Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (31 page)

But we do not care if Dan understands or not. For what Dan has done to we, making we ugly, we do not care if Dan understands or not. 

Afterward, we are not the same, but we try. We try to be we beautiful we.

Doris shows up as we sit on the sofa, television still on from last night. They nonsense. We sit up proud as Doris turns to face we and lets out a tiny scream of surprise.

We must have succeeded. Perhaps we are even more beautiful than before.

Doris approaches we slowly. Doris’s always dark clouds face is now contorted much as Sarah’s had been distorted when Sarah left. Doris glances away from we, around the apartment, and sees the open door to Granmama’s sewing room, where we left the remains of Dan.

We did not need all of Dan.

“What have you done?”

We smile we one remaining pleasant smile and one stitched on pleasant smile.

“What have you done?”

Doris takes out Doris’s cell phone with shaking hand.

We listen:

“Broggs. You need to come to Belladonna’s apartment now. No, Broggs. No. She’s … Dan’s dead. What? She … She cut him up. She killed him and cut him up. She’s different, not the same. What? She’s … It’s as if something happened and …” And pause, listening to Broggs. “She’s sitting in front of me, on the sofa. She’s got Dan’s arms and legs stitched to slits in her flesh at her shoulders and hips. She’s got … she’s …” Pause again, speechless. We beauty must make Doris speechless. “She’s like … like a Frankenstein’s monster version of who she was. Of what she was. You need to get here now. Get somebody here, now. What? No, not long. I can’t stay here long, goddamnit. Haven’t you been listening to me?
Get somebody here, now!”

Doris closes Doris’s cell phone and backs away toward the front door. Doris places Doris’s hand on the door handle. Doris must be eager for Broggs to show up. To show Broggs we beautiful we. Doris stares at us with strange look in Doris’s eyes.

We listen deeper:

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

We must inspire awe now. God-like. We stand and open we two functioning arms and two Dan arms toward Doris, to offer Doris a hug. Doris leans away from we, back pressed to the door. We understand Doris’s apprehension. Doris has never seen such beauty.

We are beautiful. So beautiful. More beautiful than before.

The most beautiful thing in the world.

“There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.” – Edgar Allan Poe.

THE LAST REVELATION OF GLA’AKI, AN EXCERPT

Ramsey Campbell

Sandra hadn’t even let Fairman finish telling her what he knew about Deepfall Water, although it wasn’t a great deal. He’d found none of it worth mentioning in the essay that had ended up online.

Had a cult ever really made its home beside the unfrequented lake? In the 1960s the notion had been revived after Thomas Cartwright, a minor artist specialising in fantastic and occult themes, moved into one of the lakeside houses and died as the result of some kind of attack. A police investigation had proved inconclusive, and a family who were supposed to have abandoned the house before Cartwright took it over had never been tracked down. If the houses had at some stage been served by a private graveyard, no identifiable trace was found, though some tales suggested that the stone tombs had been pulverised beyond recognition.
We Pass from View
,
an occult book by local author Roland Franklyn, even claimed that they’d been destroyed by the police.

Fairman had thought this unsuitable for mentioning in
Book Hunter Monthly
, and Sandra hadn’t wanted to hear any more. She would have liked his other anecdotes even less – schoolboy stupidity, he imagined she would call them. They dated from his days at Brichester High, a quarter of a century after the Cartwright business. The lake had become a place you dared your friends to visit after dark, and he’d assumed his fellow pupils had borrowed the idea from films, though the originator of the challenge had lived on the edge of Brichester nearest the lake. Those who ventured there brought back increasingly extreme stories: the lake had begun to throb like an enormous heart, or a procession of figures as stiff as bones had been glimpsed among the trees on the far side of the water, or a globular growth on a stalk in the middle of the lake had turned so as to keep a party of teenagers in sight, and they’d realised it was an eye. How could any of this have been visible at night? At the time Fairman hadn’t been surprised that the adventurers had ended up with nightmares, but once the headmaster learned of the visits to the lake he’d forbidden them. Apparently his fierceness was daunting enough, since the lake reverted to the status of a rumour. Since then, so far as Fairman knew, it had been visited mostly by the kind of people who tried to plumb the depths of Loch Ness, and they’d found just as little evidence of anything unnatural.

He didn’t think he would ever tell Sandra that he’d visited Deepfall Water. He’d hoped to bring his essay more to life, but perhaps he also meant to prove that he wasn’t quite the bookish introverted fellow his schoolmates had thought him. He could see no reason to go at night, and even on a February afternoon the place had seemed unnecessarily dark, no doubt because of the trees that stooped close to the unpaved track from the main road as well as surrounding the lake. They overshadowed the row of three-storey houses that huddled alongside a cobblestone pavement at the edge of the water. All six roofs had caved in, and some of the floors were so rotten that they’d collapsed under the weight of debris. Great leaves of blackened wallpaper drooped off the walls of a house in the middle of the terrace, and Fairman had wondered if this was the one most recently occupied, nearly half a century ago. None of the windows contained even a fragment of glass, and he suspected his old schoolmates might have been at least partly responsible. The buildings seemed to gape at the expanse of water like masks lined up to demonstrate they had no identity of their own. He’d found the thought oddly disturbing as he went to the edge of the lake.

The murky water stretched perhaps half a mile to the trees where some of his schoolfellows had claimed to see a procession that shouldn’t have been walking. He doubted you could see that even with a flashlight, given how close together the trees grew. The depths of the lake were even harder to distinguish. It was fringed by large ferns, but he’d made out just a few inches of the stalks beneath the surface, which was so nearly opaque that he might have imagined the mud was being stirred up by some activity in the lake. In fact the water had been absolutely stagnant, and he’d peered harder into it as though he was compelled to find some reason to have visited Deepfall Water. He’d had the odd impression that around it all the trees were craning to imitate him, enclosing the lake with an iris of darkness that was capable of shrinking the sky overhead. That must have been an effect of his concentration, along with the idea that his scrutiny could waken some presence in the depths; in fact, a sluggish ripple had begun to spread from the middle of the lake, followed by another and another. They’d advanced so slowly that their lethargy had seemed to take hold of him; he could have fancied that the waves of his brain had been reduced to the pace of the hypnotic ripples. The thought had jerked him back to consciousness, not least of the unnaturally premature dark. As the ripples grew audible he’d turned his back and retreated to his car. He’d heard water splashing the edge of the pavement by the time he’d succeeded in starting the engine. Of course the ripples must have been caused by a wind, since all the trees around the lake had bent towards the water.

Besides these impressions, he’d seemed to take something else home. Like Sandra, for whom it was a reason to be proud of her rationality and control, he didn’t dream or at least never remembered having done so, but for some nights after visiting Deepfall Water he’d been troubled by wakeful thoughts. Whenever he drifted close to sleep he’d found himself thinking of the investigators who had tried to search the lake. The notion of sounding it had brought to mind a disconcertingly vivid image of a vast shape burrowing deeper into the bed of the lake, raising a cloud of mud so thick that it blotted out the denizen. No doubt this betrayed how preoccupied he was with the impossibly rare book, but he’d been assailed by the vision several times a night, until he’d begun almost to dread attempting to sleep. If dreaming was like that, it wasn’t for him.

Excerpt from: “The Last Revelation of Gla’aki,” 2013

About the Contributors

Jerrod Balzer

In addition to a horror target, Jerrod Balzer is the co-founder of Skullvines Press, and he’s the website/ebook tech and cover designer for its umbrella company, KHP Publishers, Inc. He rarely behaves but even at his grumpiest, he won’t turn down a good laugh. Look for him at
jerrodbalzer.com
and wherever else Jerrod-Balzers can be found.

*     *     *

Doug Blakeslee

The author lives in the Pacific Northwest and spends his time writing, cooking, gaming, and following the local WHL hockey team. His interest in books and reading started early thanks to his parents, though his serious attempts at writing only started a few years ago. From time to time he blogs about writing and other related topics at The Simms Project at
http://thesimmsproject.blogspot.com/
. His current project is an urban fantasy novella featuring a group of changelings in the modern world. He can be reached on Facebook or
[email protected]
.

*     *     *

Michael Burnside

Michael Burnside is a graduate of Ohio University whose inquisitive nature has led him to study and work in a wide variety of fields. His interests include gaming, science, computer technology, history, politics, and, of course, writing.

Michael is the creator of the role playing games Space Conspiracy and World War Two Roleplay. He is now branching out into fiction writing, specializing in the steampunk and horror genres. Read more nice things about him, as well as some free stories, at
www.michaelburnside.com
.

*     *     *

Ramsey Campbell

The
Oxford Companion to English Literature
describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are
The Face That Must Die
,
Incarnate
,
Midnight Sun
,
The Count of Eleven
,
Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight
,
Secret Story
,
The Grin of the Dark
,
Thieving Fear
,
Creatures of the Pool
,
The Seven Days of Cain
,
Ghosts Know
and
The Kind Folk.
Forthcoming are
Bad Thoughts
and
Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach. The Last Revelation of Gla’aki
and
The Pretence
are novellas.
His collections include
Waking Nightmares
,
Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things
,
Told by the Dead
and
Just Behind You
, and his non-fiction is collected as
Ramsey Campbell, Probably
. His novels
The Nameless
and
Pact of the Fathers
have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in
Prism
,
Dead Reckonings
and
Video Watchdog
. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at
www.ramseycampbell.com
.

*     *     *

Spencer Carvalho

Spencer Carvalho has written short stories for various literary magazines and anthologies.
 Revolver Concert was previously published in the Barcelona Review issue 70 2010, Litter Box Magazine, issue 9 Sept. 2010, ken*again Summer 2011, Inner Sins issue 4 Dec. 2012, Fever Dreams Ezine Issue 1 January-March 2013, Allegory Volume 21/48 Spring 2013, and eRomance volume 1 no. 6 June 2013. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies Certain Circuits Volume 1, Another Wild West, Remembrances of Wars Past: A War Veterans Anthology, and Tales of the Undead-Suffer Eternal: Volume 3.

*     *     *

Stinky Cat

Stinky Cat is a long-haired grey domestic feline suffering from hyperthyroidism and chronic diarrhea. Stinky’s hobbies include excessive purring, table jumping and eating other cats’ food. Stinky’s birthplace and age remain unknown.

*     *     *

Scott Colbert

Scott Colbert is the author of the horror novella Barbed Wire Kisses and the short story sampler Detritus. He is also a contributor and editor for the movie website
www.talkbacker.com
. Scott resides in Phoenix, AZ with his cat Odetta and can be reached at
www.scottcolbert.com
.

*     *     *

Joshua Dobson

Joshua Dobson likes to make his
 own fun some of which can be seen at
http://joshuadobson.deviantart.com/

*     *     *

Deb Eskie

Deb Eskie is a resident of Somerville, MA and has an M.Ed in creative arts education. With a background in women’s studies, her focus as a writer is to expose the woman’s experience through unsettling tales that highlight the dilemma of sexual repression and oppression. By combining the genres of feminist and horror fiction she aims to not only disturb readers, but deliver a message that is informative and thought provoking.

In 2005 Deb’s play, Tell Me About Love, was featured in the Provincetown Playwright Festival. She has been featured in online magazines such as Deadman’s Tome, Bad Moon Rising, Death Head Grin, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia. Deb has also had a number of short stories published through Pill Hill Press, Post Mortem Press, Cruentus Libri Press, and Short Scary Tales Publications.

*     *     *

Tony Flynn

Tony is 25 years old, and lives in Dublin, Ireland. A writer of poetry, screenplays and short stories; he is terribly afraid of most everything and therefore has a particular interest in the horror genre. Previous publishing credits include the short story 'Monica' which appeared online in the Autumn 13 edition of wordlegs.com.
 Other writing can be found via 
http://tonywritesstuff.tumblr.com

*     *     *

Carl Thomas Fox

Carl Thomas Fox Lives in Swansea with his fiancé, Samantha Smith, and their two daughters, Amelia and Nevaeh.  Carl is a teaching assistant in the Reception area of a Primary School. Primarily a writer of horror, but also of thrillers, science fiction, sword and sorcery and fantasy and children’s novels and picture books. A pagan with a deep interest in the occult and ancient mythologies, all of his work will all be part of what is known as the Wellworlds mythology, with invented languages. You can find him on Facebook at
[email protected]
.

*     *     *

Ken Goldman

Ken Goldman, former Philadelphia teacher and
 an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association, has homes on the Main Line in Pennsylvania and at the Jersey shore depending upon his need for a tan.  His stories have  appeared in over 680 independent press publications with over twenty due in 2014. Ken’s tales have received seven honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has written four books: YOU HAD ME AT ARRGH!! (Sam's Dot Publishers); DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (A/A Productions), STAR-CROSSED (Vampires 2 Publishers),  and DESIREE, (Damnation books). His novel, ...OF A FEATHER,  is due in late 2013 or early 2014 (Horrific Tales Publishers). Ken would be famous except for the fact nobody seems to know who he is.  Visit Ken’s Facebook page at : 
http://www.facebook.com/kenneth.goldman1
 
 

*     *     *

John Goodrich

John Goodrich has never enjoyed the company of monkeys. Something to do with their manners.

*     *     *

Wesley D. Gray

Wesley D. Gray is an author of fiction and poetry. His work is difficult to classify, as he writes words of darkness and light, things both beautiful and grotesque. That is to say, his writing is diverse. He doesn't easily adhere to one particular genre, although much of his published work can be found in the speculative realms of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. He currently resides in Florida with his wife and two children. Visit Wesley and learn more about his writing on his website,
www.wesdgray.com
.

*     *     *

Meagan Hightower

Meagan Hightower is a writer and music producer from Japan and North Carolina. Her work has published in the
Peace College Prism
magazine and in the
Peace Times
newspaper. When she is not writing, she can be found playing with voice synths and other virtual instruments.

*     *     *

Mathias Jansson

Mathias Jansson is a Swedish art critic and poet. He has been published in such magazines as The Horror Zine Magazine, Dark Eclipse, Schlock, The Sirens Call and The Poetry Box. He has also contributed to several anthologies from Horrified Press and James Ward Kirk Fiction as Suffer Eternal anthology Volume 1-3, Hell Whore Anthology Volume 1-3, Barnyard Horror and Serial Killers Tres Tria. Homepage: 
http://mathiasjansson72.blogspot.se/

*     *     *

Melanie-Jo Lee

Melanie-Jo was born at Women’s Pavilion Hospital in Winnipeg Manitoba, July 28th, 1982. Both parents were at the birth, and dogged her with their common sense and watchful eyes until she left home to wander the country at 18. She currently resides somewhere in the valleys of Manitoba, and writes about her two favorite places, the Pembina Valley and Snow Valley. If you happen to see some of her work, whether you like it or not, she’d love to hear from you at
[email protected]
.

*     *     *

Kerry Lipp and Emily Meier

Emily and Kerry are an unlikely pair who found a bond over hating the same skanks, liking the same beers, and ignoring 90% of what the other says. Kerry spends his days in Dayton writing and getting turned down by women, and Emily resides in Cincinnati with her son, who will never be allowed to read this story. Links would be
@kerrylipp
on Twitter and New World Horror - Kerry G.S. Lipp on Facebook. She doesn't have/want any links included.

*     *     *

Mike Meroney

Mike Meroney has been writing stories and poetry since the age of 8. He is his own genre and writes for both children and adults. He finds particular comfort in dark writing, loves coffee and thinks that dogs are better than humans. His writing can be found at his own blog site (
http://thatmanitouguy.blogspot.com/
) as well as a horror themed blog that he shares with his wife (
http://deadbydawn66.blogspot.com/
)

*     *     *

Christine Morgan

Christine Morgan is so terribly afraid of being exposed as a fandom hack that she’s written over two million words of fanfiction since 1996 and posted it all online under her own real name in hopes that nobody will ever ever ever find out. She’s also the author of about twenty novels and has had dozens of stories published in anthologies and magazines. Visit her at
http://www.christine-morgan.com/
on Facebook at
ChristineMorganAuthor
and on Twitter at
@CMorganAuthor