Candle in the Attic Window(50)
Far below, she heard the front door slam.
Ave swung the useless candelabrum around. “Sheridan?” The attic door creaked shut behind her bare feet. “Sheridan, it’s Ave.” Her voice shook. “We can be together again.”
Silence.
Why would Sheridan frighten her so? She would ask him as soon as she could unclamp her throat and speak again.
And then, so faintly she wasn’t sure at first that she felt it, a touch on her ankle.
Lighter than a wisp of dust. Weightless as a gossamer insect’s wing floating upward on a draft, a trickle of feeling drifted against gravity along her leg.
She wasn’t sure she felt anything until it spread behind both knees and clambered up to seize the insides of her thighs.
She screamed and hurtled the candelabrum. Heard it crash as she tried to backpedal toward the ladder, out of the attic.
Found she couldn’t move.
What had happened to the music? When had it stopped?
And what was this that roiled just in front of her? Darkness boiled thicker than the darkness it drew from.
She whimpered, mute with terror and hope. And sudden, deep, humiliated pleasure. Her trapped legs spasmed.
“Ssshhh.” Oddly, the sibilant shush quieted her as the pitch mass surged against her trembling, welcoming limbs.
It eased her to the floor, pierced her body with white-hot chill and splintered her mind with light. Pleasure fled before awe. She succumbed in amazement, unsure that this thing that embraced her could ever have been Sheridan, gathering ethereal fragments of himself to swarm back to her from his oblivion.
Alexis Brooks de Vita has published literary theory in Mythatypes, an historical murder mystery titled The 1855 Murder Case of Missouri versus Celia, a translation of Dante’s Comedy, beginning with Dante’s Inferno: A Wanderer in Hell, and has contracted with Double Dragon/Blood Moon to publish a series of Atlantic Slave Trade dark fantasy titles, beginning with The Books of Joy: Burning Streams and Blood of Angels. She can be found at: alexisbrooksdevita.com.
Objects & Mementos
“As we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St. John’s pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure. So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background.”
“The Hound”, H.P.Lovecraft
The Ba-Curse
By Ann K. Schwader
They asked him if he feared the mummy’s curse,
That blameless maid he’d stolen from her tomb.
The excavator laughed; he’d heard far worse
In every local souk. As twilight’s gloom
Suffused the valley like the Nile at flood,
He lit a lamp & tied his tent-flaps tight,
Then, with a flourish fit to freeze the blood,
He poured a dram & bade his prize goodnight.
They never knew what savaged him, although
He shrieked it very clearly as he died: “Ba! Ba!”
“Ba! Ba!” A madman’s babble ... Even so,
His men won’t speak of things they saw inside,
For neither time nor whiskey can erase
That black-winged nightmare with a maiden’s face.
Ann K. Schwader is the author of five speculative poetry collections: Werewoman, The Worms Remember, Architectures of Night, In the Yaddith Time, and Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2010). Twisted in Dream, a comprehensive collection of her weird verse, to be edited by S.T. Joshi, is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press. Ann lives and writes in Colorado, USA. For more about her work, visit her Web site, http://home.earthlink.net/~schwader/ or read her LiveJournal, Yaddith Times: http://ankh_hpl.livejournal.com/.
Hitomi
By Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas
“The pupils dilate and shine with the thousand facets of a kaleidoscope with an abyss in the centre.”
— Clemente Palma
The fire that floats in the hallways purrs, whispers my name.
I was in the last stages of writing a thesis about Japanese literature. The classes were over and the summer, which one could foresee would be severe, reminded me of the imminence of the deadline.
I read, as part of my investigation, an odd little novelette titled ‘Hitomi’, written by a woman called “Tsukino” during the first years of the Edo period in Japan. It was a complex text with a plot revolving around insomnia; the characters seemed to be one alone, repeated infinitely, who, with a different costume, moved from house to house to escape the impossibility of sleep. I, insomniac by election, did not wish to escape, but had no option.
Like the infinite faces created by Tsukino, the rigour of summer forced me to find a new place to live: a return to my parents’ home was not an option. Besides, Mexico City had something that demanded I stay, search for a roof atop the ancient lake, traverse its subterranean veins inside suffocating, sweaty trains; the same “something” which took me that day to Donceles Street.