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Mr. V : A Clinton Varne Serial Mystery

Clinton Varne is back, caught up with ex-cons, corrupt politicians, occult oddities, and a whole lot of corpses.

My first novel, The Hole, began life as an online serial. I published a little every week as I wrote. It worked well and lead to a publishing contract. For my next book, I’d like to try it again.

Mr. V continues the adventures of ex-cop Clinton Varne, who first appeared in the short story, “Old Lady Prideaux’s Terrible Menagerie.” Mr. V takes Clinton’s involvement in weird occultism and mystery a good deal deeper.

Old Lady Prideaux’s Terrible Menagerie

A quick note on the nature of this serial: I’m publishing as I write. That means what you’re reading is a work-in-progress, with all the caveats about occasional mistakes and lack of polish that go along with that.

I hope you enjoy Mr. V!

Table of Contents

PART 1: Clinton Varne, ex-cop, meets a man he locked up years ago, and gets dragged into investigating more than few murders.

I hope you’ve enjoyed Mr. V so far. More parts are coming soon. Click the Follow link at the top of this page to get notified as I add them.

Mr. V : A Clinton Varne Serial Mystery was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mr. V: A Serial Mystery — Part 1

Clinton Varne, ex-cop, meets a man he locked up years ago, and gets dragged into investigating more than few murders.

This is part one of an ongoing serialized novel. You can learn about the book and find links to all published parts by visiting Mr. V’s main page.

I’m in my living room and Deputy Neblett tells me I should get away for a while. After what happened with old lady Prideaux, he has a point.

He says, “There’s this exhibit, Clint. In the city, at the big museum they got there. Artifacts.” He looks around my living room. “The kind of stuff you like, right?”

I nod. Neblett had come over to give me a check from the county, payment for “consulting services” they called it. He could’ve mailed it, but that’s not Deputy Neblett’s style. He’s the hand-deliver sort. Likes to be old-fashioned.

Neblett continues, “I saw the flier, up at the post office, Clint. Real pretty flier. Full color, even. With pictures of spears and masks, all that.”

“Yeah?” I say. He hasn’t actually given me the check. Still has it and he’s gesturing with it. “Spears?”

“And masks.”

“They got an admission fee?”

“Think so. You can pay it out of this,” he says, finally handing me the envelope.

I take it but don’t bother opening it, knowing it’ll be less than I’d like but as much as they can afford. “I just might,” I say.

“The museum?”

“Yeah.”

“Bet you’re gonna love it, Clint. Masks and spears and artifacts. Bet you’re gonna split.”

So that’s how I ended up driving three hours, stop to eat at a shitty diner growing out the side of a gas station, and then another two hours. Getting a hotel, because there’s no way I’m driving back, on those roads, at night.

And now I’m standing in front of the museum, the building looming, bricks covered in old soot stains from when the city burned a hundred years back, and I think maybe the dark stain there on the steps is blood.

A kid cracked his head skateboarding’s what it is. I don’t bother giving it another glance as I walk past. Up the stairs and through the front doors, propped open with a concrete planter full of half-dead geraniums, there’s a cramped foyer. A desk sports a bored security guard and a narrow hallway forces visitors single file if they want into the museum proper. I queue up, pull out my wallet, and pay fifteen bucks when I get to the front of the line. Which, Jesus, they expect kids to get an education in the ways of the past if it costs sixty bucks for a family of four?

Then I’m through and Neblet’s right. They’ve got spears and masks and all sorts of things, and I have to admit it was a good idea coming here. I think maybe I’ll tell Neblet when I get back, seeing how much he’s always after my approval. Kid never served under me — I retired from chief a couple of years before he showed up — but he’s trying to live up to my example is what he told me once. “You’re a legend, Clint. The best there was.” Which is another thing Neblet’s right about, mostly. I’m by no means a legend, but I probably am the best chief the little department ever had.

I wander. You always get the sense in places like this that the past knew something we don’t. That they cared about better things. More fitting things. Love and soil and hunting and gods. Simplicity and focus. I know I’m the one being too simple when I think that way. That I’m the one focusing on the stuff that’s survived, on the artifacts worth keeping and displaying. That most of the past was as much crap as most of the present. But still. One can dream.

I finish in the special exhibition and still have an hour or two before I’m going to feel like lunch. So I wander to the museum’s permanent collection and end up looking at the bones of the earth’s last rulers. I’m standing there, staring up at a skull the size of my bathroom, when I see him. Ricky Hepburn. I remember because that last name, who could forget? Kid used to live in my town, back when I was still a cop. Homeless most of the time, and rumor said he cooked meth up in the hills. Nobody knew for certain, and Ricky never went around saying it’s what he did out there, but it got to be an urban legend, and then assumed truth. Except you couldn’t find the place and Ricky never got caught selling.

But I found him eventually, found his little shack and his equipment and his drugs, and sent him away. For just three years on account of how young he was and how the judge had a son about the same age.

You want to think, when they’re as young and strung out as Ricky, that they’ll thank you for busting them. Like maybe it’s a state-funded intervention. Rehab. But it’s never like that.

Which is why when I see him standing close to the rope barrier, craning to look up the neck of the museum’s big tyrannosaurus rex, I don’t for a minute consider saying hi. Who wants to cause a scene? I’m on vacation.

But then Ricky, he’s still looking up, but he pivots, like he’s trying to make himself dizzy, and he’s staring right at me. Over the heads of a pack of school kids, I give him a tough nod and stroll in the direction of the pre-historic sea life.

Ricky shouts, “Hey, Mr. Varne! That you?” And I smell him behind me, knowing by that smell the kid’s still hooked on crank.

I turn. He’s got scars on his face and he’s skinny like a dead fashion model. He says, “Jesus, finding you here, what’re the odds?”

I say, “Ricky.”

He’s not smiling. Ricky always smiled. He says, “It’s fucking fate, Mr. Varne. Gotta be. Because I really need your help.”

“When’d you get out?” I’d put him away for longer than this. Even if he’s the good behavior type.

Ricky shakes his head. Dismisses my question. “Little ways back.” Then he’s glancing around, making sure nobody’s in ear shot even though of course there are, how crowded it is. Not going to stop Ricky, though. “Listen Mr. Varne,” he says. “We gotta talk. I’m serious.” He whispers, “It’s about murder.”

I think, Shit. I say, “You kill someone Ricky?”

A scrawny mom walking by with her fat kid goes wide eyed at me at me. Flashes irritatation. Ricky says, “Oh, Jesus, no. Not me. There’s been a murder. Murders, actually.”

“Who?” I ask. The scrawny mom pulls her kid close and shuffles him away.

“Dude I know, most recently. Some other people I know, too.”

He’s fucking with me. I don’t want anything to do with it, real or not. I say, “You should tell the police, Ricky. I’m retired. This isn’t even my town anyway.”

Ricky grabs my hand, starts pulling me. His grip’s cold. “Not here,” he says. “We gotta talk and it’s gotta be somewhere else. Here isn’t safe.”

That tug, the look on his face when he does it. His eyes. You’re a cop, you get a kind of sense about these things. You know when someone’s bullshitting you. Ricky’s not. He’s legit. Which means I can’t ignore him, even if It’s not my job anymore. People getting killed, the police here need to know. If Ricky’s not going to tell them, I need to know enough to do it myself. I’m stuck. Ricky’s dragged me in.

So I let him lead me to the front of the museum and then outside, telling myself the exhibits weren’t that good anyway. Saying again and again this is the right thing to do. Even if it’s Ricky. It’s the right goddamn thing to do.

Ricky says, “Place is just up the block.”

I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Part 2’s coming soon. Click the Follow link at the top of this page to get notified when it’s available.

Mr. V: A Serial Mystery — Part 1 was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introducing “Mr. V”

My first serial novel in ten years.

As a special preview for subscribers, here’s the first chapter of my new serial novel, Mr. V. This hasn’t been made public yet, but I’d love to hear what you think. If you have feedback, you can add it directly to the chapter by highlighting text and then clicking the little comment button. (Though that might only work on in desktop browsers. I’m not sure.) Enjoy!

Mr. V: A Serial Mystery — Part 1

Introducing “Mr. V” was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aaron’s Newsletter

I send out an occasional newsletter with updates on what I’m working on, short essays about whatever’s on my mind, and links to my latest writings and podcasts.

If you’d like to sign up, just click “Follow” at the top of this page and then follow the instructions. It’s easy.

Aaron’s Newsletter was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Old Lady Prideaux’s Terrible Menagerie

A horror and mystery short story about an ex-cop and his very weird neighbor.

The crone lived in a house dingy and decrepit and decades past the point somebody should’ve burned it down. For years, I’d stared out my front window at that shack, hoping she’d move or die — or that some street tough from the city would get the idea she hoarded loot and make up his mind to rob the place. She’d fight him off — that bitch was mean — and there’d be no way the thug would get out but to shoot her dead.

I could exhaust all my fingers and toes counting the times she’d hollered at me from across the street, telling me to keep my lawnmower quiet or to not go pulling into my driveway so late at night on account of it frightened her cats. One time she’d chalked “BASTARD” on my front door after I told her she needed to paint her house because it was ruining my property’s value.

And it was. The house sat right across the street from mine, and a few feet further up the low mountain, one of many such thickly wooded humps of earth that make up the landscape of this town. Those few feet meant her front windows sat higher than mine and that meant I had to see awful yard and the rotting wood lattice rising from it whenever I gazed out of my living room. I had to see her goddamn ass at eye level when she squatted or kneeled to pull some weeds from among all the other weeds that together made her front garden.

The lady was stone crazy and her favorite thing in all the world was inflicting that awful lunacy on me.

So that’s why I had to laugh when Nelson Neblett, one of Sheriff Trembley’s new deputies, stood with his hat in his hands in my living room and asked, “Clinton, you ever seen anything weird going on over there?”

I said, “Nah, deputy, just that crazy old bitch and sometimes her crazy son-in-law.” Her daughter had died of cancer a while before I moved into my house, but not before the girl married and got a husband, who became a tad too attached to his new “mom.” The daughter’d been dead thirty years at least, but the husband still visited old lady Elnora Prideaux at least twice a month. Probably asking for money.

“See, Clint,” the deputy said, “it’s just that we’ve got some complaints from the other neighbors. Lights in the night coming from over there. Sounds, too.”

“Sure,” I said. “That ain’t nothing new. Elnora plays her music and I think — God knows why — but I think she sets off fireworks sometimes in her back yard.”

Deputy Neblett stared at me. “Fireworks?” he said. “Man, what’s an old lady like her doing that for?”

I shrugged. “Shit if I know. Regardless, I never took none of it for ‘weird.’ Least not weird enough to call you boys.”

Neblett looked down at his hat, then back at me. Sheriff Trembley needed to hire some kids with balls if he wanted anyone to take the force seriously. “See, here’s the thing, Clint,” Neblett said, “We’ve been getting these complaints but each time we send someone out to look — even the time we had a car parked overnight — we didn’t see or hear nothing. Maybe the neighbors is just getting sick of her and blowing it out of proportion. I hear she ain’t the most pleasant woman and her house sure ain’t nothing to look at. But Sheriff Trembley says we gotta least keep up appearances of listening to those folks’ complaints.” He stopped and swallowed. “Now you say you seen something, even if it ain’t what you might call really ‘weird…’”

“Yeah?” I said, hoping he wasn’t about to ask what it sounded like he was about to ask.

But he did. “Mr. Varn, we was hoping, on account of you used to be in the police force here — ”

“Used to be sheriff,” I said.

“Right. On account of you used to be sheriff, we thought maybe you’d like to help us out.”

“I’m retired.”

“Oh, I’m aware, Mr. Varn, and I’m sure it’s mighty pleasant not needing to work no more, but we thought maybe you’d see it as your civic duty. Sort of once a cop, always a cop, you know?”

I thought about it a minute, not liking at all where my thoughts took me. But Neblett was right. “Shit,” I said.

“You’ll help us?”

“Yeah, Deputy Neblett, I suppose I will.”

Neblett left without taking the beer I offered him. The kid might not even have been old enough to drink — which in my mind meant he wasn’t old enough to carry a gun, either. I cursed Sheriff Trembley and decided to drink Neblett’s beer myself.

And that’s how they got me keeping an eye on the old lady. I’d sit in my living room, reading a book or watching TV, but facing in such a direction that I’d be sure to catch any strange goings on coming from her shack. Of course, that meant looking at the damn thing a good deal more than I’d have liked, but Trembley knew how to play to my sense of duty. “Once a cop” was accurate — at least for me.

But, Jesus, it was boring. Three evenings I spent watching, a book of civil war history in my lap or else some crap on PBS playing — and with always an eye on that terrible house. For three evenings almost nothing happened. I saw her once come out and look around, like she was expecting a package that hadn’t arrived, and another time she crawled around in the garden, picking the small weeds out from around the larger ones, but I sure as hell didn’t see anything weird.

I was getting ready to call up Trembley and tell him I’d done all I could, that staring at Elnora’s abode was starting to make me feel like a pervert, when she finally got to something truly strange.

It was nine o’clock at night when I put down my book. I’d noticed a light coming from her house. I stood up, leaving the TV on, and crossed the living room for a closer look. The light came again thirty seconds later, a bright flash from the twin front windows, a single pulse of yellow, like a spotlight turned on then off.

An officer of the law is taught to be observant and, in my day, I’d been a fine example of an officer of the law. But standing in my front window, staring at my neighbor’s house, I felt like a goddamn fool. This was an old lady a bunch of fussy neighbors had complained about. Hell, I’d complained about her on more than one occasion, but that didn’t mean the police needed to look into it. Deputy Neblett and Sheriff Trembley knew how to play me, how to manipulate me into doing just such an asinine thing as spying on an old lady.

Then the light came again and I forgot all about my moral concerns.

This area floods occasionally. The rain comes down in the hills surrounding it and flows into town, gathering mass and mud, until the streets are tiny rivers. Nobody tends to get hurt, but if your house isn’t propped up off that soggy ground, you’ll pay for it with all kinds of water damage.

So, like most houses around here, Elnora’s place hovered a good eighteen inches above the dirt, supported by metal poles sunk deep into the earth. Besides keeping it safe from the floods, this meant her house, like mine, lacked a basement. There weren’t any windows along the foundation or cellar doors. Instead, there was only a lattice of wood, once whitewashed but now chipped and grey and brown.

It was from behind this, deep below the floor of Elnora’s house, that the light poured. At first, I thought it was fire. The light wasn’t steady and the colors flowed from red to orange to yellow and then blue. I turned off my television and killed the rest of the lights in the living room. I wanted to be able to see what was happening without the pollution of my own glare.

The lights wavered under there, bright enough to illuminate most of her lawn. They sure as hell weren’t fireworks and, the more I watched, the more I realized they weren’t from a fire, either. At least not the kind of fire that gives off smoke and consumes wood lattice. No, these were just lights, like the shifting glow of a fake fireplace.

What the hell was that crazy broad up to?

After ten minutes, without any secession of the light show, I decided to go find out. I went outside, onto my front porch, locking the door behind me. I walked slowly across the street. The night was hot, but none of the heat came from the display under her house.

The windows of her house were dark. The first pulse, the one that had come from behind that now dark glass, must have been only a preface to the display going on under Elnora’s house.

And what a crazy, confounding display it was. I stood on the narrow strip of dirt between the street and Elnora’s front lawn. Even from this distance — less than a lawn dart throw to the side of her house — I couldn’t feel any heat on my skin. I tried to look in the front windows, not wanting Elnora to see me prowling in her yard, but they remained dark. I was sufficiently illuminated, however, to be sure the old broad would have no trouble seeing me from behind those black panes of glass.

I crept closer. When I stood roughly my own height away from the lattice, nearer the side of the house than to Elnora’s front door, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled across the grass to peer through the holes in the wood, into the undercarriage of the house.

The dirt underneath was packed hard, its smoothness unbroken by rockets, sticks, or trash. But it was far from empty.

At regular intervals, starting on the left hand side of the house and continuing in even rows, front to back, nearly two thirds of the way across the foundation, were bowling ball sized crystals. From these the light poured. The shifting colors I’d noticed earlier came from the differences in hue of each crystal and the way the light from each ebbed and flowed. The glare was too bright for me to make out any detail on the objects, but from this distance they looked like goddamn snow globes or the seeing stones witches keep in fairy tales.

Toward the back of the house, on the left side, the lattice had been pulled way in a strip a few feet wide. Crouching, I ran around the corner of Elnora’s place and bent down to stick my head through the opening. I recognize the stupidity of doing so, but at the time I was fascinated by what I saw. You live across the street from such a miserable and boring woman for as many years as I have and nearly anything out of the ordinary will catch your interest. Shit as strange as this, though, cast all consideration for personal safety from my mind. Elnora Prideaux was up to something exceedingly odd indeed, and there was just no way I’d pass it up — even if I hadn’t been obligated to take a peek by my agreement with Deputy Neblett.

Having my head poked through the hole didn’t get me a great deal closer to the crystals. If I wanted to see them in any detail, I’d have to push the rest of the way through.

Which I did, and crawled until I was only a couple of feet from one of the glowing globes. Up close, I saw it wasn’t a sphere as I originally thought. No, the crystal was shaped, carved or molded with great care. That the precision had gone toward fashioning a shape so macabre, however, had me wondering if the old lady was even more out of her goddamn gourd than I’d previously thought.

The crystal bore the distinct likeness of a human head.

I stared, unsure of what to do. Deciding I needed to investigate further, I crawled along to the next crystal and found it to be the same. Elnora had four rows of glowing human heads, five in the first three rows and two in the last.

I had turned to leave this odd display and return to my house to call Deputy Neblett or Sheriff Trembley when one of the heads moved. I stopped and looked again. It could have just been the shifting light.

But no. As I inched closer, the head, the second of two in the back row, turned slowly toward me. The dirt around it cracked and tumbled, and dust puffed into the still air.

I stopped breathing. My heart pounded against my ribs. The head turned until it faced me. Still unable to move, I watched as its mouth opened and closed. The dents where eyes would’ve been shrunk down. It squinted at me. Then the mouth came open again into a wide scream.

Yet there was no sound, just the smooth depression in the crystal, held in an O.

My wits returned. I crawled as fast as I could to the opening the lattice and out onto the lawn. I stood to run before I’d made it all the way out, scratching my back against the lower rim of Elnora’s house. I sprinted, across her property and onto the street, onto my yard, up the stairs, and, after madly fumbling for my keys, back into my house.

I pushed the door closed behind me, locked it, and shoved the dead bolt into place. I panted, leaning against the door, before getting up the nerve to take another look at Elnora’s house.

The glow was quickly fading. But before it went out, the lights in Elnora’s house came on and she opened her front door, peered out into the night, and then slammed it shut.

I picked up the phone and dialed the police main line, thinking I should call Trembley direct, but not not knowing his number, not having time to look it up.

Because the young recruits get stuck with the crap shifts and because it was getting on ten o’clock, Deputy Neblett answered.

I shouted at him. “You get your damn ass over here, you hear me? That crazy bitch is up to something way beyond lights and fireworks.”

“Clint?” Neblett said. “That you, Clint? What you hootin’ and hollerin’ about? You see something over at that house?”

“See something? Jesus, did I ever see something.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me, Clint. But don’t go screaming like that. I can hardly hear you ’cause of it.”

I took a deep breath. “She’s got heads, Neblett. Big crystal heads. In rows, under her house. They’re the things doing all the glowing and fussing up the neighbors.”

“Heads?”

“Rows of ‘em.” I tried to remember how many. “Four rows, I think. Five heads in all but the last one, which had just two.”

“You’re saying old lady Prideaux has heads under her house, Clint? Because, Clinton, that sounds mighty crazy — ”

“Shut up and listen, deputy. Elnora Prideaux has five rows of crystal heads, sticking up out of the ground under that damn shack of hers, and the things got to glowing tonight. That’s how I found them. Crawled right under there — ”

“You crawled under her house?”

“Right under it. And those heads moved. At least one of them did. Turned and looked right at me and tried to talk.”

“Oh, now, Clinton, you’re not making any sense. They aren’t real heads, you said so yourself. Fake heads don’t talk — unless they’re robot heads. Were they robot heads, Clint?”

I wished I had a beer. I wished I had something a good deal stronger than a beer and that I was talking to Sheriff Trembley instead of the great, inane Deputy Neblett. I had to settle for taking another deep breath. “I’d recognize if they were robot heads, Deputy. If they had little lights and speakers for mouths and shit like that, I’d have recognized it. These were crystal heads. Do they make robots out of crystal?”

“I don’t know what folks make robots out of, Clint. But I suppose they might.”

“They weren’t robots, Deputy.”

He started to say something, but stopped. I heard him hum into the phone. Neblett probably didn’t realize he was doing it. I let him finish. “Clint?” he said, eventually. “I think Ms. Prideaux may be up to something over at that place of hers.”

“Yes, Deputy Neblett, I imagine that is true.”

“So here’s what I’m going to do, Clint. I’m going to hang up the phone with you right here and I’m going to have a talk about it with the Sheriff. He’ll know what to do. Then I’ll call you back and tell you what we’ll be doing about it.”

I rolled my eyes. “I look forward to your call, Deputy.”

“Talk to you soon, Clint.” He hung up.

“Sure thing, Deputy,” I said into the dead line. Who knew how long it’d take Trembley and Neblett to figure out a plan? And what were the chances that, when they did, it’d amount to a knock on Elnora’s door and a kindly request to look under her house, if you don’t mind, ma’am? I’d have been keen to wait for them to get their shit together, except that Elnora was spooked. She’d come to the door and looked outside. She knew something was up. And that meant, if she had any sense left in her ancient and dusty brain, she’d clear up that craziness in the dirt beneath her floor and say to those officers when they showed up, “Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about, boys, but it sure is hot out, so why don’t the two of you come in for some lemonade and gingersnaps?”

I had to go back over there and I had to do it soon. Neblett was probably wrong about those heads being robots. Who kept robots under their house, anyway? But that didn’t answer the question of just what the hell the heads were, or what made them to glow. I’d been a cop in this town for all of my adult life. The force doesn’t leave you, even after you retire. And what do cops do but poke around in people’s business, making sure that business doesn’t harm the other folks that cop is sworn to protect?

Who knew the shit Elnora might be into? Could be she likes to keep crystal heads under her house the way some people like to leave their Christmas lights up all year. Could be those things were worth some money, were antiques from the Old World, and batty old Elnora figured having them buried in the dirt was the best means to keep them safe from kids who might break into her place looking for some easy cash.

I could accept all that, because when you’re an officer of the law in a small town like this for as long as I was, you get used to folks doing the wackiest shit imaginable. It goes with the territory. Around here, people talk about the city like it’s where the odd ones go, while the sensible, salt-of-the-earth types stay around because they know how good the simple life is for the health and disposition. But spend a lifetime policing those salt-of-the-earth types and you get to know the truth: most of them are more crazy than the city folks could dream of being — and their craziness runs deep into the family stock.

But even knowing all that, I couldn’t leave Elnora alone. Crystal heads is one thing. Crystal heads that move and try to talk is quite another.

This time I took my goddamn gun.

She’d turned off her lights. No glow came from under the house. I went back outside. This time, however, I walked a hundred feet down the street before crossing over to Elnora’s side. Once across the road, I kept going up the hill, until I was within the line of trees. Then I trudged in the direction of Elnora’s house, gun held down at my side. I wanted to approach her place from the rear. I didn’t want her to see me coming. The woods stank of wet leaves and rot and somewhere a bobcat screamed.

I gave up a lot when I retired: the camaraderie of the force, the authority of a badge. I enjoyed my time as sheriff and, on lonely days, I missed the thrill when the station phone rang — even if it only brought news of a kid shoplifting or a drunk woman yelling at people from the middle of Main Street. But one thing I did not miss, one thing I could easily do without, was trudging around in the woods at night. I hate the cold and the damp and I hate hearing animals I can’t see.

I stopped when I saw the back of Elnora’s house through the trees. Still no light came from it, whether above or below, and so I hunched down and scampered across the grass. A tipped over birdbath lay near a strip of wooden fence that stretched only ten feet back from the right side of the house before ending in a series of progressively smaller broken planks. She had a shopping cart next to the steps that lead to her back door and a plastic liner for a pond resting near a shallow hole that someone had started digging but never finished.

Right in the middle of it all, a dark lump a little higher than my knees, lay the entrance to a storm cellar, its double doors closed but not locked or chained.

None of us who lived out in these parts had storm cellars. The ground was too full of rocks and roots to make digging them sensible. So what was this entrance doing out here?

I crouched even lower, trying to make myself small enough that the squat entrance would block the sightline from the back windows. If I was going into whatever lay beyond those doors, I didn’t want Elnora to see me do it.

One of the two doors had warped with time, leaving a half inch opening between its bottom corner and the frame. I transferred my gun to my other hand and slipped my fingers under the wood. The door came open easier than I expected. I lifted it enough to stick my head in.

I saw nothing but darkness beyond. I put the gun in my belt and took out the tiny emergency flashlight I keep clipped to my wallet. Turning it on, I could make out a set of steps descending to a dirt floor. I shoved the door open the rest of the way and climbed slowly down the steps into the darkness.

My questions about why she’d go digging a cellar were answered as soon as I reached the bottom. This wasn’t a manmade shelter at all, but a cave, with the storm cellar opening covering its natural entrance. The floor was stone and packed dirt, the walls rock. They had the smooth, organic look of limestone deposited across countless eons by dripping water. My minuscule light only illuminated small parts of the cave at a time, forcing me to stumble forward, sweeping the flashlight from side to side in hope of seeing any obstacle before wandering into it.

The cave appeared to run in the direction of Elnora’s house. I followed it, wondering if I’d end up underneath her place — and thus under the glowing heads themselves. I had no idea what I’d find. My heart beat faster and I began to sweat. The air of the cave felt slick going down my throat and into my lungs.

The cave was shorter than I expected. After only a dozen yards, it came to an end, the walls narrowing until they merged in a cluster of bulbous stone, with my head only half a foot from the ceiling.

I turned around, looking back in the direction I’d come. But I’d closed the cellar door behind me when I climbed down, so no moonlight made it inside. I glanced back to the wall, shining my light over its surface. Why have a empty room like this? Was it only to provide shelter? I couldn’t believe that. Not with what I’d seen under Elnora’s house.

My hunch was right. Rising no more than two feet from the floor in the spot where the walls converged, rocks had been stacked to cover an opening. I walked toward it and bent down, playing my light around the stones. Behind lay a corridor continuing toward Elnora’s house.

I grabbed a rock and pulled up, only to stagger back, almost falling over. It weighed next to nothing. What I’d taken for rock was actually painted foam. It was a prop, a goddamn fake stone. I laughed. Elnora was an old bitch, for sure, and so it only made sense she’d hide her passageway behind something she could move herself.

Clearing the entrance took no time. Once through, I pulled all the foam stones back into place behind me. When I pointed my light along the length of the tunnel, I saw that I was no longer in a natural cave. Wooden planks held back the earth around me and, half a dozen yards ahead, I could see that Elnora in fact did have a genuine basement.

I inched forward, not comfortable with so much dirt and rock pressed in close around me, until I made it to the tunnel’s end. And it was there, lying on the floor and staring up into the subterranean room, that I realized that heads above ground meant bodies underneath.

In neat rows, along the ceiling of the basement that looked to be exactly the size of Elnora’s house, hung people. Some men, some women, all filthy with torn clothes and bare feet. Their shoes made a pile in one corner.

I stood up and ran to the nearest body, a woman, her arms limp at her sides, and dressed in a powder blue sun dress. Her head vanished into a neat hole cut in the dirt of the ceiling. I shined my light in after it. Starting just above her shoulders, the skin grew pale, then white, and then faded away to nothing, replaced by the same clear crystal I’d seen above. I felt ill.

A look at the other bodies revealed more of the same: crystal above the neck, flesh below, with ragged clothes and no shoes. What the hell was this? Where had these people come from? Elnora couldn’t have done it all herself. Even lifting one of the smaller women up to the ceiling would be too much for her — as would dragging them under the house and lowering them from above. Elnora had help.

I’d decided that it was time to head home and place a call to the station when I heard the bang of the storm cellar doors falling open and the noise of someone coming down the steps. I looked around. The basement room only had a single exit: back through the tunnel and into the cave. I had to find somewhere to hide.

I ran over to the pile of shoes. There were countless more here than could be accounted for by the folks hanging from the ceiling. How many had come before them? And what happened to the bodes discarded to make room for these new ones?

I dug into the pile, pushing shoes out of the way until I’d made a space large enough to hold me, and then pulling them back over myself. When this was finished, I pushed out with my fingers, making an opening so I could see the tunnel entrance. I prayed whoever was coming wouldn’t inspect the shoe pile closely. Anything more than a casual glance would give me away.

I had to wait only a minute or two before a light appeared at the tunnel entrance, followed by the son-in-law holding a flashlight, and then Elnora Prideaux herself. They stood and dusted themselves off. Elnora setup a portable lantern she’d brought. The light was bright enough to make seeing them easy, but not so bright that they’d have a good look at my hiding place.

Elnora whispered something to her companion and he nodded. The two walked slowly along the rows of bodies, inspecting their inventory. Elnora passed within six feet of me, but didn’t look in my direction.

When they were done, she and her son-in-law meet back at the middle of the room and again conferred in whispers. The only word I could make out, one they both used several times, was “ripe.”

The man — I never had learned his name — pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and bent near the floor. He began to draw. From such a low angle, I couldn’t make out much of it, but he started with a large circle and then filled its center with details. Elnora stood and watched him, arms crossed over her chest.

It took him ten minutes to finish. Then they knelt on opposite sides of the circle, just outside the line of chalk, Elnora closest to me. She coughed and started singing. A moment later, her son-in-law joined her.

The song was somewhere between a hum and a chant, and made me think of Gregorian monks — though neither of these two sounded as good. If there were words in the chant, I couldn’t understand them. The town has a lot of Germans, but this wasn’t German. The language was older, the sounds more guttural and primordial. I suddenly felt cold under the shoes.

I quickly forgot my discomfort, however. A good fifteen minutes into their song, the ground started to shake. My immediate thought was that the vibrations would dislodge my obscuring pile and I’d be given away. But neither Elnora nor her son-in-law were paying any attention. Both had their heads down and I could see that the man had his eyes closed.

Then the floor fell away. Starting in the center of the chalk circle and growing outward, the ground crumbled and collapsed. A great pit opened and a smell wafted out, like mushrooms and stagnant water and rancid meat. I covered my mouth, forcing down a gag.

Elnora and her companion sat still, chanting, eyes closed, their faces directed at the pit.

It was then that events occurred that forever changed the way I looked at the world and at my ignorance of its true nature. There is a great deal about this existence that we don’t understand. I lived through the sixties and seventies and paid enough attention to the counter-culture to pick up on that. The notion had always made me shrug, however. Who cares, really, whether we’re here or just projections of the Buddha? What does it matter if truth is eternal? I had a job to do and bills to pay and a house to take care of. I had a life to live. You want to turn on, tune in, and drop out, that’s fine by me.

But now, watching what came out of that pit, I had to admit that maybe the hippies had a point. If this was what the world had to offer us, it stood to reason that we should try to figure it out. I mean, I’d lived decades with this thing perhaps only a field goal length away from where I ate and shit and slept.

Arms came out of the pit. They were the colors of human flesh, some black, some white, some yellow or red. They were mottled with birthmarks and sores and all were scrawny, without any fat. But they weren’t all human arms. Elnora didn’t just keep people down in that hole. No, among the regular, unmonstrous arms and hands slapping and clawing and pulling at the edges of the pit rose new arms, at least ten feet long each and riddled with elbow joints, one every six inches or so. Some elbows bent in one direction, some in another, causing the arms to writhe and twist like snakes. At the end of each was a large sucker, its circumference rimmed with fingers, which reached out, stretching toward the bodies in the twin rows.

One of the suckers grabbed hold of the foot of a man hanging from the ceiling. The fingers crawled over his toes and up his ankle, the sucker swallowing as it went. I could see the arm bulge as it consumed its meal. When it reached the man’s knee, his other leg started kicking and his hands flew up to his neck. He pushed against the ceiling, trying to free himself.

He was alive. That awful truth descended on me.

These crystal-headed people still lived.

I stood up, shoving away the shoes, and pulled my gun from my pocket. I waved it, my back against the wall, and shouted at the two figures crouched by the circle to stop, to make it all stop. Neither looked at me. Neither moved.

The pit’s other enormous arms found their own bodies to attach to and devour. I saw with horror that the arms were not swallowing the whole of each person, but stopped when they reached the crotch. It was then that the arms began sucking, their flesh undulating in great waves. As they nursed on their victims, the crystalline discoloration of the flesh flowed slowly down the captives’ necks, across their shoulders, and down their chests. Everything — flesh and clothing — lost its opacity and turned clear as glass. Where the crystal was exposed, light poured forth. This was the glow I’d seen from my front windows — this was the display that had brought Deputy Neblett to my door.

I took a step toward the old woman, my gun aimed at the middle of her back. “You crazy bitch,” I said to her. “What the hell are you doing, you old crazy bitch?”

This time she did notice me. Elnora turned her head and stared at the gun. Then she lifted her eyes to my face and gave the barest hint of a smile. “Oh, Herbert?” she said. “Herbert, darling, would you take care of Mr. Varn?”

Elnora’s son-in-law, Herbert, pushed himself off the ground. “Uh huh, Ms. Prideaux,” he said. “I got him. You keep on.” He started around the circle toward me.

I moved my gun from Elnora to him. “Don’t move,” I shouted. “You stay right where you are.”

He laughed. “Oh, mister, you in big trouble.”

The arms continued to suck. On the body across the room from me, the crystal had descended nearly to the waist and the glow flooded the basement as bright as a noon day. Soon the glare would make it difficult to see at all.

Herbert kept coming, ignoring the heaving arms and their victims. He had to duck under a fat appendage as he rounded the side of the pit.

“Stop,” I said.

He didn’t. I shot him, the bullet taking Herbert high on his chest. But he didn’t fall. He didn’t even stumble. And the wound failed to bleed. Instead, light erupted from the hole in his shirt.

I stumbled backwards until I felt the wall pressed against me. Elnora was still kneeling and Herbert was only a couple yards away. I fired again, aiming for his head this time, and the bullet struck where I wanted it. But again there was no physical reaction from Herbert and again the wound didn’t bleed. Where the bullet hit, Herbert’s flesh cracked and fell away in a spiderweb pattern covering the whole of the right side of his face. Under the flesh was only more crystal and more light.

The arms had nearly completed their meals. The glare from the captives hurt my eyes. I rushed past Herbert and at Elnora, still kneeling before the rift, and kicked her in the middle of her back. She flailed, trying to steady herself — but she was small and frail and I wasn’t. Elnora Prideaux tumbled, screamed, and fell into the pit.

Immediately, one of the arms detached from the body on which it had fed, and whipped around to follow her down. I heard no thud, no sound of impact, nothing that would indicate Elnora had hit bottom — just a sudden end to her scream and a cacophony of clicks, like thousands of fingers snapping at once.

Herbert called her name and fell to his knees. He looked down at the pit, staring into the black where his mother-in-law had gone. I ran at him, hoping to repeat the attack that had been so effective against the old woman.

Herbert saw me coming and spun to meet me, his shoulder catching me in the stomach as he rose. I grunted, but managed to grab his head. The crystal side was slick and he twisted in my grip. I shoved, digging my feet into the dirt of the floor, driving him backwards toward the pit.

Herbert fought me and, for a moment, I thought he would succeed — but then the will left him. He stared up at the ceiling and let his weight carry him down. As he fell, Herbert smiled. “I’m coming,” he said. “Mother, I’m coming.” I didn’t know if he meant Elnora Prideaux — or the thing in the pit.

Herbert vanished into the dark and the arms, sated, broke from their meals. They writhed briefly in the air before following him back into the hole. The light from the bodies faded.

I sat down, coughing. Some minutes later, I managed the courage to look over the edge. But there was nothing: only emptiness with no bottom.

I left the room then, crawling back through the passage into the cave and climbing the steps until I was again in Elnora’s backyard.

I walked across the street to my house, let myself in, and picked up the phone to call Sheriff Trembley.

Old Lady Prideaux’s Terrible Menagerie was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Helix

A cyberpunk detective story.

She looked at me in a soon-to-be-emotional way that meant I should get to the point as quickly as possible.

“Those are my fees,” I said. “I’m not flexible regarding them and I expect to be paid on time.”

She nodded and inhaled through her nose, a wet, stuffy sound made more pathetic by the tears. I didn’t have a Kleenex to give her.

I continued, “Mrs. Wynett, I’m aware this is difficult for you.”

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

I looked at her without speaking. She wore an outfit out of the latest fashion feed: ribbons of bioluminescent fabric hung from a plastic ring around her neck, covering nothing and pulsing colors in a caricature of chromed reflections. Her skirt was barely opaque and pale green, veined with darker shades. She looked like a flower gone to seed.

I nodded. “You might be right. But this is my job and I deal with situations like this every day. So while I may lack your subjective awareness, I certainly have a keen objective grasp of the in’s and out’s.”

“I’m beginning to not like you, Detective Pegg.”

“You don’t have to like me,” I said. “You’re hiring me to find your husband, not replace him.”

I think she would’ve slapped me if she’d been close enough. Instead, she sat up straighter and crossed her arms, grabbing her elbows. “You must find it difficult to keep clients if you say things like that to all of them.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I mean it. I added, “That was out of line.”

“It was.” She hugged herself tighter. “I’m willing to put it behind me, though. I need to find my husband, Detective.”

“I’ll do my best. It’s a big city. I can’t make any promises but — ”

“Is there some sort of refund if you don’t find him?”

Normally I’d say no, but I still felt bad and didn’t want to lose the client. “Fifteen percent. But that’s only if I decide to call it quits, not if you just think I’m taking too long.”

She reached for her purse. “I assume you don’t make a habit of dragging out investigations?”

“No. I’m honest, Mrs. Wynett.”

“I do hope so.” She pulled out her credit card and handed it to me. “Please take the retainer. I’d appreciate it if you’d begin immediately.”

I took my card out of my wallet, pressed it against hers, and thumbed the amount. “Of course,” I said. “My client list’s thin right now. I’ll start some digging tonight.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. I liked it and said so.

“You’re here to find my husband,” she reminded me. Mrs. Wynett stood, turned around, and left my office, the door banging shut behind her.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. A moth flew from the top of a shelf and got caught in the currents of the fan mounted at the center of the room. It moved in tight circles for a dozen revolutions and then broke free, fluttering down a helix path. It immediately returned to the fan.

I opened a window, waved my arms, and after much trial and error, guided the moth out.

I looked at the clock. 3:30. I palmed my desk into phone mode and rang up Wendell Nest at the police department. His smooth, baled, brown face — like an old boxer’s — appeared in an eight-by-eight square next to my coffee mug.

“Pegg. Good to see you.”

“Hey, Wendell. I need access to the citizen DB.”

“Is this for a case?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Good. I had to ask. Procedure.”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll send you a temporary access code.”

“Thanks.” I reached over to hang up.

“It was good to hear from you, Ian.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Nest said, “Good luck,” and hung up before my hand hit the button.

I finished my coffee while I waited for the code. The desk beeped its arrival a couple of minutes later. I loaded up the DB, fed in the sequence of numbers Nest had sent me, and entered Robert Wynett’s name.

His picture loaded in the upper left corner and text began to fill in the space around it. I told myself to remember to renew my speech synth subscription soon.

Robert Wynett was a thin man in his mid-thirties. His Past Grievances Amendment registration photo was a couple of years old and showed him with wavy brown hair of the sort that can only come naturally and the sharp features of health and low body fat. He looked like someone I’d probably like.

His CV said he was currently employed by Accelerated Conduction, Inc. at a fifty-eighth story research park nine miles from the coast. The salary listed was higher than I’d expected but made sense in light of the clothes his wife had been wearing. Her name was listed under the heading “Spouse” and next to it was “unemployed.”

Wynett’s criminal record was short and boring. He’d been busted a decade ago for sex with a minor just before it had been made legal. It said he had begun the process of getting registered as an offender, but his lawyer had argued him out of it.

There was nothing to explain his sudden disappearance.

I pushed my chair back from the desk and stood. Then I quickly sat back down, looked for, and keyed Wynett’s mobile number. It rang eight times before someone picked up. In the background I could hear club music, a polyrhythmic thumping and the hiss of synthesized exhaust.

“Hello?” I said.

I got nothing for several seconds, just the music and, once, people shouting. Then: “And you are?” The voice had the strange modulations of heavy drug use.

“My name’s Ian Pegg. Is this Robert Wynett?”

Another few seconds went by before he responded, “Not anymore.”

“Mr. Wynett, I’m a detective. I was hired by your wife — ”

“She’s dead to me,” Wynett said.

“That may well be, sir, but she’d like me to find you. And I guess I sort of have. And, frankly, that has me a little confused.”

Wynett coughed. I heard him take a drink. He said, “I’m tired, Ian. I’m going to hang up.”

“Wait! Just one phone call, Mr. Wynett, that’s all I had to do. Why couldn’t she have done that?”

Robert Wynett killed the connection and I stood up for the second time, grabbed my coat, and left the office.

Outside the humidity was spiking. The beach just east of my building was covered with people holding what looked like a body mod festival, and the monolithic shadows of the cell generators half-a-mile out to sea cut the crowd into bands of light and dark.

I hailed a cab and gave the Native American woman behind the wheel Rebecca Wynett’s home address. As we drove, I thought about what I’d say. I couldn’t spook her; that was important. I couldn’t show her the same confusion I’d expressed to her husband. The more I thought about it, the less I was sure exactly why I was on the way to her apartment.

I hadn’t made any progress by the time the cab stopped. I got out and dug in my pocket for my card to tip. The woman pointed at the union policies sticker on the windshield and shook her head. I shrugged and put the card away.

The Wynetts were in the third-mile middle class: rich enough to avoid the worst of the humidity but not yet able to afford a lawn. I was as jealous as I usually get in these neighborhoods.

Their building rose a hundred stories, the windows tinted, the plastic between black and greasily reflective. I stretched my neck, looking up. The last quarter of the floors faded into the low clouds. Against the soft haze, the shadows of dehumidifier ports looked like bicycle tires.

I was buzzed in and rode up in the elevator. The Wynetts’ door was the forth along the hall. I rang the bell. A red light flashed on at eye level, switched to green, and the door opened.

Rebecca Wynett had changed her clothes to a more modest corset that rose just high enough to horizontally bisect her nipples, leaving red half circles on pale skin over the jade satin, like the bizarre double negative of an ocean sunset.

I accepted the drink she offered and sat down on the couch after draping my coat over a large, grey cushion. Mrs. Wynett sat on the floor in front of me, her legs crossed, and looked up at me.

“You haven’t decided to drop my case already, have you?”

I shook my head. “No. In fact, I’ve had a break. A big one.”

She crinkled her brow, confused. “I only spoke with you an hour ago. That seems quite fast.”

“I called him.”

“What?”

“I looked up your husband’s record in the citizens database to see if maybe there was anything that might help. There wasn’t, but as a ‘what the hell?’ I called the personal number listed. And your husband picked up.” I leaned back to wait for a reaction. I didn’t get much of one.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t try that? I did. Of course I did. I’ve called him constantly since he went missing. He hasn’t picked up for me.” Her voice got quieter. “Perhaps he doesn’t wish to speak to me.”

“Actually, Mrs. Wynett, I was just passing on information. There wasn’t any question implied.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m on edge.”

“I imagine,” I said.

“What did he say?”

“Not much. He sounded high and he was drinking.”

“Where was he?”

“I can’t be sure. I think he was in a club. Or some other place with lots of people and loud music.”

“Robert doesn’t go to clubs,” she told me.

“Mrs. Wynett, I think it’s a good bet he didn’t know where he was.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

I raised an eyebrow and continued, “He said he was tired and when I asked if this was Robert Wynett, he said ‘Not anymore.’”

That startled her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, her voice rising.

“Means he was high. As a kite or a trans. That’s my guess.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Mission hasn’t changed. But the circumstances have. A little. In light of recent events,” I said and sipped my drink for effect, “I’m thinking he doesn’t want or need to be found.”

She stood up and shuddered. “That is not acceptable.”

“How long has he been missing?” I asked.

“A week.”

“Right. A week. We know he’s alive. Why don’t you just wait this out? Wait another week. See if he comes home. Give him some time. He probably just needs to sulk for a while.”

“I’m paying you.”

“And I’ll give you a refund. Don’t waste your money on an investigation that it looks like you don’t need.”

“I’ll double it.”

This time I was startled.

“I’ll pay you twice your asking price,” she said, “and all I ask is that you find him. You don’t even need to bring him home if he doesn’t want that.”

“I couldn’t do that anyway,” I said. “But, Mrs. Wynett, are you sure you want to do this? I mean, the money’d be nice and I’m loath to turn it down, but why don’t you just call him again yourself? Maybe he’ll pick up. If he doesn’t, call him from a public terminal. Hell, you can call him from my phone, you want.”

“No,” she said, walking over to the table by the door and picking up her purse, “No, I’d rather that you do it. I feel more comfortable that way.”

I shrugged. “Okay. It’s your tab.” I set down my drink and got up. “I’ll track him down. You want an image or just my word that I found him and talked to him?”

She hand me her card. “You can record it if it’s not too much trouble, but your word will suffice.”

I charged her my usual deposit for the second time and gave the card back. She took it and made brief eye contact, her face flashing some expression I couldn’t make. I smiled and somehow tried to nod and shrug at the same time. I probably looked like an idiot.

“I’ll call you if I find out anything more,” I said.

Rebecca Wynett thanked me and walked me to the door, her hand pressed lightly between my shoulder blades.

In the hall on the way to the elevator, I passed a short man — a gaudy sculpt — standing with his back to a ficus. He was engaged in a telepresence meeting, his hands gesturing and occasionally typing. As I got close, he stopped talking and looked at me, grinning with teeth like a ferret. Before I could say anything, he plunged back into his long distance conversation.

I slid my glasses down from the top of my head, indexed the guy, and set a spider to find out more about him. It was bound to be a waste but the CPU cycles were just sitting there.

The elevator ride down was quiet, twenty-six floors going by with only the calming blink of the progress indicator. The rent in the place must’ve been high to be so conspicuously spam-free.

My phone rang as I stepped out into the lobby.

“Pegg.”

“Ian, it’s Wendell.” He sounded borderline upset.

“What’s up?”

“You didn’t mess with anything while you were in the database, did you?”

I was almost to the doors. I stopped. “No. What do you mean?”

“I mean, the data you looked up, the logs show you accessed it, checked it out for a little while, and then deleted it.”

“I can’t delete it.” The elevator behind me dinged. I turned around and saw the gaudy sculpt step out. He smiled again, with just as many teeth.

Nest was saying, “I know. At least, you shouldn’t be able to delete anything.” He paused. “You can’t, can you?”

“I said I couldn’t.” The guy walked by me, close. I could smell disinfectant. I pulled down my glasses again.

“You haven’t paid anyone to up your access? Dicks do that — ”

“Hey, Wendell, I send you a shot of a guy, can you look it up for me real quick?”

“Yeah, sure. But we gotta talk about this, Ian.”

“We will. Just do this for me.” I sent him the index flag I’d already made and did another one as the guy went out the doors. Sometimes a rear view could bring up something a front shot missed.

“Huh,” Nest said after a half-minute pause. “System shows he’s a standard. There’re thousands just like him out there.”

“A standard? It’s kinda ugly for that.”

“No accounting for taste. But — Can you do a remote print on him?”

“No, I don’t have the equipment with me.”

“Okay. With a stock genome, visual’s not going to give us much. But I’ll run it anyway.” Nest paused. “Ian, seriously, you didn’t delete Robert Wynett’s information?”

I sighed loud enough for him to hear. “I’m gonna keep saying ‘no’ and you’re only gonna like it less and less the more you ask.”

“I know. Sorry. I trust you but this type of thing the department has to look into. If it turns out you were involved, I’m the one who gets fined, demoted, or fired.”

“I wasn’t. But I’ll look into it. Don’t worry.”

“Great. Keep your phone on. I’ll get a hold of you if the department starts getting pushy.” He hung up.

I pushed open the doors and left Rebecca Wynett’s apartment building. I put on my hat and thought about food.

The neighborhood was too upscale to support the sort of thriving street vendor economy that kept everyone with a couple of bucks well fed on my block. After some looking, I found a little Cantonese dive and told the remote waiter I wanted something with noodles in it. When the food showed up, I ate slowly, doing research on Wynett and Accelerated Conduction between each spoonful.

The studying didn’t net me much. Back in my office at a little after six o’clock, I decided to go with another approach.

My search through the ad feed backlogs yielded two results. The song I’d heard in the background had been used in an ad-synchronized feed bought by a club in the north end at the same time I’d been talking to Wynett. Another place, this one only a mile or so up the coast, had bought the same feed.

I went with the closer one first.

It was a small joint, more a bar than a club, and they didn’t charge me cover when I pushed through the heavy red door. The walls in the little entrance hummed. I felt a tickling, the hairs on my arms shifting around, like I had walked under high power cables. The weapons scan finished, a speaker over my head beeped twice, and the child-sized gate in front of me slid to one side.

The red of the door continued inside. The walls were padded and dimpled in a two foot grid where the fabric was attached to the concrete behind it. The ceiling was low and pulsed in a hellish chessboard pattern. I walked past the small and nearly empty dance floor and over to the bar. Behind it stood a short man with orange skin and grey stripes tattooed down his cheeks. “Yeah?” he said.

“I’m looking for a guy.” I held up Wynett’s picture.

The bartender looked at it, rubbed his chin, said: “I ain’t see him.”

“This afternoon, maybe?”

“Lot of people come in here. Post-lunch rush. Most of ’em don’t stand out like you.”

I laughed. “It’s obvious?”

He shrugged. “You police? Or private?”

“Private,” I said. “This guy, he would’ve been in around three, three-thirty.” I looked around. “He was at a place playing some band called ‘Shapelessness and the Thick.’ He got cut off but he sounded in bad shape. So I’m trying to find him, make sure there isn’t any trouble.”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“Okay, sure.” I put the picture of Robert Wynett back in my pocket. “Sorry to take up your time.”

The bartender waved his hand at the empty bar and said, “I got nothing but time. Still, you’re sorry, maybe you could buy a drink?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” I sat down. “I’ll take a light beer. Whatever you have on tap.”

I drank my beer quietly. When I’d finished, I thanked the bartender and went outside to hail a cab.

The inside of the second club was like the skin of a frog; deep greens and browns waved across the smooth surfaces and blended into each other or were lost in the high gloss reflections from the bioluminescent tapestries that hung as gauzy divides. I guessed there were a couple hundred people dancing, drinking, or flirting and a lot of them, in that warm light, could’ve been Robert Wynett.

Wynett’s lack of prior felonies meant he wasn’t tagged, so even if I had access to the tracking system, I wouldn’t have been able to find him that way.

A large man was standing by a gate in the steel cage that separated the entrance from the club proper. He looked bored, yawning twice in the time it took me to cross the distance from the door to his station. It was still early enough that there wasn’t much of a line.

When I got up to him, he pointed a meaty finger at the card scanner on a pedestal next to his leg and looked at me with complete detachment. I pulled out my ID and scrolled through it to my licensed investigator badge. The bouncer wasn’t impressed.

“You gotta pay if you wanna get in,” he said.

His voice had clearly been augmented to carry over the music.

I leaned in close to respond. “I’m looking for someone.”

He nodded, his blue hair staying in place like the top of a moving spring. “Customers only.”

I took my cash card out of my pocket, scanned it, and walked past him through the metal gate.

This place was much classier than the first, the clientele dressed in the latest fashions, the sort that put more emphasis on the flow of clean lines than the covering of skin. It was a good thing it rarely got cold; most of them would freeze before they could flag a taxi home.

I found the bar: a huge, a sweeping curve of creamy, transparent plastic with lights moving like fish along its surface.

I waved down one of the dozen bartenders and showed him Wynett’s picture. He didn’t know, but called over a couple of his coworkers to give a second and third opinion. One of them nodded, said, “I think he’s here, back through there in one of the private rooms,” pointing off to my left, and then asked if I wanted a drink. I said no, thanked him, and wandered through the crowd.

The third room, behind a glowing curtain, held what I was looking for.

Robert Wynett was thinner than his picture had shown. If he was lucky, he was a hundred-and-fifteen pounds and most of the weight seemed to be exhaustion. He had his back to me as he sat alone at a table for two and he rocked smoothly from side to side, shrugging his shoulders in the middle of each cycle.

“I ain’t goin’ home,” he said and I thought maybe he knew I was there. But it turned out to just be the first line of a chorus as he continued, “No, I AIN’T goin’ home! Not EH-ver!” He clapped his hands together and, as I came around the side of his chair, reached forward for a drink with both palms touching at the wrists, like he was grabbing a hot mug of cocoa.

“Mr. Wynett?” I said and he started, dropping the heavy tumbler, sloshing a few drops of something clear and probably cheap and probably strong.

Wynett looked at me. He said, “I said, on the phone — ” His right eye blinked with each syllable.

“I’m not here to take you home.” I sat down in the chair opposite him. “I just want to talk.”

He took a drink and shrugged out of sequence. Out in the hall, I could hear some trans I’d passed arguing about sapience. “You, you’re a detective. You said so on the phone.”

“I am.”

“What you detectin’, Mr. Detective?”

I pulled the chair in close to the table. “That you’re drunk. And that you can’t sing.”

“Ha!” He put the glass down and pushed it away towards me. “It’s a ruse. Like the Trojans and their horse.” He rubbed his head. “It’s big and wooden and it hides a world of little men.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “What have you been taking?”

“I’ve been taken,” he said. “But you’re not going to take me.”

“Mr. Wynett, your wife is very worried. If you could just call her — ”

“No!” He drank again, looking nervously around the room. “No, I won’t talk to her,” he continued. “I can’t do that. I can’t hurt her. She mustn’t let the horse through the gates.” He scratched behind his ear. “Have you ever seen a horse, detective?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Beautiful animals. So pure and majestic. If you ignore what’s hiding in their belly.”

“Yeah, I get it. The Trojans. The horse. The Greeks sacking Troy. It’s called a leitmotif and you’re dragging it out a bit too far.”

“What do you know?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking. “That you worked for Accelerated Conduction. That you ran off a week ago.”

“Not that,” he said. “That’s not important.”

“Okay. What is?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. Okay, Mr. Wynett, that’s enough of that I guess. You want to stay here and drink, that’s fine by me. I’d recommend you go through a toxic rebuild before you go home to your wife, but I’ve got what I need to earn my fee.”

As I stood up, he did the same. He came around the table and grabbed my arm. “You can’t leave.” His voice was sharp.

“It’s not safe. Rebecca, she’s — ”

I shrugged out of his grip. “Goodbye, Mr. Wynett.”

He grabbed me again and I pushed him away, hard. I shouldn’t have but I did and when I turned around, there was a young transient couple standing in the doorway, the curtain pushed aside. They looked at me startled and scared and rushed back out into the club’s main room.

I put my chair back and walked out.

I went home, put a little food in my stomach, watched the news, and went to sleep. My girlfriend came home a few hours later and woke me up briefly, but only briefly. I was exhausted and didn’t feel much like hearing about her day.

It was early morning and my phone was beeping. I rolled over in the wrong direction at first, bumped into Eve, sighed, and reached back over my shoulder to grab the thing. The clock on Eve’s little table read 4:21.

It was Nest.

“Ian?” he said, his voice sounding more like forced air than anything else. “Ian, did I get you?”

“It’s early, Wendell,” I said. As I spoke, I got up and walked across the small room to the door and closed it behind me, putting the couple of inches of wood between me and Eve to muffle the conversation.

“I have to ask you a question.” Nest was calmer now. His tone was artificial. “When was the last time you saw Robert Wynett?”

I thought for a moment, counting back the hours. “Would’ve been around nine-thirty last night. Ten, maybe. I can check my logs if you want it exact.”

“And he was — Was everything fine when you left him?”

“What’s happened?”

“He’s dead.”

I leaned against the door. “How?”

“Shot. From a distance. We don’t know much more than that.”

“When?”

“An hour ago. Maybe less. It’s hard to tell for sure in places like that.”

“I’ll get out there,” I said and opened to door to the bedroom.

“I wouldn’t, Ian.”

“Yeah?”

“From what the boys are telling me, you’re a suspect. I wouldn’t be too surprised if you get a visit from them soon.”

I stepped back out into the hall. “They think I did it?”

“They have witnesses who placed you with the victim.”

“But that was last night.”

“And it sounds like they saw you hit him.”

“Not hard and I left right after — ”

“I don’t think you did it, Ian. They probably don’t for sure, either. But they’re still gonna want to talk to you.”

“Okay. Should I go down to headquarters?”

“You don’t need to now. I think I can buy you some time. You’re white, the victim’s white, I think I can tie it up a bit in Equal Opportunity procedures for maybe a day before they move forward with it or pass it off on someone private.”

“What am I going to do in a day?”

Nest said, “Find out something. You’re the brilliant detective. Crack the case.”

I crammed a quick breakfast and headed to the office. When I got in, my desk was beeping softly with the results of the spider I’d set on the ferret guy outside of the Wynetts’ apartment. I made myself some coffee, sat down, and read through what it had to say.

The ferret guy, like Nest had told me, was a stock job, a body type and feature set picked from a catalog for rapid genome reconstruction. But his teeth were custom. The spider had dug through all the photographs the search system had indexed and returned three results with teeth like that. Two of them were women. The last was my man.

I scanned through the associated articles. He was a member of a group called the Human Ascension League. They were a pretty standard AI rights group, their mission statement to advance humanity through the field of artificial sapience. I’d run into some of them before, handing out literature at the airport.

The pictures came from events they’d sponsored. The best one was of the ferret smiling wide for the camera and holding an oversized check HAL had won from some private charity.

I ran another search. I told the spider to find me, within three degrees of separation, links between Robert Wynett — or Rebecca Wynett — and HAL. I killed the hour it took by paying bills and cleaning the office. Eve was supposed to drop by for lunch tomorrow and I didn’t want her complaining about the dust.

I got one result and it was better than I’d hoped for. A year ago, Robert Wynett had written an article about an advancement in computer sapience he’d been working on. I skimmed the article but most of it was way over my head. It did, however, contain a quote from a coworker, Sebastian Sable, who worked at Accelerated Conduction as a ghost shrink. Sable was listed as having a Gold Level membership with HAL.

A hunch struck me and I called Nest.

“Wendell Nest, PD,” he said.

“You sound like a vid show.”

“Ian! I’ve been talking to an EOC attorney. They’re making the case private, so you’ve got a couple of days before anyone hauls you in.”

“I don’t think I’ll need that much.”

“Really?”

“But I need you to do me a favor.” I told him what I’d discovered and asked if he could have the medical examiner check if Robert Wynett had been fixed up with a rider AI. Nest said he’d call me back.

A half hour later, he did.

“Yeah, Ian, Wynett had a rider. Company installed. The ME said something was broken about it, though. Some shorts and other problems that wouldn’t have been caused just by Wynett being shot.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s what I was hoping for. I’ll call you back when I’m sure, but this is falling together.”

“One of those detective epiphanies?”

“Uh huh. I hope so.”

It all made sense in a sad and sick way. A less-than-legal check of Rebecca Wynett’s phone records and an hour of additional research confirmed it. I put on my coat, left the office, and hailed a cab to my client’s apartment.

After she opened the door, Rebecca Wynett moved cautiously away from me, her eyes on the floor and her shoulders sagging. I stepped into the room and said, “I wish this’d all turned out better.”

She lifted her head up and looked at me. “I shouldn’t have involved you.”

I walked around her, down the short hall, and into the kitchen to look for glasses. She needed something. “You didn’t have a choice,” I said over my shoulder. “You didn’t know what they’d do to Robert.”

She came up behind me and leaned against the door jam. “I still don’t know what they did to him. Not really.”

I pulled two crystal tumblers off a shelf. Rebecca pointed over my head at another cabinet. I found several bottles including a large one of scotch that seemed to fit the mood. As I poured, I said, “I can tell you all of it, from the beginning, if you think it’d help.”

She nodded and took the drink I held out to her. We stayed in the kitchen as I began:

“Straight up, it was corporate espionage. No real moral complexity or political agenda. What little there was was all a cover. Do you know what your husband was working on?”

“Computers. Computer sapience — or sentience; I don’t remember.”

“Sapience. I don’t have all the details. They’re hard to get or else none of this would’ve happened. Anyway, that’s what these guys were after. The details of your husband’s work. They went after him by what should’ve been an easy route: Robert’s rider AI.” I paused. “You knew he had one, right?”

Rebecca shook her head.

“I guess it was standard at Accelerated Conduction. The whole R&D staff had them to aid memory, cross-checking, that sort of thing. Usually a rider’s pretty stable. It sits there in your brain, waits for instructions, and helps out when it’s programmed to. No reason you ever would’ve noticed he had one.” I drank and shifted so I was propped against the counter. “Problem was, these guys — ”

“You don’t know who they are?”

“No. Well, I mean, there’s the doc — the ghost shrink — who set it up and the group HAL — Human Ascension League — that he was working for, but they’re only sellers. I don’t know who commissioned the job, but there must’ve been a buyer.”

She blinked and I saw fear flash into her eyes.

“You’re safe, Rebecca. This was pro. They’ve got no reason to bother you.”

She jerked her head and sipped nervously.

“Again,” I added quickly.

Rebecca sighed. “No, it’s okay. I trust you. Though,” she paused, “you obviously don’t have any reason to trust me.”

“You did what you had to do. You didn’t know what they were planning.”

“Just go back to the story,” she said without looking at me.

I did. “Riders need check-ups. As I said, they’re pretty stable — there aren’t many records of them going bad — but it’s usual policy to have them looked at occasionally. Monthly, bimonthly, sometimes annually. Riders are great recording devices. They have huge amounts of memory, they’re always on, and they have access to everything the host sees, hears, touches, that sort of thing. If you’re going to conduct industrial espionage, they’re a nice way to do it. Problem usually is, the encryption schemes buffering the riders are strong as hell and brute force attacks don’t work because you’re dealing with a living host. You can’t just plug him in to a cracking box for six to eight weeks. Not that that would really work anyway. The encryption keys are too big.”

Rebecca had stopped paying attention and was staring into her drink. I picked up the pace of the explanation.

“They hit Robert through his rider. To do it, they used a man on the inside, the doctor who did the semi-annual examination. Robert was put under and they snuck in an update to the software, installing a data tap. I think the way it was supposed to work, the system would override him at regular intervals and report in. That would seem to make the most sense but it didn’t work out. Best I can figure, Robert was put through a routine scan at some point after the placing of the tap and the rider went into passive mode to avoid the detection of — ”

“I’m sorry,” Rebecca cut in, “but this — I guess can you just give me a little less detail?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yeah, I can trim it down. The software they installed broke. It messed with Robert’s head. It looks like he knew it, that he recognized something was wrong, but couldn’t seem to make that known. He freaked out and ran. Whether it was to seek help or to protect you, I can’t be sure.”

Her eyes closed for a couple of heartbeats. Then she opened them and said, “And they used me — and used you — to find him. So they could kill him.”

“That’s what it looks like. They probably figured they could more easily hide their own responsibility if they got me involved and tried to make it look like I took him out at your request. I’d have had to keep my mouth shut because of privilege and if I did say anything on your behalf, it would’ve only look like I was protecting my interests and yours.”

“They told me they were from the company.”

“I know.”

“That they were trying to help him. They said he’d be spooked if he thought someone from AC was looking for him and said I should get a detective to do it. It’d put Robert more at ease.”

Her drink was almost empty. I reached behind me for the bottle and held it up to her but she shook her head, putting her glass down on the counter.

I said, “This wasn’t your fault.”

Rebecca shook her head.

“It wasn’t,” I said again. “When you came into my office, you were concerned about your husband. You wanted him found. That was genuine. You were doing what you thought was best for Robert.”

“If I’d left him alone, if I’d just — If I hadn’t come to you and had just told those men to go to hell, he’d be hiding out somewhere. Safe. He’d be alive.” She picked up the glass and gestured with it at the scotch. I poured. Her eyes were shiny and she looked away from me to hide it.

“Rebecca, I am sorry. I don’t know what else to say. This is hard, I understand that, and no matter what the motives behind it or who’s at fault, you’ve still lost your husband.” I felt like I was spinning my wheels. I’d gone past the point of helping her but everything felt so uncomfortable and silence would only make it worse.

“He loved you,” I said.

She looked up at me quickly, then back down at the glass, and drank a large swallow.

“He told me, when I saw him in the club the night he was killed. He was pretty incoherent — he’d been taking drugs and drinking to get away from the pain in his head — but he was clear on this. He said he loved you, he wanted me to tell you.”

Rebecca put down her drink and turned, walking out along the hall and into the living room.

I waited a moment before following her.

She turned to look at me. A tear hung from the corner of her mouth.

I reached over the back of the couch, grabbed my coat, and before putting it on, pulled a card out of the pocket. I walked past her and put the card down on the table by the door. Then I looked back, paused, and took a couple of steps so I was close enough to put my hand on her shoulder.

“You call me, you need anything,” I said.

Rebecca Wynett nodded and went slowly back down the hall and into the kitchen. I let myself out, rode down the elevator, and left the lobby, taking off my coat and draping it over my arm in the damp heat.

Helix was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That Time Dave Thomas of Wendy’s Hung Out on My Website to Talk Dungeons & Dragons

A maybe true story.

In 1999, with a couple of friends, I founded the Gaming Outpost. For a time in the early 2000s, it was the internet’s largest tabletop gaming website, until brought low by a combination a disgruntled employee, a late-night hack, tapering revenue, and founders who decided to get real jobs. But the Gaming Outpost’s influence lived on. Mike Mearls, designer of the wildly successful Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, got his first paid writing gig as a columnist on the site. Shannon Appelcline’s magisterial, four-volume history of the the RPG industry, Designers & Dragons, looks back on the Gaming Outpost as the incubator and stomping ground for the ideas and designers who eventually gave us the modern indie RPG movement. While it now exists only in the Internet Archives’s Wayback Machine, GO was a pretty cool place.

It was also a favorite hangout of Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas.

Maybe.

The Gaming Outpost featured news, articles, and reviews about all things tabletop gaming, but its main attraction was its discussion forum. That’s where designers like Ron Edwards, Clinton R. Nixon, Jared A. Sorensen, Mike Mearls, and John Wick hashed out ideas. It’s where Mike Daisy, later infamous for his controversial The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs theatrical monolog, lead conversations in his “Critical Hit” board. And it was where Dave Thomas talked about his love of role playing games — or where an unnecessarily elaborate hoax tried to convince us he did.

This was all close to twenty years ago, so my memory’s a little fuzzy on dates and specifics. But here’s how I remember it: For some time, a user calling himself Dave Thomas was a semi-regular participant in the Gaming Outpost discussion boards. There wasn’t much remarkable about his posts, but it was clear he was an active tabletop gamer, like everyone at at GO.

Then another user asked if he was the Dave Thomas, the guy we’d all grown up with on TV, somewhat awkwardly pitching us on hamburgers, Frosties, and baked potatoes. Yes, Dave answered, I am. This was, of course, a remarkable claim. Proof was needed.

Here’s the thing: Dave delivered. He asked for the Gaming Outpost user’s mailing address. A couple of weeks later, this incredulous gamer received a care package containing signed Dave Thomas of Wendy’s photos. When Dave Thomas died, activity on the account stopped.

This could’ve been a hoax. Someone could’ve used a “Dave Thomas” account on the Gaming Outpost with the plan to one day play a prank when asked about his identity. He could’ve bought the signed photographs. That’s all possible.

But I don’t want it to be. I’d like to think that, in addition to everything my little website gave to the flourishing tabletop RPG scene today, it also provided Wendy’s Dave Thomas, in the last years of his life, with a break from hamburgers, and a place talk about the games he loved.

That Time Dave Thomas of Wendy’s Hung Out on My Website to Talk Dungeons & Dragons was originally published in Aaron Ross Powell’s Homepage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

America’s Hyperbole Problem

Ours has become a culture of hyperbole. Nothing characterizes American social interaction, mediated through politics and social media, more than our need to assure ourselves, and broadcast to others, that whatever is happening now — whatever currently grasps our unexamined attention — is the most, greatest, acutest of whatever has ever been.

Everything — sexism, racism, political differences, economic differences — is a war. A war on women. A war on blacks. A war on the poor or on the elderly or on immigrants or on Christmas. We are all soldiers for equality, religion, ideology. We engage not in debate, but in skirmishes. We face not interlocutors, but enemy combatants.

This war footing turns our interactions toxic and destructive. Twitter shame mobbing, or counter protesting, or who we allow to speak on our campuses, accomplishes little of value but causes great harm, because we’re fighting the good fight, no matter the costs and no matter the stakes — which are, let’s face it, typically enormously low.

We do this because it’s fun. Because it makes us feel like important players in battles of significance, instead of the playacting trolls we so frequently actually are. None of it matters, except insofar as we’ve opted to destroy livelihoods or lives or just faces when we thrill in punching instead parley. But we can’t admit we do it for fun, because that would be admitting we’re not at war, not really, but instead seek only the rush of pretending to be foot soldiers in whatever Battle for the Fate of Civilization strikes our fancy at the soon-to-be-forgotten moment.

Without the belief in culture war, we’d burn out. Adrenaline takes its toll. With the belief in culture war, we keep up this destructive and deranged momentum through an irrational sense of moral urgency. “This matters,” we tell ourselves and signal to our tribes. “We can’t stop now, lest we capitulate to them.”

As one side stumbles drunkenly into this process, the other ratchets up its hyperbole engines in response, and the cycle accelerates, tearing through decency and respect and social bonds. Nobody wants to be the one who calls a halt, who halts themselves, for the war of the moment must be won, and besides, it’s all so gratifying and fun.

Except it’s not. Not at all. It’s degrading and the fun is false, like the rush of skydiving without a parachute. What’s needed is a culture-wide calming down, a letting out of breath. What’s needed is an understanding that things aren’t as dire or urgent or aggressively bad or dangerous as we’ve worked ourselves up to believe.

Can we do that? I don’t know. But you can. You can step away from your hyperbolic guns and find something better to do.

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003: Science Fiction w/ Will Duffield

In this episode, Will and I talk about our favorite science fiction novels.Subscribe to the show.https://medium.com/media/d73e26d43d9b8c0ed7ffc92b7c6949a8/href

003: Science Fiction w/ Will Duffield was originally published in The Aaron Ross Powell Show on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Has there ever been a box office smash scifi movie with less cultural impact than Avatar?

We’re on our way to four(!) Avatar sequels, which is probably the same as number of people excited about Avatar sequels.

It’s pretty striking, really, how quickly Avatar vanished from the public consciousness. The movie came out at the end of 2009, and in the years since, we’ve seen really no lasting attempts to keep the universe alive. There aren’t any Avatar toys, novels, or comics being sold. No video game franchise. People don’t wear Avatar t-shirts, or reference it except in occasional satire. Nobody’s wondering what the Avatar universe holds, or about the backstories of its characters. It was a pretty 3D movie, but otherwise entirely forgettable. And “forgotten” is exactly what happened to it, except in the mind of James Cameron and as trivia about top box office receipts.

Avatar’s disappearance happened so fast, with so little cultural impact, that I got to wondering whether any other movie comes close.

The answer is “No.” Avatar looks rather unique in this regard. To figure it out, I went to Box Office Mojo’s list of all time top “Sci-Fi — Adventure” movies, and sorted it by estimated ticket sold. Avatar sits at #5. People bought 97,000,000 tickets to see it. Here’s what its company in the Top 20 looks like, skipping movies that are sequels to films already in the list, and so piggybacking on their parent’s cultural impact.

Star Wars
E.T.
Jurassic Park
Back to the Future
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2001: A Space Oddessy
Guardians of the Galaxy
Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Star Wars, of course, has more cultural influence than any movie ever made. The others either continue to live in public consciousness, are considered eminently rewatchable classics, or have inspired entire genres. The only that might not fit this are the last two. Guardians of the Galaxy is part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so it’s impossible to judge what its impact would’ve been without membership in the MCU. (My bet, however, is that without the MCU tie-in, it wouldn’t have cracked the Top 20 in the first place.) Star Trek: The Motion Picture itself is something of a forgotten film, but it kicked off the Star Trek movie franchise, and there’s no doubting the importance of that. Avatar, which falls between E.T. and Jurassic Park in box office receipts, stands alone as leaving not a ripple.

And it’s not like Cameron has no experience making culturally influential films. He gave us Aliens, the Terminator movies, and Titanic. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

The easy answer is that Avatar was just a spectacle. People didn’t see it for its characters, story, or world building. They saw it because it was the first major 3D movie to make full use of that medium. But still, really popular sci-fi stuff tends to take on a life of its own. That’s the nature of sci-fi fandom. The fans want to live in the world, explore it more, expand upon it. Or, at the very least, reference it incessantly. And yet, nothing.

Now 3D’s been done. We’ve all seen Avatar. Four more Avatars will be nothing more than four more Avatars, without the breakthrough to drive ticket sales. Still, the movie’s absence from pop culture remains interesting. It’s not even parodied. To make something so big and yet so forgettable is, itself, a rather remarkable achievement.

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