Wily Writers Presents Tales of Foreboding

By E.S. Magill

You know that feeling. 

Foreboding—the feeling that bad, or evil, awaits you at some point in your future, distant or near.

It's like a pressure at the back of your brain, a whisper that it can all go terribly wrong. The sense of foreboding reminds us the bad is coming—but we don't know exactly when.

Here are 14 tales where evil is searching for a way in. But these are no ordinary sufferings and miseries: cults, mythical forest creatures, elder gods, psychic powers, murder, parallel universes, monsters, death, nature gone awry, zombies, ghosts, and, yes, husbands. In these 14 tales, things just don't bode well:

 

• In Lisa Morton's "High Desert," abandoned in the desert one woman learns the hard way that some spines pierce deeper than others.
• Nature figures out how to take a sinister upper hand in Bill Bodden's "When to Let Go."
• "Coffin" by Alison J. McKenzie asks the question 'can you exist without being alive?'
• Jennifer Brozek explores the difficulty, and danger, of trying to understand one's own mind in "A Test of Vigilance and Will."
• In "Jenny" by Lee Call, curiosity and love possess their own perils, but when they cross paths...
• Yvonne Navarro's "Meet Me On the Other Side" delves into an alternate world and explores love and sacrifice in the face of an impending apocalypse and libidinous beasts.
• Which is worse—a natural disaster, a monster, or a husband—is the question at the heart of Allie Yohn's "In the Very Air You Breathe."
• Chris Marrs, in "Frostlings," gives us the definitive answer about family and love—and mythical creatures.
• In "Still Life With Shattered Glass," Loren Rhoads exposes a morbid hobby, and where it leads.
• Joan De La Haye's "Getting Rid of Charlie" examines that father-daughter bonding time is very important—and can come in an aberrant form.
• In "A Spectacle of a Man" by Weston Ochse, one man finds that better living can come from the Elder Gods, but it's not going to be pretty.
• "Purgatory" by Angel Leigh McCoy warns us how one mistake can last forever and forever and forever... 
• S.G Browne's "Lower Slaughter" reveals how thin the veneer of reality is—and that making the bus on time is crucial. 
• E.S. Magill's "Los Necrocorridos" proves that love can exist in the most horrific conditions, even in the zombie apocalypse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E.S. Magill
• Release date: Sep 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781961502048

E.S. Magill

E.S. Magill's fondest childhood memories are of watching scary movies with her mom. Today, she is the editor of the anthologies Deep Cuts and The Haunted Mansion Project Year One. Her short stories can be found in Blood Lite III and other anthologies. She has an MA in English and her thesis was on the postmodern gothic. She recently retired from over twenty years of teaching middle school English. She and her husband Greg enjoy driving their Corvettes and traveling. She's currently spending her retirement writing and watching scary movies.

Book preview

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The Wily Writers Presents Anthology Series

––––––––

Tales of Dread

edited by Lisa Morton

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Tales of Nightmares

edited by Loren Rhoads

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Tales of Evil

edited by Angel Leigh McCoy

and Alison J. McKenzie

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Tales of Foreboding

edited by E.S. Magill

and Bill Bodden

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Click here for more information.

WILY WRITERS

PRESENTS

TALES

OF

Foreboding

––––––––

Edited by E.S. Magill

and

Bill Bodden

https://wilywriters.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/wilywritersNet-banner700-1.png

2022

A close-up of a paper Description automatically generated

Edited by E.S. Magill and Bill Bodden

Cover and interior design by Rick Pickman

Foreword © 2022 by E.S. Magill

High Desert © 2022 by Lisa Morton. First published in The Forsaken: Stories of Abandoned Places, 2017.

When to Let Go © 2022 by Bill Bodden. Original to this anthology.

Jenny © 2022 by Lee Call. Original to this anthology.

Meet Me on the Other Side © 2022 by Yvonne Navarro. First published in Children of Cthlulu, 2001.

Coffin © 2022 by Alison J. McKenzie. Original to this anthology.

Purgatory © 2022 by Angel Leigh McCoy. First published in The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, 2013.

A Test of Vigilance and Will © 2022 by Jennifer Brozek. Original to this anthology.

The Frostlings © 2022 by Chris Marrs. First published in Prairie Gothic, 2020.

Lower Slaughter © 2022 by S.G. Browne. First published in Horrorfind.com, 2001.

In the Very Air You Breathe © 2022 by Allie Yohn. Original to this anthology.

A Spectacle of a Man © 2022 by Weston Ochse. First published in Children of Cthlulu, 2001.

Getting Rid of Charlie © 2022 by Joan De La Haye. First published in Sliced and Diced 2, 2021.

Still Life with Shattered Glass © 2022 by Loren Rhoads. First published in Cemetery Dance, 2006.

Los Necrocorridos © 2022 by E.S. Magill. Original to this anthology.

Afterword © 2022 by Bill Bodden

Table of Contents

Foreword

HIGH DESERT

WHEN TO LET GO

JENNY

MEET ME ON THE OTHER SIDE

COFFIN

PURGATORY

A TEST OF VIGILANCE AND WILL

THE FROSTLINGS

LOWER SLAUGHTER

IN THE VERY AIR YOU BREATHE

A SPECTACLE OF A MAN

GETTING RID OF CHARLIE

STILL LIFE WITH SHATTERED GLASS

LOS NECROCORRIDOS

Afterword

EDITORS’ NOTE

Foreword

Most of us live in a constant state of foreboding—the feeling that bad, or evil, awaits us at some point in our future, distant or near. Unless you’re one of those ever-optimistic Pollyannas with a perpetual smile on your face spinning every moment into living-your-best-life, but that doesn’t mean bad isn’t coming for you. There is no hiding from it.

The rest of us are aware of this truth. We are all a second away from catastrophe. Cancer and accidents are amongst the traditional forms of bad. But now even dropping your kids off at school leaves an ache in your gut, not knowing whether your offspring is going to survive the day. Going to a movie theater means keeping an eye on the exit door in case it opens spilling light and bullets across an unsuspecting but not an unsurprised audience. And that’s just it. The sense of foreboding reminds us we know it's coming but we don’t know exactly when. Keep your eyes open for it though.

Portents abound. We watch for the tell-tale signs life is about to unravel. Don’t believe we live in this state of unease? Look at our rituals to ward off the bad—knock on wood, avoid the number 13, don’t break mirrors, and our new one, wear a face mask. We press our shoulder to the door, the bad on the other side bumping up against it. Those who understand that the true nature of the world is chaos and madness, disease and death, betrayal and violence, also understand that bad and evil are nosing the chinks in our lives, searching for a way in. 

That sense of foreboding is a tool, reminding you to be wary and critical. See, it doesn’t matter if you’re a glass half full, a glass half empty, a glass drunk down, or one barely sipped from. No, what you really need to be concerned with is whether the water is poisoned. Optimists and realists go to the grave at the same rate. Pessimists, however, outlive us all (studies have proven this). There is something to be said for constantly looking over your shoulder. 

Within these pages you will find 14 stories that hold no commonalities—except one. The future does not bode well in any of these tales. It is up to the protagonist to attend to omens and presentiments. Disruption lies in wait. And when bad comes, because it will come, the protagonists need to possess the wherewithal to go up against the bad...or be consumed.

So, reader, foreboding isn’t all in your head. Nature imbued us with this survival feature. Use it to your advantage. You are the protagonist of your own story.

***

The first person I want to thank is Angel Leigh McCoy, who created this incredible writers community, Wily Writers. In a little over a year, we have all come so far—novels, nonfiction, short stories, anthologies, collections, and new writing and publishing knowledge. Personally, I never could’ve imagined that all of us could have accomplished this much in so little time. It speaks to the power of many minds coming together to assist one another in manifesting and achieving our personal dreams.

Next, I would like to thank my co-editor Bill Bodden for his diligence and assistance in creating this anthology. More thank yous go to Loren Rhoads and Lisa Morton for launching the Wily Writers Presents series. And the final thank yous go to the contributing writers for sending us their stories and who were all wonderful to work with. Creating an anthology is a team project and a difficult one at its best. In the end, it is a labor of love that we joyfully share with our readers.

E.S. Magill, November 2022

WILY WRITERS

PRESENTS

TALES

OF

FOREBODING

HIGH DESERT

Lisa Morton

––––––––

As Tadd negotiated the car along the rutted dirt road, Kara looked out the passenger window at the bleak Mojave Desert sandscape and thought, Why would anyone live out here?

The day trip had been Tadd’s idea. He’d been reading a book—one of those old, strange paperbacks he liked to pick up cheap in the used bookstores—about a religious cult that had supposedly lived out here until they’d disappeared sometime in the 1960s, and he wanted to check it out. It’s only about two hours east of L.A., he’d told her. It’ll be fun. An adventure. 

Except they’d been driving three hours now, the car’s thermometer said the outside temperature was 112 degrees, and they hadn’t spoken a word to each other for the last twenty miles. Since they’d traveled up and over the Cajon Pass and left the 15 freeway behind, traffic and houses both had petered out, then become non-existent once Todd left the two-lane blacktop and started along the dirt road. All Kara could see was sand, scrub, and tall, spiny Joshua trees, looking like something out of a science fiction movie.

Did you know Mormons named them after Joshua reaching toward Heaven? Tadd had told her when they’d seen the first few sprinkled across the high desert plain. 

They’re really strange, Kara had answered. Trees made her think of lush, green firs, not these brownish things with clumps like tumors at the ends of branches. 

Hey, don’t knock ‘em. They live a thousand years.

Kara had to admit that was impressive. But she still preferred a real forest, with crowded greenery and shade. The desert made her feel lonely, even in an air-conditioned car, with Tadd seated two feet away.

She’d agreed to the trip partly because she agreed to anything Tadd suggested, and partly because she thought it would be a good time to tell him what she had to say. They’d been dating for six weeks, ever since they’d met at the dorm party. Tadd had intrigued Kara the instant she’d spotted him; he wore brightly-colored shirts with outrageous graphics, talked a little louder than anyone else, and didn’t so much gesture as offer grand flourishes. Everything he did seemed somehow bigger than life. The opposite of her, in other words.

Kara’s existence had always seemed small to her. Brought up by a small single mother, who had worked so hard as a waitress that she’d succeeded in making herself even smaller. A small trailer in Oregon, small successes at school, just enough to get her into this Southern California college, which wasn’t small and so it intimidated Kara. She’d changed her major three times in two years and had finally settled on a useless degree in English. She had no idea what she’d do with it once she graduated. She supposed she could just keep going to school, pursue a master’s, but she didn’t want to saddle herself with years of debt, especially if she wound up being nothing more than a waitress, wasting slowly away like her mother.

She hadn’t kissed anyone in nearly a year, and so when Tadd descended on her like a storm and suggested they go back to her room, she’d simply nodded. Twenty minutes later Tadd climaxed, rolled off Kara, lit up a joint, and told her about a prank he’d played last week on a kid named Will Andreasson. Will was a born-again Christian who was given to occasional proselytizing. Tadd was a hardcore joker who, one morning, had placed a pair of shoes with smoking dry ice in them just outside Tadd’s door, dropped a printout from an internet site about the Rapture, knocked three times, and then fled. Tadd claimed to have witnessed Will opening the door and falling to his knees while agape in awe, but Kara thought it likelier that Will had probably frowned and then tossed the whole mess in the nearest trash can.

But she liked having Tadd in her life. She never knew what to expect with him; she liked the fact that he left her slightly on edge, never completely sure. Sometimes, when they were in a restaurant or just sitting in the car in traffic, Tadd would shout in ways that made her uncomfortable, but then later he’d joke or call her cute and her discomfort would turn to pleasure. 

Check it out, he said, drawing her attention back to the never-ending desert. He’d just driven the car through a small canyon, and on the road ahead (which seemed like more of a trail at this point), Kara could see a series of squatting, ugly shapes—cabins, probably fourteen or fifteen.

Is that them? she asked.

Tadd had told her the cult, which had called itself The Church of Transubstantiation, had numbered 60 followers, and that they’d come out to the high desert in 1966. By 1968, they’d vanished, leaving behind only a single body—a 10-year-old girl, who’d apparently been ritually stabbed to death. 

Tadd nodded, and Kara could feel his excitement. Yeah, I think so. Reverend Biltock’s house is the first one. 

Reverend Biltock... Tadd had told her he was the cult’s leader, an older man who had once been an Episcopal priest but had left that religion behind, claiming that it "didn’t offer anything really useful for this life. Biltock’s doctrine of transubstantiation" had nothing to do with the Catholic Communion but was rather based on a search for a way to transform his own body. Tadd had gotten all this first from the sensationalized 1969 paperback called Church of Doom and had filled in the gaps with material culled from the internet. He hadn’t told her why Gabriel Biltock and his followers had chosen this place to re-settle, but Kara assumed the answer was obvious: Because they were all crazy.

They approached the first house. Tadd pulled up before it and parked but left the engine running to keep the car cool. The structure was a single room cabin, with a foundation made of carefully packed boulders and wooden walls and roof. Windows had been boarded over; porches were sagging. The wood was unpainted and splintering, the rafters bowing—all the gray-brown hue of pollution.

Tadd gazed for a moment at the dilapidated structure, and Kara couldn’t imagine what he found so fascinating about it, not when it made her shiver even as she felt the heat radiating in through the car’s windows. After a few seconds, Tadd undid his seat belt and opened his door. Stay here, he told her, I want to check something.

She nodded; she needed little persuading to stay in the car.

Tadd got out, walked around to the rear of the car, and bent down out of her view. He was gone for a few seconds, then she heard him yell, Shit!

Kara waited as he came back to the front of the car. When he opened the door, the blast of heat made Kara flinch. Houston, we’ve got a problem.

What?

I thought I felt something strange when we were driving. The rear left tire is nearly flat.

Oh. Well, you’ve got a spare, right?

Uhhhhh...

Kara felt panic rise from her gut. You don’t have a spare tire?

It’s flat, too. I kept meaning to get it inflated.

God, Tadd. This was the part of his mischievous nature she most disliked—the irresponsibility that would now leave them stranded in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing but blast-furnace heat, Joshua trees, and a row of long-dead shotgun shacks. She dug her phone out of her purse, even though she knew there was no chance it would get a signal out here. So what do we do now?

Well...fuck... Tadd, still standing just outside the door, sweat already running down his narrow face, looked around, finally settling his gaze on the way they’d come. It’s three miles back to the main road. I can walk that then try to flag somebody down...

It’s a hundred and twelve degrees out here! She didn’t relish the idea of trudging along under the sun, between snakes and cacti—especially not given what she had to tell him.

It’d only take me an hour. I suppose I could wait until nightfall, but, fuck—that’s at least six hours away. I’ll bet I can be back here with help in two.

You’re going to leave me here? Somehow waiting alone, near these rotting ruins, didn’t seem like much of an alternative.

Tadd leaned into the car and touched her hand. Hey, no sense in making both of us get out there. No, you should stay here with the car. I’ll have to turn the engine off so you won’t have the A/C, but there’s the big jug of water in the back, and if the car gets too hot, you can sit in the shade of one of the cabins.

I’d rather fry, she thought, but what she said was, Well...I guess...

C’mere. He motioned to her. She released her seat belt buckle, leaned across the seat to him. He kissed her, and it was not his usual open-mouthed attempt at speeding up foreplay, but sweet and concerned. He whispered to her, I’ll be right back.

Okay. Drink some water first, though. 

He reached behind the sedan’s front seats, found the half-gallon jug they’d bought at the convenience store in L.A., took a big swallow, then found a baseball cap and placed it on his head. He turned off the ignition and pocketed the key; almost immediately Kara felt the heat invading the car’s interior. Tadd gave her an ironic little salute, turned, and started off. She watched him in the rearview mirror until he was swallowed up by the canyon they’d driven through.

The temperature in the car climbed rapidly, and Kara knew she wouldn’t be able to endure the metal box. She opened the door and reluctantly stepped out. Reverend Biltock’s cabin crouched fifty feet away, Joshua trees ringing the periphery. At least the wooden porch offered the promise of shade. That should lower the temperature to a mere hundred degrees. 

Kara started toward the cabin. Something slithered through the sand before her, and she paused, uncertain whether it’d been a lizard, a snake, or a scorpion. She wondered briefly how many of the wild things out here could kill her. She hoped none of them were interested today.

She reached the porch and tested the wood with a foot. It creaked but seemed solid enough. Looking up, she examined the roof beams. Kara at last lowered herself to sit, cautiously, but the cabin had been solidly built and didn’t threaten to crash down now.

She wiped moisture from her brow, thinking about the way Tadd had kissed her in the car, how it had felt so completely different. Sex with Tadd had always been fast and vaguely unsatisfying; he wasn’t interested in sharing afterwards, unless it involved him talking. Gestures of affection didn’t really appeal to him. At least he used condoms.

Which was part of what Kara had to talk to him about today. Her period hadn’t come this month, and a cheap testing kit from the drug store had confirmed her fear: She was pregnant.

She’d of course been over and over it in her head, trying to understand how it could have happened. She supposed the condom must have simply slipped once, although wouldn’t it have come completely off, had that been the case? She’d always seen Tadd remove them afterwards, and he’d always flushed them down the toilet. After the last time he’d left, she’d looked for the foil wrapper, wondering if what he was using had expired, but she realized that he’d always kept