Out of Water Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Read

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this collection are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-950305-05-6 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-950305-06-3 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944108

  First printing edition: November 1, 2019

  Printed by Trepidatio Publishing in the United States of America.

  Cover Design and Layout: Mikio Murakami

  Interior Layout: Lori Michelle

  Edited by Scarlett R. Algee

  Proofread by Sean Leonard

  Trepidatio Publishing, an imprint of JournalStone Publishing

  3205 Sassafras Trail

  Carbondale, Illinois 62901

  Trepidatio books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Trepidatio | www.trepidatio.com

  or

  JournalStone | www.journalstone.com

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR OUT OF WATER

  “Sarah Read’s short stories are wonderfully creepy, heartbreaking, scary, and delightful! Highly recommended!”

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-Wars and Glimpse

  “In Sarah Read’s Out of Water you will find monsters with human faces and humans with monstrous hearts. There are secrets dark and deep, and dreams darker and deeper still. And there are characters who stretch their hands from haunted shores in hopes of reaching a happier one. Read’s collection is filled with grim humour, heart-wrenching horror and, sometimes, dire hopes.”

  —Angela Slatter, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

  “Sarah Read is one of my very favorite voices in horror and dark fantasy, and I’ve been waiting a long time for her to release a collection. So let me say this loud and clear: that wait was absolutely worth it. Out of Water is a gorgeous, sinister, and incredibly lovely dive into all the darkness the horror genre has to offer. Sarah knows exactly how to draw the reader in and then send chills up their spine, all while breaking their hearts. Whatever you do, don’t miss this book.”

  —Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Rust Maidens and The Invention of Ghosts

  “Read’s stories left me emotionally wrought and viscerally disturbed. With unforgettable imagery and characters that come to life on the page, Out of Water is one of the best collections I’ve read this year.”

  —Kaaron Warren, Aurealis and Australian Shadows award-winning author of Tide of Stone

  For Sweet Grandma Lou, for the words in the first place.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY GEMMA FILES

  ENDOSKELETAL

  MAKING MONSTERS

  DEAD MAN’S CURVE

  IN TONGUES

  THE EYES OF SALTON SEA

  UNDERWATERTHING

  TALL GRASS, SHALLOW WATER

  INTERSECT

  GRAVE MOTHER

  THORN TONGUE

  THROUGH GRAVEL

  STILL LIFE WITH NATALIE

  GOLDEN AVERY

  SCAVENGERS

  THE EYE LIARS

  MAGNIFYING GLASS

  CROSSWIND

  RENOVATION

  INTRODUCTION

  Gemma Files

  Teaching is one of the great joys in my life, though it wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, it was “just” a job—something I clung to desperately as my film criticism career ebbed away, always aware that my sole university degree was in journalism, not education. In a way, it took losing a full-time teaching position, as well as using that loss to (eventually) jump-start my the next phase of my professional fiction-writing career, to reconnect me with the quote-quote simple joys of helping someone else nurture their own creative spark by spinning a moment’s absent thought into something entirely different, black on white, words on a page. A beautiful, tumorous blossom of metaphor run wild with narrative for blood, referential imagery for bone.

  This is how I first met Sarah Read . . . not in body, but mind to mind. By watching a creepy, frightening, wonderful idea she pitched me evolve, stage by stage, into something which would eventually become one of the best horror stories of the year. It was called “Endoskeletal,” and you’ll meet it soon enough, since it opens this debut collection of Sarah’s short fiction. Let me put it to you this way: it makes me wish I’d written it, even though I know damn well I never could have.

  The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it.

  Now granted, any story involving archaeology is basically guaranteed my full attention, but what I love about what Sarah’s doing here is the way she cross-breeds her utterly convincing grasp of methodology with sharp psychological observation, making us care deeply about both the artefact her protagonist is examining and her own bone-deep regret that the only way to confirm the ancient mystery before her—let alone to understand it—is to lose even a single part of something so irreplaceable. Simple, clear, concise, human; these sentences confirm how much I love the way that Sarah thinks, almost as much as I love the things she thinks about. What I like best about this paragraph, in other words, is pretty much everything.

  But man, I kind of like this one that comes a bit later on even better:

  Panting, she held her hands up to the light. Her knuckles twisted as the skin pulled tighter. The grooves of her knuckles split, the fissures like small gaping mouths from which erupted bone upon bone. She shrieked at the sting of it and tried to close the split flesh by straightening her fingers, felt the pressure grow, pulsing under her nails—saw the white of bone pale like blisters at the tips of her fingers. She stretched her fingers further and the skin burst, springing back along the protruding shafts of bone, curling back like a blooming flower.

  It’s always very funny to me, the generalized received wisdom that women aren’t supposed to embrace horror, when horror is—in a lot of ways—the female condition, as well as the human one: body horror, social horror, moral horror. Some of the meat-suits we’re born into can bleed seven days and not die, or come pre-equipped to incubate, then push forth, a parasitical proto-human only partially made from our own DNA, whom we may not automatically love simply because we’re “automatically” genetically pre-disposed to. Politicians and religious leaders often seem bent on reducing us to mere extensions of our bodily functions, while the marriage-happy fairytale the media spends much of its time selling us on is alarmingly far more likely to end less in happily ever after than in violence and rancor, divorce at best, murder-suicide at worst. Turn a prospective lover down and you might get shot, get acid thrown in your face, get your baby thrown over a shopping mall balcony in order to teach you a lesson. Every woman I know doesn’t have just one #MeToo story, but a handful—at the least. The ver
y, very least.

  Browse the Internet for ten minutes (or wait a similar length of time after making a Twitter post about equalized gender representation in fandom), and you’ll soon find out that we’re Other by literal nature, pariahs, witches, bitches, Staceys—hollow things made from spare parts, malign and perverse, never content to just shut the hell up and do what we’re told. We steer dudes around by their parts, suck their virility dry in their dreams, prevent them from being the men they always expected to become by depriving them of . . . um, ourselves, I guess: mothers, wives, sex-toys. Something permanently less, perfectly designed to make any random guy feel like something permanently more.

  It’s like the joke about the old Jewish man who, when asked why he kept on re-reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, replied: “Because I want to remember how powerful I supposedly am.” Except in our case, the book in question is not just Malleus Malificarum, that Burning Times textbook on how to find evil creepy penis-stealing ladies anywhere a dissatisfied guy might glance, but almost every other myth and fairytale going back through time . . . these endless fantasies of sexual lure and betrayal, of cannibal mothers, of lying scolds whose evil words inevitably come true, spinning spells from insults. Sin on legs, constantly on the run from Eve’s legacy: a tryst with the serpent that ruined a previously perfect world by letting in not only knowledge, but death.

  And I have to say, after a while, the idea that every woman is a barely-disguised potential monster starts to sound pretty good, by comparison. “Baba Yaga wouldn’t have to take this sort of crap,” you find yourself thinking; or Tiamat, or Lilith, or Echidna, or Kayako. Pretty soon you’re having fantasies of your own, ones which all too often end with you getting offered butter/a delicious life by a sexy- voiced black goat and rising into the dark air on boiled baby-fat, laughing hysterically. Or losing everything and getting burned at the stake, whichever comes first!

  Sarah Read gets all this, on a very basic level, and the scenarios she comes up with to combat the all- too-mundane horrors of the world around us burn and shine with a darkness that immerses, entrances, inspires. Her anger and humour are equally resonant; science and the supernatural interbreed freely, spawning all sorts of unique and fascinating nightmares. And all of it reads with the same snap, the same flare, the same gorgeously offhand-seeming gothic grotesquerie: insects and angels, storms and spectres, curdled love, transforming grief. This book is full of awful, delightful things, and I’m so glad it exists, I can’t even tell you.

  So read on or don’t, but never say you weren’t warned. It takes a certain type of person to write like Sarah Read writes. Luckily for the rest of us, however, all we have to do in order to enjoy the fruits of her labour . . . is to develop a taste.

  ENDOSKELETAL

  The figures are drawn in yellow ochre, their limbs overlong, their faces drawn as skulls—white with crushed calcite, eyes carbon black with a spark of red ochre inside. Each figure holds an orb-like jar beneath its chin. Umber shadows trail behind them as they march the length of the chamber, deep into the small spaces at the back of the cave, where there is the monster. A mass all in soot bone black, large as the cave wall, covered in a hundred lidless eyes. The eyes are not drawn, but etched into the stone itself.

  Ashley looked from the cave wall back to her sketch and smoothed her thumb over a figure’s shadow, blending her pencil lines. Henri’s camera flashed, blinding her. When her eyes adjusted, pupils wavering into equilibrium, her LED lantern seemed dimmer than before, the figures drawn on the cave walls harder to make out.

  “Can you wait a minute, please?” She didn’t temper the edge in her voice. She’d asked him this a hundred times already—at the office as she checked her daypack, along the Alpine trail as he led the way at a pace she could not possibly match. You must get used to the altitude if you want to study here, he’d said as she caught up, panting, the thin air heavy in her lungs. You’re not ready to study here, is what she heard. What he probably wanted her to hear.

  “I am studying here,” she’d puffed between shallow gasps. “And you can’t outrun altitude sickness. Don’t they teach that to guides here?” She’d planted herself on a rock and made him wait.

  His camera flashed again. “We don’t have time.” Another photo. “We’ve waited half the day away. Your drawings are too slow. We don’t do it that way anymore.”

  Ashley shifted; the cold of the cave floor had crept through the sweater she’d folded into a cushion. She counted to ten, her eyes squeezed shut against the flashes. “I’m not just sketching to record them, Henri. I’m learning them—studying them.”

  “You can do that in the lab, unless you want to hike back in the dark. You’re wasting time. We don’t even know if you’ll be allowed to study these.”

  She stood then, clutching her pencils in her fist. “What do you mean?”

  “You came to study bears? These aren’t bears. There are bears in the other chamber you can study—we have enough of those to share. But this is special. This is weird. They will want a Swiss archaeologist for this.”

  Ashley hadn’t considered that. When she’d proposed the expedition to explore the new chambers exposed by the receding glacier, she’d counted on finding either cave bears or nothing. Instead, she’d found a national treasure. The specters from the camera flash danced in her eyes as she added notes to her handwritten report. He hadn’t convinced her to hurry. Now her notebook was more important than ever—it might be the only proof she’d have of the discovery, if the site was seized.

  The cave painting showed at least twenty figures confronting the shadow covered with eyes. The skull-faced figures threw bones at the shadow, though it wasn’t clear if they were fighting it or feeding it. Ashley paced the length of the chamber, back toward where she had to bow her six-foot-seven frame to fit beneath the mineral-slick stone. The eyes of the monster seemed to follow her, their charcoal-darkened shadows shifting in the weak light. It made the hair on her arms rise, made it difficult to look away from the creature—as if it would move closer when her back turned.

  A dozen skeletal remains filled shallow alcoves that lined the walls beneath the drawings. Beyond the alcoves, two narrow openings split the back of the cave. One led to nothing but a cavernous sinkhole. The other led to the much-trafficked cave chamber containing the remains of several cave bears. No one had known that the loose rubble wall of the cave bear room had concealed the entrance to another chamber. No one had wanted to disturb the stones and risk a cave-in. But with temperatures rising, the ice on the opposite slope had melted away, and the true entrance to the cave had opened its dark eye over the valley below.

  She looked back to her sketch and darkened the space inside an eye socket, layering the charcoal until there was no hint of cream paper beneath. She leaned further over the skeletal remains in an alcove. The bones of the legs and arms were broken, but Ashley could tell from the growth plates that he died young. The bones are in bad condition—fragmented and overgrown with mineral deposits that will be difficult or impossible to remove without destroying the specimen . . .

  The skulls, though, were all complete: each one with its jaw pried apart and a jar shoved between its teeth. The jars are clay or stone, perhaps dug from the cave walls? Smooth and yellowed. They’re undecorated, sealed with fine leather. They are some form of canopic jar perhaps, or an offering to the dead or the afterlife? She reached out a finger to touch the fragile leather, then pulled back. The leather remains intact despite no apparent organic matter left on the bodies themselves. It will need to be tested for ancient preservation techniques.

  There wasn’t much known about Paleolithic funerary rites. Because sites like this were never found.

  Most of the jars lay in shards—the pieces tumbled toward the back of the skeletons’ throats, the jaws left gaping—only fine dust remained of their contents. But there were five jars whole and tempting. Her hands kept returning to the space above the skull, hovering, as if to stroke its brow. She had never
before been tempted to touch a specimen, to violate every rule that she herself had repeated incessantly to students and assistants at her sites.

  “We’re taking one back with us,” Ashley said, tucking her book into her pack.

  The camera flash paused, and Ashley felt Henri’s eyes scolding her through the darkness. There was something in the way he looked at her that made her skin prickle.

  “I don’t think we should,” he said.

  Ashley pulled another kit from her pack—a small plastic crate filled with chunks of polyethylene foam, and rolls of gauze and tape. She began assembling a nest that would protect the specimen as they hiked back to the research center.

  “Dr. Knochdieb won’t like it. You’ll lose your post for sure if you disturb this site.”

  “Isn’t that what you all want, anyway?” She was done with their bureaucracy—she’d come here to work. And the thought of leaving without something more to study—without some way to begin answering the thousand questions storming in her brain—was torture.

  Henri’s scoff echoed off the walls, the drawings, the bones. “It’ll be dark before we get back as it is. It’ll be dark before we leave if we wait much longer. I can hike that trail in the dark, but you’re going to get hurt if you try.” He mumbled to himself in German as he changed the camera’s memory card. It sounded like a prayer. His hair was the brightest thing in the cave—the sort of blond Californians paid good money for. Perhaps he’d be her beacon in the dark. She imagined she’d disappear in the dark entirely, invisible against the sky, though Henri had earlier said that her height made her impossible to lose. She felt the telltale ache in her shoulders as she’d unconsciously slouched ever since.

  He was right, though, about all of it. She could picture the red-faced spluttering of the department head when he learned she had touched an unknown burial site. It would be several shades darker than when he’d learned she’d be studying there to begin with. The program hadn’t accepted any foreign students since the dawn of digital record keeping. They weren’t keen to break the record. And, of course, they hadn’t known what she would find in the cave. Henri, in particular, was upset to lose what would have been his project—what now would be, at best, a third-author credit, behind her, if she stayed—and her behind the soon-to-be-furious Dr. Knochdieb.