October Story of the Month
Ze Day of Darkness
By
Aza Smith
A stained-glass window shattered from the inside. The projectile thrown through it, a Cossack with an eye patch over his right eye, liquified in the midday sun.
His cosmopolitan entourage bared their fangs and hissed like feral cats. There was a bride in a bloodstained wedding dress who leaped many feet into the air, only to hit the ground with her head blown clean off. A Viking ran through the heart with a blade before he could rend any limbs with his ax. A street punk vomiting blood as his neck was slashed open. Each met with a sudden and painful end at the end of a custom shotgun and silver-tipped long knife. All in an attempt to circle Ahab Killingmeister: Vampire Hunter.
More and more fell before the remaining vampires backed away at the command of a pair of fingers snapping.
Standing above them stood the latest self-proclaimed vampire lord known as The Baron. He was dressed in Baroque-era frills, a massive, powdered wig, white makeup made redundant on his undead skin, and a false beauty mark under his eye.
“Vell, vell, vell,” said The Baron. “You have done very vell to survive so long against my court of carnage, Mizter Killingmeister.”
“This ain’t my first rodeo, pal, and it sure as hell won’t be the last,” said Ahab.
“On ze contrary, Mizter Killingmeister, you must understand that zis will be ze last peaceful day you, and every other human will ever bear witness to.”
“Uh-huh. And this is the part where you tell me what you and your legion of leeches are up to. I know you freaks only crowd around each other like this whenever you're all about to do something big and tacky. Now, is anyone going to tell me what it is, or am I going to have to start yanking your fangs out one at a time until one of you talks?”
The Baron produced a chortle only the inbred sinuses and inflated self-importance of the aristocracy could produce. His court started laughing with him with more enthusiasm than was necessary.
“I will truly miss our witty repartee, Mizter Killingmeister…”
“This is literally the first time we’ve ever met.”
“...but I’m afraid you are too late.”
He pointed a manicured claw towards the broken window, and Ahab saw that the sky had gone from bright blue to a twilight orange. The shadows within the manor grew. The Baron was grinning in rapture.
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“Ze Day of Darkness is at hand!” The Baron rejoiced, milking the giant cow with his talon-like nails. “Ze creatures of ze night shall roam ze Earth, and humanity shall live miserable lives as slaves for my glorious Barony of Blood!”
Ahab lowered his weapons.
“Day of… wait, you mean the solar eclipse?”
“Yes, Mizter Killingmeister!” The Baron belted, reveling in his indistinct European accent. “Ze Day of Darkness!”
Ahab’s shoulders dropped. “That was your big plan? A solar eclipse? Seriously? You mean I had to skip out on book club for this? Come on, man.”
“Zere is nowhere to run, Ahab Killingmeister. Your days are numbered, and I shall zupple upon ze blood of you and all you hold dear!”
“First of all, don’t say ‘supple’ like that. Second, stop saying my name. It’s really weird. Thirdly…”
Ahab pointed his gun point-blank at The Baron. Smoke and noise shot from the tip, but The Baron had already appeared behind him in a flash, grabbing his coat’s collar and tossing him through the doors onto the mansion’s front lawn. The sun and moon made a white-ringed hole in the sky, and the stars were visible.
The Vampire Hunter tested the anchorage of his arms, making sure the impact didn’t fracture his shoulder blades. With another feat of super-speed, Ahab was already an extra foot off the ground as The Baron held him up by his neck.
“Zis is ze end, Killingmeister. Ze end of you, ze end of mankind, but most importantly, ze end of you.”
The Baron squinted up at the eclipse in defiance of the burning ball of gas that had filled his existence with dread. Then pain crawled all over his face. He put his free hand on his cheek and felt it blistering.
“What is happening?!” He dropped Ahab in a panic, the hand that choked the Vampire Hunter trying to block the eclipse, only for burns to form on his hand too. “Ze sun! Ze sun should not be doing zis!”
“You dumbass,” coughed Ahab. “Solar eclipses don’t block out all of the sun’s rays. Just most of them. It’s still technically daytime.”
The vampire’s screams only grew louder as radiation burns covered his whole body, his antique shirt stained from the natural fats and oils leaking out of his cooking torso.
“Zis was… meant to be… my Day of… Darkness!”
“Solar eclipses don’t last that long. Your ‘Day of Darkness’ only lasts for, like, an hour tops.”
The Baron’s brains microwaved in his skull as coagulated blood leaked from his nose, ears, and tear ducts. He collapsed motionless, his cries of pain dying with him.
Ahab nudged the fop with his boot. There was a crunch, the smell of overcooked turkey steaming off the corpse. When the body didn’t react, he looked up and saw dozens of eyes, reflecting red in the shadows of the manor. Some exchanged glances. Others only glared at Ahab with contempt.
“Why is it that whenever you guys all crowd around like this, there’s always some fashion-victim wannabe Dracula-type with a made-up accent gesticulating all over the place? I mean, every. Single. Time! Seriously, where do you find these guys?” Ahab found a pair of blessed bullets lost in his coat pockets and loaded them into his gun. “Now I’m gonna kill all of you.”
The Vampire Hunter cocked the gun one-handed for emphasis. He had forgotten that he hadn’t actually fired it yet, and both bullets fell out.
“Ah, shit.”
​
Aza Smith is a mall ninja, banished from his clan from NorthPark in disgrace for that thing he did, and now wanders the streets of DFW, surviving on street tacos and subpar ice lattes. Since officially starting his career as an author, he has published work on Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, Last Girls Club: The Witch's Cosmo, Jokes Literary Review, The Molotov Cocktail, Nat 1 Publishing, WATG Press, and has been a finalist for the Curious Curls Publishing Short Story Contest two years in a row. His hobbies include painting and soft-sculpture, skyclad occultism, TV Tropes, trashy isekai, and friends-with-benefits movie nights.
Story of the Month Winner
Aza Smith
Author Spotlight
Aza takes the time to answer our silly little questions:
1. If you could be any horror creature for a day, which would you choose and why?
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I’d be one of the bugs from James and the Giant Peach. What’s that? ‘The bugs from that movie aren’t scary’? ‘They sing and dance and play the violin and give life advice’? You wouldn’t find them so charming if they were depicted in live-action instead of stop-motion animation, singing Randy Newman with anatomically correct mandibles and vocal-cords. They’re bugs given super-intelligence by the kind of unknowable black magic that would fit right at home in some Satanic Folk Horror film from the mid-Aughties. Or maybe the ‘tongues’ were actually worms used in radioactive experiments from an eighties creature-feature. Spiker and Sponge’s property is barren, foggy and inhospitable, as though they had been spilling toxic waste there. Plus this was post-Thatcher. What were we talking about? Oh, right! The bugs aren’t just dumb animals you can electrocute in the sewers like the slugs from Slugs. These things have human intelligence, but with above-human physical abilities. The Grasshopper can leap tall buildings, Miss Ladybug can fly, Miss Spider ties up children in her webs like they were flies, and Gloworm…glows. …with the fires of Satan, I bet!
2. What is your favorite horror/sci-fi/fantasy movie and why?
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Dear God, I hate this question. Asking me to list my favorite movies is like asking me my favorite dish. It’s what I crave in the moment!
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Let’s start off with something easy: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. I first saw that movie when I was still a baby, and I’ve seen it more times than any other movie. The characters are unforgettable, every song is a memorable song, its style is all its own. Jack Skellington was my childhood hero next to PS1-era Spyro the Dragon.
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Next is Coraline. It inspired me to go into soft-sculpture and I think it might be one of the best animated films ever made. Memorable characters, suspenseful imaginative, are written in such a way where, if you explained the plot, you’d think it was just a straight up horror film and it's for all ages.
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That ill-defined Gothic Horror-Glam Rock-Counter Culture Musical genre we don’t have a name for. I’m talkin’ Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Phantom of the Paradise, Repo: The Genetic Opera. You know the ones.
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David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. It’s surreal, it’s captivating, it inspired me to read the book. Or I tried to read the book. The book is even weirder. I enjoyed every second I read it, then I would put it down and suddenly forget what I just read like some memetic hazard. It might be the contact high; William S Burroughs claimed he was so hopped up on every drug you could imagine that he didn’t even remember writing it, and you can tell. It’s Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas with a drinking problem. And the drink is absinthe.
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Am I painting a proper picture of what kind of guy I am?
3. What do you do when you aren't writing?
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Trashy isekai, tarot readings, and experimental recipes, usually tacos and pizza. I got my first cast-iron pan when I learned how to make tortillas and it changed my life! When I’m not doing those things, I work as a stock associate at World Market where I stalk the customers, picking and choosing worthy sacrifices as my right as Hierophant to the Star God. My coworkers are all like ‘Aza, you can’t cut open old ladies on the display tables when they ask where we keep the Torani bottles.’ I’m sorry, I thought this was America! The first amendment clearly states that I have a right to practice my religion without Big Brother-Government kicking down my door and telling me who I can and can’t worship! I tried offering the Stellar One animal blood-offerings, and he just ain’t having it! I also like to paint.
4. What is your favorite short story that you have written, and where can we find it?
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“Arson Jax”. It’s actually the second story I have published ever since I got around to writing in 2024, pursuing my dream of being a published author. It’s a dark comedy short story that plays like a subversion of the kind of breakfast cereal commercial my generation grew up with. While the first story I had published – “Paranoia Retardant” on Flash Fiction Magazine (https://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2024/03/23/paranoia-retardant-2/) – was how it started, “Arson Jax” won me First Place in the 2024 Short Story Contest by Curious Curls Publishing. It was the first time I had ever gotten paid for a story, and it kind of solidified that I had enough talent and skill to pursue fiction writing. Plus it might be one of my funniest stories yet, and I feel like the funny ones need a home. (If anyone knows any humor fiction lit mags, I’m game). The story is free to read on their website to this day: https://www.curiouscurlspublishing.com/short-stories/arson-jax
5. Who is your favorite author and why?
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A personal favorite of mine, one I’m always excited to see, would be A. Lee Martinez. I primarily gravitate towards humor fiction – Douglas Adams, Terry Prachette, Yahtzee Croshaw, etc – but Martinez I have a particular fondness for. Could be because he’s considered a “local” author where I live. He’s from El Paso, but he lives in Lewisville, I’m in Oak Cliff, it’s all DFW. Anyway, he likes to toy with different forms of speculative fiction in ways that make them all comically absurd, like classic monster movies (Gil’s All Fright Diner), High Fantasy (In the Company of Ogres, Too Many Curses, and A Nameless Witch), Science Fiction (The Automatic Detective and Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain), Cosmic Horror (Chasing the Moon), Urban Fantasy (Monster, Divine Misfortune, and Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest), and a little bit of everything (the Constance Verity Trilogy). You look up how to write humor fiction and no one seems to know how to tell you, so one has to go by example and example alone. Plus I’m a TV Tropes junkie, I find his clever use of genre conventions very stimulating.
6. What is your favorite novel?
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You ask me for a favorite author, now you want a favorite novel. Alright. My favorite of A Lee Martinez’s work would have to be the Constance Verity Trilogy. Specifically The Last Adventures of Constance Verity. Spoilers: it’s the first in the trilogy, so it isn’t her last adventure. I listen to audiobooks when I drive and when I work and I listened to this series three times. It's about a woman who's basically every protagonist ever: every adventure, every prophecy, every world-ending form of weirdness than needs someone to thwart it, she’s there to save the day. The first chapter is literally her trying to find a normal job as a change of pace, having grown exhausted from doing literally every action-adventure/sci-fi/fantasy/horror plot ever, only to find that the office she was apply for was actually a front from an eldritch horror from beneath the earth, and she effortlessly thwarts them. This is literally her day-to-day. These books are packed with lore, little references to past adventures, Chekhov’s Guns, Brick Jokes, genre tropes, and they might be the funniest books I’ve ever read. I can’t stress that enough.
7. What number are we thinking of?
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Banana.