Revelations, page 1
REVELATIONS
Horror Writers for Climate Action
Edited by Seán O’Connor
Dead Sky Publishing
DEAD SKY PUBLISHING
Miami Beach, Florida
www.deadskypublishing.com
Copyright © 2023
All Rights Reserved
The stories included in this publication are a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Interior Design by Kenneth W. Cain
For Earth
“There is no going back — no matter what we do now, it’s too late to avoid climate change and the poorest, the most vulnerable, those with the least security, are now certain to suffer.”
—Sir David Attenborough,
February 2021
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Sadie Hartmann
1. FIELDS OF ICE Gemma Amor
2. THE WOOD ON THE HILL Clive Barker
3. FEAR SUN Laird Barron
4. NO STORY IN IT Ramsey Campbell
5. THE TOWER Richard Chizmar
6. CARRIERS Tananarive Due
7. THE GUARDIAN Philip Fracassi
8. LOW HANGING CLOUDS T.E. Grau
9. DEAD-WOOD Joe Hill
10. JUDE CONFRONTS GLOBAL WARMING Joe Hill
11. SUMMER THUNDER Stephen King
12. THE MAID FROM THE ASH: A LIFE IN PICTURES Gwendolyn Kiste
13. INUNDATION John Langan
14. LOVE PERVERTS Sarah Langan
15. IN THE COLD, DARK TIME Joe R. Lansdale
16. THE EVOLUTIONARY Tim Lebbon
17. TEENAGE GRAVEYARD WATCHMAN Josh Malerman
18. CALL THE NAME Adam L.G. Nevill
19. BLACK QUEEN Nuzo Onoh
20. SNOW ANGELS Sarah Pinborough
21. MAW Priya Sharma
22. MEAN TIME Paul Tremblay
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT & PUBLICATION HISTORY
ABOUT CLIMATE OUTREACH
INTRODUCTION
The authors you’ll see in the Table of Contents for Revelations need no introduction. I was invited to do just that by the editor and my friend, Seán O’Connor. How do I introduce Ramsey Campbell to horror fans? Clive Barker anyone? Ever heard of him? How about this, Tananarive Due? I heard that Stephen King guy can write his way out of a paper bag.
This is a joke I could easily run into the ground, and I think I’ve made my point. The table of contents is a guest list like no other and I am incredibly honored to be typing these words. I’ve enjoyed hours and hours of reading words penned by this lot; visited many fictional worlds from their imaginations and fell in love with the characters they have created.
Between them all, I’m sure every literary award you could think of has been won – more than once. So, what I will attempt to do is set the stage for the purpose of this anthology and then introduce the stories represented here by doing what I do best,
Sharing my thoughts, pulling quotes, and urging other readers to join me.
I thought a lot about this introduction sitting in a wicker chair on the porch of a beach house called Wit’s End. When I was a kid, my parents booked a week in this house every year for our family’s one vacation. My sisters and I used to talk about how our classmates and friends took family trips to Yellowstone or Disneyland and how our family just went to Dillon Beach, California every year but honestly, I don’t think we missed out on anything.
This year, my sister and I left our own families at home to crash our parent’s vacation at Wit’s End. We both left California and moved to Washington and neither one of us had been to Dillon Beach since my sister’s bachelorette party over a decade ago.
Flying over California, we could see a wildfire. Brownish, gray plumes of smoke mixing with the clouds and on the land below, a clear line of demarcation between the blackened, charred landscape and the wildlife anticipating certain destruction.
Climate change is one hundred percent why California faces a worsening wildfire season every year. The summers are hotter, the drought conditions longer, and the plant life is dryer making the landscape extra flammable. Most California fires start from lightning or downed power lines during high winds. But people are responsible too.
Fireworks during backyard celebrations.
A cigarette is carelessly thrown out of a car on the freeway.
Campers leaving a fire unattended at a campground.
Growing up in a rural, Northern California town, we never canceled school every year because the air quality was dangerous due to smoke. The power company didn’t schedule power outages during windstorms. We didn’t live under the threat of an evacuation every summer. But these things are common practice now and for the last several years. California is seeing the very real consequences of climate change. This is the way California is now. It will likely get worse.
Everywhere.
Nationally.
Globally.
Unless we do something to radically change our course.
My vision for pulling my favorite quotes from each story serves two purposes. One, to entice you, and two, to create an atmosphere similar to the Academy Awards during the ceremony when clips of nominated movies are shown to the audience. A few lines of greatness to highlight the quality of the film. I hope you enjoy these as they pertain to the theme of our anthology.
“The late State of California had yet more dying to do.”
CARRIERS by Tananarive Due
“Haven’t you noticed that most of the woodland birds are already gone? No chickadee concerts in the morning, no crow music at noon. By September, the loons will be as gone as the loons who did this. The fish will live a little longer, but eventually, they’ll be gone too. Like the deer, the rabbits, and the chipmunks.”
SUMMER THUNDER by Stephen King
“Among the corpses on the beach, and amidst the audible splinterings of bone behind the seawall of rubble, she understands that this is the way of things here, in this time. This revelation is the worst thing of all.”
CALL THE NAME by Adam L.G. Nevill
“Things in the City were deteriorating rapidly. There were riots. Disease had taken hold of the lower levels. Famine threatened. Political unrest and misinformation was rife.”
FIELDS OF ICE by Gemma Amor
“As they walked down the hill Michael smiled a little to himself. Not a happy smile, you understand, but a resigned smile of one who knows what is about to happen, and who also knows that he may do nothing about it.”
THE WOOD ON THE HILL by Clive Barker
“The question is, do you want to live to see a curtain call. You’re the heroine and if we’re following the original plot, you have an unpleasant reckoning in your near future.”
FEAR SUN by Laird Barron
“Just now writing something other than his story might well be a trap. He donned sandals and shorts and unbuttoned his shirt as he ventured out beneath a sun that looked as fierce as the rim of a total eclipse.”
NO STORY IN IT by Ramsey Campbell
“Of course, when a series of dark and mostly unexplainable events occur in the same spot over the course of many years, and most especially when these events occur within the confines of a small town, the spot is inevitably said to be cursed or even haunted – and the old water tower was no exception.”
THE TOWER by Richard Chizmar
“Hesitantly, Eva looked back toward the beach between the rocks and the water, the imbedded footprints of her and Bryce’s path still evident. The sand was crawling. All of it.”
THE GUARDIAN by Philip Fracassi
“She slept better in the morning. During the night, when she was alone with the dark, she heard screams coming from the hills above. Could be coyotes. Could be worse. The whispering city never gave clues.”
LOW HANGING CLOUDS by T. E. Grau
“Somehow it’s easier to imagine the ghost of a tree than it is the ghost of a man.”
DEAD-WOOD by Joe Hill
“Rather rude, don’t you think? Destroying a person’s home?
I can’t fathom anything so devilish as that.”
THE MAID FROM THE ASH
by Gwendolyn Kiste
“It’s a watery place, teeming with all manner of strange fauna.”
INUNDATION by John Langan
“I used to be so into the zombie apocalypse. I figured I’d be this hero in a society risen from ashes. Me, the phoenix of the new world order. But the real thing sucks. Because I’m going to die, and I can’t figure out which is more cowardly; resigning to that fate,
or fighting it.”
LOVE PERVERTS by Sarah Langan
“It isn’t your wound that aches you, makes you want to die, it’s the war.”
IN THE COLD, DARK TIME by Joe R. Lansdale
“We’re a long time ago, and you’d barely recognise the people who live here right now. But even in its earliest days, humankind was interfering with nature.”
THE EVOLUTIONARY by Tim Lebbon
“A cool gig, the coolest he’d ever heard of
TEENAGE GRAVEYARD WATCHMAN
by Josh Malerman
“Crawling her winding flow along the contours of our village, Black Queen was as beautiful as
she was terrifying.”
BLACK QUEEN by Nuzo Onoh
“The snow still falls. I can feel its purpose, and I think that if I close my eyes a little, I’ll see the colors hiding in it.”
SNOW ANGELS by Sara Pinborough
“He’s been given to Maw as a gift and Maw will give us the sea’s bounty in return.”
MAW by Priya Sharma
“All our apartment buildings, libraries, markets, salons, and restaurants were crammed together, like space was something to be shared intimately with everyone.”
MEAN TIME by Paul Tremblay
A charity anthology donating its proceeds to climateoutreach.org seems so small compared to the scale of the problem. But coming together under the banner of horror fiction in a gesture of unity for the sake of awareness and contribution to a solution is better than not doing anything in all. Climate Outreach is dedicated to research, correcting misinformation, educating the public, and centering the climate change conversation around people, not politics.
It’s really important that we keep the dialog about climate change at the forefront of everything we do. Thank you for joining us in making that happen by buying, reading, reviewing, and talking about Revelations.
—Sadie Hartmann
November 2021
FIELDS OF ICE
In the Northern Reaches of a dying land that was once prosperous, a vast glacier sprawls along the floor of a valley between two distinct mountain ranges. The largest mountains in each range sit on either side of the glacier like guardian sisters. One is called Old White, and the other Old Red, named for the colours that burn on their peaks at sunrise and sunset. Old Red has a distinct geology, one composed mostly of sedimentary Ironstone, the surface of which has oxidised and now glows a brilliant shade of crimson when the sun hits it just so. Old White’s peak is perpetually capped with snow. She is taller, and has a more pronounced summit, one that thrusts up into the sky like a dagger jammed between a man’s ribs.
***
Not much is known of the territory that lies beyond the mountains. The barricade of ice that has piled up over centuries between them has prevented the few scientific and geographic teams that have ventured this far north from making much progress in the region.
Those teams did not count Hayder amongst their number.
Hayder does not travel as part of a team. Hayder travels alone. She does not enjoy responsibility. Expeditions that involve more than one person automatically imply an obligation: to protect the well-being and safety of that extra person. This onerous duty interferes heavily with her ability to do her job. Which is, simply, to find things. Hayder is very good at finding things, but only when she is left the fuck alone to do so. She is an archaeologist, one of the few left in the world, and glad for that. Academic scarcity means that she is valuable to the Minister, and valuable to the Keep. Being valued as a person in this day and age is not a common conceit.
At this present moment in time, Hayder hangs from two ice picks jammed hard into the side of a steeply curving wall of diamond-white ice, about two miles in on the swooping, crenelated surface of the glacier. Her boots are wrapped with leather straps that have wicked metal spikes attached to them: crampons. Her toes are bleeding from the impact of jabbing her spikes into the ice wall over and over again. The fortification she is scaling is starting to crumble in the midday sun. She must get to the top before the ice becomes too mushy to let her climb. If she fails, she will spend another cold, miserable night stuck in a deep, cobalt-blue crevasse, and she does not want that. Crevasses are natural traps, and Hayder has heard movement on the glacier at night. She is fairly certain it is a bear, and a hungry one, and she does not wish to present herself as an easy target by spending any more time in the fissure than she has to. Hayder is not enough of an idiot to think that she can fight a fully grown ice-bear and come out of the encounter unscathed.
Hayder adjusts her goggles, grits her teeth, and drags herself higher up the wall. Her foot slips, suddenly, and she finds herself cheek to jowl with the glacier. It is not a gentle dance partner. She hangs there for a moment, too tired to do much else. Her weight is taken by a rope around her waist. The rope is looped through an iron hoop hammered into the ice wall above her head. As she makes progress, she hammers in new hoops and ties the rope off fresh to each one, anchoring herself to the wall. It’s a laborious process. Her arms ache. In fact, Hayder’s whole body aches, and she feels as if she has been pummelled flat against an anvil by a heavy hammer. She is getting too old for solo expeditions, she knows this. But Hayder is stubborn, and motivated.
Because at the end of all this, there lies a prize. The Minister has given her a commission.
Once she has fulfilled it, she will be free.
As she recovers her breath, something in the ice by her cheek catches her attention, a discoloration in the intense blue that she has not noticed until now. She squints through her goggles, trying to see what it is. It is something stuck in the ice, something huge, and brownish in colour. It is frozen in place about five hand-widths away from her face, embedded into the glacier like an air-bubble in a pane of glass. The frozen mass is too distorted to be visible clearly, but she thinks she can make out legs, insectile, clawed. Lots of legs, in fact, and a blurry, distorted sort of head, or maybe it is a carapace, or maybe just a rock. Whatever it is, or was, alive or dead, it has been stuck in the ice for a long time and therefore doesn’t concern her at this present moment. The only thing she is concerned with is getting out of this crevasse and on with her commission. She has many miles of glacier left to cross, and as intriguing as the frozen object is, it is a distraction she cannot afford.
Hayder takes a deep breath, kicks out away from the wall. On the backwards swing, she jams first one foot, and then the other, into the ice, and pushes up. She throws her right arm back, and sharply hammers her ice axe into the wall. She checks to see that the axe has held, steadies herself, and repeats the motion with her left arm, making sure to swing vertically, rather than down. The trick is not to try and dig a hole with the axe, but to drive it in, like it’s a nail being driven through wood. Like most things, it’s about rhythm. Once a person masters the rhythm, the rest is simple enough. It’s also about keeping as close to the wall as possible, to distribute body weight evenly. Easier said than done, Hayder thinks, dragging herself higher. She wonders what the Minister would think of her if he could see her now, red-faced and raw, clinging to a slope like a tick on a goat, short hair drenched in sweat beneath her hat, face already bruised from slamming into the ice. He would most likely find it highly amusing, because he seems to find most things about Hayder amusing, indulging her as one would indulge a favorite pet.
Hayder can put up with his indulgence if it keeps her alive.
***
The Minister summoned Hayder in the early grey hours of one morning three weeks ago, to his private quarters, which Hayder was not too comfortable with. She went anyway, because the Minister was difficult to say ‘no’ to. She hoped he would not try to seduce her again. The last time he had, both of them had come out of the encounter feeling sickened. She had allowed him to paw her a little, but made it clear that she was not in any way enjoying the encounter. He had continued to paw at her despite this, his small, sweaty hands seeking a confirmation that didn’t exist, before eventually giving up, acknowledging that her mind was somewhere else entirely. Afterwards, Hayder had told him, gently, not to be offended.
