Queen Anne's Resurrection - Journey V - The Abyss and the Kraken - Stories by Allyson Bird and Scott Nicholson

Queen Anne's Resurrection - Journey V - The Abyss and the Kraken - Stories by Allyson Bird and Scott Nicholson. Read the complete version in italian

Beneathby Allyson Bird
His suit was made of vulcanised rubber and his lead-weighted boots dragged up the silt from the bed at the depth of 30 metres. The copper helmet was very heavy, secured by rivets, and Thomas had never really worried about the water leaking in.  He needed more oyster shells. Pinctada Maxima. Genera of bivalve molluscs. Thomas wanted the large pearls. His hope was to find one like La Peregrina -discovered in the Gulf of Panama in the sixteenth century and given to kings and queens thorough the centuries. He knew that a Roman general called Vitellius had raised the money for a war with the sale of his mother’s pearls. Caligula had adorned his horse with them. Roman women once had pearls sewn to couches where they sat and drank wine from glistening goblets encrusted with them. Thomas could almost taste the wine -almost. Buttons had been made from mother-of-pearl. He knew everything there was to know about pearls whether from oyster or abalone and admired the South Sea ones in all their colours…white, cream, gold and silver, and also the green, blue, grey, purple and peacock mix of the Tahitian pearl. As he harvested the shells off the seabed and placed them in his rope basket which hung around his neck he thought of the stories that the pearl divers had told each other around the campfire at night -tales of the kraken with tentacles strong enough to drag down sailing ships beneath the waves and of sharks that could rip a man in two with one bite. Blood flooding the water turning from red to pink to nothing in the current. The same current which threatened to sweep Thomas off his feet but he kept going -determined to fill his basket. It never seemed to fill. He’d tried to find the largest oysters and shunned the smaller. As he worked on his imagination did so too. Thomas thought, through the gloom, that he saw a pale, flabby, hand try to grab his, and he jumped back. He looked around him out of the side of the three faced helmet. Nothing -nothing but the semi-dark and the silence. He looked up and peered through the front, glass window of his helmet, across the ocean bottom, into the foggy distance and he wondered about what could dwell there. He stopped looking for oysters. Dragging himself on, the sea pushing him back one step for every two forward, he then saw a figure, half covered by sand, lying on the seabed. He stooped and moved his gloved hands around the head of it, sweeping away until the sand spiralled around them both. Suddenly the water became clearer and he found himself looking down at a woman, her bloated white face -no eyes. Small fish had been nibbling at her arms and had darted away when they first felt the movement of him in the water. She hadn’t been there long. She clutched something to her breast that the sea, storm, or creature hadn’t managed to take from her. It gave itself up for Thomas. As he touched her arm whatever she was holding slid from her. He snatched at it but the current took it quickly out of reach. He was just too slow in the heavy boots. But he saw what it was. Its dark hair a sombre halo around its head as it rose above him. There would be no funeral for that lost soul -nor for its mother. Why didn’t she float to the surface? He felt beneath her body and found a chain. Followed that and uncovered it. It was an anchor. An odd shape though. Like a cross. Then he noticed the chain around her waist. He fumbled awkwardly but saw that it was padlocked. He could do nothing to free her. Thomas looked up to see if he could still see the child and was surprised to find he could. He saw a dark shape above it and hands dip into the ocean to try to rescue it. A futile act. That sight touched his soul and he wept. He wept for the child, its mother and himself. Perhaps he should return to the surface himself now? How long had he been down? He looked for the pipe which fed him air and saw that it had come away from its anchor and floated a few feet above him and he faced what he had fought to dismiss from his mind. He had known the line had broken. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that. He had known for many years. He had looked up many times at that broken lifeline and tried to think. Reality always receding into the dark water.  At the edge of the abyss he hesitated for one moment and then stepped out. He thought that he would sink faster -the lead boots and all but he didn’t. Thomas felt awe rather than fear. He was dead but was fully aware of that now. It grew darker. Down through the black sea he sank. An anglerfish swam in front of him. The tiny light lure teasing -and then the fish wandered lazily off towards easy prey.  Finally, with a thud, his boots hit the bottom. How many kilometres down? He wasn’t sure. The deepest part of the ocean, Challenger Deep was about nine. Thomas was nowhere near there though. Through the cloudy sea he saw a shimmer of gold.  Another fish? The latter was likely. He had seen many strange things in the sea. As he drew closer he wondered why, if alive, it did not move. The nearer he got the brighter the light became although it seemed to disappear at regular intervals.  The he saw it. Far taller than he had ever seen it on land. Broad at the base and tapering up to where the light intermittently shone as it reached out to him.  When he reached the lighthouse he looked up at the immense height of it. Over the old oak and worm-ridden door hung a shroud of deep green seaweed and for a moment thought he felt it brush his cheek. He pushed at the door and heard the creak. Impossible.   As he ascended the stairs he could hear his heavy, iron boots on the stone steps and as he wound his way upwards and looked down he could see not the seabed boots but his old walking boots. He could see the scruffs on the side and the old laces reaching out in the water like the arms of a sea anemone. The rail was made of coral, twisted and purple in colour. Tiny sea creatures had made their home there and they darted in and out as he went by. He saw flashes of orange and turquoise and a magnificent red. His suit and helmet disappeared and he wore the trousers and navy blue jumper he kept at home -something warm to come back to. When at the top of the stairs he opened another wooden door and stepped into the room. Through the glass windows he could see emerald green water and he marvelled at the colour of it. A woman looked up -she had been reading a book, and smiled at him. A child wrapped in a soft blanket lay asleep on the red rug at her feet. There was, at the table, an empty chair for Thomas. 

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Allyson Bird is the author of two collections: Bull Running for Girls and Wine and Rank Poison. She has co-edited with Joel Lane the anthology, Never Again. Her debut novel, Isis Unbound, is due out in the summer from Dark Regions Press. She won The British Fantasy Society award for best collection, for Bull Running for Girls, in 2009. You can find out more about Allyson Bird on her Web Site

Last Writesby Scott Nicholson
I wasn’t always like this. When I was alive, I walked the beach in search of shark’s teeth and pretty shells. In bare feet, dawn fast and pink on the horizon, the water licking at my ankles with a gentle, foaming tongue. The lighthouse was a marker, a means to measure the distance I had walked from the cottage I shared with my doting, deaf parents. Usually, I turned back when the lighthouse window was clearly visible, though on foggy mornings I might not see the towering structure until I was nearly upon it. On those days, a single bright lantern would burn in the uppermost window, serving as a guide for ships that might be daring the narrow passage. I was a ship myself, a vessel with an empty hull, as lost as any rudderless cutter. On the day I died, I decided to keep walking, though the tide had run out and my parents would be waiting for me to sweep sand from the floors, cook mackerel, and air the mildewed blankets. The lighthouse towered before me that day, bright as sand as it stretched higher and higher into the sky with my every step. It was capped with copper that had long ago turned dull green. The masonry that from a distance had seemed solid revealed itself to be covered with spidery cracks, iron bands girding the base. As I grew nearer, I detected rust on the hardware of the single oaken door set in the rounded base of the structure. The door had a large metal knocker in the center. The keyhole in the door handle was like the black eye of a dead shark. Sand skirled in the breeze around the base of the door, and cool, fetid air oozed from the cracks between the oak planks. I touched the wood, wondering about the man behind. I tapped the door and a hollow echo sounded inside. The only sound in reply was the reverberation inside the base of the lighthouse, the whispering of the surf, and the distant cry of a gull. But at last there came a turning in the works of the door, and it creaked open. I found myself facing a man of dark countenance, with black, haunted eyes and a large, pale forehead. He was perhaps twenty, though his eyes looked far older than that, as if he had witnessed tragedies in abundance. His hair was swept away from his brow in a wild manner, like a tangled tuft of sea oats. He wore a vest and a white shirt, both stained and rumpled. The smell of drink hung about him like a mist. “Do you know how many steps I had to climb?” he said. I gave him my sweetest smile, though I’d had little practice in that art. Despite his grave expression, he was handsome.  “I live around the point,” I said, “Since we’re neighbors-” “I have no need of neighbors,” he said. “I wish to be alone.” But I caught him staring past my shoulder at the shoreline. The beach was empty, for the coral was sharp and discouraged bathers, and the currents here were too rough for putting out fishing boats. “I was wondering if I could see the view from up there,” I said, leaning my head back to look at the windows far above. “I’ve lived here all my life but I scarcely know what the place looks like.” “I have my duties,” he said. “I’ve no time for guided tours.” “Please, sir, I will only be a moment. Just one look. And I came all this way.” I smoothed the lap of my dress, a gesture I had seen women use in church when speaking to men they wished to flatter. He seemed to reflect for an instant, and his eyes grew softer. “Hmm. You remind me of someone I once knew. Perhaps I can spare some time. But you must promise to be careful. These stairs are wretched.” “I will take care, sir.” The base of the lighthouse was hollow, with a well perhaps forty feet deep. The metal stairs wound up into the gloom, and I could see why he thought them treacherous. His lantern threw long, flickering shadows up the curved wall of the lighthouse. We navigated upwards, his shoes thundering on the narrow metal steps. “It’s difficult the first few times, but it gets easier,” he said. “You haven’t told me your name,” I said. “Poe,” he said. “From Baltimore. And yours?” I wasn’t prepared to tell him yet. I was still wary of what the villagers might think if he went around reporting that I had visited him alone. Word would also get back to my parents, and while I resented their control of me, I still loved them and wished them no additional worries on my behalf. “Mary,” I said, the first name that came to mind. Only later, after my death, would he know my true name. “Mary. One of my favorites.” We continued our climb and eventually reached a small trap door at the top. Poe’s watch chamber was sparsely furnished. A table and a chair were on one end of the round room, a logbook of some type on the table, a quill pen and inkwell beside it. Papers were piled beneath the logbook, and a collapsed telescope lay across the open pages of the book. A bunk sat low to the floor at the other end of the room, a walnut trunk at its foot, presumably to contain his clothes. A cabinet stood near the trunk, filled with bread, dried meat and fish, apples, and several rows of corked bottles filled with amber liquid. A chamber pot, covered indiscreetly with a board, was off to the side. Empty bottles were scattered beneath the bunk, and the cramped room had the same spirited aroma that surrounded the man, combined with the cloying stench of the chamber pot. Poe waved one florid hand to the three windows facing the seaside. “There’s your view,” he said, then sat in the chair by the logbook. The flat, gray water stretched for miles, the horizon farther than I had ever seen it. The ocean seemed to curve, and distant full-sheeted masts protruded from the water like tiny clusters of white flowers. The shoreline stretched in either direction, the north sweeping more gently, the south broken by crags and cays. The natural breakwater of which ships’ captains were afraid was black and sharp, gleaming like wet teeth. I took in the view for some minutes, not remarking. “One gets bored with it after a while,” Poe said. He uncorked one of the bottles and poured some of the liquor into a glass. He drank without offering me any. “Are you not a lover of the sea?” I said. “I would have thought someone taking a post such as this-’
“-must be as mad as a hatter,” he said, looking glumly into his glass. “Four months here, and I’ve barely even started.” “I don’t understand,” I said. He gestured toward the papers on the table. “My work.” “You keep a record of the currents, tides, and ships?” “Not that work. I meant my writing.” “You are a writer, then?” “Yes. I used to be a newspaper reporter. But I’m driven to write of false things. I thought with a change of scenery, and blessed isolation . . .” “You have plenty of both here, I imagine. I know something of isolation myself.” He gave a grim smile, as if his loneliness were the deepest in all the world and weighed most heavily on his shoulders. He drank more liquor, in gulps instead of sips, and refilled his glass. My legs were trembling from the long climb, but the only place to sit was his bed. I had never been in a man’s bed. “Isolation is the devil’s tool,” Poe said. “I want to concentrate on my work, but one hears things in this damnable cylinder. The rush of high tide sounds like voices in the chamber below, like the soft cries of those who have been pulled under the water. Think of all those ships lying on the ocean floor yonder, and the white bones of those who went down with them. Where do you suppose they go?” For the first time, I had an inkling of the man’s instability. His brooding good looks became sharper and fiercer, his eyes flashing with a morose anger. Beyond the windows, the clouds had gathered and grown darker as if to match Poe’s mood. A squall was pushing in from the sea, and the cutters spread across the sea had taken down their sails as the wind increased. “A storm is blowing in,” I said. “Shouldn’t you light the lamps?” He said nothing, just wiped at his chin. Wanting to pull him from his mood, not yet ready to trouble him to lead me back down the stairs, I asked what he was writing. “It’s about a shipwreck.” “Shipwreck?”  “A ghost ship. With a morbid crew.” I laughed. “One hears plenty of those tales. I found a paper in a corked bottle once, washed up on the beach.” His eyebrows arched. “What did it say?” “The water had gotten to it.” “It always does,” he said, with the air of one who had floated many futile messages. “Can I hear the story?” “It’s no good,” he said. He tapped the rumpled pages beneath the logbook. “This may be the last thing I ever write.” “Please, read me one.” “It’s not fit for ladies,” he said, and I wondered how much of his gallantry was due to drunkenness. He closed the logbook and passed it to me. I opened it to the first page. I’d had some schooling in the village, but could read little. He had started entries on January first. His handwriting was florid and bold, the words scrawled with an intensity that matched his features. He took it from me. “’January two,’” he read. “‘I have passed this day in a species of ecstasy that I find impossible to describe. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more thoroughly gratified. I do not say satisfied; for I believe I should never be satiated with such delight as I have experienced today. The wind lulled about daybreak, and by the afternoon the sea had gone down materially. Nothing to be seen, with the telescope even, but ocean and sky, with an occasional gull.’” “That’s lovely,” I say. I know nothing of poetry. “January three,’” he continued. “ A dead calm all day. Towards evening the sea looked very much like glass. A few seaweeds came in sight; but besides them absolutely nothing all day, not even the slightest speck of cloud.’” “Much like this morning, only now the wind is picking up and there’s a swell rising.” He closed the book and stared out at the sea for a moment. “What do you know of murder?” he asked, appraising me, his eyes gleaming. “Very little,” I said. “I can’t imagine such a horrid thing.” “I can,” he said. “Far too easily. The mind of man is a foul, corrupt thing. And when a man is alone with his thoughts . . .” He drained his glass again, refilled it, spilling a few drops on the table. “But forgive me,” he said, louder. “I forget my manners. You are a guest and I have made you stand.” I shivered, though the room was warm. “I must be getting home,” I said. “My parents are waiting, and I dare not get caught out in this storm.” “Why don’t you stay until it blows over?” he said, leaning back on the bunk a little. “They’ll be expecting me,” I said. I took a tentative step toward the trap door, loathe to negotiate those many steps again without a lantern. Poe grabbed my arm, and his eyes were dead as coal. “I can’t be alone anymore,” he said. “Don’t you hear them?” I tried to pull away, but his was the grip of a lunatic. “Please,” I implored, silently cursing my recklessness in coming here. A barren life on a lonely strip of shore was better than no life at all, and the excitement I had craved was now full upon me, but I wanted it no more. “The voices,” he said with a hiss, his face clenched, sweat clinging to that high, broad forehead. “With every storm they come, the souls of the shipwrecked and lost at sea.” As the wind picked up, I thought I could hear them, but perhaps it was only the roaring heartbeat in my ears. I wrenched free, desperate and afraid. He grabbed at me again, and I dodged away. He howled, the mad sound blending with the wind until it filled the watch chamber. “Don’t leave me,” he shouted, diving toward me. I stepped backward, into the space of the open trap door, falling to the top step and then into the yawning black abyss, toward those tormented voices at the base of the lighthouse.
I stayed with Poe for the remainder of his term. He disposed of my body, of course, weighed me down by slipping scrap iron into my dress, and set me out to sea in the early morning dark of high tide. I came back with the tide the next night, watched as he brooded with his bottles and occasionally scrawled barely legible words on his papers. I read his logbook over his shoulder, what I could of it. I waited until he fell into a restless sleep before I began whispering. Poe was right, those voices in the well of the lighthouse were of the dead, and I both imitated and joined them. Poe tossed in his sleep, sweated like driftwood, and finally woke. “Who’s there?” he asked. I told him my name, as I told all of them my name in the years and centuries to come. He finished his story, wrote poetry, and drank to forget me, though he could not forget the one who was his constant companion. He had come to the lighthouse to be alone, but in the end, that was the last thing I allowed him. He read to me from his journal: “It is strange that I never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word has: ‘Alone.’” And though Poe left at the end of the year, I imagine I haunted him for the remainder of his days. I longed to be the last thing of which he ever wrote. And he made me immortal. Me, his Annabel Lee.

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Scott Nicholson: His first novel The Red Church inspired by an actual haunted church near his home, was released as a mass market paperback in 2002. It was selected for three book-of-the-month clubs and was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. His other novels are The Harvest, The Manor, The Home, The Farm, They Hunger, Disintegration, Drummer Boy, the sequel to The Red Church. Nicholson won the grand prize in the international Writers of the Future contest in 1999. That same year, he was first runner-up for the Darrell Award and his work was recommended for both the Stoker and Nebula Awards. He’s published over 40 stories in six different countries, some of which appear in his collection Thank You For The Flowers.  Web Site

Kraken Revengeby Daniele Serra

Profilo dell' AutoreDaniele Serra is a professional illustrator. His work has been published in Europe, Australia and the United States, and displayed at various exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. He has provided illustrations for authors such as Brian Stableford, Rain Graves and Steven Savile. He has also worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Web Site




Read the complete version in italian