- Introduction: Dreams and Nightmares by A. J. French
- Flowers in Her Hair by A.J. Brown
- Lifeboat by Larsen
- Paradiso by Châteaureynaud
- The Doll by Hornak
- The One Ton Woman and the Amazonian Half Man by Malinenko
- True Blue by Parks
- The Emperor's Nose by Paul Malone
INTRODUCTION to Issue 9 Stories
Dreams and Nightmares
By A. J. French
Men and women writing solely of your nightmares, I say unto thee: You write only of yourselves.
Every grand vision, every lumbering wretch, every teetering town, every cosmic uttering, every decayed child and teeth-torn flesh—that is yourself you see. Not a glimpse of an enigmatic world, or some intuitive understanding of arcane knowledge.
You who records nightmares as though an Eidolon sent them. You cherish these horrors, thinking they grant power and importance, yet you're quick to dismiss them as meaningless. You chalk them up to the cinema and daily events.
You with faces black and grim visions deep. Witnessing one monstrosity, then the next, pondering it all, frightened, alone.
A nameless creature bolted together with barbed wire, with rusty nails driven through its tough red hide. Moaning beast of anguish groping its way through an empty town. A shadowy apparition wheeling in the sky. Another taking wing above some gabled rooftops. Green serpents dropping through miasma clouds. Newborn babies falling like some perverted rainstorm, sobbing and wailing, striking the cobbles in sprays of bone and blood.
Somewhere nearby you lay in the safety of your bed, and I can hardly believe it, but is that a smile on your lips? Do you find this bloodstorm amusing?
How you cling to every wretched image as though it were the finest treasure, and how you ponder it in vain, wondering at its cryptic meaning. You find such importance in these nightmares, when you know nothing of their import.
Is it because they rumble the earth beneath you, shock you, amaze you, hold you in a state of awe? Are you so dead to yourself that such a level of stimulus is needed?
Let us not forget the zombies, the living dead, the flesh-eaters. I know without asking that these creatures haunt your dreams. You wake shivering, screaming maybe, covered in sweat.
Will you reach for the notepad beside your bed and jot down the images, so that later you can make use of them? Spin a marvelous tale, one that frightens, that grabs the reader's and—let us not forget—the editor's attention. One that sells, that gets published, that creates a tiny splash in the horror industry?
I am brilliant! you will say. Where do the images—these accursed images unlike anything in my waking life—where do they come from?
Damned if I know, you will answer. But they're a wellspring of inspiration. And they are mine; they come only to me. That means I must be special.
You remain ignorant to the fact that people are responding to these images. Shine the light of logic on this, and you'd realized they are privy to the dark visions as well. When they read your darkness, they recall their own, and they feel less alone.
Men and Women writing solely of your nightmares, I say unto thee: You write only of yourselves—
—Shut down grand majestic dream—
—Rejoin reality, taste every tear, endure every sorrow, sniff the decay—
—Listen for the sound of the Death's Head Child rising!—
You look into yourself. You peer into your own depths. You are every person in your dreams.
The remains of your divinity lie scattered like broken glass across a wreckage yard, sharp shards glinting in the sunlight. Feral children roll in the debris, cutting and scraping their hands and knees. Clutching themselves, writhing, weeping—MY GOD, HOW THEY WEEP!
I can hear them in your paragraphs, in your sentences, in the resolution of your plots and narratives. They cry through the void, begging to be reconnected with their inherent source.
It is YOU who is weeping, YOU who is diseased and decayed, YOU like a zombie, dead creature stumbling through vacant streets in search of flesh to devour, you who are STARVING.
All thoughts of grandiose vision are illusion. All ideas of religious import are illusion. You cannot bear to look at yourself, so you ascribe these nightmares to some external source. And then, like a child, you cherish them. You hold them to your chest in the dark, turning them over in your hands, secreting them away under floorboards where no one will find them.
No one is going to steal YOUR ethereal images. But you will let them view a couple in the form of a short story.
Still the horror—all this violence, brutality, and horror—is YOU. And now I turn from my darkened corner, where heretofore I have secreted myself, and you see that I too am horrific, morbid. I am small and withered and thin like a sick child, and yet my features belie a certain maturity, a certain experience. I am dressed in tattered petticoats, my face long and droopy like an Edvard Munch painting. Greasepaint furrows down my cheeks, my angular jawline. My eyes leak black mascara, round empty things devoid of life.
I scuttle nearer to you on bent and broken limbs. You recoil. You are no longer smiling. None of this amuses you.
I reach in your direction, and now it is I who is weeping. I cry, "My brother, what have they done to you? My sister, what have they done to you? —
—God in Heaven, what have they done?"
BIO:
A.J. French has appeared in Abandoned Towers, The Absent Willow Review, Short-Story.Me!, Golden Visions Magazine, and the upcoming issue of Black Ink Horror. He also has stories featured in the following anthologies: Ruthless: An Extreme Horror Anthology with introduction by Bentley Little; Pellucid Lunacy edited by Michael Bailey; M is for Monster compiled by John Prescott; Novus Creatura presented by Aurora Wolf Press; and many fine Static Movement and Pill Hill Press anthologies.