Outside the Sleepers were waking up. They were crawling from their nests inside the unique willow trees that grew in that wood. Their hairy, eight-legged forms had a pattern on their backs in a soft whitish-pink that made them look almost like a human hand from a distance.

A whole forest of hairy, eight-legged human hands was crawling out from their nests in the boughs of the willows. Like some dark and twisted ritual, they all climbed to the tops of their trees. At the top of the trees, poking out above the woods, there was the cold wind that constantly blew from the mountains. It blew down those rugged peaks through this valley and out to the next forest a kingdom away. Each Sleeper would spin an off-white sail, stand up on its back four legs–four other hairy insectoid legs spread upwards–and flick out its sail to catch the cold wind.

One by one, each spider took off, floating upwards and onwards like a silent, hideous, hairy hand over the dark woods. One by one, they would disappear into the night.

Only, nothing really disappears. The Sleepers would reappear, falling from the sky in the nearby kingdom. They would silently fall from the night sky in another wood outside another village that were also huddled indoors telling stories about the annual flight of the Fallers that dropped from the dark sky once a year to steal away mortals caught in their webs…

And, back in the wood in the boughs of those old willow trees, the spiders’ eggs lay awaiting the day in a year’s time when they too could fly to the mating grounds.

Fantasy

The Illusionist’s Maze

Leave a comment

illusionist

The light of day recedes and a chilly, silence covers the air as you step over the threshold into the infamous maze.

From the outside, it looks just like a dark, overgrown cave entrance in the side of a rugged mountain, but local legend said that an immortal wizard had built the maze out of boredom. Since before the village was founded, he has always lured adventurers into the maze’s clutches with the promise of treasure. But his true aim is just  to amuse himself across the endless ages with the falsely heroic struggles of those who step into his realm.

No one knows how true the legend is, but it is a fact that no one had ever come out of the maze alive. If the ancient, forgotten language chiseled into the rock face is anything to go by, then it is also true that the maze predates the small peasant village a couple miles away. It likely even predates the current line of kings ruling this quiet little land.

A tingle runs down your spine as you pass a decrepit statue of some old man gazing out at some unknown era. The rock is weathered, cracking and covered with moss and ivy, much like the walls of this place. Perhaps he is the wizard, you think, or maybe not. You doubt that you will ever truly know, but the same curiosity that drove you to leave your own small, little farming village and explore the wide world drives you deeper into the dark maw of that ancient structure.

You turn the first corner in the maze and the light and noise of day fades away. It is replaced by a tense, brooding darkness. The chill air is still and the very maze seems to be waiting in anticipation for your next move. It feels like hidden eyes are watching you with ill-intent.

In front of you are three corridors heading off in separate directions. You can instinctively know that only one of these options is the right one, but which one?

You light a torch you are carrying. Its tar-tip splutters to life, casting a flickering, sickly light around you. You check your weapons: your sword is strapped at your side and your dagger is slipped into your boots. You call the former Big and the latter Small, because you are both a practical man and you know that all great adventurers name their blades. It gives the bards something to sing about much later, but all of that is far from your mind right now.

The air from the one corridor smells vaguely of rot and something much, much fouler. The air from the other two corridors smells old, but fine. As you step forward, though, you notice that one of these other two tunnels has deep scratch marks on some of its stone wall and you sense a lurking doom waiting for you at the end of it. It almost feels like you know that you should not walk that corridor.

And so you choose the remaining corridor to follow and begin to walk carefully down it, all the while watching for traps and things far worse. The hair on the back of your neck is raised and you still feel like unseen eyes are quietly watching your every step.

Suddenly you are surrounded by a thousand, dark-eyed rouges. A sputtering torch in their one hand with the other hand hovering over the hilt of a sword at their side.

You smile. This is the first of the illusions. They are all you walking down the corridor that you are walking down. You stop and look carefully at each one of them. They are all exactly the same. They are all your reflections wrought by magic in this dark place.

You take a small step forward. They all take a small step forward. You raise your torch and peer around. They all raise their torches and peer around.

And then you smile and your sword flashes out. Steel shatters the illusion and a terrible howl pierces the heavy darkness of the maze. The one reflection was fractionally too slow to follow your actions. The one reflection did not have the same scar you have just below your chin where a kobold’s wicked claw tore the skin. And the one reflection falls dead at your feet, shifting into a dark, hairy beast with claws and teeth like a mountain bear.

All the magic mirrors on the walls shatter and blow away as foul-smelling dust. The darkness in the maze seems to retreat for a moment like a wounded animal, before rushing back to surrounded you.

Your torch flickers and you are standing alone in the same tunnels again, but with a slain beast at your feet.

You wipe the blood off Big on the beast and sheeth it again. You can feel the comforting weight of Small in your boot. You smile grimly and step over the beast, continuing on your way.

It will take more than that, old man, to trick me, you think, as you wind your way down the dark, endless corridor and deeper into the maze.

Right at the end of the maze, an ancient old man is standing. His skin is taunt over his bones making his near skeletal features look chiseled into the darkness that surrounds him. Brustling white eyebrows cast his face in more shadows than the darkness and in his hand he holds an old, warn wand with evil runes carved into it. He smiles and looks at the person lying on the altar before him.

The person lying there is you, but your eyes are closed. Your fists clench and you twitch in your dark, enchanted slumber. Your sword, Big, lies impotently broken in three pieces on the other side of the room and your dagger, Small, is nowhere to be seen. A single drip of blood slides from your nose, down your check and drips onto the cold stone altar, sizzling when it touches it.

“He is encountering the cyclops now,” the ancient wizard rasps, an evil smile dancing across his thin lips, “And then it will be the Chamber of Spiders. I wonder if he will die there again? Maybe he will pass that one this time. He did choose the right corridor this time, but how far will he get?”

An evil laugh echoes off the cold walls in that chamber, but you are oblivious as you walk through what you think is the maze.

But what you do not know and what you will never find out, is that you have already walked that maze and you have already come up against the ancient wizard there. And, trapped in his illusion, you will now walk that maze for eternity or until he is bored of you.

Because, that, dear adventurer, is the Illusionist’s Maze: It does not exist, but you remain trapped in it walking it again and again.

And the evil laughter grows louder while you squirm on that altar, mentally battling a great, smelly cyclops in a cramped, dark corridor filled with spikes…

Horror & Dark Fiction

The Old Monastery

Leave a comment

"Do not fear, my children, for we have many trees around here."

“The leaf falls but once to the ground,” the old monk said slowly, picking his words as he cast his gaze across his students. They all sat cross-legged on the floor before him, their orange robes and shaved heads blurring into one attentive crowd.

Later that year one of his students would die in training, a snapped spine rupturing. No amount of chi or sweet-smelling smoke could save the child. They were all orphans here, so there was no family to send his body back to. So they mixed the ashes into the walls of the new monastery wing that they were building. This was like they had always done and, briefly, some of the students wondered how many people’s ashes were mixed into the walls around them.

One of the students actually asked the old monk about this. The old monk just smiled and said: “A leaf falls but once to the ground.”

But it was a place of love and kindness, and all the orphans that came were taken in, cared for, schooled and made the family.

Unfortunately, the rest of the lands were not so kind. Civil war flared up as clans vied for power, innocents falling amidst the clashes. Some clans even began attacking villagers, targeting places of safety in other clan territories.

And then vicious mercenaries and a hardened army were outside the monastery walls. They had death in their hearts and blood on their mind.

The old monk called all the children together. They sat down one last time, the shaved heads and orange robes made a beautiful flower before the old monk and he smiled.

“The leaf falls but once to the ground,” the old monk started, “but on the ground, it does not disappear. Being separated from the tree does not make it less of a leaf. Rather the leaf becomes one with the ground from which the next tree and the next thousand trees grow from. Do not fear, my children, for we have many trees around us here.”

Slowly and quietly, the dead began to rise from their monasteries very walls. In absolute silence, they began to climb out of the walls, blank faces, shaved heads and dirty, orange robes. They were not angry, or bitter or hateful. They were the loved orphans taken in by the body of this great tree, and they were here to protect it as a family.

And protect it they did.

There would be myths written about that battle when the rebel army of Wu Chang fell at the hands of ghosts. There would be whispered stories of the dead rising and an ethereal army charging from the small, isolated monastery’s walls like a portal to the afterworld itself. But none of them would tell of the old monk and his family of lost children that had lived there.