Black Hex Zine

Cosmic body horror story

Photo by Eugene Golovesov on Unsplash

The Black Hex zine arrived wrapped in butcher paper.

I tore it open, the cover art disarmingly sweet, depicting a cutesy liver illustration. I expected photocopied content, but instead got a paginated slab of meat woven page-to-page. When I opened it, the meat drew its fibres into a kind of origami lattice, holding each sheet together while leaving thin holes between the strands so I could still read the text. Reading it was brutal. It was also marbled with fat, almost pretty.

I couldn’t get over the idea that anyone could make something this messed up. The main problem was the stench—I tried to ignore it, but someone had gone to the trouble of shoving all that meat between the pages. So the only thing left was to stick it in the fridge and preserve it for a little bit longer.

By night, the stink only intensified, but I flipped through the zine anyway. Every time I opened and closed this marvellous creation, a live-wire jolt ran through it. The whole thing lit up, electrified, dancing with sparks of energy.

On day two, the zine got even weirder. It wasn’t just hard to read—its fibres were creeping outward. When I opened the fridge, there it was—bigger—strands sprouting from it, porous and growing.

Not only did it smell worse, but reading it was even harder with flesh threads everywhere. But I was starving for knowledge, so I sliced the meaty bits off with my steak knife. It went smoothly, but it bled a lot—so maybe the zine was alive. What I cut was basically free meat, so I tried it raw—chewy, like beef jerky. I fried it in my cast-iron Lodge pan, and it was actually good. Peering through the holes, I finally made out what page 15 said, though the pages were a little bloodied. The zine detailed strange rituals and occult processions. Some details felt borderline sacrificial, and I had to check whether any of that was legal. I didn’t find a definite answer.

As I read, I chewed bits of the zine, and strange static buzzed behind my teeth.

The zine kept growing, and I kept eating it every day. Why not? Free food, after all. But eating the zine felt strange. I threw up a few times and had the strangest jolting sensation down in my guts—like jump leads. Maybe feeding on it was a mistake.

Ever since I started reading the zine, the moon has been right there outside. Weird. It wasn’t even supposed to be a full moon. And it wasn’t the normal kind of moon; it was a little red. A blood moon, I figured. Something messed up was coming, but I lay down instead of stewing on it. I was exhausted.

Waking up was a shock. I couldn’t roll to my right, and my vision was blurry. I tried to turn over only to feel something stopping me from rolling onto my side. I opened my eyes and saw dense threads and tendrils coiling around one another, branching like nerve endings. It was just like the pages of the zine, but on my body. I panicked, realising they were growing out of me. They were sticking out of my arms, legs, and belly. I stumbled to the mirror only to see that meaty fibres were sprouting from my eyes as well, which explained the blurriness.

I dragged myself to the kitchen and grabbed the kitchen shears. I cut those damned branches; it was painful, and blood splattered across the floor.

Seeing offcuts on the floor, I couldn’t resist; a sudden hunger hit me, as if a new instinct craved the trimmings.

So I pan-fried them, adding salt and pepper. They tasted incredible, like last time.

I looked out the window; it was already nine a.m., yet still night. Something was very wrong. When I raised the blinds and peered out, there was the moon again—huge, filling half the sky—red as fresh blood, staining the city beneath.

Under the moon’s red light, the fibres surged from my hands, legs, eyes, and chest.

They piled up fast—living threads lacing the air and binding tight around me.

They tugged my skin and cloth, knotting themselves into a scaffold, branching endlessly.

Heat washed over me, and a metallic reek filled the room.

The fleshy lattice multiplied from me in all directions, swarming the walls and glass, the bed.

It engulfed me, and I couldn’t even scream.

Stuck in place, I looked at the blood moon. I felt something beyond it, watching.

There was no room left—only fibres, porous and bathed in the red moonlight, and all I could do was watch, losing vision from the multiplicity of threads.

My thoughts ran red; I was becoming it, a cathedral of flesh. And breath… My breath had stopped.

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Third Eye Horror
© Mac Sitko, 2025
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