Hello, dear friends! I’m very excited to announce that my platform for hosting my original fiction is officially live on Patreon!
–>Read the first part of my debut novel La Gorgona here!
I hope you’ll consider joining as a paid member to support me in my dream of becoming a full-time, original fiction author.
Fernando woke face-down in the wet sand, hot and sticky and aching. He twitched, wincing as he stirred. He felt like he’d been run over by a truck. Every fiber of him groaned in agony as he dragged himself up to sit sprawling and dazed on the underground stream bed.
In the light of day, the grotto was cool and bluely shaded through the mossy skylights overhead. It wasn’t difficult in such light for him to assess the damage, which was so extensive he only cataloged it in a perfunctory way.
His
The gorgon’s banshee shriek pierced the night air.
Fernando rammed the blade deeper into her as she railed against him. His ears lanced, ringing. His knees dug into her scaly hide to keep her from bucking him off. Fernando sneered into her twisted monster’s face like a madman, too far gone to care.
“Fuck you, you thieving cunt,” he said, as he wrenched the blade out and shoved his arm into her again.
She thrashed under him, clawing at him. He held her pinned with lunatic strength as he
Steeling her voice, Morgan said again, “You’ve had your fun, you wretches. Now, release me.”
A voice scoffed. “Who’re you bossin’ and callin’ a wretch, you slut?”
It was a young man’s voice, lowered. Morgan did not recognize it. The other voices—presumably his friends—snickered lowly as well.
“Let me out of here,” she said, striving to keep her voice steady.
“Nah,” the young man said again, “don’t think we will.”
Morgan could practically
The gorgon’s seductive smile widened. Her gimlet eyes glittered.
She beckoned to him with a slender hook of finger, tapering to a glinting point of ivory nail. Fernando approached her across the sparkling silt of the ancient streambed. A short distance from her he stopped, close enough so that he could smell the warm mineral scent of her. She rolled her serpent’s body for him again, pinched her red-violet nipples to budding points.
“Do you dare only to lay your eyes on me, conquistador?”
It was a snake and not a snake—
AÂ gigantic reptilian beast, which resolved itself by slow and dreadful degrees into the hybrid, chimeric image of a woman.
Her skin was pale, luminescent as pearl. Her flat belly was navel-less where it met the scaled serpentine body of her lower half. But above this snake-half she was hardly more human. Her beautiful face had a flinty quality, as though it had been carved from stone. Her eyes were cracked gold, her pupils elliptical. Her black waving hair seemed
Fernando didn’t fall far—maybe three meters or so. Still he thought it a dim miracle he didn’t snap his ankle in the plunge.
He sat up cringing in the moss. A shower of dirt and leaves rained down on him from above, slowly thinning. He sneezed, then shook himself off. He reached for his flashlight just as its dying glow sputtered out.
The darkness that descended on him was total. It gave him a sickening sweep of vertigo as he pushed himself to his feet in the disorienting gloom, wondering
Though Fernando’s judgment was far from sound, abruptly to him, it seemed, the character of the Amazonian wilderness grew wilder and more sinister. The looming trees pressed close around him, older and thicker and more ghastly in their contorted forms. The strident animal calls dampened, sounding lower and nearer, eerily menacing in their pitch. Even the darkness here felt different—a palpable, murky blackness that stifled him even more than the smothering reek of decay.
Centuries deep, the
Between the wrench of the rope and the heft of the animal, the noose cinched taut around its throat. Jerked to its hindlegs in the stranglehold, the goat bucked and thrashed like a grotesque puppet dancing on its strings.
Fernando laughed raspily, unhinged. The rush of savage triumph demented him. As the goat exhausted itself with its futile struggling, he slackened the rope. He slipped it down from the branch as the goat slumped forward. On bent forelegs it slid into the undergrowth.
Gathering
In retrospect, charging headlong in the dead of night into an unfamiliar wilderness full of vipers, jaguars and other known dangers had been a damn stupid thing to do. But dizzy with resentment, and perhaps even then the incipient effects of the potion, Fernando slashed his way heedless through the verdant brush and trailing vines.
Unbridled vehemence fueled him. With absolute fixed intent he sighted the trail the goat had trampled in its hasty flight. More like a reaper than a tracker, he pursued
In the scant illumination of the embers, Fernando fumbled for the flashlight he’d brought with him from Chico’s place. The pale beam streamed out before him. Descending the warped wooden steps, he started out across the churned, sticking mud of the yard. He circled around the hulking wreckage of the shack.
The nighttime landscape distorted his perception. But after a bit of searching he found what he was searching for—the small cabinet tumbled over with its door hanging just ajar.