The air grew as still as the grave. The moon ghoulish, bluer and bluer with every moment, occluding itself with spectral wisps. The stars winked like a million eyes.

The smoking black line rolled forward, taking over the sea and the sky in its approach. Fog stole onto the shore and soon most of the beach was invisible. Out of the fog there came a long, slow horn, and as it cut short there followed the unmistakable creaking of ship masts.

The mist rolled back, as though someone were sweeping it away with a broom. The blackness dissipated and the beach lay clear and dark gold. Anchored in the bay was a grey and white ship and pulling up to the shoreline were three boats full of the dead.

The country passed in a dream. They rode through flat red sand, and then shallow red dunes, rippling like bloody waves in a static sea. Only tufts of weathered grass and the occasional doom palm passed for plant life, the doom palms standing grim and bent like sunken ship masts in a scarlet ocean.

The divers travelled deeper through the coral city, as softly gleaming shoals of angelfish split in two to pass them on either side. Chromatic eels and sea worms wriggled in and out of holes; crabs scuttled sideways along alien beds. Feathered things danced, suspended in the water. The kaleidoscopic lights of the coral almost outshone the silver-blue lights they swam towards. If not for these sources of illumination they would have been swimming in a deep, dark blue; looking up, India could see lighter water, but could not make out the sun.

The jungle was a miasma of feral shadows and blue streaks of moonlight. Plants India had never seen before bloomed luminescent in the dark. Greens, blues, purples. Yet the lights simply brought out more of the night. He found as time wore on he could only make out the lambent flowers, the flickering vines. Everything else began to seem as naught but some black ocean, an oblivion sea strewn with siren flora. Something upon which he imagined shapes of death as much as beauty: skulls gilded by petals, boas as big as trees and trees like holes in the world. Half-naked women with bared teeth and clawed hands and hissing serpents for belts. Slithering creatures as though caimans had mated with fish and frogs, their every joint home to a greedy, snapping maw breathing out billows of wet mist . . .

Everything was real, nothing was real. Demons in the dark.

The stream vanished into the undergrowth. The seven friends journeyed for days without seeing a single other soul. Nothing human at least. There were bounding, curious jackalopes singing in the dark, and the Tall Man hiding in the pines. At one point India swore he encountered a sasq’et, eight foot tall in its shaggy hide, lumbering off through the forest. He tried to follow, but the sasq’et moved too fast, and India had to stop lest he get lost from the others. Ahead he saw nothing but trees; but maybe, perhaps, heard a lonely roaring, echoing from distant trunks.

Another day saw gargantuan red trees throw back the pines. Hundreds of feet tall, they towered over the travellers. India felt like he stood amongst titans of some prehistoric age. It was mostly flat land now, empty but for its giants. There were no homesteads, no buildings of any kind, no farmland, no walls or fences, no herds of cattle, no bridges, no roads, no paths, no light in the dark except moonlight and starlight and the glow of the campfire. There wasn’t even a hint of civilisation; India never saw so much as a horse trail.

What would you do if you woke up on another planet, in someone else’s body, with a gun to your head?

For a long time they walked in the Circle’s shrinking shadow, before it dropped away before them with the triumphant rising of the sun over its crooked heights. They crossed a sharp edge of night-blue, suddenly bright and crystalline and baking hot.

Jay looked back at the Black Circle, still dominating the land and sky. How long the sun had struggled to break free. How long they all had.

Pacing through black pines and blue snow. Deer and elk-things and grey foxes running at their presence. The horses silent but for the soft tramp of the hooves. Jay somewhere, somewhere further off, who knew? Vrowd behind, barely visible, his head down, his form appearing and disappearing between the trees, between the moonlight.

They rode through long gulches and canyons the colour of old sunsets, dry and bare but for tufts of grass poking out from the cliffs. Jay had his hand close to his gun, wary of attack, but it stayed quiet. Their horses’ hooves echoed back to them.

He had a flash of memory, something from years ago. He was racing through here – Crookteeth Canyon – bandits on his tail. No, no – he was the bandit, driving stolen horses before him, shooting wildly behind and they at him, the shots ricocheting off the rocks like shrieking thunder.

He put his hand on the butt of his gun, trying to see everything through his good eye, but the canyon stayed quiet – they were the only things living. The time before would not come again.

It seemed to him as though he were on some half-crumbled walkway down in the belly of the world. A gauntlet. On either side gargantuan creatures, almost but not quite motionless, stared down at him. Turning ever so slightly as he passed between them, their heads as big as houses, their bodies grey and dark, but for their eyes . . . like small burning moons, fixing on him. He saw them vividly in his brain, convincing himself he could see them by sight, too, though there was no sight to be had. They were after-images on his vision, as though those great ancient eyes had burned on him and then closed – yet only closed to his senses, for in truth they would not so much as blink. There was a bull, and a bison, their horns sprouting away from the heatless white glare of the eyes. A panther, a doyot, a dog with fangs the size of his body. Some monstrous reptilian thing standing tall. A taidan and a cinderwulf on opposite sides facing each other.

And a ghoum. A titan of one, some fell white god, as tall as the cavern but stooping so that its questing head neared his path. In absence of eyes it began to search with long fingered hands, lightly gripping the edges of the gauntlet, then probing, reaching for him. At any moment it would touch him, a foul fingertip like wet paper stroking the length of his body . . .

At last they left the shrieking hills behind. Camp and then on and camp and on, on to the bottom eyelid of the world. Journeying past little white towns that dotted southern Appalia, ghost pueblos lost and fading in the sun and the yellow hills and the desert. And each day the melting of the sun and the strata of the firmament, scars of sky tearing the evening glow to bloody shreds.

Visions of Appalian warriors from millennia gone, helmets and breastplates of gold and silver, shields like little suns dancing on the earth, spears the long poles of the stygian dead. A drink of water, deep, gulping, and sudden gasps of shade, shadows of clouds over the empty land.

The flit of a vulture. Gone the shadows. Gone the game, gone the water. A boiling wet moon, leaking outside of itself.

A short collection of weird, twisted stories.

A short collection of strange, paranoid horror stories.

Three tormented souls in the grotesquely twisted city of Rule treat morality like a plaything in this dystopian thriller.

Not really suitable for anyone and best avoided. I’m not kidding.

A Survival Guide for Imaginative Pessimists.