The Salt Grows Heavy E-Book

Cassandra Khaw

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 127

Beschreibung

A sensuous and strange horror novella full of creeping dread and delicious gore, twisting mermaid myths into something sharp, dangerous, and hungry, for fans of Christina Henry, Carmen Maria Machado and Eric LaRocca. After the murder of her husband and the fall of his empire, a mermaid and her plague doctor companion escape into the wilderness. Deep in the woods, they stumble across a village where children hunt each other for sport, sacrificing one of their own at the behest of three surgeons they call "the saints." These saints play god with their magic, harvesting the best bits of the children for themselves and piecing the sacrifices back together again. To save the children from their fates, the plague doctor must confront their past, and the mermaid must embrace the darkest parts of her true nature.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for The Salt Grows Heavy

Praise for Nothing but Blackened Teeth

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

I: The First Night

II: The Second Night

III: The Third Night

IV: Epilogue

And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE SALT GROWS HEAVY

“A feverishly gory, grotesquely beautiful and baroque fairy-tale-meets-love-sonnet. Cassandra Khaw’s imagination is limitless.”

PAUL TREMBLAY, AUTHOR OFTHE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLDANDA HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS

“Cassandra Khaw’s writing is never more lyrical than when they’re describing the knife in your heart. The bones of a fairy tale sunk deep in a charnel house of descriptive prose, an elegant confection with a blood-soaked core. I devoured it in one sitting.”

T. KINGFISHER, MULTI-AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OFWHAT MOVES THE DEADANDNETTLE & BONE

“Khaw uses poetically beautiful words to tear open your chest and gnaw on your ribs in this needle-sharp novella.”

KAARON WARREN, AUTHOR OFSLIGHTSANDTHE GRIEF HOLE

“Cassandra Khaw’s writing is immaculate, with every word carefully chosen for maximum impact.The Salt Grows Heavyis a truly mesmerizing story and one of the finest works of horror and dark fantasy I have ever read, dripping with a gruesome and disquieting passion.”

GRIMDARK MAGAZINE

“Cassandra Khaw’s steely prose is matched only by the inventiveness of their imagination.The Salt Grows Heavy demonstrates their continuing mastery of the novella form with a story Angela Carter would be jealous to have written.”

JOHN LANGAN, AUTHOR OFCORPSEMOUTH AND OTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

“A brutal and deadly romp whose language is as sharp and glittery as a scalpel made of ice. Strange and compelling,The Salt Grows Heavy is unlike anything else out there, a dark spell with needle-like teeth.”

BRIAN EVENSON, AUTHOR OFTHE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELLANDSONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD

PRAISE FOR NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH

“Brutally delicious! Khaw is a master of teasing your senses, and then terrorizing them!”

N.K. JEMISIN, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OFTHE FIFTH SEASON

“This is a glorious poem, a slow-motion collapse leading to the inevitable haunting. It is beautiful and it is brutal and it is heartbroken. Absolutely recommended.”

SEANAN MCGUIRE, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OFEVERY HEART A DOORWAY

“Khaw’s tale seems to come at you straight, setting up your story expectations, but then twists the knife at the last minute, leaving you reeling, but wanting more.”

RICHARD KADREY, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SANDMAN SLIM SERIES

“Khaw’s got a sterling premise, enduring lore, and the fresh talent to voice it.”

JOSH MALERMAN, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OFBIRD BOX

“Reading Cassandra Khaw is akin to watching a nightmare ballet, full of beauty and elegance, pain and fragility, and breathless terror.Nothing but Blackened Teeth is mesmerizing. Don’t miss it!”

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OFARARATANDRED HANDS

“Khaw is a prose wizard who has quickly become an auto-buy for me. This story of a wedding at a malevolent manor is as unexpected and delightful as their poetic approach to horror, and I loved every sharp, delicious twist of it.”

KEVIN HEARNE, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES

“This is Hill House for this century, this is Belasco House with people we’ve known since third grade, and it’s got a smile so wicked you might just have to grin along with it. I know I did.”

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLING AUTHOR OFTHE ONLY GOOD INDIANSANDMY HEART IS A CHAINSAW

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The Salt Grows Heavy

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803363424

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803363431

Abominable Book Club edition: 9781803365053

Forbidden Planet edition: 9781803365060

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan hardback edition: May 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Zoe Khaw Joo Ee 2023

“And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice” first appeared in The Dark Magazine, Issue 18 © 2016 by Zoe Khaw Joo Ee Published by arrangement with Tor Nightfire, an imprint of Tor Publishing Group, LLC.

All Rights Reserved.

Zoe Khaw Joo Ee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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 written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Not for sale within the United States of America, its territories and dependencies, the Republic of the Philippines and Canada.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Jeff Solomon,

this is what you get for not giving up on me

I

The First Night

Where are you going?”

I pause. In the penumbra, the fading dusk gorgeted by coral and gold, you could be forgiven for mistaking the ruined house a ribcage, the roof its tent of ragged skin. The foundation, at a careless look, could pass for bones, the door for a mouth, the chimney a finger crooked at the sky, or at a wife who would not be a savior.

Ash sleets from the firmament in soft handfuls of black, gathering in gauzy drifts around my ankles. The sky is ink and seething murk, whispering secrets to itself, the clouds snarled like long, dark hair. I glance into the house. Two of my daughters look back, eyes shining. They are seated astride a twitching form, its limbs too small to have belonged to an adult. Like cats, they croon to one another even as they nibble their fins and fingertips clean. My breath snags. Only days old but already, they are the best of their parents. They have their father’s full lips, his blue eyes, his supple sun-warmed skin.

And they have my teeth, my deepwater hair, like the lures of the anglerfish spun into thick coils. Nothing sticks to those radiant strands, no amount of gore or mud. Which is fortunate, given how messily my offspring eat.

One fishes a gnawed-down fingerbone from her maw, flicks it to the ground. The other pounces and for a moment, I glimpse the fair circle of their victim’s face; its eyes gouged, its cheeks flensed, its skull emptied of sweetbreads. Mermaids—especially those born half-prince—leave nothing to waste.

“Of course. I forgot. You can’t speak. My apologies.”

I look back. The plague doctor flutters a hand, voice strange behind their mask. Today, they are dressed most austerely: plain black robes; a broad-brimmed hat; the half-skull of a vulture, carefully bleached, unornamented save for a single hieroglyph embossing its brow. Alone of my husband’s people, what few remain after the apocalypse of my children’s hunger, the plague doctor is not afraid. Has not ever been afraid. “Do you know where you’re going?”

I consider the question. I’d toyed with the idea of going home. In my dreams, I still swim that soundless black, still travel its eddies of salt and cold nothing. My sisters are alive in these nocturnal fantasies: colorless, resplendent, their hair floating like a frothing of wedding veils.

But those are just baseless images pieced together by the unconscious, invoked by a longing that has since had time to turn septic. I have been on dry land for too long; the depths would devour me the way they would any creature of the air.

“Well?” The plague doctor steps closer, fearless. Eyes green as the humid, hated summer.

I shrug.

To my astonishment, they laugh.

“Such a pair we make. I don’t know what I’m going to do either, what with the kingdom being eaten to nothing.” The look they slide me—heavy-lidded and coquettish—is so audacious that I soundlessly laugh in spite of myself. “If you don’t know where you’re going, do you at least know what you plan to do?”

I shrug again. Over the snow-gilded mountains, I know there are kingdoms without number, pastoral and beautiful, each ruled by another prince or king, another czar and his court of calm-eyed lackeys. Another man like my husband: beautiful and terrible and cocksure in the magic he’d thieved from his bride.

There. I could go there, perhaps. Find another sovereign who’d fish a mute from the waters, who’d marry her, bed her, murder her sisters for a superstition, and then pry the teeth from her gums for the sake of caution. I could find one of those again, maybe, and wait until my daughters come to gnaw his country down to its bones.

As though conscious of my musings, the plague doctor nods, their voice hollowed by the fluted bone. Even after all this time, I cannot tell whether they are male, female, neither, both, some gradient wicking between definitions. “And you shall know her by the trail of dead.”

A harpy phrase. I smile at the music of it.

“How do you feel about company?”

I cock my head.

“A doctor is always useful,” they tell me, fox-sly. “What do you say?”

I say nothing, of course. My husband cut the tongue from me when he discovered I was pregnant; braised it with five-spice and saffron before feeding me the tender slivers. Animal meat was forbidden, but assisted autosarcophagy, his soothsayer had crooned, would ensure pliance.

But I smile, nonetheless, and it is answer enough for my new companion.

* * *

We burned the kingdom to cinders. Pillars of choking smoke rose from the bodies we’d heaped into neat stacks, stinking fattily, saltily of crisping pork. The plague doctor had insisted. To leave the bodies as they were was to invite disease, an epidemic that would rot the soil, infect the waters.

“What is the point of revenge if you can’t enjoy it?” The plague doctor chuckled as they led me and my chocolate-stippled horse—my husband’s last gift before our children made a feast of him: a sullen gelding who loathed him as much as I did—from the smoldering ruins.

I offered no reply and instead watched the smoke, like warnings of what would be.

* * *

In winter, as in the spring, the taiga is beautiful. Pine trees and white spruce scrape at the firmament, skeining the snow in strange patterns. There are smaller plants too, aspen and alder and birch, even colonies of withered ferns. Occasionally, I catch sight of wolves in the tree line, shark-sleek and grey; of bobcats glaring yellow-eyed from some desecrated barrow; of foxes, their muzzles sodden and dripping with red.

The plague doctor’s breath plumes through the air as we walk. Mine does not. Though I hold no particular affection for it, the cold has never been a thing I fear, a fact that once amused my husband’s court to no end. They made me promenade through the winter, my naked skin irridescing with frost. Still, my companion insists on swaddling me in fur: woolly gloves and a bearskin coat of unusual pallor.

“It would look strange if you weren’t dressed for the weather,” the plague doctor says in way of explanation as I fondle my gifts, the lining smelling of musk and frankincense oil. The fur itself is almost satiny, a delight to massage between my fingers. “People would ask questions.”

I scan the wilderness. There is no one but the hares and the badgers here, nothing but the trees and the quiet, the hawks and the wights—the unsleeping dead, burning forever, unable to rest—pacing spindle-limbed through the gloom. If there are men concealed in the boughs, they harbor no interest in our acquaintance. For fear of my plague doctor, perhaps.

Or me.

The plague doctor laughs, arsenic-sharp, a bark of a noise, before crunching into a bright red apple. “A stranger is an easy target, easier still when they are as strange as you. If you had believed our former kingdom cruel, a place of treachery, let me assure you that it was the finest of its neighbours. The rest of them—”

Something of a smile emerges, a private amusement.

“Anyway. Yes. The furs should help. At least until you smile. Your teeth will give us away immediately,” the plague doctor murmurs as they chew, their voice softer, kinder. “I’m surprised that your tongue didn’t grow back with them.”

I shrug. The physiology of my species is protean, unmetered by logic. When we breed with angels, our children accrete feathers. When we lay with hurricanes, we birth storms, wind-spirits with the voices of dead sailors. A thousand mythologies contributed to my conception. Who can say which of them was responsible for this miracle? I stroke the stump of my tongue—enough has regrown so that I might separate bitterness from salt, might savor the taste of muscle, briefly seared—over my back teeth, tracing the needle-thin growths, and shrug again, more empathically than before.

In answer, the plague doctor guffaws, a vulpine sound this time. There is no more conversation after that. We stop, once or thrice, to attend to the little shrines that dot the woods, half buried in the snow. Wax clogs their hearts like colored tendons, the corpses of a thousand candles. Food rots without, untouched by the forest.

“I don’t believe in souls,” the plague doctor whispers at one point, voice husked, and I suspect the words are intended for someone else, sometime else, a place and a moment as distant from the present as I am from the sea. They extract a feather—black as pitch save for its meridian of fire—from a satchel and place it atop the melted tallow. “But just in case: a feather to help them fly home.”

Theirs is the only feather amidst the despoiled charcuterie, the mould-spotted breads. I do not ask why, or what, or how the plague doctor expects the spirit to ascend on a single plume of ebony. Even if I had the voice to do so, I would not have. This is not my grief to split from throat to belly, not my past to reconstruct from viscera and ice.

And besides, who am I to speak on this? All of my kind are just souls with a cloak of skin and scales, barely tethered to the act of living.