The Styx Boys

The trio of young men stepping out of the blue car gave—for no outward reason at all—the impression of being brothers.

The tallest one (and the obvious leader of the group) wore a black leather jacket with quite a few more zippers than pockets. This he wore open, with a white T-shirt underneath and black jeans that were almost too short for him;  his white socks peeked out of his black shoes.

The second boy—certainly no more than fourteen or fifteen years old—wore a large, black, cotton sweatshirt. He pulled the hood back and revealed a head of short pink dreadlocks, and a sullen face with a lot of piercings and no blemishes. His blue jeans were ripped at the knees.

The last boy—the youngest, probably ten or eleven—wore a translucent windbreaker that swished as he walked. His shirt was white, but his jeans were black and quite baggy. Looking at him next to the leader, one might have gotten the impression that there had been a mix up in the morning laundry.

Comic aspects aside, these were the infamous Styx Boys, the most hellacious gang of undead bastards ever to kill a prom queen.


(This is an excerpt from "Lufdeen the Vampire and the Nightmare Market", an unfinished short story from 1996. The demons' names, from eldest to youngest, are Cephus, Ferus, and Amaldus. I really need to just dump all my old Lufdeen material into some loose approximation of formatting and self-publish it on Lulu.com, just for posterity.)

Show Me The Way To Go Home

It's not an asteroid. Because of its angular shape and glossy, even surface, we at first presumed it to be the spacecraft of an advanced alien civilization. That alone would have been a revelation. That alone was enough reason for the massive cover-up, and I wish to God that is all it had remained. The way the object was spinning listlessly past our solar system suggested it was derelict. But then the first size estimates came in, and we made them recheck the calculations, since the estimate was ridiculous. It was roughly the same size as Jupiter. A year later we captured our first clear image of it, and the room went silent.

It was not a spaceship. It was a tooth. A long, pointed tooth that superficially resembled that of a shark, slenderly triangular with canyon-like serrations marching along each edge. That was all. A tooth, the size of a planet.

What unholy terror swims in the vacuum of space? It makes me think of early mariners watching the massive tentacle of a giant squid roll ashore with the tide, filling their heads with nightmares. The imagination cannot rest after witnessing such a horror in existence. In those days, a sailor could swear off the sea. Where are we to go?