Category: Trembling With Fear

Trembling With Fear 2-16-25

Greetings, children of the dark. Did you enjoy your international day of corporate love? I’ve never been a Valentine’s gal, but I sure did enjoy the V-Day edition of TWF assembled by our own Jane Morecroft. Thanks to all who submitted – next special edition is the Summer one, and we have another new assistant editor to take the helm of that one. I’ll introduce the revamped team very soon, I promise! Just got to get over this stupid virus first…

In other news, I’m very excited to almost be up to date with our short story submissions reading. That hasn’t happened in… oh, I don’t know… YEARS. The expanded team is truly helping, and I would give each of them a massive hug if I could. Thanks to all in TWF Towers for all you do. Including the boss man, who is the world’s busiest man and I honestly don’t know how he does it all and still finds time to write and submit!

Speaking of submissions: I’m in a mode, my friends. I actually wrote an almost-10,000 word story last month and submitted it to an anthology being put together by the amazing PS Livingstone. No word yet on how/when it will be released, but I feel so smug for having actually done it that I’ve now got my sights on two folk horror anthology calls that close in the coming fortnight. And considering I’ll be off at the UK Ghost Story Festival this coming week, and then at the British Fantasy Society’s annual retreat at the iconic Gladstone’s Library the following weekend, well, maybe my writing journey might be getting back on track? Don’t make too much of a fuss; I don’t want to alert the universe to this anomaly. 

Soooo, let’s quickly and seamlessly transition to this week’s edition, where Adam Hannah tries to keep Friday’s love-fest going but takes it in a much more familiar TWF-y dark direction (aka revenge). That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

  • Autumn Bettinger’s art experiments,
  • Crystal N. Ramos’s therapy tech, and
  • Shiloh Kuhlman’s generational trauma.

And one last thing: I often mention the British Fantasy Society here, mainly because I volunteer as its marketing officer, but there’s something afoot you should really know about. We’ve recently announced a mentorship programme, and there’s a whole range of speculative fiction bods lining up to offer mentorship across everything from ideation to writing a manuscript to editing and querying to, yes, marketing and building an author brand (that one might be me). It’s only open to BFS members, but with membership starting at just £20 per year and open to anyone, anywhere, there’s really not much stopping you. Right? Details over here.

Over to you, Stuart.

Lauren McMenemy

Editor, Trembling With Fear

Hi all.

This week has been quite busy! For Trembling With Fear, we’ve been putting a huge dent into our backlog of submissions and putting out our Valentine’s Day edition! We have our internal readers going over the document for our overly late physical edition to see where it stands on going to Amazon for release. (This year’s installment looks like it’ll be split into two editions again due to size.)

For my own writing, I received a rejection and submitted a novella and a short story this week. We’ll see how those go! 

Now, for the standards:

  • Thank you so much to everyone who has become a Patreon for Horror Tree. We honestly couldn’t make it without you all!
  • Be sure to order a copy of Shadowed Realms on Amazon, we’d love for you to check it out and leave a review!

Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

(more…)

Serial Saturday: Wotan Watches by J. R. Santos, Chapter One

Chapter One

                                                          

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

― From Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria.

*

He prayed for it to stop, wishing to be unseen: to be forgotten. Even should all of humanity forget him, he would accept it—Bard just couldn’t take it anymore.

“No matter where I go or what I do, he’s there, staring at me.” Bard didn’t care if the psychologist, Joanita DeMillo, believed him or not; he needed to talk and she was paid to listen. “It started on the night I broke up with Angelo. It was an ugly scene, decades in the making.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she tried, meekly; the feeling was genuine, but the relationship had been bound to crash and burn. It had been obvious to her, and certainly to him.

Bard shook his head. “He was cheating on me and didn’t have the balls to break up. I’m not sure he ever even liked me. I had money from some royalties and that’s all he really cared for. Residuals and bragging rights, having me as his trophy boy—the artist.

“I hate him.” Even as he said the words, Bard knew he only half meant them. He hated himself more than he could hate Angelo, who had always presented himself as he was: a tremendous piece of shit.

“He was somewhat aggressive, wasn’t he?” DeMillo asked politely. Angelo had a history of beating Bard, shouting and manipulating him.

“I’m the only one who cares about you. They’re not your friends. Why did you let him talk like that to you? Why are you such a coward?

“Why are you so useless?”

Angelo was a hedonist, seeking his own pleasure and stopping at nothing to obtain it. Bard had thought to see a core of decency in his boyfriend, something approaching kindness. At last the scales had fallen from his eyes. Not only to have found Angelo with his cock in another man’s mouth, but the state of that man. Bruised, anemic, and needle marks like a deadly constellation against the ashy skin.

A mummified teenager. His eyes were haunting and beyond suffering, dead and numb. Bard recognized himself in those eyes and felt his throat burning with acid. Angelo reacted as he had expected.

“What? Can’t I have a fucking moment for myself? Go home and try not to piss the bed this time.”

Bard forced himself back to the present, half-awake in the shadows in the confines of the little doctor’s office. A potted plant stood in a corner looking dejected, a sun-bleached calendar marking the year of 1981 hung from the wall, and every wall was covered by green patterned wallpaper.

The doctor waited patiently for Bard to continue, letting him form the words, but all he could see were the patterns, how they seemed to move. Bard mouthed syllables which he could not voice or even comprehend himself, reading a language so ancient it was alien to him.

Still the writing on the wall, or walls, didn’t need to be read in order to be known for what it was: a warning. He would fall to either madness or death and nothing would stop it. From the parade of runes, a face peered with a single baleful eye.

“I was outside. The night air cooled down the fire in my head and I started to shake. I was so angry, so lost. I think that maybe I deserved it. That I was weak, so he cheated on me. That weak people don’t deserve love, or respect. He never loved me…”

“Everyone deserves love,” DeMillo tried, her concern genuine. Despite having heard such things uttered a thousand times before, she hadn’t been numbed to them.

“No. Some people weren’t made for it. Maybe weakness has nothing to do with it and was just what I felt at the time, but I know it is not for everyone.”

“Do you mean Angelo or yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Bard admitted, hiding his face to shield himself from the glare of the one-eyed man. “I saw him then, that night, out in the street. He was staring at me from across the road, his face hard to see. I thought it was a homeless man at first.

“His hair and beard were so long and dirty, matted with shit. Half his face was covered with hair, and he was staring at me with this horrible yellow eye. He was all hunched, covered by some kind of quilt.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He … he made a sound.” Like the wind, like a trumpet announcing judgment day, a fog horn from the end of time cutting through the mist of ages. “He pulled back his hair,” and the stranger peeled back also the lids over both his eyes, “his left eye was missing,” a cavernous hole, a black chasm on a purple pit, his right eye yellowed and reddened, amber colored.

“You said you thought he was a homeless man. He wasn’t?”

Bard felt if left to his nervous ticks he might chew the inside of his cheek until he bled. He pried the answers from himself with tremendous effort. “It wasn’t a man at all.”

Outside Doctor DeMillo’s office the wind whistled like an oncoming train. She looked through the half shielded window panes to witness the sudden swaying of trees in the warmly lit afternoon. “What do you mean, Bard?”

“It was God.” Bard was again standing in the night, street lights dimming as the single-syllable lament grew deeper and louder. Winds grew violent, dust and filth were swept and some of that grime latched to Bard’s skin and clothes. He flinched and shouted in more surprise than pain; some of the dust had gotten into his eye. “I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I looked back, he was gone.”

DeMillo wrote something in her notebook and refrained to comment. Bard could practically see the word “delusional” materialize over her head, her silence accusing him of tipping over the edge. DeMillo would likely be sending Bard to speak with a psychiatrist, to have him followed by someone who could medicate him. “What happened next?”

“I walked home.” Bard arrived at his apartment feeling miserable. Unable to tell fact from fiction, he locked his door and put on the latch; exhausted as he was, he dragged the heavy couch to block the door further. He would have done more to barricade himself but all he could manage was lay on the sofa and fall asleep. “I slept and there were no dreams I can remember. Next morning I put all of Angelo’s things outside the building. Haven’t seen him since, and the homeless just took off with his stuff. I’ve had the locks changed.”

“That will have consequences. I’m afraid for you, Bard.” He knew she would say it next, the thing she had said before and which haunted him since she first uttered the words so many sessions ago. “I see you very alone, Bard.”

“It’s fine to be alone.”

“By choice. Sometimes. We’re all different, but isolation comes at a risk. You need to be able to trust others, to reach out, and what I see is a ship drifting further away from the shore. Have you been talking to anyone? Family? Friends?”

“I’m fine Doc. I’m not a talker, not outside our sessions.”

“I think you would talk more if Angelo had been more receptive to listening. You closed yourself to the world, and you kept feeding a bad habit.” There was a sad shadow of a smile on her lips. “Since he’s gone, maybe it’s time you changed course.

“Is there anyone you could try and reach out to?”

“Yes,” Bard lied, “some friends.”

It would have been unprofessional of DeMillo to question the veracity of the statement; she pretended to take notes while figuring out how to broach the topic.

“I would like to give you a number for a shelter. You don’t have to call,” she cut off Bard before he could protest, “but I want you to consider it. If you need it. I know it can be very hard to ask for help but I want you to try; if the time comes and you feel you have no one else to turn to. There are things we don’t want to share with family or friends either but we have to share with someone, anyone.

“There are burdens too great for a person to carry alone.”

She reached out with the piece of paper and the scribbled number. From outside, the coming storm, the swaying of tree branches, the rustling of leaves and the apparent gathering of storm clouds combined to sound like a nautical scene.

Bard was drowning, and here was a fellow sailor attempting a tenuous rescue by reaching out with a boat paddle. Why was it so hard to accept it?

“Have you been through something like this?”

DeMillo did not budge. “Yes,” was all she said and Bard took the paper.

“Thank you,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Bard. Not my case, nor yours. It’s not on you.”

He could have cried then, but likely the appointment was already running overtime. “But before you leave … You said this strange man was God. What did you mean by it?”

“Honestly,” Bard replied after thinking about it, “I’m not sure. He made me think of God, I guess.”

The doctor scribbled her final notes for the section and released her patient to flee from her watchful eye. Bard greeted the outside gladly, filling his lungs with the smell of rain and wet grass. A light drizzle filled the air with mist-like textures, and the sky grew darker with clouds, a sudden twilight borne mid-afternoon. Bard had always loved the rain. Anxiety and a bad temper had always made it feel like he had a fire inside his skull that only such weather seemed to cool off. Bard imagined the smoke wafting from under his eyelids, the paper with the number for the shelter still in his hand.

He had stayed in a shelter, some two years before. He saw others he felt were doing worse than him, and felt guilty he had taken space that had to be denied to someone else. Reason told him he was being a fool; that he had to survive, had to stay alive somehow, had been as much a victim as the others. Suffering was not a competition.

He had seen a woman holding her boy. If she was like him, as she was like to be, he could not begin to imagine how much harder she had it. Trying to explain things that shouldn’t require explanation, that simply were, to a world that doubted everything that touched you, as if your existence was a contradiction and the very nature of the reality you inhabited couldn’t be trusted.

Bard would never forget that little boy and his toy hammer. The woman kissed her son atop his head, caressed his auburn hair. “We’ll be fine,” she whispered to him, “we’ll be fine.”

Bard let go of the paper, watched it float to the sodden sidewalk and dissolve away like sugar. The idea of the shelter sickened him; trapped in that warmth but unable to open up; seeing himself reflected in the eyes of others. He didn’t need the shelter, not this time, he argued within himself. He had changed the locks; everything would be fine.

Trembling With Fear – Valentine’s 2025 Edition!

Welcome to Trembling With Fear’s Valentine Special! Are you feeling the luurve? In some of these stories you might wish you never had. As you get ready for a romantic evening out, putting the final touches to your lipstick or adjusting the collar of your shirt, remember to spare a thought for all those who don’t have a date on Valentine’s Day, and what they might just do to get one.

In this Valentine’s Special we look at the darker side of romance and lust, and what these emotions can lead to: in these stories it’s revenge, creation, technology and horticulture, but with a darker twist of course. Whether your mission is to bury, not bed, or discover your perfect partner is an AI bot, we have something for you. Follow our would-be valentines as they sew body parts together to create loved ones, fight off possessed hairbrushes, or savour oranges grown from a tree fed with a very ‘special’ fertilizer. These stories are certain to bring a flutter of dread–sorry warmth, to your hammering heart. So open that box of chocolates–you never know what you’re going to get–fill up your glass (just make sure it’s not poisoned) and slip into something more comfortable to fully appreciate these love stories, specially crafted to fill your heart with terror.

Happy Valentine xxx

 

Jane Morecroft

Editor, Valentine's Special, Trembling With Fear, Horror Tree

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Trembling With Fear 2-9-25

Greetings, children of the dark. I’m loaded full of cold and flu right now so will cut to the chase today with just a few parish notices:

  • We are now closed to Valentine’s submissions. Our V-day editor Jane Morecroft will be getting in touch in the coming days – if she hasn’t already – to let you know if you were successful. Make sure you keep an eye out for the Dark Love edition hitting the interwebz on Friday!
  • We are slowly, slowly working our way through the regular ol’ short story submissions from both the October and January window; please bear with us but we’re catching up slowly.
  • We’re also now proofreading the 2023 anthology, which should hopefully be ready soon. Thanks to the legend that is Steph Ellis for helping pull this together, and some of our fresh new residents of TWF Towers who are divvying up the proofreading to help out.
  • Finally, this is your regular reminder that we have an insatiable need for drabbles – like, all the damn time. Get your little darklings of exactly 100 words over to us via the submission form, and make sure they’re a complete story in and of themselves; as much as I love reading extracts from longer works, our drabbles need to work on their own more than anything. 

And so onto this week’s edition, where P.A. Cornell (a Nebula finalist, no less!) has a neighbour who takes a bit too much and faces the consequences. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

  • Nico Martinez Nocito’s glimmer in the dark,
  • Kelley Tai’s star-crossed lovers, and
  • Nissa Harlow’s woodland wanderings.

Over to you, Stuart.

Oh, PS: for those who have been following my creative burnout journey, guess what? I only bloody well finished and submitted an almost-10,000 word short story this week! I know, I can’t believe it either. It’s probably why I’m sick now…

Lauren McMenemy

Editor, Trembling With Fear

Hi all.

This week, I took some ‘me’ time to work on a novella that I’m hoping to submit before an upcoming deadline. I’ve got two to possibly three that I’m hoping to send to publishers this year. We’ll see if that happens! 

For Horror Tree, I did work on reading a LOT of fiction for our Valentine’s Day special and some drabbles. However, I still have a ton of shorts to read and to get our physical copy moving forward again. I also worked a ‘little’ on the website, waiting for a bit more internal feedback before the next set of updates. Hopefully, we’ll get that truly going soon! 

Now, for the standards:

  • Thank you so much to everyone who has become a Patreon for Horror Tree. We honestly couldn’t make it without you all!
  • Be sure to order a copy of Shadowed Realms on Amazon, we’d love for you to check it out and leave a review!

Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

(more…)

Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four

  1. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter One
  2. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Two
  3. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Three
  4. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Sharp as a Razor Clam

                                                          

I lie in bed, exhausted, but a discomfort stops me from drifting off. The moonlit outline of my hand-fasting dress with its patchwork skirt and laced bustier hangs on the wall by my window as if watching over me, ghost of my future. The house rests in darkness, silent other than the rattle of Father’s snores. I close my eyes and see the slash of my betrothed’s insidious grin,  obsidian pits for eyes. I feel unwell. Could be nerves, could be bad meat. Restless, I get up, take my lantern and, avoiding the creaking slabs, head to Alora’s room to ask if she feels sick too. 

I tiptoe through the living room where I left my betrothed. The horizontal mound of him suddenly shifts position. I freeze and wait, becoming a petrified shadow, until certain he’s fast asleep. 

By the front door, the hump of my workbag on its hook. Something within me, an idea, prompts me to lift it down and carry it. I reach Alora’s room and push her door open. Two eyes are on me. Alora sits up in her crib. 

“I’m scared.” She reaches up. I want to lift her out and comfort her but pain overwhelms me. I drop my bag. A punch from inside. I buckle, hug my core. 

“What’s wrong?” Alora’s voice. 

“I don’t kn— ”A sharper pain comes. “Look away, Alora.” My sister covers her eyes. Clutching my side, I stagger and grip Alora’s crib. My fingernails dig into the wood, drown in grain, as my stomach pulses again. Again. Agony. 

I yank up my blouse and down the waistband of my skirt. Where the grip of my betrothed left a bruise earlier in the centre of my stomach, a dark ball appears under the skin. The ball swells until the skin above it is translucent. Ball, sharp tip, sharp tip bursts through. My fifth thorn jags and rams through skin until it comes out and away completely. I await the instant relief shedding brings. It does not come.

The girth of this overripe, skewer-tipped thorn fills both my hands. The exit wound doesn’t seal over immediately, leaving fresh pink-orange swirls like the times before. Instead, my skin continues to shift and unfurl. Out bursts a flesh-bud. Golden yellow petals. The folds spiral out with the symmetry and ratios of a whorled seashell. Soft tissues ripple, beat, then come to rest, setting into a small shape: an ear.

Alora, wide-eyed, grabs at her own small thorn nubs. “This…will happen to me?” I cup my hand over my new protrusion. Her quiet night voice sounds so loud.

“Yes…no…not like that.” I struggle to speak. “That one came too fast. Didn’t think I had a fifth.” The hidden whisper behind Emmanuelle’s eyes I could not quite hear—I hear it now, resonating throughout my solar plexus, a fresh subtext in every sound. The secrets of adulthood unlock. 

I feel woozy, crazed, but as I look at my sister, the fear on her face, I recall the plan I formulated as I crept to her room.

“Want to hold my horn?” I ask. She nods.

“Well…you can. You can keep it, if you let me take yours.”

“My nubs?”

“And your quills.” I force a smile, explain I don’t want to pull them out, just give them a trim. Her brow furrows. I hold my fresh thorn out. Bribery. She admires its serrated ridge, the root of it, barbed ligaments still attached, yet to whither. Then I pull it back. She looks at her own quills on her upper arms. “They just get in the way, don’t they?” I say. 

She puffs her cheeks. “Okay. Trim me. But if it hurts, you stop. Straight away.”

“It’s like clipping fingernails,” I say.

From my rucksack, I draw my diamond-tipped chisel.

I take hold of the brush of quills projecting from her nearest shoulder. She whimpers, tears collect in her eyes. “Squeeze here,” I say and point to the firm beam of wood which forms the lip of her crib. “The smoothness will be temporary. Trimmed quills grow back, I expect. I won’t dig out the roots.” 

I rest my chisel on the floor, retrieve Thalia from my pocket, and make her teddy do a silly dance. She wipes her eyes, half-smiles. “I love you, Alora. I do this to keep you safe. Close your eyes. Hum your favourite song.”

I tug, hack, and slash. She moans gently.  Her timorous sounds echo somewhere new within me but I refuse to let her wails set their hooks in my heart as I carefully sever all her quills and thorns. She doesn’t understand the why of it all. Can not. And I will not let her. 

 “There, don’t you look grown up,” I say, although she does not realise what I’ve done is to help her retain childhood. No girl should change their appearance to avoid the male gaze, but there’s a monster in our midst. 

 “Feel cold,” she says, “my arms don’t look like yours.” 

“I know, I’m sorry.” I push up my sleeve and let her trace my swirls. “But one day your skin will be this soft…and you’ll choose who you let touch it. May I?” I point to the largest of her jarred beach collections, lift it down, unlatch the lid. Inside, tens of smooth pieces of sea glass in oceanic shades sting cold my fingers as I scoop out a handful. “I need to smash them.”

“Okay,” she says.

 “You must try to sleep.” 

As I bend to place a kiss on her forehead, I hear the subtlest of sounds. I freeze stock-still. “What is it?” she asks. It stops. 

“Father snoring,” I say and mime an impression then pass the promised reward. “Take this, you’ve earned it.” She leans back in her crib and runs her finger over the edges of my thorn. “Be careful, sharp as a razorclam.”

I place the handful of seaglass pebbles in a pillowcase and jab at them with my chisel until the battered-smooth hazed chunks split apart to reveal their shiny teeth. Tiny knives. Small enough to be lost, yet so sharp they’ll murder by a thousand internal cuts. 

I think, erratically, as I hack glassy pebbles into an inconspicuous weapon, how sad it is for something so beautifully smooth and elegantly polished by time, to be shattered in an instant to razor-shards, to be forced to evolve into something dangerous, vengeful. But I must do this to protect her. 

Tipping my sister’s shaved loosenings into the sack of cutting mess, I shake them together, then place the sack in the corner of Alora’s room.

Tomorrow, I’ll return to Marmos and give him the rest of my loosenings, seasoned with invisible blades. 

*

The noise again. My new ear throbs, a sentient pain.

A dragging sound, the cadence of a hobbling monster. As it grows louder, closer, the whirr of heavy breath punctuates each step. Alora shrugs, her face full of confusion. She does not hear it. I gesture at her to lie down, make herself small. “Do not move,” I mouth, then yank her blanket over her face. I move to stand to one side of her closed bedroom door with my back pressed flat against the wall.

In my hand, the bone-handle of my chisel sits hard, warm in my palm, its sharp blade slick with purpose. This powerful tool is now an extension of my arm, my rage. My heart has never lashed so fast. Tonight, I have felt great pain, and I, now woman, will soon feel bliss. 

A third sound. I hear its truth throughout my frame. It is far from a tune of love. 

Quiet, yet screeching, knife-on-plate, like a diamond-tipped blade plunging through, cracking open a sternum: the sound of my sister’s bedroom door knob turning. 

Trembling With Fear 2-2-25

Greetings, children of the dark. Finally – finally! – the neverending bullsh*t of January is over. But that does mean it’s now February, and time marches ever onward. I’m consoling myself with the fact the daylight is staying around slightly longer every day. 

The arrival of February also means we’ve officially started reviewing our Valentine’s submissions, but you’ve got a few more days left to get yours in – hit our submissions page for details, and make sure you’re channeling your best jilted monster lover, ghostly unrequited feelings, and other obsessions of the soul. Which brings me to introducing the first of our new residents in TWF Towers: welcome, Jane Morecroft, who’s now laser-focused on your dark hearts. Jane is a journalist as well as a creative writer, a slush reader for Andromeda Spaceways, an editorial assistant at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and now the Assistant Editor for the Valentine’s Special Edition at TWF. Needless to say, she’s pretty darn qualified to sit in the loveseat.

Wanting to catch her eye? Jane says she’s looking for character driven stories with a twist, and a close narrative voice is very appealing to her. All the usual TWF submission guidelines also apply, so head over here to check those and get submitting. 

And so onto this week’s edition. For today’s TWF main course we get weird – real weird – on a stormy clifftop with Andrew Keyworth. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

  • Catherine Berry’s warning, (trigger warning: sexual harassment)
  • Brian Rosenberger’s vengeance, and
  • Henry Gibbons’s impatience (trigger warning: talk of suicide)

Over to you, Stuart.

Lauren McMenemy

Editor, Trembling With Fear

Hi all.

Another week of working on the new layout, we’re closing in! I didn’t have much of a chance to work on the anthologies, however. Hopefully, this week! 

Now, for the standards:

  • Thank you so much to everyone who has become a Patreon for Horror Tree. We honestly couldn’t make it without you all!
  • Be sure to order a copy of Shadowed Realms on Amazon, we’d love for you to check it out and leave a review!

Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.

Stuart Conover

Editor, Horror Tree

(more…)

Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Three

  1. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter One
  2. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Two
  3. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Three
  4. Serial Saturday: Where the Yellow Rose Blooms by Sarah Townend, Chapter Four

Chapter Three: Hand-Fasting

                                                          

Three days have passed since Marmos. I’ve barely slept, have not eaten. This evening, the eve of my hand-fasting ceremony, my betrothed will join us for dinner. Mother made me piece together a makeshift bed in the living room. There, he will sleep alone tonight. We are forbade to touch until hand-fasted, so celestial law states.

Tomorrow morning, in the top field where the stone circle of our dead sleep, under the watchful eye of the village council, my betrothed and I will be wed, then he and I will return to the home in which I grew up and he will sleep in my room, with me. By tradition, consummation will occur. Tomorrow night, I will experience the pain before the bliss. I do not even know his name.

*

Mother, from her chair, hurls out commands: how I should wear my petals, how the table should be laid, what we can and can’t ask my betrothed of his wealth and background. 

 “Do not forget to turn the meat.” Mother’s voice, trill. “Put Alora in her prettiest frock, the white one. The short sleeves which show off her quills.”

“Stop fussing, woman,” Father says. Mother shrinks. Father pours himself an ale, pulls out his seat, head of the table, and sits.

I polish and lay out cutlery. We’ve borrowed fine porcelain from next door. Father insists we give off the impression of wealth, hoping it will beget wealth. 

In the kitchen, I turn the piglet on the spit. Cooked pork tang fills the air, a smell that normally whets my palette. 

I wash and dress myself and Alora and we sit and wait.

A knock at the door.

My heart bolts. 

I let him in. “Hello,” I say. Here he is: broad, oxen-like. He grunts hello back, his greeting punctuated with a deep wheeze, and enters. 

I muster a half-smile and guide him through our home. He walks with a thuggish limp, his left foot dragging slightly. I take his coat, careful not to brush my skin against his as he passes it to me, hang it up, and direct him to the table where my family sit.

*

I serve up the meat, the soup made from parsnips from the garden. Father fills our glasses with wine, downs his in three, fills it up again. 

“Glad to have someone with grand connections taking on our daughter,” Father says. “She’s not perfect, but her skin is smooth.” Father raises his glass in my direction, swigs from it, maintaining eye contact with our guest.

“Yes.” My betrothed speaks, drawing breath loudly. “Your daughter is a fine flower—I see by the scars on her hand she works hard— ” 

They discuss me as if I’m not there, am but an object. Heat rises in my belly. But fast, the conversation veers from me as our guest turns to his right and pats my sister on her petals. 

“And Alora. Alora has something about her.” My betrothed pauses, looks at me again, lust dripping like honey from his tongue, then at Alora. “An innocence.” I watch on, like a pinned victim of sleep paralysis, as his eyes drink her in. “A rose with thorns.” He swigs on his wine. “Dangerous, yet beautiful, don’t you think?”

Father rests his fork, grabs at the tuft of white petals that crest his scalp, then picks up his fork again. With a wavering hand, he stabs another piece of meat from the central mound and pushes it off onto his already full plate without uttering a word.

Mother drops her knife. I pass her a clean one, enclosing the handle of the sharp silverware between her arthritic fingers, and directing her hand back to her plate, 

Father grunts. “Eat.” He shovels pink meat into his mouth.

The tongue of the stranger slithers between ridges of pork. He makes primordial sounds as he feeds. Yet all the while I stare at him, disgust pulsing in my belly, he sucks and chews and stares—the white of his eyes exposed—at Alora. Still covered with spines and thorns, dolls and sea treasure her sources of joy in life, he watches her while she eats.

I blow steam from my bowl, rearrange my napkin, sip on soup I do not hunger for, find anything to do at the table except be in my head. 

Bones stack like grim firewood on our guest’s plate. “Delicious,” he says and pushes his plate forward, then leans back in his seat. He strokes my sister’s quills with the back of his hand. My sister—her plump, pale arms far from adult softness, her small fingers clumsy—giggles. Her childhood spines bounce as she laughs. “Tickles,” she says.

My betrothed releases a slow sigh. Too far away to push his hand from her, I cough and kick a table leg. Cutlery and plates jump, clink. My betrothed looks across at me and removes his hand from her. My fingers flinch and move towards my meat knife. I wrap my right hand around the blade’s stone handle so tightly my knuckles shout in whiteness.

I can’t face another mouthful. “May the Celestials excuse me,” I say, and rise and take my full bowl to the sink. He follows me into the kitchen. I skirt around him like a glass chess piece on a board, I, a queen alone, all my pieces captured; him, encroaching, gearing up for checkmate. He grabs me. Firm, dirty fingers poke hard into the crook of my waist. “You are not my usual type,” he says, his hot breath a miasma of dinner and no self care, “but we will wed regardless.” 

 “Don’t touch me,” I say and pull myself from his grip. “You know as well as I, those betrothed must not touch before hand-fasting. What’ve you done? Get off.” My waist smarts from his aggressive grip. I brush away the kinks his forceful hand crimped into my smock and continue to brush long after my dress lies flat. 

He mirrors my actions, mocking me. “Cheer up,” he says and heads back to the table. 

In the kitchen, I scrape plates, wipe crumbs, contemplate a brittle marriage. A ghost pain strikes me in my side where his fingers have undoubtedly left their foul mark. I rub the area where my thorns once were to ease the discomfort and wish for the freedom of youth, quills and thorns.

Father calls me to the table. I return, squeezing Mother’s arm as I drop into my seat. She doesn’t respond. No one speaks. The rattle of my betrothed’s laboured breathing is all I hear.

“Alora, do you know the penny and handkerchief trick?” the stranger asks. He pulls a coin and dirty rag from his pocket, my sister captivated by his faux magic. Father, half-cut since sunset, offers this beast of a man something a little stronger, to which my betrothed nods and  the two men head to Father’s study.

*

Alora and I sort the kitchen. Mother knits in her chair, feeling each stitch onto the needle. A grey scarf drapes and puddles onto the floor by her feet. 

The click clack of her art, although hypnotic, is not enough to distract me from the anxiety in my bones. I keep busy, keep Alora busy. We do anything that keeps a wall between us and the men.

Mother calls my name. “Take me to my room,” she says. “Then put Alora to bed. You both need sleep for tomorrow.” A hollowness rings in her voice. Her eyes, catching the light of the candelabra, shine with a blank iridescence. Oil on water. I’ve never seen her look so old. I help her from her seat, her frail body a sad lightness to it, and she says nothing else. I want to express my trepidation to her, but these feelings pop like bubbles in my sternum, way before they birth into words.

*

“To bed, Alora,” I say after I’ve guided Mother to hers. I poke safe fireplace embers, then check on Father and the guest to bid them goodnight. 

Father sleeps in his chair, his jaw hung open. I drape blankets over him and direct our guest to his makeshift bed. He sways as he walks loudly, knocking paintings, and swigs the remnants of Father’s sherry. 

“Those are for you,” I gesture at the blanket stack, turn on a lantern for him so the room is dimly lit, and leave to get Alora ready for bed without looking him in the eye.

*

I read to Alora, brush smooth her petals, her quills. “He’s a nice man,” she says as I put down the book. “When he speaks closely though, I breathe like this.” Alora inhales and exhales through her mouth. “Remember the carcass we found on the beach? The ripped dolphin?” She mock-vomits. “He told me my thorns were beautiful though. Said he’d never felt such sharp tips.”

“He did?” Dear Celestials. “They are not his to touch, Alora.” She blushes. Pride slips from her face. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to raise my voice.” I pull her quilt up, and kiss her forehead. “You are gorgeous, what’s inside you is beautiful.” I point to her heart, blow another kiss, then leave. Closing her door behind me, I scurry to my room.

Unholy Trinity: Rats by Alex Grass

Our church worships at the altar of the Unholy Trinity. Its gospels are delivered as a trio of dark drabbles, linked so that Three become One. All hail the power of the Three.

 

An Influx of Vermin

 

There’s a nasty dead rat on the tabletop. It’s dried out, like roadkill left on a desert road during a drought. A balloon-shaped snifter hits the table, the burning spoon goes flying, and cognac soaks the rat’s tail. The air is dense with fumes like old furniture and dried fruit. The rat’s tail fattens like a dry paper towel eating up a spill.

No one else watches, no one else notices, but fascination keeps his eyes on the rat. There’s a creaking sound like a branch groaning just before it breaks. The rat’s eyes open. The rat looks at him.

 

A Wriggling Purge

 

The woman’s flesh looked like someone took a cheese grater to it, unevenly scraped off her eyebrows, scalped her, dragged her lips from her face. I’ve seen her walking outside Emory University, and today I saw her when I pulled into the Headquarters’ parking lot off off Clifton Road. I stopped my car and rolled down the window. There aren’t that many people to talk to anymore; beggars can’t be choosers.“Afternoon,” I said.

The woman smiled. Then she started retching. I was about to perform CPR. But I was paralyzed by the sight of her mouth spewing out rats.  

 

The Bubonic Transfiguration

 

People used to kill each other over this place. There’s blood in the stones, soaked into the ground. The sun rises over the temple wall. It reminds the boy of the floating ball illusion; the sun is the magician’s ball, the limestone wall a two-thousand year old prestidigitator’s rag.

The boy thought he was the only one alive who didn’t have a tail like a worm with fur. Then, the old man came and started praying. With each day of supplication, his head worn raw from pressing it to the stones, the old man changed. He became like a vermin.

 

Alex Grass

I am a writer born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I live in Brooklyn now with my wife and kids. It’s important to me that I find the readers who I can make feel about my writing the way I feel about my favorite authors.