Horror Through the Wall

“We will expedite our glorious fathers! The return of Uriel, the divine sentinel, the reborn Lesbians to stand guard upon hir gate!”

A woman screams, chokes, crashes against furniture. A shrieking of crickets. Burgess Meredith, young and saturnine, bellows from offstage, cackles, laughs, slaps palms together.

“Rise! Rise!” Blare of trumpets. “You have been chosen of the lord God! Now you must destroy yourself, be one with us, be one with our kingdom!”

Another voice from below the floor: “Take it! Let this night lead you to us! Make you well again!”

A chiming of bells echoes off the distant cliffs of the city. A cacophony of seagulls, crashing of waves, the orchestra loses its goddamn mind, strings warring on brass, percussion shaking the walls of Jericho.

“Resist! Desist!”

In her hand a triangular knife. The old man’s blood wet upon her dress. The music and voices swell beyond bearing and—

Patrimony

It sneaks up on him when he’s twelve.

“Why is the basement always locked?”

“Oh, there’s a lot of tools and things down there, you could hurt yourself,” says his father, making him a sandwich. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why do you keep planting rosebushes?” The garden overflows; the backyard is a maze of thorns and blossoms. It’s a thick, heavy smell, like the back of a closet, like retirement candy.

“They’re beautiful blooms,” he says, leather gloves up to his elbows, leaning on the handle of a shovel. “And it’s good exercise, all this digging.”

“What are you doing in the attic?”

“Just moving old furniture around.” He’s looking up at his father crouched at the lip of the trapdoor. Lit from below he’s genial and sinister, like a chuckling halloween decoration. “Don’t come up, there’s fiberglass insulation up here.”

At night something moves in the walls, drags itself across the floor above. When he comes out of his room to check, his father is there, sitting on a kitchen chair in the hallway, drinking quietly in the dark. “Go back to bed, son my son. There’s nothing to worry about. Dad’s here to keep you safe while you’re young.”

Copper Canyon

The job went like clockwork for the most part, except the guards at the switchyard started to get lippy and Budd had to shoot one of them to prove they were serious. Wasn’t always the way it went, but it happened often enough that Tits Akimbo wasn’t any too worked up about it. Casualties to a minimum, she’d told them, but situation like that you either shoot one idiot early or all of them later. His own damn fault: it’s one of god’s own fools who acts big at a woman holding a semiautomatic on him.

It’s a new town, so no one knows her. Normally she’s happy to keep close to home, but every so often Tits misses the old days when she had more to prove, where she couldn’t put the fear of god into anyone just by showing up. So she gets a crew together and they go knock some place over, clear it out soup to nuts. Company towns, usually; private equity means private security instead of the cops, means workers who are happy to see the company getting fucked instead of doing the fucking for a change, means more loose money and more cowards.

She tags the walkie talkie. “You into that safe yet?”

“Just about,” says Jemisin, standing guard. There’s a whump she can feel even six blocks away, and Russo is cackling in the background when the walkie talkie squawks again.

“Alright,” she tells the remaining guards, “you all stay calm and you’ll come out of this alive yet.”

Repent, If Ye Would Be Forgiven

O, to bite down just once! To sink teeth into flesh!

Cursed by his greed, Young Andrew has been reborn, a man in the shape of a myth. Long his legs and lupine his jaw, but in his eyes an all too human cruelty. Shunned by all, he wanders south, through mountains and forests, running, always running, and hungering, always hungering. He eats carrion, when he finds it, and mice, when he can catch them, and, best of all, true wolves, if he can catch them alone. His throat aches with thirst and his belly howls its hollowness.

Every hand turned against him, he seeks the high places, the jagged side of a shattered cliff, the shadowed woods where the snow never melts, even in these winters turned summers. He has been bandit, and cannibal, and in the shadows he practices speech until he can again command a human voice, or as close as sharp teeth and lolling tongue will allow.

Help, he cries, from the bottom of the canyon. Help me, please, o, I have fallen and broken my leg. Please, I have money, please, just a little bit farther. They come to him in the mists, the helpful, the trusting, but the mountains are old, and the nights are dark as ever they were, and Young Andrew is impatient with wanting.

Lanugo

The Devil has shrunk her down to a mote to sit on his shoulder as he tempts another poor starveling. It’s the first time Colleen’s been tapped for this particular duty, and she’s finding it an interesting novelty. She’s seen it from the other side, of course, but that doesn’t exactly signify. She struggles to remember what it was like, being hungry like that, but from the Devil’s lapel she sees the sunken cheeks of the girl, the pale hairs on her forearms, and she shudders invisibly. She may not remember, but her absent body does.

“Worship me,” the Devil says again, and the girl looks nothing but bored. “I will raise you up, I will give you power and command—”

“—you will never go hungry,” whispers Colleen, and the Devil weaves it in. The girl perks up as he continues, velvet voice a half beat behind Colleen’s minuscule piping, “I will spread before you an endless banquet, in a hall warm and lit, and you shall have but to reach forth your hand for whatever you crave. If these dishes do appall, merely say the name and it shall be brought.”

“I would—” She coughs, voice cracking from disuse. “I used to love lemon meringue pie. I haven’t had that in years and years…” The girl’s lip splits open as she talks, a drop of blood swallowed back by a flickering tongue. And the Devil is well-pleased.