The Wretched
Short Story Excerpt (Eldritch Horror):
Anders cried out for help, but no one came. There in the moonlight — asleep — he was a restless ghoul thrashing against a pitch-black womb.
He dreamt of blood. An ocean of blood. The walls were blood. Arterial carpets squelched underfoot, and footprints in the blood-paint marred the ceiling above.
His son came out from the bathroom and was also drenched in red — across his face, his clothes, his bottomless eyes. He held out his hand and offered a gift and smiled, but the smile wasn’t real, and the gift was the corpse of an animal. Blood-snot bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
“I made it for you,” he said. “Do you like it?” His lips pulled back when he spoke and Anders could see blood dripping from baby-sized teeth. “I made presents! Presents for you, daddy! Do you like them?”
Anders looked past the creature and saw a mountain of corpses stacked high like a monument to god. He was god and his child had made this for him.
Then he was scrubbing.
Kneeling in a river of blood, hands raw, he clutched at the steel-wire brush that would scrape away his sin. He scrubbed. Up. Down. Up. Down. His flesh tore away, veins and sinew squirmed beneath — frantically he scrubbed, and he screamed, and he cried, and the demon-child stood beside him and watched.
“You have it too, daddy,” the creature growled. “It’s inside of you. Just like me.”
TRANSFIGURATION
Novel Excerpt (Sci-Fi Horror):
Before Captain Nia Jesani cracked her skull upon the floor and went black, she caught the K symbol — Kappa Crew — on the jumpsuits of the corpses that had claimed the ship’s antechamber as tomb.
“Captain! Captain!”
Morgy’s voice came to her from somewhere far away, somewhere with infinite echoes and platinum skies. The corpses quadrupled. She was face-to-face with them, swallowed by their decay, by their pseudo-skeletal grotesquerie. A siren sounded between her bleeding ears.
“Captain, answer me!”
Warbled clanging from above. A monster in the vents. Nia tried to kick herself away. Everything was so close — the blockade, the bodies, the message, written in blood; she bore witness, and the smell of putrefaction would allow no escape.
The duplicates coalesced. The eight corpses became two. They were unnaturally preserved. She could discern morbid detail; there was enough flesh left on bone to see where each of them had slit their wrists — a letting of the paint by which they wrote their final words:
END US
“Captai—holy fuck! Holy fuck! What is that?! What the fuck is that?!”
She could see Morgy’s face peering down from the vents. Manic fear melted his features. His eyes were fixed on the corpses. A pool of stagnant red had long ago flowered and flaked beneath them.
Nia yearned for the tubes. For the dreams. For the irradiated air of home.
END US END US END US END US
The words — like infernal calligraphy — flashed behind her eyelids, until consciousness left her at last.
THOSe Who’ve Come
Novel Excerpt (Sci-Fi):
“Aliens!” he barked. “Aliens! Buncha’ horseshit — buncha’ liberal propaganda, science mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus horseshit. Ain’t no such thing as aliens. Ain’t no God ‘a mine ever made no aliens!”
Pastor Jones stampeded through his Alabaman home like a wild boar. His wifebeater was yellowed with sweat, and his underwear hung low around fat, swollen legs. “Tryna turn us away from God, that’s it,” he huffed. Slam. “Same as always — ain’t nothin’ ever changes — same as always — our war against the heathens, Lord — eternal and everlastin’, jus’ as you said.” Bang.
It was late and quiet. The neighbors certainly heard his ruckus. It was nothing new. That was Pastor Bobby Jones. That’s just how he was. The sacrifices he made to commune with the Lord — using a bottle to bear the burden — could any lesser man find fault?
“Lookee, see here?” He grabbed his Bible from a countertop, and waved it around to some imaginary revival. “This here’s the word of the Lord — his only word — the sole source of truth on this Earth, and it ain’t say nothin’ about no damn aliens!”
He threw the Bible down. Alcohol pried at long-shut doors.
“I’m so scared, Lord — please, Jesus — I’m scared,” he whimpered. “I’m listenin’ for the sign, Lord — what are you tryna say? Tell me, please. Tell me!” He knocked an ever-present whiskey bottle off the kitchen table. It shattered across the floor. Glass and liquor began a dance atop antebellum wood.
The Pastor fell to his knees and wept. “I don’t know what to do, Lord.” He sobbed openly, chin to chest, drool mingling with coarse-black hair. “I’m tryin’ to protect my people — our people — but a Shepard ain’t never protected his flock without no staff — and I need you to be my staff, to comfort me, O Lord, to be with me in this hour of darkness…”
He paused. His chin came up from his chest. He stared out into the empty abyss of his home.
“...unless...”
A fire burned in those bloodshot eyes. He stood, stumbled towards his Bible, bare feet dragging across broken glass, and tore through its pages; he scanned chapter and verse with medieval zealotry, and uttered the text aloud.
“...the day of judgment... and the beasts descended upon the Earth...”
Pastor Jones took his Bible in hand, outstretched his arms, and looked up towards the ceiling, towards the sky, towards the great, infinite beyond.
“My Lord,” he asked, in breathless euphoria, “is this the end?”