Subterranean Press – To Be Read Upon Your Waking

My novella To Be Read Upon Your Waking can be read for free (possibly upon your waking) over here, at Subterranean Press.

A quote:

I will start with good news. After several weeks of work, I have successfully excavated the entirety of the foundation of the abbey. It is almost exactly as small and rectangular as I’d originally estimated. Bit dull, shape-wise. I have also cleared away much of the door in the floor behind the dais.

 

It is stairs, Laurence. But I have never quite seen stairs like this before. They are very steep, with each stair being nearly two feet tall. It makes no sense to me. The average human heights were much smaller back then, due to malnourishment. They were tiny people, really. But these stairs, which are very much man-made, of course, appear to be made for legs so long I can’t imagine them. Certainly not the stumpy little things they’d have been running around with.

 

And then there are the carvings in the walls of the staircase. I have seen a lot of Medieval Christian carvings, and I have seen no precedence for what I’m finding here. I mean, Christ should show up in at least a couple of these carvings, right? Christ, or Mary, or some saint. But no. They are carvings of the moon, and the stars, and a great endless forest (I think) with huge trees that stretch on and on. And one bas-relief shows there is a house in the center of the forest, a huge, low, wooden thing you imagine pagan kings lived in, with big bonefires bonfires all around it.