Scars of Your Love

Scars of Your Love
by
Bobby Derie

Breast forms tonight, just enough to give some shape to her dress. The familiar weight brought renewed confidence as Jill surveyed the crowd. She struck a pose at the end of the bar, letting her skirt fall open to the thigh, no panty lines. Hello girls. I’m back.

Meredith was trouble, damaged goods in a ripped tee and oh-so-tight black jeans, the bulge visible down her left pants leg. The elbow-length gloves didn’t quite hide the track marks, the brittle fingernails or the too-red gums when she laughed and smiled.

They found each other on the floor, eyes locked, slow-grinding against frenetic dubstep, an island of playing how close they could get without touching in the middle of a dancing, jostling ocean. Meredith took the lead, pulled her in for a dip and a kiss, half-closed eyes gone wide as she felt Jill’s hand press into the dildo, then half-closed again.

No tongue this time. Just lips locked, Jill breathing in as though she would suck the life from her. Meredith hardly noticed when the hair came off in her hand, black strands touching the floor. The music flowed into a different piece, something goa, blue lights turned red and the crowd shifted. They fought their way to the edge of the floor, holding hands.

Jill’s place; Meredith didn’t have one. A war of copping feels in the taxi, giving the Pakistanti driver an eyeful and an earful. Meredith’s hands went straight for the tits, Jill grabbed her wrists and pulled her into a kiss, Meredith’s tongue slipping out of the side of her mouth, down her neck to the hollow of her collarbone, leaving a trail of hickies and lovebites. Jill wrapped her leg around Meredith’s right leg, grinding against a knee.

They disentangled themselves enough to get up the stairs. Meredith was biting her lip as Jill fumbled with the door.

The apartment smelled of wood, dry and a bit sweet. Everything was handmade, purposeful, iconic crudeness: bedframe, bookshelves, table, desk, and chairs, all two-by-fours and galvanized nails, cut and sanded but left unvarnished, unpainted. A termite’s heaven, if they came this far north. On the wall, a collection of hammers. Above the bed, a painting of a hammer.

The questions Meredith might have asked died when Jill’s hand found her waist, reaching around to unzip her, lips kissing the top of her spine. The strap-on popped out and Jill stroked it for her, whispering something as they staggered towards the bed.

Meredith, turned suddenly, her cock slapping Jill in the hip, grabbed and tossed Jill onto her bed, then crawled up on her knees, looming over Jill, eyes seeking eyes. She watched Jill blush as her hands found the straps on the dress, pulled it down. Jill turned away, cheeks burning. Her tits were a mess, off-kilter and the left one sliding into her armpit. Meredith made a purring growl in her throat as she pulled them off, felt them jiggle as she laid them aside, then her eyes went wide.

“Wow.”

A band of bright painted flesh, a flowing landscape playing over the purple-pink scars. Abstract lines, fading one into the other, dizzying hints of flowers, rays, skulls, and strange, cancerous growths. Jill’s cheeks still burned, but she moved her hips a little, grinding into the plastic dick, and Meredith dipped her tongue down to explore, playing over the scars, tasting her.

Jill grabbed a hand, brought it to her lips, sucked on a thumb as she rolled down the sleeve. Pale lines and banded flesh there, striated railroad tracks running from elbow to wrist. Most were old, some looked fresh. Her lips moved down to the wrist, nibbled a bit there, kept exploring. It was a game then, looking each other over, tasting this, feeling that, seeing who would give in to the burning need first, and how.

Jill nibbled on her cock, leaving teethmarks. Meredith flipped her over onto her stomach, admiring how the tattoo reached all away around her back, traced the fine lines. Then she reached for a hammer curiously near the bed, playing the smooth rubbergrip handle over the crack of Jill’s ass.

It wasn’t a full night. Two hours left them exhausted, half-naked, sheets drenched. Meredith was in the bathroom, rummaging for pills, probably stealing one of Jill’s shirts. Jill laid up against the backboard, a tit in either hand, weighing them and watching the breast forms jiggle a bit before she put them away. She ran a hand through her hair, thin and weak and soft but growing out again. Smiled when she heard Meredith discover the shower attachments.

I’m back.

###

Maggot-ridden

Maggot-ridden
by
Bobby Derie

It was late evening on a warm summer day, with the wind from the sea taking the heat off the long-hanging sun as John Magnus and his boy came to Carradin, along the coast road with the Irish Sea on his right hand, which had been built up over the years so that on the right the grassy slope went quickly to the rocks and sand and tall grasses of the beach, and on the left darker grasses ran down to a briny mere, where the tall stumps of a drowned forest stood up for a way.

Before the village on the left-hand side of the road was a bulluan stone, a mossy thing with a cup-shaped hole worn in it from some long ago, and John Magnus stopped to give a lesson and a lecture about their history and their use. The boy for his part stood at attention and gave his most attentive ear as he soaked up the little bits of lore, despite the way he shifted his feet from one to the other, and grasped the heavy pack on his back by the straps that were cutting into his shoulders.

Yet as the cunning man knelt down and stooped a finger toward that bowl of stone, he froze for a moment and peered closer, frowning, great shaggy brows twisting together. The rim of the bowl was green-black with moss, but the still water was coated by a scum of dead flies. The cunning man stood up to his full height then, and looked around as best he could as afternoon gave way to evening, and it seemed to the boy he looked for an awful long time out in the mere, and the way he glowered the boy thought perhaps he did not like what he saw there. Yet John Magnus said not a word more about it, and they carried on into the village of Carradin.

The streets were dirt, but some soul or old English lord had put up slabs of stone as sidewalks along the one and only street, and there was a public house whose sign was the dubh dael, and John Magnus stopped there and frowned at that, but after a few moments entered in, the boy at his heels. There was a bed to be had, cool ale from the cask, and good bread from the morning and warm fish from the evening, and so money changed hands and the travelers availed themselves of the hospitality, though the boy noted that John Magnus did not take off his boots or cloak, and kept the long dagger at his left side as they sat in the common room and ate.

The meal took perhaps an hour, with John Magnus and the boy relating the news and receiving the gossip, and then as he loaded his little clay pipe with willow-bark there was a disturbance outside—the cries and shrieks of a woman and a girl. The boy saw that the cunning man did not quite smile, but placed the unlit pipe in a pocket, and stood up with hat in hand to see the fuss.

The corpse had collapsed in the middle of the street. At first the boy thought its shirt was untucked, but as he peered closer in the dying light he saw that the thing had no shirt, but that the belly had swollen and stretched the skin, and then burst forth, giving birth to a heap of crawling white maggots. Across the street, a woman was in a faint on the sidewalk stone, a young girl of five or six wailing after her. John Magnus saw the boy inch closer and smiled, then called for a fire and water, and removing the long bladed knife he slipped the flat of the blade under one shoulder and flipped it over. A swarm of black flies shot up from the belly wound, and clustered thick around the mouth and eyes. The innkeeper arrived with a full bucket, and behind him his sun with a torch, and John sheathed his knife and took it from him, pouring the contents slowly and carefully on the face so that the drowning flies left it.

“Who knows this man?” he said aloud, for a small crowd had come out, and now the dead man’s features were clear to see. No-one answered right away, so he asked again. “Come, this must be friend or kin to someone here, he did not walk from far away.”

There was a murmur then, and one stepped forward and said as it was Thomas Rourke, dead these last three days. Then there was a burble of something in the crowd, and the boy caught certain names and prayers against Beelzebub and his minions, and crossed himself.

“There is cunning here,” John Magnus said “and I think if this is the first of the maggot-ridden you have seen, it will not be the last unless it is put out.”

That too caused a stir in the crowd, and the hazy trail of rumors and recollections came crowding in. The cunning man held up a hand, and directed everyone into the inn for safety and conversation, but from his belt he took a small leather satchel and handed it to the boy, and directed the innkeeper’s son with the torch to stay and do as he said.

Now the innkeeper’s son was full fourteen or so, and the boy could not have been more than eleven, and one would not likely have taken orders easily from the other. Yet the boy moved with a purpose as he opened the satchel and took out the little brown bottle, carefully pulling the stopper with his teeth to not spill a drop or breath in the fumes, and began pouring it over the corpse, aiming for the wounds where the flies and maggots poured out. Then he called the innkeeper’s son closer and touched the torch to it, and the liquid caught and began to burn with a livid blue and then orange, sending up foul smoke that caused the innkeeper’s son to fall back. Yet the boy stayed near the corpse-fire for a long while, though his eyes stung and the tears ran, to crush and burn any maggot that tried to wiggle free from the holocaust.

Perhaps a few hours passed; he had called to the innkeeper’s son for wood when the oil ran low, and those first faggots were now red-limned blackened coals when John Magnus came out. The cunning man kicked at the fire and a few more maggots spilled out over his boot, but they were crispy and curled. He nodded at the boy.

“Well done. There is another here, whose taste goes to revenants and nigrimancy, though if this is all his art there is not much to fear, and I must go to meet him.”

The boy looked a question at the inn, but John Magnus shook his head, so they started out back the road they had come, just as they were. Going south on that road they came to a little trail that the boy had not seen before, and followed it down to the very edge of the salty meer, and in the depths of which tiny balls of blue flame seemed to hover over still waters. John Magnus took a few herbs and bottles of oil from his belt, and crushed and rubbed them into his skin, around the neck and face and wrists, then turned and did the same to the boy—who grimaced at the foul naptha-smell, but said nothing as the big hands massaged it into his flesh. So prepared, they set off into the meer.

Along the way the cunning man told a story, half to the boy and half to himself, of the witches Llanddona—three women with Irish accents who had washed up in a boat on the shores of Wales, and by their powers were permitted to settle outside the town, and by their malice caused much disagreement and trouble by the black flies they kept clutched to their bosoms, and released on their foes… “Now the Order of the Fly has not always had strength in Ireland, nor was it ever very much widespread, for those who practice it are not apt to share much. I wonder now what relation our man is to them—father, or uncle, perhaps?—but I doubt not that is of their kind, though perhaps about a darker business.”

It was a slippery and crooked trail, and the air was alive with black flies big and small, and here and there were offerings of game and fowl strung up, cut open, and left to hang and rot, so that the flies clustered close and thick on them like a living carpet. It was dark now, and the moon hid its face behind a cloud, with only the north star bright and clear enough to guide by, so it seemed they headed south and then west, before they came to a rude hut with windows of greasy parchment, which glowed dully like the orange eyes of some sunken giant of old. Overhead, the boy could make out black swarms of flies like evil clouds, moving in strange coordination.

There were two women standing outside in dresses of soiled sack-cloth that were mere tatters, so that their saggy breasts were naked to the air, and their hairy gashes as well. Those two females shivered in their movements, and at each step trembling maggots shook forth and fell on the ground from their cunts, to leave a slimy trail behind them. The boy looked up and could not see his master’s face in the dark, but heard the sound of the blade slide forth and could almost feel his smile. He spoke, this time once again in the tones of a lesson.

“Each man and woman is set a term in this life, and by love of god will fill it until struck down by accident, violence, or disease. Yet I’ve told you all life is a cycle, and not all is neat as all that, aye? These ones here were only two, perhaps three hours dead when he let his flies upon them, and in a day or three were up and shambling, driven by the worms that slowly consume them. There is no thought in those brains, they feel no pain nor recognize sight or sound, but only movement is granted them.”

He leaped forth then, and despite what he had said the two swung at him, though a little slow, and his blade sliced up from crotch to sternum of one so purple guts and inch-long pale white wiggling worms fell upon the ground, and then danced away and did the same to the next. The women-things staggered and collapsed as the maggots fell away from their hosts, and lay on the ground, arms and legs still spasming and twitching.

“They cannot be killed—destroyed, yes, with fire, or dismembered, but it is the worms that drive them.”

Cleaning his blade against a patch of clean dirt, but not bothering to sheath it, John Magnus strode up to the house, the boy close behind.

It was small but surprising uncluttered, clean save for vast trails of fly-speck, and there were shelves of bottles and aliments, mortar and pestle, a crumbling bundle of pages that might once have been a book, and a small table or work bench with a tin plate filled with blood and raw meat, on which the flies swarmed. There was a fire there, and a stool beside it, and on the stool an old man sat more ancient than any the boy had ever seen, so bent and grey and hairy was he, and naked to the waist before the fire. There was an evil wound along his scalp, and the edges were swollen red and shot with veins of black; the silvery hair had almost all fallen away, and in places the boy would have sworn that yellow bone poked through.

John Magnus could not stand at his full height in the house without his head knocking the ceiling, but he sketched a nod and introduced himself.

“I saw you on the road,” the old man burbled. “I knew then, you might be trouble. So I sent him, just as a warning.”

“You would have done better to leave me sleep. I might have left in the morning.”

The old man turned and gave a ghastly, broken smile. His face was marred by some ancient punishment, the nose merely a gaping hole above the scarred lips and crooked lips.

“No you wouldn’t.” the fly doctor said.

“No I wouldn’t.” the cunning man agreed.

“My hussies?” he asked.

“You’ll take no more pleasure from them. If that was the limit of your skills and ambition, I think you’d have been better sticking it in living women.”

The old man shrugged. “Experiments for my science. They served their purpose, and then they served another.”

“Your science is at an end. Give up now, and I’ll make it quick.”

The old man laughed at that, and the laugh turned into a choke, and John Magnus swore and pushed the boy out of the shack. A horrid buzzing filled his ears as the black, moving clouds above the hut seemed to descend upon it. John Magnus did not waste his breath, one hand clutching his cloak up around his mouth and nose as his dagger hand went to work on the old man. Yet the fragile figure seemed to almost vomit forth the black flies, and soon they covered everything.

The moon came out, and the boy stared back into the cabin. By the light of moon and fire he could see two figures crawling with flies locked in a death-struggle, and the buzzing of the great swarm took on a strange, half-hypnotic rhythm. Then at least John Magnus threw away his dagger and his cloak, and grabbed that old man’s head in both hands. He must have squeezed, for there was a terrible crack as the thin shell of the skull gave way, and a massive, pale fat grey maggot fell out onto the floor, the buzzing rising to a fever pitch—and then John Magnus’ boot fell down upon the squirming thing, and the synchronized buzz broke off to simple dissonant noise, and the swarm began to dissipate.

They burned the shack and all the contents, save for the book—which, as the cunning man said, might be worth something, then trudged back along the dark path toward the inn, where beer and baths were waiting.

The boy said nothing at first, then asked his question.

“He was old, and sought a way out of his failing flesh. The Order of the Fly are known for such regenerations—the maggot-ridden are but the first step in the path that leads to such transfigurations, though it is a terrible science, and full of risk. For the worm gnaws and gnaws, and the subject must have great faith or desperation to try it—for who knows if any of what they are will survive at all?” Leaving the boy to ponder that question, the cunning man ended the lesson.

###

Gone, Zo

Gone, Zo

by

Bobby Derie

The street sang to me, bare feet to concrete, calluses scraping off and growing hard again, and ever step let me hear the city’s song. On this corner, a sixteen-year old girl was raped by four Tans just coming into their teens. That was about three hours ago; the rain was washing her blood and the memory of her pain away, and I left bloody footprints on the skin of the city. I ran a hand over the bench at the bus stop, stirred up the ghosts of ancient orgasms, true love declared in quickies between stops, and felt like a voyeur with an ear to the door. The television in the shop window called to me, eldritch secrets from outside my headspace. I stopped to give it worship.

A forest of microphones stood up, odd stamens in the growth-cycle of the journalist creed. I imagined the women wet and ovulating, hoping some of the pollen being spread on the breeze would finds its way to them. Undoubtedly, someone would leave this press conference pregnant.

“Mr. President, would you like to comment on the wedding performed this morning at the White House?”

The old man smiled like your grandfather caught with a bit of porn on the way out of the bathroom, endearing and innocent as long as you didn’t think too hard about what just happened.

“It was a favor to a pair of very good friends of mine, the new Mr. and Mrs. Wylie-Smith. We have known each other for years and they’ve been diligent supporters for my campaign, so I agreed to host the ceremony.”

A babble and crush from the reporters, a thousand questions. One of them screamed to be heard about the others, waving her black phallus microphone taller than the rest.

“Is it true the bride was nude?”

I willed the universe to end, to flip the channel with my brain.

The rusty speakers announced Haagenti led Gaap in the polls by six points, the dollar was down, the Pandemonium Pitfiends were ahead by three field goals and sex desecrated cheerleaders, and the toilet chimed the hour as Jaxon Tremaine finally found his way back from the sole restroom to a seat at the bar, a perilous journey of six paces over three dead drunks and around a spittoon curling with sulfurous yellow smoke. The haggard shade behind the counter coaxed up the volume a notch as news from the front came in, laid a couple drops of liquid smoke in front of us, and disappeared. I waited until Jaxon had his shot before I pressed the square-cut barrel dig into his ribs. With the practiced ease of a stoolie, he slowly laid his empty hands on the bar.

“I got a couple dollars in my back pocket, and a sacrament. My soul belongs to Barbas.”

“Paulina Rigamenti.” I said.

“Vaxas’s clan, down-pit.”

“But you know her.”

“Not really. She’s from down pit. Likes to get a taste of what’s outside the Old Wall from time to time. That’s all.”

“Where is she?”

“Fuck, I dunno boss.”

I flipped the channel again, bored and angry at the television gods that spoke to me through their storefront oracle.

When the security people came down to the cubicle gulag, I froze. It wasn’t a question if they had found out something, it’s what they had found out—the copy of Tetris loaded in the spreadsheet file? The proxy browser that let my bypass the work firewall? The CD with all the freeware that was better than the crap they were paying thousands of dollars each year in licenses for?

“Ms. Nunez.” One of them said. “Your presence has been requested downstairs. We’ve been asked to escort you.”

It was a head, decapitated, rotting. There was a WXR jack installed at the back of its neck, the thin scars along the neck and jawbone suggested wires. I looked a question.

“We think it’s Russian.” Her boss said. “We need you to do an evaluation.”

Bile surged through me, and in a burst of static we returned to our regular scheduled program.

“…have been members of the Wiccan faith for many years.” The President explained. “It is traditional in the ceremonies of their particular coven that the bride and groom should be skyclad.”

###

Cookie

Cookie
by
Bobby Derie

Settling in the chair next to the hospital bed, she slips her big purple mitt into his furry blue paw and waits for the night to take her. His breathing was deep and gravely, a burr that started deep in his chest and rumbled outward; she’d grown used to it, over the years, and just listening to that growling purr put her in mind of sleep. Soon, she knows, he’ll start to talk in his sleep, as he always does. She waits for it, the unconscious smack of his lips followed by the low, groaning, drawn out “Coo-ookiee-ee…”

They had met years ago, while working in Hollywood. There was a golden arches just across the street from the studio lot, and she’d sneaked over to steal a milkshake. He had been there, fists full of those little dry wafers they passed off as cookies, terrorizing parents and thrilling children. She didn’t know what he saw in her—she was little more than a big purple blob with arms and legs back then. Before she knew it, he’d talked her back to his place to make her some cookies…for breakfast, it turned out. They’d been together ever since.

It was a quiet ceremony, mostly family; her parents, his parents, Uncle O’Grimacey whom she hadn’t seen in years, even Jim—neither of them had expected that, but she could tell that her big blue monster was touched he showed up. A cookie cake, naturally. After that their careers had kept them on their feet, busy schedules. She had only ever gotten work in television, and less and less of that lately, but he had managed a few films even with his health problems, plus the residuals—songs, merchandise, guest appearances. They’d done well.

The diabetes didn’t really come as a surprise, to either of them. They’d both had to adjust their eating habits. A “lifestyle change” is what the doctors and producers had called for, but it was so much harder for him. It was who he was. She still remembered him crying after the reviews, right after “a sometime snack.” Yet he kept at it. Fruits and veggies, anything that would crunch, but it wasn’t enough. His sugars would get too high, and he couldn’t manage it just with diet and exercise. He had always been active, but at his size, to get the weight off, it was hard.

The arrival of a night nurse interrupted her reverie.

“Sorry Mrs. G, just have to change his catheter.” The young woman said.

“Go right ahead, dear.” she said, reaching back for a protein shake.

“Coo-ookiee-ee…” he mumbled in his sleep.

The nurse frowned at that, looked like she might say something.

“Oh, it’s not what you think.” she said, big smile stretching from one side of her to the other, giving his paw a little squeeze. “That was his nickname for me. He always loved his Cookie.”

The nurse smiled and got back to work, turning back the sheets. One of the blue furry legs ended abruptly in a bandage-wrapped stump.

###

On the Case

On the Case
by
Bobby Derie

The Necronaut was sipping a Samoan Fog Cutter, one gloved hand paging through scene of the crime photos on the tablet. A corpse in a bathtub full of ice. Skin and bones gone clear as crystal or plastic; even then the anatomy was wrong, bone structure subtly warped from adolescent pokes through medical textbooks looking for details on genitalia. Cause of death presumed to be the harpoon sticking obscenely out of its torso, sticking up out of the ice between its knees like the biggest boner in the world. The bathroom had been covered in clear fluid which the lab techs swore up and down was blood. A grass-skirted punk with the wrong tribal tattoos and pieced nipples came up with a pad. Jack ordered a Suffering Bastard, Beachcomber-style. The steel teeth clacked from inside the black crystal fishbowl.

“Messy.”

“They tend to be.”

“Not like this.”

“No. You ever seen something like that before?”

“Yes.”

Jack’s drink arrived. He took a sip, grimaced. Trader Vic’s. Now the only Bastard that was suffering was him. Jack sighed, promised to rip out the waiter’s piercings, and took another sip.

“Why do you order those, if you don’t like them?”

“They’re named after my grandfather. So, spill.”

“An obscure lineage, the Griffins. Developed a biochemical compound to change the refractive index of organic tissues. This would have been over a century ago, in Britain. I believe they’re still dealing with the fallout from that.”

“What kind of fallout?”

“Griffin didn’t begin experimenting on human subjects. The compound was tested first on small animals—rats, mice, cats, dogs, a chimpanzee, all of that. He disposed of the corpses, but the compound doesn’t break down easily. It passed into the local ecosystem. They’ll still be trapping blind rats with invisible skin a century from now.”

Jack finished his Bastard, held up his finger to the waitress for another. His hands itched for a cigarette. The waitress set them up, and they put them down. Jack gave in and lit up, letting the smoke sit in his lungs for a few minutes. The Necronaut kept talking, spinning out a secret history, and Jack let the individual words float past him, distilling out the essence. Deep sea fish with invisible skin; fish-people live down deep with the same thing, very hard to find as a consequence. Close to humans—they could interbreed—but a weird evolutionary path, back to the sea. Griffin had found out about them in his research, the water babies, gone trawling, committing atrocities worthy of a Mengele, distilling the protein or whatever the compound was out of their bodies while they were still alive. Side effect: the fish-people were very long-lived. The compound he injected himself with was more than an invisibility serum, it was immortality.

The servos in the Necronaut’s suit whined, and he sorted through the photos, bringing one up. There had been a gash in the torso, like a bone saw taken to inch-thick cellophane, revealing a cavity—lymph nodes removed.

“You see this? The compound concentrates here, in the nodes. This was a harvesting operation.”

“So this was a…what did you call them, Deep One?”

“Perhaps a hybrid, but yes.”

Robert Drasnin kicked in on the speakers, the first strains of Voodoo announcing the end of the happy hour and the beginning of the witching hour. Jack stabbed his cigarette out in a dish of black sand.

“Okay. So Griffin or whomever goes fishing, hooks our guy, takes him back to the hotel to clean the kill and harvest the goods. That helps.”

“Does it?” The Necronaut asked, gloved fingers digging into a bowl of nuts with a grinding sound.

“Sure. These are deep water critters, that means there’s a boat. We have a timeframe, there’s only so many docks in town, something set up for deep-sea fishing, out and back in time—but not too big, or they’d have an ice locker onboard that could handle a body, so a smaller boat. Somebody will remember it going out and coming back, there’ll be a registry somewhere. If Griffin’s an idiot he might even have it registered under his own name—”

“Griffin is dead.” The Necronaut chimed in.

Jack waved off the inconsequential detail.

“—okay, so somebody that knows Griffin’s tricks. Or discovered it on their own. Immortality-cum-invisibility syndrome? In L.A.? Probably somebody grinding things up and selling them as miracle vanishing crèmes to actresses. Wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve seen people try. The invisible thing threw me, but I’ve got a handle on it now.”

“So, you are off?”

“Nah, I’m on the case. Let’s get another drink.”

###

Never Pure

Never Pure
by
Bobby Derie

So on the seventh moon of her fifteenth year, Iben was led to the grove to hold the maiden’s vigil. Her parents left without word, as was custom, and without looking back, as was superstition, and Iben looked after them for long minutes, wishing they would come back and take her away before the beast appeared or did not.

The rock Iben sat upon was warm, which she was thankful for, since the girls in the village whispered that the beast never appeared save at sunset or sunrise, and so Iben might have to wait all night on the slab...and then when the beast did not appear, her life as she knew it would be over. Iben had seen it happen to other girls, who had come back alone.

Sometimes their parents turned them out, and they worked the streets for money, and cemented what everyone thought of them. Others became prey for the boys, who thought nothing of a girl obviously already sullied, if the beast rejected them. The lucky few were forced into marriages far too young, and often looked out at the world with sad eyes.

Yet Iben had no name to give to her parents, no boy to single out. There had been games in the dark, as children of a certain age play, and one night that had been that. Now the beast would not come for her, and the last Iben would see was the disappointment in her mother’s eyes, and the scorn of the village for wasting seven year’s luck.

As the evening drew on to dusk and no beast appeared, Iben lay against the stone and thought of how far it would be to walk away from all this. They would know still, she knew, but then Iben would not have to face them with the stark truth of it. She might starve or worse on the way, but perhaps that was not so bad.

The undergrowth at the edge of the grove rustled, and Iben sat bolt upright, hoping beyond hope to catch a glimpse of white horn and black cloven hoof. Yet it was only a witch who emerged from the gloaming forest. Iben knew her for a witch because she wore the grey and the black, and her red hair fell down uncovered, and there was a smile in her eyes that went all the way to the bottom of the soul and the devils laughing there.

Not unkindly, the woman and a girl exchanged their greetings. Then Iben noticed the witch carried a shallow basket with bread and cheese and fish, and her stomach rumbled, for it had been some hours since they had eaten. So the witch laid it on the stone beside Iben, and took a seat, and they shared the repast. In between bites of the meal, Iben confessed herself to the witch, and those smiling eyes only glittered more brightly in the dying light.

When Iben had finished, the witch put the basket away, and sat closer to the girl, spreading out her cloak, and Iben laid her head on the witch’s shoulder.

“Am I a slut?” Iben asked.

“Only if that is what you wish to be.” said the witch.

“I do wish it, I think.” The girl spoke with lightened heart and sleepy voice. “I wish to be the best slut in the world. I want to love people and have them love me, and heal those who are hurt of heart and give relief to those who are lonely and in need. I do not wish to live in fear of my neighbor’s eyes or my mother’s frown, nor see papa take to the drink angry and sad and fearful at himself for my sake. Nevermore would I look down on those others who failed the virgin’s vigil, but we would all be friends again as we had been before, and nevermore would I hide my eyes when I saw them stand stained with crimson light beneath the red lantern, or the next day when I saw the bruises and the bites, or hear the foul names that their visitors would call them and the fouler things the old whispered of them.”

“That is a very good wish.” said the witch.

So they sat and waited for what dawn might bring.

###

Arkham Cycle

Arkham Cycle
by
Bobby Derie

Carter stared into the banks of the Miskatonic. The dark, deep waters ran as they did in his youth, before the stench of industry had tainted the valley’s lifeblood with chemical poisons. When he was a lad of eight or so, he would sit on the curbed masonry bank as the river entered into the Arkham city limits, and dangle his toes in waters that had known Dunwich and would turn south toward Kingsport before finding the ocean again. Lining this bend of the river were the old Georgian houses, bright as he had never seen them with the fresh colors they must once have worn, and high looming gambrel roofs in good repair. Even the smells here were of an Arkham he had never known—the clear, clean smell of a north wind before the snow, baking bread upon the morning hearth, fresh hay and tobacco from the outlying farms, and among it all the strong clear salt-scent of the sea.

There were people here, too. Old townies he had met, friends of his father and grandfather he’d thought dead or gone, neighbors of yesteryear smiling and about their business. Carter walked among them, and they smiled to see him, their eyes a little sad as they asked after his family, old acquaintances long dead and still fondly remembered. Here he fell in again to a half-forgotten civility of long use and ancient practice, tipping his hat to the ladies as his grandfather did, bidding good morrow to citizens as his grandmother had taught him to do. The streets of Arkham were the old cobbles, so rare these days, and the sidewalks slabs of stone cut and brought in from the quarry that had sat used and abandoned when he was a child, and here and there an iron ring had been bolted down for horses to be tied, and there were horses too, at some of them.

Cater reached for one horse, a pale gelding with a shock of blond hair that he swore he’d seen once, on some friend’s farm from yesteryear, when the bells of the churches rang, the somber Episcopal chiming the hour, and the Baptists and Quakers not far behind. With each toll the city seemed to come away from him a little. The sun shone less, as if evening was setting, and in the shadows that grew the streets grew darker and populated by more villainous characters. By the seventh toll, Carter felt as if he stood in the shadow of the Arkham he knew; the river seethed with a nightmare of cuttlefish, and the handsome houses and roofs were rotten from within, ready to collapse and let loose some fetid horror, like evil fungi waiting for a sudden act of violence to release their spores. Monsters walked the town streets in human clothes, but did not have the human shape to do more than ape the movements and sounds of man, and more than one terrible limb slid out to kiss and caress Carter as he ran through the broken streets.

The eighth bell tolled, and the lights went out on Arkham.

Carter rolled over and turned off the ringing alarm clock, more tired now than he had been when he went to bed the night before. He lay awake for some time as the sounds of the world filtered in through the thin, ill-fitting windows of his apartment. There was the sound of a man outside, a busker mystic on a milk carton, laying out his spiel.

“Perhaps it is my country upbringing, but I had never shaken the unease that can be found when visiting a city. Whenever I would venture out into those teeming streets I felt as if I lost myself to some quiet hex from the old country, bustled and hustled against my desires, forced to submit to a will greater than my own. At night and the wee hours of the morning, when the streets were empty, it was even worse. I felt an interloper in a place devoid of human occupation, an intruder on a grave or some other holy place—and yet I did not feel alone there. Always as I made my way down the harsh pavements I felt the gentle stirring of the city beneath me, felt the exhalation of its breath on my cheek, and the almost subaural sound of its continued life and activity.”

The speaker’s voice was a greater soporific than any opium Carter had ever known, yet he struggled to stay awake. There was something in his words that rang true, and he wished to hear it to the end.

“Every city is different thus. I have been to Boston and to New York, and would care to visit neither of them again, but I must admit that each possessed a distinct identity unto itself, vast as the metropolis itself and yet intimate. To be in such a city is to feel as an ant under the magnifying glass, praying that an errant shaft of sunlight does not result in your own total destruction. Stranger but no less invasive is the personality of the larger towns like Arkham and Kingsport, which if they lack the vaster power of the great cities make up for it with a subtle corruption that is all the more insidious. Arkham I know better, for business has forced me there more often than any other urbanity and it as if something has displaced the native genius loci, replacing them with a force which is at once requiring of and antithetical to human existence. Mark me well, for I say that Arkham but waits its time, and we two-legs who stride its streets are all but visitors allowed to stay on its forbearance, yea even those who were born there. Arkham waits, and one day its purpose will be realized, and we shall not walk its streets anymore.”

There was a sonorous lull as the street-speaker stopped, and Carter closed his eyes once more. Yet some echo of that voice seemed to follow him in sleep, and he found himself before the crowd, speaking with that same broken voice to address a crowd of strange faces with familiar features.

“Once, I knew a world outside the limits of Arkham. Now there is only the city. I have walked for days along avenues that were all of Arkham town, and followed the Miskatonic in an infinite loop that would make Escher laugh and claw at his eyes to see. There are alleys here with old, strange names, filled with quaint shops that sell things we had no names for when I was a boy. There are quarters of town I never dreamt of, where the mere physical and spiritual laws of my own world are all overturned, inverted, torn down and replaced by strange logics. My mailman has three eyes, and thinks nothing of his deformity, for it is quite common among the Arkham he hails from; the baker's mouth is replaced by a horror of feelers, strange pseudopods that kneed the dough to make my daily bread, and not one customer in a hundred blinks at this, but downs their hex-marked snickerdoodles with every sign of pleasure.”

Carter felt a fervor stir in his breast as he spoke, for all that he said he found evidence of in the crowd before him. All the slight deformities he might have attributed to age, disease, or industrial accident he saw now were no ordinary deviations, but hints of some profound teratology. Not a one seemed wholesome and fully human to his eye, and his speech became more frantic as he felt the weight of their stare upon him.

“There is the ocean here, but it is not the eternal Atlantic I once knew. In some places it is red, in others green and weed-chokes, and under one damnably violet sky I saw it a milky golden color, and things frolicked on beaches of black and silver sands which I cannot rightly describe, but they were dressed as children. There is the University as well, and it is a sprawling affair, with each corridor leading to some other and stranger place, to departments without number and fields far beyond the education of any right-thinking men. And there are strange houses, on streets with almost-familiar names, of curious materials and every scheme of planning and building, but always with some mocking feature of the Arkham I knew. So there may be great round-houses of ceramic brick, six stories high with gambrel roofs, and slate-colored mud huts on stilts above a noxious swamp, with signs pointing to Dunwich and Kingsport, and fabled manses of faery glass of red, and blue, and green. All this and more is Arkham, always Arkham.”

The first stone came from a six-fingered claw that might have belonged to a Whateley, and Carter fell as it struck, tasted the blood as it ran down his face. The blood pounded in his veins as he fled that baying mob, human speech mixed with such tones as he never imagined a human throat might bear. He sought escape in the tangled alleys that backed Arkham’s grid of streets, the tiny twisting foot-lanes that survived, strewn with trash or tall grass between the buildings, then slowed and caught his breath, listening for the pursuit. Satisfied there was none, Carter stepped once more into Lich Street, and what caught his eye there nearly stopped his heart.

She was a witch-woman, Carter could see that clearly. He had emerged into a back-alley bookstall, and half-took the city for a shadow among the quaint old brickwork. Her dress was modern, but the materials and fixings were old-fashioned - wire rim spectacles from another century, a homespun cotton blouse with buttons of 17th century elephant ivory, real hobnailed boots, and a dress black as Arkham's darkest alley. She moved in step with the crowd, and each movement of her skirt echoed some distant siren or factory whistle, each tread could be felt under the boots as the passing trolley or automobile. Some instinct possessed Carter to watch, and he followed as best he could as she left the booksellers and went into an alley, hobbed boots clacking on the pavements. Soon he was running to keep up with her, though she had never broken out of a sauntering walk, and came almost to her shoulder. Her hair, this close, was a tangle of widow's weeds that a rat or something worse might lie in, and when he caught a draft of her perfume he gagged, and ran face-first into a wall. It was the city streets at night - humid, sweet and sick like something dying in a gutter, with the faint breath of the ocean and beer underneath.

Carter stood back, stunned, nose bleeding, and looked up at the bare apartment building. Her shadow was on it, a witch's silhouette writ large. From the roof, there was the sound of chanting... and an arm slipped into his, taking him by the elbow. He allowed himself to be led, struggled to compose himself.

She led him to the Arkham Drogue, the old anchor-stone that first settlers had brought and planted here. Carter recalled the old story, not so much told but hinted at in the books of Arkham’s founding—how this has all been Indian land once, a sizable town devastated by plague, and those strangely fervent colonists had come up to find fields neatly cleared into gardens, and chose to found their town on that spot. There was a plague-pit in Arkham, they said, older than the first buildings, because the first thing those faithful men and women did is gather all the dead and bury them certain fathoms deep, and marked the spot with the anchor-stone, in accordance with the old superstitions. Yet he wondered why she had led him here—she who was, in Carter’s mind at least, the personification of Arkham, with all her old grace and terrible wickedness. What strange spirit might the colonists have trapped here with their anchor-stone, Carted wondered. Like a dryad bound to its tree, a hungry spirit kept for centuries, only to manifest as this…woman.

Arkham laid him down then on the browning turf; his head propped up against the cool stone, and placed her hand on his head where the rock had struck him. Her fingers came back sticky with blood, which she wiped across her lips. Carter felt the strength leave him, as though he were one with the earth and the stone, and did not resist as her hand moved down to his belt, or when she lifted her skirts to reveal the spider’s nest there, and lowered herself upon him. He hissed and groaned with each bony thump as she drew him into her. She offered a pale neck, and Carter leaned forward and gently sank his teeth into it. Arkham trembled above and beneath him, the trees on the avenue shaking off their leaves though no wind blew, and a whole shudder seemed to run through the streets that made the windows vibrate. And when they had each spent, she raised herself from him, and gave one last bloody kiss before fading into the night.

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