B.E. Scully's Blog, page 2

Fire Devils

"Let it be cleansed, let it be reborn anew. Let creation come from destruction, as all life must come from death. Let it burn."

“Fire Devils,” a short story from my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, was inspired by a friend of mine who was in an accident that paralyzed him from the waist down. When a person loses something so monumental, a dangerous question whispers out of the abyss—how far would you be willing to go to get that something back? Would you trade our soul? Your integrity—or perhaps something even worse?
Zach, the story's protagonist, is a paraplegic fire watcher in the Arizona desert (this is an actual job whereby people sit in fire stations and scan the desert for signs of wildfires). The devils that spark to life within fire’s blazing whirl have been whispering the Phoenix-tale of rising up from the ashes of one’s own immolation…but Zach must be careful about what else may burn down in the process…

To read more about "Fire Devils" and other thoughts and scribblings, visit my web site at the link below:

http://www.bescully.com/2012/12/fire-...

Earth Shall Return Them

"The mummified corpse was blackened with time and twisted into a fetal position so severe it was almost spherical, but it was still unmistakably human. However, every time Dr. Rahmano looked at it, he had to remind himself that sometimes ‘human’ was a relative term..."

When I came across a news story about the so-called "Frankenstein Mummies"--bodies unearthed in 2001 during excavations beneath the foundations of an approximately 3,000-year-old house on an island off the west coast of Scotland whose remains researchers determined to be composites of several corpses--I knew there had to be a short story in there somewhere. What bizarre rituals had been at work to create the Frankenstein Mummies? What secrets had been buried forever in those ancient graves?

"The island which existed long before mankind and shall exist long after mankind has gone knows that there are always some who remember..."

My short story "Earth Shall Return Them," from my new collection The Knife and The Wound It Deals, journeys back through time to a land where the boundaries between human beings and their gods and goddesses, between nature and mankind--between life, death, and beyond--were as fluid and changeable as the waters that surround an island under threat from forces both tangible and otherwise.

"No swords could stop their flesh now; no man born of Earth could shed the blood of those who had risen from blood itself..."


Purchase The Knife and the Wound It Deals in paperback or e-book version to read "Earth Shall Return Them" and twelve other Gothic tales of uncanny occurrences and fantastic happenings.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1478...

The Devil's in the Details

"Why is it that some artists just as talented and hard-working as the next guy never make it, while the next guy goes all the way to the top?"

That question has haunted musician Mathew “Maz” Zolbe ever since his neighbor Old Lady Ivy told him the story of Robert Johnson and the Crossroads... to read more about the dark Delta legend and excerpts from the short story it inspired, "The Devil's in the Details," from my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, visit my blog at the link below:

http://www.bescully.com/2012/12/the-d...

A Simple Game of Chess

Obsessions... that particular someone who for reasons neither rational nor restrained possesses one's thoughts, preoccupies one's mind, stains one's soul with pure, single-minded mania.
Obsessions... the incendiary devices that ignite the passions that sustain us--and threaten to immolate us within their flames.

Read an excerpt from my Poe-inspired short story "A Simple Game of Chess," from my new collection The Knife and the Wound it Deals by clicking the link to my blog site: http://www.bescully.com/2012/11/a-sim...

The Suffering Other

“A trauma so great that it can’t be absorbed. At least not all at once. So it gets cast out of time, cast out of consciousness. It’s still happening, though, and that’s where things get tricky.”

When I was eighteen years old, slinging coffee in San Francisco's Embarcadero and surviving on double-shot espressos and filched cheese pastries, I (perhaps not surprisingly) got very sick and almost died. An infection took over my throat like a starving, steel-armed octopus determined to squeeze the life out of me one raw, throbbing gland at a time.

Pain like that is so enormous, so complete, that one doesn’t feel it so much as become it.

If you’ve ever felt pain like that, you never, ever forget it.

Enter the miracles of modern anesthesia, whereby the body still experiences pain, but we’ve tricked the mind into not feeling it…

Makes you wonder, though--where does it go, all of that unfelt pain?

In my short story “The Suffering Other,” from my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, a woman undergoes a routine operation that reveals a rather unroutine parallel world of pain and suffering just out of reach of our consciousness—that is, until something goes terribly, terribly wrong...

“Start counting backwards from ten and by the time you hit five, you won’t feel a thing. By the time you hit one, you won’t even remember how to count.”
Doctor Holborn had probably used that same joke a thousand times without ever realizing it wasn’t funny. But having no desire to displease the person about ready to remove a part of her anatomy, Jane laughed anyway.
“Okay, ready? Next thing you know, you’ll be waking up tonsil-free.Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…
By the time Jane hit five, she wasn’t feeling a thing. By the time she hit one, what happened next made her wish she could forget more than just how to count...

Read "The Suffering Other" and twelve other gothic tales of strange and fantastic happenings in my new short story collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals. In paperback or e-book version.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Knife-Wound...

Age Will Be Responsible

Old pawn shops, forgotten boxes tucked into attic corners, faces staring silently from the photo frames of time… certain objects seem to whisper more distinctly than others of the strange tales that have marked their journeys from one place and time to another. In “Age Shall Be Responsible,” the fifth short story in my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, a moldering old trunk in a Hollywood Golden Era apartment building long past its prime contains a secret just waiting to emerge from the dusty vaults of history and find a modern day counterpart to complete its terrible past...

To read more about "Age Will Be Responsible" and the twelve other strange and fantastic tales in my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, visit my web site at http://www.bescully.com/2012/10/age-w...

Grief Assassins

"Grief can be the garden of compassion." –Rumi

Wise, true words indeed--but what happens if that grief-sown garden begins to wither away beneath the deadened dregs of apathy and neglect that remain after grief’s tsunami wave carries all else out to sea? In the fourth story in my new collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, mysterious beings from another dimension cross into ours in order to help regulate the complex, confounding corridors of the human psyche--but when one Grief Assassin goes too far, the results are far from what he ever could have imagined or desired…

Grief Assassins
Marquisha’s bottomless well of pain had almost swallowed him whole. And yet it wasn’t an entirely empty well, either. There was still love and passion and life in there along with all that pain. It just hadn’t found its way to the surface yet. But now she had her hand wrapped around the pistol that would end any chance that it ever would. If he was going to act, it would have to be now. He was, after all, a Grief Assassin. That’s the job he had been sent to do, and this time he was going to do it right...

To read "Grief Assassins" and twelve more gothic tales of strange and fantastic happenings, visit the link below to purchase my new short story collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals in paperback or e-book version.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Knife-Wound...

Animal Undertaking

From the first mysterious beginnings of life on our planet to the timeless repetitions of death and rebirth, the natural cycles of decay have been an integral part of our continued existence. And yet as time progressed and modern civilizations emerged, our enduring fears and misgivings about death compelled us to seek increasingly odd interruptions of this process, culminating in the practices of the modern funeral industry, where curiosities such as embalming, lead-lined coffins, and corporate “death care” interests now fuel a billion dollar industry.

In the third story in my short story collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, one old-timer in the mountains of West Virginia decides to take a bit different approach to her own demise.The story is told from the point of view of her grandson, and his “roadkill spotting ” is based upon actual programs that many states have initiated to track and record roadkill in online databases.

Animal Undertaking
And then I saw all three of them down in Shady View Cemetery, only they weren’t lying side by side in their graves like they were supposed to be. Instead they were above the ground piled one on top of the other like stacks of hot cakes. I looked around and saw that everybody else in Shady View was the same way. Nobody was rotted away or anything, they were all just lying there one on top of the other like they were still alive, only they weren’t. They were dead all right, only it was like they’d forgotten how to be dead and nobody had seen fit to come along and remind them...

To read "Animal Undertaking" and twelve more gothic tales of strange and wondrous happenings, click the link to purchase The Knife and the Wound It Deals in print or e-book version.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Knife-Wound...

The Champ

I’ve always had a fascination with old, abandoned places that have nothing left but their deteriorating memories and the ghosts of decay that haunt their empty halls and rooms. Perhaps no such structures retain the twisted tales sealed within the coffin of time more so than institutions where people go in but can’t come out—at least willingly, that is. Old mental institutions and prisons are haunted, haunting places indeed, so I combined the frightening best of both worlds in the second story in my new short story collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals. “The Champ” tells the strange tale of an old fighter who isn’t ready to step out of the ring just yet. The setting is in part inspired by the historic Danville State Hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania, where both of my parents worked for a time in the 1980s. In fact, the rocking chair incident in the underground tunnels actually happened to my mother, who decades later still tells the tale with a quiver in her voice.

"The guards eventually found the Champ after he failed to show up for his round of dinner meds. An investigation was launched, but nobody poked around all that long or hard. The Champ didn’t have anybody on the outside who cared if he was alive or dead, and more than a few were relieved to hear it was the latter. His murder was filed under “Unsolved” along with a hundred others, and that’s where it would have stayed if a month later the Professor hadn’t seen the Champ standing in the shower room looking as mean and nasty as any ghoul come back from the grave with a score to settle..."

Read "The Champ" and twelve other chillingly gothic tales in my new short story collection The Knife and the Wound It Deals, now available in paperback or e-book version.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Knife-Wound...

This Thing Lives

The opening short story in my new collection The Knife and the Wound it Deals was inspired by Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle, a subtly unsettling 1903 novella about a man, John Marcher, who defines his existence by the “beast in the jungle” that has been lying in wait for him all of his life. (The novella is available for free on Amazon’s Kindle). I’ve always been taken with the story’s exploration of destiny, longing, loneliness, and unbearable loss, themes which are as relevant and keenly felt now as they were over a hundred years ago in James’s time. Thus, I re-imagined John Marcher amidst the peculiarly violent and lurid obsessions of our current times, yet still driven by that universal sense of alienation and existential dread. A haunting scene from the equally haunting film In a Year of 13 Moons, the 1978 German drama written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, helped the narrative along, and the result is one of my favorites in the collection…

This Thing Lives
The first shovelful of dirt skittered across the casket as if Death’s nervous fingers were trying to grab hold of their slippery new prize. As Will Aughten watched the glossy black lid disappear under mounds of damp earth, a part of him wished that the still-preserved corpse inside would pop out of the ground and point at him, shout out loud, shake her fist—anything to indicate to these somber-faced strangers what he had been to her.
They had been nothing at all, and yet some fourth cousin once removed now had more of a claim on her than he did.
As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Will Aughten, the kindly gentleman friend of Anya May, had lost nothing but one more piece of an already rapidly disappearing past. If only they knew that yesterday the kindly gentleman friend had bought and paid for the plot right next to the woman now patiently waiting for him to join her beneath the ground.
Neither of them had ever had anyone else in life, so why not preserve the arrangement in death?
He looked around at the small group of far-flung relatives whose heads were already full of whatever useless trinkets and trifles they could seize from Anya’s no doubt meager estate. They knew nothing of the far greater inheritance he had received while she was still alive—and which now was utterly, eternally lost.
With Anya’s death, William Aughten had lost the only person on earth who understood the unspeakable “Thing” that had haunted his existence and shadowed his soul for over seventy years.
Even more disastrous, he had also lost the only person capable of helping him to keep it at bay…

Read “This Thing Lives” and twelve more gothic tales in the Kindle edition of The Knife and the Wound it Deals at a special introductory rate on Amazon...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Knife-Wound...