FriendlyHorrorandOtherWeirdTales Read online

  The Friendly Horror

  & Other Weird Tales

  By Jessica Burke & Anthony Burdge

  Illustrated by Luke Spooner

  Copyright Myth Ink Books, 2015

  Staten Island, New York

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, or it was not purchased via Amazon.com, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work that went into creating this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer.

  Dedication

  For Mama and Papa Burke,

  our Beloved Aged Ps.

  For all the dreamers who came before,

  and all those who come after.

  For Luna & Sage,

  our sibilant muses.

  In memory of Anne Petty,

  who believed in us enough to give us a chance.

  Disclaimer

  The opinions expressed in this collection are those of the authors, regardless of how creepy. If you do not have eerie and shattered dreams after reading this collection, we are not responsible. Void where Prohibited. Watch the Gap. And, remember, maps never have true boundaries, cats were once worshipped as gods, and not every lock has a key. Hail Cthulhu. Hail Magna Mater.

  Contents

  Foreword

  An Introduction

  The Odor

  Pockets

  A Guide to Acclimating New Felines to their New Home—Best done with Kittens under the age of 10 months, Can be Adapted with Ease

  A Daddy & Me Day

  Hungry Snow

  Keepsakes

  Concerning the Storm

  The Friendly Horror

  Afterword

  About the Contributors

  Foreword

  Horror is, by definition, not very friendly.

  A really good horror story takes you in its clutches, squeezes the breath out of you, pounds your face against the wall, gets your heart spasmodically pumping faster than the whirring blades of a demonically-possessed harvest combine, and liquefies you into an emotional puddle on the floor of an abandoned insane asylum for a twitchy clown to mop up with his mop made of human hair.

  As I said —not friendly.

  But as terrifying as horror can be, it generally wears its evil grin with pride. Horror is the bad boy or bad girl at school. You know they’ll break your gf’thothu heart, but you don’t care. And they know you don’t care. So they’re going to really break your heart and you’re going to love it.

  Because you have issues.

  When you turn the pages of a story titled something like “The Three-Headed Monster That Ate People,” you’re good and ready to read about a three-headed monster who eats people. Any characters you meet along the way are processed in your ravenous, ai’ai brain in terms of how long before they are eaten by the three-headed monster, and what will they taste like? You’re spooked, you’re creeped, you’re vish’ngath’ptha grossed-out, but you’re not truly concerned. Of course the pretty little girl in the blue dress had her head bitten off, the story is about a three-headed monster who eats people. No big whoop.

  But what really gets under your skin, churns your insides, and erases all hope in the world is when horror smiles at you. There’s a reason people are afraid of kor-a’y’gyzth clowns. Clowns are supposed to be nice. When nice things turn evil, it defies our worldview. We’re no longer safe and secure in our little corner of the universe. If nice things can be evil, then anything is possible. Take this forward. You’re reading it thinking that it’s going to simply say nice things about the stories you’re about to read. You’re expecting it to be nice. But how do you know there’s isn’t a diabolical code hidden within the m’mnum’ words? How do you know that you aren’t, at this very moment, inadvertently summoning an eldritch v’thn horror from beyond time and space into your living room? How do you know this entire collection of stories hasn’t been put together to bring forth an unholy abomination that will devour mankind whole? Starting with you?

  You don’t.

  Friendly horror is the nastiest horror of all. Friendly horror soothes your pain, eases your fears, and burrows into your gut to plant countless seed pods that will eventually hatch and consume you from the inside. The ghn’uthpl’wg stories in this collection are like the cute little bunny rabbit you bring home one day from the pet store who grows up to gouge out your eyeballs with its claws and then sucks out your brain through the now-empty eye sockets with a hollow, tentacle-like appendage. The authors take things that are good and wholesome and make them mean and cruel and horrific and terrifying and oh my God you’re going to die!!!!!

  Things like snow. Everybody loves snow. And kitties. How can you not love kitties? And ice cream. Good God, people, they made ice cream scary! Have they no shame?

  Reading this collection, you find yourself doubting your sanity, which is as much an homage as it is a compliment. It’s all well and good to toss around terms like “Lovecraftian” and “fhtagn” and make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. Heck, you got a monster with a tentacle? Must be Lovecraftian! But these authors, they like their Lovecraftian themes well-developed and mythos-mired. Jessica and Anthony are so Lovecraftian, they have tentacles coming out of their eye sockets. Hell, Jessica has an umbrella with a tentacle handle! Now that’s devotion! I’m insanely jealous.

  This is the point of the forward where I go through the stories one by one and explain why they are each so great. Except I’m not going to do that. You’re about to read them, you’ll find out for yourself soon enough. So instead, I want to just tease your horror palette with a couple of thoughts and musings from my diseased and disturbed mind.

  Let’s start at the end. The final and largest story in the collection, “The Friendly Horror” (which I’m told may have had something to do with the name of the entire collection), is a peek inside good old H.P.’s world which we’ve all wanted to take, but never had the guts. Jessica and Anthony have the guts. Yes, they scooped them off the floor after their character from “Keepsakes” had dropped by for a visit, but they took those guts and laid them bare, giving us a chance to glimpse inside the thoughts and cares of the people of Innsmouth. Consider your mind blown.

  Working backwards, “Concerning the Storm” tosses all your FEMA conspiracy stories into the shredder and shines a very calm, cool, and collected light on the real horrors existing within so-called ‘natural’ disasters —in this case Hurricane Sandy. For me, these two stories highlight yet another disturbing gift owned by Jessica and Anthony— their ability to slip their sweet little evils into our very real world. These stories don’t take place in some unnamed location on the globe, they take place in very specific locations near and dear to the authors’ twisted hearts. They turn their home into the settings of nightmares, and through their words, we are transported into those nightmares and encouraged to scream like little babies. And really, isn’t that all we can ask from an author?

  Jessica and Anthony are very nice people. Very —dare I say— friendly people. That they have such gut-wrenching abominations buried inside their collective hive-mind (they are one, you know) is both a testament to how good they are at making everyone think they are such nice people and not the blood-sucking, multi-tentacled, five-eyed horrors lurking in the darkest corners of your mind
that they truly are. Like their stories, they offer a welcoming smile, a friendly hand-shake, and a descent into madness unimaginable. Jessica and Anthony are an experience like no other, and you would do well to spend just a few minutes in their presence. But since you can’t bring them home and put them on your bed-side table (unless you have a great deal of money), then this collection of stories will have to do.

  You’ve been warned.

  I’m going to go have some ice cream.

  By the way, there’s something seriously evil in your living room right now.

  —David Neilsen

  Author/Storyteller/Damaged Soul

  October 30, 2014

  An Introduction

  As writers, we are drawn to the darkly lit borders just beyond humanity’s mundane, “normal” vision, into eldritch landscapes. Beyond these borders dwell creatures and events that constantly infiltrate the imagination. A few of our stories here, in our first fiction collection, deal with events that we all take for granted. The weird can be found in an abundance in snow storms, hurricanes, icicles hanging from the roof, the tide rushing the beach, even the jarring presence of an ice cream truck coasting along the neighborhood.

  Our collection of Weird Tales opens with two poems, “The Odor” and “Pockets,” independently composed. The first, is an odiferous exploration that literally came to me one day where I currently work— a local hospital— and helped me to move past an experience, rather an odor, that is an all-too-familiar one at my job. Jessie’s piece, “Pockets,” was written in a gelato-induced high on the Staten Island Ferry after we attended a reading from one of our favorite authors. The remaining tales were written in tandem.

  As you, the reader, progress through our stories, consider each tale a step further into the bordering realms of the unknown— while being grounded within the everyday. “A Guide to Acclimating New Felines to their New Home” may answer the questions every new (and experienced) cat guardian has— where do kitties go when I can’t find them and what are they looking at? “A Daddy & Me Day” shows us that some routine concerns (like is my child normal and should I bring him to work) aren’t just human exclusive. “Hungry Snow” and “Concerning the Storm” put an eldritch spin on Mother Nature. “Keepsakes” is a whimsically horrific nod to ‘paranormal investigation.’ Our final story, “The Friendly Horror” is an homage to the man himself, H.P. Lovecraft, and that ever bizarre place we call home, Staten Island.

  The immediate environment (real or imagined), neighborhoods and hometowns of writers we are inspired by — Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe, George R.R. Martin, and Douglas Adams— have played a key role in their work. For us, it is no different. As residents of Staten Island, we have educated ourselves on the rich history of our hometown and borough of New York City. More recently, however, after acquiring Lovecraft’s Letters from New York, we were struck speechless by a diminutive mention in Letter 14, addressed to Lillian and dated September 29th 1924:

  Saturday...was a home day... but on Sunday I made up for this undue domesticity by taking an all-day jaunt to elder regions. Whoopee! The past for me! I embarked on the Staten Island ferry, and was soon in a land of quaint villages that might have been five hundred miles from any metropolis. ...And there I took a wheezy accommodation train for Tottenville, on the far tip of the island, which when reached savoured of Pascoag. A short walk out of Tottenville, embowered among antique pines on the south shore and now in a state of vast decrepitude, is the old Billop house.... both impressive and terrible in its steep and hoary gable— one could write a story about it.1

  In a way, we have. Not that we realized the connection when we were writing. This same “wheezy accommodation train” is what Jessica and I have taken to work. The park around this “impressive and terrible” house is where we spent many an afternoon volunteering. This same house is where we got our first EVP. This same neighborhood lined with trees is where we’ve set our stories— moments that were written ages before we read those lines. As a writer, an admirer of HPL and someone infinitely fascinated at the conjunction of reality and story, to find out that the same stretch of dead-end road where in our story “The Friendly Horror” our friend Silas parks his ice cream truck to have his lunch was the same stretch of dead-end road that HP Lovecraft once walked. This knowledge, chilling and captivating, changes how we view our neighborhood. It is our hope that you, our friends, will look upon your history and your surroundings a bit differently after reading our stories.

  Staten Island is no longer a quaint village embowered with antique pines. The Old Billop House, now called the Conference House, is not in the state of decrepitude that HPL saw it in. Instead, Staten Island itself has become a kind of paradox, the old seen beneath the new, itself a kind of mundane magic, a skewed vision of reality. We invite you to seek for that in your hometown. You don’t need to look far. Ponder the wonders, the horrors, the creeping fears lurking in that patch of woods down the block from where you sleep at night, dwelling upon your beaches, washing in from the bay, or looking down upon you from the trees. It may entice you, stun you, lure you into the unknown.

  —Anthony S. Burdge

  Aquehonga Monacnong, July 2013

  _____________________________

  H.P. Lovecraft. Letters from New York. S.T. Joshi & David E. Schultz, ed. Night Shade Books: San Francisco, 2005. 68-69.

  The Odor

  —A. Burdge

  The bright rapturous volumes

  of fragrant garden incenses gently

  encapsulate our olfactory senses,

  wafting delicately,

  from rose to rose,

  honeysuckle to lavender,

  transporting our understory experience to heavenly realms.

  Our Divine prescriptions of ritualistic scents,

  whether frankincense or myrrh, jasmine or cedar,

  elevate us through the corridors of Spirit.

  Many Priests walk the cathedral aisle

  blessing congregants with their perfumed censors

  offering prayer-filled ascendance.

  The Shaman, Witch and Occultist gather

  ceremonial bits of resiny desert sage and tall sweetgrass

  to smudge away the negative ions

  eliciting safe visionary travel.

  What greater a Sight than

  the expression of a loved one

  wrapped in the delicate joy

  of a sensuous red rose in a tender moment?

  A rose so sweet,

  tinged with a sharp fruitful earthy aroma,

  which illuminates the heart and mind,

  filling love’s center with blissful romance.

  We adore the pleasurable Sencha,

  and the citrus notes of Earl Grey

  or the ambrosial Red Roobios.

  One does not forget the bouquet of a morning Java,

  especially when the nervous system

  is coupled with its caffeinated foment.

  Each of these moments are recorded

  on the mental plains of the Self.

  Each new experience

  enriches the memory

  with every repeated indulgence.

  Our odiferous landscape

  enlightens and educates

  the waking and unconscious

  Awareness,

  whether the scent is

  manmade or natural.

  However, there is one

  malodorous discharge that educates

  while offering Nothing,

  but mental, spiritual and physical discontent.

  From the very first inhalation

  does it send immediate tremors

  up and down our backbone.

  Our fibrous gray matter bursts

  with electrifying neurons,

  wave after wave

  of racing synaptic beads of light

  are taken Over,

  by the dank putrescence

  of parasitic disgust.

&n
bsp; Our innards quake

  with a lightning warmth

  that churns our repugnant stomach juices.

  Many a wounded soldier endures

  as Brother and Sister

  lie in the dirt,

  after campaigns against foreign enemies.

  The fœtor

  of raw ripe meat

  emanates across

  the battlefield.

  In poor

  third world countries

  where villagers have not the benefit

  of modern healthcare,

  many the fly congregate

  upon the untended gangrenous wounds,

  where tribal conflict and

  animal attack have

  opened the body in odd places.

  A foul emission

  from the bacterial mucous

  of drying untreated stumps,

  where limbs once hung

  travels upon even a slight breeze,

  with the tang

  of organic secretions gone vile.

  How do We reconcile

  prior rapturous moments

  of beauty,

  with a smell

  that grips our nasal passages

  with a fetid zest?

  Whether on the field of battle

  or forgotten third world zones,

  the burnt copper

  of spilled blood is

  a bitter trail yet manageable.