This book is a collection of 10 stories and 2 novellas, taking place within, or tangential to, Walpurgis County, a place benighted by fallen angles and old curses, pockets of time dilation, and a sinister cult fixated on the end of all things. Overlooking the entire place broods Walpurgis Peak, a snarling ogre of a mountain, beneath which a comatose entity convalesces, kept alive by a colossal bio-mechanical atrocity, known only as The Machine. Connected by events and recurring characters, whether taking place in the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries, the history and lore of Walpurgis County revealed through the stories of those who lived it. Exorcisms and scarecrows. A wicked mountain and an unaging house. Disintegrating family and a lonely motel. Demons and monsters. Alternative history and the end of all things. Methamphetamine and Slayer.
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Excerpt from 'Billy Beauchamp and the Monster Cartel'
Scarlet, leaning to accommodate Fate, gazed up at me. The twins wore a plain white dress of mismatched sizes, no shoes, and a garland of flowers arranged in each mane. Scarlet, the pagan maiden eager to plunge into the volcano. The look in her eye told me she had resigned herself to that day and had not that sacrifice spelled doom for her younger sister, I felt she would have acted on it there and then.
I felt sorrow for her. Though so pure and unafraid, I saw a future in service to monsters as they feasted on tentacles, traumatized children, and walked the endless line between desolation and damnation.
The conjoined sisters turned away and joined hands with the others. Six girls formed a perimeter around the magic weave. A freakish sight by any measure, but it would be a crude disservice to refer to these young ladies as freaks. In the Purg, bones fused in ways not seen, bloodlines ran long and true. Haunted and hunted had found refuge here, despite the bloody knife of Walpurgis Peak and the terrible events shat upon its slopes.
“Pneuma,” said the tallest of them, Destiny I believe. Her twin, Candi, half her size and nearly half her age, repeated the word in a whisper.
“Haima,” said another.
“Mystiko,” said a third.
The last time I heard Greek, Lena and I were in a restaurant in Studio City, and she had to order for us because I was about four Ouzos into a future DUI. But in the presence of Penny Brynnwick’s daughters, their words were clearly understood: Breath. Blood. Secret.
One second the magic circle was an ugly nightmare of lines and symbols―the next, an icy extrusion of light burst from those same lines. Shadows splashed throughout the Grand Room, and somewhere in the hollows of my heart, I knew if I stared at this shadow theatre long enough, I’d catch a glimpse of what waited out there, in the Elsewhere, that place of abandonment The Proprietor lamented over, the place where the monsters were left behind.
The temperature dropped. Serpents of frigid air slithered through the Grand Room. In their linen dresses and bare shoulders, these barefoot girls made me feel like a coward for shivering in my long sleeves, jeans, boots, and leather vest. Their hair, caught in the gale, sought the center of the conjuring rug.
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About the Author: Kyle Toucher
Kyle Toucher is the author of the novel Live Wire, from Crystal Lake Entertainment, the novella Life Returns, and the Black Hare Press release, Southpaw.
He recently appeared in the anthologies Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror and To Hell and Back, from Crystal Lake and Hellbound Books respectively.
This September, expect his first collection The Medusa Psalms: Welcome to Walpurgis County ―also from Crystal Lake Entertainment―to rise from the slab of a coroner's office near you. Ten stories. Two novellas. One benighted landscape.
Chat to Kyle on social media
X: @kyletoucher
Instagram: @kyletoucher
