Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 7

Psychomanteum #6

EDITORIAL

I watched Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme a few weeks ago. If you’re not familiar with the film, it’s a 1973 adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s novel of the same name. It’s an odd bit of cinema – at once pre-and-post apocalyptic, with a shimmering glaze of psychedelia that keeps things from being too grim.

It’s a favourite of mine, largely because of how it entwines nonsensical elements into a straightforward linear plot, like cars stacked in Trafalgar Square or nuns playing fruit machines inside an even larger pinball machine. Things happen without explanation or elaboration as the characters plough forward, faster and faster, almost as if the world’s descent into anarchy is causing a fairly predictable espionage story to collapse into cosmic horror – what else would you call something like Miss Brunner, after all?

It’s sly and nasty and joyful; it gleefully tosses aside narrative coherence in order to throw more and weirder stuff at you. Then, sometimes, it hits you with a quiet moment, full of portent and philosophy. I’ve watched it a few times now, and every time I see something new, or hear some bit of dialogue that I’d forgotten, and it makes the part of my brain that likes that stuff quiver in happiness.

I’ve heard that Moorcock wasn’t pleased with the film, but I don’t really see why. It seems to me to be a perfect encapsulation of his work from this period – story slaved to vibes. It’s a brew of eastern mysticism and western political dogma and ridiculous pulp science-fiction, blended in an alembic painted in psychedelic colours. Heady stuff, or maybe just creamy froth, depending on how seriously you take it.

Like all the best things, it makes no sense, yet, somehow, you understand it all the same.

NEWS

I’ve spent most of this month working on Return of the Monster-Men. Adapting a graphic novel is both incredibly fun and incredibly challenging work, but it’s going smoothly thus far. I’m close to being done, though, which is nice. The past year or two I’ve been so foggy-headed from back-to-back bouts of Covid that working on – well – anything has taxed my brain a lot more than it ought. Thankfully, I appear to be coming out of the fog at last.

I’ve also been working on some short stories and a few longer pieces. I recently finished a novelette featuring Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and a handful of Sherlock Holmes stories. I also managed to sell a new short story this month, and a few recently submitted pieces have been short-listed. But more on those later. Besides all of this, I’ve been plucking away at a Lovecraftian story that’s a sort of ‘retelling of/what happened after’ of “The Dunwich Horror”, told from the point of view of Wilbur Whateley himself.

New Audio – Shadows of Pnath

My second Arkham Horror novel has gotten the full-cast audio drama treatment from Graphic Audio. Its available on Audible as well as from the Graphic Audio site. You can also get the first volume, Wrath of N’kai, as a full-cast audio drama, from the same sites.

New Giveaway – Shadows of Pnath Codes

Courtesy of Aconyte Books and Graphic Audio, I’ve got four codes for a free download of the aforementioned audio drama. If you’re interested, just shoot me a DM on either Facebook or Bluesky. Be quick though, it’s first come, first served!

New Reprint – “A Tiger’s Heart, A Player’s Hide”

Not really a new short story, but a reprint, courtesy of Occult Detective Magazine’s Cthulhu Mythos Special 2, which is now available from all online retailers. Still, possibly new to someone reading this. One of my favourites, as a matter of fact. It’s a Royal Occultist story, but one that takes place during the tenure of the first to hold the office, Dr. John Dee, and sees him matching wits with a cosmic horror known as Sebastian Melmoth.

Melmoth, of course, first appeared in an earlier Royal Occultist story, “The Gotterdammerung Gavotte”, set a few centuries later. “A Tiger’s Heart…” originally appeared in 2016, in the Snow Books anthology, Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu.

Reminder – A Bitter Taste

Reminder that my newest Legend of the Five Rings novel, A Bitter Taste, is now available on NetGalley. If you’d like to request and review a copy, I’d be obliged – as would my publisher. I’m not certain yet whether this is the last in the series, or merely the penultimate instalment, but it’s a big one either way. So why not preorder a copy as well?

Reminder – “Children of the Dust”

Friendly reminder that if you sign up for the Cohesion Press newsletter you’ll receive SNAFU: Comms, a free digital anthology with an all new story by me. Set during the Rif War, it finds a group of beleaguered Foreign Legionnaires encountering something ancient – and nasty – in an abandoned village in the mountains. Get it here!

Reminder – “Mind Over Matter”

Just a reminder that I’ve got a story in the first issue of Spooky Magazine. My contribution, “Mind Over Matter”, started life as a submission to a Kolchak: The Nightstalker tribute anthology. Needless to say, when it didn’t make the final cut, I gave it a few tweaks, filed off the serial numbers and submitted it elsewhere. I think it’s a good story, and I might even write a sequel or two, should inspiration strike.  Get your copy here.

Site Update – Miscellaneous Writing

I’ve added new entries to both Nightmare Men and Silver Screams this month, if you’d care to read them. As stated earlier, they’re free to read, for subscribers (subscribing is also free).

MONTHLY STORY

“Cemetery Gun” is an odd one. Beckford clearly wants to be a series character, dealing with the ins and outs of life in Ossuary – a place that’s half Gormenghast and half Warhammer hive world – but somehow I just never got around to it. Possibly because I never managed to sell this one. After letting it do the rounds for a year, I wound up posting it on Patreon. I don’t think anyone ever read it there either, which is a shame. Anyway, enjoy!

Beckford sat in the dark, listening to the rats. There were rats everywhere in Ossuary. Behind every wall, under the eaves of every roof, and in every tomb. Beckford didn’t mind. Rats weren’t so bad. There were worse things, the lower in the city you went.

Ossuary rose up out of the fens like grave-marker. Or so Beckford heard tell. He’d never seen the world outside. The city was a ziggurat of stone, piled by generation upon generation, one ring atop the next. Over the centuries, the weight of the city had caused its foundations to sink lower and lower. Much of it was underground now, and a million souls toiled in the deep, damp dark. Yet still, year by year, it grew taller. As if those at the top were trying to escape the things that gnawed at the city’s roots.

Bones clattered, somewhere out of sight. Beckford tensed. He began to regret that he’d turned off his lantern to conserve fuel. The lower necropolis were dangerous at the best of times. His hand fell to his pistol. He traced the markings he’d carved into the grip, seeking reassurance. The revolver was blessed, and the cartridges as well. It had cost him, but that was the price of being in the trade. Blessed bullets, holy amulets, whatever edge you could find, you took. Otherwise, you damn sure got taken.

The brass hinges of the mausoleum door squealed. Beckford drew his pistol. The sound of the weapon being cocked was loud in the confined space of the crypt, but he took little notice. The metal door swung wide, letting in a gust of damp air and a wash of lantern light. Someone stepped inside.

Beckford’s stool fell over as he stood, finger on the trigger. The newcomer gave a startled yelp and threw his hands up, nearly dropping his lantern. Beckford lowered his weapon. “Knock next time, Valmont,” he said.

“When did we start knocking?” Valmont spat. He was tall, but not slim and hadn’t been for longer than he liked to admit. His pale hair was swept back, and bound in funerary ribbon, as was the fashion. Beckford kept his cut short. Less for someone to grab onto.

“Common sense,” Beckford said, simply.

“If we had any of that, we wouldn’t be doing this job.”

“Fair point. Why are you here?”

“A better question is why are you?” Valmont’s hand was resting on his pistol. Beckford pretended not to notice. He holstered his revolver and nodded to the sarcophagus. It was a heavy thing, thick with gilt and colorful besides. Its occupant had been a young rakehell named Victor Calza, before what the smart money suspected was a cup of poisoned wine had rendered him so much cold meat.

“The Calza hired you?” Valmont sounded incredulous. The Calza were old money, dusty with age. They had an army on retainer; they didn’t need to hire a Cemetery Gun. But the Lady Calza was a believer in doing things properly. And if you wanted to guard the dead, you hired a Cemetery Gun.

They protected the dead, because the dead couldn’t protect themselves. And in a city like Ossuary, it was more dangerous to be dead than alive. The great necropolis were haunted by more than rats. A proper bone-man could do a lot of bad things with a bit of powdered bone. They could bind your soul or set your limbs to moving. They could make you a slave in death, whatever your status in life. Most would pay handsomely to avoid that fate for themselves or their family, and the Calza were no different.

“Lady Calza is a traditionalist,” Beckford said. Ossuary ran on tradition—that, and the dead. The corpses of the poor, enslaved by bone-men, toiled alongside their living kin, in service to the great and the good. Only the wealthy got to enjoy their final breath. “I’ve been here for two nights. One to go.”

“Nobody mentioned it to me,” Valmont said. He set his lantern down on one of the sarcophagi which cluttered the mausoleum. The witch-light within cast dancing shadows across the walls, illuminating the stylish bas-reliefs which decorated them. The rich liked their mausoleums fancy, and their bodies undisturbed.

“Why would they? This is my oath, not yours.” Beckford righted his stool and sat down. “You haven’t answered my question, Valmont.”

“Stop using my name like that, Beckford.”

“Like what, Valmont?”

“Like a curse.”

Beckford smiled. “Sorry.”

Valmont grimaced. He understood. The third night was always the worst. By tradition, a body interred in a mausoleum was sacrosanct after three nights, protected by the Gods Below. Even the ghul steered clear after the third night. The corpse-eaters had traditions of their own. But until then, the recently deceased were fair game for tomb-robbers, bone-men and vengeful rivals.

It was the last of those that concerned the Calza, more so than the others. They were one of the Ninety; a founding family. A Calza had helped build Ossuary, and her descendants helped rule it. But there were eighty-nine other founding families. One for each level of the city, and the Calza only got along with three of them. So when young Victor had collapsed at dinner, his face purple and his tongue black, his mother had leapt to the obvious conclusion. It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ so much as ‘who’.

None of that mattered to Beckford. He wasn’t a thief-taker. His gun only had one purpose, and after three days, that purpose was fulfilled.

Valmont brushed dust off of the sarcophagus and leaned against it. “Heard anything?”

“Other than you sneaking around?” Beckford scratched his chin and leaned forward. Valmont was avoiding the question. Beckford wondered why. “Plenty. Rats, mostly.”

Valmont looked nervous. His fingers tapped against his pistol in its tooled leather holster. It was a fancy sort of rig. Then, so was Valmont. Good clothes, clean boots. Beckford couldn’t bring himself to fully trust a man with clean boots. But Valmont was a Cemetery Gun, same as Beckford, and that bought him some grace.

“Mostly,” Valmont repeated.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“But you heard it?”

“I heard something. No telling what it was, if it was anything at all. You didn’t answer my question.” Beckford studied the other man. It wasn’t just nerves. Valmont was scared. That wasn’t unusual, down here. But why was he down here in the first place? “You know the rules. One oath, one gun. No more, no less.”

“I was in the neighbourhood.”

Beckford frowned. “Another contract?” He hadn’t heard anything about it, but that didn’t mean anything. Hundreds died every day, and some of them had the money to pay for the services of a Gun.

“Yeah.” Valmont didn’t look at him. His hand was still on his gun, Beckford noticed. He said nothing. Just waiting. Valmont’s fingers slid away from the spring-snap on his holster. “What did you hear?”

“Besides the rats?”

“You know what I mean. Was—was it them?” Valmont glanced at the floor for emphasis. As if Beckford might not know who he was talking about. As if anyone in Ossuary wouldn’t know. The ghul regarded the tombs and vaults of the wealthy as little more than orchards, ripe for the plucking, whatever the status of their occupants.

“Might as be,” Beckford said. The sound had been a slight, scraping sort. Like something sharp working against stone. Rats could chew through stone, if they had the time and inclination. He didn’t think it was rats, though.

Valmont looked around, touching one of the amulets he wore. “Not the right season for it. The upper tunnels must be flooded.” In the rainy season, the upper tunnels became rivers, driving the city’s poor to higher ground, and the ghul into the deep tunnels, down past the original foundations.

“Been dry these last few months.”

Valmont grunted. There was a weight on him, though Beckford couldn’t say what it was. Valmont spent money faster than he earned it. Once, a gambler from up the bones had shimmied down looking for him, with a few friends in tow. Big friends, with scarred hands and flat eyes. Valmont had left them for the rats. He was a quick shot, when he was pressed. Something to keep in mind.

“I’m still waiting for you to answer my question,” Beckford said. He glanced aside, listening. The sound was back. Scrape-scrape-scrape. He wondered if Valmont heard it.

Valmont didn’t look at him. “None of your business.”

Beckford dropped his hand to his revolver. “Fun as this has been, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You know the rules: one oath, one gun.”

“Yeah.” Valmont glanced at him. “Yeah, I know.”

He was quick. Quicker than Beckford. He’d been prepared for it, and Valmont still beat him to the draw by a half-second. Valmont eyed him over the barrel of his revolver. “Take his gun,” he said.

Beckford didn’t have long to wonder who he was talking to. Valmont had distracted him, kept him from realizing they weren’t alone. Strong hands caught his wrists. There were two of them, both middling height, with that thin, pop-eyed look folk from the lower levels sometimes got. Too many blood-marriages, down there in the dark. He recognized one of them—Elmer Goss. Elmer had a thief-mark branded on his cheek and twitchy fingers. The gun he wore was too expensive for him, and he kept fidgeting with it. He kicked Beckford in the shin. “Stop looking at me.”

“Hard not to, Elmer. That mark on your cheek is awful distinctive.”

Elmer raised his fist, thought better of it, and kicked Beckford again. “You’d know. You gave it to me.”

“Judges gave it to you, Elmer.”

“Only after you turned me over to them!”

Beckford laughed, and Elmer did punch him this time. “You were trying to rob a crypt, Elmer,” Beckford wheezed. “I could’ve shot you.” Elmer made to hit him again.

“Leave off,” Valmont said, as Beckford was forced to his knees.

“Why not just shoot him?” the second man asked, as he tied Beckford’s wrists.

“Because, Tupo, he’s a Cemetery Gun. Like me. I’d shoot you before I shot him. Now get his gun, like I told you.”

“Why’d you tell him my name?” Tupo whined. He jerked Beckford back, and shoved him to the ground. Boot on his chest, he snatched Beckford’s revolver. He examined it. “Good gun,” he said, smiling nastily.

“Give it back, and I’ll show you how good,” Beckford said.

“Quiet,” Elmer said, kicking him again, this time in the ribs. “Give me that.” He snatched the pistol from Tupo. He stuffed it through his gun-belt. “Open the damn sarcophagus.”

Tupo had a pistol of his own. It was a boxy thing, cheaply made. He didn’t quite reach for it. “I ain’t your meat-puppet, Elmer. You open it.”

“It will take both of you,” Valmont said.

“What about you?” Tupo said.

“I’m watching him.”

“He ain’t nothing.” Tupo pressed down on Beckford’s chest with his foot. Beckford winced. Tupo was heavy enough to break something, if he kept pressing.

“Let him up, or I’ll feed you to the rats.” Valmont’s revolver twitched. Tupo stepped back, his face sour.

“You can’t. We got you by the balls, fancy man.”

Valmont stared hard at him. “Maybe, but you’d best stop fondling them, and get to work.” Tupo opened his mouth, but whatever he saw in Valmont’s eyes made him think better of it. He turned back to the sarcophagus.

As Tupo and Elmer worked at getting it open, Valmont looked down at Beckford. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Cut me loose, I’ll consider us square,” Beckford said.

Valmont smirked. “No, I don’t think so.”

The floor shivered ever-so slightly under Beckford. Like something was moving beneath the stones. The necropolis was lousy with tunnels—rat tunnels, mostly. This didn’t feel like rats. He could hear the scraping sound again, barely audible over the grunts of effort and the creak of the sarcophagus being pried open. Valmont didn’t look like he’d noticed yet. Then, he probably had his mind on other things. Beckford decided to see that it stayed there.

“So, what was it? Money?”

Valmont’s smirk curdled into a frown. “Does it matter?”

Beckford sat up. Valmont stepped back, pistol raised. “Just passing the time, Valmont. Just wondering why a Cemetery Gun would spit on his oath.”

“Your oath, not mine, remember?”

Beckford laughed. Valmont flinched. “Money,” he said. “I needed it. They had it.”

“Who?”

“Nobody you need to know.”

“What do they want with the body?”

Valmont shrugged. “What do they always want? A bit of meat, a scrap of bone. Victor Calza’s soul on a hook. That’s not my line. I’m not the grave robber, here.”

“I prefer ‘cellar-man’,” Tupo said. He’d wedged a pry bar into a crack between the lid and the side of the sarcophagus and was steadily working it loose. Elmer did the same on the other side. “Best in the business, I am. Collected rag and bone from all the great families, I have. I know just how much to take, and from where.”

“A scavenger by any other name,” Beckford said. Tupo grinned at him over the top of the sarcophagus.

“And proud of it. A man’s got to make a living.”

“Even at the expense of the dead.”

“What do they care?” Elmer said. He stopped what he was doing and glared hard at Beckford. “Seems to me, it’s a poor sort of man who cares more about the dead than the living.”

“Someone has to,” Beckford said. He glanced at Valmont, who looked away. “You used to know that.”

“You don’t know what it’s like, to have nothing,” Valmont said. “I’m not ending up on the Midden, or selling myself a piece at a time to the bone-men. Better an oath breaker than a meat-puppet.”

Beckford nodded, as if he understood. In a way, he did. He’d taken up the gun for money, same as most Cemetery Guns. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to crack open Valmont’s skull at the first opportunity. He had a duty. He’d taken an oath to defend the dead. And until this night was done, he intended to do so. No matter what. “And me?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

Valmont looked away. Elmer snickered. “Maybe we’ll sell your ghost to a bone-man, Beckford. Bet you’ve got a strong ghost.”

“Shut up and get that thing open,” Valmont snarled.

The sound was louder now. In the glow of the lantern, Beckford could see the floor beneath the sarcophagus trembling slightly. There was a faint smell, too—a hot smell, rank—seeping up from beneath the cool flagstones.

Valmont cocked his head. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Beckford said.

“I heard something outside.” Valmont took a step towards the door.

The floor cracked. The sound was loud, like a gunshot. Elmer leapt back from the sarcophagus with a yelp. Tupo stumbled, as the flagstones shifted beneath him. “What—?” he began, groping for his pistol. The stones buckled, tilting in, venting dust and dirt. The smell swelled up and filled the mausoleum.

Long arms reached up, silent and quick, for Tupo’s legs. The clawed hands caught him, and bone cracked. The gunman screamed as he was yanked down, into the hole, one limb at a time. The revolver in his hand thundered as his trigger finger contracted spasmodically. The roar of the gun split the silence, again and again until the last bullet had been discharged into the dark.

Then Tupo was gone. Dust filled the air, carrying the stink of rot with it. The sarcophagus wobbled on its plinth. In a moment, it might tip and follow Tupo into the dark. Valmont lunged for it, as if he could stop it. Something slammed into it, coming up from below. The sarcophagus slammed down with a crack, as something hungry scrambled into the lantern light. The ghul perched on the edge of the sarcophagus for a moment, outsize jaws agape, eyes squinting against the light.

The ghul weren’t hyenas any more than they were apes, though they resembled both. Long arms, stubby legs, piebald barrel torsos covered in sparse bristles. Jaws that could crack an iron helmet and the skull beneath. The thing was male, rampantly so, and it let loose a bellow of challenge that momentarily deafened Beckford.

Valmont, face white, eyes wide, snatched his revolver up and filled the air with silver and lead. The ghul jerked back and let out a despairing howl. It fell back, half in half out of the hole, hairy limbs twitching in its death-agonies. Clawed hands clutched at it, yanking it back down. The ghul let nothing go to waste. Not even each other.

Beckford lunged for Elmer, who was gaping in shock. He’d probably never seen a ghul up close, outside of a cage. Not many had, not if they were lucky. He looped his bound wrists around Elmer’s scrawny neck and drove a knee into his back, pulling him off balance. Valmont cursed and turned, snapping off a shot. Elmer made a gargling sound. Beckford hauled him back, as Valmont fired again. His revolver clicked dry, the sound loud in the confines of the mausoleum. Elmer sagged. Valmont was a good shot, as well as quick. Beckford extricated himself from the deadweight and clawed for his pistol, thrust through Elmer’s belt. Freeing his hands could wait.

Just as he tugged the weapon loose, he heard the sharp click of Valmont snapping a new cylinder in place. “Fast,” Beckford said.

“Faster than you,” Valmont huffed. He was shaking. In the dark of the ghul-hole, something snuffled. Ghuls hunted in packs. There was never just one. Valmont risked a glance. Whatever he saw didn’t make him happy. “Shit.”

“Yep.” Beckford cocked his revolver. “At least three, by the sound of it.”

“Shit-shit-shit.”

Beckford smiled, as a ghul lunged out of the hole. It sprang up onto and over the crypt, moving fast, hairy arms reaching for Valmont. Beckford fired, and the ghul fell, its brains decorating the ceiling. Behind him, claws scraped on stone. He turned, fanning the hammer. A ghul lurched back, tumbling out through the door. They were probably all over the mausoleum. Valmont’s pistol roared, as Beckford hurriedly reloaded. It was hard going with his hands still tied, but he managed.

Ghul boiled out of the hole like maggots, squirming up into the light, hungry for dead flesh. One caught Valmont up in a long-limbed hug, and its jaws snapped down. Beckford heard bone crunch, and Valmont screamed. He shot the ghul in the back. Two more paced forward, on all fours, heads swaying back and forth strangely. One stalked towards Valmont, still trapped under the one that’d bit him. It raised a claw, trying to shield its eyes from the glow of the lantern.

They needed more light. Ghul hated light. Their eyes weren’t used to it. Beckford turned and shot the ghul that was pawing at Valmont’s boots. The other charged at him like a bull, head down, limbs churning. He took aim, but his revolver clicked empty.

It slammed into him full-tilt, knocking him on his ass. He dropped his gun, and looped his bound arms over the ghul’s head, dragging it forward. Their skulls connected with a crack. The ghul lurched up, dragging him to his feet. He drove a knee into its groin, eliciting a high-pitched shriek. It clawed at him, sending him flying. He rolled across Elmer’s body, and spotted the dead man’s gun. Fancy and heavy, it would have to do the job. He snatched at it as the ghul ambled towards him. He could hear more of them, down in the hole. They’d be here soon. He had to get to the lantern.

Gun in hand, he scrambled to his feet and lunged for the lantern. It had fallen off the sarcophagus when it’d shifted. He caught hold of the base, even as the ghul caught his foot and dragged him back. Beckford twisted and kicked. He heard teeth break, and rolled over as the ghul released him. It stumbled back, pawing at its muzzle.

He threw it the lantern. It caught it and made a sound of bemusement, deep in its throat. The sound became a scream when Beckford shot the lantern. Witch fire swelled up and the ghul screeched as it was engulfed in flame. It stumbled blindly towards him, and he slumped aside, letting it topple into the hole. Screams rose up from below, and howls of fear. Witch fire was dangerous. It spread quickly, and would burn until there was nothing left to consume. The floor trembled. The rest of the pack was fleeing.

Beckford hefted Elmer’s pistol and went to Valmont. He caught the ghul’s scalp and dragged it aside. Valmont’s guts went with it, tangled on its claws. Valmont’s pistol came up. Click. “Shit,” Valmont said.

Beckford sank to his haunches. “You’re welcome.”

“For what?” Valmont sagged back. “I’m dead.”

“Near about,” Beckford said.

Valmont grimaced. “It hurts.”

“Good.”

“I wouldn’t have let them sell your ghost. I owed you that much. I wouldn’t have let them…” His voice trailed off into an agonized wheeze. Beckford noticed that the funerary ribbon in his hair had come undone.

“Don’t—don’t let the bone-men get me.” Valmont’s eyes were closed. His hands pressed tight to his stomach, but the blood was still coming, staining his fancy clothes, and there was a lot of him missing. The ghul had mauled him, even as it died.

Beckford hesitated. Then, “I won’t.”

“Swear!”

“I do.” Beckford stood. His ribs hurt from where the ghul had clawed him, but he’d live. He raised his gun, but hesitated. “Valmont, I…” He trailed off, uncertain. What was there to say? They’d both made the same oath. But Valmont had chosen to break it.

“Why don’t you stop talking and use that gun for what it’s for?” Valmont slurred.

Beckford did.

As the echoes of the shot faded, he sagged, suddenly tired. The Calza would take what was left of Elmer and torture his ghost until the grave-robber named his employer. They’d want to do the same to Valmont. He caught hold of Valmont’s fancy boots and dragged his body towards the hole, and the heat of the witch fires still raging below.

It wasn’t a good sort of burial, but it’d serve.

When it was done, Beckford sat down in the doorway and began to reload his pistol. The third night wasn’t over yet. And he still had an oath to fulfil.

No matter what.

And that’s it for this month. If you made it this far, thanks for giving it a read and possibly even subscribing. I hope you enjoyed this back-to-basics newsletter. Check back next time for more new releases (hopefully) and a new (old) monthly story.

But for now, to paraphrase the estimable Carnacki – out you go!

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Physician Extraordinary – John Silence

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Son of Dracula (1943)

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Psychomanteum #5

EDITORIAL

Hi, I’m Josh and I’m a workaholic.

It sound funny when you say it out loud, because it seems nonsensical. How can you be addicted to work? Yet, I am. I don’t feel right unless I’m head down, nose to the grindstone. I’ve always been one of those guys who works past the end of his shift and volunteers for holiday hours – both because I needed the money and because – well. I didn’t feel right not working. I needed – need – to be productive.

It’s a bad habit to have. It leads to all sorts of unpleasantness, especially periodic burnout. To combat that, I’ve taken to forcing myself to take days off, to relax. It’s not easy because it doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve forgotten how to relax, if I ever knew how in the first place. To just sit and read a book or watch a film without simultaneously working on something is…inconceivable to me.

But I’m trying. I’m relearning how to just sit and do nothing. How to read for pleasure, rather than research. How to watch something just for fun, rather than because I need background noise to help me concentrate. As such, I’ve recently started digging into my dangerously large TBR pile.

At the moment I’m reading R. Garcia y Robertson’s The Spiral Dance, which is a fantastic alternate history/fantasy/folk horror novel set in Elizabethan England, involving time loops, faerie rings and an Irish werewolf. I’m also rereading Meredith Gran’s fantastic comic, Octopus Pie.

The latter in particular is near and dear to my heart. Once upon a time, back in the misty days of the late Nineties, I used to be quite the webcomic aficionado. I read some good ones and some bad ones, and Octopus Pie was one of the best. It’s the sort of slice-of-life fiction I’ve always wished I had a talent for, focusing on themes of growth and change.

Maybe one day I’ll try my hand at it again. But only after some time off.

NEWS

This has been a busy month, work-wise. I’ve written a few short stories, revised a few others, submitted a few more and started work on Return of the Monster-Men. So far so good. I take a certain pleasure from being busy, and this time of year my schedule is normally full.

Once I’ve finished Return of the Monster-Men, I’m planning to return to an old favourite of mine – Sherlock Holmes. I’ve got two stories to work on at the moment, and I’m looking forward to it. I find writing Holmes stories to act as a sort of palate cleanser for me.

New Interview – Worlds, Images & Words Podcast

I got interviewed by Jason DeHart over at the World, Images & Words Podcast about writing Arkham Horror and various other things. Go give it a listen!

New Novel – Song of Carcosa

My newest Arkham Horror novel, Song of Carcosa, is now available in print in the UK and Australia, as well as the US. It’s the third Alessandra Zorzi novel, and it involves the King in Yellow, secret societies and fascists getting punched. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, why not grab a copy?

New Short Story – Alessandra Zorzi in Arkham

Fantasy Flight Games and Aconyte Books have updated the digital edition of The Investigators of Arkham Horror, and among the new additions is a new Alessandra Zorzi short story, in which our favourite acquisitionist takes tea with Henry Armitage. The story leads directly into Alessandra’s involvement in the new Arkham Horror expansion, The Feast of Hemlock Vale. Grab a copy from Aconyte today!

New Short Story – “Children of the Dust”

If you sign up for the Cohesion Press newsletter you’ll receive SNAFU: Comms, a free digital anthology with an all new story by me. Set during the Rif War, it finds a group of beleaguered Foreign Legionnaires encountering something ancient – and nasty – in an abandoned village in the mountains. Get it here!

Sale – Palatine Phoenix/Manflayer/Sinner’s Bounty

The audio versions of my Warhammer 40,000 novels, Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, Fabius Bile: Manflayer, and Kal Jerico: Sinner’s Bounty are on sale on Audible for a whopping 81 percent off for the next few days. Grab them while you can. If you can only nab one, I suggest Sinner’s Bounty – of the three, it was probably the one I most enjoyed writing.

MONTHLY STORY

“Pittailiniq” is a sort of spin-off of my Royal Occultist stories – kind of. If you squint. It’s a very plot-driven sort of story, and was originally part of the short-lived Weird Heroes series from Pro Se Press. The plan was to write more stories about old Ukaleq but I never got around to it. I might go back to him some day, if the right idea comes along. If you’d like to listen to a nice review of this one, and the rest of the Weird Heroes series, I stumbled across this YouTube video courtesy of Obscure Book Adventures.

When Ukaleq heard the sound of bones snapping, he froze. It could simply have been ice on the bay, but there was a tincture to the sound that recalled the hare he had butchered the night before, and so he froze, listening. For a moment, all he heard was the omnipresent crunch of thawing ice.

Then the sound of splintering bones crawled through the stiff, sparse trees and into his ears and he closed his eyes, trying to control the sound of his heart before they heard it. When his heart-rate had slowed, he opened his eyes and began to move again, trying to make as little noise as possible. The snow crunching beneath his feet sounded thunderous to his straining ears and he forced himself to slow his pace. What was waiting for him wasn’t going anywhere, and he certainly didn’t want it coming to meet him.

The trading post was a collection of ramshackle shacks that stank of grease, oil and southerners, despite the dulling effect of the cold. Skeletal buildings sat uncompleted amidst stacks of felled trees and there were kayaks lying forgotten on the shore and against the shacks. He saw humps of things that he did not want to look at too closely. He had been to the trading post many times, but now it seemed unfamiliar and hostile, as if it were truly awake for the first time and hungry as well.

The quiet, wordless voice of his tuurngaq murmured to him. The spirit was his guide and guardian in places like this, where one world bled into the other.  He stopped, just at the edge of the first shack and his fingers burrowed through his furs to the handle of his knife. Then, reluctantly, he touched the shape of the pistol thrust through his belt. Its only purpose was to make men dead, and Ukaleq wouldn’t have had it with him, had he not feared he would need it.

Something struck a shack, and the sound was loud, momentarily eclipsing the sound of bones being cracked open. Ukaleq did not flinch or whirl, because the wrong sort of movement could see him dead as surely as not moving when it was called for. His other hand tightened on his staff as he drew the pistol, cocking it beneath his furs so that the noise would not carry.

A flash of red caught his eye. The white man was dead and it was hard for Ukaleq to see where his wounds ended and his red serge uniform jacket began. The atshen crouched on his chest, greedily stuffing bits of gray and red and pink into its distended mouth. Its eyes looked like boiled eggs and its skin was puffy and blistered with the weight of its hunger. It chewed mindlessly and messily, like a bear cub getting its first taste of meat.

Ukaleq lifted his staff and took a step towards it. Snow crunched beneath his feet. The atshen looked up, white eyes rolling in its sagging sockets. It had been an old woman once, of his people, before it was atshen. Its mouth was too full for it to make any noise louder than a strangled gurgle and Ukaleq breathed a sigh of relief as he brought the end of his staff down on its head. Its skull was distressingly soft and his staff sank into it with a wet sound. He jerked it free with a grimace and the atshen fell off of its meal, its legs kicking. He stood, head cocked, listening.

More bones burst, somewhere. There had been horses at the trading post, he recalled. Big beasts, plenty of meat, they’d keep the atshen busy for hours, he hoped. His eyes found those of the dead man, his bearded jaw slack in the last shock of his life. Ukaleq shook his head. What had they expected, breaking the laws as they had?

Then, the southerners thought that the Inuit had no laws because they were not written down on paper or in books. But paper could be torn and books burned. The laws of Ukaleq’s people were not written on paper.

The eyes of the dead man seemed to say, but we did not know, and Ukaleq thought, perhaps you should have asked. He could have told them, had they simply asked. He would have been happy to tell them. Ukaleq was an angakkuq; the southerners called him a ‘shaman’, but it was not the same thing, he did not think.  He did not make it a habit to talk to spirits, as the southerners said shamans did. You could not trust spirits, unless, like his tuurngaq, they were bound to him. Unbound, they turned with the wind. Like the atshen.  His tuurngaq spoke softly in his ear as something moved atop the shack closest to him.

Again he froze, old instincts taking control. They moved quickly, far more quickly than a man, even an angakkuq. His heartbeat was loud in his ears and his hand inched towards the pistol. He was not a good shot, as some reckoned such things, but the bullets were special. They found their mark regardless, and he had worked the same rites on them as he did on the bullets and arrows of hunters.

Wood creaked under an unseen weight and he heard an exhalation of air from sagging jaws. Atshen did not breathe, but the gases of the bodies they climbed into escaped nonetheless. He heard a scrape of knuckles and toes and then a shadow crossed the snow and he threw himself forward, rolling, and the pistol sliding from his belt into his hand. Its bark was loud. The atshen had been a man, once, dressed in southern fashion. Teeth clicked together in a mangled jaw as it tumbled past him. Its heels drummed on the snow as the spirit left it. Ukaleq rose, breathing heavily. Feet scraped on snow and he turned.

They boiled between the shacks, jaws wide and faces slack with abnormal hunger. They reached for him with red fingers and he set his feet and emptied the pistol. The sound would only draw more of them, but he had no choice. When the pistol clicked empty, he dropped it and drew his knife.

The last atshen barrelled into him, its teeth snapping at his windpipe. It stank of blood and rot and something else that he could not name. He grabbed its chin and twisted its head back as it drove him to ground. Its dead flesh ripped and squashed in his grip. It was heavy and strong, but so was he. He forced its thrashing head back and drove his knife up through its jaw. It reared back, grasping blindly at its head and Ukaleq squirmed from beneath it and scrambled for where he’d dropped his staff.

The atshen hunched towards him on its knees even as he lurched to his feet, staff in his hands. He struck it on the side of the head, dropping it. Shaking, he retrieved his knife. Its jaws flapped open, but the malevolent force that had sent them towards his throat was gone.

They were fragile, the atshen. Fragile but dangerous, like ice during the thaw.  And like melting ice, they spread. They spread through bite and blood, like a sickness, and unchecked one became two and two four and four eight and then, too many.  He had seen it before, and worse things besides, and it was his responsibility as angakkuq to see them and placate or exorcise them.

He could have told them, had they asked, the Hudson Bay Company men.  He could have told them that this place was no good, that there were spirits in the ice and the water of this stretch of shore. There were tuurngait everywhere of course, some were good like his tuurngaq, and some were bad, but most simply there. The atshen were bad. They were bad and they were patient, which was worse.

They could wait for months, years, centuries, hiding in the air and the water, waiting for some poor unfortunate to make camp and then, they would wait even longer for that same unfortunate to disobey the rules of the land, the rules that governed everything. There were things to avoid, things to follow, things to do. This place was pittailiniq, one of things to be avoided. It was a sour place, where evil things squatted in the spaces between breaths, waiting to enter into men and women and make monsters of them.

Ukaleq picked up the pistol, cracking it open. It was a Webley, a gift from an Englishman of his acquaintance, a ‘shaman’ according to the southern way of things, though maybe he was an angakkuq as well. He hadn’t had the heart to tell his brother-angakkuq that he found such things repulsive. A rifle was one thing, but pistols, to his mind, were meant only for killing men.  

It was heavy as he fumbled cartridges into it, listening for the sound of bare feet on snow.  He thought of the Englishman as he jerked the ammunition cylinder back into place. He would have simply told his people not to put their trading post here, and they would have listened. But Ukaleq wasn’t English, wasn’t Canadian, and they would not have listened to him.

Ukaleq smiled crookedly. Sometimes even his own people didn’t listen to him. The smile faded. Fewer and fewer of them listened every year, since the southerners had sent their shamans north. Not like his English friend these, but men who spoke for one spirit. They wanted his people to listen to their spirit and no others, which was perfectly understandable as spirits were greedy things. But it was dangerous as well.

New ways meant that the old ways were forgotten, and in the forgetting, the atshen had their entrance. And when rules were forgotten or broken, the angakkuq must put things right, even if that meant putting a bullet or knife in every single body ridden by an atshen.

But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

For one thing, he didn’t have nearly enough bullets.  For another, you couldn’t kill them, not really. You could only kill the body. And if there was one thing the atshen didn’t lack for here, it was bodies to slip into like a man putting on boots.

He heard the harsh rush of skin over snow and, staff in one hand and pistol in the other, began to run. There were more dead men in the snow and on the shore, some in red others in furs. It had been sudden. The atshen were very fast, whether they were in bodies or not. Soon those dead men would join the others, rising to be atshen with the rest. Hopefully he would be done with things before then.

As he ran, he caught sight of the chapel rising between and behind two other buildings. He grunted and turned, leaping over a barrel and through a curtain of drying skins. The atshen were above him as well as behind him and he shuddered as he heard their feet crash across the rooftops. They were hungry for living meat now. Atshen were always hungry. They ate, though they did not need it, and as they ate, they spread themselves. They were like a river, seeping out of a hole in the world. The only way to stop them was to dam the entrance up.

The chapel stank of spirits, and he knew it was where the atshen had emerged. The doors sagged on their hinges and the smell of gunpowder and blood seeped out of the wood. The Hudson Bay men had made their stand here. They had had no way of knowing that they were seeking safety in the very den of their killers. He stepped inside swiftly, and away from the doors, whispering to his tuurngaq to hide him. Something like fox fur brushed against him as the spirit answered his plea, hiding him from the ears of the atshen as they ran past the chapel, snuffling like pigs.

He whispered again and gestured with his staff. He felt a quiet pressure on his limbs and then something like a breeze curled away from him and out the door. The tuurngaq would lead the atshen away and hopefully give him enough time to banish them back into the places between. He pushed away from the wall, looking around.

The chapel was a quiet place. It was a box for spirits, and there were many trapped here now. Ukaleq stepped through the bodies, noting the men and women here of the Inuit. They had come for siqqitiqtuq; ‘baptism’ the southern shamans called it. That in and of itself wouldn’t have been enough to wake the atshen, but sometimes-

“Ah,” he breathed. On the altar was a bowl and in the bowl was cooked caribou lung and heart and he shook his head sadly. Sometimes, the southern spirits wanted a show of fealty and their shamans made the converts consume food that was pittailiniq, to show that they were fully siqqtiq. It was a sad thing in most cases, but here it had been fatal. They had broken the rules and the atshen had been freed to wreak their malice.

In his ear, his tuurngaq whispered. Fingernails clawed at the wooden floor and heels drummed. The bodies jerked and twitched like leaves caught in a wind and he knew that he had no more time. Quickly he shoved the pistol through his belt and stripped off his glove with his teeth. Laying his staff aside, he pulled his knife from its sheath and swiftly dumped the offensive offerings from the bowl on the altar. He caught sight of the shaman on the floor behind it, all in black, his face blue and burst like a rotten flower.

The floorboards creaked and sighed as he turned and sank to his knees. He placed the bowl on the floor before him and held his hand over it, palm down. Teeth champed and feet stamped as the dead rose, fingers twitching as they reached hungrily for him.  The air seemed somehow colder, and he fancied that he could see great shapes, beast shapes, monstrous and immense, crouching over the bodies, like bears standing in puddles.

‘You are hungry,’ he said. ‘Take this and go.’

The knife cut like fire across his palm and blood plopped into the bowl. It was a simple thing, a placatory exorcism, and offer and a command all in one. He stabbed the knife into the floor and squeezed his hand, forcing more blood out, filling the bowl. Fingers stretched towards him and heard something, many something growl softly, then a moment later, a sigh which was at once appreciative and resigned.

Ukaleq closed his eyes as the bodies toppled like children’s blocks. When he opened them, the air was less oppressive and less hungry. He could still feel them however, like tremors in his muscles. He rose stiffly to his feet, his hand aching and wet. When the pain had lessened, he would begin the process of burning the bodies.

Maybe, when the southerners found their trading post in ashes, they would come and find him and ask him why.

And if not, well, the atshen were patient. 

And that’s it for this month. If you made it this far, thanks for giving it a read and possibly even subscribing. I hope you enjoyed this back-to-basics newsletter. Check back next time for more new releases (hopefully) and a new (old) monthly story.

But for now, to paraphrase the estimable Carnacki – out you go!

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The Thing From Another World (1951)

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Psychomanteum #4

EDITORIAL

I’ve been thinking about my friend and fellow-author, Derrick Ferguson, of late. Derrick passed away a few years ago, on April 4th, hence my preoccupation. Despite all the time we spent talking to one another, via email and otherwise, I never got to meet him in person. Our schedules never aligned, I guess. Doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Worse, these days it seems like every time I log on to social media, I see a new obituary. Sometimes it’s people I shared a table of contents with a time or three, other times its someone I used to talk to regularly at one time, if not lately because I’m a champion at not staying in touch.

It leaves me feeling as if the world is contracting around me; as if I’m in a long hallway and the lights are going dark fixture by fixture, the way you see in the movies. The world seems meaner and pettier by the day, and all my heroes are gone or going. All I have left are their words, their books. I cherish those more and more, as the lights go out and the dark rises.

But I cherish Derrick’s most of all.

I mentioned to another friend recently that I had a Derrick notebook: a notebook specifically for ideas I wanted to write with him. We wrote one book together and planned to do more but – life, you know?

Plans fall through. Time speeds on. Excuses, excuses, excuses.

So now I have a notebook that I put those ideas into, where they’ll stay forever. Stories of heroes and villains and adventures in far away places. Because I can’t write them, you see – not without him. But they won’t stop coming.

And I don’t want them to, if I’m being honest. Because when I’m scribbling them out, I can pretend that he might get to see them. I can pretend, just for a moment, that we might get to write together again. And in that moment, the dark doesn’t seem so deep.

But only for a moment.

Only until another damn light goes out.

I hate this month.

I miss my friend.

NEWS

I sold a story this month, and was commissioned to write another, so that’s nice. I also submitted a bunch to various markets that crossed my feed, as the kids say – both new stories and reprints. Other than that, I’ve been working on a few pitches for various things; short stories, mostly. I think this is shaping up to be a short fiction sort of year – not a bad thing by any stretch, but challenging in its own way.

The received wisdom is that you can’t make a living from short fiction – not these days, at least. I expect that’s true for most of us. The days of Truman Capote and Harlan Ellison are long gone. But it’s fun, and the right markets pay well enough that it’s not an exercise in futility. At least in my opinion. Grain of salt, mileage may vary, etc.

Anyway, next month I’ll be starting work on the licensed sequel, Return of the Monster-Men, for Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. I’ve got three months to write it, which is fantastic. Plenty of breathing room, and the whole novel has been outlined and broken down for ease of writing. Hopefully that means it’ll be smooth sailing – knock on wood.

New Kickstarter – Alone on the Borderland

I’m pleased to have a story in this anthology of weird fiction from Belanger Books, and even more pleased that it appears to have hit its Kickstarter goal, and then some. But you can still get in on a good thing if you’re of a mind. I do recommend that you give it a look, at least. There’s some nice rewards on offer.

New Novel – A Bitter Taste: A Daidoji Shin Mystery

My newest Legend of the Five Rings novel, A Bitter Taste, is now available on NetGalley. If you’d like to request and review a copy, I’d be obliged – as would my publisher. I’m not certain yet whether this is the last in the series, or merely the penultimate instalment, but it’s a big one either way. So why not preorder a copy as well?

New Omnibus – War for the Mortal Realms

This new Age of Sigmar omnibus from Black Library contains my novel, Soul Wars, as well as two others, by authors Chris Wraight and Darius Hinks. Soul Wars is the little novel that could; it keeps selling, no matter how deeply they bury it. Then, it is a book about the undead. Anyway, if you’d like to preorder the omnibus, by all means head over to Black Library and do so.

New Short Story – “Mind Over Matter”

I’m pleased to say that I’ve got a story in the first issue of Spooky Magazine. My contribution, “Mind Over Matter”, started life as a submission to a Kolchak: The Nightstalker tribute anthology. Needless to say, when it didn’t make the final cut, I gave it a few tweaks, filed off the serial numbers and submitted it elsewhere. I think it’s a good story, and I might even write a sequel or two, should inspiration strike. The issue will be out on Walpurgisnacht, appropriately enough. Get your copy here.

Sale – Darkly Dreaming

My Warhammer Horror audio drama, Darkly Dreaming, is on sale over at Audible for a whopping sixty-two percent off. It’s my attempt to do an Age of Sigmar version of the King in Yellow, with a city teetering on the edge of madness, a corrupt aristocracy and a crazed poet looking to make her mark. One of the last things I wrote for Black Library, and probably one of the best, in my humble opinion. Get it while it’s hot.

Site Update – Miscellaneous Writing

I’ve added new entries to both Nightmare Men and Silver Screams this month, if you’d care to read them. As stated earlier, they’re free to read, for subscribers (subscribing is also free).

MONTHLY STORY

“Daniski’s Wolf” is one of my early, better stories. First published in 2009 or 2010 (I forget which, both because I am old and because back to back bouts of Covid did the Mojave two-step on my long-term recall) it was a nice, weird spin on a werewolf story. It’s been reprinted a handful of times since its initial appearance, and every so often I find myself going back to it, just to reread it. It marks what I think of as the end of my journeyman days as a writer. Not long after its publication, I would start writing for Black Library, among other things…

When Arthur Daniski looked down out of his sitting room window to watch the sun rise, the wolf looked up and in at him from the sidewalk below.  Its eyes were yellow and stupid under the light of the streetlamp. Nonetheless, he felt as if it were laughing at him.

It was, of course, the same wolf.

It was always the same wolf. Until it wasn’t. 

He closed his eyes tightly, brushing forcefully at the lids with his knuckles, trying to control his breathing.  One. Two. Three. Let’s see what we can see.

My what big eyes you have. Daniski swallowed thickly as stray thoughts loped through his skull and looked out the window again.  The bag of garbage his downstairs neighbour had left on the curb for the trash man in the morning looked up at him, the light of the street lamp reflecting eerily off something metal visible through a rip in the bag as it sputtered and went out. There now. Perfectly reasonable.

Perfectly.

Something growled and he whirled, sloshing tea all over his white shirt and eliciting a yelp from him as he looked around wildly.  The cordless phone growled again from its place on the television, a soft, dull snarl. Reasonable.  This was a reasonable world, full of reasonable people.

Reasonable.

Perfectly.

He snatched up the phone and hissed into the receiver. A telemarketer snarled back at him and he slammed the phone down on the table and furiously daubed at the tea on his shirt with a napkin.  Morning breakfast was becoming more dangerous all the time. The wolf nodded in agreement and he threw his cup at it, a shriek dying in his throat as the cup cracked the television screen. Only a reflection. Just a reflection of something that wasn’t there.

He stood in the center of his living room and looked around to be sure. The wolf was gone. It was always gone. Until it wasn’t.

Daniski sat down heavily on a chair, his head in his hands.  Why wouldn’t it go away?  Why was it following him? Trembling fingers reached for the phone. Dialled a number. So familiar he’d worn the numbers off the buttons on the phone. Buzz. Buzz.

“Hello?” A sleepy voice answered. “Hello?” Cranky now. An edge to the words. He could hear the rustling of sheets. How late did psychiatrists sleep?

“Doctor Goodwin? It’s Arthur Daniski. I-I saw it again.”

“Arthur? Saw what?” Doctor Goodwin sounded confused. Daniski resisted the urge to hang up. She couldn’t help him. It was foolish to think otherwise.

“The wolf. I saw it again.” He felt as if the world were crumbling beneath his feet.  She couldn’t help. No one could.

“The wolf? Oh. Oh! Arthur.” She spoke with a firmness that implied recognition. Sympathy. Doctor Goodwin was good at that. Skilful. “Arthur. You know you’re not supposed to call outside of office hours.”

“I know. I just-I saw it again. The pills aren’t helping. I can still see it!” His voice had a brittle pitch he didn’t like but he couldn’t control it.  “And it can see me.”

A sigh. Barely audible. “It can’t see you Arthur. It’s not real. We’ve been over this. It’s simply a hallucination. Apparently a stubborn one.” A fumbling sound. A hand reaching for an alarm clock perhaps. Another sigh. Louder than the first. She wanted him to know he’d inconvenienced her. The doctor as suffering saint, a voice in his head growled, pink tongue lolling over yellow teeth. He held his hand over the phone and looked around.

“Shut up,” he hissed. The wolf laughed, hidden somewhere. Daniski backed away until he felt the wall behind him, hard against his spine. If he could see it coming it couldn’t get him.

“Arthur?” Doctor Goodwin’s voice, muffled by the meat of his palm. Concerned. Angry. “Arthur are you listening?”

“Yes. Yes Doctor. Just distracted. I’m sorry. Yes?”

“Arthur, I want you to come for a session this afternoon. After my last appointment at five.”

“You want me to come at night?” Panic thrilled through him like ice-water coursing through his arteries. Night? Wolves were nocturnal weren’t they?

That we are, the wolf growl-laughed. He could hear it padding around. Pad-pad-pad. Its tail swished against the walls. We are the children of the night and we make such beautiful music as a famous man once said. Sweat popped and trickled down Arthur’s face as he whipped his head back and forth, trying to find it. “Go away. You’re not real.”

But I am, until I’m not, said the wolf, its foul breath tickling Arthur’s earlobe. He screamed, the phone flipping from his hand as he hurled himself away from the wall, not looking. Not wanting to see. “Arthur? Arthur!” Doctor Goodwin, sounding agitated. Angry. “Arthur, it’s not real!”

He slunk across the floor, eyes darting left and right. Yes it is. Yes it is. “I-it’s not real. It’s not real.” He picked up the phone, cradling it to his head. “It’s not real, Doctor Goodwin.” Yes it is and its looking at me from the wall with its stupid yellow eyes and pink tongue. And it was. The wolf sat sideways on the wall, looking at him. Watching him. How had it got in his flat? How could it climb walls like a spider?

I’m a special wolf, it said, licking its chops as it stalked down the wall leaving smoking footprints in the wallpaper. I’m a special wolf, with special ins and outs and special hiding places. Doctor Goodwin hung up her end with a final, sympathetic admonishment. Empty words that bolstered the wall in his mind, that barred the door against the wolf as it came towards him, brushy black tail wagging in amusement. I can hear the door slamming Arthur but you can’t keep me out, it grunted, sitting in front of him, malformed front paws kneading the carpet. I can come in anytime I want, you know that.

And he did.

“Go away.” He shut his eyes tightly. “Go away. You’re not real.”

Stinking breath, smelling of rotten meat and spoiled milk, washed over his face and he could sense it staring at him. Waiting. watching. Until it wasn’t.

He opened his eyes and it was gone, leaving only a whiff of something foul in the air. But it would be back. It always came back.

He tried to work for the remainder of the day. He worked at home these days. Ever since he’d first seen the wolf. Following him in the street, weaving in and out of the crowd on Saint James Street on a Saturday afternoon, the sound of the ocean pounding in his skull. Brighton was lovely in the summer and Arthur loved it. Until the wolf ruined it.

He’d thought it was a dog at first, somebody’s mutt allowed to run loose until it brushed past him and looked up at him with those yellow eyes. A shade of yellow that existed on no painter’s palette, nor in nature. The color of sickness, of plague. A wolf with eyes the color of disease and its voice rattled in his head like gravel loose in a washing machine. He didn’t listen then. He almost wished he had, maybe it would have told him why it was following him. But he hadn’t, he ran instead, dropping his groceries, the bags from Somerfield’s bursting and littering their contents all over the street, cans of food rupturing and splashing.

The wolf loped easily beside him as he ran, its words lost in the babble of human voices, the raucous cries of seagulls, the sound of cars humming through the narrow streets. It paced him as he blundered through the midday crowd, tongue lolling, eyes blazing as it laughed at him.

It always laughed at him. Quiet, mocking laughter, as if it were aware of some secret joke concerning him.

He couldn’t go out of the house without it following him, especially at night. At night it was bigger. Louder. It didn’t disappear as quickly, instead content to laugh and pad after him. Pad-pad-pad. He hated that sound. The most horrible sound in the universe, the sound of its rough pads kissing the ground. Hateful sound. He couldn’t get it out of his head.

It followed him down the street as he ran errands or up and down the aisles of bus and train, toe nails clicking, pads rubbing. He couldn’t see it at those times but it was there. It was always there. Even when it wasn’t.

He’d quit his job, taken one he could do out of his home. Something with computers. In demand these days. Stopped going out with friends. Stopped talking to people unless he had to because you never knew if the wolf was listening. He’d even gotten a new flat without telling anyone but Doctor Goodwin. He’d thought the wolf couldn’t get in, couldn’t find him. He was wrong. It watched him from the streets and the rooftops and from his television. From his computer screen. From inside his mirror.

Special ins and special outs and special hiding places. Wasn’t that what it said?

No. It hadn’t said anything. It wasn’t real, that was what Doctor Goodwin said. That was what she always said.

He’d started seeing her after he’d quit his job. It was one of the few times he allowed himself to go outside. She had a tiny office, with a green door on the street and small steps leading up. The smell of the wolf had been thick there the first time he took those stairs, coiling around him, pulling him back down. He hadn’t been able to move, to go either up or down. Trapped with the sound of the wolf’s laughter and its nails click-clicking on the steps as it climbed towards him.

Doctor Goodwin had found him there, paralyzed and shaking. She’d prescribed anti-psychotics on the spot. Little foul tasting pills that dulled the sharp corners of his mind. That hid him from the wolf. But only if he took enough of them. Sometimes it was hard to tell though. The wolf was getting stronger, like a dog that strains at a leash every day will become stronger.

It even followed him in his dreams now. He hadn’t slept in days.

As the sun began to dip, he gave up on work and made dinner. He was hungry. Always so hungry. The steak curled and turned from red to brown in the pan, its juices boiling away in a hiss of steam and his stomach rebelled at the sight of it. He slid it onto a plate, his mouth watering, fingers not working.

He dropped his utensils so many times that he eventually gave up on them entirely, eating the cooling meat with his hands. His stomach groaned and his eyes strayed to the clock on the wall, Fritz the Cat’s eyes and tail swinging this way and that only it wasn’t Fritz it was the wolf and it grinned at him over the rim of the clock it held, bushy tail swinging this way and that, yellow eyes watching him eat as it laughed. A black nail tapped the plastic as his gorge rose in his throat.

You’re going to be late. Mustn’t keep her waiting.

It was after five. Daniski, his eyes never leaving those of the wolf, pushed himself away from the table, chair falling over backwards, unnoticed. He had to get to Doctor Goodwin’s. Get more pills. Get some help. Daniski ran out of his flat, trying not to listen to the sound of the wolf’s feet following after.

Saint James’ Street was crowded and his head pulsed with the sounds of hurrying feet and conversations he didn’t quite catch or understand. Some were in other languages or in voices too hushed for him to hear but he still strained, hoping someone would mention the wolf behind him. Following after him. It was a futile hope that someone would see it just as he did. Sometimes he thought that perhaps if someone else saw it, it would leave him alone and follow them. Hunt them. But no one did. And it didn’t. It was always there.

The sidewalk was crowded and Daniski pushed his way through, narrow and stoop shouldered, burdened by the weight of the wolf as it slunk through the crowd, disappearing occasionally but always reappearing at his side, eyes watching him and laughing.

Run as fast as you like Arthur, but I’ll always be here, right beside you, it snarled softly as it nipped at his legs, hurrying him along. You can feel me can’t you?

Arthur stumbled as pain shot through his legs and rumbled up through his bowels into his guts, like the meat he’d eaten was trying to climb back out of his throat. Things pushed inside him. It felt as if he’d swallowed a hunk of steel wool. He had to see Doctor Goodwin. She’d help him. She had to.

The stairs were narrower than he remembered and they seemed to twist and turn upon themselves. He stumbled more than once, and at last resorted to pulling himself up along the wall, the wallpaper seeming to boil and pucker beneath his sweaty fingers. A rough, sandpapery tongue licked his palm and he staggered away from the wall, nearly falling back down the steps. 

The wolf’s skull, its shape bulged beneath the wallpaper and it moved slowly, keeping pace with him as he climbed the stairs, his fearful eyes locked on it.  As he rounded a turn, he came face to face with Doctor Goodwin who was shutting her door behind herself with brisk, efficient movements.  “Doctor Goodwin?”

“Oh. Arthur.” She turned, a disapproving set to her features. “I didn’t think you’d make it.”

“I-I’m sorry. Time slipped away from me.”

“It does that often, doesn’t it? We’ve had this discussion before.” She tapped her watch, her eyes hard. Then they softened. “Come in, Arthur. I think we need to have a talk.”

“Yes, Doctor Goodwin.” Arthur cast a last nervous glance at the stairwell. The wolf was nowhere to be seen. It was hiding. Somewhere. It was always hiding. Until it wasn’t.

She sat Arthur down on the chair across from hers. Doctor Goodwin didn’t believe in couch-therapy. She said it induced false maternal bonding between patient and doctor. Arthur only knew that the high-backed faux leather chairs hurt his back. He squirmed in his seat as she settled primly across from him, hands folded neatly on her lap. “Well?”

“Doctor?” he asked, in some confusion. 

“Arthur. What is the problem? I thought we had settled this before. This wolf of yours is merely and auditory and visual hallucination, one you can control with a proper chemical regimen. The regimen I put you on and which you have evidently failed to keep up.”

“I didn’t! I-I mean I did! I’ve been taking the pills just like you said Doctor and it was working. It was!” Arthur toppled in his chair, bending until his forehead almost touched his knees, his hands cradling his face. “But its not anymore. The wolf can see me again. I can see it. It followed me here!” His voice was sharp with anguish and Doctor Goodwin’s eyes narrowed in concern. “It followed me here,” he whispered, looking up at her, tears rolling down his sallow cheeks. Doctor Goodwin sighed and leaned forward.

“Arthur, the wolf is not real. You know this. It is simply a product of your disordered psyche. A hiccup in your mental processes, one that is easily controlled. You are suffering from a very specific, focused form of schizophrenia. Reality is harder for you to maintain your hold of than the average person. We’ve discussed this. You need to work harder at it. Discipline yourself.”

“I thought so too, but-“

“No buts Arthur. The wolf is not real. Say it with me.”

“The wolf is-“

“Isn’t real. The wolf isn’t real.” Doctor Goodwin’s voice was calm. Reasonable. It was always reasonable. “The wolf isn’t real.”

“The wolf isn’t real,” Arthur stuttered. The office was tiny, barely a closet really. Dimly lit, the noise of Saint James’ Street an ever-present rumble of muddled voices and vehicle engines grunting along. She didn’t even have a desk. Just a bookshelf and two chairs. Spartan. Efficient. She said she didn’t want any distractions. She was a good doctor. “The wolf isn’t real.”

“Good. Now we can go forward.” She nodded and leaned back. “When you see the wolf, what is it doing Arthur?”

“But you said-“

“Yes. I did. And it isn’t. But humor me, what is it doing?”

“Watching me.  Stalking me.”

“Hounding you?”

“Yes. Yes!” Arthur was breathing heavily now. “Its in my head all the time, driving me this way and that. Trying to-trying to…” His voice died away. What was it trying to do? What? He rubbed his brow with both hands, fingertips sweaty and slick over his skin. What was it trying to do? He looked at Doctor Goodwin, who was smiling patiently. She was always smiling, even when she wasn’t. Like she was laughing at him. Always laughing.

He never saw her other patients. There was never anyone in her office except her. Never anyone on the stairwell. Just the wolf. The wolf was always there. Except when it wasn’t. Hunting him. Driving him forward. Cutting him off from friends. Family.

Wolves. What did wolves do? Wolves drove weaker prey from the herd, circling it until it was tired. Exhausted. Alone. And then they pounced. Something circled in his gut, eating away at him and his hands trembled. It was in his head. The wolf wasn’t real. Doctor Goodwin said so. She was a good doctor. He jerked as she said his name.

“Arthur? Arthur, are you paying attention?”

“I-yes.” It was here. Hiding. Watching. Waiting. He looked around. If he could just spot it… “I was paying attention Doctor.”

“No. No, you weren’t Arthur. You haven’t been paying attention for some time. Always too busy looking over your shoulder to see what’s right in front of you.”

It wasn’t Doctor Goodwin’s voice. Arthur whipped around and nearly fell from his chair as he stared into the muzzle of the wolf. It grinned at him, licking its chops. It sat in Doctor Goodwin’s chair, tail swishing, malformed paws clasped together. “Hello Arthur,” the wolf said, teeth clicking together as it spoke.

“H-how? What?” Arthur pushed the chair back, every limb straining as the wolf leaned forward, yellow eyes blazing like the sun. Like the moon. “Doctor Goodwin?”

“Shhh Arthur. No more talking.”

“But I’m not alone.” He wasn’t alone. The wolf wasn’t real. It wasn’t. “Doctor Goodwin…”

The wolf placed its deformed paws on the armrests of his chair, leaning toward him, hair brushing against him as it grinned at him. Its jaws opened slowly as Arthur watched, teeth so much longer and bigger than he’d thought.  Not real. Not realnotrealnotreal. “You’re not real…” he whispered, closing his eyes, trying to shrink away from the warm touch of its breath.

“No, I’m not,” the wolf said as its jaws closed around his head. “But sometimes, I am.”

Doctor Goodwin watched as Arthur Daniski jerked and struggled in his chair his eyes closed, silent screams distorting his features. Then he stiffened and collapsed, falling from the chair onto the floor, limp and dead, without a mark on him. 

Smoke, thick and foul smelling, rose from his contorted form and rolled across the floor towards her, stretching and shaping itself into a rough lupine shape before dispersing and flowing between her parted lips and wide nostrils.

With a sigh, Goodwin settled back in her chair, a satisfied smile on her face, her pale pink tongue running over her lips, her long teeth flashing for just a moment. Poor Arthur. She placed her hands over her belly and turned to the window, her eyes peering down at the street below. In the light of the setting sun, they would have looked to be the deepest yellow if anyone had been there to see them before they closed. 

She would have to go hunting again soon. Right now, she was satisfied.

But soon she would be hungry.

She was always hungry.

Until she wasn’t.

And that’s it for this month. If you made it this far, thanks for giving it a read and possibly even subscribing. I hope you enjoyed this back-to-basics newsletter. Check back next time for more new releases (hopefully) and a new (old) monthly story.

But for now, to paraphrase the estimable Carnacki – out you go!

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Psychic Warrior – Dr. Orient

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The Restorationist – Jane Bradshawe

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Psychomanteum #3

EDITORIAL

Several things I’ve read on social media of late have got me thinking about the past, and my place in it. Dangerous territory, in some ways. Nostalgia is a vice one can ill afford these days. Things were not better, or worse. Merely different.

When I were a lad, the internet was a wild and woolly place. A man could make a good living, selling Lovecraftian pastiches to fly-by-night electronic ‘zines, none of which had anything like credibility. In my prime, I could write four or five of those a month, and make a car payment or buy groceries, depending. Admittedly, these places paid peanuts, but it all added up. Quantity has a quality all its own, as some famous fellow once had it.

It was a strange time to be a young writer. This was in the days before you had to have a site or a brand or a social media presence; it was all on the way, but it wasn’t here quite yet. Sometimes you’d recognise a name in a table of contents, and do a deep-dive into the digital sea, looking for more, only to come up empty. People were ghosts. All you knew of them was their writing.

Sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t better.

On that note, I had occasion to look back, recently, and I realized that few, if any, of those early stories I wrote are still online. I don’t even have my own copies any more – all lost in the great Floppy Disk Erasure of 2008 – which means that they might as well have never existed. Let me reassure you: those missing stories are no great loss to literature. But I still regret their absence. For better or worse, they’re my history, or were.

I’ll be forty-four this year. I started writing professionally in my last years in college, so nearly twenty years ago. That’s a long time, and a lot of books under the bridge. A lot of the writers I used to share line-ups with are gone. Some gave up writing entirely, or moved onto more lucrative applications of their skills.

Some are dead.

But some are still here, plugging away at the bottom rung of the mid-list, just like me. We write and write, trying to get onto that next rung. Sometimes we succeed; sometimes we slip and fall. Sometimes we don’t go anywhere – we just hold onto our rung for dear life, saving our strength for the next attempt.

Shorn of nostalgia and braggadocio, its taken me twenty years to get here. These days, I have to face the fact that it might take me twenty more to get where I want to be.

Still, things could be worse. I make a good living, all things considered. Black Library royalties alone keep food on the table, the roof patched and the bills paid. Yet, I can’t help but want more. I don’t want my name to vanish into the aether when I go. Maybe that’s greedy of me, but hell, isn’t that what every writer wants?

Until I figure out how to do that, I guess I’ll just keep writing.

NEWS

I’ve sold a story or two this month, but more on that later, when I can properly announce them. I’ve also submitted around a dozen short stories to various markets, as well as a few reprints. I’ve been somewhat lax on the submissions front of late, so this is more about playing catch-up than business as usual. One of the ways I deal with professional anxiety is by keeping short story submissions turning over; one gets rejected, I send it back out as soon as possible. I don’t pause to feel bad about it. It’s worked for me so far. And it lets me feel like I’m doing something.

Other than that, with most of my other rolling commissions completed, I’ve been fiddling with some longer projects. If I’m facing a paucity of commissioned work this year, I figure I ought to put the free time to good use. Maybe I’ll even try and self-publish something. What can I say…I like to stay busy.

New Audio – Gotrek & Felix: Road of Skulls

To this day, I have never received as much hate-mail for a book as I did for this one. Its obvious why, in retrospect, but at the time it was my first brush with Warhammer fandom. Still, I enjoyed writing it and I hope the folks who bought it enjoyed reading it. Anyway, for whatever reason, Black Library have decided to make an audio version. Grab a copy, if you’re interested.

New Novel – Song of Carcosa

My new Arkham Horror novel, Song of Carcosa, is now available in the US. It’s the third – and possibly final – entry in the adventures of Alessandra Zorzi. It’ll be out in paperback in the UK later this year, but if you’d like a copy, the e-book is available. Check out the publisher’s page to learn more.

Sale – Lukas the Trickster/Lord of the End Times/Dark Harvest/Apocalypse

The audio versions of a few of my Black Library titles are on sale, courtesy of Audible. For the next week or so, you can grab an audio version of Lukas the Trickster, Dark Harvest, Lord of the End Times and/or Apocalypse for just £2.99 which is around 87 percent off. Why not grab one or two and give them a listen?

Site Update – Miscellaneous Writing

I’ve tweaked the site a bit this month, as you may or may not have noticed. I’ll be posting some of my essays on film and occult detectives on an irregular basis, i.e. as and when I get the time. They’ll be absolutely free to read for subscribers to the site. I’ve posted a handful already, and there’s more on the way next month. Enjoy!

MONTHLY STORY

This is one of my favourites. I wrote it a decade ago, but it still ranks high up on my list of personal bests. “Bultungin” is about a lot of things, but mostly hyenas and witches. It was first published in 2013, in the wonderful Fox Spirit anthology, Shapeshifters. I recommend picking up a copy.

In his dreams, he heard laughter.

Raucous cries, echoing from the canyons of steel and stone that was the city. Madcap giggles slithering through the open-air markets and coloured tents. Chuckles as deep and dark as the lagoons.

In his dreams, John Dollar ran, and the laughter followed him. He ran through nonsense streets, pursued by bodiless sound, hunted through the angles by the laughing dogs.

And then he would wake, alone in his prison, and he could not tell which world he preferred. In his dreams, he was hunted, true, but in the waking world, he had already been caught.

‘You are my witch, John Dollar.’ That was what Macumbe had said, in that thunderstorm voice of his. ‘And you will catch these things for me.’

That was all the conversation there was. A statement of intent from the quiet king of Victoria Island, and then John Dollar was parked on the shoulder of the Third Mainland Bridge, squatting for three days in the back of a car made of rust, paint and dents.

Loose canvas clothes, heavy in the humidity of the rainy season, covered him and he wore a pair of insect-eye sunglasses that kept the day’s harsh yellow-brown light out of his sensitive eyes. John Dollar was a fake white man, with none of the recourse to the sun’s glare available to real oh-ee-boh. His skin was like snow, and it melted almost as quickly.

That was why Macumbe kept him. For a rich man, he had more than his share of a poor man’s superstitions, and John Dollar’s frail skin was one of them. He knew Macumbe sold his hair and his blood and nail trimmings to similar thinkers. And Macumbe sent him on witch-quests. Like this one.

Dollar lay across the back seat of the car, trying not to breathe too much in the wet heat for fear of the smoke and pollution that clung to the nicotine coloured air like a film, listening to the sounds of the traffic jam just beyond the car. Bumper to bumper on a bridge that trembled and groaned. The Third Mainland talked at night, Dollar had found, holding open-ended discourse on the follies of Lagos and the State.

Dollar didn’t have the heart to tell the bridge that it was dying. It probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. He wasn’t a witch, after all, despite Macumbe’s yearnings. This was Lagos, and there were no witches here. Only people.

Some good, some bad, but only people. Witches didn’t exist, more was the pity. Dollar fancied that he might have made a good witch.

A pistol rested on his belly, and Dollar cleaned the cylinder with a twist of paper. There were silver bullets somewhere, in a fancy box, given to him by Macumbe, but Dollar thought he might sell those, rather than waste them on the bultungin. It might even pay for him to go somewhere away from Lagos, away from Macumbe and his neat little room in the Victoria Island compound.

Granted, that meant getting rid of Song, first.

The other man was big and dark and snoring. He wore knock-offs of knock-offs, striving to emulate the Nollywood gangsters who emulated Europeans who emulated Americans. There was a machete on the dashboard and an automatic rifle painted in the national colors in the floor. Song Abiye was Macumbe’s boy. He collected for him, when he wasn’t watching witches. Or catching monsters.

Macumbe was greedy. He wanted everything, to have and to show off. Dollar thought of the times Macumbe had trotted him out to guests, and made him mumble spells to elicit shrieks of delight.

Being a witch was better than being dead, but not by much. Maybe being a bultungin was better than being a man. Perhaps, when they found them, he would ask.

If they didn’t kill him, of course, if they even existed. Maybe it was simply dream-sickness, but Dollar thought that this time, this witch-quest, might be different. Something was out there. Something—

Dollar sat up as something went crack-crack-crack. Song grunted, and pushed up the lenses of his sunglasses. ‘What?’ he said.

‘They are here,’ Dollar said, reassembling his pistol.

‘Bultungin,’ Song said, voice cracking.

‘No, robbers,’ Dollar said and spun the cylinder, taking comfort in the soft zee of clicking metal. ‘The bait,’ he added.

‘Ah,’ Song said, sitting up and hefting his rifle. He checked it with brisk movements, letting his fingers play across it lovingly. Dollar gestured.

‘Keep it out of sight. No shooting until we have to.’

‘Do not tell me my business, witch,’ Song said.

‘But this is not your business, is it, boy?’ Dollar said, ‘Quiet.’ Song subsided without saying anything. Dollar wasn’t sure whether Song really thought him a witch, but he feared Macumbe. Everyone feared Macumbe.

The robbers stalked through the haze of exhaust fumes and water vapor, shoving at each other and threatening the stalled motorists. They were a common sight along the bridges from Lagos, waiting for breakdowns and traffic jams. Then they would swarm like wild dogs.

One swung a rifle over his head like a banner, emptying a clip in a showy display of control. Song sniffed.

‘Stupid. Bullets are expensive.’

‘They are hoping for tourists.’ Dollar hunched closer to the door, keeping his body low. No sense attracting attention. Not yet.

‘I know. I am not stupid,’ Song said. ‘I have done a bit of it myself, you know.’ He preened slightly, proud of his hard man heritage.

Dollar said nothing. He was not a hard man, not by any stretch. So, when the robbers began pulling men and women out of their cars and forcing them to lie down on the bridge, Dollar looked away. Instead of listening to the screams as a car rolled over one of the victims in an effort by the driver to avoid a robber’s eye, he thought about the signs. Signs in the dust. Signs in the garbage. On the stones. Old signs, older than Lagos State, older than the city; older than everything except Nigeria.

John Dollar saw those signs in his dreams sometimes. He had never wondered what they meant, until now.

Old men, who had lived out away from the city, where animals other than rats and dogs roamed, said that hyenas walked signs in the dirt to mark their range. They walked strange circles, back and forth, twisting back in on themselves. Spiral marks.

It was just folklore. Stupid folklore. Like witches, Dollar knew. Hyenas did not walk spirals and albinos were not witches and men did not become beasts.

But Macumbe had photos, from all over the city. Spirals walked in odd places, places where the rain wouldn’t touch and no human foot would disturb. Under overpasses and in alleyways too small for men. On windowsills and the hoods of taxis. And on the Third Mainland Bridge.

Bodies, too, had turned up. Bad men, mostly, and in pieces, near the spirals. Hyenas waged war on other predators. That was what the old men said.

Everyone and everything comes to Lagos, sooner or later. Dollar couldn’t remember who had told him that, but it was true. After all, he had come, hadn’t he?

Maybe even witches would come, eventually. Maybe bultungin, too. Everything was in Lagos.

John Dollar hoped so, for his own sake. He hoped Macumbe was right. He clutched the pistol tighter and forced himself to turn back. Another failure and Macumbe might decide that he needed a new witch to go with his hyenas.

Song hissed and then chuckled. ‘Shot him, oh my,’ he said, slapping his thigh. A motorist fell wearing a crimson mask and a robber gave a bark of loud laughter.

The bark became a shrill cry as something, a blur, a blotch of color, streaked past, spinning him in a spray of slippery pink things. Song cursed, but Dollar grabbed his wrist.

‘No. Watch,’ he said.

‘But—’

‘Watch,’ Dollar snarled.

Guns were snapping, in all directions and people were running. Car horns honked. Metal gave a whine as something heavy bounded off of a roof and scrabbled across the road surface. The thing moved so fast, hunched and slithering forward through the canyon of bumpers and wheels.

A robber vanished, pulled beneath a car. The others were scattering, no longer wild dogs but running goats, fleeing from something they couldn’t see. ‘Now,’ Song said.

‘Wait!’

‘Now,’ Song said again, opening the door and sliding out, weapon already swinging to his shoulder. Dollar rolled onto his back as the top of the car gave a groan.

Song spun as something jumped onto him. The rifle clattered away as the hyena bared too-white teeth and gave a throaty chuckle. Song grabbed its throat and struggled as it forced its head lower.

‘Help me!’ he said.

‘Hyenas hunt in groups, fool,’ Dollar said as he stepped out and shot the hyena in the back. Its chuckle spiralled up into a shriek and it whipped away from Song, stumbling sideways, its blood making a circular pattern on the street. ‘That is what I was trying to tell you.’ Dollar shot it again, in the haunch. Its leg gave way and it sat awkwardly, panting.

Dollar sank to his haunches in front of it without really knowing why as Song scooped up his rifle. ‘Kill it!’ Song said.

‘Watch out for the other ones,’ Dollar said absently. ‘They know we are here now.’

‘I will kill this one first.’

‘Mr. Macumbe wants them alive.’ Dollar did not look at the other man. ‘Go find them. Do not kill them too much.’

Song grimaced and turned away, rifle barrel slicing the air. Dollar crawled forward. The hyena did not move, save for the in and out of its chest. Its eyes were those of a woman.

‘Bultungin,’ Dollar said. He blinked, and the beast was gone and only a woman lay there, propped up against a car, breathing heavily, clutching herself. Dollar stared at her, entranced. A mane of matted hair sprouted from her sloped skull, flaring back and dangling across her broad shoulders and wide back like a hyena’s ruff.

She was not beautiful. Not really. Her face was too rounded, too coarse. Her eyes were too dark and her teeth too white. He could see the beast beneath her dark skin.

And yet-and yet, she was beautiful, and almost familiar, in the way of a half-glimpsed face. Where had he seen her before?

‘Witch,’ she said. Her voice was high-pitched, like a giggle. Dollar licked his lips and tried to ignore her nakedness.

‘No,’ he said. She looked at the gun in his hand, and he felt a surge of shame. ‘I am sorry. But I had no choice. Not in this or anything.’

She grunted, and tried to rise. Her bare back was wet with blood and her thigh as well. She fell. Dollar almost reached out to help her, but remembered himself.

There were ropes and chains and straps and other things in the car; things to bind her with. Blessed, and silver and gold and every other thing Macumbe had read or been told by frauds and hucksters. It was superstition, just like the talk of witches. Or bultungin, a traitorous part of his mind whispered.  

He rose to his feet. People were keeping to their cars, staying out of things. Eyes looked away from him. He knew that he should have had Song bind her.  

‘Witch,’ the woman said again, pulling herself up. Teeth snapped together behind her lips. It looked as if something were fighting to be free from her skin.

‘I am no witch,’ Dollar said. He gestured with the pistol. ‘Stay still.’

‘This is ours now,’ she said, slapping the body of the car, ‘Ours! We made our marks, witch.’

‘Your marks mean nothing to Mr. Macumbe,’ Dollar said, stepping back. Song was weaving through the cars now, rifle raised, following the sounds of grunting and whining and giggling. They were eating the robbers, Dollar knew. Maybe that would keep Song alive.

He looked back at the woman. She braced herself against the car. Metal glinted in her thigh, and blood ran in thick rivulets down her leg. He smelled hot metal and cooking meat.

‘This is all ours. Lagos is ours.’ She coughed, and red splattered at Dollar’s feet. Amidst the red, one of his bullets rolled glinting. He thought of the little box of silver bullets in the car, and then, that maybe those hucksters and blessing-men had been right after all. He raised the pistol, wondering if it would work a second time.

‘Lagos belongs to Mr. Macumbe,’ he said, knowing it was foolish even as he said it, ‘As you do.’

She bared her teeth, and he stepped further back. ‘Is he a witch too?’ she said.

Dollar blinked. ‘No.’

‘Then why do you serve him?’

‘I am not a witch!’

She threw back her head and laughed, the same high-pitched rattling cry from his dreams, and Dollar shuddered, feeling weak. Her eyes shone in the light of the setting sun and her teeth clicked.

The old men told stories of villages where all the women were hyenas at night. And all the men were witches. Dollar blinked away the thought, wondering why it had occurred to him. This was Lagos, and there were no witches in Lagos.  

Song’s rifle went rat-tat-tat, and something screamed. The woman turned, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring. Dollar pressed his back to the car. Song came back, looking over his shoulder the entire way. His face had gone the color of ash.

‘They were—’

‘I know what they were doing,’ Dollar said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Ran. I put a half-clip in one, but he did not stop. Did not even slow down.’ Song looked at Dollar. ‘Why did she stop, but not them?’

‘I do not know,’ Dollar said after a moment. ‘Get the chains. Quickly. They will be back.’

Song hesitated, then slung his rifle and did as Dollar asked, moving with nervous speed. The woman watched him without interest.

‘We do not take more than our share, witch,’ she said.

‘Stop calling me that,’ Dollar snapped. The woman didn’t even blink.

‘There are so many of them—area boys and gangsters and robbers. They are in our territory and we drive them out. It is ours.’ She flashed her teeth. ‘Ours,’ she repeated.

Up ahead, a car was moving. Engines grumbled. Somewhere, far back, sirens pealed. Dollar shook his head as Song bound her. ‘You are mistaken. Hurry, boy.’

‘No,’ she said. Her arm flashed out and Song grunted and stumbled, bleeding from a slash across his cheek. His big hand flashed out, catching her across the jaw. She swayed, but did not fall.

‘Bitch,’ Song said, lifting the chains.

Cars were moving around them, engines gurgling like a river. Dollar heard laughter below the noise, growing louder. He turned as something blew hot on his neck.

The hyena giggled.

Dollar shot it, and it rolled off of the car, whimpering. More of them appeared, not two, or three, but a dozen, more, dancing across the hoods and roofs of the moving cars like wind-blown leaves, moving in a crescent of savagery.

The hyena on the ground had become a woman, shrieking and cradling her arm. How had that happened? Song dropped his chains and grabbed for his gun. People were screaming in their cars as the hyenas flashed over them, laughing like the shadows in Dollar’s dreams. Cars crashed into each other, glass shattering and metal buckling. None of it mattered to Dollar. It was just background noise. He looked at his pistol.

‘Witch,’ the woman said, jumping onto Dollar, her fingers fastening on his throat and head. ‘Witch,’ she snarled.

‘I—no—’ Dollar tried to look away, but she held him, her strength far greater than he had imagined.

‘Only witches can hurt us,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. He could hear Song cursing, could hear his rifle firing, but the laughter continued. The wounded woman had become a beast again, and was chortling as she stalked Macumbe’s boy. Beneath his feet, the Third Mainland was talking. It was talking in Macumbe’s voice, telling him what he was and what he must do, and Dollar wondered, as he always did, why.  

‘Ours,’ the woman murmured, pressing close to him. He could smell nothing but the rank heat of her. In her eyes, he could see the shadows, drawing closer. But they weren’t hunting him, were they? They never had been.

‘No witches in Lagos,’ he whispered.

‘Everything is in Lagos,’ she said. Her fingers found his wrist and his arm swung up, his finger on the trigger. He fired three times, very fast.

Song pitched forward, never knowing what had killed him. Dollar looked down at the pistol, and tossed it aside. Dark fingers trailed down his white skin, leaving red pressure marks.

‘Witch,’ she said, and he didn’t deny it.

The hyenas watched him, squatting in a circle, eyes gleaming, jaws open, dim chuckles dripping from within valleys of spear point fangs. They hooted as he looked at the woman.

‘How?’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Bultungin—I change myself.’ The woman pressed herself tighter to him and the smile became a grin, and then she was gone, on all fours, only her laughter left to keep him company.

Dollar stood, on the side of the road, and watched the cars stream by for some time. One of them rolled over Song, tumbling him out of sight. He thought about his dreams, and what he’d thought they’d meant, and which world he preferred.

And then about the old men, and the villages they’d spoke of, and wondered if those were happy places, where witches and hyenas lived, away from Lagos, away from the Songs and the Macumbes.

‘I change myself,’ he said, and laughed.

Dollar began to walk back towards the city, leaving the car where it was. He left Song, and the pistol and all of it, shedding his fears and worries. Following the marks of the hyenas into the hidden places, as they’d intended.

Bultungin. 

And that’s it for this month. If you made it this far, thanks for giving it a read and possibly even subscribing. I hope you enjoyed this back-to-basics newsletter. Check back next time for more new releases (hopefully) and a new (old) monthly story.

But for now, to paraphrase the estimable Carnacki – out you go!

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