Black Static Horror Magazine #3 Read online

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  TTA Press

  www.ttapress.com

  Copyright ©

  First published in 2008

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  BLACK STATIC

  HORROR

  ISSUE 3

  JAN—FEB 2008

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  PUBLICATION DATE February 2008 DESIGN/ARTWORK David Gentry DESIGN/TYPESMIRTING/EDITING Andy Cox ISSN 1753-0709 PUBLISHED BIMONTHLY BY TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK COPYRIGHT © 2008 Black Static and its contributors EMAIL [email protected] WEBSITE ttapress.com FORUM ttapress.com/forum SUBSCRIPTIONS The number on your mailing label refers to the final issue of your subscription. If it's due for renewal you'll see a massive great reminder on the centre pages pullout. Ignore this at your peril. Fill out and post the form (with money!) or renew securely via the TTA website.

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  CONTENTS

  WHITE NOISE—Andy Cox

  THE PIT—Alexander Glass

  BLOOD SPECTRUM—Tony Lee

  THE MIST OF LICHTHAFEN—Seth Skorkowsky

  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

  THE SENTINELS—Tony Richards

  INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN—Ian R. Faulkner

  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

  THE MORNING AFTER—Carole Johnstone

  THE FANTASY JUMPER—Will McIntosh

  NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll

  THE TOAD AND I—Matthew Holness

  CONTENTS

  THE PIT—Alexander Glass

  BLOOD SPECTRUM—Tony Lee

  THE MIST OF LICHTHAFEN—Seth Skorkowsky

  ELECTRIC DARKNESS—Stephen Volk

  THE SENTINELS—Tony Richards

  INTERFERENCE—Christopher Fowler

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN—Ian R. Faulkner

  CASE NOTES—Peter Tennant

  THE MORNING AFTER—Carole Johnstone

  THE FANTASY JUMPER—Will McIntosh

  NIGHT'S PLUTONIAN SHORE—Mike O'Driscoll

  THE TOAD AND I—Matthew Holness

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  WHITE NOISE

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  I said we'd be using the White Noise space differently from this issue. I suppose we are, in a way, just not quite as we intended. Time is the enemy, all that. Maybe we'll see the intended change next issue...

  I also need to apologise for the mistake I made with the closing date for last issue's Perfect Creature DVD competition. Most of you hadn't even received your magazine by the date given. I don't know what I was thinking, sorry. I didn't receive any opinions about paper stock by the way, so we're back to Plan A. I don't suppose it's really that important. But I do wish we could get a lot more feedback and discussion about the magazine, its stories and features, related issues and Horror in general. Registering on—or at least visiting—the forum (ttapress.com/forum) will also keep you up to date with other developments...

  Such as Paul Meloy's collection Islington Crocodiles, and before that the publication of Andrew Humphrey's long awaited debut novel Alison. I wanted to announce all the exact details in this issue but at the time of writing the actual price of the book has not been finalised. Please don't let that stop you from registering your interest via snail mail or email (see insert). I expect the book to be available in both limited edition paperback and casebound formats. Price will be confirmed and your full agreement sought before you are charged or shipped anything. Naturally those of you who have already pre-ordered will receive the book at that particular (lower) rate and no more than that.

  It should be available by Saturday 1st March. Please go along to the Jurnets Club (Wensum Lodge, 169 King Street, Norwich NR1 1QW) on that day anyway, between 6.30pm and 11.30pm, because this event was actually first arranged as the official launch of Andy's second short-story collection Other Voices, published by the award-winning Elastic Press. So hopefully you can buy both books there and get them signed by the author who put Norwich Noir on the literary map.

  Back to this issue, and I'm delighted to welcome back Alexander Glass. If you're lucky enough to be on Alexander's Christmas card list you will have enjoyed the devilish seasonal little stories he includes with his cards, but otherwise there hasn't been any new fiction from this once prolific author—who made his debut in The Third Alternative (which is what this magazine used to be called)—in years. Two other authors celebrate their first story sales in this issue: Seth Skorkowsky and Carole Johnstone. I have a feeling that we'll be seeing a lot more from both. Other contributors you know already—Tony Richards, Ian Faulkner and Garth Marenghi creator Matthew Holness—and readers who have come over to the dark side from our sister magazine Interzone will recognise Will McIntosh, his ‘Soft Apocalypse’ stories there proving very popular. John Paul Catton (Japan's Dark Lanterns) is taking a break but otherwise all the regular columnists are here, and as usual my colleague David Gentry provides all the original artwork.

  We hope you enjoy it all. Don't forget to let us know on the forum. Thanks!

  Copyright © 2008 Andy Cox

  THE PIT—Alexander Glass

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  Alexander Glass juggles work for a law firm with family life: he is married with two small, but very loud, children. He has caught a glimpse of the pit from the corner of his eye, but has never climbed down inside. The links between self-harm, episodic depression and adrenaline are fairly well-documented, which is why people suffering mild depression are often advised to exercise, as that is an alternative source of adrenaline.

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  Two o'clock, and all's well. So far. Only another couple of hours to go. Two hours, three hours, left to go.

  Sarah is dead, and so she has broken her promise. Not a promise to stay alive. We both knew that would have been foolish. Just a promise to play the game.

  I'm sitting crosslegged on the sofa, in the dark, in the smallest hours, waiting. The grandfather clock stands tall at my side, a shard of moonlight reflected on its face like a ghostly hand upon the dial, pointing to a lost hour. Inside the box of its body, a bronze weight moves sleepily back and forth. All else in the room is still, but the pendulum keeps on swinging, as if unable to decide where it should rest. I am tempted to stop it—my hand lifts towards its casing, then falls again, mimicking the motion of the weight—but I must know the time. I must know the time.

  Outside, traffic moves on the main street, wet tyres hissing on a wet road, a sound that reminds me of the flourish of waves on a lonely shore. The wind moves around the houses. The stars move across the heavens. Inside, the pendulum is moving in its box. Even my mind refuses to be still. It's maddening. No, not maddening: infuriating. A careful distinction. I would halt the traffic if I could, and stem the wind, and numb the heavens, and stop the pendulum. Most of all, I would put my mind at rest. But there are only a few ways to do that. None of them are open to me. Not for two hours, or three.

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  Hide and seek. That was the beginning of it. The oldest game.

  When we were young, and even later, when we were teenagers, we'd played the game in her father's house, on cold, grey days with cold, gre
y rain splattering on the windows. Everywhere was fair game as a hiding place. We crammed ourselves into cupboards, into wardrobes, into washing baskets, under beds, chairs, tables, in corners and cubby holes, up on to the ledges of the high windows. Sarah always won. She knew the house and its secrets better than I did. And besides, she always cheated. Instead of hiding, she'd find a place from where she could watch me, seeking. She'd slip off her shoes and follow me from room to room, staying behind me, unheard and out of sight. And when, at last, I had searched everywhere and given up, defeated, she would pretend to emerge from the very first place I had looked.

  Being able to hide is a useful skill.

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  And then there was the pit. Why am I procrastinating? Why am I reluctant to speak of it? Perhaps it is that the pit itself is reluctant to be thought of, and shields itself from my memory. When it is gone, it hides, but it also watches me, follows me.

  I could tell this story without mentioning the pit, and it would remain true, but that would be a niggardly kind of truth. Very well, then.

  It first found me as a child. Sleepless, I had given myself over to imaginings: my mattress was a flat expanse of rock atop an alien plateau; the bedclothes, a range of hills, cave-riddled, with nameless things lying half-awake, half-aware, beneath; the floor of my room, a vast expanse of desert plain, flat and red and empty to the horizon of the far wall. I had not made room, in my creation, for the sound of weeping that filtered, forlornly distorted, through the wall by my bed. Perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps that was why the pit found me. Perhaps the muffled sobs had drawn it somehow, into the space I had failed to imagine away.

  At first I thought the moaning I heard was only an addendum to the sobs; but it seemed at once clearer and further away. It was not coming through the wall, unless by some swirl of echoes it was returning as if from the floor. I moved to the side of the bed, gripped the edge of the mattress with both hands, and peered over. At once the lament grew louder—as if whatever made it had sensed my presence—then immediately died again. Having left the shelter of the bedclothes, I realised the room had become very cold.

  A pit had opened in the centre of the floor, roughly round, just large enough to accommodate my body if I kept my arms flat against my sides. At its edges, threads and strings of the cheap red carpet trembled, streaming into the hole. Below that, the sides of the pit were dark, perhaps of stone, perhaps of some other material. It seemed to lead straight downwards, as far as could be seen; its bottom, if it had one, was lost in blackness. It was sucking the air from the room. I could see the dirty net curtain at the window swaying, dancing, as night air was drawn in through the edge of the ill-fitting window. The moaning sound was a howl of wind, deep in the pit, countless miles down, gathering speed as it fell, tearing itself against the hard, rough walls. The pit was so deep, the howl so far away, that it reached the pit-mouth only as a moan.

  I knew, of course I knew, that the pit could not be so deep. Only a little way beneath my room was another, and below that another, and so on all the way to the ground. It didn't matter. I didn't dare leave the bed. I might lose my footing, and slip into the pit. I might be sucked in by the wind. The pit itself might move to pursue me—after all, if it could appear from nowhere, why shouldn't it move?

  Worst of all, I might find myself walking deliberately toward the pit, stepping willingly into its maw. I think I realised that, even then. I think I was tempted, even then.

  With an effort of will I turned away, shuffling my body closer to the wall, putting as much of the bed as I could between myself and the pit, hiding as much of myself as possible beneath the bedclothes. After a time, the distant howl faded into silence. The room grew perceptibly warmer. The net curtain slackened and hung limp from its rail. I knew, without needing to look, that the pit was gone, and that no sign of it would remain on the floor.

  It was only later, as I drifted into sleep, that I realised the sound of sobbing had also ceased.

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  "You've seen it too?"

  Sarah had found me, again, and the game had come to its natural end. Instead of going off to hide, she had sat down on the floor beside me, and we had begun talking, aimlessly at first, until I mentioned the pit.

  "A few times,” she said.

  "When was the first time?"

  "After my ... after my periods started.” She gave me a defiant look, as if unsure whether she should mention menarche to me, but determined to do so anyway. “But it felt like..."

  "Like the pit had always been there. But now you could see it."

  She nodded. “It knows when to come. When you're weak, maybe ill with a fever. When you're tired. When you're miserable. Times when it thinks you won't be able to resist it."

  I frowned. “What happens if you don't? I mean, if you climb down inside?"

  "I don't want to find out."

  "I'd like to know, though."

  "Why? What good would it do, to know?"

  I hesitated. “If it comes for me one night, and I go ... I shouldn't, I know I shouldn't, but ... How bad would it be? Could I come back?"

  Sarah lifted her shoulders. “Different people say different things. Some say you just vanish, and no one knows what happens to you. Some say it isn't like that, that it only takes the quick part of you. So you come back as a husk."

  "Dead?"

  "Sometimes dead, sometimes alive but changed, sort of hollow. I've met people who seemed like that."

  "It comes most often when my dad calls. He talks to me, and I kind of know things I want to say, but when the time comes to say them, they never sound right in my head. Then I listen to him and Mum talking, about me mostly..."

  "You can't hide from it, I know that. You can run, but it will always find you, though it can't open underneath you and swallow you. It can call you, and try to drag you down; it could open right at your side, right there on the floor; but it can't swallow you unless you choose to go."

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again and whispered: “I wonder if there's any way of calling it. Of making it come."

  "I don't know. I've never tried it. But someone told me a way to get rid of it, when does come.

  "Does it work?"

  She looked away. “Yes."

  "Tell me!"

  "But you mustn't let anyone find out."

  "I promise.” I meant it. Promises come so easily to the young.

  "All right. But if I find out you've told anyone, I'll come looking for you ... The pit will take your blood as a payment, to leave you alone, to forget about you. If it comes for you, make a cut and let some blood fall into it, and it will close."

  I felt my mouth contort with disgust, and with a kind of fascinated horror. “Blood?"

  "It has to be your own blood."

  "No throwing slices of black pudding in, then.” We both laughed, a little harder than my weak joke deserved. Sarah grew serious again very quickly.

  "You have to draw it yourself, right then and there. You can't even draw it ahead of time. It has to be fresh."

  "A lot of blood?"

  "It depends on the size of the pit. But a little goes a very long way."

  "You've tried it?"

  "It works. For a while..."

  She rolled up her sleeve, and I saw the row of scars along her wrist.

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  The pit came again, and again, always at night or in the dark, until I grew accustomed to its presence—though never so well accustomed that I could sleep while it was there. It always appeared in the same place; it never moved; and though I was still afraid I might be drawn to it, I never left my bed: never weakening, or never finding the courage. One of the two.

  I realised that it was not drawn to the sound of sobbing, but seemed to respond to things that had happened in the day. It came after I was beaten by two older boys, and my watch—my new digital watch, with the plastic strap and the pale button-light, to my young mind like something out of a science fiction movie—was stolen; but
it did not come when I fell from the wall behind the block, and knocked my temple on the kerb, and sheared away the skin. It came when my parents fought, but not every time. It came when my mother told me about the divorce, how everything was final now.

  That time, I sat and listened, at the kitchen table, with twilight streaming through the window, while my mother explained. I did not understand, or did not want to; a part of me understood it all perfectly, and another part understood none of it, and I preferred the part that didn't understand; it seemed easier, somehow.

  Until then, I suppose, I had thought that things might get better, that we would go back to live with Dad. I had imagined his return, over and over. I could still imagine it, but I couldn't believe in it any more.

  As my mother spoke I nodded in what seemed to be the right places. After a while she fell silent, and looked away. I didn't say anything at all. There didn't seem to be anything useful I could say. I left the room, and went to my own room, and lay on the bed. I didn't cry. I told myself I didn't see what there was to cry about. I lay on the bed and tried to think of nothing, and eventually I fell asleep.

  Even as my mother had spoken, I could already sense it coming, perhaps hearing its howl in the distance, perhaps through some more nebulous sense.

  That night the pit woke me. It was the first time it had done so. I started awake at the sound of its howl, nearer and louder now than it had been before. The net curtain was shuddering, undulating like a wave on a stormy sea. Peering over the edge of the bed, I saw the pit-mouth, nearer to my bed, and larger. My body would fit into it more easily now. I could fall to its bottom, if it had one, without once touching the sides. As I watched, a part of the pit's edge crumbled and fell away, spiralling down until it was lost from view, and a great sigh lifted through the pit's constant moan.

  I would not need to climb out of bed, now, to fall into the pit. All I need do was lean forward, let go of the mattress, and gravity and the wind would do the rest. I pressed myself against the mattress and leaned as close as I dared. The wind tousled my hair; I was disturbed by how welcome its touch was.