Shadows & Tall Trees

by Shadows

  Climbed to the ledge right before sunset and used my knife to carve our names into the rock, adding them to all the others, weeping as I did it because I know what it means, even though I still can’t say it out loud.

  They are coming. I have seen them.

  Climbed to the top of the rock this morning for one last look, for one single sign of humanity that might tell us where to go, and I saw them. Annie is waiting for me below but I don’t want to go down and face her. She’s going to ask me what I saw and what’s going to happen to us. What am I going to say? What am I going to tell her now?

  I can see them. Coming from far away. They are running toward us on all fours. They fill the horizon like a swarm. Some of them are riding and the creatures they are riding on have human faces.

  Please. Help us.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Tara Isabella Burton’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming inArc, Shimmer, PANK, and more. Her nonfiction writing on French decadence and the “weird tale” can be found at Strange Horizons and Wormwood (Tartarus Press), and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She also writes for The Atlantic, National Geographic Traveler, Salon, Guernica and more. In 2012 she received the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing. An earlier draft of her first novel, now on submission, was long listed for the 2013 Mslexia Novel Competition.

  S. M. Beiko is the author of the YA novel The Lake and the Library. When not writing, she attempts to stay warm in the Winnipeg winters, and does editorial and design work.

  Based in Buenos Aries, Santiago Caruso’s surrealist-gothic art has graced many book and CD covers. Visit him at: www.santiagocaruso.com.ar

  This is Ray Cluley’s third appearance in Shadows & Tall Trees. He has also been published in Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave from TTA Press, and there is a story forthcoming in Icarus from Lethe Press. His work has featured in a variety of anthologies, including as reprints for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction. His story ‘Shark! Shark!’ recently won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. ‘Within the Wind, Beneath the Snow’, a limited edition novelette, will appear later this year from Spectral Press, while a collection, Probably Monsters, is due from ChiZine Press in 2015. Ray also writes non-fiction but generally he prefers to make stuff up. You can find out more at probablymonsters.wordpress.com

  F. Brett Cox’s fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, most recently in Eclipse Online, New Haven Review, and the anthology Manifest West: Even Cowboys Carry Cell Phones. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004). He currently serves as Vice-President of the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Award. A native of North Carolina, Brett is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University and lives with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith, in Roxbury, Vermont, where cell phone service remains unavailable.

  Myriam Frey is a Swiss writer, translator and occasional illustrator. A trained architect, she recently rolled up the tracing paper and abandoned the profession in favour of her old love, language. She’s currently preparing to go back to university to study Applied Linguistics. Her short stories have appeared in Ambit Magazine, on Paraxis.org and in Still, an anthology by Negative Press, London. Myriam lives in Olten, Switzerland, with her husband and two children. You can find some of her work on www.myriamfrey.ch.

  Christopher Harman lives in Preston in the UK and is a librarian.

  Since his first story in 1992, his work has appeared in magazines such as Ghosts and Scholars, Supernatural Tales, Dark Horizons, New Genre, All Hallows and Postscripts, and also in books such as Acquainted with the Night, Shades of Darkness, Strange Tales from Tartarus, Unfit for Eden, The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Shadows, Rustblind and Silverbright: A Slipstream Anthology of Railway Stories and three volumes of the Terror Tales series (“Cotswolds”, “East Anglia” and “the Seaside”).

  The Heaven Tree and Other Stories is a collection of his work that has recently been published by Sarob Press.

  Michael Kelly is an anthologist, publisher, and writer based near Toronto, Canada. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals, magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Weird Fiction Review. As editor, he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award. He runs Undertow Publications, an imprint of ChiZine Publications.

  This is V.H. Leslie’s second appearance for fiction in Shadows & Tall Trees. Her other stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, Weird Fiction Review and recently in Strange Tales IV. Her story ‘Namesake’ has also just been selected for Best British Horror. She also writes non-fiction for a range of literary publications and is a columnist for This is Horror. She was recently awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Lightship First Chapter Prize. For more details on her work please visit:

  www.vhleslie.wordpress.com

  Robert Levy is a screenwriter and playwright whose work has been seen Off-Broadway. His dark fantasy/horror novel, The Glittering World, is set in Cape Breton and will be published in 2015 by Gallery/Simon & Schuster. Shorter work has recently appeared in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction and Harper Perennial’s anthology The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Authors Famous and Obscure.

  Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the National Book Awards 2012 (New Writer of the Year) before winning the McKitterick Prize 2013. Her second novel, He Wants, will be published in August 2014. Her shorter fiction has been published in Best British Short Stories anthologies and in her debut collection The Pre-War House and Other Stories, whose title story won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham and is an honorary lecturer in the School of English at Nottingham University.

  www.alison-moore.com

  Ralph Robert Moore’s fiction has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, Midnight Street, ChiZine, and others. His short story ‘The Machine of a Religious Man’ was included in Ellen Datlow’s nineteenth edition of The Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy; ‘Our Island’ was one of four stories nominated for Best Story of 2012 by The British Fantasy Society. SENTENCE at www.ralphrobertmoore.com contains a wide selection of his writings, both fiction and non-fiction. Moore lives with his wife Mary in Texas.

  C. M. Muller lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife and two sons—and, of course, all those quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. He is distantly related to the Norwegian writer Jonas Lie, and draws much inspiration from that scrivener of old. In addition to writing, he enjoys the fine art of bookmaking, and has produced three volumes in just that manner. This is his first published story. More information can be found online at: chthonicmatter.wordpress.com

  John Oakey is a U. K.-based graphic designer. Some of his work can be seen at www.johnoakeydesign.co.uk

  R.B. Russell is an English publisher who runs Tartarus Press with his partner, Rosalie Parker. He has had three collections of his own short stories published, Putting the Pieces in Place (2009), Literary Remains (2010) and Leave Your Sleep (2012), a novella, Bloody Baudelaire (2009), and a collected edition, Ghosts (2012). He is also, occasionally, an illustrator and songwriter, and enjoys making videos. Two new novellas by Russell have been accepted for publication in 2014/15.

  Eric Schaller’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as Sci Fiction, Postscripts, Shadows & Tall Trees, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best of the Rest, Fantasy: Best of the Year, and The Time Traveller’s Almanac. His
illustrations can be found in Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen and Hal Duncan’s An A to Z of the Fantastic City. He is co-editor of The Revelator

  www.revelatormagazine.com

  Robert Shearman has written four short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize and three British Fantasy Awards. A fifth collection, They Do The Same Things Different There, is to be published by ChiZine later this year.

  He writes regularly in the UK for theatre and BBC Radio, winning the Sunday Times Playwriting Award and the Guinness Award in association with the Royal National Theatre.

  He’s probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the twenty-first century revival of Doctor Who, in an episode that was a finalist for the Hugo Award.

  David Surface lives and writes in Sleepy Hollow, NY. His stories have appeared in Supernatural Tales, Shadows & Tall Trees Volume 4, The Six-Fingered Hand, and The Tenth Black Book of Horror. He writes a blog on the many sides of horror in writing, film, and life, Poe’s Doorknob at dsurface.wordpress.com. He is thrilled to be appearing along with so many fine writers in Shadows & Tall Trees Volume 6.

  Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and four short story collections. Her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Anthologies.

  You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she Tweets @KaaronWarren

  Michael Wehunt’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Cemetery Dance, Shock Totem, and One Buck Horror, among others. He spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. Please visit him at www.michaelwehunt.com

  Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Snowman and Other Poems (Iron Press, 1978) and The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000). His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (Norton), Midwinter Mysteries (Little, Brown), Unthology (Unthank Books), London Magazine, Able Muse (U.S.A.) and in genre magazines/ anthologies such as Supernatural Tales, Horror Without Victims (Megazanthus Press), The Sea in Birmingham (TSFG), Sacrum Regnum, Rustblind and Silverbright (Eibonvale Press) and Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. Ag & Au, a pamphlet of his poems, has come out from Flarestack. He lives in Powys, Wales.

  Conrad Williams is the author of seven novels: Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation and Blonde on a Stick. He has also written four novellas and over 100 short stories, some of which are collected in Use Once Then Destroy and Born With Teeth.

  In addition to his International Horror Guild Award for his novel The Unblemished, he is a three-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award, including Best Novel for One. His debut anthology, Gutshot, was shortlisted at both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. He has also been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson award on two occasions. He lives with his wife, three sons and a big Maine Coon in Manchester.

  PRAISE FOR

  SHADOWS & TALL TREES

  “Michael Kelly’s Shadows and Tall Trees is a smart, soulful, illuminating investigation of the many forms and tactics available to those writers involved in one of our moment’s most interesting and necessary projects, that of opening up horror literature to every sort of formal interrogation. It is a beautiful and courageous journal.”

  —Peter Straub, Best-Selling Author of Ghost Story, and A Dark Matter

  “. . . elegant digest-sized format and consistently good supernatural, ghost, and weird fiction...This looks to be the perfect magazine for aficionados of low-key horror. Bravo!”

  —Ellen Datlow, The Best Horror of the Year 3

  “Like mist creeping though a northern forest, this journal of the ghostly and ghastly will have you starting at sudden noises, and recoiling from half-glimpsed faces in the shadows on the wall.”

  —Laird Barron, Author of The Croning, and Occultation

  “Shadows and Tall Trees comes on like the wendigo, or a will-o’-the-wisp, consistently quiet and ominous and delicious and very welcome indeed.”

  —Glen Hirshberg, Author of The Book of Bunk, and Motherless Child

  “Shadows & Tall Trees is a really strong collection of stories, a high quality product with high quality writing. I thoroughly recommend it.”

  —Anthony Watson, Dark Musings

  “Shadows and Tall Trees appears to have a bright future and may well become one of the places to go to find new weird fiction.”

  —Speculative Fiction Junkie

  “Just received a copy of the latest issue of this superb little publication from Undertow Books. The editor, Michael Kelly, is creating something quite special here, I feel. Expertly produced and presented, an example of what a horror publication of this type should ‘feel’ like when you pull it out of the envelope. Another great selection of tight, quiet horror stories in this issue, stories that unsettle and cause the reader to think beyond the parameters of the ordinary. Issue 2 contained a story ‘Back Amongst the Shy Trees’ by Steve Rasnic Tem that any writer of horror ought to aspire to.

  —Danny Rhodes, The Crow’s Nest II

  “Editor/publisher Michael Kelly’s aim, is, professedly, to offer good quality short fiction in the horror genre. I can testify that he’s doing a great job and the third issue of Shadows & Tall Trees provides further evidence of his continuous success in that difficult task. The journal (which actually has the format and the layout of a short story anthology) manages once again to recruit excellent writers at the top of their game. I guarantee it’s worth your money.”

  —Mario Guslandi, Horror World

  “Kelly is doing a wonderful job collecting and publishing authors who really have significant literary talents.”

  —Benjamin Uminsky, Goodreads

  ABOUT SHADOWS & TALL TREES

  Shadows & Tall Trees is an annual anthology, in print and eBook format, of strange and weird tales. Many of our stories have been selected for reprint in various “Best Of” and “Year’s Best” anthologies. We publish stories of exceptional literary merit.

  Submissions of exceptional literary merit, up to 7500 words, are welcome and are assumed to be original and previously unpublished. Please do not query about reprints. Unsolicited manuscripts accepted for publication are paid at 1-cent-per-word to a maximum of $50. Contributors will also receive 2 copies of the journal.

  All correspondence, including submissions, should be sent to: undertowbooks@gmail.com

  For detailed guidelines, please visit the website:

  www.undertowbooks.com/submissions

  COPYRIGHT

  Shadows & Tall Trees 6, edited by Michael Kelly

  Cover artwork © 2014 Santiago Caruso

  Cover design © 2014 John Oakey

  Interior design, typesetting, layout © 2014 Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Undertow Publications.

  “To Assume the Writer’s Crown: Notes on the Craft” Copyright © 2014 by Eric Schaller

  “Onanon” Copyright © 2014 by Michael Wehunt

  “It Flows From the Mouth” Copyright © 2014 by Robert Shearman

  “Hidden in the Alphabet” Copyright © 2014 by Charles Wilkinson

  “Death’s Door Café” Copyright © 2014 by Kaaron Warren

  “The Golem of Leopoldstadt” Copyright © 2014 by Tara Isabella Burton

  “Road Dead” Copyright © 2014 by F. Brett Cox

  “The Quiet R
oom” © Copyright 2014 by V. H. Leslie

  “Night Porter” © Copyright 2014 by R. B. Russell

  “The Statue” © Copyright 2014 by Myriam Frey

  “Shaddertown” © Copyright 2014 by Conrad Williams

  “The Vault of the Sky, The Face of the Deep” © Copyright 2014 by Robert Levy

  “Apple Pie and Sulphur” © Copyright 2014 by Christopher Harman

  “Summerside” © Copyright 2014 by Alison Moore

  “The Space Between” © Copyright 2014 by Ralph Robert Moore and Ray Cluley

  “Vrangr” © Copyright 2014 by C. M. Muller

  “Writings Found in a Red Notebook” © Copyright 2014 by David Surface

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN: 978-0-98131-774-8

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.