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  Worship the Night

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Copyright © 2015 Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Worship the Night was originally published as a limited edition hardcover and trade paperback by Dark Renaissance Books, 2013.

  Cover photo: Dai Nam Van Hien, Vietnam. From the author’s collection.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Lost Family

  Counterclockwise

  The Holy Bowl

  In Limbo

  About the Author

  The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo

  Children of the Dragon

  The Sea of Flesh

  About the Author

  Publishing Credits

  The Lost Family first appeared in the electronic anthology Vivisepulture, Anarchy Books, 2011.

  Counterclockwise first appeared in the anthology Aklonomicon, Aklo Press, 2012.

  The Holy Bowl first appeared in the anthology Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Eraserhead Press, 2011.

  In Limbo is original to this collection. Reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1, Undertow Publications, 2014.

  About the Author is original to this collection.

  The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo first appeared in The Lovecraft eZine, 2012.

  Children of the Dragon first appeared (in German translation) in the author’s collection Geschichten aus dem Cthulhu-Mythos, Festa Verlag, 2012.

  The Sea of Flesh first appeared in the book The Sea of Flesh and Ash, Terradan Works, 2011.

  Introduction

  When I see short story collections from writer friends of mine that feature incisive introductions by scholarly folk like Matt Cardin or John Langan, I sometimes feel jealous. But then, who better to introduce my work than me? Especially since I’d like to say a few words about each of the stories in this collection – giving each its own sub-introduction, as it were.

  So let’s begin with...

  The Lost Family focuses on the protagonist of my novel The Fall of Hades, which is set in Hell two thousand years after an apocalyptic war between Angels, Demons and the Damned. The events of The Lost Family don’t take place prior to, or after, the events of The Fall of Hades, but somewhere in the middle of the protagonist’s travels in the novel. For that reason, I might just as well have titled this story The Lost Chapter. But it is also meant to work as a stand-alone story, if you haven’t read that novel.

  Counterclockwise is set in my futuristic milieu of Punktown. I thought it best to allow my favorite stamping ground at least one manifestation here...lest it grow vengeful. The setting has been good to me and I don’t take that lightly, since Punktown is not often kind.

  The Holy Bowl was written for an anthology about that mightiest of deities, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Since I suspected most of my fellow contributors to that book would go for broad humor and the extreme bizarre, I decided to play my story a bit more straight.

  In Limbo was written especially for this collection. The premise for it came to me one late October night in 2012 as Hurricane Sandy, Halloween, and Life itself bore down upon me.

  About the Author makes the observation that sometimes a writer is more fascinating, and stranger, than anything they may have written. It’s also about my general preference for innovative horror as opposed to tropes that have been done to death...or undeath.

  The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo is a Lovecraftian piece that features actual alleged gangland personalities and events. (Notice I said “alleged,” so no one need track me down and whack me.) My brother Scott and I have long been intrigued with the fascinating and charismatic Joe Gallo.

  Children of the Dragon is another Lovecraftian piece, this one set in modern day Viet Nam. I have quite a love affair with Viet Nam...largely because I have had a number of love affairs with Vietnamese women. Subsequently, my beautiful daughter Jade is half Vietnamese. Since my first trip in October of 2004, and to the time of this writing, I have traveled to Viet Nam eight times. Children of the Dragon incorporates actual places I have visited in that country, which is not nearly as ominous (these days, at least) as I portray it here – but it often serves a dramatic purpose to set a character down in an unfamiliar environment in which, a fish out of water, he can become thoroughly disoriented. Ah, the deliciously disorienting Orient!

  Viet Nam also has its influence in The Sea of Flesh, in that a number of its characters are Vietnamese, but this story takes place in another of my favorite locales: Salem, Massachusetts. This long novella (or short novel?) was written for a book called The Sea of Flesh and Ash, which was long delayed with its original publisher and therefore withdrawn from them, finally released by another publisher to a very limited readership. The premise of The Sea of Flesh and Ash was that my brother Scott Thomas and I would both write a novella based on the same beautiful piece of artwork by Travis Anthony Soumis, which would serve as our cover. Thus, I wrote my dark fantasy The Sea of Flesh, and Scott wrote The Sea of Ash...a brilliant work that has recently been released as a standalone book by the Lovecraft eZine’s imprint, to greater exposure and much acclaim.

  The title of this book, Worship the Night, was inspired by a kind of loose theme at work in these stories: the notion of deities, hereafters, or otherwheres beyond the mortal plane. As I say, The Lost Family involves angels and demons, if not quite in the traditional sense, while Counterclockwise offers a glimpse into an alien belief system. The Holy Bowl invokes the aforementioned Flying Spaghetti Monster – as convincing a deity as this world has to offer, and much tastier than most. The title of In Limbo evokes the dismal way station said to lie between the two more definitive afterlives, and hence – literally or metaphorically – between damnation and salvation. Similarly, the protagonist of About the Author believes she has torn through a barrier between this world and the netherworld. If your spiritual calling leans less toward Judeo-Christian conceptions and more toward the eldritch, you might want to become an acolyte of the Cthulhu Mythos, as addressed in The Strange Case of Crazy Joe Gallo and Children of the Dragon. Finally, the main characters of The Sea of Flesh interact with a mystical alternate realm.

  With a theme of this nature, one might well wonder what the author’s position on religion could be.

  Don’t ask.

  Okay, that probably isn’t fair. Better to say, then, that I despise religion. That is, religion as practiced by those who wish for eternal torture to be inflicted on others for not sharing their particular brand of superstition. Which isn’t to say that I don’t necessarily believe in mysterious forces at work in the universe. My personal jury is still out on that one. I am in awe of the unknown, with a capital “Un,” and I hope that sense of wonder translates into some of these tales. But in regard to my disgust, I’m not talking about spiritual matters...I’m talking about physical matter, matter shaped into the things we call people, human effing beings, who can be credited with other such hateful inventions as guns and money. Perhaps money will be the theme of my next collection. God – such as He, She or It might be – forbid.

  Anyway.

  With our introduction and sub-introductions behind us, let us now allow these stories to speak for themselves...

  – Jeffrey Thomas

  THE LOST FAMILY

  “Please be careful not to dislodge me, madam,” Jay said, riding across the woman’s back. “If I fall from this distance I’ll surely break.”

  Vee paused in her climb to glance downward, into the shaf
t through which she ascended. They had entered the vertical service shaft through an access hatch on Level 119, but the shaft ran deeper than that. Maybe all the way to the basement?

  “Even if you didn’t break, Jay, sorry but I don’t think I’d go down there after you.”

  “Understood,” Jay said drily. “All the more reason for caution, if you will.”

  The Angel named Vee had heard there was a settlement called Freetown on the 128th floor of the Construct. A large colony where the Damned lived cooperatively alongside Angels, and even Demons – though not all races of Demon, surely, for she had just barely escaped a pack of small, skull-faced Demons several levels below her present position.

  She had learned of Freetown from Jay, her only companion in her exploration of the Construct. Only recently had she awakened from centuries as a catatonic prisoner of war, many levels below in the bowels of the Construct, without any memory of her past either as a mortal woman or, after her death, as an Angel. Nor did she remember the infernal war she herself had apparently participated in – the Armageddon that had left the last remaining Damned, Angels and Demons sheltering inside the impossibly vast structure called the Construct, with the shattered remnants of Hell outside its walls buried under solidified lava.

  In this utterly alien world, Jay had served as a most useful guide; the Virgil to her Dante. But to add to that he also shot bullets, being a mecha-organic rifle grown from bone, with a single eye and a pair of lips set into his side, and the sentience of a Demon. To top off his usefulness, he could jack into the Mesh. And it was through the Mesh that Jay himself had learned of Freetown. For Vee, who couldn’t recall anyplace from life or afterlife that might have felt like home, it sounded as good a destination as any.

  Vee had gained the many floors of her ascent by any number of means – from crawling up through ventilation ducts to riding freight lifts, from metal spiral staircases to opulent marble staircases. Presently she ascended to Level 120 by shimmying up a thick bundle of cables that ran through a concrete shaft. Corroded rungs were set into the side of the shaft, but after one had pulled out of the wall in her hand she had decided the cables were safer. Also set into one wall were a series of lights, about every third light still providing illumination. The Construct’s technology had been added to over the centuries, but many systems had never run down even without repair or modification after nearly two thousand years. That said a lot about Demonic technology – but then again, it was only an illusory corporeality anyway, like Vee’s own body.

  Illusory or not, by the time she reached the top of the shaft and passed through the soaring heights of Level 119 into Level 120, Vee was gulping make-believe air and sweating make-believe perspiration inside the form-fitting second skin of her rubbery black jumpsuit. Her shortish, reddish hair was plastered in spikes across her forehead.

  She poked her head up through the opening warily at first, poking up the blunt muzzle of the bone gun with her, but she saw no one about. For all the many Damned, Demons and Angels who made their home inside the Construct, they were so dispersed and the Construct so unthinkably immense that anywhere you went within it seemed desolate. Sometimes Vee felt that she and the gun were the only beings in the entire structure. Sometimes she wished they were.

  There had been a metal plate in the floor covering this opening at one time, but it had been unfastened and set aside before her. She was grateful; though she had a few simple tools in the pouch slung over her back, it would have been awkward if not impossible clinging to the rope of cables and unfastening the cover herself. Plus, if those skull-faced Demons had continued tracking her and were to follow her up the shaft, it would have been all the more unpleasant trying to get that cover off.

  She pulled herself out of the hole and to her feet, turning this way and that alertly. However peaceful Freetown might truly prove to be she couldn’t as yet say, but she had not only encountered hostile Demons since awakening from her coma, but hostile tribes of Damned and Angels as well.

  She was in a room so long and wide that three of its walls were lost in the murk. The nearer fourth wall was composed entirely of huge windows that had once let in the glow of Hell’s churning red sky. Now, outside the windows was only solid volcanic stone flush right up against the panes.

  A forest of riveted metal support columns lay around her in all directions, and the ceiling – low in this particular room, not reflecting the true ceiling of Level 120 – was similarly crisscrossed with support beams. But other than that, and puddles on the floor where water had leaked through the ceiling here and there, the room appeared absolutely empty. It had the look of a construction project that had never been finished. She was surprised one of the larger, more ambitious tribes hadn’t staked out this open territory in order to build a community.

  She had opened her mouth to express this thought to Jay – and to ask if he had any idea what direction they should take from here to find a means of continuing their ascent – when she caught her breath.

  She smelled the Demon before she saw it. It was a scent of incense, burnt into the entity’s flesh. Up close she knew the scent would be choking. She didn’t want to get close enough to experience that.

  A moment later and she could hear its approach, too, but by then she had already ducked behind the nearest support girder, wide enough to mask her long lean body. Peeking around its edge, she stared into the dark haze of the distance where the lights were too far-spaced or feeble to illuminate. A pair of white eyes beamed from the shadows, followed gradually by a hulking dark shape that began to form from the gloom.

  Jay had told her that when the more human-like races of Demons had begun sympathizing with the rebellious Damned, Hell’s response had been to mass produce less anthropomorphic Demons. This was one of them. It was a bulky thing, so wide it barely passed through the spaces between the metal pillars. It looked like a great soft body partly hatched from a hard chitin exoskeleton; a horrible synthesis of obese human and predatory insect. It was sepia in color, though its scorpion’s forelimbs shaded to black.

  Its glowing white eyes slowly turned this way, then that, sweeping the girder forest. Was it patrolling its territory? Hunting? Or merely pacing this vast room in a mindless state to pass the hours of eternity, like a sleepwalker, just as she herself had lapsed into catatonia in the Construct’s dungeon? It didn’t matter; whatever motivated the creature, it was a being she didn’t care to encounter – certainly not one of the Demon races she expected to find living in Freetown.

  Could she cross the room column to column, waiting for its head to swivel in another direction each time she needed to advance? But how wide was this room; how long before she found a doorway? After her arduous climb, she didn’t want to backtrack to the shaft and descend, then have to seek out another means of gaining this level. She might run into those little skull-headed Demons again; out of the frying pan and into the fire. Anyway, if this Demon were to look into the shaft while she was descending, though it was far too large to follow her inside it might still find something heavy to drop down on her, or even snip the cables free with its pincers.

  No, she would take her chances crossing the room, advancing toward the creature as it advanced toward her until they’d passed each other. Its bulk and slowness were to her advantage. When she saw the Demon turn its burning eyes away from her, she darted to the next closest girder. That incense scent was stronger. She only hoped the Demon couldn’t sniff her out, too.

  Vee had advanced a half dozen girders and was growing more optimistic about stealing past the Demon without it becoming the wiser, when she heard Jay whisper, “Madam! Behind you!”

  Pressed close to her present shelter, Vee looked over her shoulder. Through the metal tree trunks she caught a glimpse of eyes like very distant headlights, moving slowly at an angle from left to right. Another wandering Demon, her back exposed to it. She was lucky Jay had spotted it; with him, she had three eyes.

  The one in front of her was shambling nearer. How
much sooner before the one behind noticed her? And how many more Demons might be patrolling this great room? A dozen? A hundred? This could well be why the space hadn’t been claimed by would-be colonists.

  Vee glanced around the floor, looking for a plate covering another shaft entrance. Unless one were hidden by one of the scattered pools, there didn’t appear to be any. Scattered pools…from leaks in the ceiling. Vee cast her eyes to the ceiling. A system of open latticed joists. Yes! She could crawl along the lower portion of the beams, above the heads of the Demons until she found a safe spot to return to the floor…a spot with an exit from this chamber.

  The rivets in the girder were large, distended, and she planted one foot on the lowest of them to boost herself up. She needed both hands free to take hold of the girder’s rusting, flaking edges, so she had quickly secured Jay through the straps of her pouch, across her back, just as when she’d climbed the rope made of power cables.

  Vee made it to the top of the column and immediately pressed herself flat across one of the iron beams, a surface just broad enough to conceal her. The Demon that had been ahead of her began to pass directly below her. It stopped suddenly, swiveled its head, appeared to be sniffing at the air or listening. Vee held her breath – not that her body actually needed to breathe in any case.

  Finally, as if reluctant to give up the scent, the Demon gave a deep, irritable grunt and continued on. Answering grunts came rumbling from three or four other directions. Vee congratulated herself on taking this approach instead of the former.

  Not that it was easy inching along on her belly, the beam’s surface interrupted in the center by the angled latticework that connected upper and lower portions, crowding her movements. And she did her best not to let the bone gun scrape noisily against the metal. It would be a slow, stealthy process. She was still learning patience, having to accustom herself all over again to the notion that the immortal didn’t need to hurry.