The Lunar Gothic Trilogy - Cathedral of the Drowned E-Book

Nathan Ballingrud

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 166

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Lovecraftian horror meets the wildly inventive mind of Shirley Jackson award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud, in this cosmic horror sequel to Crypt of the Moon Spider, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp. One is a brain in a jar, stranded on Jupiter's jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home. The other is hanging on the wall of Barrowfield Home on Earth's own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage. On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called The Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronauts inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while a new Moon Spider prepares to hatch.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

IGhosts of Red Hook

IIIo, Jungle Moon of Jupiter

IIIGoodnight Maggie

IVThe Bishop

VReturn to Barrowfield

VIThe Beast in the Bell Tower

VIISentimental Centipedes

Acknowledgments

Prologue

ICold Freight

About the Author

PRAISE FOR CATHEDRAL OF THE DROWNED

“A demented bacchanalia written at an intense fever pitch, Cathedral of the Drowned is sumptuous, grotesque, and utterly ravishing.”

ERIC LAROCCA, BRAM STOKER AWARD®-NOMINATED AUTHOR OF THINGS HAVE GOTTEN WORSE SINCE WE LAST SPOKE

“The soaring, lurid, gothic feast that is the Cathedral of the Drowned will take over your nightmares. There’s never been a roaring ‘20s pulp horror/crime story like this.”

PAUL TREMBLAY, NEW YORK TIMES-BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF HORROR MOVIE AND THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

“An elegiac, deeply strange, wildly compelling sci-fantasy wonder dripping with gore and tenderness.”

CASSANDRA KHAW, BRAM STOKER AWARD®-WINNING AUTHOR OF BREAKABLE THINGS AND THE LIBRARY AT HELLEBORE

“No one, and I mean no one, does it like Ballingrud. I personally wouldn’t even attempt it.”

JASON PARGIN, AUTHOR OF JOHN DIES AT THE END

“Thrilling and haunting in equal measure. Cathedral of the Drowned is a noir-tinged phantasmagoria.”

SOFIA AJRAM, BRAM STOKER AWARD®-WINNING AUTHOR OF COUP DE GRÂCE

ALSO BY NATHAN BALLINGRUDAND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Strange

THE LUNAR GOTHIC TRILOGYCrypt of the Moon Spider

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Cathedral of the Drowned

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803368832

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803368849

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Nathan Ballingrud 2025

Nathan Ballingrud asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

To Lisa Nance

I

Ghosts of Red Hook

Two ghosts visited Goodnight Maggie in the summer of 1924.

The second arrived on the same night they dragged Handsome Billy from the harbor, his belly slit from cock to collarbone and his innards spilling out like wet fish. She came home to a revenant from her past, the man in the moon she’d thought a year dead. He crouched by the steps to her brownstone, hidden so well in the shadows that she would have missed him entirely had he not stood to present himself as her driver pulled away.

It was four in the morning. Clouds scudded across the sky. Rain had threatened all day, but there had been nothing but a cold, driving wind. She’d just come back from the docks, where Billy’s corpse had been discovered in a fishing net dropped in front of McElhone’s Fishery, the warehouse from which she ran a gang that, until a few months ago, had run the docks in Red Hook with uncontested dominance. They handled booze, gambling, and prostitutes, but what kept them in control was their exclusive access to moonsilk—spiderwebs smuggled from the forests of the moon, which bestowed incredible dreams on those who ingested it.

Then the Sicilians started arriving, and with them came a new organization calling itself the Mafia. They were brutally strong, and they wanted what she had. The death of Handsome Billy—seventeen years old, a sweet child with a useful mean streak—made that clear.

So when a youngish, disheveled man, who years ago had been one of her most ardent customers, lurched unexpectedly from the shadows in front of her house, she nearly put a bullet through his head from simple reflex. If she hadn’t been numb with cold and so tired that her eyes burned, he wouldn’t have had time to speak.

“Maggie,” he said. “It’s me.”

She recognized the voice, even after all this time. “Come out where I can see you.” The gun did not leave her hand.

The figure shuffled closer, until the lamp across the street illuminated the face of Doctor Barrington Cull.

It no longer looked much like a face at all. The skin had been flayed or torn on the left side from the corner of his mouth to the crown of his head, leaving a pale, shiny mass of scar tissue which pulled his features askew. A hole gaped where his eye had been. He favored his left leg, which looked twisted under his threadbare pants. His clothes were rags: not torn and bloody, but grimy and ill-fitting. A vagrant’s garb.

“I need help,” he said.

Maggie slipped the gun back into her pocket. “I heard you were dead.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Did Charlie do this to you?”

Dr. Cull glanced furtively up and down the empty street, where the streetlamps shed cones of light. The shadows between them festered with possibilities. The neighbors’ windows were all dark at this hour, but dawn was near; they wouldn’t be for much longer. He peered into the cloudy sky, as if frightened something would come swooping down for him. “Please, can we go inside? They’re looking for me.”

“Who are?”

“The Alabaster Scholars. She sent them.”

Maggie didn’t know what that meant but it hardly mattered. She didn’t want to be outside any longer, either. “Can you walk on that leg?”

“These injuries are old. I’m fine.”

“Then come on.” She mounted the steps, unlocked the door, and ushered him inside. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d been feeling until securing the locks again behind her. For the moment, she felt safe.

Goodnight Maggie lived alone. Though she had climbed a long way from being the poor little girl from the slums, she’d never been able to shake off the oppressive stink of failure, which lingered despite every hard-won block, every conquered rival, every new stratum of wealth. Her home was warm, her furniture was expensive, and art decorated her walls; still, she spent each night steeped in the shame of poverty.

Dr. Cull followed her into the living room and stood uncertainly while she turned on a lamp and poured two glasses of Scotch whisky. She handed him one and pointed to a leather club chair. “Sit down, Barry.”

A flicker of anger crossed his face. He hated when she called him that. But he said nothing as he took his seat. It struck her how different he seemed now. Seven years ago he’d been a brash young man—probably a genius, though she knew she was no judge of those things. But he’d been conducting experiments on the brains of the mad and the desperate in dingy little shacks along the wharf, using silk he bought from her, and after some trial and error the results became impressive enough that he was able to secure the funding for the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, located offworld, in the forests of the moon, where the silk was most abundant.

That young man would have corrected her: “Barrington, if you please. Or simply, ‘Doctor.’”

Not disrespectfully. Never that. Cull had always fancied himself a cultivated man; more importantly, he needed her. He needed access to the silk, which she bought from two moonrunners, Little Frankie Delaware and his cousin Cy. They had a tiny rattle-trap ship which would take them to the moon and back, and they had the guts to venture into the forest to harvest the silk. The Moon Spiders were all supposed to be dead; nevertheless, people who went into the woods had a tendency not to come out again.

Maggie sat on her couch and leaned back, not troubling to take off her coat. She closed her eyes, thoughts running amok.

The Sicilians had drawn first blood. She might have given them the booze and everything else, in the interests of survival—but not the silk. That was hers. It had taken too long to find and cultivate her moonrunners, and it cost too much to pay off the right people. She understood that her monopoly on the silk couldn’t last forever, especially as it gained in popularity. But she would not have it taken from her. Not yet, and certainly not by these people.

And Handsome Billy dead. Unforgivable. An outrage that would have to be answered. Billy was a good boy who grew up without a mama and would do whatever Maggie told him to, as long as she treated him with a little kindness. No one is so easily steered as an unloved boy.

Thinking of Billy, as always, recalled Charlie Duchamp to her mind. Charlie was a man in his mid-forties when last she saw him in the flesh; nevertheless she still considered him one of her boys. One of her favorites. Yet he was unpredictably violent, and being unpredictable was a flaw. So she’d sent him to Cull to be fixed. And he never came back home.

Cull would have to answer for that.

She opened her eyes. Cull sat quietly in the chair, as docile as a choirboy. He took a greedy sip from his glass, then met her eyes.

“Thank me,” she said.

“Thank you, Maggie.”

“You made the papers here, almost a year ago. Your precious asylum taken over by the inmates. You and all your staff killed. Barrowfield out of business. The moon an expensive disaster, all travel there forbidden now.”

He nodded, then seemed to change his mind and shook his head. “That’s not the real story.”

“You’ve made things difficult for my moonrunners. Difficult for me. And just tonight the Sicilians killed one of my boys. There’s going to be a war, and it’s a war I don’t think I can win. Now, on top of that, I have to deal with you, too.”

“Not for long. I just have to find a way to get offworld.”

“And go where?”

“Out there. As far as I can.”

Maggie rubbed at her eyes. Thinking was difficult. She needed sleep. “Tell me about these students hunting you.”

“Scholars, not students,” Cull said, a hint of impatience creeping into his voice. “The Alabaster Scholars. They worship the Moon Spiders. She’s using them as assassins now.”

Maggie didn’t know who “she” was but would worry about that later. “They have their own spacecraft? They can find you here?”

“They don’t need vessels. They can travel behind space now.”

He was speaking nonsense. Maybe he was crazy. If so she could dispose of him easily enough. The Sicilians were her primary concern. If they found Frankie and his cousin they would take the silk trade from her. Now Barrington Cull created one more weak spot for her organization, one more point of entry for the Mafia.

She could not let him leave her apartment.

She put on her most reassuring voice and assumed what she thought of as the “mother mask.” “I’ll protect you, Barry.”

He ducked his head. Tears of relief glistened in the low light. “I have to get back up there. I have to go out to the edge of the solar system. I have to see what’s there. Will you help me do that, too?”

“Of course. We have a lot to talk about. But right now we need to sleep. Take the guest bedroom. In the morning, I’ll have my boys bring you some fresh clothes. We’ll figure out what to do, okay?”

“Yes. All right.” He drained the last of his whisky. “It’s been so long since I tasted anything like this.”

“Have another if you like. It’ll help you sleep.”

He stood, a little shakily. “I won’t need any help. I’ve been running from them. I haven’t slept in two days.” Halfway down the hall, he paused and turned back to her. “Thank you, Maggie. I knew I could count on you. You’re the only one on Earth I can.”

She smiled. “Go to sleep, Barry. Everything will be okay.”

Maggie poured herself another glass and sat there for a while longer. She was tired but her mind was spinning like an engine. Barrowfield fell apart a year ago. How long had Cull been back on Earth? What had he been doing? She was furious at this distraction but at the same time felt sure that there was an opportunity here, something she could use in her war against the Mafia. She just had to get him to tell her everything, then study the problem. There had never been a problem she couldn’t think her way out of, never been an adversary she couldn’t outwit.

She turned off the light and made her way down to her bedroom. She put her ear against the closed door of the guest room, until she could make out the slow, regular breathing of Cull, now fast asleep. Quietly she entered her own room and closed the door.

She undressed in the darkness, a soft city light coming in through the curtains. If the windows were open she’d be able to smell the salt in the air from the harbor, the perfume of oil and diesel from the dockyards. Slipping on her nightgown, she sat on the foot of her bed and faced the closet door, which was open only an inch or two.

She desperately needed sleep, but more than that she needed to feel him.

“Charlie? Are you there?”

She hated how much she needed to feel him.

Charlie had been the first ghost to visit her that summer. He’d shown up barely a month ago. Unlike Cull, he was a real ghost, or at least as close to one as she had ever seen.

Her world hadn’t been under siege yet. Handsome Billy was still alive, the Sicilians no more than a storm cloud on the horizon—something to keep an eye on, little more than that. She’d been dressing for bed, just as she was now, when she’d heard the sound: a low static covering a nearly sub-audible hum, like an electric whisper draped over a deep bass current. The hairs on her arms had stood up. And then a pale glow bled from inside her closet, rippling like the reflection of light from water.

A metal orb sprouting dozens of long silver spines in every direction, some of them ending in red or blue blinking lights, rested on the floor. A satellite. It was small—no more than two feet in diameter. Oily water trickled from it in a series of steady streams, as if it rested beneath a small waterfall she could not see.

It was Charlie. She knew it by some peculiar magic, some primordial intuition. She felt it in her brain, on her skin. Later she would understand that it was the moonsilk which enabled this recognition, and which enabled his voice to fill her mind when he spoke—an intimacy she had never believed possible and for which she was not prepared. But in the moment it seemed a visitation from beyond the grave, obeying a logic unfathomable to her.

She could sense him trying to speak. No words came but she felt him reaching for her, touching her, filling the space behind her eyes, between her organs, all the dark places of her body.

“Charlie? Is that you? How can that be you?”

The ghost, if it was a ghost, stuttered and went briefly out; she thought for a moment he was gone, and she felt a sharp panic. But then he flickered back, the strange trickle of murky water still running over the satellite’s shell but disappearing before it touched her floor.

“Where are you? You were supposed to come back to me,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

He could not. But she felt his yearning, felt his fear and his confusion, and felt, too, the consolation he experienced in finding her, even in this bewildering fashion. She fell back on the bed, frightened and confused herself, as much by the warmth that filled her body as by the weird presence. When he disappeared—abruptly, like an interrupted current—the sudden chill made her cry out. He did not return that night, and although she never partook of the moonsilk she sold, she wondered if her constant proximity to it had finally affected her dreams. But she opened the closet door each night thereafter, just in case. He came back on the fourth night and intermittent nights following. They never spoke, but she almost didn’t mind. She could feel him trying to cross the distance between them. She could feel him in all kinds of ways.

So when Barrington Cull showed up a few weeks later, she was not as surprised as she might have been. She offered him help not because she cared for him or his fate, but because he might tell her what happened to Charlie. She might learn how to bring him home.

And now, preparing for bed with Cull sleeping only a few feet away and the Mafia declaring war, she wanted to feel him again. She wanted to feel something good again. She pulled the door ajar.

“Charlie?”

Silence.

“Charlie.”

After a moment the watery light shivered across the floor, and she felt a gust of warm, thick air. The satellite was there again, lights winking in the darkness.

“There’s my sweet boy,” she said. As had become her habit, she lay down on the floor beside him, closing her eyes, cutting off everything except the feeling of him. She had been ashamed of this at first, as if she were performing an indecent act in public. But that shame had abated quickly enough.

This time, something was different. Riding like a cold current under the warmth of his presence was a stronger fear than she had ever felt from him before. Did he know Cull was in the apartment with her? Or was it caused by something where he was?

“Don’t be scared. You were never scared of anything.”

The fear did not abate. The satellite flickered. A cascade of lights flowed across the tips of the antennae, as if sensors were searching for feedback.

“I’m sorry I sent you away. It was a mistake. I need you here.”

She wiped at her eyes. She had to sleep so badly, but not yet; not yet.

“I wish I could see where you are.”

Instead, she looked through the window at the moon, the last place she’d known him to be, glaring in the sky.

A gibbous white shard.

A pitiless light.

II

Io, Jungle Moon of Jupiter

L