There once was a prince called Sans Soleil, which is to say, Sunless. It had been prophesied at his birth that he would grow so handsome, his beauty would outshine the sun. That he might not be killed by the jealous star, he had to be kept in the dark, for it was said that he would die if ever a shaft of sunlight fell upon his brow.
So the very night he was born, his father, the king, had him carried away to a castle that was carved out of rock. And in that candlelit cave-castle, the young prince grew and flourished without ever seeing the sun.
Now, by the time Sans Soleil was twenty years old, the story of his strange beauty and of the evil prediction had been told at every hearth and hall in the kingdom. And every maiden of marrying age had heard his tragic tale.
But one in particular, Viga, the daughter of a duke, did not believe what she heard.
“Surely,” she said, tossing her raven-black hair from her face, “surely the king has hidden his son from the light because he is too monstrous to behold.”
Her father shook his head. “Nay,” he replied. “I have been to this cave-castle and have seen this prince. He is handsomer than the sun.”
But still Viga did not believe what her father told her. “The sun cannot harm anyone,” she said. ‘‘There is no sense in what you say.” And she took herself to the king dressed in her finest gown of silver and gold.
“Sire,” she said, “at court you have been taken in by lies. The sun is not harmful. It nourishes. It causes all things to grow. It will not kill the prince.”
The king was touched by the girl’s sincerity. He was moved by her beauty. He was awed by her strength of purpose, for it is no little thing to contradict a king. Still, he shook his head and said, “It was prophesied at his birth that he would die if ever a shaft of sunlight struck his brow.”
“Old wives and young babes believe such tales. They should not frighten you, sire. They do not frighten me,” Viga replied. ·
‘‘They do not frighten you because you are not the one who would die,” said the king, and at these words all the courtiers smiled and nodded their heads and murmured to one another. “Still, I will give the matter more thought.”
Viga gave a low curtsy. And as she rose, she said quietly, so that only the king could hear it, “It does seem strange that sun and son do sound the same.” Then she smiled brightly and departed.
The very best horror in all its ghoulish, glorious humanity.
—Deborah Miller, two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (and also Sam’s mom)
Everyone says it but no one believes it: attitude makes all the difference. People parrot the words but the words don’t penetrate, not really, not down to the core. That’s why Carolina Bugtuttle has all those lines on her face, always scowling when I reach for that third or fourth cookie after Sunday worship, always emailing me LOW FAT RECIPES and MIRACLE DIETS peppered with those godforsaken, soulless smiley-face things. That’s why she’s always stressed out about six hundred things that don’t have a smidge to do with her. Because she has a bad attitude. She needs to worry less about my weight and more about that degenerate son of hers, if you ask me, but you didn’t, so.
My smile isn’t just on the surface. That’s why I knew, Wednesday morning, when I woke up and Timmy still hadn’t come home, when I checked my phone and he still hadn’t replied to my texts and voicemails, why I knew I had the strength to go find him—wherever he was. And bring him home. And get started on a new installment of The Deacon’s Wife for the church e-bulletin. Write it raw, rough, naked, curses and gossip intact, more a letter to my sweet, wise husband Pastor Jerome than anything else, so he can go through it with scissors and a scalpel before sending it out to the four-thousand-strong flock of the Grace Abounding Evangelical Church.
What To Do When Your Child Strays from God.
Timmy’s rebellion had spent a long time percolating. By the time Timmy vanished I had seen the signs—seen him in Facebook photos with That Whore Susan; seen him sketching the Spiderman logo that webheads were so fond of—and had armed myself with knowledge, courtesy of the Internet. I knew more about spiderwebbing than any God-fearing mother has any business knowing. I had logged enough hours on websites and wikis and forums to bring me to the attention of a couple dozen law enforcement agencies, places Carolina Bugtuttle would never in hell have spent a single second. Not even if it meant the difference between saving her son’s soul and losing him forever.
I climbed the steps slowly, aware of the sin I was about to commit. I paused at the door to his room.
Let me tell you something about the bedrooms of teenage boys. They are sovereign nations, islands of liberty hedged in on all sides by brutal tyranny. To cross the threshold uninvited is an act of war. To intrude and search is a crime meriting full-scale thermonuclear response: neutron-bomb silence, mutually-assured temper tantrums.
So I did not enter Timmy’s room lightly, and panic seized me in the instant that I did. Fear stopped me in my tracks, threatened to turn me around. The smell of stale laundry made my head swim—the bodily odors that meant my little boy had become a man. I summoned him up as the smiling boy he had been before puberty caused him to declare independence, defy us as righteously and violently as America spurned its colonial overlords.
I searched swiftly, joylessly. Praying, somehow, that I’d get caught. Desperate for him to come home, no matter what the cost to me might be.
And that’s when I realized I was in over my head. I missed him, my boy, my son, the obedient, wide-eyed one who loved his father and loved me—as opposed to the cruel and sullen thing with a heart full of hate he’d become. I’d built walls around the Bad Timmy, moats and turrets to protect my heart. Against Good Timmy I had no defense.
I found plenty. Sperm-stiffened socks; eerily-empty browser history. A CD that looked Satanic. None of it was what I wanted.
Permit me a digression here, fellow congregant, beloved pastor.
You probably know none of this, because you’re a good churchgoing Christian who’d never dream of Googling illegal substances. Nor have you ever had need to learn about the complex moral codes of conduct common to drug dealers and other criminals.
Thanks to the 60 Minutes and the Dateline and the nightly national news, you already know that spiderwebbing is a hallucinogen—but you don’t know what a weird one it is. The basic legend of its manufacture goes like this: in top secret farms run by the Taliban or the Chinese government or some other Existential Threat, Amazon psychovenom spiders chimerically combined with God Knows What get dusted with US mindmeld pharmaceuticals, then fed a GMO protein ooze that makes their web-producing glands go into overdrive, producing webs that get sprayed with wonky unstable Soviet-era hallucinogens intended to induce extreme suggestibility, then the spray crystallizes, the crystallized web is broken down into a dust and put into solution, which, after various alchemical adulterations, is dripped into the user’s eye with a dropper. All of this is speculation, of course, since the origins of the drug are so shrouded in mystery. For all I know they just dissolve LSD in liquid Ativan and sprinkle it with fairy dust and boom.
Two or more users who drop from the same web will experience a shared hallucination. If one of them sees the ground open up and an angel with a centipede face fly out, they all do. No matter how far apart they go, as long as the drug lasts they’re in synch. Like, they’re in each other’s minds. Psychically linked. No one knows why this is. No one knows much about anything when it comes to spiderwebbing. We made that stuff so illegal in the early days of the crisis that no lab in the country can legally possess a shred of it. Wise Pastor Jerome says you can be damn sure the government’s doing research on how to use it against traditional-minded Americans, but it’s his job to scare people about What The Government Is Up To.
So. Invading someone’s webbing experience is a potentially fatal act of aggression.
[STARRED REVIEW] Finding danger and humanity in their characters, the short stories of Boys, Beasts & Men marry emotional epiphanies with violence, resulting in imaginative, stirring meditations on LGBTQ+ struggles and acceptance.
—Foreword
Strange that I didn’t see who she was when she stood in the street, arm upraised, headlights strobing her like flashbulbs, exactly as she’d appeared in the publicity stills that papered New York City for one whole summer. Only when she got in the cab and told me where she was going and slumped back in the seat, and I looked in the mirror and saw the look of utter exhaustion and emptiness fill her face—only then did it click.
“You’re her,” I said, breath hitching.
“I’m somebody,” she said, weary, clearly gut-sick of having this conversation, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“You’re Ann Darrow.”
“The one and only.”
And maybe I had recognized her, on some unconscious level, because I hadn’t meant to pick up any passengers when I got in my cab and started driving. Friday nights I’d sometimes hit up the Ziegfeld, the Palace, drive in circles to see the movie stars arriving at their premieres, and, later on, leaving, and later still staggering out of their afterparties. Purely recreational, usually, but that night it was downright medicinal. I needed that glamour, those sixty-karat smiles, the wonder in the eyes of the crowd. The lie of a beautiful world.
Bombs were falling, four thousand miles away. Crematoria were being kindled.
I pulled away from the curb. One of her posters was framed on the wall of the room I rented. The only decorative touch that had followed me through all five of the boarding houses I’d lived in since getting kicked out of the house. Ann Darrow, eyes wide with terror, arm upraised to fend off something monstrous. A massive black outline hulked behind her. Art deco lettering beneath her blared KONG: THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD.
“You Jewish?” she asked.
“I am,” I said, tracing my profile in the rearview mirror. “The nose gave it away?”
“The eyes,” she said. “The only people who look really scared today are Jewish.”
It took me an awful long time to say, “That’s because most people have no idea what horrible things human beings are capable of,” and even once I said it it wasn’t quite right, didn’t quite capture the rich flavor of my fear, my rage.
“Some of us do,” she said. “Some of us know exactly.”
“I’m Solomon,” I said.
“That why your radio’s switched off, Solomon?”
“Yeah, sorry. Couldn’t stand to hear it one more time. I can turn it back on if you want to listen to something.”
“No,” she said. “That’s one of several things I’m trying not to think about tonight.”
September 1st, 1939. At 4:45 that morning, Germany had invaded Poland. Word was, England and France would be declaring war within the week. Not that anyone expected them to lift too many fingers to save the millions of Jews in Poland.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgot to ask—where you heading?”
“Just drive,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.”
“You coming from a movie premiere?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The Women. It had its moments. They love to have notorious floozies and disgraced politicians show up on the red carpet. Who am I to turn down free food and alcohol?”
Normally, my New York City cabdriver cool prevailed. Even with only five years driving under my belt, I’d already had more movie stars in my backseat than there were cross streets in Manhattan. But this was no movie star. No fraudulent sorcerer, whose magic was made up of lighting and make-up and special effects and screenwriting. This was Ann Darrow. This was someone who knew what magic was. Who’d been held in its hand. Who’d been lifted high into the sky by it, and then watched it die.
“Let me guess,” she said, catching my repeated mirror glances. “You were there that night. You were in the theater. You’re a baby, you would have been, what, twelve?”
“Twelve exactly,” I said, startled. Most people pegged me for far older. I’d been driving a cab on New York City streets since I was thirteen, and nobody’d ever batted an eyelash at it. “But I wasn’t in the theater that night.”
“I know,” she said. “Somebody tells me they were, I know they’re lying. Swear to god, you add up all the people who’ve told me they were there that night, there were a couple million people in the audience. Place only had a thousand seats, and half of them were empty. People make it seem like Denham was some kind of genius promoter, but that piece of shit was as bad at that as he was at everything else.”
I had so many questions. For years I’d dreamed of this moment. Now my words were nowhere to be found.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You want to know about . . . him.”
“Yeah.”
She rolled her eyes.
She wasn’t that much older than me. She’d been twenty, when she traveled to Skull Island. But those events, and the six years since then, had accelerated her aging. From her purse, she pulled a bottle and a glass. Not a flask; a glass, in her purse. “You want a drink, Solomon?”
“Not while I’m driving.”
“Where are your people from, Solomon?”
“Poland,” I said.
She cursed, so softly I couldn’t hear which one. “You got people over there still?”
“Three grandparents.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, one hand reaching forward to touch my shoulder.
She was kind. That much was true. I’d imagined her in the hold of the ship, comforting Kong in his chains and his seasickness. Backstage, calming him down while tiny men flashed cameras in his helpless face. Eighty stories up, pleading with him to pick her back up, trying to tell him that the airplanes wouldn’t shoot him while he was holding her. Angry at him for not understanding her, or for understanding and not wanting to put her at risk.
In celebration of the release of Carrie Vaughn’s final Kitty Norville book KITTY’S MIX-TAPE, Tachyon presents glimpses from the book that is “comfort food for the urban fantasy soul.” (Seanan McGuire, author of Come Tumbling Down and Every Heart a Doorway)
In celebration of the release of THE MIDNIGHT CIRCUS by Jane Yolen, Tachyon presents glimpses from the book that “draws readers into fully realized worlds with strong characters who reflect the strengths—and the darkness—in all of us.” (Susan Vaught, author of Trigger and Freaks Like Us)
by
Jane Yolen
The Dog Boy was just a year old and newly walking when his father returned to take him into Central Park. It was summer and the moon was full over green trees.
The only scents he’d loved ’til then were the sweet milk smells his mother made, the fust of the sofa cushions, the prickly up-your-nose of the feathers in his pillow, the pure spume of water from the tap, and the primal stink of his own shit before it was washed down into the white bowl.
When his father came to fetch him that first time, his mother wept. Still in her teens, she’d not had a lot of knowledge of the world before Red Cap had taken her up. But the baby, he was all hers. The only thing, she often thought, that truly was.
“Don’t take him,” she cried, “I’ve done everything you asked. I promise to be even more careful of him.” Her tears slipped silently down her cheeks, small globules, smelling slightly salty, like soup.
His father hit her with his fist for crying, and red blood gushed from her nose. He hated crying, something Dog Boy was soon to find out.
But Dog Boy had never smelled blood like that before, only his mother’s monthly flow which had a nasty pong to it. His head jerked up at the sharpness, a scent he would later know as iron. He practically wet himself with delight.
His father watched him and smiled. It was a slow smile and not at all comforting, but it was all Dog Boy would ever get from him.
“Come, Boy,” his father said, adjusting the red cap he always wore, a cap that was the first thing Dog Boy recognized about his father, even before his smell, that odd compound of old blood and something meaty, something nasty, that both repelled and excited him. Without more of an invitation, his father reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather leash, winding it expertly about the Dog Boy’s chest and shoulders, tugging him toward the door. And not knowing why, only that it would surely be something new and interesting, Dog Boy toddled after him, never looking back at his mother who still simpered behind them.
In celebration for the release of the irreverent, self-depreciating, profane, and funny PETER WATTS IS AN ANGRY SENTIENT TUMOR, Tachyon presents glimpses from the essay collection.
The previews included:
For more info about PETER WATTS IS AN ANGRY SENTIENT TUMOR, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
Icon by John Coulthart
In celebration for the release of THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s strange and macabre tales by the “reigning queen of dark fantasy.”
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
August
16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)
Sabit
came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out
for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these
days food is only fucking food—curry or wasabi, but when I
asked why she’d changed her mind, she just stared
at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she
was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is
Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep,
snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. &
I’m losing the momentum I needed to say anything
more about what happened @ CeM on Sat.
night. It’s all fading, like a dream. I’ve been reading one of
Sabit’s books, The
Breathing Composition (Welleran Smith, 2025),
something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination
of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor &
theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art
pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research
for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find—or what
any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down?
That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do you
dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you dream
in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig
flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite
still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your
sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to
sleep? There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking
stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and
popping your blue Peruvian bonbons. Just this one thing. I’m not
the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the
agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and
mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps
coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn
after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant
rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does
that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx,
the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then
fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah?
Ad
infinitum, ad nauseam, Hail Mary, full of beans.
Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I
should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions. But
now, now
Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So,
here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel.
Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh,
towers of iron—oh yeah, sure—fucking corpses heaped in dumpsters
and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget
the kid with the Cuisinart—sure, fine—but that one labeled #17,
oh, now that’s
another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’
Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the
way it goes?
Are
you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next
to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book,
Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a
woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know
her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch
prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here,
while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to
say about #17:
spines
and bellies knitted & proud and all open
all
watching spines and bellies and the three;
triptych
& buckled, ragdoll fusion
3
of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,
arterial
hallways knitted red proud flesh
Healing
and straining for cartilage & epidermis
Not
taking, we cannot imagine
So
many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy
And
all expecting Jerusalem
And
Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent
schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” &
turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause
she’d drugged her lover—she was a lesbian; of
course, she had
to be a lesbian—she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to
sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed, after
performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe
sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then
tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not
named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks
before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ,
Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane
Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m
guessing—hyperlucid
& worshipped by the snips—& maybe the woman she mutilated
is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched
her up (ha, ha fucking ha). Maybe even made her good as new again,
but I doubt it. I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my
eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking
cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after
midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp,
when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @
Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff
Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have
screwed just to piss you off, Sabit. I should have brought her back
here and fucked her in our bed, let her use your toothbrush, &
maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I
could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking
after.
For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story
In celebration of the release of Jo Walton’s STARLINGS, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s magnificent tales.
This week’s previews included
For more info on STARLINGS, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover design by Elizabeth Story
With award-winning, superstar editor Ellen Datlow’s “superb sampling of some of the most significant short horror works published between 1985 and 2005” Darkness being featured as part of the Humble Horror Book Bundle, we’re sharing excerpts from nine select stories over the next seven days.
Our next glimpse comes from “Teratisms” by Kathe Koja.
“Beaumont.” Dreamy, Alex’s voice. Sitting in the circle of the heat, curtains drawn in the living room: laddered magenta scenes of birds and dripping trees. “Delcambre. Thibodaux.” Slow-drying dribble like rusty water on the bathroom floor. “Abbeville,” car door slam, “Chinchuba,” screen door slam. Triumphant through its echo, “Baton Rouge!”
Tense hoarse holler almost childish with rage: “Will you shut the fuck up?”
From the kitchen, woman’s voice, Randle’s voice, drawl like cooling blood: “Mitch’s home.”
“You’re damn right Mitch is home.” Flat slap of his unread newspaper against the cracked laminate of the kitchen table, the whole set from the Goodwill for thirty dollars. None of the chairs matched. Randle sat in the cane-bottomed one, leg swinging back and forth, shapely metronome, making sure the ragged gape of her tank top gave Mitch a good look. Fanning herself with four slow fingers.
“Bad day, big brother?”
Too tired to sit, propping himself jackknife against the counter. “They’re all bad, Francey.”
“Mmmm, forgetful. My name’s Randle now.”
“Doesn’t matter what your name is, you’re still a bitch.”
Soft as dust, from the living room: “De Quincy. Longville.” Tenderly, “Bewelcome.”
Mitch’s sigh. “Numbnuts in there still at it?”
“All day.”
Another sigh, he bent to prowl the squat refrigerator, let the door fall shut. Half-angry again, “There’s nothing in here to eat, Fran — Randle.”
“So what?”
“So what’d you eat?”
More than a laugh, bubbling under. “I don’t think you really want to know.” Deliberately exposing half a breast, palm lolling beneath like a sideshow, like a street-corner card trick. Presto. “Big brother.”
His third sigh, lips closed in decision. “I don’t need this,” passing close to the wall, warding the barest brush against her, her legs in the chair as deliberate, a sluttish spraddle but all of it understood: an old, unfunny family joke; like calling names; nicknames.
The door slamming, out as in, and in the settling silence of departure: “Is he gone?”
Stiff back, Randle rubbing too hard the itchy tickle of sweat. Pushing at the table to move the chair away. “You heard the car yourself, Alex. You know he’s gone.”
Pause, then plaintive, “Come sit with me.” Sweet; but there are nicknames and nicknames, jokes and jokes; a million ways to say I love you. Through the raddled arch into the living room, Randle’s back tighter still, into the smell, and Alex’s voice, bright.
“Let’s talk,” he said.
Mitch, so much later, pausing at the screenless front door, and on the porch Randle’s cigarette, drawing lines in the dark like a child with a sparkler.
“Took your time,” she said.
Defensively, “It’s not that late.”
“I know what time it is.”
He sat down, not beside her but close enough to speak softly and be heard. “You got another cigarette?”
She took the pack from somewhere, flipped it listless to his lap. “Keep ’em. They’re yours anyway.”
He lit the cigarette with gold foil matches, JUDY’S DROP-IN. An impulse, shaming, to do as he used to, light a match and hold it to her fingertips to see how long it took to blister. No wonder she hated him. “Do you hate me?”
“Not as much as I hate him.” He could feel her motion, half a head-shake. “Do you know what he did?”
“The cities.”
“Besides the cities.” He did not see her fingers, startled twitch as he felt the pack of cigarettes leave the balance of his thigh. “He was down by the grocery store, the dumpster. Playing. It took me almost an hour just to talk him home.” A black sigh. “He’s getting worse.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true, Mitch, whether you want to think so or not. Something really bad’s going to happen if we don’t get him —”
“Get him what?” Sour. No bitter. “A doctor? A shrink? How about a one-way ticket back to Shitsburg so he —”
“Fine, that’s fine. But when the cops come knocking I’ll let you answer the door,” and her quick feet bare on the step, into the house. Tense unconscious rise of his shoulders: Don’t slam the door. Don’t wake him up.
Check out the Humble Horror Book Bundle which includes works from Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Joss Whedon, Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Robert R. McCammon, and Dan Simmons.
For more info about Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, visit the Tachyon page.
Cover by Ann Monn.
