FICTION BY CHAD ANCTIL

Chad Anctil grew up in the fascinating little state of Rhode Island, birthplace of H.P. Lovecraft and his peculiar branch of fiction, where he found his love for reading and horror at a young age—probably too young, but that’s just how Generation X did it. He has always been creative, taking up both writing and DJing in his teenage years before joining the Navy as an electronics engineer on fast attack submarines through the 90s.

Chad is the author of the supernatural mystery novel The Midnight Tree, is the guest editor of the horror anthology Circus of the Dead, and has had his short stories published in anthologies such as  Dead Girls Walking,  Abandoned Altars, Masks of Sanity, Wicked Abandoned, and Wreckollections among many others. His urban fantasy crime series Providence Supernatural Crimes Unit debuts in 2025.

He posts short stories and thoughts on writing on his website HERE 

THE BLACK CITY
by Chad Anctil

My name is Robert Cranshaw. Yes, that Robert Cranshaw, the horror writer. You may have heard of me, or maybe not; I guess I’m pretty famous in some circles, but only among people who like their terror weird and bloody and extreme.

The irony is that I’ve spent most of my life trying to run away from the horrors I write about. The stories of Valtrus the Bloody, of blasphemous Kher, priest of dead stars, and of that cursed Black City that haunts dreams and drives men to madness. I have spent my life running away from those abominations.

Tonight, on Halloween night, I know I must return.

My story truly starts twenty years ago tonight, when I was only nine years old. I was a normal kid with normal parents, living in a normal suburban home. I had a cat named Bailey, and I loved cartoons like Voltron. I was as far away from Famous Horror Writer as a person could be.

The only thing “spooky” I really enjoyed at that age was Halloween, that night of candy and drugstore costumes and plastic skeletons. I looked forward to it as any child would; I had no knowledge of its true origins, that thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, or the dark spirits that walked among us until dawn's light banished them again.

Banished them back to The Black City.

*****

It was the first year my parents let me go trick or treating without them, as I had managed to befriend a group of other kids in my elementary school. We all decided, at the ripe old age of nine, that we didn’t need adults to supervise us anymore and that we could don our costumes and parade through our quiet suburb all by ourselves, gathering treats and playing the occasional trick—harmless pranks that caused the adults to wag a finger at us as they chuckled under their breath.

We started at dusk, just as the streetlights were flickering on, and I remember it felt like the greatest night of my life. I was dressed in a box-store Dracula costume my mom had bought for me, my black and red satin cape flapping gracefully in the October breeze. I remember the toothy grin of the plastic fangs that filled my mouth with saliva and made my friends “oooh” and “aahh” as I said “I vant to suck your blood” in a terrible accent that was more Sesame Street than Bela Lugosi.

We practically bounced from house to house yelling “Trick or Treat!” while holding out our pillowcases and plastic pumpkins, eager to receive Hershey bars, popcorn balls, and peanut butter cups. Any house that didn’t have lights on received our wrath: cans of silly string that Billy Willet and Walter Monroe brought were sprayed across front steps and fences as the rest of us laughed.

Thinking back, it was the last time I ever felt happy.

As it got late—late for nine-year-olds, anyway—and our treat bags got heavy, the group started to thin out, with kids peeling off and heading home to examine their bounty of sugary confections.

I was headed home myself when I first encountered it. The Black City.

Walking up Barnes Street towards home, flickering lights caught my eye, and I found myself looking down a road that shouldn’t have been there. It was narrow and flanked by tall trees on either side, trees I didn’t recognize, and there were luminaria lining the road at irregular intervals. I had no idea what a “luminaria” was back then, but since that night, I’ve been over every detail again and again, and as a writer, I’ve learned a lot of new words.

Of course, on that night, I was a curious nine-year-old, and I didn’t really understand the danger this unexpected situation posed, so I followed the dark winding path between the eerily glowing lights just to see where it led.

As soon as I started down that strange road, I remember how the world changed. The wind rattled the tree branches like clattering bones, and I heard a low moaning that made me shiver. The air took on a heavy, wet quality with a sour, earthy smell. My eyes darted left and right, catching glimpses of shadowy figures that seemed to flit in and out of my peripheral vision, but I was on a Halloween high; I wasn’t afraid, I was intrigued.

I wish I had been afraid.

I had only been following the path for fifteen minutes when I saw gate posts flanking either side of the road.

They were like something out of a scary movie, tall and crooked, made of crumbling blocks of a dark, mottled gray stone and covered with black, wet moss.

I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and it made me jump; something long and skinny and glistening, but it was gone before I could get a good look.

As I passed through those cursed gates, the city—that black, blasphemous city—rose before me. I remember onyx spires and dark archways and rough cobblestone streets that wound, mazelike, between menacing buildings, with windows that glared down at me like empty eye sockets. The atmosphere was heavy and smelled damp and earthy, as I imagined an open grave might smell. I had no idea where I was; it was like no place I had ever seen before, but I knew wherever I was, I wasn’t supposed to be there, and I was finally becoming afraid.

I started to turn around, to head back home as fast as my legs could carry me, but I heard something coming up the path behind me, blocking the road I had followed to the city and with it my only escape. It sounded like voices, but inhuman, deep, and guttural. Panicking, I ran deeper into the city until I found an alcove to duck into, and I crouched and waited.

What happened next almost stopped my heart.

Two things came into view from around the corner, and I had to bite the fleshy part of my hand to keep from crying out in terror. One was tall and thin, covered in grimy rags, with long, stringy hair that seemed to wriggle and writhe all on its own. The thing had a face like a skull with too-pale skin pulled tight over it, and eyes that looked like black, empty sockets with tiny flickers of red light within.

The other creature was half the height of the first, grotesque and bulbous and shuffling along on squat, flabby legs. Its whole body jiggled as if it were made of some sickly gray gelatin, and I realized as it spoke that its rotund belly opened in a horizontal slit, a gaping maw with bits of pink flesh still stuck on needle-like teeth.

“I don’t know why he needs us back,” the shorter creature spoke in a thick, guttural accent that I could still, frighteningly, understand. “I just know Kher himself called us to return, so we must return. Must be important to call us back now?”

“But I’m still hungry,” the taller fiend moaned, elongated fingers clutching an emaciated belly. “It’s the only night we get to go out there and—”

“Here, I was saving this, but I’m already sick of hearing you moan,” the fat thing hissed as it tossed a chunk of pink, bloody flesh at its companion, who snatched it out of the air and devoured it with sickening, wet sounds as the pair turned the corner and disappeared up the cobbled road, headed towards the dark, malevolent spire that seemed to be the center of The Black City.

I sat there, shaking and crying, and unsure of what to do. I was only nine years old, and I had found myself in a literal nightmare, with no idea how to get out. I heard more sounds, more footsteps on the cobbled stone streets. I heard sickly, gelatinous sounds, rattling sounds, moaning and hissing and ripping and tearing sounds as I hid there in my alcove. And the smells– rotten meat mixed with cloying incense, or candy apples mingling with sour milk, making me want to retch as the fiends walked by my hiding spot.

I heard snippets of their horrible conversations as well as the demoniac creatures lumbered and shambled up the twisted streets. I heard them speak of Kher, the priest of dead stars, and of Valtrus, who flayed the flesh of the penitent, and of the zephyrion, the flapping of their leathery wings filling the night with terrors untold.

I tried not to look, I really tried, but even terrified, even frightened beyond all reason…I was still a curious nine-year-old boy, and so I peeked.

I saw the death priest Morthus with his living crown of blood and bone, walking regally up the street with flabby, misshapen creatures following him, carrying the edges of his long robe, which seemed to be made of living, writhing flesh. I saw Grine and Trine, twin horrors conjoined in the middle, a bloody gash between them where they were sewn together by their mother, the Empress of Crows.

The more I stared, the more I saw and heard, the more I knew and, I think, the more of my sanity fled. The more the terror filled my heart. Shuddering and crying, I looked up at the night sky for comfort, but saw only those dead stars and a hollow moon looking back at me.

At some point, I was startled not by noise but by silence. I heard no chittering voices, no flopping steps, no blasphemous conversations. All was quiet, and I felt it would be my best—
possibly only—chance for escape.

I left the safety of my small alcove and hurried down the street the way I had come, headed again for those hideous gates. As I rounded a corner and saw them, I knew I was free. There were no creatures in sight, the road was clear, so I started to run. Nearly at the gate, however, I slowed down because something glinted on the ground in the moonlight, catching my eye. Money!

It was a silver coin, about the size of a quarter, but it was heavy, and it felt uncomfortable in my small hand. I could see there were strange markings or sigils on it, but I didn’t take the time to study them. I was in the middle of making my escape, so I put the coin in my pocket and I rushed out of the gate and then continued down the road.

I thought I had escaped. But then I froze; every muscle locked in cold terror.
Ahead—shuffling, wet, gravelly voices, closer now. Something huge sniffed the air, the sound of it dragging over my nerves like broken glass.

“There’s somethin’ ahead that ain’t supposed to be here,” a deep, crepuscular voice crooned, words stretched into an off-key sing-song that made my skin crawl.

“We gots to get back,” another voice screeched—sharp and wrong, like a bird imitating human speech with a beak full of blood.

“It can’t hurt to check it out,” the deep voice rumbled. Hoofbeats—massive, cloven—clopped against the road, gaining speed, coming straight for me.

I bolted. Not back toward the city, but sideways into the dark, twisted trees. Vines coiled around my ankles, thorns raked my skin, and the branches seemed to reach for me with skeletal fingers. Behind me came the crash of something huge, too close, too fast—monsters that would eat me or worse, when they caught me.

I ran until my chest burned and black spots swam in my vision. When the noise behind me faded, I stumbled to a halt, panting, ears straining. Nothing—only the distant sigh of the forest.

I slid into the shadows between two ancient trees and crouched there, shivering. The brush clawed at my face, my torn costume hanging in tatters, while I tried to make myself small enough to disappear. My face in my hands, I closed my eyes and wept.

That was the last thing I remembered until morning, when I heard voices calling my name.

I awoke to the first rays of sunrise flooding through the thin canopy of tree branches in a small wooded area I recognized, smelling of damp earth and leaves, a few blocks from my home. I looked around, slowly recognizing where I was and trying to remember how I had gotten there. I remembered The Black City and its horrors, and I remembered hiding in those dark, ancient woods, but that wasn’t here, that wasn’t where I found myself.

I called out for help, and some of the grown-ups—Mister Wilson from down the street and Mrs. Stein from the grocery store—came running over. I had never come home after trick-or-treating, and my parents had called the police and rallied the neighbors to search for me throughout the night.

Reunited with my family, I tried to tell them what had happened, but of course, no one believed me. I took them to the place where the road had appeared, with its shimmering luminaria, but there was nothing there, just a field and some small trees. In the end, it was decided that I had gotten lost in the dark, fallen asleep in the woods, and had a vivid nightmare. That story seemed to satisfy everyone.

Almost everyone.

I was never the same after that night. I tried so hard to convince my parents of what really happened, tried to tell the school counselor, but they just needed to believe the official story—

I realize that now, even if I hadn’t back then. They couldn’t face the truth; they couldn’t comprehend the idea of The Black City or its inhabitants, creatures of fable and nightmare who spill out into our world on that one blasphemous night to feast and revel and torment and torture.

For years, I went back every Halloween night. I wanted to show others what I saw, but the road to The Black City never returned, and I just looked more crazy and more desperate. I resented the fact that nobody would believe me, but now, so many years later, I understand why they couldn’t. I envy them.

The rest, as they say in the movies, is history. I grew up with a myriad of psychological issues stemming from that night, issues that could never really be diagnosed since the source of my trauma wasn’t exactly covered in the textbooks. I had night terrors that woke me screaming, drenched in sweat, and saying such bizarre things like ‘The river Gorial runs with blood’ or ‘The dead stars align to select our new sovereign.’

Eventually, the only way I could get any restful sleep was with a cocktail of potent drugs, and even then, sometimes the nightmare world of The Black City would break through.

As I graduated from high school with barely mediocre grades, I started writing about The Black City and my memories of it, my dreams, those images that would sometimes flood my mind on moonless nights when I was unable to sleep. I started doing it as a way to exorcise those images from my mind, and it worked, for a time, but my thoughts, my dreams, would always return to The Black City.

I wrote a short story that was bought by a small horror ‘zine, and that story garnered attention from an up-and-coming publisher you may have heard of, Dark Stones Press. Yes, them—I was their first signed author, at the ripe old age of nineteen. We have both grown in popularity since those early days, after they published Black Temple of Night and then Priestess of the Dead Moon, my first best seller. Once Amazon Prime bought the film rights to that one, things really started to take off.

I kept writing, I kept trying to run away from The Black City and the events of that Halloween night, but the pull of the city kept getting stronger, kept pulling me deeper and deeper into that abyss. I know that I can never escape. I’ve finally realized the truth.

So here I am, on Halloween, twenty years to the day from that horrific night, back in my hometown. Nobody knows I’ve come; not my agent, not even my parents. I parked my car in the municipal lot by the drugstore, and I’m walking across town, just as the streetlights are beginning to flicker on, watching all the kids in their costumes, bouncing from door to door with a cheerful ‘Trick or Treat,’ collecting candy bars and sour gummies. It’s not that different from when we went trick or treating all those years ago, though I don’t see any groups of unsupervised nine-year-olds now…probably for the best.

I walk slowly, taking in the cool night air and the sounds of childhood fun, the smells of popcorn and candy apples and wet leaves. All those memories being made. Watching them, I wonder how different my life would have been if it hadn’t been for The Black City. I’ve been to so many therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists—hell, I’ve even had a sweat lodge ceremony done by a shaman, to try to purge these demons from my soul.

None of it worked because I could never convince myself that it was all in my head. I could never convince myself that it wasn’t real; it was all just a bad dream I had while I was lost in the woods. I can’t convince myself of that for two reasons.

The first reason–and you might have guessed this based on my accelerated book release schedule recently–is that my dreams and imaginings of The Black City are gaining strength. The visions and thoughts and my connection to the city continue to grow and become more vivid, more terrifying, and I have realized that it is finally getting ready to re-appear.

The second reason sits heavy in my right pocket. That coin—the silver coin that I picked up in the city twenty years ago that I have kept with me all this time. I’ve shown it to everyone from my parents to my therapists to an actual scientist, and to them it’s just a coin, there’s nothing ‘special’ about it…

But none of them can look directly at it for more than a moment or two. Nobody can translate it. It’s a mystery that, for reasons known only to me, no one wants to solve.

The porch lights are starting to go out now. There are fewer kids on the streets. I see a little mermaid yawning as her father carries her back home. It is almost time, I can feel it now. I feel the City calling me. I turn left and head up Barnes Street, my hands shaking as my feet lead the way.

The road is there, with the luminaria flickering like witchlights, exactly as I remember them. I don’t hesitate, I don’t even slow down as I turn left and head onto the road. The Black City is calling to me, Kher and Valtrus, and The Empress of Crows and all the other horrors are calling to me, and finally, after all these years, I must heed their call.

I must go home. To The Black City.