Today I am going to the island.
I climb the slick wood stairs down to Whitmuth beach. The wind blows fierce through the town like usual and swirls back out to sea, smoky with our coal fires and smacking with hot oil from the fry shops up and down the boardwalk.
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The fish were restless. They spun the water mossy dark until the pond was the color of crushed bottles.
Pey held onto her sister’s hand. They peered down at the water.
This morning, their mother opened her eyes and said she was too cold to get out of bed, so their father said they would spend the afternoon at the hot springs.
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Susan found her boss’s feelings drawer by accident. She drank too much and took a wrong turn in Sundrun’s apartment at the office holiday party, while looking for the bathroom. It had been all the rage five
years ago, getting your feelings surgically removed. After a sensectomies, some people had the feelings stuffed or encased in glass to use as paperweights so they could show them off during meetings with clients. That’s my fear, the size of an inchworm! Impressive, isn’t it?
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The chair first appeared on a Thursday afternoon on the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Bank and Trust on Lancaster Street in Pulaski, Kansas. Nobody saw how it got there. At least, no reliable eyewitnesses have ever come forward, so we are unable to pinpoint the exact moment of its arrival. Customers began to ask the tellers about it shortly after lunch.
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Captain Confederation was annoyed when he got off the elevator and it showed. It would have been so simple and logical for him to land on the roof of the Superhero Administration Centre, or in the ample grounds surrounding it, but these alternatives were no longer open to him. Last month Transport Canada had proposed a regulation requiring superheroes to take off and land from helipads unless actually fighting crime, and for some inexplicable reason the Department of Superhero Affairs had gone along with it.
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Nate had expected the first serial killer. In fact the first thing he’d said to Kelly once their Ford rolled to a stop on the shoulder was, “This is serial killer country. We’re finished.” She made scaredy-cat eyes and drew a finger across her throat. “Finished,” he enunciated. She’d heard his bake before, something to the effect that certain places settled and then maybe recultivated to feel remote–the Wisconsin Northwoods, for example, or parts of Appalachia or, in this case, Tornado Alley–were stuffed silly with the dumped spent corpses that were the nuggets of serial killers’ labor. The type needed space to operate. So each tree in the Northwoods doubled as a headstone, each stalk of corn out here a memorial, and to hike cross-country through such territory was to traipse condemned through the densest kind of cemetery.
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After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again. A hill and a half lay between the bookstore where I found work and the apartment I shared with the Kotos. Every morning and evening I walked, breathing mist and rain into my desert-scarred lungs, and every morning the walk was a little easier. Even at the beginning, when my feet ached all day from the unaccustomed strain, it was a hill and a half that I hadn’t been permitted for seventeen years.
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You’re listening to the Mike Colavito Show on Cleveland’s home for straight talk, WCUY 1200. The opinions expressed on this program do not reflect those of WCUY, its management, or its sponsors.
Fair warning; I’m in a mood today, folks.
We’ve got a mayor whose only talent seems to be showing up at luncheons and waving at the cameras.
Eighty bucks I had to pay yesterday for not wearing my seatbelt. Show me the seatbelts on a school bus.
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The ghost in my attic is Margaret, but she lets me call her Margie. She was seventy-six years old when she died, and now that she’s a ghost she sits in her rocking chair day and night, holding a tiny baby in her arms. The baby rarely moves and almost never cries. His name is Gavin, and he is thin and wrinkly and covered in fine brown hair. Funny looking, as preemies often are, but sweet nonetheless. Margie keeps him wrapped in a blanket of cobwebs, which I think is disgusting. I’ve always hated spiders.
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What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.
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There’s a dream you have.
It’s not a proper dream. It’s impatient, fired with urgency. It arrives without warning, veering suddenly out of the night.
You’re kneeling on the bridge. It’s late afternoon. Clouds mass low in the sky, seagulls wheel over the bridge spans, humidity hangs thick in the air. Cars speed by on either side of you, the whoosh of
their passage filling your ears.
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H.P. Lovecraft Month continues with an originally commissioned story: “To Whatever” by Shaenon Garrity.
To know or not to know is the penultimate question in Lovecraftian horror. What mysteries lie beyond the wall of our understanding? What if we were to commune with whatever lay beyond that wall? Or in that wall? That is the crux of this week’s story.
To whatever lives in the walls—
Please stop taking my half & half.
Let’s get this out of the way: I know you’re there. Don’t think I’m unaware of the scrabbling sounds, the walls creaking from your bulk, the way my razor in the morning is never exactly where I left it last night. Richard always said it was the building settling—as if a building, however old, could take apples out of the fruit crisper—but he was as wrong about that as he was about a lot of things beyond the scope of this note. And since he moved out I feel you’ve gotten bolder.
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West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
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I was shot with the cure in the dark. Later, someone would tell me it was a Tuesday, but before the tranq dart I didn’t know such a thing existed. It was either day or night, hungry or sated, alive or dead.
Then there was the cure and I was hauled to the Sanitation Center to be processed: our identities to be confirmed, and if forgotten, to be assigned a name, a registration number, date of birth, address.
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“It all began with the chicken in the end of the road,” she said.
“Pardon?” I gestured. “Could you say that again?”
Miss Sanderson reached out and tapped the translation device on the table, then picked it up and fiddled with its settings. She was the ugliest female of her species I’d ever seen– obscenely symmetrical features, pale hair and complexion, long limbs–and yet forever twirling a finger in her hair like she was trying to proposition me.
Disgusting!
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Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door.
“Bert!” the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.
“Gol Dang!” said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.
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