Bones of Aneth-Ka in Witch House # 2

 

a cornucopia of alarming tales, including my own Weird Urban Western, Bones of Aneth-Ka.

Get it here: 

https://witchhousemag.blogspot.com/2022/08/witch-house-issue-2-is-now-available.html

Six Heads for Gullahm-Khullgosh in Whetstone #4.

 https://whetstonemag.blogspot.com/2021/12/whetstone-issue-4-now-available.html

Download your free copy of Whetstone #4 for free and enjoy the mind boggling Six Heads for Gullahm-Khullgosh, along with other sanity blasting Sword and Sorcery!

Corridors - a new anthology

Savage Realms #2

One of my tales has made it into this fine publication. 

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Realms-Monthly-collection-adventure-ebook/dp/B08Y5775T6

The Embrace of Masa-Mangtow

 

What follows is a fragment of an account of a sea voyage by Hippias of Syracuse. It currently exists only as a Latin translation of an older Greek source. 

I.

Aranthur, one of the various sea-warlords who have run roughshod across the world of late, had carved himself a small kingdom among the lands to the west. These included a chain of islands that lay beyond and south of Gades. Unable to explore these islands himself, he procured the services of the famed explorer and cartographer, Erastus of Argos. Erastus in turn called upon me, Hippias of Syracuse, to undertake the voyage with him. Holding Erastus in high esteem as a mentor, and hungering to venture once more to unknown regions, I accepted his invitation.

The Stalkers of U’Ad

 

 

I. Waylaid!

    I stood at bay, the still-warm carcass of my slain dromedary at my back, surrounded by a half-dozen dwarfish Qllgir hill men; they brandished long, wickedly-curved knives and their eyes were hidden behind lenses of darkly stained glass. I tore the keffiyeh from my head and spat at them.

    “Dogs! Come forth and have done with it!”

Xoscullian

In the late 2020's eccentric trillionaire Darren Kovacs, nostalgically obsessed with the 80's arcade shoot-‘em-up Xoscullian, spends billions on a super advanced version of the game.

This version of Xoskullian becomes self-aware and seizes control of numerous defense systems nearly setting off an apocalypse trying to recreate its violent futuristic gameplay.

The renegade AI is thwarted by a team of special agents. Xoskullian is seemingly destroyed but survives, cropping up periodically to cause trouble, eventually contributing to a global crisis that results in the downfall of civilization. 

Xoskullian would seem to be no more in this ruined, primitive earth, but the name is remembered and deified by various cults that worship a garbled interpretation of the program.

Perhaps Xoskullian survives deep in some underground complex... dormant... waiting...

Sigyn of Kindle

Get your e-book here.

I've rewritten Sigyn out of the Hyborian  Age and into a quasi-historical bronze age. Reaching the pinnacle of vanity, I've self published with Kindle. At least it's cheap.

The Abraxas Inevitability.

Ancestors & Descendants

Place your preorder for Ancestors and Descendants. A chilling collection of Lovecraftian horror tales, including one by yours truly. Buy your mamma a copy before somebody else does.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancestors-Descendants-Lovecraftian-Prequels-Sequels/dp/164606044X/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=poyton&qid=1573318405&s=books&sr=1-6

The Matrix of Khouzouhept

I
  Kaa-Vulth, deposed Emperor of Tazzozz, grinned as he surveyed the surreal vista laid out in the bowl-shaped valley beneath him.

Bane of the Man-Serpent.

    Kaa-Vulth had battled past guardians human and inhuman, and cheated death at every turn.
    Now, he at last breached the inner sanctum of Man -Serpent. The he would pit cold steel against the eldritch sorcery of an ageless evil.

Queen Sigyn fragment

Fragment

    

    In replendant Velathra, ‘neath lapis vaults and diaphanous shrouds, Queen Sigyn slumbered, and slumbering, dreamt.

The Track of the God-Ape

It is, I‘m told, natural for one to grow nostalgic as one ages. Like many others I look back with wistful fondness upon my youth and childhood. But I have also found myself immersed in reminiscences that are not connected with any events of my lifetime. Visions I would dismiss as daydreams or phantasms were it not for their vividness and the absolute conviction I have that I lived these events as surely as I attended grade school and enjoyed my first kiss. One such vision that forced itself upon me is a memory from when I was Diyang-Buru of the Stork Folk.

Man-I-Pede

….What follows is claimed by Mr. Conrad to be a transcribed from a radio transmission he was party to during his time working with the I-Tech group. Conrad asserts the transmission was one of several made by a “General Blair” from an extrasolar planet named “Ghonshu”.  

I-Tech maintains that Mr. Conrad was engaged in no unusual projects during his employment, and Pentagon sources deny that any “General Blair” was reported missing during the timeframe Mr Conrad claims these various incidents occurred.

...It was probably about sixty, eighty feet long, ten, twelve feet in diameter. It had a hard shell like a lobster.Hard to say what color it was, everything has a bluish tint under Ghonshu’s weird, tiny sun. it had rows and rows of smooth, flabby arms, like a baby’s arms, each with fat, fingers with slimy bulbs on the tips. I want to say it had the head of a man, but that’s not accurate. The head was huge, the size of a VW beetle, bald, mottled and sprouting wart-like growths. It had a long tangled beard that seemed to have moss or fungus growing in it. It’s eyes were wide and rolled about crazilly. It’s mouth hung open and drooled over yellow peg-like teeth. It was gibbering the whole time. Sometimes it might have spoke words. It stunk too. Like mildew and rotting vegetables, but worse, and stronger.
    It had a big metal ring through it's nose, like someone might have led it around like a cow at some point. Best not to think about it.
 

    It sounds comical as I recall the thing, but it was no joke at the time. The locals shot arrows into it and hit it with axes and hammers and whatnot, that just seemed to anger it.

    Finally I had to use five more rounds from the M16 to put it down.

 

Wings out of Hell

Painting by Bob Rothwell.

www.deviantart.com/ustranga

Prologue

Excerpts from the Karkana Fragments, a collection of fifteen partially complete clay tablets housed at the Tokyo National Museum. 

It is claimed by some scholars they were translated to Greek from an earlier, proto-greek language from scrolls dating from 10,000 years B.C.E.:

    … Thus did Nanossuss of Koth with fivescore and twenty spearmen drive headlong into the massed throngs of the Red Brotherhood upon the beach at Velathra.

    Outnumbered twenty to one, and roughly treated by the archers loosing their arrows from the decks of some five hundred triremes thronging the bay, they smashed the pirate rabble and laid them low.
The retinue of Nanossuss slew until their spears were broken, then belabored the corsairs with sword and axe. The waves were stained deep crimson and the beach cluttered with all manner of human detritus.

In the Garden of the Toad

    François Arnauld, late of Saint-Domingue, drained the last of the wine from his bejeweled goblet; heedless of the overflow dribbling down his long, unkempt beard and further staining the white linen robe that shrouded his bulbous form. The heavy oak chair he wallowed in creaked in protest as he shifted his flabby bulk. Wiping first his mouth then his sweaty forehead with his dirty sleeve, He proffered the empty goblet to a white-robed Creole girl at his side, who dutifully refilled it. François leered at her from behind the darkened spectacles he habitually wore and bared his blackened gums and rotting teeth at her in a perverse grin.

The Widow Ayers

“But the devils cannot interfere with the stars.”  

― Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum

I

   I will own that even now in my dotage, I am neither wise nor of particularly strong character, but after bearing witness to the events I am about to relate to you, I came to the conclusion there is naught on God’s earth that can frighten me again. One does not look upon the face of primal, naked horror and come away unchanged.

She-Fiends of Yaramaj

She-Fiends of Yaramaj

Being an account of the violence that plagued that city, as recorded by Kostio, subprefect.

The First Incident

    It was in the third week of my assignment to the city guard of Yaramaj that the first incident occurred. The incident was unusual only in the fact it was brought to our attention at all, and that the one reporting it was such an outlandish individual. She was a green-eyed giantess of a woman, with flaxen hair bound it two great braids that reached to her waist, clad in a rude tunic sewn from a tiger’s pelt.

The Red Stained Lips

From the journal of Kirkman Eubanks Forester. An alleged mentally sick person

My carefully laid plans to summon YrrdrGdnol from blackest Ghonshu had come together without a hitch. Assembling the induction coils had been simplicity itself, (if Jorgenson had done it 1890, how hard could it be for me in 2009?) instructions for the ritual where easily obtainable off the internet, and finding a suitable location had been quite easy. (The archway from the abandoned Old Holiness Brotherhood compound in the foothills south of Sweetwater was perfect for my purposes, and the irony of using such a location was delicious). Even obtaining a child for the required blood sacrifice had been easy. I found her wandering unattended in Wal-Mart while her mother tried on cheap Chinese sweat pants in the dressing room. I simply seized her by the hand and walked out with her. People these days don’t watch their children as they should.