The rows of piñatas danced on the vibrations, their twisted faces smirking at the destruction. Sonia staggered across the baked uneven ground, screaming incoherently at the sky, covered in Rachel’s blood. Her eyes were wide, crazed, confused by the chaos around her. Other Tletliztlii bumped into her in their mad scramble to escape, but one by one the collapsing ground took them—took Muñoz and Manillo and all the rest—until only Sonia remained. Sonia, and those endless rows of misshapen piñatas. She looked around, desperate for help, but no one was there. No one but Noah, who remained hidden. She stumbled, looking for somewhere safe she could step, and as her eyes scanned the crumbling landscape he froze, convinced she had spotted him in the midst of the brush staring at her. If their eyes locked, it was only for the fraction of a second before the ground beneath her feet wrenched open and swallowed her whole.
Noah’s head continued to swim, faster and faster. Had what he witnessed been real, or had the horror and the heat finally broken him, filling his sight with the impossible? The rocky ground could not be yawning wide, swallowing chunks of the barren heath into its endless void. The ruins could not be crumbling, not after so many years of standing, crushing anything that still remained—everything but those piñatas. Those plaster abominations that shook and rattled but did not fall, not one of them into the ever-widening crack into the centre of the world. Instead, they served as silent, multicoloured witnesses to what Noah had to endure. He wondered how any of it was possible, any of the death and destruction that lay before him on the thundering ground, and for the briefest instant he felt hope. Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps nothing was real, and Rachel and Eli were somewhere else, somewhere far away from the boiling destruction, from the ground bubbling up, throwing rocks outward. Perhaps they were on that beach, relaxing and looking at the animals in the soft clouds. Noah looked up and saw nothing in the sky but a sole burning orb in endless blankness; the only animals left on the ground twisted, ugly and dead inside.
Noah’s entire body was racked with pain, but as rocks rained down around him he knew he had to escape. He slid his legs to the side, then under him, enough to push himself back up. Exploding lights filled his eyes as he felt the knives of his bones slicing into his insides, but he managed to stand on a pair of unsteady legs. Stand and survey the end of everything before him.
The plaster effigies were vibrating so quickly on the quaking earth that they appeared as blurs, so insubstantial as to no longer be part of the world. Like ghosts, they hovered over the broken ground, and the sound they made was a strange-pitched and deafening howl. Deep black cracks formed across the piñatas, widening and deepening before Noah’s disbelieving eyes, and from those long black cracks dark ichor flowed. It bubbled out, slow and viscous, but instead of falling to the rutted ground it moved unnaturally upward, up and across the plaster backs of the faux animals, and Noah realised it was not blood or liquid that he saw but fire. The piñatas were burning. But the flames were as black as night. They grew higher, burning clean everything they touched, destroying any life that still remained on that rocky barren heath. The brush that surrounded it lit as well, Noah’s hiding spot quickly becoming an inferno, further obscuring his vision.
The flames grew higher, enveloping the entire heath, and in the centre of it the deep chasm that had swallowed so many spewed something back to the above world, the world of living. It was small, the size of an orange, burnt black and still afire. The flames, those black burning flames, had destroyed everything to bring it life, and as the cold fire grew so did it. First it doubled its size, then doubled again, growing exponentially before Noah’s fracturing psyche. It grew and metamorphosed as the black fire that enveloped it burned—arms that became a pair of writhing serpents, an encephalitic head perched precariously on sloped shoulders. Along its newly formed ebony back, curved spines jutted in odd patterns, each alight with burning phosphorescence. But its eyes were the most horrifying of all. Deep pits of nothing, they scoured the blasted heath that was its nursery, blind to all the horrors that had transgressed, and as that giant misshapen skull panned toward Noah those two deep wastes stayed. Though the fire burned unfettered, uncontrolled, Noah’s being became ice and he averted his gaze in pain.
There was a wrenching sound then, and the thing bellowed an indescribable noise that echoed across the empty wasteland. It lifted one of its many bent legs out from deep within the earth—a pillar of black fire that filled the sky with the dark storm of night, a storm that lasted forever—and stepped over its father below and into the blistering day. Each footfall struck the ground with the force of the heavens, the first laying waste to the circle of piñatas that had acted as its host. Small bones spilled forth, some very old and some very fresh, many generations of bones all kept, all hoarded for one particular day, one particular set of events, bones no bigger than a child’s. Seeds for the rebirth of an aborted god brought forth to reclaim the future it had lost. And to deliver unto all everything it had promised.
But Noah would know none of it, trapped as he was in the prison of his broken mind. Eli was there, smiling, laughing, dancing in circles around the edges of the world while Noah desperately tried to catch him before the boy was lost forever.
NECROLOGY: 2014
(Stephen Jones & Kim Newman)
ONCE MORE WE note the passing of writers, artists, performers and technicians who, during their lifetimes, made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres (or left their mark on popular culture in other, often fascinating, ways)…
American author Alexander Malec, whose SF fiction was collected in Extrapolasis (1967), died on January 1, aged 84.
British author Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE died on January 2, aged 90. In 1946 she joined the newly created Inland Waterways Association as a part-time secretary to co-founder Robert Aickman. After three years of marriage to naturalist (Sir) Peter Scott (the son of the famous Antarctic explorer), she walked out on her husband and baby daughter and began an affair with the already married Aickman. Together they wrote the collection We Are the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951) before the relationship ended. She then went on to become a successful novelist, while her collections included Mr. Wrong and the omnibus volume Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories. Howard had a reconciliatory meeting with Aickman shortly before his death from cancer in 1981, and her third husband was novelist Sir Kingsley Amis. Her auto-biography is entitled Slipstream (2002).
American playwright and SF and fantasy author and critic Michael Hemmingson died of apparent cardiac arrest in Tijuana, Mexico, on January 9. He was 47. Hemmingson was an expert on the works of Robert Silverberg and published critical works on Star Trek and Barry Malzberg. His books include The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (co-edited with Maxim Jakubowski), Poison from a Dead Sun/The Chronotope and Judas Payne: A Weird Western.