Lost Tales: Beyond Monstrosity

By Marx Pyle, Michael La Ronn, Marisa Wolf and 6 more

MORE STORIES FROM THE CROSSING GENRES ANTHOLOGY COLLECTION

Born from the highly successful Tales of Monstrosity Kickstarter...comes the Lost Tales: Beyond Monstrosity anthology. Crafted by the same talented voices that brought you Tales of Monstrosity, this anthology goes beyond mere monsters. Its nine tales meld genres, conjuring a blend of fear, wonder, and amusement. Monsters, ghosts, aliens, and spaceships...Lost Tales promises to captivate and mesmerize.

 

STORIES BY

 

MARX PYLE - MICHAEL LA RONN – MARISA WOLF
JEFF BURNS - JEREMIAH DYLAN COOK – KATHARINE DOW
CARRIE GESSNER – J.C. MASTRO – KEVIN PYLBON

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marx Pyle
• Release date: Aug 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223490777

Book preview

Lost Tales

Beyond Monstrosity

Marx Pyle, Michael La Ronn, Carrie Gessner, Jeremiah Dylan Cook, Kevin Plybon, Jeff Burns, Marisa Wolf, Katharine Dow, J.C. Mastro

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Cabbit Crossing Publishing, LLC

Lost Tales: Beyond Monstrosity

Copyright © 2023 by Cabbit Crossing Publishing LLC

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design by rebecacovers on Fiverr

The Ghost Suburb Copyright © 2023 by Michael La Ronn.

A Whisper from the Waves Copyright © 2023 by Carrie Gessner. Originally published in The Future Fire, 2018. Reprinted by permission by the author.

After He Wakes Copyright © 2023 by Jeremiah Dylan Cook. Originally published for Lovecraft eZine, 2021. Reprinted by permission by the author.

Bridge Out Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Plybon.

First Contact Handbook Copyright © 2023 by Marx Pyle. Originally published in Like Sunshine After Rain, 2021. Reprinted by permission by the author.

The Case of the Stolen Chibibibis: An Elena and Ned Adventure Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Burns.

At The Still Point Copyright © 2023 by Marisa Wolf. Originally published in Flights of Fantasy, 2020. Reprinted by permission by the author.

The Funeral Company Copyright © 2023 by Katharine Dow. Originally published in Working Futures: 14 Speculative Stories About The Future Of Work, 2019. Reprinted by permission by the author.

Academy Bound: Training Flight Copyright © 2023 by J.C. Mastro. Originally published in Academy Bound, August 2022. Reprinted by permission by the author.

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States’ copyright law.

Contents

Introduction

By Marx Pyle

1.The Ghost Suburb

1. By Michael La Ronn

2.A Whisper from the Waves

2. By Carrie Gessner

3.After He Wakes

3. By Jeremiah Dylan Cook

4.Bridge Out

4. By Kevin Plybon

5.First Contact Handbook

5. By Marx Pyle

6.The Case of the Stolen Chibibibis: An Elena and Ned Adventure

6. By Jeff Burns

7.At The Still Point

7. By Marisa Wolf

8.The Funeral Company

8. By Katharine Dow

9.Academy Bound: Training Flight

9. By J.C. Mastro

What Next?

Introduction

By Marx Pyle

In the wake of an overwhelming outpouring of support from our backers on Kickstarter for  Tales of Monstrosity: Monsters, Myths, and Miscreants, we are ecstatic to unveil our latest creation—Lost Tales: Beyond Monstrosity. This anthology, though shorter in size, will transport you to uncharted realms. You don't need to read Tales of Monstrosity to enjoy Lost Tales, although these stories are from the same authors (and a couple of them take place in the same worlds). It is a self-contained anthology. And while not all of the stories feature monsters, each one has been crafted by the talented authors featured in our Tales of Monstrosity anthology.

The stories start spooky with The Ghost Suburb and become darker as they move onward with A Whisper from the Waves, After He Wakes, and Bridge Out. Then we shine some light of humor with First Contact Handbook and The Case of the Stolen Chibibibis. Then we wrap things up with dramatic urban fantasy in At The Still Point and science fiction explorations of the possible future with The Funeral Company and Training Flight. We hope that you will find these stories a delightful addition to your collection.

If you enjoy this book, then we are confident you'll love our anthologies from The Crossing Genres Anthology Collection series. Traverse the ethereal skies with Dragons of a Different Tail: 17 Unusual Dragon Tales and visit the haunting wonders of Tales of Monstrosity: Monsters, Myths, and Miscreants. Each anthology is packed with stories and bonus content from the same creative voices you will find within the Lost Tales.

Sincerely,

Marx Pyle, March 1st 2023

Cabbit Crossing Publishing, LLC

The Ghost Suburb

By Michael La Ronn

They call it the ghost suburb. On a foggy night, by the light of a waning gibbous, when your skin is bone-white under the moonlight and radios speak in static, it calls.

Your phone might buzz with an alert from the Pemberton Oaks Police Department, advising you to be on the lookout for a young black male wearing a green hoodie and striped pants who disappeared from home three nights ago.

You might receive a text message from your tailor yelling into the phone with a thick Chinese accent, demanding to be paid for the trousers that you dropped off.

Except there is no Pemberton Oaks Police Department anymore. The boy who disappeared jogging? His mom vanished with the police investigators, so the case was never solved.

The bellicose tailor? According to every search engine, the building has been permanently closed for ten years. The phone line honks in violent, stabby Morse code if you call it.

All that exists now is an empty suburb in the middle of Des Moines, Iowa, that no one dares enter. Driveways with weeds tall as prairie grass, bedroom lights still left on, and streets cordoned off at the city limits.

A modern-day museum of the disappeared, except no one is buying any tickets.

Sometimes, I think ghost suburbs exist in this world to remind us of the Rift.

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It happened in the middle of October. They say that the sky opened up over Chicago. A galaxy-shaped pink rift oozing ectoplasm and screaming phantoms. The city glowed like something out of a horror movie. Everything you thought was fake—ghosts, poltergeists, bad spirits—blinked on like someone flipped a supernatural light switch.

Nobody knows why it happened, but I like to think it was because a team of good guys lost a long fight against a crazy supervillain. I have no facts to support that, but it’s the best non-scientific explanation I can think of. It would also make sense because there has been a shocking absence of good paranormals since the world went to hell.

After the Rift, if you didn’t believe in ghosts, you could no longer deny that something was bumping around upstairs, or that the children with no feet standing at the foot of your bed in the middle of the night were figments of your imagination.

Let me put it this way. I once watched a video on the internet about what happens when a city gets hit with a nuclear bomb. First, everyone at ground zero gets vaporized in the blast. Next, the radioactive fallout begins as the winds carry the nuclear material across the land. Then, people die.

The Rift opening into this world was the blast. The appearance of ghosts was the fallout. Switch out starvation with mass hysteria, and you’ve got yourself a picture of a world on the verge of despair.

Things are mostly back to normal now, aside from events of supernatural malfeasance, which are as regular as thunderstorms. People have learned to live alongside ghosts like they do with deer. The paranormal is just a fact of life now.

Nobody says the words there’s no such thing as ghosts, which I think is a net positive because people like me are in high demand.

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Ten years ago, before the world went postal, most people would have called me a crackpot.

My credentials: I sense ghosts. I talk to them, but it’s not my favorite thing to do. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re exhausting.

If there’s a Good Lord up there, he made ghosts stay behind to learn a lesson. It’s a sick joke if you ask me. If you want me to teach your dog a trick, I’ll take that any day over teaching a ghost to learn forgiveness.

Some people are magnets for ghosts. I’m like the Statue of Liberty for them. Something about my soul burns like a torch in the dark.

It’s like God etched the following words in my soul: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…

Add the fact that I’m a black man, and you have a really strange crackpot.

In the black community, we don’t talk about the paranormal. We’ll talk about Jesus and the Holy Ghost all day long, but the ghost of Aunt Josephine in the third-floor bedroom, rummaging through her frocks? You just don’t hear it.

I’ve always felt like I suppressed part of myself all these years, like pork in a pressure cooker. When the Rift happened, the universe removed the lid. And good timing too, because I don’t know how much longer I could have survived.

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When you think of cities with heavy paranormal activity, you probably don’t think of Des Moines, Iowa.

I hadn’t been here in over a decade, but now I rumbled my pickup truck off I-235 and back into the city limits, ready for action.

When I moved here in 1999 with nothing but a pickup truck with all my worldly possessions from Athens, Georgia, I wondered why my son wanted to go to school here. He got a scholarship to play ball at Iowa State University, but he could have gone anywhere.

I found a job as an electrician in Des Moines (my original vocation before the Rift), close enough to help him out with laundry and weekly transactions from the Bank of Dad, but far enough for him to live the college life without having to worry about running into me at Walmart.

My first impression of this place was that it looked like any other city in America, just a little whiter. There were 12 black people here in 1999, and I inched the counter up to 13. Okay, I’m joking, but it wasn’t Georgia, that’s for sure.

I used to drive a truck long haul, and I’ve seen all fifty states. If you ask me, everywhere looks the same. The only difference is the weather and the terrain. As far as the things that mattered, Des Moines had the same franchise pizza parlors and burger joints as anywhere else, just fewer of them.

The place had changed since I left in 2005, a few years before the Rift. Like all other places in America, the wheel of time kept on turning; more and more franchise restaurants, strip malls with flashing neon lights in the windows, and labyrinthine suburbs off the main roads in the place of former cornfields. This was the kind of place, like any place, where you drove past cookie-cutter houses and wondered just what the hell people did for a living.

It was peak fall. The trees were gradients of viridian, scarlet, and vermilion, and it made me realize how much I had missed the four seasons.

I passed by the colonial-style brick apartment building I first lived in when I moved here. The one with the electric stove that always smelled like bacon no matter how much I nuked it with cleaning solution. The one with the bedroom window view of a schoolyard with laughing children who tested each other’s imaginations daily.

I sat on a picnic table in the park behind my old apartment, eating a peanut butter sandwich and reminiscing.

I finished my sandwich, wiped the crumbs off my face, and walked back to my pickup truck, my trusty steed in this world full of supernatural monstrosities.

These days, I don’t have a home. I’m a nomad, living in the trailer that I tow with me everywhere I go. I picked it up on sale shortly after the Rift. People weren’t exactly buying trailers, and I got it half-price from a dealer in Poughkeepsie. I’ve lived on the road since starting my traveling PI business that I’ve used to make a name for myself.

I stepped into my trailer the way Clark Kent steps into a telephone booth and traded my Iowa State Cyclones basketball shirt and gym shorts for a tailored, pinstriped suit and a fedora. I wore a paisley tie with saxophones on it that I bought at the Museum of Jazz in Kansas City. I carried a brown leather doctor’s bag with all of my ghost-hunting equipment. Paranormal light, electromagnetic reader, electronic voice phenomena recorder, a nine-millimeter for tricky situations, a bottle of cola, and an extra peanut butter sandwich for long stakeouts.

I glanced in the mirror, straightened my tie, and stepped out of my trailer just as a blue sedan pulled into the gravel lot near the playground where I had parked.

A slightly overweight man in a blue polo stepped out of the car. He had messy black hair, glasses that could have put him in the running for a B-level Harry Potter remake, and wrinkled khakis. I waved at him.

Peter Scanlon looked like his profile page on the City of Des Moines website. I could have spotted him from a mile away. I have that knack when it comes to paying clients. He