Moonless Nocturne
MOONLESS NOCTURNE
OTHER TITLES
COMING SOON
American Nocturne
(Re-releasing 2022)
Darwin’s Laws
(2023)
THE JAKE HATCHER SERIES
Damnable
(Book 1)
Diabolical
(Book 2)
The Angel of The Abyss
(Book 3)
The Emperor of Shadows
(Book 4, coming in 2024)
Check out more books we love at:
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
MOONLESS NOCTURNE
Copyright © 2022 by Hank Schwaeble
Published by Esker & Riddle Press
an imprint of 25 & Y Publishing
Denver, Colorado
25andY.com
“The Yearning Jade” copyright © 2019 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias, Lycan Valley Press Publications 2019)
“Household” copyright © 2019 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Welcome Home, Lycan Valley Press Publications 2019)
“Everything Not Forbidden” copyright © 2022 by Hank Schwaeble
“Shifty Devil Blues” copyright © 2020 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Unthinkable Tales Anthology Two, October 2020)
“Moonless Nocturne” copyright © 2022 by Hank Schwaeble
“Haunter” copyright © 2014 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Death’s Realm, Grey Matter Press 2014)
“Deepest, Darkest” copyright © 2016 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in SNAFU: Black Ops, Cohesion Press 2018)
“Psycho Metrics” copyright © 2022 by Hank Schwaeble
“Payday” copyright © 2019 by Hank Schwaeble (first appeared in Weird Tales Magazine,
Issue #363)
“Zafari! (Unlimited)” copyright © 2022 by Hank Schwaeble
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to: permissions@25andy.com
Cover Design by Andy Carpenter Design
Book Design by Sebastian Penraeth
Chapter art by Maria Jesus Aragoneses
978-1-953134-44-8 (Hardback)
978-1-953134-45-5 (Paperback)
978-1-953134-46-2 (Ebook)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pieces like this are called nocturnes. They’re meant to capture the mood of the night, remind one of things that happen after dark. Originally, they were only played after sundown, usually quite late. Some composers would write them by moonlight, to help ensure they evoked the proper emotions.
—American Nocturne
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction by F. Paul Wilson
The Yearning Jade
Household
Everything Not Forbidden
Shifty Devil Blues
Moonless Nocturne
Haunter
Deepest, Darkest
Psycho Metrics
Payday
Zafari!
Story Notes
Publication & Copyright Credits
Foreword
Hard to believe it’s been five years since my first collection, American Nocturne, was published. Even harder to believe I’ve been writing now as a published author for fifteen, that my first novel was released a dozen years ago, and that I’m now, well, let’s just say I’m not what anyone short of their 90s would consider a young guy starting out anymore. But time is like that, a constant presence in all our lives, as relentless as a faucet drip, a slow leak draining the volume of our existence one drop drop drop for every tick tick tick of the clock without us really noticing until the water level in the pool is so low we’re left wondering where it all went. That’s why it’s crucial we fill that time, while we have it, with meaning, and the way we do that is by investing hours each day in things like relationships, family, faith, learning, goals, hobbies or some combination of the like. One of those sources of meaning for me is writing.
Ask any writer why they write and, if they’re being honest, you’ll invariably get some version of the same answer: “because I have to.” It’s a compulsion; if not clinically, then as a practical matter. We not only do it to indulge our creative impulses, we use fiction to make sense of facts, lies to explain truths, characters we’ve imagined to illustrate the complexities of interactions we’ve experienced. And we all share a deeply felt need to express ourselves through story. Stories are the way we make sense of the world, the way we process the accumulated traumas of loss, disappointment, grief, heartbreak, and all the divers slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes each of us, like everyone, has had to endure, to varying degrees, at some points in our lives.
But while all that may be true and provides a reason why we write, it doesn’t exactly explain why people like me write what we write. Why horror? Why stories with dark settings and dark characters and, frequently, creatures that slither and crawl and lurk in the shadows? From where does this interest, if not outright fascination, with the stuff of nightmares hail? What makes someone like me feel drawn to writing horror stories? I’ve been interested in horror since I was a young boy, but I can’t point to anything in my childhood that as a logical proposition should have made it resonate with me. I was not abused or terrorized. Sure, I was a child of divorce, like so many millions of others, but I never felt particularly victimized by it. My home life was reasonably stable, compared to other kids I knew. Even though finances were often tight, I rarely felt any sort of deprivation. I had food, shelter, toys, and lived in a relatively safe lower-middle class neighborhood. I never witnessed any significant acts of violence beyond some schoolyard fights and was seldom involved in fistfights myself growing up. So, that raises the question—why do some of us write horror, violent pieces about bad people in bad places and things that do more than go bump in the night, rather than stories dealing with circumstances we have more direct experience with? I think the answer is simple. Although like all writers we write to process and understand emotions, we write horror because of an intellectual curiosity that drives us to explore the unknown, to shine a light into the blackened alleys and recesses others pass by and give a wide berth. We get a thrill when imagining the possibilities of what lay in the grasp of those shadows, or beyond them, and want to share those imaginings with others. While many writers use stories to hold a mirror to society, we want to show our readers what’s on the other side of it. Most authors explore the human condition through the examination of characters in conflict with nature, with others, with themselves, or the like. We do the same, but with an added dose of “what if ?” directed at the inky, lightless corners of that same world. It’s often the dark side of human nature that interests us, but it’s also the human reaction to the kind of darkness that isn’t necessarily found in nature that piques our imagination. While others write to present their readers with character studies as a way of recognizing our common humanity, we who write horror already know there is one such commonality that unites us, one shared emotion that transcends almost everything else. Fear. We know that it’s not the dark of night that scares us as humans, it’s what that dark might be hiding…or what sort of darkness the person sitting beside us on a train might be hiding. This, I believe, is what drives our storytelling. We want to relate to our readers not merely on an intellectual level but also at a visceral one, to make them feel alive through a triggering of that most basic emotion, the same one felt by medieval villagers digging up bodies in the belief a vampire was plaguing their hamlet. The same one felt by travelers on horseback moving through black forests and seeing glowing eyes peering from behind trees or sailors in uncharted waters seeing large, strange creatures emerging from the depths. The same one doubtless felt by Neanderthals witnessing an eclipse or hearing the chuffing of a sabretooth tiger outside their cave on a moonless night.
But the kind of fear I’m talking about isn’t the literary equivalent of a jump scare. What interests me is more the slow-burn kind of fright, the kind that is often scary in retrospect more than in the reading, the kind that comes from a story that lingers, that makes you think. People often accuse horror of being low-brow, and over the years certainly much of it has been, but no one who’s read masterpieces by Edgar Allan Poe such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “A Casque of Amontillado,” for example, can defend a dismissal of the genre with such an accusation. The same can be said of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, or “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. These stories, and others like them, stay with us, provoking deep consideration of their implications even, in my case, decades after I read them. It is worth noting that none of these particular stories involve the supernatural, or non-human monsters, but they most definitely are horror. What makes them horror? The places they take us and the things they make us confront when we get there. Good horror makes us stand up to the unknown even as we accept it’s a battle we can never win. There are so many things we don’t understand about our existence, and the more we learn, the more disturbing thing
s become. Eternity stretches out before us. Either there is life after death, or there isn’t—and either prospect is terrifying, if you give it enough thought. Either we’re alone in the universe, or we aren’t. Each of those possibilities is equally frightening for different reasons—if you give it enough thought. That, in my opinion, is the horror writer’s calling, to make you the reader give the things out there, or that may be out there, that are frightening, if contemplated enough, due consideration. Because giving such things the contemplation they deserve is the key to understanding why they frighten us—or, in some cases, why they don’t—and that, in my opinion, is the key to understanding what makes us human. If I can make a reader contemplate some of those things, even a little, while entertaining them along the way, as I see it that means I’ve done my job.
That is what I’ve attempted here with Moonless Nocturne. If I have indeed done my job, in the pages that follow you’ll find ten stories that will serve their purpose of both entertaining and prodding you, both capturing your imagination and stimulating it. Stories that, I hope, will linger in your thoughts, scratch an itch you didn’t realize you had, plant seeds in your mind that will germinate as you lay in bed, drifting off to a sleep marked by dreams that pose even more questions. Stories that will resonate in some way, intellectually or emotionally or both. Stories I hope you will thoroughly enjoy reading and just as thoroughly enjoy thinking about afterwards. And stories that maybe, just maybe, might even scare you a little bit.
It would be impossible for me to list all the people who have contributed to my development as a writer, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few. As I discussed in the Foreword to American Nocturne, in my youth I was greatly influenced by Stephen King and Clive Barker, particularly by their short fiction. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story occupies a prominent spot in the memories of when I was a young teen hungry for serious treatment of the scary and the supernatural. Reading Edgar Allan Poe was almost certainly my first experience with horror, so this would definitely be incomplete without mentioning him. Later on, as I made my first forays into writing, many professionals provided invaluable assistance along the way. I’m grateful to writers like Tom Monteleone, the late Jack Ketchum, Gary Braunbeck, Deborah LeBlanc, and others who gave me advice and encouragement in those early days. Writers like Jonathan Maberry, who, among other things, graciously agreed to pen the introduction to American Nocturne, Mark Greaney, Steve Berry, Cherry Adair and Heather Graham have all stepped up when I needed someone to read my stuff, and for a writer, that’s the most ingratiating thing a person can do. Minor acts of kindness by many writers have made outsized impacts on my career, such as when Neil Gaiman took the time to have a drink with me in Brighton after I won the Bram Stoker Award for Damnable, providing me with an occasion I’ll never forget (but one I doubt he’d recall) where I soaked up all I could as he shared his thoughts on his latest novel I’d just read on the plane ride over. Many thanks to all of them for debts I can never repay, but for which I will always be grateful.
I also want to give a shout out to my publisher, Isabel Penraeth, for her enthusiastic support and commitment to this collection, along with all the folks at 25&Y who’ve worked so hard to bring it all together with artwork, cover design, layout, edits and marketing and all the other things that go into a quality hardcover release that are routinely overlooked but are nevertheless vital to its success. As always, I also want to thank my agent, Rachel Sussman, for simply putting up with me.
Special thanks go out to F. Paul Wilson, who generously agreed to write the Introduction to this collection. I first read one of F. Paul’s stories over twenty years ago and remember being floored by the force and clarity of his prose and have been a fan ever since. The thought of him now providing the introduction to a collection of my own stories is as mind-boggling as it is gratifying.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife, Rhodi, for being my companion through it all, my anchor and my rudder, my partner and my love. As I undertake these excursions into darkness, she keeps me grounded in the light.
I hope you enjoy your nighttime stroll through the pages that follow but please, for your sake and that of your loved ones, be careful not to get lost in the gloaming. There may be no moon to light the way back.
Hank Schwaeble
Magnolia, Texas
May 2021
Introduction
Short fiction…it’s different. It requires a different skillset—a different mindset—from the novel. I know excellent novelists who can’t write a short story worth a damn. Conversely, I know short story wizards who are totally flummoxed by the long form. When I was starting out—shortly after the Permian extinction—I counted myself in the latter category.
I’ve always written. I can remember penning stories—haunted house and ghost stories, naturally—as far back as the second grade. But in my early twenties I set myself the goal of becoming a published author. I saw no way of making a living as a writer—not at a pay rate of a few cents a word—but I loved telling stories and wanted to make writing a part of my life.
With absolutely no guidance, without ever taking a writing class or attending a workshop, I began writing short stories. No horror market existed at the time, so I sent them off to the SF magazines and collected a pile of rejection slips. But I was not to be deterred. I was going to make this happen. I kept submitting and soon started selling. Five cents a word when I was lucky, otherwise three cents. Sometimes nothing when the magazine folded before it sent the check.
I wanted very much to write a novel but found the prospect of sustaining a coherent narrative for that long positively daunting. My first “novel,” Healer, was in fact a succession of novelettes and short stories about the same immortal character strung out over 1200 years. Next came Wheels Within Wheels which was just as fragmented with flashbacks and side stories. My first real novel is my third, An Enemy of the State.
But I kept writing short stories because I loved the discipline, the focus, and the tradition.
Speaking of tradition, the short story is a very American form of fiction that finds its origins in Edgar Allan Poe. According to Poe, a short story can be read in less than an hour and must leave a powerful impression. It should strive for a “unity of effect,” and by that he means that every word in the story is directed toward its dénouement which should land with an impact “unattainable by the novel.”
His form of short story became immensely popular in the US, leading eventually to the pulp magazine era in the first half of the twentieth century. People who’ve researched that period say that at the height of their popularity in the mid-1930s, an amazing total of 150 pulp titles fought for newsstand space. We’re talking general fiction, romance, western, mystery, SF, horror, “spicy” fiction, crime, sports, war, aviation, and on and on. Consider that each title published an average of ten stories per issue (some fewer, some more, but even the hero pulps with a “novel” every issue contained backup short stories) and some of these, like Argosy and All-Story, were published weekly.
Think about that: a short-fiction market in the neighborhood of 1,500 stories per month, every month. Of course, if Sturgeon’s law holds true, 90% of those stories were crap. But I think I can safely say that if you couldn’t place a piece of your fiction then, you’d never sell—anywhere, any time.
Things are different now. Short fiction is undergoing a bit of a resurgence in popularity at the moment but the market to sell it (as opposed to self-publish it) has contracted dramatically. The novel is the most popular length for thriller fiction (and under that umbrella I include political thrillers, horror thrillers, science thrillers, and so on), but the short form exists.
Case in point: Back in 2006, the International Thriller Writers put together an anthology called, surprisingly, Thriller, a who’s who of the thriller genre: Lee Child, Brad Thor, Preston & Child, Rollins, Lescroart, etc. All great novelists, but some not so comfortable with the short form. I’m happy to say, though, that in her review for the NY Times, Janet Maslin singled out my story for special mention because it had “a beginning, middle and ending, as well as some neat tricks in between.”