A Deathly Dark Hour

By F K Marlowe

The moths are unique: they have the ability to pierce human flesh and drink blood. Researcher Matthias lets them get too far under his skin, obsessed with documenting their life cycle even as colleagues die. A nightmarish, skin-crawling tale of scientific curiosity gone wrong.

The moors hide a grisly secret in their eerie, rolling mists. Carol arrives at Moor Hall Hotel on an impulse to face shrieks in the night and scrawled messages warning her to leave. What is the hotel’s brooding, arrogant owner hiding? And what will it cost her to find out?

Love, betrayal, revenge. Mall thought love would last forever. She was wrong. But some things do endure beyond the grave, and Hallowe’en is a time for reckonings.

Three terrifying tales to bring a shiver for a deathly dark hour or two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: F K Marlowe
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005578831

F K Marlowe

You might ask why F.K Marlowe needs to hide behind a pen name and apart from the standard answer of names being changed to protect the guilty, I’d have to say it has something to do with her inability to stick to one personality longer than it takes to eat lunch. Easily distracted by shiny objects, it’s a miracle Marlowe ever finishes anything, but when she does, it has its commas mostly in the right places.Marlowe is on a horror jaunt right now, but also writes Young Adult fiction about misfits and vampires and wolves (oh my!) Being utterly mercurial she makes no promises about future genres.Marlowe currently lives in Vancouver with her husband, three daughters and a rescue pup who is systematically destroying the lawn. Marlowe wholly approves of this behaviour.

Book preview

A DEATHLY DARK HOUR

F.K. MARLOWE

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2022 F.K. Marlowe

www.fkmarlowe.com

F.K. Marlowe asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved under Canadian and International Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design & desktop publishing, F.K. Marlowe

Cover composition: © F.K. Marlowe

Cover elements: Canva.com

www.aswewrite.com

eBook edition, Copyright © 2022 F.K. Marlowe

Version: 2022-10-18

Content Warning

A Deathly Dark Hour contains graphic descriptions of body horror and of physical violence that some readers may find distressing.

PRAISE FOR F. K. MARLOWE’S WORK

Got a truly creepy wake-up this morning with the truly creepy Calyptra Mortiferum by F.K. Marlowe. As my wife put it, visceral. More importantly, potential. I can’t wait to see larger, more ambitious works from her in the future!

Kate Flemming, International Romance Author

I’m a horror snob. Sorry, I said it. Most horror writing falls flat on me. When I’m asked to review horror I’m the one who is afraid. How will I balance honesty while reviewing it fairly? Calyptra Mortiferum instead was an unsettling pleasure. The frankness and inevitability made me feel like I was sitting beside a mad conductor driving his train, with me on it, off a cliff. As I went off the edge and stared into the abyss below I smiled. The writing showed confidence in the story to let it go without unnecessary dressing. The result is a tight, short horror story that we don’t see enough of.

Leto Armitage, Author

The pacing of this story is absolutely flawless. The author deftly stacks one more layer of horror upon the last, then one more, then just one more, so that the reader follows sedately along, lulled into something akin to Matthias’s faith that the scientific journey is the thing. I was completely drawn in, from first to last. I look forward to much more from this talented storyteller. Brava!

Suzanna Lundale, Author

DEDICATION

To Evalena Styf, who taught me this dark magic of publishing, and to my three little horrors and their father. Xxx

CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE FOR F. K. MARLOWE’S WORK

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CALYPTRA MORTIFERUM

THE MISTS OF MOOR HALL

A HALLOWE’EN TALE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THANK YOU

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREVIOUS AND UPCOMING RELEASES

DARK CANDY (TASTER)

WRITER’S BLOG (TASTER)

EPIGRAPH

"In a deathly dark hour, each soul stares deep into the well of its own ending".

Anon.

CALYPTRA MORTIFERUM

The discovery of a new species of vampiric moth was a shot in the arm, really, just as funding for the butterfly sanctuary had been running dry. Interest from the media led to an almost immediate flood of donations, as well as a hike in entrance revenues. Blood money, Matthias joked to his fiancé, Deborah, who didn’t find it amusing. The whole thing already made her so squeamish that she waited for him in the parking lot at nights to avoid coming in.

The moths themselves were odd, disconcerting creatures. A scientist doesn’t speak in terms of beauty or ugliness, of course; the thrill of discovery confers an allure upon any specimen, and yet, Matthias found them difficult to look at for long, even under a microscope. Like their cousins, the orthograptra, their long, tapered wings resembled dead leaves, but the new species had developed this feature to mimic a state of advanced decomposition, with semi-circular patches of black-brown apparent decay ringed by a lurid yellow border. Their bodies were covered in a grey fuzz that looked like mould. The whole disguise was so effective as to be repellent; sometimes he felt as though he could smell them.

It was their proboscises, though, that visitors came to see; those long, curved mouth parts specially adapted to pierce human skin and drink blood. Unlike their close relatives vampire moths, Professor Durmo had already been able to ascertain that both male and female moths in the new species she had dubbed Nightshade possessed and utilised this macabre, crowd-drawing ability.

At present, the public had to be content with a looped, hastily recorded video of the professor allowing one specimen to feast upon her wrist, and a detailed close-up photograph of its blood sucking anatomy. The argument about placing a piglet in a sealed enclosure with several of the moths to offer an exciting live experience raged in the boardroom. Debate was split between members wedded to the mantra that all publicity was good publicity, if it converted into much needed revenue, and those who were – well – rather more queasy about the whole idea.

Matthias suspected money would eventually win out over ethics, but for now ethics