Halloween has arrived, bringing with it the crisp crunch of autumn leaves and the thrill of the supernatural! We’re excited to unveil the seventy-first edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter, just in time for the most haunted night of the year. This month, our theme is Monster Masquerade, where shadows come alive and the unknown beckons. Prepare for an eerie escape into tales of hidden identities and monstrous mysteries. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work this month – your stories chilled us to the core! Here’s to a Halloween filled with masked horrors and monstrous delights!

Congratulations to both winners of the November theme: Erik VanBezooijen and Robert Stahl!

Reprise of the Red Death by Erik VanBezooijen – An unseen force revels in an eternal cycle of horror, haunting Prince Prospero’s masked revelers in a deadly game that resets with each final, bloody breath...

Hungry Waters by Robert Stahl – Memories haunt a protagonist who never goes in the water – memories of a summer outing turned deadly, and new revelations of the mysteries of the universe.

This month's newsletter features:

• FLAME TREE PRESS: New titles coming this month!
• Ramsey Campbell at 60
• FOUR Calls for Submissions
• Original Horror Flash Fiction #1: Reprise of the Red Death by Erik VanBezooijen
• Original Horror Flash Fiction #2: Hungry Waters by Robert Stahl
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Reprise of the Red Death

Erik VanBezooijen

There is always the bleak, reverberant music of the clock as it chimes, the ebony clock in the seventh chamber of Prince Prospero’s abbey – that impregnably sealed, fancifully furnished hideaway which he always dreams will be his shelter, but which he always remembers, upon waking, as his tomb; and there is always the silence that follows, broken only by echoes of blood, ticking in slow trickles from the walls, from the black sable drapes, from the mouths of the prince and his thousand dead revelers, faces frozen behind festive masks whose stained grins all seem to laugh with me.

There is always the warm thrill of victory – a meaningless victory, I’ll admit, for this is a child’s game, with no true stakes and no true competitors. But a game has no purpose but delight, and my delight is not lessened by having always, already, won.

The game begins like this:

I slip like mist from the empty chamber, into the low, lightless places of Prospero’s realm. I choose my first on a whim – a foreigner shivering in an overstuffed attic, a haggard girl in a sin-blistered brothel, a scrawny child wrestling pigs for rotted scraps in a manger. Unseen, I press my lips to theirs. They drink my breath. It is not amusing in itself, to watch such creatures spasm and howl as their blood rises, mottling their faces, pouring from their eyes, ears, and mouths. But to see my breath carried on the wind in red droplets, settling finally into the lungs of those who believed gold coins and good morals could barricade them from suffering – churchmen, burghers, tradesmen, sheriffs, aching and bleeding and clawing their throats as they slump over well-laden tables – this never fails to amuse me.

A dourer character might grieve and despair. But not Prospero, no, not Prospero. A humorous man, he summons a thousand of his favorites – the highest-spirited knights and dames of his court, the most accomplished musicians, the most graceful acrobats, the most interesting grotesques – to his abbey, a high-walled place with seven winding, irregular chambers. He decorates each chamber in a single color, from the hangings on the walls to the panes of the windows – aside from the seventh, where the ebony clock stands against the westernmost wall.

That Prospero cannot remember ever purchasing the clock does not trouble him, but inspires him to furnish this chamber entirely in black, and to color the windows lurid red – a parody of the darkness and blood in which I have drowned his land. Whenever the clock chimes, his guests shudder, for its music is like nothing they have ever heard. Yet this hint of horror only refines their appreciation of their master’s insouciant wit.

As he makes his designs, I stalk his towns and villages, following the carnage trail of my breath. Contorted bodies, confined to locked rooms and sealed windows, dissipate into stench. Some brave the blood-soaked air to rush the walls of Prospero’s abbey, only to drop, pierced with arrows by his guards. The game ripens. I stifle my laughter.

It is never long after the last breath of the last life rattles away that Prospero announces his masquerade, a phantasmagoric affair, in which he and his knights shroud their basest lusts in lavish, antinomian glamours – dissonant orchestras, shadowy ballets, orgies where the tears of freaks blend with the laughter of the beautiful.

All but bursting with glee, I wade into the red mist salting the empty streets, and from its loom, I weave the clothes and fashion the mask to make myself presentable for the ball. The same clothes, the same mask every time, for their reactions are always too perfect to spoil.

The clock chimes midnight. I arrive in the first chamber, colored blue, just as the last note fades.

Masks fall. Faces gasp at my graveyard motley, soaked with the blood of a thousand futile lives, and at my mask, the perfect likeness of a plagued beggar’s face.

Prince Prospero is always there, at the other end of the chamber. Always, he reddens at the sound of my laughter, demands his courtiers apprehend me, unmask me, reveal what miscreant has dared mock his debauch.

Nobody moves. I walk toward him, laughing and laughing.

He flinches, and I walk past him, through the blue chamber, into the purple, the green, the orange, the white, the violet, stopping at last in the black.

It is never long before he charges after me, desperate to save his honor, dagger shining red in his hand.

Always, my timing is flawless. I turn around, catch his wrist, twist the blade from his hand – and lean close, close enough for my corpse-mask lips to touch his own. This is the moment I live for, when the remembrance sparks in his eyes. He recalls that this has always been his fate, to die with my laughter in his ears, and the blood of the rabble mingling with his own – to wake again, forget again, only to meet me and remember again, each time more crushing than the last. I savor the rich, sweet, bloody aroma of his anamnesis, then throw him lifeless to the floor. I laugh until I nearly gag.

Always, his cronies rush in, seize my robes and unmask me – and always, I exult in their horror, as they gape at my nothingness, and remember that this is how it ends, always how it ends, with blood in their mouths and my laughter in red-shadowed darkness.

The last breath fades. The clock chimes the last hour. Laughing, still laughing, I wind back the clock, to the hour just before my game began. The blood returns to each body, the forgetfulness to each head. I have not tired of this game, and do not expect I ever shall. For this is my eternal masquerade, and Prospero my eternal, most favored fool.

Erik VanBezooijen is a journalist and fiction writer. Raised in Brookfield, Connecticut, he now lives with his wife in Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, and his articles on religion, politics, and culture have appeared in America, Commonweal, Jacobin, and Sublation Magazine. “Reprise of the Red Death” is a retelling of one of his favorite horror stories, “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. He can be found on Twitter @erikvanbez

Hungry Waters

Robert Stahl

People aren’t being mean when they ask. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to hear at a pool or lake when everyone else is in their swimsuits but you’re standing there in your Bermuda shorts and loafers with your arms folded tightly across your chest.

“Aren’t you getting in?”

It’s been ten years since it happened, but tears always sting my eyes. I rarely answer. Instead, I look skyward and think of Corinne.

I was supposed to be watching her. That was the deal. Mom would drop us off at Poseidon’s Playground, and I would look after my little sister. The water park was what all the kids in town were talking about since its grand opening earlier that summer. My sister and I seemed to be the only ones who hadn’t gone yet.

The wave pool, everyone said, was totally killer.

Before I go on, you shouldn’t blame Mom. She was doing the best she could after Dad left. Sure, it was a holiday, but not for hotel workers. Someone had to change the sheets, fluff the pillows and clean the toilets.

I was fifteen, skinny and awkward with raging hormones. Corinne was seven, cute as a button with yellow hair and a Barbie obsession. It was the summer of 2024, the year SETI finally told the public they’d been receiving alien signals from outer space. Of course, they only said so afterwards. Had anyone known earlier, Corinne might still be—

No, there I go blaming again. If those years in therapy taught me anything, it’s to take responsibility for my actions.

I…Excuse me. It’s still hard to talk about. I was supposed to be watching her.

It was Labor Day, and the park was full of locals getting in their last soak of the season. The day was sweltering hot. Almost everyone was in the wave pool. I can still smell the suntan lotion and chlorine in the air, and as long as I live, I’ll never forget the sight of all those people waiting for the machines to turn on, treading water in the deep end with their heads bobbing along the surface. Not Corinne, though. She was in the shallow end where I could watch her. I don’t know that I’d ever seen her so happy, splashing around in her Barbie floaties, sunlight glinting off her wet golden hair.

Why wasn’t I in the pool with her? Well, I was more interested in the redhead working the ice cream stand who’d given me a scoop of vanilla for free. Hormones, amiright? Sitting in my lounge chair with dark sunglasses on, I could check her out all I wanted and no one was the wiser.

Then, sure enough, you heard this bone-rattling roar as the hydraulics kicked on. The waves began at last, big rolling peaks from way in the back that moved in a zigzag pattern toward the front. People hooted and hollered as the waves tossed them back and forth, back and forth. In the shallow end, Corinne shrieked with delight as she frolicked in the splashing water. “Johnny!”  she shouted. “Look at me.”

I gave her a thumbs up and turned my attention to the redhead again, lost in a creamy dream world of adolescent fantasies.

Next thing I knew there was a horrible sound: Ka-thunk!

Someone screamed.

I jerked upright and looked out across the water. Near the back, the whitecaps were breaking. Only they weren’t white. They were blood red.

It wasn’t Corinne, thank God. She was still in the shallow end. I assumed the unimaginable had happened: a swimmer had been accidentally sucked into one of the propellers that created the waves, which should have been housed safely at the back of the pool.

That is what happened.

It wasn’t an accident, though.

The waves became violent, churning and roiling. One by one, people were pulled under, their screams muffled by the relentless waves. Every time a body went under, I kept hearing it. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk.

From somewhere deep underneath the pool, there was a thunderous, belching sound. The red tinge of the water crept toward the front.

I jumped up, scrambling across a sea of lounge chairs toward Corinne, who was struggling to move toward me in the surge.

I’d just made it to the edge of the sloping ramp that led into the pool. I was reaching out, ready to grab her, to haul her in—

Suddenly, a low rumble echoed through the park, and the ground began to tremble.

In the wall at the rear of the pool, two awful alien eyes appeared. Set deep within shadowy sockets, they glared out with a cold malevolence.

Impossibly, I knew I was looking at the eyes of a living alien creature. It trembled with anticipation in its disguised burrow. The wave pool itself was its mouth.

There was a cracking sound below. Under my feet, a fissure yawned open.

The sloping pool floor began to rise. The people who were scrambling to safety now found themselves on a ramp that forced them away from me, and back into the water. That’s the last time I saw Corinne. She was sliding toward the churning, bloody froth, her angelic face twisted in a look of horror and confusion.

A strange humming noise filled the air and the pool itself began to transform. Sleek, metallic walls appeared on every side, forming a giant gleaming rectangle that trapped everyone inside.

My legs went weak as I watched the pool – now unmistakably a spacecraft – rise slowly from the ground and lift into the sky. It streaked off into the bright afternoon carrying my sister Corinne with it.

The thought of it – lying in wait all season until the busiest day of the year – to strike.

So, no thanks. I’ll stay here on dry land if it’s all the same to you.

I don’t trust the water. You never know when it’s hungry.

Unbeknownst to Robert Stahl, his body is an empty shell that’s telepathically controlled by a brain in a jar which was buried long ago under the floor of his home in Dallas, Texas. Consequently, his days are filled with the urge to write: stories, letters, articles, whatever. At night he listens to music, and when he finally drifts off to sleep, the brain laughs, a humorless, pitiful sound as it jiggles alone in the dusty darkness. His work has been published at Story Unlikely, The Dread Machine and Crystal Lake Publishing. Learn more at robertestahl.com.