We Summon You!

WE SUMMON YOU

 Castle Swanson seeks a scribe to create tales fit for imprisonment within its ancient walls. Only the most unsettling, elegant, or strange horrors shall be admitted. We are growing, out shadow is spreading, and soon we shall encompass the world!

If you would like to join our castle, email a writing sample and a link to your portfolio if you have one.

If you are an aspiring writer and would like to submit a story, just email it to castleswanson@gmail.com. Let me know that is it a SUBMISSION. 

If you would like to submit artwork, let me know you are submitting art. 

We want horror that is

A: Gothic.

B: Says something about the world that created it.

C: Modern, modern fear, modern anxiety.

D: Responsive to real world horrors, but understands genre conventions

Responsibilities — As Decreed by Castle Swanson

We are not a factory of content.
We are not a newsroom chasing crumbs.

We are laid back in manner… but ruthless in spirit.

Castle Swanson seeks authentic and intense fiction, or critical dissections of horror that cut deeper than surface screams. If you bring us a review, it must carry weight — expertise, insight, blood beneath the fingernails. We will publish reviews only if we are first to unearth the corpse… or if you dare to challenge the larger horror empires with a counter-review that burns brighter than theirs.

We do not tremble over spelling slips.
We do not worship formatting rituals.

We seek those who can look upon the ordinary… and douse it in flame.

This is not a business in a glass tower.
We do not bow to résumés or degrees framed upon walls.

We are building something older — something rooted in trust, community, and the shared thrill of standing at the edge of modern horror and peering into its abyss.

If you are passionate about horror in this age —
if you see the world at a crooked angle —
if your voice is strange, fierce, or beautifully unsettling —

Then perhaps the gates of Castle Swanson will open for you.

ANNOUNCEMENT

 

My dear, nocturnal friends… after a long slumber in the crypt, Castle Swanson shall awaken once more. The stories that linger in the shadows shall creep from their tombs and haunt your waking hours. Prepare… for the darkness returns, and it hungers to be read.

Generations ago, our ancestors built a great fortress to imprison the monsters of the world. Back then, we published weekly, keeping the horrors alive in the minds of those brave enough to wander the night. That castle still stands, and I am proud to announce that we shall return to weekly postings.

Our goal: one chilling article or brief horror each week, and one major tale of terror each month. Keep your candles lit… Castle Swanson stirs, and the shadows have much to whisper.

You are invited..."

GS

The Fairfax Files

 The Fairfax Files

Graham Swanson

the Mugshot of Dr. L.P. Fairfax

December 21^st, 2015, the Angel City Occult department arrested Dr. L.P Fairfax on charges of interdimensional human trafficking, crimes against humanity, and violating local ordinance 141B which forbids secret lairs around or beneath city property. 13 arrests were made with one unidentified person. Fairfax was kept in a top security cell within the Angel City police department. It was created specifically for Occult criminals.

However shortly after his incarceration there was power flash in the city. Riots broke out, old churches that became crack houses went up in flames, Mayor Kunst ordered a state of emergency to protect the crack houses. Police trucks patrolled city streets. After the violence subsided, safety checks were made at the Police Station.

Without the cage door breaking open, without security measures getting tripped, security burst in the Occult holding with their weapons drawn. Fire suppressing foam melted on the floor. Bodies squirmed against the wall trying to hold their guts in. They kicked down the red door to the Occult cell.

Fairfax’s arm hung from the cell bar where he last gripped it. The melted steel clasped the flesh of his hand. It melted down to sharp ice cycles. Inside cell almost nothing remained of Fairfax. His head was found jammed into the tank of his toilet. The other pieces of his body has been slammed into the ceiling until it became meshed with the grain of the support beams.

Not a single magic circle had broken. Though the glowing circles within stars within circles did sputter sparks and belch clouds of yellow and green smoke. The light of the cell was still on. The mattress had been torn in half and hurled against the cell wall. The flooring of the cell was beat to rubble.

The mayor met with the police commissioner and they made a media address before the Occult Department filed a single report. They claimed that Fairfax committed suicide in his cell, and announced that the security guards who risked their lives to check his cell would be fired for incompetence. The Occult Department, who was responsible for the investigation, would be downsized. Not hard considering that in the attack, every member of the Occult Department was killed, except for its Detective, Arty Welch, who was reassigned to “internal misaffairs”.

He kept his real investigation secret from the authorities of Angel City. In his dungeon office deep beneath the police department he continued searching for links of Fairfax’s trafficking ring. He knew already because he’d been chasing this wizard for 15 years. Former child soldier and mystic, Ashgabat. It was his building that sheltered Fairfax. It was his criminal aparatus who managed the trafficking ring. He was the only one that did not get arrested that day.

Angel City is defined its gleaming towers in a district called “the Overgrowth” which is accessed by overpass freeways that cross over slums known as “the Undergrowth”. Those towers aren’t just the tallest and brightest in all of the State of Dagan. Those insurance companies, those architecture firms, those pharma companies, some the biggest in the world, are headquarted in this land.

Angel City. In the year 1900, the population was over 700,000. Now in 2026, it’s less than 100,000. The state stopped growing after 50,000 children vanished from their beds in one night. Every place has crime, but every week they apprehend another serial killer on accident. Routine patrol, found three bodies stuffed into garbage bags headed for the smoldering pit. The violence. The things Arty had to pull out of drains. The things he’s had to tell mothers. Despite it all, those silver towers never moved.

Before 9/11, they attacked these towers first. However the footage they gave Bin Laden was enough to make him order his men to stay OUT of Dagan. That footage is gone now but it was in the Occult Department files before the restructuring. Six planes each hit one building. They exploded. The outer walls of the towers burned. One after another they came in expecting to take the buildings down and be heroes. Yet not only did the buildings absorb the damage, in the smoke that lifted over the towers, one can see the face of a demon mocking them.

Arty kept his investigation going but he told no one that he was focusing on the people who live and work inside those towers. He never got too far without burying his head into his hands. Memories of the attack still fresh. Shadows of the evidence he once had broken to pieces. It seemed all was lost.

He knew because of Cassidy Dawnson. This young beautiful girl was imprisoned in one of those towers. Her husband was Leland Dawnson the III. He kept her in a nursing room where she gave birth to four of his monsters. Fairfax didn’t invent some revolutionary DNA combining machine. He used natural machines that already existed. He simply injected the DNA of a monster into her uterus.

Cassidy was younger than 25 but each monster she gave birth to added another ten years to her skin. Not only did they use her for this purpose, but they gave her no time to recover. They injected her with another monster just after 21 days.

She worked in secret with the Occult Department. Told him about who did this to her, and who he had been meeting.

“if you didn’t feel comfortable, why did you go through with it?”

“He seemed nice. He told me that he knew my husband.”

The detective worked hard to compile everything they learned. Names, locations, quality of meeting. Enduring, indelible relationships. Missing people. In cities across the world, Fairfax was putting out adds. Fly to Angel City for a dream job. 400,000$ a year all you have to do is live in an empty apartment and check in with Fairfax once a day on a laptop that can’t browse the internet, cant play games, and cant make calls, they only receive them from him.

Girls from Mexico, from Indonesia, from Germany, from Persia, from Japan, from Singapore. They ended up melting in a chemical bath brewed in a hot tub. Sure enough Buford Kunst knew him, been seen with him on numerous occasions. Fairfax knew everyone, even Arty Welch. He knew who would arrest him and when.

On the night of the attack Arty rushed Cassidy out of the city. He gave her a copy of the files and told her to publish them. However, the next day she was shot by men in black suits. Arty Welch never trusted the power of arcane. He had proven many times that magic can be an illusion to the supernatural, he had also proven to himself that magic was a real force in the world, and more often than not, it opened dark portals that fed on the innocent people of Dagan.

He called her every night at midnight from the privacy of his dungeon office. Using the relics that friendly homeless wizards let him have, they discussed their next move.

“...the Chasm.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that thing.”

The Chasm was something only the city’s elite were meant to know about. However Arty discovered it upon his adventures. In the times of indigenous people, it was believed to grant wishes. In truth, it was a deposit of water. The only deposit of its kind of Earth. The Black Glacier that once rode on this continent and flattened the grounds that would become Dagan melted, and it sank into the ground. That pool underground is all that’s left. It caused the supernatural outbreaks across Angel City, maybe even Dagan itself. The very presence of the Chasm is responsible for the divide between Dagan and the rest of the country. Where people slip away in the veil between the borders of Dagan.

It seemed hopeless so Arty went back to Ashgabat’s lair. A desolate building that once made costumes for theatre. When the railroads failed this entire part of the Undergrowth became worse than ever before. He had to stop his car to move through the street in this part of the slum. Fog, lurching shadows, flickering street lights, piles of trash packed into alley walls. Rats eating everything. Diapers. Pizza. Building Legos in dumpsters.

He found a door. CONDEMNED by ANGEL CITY OFFICE OF ORDINANCES. The sign lay on the ground at the bottom of a stair well that went under the sidewalk. He knocked on the door. A slot slid open. Eyeballs appeared.

“I need to see Ashgabat.”

The door opened. On the other side no one stood to open the door. Arty went in to a candlelit hall that opened to a drafty chamber full of smoke and hooded men shivering over tables. When Arty came down many of them shielded their faces from him. He crossed the smokey room, ignored the people, and came to an empty seat at a table. Jewels sat there on a scale along some bricks of heroin. Arty went to the far wall, and began knocking until he heard glass. A mirror. Behind the mirror he found a hand carved tunnel. Arty stepped on planks along the floor. He lowered his head so the cage around the hanging light bulbs didn’t smack his head. At the other side he discovered Ashgabat’s office.

Narrow. Shelves heavy with trophies. A heart in a jar. A skull with a candle in its mouth. On the desk at the end Arty saw Ashgabat’s most recent project. A web page glowed from the computer monitor. It was a page without many nuts and bolts. Mono color. Text heavy, no graphic. Looked like someone’s sad Buffy forum from the 90s.

Next to the computer sat a dish with a dissected rat. Next to that sat a cage of rats. The page was in a language that Arty had never seen before. Arty opened the cage door and let the rats out. They scurried through the tunnel and escape through a hole in he hole beneath a plank. Ashgabat appeared.

“For me, Detective?” Ashgabat smiled. The moon tattoos on his brows almost touched.

“Ash, I need to know where the Chasm is.”

“Is the investigation not going well?”

“You killed him.”

“If you would’ve consulted me he’d have lived to testify. Instead you come to me once your avenues are dead ends. And you set loose my pets.”

“Time is running out.”

“To the contrary, Detective. You initiated something when you arrested Fairfax. Those he protected from the likes of you are now trying to flee the city. They will find there is no escape, only a banquet for the flies. You’ve got nothing but time.”

“I need to get to the Chasm. What do you want for it?

“The Files.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You intend on putting them into another magic cell? You saw how they deal with that problem. I will send them to Hell, Detective.”

“After they go to prison, you’re next.”

“Detective, you’ve broken my heart. I wish you could see the beauty of what I am trying to do. The merchandising is just means to an end. My real passions are here.”

“Magic isn’t real.”

“If that’s what you believe, maybe you are in the wrong city.” Ashgabat unscrolled some maps of the sewer. He pointed to a black spot on the map. Far beneath the oldest parts of the city. Parts so old that the streets and buildings sunk into the ground long ago.

Arty turned around to leave.

“Don’t worry about your vehicle. It’s gone.” He shoved over a book case and removed some plywood from a hole in the wall. “This is will lead you where you want to go.”

Cold wind echoed down a silty tunnel. It led Arty from dirt and darkness to brick and running water. He splashed down into the old sewer. This part of it was shut down in the 30s. It still smelled abd was coated in damp slime but it didn’t flow with water any longer. In the dark he heard a familiar voice. He couldn’t believe it.

“Billy? Is that you?”

“I’m cold, big brother. Where are you?”

“I’m coming.”

Arty followed the echoes of the voice through narrow pipes. Yellow eyes watched from holes in the brick. The closer he came the worse the heat got. He realized it wasn’t getting hot at all. Black specks flying in the air like gnats lande on his skin and tried to get into his mouth. They excreted a resin when they shit that left permanent scars on his face, lips, and eye lids. He felt them enter his lungs when he breathed . Yet he could hear the current of flame. He could hear his little brother’s voice echo from behind it.

He crawled under a portion of broken brick, and crawled until the ground was nothing but pale powder. Then he got up, the wind of black specks now the exhaust of a blast furnace. He covered his face as the black specks built on his on his teeth and hands. Yet he could hear the wonderful explosions burst into rainbows against the cave walls. Shimmering reflections of stars long extinct blazed from a smoking pit. At the bottom shined something so bright that it seemed to be moving when it really had been sitting still for thousands of years.

Wind and light wrapped around Arty like a cyclone. The voices of the Chasm called on him one after another as different shadows reached out of the fog for him.

“Jump in, Arty.”

He held the files out over the rim of the chasm. He climbed up the ridge and perched himself over its opening. Hot air singled the hairs on his face curl. He began to loose vision in both eyes so he reached is hand with the files over the edge when a gunshot echoed through the tunnel. Ashgabat walked out from the dark, his face masked, except for one eye.

Arty felt pinned against the rocky surface. He slid down at first, his body failing fast. He didn’t even believe it was a gunshot until he saw the blood pour from his chest onto the manila envelope. But in the corner of his eye he saw Ashgabat sweeping nearer. Arty had no choice. He reached up with the files one more time, and pulled himself up. Before Ash could take the files from him, he jumped into the Chasm with the files wrapped around his chest.

Arty awoke to a seaside view. A balcony that overlooked the grey coast. He had never seen the ocean before. Never smelled it. He looked down and saw birds eating dead creatures on the rocks below.

A man in a white robe appeared next to Arty. He recognized him right away.

“Billy, you’re still alive.”

“Now that you know where I am, will you ever leave?”

“I’m going to get you out of here. Get you away from these people. Get you back-”

“You would let us all go?”

“Yes, little brother. Everyone is getting out of here.” He felt around his chest and realized he no longer held the files.

“We can’t, Arty. We are sacrifices.”

“That’s bullshit, Billy. No one controls us.”

“You have made them very Angry, brother. Imagine what they would do, if everyone left at once.”

The ground shook. The walls and floor flexed. A huge glacier appeared from the fog across the sea. Covered in birds and grass and trees it slid nearer.

“Soon it will destroy this place. Soon, it will destroy Angel City. Then it will destroy Dagan. Then, who knows where it’s waters may reach.” He climbed over the rail and stood on it. “Arthur, I want you to push me.”

“No. You’re coming back.”

“I died a long time ago, brother.”

“I’ve been searching for decades…”

“What was born and dies will walk again in the City of Angels.”

“Not if it gets eaten by fish and distributed across the Ocean.”

Billy smiled and laughed. Then the birds below all rose to the sky at once as a his body plummeted to the bottom. It splashes against the rocks. Arty watched with both hands on the railing. The tide pulled the body in. Some of his robe was left on a rock The blood washed away with each slap of the waves. The body floated atop foam, then faded under the layer of the surface. Then the body tilted feet down, and it sunk to the depths.

Arty went back inside. It was cold, windy, grey out. A computer screen was on. It looked like the page Ashgabat was using. A pitcher of water sat nearby. It smelled bitter like the air of the Chasm. It tasted bitter too. Arty poured it over the computer. Still the screen stayed on. The files were on the computer. Digitized and ready to be uploaded to the internet.

When he clicked SHARE the glacier outside collided with the walls of the castle. Arty tried to hold onto the floor but it flipped over and he found himself pinned against cascading building blocks. He found himself up against the glacier itself. The freezing ice instantly turned the moisture on his hands to frost. His eyes turned yellow when he tasted the vapor exhausting from its surface.

Dagan was created by that very same glacier. It’s waters gave birth to a special race of monster that thrived in the glacial conditions until it melted. The DNA from those monsters exists to this very day. When it gets cold, icelets form from traces of that moisture from the black glacier. Arty stayed in Angel City because he shared the same eyes as those monsters. When exposed to it’s shards , those traits come back.

When the traits came back, Arty pulled himself from the Chasm. Covered in burns, contusions, fractures, he reached back over the top and slid down to the sand below. The specks no longer hurt him. He liked how it felt. Behind him he saw a thousand frightened shadows.

A ladder descended from the roof of the cave. Arty and took it up and the rest followed. A line of people stretched from the ladder to the chasm. A sewer lid opened, and Arty came out back to the rain of Angel City. Back to the street and its smells.

Back to the droves of furtive people moving swiftly around downtown. Some people recognized the street. Other, like the indigenous people’s, had no idea what to do and could not speak the language. But every in town saw those people emerge and flood the street, led by Detective Arthur Welch.

The elite people sat in a meeting room in their silver tower in the Overgrowth watching. Banners of pyramids, large eyeballs on computer monitors, Lelend Dawnson III among them. They all turned to Ashgabat who sat in the center of the room. A masked guard stood in each corer and two stood by the door. They had long tongues like a snake and assault rifles on their shoulders.

“How will we suppress this scandal?”

“The News is fake!”

“The people are paid off by billionaires!”

“They’re all AI.”

Ashgabat stood on the table, a sword in his hand. The Mayor tried to calm everyone down.

“They know about the Chasm now. There’s no place to hide.”

“You snake, you told us we’d be protected.”

“And you were. But now you’re time is up. It is time of the Mage.” Ashgabat said.

The men with guns began putting bags on people’s heads and tightening drawstrings around their necks.

“What are you planning on doing?” Leland wept.

“I’m going to bring the glacier back. And it will melt.”

“You don’t have the power to move a glacier let alone melt it.”

“No, it was 70 degrees in February in Omaha this year. Did you know that? I believe the glacier will melt. And when that happens its waters will reach the Gulf of Mexico.”

The gunmen walked the captives out of the room. Ashgabat took out a small seeing crystal. He used it to examine a field of yellow energy secreting from Arty Welch.

“Oh Detective, you are more interesting than you think you are.”

Detective Arthur Welch

https://www.justice.gov/epstein

https://vault.fbi.gov/jeffrey-epstein

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405

Resident Evil Requiem: Survival Horror in the Age of Collapse

 Resident Evil Requiem: Survival Horror in the Age of Collapse

Graham Swanson

It always felt like the world has ended here. The streets are empty. The homes are remote. The buildings are quiet. There's sirens in the distance. There used to be a store with the door in the alleyway where someone could rent tapes and N64 games. Ever since seeing the Zombies drift across the flaming streets in Resident Evil 3, I imagined them roaming around town like part of the scenery.

Now something electric is droning somewhere in the fog. When the pandemic happened it only made this place seem more deserted. Empty shelves. Footage of cities on fire. I like to think the zombie I was afraid lived in the alley when I was tiny is still living there. 

Old fantasies seem quaint to the Global trauma of the New Millennium, and the new fears have not eroded the irrational fear of a zombie in the alley. Tech companies and shadowy ethics. Evil corporations. AI and how it merges with flesh and brain. Climate change (its 70 degrees in Nebraska this February). The aftermath of the pandemic, and even political violence and re emergence of fascism. The Horror genre was reborn before our eyes and we didn't notice it until it stared back. Today, a game like this feels like a challenge, not a dare like it did at our slumber parties. You're not playing with your friends.

It's one confronting the horrors of the New Millennium and the collapse of the world! The shutdowns, food prices, fascism, wars, disease, tech companies, public violence, failure of institutions, the overreach of science, will become the enemies the player must slay. It’s called Resident Evil Requiem. Development began in 2020, and it’s releasing on February 27^th, 2026. It promises to be more frightening than Resident Evil Village, but will also welcome newer, younger players to the world.

Younger players that know only a Post Covid World.

The aspect of Horror that 90’s Resident Evil mastered is the grotesque transformation of the human body into an outrageous monstrosity. Each enemy in this franchise is someone who suffered from mutation, infection, or experimentation. The real terror that these older games exploited was the loss of personal autonomy. The threats of the game pressure the player to succumb to the infection and become another shadow wandering in the fog.

In Resident Evil Requiem, we will see many aspects of Post Covid Horror. “Screenlife” techniques, social isolation, information that can’t be trusted, dead bodies lined up at hospital, panic becomes contagious as the hospital quarantines, fear and horror become the real virus. Indeed the game starts off with Grace, a young bookworm who is too young to remember Racoon City. She wakes up isolated in an emergency room cold, alone, with gore and lifeless bodies asunder, the only lifeline is a phone device that barely works.

Resident Evil stands not just as entertainment but a cultural mirror that reflects the fears of the society that plays it. Corporate power, institutional distrust, the loss of body. While in some games the goal would be to restore the world, it’s too unstable, so instead Resident Evil offers the player survival. The “Evil” it refers to is not some malevolent supernatural force that exists for no reason, it was manufactured and manipulated by powerful people.

In Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, an invisible virus sweeps the Earth. It’s hardly noticeably at first with mild symptoms, so it spreads quickly. As worse symptoms emerge, everyday things, like buying, falls under the shade of risk. Once mundane things like drinking fountains become death traps. Strangers become unwelcomed. The ordinary- like a jet fan- becomes a lethal body part.

In the past plagues were seen as divine punishment against moral corruption. Resident Evil reflects a very contemporary fear, that evil is not done to the world by supernatural forces, but it is manufactured and inflicted by the society that is meant to protect them. Ironically, the vary science that helped create vaccines that defeated the plague, in the world of Resident Evil, is now being used to create super viruses, and weaponized abominations. If something is killing you in the New Millennium, it’s not a demon that will destroy you, it’s not nature, but human innovation. Indeed the technological innovations of our time have been used to inflict horrors onto the people, as represented in Resident Evil Village by the man with a Jet Fan as a head.

The monsters of Resident Evil are the victims of this evil misuse of power. They are tragic figures who embody the fear of what happens to use when a society collapses. They deform, lose their humanity, and become cannibals. The loss of identity. The horror of having that identity taken and warped without consent. The echoes of vulnerability. Mortal danger to a body from something so small one can’t even see it.

The biological fear exists because of the presence of an evil Corporation, Umbrella. They represent the fear of these systems. They experiment on people in secret labs and destroyed Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2. In the real world, they reflect the nature of pharmaceutical companies, their monopolistic nature, privatized research, and the opaque decision making, all of which has led to a total failure of public trust. Those who remember the Covid 19 pandemic can retell stories of people who refused to even believe the virus was even real, let alone that the vaccines would do them any good. Men like Luigi Mangione lost more than confidence in healthcare companies. The very companies founded to make us healthier became monsters themselves.

Resident Evil suggests that man created his own monsters. Today humans beings are not hunted down by the Dinopithecus. They are subject to threats man made.

A zombie outbreak is can be PREVENTED unless someone wants them to get loose. This narrative frameworks mirrors real world anxiety that the institutions that once protected people are in fact preying on people. The erosion on the empty streets is the loss of confidence people once had for authority, capitalism, and the Democracy itself.

The horror unfolds in two phases.

Phase 1: The virus
Phase 2: People entrusted with public safety are complicit in the danger.

Resident Evil isn’t just about gore and mayhem. It’s the tragedy of the victims and the gothic downfall of these seemingly all powerful entities. They become the architecture of horror as the locations trap the player. Enclosed within a nightmare, shut in with living horrors. The isolation of a post Covid world breathes new life into this survival horror convention!

Every open space serves to isolate the player. A huge mansion can become an oppressive labyrinth. Police stations can be over ran by the undead. Destitute village can become a death trap. Pathways narrow, locked doors, and faint visability increases psychological pressure.

“The World’s a mess” can be said in many different ways, but Resident Evil’s story has aged well even to a micro region. In Nebraska these parallel themes should be explored. How the vast open plains becomes a prison. The Tecumseh Prison Riots. The Fall of Lexington.

On broader scale, people are lonelier in the 2020s than in decades prior. We interact with technological conveniences rather than in person connection. We go out side less. Some people who went inside during Covid never left.

The use of architecture to reinforce this dread is a gothic convention that goes back to the Castle of Otranto. Big buildings are not just office space. They are acts of aggression, symbols of oppression. With black spires and sky high buttresses, to black windows that dominate the sunlight. The message is elegant and clear.

You are not alone. You are not safe. You are weak, small, defenseless. Even if you escaped the confines of the nightmare, the world outside is waiting to EAT YOU. Things may appear beautiful but that’s only to disguise danger. Things can appear peaceful, but somewhere in the world, shit is on fire. (I believe there are gun battles in Mexico as I write this. *update War with Iran now).

A Requiem bell rings. Resident Evil returns but what is “Requiem” referring to? The loss of life, the fall of powerful companies, the collapse of the international free market system, the decline in institutional trust? I say we look at the characters. Leon Kennedy is back, but there’s a new character too, Agent Grace of the FBI.

Leon survives not by fixing the system but by enduring its failure. Rings of flawless heroism don’t hold water anymore. People flock to see Deadpool, not Superman. Political instability, economic downfall, violence in the streets. We don’t expect triumph anymore. This is the era of resilience.

 Koshi Nakanishi,The Director of RE Requiem, says that the gameplay is divided between Leon and Grace. Leon has already survived two games, RE2 and RE4. His segments in the game are high pressure encounters wheras Grace feels more like a Silent Hill character. She’s careful, cautious, and will be more involved in slower parts of the game. Unlike Leon, she does not fight as well, and is easily frightened.

Grace comes from within a powerful institution that is responsible for public safety. She is a technical analyst, and wants to know what killed her mother. She winds up in the quarantined ruins of Raccoon City. She’s on her own to investigate. Her discovery will be a reqiuem to the sense of control and order we once enjoyed, an old world that no longer exists. Her survival will depend on breaking the ilussion that it even existed in the first place.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3764200/Resident_Evil_Requiem/

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/resident-evil-requiem/

You Can't Escape

You Can't Escape 

by Graham Swanson 

    Renea walked in boots that came apart in the snow. The street to the outskirts in the howling cold beat apart

her zipper and pockets. Just another day with her friends in tow. None of them went to school that day.

The temperature dropped from 40 degrees to negative 10 overnight, but they left their homes. A huge

secret awaited them. 

    “It’s just a fence.” Randolph said, pointing to the woods, a tarp with him.

    “What’s on the other side?" Renea asked

    “More woods.” One of the other boys remarked. 

    “No, no.” Randolph held a crumbling map with letters and calligraphy of an unrecognizable language. “It’s where they used to carry out human sacrifice.” 

    Once they got into the snow covered woods the wind felt remote. With all the wind blocked, and no leaves, the sky seemed to bring brightness to the snow around them. Already frost formed on the corners of Renea’s mouth. The others shivered too. Ever since they were kids they had heard rumors of cave fires and shadows lurking in the woods to perform strange magic. They knew stories of strange creatures that once walked the land, and how what is now dry and vast was once under a black ocean. Great heaping glaciers of black ice whose waters brought immortal powers to predators. They never saw enough to believe the stories of old hermits, and their families disregarded the lore as gossip shared by the local homeless and the mentally ill. 

    In a strange way the path in the woods waited for them. No snow covered it, and no debris blocked the way forward. As they went along the sound of highway and town receded into the silence of winter. Some squirrels jumped around the branches, then a little ways down they heard the cry of a hawk, then the snarl of something they could not identify. Just as the snow seemed to dissipate into a mist that covered their waists, the group of friends came to a fence. High, and protected by a coil of razor wire. On the other side they saw a tablet and other strange formations unnatural for geometry. 

    Randolph went first. He really wanted to impress Renea with his bravery and adventurous, and he felt like he was doing that as he scaled the fence. The razors on top flopped as the metal links shook. He hurled the tarp over the razor coils, and pulled himself over. He was nimble enough to reach around the razors, saddle the fence, but as he began to pull his leg over the tarp ripped and a razor bit into his flesh. It sliced right into the meat of his leg muscles, the part that flexes anytime a human runs. He yelped because he felt a pinch, then when the metal sank deeper into his flesh, he howled in pain. He tried to pull his leg back but the coil only wrapped tighter around his leg and when he tried to pull away, six or seven blades cut into his leg all at once. The pain was too much, and he hung there screaming as blood dripped down his leg, down his face, down the frosty chain links, to the snow below. 

    Randolph’s friends panicked and ran away. They took the path back to town, but when they looked back, the mist had covered the woods, and snow cover filled in the moist lane where a path once lay for them. They told their parents nothing of what had happened or what they had set out to do. When people began to realize that he was missing, the town organized a search. They found his detached leg, still in the clutches of razor wire. The metal razors bite clear through to the bone. The way the leg hung there when they found it, like something tried to pull it loose, but only got more tangled in the crown of blades. 

    At night Renea could hear his screams. She looked to the woods and heard his deep voice breaking into boyish yelps, and the pulse of metal. Each dream brought nightmares of his body writhing in pain, withering away, being picked at by the animals. She told an adult about the stress and the nightmares. The adult she talked to was none other than the local shaman who lived in a trailer and sold rugs.  She gave the girl a special crystal rock to swallow if she was in danger. 

    The family of Randolph receive bad news. They didn’t find the rest of their oldest son, and they couldn’t determine how he died. 

    “ Because he had his leg ripped off!” 

    “It’s that damn fence! Why is it in the woods? Why did the city put it there?”

    “It’s actually private property. That land belongs to the Montsan family.”

    The Montsans. In the past, when sea creatures walked the land, they had gold, prestige, wine, and slaves. Since then they devolved into beggars, robbers, meth cooks, and recluses. No one even knew if they were still around because their once beautiful home had almost collapsed on itself the last snow fall they had. The known home dwellers were in state prison at the time for kidnapping and selling children to unknown men and women on the internet. 

    More rumors began about how the Montsans killed the boy themselves and then covered it up. Renea still heard him scream in the woods, so she took a flashlight and went into the woods one night. The metal links echoed in the silence of the woods. She heard Randolph call on her. The mist and path opened up for once more. 

    The coils of the razor turned blue in the moonlight. She saw naked shadows of people on the other side. One, legless, eyeless, no light in his face, but pale and glowing, she did not mistake. Yet he didn’t make words, he just reached out to her with a frail arm, the flesh in his hands blue with veins. She began scaling the fence but stopped at the first wire. It bent around and began slicing into her wrist. She let go, fell from the fence, laid in the snow bleeding as the shadows enveloped her, but from the other side. They passed through the fence like vapor, then began wrapping coils around her ankles. 

    The cut went deep. It just didn’t nick her flesh, it sliced back and forth twenty times and turned the flesh below her hand into ribbons. She hurried through the cold, feeling heavy coils wrapped around her ankles grow tighter, then finally snap tight. The blade bit the tendons of her ankles clean off. The tendon in the back of her foot was completely severed. With one strong tug, he felt the boot and flesh peel off one foot, and the entire other foot came off next. The pain became too strong, so she swallowed the Shaman’s rock. 

    By morning she arrived back in town, crawling on her face, her coat soiled, and her entire face frozen under a mask of frost. A trail of blood followed her and she finally passed out on the highway. When she awoke in the hospital she could still use one foot, but the other turned up later. When she got home she found it wrapped in razor wire on her bed. 

    At night she tried to sleep, tried to dream of escaping the curse and its tendrils, tried to dream of good things but behind every dream lay a dark reality. One dreams of food when they are starved and one dreams of safety when they are besieged. Even though the damage healed, she still felt those cold blades against her skin. She felt them around her ankle. She felt them around her wrists. She felt them around her neck and chest. 

    One day she hopped on her crutches and went to the Montsan Estate. A Caretaker emerged from the cellar. He explained that no one lived in the mansion and that she should go. The Caretaker took her by the hand, not to lead her out, but to show her the scar on her wrist. 

“He knows you're here.”  The Caretaker’s mood changed as he took his hat off.

“Please, is there anyone who can help me?”

“There’s one relative left around. Probably lives in a box down by the river. If anyone knows about him its going to be a family member.”  The Caretaker went back down into the cellar. 

Renea hobbled around the edge of the river where people often leave behind campfires or tents. She hobbled among wreckage cast out from storms and damage. Tubs, car wheels, a bike. Plastic bags drifted in the wind. She stopped when she saw a floating lantern by a tent.

There she found a man with long arms covered in needle scars, greasy, underweight, ungroomed, riddled with sores and blisters. He picked at visible festers on the surface of his skin with a knife. He heard her steps and hurried into his truck. He only came out after seeing the scars on her wrists.

"Please, don't hide. These scars came from the razor wire on Montsan land."

"How did you know about that?" He peeked out of the hole by the broken zipper.

The Forgotten started a fire and sat her down with him. 

“It already touched you.” 

“How do I get it off?”

“You don’t. It gets tighter and tighter.” The Forgotten showed her his scars around his neck. “Once I touched a blade, it was too late.”

“So I should go back and let it kill me?”

“No, he doesn’t want us to die, he wants us to live!” 

The Forgotten unraveled his sleeves and held his own scared wrists into the light of the fire. He looked off in the direction of the tablet and stones and when the wind blew he became ill. He tremble and coughed until he fell from his cooler seat. He gagged up foam but pulled himself up, reaching into his mouth, his fingers sliding down his throat. He made the sounds a broken valve makes until he pulled out his fist, and blade by blade he reeled 25 links of razor wire.

"See? I live." The Forgotten wiped the blood from his mouth, smiled at Renea.

That night while Renea stayed up all night listening to the clamor of chains and metal, the vagrant went into the woods. He took a coil of razor wire, and walked back to town. The caretaker sat in his car. Every day he reached down for his smokes in the cup holder. Today he found no smoke, only a fistful of razor wire. 

    Elsewhere, where the crackheads hang out behind the dumpsters at the gas station, they sat down on a pallet only to yelp in pain. They jumped up, ripped the trash bags apart, and found coils of razor wire inside. 

Laughter and joy became panic. The shadows of woods wandered the outskirts and gazed on through the windows. The razor wire around the Montsan house glistened as the lights of the mansion came on. For the first time in centuries, a virgin had taken to the guardian demon of their cursed bloodline. With her blood on the rock, the satisfied razors turned back into dry fetters from fallen trees. The high fence rattled with pleasure, bones and hair and birds and squirrels once flying free now caught in its snares. The Monstan tower room loomed over the hills and small town. Shadows emerged from the ground, their flesh and blood restored, and they entered the house. 

To this day, anyone who tries to escape this town is stopped by a fence of razor wire. They are later found in pieces scattered along the fence in the woods.

Cannibals

Cannibals 

by Graham Swanson

Uncanny Valley suggests that things that look almost human cause distrust, not empathy. 

Ku. Ku bit fish. He found it dying in the sand. It flopped and flopped, but with one swoop of his arm, strong from high climbs, he crushed its bones, bit off its head, and began eating the meat and scales. Tiny bones picked his mouth but he didn't worry. His body was sore with worms and infections. His hand still hurt, so he rubbed mud into the cut. He smeared mud across any aching, open wound. 

Ku didn't like his kin. Those hominins yelled and fought all the time. They killed his favorite animal, who kept him warm, who chased away the vermin that sneaked into his pot of seed. Then one hominin was sad because he dropped his meat in the dirt. The dirt covered the fat of his meat, and instead of eating it anyway or cleaning it, he took his club and bashed someone over the head, then stole their meat. Sad hominin ate the meat he stole, but then was placed in a hole, where he sat, until the tribe decided what to do. 

Ku liked Shima. Shima still had her fur, but she was always being grabbed and taken away by Cle. Cle didn't like Ku. He beat Ku up for not joining the hunt, for not coming to the circle, for asking questions of the elder hominins who remembered the first arrows and the last time they saw the others before they left to cross the great water. 

Ku spent his evenings on his own side of the mountain. He could hear his tribe, but could not see them squabble or bicker over crumbs. They could find him, if need be, and he could find them, should he need to. Like during big thunderstorms, or when the Dinopethicus prowled the Veldt. He kept no weapons other than a staff he used to knock fruit from trees or keep birds away. 

It was dangerous being alone. But he liked the serenity of the sunrise, and the peace of the flowing water. The sand, the way the light rippled, and when the sun was far, he even saw his reflection. Abysmal and deformed, but still kindness softened the wrinkles and spots where the fur no longer grew. Good. Too many hominins ripped out their own fur in the extreme heat. Some were lucky enough to be born with small patches of fur or less. Still, his large eyes and large nose made the rest of his skull look small under the jungle of hair on his head. When he opened his mouth, he saw a goofy expression in the water. Missing teeth, and scars. 

Still, he longed to share this peace, so when away from his kin, he went searching. Sometimes he even crossed to the other end of the mountain, then crossed to the mountain beyond that, and rested on its peak. Then he'd return and share tales of his adventures. Of what he had eaten. Of what caused him pain. Of what new resources lay beyond. Of the other hominins he shared a fire with. He was careful though. He didn't want them to kill all the animals he liked. He didn't want them fighting with the other peaceful creatures he spoke to.  

Ku heard the screams and hollers coming from his side of the grass. A commotion so loud that it frightened the birds from their homes in the trees. He took off running and scooped up his spear and bag. The branches and blades of grass battered the furless parts of his body. He smelled blood. 

“What terrible consequence befell my strange kinsfolk this time? Why is that stench so potent if they are still at such a great distance from my restful emporium?” He thought, but he could only bark out blunt bursts of hot air and meaningless babble. Then he’d grunt as his mind continued on.

The blood splatter from wood and rock and mushroom smeared onto his flesh. He stopped running. A heavy dread fell over his brow. With his spear he moved around branches and debris to find a dead deer. Several small spears pierced its gut and chest and heart. A pool of blood covered the ground. No flesh remained on its lower legs. The knobs of exposed leg bone were riddled with gnash marks as if something ate it from the feet up. He ripped out one of the spears, It was small, poorly made, not balanced, and crude. 

Well, it can’t be the Dinopithecus. I’ve never seen a spear like that. There’s no time to worry about it now. Life is in the way!

Ku sighed and started running again. 

Bad news. Cle dropped his meat. He tried eating it with ants and dirt on it but he spat it out. He got angry, stood up, knuckles dragging, lunged for the hominin next to him, took the meat from his hands and began eating it. Yru, who had been out foraging all day, couldn’t sleep because of the infections in his feet and mouth, and hadn’t eaten in days, grabbed his club and slammed it down on the back of Cle’s head while he was hunkered down with his face full of meat. His skull cracked open and a storm of blood showered them all. 

In the rage that followed, blue mushrooms were consumed, Shi got thrown into the pond, and snakes bit people. Cle’s kin gathered around his twitching body. They believed the convulsions meant he was still alive. They scooped his brains up and tried to put them back into his head. Yru was in a pit when Ku returned. 

I didn’t do anything wrong, he was a thief, I just took what back he stole.

Yru tried to tell them but he could only moan low and growl. 

My God! This is means for exile! Yru, what have you done? 

Ku jumped on a rock and hurled his spear into the dirt. 

If Cle is dead, who will fight whatever killed that deer? 

Ku wasted no time. He held out the spear he found. Shima knew what he was. She reached out, her eyes quaking. Shima was not from his klan. Her people died out long ago. 

The gnomes! They killed my kin! They snuck into our caves, hid where we couldn’t see them, and when we were gone they stole our babies and our sacks of food! It wasn’t even ready to be eaten yet, it was still seeds! They waited for us to fall asleep then stabbed us with those spears!

Shima cried and screamed at the site of the spear. 

The fight was the result of stealing, but this land isn’t what it used to be when we first found it. When we came here the wildlife was gone and the vegetation didn’t grow back. It’s getting cold, let us plant seeds and return when the stars are right. 

Ku threw down the scrappy spear and pointed to the stars. 

They laid Cle’s body in the tightest space of the most remote cave they knew about. Work had to be done, but they all agreed that they had to leave. Soon the frost would return, so they planted their seeds and filled their pots, and planned to return the next season. By then, the vegetation and animals would return. The curse on the land would be lifted. The one fear Ku had was about what he found in the woods and what it would mean for the land once they left.

Ku stayed behind to watch their land and find out who the spears belonged to. He patrolled the woods, the mountains, the sands. He remained quiet and disguised himself at the nature around him. Once it seemed that the hominins were gone, he began hearing voices. When he approached they’d be gone. 

Next we went to the cave where they interred Cle. To his shock, the body was gone. He sharped his spear, and went into the parts of the cave too high or too tight for the others to tread.  In his exploration he found networks of caves under their feet. Inside of them he heard the same voices, but never saw a soul. He went towards faint beams of light coming in from slivers in the ceiling and wall. When he lowered himself down, he found no hominins, but he did find bones that looked like the grave sewn bones of their fellow humans except flayed of enamel, cut, defleshed completely, as if licked clean and nibbled. Cracks, where the marrow had been extracted. Then he came across a hominin skull.  The top of the skull had been cracked open, like a lid, he lifted it from the rest of the skull. The bottom looked like it had been scraped clean. Tiny finger marks remained. Against the wall he found a mound of bones, and crossed spears. 

Their spears were inferior to the kin of Ku. They had no rock head to pierce hide. It was just a stick with a rough end. Not good enough to hurl, but fine enough to jam into a tree for a rodent, or to stick in an ant hill for the insects. They didn't even use rocks to sharpen the spears. It looked like the same nibble marks as the bones.

Ku almost wailed when he heard the voices again. He looked into a dark corner, where a hole no more than a few stones high opened up. He hoped it was a rodent. The eyes he saw glistening, the hard, struggling breathing, a set of huge teeth sticking out of a small jaw. The creature tried to close its mouth, but it couldn't or it wouldn't be able to breathe. It came out of the shadow, moving on its feet and hands. It had a tiny head, its brain so small that instead of a head that is round and blunt it was pointy.  Ku tried to speak. A few words he used among the kin. 

Ku flexed every muscle from his throat to diaphram. He tried his hardest to make the sound he wanted to make. 

"Food?" He said, holding out some berries he picked. 

The creature quaked and snarled, then darted back into the hole. It darted back out carrying an infant covered in hair. The creature screamed at the infant, screamed at Ku, then screamed at the infant. Ku expected him to show off the baby so he could feed them the berries but instead the creature went into a rage. The voice he had heard was the infant's babbles. Instead of comforting the baby, as his kin did, the creature began beating the baby against a rock. Ku nearly collapsed in horror. Blood splattered the fur on his legs. 

Splat Splat Splat

The baby screamed and cried. The little creature did not possess the strength to break the bones of the baby so he threw them down and began jumping on them. Then the creature looked up at Ku, blood on its chest, face, feet, and hands. This thing, about the height of a swine, squatted down and began tearing the infants flesh off with his large flat teeth. When he realized Ku was watching him, he began offering him pieces of the dead creature as if it was the berries he offered him. 

Ku had his own food, he couldn't imagine why this creature would assume he wanted to sup on that carcass, but as the wailing and hissing continued, he heard other chiding growls emerge from gaps and crevices. He escaped and from the safety of a tree, he watched out. These creatures, these gnomish humanoids, began to creep out and scout the land. Once they determined the hominins had left, they began to scout more. However they did not have the confidence that the hominids had left forever or died out. Ku noticed fewer returned to the caves, but he didn't see them from the tree tops he hid on. It didn’t seem like their ancestors could climb trees at all, unlike his.  

Ku noticed that they didn’t climb, but they could dig. They didn’t come from the same ancestors as he did. They came from the dirt. They were born as a seed that developed in the raw earth. They didn’t develop empathy because they never held and nurtured their young. They pulled their infants from the ground. 

Ku knew where they were hiding though. These creatures pissed and shit all over. It wasn't difficult to detect them because of the growing amount of waste and foul air. Even the snakes began to stay away. So noisy, they scared the game away. Ku wanted to tell them not to scare the swine and birds away, but he realized that they did not care about the long term, they did not care about the megafauna or the hunt. They searched for him to make into their dinner. He wanted to run off to the others, and tell them everything he witnessed. Even if he had to invent new sounds and new words, because the horror he witnessed was indescribable to his limited vocabulary. But it occurred to him that should he leave his tree, any activity they pursued would go unrecognized. 

They must have been eating something. He took his stone knife and lowered himself down. He went to the side of the mountain where the kin left their dwellings, and found it covered in piss and shit. The creatures rolled around in it, mated in it, and ate it. Then they would jump into the pot of grain and spill it everywhere just to take a handful before the others began punching and kicking one another to steal the same handful, even though there was enough to feed several. Ku began to hit himself in the head. He didn't know what to do, and he hated the indecision overcoming him. Meanwhile, the creatures didn't appear to think at all. Just steal from the kin, revel in their own feces, then rip each other to pieces and reproduce. 

They didn't use their spears to hunt like he assumed.  They used their inferior spears to beat each other to death. Then they'd eat the dead body of the fallen. Usually an older creature, or weaker creature, or creature that appeared smarter than the rest, or different eye color or fur pattern. They always scattered seeds around where they walked and never crossed where they already treaded. When it rained, they'd pull a new out by the hair. If it couldn't escape on its own, they devoured it. They weren't hominin kin. They weren't human at all.

In their cruelty Ku saw how they survived. When their teeth were dripping with blood, their eyes opened wide as if sucking air through them. The cones of their head are soft, uncovered by hair,, looking for the rest of the hominins.

The kin returned months later. Ku rushed to find them. He tried to tell them to turn back and avoid this place, but the hominins needed their grains, their weapons, the belongings left back in their caves and shelters. What they discovered was a breeding ground of disease and bones. Ku tried to get them all to go back. He jumped and pointed and waved but they ignored him, their curiosity leading them on. At first a fear took hold of the kin, and as they moved back into their homes, they found things not too different. The weapons remained where they left them, the pots remained where they left them. Shima and her kin entered their home. She now had an infant against her breast. He still had his fur too, like her. Smart little thing, could sing, and repeat the sounds they made. 

They entered their home, and come nightfall small creatures burst out of the dark holes, turned over the pots and took their weapons and pounced on their sleeping beds. They slaughtered the inhabitants, took as much food as they could, and ran off with the baby. 

The kin then wept and cried over the carnage.. The men of the kin began taking clubs made of wood, bone, with spears and arrows used for hunting. In the past they had run their rivals off the land with these weapons. In the past they hunted the megafauna with these weapons. They would surely eradicate the gnomes. Ku was beside himself in the sanctuary of his hilltop. From there he witnessed the extermination of the gnomes. The hominids didn't just kill a few, they destroyed everything the gnomes touched. They found nests full of bones and blood where the gnomes slept and they pelted them with rocks. If they got close they skewered them. 

The hominins would return to Ku and ask what else he knew about these creatures. They liked to hide in small places and strike when their victims slept. The violence went on and on. Hominids pulled gnomes out of trees and clubbed their heads to bits. A big bonk right on the tip of the coneskull caused an explosion of skull and brain. Their brains were smooth and tiny. 

The extermination went on for months as the coneheads were rooted from their hovels, and then using their fire, they set ablaze the mouths of the cave. The hominins knew a fire deep within would cause smoke to drift out, but a fire on the front caused the smoke to suffocate the cave. Indeed they sat out with their spears and arrows, and when the coneheads began pouring out they killed so many that the bits of bone would be discovered ten thousand years later. 

The gnomes died out that day, but the horrors and war remained in the memories of the hominin.They migrated the Veldt from the ever lasting deserts to the land where there is no sun and the wind is always cold. They shared a sound and tried to retell the story to other tribes. They could feel it in their throat when they talked to their young. The BONE trying to vibrate. Ku took blue mushrooms and breathed in smoke from burning herbs. He saw time begin, he saw the rise of empires, the rise of industry, the ships crossing the cosmic beyond, and finally the end of the universe, and what lay further than that. He could never talk about what he saw, because the words did not exist. However the stories of the monstrous gnome went on for ages, even to this day.

A researcher in the basement of the university dusts off the skulls of these creatures. She holds them, hums as she examines the features of the pointy skull. When she touches them, she feels the primal compulsion to return to the realm of the hominin. She hears stories of gnomes returning as the climate changes and the wild animals go extinct. She feels them emerging from the ground, born of seed not blood.