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ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 21 – July 2013 Terra Matter By Tyler Bowler Illustrated by Jeffrey James Oleniacz
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Goat By Jude-Marie Green
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Night Terrors By Paul Michael Moreau
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Aneurism By Tim Foley Illustrated By Caleb Voohees
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Dreams of the Recently Dead By Paul Williams
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Forced Amnesia By Joe Jablonski
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A Conspiracy Of Mouths By Charles Austin Muir Illustrated By Vladimir Petkovic
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April: An Epilogue By Benjamin Blake
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The Rats Upstairs By J.B. Ronan
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The Congo Exorcist By Morgan Duchesney
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Illustrated By Candra Hope
Sixteen Times A Minute By Edward Taylor
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Cover By Duane Myers - http://www.duanemyers.com/ Proof-read By Sheri White. All material contained within the pages of this magazine and associated websites is copyright of Morpheus Tales. All. Rights Reserved. No material contained herein can be copied or otherwise used without the express permission of the copyright holders. 2
In a land once ruled by magic and men, only one thing becomes certain: only the insidious survive. I speak of a nation that was formed with the best of intentions, consummating only a cruel and harsh agenda. Day after day evil triumphs over good, and only the most treacherous deeds are rewarded. People suffer from famine, drought, and poverty knowing full well that in this indigent society you must abandon all sense of morale if one hopes to endure. For they all know that in a land dominated by the wicked, the sun does not shine... because the sun is dead! Everyone accepts that life isn’t fair as they go about their short and pointless lives, praying to a god that they’re sure does not exist to grant them strength so that they may live out one more day. The people hide in the shadows, cowering from the evils that threaten to take everything. The unlucky ones lie dead in the streets, victims of greed and corruption. Their decaying bodies are left carelessly about everywhere, filling the air with a thick stench of rotted meat and body odour, while the blood drains into the river, turning it red, procuring the name River of Sorrows. A half-decayed head is impaled on a sign that reads ‘Welcome to Terra Matter,’ and all appears quiet as a cemetery. A jaded traveller walks up and examines the sign, and upon close observation notices that a poem is written on the post in tiny letters. Forsake these lands for all hope is gone, We were abandoned by the holy one, Tried and sentenced long ago, We are dead now... he made it so. “All hope is not gone...,” the jaded traveller exclaimed triumphantly, ignoring the stink that seemed to augment with every passing second. “For I offer a new path for everyone. The evil that has tainted these lands will now be cast out, for I have been sent by the Holy One to purge the wicked.” People began walking out from the shadows to examine the traveller, revealing their fearstricken eyes. Whispers travelled across the town of a hero in a long suede jacket and a cowboy hat that hid all facial features. Pretty soon masses of the town’s inhabitants started running into the streets, all appearing worn and thin as if they hadn’t experienced one good day in their lives. “Are you here to save us?” one little boy asked, walking out from the assemblage. The jaded traveller gave him a solemn nod, and brushed a hand across the little boy’s rough bony cheek. “This woman is here to die!” A twisted voice bellowed out from behind the curious crowd. A spark erupted in front of the jaded traveller revealing a tall, thin, sickly looking man with large red beady eyes. His skin looked puke orange, and when he sneered at her, his teeth were like finely pointed yellow knives. His aroma was that of a garbage can, and his bones cracked whenever he moved, reminiscent of a foul ghoul from a horror story told to scare little kids around the camp fire. “What is your name?” he asked, tilting his head to the side, randomly moving about. “I no longer have a name, and what it once was does not matter now,” the jaded traveller told him with a voice of authority. “But others I have come across identify me as Xandria.” “Protector of mankind,” the ghoulish creature sneered. “You can protect nothing here, my dear.” Xandria, the jaded traveller, felt no fear of this incubus. Nor did she feel pity or remorse; she only saw this ghoul as a burden on this once proud kingdom of Terra Matter. She had been travelling a long way for the past few months, with the Holy One whispering directions to her in her thoughts. At the time, she didn’t know where she was going or why, only that she must go. However, upon seeing the town, her quest became all too clear. “What is your name, demon?” Xandria asked, reaching for her magnum. “Or shall I just call you Misery?” 3
“Why is the blood donor centre in the basement?” Shawna asked me. As if I’d know. Just because I worked there. “Closer to the labs,” I lied. “Administratively speaking, it’s easier to maintain because it’s centralized.” What a bunch of bull. The blood donor centre was much more difficult to find down there in the basement, at the end of the hall, down two elevator levels, past the chapel, turn right at the Contemplation Garden. Or was it turn left? I grabbed Shawna’s elbow and pulled her along. “C’mon, we have to hurry,” I said. “It’s almost dusk.” She skidded to a stop near the glass doors of the Contemplation Garden. “Geez, Lyndie. Is that... garlic? Why are you growing garlic at a hospital?” I stopped, too and wiped sweat from my forehead. “Shawna, darling, I have no idea. But if you don’t hustle, we’ll be late.” We were already late but there was still time. Still time. “Lyndie,” she said, still refusing to move, “why is there garlic tied to the chapel doors? Is it some kind of religious ritual?”
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The terror always came at night as if the black sky put down long probing fingers to seep fear that flowed into the shadows and dark places, clinging and lingering, engulfing the world in a suffocating fog of dread. They always said that there is nothing to be afraid of, but the small boy kneeling on a chair at his bedroom window knew that adults sometimes lie. It came unbidden and without warning, insinuated deep into dreams and subconscious thought, a fleeting and maybe imaginary visitation, but one so real to an inquisitive child’s mind. Surely the darkest nights made anything possible? Things that shrank from the light might walk freely, the worlds of the living and the dead might touch and, at those intersections, fates are determined. From the window the boy looked down upon the gardens of the short terrace of four cottages. The familiar daytime aspects, transformed by night, held morbid a fascination. His own garden lay shrouded in black as Mum and Dad had long gone to bed but, to either side, faint light from downstairs windows shone into the gardens of numbers one and three, while, at the far end with only the bottom half of the garden in view, Mr. Lewis at number four, home very late again, reversed his car along the concrete driveway into the garage before switching off the headlights. At the end of the gardens, dark fields stretched away to the village where a few lights still twinkled, and beyond that the glow from the motorway and the town on the far side cast their yellow aura. The night lay heavy, smothered by low cloud, moonless and starless. He will be in trouble if found out of bed, but cannot pull away from the window, transfixed by his own fearful curiosity, by visions of strange creatures and terrible secrets, looking up at the blank sky to imagine the flight of a witch, the beating of scaled wings about a terrible flame-lit mouth, watching vigilantly for any sign of ghost, goblin, or vampire, but he saw no more than a cat hunting amongst the shrubs. More lights switched off in the village as the surrender to night spread. He didn’t want to sleep, that’s when it came, but his eyes ached so he left the window, still feeling afraid, to curl up in the warmth of his bed with the quilt pulled over his head. He tried hard to sleep, hoping that the monsters would not come, that he would not wake his parents again that night. ### Next door at number one, Ron Richards sat at his kitchen table contemplating the packet of foil-sealed sleeping pills before him, two tablets to be taken immediately before bed as the doctor confidently prescribed, not that they actually did any good. He rubbed red-rimmed eyes and glanced up at the clock. Perhaps sleep will come tonight. In another three days his results will be due, a moment he isn’t looking forward to. They don’t give you three different types of scan for nothing, leaving slim chance for positive news. He contemplated an alternative, buying a bottle of whisky, washing down the lot, having done with it, but instead removes the correct dose, swallowing them with water before drumming his fingers against the table-top as he waited to feel drowsy. ### George took one more look out at the gloomy recesses in the garden of number three before finally drawing the curtains and turning to reassure his wife: “I told you, Norma, there’s absolutely nothing out there.” “I’m sure I heard something.” “There’s nothing there,” George’s voice softened as he sat beside her on the sofa. “I think those reports about the prowler are playing on your mind. You didn’t sleep much last night.” “It’s hardly surprising, is it? Three break-ins around town in two weeks and with what he did to that old lady?” “That was miles away.” 5
An aneurism is a sack of blood, formed in the wall of an artery. When it bursts, there is a small explosion of blood. If the explosion happens to be in the confined space of the skull, there are consequences. And I remember. That is to say, I remember the moment when the aneurism in my brain burst. I was in that flower shop on the Portobello Road, the one tucked in among the restaurants. I had slipped out of my office to settle a bill. In some cursed moment of generosity, you see, I had agreed to pick up the florist tab for my ex-wife’s sister’s second wedding. Completely idiotic, I’ll admit. I had a few problems with the charges and was discussing the matter with the florist, a tall and inattentive woman. We settled things, and I turned from the counter and began to walk out of the shop. I remember it with a strange clarity. A couple of strides and I reached for the handle of the door. My fingers closed on the metal latch. I was looking at the frosted glass of the door, at some advertising decals pasted there, boasting the value of floral bouquets. Right then, everything - or at least my part of everything - shifted. The hand in front of me was not my hand. The door, even as it swung open, was somehow a different door. A curtain came down with a crack. Not a full curtain, more like a screen or a pane of distorting glass. And something - smoke or fog - rose between my vision and the newly different scene. My momentum carried me forward out of the shop and there I was on the sidewalk. The view shifted and twisted, like a rippling pool. “There is something wrong,” I said, or at least that is what I think I said. Who I said it to, or even if anyone was there, I’ve not the slightest. A roaring, rushing sound, like an incoming train as you stand in the tube, started behind my ears and never intended to stop. That was that, and it seemed quite final. I remember nothing of the ambulance, or the paramedics, or any of the next part. Quite exciting, so they told me later. Touch and go, apparently. Some question of whether I would make it through. The next thing I remember is realizing that I was thinking. Strange as it sounds, my next thought was a recognition of thought. The doctors tell me - and I asked them - that I am mistaken, that this is impossible. Feeling comes before thought, they tell me. But I remember, and the doctors are wrong. I was surrounded, wrapped up, so to speak, in a light dull greyness. All around me, this cocoon. The sound of the train was gone, now all was silence except a faint, almost imperceptible churning, like the turning of the tide in the ocean, or the sound you hear when you cover your ears with your hands. I wondered if I was dead, if this was death, and I was quite surprised. I was not sliding into some cold black sea, which is what I expected, nor was I racing toward some joyous light. Time, the progression from moment to moment, had stopped. My consciousness was alive, though, and the whole experience was not particularly unpleasant. But it was rather dull. Until things shifted, again with no warning. Now, in telling you what happened next, I fully realize you may think me delusional. But I relate only what I experienced, and it was - it is - as real to me as the hospital bed I am lying in right now. I was sitting, cross-legged, outdoors. I felt the insistent blades of rough grass on my legs. A cold sunshine surrounded me, and fell on my arms and shoulders. My hair, flat on my forehead, was wet. I wore only bathing trunks. My body was intensely familiar, yet different and strange. I was small. 6
We are dying. We are dead. In the minds of sentient beings we survive. In your dreams we live. Visualising once more those moments when we moved like you, thought like you and saw a future as physical beings. A decillion memories of millennia past and millennia still to come. We have conquered time but did not live to see or savour the victory. Now we are our own memories. Traces drifting aimlessly from sleeping human to sleeping human, and occasionally to other intelligent beings that dwell amongst you but which you do not yet recognise except in dreams like this. Dreams which you will only vaguely recall when you wake. Those who are gifted may remember more. Your future flashes of inspiration and earlier moments of unpredictable brilliance stem from us. We are the stones grinding out ideas and discharging fragments into brains not equipped to handle them. Some people we have driven insane, but they were not the stupid ones. They realised that we existed. They tried to fight, communicate, or understand but could not succeed. The attempt left them unable to fight with, communicate with, or understand their peers. Consequently they became the forgotten victims of the ceaseless war that humanity had with itself. Derided, abandoned in asylums, murdered, executed, or tempted into suicide. Then they could understand. Then they could join us. Fragments of their dying minds absorbed into our consciousness. Consumed by us. Part of us. We understood them more fully than we understand you. We cannot access everything in your mind. Even in sleep, you block access. A firewall that ceases to function when the brain controlling it fails and dies. Then there is release for the soul. It is discarded, either to perish in the aeons of nothingness or to join us. To be absorbed. We welcome everyone. We have no option to reject. We change slightly with each newcomer, expanding our memory to access the dreams of every sentient being that we are descended from and every one of their descendants. The pathway to the consciousness of every human that ever lived is through the dead. In death we grow. In your dreams we live.
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In the beginning there was nothing. Then slowly out of the void came darkness and a foreign sense of self. It was wet and warm wherever here was, though both the words and the feeling they described were meaningless to the moment. This was the world as it had always been. It was perfect. Suddenly there was pressure from all sides, and with it, the sensation of being pushed. There was confusion. There was fear. There was pain. Then there was a light. It was blinding. A shape blocked out the brightness, something mechanical and unnatural, gripping my sense of self with cold metal scoops, and pulling me from the darkness. The scene then shifted to a giant face that stared and smiled and panted. It was brown and covered in drops of liquid. A sound came from somewhere unseen - screaming emanating both from within and without. It was bloodcurdling. Nothing made sense. There wasn’t even yet the capacity to understand that nothing made sense. Or what any of this meant. There was only fear, and pain, and loss of that perfect place. The face had limbs. Grabbing me, it pushed my sense of self against warm lumps somewhere below the face to be lost in the folds of the skin of a giant. This wasn’t right. The dark place was missed. The fear turned to terror. The screaming didn’t stop. This was the worst day of my life. It was the day I was born. And I remember every painful second of it…
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He’d wanted to escape the children. Horrid creatures. Pink-fisted, ragged-numbered, plunging the wet streets into a night of plunder and rapine sanctioned by the saccharine theme of a holiday he had never understood. As he saw it, Halloween was nothing more than a confectioner’s laugh at the toothiest species on earth, cashing in on the gnomish nuisances in factory-made accoutrements and grotesquely dyed fabrics, rampaging their bottomless bellies all over the neighbourhood. Experience had taught him it was easier to stretch his legs a while than to test his temperament against the invaders. Spoiled little wretches, he thought, unlatching his backyard gate. He thought he could hear them ringing the front doorbell, panting through their vents of cheap, slobbermouthed plastic — Candy, damn you, we want candy. Not from me, you won’t. He secured the gate behind him, padded down the gravel drive. Head down, he slipped between bordering hedges and hurried down the street. He expected a shout, a kick at his door even, but heard nothing. Only their breathing, the rattle of frustrated greed stifled behind moulded silicone as they shuffled off for the next darkened house. With sympathy he thought of his neighbour, an old man, unsociable, childless like himself. How he loathed the sight of them: their mouths, the elastic maws of overfed schoolchildren sucking up to his peephole in fisheye vision. He regretted his identification, for the image bled into the night around him. As he turned left, scanning the sleepy houses on the cross street, the scene seemed to unhinge itself in a furtive congregation of idiot, hungry mouths hidden from view. Indeed, it seemed as if those gluttonous orifices – too hideous, even, for the farcical countenances that employed them – had transcended their vessels and nested in every crevice in sight, gaping at him from under porches and through fences with swinish intensity like some bugeyed onlooker at a prepubescent beauty contest. Up the middle of the street he walked, unchallenged by traffic, peering between buildings and into the boughs of trees, listening to the hunger in those slavering, black, misshapen mouths he knew to be camouflaged in autumn finery. More trick-or-treaters at the corner. He kept his head down, jammed his fists into the bottoms of his pockets. He braced himself for their taunts, their nougaty projectiles, their impish snufflings. But like their predecessors they passed in sluggish automatism – rumbling deep in their throats, like dogs dreaming of the chase – and without incident crossed the street, either oblivious or indifferent to him. At the corner he stood and watched them proceed down the block and turn right, onto a treelined side street. Others, thick knots of them, joined them from the opposite direction, like villagers assembling for a town hall. And he noticed, apart from their silence and unity of purpose, that they were dressed differently from the urchins of Halloweens past: a trend in costume: a fashioning of carnage that reflected the current taste for degrading even the most horrific forms of violence into a fetish. These midget masqueraders wore blood-soaked garments that belonged onscreen, not on the apparel of the latest cartoon character. The wounds seemed horribly authentic. They gaped at him like rosy versions of the mouths snapping in the shadows all around him, like the raw, snot-green bulge of his mother’s colostomy wound all those years ago, weeping redly under the nurse’s swab. A revolting update to an already trivialized pagan ritual. Incredulous, he crossed the street for a closer view.
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Okay, so where to start? How about the part that the only girl that I have ever loved has been dead for the past thirteen years? Or how about the fact that even when I was with her, she was deceased? Sound good? Want me to go on? Well, you don’t have a choice, whoever you are. To be totally fucking honest, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to write this down. You won’t believe it, plus I don’t want to go into all the goddamn details, anyway. Hell, it’s more than likely that you won’t even read it. I’ll probably just burn it, or screw it into a ball and toss it in the trash. Maybe I just want something tangible. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m past that. Way fucking past it. I’ve been working the same shitty job for the past eight years, doing night-shift stocking shelves at a small town grocery store in Kentucky. My parents thought it would be good for me to get out of Aderson, away from everything that happened in that quiet Indiana town. That was after six years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. They thought I was delusional, or some such bullshit. I’m not. Fucked up beyond the point of fixing, yes. But delusional, no. The only people that actually seemed to believe me were the typical ghost hunter folk that would appear at the door every now and again, wanting a first-hand account of it all. I spoke to them to begin with; I think I just wanted somebody to talk to that didn’t think I was totally nuts. But the novelty soon wore off; I got no closure, they would just sit there with a bloodthirsty look in their eyes, lapping up every detail. They didn’t care about her, they just cared for their proof that something existed beyond death. I walked out of my job at around five AM this morning; I’m supposed to stay ’til six, but I’m not going back. I’m going to do what I should have done that night in the park - but never had the guts to do. My blood should have spilt on that snow, beside that partially-frozen pond. I should have been dead years ago.
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Jason Prescott felt the knock on his apartment door through his spine long before he heard it. He knew who it was, knew better than to answer, and took another swig of beer. Knowing that the confrontation that was about to occur was not going to be pretty. Another knock, this time harder. Instinct told him that ignoring the problem would only make it worse, and he sighed in defeat, setting his drink on the nightstand and taking a deep breath before he forced himself off the bed. The thing at his doorstep was his upstairs neighbour. He heard her complain loudly through the ceiling for about five minutes, and then there was the purposeful pounding of her feet as she crossed the living room floor a few times before stomping down the cheap stairwell and stopping short of the ‘welcome’ mat laid out for everyone but her. God... he hated that woman! Jason’s hand hesitated at the doorknob, holding steady just above it in an unspoken standoff and one last desperate hope that she would just go away. No such luck. Again her fat knuckles rapped against his door, and although Jason’s insides twisted like a dishrag, he flipped the deadbolt up and pulled the heavy blue door open just wide enough until he was staring into his neighbour’s small, dark eyes behind the old, yellow tinged glasses shoved up against her shiny, pocked nose. For a brief flicker of a moment she had the features of a rat. Maybe it was her stance or her sausage fingers curled into fists that gave him that impression, but either way, her tired, greasy face framed by tangled brown hair was bright red. “Do you mind turning your music down?” she snarled. Her teeth were the colour of antique playing cards, translucent around the edges. Jason tried not to make a face but the alcohol rushing through his thin body made impulse control non-existent. Deep pits, bloody scabs, and blackheads covered her face and neck and above the collar of her thin, green shirt, and were illuminated in harsh, florescent hallway lighting. Everything seemed to highlight the hideousness with unrelenting clarity. “Is it really that loud?” Jason mumbled, though he didn’t care. His music was as loud as he wanted it and no one was going to tell him otherwise. “If anyone should be having a conversation with you about volume control it should be me! Yelling at your kid all the time... I play my music to drown you out!” Her knuckles turned white as she stood on the doorstep quivering with rage and Jason restrained himself, knowing that strangling his neighbour was not worth the jail time. Her eyes narrowed behind the thick, scratched glasses, clearly expecting more. “Discipline is different—” “Discipline? Cursing at your kid isn’t discipline!” “Maybe I wouldn’t if I could sleep! You’ve played that stupid song over and over again for the past five hours. I mean... come on! It’s two in the morning and it’s so loud my heater vents are rattling!” She shifted her weight in her leopard-print fuzzy slippers, her body not so much round as blobby with folds of fat dripping down her frame like cake frosting, but not nearly as attractive. Jason caught a whiff of fresh urine from her old, cat-hair covered clothes that were much too small for her girth, but he wasn’t sure if it was her urine or from her cats. “I’m sorry,” he lied, “I’ll turn it down.” “There are things called ‘headphones,’ you know.” She sneered, turning back towards the stairs. “Normal people sleep at night. Playing music like this is just rude!” “I’ll just turn it off, would that make you happy?” he snapped without thinking. She whirled back to face him, scabby jowls jiggling and her features turned rat-like again for a flicker of a moment. 11
I met Father Swann shortly after my sixteenth birthday and sensed his malevolence almost immediately. Swann had exited his previous parish under a cloud of muted scandal, and the Bishop’s will decreed that he serve his final term in the sleepy village of Kidston. Swann’s suspected paedophilia was widely considered to be the cause of his recent transfer from his former and much larger parish. The outgoing priest, a beloved old character named MacLean, had retired too soon for my taste. His wit and kindness had been nicely complemented by the brevity of his sermons. The horrific revelations of a subterranean adventure in the church’s crypts inspired me to spend long hours gathering evidence of Father Swann’s nefarious activities. I had inadvertently seen unholy things in a secret place that could only be known to the serving priest, and I was sure Father MacLean was innocent of dark dealings. My friend Carter and I would habitually steal into the church’s eldritch basement to explore its dusty expanse of shadowy alcoves and shelves of old books. While exploring one rainy afternoon, I inadvertently pressed a stone that caused a hidden door to creak open, revealing a steep set of decrepit wooden stairs. We could not resist this temptation and descended the creaky steps after placing a book at the door base to prevent its closure. Our nostrils were quickly assaulted by the pungent fumes of mould, incense and a darker odour, like spoiled meat or suet. There were fat black candles on a rough stone altar below something that jolted me with an icy burst of adrenalin. I heard Carter’s sharp intake of breath and turned to see him staring at the far wall, transfixed with shock. Entwined around a large inverted cross was a carved black serpent featuring lambent amber eyes and the leathery wings of a huge bat. It was the most horrible thing I had ever witnessed, and its bizarre location made the abomination doubly obscene. Tearing my eyes from the debased cross and altar, I surveyed the rest of the room, observing a large chalk circle on the floor and a crude table upon which lay a stained metal bowl and a wicked dagger of jet obsidian with a bejewelled handle. Beside these objects was a worn, leather-bound book full of crabbed script and vivid illustrations of ritual mutilation and obscene tortures. A common theme of the volume was depictions of black men genuflecting before a creature that could only be the winged monstrosity on the cross. The men were often shown holding a child aloft before the serpentine horror. Perhaps the incense affected me, since I suddenly felt an odd sense of detachment as if I were at one with the scenes depicted. I violently shut the book and dropped it in disgust. Turning to the transfixed Carter, I hissed, “Let’s get out of here now! We can’t get caught in this damn place!” Once outside, we stumbled down to the shore to consider the implications of our subterranean discovery. Carter suggested that we contact Father Maclean and see what he thought. I suspected that the kindly old priest might know a great deal more than anyone else. After knocking on the worn oak door of the old priest’s home, I was admitted by the silent housekeeper and directed to a small study where Father MacLean sat studying the dancing flames in the stone hearth. He bid me sit, and after lighting his old pipe and tossing the spent match into the fire, turned to me and asked, “What brings you to me on this dank day, my son?” I paused, gazing into the fire’s blaze to compose my thoughts. “What do you know about Father Swann?” I asked. The priest replied, “How can I tell you what I’ve never told another soul, not even in the confessional? How could anyone understand what he is?” Shocked by this last remark, I said, “What do you mean when you say: what he is?”
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They say that the average person blinks 16 times a minute. That’s 960 times an hour or 23,040 a day. A DAY! ON AVERAGE! Sorry if I am yelling, I really have had a bad day. I woke up this morning with the feeling that a migraine was coming on and it should not be possible. I know everyone gets them from time to time; in fact I used to get them so bad that blinking was excruciating pain to me. The doctor said that the pressure behind my eyes was intense, more than he had seen in someone my age. They did a CT scan and found that I had a massive haemorrhage between my eyes that was causing the headaches, and it was putting undo pressure on my brain. I was rushed to the hospital and a shunt was put in and the blood drained off; how I was still alive was considered a medical miracle, now I just wish I had died back then. Did you know this road used to be an office building? Yeah, sometime in the past, looked like about fifty or so years ago, there was a building here. I guess they tore it down to put the road in to connect the two state routes near here. It was a nice building, lots of open space, plenty of pretty ladies in the office pool, just one issue of smoking in the building, but I was just “passing through,” if you get what I mean.
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