October 31, 2011

From “Horror at Ridge Peak Mine” by Luther Frank Robinson

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And the creatures…Shan had called them zombies, and they’d certainly been close enough during the harrowing flight from the open mineshaft. But even then, Bock had noticed features that made their relentless pursuers something other than human: extra limbs, vicious claws, gaping maws in the chest and arms.

Now, with the searchlight on, he could see them in good light for the first time since sunset.

They weren’t the same creatures that had attacked earlier with bare hands or whatever weapons they could flail about. Now only certain tangential features were recognizably human–a hand here, and eye there, a few vestigial tufts of hair visible on the glistening hides of the monstrosities.

Shan’s “zombies” had been evolving, and fast.

And they were swarming about the searchlight beam like moths to a flame.

 

October 27, 2011

From “The Bloody Print” by Albert R. Fostere

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“Whenever he closed his eyes he could see the image of a bloody handprint, like it was burned into his eyelids. The doctors said there was nothing wrong, that it was all in his head. He tried to ignore it, but it was always there, like the spots you see when you stare at a light for too long.”

Ralph made a show of yawning and stretching.

“Then, one day, he came home to find his house empty and his family missing. The door were locked and nothing had been disturbed…aside from one bloody handprint near the basement door–his wife’s.”

“That’s it?” Ralph said. “That’s the best you can do? Give me the flashlight.”

Arnie, who thought that his tale had been a masterpiece of horror, grudgingly surrendered the torch to his competitor and slunk off toward the latrine with only his measly pocket light in hand.

When he got there, Arnie played the light over the whitewashed metal, looking for the handle. Instead, it alighted on something that hadn’t been there in the daylight.

A bloody child-sized handprint.

 

October 18, 2011

From “Scaring Klyde” by Jonnie G. Humpbert II

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People on Verner Street had been putting up with Klyde’s Halloween hijinks for years. Old-timers remembered him moving in back in the 60’s and even then putting together elaborate decorations, scares, and even a haunted garage that had brought noise complaints from three blocks away. Back then, though, his Devil’s Night reveries had to compete with a day job and a family. His retirement in 1985 and his wife’s death a year later removed those obstacles, allowing him to pursue Halloween virtually full-time.

There’s still talk of the mad scientist set-up from 1987, which had involved sixteen pounds of dry ice and three pig carcasses. More than one teen hardened by slasher movies nevertheless voided their bowels in 1989 when Klyde’s self-dismemberment schtick had splattered them with what turned out to be chicken giblets. The pranks became notably more mean-spirited in later years, but Klyde was crafty enough not to be caught red-handed, so to speak.

That’s how, in the fall of 1999, a group gathered with the sole and express purpose of giving old man Klyde a taste of his own medicine.

 

October 3, 2011

From “Sepulcher of the Non-Euclidean God-Essence” by H. Brent Ryder

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This post is part of the October 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is to compose a dark story with Lovecraftian words..

The entire landing party, at least half of Captain Kobeyashi’s crew, had slaughtered each other in the grotto. They lay in a tangled mess, spreading fresh blood into the sand from gaping pistol, rifle, and sword wounds. The furthest corpse was at the very foot of a coral altar heaped with gold.

Kobeyashi himself was near the entrance, seated on his knees. His starched white dress uniform was unrecognizable, spattered with gore and unidentifiable chunks of human flesh.

“Easy now,” said Harrison, leveling his gun. He motioned Joy forward with his free hand.

“What…what in God’s name did you do?” Joy cried. She found herself numbly trying to count the bodies.

“Did you ever wonder what happened to the two thousand people who lived here in 1914?” Kobeyashi said evenly, without meeting his foes’ gaze. “They did not abandon the island. The Saudeleur didn’t sign away the islanders’ lands to Bernhard…he signed away their souls.”

“Like you, giving up everything to run after some treasure?”

“Don’t you see? This isn’t a treasure trove, and that isn’t gold it contains. It’s the sepulcher of a dead god, piled high with its manifest essence.” Kobeyashi produced a pistol from the depths of his blood-spattered uniform. As if preparing for a dress inspection, he slowly and deliberately loaded it.

“Watch it,” Harrison barked. His voice quivered on the edge of breaking.

Kobeyashi gave no sign that he’d heard. He raised the pistol to his right temple. “Incorporeal for longer than humankind has existed, now enshrined once more in flesh. A pity I won’t be able to see it.”

He fired, and slumped to the ground.

“Ninety-nine…” Joy said. She seized Harrison’s shoulders. “Ninety-nine sacrifices! We have to get out of here!”

Harrison stared blankly at her for a moment, before Ishi’s warning flooded his memory and his eyes widened.

Before either could make it to the coral staircase, the grotto was gripped by a series of violent tremors. The spilled blood began to boil, to vaporize, as skin and viscera sloughed off the corpses. Rivers of meat and bone churned toward the center of the cavern, where they were joined and twisted into terrible amorphous non-Euclidean shapes. An inhuman roar flooded the grotto – the birthing cry of something altogether too terrible to comprehend.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
Cath
Diana Rajchel
Alynza
lufftocraft
robeiae
pyrosama
dolores haze
leahzero
AbielleRose
pezie
MysteryRiter
JSSchley
Inkstrokes
Alpha Echo
Proach
AuburnAssassin
spacejock2
Madelein.Eirwen
AlishaS

 

September 23, 2011

From “Interview with a Retired Game Designer” by Paul Y. Declan

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We called ourselves ‘Supprimerlesens,’ which was a bit of an in-joke. Pierre, the lead developer, liked to say that video games subsumed and deleted the senses, so we slapped together the French phrase ‘supprimer le sens’ with no spaces.

It was a very innovative game, and a special processor in the arcade board allowed it to do amazing things with vector graphics…scaling and motion unlike anything else at the time, and more vectors on the screen at once than even dedicated vector systems. We combined it with a series of sophisticated, high-resolution sprites that formed the title, backgrounds, and some gameplay elements. It was all very abstract and geometrical, which is why we called it ‘Pythagoras.’

Of course we were our own testers at first. Everything was going well, and we had a working mocked-up arcade cabinet with schematics for mass-production and several interested arcade companies. Then we brought in outside testers from a local university. One of them had a grand mal epileptic seizure after just a few moments of gameplay. All those flashing lights and spinning colors…

The testers who weren’t susceptible to seizures loved the game, so we modified it and removed the backgrounds. We thought that was enough, but within a month the testers began suffering from a variety of neurological side-effects. Amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors…even a suicide. That should have been the end of things, but the French DGSE signals intelligence unit learned of this and bought us out. We produced a limited run of 10-12 machines, which were each modified by the DGSE before being distributed to ‘test markets’ in the United States.

Washington State, Maine, Montana, the upper peninsula of Michigan…we were told that the DGSE was going to iron out the bugs while using the game cabinets as dead drops for field agents. We beleived them, or told ourselves that we did…we were young, and ambitious, remember. The first murder-suicides put an end to all that.

 

August 23, 2011

From “The Cobh Reel” by Peter McDonnell Jutland

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They called it the Cobh Reel, and it had only been played and danced once.

During Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland, a contingent of men pledged to support a free Ireland found themselves caught between the Scylla of a Royalist garrison and the Charybdis of an advancing Republican formation. Their musicians, drawn from the hinterlands, had knowledge of the Reel passed down from the ancient time of the Irish High Kings, and proposed it to their commander. He, a coward that planned to watch the battle from a nearby escarpment and flee if it went ill, agreed.

He saw the Republicans and Royalists clash with his own force caught between. He even heard snatches of the music through the din of battle joined.

He did not see the force that emptied the battlefield of men, bearing them wailing off to parts unknown and leaving only blood and armor behind.

The few survivors were maddened by what they had seen–blinded, deafened, or shouting only in strange tongues. Every last one was caked in the blood of their fellows. Cromwell’s lieutenants reported that his forces had been wiped out by an ambush, and they were right enough about that. But as to who had done the ambushing, and what the Cobh Reel had to do with it, well…there was a reason it was only used once.

 

August 12, 2011

From “Amur’s Cave” by Hollister Philips-Morely

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At the height of his powers, with around 5,000 cloistered followers and perhaps 10,000 or more admirers or loose adherents to his philosophy, Amur declared that it was time to reveal the great secrets of his movement. The Amurite press duly printed and distributed pamphlets with their prophet’s revelations:

1. Heaven lies not within the skies above but in the earth below.
2. Those who lack the spirituality to ascend to heaven through earthy denial must seek it physically.
3. A connection exists between earth and heaven at the deepest part of the earth accessible by man; anyone to reach it and return will be blessed by the wisdom and riches of heaven.

These “revelations” caused mass defections from Amur’s cult, even though he displayed an item of wrought gold he claimed to have been retrieved from the earthly entrance to heaven. Not long after, his community was broken up by government troops, Amur himself disappeared in the chaos, and his gold was seized and put on display in a museum.

Bizarrely, some adventurers (inspired by the appearance of what has come to be known as Amur’s Crown) have sought the entrance to heaven that he prophesied. Some claim it is near the great Sakhalin borehole; others hold out for Voronya Cave in Abkhazia, or one of the many caves in Sarawak. But many who have sought Amur’s Cave have never returned.

Until now.

 

August 6, 2011

From “The Horror at Demon’s Island” by Jean Phillippe DuClare

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“You consider this to be the lap of luxury, Captain?” Pierre said, indicating his hut with a sweep of the hand. “Believe me, I am almost ready for the regimen and steady diet of penal colony life after this.”

“Tell me what happened, Pierre. And stop talking us in circles or you’ll find yourself under the guillotine or up against a pockmarked wall.”

“The supply ships stopped coming two years ago,” Pierre said. “About when Paris fell. Order broke down, the guards deserted us in the middle of the night and took the only boats. The lucky ones made it ashore by swimming. The unlucky ones? Maybe still on one of the islands. Maybe shark food. Isn’t that what you’re here to find out?”

 

July 9, 2011

From “The Hinison Institute” by E. G. D. Lloyd

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We offer kindness and care to people with debilitating physical injuries, and often the mental problems that accompany them. What people who have never been deeply injured cannot realize is that, while physical wounds may heal and people may learn to adapt to a missing limb, the mental scars often persevere. It’s incumbent upon us not only as physicians but as human beings to treat the whole patient, not only their missing leg or sulfur mustard burns.

That is the credo that the Hinison Institute is founded upon, put forth by Dr. Samuel Hinison in 1909 and adhered to in the decade and a half since. Many have challenged it, just as many have embraced it. But we hope to offer patients and their families something that other treatments cannot: serenity and peace of mind.

“I can still remember every line in that brochure,” Ashton croaked. “Who’d have thought we’d wind up like this after such a start?”

 

July 8, 2011

From “Maxwell’s Staircase” by Adelle Russell Jacobs

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She suddenly looked very weary, very old. “I keep having the same dream, you know. Every night.”

Max studied her for a moment. “What’s it about?” he said, smoothly humoring her until the conversation could be turned back to the matters at hand.

“I dream of this little alcove in my cellar. It used to hold wine racks, I think, but in my dreamer’s eye it conceals a door in the stones, one that leads to an ancient staircase.”

“The staircase to another sub-basement, maybe?” said Max, probing for an opening to take control of their talk. “Or maybe a cave?”

“That’s just the thing,” Isabelle said. “Every night I lift myself out of this old shell and wander downstairs as a young woman. I find the secret to opening that door–it’s different every time–and start to climb down. Every now and then there’s a chink in the wall, but I can’t see through. Whatever’s lighting the stairs–I haven’t a flashlight or candle–doesn’t let me see anything beyond. I just get this…impression…of a vast space beyond. Something dark, inconceivable, even menacing. But even so I’m desperate to see it for myself.”

Max fiddled with his watch under the desk, bored. “What is it?”

“That’s the thing, Mr. Maxwell…I never reach the bottom. Each time I get a little further, but I never see what it is that the steps lead to. Maybe they’re endless. But I’m starting to feel that the steps lead somewhere, and I only hope I live long enough to find out.”

 

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