This Spooky Season, We Aren’t Dead Yet are launching our first fiction anthology with Macabre and Monstrous, a horror story collection from the bursting and imaginative minds of Emily Armstrong, KS Bishoff and bestselling cyberpunk author Sapha Burnell.
The second of Sapha’s stories in Macabre and Monstrous is The Lamia, a tale woven into the fabric of the Judge of Mystics Saga. I’m looking forward to seeing what you think of The Lamia, and the other yarns interwoven within this collection.
But for now… be terrified and alone in the West End of Vancouver.
A bundle of fabric and bones rolled onto the grass between 12th Avenue and the sidewalk in Vancouver’s West End. Had darkness not come to the exhausted metropolis, Caleb Mauthisen would be a stain on the roadway.
The few pedestrians who strutted off to Granville street’s restaurants and gallery shows crossed to the other side of the road. Poor thing, driven from drink to drug until only the street would claim him. Better lock the car door, best not let him see you look, he might think you’ve got spare change. An apple. A clever pill.
Hyperion had left him, as the elder sun god abandoned Ouranos, as he’d left Kronos a field of dry sand pummelled by the rock he swallowed whole. Caleb rolled to his belly and a garbled groan curled from the dust of his coat. The sound rose as a hymn to the raven headed Lamia and its’ once human lascivious claws.
Caleb panted and pushed his hand into the bundle of rags across his midriff. His lips parted over red-stained, loose teeth.
He wailed.
A long fang slopped into his palm, soaked in the life-blood which should have been inside of him, pumping on its marathon circuit around his heart.
The night broke with the snuffling, raw bellow of the Lamia's hunting call. No more cooes of feminine lust, nor the deep throated laughter of a woman on the prowl for the slake of her sensuous desires. Once the Lamia realized Caleb would not be turned to her bed, vixen begat venom.
By rights, any humanity fell away with the lethal hiss and elongated teeth in a confined space. The initial spray of Lamia’s venom ought to have slain him wholesale, but the Judge of Mystics was resilient against more than her initial whiles. Thudding irregular heartbeats tapered down the magic in his spirit, every ounce of power in his bone cage split into the act of survival from the deadly strike.
Reduced, in the eyes of the monster and the reflection of his own head-dizzy concern, Caleb was no deity nor mythic hero. He was a man.
Caleb shut his lips and pushed his knee at the mossy ground. He was lost, without all power but his wits. For the growing black in his eyes, he smelled the moss in the sidewalk, rain doused marigolds and roses for their nightly repast. Had he fallen into a meadow? Had he taken that last door?
Elysium would feel as pleasant as the warmth flowing from his stomach onto his fingers. Too bad the Truce would have far too much to say about any afterlife. Heaven wouldn’t be so bad, the music should be good…
“You didn’t take the door.” The Night said.
Rain pelted his back. He sunk into the sod. The venom’s rattling burn sunk into his chest.