Title Page

Copyright

eBook Edition

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Text © 2023 by Tim Curran

Cover Artwork © 2023, by K. L. Turner

Interior and cover design by Cyrusfiction Productions

Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey

Weird House Press

Central Point, OR 97502

Contents

1 Kharkov Station

2 Dirty Little Secrets

3 Bogies

4 Lake Vordog

5 The Habitat

6 Déjà Vu

7 Encounter

8 Paranoid

9 Nightmare

10 Mother Regina

11 Threshold

12 The City

13 Little Sarah

14 Breakdown

15 The Scratching

16 Tales Told

17 The Thing in The Corner

18 Little Lost Girl

19 Bodies

20 A Mother’s Secrets

21 Ten Minutes to Midnight

22 Pollyanna is Dead

23 Memory Lane

24 Sea Monster

25 Big Brother

26 Aftermath

27 Doomsday

28 Ghosts

29 Revelation

30 Halloween Girl

31 Catalyst

32 Ghost Town

33 The Inhabitant of the City

34 Epic Fail

35 Organism

36 Chaos

37 Born Again

38 The Monster

39 Escape

40 Regression

41 Alone

42 Prenatal

43 Prelude

44 The Rising

45 Birth

Glossary

About the Author

About the Artist

1
KHARKOV STATION

Kharkov still stood.

Alone and silent and grim, it still stood.

Despite many harsh winters that had elapsed since the tragedy, it had not fallen or been eroded away by the ice-winds. It waited, a collection of orange-striped metal buildings—the boxy slab of the power station, the oval meteorology dome, the rising bubble of the observatory, the long and low rectangle of Targa House capped by aerials and antennas, and the numerous garages and outbuildings and huts beyond.

They had stood silent and empty for years, prey to ice and snow and the unbearable cold that blew in across the polar plateau, the bitter weather that swept down from the jagged promontories of the Dominion Range. Like monuments to something long dead, they waited and watched.

The station had seen tragedy and horror and nightmare given flesh. And no structure, regardless of how sterile and lifeless, could absorb that much malefic energy without holding some of it in its dark belly, a palpable miasma that oozed from the walls and ceilings, an evil that dripped thickly from every rivet and plank and joist.

And if you were alone there for any length of time, you would have felt these things, knew these things, for they would have flooded you and poisoned you, devoured you joint by joint, filling your head with blank echoing screams and the profane melodies of things dead for uncounted eons.

For at Kharkov Station, you were never truly alone. Always behind you or out of the corner of your eye, fantastic shapes mocked and whispered. Loathsome memories rustled and crawled.

The summer before, resurrection of a sort had been attempted.