Nine Tenths of the Law: III

by Sean Padlo

Art by Bonita Barlow  

   Nash massaged his neck, refusing to meet Jacob’s stare. “Well, I suppose...yes. Are you a relation? I mean, are you the Archangel Lucifer in the flesh? I have heard stories, especially in the world today, so please don’t take offense.” 

   “I shouldn’t be offended by being asked if I am the devil. Are you asking if I am the very monster of the Bible, the veritable cause of humanity’s fall?” Jacob realized his voice had risen to a shout. He put his hands out, bringing himself back in control.

   Mr. Nash was gripping the balustrade with white knuckles, and it appeared to Jacob that the manager of the ghost hut may have forgotten how to breathe. “I’m sorry.” Nash would not look up.

   Jacob took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Mr. Nash. Please just ask your question so we can get back to the matter at hand. The important matter.”

   “Oh! Oh yes of course! I truly am sorry for my question! The name, Morningstar, it’s not a very common surname. Not at all.” Nash looked at Jacob now, his eyebrows raised comically high, his expression as close to innocence as Jacob could even recall over his lifetime.

   Jacob smiled gently. “No sir, Morningstar is not a common surname.” He paused for a moment, knowing Nash would wet himself at the very least if the wrong thing was said, or even the right thing taken wrong. “Morningstar is actually very common in Native American tribes.” Jacob passed Nash on the stairs and lead the way. Over his shoulder he added, “Specifically the Cheyenne of the American West.”

   Mr. Nash did not follow immediately, allowing the information to sink deeply into his mind. At last, with a bursting, “Oho! Marvelous!” Nash hopped in place, clapping his sweaty hands together. Jacob Morningstar continued down the stairs at an even pace, and Nash eventually caught up. They were over halfway to the barracks now.

   “The foundation has been restructured with a limestone base,” Nash announced, his voice coming from over Jacob’s shoulder. “Limestone is a basic barrier that holds spirits inside the fort.”

   “Where are the boy’s parents?” Jacob asked.

   Nash paused. “His guardians were sent back to the waiting area when the incident first occurred. They’ve been to see him at least five times since Tuesday.”

   “Today is Monday, Mr. Nash. They have seen him less than once per day?”

   “I’m sorry to say, but yes. His condition has declined rapidly,” Nash explained. “I don’t believe they have visited the boy since we had him restrained, and that would have been late Thursday.”

   Jacob felt his heart skip. “Late Thursday? Restrained this whole time?”

   Nash nodded reluctantly. “I’m afraid so. The boy had taken to injuring himself. Quite severely in fact.”

   As the men descended, the air became stale and musty, and the temperature had fallen to the point where Jacob could see his own breath. He shivered. “Why has it grown so frigid. Mr. Nash? Ephemerals may pull energy from their vicinity, but never to this extreme.”

   Nash crossed his arms, rubbing them as if he was reminded of the freezing atmosphere. “Brr!” He offered Jacob a weak smile. “Before contacting you, we had called upon our own team to assist the issue at hand. They had given Communion to the boy, which he of course rejected completely. Violently so, in fact.

   “Symbols were set around the boy, who had been shackled at that point. He is bound to that spot, but extraction of the possessor has proved impossible. Our ephemeral garrison had become agitated, and the last Extractor we called upon made the decision to send other ephemerals, our strongest in fact, into the boy. We hoped the others would…dislodge the problem.”

   “What is the name of the ephemeral that refused to leave the boy?” Jacob hesitated. “And what is the boy’s name? You’ve not once spoken it.”

   Nash wiped his nose with his sleeve. The scent of ozone was noticeable now; it would be overly strong soon. The barracks smelled like an extended burst of lightning  having struck an electrical fire. “His guardians claimed the boy’s name is Thomas Stasi. But we have not been able to locate any records that this child even exists at all.” Nash turned to Jacob Morningstar. “That is why and when the guardians were barred from seeing the boy. As for the ephemeral, it is a low-level spirit the family chose so the boy could perform magic tricks at a birthday party.”

   They passed beneath a series of wards placed at mid-story landing, and as all three began to release light of myriad colors, something in Jacob’s eyes shifted. Nash gasped as his expression revisited the poorly-veiled panic he showed earlier. Jacob saw this change, stepped nearer, and asked, “Why do you look at me like this?”

   Nash drew back from Jacob Morningstar. “I don’t know. Something. My eyes are playing tricks on me. You seem to double before my vision, fade like an ephemeral, and then I blink and everything is back to normal.”

   Jacob asked, “Have you slept at all lately?” Nash shook his head. “You must be exhausted!”

   Nash nodded. “That must be it. This has been an ordeal for everyone.” As an afterthought, Nash added, “That poor child.”

   The men at last reached the landing and stood before a pair of immense, wrought iron doors. “Through here,” Nash gestured. “The barracks are lined in iron.”

   “Iron is the best way to keep ephemerals in.” Jacob touched the door’s surface. His fingertips sparked, and he pulled his hand away, wincing. “With hidden wards?”

   “Oh, not at all. The protections are etched into the other side.” He stepped away from Morningstar and pushed the door wide. The sigil that came together when the doors were closed crackled and spark as the halves separated. “Curious,” he said.

   Jacob Morningstar stepped around Nash and entered the room. Jacobs Ladders and Faraday Cages were displayed along the stone walls at regular intervals. The whole room appeared to shimmer, though a closer and more studied look around the room showed a massive crowd of ephemerals, possibly hundreds, gathered around a lone boy secured to a metal bench with shackles on his ankles, wrists, and a restraining clasp around his chest. Upon the boy’s head was a fighter’s coronet.

   Jacob approached the boy, slipping past a trio of priests who were standing in the center of the room. Ephemerals gave them a wide berth as the priests chanted their exorcisms. The priest in the center offered the calls while the priests to each side delivered the responses. Cautiously they drew near; an aspergillum sprayed holy water over both Jacob and the boy. Jacob hissed an order for them to stop and returned his attention to the boy. Thomas, the boy, was frail and weak. Heat rose from his body in waves of roiling mist. The child was burning up, though he wore nothing but a pair of very soiled underwear.

   Jacob was thrown aside as ephemerals continued to rush over one by one, launching themselves into the child. As they entered his body Thomas moaned, his head rocking backward as each invasion caused light to burst from his tiny form, rapidly fading before the next ephemeral went in. The boy’s flesh rippled with each incursion, words and symbols rising to the surface to be replaced by more. Symbols overlapped, skin split open only to be knitted together before being split open once again. Tremors rocked the boy’s body. His chest surged against the onslaught, and an anguished, hollow moan escaped his lips. His eyes rolled to the whites, then his eyelids closed. His head fell forward like an assured nod, with his chin coming to rest against his chest.

   Thomas had not the time nor the energy to brace himself before the next ephemeral invaded him in another burst of warm light. The onslaught was unrelenting.

    

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 Nine Tenths of the Law

by Sean Padlo





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Porris in Wunperland

by John Shirley

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Elixir of Thorns

by Shaun A. Lawton

watercolor by Shaun Lawton

   Before initiating the fair-haired waif into our metabolic ceremony, a host of issues attended my repose. The old man and I weren't exactly on speaking terms since the last hibernation. I suffered from a bad back, incurred from a combination of plowing the vegetable garden and an extended bout of overeating that past season. All that's left of our family is the old man and I, our memories tainted by painful associations with the mother. I have been forbidden by him to relate so much as a single detail about her, with the only exception that she existed. Hence my being provoked to write this down, as a means to preserve what I remember of her. I've often wondered, why didn't the old begetter just wish to bury her secret altogether? I think I know the answer, now. He must've felt that leaking the faintest whisper of her existence might put the cork in the bottle somehow. That is to say, to give blush to the lie, so to speak. There's a certain comfort in thinking superstitions aren't true. Whatever it was the old buzzard kept alive in his narrow skull, it's nothing but crumpled paper, now. Time to light a match to it.

   I used to get the uneasy feeling that if nothing were told about her at all, people might begin to suspect more about us somehow, and our exceptional nature would be revealed. Chalk it off to tell-tale heart syndrome, I guess. Blank spaces need to be filled. When word of her presence fell casually upon turned ears, it was almost as if this sealed the questions of her whereabouts and origins. Folks out here this far north mind their own business, you see. A brief reminder the old man had once been married was enough to stop them asking more questions; although granted, not enough to keep them from fervently wondering. But they knew to leave well enough alone when it came to sorrowful matters at the heart of a family. I regret ever having mentioned the mother to anyone, really, but it's far too late for that now. Whispers about her character have been let out of their cage and transformed into opinions; some bright, most dull. All I can do is tell my story from the beginning, in the only way that I know how.

   I grew up lonesome with the old man in our flaking clapboard abode, amid the scent of Balsam firs and split maple trees. It was a low roofed hovel fixed amid a fell of rocks not half a mile from the seashore. It was protected by a thicket of closely grown hemlock, pine, aspen, and elm trees bound in by a ferocious Himalayan blackberry bush which served as a myriad pin-pointed barricade between the wind and the sea. It was my duty to cut the savage, thorny vines back and to insure it was bound into a circuitous route fencing that side of our rough-hewn property. The old man and I don't much stand the approach of strangers.

   It was the old man who taught me how to cut off the blackberry bush's best stalks and replant them in the ground where we wanted the rising beast to emerge. He showed me how to shape and direct its offspring by clipping a section of the root to produce the strongest branches. He taught me to fertilize the ground with abalone shells and phosphorous and other things in order to yield the largest and best blackberries.  As we had greater access to the inner sanctum of the great thorned bush, our collected berries went for the highest price in the local marketplace. They were considered the gold standard as long as anyone could remember, always winning the blue ribbon prize whenever I bothered entering the state fair competition.

   Our personal region of the coastal forest was so interwoven with the elaborate maze of the spiny bush's fantastic outgrowth, that no one in our area was all that aware of our domicile's entrance within the brambly copse. It was generally felt to be an untamed area anyhow, in reference to our surrounds, and the local folk stayed out of its interior, content to merely approach its outer perimeter on sunny days to pluck what fat, juicy berries they could for their tarts and pies, leaving the rest for wild bird-feed. Besides, the fishers that lived deep within this part of the forest had built a vicious reputation. Not even the local dogs would stray near our territory. The occasional rogue boar found fuming about didn't help matters, either. Whenever we happened to snag one in a trap, the old man and I feasted on some of the toughest, stringiest meat the two of us had ever tried, but boy was it tasty.

   My father taught me things I suspect no one knows. One thing I learned from him was how the perennial plant links up, at the cellular level, with the human brain's most secret synapses. The network of individual cells in a person's brain ranks alongside the number of stars in our galaxy, according to him. This blackberry bush contained an arcane component for enleavening that only he knew about, he told me once when I was five years old. He insisted it contained elements that would transform us for the better. He whispered me its secret during a violent thunderstorm one winter I'll never forget. When it came time to send me to bed after filling my head with esoteric gardener's lore, the old man would indicate for me to "Go on, now..." and visit the mother in the rear lower chamber of our cavernous dwelling.

   The trouble with my memory happens to deal with the shape of the mother. I only knew it to be a somewhat misshapen bulk of gathered shadow nearby. I could sense primal vibrations from it, sometimes velvety and lush, with deep undertones I'd be drawn to with longing, until I got too close, at which point the murmuring would stop cold, leaving only the sound of my muffled heartbeat thumping in my chest. The mother would drawl out in a series of humming chirps and muffled flutters which I'd respond to emotionally, depending on the intonation.

   Sometimes there was an urgency which warned to keep my guard and distance. Other times the thrumming would soften to a kind of purr, leading me closer until I approached the bulk of her shadow, when the vibration would cease of a sudden once again, bringing me to a stop before her. These moments, when I lay as close to the mother as I was permitted, were always cool and pleasant. There would be a chill that I couldn't understand, because although it may have been a winter's night, this coldness came from within, while the waves could be heard to crash into the distance upon the rocky beach. At the same time, I'd be comforted by the idea that no other living creatures dared approach within a hundred yards. I always thought the blackberry bush was the reason. Only when I got older did I realize the greater, underlying cause of it.

   Often I would listen into the darkness of the mother gathered in shadow before me, and hear a soft rasping sound, as if something enormous were uncoiling smoothly, becoming even larger. I felt the air would energize, as if a charge were building from this action. I would stare fixedly ahead into the spot I knew the mother to be, and my mind would conjure suggestions of images. I could picture the soft black hairs of a spider, but the more I looked at it, I'd realize it was just a black puddle of oil reflecting stars. The oily substance would ripple, elongate and shimmer in one direction, then reverse its flow in the other direction.  The glossy undulations would start to smudge and then render into stippled velvet for a moment, and this would flatten back out into obscure shadow once again. I'd blink and suddenly, nothing. Just ordinary darkness. A lack of presence. I'd look up at the black mold that had gathered on the ceiling and realize how much it looked like deep space.

   I knew these to be the instances in which the mother had retreated. Yet I could never determine to where she'd gone, or exactly how she'd managed it. She would be there for a spell, and then she wouldn't.  I often wondered how such a powerful being as that could mobilize without disruption, and a part of me knew the answer, but somehow kept that to itself. As if protecting my conscious mind. After the mother had gone away, the old man would return, stepping softly into our cul-de-sac, and mutter under his breath that it was time to heat up some water for coffee or tea.

   The old man would often ask if I'd pulled the ragweed and lion's mane earlier, and I'd sigh and get on with those chores. It didn't matter if it was the middle of the night. I'd look to the stars during these times for a shape blotting out the constellations, but only found obscure clouds slowly drifting by overhead. Days and often weeks would bleed away before the mother returned from her nocturnal sojourns. I would sometimes become aware that she was calling out to me, but from within my cranium.  This always left me a little uneasy, especially when glancing over at the old man, noticing his profile sitting by the wood stove, still and relaxed, as he dozed off in his favorite oak chair. It appeared that only I could hear what the mother had to say on occasions such as this.

   She never communicated in words. It was always impressions, thick, vivid, cold, startling. My head would feel as if it were being filled with black gelatin. Sometimes it would fill up quick and warm, other times very slowly and much colder. These instances of my head being glutted would occur in intervals, sometimes short, other times taking longer and laden with more intricacy. Certain thoughts would be conveyed with a sense of effervescent wonder, the sensation of my skull being filled up taking on the feeling of a carbonated beverage being poured into a glass. Other times the thoughts were much denser, no bubbles in it at all, just a complete sort of solid dark displacement which threatened to suffocate. Contained within the various extremes of these modalities, the thoughts would beckon and develop in my brain until I understood what it was the mother said.

   The day the mother left us for good, I had just turned nine. My head was full of the densest charcoal pitch I'd ever felt. It was like liquid onyx being poured into a bullet mold. The small space left in my forehead warmed up and appeared in my mind's eye almost as a purplish hue, like the faintest blushing of a sunset about to be drowned under eventide. This coloration (not unlike the rich shade of berries I picked seasonally and sold to market) seemed to contain a message for me in and of itself. Then it winked out, a final sunset swallowed by the eclipse of nightfall. That was the last time the mother ever spoke to me.  I never told the old man about it. He wouldn't understand anyhow. It was her way of saying goodbye.

   When I turned ten years old, our blackberry bush experienced a profound increase in growth, to the point I had to stay up later every day that summer to hack it back. I could swear some days the canes of wicked thorns, thick as my wrist in places, would snake out rapidly enough for me to actually see them growing, at about the pace of a second hand sweeping around the face of a clock.  I once stood before a curling out tendril to test this, and before my heart pounded four times in my chest the tip of the vine reached me, brushing my nose. I stood rooted to the spot, shocked at how fast the branch grew and before I knew it, the thorned green cane pushed past the bridge of my nose and into my eye, pricking the cornea just enough for me to jerk away, scratching my lower eyelid in the process. I stumbled back from the reaching tendril of the spined creature, and without thinking lashed out with my pruning knife, hacking the end of the new vine off clean, and watched it drop to the dirt at my feet. I stomped on it with my boot, crushing it in a rage.

    Afterward I began developing the black and purple rash around my left eye. I showed the old man and he only looked away, shaking his head, muttering something under his breath. I took it to be a family curse, the way his expression reflected familiarity with the strange raised welts spreading from the corner of my eye toward my ear. "Eat more berries tonight," would be his only advice.  I did and the rash would be gone by the next morning.  But drinking the blood clotting berry juice always left me ravenous. I'd then be compelled to hunt down a rabbit or fowl or wayfaring boar and roast it up whole, picking the meat off its bones with my knife by our campfire, until the craving in my stomach let up. If I declined having more blackberry juice, the old man would have none of that, insisting I devour more. At least I liked the taste, there was just something about it that always left me unsettled.

   It wasn't until I reached early manhood myself that I understood the meaning behind the impressions the mother had left with me as a growing child. She had only been showing me in her own way the importance of my being properly fed. I never understood this until I took down my first changeling, on the night before I turned nineteen. It was from a distant township, with fair and golden hair, and the palest legs I'd ever seen. She'd been a regular sight on clear evenings as of late. I often spotted her down by the seaside under a full moon. 

   I knew this one to be the prize because it strayed from the rest of its colony on moonlit nights, wandering alone down by the sea shore, drawn by the waves and the cold spray crashing against the rocks. Little did she know who gazed at her lissome form every night from within the tangles of the blackberry bush leaves. It was little old me. The first time I spotted her down by the ocean's edge I knew she was the one I was meant to have. The mother's voice no longer filled my head, but the echoes of what she'd said to me as a boy haunted to remind me. It was as if she had suggested there were a missing puzzle piece. A portion of softest alabaster broken off the moon. Something for me to treasure as all my own. A secret with a name. Sonia.

   In this case, the secret turned out to be a young lady from a clutch of migrants passing through. She was the daughter of a Mennonite preacher who led the travelling clan on their way to Saskatchewan, she said. I think I frightened her the first time I approached from the forest's edge, but only for a moment, apparently. My sudden presence only startled her, she reassured me. All I could do is look at her. Her beauty radiated a certain light which blended immediately with the night. I swear if I stared at her long enough she would disappear.  I would only find her again after noticing the patch of stars her outline blotted out. Then she'd regain focus, her pale features blooming out of the dark and into sharp contrast before me.

   We got in the habit of meeting by the cove after dusk. The tang of salt in the air and the sound of waves crashing into the distance serenaded us beneath the sprawling constellations. I was never one much for talking but she had a way of loosening my tongue. I told her about my gardening and how I diligently pruned the immense blackberry bush on our property. She was curious about my heritage. She kept asking me about my ancestry. I'd tell her I didn't know much about that. My father had inherited the land and the old house from his grandfather. It had been around in our genealogy for generations. When she asked about my mother, I evaded the issue by glancing away and muttering about how she'd passed on when I was younger. Our meetings were always cut short when Sonia suddenly had to leave before it got too late. She always said her father would have her hide if he found out about our trysts.

    I only ever saw Sonia long after the sun had set and the stars had come out. Although her hair was as white as spun cotton, her eyes appeared darker than the evening about us. She had a twist about her smile that I found charming. Her skin shone like a bottle of milk glowing in the dead of night. I only wanted to drink up her every last warm drop until I was glutted. I had an idea about how to accomplish that. While staring at her my eyes would glaze over as impressions reverberated in my head. I was left standing there with the idea having formed in my mind to lure her into our thorned sanctum. I would bury her there under the watchful eye of the moonlight.

   Her limber form was just the compost I needed to bring our berries to their plumpest and juiciest. So on our third meeting together I worked up the courage to ask her, "Would you like to see our Himalayan blackberry bush?" Apparently this was the right thing to say, because she swooned toward me and smiled, holding out her pallid hand for me to take in mine. This was her unspoken permission for me to lead the way, the twist about her smile indicating it was okay. I was honored to show her the way through the thickets to our lonesome, ramshackle home. The darkness surrounding us hummed with insects and the air was filled with the murmur of moths. An assortment of pollen was blown in adrift on the wind from the sea. The last time she looked at me, I felt calm and serene. The strange pressure in my head had been alleviated.

   When she first saw the old man, she screamed. By then of course it was a tad too late for my beautiful Sonia. Her cries of alarm were swallowed up by the thick growth of nettles and vines and tightly interlocked branches of trees. A flutter of sparrows was disturbed outside momentarily. The intent look in the old man's eye said it all. She will do, that look said. Oh, she'll do. To me, those eyes stated you've done well. The mother would be proud. I smiled, feeling pleased inside. I knew he was right. So we dined for awhile on her pressed wine and tripe, with blackberries and sweetbreads all through the rest of those cold winter nights.

Art by Cal Leckie

Return This Saturday, March 21

for Part III of Nine Tenths of the Law

by Sean Padlo

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the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction  

Nine Tenths of the Law: II

   by Sean Padlo

Art by Bonita Barlow

   The existence of spirits and an afterlife was a matter of lively discussion for millennia. As the advent and proliferation of the sciences grew in size and scope, the evidence of such things was relegated to blurry photos and out-of-focus video. The existence debate was muddied even further by deliberate manipulation of those images and video clips, and of questionable audio captures, both by recorded conversations with “entities” and by the listening within the spaces of purposeful white noise. Jacob believed religion to be the cause of the division between the concretion of science and the assertion of belief. That divide spread wide caused everything from the split of families to never-ending war.

   Jacob sat on a bench outside the back entrance and looked directly into the video camera mounted above a metallic doorway that bled fresh rust. The main entrance was adorned with Angels and Gargoyles, alternating positions as one made their way inside. To each side of the main doors were the names of the “connected departed.” This place pulled out all the stops when it came to services and amenities. Other start-ups like this around the world fell short on safety as well as coming up even shorter on services. Charlatans could acquire an International Permit by doing nothing more than greasing the right palm. The whole system was in disarray, but it kept Jacob working regularly.

   His job was to extract spirits from the unwillingly possessed. Instead of going over his credentials with every possible employer, his business card simply read: Exorcism Services. Of course, his religious studies, academic degrees, and exorcism accomplishments were listed on his website, but no longer included at the bottom of every card. Jacob had been at this so long that his success had finally begun to precede him, making such self-promotion unnecessary.

   Feedback burst from a speaker hidden somewhere near the door. “Jacob Morningstar?” Jacob nodded toward the video camera. “I’m William Nash, facility and operations manager. I apologize for my lateness, but this whole thing has been a nightmare for us. A nightmare for us, for the board—”

   Jacob interrupted. “And for the boy.”

   “Yes. Oh, of course! And for the boy!” After a short, awkward pause, Nash continued, “I’ll be up to meet you shortly,” an abrupt feedback whistle followed, then nothing.

   Solid, irrefutable evidence of the existence of the disembodied came through a well-televised case. David Galen was accused of having murdered his wife, Ellen, with the defense making a wild claim: “innocent by possession.” That’s when the case made the news. Witnesses to the event claimed that Galen rose up from the stand and hovered there, tumbling and performing acrobatic feats without a net. Much like the performance of the child, minus the impressive wings. That must have cost extra, Jacob thought.

   Galen was found innocent during the ensuing chaos, and the judge ordered an exorcism. That was the watershed moment, Jacob reflected, when the shit hit the proverbial fan. Galen’s possessor objected, claimed he was summoned by Galen himself to perform the execution of the wife, due to the fact that Galen himself was “too much of a bitch to do it himself.”

   The judge repeated his decision, and Galen’s possessor objected. The spirit, still in possession of Galen, floated up once more, bowed to the people in the gallery, turned to the judge, winked, and folded Galen in half before freeing itself from the now very dead Galen—whose body dropped with unimaginable finality.

   The metal door screeched open, snatching Jacob from his thoughts. He stood as Nash squeezed himself sideways through the doorway, hesitating momentarily to catch his breath, straighten his clothes, and attempt to brush away wrinkles that were quite likely permanent. To Jacob, Nash looked all of five feet, tall and round. Nash wiped a chubby hand off on his red Ringmaster top coat and adjusted his top hat before extending the not-quite-unmoist hand to Jacob.

   Jacob took it, shook it, and let go. “Ah. Mr. Nash.”

   A realization about Jacob seemed to flash brightly in the stout man’s eyes and slipped beneath his jovial expression, as Nash took an unconscious step backward. Just as suddenly, it was gone and the mask was back up. He hooked his thumbs under his rainbow-colored suspenders and cleared his throat.

   “Are you all right, Mr. Nash?” Jacob reached out to steady the man, but Nash cringed from his reach.

   Nash cleared his throat again, tugging at his too-tight collar with a finger. “Yes! I mean, this is all part of the, uh, spectacle. But I feel I should apologize. This,” Nash gestured to his wardrobe, “doesn’t properly reflect the seriousness of the matter.”

   Jacob gestured them onward. “Let us make our way to the boy, then.”

   Nash led the way, squeezing back through the doorway. “As you may be aware, we have no elevators. In fact, most equipment here is manually controlled.” He waited for Jacob to enter, shutting and bolting the door behind them before continuing on. “Non-corporeals have a deleterious effect on electrical devices. I’m afraid we have a long stairwell down to the old barracks.”

   Jacob followed Nash, who stopped at the top of the stairs. Jacob leaned over the inside edge and looked down. “Long spiral stairwell.”

   Nash nodded and led the way. Jacob took note of the wards along the walls as the men descended, unconsciously identifying them aloud as they passed. “Enochian…Angelic…Latin. Sigils, symbols. Religious mostly.”

   “Oh my, yes! Religion and science! Church and state!” Nash noticed that the sigils and wards emitted a faint glow as Jacob passed them. “Mister…Morningstar, isn’t it? The wards appear to be reacting to your proximity. Not like they do when the ephemerals attempt to pass,” Nash stopped and examined Jacob’s face, “but they are reacting just the same.”

   Jacob shrugged. “I have carved protections into my flesh.” He rolled up his left sleeve, displaying symbols etched and burned into his forearm, then pulled his collar aside to show tattoos, on his neck and along his collarbone. “I have branded myself with wards,” he unbuttoned then tugged his shirt out of his jeans and raised his chest high, revealing complex, overlapping designs all along his torso, wrapping around to his back. Scars, tattoos, and what appeared to be a form of etchings that entirely covered his abdomen, disappearing beneath his waistline. The designs upon his skin glowed warmly as if backlit. He waited until Nash was satisfied before re-buttoning and re-tucking where necessary. “I have them all over my body. I require the strongest protections in this line of business, and it makes my job much easier by not requiring the extra time to assemble wards and sigils before doing my work.”

   “Oh yes, I can understand completely!” Nash was nodding like a short, pudgy little bobble-head, shifting his weight back and forth, from one foot to the other, then back again.

   Jacob snapped his fingers. “And the other question you’ve been holding against the tip of your tongue—?” 

   Nash glanced away, his cheeks suddenly flushed a deep red. The man began to stammer, “I…I’m not...not sure what you mean…”

   Jacob enjoyed this bit of theater. He spelled out “M-o-r-n-i-n-g-s-t-a-r,” and locked eyes with the fat man. “Morningstar...as in Lucifer...”

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 Part III of Nine Tenths of the Law

by Sean Padlo

Meanwhile return this Monday

 March 16 to read

Elixir of Thorns

by Shaun A. Lawton

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~ Fiction ~

   

Name2Face.app

By Keith P. Graham

 




   While I was on a pirate website I saw an app called Name2Face. It was a facial recognition app. It was supposed to hook up to the cloud and match faces against a billion images. According to the docs it used the Russian VK database, but had backdoors into Facebook, Google, and Shutterfly. It claimed 99% accuracy. Normally €199.99 but they had a hacked version for free. I snatched it.

   You know, there is reason that you shouldn’t download apps for your android from anywhere except the Google Play Store. What that reason is, though, escapes me from time to time and I give it a try. If you are really adventurous you can try some of the Indian or Russian sites and get some cracked premium apps for free. Of course, this is like going on vacation and leaving your condoms at home.

   Name2Face was habit forming. There is a joke that if you walk down any street in New York and call everyone you meet an asshole, nine times out of ten you’ll be right. This is probably true, but now I knew all of the asshole’s names.

   Turn on the app and a splash screen comes on with the image of a shield with some Cyrillic text. Press the button on the left (I figure it is the Russian word for OK) and hold up the phone to a crowd of people. Little boxes appear around everyone’s head, and in a second their name appears. You can tap the name and go to their Facebook wall, or Twitter feed, VK, or their Instagram account or some sites in Russian and Chinese. You can send them an email or text. Pretty cool, don’t you think?

   To give an example, I was walking down Broad Street on my way to work, when this drop dead gorgeous woman crossed in front of me going across on Wall Street. She had to have been a model or actress or call girl. The app was on and it caught her face. One tap later I had her.

   Mindy Mossfirth it said. I followed after her. Age 28, Vice President of Angular Investments, Inc. There was a list of her social accounts, her email and a few phone numbers I clicked on the first one and sent a text: “Dinner Tonight?” I watched as she pulled out her phone and tapped it. She looked puzzled, tapped again and put the phone in her pocket.

   “How about lunch?” I texted.

   Again she discarded the message.

   I tried again, “Sex?”

   She didn’t even take the phone out of her pocket. Oh well, it was her loss.

   It was fun. I could walk down a street and say, “Hi Bill,” “Hey Frankie,” “What’s up Estelle?” and get these surprised faces. I would just keep moving, leaving behind some confused people. I got into the habit of doing it every morning while waiting for the train, and in a while I was getting people saying “hello” to me before I even got their names on the screen. Someone called me Carlos one morning while waiting for the 8:19, and then everyone was saying “Hi Carlos.” My name is Anthony. 

   Every few days I would see beautiful Mindy and she would get a dirty text from me. This went on for a couple of weeks until she turned around and slapped me in the face. I guess she figured it out. It was not a coincidence that I was always there when she got the texts.

   The other women I texted like that never did catch on.

   At lunchtime there was a guy who sat on a park bench near the corner of Broadway and Chambers. He always looked out of it. He would eat a sandwich and feed bits of bread to the pigeons. He was dressed well enough, but his clothes didn’t seem to fit right. He was overweight and had one of those mashed potato faces. His name was Roland Mitchell.

   One day I sent him a text: “Roland, Why don’t you just give up.”

   He reached in his pocket and tapped his phone. My phone buzzed when he answered, “OK.”

   I saw him the next day. “End it now. You’ve got nothing to live for.”

   No answer.

   The next day I sent him: “Just fall down in front of a bus.”

   The next day there was a pile of flowers on the park bench.

   What a loser.

   The app was not 100%. Several times I saw Tommy Rivera, who had died riding the top of a subway car through the Bronx when we were 15. The train passed under a low clearance ceiling and scraped him off. He was my best friend until then. I nearly fell down the first time the app said Tommy Rivera, because it was him. He hadn’t changed a bit since we were in high school. The person, who was not Tommy Rivera because Tommy was dead, must have worked near the World Trade Center because I kept seeing him down near Battery Place. Maybe he was Tommy’s cousin or something, but I never asked.

   I saw Roland Mitchell again and he wasn’t dead. He walked by me and stared me in the face. The app said it was him. Before I could text him, the guy, who couldn’t have been Roland Mitchell, gave me the finger as he passed me. When I turned to yell back at him he was gone.

   The app made a few weird mistakes. I saw Alfred Hitchcock, Woodrow Wilson and Kurt Cobain. The app was right except that they were all dead. I kept seeing them. Once I said “Hi Kurt,” and the guy said “hey,” and kept walking. I guess he was used to it.

   Jesus Christ was a frequent visitor to Wall Street. I guess he has some work there. He was an Arab looking guy with a short beard. He was dressed in a gray business suit. I think the app may have been confused because he wore sandals, although I doubt the real Jesus wore his sandals with white socks.

   Whenever I met Jesus, he would smile and nod to me. The app said he was Jesus Christ, or sometimes Jesus of Nazareth, but he was always seemed a hell of a nice guy.

   Now this is the bad part.

   One day I saw Death. That’s what the app said.

   The first time I literally felt cold chills up and down my spine. There was this guy two blocks in front of me, but he was tall and I could see him clearly. The app said “Death” with a capital “D.” He wore a black hoodie, black skinny jeans and black high tops, but you couldn’t see his face. All I could see when I passed by him was the glint of eyes in the shadows of the hood. He looked me in the eye; he just stared right at me like he was waiting for something.

   Every few hours I saw the guy. He was always standing still, and it was always a good distance away. He was always looking right at me. If I tapped the box around his head, there was nothing there except a website link, but if I tapped the link I would get this “Server not Found” error.

   I tried to make a little sense out of everything. The app was definitely wacky. It worked well on most people, but when it failed, it failed on the weird side. The main trouble is it kept on showing me dead people.

   For example, on one walk from the subway exit to my job, about six blocks, I saw Tommy Rivera twice, my Grandfather, my Father, Uncle Frankie, my second grade school teacher Mrs. Riesman, Albert Einstein, and five presidents. It was like there were more dead people than live ones on the street that day.

   One day I saw my cousin Shirley (Mom’s sister’s kid). I walked over to talk to her, but she was gone. My mother called me that night to tell me Shirley had died of breast cancer about the time I saw her.

   My Grandma Torino claimed to be psychic. She said she always knew when someone had died or someone was in trouble. She dreamed about my Grandfather dying the day before he had the heart attack. She liked to look at you and read your future. She always told me that I was headed for a bad end if I wasn’t careful. I’ve always proven her wrong, even if I’ve come close a couple of times. Maybe the app was bringing out the same talent in me. Maybe this was my talent. Maybe I could see Death.

   I stopped using the app, but now that I knew what to look for I kept seeing Jesus and Death, and, for some reason, an old time actor named Ronald Coleman.

   I decided that I needed a change so I took some vacation time and went to a resort hotel on Cancun.

   It didn’t help. Death was still death and Jesus Christ went swimming with one of those teeny weenie euro-trash swimming trunks. At least he didn’t go commando like some of the people there.

   I used the app to chat up a pretty woman in a bikini. She was a few years older than I and a little overweight, but I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, as they say, and I didn’t have to. She took my mind off of things. She was from Boston. I gave her a fake email and promised to call her. I doubt if I will.

   Life is too short to worry about this stuff. I came back with a new attitude. I didn’t have time to think about Death and the dead people. They were just annoying things that sprang up from an app that encouraged my imagination to work overtime. You could see animals in the clouds, faces in the grain of a piece of wood. You could see the shadows move; sometimes when there was nothing there.

   The app, like the human brain, is a liar. It likes to connect the dots when the dots are just random. Anyone could find patterns in randomness. Anyone could hear music flowing in the traffic noise. Anyone could see Death standing behind every door. The app was just a simple version of a human brain looking for patterns and finding them whether they were real or not.

   It was my own damn fault for letting it get to me, and I found it easy to cut it out. As soon as I stopped looking, I stopped seeing. I kept my phone in my pocket and never started the app. I looked straight ahead and stopped making eye contact with people on the street. I didn’t see Death. All I had to do was stop looking for him. If I didn’t see him, he wasn’t there. That’s the way I approached it.

   Of course Jesus Christ still smiled when I crossed his path, but that’s because I had been saying “hi” to him for so long. I kept seeing Roland Mitchell standing in the middle of the street while I waited for the light to change, but the buses went around him. Mindy Mossfirth still crossed Broad Street on the way to work, but she never showed signs of recognizing me. I owed her a nice juicy text, but why bother? She was out of my league.

   That’s not to say that I never used the app again. It was useful. There was an old time guy named Big Jim Farley who owned a Library. He was supposed to have kept a book of everyone’s name and particulars so he could walk up to you, look you in the eye and make you feel like he really remembered you. The app was my “Farley File.” I sometimes had meetings with high level clients, and it was useful to walk up to a guy you may never have met, look him in the eye and say “Hi, Maxwell, how’s Irene and the kids?” Whenever I was in these meetings, though, Death stood in the back of the room and just watched. He never raised his hand when I asked the eventual, “Any questions?”

   The last time I used the app was at this big shindig for the some high mucky-mucks from the London Stock Exchange. It was held in one of the big meeting rooms at the Andaz Hotel. They had a tacky champagne fountain and pretty girls carrying plates of spicy fried squid and other stuff you’d never touch if it wasn’t free. I went for the open bar, but I stayed because it was a fun place to use the app.

   I harassed several tall thin women in spike heels that were either trophy wives or hired escorts. I said hello to heads of state and asked about the health of their grandchildren. I hit on the wives of Wall Street executives. I had entirely too much fun.

   I walked up to a delegate from the Russian embassy that looked lost and alone. “Hey, Serge,” I said with a wink, “How’s the back? I heard you sprained it. Too much rough sex?” I knew about his bad back because he had posted about it on VK, the Russian Facebook. I knew about his special interests because he had two accounts and the app knew both of them. One was definitely not meant to be public.

   I slapped him on the back and he grunted in pain. I think that is when I screwed up. I turned and held up my phone looking for something else fun to do, and I think he saw the screen and recognized it. Maybe, though, the app was monitored and I was getting a little too much use out of it on a connection that was not meant for the general public. It could be that the SVR RF (Russian CIA) was tracking me. I may have over utilized the app in the party at the Andaz.

   A couple of hours later I left the party, feeling no pain. I had been drinking $50 shots of single malts. It was lucky that I didn’t have to drive. I could take the water ferry up to 40th street and the cool river air would help me sober up.

   I was walking down to the dock at the foot of Wall when two guys in dark suits came up on either side of me and held my arms. One reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my phone. They pushed me down and by the time I stood up they were gone.

   The next day I got a new phone. I restored all my data from the cloud, but the app, since it had not been purchased, had never been backed up. I looked for the website where I had downloaded it, but I couldn’t find it. That’s OK. I’d had my fun with the app. I didn’t need it.

   A week later there was a stock market “correction” and my firm needed to lay off a few hundred people so I was out of a job. I have money squirreled away, so I was not too concerned. A smart guy like me wouldn’t be on unemployment for long. I started my job search. I missed the app, especially for interviews. It would have helped.

   After a few months of fruitless job hunting, I would just go down to corner of Broadway and Chambers and sit with Roland on the bench and watch people.

   I don’t really need the app. I can tell you the name of almost everyone that passes by. Lots of them are dead people. Albert Einstein is cool. He always gives me a high five when he goes by. Tommy Rivera is definitely not cool and doesn’t even talk to me. Everyone knows me as Carlos, still, so I guess that I am Carlos now.

   My life now is watching all the people go by on Broadway on their way to meaningless jobs. I know their names and I know their stories. I think I am waiting for something to happen. I might get a job. Someone might like my resume. I’ve got time. I don’t spend much and I won’t need to work for years. I get the feeling that something is going to happen eventually. Maybe there is an app that will tell me.

   They say “there is an app for that,” but what if you need an app but don’t know why. Is there an app that will get me a job? Is there an app that will stop me from seeing dead people? Is there an app that will tell death to stop following me? Is there an app that will make sense of my life? Is there an app to tell what app I need? I guess I can Google Ukrainian pirate sites and browse the hacked apps to find what I need.

   Death sits right next to me now, although he doesn’t talk. His bony fingers point to someone from time to time and I know that their time is nearly up. His hoodie has the Nike logo on the back, and I try to peek into the hood to see his face, but I can only make out the shine of his eyes.

   Jesus stands still on the crowded sidewalk. He smiles at me a lot and seems to be waiting for me to say something. I wonder why I see him and not Moses or Mohammad. Why not the devil or some Norse God?

   I never talk to him. I don’t have anything to say. What do you say to Jesus, anyway?

   I’ll be damned if I know.

Please Return This Saturday

for Part II of Nine Tenths of the Law

by Sean Padlo

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Nine Tenths of the Law: I

  by Sean Padlo

Art by Bonita Barlow

    Jacob Morningstar stepped out of his vehicle, tying his long brown hair back, and was already moving toward the back entrance at the right end of the Fort Monroe parking lot, when he noticed a crowd gathered on the courtyard grounds near the main entrance. In the middle of the crowd, a tiny waif of a girl wearing a yellow-flowered sundress currently held a full-grown man over her head. She smiled brightly, arms held straight overhead, as the man’s body appeared to…expand. Jacob glanced at his watch, saw no one waiting for him by the service entrance, and headed toward the crowd instead.

   Although businesses like this were still relatively new to the populace, and the laws regarding them were rudimentary at best, Jacob noted that some business owners enjoyed bringing a festive, P.T. Barnumesque panache to their workplaces. Here, it seemed that the owner—a curious, darkly strange man who went by the surname of Pyx—had fashioned himself a place of both utility and pageantry. Jacob thought it strange that anything so extreme could happen in such a place as this that would require his expertise, though not once had he spoken with Mr. Pyx. He had, and apparently would, only be dealing with the manager, an excitable fellow named William Nash.

   Once the man held in the air by the little girl had grown impossibly huge, the girl shoved him up and away from her, where he flipped once and landed on his feet. The crowd applauded. The massive behemoth of a man stepped back onto the platform. He took the girl by the waist, and threw her into the air. She rose higher and higher still before slowing at last, only to find herself hovering there momentarily, just a blot of yellow in a powder-blue sky. It reminded Jacob of the Roadrunner cartoons where the coyote runs off a plateau, defying gravity until he noticed and pulled a sign from out of nowhere with “?!” scrawled on it, just before he fell. There was no sign in this scenario, just a crowd of people holding their collective breath, waiting for the girl to fall. Instead, she arched her back and shrieked as dark, leathery wings burst from her shoulder blades. She tucked into a ball as her wings unfurled before diving earthward. Her wings folded back, and she accelerated, until she became nothing more than a blur rushing headlong toward the ground.

   The crowd gasped, ducking their heads, and started to scatter. Jacob noted that no one stood fast under the falling child to try and rescue her. The girl spread her wings wide and flew just over their heads. Now they began to cheer, those cheers increasing to a roar of approval as she flipped and tumbled through the air, at last coming to land gently on the grass. Applause exploded from the crowd, and she bowed to them then, her wings tucking and retreating into her back. Jacob could see only two small holes in the back of her sundress. No blood, no trace of her massive wings. Not even a single black feather.

   Jacob smiled at the little girl's performance. It was most impressive, and he found himself applauding right along with the crowd. He watched the behemoth slowly deflate back to his normal size. The whole thing happened before the business was open for the day. It reminded him of those people who tell jokes and hype the studio audience before a talk show begins. Jacob checked his watch again and realized it was eleven minutes after eight in the morning. He would have time to take a few looks around before meeting up with Mr. Nash and getting down to work.

   Fort Monroe was most recently purchased about three years ago, and major work ensued to secure the building. But as it was once fortified against attacks from the outside, it now served its purpose as to be guarded from within. Jacob supposed that the man and the child from the performance had at least level twos, but it was more likely that the girl had a three…or even possibly a four. By law, security for ephemerals from level three to level five is required to be multi-faceted, complex, convoluted really, and exhaustively thorough. And expensive.

   Fort Monroe—or more precisely the land itself where the fort now stood—had a dark, sordid history. The land was named Old Point Comfort by the settlers of Jamestown as they’d passed through the area. Local natives were used, abused, then driven out and massacred. Fort Algernon was built upon the Point, then accidentally burned to the ground. The fortification was built and rebuilt repeatedly for years, but they all crumbled or had some calamity or another befall the area. Fort George was built there, and boat after boat full of African slaves passed through the area before a hurricane turned Fort George to ruin.

   The fort became a Union stronghold despite being in Confederate territory. It was a pro-slave area that became a bastion of freedom for runaway slaves, being dubbed “Freedom’s Fortress.” Fort Monroe was officially decommissioned in 2005, and was eventually purchased by a group under the orders of Mr. Pyx. The new owners found it would be, for whatever the reason, a good idea to reform the fort’s exterior to take on a five-pointed star shape. “You can see us from the sky,” Mr. Nash had exclaimed to him over the phone in an exuberantly high-yet-throaty voice, “and it looks great on maps!”

   Jacob looked up at the bright blue sky with its magnificent, cottony clouds and wondered if this job would turn out different from the rest. Land is like a man’s spirit, it remembers the good and the bad, and the dark weighs heavy upon it. Jacob wondered if Mr. Pyx understood the power of the soil, and that of pentacles. He shook himself out of those thoughts and looked around, surprised that he’d already reached the service entrance, and he noticed that this spot offered him a unique vantage point: he could see the repetitive paths of the security detail. Always in pairs, they covered the area well. He saw that the visitors had lined up at the front entrance. Even though he was good at his job and did it very well, Jacob always felt a degree of dread over the work he was hired for: extraction.

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 Part II of Nine Tenths of the Law

by Sean Padlo

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Name2Face.app

by Keith Graham

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