Bibliography

August.

I have a little money but my flat is drab and empty, and the work is cutting smooth slices from my sanity. I listen to old records, watch old movies, and huddle in the park on a bench dedicated to some long-dead stranger, watching the swan family, which has grown by two chubby cygnets. I'd hoped the grief would have faded by now, but it's knotted in my stomach like a tumour.

In a sense, I suppose, it’s a spirit of morbidity that draws me back to those days upon the mountain and their awful finale, which I failed to witness only by the purest chance. But what draws me most, I think, is the memory of what I saw after I left Bergenssen and the others—that knowledge which is mine uniquely. It’s without disrespect to the Times that I say they know nothing, nothing whatsoever, of the horror of Mount Kangchenjunga. Likely, there is no one else alive who does.

The space was too narrow to turn around in. Anything could have been behind us, or in front. I'd have frozen again, but instinct insisted it would be worse to be left behind, so I kept moving. My application of the torch was useless, though, and Charlotte must have been moving into utter blackness. If it bothered her, she gave no sign.

I found that I couldn't imagine the world outside, or a sky that wasn't just above my head. All of that seemed unreal. Yet so did the passage, as if it was only a place between places. There was nothing to do but crawl forward, my gaze and every movement bound to Charlotte's shifting outline.

It was when she disappeared that I panicked for real.

Final Relocation in The Glass Parachute anthology from Villipede Publications

There were more bodies as they came nearer, and in increasing numbers. Some had obviously been left where they’d fallen. Others had been dragged into obscene sculptures, a hopeless attempt to stop sickness from spreading. The piles were a barricade ringing the camp in every direction.

Partly for that reason, the stench reached her long before they arrived. It was the worst thing she’d ever smelt, an open sewer running through a sick room. It was sweet, and it clung to her mouth and throat. She knew there was nothing to be done, no way to clean, to sanitise, or to bury the dead in the heat-frozen earth. She still couldn't help feeling disgusted. The level of degradation was so beyond anything she could have imagined. How could people live this way? How could they die like this?

Even in the asylum, Johnson was kept apart. His mania, they said, disturbed the other patients. I recall the expression on his face, how despite the excruciating brightness of the electric light, he seemed lost in darkness. More, I remember his screams. “Astasoth! Astasoth!” He repeated the meaningless word endlessly.

With memories such as those, accompanied by Johnson’s alarming journals, what wonder is it that my thoughts are unsettled? Is it so strange that I should be troubled by nightmares myself?

Hand That Feeds in Nil Desperandum

Dussard took a roll of papers from his document case and unfurled them over the desk. There were perhaps a dozen sheets: one large design, and other smaller details, annotated in an elaborate scrawl. Legris took up the largest sheet and inspected at it. "The hand is the state, of course. The figure is you?"

"It’s the artist, any artist. It will cover the entire east wall."

A Study in Red and White at the Angry Robot blog

The air reeks of snow. It licks across raw, red muscle and sinew, testing cavities and meaty crevices. The cold reminds the Santa Thing of home – and for a moment, it recalls older winters, deeper frosts, the uncluttered, frozen eons before shape and form and roiling, sickly life. An age when it seemed nothing would ever claw its way from the utter chill to crawl and mewl. An age when there was no need for subterfuge.

Jenny's Sick in the Lightspeed Year One anthology from Prime Books

There's this noise coming from Jenny's room, like nothing I've heard. I mean, I've heard coughing before. But this isn't clearing-your-throat coughing; this is a cruel, hacking bout that goes on for two full minutes, while I stand in the hallway, not sure what I'm hearing.

By the time I knock on her door it's started again. When I open it the cough is shaking right through her, throwing her about like a rag doll. I don't know what to do, whether I should try and help, so I just stand watching and for a while she doesn't seem to know I'm there. Then finally there's a break, and she looks up. "I'm sick," she tells me. She says it with a weird grin, like she's challenging me.

"What do you mean? Nobody gets sick. There's nothing left to get sick with."

Dancing in the Winter Rooms in Electric Velocipede

Beth looks serious for just a moment. "This place will beat us if we let it. Better to defy it right from the start."

"The Winter Rooms don't care what we do. The cold doesn't care. You'd all do better to save your energy. The only fight that matters here is surviving."

Gently, she touches my shoulder. "We can't live like that, can we? Just surviving? Not even for a Season."

Passive Resistance in Redstone Science Fiction

Alec turned just in time to see Ennis begin to fall, to feel wetness spray across his face. Ennis, his bodyguard, his friend, wavered for an instant - then collapsed backward, emptying a flower of red over the steps behind him.

Alec was already running. There was the whiplash crack of a second shot and a pane in the vast series of glass doors disintegrated. Arms up over his face, Alec threw himself into the opening, felt splinters shivering across his clothes and skin, stumbled and fell.

Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams in the Best of Necrotic Tissue anthology from Stygian Publications

Gug-Shabeth returned his watery stare to the long field. There, other birds had nestled amongst the crop, their leathery wings tucked around them like cloaks, their proboscises probing the strange fruits that grew there.

The scarecrow he’d built was nothing now but a cruciform frame draped with scraps of leathery meat.

He was failing in his responsibility. But if they had ever intended him to succeed, ever cared at all, then they would not have made him so carelessly; every thought, every step, would not be such torment. No, the gods had little time for this patch of their creation, if indeed they had time for any of it, in their wantonness and their cruelty.

Devilry at the Hanging Tree Inn in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction

At the junction where the east-west highway crossed the north-south byway, a diamond of dusty ground had formed. A defunct gallows rose from the northwest corner, dark and crude like a charcoal sketch. Opposite, set back from the curve of meeting roads, stood its namesake, the Hanging Tree inn. With its macabre sign, its black-beamed walls and madly sagging roof, it was a relic of an older, stranger time.

There was a tale told thereabouts: that if the fire in the inn’s hearth should ever burn out then the Devil would leap from the ashes and run wild in the world. If it was more than a story, however, no one could say, for it had never been tested so far as anyone knew.

Black Horticulture in Abyss and Apex

I realized I must be before Alambic himself, and had already, without so much as a word, achieved a terrible impression. He was sat in a latticed pagoda, sheltering from the heat of the afternoon sun. My first thought was, can that really be him? By the depths, he's old! Never had I seen someone so profoundly weathered, nor with a beard so long that it required its own stool.

I prepared to stammer an apology, but he cut me off with, "If you've come to beg then you're the most determined vagabond I've met. If you're an assassin then the King's enemies are truly in despair."

"My lord," I replied, "I've come about your advertisement."

Black Sun in the First Contact anthology from Digital Science Fiction.

The explosion set the Fixed Identity quivering end to end. The gravity gave up altogether. Wei struck the ceiling, darted out a hand, found an edged surface to clutch with bloody fingertips. He hung on.

The map was below him now – like some obscene game, a miniaturized catastrophe.

Was that a planet?

The Fixed Identity ruptured its guts into space. The Hindbrain panicked. Waves of blue and orange light vibrated up and across the walls, while every alarm sounded all at once. First came heat, then awful cold. The pressure was like a fist, closing and closing.

Could that sick, deathly orb be a sun?

The Burning Room in Bull Spec #4

Behind me, the door slammed, and I nearly fell from the bed. I twisted round, only to find that there was nothing to see. The door was closed. Could the sound have come from a neighbouring house? I was certain it hadn't.

It occurred to me then that there was something before the door, like the faintest glow of phosphor, about half way up its surface. Slowly it spread, upwards at first and then downwards as well. Soon I could recognise something like a figure in outline, pale and insubstantial. I realised I'd stopped shaking, though I was terribly afraid. I don't believe anything could have made me tear my eyes away.

Jenny's Sick in Lightspeed #7

There's this noise coming from Jenny's room, like nothing I've heard. I mean, I've heard coughing before. But this isn't clearing-your-throat coughing; this is a cruel, hacking bout that goes on for two full minutes, while I stand in the hallway, not sure what I'm hearing.

By the time I knock on her door it's started again. When I open it the cough is shaking right through her, throwing her about like a rag doll. I don't know what to do, whether I should try and help, so I just stand watching and for a while she doesn't seem to know I'm there. Then finally there's a break, and she looks up. "I'm sick," she tells me. She says it with a weird grin, like she's challenging me.

"What do you mean? Nobody gets sick. There's nothing left to get sick with."

Glass Houses in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #34

Something too large to be a sound assailed his ears. The explosion was deafening. By the time he realised what it was it had subsided to a declining rumble that brought plaster showering from the ceiling.

The Professor cupped his arms over his head but didn't stop. It must have been the outer doors. They’d been magnetically sealed, locked tight without internal power. The lack of subtlety could be forgiven.

So the General was inside. Now it was only a matter of time.

The Unleashing of the Ineffectual in Something Wicked from Futurequake Press

In a chthonic place, amidst dank vapours and the hot scent of blood, three figures chant words of nonsensical meaning...

"Nu-mu-un-su! Munu ur-ra barag! Ga-ba!"

Beyond the altar, the gate, which rends time and space as a pin might pierce the mush of an eyeball...

"Igi-gig-e! Igi-gig-me-en! Ur-namma!"

Suddenly the chant is strangled in throats too parched to utter sound. As the noise dies, so the gyroscope of the gate contracts, folds in logic-defying curves. But too late!

The Untold Ghost in the Haunted anthology from Pill Hill Press

I noticed the picture again going downstairs, the sketch of the two girls.

The girls were practically identical, even down to the trim of their hair and the cut of their collars. Their faces, caught between boredom and hesitant smiles, were much the same. They might have been reflections of each other. Except...

I admit that I still felt shaken, and tired from the day's driving. Yet it seemed to me there was a difference, a distinction too subtle for the heavy-handed artist to have caught deliberately. It had something to do with light and shade, with the curve of lips and the barest hint of expression in eyes. Its effect was simply that the girl on the right looked wrong.

Today the War Ended, Tonight the Sky Burned in
OG's Speculative Fiction #24

"Shut up," he said, and she did. He stopped to glare at her; then his expression softened. "I'm sorry. I want to take my wife away. There's no reason for her to be here anymore." He brushed long fingers across his eyes and seemed, just for a moment, to waver. "The thing is, it's over."

"What--"

"The war."

Rosalie struggled to find her voice. "That's impossible."

"It's true."

Wunderkind in Bards and Sages Quarterly vol. 2 #2

She was one of the few survivors left who remembered that last night, when they'd gazed at a sky banded with purple and azure that glittered and billowed like some continental sea. Scientists the next morning had explained it away as a comet that had shattered in the upper atmosphere; but by then the first chunks had already been found, the first Powerful born. The early news reports were jubilant: like something from a movie, they joked, like a comic book become real.

Yet even as they spoke the violence had begun.

Feeler in Shelter of Daylight #3

Jennifer didn't answer.

It would have been difficult to. As she descended further into the darkness behind her eyelids, as she let her self unfold towards him, so his voice started to dissolve, flaking away like desiccated skin. She knew he was still talking, but only snatches of phrases made it to her, as if from a great distance: "Kept thinking maybe she'd call," "Couldn't go to work," "Everyone would see it."

It was only when she shut his voice out entirely that the flowers began to bloom.

The Painted City in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

Everything - the square, the street, the structures - was painted in a kaleidoscope of colour, in countless patches of incredible shades that ebbed and flowed around each other. It was like a massive, magnificent fractal, or a Rorschach test of the gods. It was astonishingly, painfully beautiful to look at. It brought hot tears to his eyes and hot thoughts into his mind.

Under his breath, Kafka said, “This is bad. This is the worst, most wonderful place we’ve ever found." Then out loud: "I think we should leave.”

Survivor Guilt podcast at Variant Frequencies

Something darts across my peripheral vision and I loose a shot. When the echo subsides I can still hear tiny, clawed feet scratching in the dirt. Pulling at the tourniquet around my useless left leg, probably just making the bleeding worse, I start off again, following the trail of extinguished ceiling lights that’s led me this far.

The rats aren’t the first to have lived here. With all the dirt it’s hard to say what these tunnels might have been. The walls have a metallic sheen and gutted access panels pock the surface. The last notice I passed read ‘BLUE LEVEL’, in square letters barely visible beneath the grime. There were people down here once. It would have been easy to secure; why did they leave?

I can’t be sure they did.

Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams in Necrotic Tissue

Gug-Shabeth returned his watery stare to the long field. There, other birds had nestled amongst the crop, their leathery wings tucked around them like cloaks, their proboscises probing the strange fruits that grew there.

The scarecrow he’d built was nothing now but a cruciform frame draped with scraps of leathery meat.

He was failing in his responsibility. But if they had ever intended him to succeed, ever cared at all, then they would not have made him so carelessly; every thought, every step, would not be such torment. No, the gods had little time for this patch of their creation, if indeed they had time for any of it, in their wantonness and their cruelty.

I stood there on the cusp of the crater looking down for perhaps half an hour, feeling like at any moment I’d wake up.

But the more I looked, the more real it seemed. It was something like an igloo, a dome of metallic fibre slung over a large framework with an airlock jutting from one side. It was built partly over the water pipe that runs through DeLambre, while power appeared to come from a nest of solar panels on the nearest rim and oxygen recycling to be handled by scrubbers jutting from the side opposite the door.