An Echo Of Lost Divinity: "The Hollow Stars in Heaven" by Avery Kit Malone Has Escaped!
“The Hollow Stars in Heaven” by Avery Kit Malone.
This tale originally appeared in Planet Scumm Issue 11: Snake Eyes.
We’re pleased to present it to you now.
In the dirty red-green neon glow and sea of laughter and voices amplified by drunkenness, I seethe through the crowds and sip my whiskey because it’s a Saturday night and my skin is restless. Restless enough to draw me in, to old places, old habits. In this bar, it’s dim enough that I almost feel safe. Almost expect that no one can decipher more of me than an indistinct shadow hovering beyond the periphery of any group.
It doesn’t take me long to realize this was a mistake. I see, too late, a member of the old crew, washed-out men I haunted this and other venues with, and one head turns, then two, faces scrunched in concentration. They are looking at my face, eyes like paring knives, peeling away layers to look for what they might recognize underneath. Those eyes flash with recognition—not of me, but me in a past life—and I turn away sharply. Before I can see their faces crease with disgust. Before I might hear them calling at my back.
I’m too tired for this shit.
I stumble through to the farthest, darkest corner, and it’s a bit quieter here. I don’t stop until a throng of people separates us, and I know the group’s eyes like knives in my back are imagined. Wanting some connection with someone, something to keep them at bay, I turn to the man leaning against the wall beside me and give a whiskey-emboldened grin.
In the dark, I see a gaunt frame, tall. Black button-down, belt and slacks clinging to his thin frame like a half-discarded shed. The glass in his hand is cold and clear and could be anything. His eyes are bold in the dim light, embers in darkened pits, and the shine to them—something bright and fervent there, and I wonder if he might be rolling. His head is utterly shaved and I hesitate, wondering if I’m dealing with a skinhead, but no—doesn’t have that vibe about him. Instead, he simply seems … off. But he smiles back.
“I’m Leo,” I say, extending my hand.
He stares at it, apparently hesitating. Well, shit. Probably straight. Wandered in for a drink, not knowing.
But then he grasps my hand, an oddly mechanical motion that slides into gentleness; he holds my hand for just that much longer than he should. He doesn’t offer his name. Instead, he says, “Here … with others?”
“Just me this time around.”
We have some bullshit conversation, though he seems earnestly engaged in our small talk. Too measured, coherent, to be ecstasy or anything else I know, I decide. Possibly he is just insane.
We end up in a stall in the men’s room. In the cold light, I can see him a bit more clearly. He is passive but eager. I am happy to oblige, happier yet when he doesn’t turn on me. No revulsion. Not even a hint of surprise at what I am.
“Let’s head to my place,” I find myself saying.
“Your place,” he echoes in agreement.
If the drab confines of my tiny, shitty apartment in any way defy his expectations, he doesn’t show it.
Instead, in my bedroom I am surprised, as I peel away his shirt button by button, by the intricate system of symbols, runes, and circles and lines arranged in tattoos spanning his body, so carefully designed they surely bear some esoteric meaning. He doesn’t comment on them. I don’t bother to ask.
In the quiet darkness of my room, he is not passive. He moves with hunger and frenetic obsession. It is outside of anything I have experienced.
I am happy to oblige.
I invite him inside many times after that. He appears at my doorstep. I don’t know his name, and it feels unimportant.
I often find him staring out of the window up at the sky, sometimes craning his entire neck to fit his face through the lifted mesh like a highway-bound dog, and peering up with something unreadable but seemingly heartfelt at the lid of clouds and light over the city that masks the stars beyond. Sometimes I hear him laugh quietly, facing the ceiling, or in a dark corner alone.
One night I am doing something parallel to sleep, sweating restless in the bed as I am prone to, while he is breathing evenly beside me with his eyes wide open in what might or might not be actual sleep. My phone begins to buzz on the table beside me and, exhaustion-drugged, I slide it over and answer it without checking.
It’s been so long that I’ve gotten complacent.
“Livvy,” says a voice hoarse with emotion—or perhaps from fervent prayer late into the night—breathless in a rush to speak before I can respond, “I want you to know I’ve been praying for you. When you decide to live a normal life, you always have a place he—”
I’ve cut the call and slammed my phone down before my mind has fully caught up with me. He’s shifting around behind me. I roll around to find the gleam of his eyes, that febrile light in the dark.
“They think my life is a sin,” I say.
“Sin” He tests the word with his mouth.
I don’t know if it’s his quirk of echolalia or a question, but I decide to keep talking.
“They always held heaven over my head like a cinderblock. Can’t get in with a life of sin.”
He startles me with a burst of laughter. I look at his face and see only those impossible eyes, vivid like a snake’s, like a cat’s in the dark—but no light shines for them to reflect.
“There is no sin or absence of sin in heaven. Heaven is a dead place. It’s full of ghosts.”
He is still laughing, quietly, when I somehow fall asleep. I dream of a field of unbroken darkness, impossible pressure; something coiled around me, pulsating. A single distant point of light opening like an eye.
The solitude and dark like a blanket. The blinding light, a dagger.
The needle glides out of my skin and leaves a bead of irritable red welling on my thigh. I’m patching it over with a bandage while he watches in quiet fascination from several feet away.
“Your name,” I say.
He says something bizarre.
I snap my head up. He has a way of looking calm and feverishly, deliriously happy at once.
He repeats himself, a string of syllables I can’t follow. Something sounding like it should require two throats at once.
“My name,” he clarifies.
“Well, do you have, like, a nickname?” I say.
He’s swaying back and forth as if to music I can’t hear, ever so gently, and my internal pendulum of categorizing him swings back to drugs.
“And what do you do?” I prompt him further, lying back on my bed and watching his unfathomable smile. “Where are you from?”
“I’m a … ghost. Ancient ghost. I came here from inside a sun-star-corpse, distant.”
The pendulum swings again. Madman it is.
“A star ghost,” I say.
“Yes. Sleeping in cores of stars and planets. Vast dreamers, dreaming vast dreams.”
“Gods?” I offer. “Sounds more like gods to me.”
He doesn’t seem to understand the difference.
“Okay, let’s go back to the planets,” I say. “How about Earth? Earth has a ghost living inside of it?”
“Yes,” he says. “It hates you all.”
I’d believe it.
“Okay,” I say. I’m starting to feel a headache coming on, and I’m wishing he would leave now. I debate kicking him out. He doesn’t seem the violent type; he’d probably comply. “So you’re an alien god-ghost. What were you doing in the gay bar on Market Street?”
“Wandering … Heard the sound. Voices. Sea of voices. Felt familiar. I wanted to drown in it,” he says.
“Prove it,” I say abruptly.
“Prove it?” he echoes.
“Prove you’re not human,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
Something goes wrong with his eyes, right at once. They start to shake and slide askew; something black starts to rim them as though he’s crying tar, and it slides down his cheeks with the consistency of semi-congealed blood. He opens his mouth, making a sound like someone coughing <i>inward</i>, a gasping sort of choking sound. A dark thing begins to squirm its way up from the shadowed depths of his throat, black and gleaming, and the tip of it writhes out of his mouth—
“Get out,” I yell, standing.
He startles back into himself. Looks at me blankly.
“Get out. Get the fuck out!”
He pauses and I sense hesitation. An unknowable chain of thought behind his gleaming eyes—I think of a mantis, or an octopus, his steady, unreadable gaze judging me a threat or not.
And, too, all at once, I see my tone and posture as if in third person, and I see in myself something horrible and mirrored here in too many encounters I’ve had myself.
The fear and revulsion clear in my face.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Slow my breath. Say, “Wait.”
He tells me he is extremely young, relative to others, as we walk along the riverside, city lights bits of splintered gold on the water. That his star is not yet dead.
That it gets harder to come back, the longer they sleep up there.
He tells me that all of the ghosts nestled in the cores of the cooling, luminous corpses of supernovae are waiting.
Dreaming gods, dead but not. The endless dark of space is haunted.
Something is wrong with him. It’s evident as soon as he comes over.
He’s sluggish, sometimes pausing to steady himself, groaning as one might with a migraine or on the verge of vomiting. Sometimes, he does vomit—a substance like bloody tar, with fat granules of what looks like coal interspersed within. I watch with distaste as it bubbles on my bathroom tile.
“What is going on with you?” I finally ask.
One eye swivels to me, but he appears to have lost the fight for the other; it rolls shakily up into his eyelid.
“Losing tether,” he says through a stiffened jaw. “Must go home soon.”
I consider this. He stumbles to my front door.
“Where are you going?” I say. It’s nearing midnight.
“Fan club,” he says, a lunatic smile flashing at me from over his shoulder. “Church.”
I follow.
In the shambling ruin of what was once a warehouse by the river, a surprising coterie awaits, unbothered by the thick dust that flashes like stars beneath dour industrial ceiling lights. Many are well-dressed. Some are cloaked in filthy rags. They all glare at me as I enter, tight-faced and quiet when I pass; a ripple of murmurs trails in my wake. Whether their dislike is born of the fact that I’m an outsider to their esoteric enclave or because I fucked their god for three weeks remains to be seen.
I’ve dealt with far more cutting hatred, though, and I take my seat in a front-row chair. The dilapidated building is empty aside from this makeshift nave. The concrete floors are stained and damp; the walls, rust-mottled metal sheets.
My companion drags himself to the front, to the pulpit made of a podium and a microphone wired to speakers on either side. He steadies himself by gripping it with white knuckles. I am immediately forgotten by everyone else, and all eyes attune to him.
In a rambling speech replete with odd lexical choices and his idiosyncratic prosody, I gather that he is “wearing their priest” as a “sacrifice-gift,” and that his brief visit is at its end. That he must go back to sleep. Back home.
He’s chosen the person to take back with him. The crowd’s anticipation is thick in the air. You could hear a mouse pissing in the rafters in the breathless vacuum. His speech ends; his eyes refuse to steady, and so his entire head lolls toward me.
And, oh, their glares are lethal all around.
“Come home?” he says.
I stand and go to the front, along with a matronly woman whose style and bearing reek of suburbia, complete with polite condescension.
He collapses before I get there, trembling in a violent seizure, black foam pooling at his mouth. And then something black and gleaming pulls itself from his mouth, long and ropy, coiling and uncoiling spastically, and hovers above—a dark, impossible shape with a sunbright glow emanating from its deepest center. I look down at the “priest,” unmoving in a small puddle of blood and tar, and wonder if he’s dead.
Then I look again to the thing hovering above.
“What are you waiting for up there?” I ask. “All of you sleeping in stars, waiting. For what?”
<i>New era. Era for</i> us, it says. <i>Everything will burn and we’ll come back.</i>
I’ve made my decision. The smirking woman standing beside me hands over a strange, gleaming blade. She shows me the motion I need to make, the odd shape to carve on my flesh. She seems to think the knife’s cold edge will scare me off.
Now I smile, staring her in the face. Needles, blade. I’m used to the ritual of opening my skin.
I immediately feel a strange gravity inside of me, a pull in my very guts, and I hear the <i>clang</i> of the blade as it clatters to the ground, and I am whirling upward, up beyond the ceiling, with the impossible shape of this alien god above me. I see—or sense—the earth falling away.
The soft blue rim of the atmosphere coalesces below me, encircled by the true dark, and just as soon fades, a marble shrinking into oblivion, and I am moving on and on, at a speed and distance I can’t begin to judge.
A sun approaches: young and mind-shatteringly bright. I want to hesitate, but there is no longer a choice. My companion pulls me into it, and the heat sears away my flesh, my being, a sudden wall of agony. My body vaporizes in the heat, bones like charcoal and then crumbling dust and then nothing, insignificant and swallowed like a thimbleful of salt into the hungry sea. And something in me crawls out like a cicada from its feeble husk, onward into the sun.
And I am free. I am purely me, rid of my body and its rituals and needs, all of the pain, both of my lives, my supposed sins. I am essence. A shifting, nebulous body with a core of blinding fire.
Nestled nearby, my companion in our star draws back into itself and gently submerges into its dreams. Scattered around us in the void: other stars like translucent shells to my new eyes, other dreaming ghosts as shadows inside of them, the young suns and the dead and cooling alike. My brothers and sisters. Our scattered brood spans the galaxy.
The heavens are utterly silent. My vision stretches for vast expanses, and I look back for that familiar marble.
Time passes in a new way. In the heart of a star, I rest.
I’m a judge in heaven now. Humanity’s absolution will come in a flash of flame. My companion and I, all our ever-patient siblings, we’ll descend as a hundred thousand falling stars and live new and radiant lives in the smoldering ash. Free of guilt and suffering. Free from any hiding.
Resplendent lives.
With a vengeful eye turned Earthward, I wait for the coming of a new era.
Issue #11 is an A5” paperback book with a soft touch cover.
Inside, you’ll find stories that wind a serpentine course through the realm between science fiction and fantasy. “Snake Eyes” was thoughtfully curated by Guest-Editor-in-Chief and Scumm alum / Stoker Award Winner Hailey Piper (The Worm and His Kings, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy), joined by a guest editorial team of illustrator Maura McGonagle (WITCH comic), Clare Fuller (Saving Daylight Magazine), and our own creative director, Alyssa Alarcón Santo.
We’re proud to present the stories collected here to you, the reader, and hope that we can continue to highlight voices that have been traditionally underrepresented in science fiction and speculative fiction.
Issue #11 features the stories:
A Defiance of Violins by Ana Gardner
The Hollow Stars in Heaven by Avery Kit Malone
Hivemind by LC von Hessen
The Secret of Theta Pi by Stephanie Gray
The Long Sleep by Diana Fenves
Real Sugar Is Hard to Find by Sim Kern
Ma Dresden by Laura Barker
An Eventual Feast by Lindsay King-Miller
Featuring original art from Maura McGonagle