Violet Lagoon (6 page)
Authors: John Everson
VIII. At Home
illy was a hero. And a victim. The papers painted it both ways. He didn’t think much about it. Instead, he stared at his coffee every morning in his apartment, and wondered when his headache was going to go away.
Wondered, until one day, he felt it shift and move. And his eyes exploded into tears from the pressure.
“Damnit,” he complained, and hung his head into his hands.
When he pulled his head back up, his palms were glistening.
Tears had escaped from his eyes, and as he looked at the white of his hand, he saw the remains of something purple fragmented across his skin. He pressed his hands to his forehead and brought them back, There was another tear left behind.
And another purple glimmer. As he looked closer, the legs of the glimmer moved.
The legs of his new cargo.
The legs that made his headache grow deeper. The legs of spiders with violet eyes.
He thought of the flies, and their bites. And he thought of the maggots that flies normally left behind. These flies, perhaps, left something else. Something that hatched with eight legs.
He remembered the blown-out hole in the back of the skull they had found on the island and groaned.
Maybe this time, they would be gentler, kinder.
But when Billy laid back in his bed, he really didn’t think so.
Instead, he waited for the explosion to build at the back of his skull. He waited for the inevitable.
And he cried purple tears.
About The Author
John Everson
has developed a deep fascination with the culinary joys of jalapenos and New Mexican chiles over the past 13 years since his first book,
Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions
, was published. His favorite band remains The Cure, but he was first in line to buy the new Ke$ha CD. Over the past decade, he has authored seven horror novels and dozens of short stories.
His short work, ranging from light fantasy to erotic horror, has appeared in anthologies like
Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. II), Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. I) The Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror, The Green Hornet Case Files
and many more. His fiction has also appeared in a variety of magazines, including
Dark Discoveries, Grue, Literary Mayhem, Doorways, Bloodsongs, Dead of Night, Terminal Fright
and
Sirius Visions
.
In October of 2000, many of his erotic horror tales were collected and published in hardcover by Delirium Books as
Cage of Bones and Other Deadly Obsessions.
Another collection,
Vigilantes of Love,
followed three years later. His more recent fiction collections include
Needles & Sins, Creeptych
and
Deadly Nightlusts.
Over the past decade, Everson has written seven novels —
Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13
th
,
Siren,
The Pumpkin Man
,
NightWhere
and
Violet Eyes
. His first novel,
Covenant
, won a Bram Stoker Award upon its original limited edition release through Delirium Books in 2004. It was later reissued in mass market paperback by Leisure Books.
NightWhere,
his sixth novel and first for Samhain Publishing, was a 2012 Bram Stoker Award Finalist.
Everson is the publisher of Dark Arts Books (
www.darkartsbooks.com
), a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), a past participant and publications director for the Twilight Tales Reading Series and has served as a longtime copyeditor for Necro Publications and Cemetery Dance. From 1999-2002, he served as a fiction editor for
Dark Regions
magazine.
Despite an omnipresent nagging dream of relocating to warmer climes, John still lives in the west ‘burbs of Chicago with his wife Geri, his son Shaun, and three petulant birds.
Find out more about his fiction, art and music at
www.johneverson.com
.
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