Isles

By Soyos Books, William J.A. Darlington, Gabriel 'ArchAngel' Ehijie and 4 more

Six Authors. Six Islands. One story.

 

A cursed town where the rain never stops is on the brink of a slow death. Visitors at a luxury hotel fall victim to a sinister political plot. Running from a nightmare, a retired firefighter must escape himself. To save her own life, a woman considers an invasive procedure. An accountant discovers a world beyond the end of life. A family returns to find that everything is just as it should be – but nothing is the same.

 

ISLES is more than an anthology collection. A selection of stories weave together to create a narrative collage connected by theme and image. Drawing from different corners of the globe, these writers all present a unique angle when tackling the same subject matter. Together, combining different interpretations that resound in a complete narrative that forms one deep and collective inner journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Soyos Books
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201326678

Book preview

CONTENTS

Heart of a Dog  Zeb Rodgerson........5

The Bourdillon Hotel  Gabriel ArchAngel Ehijie........23

Unheard & Unmoving  Rachael Morrow........55

Across the Water  Jay Wayward........75

The Olive Tree  Thomas Huntington........99

The Child of a Myriad Faces  William J.A. Darlington........131

Heart of a Dog

Zeb Rodgerson

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Waking up to something tickling his ankle, and rain hitting his face again, Indrid looked down and found a stray dog licking puss off his leg.

His boils were lancing themselves after another day in old boots and mud. ‘You better not be fucking sick,’ he thought, ‘if I die from some dog licking me, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’

He looked up to see why he was getting rained on; he'd assembled this roof only a few weeks ago. Sure enough, a hole had broken through, perfectly above him, like God had put it there just to wake him up.

Indrid kicked at the dog and stood up, stretching and wiping his face with wet sleeves. Looking out from his makeshift porch, he saw more of what he’d seen in the weeks, months before.

Rain falling sideways. Fields of grey and green stretching out for ages, until just beyond his eyeline, it hit the moat that they’d all been given. Looking down at the dog, still lingering by his ankles, shivering wet and scabby, Indrid thought about eating it.

It was an awful idea. He’d seen what happened to some of the other locals who had tried doing it before. It was fine for some, but it wasn’t for others. As much as their little town had become accustomed to cruel and strange maladies and deaths, there seemed something particularly undignified about dying from eating a sick dog.

Indrid blew his nose into the air and opened the door to his shack, kicking again at the dog to keep him from running inside. Walking inside, he instinctively walked over to his fireplace and put his hands out to warm them before remembering that the fire wasn’t lit, hadn’t been for months, couldn’t be. He retched a cough and sat down on his bed, examining his legs. ‘These things are disgusting,’ he thought, running his fingers over the boils congregating from his foot up his calf. He winced as he accidentally scratched a popped one, then shivered, thinking about the dog licking it. The battering sound of rain and wind against tin was cut by three loud knocks on his door. ‘Indrid!’

‘Come in,’ Indrid said, once quietly, then again loud enough for his guest to hear him. The door swung open and the dog ran inside, followed by Cole, a mountain of a man, barefoot, dripping wet. ‘Get that fucking thing out of here!’ Indrid said, pointing at the dog, Cole looked at it, grabbed the scruff of its neck, and tossed it outside to a hoarse whimper, closing the door behind it. Cole sat down beside Indrid and looked at his feet.

‘Blisters... Boils, I don’t know, buboes maybe?’ Indrid thought aloud. Cole lifted his foot up onto the bed and wiped the mud off, revealing underneath a hole the size of a bottle cap, black in the centre, purple and red stretching outwards sitting on top of his foot.

‘Jesus Cole, what about some shoes?’

‘Yeah? Where should I go for that? And do you know how painful this thing is? Dirty leather rubbing against it all day? I’m done with it.’ Both sat in silence for a bit, listening to the rain, Indrid noticing more and more leaks in his roof.

‘It’s not going anywhere Indrid, the water’s sure to just keep on rising, every inch it moves up, more of us die, until it covers us all up, and by then we’ll all be gone anyway.’

‘I know Cole, fuck,’ Indrid sighed.

They’ll all say it was evil, but they all cheered when those men threw that boy in the dam. Every one of them cheered and every one of them saw the others cheering too.

At the same time—the boy was no good, after what he did to his mother, then what he drove his father to. Leaving that poor girl too, his own sister, all alone in the world.

Indrid and Cole walked from Indrid’s house towards the centre of town, tiny canals like capillaries breaking apart every road they travelled along. Indrid would wince at the force of his weight against his bubonic feet as he skipped over them, Cole waded straight through them, resigned to the fate of his own feet.

‘Harvest festival,’ Indrid said, looking up at the rain.

‘Tradition Indrid, it’s important to people,’

‘What’s to celebrate?’

‘The fact that this is the last one we’ll ever have,’

‘It’s a sad fact, Cole,’ Indrid said, Cole said nothing for a moment before laughing.

‘We should commemorate the day we threw that fucking kid in the water.’ Indrid shook his head, Cole’s misanthropic sentiment was upsetting, but he knew he could hardly judge it.

‘I doubt we’ll make it long enough.’ Indrid said, half to himself.

They arrived at the festival. If anyone could ever give it that name, maybe half of the remaining townsfolk were there. Mostly, they were congregated under a large piece of tin, held up by rotting timber foundations forced into the mud. It was already getting dark without the light of the moon, and the people, drunk. Someone in the centre of the congregation was yelling, delivering a speech over the sound of the rain against the roof.

‘Today we celebrate... or mourn, may be more appropriate given our circumstances, our day of harvest. We cannot know why this rain has beset our town, or what we might be able to do to stop it.’ The man projected. Someone in the audience yelled out, ‘I’ve got one clue why it might be happening!’. The speaker held up his hands in defence, trying to hush the drunken disquiet building underneath the sheet of metal.

Cole chuckled to himself hearing the commotion. Quickly, the festival had turned into a discordant chorus of hoarse shouting, feet slapping on mud, rain and wind. It was clear to everyone watching, the town was tearing itself to pieces. Something broke here one day, and almost everyone was diving, head first, towards the end. The congregation had turned into a limp drunken brawl. People starving and weak, shoving one another.

‘They’re about to knock the fucking gazebo over.’ Indrid said, pointing at the foundations, barely holding themselves upright under the weight of the skirmish. Unsurprisingly, the structure collapsed, falling down slowly on top of a dozen people.

For the next ten minutes people slowly crawled out from underneath the tin, no one tried to lift it up, no one thought it their job to help, they watched as everyone slowly exited, covered in mud, some with small gashes on their heads or faces.

Indrid woke up the next morning to rain dripping on his face again, another hole, this time perfectly situated above his bed. He looked down and saw the dog laying asleep at his feet.

Getting up and out of bed woke the dog, who jumped down and stood by his side looking up at him. ‘I hope you’re not just here for all this pus dog, it belongs to me.’ He told the dog, who wagged his tail and smiled in response, ‘We’re going for a walk.’ He slid on his boots and coats and walked outside.

Looking out at the rain and grass from his porch, he noticed he could see the moat now. Indrid and the dog made their way towards town again, hoping that the wind may have sprayed some debris that he might be able to patch his house with, for a while now the rule of finders keepers had been brought into full effect amongst the locals.

He looked at each house as he passed it and thought about the people who lived there, the people who had lived there; friends of his, people he’d grown up with, someone he loved. He knew that inside a few of those houses at least, those people were still there. The sad thing was that he almost had no idea which of them were. He couldn’t remember whose eyes he’d stopped meeting and who’d gone and died since the rain started.

Arriving at the scene of last night’s celebration, Indrid spotted that the sheet metal roof was still laying there, now slightly submerged in the mud. He approached it and thought about the logistics of carrying it home; the sound of his empty gut had melted into the sound of the rain and wind weeks ago and it had started to take a toll, a walk home carrying that could be far more trouble than it was worth. An element of fatigue had affected most people in the town’s survival instinct and drive to work too hard for safety or comfort. Indrid bent over and grabbed a hold of the tin and lifted it, testing the weight. The dog immediately ran underneath, forcing Indrid to hold the metal up.

‘Get out dog, hurry,’ he yelled to it, ‘I’ve got no problem dropping this fucking thing on you.’

The dog soon returned, carrying in its mouth a boot, in better shape than Indrid’s. Indrid grabbed it off the dog and put it on, it fit well enough to find the other. He lifted the sheet again and flipped it backward, seeing where his new boot had come from. The dog ran towards the body and started biting at its ear. Indrid shooed the dog away and bent down to grab the other boot, putting it