Beneath a pale sky, p.1
Beneath a Pale Sky, page 1
Table of Contents
Praise
Beneath A Pale Sky
Also By Philip Fracassi
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction by Josh Malerman
Harvest
The Wheel
Soda Jerk
Symphony
Ateuchus
ID
Fragile Dreams
Death, My Old Friend
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PRAISE FOR
BENEATH A PALE SKY
“The stories in Beneath a Pale Sky are elegant, unsettling,
and beautifully wrought. One of the best collections
I’ve read in a long while.”
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
*
“Highlights the author’s skill at capturing
disasters, gore, and cosmic horror.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
*
“Poignant, shattering, and wholly original, Beneath a Pale Sky
is a marvelous collection of tales from a master storyteller.”
JONATHAN JANZ
*
“There’s a wonderful and elegantly deceptive classicism to the storytelling in Philip Fracassi’s Beneath a Pale Sky.
But rest assured, lucky reader, that much like the too-still waters of Sabbath Lake, the beauty of these stories conceals a depth
and a darkness that will chill you through and through.”
JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON
Also by Philip Fracassi
Behold the Void
Sacculina
Shiloh
Commodore
Copyright 2021 by Philip Fracassi.
ISBN: 978-1-59021-719-1
Front Cover Art by Francois Vaillancourt
Cover and Interior Design by Inkspiral Design
Author Photograph Art by Max Stark
Published by Lethe Press
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
“Ateuchus” © 2018, first published in Dark Discoveries #38 / “Death, My Old Friend” © 2016, first published in Fragile Dreams (JournalStone) / “Fragile Dreams” © 2016, first published as standalone novella (JournalStone) / “Harvest” © 2021, original to this collection / “ID” © 2017, first published in Walk on the Weird Side (LASC Press) / “Soda Jerk” © 2018, first published in Shiloh (Lovecraft eZine) / “Symphony” © 2017, first published in The Demons of King Solomon (JournalStone) /
“The Wheel” © 2021, original to the collection
For Laird Barron
“...there is a certain place in any discussion of any one
thing in existence where knowledge ends and the
Great Vacuum extends on out into infinity.”
Ray Bradbury
INTRODUCTION
JOSH MALERMAN
THE SCARIEST HORROR story is the one told by a stranger on the front porch of a house party, plastic cup in hand, the two of you crossing paths circumstantially, both out to get some air, the music loud inside. He asks what you do. For people like me and Philip Fracassi, the subject of horror stories is never more than a few exchanged pleasantries away. But even if you don’t live in the genre, the subject comes up. Often, the stranger tells you his ghost story. It’s never more than a few sentences. He was gathering laundry from the basement. Saw his dead aunt peer around the furnace. She winked at him.
You say wow.
He says yeah.
Then he’s off, back inside, leaving you alone to fill in the gaps.
You can almost see the bar graph, can’t you? Dependent lines: the briefer the story, the more room to imagine horrors of your own. Some might say the horror story works best the smaller it is. Our stranger on the porch has given us more story than he knows: he’s the main character, after all, and speaking so suddenly about ghosts sets the mood. Yet, us readers, we long for more. At least a little more. Sometimes a lot. We want to spend time, as much time as we can, inside that scary story. Yet, we want that front porch mood to remain…
Where to look?
For a lot of us, the novel is home. The horror novel. And if the author fails at maintaining the menace for more than 300 pages? That’s alright, we give him or her a pass, it’s not an easy thing to do. But still, we jones, we fiend, we start to explore avenues where the scare is less diluted, less cluttered, less buried. The novella, we say. The novella! Without the full diversions of the novel, and with less expectation of things being neatly summed up, we find in the novella something closer to the experience we might find outside a house party.
Yet… even a hundred pages starts to feel too long. The brevity of the stranger’s story is never entirely out of our minds. Neither is the feeling it gave us.
His dead aunt.
Peering.
Winking.
Give us that! we say. Without all the build-up, without all the plot! Give us the smallest thing you got.
But it still has to scare us apart.
So, we turn, at last, to the short story.
And it’s here where we unearth horror at its most potent.
If you’ve spent a lifetime in books, you’ve no doubt read more than a handful of short story collections. Some readers explore this world exclusively, but most of us spend our time in Novel Land, with vacations to where the short stuff lives. Yet, every time we go, we ask ourselves why we don’t just move there. Buy a bungalow. Make a friend. Become a regular at the short story bars.
I have a theory about this.
I can easily remember reading Ray Bradbury’s The October Country in various settings in Michigan, each of those places fading into nothingness as Bradbury delivered unbelievable punch after punch. I started to get excited, in the nervy way, nearly manic: here wasn’t just a book, but a series of ideas so fierce, the electricity of the first story hadn’t worn off by the second. Bradbury simply didn’t let up. The same thing happened, the same state achieved, with Penguin’s American Supernatural Tales. I made notes after each entry, bullet-point ideas of my own. That single collection inspired a dozen novel ideas to come. M.R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories was another. Algernon Blackwood, too. The unforgettable fire of Edgar Allan Poe.
I learned from these books and others: the short story collection was where the real writers told tales. And anybody who could pull off a complete collection, cover to cover, without a dip on the way, was someone to applaud.
Applaud, then, for Philip Fracassi.
Beneath a Pale Sky belongs in that fantastic club.
Prepare yourself for this book. It won’t come at you with a sledgehammer, it’s not that kind of horror, but you’d be nuts to call what happens in these pages quiet. And while I’m not going to go through the book story by story, I’ll try my best to express how it’s going to make you feel.
Is it possible Fracassi grouped these particular stories together because he discovered in them a similar sound, a similar depth? It feels that way. It feels like he recognized the intoxicating combination that occurs in each: small scenario, enormous repercussions. In these pages we’ve got friends who ought to be lovers, earthquakes and drunk pilots, all the passion of life balancing atop the Ferris Wheel. Herein lies friends of the Devil and greedy scientists, mental homes and the music of Hell.
Was Fracassi aware of the collection as he pieced this together? Was Bradbury ever aware of his? Because the best collections are the ones where the stories work in tandem, the stories play as a team. This is not to say Fracassi left easter eggs of one story in another, but rather, Beneath a Pale Sky rolls out like music. Suggestions of early themes grow-up by the end, and the echoes of the those we began with never entirely go away.
I realized early on that this was a book for the ages. I tweeted as much and I privately wrote some friends. I wrote Philip Fracassi, too, story by story, as I finished reading them, unable to stop myself, not wanting to stop myself, aware that I was in rare hands. Like the collections that electrified me in the past, Beneath a Pale Sky doesn’t let up, and it’s not difficult to imagine these stories populating an entire season of an anthology television show on their own.
You’re probably at the point where you want to read these for yourself. Great. I’ll step aside here. But first, a prediction:
You will read these stories, and you will think of them the next time you find yourself on the front porch of a party, a stranger two-sheets to the wind, suggesting he saw his deceased aunt winking from behind a furnace. But this time you will stop the stranger as he heads back into the house. You will think of Philip Fracassi’s stories and you will say, Wait a minute. Hold on. I’ve got one for you, too…
Josh Malerman
Michigan
HARVEST
PART ONE
Blue Sky
THE BLUE SKY was vast. Cornstalks reached to the heavens, unfurled green leaves turned upward like praying hands with crispy b
The antlers of the male flower pushed through the top of the stalks. Pollen lifted from the knobby stems in the autumnal breeze, clung to the feet of hungry insects, found the silky threads of female hair in a five-hundred-acre mating dance. The semi-sheathed beards took it in, the shy ladies fertilized, ready to birth budding shafts of sweet corn. A joyous miracle that would be plowed, harvested, and repeated. The time for reaping was near. Winter was still far off, but summer had been long left behind.
At the edge of the harvest rested a white church, its broad plank siding bright and clean. The tall arched windows marched along its sides were stretched shadows tinged with midnight blue where hazy sunlight caught the glass. Out front, an ancient gnarled oak craned up past the steeple, thick leafy arms stretched outward in every direction. Its massive trunk stood near the entrance, where it had endured for more than 150 years; settled firmly on its roots, stealing life from the soil, its weathered bark far older than the church and even the immense crop surrounding it. But age and frailty are close friends, and a poison ran through the great tree. Dehydration and decay festered in its veins. Leaves, most the size of an adult hand, lay strewn along its base, browned and weathered. The arching branches still clung tightly to an assortment of summer holdovers, the clingers-on dangling lifelessly as ancient Chinese fans, adorning the dying tree with a ghastly dystopic headdress, the entire milieu a symbol for the end of all things, or at the very least a season. And yet the great tree stood, stubborn, clinging to life and pride like a dying giant in a fairy tale.
And on this autumnal day it watched, wearily, as a broken line of cars approached from the distance, each chased by a cloud of dust. A spattering of parishioners en route for the ceremony to come.
CARRIE WORE WHITE and stared dazedly through a church window at the seemingly infinite army of marching green stalks. At the edge of the crop she observed a clay-colored cottontail slip briefly onto the perimeter of shorn grass, sniff the air, then shoot back into the folds of the cornfield. Mother sipped coffee in the corner, a napkin between palm and cup ready to catch any wayward drop that might infect her best yellow dress. Carrie’s bridesmaids wore cauliflower blue silk with a lace top and only one shoulder exposed, a concession she’d made in exchange for serving liquor at the reception. Beth and Trish took turns pouting lips into the vestry’s lone mirror, smoothing eyebrows, tucking loose hairs. They were chatting enthusiastically, but it was white noise to Carrie. Static.
Trish had flown in from school. She was sweet and harmless, fat and plain. Beth was pretty but petulant, liked to mouth-off to impress whoever was within earshot. She’d slept with the groom once, before he and Carrie had been serious, and both girls had been forced to swallow resentment like sin-eaters in order to remain friends. The three women had known each other since preschool but were not as close as some might believe. Deep down, Carrie had secretly hoped they wouldn’t come at all but… well, here they were.
The vestry was small, and after a few hours pacing its confines, primping and filling the enclosed air with banal gossip, Carrie had begun to feel claustrophobic. Staring out the window at the navy-blue sky and bushy green field eased her mind and settled her nerves. She noticed clouds plotting in the far distance, rubbing shoulders like hazy mountaintops…
Navy blue? Carrie thought, distracted from her inner musings. Had the sky really turned a shade darker than it was only minutes before?
Carrie closed her eyes and cursed under her breath. She prayed for a beautiful day. A perfect day. She also prayed for peace, and perhaps a little quiet, as the constant attention from her attendants wore thin. Thankfully her overly-fretful nana, the most vocal and challenging of the small group, had left to secure arrangements in the sanctuary. Carrie figured she had Pastor Willard’s elbow by now, pacing him through his well-worn Book of Common Prayer to steel his resolve against adding any modern flourishes to the traditional ceremony language.
“Carrie, darling.” Mother. “You should eat something.”
“I’ve had a sip of wine, and Nana brought lemon cookies. I’ve had three.” Carrie patted the taut tummy of her embroidered wedding gown. “Besides, I’m too nervous. I’ll eat at the reception.”
“If you don’t faint first. Such a humid autumn, my god,” her mother said, patting her throat and chin with a tissue. “Girls, go find a pitcher of water. Some iced tea.” They laughed and ignored her.
It was warm, especially for the season, but Carrie thought stifling the more appropriate adjective. Thankfully, the church had brought a fan into the vestry which pushed the heavy flower-scented air around enough to keep any dew drops of perspiration bursting from her pores. Despite her gown being full-sleeved and high-necked, the fabric along the arms and shoulders was light – a semi-opaque lace – that allowed her tanned skin to breathe. And despite what she told her mother, she wasn’t nervous in the slightest.
Anxious, perhaps.
Parker was a good man. Handsome. He would run his father’s (quite profitable) wheat mill one day – the largest in Gehenna County – securing their financial future. Her anxiety stemmed not from her future husband, or her tedious mother, but from a nagging, damnable black string which tugged at the back of her mind. A black string that wore overalls socially and knew all of her most private thoughts. Her secrets. A six-foot problem with blue eyes and haystack-colored hair.
Eli.
Carrie’s heart beat faster at the thought of him, and she clenched a tight fist, shut her eyes, said another prayer. Stay out of my head, she thought, knowing the futility of the command. Because he was there, swimming inside her, swirling around her thoughts and kicking at her heart; a ghostly presence that carried a worn suitcase bursting with a lifetime of memories, tied shut with that same dark string.
Then, without her consent, that black string gave a tug… and slid free.
THE KIDS WERE hidden from the larger world beneath a leaf-strewn canopy and the heavy shadow of surrounding trees. Storm clouds laid thick along the sky’s underbelly like smoke from a house fire. In the distance, thunder rumbled.
“God wants in.”
Carrie rolled her eyes at the joke for the hundredth time. Felt like the millionth.
“So let him in, dummy,” she snapped, her bare feet folded beneath her knees in the matted tall grass. She picked at the rip in her dress, the fabric covering her bony knee having been rent by a splintered branch while she’d climbed a low-armed mulberry.
Eli lay supine, eyes studying the arching branches high above. He wore overalls and a white T-shirt stained with a young boy’s persistence. His feet were bare like Carrie’s, his heels blackened and rough. His light-colored hair was buzzed to stubble because of high heat and a recent bout with lice, his soft face reddened by a receding summer.
The makeshift creek whispered along beside them, a narrow ribbon brought to life by the wet season. The stream connected Jackson Pond to a state park miles away. When it rose high enough it carried trout. Eli’s daddy had diverted the creek so it split the property between their two crops, running it through a dense thicket of basswoods, shrubby oaks and sugar maples. It also created a park for the children. A living playground of trees to climb, dirt to furrow for planting flower and corn seeds, a cold stream to mine for smooth rocks and minnows.
Rainfall pattered against the leaves that surrounded them, tapped against the covering above. Thunder rumbled a second time, rolling across the broiling gray sky from east to west. Carrie didn’t hear the crack of distant lightning, so decided they’d stay a bit longer before heading home to schoolwork and chores. She slapped Eli’s knee and he smiled at her.
“What?”
“Do something.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged, scratched behind her ear, and looked around for inspiration. Her eyes fell upon the water, then twitched back to Eli, who watched her closely. She nodded toward the water and he gave a half-grin, then focused his eyes on the stream.
