Apexology: Horror Read online

  “Splendid. I take it, my princess, that you did not overwork yourself? Or was not too bored on these premises?”

  She coughed.

  “No,” she said.

  He smiled. He pulled out a bronze knife and began to cut into the mermaid’s back, peeling off a thin slice of muscle and then laying it on a plate. “Good.”

  “Although,” she said, “I noticed that my key does not open every room in the house. There is one room it cannot open.”

  He pointed the knife at her. “And you shall not go in there. Do you understand? That room is off limits.”

  She smiled.

  Of course, she thought. That room is my escape from this madness.

  It amazed Cathy how quickly she forgot her own life and became absorbed in Valerie. She slid away from who she was, her old sense of self slowly falling into a distant abyss. She had memories, somewhere—of Josh being an artist. Of her attending an art show. But they became muddled with this life, this history, this crumbling mansion that she now found herself trapped.

  One without any windows to see the world outside.

  She had some other memories—but they had merged and changed. Josh was her uncle, lord of this estate and her husband. She was a princess from afar. He abused her and beat her with a table leg, he tried to scoop out her eye sockets with a spoon. In her mind Josh and the Lord and her ex-husband all became merged into a single individual.

  And even though her normal life had fallen into an abyss of her memories she felt a pull and a tug towards what was there before. Like she was haunted by something she knew. Something about a room full of body parts. Something about her old life, a life different than this one.

  She had dreams about that old life. About going to a job every day. About seeing her friends, and going bar hopping in the evening. About paying bills and scraping by and wondering if she would have enough money to eat next month or not.

  She always awoke with a feeling of ghosts running over her skin and the mad nightmare of limbs and torsos and disfigured female forms, and this feeling like she was escaping here. That she had fled here from her own rational existence into one of phantasmagoria.

  The passages were filled with moving things. Light, shadow, tiny creatures made of clockwork. She saw grubs crawling along the floor, searching for corpses to eat. And she followed them. Followed everything.

  She knew that she was a mist here. A princess trapped here. She had not eaten of the mermaid for this very reason—knowing the story of a daughter kidnapped and taken to faerie and trapped after eating the food.

  She came to the door—she recognized it. It was the door this key could not open. She tried again to no avail. Tried a third and fourth time. And then she took her own ring finger and stuck it into the lock. Her wedding ring locked against it. Click, click, click.

  The door swung open.

  She saw the living room of the apartment.

  She saw the body parts lining floor and wall.

  And she saw herself. Laying on the floor, crawling. Trying to get away. And above her stood Josh. But not Josh. He was dog faced and had a saw in one hand and a table leg in the other. He was naked. He had her ex husband’s back and the lord’s penis. And she saw herself on the floor, stoney eyed and crawling.

  Her skirt was hiked up and covered in blood. Her face was distorted, broken, smashed in. She mewled like a kitten as she crawled, a sickening sound that made every bone in Valerie’s body melt.

  And she saw that she had half a leg missing.

  Half an arm missing.

  Half her face.

  Valerie saw herself on the floor and the creature above her, torturing her, tearing her limb from limb. Howling about his art, screaming about his art. About the ethics of death, about the beauty of the morbid that would transfix the world. About violence as a statement of ethical boundaries.

  Her double looked up at her. Mewling. Her whole form like a smashed doll. A broken toy smacked around and tossed out and waiting for the rain and the sun to come and bleach it and destroy it.

  She saw herself.

  Felt herself splinter, smash, broken mirror.

  And.

  And she turned.

  And she closed the door.

  And she walked into the corridors.

  And she found the mermaid corpse.

  And she sat down.

  And started to eat.

  It tasted like the sea. It tasted like warm sausages. It tasted like old wine poured over broken glass. It tasted like the sun going down her stomach, exploding inside of her and lighting up her heart and her veins from the inside out.

  If you enjoyed Paul’s story, check out his space opera novella OPEN YOUR EYES from Apex Publications.

  Her lover was a supernova who took worlds with him when he died, and as a new world grows within Ekhi, savage lives rage and love on a small ship in the outer reaches of space. A ship with an agenda of its own.

  Critically acclaimed author of weird fiction Paul Jessup sends puppets to speak and fight for their masters while a linguistic virus eats through the minds of a group of scavengers in Open Your Eyes, a surrealist space opera of haunting beauty and infinite darkness.

  Available today from Apex Publications

  http://www.apexbookcompany.com/open-your-eyes-book/

  SUMMON, BIND, BANISH

  Nick Mamatas

  NICK MAMATAS is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and of over sixty short stories, many of which were collected in You Might Sleep.... A third novel, Sensation, is forthcoming in 2011. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.

  Nick’s non-fiction book about how to survive as a writer in the 21st century, Starve Better, will be released by Apex Publications in 2011. He has also appeared in the Apex horror anthology Dark Faith and issue 15 of Apex Magazine.

  “Summon, Bind, Banish” appeared in the second issue of Apex Magazine in the summer of 2008. Review site “The Fix” had the following to say about the story: “The speculative element in “Summon, Bind, Banish” is slight, but the skillfully woven double narrative that binds the past and present together resonates with the shared pathos of two men whose deeds transcend time.”

  After reading Paul and Nick’s stories, you might think that Apex publishes nothing but weird. We are partial to slipstream work, but mostly the editor thought it best to challenge your perceptions right off the bat.

  —§—

  Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick’s Egypt is not the one she cares for. She prefers the Sphinx from the outside, tea under tents, tourist guides who haggle on her behalf for dates and carpeting. She wanted to take a trip on a barge down the Nile, but there weren’t any. At night, she spreads for Alick, or sometimes takes to her belly, and lets him slam and grind till dawn. Mother was wrong. There is no need to think of the Empire, or the men in novels. There’s Alick’s wheezing in her ear, the thick musk of an animal inside the man, and waves of pleasure that stretch a moment into an aeon. But she doesn’t sleep well because the Egypt morning is too hot.

  A ritual Alick performs fails. The ambience of Great Pyramid cannot help but inspire, but the shuffling travelers and their boorish gawking profanes the sacred. The sylphs he promised to show his wife—“This time, it will work, Rose. I can feel it” Alick had said, his voice gravel—do not appear. But Rose enters a trance and stays there, smiling slightly and not sweating even under the brassy noon sky for the rest of the trip.

  “They’re waiting for you!” she says. And under her direction Alick sits in the cramped room of his pension and experiences the presence of Aiwaz, the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat, Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel, and the transmitter of Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, The Book of the Law, as delivered by XCIII=418 to DCLXVI.

  Alick doesn’t turn around. He never turns around over the c
ourse of those three days of hysterical dictation. But he feels Aiwaz, and has an idea of how the spirit manifests. A young man, slightly older than Alick, but dark, strong, and active. As ancient in aspect and confident in tone as Alick wishes he was. The voice, he’s sure, is coming from the corner of the room, over his left shoulder. He writes for an hour a day, for three days.

  See, people, here’s the thing about Crowley. He was racist and sexist and sure hated the Jews. Real controversial stuff, sure, but you know what, he was actually in the dead center of polite opinion when it came to the Negroes and the swarthies and money-grubbing kikes and all those other lovely stereotypes. Crowley and the Queen could have had tea and, with pinkies raised, tittered over some joke about big black Zulu penises. Except. Except Crowley loved the penis. His sphincter squeaked like an old shoe as he performed the most sacred of his magickal rituals. That’s where it all comes from, really. The Book of the Law, Aiwaz, the whole deal with the HGA, it’s buggery. That dark voice over the left shoulder is a spirit, all right, but it’s the spirit of Herbert Charles Pollitt, who’d growl and bare his teeth and sink them into the back of Crowley’s neck after bending the wizard over and penetrating him.

  You ever get that feeling? The feeling of a presence, generally at night, alone, in a home that’s quiet except for the lurch and hum of an old fridge, or the clock radio mistuned to be half on your favorite radio station and half in the null region of frizzy static. It’s not all in your head, by definition, as you willed your anxieties and neuroses three feet back and to the left. And that’s a good thing. Because the last thing you want is for it to be in your skull with you. The last thing you want is for me to be in your skull with you. Crowley pushed it out, out into the world.

  Alick in Berlin, fuming at being passed over for a position in British Intelligence. He may be a beast, a fornicator, a bugger, and ol’ 666 himself, but he had been a Cambridge man, bloody hell, and that used to mean something. He didn’t betray Great Britain, it was Great Britain that betrayed him. Rose did as well, the fat old cow of a whore. So he works for the Hun, in Germany, writing anti-British propaganda: “For some reason or other the Germans have decided to make the damage as widespread as possible, instead of concentrating on one quarter. A great deal of damage was done in Croydon where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.” But the old home still tugs at him, so he declares himself Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all other Britons within the sanctuary of the Gnosis.

  The winter is damp and the water stays in his lungs. The doctor gives him heroin and Alick dreams in his small bed that his teeth are falling out. Awake again, he files a few into points, so dosed on his medication that he sees not himself in the mirror, but another man both in and before the mirror. The real Alick, the young boy whose mother called him the Beast for masturbating, stands in the well of the doorway, watching and feeling only the slightest cracking pain, in sympathy with the actions of the Alick he’s watching. Those fangs will find a wrist one day.

  I reached enlightenment in the way most people do these days; in my mother’s basement, which I converted into a mockery of an apartment thanks to a dorm fridge, a hot plate I never used, and a half-bath my father put in for me after I promised to go back to school and at least get my Associates degree. The only good thing about community college is that it gave me access to the library at the state college, and like any library of size, it had a fairly decent collection of occult materials. I’m from a pretty conservative area too, so the books had been left on the shelf, unmolested in their crumbling hardcovers, for years. Old-looking occult books are the most frequently stolen from libraries, after classic art books that could pass for porn, but out here in Bucks County even the metalheads couldn’t care less, so I was the one who got to swipe them.

  Mostly they stayed under my futons, infusing the dust bunnies with dark wisdom. I really have to credit my metaphysical sensitivities to my old television. It’s a black-and-white number with knobs and everything, one for VHF and one for UHF. Small, it had been on my grandmother’s bureau for years, off entirely except on Sundays, when she’d tune in to Channel 67 and watch the Polish language programming. After she died my mother’s brothers and sisters swarmed all over her tiny room, snagging gaudy jewelry—lots of silver and amethysts, and broaches the size of small turtles—the fancy sheets she hadn’t used in the entire time I’d been alive, the passbooks and checkbooks, and then, finally, the dense Old World furniture she’d kept after selling her own place and moving in with us.

  By 3 PM that afternoon, when I got home from class, the only things left in grandma’s room were her TV (on the floor in a dusty rectangle where the dresser had been), a doily (still atop the TV) and the smell of her, half-perfume, half-sausage (everywhere). I stood around while my mother cried and father frowned, but I felt nothing except the presence. Grandma on the steps, walking down into the living room. Grandma on the big easy chair, tiny feet in beige stockings poking up on the ottoman, her lips smacking as she turned the page in a newspaper. The sharp wheeze before she spoke to ask for something, her voice a crackling song on a 78 RPM record, tinny and distant. I’d always cringe a bit when she walked into the room, and was cringing now that she was gone. Because she wasn’t.

  Alick in Italy, at the height of his powers. The Scarlet Women, Leah Hirsig, is with him. Two points pierce her flesh just past her palms, like a tiny stigmata run dry. The UK is still out of the question, and Germany, an economic basketcase: Theodor Reuss and the other members of the Ordo Templi Orientis are pushing wheelbarrows full of scrip to the store to buy their daily bread. New York reeks of piss and Irishmen, and Leah’s family up in the Bronx would not understand that she has become Alostrael, the womb of God. Paris has gaping cunts and asses aplenty, but the magus needs time and space enough to remove himself from the world. And Cefalu, in Palermo, Sicily, is cheap and far from the bald old bugger Mussolini. The weather does his lungs good, but the taste of opium, the sizzle of heroin boiling, never leaves his tongue or nostrils.

  Sometimes Alick fancies himself the Lord of the Manor when a peasant knocks on the door and offers him a goat. “Milk good yes,” the man says, likely the only English he knows. Twenty minutes later, staggering drunk around the courtyard, eyes crossed, goat following the rope lead in his hand like a reluctant dog, does Alick realize the goat is a male. No milk there. Leah declares, time and again, till she believes it: “I dedicate myself wholly to the great work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures.” Alick, for a moment, decides to test her on the peasant, but in the end takes the goat.

  The ritual is cramped. Alick had gathered around home a mess of bohemians, whores, and thrillseekers, but there’s real magic to be had, he’s sure of it. Alostrael bends over the altar, and Alick nods for the goat to be brought in. Its phallus is huge and swings low, so Alick himself masturbates it, and then, with his other hand on one of the goat’s horns, leads the animal to Leah. The penetration is clumsy, he misses twice and Leah squirms—Christ, Alick hates it when women squirm, and that’s why he’s always preferred men, and to be the one presenting his anus. He can do it right. Just lay there, bitch!—but finally it is achieved. Leah is a wild woman, all hips and twisted back, and Alick watches her closely. At the moment of orgasm, her orgasm, not the goat’s, he’ll slit the beast’s throat. But the bucking bitch comes too quickly and Alick can’t let go of the goat to reach the knife, so he wraps his thick hands around its neck, fingers searching under the coarse hair to find the vein and throat, and starts to squeeze and crush.

  Starve Better by Nick Mamatas

  Starve Better makes no promises of making you a bestselling author. It won’t feed aspiring writers’ dreams of fame and fortune. This book is about survival: how to generate ideas when you needed them yesterday, dialogue and plot on the quick,
and what your manuscript is up against in the slush piles of the world. For non-fiction writers, Starve Better offers writing techniques such as how to get (relatively) high-paying assignments in second and third-tier magazines, how to react to your first commissioned assignment, and how to find gigs that pay NOW as the final notices pile up and the mice eat the last of the pasta in the cupboard.

  Humor, essays and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas, author and editor of fiction that has caught the attention of speculative fiction’s most prestigious awards, come together for the first time in a writers’ guide that won’t teach anyone how to get rich and famous… but will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.

  http://www.apexbookcompany.com/starve-better/

  TO EVERY THING THERE IS A SEASON

  by Dru Pagliassotti

  Dru Pagliassotti is the author of the mass market paperback Clockwork Heart (Juno Books). She teaches at California Luthernan University and has been running her webzine, The Harrow, for over ten years. She enjoys traveling, adores iguanas, and can't fix any of her four broken pocket watches.

  Her novel An Agreement with Hell (Apex Publications) is set to appear in early-mid 2011. Apex doesn’t publish many Lovecraft-type stories (though it has happened from time to time), so when Dru sent this one for Apexology, I was quite pleased.

  —§—

  Camille Wilmarth was bored to tears with this year's Season. Ever since R'lyeh had risen from the sea, it seemed that all the ton could find to talk about was the Egyptian Cultist revival in home decorating or how to clean Leng porcelains or whether Lord Byron had bought an original Unaussprechlichen Kulten for his new wife or been hoodwinked by an unscrupulous German forger.