Read Online No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) by Digital Fiction - Free Book Online

the deepest pit of all, the one inside us all. “The light here is
older than humanity,” Cassie said. She tapped the wall and it rang not like stone,
but like glass. “This is the hanging court.” She nodded her head up, and I
followed the gesture.
    Empty
pairs of chains dangled from points along the wall. The windows, I supposed,
were evenly spaced apart. After what I’d seen getting here, I could imagine the
room’s purpose. Something blocked out a scatter of lights for a moment, just a
moment. It drifted slowly across them, following a path around width of the
pit. It was on the other side of the glass.
    “Don’t
look,” Cassie said as she turned her head so she couldn’t, and I did the same.
“What is it?” My throat was dry and something was picking at the edges of my
hearing, a sound I couldn’t and didn’t want to identify.
    “It
doesn’t have a name, none of them do. They’re older than that. Mostly they
sleep, but sometimes they wake up.”
    I wanted
to turn, to look at it. I knew if I did, it would take everything from me. I
don’t know how I knew, I just did. It was a deeper, more animal kind of fear
than most people can understand.
    “What do
they do when they wake up?” “They watch.”
    I don’t
know how long we stood there waiting for it to pass us by. Cassie shifted her
feet and slowly turned her gaze around, and I knew it was safe to move.
    Something
was different. The room was unchanged, but the light was altered, somehow other
than it was when we entered. I think it left something behind it, perhaps a
trace smeared on the glass walls. I didn’t think it had come so close to touch,
but then, I wasn’t looking and it’s possible it did.
    My center
of gravity shifted in my stomach, pulling me gently to one side.
    I’d left
the House behind. I was in Carcosa, nowhere else but Carcosa. Slipped in
through the door swinging open in my head, where the thoughts from before found
their way in first.
    The only
way out was as Cassie said; straight on. The House of Nothing was just what it
said it was, nothing, but that was a lie.
    In
Carcosa, even nothing has meaning.
     
    The door
Cassie brought me to was the way back. We weren’t alone when we reached it.
Linda was there waiting for us, and I wasn’t surprised to see her. It fitted
together. She’d brought me to the party, after all. She didn’t say a word when
I left with Cassie, and now I understood why.
    At first,
I didn’t recognize her; then I saw the same mark, the same spiral I’d seen on
the angel in the harness.
    She was
breathing hard, panting wetly like an animal. I think she had been waiting for
a long time.
    This was
the only room I saw in the House that made sense, its proportions fitting to
the view from outside.
    Cassie
handed me the knife.
    “She wants
it, look at her.” She pointed, like how you might for a child. “She’s used up,
almost, and we need to bring another delight for us.”
    I saw
something else in Linda — I saw acceptance in her eyes. She wanted this, needed
it as much as she needed whatever was burning her up. It and the result waiting
at the end of the blade were separate things, but somehow connected. Her lips
were moving in a silent flurry, so fast I almost couldn’t read them.
    ‘Not
dreaming, but in Carcosa. Not dead, but in Carcosa. Not in hell, but in
Carcosa.’
    She
mouthed it over and over again. There was something crawling under my skin
then, I felt it tickle and wriggle along my forearms. My own need started there
in that room.
    You can’t stop it.
There’s no way to get clean; you can only wash it off for a time, and even the
cleanest hands are washed in blood.
     

     

I woke
up on the shore of a lake, dressed in a stained yellow robe.
     

All We Have
     
     
     
    The night
it happened, Eric asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn’t. I don’t
remember much after that.
    Our
photographs were now only my photographs because he wasn’t in them anymore. As
though whatever