• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2143 0

could see what was inside the falling flakes of snow, just as I could see what was inside all other things, activating them with its force. And what I saw was a black snow tumbling with an incessant roar from a black sky. There was nothing recognizable in that sky—certainly no familiar visage spread out across the night and implanted into it. There was only this roaring blackness above and this roaring blackness below. There was only this consuming, proliferating, roaring blackness whose only true and final success was in the mere perpetuation of itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon … until everything is entirely consumed and there is only one thing remaining in all existence and it is an infinite body of roaring blackness activating itself and thriving upon itself with eternal success in the deepest abyss of entity. Grossvogel could not resist or betray it, even if it was an absolute nightmare, the ultimate physical-metaphysical nightmare. He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism. “Anyone would do the same,” he said.

And no matter what I say I cannot resist or betray it. No one could do so because there is no one here. There is only this body, this shadow, this darkness.

Rick Hautala

KNOCKING

Rick Hautala’s novel Night Stone was famous for its cover (which sported a hologram, a publishing first) as well as for its contents. Like Ramsey Campbell, he has refused to abandon the field, and has steadfastly kept to the path he laid out years ago with such subsequent horror and thriller novels as Impulse, Dark Silence, and Cold Whisper.

For 999, Rick came up with a dandy piece, which actually features the millennium, something I wanted to avoid. But somehow in this story I didn’t mind at all, since the millennium is just background—like the Dune-like worms in Star Wars, which made my jaw drop, not because they were so neat but because Lucas had the nerve to just make them background.

This story is not about the millennium at all. It’s about something much more scary: the human mind.

The streets were on fire.

For the last six weeks, once the sun was down, Martin Gordon wouldn’t leave his house.

He didn’t dare.

He hadn’t seen any news reports since the television stations had gone off the air last week. It had been even longer since he’d read a current newspaper or magazine. But he didn’t need anyone to tell him that being out after dark was dangerous. From his second-floor bedroom window, he could see marauding bands of young people, their black silhouettes outlined like hot metal against the dancing flames of the burning city as they roved the streets.

The millennial celebrations had started in early December. At first they had been nothing more than sporadic nightly celebrations; but for the last few weeks, they had continued from dusk until dawn as throngs of people moved from city block to city block. What had started as a spontaneous celebration quickly turned into wanton destruction as people’s frustrations and insecurities took over. It wasn’t long before the burning and looting began.

Martin had quit his job on Monday of last week. He thought quit might be too strong a word. There was no superior left at the factory for him to give his notice to, so one morning he simply stopped showing up.

He didn’t mind being out of work all that much. He’d never really liked his job in the first place, and now he had plenty of time to do the things he enjoyed doing, such as working on his model railroad. Of course, with no electricity, he couldn’t run the trains. In the gathering darkness, he could only admire the work he’d done that day and hope that—eventually—once the electricity was restored, he could run them again.

For the last several days, however, he’d spent most of the daylight hours reinforcing the barricades around his house. He’d sacrificed nearly all of the heavy oak doors from inside the house to cover the downstairs windows. He picked up some heavy-duty