/lit/ - Literature

This scared me a lot:

https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350192856154198016

>>17303825
Boomp

>>17303837
That was bizarre. Was it mental illness on the part of the stalker?

>>17303825
Might as well post the /lit/ chart.

>>17303837
>Researcher in Tattoing studies

>>17303857
Saved

>>17303857
>The Girl Next Door
You are not prepared for this one. If you think you are, you definitely are not.

I'm sending my friend a Robert Aickman collection for his birthday so I'm going to reread some of his stuff soon.

Other than that I plan to check out Hodgson's The Ghost Pirates. Incredibly frustrating writer in my experience, but there's something so idiosyncratic and "who in their right mind would do this?" to him that keeps me coming back.

Any good mind-bending horror books?

These books! They're the only official /lit approved series. Amazing stuff.

Anybody read this?

Not sure if it counts as horror, but it is definitely quite dark and sinister. The movie also feels like a horror movie.

>>17304202
/thread

>>17303857
Just used my Audible credit on The Fisherman

>>17303857
someone should get house of leaves out of there at some point

>>17304557
Why? Book's spooky as hell.

I recently read a short story called A Pail of Air (on a rec from another /lit/izen, no less) and, while it was technically a science fiction story, it had some deftly nuanced cosmic horror elements to it. Stuck with me for a couple days.

>>17304573
i dont like being negative but any spookines the concept might have had is ruined by the pretentious choices and the cringy writing. its like you can see thru the veil and the writer is just putting stuff in cuz he thought itd be cool but it doesnt mesh
>>17304208
the end recontextualizes it as just depressing so i wouldnt call it horror
>>17303920
whats the best one story to start with aickman?
>>17303885
yeah its the most disturbing thing ive read. well written too. to think that the real life thing is even worse... but i wouldnt go for it if i wanted straight up horror. it has uncanniness but it lacks a bit of the unknown element to be spooky. or maybe its just too much

Gonna dump "Window" by Bob Leman, just read this one and enjoyed it a lot

* * *
“We don’t know what the hell’s going on out there,” they told Gilson in Washington. “It may
be pretty big. The nut in charge tried to keep it under wraps, but the army was furnishing
routine security, and the commanding officer tipped us off. A screwball project. Apparently
been funded for years without anyone paying much attention. Extrasensory perception, for
God’s sake. And maybe they’ve found something. The security colonel thinks so, anyway.
Find out about it.”

The Nut-in-Charge was a rumpled professor of psychology named Krantz. He and the
colonel met Gilson at the airport, and they set off directly for the site in an army sedan. The
colonel began talking immediately.

“You’ve got something mighty queer here, Gilson,” he said. “I never saw anything like it,
and neither did anybody else. Krantz here is as mystified as anybody. And it’s his baby.
We’re just security. Not that they’ve needed any, up to now. Not even any need for secrecy,
except to keep the public from laughing its head off. The setup we’ve got here is—”

“Dr. Krantz,” Gilson said, “you’d better give me a complete rundown on the situation here.
So far, I haven’t any information at all.”

Krantz was occupied with the lighting of a cigar. He blew a cloud of foul smoke, and through
it he said, “We’re missing one prefab building, one POBEC computer, some medical
machinery, and one, uh, researcher named Culvergast.”

“Explain ‘missing,’ ” Gilson said.

“Gone. Disappeared. A building and everything in it. Just not there any more. But we do
have something in exchange.”

“And what’s that?”

>>17304697


“I think you’d better wait and see for yourself,” Krantz said. “We’ll be there in a few
minutes.” They were passing through the farther reaches of the metropolitan area, a series of
decayed small towns. The highway wound down the valley beside the river, and the towns
lay stretched along it, none of them more than a block or two wide, their side streets rising
steeply toward the first ridge. In one of these moribund communities they left the highway
and went bouncing up the hillside on a crooked road whose surface changed from
cobblestones to slag after the houses had been left behind. Beyond the crest of the ridge the
road began to drop as steeply as it had risen, and after a quarter of a mile they turned into a
lane whose entrance would have been missed by anyone not watching for it. They were in a forest now; it was second growth, but the logging had been done so long ago that it might
almost have been a virgin stand, lofty, silent, and somewhat gloomy on this gray day.

“Pretty,” Gilson said. “How does a project like this come to be way out here, anyhow?”

“The place was available,” the colonel said. “Has been since World War Two. They set it up
for some work on proximity fuses. Shut it down in ’48. Was vacant until the professor took it
over.”

“Culvergast is a little bit eccentric,” Krantz said. “He wouldn’t work at the university—too
many people, he said. When I heard this place was available, I put in for it, and got it—along
with the colonel, here. Culvergast has been happy with the setup, but I guess he bothers the
colonel a little.”

“He’s a certifiable loony,” the colonel said, “and his little helpers are worse.”

“Well, what the devil was he doing?” Gilson asked.

>>17304703

Before Krantz could answer, the driver braked at a chain-link gate that stood across the lane.
It was fastened with a loop of heavy logging chain and manned by armed soldiers. One of
them, machine pistol in hand, peered into the car.

“Everything O.K., sir?” he said.

“O.K. with waffles, Sergeant,” the colonel said. It was evidently a password. The noncom
unlocked the enormous padlock that secured the chain. “Pretty primitive,” the colonel said as
they bumped through the gateway, “but it’ll do until we get proper stuff in. We’ve got men
with dogs patrolling the fence.” He looked at Gilson. “We’re just about there. Get a load of
this, now.”

It was a house. It stood in the center of the clearing in an island of sunshine, white, gleaming,
and incongruous. All around was the dark loom of the forest under a sunless sky, but
somehow sunlight lay on the house, sparkling in its polished windows and making brilliant
the colors of massed flowers in carefully tended beds, reflecting from the pristine whiteness of
its siding out into the gray, littered clearing with its congeries of derelict buildings.

“You couldn’t have picked a better time,” the colonel said. “Shining there, cloudy here.”

Gilson was not listening. He had climbed from the car and was staring in fascination. “Jesus,”
he said. “Like a goddamn Victorian postcard.”

>>17304711

Lacy scrollwork foamed over the rambling wooden mansion, running riot at the eaves of the
steep roof, climbing elaborately up towers and turrets, embellishing deep oriels and outlining
a long, airy veranda. Tall windows showed by their spacing that the rooms were many and
large. It seemed to be a new house, or perhaps just newly painted and supremely well-kept. A
driveway of fine white gravel led under a high porte-cochère.

“How about that?” the colonel said. “Look like your grandpa’s house?”

As a matter of fact, it did: like his grandfather’s house enlarged and perfected and seen through a lens of romantic nostalgia, his grandfather’s house groomed and pampered as the
old farmhouse never had been.

He said, “And you got this in exchange for a prefab, did
you?”

“Just like that one,” the colonel said, pointing to one of the seedy buildings. “Of course we
could use the prefab.”

“What does that mean?”

“Watch,” the colonel said. He picked up a small rock and tossed it in the direction of the
house. The rock rose, topped its arc, and began to fall. Suddenly it was not there.

“Here,” Gilson said. “Let me try that.”

>>17304719


He threw the rock like a baseball, a high, hard one. It disappeared about fifty feet from the
house. As he stared at the point of its disappearance, Gilson became aware that the smooth
green of the lawn ended exactly below. Where the grass ended, there began the weeds and
rocks that made up the floor of the clearing. The line of separation was absolutely straight,
running at an angle across the lawn. Near the driveway it turned ninety degrees, and sliced
off lawn, driveway and shrubbery with the same precise straightness.

“It’s perfectly square,” Krantz said. “About a hundred feet to a side. Probably a cube,
actually. We know the top’s about ninety feet in the air. I’d guess there are about ten feet of it
underground.”

“It?” Gilson said. “ ‘It’? What’s ‘it’?”

“Name it and you can have it,” Krantz said. “A three-dimensional television receiver a
hundred feet to a side, maybe. A cubical crystal ball. Who knows?”

“The rocks we threw. They didn’t hit the house. Where did the rocks go?”

“Ah. Where, indeed? Answer that and perhaps you answer all.”

Gilson took a deep breath. “All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me about it. From the beginning.”

>>17304722


Krantz was silent for a moment; then, in a dry lecturer’s voice he said, “Five days ago, June
thirteenth, at eleven thirty a.m., give or take three minutes, Private Ellis Mulvihill, on duty at
the gate, heard what he later described as ‘an explosion that was quiet, like.’ He entered the
enclosure, locked the gate behind him, and ran up here to the clearing. He was
staggered—‘shook-up’ was his expression—to see, instead of Culvergast’s broken-down
prefab, that house, there. I gather that he stood gulping and blinking for a time, trying to
come to terms with what his eyes told him. Then he ran over there to the guardhouse and
called the colonel. Who called me. We came out here and found that a quarter of an acre of
land and a building with a man in it had disappeared and been replaced by this, as neat as a
peg in a pegboard.”

“You think the prefab went where the rocks did,” Gilson said. It was a statement.

“Why, we’re not even absolutely sure it’s gone. What we’re seeing can’t actually be where
we’re seeing it. It rains on that house when it’s sunny here, and right now you can see the
sunlight on it, on a day like this. It’s a window.”

“A window on what?”

“Well—that looks like a new house, doesn’t it? When were they building houses like that?”

“Eighteen seventy or eighty, something like—oh.”

“Yes,” Krantz said. “I think we’re looking at the past.”

>>17304557

Oh come on, it's perfectly scary. The scene where Karen is watching the Navidson tape in the bathroom and the entire wall behind her silently disappears into a pitch black void fucked me up.

>>17304727


“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gilson said.

“I know how you feel. And I may be wrong. But I have to say it looks very much that way. I
want you to hear what Reeves says about it. He’s been here from the beginning. A graduate
student, assisting here. Reeves!”

A very tall, very thin young man unfolded himself from a crouched position over an
odd-looking machine that stood near the line between grass and rubble and ambled over to
the three men. Reeves was an enthusiast. “Oh, it’s the past, all right,” he said. “Sometime in
the eighties. My girl got some books on costume from the library, and the clothes check out
for that decade. And the decorations on the horses’ harnesses are a clue, too. I got that
from—”

“Wait a minute,” Gilson said. “Clothes? You mean there are people in there?”

“Oh, sure,” Reeves said. “A fine little family. Mamma, poppa, little girl, little boy, old granny
or auntie. A dog. Good people.”

“How can you tell that?”

>>17304735

“I’ve been watching them for five days, you know? They’re having—were having—fine
weather there—or then, or whatever you’d say. They’re nice to each other, they like each
other. Good people. You’ll see.”

“When?”

“Well, they’ll be eating dinner now. They usually come out after dinner. In an hour, maybe.”

“I’ll wait,” Gilson said. “And while we wait, you will please tell me some more.”

Krantz assumed his lecturing voice again. “As to the nature of it, nothing. We have a
window, which we believe to open into the past. We can see into it, so we know that light
passes through; but it passes in only one direction, as evidenced by the fact that the people
over there are wholly unaware of us. Nothing else goes through. You saw what happened to
the rocks. We’ve shoved poles through the interface there—there’s no resistance at all—but
anything that goes through is gone, God knows where. Whatever you put through stays there. Your pole is cut off clean. Fascinating. But wherever it is, it’s not where the house is.
That interface isn’t between us and the past; it’s between us and—someplace else. I think our
window here is just an incidental side-effect, a—a twisting of time that resulted from whatever
tensions exist along that interface.”

>>17304745


Gilson sighed. “Krantz,” he said, “what am I going to tell the secretary? You’ve lucked into
what may be the biggest thing that ever happened, and you’ve kept it bottled up for five
days. We wouldn’t know about it now if it weren’t for the colonel’s report. Five days wasted.
Who knows how long this thing will last? The whole goddamn scientific establishment ought
to be here—should have been from day one. This needs the whole works. At this point the
place should be a beehive. And what do I find? You and a graduate student throwing rocks
and poking with sticks. And a girlfriend looking up the dates of costumes. It’s damn near
criminal.”

Krantz did not look abashed. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “But look at it this way.
Like it or not, this thing wasn’t produced by technology or science. It was pure psi. If we can
reconstruct Culvergast’s work, we may be able to find out what happened; we may be able to
repeat the phenomenon. But I don’t like what’s going to happen after you’ve called in your
experimenters, Gilson. They’ll measure and test and conjecture and theorize, and never once
will they accept for a moment the real basis of what’s happened. The day they arrive, I’ll be
out. And damnit, Gilson, this is mine.”

“Not any more,” Gilson said. “It’s too big.”

>>17304751

“It’s not as though we weren’t doing some hard experiments of our own,” Krantz said.
“Reeves, tell him about your batting machine.”

“Yes, sir,” Reeves said. “You see, Mr. Gilson, what the professor said wasn’t absolutely the
whole truth, you know? Sometimes something can get through the window. We saw it on the
first day. There was a temperature inversion over in the valley, and the stink from the
chemical plant had been accumulating for about a week. It broke up that day, and the wind
blew the gunk through the notch and right over here. A really rotten stench. We were
watching our people over there, and all of a sudden they began to sniff and wrinkle their
noses and make disgusted faces. We figured it had to be the chemical stink. We pushed a pole
out right away, but the end just disappeared, as usual. The professor suggested that maybe
there was a pulse, or something of the sort, in the interface, that it exists only intermittently.
We cobbled up a gadget to test the idea. Come and have a look at it.”

It was a horizontal flywheel with a paddle attached to its rim, like an extended cleat. As the
wheel spun, the paddle swept around a table. There was a hopper hanging above, and at
intervals something dropped from the hopper onto the table, where it was immediately
banged by the paddle and sent flying. Gilson peered into the hopper and raised an
interrogatory eyebrow. “Ice cubes,” Reeves said. “Colored orange for visibility. That thing
shoots an ice cube at the interface once a second. Somebody is always on duty with a
stopwatch. We’ve established that every fifteen hours and twenty minutes the thing is open for five seconds. Five ice cubes go through and drop on the lawn in there. The rest of the time
they just vanish at the interface.”

>>17304688
Yeah, Jack Ketchum is excellent, but so hard to recommend. He goes to some pitch black dark places, and isn't squeamish about blood and gore. Horrible things happen to people in his books, and the survivors don't come out the other side in one piece.

>>17304759

“Ice cubes. Why ice cubes?”

“They melt and disappear. We can’t be littering up the past with artifacts from our day. God
knows what the effect might be. Then, too, they’re cheap, and we’re shooting a lot of them.”

“Science,” Gilson said heavily. “I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to say in
Washington.”

“Sneer all you like,” Krantz said. “The house is there, the interface is there. We’ve by God
turned up some kind of time travel. And Culvergast the screwball did it, not a physicist or an
engineer.”

“Now that you bring it up,” Gilson said, “just what was your man Culvergast up to?”

>>17304765

“Good question. What he was doing was—well, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was
trying to discover spells.”

“Spells?”

“The kind you cast. Magic words. Don’t look disgusted yet. It makes sense, in a way. We
were funded to look into telekinesis—the manipulation of matter by the mind. It’s obvious
that telekinesis, if it could be applied with precision, would be a marvelous weapon.
Culvergast’s hypothesis was that there are in fact people who perform feats of telekinesis, and
although they never seem to know or be able to explain how they do it, they nevertheless
perform a specific mental action that enables them to tap some source of energy that
apparently exists all around us, and to some degree to focus and direct that energy.
Culvergast proposed to discover the common factor in their mental processes.

“He ran a lot of putative telekinesists through here, and he reported that he had found a
pattern, a sort of mnemonic device functioning at the very bottom of, or below, the verbal
level. In one of his people he found it as a set of musical notes, in several as gibberish of
various sorts, and in one, he said, as mathematics at the primary arithmetic level. He was
feeding all this into the computer, trying to eliminate simple noise and the personal
idiosyncrasies of the subjects, trying to lay bare the actual, effective essence. He then
proposed to organize this essence into words; words that would so shape the mental currents
of a speaker of standard American English that they would channel and manipulate the
telekinetic power at the will of the speaker. Magic words, you might say. Spells.

>>17304770
>Jack Ketchum


“He was evidently further along than I suspected. I think he must have arrived at some
words, tried them out, and made an attempt at telekinesis—some small thing, like causing an
ashtray to rise off his desk and float in the air, perhaps. And it worked, but what he got
wasn’t a dainty little ashtray-lifting force; he had opened the gate wide, and some kind of
terrible power came through. It’s pure conjecture, of course, but it must have been something
like that to have had an effect like this.”

Gilson had listened in silence. He said, “I won’t say you’re crazy, because I can see that house
and I’m watching what’s happening to those ice cubes. How it happened isn’t my problem,
anyhow. My problem is what I’ll recommend to the secretary that we do with it now that
we’ve got it. One thing’s sure, Krantz: this isn’t going to be your private playpen much
longer.”

There was a yelp of pure pain from Reeves. “They can’t do that,” he said. “This is ours, it’s the
professor’s. Look at it, look at that house. Do you want a bunch of damn engineers messing
around with that?”

>>17304776

Gilson could understand how Reeves felt. The house was drenched now with the light of a red
sunset; it seemed to glow from within with a deep, rosy blush. But, Gilson reflected, the sunset
wasn’t really necessary; sentiment and the universal, unacknowledged yearning for a simple,
cleaner time would lend rosiness enough. He was quite aware that the surge of longing and
nostalgia he felt was nostalgia for something he had never actually experienced, that the way
of life the house epitomized for him was in fact his own creation, built from patches of novels
and films; nonetheless he found himself hungry for that life, yearning for that time. It was a
gentle and secure time, he thought, a time when the pace was unhurried and the air was
clean; a time when there was grace and style, when young men in striped blazers and boater
hats might pay decorous court to young ladies in long white dresses, whiling away the long
drowsy afternoons of summer in peaceable conversations on shady porches. There would be
jolly bicycle tours over shade-dappled roads that twisted among the hills to arrive at cool
glens where swift little streams ran; there would be long sweet buggy rides behind somnolent
patient horses under a great white moon, lover whispering urgently to lover while nightbirds
sang. There would be excursions down the broad clean river, boats gentle on the current,
floating toward the sound from across the water of a brass band playing at the landing.
Yes, thought Gilson, and there would probably be an old geezer with a trunkful of adjectives
around somewhere, carrying on about how much better things had been a hundred years
before. If he didn’t watch himself he’d be helping Krantz and Reeves try to keep things
hidden. Young Reeves—oddly, for someone his age—seemed to be hopelessly mired in this
bogus nostalgia. His description of the family in the house had been simple doting. Oh, it was
definitely time that the cold-eyed boys were called in. High time.

“They ought to be coming out any minute, now,” Reeves was saying. “Wait till you see
Martha.”

“Martha,” Gilson said.
“The little girl. She’s a doll.”

Gilson looked at him. Reeves reddened and said, “Well, I sort of gave them names. The
children. Martha and Pete. And the dog’s Alfie. They kind of look like those names, you
know?” Gilson did not answer, and Reeves reddened further.
“Well, you can see for yourself.
Here they come.”

>>17304780


A fine little family, as Reeves had said. After watching them for half an hour, Gilson was
ready to concede that they were indeed most engaging, as perfect in their way as their house.
They were just what it took to complete the picture, to make an authentic Victorian genre
painting. Mama and Papa were good-looking and still in love, the children were healthy and
merry and content with their world. Or so it seemed to him as he watched them in the
darkening evening, imagining the comfortable, affectionate conversation of the parents as
they sat on the porch swing, almost hearing the squeals of the children and the barking of the
dog as they raced about the lawn. It was almost dark now; a mellow light of oil lamps glowed
in the windows, and fireflies winked over the lawn. There was an arc of fire as the father
tossed his cigar butt over the railing and rose to his feet. Then there followed a pretty little
pantomime, as he called the children, who duly protested, were duly permitted a few more
minutes, and then were firmly commanded. They moved reluctantly to the porch and were
shooed inside, and the dog, having delayed to give a shrub a final wetting, came scrambling
up to join them. The children and the dog entered the house, then the mother and father. The
door closed, and there was only the soft light from the windows.

>>17304791


Reeves exhaled a long breath. “Isn’t that something,” he said. “That’s the way to live, you
know? If a person could just say to hell with all this crap we live in today and go back there
and live like that… And Martha, you saw Martha. An angel, right? Man, what I’d give to—”

Gilson interrupted him: “When does the next batch of ice cubes go through?”

“—be able to—Uh, yeah. Let’s see. The last penetration was at 3:15, just before you got here.
Next one will be at 6:35 in the morning, if the pattern holds. And it has, so far.”

“I want to see that. But right now I’ve got to do some telephoning. Colonel!”

Gilson did not sleep that night, nor, apparently, did Krantz and Reeves. When he arrived at
the clearing at five a.m. they were still there, unshaven and red-eyed, drinking coffee from
thermos bottles. It was cloudy again, and the clearing was in total darkness except for a pale
light from beyond the interface, where a sunny day was on the verge of breaking.

“Anything new?” Gilson said.


“I think that’s my question,” Krantz said. “What’s going to happen?”

“Just about what you expected, I’m afraid. I think that by evening this place is going to be a
real hive. And by tomorrow night you’ll be lucky if you can find a place to stand. I imagine
Bannon’s been on the phone since I called him at midnight, rounding up the scientists. And
they’ll round up the technicians. Who’ll bring their machines. And the army’s going to beef
up the security. How about some of that coffee?”

“Help yourself. You bring bad news, Gilson.”

“Sorry,” Gilson said, “but there it is.”

“Goddam!” Reeves said loudly. “Oh, goddamn!” He seemed to be about to burst into tears.
“That’ll be the end for me, you know? They won’t even let me in. A damn graduate student?
In psychology? I won’t get near the place. Oh, damn it to hell!” he glared at Gilson in rage and
despair.

>>17304798

The sun had risen, bringing gray light to the clearing and brilliance to the house across the
interface. There was no sound but the regular bang of the ice cube machine. The three men
stared quietly at the house. Gilson drank his coffee.

“There’s Martha,” Reeves said. “Up there.” A small face had appeared between the curtains
of a second-floor window, and bright blue eyes were surveying the morning. “She does that
every day,” Reeves said. “Sits there and watches the birds and squirrels until I guess they call
her for breakfast.” They stood and watched the little girl, who was looking at something that
lay beyond the scope of their window on her world, something that would have been to their
rear had the worlds been the same. Gilson almost found himself turning around to see what it
was that she stared at. Reeves apparently had the same impulse. “What’s she looking at, do
you think?” he said. “It’s not necessarily forest, like now. I think this was logged out earlier.
Maybe a meadow? Cattle or horses on it? Man, what I’d give to be there and see what it is.”


Krantz looked at his watch and said, “We’d better go over there. Just a few minutes, now.”

They moved to where the machine was monotonously batting ice cubes into the interface. A
soldier with a stopwatch sat beside it, behind a table bearing a formidable chronometer and a
sheaf of charts. He said, “Two minutes, Dr. Krantz.”

Krantz said to Gilson, “Just keep your eye on the ice cubes. You can’t miss it when it
happens.”

Gilson watched the machine, mildly amused by the rhythm of its homely sounds:
plink—a cube drops; whuff—the paddle sweeps around; bang—paddle strikes ice cube. And
then a flat trajectory to the interface, where the small orange missile abruptly vanishes. A
second later, another. Then another.

“Five seconds,” the soldier called. “Four. Three. Two. One. Now.”

>>17304805


His timing was off by a second; the ice cube disappeared like its predecessors. But the next
one continued its flight and dropped onto the lawn, where it lay glistening. It was really a
fact, then, thought Gilson. Time travel for ice cubes.

Suddenly behind him there was an incomprehensible shout from Krantz and another from
Reeves, and then a loud, clear, and anguished, “Reeves, no!” from Krantz. Gilson heard a
thud of running feet and caught a flash of swift movement at the edge of his vision. He
whirled in time to see Reeves’ gangling figure hurtle past, plunge through the interface, and
land sprawling on the lawn. Krantz said, violently, “Fool!” An ice cube shot through and
landed near Reeves. The machine banged again; an ice cube flew out and vanished. The five
seconds of accessibility were over.


Reeves raised his head and stared for a moment at the grass on which he lay. He shifted his gaze to the house. He rose slowly to his feet, wearing a bemused expression. A grin came
slowly over his face, then, and the men watching from the other side could almost read his
thoughts: Well, I’ll be damned. I made it. I’m really here.

Krantz was babbling uncontrollably. “We’re still here, Gilson, we’re still here, we still exist,
everything seems the same. Maybe he didn’t change things much, maybe the future is fixed
and he didn’t change anything at all. I was afraid of this, of something like this. Ever since
you came out here, he’s been—”

Gilson did not hear him. He was staring with shock and disbelief at the child in the window,
trying to comprehend what he saw and did not believe he was seeing. Her behavior was
wrong, it was very, very wrong. A man had materialized on her lawn, suddenly, out of thin
air, on a sunny morning, and she had evinced no surprise or amazement or fear. Instead she
had smiled—instantly, spontaneously, a smile that broadened and broadened until it seemed
to split the lower half of her face, a smile that showed too many teeth, a smile fixed and
incongruous and terrible below her bright blue eyes. Gilson felt his stomach knot; he realized
that he was dreadfully afraid.

>>17304811


The face abruptly disappeared from the window; a few seconds later the front door flew open
and the little girl rushed through the doorway, making for Reeves with furious speed, moving
in a curious, scuttling run. When she was a few feet away, she leaped at him, with the agility
and eye-dazzling quickness of a flea. Reeves’ eyes had just begun to take on a puzzled look
when the powerful little teeth tore out his throat.

She dropped away from him and sprang back. A geyser of bright blood erupted from the
ragged hole in his neck. He looked at it in stupefaction for a long moment, then brought up
his hands to cover the wound; the blood boiled through his fingers and ran down his
forearms. He sank gently to his knees, staring at the little girl with wide astonishment. He
rocked, shivered, and pitched forward on his face.

She watched with eyes as cold as a reptile’s, the terrible smile still on her face. She was naked,
and it seemed to Gilson that there was something wrong with her torso, as well as with her
mouth. She turned and appeared to shout toward the house.

In a moment they all came rushing out, mother, father, little boy, and granny, all naked, all
undergoing that hideous transformation of the mouth. Without pause or diminution of speed
they scuttled to the body, crouched around it, and frenziedly tore off its clothes. Then,
squatting on the lawn in the morning sunshine, the fine little family began horribly to feed.

>>17304821


Krantz’s babbling had changed its tenor: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us…” The
soldier with the stopwatch was noisily sick. Someone emptied a clip of a machine pistol into
the interface, and the colonel cursed luridly. When Gilson could no longer bear to watch the
grisly feast, he looked away and found himself staring at the dog, which sat happily on the
porch, thumping its tail.

“By God, it just can’t be!” Krantz burst out. “It would be in the histories, in the newspapers, if there’d been people like that here. My God, something like that couldn’t be forgotten!”

“Oh, don’t talk like a fool!” Gilson said angrily. “That’s not the past. I don’t know what it is,
but it’s not the past. Can’t be. It’s—I don’t know—someplace else. Some other—dimension?
Universe? One of those theories. Alternate worlds, worlds of If, probability worlds, whatever
you call ’em. They’re in the present time, all right, that filth over there. Culvergast’s damn
spell holed through to one of those parallels. Got to be something like that. And, my God,
what the hell was its history to produce those? They’re not human, Krantz, no way human,
whatever they look like. ‘Jolly bicycle tours.’ How wrong can you be?”

It ended at last. The family lay on the grass with distended bellies, covered with blood and
grease, their eyelids heavy in repletion. The two little ones fell asleep. The large male appeared
to be deep in thought. After a time he rose, gathered up Reeves’ clothes, and examined them
carefully. Then he woke the small female and apparently questioned her at some length. She
gestured, pointed, and pantomimed Reeves’ headlong arrival. He stared thoughtfully at the
place where Reeves had materialized, and for a moment it seemed to Gilson that the pitiless
eyes were glaring directly into his. He turned, walked slowly and reflectively to the house,
and went inside.


It was silent in the clearing except for the thump of the machine. Krantz began to weep, and
the colonel to swear in a monotone. The soldiers seemed dazed. And we’re all afraid, Gilson
thought. Scared to death.

On the lawn they were enacting a grotesque parody of making things tidy after a picnic. The
small ones had brought a basket and, under the meticulous supervision of the adult females,
went about gathering up the debris of their feeding. One of them tossed a bone to the dog,
and the timekeeper vomited again. When the lawn was once again immaculate, they carried
off the basket to the rear, and the adults returned to the house. A moment later the male
emerged, now dressed in a white linen suit. He carried a book.

“A Bible,” said Krantz in amazement. “It’s a Bible.”

“Not a Bible,” Gilson said. “There’s no way those—things could have Bibles. Something else.
Got to be.”

>>17304830


It looked like a Bible; its binding was limp black leather, and when the male began to leaf
through it, evidently in search of a particular passage, they could see that the paper was the
thin, tough paper Bibles are printed on. He found his page and began, as it appeared to
Gilson, to read aloud in a declamatory manner, mouthing the words.
“What the hell do you suppose he’s up to?” Gilson said.

He was still speaking when the
window ceased to exist.
House and lawn and white-suited declaimer vanished.

Gilson caught a swift glimpse of trees
across the clearing, hidden until now by the window, and of a broad pit between him and the
trees. Then he was knocked off his feet by a blast of wind, and the air was full of dust and flying trash and the wind’s howl. The wind stopped, as suddenly as it had come, and there
was a patter of falling small objects that had momentarily been wind-borne. The site of the
house was entirely obscured by an eddying cloud of dust.

The dust settled slowly. Where the window had been there was a great hole in the ground, a
perfectly square hole a hundred feet across and perhaps ten feet deep, its bottom as flat as a
table. Gilson’s glimpse of it before the wind had rushed in to fill the vacuum had shown the
sides to be as smooth and straight as if sliced through cheese with a sharp knife; but now
small-landslides were occurring all around the perimeter, as topsoil and gravel caved and slid
to the bottom, and the edges were becoming ragged and irregular.

Gilson and Krantz slowly rose to their feet. “And that seems to be that,” Gilson said. “It was
here and now it’s gone. But where’s the prefab? Where’s Culvergast?”

>>17304837

“God knows,” Krantz said. He was not being irreverent. “But I think he’s gone for good. And
at least he’s not where those things are.”

“What are they, do you think?”

“As you said, certainly not human. Less human than a spider or an oyster. But, Gilson, the
way they look and dress, that house—”

“If there’s an infinite number of possible worlds, then every possible sort of world will exist.”

Krantz looked doubtful. “Yes, well, perhaps. We don’t know anything, do we?” He was silent
for a moment. “Those things were pretty frightening, Gilson. It didn’t take even a fraction of
a second for her to react to Reeves. She knew instantly that he was alien, and she moved
instantly to destroy him. And that’s a baby one. I think maybe we can feel safer with the
window gone.”

“Amen to that. What do you think happened to it?”


“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They know how to use the energies Culvergast was blundering around
with. The book—it has to be a book of spells. They must have a science of it—tried-and-true
stuff, part of their received wisdom. That thing used the book like a routine everyday tool.

After it got over the excitement of its big feed, it didn’t need more than twenty minutes to
figure out how Reeves got there, and what to do about it. It just got its book of spells, picked
the one it needed (I’d like to see the index of that book) and said the words. Poof! Window
gone and Culvergast stranded, God knows where.”


“It’s possible, I guess. Hell, maybe even likely. You’re right, we don’t really know a thing
about all this.”

Krantz suddenly looked frightened. “Gilson, what if—look. If it was that easy for him to
cancel out the window, if he has that kind of control of telekinetic power, what’s to prevent
him from getting a window on us? Maybe they’re watching us now, the way we were
watching them. They know we’re here, now. What kind of ideas might they get? Maybe they need meat. Maybe they—my God.”

“No,” Gilson said. “Impossible. It was pure, blind chance that located the window in that
world. Culvergast had no more idea what he was doing than a chimp at a computer console
does. If the Possible-Worlds Theory is the explanation of this thing, then the world he hit is
one of an infinite number. Even if the things over there do know how to make these windows,
the odds are infinite against their finding us. That is to say, it’s impossible.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Krantz said, gratefully. “Of course. They could try forever and never
find us. Even if they wanted to.” He thought for a moment.
“And I think they do want to. It
was pure reflex, their destroying Reeves, as involuntary as a knee jerk, by the look of it. Now
that they know we’re here, they’ll have to try to get at us; if I’ve sized them up right, it
wouldn’t be possible for them to do anything else.”

>>17304845
Gilson remembered the eyes. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said. “But now we both
better—”
“Dr. Krantz!” someone screamed. “Dr. Krantz!” There was absolute terror in the voice.

The two men spun around. The soldier with the stopwatch was pointing with a trembling
hand. As they looked, something white materialized in the air above the rim of the pit and
sailed out and downward to land beside a similar object already lying on the ground. Another
came; then another, and another. Five in all, scattered over an area perhaps a yard square.

“It’s bones!” Krantz said. “Oh, my God, Gilson, it’s bones!” His voice shuddered on the edge
of hysteria. Gilson said, “Stop it, now. Stop it! Come on!”
They ran to the spot. The soldier
was already there, squatting, his face made strange by nausea and terror. “That one,” he
said, pointing. “That one there. That’s the one they threw to the dog. You can see the teeth
marks. Oh, Jesus. It’s the one they threw to the dog.”

They’ve already made a window, then, Gilson thought. They must know a lot about these
matters, to have done it so quickly. And they’re watching us now. But why the bones? To
warn us off? Or just a test? But if a test, then still why the bones? Why not a pebble—or an
ice cube? To gauge our reactions, perhaps. To see what we’ll do.

And what will we do? How do we protect ourselves against this? If it is in the nature of these
creatures to cooperate among themselves, the fine little family will no doubt lose no time in
spreading the word over their whole world, so that one of these days we’ll find that a million
million of them have leaped simultaneously through such windows all over the earth,
suddenly materializing like a cloud of huge, carnivorous locusts, swarming in to feed with
that insensate voracity of theirs until they have left the planet a desert of bones. Is there any
protection against that?

>>17304856

Krantz had been thinking along the same track. He said, shakily, “We’re in a spot, Gilson,
but we’ve got one little thing on our side. We know when the damn thing opens up, we’ve got
it timed exactly. Washington will have to go all out, warn the whole world, do it through the U.N. or something. We know right down to the second when the window can be penetrated. We set up a warning system, every community on earth blows a whistle or rings a bell when
it’s time. Bell rings, everybody grabs a weapon and stands ready. If the things haven’t come
in five seconds, bell rings again, and everybody goes about his business until time for the next
opening. It could work, Gilson, but we’ve got to work fast. In fifteen hours and, uh, a couple
of minutes it’ll be open again.”

Fifteen hours and a couple of minutes, Gilson thought, then five seconds of awful
vulnerability, and then fifteen hours and twenty minutes of safety before terror arrives again.
And so on for—how long? Presumably until the things come, which might be never (who
knew how their minds worked?), or until Culvergast’s accident could be duplicated, which,
again, might be never. He questioned whether human beings could exist under those
conditions without going mad; it was doubtful if the psyche could cohere when its sole
foreseeable future was an interminable roller coaster down into long valleys of terror and
suspense and thence violently up to brief peaks of relief. Will a mind continue to function
when its only alternatives are ghastly death or unbearable tension endlessly protracted? Is
there any way, Gilson asked himself, that the race can live with the knowledge that it has no
assured future beyond the next fifteen hours and twenty minutes?

>>17304863

And then he saw, hopelessly and with despair, that it was not fifteen hours and twenty
minutes, that it was not even one hour, that it was no time at all. The window was not, it
seemed, intermittent. Materializing out of the air was a confusion of bones and rent clothing,
a flurry of contemptuously flung garbage that clattered to the ground and lay there in an
untidy heap, noisome and foreboding.

>>17304867

THE END.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Call of the Crocodile

>>17303857
Here’s the 1.0 version, that one was a working version.

>>17304966
>The Ruins
That movie is fucked up

>>17304688
>whats the best one story to start with aickman?
I think Ringing the Changes is the most anthologized. It's not as befuddling and subtle as some of his stuff, but you'll know by the end whether you're interested in more.

>>17303825
I just started reading the Mark Samuels collection and it’s excellent so far. I think he’s the only writer who stands in the same league as Ligotti and Brian Evenson.

Here’s a chart of the 21st century Weird Horror Revival, most people don’t realize it but we are living in a golden age for horror short stories.

>>17304992
>Simon Strantzas
Nice
List needs some China Mieville. Get Perdido Street Station on there. I've heard Kraken is p spooky.

>>17304729
again, not trying to be all jaded but once you have spooky house that plays tricks on you, something like that is a given

>>17305020
This one is all short story collections, is there a particular short story collection of his I should add?

>>17303825
I've read tree or four short stories from Teatro Grottesco and never finished the book, I don't know why if i'm being honest, the book was fairly pricey

>>17304761
I made the mistake of reading Kate Millet's The Basement, a nonfiction on the Likens case. Holy shit, and they all got off light too.

This book.

god i hate ligotti, i hate everything about his midwit ideas and midwit writing style, i hate how all the pictures associated with him that people post when they want to talk about him are ugly garbage for midwits, i hate how every horror thread turns into ligotti discussion between midwits posting those ugly fucking pictures

Tm Curran, Skull Moon.

Decent Western horror story. Had some good scenes, and maintained a nice creepy mood throughout. If you like horror stories, you'll probably enjoy it.

>>17303825
I found this rareboi for almost nothing a few days ago.
>>17303920
>Incredibly frustrating writer in my experience
Why? The Night Land is his most frustrating book, the prose and the almost endless loop out walking, drinking, eating tablet, sleep, drove me crazy, but the rest of his work is normal. In particular Carnacki and the nautical stories.

>>17303825
Algernon Blackwood - The Willows. Not that much happens, but the athmosphere is amazing. It's part of the giant The Weird compendium.

>>17306459
What horror authors do you think are good?

>>17305501
Three Moments of an Explosion

>>17306917
Nah, house on the borderland is similarly tedious when the time acceleration part starts.

>>17306934
I would recommend his entire Incredible Adventures collection. Not all of the are horror, but weird fiction.

>>17306917
So far I've only read The Night Land and House on the Borderland, but I agree with >>17307669. Borderland describes phantasmagorical cosmic visions with all the excitement of a grocery list. It's one of the biggest gaps between strength of imagination and quality of prose I've ever read.

>>17306934
I'm going to follow your advice and read this book.

>>17308933
Also read The Wendigo. If you are looking for truly scary weird stories, then Blackwood's these two tales are pretty much the top 2

>>17306934
The atmosphere is terrific. It’s HPL’s favourite short story as well.

>>17307024

>>17309354
>If you are looking for truly scary weird stories, then Blackwood's these two tales are pretty much the top 2

There are, moreover, two kinds of readers in the world: those who prefer The Willows, and those who prefer The Wendigo.

I'm a Wendigo man, myself. The mountains, wind, and cold scratch my horror itch in a way that streams and willows do not.

Been reading pic related these last few days. The eponymous story had my eyes watering and my skin crawling, something rare since I don't usually get affected by horror stories.

Call of the Arcade

>>17310662
>>17306453
Why hasn't this fucko been banned yet?

>>17310697
Because recommending a horror novel in a thread about horror novels isn't a banable offense.
You however, are not contributing much to this thread, which could be argued as low quality posting or possibly trolling outside of /b.
F. Gardner's books are based. You'd know that if you read them.

>>17310909
>t. F. Gardner

>>17310986
Be nice

Richard Gavin's latest collection

>>17310697
A lot of it isn't him anymore. It's just anons joking around and laughing about these meme books.

>>17312888
Quick rundown on F. Gardner?

>>17304966
I loved the Books of Blood, probably my all time fave horror anthology.
Anyone know of more fucked up Lotf meets supernatural horror esque stuff like Pig Blood Blues?

>>17304969
The characters (in the books at least) were so insufferable I ended up rooting for the plant ngl

Does anyone know of any creepy, but kidna comfy, folklore horror like Gogols Viy?

Is this /horror/?

>>17314510
A Good Man is Hard to Find is a classic, and you can read it in like, an hour.

>>17314510
https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/160332/A%20good%20man%20is%20hard%20to%20find%20-%20Flannery%20O%27Connor.pdf

>>17310539
I prefer The Willows. The way the outside horror gradually intrudes our reality and those willows, Blackwood does it perfect.