Re-release date: September 15, 2020
Subgenre: Horror, Dark Fantasy
About The Cipher:
"Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." When a strange hole materializes in a storage room, would-be poet Nicholas and his feral lover Nakota allow their curiosity to lead them into the depths of terror. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says, "We're not." But no one is in control, and their experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.
Excerpt:
One
Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her
ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in
my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift-shop chair, the
window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive,
giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of
this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped
full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In
space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny
teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most
people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath
them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be
the first to admit it.
She lit a cigarette. She was the only one of my friends who still
smoked, without defiance or a guilty flourish, smoked like she
breathed but not as often. Black cigarettes, and sweetened mineral
water. “So. You gonna touch it today?”
“No.”
Another unsmile. “Wiener.” I shrugged. “Not really.” “Nicholas
Wiener.”
So I didn’t answer her. Back to the kitchen. Get your own mineral
water. The beer was almost too cold, it hurt going down. When I
came back to the living room, what passed for it—big windows, small
floor space, couch, bed and bad chair—she smiled at me, the real
thing this time. Sometimes I thought I was the only one who ever
saw that she was beautiful, who ever had. God knows there wasn’t
much, but I had eyes for it all.
“Let’s go look at it,” she said.
The one argument there was no resisting. Quietly, we had learned to
do it quietly, down the stairs, turn right on the first landing
(second floor to you), past the new graffiti that advised LEESA IS
A HORE (no phone number, naturally; thanks a lot assholes) and the
unhealthy patina of aging slurs, down the hall to what seemed,
might be, some sort of storage room. Detergent bottles, tools, when
you opened the door, jumble of crap on the floor, and beyond that a
place, a space, the dust around it pale and easily dispersed.
Behold the Funhole.
“Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She
knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms,
closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she
could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t
feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her,
to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the
unspeakable?
Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black.
Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the
sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely,
the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking
wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to
her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it
again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did,
straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into
poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning,
when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off
to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22 and me late again for the
video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day
maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she
wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re
any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long
that the real trick becomes thinking straight.
Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.”
I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made
the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can
guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely
identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell
forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I
couldn’t forget something that weird.
For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?”
And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.”
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About Kathe Koja:
Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and
produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a
rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres,
and her books have won awards, been translated, and optioned for
film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally.
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About Meerkat Press:
Meerkat Press is an independent publisher committed to finding and
publishing exceptional, irresistible, unforgettable fiction. And despite
the previous sentence, we frown on overuse of adjectives and adverbs in
submissions. *smile*
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