Nightmare Magazine, Issue 51 (December 2016) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2016-11-26T20:32:03+00:00

Eventide, the 31st of December, 1878

(I have become an expert in rolling those sticky brown balls. My mother would be so proud. And with every inhalation, with every smoky exhalation from the furnace of my lungs, I become more proud of her, more in awe of her courage and strength, that she was able to endure and survive that terrible, mismanaged first ceremony at Maiden Lane, that she was able to carry me in her womb for such an unnaturally lengthy amount of time, giving birth to me in painful secret only after years of fighting my contractions, after decades of confusing and stunting my purpose and sight with seductive poppy dreams. But I am older now, and I have power. She did not create me, but she gave my primordial flesh its final form. When the smoke billows into my body, I know how to hold it, how to shape it into purpose, how to extrude it into the air along with all the other invisible squiggling black horrors that populate the world. This is not addiction. This is destiny.)

And smoke still rises to the southeast, a lightning-studded pillar as thick and coiled as Krakatoa, a muscular demon rising out of the volcanic center of the earth to grab and pull down the sky. When I sit at my writing desk with my diary and pen and pipe, I see it billowing up past the medieval gables and spires of Bruges through the delft blue mornings and violet nights, all the smoldering remains of Leuven wafting back into the cosmos. I wonder how much of my aunt is above me now, and how much remains below.

Forever will I feed from the look on her face, the look she gave me as the twelve acolytes—so beautifully laid out against the lush carpet of morning-kissed grass, their pale hairless limbs parted wide and draped in silver chains that formed an intricate web, copies of the profane book of the goddess Kassogtha attached at their trembling wet notches, the Odic force flowing thick and hot between them like a cyclone—all started in perfect unison, the interdimensional bees streaming away from their now naked, sepulchral faces as they half-rose and cried out when they felt the thirteenth book with its massive protuberance inserted into my womanhood, my energies merging with theirs as I too cried out in tremulous painful joy. My triumphant aunt, and all those smug-faced priests with their tall linen and gold caps, their bejeweled vestments, their chalices of wine and bowls of incense. All of them dancing and rubbing themselves, waiting for their goddess to rise from the tangling birthing circle of limbs and suck them off while my aunt stared on like a Roman statue, imperious and oblivious to the cacophony around her. Eyes and the eyes of her bees, only on me.

And how I will remember until the vast fecund river of time becomes as dried up as a prostitute’s bottomless pit how those same eyes widened as

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