Guild of unpublished horror writers

 

Alden Dankworth had joined the Guild of English Horror Writers three months previously and had instantly made a strong impression on Henry. Dankworth was effortlessly charismatic and seemed able to charm all around him. He had been writing for barely a year but had already had a number of submissions published by some of the more high-profile horror periodicals. Henry, who was considered something of an old hand had started to experience a reversal of fortune at about the same time and was captivated my Dankworth’s energy and drive. 

It had taken little time for them to build a strong friendship and the two men would communicate almost daily via text message, email or social media. Dankworth would share ideas for stories, sometimes even short extracts of his work for Henry’s consideration. The work was impressive, conjuring spectacular images of imagined worlds and beings of dark power. Whether Henry felt intimidated by the newcomer’s prowess or whether he had just become jaded with genre writing, he found it progressively harder to produce anything of worth. He complained frequently to Dankworth of his withering inspiration and expressed the idea that he might quit writing altogether.

Dankworth implored him not to be too hasty and, somewhat reluctantly, suggested he had something that he could share with Henry that might help. He hints suggested that his muse was rather outré and maybe illicit and Henry was intrigued. Dankworth swore him to secrecy and invited him to visit him at home one evening later that week. Henry accepted eagerly and so it was that the following Thursday evening he pulled up outside an impressive home that looked like an old mansion house situated on the outskirts of North London.

Dankworth had welcomed Henry in as if he had arrived early for a dinner party, a warm handshake and the offer of a drink. Henry accepted the handshake happily but declined the drink. He wanted his head to be clear for the evening. If what Dankworth had promised him was true then he would be about to witness something potentially fascinating and he wanted his wits fully about him.

Dankworth led Henry through the house to a heavy security door next to the kitchen. Dankworth needed two keys to open the door which led directly onto steps that descended into a rather gloomily lit, but dry, cellar. Dankworth chatted amiably to him as they went, talking about the history of the house and of his family. At the rear of the cellar was a large opening in the brickwork which was replaced by a space hewn directly into the rock.

A pair of heavy velvet curtain was drawn across the entrance. They were a deep purple colour but aged and worn in places to a pale lilac. A smell penetrated the curtains which seemed familiar to Henry but which he couldn’t quite place. The curtains were drawn aside solemnly by two men. One was tall and well-built while the other was significantly smaller and made Henry think of a weasel. Both were dressed up in something like the costumes from a cheap Hammer Horror film, dark hooded robes tied with rope and wearing heavy leather gloves that fitted them up to the elbow.

“My acolytes.” Dankworth introduced them seriously before giving a mischievous chuckle. “Not really, just friends of mine, chums from school.”

Before he could greet the men, Henry’s attention was arrested by the sight of a grotesque creature lying on something like an alter raised up on a stout plinth.   He hung back briefly before Dankworth took his elbow and gently urged him forwards for a better view. The thing was a hideous conglomeration of all that is most horrible in nature. The body was a great wet leathery sack, like something dredged from the deeps of the sea that was not meant to see sunlight. Black and glistening with pale grey and white streaks in its flanks where it looked like the sack was stretching thin, almost to breaking point. Henry dared not imagine what vile entrails would spill from it were the sack to split and pour its contents on the rough-hewn stone floor. 

On its back were a pair of wings not unlike those of a bat. Expect that these were huge, twisted and malformed. Bones jutted from the joints in the wings and on looking more closely Henry could see that the wings themselves were bound tightly together. The binding ropes were so tight that the sparse flesh of the wings seemed to have partly grown over them much as a tree might in time grow around and encompass a barbed wire fence. 

From the position it was lying in Henry could not see any other limbs, if it had them they were crushed under its flabby body. The face, such as it was, comprised only of a tiny squinting eyes that were filmed and cloudy, and a mass of writhing tentacle like protuberances. Most of these were relatively short and thin, like large earthworms. A few others were a bit more substantial like eels writhing in a swamp. There were two larger tentacles that flapped and thrashed. They gave the animal a suggestion of a two trunked elephant.  On these trunks Henry could clearly see that rows of suckers on the underside were interspersed with short, hooked spines. 

In amongst this mass Henry could see many short stubs of tentacles that appeared to have broken off. The scarred ends looked dried and crusted and Henry felt his gorge rise as one of these stubs oozed a gobbet of white pus like slime that flopped down onto its already slick body.

Dankworth stood by the creature proudly with an expectant look on his face, as if waiting for Henry to start heaping praise on the monstrosity. 

“Remarkable isn’t it?” He promoted when Henry continued to stare in dumbfounded loathing. He advanced another step and bent slightly to peer closer. The things eyes were almost human like and it seemed to Henry that they rolled ever so slightly to look in his direction although they appeared unfocussed. As Henry watched it blinked and revealed two sets of eyelids like a lizard, one set closing vertically. As it did so Henry felt his mind fog suddenly and his concentration slide before he refocussed once again. The sensation left him with a nausea like vertigo and a sudden tension headache. It felt like he did when he had spent too long typing at his laptop in the dark of an evening, as if an iron band was tightening inside his skull. 

“I mean, what is it?” He murmured almost to himself, scrunching his eyes and gently shaking his head to try and clear the pain.

Dankworth took this as his cue and relished in the opportunity to demonstrate his knowledge. He addressed not only Henry but the other two men in the room although this couldn’t have been the first time they had heard this lecture.

“Not of this Earth that’s for sure.” Dankworth pronounced. “It could be alien maybe, abandoned or crashed to earth. Or maybe it’s a demon or some mythical being. It’s certainly got what would have been called ‘magic powers’ back in the old days. You feel that?” He pointed suddenly at Henry’s brow. “The headache.” He elaborated. Henry nodded and massaged his temples with one hand.

Dankworth pointed at the thing merrily. “It’s doing it, it’s causing your headache. If it had all of its power it would be controlling your mind, making you its man puppet.” He looked too gleeful at this prospect and seemed to note the concern on Henry’s face. 

“Oh, don’t worry,” he reassured. “its been ‘docked’, much less powerful now.”

“Docked?” Henry asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s tentacles you see.” And here he pointed at the stumps of tentacle Henry had seen ooze the pus a moment earlier. “Its power comes from its tentacles. In fact, pretty much everything it does seems to come from its tentacles. They grow all the time, look here.” At this he gesticulated to the small wormlike tentacles. “These are new ones, barely a couple of years old, these longer ones here are ready to be harvested and these two big ones here we have to leave alone. If it doesn’t have at least a couple that are allowed to grow full size it gets sick, sicker than it looks now at least.” He smirked.

Henry’s mind was a whirl of questions but Dankworth seemed in full flow and as he was Henry’s host he didn’t feel he could interrupt.

“It was my great grandfather who found him, out in South America. Great grandfather was negotiating logging rights with the local tribespeople when they told him of a tribe who were extremely hostile and would resist not only logging but any contact with outsiders. The other tribes said they were cursed, that they worshipped a dead god that had been dragged from the river after a mudslide. The old man sent men to scout out the tribe but none came back. In the end his company instructed him to hire mercenaries to drive the hostile tribe out if they weren’t going to be reasonable. There was a great slaughter apparently, the mercenaries started killing tribe’s people and then started to kill each other. One of the vehicles got hit in the crossfire and the fuel tank exploded, this seemed to bring everyone to their senses. The remaining mercenaries stumbled about as if coming out of a trance, the tribe’s people ran away and were never seen again.” Dankworth gave a small nod as if he had been personally responsible for the victory. He paused for dramatic effect, looking around at his audience.

“They found this,” he pointed at the creature. “It had been badly hurt in the explosion, lost most of its tentacles and torn its wings. My great grandfather was going to order it killed and dumped in the river but something stopped him. Smuggled it back to England instead and set it up here in the cellar. Over time he had this chamber dug into the rock to make a more fitting home for it.”

He waved his arm grandly as it introducing them to the chamber for the first time. 

“My family have studied it ever since, learnt its secrets. It’s truly fascinating. Doesn’t eat at all, or piss or shit. Seems to get everything it needs from its tentacles. It was barely alive for the first few years but then the tentacles started to grow back and it got healthier. Too healthy if anything, started to get into peoples heads and my Lord wasn’t it angry.” Dankworth was hitting his stride, relishing the retelling of the family legend.

“Great grandfather had tasked two of the servants with caring for the thing, a maid and the gardener’s boy. Not much they could really do for it, keep the cellar warm and keep the creature moist was about the best they could manage. But over time they started to complain of sickness, started to have nightmares. The maid complained that she was having the nightmares when she was awake, would start shrieking and flailing about the place. The gardener’s boy found her one day, hanged in the cellar from one of the joists just out there.” He pointed past the velvet curtain back into the cellar.

“The garden boy didn’t last long either, got into the drinking habit. The housekeeper caught him dipping into the master’s whisky and he was dismissed. Apparently, they found his body in the canal a few days later. The gardener himself was given responsibility for looking after ‘It’ and of course it didn’t take long for him to start complaining of feeling ill and of nightmares as well. Luckily for him my great grandfather was pretty sharp, he started to figure out that as the tentacles grew the beast was able to exert and influence over people. Ever the experimenter he paid two local medical students to spend a week down in the cellar observing the creature. He provided them with plenty to eat and drink and any science apparatus they needed. Of course, once they went down into the cellar the door was locked. They didn’t open it until the screams stopped four days later. The two seemed to have attacked each other in the end, no weapons, they had torn each other apart.” Dankworth was physically excited by this idea, his eyes shone and he licked his lips in delight as he left his audience to imagine the grisly details.

Adopting a more studious air he went on. “Before they died they had recorded some rather useful observations. They had deducted that the creature was able to apply some sort of telepathy, mind control. They had taken samples of tissue from various parts of the animal, its wings, its body and its tentacles. They found that the tentacles are more than just suckers and muscle, they contain a highly developed nervous system not unlike the neural pathways of the mammalian brain, only even more complex.” He looked around imperiously. “They had kept detailed notes, sketches and the like. On the workbench there was the remains of one of the tentacles that they had removed.”

Dankworth paused a beat, his Grand finale at the ready. “Do you know what a zoophage is?” He posed the question but didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “A zoophage is a person who has an interest in eating strange, exotic or unusual animals, things not usually part of the human diet.” 

Henry looked back at the Demon in its rank pit and took note again of the stubby, broken tentacles- ‘docked’.

Dankworth confirmed his thoughts.

“The old boy couldn’t resist, he was considered quite the adventurous gourmand of his time. He kept a record of his more interesting meals. It has been claimed that the common mole is the most disgusting thing ever eaten, great grandfather disagreed, he found the paw pads of the Giant Panda to be particularly disagreeable. He never commented on the tentacle from a gastronomic perspective, he found it had other properties that were far more interesting.” He was getting to the heart of why Henry was here. He had been promised a glimpse into another world, to see fantasies that would feed his stories for decades to come. Surely it was these tentacles that could be his gateway to these other realms.

Dankworth elaborated. “The tentacles confer only a tiny fraction of the animal’s power to the consumer but that in itself is hugely beneficial. The effects last for many months before they need to be renewed. Just a mouthful will give you a power over men’s minds. Not enough to control them like the creature does, not enough to drive them mad or to take life. But enough to influence them, to suggest and cajole. Especially on the weak minded or desperate.” He smiled indulgently at Henry as he said this before continuing. 

“And the visions, things beyond description, things from beyond time and space. Colours your eyes shouldn’t be able to see, shapes the human mind can’t comprehend, pleasure that is hard to bare.” His face was rapturous as he described such sights and Henry hungered to see them for himself.

Dankworth’s reached a hand out to him, welcoming him forwards. From inside his robes he produced a fine, thin and viciously sharp knife with a blade so curved inwards that it resembled a small sickle.

“You must be the one to harvest,” he smiled, gesturing towards the creature. “Remove one of these ones here,” he indicated to one of the mid-sized tentacles. “remove it with one cut of the knife, you must cut very hard and deep, they are tough,” he warned. Trance like Henry reached out his hand and took the knife. He drifted towards the creature, hesitating when almost in reach of the two larger tentacles that had reared up in a defensive pose. 

Swiftly the two acolytes tackled the large tentacles, one grasping each and wrestling them under control, their heavy leather gauntlets protecting them from the spines.

“Now!” Shrieked Dankworth.

Compelled forwards, Henry threw himself at the creature. He grabbed a tentacle with one hand, drawing it out tight although it resisted fiercely. With all his strength he hooked the tentacle with the knife and pulled furiously as it. He had expected the tentacle to be elastic and rubbery and had been prepared for it to stretch and pull before cutting through. Instead, he found it hard and fibrous like a tree root. For a moment he feared he would not be able to cut through it with one stroke but found that by drawing the knife in a slicing motion, rather than trying to pull it through the tentacle, he was able to cut it clear. 

 “Well done,” he said, “excellent.” He looked at the tentacle in Henry’s clenched fist and then up at his face, eyebrows raised.

“You have to consume it all I’m afraid. No easy way of doing it, it will feel impossible at first but you just have to keep going. I’m afraid if we try to cut it up or process it in any way it will almost immediately lose its potency.”

Henry was hesitant and enquired whether Dankworth and the acolytes would not be joining him.

“Oh no, not today.” Dankworth replied. “We do not need to renew ourselves just yet. We are all here for you.” He smiled. After a moment’s silence he made a small eating gesture in Henry’s direction, putting his hand to his mouth and miming biting the tentacle. Henry wondered if he was being mocked. He had a moment of clarity when the idea of eating the creature’s tentacle, of even being in the same building as it, felt abhorrent and ridiculous. However, his thoughts clouded over, suppressing instinct. Mechanically, he raised the tentacle to his mouth.

His body seemed to reject the mere idea of the tentacle being food. Bite and chew as he could there seemed no possibility that his body would allow him to swallow it. The thing tasted of mercifully little, mud and swampy water. The texture was punishing, sinewy and splintered. He felt tiny spines and spikes dig into his tongue, gums and the insides of his cheeks. The mass seemed to expand in his mouth so that he could barley chew it and he felt like he would gag. 

Drool dribbled from his mouth, Henry breathed heavily through his nose and with a huge effort he started to swallow. It stuck in his throat all the way down making it almost impossible to breath. Unable to break the mass up at all no matter how much he chewed, he had no choice but to swallow it whole, frantically gulping and forcing it back with his tongue. After what seemed an age he finally succeeded and gasped an enormous sigh of relief.

In another moment he was transported. His pupils dilated and he saw far beyond the walls of the cellar and the house. He was souring away from his body, out into the cosmos leaving the earth far behind. His mind eye rushed past whirling galaxies, many coloured suns and spaces of unfathomable darkness. He wept at the sensation of being part of the whole universe, connected and embraced by everything at once. His mind looped around and hovered in the eternal space looking back towards his body. He marvelled at the beauty and timelessness of creation as he allowed himself to drift back towards the Earth.

Henry’s ecstasy was abruptly interrupted as his mind flowed through the void. A sudden and deep unease overtook him. Like a child who has swum too far out into the ocean and turns around to see the shore line frighteningly far away, feels the cold depths beneath them and wonders if they can ever make it back. 

A leaden sense of doom swamped him and he cautiously slunk back to his own world. As he travelled he became further aware of a great oppressive atmosphere that cloaked the stars around him. His thoughts turned black and hopeless and for a dangerous moment he lost all impulse to return to himself and was resigned to drifting endlessly through the dark. With an effort of will Henry forced himself onwards. The heavy atmosphere appeared to be condensing into something more tangible.

A presence made itself know to him, tracking him through space. He turned and saw a vast and terrible being. Had he corporeal form at that time he would have screamed his lungs raw. The being was of unbelievable proportion, a body the size of huge whale, with outstretched wings that seemed to glide through the ether, billowing with solar winds. The face a thrashing mass of engorged tentacles longer than a bus, tipped with vicious hooked spikes longer than Henry’s arm. In physical form the similarity to the creature in Dankworth’s cellar was clear, but in pure power and malice it was beyond compare. 

Henry’s mind shook and crumbled as the being turned it psychic influences towards him, directing its power through the throbbing tentacles. He knew beyond all doubt that he was in the presence of nothing less than a god, against which he was a barely significant spec. But in a short moment he felt the power shifting, it sensed something in him and the word god was replaced with another- Mother. 

Abruptly the influence that had restrained him was released and he shot back to earth as if his body was reeling in his mind at a terrific rate. As his mind re-joined his body he sagged to his knees in exhaustion. Henry raised his head and looked Dankworth in the eyes, the man could barely contain his glee and seemed to be resisting the urge to dance on the spot.

“Did you see it?” He asked, the pitch of his voice raised with excitement. “It’s coming for you now, yes, it is.” He was babbling. “It was coming for us because of what we did to its offspring. It has been travelling here for over a hundred years through space and it was coming to destroy us. For the last ten years we have all felt and seen it.” He nodded towards the acolytes as if seeking their agreement, which was offered only by the tiniest nodding of their heads.

 “But now it’s only you who has the offspring within them. We have abstained for this very reason. The mother will see that we are clean but that you are tainted. She will let us worship her and act in her service but she will tear your soul apart.” His ravings were extraordinary, his voice becoming faster and louder and higher pitched. The acolytes seemed to be getting sucked into the frenzy, their bodies jerking and twitching and strange vocalisations escaped their mouths.

“She is here, she is here!” One violently exclaimed. All four men found themselves physically frozen in place while their minds lost all will to try to move even if they could. Their perceptions changed, they continued to see with their eyes but their minds also showed them far away things. The Mother had, indeed, arrived. She was still hundreds of millions of miles away but such was her power that they were all fully in range of her influence

Dankworth and the acolytes stood in slack jawed terror as in their minds the vast entity bore down on them. Henry watched as their wills collapsed under its thrall and their bodies gave way to its commands. Only their eyes betrayed that they were conscious, able to fear and to feel every torment. Their confidence that they were to be spared evaporated in the heavy blanked of malevolence that smothered them.

The first acolyte, the short weaselly one slumped to the floor with his back to the wall. Henry couldn’t turn his head away as he watched the little man slowly raise his hands to his mouth where he proceeded to bite and chew each of his fingers off at the first knuckle. His fingers were left with jagged protruding bones and with these new claws he tore his own stomach open, heaping the steaming ropes of innards onto the floor in front of him as the light in his eyes finally dimmed and he was still.

The tall, heavily set acolyte was standing bolt upright, his faced a rictus grin. With stiff, robotic movements he turned towards the monster on the alter and took two lurching steps forwards to that he was standing to attention directly in front of it. Grin still in place, the acolyte bent at the waste, arms and legs still straight. He presented the top of his head to the creature who, with more animation than Henry would have thought possible, lurched forwards to engulf the whole of the man’s head and shoulders in its nest of tentacles. They closed around the man like a sea anemone and there was a short moment of slurping and grinding before his body dropped to the floor, the head and shoulders missing, blood pouring from the torso. 

Dankworth was gibbering in the corner of the room, he seemed to be fighting against the impulses that were driving him and yet as hard as he struggled the will of the Mother was inexorable. His hands came up to his face and were forced into his mouth. He grasped the sides of his cheeks and started to violently wrench and tear at them. Dankworth’s lips split and blood poured from his wounds as he succeeded in ripping one cheek fully off before stuffing it back into his mouth and furiously consuming it. The whole side of his mouth lay open where the cheek had been removed so that Henry could clearly see Dankworth’s teeth now chomping and biting at his own tongue. Dankworth had to tip his head right back to swallow the tongue down. He was shrieking and keening in pain and terror but could not prevent his fingers from scrabbling at his own eyes. Both were shucked from their sockets and swallowed whole.

Dankworth clawed and ripped at his own flesh, stuffing his throat with such fistfuls of meat that he could swallow no more. In the last few dreadful moments the cosmic being returned full control to Dankworth, so that he was able to try and pull the gore from his throat before he chocked to death. Try as he might, his windpipe remained clogged. Although blind and wracked with pain and panic Dankworth seemed to search for Henry, staggering a few steps with his hands outreaching in supplication before finally succumbing to suffocation.

Henry silently pleaded with the Mother for mercy, he felt the content of his stomach lurch and churn. Sharp cramping pains rippled through his insides. He gripped himself and moaned as he felt something move under his fingers. His skin stretched and distended as something deep inside him squirmed. There was a burning in his chest and he started to choke and gag as something hard blocked his throat, rising up from his stomach. Henry’s throat swelled and he tasted blood and bile as something forced its way up into his mouth. Further and further his throat stretched, his jaw was forced painfully wide open as a mass of barbed tentacles thrashed and writhed their way out of him. The first of the tentacles fell to the ground, but in doing so they seemed to drag more up from the depths of his being so that a continuous tangle grew out of him. 

Henry watched in horrified awe as the tentacles pulled his insides out with them, lumps of purple black and pink flesh. He felt himself been torn and stripped from the inside, pieces of himself wrapped in the dreadful tentacles. With a sound like wet paper tearing he felt his lungs being pulled free of his chest and tugged out of his mouth, he saw them land and his eyes bulged in disbelief to see his heart beating amongst the nest of gore and slimmed tentacles. The mass had reached the size of a medium sized dog when it started to lurch like a single entity in the direction of the creature on the alter, dragging him forwards by the ropes of his own viscera that still attached him to his heart and lungs. 

Henry had once written about a King Rat, a ball of rats that had somehow irreversibly tangle their tales together and, driven mad by hunger, would become a savage rampaging ball of razor teeth and claws, attacking anything and everything that came within reach. Abstractly his mind was taken back to this image as he watched the ball of tentacles drag him forwards. He no longer felt pain, he had no need to draw breath. His body no longer felt a part of him, he had more in common with the tentacles he had birthed than with his mortal remains. 

The tentacles reached the alter and, stretching up, were able to drag themselves towards the creature. They intertwined with the beast’s own tentacles, merged with the scared remains of the those that had been docked. The beast seemed to take control of them now that they were part of him. Henry felt his consciousness shift, his body was numb and lifeless but he could direct the tentacles, they were part of him too now, or he was part of them. The final act of his old body was to bite down with full force on the tubes and strands of muscle that bound him to the old husk, severing the connection and binding him to his brother forever.