A Gentle Hell

By Autumn Christian

A Gentle Hell is comprised of four dark speculative stories of quiet tension and uncomfortable nostalgia, written for deformed children and girls that dream of demons.

In “They Promised Dreamless Death” a salesmen sells sleep with the promise of a better life, but what dreams lurk beneath the substrate of consciousness for those who take it are stranger than they ever imagined.

In “Your Demiurge is Dead,” while the world adjusts to the death of God and the new reign of the Triple Goddess, Charles hunts for an Oklahoma murderer and is forced to confront his religious ideals when he encounters a new prophet.

“The Dog That Bit Her,” is the story of a neurotic young woman who gains freedom from her co-dependent marriage with the bite of a rabid dog.

And in the semi-autobiographical “The Singing Grass,” the artist and the writer converge at a meadow haunted by a carnivorous deer and the burnt monsters that show them the consequences of an artistic life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Autumn Christian
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310454899

Autumn Christian

My name is Autumn Christian. I am a horror writer currently living in Austin, Texas.I’ve been a freelance writer, an iPhone game designer, a cheese producer, a haunted house actor, and a video game tester. I consider Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Katie Jane Garside, the southern gothic, and dubstep as main sources of inspiration. I’ve been published in numerous literary magazines that are probably too obscure to worth mentioning. I also find writing biographies the proper way in third person intensely uncomfortable.

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A Gentle Hell

By Autumn Christian

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First Published January 2012 by Dark Continents Publishing

www.darkcontinents.com

Copyright ©2012 Autumn Christian

Front cover design by David Naughton-Shires

Layout and full cover design by Jake Gidall [e-mail]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book contains a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s creation or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

All rights reserved

They Promised Dreamless Death

Your Demiurge is Dead

The Dog That Bit Her

The Singing Grass

About The Author

They Promised Dreamless Death

Dear customer, the man on the television said, no more twisting your spine and bracing hips in the night. Your restless weeks are wastelands of dissociative depression and existentialist boredom. You nurse the brink of destruction searching for rest. Let us into your mind; let us give you the dreamless and dark headspace you always wanted.

One by one my friends and family have disappeared under the gentle, slip-wire cocoons of the machines. Mother’s ghost smiled like a crooked dog. She hadn’t been able to sleep, she told me, not after my father died, because that damn vampire stood at her bedside howling in her ear for the last twenty years. It didn’t hurt, she told me when I asked, you don’t feel anything at all.

I didn’t know if it was really her speaking to me, from some netherworld of subconsciousness, or the machine the doctors placed in her head. Whatever it was, she assured me, that damn vampire was finally gone.

My brother tried to commit suicide in his freshman year of college. Bipolar disorder, they said, little high little low. Years of therapy and medication could not diminish his slit wrists or gnashing teeth. How many undergraduate students, bent under the pressure of midterms and lovers that never call back, have gone into the dark woods and never returned? The machines promised relief. When he woke up in the next ten years, he would have graduated with a bachelor’s degree, married a studious and slack-jawed maiden, and had two kids, a great job, and absolutely no reason to be unhappy. Life would be better if we weren’t present during our difficult transitory periods, if we shut off the part of us that thought and felt and tasted, and slid our heads down on dark waters while the machines lived for us.

I found him standing over my bed one night.

It didn’t hurt, my brother said, you don’t feel anything at all. This body doesn’t sleep anymore. My head is blissfully unaware of the grief that’s been transferred to my fingernails and my lips. Why don’t you join me? You were always mother’s favorite. What pressure, he said, what stress. Come and join me underwater in the long sleep. Five years, he said, fifteen, twenty, your life will be straightened out. You don’t feel anything at all.

The next morning my mother made waffles and poached eggs, and my brother wrote in the margins of Notes From The Underground and drank cold coffee. The pink scars on his wrists from his suicide attempt were still visible, white in the middle, like soft, uncooked meat.

There’s no real difference in their personalities or their mannerisms. If I hadn’t seen the machines inserted into them myself I would have thought nothing had changed. I just knew that when mother pushed her hair out of her face and clipped it in the back, or licked waffle batter off her finger, or when my brother roamed the house during thunderstorms and typed his college essays by the glow of the computer in the den, they were really creatures living dead, oblivious, sleeping heavy.

I remembered when I was seventeen, before the machines came, and to my parents the only thing worse than death was being too alive. I couldn’t tell them I drove my Camaro on the Texas back roads late at night with my girlfriend, drove to the place where Texas bottoms out, where the road is a glittering sink or swim, a fogged-out dark shell melting everywhere the headlights didn’t touch. Drove eighty miles an hour, ninety, a hundred, and my girlfriend, her name was Jeanine, all pretty girls were named Jeanine, she sat in the passenger seat looking at me softly biting her lip. I gripped the steering wheel and stared into the expanse of gloomy gray ahead, miles and miles of the ordinary world turned by the night into a Hades realm of shadow and ice.

I went up to a hundred and ten miles and death sat on the hood of the car, her hair blowing in the wind, her breasts pressed to the engine heat.

Jeanine, I whispered.

Jeanine, the name for all pretty girls, the name for girls with parents who still think all their children are virgins. Jeanine, girl of my dreams, girl with my dick in her mouth. I couldn’t stop the Camaro, couldn't slow, couldn't hesitate. I had to plaster every deer that stepped in the headlights and keep melting the asphalt with Jeanine’s teeth and my foot on the pedal and her warm-honey shy eyes in my stomach because I knew I’d never feel that way again.

I don’t know how many people have succumbed to the machines, punched a hole in the living room or slit their skin to the bone and said, this is enough for me, slip it under. It’s illegal to release machine records; they’re under the strictest confidence and security, just like adoption records. It’s illegal to discriminate against those who have the machine, not that employers or