The Day the Words Took Shape by Francesca Haig
Juggernaut Revisited by Lou Morgan
The Anniversary by Den Patrick
Kraken Rising by Andrew Reid
Party at the Witch House by Richard Kellum
The Lake by Severity Chase
The Biggest Candle of Them All by Peter Newman
I said, ‘Is it true time has no meaning in the Labyrinth?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because the tape is only four minutes long, but I’m sure my rape took longer.’
He nodded. ‘It did.’ He stared at nothing for a moment. ‘Where are your companions from that night?’
‘I don’t know.’ And it’s in their best interests not to be found. You can hear them laughing on the security tape, under the Minotaur’s grunts and the sound of tearing meat. Only one wall away, and they didn’t try to save me. Justin, Marcus, and Caroline just patched their handscreens into the camera and watched the whole thing.
Minos said, ‘Tell me what happened.’
I didn’t want to need him. I said, ‘You know.’
‘I saw. It’s not the same thing.’
The Journey Into kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/763571195/edgar-allan-poe-meets-ken-scholes-a-journey-into-e/posts
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Halloween Parade music is “Ominousity” by Nick and Gerald, from MusicAlley.com.
Most of the year, Jack was a fine enough boy. He almost always remembered to put his dirty socks in the hamper instead of under the bed. He certainly never hid his mama’s darning needles – except for when she deserved it. And if he occasionally didn’t go to sleep right when he told his papa he would, it was only because he was too afraid of the dark to turn out his light – and who can sleep with the light on? He hauled hay, set the table, did his schoolwork sometimes. Most of the year, Jack was a fine enough boy.
There are only ever two combatants in a knife fight, and each combatant is allowed a knife.
The knives are to be provided by the combatants, in a keen, clean condition free of rust. Other objects—scissors, hammers, axes, surgical instruments—shall not be considered knives for the purposes of the knife fight.
Combatants shall arrive stripped to the waist, and well-lubricated so as to keep the knife fight from becoming a wrestling match, which is unseemly.
Goose fat is considered an acceptable lubricant for the purposes of a knife fight.
Victory in the knife fight is usually decided by the drawing of first blood.
Combatants shall avoid their opponents’ faces, hands, and throats, confining their strikes to parts of the body usually covered by appropriate business attire.
In the event that both combatants draw blood from one another in the same instant, the knife fight shall be considered a draw and entered into the Records as such.
To the victor go the spoils.
The thing that I always ask guys is if they can get me glow. Scribbled in my father’s notebook:
glow, aka, snot, rubber, soul, bright light. Knock offs include deadlights and slag (ecstasy cut with meth emulsified with gelatin and made into a hard jelly).
The corn stood shoulder high on Carla as she cut through her father’s fields. At the edge of the field she stopped, took a deep breath, and forced her fists to unclench. She stared at the wooded land in front of her but didn’t set foot in it. Instead she dug the toe of her slip-on into the dry dirt, catching crumbled earth-bits in the crease between plastic and canvas, then fidgeted with the band of her bra, trying to get air to the sweat pooling beneath it. She blew out a breath. “Stop being stupid, Carla,” she muttered. It was enough of a prod for her to manage five steps out of the field and into the bordering woodland before panic seized her and she sprinted back to the sheltering rows of corn. Carla swallowed a sob. She hadn’t been able to make herself go inside the wood for three months. But she had to now. She had to. She needed to get back to the clearing–the place where she’d seen the Green Man the one and only time she’d ever seen him. If she got there, she would find him again. She was certain of it.
She scrubbed at her face and tried again. She got as far as the first pine; its thick branches reached out toward her with the rustle of the wind. Carla whimpered. She took another step. Something brushed against her forearm. She squeaked and jumped. Every muscle in her body strained. She felt her lip tremble. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go farther into the wood.
‘Green Man,’ she whispered to the trees. Tears and frustration choked her voice. ‘Green Man, help me.’
He’d helped her out once before, maybe he would again.
Philip Roberts THE FORTIS HASTATUS Kickstarter project can be accessed here.
M.F. Wahl’s DISEASE can be pre-ordered here.
‘That the best you can do?’ He asked gamely.
Will took a swallow of beer, his eyes never leaving Sam’s.
‘Best he can do,’ Will said, nodding derisively towards Artie.
Artie just shrugged. He was technically the better pitcher, but it was an honest fact that he couldn’t match Will for sheer power.
Will stared up at the sun as if it were a clock.
‘You’re late,’ He said in Sam’s direction.
Sam looked up at the sun. It just looked like a ball of burning gas to him. He wondered if Will could really tell the time by the sun, or if it were all for show. With Will you never quite knew for sure. That was part of his magic.
Will grinned, and it made him look mean. He had a face like a ring seasoned boxer. His eyes looked like hard narrow gun sights. He always reminded Sam of a surly Robert Mitchum. He claimed to have been a Navy Seal as a young man, and although both Sam and Artie couldn’t swim a stroke, neither dared to say differently.
You just never could tell with Will.
“I used to work opposite an 18th century building with an odd little window in its back. As I knew the owners, I asked about it, and they weren’t aware that there was even a window – the room had been bricked up many years before and forgotten about. As I wondered what might be in the room, the story came to me.”
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‘I don’t know why they had to turn the fucking lights off,’ moaned Marrick as he and Jonathan passed beneath the cracked AIKO sign and entered the ground floor of the building. ‘Look at it out there, ten in the morning and you’d think it was fucking midnight. Did you bring a torch?’
‘Yes. The main staircase is to the rear of this room.’ Jonathan clicked on the flashlight and raised its beam. The showroom had been stripped to a few piles of mildewed carpet tiles and some battered old shelf units. It smelled bad – damp and sickly. From far above them came the drone of heavy rain and the warble of sheltering pigeons. They reached the foot of the stairs and started up.
‘I wanna make sure they cleared everything out. Barney couldn’t get here this morning, his wife’s sick or something.’ Barney was an ex-bouncer and former prison warden whose aggressive temperament perfectly qualified him for his position as Marrick’s site manager. Unpleasant things happened in Marrick’s company that Jonathan did not know about, that he could not allow himself to discover. Not if he wanted to keep his job and his sanity.
Although Marrick was young, he was considerably overweight; the stairs were already defeating him. He reached the second-floor landing and looked up through the centre of the stairwell, catching his breath. ‘You can check out the top two floors, Jon, make sure we ain’t got any squatters in. Fucking hell, it stinks in here.’
Jonathan stopped on the staircase and stared out of the rain-streaked window into the centre of the block, where the backs of the buildings met.
Rooms. Something odd about the rooms. He studied the brick walls of the courtyard formed by the other properties. He felt as if he had a cold coming on. Getting his jacket so wet hadn’t helped matters. He should have bought himself a new umbrella. He sneezed hard, wiped his nose on a tissue. Spots of dark blood, a crimson constellation. He looked from the window again. The bricks. That’s what it was. The bricks to the right of the window. They were in the wrong place. There should have been an empty space there. It was marked on the map, but not there from the window.
There was one room too many.