The Triad find themselves trapped the wrong side of the portal with an unexpected benefit for Wes.
CWs: fist-fight, blood, disordered eating/mindless eating to painful over-capacity (of rotten food)
Chapter 11
Wes gave a loud shout and nearly cannoned into him, forcing his sister to duck down.
~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 327-8
Ricky turned.
Something was emerging from the sea, the water running off its hide as the waters boiled around it. He scowled. ‘Boiled’… he was starting to sound like Grampa Nathan.
But that’s what it looked like – the waters bubbling and foaming, churning up around the hulking shape as it rose in a hump of mottled seabed hues, bilge-brown, shark-grey, silt-black. A bulging eye, which he judged to be the width and length of his own torso, opened, two sets of eyelids blinking vertically and horizontally.
Ricky inhaled the amphibious stink.
“Cor. That’s a bloody big frog.”
This is the act of the novel where I got to play with my favourite classic Weird stories, and the main one was Dagon by H. P. Lovecraft. The volcanic rock island and, later, the appearance of Grandad, are things I took from that, but also a family of eldritch horrors are not about to be cowed by actual Old Ones or anything else, so Katy tries to take a photo of it on her phone.
Ricky is guided through the landscape by recalling the journals of Grampa Nathan, who was a human before he met Miss Deirdre Wend and drinking Beverley’s tea. The refrain “Don’t drink the tea” in The Crows makes more sense when you know what it does to you.
The lovely heart-warming (/sarcasm) tale of Nathan Montague Porter and Deirdre Wend, a domestic tale of Weird happenings and body horror, and not enough fade-to-black tentacle sex, is published in THE UNCANNY AND THE DEAD.
Amzn UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09QP22ZCT
Amzn US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09QP22ZCT
eBook: https://books2read.com/u/4jPYL5
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