The first question everyone asked was why the horses hadn't run. The standing stones held them like a closed fist, like the folding in of a carnivorous flower. It wasn’t just that the stones had toppled; they'd constricted, exerting enough force to embed the luckless animals inches into the earth.

Martin was already on the scene when the other officers arrived. His gaze lingered now on the tapers of bone, impossibly delicate by contrast, curving up from the nearest carcass.

“There’s no blood,” noted Ware beside him, breath coming in clouds.

It was a spring dawn, stingingly cold. Ware shivered. Martin had gotten used to it.

“Better go check up at the Seven Widows, see if there’s anything similar,” he said, and Ware nodded as she broke away from the observers, cinching her jacket tighter with one hand and reaching for her radio with the other.

“I need you to get over there yourself,” he called after her.

#

Martin waited until the birds began to rise, then turned and trudged back alone over the moors. A cloying smell of sodden ash followed. The firefighters had put down the ritual fire left burning into the early hours, charring the clouds the colour of old blood and raising the alarm, but it hardly mattered now.

He made for the village. Above him, tracer lines of crows scattered in all directions. Their unease was deep and rasping.

The first tremors struck before he reached the outlying farms. He knew it’d be quick. Ware had been a good officer.

Starlings lifted from high boughs and wheeled through the sky in ugly overlapping waveforms, mistimed murmurations colliding with force, the fall of broken bodies shocking; at first just a handful but, as Martin made headway, in increasing numbers.

He looked out over surfaces becoming unreliable, fields waylaid by sinkholes like shallow inhalations. Away to his left, strips of dry stone wall began to curl like breakers down the hill, liquid and strange. From a farmyard rose yells and the skirling of dogs, and he suspected old man Cottle had reacted a little too slowly.

Martin entered the village. The leafy lanes gave cover from a gentle spring rain and a sky choked with disarray.

Smoke was billowing across graves and gardens from where the roof of the church had dropped like an inverted bear trap. People in their Sunday best hauled at arms outflung from the rubble. He looked into their eyes, saw them glassy with shock. Distant ambulances burred.

Martin smiled, and didn’t stop.

The day was just beginning.

I was 10 years old the day the grey clouds came. It was rare that the endless blue desert sky saw that much moisture. Typically, the sun shone over 300 days a year; but that was a long time ago.

“Look,” my mother pointed, “The clouds are kissing the mountains.”

My mother thought it was sweet, so near Valentine’s Day.

But the clouds never went away, and it wasn’t moisture that filled them. It was something else.

At first, the clouds were billowy and fluffy, like a child’s stuffed toy lamb, a flock making its way down the mountainside to play. We never suspected what it really was or what we would become. Who knew the clouds were its disguise. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A predator that had caught the scent of its prey.

I can’t remember what the peaks of the mountains look like now. Too many years have passed.

The grey clouds moved in, carried on the wind. We thought the wind would blow the clouds away, but alas, the weather had other plans. Into the valley, the clouds came only to transform. Near the ground, they became an evil grey mist that slithered and gathered and held until everything blurred, lost its shape and then disappeared from view. Everything was still there but the fog had swallowed it. A grey blanket smothered us all.

One day, the sun ceased to shine. We were blind. Unable to see, life stopped; no one could drive. Planes could not fly. Ships could not steer.

Our homes were the only safe place, for a while. Then the grey fog stole in—under  doors, through cracks, clinging to us like a disease. Finally, one morning we woke from a long night, unable to see our hands in front of our faces.

No one knows why the sky fell. Perhaps it was because of our inability to care for our aging Mother Earth or resolve our petty human squabbles, which quickly withered in comparison to the power of the clouds.

Nevertheless, for now, the Grey rules us all. 

DW Milton is a pen name. The author has a day job but would rather be writing speculative fiction. ​

What does it mean to encounter the cosmically horrific? 

I cannot describe it in mere words, for any mortal to look upon it would melt to dust. It is that thing humanity cannot fathom, for it would twist our souls into knots. It would bend our minuscule minds into putty. We would lose ourselves in warped logic and imperceptive chaos, descending into the madness of insurmountable grief. 

That thing immeasurable, incalculable, inconceivable lies in wait. It resides here and there and everywhere. It is behind you, uncaring, merciless, unceasing. Its whims move mountains and destroy galaxies. 

It is life, death, chaos, order, and the majesty of the indifferent universe. It is cold, undulating, indescribably indiscernible. Where does it start and infinity end? It exists behind time, above all, below the depths. 

What is it to be observed by the crescent of totality, reflected upon the glossy globule of the all-seeing oculus? The abysmal abyss stares back unblinking. It knows us and soon will swat our reality as a dragon bats a gnat.

The truth eternal has plucked the last wet tear from my dry eye. It has struck its fatal blow upon my frail personage. I wither before the dark light of soul-splitting reality revealed.
The fear engulfed my mind in totality and trepidation consumed my physical vitality from the inside out. After this grave confrontation, I endure but briefly, long enough to warn the world, condemned by my hubris.

I burned my research. I destroyed my cosmometer, the sole apparatus constructed for observing existence beyond the dark veil. And yet the image of its dizzying sovereignty is seared into my retinas; even after the optical display was splintered into ten thousand tiny shards, it cannot escape my maddening mind’s eye.

This astrological knowledge has cost me my sanity, my virtue, my last living hope. I can no longer contain myself within this feeble mortal form. My shivering bones are splinters and dough.

Even now, as I scribble this cautionary address with trembling fingers, my eyes are bleeding out of their sockets, and I can feel my brain dissolving into gray sludge. In a matter of minutes, I will be reduced to a puddle of former matter.
​
Do not seek out the master of masters. All is vanity under its eye. I employ you, seek not the forbidden sight!

​Jonathan Reddoch is co-owner of Collective Tales Publishing. He is a father, writer, editor, and publisher. He writes sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and especially horror. He’s a prolific flash fiction author, but also writes poetry and short stories. He has been working on his enormous sci-fi novel for over a decade and would like to finish it in this lifetime if possible. He’s from southern California, but lives in Salt Lake City. Notable works included in Deluxe Darkness, Darkness 101: Lessons Were Learned, and This Isn’t the Place.
 
Find him on Instagram @JonathanReddochAuthor or CTPfiction.com

Greeta’s hollow eyes scraped across the darkening horizon until Jekobe nudged her aside so he could put the board back on the bathroom window.

“Wind is picking up,” he said.

She wilted to the floor and squeezed the clover-shaped locket around her neck. Greeta then pressed it to her lips to stifle a sob at the memory of what it once took from them and what it now wanted again.

Her little squeak drew Jekobe’s gaze down to his wife, on the floor curled around the base of their toilet. Husband and wife listened to silted winds drawing closer and to the radio choir on the other side of the bathroom door.

“You must get up.” His tone, as beaten as the bathroom with all its rust and dust and dirt, always the dirt.

She fought a dangerous impulse to toss the locket into the toilet and pretend it never lit up, never chose them. Chose her.

Jekobe extended a sooty hand. “It falls to you.”

She unfurled sloth-slow and set her hand in his—filth in filth, bones in bones. They worked in dirt, breathed in dirt, scrubbed it off their hands, washed it from their clothes. Some nights Jekobe shuddered awake to tell her of his nightmares about the dirt raining on their bed until it buried them. Greeta often imagined mud cakes filling her lungs.

“Blessings to the remainders,” she murmured as he pulled her to standing, eyes averted from the shiny aluminum locket and the pink glow spilling from its interior. Such a lovely color in a world devoid of colors, she’d thought when first it lit up, when she didn’t understand the significance of its glow. The Landlords encouraged mothers to place photos inside, but Greeta feared they might increase their odds of being chosen, so left it empty.

It chose them anyway.

“If I could take your burden, Greeta—”

A soft knock on the door startled them both.

“Obie needs to wee,” came the voice of Judeeth, their eldest.

Greeta yanked her arm free from Jekobe. “Just a moment.” The draw of her thin shoulders laid bare her misery, but her face settled into a neutral expression. She tucked stray hairs behind pins and tucked the locket into the bodice of her housedress.

“I will not choose,” she said.

Quick as a bog ghoul, Jekobe seized her shoulders. “We are not so proud we don’t obey.”

She slapped his face, leaving a handprint in the grime. “Understood.”

Greeta opened the door and entered the living area, a space without embellishment. A table for eating, chairs for sitting, the Text for learning, and radio for music and worship. Her children had gathered around the radio. Five-year-old Obie, aiming his glorious dimples at her, danced from foot to foot. “‘‘mergency, momma! ‘mergency!”

“Obie, you may go now.” Greeta tousled his unruly hair as he zipped by, bare feet slapping the floorboards until he slammed the bathroom door closed behind him.

Her gaze fell on her older children. Sixteen-year-old Judeeth, a beauty with raven hair and hazel eyes—they kept her hidden from the carnal attentions of the Landlords. Tomash had grown tall and strong enough to work alongside his poppa. Luzzi, a miraculously plump mischief-maker who read the Texts with fluency at eight years old, finished winding her yarn ball and set it in the basket.

“Momma, are you sick?” Judeeth asked.

“She’s better now,” Jekobe answered. “Right, Momma?”

Greeta put on a smile. But her womb pulsed rhythmically as memories of the children’s first steps, first words, the joy and mess of their arrivals—even poor Kellan’s—flew through her head like a picture show.

Then the gate outside squeaked open.

“Who wants to play a game?” Jekobe asked the kids. His face beamed with theatrical enthusiasm.

“Let’s wait for Obie,” Judeeth said.

Not my baby, thought Greeta.

Porch stairs whined under a great weight followed by a dragging noise advancing to the door. The family stood rooted to their floor. Waiting.

Every creek brought Greeta visions of Kellan, poor Kellan—eyes dark with terror and betrayal, the shriek that never escaped his mouth...

Jekobe clapped his hands. “The game has begun! Isn’t it thrilling?”

Each child cast a suspicious glare at the door.

“Exciting, yes, Momma?” Jekobe’s eyes bored into Greeta’s until she nodded.

Tomash switched off the radio. Its silence amplified the thrum of blustering wind, and worse: a host of sharp objects raking back and forth across the door.

Winds circled the house, rattled the walls. Tomash and Luzzi clung together. Judeeth rose from her chair, head pivoting between the flush of the toilet and pounding so forceful the front door bulged inward.

Greeta’s sternum grew hot as the locket came more fully alive.

Jekobe’s lips pressed into Greeta’s ear. “Let us be clean, Greeta.”

Another reel whirred to life, this one showing the times when the children were proud or disobedient. Judeeth’s defiance. Luzzi’s mischief. Tomash bullying his sisters. Obie’s—no. She refused to see Obie.

“Momma,” Jekobe prompted in a cheerful voice. “The children wish to play the game.”

“We do not, Father.” Judeeth’s voice rose an octave.

Judeeth always questions our authority.

Greeta pressed the burning locket against her chest until her wound reopened. “Judeeth, will you open the door, my love?”

“No, Momma.”

“Open the door, Judeeth.”

Her eldest stamped her boots, eyes ablaze with defiance. “I do not wish to play. Luzzi does not wish to play, Tomash does not—”

“I do! I do!” Obie toddled to the door, and before Greeta or Jekobe could react, his grubby little hand swung it open.

In a great roar of weather, of hunger, of violent extinction, of a feeble little scream muted by the churning dirt, Greeta’s heart broke and her chest erupted in flame.

Night breeds a certain animal, made more beast than man. One made with eyes glued to a television screen. One made with a long pointy nose and jagged teeth.

He stalks the night, never once seeing his prey, blind as he is from anything outside his screen. He uses his nose to sniff out perfumed vanilla, cinnamon, and his favorite of all, lavender.

His victims never hear him approach as they are deaf from everything outside their headphones, nor do they feel his touch until it's too late—until they’re dragged through the night, and he’s feasted once more.

But there is one small creature who sees all and hears most. It is the darkness that lives within the walls, the life that breathes through the dirt. It is the all-seeing thing of the world, hidden within plain sight.
​
It knows our secrets but never speaks. It sees our pain but never helps. Its actions aren’t of malice, yet when the weak cry out in the night, it stays still, watching the beast in the shadows. Watching and waiting for a new day to come. For a day where screens break and delicate women become fierce. 

What is it that they have? The Eyes I mean
They have seeds, petals, and a missing spleen

The Eyes have incantations of all kinds
These Eyes have the magics to hide their minds

The Eyes have the sight to mar our souls
The Eyes have the will to cross the coals

Are they merely men or are they visionaries?
Were they truly expelled from the land of fairies?

What glories they’ve seen with eyes closed
Horrors witnessed while the world dozed…
​
What is this power they wield over me?
What have Eye done so I’ll never be free?

​Jonathan Reddoch is co-owner of Collective Tales Publishing. He is a father, writer, editor, and publisher. He writes sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and especially horror. He’s a prolific flash fiction author, but also writes poetry and short stories. He has been working on his enormous sci-fi novel for over a decade and would like to finish it in this lifetime if possible. He’s from southern California, but lives in Salt Lake City. Notable works included in Deluxe Darkness, Darkness 101: Lessons Were Learned, and This Isn’t the Place.
 
Find him on Instagram @JonathanReddochAuthor or CTPfiction.com

The rain slashes down. She’s cold, adrift amongst it. At least it is night, she thinks, the blanket of which hides more than my sadness. Standing there, naked, drained, she’s relieved she left her front door off the latch, ever hopeful he’ll return. The amber-dandelion glow of a streetlamp helps her locate the handle. She pushes the door open, runs upstairs.

The bathroom light does not click on. It is forever broken. So, in habit, she sets a-glow a corner candle. Familiarity guides her, fits her like a glove. She is not one for change. The shower above the bathtub however, does click on. The thrum of hissing water softens her sobs. Tears, fuggy air, soupy mist. She steps into the bath, under the hot water, closes her eyes, rests her back against the tiled wall. Warmth embraces her. Hot jets, the only arms around her since he left. Impossible, yet infinite drive propels her on, keeps her head above the ever-rising water. There’s the possibility one day he might return, is why she always leaves the door off the latch: he might push the door open and run upstairs, save her from the darkness.

Under the rushing water, her gold band is loose enough for her to free her finger, but she is not ready for her finger and the ring to become two separate entities, never will be. She holds her ring on, closes her eyes, cries, fights off the lick of jaded thoughts, despite knowing her situation won’t change. In dreams, she feels the same, although she’s no longer sure if waking time is waking time or if all of her time is part of a dream, even in this account of it all, written by the woman as if she is not the woman. She and I remain unsure.
He’d placed his wedding band on the kitchen counter the day he ended things, left without a goodbye. Left a note with his ring. Her heart had flooded with midnight pain. The dark note still sits under his ring. Will stay there forever. She knows though, through his actions, he’d ended things much earlier than that day. His path had split off, a tangent, some time before. He’d not wanted to spend a moment longer with her despite, in vows, promising eternity.

She opens her eyes and the ghosts of the darkness loom. She reaches for the blade to cut free the darkness. No need. Oestrogen surge. Gushing water once transparent, clouds. Vermillion tongues trickle down her thigh. She tilts her head back. Relief. Wet heat pounds her face, drags her cheek flesh down. Sadness and red rinse away.

The ceiling light flickers on-off. In that moment, she sees the screw which has become loose, which anchors the light fitting to the ceiling above the shower in which she’ll forever try to wash away. Could it be the loose screw why she wets her red self clean? Why she leaves the door off the latch, hopeful he might return?

She steps out. Rust-water drip-drops from her body. Pitter-patter, across the landing, she retrieves the ladder which he’d said was only for the loft.

Drags the ladder, props it up, ascends. She reaches up, touches the fitting, tries to fix it. It comes away in her hand. New hope whispers from the space left behind. She stretches down, balances the fitting on the basin, then, gripping the ladder, climbs further up.

With hands and arms and bones and muscles that feel every inch of tiredness from her endless, circular toil, she pulls herself up into the future space which calls to her, behind the fitting, below the roof.

One, two, three candle-lit steps below become smaller. She lugs herself up into the vent, the vent in the loft which he had said the ladder was for, the ladder with infinite rungs, rungs of a journey never to conclude.

She squeezes herself through the dark channel, a liminal freedom between ceiling and loft she did not know existed yet, at the back of her mind, always knew existed. She bends forward, over, moves. On hands and knees, in the absence of light, she crawls along the vent until she sees a dim glow ahead, senses it with her pineal. A gold sphere, a noise of almost-light calls to her, speaks promises of eternity, shines at the end of the tunnel in the vent. She lowers herself down and through this wet ring of gold to discover the ring is the glow of a dim streetlamp. Feet shirk on wet grass. She finds herself outside of her house, not too far from her front door, which she has left unbolted in the hope that one day, he might come home.

The rain slashes down. She’s cold, adrift amongst it. At least it is night, she thinks, the blanket of which hides more than my sadness. Standing there, naked, drained, she’s relieved she left her front door off the latch, ever hopeful he’ll return. The amber-dandelion glow of a streetlamp helps her locate the handle. She pushes the door open, runs upstairs.
The bathroom light does not click on. It is forever broken. So, in habit, she sets a-glow a corner candle. Familiarity guides her, fits her like a glove. She is not one for change. The shower above the bathtub however, does click on. The thrum of hissing water softens her sobs. Tears, fuggy air, soupy mist. She steps into the bath, under the hot water, closes her eyes, rests her back against the tiled wall. Warmth embraces her. Hot jets, the only arms around her since he left. Impossible, yet infinite drive propels her on, keeps her head above the ever-rising water. There’s the possibility one day he might return, is why she always leaves the door off the latch: he might push the door open and run upstairs, save her from the darkness. 

SJ Townend, an author of dark fiction, has stories published with Vastarien, Ghost Orchid Press, Gravely Unusual Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, and Timber Ghost Press. Her first horror collection, Sick Girl Screams, is out Winter, 2024 (Brigid’s Gate Press) and her second horror collection, Your Final Sunset, is coming in 2025 (Sley House Press). Twitter:@SJTownend

www.sjtownend.com 

“What do you remember?”

It was what they asked. Teacher, Scientist, Mother. The same testing question, always.
Heads bowed, we stared at our desks. We didn’t understand why, but we knew the question was dangerous.

“I... I remember...” a voice crept out from my left and I screwed my eyes shut.

“Yes, Tommy?” the Teacher coaxed.

The classroom held its breath.

“I remember... there were more of us.”

There was a long silence. “No, Tommy. You are mistaken. That is enough school for today. Your Mothers are waiting.”

We filed out into the corridor, ashamed, silent, eyes fixed on the heels of the boy in front.
There were only eleven Mothers.

Tommy’s wasn’t there.

Tommy was right though. There had been more. The empty desks hadn’t always been empty, even if I couldn’t remember the older boys who had sat there.

There would be another empty desk tomorrow. I promised myself I would remember his name.
And his lesson.

Tommy had remembered something you weren’t supposed to notice. And that had been enough.
Back home, Mother sat me down, lowered herself to my level.

“What do you remember, Alex?” she asked.

Worms writhed in my stomach. In the classroom, you could hide behind the other boys, wait for one of them to fill the void with a safe, recent, memory.

“What do you remember?” Mother insisted.

But when they asked you a direct question, there was no escape. You had to find an answer. One that kept Mother happy.

Only, I remembered so much more than I should. I remembered before.

I remembered a sister; a smiling, sleeping, crying baby sister.

I remembered a moon, as well as a sun.

I remembered trees, and grass, and birds.

And I remembered my mother. My real mother.

Delicate purple fronds emerged from the tip of Mother’s arm, wiping away the tears as I sobbed. Fleshy pads tilted my chin until I met her glittering eyes. And a hushed voice whispered in my ear:
​
“What do you remember?”

​Liam Hogan is an award-winning short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He helps host live literary event Liars’ League and volunteers at the creative writing charity Ministry of Stories. More details at http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk