Apexology: Horror Read online

“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.

  When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.

  “Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.

  Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.

  “In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”

  Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.

  Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.

  As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.

  Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.

  King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.

  “It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”

  “Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”

  “Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.

  Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.

  “He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”

  “No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”

  “Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”

  Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.

  “Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”

  Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.

  Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.

  “NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.

  Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.

  “Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.

  Marsh flashed a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.

  Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.

  “I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.

  The horrid, bat-winged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.

  With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.

  “Tekeli-li?”

  Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.

  Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.

  “My lord....”

  “You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.

  “The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”

  The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.

  “Oh....” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”

  Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”

  “Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”

  “Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”

  A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.

  “But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”

  Flustered, she blushed.

  “Douglas....”

  “I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
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  “What happens after that?”

  “I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”

  “Oh, Douglas!”

  Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.

  An Agreement with Hell by Dru Pagliassotti

  In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions. Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

  http://www.apexbookcompany.com/an-agreement-with-hell/

  LIFE’S A BEACH

  By Alethea Kontis and Ariell Branson

  Alethea Kontis is the New York Times bestselling author of the AlphaOops series of picture books and Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter Companion. In 2009, Apex Publications released a collection of Alethea’s essays titled Beauty & Dynamite. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She can be found online narrating short fiction for Apex Magazine, reviewing books for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, or blathering on at her own website: www.aletheakontis.com. Alethea currently lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily and a teddy bear named Charlie.

  Ariell Branson is a fairy, author, sister, daughter, friend, and princess-in-training. She enjoys rainbows, garden gnomes, butterflies, her stuffed beaver, and writing about death. This is her first publication, and she’s overjoyed that she got to write a story with Alethea Kontis, her Fairy Godmother. Expect more from this dynamic duo!

  —§—

  Whoever said that having a bird shit on you is good luck was probably the same schadenfreude-loving asshole who named the "funny" bone. Eddie had not felt particularly lucky the day he'd been shat upon. Shat...is that a word? It should be.

  "Squawk!" cried the birds. "Caw! Caw!"

  Murder. Now that was a word.

  An hour later, in the cool, quiet confines of the boy's locker room at Ocean High, Eddie's face was still red and his heart was still pounding. He put on his gym tee and threw his ruined Carl the Llama shirt in the garbage. He'd loved that shirt, but looking at it reminded him of the worst moments of his life. All because of one stupid seagull. He could hear them outside, hooting and screeching and waiting for him.

  Truth be told, he was grateful to those birds. With the release of its bowels, the world around Eddie had released its truth, its bitter rage. They had laughed—oh, how they had all laughed. Skinny Brittany in that stupid polka-dot bikini. Nerdy Justin with his ridiculous seashell collection. Joey, whose laugh faded as his skateboard passed by. That little kid in the Bert visor picking his nose. Even his beloved Lizzie with the voice he once thought was made of sunshine.

  Luck? Eddie was lucky it was the off-season, or there would have been more people on the beach to laugh at him. He was also lucky that school was close enough for him to change clothes. Yeah. Luck. Lizzie had broken up with him. Effing birds. Now they were all going to know what it felt like to hurt. Not the birds, oh no. The ones who had laughed at him.

  When he got back to the strip, Lizzie was still there, her beautiful brown hair shining in the sunlight. He remembered the good times they had shared, back before she'd ripped his heart out. Back before the birds.

  Seagulls flapped around him, crowded around his head, and spoke to him as he walked.

  “She’s moved on Edward."

  "She never even cared about you.”

  “Kill her Edward."

  "Squawk!"

  "She should never be allowed to break another man’s heart.”

  They were right. Lizzie didn’t love him; she never had. By erasing her, Eddie would save who knows how many of her future victims.

  "Do it, Edward."

  "For the good of the world."

  "Caw!"

  Lizzie saw him. Without a word, she began to pack her things. She threw a bottle of suntan lotion and her book into her bag, and began dressing.

  Eddie pulled her pink, frilly beach umbrella out of the sand. "Want me to carry this for you?"

  "Whatever." She shrugged. “Don’t think this will make me come running back to you." Smirking, she added, "Shithead.” Lizzie had always believed she was funny.

  Eddie kept quiet until they reached her car, one of the few in the parking lot. The beach was almost deserted; in the off-season you couldn’t swim in the water due to the serious jellyfish problem. Eddie turned to face Lizzie, still holding her umbrella. He walked closer to her, pinning her against the car with the sharp end of the stick. He froze there, watching as her face went delightfully from shock, to anger, to fear. Then it was Eddie’s turn to smirk, as he drove the sharp wood into her stomach.

  He pushed the pole through her bare, uncovered abdomen. The muscles of her stomach contracted around his hand as she screamed. He smiled as she vomited blood, trying to breathe long enough to continue screaming. Not that it mattered; there was no one to hear her. When she stopped struggling he pulled the umbrella out, noting with pride that the hole in her midsection was straight and steady. Lizzie fell to the ground, blood spurting from her stomach and lips to form a dark pool on the asphalt.

  The seagulls flocked to the scene, landing all around him. They pecked at Lizzie's skin; the two lead seagulls each took one of her eyeballs in their sharp beaks. Her face quickly became nothing more than an exposed skull, its eye sockets soulless and empty as her heart, but it felt as if Lizzie was still watching him.

  Eddie washed his hands with the rest of Lizzie's warm bottle of Evian and used her towel to wipe off his fingers. He took the umbrella to the end of the pier and threw it like a bloody javelin into the water. On his way back he saw Justin at the base of the pier, bent over a pile of dead jellyfish, horseshoe crabs, and assorted shells. Eddie didn't worry about Justin having seen him dispose of the umbrella—that nerd wouldn't have looked up long enough from his scientific obsession to notice Megan Fox.

  Justin was pathetic. And he had the nerve to laugh at Eddie? Eddie was so much better than him, and he always would be. Then the gulls came to him.

  “He laughed at you Edward."

  "Make sure he never laughs again.”

  "Screech!"

  Justin wouldn’t laugh at his betters again. Not if Eddie had anything to do with it. He jumped down from the pier to where Justin sat. "Someone spotted a Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish over by those rocks.”

  "No way!" Now he had the goober's attention. "Really? Where?"

  "Over there." Eddie pointed to the farthest line of dark boulders beneath the pier. "Come on!"

  Justin took off running, his face a mask of unabashed happiness. Eddie ran after him. He waited until Justin was standing on top of the rocks and made the dangerous climb to join him. Justin shot Eddie an annoyed look. "That's what I thought. Where’s the jellyfish, loser?”

  Oh, yeah. Now he was going to die, and it was going to be painful. Eddie started to laugh uncontrollably, as if he had just punked Ashton Kutcher. He grabbed Justin by the neck, smashing his head into the rocks. Over and over, until his skull was crushed, and the boulders had been stained with blood. Sticky redness crept over the jagged edges of the rocks and into the water, staining it crimson.

  The seagulls swooped down in slow, languid circles, sticking their beaks into Justin's open head wounds, digging down unti
l the skull yielded soft brain matter. The two lead seagulls once again partook of the crushed, gushing eyeballs.

  "Caw!"

  Eddie's stomach grumbled.

  He walked to the surf shack, hungry after all of his hard work. Morgan, Justin's older, smarter, more popular brother stood behind the counter.

  “Can I get two corndogs please?”

  Morgan started to ring up his order and then paused, laughing. “Hey! You’re the guy that bird shit on!!! That was hilarious!”

  “Shut up.” The birds mocked him from their perch on the telephone lines high above. Eddie hadn't figured Morgan into his dastardly plans, but he could always come up with something on the fly.

  “Whatever you say,” Morgan replied with a smirk.

  “SHUT THE HELL UP!” Eddie shrieked.

  A seagull swooped down to the counter; a few more to the sidewalk behind him.

  “Kill him Edward."

  "He’ll never amount to anything.”

  "Squawk!!"

  Eddie jumped over the counter and grabbed a handful of corndog sticks from the large pile. He grabbed Morgan by his poufy hair and pinned him to the wall. With his free hand, he took two sticks and brutally stabbed them into Morgan’s eyes. Eddie pushed on each one until he was sure it had punctured the brain and blood began to seep out through the eye sockets. Morgan looked as if he were truly crying blood.

  "Crybaby," said Eddie.

  "Screech!" said the birds.

  Eddie pulled the sticks out, the eyeballs still skewered on them, and turned on the shack's grill on. He toasted the eyeballs to a golden brown, until all of the liquid had evaporated. The seagulls ate them greedily. Dripping with blood and eye jelly, they flew to Eddie’s next victim.

  Eddie retrieved the water gun from his truck and filled it with honey from the large vat he had stolen from the surf shack. He strolled leisurely up and down the boardwalk until he heard the distinct, rhythmic clacking of polyurethane on wood.

  "He's coming," the birds cried.

  "He tortures us," they said.