Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Read online

  Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013

  Don Webb, Jeffrey Thomas, Brian M, Sammons, Peter Rawlik, Paul Mudie, William Meikle, Kevin Lucia, David Kernot, Scott R. Jones, C.J. Henderson, Cody Goodfellow, David Dunwoody, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and David Conyers

  Copyright 2013 the authors.

  About the Book

  Inside this book you’ll find a taste of some of today’s top Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian writers.

  “The Great White Bed” by Don Webb – A senile old man makes a deal with a strange being for a new lease on life. What happens when a book reads you?

  “The Cellar Gods” by Jeffrey Thomas – In the 1940s, a young medical student protects a beautiful Asian woman from prejudiced townsfolk, only to discover she is connected to mysterious entities from an unholy dimension.

  “The Locked Door” by Brian M. Sammons – The visions of a psychic threatens the existence of a secret order.

  “In the Gyre” by William Meikle – A research vessel investigating a growing pollution problem in the ocean finds that something else has discovered a use for our waste material—something designed for building, and growing, and multiplying.

  “The Gate and the Way” by Kevin Lucia – Poking around the local spook house for redeemable cans and bottles, two brothers stumble upon cosmic horrors from beyond space and time.

  “I Cannot Begin To Tell You” by Scott R Jones – A desperate father kidnaps his infant son and flees to a remote cabin to wait out an apocalypse only he can perceive. Is the man psychotic? Or is the boy a conduit for an ancient malevolence from the depths of Time?

  “Cutter” by David Dunwoody – In this prequel to Dunwoody’s novel The Harvest Cycle, a man and boy are trapped in an abandoned house by plague of bizarre monsters.

  “Graveyard Orbit” by Shane Jiraiya Cummings – In the future, the deep space exploration vessel Wellington encounters the unthinkable orbiting the uncharted planet Osiris II. Amid the debris of a trillion alien corpses, the Wellington’s Captain Walker will stumble upon an unlikely ally—and potentially, the secrets of the universe.

  “The Weaponized Puzzle” by David Conyers – A Russian spy steals an alien artifact from the Australian Government which soon transforms into a prison, and Australian spy Harrison Peel must solve its various puzzles and confront its captive horrors to escape again.

  This sampler collection provides links to the various author’s works, personal interviews, and further information on their e-books.

  Step inside, and discover the newest horror releases lurking in the nightmare lands of Lovecraft…

  “Don Webb is adept at mixing Terror and Beauty.” — Ramsey Campbell

  “Jeffrey Thomas’ imagination is as twisted as it is relentless.” — F. Paul Wilson

  “He strikes without warning in any corner of the weird tale, scaling conventions and leaping over genre boundaries with the seasoned finesse of a literary ninja. With razor-sharp keyboard clenched in his teeth, he leaves only seemingly innocuous though gnarly origami horror yarns that are actually deathtraps of ingenious artistry. Brian Sammons is not so much a writer to watch as a writer to seize, interrogate and, if beheaded, keep the head, 'cos it's sure to go up in value.” – Cody Goodfellow, author of Radiant Dawn

  “There is no doubt in my mind that William Meikle is one of the premier storytellers of our time.” — Famous Monsters of Filmland

  “Kevin Lucia is a true craftsman of the horror story, with a fine sense of the genre’s best traditions.” — Norman Prentiss, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Invisible Fences and The Fleshless Man

  “Winds of Nzambi by … David Kernot is a unique and rather dark tale of Portuguese colonisation and gods brought to life.” — Thirteen O’Clock

  “Some horror is meant to scare you, some to gross you out, yet Jones’ horror is meant to engage you, upset you, unsettle you. Cage-rattling horror ... crawls under your skin, and lays eggs.” — Jordan Stratford, author of Mechanicals and Living Gnosticism: An Ancient Way of Knowing

  “Simply put, David Dunwoody is one of the most imaginative dark fantasy writers working today. His stories are endlessly inventive, and he never fails to cut new paths through our collective nightmare landscape. It’s been too long since a book raised the hairs on the back of my neck, but the stories in Unbound did just that. A truly outstanding collection.” — Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Dead City, on Unbound & Other Tales

  “[Requiem for the Burning God is] a story of epic scope and grand pulp-style adventure, with everything from flesh-eating ooze to biplanes dogfighting zeppelins ... it is the sort of story that I wish my role-playing sessions ran like!” – Andrew J. McKiernan, HorrorScope

  “The versatile David Conyers greatly impresses. He is gifted with much imagination, the knack for intriguing plot, suspenseful pacing, and compelling characters. I suspect the man can do it all, and will.” — Jeffrey Thomas, author of Deadstock

  Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 copyright 2013 Jeffrey Thomas, Peter Rawlik, Kevin Lucia, Scott R Jones, C.J. Henderson, David Dunwoody, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, David Conyers, All Rights Reserved.

  “The Great White Bed” copyright Don Webb 2013 first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 2007)

  “The Cellar Gods” copyright Jeffrey Thomas 2002 first appeared in the anthology New Mythos Legends (Marietta Publishing, 2002).

  “The Locked Door” copyright Brian M. Sammons 2005 first appeared in Dreaming in R’lyeh #3.

  “Memory of the Night” copyright Peter Rawlik is original to this collection.

  “In the Gyre” copyright William Meikle 2013 first appeared as the first chapter of The Creeping Kelp novel (Dark Regions Press, 2011).

  “Winds of Nzambi” copyright David Kernot and David Conyers 2011 first appeared in Midnight Echo in 2011.

  “The Gate and the Way” copyright Kevin Lucia 2013 first appeared in Things Slip Through (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2013).

  “I Cannot Being To Tell You” copyright Scott R Jones 2013 is original to this collection.

  Radiant Dawn, copyright Cody Goodfellow 2000 first published by Perilous Press.

  “Cutter” copyright David Dunwoody 2012 first published in Slices of Flesh (Dark Moon Books, 2013).

  “Graveyard Orbit” copyright Shane Jiraiya Cummings 2011 first appeared in Midnight Echo #6, ed. David Conyers, Jason Fischer, and David Kernot (AHWA, 2011).

  “The Weaponized Puzzle” copyright David Conyers 2013 first appeared in The Weaponized Puzzle (Amazon Digial Publishing, 2013).

  Cover Image “Deep Ones” copyright 2013 Paul Mudie, All Rights Reserved.

  Each author is solely responsible for their own work.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters, companies and private organizations in this book are fictitious.

  No reference to any living person is intended.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  “The Great White Bed”

  Interview with author Don Webb

  About Don Webb

  “The Cellar Gods”

  Interview with author Jeffrey Thomas

  About Jeffrey Thomas

  “The Locked Door”

  Interview with author Brian M. Sammons

  About Brian M. Sammons
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  “Memory of the Night”

  Interview with author Peter Rawlik

  About Peter Rawlik

  Interview with cover artist Paul Mudie

  About Paul Mudie

  “In the Gyre”

  Interview with author William Meikle

  About William Meikle

  “The Gate and the Way”

  Interview with author Kevin Lucia

  About Kevin Lucia

  “Winds of Nzambi”

  Interview with author David Kernot

  About David Kernot

  “I Cannot Begin to Tell You”

  Interview with author Scott R Jones

  About Scott R Jones

  “Patiently Waiting”

  Interview with author C.J. Henderson

  About C.J. Henderson

  Radiant Dawn

  Interview with author Cody Goodfellow

  About Cody Goodfellow

  “Cutter”

  Interview with author David Dunwoody

  About David Dunwoody

  “Graveyard Orbit”

  Interview with author Shane Jiraiya Cummings

  About Shane Jiraiya Cummings

  “The Weaponized Puzzle”

  Interview with author David Conyers

  About David Conyers

  The Great White Bed

  Don Webb

  The follow novella/short story appears in Author’s book, When They Came and was dedicated to Basil Cooper.

  I wanted to write about the bed because I thought it would be therapeutic. For pretty obvious reasons I never got over that summer, and I know there’s a mental part to go along with the physical part. I don’t write about the book. And see I’m already there. I can’t make myself think about what I need to think about. The room. The bedroom. I can start with that. It smelled of geraniums. My grandmother had loved them and it had become my job to keep them alive after she had died. She grew them in coffee cans, and when they got too root-bound she would put them in plastic buckets that she got working at the cleaners. Clay pots were an extravagance. There were five of the big light blue buckets on a special shelf built across the windows in the bedroom, so the bedroom always had a green smell.

  It was hot too. There were two swamp coolers that cooled the house down. One in the living room at the front of the house, one in the den in the back. Neither supplied much cool air to the place where I slept. I remember the first thing that Grandpa had asked when I moved in with him that summer was if I wanted to sleep with him. I thought that was creepy and I said I’d sleep in the guest bedroom, where Granny did her sewing. It was so hot that I never turned down the big white thick bedspread on the bed and lay on the sheets. I just lay on top of it. I didn’t want anything over my body. At home I slept on a twin bed, the king size bed seemed the biggest things in the world to me.

  I was thirteen. Next year would be Junior High.

  I helped Grandpa out. I cooked his meals, did his laundry, cut the grass. In retrospect it was a big job for someone my age, but I came from a family of workers. I didn’t do a good job with the laundry and my food repertoire relied heavily on Spam baked in the oven covered with ketchup.

  My friends were rich kids, mainly in camp or hanging out at the private

  swimming pool. These days I know they weren’t rich, but they seemed rich to me. I amused myself with TV watching old black and white comedies in syndication. I remember a that summer had good dose of the Dick Van Dyke show mixed up with the strangeness. Cable TV was new to Doublesign that year. We got twenty-eight stations. Grandpa would get up early and wake me up. He had been a farmer, before they moved to town. Kids are not supposed to see the dawn in summer, no matter what anyone says. He liked cereal for breakfast. He really liked one called Team, I don’t think they make it anymore. He would make coffee and I would pour the cereal. Afterward he would go off to the read the paper and I would do the dishes. If I had any yard work to do I would do it in the mornings before it got too hot. I trimmed the hedge, cut the grass, weeded out the dandelions. Early on I had tried to keep a little garden going. I had planted some tomatoes and cucumbers. But one day Grandpa had weeded them all out of the bed where I had planted them. His mind was going, but no one in the family would say so. When I tried to stop him he hit me with his cane and said I was stupid. Like I say, even without the weirdness, it was a big job,

  Noon would come around and Mom would join us for lunch, which I had made. She worked downtown, a mysterious place full of much activity. She would eat my ketchup-covered Spam and canned green beans and visit with her dad. Sometimes he would ask her things like “How come I haven’t seen you in a month?” even though she came everyday. In the afternoons he would forget that we had eaten lunch and ask me when the hell I was going to fix it. He took a nap about three, and I know this will sound strange, but I started napping too. Summer was long and boring and it was easy to doze off. I would lay down in the green smell on the huge white bed and snooze.

  School had been out about three weeks, when I woke one day to seeing Grandpa reading the book. I always slept less time than him so I was startled he was up. I went in the living room. He sat in his rocking chair and even though the light streaming in through the picture window lighted the room he had Grandmother’s prize lamp turned on. I loved that lamp. It had two globes, one above and one below. Someone had painted a rose on each globe. . I wonder who has it now.

  The book was small and thick – about the size of a Stephen King paperback. It was bound in golden colored leather, and had a green nine angled design on its cover. I don’t want to say more about it. I didn’t mean to say that much.

  Grandpa was totally absorbed, his lips moving slowly. I had only seen him with a few Reader’s Digests over the years. His concentration had been slipping so much since Granny died I didn’t know how he could be reading. I guessed he probably wasn’t. Just distracting himself. I was always in favor of his distractions. He didn’t get mad at me and I didn’t have to think up things to talk about. It was a lot easier cutting his lawn than coming up with discussion topics.

  I made macaroni and cheese plus canned yams for dinner. I didn’t disturb him until I had food on his plate. He came in, we said our prayers and afterwards we watched the six o-clock news. We watched TV together every night. He would fall asleep about eight. I would get him up and tell him to undress about ten.

  The next day I had a pleasant surprise. Sunlight woke me, not Grandpa. I got up, pulled on my clothes and found him reading again.

  “Hey you ready for breakfast?” I asked.

  “You bet.” He said.

  His eyes had the shine they used to have when I was a little kid. He got up out of his chair, and told me, “You know I think you’re old enough to have coffee now.”

  He put a great deal of sugar and milk in my coffee. I loved it and I still do. We ate our cereal in our usual crunchy silence, until curiosity got the better of me.

  “What’s that book you’re reading?”

  He looked at me, as though I had something very strange like “Are we going to the moon this afternoon?” He said, “I’m not reading anything.”

  “Not now. I meant just before breakfast.”

  “I wasn’t reading anything.”

  The light went out of his eyes just as though someone had hit the switch.

  I did the dishes and went off to watch I Married Joan,. The TV was in the den . After laughing at Joan Davis’ antics for a quarter of an hour or so, I went to the front of the house and spied on Grandpa. He was reading. He seemed about halfway through the book. I cleared my throat. He didn’t look up. “I’m going down to the park.” I said. He didn’t look up. I went back to watching TV. Maybe his senility had entered a new peaceful stage.

  When Mom came that day, Grandpa was talkative and cheerful. He told Mom what a great job I did with the lawn, how much he liked my food, his opinion of the Mayor and otherwise talked like an adult human being. I didn’t know what had happened, but I tho
ught it was the greatest thing ever!

  Mom gave me some money so that I could walk down to the Ice Palace and buy cones for Grandpa and myself later that day. I knew she was happy. She had been through so much grief watching her dad rot, and she thought that maybe, just maybe this time, God had listened to our prayers. I thought it was my cooking. OK I really didn’t think that. I thought it was the book.

  It was on the walk down to the Ice Palace that greed filled my soul. What if really and truly the book was making Grandpa well again? If it could fix up his tore-up mind what might it do for mine? I mean my mind was good; I made A’s in Math and English, I could always outsmart people in game shows. I would get the book. Not take it from Grandpa, because I didn’t want to stop his miracle, but read sometime when he was asleep and get my own benefit. I would begin Junior High as a genius!

  The first logical time would be afternoon nap. I watched the old Seth Thomas clock on the living room mantel with X-ray eyes. Grandpa read. It became three.

  “Don’t you want to take your nap?” I asked.

  I had to repeat myself a couple of times before he looked up.

  “I’m giving up naps in the afternoon.” He said. “I think I’ve slept enough in my long life. But I bet you sure are sleepy.”

  The moment he said it, all I could think of was sleep. The great white bed filled my mind. Big and solid and soft. It seemed huge and inviting. The bed was in my head and I needed to be in the bed. I started to speak, but I just yawned. I got control of myself and said, “ A nap does sound good.”

  I went to the bedroom and lay atop the thick white bedspread. Usually I had to lie still for a long while, staring at the round glass light fixture that Granny had put in. I would watch the center brass nut and focus on it while my thoughts drained away into the milky white glass around it. But today sleep came the moment I lay on the pillow. I slept until Grandpa woke me.