Horror – Page 6 – Matthew Keville

It Was Taking Too Long

Hey, all.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been rolling out my old short stories one at a time, each complete with their own product page and a promotional post on the blog. But like the title says, I decided that was taking too long. Those stories were published before. There was no point in drawing things out.

So now, all previously published stories are once again available at Amazon. All are also enrolled in KDP Select, so if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, they are available there for your reading pleasure.

Product pages coming soon, as well as new stories. And keep your eye out for promotions!

Looking the Other Way is now available for sale!

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The first story of the dark beneath the City is now available for sale! Check out the updated Short Stories page, the story’s own page, or, if you’re in a hurry, just go straight to Amazon. It’s available both for purchase and for checkout with Kindle Unlimited.

(All stories previously released through this site are now available only through Amazon, and can now be checked out through Kindle Unlimited.)

Excerpt:

The tracks were full of vermin.

It was a living river, flowing from the Queensward side – from the deep and unbroken dark beneath the East River. Probably shin-deep or worse, if I’d actually dared to get down there: rats squirming and climbing and tumbling over each other as an endless current of cockroaches carried them along.

They were running from something. Was the tunnel flooding? Should I be headed for the surface, like right-frigging-now?

But no, that wasn’t it. If I looked further up the tracks, toward the tunnel, I could see what they were running from. Right behind the cockroaches was a tide of…well, they looked like cockroaches, too, except that they were black – I mean absolute, gleaming, lightless, deep-space black, like chips of the all-consuming Void moving among the plain brown carapaces of New York’s everyday garbage-eaters – and they were big. The ones the size of my finger were running before the ones the size of my palm, who were running before the ones the size of my whole hand, who were…

Then, just as I was about to make a run for the surface – possibly while screaming like a little girl – a dark shape appeared in the tunnel. It looked human and it lurched along like it was drunk or unsteady on its feet, like the homeless guy up on the platform.

I started forward; plague of giant mutant cockroaches or no, a person down on those tracks is in several different kinds of deep trouble. The train would be along any minute, but it might not even be that long before a stumbling drunk stumbled into the third rail.

I didn’t get two steps before Janitor’s Coveralls grabbed my shoulder. “Dejalo, m’ijo,” he said. “Leave it. This is their territory.”

“Their what?” I said, starting forward again. Then I stopped short as the figure emerged from the tunnel.

It wasn’t human. If it ever had been, it wasn’t anymore. More of the black cockroaches – these ones with weird silver-colored ridges and knobs forming patterns on their shells – were swarming all over it. Over it and through it. Black bugs dripped from the sleeves of its trench coat and the cuffs of its raggedy corduroys; they spread like sweat stains across its ancient white undershirt; they concealed its feet as it shuffled forward through the swarm. It opened its mouth and a horrible crackling noise emerged, followed by more of the finger-sized black beetles. Worst of all, when it raised its head so I could see under the battered brim of its hat, I saw two of them lodged in its eye sockets, like tiny pilots operating the vehicle that had once been a man.

About the Upcoming Stories

The next three stories are also set in New York, and will almost certainly be included in the Shining Towers, Shadowed Tunnels compilation. I’m not quite as certain if they’ll be included in my broader New York City mythos, along with the Washington Heights Witches and other NYC supernaturals that I intend to introduce over the course of coming stories.

You see, the Guardian Cats of New York City series was originally inspired by this cartoon from the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Guardian Cat Source

What if, I wondered, there really was some kind of ancient pact between cats and humanity? What if they defended us from Dangers Of The Night that might otherwise slip beneath our radar? Human magic-users and monster hunters might be good at staking vampires and banishing demons, but we won’t notice the rat king in the sewers until the entire town is consumed with pestilence. We’re good a blocking the punch to the face, but we’d never even notice the bite from the plague-bearing flea until it was far too late. Thus, the Old Compact with the cats.

I got three good stories out of the idea, but then started to run out of gas. Cats secretly defending humans from occult threats is an inherently cute idea; I wanted to treat it seriously, but it was resisting. As for incorporating the Guardian Cats into my NYC mythos with the Rivera family and other characters I have planned, there’s no technical reason why not, I suppose, but it raises difficult questions: are all of the cats in my setting Guardian Cats, or does it take a special breed of cat, like a witch’s familiar or Sailor Moon’s companions? What about rats (cats’ eternal enemies) or dogs (their reluctantly-accepted comrades in the defense of the two-legs)? How sapient are they? Does all of this fit into a world of gritty street-level magic?

Those are questions I need to work on as I compile Shining Towers, Shadowed Tunnels. Any suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, tomorrow’s story is the first story in the Guardian Cats series, and the one that establishes the rules. Come back tomorrow and enjoy Shin-Nephura’s Neighborhood.

Stories From Friends

Hey, all.

As you might suspect, I don’t spend all of my time online here at matthewkeville.com. One of my favorite places to spend time is at Slacktivist, which I’ll be writing about in more detail soon.

I’m not the only writer or blogger at Slacktivist, so I just thought I’d share a few of the hidden gems I’ve found there.

The first is from a commenter who goes by the handle of “Von Krieger”, and the idea is one I’ve seen before, but never quite this way:

Writing Prompt: Demons are not born, they are made from humans surviving in hell long enough

Warning: possible blasphemy.

The next is The Comforts of Winter by a commenter called AlyceInJeans, which is a spicy, erotic fantasy romance. If you like it, Alyce tells me that there’s a sequel in the works.

BTW, readers, do any of you know anything about Inkitt? Should I be trying to post any of my own work there?

And special thanks to the friend from Slacktivist who is the first (that I know of) to put Matthewkeville.com on their blogroll:

Tools of the Trade

New Story Up Tomorrow!

Bodega

Coming up tomorrow is Neighborhood Witch, a tale of everyday magic in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Like Looking The Other Way, Neighborhood Witch will be part of the upcoming Shining Towers, Shadowed Tunnels short story connection.

Neighborhood Witch, like Looking The Other Way, is based on my own experiences – people I’ve met, places I’ve seen. They needed a lot less alteration than you might expect to create an urban fantasy story. There’s magic, both dark and bright, in those streets.

Excerpt:

The witch came out of the corner store with her carton of smokes and her two-liter bottle of Pepsi in a plain black plastic bag.

“Hola, Mami,” one of the old men playing dominos in front of the store greeted her.

“Hola, hola,” she replied. At seventy-one, he had a good six years on her, but “mami” was a title that honored more than just age. In fact, she’d earned it through sheer pushiness by the time she was three.

She turned the corner onto 180th street and waved at the local drug dealers before mounting the front steps to her apartment building. They waved back and shouted their greetings – “Hola, Señora Rivera!” “ ‘Ey, Doña Celia!” – before turning back to the people they were speaking with.

Such nice boys. Why, she remembered when her elder daughter and her husband had needed to move in with her for a few weeks as part of their move to New York (move back to New York in Aracelli’s case). Brian – also a nice boy, but ay, such a country mouse! More than once she’d had to rescue him from con artists or chatty street people – had been a bit intimidated by all of the people sitting on the stoop while he tried to parallel park, but the dealers had coached him through it and then watched the luggage so it didn’t walk away while Brian and Aracelli were moving it from the curb to the apartment.

They weren’t the kind of boys who went shooting at everyone who wore the wrong colors. They didn’t want trouble. They just wanted to sell their pot and ecstasy to Columbia students and at all the new clubs opening up in Inwood. Living in New York meant making such accommodations.

Besides, anyone who was more trouble than that didn’t get to stay in Celia Rivera’s neighborhood very long.

First Story Coming Tomorrow!

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I thought that the best place to start on this new site would be with one of my most popular short stories.

Looking the Other Way is a story of hard times and the darkness beneath New York City, and what you sometimes have to do to survive both. Inspired by my own experiences in the Great Recession, Looking the Other Way will be one of the stories in my upcoming short story collection Shining Towers, Shadowed Tunnels.

Excerpt:

2008 was a bad year. Even in New York City, where the Great Recession never got quite as deep as it did in the rest of the country, that fall and winter were deep, dark, tell-your-grandkids-how-you-lived-through-the-hard-times bad. Hundred-year-old investment firms closed down like Broadway shows, and Broadway shows shut down like a community theatre production in Ogdensburg. Even the strip clubs were hurting.

I was one of the lucky ones. Well, not one of the really lucky ones. They kept their jobs. But I had a good severance package, a couple of 401(k)’s I could cash out for a couple thousand apiece (hurt me at tax time, but you do what you have to do), and an ex who insisted on rooming with me as long as I needed help with the rent. Between all that, Unemployment, and the fact that I was able to find temp work almost immediately, I was able to hold on and get through.

That last part was really key. When 2008 happened, I was a paralegal at a big Wall Street law firm. That made me a very useful fellow, but in 2008, even I was taking whatever work I could, wherever I could, whenever I could, and was grateful to get it.

Even so, I quickly discovered that I didn’t like night shifts. It puts you out of sync with the rest of the world. Sure, it’s nice to be able to go to the gym at noon when there are maybe three people in the whole place, but it’s just not New York if you can’t take a date to dinner and a play. Not that I could have afforded to do that anyway, but still.

Anyway, that was how I ended up standing on the subway platform at 59th and Lexington at 3:30 in the morning, headed back out to my apartment in Queens: a temp job. This law firm had needed someone to cover for their Proofreading Department while he took his “use ‘em or lose ‘em” vacation days before the end of the year, and his shift was from 6 PM to 2 AM…and that night had run into overtime.