Distant Worlds Volume 1 Read online

  “You can’t escape me, Johnny, you’ve always belonged to me, just like all the others!”

  Jonathon still held the wooden cross in his hand and he thrust it out before him.

  “Begone, devil!”

  The monster threw its hands up and screamed. The sound it made was grotesque.

  “Get thee back, unclean spirit!”

  The monster stumbled backward, giving Jonathon enough time to scramble to his feet. He moved closer to his childhood tormentor, pushing it back with each step and invocation. It crouched down, hands still up, and wailed in agony. Seizing his chance, Jonathon darted past it and over to the closet door. He reached down and wet his hand in the holy water that had gathered in a puddle on the floor. Flicking a bit of water into the closet, he hastily spoke the blessing. In the instant he finished, the closet’s interior roared as if it were alive and abruptly burst into flames. The sudden fire discharged a burst of fumes and smoke that knocked Jonathon onto his back.

  As the fire spread out of the closet, he tried to get up, but the monster had recovered and pounced on him, knocking the cross across the room. It jerked Jonathon off the floor and hoisted him into the air.

  He struggled against the monster’s iron grip as it slowly crushed his throat. Swatting his arms desperately, his hand, still wet with holy water, clutched at the monster’s face and its putrid flesh burned at his touch. The monster howled and dropped him to the floor as it recoiled.

  Jonathon tried to draw a breath of precious air into his lungs but he coughed when he inhaled a lungful of smoke. Panicked, he threw himself across the room and snatched the cross from the floor. He scrambled to his feet and spun around in time to see the monster leaping towards him amidst the thickening smoke. Gripping the cross like a hatchet, he broke it against the monster’s head and sent it reeling to the floor.

  Rage swept over Jonathon as he fell upon his vulnerable tormentor, battering its twisted face again and again with his fists. Blood seeped from its wounds, thick, rancid, and black. For the first time, its demonic eyes were filled with a fear of their own.

  Jonathon screamed; it was a sound of hatred, pain, and sorrow.

  Smoke engulfed the room and Jonathon could scarcely see anything, but he still felt the monster’s body beneath him. Although he knew if he delayed any longer he might not be able to find his way out, he couldn’t bear to leave until he knew the monster was dead. Half delirious from asphyxiation, he thought he could hear it laughing at him. Still screaming, he battered it again and again and again. As his consciousness slowly succumbed to the smoke, he thought he felt arms grasping his body, pulling him away from the monster. He tried to struggle, but his body refused to respond and his mind slipped into darkness.

  Jonathon awoke in a comfortable bed in a small, well-lit room. A young woman in a blue shirt looked down at him.

  “Good evening, Father Cross.”

  He tried to speak, but his throat was too sore to produce any intelligible sound.

  “No, no, don’t try to talk! Your throat is burned from all the smoke you inhaled this morning.” The woman smiled warmly. “I’m Doctor Ross and you’re in the intensive care unit at Mercy Hospital. You suffered severe burns in that fire this morning. Do you remember being pulled out of the house by fire rescue?”

  Jonathon shook his head slowly.

  “Well, you were lucky they got to you when they did. I’d said it’s a miracle you survived at all.”

  An intercom speaker in the room crackled to life as she spoke.

  “Dr. Ross to ER, Dr. Ross to ER.”

  “I have to go, now, Father,” she said. “Just try to get some sleep for now, okay? I’ll be back to check up on you as soon as I can.”

  Jonathon nodded weakly. Dr. Ross smiled and turned to leave the room. She clicked the light switch off and the room went dark except for the lights from the monitors next to his bed. Jonathon’s entire body hurt. He didn’t want to think about the burns he’d suffered that morning. But physical wounds would always heal, he reminded himself. There were deeper kinds of wounds from which a man could never fully recover.

  Exhausted, Jonathon closed his eyes and tried to pass out. Despite the pain, he found it easy to relax. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the need to look in the shadows of the dark room. There was no longer any need.

  “Johnny?”

  Jonathon’s eyes snapped open. It had to be a hallucination. He sat up, ignoring the intense pain of moving his burned skin. In the far corner of the room a closet door was set into the wall. Its surface was a swirling maelstrom of horrors. The entire room smelled of rot and decay. Jonathon heard the door creak open and two vile eyes bored into him from the darkness.

  “I’m so glad you’re awake!”

  Homecoming

  Originally published in Rejected (ACA Books, 2015)

  Another story based almost entirely upon the opening sentence, “Homecoming” took its inspiration for quite a few sources along the way. There’s a bit of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, some of Tarsem Singh’s film The Cell, and a dash of Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands” story cycle thrown in for good measure. Written sometime in 2006, “Homecoming” is definitely an instance in which I was trying to push against the confines of the short story format. The story desperately wants to be epic in scope, but that ambition sometimes comes at the expense of the pushing the narrative forward. All in all, I think it’s still an interesting read, though I would definitely make different choices if I were writing it today.

  Blake fell into a shadow when he was nine years old. It happened on his way home from school, passing beneath the limbs of the old banyan tree in Market Street Park. The next day he told his friend Mallory about it and that night she vanished. Her parents were convinced that someone had slipped into their house and stolen her away, but Blake knew better. He never spoke of it again.

  Some part of him, he came to realize, had been left behind when he crossed over and back. He was not the same little boy after it happened and he could not help but feel he had spent a lifetime beyond daylight’s reach. Schoolmates shied away from him and adults were uncomfortable in his presence. As he got older, his grades slipped and his mood grew dour. His parents panicked, thinking he had fallen into drugs or plotted suicide, neither of which had ever crossed his mind.

  Blake was sent to a mental hospital when he was fifteen. They would have sent him home in a few weeks had an ambitious young doctor not been assigned to his case. Doctor Lambert knew there was something wrong with him, but he could find no evidence beyond his own intuition and Blake’s recurring dreams of unnatural things and places. They were enough to keep Blake there for four traumatic years of testing and analysis. Doctor Lambert would have kept him longer had his parents not finally decided the treatment was going nowhere.

  When Blake returned home, the first place he visited was Market Street Park. Why he went there after being gone for so long he could not say; he had not gone near the old tree since his experience ten years earlier. He felt drawn to it now, as if his homecoming would not be complete until he stepped into its black shadow again.

  But the tree was gone. Even its sprawling roots had been ripped from the earth and cast aside to make room for a future community center. Blake tried to convince himself that he was happy about its destruction and that its absence from the world would allow him to move on with his life. But the rationalization rang hollow; the emotion he felt was one of profound loss, not relief.

  The house where Mallory had lived stood across the street from the park. He stared at it for several minutes, wondering why her parents had never moved. There were no cars in the driveway and the house somehow seemed less healthy than its neighbors. Nothing about its exterior had changed so he presumed that it had not been sold.

  Something more than curiosity spurred him to cross the street and circle around the house to the back door. He peeked through a window and saw the sheets covering the furniture inside, as if Mallory’s parent
s had given the house its own funeral service and moved on with their lives. A small patch of weeds next to the doorstep was all that remained of the garden Mallory was so proud to point out every time Blake had come to visit. In the center of the little plot was an obnoxiously cute garden gnome. Blake lifted the statuette to find the house key Mallory had hidden there in case she ever got locked out, which was a regular occurrence. After wiping away the dirt, Blake slipped the key into the doorknob and went inside.

  Everything in the house was as he remembered it. When Mallory’s parents sealed the place up, they had apparently left empty-handed. Blake noticed, however, that every picture frame in the house had been turned down. He picked up a few of them and saw Mallory’s smiling face.

  After peering into a few rooms, he headed upstairs to Mallory’s room. A faded piece of pink construction paper was taped to her door with the words “Princess Mallory’s Royal Chambers” written on it in faded purple crayon. The sign made Blake think of Doctor Lambert. He would have enjoyed analyzing Mallory’s parents.

  Blake opened the door and wasn’t surprised to find its contents arranged in perfect order, everything except Mallory’s bed. It had been left unmade and perhaps even untouched since her disappearance ten years ago. He found something weirdly macabre about the room, even more so than the rest of the house.

  There was a single window in the room on the wall opposite Mallory’s bed. Blake pulled the curtain back to gaze out the window. What he saw made him recoil, his hands trembling and his mouth turning dry.

  The window overlooked Market Street Park and the construction site where the great banyan tree once stood.

  Blake wanted to pull the curtain back and run out of the house. He had made a mistake by coming inside; better to leave the past where it belonged in the dark recesses of his memory. But then he noticed something peculiar about the light coming through the window. A shadow fell across his arm where there appeared to be nothing obstructing the light. He glanced back at Mallory’s bed and his eyes met the empty, wide-eyed gaze of a teenage girl.

  The girl was thin and completely naked, her skin so pale that it was almost blue. She held her knees tightly against her chest; her long black hair, wet and matted, clung to her trembling skin. A filmy glaze covered her eyes, making them appear almost white. She opened her mouth to speak and the thick, inky liquid that covered most of her teeth ran out onto her chin and down her clutched legs.

  “Help me,” was all she managed to say, her voice garbled by the black bile that flowed from her mouth.

  “Mallory?”

  At the sound of the name she did not so much fade as melt into the shadow that fell across the bed, the shadow that Blake only then recognized as the silhouette of the old banyan tree. In the span of a mere second, there was no sign that she had been there. Only the shadow remained.

  Blake did not think. To do so would have sent him running from the house, at last convinced that he was indeed mad. Instead he sat down on the bed beneath the dark shadow cast by the tree that was no longer there. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again it took several seconds for him to realize that he was enveloped by a hideously complete darkness. He sat up and instinctively looked around despite the fact that his eyes were useless. The soft mattress of Mallory’s bed was gone, replaced by wet, slimy stone.

  Blake found the darkness familiar, the sensation of its embrace faintly stirring the memories of his childhood experience. The recollections that found their way back to the conscious portions of his mind were much closer to feelings than memories, equal parts comforting and unpleasant.

  Using his hands, Blake explored the ground immediately around him and found it to be completely flat. He stood up and took a small, inquisitive step into the black void. When he was sure of his footing, he took another step, his hands held out to probe for any obstructions.

  He continued in that way for some time, though it was difficult to mark his distance without visible landmarks. As he walked along blindly, he heard occasional cries drifting through the darkness. He could not decide if their distant sources were human.

  Then Blake stepped on something other than rock and the voice of a young boy called out.

  “Ouch! Who’s there?”

  Blake almost answered, but he thought better of it and remained silent.

  “Hello?”

  Judging from the sound of the boy’s voice, he couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten. An image of the boy came to Blake’s mind- small, dirty, and utterly alone in the darkness. The image was accompanied by an ominous memory. He wanted to tell the boy to be quiet lest he draw unwanted attention to himself.

  But it was too late for any warning. An inhuman voice gibbered in the darkness, accompanied by the clanking of heavy boots upon the rocky ground. Blake connected the sounds with one of the grotesque, hunched things that had stalked his dreams for ten years. He anticipated the snap of an iron collar clamping down on the boy’s neck, strangling his shrill cry for help.

  Blake ran, leaving the boy at the mercy of his subhuman captor. There was nothing he could do to help him as he was still blind and ignorant of the world he had entered.

  He ran until his lungs burned and his legs had nearly given out. When he stopped he had left the rocky ground behind and stepped into deep mud that rose up past his ankles. He dropped to his knees, chest heaving, to catch his breath and it was only then that he heard the low, sorrowful chorus of moans drifting through the air around him.

  Blake thought it unwise to remain where he was. Although his eyes were still useless, he felt like something was watching him. Something sloshed clumsily in the mud nearby and amidst the pitiful moans he could make hear gnashing of long, sharp teeth. It was an easy task to associate the sounds with the horrid things lumbering out of a forgotten memory. He tried to rise to his feet, to get away from the creatures closing in on him, but the muck clung to his limbs firmly and would not yield to his struggles. The memories grew vivid suddenly and for a moment he was unsure if the pain he felt, that of muscle and skin being ripped from his bones, was real or imagined.

  Something rough brushed against Blake’s arm then and he opened his mouth to scream. But he didn’t scream. A different, yet familiar sound came from somewhere deep inside his chest, a rasping and haggard cadence of foul words that made his bones quiver as he uttered them.

  Blake heard the things shriek and flounder in the mud for a brief moment before the darkness fell silent once more. The muck that had held him fast mere seconds earlier had returned to its benign state and he could once again move with only minimal difficulty.

  For a moment, Blake couldn’t bring himself to move. His mind reeled from the echoes of words that cascaded out of some corner of his consciousness. The strange sounds finally took shape in his mind and the same phrase began to repeat in his mind over and over. When he regained his composure, Blake stood up and gave voice to the wretched language.

  “Vlathkis mondried ubneeshka thals.”

  As soon as he finished, something that felt like tiny blades slashed across his eyes and his head burst with pain. He reeled back as the very substance of the darkness around him flooded into his eyes like some vile liquid. Blake felt nauseated for a moment, but then the pain receded.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes.

  After stumbling through the darkness for so long, the dim, hazy twilight that hung over the barren landscape seemed brighter than a desert sun. His eyes took only a moment to adjust and he gasped when they fell upon the monstrous, hunched creatures standing only an arm’s length from him. They stood there silently and while they had no eyes to stare with, Blake felt that he commanded the attention of the senses they did possess.

  He backed away from the eyeless things, ready to break into a run if they made to follow him, but they remained still. Only when he was well clear of them did he dare turn his back to the distant creatures, though he continued to cast an occasional glance over his shoulder as he walked. They soo
n faded from view and there arose no sounds of pursuit.

  Blake pressed forward, slogging his way across the field of mud until he reached a sandy plain on the opposite side. The air felt drier there, but no less stale. Exhausted and convinced he was finally alone, he sat down on the sand, wondering if he was any closer to finding Mallory. Unsure of how to proceed, he took a moment to survey the landscape of the shadowy realm. There was no color, at least nothing vibrant enough to stand out from the sea of grays and blacks. The shadows of the oppressive twilight were still too deep for him to see any farther than a few hundred yards and the area he could see was as empty as the darkness that had until recently enveloped him.

  He waited, hoping some repressed memory of that blackened wasteland would spring to mind and propel him forward. No solution presented itself.

  “You should not be here.”

  Blake sprang to his feet and turned to find the face of an impossibly old man regarding him. His ancient, withered body had been crucified upon the trunk and limbs of a crooked, petrified tree; over a dozen rusted spikes protruded from the old man’s arms and legs. A cloudy film covered his eyes, lending them a hue as white as Mallory’s had been. Blake was certain that neither the man nor the tree had been there moments ago.

  “Who are you?” Blake asked.

  “Do you not remember me, boy?”

  Blake shook his head.

  “Ah, to be expected, perhaps,” the man said. “Passing out of the shadow can play tricks on the mind, I’ve been told.”

  “Do I know you?”

  The man’s wizened eyes narrowed.

  “Have you forgotten so much?” he asked, though he muttered so quietly that Blake could not tell if the words were intended for him.