Kzine Issue 8 Read online

  KZINE MAGAZINE

  Issue 8

  edited by Graeme Hurry

  Kzine Issue 8 © January 2014 by Kimota Publishing

  cover © Dave Windett, 2013

  Editorial © Graeme Hurry, 2014

  Pickman’s Motel © C.I. Kemp, 2014

  Small Victories © Dan Grace, 2014

  Spell Check © M.C. Tuggle, 2014

  Heat © Steve Jordan, 2014

  T-Vision © Richard Zwicker, 2014

  The Abolitionist © Mjke Wood, 2014

  The Angel In The Hourglass © Donald Sterling, 2014

  The Other Side of the Door © Rhooda Parrish, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder. For editorial content this is Graeme Hurry, for stories it is the individual author, for artwork it is the artist.

  CONTENTS

  PICKMAN’S MOTEL by C.I. Kemp (7)

  SMALL VICTORIES by Dan Grace (7)

  SPELL CHECK by M.C. Tuggle (6)

  HEAT by Steve Jordan (11)

  T-VISION by Richard Zwicker (12)

  THE ABOLITIONIST by Mjke Wood (16)

  THE ANGEL IN THE HOURGLASS by Douglas Sterling (18)

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR by Rhonda Parrish (7)

  Editorial by Graeme Hurry

  Reviews

  Contributor Notes

  The number in brackets indicates the approximate printed page length of the story.

  PICKMAN’S MOTEL

  by C.I. Kemp

  Melanie is gone.

  I guess I’m lucky not to be considered the prime suspect. After all, anytime a wife goes missing, it’s most likely the husband who’s responsible, right? In my case, most people don’t look at it that way, given the extent of my injuries. Still, there are those few who think I know what happened to Melanie and where she is now.

  They’re right.

  I could tell them what happened, but they wouldn’t believe me. And I could tell them where she is.

  She’s with Pickman.

  It began in one of those little out-of-the way places Melanie was so good at finding. We were driving through Boston’s North End when she shouted, “Stop there!”

  “There” turned out to be a nondescript art gallery, a divey little hole in the wall. I would have preferred to give it a pass, but Melanie always said you could see things in places like this that you couldn’t see anywhere else.

  How right she was.

  The sketches and paintings weren’t like anything either of us had ever seen. The subject matter was bizarre enough – graveyards, otherworldly landscapes, underground scenes – but the technique. The detail was surreal, yet meticulous to the point of being photographic. No way could these be reproductions of anything photographed, not unless someone took pictures of stooping bipedal life forms exuding a malevolence no human face could convey.

  “Genius.” Melanie spoke with the awe of a pre-teen girl for a hunkish, but no-talent pop star.

  She picked up a brochure and began reading. “Richard Upton Pickman. Master of the New England Gothic school. Active in the 1920’s. Studio in the North End of Boston where he painted the works on display. Part of the circle that included Reid, Minot, Rosworth, and Thurber.” She paused. “Apparently, they dropped him from their clique.”

  I could see why. I strolled through the gallery, viewing pieces which had the power to repulse and fascinate at the same time.

  The Lesson. A gathering of ghoulish beings feeding on carrion, teaching a human child to do likewise.

  Subway Accident. A chaotic representation of monstrous entities lurching their way amidst a terrified crowd in a subway station.

  The Hanging. A bloated discolored corpse dangling from the gallows with a cluster of things surrounding it, their heads raised, their mouths baying.

  The Reading. A colonial patriarch reading from the Scriptures where every family member but one listened with reverent devotion. The exception was a young man whose sneering face reeked with mockery and disdain. According to the brochure, the features of this blasphemer were Pickman’s own.

  “Listen to what Thurber says about him,” Melanie read on. “ ‘The really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in.’ Isn’t that fascinating?”

  Less than fascinated, I turned back to the paintings. The one which had the most visceral effect on me was titled The Altar. It was a semi-elevated view of a horde of those semi-human monstrosities poised over a young naked woman. The things were holding her down and had spread her legs to an anatomically impossible angle. Her face was partially obscured, but her expression, what you could see of it, was one of sheer terror. Surrounding this tableau, arranged in a semicircle was a series of cairns, each of which was topped with a candle.

  “Todd, did you see these?”

  I looked.

  Apparently, I was wrong when I supposed that Pickman’s models could not be reproductions of anything photographed. On this wall were sepia-tinted copies of photos, taken by Pickman himself.

  “These had to have been staged.”

  Melanie looked at me as if I’d grown a second head. “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, come on. Look at these. Do you think anything like this could exist in real life?”

  Melanie shrugged, then went back to staring at the photos with an absorption I couldn’t bring myself to share. The doglike faces on those shambling creatures. Their hunched-over posture, more reminiscent of beasts then humans. The open-mouthed, crouching thing which held something that resembled a man. The sub-human configuration of hands that ended in claws. Bodies incrusted with muck-like foulness. Feet that ended not in hooves or toes, but in something else, something indescribable.

  No, these could not the likenesses of anything that existed in the real world – they could only exist in the world of Pickman’s twisted imagination.

  “Look at this, Todd,” Melanie went on, tearing herself away from the photograph wall. “It says here that Pickman disappeared. The last place he was seen was a motel called the Sentinel Inn. It was an artists’ colony back in the 1920’s.” She gestured toward The Altar. “That’s where he painted that scene you were admiring.”

  Admiring?

  The painting took on an organic quality, even as I stared. I could almost see the candles flickering, the woman writhing. I could almost smell the stench rising from her leering captors.

  “I want to go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the Sentinel Inn.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just do. I can’t explain it.”

  She didn’t have to. I could hear that pre-teen admiration give way to a tone of envy. You might find an occasional Melanie Grayson seascape or nature scene in a gallery, but Melanie wanted more. She’d give anything to have an entire gallery dedicated to her work exclusively, as this one was for Pickman.

  I began reading over her shoulder. “It says here that the place was closed up in 1928. It doesn’t say why.”

  Melanie would not be deterred. She whipped out her Smartphone. “Look! It’s still standing! And it’s not far from here.”

  “I thought we wanted to be in Stockton by dinnertime.”

  “So we’ll be an hour or two late,” Melanie persisted. “Come on, honey. Let’s do it!”

  I knew when I was licked. “All rig
ht, all right. We’ll go.”

  We caught our first glimpse of the place, from a ridge.

  It wasn’t a motel the way we think of motels today. It wasn’t a row of rooms with a courtyard, a pool, and an overhang above the entrance with a familiar logo. Rather it was a series of cabins arranged in a wide U-shaped configuration around an expanse of grass. I could just envision a bunch of artists setting up their easels on that lawn, painting gentle rolling hills under a cloudless azure sky.

  Melanie spoke. “Look at those mountains. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “I like yours better,” I answered, taking my eyes off the road just long enough to give them a quick ogle.

  Melanie giggled. “You’re so bad.”

  I spared another look at the Sentinel Inn framed by the looming hills. They were beautiful, all right, but there was something about that place I just didn’t like.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were driving up a rutted dirt road which passed in front of the cabins. We got out of the car and Melanie reached for her Canon.

  “I want to get a shot of you with sun going down behind the mountains, hon. Why don’t you stand in front of that well?”

  I looked. On the lawn was one of those old-fashioned wishing wells with a peaked overhang whose wood was flaking and rotting. The well itself was about five feet across, three feet above ground level, whose foot-thick stone walls were covered with something grey that looked like fungus.

  Curiosity got the better of aversion and I walked over to the well to get a closer look. I looked down, expecting to see a pool of brackish water, but instead…nothing.

  “Hey, Mel. Come here. Take a look at this.”

  She came and stared down into the empty blackness.

  “Probably some fault in the earth,” she said. “Must have opened up years ago.” She stepped back and aimed the Canon. “Stand by by the well Todd. Let me get a shot of you making a wish.”

  I reached for a coin, made my wish …

  I wish we could get the hell away from this place. …and dropped in the coin.

  I never heard it hit bottom.

  “Got it!”

  I was hoping my wish was about to come true, when Melanie made for the trunk and hauled out her easel, canvas, and art supplies.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to paint the sun going down behind that mountain. It’ll be magnificent.”

  “But Stockton…”

  “Stockton’ll still be there. Tell you what, hon. Why don’t you head back to that General Store we passed and pick up some eats while I work? We’ll have a picnic.” She touched my cheek and planted a kiss. “It’ll be so romantic.”

  It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I said, “How can I resist?”

  “I knew I could twist your arm.”

  The General Store was the kind you’d expect to be run by some canny old New Englander with heaps of homespun wisdom. Instead, there was a high schooler who looked like he’d be more at home groping Emmylou in the back seat than taking food orders behind a counter.

  “Hi, there.”

  “Hello. What can I get you?”

  I gave him my order: two subs (Veggie Special for Melanie, Italian Combo for me), two Raspberry Snapple’s (diet for Melanie, regular for me), a bag of chips, and a couple of apples. As he was ringing me up, I asked him, on a whim, “You ever hear of a place called the Sentinel Inn?”

  Maybe it was my imagination, but the kid’s rhythm on the cash register seemed to falter a tad.

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Just came from there. My wife wanted to check it out…”

  “You’re kidding,” he interrupted. “That place?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  He laughed the kind of laugh someone lets out when they hear a joke that isn’t funny, but they’re too polite not to laugh.

  “All’s I know is that something bad went down there, long time ago,” he answered. “It’s a good place to stay away from, mister.”

  “How so?”

  “Just is.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks.”

  I headed out of the store faster than when I went in, but not before allowing myself one look back.

  Damned if the kid wasn’t crossing himself!

  It was starting to get dark and I knew I was driving too fast on those twist-ey wind-ey roads, but I didn’t care. I’d had a bad feeling about that place from the get-go, and now someone else had validated that feeling. The brochure mentioned that the place had closed down back in Pickman’s time, but it hadn’t gone into detail. Thinking back, that bothered me. So did the bottomless well. So did the hold that the place had on Melanie. Back at the gallery, it was like she couldn’t pass it up and once we got there, she couldn’t bring herself to leave, but was just rational enough…

  “I want to paint the sun going down behind that mountain. It’ll be magnificent.”

  …to find an excuse not to leave.

  I goosed the accelerator and didn’t let up until I got to the ridge where we’d gotten our first glimpse of the Sentinel Inn.

  When I saw what was happening down there, I slammed on the brakes and almost skidded off the road.

  The roofs of the cabins, lining the U-shaped drive, were burning like candles on cairns around a semicircle.

  The grassy expanse where Melanie had set up her canvas was gone. In its place was a series of furrows and holes. I didn’t see my wife.

  I got back into the car and burned rubber.

  The dirt road leading up to the cabin was no longer simply rutted. It was an obstacle course with pits and gashes that looked, not like they’d been dug on the surface, but as if they’d been made from beneath.

  Finally, I came to a gouge in the road so wide I couldn’t get the car past it. I got out, and broad-jumped it, shouting my wife’s name. The only answer was the crackle of flames and blistering heat as I got closer to the spot where I’d left her.

  The cabins were all blazing and as I watched and the lawn heaved upwards as if something enormous was trying to push its way through. I shouted Melanie’s name again and this time I was answered, not by raging flames, but by a woman’s mad laughter.

  I followed the sound and found Melanie, between two of the burning cabins, unbothered by the sizzling heat. Before her was her canvas with a rendering that chilled my blood, even amidst this inferno.

  It was the courtyard of the Sentinel Inn, not as we’d first seen it, but as it appeared now. I, who knew every nuance, every subtlety of Melanie’s style saw none of her gentle brush strokes or subtle blend of colors. Instead, the details were surreal, yet meticulous to the point of being photographic and those details …my God!

  Melanie’s face was drawn back in a gleeful rictus and her voice was a shriek. “The fools! They shunned him! They feared him! They drove him here!”

  I tried shaking her but she threw me off with a strength that was beyond human. I fell backward, catching my ankle in one of the furrows. I heard a crack and a wave of pain rode up my leg.

  As I tried to rise, her brush arm moved with a speed that was as inhuman as her strength. On her canvas, those anthropoidal things that graced The Altar were breaking out of the well. They were coming out of the furrows in the ground.

  Oblivious to me, she kept painting and shouting. “He painted things that were, but it all changed when he came here! Here, they became real when he painted them!”

  I caught movement from the corner of my eye and with a thrill of horror, I saw those repugnant life forms appear out of the well – the real well whose sides and roof were sundering with the force of their emergence – exactly as she’d painted it.

  “Melanie, stop!”

  Her hand ceased its blurred motion and I thought I’d reached her, but then it started again, painting not more of these unholy monstrosities, but something else. An object.

  An altar.

  No sooner had she begun than a raised platform began to materialize on the lawn, in one of the few s
pots where there was no upheaval.

  “No!”

  I staggered to my feet unmindful of the pain. I grabbed her arm, trying to arrest her motion, but it was like trying to wrestle a machine. She kept painting, painting a woman whose features were both dear and familiar to me.

  “MELANIE!”

  This could not continue. If I couldn’t stop her, I would destroy the canvas. Grab it, throw it in the flames, and pray that once it was a withered mass of ash, this terrible tableau would vanish.

  I never got the chance.

  Clawlike hands closed on me, wrested me away from the woman I loved. Sheer numbers forced me to the ground and one of them…

  God help me!

  …one of them had that familiar sneering face that tainted the scene of piety and veneration in a painting of a colonial patriarch reading from the Scriptures.

  Subhuman fists pummeled me and I gagged as vileness assaulted my nostrils. Amidst revolting howls and laughter I heard Melanie’s frenzied shrieks.

  “It all changed here! Things became because he painted them!”

  It’s been five years since I was found, near death, on the lawn of the abandoned Sentinel Inn. I was brought to the hospital where I lay for weeks, recovering from injuries that would leave me crippled me for life.

  During that time, I was questioned, grilled, and interrogated about the disappearance of Melanie Grayson, semi-famous artist, and my one-time wife, lover, and best friend. My answers were written off as the imaginings of a mind traumatized by a severe beating by persons unknown. Melanie’s disappearance was written off as abduction by those same persons unknown.

  There were investigations, of course, but they turned up nothing. All the police were able to verify was that we had, in fact, been at the Sentinel Inn. That’s where they found our car. That’s where they found Melanie’s art supplies. Some were strewn amidst cabins that had burned down nearly a century ago, others alongside a sump hole of unfathomable depths where an old-fashioned wishing well once stood.

  I did some investigation on my own and I’m sorry I did.

  I went back to that North End gallery where it all began. I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought I could learn something about Richard Upton Pickman which could bring me understanding or, better still, closure.