OF CADENCE AND WEATHERED STATUES: I

by Vincent Daemon

This story is dedicated to my Father Vincent Sr., 
who fought in that awful war and let me borrow some 
of his actual exploits in those jungles for this tale.

Chapter 1: (Beach Party) Vietnam

             Victor Marks’ tour through the dense and hateful jungles of Vietnam had been among the worst imaginable, a blood soaked Hell on Earth since day one. His name and number quite literally drawn from a greasy government hat, Victor had been ripped away from a fairly good, simple life of his own creation. His beautiful and leggy girlfriend Charlene, with her loving turquoise eyes and soft hay-colored hair, velveteen lips and brilliant charisma; Vic’s own fuzz-tone driven, 13^th Floor Elevators inspired garage band Vulture Breeze; his stoned Bohemian lifestyle of art and love and music, freedom, peace—now just faded distant memories. Music he could no longer hear through machine-gun fire deafened ears. Apparently, just being a free citizen had obligated him to some bizarre generational doctrine of patriotism that he did not possess, and a code of ethics that was not his.

The day that inevitably grim piece of paper arrived in the mailbox, his mother howled and cried, wailing “Unfair!” to the Roman Catholic God within her whom she so blindly placed her faith. She wanted to empty their savings, give her son the money, and tell him to run, though it was something she dare not ever do. Vic Sr. would have been furious, as he’d been prodding his one and only son to go G.I. Joe since before the damned affair had officially began. The Old Man himself had served in both WWII and the shady "police action" known as the Korean War, intrusively enforcing his deep seeded hatred for all things with “sloped eyes and yellow skin” severely upon his son and daughter both. From Vic Jr.’s early childhood on he used a particular brand of bloodline-brainwashing guilt on the boy to “...just do the right things...for your country...your family...for God.”

            

            Victor Jr. had meant no disrespect to his great white lineage of mighty Roman Catholic patriot warriors, but he held none of their beliefs. For starters, he had nary a racist bone in his body. In fact, much to his father’s fury (and even more so to his mother’s secretly silent admiration) he had taken many a beating for the Civil Rights movement as a whole. Concussions, blackened eyes, snapped ribs, a broken wrist and a busted jaw even. He could clearly see through the napalm thick veil of media propaganda, monotheistic moral rhetoric, and the simple hatred of mankind unto itself. It was not even remotely in his nature, and he could not buy into any of it.

In the end though, he caved. Never ran to Canada. He knew the Old Man would take it out on his mother and sister if he really were to have dodged. The guilt and concern for the well-being of his family against the old bastard forcibly violated his own personal ethics. It hung ‘round his neck like a razor wire noose tied to a PCP enraged albatross.

A rattling resentment of this guilt-prodded decision whirled around the inside of his skull like the Viet-Cong bullets just outside of it. He felt the intense heat as they whizzed by his filthy, sweat-soaked face, sweat that trickled fast and salty-hot into tired, traumatized, sun-cooked eyes. Every time he’d attempt a quick wipe with his forearm, dirt and detritus would further cake with the sweat and the tears of anguished exhaustion to create a blinding runny brown mud. The relentless hail of Viet-Cong gunfire continued as Victor dove to his belly, crawled like some panicked insect through the mud of the stink-mulched jungle floor. The tormented cries of the rest of his platoon could be heard even over tumultuous gunfire and exploding mines. It had all happened so fast...there was nothing they could do but scatter like disrupted little camouflage work ants. Hell, that’s essentially all they really were anyway.

Things had been quiet for a few days as their platoon made its way from village to village, doing weapons searches and confiscations. Victor bore witness to some seriously questionable moral/ethical behaviors on the part of his fellow troops, but also felt that he (for lack of a better word) understood. One of the more distressing things that he had learned about humanity, as well as himself, was that in adrenaline and madness fueled fight or flight situations, stress and anger can become almost contagious, and even the most cultured, meek, intelligent and/or God-fearing individuals can and invariably will fall to the most primal base instincts of human animal survival, the ultimate savagery of eat, fuck, kill.

And in this terrible alien land of lush green hell, the heat and humidity will play tricks on the mind. The bad diet of ancient rations and sketchy jungle village food occasionally offered (though usually just taken) from village residents was barely enough to keep one going. It didn’t help that there was also an omnipresent fear of, and complete inability to, trust the ones you are supposed to be protecting. After the horrendous visual of the first exploding baby basket bomb...what do you do? Exhaustion from constant movement, readiness, anxiety and fear, running, hiding, waiting for an invisible enemy that functions on a plane far beyond reason, who will torture you, quite cruelly, for a very long time, if you don’t kill them, or get killed first...what does one do?

An unexpected tsunami of searing blood washed over Victor as he slithered along, stopping him dead on his belly like a fear frozen newt. Knowing he shouldn’t look, Victor did just that to see who it was and if they were...salvageable. It only took a moment for Vic to realize he was now soaked in the steaming gore of his best friend, Willy Abrams. Willy lay on his back, his head intact, but most of his jaw missing. He was still alive, in the most abstract sense of the word, glassy eyes shock-wide as he struggled, silent but for little tortured puppy-like whimpers, trying to raise his head and gawk at his condition. His body looked as though it had been torn in two. Willy’s entire left side, his arm, leg, and into the direct center of his torso and belly, had been blown out completely, becoming the simmering flesh-mush jelly which scalded Vic’s right arm and cheek. 

Nausea boiled deep inside Victor and he felt about to shit himself, a knot of distress deep in his gut, churning his guts like fork-spun spaghetti. His gaze held on to and watched Willy’s eyes intently, watched what was left of Willy’s jaw struggle to emit those ghastly whimpers. Certainly, had there been more of him, Willy would have shrieked a dead dog’s howl up into the firefight. Instead he wore a frozen, unblinking stare. Victor hoped beyond reason that his friend was so deep in shock that none of this registered. Hell, he couldn’t even figure out how the poor bastard was still alive.

Victor went for his pistol, no longer able to witness Willy suffer and fade away in this condition. Fighting tears, sickness, nausea, and emotion, Vic shakily raised the pistol, realizing he had perfect aim. True humanity is never letting a sick animal suffer.

Astonishingly, Willy’s eyes seemed to suddenly register and shifted, all wide and gawky, making direct pupil to pupil contact with Victor. Willy’s face now bore an awkward Harpo Marx-like ogle. It would have been somewhat humorous, had this situation not been what it was.

Amid the chaos and screaming and clatter of bullets and splattering blood and raining innards and mind-shattering decibel-levels of noise, a total silence fell over all around Vic. He felt he could hear Willy communicating through the terror stricken pupils of his moribund eyes. Time seemed frozen. He heard nothing. Vic tried to breathe, but felt suffocated by the soupy hot and cream-thick air—rife with sulfur and putrescence—pulling into his lungs.

Above all the other hypersensitive stimuli, Vic could feel every fine hair, every mud and blood caked pore, every last microscopic skin cell actually move. He could feel how every atomic particle in his hand worked, its natural dynamic. The silence faded into a deep, kettledrum fierce pulse beat deep in his ears.

As Victor Marks pulled the trigger, he could feel his pineal gland tingling. He was seeing spots, little tack-welder firework burns dancing like machine elves on his cornea.

As Victor Marks pulled the trigger, he felt a bullet slam into the gun in his hand, felt the bullet go through the palm of his own hand.

Now, Victor did shit his pants.

The affliction of the wound caused time to crash back hard, along with all the all-sense destroying rages of this foreign war around him. The stray bullet from Vic’s misfired pistol caught another of their platoon, Raymond Davie, right in the head.

Victor again caught Willy’s eyes, locked, and Willy was home, and the light was on. The poor half-bodied bastard shrieked a death cry louder than even the roar of the violent chaos exploding now from the jungle in virtually every direction but one: straight ahead.

Another rush of adrenaline burst throughout Vic’s body, agony induced, inside and out, physical and mental, spiritual. He forcibly, guiltily broke the deadlock with Willy. It was just too much, and he resumed fleeing from the relentless pursuit of their invisible enemy. Victor sobbed hard as he just left Willy there, having no real other choice. This was fight or flight...this was eat, fuck, kill.

Balling his wounded fist white-knuckle tight, Vic could hear Willy off in the distance now, trying to shriek himself to death. He began to vomit as he ran, and could feel the diarrhea streaming out his searing asshole like a broken faucet from his heat-sick, dehydrated body. His eyes blind from mud and sweat and Willy’s blood.

There was not time for guilt or mourning, only survival.

Victor’s peripheral vision had always been top notch, and out of the far corners of his grit-flecked eyes he could now actually, finally see the shadows of his enemy coming from the bushes. Each bullet grew closer, as well, but never gave Victor Marks what he craved then more than anything, ever, at that precise sliver of time: death, sweet death. Peace. He just wanted out, to die, then and there in that very moment.

Victor ran, fast and hard, forcing his way through thick and painful sharp underbrush bramble, noticing slowly and with great unease that he could hear no traces of his platoon anymore. The Viet-Cong gunfire was beginning to cease, but he could now hear (as a series of muffled and disorganized thuds in his war-numb eardrums) their footsteps behind him, gaining quickly.

Were he to be caught, they would not kill him. That much was a given. They would keep him and torture him for years, or until they tired of him. Hell, they weren’t even shooting now. They just chased, coming ever closer, ten steps to his exhausted and disoriented two, in near complete silence, a mere hush...and still near complete invisibility. He was still only seeing traces of them, like ghosts, shadow people.

Victor’s mind juggled blinding flashes of a thousand thoughts at once, but one stood out. He homed in on it: I should have gone to Canada, to Mexico, anywhere but here. He realized his father’s respect for the things he holds dear will always remain moot. They will never matter. Essentially, my coming into this vile hell-war has meant absolutely nothing.

A burst of energy overtook Victor. A furious speed involuntarily coursed through his legs, a sprint of self-preservation, pushing his body somehow momentarily beyond its near death limit. Eyes still bloody with mud-sweat and nearly blind, he charged forward, numb to the puncturing thorns and slicing bramble netting his path.

Victor quite suddenly felt light and airless then, his body in an unexpected free fall, over an edge of land he couldn’t see. The feeling lifted all discomfort from his being, the feeling as eternal as watching his best friend realize the ultimate uselessness and futility of his condition, his situation, all their situations, and the soulless ripping agony of being that end-stage kind of helpless. To know there was no way out, alone on your deathbed, merely for the full course to run itself out in stultifying misery.

Victor’s fall was (again quite unexpectedly) broken and slightly softened by a thick pool of warm and sticky stagnant mud, the stench of which was quite fetid and positively gruesome. His mental state completely dazed, the free-fall anesthetized pain returned at ten times its previous strength. Looking up, he could hazily see the drop-off point from which he fell, and he could see his pursuers standing at the edge. Victor could not tell how many there were, as their forms had been silhouetted by the thick beams of bright hazy sunlight that filtered through the lingering smoke-haloed trees and underbrush, his eyes still stinging from the stew of fluids and filth that seemed now to be permanent.

What was left of his mangled rifle slipped from his shot up hand as he fumbled clumsily with it in the vile mud. He knew the gun was now slag (there’s the good ol’ U.S. of A. lookin’ out for their boys again snarled deep in his thoughts), but just the security of having it on his person sank into the mud with the weapon itself. Looking up again, he could still see his assailants, motionless, watching him like mocking gods from way up on high.

            

             One of the Viet-Cong yelled something to him, the rest following suit. They were acting a strange cross between what seemed like both manic elation and spiritual panic, their words now monotone and ritualistic sounding, with similarly odd accompanying physical gesticulations. One word seemed to stand out in their droning repetitive din, increasing both the intensity of this mantra and their gestures. They all pointed at Victor, intermittently laughing like truly mad men. 

             “Conree” it sounded like they were saying. Victor had picked up a bit of Vietnamese here and there, enough to get by in a restaurant, shop, or whorehouse, but was completely ignorant to this word, its meaning.  He was convinced, however, that he had indeed heard this word before, yet familiar as it sounded, he was stumped and somewhat concerned. Are they going to capture and torture me? Christ in heaven please let them just kill me.

            

             As quick and shadowy silent as they had initially erupted with their gunfire, they now just the same slipped back into the floral maw of the mangled vine-branch teeth of the jungle; a seamless disappearing act in harsh silence. Asian Houdini’s of war.

            

             There was total silence now, complete and death-like; no gunfire, no landmines, no screaming. It was like everything in the jungle had just up and died. Or that the jungle herself had her vocals cords slit from behind.

            

             

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OF CADENCE AND

WEATHERED STATUES

by Vincent Daemon

MERCY STREET

by Edward Morris

 
Even with a magic wand and wings, the Fractured Fairy on "Rocky and Bullwinkle" could never open The Book all the way. Consider a poet who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into the Middle World, speaking what were once tongues.

Consider a locked garage, an idling engine, the warm. The warm. The warm in the guts from the vodka, the warm orange dashboard in the dark, the radio stuck on no music La Principesa can comprehend.

The clocks have melted down. The gods are going home. Anne Sexton is stuck in the time machine, swimming backward like a salmon, in a green early-Seventies Ford that billows and belches gray smoke from within. A black pool-sized hose is clamped to the exhaust, and runs in the back window around a blanket and strapping-tape that covers the last three open inches.

Anne is driving like a drunk; or worse, like someone asleep at the wheel and dreaming, drifting all over the flagstone crossroads of this perhaps-land, this Possibly Promised Land. But for once in her life, she doesn't miss her turn.

The sign announcing said turn looms from an odd traffic-circle that almost wants to be a corner, cemented with a stone cairn beneath it, a bench with the imprint of a long-ago leaky body, and sparse weeds trying to bloom anywhere they can. The sign is wooden, burnt black with letters never typed on Earth:

THE STREET OF MERCIES.

Anne mouths the story one last time, and keeps driving.



*



Once upon a time, in the distant kingdom of Carcosa, there lived the princess Anne of Sexton, who was called Briar Rose, whose father was mad, whose mother dug for gold. Madness ran in that family. Money didn't as much. There was math of some kind involved.

At her christening, he invited only twelve of the thirteen wise-women from the neighboring villages, since the number thirteen was ungodly. More math.

But the thirteenth, an hermaphrodite shaman whose name was Cassilda like their mother's mother, made it in to Town. Cassilda was a sight to behold, with fingers long and thin as femur-bones, eyes burnt by strange herbs. "For every scrap of your genius," Cassilda sang, "Insanity will drown it out. And on your fifteenth birthday will come a pricking. A drop of blood lost to a needle shall send you to sleep. "

To sleep. The King did not protest at first; in fact, looked strangely curious and scheming."None shall spin," he answered slowly when Cassilda had been beheaded. "And every suitor to pass through the door of my castle shall answer my questions three. Come here, little doll-child, and sit on my knee. I have a penny for your thoughts."

That night, the King and his rank mead breath came in a long midnight that was no dream, when Briar Rose woke from the laudanum too early and did not know the hour. She had dreamed red. Her nose bled, and a sea of blood she could never swallow hung in her throat.

She wanted to sleep forever and forget, but never spoke of it, for Sanity was awful enough. She let the bugs crawl into her eyes and keep her awake, and grew to be a goddess, dwelling in the King's rank yellow honeysuckle stench, while the impaled corpses of suitors drew crows to the impenetrable rose-gardens on the King's Preserve.

On her fifteenth birthday, she was playing in a haystack, and found the last spinning-needle in Carcosa. Or more precisely, it found her. When she collapsed, the clocks stopped, and the flies died on the walls.

The King, the Queen, the courtiers, fell into a Silence for one hundred years. The City died, stuck in its own time machine like blood-drenched kudzu vines, the roses swallowed the fief. And in his tattered cloak of jaundiced human skin, the inevitable Prince Charming was no cure when he came and parted the vines with something that might once have been a word, and all the dessicated corpses fell to earth like electrocuted birds.

When the King in Yellow kissed her, Princess Anne woke up crying Daddy, and never slept again, or let herself wake up in a dream. The kiss never stopped. It only pretended to. And no matter what she wrote, she never really woke back up all the way.

Now, wasn't that a nice story, kids?

Kids?



*



Do not sleep, for you will flee without strength,
and where You fall, the King in Yellow waits
to sew up your skin.

Do not sleep. The King will go up your nose and make a transplant.



He wants you to walk into him, as into a dark fire.

He wants to open his tattered cloak, and show, beneath,
The two little kids He sucked up like pollen:

Terror and Doubt
Instability and Division
Deformed and Deformer,

Their tongues poverty,
stinky tears like pus,
Sucking with love at the coral,
bobbing like grubs in formalin,
Foetal, half-alive, skinned
soft as avocados,
Dying in their tattered pen.

Up from oysters and weeds
and the wandering tide,
the King comes
into my mouth when I sleep,
And I wake in dead Carcosa,
Nailed into place, and forget
who I am, drinking hundred-proof
blood from my wrists,

Sensual as cold yellow moonlight on the pond
where our bodies floated and bumped in moonwater
and the cicadas called like citharas
and all the toads stopped singing at once
when we came

when we came to Carcosa 

I am rowing into Carcosa, 
With no more old age or disease,
Wildly but accurately,
Knowing my best route.

I am rowing this fucked-up old green Ford into Carcosa,
With its cruel houses and strange apparitions, tall spires
of the country I misplaced,

The nagging rain, the skin trying to poison itself inside-out,
The saws halving my heart like a magician's assistant,

The people in Carcosa are made of macadam,
and crack. They have no water. They are not
allowed to touch.

Listen. They are bewitched,
Writing down their lives
on a century falling to ruin.

But I'm still rowing.

I never wanted to be this Rhea of evil luck,
longing to become what I could only visit,
Living in the ruins of the mansion I wished I had.
While all the toy villages fall

My eyes are turning purple, my mouth is glue.
Death was entangled into my beginning.
But I'm rowing into Carcosa,
Though The Moon is a blood clot,
the sun a smear of mud, the stars themselves
black holes,

Though there's blood in the water
And the oarlocks are rusty
Rowing toward the King, the King,

Rowing to see the King,
Driving onto The Street of Mercies
The exhaust smoke inside my car
coats my skin like yellow oil.
Driving toward Mercy.
The flagstones bump and bump
He's waiting up

He knows I'm home
The land becomes blazing pitch
The smoke rises forever. For generations,
It will lie waste, and none shall pass
again, yet I pass through.

I have dreamed the secret door
to #45 Mercy Street.

It is half a mile away.

Half a mile, half a mile on.
Into Lost Carcosa drove
the prodigal daughter, as
the human face moves,
knowing it will be kissed.

Two blocks now.
I see the stained-glass window,
dark as the leathery dead
No one around.

I'm.
Just.
There:



*



The car slowed to a stop, still smoking. The front door to #45 opened, and down the porch the King In Yellow came.

The seething snakes of His cloak licked the air. He cocked His masked face like a carrion-dog, wanting to eat the newcomer lips and tongue first in a kiss that couldn't halt itself.

Presto. She was out of prison. Queen Briar Rose of Carcosa exited the car, lifting the pallid mask of childhood from her own face, using it to cover her heart.

When Anne did so, the King actually backed up a step. "Yes," she told him, "Yes, I will, yes."

The King In Yellow knelt before this miracle, forgetting its knife.



*


SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ANNE SEXTON

~Click gas-mask to read

 Vincent Daemon's~

~ Of Cadence and 

Weathered Statues

appearing only on the FREEZINE

of Fantasy and Science Fiction~

CRYPTID'S LAIR

by Gene Stewart

illustration by Gene Stewart

 As we crested the ridge the dogs alerted and began tugging on the leads, moaning in that eager, almost sexual tone dogs have when they desperately want to follow their instincts. We nearly let them loose, too; the tracks in the gully had seemed fresh.  Something made us hold back, though, and a few moments later a large mountain goat burst from cover to scramble up an impossibly sheer cliff.  It stood regal and disdainful atop the cliff, in silhouette, for all the world as if showing off, before vanishing in a single bound over the far side.

 At once the dogs settled and I suggested we take them back into the gully to refresh their scent.  “We’re after Yeti, not goat,” was my point.

 Bob nodded and Carla and Jim came down from higher up as we turned around.  Sun had us sweating but a crisp breeze was picking up from the northeast and we knew that night would be frigid, perhaps snowy.  It was fairly late in the season to be tracking Yeti but the TV production crew who’d hired us was paying premium prices and I was determined to give them good weight.  

 After all, I’d talked them into taking a team of tracking dogs.  “Has anyone ever tried it?” I asked, and no one knew of such a Yeti hunt.  “Not even Tom Slick’s expedition took dogs.”  It seemed only reasonable to me that tracking dogs would work. 

 Explorers came back with plaster casts of tracks, bits of spoor such as tufts of hair or stool samples, and in more recent times photographs of blobs on distant slopes had given way to large, seemingly upright animals shuffling behind foliage in blurs of infrared false color.  It was those clips that gave me the idea to use dogs.  

 At the meeting on the 36th floor of the NYC high-rise I showed a group of TV executives the sequence Josh Gates had shot in 2007, in Nepal.  It showed a manlike heat source behind moving foliage darting right to left up a slope and out of sight.  “Not conclusive by any means, possibly a Sherpa sent to fetch batteries for their equipment, but--”  And here I signaled for my partner Bob to open the door, letting our big friendly dogs burst into the room to slobber on Versace suits.

 As they sniffed and whined and wagged their tails I said, “If dogs had been part of Josh’s team he could have let them go after this shape and we might then know.”
 

 “Aren’t you afraid the dogs might be killed?”

I looked at the young woman who’d asked and smiled but lowered my tone.  “It’s always a concern, ma’am, but these dogs are trained to go after bear.  These very dogs have kept twelve-hundred pound grizzlies at bay until we got there with tranquilizers and radio collars, and, barring a lucky swat from a set of claws, they can do it again with a Yeti, I’m sure, and come out of it unscathed.”
 

 Bob cut me a look in the darkened room, knowing I was shading things a bit too sunny; truth was, we tended to lose three or four dogs per expedition when larger animals were concerned.  Dogs are brave when frenzied, or stupid, so they will attack without hesitation any beast that riles them past their training.  They go red, we call it.

Still, our dogs were the best in the business, and my notion of sending them after a Yeti appealed to the producers.

We got the assignment and spent the next couple months rounding up a team; getting travel permits, visas, and passports; getting shots; arranging for supplies; buying clothes and equipment; facing the challenge of training dogs to track an animal with no confirmed scent. Bob favored the notion of sight dogs trained to go after big silhouettes.  I liked scent.

Our plan was to find footprints and let the dogs fix on that scent.  If it turned out to be a hoaxer making the tracks we would very likely find out at once by the dogs’ response.  We were taking bloodhounds, wolfhounds, deerhounds, and even a handful of bassets; big animals, most of them, and fully capable of tracing minute scent trails for miles, sometimes over terrain that daunted even us.

There were cases on record of bloodhounds tracking kidnap victims who’d been put into the trunks of cars and driven miles.  How it was even possible remained a mystery.

Bob and I were partners in the search-and-rescue dog team business, while Carla and Jim funded some of our fringe expeditions, such as searching for skunk apes, Bigfoot, and even the occasional ghost.  We had instigated most of these paranormal or cryptid searches, figuring that dogs could track escaped criminals even when they drove away in cars, and sniff out the beginnings of skin and other types of cancer, and find termites before the amplified microphones could even hear them, so why not try dogs on things people had traditionally failed to find when they looked?

Besides, it made for good fringe TV.

My job was handling the bassets on leads while Bob kept the wolf- and deerhounds in reserve, in a pen, and handled the bloodhounds on leads.  The pen was rolled and carried, depending on terrain, by ATVs or Sherpas.  It could even be mounted on a cart and pulled behind a truck in situations permitting such vehicles.  You’d be surprised how many places are closed to them these days, or snowmobiles, or dirt bikes even.

As it turned out, though, it was just me walking my favorite pair of beagles that turned up the most remarkable find, the one everyone’s still discussing.

I’d gotten up early after a bad night.  We had been celebrating a local festival with the Sherpa leaders the night before and I was keyed up from that and from a scheduled uplink to my wife and kids back in Montana that was getting close.  We were budgeted for one uplink a week per team member, and my rotation put me for that coming Saturday.

It was Friday the thirteenth when I left my tent and checked on the dogs. Most were glad to see me but I noticed Betsy and Wild Boy, two of my three beagles, remained listless when I approached their pen.  “You feeling the altitude?” I asked them, petting them and ascertaining their noses were cold and wet and the pads of their feet were whole and not too warm.

Deciding a walk would perk them up, I collared and leashed both and led them from the dog area, which was now a place of unholy noise I’m sure last night’s other celebrants did not appreciate.

I let the dogs lead me for awhile, content to breathe crisp air cleaner than anywhere else in the world.  White-peaked mountains surrounded me and stars twinkled brightly in the purple velvet sky.  Dawn would come soon, I knew.  Already the tips of the highest mountains gleamed like beacons.

We had meandered down slope in a wayward, nose-led zigzag route that had brought us to a ravine cut by a glacial stream.  Sliding down some talus, the dogs and I ended up walking along the stream in a deep shadow even as the air above the ravine glowed golden and ever brighter.  

The dogs seemed agitated, as if following a broken trail.  They surged forward a few yards, then scanned side to side until once again charging forward.  I held their leads and let them go where they wanted.

It turned out they led me to a boulder the size of a small house.  It has probably been moved there the last time the glacier’s ice had crept that far downslope.  Now it stood blocking the way, wedged into the ravine.  The stream ran from both sides, as if embracing the boulder.

To go around meant climbing scree; such loose rock is difficult and dangerous.  Turning around was the only reasonable solution.  I could backtrack and find a safer way out of the ravine, then come back to the boulder and see if the dogs would pick up a scent trail upslope from it.

As I tugged their leads to pull them back with me, Betsy’s collar loosened and she slipped out of it.  Surprised, I called after her as she bolted toward the undercurve of the huge boulder.  Meanwhile Wild Boy noticed me not paying strict attention and made to follow Betsy.

A deep snarl, followed by a resonant roar, stopped me in my tracks.   Wild Boy came up short, too, sitting comically as if he’d been commanded to, his butt in the stream.  That lasted all of a couple seconds, though.  When the roar came again, Wild Boy stood up and bolted past me, heading down and away.

His leash was torn from my grip and he dragged it off, yelping now and then as if chased by Hell itself.

Okay, I admit I was scared, too.  That animal sound dredged atavistic terrors from the muck of my ancestral cells.  I shuddered and wished I had a gun.

That, and a rocket pack to cary me out of that ravine fast.  I pictured a huge bear chasing me along the narrow ravine; I would be unable to dodge to one side and hide, and the bear would inevitably run me down sooner or later.  

 They’re faster than people and he was on home ground. 

But it had not sounded like a bear, my inner voice said. 

Deeper, rougher, and wilder, it had sounded pretty much the way I imagined a Yeti might sound.

Then there was the stench.  Rotting cabbage on acid, it was a choking smell of unwashed flesh, matted fur, and moldy intentions calculated to make my bones tremble.

And that’s when I realized I could not see Betsy, although I could hear her occasional yip of excitement.

Her yips echoed slightly.

Following her tracks, I discovered she had entered a cavern under the bolder, on the left side when approached from downslope.  You couldn’t see it until you were on it.  The opening was fairly large but lay long and flat, rather than standing tall.  I could duck in but just barely; it would’ve been easier for me to have dropped flat and rolled.

“Betsy?  Here, girl.  Come on out of there now.”  I could hear her sniffing and scrabbling but could not see her in the cavern’s dark, so I unclipped a hand lantern.  It worked on batteries and was in fact a type of flashlight but it illuminated in a sphere of light out to ten yards.  

Betsy was deeper into the cavern so I went after her, moving in a series of hunched hops and slow slides.  The cavern’s floor sloped downward there.  It was getting deeper.  Soon I could stand and not reach the roof even on tiptoe.  

 Betsy gave a brief whimper and I beamed the light that way.  Sure enough, her blue leash slithered around a stone and vanished into blackness.  “Aw, Betsy, come on, let’s go. Come here girl.”

My calls failed.

Rounding the stone, I found myself facing a kind of ramp that led down farther, then around in a series of twists.  Aware how alone I was, I tried my walkie-talkie.  All I got was static.  The prudent thing to have done was to retreat, get reinforcements, and explore the cavern with a trained team.  

I might have, had Betsy not whimpered and fallen silent.

I imagined her lying hurt and it galvanized me to move forward.  I could not leave my favorite beagle there, not even for the time it would take to fetch help.  Truth was, Betsy was the last dog my mother had given me before the cancer bit her life short.  Some say they’re just animals, as if we’re not.  Or they’re just dogs, as if dogs would be worth less than people, or worthy of less effort.  Having been around dogs and other animals all my life, I know better. They’re family.

Easing my way down the dirt ramp, I found that, although it twisted first right, then left, and kept zig-zagging, there was plenty of room for me.  Due to the turns, my flashlight did not do much good. 

The last ten or twelve feet I slid too fast.  Smooth walls too far apart gave me no brakes.  I fell into darkness, hoping Betsy wasn’t lying hurt where I would land.  Not knowing how far I was falling, I braced, but hit dirt almost at once. Catching my breath, which condensed in the cold, I scanned with the flash and could not believe my eyes.

It looked like...I don’t know.  

A stone age control room, maybe.  

A child’s idea of high tech.  There were gears, pulleys, and levers carved from stone.  Intricate and glittering, gears made of what looked like ice whirled and meshed.  Wooden slats rocked back and forth.  Skins inflated, deflated, and flapped.  Air and water moved through the system. It lay all around me, in a cavern chamber maybe the size of a typical suburban house.  A house without internal walls and with a deep basement and high attic.  A house of contraptions for pumping air and water.

No sign of Betsy except marks in the dirt floor.  I followed these with my flash to a corner, then froze, horror washing through me.  

 A being, I thought.

Its eyes gleamed in my feeble light.  It sat motionless, back wedged into a corner, holding Betsy in a gorilla-like hug.  It looked old, its matted hair--fur?--gray, and its face wrinkled.  But those eyes, glittering and alive, watching me, sad and knowing and maybe a little regretful; that gaze struck me to the core.  Here was a sentient being.

“Betsy,” I said, in a whisper, and thought I saw her ear twitch, although she did not open her eyes.

“Alma,” the thing said, clear as a glacial stream, and then it extended a hand, palm up.

Now what? I wondered.  Every hair on my body stood stiff.  I was ready to run through rocks if I had to, but did not move.  I barely breathed.  My guts sloshed like ice water.

It said, “Alma,” again, still clutching Betsy to its chest with one hand, the other stretched toward me as if to shake hands, or accept a gift, or offer one.

My mind started working.  Alma was, I remembered, a Russian term for what Americans called Sasquatch or Bigfoot and the Tibetans called Yeti or Meh-teh.  Russian folk lore said Alma used tools.  From the looks of the room around me, they had a whole technology, primitive but complex.

When it picked something up and held it toward me, I nearly bolted.  Then I realized it was proffering me something and took a very slow, wary step toward it, so I could reach.  It was heavy; a stone tablet, no, three, stacked, each carved with what looked like runes of some kind, and...yes, drawings.

I thought of Joseph Smith and the amazing technicolor vanishing golden tablets of Mormonism and nearly laughed.

As I studied the tablets I grew fascinated and squatted on the dirt floor to fan them in front of me, using my flash to see them better.  “Literate,” I muttered, not even hearing myself.  The better part of my mind was focused on deciphering the pictograms, some of which teased at the edge of being understandable.

Landscapes, mountains and forests, and a star.  Chaos, then figures huddled.  

“They’re survivors,” I said aloud.  They had survived a catastrophe, who knew how many ages ago.  These creatures were remnants of a prior race, maybe the Neanderthal, I thought.  An apocalypse had driven them underground, literally.  

Glancing over at the Alma in the corner, I knew telling the world about them would destroy their culture, even as it might help the remaining ones improve their individual lives.

To drag them into our world would be unconscionable, though.  They did not have a place and would be freaks or, worse, zoo animals on display for fat, stupid tourists.

We sat in the stone, wood and ice machine hidden at high altitude inside a mountain cavern and regarded each other not like adversaries, not like strangers, and not at all like different species.  It felt more, to me, like brotherhood.

When Betsy opened her eyes and whimpered, the Alma handed her gently to me and I left, using a different route, one that did not require much climbing. It was a route the Alma showed me, leading the way in pitch darkness, me following with my feeble light.

 

I wrote this for you, descendant or friend, so the family of man will know. You’ll read this only once I’m gone and another generation or two has come and gone as well.  You’ll be my great-great grandchild, I hope. You’ll have to decide for yourselves what to do with this knowledge, once you’ve read this far.  (Wonder if Jack the Ripper left a letter like this?  Or Ambrose Bierce or Judge Crater or any of the others who have vanished forever from society’s ken?)

Of course, it might be fiction or the delusions of an old man who had a hellacious life of wild adventure back in the days of clean air and nearly free water.  

Altitude sickness, sure, put it down to that.  Pollution poisoning...could be anything in this tumult of catastrophe and disaster our greed has brought upon us.

When I left the cavern I carried Betsy with me.  She was quiet and wouldn’t walk and she was heavy but I couldn’t leave her.  Nor could I find any injury and, as we approached camp, she wiggled and jumped down and got back to normal.  She would sometimes come to me and huddle against my legs, though, as if remembering.  I kept her as a pet from then on and didn’t work her except for exercise.

What disturbs my sleep, and makes me write this, is picturing my grandkids huddling in caverns, becoming hairy beasts, cryptids themselves huddled in lairs devolving into using stones, wood, and ice to mimic barely-remembered technology that should have been theirs by birthright had it not been for the greedy few who trashed it all for profit.  

Or else I dream I’m falling, and glance down to see Earth, a blue and white glassy ball, and I know that when I hit the ground my world will shatter.  

 It’s an awful feeling, not being able to stop the fall and not knowing where your loved ones will land.

If others ever find you, offer them your hand.

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to read

MERCY 
STREET

by Edward

Morris

RepFix

by Keith Graham

art by Jesse Stevens

Mackey Dooley sent me to this web page, all deep purples and manga-eyed girls that played some low resolution techno music with a subsonic thump to it. RepFix, it said in a grunge font so whacked out you had to squint in order to read it.  The contact information resolved to an old fashioned 32 bit IP address, the kind they used to use back when people still used ugly homemade web pages like this.

I ran back the IP address to a physical location. Mackey was right - it was local. I knew the area and recognized the street. I tapped the link and a second later was walking down a sidewalk in a nasty block far from the subway, looking for number 17B. I had to walk sideways down the entryway to get by a stack of old style hard drives plugged into a web of yellow cable. I was surprised to hear them humming. A thousand little red LEDs were blinking in complex patterns in the shadows under the tarps.

The door was painted red with the name Eric Selvaggio written with a sharpie. A water stained banner read "RepFix - Open". The door was sticky and made a noise when I opened it. I could almost smell the mildew.

"Weinstein?" a voice called from the darkness.

I was going to ask him how he knew it was me, but there had to be 50 ways he could have googled me as I walked up the path to his door.

"Selvaggio?" I countered. The door closed behind me. The only illumination was from a small flat screen on the far wall. I could see my own face through cobwebs of hanging cable.

"It will cost you $20,000 cash and take at week at most." Selvaggio said. I still couldn't see him. "Lucky that Monica bitch got tired of you or it might have cost more and taken longer."

I could see an image of me on the flat screen behind a bunch of program windows. One had a Linux command prompt. The image shifted and I saw a dirty finger press Esc on a keyboard and then the image shifted back to me. There was a glint of reflected light and I saw a dark shape in the corner.

"What do I get for the 20K?" I asked trying to see in the murk.

A red spot appeared and glowed brighter. It was a cigarette. The guy was wearing some kind of large headset over the top half of his face. I couldn’t make him out in the gloom, and I had to try hard not to watch my reactions in the flat screen.

"Your bad news gets erased from the search engines. All pages with unpleasant references to you and your alleged activities are erased. Monica’s personal pages get trashed and her password scrambled. Anyone who linked to any of her pages gets the same treatment."

"What if the nets heal?" I had heard this theory that broken links eventually heal.

"Forget it. A broken link is a broken link. It can't heal unless the data is reposted."

"But, what if she pulls this crap again?"

"That's up to you. Don't mess with her and she has no reason to continue with this. Don't screw with her and she'll forget you. Don't think about her and she'll go away. It's all up to you. Don't give her a reason to scratch the itch. Let it heal by itself."

"But she's a vindictive bitch."

"And you are an asshole. You will have to change your behavior or else keep me on a retainer."

There was a glow as Selvaggio sucked on his cigarette. The image on the flat screen altered and I could see the large image of a dirty hand setting the cigarette into a filthy ashtray next to the keyboard. The screen zoomed in as the hand moved to the mouse. The magnified head of an orange cat blocked the view at that point. A paw tentatively touched the end of the cigarette and it fell out of the ashtray. The screen abruptly shifted back to my face as I heard the cat hiss and a thump as Selvaggio tossed it to the floor.

"Speaking of which, how will you be paying? Cash money I hope. That was what your agent agreed to."

I opened my hand and showed him my palm. Tattooed in red script was my public key.

"I see it. There will be a surcharge of 10%. I have to hide the transaction and it costs a little. I did say cash."

"Cash? I never deal in cash. It's too much trouble. What would you do with it, anyway?"

"I would put it under my pillow and sleep well." There was a rustling and I could see the man getting up. He was large and very overweight. He danced through the piles of obsolete debris without touching any of it. "Here's an anonymous link that you can use to contact me by voice." He flashed a tinyurl, and my pod recorded it.

"It's a deal then." He said and stuck out his hand. It was covered by small crawling things in pixel primary colors. They looked like small spider mites in magenta, cyan, yellow and black. I recognized them as IP sprites, small programs that could be programmed to deflect pings and other intrusive access. I saw a close up of my face on the flat screen. I could almost feel the bugs crawling up my arm as we made virtual contact.

"Well begun is half the job done." He said. I tried to brush a bug off my arm.

"You like my little cellular automata?" Selvaggio asked. "They're my own special recipe: very smart, very cool."

Selvaggio laughed, the cat hissed, and the room went black.

I was back in my office and the familiar Freedom Tree logo flashed as my pod booted. My glasses cleared to a pale blue and then I could see the room. I took the pod out from my pocket. The LEDs were flashing in spasmodic codes. A long list of error messages in yellow courier font scrolled across the glasses. The data flow paused and then the room booted again. The dirty curtains disappeared. The view of the brick wall outside my window folded into a more appealing glass wall with a view of the harbor. The room virtualized and I was back in my usual place.

Somehow, Selvaggio had crashed my link. It was something that you weren't supposed to be able to do. Maybe the IP sprites had followed the datagram back to my pod, or maybe he had ways of sniffing his way back to my office. It had to have been those damn cellular automata.

In the corner of my vision I could see a small magenta dot. It might have been a pixel sprite but it disappeared when I tried to focus on it.

A ringtone clashed with a message gnome as they started at nearly the same time. I sounded like Fur Elise blown by a hippy harmonica player. I answered the phone while I read the popup. My account had just paid $22,000 to an offshore betting site.  That was quick.

"What," I asked, answering the incoming call.

"You're back. Good." Mackey Dooley said. He looked cheerful. "How did it go?"

"22K is what it cost me. I just got paypaled on it."

"Cheap at half the price."

"Yeah, so you say."

"I thought you'd have been able to handle this stuff on your own. I was surprised that you asked me to find you a hired gun."

"Hey, this guy was your idea."

"Then why did I wind up doing all the legwork?" Mackey asked.

"I wanted an extra layer of protection. I have to have plausible deniability. You made the contact and my persona went through a dozen anonymous routers." This was true, yet I thought, Selvaggio had managed to burn my link and crash my pod. I thought I saw a cyan dot swimming at the edge of my vision.

"It's too easy," Mackey said. "If he can repair your rep that easy and that cheap, everyone would be doing it."

"He's got my 22K as of two minutes ago. I'll give him a day or two and see what happens."

Mackey hung up.

The next day I googled my name along with a few key phrases. There were no hits. Just one day ago the nets were full of the most terrible lies and now there was nothing. I tried the bitch's home page and it was gone. Her email was even gone from my address book. She wasn't listed at any of the big directories.  She wasn't in any of the reverse listings and her address would not map at any of the GPS sites.

This guy Selvaggio was good. She was unlisted. It took less than 24 hours to kill off her completely.

But, of course, she still breathed.

A week later, the bitch, my former wife, Monica Weinstein nee Yeager stood at my doorstep. She was a wreck. I tried not to smile.

"You did this." She said. She didn't seem angry, just tired. If she had shown more signs of suffering, I would have been happier. Her hair was dirty and she looked like she had slept in the park, but for all that she only seemed tired.

"Monica, darling. I would never do anything to harm you."

"May I use your bathroom?" she asked, but I held firmly on the door and did not let her in.

"After the terrible things you said and did, I don't see how I could let you in."

"Pervert." She said. "I did nothing more than tell the truth."

"You were my wife, my better half. You are supposed to stand by your man."

"My man is a criminal and a pervert and a disgusting..." she sputtered and could not finish.

"They were lies and yet people believed them." I said calmly, "I have tastes and I have preferences. Perhaps they are little out of the ordinary, some might call them strange. Perhaps they are not in the mainstream, but they are hardly perversions. I am not that much different than the average man who hides his secret thoughts. I just have the money and the means to act on my secret thoughts. You were indiscrete and you caused me pain and now you want to use my bathroom?"

"I need a shower. I'm locked out of my apartment." Damn, that Selvaggio was good. "My credit cards don't work. I have no cash. All I want is a shower and then I'll be gone."

"I'm afraid not, darling."

I can't repeat what she said next, but you can imagine. I still feel good at the memory of her venting her spleen. I felt then, for the first time, that I had gotten some of my own back. I felt that she was hurting almost as much as she had hurt me.

As she walked down the hall, she turned and said, "You can't erase what's up here." She pointed to her darling little head, "You can erase me from the nets, creep, but you can't erase what I saw and what I know. You will always be a pervert and a monster to me. As long as I live, you will have to live a lie, a lie that everyone knows about. Everyone I meet will know your story. Everyone I talk to will remember you. People on the street will stop as you pass by and point at you and call you a pervert because they'll know the truth."

She was gone before I could think of what to say.

There was a small article for sale on Craigslist the next day. I received 50 calls before coffee the next morning from the vilest sort of persons. A service request to the site killed the posting by noon, but I had to take my phones off the hook and filter email with a certain unpleasant phrase.

Similar things happened that afternoon. I began to receive anonymous email: some warning me about hell, and some asking some deeply personal questions. When I went out to dinner the doorman refused to make eye contact.

"Selvaggio, this is Weinstein." I said.

"I told you to leave her alone. 120K this time." He said before I could tell him what I wanted. His video was off. It sounded like he was talking through an ancient black Western Electric telephone handset.

"I want her dead for good, dead for real."

"I don't do reality. 120k to fix her latest antics. I can promise to keep you squeaky clean for a week, but unless you modify your behavior towards her and convince her to keep quiet, I can't guarantee that she won't go commando on you again."

I cut the connection after expressing myself in language that I seldom use. I opened up a meta search page. 

Unfortunately, there seemed to be precious few links for reputation repair.

I called again, but before I could speak the idiot said,"250K for the fix."

"I need to fix this permanently."

"That would be up to you. You have to change who you are and you have to change how she sees you. Since I don't see that happening..."

"I need the data fix, but I need to see her alone in the real world."

"I don't do..."

"Yeah, I know you don't do reality. All I need is a minute and an alibi."

There was quiet on the line for a moment.

"Ten million in my account and I can get you both in a room. You can talk to her. Convince her to lay off.  You never call me again."

Ten million was almost exactly the amount that I had in legitimate banks. I had twice that in hidden reserves, but that would be hard to get quickly. Selvaggio must have known that. Well you get what you pay for.

"Sounds like a plan." I said.

I went out that night. I needed some relief. My contacts hooked me up with a particular flavor, a particular texture. I won't go into it, but it cost me plenty. I didn't mind. I would be spending much much more in a few hours and a fellow needs some sweet release from time to time.

When I got back to my place, the door wouldn't unlock. I found a token in my pocket and made a call from the corner data kiosk. My data glasses were full of Selvaggio's buglets.

"Mackey," I said, "The bitch has me by the short hairs. I'm locked out of my house."

"I guess she figures that it's good for the gander. Wait where you are. I've had a message from Selvaggio to pick you up."

"What is that bastard's game?"

It took the creep over an hour to find me. I didn't have cash for cigarette and, of course, Mackey doesn't smoke.

"Oh no," he said when I asked him to buy me a pack, "I don't want any tobacco in this car."

I called him a few names, but it wasn't very satisfying. I had to hold back or else he just might have let me out of the car to walk. It wasn't long before we were walking down the sidewalk looking for 17B, but this time it was for real, not virtual. This time I could feel the warmth radiating from the array of disk drives and this time I could smell the mildew.

I pushed open the door. Mackey made an after-you gesture so I went in and he followed. The walls were crawling with bugs in deep saturated colors and they did not go away when I took off the data glasses.

"Where the hell are you?" I yelled.

"I'm in here darling." It was Monica the Bitch and her voice was coming from another room. Selvaggio had left a pistol on the table and I picked it up. I could see light coming from the crack under a door.

"Your hacker said you wanted to talk." She said from another room. As I walked towards the door a message gnome popped up. I opened it with a gesture. My account had been debited $11 million dollars. I shrugged it off. I would deal with Selvaggio at another time. He couldn't hide the money and there were ways to get it back, or at least most of it. Yeah, Selvaggio was probably making a vid of this, but there were still ways to get to him.

I pushed the door open. Monica was there, standing in the middle of the room. Multi-color bugs crawled all over the walls and floors and they covered her completely up to her knees.

Mackey went over to her and kissed her hard on the lips. He turned to me and put his arm around her. They smiled sweetly. The creeps were in love.

"Just so you know, this is entirely your own fault. You pushed us into this," he said.

She didn't even look at me. She just smiled up at him. A yellow cat walked into the room from behind me. It rubbed against my leg making me jump. It was so covered with the colored bugs that you could hardly tell it was the same cat.

I wiped a bug off of my face and saw that my hand was covered with them. It was the hand that held the gun. I remembered why I was there and started shooting.

As soon as I pulled the trigger the lights went out. I kept pulling the trigger and I could see the two of them at every flash like an old movie. Bang, she was holding him tight. Bang, he turned to face me pushing the bitch behind him. Bang he was walking towards me. Bang he was closer. I couldn’t have missed. Bang he was raising his hand, with something dark in it.

I woke up downtown with no shoes and a bottle in my hand. My head hurt. My pod and my glasses were gone, but the bugs followed me everywhere. None of my passwords worked in the data kiosks and I am told my soshsec is not on file. God damn bugs are everywhere. They run all over me and won't let me sleep. I can't find Mackey and I can't find Selvaggio. The place at 17B doesn't even exist. I don't know how they did it, but the bitch scammed me and skipped town. Mackey helped them set me up.

So, please, can you spare a token? Can you give me a fiver until the soup kitchen opens? Hey don't walk away from me. I'm talking to you. Can you spare me a butt. I haven't had a smoke in three days. Hey you. Hey!

Bastard. Somebody's got to have a cigarette. Goddamn bugs.

Hey you. Look mister. Hey just a minute. Listen to what I've got to say. This is how it started. Mackey Dooley sent me to this web page...

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to read

CRYPTID'S LAIR

by Gene Stewart