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November 2008

Comet Press open for submissions

Our print division, Comet Press, is currently accepting submissions for horror, suspense, and dark crime novels and novellas. Visit www.cometpress.us for details.

Available for order from Comet Press

DEADLINES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR AND DARK FICTION, will be released in November of 2008! Visit www.cometpress.us

Visiting Hour
by Michael Pelc

Owing to the nature of my crime, the authorities, in the rightful exercise of their wisdom and their vindictiveness, determined that I should live out the remainder of my natural days without ever again being allowed contact with another human being. Accordingly, my cell has no windows, and neither does it have a door, though once there used to be one, but that was before they filled it in with stones and mortar. Thus, there is no way for me to know if it is day or night, winter or summer, today or yesterday. It is a world without time. The past is forever, and there is no future except never.

A single bulb, suspended on a chain far above my head, provides the only illumination. The light is always on. It is my sun. It is my moon. It is my night. It is my day.

It used to be my god.

In keeping with the dictates of the state, my meals are delivered in a most mechanical and impersonal manner. They arrive through a narrow slit in the wall where the door used to be, the slit having been left there for the sole purpose of feeding me. My food, which is quite ample though rather tasteless, comes to me pushed along the floor by a wooden plow. It arrives without benefit of either plate or tray. It is the way one might feed an animal.

The arrival of food attracts the other residents of my cell, the cockroaches. It is the aroma, I suspect, that causes them to emerge from the corners and from behind the commode, all a-twitter with excitement. I take delight in watching their shiny brown bodies crawl over my food, sampling this and tasting that. Then, as they scurry back to the nooks and crannies from whence they came, their little tummies full and their appetites satiated, I step on them. I crush them beneath my foot and grind their powdery remains into the floor. It remains of my personality that, to this day, I have yet to find a greater joy than listening to the sweet, delicious crunch of death.

Thus it is that I have adjusted to my circumstances, praying to a light bulb and crushing cockroaches. Every undefined moment of my existence, be it an hour or a day or a year, is exactly like the one that preceded it, and it gives me peace of mind to know that each moment in which I live will also, in turn, be exactly like every moment that follows. If I want not more than what I have been given, I can not be disappointed.

Or so I thought until the devil slipped a note into my cell.

It was not a note in the usual sense that one thinks of such a thing. No billet-doux, elegantly penned on fine parchment, its most personal contents kept safe from prying eyes by a discreet application of sealing wax. Nor was it a supplication for a favor, the type a merchant might employ in the course of his business affairs, seeking perhaps a meeting on Tuesday next, should such time be agreeable to all concerned. No, the note was nothing like that, for a note like that would never be allowed the likes of me. My evil, it seems, is such that it is thought to be capable of contaminating the sender of even the most innocent of missives.

No, this note, this note from the devil, arrives, not by the usual post, but rather by the most clandestine and peculiar of means. It is contained within the gristle of my stew, its characters so minuscule and difficult to decipher that, were I not so attentive to even the most minute details of my own existence, I might have missed them entirely.

Upon discovering the note thusly hidden within my food, I cradle the gristle in my hands, tilting it first one way and then the other so that the light may best illuminate the writing. My eyes, having grown weak during the time I have been incarcerated here, strain to read the message. But I persist, going over the script again and again until I am sure that I have it right, that I have read it correctly.

The devil, it seems, would like to meet me, to visit.

I am elated at the prospect of contact with another being. Tears fill my eyes and blur my vision. I wipe them aside so that I may continue reading. But first, the devil writes, before he will consent to a visit, I must get rid of my god.

I have never thought of such a thing before and find myself hesitant to act on even so simple a request. It would be easy enough, I suppose, to remove a shoe and hurl it toward the heavens above, striking a mortal blow against my incandescent god as easily as I might crush a cockroach. And yet, I do not.

But the devil does not leave me alone. He persists in taunting me, in challenging me. He writes to ask if I am scared of the dark. He must think me a child, this devil, tethered to my mother's apron strings no doubt, and afraid to cross the street on my own.

I remove my shoe and heft it in my hand a time or two so that I might gauge its weight and thereby reckon the amount of strength one would need to cast it toward the light. Yet still I equivocate.

The devil senses my weakness. Lose the god, he writes. Lose the god and I will reveal unto you the secrets of the universe and unfold before your eyes the mystery of time so that you alone may come to comprehend the enigma that is life itself.

Like all mortals, I wish to know these things, these quandaries that have long bedeviled even the greatest of minds. I rise to my feet, my shoe held firmly in hand. Like no other man before me, I stand on the precipice of knowing the unknowable, and all I need do is destroy the light. A simple task, as meaningless as killing a cockroach. For what need hath any man of a god were he to know the things the devil has offered to disclose?

The excitement of the moment courses through my body, and I fling the shoe above my head. It is unerring in its trajectory. There is a brief, explosive burst of light. Reflexively, I close my eyes. Electrical sparks crackle above me, and I drop to the floor and cover my head. A shower of glass rains down upon me. When it is done, I grope the floor, seeking out the gristle. It does not take long for my fingers to find it. I lift it gently from the floor and bring it to my face, my hands cupped together as if in prayer. Slowly, I open my eyes so that I might read the note.

To my dismay, there is but darkness. No longer is there any god of the filament. No longer glows there a light by which I might read what the devil has written. I hold in my hands the secrets of time and life and death and all that is both betwixt and beyond ... and I can not read them. I slump to the floor and sit hunch-shouldered and motionless. In a moment I sense the cockroaches returning. I feel them crawling over my body, seeking out their meal. I extend my hands and offer unto them the gristle. Let them taste of the devil if they wish. I have had my fill of him.