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THE ALTAR(ED) SLATE & SNAKEROOT WORKS
PRESENT:
Ossuary Erotica
Volume II : Issue I
Stories by:
Heatherlie Allison and Patricia Cram
With First-Time Guest Contributors:
Richard Gavin explores fear and the numinous. His latest book is grotesquerie (Undertow Publications, 2020). Online presence: www.richardgavin.net
-and-
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald is a California writer of esoterica, including A Gathering of Masks and Arcanum Bestiarum, both published by Three Hands Press. He is also the author of the forthcoming horror collection, The Iteration and Others. With Heatherlie Allison, he is one of the editors of Strixa: Occult Lore & Fiction, whose premier issue will be published in 2021.
View Trailer HERE.
Made by hand
Printed on 100% recycled paper
Dimensions: 5.25" x 5.25"
60 pages
II:I TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. DEW OF LIVER OF DEW
Immersed in monastic living, a young widow wakes destiny when she finds a forbidden book and acts on its instructions.
“Its presence flicks at her spine. She turns to find nothing but dirt and stone, but then sees another twitch of movement. She turns again, tracking, and feels the wetting pulse in her abdomen. Do they know the book presses against her skin? That she carries it daily? Is it the book they want, or her?”
II. PLAYGROUND SAINT: A Nocturne
A tortured woman returns to a childhood setting in hopes of liberation—and reuniting with a defining presence.
“Here, night falls endlessly, forever trapping the terrain in the moment when the sun is buried deepest in its western grave and tomorrow feels hopelessly unreachable. Here, in that sure and arrogant darkness, the playground and its surroundings are thrashed and ravaged eternally.”
III. SKEIN
By Robert Fitzgerald
The discovery of a prehistoric cavern awakens an ancient force long asleep.
“Deep in her bones, she roused, and with senses undiminished by time, probed the intruders, smelt them. And in the scent received, the ages unfurled before her long-extinct vision. She saw all that had happened since her elder worship faltered before the Bear God.”
IV. ROUSING THE RELIQUARY:
A Cast in Four Measures
Excavating the tomb-of-self, an oracle calls upon the bones, consequently arousing an ancestral specter.
“Enter here. Where Oracle waits preserved upon altar of sacrifice. See in her corpse wrapped the body of Self. Lean into now mirror-double. Upon her, trace hands in diamond-shape, from xiphoid apex to twelfth rib at base. Diagonal down—to venal tip. Where thread seams unravel.”