The Second Haunts & Horrors by Fritz Leiber & Frank Belknap Long & A. R. Morlan & Robert Moore Williams & Janet Fox

Author:Fritz Leiber & Frank Belknap Long & A. R. Morlan & Robert Moore Williams & Janet Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, supernatural, ghost, monsters, dark fantasy
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

LIQUID SKIN, by Gareth Owens

Originally published in Quercus One: The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories (2008)

She would be walking down the street, the grey concrete of a normal day. She would look down, the pavement a muted and colourless paste of brick, spotted with bleached chewing gum and seagull droppings. She would be struck by how much the runnels between the square tiles looked like the gaps between the chunks on a bar of chocolate, and then she would hear the crack.

It always sounded like a rifle shot, like ice breaking beneath her feet. She could always feel the surface give a little first, as if it had not quite broken all the way through. Looking down, the pavement would be crazed, like a smashed car window, circular and web-like, and oozing stickily through the cracks, welling up as though from a slow wound, came the dark, deliberate, blood.

Stepping away she would look down, shocked and bewildered, then the crack would happen again under her feet, but this time she could not stop herself, and her foot would always go right through into the blood below, warm and sticky.

Pulling herself free, dripping and nauseous, she takes another step…crack…and another…crack. The concrete world is giving way under her. The breathless terror mounts, and she is overwhelmed with inchoate, primeval panic. Suddenly she is running, the floor under her feet cracking and crunching like the icing on a cake, cracking like ice, and crunching like snow.

In panic she looks over her shoulder as she runs, and she can see her foot prints as dark wounds on the skin of reality, as if the whole world was nothing but a thin crust of insubstantial bone, below which waits a vast and unquiet ocean of blood, heaving beneath the surface.

She tries to scream, but her voice is lost. She can’t seem to make any noise. She can’t remember how to speak. She is too terrified. It feels like a great weight on her chest, and no sound comes. From away in the distance she can hear a pathetic whistling, peeping sound, she can hear it as a panic stricken and breathless whisper; she can hear the tears in it, even though she is not crying.

As she runs, she looks down, and the blood makes pat pat pat noises like the splash of a shallow puddle, like a child in bright red boots, playing in the rain, the rain becomes blood, the sky is bleeding.

She can feel its weak tackiness every time she lifts a foot to take a step, as if the blood is trying to hold on to her, to pull her down.

And then she would wake, tears in her eyes, and anger in her heart. The tears of terror, and the anger of frustration. These dreams had plagued her as long as she could remember. Doctor Eams, the expedition psycher, had told her that they were either a function of stress, or a symptom of demonic possession.

Beale Voynitch lay panting on

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