Rebelein Edenville

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80336-469-8
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Goosebumps meets Stephen King at Edenville College, where an aspiring horror novelist takes a teaching job and soon finds a blood-soaked town history, a secret society in the library basement, alternate dimensions and people who might actually be spiders... When young horror writer Cam Marion is offered a teaching opportunity at a prestigious liberal arts college upstate, his long-time girlfriend Quinn is skeptical. She knows the college is located in Edenville, in infamous Renfield County. The county where people seem to go missing. The county where Quinn's high school best friend was mysteriously killed. Quinn figures the job opportunity is a trap somehow, so she follows Cam upstate to investigate some of the county's mysteries (including her own). She quickly discovers that there's an entire society dedicated to solving Renfield's many riddles. A society that puts on plays dedicated to Renfield's macabre, blood-soaked history. A society that meets in the library basement once a week. A society made up of people who might not be people at all....Meanwhile, Cam discovers that his newest story idea isn't an idea so much as it is a vision of another world. A world that the faculty at Edenville College need his help to access before it accesses them.

Sam Rebelein holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, with a focus on Horror and Memoir. His short fiction been published in Bourbon Penn, Planet Scumm, Dark Moon Digest, Shimmer, and featured in Ellen Datlow's prestigious Best Horror of the Year. His award-nominated story 'Black Fanged Thing' was listed as a stand-out piece on Barnes & Noble's 'Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog.' Edenville is his debut novel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rebelein, Sam

Leseproben

THE GUMMERFOLK

He dreamt of an attic. Of course, it wasn’t a dream, per se. But Cam didn’t know that at the time.

The attic had a sharp-peaked roof, as if Cam were inside a perfectly triangular wooden prism. The point at the center of the ceiling ran from the stairs at one wall all the way to the small square window in the other. He wondered what the outside of the house looked like, if the roof was so sharp you could cut yourself along its edge.

The wood of the attic was unfinished, unsanded, splinterous, and rough. Nail ends jutted out all over. The room itself looked like a torture device. In its center was a faded pink sofa with wooden legs carved into human feet. The rest of the attic was bare.

Cam sat on the sofa’s middle cushion. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. Across from him, about a foot off the floor, something was etched into the sloped wood of the wall. He managed to squint, and saw it was a man. Or . . . manlike. Minimalist, in thick, cakey yellow chalk. Two lines for legs, one down-swooping curve for each arm. And a ragged mass of spiked hair for the head. Someone had taken the chalk and scribbled it in an angry circle several times, digging in until the chalk cracked and caked in odd patterns. In the middle of this hair were two thick, slanted lines. Deep. Gouged hard into the wood.

The eyes hurt to look at. Like gazing into the sun.

Cam struggled to open his mouth, to speak, and as he did, the figure on the wall opened with him. The yellow chalk lines blurred. Beads of red popped like sweat from pores. Dark crimson fluid began to drain from the figure’s hair and eyes, to run across the floor in spidery tendrils, throbbing as they stretched in all directions. Fingers poked out between the boards of the attic wall. Dozens of black-clawed, gray-fleshed hands wrapped around the wood from the other side. Yellow eyes and puckered mouths, pressing up against the wall from within. Fingers yanking at the wood, trying to pull it apart, to pop loose all the boards upon which this figure was drawn.

The gummerfolk were coming through.

“Don’t,” Cam managed to say, the word molasses-ing out of him. “Dooon’t.”

But his voice was drowned by another. Someone he couldn’t see. Some booming, hell-thunder tone that read to him—the poem.

He’d remember it for the rest of his life, word for fuckin word:

The Shattered Man,
with wild hair.
You better run,
avoid His stare.
If you see Him,
you are through.
Cuz chances are?
He already
has seen
you.

On the final word, a board wrenched free with a snap. Fingers pulled it back into the darkness of the wall. And the gummerfolk began to slide into the attic.

If they had ever been human, they definitely weren’t now. Now they looked like someone had dug the bones out of regular people, held their skins to a flame, and watched them melt. Their shoulders oozed halfway down their sides. Arms bent out of their abdomens. Legs dribbled directly down from their ribs. Their heads rolled, sloshing against their chests. Their faces drooped and their waxy lips opened, closed, like fish on hooks, choking on air. Their clothes were all askew, simple T-shirts and denim jeans, on sidewise and janky. Their hair was tufts of brown wire plugged into the warm clay of their scalps. The gummerfolk, an abandoned project forgotten in the cellar of the universe, squeezed their way out of this bleeding hole, one at a time, and spread like multiplying cells, expanding through the attic. Wobbling and sloshing. Some poorly made cross between a man, a leech, and one of those slippery snake tube-toys you find at, like, Rainforest Cafe.

God gave up while making these.

“Doon’t,” said Cam, more strained this time, like shouting through mud.

So many of them pouring through the hole. Warbling and swaggering around the attic. Aimless—until their eyes landed on Cam.

The first oodled its way around the side of the sofa. Its arms dangled at its sides, one twisted to the front, the other wrenched behind its back. It opened its mouth and ran its bugged eyes (one falling far down its cheek) over the entire course of Cam’s body. He could feel the eyes like snakes upon his limbs, slithering up and down. Tasting him. The gummerthing made slobbery, licky noises. Wavering side to side.

Then fell on him.

It smacked its mouth against the side of Cam’s neck, the fleshy bit with lots of strings inside. And it began to chew. To gum, really, because it had no teeth. It gnawed at him, very slowly. And as it did, Cam realized its lips weren’t waxy, weak things at all. They had muscle behind them. They were strong. It’d take a while, yes, but this thing was going to gum him to death, no doubt about it. In a matter of maybe two or three agonizingly slow, gradually more painful hours, Cam was going to die at the hands of a toothless leech.

Another fell upon his ankle, splatting prostrate onto the floor. It moaned with pleasure, and its eyes rolled in opposite directions as it sucked at the side of Cam’s foot, just over the big knob of bone.

Another fell on Cam’s arm. Its mouth began to work at the flesh inside his elbow. Gums clenching, squeezing, releasing. He could feel tongues rolling over him. Warm, wet slobbering. Their jaws were strong, so strong. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t fend them off.

Another gummerthing tripped over the one on the floor and fell into Cam’s lap. It made an audible, cartoonish amph! as it chomped down on Cam’s inner thigh. Another leapt over the back of the sofa, nuzzled Cam’s shirt off his belly, and latched on to his navel. He felt the gums working at his gut. Squeezing, releasing. Squeezing, sucking, releasing. Nudging around the organs inside.

Another fell on his bare toes.

Another swallowed his entire hand, knuckles grrrinding between its gums as its mouth squeeeezed . . .

At last, one of them waddled around behind him. He heard it crack open its mouth in a big, wet yawn. Drool dripped into his hair.

“Doon’t,” Cam moaned.

But the thing didn’t listen. Of course it didn’t. Why would it?

A great whoosh of air as it swooped down and took the crown of Cam’s head inside its jaw. It squeezed its gums around his skull and sucked. Some of Cam’s hair ripped loose, vacuumed away down its widening throat.

“Doon’t.” It slid its mouth lower. A snake shoving prey into itself. “Dooon’t.”

It worked its mouth down, lips wriggling over Cam’s eyes. He felt them squish back into his skull, the gums pressing, pressing. Everything went dark.

“Doooon’t.”

The mouth descended over his nostrils, practically breaking Cam’s nose up into his brain, grinding into the nape of his neck and his ears. All the while, more mouths fell on him, all over his body.

“Dooooon’t!” he cried as he sucked in air between his teeth. He took a big breath, and the thing swept its lip into his mouth, shoved his tongue back into his throat. It dug its own tongue into him, tasting him gag. It pulsed lower, mouth moving down over Cam’s chin, so that the suffocating, warm, wet flesh of its throat covered his entire face. He could taste its bile as it tasted him. Things in its jaw cracked as it widened, and prepared to take his shoulders.

Finally, the scream yawned from Cam’s chest in one big “DOOON’T!”

He was awake.

He lurched up in bed. The R train rumbled through Brooklyn’s underground, rattling the windows from far below. Lampposts poured a soft orange glow across the ceiling. Quinn snored gently at his side.

He was awake. And he was alive.

“Jesus,” he murmured. He took a shaky breath, rubbed at his eyes. Pain lashed through his skull. He grit his teeth, swore at the dim bedroom. He blinked hard, several times. He wasn’t crying. Something else was in his eyes. Something gluey? He held up his hand, pulled his fingers apart. Fluid separated between his knuckles in thick boogery strands. It was cold. Glacier-cold.

The fuck?

He blinked again, and the poem blared in his mind.

He scrabbled for his phone on the nightstand and typed it all out, though the screen was blurred, his fingers sticky, his eyes throbbing horribly.

He felt like if he didn’t write it down, he’d die.

The Shattered Man,
with wild hair.
You better run,
avoid His stare.
If you see Him,
you are through.
Cuz chances are?
He already
has seen
you.

*   *   *

“Ew, why would you have jizz in your eyes?” Quinn asked, brushing her teeth in the open doorway between their bedroom and the bathroom.

Cam, still in bed, stared at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes. “Well, it’s not snot. It’s . . . rubbery. And sort of white.”

“You save any of it?”

“God, no.”

Quinn grunted around her toothbrush.

“My hypothesis,” said Cam, in his I have an MFA, therefore am smart tone that Quinn used to love and now didn’t at all, “is that it was a wet...