Two months after Cal Fichtner took himself officially “off the map”, Greer Reizendaark logged onto the Company webmail account to find a particularly well-scrubbed piece of e-correspondence waiting for him. No header, no address, no send-date—just a numerical link embedded in the body, with this curt instruction: LIVE AT ONE. CLICK HERE.
Gemma Files
Former film critic, teacher, and screenwriter Gemma Files won the 1999 International Horror Guild short fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” which appears in her collection The Worm in Every Heart. Both it and her earlier collection, Kissing Carrion, feature stories that were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scot Free Productions. Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series (ChiZine Publications, 2010), was a Stoker first novel finalist and won a DarkScribe Magazine Black Quill award for “Best Small Press Chill” in both the Editor’s and Readers’ Choice categories. A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012) complete the trilogy. We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven, a story-cycle of linked short fiction, was released in August, 2014. Her latest novel, Experimental Film, was released in November 2015.
each thing i show you is a piece of my death
Somewhere, out beyond the too-often-unmapped intersection of known and forgotten, there’s a hole through which the dead crawl back up to this world: A crack, a crevasse, a deep, dark cave. It splits the earth’s crust like a canker, sore lips thrust wide to divulge some even sorer mouth beneath–tongueless, toothless, depthless.