the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction

SEPT '11 ISSUE

2011-09-30T22:10:00.006-06:00

~ PROUDLY PRESENTS ~

THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON
by Adam Bolivar
© by adam bolivar
+ Click Images Below To Begin Reading +

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER
by Gil James Bavel
© by gil james bavel

WE ARE SPACELORD! AND WE
COMMAND YOU TO LOVE US!
by Sean Manseau
© by sean manseau

The SEPT '11 ISSUE marks another wrap for the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction. That's a total of fifteen issues since our inception just over two years ago, when John Shirley helped us launch this literary cyber-rocket into and beyond outer space with his then never-before-published novella SKY PIRATES (an homage to a more golden era of pulp science fiction, particularly that of Jack Vance and Edgar Rice Burroughs, with a nod to Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood).

The idea then (as now) was to bring the imaginatively-starved populace of this 21st century some new, original stories to be serialized in daily installments, the way Charles Dickens used to be serialized in the newspapers. As Editor In Chief of this virtual cybervessel, I've been appointed by a mysterious force known as "the Bloodhorde", or the "Blood Host"—also referred to sometimes as the "nano horde"—apparantly a collective of superminiaturized quantum computers dispatched from the future with the specific intention of having chosen US as the proprietors of establishing the ONE past out of more than a quadrillion-cubed-plus possible universes.

I've since been keeping tabs on the missives I get from the Nanohorde, and discovered they are in effect emissaries sent by our own descendants in order to make certain this crucial juncture of humanity's generations doesn't let slip the essential power and magic of our imagination itself! You see, I've since been able to logically deduce the following: The future already happened in the grand scheme of things. (This is just another way of saying "there is no such thing as the future," insofar as the peculiar nature of quantum physics is concerned.) We do not "choose" the future, that is a common misconception due to the proprietarily induced "Inversion Principle" which continues to blur our correct vision of the greater scheme of things. We've all been conditioned since elementary school to think of the future as this nebulous possibility we have yet to shape. Nothing could be further from the truth. Think about it. Every decision we make—and lack thereof—helps to actually shape the past. In the great quantum realm of things where time and space get tied up into virtually impossible-to-perceive knots, there is yet to exist a nearly infinite possibility of "Universes To Be Shaped". In other words, we have always had within our realistic grasp the potential to shape any world we demand—limited only by our imagination. Every real-world decision we make (or lack thereof) in fact does irrevocably shape The Past into what it is now! And it is our own emissaries from the Future who have selected us in precisely the same manner that we, in turn, necessarily select the past. Continue dwelling upon this crucial fact in our lives, until you "get it". I have determined that The Blood Host (as I initially called them, since they've invaded my central nervous system) are in fact these very Emissaries, sent from the future to make sure that we, in the present, make the better choices by which the One Past is optimally forged.

Which brings me to the imaginative efforts of the three Freezine Veterans who have graciously supplied us each with another free story of theirs. Three Cheers for our Returning Heroes!

First up, we have Adam Bolivar, who has shimmied up the totem pole to claim the most stories published in the FREEZINE under his belt, thus far. THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON is not merely his sixth (count 'em) story here, but also his fourth "Weird Jack Tale" (begun auspiciously with THE FOX IN THE THORN, from our AUGUST 2010 ISSUE). Taking his cue from Jack Tales and the olden Nursery Rhymes of Mother Goose, combined with a more modern and post-Lovecraftian sensibility, our illustrious Mr. Bolivar may pride himself for having concocted the Weird Jack Tale—and the FREEZINE is proud to have premiered them online for our insatiable readership. The nanohorde seem most satisfied with Adam's anachronistic offerings, and we here at the FREEZINE can't thank him enough for their distinctive support in this literary venue.

Next, we remain grateful to Gil James Bavel, another veteran Freezine author who cut his teeth on the SubGenius's Foundation anthology Revelation X: The “Bob” Apocryphon originally, and has already graced the pixels of our FREEZINE with three other original stories, archived in the right margin here under the ARCHIVE OF STORIES AND BIOS section (scroll down through this to see a list of every contributing author and their respective story hyperlinks). The Blood Host is especially pleased to have received Gil's science fiction novella SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER, and for decreasingly unfathomable reasons, have issued a command for us to manufacture a Limited Edition T-shirt featuring the cover art for Gil's serial, the "Jovian Sister" depiction my wife Shasta Fletcher Lawton threw together especially for it. Gil's novella premiered worldwide during the middle of September, in twelve daily installments, and is now archived here for posterity—hopefully, for the perusal and edification of our overseeing descendants.

Note: The staff here at the Freezine have fulfilled the request of our Overseer's, and have commissioned a limited set of Freezine T-shirts, available in short sleeve or long. Email us at freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com if you or a friend or family member would like to be one of only 48 humans on earth to own this special, one-of-a-kind T-shirt. The short-sleeves cost fifteen dollars plus shipping = twenty dollars, and the longsleeves cost twenty dollars plus shipping = twenty-five dollars. At least a dozen have been sold already, leaving only 36 of these smart looking beauties left. Incidentally, authors who've been published in the Freezine are entitled to a free shirt of their own, so if you're reading this and want one, email us promptly while they're still available—on a first come, first serve basis.

The concluding short story to our SEPT '11 ISSUE is an extraordinarily written fable brought to us by yet another Freezine veteran, Sean Manseau. The Blood Host as well as our staff here at the Freezine are positively ecstatic over WE ARE SPACELORD! AND WE COMMAND YOU TO LOVE US!, a moving and hilarious parable of the transcendent power love itself holds over even the mightiest of demi-gods. A knowing wink and another grateful nod must go out to the author, Sean Manseau, for having submitted this wonderful story to our ongoing webzine. Readers take note: Mr. Manseau will return in a near-future issue with his first Freezine novella, slated for daily serialization—a notable event you do not want to miss out on.

Please take the time to leave a comment under these stories, and also to SHARE them with your friends on facebook, via the nifty little fb-share button located beneath each story. What better way to support your fellow writers than to spread the meme of their fiction throughout our shared social utility networks? You can also search these authors' names on Amazon.com and place an order for a book of theirs, many of which are now available quite inexpensively via Kindle and the like. We at the Freezine are dedicated to doing whatever we can to further the writing careers of our favorite authors. If you know someone with a talent for creative writing, urge them to Google the word FREEZINE and to begin Following our mutual enterprise here, and especially encourage them to submit a piece of their writing, be it flash fiction, a short story, or even a novella to be considered for daily serialization. Our staff of editors will treat them fairly and with courtesy, taking the care to reply and communicate honestly about the strengths and/or shortcomings of their writing. It can be particularly daunting to submit one's own writing for strangers to judge, yet we here at the Freezine openly encourage any and all writers, be they established professionals or aspiring beginners, to go ahead and do so, because you never know. You too could easily be included in the growing roster of creative writers here, alongside such luminaries in the field as John Shirley, award-winning authors such as Rain Graves, and our own growing crew of dedicated veterans who've banded together to give us the best free fiction magazine on the world wide web.

A tremendous THANK YOU goes out to all the Followers of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. With your increasing support, together we will continue striving to expose this webzine to a wider readership. Until the next—JANUARY or FEBRUARY issue—we bid you a most gracious adieu.

WE ARE SPACELORD! AND WE COMMAND YOU TO LOVE US!

2011-09-30T20:12:00.007-06:00

by Sean Manseau

Who or what is Spacelord? Ultimately, Spacelord is beyond language. He is the mysterium tremendum, the Alpha and Omega, a universal force with a face.

But the important thing to remember is that Spacelord was, once upon a time, once before a time, a man. Not a human being like us, perhaps, but a sentient being, with barely understood needs and desires. Achieving godhood is no guarantee when it comes to the extinction of desire; ask the Hindus or Greeks about that. Desire instead undergoes a Great Inflation comparable to that of the universe itself in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Which is just to say that at thirteen billion years old, Spacelord is still struggling with his desires, just like you and me. Sometimes his desires make him do stupid things. Just like you and me.

Some people think that because Spacelord gobbles worlds, he is evil. Not so. Spacelord is, as Nietzsche said, beyond good and evil. Moral considerations are for the mortal. Humor, however, is a divine quality present at every level of creation, from the gross to the transcendent. Spacelord has a great sense of humor. The multiverse glows radioactively with information—Spacelord processes it all, effortlessly. He loves Lolcats and the original BBC version of The Office.

Why did Spacelord return to Earth? He once swore a grateful oath that our planet was forever safe from his predations. But it gets lonely out there among the stars. Spacelord returned to Earth to win back the only man he had ever loved: his former herald, whom he had marooned on our world as punishment for insubordination.

For someone/thing that is more metaphysical concept than entity, Spacelord travels the old-fashioned way: by vehicle. His ship is a moon-sized, mirror-finished sphere that bristles with a thousand unnamed instruments and weapons. It is a physical object, but travels unconstrained by physics. Relativity is of no concern to Spacelord; relativity is relative to him. One moment he is in the vicinity of a certain star, and the next he is in a place so far away that the universe may end before the light of that star could find him. No big whoop to Spacelord. That’s how he rolls. His disco ball of a spaceship winks into existence between the Earth and its moon, and while the computerized defense networks of every nation have a collective grand mal seizure, Spacelord searches for Norrin.

Is Spacelord omniscient? Not exactly. Some things are hidden, even from him. And though he knows a lot, he’s forgotten a lot, too. He once spent the better part of a thousand years hunting fruitlessly for a particular world, positively succulent with life-energy, before he remembered he’d already eaten it. Hey, he’s thirteen billion years old. You try to keep it all straight.

Spacelord reaches out with his nearly-omniscient mind and determines that Norrin is in San Francisco. But Spacelord stops there. Norrin too has Cosmic Awareness; it was one of the gifts Spacelord bestowed upon him at his creation. Along with gorgeous liquid mercury skin and the ability to soar unfettered through the cosmos. You’d think the guy might show a little gratitude. Anyway. The point is, Norrin will sense it if Spacelord pulls too much information from the ether. He will consider it snooping. He’ll be a complete bitch about it, and things will start badly and get worse. But Spacelord has not crossed ten thousand parsecs to fail. He will not pry any further, not even to find out if Norrin is currently seeing anyone special.

He descends under the cover of a raging thunderstorm, the kind that city by the bay almost never sees: black clouds swirling like the sky is escaping through a drain, cobwebs of lightning arcing to earth. Though he exists in every layer of the multiverse at once, to the unaided eye he appears to be a forty-five foot tall man in blue-and-purple samurai armor, with a great antlered helmet on his head. This will not do, however. He intends to keep this visit low key. By the time his boots settle on macadam, Spacelord is a six foot tall man in samurai armor. Seven, counting his helmet. He hopes Norrin will interpret this as self-abasement, and that as a gesture, it will be satisfactory. Spacelord has never had to grovel. But he will tonight if he has to.

The rain continues to lash the streets. Spacelord allows himself to be soaked. This will, he hopes, make him slightly more sympathetic. He stands at the door of a shop, and after a moment’s deliberation, turns the knob and pushes his way inside.

It’s warm in here, and smells richly of leather. One whole wall is given over to the displays of dozens of pairs of boots, both practical and extravagant, and there are racks of jackets and pants and bondage gear. Atop the racks there are mannequins modeling harnesses and restraint equipment. These, Spacelord knows, have been designed and crafted by Norrin. The way this shop smells of treated animal skin, these goods radiate traces of his former herald. Norrin’s residual consciousness makes Spacelord tingle and ache.

There are things hidden from Spacelord, and one of them is the why he cannot put his desire for Norrin aside. Spacelord has experimented and determined that he can, by sheer force of will, arrange 81,027 atoms into a configuration that exactly matches that of his former herald, from the dendrites in his neurons to the cells of his stratum corneum. In every way, shape and form, he can create Norrin’s duplicate. But they are never him. Not even close.

The man behind the counter is older, as human beings go, with a bald head and a white moustache that a walrus might envy. As muscular as a comic book superhero, he is shirtless under his black leather vest. A chain choker, secured with a padlock, is tight around his massive neck. The man hears the bell above the entrance ring, puts down his newspaper, and doesn’t bat an eye at Spacelord’s armor. This is Folsom Street, San Francisco, after all.

“Help you, stud?” he says.

Spacelord clears his throat. “We are hoping to speak with Norrin.”

The man looks at Spacelord with new interest. He is the owner of this shop, and he is Norrin's lover, a position he has enjoyed for almost ten years. They were married two winters ago in a ceremony at City Hall. The shop keeper, whose name is Lyle, wore a white wedding dress. Norrin wore a leather tuxedo and jackboots.

"You a friend of his?" Lyle asks.

Spacelord does not vaporize him with a thought. He does not turn him into a cockroach, or teleport him to asphyxiate on the surface of Mars, or send him back in time to be torn apart by a pack of velociraptors. Which is not to say he wouldn't enjoy any of those options. He nods and says, "We are."

Lyle gets up and moves to the doorway behind the counter. He pulls back the black rubber curtain and calls, "Nor! You got company."

The machine chatter stops. Lyle steps back from the doorway. And then Norrin is there.

Some people say that because Spacelord is not human, he knows nothing of love. Human beings, especially intelligent ones, can be chauvinistic that way—as if human beings invented love. Spacelord has been in love with Norrin since before the Earth was formed. He fell in love with Norrin’s long shining limbs, the sublime geometry of his face, but most especially, his courage in the face of the vision of wrath and terror that is Spacelord as he prepares to feast; Norrin traded his life for the survival of his world. Spacelord made him his slave, but in doing so, he became Norrin’s slave, as well. He made Norrin into something beyond the reach of death, imbued him with powers I can’t describe to you, because they are exercised at levels of reality neither you nor I can perceive. But the one gift he didn’t have to give Norrin was numinous beauty. That, he only externalized.

Spacelord trembles at Norrin’s appearance in the doorway as whole worlds tremble at Spacelord’s approach. Norrin is wearing leather pants and a white undershirt. Around his throat: a choke chain and padlock. The reflections of the overhead track lights dance across his chromed skin.

Of course Norrin knew he was coming. He says, “What are you doing here, Galen?”

Only Norrin, of all the sentient beings in all the universe, is allowed to call him that. Galen was Spacelord’s name, when he was a man.

“We were hoping we could talk,” Spacelord says.

Norrin sighs. It’s for effect: Norrin doesn’t need to breathe. “Now is not a good time. I’m way behind on an order.”

“We have come very far to speak with you.” A puddle is spreading between Spacelord’s purple boots. “We are soaking wet.”

Norrin and Lyle exchange a look. “We were just about to close,” Lyle says. “So unless you wanted to purchase something…”

Spacelord apports bills from the cash register into his hand and buys a pair of leather pants without bothering to try them on for size. Then he leaves and rents a room in a SRO hotel down the street from the leather shop. Upstairs, with his neighbors hacking the last of their lives into crumpled tissues and fighting over who has the radio turned up too loud, he puts on the pants. They are a perfect fit. Spacelord materializes thick-soled combat boots, a white undershirt, a wallet on a chain, a little leather hat. And a mustache. His purple armor he leaves strewn across the floor.

Every day Spacelord visits the shop. But Norrin remains behind the black rubber curtain, and the machine chatters idiotically. After a week Lyle takes pity on him, and they begin to talk. Spacelord tries very hard not to read Lyle’s mind. He learned this was necessary one morning after Lyle and Norrin had shared a particularly ferocious bout of lovemaking. Usually, Lyle wasn’t especially curious about Norrin’s rather exotic origins, or his preternatural abilities. But the evening before Lyle had asked Norrin to instantiate himself twice over, so that their bed groaned under four bodies desperately coupling.

Something you need to know: Spacelord and Norrin, during the several hundred thousand years of their association, were not lovers. Not the way Norrin and Lyle are. Spacelord acknowledges that was entirely his fault. He was a little caught up in his god-complex, thought he was above such things. He couldn’t understand Norrin’s obsession with fucking. It seemed so…biological. But in the decades since he condemned Norrin to eternal exile on this planet located in the ass-end of nowhere—what it came down to, really, was that on Earth Norrin had found the pleasure palace of his dreams, and had sided with the natives when Spacelord had arrived to gobble the planet whole, and yes at the time Spacelord was furious, but in addition to lust, Spacelord had discovered forgiveness (funny the way one directly influenced the other)—anyway—Spacelord has come to share Norrin’s attitudes towards the subject of fucking. In a big way. Spacelord wants to drag Norrin into the heart of the Sun (only a G2 class star, but it’ll do) and get it on until the space/time fabric tears beneath them. Sex, he has come to understand, transcends the biological. Or at least it can. With Norrin, he’s sure it will.

What changed his mind? If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, you already know. Some things are hidden, even from Spacelord; one of those things was the true nature of his feelings for Norrin. Only when Norrin was gone did Spacelord recognize the void his herald had filled. Andus III, Bergeron X1, Leonides IIa—planet after planet, with all their cities, seas, flora, fauna, blogs, reality TV shows, celebutantes—all were converted into energy to feed Spacelord. But somehow, none of it satisfies anymore. If you’ve eaten too many meals alone, you know what I’m talking about.

Spacelord read Lyle’s mind by accident, and what he saw there made him wish he’d perished along with the rest of his universe, those long fifteen billion years ago. That day he didn’t spend the morning in the shop, hoping Norrin would come out from behind the curtain. He went home, put on this armor, and teleported back to his sphere, still in orbit around the moon. “Fuck this shit,” he kept saying to himself. It was an expression he’d overheard from a couple arguing next to the bondage harnesses. The next morning, though, he was back in the leather shop, in his jeans and chain wallet, talking to Lyle. Lyle talks to Spacelord because he is sure Spacelord is no threat to his happy home; the things Norrin says to Lyle about Spacelord are another reason Spacelord tries to avoid reading the shopkeeper’s mind. Which brings up another thing that Spacelord cannot comprehend. Why would Norrin prefer a dimensionally-delimited pressurized bag of fluids like Lyle to the immortal power and glory that is Spacelord? Why? Why? Why?

Weeks go by like this. Spacelord is aware that his leather pants are hanging on him. If he doesn’t feed soon, he will lack the energy to return to his ship. He will be stuck here, on Earth, for a working definition of forever. In six billion years, when the Sun goes nova and consumes the Earth completely, Spacelord will be left floating in space, a wraith waiting for the Big Crunch to compress all the matter in the universe to a single point so the whole cycle can begin again. But the thought of leaving without Norrin by his side is equally unbearable. Spacelord decides to play the only card he has left.

The next morning he does not visit the shop. He takes a seat in the window of Pizza Love, across the street. Spacelord sips Diet Coke and waits for the world to complete a half rotation on its axis. When the sky has gone dark and the halogen street lights coldly glow, Lyle and Norrin exit the shop. Norrin walks over to start the motorcycle they ride together, while Lyle bends to lock the deadbolt on the front door.

For Spacelord, will and action are synonymous. He is sitting quietly sipping his soda. Then he is standing beside Norrin. He says, “It is imperative we speak.”

Lyle clears his throat. “Maybe it’s time you had that talk, Nor. I’m going down to Brainwash for a cup of coffee. Be back in twenty minutes?”

Norrin stares after him accusingly. Then to Spacelord he says, “Say what you have to say.”

Spacelord does. He reminds Norrin of the boundlessness of the universe, of the wonders that await in the furthest removes of space. He abandons English and speaks in wavelengths, in atomic decay rates, in quasar pulses. He apologizes for being a megalomaniacal shithead. He swears he is committed to becoming the best trans-dimensional omnipotent entity he can be. But to reach that lofty goal, he needs Norrin, because Norrin makes him want to be better. Norrin is his pole star.

“I broke my board,” Norrin says.

“We will make you a new one,” Spacelord promises.

“I don’t want a new one,” Norrin assures him. “I’m done roaming space and time. Home for me is a two-bedroom apartment in Hayes Valley. Lyle is my home. And I’m not leaving. Ever.”

"I can destroy this place." Spacelord hears the desperation in his own voice, and hates himself for it. "You know that. You and your monkey and your terra cotta dinnerware will be so much excretory effluvia trailing in my wake."

Norrin smirks. "That's the only way I'm getting anywhere near your ass, you bullying fuck."

Spacelord loses it. He is forty-five feet tall, in his blue-and-purple samurai armor. The sky has turned black and lightning forks to strike the antlers of his forehead. The hills tremble. The blacktop cracks. The Bay Bridge sways. People are running and screaming in the street.

“RETURN, HERALD!” he thunders. “WE ARE SPACELORD! AND WE COMMAND YOU TO LOVE US!”

“You’re making a scene, Galen.” Norrin sits back against the chopper’s sissy seat, his arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry you’re hurting. But the answer will always be no.”

One hundred thirty thousand miles above them, Spacelord’s spherical ship deploys the Elemental Converter. In a matter of minutes, the Earth could be returned to a state of embryonic malleability, its oceans boiled away, its mantle running like syrup. Spacelord would sink slowly towards the planetary core, and linger there for the next several days, absorbing everything that made this world such a shining jewel, such a unique treasure in a universe overflowing with riches. Spacelord will be nourished by the sentience of its every creature, from the one-celled eukaryotes to the astral beings only a few orders of evolutionary development below his own, the ones whose existence human beings could never quite credence. Doing this would not be wrong; in fact, it would be in agreement with the universal order. For inscrutable reasons, this is what Spacelord was created for.

But he doesn’t do it. The Elemental Converter returns to its cradle, and Spacelord returns to his room in the SRO across the street. He takes off his armor and sits at the end of the single bed. He won’t destroy the Earth, because destroying the Earth would mean putting an end to Norrin’s happiness. Spacelord bitterly wishes he didn’t care.

That night he takes a walk. There is still time. Not much, but for a little while, he still has the strength to return to his ship. There is another life-sustaining world, not too distant. No sentient life there, unfortunately, nothing with hopes, hurts and dreams, so it will not be enough to return him to full strength, but it will keep him going until he can find someplace more suitable. Perhaps on that next planet he might find another herald. A little company for the endless night between stars. That’s later, though. Tonight he walks a few blocks down Folsom Street, until he comes to a bar called The Stud. Outside, a little claque of beefy men in strap-shoulder t-shirts stands smoking; they look him over appraisingly. One nods.

Spacelord goes inside. It is dark and the music is loud. Spacelord knows this song: “Ring My Bells”, by Anita Ward. The dance floor is crowded with shirtless men. Spacelord orders a beer, leaves the change from his ten on the bar, strips off his t-shirt, and joins the melee. The beer is cold. Hands grope him. It’s bliss. If you are ever heart-broken and want to forget everything, there are worse places to go than The Stud on a Friday night. Just so you know.

Hours later Spacelord leaves. Or rather, he is pulled from The Stud by a man named Tom. Tom has a shaved head, a Van Dyke beard, and rings through his nipples. Spacelord takes Tom to his SRO room. The man behind the bulletproof glass at the registration desk nods at Tom as if they are old friends.

High above, between the Earth and the Moon, Spacelord’s ship is keening. His energy levels are critically low. It’s time for him to return. Spacelord ignores its entreaties. Is it the beer that’s gone to his head? Or just the prospect of sex? Like I said before: sometimes desire makes us do stupid things. All of us. Even demi-gods.

Tom loves Spacelord’s armor. He insists on trying it on. He won’t take it off. He kisses Spacelord roughly. Then he turns Spacelord around, forcing him forward until he is braced against the bed’s iron frame.

Tom spits into his palm and says, “I don’t have any condoms. Do you care?”

“No,” Spacelord says.

So this is sex. It’s not quite the weightless, spiraling, gamma-ray explosion Spacelord had envisioned. There’s a lot more grunting than he expected. And it hurts. But that’s not a bad thing.

“What’s my name?” Tom says. “Say my name, bitch!”

“Tom,” Spacelord says.

“Bitch, look at me! Do I look like a Tom?” Spacelord turns to see a vision of wrath and terror whose antlers are scraping black paint chips from the low ceiling. He sees what, for the denizens of uncounted millions of worlds, was the last fact of existence. “Now say my name!”

“Spacelord,” Spacelord mutters.

“Louder!”

“Ah! Spacelord! Spacelord!”

Tom spends himself. He slumps over Spacelord’s back. His skin is slick and hot. His arm circles Spacelord’s waist. Spacelord breathes hard, although he doesn’t need to.

After a while Tom gets off him. Tom says, “Got any smokes?”

“No,” Spacelord says.

“Well, fuck me," Tom says. "I’m going to go buy some smokes. But don’t you fucking move. I better find you in exactly the same position when I get back, or you’re gonna pay. You understand me?”

“We—I—understand.”

Spacelord’s thighs are burning. His back aches. Sweat beads at the end of his nose, then drips to stain the bare mattress below.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: XII

2011-09-30T12:56:00.003-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 12:47 hours
Ganymede Base Alpha, underground
Second Shift

Short period comet Murakami-Honda entered the Jovian system and set off the JSDA at 12:47 hours. Inside his underground facility, First director David Chenowith hit the button to silence the alarm, began recording, and watched the comet through the array’s network of cameras on his telescreen. It wasn’t large, but it had an unusually high mass and would pass close enough to Ganymede on its way into Jupiter that there would be serious disruptions. He was glad he was so deep in the interior of Ganymede—he wouldn’t have to worry about anything more serious than a rattling, but the crew of Ganymede Base would likely not survive.

Chenowith would pass the data onto the Earth station Mission Council. They would need to know every detail so they could prepare the next crew to inhabit the station. This entire event would be classified on a need-to-know basis, the only personnel to hear about it would be the construction grunts from the Company ferried out by the Space Corps to rebuild the installation and clean up what was salvageable. They were all cleared as top secret Company officers. As Chenowith prepared the data to send, he watched the comet continue on its path toward Jupiter. He continued his calculations and recordings.

The comet raced ever onward, pulled in by the sun, and shearing toward Jupiter because of Jupiter’s massive local gravity well. The comet’s tail was already brilliantly lit this far out in the system, outgassing cyanogen, water ice, C02 ice and other elements. It had a core of nickel/iron, ice, rock and other ores that gave Comet Murakami-Honda considerably more gravitational impact than most. Chenowith continued recording. This would be the closest Ganymede had been to a comet impact in his career, since the Company had been keeping track. It was a first, and a scientific curiosity.

Ganymede’s orbit was in an unfortunate position in relation to Jupiter and Murakami-Honda—they were both in almost perfect alignment with the sun. Chenowith had run the calculations over and over again, and while there was no chance of a direct impact with Ganymede, the gravitational perturbations would cause unyielding stresses on the moon’s surface. It would crack up the installation like an eggshell. Easy come, easy go, thought Director Chenowith. They wouldn’t be the first crew to die in space.

The day before, Chenowith had put the autobots that ferried H-3, water and oxygen from various stations such as Io to him on hold so they would not be affected by this event. He had supplies for his fusion reactor socked away; it wouldn’t inconvenience him a bit. As the comet grew closer, Chenowith began recording video from all the cameras on the Ganymede mining station, inside the base, the external angles—the Company would want every last moment for analysis.

The crew of Ganymede Mining Base was going about their business, blissfully ignorant of what was about to befall them. Technician Jensen was preparing to suit up to go onto the surface for his duty assignment. He’ll never survive, Chenowith thought. He turned to the JSDA camera and watched Murakami-Honda continue in. No one had ever been this close to a comet before in human history. This was one of the primary reasons that Chenowith was out here, to help study the ongoing impact of comets on life in space. While it was a once-in-a-blue-moon affair, scientifically speaking, it would be invaluable data, as freak an occurrence as it was.

Technician Jensen was outside the base, now, flouncing over to the radio shack. Chenowith watched with a keener sense than usual knowing that this would very likely be Jensen’s last duty—to direct the radio shack’s antennae toward the JSDA so it could pass on every last bit of data about the base’s last moments in crystal clarity. Chenowith felt no remorse, it was just another day in the Company for him. This was as exciting as his life ever got.

Jensen climbed up with a jump to the top of the radio shack and began his work repositioning the antennae. Chenowith zoomed in with an external camera to make sure that he was doing it right. Not that he could communicate with any of them now, that would be a dead giveaway. But still, it was part of his job to monitor the last duties of this crew. Jensen dutifully turned the dials that shifted the first and secondary antennae toward the JSDA. When he had completed that task, he manually moved the tertiary antenna, which took some effort and time. He had to line it up exactly, which required the use of his in-suit computer to insure the alignment.

Once finished, he radioed in that the work was complete and hopped off the roof onto the surface. Jensen made his way back toward the base, about a three-minute flounce. That’s when the moonquake started. The cameras in the base that Chenowith had been monitoring went offline, so he turned his attention to the astronomical event itself, eager to watch the rest of the show.

The comet roared by Ganymede, less than 70,000 kilometers away. Chenowith felt a deep rumbling from Ganymede’s iron core; the mantle shook and the icy crust with it. Down here in his core, he was safe from all but a direct strike, but it was still too close for comfort. In a few minutes, Comet Murakami-Honda would be swallowed up by Jupiter, and he would send the results of his observations on off to Earth Control.

First Director Chenowith continued recording for another fifteen minutes until the comet actually impacted Jupiter; it struck with a brilliant flash that overpowered the camera until it could compensate with a filter. It would leave a black eye the size of the Earth on Jupiter’s visible surface for a few days, and then all trace of it would be gone, forever. Chenowith wrapped up his notes, recordings, and sent them off to his colleagues on Earth. He turned to his desk and began writing his after-action report.

Ganymede Base mining station was no more.

Mission Day 723: 15:30 hours
Ganymede Base Alpha, underground
Second Shift

It had been over a day since I’d received word that the Company had received my transmissions. The Company disavowed any knowledge of the incident. But they agreed with my estimation that this much time alone had driven the Director stark raving mad.

So no one will ever know what I went through, the Company would blame it on the Director, and since he’s dead, there’s no one left to take the fall. They’ll buy my silence, and put me out to pasture.

The radio squawked. “Hey, Will, you down there? It was pretty hard landing this thing. I’ve got a ladder for you, but I’m going to have to depressurize for you to get in. These shuttles are fast, but we’re really supposed to have a landing bay to accommodate passengers.” It was Captain Jim Stanton. Big Jim Stanton. Boy, was I glad to hear his voice.

“Copy that, Jim. I’ll be out in a few.” I powered down the console, screwed the helmet to my suit, and made my way back to the elevator.

God help whoever sits in that chair again, I thought, and hit the one single button in the elevator. Going up. Going home. I was going to make a new start, see my family and be glad I got away with my life.

I was going home.

~ The End ~

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SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: XI

2011-09-29T14:30:00.001-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 674: 7:56 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

Marquis Williams was the first out of bed. He went directly to the workout facility and stretched, then put in a half hour on the exercise equipment. It was mandatory for all crew to use the workout equipment daily. Afterward, he got into the shower. When he had finished and gotten dressed for duty, on his own way to the mess hall he met John Biggs headed toward the workout station.

“Morning.” Williams offered cheerfully,

“Morning, Marquis,” Biggs replied. “Did you wipe down the bike seat?” he asked playfully.

“Yeah, it’s all ready for you to use. Have a good workout. See you in the mess hall.”

“Right,” answered Biggs, and patted his friend on the shoulder as they crossed.

Mission Day 674: 8:29 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

The mess hall was already buzzing with activity. Today was a Friday Run, and since the crew had been allowed to sleep in, they were feeling lazy. They now had less time to do to catch-up to prepare the shuttle bay, and were consequently running pre-landing checks while they ate their breakfast.

Dr. Devon Berkshire was sipping black tea—Irish Breakfast—while Dr. Lisa Obermeyer and Will Jensen were drinking coffee and eating what passed for reconstituted eggs with some kind of soy-sausage patties. Obermeyer was finishing a fruit protein bar. They were noodling together while parallel working on their respective duty pads.

Marquis Williams entered the mess hall. “Morning all,” he offered, and made his way toward the drink station to procure some coffee. Various salutations went up from the crew, and Berkshire offered him a pad.

“Make sure you get your ducks in a row this morning. We’re running late, and I want to make sure our deliveries get made without a hitch. And that Jim and Sondra don’t have to do any more work than usual because we slept in today.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Williams replied, taking the pad and looking it over while he retrieved a cup from the drink station. He poured himself a coffee, stirred in some creamer and sat down with the rest of the crew in the breakfast nook. They munched at their breakfast and began planning out their duties for the day.

“Who wants to wash out the landing bay? I want it done before noon so they have an easy landing,” Berkshire ordered.

Jensen raised a hand. “I’ll take care of it. Then I can hit the bike afterward and be ready for them when they get here. What’s on the bird today?”

Berkshire wiped his pad with a finger and called up the relevant data. “Looks like we’ve got more drill bits, blower parts and algae kits. Oh, and they’re bringing us that new rover that’s been on backorder. I guess they worked out all the kinks, finally. Look, when it gets here, I want John to go over every system, check it and prepare it for initialization. Will, will you see that it gets done? And when you’re finished, I want it stowed away and locked down under a tarp. We won’t need it for a while yet. Let’s get as much mileage out of the old one as we can.”

Jensen nodded, finishing his breakfast. “I’ll make sure to tell him.”

“Everyone have their duty rosters down for today?” Berkshire asked his crew.

“Yeah, we’re ready, Devon,” answered Obermeyer.

“Good. When you’ve finished up breakfast, let’s get to work.” Berkshire resumed looking at the data he’d brought up and lost himself in his cup of Irish Breakfast.

Mission Day 674: 10:04 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

Class I Mechanical/Maintenance Technician Will Jensen was spraying out the landing bay, not with water, but with an air hose. A grating at the far side near the bay door caught the grit and stored it for eventual redistribution on the surface. It was tedious work, but compared to installing the annex, it was easy, and it was necessary to insure the Friday Run ship had a smooth landing. Jensen thought about seeing Sondra Lawton and Captain Jim Stanton again; Sondra always lit up the base with her youthful enthusiasm, and Stanton would be retiring soon. He wondered if they’d have a party. Jensen would have to look him up once his own rotation was over.

Of course, he’d have to repeat this process after the ship departed again, but that was par for the course. Dr. Lisa Obermeyer popped open the airlock and joined him in the shuttle bay.

“I’ll help you clean out the grate and get the regolith out, if you like. After a little nookie,” she said, a familiar glint in her eye.

Jensen smiled. “Sounds good, I’m done here. I’ll have to clean up before I suit up again, anyway. Let’s knock off for an early lunch, I’ll tell Devon I’m done here and that we’ll depressurize the bay in an hour or so.” He turned off the air hose and stowed it back on its rack on the wall. They left the bay together holding hands, and made for the command center. Dr. Berkshire was there, correlating data.

He turned to face the two of them. “Get the bay sprayed out?” he asked.

Jensen nodded. “Yeah, just finished. If it’s okay with you, Lisa and I are going to punch out for an early lunch, and then we’ll depressurize the bay and empty the grate outside.”

Berkshire agreed. “Okay, but when you’re done, I have instructions for you to reposition the antennae array on the radio shack. Not sure why, but here are the coordinates. Make sure you put them into your suit.”

Jensen took the pad. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, examining the data.

Obermeyer reached for Jensen’s other hand. “Let’s go, I’m hungry!” she remarked.

Berkshire smiled. “Have fun guys. Don’t fail to be back on duty in an hour,” he commanded. “Friday Run ship is due no later than noon-thirty”.

“Will do,” Jensen replied, taking Obermeyer’s other hand and following her out of their Commander’s control center.

They quietly walked back to her quarters. She opened the door and pulled him through.

“I didn’t get enough of you this morning,” she said, unzipping his jumpsuit. Jensen began removing her own clothes and soon they were in a competition with each other as to which would get the other’s clothes off first. Their boots fell to the floor and soon they were lost in each other.

“I want to have children,” Obermeyer admitted.

“What, now?” joked Jensen, fondling her smooth, white breasts.

“We could get started now,” she answered in between breathy moans. “No time like the present.” She instinctually inverted him so he was on top of her.

“You’re serious? Why the sudden urge to have kids?” Jensen asked. He was beginning to drop beads of sweat onto her naked body with every thrust of his pelvis.

Obermeyer's eyes rolled back in ecstasy. “Ohh…I…don’t know. I don’t want to wait until I’m forty to have kids.”

“You’ll have to marry me when we get home,” Jensen said, seriously.

“Oh...oh...okay...FUCK ME!” screamed Obermeyer, and pulled him into her where he exploded like one of Io’s volcanoes. He settled down onto her smooth, flat body and folded his fingers inside hers.

“I’m going to hold you to that, Doctor,” Jensen said, smiling.

Obermeyer was lost in post-coital bliss. “Oh, you do that,” she said with a sigh.

After a few minutes, she sat up, reaching for a nearby towel. “I’m hungry, let’s go eat.”

Jensen laughed. “Okay. Then we’ve got to clean up and suit up.” She handed him the towel and he cleaned off. Putting on his clothes, he zipped up and put his boots on. “I’ll see you in the mess hall.”

“Wait, I’ll come with you,” she said, and hopped out of bed. She dressed quickly and they left her quarters, headed for the mess hall. She planted a kiss on his lips as they departed.

Click Here

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SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: X

2011-09-28T15:43:00.005-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 674: 3:01 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

The crew of Ganymede Base was sleeping comfortably while a rain of micrometeoroids fell harmlessly outside. The modifications to the base complete, they were enjoying a well deserved extra few hours of sleep.

The installation now sported extra crew quarters, new shower and restroom facilities, and waste disposal and containment areas. The airlock to the new section had gone in seamlessly. The survey team had graded the surface, laid a slab, and the construction team had gotten the annex up in well under the allotted time, testing each corner, wall and weld. They had pressurized it, waited an hour to insure there were no leaks, and then opened the airlock into it. No problems.

The most difficult part was wiring the electronics, but that was a simple matter to Jensen. As a mechanical engineer, he was used to fixing things on the fly with fewer materials than he’d like. This new section had really gone up without a hitch. Every member of the crew had pitched in, from the surveyors to the Commander. The micrometeoroids were breaking in the virgin surfaces of the outside of the annex, falling harmlessly to the ground afterward.

Dr. Lisa Obermeyer rolled over in her sleep. Will Jensen was there, in her rack, dreaming of his family back in the inner system: Walking on the beaches of Earth with his nephew, Colin; visiting Luna and his mother; and eventually of crawling through the caves of Mars with his brother Michael and his family. They loved spelunking those ancient caves. Michael’s stepchildren were young enough that they still believed that the caves had been cut out of the living rock by aliens millennia ago. It was one of their favorite hobbies. With nearly twenty billion people on the Earth, it had been an easy option for many of his family to settle offworld to the colonies. It was a lot less cramped, and a more easygoing lifestyle, if you could handle it.

Dr. Devon Berkshire stirred, rolled over in his own rack and awoke. “Computer,” he commanded, “MM status.”

The computer answered back, “Nominal.”

Berkshire called up the exterior view of the new addition and watched the dust of micrometeoroids bouncing harmlessly off of it. Over the years he had learned to wake up to the soft pellets of rain on the base. It was an uneasy sleep that came with command. Of course, the annex was the safest part of the installation now, but being the newest, in his mind it was the most prone to faults. He did a systems check from his bed and then rolled over and went back to sleep.

Biggs and Williams likewise slept restively, they were used to the sound of the rain outside but knew that during a micrometeoroid storm, there was a small but not impossible chance that a breach could occur and they’d have to get up and seal it when the alarm sounded.

Presently, the micrometeoroids slowed and the shower ended. The crew of Ganymede Base could rest easy for the remainder of their rack time and sleep in.

Click Here

for Part XI

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: IX

2011-09-27T15:22:00.005-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 15:20 hours
Unknown Ganymede station
Second Shift

I finished recording the door mechanism and put my helmet back on. One last bounce onto the ledge and over the paperweight that sat between the doors. The second robot stared me down as if we were about to draw on each other in an old 20th century western. Instinctively, I looked back at the defunct robot to see if I could get access to my tire tool. It appeared as if, when it had powered down, the first robot’s magnetic inductors had failed, because the tire tool was lying on the floor next to it. I leaned over, reached down, and took it confidently in one hand.

I then approached on the second robot’s position, brandishing the tire tool in front of me. The robot backed up tentatively and I then knew how I was going to manage my way. I threw the tire tool down, past the first robot’s dead hand—about four feet further down the hall. The robot backed away immediately. It didn’t want to tangle with metal objects on the floor. I continued this, tool over metal hand, until I had backed the robot up against its original door. I made sure to leave the tire tool in its way so that I’d be able to pick up the first robot’s hand. Grabbing this, I made my way back to the T-junction, to the consternation of the second robot, unable to advance.

Now I was ready. I removed my helmet and prepared to activate the actuator that would play the signal from the door. First I held up the robot’s spherical hand and set it inside the ducted indentation. Then I pressed the button in my helmet. From the additional interface emerged a small button. I leaned forward and pressed it with my forehead.

The ceramic indentation pulled the robot’s hand out of mine with a strong electromagnetic field, and I felt a grinding underneath me. Looking toward the chasm, I saw that the rail in the middle was opening, and the bridge was extending into the darkness beyond. Lights flickered on. Success!

Smiling, I put my helmet back on, but then remembered how I had gotten here. This was the last place I could go. Wherever this bridge led, there was the end of my journey. To be prudent, I waited until the grinding stopped, which was at least ninety seconds. When the bridge had extended all the way, I grabbed my helmet, clipped the plasma torch back onto my jumpsuit, and took a first tentative step onto the bridge. Sturdy enough. I made my way across the bridge, being careful not to look down. There was something really strange about the gravity here, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was somehow stronger, but it should be weaker, I thought. It felt more like Luna’s. No matter.

On into the darkness I walked. It took me about a minute to get across to the other side, where I found another hallway much like the one I’d left. This door had another simple button, which I pressed. The door opened and I was greeted by a warm temperature, and a warmer glow from the lights inside. And here I could smell life. This was a familiar smell. Someone was indeed here. And I had questions.

I was in an outer access area, with simple accommodations and a hydroponics bay. It was not unlike the one in our installation, smaller, but also older. It looked as if one half had been recently cleared and new vegetation was growing, the other half was full of familiar veggies and fruit. I looked at some of the food there—I knew better than to touch it, but my mouth watered at the thought. It had been some time since I’d eaten. Focus.

Looking around, I could see a restroom and a shower/locker area to my left. There was only one shower, with a detachable wand and a metal bench. It could not service more than a few people. I wondered who lived here. To my right, I could see a hatch above the ledge near a drink station, and a round bin next to a cabinet with two doors in front. The hatch appeared to be closed, but was round, and looked as if it might accommodate a cylinder about eighteen inches wide.

I grew curious and opened the doors to the cabinet. Napkins, silverware, food paste tubes, condiment packets—someone not only lived here, but received regular shipments from home. But not from the Friday Run ships—they would have told us. I’m sure they would have. The occupants of this station also received fuel from somewhere—perhaps the auto-bots that mined Io for H-3, hydrogen and other ores. I stepped on the lever to the bin and a similar chute to the hatch above led down into the dark. Waste disposal. Fairly well planned out for such a small population. I unclipped the plasma welder and held it firmly in my right hand.

Ahead of me I could see another door, this one with a familiar panel on it—it looked exactly like the ones in our installation. So it was the company. I pressed my fist against the entry button, and the doors parted. Beyond was an all-too-familiar sight.

Something like a video studio, with a room-wide telescreen on one wall, and a camera on the other. I could see other things in my peripheral vision, but straight ahead of me—impossibly—was First Director David Chenowith of the Company. He was seated behind his command center desk, and seemed truly startled to see me. He regained his composure and put down the pad he was working with. He spoke with a familiar voice, but now it was uncompressed and, in real life, raspier than I expected.

“Well, son, I must congratulate you on your ingenuity and tenacity. I imagine you must have a dozen questions. I was truly sorry to see that Ganymede Base was compromised by the rogue comet.”

I could no longer contain my rage. “Compromised? Compromised-?” He obviously had eyes on our base, hell, he had probably had eyes in our base. “Okay, so it’s a rogue comet now. Did the Company know it was coming? Could they have saved the crew?”

“No, son. There was no way to save the crew or we would have, you must understand that.” He looked me unflinchingly in the eye.

“How much lead time did they have? Why have another base so close and not evacuate the crew? Why did you let them die? I loved her!” I was exasperated.

Chenowith shifted in his chair and crossed his legs under his desk. “They knew the risks when they signed on. It’s a dangerous life out here. That’s why you’re paid so well. Why your families are provided for so well in the event of your deaths. The benefits and perks are better than any other in the Corps. Earthside officers don’t make the kind of money that you do,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“What possible reason could you have for not evacuating us?”

“There was nothing we could do. We suspected the comet would affect the stability of Ganymede, but we weren’t sure. If it did, telling the crew wouldn’t do any good. If it didn’t, it would have been a close call.”

“Why did you disable the JSDA?” I asked.

“We did nothing to the array. We only modified your Commander’s COM system software so the alarm would not sound. Knowing there was a potential threat would have done you no good. Panic would have ensued, and no one would ever have survived anyway. Frankly, the only reason you did is because you were already outside in your suit. I must credit you for your ingenuity on making it this far,” he replied.

I was getting angrier with every word he said. “We all could have survived down here! Look at the room! It’s bigger than our entire installation!”

“But there are no supplies for a team as big as yours. My needs are small. As you are now aware, I am the only one here. I was the first settler sent here, and it was because of my advanced age that I was approved at all. When I came here, we did not have the advances in radiation shielding and plasma field control that we enjoy today. I have been through three bouts of severe radiation poisoning, and let me tell you, it’s no fun, son.” Chenowith looked at me.

“Neither is losing your entire team! We all could have survived until the Friday Run in here!”

“But who would have gone back?” he answered. “In the cargo hold of a shuttle? No one would have survived in the hold. It’s not meant for human transport. It’s not pressurized and has no radiation shielding. The Friday Run ship only seats two, you know that. Would you have drawn straws? Killed each other? Left five to die? We had no way of knowing for certain that you would have been affected at all. Predicting the effects of short period comets is hardly an exact science.” He set his hands in his lap, and leaned back in his chair.

“You should have given us the choice. We could have moved the fuel storage tanks away from the installation. We would have taken our chances.”

“Then how do you know that it wouldn’t have been something else to go wrong?” He queried.

Chenowith’s answers were getting dodgier and dodgier. His confidence was eroding and I could tell. It was palpable. He kept his composure, but I could feel his authority waning.

“And why have you been sending us messages from here as if you were on Earth? What’s with the pre-recorded background?”

“I’m sorry, son, but you’re not authorized for that level of clearance. Suffice it to say that the Space Corps and The Company deemed it mission-critical to have a commander off-site, and that will have to be enough for you.”

That tied it. Waving my plasma welder, I said, “I’m coming over there, old man, and I’m going to burn the answers out of you.” I advanced on the Director’s desk.

“I wouldn’t advise violence, son,” said Chenowith, and pulled a micro laser pistol from his lap, pointing it at my head. “This is the one weapon that, fired in here, will cause the core no harm whatsoever. It will, however, leave you quite dead. I’m sure you’ll see that I will be able to shoot you well before you can reach me.”

He had me there. My mind was reeling. He had secrets he was keeping and I was determined to find out what they were. Or die trying.

I was acutely aware of the fact that I had nothing left to lose.

Click Here

for Part X

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER:VIII

2011-09-26T20:59:00.001-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 655: 10:45 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Third Shift

John Biggs and Will Jensen were just completing the internal modifications to the indoor hatch. They’d cut into the interior wall that tomorrow would be an airlock. Most of the work had been in measuring the cuts to the exacting specifications their Commander had shared with them earlier.

Prepping the plate, they put down the welding visors over their faces and arc-welded it over the cuts they’d made with hand-held plasma welders. This was mostly a formality, as there was another exterior wall on the other side, but in case something weakened it, they had to strengthen the interior wall. It would be easy enough to remove the plate with the thermal lance in the morning.

The work went smoothly, and within a few minutes the plate was fixed. Powering down the welding gear, Biggs and Jensen shot the breeze as they put the equipment away, and stowed the gear. They said their good nights and retired to their respective quarters.

When Will Jensen got to his quarters, Dr. Lisa Obermeyer was there waiting for him.

“Why don’t you come over to my place?” she said, and offered him a languid hand.

Jensen simply smiled, took it, and followed her, too tired to argue. She led him back to her quarters, which she’d lighted appropriately and had obviously been preparing for some time.

“I’m touched, Lisa, I really am,” Jensen said. “But I’ve got to be up in a few hours and get back to work. Can we just sleep together?” he asked, weary.

“You’re going to fuck me now...or in the morning. It’s up to you.” Obermeyer led him to her rack, practically threw him into it and started pulling off his boots, then his jumpsuit. “Lights,” she instructed the computer, and they dimmed the rest of the way.

“In the morning, then.” Jensen relented. “I’ll need a pick-me-up anyway.”

Obermeyer punched him gently in the shoulder, and nestled in with him in her bed. She nibbled at his neck and whispered, “Oh, I’ll pick you up all right.” She kissed him sweetly, and then they drifted off to sleep and dreamt of being back on Earth.

They almost always did.

Mission Day 656: 6:00 hours
Ganymede mining station
First Shift

The lights came on in Dr. Lisa Obermeyer’s quarters. A gentle musical alarm sounded which she immediately turned off with a light touch. She reached over to Will Jensen, still groggy with sleep, and put one hand on his chest. “Wakey wakey,” she said, and moved her hand down to his already-erect member.

“You mean business, huh?” he said, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Okay, saddle up,” he said, “I’ve got time for a quickie, but that’s it.”

She accommodated him, straddling him and locking her ankles under his legs. They’d done this many times before. This position called for no straps in Ganymede’s low gravity. She locked her fingers into the small of his back and he grabbed onto her shoulders. They made love as if it were the last time they would ever see each other.

It wasn’t long before they both came together in a furious orgasm, and with a modicum of post-coital cuddling, they cleaned up and Will was on his feet. “J’excuse, mon cheri,” he said, getting dressed, “But duty calls.”

Obermeyer rose, placed her hands around his neck, and gave him a long, passionate kiss on his way out.

“Be safe,” she called after him, and as the door closed, she fell back onto her bed with a soft sigh. She would have to be up and at duty herself soon.

Jensen walked down the hallway and toward the showers.

Click Here

for Part IX

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: VII

2011-09-26T15:23:00.004-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 654: 12:21 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Second Shift

With the survey work completed for the week, the North Forty had been leveled and was ready for the new terraforming equipment. The crew of Ganymede Base were in the mess hall taking a well-deserved break. Marquis Williams broke the silence of lunch.

“So, Devon,” he started, “We going to break out the construction gear tomorrow?”

Berkshire played with the food he’d squirted out onto his plate, mashing it into the vegetables they’d grown in the hydroponics bay. “Bright and early. Be up at six hundred hours, I want to get an early start on it. We’re going to finish getting the East side leveled and ready so by the time the Friday Run ship comes in, all we’ll have to do is set it up and join it to the existing structure.” He looked at John Biggs, and Will Jensen. “You guys are going to need to set up the interface for the new airlock. They’re adding steerage for six more bodies. That’s three rooms worth of kits, a corridor and another restroom. We’re going to be doing work outdoors for a couple of weeks. But I want it done in short shifts, like the survey team does. Too much radiation out there, your suits can’t handle long durations. Keep it to six hours, no more.” He eventually found something edible on his tray and forked it into his mouth. Chewing, he said, “I got most of the East side surveyed, it’s nearly level already. Mostly filling in small craters and laying a slab. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Biggs nodded, reaching for his drink. “I can knock the cutting out tonight, and put a panel on the inside, so we’ll be ready in the morning to depressurize.” He turned to Jensen. “Will, you want to put in a few hours this evening after dinner?”

Jensen was caught shoveling food into his mouth, an orange glop that at one time could have been some kind of meat—with sweet potatoes, probably. “Sure, that sounds fine,” he answered. I’ll prep my suit.”

Biggs drank from his glass and shook his head. “Shouldn’t need it. We won’t make the cuts on the outer wall until tomorrow, I just want to get a plate up on the inside so it won’t take us long in the morning.” He looked at his Commander. “Boss, there’s very little chance of anything going wrong, but in case, do you want to relocate into the radio shack?”

Berkshire contemplated the food on his tray and shook his head. “Nah. We should be all right. Besides, if there’s a problem, there’s not much we can do about it anyway. Anybody that’s squeamish can get into a suit. You’ve been cramming on your construction training, right?”

Jensen swallowed and said, “Yeah, all week. We’re ready. It will only take a couple hours after dinner, we’ll be in bed early.” He looked at Biggs as if it were a challenge.

The stark, white interior of the mess hall reminded him of a museum. “Hey, boss,” Jensen said, “Can we at least paint the new unit when we install it? White gets so boring.”

Berkshire looked at Jensen with a smile. “Sure. Paint it green if you like. Just get it back to regulation before you pressurize it.”

A panel lit up by the telescreen, which was showing several external views of the surface around the base. There was a transmission in from Earth. Berkshire reached over and hit a button. “Look alive, people, it’s the Director, regular priority.”

“Received from Jovian Deep Space Array, 12:24:17 hours,” the computer voice announced.

Indeed, the staid face of First Director Chenowith materialized on the telescreen. He appeared in the foreground in front of the camera, again with a bevy of technicians behind him going about their duties in the background. It was a familiar sight to the crew.

“Greetings, Ganymede Base”, the transmission began. “Fine work you’re doing. We want you to know that we’re all behind you. I have a mail packet coming in for you after this transmission ends. Just wanted to let you know that your supplies and the spare parts and construction materials for the new addition will be arriving on tomorrow’s Friday Run. As you’re aware, Devon, the mission council have determined that the North Forty is incompatible with further mining stations, but not for a blower, so you’ll be getting a new one of those as well. I’m putting you in for a note of merit for getting it done ahead of schedule. You probably saved yourself a week of surveying by getting that out of the way. Good work. Also, Devon, after the mail packet, there is a priority message for you, eyes only. Take it in your private quarters. Keep up the good work, everyone. First Director Chenowith out.”

Dr. Lisa Obermeyer rolled her eyes. “Note of merit. Big fucking deal.” Turning to Berkshire, she grinned. “Gold star for you, Devon.” She had finished her lunch and pushing her tray forward, got up to go to the restroom. “You’ll be able to get another raise soon.”

Berkshire seemed nonplussed. “Feh, out here it really doesn’t matter. Okay, everyone, mail call.” He got up and began handing out pads to the crew. “Take your time, there’s another half an hour before anyone needs to worry about getting back to work. Enjoy your videos from home, folks.”

Obermeyer looked at Jensen with a wink and closed the restroom door behind her. Jensen took his pad from Berkshire and looked it over. Message from his mother, several from his family on Moonbase Beta, and a recording from his nephew back on Earth. He picked up his tray, finished what was on it, and retired to his quarters to watch them.

The rest of the Ganymede base crew followed suit, and slowly got up, looking at their pads, putting the trays from lunch into the washing unit. Berkshire went to his quarters and took the priority message from there. Sitting down at his COM center, he piped it through. It was a program designed to run only with an officer’s password. Berkshire entered his. The computer at the COM center unpacked the archive, processed it, and it ran.

They were specifications for the new addition, plus plans for the blower, algae kits and the spare parts they’d ordered. The only priority eyes-only material other than that was a directive that the addition be up and habitable as soon as possible. Why that couldn’t be opened in front of the rest of the crew was beyond him. He took notes on the specs, and saved it. Back to the grind, he thought, and turned off the workstation. He’d share the specs with the crew later.

Click Here

for Part VIII

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: VI

2011-09-26T11:04:00.004-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 15:15 hours
Unknown Ganymede station
Second Shift

At the bottom of the shaft, I was in complete darkness, although my eyes were adjusting slowly. Just as I wondered how I was going to get out of the car, its doors opened up and lights flickered on in a hallway in front of me. I got to my feet—steady, I thought. The gravity down here felt different from both the installation, and topside. I was just getting my bearings when I saw that there was only one button in the elevator car. Up when you’re down and down when you’re up, and you’d better have your spacesuit on, I thought. I threw the tire tool into the hallway, where it gently bounced against the metal floor.

My own suit’s power supply now dead, I unscrewed my helmet hoping there was breathable air here. I still didn’t have much choice. I’d know momentarily if there was, or I’d suffer decompression so severe that it would make the bends that divers back home get look like a mild case of the hiccups. Phsst! My helmet came off and I smelled fresh, clean air. It was warm—a little cooler than the installation had been, but the air here was more pure somehow. It didn’t smell of people. Even with atmospheric reprocessors and C02 scrubbers, you could still smell the farts and the dead skin cells that had flaked off of your crew. Here, there was none of that. It was clean, cold, clinical. And yet, there had to be somebody here. Why else the atmosphere? The elevator?

I stripped off my suit and crawled out, leaving my boots and jumpsuit on. I grabbed the plasma torch and headed down the hallway. Let’s see what there is to see, I thought. As I rounded the corner carefully, my mind began spinning through the options. It’s a control station. A monitoring station. That’s it. That’s got to be it. Just a once-in-a-while, mostly unmanned pit stop to check levels on tidal forces and moonquakes. Like the one we got hit with. Too convenient. This was obviously a permanent station, not built out of a kit like our installation was; our mining stations; our terraforming units. This was first.

The long hallway came to an end with a big drop at a T-junction. This must have been built on a natural ice cave, blasted out of the methane before our installation. I had learned in school that Ganymede is almost 52% larger than the diameter of the Moon and has twice its mass. It is 77% the diameter of Mars—but comprised of mostly ice and ores, it has such low density that its gravity makes it easy pickings. But why keep this station a secret?

I went to the edge, and looked over. My head was spinning. Even at one seventh G, it was a long way down. It got dark about twenty feet from the rail, and I could only imagine how far down it went. If I could see the other side, there was a chance I could run, launch off the rail, and grab the other side—if there even was one.

Thinking better of it, I explored the hallway perpendicular to the one I’d entered from. The walls here were made from much sterner stuff than our old installation; it looked to me like high-grade prefabbed aluminum, almost certainly with old style, heavy-duty radiation shielding behind it. The kind with lead, concrete and Mylar sandwiched together. But the floor was made to exactly the same specifications as ours. This made me angry. Some kind of secret program built here, first, and none of us knew about it. This place could have saved everybody I worked with. It could have saved the woman I loved. This didn’t feel like the Space Corps to me—somebody would have breathed a word of it to Devon, and he would have told the rest of us. This had to be the Company’s doing.

Someone wanted us out of the way. That was no rogue comet. They probably knew it was coming for months. The Jovian Deep Space Array would have detected it. I was becoming furious just thinking about it. Somebody purposefully wanted us dead.

I reached the end of the left-hand portion of the hallway. A big door. With little slits through it at the top like a high-school gym locker. Dark. No doorknob, no keypad, just a panel to the left of the door with a ducted ceramic indentation. Looked like a high dielectric coupling device, probably piezoelectric-acoustical wave. I obviously didn’t have a spherical key for that, so I doubled back, boots CLICKing, and went down the hall the other way at the T-junction and tried the other door. Not surprisingly, it was exactly the same. Returning to the hallway, I noticed that there was a similar control for something in the middle, this one had an additional interface with an indentation in it. It seemed as if there were an extendable bridge leading over the chasm of ice. I could see the end of it jutting out from the edge of the floor.

I was at an impasse. Fat lot of good being a class I mechanical/maintenance technician did me without any tools. Well, I got in, I thought, now I just have to get in further. If I couldn’t get inside those doors, I’d have to bring somebody out. It was too clean in here, like the clean rooms back at Space Corps. Somehow, I would have to make a mess and see who came out to clean it up. But with what? I thought about lighting my suit on fire with the plasma torch, but if I were ever to escape from here and make the Friday Run shuttle, I would need it to get back to our damaged installation. First I’d have to figure out a way to power it up. One thing at a time.

I went back down the hallway to the door to the left of the junction. A sensor above the door peered down at me that I’d missed before. I could damage it, I thought, with the tire tool or the plasma torch. But that was a trick I could only play once. Then it hit me. The water supply inside my suit. Unless I got power back into it, it wouldn’t recycle for long enough to last until Friday. But there was enough there to maybe short out that control panel.

I made my way back to the elevator where I’d left my suit, and grabbed the tire tool and water bottle out of it. There were secondary and tertiary backups, so this wouldn’t be the absolute end of my supply. I checked the greywater containers but there wasn’t enough there to do much with. I took a last, long pull from the water bottle—who knew when I’d get another primary source.

I squirted the remainder of the water onto the electro- mechanical coupling device and the control panel next to it. The panel sparked, as if it had shorted out. Then, nothing. My hopes were dashed. I had nothing left to affect the door with short of burning my suit. I sat down, frustrated. My anger at being a patsy to whoever had built this station was combined with a growing sadness at my inability to work my way further into whatever it was.

Just then, the large metal door opened silently. A mechanized robot floated out into the hall, repelling off of the metal floor somehow. It wasn’t huge, but it was intimidating; gunmetal grey with a sort of flower pot head and two arms—one with a spherical end! It had no legs, but hovered a few feet above the floor, moving with slow determination.

Wasting no time, I rolled just under the robot and into the small room it had come out of–the closing doors nearly clipped me as I pulled my feet through, getting only a piece of the tire tool that I was still holding onto. Rising to my feet, I could hear faint whirring and mechanical noises from inside the walls of the maintenance closet. It sounded like electronic music, repetitious and eerie.

I looked around, and although many controls and devices adorned the room, I could see no openings or doors from here that I could fit through save the one I’d just entered. Screens atop a ledge displayed machine data; there were waste chutes and refills for cleaning supplies, but no other ways out. That robot would be coming back soon, I thought. As soon as it’s dried the panel and worked out the short, it would come back and I did not want to have to fight a metal man when it did. And another thing—that robot looked like it used a linear induction motor for propulsion, like the kind used in maglev trains. That means I don’t want to touch it—it’s operating under extremely high voltage. And any minute, it would be crammed in here with me and I wouldn’t have any choice but to touch it. I’d have to incapacitate it without touching it.

One last good look around. Nothing. Nothing I could use. I looked down at the tire tool in my right hand. Nothing had ever seemed so clunky and useless. I was stuck alone in a maintenance closet with nothing but faint, creepy mechanical music to keep me company.

Then it struck me. In my training toward my mechanical engineering degree with the Company, I remember learning that the acoustical wave devices used in electromechanical coupling controls like that were subsonic. 20 Khz at best. There’s no way a human being could hear them. But those connectors—that’s all they could hear. This type of control was infrasonic.

So all I had to do was disable the robot without touching it, take its arm off, and play the appropriate sounds for the controls on that extendable bridge’s panel while coupling the arm to the spherical ducting.

I might as well still be outside, frozen to the surface, staring up at the Great Red Spot. Keep your mind in the game, I thought. You’re running out of time. I had passed underneath the robot without any ill effects; what if I could use its high voltage against it? Somehow stop it in its tracks. Something to get in the way of its propulsion.

That’s why the tire tool had hit the door on my way in—it wasn’t that I was too slow—it was being pulled back by the linear induction motor’s magnetic field. I knew what to do now. I placed the tire tool directly in front of the doors and stepped onto the ledge in front of the screens that were streaming mostly machine data, and the occasional external shot of Ganymede. Now all I had to do was wait.

Within seconds, the doors opened again, and the robot began gliding into the room. As it passed over the tire tool, it spun wildly in an upward spiral and struck the robot on the bottom of its housing with a loud, hideous, CLANG! The robot wobbled, spun out of control and fell to the ground, and when it hit, it powered down—shorted out between its own high voltage and the floor.

The doors could not close because the robot was solidly wedged between them. I unclipped the plasma torch from my jumpsuit and tossed it at the robot to make sure that it was no longer electrified. It struck the robot and fell to the ground harmlessly. I picked up the plasma torch, clipped it back on and got to work. I assumed the other maintenance closet had an identical robot and that it would be here as soon as it figured out its companion was down to come take care of it.

I applied the plasma torch to the end of the robot’s arm, near the join to the sphere at the end. It didn’t take long before the metal gave way and the end dropped to the floor. Hurriedly, I crawled over the robot, and went out to grab my water bottle. There was a little left in it, which was lucky. I scrambled back over the robot onto the ledge and squirted the remainder onto the hot slag end of the robot’s limb and left it to cool. Hopping over the dead hulk again, I landed with a bounce onto the metal floor and a CLICK—and ran for my life. The gravity here was definitely somehow different. Running was hard. It took a concerted effort of will not to tumble end over end.

As fast as I was able, I sprinted down the hallway to the T-junction, and indeed, there was a robot identical to the one I had just disabled, just clearing the other corner. I raced to my suit, grabbed my helmet and made a break back for the maintenance closet. We never had this much room to run in our old installation. I was glad that I’d continued working out after being on the track team back home. It was crucial to life on Ganymede. As it was, I beat the second robot as it closed the gap at the T-junction with little time to spare.

I returned to the maintenance closet, making my way over to the first, defunct robot. Its dead limb was hot to the touch, but not hot enough to burn me. I had only one chance to make this work. Hopping back over the robot, I landed on the floor and met the second robot about halfway down the corridor. Staying clear of its outstretched arms, I laid the first robot’s appendage in the way of the second. I had to hope that they didn’t communicate with one another.

But this one seemed savvier. Maybe it was that the first one couldn’t see the tire tool in front of the doors—but this one didn’t approach any further than about five feet from its twin’s metal hand. It backed up, tried to make another approach, and then backed away again. It hovered there, menacingly, blocking my exit from this side of the hallway.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I put on my helmet, and made my way over the fallen robot back into the maintenance room. I could still hear the faint whirring and creepy musical sounds emanating from the room. I hoped that the infrasonic decoupler was still active and transmitting inside the door, which was still unable to close around its keeper.

Now, a bit more calmly, I removed the helmet and pointed its internal microphone at the control panel. Using the com recorder inside my helmet, I hoped I was recording the signal that would activate the extendable bridge at the T-junction—if I could just get past metal-head out there.

Click Here

for Part VII

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: V

2011-09-23T07:40:00.003-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 648: 06:51 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

In the mess hall, the lights were on and Dr. Lisa Obermeyer and Will Jensen were already up and drinking coffee at the breakfast nook when Marquis Williams and Jim Stanton ambled in. Obermeyer and Jensen had been quietly cooing at each other and speaking in hushed tones. Obermeyer took her hand off of Jensen’s reflexively.

“Morning,” she said to the two. “Coffee?” She reached for the carafe.

“Look,” said Stanton, “You guys don’t have to pretend. Everybody knows you’re seeing each other out here. Hell, I don’t blame you. Just keep it professional and you won’t get in trouble. And yeah, some coffee sounds great.” The tall shuttle captain ducked his head by the drink station and poured himself a cup. In the main lab, the ceilings were just a little too short for his liking.

Obermeyer flushed. “Well, that’s awfully big of you, Jim.” She admitted.

Stanton sat down with them as Williams made his way to the coffee. “You’re the medical authority, Doctor. Sexual tension is bad for the mission. We’re all adults out here, and frankly, it’s a dangerous job. This is one thing the Space Corps and the Company see eye to eye on. You know what you’re doing. You can see a civvie if you want to.” Stanton smelled the coffee, it agreed with him, and he blew on the surface to cool it and took a tentative sip.

Jensen sat up a little straighter with a gleam in his eye. “So, Cap, what did you guys get up to last night?” he said sarcastically.

“Oh, I wish you guys would cut it out. You know I’m married,” Stanton responded, setting his mug down carefully. “Hand me a lid, Marquis, will you?”

Williams complied, poured himself a cup and joined the other three at the table. “Hey, yeah, didn’t your wife squeeze out another kid recently?” he asked.

Stanton nodded. “Yeah. Our first girl, Stacie.” He pulled out the pictures. He carried them old-style, in his ID pack. He handed them around the table as if they were party favors.

Obermeyer looked at them longingly. “Wow, she’s so beautiful.” Obermeyer was feeling her own biological clock ticking away.

“Thanks, I think so. Melissa had another smooth labor, just under three hours. I think we might call it quits now. Two boys and a girl is enough, even if we do retire to Mars.” Stanton took an honest gulp of his coffee, followed by a satisfied Ahh. “One thing’s for sure, you guys may be roughing it out here, but you sure have some damn good coffee. I’ve thought more than once about pilfering some from your delivery,” he said mischievously. “It’s getting harder to get the real stuff back home.”

Williams, comfortable in his medium build, was accustomed to the smaller spaces in the installation. He stretched out and tried his coffee. “You’d never even think about it. They’d kick your ass out of the Corps and you’d lose your pension.”

Jensen piped in, “Hey, let’s have a look and see if we took any damage last night from those MMs,” He deftly pulled a computer pad over to the table and set it on its armature. He called up the relevant damage reports and video camera angles. “Well, it’s a good thing we got you in when we did, but it looks like there’s no damage to the station. Your surveys are going to have to be redone, though,” he said looking at Obermeyer and Williams.

Obermeyer put her free hand back on Jensen’s, and sighed. “Well, we knew that was going to happen, anyway. She gave him a squeeze. “The important thing is that nobody got hurt and there’s no damage to any equipment.”

“Speaking of which,” Captain Stanton interjected, “let’s take some time while we have it and compile a list of what you guys need next week. Will?”

“Okay, well, let’s see,” he said, and wiped the computer pad with one hand, clearing the damage control data. Calling up the installation manifest, he entered in his maintenance code and began poring over a new screen. “Looks like we blew through four drill bits, and we’ve got four on hand, so let’s put in for another four. No, six.” He turned to Williams. “You guys decide whether you’re going to put in another drill station over on the North Forty?”

Williams shook his head. “That’s Devon’s call. But if I had to put money on it, I’d say no. The terrain is too rough and I think it’s too close to the other ones. But like I said, it’s up to him. He’s in command.” Williams got up to refill his coffee, and as he did, Berkshire’s head appeared at the entrance of the mess hall.

“That’s affirmative,” Dr. Berkshire agreed,” we really don’t need another drilling station that close. Hey, grab me a tea while you’re over there, will you, Marquis?” he asked, and sat down at the increasingly crowded table. It came out “Marky” in his dulled British accent. He ran one hand through his thinning black hair. “The company wants more terraforming equipment here, though. You’d better put us down for another blower and algae kit.” Berkshire’s beard stubble was already thick enough to see this early in the morning. Williams handed him a steaming cup of hot water with a lid and a bag of black tea in it, along with a toothpick.

Jensen nodded, and entered the data into the manifest. “Got it. Just need your signature here, Devon.” He handed the pad over to Berkshire. He set down his cup, looked over the pad, and pressed his thumb up against the screen. After a moment, he held it up to his eye and it scanned his retina.

“Okay,” Berkshire said, “Done and done. He handed the pad back to Jensen, picked up his tea and very slowly pulled the tab up and down on the toothpick and then let it steep.

A lull settled over the mess hall as they all paused, sipping their drinks.

Lawton and Biggs broke the peace, entering, much too perky for the rest of the crew.

“Hey guys, what did we miss?” Lawton asked, with a broad, playful smile. She entered the mess hall and took a seat at the table. She was still in her undershirt and shorts.

“Oh, good, the gang’s all here,” Berkshire said, getting up. “Have a seat, John.”

John Biggs sat down as if there were an ominous punishment coming his way. “Okay, Devon, what is it?”

Dr. Berkshire didn’t enjoy command, he was a planetary geologist first and foremost, and then a terraforming specialist second. The whole chain of command thing bugged him. “There’s a message from the Director that we’re all supposed to see. It’s not for the shuttle crew, but there’s no reason that you shouldn’t see it, too.” He dimmed the lights and turned on the telescreen, which normally showed a view of Ganymede’s surface.

“Received from Jovian Deep Space Array, 05:44:34 hours,” the computer voice emitted.

The Director’s image appeared on the screen. An older man, in his seventies, First Director Chenowith had been with the Company as long as any of the current crew could remember. Chenowith was a distinguished-looking man with white hair, and the smart grey coat of a bureaucrat. He sat in the foreground, in front of a telescreen camera, with a coterie of people behind him moving back and forth, all buzzing about on their own tasks. Several controllers and technicians sat behind computer stations in the background, going about their business. There was an audible buzz of activity behind him.

“Greetings, Ganymede Base,” he started, “I know you’re out there on your own, and you’re doing good work. Your reports have been coming in regularly and I especially want to thank Dr. Berkshire for his continuing level of excellence. There is good news and better news. The Space Corps have authorized you for a new rover for your expeditions to survey new mining and terraforming territory on Ganymede. I must tell you that the financial outlay for this was difficult to secure in the current monetary climate. It will come equipped with the full complement of surveying apparati and the latest in technology. The new transmitter for the lab is on its way as well.

“We’re also sending you an extra blower and algae pack kit. You’ll be building a new terraforming station on the North Forty, so scrap the plans for mining there. Also, we’ll be upgrading the capacity of the installation to accommodate more space for your crew. Unfortunately, we can’t spare the manpower, so you’ll have to make the upgrades yourselves. I know you’re not construction grunts, but you’ll have the benefit of knowing the job’s been done right and we’re doubling both your pay and your rations during the entire upgrade. There’ll be extra living quarters and more space in the lab.

“Additionally, the helium-3 output from your ore stations will be doubling. It’s a lot of extra work, but that’s why you’re there. Your accounts have already been credited this month; I wanted to be the first to tell you. Specifications and orders follow. Again, good work, Devon and crew, and we’re all behind you. First Director Chenowith out.”

The transmission ended and the telescreen resumed its view of Ganymede’s surface. The grumbling among the crew began immediately.

Berkshire put his hands up at once to quell the uproar. “All right, all right, it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. We’ve had it relatively easy out here until now, it hasn’t been a picnic, but we knew the harder work was yet to come. That’s why they pay us the big bucks. So let’s look at the specifications and see what we’re in for. Hell, by the time we’re done with the upgrades, you guys will still be bitching about it.”

Captain Stanton raised a hand. “Look, we’ve got to haul the extra stuff, and I know it doesn’t make much difference to you guys, but we can help put in some extra time.”

Berkshire shook his head. “Thanks, Jim, but they’d throw a fit if anything happened to either of you. We can handle it. We’ve had secondary construction training from the Company. We’ll figure it out. For now, let’s just deal with what we have to do and get on with our lives.”

“Chenowith is an evil slave-driving bastard,” said Williams, looking over the pad with the specifications on it.

Berkshire tried to stifle a laugh, unsuccessfully. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. If you don’t want the job, I can send you to Titan Station.”

“No you can’t,” answered Williams. “You need me here, and they’d send you with me if you tried.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Berkshire answered. “But we’d see more of each other.” He smiled.

Both crews continued grumbling about the extra work, talked about their bonuses and went about preparing their mission work for the day. It would be a long couple of weeks.

Click Here

for Part VI

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: IV

2011-09-22T14:27:00.005-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 648: 02:40 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

After loading in the cargo and putting it away, the crew refueled their shuttle from the hydrogen tanks and brought the waste out to the loading bay. Space Corps regulations were very strict: you leave nothing but footprints and shoot the waste into the sun on your way back to Earth. Space junk got so thick in the mid-22nd century that after an expensive and monumental effort to collect it from Earth orbit, it was decided that any waste that couldn’t be recycled in space would be added to the mass of the sun. All future missions observed this protocol on pain of discharge from the Corps. Even radioactive waste had been disposed of this way.

The station and shuttle crews had long since had dinner, and retired to their small but cozy quarters for the night. It was quiet in Ganymede station. The only thing the crew could hear was the sound of the ventilation fans breathing fresh, warm atmosphere into their quarters. The walls inside the installation were unfortunately stark white. There weren’t a lot of décor options due to weight and radiation shielding considerations.

John Biggs and Sondra Lawton were shacked up together in his quarters. They were spartan, as all company quarters were; clean, confined and boring. Biggs was an athletic mulatto, medium tall with close-cropped hair and young looking for his age of thirty-six. He was undressed save for his boxers and was playing with her hair while she kissed him. His rack was a plastic bunk bed, with an identical empty copy stacked on top.

They were in the bottom rack, which he’d outfitted against regulation with an extra mattress from the top bunk, even though in this gravity he didn’t need it. In fact, to have sexual congress in one-seventh G, straps had to be engaged, like any other form of physical exercise. But they weren’t quite there yet. The covers had been kicked off onto the plain white plastic floor.

Lawton was on top of Biggs, placing small, familiar kisses on his neck. “Hey, girl, we’ve got all night,” Biggs said, lifting her up to get a look at her. “You in some kind of hurry?”

She smiled and gave him a little slap. “I do want to get some sleep tonight. I just spent thirty-six hours dragging your damn radio here and taking out the trash! Twenty-four hours crammed in that shuttle with the Captain and another twelve powering down after unloading cargo. Now, are you going to do me, or do I have to beg?” Lawton’s long, brown legs nestled around Biggs, trying to find purchase.

Biggs felt playful. “So we’re getting serious now, huh?” he said, sitting up. He was going to make her work for it. “Talk about a long distance relationship!” He laughed.

“Ugh,” Lawton replied, falling on top of him. One hand on his chest, she grabbed his wrist and said “This is just casual sex. I’m dating a miner on Ganymede? Who I see once a week? Hey, it’s my job. You’re just a fringe benefit, and don’t you forget it, mister.”

Biggs pretended to be hurt. “What, you got some other beau now?” He twisted his wrist out of her hand and grabbed hers. “And I’m a mining engineer, not a miner, don’t forget.”

“No, I just like to keep my options open,” she said, falling on him again and breaking his hold. She moved her free hand down to his waist and presented him with a pouty look. “You’re not angry with me...are you, Doctor?”

“Oh, a lot of options for a gal that runs supplies in the outer system...” Biggs let her remove his boxers. He was evidently quite ready for her. She pressed him into her, slowly, and with both hands, grabbed his butt and locked him in for a very long moment. She sighed and closed her eyes.

Biggs made a small sound of satisfaction, then whispered into her ear. “Look, I’d get you transferred out here if you were qualified. You know I want to see you more than once a week”.

Lawton slowly began to twirl, up and down, back and forth. In between passionate kisses, she said, “John, I’d never work out here. It’s far too dangerous.”

“What dangerous? You mean the micrometeoroids? We’ve never suffered any casualties because of them. Pieces get damaged, you bring us new ones. That’s the job.” Biggs pulled straps out from under the bed with both hands and prepared to hook them around the small of Lawton’s back. “God, you’re beautiful.” He could smell the sweat coming off her body tinged with the light essential-oil scent she was wearing.

She arched her tummy toward him and allowed him to cinch them together. “Look, I’m a flygirl, I’m in the Corps. This is as good as it’s going to get for us right now. I’m on a forty-two month commitment and on track to make officer, if I stay in for the long haul. This is a good career for me.” She continued slowly screwing him, one hand on each side of the rack. “Besides, I love flying”.

John Biggs was evidently lost in her. He had stopped talking and was enjoying the feeling of her breasts moving up and down against his well-defined chest. “Lights” he whispered, and the computer dutifully dimmed them out. The two continued making love much longer into the night than either of them had expected.

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for Part V

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: III

2011-09-21T16:01:00.004-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 15:05 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Second Shift

I walked over to the shuttle bay and surveyed the damage. Everything was blown to bits and the bay was almost completely cleaned out. Debris from the drums, lights, repair dock and most of the tools littered the floor. The refueling tanks had blown out one entire wall of the bay and the back into the lab. The only tool that still seemed to be functioning was a welding plasma torch, which I nabbed and clipped to my suit.

Aside from that, the only other thing that was intact was the new rover, which had been secured and covered with a tarp—which was still there, but had some tears in it. I unscrewed the tarp from its moorings, and uncovered the rover to see if it was serviceable. Checking it over, I saw that it was still brand new from the factory. My space suit’s computer beeped at me that power levels were critical. “Power levels ten percent.”

The tires were clean, and had good, strong treads on them. A brand new rover. It had been intended for survey work, and we were not supposed to take it out until after Biggs and I had had a chance to initialize it. No one to stop me now. The initialization routine was simple enough, even in a spacesuit. I powered the rover up, and it responded to my commands as it should. It was ready to go.

With its fully charged nickel/hydride batteries, it had far more run time in it than my suit did. This gave me some initial hope, but when I realized there was no way to couple the power supply from the rover to my suit, I backed it out of the bay, and on my way out, I made sure that the toolkit and emergency medikit were on board. I also grabbed a piece of rebar debris as a weapon—although it didn’t make sense, it made me feel more secure. I was alone on this rock now.

There was a bright flash from Jupiter. That clinched it. The gas giant had vacuumed up another comet. I watched the astronomical oddity for a bit, and away I went. Driving the rover felt mischievous, as it was such a smooth ride and it was off limits. Because the micro-gravity on Ganymede—slightly less even than that of Luna, and due to the long stretches of flat plains on this side of the moon—I was able to go at much faster speeds than I expected. I flipped on the navigation system, just for the hell of it.

There were no satellites orbiting Ganymede, so no GPS, but there was a tracking system for detecting the survey stations that we were in the process of setting up when the accident occurred. Again, my suit reminded me that power levels were reaching critical. “Power levels seven percent.”

I thought about the environmental conditions on Ganymede as I drove the rover. My mind was wandering as I was. The Jovian year is about 12 Earth years…so the terminator moves, albeit slowly. And Ganymede has a magnetic field of its own, which protects it from some of the raw cosmic and solar radiation, but not completely from all the still poorly-understood fire that giant Jupiter spat out at us. How can a planet produce more energy than it receives from the sun? This question has still not been answered in centuries of research.

While Ganymede has no real atmosphere to speak of, its exosphere has moderate amounts of oxygen and ozone, which was among the reasons that it was selected for terraforming. It was easy to mine ice from its surface, which gave us abundant water to drink, cook, wash and water the hydroponic gardens with—and some to store. When the sunlight hits Ganymede’s surface, ozone is generated, which helps protect its surface from radiation. This is a continuous process. The blowers that we set up shot oxygen atoms into the ozone, where they combined to form more oxygen, which falls back down to the surface—albeit slowly.

The blowers mined hydrogen for fuel and oxygen out of the surface, and the drills produced helium-3 and other raw materials for our work. One of the few things we had to continually bring from Earth was topsoil, as we needed it. This far deep in the system, vegetarianism was a convention. There just wasn’t room to keep live animals, much less what they would need to survive. What little meat we got came in dried form, or in tubes as a paste.

Suddenly, a blip showed up on the navigation system that shouldn’t have been there. It showed a large installation due Ganymedean East of my present location! This had to be a mistake… or… was it? An alien base, monitoring our installation? Perhaps the Company had another terraforming station set up separate from ours? But why would they keep it a secret? It made no sense. Whatever this thing was, it was not only within the range of the rover, but less than half an hour away—which gave me a chance to lay eyes on it before I died. I was determined to see what the hell it was. “Power levels five percent”. Damn, it was getting cold in the suit.

A long, hell-bent-for-leather drive across the plains of a Jovian moon made my heart race. Steering around a few craters, I took some big bounces along the way that would have been death-defying on Earth. Catching 100 feet of air on an airless moon pumps you full of adrenaline when you realize that each bounce could be your last. The feeling of vertigo I was used to just looking up at Jupiter—which always seemed somehow like looking down—was intensified at the apex of these long, careening bounces. Presently I arrived at the location that the navigation system said should be there, but saw nothing. I drove around a bit, looking at the ground, and then I saw it. A dark, inconsistent obelisk jutted up from the surface. The heads-up display in my helmet dimmed, and went nearly dark. “Power levels critically low in suit,” the computer voice said. I ignored it, focused on the obelisk. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

No, wait, there was the top of an elevator shaft poking out of the ground, just big enough for a human to enter. It wasn’t supposed to be there. It couldn’t be there. I drove up to it and parked the rover. The shaft looked brand new, of gleaming metal. There was a keypad on the right side of two doors. And I didn’t know the code.

I grabbed the piece of rebar I’d brought, and banged on the doors—maybe someone would hear. I couldn’t believe my luck. There’s got to be somebody in there. I looked at the power gauge—down to 3%. I had to get in; it was now or never. I had five minutes or less before my suit’s power pack failed and then it would get real cold in here real fast.

Think. How to open secured mag-locked doors without a code? I remembered from the Space Corps training that Io's volcanoes give off particles of sulfur and sodium that are ionized by Jupiter's magnetic field, and the Io plasma torus around its orbit is so radioactive that any unprotected human there would almost immediately be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. These particles make it over to Ganymede, not only through the natural migration of the Jovian system, but also clinging on to the ships that occasionally go back and forth. We had to scrub down in the airlocks before going in or out of a ship. Mostly these days, robots automatically handled the cargo.

So these doors must be radiation shielded as well as code-locked. Four minutes. Necessity really is the mother of invention. I wasn’t going to be using the rover again—not anytime soon, anyway—so I grabbed the repair kit and flung it open to see what I could use to get that damn keypad to open the doors. Tape, battery acid, various metals, lengths of wire… and then it hit me. Brute force.

I went to the keypad and put the rebar up against it. I couldn’t fit either end in, so I gave it a good whack and nothing happened. Whack. Whack. Each time, it lifted me off the surface a little, and I landed again. This was getting me nowhere. I wasn’t even making a scratch in the chrome of the keypad. Three minutes.

The jack. Even on Ganymede, the rover would occasionally need to have its tires changed. I flounced to the repair kit and pulled out the jack. It had a tire tool, much like the ones used on Earth, with a wedge end. I’d be able to fit it in between the control pad and its housing. I flounced back over to the elevator and tried the tire tool’s flat end inbetween the two. It fit as if it were made for the task. Gripping it near the bottom in case I struck my suit, I braced myself and smacked the rebar against the top end of the tire tool. It made no sound, but I could feel the tire tool give a bit. Two minutes.

Again. This time, the pad came off and floated away, spinning wildly like a playing card thrown at a wastebasket. Exposed, the inner control mechanism of the pad looked like a fishnet stocking made out of gold, platinum and extruded copper. Electronic leads were sticking out that looked like they might control the doors and the radiation shielding. One minute.

Assuming this radiation shielding was of the ALARP variety (As Low As Reasonably Practicable), I guessed that the doors were protected not only by sheet lead, various levels of Mylar mesh and other neutron-repelling materials, but also by a strong EMF, likely a plasma. I had to short out the system long enough to get in without damaging it, if at all possible. I’d have to drain the rover’s battery to get in. But it was life or death. It didn’t matter.

Using the tire tool, I unhooked the one of the rover’s batteries and pulled it away from the bracket. Using the lengths of wire from the repair kit, I wrapped them around the terminals and attached one pole to the longer of the two leads in the exposed keypad housing. I set the battery on the ground, being careful not to lose the connection, and wrapped another length of wire around the other pole’s terminal. I realized that what I was about to do could very well kill me—but I was a dead man anyway.

“Power levels in this suit have reached critical. Shutting down.” The rest of my suit’s lights dimmed out, and turned off. The whir of the heating fan slowed, and stopped. This was it. Body heat wouldn’t last long now. I had never been this cold. I grabbed the other length of wire and touched it to the only other obvious lead in the keypad’s exposed socket. A massive spark came not from the socket, but from the doors of the elevator, which opened a few inches. I could see the sputtering plasma field trying to kick in. I probably only had seconds to get inside, and I was already feeling arctic cold setting in.

Grabbing the tire tool, I flounced to the doors and wedged one foot between them. Using both hands, I pushed against the doors in an effort to get them to open wider. They were trying to close. I was in a panic. Turning, I put my back against one door and used the tire tool to push against the other as hard as I could. In one-seventh gravity, this is a tricky feat at best. With one last Herculean effort, I fell into the elevator, the plasma field sputtered back into life, the doors closed and I suddenly felt myself going down. I was enveloped in a new kind of darkness.

I could already feel it getting warmer. Someone was here. There would be power. Oxygen. Safety. I was going to live. Even without food, there was enough recyclable water in my suit to last until Friday. Surely I’d be able to survive until then. Down, in complete blackness, I rode the elevator car. I cracked a smile inside my suit. I was going to make it.

Click Here

for Part IV

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: II

2011-09-20T13:38:00.004-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 647: 19:22 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Third Shift

Dr. Devon Berkshire was out on the plains of Ganymede, performing routine survey work with Dr. Marquis Williams and Dr. Lisa Obermeyer, when the Friday Run ship came into view. They looked up, and waved, as the shuttle came in toward the bay of the installation. A small mining base, the only social interaction that the miners and terraformmers got other than each other was when the Friday Run ships came to deliver replenishables and take away waste. The crew continued their work; they knew they’d be able to interact with the pilot and navigator from Earth when they got back from their shift. They’d be done in a couple of hours.

The ship kicked up very little in the way of grit coming into the landing bay. As the sleek, white shuttle cruised in and came to a smooth, skidding stop, the radio inside the cockpit came on.

“Hey, you guys, welcome back!” said John Biggs, the installation’s radio operator. “Gave me a heart attack; why didn’t you radio ahead?” he asked. “Over”.

Sondra Lawton, Navigator on board the Company shuttle came over the squelching radio in the control room. “We thought we’d surprise you today. Not like you didn’t know we were coming. Over.” Sondra looked over at her pilot and commanding officer, Jim Stanton, with a smile. “Think we should tell him about the new radio?”

Stanton eased out of the controls and shut the ship down, clicking off switches and making last minute checks. “Nah, he’ll find out about it soon enough. He’ll be like a kid on Christmas morning”. Back to work. Stanton queued up the mic. “Ganymede Base, this is shuttle Alpha, we’re in and down, hit the garage door and power up your life support so we can disembark this bird, willya? Over.”

“Already on top of it, Jim, over,” said Biggs, and indeed, the bay door began closing and the atmospheric distribution tanks powered up. Within thirty seconds, the door was down, the bay was filling up with atmosphere and the heaters had it warming to a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Sondra Lawton unstrapped from the safety harness and began her post-landing checks. Everything seemed to be in order.

Pilot Jim Stanton handed her a checklist, still on paper after a hundred and sixty years in human spaceflight. “Why don’t you tag ‘em and I’ll bag ‘em?” said the handsome, swarthy, fortysomething pilot, his helmet already off and flight suit unzipped to the waist.

“You got it, Cap’n,” the navigator replied, accepted the small pad from him, tossed it in her lap and removed her own helmet, letting down a long shock of brown hair. Co-pilot Second Class Sondra Lawton was about medium size, with bronzed skin and sharp features, which she downplayed. A few years in the Space Corps will teach a good-looking, twenty-six year-old girl to be as dowdy as possible. She wore no makeup and usually kept her shoulder-length hair in a regulation ponytail when she wasn’t in a spacesuit.

Lawton stowed her helmet at her feet, and took down the pertinent after-action data on the pad with a number two pencil.

“Pressure check,” Stanton said.

“Roger that,” Lawton came back, finished her checks and tossed the completed checklist into her helmet.

Checking a dial, the pilot cracked the seal on the shuttle’s door, and unlatched up the canopy, which raised up, looking like a huge metal bird yawning.

“Okay, we’ve got air, you ready?” Captain Stanton asked.

“Am I ever! Let’s ditch this bitch!” Lawton replied, putting one arm to the fuselage and getting ready to make the jump to the deck. It was a big drop, but in one-seventh gravity, they were used to it. Both of them hopped down, their magnetic boots making loud CLICKs on the metal floor, and stretched their legs. The flight from the Company Mars base took most of a solar day, and from Moonbase, an entire one if made in one shot. They were ready for some R and R. But first, the shuttle needed unloading and refueling.

The shuttle bay was nearly as long as it was wide, and housed fuel storage space for the shuttle’s return trip. The bay was a little greyer than the rest of the base, from the regolith of Ganymede’s surface that came in each time a shuttle did. Even with regular cleanings and electrostatics, small particles of grit managed to stick to the inside of the hangar. Repair tools, drums of hydrogen fuel and the base’s rover were stored inside.

The outer airlock door from opposite the bay door breathed out with an audible hiss and in popped John Biggs, the station’s primary engineer and radio operator, and Will Jensen, computer systems analyst and communications/mechanical engineer.

Biggs and Jensen wore white jumpsuits, flagged and stitched with smart-looking Company insignia. A well-built, M.I.T.-educated black man, Biggs was genuinely happy to see the shuttle crew. Jensen, of Danish extraction, was about the same age as John Biggs, in his late twenties, and was likewise enthused about seeing their friends.

“Long time no see, Kemosabee!” said Biggs, walking over to the pair. He gave Sondra Lawton a big hug, lifting her off the ground with a double CLICK. She squealed.

“Cap’n.” Jensen said with a smile, and offered a firm handshake to the pilot. “What have you got on the bird for us this week?”

Lawton turned from Biggs and gave Jensen a terse look. “You’ll have to wait like everyone else. But I will say this—you’re gonna be surprised!” She ended this by looking back and forth at both Biggs and Jensen, pointing at them with her mouth open, taunting them.

“Okay, kids, let’s get this show on the road. We’ve got to unload this cargo and get inside. While aerobraking through Jupiter, we discovered some micrometeoroids coming in about an hour out, and I want to get in and have a lie down for a while. And the Director wants Devon to send in his status report as soon as we’re done here.”

“Aw, the old man’s got a backache again,” said Biggs, and slapped “Big” Jim Stanton on the back. At over six feet, Captain Stanton was lucky to still be flying in the corps, even outer system missions. Although he wasn’t yet middle-aged, he was too tall to be a pilot but had enough influence back home to have had strings pulled. It was understandable that he’d be cramped in a cockpit made for shorter men.

“Okay, let’s git ‘er done,” he intoned with a false drawl. The crew proceeded to the cargo bays of the shuttle and began fetching the cargo containers from the ship. In one-seventh Earth gravity, hand trucks were hardly ever necessary. If you couldn’t lift 700 pounds on Ganymede, you couldn’t cut the muster.

“Be careful with this one,” Lawton said to Biggs, handing him a specially marked box. “This is your surprise this trip. Wouldn’t want you to drop that.”

John Biggs sized up the box he was holding. “Okay, Sondra, I’ll be careful.” He smiled, and moved over toward the airlock where he set the box down. “Kinda feels like a radio set,” he guessed.

“Dammit!” said Stanton, genuinely frustrated.

“Oh, cool,” said Will Jensen as he moved freight. “It’s the new backup, right?”

Lawton laughed at her commanding officer and shoved him. “Hey, I didn’t say anything”.

Captain Stanton wrinkled his nose at her. “No, you just gave it completely away.”

The crew of the shuttle and the two of the base moved the rest of the cargo inside, and sealed up.

Outside, on the icy, pebble-strewn surface, the survey crew flounced along to their new positions. Flouncing was what they called their movements outside, a cross between floating and bouncing. In the partial shadow of vast Jupiter, Drs. Berkshire, Williams and Obermeyer were now just beginning the final survey for the day. “Okay, give me a reading on this conditional line from the first station”, Berkshire called out.

Marquis Williams peered through his optical instrument at the designated merestone. “It’s off true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Williams agreed, “by a declination of ten degrees, almost exactly.”

Obermeyer piped up. “Marquis, is it almost exactly ten degrees, or exactly ten degrees?”

“It’s exactly ten degrees off. Christ, you’d think it mattered. We’re not putting a drilling station here and you both know it.”

Dr. Devon Berkshire put his gloved hands on suited hips. “Actually, that’s my call, if you don’t mind, Marquis. But you’re probably right. Let’s—“

“Perimeter alarm sounding. Micrometeoroid storm approaching,” droned the automatic computer in their helmets. The Jovian Deep Space Array was never wrong.

“Okay, let’s wrap it up, people. It’s a moot point now. Time to get back.”

Lisa Obermeyer made for the beat-up rover nearby, flouncing over to it. “You’ll get no argument from me”, she said, stowing her gear in the rear compartment and sitting in the front passenger seat. The power gauge on her suit read 26%, and that was enough margin for error, but she’d rather not take any chances. If something should happen to the rover on the way back to the station, they could have problems. It wasn’t the first time the rover had served as cover during a micrometeor storm; it was evident from all the dings and pock marks on it.

Williams got into the shotgun backseat and Berkshire into the driver’s seat. They made good time on the way back, in relative quiet. Micrometeor Storms were serious business; a speck the size of a grain of sand could end your career out here, if it were traveling fast enough, and even your life if you weren’t careful. So far they’d been lucky.

The team of planetary geologist, mining specialist and medical doctor/planetary surveyor made tracks back to Ganymede Base station the rest of the way in nervous silence.

Click Here

for Part III

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: I

2011-09-19T17:08:00.007-06:00

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 14:55 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Second Shift

I realized as I was freezing to death how beautiful Jupiter is from Ganymede's surface. Beautiful like a huge spider watching me with one powerful, raging mutant eye. Hanging there in its web, space. Coldly staring me down. Which only added to the growing chill I felt from my failing spacesuit. The fuel supply was nearly extinguished. I found myself doing the most ridiculous things in an attempt to stay warm. Rubbing my gloved hands together. Going for low-gravity jogs. Even if I could reach Ganymede's terminator in time, it didn’t provide enough ambient heat to be of any help. I was doomed.

Jupiter's natural beauty was as little a comfort as it was undeniable. When the Great Red Spot was facing Ganymede, it was all you could focus on. The bands of gravity-fed gas storms were stunning from my vantage point, and glowed brilliantly in their ever-churning incandescent rainbow of colors. What you see on the telescreens back home just doesn’t do it justice. Still, my suit's heads-up display read 12% on the power gauge, which meant I had maybe an hour or so before I would succumb to the stark cold of open space. It seemed ironic that the one thing that I had an enormous supply of was oxygen, and it was a highly combustible resource. Of course, I'd have to remove my breathing apparatus if I wanted to ignite it. I had already run over every possible scenario countless times in my mind, and I was stumped.

Io came into view from one side of massive Jupiter, a small speck brilliantly lit by the sun, 483,780,000 miles away. Why couldn't I be on one of Jupiter's other moons? I knew, of course, that we hadn't settled Io because Ganymede was so much bigger, because of its magnetosphere, relative stability and raw materials, but we did have mining stations over there. There was power there. Io had more internal heat than Ganymede, but that was because of the tidal flexing, which made Io more unstable.

I'd made the Ganymede-Io run a few times. Now there's an interesting feeling of vertigo, hanging between two tiny pebbles while racing past the gaping maw of the largest planetary body in the solar system. From here, it seemed even bigger than the sun could possibly be. From here, Jupiter looked like the biggest object in the universe. It was all you could see from such a low orbit.

It seemed like much longer than ten years since humanity had settled Ganymede. It had been discussed, budgeted, shelved, reopened, mothballed, reconsidered, shitcanned again, and finally implemented. Whoever figured out that terraforming Ganymede would be much cheaper and much faster than Venus or Mars was a genius. And by now quite rich, I should think. The Helium-3 on Ganymede was so much richer and easier to access than on Luna, and the advances in radiation protection in the last twenty-five years had allowed us to make semi-permanent habitation here a reality. To us, Jupiter was no longer the hot, spitting dragon she had been a century before. That, and the moon-huggers had a fit after we started mining on Luna. But it was okay with them if they couldn’t see it.

We were doing important work out here. Environmentalists never see the bigger picture. Without the Helium-3 from our installation, Earth would have to return to reliance on the dirty fossil fuels and radioactive fissile ones that had nearly destroyed the planet’s economy and biosphere in the early 21st century.

Too bad there still wasn't any atmosphere to lock in heat. Early on, they had proposed a low-orbit dusting of carbon to attract light and maintain some temperature. It wouldn't work because of radio and other early technological considerations; keeping the radio-link with Earth and Moonbase was the top priority, in case something like what did happen happened.

The accident wasn't the Company's fault, nor was there any mechanical malfunction or human error. It must have been a rogue comet. Jupiter vacuums up a hell of a lot more of them than previously thought. I’m surprised the Jovian Deep Space Array didn’t pick it up. When the tidal forces nearby Jupiter’s massive gravity-well changed, there was a massive moonquake that, by itself, we could have weathered.

There would have been some damage, but not the wholesale devastation to the installation that occurred when one of the fuel storage tanks ruptured in the shuttle bay. It lifted me off my feet and threw me on my ass, onto Ganymede’s surface, which shook with a rage like a giant teething child. I struggled like a tortoise on its back for a few minutes just to get back on my feet.

We stored raw hydrogen off-base for our fusion reactors, but some was used to refuel the shuttles. The shuttles’ main job, aside from replenishing our supplies, was ferrying the H-3 back to Earth for use planetwide. The chain reaction took out half of the lab—the main building—and explosive decompression took care of the rest. I was finishing up my fieldwork for the week, manually adjusting the antennae outside on the radio shack when it happened.

I saw Biggs and Williams tumble past, dead before they hit Ganymede's rocky, icy surface. I discovered that Lisa had lived for long enough that I regretted it; she'd recorded a few words into her suit’s com system before dying, "I love you Will." Hearing that when I got to her body was especially heartbreaking, because she really did. And I had loved her.

At first, when we started serving together, I thought she was into women. Maybe that was just a front she put up, serving with so many men. Over time, we had fallen for each other hard. Her face was so serene in death, her beautiful, long white neck looked so strange with her comparatively Day-Glo orange blood frozen to it. Her nose and ears had leaked blood onto the visor of her helmet, which I removed. She would have been proud that her short, spiky blonde hair still had unbelievable hold. Tears streamed down my face inside my suit, and I moved on.

I found my commanding officer, Devon, still alive behind the glass of the multipurpose building we used as radio shack, supply storage, and occasional hideaway when we needed privacy. Devon and I had conversations with my helmet up against the glass about the proximity of ships in the area, how we could restore the radio transmitter, if there were any way to get part of my oxygen supply to him, things like that. It didn't seem fair that I was out here and had plenty of air, but eventually Devon opened the airlock and choked on nothing at all instead of his own waste Co2 so that I could get in.

It wasn't the first time I'd had to put the glass of my helmet up to the bay window of the building to talk with whoever might be in there; the radio in the building was the original one they'd brought to Ganymede, now a secondary transmitter since they'd had the new one in the lab. Actually, there was a backup in the lab that was better, but we were only supposed to turn it on during a radio emergency. The multipurpose building's old radio had been screwed up for months, and we'd put in for another last Wednesday. I know, because I'm the one that requested it.

The Company said it was just a luxury though, and denied the request. I think it must have gotten back to them that off-duty I used to walk the underground tunnel into the building, close the airlock and communicate with radio operators back home. Because of our proximity to Jupiter, I only had a 2-hour window to send and receive one-way messages, and since it takes 44 minutes for messages to go each way, carrying on one conversation often took days. I'd periodically come in and check the computer to see if anything had come in during the week-long Ganymedean day. Of course, I don't really think the Company cared a whole lot. They never mentioned it to me.

I'd gone into the lab, and tried to leave a message on the computer for whoever might find us. The Company would be sure to investigate on next Friday's Run when they didn't hear from us. Today was Sunday. The power was out in the lab, and Devon finally came out into the underground hallway, his oxygen spent. His death was as instantaneous as it was grisly. Without an atmosphere, open liquid is not possible; where there is no air pressure, all materials sublimate immediately.

An unprotected human body, being comprised of mostly water and other liquids, shrivels up like a tin can in a vacuum. I went in to the radio shack to see about leaving some kind of message, but if you've ever tried to use a keyboard from inside a spacesuit, it's pretty goddamn difficult. Communications were offline. I eventually opened up a long-obsolete paint program and drew letters with a gloved finger on the hands-on pad.

"Installation compromised massive moonquake," I'd scribbled, "Technician William Jensen only survivor of initial damage, and I haven’t got long." It felt funny leaving a message for someone to read after you'd died. "Mortician:" I'd almost added as an afterthought, "allergic to formaldehyde." When I was done, I saved it and shut the computer down to save energy in case I could figure out how to jury-rig a link to my spacesuit's system in the next several minutes. It came down to tools. If I'd had the right tools, I think I could have tapped power from the multipurpose building's generator for long enough to survive until the Friday Run showed up. Of course, by that time, my suit would have been full to the knees with my own organic waste product (I'd always hated that Company euphemism). It wouldn't have been very comfortable, but I could've made it. The tools I required, if they hadn't been melted or disintegrated in the lab blast, were probably halfway to the other side of Ganymede by now. If I had long enough, I'm sure they'd have floated past. They'll find them someday and know that they're proof of previous life on Jupiter's moons. "Spanners of the Gods;" I could see the headline now.

As it was, I had fifty or so minutes, and I had run out of options.

I wondered if I should stay close to the installation, so it would be easier for them to find my body, or maybe go for a walk. The temptation to go on a final, last visionquest was irresistible. During the two and a half years I'd been here, I'd only ever seen Ganymede from the installation, the Io shuttle, or the Friday Run ships. We're not supposed to take walks. On Ganymede, we were exposed to about 8 rem of radiation a day from Jupiter without protection. 75 rems over a period of a few days is enough to cause radiation poisoning, and about 500 rems over a few days is fatal. My suit couldn’t protect me for more than a few hours—but I didn’t have that long. Nothing to stop me now. Walkabout. I might even find one of those alien spanners.

Click Here

for Part II

THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON:VIII

2011-09-19T10:26:00.003-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

“Really?” I said, trying to sound as casual as I could. “Because if you’re planning to turn yourself into a ghoul, I’d advise against it. It may be immortality of a sort, but it’s a pretty nasty one.”

“Nothing so crude.”

My eyes flicked to the horrible book on his lab bench. For some reason my gaze kept being drawn to it. Dr. Choate noticed and smiled thinly.

“Ah, I see you admire my Necronomicon. It is a vanishingly rare English edition translated by John Dee. Only a handful of them still exist. My ancestor brought it with him from England on the Speedwell. But you are no stranger to forbidden knowledge, are you Jack?”

“And you are no stranger to the sword of Jack the Giant-Killer,” I replied. Ah, so this was the witty repartee I’d heard so much about.

Just then, the Reverend’s disembodied head appeared in thin air behind and unnoticed by Dr. Choate. A finger appeared over the Reverend’s lips and he winked. Then he pulled a hood over his head and disappeared once more. He must have been wearing the cloak of invisibility, which I recalled was one of Jack the Giant-Killer’s magic gifts.

“Quite so,” Dr. Choate riposted. “Once this experiment is completed, I shall enjoy studying it more closely. The blade appears to be made of adamantine, which by all the known physical laws should not exist. But that is why my discoveries have superseded those of other scientists, for I delve into the mystical and the occult as well as the rational.”

He certainly liked the sound of his own voice. I realized it would be a piece of cake getting him to talk about his plans.

“So what do you want with Gretchen?”

“Gretchen? Ah yes, the girl. I should have known you had a romantic attachment to her. Your pupils dilate when you look at her. Alas, she is a sacrificial lamb to my quest for immortality. She will achieve a form of immortality herself, albeit a less desirable one.”

“You’re turning her into a ghoul?” I renewed trying to dislodge the bars of my prison cell, but they held fast. I had to get out of this thing. I had to stop him. Was it already too late?

“I have been studying the process of transformation. I am very close to isolating exactly what causes a ghoul to lose his humanity. Once I do, I will be able to halt it, and create an immortal being as intelligent and cultivated as you or I. Well, I anyway. I shall be the final experiment.”

“But you’ll still be a ghoul, intelligent or not. You’ll still need to feed on human remains.”

“That is a small price to pay for immortality.”

“Pay this price! Tantivy!” Harriet appeared out of nowhere, brandishing the sword.

“How dare you—” began Dr. Choate. Those were the last words he ever spoke. The impossibly sharp blade of the sword sliced through his neck as if it were made of warm butter. Snickt. His head dropped off his body like a rose blossom snipped by shears, and rolled across the stone floor. For a few seconds, his mouth moved silently and his eyes widened with terror. Then Dr. Archimedes Cabot Choate fell into the endless sleep of death that he had worked so hard to avoid. I wish I could say I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t.

Harriet sliced through the lock on my prison door with the sword. Without stopping to thank her, I rushed to Gretchen’s side. The Reverend removed his cloak and materialized next to me.

“I would have come sooner, but the twists and turns of this underground labyrinth are most perplexing.”

“Do something,” I pleaded. “Help her.”

The Reverend yanked the IV out of her arm, and opened her eyelid. A cold lifeless stare lay beneath. I turned to Harriet.

“Can you...do what did you for me? Make her drink your blood?”

“She’s too far gone, Jack,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “That only works before the transformation gets to a certain point.”

“She belongs to me now.”

We all turned. A woman had entered the vault and behind her stood half a dozen ghouls. She herself had the emaciated body and canine features of a ghoul, but she was different somehow. More alert. More intelligent. Piercingly intelligent, in fact. Then I recognized her. The illustration in the book was of her.

“Queen Syraxsya,” Harriet said, completing my thought.

“Stand aside, vampire,” Syraxsya said haughtily. “And allow my subject to join me.”

Gretchen’s eyes shot open. The Reverend had already undone her restraints, and she climbed off the table without looking at us, shuffling toward her Queen.

“Wait, Gretchen!” I cried, trying to reach for her. But the Reverend and Harriet held me back.

“There’s nothing we can do,” the Reverend said. “The transformation is irreversible. Gretchen is one of them now. She will never be as she was.”

Gretchen joined the mass of ghouls behind Syraxsya, and stared forward without a flicker of acknowledgment of me in her eyes.

“I offer a truce,” Syraxsya said. “Now that the blasphemer has been dispatched, I shall take my new subjects with me to the realm of shadow and leave your city undisturbed. But you must go back to the waking world and not return to my domain.”

“That is a most equitable arrangement, Your Majesty,” the Reverend replied, bowing courteously.

Harriet sheathed her sword. It was decided. Syraxya’s ghouls descended upon Dr. Choate’s fresh corpse like a pack of wolves. Gretchen was among them. I looked away. Harriet and the Reverend each took an arm, and firmly guided me out of the chamber. The last thing I heard was the sound of Dr. Choate’s skull being cracked open like a walnut, and then a cry of delight. Was that Gretchen’s voice? I couldn’t be sure...didn’t want to know. As soon as we were out of the vault, I vomited green bile onto the grey stone floor.

We emerged from the door of a tomb into the upper world. I never knew air could smell so sweet. Copp’s Hill commanded an excellent view of Boston Harbor, and I knew that any minute the first blushes of dawn would be appearing over the sea. Harriet knew it too, and was anxious to find shelter.

“Can I crash at your house, Jack?” she asked.

“You can have it,” I said. “I’m not going back.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. I’m done. Finito. I don’t care about the Thursbane, or serving Mother Goose. I quit.”

I took the feather out of my hat and dropped it on the ground. I turned my back on them and started walking away.

“Wait,” the Reverend said. I stopped in my tracks, hesitating. He pressed the feather back into my hand.

“Keep this. No matter what happens, you’re still Jack. Farewell, my friend. May the blessings of Fríg be on your brow, and the wind of the Weird at your back.”

Harriet gave me a long hug, which made me shiver with cold, but I didn’t care. She gave me a frosty kiss on the cheek. “Take care, my love.”

I put the feather back in my hat and made my way down to the highway, where I stuck out my thumb.

Travelling Jack never looked back.

~ the end ~

THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: VII

2011-09-18T20:56:00.002-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

“So everyone keeps telling me.” I automatically touched my chest and felt the silver key hanging by a cord around my neck. Most of the time I forgot it was there, like a distant dream. I had first used the key to open a dream gate beneath Copp’s Hill and I couldn't help but wonder if there was a connection between that event and what was happening now. Had I allowed ghouls an opening to enter the waking world and prey upon the innocent denizens of Boston?

The Volkswagen bus pulled up alongside the venerable burying ground, and one-by-one, we emerged into the misty night. I felt like we were some kind of supernatural posse. In a way, I suppose that’s just what we were. The clock tower in Old North Church chimed twelve times, reinforcing the feeling that this was an Old West shootout. Only instead of a high noon on the frontier, it was darkest midnight in the one of the oldest cemeteries in America. Tombstone, Massachusetts.

It occurred to me that I should have called Detective Striker. But it was too late now, and I doubted there was anything he could have done to help. Bullets had no effect on ghouls. It would have just led to a lot of cops getting killed—or worse. We were the authorities here. We were the Thursbane, all of us together. The guardians of the waking world.

Gretchen and I scaled the wrought-iron fence easily. But it was evident that the Reverend was going to need some extra help. Harriet gave him a piggyback ride as she bounded over the fence as easily as stepping over a threshold.

“Show off,” I said.

“Hey, somebody’s got to demonstrate a little physical prowess in this flabby bunch.”

We walked towards the center of the cemetery, which was literally as quiet as the grave. The silence was so deep I could hear myself breathing. But the moon provided ample light, filling the ancient boneyard with an eerie silver glow.

“So where are the ghouls?” Gretchen asked. “Not that I’m eager to find any.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Something’s not right. Harriet, can you hear anything with those vampire ears of yours?” There was no reply. I wheeled around. “Harriet?” She had vanished. I turned back to Gretchen, but she was gone too.

“Gretchen? Reverend?”

Something very blunt and very hard struck the back of my head.

Then, darkness.

I awoke inside a dank, fetid-smelling prison cell the size of a closet. My head pounded in protest at the abuse that had been inflicted upon it. I rattled the cold iron bars of my cage to no avail.

“Harriet?” I cried. “Gretchen?”

“Your friends cannot hear you,” replied a voice as devoid of feeling as a machine. I forced my eyes to focus. Standing outside my cell was a slight tall man with thinning blond hair and owlish, wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing an old-fashioned white lab coat with buttons along the side. His calculating pale blue eyes appraised me like a butcher inspecting a choice cut of meat.

“How... how did you...?” I asked haltingly. I could barely string a sentence together, my head hurt so much. I felt as if I might puke at any moment.

“How did I overcome the vampire?” the man completed for me. He had the quasi-English accent of a Boston Brahmin, dripping with condescension for those less cultured than he. “It was quite simple. The old legend about vampires shrinking from a cross is not entirely without merit. Of course it has nothing to do with the power of some impotent deity. Any sufficiently charged sigil will do.”

I was able to focus enough to get a layout at the chamber outside my cell. It was some kind of underground vault, no doubt somewhere in catacombs that lay beneath Copp’s Hill and perhaps much of the old part of Boston. It looked as if some sort of laboratory had been set up down here. The chamber was filled with a peculiar hodge-podge of the scientific and the occult. The scientific equipment looked as if it dated from the 1920s and 30s: bubbling beakers on Bunsen burners, crackling Tesla coils and a warbling oscilloscope. And interspersed amongst them was an assortment of occult paraphernalia: a chalice, a ceremonial dagger, black candles, a human skull and an ancient tome bound in a most peculiar leather.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” my captor said. “My name is Dr. Archimedes Cabot Choate.” With a name like that, the man was probably cousin to every family on Beacon Hill several times over. But why wasn’t he at a lobster social at the Mayflower Club? What was he doing here in this charnel house reeking of putrefaction?

As if in answer to my silent question, Dr. Choate pulled back a curtain to reveal an operating table. Gretchen was on top of it, unconscious, and bound by leather straps that must have dated to the Victorian era. An IV was inserted into her arm, and a sickly dark green liquid was oozing down a long transparent tube to trickle into her bloodstream. I wanted to call out to her, but I restrained myself. It would be pointless, and besides, I needed to keep my cool with this madman.

“I am on the brink of unlocking the mystery to eternal life, sought by alchemists since the time of Hermes Trismegistus. The key to immortality lies in death itself.”

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THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: VI

2011-09-17T17:33:00.003-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

The language was thick with archaisms, but their meaning was clear. Like the pointer of a Ouija board, my hand moved of its own accord and flipped through the decaying parchment pages until they settled on a well-worn passage.

Such things owt not be seen by ye eyes of mortal Man or hys verie soul lyeth in jeopardie. Amongst ye Kindred of Ghule that feasteth on human remaynes by dead of nyght, there is a Queene. Her nayme must not be speak’d aloude. It is Syraxya. All ye Ghules do serve her pleasure as bees in a hyve. And where so ever ye may find them, then Queene Syraxya is not far awaye. Yet take ye heede, for she is moste cunnyng and lycentious, and taketh joye in colde crueltie, for Ghules be a colde and cruel race.

Across from the passage was a ghastly woodcut illustration of Syraxya herself, grinning and emaciated, and yet strangely beautiful. She was crouched over a fresh corpse, a look of delight on her face at the delicious rapture of feasting to come. The picture made me feel strangely hungry. Ravenous. Quickly regaining control of myself, I snapped the book shut, and set it down on the coffee table in front of me. Gretchen offered me a cigarette, which I snatched and lit in one fell swoop, gratefully inhaling the calming fumes. My hands were trembling.

“So now you know what we’re up against.”

Harriet walked through the cloud of cigarette smoke engulfing the room. Very dramatic of her. She was really embracing this vampire thing.

“You come and go as you please,” Gretchen remarked.

“Can you cut out this bullshit?” Harriet snapped. “You’re Jack’s girlfriend, all right? I’m just a friend.”

“A friend who likes to suck his blood.”

“Excuse me. Vampire. And if I hadn’t last night, Jack would be a walking undead creature right now.”

“Yeah. Thanks for that. You’re right, I shouldn’t be such a bitch.”

“Happens to the best of us, kid.”

“Who are you calling kid? What are you? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Actually, I just turned ninety-nine a few days ago.”

“What?” I said. “How can that be?”

“Vampire, remember?”

“Yeah, but...you just turned into a vampire last year.”

“From your point of view. I’ve been travelling in the Dreamlands. Time moves differently there.”

Gretchen and I stared at each other openmouthed. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, I got served a weird sandwich with extra weird sauce.

“You can pick your jaws up off the floor now,” Harriet said. “I’ve learned a lot since we last met. I’ve visited the fabled onyx libraries of Gandermoon and read the forbidden texts. I’ve journeyed to benighted Kadath, where no mortal may enter. But I am no mortal. Nyarlathotep himself served me tea made from demon hearts steeped in the tears of angels. And I have sailed on a black ship to the red planet of Nergal, where I sampled drugs that let you see time as a whole. It was then that I knew my weird was the return to the waking world, and serve the Thursbane.”

“The Thursbane?”

“From the Anglo-Saxon thurs,” a warbling old man’s voice answered me. It was Gretchen’s professor, the Reverend Ezekiel Whitlock. I was hosting an unexpected party. “Which means giant, or more precisely, an evil of gigantic proportion. And bane, which means killer, of course.”

“Reverend?” Gretchen said. “What are you doing here?”

“Harriet persuaded me that the circumstances were dire enough to warrant coming out of retirement. I hear you are having a problem with ghouls.”

The Reverend was wearing a long black duster that reached nearly to the floor and a wide-brimmed black preacher’s hat.

I nodded. “They’ve been raiding cemeteries all over town. But it looks like their lair is in Copp’s Hill.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” the Reverend said. “Let’s go kick some bony ghoul arse!”

- III -

The Ghoul Maker

A familiar Volkswagen bus was parked in front of the house on the hill. It was the same bus Harriet had driven me to Fiddle Creak in a year ago. A year ago my time, eighty years ago hers. We piled inside. Harriet took the driver’s seat. I took the passenger seat. The Reverend and Gretchen sat in the back. Harriet started the ignition and the Volkswagen bus sputtered to life.

“I have some fond memories of this bus,” the Reverend said. “Your grandparents and I had such fantastical adventures in her.”

“So I’ve heard,” Harriet replied, as she deftly zigzagged through traffic from Centre Street onto Perkins then onto Jamaica Way. Vampires made the best drivers.

“Why, I rode in this bus the very day I met Jack and Sunshine. It seems like so very long ago now.”

“Well, time is relative isn’t it?”

“Especially when the Dreamlands are involved.”

The Reverend and Harriet laughed at their private joke. Gretchen looked at me, hoping for some commiseration. But I had entered the Dreamlands myself more than once now, although not as deeply as they had.

Gretchen’s sympathy came from the Reverend. “Of course this must sound dreadfully confusing, my dear.”

“I’m trying to catch up,” she said. “I’m not a complete novice. Jack and I went to the land of the dead.”

“By the Goose, I didn’t mean to imply that you were. Your importance is not to be underestimated. You are the spell-caster.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me again.”

Harriet deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand while driving with the other. When she lit it, familiar purple smoke rose. It was weirdwort. She passed me the pouch, and I eagerly rolled my own cigarette from it.

“Jack doesn’t protect the earth from the Old Ones on his own,” Harriet said. “There is a sword-wielder and a spell-caster. You are the spell-caster. Jack usually wields the sword, but he has forsaken it. So I am the sword-wielder in his stead.”

“But if you’re the sword-wielder, then what am I?”

“You are Jack,” the Reverend replied. “Usually Jack is the sword-wielder...but sometimes he’s not. It doesn’t matter. Jack is Jack. You are the key to it all.”

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THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: V

2011-09-16T14:43:00.003-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

I walked through a garden of white roses at night, beneath a silver moon that illumined the roses in a pale glow like a vampire’s skin. The garden was a labyrinth where all paths led to the middle. At the heart of the labyrinth was a woman sitting on a silver throne. She had hair the color of night and eyes as black and deep as a million midnights. I had met her before—she was known variously as Lily, the Queen of Night and the Dark Mother of Dreams. And I learned a new name tonight. A man dressed in a black suit and a scarlet tie was speaking to her. It was the same man I had met at the pub, the one who had given me the box containing a glass syringe and bottle of hypnosium. Pitt.

“At your will, Morrigan,” Pitt said, bowing deeply to his Queen. He tipped his black fedora to me. “Jack.” Then he strode purposely down one of the paths of the garden and vanished from sight. I was alone with the Queen of Night.

“Well, Jack,” she said. “Once more, you enter my realm. I begin to think you may be a child of night yourself.”

“I understand I am bound to Fríg for seven years.”

“I have saved you more than once now. But you owe me no debt. You are welcome in my realm anytime and are equally welcome to leave. Go and finish your servitude to my sister then. A man cannot have two Queens. But should you wish to become a Jack of Spades, the Night holds many pleasures the Day cannot offer. Think on it.”

And then I awoke. The birds were chirping the coming of dawn. Harriet had fled. Of the ghoulish wound on my leg, there was no sign. I slowly opened my blinds, then just as quickly closed them again. The sunlight burned like scalding hot water on my flesh. I looked at my hand, which appeared even paler than usual. My god, was I turning into a vampire?

No, I wasn’t a vampire. Not yet. From the way I had observed Harriet behave, I gathered that sunlight killed vampires, not merely hurt them. I remembered drinking Harriet’s blood to heal the wound from the ghoul’s bite. That must explain my sensitivity to the sun. I knew she wouldn’t turn me into a vampire without my consent. Even with the curtains drawn, the light of day filtering into the bedroom was unpleasant. Hopefully this condition would pass. In the meantime, it didn’t seem like I’d be able to function during the day. So I pulled the covers over my head and allowed my body to do what it longed to: sleep.

I was dragged from my deep and dreamless slumber by a persistent prodding.

“Are you still sleeping, Jack?” Gretchen said. “For fuck’s sake, it’s six o’clock.” She whipped the blanket off me.

My eyes fluttered open. A thin trickle of daylight penetrated the blinds. This time I was able to stand it without pain. Either it was late and the sunlight wasn’t direct enough to affect me, or my vampiric condition had passed. Or maybe some of both.

“I’ve had a rough night. How did your test go?”

“I aced it of course. But never mind that. I went to visit the Reverend. He knows what we’re up against.”

“Ghouls,” I finished for her.

“You sure know how to steal a girl’s thunder.”

“I had a run-in with them last night. Almost got killed.”

“Hey, what’s that on your neck?”

I put my hand over my neck. Of course. The bite marks.

“It was her, wasn’t it? You’ve been seeing her again.”

She started backing away from me.

“Gretchen, wait. It’s not like that.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can handle this.”

Gretchen walked out my bedroom. Think fast, Jack. I put my pants on in record time and dashed after her before she reached the front door.

“I just need some time alone,” she said, as I put my hand on her arm.

“It’s not like that, Gretchen,” I said. “The ghouls were about to kill me. One of them had already bitten me. Harriet rescued me. And she had to bite me to heal me. Something about drinking her blood healed the infection or whatever it was. If it weren’t for her, I’d be dead now. Or...worse.”

Gretchen paused. “You promise there’s nothing between you and her?”

“I promise.” As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was a half-truth. Half would have to do for now.

A trace of a smile flickered across her face. “Well, I wouldn’t want you dead, I suppose.”

“I should hope not.” A hint of my grandmother’s Cornish burr peeked through. I knew Gretchen liked that. I played it up a little. “Why don’t I make us some tea and you can tell me what the Reverend said.”

“He did more than say. He gave me a book.”

Gretchen opened up her backpack and extracted a weighty tome that looked as if it might have once belonged to King Solomon’s library. She put it in my hands. I lifted the cover and recoiled with horror at the gruesome illustration on the frontispiece. It was a hideous creature devouring a corpse from an open coffin. Uncannily, the creature in the illustration stared at me from the page, its eyes looking directly into mine. I didn’t need a book to tell me what the creature was. I sank into the nearest chair. All thoughts of making tea had vanished like the light trace of sunlight beneath the horizon.

Ye CULTE OF GHULES

A Historie of Ynutterable Abomynation

Render’d into English

by Frauncis Pickman

London

A.D. 1603

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THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: IV

2011-09-15T14:42:00.002-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

When I awoke it was eleven o’clock at night and Gretchen was gone. I dragged myself out of bed and donned my black jeans, black T-shirt, leather jacket and porkpie hat. It was time to go to work. I made my way down the hill to the Stony Brook T station. There was still enough time to catch a train to the North End, but I had no idea how I’d get back. The T would have stopped running by the time I was through with my grisly business. Oh well, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

Late night on the MBTA on Tuesday was pretty grim. Instead of attractive young people on their way to and from parties and nightclubs, the crowd consisted mainly of sad-eyed middle-aged bachelors on their way home from the bar. But who am I to judge? At least they weren’t on their way to sneak into a graveyard hunting for depraved cannibals.

It wasn’t far from North Station to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Just a hop, skip and a jump. But there was no Rampant Hare to guide me this time. The cemetery gate was chained shut for the night, but that was no obstacle to me. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. I hopped that fence like a candlestick.

The hushed antiquity of the venerable gravesite was amplified by the still of night. As always, I felt somewhat in awe of names and dates lovingly carved in grey slate. 1824...1791...1745... 1692...1664... There was one gravestone on the far end of the cemetery pockmarked with holes. Apparently, it belonged to an early rebel against the Crown, whose burial marker was used for target practice by scornful redcoats.

But the thing in the burying ground I gravitated to most was an obelisk-topped tomb that two vampires and I had once desecrated. There was a flight of stairs inside the tomb that had led to a dream gate deep beneath the hill. But that is another story. The tomb was sealed tonight, and I couldn’t find the mechanism that opened it. If it had ever been open. That experience seemed like a dream and I wondered if it had ever happened at all. My musings were cut short by the sound of moaning, somewhere in the shadows.

I crouched down instinctively, and hid behind the tomb. Oh shit. What had I gotten into? What if the corpse-eaters were here in the cemetery with me? What would I do? I didn’t have any weapons, not even a pocketknife. But I was Jack. I had a hat with a goose feather stuck in the ribbon. Somehow I’d be all right. I just had to do go for it. Tantivy!

Mustering my resolve, I crept towards the moaning sounds. There was more than one voice doing it. There were several. A real cacophony of “unnnnnnnnhhhhh.” I concealed myself as best I could behind a gravestone (thanks INCREASE MATHER) and peered over the top.

Oh my fucking god! There were five, six, seven...things... walking corpses...I don’t know...wearing nothing but tatters, bent over an open grave munching on a dead body like an all-you-can-eat buffet. One of them sniffed the air and looked in my direction. I ducked down beneath the gravestone, but it was too late. He had seen me. The zombie...ghoul...whatever he was started walking towards me. His friends dropped the hunks of rotting flesh they were munching and followed him.

There was no point in hiding anymore, so I started to back away. Then I turned and booked it for the fence. But the creature in the lead—the one who had spotted me first—was too fast. It pounced on me like a lion and knocked me to the ground. To my horror, the thing bit a chunk out of my shin. I saw his grinning emaciated face, a huge gobbet of my bloody flesh between his teeth. Was I going to die in a scene from a cheap horror movie? How cliché. At least I could take comfort from the fact that this wasn’t just any old cemetery. This was Copp’s Fucking Hill Burial Ground, one of the oldest Colonial graveyards in Boston.

“Begone! Scat!”

The thing eating my flesh abruptly dropped my leg and fled into the shadows like a scared cat. A deathly pale girl wearing a black hoodie stood over me. She had dyed-purple dreadlocks and held a sword in one hand, its silver blade glinting in the moonlight.

“Harriet?” I croaked. “You’re looking very goth.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

Then I passed out.

I awoke naked in my own bed. My leg screamed with pain. Forcing myself to look, I saw a sickening chunk missing from my calf. Strangely, it wasn’t bleeding. The edges of the wound were a sickly greenish color, which seemed to spread slowly before my very eyes.

“Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.” Harriet’s fangs sank into my neck with familiar needle pricks. A rush of ecstasy spread through my body, quelling even the pain from my leg. Then, unexpectedly, Harriet pulled her fangs out of my neck. She had never done that before, not so soon. She bit the inside of her own arm and a crimson rivulet of blood trickled from the puncture. Harriet pressed her arm to my lips and instinctively I began to drink. It was like the finest, most complicated wine. Her blood was ambrosia, the food of the gods. I dreamt.

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THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON:III

2011-09-14T18:17:00.004-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

Mark’s police-issue Crown Victoria was parked in front of my house, and we all piled in, me in the front passenger seat and Gretchen in the back. The car had no official police markings on it, yet somehow cars veered out of our way as we drove up behind them. I guess a Crown Vic just screamed fuzz, even when it was painted basic black. There was a flashing police light on the dashboard that I wish Mark would use, but he didn’t. He didn’t need it. Our destination was only about five minutes up the road: Forest Hills Cemetery.

This may sound creepy, but I’ve always found Forest Hills Cemetery to be one of the perks of living in Jamaica Plain. Although I preferred Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge just a tad more, the antique and morbid splendor of Forest Hills was nothing to sneeze at. We parked at the end of Tower Street and strode in through the spidery wrought-iron gate at the side entrance.

It was the height of May and the lilacs were in full bloom, a peculiar juxtaposition to our macabre errand. I tried to appear suitably serious, but it was hard not to feel ebullient in the sunshine and warm-scented breeze after suffering for months under the frigid yoke of a New England winter. Gretchen held my hand and I could see that she was having similar feelings, that we should be out enjoying a stroll in the merry month of May, not stalking some supernatural menace in a graveyard. Only Mark looked genuinely grim, for he had already witnessed the foulness that we were about to discover.

Mark led us down a succession of narrow paths that wound between stooping elms, stone angels and endless slabs of grey slate. Their drabness stood in stark relief against the vibrant green of the grass and leaves, the lavender lilacs, and the white and red dogwood. Death and life co-mingled here in the garden of eternity. In the end was the beginning, and in the beginning was the end.

We arrived at a grand family crypt, surmounted with a familial crest and the surname PEABODY. I recognized the name immediately. One of the oldest families in Boston. The iron gate to the crypt was ajar. Someone had destroyed the Victorian-era padlock, the elegant mechanisms within desecrated by brute force. Mark pushed the gate wide open and motioned for us to follow. Gretchen and I looked at each other and smiled. We had dared the very halls of Hades himself. What could a little tomb in Forest Hills Cemetery contain that could shock us?

Mark withdrew a handheld flashlight and shone a beacon of truth onto the crypt’s darkened interior. The stone coffins within had been plundered. Some were empty, their contents spirited away for heavens knew what blasphemous purpose. But two contained remnants of bodies, any trace of flesh stripped from them. As I knelt down to examine the bones, I saw that they were marked with dozens of nicks. Could they be...?

“Teeth marks,” Mark confirmed, holding a white handkerchief to his mouth. I wish I had one too. Between the gnawed-on human bones and the charnel stench, I felt like I was going to hurl.

“Let’s get out of here,” Gretchen said, pulling on my arm. I looked at Mark and he nodded his agreement. We emerged in the fresh air once more, shuddering to our souls. Mark swung the gate shut, although he had to leave it ajar.

“This isn’t the only one,” he said. “Tombs all over the city are being ransacked. Someone is...eating the bodies. Sometimes they take the bodies to go, and sometimes they dine in. All the graves have been old so far. None less than a hundred years old. But this is the furthest afield they’ve come. Most of the robberies have been downtown.”

“Any in Copp’s Hill?” I asked.

Mark perked up. “As a matter of fact, yes. Most of the earliest ones were there. We had to work fast to cover them up. Tourists love that place. How did you know that?”

“Just a hunch,” I said.

“If you know anything about this...”

I held up my hands. “I don’t. I swear. But I have an idea how to find out about it. Give me a couple days and I’ll let you know.”

Mark looked at me suspiciously, then handed me his card. I guess cops were just suspicious by nature. “Forty-eight hours. If you find out anything at all, let me know. Can I give you a lift back home?”

“Actually, it’s such a nice day, I think I’ll walk. Care to join me, Gretch?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Arm-in-arm, we strode up Centre Street like two young lovers on a spring day, not at all like two people who had just seen the inside of a pillaged tomb. There are some things the brain just can’t process all at once. I’m sure the images would resurface in my dreams that night.

We stopped at the Store 24 and bought a pack of American Spirits each to satisfy our shared addiction. After we had stepped back into the sunshine and ceremonially tamped down our packs, I lit the cigarette that appeared like magic between Gretchen’s lips before lighting my own. I took a deep drag, long overdue after seeing open caskets, rotting flesh and gnawed-upon bones.

“So I guess you’re like some kind of detective now,” Gretchen said. “Jack, P.I.”

“And you’re my trusty partner-in-crime.”

“All we need are a few more and we can have our own Scooby gang.”

“I get to be Shaggy,” I said.

“Zoiks!” Gretchen replied. “Can I be Scooby then?”

“Only if you share your Scooby snacks.”

“I guess I’m really more of a Velma type. Although I suspect she was a lesbian.”

“I can see you as Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I suggested.

“She was a lesbian too.”

“Interesting,” I said smiling. I knew Gretchen most certainly was not a lesbian. Bisexual, perhaps, but not a lesbian.

“I’m going to have to go back to Mousehole this evening to study. I have a big exam tomorrow morning.”

“That’s okay. I should probably do the investigation on my own anyway.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Dollars to donuts, Copp’s Hill Cemetery has something to do with all this. I’ll go down there tonight and poke a few sticks in some holes. See what surfaces.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Well, I am Jack the Giant-Killer. Danger is my middle name.”

“I thought your middle name was ‘the’.”

I tickled Gretchen in the ribs, almost making her drop her cigarette. “Wise ass.”

After her laughter subsided, Gretchen suddenly became serious. “Be careful, Jack. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I will be.”

“While I’m at Mousehole, I’ll ask the Reverend if he knows anything that might be helpful. I’ll call you and let you know.”

I dropped my third cigarette into the gutter. We had arrived at the house on the hill.

“Do you have to leave now?” I said.

“I can stick around for a little while. What did you have in mind?”

“Afternoon delight? We need to put those lesbian rumors to bed.”

“I thought you’d never ask...”

Click Here

for Part IV

THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: II

2011-09-13T10:36:00.003-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

“I meant to bring you the jewel,” I stammered. “But...”

“You thought that Fríg could absorb your debt? You think such obligations can be bought and sold like carrots at the marketplace?”

“What do you want from me?” I asked, although I regretted it as soon as the words had crossed my lips. Oleandra smiled wickedly.

“Oh, I want so many things, Jack. But knowing you are my puppet is pleasing enough for now. I shall twitch your strings and make you dance for me. In some ways, I’m glad you are still beholden to me. Having a Jack in my thrall is a treat. Such games I shall play. Now be gone from my sight, until I have need of you again.”

My limbs moved of their own accord. One leg jerked upward awkwardly and then the other. My arms flopped like someone in the throes of a seizure. I lurched back through the dream door into the closet across from the nook under the stairs. And there among all my winter coats I vomited the pint of Guinness that Pitt had bought for me, right there on the floor of the closet. I barely made it back to my bedroom before I collapsed into a dreamless sleep, boots and all.

- II -

The Tomb

“Good morning, Jack!”

My eyes fluttered opened to Gretchen pulling open the drapes and admitting a dangerous amount of sunlight.

“I’m a night-owl too, but sometimes you have to come out in the day.”

Sez you, I thought with luciferian defiance. She whipped off my covers to reveal a pale, bony, and altogether naked body. She didn’t look away. Why should she? She’d seen it several times before.

“Get decent. You have a visitor.”

My sleepy haze immediately dissipated, and I pulled on my habitual black T-shirt and black jeans. When was the last time I’d washed those jeans?

“What visitor?” I asked, gazing into the mirror on my wall and trying with my fingers—unsuccessfully—to make my hair appear less insane. Gretchen took pity on me and handed me a comb.

“You remember me telling you about my cousin the police inspector?” I nearly jumped out the window. What if he found my box with the glass syringe and the vial of strange black ink?

“Don’t worry, Jack, he’s not going to arrest you. He wants to consult with you.”

“Consult with me? About what?” Now my curiosity was piqued, although I still had a mad urge to jump out the window and run as far and as fast as I could. I wasn’t fond of authority figures.

“Well, I’ll let him tell you about it. Apparently there’s been some strange heebie-jeebie stuff happening around town. Right out of the X-Files. The cops can’t investigate formally, but I told my cousin that you might be able to help him. Unofficially, of course.

I smiled. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Don’t make me punch you, giant-killer. You look marvellous. Let’s go meet Mark.”

I followed Gretchen from my bedroom down the hall to the living room. Or should I say, the parlor? Will you step into my parlor, Mr. Police Detective? More like I was stepping into his parlor. Since when did I become a supernatural consultant for the police? Since I became Jack the fucking Giant-Killer, that’s when!

Gretchen's cousin was very good-looking, in a scruffy, emo sort of way. If he wasn’t her cousin, I’d be jealous. Well, maybe I should be jealous anyway. He had sideburns and hair that was gelled to stick straight up from his head. He was wearing a vintage blue, pinstriped suit, with a red tie and the shirt collar fashionably open. He was hot. If I were gay, I would have done him. The fashion-plate police detective held out his hand and I shook it. It was firm and reassuring.

“Detective Mark Striker,” he said. “You must be Jack.”

“That I am,” I said. “What can I do for you, Detective Mark Striker?”

Striker looked at Gretchen imploringly.

“Go ahead,” she said. “You can tell him. Trust me, he’ll believe you.”

“Someone is digging up people from graveyards and...bringing them back to life.”

“Ah,” I said. Sadly, I did believe him. But I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do about it. And I said as much.

“Sounds like a pretty...grave problem.” Groan. “So...uh...what do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, er, Gretchen told me that...oh shit. I can’t believe I’m really saying this.”

“It’s true, Mark,” Gretchen said. “I sweah.” I noticed that around her cousin, Gretchen’s Boston accent came to the fore.

“Gretchen said that you’re like...the reincarnation of Jack the Giant-Killer. And you can help. I hope to God it’s true, because I tell you...the force is going nuts with this. We know it’s happening, but we can’t tell anybody or we’d all get carted off to the loony bin. And we don’t know what to do.”

Gretchen looked at me expectantly. She fluttered her eyes with suggestions of things to come. Oh fuck, Gretchen. You know I can’t refuse you anything when you look at me that way.

“I reckon it’s true. I’m Jack all right.” Just as Gretchen’s accent had become more Boston, mine had become more Appalachian. The last Jack had hailed from Fiddle Creak, North Carolina, and sometimes I drew on his persona for strength. In some ways, we were the same person, although we weren’t. Don’t ask me to explain it. You have to be a Jack to understand.

“Maybe it would be easier if I showed you,” Mark said.

“Tantivy!” I said, donning my leather jacket and porkpie hat. There was a goose feather stuck in the hat’s ribbon.

“Huh?”

“He means, let’s go,” Gretchen translated. “Arriba! Presto!”

The game was afoot.

Click Here

for Part III

THE DEVIL CAME TO BOSTON: I

2011-09-12T16:06:00.005-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

- I -

Strings

I am Jack. Jack the Giant-Killer. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Jack and Jill went up the hill. Little Jack Horner sat in a corner. You get the idea. There have been Jacks all throughout time. We protect the waking world from the Things Outside, slimy creepy things with tentacles that ruled the earth before humans. They’re locked away in another dimension now. Trust me, you don’t want to know much about them.

I had an adventure in the Dreamlands and won a bag of gold coins, which I brought back to the waking world. It’s a lot harder to spend gold coins than you might think. Everyone wants to know where you got them. Fortunately, Gretchen’s uncle works in the jewelry business and helped me sell them, no questions asked. Gretchen is my girlfriend and she’s pretty cool. With the money I made from selling the gold coins, I bought a house on a hill in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Gretchen stayed there some of the time. She also had an apartment in Mousehole, Massachusetts, where she was going to university.

Most of the time, I was alone in my house. That suited me just fine. I was a loner by nature. I spent most of my days wandering up and down the creaking stair, or sitting hunched over an Underwood typewriter. A-ratta-tat-tat. Ratta-tat-tattick.

It was only when night was ascendant and the moon reigned over the sky that I stole from my solitary endeavors and made my way to the bottom of the hill. There the James Joyce pub awaited me like an eager lover. One Friday night, as I perched like a crow on my stool draining a pint of Guinness to the dregs, a second crow sat down next to me and offered to buy me another.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said in a silky, sonorous voice. “Pitt is my name. Sammy Pitt.” He was an older man, with slicked-back black hair. He wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a crisp white shirt and a scarlet tie, neatly topped by an immaculate black overcoat and black fedora. Something about him made me shudder, but I didn’t turn down the beer he bought me. He bought one for himself too. We clinked glasses.

“I’m Jack,” I said. I tipped my battered porkpie. Pitt smiled sardonically.

“I know who you are. I’ve come here on business, Jack, regarding a certain black jewel.”

I almost dropped my pint glass. “I thought that was done with. I gave it to the Shadow King. Mother Goose is taking on my debt in return for seven years of bondage.”

Saying it out loud made it sound pretty absurd, not to mention kinky. I suppressed a smile at the thought of being chained up by an old lady dressed in a cape and a conical hat, who whipped me while reciting “Little Miss Muffet.”

“I’m afraid my client doesn’t view it that way.”

“Your client?”

“Lady Oleandra, the Duchess of the Small Hours. I believe you have met.”

I remembered the deal I had struck with her. In return for opening the dream gate to begin my quest for the White Cup, I agreed to give her the black jewel. I thought I was free of that deal, but it seemed not.

Sammy Pitt produced a wooden box from the pocket of his overcoat and handed it to me. “Take this and perform the ritual at midnight. Lady Oleandra would have words with you.”

I looked down at the box and saw the symbol of a lotus flower carved into the top. When I looked up, Pitt was gone. I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve. There was about a quarter of a glass of Guinness left. I drained it in one go, and left the bar, taking my strange gift with me.

The wind whipped up whirligigs of freshly fallen flower petals as I made my way up the hill to the crooked house where I lived. I locked the door behind me, and flopped down on my bed, opening the box with the lotus flower carved in it. Inside, on a bed of blood-red velvet, was a glass syringe and a bottle filled with a mercurial black ink. Hypnosium. I was being summoned.

I should have closed the box. Buried it in the ground. Thrown it in the pond. Tossed it in the fire. Anything but what I did. I started the Ritual.

I tapped out a drop of the black ink into a silver spoon and sucked it up into the needle-sharp tip of the syringe. Rolling back my sleeve, I teased out a sturdy blue leviathan of a vein. It throbbed mightily, aching to be harpooned like a whale. And I did it. I plunged the needle into the vein and thrust that silky black hypnosium into my bloodstream. The effect was instantaneous. I lay back into my pillow and nodded for seconds...minutes...hours...

Finally, I rose from my torpor, a dream Jack now, and wandered into the hall.

This is the mahogany hall
that led to the stairs
in the house that Jack built.

This is the nook under the stairs
at the end of the mahogany hall
in the house that Jack built.

This is the closet
across from the nook under the stairs
at the end of the mahogany hall
in the house that Jack built.

This is the dream door
inside the closet
across from the nook under the stairs
at the end of the mahogany hall
in the house that Jack built

This is the silver key
that opens the dream door
inside the closet
across the nook under the stairs
at the end of the mahogany hall
in the house that Jack built.

I turned the silver key in the dream door—click—and the dream door opened.

I walked across the threshold into a chamber filled with gauzy red silk and cold black stone. A milk-skinned woman with hair as white as ivory awaited me there.

It was Oleandra, the Duchess of the Small Hours.

“You have broken our bargain, Jack,” she said, her thin white lips pursing in a pout. “I am most displeased.”

Click Here

for Part II

JULY ISSUE

2011-07-31T15:58:00.018-06:00

~ PROUDLY PRESENTS ~

EVERYTHING BUT THE OINK
by Keith P. Graham
© by keith p. graham
+ Click Images Below To Begin Reading +

BLOOD ECHO SYMPHONIES
by John Claude Smith

© by john claude smith

TRAP
by Vincent Daemon
© by vincent daemon

The JULY, 2011 issue of the FREEZINE is a wrap. It will remain archived throughout the rest of August, as well as for the rest of time. That is, insofar as our recently built-up technological empire survives. There are those among us who seem convinced this gleaming technopolis has an extremely limited expiration date; the editors here at the FREEZINE have been informed otherwise. In the future, The Grid will be all that remains of life-sustainable nature on Earth. All those unfortunate enough (depending on how you look at it) to find themselves off The Grid during these formative years will perish. Millions will be veritably shoved off The Grid; the poor and the dispossessed. Hundreds of thousands who elect to live off the grid will suffer untimely demises, as well. The reason for this is that the Empire Which Never Ended will have effectively mortally wounded Mother Nature herself—she will simply no longer be around to sustain anyone.

The nanoswarm responsible for possessing me to establish the FREEZINE has reported that the only human survivors will be those who have managed to keep a place officially on the Grid: those accountable human beings with government IDs scanned- and logged- into the database will constitute the only known survivors of the human race.

Eventually, there will be pockets of clans who consider themselves "off-Grid", but they will effectively be living on The Grid nonetheless, by means of having made themselves, in one fashion or another, "invisible" to The Establishment's roving camera-eyes and microphones. The old paradigm of Nature (wild land with sustainable soil to grow plants and support fauna—the great, old-fashioned "outdoors", if you will) shall become an extinct novelty of the past.

Few people alive today are willing to accept this to be true, yet like it or not, 100% of all future vegetation will eventually be horticulturally cultivated and kept up exclusively by virtue of the technology human beings built up to support it. Over ninety-nine percent of the former animal kingdom will become extinct (with the exception of a few species maintained and cultivated by humans to suit our various purposes).

In other words, Technology itself is destined to become the new "bedrock" of Father Nature; (there's a messy divorce ongoing with "Mother Nature" if you haven't noticed, and no one will see hide nor hair from her for thousands of years on this planet—if ever again). The Patriarchal overthrow of the Primeval Order has been underway for generations, and will soon complete its incidental pogrom of the old flora/fauna paradigm.

The Bloodhost here has reported that this developing trend is not "cautionary" in the least; on the contrary. It is but a reminder that Nature itself undergoes a constant process of transmutation and natural selection, which continues to evolve well unto this day, of course. The fact that nature's old paradigm might eventually become exctinct via its own transmutation is not only perfectly normal, but it also goes to show that it's merely our perception of the past and present that distorts our view of the future. The gleaming iconography of technology itself has already stepped in to begin replacing the older natural tones and textures; and so it goes. Plastic will become the new wood. Everything is proceeding and evolving as it should. Work will be the new play. And the human race is here to stay.

JULY, 2011:

Three Little Tales

A thousand thanks go out to our three returning authors for submitting their stories here to be shared with the world.

We begin this issue with the highly anticipated return of Keith Graham, one of the four original "Horsemen of the Freezine". His story EVERYTHING BUT THE OINK kicks off the JULY issue with a prescient tale of genetic hybrids—chimaeras—kept imprisoned by the government to be harvested for organ transplants. Keith's tale is a warm, funny, shocking story sure to please our growing legion of devoted readers. If you haven't already read Keith's first story in the Freezine, check the side margin under the ARCHIVE OF STORIES AND BIOS—scrolling down will take you to Keith's archived sector.

Next up, we have another story from John Claude Smith, who returns with his second tale for the Freezine, BLOOD ECHO SYMPHONIES. After reading his submission, I realized that the appropriate artwork for it had already been created last year, during the production of Vincent Daemon's apocalyptic splatterpunk novella, WAITING FOR THE END. An abstract watercolor of a rock'n'roller onstage at the microphone that I painted never found its proper scene in the serialization of Vince's story. Even back then, I knew it would only be a matter of time until this image found its narrative match. That time is here, now, and the nanoeditors at the Freezine are quite pleased with the merger of this art with J.C. Smith's surreal and cosmic vision of a transcendent experience during a live concert.

The final installment of JULY's trilogy of stories went up early on July 30, intended to fill a newly prepared "Saturday Morning Flash Fiction" slot. Veteran Freezine author Vince Daemon provides a lighthearted glimpse into the darker corner of our wild empire of predatory selection with TRAP. Another abstract watercolor was commissioned, intended to capture the confused viewpoint of the hapless protagonist in the story. The nanoswarm is pleased to have another successful merger of narrative text and visual art for the Freezine's archives, and we here hope our dear readers are briefly entertained by it, as well.

FREE ZINE ZONE

Click For the ART
of the Freezine

Stay tuned until the next, SEPTEMBER ISSUE, of the Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, available the world over, free of charge, hosted by the globally assimilating internet via blogger, and brought to you by the mysterious benefactors known as the Bloodhost, or nanohorde, sometimes referred to as the nanoswarm, which have somehow infected my nervous system, and possessed me to put this webzine together.

The FREEZINE is maximized to assist both aspiring and established authors integrate themselves into the newly burgeoning eReader revolution. This online fanzine (or "webzine" as I prefer to call it) is a labor of love. All writers of genre fiction are encouraged to submit stories to be serialized by daily installments in a future issue, or (for shorter stories) to be put up as a single posting on a Friday or Saturday. We are dedicated here to promoting the works of writers and to hyperlink directly to their websites and books for sale online. So don't be shy! Why not take a chance with us, and email your story and see what happens? Writers should be concerned about building up a personal fanbase, and the FREEZINE is primed to help do just that. *Click FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES! below for more guidelines.

More surprises are in store, so make sure to bookmark this site and tell your friends and family about it. Thanks again, and see you all in SEPTEMBER.

FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES!

:message from the editors:

TRAP

2011-07-30T11:52:00.006-06:00

by Vincent Daemon

The memory came back slowly.

It lay there, under the bush.

The morsel (or feast, as it were) had somehow remained undetected by the others.

He spied it greedily. A warm, humid evening had long fallen, yet his vision was still tiptop.

Homing in, going into hunger-fueled overdrive...heroically, the champion zooming in for the catch.

Being a scavenger is such a thrill.

That's when he felt the net.

He had been too eager, too hasty, and couldn't see the near-invisible stitching in the twilit gloom.

It had great elasticity and he struggled hard against the sticky strands, exerting too much energy.

Exhaustion set in quickly, and he recoiled back, as if in some bungee-jump mishap.

He knew then that he'd been caught in the trap.

Panic gripped his body tight, into a statuesque stillness. No, not this...

The injection of the poison was unexpected, and after an agonizing bout of convulsive paralysis, the blackout set in.

He came to, hazily, realizing that a straightjacket of that adhesive sinew enwrapped his body tight.

Claustrophobia was setting in.

This vile menace, his captor, lurched tauntingly forward along the intricate strands of thorax-ejaculate with a steadied and perfect Olympian grace.

Four black death-eyes stared coldly down in stoic superiority.

Its pinpointed, razorsharp maw widened with sick arachnoid glee.

He wanted to flee.

Both wings and all six of his legs had been so awfully confined. Didn't matter, though; he still couldn't feel them anyway.

But would he feel his inevitable exsanguination?

All he could do was watch it through the stark terror of his ninety-six eyes.

As the slow, sadistic execution and feeding began, his final thought was quite simple:

All this for a dog turd.

BLOOD ECHO SYMPHONIES

2011-07-22T14:20:00.007-06:00

by John Claude Smith

“What’s on your mind, Trace?”

Fiona asks as if it matters, as if she cannot slink through the gray matter mindfield and pluck out some bòn mót and toss it back at me like a hand grenade at any moment, her spiky flame-haired head propped up by matchstick arms, full brickwork sleeves, graffiti imprint on skin, clear midnight invocations—“Love is never, Sex is forever”—in faux spraypaint script, second-day bruise blue on infection red. She leans into me, hands coiled as snakes about to strike, yet they have no intention of striking. She feigns boredom as some kind of come-on. Blasé impulse: a bland narrative to our lives.

I turn to her and take in those bloodshot coals, simmering into sleepiness. I think how I can’t look much better, but my usual response—“Nothing’s on my mind, there’s nothing worthy to fill the space”—is diverted by the sounds that circle like vultures in need of something dead, and we are so close to filling that prescription.

The music pulses, throbs like my aching cock (no reason to flaunt false modesty), I am erect and I am hungry and the music—this music—is like a rash of electricity, of radiation—Hiroshima Mon Amour—that spreads over and through all of us in this dark place, in this dark world, the blackened current of the river Styx surging in all our decibel-scorched souls, here where lights are spattersplash wet as dripping Pollock rainbows but oh, so dim…and hope is a remnant of something extinct, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Or love…

It is alive—this music—as a green girl shoves past Fiona as if Fiona is not there, was never there in the first place (Fiona’s bicep thickens, her shoulders broaden), claws at me with slim fingers like twitchy insect legs—a praying mantis ritual—tearing at my skin, my mouth, and my teeth clamp down and I taste her, taste where she's been, after which my tongue slicks her palate and enamel and the writhing slug that is her tongue…and the sound and noise and cacophony assaulting me is like a rash demanding to be scratched. It cannot be silenced, this sound, this noise—this music—and the rash screams like a wound in the darkness, red and defiant.

Fiona sees in my forever-open eyes that this diversion means nothing, my head and heart and cock are elsewhere, and I do not sense the tendrils reaching into my brain; the woman is static, unable to truly comprehend. Her desperation hinders any possible fusion; it wiggles eel-like out of her grasp. The connection is transitory and then sizzles and sparks into dust, as memories that might have happened (to somebody else…) or dreams that seers might dream (if they dream anymore…), an empty-fisted grasp of sand through the haze of this brusque reality.

Sex is in the air, the smell of it, the wish for something more than kisses that lead to emptiness, and yet emptiness seems the prevalent vocation—
it is not love in this reality, it is only lust: blunt physicality, the sweat and release, that is all—
living on the edge of nothingness, yet the tip of something tactile bleeds, and the blood is tasty, tempting, and this temptation is felt in the body, in muscles that tense and bones that bend in impossible ways—
the dreams take shape, nudge into this reality—
desires mesh as two sticks mating, crisp sear, these fires born within, but it is heat that does not burn, it brings fever dreams—
these dreams destroy this reality, the execution of all you know, their sustenance—
and the need for something that one does not know how to truly express. Late night dalliances into oblivion, the soul of something unspoken and never quite defined.

Want and the need for more.

The band, Nameless—that is their name, the need to fill in the blanks with something to influence perceptions deemed unnecessary—draws me into their hideous take on the world we live in—no—it’s their honest take on the world we exist in, living is no longer an option, it is a byproduct, a happenstance: I am here and I am.

It is all machinery gasp and industrial grind: thick, droning, metallic junkyard clutter.

“What’s on your mind, lover?” Fiona says, her voice grown husky, the subtle intrusion of whiskers along her jawline, the slow swell of blood and muscle between her thighs.

I harrumph and raise a brow, thinking—maybe, maybe tonight—but even at that, a sphincter squeezed orgasm would be much more aesthetically pleasurable looking down on Fiona’s ass—the sweet Stratocaster slope of hip and prodding arch of sweat-drenched back—as opposed to some male fuck-fantasy in which, really, the only good thing about the male fuck-fantasy is to suck her cock, so really not in that mindset tonight, honey…

She knows this, telepathically jacks into my dirty mind and immediately her body reshapes itself to its original cast: the bulge deflates, the whiskers take flight as a swirling row of elliptical insects, eaten by lightbeam dust that floats within a dark funnel carved by flashbulb radiance, the shoulders shiver feminine, and her breasts fill her velvet vest to button-straining perfection, made so by the addition of nipples grown thick as nuggets of something dark and chewy and bisected via vertical steel bars, her last motion to sway me but, even at that, she knows, she reads the neural cartography across and between the hemispheres.

I don’t have to say anything to reject her, signs along the synaptic barbwire roadways indicate as much without the cruel defeatist finality of an actual failed pick-up…or deteriorating relationship. She understands that my desires, what I need, what I want…or at least what I think I want, do not include her tonight. She would pout—sexily at that—but it would be a waste, so she sits and sips something bright orange and bubbling tiny jack-o’-lanterns and smiles though her eyes are black and soulless, just like this world and my intentions.

She is perfect, perfection, whatever I want, whenever I want it, and yet…I need something different tonight.

Different. I laugh inside.

Fiona punches my arm lightly. “Prick.” Still smiling. Still soulless.

She understands.

I ignore her, taken by the sounds. It feels like an excuse to hurl this body full-on into the walls; and screaming, the sweet surrender to pain, and so much screaming…

Is this music…are these sounds—this band—the key to a new religion, the mantra of the long night, neon scribble stenciled on corneas and inside of anxious ears, eardrums assimilating the rhythms that bound off concrete and slick flesh…but no percussion, is it arterial, this rhythm? Is this the sound of the enigmatic Almighty (designated "NoGod" those many years ago when shadows grew long and ate the Sun) releasing the souls of all who hear it, to roam freely beyond the dim catatonic existence that has overtaken the world? Repetition de rigueur via computer-rigid jobs, ergonomic chairs for optimum comfort, the mandatory morning two vanilla mochas/lattes/frappes, waking up in cubicles the size of Porta-Pottys and feeling like shit (so you are where you belong), blah by brain-numbing blah, et cetera, bon appétit…

It all devolves into mono-driven slop scooped into the minds of people like me and Fiona and the hundreds (thousands, millions) of other beings playing a game of perseverance without reward.

I ramble silently, a mentally masticated monologue as personal philosophy—mindsplat masturbation—and wonder more so, what if this is the sound that makes it all worthwhile?

I need to know, so I need to get to know the band. I hone my attention to a laser pinpoint, focused exclusively on the female vocalist and her dark, charismatic, melancholic tones, a voice tough and uncompromising—real presence, this voice—a liquid leather seduction, laced with something deceptive, something tantalizing, something destructive: the perfect compliment to the music.

She does not sing, not exactly; it is not lyrics, yet lyrical. As with the now defunct band Sigur Ros, the vocals are utilized as a tool, a part of the aural vocabulary and not as most bands use a vocalist—to express clichéd sentiments or misplaced anger.

Something vital is captured within her vocalizations, vast nuances signifying the totality of our lives: the all-encompassing persistence of pain; the stilted and yet anxious dreamwish that is wonder; the molten crush of primal urges so profound they often push everything else to the rear, or completely out of the picture; the malaise that permeates it all.

That is just her voice. Her physical presence mesmerizes, yet clarity ripples, distinction eludes my internal need to catalogue. Eyes: jade slivers like jaguar shadows…and then just jungle shadows, roiling, shifting. Mouth: dew-stained roses, red rimmed and blackest heart…and within, shadows again…shifting; skin olive washed, soaked, marinated…and, again, shadows pull at the seams, unraveling…her body writhes and grows marble-still, Rodin yearnings made flesh…hair a leaky pen, white-ink Mohawk slash, a sliver of the supernova.

What I actually see is a visceral smear, something smudged, something blurred, because I cannot truly comprehend her totality: presence, being, self.

I need different eyes.

NoGod, I know the changeling whole of her is what I need tonight, that "something different" that so rattles me to the core, that place within that so desperately wants something more than existence, even though the situation precludes true fulfillment.

But I do not care. This woman, distorted distortion-driven diva, and her robed comrades—I see nothing within their hoods, no colors beyond the black and the occasional white-hot sparkle as of constellations singing—create an aural vortex that signifies a truth that I want to know tonight, as it digs unseen claws into my groin, as the sincerity of the audio mutilation feels like arousal, like hunger and the need to feed, to fuck and leave it all, every ounce of meat and sweat, semen and passion, in that hot place, vacuum-squeezed muscle and so damned necessary, the only necessity within this somnambulant existence.

Her vagina or the vortex, it does not matter.

I shuffle from my seat at the bar, Fiona left to fend for herself tonight, onto the crowded floor—zombie rave; sleepwalker’s sway—flowing toward the stage, arms loose, cobra-dancing like all the others, we are one, snakepit, snakebit sycophants, surging…

The female vocalist slinks from one edge of the stage to the other, pauses, swooshes, crumbles, resurrects and realigns her mass, each transformation something I can taste in the back of my throat, on the tip of the tongue that swabs the brain as one would ice cream, down to the primordial essence, the scaly limbic soul, the obliterated void: that which was not, annihilated by that which demanded existence before existence was defined.

I close my eyes and allow the shadows to envelop me, even as bodies press against me, midnight in the realm of lost causes scrabbling for something that imagines Hope as it once might have been, many years ago.

My thoughts clear and I whisper amidst the sonic deluge and the blackened thoroughfares of my mind, “Take me.”

And she does…

The muffled refraction of noise signals the hierarchy of hammers battering the walls of the small room, small postage-stamp cramped place, but I do not mind, because I am with her, the shimmering phantom. (Is it a room?) The night moves as a thief, a disciple of darkness so profound it laps up the hidden margins, nibbles nooks and crannies, and gorges on that which lurks behind.

I wanted another’s body to call my own, to use and abuse and leave fouled by my coarse physical discourse. An ephemeral conversation between flesh and flesh, with the mind of the other—woman; telepath—shaping our coupling to fit my needs, as it has been for many years since commencement of The Uncovering.

I wanted it to be different, so different I could not recognize it as anything I had experienced before, yet it would fulfill my wanton desires to overflowing. But this thing…this thing was so different I felt the howl rise from the saltwater seas boiling within, but only as a reflection of the creature I once was, fins to feet, gills to lungs…to confusion: is my self-fulfillment the average and expected outcome to this equation?

I sense mandibles clacking and carapace-yearnings, the clatter of gears and squeal of pistons, slimy dreams flood wiry antediluvian ducts, vascular progression…space sickness…

She makes a sound in the small room—cranial dungeon—a prescient vocalization that leaves me aghast, flushed of impetus, inspiration, and the insidious influx of ego and id.

My eyes open…to revelations.

I see me, whirling amidst the throng, faster now, the night within me pouring out—waves; tsunamis—spasmodic reconstruction, metamorphosis, transmutation…evolution…

“I said open your eyes, Trace.”

(How long have I been here? How does she know my name? Seconds pass in the exhaust of infinity…)

(My eyes are open!)

“Fear not that which your heart truly desires, Trace…and open your eyes.”

Oil-slick pronouncements that eclipse quasars; the whole of the cosmos in retrograde, Drakkar crashing against the turbulent chaos that is the heavens; my soul, or the voracious thing that roosted there, yanked into the cold waste, being laid to waste…laid to waste…

(My eyes are open!)

“I don’t want this,” I yell, uncertain, afraid. It is only another sound (dissonance defined) added to the noise washing over me, through me: blood echo symphonies, the dispersion of me: presence, being, self.

I remember a girl, once, eons ago—hair like snow, eyes like oceans—and loving her, loving her, and nothing else mattered.

(“I love you. I will love you forever.”)

(“Forever is a long time. Love me for now, we’ll worry about forever some other day.”)

(“Forever…”)

I remember lifetimes, hundreds and more. Lifetimes linked, daisy-chain histories, finding you and bringing you that which was always meant for you and you alone —
— and the madness that followed, scouring that which had driven me, the core of me gone vapid, deflated, blown full of self-love and narcissism, shaped by the world’s weary whim…

(The Uncovering…shhh…)

“Fear not that which your heart has desired…forever…”

Catapult into awareness, capillary rampage, Milky Way ruminations, and something more, something prodded into view again: my soul, the soul of ages, singing as it has not sung in this lifetime, this miserable existence, joining the Nameless noise—noise with purpose.

I open my eyes for the first time in this life and see her clearly now, with every iota of my being: my soul, the soul of ages, her soul, the soul of ages, our souls, forever entwined…out there, in the cold waste where the corruptions and conspiracies of this dead planet cannot touch us.

I find joy in this knowledge.

Eternity stretches before me, within us. The cold waste beyond comprehension. Your warmth soothes my fear; your belief is my tether in the omniscient ether: it knows all that has ever or will ever be; it knows me, intimately.

But.

This intimacy comes at a price.

Reading my dreams, the dreams (memories, madness) that have followed me through each reawakening, serves no purpose to me, it only feeds your seduction.

I feed your seduction.

We are one: Ouroboros instinct; black widow aspirations…

I am aware of a truth that disallows the truth: your lies. You cling to me, many metallic pincers and igneous needles and decrepit desires prying my mind for every iota of information, dreams (memories, madness)…nightmares…

I drop to my knees in silent supplication to you:

God…

NoGod.

But you are everywhere and everything (alien; insect; machine; lover…), and I am merely sustenance…

No matter.

Devour me, please…this final memory my epitaph, a cherished recollection of what it once meant to be human, and to love.

EVERYTHING BUT THE OINK

2011-07-17T21:02:00.005-06:00

by Keith P. Graham
art by Shasta Lawton

The pig was angry and not talking to anyone. One-Eyed Phil had called him Porky again and the pig wasn’t in any mood to put up with it. He sat away from the fire, and leaned against a tree. The half dozen hobos sitting around the fire all looked at the man-pig.

“C’mon man,” Big Jim said, trying to console the porker, “Phil didn’t mean anything by it. He was just joking around.”

“Hell,” said Willie, “You don’t think I like being called ‘Little’ Willie all the time? Do ya?”

“I don caw yo wiwwle Wiwwie.” The pig finally said, the words distorted by his porcine tongue and pallet.

“But you can, if you want to,” Willie argued, “We all have monikers. Nobody calls me William Fischer. There’s a Fat Willie and a Big Willie and I’m Little Willie. I don’t take offense. Ernesto DiMaiale is too much of a mouthful. Phil was just trying to give you a nickname.”

“But my name is Ernesto DiMaiale,” he said. The pig had his hands crossed over his chest. The short fingers had thick, hoof like nails and the thumbs were way up his wrists. He was looking out into the darkness at the edge of the forest.

“You are one of us, now,” Big Jim said, “We share and share alike. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black, white, or pig.”

“I am nah a pig!” squealed Ernesto DiMaiale.

“Sorry,” said Jim, “Sus Sapiens is what I meant. It don’t matter anyway. You are a genetically engineered man-pig hybrid and you’re as much a human as anyone here. That’s what I say.” There were cries of agreement from the men. The pig looked at the men and his eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sowwy,” Ernesto said, changing his tone, “I have a thin skin. You guys are the best fwiends that I’ve ever had.”

“One for all and all for one!” shouted Little Willie and held up a bottle of cheap port. They all joined in and the bottle passed around. Even Ernesto took a hit. The men shared the port until it was gone and then someone found a quart of Colt 45 and everyone pulled a slug from that. As the fire died down, the men and the man-pig hybrid grew silent. Big Ed and One-Eyed Phil started snoring in a rhythmic counterpoint. A few of the men walked back to the tree line to relieve themselves, but soon only Little Willie and Ernesto were left awake.

Little Willie sidled up to Ernesto. “So you think tonight’s the night?”

“I think so.” The pig took a piece of paper from the pocket of his L.L. Bean Relaxed Fit Jeans size 48 with the 24-inch inseam. Willie found that he could understand the pig’s speech much better after a few drinks. “This is a diagram of the complex.”

“How did you get a diagram of the place?”

“You forget that I was born there,” the man-pig said.

“Oh, yeah. But you escaped more than almost a year ago.”

“I don’t forget things like this.”

“Wait here,” Willie said and he went over to a small shelter made of oak skids and plastic sheeting. Willie turned and looked around and then reached up under the plastic and pulled out a small pistol. He checked the magazine and put it in his pocket. He returned and said to Ernesto, “I’ve got it.”

“You know,” said Ernesto, “you don’t have to come with me. The odds are that neither one of us will make it out alive.”

“I know the odds,” replied Willie, “but I can’t let you go in there alone.”

“Ok, let’s do it.”

Soon the fire was nothing but a few red embers quickly disappearing into ashes. The moon was low in the western sky and would set soon. Willie and Ernesto got up slowly and left the circle of sleeping hobos without a sound. Little Willie deserved his moniker but he still towered over Ernesto. The two of them followed the path back towards the town. When they came to the interstate, they crossed under it at the Elmer Road entrance ramp. They followed Elmer Road through the industrial park and then followed the old railroad tracks to the rear of the Orgo-Life complex.

Orgo-Life grew hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas, and other organs used in most of the country’s transplants. They grew genetically modified pigs, seeding them with portions of the human genome so that they would produce human parts in a disposable animal.

They passed under a chain link fence, pulling it up and bending the rusted wire back. There was a space where animals that raided the dumpsters for snacks dug out sandy soil. Willie and Ernesto had no trouble getting under and through the fence.
The doors to the loading dock were open, but there were no trucks parked there. It was a hot night and the doors were open for ventilation. Ernesto climbed up the steps next to the docks. He flattened himself against the wall and peered around the open doors into the processing plant. He beckoned to Willie who jumped onto the dock and crept up to the doors from the other side.

A wind of humid air flowed out the doors, flavored with the almost overpowering scent of pig shit.

Ernesto made an OK sign with his fingers, which was difficult for him, but Willie understood. They both crept into the processing plant, keeping to the shadows. Suddenly Ernesto pulled up hard against the wall and held his hand out in a motion that meant stay back. He looked at Willie and pointed up to a catwalk that ran about twenty feet above them. A naked man-pig was walking slowly along the walkway. He was carrying a large double-barreled shotgun.

“Watch out,” hissed Ernesto.

“But he’s like you.”

“Like hell he is! He’s a trustee. He trades the lives of his brothers for a few months of extra life.”

They waited while the trustee walked along the catwalk to the far side of the plant.

“Where is she?” asked Willie.

“If she is still alive, she will be in the female pens. It’s down to the left here and past the tanks.”

“They live in pens?”

“They call them pens, but it’s like a dormitory. If they called it anything but a pen, they might have to call those that live there humans.”

Dodging from shadow to shadow, hiding in doorways and behind equipment the two comrades worked their way to the female pens.

“This friend of yours, Sandra you called her, how do you know she’s still alive?” Willie asked as they crouched behind a forklift.

“They keep the females until they are 14 years old so they can harvest the breasts for cosmetic surgery. They have ten to twelve teats and they vary from size B up to double D. There’s big money in teats.”

They paused just outside the doors to the female pens. The door was unguarded, but they could hear voices. The two hid behind a large flat of Purina Hog Chow containers. Ernesto crept to the doors and cracked them open. He looked into the pens and then suddenly ran back to hide with Little Willie. “Shhh,” hissed Ernesto with a finger to his lips.

The doors opened and two humans wearing security guard uniforms walked out of the pens. They were laughing. “That Delilah is too much,” He was saying, “She can’t get enough of me.”

“Yeah and did you see Mimi?” the other said. “She was wearing that sexy outfit that Ronnie brought her. Too bad she’s going to the harvester next week.”

“It could be that she knows and she’s playing for more time. Whitlock likes her, so she might pull it off.”

The men laughed and joked as they walked along out of sight.

“Scum!” Ernesto squealed when they were gone.

“Take it easy,” Little Willie soothed the man-pig, “Let’s get Sandra out of here as quick as we can.”

The lights were out in the pens. There were rooms on either side of a long hallway with rows of bunk beds in each room. A murmur of voices rose as they passed each room. Faces with pig snouts appeared dimly through locked gates, and then disappeared as their owners fled back to the beds.

“It’s Ernesto, he’s back!” a voice cried softly as they passed one room.

“Where’s Sandra?” Ernesto whispered through a grate, but there was no response from the darkened room.

“Sandra?” Ernesto called into each room as they passed. There was movement and glimpses of naked bodies as the occupants went to their bunks and hid under the covers. “Sandra? Please, where is Sandra?”

A figure stood at the entrance to one of the rooms. She was wearing a lacy negligee, thong panties, and five brassieres in different colors and sizes.

“Sandra can’t see you,” The pig-woman said to them.

“Please, where is she? I just want to talk to her.”

“There’s nothing you can do. She’s scheduled for the harvester on Monday. They’ve got her in lockdown.”

“No, I have to talk to her!” Ernesto turned and started to run back the way they had come. Mimi, it could be no one else, smiled at Little Willie seductively and licked her painted lips. Like a bird hypnotized by a snake, Willie couldn’t take his eyes off all of those breasts. The spell was broken when he heard Ernesto call back: “Hurry Willie!” Willie turned and followed his porcine friend.

Ernesto knew where he was going. He ran without regard to guards or pigs on catwalks. Willie followed behind him but was soon lost in the maze of hallways, staging rooms and storage areas. No one saw them as they worked their way to the lockdown area.

Ernesto pulled at the padlock on a door. Willie could hear cries and oinks behind the door. Willie looked around for something to use as a lever to pry the door open, but he could see nothing.

“Sandra!” Ernesto called through the door. His call was answered with, “Ernie? Is that you?” from the other side of the door.

“Hold on Sandra, I’m coming!” He pulled at the lock.

Willie saw a fork lift down the hallway and ran for it. He pressed the starter and the propane engine caught. Willie spun the wheel around and aimed for the door.

“Get out of the way,” he called and gunned the engine.

The forks struck the steel door sending sparks flying and the door bowed in. The padlock held, though. Willie back up and rammed the door again. The doors buckled and the hasp pulled out from the metal door. As Willie pulled the forklift away from the door, Ernesto ran into the room calling “Sandra!”

Willie heard shouts of men and pig-men coming from the other direction.

“Ernesto!” he yelled, “It’s time to get the hell out of Dodge!” Willie pulled out his gun, ready to shoot his way out.

Ernesto ran out of the lockdown pulling a young thing after him. Man-pig hybrids ran from the room squealing. Some were more like pigs than men, running on all fours, but others were indistinguishable from humans except for a piggy nose and a curly tail. All of them knew their fate, and they were running for their lives.

Ernesto jumped on the back of the forklift and he pulled Sandra after him. “That way!” he pointed and Willie took off down the corridor. The trio chugged down the twisting paths of the complex directed by Ernesto. Sandra had her arms around Ernesto and she was sobbing. Willie noticed that she was indeed very beautiful, for a pig.

They turned corners with the forklift so fast that it tipped onto two wheels. Ernesto directed them, referring to his little map from time to time. The turned one way and then another and Willie was thoroughly lost.

They turned a corner and their way was blocked. Willie slammed on the brakes and the forklift skidded to a halt.

Three huge man-boar hybrids stood in the way. They each looked to weigh a quarter of a ton and even with their hulking postures were over six feet tall. They had tusks that grew curling out of their mouths and they had angry red pig eyes. They held baseball bats in their hands and walked slowly towards the three.

Willie drew out his pistol. It was a 32-caliber police special. He had liberated it from a neighboring farm. He wondered if it would even slow these monsters down.

“Here,” Willie said giving the gun to Ernesto, “I’m going to try and break through. You keep them busy with the gun.”

As Willie put his foot to the floor on the accelerator, Ernesto tried to shoot the gun, but his thick fingers couldn’t fit through the trigger guard. Sandra took the gun away from Ernesto. She jumped to a standing position on the forklift’s counter weight and braced herself against the roll bar.

Willie ducked down as the 32 barked out over his head. There were squeals of pain as the bullets found their mark. The giant porkers leapt back and the forklift barreled past them. Willie looked up at the heroic pig girl. She was fearlessly holding out the gun in front of her, ready to fight her way to freedom. Her twelve perfect nipples pointed the way.

Men with shotguns guarded the entrance to the loading docks. There were dead pig-men scattered over the floor. Sandra started shooting as soon as she saw them and the men jumped for cover. Willie yelled an Indian war whoop as he pressed the forklift forward at top speed. The men opened fire, but the escapees were a moving target in an age when boys had never been allowed to play with toy guns. The inexperienced men tried to shoot, but they shied away from the noise of their own blasts. Most of their shots went high.

The forklift practically flew through the loading dock doors into the truck bay. Willie slammed on the brakes and the vehicle turned a full 180 as it stopped. Sandra fell forward from her perch and landed hard on the pavement. Ernesto jumped off the back of the forklift and dragged her up. The three fled the complex. Ernesto had to help Sandra. She was having trouble walking.

They ran across the grounds, crouching low. When they reached the other side of the fence, Sandra fell down and said, “You go on without me Ernesto. I can’t make it.”

“Sure you can, darling,” Ernesto said, but both men saw it at the same time. Sandra’s top left breast, the perfect B cup, was covered with blood. There was a jagged hole torn by the shotgun blast just below her collarbone. It was bleeding profusely.

“I’m a goner,” she said, “I can’t walk any more, I’m so tired. Go on without me. Leave me here.”

“Sandra, No,” Ernesto said, “I’ll never leave you.” He looked at Willie. “We’ll have to carry her.”

Sandra choked and then coughed up some blood. “Ernesto,” she said looking deeply into his eyes. “I always knew that someday you’d come for me. Thank you.”

“I had to come, Sandra. I love you. I couldn’t leave you there to die.”

“And now I’m free.” She coughed more blood and her body arched in pain.

“Sandra!”

“I’m free,” she whispered, “I’m finally free.” Her head turned to the side. Her eyes stayed open, the perfect shade of blue, staring at nothing at all. Her bodied shuddered and then was utterly motionless.

“Oh, Sandra!” the man-pig cried in great heaving sobs over her body.

There were alarms sounding all over the Orgo-Life complex. Pale naked figures raced by them in the dark as Sus Sapiens renegades fled from their doom. Ernesto didn’t move. He just cried over the body of the valiant Sandra. Willie heard sirens and he saw a fleet of police cars speed through the gates at the far end of the complex. Searchlights snapped on, sweeping the grounds with their beams.

Willie tugged at Ernesto. “Come on, man. We’ve got to get going. The heat is on. They’ll find us soon.”

“I can’t leave her—not like this.”

“Ok, we’ll carry her.” Willie took the gun that was still in Sandra’s hand and picked up Sandra’s body under the arms. Ernesto grabbed her feet. Willie wondered what they would do with the body once they got back to the hobo jungle. They would have to dispose of it quick or the cops would know that they’d been to the complex. The police and the goons from the Orgo-Life were not above breaking a few heads.

It was early dawn when they arrived back at the camp. Willie went to his flop and hid the gun. He slept most of the morning. When the police and the corporate goons tossed the hobo camp later that day, they didn’t find the gun and Ernesto was hiding in the low brush of the forest with some new friends. He didn’t return until after dark when it was suppertime. He brought a pig man and two pig women with him out of the forest. The hobos contributed some old clothes to dress the naked escapees and Willie, Ernesto and the rest of the group sat down with their new friends to enjoy freedom and a hot meal.

Ernesto was still so broken up that he could hardly speak. “She was so young, so innocent,” Ernesto cried. The pig-man could not stop the tears flowing down over his snout. Someone passed him the bottle of wine and he took a slug.

Willie put an arm around Ernesto’s shoulders and gave him a warm hug. “Hey man, don’t think about it. Sandra tried and that’s what counts. It’s better to die fighting for freedom than to live as a slave.”

Ernesto squealed a little as he sobbed and passed the wine to Willie. He sat up straight and looked up at the stars. “We’ll always have that moment of freedom together. That’s how I’ll remember her.”

“There will be other days, other quests, and even other women,” Willie said. He winked at the pig woman next to Ernesto. He sipped from the bottle of 99¢ wine, and then picked a string of meat from between his teeth. “They won’t be the same as she was, and you’ll never forget her, but I promise you that the hurt will fade as time goes by.”

“She was a sweet thing,” Ernesto seemed to get a grip on himself. Willie speared another hunk of meat from the stew and chewed it.

Big Jim brought a plate of the stew over to Ernesto. “Eat up brother. Waste not, want not.”

Ernesto took the plate and fork from Willy. He jabbed a small piece of meat, brought it up to his nose, and sniffed. He shrugged his shoulders and put the meat in his mouth. He chewed is slowly at first and then closed his mouth and swallowed.

“Yes, she was a fine sweet thing.” Ernesto said.

“And tender, too.” Little Willie answered, forking another piece of pork.

MAY ISSUE

2011-05-31T13:16:00.011-06:00

~ PROUDLY PRESENTS ~

THE DREAM KEY
by Adam Bolivar
© by adam bolivar
+ Click Images Below To Begin Reading +

AS YOU WISH
by johnny strike
art by Richard Sala
© by johnny strike

THE PORCELAIN WOMAN
by Icy Sedgwick
© by icy sedgwick

THE THING AT THE
BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT
by Gil James Bavel
© by gil james bavel

The FREEZINE would like to take this time to thank Blogger for hosting us, and all four contributing authors who provided their fiction here online at zero cost to the reader, for taking a chance with us. If you like an author's story which appears on the Freezine, be sure to look them up on Amazon.com and order one of their books, or something. Also, be sure to tell a friend about the FREEZINE, just tell them to "Google the word FREEZINE" and that should lead them right to it. All stories and posts on the Freezine feature SHARE buttons beneath, so be sure to do your part and help spread the word. You may also click on FOLLOW (either via Blogger or Networked Blogs on Facebook) which shows your support for this online, literary endeavor.

The MAY 2011 ISSUE of the Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction features the third "Weird Jack Tale" by Adam Bolivar, THE DREAM KEY, serialized in daily intallments (like its predecessors THE FOX IN THE THORN and THE WHITE CUP) and now archived for the reading pleasure of all present and future visitors. These three stories now comprise the world's first Weird Jack Trilogy—brought to you for free—exlusively on this forum. Mr. Bolivar made his debut appearance on the Freezine in the NOVEMBER 2009 issue, with his anachronistic short story THE TIME-EATER. As of this current MAY 2011 issue, he leaps forth adroitly to the front ranks of our rogue crew of literary misfits, with five (count 'em) stories under his belt. Curiously enough, I've just returned from the Dreamlands myself, and the word is already out, that more Weird Jack Tales are being penned even as we sleep.

For our first stand-alone short story, the Freezine is proud to announce the return of Johnny Strike on Friday the 13th, with AS YOU WISH, a tale culled from his first collection, A Loud Humming Sound Came From Above (published by Rudos and Rubes). AS YOU WISH is a story in loud humming sound, and also happens to be the first chapter from johnny strike's forthcoming novel Curse of the Djinn. If you don't know who Johnny Strike is—he wrote songs, played guitar, and sang for the first-generation San Francisco punk band CRIME in the late seventies and early eighties. The group released three singles. (Strike’s song "Hot Wire My Heart" was later covered by the band Sonic Youth on their Sister album.)

Strike is the author of the cult novel Ports of Hell and the collection of short stories A Loud Humming Sound Came From Above. He has penned articles and conducted interviews for Headpress, and published short fiction in Ambit and the Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Additionally, Strike has worked at various times as a counselor at a methadone clinic, a cab driver (Madonna was one of his fares), and a pet sitter. He lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown with his wife Jane and their family of stray cats. His interests include cigars, cannabis, Masonic and occult rites, reading a variety of novel genres, and traveling in Morocco and Mexico.

For this issue's second stand-alone story, the Freezine is excited to announce a new contributor, London's own Icy Sedgwick, and is proud to showcase the debut of her story THE PORCELAIN WOMAN. Icy Sedgwick hails from the frozen north of England, but currently lives and works in London. She balances her writing with a full time job in office management, although she is about to begin a PhD in Film Studies in October. Icy has two e-books to her name, The First Tale and Checkmate & Other Stories, as well as stories in other anthologies. She can't actually pinpoint when she started writing, as she's been scribbling stories for as long as she can remember. From the first tales scrawled with wax crayons to longer work bashed out on her mother's old typewriter, Icy has since made the leap to weekly flash fictions, web-based serials and even a novel. The Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is thrilled to feature her work, and looks forward to following her 21st-century career, which is on the verge of blasting off to sectors heretofore unexplored in the universe. Watch for Icy's Author Bio just added in the dropdown menu on the Freezine's margin.

THE THING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT, by Gil James Bavel, appropriately wraps up the MAY 2011 issue. This is Gil's third story published in the Freezine, and qualifies him to be upgraded to "Freezine Warrior" status. If you look over to the side margin in the "Archive of Stories + Bios", you'll see that Gil has moved up the ranks to join the likes of Vincent Daemon, Sean Manseau, Adam Bolivar, Johnny Strike, and John Shirley—Freezine Veterans, all. For this installment in our growing legacy, we have another homage to the one and only H.P. Lovecraft, and as such, concludes this month's issue appropriately, in the eyes of the Bloodhost—the fleet of nanobots surreptitiously inserted into my bloodstream and possessing me to put the Freezine out. This also marks the second piece of artwork handed in to our webzine by Mr. Bavel, and it will soon find its way to his gallery showcased in the FREE ZINE ZONE, our sister-site dedicated to archiving seperately all the artwork used for the Freezine.

Stay tuned until the next, JULY ISSUE, of the Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, available the world over, free of charge, hosted by the globally assimilating internet and brought to you by the mysterious benefactors known as the Bloodhost. More surprises are in store, so be sure to bookmark this site and tell all your friends about it. See hyperlinks below for guidelines for submitting your own stories, and read a clarifying message from the editors. Thanks again, and see you in JULY.

FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES!

:message from the editors:

THE THING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT

2011-05-30T20:49:00.008-06:00

story & art by Gil James Bavel

~WITH APOLOGIES TO H.P. LOVECRAFT~

I had come up to the university library to borrow some books, pursuing my strange fixation of the occult and the bizarre. I took the old freight elevator down, down into the mysterious depths of the ancient building, wondering what horrors I would find. The old brickwork panned slowly upward as the car descended. Finally, the creaking elevator came to a jerky stop at the bottom of the shaft. As I pulled open the iron inner door and strode out into the archive of literature, I noticed an old fluorescent light flickering out, and I was suddenly plunged into complete darkness. I thought it a bit coincidental that it should burn out just as I exited the elevator. Fortunately I had previously obtained a book of matches from a local restaurant, which I now withdrew and made use of.

With a sputter, the match lit up like a small flare, the sulfurous smoke singeing my nostrils. I took a tentative glance at my surroundings, and boldly made my way down the narrow corridor between the dusty stack wall and the long tier of bookshelves. A musty odor pervaded the long room, and I noticed the low ceiling had become lined with cobwebs over the years. It was somewhat difficult to ascertain the call numbers on the shelves by match-light, yet I did manage to locate the shelf, which contained the one tome I was seeking.

Some time beforehand, I had been searching for a few books on demonology, for a religion and theology class I was taking. I found most of them to be quite large, being mostly in German and a few of the much older ones in Latin. It was then that I stumbled across the manual which I now sought—the Necronomicon; that infamous book of evil lore containing spells and incantations which reputedly imbued the reader with the power to summon beings from other planes, and to manipulate his fellow man.

Although my interest was purely academic, I must admit I had become somewhat fanatic in my quest for the book, having seen it in the library once and not again thereafter. I plagued the librarian many times to locate it, and she finally granted me the information that it had been placed in the stacks accidentally, and was not for public borrowing due to its age and condition.

According to her, the book was securely locked away in an area of the building that had been closed off for well over a century.

It was to this place that I had now come, amongst the oldest and most secret books owned by the university, one of the oldest in the country. I rounded the corner, and began to progress down between the shelves when the match burnt down to my fingers, causing some slight pain. I cursed, pulling the matchbook out again, and lit another. I noticed to my surprise that there were quite a few fluorescent bars attached to the ceiling, but none were functioning. I assumed that the power had gone out, and realized that I might be trapped down in the old room, which held the legendary tome I so earnestly searched for. I hurried back to the elevator to find that my fear was justified—the lattice-style doors opened, however the internal floor lights were not illuminated and the elevator did not respond when I pushed the buttons.

I thought that naturally the entire building had suffered a power loss, or at least, a fair portion of it, and that electricity would soon be returned, as it tends to be in such circumstances. I made my way around the entirety of the large room, hoping to find a door leading to a stairway, or perhaps a window through which I could exit if power was not restored soon. This endeavor consumed five more matches to no avail. It was then that I realized my plight; I was beneath the ground floor in an old sub-basement, where no windows were to be found.

I did locate a strange, bricked-up portion of what I thought was the north wall, which presumably served as the entrance to a stairway long ago, but must have been covered over when the elevator was installed. I tested a few of the large, ruddy bricks and found that despite the age of the construction, the mortar was quite solid and none of the bricks were loose. Finally, returning to the task of locating the Necronomicon, I walked between some shelves, which I had previously overlooked, and stumbled quite fortuitously upon an old kerosene lamp in an alcove, between some books. I thanked whatever forces moved decades ago when some absent-minded book-tender neglected to return the lamp to the library proper.

I picked the lamp up carefully, and observed to my dismay that it contained no fluid. Hoping the bottom end might still retain some fumes or residue, I withdrew the wick from its holder, and turned it around, re-inserting it. I then lit my second-to-last-match, touching it to the wick, which sputtered but eventually grew into a fairly bright flame. I covered the lamp with its glass top, and hoped the kerosene resins would burn for a few minutes at least. Slowly walking back to the shelf that contained the Necronomicon, I noticed the shadows from the lantern playing off the old bookshelves, dancing as if to mimic the flame inside it. The large book stood out among the others, its black leather binding after all this time retaining some kind of glossy sheen, and really, all told, was in relatively good condition compared to the decaying books surrounding it.

The book’s title was not on the spine, but some sort of lettering was present; the runes of an ancient alphabet were embossed deeply into the cover’s fiber. Neither title nor name was necessary; according to legend, he who had the grimoire in his possession knew what it was, those who did not probably were better off not knowing its true nature.

I reached for the Necronomicon, and my hand closed around the spine and grasped it firmly. Pulling the over-sized book from the shelf, I found it to be much heavier than I had expected. I looked over it for a moment, and sat down on the floor to examine it at greater length. I lost myself in it for some time, reading the Arabic to which it had been translated. No one knows in what language it was originally written, though it has been speculated that it may have been Babylonian or Sumerian.

After some time, I noted that the flame from the lamp had grown dim, and I remembered my predicament. Taking both the lamp and the tome, I stood up and made my way back to the elevator to find that power had not yet returned. I opened the doors, entered, and closed them behind me. I looked up and noticed a hole in the ceiling, which I knew led into the shaft above that could be my only means of exit. I jumped up and pushed on the panel, which offered no resistance, and merely fell to one side of the opening.

Stashing the tome and lamp on top of the elevator, I prepared to venture into the shaft myself, when I heard an ominous scratching sound from beneath the car. I knew at once that something was amiss. At first, I thought perhaps some poor soul had been trapped underneath the elevator, but then my concern turned to fear and then stark terror as the scratching became louder and louder, until I could feel a powerful vibration under my feet. It was then I realized that something was not only alive under the car, but something primal, intelligent, and evil.

Something had been living at the bottom of the shaft, undisturbed, for God knows how long—and now, it was trying to get out.

My mind raced with horror at the implications. To climb up the long cable would most certainly be an arduous task, but the horrifying alternative, to remain in the library sub-basement alone with the thing at the bottom of the shaft was not a savory idea. I could barely conceive the notion of waiting for the power to return while that unbearable screeching of metal resonated throughout the archive. The unwholesome cacophony was growing progressively louder and more terrifying, and I knew that if I did not escape it, my hysteria would turn quickly to insanity.

Without further hesitation, I jumped for the opening overhead, and pulled myself into the shaft, which was growing ever darker by the dying flame of the lamp. I somehow overcame the instinctual urge to leave both book and lamp behind and climb the cable with the greatest possible expedition, and instead, against my better judgment, lowered the lamp warily into the elevator proper to observe what I could.

Up from below the car came the most horrid shrill growling I have ever heard, either before or since. Suddenly, with a terrible sound, the elevator floor was torn apart as if it were paper, and through it came that which my unbelieving eyes determined to be huge, metallic claws supported by stone-like arms of basic humanoid appearance, if not proportion.

I gasped, my eyes wide with terror, and stuffed the Necronomicon into my shirt, tucking it in so as not to allow the book to fall below where I surely would never recover it. Then, hooking the lantern handle around my arm, I began climbing up the elevator shaft toward the more modern levels of the building. To my horror, the thing, which had come through the floor of the elevator car, had made its way into the car, and jumped effortlessly onto its roof.

This event filled me with the utmost fear, and I redoubled my effort. I was able only to take sporadic glances below, but I saw well enough to know that the thing which had come from beneath the shaft was not natural, nor of this earth, but perhaps some dark cavernous catacomb, from which it found its way into the tunnels and sewers underneath the library, eventually breaking into the shaft. But this was no time for theory, for I could tell by the shrieking of the creature that it was no less than ten feet below me, and I was still well below the first floor; the light emanating from under the elevator doors above made this plain.

Suddenly the lamp unceremoniously flickered and died, plunging both the beast and myself into a nearly absolute shroud of darkness. Overcome with panic, I became somewhat irrational, but it was perhaps this fact and this fact alone that permitted me the insight that may have saved my life. I let the brass kerosene lamp fall from my arm into my hand, and wrapped a leg around the elevator cable. I could hear the heavy breathing of the beast directly underneath me, and hanging on to the cable for dear life, I blindly swung the unwieldy lantern with all my might.

The lamp connected with a loud bang, which reverberated throughout the shaft. A loud and horrible wail came from the monster out of the darkness, and I heard it fall from the cable down perhaps twenty feet of shaft onto the elevator roof below. I could tell that the thing had not been killed by the fall, but only hurt and angered, for its intense wailing did not cease, but in fact, increased substantially.

My load partially lightened, I continued my climb upward, and found it faster going without the encumbrance of the lantern. Upon reaching the first-floor doors, I set one foot on the ledge, and pressed the other against the cable for leverage. I slipped my free hand through the handle of the outer door, but it would not budge. The freight elevator doors had been designed to open in unison, to prevent the unwary from falling down the shaft.

The screaming thing below must have gotten to its feet, because the cable started vibrating as if it were being climbed. Electricity must then have returned to the building, for suddenly the cable jolted, and the car below began to quickly rise. I gasped as I made efforts to regain my balance, my foothold on the cable lost, and I almost fell to a grisly death below, either on the roof of the elevator, or at the fangs of the unnamed creature on it. I managed, however, to grab hold of the sides of the outer doors, and locate the catch that allows them to open. Flipping the catch, I opened the door and fell onto the first floor, breathing hard.

A small crowd had gathered around the doors, obviously attracted by the unearthly shrieking of the thing that was now on its way up the shaft. I wasted no time in scrambling to my feet, looking around for any object I could use as a weapon. Nearby, I spied a small staircase, accompanied by a railing, which attracted my attention.

Pushing my way through the quizzical group, I bolted to the stairs and grabbed a loose bar from the rail, looking it over. It was made of aluminum, but was sturdy and would serve as an effective bludgeon. I spun on my heel to see the elevator doors, which had slammed shut behind me re-opening. I ran at full tilt through the parting crowd at the now-widening gap between the doors.

The demonic thing lunged out of the elevator with an ear-splitting shriek, only to be directly impaled on the bar that I had intended to use on it as a club. The momentum of the creature toppled me to the ground, where I observed it stop and clutch its stomach, which spewed a greenish-red mixture of intestinal fluid and blood. The crowd collectively gasped at the sight, but nevertheless stood paralyzed in fear. Quickly regaining my wits, I swung my leg into the back of the demon’s feet, causing it to fall backward into the dark shaft and plummet to its death.

Later, supported by the eyewitness accounts of the crowd, the authorities and I filled out a report and collected the remains of the hell-spawned creature, which were to be examined and submitted to a postmortem by the county coroner. University officials were quite concerned about the matter, busying themselves so with the strange account that they perhaps forgot to question my presence in the old archive in the first place. I was ultimately released and allowed to go on about my business, which of course, included the perusal of the Necronomicon, which had been furtively hidden in my shirt. I found through my long course of study that a curse had been laid upon the manual by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, which must have been responsible for the fantastic experience I had undergone.

The Necronomicon stated that:

"Those who do not first recite Cthulhu’s own Ritual of Eternal Banishment upon opening the book, will cause Nhgh the forbidden to be summoned from his agony pools of perpetual waiting, granting merciless and unending torment to those who tamper with the Necronomicon."

I read on, and discovered a passage that filled my very being with the utmost dread:

"Lest he is killed, Nhgh will surely slay all who caused him to appear and return with their doomed souls to his dark corner of the abyss...."

~End~

CLICK FOR MAY ISSUE

THE DREAM KEY:VIII

2011-05-26T16:57:00.004-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

Our enthusiasm waned somewhat when we reached the bottom of the stairs and heard a bloodcurdling cacophony of moaning, wailing and shrieking. Gretchen involuntarily clung to me. I would have felt very manly, except that I was clinging to her just as tightly, and shaking like a leaf. We pressed forward, holding onto each other for comfort like Hansel and Gretel in the forest.

Another path of glowing moonstones guided us through the darkness like a trail of breadcrumbs. This time, we had absolutely no desire to stray from it. I felt nothing but fear of the darkness that surrounded us, and yet I had a perverse desire to peer into it just the same. Dimly, I made out scenes of pain and misery.

I saw a naked man strapped to a flaming wheel, spinning slowly around and around like a pig on a spit. Another man was straining for an apple on a tree branch, but never reaching it. Yet another was rolling a boulder up a hill, and, just as it was about to reach the top, the boulder slipped out of his grasp and rolled back down again. And again. And again. And again.

I caught a glimpse of Harriet in the darkness, beckoning us to come to her. With trepidation, we stepped off the moonstone path and the darkness lifted like a black curtain on a stage. We found ourselves in windy field beneath slate grey skies. In the distance, a flock of sheep placidly grazed. It looked a lot like my grandmother’s description of her childhood home in Cornwall.

Harriet was in a circle of standing blue-grey stones, like Stonehenge, only much smaller. There were twelve stones in all, like the signs in the zodiac. In the middle of the circle, a long flat stone lay on the ground like an altar. And lying on the altar was a young man with blond hair wearing overalls and a battered old hat with a feather stuck in it. There were shiny silver chains and manacles binding his wrists and ankles to the stone. Something about him was familiar.

“Holy shit,” Gretchen said. “It’s you!”

It was true. Looking at his face was like looking into a mirror.

“Jack,” Harriet said. “Meet my grandpa. You two met once before, briefly.”

It was the old Jack, my predecessor. He had looked like an old man when I’d met him before. But I suppose in death everyone appeared as their ideal selves, even if chained to an altar stone. The other Jack beamed at me.

“Well, howdy do, Jack.”

“Hi,” I said. “I guess we should get you out of those chains.” I turned to Harriet. “Can you break them with the sword?”

“’Fraid not. Those chains are adamantine. There’s only one thing the Thursbane can’t cut, and that would be it.”

“Every lock has a key,” the other Jack winked. “Answer the riddle and set me free.”

I puzzled over this for a moment and then it hit me. There was a silver key under my shirt, hanging by a cord around my neck. Most of the time I only half-remembered it, like yesterday’s dream. I pulled it out and inserted it into the keyhole of one of the manacles. Click! The key worked like a charm. One hand sprang free. Then the other. Then one foot and the other. Jack leapt to his feet.

“Thanks, cousin! Now we best be on our way.”

Pop-eyed, I discerned a two-headed giant striding across the moor towards us. One of the giant’s heads had a fierce expression and long, scraggly red hair, while the other had dark hair and sad eyes. I remembered the giant well. It was the same one I had helped kill almost a year before. Now, in the land of the dead, the giant was back to repay the favor.

“Fee fie fo fen!” the giant bellowed. “I smell the blood of two Englishmen.”

“Open the dream gate,” the other Jack shouted. “Quick!”

I nodded and pointed the key towards the centre of the stone circle, but nothing happened. Then I realized what was missing. I turned to Gretchen, who was rooted to the spot, staring at the giant. “The book!” I yelled. “Read from the book!”

She came to her senses and whipped the Mother Goose out of her backpack. As it had before, the book sprang open in her hands, the pages fluttering of their own accord until they settled on the page she needed. Two ravens fluttered down from the heavens and alit on one of the standing stones. They watched us balefully with their midnight eyes. Gretchen incanted the spell.

“One is for sorrow,
Two is for mirth,
Open the gate
To take us to earth.”

A rip appeared in space itself, right above the altar stone where Jack had been chained. I grabbed Gretchen’s hand and we jumped through together, tumbling out the other side like Jack and Jill down the hill. We had emerged behind old Jack’s cabin in the Appalachian woods, right where we had begun our journey to the land of the dead. With vampiric agility, Harriet soared out of the rip, twirling like an acrobat, and landed on her feet. Jack hopped out a little less gracefully, and plopped to the ground.

The giant’s hand reached through the rip in space and grabbed hold of Jack’s ankle, trying to pull him back to the other side. Jack dug into the ground with his fingernails, but to no avail. In a blur of speed, Harriet drew the sword strapped to her back, and lopped off the giant’s hand. A terrifying howl of agony ensued, abruptly silenced as the rip in space drew together and sealed itself. There was a crackle of electricity and a thunderstorm smell to the air, but otherwise no trace remained of the dream gate. Oh, and also the twitching giant’s hand lying on the ground.

We didn’t linger in Fiddle Creak. Jack and Harriet were putting to sea at dawn, and it was over four hundred miles to the coast. But that was no challenge for a vampire’s driving. Harriet took the wheel of Gretchen’s Jetta, and covered the entire distance in less than four hours. Somehow she was able to sense cops from miles away, and evade them at every turn. We arrived at the beach in the small hours, before the first signs of dawn had even appeared on the horizon. A crescent moon hung over the black ocean, and a million stars twinkled in the sky. I saw a shooting star and made a wish. A whole universe of possibilities was spread out before us.

“Wait,” Gretchen said. “Didn’t you become Jack when the old Jack died? So which one of you is the Jack now?”

Jack and I looked at each other mischievously. Standing next to each other, we looked like twins, albeit separated at birth. With my leather jacket and black jeans, I was definitely the city mouse. And with his patched-up overalls and floppy brown hat, he was the country mouse.

I cupped my hand to his ear and whispered, “Whickedy whack, now we’re Jack!” Why did there have to be only one at a time?

I turned to Gretchen and grinned. “That’s for us to know and you to find out.”

She punched me in the arm. “You are so infuriating, Jack.”

Without our even noticing, a ship had materialized just offshore like an apparition. It was a three-masted sailing ship like a Blackbeard would have sailed, and absolutely utterly black. The sails were black, the masts were black, and the hull was black. A man wearing a tricorne hat and breeches stood on the deck, scowling at a map. Next to him was a cat wearing a red silk kimono and a samurai sword.

“There’s more than one way to get to the dreamlands,” Jack said. “I reckon dreams are big enough for the two of us.”

“See ya round, Jack,” Harriet said to me. “Take care of him for me,” she said to Gretchen. “He’s always getting into trouble. She stole one last kiss, her ice-cold lips reminding me of what I would be missing. But it was all for the best. It was time to enjoy more earthly pleasures.

A black skiff uncannily rowed itself to the beach to convey Jack and Harriet to the ship. In a few minutes they were standing on the deck. Jack slapped the man with the tricorne hat on the back, and they shared a laugh like old friends. And then, the mysterious black ship was gone. One moment it was there. I blinked and it was gone. Harriet and I were alone on the beach.

The sky began to pinken with the first stirrings of dawn. We sat in the sand, she and I, huddled together against the chill, and watched the sun come up on a new day. It was the first day of my seven years. Time to go back to Boston.

There was a very large bag of gold coins buried under a willow tree near Jamaica Pond. And only I knew where it was. The devil may be two steps behind me, but I was Jack with his hound and horn, who hunted the fox that lived in the thorn. I was ready to jump over any candlestick he lit for me.

Bring it.

~ finis ~

THE DREAM KEY: VII

2011-05-25T22:54:00.010-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

Far away in his garret, the writer stilled his pen. The threads were drawing together, and he must weave them with skill. Why was Jack going to the land of the dead? For what purpose? And how would he escape? Jack would find a way. He was nimble and quick. Jack was Jack. The writer would have to trust the story to find its own end. He dipped his quill in the night-black ink and began scratching words onto fresh vellum...

“Who’s this, Jack?” Gretchen asked, a note of iciness creeping into her voice. I felt like a man who had been caught cheating. But cheating on whom with whom?

“Gretchen this is Harriet. Harriet, Gretchen.”

The two women sized each other up and reluctantly shook each other’s hands.

“Wow, your hand is freezing,” Gretchen remarked.

“That’s because...” I began—then stopped, uncertain whether I should reveal the reason.

“Tell her, Jack,” Harriet said, crossing her arms across her chest. She looked amused.

“Harriet’s a vampire. She was turned into a vampire rescuing me.”

“Is she the one you found the White Cup for?”

“Yeah, although she...changed her mind at the end. Decided to stay a vampire.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

I thought about the question a minute. “She’s kind of my...fiancée.”

“Your what?”

“It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if she is or not. It happened in a dream...”

Gretchen turned away from me. “You suck, Jack,” she said and stomped off to the other side of the boat.

“Actually...I suck,” Harriet whispered in my ear. “But we can talk about that later if you want.”

For the first time, the prospect of being bitten by Harriet had no appeal whatsoever.

The rest of the ride passed in silence, but for the steady swish of the boat sluicing through the water as Charon poled it across the river. After an awkward eternity, we alit on the far shore and disembarked. Visiting the land of the dead should have been an awe-inspiring moment, but the experience was marred by personal tension. I sighed. This was why I hated relationships.

“Look, Gretchen, I really like you. I’m sorry I’m such a shithead. Do you want to...you know...go out sometime?”

The absurdity of asking someone out on a date on the bank of the River Styx forced her to smile.

“Sure. Do you think there’s any place to get Chinese in Hades?”

I took her by the hand. “Well, I’ve heard the dead are always hungry.”

We started down a long winding path through the bleakest landscape I had ever seen. I looked around but Harriet was gone. She had a way of disappearing and reappearing when she felt like it. No doubt she’d turn up again.

Gretchen dropped my hand and looked me in the eye. “So what’s the deal with you and the vampire chick? Is she your fiancée or not?”

I thought about that for a minute. It’s not like I ever asked her or she asked me. She had been sleeping in the thorn and I pulled up her veil and kissed her. It had been a fairy tale in a dream. But symbolism aside, I was Jack, damn it. I did as I pleased. The Weird or whatever wasn’t the boss of me. It couldn’t decide who I married.

“She’s not,” I said. “It was only a dream.”

Gretchen took my hand again. “Good. Now let’s go talk to Old King Hades and find out what he wants.”

Leading away from the river was a path of white stones that glowed wanly like little moons. We started down the path tentatively. On either side of us was absolute black nothingness. No, not nothingness. I smelled something. Something familiar. A scent from my childhood. I peered into the darkness and saw my grandmother in her kitchen cooking pasties, those yummy meat pies from Cornwall. The sight and smell was so appealing, I was tempted to walk off the path of moonstones into my grandmother’s kitchen.

“Ahem,” I heard. I stopped myself. I noticed Gretchen was about to walk off the path too, and I grabbed her hand to stop her.

“Dad,” she said. “I see my dad. He died when I was eight...”

“Do not stray from the path” (came the same voice that had said “ahem”) “Or you will become lotus-eaters and never return.”

A hare stood before us on two legs, his nose twitching furiously. He was wearing a frayed and patched tweed suit and a stiff Edwardian collar with a bow tie. A silver watch chain dangled from his waistcoat.

“Oh my god!” Gretchen gaped. “What is that?”

“Who is that, if you please,” the Rampant Hare said. He had a distinct upper-class English accent, very precise and brittle.

“Sorry, it's just that I didn’t know there were talking rabbits outside of Alice in Wonderland.”

“I am a hare, actually. The two breeds are separate and distinct.”

“Gretchen, this is the Rampant Hare,” I cut in quickly before she put her foot in her mouth again. “He keeps popping up just when I need him.”

“It is no accident,” the Rampant Hare said. “I am bound to serve you, Jack.”

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.” Then a memory surfaced. Actually, I did know that. The Rampant Hare had been the squire of the original Jack the Giant-Killer. Well, that was handy. Everyone could use a squire.

“Thanks for keeping us from walking off the path,” Gretchen said, trying to make amends. “Sorry for calling you a rabbit.”

“I am not offended by the rudeness of earthlies. You are an ignorant race. Follow me, please. I shall lead you to the court of the Shadow King.”

With that, the Rampant Hare set off briskly down the path of moonstones without looking back. Gretchen and I looked at each other and shrugged. We followed along behind him. We’re off to see the wizard, I thought.

The last time I had met the Rampant Hare, he had led me to the court of Queen Pussywillow of Hen. That’s when I had been sent on a quest to find the White Cup. Her cousin Oleandra had opened the dream gate for me to start my quest, and her price had been the enchanted emerald I now carried in my messenger bag. Now the Rampant Hare was leading me to the court of the Shadow King. I couldn’t help but feel there was a certain symmetry to events. I was coming to the close of a cycle.

After about a mile of meandering through the darkness, the moonstone path terminated at a black iron gate in a wall of craggy grey stone. The Rampant Hare pushed the gate open and entered into the yawning gap. Gretchen and I exchanged glances, and, holding hands for courage, followed after. The court of Hades was, as might be expected, dark and gloomy. We were met by a skeleton wearing tattered black velvet livery, and carrying a lit torch in one hand. With his free hand, he gestured for us to follow him. The skeleton led us down a long circular tunnel bored through the stone like a giant wormhole. The Rampant Hare had vanished once more, but by now I was used to his comings and goings. My familiar.

The tunnel opened out into a vast echoing cave, complete with stalactites and stalagmites. On two identical jewel-studded golden thrones sat the Shadow King and a woman whom I presumed must be his queen. They were larger than life, maybe eight feet tall, and their skin was pale as milk, their hair black as ink.

The Shadow King had a tightly curled black beard that put me in mind of an engraving of Ashurbanipal I had once seen at the Museum of Fine Arts. Hades was no less fearsome a king. And someone else was in the cave with us. It was Harriet. I gave Gretchen’s hand a squeeze, which she returned.

“I was wondering when you guys would finally turn up,” Harriet said.

She was wearing a sword and scabbard strapped to her back. A blood-red ruby glinted in its pommel. I immediately recognized it as the Thursbane. How had she visited the Reverend in Mousehole and come back so fast?

“You seem to come and go as you please,” I remarked.

“Well, being neither dead nor alive has its privileges,” she replied. “So are you two an item now or what?”

“What if we are?” Gretchen asked.

“Hey, it was a simple question. Jack can do what he wants. It’s all the same to me.”

Was there a note of hurt in Harriet’s voice? I felt like an ass.

“Anyway,” Harriet went on. “We should get down to business. I’ve been negotiating with the Shadow King for you. He’s agreed to be the keeper of the Eye of Set. What safer place for it than the land of the dead? Nobody comes or goes without his knowledge. Well, hardly anybody.”

“But what about Oleandra?” I asked. “She named it as her price from opening the dream gate.”

“Fríg will take on that debt for you. And in return, you will be her champion for seven years. What say you?” All this wheeling and dealing was confusing the hell out of me. It didn’t seem like I had much choice in the matter. I wondered what being Fríg’s champion for seven years would entail? Well, at least I’d be rid of this damned emerald. That was easily worth seven years.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

Another skeleton in black livery stepped forward. He stopped when he was in front of me and held out his hands, palms up. A few moments passed in silence while the skeleton stood there, grinning disconcertingly.

“I think he wants the emerald, Jack,” Gretchen whispered.

Duh. Of course. Feeling foolish, I opened up my messenger bag and pulled out the cedar box. For a moment, I didn’t want to give it up. My precious! Then, quickly, I handed it over. The finger bones closed around the box and took it out of my grasp. The skeleton walked off and disappeared into the gloom. I suddenly felt gleeful, like I wanted to burst into song. The emerald is gone! The emerald is gone! Ding dong, the emerald is gone! Thankfully for everyone else, I kept my silence. Hearing me sing is torture even the dead shouldn’t have to endure.

Throughout this entire transaction, neither the Shadow King nor Queen had uttered a word or moved a muscle. They just sat rigidly upright in their golden thrones, staring fixedly forward like statues. Maybe they existed in a much slower time frame than we did. In any case, I was ready to skedaddle. All these walking skeletons were seriously giving me the heebie-jeebies.

Gretchen shared my feelings. “Can we go now?” she asked.

“Just one last thing,” Harriet said. Between the King and Queen’s thrones, an aperture swung open in the wall, revealing a flight of onyx stairs leading downward. “In exchange for the Eye of Set, the Shadow King will allow us to bring Jack back with us to the upper world.”

“Well, I hope I can go back,” I said.

“Not you, Jack. The other Jack. My grandfather Jack.”

“Your grandfather? We can bring him back from the dead?”

“Not just from the dead. From Tartarus. He was a naughty boy.”

Without another word, Harriet strode through the gate and started down the stairs. I turned to Gretchen.

“You don’t have to come with us.”

“Don’t be silly, Jack. In for a penny. You don’t think I’d let you spend those seven years on your own, do you?”

Gretchen and I shared our first kiss, right there in the land of the dead in front of the disinterested stares of the Shadow King and Queen. And there was nothing gloomy about it. It was warm and alive and full of hope. Drunk with glee, we ran through the gate to Tartarus and took the onyx stairs two by two.

“Tantivy!” I shouted.

“Tantivy!” Gretchen echoed.

Click Here
For the Conclusion of
THE DREAM KEY
by Adam Bolivar

THE DREAM KEY: VI

2011-05-24T08:05:00.004-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

“I don’t remember Jack being in Norse mythology,” Gretchen said, finishing her glass and holding it out for Woden to refill, which he did. She had also caught onto the fact that the jug was neverending. Funny how quickly you can adapt to fairy-tale logic. “Or is he Thor? No, wait. Jack would be more like Loki. He’s the trickster, right?”

“Jack is Jack,” Woden said.

“I knew you were going to say something like that. Typical god.” Gretchen was almost halfway through her second mason jar and acting very bold.

“My son Thunor was a giant-killer like Jack. But you are right, Jack is also a trickster like Loki. Jack is both Thunor and Loki. He is Woden and Fríg. The sun and the moon. He is the key.”

“Stop,” I said. “You’re going to give me a big head.” But truly I didn’t mind. My head was swelling so fast, it was going to burst through the roof of the cabin soon.

Woden fixed me with a terrible stare that pierced me to my core. For the first time I realized that only one of his eyes was real. “It is only the truth, Jack. You are the key to it all. All the stories revolve around you.”

“I don’t feel like much of a giant-killer,” I said. “The Reverend offered me a sword and I turned it down. I’m no killer.”

“Then we will have to find something else for you to do. There are many ways to be a Jack. He pulled something down from the mantle above the fireplace and handed it to me. It was a worn leather case. I unfastened the clasps and opened it. A beautiful fiddle lay within, made of a dark reddish wood, and a long horsehair bow was affixed inside the top of the case.

“Play us a song, Jack,” Woden bade me.

“You play the fiddle?” Gretchen said. “You never told me that.

“I don’t,” I insisted. “I’ve never picked up a fiddle in my life.”

“Just try it,” Woden said. “You’ll remember.”

Shrugging, I drained the rest of my mason jar of stout for courage, and took the fiddle out of the case. I put the fiddle under my chin and poised the bow as if I’d been playing my entire life. I felt like a marionette. Someone else was pulling the strings. I began to play and a merry old tune came out. Playing was as natural as walking. Gretchen abruptly stood up and started dancing. She sang:

“I won’t be my father’s Jack
I won’t be my mother’s Jill
I will be the fiddler’s wife
And have music when I will.”

I stopped played and Gretchen stopped dancing, flopping back into her chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She looked at me openmouthed. “Why did I just do that?”

Woden grinned wolfishly. “Now we’re cookin’. Show me the emerald, Jack. Show me the dream key.”

Gretchen and I looked at each other with fear. We had learned the hard way that taking the emerald out of its box was a bad idea. But Woden was a god. He must know what he was doing, right? I set down the fiddle, retrieved my messenger bag, and pulled out the cedar box with the strange symbols carved on it. Woden held out a lean, wizened hand, and, with trepidation, I handed it to him. What if this were some kind of trick to steal the emerald? But it was too late now.

Woden’s mouth moved in a low incantation. He was reciting something in a guttural, growling language I didn’t recognize, although it sounded vaguely familiar. It was like Old English, but much, much older. It was Old English’s great-grandfather. The cedar box sprang open of its own accord, and the emerald popped out of it like toast from a toaster. Woden caught it in midair and held it between his thumb and forefinger where it glittered darkly in the firelight.

“Play!” Woden commanded me. “Play for your life!”

I grabbed the fiddle and without even thinking about it, started playing a shrill melody that sounded like cats yowling. Gretchen was possessed again, and with forced, jerky movements, pulled the ancient leather-bound tome from her backpack. The book flew open in her hands, and the pages fluttered wildly, like the wings of a frenzied bird. The pages finally settled down, and Gretchen read what was on them aloud:

“Iä! Yog-Sothoth! That which must never be,
The Old Ones dream beyond the gate,
A-waiting for the key.
Fríg protect us, Woden, Thunor,
I summon the Old Ones, and open the door.”

It was the opposite of the spell the Reverend had read. Instead of banishing the Old Ones, Gretchen was summoning them, although not by choice. I stopped fiddling, and Gretchen slammed the book shut, finally in control of her own body again.

All went silent until...a knock sounded on the door. Then another. Then another. Gretchen and I looked at each other wide-eyed. My heart was beating so fast, I felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. Woden moved to answer the door. What was he doing? Was he crazy? He opened it.

At the threshold was a walking skeleton wearing a tattered black hooded cloak. The skeleton held out his hand.

“I reckon he wants his fare. A coin for each of you.” I felt in my pocket. There were two pennies, the old-fashioned kind with the ears of wheat on the back. With a trembling hand, I put them into the skeleton’s hand. The skeleton sequestered the coins beneath his cloak and then turned to leave. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at me, gesturing for me to follow. So I did.

- III -
Jack in the Land of the Dead

I followed my skeletal guide out of the cabin, and Gretchen and Woden followed after. Woden had donned a wide-brimmed hat, a grey cloak, and he was carried a white wooden staff. The ensemble made him look more like Gandalf than ever. But, I supposed, Gandalf was the one who looked like him.

The black-cloaked skeleton led us into the forest behind old Jack’s cabin, a wood filled with whispering, bare-branched trees. Our feet crunched dry, dead leaves, and the full moon illumined our way. Even for November, it was a cold night. A million stars blazed overhead. Finally, we emerged by the bank of a dark river with spectral mist swirling over its murmuring waters. A boat was moored to a rotting pier, bobbing in time to the river’s heartbeat. The skeleton strode onboard the boat and picked up a long pole, which he thrust into the river’s inscrutable depths. Even I knew that this was Charon, come to take us to the land of the dead. Woden handed me back the cedar box that contained the black emerald.

“This is as far as I go,” he said.

“You’re not coming with me?” I felt abandoned. I had been counting on his help.

“This ain’t my mythos, son. But don’t you fret. You’ll get help along the way.”

I turned to Gretchen, who stood next to Woden, as motionless as a statue.

“I know it’s asking a lot...” I began.

“Save it, Jack. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

We joined hands and stepped onto Charon’s boat together. Our weirds were one. The wood creaked disconcertingly beneath our feet. This boat had been around as long as death had. Oh well, I supposed if it held up this long, it wasn’t going to sink now.

“The land of the dead, please,” I said to Charon. The skeleton nodded, and I could swear he was grinning at me. Maybe it was just all the teeth. The ferryman pushed the boat away from the pier and we were on our way. I looked back to see Woden watching our departure wistfully until he was swallowed up by the swirling mist.

A shiver ran down my spine. Someone tapped me on my shoulder and I wheeled around in surprise.

“Hey Jack. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

It was Harriet.

Click Here for Part VII

THE DREAM KEY: V

2011-05-23T11:31:00.005-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

A rush of memories flew into my head like a swarm of buzzing bees. People who had died before I was born, but who the last Jack had known and loved. Sunshine...my darling Sunshine... It was Fiddle Creak, sure as eggs are eggs. How could I forget?

“And Jack’s house?” I pressed. “How do I get to Jack’s house?”

The gas-station attendant lifted up the bill of his cap and looked me square in the eye. His eyes were as blue as heaven and the lines in his face were as deep as hell.

“What in Sam Hill are ye talkin’ about, Jack? Don’t ye know the way to your own house?”

More memories streamed into my head. An oak tree. A road. A scarecrow. A house. Yes, of course I knew where it was. I shook the attendant’s hand, which was as rough as tree bark—tree bark slicked with motor oil—and got back in the car.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Gretchen said.

“The ghost of Christmas past, I reckon. Head down that road up yonder, ’bout a mile, then turn at the old oak. You’ll find it.”

Gretchen looked at me like I had three heads, but did what I told her. In a cloud of dust, we put the tiny town behind us and delved deeper into the unknown.

The Appalachians are the oldest mountains in the world, as old as some stars. And there are secrets nestled in their hollows, secrets that should never be told. Old gods sleep here, gods that ruled the earth æons before man was born. And if they are woken, they will rule again, purging our pitiful kind from the surface of the earth like a layer of mold.

Somehow I remembered the way, directing Gretchen to turn right at the oak tree and then left down a path, the one overgrown with thorns that none had gone down in at least half a century. The memories came from the Jack before me, the one who was a child of these mountains. I didn’t remember much of the other Jacks’ lives, but sometimes I got a flash, a vivid impression, like the sudden remembrance of a dream from years ago.

And then we emerged at a single-pen cabin that must have been built two hundred years ago, and yet somehow was still standing. It was mid-afternoon now, and already the light was fading, now that the days were so short. Gretchen killed the engine and we emerged from the car like two astronauts stepping out onto the surface of another planet, uncertain what to expect. There was smoke coming from the chimney of the cabin.

The door creaked open and a wizened old man with a long grey beard emerged. For half a moment, I thought it was the old Jack, who had lived here once. But no, he was dead. This was another greybeard. Then it clicked into place. I had met him in the subway last summer, and he had given me a bottle full of magic beans.

“Howdy do, Jack,” said Old Greybeard. He had an Appalachian accent with a trace of something else, something older—almost German-sounding. “Who’s yer lady friend?”

“I’m Gretchen,” Gretchen introduced herself. She stretched out her hand. Old Greybeard took hold and shook it. The side of his mouth quirked upwards with amusement.

“Ladyfolk are mighty spirited these days.”

“And proud of it, old timer. Do you have a name?”

“Sure I do. I have a hundred of ’em. Which one do you want to call me? Ol’ Greybeard? Allfather? Lord of the Gallows? Twice Blind? The Ancient One? Take yer pick. You look like you’ve read a sight of books. I reckon you’ve run across me in some of the old tales.”

For a moment, Old Greybeard looked very ancient indeed, and very powerful. Gretchen looked visibly shaken. “O-o-odin?” she stammered.

“Ah, now that’s an old ‘un. I don’t hear that name too often nomore. How ‘bout you call me Woden? That’s what folks in these parts call me. Or their ancestors did leastaways, round about a thousand years ago.”

I sniffed the air. Something was cooking. “Are you going to ask us in for dinner?” I said. “It’s my house, after all.”

Woden smiled and nodded. “Why sure, Jack. You must be hungry as a bear after coming so far. Did you bring my wife’s book?”

“Your wife?” I said.

“Fríg.”

“I have it,” Gretchen said, retrieving her backpack from the car.

“And I reckon you’ve got the dream key.” Woden looked at me meaningfully. I was already carrying the messenger bag that held the cedar box with the emerald inside. “I’ve got it,” I said.

“Well come on in then. I’m cookin’ up a mess of stew. Then we’ll have ourselves a good long jaw session.”

The inside of the cabin was just how I remembered it. I had visited here last January with Harriet, albeit briefly. I noticed the secret hatch in the floor where the old Jack had spirited me to safety before being killed by vampires—their leader the same vampire who had turned Harriet into one of their kind.

On one side of the cabin was a fireplace with a black cast-iron pot straddling it. Old Greybeard, Woden, whatever his name was lifted the lid releasing a pleasant aroma that set my stomach rumbling. I felt like a slavering wolf as the old man ladled out bowls of the stew for us, and as soon as it was in my hands, I practically inhaled it. It was when I was eating my second bowl that I was able to appreciate how good it tasted. Beans, carrots and some kind of unidentifiable roast meat.

Finally, Gretchen and I were sated (I noticed she had eaten hers with equal ravenousness), and we sat by the fire smoking cigarettes, while Woden lit up a long-stemmed wooden pipe. I couldn’t help but think of Gandalf. But of course, Tolkien was a scholar of old Anglo-Saxon mythology. Gandalf was probably based on Woden.

“So how can you be a god?” Gretchen asked. “I still can’t believe it. Shouldn’t you be in Valhalla feasting with valkyries or something?”

Woden lifted a shaggy eyebrow. “Ah, those were days of glory indeed. But we gods are only as powerful as the prayers we receive.”

“Like Tinkerbell?” I asked.

“A fair comparison, if a sassy one. Very few believe in me nowadays, so I am likewise diminished. But it’s all one to me. This is my Valhalla.” He spread his arms to indicate the cabin. It was snug and warm, and our bellies were full of food. A small Valhalla, but a Valhalla still. Only one thing was missing...

Woden produced an ancient clay jug, and poured its contents into three mason jars, handing two to Gretchen and me. I sniffed mine dubiously. It smelled like beer—some kind of dark stout. Woden raised his in a toast and Gretchen and I did the same.

“Skull!” he cried, and took a mighty swig of his stout, drinking about half the jar. I did my best to do the toast justice, but was only able to drink about a quarter of mine. Gretchen, I noticed, did a little better, nearly downing half of her jar. Woden had drained his to the dregs, and he refilled his jar from the jug. The jug didn’t look big enough to hold so much, but I supposed it must have been some kind of magic jug that never ran out. I had a feeling I was going to get very drunk that night.

Click Here for Part VI

THE PORCELAIN WOMAN

2011-05-20T17:22:00.006-06:00

by Icy Sedgwick

Gregor sat back in his chair and smiled. He put down the brush to admire his handiwork. The porcelain woman sat on the bench before him, the paint still sticky on her face. He didn’t need to check the photograph to know she was the twin of his beloved Sylvie. They were identical in every way, right down to the fact that neither of them was alive.

Gregor ran a hand through the porcelain woman’s golden curls. They sprang back into place, glinting in the late afternoon sunlight.

“Ah, my beautiful porcelain woman. I shall name you Odile,” he said. He took one of her cold, smooth hands in his own and gazed into the painted blue eyes.

Gregor talked to the porcelain woman, telling Odile about Sylvie, and their dreams of running an art school in the town. He told her about the tuberculosis that stole his Sylvie away, leaving him lost and alone. He explained how he spent the intervening years locked away in his rooms at the top of the tower. Odile simply listened.

Some hours after sunset, Gregor yawned and shook his tired limbs. He scooped up Odile and carried her into his bedroom. He settled her into the rocking chair by the window.

“Sylvie used to sit here when she couldn’t sleep. She said she liked to knit by moonlight, and keep watch over me. You can hold her vigil now,” he said.

Gregor planted a kiss on Odile’s lifeless cheek. He climbed into bed and fell asleep under the watchful gaze of his porcelain angel.

Dawn’s tentative fingers crept over the red roofs and smoking chimneys. Gregor stirred, feeling the sun’s early caress on his cheek. He got out of bed and carried Odile up to the small roof terrace at the top of the tower. Gregor settled her on some pillows so she could gaze down over the town.

“Sylvie used to sit up here while I worked. She liked the fresh air and the morning sun. I’ll come and get you at lunchtime,” said Gregor.

He patted Odile’s head and left the terrace. His footsteps rang out on the narrow stairs. For the first time in fifteen years, he whistled a melody of summer and hope. The tune echoed around his tiny kitchen as he prepared his solitary breakfast, and continued while he pottered around in his workshop. At lunchtime, he fetched Odile, and she watched him work during the afternoon. She listened to his prattle about ceramics and glazing during supper, and she watched over him while he slept.

Days turned into weeks, and Gregor continued to talk to Odile. He fixed up her hair, and sewed her new clothes. Sometimes he touched up her paintwork. Gregor was always very careful with his porcelain woman. On Valentine’s Day, he laid out a special supper for them, and confessed he was scared he might trip on the stairs, and break her.

“I’d be ever so upset if anything ever happened to you, Odile. You have no idea how much I appreciate you. It’s been so long since I had anyone to talk to. The people down in the town...oh, they let you talk as long as they get to interrupt with their gossip and idle chatter. Not you, my dearest Odile, you know how to listen,” said Gregor. He patted her hand.

The weeks turned into months. Gregor showed Odile the pieces he was working on, although he was careful not to allow any buyers to visit him at home. He feared they might want to buy Odile. She was not for sale, and it didn’t seem right to make another.

One Thursday in late September, Odile sat outside. A makeshift shelter of wood and canvas stretched above her in case it rained. The clock in the town square struck noon. People scurried around in the streets below, hurrying to the market for their lunch of bread and cheese.

Later, the clock struck six in the evening. Odile remained on the terrace, surrounded by twilight. Candles burned at the windows in the houses below. Men patrolled the streets, lighting the gas lamps. Their glow cast warm circles of light across the cobbles. Gregor did not come for Odile.

Thursday turned into Friday and Odile still sat on the terrace. A light drizzle pattered on the canvas above her as the sun fought to break through the early morning mist. Lunchtime came and went, but Gregor did not. That evening, a strong wind pulled down the canvas over Odile, blocking her view of the town.

Some days later, a stranger ventured onto the terrace. He saw a pile of old canvas by the chimney stack, and made a note in his book. He muttered about the state in which the old man had left the place, and left. Another strong wind that night tore away the canvas. It fluttered across the terrace and over the side, snapping from one gust to the next into the darkness. Odile sat in the cold night air, watching the lights go out in the windows of the town.

Night and day chased each other across the sky. Heavy rains plastered Odile’s hair to her porcelain head, and strong winds tugged it dry. Birds gathered on the terrace. The sound of nails being driven into wood within the tower drove them away; only mice and rats would use the narrow stairs now.

The nights grew longer, and colder. Rodents sniffed at Odile’s dress, tearing strips from the skirt to line their holes. Her beautiful floral dress, so similar to Sylvie’s, hung in rags around her porcelain legs. Spiders crept across her hands, spinning webs between her fingers.

Snowflakes drifted onto the terrace on Christmas Day. The town spread beneath a steel grey sky. Odile’s painted eyes didn’t see the townsfolk singing carols around the tree in the square. Children ran around in the rooms below, their laughter drifting up the stairs toward the terrace.

A tear slid down Odile’s cheek.

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THE DREAM KEY: IV

2011-05-19T21:45:00.007-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

- II -
Return to Fiddle Creak

Gretchen meandered southwards down a series of back roads, studiously avoiding the main highways. I had little to say on the matter, for as a Bostonian, my knowledge of the world south of Braintree was woefully limited, and I was content to let Gretchen navigate a path to Fiddle Creak. Well, she would be able to get us to Asheville, North Carolina, which was the nearest town amounting to a hill of beans. From there, it would be up to me and my Jack instincts to find where we were going. Fiddle Creak wasn’t on any map that we could find.

We got a late start leaving Massachusetts, however, and the shadows were growing long before we reached the Mason-Dixon line, even at the speed Gretchen drove. It was decided that trying to find our way through the backwoods of Appalachia in the dead of night was foolhardy at best, and around midnight we stopped at a motel somewhere in Virginia. The ‘M’ and ‘E’ in the neon MOTEL sign flickered sporadically and the toothless old man in the office had a shotgun propped up next to him. It was one of those kinds of places.

At least the sheets were reasonably clean, and Gretchen collapsed on them, falling asleep within seconds of her head hitting the pillow. I didn’t have a driver’s license (hey, I’m from Boston, all right?) and she had done all the driving. At least I had paid for all the tolls, the gas, our dinner at Jack in the Box (our little joke), and the motel. My last adventure in the land of Hen had yielded a sack full of gold coins, and I had sold a few of them at a pawnshop, so I had a nice head of lettuce in my wallet. I had buried the rest of the coins so I could come back for them later. No, I won’t tell you where.

Gretchen may have fallen asleep, but I was buzzed. I didn’t want to turn on the TV and disturb her, and I couldn’t concentrate on reading the trashy novel she had lent me (some spy thriller thing). I decided to take a walk, and bring the emerald with me. Not that I didn’t trust Gretchen, but she was sleeping and I didn’t want to leave the most dangerous jewel on earth unattended. So I donned my leather jacket and hat, slung the messenger bag over my shoulder, and stepped out into the witching-hour mist.

I wandered across the road into a dark wood, and the trees rustled and moaned in their sleep. A moonbeam stretched out before me like a long pale finger pointed my way. It was no accident that I’d entered this wood. The voices were whispering in my head. The Old Ones were stirring.

After walking for about half an hour, I stumbled upon a long-abandoned graveyard. There were slabs of slate here marking the final resting places of some of the earliest English settlers to this continent. I sat next to the stone of INCREASE PEASLEE, who was born in Sussex in 1630. The ran my fingers over the words graven in the stone:

Remember me as you pass by;
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be;
Prepare for death and follow me.

“Not everyone is food for worms, you know.”

Startled, I wheeled around and saw Harriet standing there next to a ruined crypt, her skin glowing as if she were made of moonlight.

“Harriet!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m always near you, Jack. I told you I’d help you get with the emerald.”

“What am I supposed to do with it? Can you tell me?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I think you’re on the right track. Keep heading for Fiddle Creak. Find my grandpa’s old cabin. I think you’ll find something there that will help.”

“Why don’t you come back with me to the motel? You can drive the rest of the way with us, and show us where it is.”

“Don’t be silly, Jack. You’ll be driving in the daytime, and the sun doesn’t...um...agree with my complexion. Besides, I don’t think your friend would like the competition.”

“Gretchen? We’re just friends.”

Harriet smiled, revealing wolf-like fangs.

“Men are so clueless. You’d better get back. There are things in these woods that would like nothing more than to get their hands on that emerald.”

“Okay. I’ll see you soon?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll turn up. I’m like a bad penny.”

I turned to leave, but Harriet’s hand fell on my shoulder stopping me. She had been over twenty feet away just a second before. I forgot how cold she was.

“Before you go...I don’t suppose I could...have a little blood? All I’ve had to drink lately are rats and squirrels. Not very satisfying.”

“Sure, why not?”

Harriet had fed on me before. At first I had enjoyed it. The experience was thrilling. Later, I felt more ambivalent about it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being dinner. And prime rib at that. Something about the blood of a Jack was special, apparently.

But it was too late to protest now. I felt Harriet’s fangs slide into my neck, and as before I had the unnerving sensation of being penetrated. Then the rush of pleasure, like a drug, flooded my body, and I convulsed involuntarily. Then, it was over as quickly as it had begun. I was alone once more in the cemetery, shivering with the cold. An owl hooted in the wood. I stumbled back up the path from which I had come, back to the warmth of the motel room and a soft bed with Gretchen.

Quietly entering the motel room, I locked the door and set down my gear. Gretchen stirred, but didn’t wake. Opening my messenger bag, I fished out the wooden box that contained its terrible cargo. Resisting the temptation to open it, just to take a peek at that seductively beautiful emerald, I put the box under my pillow and crawled into bed. Thinking about what Harriet had said, I pressed myself up against Gretchen’s warm back. She involuntarily grasped my hand, even though asleep, and we slept like that, two spoons in a drawer through the long cold night.

The next morning, Gretchen and I arose wordlessly, and set about looking for coffee. I didn’t mention my late-night excursion, although I think the early-morning snuggling hadn’t gone unnoticed. Noticed, but not commented on.

Deciding that there was no humanly consumable coffee to be found at this motel, we ventured onwards a bit further until we found a roadside diner that served coffee as black as the screaming abyss I’d seen inside the emerald. I had to get rid of this thing soon. But how?

We ate eggs and bacon that were nauseatingly greasy. I’d traded a hungry belly for a sick one. I’m not sure which was worse. A couple of cigarettes helped tamp down the nausea, however, and we steeled ourselves for the ride ahead.

The roads we found ourselves on became narrower and windier, and the towns became smaller and further apart. We were in serious hill country. The backwoods of Appalachia. At one o’clock—twenty-four hours after we had embarked from Mousehole, Mass., we pulled into a filling station in a tiny settlement, which amounted to nothing more than a few shops (mostly boarded up) huddled together next to a dirt road. The gas-station attendant wore a duckbilled cap as greasy as the eggs we'd had for breakfast.

“Fill ’er up, my good man,” said Gretchen in a cheesy mock-English accent. The taciturn attendant either didn’t see the humor (granted, there was little to see) or didn’t care. Wordlessly, he removed the nozzle from the 1930’s-vintage gas pump and inserted it into the Jetta’s tank. The gas pump made ting-ting-ting noises while little numbers scrolled behind a cracked pane of glass. I got out of the car to stretch my legs and have a smoke.

Finally, the fueling was complete, and the attendant returned the nozzle to its cradle. The total was $19.10. I pulled out my wallet and found exactly nineteen dollars left to my hoard. I forked over the pile of fives and ones, and scrounged in my pocket for change. I found a silver dime and two copper pennies. I handed the attendant the dime and put the two pennies back in my pocket. They were the last of my earthly money.

“By any chance, would you know the way to Fiddle Creak?” I asked.

The attendant spat a wad of chewing tobacco on the ground.

“Are you funnin’ with me?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Why, you’re in it, sure as eggs’re eggs. This is Fiddle Creak.”

We Continue Monday with Part V

Stay Tuned For This Weekend's Short Story

THE PORCELAIN WOMAN

by Icy Sedgwick

THE DREAM KEY: III

2011-05-18T19:12:00.005-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

“One!” shouted the Reverend.

“Two!” cried Gretchen.

“Threeeeee!!!!” I screamed, the tip of the sword’s blade pointing itself at the crack like a dowsing rod. The crack in the wall drew together and sealed itself. A few seconds later, it was gone. There was no trace that it had ever been there at all. I still clenched the hilt of the sword. My eyes bulged like a madman’s. The Reverend gently prized it from my grip, and slid the blade into the scabbard. He cleared a space on his couch, into which Gretchen and I collapsed like two marionettes whose strings had been cut.

“I think we could all do with a spot of tea,” the Reverend remarked.

A few minutes later, with hot cups of Earl Grey in our hands, the shock of what had just happened waned somewhat. Gretchen broke the silence.

“Am I going to be the first to say it? That was insane! What the fuck just happened?”

“You simply witnessed a textbook example of why you should never perform a summoning ritual without the proper protections,” the Reverend replied.

“But I’ve opened the box before and nothing happened,” I countered.

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Well...there were the whispers in my head. And the strange dreams.”

The Reverend nodded vigorously.

“You have been weakening the wall. This time was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. It’s lucky you were here when it did, or else...who knows what might have happened?”

“The sword,” I said. “I’ve used that sword before...in the dreamlands.”

“There he goes with the dreamlands again,” Gretchen said.

The Reverend smiled like a Cheshire cat.

“Now, now, Gretchen. There are more things in heaven and earth. Pray continue, Jack.”

“I used it to cut a rope that was holding up a cage... The cage fell and Mother Goose flew out. It was very confusing. But I swear—it was the same sword. Where did you get it?”

“It belonged to my old friend, of course, who was also named Jack.”

Memories came flooding into my head that were not from my own life. They belonged to another Jack, the one before me. The old man in the shack in the Appalachian Mountains. But he had not always been old. Once he had been young like me. Young and blond-haired and full of mischief. He had been Jack. Nimble and quick. The Reverend smiled.

“You remember, don’t you Jack?”

“Wait a minute,” Gretchen said. “You two have met?”

“Not precisely,” the Reverend explained patiently. “I knew the Jack-that-was. But in many ways all the Jacks are the same person. The same, but different.”

“I get it. Not!”

I got up and lifted the sword, now safely ensconced in the scabbard. It was much lighter than a sword of that size should be. But I suppose it was not made of ordinary steel.

“The sword is yours Jack,” the Reverend said. “It is the Thursbane—the giant-killing blade renowned in phrase and fable. It belongs to you.”

A voice whispered in my head. “Take it, Jack. Take it and you will win all the fame and fortune you desire. Wine, women and power. Stacks of gold piled high in a tower...”

I pushed the voice out of my mind and set the sword back on top of the Reverend’s bookshelf.

“No. It’s not for me. I’m not a swordy kind of guy.”

The Reverend nodded. “A wise choice. It will stay in my care then.”

Gretchen, meanwhile, was fingering the book on the Reverend’s desk, the one she had been reading from a few minutes before.

“May I?” she asked.

“By all means, the Reverend replied.

Gretchen opened the cover and I looked over her shoulder at the frontispiece.

Ye Wisdomme of Fryg
Who is elsewyse knowne as
MOTHER GOOSE

Gretchen and I exchanged glances. She flipped through the vellum pages and we saw the same nursery rhymes we grew up with as children. Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle. Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop. Little boy blue, come blow your horn. But as she waded deeper into the book, the rhymes became weirder and unfamiliar. That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange æons even death may die. Something about this rhyme made my stomach flutter, and I shuddered involuntarily. I could tell Gretchen had the same reaction, for after reading the couplet, she shut the book firmly. That was one weird Mother Goose book.

“Yes, perhaps it’s best not to drink in too much knowledge at one time,” the Reverend said. “But I assure the book will come in handy when you need it.” “You mean...you’re giving it to me?” Gretchen said.

“Indeed. It is far too burdensome for me to lug around anymore.”

“I was kind of hoping you’d come with us, Reverend,” I said. “Like in the old days.”

“A tempting offer, Jack. But I am far too old for dream-quests now. The best I can do is offer a word or two of advice from my considerable storehouse of experience.”

“Then what do you advise we do with the emerald?”

“Ah, a tricky conundrum, isn’t it? It is too dangerous to keep, and yet too dangerous to give away.”

“Maybe we can throw it in Mount Doom,” Gretchen grinned.

“Ah, dear old Tolkien,” the Reverend said. “How I miss the talks we had late into the night at the Eagle and Child. The problem, my dear Gretchen, is that unlike the One True Ring, the Eye of Set is indestructible.”

“Then what are we going to do?” I said.

“You must follow your weird,” the Reverend replied. “And trust in the wisdom of Fríg.”

“Frig?” said Gretchen. “Seriously?”

“Now, now. No need to be childish. And it’s not Frig, it’s Fríg.” He pronounced the name Freeg.

“Then I should keep going to Fiddle Creak?” I said. “Isn’t that what...” I whispered the name, that terrible name. “Yog-Sothoth wants?”

“If that is where your weird is taking you, then you should let it. I have faith in you Jack. You’ll find a way to outsmart the Old Ones. You always do.”

The tea had grown cold and more than half the day was spent. It was time to go. Gretchen reluctantly put the ancient Mother Goose (or whatever it was) in her backpack. She didn’t particularly want to take it. But I had refused the sword, and we needed some ace up our sleeve, albeit a very bulky one.

The Reverend walked us to the main gate of Mousehole University, a spindly, wrought iron affair surmounted on either side by two black, cast-iron ravens. He hugged us each and gave Gretchen a kiss on the cheek. I stole one last glance at the back of the frock-coated old man as he scuttled back into the warmth of his office, and wondered if I’d ever see him again. Well, of course I would.

The clock struck one as we climbed into Gretchen’s black Volkswagen Jetta and, unbidden, a nursery rhyme sprang to mind.

Hickory dickory dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory dickory dock.

Mother Goose, Fríg, whoever you are, help us.

We were on our way to Fiddle Creak.

~Click Here for Part IV~

THE DREAM KEY: II

2011-05-17T19:01:00.004-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

Gretchen made her phone call, and by the time the sun came up we were bundled into her black Volkswagen Jetta, ready to get on the road. All she packed were a few changes of clothes, which was more than I had. I had learned that when crossing over to other dimensions, it was best to travel light. Although the terrible emerald I carried in a cedar box in my backpack was the heaviest burden of all.

We stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts on the way out of town for provisions. She drank her coffee black, as did I. We were hardcore. Next we stopped at Store 24 to buy a pack of American Spirits each. It was 7:30 by the time we were on the highway, heading west. Every fiber of my being was telling me to head for Fiddle Creak. Fiddle Creak! Yog-Sothoth! Fiddle Creak! Iä! Iä! But Gretchen convinced me that we should stop in Mousehole to visit a professor of hers. Mousehole was a little frequented town in western Massachusetts, and although I had lived in Boston my whole life, I had never heard of it. Of course, Bostonians are notoriously ill informed about the world west of Brighton.

Instead of taking the Mass Pike, we meandered up Route 2, past Concord, past Fitchburg, until we were in wilds would make any proper Bostonian shudder. Gretchen, however, seemed to know exactly where she was going, and turned off Route 2 onto a succession of back roads with the surety of a native.

Finally, we arrived in Mousehole. The town had only one main street, and was little more than an excuse to house a university. As we approached the towering spires and gothic architecture of Mousehole University, I was immediately brought to mind of Goosebridge, and said as much.

“Goosebridge?” Gretchen asked. “Where’s that?”

“Would you believe in the land of Hen?”

“At this point if you said that little green men had landed, I’d believe you, giant-killer.”

“You might be closer to the truth than you think.”

Gretchen had no reply for my ominous statement, and she parked the car in the town square. I hefted my blasphemous burden, and together we strolled onto the campus. The air was as crisp as apple cider, and I buttoned my jacket against the unforgiving November chill. The psychedelic foliage that New England is so famous for had by and large fallen away by then, and the trees’ barren branches reached towards blue heaven like supplicant fingers.

“Are you sure this guy can help us?” I asked as we entered a building through an arch-shaped door crowned by a stained glass fanlight.

“Definitely. You’ll see when you meet him. If anyone can help us with the Eye of Set, it’s the Reverend Ezekiel Whitlock.”

Gretchen was telling the truth. She knocked on the door of his office, and we heard a warbling, high-pitched voice emanate from within.

“Enter!”

Gretchen opened the door and ushered me in. The first thing I noticed about the Reverend’s office was the vast multitude of books. Every conceivable surface was covered in books, many of them stacked in precarious leaning towers. And sitting at an ancient oak desk like a spider in a bibliographic web, was an impossibly old man with a long white beard. He wore a tattered black frock coat that must have dated back to Victorian times, a stiff wing collar, and a white cravat. His morning blue eyes twinkled like a wizard’s.

“Gretchen Greene, what a surprise!” He sprang to his feet, surprisingly nimble for someone who must be a hundred years old if he was a day.

“Reverend, let me introduce my friend...” Gretchen began.

“Well bless my soul,” the Reverend said in his peculiar high-pitched voice. “You must be Jack.” He shook my hand as if handshakes were going out of style, working my arm like a water-pump handle.

“I can see you know how many beans make five,” I said, trying to sound clever.

“You are the spit and image of your predecessor.”

“You knew the last Jack?”

“He and I were the dearest of friends. It saddens me to no end to learn of his demise. But I suppose he is with his Sunshine now. As one day, I shall join my Lavinia.”

“I know you’re busy with your work,” Gretchen said. “But we need your help.”

“My dear child, of course. This is my work. How many I be of help to you?”

Gretchen and I exchanged glances. I shrugged.

“May as well cut to the chase,” I said. I opened my messenger bag and pulled out the box of grotesquely carved wood. As I began to open it, the Reverend shouted, “Wait! You must recite the binding spell before...” But it was too late. I had opened the box fully, and laid bare the accursed jewel. That’s when all hell broke loose. A crack opened up in the wall like ice splitting in a frozen pond in the spring. There was madness behind that crack, stark raving madness. There were eyes, thousands of eyes. And mouths filled with razor-sharp fangs, ravening for meaty delights. I would have given my soul to be able to turn away from the sight, to close my eyes. But I couldn’t. Even as I write these words I shudder at the memory. It will haunt me to my dying day.

“Jack!” came a cry, and the voice cut through my delirium like a knife’s blade. It was the Reverend. With my last iota of will power, I turned to see him pulling something down from the top of his bookshelf. It was a sword in a scabbard. The hilt was silver with a blood red ruby set it the pommel. With considerable legerdemain, the old man pulled the sword from the scabbard, revealing a glinting silver blade. “Catch!”

The sword twirled through the air, point over pommel, and in an unconsciously fluid motion, I plucked it from its arc and sliced at the slimy green tentacle that was creeping out of the crack in the wall. The blade repulsed the tentacle as surely as the like poles of two magnets. A terrible shriek rent my eardrums, the sound of a thousand teakettles going off at once.

The Reverend had already opened an ancient hidebound tome and shoved it into Gretchen’s hands. I stole a glimpse at her face and saw that it was ashen and slack-jawed. She had lost as much sanity gazing at the horror as I had.

“Read!” the Reverend bade her. Something about his voice brought her back from the brink. It was as impossible not to do what he said as it had been to turn away from the monstrosities in the crack.

“I cast thee out Yog-Sothoth, abhorrent to see,
Back through the gate when I count to three.
Fríg protect us and Woden, Thunor,
I cast thee out Old Ones, and shut fast the door.”

~Click Here for Part III~

THE DREAM KEY: I

2011-05-16T14:13:00.011-06:00

by Adam Bolivar

- I -
The Black Emerald

I am Jack. I am of a line of Jacks that stretches back to the beginning of time. I walk the threshold between waking and dreaming, and am equally at home in either. I keep the world safe, for there are Things Outside that seek to break through in a torrent of madness, and sweep away all that we know. I hear them whispering in the black emerald I keep in a cedar box beneath my pillow at night, my sleep plagued by nightmares.

Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth is the key. The key that opens the gate. Open the gate and we will be free. Be free... Be free... Open the gate and we will be free...

I stood in a windswept moor, a place between worlds that stretched endlessly in all directions. There was a circle of stones standing there, like the ones that dotted the British Isles, erected by a long-forgotten race. I approached the circle in wonderment, running my hand over one of the rough-hewn obelisks. How many æons had it stood here?

“Well met,” intoned a deep, sonorous voice. I wheeled around and beheld a pale-skinned man wearing black Georgian finery: a black frock coat, breeches, hose, a powdered periwig and a black tricorne hat. “I knew we would cross paths one day, Jack.”

“Who are you?”

“What’s in a name? I have so many. I’ll be seeing you again, Jack. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not the next day. But I’ll be seeing you again soon...”

I awoke shivering with the cold, even though I was covered in warm blankets. The blue digits of my alarm clock shone in the darkness like a burning bush. 3:33. That could only mean one thing. It was time to call Gretchen.

She was wide-awake as usual, even at this hour, but answered me in an icy tone, quite unlike her usual chirpy banter. “Good morning, Jack.”

She knew it was me. Probably because I was the only one who ever called her at 3:33 in the morning. That used to be endearing to her. Now I wasn’t sure.

“I need your help, Gretchen,” I said.

“What is it this time? Are you playing a riddle game with an owl? Or did you just kill a two-headed giant?” Some desperate calls I’d made to her recently had convinced her I’d gone off the deep end. But our friendship was strong enough that I was sure it would survive, even if it had been strained. I pressed on.

“Look, I know you must think I’m a psycho. And I don’t blame you. Can’t you give me one more chance? My stories must be entertaining at least.”

There was a pause. Then she relented. “Well...I guess it’s better than watching TV. There’s not even a Bela Lugosi movie on. You can come over. But I warn you, I have a black belt in karate. So don’t try anything, giant-killer.”

I could almost hear her smiling through the phone. I was forgiven. Yay! I couldn’t stand the thought of Gretchen being angry with me. I held the engraved cedar box that held the abysmal emerald in my hands. If I were a true friend, maybe I’d let her stay angry at me and not drag her into this mess. But I was going to show her another world—lift the veil of the dreamlands for her. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would be more thrilled about that than Gretchen. We’d have great adventures together.

Idly rubbing the bite marks on my neck, I put the box in a well-loved messenger bag. Then I donned my leather jacket and my hat with the feather stuck in the ribbon, and set off down the road once again. Travelling Jack never looked back.

I had tread this path almost a year before, in icy January. This time it was stark November, which in many ways was even colder, for the trees’ branches were only recently denuded, and I was unused to the chilly breeze that whistled through them. The last time I had come this way, I was almost eaten by a two-headed giant, who had somehow crossed into my reality—or I into his. But this time the street was as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. It was just me, the whistling wind, and the haunted emerald whispering to me from inside my messenger bag.

“Open the creak, Jack. Open the creak with the key. Open the creak, Jack. Open it up and set us free...”

The first thing I was going to ask Gretchen for was a cigarette. It was time to start smoking again. I climbed the steps to her door and paused on the porch. I was on the threshold of something big, and once I crossed it I knew there would be no turning back. Oh, fuck it. I’d already crossed the threshold last January when I first became Jack. I knocked on the door three times, as Harriet had showed me.

Thrice I smite with holy crock
With this mell I thrice do knock,
Once for God,
Once for Wod,
And once for Lok.

Gretchen threw open the door like she’d been waiting for me just inside. Then she gave me the mother of all hugs.

“It’s all real, isn’t it Jack?”

“I wish I didn’t have to drag you into this. But I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“Are you kidding? This is fantastic. So are you really Jack the Giant-Killer? Are you going to take me with you to fairyland?”

“Basically. Well, the Appalachian Mountains anyway. A place called Fiddle Creak. That’s where it all started. And that’s where it’s going to end. Can you give me a ride?”

“When do you want to leave?”

“At first light.”

Gretchen lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, as if inhaling the significance of what I had just asked her. She saw my expression and offered me her pack. I plucked one of the tubes of tobacco like a flower from a garden and lit up. Ah, nicotine. You sweet, harsh mistress. Her sting felt good.

“I’ll have to get someone to teach my class this week. But I’m sure Rob will do it. I’ll call him before we leave.” I nodded. The concern seemed trivial compared to what we were about to come up against. But I knew Gretchen’s studies were very important to her. She hoped to become a professor one day, and she wouldn’t get tenure by being irresponsible.

“And there’s something I have to show you. I need your help identifying it.”

“Well, don’t leave me in suspense. Bust it out.”

I hesitated. It was too late not to show her. I had her hooked, the poor wriggling fish. Sighing, I opened up the messenger bag and pulled out the cedar box. She snatched it out of my hands and peered at the carvings on top.

“Oh my gods!” she said. “That looks like Hyborean. Where did you get this, Jack?”

“It’s a little difficult to explain. It was part of my reward for finding the White Cup. But I owe it to the Queen of Hen’s cousin.”

Gretchen was already flipping through a large, hidebound tome with yellowing, brittle pages. She stopped on a page with a woodcut illustration of an ornate goblet. That was it. The White Cup. It looked just the same as when I had seen it. And set in the belly of the cup was a large faceted jewel, which was also very familiar to me.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

Gretchen took a drag on her cigarette, which she had already almost smoked down to the filter.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

I opened the box and the whispering in my head grew louder and more distinct. From her widened eyes, I knew she could tell she heard it too now. For she had gazed upon the emerald, as black as a thousand nightmares.

“The Eye of Set,” she said hoarsely. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got the Eye of Set!”

Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth is the key. The key that opens the gate...

- Click Here for Part II -

AS YOU WISH

2011-05-13T20:54:00.007-06:00

by Johnny Strike

illustration by Richard Sala

Taylor Reed sat in a café looking at a fountain across the street. Behind the fountain stood a dilapidated, derelict, and yet, at one time, elegant hotel. Matisse was reported to have had stayed and worked there during one of his sojourns. “One day,” Taylor thought, “I’ll give the watchman ten dirham for a look inside.” Taylor ruminated over his last three years of living in Morocco. He spent the first year mostly drinking endless coffees and mint teas in the cafés. And smoking hashish and kif—a tobacco and marijuana mixture—in cafés of a different sort. He would drift back and forth between the expat crowd of writers, painters, musicians, and assorted eccentrics, and his Moroccan friends. Sometimes, the two crowds converged, but they usually remained separate. During the first year, he hadn’t been certain whether he had any real talent as a painter. His work proved exciting but was sporadic. Now he could look back on most of the pieces he had done then with more affection than disdain. He remembered being happy just looking out his window at the garden across from him, and over the rooftops at the cobalt blue strait of Gibraltar that filled him with ideas of mythology and adventure. The second year, he traveled: Agadir, Marrakech, Essaouira, Fez, Meknes, and, closer to home, he spent time in Asilah, Ksar es-Seghir, and the little blue town in the Rif mountains, Chefchaouen. He had covered countless canvasses, and felt himself coming into his own. Color broke free for him. And the colors of Morocco were like no others: The reds were redder, the yellows were a yellow you could taste, and they all filled his palette. The light of Morocco seemed from another world entirely. He had painted the veiled women, the date palms at the edge of the Sahara, the valleys of wildflowers, the heady, medieval souks. The intricacies of the carpet designs and tapestries had spun his mind into a pleasant delirium as he worked away in kif-induced trances. During the third year, he felt he had discovered the city of Tangier in a way that was not open to everyone—especially not to a foreigner. He also discovered magic, witnessed it, experienced it. He decided then that this was where he’d stay. Lately, he was just enjoying the simple life, the easy pace. Even with Morocco moving gradually, steadfastly into the modern world, it remained ancient, and this pleased him and others of a like mind. Of course, the days of Paul Bowles—hell, even the days of Rolling Stone Brian Jones savoring Jajouka music—were long gone, but still, something of those times stubbornly remained. Something else too: something older and indefinable would always be there, no matter what. Staring at the mosaic floor in the café and the curlicues of design over the arched doorway, he experienced again that ecstatic feeling of being outside of time in this whitewashed city, on hills that overlooked a bay that could’ve been filled with blue ink. Taylor realized that someone was observing him. The observer, a young Westerner, seemed put out when Taylor caught his eye, as though he had just been caught stealing, and, once spotted, dashed off. Taylor decided to pursue him. He followed him across the Grand Socco in the hot midday sun, knowing he’d lose him in the Medina. But Taylor knew he’d see him again, too. Tangier was like that. When he did, he’d strike up a conversation with him and see what his story was. That very evening, he saw him again. The boy was at Club Zewa, sitting with some other young tourists and they all looked a little drunk. He spied Taylor and smiled with what Taylor considered an insolent expression. Taylor went to the bar and ordered a cold Heineken “from the back of the fridge.” A Moroccan he knew was sitting there eating peanuts and drinking a tall glass of whiskey. He, too, was inebriated but cheerfully greeted Taylor with good will and a toast that Taylor couldn’t comprehend. Taylor smiled and tipped his beer at him. Taylor looked at the reflection of the group in a large brass vase behind the bar and saw that the boy was gone. He turned around and scanned the room. The boy was nowhere in sight. Taylor moved off with his beer and went outside into the garden area. The boy was sitting alone at a table, with his own Heineken, grinning. He gestured for Taylor to join him and he did. “My name is Kyle Davis and I wish to tell you a story,” he began. Taylor smiled and said okay. “Last year, while on a short visit here, I was walking along Boulevard Pasteur early one evening. A beautiful sunset was just dying and I stopped for a minute to observe the palms and the bay below. Suddenly, I was accosted and knocked to the ground by a young Moroccan. The strap to my shoulder bag broke and he kicked me as I lay on the ground stunned. He took my bag, which contained my camera, keys, floppy disks, and other small items, then ran off quickly. “I had never been mugged or robbed before. ‘Voleur! Voleur!’ I yelled at several passing petit taxi drivers and the men working at a building nearby. In less than a minute, a butagas cart came speeding past to chase the mugger. Two or three minutes later, the robber was caught, and the butagas cart driver came back to retrieve me. He took me to the Merkala police station where a line of Securitié Nationalé vans were parked in front. Inside, I saw the thief in a corner in handcuffs. A policeman asked me to identify him. I did, and then I got all my belongings back. I spent an hour at the station answering questions and the policeman in charge occasionally would step into another room to hit the thief with a stick. With my mobile phone, which was also in the bag, I called my friends and told them what had happened. Finally, I was driven back to the hotel but the next morning, I was so sore, I stayed in bed all day resting. Why am I telling you this story?” Taylor shrugged. “Since this same man now works for you, I’m worried about your safety. I know your work, Mister Reed. I also want to paint, and regardless of that unfortunate experience, I’ve decided to live here, too, at least part of the year. I have a small business in New York I must attend to a few months of the year.” “He works for me?” Taylor asked. “Nobody except Fatima, my maid, works for me. I believe you’re mistaken.” “But I saw him on various occasions delivering material to your house, and to a café a few times.” “You’re talking about Drissi,” Taylor said wondering why this boy had him under surveillance. Conveniently, Drissi was away for the summer. But Taylor played it off and laughed. “Well, come to think of it, Drissi was once a thief, but that was when he was very young. In fact, he spent a time in jail. But he’s long reformed and has since become a poet. I think you’ve confused him with someone else.” The boy didn’t look convinced. “But Kyle,” Taylor asked, “why have you been watching me so closely?” Kyle looked uncomfortable for only a second. Then he said quickly, “I’m one of your creations. I’ve escaped from one of your paintings.” Taylor was laughing now and thinking the boy was an interesting character even for Tangier. Taylor studied his impish eyes and bread white complexion, the tight mouth that revealed little. Taylor lit a cigarette. “Is that so? Which one, pray tell?” Kyle allowed a slight smile. “Well, it’s untitled but was used for the cover of Jesse Higgin’s Danger USA.” The piece that Kyle referred to was taken from a dream and had always made Taylor a little uneasy though he didn’t know why. It was based on a rough sketch he had made after waking from a dream. All he had been able to recall was two hands in a frame. That constituted the sketch and the minimal painting that followed. One hand was clenched in a fist and the other was emulating a gun. Jesse had wanted it right away for his short story collection and, although Taylor was reluctant, he went ahead and let him use it. Taylor forced a laugh. “But that was only hands.” “Yes, but they’re my hands,” Kyle imitated the piece there with his hands in the air, giving Taylor an eerie feeling. “You dreamt them right?” Kyle asked. “I did,” Taylor said. Kyle continued, “I had a similar dream. In my dream, they were my hands and I made a rough sketch when I awoke. Then I saw the Higgins book and I began researching you. I made my first trip here, although it was cut short by the mugging and the illness of two people in the party I was traveling with. But now I’m back and on my own.” “Well, I’ve got to say that’s interesting and original. You wouldn’t happen to have that sketch with you?” “Of course, Mister Reed,” Kyle pulled a bound notebook out of his backpack. The book was filled with strange drawings, cutouts from magazines and newspapers, and notes or diary entries. Kyle located the drawing and handed it over. It could have been the same initial sketch Taylor had made over a year ago. No one had ever seen that sketch. A slight prickly feeling went up Taylor’s back and circled his head, and he felt dizzy for a moment. He thought maybe his drink had been spiked but then the feeling passed. He looked at this young man whose expression revealed nothing. “So what can I do for you?” Taylor asked evenly. The boy smiled ever so slightly. “I would like to pose for you, Mister Reed. I would like to commission you to paint my portrait. I’ll pay the price you ask.” Taylor lit another cigarette. He hadn’t done any work lately and was even thinking of traveling again to get the juices going. But here was a unique opportunity: a strange proposition from a peculiar character. And why not? He could paint him in the garden and work only the days Fatima was there, since there was an oddly uncomfortable element to the whole deal. The young man may very well be mad, but that wasn’t exactly new territory for Taylor. He felt challenged and curious about painting the mysterious young man’s portrait. Taylor named a fair price and stated which days and hours he would work on it, and Kyle readily agreed. They closed the deal with another drink and talked a little shop. Taylor was impressed that Kyle knew his subject and sounded a lot like Taylor himself when he had first dreamed of becoming a painter. Kyle wrote out a Bank of America check with a New York address. Taylor would take it to the bank the next day, and wait to see if it indeed was good. He set their first date for a week later to make sure. The day arrived for the first session. It was a pleasant day and the garden was arranged with umbrellas and a refreshment table with tea, Sidi Harazem water bottles in a bucket of ice, fruit, and croissants. Caesar, Taylor’s old tomcat, sat in the chair designated for the subject and surveyed his domain skeptically. Taylor had decided that he would not show Kyle the daily progress but rather cover it at the end of each session and show him only the final work. As he was double-checking his implements, he overheard voices and looked up to see a smirking Kyle Davis wearing a striped djellaba and a red fez with tassel cocked at the side of his head. Fatima, standing behind him, gave Taylor a troubled look, then disappeared back into the kitchen. “Oh Mister Reed. I still can’t believe it. A dream come true,” Kyle said, extending his hand. Taylor shook it and said, “Well, you look very ‘Maroc.’ Folkloric.” “Yes, isn’t it splendid? It’s as close as I’ll get to Lawrence of Arabia.” “All you need is a horse and a rusty rifle,” Taylor said and moved Caesar to another seat. The old cat begrudgingly accepted the unexpected transport. “Kyle, I’d like you to call me Taylor.” He gestured to the refreshments and Kyle smiled, took his assigned seat, and produced a sebsi, or kif pipe, in two parts from his big pocket. He attached them and expertly nuzzled a small clay bowl onto the end. He filled the bowl from a pouch and offered it. Taylor, however, had already produced his own pipe and said, “Go ahead. Is that with or without spice?” He noticed Kyle’s pipe was identical to his own. “No tobacco, but a touch of hashish,” Kyle acknowledged with a wink. Taylor accepted the leather pouch, which also was like his own. It was especially good kif. And he could smell the pungent hashish. Taylor wondered how the boy had gotten hooked up so quickly but decided not to pry. They sat and puffed on their sebsis; Fatima appeared through a cloud of smoke, delivering short glasses of piping hot mint tea, essential for the kif smoker’s throat. After tea, the work began. The previous day, Taylor had spread linseed oil over the first layer of eggshell white. He began now with pencil and then switched to paint. The red ochre perfectly matched the wide stripe of the djellaba. Over the next several weeks, the sessions passed and Kyle was a perfect subject, keeping the pose that Taylor preferred and speaking only when questioned. The only other sounds were occasional Arabic music from a neighbor’s radio, the chirping of birds, and the distant horn blast of a ferry arriving from Spain. When they heard the afternoon prayer call, it was their cue to stop for the day. Kyle had no problem with not seeing the work and didn’t peek or complain. As for the portrait, it was coming along, but Taylor was having trouble with the eyes, which as the hours passed began to resemble those of a lizard or wild bird. Then, they would resume their odd, sedate yet impish, stare. Sometimes they would glow or reflect light in an odd way. Other times, the iris looked as though it was opening like some exotic flower right in front of him. Kyle seemed to sense Taylor’s difficulty and would look away, forcing Taylor to scold him. There were moments when the face in the painting would go black, and the faces of other people Taylor knew would flash before him. Taylor wiped a bead of sweat off his brow. He tried to concentrate but the tone, the color, the light and dark would change course from minute to minute. One day, Taylor asked if he could take a few photographs and, for the first time, Kyle was visibly upset. “No photographs please. I have a real aversion to having my picture taken. I realize it would help you but I must insist.” “As you wish,” Taylor said, repeating the common Moroccan expression. He studied his work and was pleased except for the eyes. He had not captured them yet and he now tried to photograph them with his mind. Kyle seemed to sense this as he said his good-byes for the day. Once alone, Taylor quickly did some sketches. One he particularly liked almost caught the odd juxtaposition of mischievous and calmness that the boy’s eye’s possessed. He went to his canvas and tacked up the drawing. He smoked a bowl of kif and looked until he was seeing both the drawing and the canvas at the same time. He fell into a trance and began to work. Taylor awoke on the bench, covered with Moroccan blankets, and on his cushions made by a tribe in the high Alas mountains. It was twilight and he felt invigorated as he sat up and looked over at the portrait. He walked toward it as moonlight spilled into his small garden. The portrait of Kyle Davis was finished and the eyes were something to behold. They persistently drew the viewer toward them and then into their sphere, triggering a feeling of recognition that could not be explained. Taylor got lost in them, standing there in the moonlight, and wondered what the real story was with the mysterious young man. He delicately printed his initials and the date in the lower right corner. He would give Kyle his portrait the following day. But the time came for Kyle to arrive and he did not appear. After an hour, Taylor took the painting inside. He realized he didn’t even know where the young man was staying. And he didn’t know anyone else who knew him, which was strange for Tangier. He would just have to wait until he heard from him. After a few days had passed, Taylor began to ask around but no one else seemed to have ever noticed the lad at all. Taylor began to wonder if the boy was a djinn—some genie or a ghost. Taylor had had profound life-changing experiences with djinns and the magic of Morocco the previous year, although others might consider it a psycopathology at best. He decided to visit an old friend named Omar who had come back to Tangier from Fez for the summer. They sat in Omar’s sister’s front room, sipping tea and smoking kif, and Taylor told him the story. As Omar poured more tea from his old, darkened samovar, he said, “If he does not come back he is a djinn. If he returns, he was possessed.” Three years ago, Taylor would’ve thought this a quaint idea, but now, after his own experiences in this realm, he believed Omar. Weeks passed and Taylor moved on to other things. He worked on a series of pieces using drawings of Caesar’s eyes and some abstract experiments that, together, took on the appearance of alien, mythological landscapes. As he was putting the finishing touches to one of these, he heard his bell. Fatima was off, so he went down to see who it was. A small Moroccan beggar boy stood on his step, holding a large blue envelope. He handed it to Taylor who used some friendly Arabic to stop him from running off. The boy smiled but continued to stare at the ground. Taylor opened the envelope and extracted a neatly-typed missive that he noticed right away was signed by Kyle Davis. Dear Taylor. Please forgive my disappearance, but there was no other way. Come to the Rembrandt Hotel immediately and I’ll explain everything. I look forward to seeing you and finally having my portrait, which I know must be done. Sincerely, Kyle Davis Taylor gave the boy a couple of dirham and watched him run off. He took a shower, dressed, and sat smoking a cigarette, examining the portrait before he would wrap it and deliver it. It was definitely finished and it was a smashing piece of work. He felt almost like he had not painted it at all; he wondered if perhaps a djinn had entered his mind and guided his hand during that entire period. Taylor leaned closer to the portrait, getting a whiff of something alien and foul. Lightning seemed to flash in his head and he stared at the painting for a long while. A chill came over him, and a gloom seemed to drift all around him. Finally, Caesar came into the room, breaking the trance. Taylor looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was time to wrap the painting and leave. On the walk to the hotel, Taylor fought off a nagging sense that he’d forgotten something. He felt a sourness in his stomach and wondered if he was going to be sick. He sat at an outdoor café and waved the waiter away. He wiped the sweat from his brow. The waiter delivered a glass of water anyhow and Taylor drank it. Slowly, he began to feel better. He left the café and continued on his way, the portrait now heavy in his hands. At the Rembrandt Hotel, the front desk clerk told him which room Monsieur Davis was in. Taylor saw waves of colors pour through the foyer and a lightening flash in his head knocked him against the desk. The clerk and Taylor glanced at each other knowing something unexplainable, unknowable had just occurred. The clerk looked for his prayer beads and Taylor picked up his painting and headed up the stairway. Kyle’s room was at the end of a hallway. As Taylor approached, he saw that the door was slightly ajar. The room looked to be swirling in lights like a damn discotheque and Taylor edged the door open with his toe. Before him, Kyle was levitating as colors splattered the room and escaped in every direction. There was a high-pitched yowl and Taylor saw in a mirror behind Kyle a creature covered in clear slime. It looked like a hideous hybrid of human and eel, its eyes demon red. The djinn’s hands mimicked the original sketch that Kyle claimed to be his own. Taylor turned away, tore the wrapping off the portrait and positioned it toward the mirror. At first, the djinn only gloated, but when Kyle gasped and fell to the floor, it shrieked and then screamed. Taylor turned and faced it with the portrait. He approached the djinn despite the shrieking and hissing. Finally, it leapt toward the open window, leaving behind the same foul smell Taylor had detected before he had wrapped the painting. Kyle, mostly recovered, gazed at his portrait and said, “I—I can never thank you enough, Taylor. I knew only you could possibly get me out of this. After all, you drew my hands. But I couldn’t tell you anything about what was happening.” Kyle took the cigarette that Taylor offered. They smoked silently and listened to the traffic noises from the busy Boulevard Pasteur below them. “Welcome to Tangier,” Taylor finally said.

Click Here for Part I of
THE DREAM KEY
by Adam Bolivar

Serialized Daily
only on the FREEZINE
of Fantasy & Science Fiction

:message from the editors:

2011-05-08T14:59:00.001-06:00

The nanofleet have reported back that in their extensive and ongoing studies, they've found the letters of all races to have grown (and shed) many skins. We at the Freezine are dedicated to a clearly nebulous field of starstruck wonder, and beholden to a legacy of strange tales that range from noir to horror, guided by mystery, and pointed directly toward a future aimed at by science. One common element these speculative exercises share, is that they are all fantasy. Branded under the term fiction, all the stories being archived in the Freezine represent a broad spectrum of styles, covering a wide variety of terrain in the post-genre landscape. Another common element these stories share, is they are the written products of different individual's uncensored expressions. The value lies in considering each author's unique perspective. The least we, the editors of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction can do, is allow these authors their own voice. The Freezine stands vigilant at the fringes of what is considered to be free speech, facing outward to protect its writers from forces that might otherwise render them silent. The comments section have been opened for all to utilize, either openly under their web-ID, or anonymously, as the case may be. The editors encourage efforts at taking the initiative to communicate, being painfully aware that the garden of evil grown from the soil of the schisms forged long ago by communication breakdowns remains the paramount problem facing us today. How to best tackle this beast? Please leave a comment, to say the least.

The Nanofleet encourages both aspiring and established writers
to submit their short stories (or longer works) to be considered
for publication (or daily serialization) in future issues of
the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, to

freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com

and an editor will get back to you in due order.
Thank you for your part in supporting genre fiction.

Click Here for
AS YOU WISH,
by Johnny Strike

appearing Friday the 13th
only on the FREEZINE
of Fantasy & Science Fiction

FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES!

2011-05-03T14:42:00.004-06:00

Head's up, wayward cybertravellers and lost virtual souls of the Interweb. The nanoswarm editors have initiated a request that genre writers submit a work of fiction for consideration in future issues.

If your story is published in The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, it will remain archived here amid an illustrious company of authors, including (yet not limited to) John Shirley, Rain Graves, Johnny Strike, David Agranoff, Adam Bolivar, Sean Manseau, Vincent Daemon, Daniel José Older, Gil James Bavel, Keith Graham, Blag Dahlia, G. Alden Davis, John Claude Smith, Paul Stuart, Icy Sedgwick, and many more still to come. The FREEZINE is dedicated to publishing new genre stories in the Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror fields for the express purpose of further exposing both established and unknown authors to a wider audience of readers.

All rights revert to the authors and artists whose work appears in the FREEZINE. This is a labor of love, and is intended as an instrument by which genre writers may interact with one another and share their stories with readers in an atmosphere unfettered by the subtle and intricate distractions the publishing industry can impose.

It's an online forum designed to grant writers the FREEDOM to experiment and cultivate ideas for maximizing their art of story writing.

Submit flash fiction, short stories, or novellas for serialization to be considered for future issues, to

freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com

and an editor will reply in due course.

The year 2011 is a great time to get onboard as a rogue partner of our motley FREEZINE crew, because pretty soon the slushpile will grow too large for the editors to handle in a timely fashion. NOW is a golden opportunity to get in while the gettin's good, before our webzine here sprouts sunward like a giant beanstalk out of control. Secure for yourself a place in history alongside these super cool writers while you can, because the FREEZINE has some great things in store for the future, and you won't want to miss out on your slice of the glory.

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~ THANK YOU ~

MARCH ISSUE

2011-03-31T17:54:00.002-06:00

~ PROUDLY PRESENTS ~

CYRANO AND THE TWO PLUMES
by John Shirley
© by john shirley
+ Click Images Below To Begin Reading +

THE WHITE CUP
by Adam Bolivar
© by adam bolivar

YOU GOT OLD, TOO BAD
by Sean Manseau
© by sean manseau

I CAN'T GET YOU OUT OF MY MIND
by Gil James Bavel
© by gil james bavel

CITIwakes
by Shaun Lawton
© by shaun lawton

LEVEL 5
by Vincent Daemon
© by vincent daemon

The nanofleet have reported back recently that their phase transition is in "a temporary state of plasmatic balance." When pressed to explain this further, the only message received was "the quantum harmonic oscillator must reach its equilibrium point"—a missive I can only interpret as suggesting that the FREEZINE is in a state of "quantum flux" and must be stabilized during its phase transition. The nearest I can paraphrase is that these cryptic messages are intended to imply that our webzine here remains in utero, but I have yet to determine how long the gestation period will last, or if, indeed, our "unborn child" here will safely break through into the blinding light of a new dawn. In the words of the microhorde: "Countering the cosmological constant is possible and may be triggered in a zero-point field. In building a literary analog to the spectral field itself, a temporary counterweight to quantum chaos may be achieved, which in turn could level the electromagnetic playing field for just enough time that a supersymmetrical cornerstone necessary to stabilize the entire operating system might be forged out of dark matter itself." I have been dwelling on the meaning behind these nano-missives for some time now, and can only conclude, for now, that the original mission embarked upon by our mysterious nanohost is progressing as intended.

The MARCH, 2011 iSsuE of the FREEZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION would not have been possible without the daring contributions of its various midwives:

An immeasurable dose of thanks goes out to the inimitable John Shirley, whose vast experience in the realm of prose is rivaled by no other writers I have known. His excursion into "the history fantastic" titled CYRANO AND THE TWO PLUMES was originally printed in an obscure French publication, over two decades ago. The FREEZINE is grateful for this particular contribution, because it sets the stage well for the 8-part serialization to follow—Adam Bolivar's second Weird Jack tale, THE WHITE CUP—and because it comfortably straddles the divide between the various subgenres our webzine has already cemented into place.

Seven-hundred-and-seventy-seven "Thank Yous" go out to Adam Bolivar, who continues the trilogy begun last August with THE FOX IN THE THORN. The FREEZINE is pleased to have published, for the very first time anywhere and anywhen, THE WHITE CUP, serialized in 8 daily installments, now archived forevermore in the Random-Access Realm of the electrified world wide web, in a subdirectory of the blogger domain. Devoted readers take note: Mr. Bolivar returns again for the next (MAY, 2011) iSsuE of the FREEZINE, to bring us the third entry of his Weird Jack Tale saga, THE DREAM KEY. It will be serialized in 8 daily installments, analogous to its predecessor in this very issue.

Next up, our gratitude is directed towards Sean Manseau, yet another of the Freezine's frontline warriors. Mr. Manseau contributes his third story to our fleeting webzine, a charming little urban horror tale called YOU GOT OLD, TOO BAD. Sean's storytelling ability shines through in this alleghorical update of an age-old ritual—with a twist. Thanks for helping keep our cybernetic anthology here above the waterline, Sean.

Speaking of returning Freezine warriors, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Gil James Bavel into the exclusive "3 Stories +" club, whose "third stripe" has been earned with the creepy and anxious tale I CAN'T GET YOU OUT OF MY MIND. In case you haven't noticed, the more stories that FREEZINE authors get under their belts—the higher up the ARCHIVES OF STORIES AND BIOS totem-pole they will rise (found in the right margin of the Freezine). Readers and writers take note: the nanofleet have devised a complex formula by which the Author Ranking is derived. I can only say that it involves more than just a straightforward "Story Count" factor: at least two other variables that affect one's placement on the Bio Totem Pole are a) seniority within the Freezine itself and b)seniority outside the Freezine itself. For this reason it will be challenging, to say the least, to rise up above John Shirley (for instance)—whose standing amid the ranks of Freezine contributors remains unassailable thus far. Thank you Gil for a suspenseful contribution that I find difficult to get out of my own mind.

As for my own story CITIwakes, the microhorde compelled me to provide my second story for the FREEZINE, in order that I maintain a certain level of equilibrium with the growing ranks of Freezine warriors. As Captain of this cybervessel, it is the least I can do to try and keep up with my motley crew. Incidentally, the story CITIwakes came into being from my decision to craft another example of "flash fiction". My short story here is the cornerstone of what I hope to build up into a longer narrative, eventually.

Which brings us to this issue's closing story, LEVEL 5, by Vincent Daemon. Vince vaults onto the "3 Stories +" stage of returning veterans with a tale that could easily be viewed as being part of his dystopian future universe we first visited in his post-apocalyptic splatterpunk novella WAITING FOR THE END—serialized in the FREEZINE last March, incidentally. It is important for readers to know the proper pronounciation of this latest story's title. Simultaneously alluding to the next stage of our Freezine's advancement, the dear reader is encouraged to say it out loud, like Max von Sydow does in the movie Flash Gordon, with exclamatory and emphatic gruffness—"LEVEL FIVE"!

Thus we delve ever deeper into the subrealm of our microhorde's grand design...

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Much gratefulness goes out to this issue's returning artists, Shasta (and Shaun) Lawton and Jesse Stevens. Without your technicolor sails, this cybership would be dead in the water. Readers: be sure to check out our sister-site, the FREE ZINE ZONE—detailing The Art Of The Freezine. Until the next MAY issue, fare well and stay hungry.

The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Seeks Stories!