EDITOR'S NOTE: Creeping Hemlock Press ships the Limited Edition trade paperback of Adam-Troy Castro's The Shallow End of the Pool TODAY! Fear Zone proudly presents this exclusive excerpt from Castro's powerful novella. Creeping Hemlock publishes some of the finest authors in the business, like Tom Piccirilli and Tim Lebbon; Castro's beautiful but brutal prose will blow you away. Take your time to savor this preview, which left me wanting to drink a gallon of water in a cool, dark cave.


Excerpt from THE SHALLOW END OF THE POOL by Adam-Troy Castro

From Creeping Hemlock Press


The hours crawled. The sun rose in the cloudless sky. The air grew hot, then sweltering, then brutal, then hellish. Our refuge of shadow narrowed, the razor-thin line between mere unbearable heat and deadly sunlight drawing closer to our curled legs. The sweat pouring down my face collected against my lips, investing the rubber bit with a foul, salty taste. My tongue swelled. I tried not to look at the opposite wall, already so bright from reflected glare that my eyes compensated by conjuring gray spots at the edges.

The shadow wasn't protecting us enough.

Sunburns don't only happen to those to expose themselves to direct sunlight. Sometimes it's possible to hide in the shade, all day long, and still suffer painful burns. It all depends on the reflectivity of the surrounding surfaces.

Ethan and I were in a big white bowl, facing one of its big white walls. Spared the worst of the sunlight, we were still absorbing enough reflected radiation to cook us more slowly. Ethan, who was darker than me and had the base tan one would expect from a boy who had spent years training under this sun, would tolerate it better than I would, with my much fairer skin. But we were both burning. By the time the zone of shadow came within a finger's length of his knees, his face had turned lobster-red, and sprouted the first of what would soon be many sun-blisters on his forehead.

He didn't move, though. He didn't shift position, to protect the parts already burned with the parts that had spent these hours protected by canvas and shadow. He didn't even lower his head. He just faced forward, his eyes closed, his expression serene and confident even as his lips cracked and the sweat pooled in the furrows between his muscles began to shine like tiny sun lamps. Not once did he let me see that it was bothering him.

By then I already knew that I was losing.

My skin was on fire. My tongue was a dry, swollen worm scraping the roof of my mouth like sandpaper. Something had gripped my bowels and twisted, turning everything inside me to acid. I'd fouled myself and not even realized it. When I moved, I could feel the stored heat rising from me in waves.

I felt snakes crawling over me. They were burning snakes, with razors instead of scales, and when they slithered over my breasts they left gaping wounds behind. They went away and were replaced by flies, each as hot as embers snatched from a fire, each with little buzzsaw wings that, twitching, shredded whatever remained. Then came the worms and the maggots. I threw up, choked on it, managed to get it down again, decided that the long day had to be over after all these hours of hell and looked down to see that the cutting edge of that wall of direct sunlight hadn't moved any closer to me in the year or so I'd been hallucinating.

I cried. I don't know how many tears came out, but I cried. I didn't care if Ethan heard me. He knew how much this was hurting.

I couldn't fool him about that.

Even if I'd lied to him about Daddy.

"You have to be a rock," Daddy said.

***

He'd only done it that one time.

***

I was a rock. Nothing could hurt me.

I looked down through the haze and thought I saw little plumes of steam rising from skin that now seemed scarlet enough to have been dipped in blood. I recoiled, gasped as the burns I already had chafed against the concrete and the sodden canvas of my arm restraints, and shifted position to pull my knees a few inches further away. It wasn't much of a reprieve, I knew. It would give me, at most, a few extra minutes of relative protection.

The line advanced, and touched skin again.

I hadn't seen Ethan move, but he was lying down now, pressed against the curve of the wall with the paler skin of his back, partially obscured by the canvas restraints binding his arms, presented to the sun that would soon be attacking both of us will all its considerable force. The skin on the top of his head was also fire-engine red, and popping with blisters. He was so still that he could have been dead. But I could tell from the corded tension in his shoulders that he was still alert, still strong, still aware of the toll this was taking on me. I should have been mad at him for not grunting or something, just to make sure I followed his example, but I couldn't blame him. He was my brother.

I lay down and rolled against the wall, pressing my face against the gentle curve that marked the junction between pool wall and pool floor. The seam, seen up close, turned out to be littered with the curled, blackened forms of ants, similar to the living ones I'd seen before, these baked to a crisp by previous mornings or afternoons. Their thoraxes pressed against their abdomens in pretend fetus positions, their little legs outthrust as if in protest. If they all came from the same hive, which was likely, then they all had the same mother, and they'd all died here, as we were dying here, as the siblings they were.

Ethan and I had more in common with them than with anybody else on the planet.

My throat thickened.

When the line touched my skin again, there was no longer any safe place to retreat.

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Look for our interview with author Adam-Troy Castro in the near future!