The Smell of Night in the Basement

by Wendy N. Wagner

I looked up when Carlos came in with a girl, two Domino’s pizzas, and a bag of marijuana gummies. It was a big basement, finished in places, dirt in others, a kind of half-assed bathroom in the corner with no walls or a door for privacy. You got used to smelling somebody drop a deuce or rinse blood out of their hair in the utility sink.

They said they were vampires. Sometimes I believed them and sometimes I didn’t, but I didn’t really care. I got enough to eat. There was always plenty of drugs and dancing and people to fuck. The screams bothered me sometimes, but not so much I wanted to leave the basement or Luca. Not that he would have let me leave. (Continue Reading…)

Things My Father Taught Me

by Rhoads Brazos

My father taught me old knowledge, not all of it useful. It was mostly platitudes that sounded profound until you realized that they were just the logic of one’s own wits. But I hold to this: If a man wants to go quickly, he travels alone. If he wants to go far, he travels with friends. Simple, direct, useful. I wanted to go far.

I was with Bwambale when he found the grenade amongst the scrapyard’s refuse. His uncle owned the business, an acre of steel skeletons rising from rust scale sheddings, and we often rooted about the new collections. His uncle was not a generous man, but if he didn’t know what it was that we had found, like the grenade, then we might pick it up cheap. Which is what happened.

And so afterwards, the three of us–Bwambale, myself, and our friend Godfrey–crouched in the dust behind the Soroti central market, looking as if we were throwing dice in its scant shade. The grenade sat between us like a squat little god. (Continue Reading…)

Luella Miller

by Mary Wilkins-Freeman

Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear. (Continue Reading…)

Eastern Promise

by Stewart Horn

‘In more western parts of Europe, incorrupt corpses were apt to induce almost the opposite response. A lack of decay was taken to be evidence that the individual had died in a state of perfect grace, immaculate and sinless. There are reputed to be whole, perfect bodies secreted among the other saintly relics in churches all over France, Spain, Italy and Prussia, and all those that remain intact have since been canonized. Many such corpses were said to emanate an ‘odour of sanctity’ for some time after death, described as akin to the smell of fresh flowers; it may be principally this olfactory phenomenon, coupled with geographical and religious incidence, that determined which corpses were worshipped as saints, and which destroyed as demons or vampires.’

M. Rhodes, Demonology and Vampirism in Europe, 1897