Impossible Spaces

By Hic Dragones

Sometimes the rules can change. Sometimes things aren’t how they appear. Sometimes you can just slip through the cracks and end up... somewhere else. What else is there? Is there somewhere else, right beside you, if you could only reach out and touch it? Or is it waiting to reach out and touch you?

Don’t trust what you see. Don’t trust what you hear. Don’t trust what you remember. It isn’t what you think.

A new collection of twenty-one dark, unsettling and weird short stories that explore the spaces at the edge of possibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hic Dragones
• Release date: Aug 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9780957679009

Hic Dragones

Hic Dragones is a creative writing and literature organization, based in Manchester UK and formed in 2010. Our ethos is intelligent, but a bit weird. We run training, education and development events in the UK, with a focus on monsters, horror, dark fiction and the strange. Hic Dragones also publishes dark fiction and markets a range of Murder Mystery Games.

Book preview

IMPOSSIBLE SPACES

Edited by Hannah Kate

twenty-one short stories exploring the space at the edge of possibility, by:

Ramsey Campbell

Simon Bestwick

Hannah Kate

Jeanette Greaves

Richard Freeman

Almira Holmes

Arpa Mukhopadhyay

Chris Galvin Nguyen

Christos Callow Jr.

Daisy Black

Douglas Thompson

Jessica George

Keris McDonald

Laura Brown

Maree Kimberley

Margrét Helgadóttir

Nancy Schumann

Rachel Yelding

Steven K. Beattie

Tej Turner

Tracy Fahey

First published 2013 by Hic Dragones

PO Box 377, Manchester M8 2DE

http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/

Copyright 2013 Hic Dragones

Smashwords Edition

Cover by Rob Shedwick

‘The Carrier’ copyright © Daisy Black 2013

‘Trading Flesh’ copyright © Simon Bestwick 2013

‘Etherotopia’ copyright © Christos Callow Jr. 2013

‘Mistfall’ copyright © Jeanette Greaves 2013

‘The Return of the Curse’ copyright © Arpa Mukhopadhyay 2013

‘I’d Lock it with a Zipper’ copyright © Rachel Yelding 2013

‘Nepenthes’ copyright © Keris McDonald 2013

‘Mindswitch’ copyright © Chris Galvin Nguyen 2013

‘Skin’ copyright © Laura Brown 2013

‘Sharpened Senses’ copyright © Richard Freeman 2013

‘The Place of Revelation’ copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2003

‘Great Rates, Central Location’ copyright © Hannah Kate 2013

‘The Meat House’ copyright © Maree Kimberley 2013

‘The Voice Within’ copyright © Steven K. Beattie 2013

‘Shadow’ copyright © Margrét Helgadóttir 2013

‘Unfamiliar’ copyright © Almira Holmes 2013

‘The Hostel’ copyright © Nancy Schumann 2013

‘New Town’ copyright © Jessica George 2013

‘Multiplicity’ copyright © Douglas Thompson 2013

‘Bruises’ copyright © Tej Turner 2013

‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’ copyright © Tracy Fahey 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Carrier by Daisy Black

Trading Flesh by Simon Bestwick

Etherotopia by Chris Callow Jr.

Mistfall by Jeanette Greaves

The Return of the Curse by Arpa Mukhopadhyay

I'd Lock it with a Zipper by Rachel Yelding

Nepenthes by Keris McDonald

Mindswitch by Chris Galvin Nguyen

Skin by Laura Brown

Sharpened Senses by Richard Freeman

The Place of Revelation by Ramsey Campbell

Great Rates, Central Location by Hannah Kate

The Meat House by Maree Kimberley

The Voice Within by Steven K. Beattie

Shadow by Margret Helgadottir

Unfamiliar by Almira Holmes

The Hostel by Nancy Schumann

New Town by Jessica George

Multiplicity by Douglas Thompson

Bruises by Tej Turner

Looking for Wildgoose Lodge by Tracy Fahey

Author Notes

Acknowledgements

Also from Hic Dragones

Introduction

Hannah Kate

As a child—like most children, I suppose—I was fascinated by other worlds. The ones through the wardrobe, in the night kitchen, on other planets, in other times. The further away from reality the better, of course. I liked stories where the rules were different, lands populated by strange creatures, magic, quests and monsters. In some ways, it seems strange to begin an introduction to a collection entitled Impossible Spaces with a reflection on the fantasy stories of my early childhood, as none of these worlds seemed ‘impossible’ to me. They were all completely within the realms of possibility—if only you could find out how to get there.

Then, when I was seven, I read Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. I liked Wonderland—I still do—but it was Looking-Glass World that really caught my attention. This wasn’t just a magical world with quirky beings and nonsensical adventures: it was both a reflection and a refraction, a skewed and back-to-front version of the world. Alice’s adventures in Looking-Glass World followed a track across a chessboard (a game I had just learnt to play), and the claustrophobic, rigid movements this entailed were instantly more intriguing than talking animals and friendly aliens. Looking-Glass World was my first impossible space, and I filled my notebooks with my own stories about mirrors and chessboards.

A couple of years later I read Helen Cresswell’s The Secret World of Polly Flint. Incidentally, in the same year I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. Tolkien’s world was rich, well-developed and magical, but Cresswell’s story offered something quite different. It’s the story of a girl who goes to stay with her grandmother and discovers a way to interact with the inhabitants of a village that disappeared years before. The people Polly talks to—the ‘time gypsies’—don’t just live in another world; they exist outside of time. It’s a hard idea to get your nine-year-old mind around—much, much harder than orcs, dwarfs and magical rings—but I thought it was brilliant. And I filled my notebooks with my own stories about people dropping in and out of time.

This anecdotal rambling is not just nostalgia. For me, there is a really important distinction in speculative fiction between the realms we wish were real and the spaces we struggle to comprehend. There is a lot of pleasure to be had in both, and they’re not always mutually exclusive.

As an adult—like a lot of adults, I suppose—my reading tastes are pretty eclectic. But I still retain that fascination with other worlds, particularly with those spaces that are so hard to understand. I still love Looking-Glass World, but I also love the conceptual contortions of China Miéville’s fiction and the mind-bendiness of Philip K. Dick and Stanisław Lem. My early love of the chessboard-claustrophobia on the other side of the mirror developed into an interest in Orwellian dystopias and bleak, empty futurescapes. I found ancestors and descendants of Cresswell’s time gypsies in, amongst others, the Fisher King of medieval Grail-romances and Stephen King’s The Langoliers.

The idea for the Impossible Spaces anthology grew out of my long love of those fictional places that are hard to get your head around. But, of course, when we first started inviting submissions, I had no idea what sort of spaces our writers would explore. We kept the brief for the anthology general—no genre restrictions, no rules about world-building—all we asked was that writers set their stories in places that could not—or should not—be.

The stories collected in the book are a mix of genres, styles, inspirations and tastes. From a post-apocalyptic cityscape to the cold reaches of space, from a council tower block to a house made of living flesh, from a steampunk workshop to a psychiatric hospital, the stories take place in a number of settings—transforming the familiar (or otherwise) into something other, something uncanny, something else. For some of our writers, it is the boundary between worlds that is the focus, and—as Alice discovers with the looking-glass—this boundary is not always particularly solid. Characters slip between, fall out, cross over. Time and space change their meaning, monsters seep out, and death is not always the end.

For some of the writers, however, impossibility is a state of mind. Human perception—senses, memories, understanding—is fickle and fallible. Their stories explore the shifting sands of reality, and reveal how easily this can change (or maybe it never really was what it was thought to be). For some, this is a dangerous and frightening truth, and characters desperately cling to a sense of how things should be. But for others, it is a testament to the power of continuous rewriting. In narrative (or lie) resides the potential for creating a new reality—and some of our writers explore this in their works. After all, maybe reality is nothing more than the stories we tell about it.

So maybe none of the spaces created within these pages are really ‘impossible’. While every logical and rational bone in our bodies cries out that they could not and should not be… they are, as you read this book, real. Our writers have conjured them into existence, and (I hope) our readers will take up temporary residence. The stories in this collection invite speculation; they encourage the reader to imagine what it would be like if the possibilities were different. If the possibilities were endless…

The Carrier

Daisy Black

A steep, narrow staircase. It began in the lowest kitchen, with its cloying smells and the burnt iron grating which let in the briefest gasp of air. Each step was slightly indented. Looking closely, you could see evidence of past treaders, the smooth indentations of naked feet, deeper scratches left by hobnails and the faintest smear of red leather dye caught in the grains of the stairwell. Climbing, each step carried you around, away from the punishing steam and heat, and up until the air became damper and colder; thirty-two windows set at regular intervals to disperse the heat until it was quickly forgotten. The stairs clung to the core of the tower, a perfect curve interrupted by doors and dim little alcoves.

Three hundred and five steps in this upright world. One hundred and nine window slits, thirty-eight light brackets and three doors, two of them unlocked. The steps on the lower floors were slightly shallower than those further up, and the materials changed as you got higher and brick replaced stone; settings and girders became precise and modern, the work of many different men. No apparent entrance or exit. My space was at the first unlocked door, which opened to a small alcove with a bed, a chair and a washstand holding a small amount of water (water which was usually cold by the time I’d dragged it up the one hundred and forty-five steps).

My life was vertical. I was a Carrier: my chief task to ascend and descend the endless steps with water, wine and those mysterious boxes carrying rare objects or instruments that I didn’t dare ask about. These things would be returned to me in a different form, to be carried, jolt by jolt, to the world below. Sometimes they would return again a few months later for a new transfiguration to take place. In my half-life between cellar and spire, I was the one thing that never changed.

I came to the tower when I was young: ten years, nine months. I’d been rather feral on the horizontal plane. I would run everywhere. Through the town and out into the wide spaces beyond. I’d dart along the cluttered canals, out to fields and scrubby grasslands, rushing chaotically to where the distant wood cloaked the hills in an impenetrable green. Nobody could stop me, or even tried to.

Until the day I returned to find two dark horsemen outside our house. Mother was also standing in the grubby road. She didn’t meet my eye. As I sauntered over, the horses shifted restlessly.

A strange-looking child. What an unusual flush there is in her cheeks.

Her looks are immaterial, said his companion. Is she fit?

Well, yes, my mother answered. Too much energy, if the truth be told. They considered me a little longer. I didn’t look at their faces. Instead, I stared hard at their horses’ feet as they stamped impatiently on the ground. I didn’t care much for being called strange-looking, and felt a strong dislike for the men. Besides, I was far more interested in the glossy coats of the horses and the six polished brass points of their harnesses. Their rich, musty smell intrigued me. They were so different from the broken nags on the canals.

I don’t exactly know when the deal was struck, or even if my mother had a choice in the matter. She tied a green ribbon around my neck, her one piece of finery. She told me to be good, and left me. Then I was lifted onto the horse, and a rough woven rag was pressed to my face. An old perfume filled my mind, blotting out the coke-smeared town. Its chimneys blurred into iron railings and I remembered nothing else until I woke in the purer, colder air of the room halfway up the tower. In the days that followed I began my drudgery, bringing objects to and from the strange master who sat in his tower and thought. In those early days, I didn’t know why he wanted them or what they did. I didn’t even know what he looked like. From then on, I was only the Carrier.

I still tried to run, of course. All that first year I scrambled up the stairs two at a time, jumping down them in threes. But one day I was given a sphere made of glass. It was a beautiful thing, imprisoning a green moth with crescent wings that flapped pointlessly against the glass and clouded it with soft powder. I was captivated, and eager to present such a rare and wonderful object. I began the breathless climb of two stairs at once: two, then two, then three, then two. Then slipped. For a breath’s moment the glass was airborne, suspending the moth inside. Then it fell and shattered on the newel of the staircase. Free. The moth spun into the air. Caught in a beam of light, it darted upwards for a few delicious seconds, before softly crumbling into dust.

He was furious. When I reached the top of the tower, he could tell immediately from my miserable, breathless state what I’d done. He slapped me sharply across the face.

Never be careless again.

He then tore the ribbon from my neck and flung it out of the window. I watched it flutter down, past the girders and split masonry, until the sinuous reminder of my greener past vanished from sight. Tear-choked and shamed, I left the room and walked slowly and heavily down, down the everlasting staircase. By the time I reached the bottom steps, all memories of the stinking canals, grimy terraces and distant woods had unravelled. From that day, the counting started. I took care to tread firmly with precise, measured steps. Each appointed task, no matter how heavy, arrived in exactly the same amount of time. Hot water was always cold by the time it arrived. He’d put a stop to my running.

As time passed, I started to pay more attention to the things I was carrying. There were strange mechanical devices marked with random figures, tiny models of ships and bottles of dark liquid. But the next object to really capture my attention was flat and made of brass, and looked a little like a puzzle. It had two overlapping circles inside it, engraved with words I couldn’t decipher and a straight bar with marked intervals. It drew the attention of my stair-numbed mind. As I counted my way up the tower, I allocated myself an extra ten steps so I could examine it more closely.

My timing had been so exact during the many years of carrying that, of course, he noticed the delay. And as I mounted the final three steps, puzzling over the thing, I didn’t notice that he was standing in the door to the tower room.

It interests you.

I jumped, terrified I’d been caught committing a sin. But he seemed indifferent to my lateness. He took the object from me and carried it to the window. I lurked nervously by the door.

Come, he commanded. I took a tentative step forwards.

As I did, the autumn moon shone through the glass onto his face. For the first time in years, I saw him properly. With a shock, I realised that he wasn’t much older than me. An angular, hard figure in a dark blue robe, his willowy back knotted out of shape from leaning over books in poor candlelight. Features sketched as if an artist had attempted to draw an eagle but remembered at the last minute that he was supposed to be depicting a man. Young features, almost handsome. And yet… I’d been serving this man for many years. The last time I’d seen him this close had been the day he’d hit me. But he hadn’t changed or aged.

Are you deaf?

I shuffled nearer, feeling ungainly on the unnerving flatness of the floor. Each movement felt as though I’d missed a step and was falling, my sinews not used to any movement other than ascending or descending. Eventually I reached his side. He was holding the instrument at right angles to the window. Concentrating past the twenty-two diamonds of leaded glass to the night-speckled sky beyond, he turned one of the dials towards a distant star.

This is an astrolabe. His voice was quiet, preoccupied. It has many functions. It is a simple inclinometer, and may be used to locate and predict the positions of stars, latitude, time, height, triangulation… it can even calculate the future.

I was silent, not sure if he expected a reply. Impatiently, he pressed the dense instrument into my hands and pulled my arms up so they were in line with the window.

See? My awkward fingers fluttered at the dials, completely lost. Though I could read and count in the common tongue, the gold-etched numerals were foreign to me. Even without that, this was the first time I’d seen more than a sliver of night sky: there were no stars on my staircase. Now, the silent world lay below me, impossibly wide. Squinting hard at the dusty moon and trying to angle the bar with clumsy, inexperienced hands, I suddenly became aware of how closely he was watching me.

You have outgrown your clothes. I flushed. Of course I’d outgrown them, and outworn them. Fortunately the incessant climbing had stunted my growth, but by now my smock was shapeless and short, worn to semi-translucency at the elbows and knees. I’d given up on boots, having broken them through years ago.

A wry smile played along the corners of his mouth.

If you can accurately calculate the height of the moon and the angle it is making with the earth, I will give you something new to wear.

I felt myself grow cold. I can’t do that, sir. His gaze didn’t falter, but pinned me there like one of his specimens.

But you do not try.

I didn’t want to tell him that I’d no idea how the dials worked, that all I could do was count, count, count, so I stupidly grasped the instrument and pointed it at the moon and at the ground. Since I could make nothing of the markings, I made a wild guess.

Two thousand leagues high. And the angle is thirty-three. His expression didn’t change as he took the astrolabe from my hands.

Pity.

Every night after, he would rail me with questions about the astrolabe, challenging me to answer, taunting me with the promise of warmer clothes as winter set in and I began to shiver even during the heat of the climb. And the strangest thing was that the more he asked, the more obsessed I became with knowing, and the angrier I felt when I couldn’t answer. So eventually I grew dishonest in my carrying. When I was given things to take down or up, I would take them first to my cell, poring over them for snatched minutes, trying to see how they worked, trying to find meaning in the great books and spindly tools, hoping that one day the answer would scream out to me. And after many months, it did.

It was very late when I carried the day’s last object up to him: a glass of the red wine that seemed his only sustenance. The tower was empty, at least it felt so, and I’d long ceased to wonder how he managed to leave it without passing me on the stairs. On the windowsill stood the heavy brass astrolabe, reminding me of his quiet, persistent mockery. The moon hung perpendicular to the tower, oppressively yellow, its clouded face sullen. But tonight felt different. As I crossed the floor, strongly tempted to throw the wretched dial out of the window, there was a tremor in the air, something tenuous and magical, like the breath held in the moment before creation. More out of habit than hope, I picked up the instrument and focused the rule to align with the crest of the moon, just as I’d often seen him do. The angle at that time of year looked as though it read at eighty-four degrees to the earth, but what of the height?

Height!—of course. I hadn’t managed to get the right measurement yet because I’d been taking my calculations from the top of the tower, not from the ground. Gripped by a sudden fervour, my fragments of knowledge began to fall into order and I started to calculate the height of the tower based on the number of steps I climbed every day…

I went to bed triumphant, knowing that on the windowsill of the silent tower room was a scrap of paper with my writing on it. The paper said: Three hours before midnight on the fourth day past midwinter of this current year, the moon travelled at 88 degrees to the earth and a height of 8333 leagues.

The next morning I woke up to find new clothes draped over my tiny chair: a woollen dress in the same dark blue hue he was accustomed to wearing. I put it on. It fell in graceful lines to the floor and made me feel safe. However, as I found when I made my first trip down to the kitchens, the dress didn’t do for the stairs. Catching the hem on the return journey, I tripped, grazing my hands and bringing into my mouth every curse I knew. So I took a pair of scissors and a bone needle and set to work hacking at it, eventually fashioning the skirt into a pair of shorter breeches which would let me climb without fear of breaking my head.

When he saw me in my altered and probably ruined dress, he drew a sharp breath. I flinched, scared he might fly at me as he’d done before. But he didn’t. His eyes darted to my red hands and seemed to comprehend.

An interesting alteration to a perfectly adequate garment, but I imagine you thought it necessary.

I did. Sir. I shifted my weight.

So, you eventually managed to solve my little riddle.

I have done my best.

And how did you calculate the height of this tower without using an additional tool of measurement?

I frowned. I climb this tower many times every day, sir. I pay attention.

For some reason, this seemed to amuse him. Show me, he commanded. And so I took one of the pieces of charcoal that littered his table and a scrap of paper, and, hunching over, started to explain all about the differences between step heights in the lower passages, the average height of the newer steps, bricks and stones, and the number of corkscrews in the staircase. When I had finished, I found him standing behind me—much closer than I’d realised. As I straightened my spine, I felt his fingertips lightly run along the back of my exposed neck and rest for a moment in my hair.

Interesting. I must give you more difficult questions to solve. He leaned in, until I could almost taste the sharp bitterness of the wine on his breath. My colour suits you, you know. Instinct told me to move, and move fast, but my feet did nothing. His lips ghosted against the hollow of my neck while my fist silently crushed the piece of charcoal under the table. Then suddenly I was alone with ash-blackened fingers and messy thoughts.

That was the first night he came to me. I wouldn’t look at him, instead focusing my attention on the narrow taper burning by the door. The darkness of the flame near the wick flickered in the spiral gusts that wound their way up the staircase and into my little alcove. I concentrated my entire being on that candle, until the third night, when he followed my gaze and irritably snuffed it out. Then I used that time more productively, conducting my own mental calculations, searching for the square roots of the number of stairs I’d climbed up or down in a day, or working out the ratio of stones and bricks in the tower.

After a while, when he was in a good humour, he would explain things to me. The objects I carried came to take on more meaning. This instrument calculated the movement of the planets, this one the longitude and latitude of a lost ship. Another measured the pigment of the chlorophyll in a leaf, or the curvature of a rainbow. And some objects measured nothing at all, but influenced the winds, or altered the way in which a mouse built its nest, or tampered with the transparency of dreams or, he said, recorded the pleasure of a woman in bed.

And I hoarded everything he told me. As I learnt, there came rewards. I was given a pair of red leather shoes with sturdy soles, supporting my worn tendons as I climbed the stairs. Then a soft blanket. Books on geometry and architecture. A wooden box of slide rules, a silk scarf, my own set of bronze instruments, until eventually I was working on the same problems as he was, and far beyond.

However, there were other gifts, gifts he didn’t seem aware he was giving. His handsome youth began to fade, while mine grew stronger, my clumsy features settling into an eerie harmony, growing straighter, darker and more bird-like. As my learning surpassed his, I began to spend more and more time in the horizontal room, obsessing over the minute clockwork of an outside world I would never see, reaching beyond the density of steps, glass and mortar to reckon with the furthest reaches of the solar system. He introduced me to the deep red wine that I had thought so bitter, and when I was engrossed for days on a particularly difficult problem, it became my only sustenance.

He forgot as I learnt, and began to fabricate stories about the place he said he’d come from, a place of smoky chimneys, grassy wastelands and canals divided by rotting lock-gates that felt foreign and dull to my ears. He remembered his mother, a hazy, mercenary woman. I silenced his chatter with a cold glare, wondering why he would think I would be interested in something so completely irrelevant to me or to my work.

He didn’t notice that it was increasingly he who was climbing stairs, he who was carrying the heavy and fragile, beautiful and cruel objects I needed for my investigations. He didn’t even notice when I finally took his place, and he became the one whose life narrowed and stretched between two points.

And that’s how it is now. He is my Carrier. His midnight blue robes have become threadbare, almost translucent, and these days it is I who punish him for carelessness, I who frequent his bed and let him stare at candles—on the rare occasions I pity him. My legs lengthen and become straight, while his warp with the continuous strain and brace of climbing. He treads like an old woman. One day, I will begin to set him the menial questions, and watch as he labours and fails at these tasks with a half mocking smile. But for now, the Carrier toils, and I sit in my tower and think.

Trading Flesh

Simon Bestwick

The dawn seeped like blood through the room’s thin curtains. Jess woke and stared at the cracked ceiling. It’d be easy to stay in bed all day, to keep promising herself she’d rise shortly, till it was dark again…

She rose.

She sat, giddy for an instant, then swung her legs out and stood staring at the patterns on the curtains: you could stare at them all day, get lost in them if you…

She pulled the curtains wide.

Outside, the wide and murky Schleine glowed red,