The Dark Fiction Library features the short stories of blog author Michael John Grist, stories spanning the fantasy, science fiction, and surreal genres, with plenty of mystery, horror and adventure thrown in.
So what is dark weird fiction? They’re stories that get dark, and weird. They’re stories of extraordinary adventures and legendary happenings in empty post-apocalyptic landscapes, chaotic frenzied cities, and fairy-tale mythscapes. They’re stories of loss, love, punishment and redemption, of trying to do the right thing, of failure and success, of good vs. evil and madness vs. sanity. Some of them are crazy, some of them appear sane, but all of them tiptoe up to the edge to take a peek over the side.
To read more about Grist’s fiction appearing in magazines and books, go to the about page.
Stick Man |
Building New Atlantis |
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| Dray is slumped at the edge of his desk, doodling. It’s Saturday again. Another business studies class. 4 low level Japanese students talking about their companies in broken English.No matter what he does, it’s always boring. You’d think, you’re the teacher of a class, it’s going to be interesting. You’d think, you’re the teacher, you shouldn’t be the one falling asleep.But it happens. He spends longer every time, planning, brings in CDs, newspapers, games, but somehow it always comes down to this. Just, dull.
Image from here. |
The first stage in the construction of New Atlantis went quietly, and the world scarcely noticed. It looked enough like a new ship or oil drilling platform on the satellite photos that no other nation would pay it too much mind.
It was only after that first stage was completed, and the second stage begun right next to it, that the world sat up and took notice. “Is this a new fleet then?” asked the United Nations. “Whose property is this?” asked NATO. |
Brand New Day |
Two Hearts |
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| She wakes up slow, opens her dull eyes expecting the new day to glow in, but no. It’s still night. She blinks, yawns into her pillow, stretches beneath the duvet. It’s the pig bedspread, the one her mother made. Her dozy palms bobble over the linen pigs stitched onto the cotton, sleep-weakened fingers catching in the felt swirls of their curly pink tails. She pulls one out gently, lets it tug back into place, and smiles.
In the distance, muted by the thick velvet curtains swaddling her second floor window, there’s the sound of drunken students calling out on the spine. Back from the Carleton probably, she muses, fresh off the Uni bus and trying their hardest to act like louts. 3, 4 in the morning perhaps. She rolls over, arches her back, sighs dreamily. Nudges a foot out from under the duvet, snuggles a hand underneath her double pillows, and slowly drifts back to sleep, only vaguely wondering why she woke at all. Image from here. |
He held the FridgePak plastic bag close up to his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything special. He saw no spark of life, no memory of love, nor any trace of meaning. He just saw the pulp of a heart. Liquidized. Red and purple, twisted through with fragments of yellow fat, white sinew, the strings and cords that held the organ together. Floating in the melted mushy blur.
He squeezed the bag. He felt the texture of ground meat, some gristly chunks remaining. He felt the fluid rush of blood, filling the bag’s vacuum, the indentations of his fingers, his fingerprints transferring to the plastic. He wanted to smile but he couldn’t. He placed the bag into his briefcase, closed it and locked the number dials, then got into his Mercedes and drove off. Image from David Ehlen. |
Sir Clowdishley and the Sea |
Sky Painter |
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| His name was Sir Clowdishley. He was once a royalty man, an astronomer to the king. He surveyed great kingdoms of heaven and charted the progress of the stars. He named whole galaxies after his two children and wife, but his family were now all dead, outlived by their celestial counterparts, lost to the sea.
He stalked the ocean, walking the shores of England’s beaches, from Land’s End in the north to John O’Groats in the south. He lived off tubers and seaweed, jellyfish he found rotting on the sand, husks of old cod half-desiccated in the salty winds. He was emaciated, where once stood a proud and hefty figure. He slumped along the coastline, ragged and draggle-haired, hefting his hundredweight chain like a penance behind him, picking his next sortie with the utmost care. Sir Clowdishley warred with the sea. He battered it with his chain. He lashed it endlessly, striking foam from its ragged edge and beating the surging tides with all his strength. Image by Caspar David Friedrich. |
The Sky Painter lived on the mountain and painted the sky. He painted it blue for blue skies, and white and grey for clouds. At night he painted it black, with white for all the stars. When the sun rose he dashed its arcing yellow lines across the heavens, and as it sank he brushed it orange and gold over the horizon.
He knew he had to paint the sky. If he didn’t paint the sky, who would? Nobody would. He knew that. So he stayed, and he painted the sky. Image from here. |
Freya 13 |
My Kids |
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| Delathon Rent, a 28 year old technician on the Freya 13 space station, sits slumped in the Outer rim command pod with a gas hatch sealed behind him, video-phone in his lap, waiting for it to ring. He’s been waiting for about 10 minutes now, after intermittently placing calls himself to the Freya Commune for the last hour. He has an awkward itch in the corner of his right eye. He wants to scratch it with the machined tip of his blue biro, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid to even touch his eyes.
He can’t forget Boli’s face. The moment the first of them burst loose from his fingers. Poor Boli, smiling all black-eyed and blind when it happened. Talking to his parents, maybe, or an old girlfriend. They’d left him to die, and so he’d died. Image from here. |
“It happened 2 years ago,” he says.
“What did?” Silence. “You don’t remember?” “Did I ever know?” Silence. Reflection. “I don’t think you ever did.” “Then that’s good.” “Yes. It is.” Image from here. |
Route 66 |
Hunting Ground |
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| Black highway snaking through an empty desert, star-studded midnight sky overhead, reflecting on the polished blacktop. Constellations dot to dot across the shiny old road, here and there disturbed by the central glint of refracting cat’s eyes, forming new and curious imaginary beasts on the black surface, the earth’s alteration of the heavens’ map.
All around blocky sandstone buttes loom from the darkness, like giant gardeners tending to the strip of alien stone set through their territory. Somewhere, perhaps on the peaks of the gloomed out outcroppings, a wolf howls into the night. Image from artbypavel. |
REN, TEKALUS, LORIE
They pick up the blip off the bait drop corner, burning bright green on the inner screen of their visors, flashing with a rapid-fire heartbeat, scouring afterglow trails into their eyes. It’s the strongest they’ve ever seen. Each blood beat swells across their visors like an explosion, waves spreading and lapping over the in-screen maps, washing out grey line buildings and buckled black roads beneath it. Image from here. |
Cullsman #9
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The Book of All
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| They’re coming. It’s been 20 years, and now they’re coming.I knew it, of course. I’ve been preparing. It’s the reason I’m here, after all, the reason we’re all here, the 38 of us that are left. Preparing for the Cull.
This world I’ve known, soon, there’ll be nothing left. Everything I did, thought, every choice I made, none of it will matter. Everything will be wiped clean and forgotten. A world of work, a generation, and nothing to show for it. I am glad. I am going home. I will see my wife. My daughters will be 22 and 23 now, surely sick of only knowing their father through old simulations. I will understand. I have watched their images dancing through my rooms every night for the last 15 years. I am ready to meet them now. I am going home. Image from Rassouli. |
I’m a cripple. Always have been. I was born with one of the latest cerebro-spinal disorders, unpleasant off-shoot of muddled genetic manipulation in vitro. My father was one of the leading scientists in the field at the time. He was also a drunk.My name is Dr. Pario Souder. I’ve been tied to a chair my whole life. My voice is fake, an interpretation through a voice box reader strapped around my neck. My motion is powered by the faint movements of my right hand, the only spinal thread they could preserve as my body warped itself through my early development.
I am the inventor of the Book of All. I wrote it, and I seeded it. Nobody would have expected as much, least of all me. I created it. I rely upon it. And now, I have to live with it. Image from here. |
Fade out
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Deathwatch
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| They strapped a man to the ceiling today. I know him. His name is Wasari Ichimura. I tried to talk to him afterwards but he wasn`t interested, and I was too tired to give chase. Most days now, my muscles don`t stop shaking `til past midnight. You`d think you`d get used to it. Even now, my last desk job 12 years distant, my frame swelled by 50 or so pounds, I still shake through the night.
My wife thinks it`s funny. Thought it was funny. Now it just scares us both. Image from here. |
It`s a beautiful day already. The sun is up and dawning like a golden rip in the pewter and orange sky, leaking rays of light across the blue ocean and bridge.
Everything is still. It`s a beginning, the start of a new day. Strange thing is, everything that matters is already over. The man lies pinioned to the grindstone of the bridge, door heavy over his slack frame, I`m kneeling here beside him, and the kid has gone for coffee and bagels. We`re all ready, in our places, but there`s nothing left to wait for. Image from here. |
Universal Time
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Fortune City
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| I’m working the deep 7 run again. Last time I was out here, must’ve been pre-schism. Before the split, and opinion divided the universe.
-Blah blah. That’s what my mistress says, when I try to discuss politics. -All I can hear is blah blah. Image from here. |
I started talking out loud around 3, I think. It’s a sweltering day, but that’s no excuse. It’s more to do with the height, I think. The wind rushing in my ears and I couldn’t hear a damn thing I was thinking.
What was I saying? Oh. |
The Blue Chipset and the Thing
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The Giant Robot and the Myna Bird |
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| I’m standing at the Way-station Hub. Everybody around me is dead. I’m holding the blue chipset in my hand and I’m willing it to work.
Over my head the sky is swirling. It’s a purple vortex. I’m waiting for it all to end. Image from Andrew Jones. |
The giant robot stalked the empty world, looking for its lost arm.It had fought in many wars, from the beginning to the end. In ancient Thrace it had brought down the gates of Thermopylae. In Samarkand it had crushed the Czar’s men underfoot. On the fields of the Somme it had walked the no-man’s land and razed the flags of the Third Reich.Towards the end had been the lasers. The large bombs. The A-bomb, and the B-bomb that followed it. Artillery that could shred its skin, and tanks that could push it over.
Image from here. |
Isidro’s Furnace
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Bathsheba
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| Isidro’s furnace demanded FBI agents, but he only fed it limestone and coke, sometimes Rice Crispies if it was good. In return, it fed his insanity. Neither got exactly what they wanted, but it was a happy enough arrangement for the both of them.
“FBI agents!” it would roar down the phone at Isidro, who often held a towel to his other ear to keep the noise in. “Out there, in the lawn, take your blunderbuss to the cheeky lot of them!” Isidro would look out at the lawn, see only squirrels. “They look more like squirrels,” he would say, but that would only provoke the furnace’s wrath. “They’re in disguise!” the furnace would roar. “Blunderbuss those sneaky squirrel-costume-wearing FBI agents!” Image from here. |
Mad Noah can’t give me what I want.No. Mad Noah stands in his tent and shouts at me in the doorway- “Incubus of Satan! If you had SEEN the holy holy holy as I have, if you had SEEN!” And I leave.
Mad Noah comes to me at night and between his whisperings of a world gone mad he slips his fingers between my thighs, and while he tells the story of the one eyed fox that learnt to fly above the second flood, he strokes me, and I do what? This proud woman, tall, strong, I do what to this little man above me? I do nothing to stop him at all. Image from here. |
Stormwatcher |
Leanna Drew the Moon
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| The storm-post was made of crumbling old red brick. Ragged weeds grew up its chipped and tattered sides, through its paving stones and round the observation platform binoculars on its roof. The grindstone railings that once prevented tourists from falling over the edge had collapsed inwards in a landslide a long time ago.
Once it had been a place filled with people, tourists come to see the volcano spume and smoke, then the storms came, the avalanches began, and the people left. There were still cars in the parking lot, their black tires faded and deflated, their metal rusting slowly under the weight of time and ice. It was a dead place. A place of cold, and wind, and long-forgotten memories. And the Storm-watcher.Image from here. |
Leanna knew she was a special little girl because the moon spoke to her. She knew that it shouldn’t, and that she shouldn’t listen, but none of that stopped it from happening. She drew pictures at school of her talking to a big moon face and the moon saying things like “try eating those soap suds, Leanna,” or “that dog wants a bite of clay, go on,” and in the pictures she would go ahead and do it. The moon, after all, was her friend.
But it wasn’t always so nice. She was 5 when it told her to kill her little brother. Her little brother was 6 months old. He lay in a cot and gurgled all day, while her parents fussed over him like he was a box of chocolates or something. |
Waterfall |
One Eighty
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| I cut open his brain because he needed help.”Help me,” he’d whispered, banging at my fly screen in the middle of the night, his wet shirtsleeves slapping against the cracked glass of my back-porch slide door. “I need help.”
So I’d let him in. Set him down. Listened to him talk. “There’s a waterfall,” he’d said, lying there in the dark kitchen slumped across my table. “I see it when I dream. And the dark creatures. There are dark creatures in the waterfall. Slithering in the cold, behind the falls.” |
It’s not what he expects. His room is in disarray, futon lying disheveled with the covers beneath it, bookshelf standing on its head and tilted into the corner, full-length mirror fallen flat and smashed to pieces.But that isn’t everything. The main thing is the light bulb by his feet. He takes a deep breath, and looks out the window.
“What the,†he breathes. The world is upside down. Image from here. |
The People in the Walls |
Caterpillar Man |
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| The people in the walls are an infestation.They crowd around the living room in their inch-thin insulation space and watch me while I go about my life.
Some of them have drilled peep-holes. I cover the holes with paintings I paint myself, and vases full of flowers which they sometimes steal and eat.I paint paintings of the people in the walls. I suppose they look a little bit like aliens. They have big and flat grey heads an inch thick. They look a lot like stick men. They are normally smiling stick-thin smiles, which creeps me out. Image from here. |
I fell in the hole on a Tuesday. The hole is a hole in the road. Maybe 50 people walk by a day. I fell in by accident and now I can’t get out.
The sides are steep, and there’s nothing down here for me to eat but this damn banana tree and rat bones.There’s a lot of dry and desiccated rats down here.It doesn’t make any sense to me. But, I have to eat, so I crack the bones and slurp down the dry marrow.It’s like molasses, but not as sweet. |
Stick Man |
Alegria’s Hair |
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| Dray is slumped at the edge of his desk, doodling. It’s Saturday again. Another business studies class. Four low level Japanese students talking about their companies in broken English. No matter what he does, it’s always boring.
You’d think, you’re the teacher of a class, it’s going to be interesting. You’d think, you’re the teacher, you shouldn’t be the one falling asleep. But it happens. He spends longer every time, planning, brings in CDs, newspapers, games, but somehow it always comes down to this. Just, dull. |
The first time Tarragon Ray saw the giant Alegria, he was a baby. He was lying in his father’s arms, staring goggle-eyed up at the clouds and the big blue sky. He could hear the comforting crack of his father’s whip, and the low braying of their humpback pony as it strained against its hauliers. He could feel the joggle of their Sheckler’s wagon over the ramshackle red dust road, and the gentle motion of his father around him.”She’s a big girl,” said his father, but Tarragon didn’t understand. He saw his father’s face leaning over him, smiling, and he smiled back. “They say, when she dances, the earth quakes for miles around.”
Tarragon made googling noises. Then he saw Alegria. He saw her hand, batting and patting at the whuffs of cloud in the sky. He thought it was his father’s hand, but when he reached out to touch it, he couldn’t. So he watched it. He watched it balling up clouds, shaping them into elephants, stringing them across the sky. Image from here. |
Emhoola’s Gibbet |
Mandragora’s Laws |
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| Emhoola peddled magic. He sold it by the cartload, and everywhere he went it was bought with self-deceiving gusto. He sold it in cheap brass compasses that no longer worked, in the shriveled corpses of pack donkeys whose heads lolled flea-bitten against the sales-rack strappings of his wagon, in straw dolls and dried frogs and mosquito paste and all variety of herbs and medicinal fungi.
He was a collector of all things collectible, and he purveyed these wares with a rag and bone man’s pitch few could resist. |
It was a bright spring morning when Mandragora came upon the sweet little cottage with the two dead bodies hanging from its eaves.
“What’s all this then?” he asked his skulls, rattling out behind him on their 100 leather tethers. “Looks like a violation,” they called, bobbing and jostling to see. “A clear violation. Bodies from the eaves, what else could that be?” Image from here. |
Tanglewood
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Flatland |
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| On the southernmost fringe of the tanglewood forest beyond the kingdoms of men, in the midst of a purgatorial wasteland blighted with perpetual winter and savaged by endless storms, there stands an inn where the battle-lines between sanity and madness meet.
Here, where soul-consuming demons walk freely as men, where nightmares parade their garish hues like common whores of the street, where only the boldest or the most benighted seek to tread, our story is enacted. Image from here. |
At the center of Flatland there was a tall sky-scraper, thirty stories high. In the skyscraper were many offices, filled with workers who spent their days typing at their ledgers, recording the business of Flatland that they could see out of their windows. After their work was finished every day, they left the skyscraper and went to their homes. They lived in houses and farms spread around the town- the only town in Flatland. Flatland was not very big. Perhaps as big as six football fields. |
Sagasu’s Life |
The Mistman |
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| Sagasu was watching the child in the corner. The corner was dark, and the child was dark. Its mouth was open, always.Sagasu was grinding butterfly’s wings. He was mixing them with chalk dust and melted ox fat. He used a pestle and mortar and he ground them so the smell of ivory burning filled the air, and he clicked his teeth and sometimes he spat into the paste.
He shaved a hammer and dropped the fine iron filings into the mixtures. He poured them out into a dimpled tray of eight metal cups, each as big as an egg, and then he set them in the oven, and then he waited. Image from here. |
There was a village in the mountains at the top of the world that was always shrouded in mist. Its name was Ballahee, and in it lived a small community of people, good people, who tended to their crops on the mountainsides, and looked after their sheep and their hardy goats, and helped each other through the cold and cruel winters.
The villagers had many problems, such as the cold winters, and the wolves in the scrub-woods, but by far their biggest problem was the mist. Image from here. |
Freemantle Mons the Leviathan Smile |
Stereo Ward the Simpleton |
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| It was 4:59 and a minute from dawn when Freemantle Mons the Leviathan Smile felt the Grammaton clockworkings die. He was up in the great clock-tower’s belfry alone that night, calibrating old cogwork and balancing up the penny weight piles, a gas revelatory tuned soft and hissing by his side.It was a gradual death. It spread up from the coils as the unravel slowed, and the 3 story pendulum’s swing faded out. | It was 6:35 by the Grammaton and 2 hours to pushing off time when Stereo Ward the Simpleton found writing on the subway wall. That day he was working the Willoughby line, along with 20 other tunnel-worms fanned out behind him, trawling along by revelatory light, scraping away at the limey cakedust griming the concave walls. |
Killin Jack the Malakite |
Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand |
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| It was gone All Hallows by the Grammaton’s gong when Killin Jack the Malakite mobbed down the last of the Bunnymen. He was stalking spires up the Seasham cathedral that night, hopping from ladder-top to gargoyle round the copper-roofed cloisters, swerving in to the dome-top graveyard in the middle. The Bunnyman was knelt in a moonlight lozenge midst the marble gravestones, shovel in his hand and a clothy bundle at his feet, white glow bathing his silver fur pristine. Image from Mike Beddall. | It was nearing high-tide on the Sheckledown Sea when Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand finally bashed his way out of the belly of the whale. Ashen face covered with gobbets of blubber and gut, he slithered down the black rubber side of the beached leviathan, a river of purple slime showering down on his head.He gasped, coughed up a wad of bloody kelp and brine, then slumped himself starfish-splayed on the beach. Image from here. |
The haikyoist must be ready to hot-wire an old mammoth or jerry-rig an escalator to run like a hamster-wheel at a moment`s notice.
They're coming.
It's been 20 years, and now they're coming.
I knew it, of course. I've been preparing.
When Iraq lost the war back in 2003 the iconic image was one of American soldiers tearing down a great bronze statue of Saddam Hussein.
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| By N2H | ||||||||
on Diggnation!
on Diggnation!
on Diggnation!
Copyright © 2010 · michael john grist · Designed by New Dirt
Cullsman #9
