Exquisite Corpse

By Cassandra Khaw and Paul Cornell

Ten horror authors stitch together a haunting tale of sci-fi horror in which the women abused by the ultimate terrible media man take exquisite revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Realm
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682107881

Book preview

Exquisite Corpse

Cassandra Khaw, Paul Cornell, Brian Keene, Sisters of Slaughter, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, Christopher Golden, Stephen Kozeniewski, Nick Mamatas & Alyssa Wong

Exquisite Corpse © 2023 text by Realm of Possibility, Inc.

All materials, including, without limitation, the characters, names, titles, and settings, are the exclusive property of Realm of Possibility, Inc. All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2019.

For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at Realm, 115 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10006.

ISBN: 978-1-68210-788-1

This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Written by: Cassandra Khaw, Paul Cornell, Brian Keene, Sisters of Slaughter, Paul Tremblay, Richard Chizmar, Christopher Golden, Stephen Kozeniewski, Nick Mamatas & Alyssa Wong

Executive Producers: Molly Barton and Julian Yap

Table of Contents

Exquisite Corpse

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Writer Team

One

Cassandra Khaw

He is dying.

He has been dying for six months now. The aruspices of modern medicine prophesied three possible deaths: cardiovascular complications, liver failure, neuronal autophagy. In the end, as is so often the case these days, it was cancer, a harvest of tumors taking root in his lungs.

He’d never smoked, but according to his doctors, that didn’t matter. They predicated an explanation on the fact that he was cosmopolitan. Cities, sighed a black woman in white, are carcinogenic, slow-acting vectors of disease. The decades he’d spent sipping carbon monoxide from the air, chasing it with tap-water bromodichloromethane, chromium, and chloroform—these all counted. Death by urban living was absolutely a thing.

Noon-light cuts through the hospital window, honeyed by the tinted glass. On a power line outside, a parliament of pigeons holds court while sparrows bear witness. He watched them for a while. In half an hour he’d retweet himself to the ghost town of Twitter. Thank god for backward compatibility. Thank god for the sentimental and for nostalgic Millennials, the ones who built their platforms on the rotting ribs of the original.

Without them, he’d be alone.

Virtualization technology lended an intimacy once lacking in yesterday’s social media. He’d been an early adopter for that reason. Work had squeezed his middle age of all its best hours and it was always easier to choose the worship of the flat-screen TV. Always easier to self-anesthetize than to self-improve, to stay home than to go out, speak up. There was always someday, one day, the next day. Until there weren’t any left.

But the digitization of three-dimensional company helped.

He rotates through a palette of suits, oxblood and maroon, navy and silver, every last one of them perfectly matched to jocular socks and silk ties. His sons spared no expense. It has been years since he last took pleasure in his reflection, but that didn’t matter, not when he could tease each filament of hair into place, adjust the shine of his scalp, even control the consistency of his five-o’clock shadow.

Today, he’d wear black. Black with full brogue Oxford dress shoes the color of bronzed sandalwood, and a wine-dark tie striped with gold. Black so deep, so rootless, it knows no ancestry with light, a chthonic velvet relieved only by the accents he’d elected. The program he’d subscribed to was decadent. It wasn’t just visuals that they provided. Audio, olfactory feedback, tactile sensation, taste, all of it came parceled with the monthly package, all for less money than he’d expected, more than he should have spent.

If he’d not been so keen to indulge his vanity, perhaps they would have unearthed his cancer sooner.

No point in wallowing, however.

He takes a screenshot, uploads the image via a third-party service, which then broadcasts it in triplicate, neural network sanding down the imperfections. The gallery opening is in three days. His last, crowed the myriad PR companies, hoping to wring that last vestige of relevance from the dregs of his name.

And it worked.

For the first time in years, they came, runneling through decayed RSS feeds, a few faithfuls at first: old friends, old acquaintances, colleagues still tethered by some whimper of loyalty; although, if he could still stomach honesty, he’d admit it was more likely pity that drove them to the newsletters. But as marketing was so fond of saying, all press is