Short Horror Fiction - Tumblr Posts

Red Hands

It was Fall.

Smoke rose from a squat birch hut that was dug half into the slope of a leaf-littered hill.

The cottage’s roof was piled with heavy mats of green moss, and the lambent orange glow of tallow lights shined through its deep-set windows.

Inside was a hushed voice muttering of the cold and of sad little no-one’s.

A child’s bones were there, wrapped in a swan’s wings and tucked into a nest of sticks.

I heard a woman weeping, her deep sobs answered by a pained voice, dark and coarse, whose wet rasp sounded like dull steel scraped over bone.

In the faint amber radiance of the dying sun, I pressed my ear lightly to the chinking and listened in the chill.

The thing croaked and hissed of things hidden, and, mesmerized, the woman swooned.

It spoke in kennings of the ancient ways, and of the faint life that lives in death.

The wretched wight revealed to her the dim paths that lead into Shadow, prescribing offerings and signs as it instructed her in the opening of the ways.

As the setting sun kissed the horizon, the cottage fell silent, and the mourning woman ground something slowly with a mortar and pestle.

Then, she hummed a sad tune to her strange god, her dead offspring, and I, her lurking watcher.

It was then that I left her to suffer alone in that place the grim tasks of the wight.

I padded away like a wolf. And though I parted as night from the dawn, I left her all the coin in my purse and the haunch of a deer whose blood inexplicably yet stains my hands.

I have never returned to those woods where I came upon the woman and the infant’s remains.

Many years have passed since then, and I am too old and frail to hunt. As you can see, time has gnarled my joints and drawn the color from my beard. But, I have never forgotten what I learned there, in the red dusk of yesterday, and a harsh voice continues to utter black secrets in the darkness of my dreams.

© JM Tiffany

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Black Wings

I transformed myself into a murder of ebon birds, their tenebrous wings battering the air as we ascended in a burst of dark feathers.

Up we leaped past heaps of bones to soar over rivers of blood whose garnet depths coursed in jagged veins to a distant sea. We followed their branching paths to this sanguine expanse where we saw, amid the haunted waves, great skeletal beasts sloshing and wailing in the wine-colored swells. Raven-swift, we darted across the raw expanse until basalt cliffs jutted into view.

Beneath this chorus of giant knives, the Vermilion Sea was churned to an agonized pinkish foam, the coast’s tidal orifices flecked like rabid mouths.

Further inland we flew, crossing carnal fields of gnawing flowers whose narcotizing fragrance pulled at our desires and begged us to dream.

There, the tired wind’s laborious breath carried us slowly over the fleshy blooms to a forest of pale trees. Their ruby leaves glistened in the wan light like drops of crimson misery as the smooth flesh of their twisted limbs winked with eyes that bore witness to our passing. Beyond them, we crossed wastes that wept with milky marshes. Pumping our wings in a storm of black pinions we rose higher above their troubling miasma and rode updrafts that bore us toward the crooked shadow of distant mountains. These cut through the haze like a great carnivore’s teeth and gave the impression of being swallowed. Onward we flapped, coming at last to circle about a titanic edifice of impossible antiquity. It gleamed gun-metal-black in the cool, distant light of an indiscernible sun. Dark and ominous the tower loomed, its massive length driven like a spear through the world. We entered the structure in a whispering rush through an organically shaped window. Within was a spiraling labyrinth of iniquitous geometries. Insane corridors of pulsating flesh whose membranous doorways opened onto rooms red and glistening as fresh wounds.

The great tower’s lofty vertex was shrouded in the tattered gauze of lamentable clouds, yet at its peak, which rose just above them, was an open court surrounded by monolithic pillars. Near its center was an august and ominous seat of angular stone.

Upon it sat a niveous vision, her dusky eyes glittering in the anemic light, her full, wet lips the color of blood.

She reclined luxuriously there upon her monolithic throne, bare as a sword save for torrents of jet hair that issued from her exquisite head to coil about her pallid face like dark serpents.

A shadow of my shape surged out of the vortex of black birds who swirled madly, a cacophonous maelstrom whose mass then coalesced before her. Having robed myself in human form, I stepped forward and knelt humbly before her.

“Rise”, she said. I did as she commanded and rose to my feet. “Speak,” she said, “tell me your heart.” Trembling with fear and lust, I spoke, “I have crossed worlds of pain and desire to seek you. I have known you in the night as my lover and my mother. I have known your body in the hollowness of my form and tasted your mouth in the spaces between lives. I would know you if I knew no other. You are the chrysalis of doom, the womb of eternity. I will only to will your will, my Queen.” She smiled and beckoned me forward, “Come here and kiss me”. A storm of joy and terror assailed my heart. Nervously, I stepped forward, suddenly viscerally aware of her presence and the beauty and power that she commanded. Just as light falls into black holes, I went to her. Our lips approached, and, meeting, formed a singularity. Then, she gave me the gift of her True Name, but I found I could not utter it. I wanted to sing it, so glorious it was, but I immediately choked as I tried to speak it aloud. Gasping violently, I grasped my throat and fretted with my tongue, but I was struck mute and cursed to die.

Despairing, I fell at her feet and struggled dismayed. Then, suddenly, the universe seemed to tumble in on itself, as if suddenly unmade, until there was nothing. Not anything. Just absolute, unnamable, unfathomable formlessness.

I was no more. No thought was self, no such concept was there, nor need of it in that perfect aphotic eternity.

And then, suddenly, violently, I was torn from her womb and born into a flowering, effulgent chaos.

In horror and awe, I worshipped her, and she loved me, and by us worlds became.

From us sprang gods, civilizations, and countless empires rose and fell, until at last, all that remained was the glittering abyss and its endless cold silence. I saw myself reflected in her eyes then and knew us to be the same: a luminous self-reflecting void, a dreaming abyss of eternally self-annihilating beauty and terror. As I opened my eyes, space and time expanded, and the darkness laughed as I was filled again with light. © JM Tiffany 2024