“I don’t believe you!”
“The god no longer talks to you!”
“You are a liar!”
They shouted and raised their sharpened weapons.
“You have nothing to give!’ howled the biggest of the men.
A machete flashed in the heat of the burning sun, ready to cut his head off.
“Wait!’ Bunseki cried. He knew they were right. But he had one hope left to appease these men. It would cost him, yet he was willing to pay that price if he must. “Wait, and trust in me one last time.”
“Why should we?’ asked the warrior with the raised machete.
“Because one among us does not believe. Nzambi is not satisfied.” He turned to his brother, whose eyes were white with fear. “Until he is dealt with, there can be no rest from the gods.”
Mukunzo clambered to his feet, stepping back to distance himself.
Bunseki smiled triumphant. There was nowhere that his weak brother could hide on this caravel.
#
Bakongo tied Mukunzo to the mast of the drifting wreck of a vessel and left him for hours. His skin bled, raw from the cutting rope against his flesh. His mouth was as dry as pebbles. He no longer sweated. And the unbearable pounding in his head was the worst pain of all. He wished now only to die, to find peace, his wives and his children in the next world. He wanted to forget he had ever laid eyes upon the Vumbi, the Portuguese slavers, and the creature, whatever it was.
While he suffered all day and that evening, his brother led the surviving Bakongo on a new fevered chant, much like the previous one. He heard them calling:”Naaa-zammm-biii … Naaa-zammm-biii …”
He watched Bunseki dance, chant and guzzle the last of the freshwater, all the while holding a knife tight in his hand. The moonlight reflected against its polished metal surface.
“I’ll thank you, brother,” Mukunzo said through a rasping throat, barely forming words, “when you find courage to plunge that blade into my gut. A good death is all I can hope for.”
“You will save us all, brother, when the time is right, when Nzambi Mpungu returns to bless us for your sacrifice. But not before.”
Mukunzo should have argued, but he no longer cared nor had strength to find the words. He only hoped the winged creature of nightmares would come soon, so that oblivion would take him. He hoped, above everything, that it would be his brother that took him, for he could image no worse terror than to be killed by that creature he could not understand. It seemed wrong, fearing that perhaps it would be a death that would never end, if the blacked winged creature took him.
“Stab me now. Call him with my blood.”
Bunseki’s response was disappointing. “You wish for that, don’t you, Mukunzo. You wish for a quick end now? But I love you, my brother. Nzambi must be appeased when he arrives, not before.”
“And where did you get that idea, little brother?’ he taunted, reminding him who was greater in the true lineage of Bakongo chiefdom.
Bunseki raised the blade and almost took the bait.
Then a screech across the still waters hurt their ears. Bunseki covered his ears. Mukunzo couldn’t, and felt drawn to the will of the dark, unforgiving monster. Convinced that the creature was summoned from a spirit realm that was worse than any nightmare, he tried to resist. But still he called out to the creature to take him.
“Brother, gut me now.” Finally he found strength to plead, his raspy voice barely a forced whisper.
But Bunseki turned to the still waters with the rest of his men and their new wives. As the tangled mass of shadows approached, changing shape more quickly than a thunderous cloud and even more violent in temperament, he grew more concerned.
Mukunzo pleaded. “Now, brother! End it for me, please!”
Bunseki turned his gaze from the creature, a monster none of them ever could comprehend, and plunged the knife deep into Mukunzo’s belly, twisting and turning until the organs inside began to spill forth among the gush of blood.
Pain surged through Mukunzo like nothing he had ever imagined, but he welcomed it. He rode the agony for darkness and oblivion to take him, and yet he remained conscious. He had to see more.
The creature swooped, scooped up several Bakongo warriors and women, stuffing their shredded body parts into its many gorging mouths, and flew on. Blood sprayed like rain, drenching Mukunzo and Bunseki. Men and women screamed, and Mukunzo saw fear in Bunseki’s eyes. Finally, the same fear he had seen in the Portuguese.
“I don’t understand,” said his brother, dropping the knife. “Where are my gifts? Where is Nzambi’s gift to his newest king?”
Then Mukunzo saw the realisation appear in his brother’s eyes.
“Mukunzo. What have I done, brother?”
Mukunzo managed to smile. “I forgive you, brother. Take yourself.” Mukunzo felt darkness approach. The pain lessened as a sense of nothing replaced it. “Use the knife before the creature claims you.”
But his brother didn’t seem to hear him. “How?’ He spoke instead to the night, watched the winged monster return and gorge again.
The creature turned to face them, and Mukunzo could smell the foul, rotting breath. It stepped closer to Bunseki, hungry mouths snapping, and then leaned in.
“I thought I did the right thing. Nzambi Mpungu was supposed to save us …”
Mukunzo might have told his brother that it never was their god, that it was only a creature in search of food, but there was no time. For him or Bunseki. As chunks of his brother’s organs fell around him, light faded. Sounds vanished. The rasping taste of stone disappeared from his mouth. The pain went away altogether.
And then … nothing.
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Interview with David Kernot
Tell us about the origins of this story?
In many ways, I don’t think I should be here amongst the great contemporary mythos writers. But I am. This story was my first attempt at a writing collaboration, and it was one of my better mythos stories at the time. I owe it to, and wrote it with David Conyers. It went on to win the Australian Horror Writers Short Story competition in 2010, and while we tried to have it pushed to a subsequent issue, it was published as the winning story in Midnight Echo Six that David Conyers and I were editing at the time along with Jason Fischer. The story was then picked up by Ticonderoga Publishing in their Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror Issue 2011, and to top it all off it was also picked up by Melbourne Books, in their Award Winning Australian Writing 2012. It’s hard to imagine that the story did so well and was appreciated by so many people.
Tell us about the collection/novel your included story appears in?
In May 2013, I decided to create an ebook of my darker fiction stories and so I cobbled together eight stories of my darker writing at the time and published them on Amazon, Goodreads and Kobo.
What inspired you to write your most recent Mythos book?
After I put aside my three Fantasy novels, I began writing a lot of short stories and wanted to try and write a novel during NaNoWriMo. I’ve written a series of six connected military horror novelettes, and some as collaborations with David Conyers’ Harrison Peel character. The stories involve either of the two (or both) of my Canadian Colonel Andrew Stone and Australian Sergeant Emerson Ash. I’m currently polishing several of the stories for an eventual release as an ebook in 2014.
What themes do you like to explore in your work?
I don’t normally have any particular themes in my work, well I didn’t think so, until I thought about this question, and I would now say I often touch on the value of relationships, and of loss in families. I like writing about ghosts, serial killers, guns, and bugs, like spiders, moths, and cockroaches — the everyday things that people are scared of — Cthulhu and falling meteorites too. Recently a lot of my writing has focused on the military within Afghanistan and Iraq.
Why should you buy my next book?
Because everybody likes Major Harrison Peel and he’s in my ebook, a
nd because I think you will like my two characters too.
What other Australian horror books or stories would you recommend?
As I said, I have written in the semi-shared world of David Conyers’ Harrison Peel collections, and so I’d have to say that I’d recommend any of his books, but over my years as an editor and slush-reader at the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM). I think I’ve read submissions from most Australian writers. But a few horror writers come to mind immediately, like Felicity Dowker (her writing scares the pants off of me), Dan Russell, Jason Crowe, Joanne Anderton has some really dark stories, and of course, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and David Conyers (both included here).
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About David Kernot
David Kernot is an Australian author living in the mid north of South Australia and when he’s not writing, he’s riding his Harley Davidson through the wheat, wine, and wool farming lands. He writes contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and is the author of over forty published short stories in a variety of anthologies in Australia and the US, including the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror and Award Winning Australian Writing.
Also by David on Kindle
Autumn Comes Slowly
Beam Rider
The Early Years
Panspermian Earth
Connect with David Online
Website: www.davidkernot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dkernot
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/David-Kernot-writer/317124821750397
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5335438.David_Kernot
Amazon: www.amazon.com/David-Kernot/e/B00CJJP82K/
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I Cannot Begin to Tell You
Scott R Jones
The following short story is original to this sampler
00:00:00 // I didn’t mean to leave his stroller behind. You have to know that, first, above everything else, that leaving it there on the side of the road for you, or the police, to find? Christ. It wasn’t my intention. You have to know that. I panicked. I did. I’m so sorry.
When it happened, my mind just went white, like it used to during the bad times. It went white and I panicked and I took him. I tore our boy out of his stroller and he wasn’t happy about that, of course, you know how he gets with surprises, or he was picking up on my panic, I don’t know, and I think I might have hurt his shoulder doing it, which just, god! I panicked and I ran and I am so sorry.
I know how much you hated seeing abandoned strollers, before he was born. Leaning against trees and signposts, their struts broken and bent. Sagging rents in the sun-bleached fabric, mud and decaying leaves clogging their spokes. I mean, no one ever thinks hey where’s the baby for that stroller? because, y’know, obviously it’s just wreckage left by some homeless person when they find a bigger cart to shift their miserable mobile hoarding around in. No one ever thinks the child that should be in that stroller is gone or that baby has been stolen. That baby has been stolen by his dad. No one sensible thinks that. Which is what I used to tell you when you would think it. Think it and then say it.
So, maybe you knew. Maybe you knew all along. Maybe it was a memory from a future so compressed and dense with the nothing that’s coming, that it ricocheted off that vast blank wall ahead of you, of us, of everyone. Pinged off a slab of solid, howling emptiness and shot back into the past, embedding itself in some fold of your brain where it could live and have some meaning for a little while. In the anxiety and disgust you’d feel every time we passed an abandoned stroller in a wet ditch.
That baby has been stolen by his dad, who loves him. They never say that, especially.
I am so sorry. Not for taking him, because that? That’s for the best, considering what’s happening. No, I’m sorry about the stroller, for not taking the thing with me when it happened. How hard would that have been? Just fold it up, throw it in the trunk, like I’ve done every day for the last eighteen months. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like that, for you to be hurt with that image. I pani— //
00:02:13 // —ey have forms, but it’s only what we dress them in so they make sense, not that it helps. They don’t stay dressed, naked and cold, they tear through all cloaks and signs, they’re not anything, they’re noth— //
00:02:55 // It doesn’t matter much, in any case. Not now.
He’s sleeping now. He sleeps a lot, thank god. I’m making this tape for you because he hasn’t yet figured out that it’s not just daddy talking to himself, which I do all the time, actually. He doesn’t know about the tape recorder. Found it in a drawer, with, like, nineteen others. A drawer just for ancient cassette decks and recorders. This place is full of abandoned crap. Your parents? Jesus. Not to speak ill of the dead, but hoarders? World class. I half-considered letting him say something into it, y’know? Say hi for mommy. Thought better of it.
I talk to myself a lot, about anything. Random stuff I won’t miss, that I don’t care about, memories I don’t need. I live in a buzzing cloud of inanities, a swarm of trivial concepts. My own hoarding. All the useless accumulated garbage of the life I had before I met you. I open my mouth and fill the air with it and when he notices me, which is rarely, he’ll... he’ll pick away at some of it. It’s like a game to him. So, this tape. Because I tried to write you but written words are the first things to go here, particularly when he’s awake. They’re too full. Too heavy. It’s just easier to talk, more direct.
Oh Christ. He’s up. I’ll fin— //
00:04:02 // ... kinda half-surprised the cops haven’t been out here yet. It would be one of the first places I’d look. How many summers did we come here, after we broke with the circle? I mean, this is where your family brought us to get clean in the first place. Christ, we were married down at the lake. This would be the first place, the only place I’d look. But how I’d do it is not how things are working now. The fact that you’re not here, that they’re not here, the police... it’s him, somehow. Our boy. The things behind our boy. It’s fate. This is how it happens.
00:04:32 // You hate me now. I understand that. I mean, I’d hate you if you had done this. And you’ll hate me until you can’t anymore, which may be sooner than you or I would like. But know that I love you, and I took him away because of that love which I will feel until I can’t anymore.
We went out walking last night, after he woke up. It helps to get him out of the cabin and into the cold; seeing his own breath in the air entertains him no end. I bundled him up, because despite what you and probably everyone else thinks now, I’m a good dad. I am. I took him out and let him toddle around the cabin in the snow and when he got tired of that, I scooped him up and sat him on my shoulders and we went walking in the trees. The moon came out at one point, shot out from behind the clouds to pin itself like a fat, bloodless grub on the black silhouettes of the pines.
He saw it, our boy. He saw it and he gurgled happily and then he reached up his little mittened hand and he pointed at the moon.
You get a sense for when it’s coming. There’s a kind of atonal shift in the sound he makes, a subtle hum that’s generated in behind the gurgling and the cooing. I don’t know if he’s making it, the hum, or if it’s coming from somewhere else, or if it’s just a... a perceived thing on my part. My sensitive nature, he said, scoffing. I don’t know what I’m seeing. Hearing. I wonder if I ever did. You remember how I was. I don’t know anything anymore.
Please remember me. Please. Remember how I was, even during the bad times. For as long as you can. I know, how can you forget, right? But just... please try.
He pointed at the moon. He pointed, and I heard what I heard, so I swung him down from my shoulders and laid him out in the snow and scooped a handful of it onto his little trusting face. He hated it, and I hated doing it, but I just couldn’t... I mean, the moon. Right? The fucking moon.
There should be an order to this thing. If it’s going to happen, and it is. It is happening. There should be an order. How’s that
for my epitaph? Bad enough that I should lose your name. I remember you, I just... it was the first thing to go, the heaviest thing. I don’t know what you call yourself. It’s gone. What I used to call you. My love. My love, for what it’s worth, for however long it lasts in the coming storm.
So I distracted him with a face full of freezing snow, like a schoolyard bully. He cried and raged a bit, but you know how he is, he’s so good natured, sweetheart. That’s all you, of that I’m fairly certain. He calmed down quick and the hum wasn’t in the air anymore. We made snow angels. Or I made snow angels and he sat in the snow and watched and laughed at my flailing as the stars shone and the moon wriggled through the branches and the hot sweat of terror cooled on my face.
Our son is a weaponized koan.
We should never have ma— //
00:07:13 // —ddamn stroller. What a thing to do, what a fucked up... I’m sorry! I’m sorry, but listen. I couldn’t speak. The enormity of it, I just.... like that, she was smoke and void and I went white. It happened at the north entrance to the park, and I’d left the car maybe half a block away and I just, I tore him from his stroller and ran for it, got him strapped into his car-seat and started driving. After a mile of city traffic, dense with signal and advertising and purpose and his suddenly perfectly normal little boy wailing from the back seat, the white started to wash out and I could think a little.
My first thought was oh shit I left his stroller behind and my second thought was what the fuck is happening? and my next thought was you know what this is. You know what you’ve done. You know.
You know.
We should never have done what we did.
I was so looking forward to his first words, and so fucking happy when they started tumbling out of his little mouth. All the monosyllabic identifiers. Every da and ma. Nana for banana. Bo for bowl. I couldn’t believe there was ever a time when I thought it would be a good idea to maybe not teach him to talk, to maintain silence around him at all times. What a pretentious... I mean, Christ, how did you put up with me? With my the moment he learns that a rose is a rose it will cease to be anything else for him bullshit.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 14
