Black Swan, White Swan

by Eugie Foster

Concentric circles lap beneath the dock’s wooden planks. A swan floats out, its shining plumage driving the water’s void back.

“There’s a man across the way.” The swan fixes Delia with polished onyx eyes. “Sometimes he’s a lighthouse and sometimes he’s a train, but silence doesn’t scare him.”

Delia stares at the luminous bird. “I don’t want a lighthouse or a train,” she says.

“Sometimes he’s a shelter in the rain.”

Delia studies the ripples that pass through the water’s surface in the swan’s wake.

“Don’t shut the door, it puts walls around you.” The swan dips its beak. “Call me the ocean, and I’ll change with the moon. You look right through me, but I can see the end of the storm.”

“Stop it.”

“Across the way there’s a man who holds questions without asking. A little peace of heart to guard with a stone wall,” the swan says. “Or a piece of heart guarded by stone walls. Let me in, and we can sing for nights.”

“Go away.”

The swan warbles, a musical wow-wo-ou. The wild cry startles Delia, and she takes a step back. Her foot catches on a knot jutting from the weathered planks; she unbalances, arms pinwheeling. As she tips into the icy lake, the swan takes wing, arrowing into the sky with a sweep of white feathers.

Black arms fold her to a black breast; the cold locks her lungs shut as water weights her limbs. Delia fights the embrace, even as she acknowledges her relief.

Still Small Voice

by Ben Burgis

Jack slipped on his invisibility shawl as he entered the café. Henry sat at a table by himself, reading a handsomely leather-bound book.

A few patrons looked up at the sound of the door opening and closing, then turned back to their business when they saw no one there. Under his cloak, Jack luxuriated in the artificial cool of the café.

Outside, it was a sweltering summer day, the kind of day that felt like all five of the Gods had lit five flames behind the clouds and the heat from those flames drowned out even the heat of the suns. It was the kind of day when even the wild dragons stayed out of the sky. Inside, it felt cool as autumn.

The heating and cooling control of the Island’s cafes and taverns, half-magic and half-mechanical, were one of the things Jack had almost forgotten to miss in his years in the West.

Henry turned the pages of his book, running his finger over the lines in a picture of intent fascination. Jack sat down across from him. Henry looked up, then shook his head and went back to the book.

Jack giggled. Henry looked up again. He closed his book, placed it ever so gently on the table and stood up. Jack forced himself to be quiet. Henry glanced to the left and then to the right, his lips set in a frown of deep suspicion. Then, at last, Jack took pity on the man and pulled off his shawl.

Henry staggered back. His chair clattered to the floor. Patrons at other tables turned to stare. Jack doubled over with laughter.

“So.” Henry picked up the chair and, with a show of dignity, sat back down. “I take it this is one of the Western marvels you wrote me about?”

“It is.” Jack folded the shawl as he spoke.

Henry stared at him. “How are you doing that? Can you see it?”

“Not a bit. I can feel it. If you stare at the damn thing for long enough, you can make out a sort of outline, but I find it’s best to remember where you left it.”

The Gateway of the Monster (Featuring Carnacki)

by William Hope Hodgson

“Two days later, I drove to the house, late in the afternoon. I found it a very old place, standing quite alone in its own grounds. Anderson had left a letter with the butler, I found, pleading excuses for his absence, and leaving the whole house at my disposal for my investigations. The butler evidently knew the object of my visit, and I questioned him pretty thoroughly during dinner, which I had in rather lonely state. He is an old and privileged servant, and had the history of the Grey Room exact in detail. From him I learned more particulars regarding two things that Anderson had mentioned in but a casual manner. The first was that the door of the Grey Room would be heard in the dead of night to open, and slam heavily, and this even though the butler knew it was locked, and the key on the bunch in his pantry. The second was that the bedclothes would always be found torn off the bed, and hurled in a heap into a corner.

“But it was the door slamming that chiefly bothered the old butler. Many and many a time, he told me, had he lain awake and just got shivering with fright, listening; for sometimes the door would be slammed time after time – thud! thud! thud! – so that sleep was impossible.

“From Anderson, I knew already that the room had a history extending back over a hundred and fifty years. Three people had been strangled in it – an ancestor of his and his wife and child. This is authentic, as I had taken very great pains to discover, so that you can imagine it was with a feeling that I had a striking case to investigate, that I went upstairs after dinner to have a look at the Grey Room.

“Peter, the old butler, was in rather a state about my going, and assured me with much solemnity that in all the twenty years of his service, no one had ever entered that room after nightfall. He begged me, in quite a fatherly way, to wait till the morning, when there would be no danger, and then he could accompany me himself.

“Of course, I smiled a little at him, and told him not to bother. I explained that I should do no more than look around a bit, and perhaps affix a few seals. He need not fear; I was used to that sort of thing. But he shook his head, when I said that.

“‘There isn’t many ghosts like ours, sir,’ he assured me, with mournful pride. And, by Jove! he was right, as you will see. “

Middle Aged Weirdo in a Cadillac

by George R. Galuschak

He’s driven this way five times already, watching the same banks and donut shops and car washes fly past in a never-ending reel. Got the front windows open, taking in the night air. And then he sees her—sitting on the curb, cradling her head in her arms, going boo hoo. Hodgepodge of girl and woman: miniskirt; halter top, no bra; friendship bracelet on wrist; hair pulled back with cherry scrunchy; Hello Kitty stick-on tattoo on her left shoulder, mushy from the heat.

“Hello.” He cruises to a stop. “I’m lost and I need to get to the Interstate.”

She raises her head and looks at him: middle-aged weirdo in a Cadillac. Tom Cruise shades; charcoal suit; porkpie hat; looks about 40, like her dad. Probably smokes; a hint of ash about him.

“I’ll give you directions.” When he shakes his head, she says: “It’s simple. Even a moron could do it.”

“I’m afraid I’m not a moron,” he tells her. “The last three people I asked gave me directions and I ended up getting more lost. So it would be easier if you just got into the car and showed me.”

She snorts: “Are you for real?” She’d be stupid to get in, she surely would.

The Parable of the Shower

by Leah Bobet

The angel of the LORD cometh upon you in the shower at the worst possible moment: one hand placed upon thy right buttock and the other bearing soap, radio blaring, humming a heathen song of sin.

Fear not! he proclaimeth from the vicinity of the shampoo caddy, and the soap falleth from thy hand.

Motherfu—thou sayest, and then thou seest the light, the wings, the blazing eyes like sunlight and starlight both at once, and since thy mother raised thee right thou coverest thy mouth with one hand and makest the sign of the cross with the other. It is the soap-hand which covereth thy mouth: thou gett’st soap in thy mouth, and spittest—away from the angel of the LORD—and do not curse again though it is terrible hard.

The angel of the LORD he does laugh.

Who in Mortal Chains

by Claire Humphrey

I almost had friends in 1965.

Ryder was a brewer in those days, when brewing was a thing no one much cared to do. He was well loved among a circle of twenty or so, every one with a lost art. Mylene was a weaver; Tom worked leather; Eskil kept bees. Up on the mountain, Andy ran a print shop, with a hundred fonts of lead type, sorted by letter into a hundred wooden trays. Clifton made images with light: albumen prints, salt prints, silver negatives on glass.

(Continue Reading…)

Doors

by Rajan Khanna

You will never find this world in a book. It is spelled out on the walls of bathrooms, in janitor’s closets and bomb shelters, in the scrawl on an alley wall. But only if you know where to look. There are maybe a hundred people across the world who do.

From the moment you find your first tag, you become a collector. Some people collect figurines or stamps or comic books, you collect locations. You’re a gambling addict in a million dollar game, a pothead with a giant brick of BC’s Finest, a sexaholic at a gang bang.

I used to be into sex. Like really kinky shit. You could tie me up and beat me with a riding crop and I’d be as happy as a pig in shit. Because in those moments, when someone was treating me like an object, I could switch off from bills and mortgages and loans and fucking laundry. Push it to one side and let the pain wash it away.

Fuck S&M, Traveling is better. Fuck meditation, Traveling is better. God help me, fuck sex.

Traveling is better.

The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half-buried, write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying your work.