A Different Darkness and Other Abominations

by Luigi Musolino, Brian Evenson

Genres: Short Stories; Horror

Synopsis

The highly original and truly terrifying folk horror of Italy’s Luigi Musolino was introduced to an international audience in the acclaimed The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now at last an entire volume of the author’s best work – eight stories and three novellas – is available in English for the first time.

In ‘Lactic Acid’, a jogger takes an unfamiliar shortcut and quickly finds himself trapped in a nightmare from which there may be no escape. In ‘Uironda’, a strange urban legend overheard at a rest stop becomes a horrifying reality for one truck driver. In ‘The Carnival of the Stag Man’, a reporter sent to cover a village carnival will learn the terrible truth behind its origins when he encounters an ancient divinity in the woods. And in the title novella, after a little girl vanishes in a supermarket, her parents find a strange solace when they discover a bottomless pit in their basement from which her laughter seems to echo – but the abyss’s shimmering darkness is not what it seems . . .

Musolino’s tales, set among the plains and mountains of his native Piedmont, are uniquely Italian, but the darkness he probes is universal. As Brian Evenson writes in the introduction, ‘Musolino has a strong and original voice and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places. Rather than blood or gore, he’s ultimately interested in what’s truly terrifying: the vertiginous darkness that threatens to open up and swallow us. A darkness that calls to us, calls to us, until we can’t help but answer and stumble toward it.’

‘Luigi Musolino enters the territories of superstition and folklore knowing that fairy tales are always terrible and legends hide unspeakable truths. Small towns, supermarkets, apartments, schools, or farms: when horror touches reality, it becomes the only thing that exists. These stories have a distinctly European feel: there’s a sense of old but not quite forgotten rituals, a touch of Pan and the deities that still linger behind the haunted fields and forests.’—Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

‘Musolino will catch you in the meshes of his nightmarish landscapes and paranoid scenarios, his engrossing stories and powerful endings. He’s the real thing.’—Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student

‘An experience worthy of David Cronenberg, a sick and monstrous universe where authors like Barker and Ligotti would feel right at home.’—Nicola Lombardi, author of The Gypsy Spiders

 

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Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Valancourt Books

Print pages: 332

Sample

Lactic Acid

 It was five-thirty in the afternoon.

Friday afternoon.

Sergio Bandini walked into his apartment and dropped his laptop bag on the couch, whistling a random tune.

Made it through another week. Tired, but everything’s going great. Turning thirty-two tomorrow. And a good meal tonight, he thought, pulling his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans.

He scrolled through his contacts, still whistling the same tune through half-closed lips, and called Chiara. His girlfriend’s voice answered after the third ring.

‘Hey there. Home already?’

‘Hi, yeah, just got here. How about you? Still at the office?’ replied Sergio, walking over to the window and casting a glance at Via Martiri della Libertà and the outline of Orlasco’s bell tower and the evening that was starting to take over the town’s cerulean ceiling.

‘Yes, still here for a while. Listen, let’s just meet at your parents’ house, okay? I’ll go straight there when I leave work, I won’t stop by home first. I have so much to do that I’ll be here till at least seven, and I’ve got your present here with me to give you tonight . . .’

‘Okay, sure thing, we’ll meet at my parents’ place,’ he cut her off, laughing. Sometimes Chiara had a tendency to ramble. ‘Listen, I’m going to go for a run. Just a quick one, five, six kilometers. Then I won’t feel so guilty about pigging out.’

She responded with a loud laugh. ‘Come on, it’s your birthday tomorrow. It’s okay to cheat now and then.’

‘I know, but I really feel like a quick jog. You know, it helps me to unwind, to relax.’

‘Yeah, I know, it’s like a drug, etc., etc.,’ Chiara mocked him, and he replied by doing his impression of her, the way only lovers can.

‘Okay, baby, I’m off now or I’ll be late. I’ll run, shower, and we’ll meet at my parents’ a little after seven, all right?’

‘Go on, Sergio, I’ll see you later. And let’s hope your mother made tiramisu.’

‘Right. Bye.’

‘Sergio?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I love you.’

‘M-me too,’ he replied, more hesitantly than he meant to. Chiara rarely said those three simple words. She had caught him off guard, like always. And it made him feel damned good every time.

He heard the click of the call being disconnected. He dropped his phone on the couch by the computer, tried to remember what tune he had just been whistling, and peered out the living room window.

Mid-October, but the days were still warm. He could just wear shorts and a hoodie. The dark and the cold wouldn’t chase away the warmth and sunlight before seven. He had plenty of time for a quick run.

He got dressed, slipping on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and a faded Miami Dolphins hoodie. MP3 player, smart watch to keep track of his distance and average speed. He was ready. He jumped into his sneakers and dashed into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He always did that before a run. A kind of ritual.

He had started running a couple of years earlier, after noticing he could no longer make it up the stairs without coughing and shortness of breath. And he only lived on the second floor.

An overly sedentary lifestyle, a desk job, an inborn inclination for the sin of gluttony, for having one too many at times, and for generally being lazy, all of that had made him pack on quite a few kilos.

Never been the athletic type, he thought with a smile, fastening the watch strap around his wrist.

His first outing as a DIY athlete had been a disaster.

A pair of extremely thin-soled shoes, a baggy jumpsuit, and off he’d gone into Orlasco’s countryside. Kilometers of unpaved roads running like gashes through the cornfields, mule tracks covered in grass and dust, paths leading to brooks and irrigation canals, practically shrines for all the couples in and around Orlasco looking for a romantic spot. He had been living in that sleepy village for two years but had never ventured outside the residential area. It was a whole other world.

After about a kilometer at a fairly slow pace he had felt a stitch in his right side but had kept on running, thinking It’ll pass. After another five hundred meters the sting in his ribs had become a throbbing pain in the center of his chest. He had stopped, bathed in sweat.

He had walked home with his hands on his hips, his head tilted back, his mouth open wide and gasping for air. When he had recovered a little he cursed himself for giving up so easily, for giving in to the pain, and had returned home, head bowed, crestfallen.

When he’d told Chiara about his first experience with exercising, in a tone halfway between comical and dramatic, she had laughed until she cried.

He didn’t give up. He kept at it, asking friends for advice, reading tips online, and buying himself proper gear – decent shoes, some breathable T-shirts, shorts (pants for winter evenings), a smart watch. He ran at least three days a week after work, and gradually he had found that consistency was the only way to improve his times and his physical condition.

A little at a time, I’ve just got to take it slow, he told himself, and eventually he had developed a taste for it.

Then, one fateful day, after about two months of training, he had managed to cover ten kilometers in under an hour. It was silly, but he had gotten so emotional that he almost cried, as if he had reached some kind of milestone.

He had never stopped since. He had lost ten kilos, he felt fit, in shape at last, and now he was training for his first half marathon. Twenty-one kilometers of suffering and sweat and swearing, but it was too soon to think about that. He still had two more months of training to go.

Sergio grabbed his keys from the coffee table and walked downstairs, putting on his headphones as he went. Lingering for a moment on the doorstep of the building, he cast an admiring glance at the sky. On the horizon the Alps showed off all their majesty, casting sharp shadows on the surrounding countryside. Beyond Monte Viso, some vaporous, ragged, grayish clouds were starting to appear. The sun highlighted their contours, brushing them with beautiful hues.

Walking slowly, Sergio reached his personal starting point – a paved country road which after a few hundred meters turned into a winding dirt path – and spent a few minutes stretching.

He glanced at the bell tower soaring above his head, its red bricks corroded by moss and pigeon droppings.

He started the timer on his smart watch, hopped in place a couple of times, then began to run. A flock of herons accompanied him for the first hundred meters.

He had been running for about ten minutes and had barely covered one and a half kilometers. Way below his usual pace.

He realized he wasn’t in form today. Stiff legs, shortness of breath, aching in his shins and calves. It happened sometimes. It was perhaps one of the things he liked most about running, its unpredictability. He might leave home feeling like a twenty-­something athlete and run like shit, or he might feel like crap and beat his best time ever. It depended on a number of factors. Nutrition, sleep, stress. Not that he worried that much about it. He was a dabbler, an amateur; he liked running but didn’t see the need to deprive himself of the pleasure of a hearty dinner, a drinking binge, a few cigarettes.

He sped up a little, glancing distractedly at the rows of poplars marching alongside him. Tangles of leaves and branches casting weary shadows over the red clay soil of the fields. In the distance he made out the dark shapes of some farmsteads, old residences belonging to those few residents of Orlasco who still practiced farming.

The MP3 player served up an old Rage Against the Machine track whose name he didn’t remember. The kind of song that energized you. Sweat was starting to run down his forehead and his chest, gluing his sweatshirt to his nipples and back. A capricious gust of wind rustled through the cornfields and surged towards the road, smacking against his clammy face. He slowed down.

His route was always the same. An almost perfect circle that started at the bell tower and ended up near the dam of an old irrigation canal a few hundred meters from home. He turned right, and out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed the massive outline of the bell tower, which had been behind him until then. His first few times out, when he was still unfamiliar with the labyrinth of narrow lanes cutting through the countryside, it had been a very helpful reference point.

He looked at his watch. Three kilometers in seventeen minutes, twelve seconds. In a little less than twenty minutes he would be back home under a jet of steaming-hot water.

Come on. Move your ass. What are you, a wuss? A real man should be able to do a kilometer in under five minutes thirty, he spurred himself on, angrily. He always did that, a macho, slightly silly way of pushing himself to do better, not to give up. It usually worked.

Not that night.

He had almost reached the turn that would lead to the finish line when he noticed a narrow path that cut across a huge, uncultivated meadow, possibly fallow land some farmer was using as a pasture for his sheep. He had seen it before, sure, but he had never paid any attention to it. It ran parallel to his preestablished route, the usual road, which glimmered a hundred meters farther on, its sandy dust sparkling in the sun that was now skimming over the mountain tops. Surely this path also went towards the last leg of his route, the final stretch of dirt road leading to the little dam.

Not knowing why, Sergio made a sudden swerve and took it, panting. He was tired, maybe he hoped it would get him home quicker, a shortcut, a scursa, as he sometimes liked to say in his dialect.

His MP3 player was playing Pink Floyd’s ‘Run Like Hell’.

He thought about Chiara, about his parents waiting for him to get there so they could celebrate his birthday, and the image of his mother sprang to his mind, setting the table, her makeup on, her hair pulled back behind the nape of her neck; pretty, a little sad.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and racked up another three hundred meters, pumping his legs like pistons. The lane was only slightly wider than a tractor and was dotted with potholes and piles of gravel. There was a strip of green running through its center, where a hodgepodge of grass, noxious weeds, and withered snapdragons grew. Sergio knew it couldn’t go on for more than five or six hundred meters before opening out onto the main road.

Sergio spat a whitish glob into the grass as he looked at the anorexic trees lining the road. Beeches. The further he went the denser they got, their autumn-stripped branches reaching towards him like imploring, emaciated arms. He was forced to move from one side of the road to the other a couple of times to avoid running into them. He sped up. The smart watch showed an average pace of five minutes twenty per kilometer. Good.

He took his eyes off the display and glanced to the right. In the distance, a thick cluster of oaks, their dark green foliage bent by a strong wind. They looked like huge balls of coagulated, rancid cotton candy. They swayed above the corrugated roof of an old farmhouse, its shingles twisted by age and inclement weather. The farmhouse gave off an unpleasant aura, not sinister, but rather a sense of abandonment and desolation that seemed to exude from the image itself, from the angle of the light, from the shadows cast by the columns of the barn.

He pondered. I’ve never noticed those trees before. Or that building, for that matter.

He picked up the pace, stretching his legs in longer strides. The autumn breeze, pleasant until a few minutes ago, was turning into a crisp, almost cold wind. The clouds had now climbed over the Alps, like an army of ashen, elusive warriors, hiding the sharp tooth of Monte Viso and the sun, whose rays nonetheless still managed to light up the plains.

He couldn’t be more than a kilometer or so away from the finish line, he was heading towards the final sprint.

A sticky patina of sweat covered his back and sides, flowing in little streams towards his navel.

‘Speed up, come on,’ he hissed between his teeth, trying to keep his breathing under control.

The beeches grew denser, more curved, forming a natural tunnel that was dark and humid; only for a few meters, then they thinned out, letting the last rays of daylight filter through. For a moment the sudden transition from shade to light blinded him and he had to squint to see his footing.

Further on, where the trees gave way to withered cornstalks, Sergio was able to make out the end of the dirt road as well as the street running parallel to it.

Here we are, the home stretch.

He reached it, then turned right and suddenly realized something was out of place. At first he couldn’t tell what was bothering him. Then he realized.

He had run that last stretch dozens and dozens of times, and the bell tower had always been visible from there.

Not now.

He could make out the shabby farmhouse and the oaks that he had found slightly unsettling, the glimpse of landscape he had never seen before; logically, the belfry had to be more or less on the hypothetical line between himself and the house, only set back a little.

But the tower wasn’t there. From where he was standing he should have been able to see it, and yet it wasn’t there. As if the ground had chewed it up, swallowed it, digested it.

‘Fuck,’ he cursed himself and went on running in place, spinning around in search of the tower, or any reference point.

He noticed a garden fence ahead of him, yes, he knew that fence, there were usually a couple of growling furballs carrying on behind it. The dogs weren’t there, but it was the right direction, no doubt about it. Wasn’t it? Was he sure?

Going a different way was a dumbshit move, he thought, and for a moment he thought about retracing his steps, taking the beech-lined path in reverse and returning along the road he had taken dozens of times, just to be sure, to be safe. But that would mean extending his run by at least two or three more kilometers, and his birthday dinner would be starting in an hour.

He kept on running, more slowly, passing a little wooden bridge over a creek – another confirmation, he had crossed that creek before – and, his heart skipping a beat, he caught a glimpse of the bell tower’s roof to his right. He breathed a sigh of relief and rushed homewards, spurred on by adrenaline and the thought of a lavish meal, unable to admit to himself that the tower seemed shifted to the right, too far to the right compared to its usual position.

The sky was a slab of bluish marble, the clouds running fast and compact, the closed ranks of an exterminating army.

The dirt track turned to the right and Sergio Bandini slackened his pace, spitting in the dust. He took off his headphones, turned off the MP3 player and slid it in his pocket.

The road should have made a wide turn to the left. Instead, it continued in the opposite direction, downhill, and then dissolved in a meadow dominated by the sparse foliage of a poplar grove. The bell tower was behind him again.

‘Damn!’ he cursed aloud, and the word seemed to echo through the countryside in discordant tones.

The road ended there, in the shade of the poplars. Sergio slowed his pace until he stopped, doubled over, his hands on his thighs and panting.

His apartment was in the opposite direction, towards the bell tower. He kicked himself for being stupid, convinced now that he had to turn back. He had no other choice.

He turned on his heels and resumed jogging at a slow pace. Three, four hundred meters at most, and he would come to the bridge, and then right after that he would be back to the supposed shortcut flanked by beech trees, the path that had led him to a dead end.

When his watch display told him he had run back a whole kilometer and he still hadn’t encountered a creek or pathway, Sergio started to get worried.

It was as if some spiteful god had torn a section of road from somewhere and forcibly stuck it onto his route, like one of those old puzzles made up of a few interchangeable pieces that form a coherent picture no matter in which order you put them together.

He wanted to get back home. It was already six-thirty, the afternoon was giving way to the evening. His shadow, barely visible, stretched on the ground like a scrawny and very tall mannequin.

It was getting dark.

And silence reigned absolute.

Even the wind seemed to have lost its voice. An incessant wind that stirred the grass and stroked the clouds, which were growing thicker, darker, more menacing.

A croaking raven, a chirping cicada, the distant rumble of a tractor would have been a comfort. He heard nothing but his own increasingly labored breathing and the blood pounding in his temples with the roar of a gushing river.

He stopped again, trying to glimpse a familiar tree, a farmhouse, a farmer stooping in the fields whom he could ask for directions.

But now the road stretched out in front of him all the way to the horizon. It seemed to have no end. No crossroads. No turns. Only that strip of dust and gravel and empty fields and wisps of misty fog slowly rising from the ground. He squinted, turned in a complete circle, and when he saw the bell tower he put his hand over his mouth.

It was impossible. It was too far away. A barely discernible black stump silhouetted against the sky, a lopsided rocket out of a Jules Verne novel. How far off was it? Seven, eight kilo­meters? It didn’t make any sense.

Sergio looked at his watch. He had run almost eleven kilometers.

No. It didn’t add up. It was as if time and space had decided to follow their own very personal path.

A pain in his chest.

‘Good God,’ he mumbled, and he realized his lips were coated in sticky, whitish drool. It reminded him of those fat, slimy snails that swarmed onto sidewalks after an autumn rainstorm. He closed his eyes and took two deep breaths.

They were waiting for him. ...