Seed

He coughed and a splattering of grease coated the mirror – something itched insanely at the back of his throat. How in the hell was he going to deal with it? Part of him was wondering why his nanite back-up system hadn’t kicked in to remove whatever foreign matter nestled there. If something had entered [...]

Squid Pro Quo 2

Bailey hadn’t been able to do much for him over the phone. He’d told him to go lie down and if it got worse to ring him back. No one knew what the hell kind of bacteria something like that would have on it so the fact that he had a dodgy stomach wasn’t exactly [...]

Squid Pro Quo 1

It was purely an evolutionary quirk that had made the thing, which appeared to be pulling itself through a tear in the very fabric of reality, resemble a giant squid. Apparently reality was akin to a crystalline structure suspended in some liquid hyperreality that the varying membranes separating different multiverses hung in like ice in [...]

Else City - Part 1: Scar Tissue

It wasn’t exactly sleep, more like throwing a switch and laying in a darkened room. Un-life – weirder than the fucking Bardo by anybody’s standards. His scars were itchy as fuck – damn, shouldn’t they stop itching once you had expired? He was not looking forward to work; part of him couldn’t believe he had [...]

Vector

He took the corkscrew out of the girl’s skull, wiped it on his artist’s smock and went and opened a bottle of crappy plonk. He fancied getting well and truly rat-arsed and keeping up the whole serial killer shtick was very tiring. Ok, so he was a real serial killer, but it wasn’t the corpses [...]

Else City: Building Tension Extract 0

The suicides were on the top tier so they could jump off the roof if they needed to fulfil their need to re-enact their un-life’s defining moment.
The patricides shared rooms with the tulpas of their fathers so they might kill them again if they so desired. The floor they were on was known as the [...]

Grigori

It unfolded its wings, thinking of the act as prelude. Sharp teeth don’t always need a human sacrifice but he was damned if he was going to eat rotten fruit. The cloud swelled like a blood blister, a leech feeding on dreams with a bellyful of razor blades. It burst and silver and red rained [...]

Me Took (Extract 1)

Shot through the head he trembled like a spastic limb, cut loose from the control of his master, another corpse that finally realised it was dead. The personality shifted into the maggot in his eyeball and left him like it were leaving an apple. Exodus meant finding some other corpse to occupy — never exactly [...]