Because maybe it hadn’t worked.
silver hadn’t worked
For some reason that thought buzzed in his head. He turned the handle over, feeling its smooth grain…
His fingertips brushed rough, carved lines near its head. Numbers or maybe letters. He frowned and brought it closer to the flashlight.
His stomach grew very cold.
C. K.
Carlton Kretch.
Grandpa Carlton’s hatchet.
Impossible. He’d seen that hatchet once, when he and Dad and Grandpa and Scott had gone camping last year. Grandpa had let out that maybe someday he’d give the hatchet to Jesse for his birthday…
Holy.
Shit.
Jesse stood and clutched the ruined and impossible handle. Everyone else could pretend Scott went crazy and killed himself, but he knew. Somehow, he knew.
That hadn’t happened.
Jesse walked from that room, heading for the town library. The hatchet was proof, of what he didn’t know, but something had happened to them here. Words had been carved into the wall. And though his memories of that day now blurred together, he knew he could remember them, if he tried hard enough.
He just needed time.
To save Scott.
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Interview with Kevin Lucia
Who are your favorite writers/role models of all time, and who are you currently hooked on?
Role models: of course, Stephen King. He introduced me to horror, played a foundational role. Peter Straub helped me realize that horror can be written beautifully, along with Charles Grant, T. M. Wright, Ray Bradbury and Ramsey Campbell. Robert McCammon, chiefly for writing Boy’s Life, but also because his novels are so layered, the plots so unique. Believe it or not—even though he’s gotten formulaic—Dean Koontz, mostly because he insists on pressing against the prevailing post-modern sensibility, and his life story is amazing and inspiring. Al Sarrantonio, for his short work, and his Halloween work.
Current favorites: Rio Youers and Ron Malfi, without question. Both writers labor at their craft, and it shows. Norman Partridge writes fiction that hits like punches to the kidneys, and so many writers try to imitate his style, and fail, miserably.
Norman Prentiss is the best contemporary working in the field of “quiet horror”, in my opinion. Kealan Patrick Burke’s Kin was fantastic. Gary Braunbeck blows my mind, and hurts my heart, in wonderful ways.
What is Things Slip Through, exactly?
Things Slip Through is my first short fiction collection, to be released on Amazon November 15th in paperback and Kindle from Crystal Lake Publishing. It’s a linked collection of eleven stories that all take place in the same small, haunted Adirondack town, connected by a framing narrative of a town sheriff looking for answers he may not actually want, once he gets them.
What was your primary influence in compiling Things Slip Through?
Well, I’m a huge fan of linked collections to begin with. The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man¸ Dandelion Wine—all by Bradbury—are foundational works. Also, I’ve always loved the creepy small-town mythos, Charles Grant’s Oxrun Station stories and novels and Gary Braunbeck’s Cedar Hill Cycle also large influences.
Are all the stories in the collection Lovecraftian in nature?
Not explicitly, no. But it’s a town full of unknowable secrets and things that have “slipped through” from beyond, so I feel as if the Lovecraftian “vibe” is there.
What are the primary themes moving through your work, in general?
In the end, for me, it comes down to the human element: What makes us human? As humans, what do we fear the most? How do these fears best us, or how do we rise to them, surmount our fears?
In an email, Mort Castle once gave me the following advice: “The real stuff, the stuff that lasts, comes out of late night conversations with your very own self.” I’ve tried more and more to make this my credo, especially when it comes to short stories.
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About Kevin Lucia
Kevin Lucia has worked as an editor for The Midnight Diner, Shroud Magazine and Cemetery Dance Magazine and is currently an Associate Fiction Editor for the soon-to-be-relaunched Horror Channel. His podcast “Horror 101“ is featured monthly on Tales to Terrify, charting the evolution of the horror genre.
He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grande Chronicles. His short fiction has appeared in several venues, and his first short story collection, Things Slip Through is forthcoming in November 5th, 2013.
He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children.
Also by Kevin on Kindle
Hiram Grange & The Chosen One
The Hiram Grange Chronicles
Things Slip Through
Connect with Kevin Online
Website: http://www.kevinlucia.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/kevinlucia
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/authorkevinlucia and http://www.facebook.com/ThingsSlipThrough
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1030571.Kevin_Lucia
Google Plus: http://plus.google.com/104055029878452392321
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Kevin-Lucia/e/B003L29OEM
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/KevinLucia33
Crystal Lake Publishing: http://www.crystallakepub.com/kevin-lucia.php
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Winds of Nzambi
David Kernot
The follow story co-authored with David Conyers appears in Autumn Comes Slowly, a collection of David Kernot’s darker short fiction.
Mukunzo pushed away the corpse. The Bakongo warrior chained to him had been dead for three days. When slavers came to throw the rotten, bloated body overboard, he ignored them, instead he focused on the stench of waste, and sweat, in the Portuguese caravel’s crowded men’s hold. He suspected the women’s quarters would be no different, and his heart went out to his favourite, Kimpa.
The retching Portuguese sailor pulled at him as he severed the corpse’s hand with a clean slash of his large machete. He discarded the bloodless hand at Mukunzo’s feet as a reminder. Several prisoners were ordered to drag the corpse up on deck and throw it overboard. Mukunzo tried to join the men, if only for a few moments of fresh air and to stretch his limbs again, but the sailor waved him down. The unkempt white-skinned man deliberately selected four scrawny men from a distant village to do his bidding, their dark skin covered in sores. Weak men had no thoughts for mutiny.
Tormented that he couldn’t stretch, Mukunzo urinated on himself, again, and sat in his own excrement. The corpse had made him gag almost constantly, and many times he’d attempted to snap the dead arm to be free of the maggot-ridden body. But the swollen flesh held together.
Despite many weeks in near-perpetual darkness, Mukunzo was still a threat and so was chained in twos, like some of the other strong Bakongo warriors to make it harder for them to fight back. Gradually losing his physique, he pushed every opportunity to clamber to the surface of the wooden caravel, away from the disgusting bowels of the ship, with the sun on his face, training with the other warriors. The same conviction had cost the life of the man he had been chained to, but they needed to be ready. They had to train and prepare for the time to escape, to retaliate for what had been done to them. They were not slaves, no matter what the Portuguese said.
Now that the manacle was freed of the corpse, the sailor looked for another man to chain to Mukunzo. Oddly, one of his fellow Bakongo warriors volunteered. Mukunzo recognised his brother Bunseki.
“Still alive, I see,” Mukunzo said in their native tongue, which the Portuguese could not understand, as his brother was chained to him. The brand shaped like an arrowhead still festered above Bunseki’s left bicep. Mukunzo’s identical brand fared little better.
“It’s your fault we’re here, brother. You sho
uldn’t have made that deal with the Vumbi. You led them to our village.”
Mukunzo nodded, feeling his shame. The Vumbi were the Kongo people’s ancestral ghosts whose skin became the colour of chalk when they died. Portuguese skin was the same colour, and his people had come to fear them by association. He remembered the slave coffle, endless weeks trekking on cut feet through the jungle, shackled together with stripped wooden branches around their necks, hands tied with thick rope. In the heat, with a lack of water and food, many had died. Families had been separated into men, boys, women and children. As to the fate of his three wives and fifteen children, Mukunzo did not know. He couldn’t be sure any of them were in the women’s hold, but he had to hope — especially Kimpa, his youngest wife and with his child growing inside her. His brother was one of the few male survivors from his village still with him.
“The Portuguese promised me we’d not be taken, brother, if we told them where our enemies lived.”
“Then you were a fool, Mukunzo. They took us all.”
Mukunzo bit down on his anger. The truth hurt, and he turned and stared through a tiny crack in the hull, watching the hot air ripple over the lapping waves. He couldn’t see land, but home couldn’t be far away. How big was the water, anyway? It couldn’t be much wider than the greatest of all waterways, the Congo. All they had to do was reach shore, and they’d be free again. A short swim at most, then the jungle would hide them again.
“We should revolt, Bunseki. There are hundreds of us. The Portuguese slavers would be lucky to have fifty men among their number. Plus, we are warriors.”
Bunseki laughed, and his decaying muscles tightened down his neck as he tugged at his chains. He spat at his brother.”You’re a chimpanzee’s arse, and twice the fool I just said you were. You forget: they have guns, my brother.”
#
Mukunzo was beyond bored, after many days, staring in the cramped dark. That morning he had listened to the Portuguese above argue, at times wailing like madmen and firing their weapons. Since then it had remained quiet. Now, when he clambered onto the wooden deck, muscles shrunken and much weaker than the previous time, he looked around carefully. The Portuguese only exercised him enough to keep him alive, so he wanted to give them no reason to punish him.
Topside it didn’t feel any cooler. The wind had died. Lifeless sails hung limp over the decks. He looked for shore and felt empty in his stomach over the clear horizon. Perhaps there was mist obscuring the jungle. He hoped so because this water was too wide to be real.
The burning sun created beads of sweat that ran down his dark skin. It ran underneath his shackles and felt like hot raking coals as it touched his raw open wounds. With the exception of the other slaves who exercised mindlessly and took in the fresh air above decks, nothing stirred. The quiet was unexpected and Mukunzo couldn’t fathom why.
He looked to the Portuguese. Many cast their eyes downwards, or lumbered in circles without energy. They seemed frightened. Of what, Mukunzi couldn’t say.
Bunseki, still chained to him, also looked thinner since their capture. His brother dragged his feet, letting Mukunzo do the hard work cleaning the decks. He could understand Mukunzo’s reluctance to help, and sucked in the warm still air, relieved to be out from the cramped and filthy hull. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had enough of his warrior’s strength to fight. A time would come when he could take his revenge on these pathetic Portuguese who had tricked him into trusting them.
“I tell you, Bunseki,” he whispered with venom on his tongue, “we should fight. Better to die a man than wallow as an animal.”
Bunseki sneered, pointed to the ashen-skinned sailors. “I’d rather wait than take my chances with them. This land of Brazil where we are headed, how far from home can it be? When we get there we disappear into the jungle, walk as long as it takes, and be home again in weeks at most.”
“You know the Portuguese are cannibals. It is a fact that their cheeses are our brains. Their wines, our blood. Our burnt bones become their gunpowder. We may not make it to Brazil. We may still become their food.”
“No, brother, they want us alive,” said Bunseki. “A slave is a slave. Whether for an African or Portuguese master, our purpose is to work. They will not kill us, not after bringing us this far. Now is not the time to fight.”
“And if we become weak in the meantime?”
Bunseki shrugged.” As I said, perhaps we’ll never need to fight before we reach this Brazil and we can just slip away instead.”
Mukunzo spat on the deck, watched its moisture evaporate quickly in the heat. “Then you are already an animal, brother, if you are willing to give in to them so quickly. Don’t you want a chance to have a family?”
“A family?” His brother snorted. “When was I ever going to take a wife of my own, or have a son? You saw to that as chief, demanding all the pretty girls of age as your own, and so I’ve lost nothing.”
Mukunzo shook his head over his brother’s pettiness, now, when they had lost everything. “Are you jealous? Aren’t we beyond that now? We have a real fight worth fighting, rather than each other.”
Bunseki’s shackles tightened as he shuffled forward, refusing to catch Mukunzo’s eye. Mukunzo didn’t care. Now that they had been more mobile, after so many weeks of inactivity, the pain in his bound ankles made him cry out.
He glanced at the Portuguese sailor leaning on his musket. The sailor took no interest in the Bakongo men, which was unusual compared to their recent behaviour. Rather, the sailor kept looking over his shoulder at the horizon. Then, the man’s eyes bulged and his mouth gaped.
Curious about the man’s fear, Mukunzo turned and looked out across the water. A shape approached, black as a shadow, yet shimmering like the wavering mirage of an animal. It had wings, sometimes he counted two, sometimes three, four or even five on occasions, and they seemed to blend and separate without form. Thick, ropy tendrils thrashed from its underbelly, skimming the water, and talons grew from its wings. Several heads moved within a mass of confused body parts, and while it flew towards them wings silently beat at the stifling air.
Someone fired a shot. It kept coming, as if it hadn’t been hit. Mukunzo looked back at the deck. The Portuguese who had fired lowered his musket and reloaded. Others raised their weapons to shoot wildly. Many of the Portuguese wailed as though they were women, and sobbed or soiled themselves like they knew what was coming and feared it. Mukunzo felt their panic, sensed their terror. He understood now what they had been shooting at earlier.
The creature grew, black like the night, and larger than Mukunzo had first estimated — the length of six men or more from wingtip to the next. It shifted as if made of multiple shadows, flicking in front and behind its central, blackened mass. It held a collision course for their vessel.
Some of the Portuguese sobbed louder; others hid along the gunwales. One fell overboard. Another ran screaming below deck. Mukunzo felt his stomach knot, wondering what could terrify the Portuguese so.
The second-in-command stepped forward, trembling. He cried a warning to the crew, signalled for them to get below. He yelled in Portuguese, words lost to Mukunzo, but his meaning was all too clear. It was obvious that they had seen the winged creature before and were powerless against it.
Its shadow passed overhead and Mukunzo felt the chill of death. For a long moment he forgot how to breathe. The silent creature tore through the sailors, shredding their flesh leaving only bloody stumps of legs still standing in their boots on the sticky red decks. Smouldering muskets fell with clunking noises, some discharging, now that the hands that once held them had vanished.
It swooped his way. Mukunzo ducked and his heart skipped several beats. When the shadow had passed he stood and looked to the other side of the caravel. The silent creature flew from them as fast as it had approached. It had taken five of their captors in a single taloned sweep, all of them white men.
Mukunzo felt fingers grip his shoulder. He turned to see Bunseki holding hi
m tightly. His brother was grinning, staring at the vanishing monstrosity.
“We’re doomed, brother,” Mukunzo’s words tasted like the coldness of death, as if even speaking of this creature had corrupted them.
Together they watched the creature grow smaller on the far horizon until it vanished altogether. It had feasted enough today, but Mukunzo knew it was only a matter of time before it returned.
“We’re not doomed, brother,” responded Bunseki calmly, almost excitedly. “That was Nzambi Mpungu. He is our god. He has come to save us.”
“That was not Nzambi.”
His younger sibling scoffed. “It has to be. What else could it be?”
“I don’t know. Something evil …”
#
Bunseki grew restless. Since the attack, the ship had drifted aimlessly, partly from the lack of wind, and also because of the revenge Nzambi Mpungu had taken on their captors, the filthy Portuguese Mundele.
In their boredom and fear, their captors quickly found new ways to torture them, for they blamed the Congolese for the monstrous attacking beast. They hung two warriors at a time over the side by their chains. The Bakongo they chose were the weakest among them, those who would not survive the remainder of their journey to Brazil. They had no value. The sailors completely submerged one slave in the water, while the second was allowed to struggle to keep himself afloat, but eventually they both became food for the giant fish the sailors called bull sharks.
Bunseki’s stomach churned the first time he heard the crunch of a man’s leg. The proud Bakongo paddled in his shackles and struggled to stay afloat, but his leg was ripped off, leaving a slick of blood over the water’s surface. It brought more bull sharks to the surface. Unable to ignore the man’s scream, Bunseki shuddered. The water foamed from the frenzied attack. Soon silent, the warrior’s insides floated on the surface before being devoured as the second Bakongo’s screams ceased.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 12
