Monsters in Spaaaace! E-Book

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

One of the most common fears is the fear of the dark: what might be lurking in the shadows, what we can’t see. All of the monsters from your childhood could be hiding in that darkness.Given this, what could be more terrifying than the infinite void of space? Who knows what creatures await you once you leave the comfortable confines of your home planet.Monsters in Spaaaace! contains seventeen such explorations, classic monsters in off world settings. This collection contains werewolves, vampires, ghosts, haunted items, and more all in the blackness of space or the terrifying settings of foreign worlds and abandoned starships. Prepare to be scared out of your spacesuit.

Leseprobe

MONSTERS IN SPAAAACE!

MICHAEL CIESLAK

Monsters in Spaaaace! is published by Dragon’s Roost Press.

This anthology is © 2019 Dragon’s Roost Press and Michael Cieslak.

All stories within this anthology are © 2019 by their representative authors and are printed with the permission of the authors.

All stories in this anthology are original except:

“Atoms” originally appeared in Fantastic Collectibles

“Captain Clone” originally appeared in Ray Gun Revival

Artwork: Luke Spooner (http://caririonhouse.com)

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any persons living, dead, or otherwise animated is strictly coincidental.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0-9988878-9-0

Digital ISBN: 978-1-956824-53-7

Ingram ISBN: 978-1-956824-47-6

Dragon’s Roost Press

2470 Hunter Rd

Brighton, MI 48114

https://thedragonsroost.biz/

CONTENTS

Introduction

Nana

Cold Comfort

Thin Air

AstroNosferatu and the Invisible Void

Bellerophon’s Gambit

The Moon Forest

The Silver Crown

The Rise of Iës

Spider In A Space Helmet

Hairy Jack

Government Issue

Ashes, Ashes

Atoms

Black Lagoon

Captain Clone

Cracking Open A Cold One

Red Death

Our Sincerest Gratitude

About the Contributors

About Last Day Dog Rescue

Also Available from Dragon’s Roost Press

INTRODUCTION

2019

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Mission.

The 40th anniversary of the classic horror film Alien.

One year after the proposal of the US Space Force.

How could we not create a collection of space themed horror?

We’ve explored loneliness, isolation, and solitude in our first anthology. We Put the Love Back in Lovecraft in our second anthology. We explored the creatures of cryptozoology in our recent pair of anthologies. Now we will go where all good series eventually go...

...to space.

Anyone who knows the history of Dragon’s Roost Press knows that our anthologies have given us the opportunity to explore some of our favorite topics. All right, so loneliness and isolation may not be favorites, but Desolation: 21 Tales for Tails gave us the opportunity to help our favorite canine rescue organization. We’ve been long time fans of the Cthulhu mythos. Cryptozoology and cryptids in general have fascinated us since childhood.

So has science fiction and the exploration of space.

The desire to leave the planet and explore the stars has been with us all our lives. It was there before our love of monsters and horror. In fact, our Editor in Chief once seriously entertained the idea of becoming an astronaut (then he learned how much math was involved). Still, that desire to feel weightlessness, to rocket beyond the reaches of Earth’s gravity and discover what lay out beyond the black has never left us.

Jason, the Leprechaun, the Cenobites, even the Critters ended up going (back) into space. We decided it was time to give some other monsters that same chance.

Earlier this year we started accepting submissions for an anthology featuring classic monsters with the stories set in space. You hold that anthology in your hands. We have collected 16 stories and one poem that we think you are really going to enjoy.

And by enjoy we mean scare the space suit off of you.

NANA

BY SARAH HANS

You sit with your feet dangling in the black water, kicking at a plastic bottle, when the latest drop crashes to the beach. The delivery ship jets away across the gray sky, and you’re up and running like a dozen other kids, leaping over old tires and bounding across mounds of reeking refuse. A fresh drop means unpicked treasures, and whoever gets there first will have first choice.

You scale the mountain of garbage and wade through knee-high detritus searching for a prize. There’s no competition among the children, not like there is between adults. You’re not after items to trade or build, you’re after items to collect. You call to Arin to see the holographic baseball card you found wedged between two glass bottles. It’s sticky and one he already has, but duplicates are more exciting than nothing. You bring Rissa an action figure to add to her collection. The legs are missing, but she’s delighted. She can always splice it together with a torso and a random head to create a finished hero.

“We’re gonna throw stuff down the whirlpool later, if you want to come,” Rissa offers.

You shrug. You desperately want to go, but you have responsibilities now that you’re old enough to contribute to the household.

“I have to look for books later, for Mother. The whirlpool is for little kids, anyway.”

Rissa narrows her eyes at you and then scurries away.

Afternoon humidity sets in and most of the other kids drift away to enjoy their finds. Your energy wanes in the heat, and the pile of fresh trash starts to stink. Your stomach aches, ready for a midday meal. You turn to climb down the pile and something slick slides out from under your foot and you’re thrown off balance. You fall, sliding and rolling down the incline, and the trash heap shifts around you. Your heart hammers when you slide to a stop halfway down, awaiting an avalanche, certain that you’re about to meet the same end as so many pickers before you, buried beneath a mountain of steaming garbage.

The trash settles and you breathe a sigh of relief. As you scramble to your feet, ready to inch your way carefully home, something catches your eye, something fabric, stained but originally flesh-colored. You grab for it, excitedly at first, and then more cautiously, slowly pulling your treasure from the mound so as not to disturb it again.

The object is a doll. She is made of beige fabric, now stained a filthy gray, the same color as the sludge water that taints everything here. Her eyes were once buttons, but they went missing long ago, leaving behind only two pieces of discolored brown felt. Her mouth is stitched on in a wide smile that, combined with the missing eyes, gives the impression of a grimace. Her hair is little more than a few frayed strands of yarn. She’s clothed in a dress that might once have been lavender with tiny purple flowers, and her shoes have been painted on, still glossy and black.

She’s exactly the treasure you hoped to find. You clutch her to your chest and rush home, heedless of the dangers in the sliding garbage beneath your bare feet.

You climb the ladder to your house with the doll tucked under your arm. You and your mother live in a house built on stilts to protect it from the dangerous tides that threaten to sweep the whole community away during the monsoon season. Your house is not the largest, but you have no brothers and sisters with whom you must share your tiny bedroom, so there’s no one to resent your doll collection. You straighten the new doll’s dress and present her to the others, arrayed all over your bedroom. In your collection there are mostly baby dolls and a few fashion dolls, as their plastic shells are the most likely to survive decay. Most are naked, many are missing limbs or eyes, others are merely watchful heads without bodies to support them. But you know all their names, all their personalities, their likes and dislikes, and which dolls get along with which others.

“This is...Nana,” you announce, holding up the new doll so each of the others can get a good look. “I expect you all to be on your best behavior.” The room is crowded, but you find a spot on the mattress where you can place the newest addition to your collection. Nana grimaces up at you.

The midday meal is shrimp dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, the meat gray and sludge-flavored. Your mother offers you half a piece of fruit from that morning’s picking, a rare and fantastic thing, and you savor the delicate sweetness of it, the soft texture, the edge of rot giving it a sour aftertaste.

You return to your room for a rest after the meal, curled up on your mattress stuffed with bits of fabric from the trash heaps, and you dream of Nana. She is whole, with bright button eyes and red yarn hair braided down her back in two neat plaits. She stares and smiles, and you hold her hand, and you skip through a field of wildflowers. You know what a field is because of the books your mother brings home from the heaps, but you’ve never experienced a wide-open space full of flowers, with a blue sky above you. Everything here on Tethis IV is gray, gray and brown and black and stinking. In your dream, the air is clean and smells sweet, and you hear birdsong in the distance. There are colors here you rarely see, pale pinks and bright yellows. You wake with tears in your eyes for a life you never knew you wanted.

Mother shakes you awake. “It’s alright. You’re safe,” she says, her brow creased with worry.

It’s rare for Mother to touch you, and rarer still for her to look at you with concern etched in her features. “It wasn’t a bad dream,” you say. “Nana and I were playing in a field of flowers. They smelled so good.”

She frowns at the doll pressed against your chest. “This is Nana?”

You hold up your prize proudly. “I found her this morning.”

Mother recoils, disgusted. “She’s even filthier than the last one.”

“That’s not her fault,” you say. “Everything here is filthy.”

Mother reacts as if she’s been slapped. It is, after all, her fault you both have to live on this awful trash planet. She’s the one who was exiled to Tethis IV, alone except for you, without a partner to help her raise you. Her expression hardens again into the mask of indifference she usually wears, and she leaves your bedroom.

You feel guilty for making Mother unhappy, and spend the afternoon picking the new heap for books, Nana tucked under your arm. You find enough texts to fill the largest canvas bag you can carry and bring them home when the monsters start to roil the depths in preparation for evening, driving all the pickers inland.

Mother isn’t home. You light the only lantern and sit on the floor, dumping books out around you to explore their pages. Most of the children of Tethis IV can’t read, but your mother made sure you could read, and read well. It was, she said, one of life’s greatest pleasures, and there were so few pleasures here. Mother’s trade in books had, of late, suffered due to the illiteracy of the other exiles. She used to trade books for food, fuel, fabric, and whatever else you needed with ease, because the other exiles were hungry for new titles. Lately, though, demand had dried up. She had a theory it was because many of the exiles who could read had died or had their sentences commuted, and fewer prison ships were landing here each year, their human cargoes diminished.

You only know of what happens beyond your filthy shores thanks to the gossip new exiles bring. Most of it is meaningless and holds little interest for you. Tethis IV is all you’ve ever known, except for what you’ve learned in Mother’s precious books. Sometimes she lets you read the nicest ones before she trades them. She has kept a few of her favorites on a shelf above the door, a handful of her most treasured texts, and you’ve read them with her so many times you’ve memorized the pages.

You prop Nana beside you and flip through the new books, looking for pictures. One is a dictionary, with a few drawings of plants and animals you’ve never seen. You find a medical text with fascinating anatomy illustrations. There’s a small red journal, leather-bound, and very unlike the others. The pages are handwritten, and there are sketches of people and places. The journal falls open to a sketch of Nana, as you saw her in the dream, with buttons for eyes and her hair styled in two neat plaits.

A chill makes you shiver. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Mother at the door. You look up, and the shape of a woman dissolves into shadow. Panic flutters behind your breastbone. You pick up Nana and the journal and go to your room, shutting the door. You feel safe surrounded by the dolls, watching and protecting you. You slip the journal under your mattress and go to sleep with Nana tucked under your chin.

You dream again, this time of playing with Nana in a big, clean house. You’re wearing clean, soft clothes, and your hair is freshly washed and curled and full of colorful ribbons. A tall, pale woman clothed in black smiles down at you, but her eyes are sad. She loves you, but death hangs around her like a shroud. She is sad the same way your mother is sad, and you take her hand and tell her you love her, trying to chase away the ghosts that mar her lovely face.

When morning comes, Mother makes you a breakfast of something she calls “grits.” From the descriptions you’ve read in cookbooks, this viscous substance is nothing like grits, but it’s made from the only edible plant that grows on Tethis IV, which the exiles cultivate and trade. It tastes sour and has a lumpy, gooey texture. It’s not your favorite meal, but it does fill you up and make your stomach feel warm and satisfied. Mother must have found some valuable books, or someone who found books valuable. It has been months since you’ve enjoyed a breakfast so decadent.

After breakfast, Mother begins sorting the books you found to take them for trade. You retreat to your room to thumb through the journal. You’re particularly interested in the pages that talk about the doll. The journal’s author also calls her Nana, a fact that makes your hands tremble as you turn the pages. The author writes about her vivid dreams, where she lives in another time, in another place, on Old Earth. She sketches the field of wildflowers and the face of the pale woman in black.

You drop the journal to the floor and kick it away from you at the sight of the woman’s face. How did you know the doll was named Nana? How did the author of this journal draw what was in your dreams? Who is the woman in black? You stare down at Nana, unsure what to do. She grimaces up at you, her smile suddenly malevolent. You need space and time to think. You open the door and take her into the main room of the house, placing her on the shelf above the door with your mother’s most precious books. Then you hurry out of the house, off to the trash heaps, where you do your best thinking while looking for treasures.

Hours later, you return to the house with a broken chair and part of a coffee pot. Mother is pleased, as she thinks she’ll be able to trade them both. There’s no fruit for the midday meal, but there is bread. It’s gritty and has a bitter flavor because the flour is made from ground-up insects, but it’s nutritious.

Nana is no longer above the door. You assume Mother must have gotten rid of her. You find yourself relieved, and then you feel a pang of guilt for feeling relieved. When you go in your room, you find that Nana sits on the bed, and now she has eyes that gleam in the dirty gray light. You scream.

“I thought I’d surprise you,” Mother says, her hands fluttering in distress. “I found the buttons this morning. They’re real abalone shell.”

You nod slowly and twist your face into a smiling shape. “They’re beautiful.” Your pulse gallops and you hope Mother doesn’t notice.

Mother goes out to pick in the afternoon. You tell her you don’t feel well and you want to stay in. She has books for you to sort while she’s gone, but while you work you can feel Nana’s pearlescent eyes watching you. The red journal calls to you where you left it on the floor. Eventually the presence of both is oppressive. You go into your room and pick them up, ready to toss them out the window.

But held in your hands, Nana is just a handmade doll, and the journal is just an old, crumbling book. Why are you so afraid? It seems silly, now, your fear. You sit on your mattress and your doll collection watches as you seat Nana in your lap and open the journal. The author found Nana in something called an “antique shop.” The doll has “Nana” stitched on her behind, so that must be her name, and you reason that you must have glimpsed the embroidered tattoo, and that’s how you knew what to call her.

Nana and the author became inseparable. The author began to have vivid dreams, and then started seeing the pale woman in black during her waking hours, always out of the corner of her eye. She had a dream about the woman trying to kill her, to drown her.

An old newspaper clipping falls out of the journal. You unfold it carefully and try to read it, but the ink is faded and the paper yellowed, so you can pick out only a few words: infanticide, disappeared, scandal. You’ll need to look them up in the dictionary above the door to learn their meanings. There is a photograph, an image that makes your pulse beat hard. It’s the face of the woman in the black dress. She isn’t wearing black and she looks happier than she did in your dream, but it’s the same woman. She holds a child in her lap, a child a little younger than you, with pale curls and bright eyes.

The author decided to return Nana to the antique shop in hopes of ending the frightening dreams. The journal pages after that are full of nonsensical scrawling and a drawing of huge, angry, black eyes.

You tuck the journal back under your mattress and gaze into Nana’s shiny button eyes. They’re so bright and colorful against the filthy brown of the felt, the stained beige of her fabric skin. They don’t look right. You think how pretty they would be sewn onto your own shirt or woven into your hair, how Arin and Rissa would be jealous. And then maybe Nana wouldn’t be able to stare at you anymore.

You rip the buttons from her face and spend the afternoon in front of your mother’s small mirror, figuring out the best way to tie the buttons into your long, tangled hair. A few times you swear there’s a shadow behind you in the mirror, a shadow in the shape of a woman in a black dress, but when you turn, it’s gone. The journal calls to you from under the mattress, but you ignore it. You consider burning it so it will leave you alone.

Mother returns with fish, and you help her prepare it for dinner. She doesn’t comment on your new adornments, or the fact that Nana is now eyeless and perched once again above the door. Mother is in one of her sullen moods, so you eat the fish in silence. Then she chooses a book from the stacks on the floor and disappears into her bedroom.

You choose a book yourself and stay up as long as you can, reading by lantern light, reluctant to sleep. Eventually your eyes close and you find yourself once again in the big, clean house, wearing soft, clean clothes. The pale woman in the black dress smiles down at you, but tears sparkle in her eyes. Her hands close around your neck, squeezing the breath from you. You try to pry her fingers from your throat but her slender digits are surprisingly strong. She thrusts your head underwater, and when you gasp for air, water fills your lungs, and the last thing you see is the woman standing over you, sobbing, her image distorted by the water.

You wake gasping for air, but something is pressed over your face. You struggle and squirm and the thing pressed over your face jerks back. Mother crouches by your mattress, holding her pillow, which bears the indentation of your face. She shakes her head, as if trying to wake herself. You scramble away from her, into the piles of dolls. You shake and suck down great gulps of air.

“I’m sorry,” Mother says softly. “I don’t know how I got here.” She glances around, as if the room will somehow reveal the source of her sleepwalking. Her eyes light on Nana, and she runs from the room.

You gather up Nana and the red journal and climb down the ladder in the dark. Tethis IV has two moons: tonight Arisia is a pale sliver and her brother Boros, far across the sky, is almost full, providing most of the pale, silvery light. High above the garbage, a few houses provide additional pinpoints of illumination, but it’s late. Almost everyone is sleeping.

The beach is silent except for the rushing of the waves and the pounding of your own heart. No one goes out at this time because of the monsters lurking just off the shore. They have long arms and can snatch trash pickers from a hundred feet away, so you creep carefully as far from the shore as you can until you arrive at the inlet caves.

The caves are a place where you and your friends have played many times‑ or you did, until you became old enough to pick trash and contribute to the livelihoods of your families. The moonlight can’t reach inside the caverns, so you quickly find yourself shrouded in darkness. You feel your way along the familiar walls, following the flow of ankle-deep water, breathing the nostalgic aroma of cool earth and stone. You walk slowly, and your muscles start to shake from being tensed for so long. Your teeth chatter.

You feel as if you’ve been walking for hours when you finally come upon the whirlpool. The whirlpool is the reason the caves stay mostly free of trash. Everything that ends up in the caves gets sucked into the whirlpool and comes up elsewhere in the ocean unless it’s strong enough to fight the current or someone has fastened it to the cave walls. Throwing things into the whirpool is a fun activity for younger children. You remember losing several dolls into the swirling water before you understood they wouldn’t come back.

You can’t see the whirlpool but you can hear it rushing and feel the salty spray of it against your cheeks. You take a deep breath and heave both Nana and the red journal into the water. You don’t hear a splash or anything else that would indicate their disappearance, but you swear you feel unwatched for the first time in days, as if the eyes on the back of your head have finally gone away.

You go home to find Mother sitting in the main room of the house, sobbing, her face red and snot-streaked. Several of your dolls are piled in her lap. When you enter, she jumps to her feet and spills the dolls to the floor, rushing to you with open arms. “I’m so sorry,” she wails.

“It’s okay,” you say, returning her embrace. “It wasn’t you. It was Nana. She’s gone now. Everything is going to be okay.”

As Mother weeps against your shoulder, you actually believe that maybe, just maybe, things really will be okay.

The long days of summer stretch into monsoon season. The rain pounds down, and you and Mother spend most of your time reading and sorting the books you stockpiled during the dry season. For an hour each morning you go to trade and find food and even do a little picking with your friends before the storms start again, but otherwise, you’re trapped indoors. The house sways frighteningly on its stilts, sometimes, but they hold for another year.

Truth be told, it’s your favorite time of year. Toward the end of the season, you have to reduce your rations, so your stomach hurts. But you and Mother spend a lot of time together and develop a quiet, pleasant rhythm. You absorb the stories in dozens of books, each one opening a world far away from Tethis IV. The storms smell of fresh water and tamp down the stink of the landfill that surrounds you. The gray days run together into one cozy, hazy, endless stretch of time.

Finally, the first day of the new summer season announces itself with clear skies. Birds wheel overhead and you venture out with your friends to hunt them with spears and arrows. The birds aren’t particularly good eating, but it’s a relief to eat something until your shrunken stomach is full, and tracking them across the trash dunes is a fun exercise after so long cooped up indoors.

You’re with Arin and Rissa, tracking a bird to its nest in the hopes of stealing its eggs, when you find yourself at the inlet caves. “Let’s go see the whirlpool,” Arin suggests, his eyes twinkling.

A feeling of dread simmers in your stomach. “Isn’t that for babies?”

Arin shrugs. “I just haven’t been down there in a long time.”

“I go all the time,” Rissa says. “It’s nice. I like the sound of it, and the smell. The younger kids don’t hang out there like we did, not anymore, not since Duggy fell in.”

You all take a few moments to think about the tragedy when Duggy, one of Rissa’s cousins, fell into the whirlpool and the parents made the kids promise never to go there again. Naturally, the younger children keep their promises, but your mother never made you promise anything, and Rissa has eight brothers and sisters, so nobody keeps track of her. And Arin takes any parental order as a challenge, every rule as something to be broken.

You can’t think of any further objections, so you follow your friends into the caves. Rissa has a flashlight cobbled together out of a bunch of electrical parts and a half-corroded battery. The light is dim but it’s better than nothing.

The smell of the caves, the feel of the wet stone against your fingers, the slosh of your feet in the ankle-deep water, all brings you back to the night you disposed of Nana and the red journal. It’s been so many months, the whole event seems hazy and unreal, especially since so much of it happened in total blackness. Your throat burns and you have a hard time taking deep breaths in the caves, as if the memory of the pale woman’s hands around your neck has physical substance here.

Arin walks in the front, and he lets out an exclamation, the sound of which is nearly drowned out by the rushing of the whirlpool. Rissa splashes up to him, shining the flashlight on whatever he’s found, and you follow, but slowly, reluctantly, dread making your feet leaden. You reach them and look down, expecting to see Nana lying there, soaked and filthy but intact.

It’s a chunk of plastic with wires sticking out. You breathe a sigh of relief, your vision briefly filling with stars. “This is stupid,” you say. “I’m leaving.” You turn and head for the entrance, retracing your way in the dark. Behind you, Arin and Rissa’s laughter echoes.

You spend your afternoon digging in the freshest trash heap near the water. It already stinks, as there’s a lot of food waste, but you find a few oranges that are only half-moldy, and a couple of almost-black bananas. You make your way home excited to present your finds to Mother. She’s been much less sullen, these past few months, and surely her spirits will be buoyed by the nice weather.

The house looks like it was hit by a monsoon. The meager furniture is smashed, your dolls thrown about, some of them dismembered. The little mirror is shattered and you cut your feet stepping on the shards of glass before you notice them. The books have been flung about the room and torn to bits, and one looks as if it has scorch marks on it. Mother is nowhere to be found. What could have happened?

You climb down the ladder and go to the neighbor’s house to inquire after Mother. Your feet bleed on their rug. They haven’t seen your mother, they don’t know who ransacked your house, and they offer you bandages for your feet, but you don’t have time for bandages. As evening approaches, you limp to the shore, but your mother isn’t among the pickers coming in from the beach.

You go home, finally clean your stinging feet, and start setting things right around the house. A few times, you think you see your mother in the doorway, but the shadow is gone when you turn. You arrange the dolls in your room, taking comfort from the familiarity of the activity, brushing their hair and wiping smears of dirt from their cheeks. You fall asleep curled among them, waiting for Mother.

You dream of Mother holding you down, drowning you. Her face is pale and she wears a black dress. She cries and her face is distorted by the water, her tears making the surface ripple. You splash and struggle but she’s strong, and your lungs fill with fluid, and darkness overtakes you. Your chest aches and then you feel nothing.

When you gasp to wakefulness, a woman is silhouetted in your doorway. It might be your mother, but it doesn’t really look like her, and she’s wearing a long dress, unusual clothing for Tethis IV. Something misshapen dangles from her right hand. In her left, something rectangular. She steps into the room and the moonlight briefly limns her form, picking out details: the doll gripped in her right hand, the journal clutched in her left. Her face is pale and twisted, but it is Mother, you think. But it’s also...not Mother. Like someone else is wearing Mother’s skin.

You crab-walk away from her, backing yourself into the corner, pulling your dolls over you, trying to hide. Her head turns, slowly, gaze fixing on you. She drops the doll and the journal, and then she steps to the wall, scaling it like a lizard you saw once in a book. She climbs across the ceiling until she dangles directly above you. Terror paralyzes you as she leans down over you, somehow still clinging to the ceiling, her face appearing in front of yours, upside-down, her long hair dangling so that it brushes your lap. Her eyes are black and her brows drawn together in a way you’ve never seen before. She’s so angry the rage practically pours off her.

You manage to choke out three words: “Who…are...you?”

She says only one word in reply: “Nana.” The voice is not your mother’s. It’s too low, too rough, like something dredged up from the depths of the black ocean.

“I want my mother,” you say.

She laughs, a sound like a door creaking wetly. “Your mother never loved you. She never wanted you. You were an accident, a mistake. You got her exiled here. She hated you before you were even born. She wishes you were dead, so she could leave this place.”

Her hands reach for your throat. You sink back into the dolls and she grabs at them instead. She screams in frustration, tossing dolls everywhere, snarling and scrabbling at them. You slide into and under your collection, crawling and wriggling until you emerge on the other side of the room. You run for the door. Your mother hisses and follows you, her knees and hands thumping against the ceiling as she crawls above you.

You snatch the Nana doll and the red journal out of the doorway as you pass through it. The lantern is on the shelf by the door, the matches beside it. You throw the doll and the journal into a basket full of books. You open the lantern and pour the oil over the contents of the basket, your hands shaking so hard you can barely manage the cap. Oil goes everywhere, on the floor, on your clothes. But it lands on the basket, too, on the doll and the journal.

There’s a thump behind you. Your heart pounds and your breath comes in great, ragged gasps, inhaling the scent of the oil, the reek of the rotting trash planet. Everything slows as you turn to face your mother.

Mother reaches for your throat again, and this time she has you. She slams you against the wall, crushing your windpipe with her powerful grip. You squirm and kick but she’s so strong. Your lungs burn and darkness gnaws at the edges of your vision. Your hands flail and find a book, bringing it up to slap the side of Mother’s face with it. She ignores it until you drive the corner of the book into her eye. Shrieking, she releases you to bat the book away.

You push her off you, grabbing for the matches and turning to the basket. Her hands close around your neck from behind but not before you strike a match, not before a small flame flares to life, not before you drop it into the basket.

The oil catches fire instantly. Mother screams with a terrible, otherworldly shriek as the doll burns. She tears at you, trying to get to the basket, but you stand firm, holding her at bay. Suddenly you’re the strong one.

The room fills with the smell of burning fabric and something else, something sharp and smoky and evil-smelling. Mother wilts before you, collapsing to the floor. Her shriek becomes a wail, and that fades to a despairing murmur.

You kneel beside her, pulling her into your embrace. “I want my mother.”

Her face twists with rage one last time. She coughs. Her eyelids flutter. The rage leaves her body like juice from a rotten fruit, and she sags in your arms. Her breathing slows. She relaxes into something that resembles normal sleep.

You stomp out the fire. Fire on a landfill spreads with incredible speed, and you can’t risk starting a conflagration that might kill everyone you know. You carry the remnants of the basket down the ladder. You carry it to the caves in the dark, as you did once before, but now, you walk with confidence. You know this place so well, and you traversed it in darkness once before. You see no reason to be afraid. In the cave, you place the basket and its contents on a ledge and light another match. This time you let the bundle burn down until the fire goes out on its own.

You take what’s left, mostly ash, and fling it into the whirlpool. You light a match so you can watch it swirl down into the dark water. Then you begin the long, dark trek back to the house, where you know you’ll find your mother.

You wonder, as you walk, whether things will go back to how they were, or whether things will be different. Nana’s words haunt you. Was your mother exiled here because of you? Does she hate you? Your heart is heavy with exhaustion and sorrow.

As you approach the house, you see a candle burning in your bedroom window, and the shape of your mother moving around the room. She’s rearranging the dolls, trying to put your collection back in place, trying to erase the damage Nana did.

You smile, and you think of how much the little kids will love your dolls when you give them away.

COLD COMFORT

JEN HAEGER

Red light, orange light, yellow light. Red light, orange light, yellow light. Elton watched the warning light on the temperature gauge blink. There was also an alarm that accompanied the blinking light, however, after a tedious eleven hour search of the underlying wiring followed by a furious thirty seconds of yanking out wires, that alarm was no longer functioning. Stupid human gauge. Checking the temperature reading again, he saw that it was holding steady at thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, but the cold didn’t bother him. Elton paused a moment to scoff at the ridiculous way that America resisted the metric system, as if continuing to make calculations more complicated was one final screw you that this former colony could send to the empire. It wasn’t enough for them to gain independence, become a superpower, pull Britain’s ass out of the flames of war again and again, and walk on the moon, the Yanks also had to one-up the British in unit systems. Elton chuckled to himself at the thought and his soft laugh echoed eerily around the bridge, bouncing off the shiny metal and smooth, hard plastic edges. All around him illuminated panels waited to be used and plasma screens begged to inform him of every minuscule change that was taking place every millisecond in this amazing feat of human engineering that was now hurling him through the vast oceans of empty space between this sun and the next. He ignored them.

At first it had all enthralled him, and he’d spent most of his time watching the Earth wither as the outer planets engorged, but this pastime eventually lost its thrill. Now he passed the portholes without so much as a glance. More mundane thoughts now preoccupied Elton’s mind. He licked his lips; it was almost time. Dismissing the overactive temperature warning lights, he amused himself by flicking through the short list of victims…er…donors that he had made for himself: Sheryl, the blond and busty microbiologist; Jimmy, the dark-haired and questionably heterosexual nurse; Susan, the colony supervisor with the mousy brown hair. AB pos, B neg, A neg. These few topped his list. He considered throwing in some O pos just so he didn’t leave all of them until later and become bored with a bland diet, but no, for this first meal he was going to make it special. Special and tasty.

Elton was daydreaming about the warm, sweet blood spilling down his throat when Control hailed him for the daily update. He scowled at the interruption to his pleasant reverie and made them wait for thirty seconds before answering in a bored drawl.

“Control this is Cryomonitor Patricks report number…” he swiped a finger across the screen to minimize the profile of Susan and bring up the craft’s log, “beta-six-four-two.”

Elton rolled his eyes, grateful that he was finally out of video-com range and that the quantadetanglethingy or whatnot that they had tried in vain to explain to him was now engaged.

The familiar and crisp voice of the mission control communications expert came out loud and self-important over the speakers as Elton mused that the man had a more impressive title than he did. He was an expert merely for his ability to speak into a microphone. Elton had already had several long chats with the man. One of the more recent chats involved Elton’s unauthorized dismantling of the temperature gauges auditory alarm.

“Copy that Monitor Patricks. What is your status?”

Elton knew that he should stick to protocols, but the further away from Earth the ship got, the less interested he became in maintaining the façade of caring about his official NASA position, so he figured, screw it.

“Control, my status is bored, terribly bored.”

There was silence on the other end of the com link, then, “Monitor Patricks, come again?”

Elton smiled a wide, Cheshire smile that exposed his elongated canines even though the man on the other end of the com couldn’t see him.

“I said I’m bored. It has been three months and not a single thing has changed except the view out of the window. All three-thousand colonists are still frozen and I’m getting hungry.”

There was another beat of silence followed by a soft click.

“Monitor Patricks, I have been instructed to inform you that the official time of necessary thaw and replenishment is still fifty-two hours and twenty-six minutes from now.”

“Elton.”

“I’m sorry?”

Elton adjusted his feet where they were propped up on the communications console.

“We have been talking back and forth for three months now, I think that we can call each other by our first names, don’t you…err…?”

This time the silence stretched on for almost a minute and Elton passed the time picturing a roomful of people back on the dirt of the disappearing point of light that was Earth shouting at each other and running back and forth like ants whose hill Elton had just destroyed with the toe of his boot. Dr. Pollak especially would be fuming. He had never trusted Elton and had in fact predicted nearly this exact scenario to anyone who would listen back at NASA. Wise man Dr. Pollak, sadly Elton had just been too charming and his particular set of skills were just too tempting to the rest of the Jade Colony mission team.

“Tim. My name is Tim.”

Ah, thought Elton, they finally contacted a psychologist or other form of head-shrinker to try to calm me and get me back on mission track.

“Well, I’m very pleased to finally meet you, Tim. Tell me, Tim, do you have a wife?”

“Now listen here, you bloo⁠—!”

Suddenly the com link cut off.

“Tim? Yoo-hoo! I think I lost you there, Friend. Oh, sorry, I mean, do you copy?”

The com link went dead and Elton went back to his perusal of colonist profiles.

The com link opened again and a new voice emanated from the invisible speakers all around Elton.

“Elton, are you there? Elton, my name is Tanya Meyers.”

Elton sat up and brought his legs down from the console. He liked this new voice much better than Tim’s voice. Not only was she a woman, but she sounded like an interesting woman, down to the way she pronounced her name Tan-ya instead of the more common Ton-ya.

“You must be the shrink,” he said, smirking.

“I do have certain degrees in psychoanalysis. I specialize in vampire psychology.”

“Called you in a little late, didn’t they Tanya?”

“Perhaps, but you said that you were bored so why don’t you humor me?”

Elton considered her proposal, but then decided that he would be much more in the mood for chit chat after a light snack.

“I’m sorry Tanya, while you do sound refreshingly interesting and will indubitably cure me of my boredom to an extent, I’m feeling a might bit peckish so I’ll have to get back to you after I’ve had a bite.”

Elton cut the com link before she had a chance to respond.

Control had been pretty much hailing him constantly since he had cut communication thirty-six hours earlier, but he found a way to mute the indicator, so Elton paid them no mind. He still couldn’t get over their ignorance and arrogance. Certainly putting a vampire in charge of the cryopreservation units of colonists on a long term, deep space mission seemed like a fantastic idea. No need to worry about keeping large portions of the ship warm or oxygen rich or wasting precious food resources. Not only that, but there was a sentient being on board to communicate daily with and keep everything running smoothly. AI was O.K., but it certainly didn’t beat a thinking entity that didn’t need sleep or power to run. Elton didn’t even need much protection from radiation, and with proper management of his resources, namely the thousand tasty blood makers in the cryohold, he could survive for centuries or even longer. There was just one tiny problem: the nature of a vampire.

Elton dabbed the blood from his chin and activated the com link on his end.

“Tanya are you there, Love?”

There were several clicks, but silence dominated.