Blade Red Press is very proud of its first single author collection, Souls Along The Meridian, by the great Bill Congreve. This book contains thirteen dark stories and was described by Australia’s Godfather of Horror, Robert Hood, as “Brutally satirical, humanely sorrowful or replete with blood, gristle and darkness, Bill Congreve’s tales explore the depths of the human and inhuman soul and linger in the heart and mind long after reading them.”

Below, as a little taster, you’ll find the opening section of the first story in the collection. Get it today – you will not be disappointed.

The Desertion of Corporal Perkins
by Bill Congreve

ONE

Up close and personal, the artillery barrage was an act of violence that made Corporal Perkins scrabble at the dirt as though he could crawl into it. Then it stopped. The echoes rolled into the hills — where they remained, crackling and rumbling like thunder as the artillery fired on other units.

The war between the Vikings and the Panzers, the Bureau of Entertainment’s first experimental night war, had begun.

Private Novice Farouk raised his head and looked at his watch. “Only twenty seconds,” he whispered.

Perkins was more pragmatic. “Too expensive for them to keep that up for long.” He wiped dirt from his mouth.

“Report!” The order was whispered out of the dark.

Every warrior in the section responded, the novices sounding surprised as name after name called off. The section was still ten strong – six men, four women.

“Most times it’s just a light show. Then the next shell will wipe out a whole section,” said Perkins.

Farouk nodded wisely.

The scout moved out. The section formed at three-metre intervals in an arrowhead formation across and along the ridgeline. Their mission was to cut off the rear of an enemy outpost that was to be attacked by the remainder of their company. But the enemy quite obviously knew where they were. An ambush would happen soon.

The vegetation was sparse, long dry grass dotted with gum trees and outcrops of rock. The half moon above the western horizon gave enough light for each man to stay in visual contact. When the moon set they would draw closer together, perhaps hole up somewhere and wait out the night, and damn to their orders. Perkins was tail-end Charlie. Farouk was in front of him, behind their sergeant. Perkins grunted. There was a jauntiness to Farouk’s step as if, after surviving one artillery barrage, he had a prerogative never to die.
Barely visible in the darkness, the scout rapped sharply on her rifle butt and dropped to one knee. A flare burst overhead and illuminated the section like frozen statues on snow. She ran for cover.

“Contact!” shouted the sergeant.

The scout was bowled off her feet within a second. The body didn’t come to ground for two metres.

They’ve got us cold, thought Perkins. What happened to her … dumdums! They’re using dumdums. No warrior does that! And Farouk’s just standing there, enjoying the show.

Perkins block-tackled Farouk. The bullet aimed for Farouk’s heart only grazed his shoulder.

“Do you want to die?”

#

Perkins peered into the darkness up the slope. Nothing but flickers of light as the enemy fired. He aimed at where one had been, more in hope than expectation.

The light machinegun carrier pulled a squat, ugly pistol from a holster on her ammunition carrier’s corpse. Sheltered by the body, she aimed the pistol into the air. A couple of seconds later a flare burst over the enemy position and the gunner began firing short bursts at darting targets. Then she stopped.

Perkins aimed again, paused, and swore.

The enemy wore no uniforms.

“They’re spectators! We’ve been ambushed by filthy fucking specs!” The sergeant shouted and lifted his head. A bullet from a sporting rifle exploded through his helmet and his skull and splashed Perkins with fresh blood.

“Where’s the controllers! Where’s the controllers!” Farouk shouted in outrage.

Shapes darted back and forth without discipline on the ridge above them, shouting, some wearing military dress, others in jeans and flannelette shirts. The shapes carried a variety of weapons: laser rifles, flechette guns, hunting rifles. Perkins even saw a hunting bow.

“Cameras? Any cameras?” Perkins shouted.

The machinegunner obviously didn’t care about being caught. She began firing again; the toll of spectators mounted. Perhaps she had decided more quickly that they had no choice.

Perkins took a deep breath and put aside his discipline. He used his FN automatic rifle — of obsolete design but recent BuEnt manufacture — on the civilians. Boot-camp basic training took charge. Aim. This is not a human being. This darting shape on the hill will kill me if it can. Breathe out gently and let the sights settle on the target. Squeeze the trigger.

If the army controllers came now, or if BuEnt’s cameras were watching, they had no excuse. They would all be executed.

Perkins smacked Farouk’s boot with the butt of his rifle. “What are you waiting for? If we don’t get out of this, we’re dead anyway!”

#

One by one the section died.

Perkins lined up another careless shape and shot it. A body twitched and fell across rocks. “Look at the jerks. They haven’t got the faintest idea!”

“But there’s too many!” Farouk fired past Perkins at a rapidly moving silhouette.

Perkins couldn’t see when the shape went down whether Farouk had hit it or if it had dived for cover.

“Shit!” said Farouk.

“There’s always too many. Specs breed like fucking rabbits! If they didn’t have us pinned down we would’ve carved them to pieces by now.”

Then Perkins and Farouk were the only two left alive, and they looked at each other and ran.

Bullets kicked dust. A laser brought smouldering branches down. Fire and smoke obscured their path. They jumped rocks and crashed off the ridgeline, tumbling through dust and scrub.

Silence.

They crept around a ledge of rock aiming to get uphill behind the spectators. Here, they were outnumbered. Up there, they might have options.

“Okay?” whispered Perkins.

Farouk nodded, and poured water from his canteen over a flashburn from a reflected laser blast. Drips splashed on the dry earth.

Voices sounded close by. They froze.

“Did you see that scout? Man, did I bag her!”

“Back off, Fred! I got her first!”

“Yeah? Just like you did those deserters in Perth last year, I suppose?” The first voice sneered.

“I want the head.”

“Jesus! Don’t get caught.”

Farouk stood, fired twice, and then screamed.

“Feel better?” Perkins asked.

They ran again, along the side of the slope, hidden in the thicker vegetation but making noise, and reached a saddle between two massive outcrops of volcanic rock that sat like mediaeval fortresses on the ridge. Cliffs reflected a ghostly radiance. Perkins and Farouk climbed into the saddle until the cliff above occluded the stars. Beyond the saddle, the ground sloped steeply into a black valley deserted by the setting moon. Then came the lights of a small coastal resort and behind that a glimpse of a flat black horizon that was the ocean.

Perkins jumped a fallen tree and dived behind a boulder. Farouk went to ground behind the log and looked out from under it. They had a view over a sloping rock platform dotted with boulders, stunted acacia and tea-tree scrub before the ground sloped into darkness fifty metres away.

“They’ve got too much cover,” said Farouk.

“It’s the best we’ll get. And they’ve gotta come this way. See anything?” Perkins whispered.

“Not yet.”

Perkins turned and looked towards the coast. Somewhere down there a regular army battalion would be patrolling the reservation boundary, containing the war and arresting and shooting deserting warriors.
Shadows danced among the rocks, too quickly to be fired at. A flechette gun burped, and shredded bark exploded off a tree a few metres away.

“Where did the spectators get that thing from? And the laser?” Farouk asked.

“They must know where the cameras are. Otherwise they couldn’t be here, doing this,” said Perkins.

“That means they have no choice. They must kill us. Are they off-duty army, or something?”

“Army’s better than this. These guys are amateur. Maybe they are the media, or BuEnt bureaucrats.” Perkins aimed down the slope, waited, and fired twice. A scream began, and didn’t stop.

“What did you do, Farouk. Why’re you here?”

“Immigration sentenced me. I came off a boat.”

“You think you’ll survive your year? Become a civilian like these aresholes?”

“No. You?”

“I got life,” Perkins grunted. He looked behind him into the dark valley, towards the reservation boundary.
“Fuck this. No judge told me I could be shot at by civilians.”

“I can’t come with you.” Farouk’s gestured back along the their path. “I’ve already run once, it didn’t work.”

“What we just did isn’t running.”

“Not that. Before I came here.”

Perkins didn’t try to change his friend’s mind. “Cover me?”

“Give me a chance to get up in those rocks.”

There could be nothing more to say. They clasped hands. Perkins opened fire at the darting shadows. Farouk climbed into the rocks.

When he heard Farouk start shooting, Perkins rolled backwards off the rock shelf and ran into the valley.

#

The torn and burning wrecks of hovertrucks and laser tanks, their camouflage paint blackened and invisible in the dark, showed where the army had recently maintained a well-armed and disciplined presence. Concrete bunkers were blasted apart; the electrified, razor-wire fence was shredded and torn.

The corpses littering the ground didn’t bother Perkins so much as the meaning behind the desolation. And that bothered him even more than Farouk’s decision to stay on the mountain.

Acrid smoke stung Perkins’s throat and made his eyes water. He dodged past the wrecks, keeping to the darkness, expecting the crackle of a laser at any second. But the winking lasers atop their semi-intelligent concrete fenceposts had also been taken out. He held his breath for twenty metres until the sea breeze blew the smoke away.

Pieces fell together in his mind: random words overheard in a bar, a secret stockpiling of ammunition, a concentration of elite army units caused by media concern over the night war, a battle between the two largest and best trained gladiator armies whose leaders were brothers. The government due for an election —and attention drawn away from politics at the right moment.

A suspicion formed in his mind.

He cursed as he tripped on something soft and slippery. A burst of automatic fire disturbed the dust behind him. One bullet grazed his calf muscle, and he felt blood trickle into his boot. A bullet? That meant another gladiator. Or a spectator. Or … God knew what.

He abandoned caution and ran.

The road wound out of sight through thick forest. Ahead of him lay the resort village of Bendemeer. He had always wondered what it would be like to visit a place like that, reserved for government cronies. Tonight he would find out. He would sneak in during the early hours of the morning and hide in some bureaucrat’s garage.

The night became still. The war on the reservation still thundered, but that was becoming amorphous, spread out, the sounds seeming to come from all directions. Perkins wondered which other boundaries had been over-run, and by whom. He slowed his headlong rush and walked silently, struggling to control his breathing. He listened.

Night sounds: animals, the whispered pounding of distant surf, tree branches creaking in the breeze.
A surreal sense of peace permeated the bushland. It could not have existed for long: a military unit of some kind, army, gladiator army, organized spectators, some-Goddamned-body, had come this way ahead of him.
Neither could the sense of peace continue.

An owl hooted. He froze in his tracks and heard distant screaming down the road ahead of him.

#

Want to read more? Read the rest of this story and many others in Bill Congreve’s awesome collection, Souls Along The Meridian. All the details here.

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Categories: Bill Congreve, New Releases
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Here’s the fourth in our series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology.

Dust
by Naomi Bell

They came from the dust, the man and the horse. From the west, where the wind screamed across the prairie, lifted the good earth to hack at the air in a host of swords. The wind that pounded the walls of the house, clattered at the windows, stole black fingers along the sill.

*

So simple a thing, so easily done. A clench of my hand and the old blade will part the skin into a black-red sea. There, at the hollow ‘twixt collar and throat, there will I find the path to deliverance.
The man sits on the bench, his face in his hands. Dust stains him in the colors of earth. Even here, it slithers under the door to lie at his feet.

I sit beside him, my hands on his flesh. He looks to Matthew while I cut away the rust-red cloth. The scissors slide flat against his skin, tug at the torn strips of shirt he has used to bind the wound. As I peel back the bandage, blood rises.

He shudders. I still my hands, the point of the scissors against the soft paleness of his body. He looks at me now with forgiveness.

—I can bear it.

Dust layers his skin, blackens the wound. Blood and dust, staining my fingers.

*

We’d been inside, in our silence. Matthew paced from room to room, the pages of the Bible in his hand rustling as autumn leaves. I set to my chores, head down to my well-trodden path. Vegetables in the pot. Plates on the table. Two plates now, not three.

I saw Jamie in the turn of my head, heard him in the slammed door, the scrape on the verandah that might be a footstep. The vegetables tumbled from my fingers.

Outside, the wind railed, pelted dust to shroud the sun in daytime darkness. Grit clawed through the chinks between the boards, pinpricked my every breath.

We heard, then, a thud on thud, wood on wood. Matthew cursed, glad of it, and looked to the window. There, in the black-gray churning, we saw the paddock gate banging loose. Matthew swore, said he’d shut the gate, but my eye led me further, to the barn and beside it a horse and a man. The horse stood head low, its rump to the wind, its nose at the barn door.

We didn’t speak, didn’t decide. Wrapped our faces in cloths, pushed open the door. We crept across the yard, holding onto each other, bent half-over. The dust launched at us, drove us sideways ‘til we nearly missed the gate, had to feel along the fence to find it.

The man half-lay along the horse’s neck, the reins trailing to the ground. Matthew caught the horse by the bridle, raised its head. When the man lifted his face, his eyes gleamed as pearls in a crusted black mask.

—For pity’s sake, help.

I did not know, not then. I unlatched the barn door, strained to drag it open against the pummeling air. Matthew clicked his tongue and led the horse inside. In the sudden hush, the man slid down the horse’s shoulder to the dirt floor.

—Thieves. On the road.

The dust had coated man and horse, skin and hide as ash. Loose, the horse stepped away, plodded into the empty stall. It stood shaking its head, blowing out its nostrils.

Matthew found a pail, carried water to the horse. He hauled off the saddle, threw it over a rail. The saddle left a square patch on the horse’s coat, deep copper streaked dark with sweat. On its withers was a penny-sized patch of white hair, where an ill-fitting saddle had once rubbed. When it had drunk and lifted its head, its gray face ended in a chestnut muzzle with a wide white splash.

The horse turned its head to Matthew and nickered.

A chestnut horse with a white blaze. Jamie’s horse.

*

Matthew had wanted his son to go to school. Wanted him to turn aside from our life of drought and blizzard. I told him, then, that the money should go to the bank, but he shook his head, said that I couldn’t understand. He took Jamie and together they walked the road off our farm, dogged by a plume of dust that reached to the knee. I watched them from the kitchen window, marked the spot where they shifted into the distance.

I turned to the farm, the labor to wring the day’s food from the land. Under the high clear sky I fed the livestock, worked the vegetable garden, hauled water bucket by bucket from the well. In the surrounding fields, the crop grew, rolling seams of gold, a promise spread across the land.

As the sun slid low, Matthew returned, leading Jamie on a horse. The dust danced about their feet. At the paddock gate, Matthew lifted Jamie down, tousled his hair, both of them grinning. Jamie threw his arms around the horse’s neck. He led the horse into a stall, loosening the saddle-cinch while Matthew gave instructions.

The horse looked like a hide stretched over a fence rail. Hollow flanks, sharp hipbones, dull red coat. Jamie took feed meant for the milk-cow and gave it to the horse.

Matthew explained that he’d taken money that we’d scratched from the earth, money that could buy a doctor or a winter meal, and offered it to the horse-dealer. And the horse-dealer shook his head. But in a corner pen, Jaime spotted a worn-out cowpony, bound for slaughter. The horse dealer smiled and clinked the coins in his pocket.

Proud of his haggling, Matthew said that the horse would teach Jamie, would keep him safe. And Jamie loved that horse. Somewhere in this cracked-dry land he found pasture for it, and when he thought I wasn’t looking he stole corn from my garden. With a harshness that shames me now, I told him that come the long cold of February he might wish that corn in his own belly, but he ran to Matthew instead. I’d hear them, sometimes, from the barn, their voices light in the dusk air. Matthew, with his fool’s tales. I’d sit on the stoop, husking corn, and listen.

Every day across the hard-baked earth, that horse bore my son the seven miles to the school. That school, those books, they poured stories into Jamie’s head, washing out the simple ways of the land.

Matthew was proud of his son. On Sundays after the service he would gather with the other men, brag of his son’s learning. As the farmers talked of the milk drying up in the cows, of the wheat shoots turning brown under the sun, Matthew would rest his hands on Jaime’s shoulders.

—My son will be more than a farmer.

Would that I could take back his pride, humble ourselves and be forgiven.

Two weeks ago, the surveyors came, with their books and strange machines to map a route for the great railroad that will connect us to the East. Every day on his ride home, Jamie would stop awhile at the surveyor’s camp, share their food, listen to their talk. He’d ride home in the slanting sun, babbling their gibberish about devices that could measure the angle of the land as if slicing it into pieces.

I wish I’d forbade such talk. Told him our ways were dug from the earth, our lives rubbed dark with dust. But my words clattered like the blades of the windmill.

Two days ago, men came. Hungry men, empty men from the sun-scorched plain, slashing at the surveyors with knives of broken glass. They wanted the food and they took it. They tried to take the surveyor’s horse, but it kicked and tore free. So one of the men seized Jamie’s horse.

Afterward they said that the surveyors had tried to stop Jamie. But Jamie loved that horse. He grabbed the man’s arm—he was just a boy, not yet ten—he grabbed the man’s arm and the man, oh God, the man killed my son for his horse.

*

Read the rest of this fantastic story and thirteen other superb dark speculative yarns in the Dark Pages anthology. Print and ebook available now. Get your copy here!

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Categories: Anthology
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I’m constantly amazed that despite the limited, if any, promise of monetary returns gained by publishing independent books there are still bold, proud individuals out there who feel it’s their destiny to take the plunge. We should be thankful of these individuals, such as those behind Blade Red Press otherwise little gems like Dark Pages would never see the light of day.

Chosen from over 250 submissions, the fourteen stories collected in Dark Pages strike at the heart of the individual’s deepest desires and fears. Editor Brenton Tomlinson chose these stories because of their ability to excite “painful emotions”.

You can read the whole review here.

If you haven’t got your copy yet, why not? It’s awesome. All the details here.

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Categories: Anthology, News, Review
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Blade Red Press is very pleased to announce our latest publication. We’ve been working with Bill Congreve to produce a collection of his excellent dark fiction and the book is available now.

Souls Along The Meridian by Bill Congreve
Cover artwork is once again provided by the awesomely talented Halinka Orszulok.

Australia’s godfather of horror, Robert Hood, says:

“A long-overdue collection from a writer generally known for publishing the best work of his peers but whose own stories are powerful, insightful and at the top of the game.

Brutally satirical, humanely sorrowful or replete with blood, gristle and darkness, Bill Congreve’s tales explore the depths of the human and inhuman soul and linger in the heart and mind long after reading them.”

Official blurb:

Souls Along The Meridian is the latest collection of short fiction from William J Atheling award-winning Australian dark fiction author Bill Congreve.

Each story bears Congreve’s hallmark style – dark, prosaic and thought-provoking. From contemporary ghost stories to apocalyptic futures, from a deserted amusement park in an isolated town to the claustrophobic depths of the London Underground to the heat-drenched brutality of the Australian outback. These are tales of things we all hope and fear might just exist, somewhere, far from the safety of our lives.

Souls Along The Meridian is a book of dark futures and dreams. As the title story shows us, it is also a book about staying true to oneself in the face of whatever the world might throw at us.

Prepare to be provoked and entertained.

“A damn good writer.” Stephen Dedman

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Categories: New Releases, News
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Here’s the third in our series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology.

Neptune’s Garden
by Lisa A. Koosis

Jacob opened his eyes to find moonlight had silvered a wedge of the bedroom wall, and her moon-shadow hovered within it. Her voice drifted in through the open French doors. “I’m planting. Go back to sleep.”

“Planting?” Propping himself up onto his elbows, Jacob squinted at the bedside clock.

She didn’t answer. Jacob kicked away the sheets, and the skin on his arms prickled as the sea breeze dried his sweat. He swung his feet onto the floor and padded toward the doors.

She was leaning over the deck railing, her hair curled in loose ringlets as it did after a shower. Her nightgown clung to her shoulders and thighs as if wet.

The breeze hinted of rain. Jacob thought of the little garden out back, its salt-coated stumps of failed azaleas and the bare, clawing arms of rose bushes. Rain wouldn’t help.

“Planting? Libby?”

“My new garden.” She turned to face him. Her nightgown, indeed wet, clung to her breasts. Her eyes glistened, trance-like.

Fragments of images fell across his memory. The night sky. Flames.

He reached for her, but she yelped when his hands touched hers.

“Lib?”

The glitter in her eyes dimmed, the trance broken. Her eyelids fluttered. Jacob caught her before she hit the deck.

*

Sitting on the closed toilet lid, Libby held out her hands. Though trails of tears lined her cheeks, she stayed silent.

Jacob wet the washcloth and dabbed her reddened hands, trying to clean the sores without tearing open the newly forming blisters. His hands shook. He rinsed the washcloth, and the reddened water swirled down the drain.

Picking fragments of shells from beneath her torn fingernails, he asked, “What were you planting?”

“I just wanted to plant something, Jacob.” One hand curled over her belly. “Something that would grow.”

He nodded. “What did you plant, honey?”

Her eyes met his, her wounded hands clutching him.

“The moonseeds,” she said, and then he held her while she sobbed.

*

After she fell asleep, he slipped outside, descended the deck’s stairs, past his surfboard, and onto the night-cooled beach. Sand rimmed the hem of his pajama bottoms like salt on a margarita glass. The moon loomed large in the night sky like a Sword of Damocles hanging above the Earth, a frozen giant meteor of pending doom.

Meteor. His breath lodged in his throat. Like a half-remembered dream he saw them, ghosts that burned his retinas, leaving an after-image all these hours later.

To the right, tendrils of pale green light rose from the sand. He started toward it.

Standing by the window, pushing aside the filmy curtains. “Lib, you have to see this.”

“What are they?” she’d asked.

“Meteors, I think.”

Moonseeds, the memory of Libby’s voice whispered.

His foot slid from beneath him, and Jacob jerked back, sitting down hard on the sand. Maneuvering to his knees, he peered into a swimming-pool-sized hole. Wisps of green steamed up from it.

Jacob stared at the hole. His heart chugged. If he blinked, maybe it would vanish, would, in fact, never have been there at all. Around the edges, displaced sand formed a rooster-tail pattern, and pressed lightly into the sand were petite, deliberate footprints. Toes spread out, they headed right for the hole.

Where the footprints ended, the sand looked smooth, as if someone had slid down. He peered over. Green steam still rose from a bottom that looked like smooth, black glass. Seawater rippled across it.

On the far side, the sand was disturbed as well. Jacob envisioned Libby, hair wild, cooling the smoldering meteorite with cold seawater before clutching it to her chest like a baby and carting it up the side of the embankment.

That’s not right. It would be heavy. Cumbersome. Impossible.

More footsteps led away. Jacob followed them until they disappeared into the ocean. He stood, letting the surf nibble his toes.

Then he followed another set of footprints home, where Libby still slept, bandaged hands folded gingerly across her abdomen.

*

He watched her over breakfast, an island of unstirred cream atop his coffee. Milk slopped onto the table as Libby tried to spoon corn flakes into her mouth using her bandaged hands. On the wall, the seashell-shaped clock ticked away minutes.

She dropped her spoon and shoved the bowl towards him. A tsunami of milk and flakes cascaded out and onto his lap. “You can’t take this away from me, too.”

“Take this away? Libby? Take away what?”

Without responding, she rose from the table and started to walk away.

”Libby!”

Turning to look at him, she crossed her arms over her chest, an organic X, a barrier between them.

His shoulders tightened. “What have I ever taken away from you?”

Libby’s arms fell back to her side, the white of the bandages contrasting with her black shorts. “I don’t know. Nothing. I’m…”

He wiped up the spilled milk and soggy cornflakes, aware that she was watching.

“I’m just not hungry this morning,” she finished.

*

After he’d showered, shaved, and booted up the computer in preparation for the day’s work, he ventured outside. He found Libby kneeling in the sand-strewn grass by her dying garden. Her shoulders shook as she pruned dead branches from the rosebush, her bandaged fingers fumbling with the spring on the shears.

“I thought we were over this.” He wanted to be over this. He ached to be over it.

Rocking back on her ankles, she wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “Well, maybe we’re not.”

“Libby…”

“Maybe I’m not,” she amended. “Maybe I’ll never be over it.”

He knelt behind her, putting his hands on her arms and pulling her back toward him. She sagged back, letting him hold her for a minute before she shook him off, and retrieved the fallen shears.

“I wished on those shooting stars last night.” She tried again to cut toward the plant’s surviving heart. “And my wish was answered. That’s why you can’t take this away from me, Jacob.”

He wanted to carry her inside and lock all the doors, to lock the world out. Instead, he retrieved a shovel from the garage and headed to the beach to fill in the crater.

*

Want to read more? Get the Dark Pages anthology today!

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In our ongoing series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology, here’s an excerpt from the second story in the collection:

Heart of Ice
by Martin Livings

Lidja sits astride the deacon’s sodden corpse as he writhes, his erect penis cold and wet inside her. Sweat runs down the young sorceress’ chest, between her small breasts, as she rocks back and forth against the dripping body. Her hair, usually black, sweeps across her eyes in a golden blur. She tilts her head back, smiling, and looks to the corner of the guest room. There, next to the hearth, huddles the deacon’s betrothed, his beloved Gudrún. Her pale blue eyes are wide, and her perfect body is naked beneath the blankets because her nightdress is wrapped around Lidja’s slight body like a chameleon’s skin. The scent of the frightened girl still clings to it. The fire beside Gudrún seems to laugh quietly to itself in crackles and pops, amused by the girl’s terror. This in turn makes Lidja smile.

“Garún,” the corpse moans, bringing Lidja’s attention back to him. His face, though grey and bloated, is still that face she knows so well, the face she has imagined close to hers so many times before. His fetid grave-breath fills her nostrils. She breathes it in, savours it. “Garún,” he says again. He can’t pronounce the name, tongue black, swollen.

“Yes, my love,” Lidja whispers back to him. “Yes, it’s me.” The lie is the smallest of her sins.

He moans and settles back against the stone that lies in the centre of the room. It is the size and shape of a small bed, its surface flat and rough and smeared with the dirt of the field from which it came…

*

“Einn, tveir, Þrír!” the men of Myrká chanted, and in unison they strained to lift the massive rock. It came away from the muddy field with a sucking noise, and left a large, wet hole like an open wound in the earth and snow where it had lain for centuries, carried there by the passage of long-gone glaciers. It looked like the capstone of a grave, just as she’d envisioned it.

Lidja smiled, satisfied, from atop her gelding as she watched the men toil with it. She was impressed by their strength and dedication. The men, their faces red, chests bare and sweaty despite the winter chill, shuffled over to the cart, and with a single skilful motion deposited the rock over its side. The wooden wheels and axle creaked and cracked and buckled beneath the sheer weight of it, and for a long moment nobody dared speak or move or even breathe. But somehow the rickety cart didn’t collapse, though the wheels sank deep into the ground. The draft horses would make short work of that, however.

*

“How did you know it would be here?” the priest, Gunnarsson, asked. He stood by her horse, his robes tucked up into his rope belt to keep them clean. His legs looked as if they’d never seen the sun before, white as the snow that still covered most of the ground.

“It spoke to me,” Lidja answered, not looking at Gunnarsson. “Called to me. It’s waited here for me, all these years.”

The two watched in silence as the draft horses were harnessed to the cart. The animals seemed agitated, bothered by the proximity of the stone. Or perhaps it was Lidja’s presence that was upsetting them. It had taken her gelding many years of training to tolerate her, and even now she could feel it twitching between her thighs. Animals could sense her kind. They used to act the same way around…

“…your mother,” Gunnarsson said from beside Lidja, taking her by surprise. She’d been lost in thought.

She turned to the priest. “What?” she snapped.

“Your mother, Freya. I was sorry to hear about her passing.”

“Oh, such a nice way to put it,” Lidja replied bitterly. “I suppose you think she’s with your God now?”

Gunnarsson shook his head, solemn. “No, child,” he said. “Your mother burns in hell as a witch. As will you.”

Lidja laughed. “Ah, Father, at least we can agree on one thing.” She looked back to the stone, sitting there in the back of the cart. “But before I do, I can do something you cannot.”

“And what is that?”

“I can return the deacon to his grave.”

Gunnarsson didn’t respond. He just looked at the cart as well. The horses were secured to it now, and one of the men slapped them across their hindquarters with a whip. They whinnied, even more displeased than before, and dragged the cart across the field. The wheels barely turned, ploughing twin furrows into the soil and snow as it inched forward.

“It is not too late for you, Lidja,” the priest said at last, his voice soft. “God forgives all sins.”
Lidja’s eyes remained upon the stone. She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Not all.”

*

Lidja puts one hand flat against the rock, feels its chill, more cold even than the deacon’s wet, dead body. And getting colder.

The deacon spasms beneath her, inside her. It’s almost time.

Under her breath, she begins her incantation in a language old as the land itself. The stone beneath her hand turns colder still. The deacon seems unaware, lost in his undead ecstasy. He shudders beneath her again, grunts like an angry ape.

A freezing sensation runs through her body, starting in her loins and spreading out, filling her with ice water. She gasps as it threatens to swallow her whole; her mind flickers like a scrap of burning parchment caught in a blizzard. She struggles to remain conscious, to push the cold, empty darkness aside. She leans hard against the rock, continues the spell she memorised from the most potent grimoire that had belonged to her mother, before…

*

“Lidja!” Her mother’s voice cut through the gale outside, where Lidja was gathering firewood against the night. Something in her mother’s tone sent a twinge of fear through her stomach. She yanked her hatchet free of the lump of wood that she’d been trying to split in two and ran back towards the hut where she’d lived her whole life, just she and her mother, Freya, the most hated and feared woman for many miles. Freya the witch. Freya the demon. Freya the sorceress. And Lidja, daughter of Freya, tarred with the same brush. Her mother’s daughter.

She stepped into the hut and quickly closed the door behind her, to keep the worst of the winter wind outside. She shook herself like a wet dog, snow falling from her hair and shoulders, then looked for her mother. She wasn’t in the main room of the hut; the fireplace in the middle, its rough iron chimney going straight up through the roof, illuminated the scant furniture: a few tables, two straw beds covered in furs. Lidja was alone here.

“Mother?”

She crossed the room and pulled aside the deerskin curtain that separated the cooking area from the living space. Her mother stood in front of the rough wooden table that had always been there, her back to Lidja. A handful of small bones were scattered before her. Even from where she stood, Lidja could see the patterns they had formed, knew what it meant. Spirals of deceit, constellations of lies.

Her mother knew.

Freya turned, eyes afire with barely-controlled rage. “Lidja,” she said through clenched teeth, “what is the meaning of this?” She clutched a birch rod in her hands, one that Lidja knew all too well.

Lidja stood there in the entryway, eyes lowered.

“I see your intent, daughter,” her mother continued, anger simmering like a three day stew. “I see the past and the future. You know that.”

Lidja nodded, still silent.

Freya took a step forward. “Did you honestly believe you could hide this from me? From me?” she shrieked.
Still Lidja didn’t respond, kept her head down. She knew her mother’s temper, bore many scars from years of punishment. She knew the sorceress’ strengths. And her weaknesses.

“Hold out your arms, child,” Freya ordered her daughter. She was shaking with rage now, apoplectic. She raised the rod that she held in her hands so tightly that her knuckles were as white as bone.

“No,” Lidja murmured.

“What did you say?” her mother hissed. “What did you say?”

Lidja looked up. “I said no. I’m not a child anymore.” There was a strength in her voice that she didn’t know she possessed. She felt as if she’d left her body and was floating beside it, watching on, detached. She watched herself meet her mother’s gaze without flinching. One hand lowered to her side. “You can’t tell me what to do anymore.”

“We’ll see about that!” The beech rod whipped upwards, above Freya’s head. She bared her teeth, ready to strike.

Her mother was a fine seer, could see the future and the past with a startling clarity. But, like all seers, there was one occurrence that was hidden to her.

Her own demise.

Lidja swung her hatchet without fear or anger, just a stony resolve. Its head sank into the side of Freya’s neck. The beech rod fell to the earthen floor, and Lidja let go of the hatchet’s handle. It stayed there, sticking out at an odd angle. Freya’s lips moved, but no words emerged, just a deep, wet burble. She shuddered, and blood coloured her lips, dripped down her chin like berry juice. She fell to her knees, her confused eyes finding her daughter’s. They held a silent plea for mercy. Too late.

Lidja reached out and grasped the hatchet’s wooden handle again. Pulled it free.

Blood gushed from Freya’s neck like a burst dam, a flood released. She collapsed sideways to the earthen floor with a wet thud. She didn’t move again. Beneath the body, the dirt drank deeply of her.

Lidja stood there for a moment longer, her mother’s blood on her hands, her face, her soul. Then she put down the bloodied hatchet and opened the rear door of the hut. She grasped Freya’s ankles and dragged her body outside, into the snow. It would be her grave, at least until the spring thaw.

She returned inside and closed the door, leaving her mother and her guilt behind. Freya’s casting bones were still on the table, still in the pattern that had betrayed her. She gathered them up, focused her will on them, and tossed them across the table.

When they came to rest, they showed her the rock, so clear that she might have been standing in the field next to it.

Lidja smiled. She had much to do, and not much time. It wouldn’t be long before the people of Myrká sent for her. She had to be ready.

*

The rock cracks.

Lidja looks past the squirming corpse beneath her, and sees that the stone is no longer stone. It has turned to ice, clear and blue like the glaciers to the north. And across its smooth surface, a delicate spider web of fractures radiates out from beneath her palm, spreading wider and wider until it covers the ice entirely. She looses a triumphant cry, thrilled by the results.

The corpse’s eyes open again, milky-white cataracts clouding them. He looks at Lidja, a troubled expression on his grey, dead face.

In the corner, Gudrún sobs.

The deacon’s head turns towards the sound. “Garún?” he slurs. His eyes return to Lidja. “Garún?”

“Shhh,” Lidja hushes. She leans down and kisses the corpse lightly on the lips. Her tongue darts out, just a little, tasting his cold, dead flesh…

*

Want to read more? Get the Dark Pages anthology today!

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Blade Red Press is very proud of its first anthology of dark fiction, Dark Pages. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing here (and in various other places online) excerpts from all the great stories in this excellent collection. If you haven’t got yourself a copy yet, these previews are sure to convince you to buy a copy. You can get a copy directly from us or at Amazon and all other good bookstores. Click here for all you need to know.

Meanwhile, here’s the first excerpt. This comes from the opening story in the anthology.

The Stain of the Psychopomp King
by Lucien E. G. Spelman

I was a nervous wreck the first day I saw my father. He was at war when I was born and through most of my early years, and although he would write my mother concise letters every few months (a page or two of neat handwriting meant to reassure her that he was still alive), he never wrote to me. I never knew him. As far as I as was concerned, he was only a legend and a photograph. A stranger.

The last letter he wrote to her said he would be home before my sixth birthday.

He kept his word.

On the day of his arrival I paced around the front window, waiting and watching until I saw the old yellow taxi pull up to the curb. The back door groaned open and out came my father, followed by a large, rough-looking dog that I thought must be a gift for me. A thought which only served to increase my anxiety. My father stood staring at the house. Squaring off with it as though he might lay siege to it. As though it were an obstacle. After what seemed like forever, he ran his fingers through his thick hair, hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder, and started up the walkway with the dog padding alongside. The dog cast watchful glances here and there, but my father seemed so calm, so sure of himself, that I immediately wanted nothing more in the world than to be him. To be with him. At the very least, to be alongside him. Like the dog was.
He reached the top of the stairs and saw me peeking out from behind the curtains. He offered me a wink, but as soon as I knew I was spotted I panicked and snapped the curtains shut.

My mom threw open the door and wrapped her arms around him so desperately I thought for one horrible moment she was trying to strangle him. There was always a melancholy desperation in my mom. My father smiled, hugged her back, and winked at me again. But it was clear, even to an almost six-year-old, that he would never be all the way home. His eyes told a dark story. His eyes told the world that part of him would simply be somewhere else forever.

The dog walked through the door behind him, eyed me warily for a moment, and finally offered me his ear to scratch.

My father shook my hand, then kissed the top of my head clumsily.

As it turned out, the dog was not a gift for me, and my fears about him proved to be unfounded.

My father called him Hound (although he looked more like a shepherd) and he was a constant companion to our family, and a vigilant watchdog until the day he died.

Until the day they both died.

*

My father got a job as an ironworker at Yankee Steeplejacks and settled into postwar life the best he could. He went about his new life with gently imposing dignity, providing for my mom and me without complaint. He asked for nothing, rarely spoke unless spoken to, and in the evenings he played his trumpet in the basement. It was an odd choice of instrument for such a quiet man, but the type of music he played on the thing suited him well–wistful, melancholy strains and passages that would drift up through the heater vents. My mother and I would listen in the living room; she knitting; me alphabetizing my comic book collection on the floor, or petting Hound; each of us pretending to be doing something mundane, but in truth simply being carried away by the notes. Each of us trying to be near him.

*

He never mentioned the war or his experience there, but one sultry evening, there was a reminder of his time away. Suppertime; a staccato knock at the door; a man in uniform. My father spoke with him for a few moments in his own tongue. I had never heard my father’s native language before–only the residue of it when he flattened out his r’s or pronounced certain words with ”th” in them: zis and zat for this and that.

It was disconcerting. It seemed to widen the gap between us somehow.

As the man at the door spoke, my father became first crestfallen, then wistful, then determined. I watched the display with fascination. It was more emotion than I had ever before seen him show, and I could read it all without understanding a word. I suddenly hated the man at the door for his ability to move my father so deeply. Eventually, the man handed him a large map rolled into a tube, then saluted. My father returned the salute, barked out what sounded like an order, and firmly closed the door.

He excused himself from supper, and when my mother asked him what was wrong, he said a friend from the war had been killed, and then he said something strange: He said he would have to play him home.
He didn’t say anything more.

He went down to the little basement, and that evening he played all through the night and maybe even a little into the next day, because when I got up for breakfast, he was just coming up from the basement, eyes red, hair wild.

*

The first time I saw the stain, the tattoo, the whole tattoo, I was almost twelve. My father took great pains to hide it. He wore long-sleeved shirts all year long, even in the stifling New England summers, but even so, the marks and lines of it would peek out beneath his sleeves. He even hid it at home. He would dress in his room with the door closed, and he would never leave the shower wearing anything less than a long terry robe. It didn’t seem he was hiding it from my mother, though. Of course she had seen it. She could be in the room while he dressed. They even took a shower together once, on New Year’s Eve, my mom drunk and giggly from champagne. But he damn sure hid it from me. It was maddening. He was maddening.

After school one afternoon, sensing that the time was right, I rolled the dice and asked him flat out to let me see the whole thing. He glared at me at first, wounding me. Wasn’t I his son? Didn’t I deserve to understand his history? To be a part of his history? The hurt turned to anger, and I glared back. Fiercely (I thought). Piercingly (I hoped). And for some reason, that seemed to soften him. He broke from my gaze, shaking his head and muttering something to himself that I didn’t understand, and then finally let loose with a wide toothy smile. It was beautiful and terrifying. Like seeing a painting come to life. He laid the newspaper by his side and stood up. His callused hands worked the buttons of his flannel, seeming almost too big for the job. He folded the shirt neatly, laid it next to the paper, and then took off his undershirt. He stood for a moment regarding me, his undershirt balled in his fist, waiting for the inevitable reaction; his body was a mass of scars. The largest ran from his left shoulder across his chest and disappeared below the waist of his Levis. There were circular scars with pinched edges, tiny star-shaped scars in a constellation above his rib cage, a diamond-shaped scar at his throat. Each a secret history. He turned to show me the tattoo, and I was unsurprised to find more scars on his back, including one that looked like a burn running across the tattoo, warping it a bit. The tattoo was a line of music running from his left wrist to his right, across his shoulders and back. I knew the tattoo had notes of course, I had seen them on those rare occasions peeking out, but I thought there might be something more. A dragon or something. A mermaid. Felix the Cat. It was just music. He opened his arms out to straighten the staff, and let me have a good long look at the quarter notes and half notes scored in blue ink against his pale flesh.

Against the fading light from the window, he was a fleshy silhouette of a cross, scarred and irregular.

“Is it a song?” I asked.

“The bones of a song,” he said.

My eyes shifted from the music to the scars and back again. A few notes, the ones on the burned skin were difficult to read, compressed and discolored.

I soaked him in. I soaked in the notes. The lines. The bars. The fanciful “S” that I would learn later was a treble clef.

“Enough?” he said, breaking the spell.

“Enough,” I said, but frankly I could have looked at him forever. Each scar held a tale, and if he wouldn’t tell me, then I would’ve been content to stand there and make them up. Just to have the fable. Just to have the story of him.

He pulled on the t-shirt, grabbed the flannel from the couch, and patted me on the head.

“Why don’t you go play with your friends,” he said, and headed for his cave downstairs.

I pretended to leave, but when he was out of sight I went back to the couch and sat there watching the dust motes chase each other in the fading light and listened to him play.

*

My mother never helped when it came to solving the mystery of my father. She could be maddeningly obtuse when she wanted to. I would try and trick her into offering information about him, but she never took the bait. It became a kind of game between us. I once lied to her that kids at school were making fun of me because they thought my father was a German spy, and she said to tell them he spoke with a Scandinavian accent, not a German one, but if they wanted to discuss it further, she could send him down there if they liked. That put an end to that.

I was determined to solve the mystery of my father on my own, then. I would spy on him when he wasn’t looking, the scars and the notes and the war and the language framing him, gilding him sometimes: a warrior hero. Tarnishing him others: a Nazi spy. But mostly just blending together, creating a haze, making him more arcane, more impenetrable.

I did it on my own. I crept down the stairs, terrified that he would come home early and catch me. I pulled the chain on the single bulb hung from the floor joists, which seemed to cast as much shadow as it did light, and was almost disappointed with the simplicity of the room. A music stand with a tattered, leather-bound book of sheet music standing on a round Persian-style rug, threadbare where my father stood. His trumpet sat in an open, old brown and silver case next to the music stand, gleaming in the single light. As I crept forward, Hound moved from the shadows, and began to growl and whimper at me. I had no idea he was there. I had no idea even how he got there. When I last saw Hound he was in the kitchen, quietly napping by his dinner dish. I jumped, startled. Guilty. He must have snuck behind me. I spun around and caught his eyes, pleading with him silently not to make any noise. He ignored my pleas, and the growls and whimpers became barks. Loud and purposeful. I heard the kitchen door slam.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I executed a panicky about-face, and ran up the stairs, straight into my mother. For the first time in my life, I saw a flash of her anger. She grabbed me by the arm fiercely.

“Would you like it if I looked in your closet? Under your bed? Between the mattresses? In your secret places?” she said. She was shouting. She had never shouted before.

“No, Ma’am,” I said, flushing, eyes brimming with tears.

“Leave people their safety,” she growled.

I’m sorry! I thought, You never said it was a rule. Nobody ever said it was a rule that I couldn’t go down there, but I said nothing; I just looked at my shoes.

And then, all at once, the anger was gone and her face was round and soft and kind again. It was as if she were reading my mind. She brushed back my hair.

“Go and play outside,” she said, gently this time.

They always seemed to want me outside.

*

My secret, guilty pleasure was to go and watch him high in the buildings downtown, walking fearlessly across the beams. He would stop sometimes and gaze out into the distance, out to the sea, just standing there with one hand in his pocket and the other wiping the sweat from his brow. At those moments, from that distance, I felt closer to him than I ever had, my tiny little father up in the skyscrapers. He seemed vulnerable. At those moments I could almost imagine I knew his secret heart.

Once, on a particularly windy day, I played hooky and went to watch him. I was worried because another steeplejack had died the month before–buffeted by the wind until he lost his footing and slipped, prayers and admonitions splitting the air as he fell. I watched him fall, but never told my father. I wondered which was the last word to escape his lips as he landed between the tables at the outdoor café with a wet thump. God, probably.

I arrived at the worksite just as the lunch whistle blew, and my father turned and saw me. The blood drained from my face, and I ran away so fast I left my lunchbox sitting on the sidewalk. That evening when I got home from school, a note was sitting on my bed attached to the lunchbox, and next to a brand new King Silvertone trumpet. It said:

I would prefer you attend school. – Dad

I assumed he meant to give me lessons, but he never brought it up. Finally I asked him over dinner one night if he might be willing to teach me, but he said he didn’t know how to teach, and then changed the subject in his simple but firm way. My mom put her hand on mine under the table and held it like that until dessert, eating awkwardly. The next day there were three trumpet instruction books on my bed: 20 All Time Hits–b Flat Solos, Sugar Blues for Trumpet, and The EZ TRUMPET METHOD Instruction Book–Beginner to Advanced.

From that point forward, when he was playing in the basement at night, I would go practice in my room, leaving my mom alone to knit and listen to the strains of this discordant duet. Eventually I got good enough to be able to jam along with records, performing duets with Armstrong and Eldridge and James. But never my father.

*

Want to read more? Plus thirteen other equally engrossing tales of dark fiction?

Get your copy of Dark Pages now.

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Categories: Anthology
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Dark Pages, the anthology of dark speculative fiction, is now available directly from us here at Blade Red Press. You can pay via PayPal and you can use a credit card if you don’t have a PayPal account. Just click on the Buy Now button on this page and follow the prompts.

The book is only AU$15.00, including postage, anywhere in the world. We can’t say fairer than that!

If you have any problems, please contact us.

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For those of you in the e-revolution, you can now read the Dark Pages anthology on your Kindle, iPhone or any other e-reader you choose. Dark Pages is now available on Kindle from Amazon and in any other ebook format from Smashwords.

You can find the Amazon Kindle edition here.

You can find multiple format ebook editions at Smashwords here.

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Categories: Anthology, Ebook, New Releases, News
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Our first anthology of dark speculative fiction, Dark Pages, is now available from Amazon. The stories included are:

The Stain of the Psychopomp King by Lucien E G Spelman
Heart Of Ice by Martin Livings
Neptune’s Garden by Lisa A Koosis
Dust by Naomi Bell
To Die For by S D Matley
The Franchise by Joe L Murr
Clip Notes by Marty Young
Blood on Green by Victoria Anisman-Reiner
Cargo by Aaron Polson
Nepenthe by Felicity Dowker
Yellow Water Pike by Derek Rutherford
Surveying The Land by B D Wilson
Nightwork by Robert Neilson
Hand And Cradle by Trent Roman

Cover art is by the awesomely talented Australian artist Halinka Orszulok.

You can find Dark Pages now at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Don’t forget you can also order the book directly from us – details on the Contact Page.

Treat yourself to a sumptuous feast of dark fiction today. While you’re at it, treat a few other people too. You won’t regret it.

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Categories: Anthology, New Releases, News
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