All Your Friends are Here

by M. Shaw

Genres: Short Stories; Horror

Synopsis

“Explores the unnerving and grotesque with glee. Shaw’s style suits the stories like a glove.”

• Publishers Weekly

“Unforgettable, ominous, and provocative. Shaw is a voice to watch in Weird fiction.”

• Library Journal, starred review

“A surreal reading experience, humorous and creepy in equal measure. An exciting new voice [that] delivers a fresh take on horror and will appeal to fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, and Jason Pargin.”

• Booklist

Just your usual, run-of-the-mill assortment of New Weird Lit stories about car-vampires; fascist deer; memory-devouring tree gods; and the torment matrix; from Wonderland Award-winning author M.Shaw (One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve).

At last we can confirm what you’ve always dreamed of: All your friends are here!

Why leave your apartment ever again? All your friends are here.

Why go to outer space? All your friends are here.

Why grow, or dream? Why take that vacation you’ve been saving up for? Why set yourself free?

All your friends are here.

Contains a novelette written especially for this collection, Ready Player (n+1).

“Dark elegies of loneliness and dissolution set in a world left dangling at the end of history. As an enquirer into the question of what it means to be human, M. Shaw is second to none.”

• Nadia Bulkin, She Said Destroy

“Wonderfully Weird, bizarro horror with a deeply resonant, poetic sensibility and an itch-under-your-skin vibe that just won't quit.”

• Michael Allen Rose, Jurassichrist

"There is not a story in this collection that doesn’t hit like a heroic dose of acid straight to your cerebellum. Unhinged in the best possible way."

• Danger Slater, Starlet and House of Rot

 

Read more

Release date: December 5, 2024

Publisher: Tenebrous Press

Print pages: 223

Sample

ROOTS IN THE GROUND

THE SUN MUST have been down about an hour, but we were nowhere near giving up. We held the line, swept the mountain sector by sector, sucking in breath after breath of frigid, pine-scented air and expelling it, warm, bearing the missing hiker’s name.

We all had work the next day, but October was still shoulder season, so at least there wouldn’t be tourists pounding on the door of every business in town first thing. The hiker was an out-of-towner. None of us were clued into what their business was here. They hadn’t brought skis or a mountain bike, neither of which would be of much use that time of year anyway. They’d come alone. If Carla Jeffries, who owned the B&B, hadn’t been such a busybody, then we might never have known they were gone.

The group I was with swept uphill along the south ridge. The ridge flattened out halfway to the peak, but the trees only got thicker from there to the treeline. It was in that dense part of the woods that someone’s flashlight beam caught a human shape. Janice blew the whistle to call a halt, and we all ran toward the sound. When I reached the spot, we were looking at the backside of a fully naked man, pressed against the trunk of a cottonwood tree. At first, we assumed it was the hiker, but then our lights found another person in a similarly compromised position. Then another, and another, and another. There were fourteen, at my count, and not a scrap of clothing on a single one.

Janice got on the radio, while the rest of us stood speechless and staring, and told the other teams that the whistle had been a false alarm. Probably for the best. Some of them included high school kids.

One by one, the naked men and women noticed our presence and turned to face us. Their fronts were covered with dirt, and quite a few freely bleeding cuts and scrapes.

“Who’s got the first aid kit?” I called out. No one responded, but, to be fair, no one had probably expected me to volunteer for the search party. I hadn’t exactly been high-functioning for the past twenty years, ever since my wife died and our little Hannah, five at the time, started spending more time with her imaginary friend than her drunk, depressed dad who talked about her dead mom nonstop. Talked to her dead mom, on the worst days. But this was the year I’d finally convinced Hannah to come back from the west coast for a Thanksgiving visit, and I guess that lit a fire in me when it came to finding lost people. Still, it was my fourth or fifth recovery attempt, so I couldn’t blame anyone for being a little wary.

One of the naked men approached us. The other . . . nudists, I guess, kept their eyes so focused on him that it almost looked like they didn’t see us at all. The man wasn’t familiar, certainly not from town. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

Personally, I wasn’t sure it was even advisable to talk to these people, much less answer their questions. Being part of a search party was an unusual enough situation; throw in whatever this was, and a guy could be forgiven for not knowing what to do.

“We’re looking for a lost hiker,” said Janice.

“I see,” said the naked man. “Well, none of us is a lost hiker.”

“And what are you

doing out here?” said Janice.

“Do you maybe want to put some clothes on?” Dave Cleary added.

The naked man ignored Dave. “If it’s any of your business, we were in the middle of an orgy.”

“Jeez Louise,” said Dave. Most of us were saying something to that effect, but Dave was standing closest to me.

“An orgy,” said Janice.

“Roots in the ground,” said the naked man, as if this clarified anything.

I swept my flashlight beam between the bodies present. Most were middle age, and looked exactly like the kind of people you’d expect to populate a town like ours, though none of them did. “I don’t recognize any of you,” I said.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said the naked man who, at least, was willing to acknowledge that I had said anything. “Look, your hiker isn’t here, so . . . ” He shrugged, hands held palm-up, an almost cartoonish gesture. “Would you mind?”

“Just a moment,” said Janice, signaling for us clothed people to huddle up together.

Anne Borden spoke first. “He did say they were having an orgy, right?”

“It’s below freezing out here,” said Dave.

“Their nipples’ve gotta be hard enough to cut glass,” said Ted Furrier.

“Thank you, Ted,” said Janice, “thank you for that contribution. Anybody here replacing a windowpane tonight?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “How do y’all suggest we handle this? I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but if we leave them here, they’ll be a dozen popsicles covered in infected gashes by morning.”

“Something’s not right about this,” said Ted. “That’s all I’m saying.”

A few of us cleared our throats. There was a whole host of not-right-here things about this, but what could we do? Even if they wanted our help, there were only three survival blankets in the first aid kit.

“Fuck it,” said Dave, “why don’t we leave ‘em? Freezing or not, I don’t want nothin’ to do with whatever this is. I mean, not that I’m well acquainted with these things, but doesn’t an orgy normally involve . . . you know . . . ” He made an O with his thumb and forefinger, then poked his other forefinger through the hole.

“Fucking!” said Ted. “Exactly! What kind of orgy is this? They’re just rubbing themselves on the trees, looks like.”

“The way they’re all scratched up,” said Dave. “They trying to diddle the trees?”

I pointed my flashlight back toward the nudists, guessing maybe I could do some forensic shit on their wounds—I’m not a CSI, I just watch too much TV. “Hold up,” I said, “look.”

Our lights lit the trees. Fourteen naked bodies had been reduced to just a few stragglers, weaving between the trees away from us, up the slope.

“I guess that’s that,” said Dave.

Ted must not have been listening, because he took off after the fleeing nudists, followed by Anne and a few others.

“Do not—” said Janice. “Hey! Hey! Fuckin’ hell.”

“Good riddance, I say,” said Dave. “I mean the weirdos, not our folks.”

“Should we follow?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” said Janice. “We stick with the plan, keep sweeping our grid. They’re in front of us, so eventually either we’ll run into them, or another team will. Provided no one else wants to do anything astonishingly stupid.”

We re-formed the line, spaced appropriately farther apart to account for the deserters. We kept calling for the missing hiker, but it’s safe to say that was no longer the first thing on my mind. I kept thinking about the way they’d all stood there, stark naked and bleeding in the cold, like they weren’t the least bit uncomfortable. As we poked through the woods, I kept looking for any discarded garments left behind, but never saw a single one. Had they somehow grabbed all their clothes as they ran, or had they never had them? Either way, where

 the hell had they come from, and where the hell were they going?

All I knew for sure was how I felt, which was that I wanted to get myself off that mountain and not look back. I told myself it was just my old chickenshit depression trying to give me an excuse to cloister myself at home and avoid the world, and that I should push on like an adult instead. Despite what the horror movies of the 1970s would have us believe, a bunch of naked hippies in the woods probably aren’t planning a Satanic murder party, no matter how scary they look.

I tried to go back to thinking about Hannah, how I’d tell this story to her in a few weeks. Oddly enough, I found this making me feel more uneasy, not less.

I’d lost track of how much time had passed when Dave tripped on a root and busted his nose. Janice called a halt so we could check him out, stick some gauze in his nostrils and bandage his ankle.

“How you feeling?” I asked him, pressing the ends of a strip of surgical tape to his cheekbones.

“Little dizzy,” he said. Dave was in pretty good shape for his age, but still forging well into his sixties. Thankfully he didn’t object when Janice drew the line and said they wouldn’t continue the search until he headed back to town.

“You know the way?” she said.

Dave mumbled something that might have been yeah, but was really more like “nyeh,” which just as easily could have been nah.

“I’ll make sure he gets there okay,” I said.

“Oh come on,” said Dave, shooting me a knitted-brows look that strongly implied, Seriously? You of all people are going to look after me? “You stick with the group, I’ll do fine on my own.”

“Yeah, I know all about doing fine on your own,” I said. Dave shrugged, which was as good as I was going to do.

***

I didn’t make the connection at the time, but when Hannah was little she had this song about trees. As far as anyone could tell, she’d made it up. It was cute. Kind of like a love song to a tree, as if it were a close friend or maybe a boyfriend. The kind of thing kids come up with, when they’re still figuring out how to process feelings like affection

and attachment.

The title of the song was “Roots in the Ground.” The lyrics changed over time along with the artist, but the chorus was always that phrase, repeated 8 times at increasing volume. The last “roots in the ground!” was a scream. It was cute.

***

Janice swore the group would be fine without us, even considering they were down by almost half between this and the ones running after the nudists. She pointed out they’d be getting those folks back, hopefully before too long.

I didn’t say so to anyone, but I was glad for the excuse to hike back down with Dave. Something the naked man said had plucked a chord in me that hadn’t been plucked in a long time, and not a pleasant one. I was ready to give in to my chickenshit depression, by that point. I had thoughts milling around in my head that I didn’t want to be there, and the sooner I could get home, eat a gummy and watch some stupid TV show, the better.

Dave found a walking stick before long and insisted it was all the support he needed. We hiked on in silence. I made sure to keep myself busy, sweeping my flashlight in all directions, still looking for our hiker because it was better than thinking about something else, like why those people had looked so familiar even though I couldn’t identify a single one of them.

We were still the better part of an hour from the base area, probably more considering that one of us was in hobbling shape. The cold wasn’t doing us any favors, either. At least we were well outside of rattlesnake season.

That being the case, one could imagine my surprise when I heard something off in the trees that sounded very much like a rattlesnake. Dave stopped in his tracks the same moment I did, so he must have heard it too. A moment later it came again, that crisp, cascading shudder. Unmistakable.

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Dave. “What now?”

It took a minute for me to get my light on it, far back in the trees as it was. Faint movement. Not a snake; even from a distance I could tell I was looking at skin, not scales.

“I think it’s a person,” I said.

“Jimminy Christmas,” said Dave.

I kept my light trained on the source of the sound and started toward it, cautioning Dave to watch his step.

It was one of the nudists from before. Or so I assumed, given her lack of clothing and prominence of wounds. How she had doubled back and passed us without our noticing was beyond me, but it was either that or there were multiple tree orgies going on that night, which I didn’t want to entertain. She looked in even worse shape than before. There were trails of blood running out of her ears and nostrils. The rattling noise came from her heaving breath, passing through all the blood in her mouth, which visibly bubbled and sputtered on each exhale. Trembling hands held a stick that she was working back and forth over her privates. Most of her fingernails were torn off. Her skin had gone bright red from the cold, with the exception of her feet, which were blue, fading into black.

“I’m out,” said Dave.

“Hold up,” I said, but when I turned, all I found was his back as he fumbled his way out of the trees.

“Too old for this shit!” he called back.

So he said, but the woman on the ground couldn’t have been any younger than him. A large and vocal part of my brain wanted me to leave her for dead right then, which I ignored. Unsettling though it was to stay there, I knew that any future reports of her death from exposure would be on my conscience. She still wasn’t doing anything besides rubbing herself with the stick and making that godawful rattle. It had an audible wheeze underneath, I was noticing.

Dave might have been out of earshot, but I tried. “You better make it back to town, asshole! You get lost, that’s on you!”

No response. Just the sound of breath, pushed through a mouthful of blood.

I didn’t have any supplies on me beyond the flashlight and my phone. I could call 911, but who could they send? All the first responders in town were already on the mountain, and Dave had taken our radio. There 

was no way the woman would be able to walk on those feet, given that they were starting to resemble overripe eggplants in shape and color.

I knelt by her and shone my light in her face. Confirmed: I had absolutely no idea who she was. Like her compatriots, though, looking at her gave me the oddest feeling that she should be familiar. Her pupils, which had been dilated across the entire iris, shrank to pinpricks when the light hit them. No reaction otherwise.

“Hey,” I said, “can you hear me? Can you sit up?”

She coughed. Blood from her mouth spattered across my face.

“Jesus!” I shot to my feet, wiping desperately at the blood with the sleeve of my Carhartt.

Something came out of her throat, which sounded like either pained retching or the word almost or both. Then, more clearly, “Please. Please, it must be enough.”

I stood over her again, making sure to keep my face a good distance from hers. Blood had splashed onto her chin and chest as well, enough that it was already forming rivulets. I took a step toward her and my foot sank into the ground, almost to the ankle, before I yanked it back. All around her, the dirt felt soft, damp. I smelled something rotten, which could have been the blood drying on my face but reminded me more of dead leaves.

The best solution I could see here was to put my coat on her and carry her piggyback into town as fast as I could. Getting her onto my back would be complicated, and there was the concern about her coughing blood on me again, but what the hell. I slid a hand under her shoulder and started to lift.

“No!” she screamed.

I stumbled and fell backward.

Her eyeballs wrenched sideways in my direction, though when I shone my light on her face they looked cloudy, staring into the distance. My ass stayed firmly planted on a pile of pine needles.

“Got separated.” Her voice was a deep, witchy croak. She burned through words like they were holding her up. “When we ran. Lost the sheltering. But I’m so close.”

My hands groped behind me, searching for anything that might

impede my scooting backward while I kept eyes on her. I realized, as I was doing this, that I had ceased to feel much of anything other than fear. My whole body was swimming with adrenaline, and it felt so terrifyingly peaceful. I wasn’t even cold anymore.

“Please,” she said again, followed by something that was either gagging, or a word made up entirely of vowels. “I accept your embrace. Please.”

Her entire face contracted, except for her mouth, which shot open. Her back arched. Either she was having a seizure, or that knobby old stick was really doing something for her. Blood pushed itself from every open wound, dark and halfway clotted.

If that was all I’d seen, it would have been enough. I could have stood at that moment and booked it into town and left her to the frozen woods. I’ve still got enough cowardice in me for that. But I didn’t, God help me.

***

Here’s the thing: kids say creepy shit all the time, especially when they’re little. All the more so when there’s a dead parent involved. It’s normal. It’s healthy, or so the shrink said. Hannah’s imaginary friend showed up about as soon as she was old enough to talk, but their relationship shifted into a new gear when her mom died. This made perfect sense to me. It also made sense that the imaginary friend in question was a bit morbid.

“Rudy,” as she called it (it, not him), was made of nothing. She would get really mad if you tried to ask what Rudy looked like. One time she cried because her first grade teacher said “Rudy doesn’t look like anything,” which Hannah insisted was not at all the same as looking like nothing. If you said anything about Rudy that she didn’t like, she’d stomp out of the room and scream that she was going to The Sheltering, which I assumed was where Rudy lived, probably a word she’d heard on some cartoon.

If you asked her what Rudy did with its time, you’d learn that it ate sticks, dead leaves, and animal bones. Its favorite activity was “gardening,” but if you asked for clarification then it turned out this involved burying things—seeds, toys, dead animals or anything else—and growing them back as trees. Rudy’s penis was also a tree, which got Hannah into trouble at school on multiple occasions. The funnest aspect of the

penis thing was that it wasn’t connected to Rudy’s body, and it didn’t stay in one location; it could be any tree, anywhere on the mountain. Rudy didn’t like us for living on the mountain, but it didn’t want us to leave, either.

You can see where we assumed that this was all about her mom’s death. The fixation with burial, with things that were dead and rotting, the central importance of someone being “nothing” and yet all around you at once. Almost too easy to analyze, and I wasn’t even the shrink.

Like all imaginary friends, Rudy went away after a while. She might have hung onto it a bit longer than most kids, but again, that was understandable. Her friendship with Rudy could even be cute at times, ...