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  Praise for WRATH AND RUIN

  “A highly satisfying mix of genres, WRATH AND RUIN offers a voice reminiscent of George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis’, with a healthy sampling of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.”

  -Kevin Lucia, author of Things Slip Through and Through a Mirror, Darkly

  “WRATH AND RUIN is an exciting and diverse collection. Briar’s debut book shows his strong writing voice and vivid imagination. I can’t wait to see what he puts out next!”

  -Ben Wolf, author of Blood for Blood

  WRATH AND RUIN

  A Chilling Anthology

  C.W. Briar

  2016

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or public historical figures used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by C.W. Briar All rights reserved. Small samples of the text may be used for quotes or review purposes. If interested in using a larger passage of the book for any purpose, please contact the author via his website at www.cwbriar.com.

  Edition: 1st (July 2016)

  Cover Illustration: Kip Ayers (www.kipayersillustration.com) Editors: Lindsay Franklin (www.lindsayafranklin.com) Ben Wolf (www.benwolf.com / Splickety Pub Group)

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-942462-10-1

  Also available in paperback.

  License Agreement This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person outside of your immediate household, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  STORIES

  Escape from Wrath and Ruin

  Lust

  The Other Edge

  The Case of Elizabeth Flora

  Stargazing

  Turpentine

  Ghoul: A Gideon Wells Story

  Wrong Number

  The Parable on Thorne Ave

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Escape from Wrath and Ruin

  The only thing I could remember was shouting, “No.”

  I awoke to an overwhelming light. It inundated me, yet somehow I saw only darkness. While my eyes discerned nothing, my ears picked up the sound of scratching a thousand times over.

  My other senses roused like patients after surgery. Next came pain. I rolled to my hands and knees at the heightening agony. My brain felt like it had exploded and nearly ruptured my skull. The top of my head was especially sore and tender to touch.

  I sensed cold, dry air on my bare face and arms, but also warm dampness on my hands. Blood. I smelled blood. Was it mine? Panicked, I stood and reached out, flailing. I discovered rough rock walls on either side of me. They were close, as if I were standing in a doorway. Slowly, touch gave way to sight, and I realized I was in a deep chasm. The light beams pouring into the stony maw seemed as tangible as a waterfall.

  “Help!” The rocks shouted my voice back a hundred times, mocking me.

  I tried to walk, but something warm and heavy blocked my feet. As light accumulated in the chasm like water filling a reservoir, the obstruction took form. It was a man’s carcass. He was old, and his twisted, ugly expression deepened the wrinkles on his face. I didn’t recognize him, and like all other details from before I awoke, the manner in which he died remained locked behind amnesia.

  Was he a friend? An enemy? I wasn’t sure, but a sickening feeling of guilt churned in my gut when I realized the blood on my hands might belong to the dead man lying in front of me. What had I done?

  The scraping, scratching sound I heard when I awoke had stopped. I only recognized its absence because the noise returned, and it was much louder than before. The ground trembled, shaking dust from the walls and creating a haze. I touched a stone and realized its surface was crawling like infested skin.

  Again I shouted for help, but the growing sound devoured my voice. My heart threw its shoulder against my ribs, and I scrambled my fingers over the rock walls in search of hand holds.

  In the blink of an eye, the chasm floor dissolved and flowed like water. Innumerable brown insects with pincer heads and segmented, snake-like bodies surged around me. I tried to climb, but I couldn’t reach the nearest projection of stone. In desperation, I stepped up on the corpse. The added height was enough for me to hook my fingers over a lip of rock. I lifted my feet off the body just as it started to move and drag along the ground.

  I began my slow ascent out of the chasm. A gnawing fire quickly built up in my arms and legs as I climbed, but I couldn’t let go. Not while insects devoured the corpse below. Every time I stopped to find a handhold or my breath, I shouted, “Help!” to no avail. No one answered.

  But help did come, and from a strange source. The light beams seemed to … they were more than mere light. Somehow they strengthened me and pulled me up like ropes. The more tired I became, the more they aided me—at least, until I reached the summit of the chasm.

  Moments before I could climb out, the light dimmed. All my weight returned and tried to drag me back into the pit. I cried out for fear I was about to fall.

  Then I realized what was shading the light. A man had appeared above me. He was kneeling at the top of the precipice, reaching toward me. With the last of my arms’ strength, I grasped his hand and let him pull me out onto level ground.

  I sat for a long time on the rim of that rift with my feet hanging above the darkness. While I massaged my exhausted forearms, the man who had helped me sat silently nearby, turning his head back and forth as he kept watch of the horizon.

  Even though I couldn’t recall my life from before the climb, I knew the terrain was foreign to me. Black sand aggregated like shadows in every crack and crevice of the red, stony land. Rock pillars jutted up from the barren plains and leaned toward distant mountain peaks. New clouds manifested rapidly in the dry air while others, which were already swollen and dark, sunk from the sky and diffused on the ground.

  A huge sun dominated the sky and bleached it white. It didn’t roast us with intolerable heat, but I did have to shield my eyes from its glow. I didn’t see any vegetation we could hide under, but I doubted trees would have helped anyway. That torrential, unrestrained light seemed to overwhelm and erase shadows.

  “Thank you,” I managed to say once my panting eased. I gulped another deep breath of the thin air.

  The stranger smiled at me. For some reason, in spite of my nearsighted memory and strange circumstances, I found immediate encouragement in that smile.

  “I’m glad I could be of help.” He glanced past me, again checking our surroundings.

  “Did you hear me yelling?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I may not have been the only one. That’s why I need to know if you’re ready to walk.”

  “I think so.” My arms were spent, but not my legs. “Where am I?”

  “Good,” he said, passing over my question. He rose to his feet, so I did the same. The man stood a head’s height taller than me, and he had paler skin. We were both wearing simple white shirts, pants, and shoes. “We can talk as we walk. I fear we may not be alone for long.”

  He glanced down at my blood-stained hands, then back at me.

  I wiped my hands on my shirt to no avail. The red stayed. My heart began to tremble again, and fresh sweat moistened my brow. My tongue tripped over my teeth as I tried to explain away the stains.

  “My fingers are hurt—hur
ting—from the climb. I’ll be all right.”

  The stranger held up a clean hand. “None of the blood got on me. It’s been there for a while.” He took a step away. “Start talking before I decide I have no reason to trust you.”

  I reluctantly confessed to the corpse in the chasm, but I insisted upon my innocence with all the grace of a log tumbling down a hill. I explained that I didn’t know the dead man, neither could I remember anything beyond the last hour with clarity. Whispers of old names and stories swirled in my mind, all of them disembodied from faces and places. I pleaded for the stranger to help me and show me where to go.

  He responded with another encouraging smile.

  “Congratulations. It appears I’ve found a traveling companion, after all. We definitely need to get going.”

  He turned and quickly walked in the same direction that the giant stone pillars were leaning. I followed. Every fifth step was a leap as I tried to keep up with his pace.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “You look worried.”

  “Law will certainly know what’s happened,” he said dryly. “He’ll come looking for you. He has a way of knowing things no one should. Nothing gets past him. He’ll seek you out, and your best hope is to distance yourself from him as much as possible. Trust me on this.”

  As I climbed onto a raised platform of stone, I tripped and banged my shin. The pain bit deep. I sucked air through gritted teeth and rubbed the swelling bump.

  “Are you running from him too?” I asked.

  “Everyone runs from him, or at least tries to. There’s no reasoning with him. He just hunts people down, and he ‘judges.’” The stranger made air quotes with the word. “He likes to call it judging, but really he just takes pleasure in punishing people. He makes a sick game of it. And I’m not talking about prison time. The man is a monster who delights in tormenting everyone he can catch.”

  Various forms of torture flashed in my mind. I clambered up a boulder and hurried to the stranger’s side. “Can’t I just go to the police and explain what’s going on? Someone needs to get that body if … if there’s anything left.”

  The man stopped long enough to glance at me with a puzzled expression. “Police? Where do you think we are?”

  “I don’t know. I already asked you that question. What’s this place called?”

  “I’m not sure this place has a name,” he said. “People tend to just pass through, and normally as quickly as possible. There’s nothing out here.”

  It dawned on me that I didn’t know the man’s name, either. I asked him.

  “Messipor. What’s your name?”

  I tried to recall it, but the effort worsened my headache. I pressed my palm against my forehead. “That’s one of the things I can’t remember.”

  Of all the voids in my memory, my name was the most troubling.

  Messipor. The name was unusual, but then so was everything else. Bands of iridescent colors swam on the cliff faces to one side of us. Shadows of vultures circled the ground we were hiking on, but there were no birds in the air. Whenever the wind stirred and took flight, it carried the sound of cackling and the scent of burning wood.

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked.

  “You were.” Messipor scooped up a pebble and tossed it to me. “This is no dream.”

  I caught the pebble and squeezed it between my fingers. It was solid.

  Messipor walked, and I followed. He seemed confident of our heading across the parched, lifeless wasteland.

  ***

  Our hike took us into the hills that had been our horizon earlier. Messipor grew increasingly anxious, and by extension, so did I. We half-crouched and studied each dust cloud that glided over the terrain, though I wasn’t sure why. I asked what we were watching out for.

  “Anything that might be chasing after us,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure what, but I’d rather not get caught off guard.”

  We walked for hours. The sun never descended from its high position overhead, nor did the thick halos around it dim. We were locked in a perpetual, otherworldly noon. I asked Messipor about that as well.

  Without glancing up, he said, “The sun? No, that’s the moon. We’ll be in serious danger if the sun rises.”

  “The moon? That glow’s too bright. It can’t be a moon.”

  Messipor remained silent.

  “What did you mean by danger if the sun rises? When will that be?”

  “I don’t know, but it hasn’t happened in centuries. Let’s hope that continues, because I’ve heard that if it does rise, it’ll scorch the whole land, and anything caught in the light dies.”

  I thought Messipor was exaggerating, but then I reconsidered the barren terrain and hard soil. Could a moon really cause that? The land desperately needed shade and rain, though it looked like the drought might be coming to an end soon. A faint rumble heralded a coming storm.

  I wondered what kind of storm came from clouds that fell out of the sky.

  “Do you hear thunder?”

  Messipor froze like a startled animal. At the next thunder roll, he scrambled to the nearest boulder. A frightened finger lashed out and signaled for me to do the same.

  The thunder sounded regular as a drumbeat, and it crescendoed. While pressing against the rock, we peered out at the coming fury. Messipor gestured at what I thought was an ordinary bird, small against the infinite sky. But its wings were beating at the same rate as the thunder. As the creature drew nearer, it grew and grew until its wings stretched large enough to span the gap between two hills.

  It was no mere bird. It had a beak and resplendent white feathers, but its body was shaped more like a dragon’s. Each stroke of its wings shattered the air, and columns of stone collapsed in its wake. Even at our distance, its breaths sounded like tornadoes.

  The creature descended into the valley and landed near the same chasm I’d climbed out of.

  Messipor pulled a small, crude telescope out of a pocket in his shirt. “Here. You need to see what we’re dealing with.”

  I thought it was rather obvious what we were dealing with. That dragon-bird was magnificent but frightening. But when I looked through the telescope, I spotted a man riding on the creature as if it were a horse. He slid off its back to the ground, and the creature threw itself to flight with a flick of its massive wings. The man was too far away for me to discern any of his features, but I felt as though he was searching the whole territory—searching for me—and it terrified me to the core.

  He knelt beside the chasm, then stepped over it and began walking along the same route Messipor and I had taken.

  “Law,” Messipor said, his voice quivering.

  A thousand beetles of fear crawled within my body. “Should I turn myself in and explain that I don’t know what happened? For all I know, I’m innocent of that man’s death.”

  Messipor grasped my shoulder hard enough to bruise it. “He finds everyone guilty, even of the smallest infractions. He thinks himself some sort of bounty hunter and arbiter, but his so-called justice is a farce. Don’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the grave danger you’re in? Everyone I know has spent their lives running from him, or has already been caught.”

  He released me with a push, his expression as stiff as steel. Messipor hurried toward the back side of the hill, away from Law. “Come on. There’s something else I should show you, and it’s on the way.”

  “Where are we going?” Trying to keep low out of Law’s sight, I stooped as I scrambled after Messipor. “Is there a town nearby?”

  Messipor quickened his swift walk to a full jog. “We’re going to find my friends so we can all get out of here together.”

  ***

  Hours later, we stopped briefly at a stream, which was the first water I had seen since awakening. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in it and realized I had blood on my face as well as my hands. I tried to wash the stains away, but they remained.

  The cold water was clear as diam
onds, and it cut a serpentine channel through the jagged terrain. Though beautiful, the stream baffled and unnerved me because it was utterly silent despite cascading into a pool. But the water was beyond pure and sweet, as if it had originated from springs inside of honeycombs.

  Messipor drank from a canteen tied under a flap of his shirt, and then he refilled it. I, meanwhile, dropped to the ground and drank from a spot where the water poured off a lip of rock.

  “Do you have a container?” Messipor asked, shaking his canteen.

  I patted my flat pockets and replied, “No.”

  “Then drink your fill now.”

  I didn’t need any coaxing. The water was remarkably good, and I felt parched from head to toe. Even after my first long drink, I had dry, sappy saliva glued to my tongue and lips.

  Our hike resumed. We skirted around the next two ridgelines we came to, then climbed atop the third. As we crawled to the rim of the plateau, I caught a whiff of acrid, rotten air, a prelude to the nightmare I was about to see.

  I witnessed a place as gruesome as thrashing, screaming immolation. Smoke spewed from the hills and shaded the entire black valley with a tent of gray soot. A flow of a different sort, an innumerable army of despondent people, marched toward the gaping jaws of a cavern. They showed no awareness of the horrors around them as they plodded with heads down, eyes in the dirt.

  Nothing startled them, not even the tall creatures walking among their ranks. Those hideous monsters were like a jumbled amalgamation of various creatures. Their stork-like legs allowed them to walk over the heads of people, and they reached down at random with crab claws and serpent necks to tear flesh or limbs from their prey. Their feline bellies bulged from gorging on the slaughter.

  All the while, the people—the prey—kept marching into that cave, trudging through a swamp of blood and black soil.

  I looked away, my skin writhing. I couldn’t shut out the sounds of the march, the ravenous feast, or the twisted moans emanating from the cave. The ground quivered from the termite movement of people underground.