Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Read online

  Welcome to issues 1 through 9 of The Lovecraft eZine! These nine issues were published in 2011, and they are bundled together here for your convenience. The Lovecraft eZine is published once a month: visit www.lovecraftzine.com to read and buy current Kindle or Nook versions. Thanks for reading, and please be sure to leave a review on Amazon for us.

  Mike Davis

  Publisher & Editor

  Table of Contents and Introduction

  ISSUE 1:

  · Sledding and Starlings by Bruce L. Priddy

  · Rickman’s Plasma by William Meikle

  · The Brown Tower by John Prescott

  · The Crane Horror by Bruce Durham

  ISSUE 2:

  · Some Distant Baying Sound by W.H. Pugmire

  · A Different Morecambe by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  · False Light by Adrian Chamberlin

  · Allure by Josh Wagner

  ISSUE 3:

  · Cockroaches by Amanda Underwood

  · A Meeting on the Trail To Hot Iron by Joseph S. Pulver

  · Things We Are Not by Brandon H. Bell

  · Descent Into Shadow and Light by W.H. Pugmire

  · The Slickens by Jeremy Russell

  · The Town of Autumn: Chapter 1 by Mike Davis

  ISSUE 4:

  · All the Gold by Joseph S. Pulver

  · Dreams of Fire and Glass by Neal Jansons

  · O, Lad of Memory and Shadow by W.H. Pugmire

  · Dragon Star Lucky Food by John Medaille

  · Curse the Child by David J. West

  ISSUE 5:

  · The Case of the Galloway Eidolon a Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes story by Bruce Durham

  · The Call of the Dance a Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes story by William Meikle

  · Unearthly Awakening by W.H. Pugmire

  · Dreams of Fire and Glass – part 2 by Neal Jansons

  · Darius Roy’s Manic Grin by Brian Barnett

  ISSUE 6:

  · Ushered On the Wind by Jeffrey J. Taylor & W.H. Pugmire

  · The Wagon’s Trail by Joseph S. Pulver

  · The Audient Void by Mark Lowell

  · In Phantom Isolation by W.H. Pugmire

  · The Weird Studies of Harley Warren by Berin Kinsman

  ISSUE 7:

  · Sky Full of Fire by Corinna Sara Bechko

  · The Lord of Endings by John R. Fultz

  · Loaners by Aaron Polson

  · The Prophecy of Zarah by Jenne Kaivo

  · The Stranger From Out of Town by John Prescott

  ISSUE 8:

  · Desert Mystery! Gas & Go! by Ann K. Schwader

  · The Tunnel Inside the Mountain by A.J. French

  · #Dreaming by William Meikle

  · What Dances In Shadow by Derek Ferreira

  · The Time Eater by Adam Bolivar

  ISSUE 9:

  · Elder Instincts by W.H. Pugmire

  · Among the Dark Places of the Earth by Julio Toro San Martin

  · At Best An Echo by Bradley H. Sinor

  · Stone City, Old as Immeasurable Time by Kelda Crich

  · Just An Accountant by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen

  –

  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  Sledding and Starlings

  by Bruce L. Priddy

  Annie left me behind in that field. I left behind fingers and toes.

  Six inches of snow in two hours, and more on the way. A freak storm no weather man in the city had predicted, no radar had seen coming. One of us had the idea of sledding at the Crescent Hill reservoir, I don’t remember who. Sometimes I think it was her, but all that means it was obviously me.

  We shouldn’t have been out. The roads were paved over in ice, the wipers could not keep up with what was falling out of the sky and the end of Annie’s car refused to stay in one lane. Twice we spun out. The three mile drive to the reservoir took us an hour. We never once thought of going back home. At least I didn’t, and if Annie did, she never put it to voice.

  There was no one else out. We were the only two people in the world.

  The bars in the reservoir’s wrought-iron fence were far enough apart to push our sleds, thin plastic saucers, through but we had to climb over. We were too old for this. Annie was pushing thirty. I’d crossed that line years ago.

  We shed two decades that night.

  The world was drained of color. Everything snow-covered glowed, moon-white. Everything else was indistinguishable silhouettes. Across a field we saw the perfect hill. An earthwork basin for the reservoir water, fifty feet high, steep, no trees close enough for us to break our necks on. The tree closest to the reservoir was alive, full. “Does it still have its leaves?” Annie asked, while we were still far away. But it didn’t sway with the wind.

  We heard the starlings before we saw them. The hiss of snow and ice meeting the ground, the rush of water through the reservoir disappeared in their calls. Annie and I had to yell, even a few feet from each other, to hear over the birds. Annie clutched my hand. “Have you ever seen so many?” I hadn’t. Their droppings reeked acidic, stuck in the back of the throat. We picked a spot on the hill away from the starling tree. But the wind still carried a hint of their stink. Our excitement let us ignore it.

  The hill was almost too steep to climb. Annie laughed every time I slipped, went down into the snow on my hands, knees and face. “Come on old man!” she’d taunt, punctuated with a snowball. At the top of the hill, I pretended to catch my breath, hands on my knees and threatened to throw her under the starling tree. Then I tossed a handful of snow into her face. She tackled me and we wrestled, tried to push each other down the hill, but never pushed hard enough, never let go of the other.

  Before we got on our sleds, Annie read the warning label on her’s. “Certain conditions may cause sled to move at excess speeds,” she said. The label was right. I did not think it was possible to go that fast or that far on a sled. Neither of us could help screaming on the way down or laughing at the other for it. Our speed sent us deep into the field, the slope always carried us towards the starling tree, though we never reached it. Snow sprayed our faces on the way down, went into sleeves and up our pants legs. It stung a little but we were having too much fun to care. We went one at a time, Annie didn’t want us to crash into each other. Near the end of her run, Annie would tip her sled over, crash herself into a snow drift and make angels while she waited for me. When she wasn’t looking, I etched horns on her angels. Then we’d climb back up the hill and do it again.

  Annie had brought the wrong kind of gloves, knit cotton ones that absorbed the snow and tried to freeze to her skin. “I can’t feel my fingers,” she said. I cupped her hands in mine, blew on them.

  “That’s a weird turn of phrase,” I said. “Do we ever really feel any of our body parts? I mean, we never notice them until they’re cold or warm or whatever, something happening to them. Even when they’re numb, we can feel them right?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s not like they’re numb. It’s like nothing’s there. Like they’re gone.” I took off my gloves, helped her hands into them. She put her hands in the pockets of her coat and I put my arms around her.

  “Your hands goin
g to be okay without gloves?” she asked as we warmed each other.

  “Of course,” I said, making my voice deeper, gruff. “I’m a man, baby.” She smirked at me and ground her frozen toboggan in my face.

  “You ready to go again?” she asked me, pretended to box body-blows.

  I turned into the light punches, faked winces. “Sure,” I said. “You warm enough?” She nodded.

  “Let’s hold hands this time. See how long we can keep hang on.” I said. Despite her earlier worries, she needed no convincing. We sat next to each other on the saucers, clutched hands. I leaned in for a kiss. “Our lips’ll freeze together”, she said, “We need to do Eskimo-kisses.” She rubbed her nose against mine, distracted me. She pushed off, pulled me down the hill with her.

  I shouted in surprise and she laughed at me. I closed my eyes against the spray of snow. Her hand tightened around mine, painful. She stopped but I kept going. She made a sound, a cross between a giggle and a sigh, something she only did in bed. I was wrenched off of my sled, flipped, landed face-first in the snow. It hurt but I rolled onto my back, coughing away the pain between laughs.

  “Annie, baby, you okay?” I asked as I looked up at a now clear sky. The moon was out, the world growing brighter. There was only one cloud, black and loose, fast moving away, opposite the wind. She didn’t respond. The starlings, I thought, she hadn’t heard me. I asked again, louder. My voice echoed back to me, the only sound in the field.

  I sat up, looked around. The field was empty. The starlings had left. No Annie, only her sled, sticking out of a drift. I ran over, calling her name again. She’s hurt, I thought. Around the drift was a splatter of blood. Not much, a light nosebleed. I dug until I reached the frozen grass. But she was gone. I screamed her name. Only the trees heard me.

  There were footprints, my boots, her boots, and another set… bare. The ground steamed in them. I thought maybe she’d hit her head, became disoriented, lost her boots. But those bare prints were too big for her feet, too far apart for her, walking or running. I followed them, tried to figure out where they came from. They did not enter or leave the field, only made a path from the starling tree to her sled and back.

  I woke up in a hospital. A security guard found me pacing between the starling tree and the sled, screaming of Annie, delirious from hypothermia. No one knows how long I was out there but it was long enough for my fingers and toes to turn black. The doctors had to take four toes and the halves of three fingers.

  Cops came to ask me questions while I recovered. Annie was found behind the reservoir. And downtown. And in a school yard. And someone’s backyard. Not much. I was never a suspect, already in the hospital when they found what they did of her. When it snows, they find more. Some hair, a piece of skin, an ear. The cops will come to the house, ask if I remember anything, if I’ve seen or heard something that can help them.

  I didn’t see or hear anything. I didn’t see twilight-clouds of starlings take the shape of Annie’s face. Her giggling sigh isn’t buried in their calls. I don’t dream. In those dreams I don’t have, we’re not in the field and Annie doesn’t tell me she’s leaving me for someone else. There isn’t a man, as tall as the moon, pretending to be the starling tree. He doesn’t scoop Annie up, carry her away with the storm. Frostbite and a surgical saw took my fingers and toes, not Annie, not her breath, blackening them as I reached for her. And when it snows, every time it snows, and the police are picking up pieces of her, I don’t see her footprints, in larger, bare prints, circling around our house.

  –

  –

  Bruce L. Priddy has had short stories published in MicroHorror, among other places. He lives in Louisville, KY with his son, cat and the raccoons that often hold MMA tournaments in his attics. He is the editor of EschatologyJournal.org, dedicated to apocalyptic and Lovecraftian flash-fiction. He will soon be writing a column on skepticism for the esoteric website BinnallofAmerica.com.

  Illustration by mimulux.

  Return to the table of contents

  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  Rickman’s Plasma

  by William Meikle

  He would call it “Soundscapes of the City”, and it would make him his fortune, of that Rickman was certain.

  How could it fail?

  All it had taken was a reconfigured dream machine. Courtesy of Dreamsoft Productions, a particularly skilled burglar, and the latest software from MYTH OS, Rickman’s visions of bringing his music to the world were now that much closer to reality.

  For the past forty nights he’d sampled and tweaked, taking the raw sounds that streamed into his loft apartment from the city outside. He merged them with his dream compositions and formed them into a holographic construct of sound and light and ionised gas, an ever-moving plasma bubble that hung like a giant amoeba in the centre of his room.

  As they swam, his creations sang, orchestrated overtures to the dark beauty of the night.

  It had been a long hard journey to this point. During those first few days everything was sharp and jagged, harsh mechanical discordances that, while they had a certain musical quality, were not what he needed… not if he was going to take the world by storm. The plasma had roiled and torn, refusing to take a permanent shape and Rickman despaired of what the city was telling him. Everything was ugly, mean-spirited. The music of the city spoke only of despair and apathy and his dreams didn’t make a dent when he overlaid them.

  Then he had his epiphany.

  Aptly, it came to him in a dream.

  It starts with thin whistling, like a simple peasant’s flute played at a far distance. At first all is black. The flute stops, and the first star flares in the darkness. And with it comes the first chord, a deep A-minor that sets the darkness spinning. The blackness resolves itself into spinning masses of gas that coalesce and thicken great clouds of matter reaching critical mass and exploding into a symphony. Stars wheel overhead in a great dance, the music of the spheres cavorting in his head.

  Rickman jumped from his bed and pointed his antenna upwards to the sky.

  Almost immediately he got results.

  The plasma formed a sphere, a ball of silver held in the holographic array. At first it just hung there in space, giving out a deep bass hum that rattled his teeth and set all the glassware in the apartment ringing.

  Things changed quickly when he overlaid his dreams.

  Shapes formed in the plasma, concretions that slid and slithered, rainbow light shimmering over their surface like oil on water. They sang as they swam, and Rickman soon found that by moving the antennae he was able to get the plasma to merge or to multiply, each collision or split giving off a new chord, the plasma taking on solid form.

  But it still wasn’t right.

  The really good stuff only really started to happen this very night. He played back his previous recordings while keeping the antenna pointed skywards.

  The plasma roiled.

  The sounds became louder, more insistent, especially when he pointed at a certain patch of sky.

  Soon he had a repeating beat going, with a modulated chorus above it that rose in intensity, and rose again as the plasma started to pulse.

  He set his recorders going and started experimenting, feeding the recordings back to the plasma through his one thousand watt speakers, merging the sounds the compositions from his dreams.

  Within the hour the globe of plasma was responding to his dream overlays. When he played the recordings back at full volume the plasma swelled.
The music grew, the chords overlaying each other in an orchestrated dance.

  Rickman was so excited that he didn’t notice that the walls of his apartment beat in time to the music.

  Nor did he spot that when he turned his back, the plasma ball grew, stretching like an inflating balloon. Cobalt blue colours flashed and it surged.

  Rickman was its first victim.

  ***

  The cops arrived ten minutes later in response to a neighbour’s complaints about the noise.

  When they burst in the door a plasma ball of rainbow colours rose to dance in the air in front of them, a swirling aura of gold and purple and black.

  The sound started.

  It was low at first, almost inaudible, but it rose to a crescendo until their ears were buffeted with raucous, mocking, piping; a cacophony of high fluting that crashed discordantly over them.

  Then the smell hit them, the foetid, unmistakable odour of death that caught at the back of the throat and threatened to send their guts into spasm.

  The cops ran.

  They didn’t look back, and all the time the crazed fluting danced in the air around them. They called for help; but each shout only brought a fresh surge in the plasma. The air above the plasma crackled with electricity, blue static running over the formless mass.

  It dragged itself across the floor leaving a grey glistening streak of slime behind it.

  Within the protoplasm things moved, detached bones flowing, scraps of clothing fused with unidentifiable pieces of flesh. The surface boiled in numerous small lesions that bubbled and split like pieces of over-ripe fruit.

  But worst of all was the source of the fluting. A huge, red, meaty maw pulsed wetly in time with the cacophony.

  The younger of the cops made it to the elevator and slammed the button. He screamed, frustrated, as the doors were slow in starting to move. He let them open just enough to slip inside before he turned to look for his partner.

  She was less than two yards from him, arms outstretched, pleading. He began to move towards her when she stopped and was jerked backwards like a marionette. Her mouth opened wide into a scream and she fell forward, her right hand hitting the down button even as he stretched out vainly.