Edward M. Erdelac's Blog, page 8

The Isle of The White Lady in Tales of Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/britannia-and-beyond-a-regional-guide-for-cthulhu-invictus

Golden Goblin Press is running the Kickstarter for their book Britannia & Beyond, a Roman setting campaign supplement for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game and the newest stretch goal is Tales of Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia, a fiction anthology which contains the last of my Macula and Damis stories, The Isle of The White Lady.

Readers may remember mystic talisman seller Damis of Nineveh and his bodyguard Macula’s printed adventures began in the first Cthulhu Invictus anthology with The Unrepeatables, and continued in The Apotheosis of Osirantinous .

This story sees Damis and Macula returning to frontier Britannia where they first met, to confront a terrible threat drifting south on winds of freezing snow.

Here’s an excerpt…

———————————————-

Modius Macula had never suspected he would return to the grey, rain-soaked hills of Britannia, let alone to the dismal little vicus of Vindolanda itself. Yet here he was, leaning in the doorway of a shabby tavern, watching the Tungrian auxiliaries march east along the Stanegate Road.

He closed his eyes and listened to the clink of the auxiliaries’ gladii. Preparations for Antoninus Pius’ invasion of the Caledonian Lowlands were in full swing. The new stone fortress at Corsopitum was nearly complete, and the Vindolanda garrison was lending three hundred men to the coming campaign.

It was unseasonably cold for Martius.

Macula drew his woollen cloak closer about his shoulders. He felt the keen pangs of a veteran among young soldiers too busy to think him anything other than some faceless, idle civilian. This dredged up in him the old envy of the fighter whose campaigns had ended.

He heard a prolonged, deep cough from behind, and glanced at the table where his employer, the venerable Damis of Nineveh, sat hacking into his balled fist. He should never have allowed his friend to make this journey.

Damis should have been in Rome making a killing off graven images of the newly deified Empress Faustina in his talisman shop on the Vicus Cesaris, but the old Assyrian had been plagued by disturbing, prophetic nightmares since the start of the year.

“A terrible doom is moving, Macula,” Damis had moaned one night in a sweat. “I saw a strange grey flame consuming all Britannia. Over everything it passed it left a blanket of white ash. It spread to Rome herself. Apollonius took me up to stand on the orb of the Moon. I saw the whole world smoking like a ball of pitch.”

Being a Pythagorean, Damis had never been one to dismiss a dream, particularly when his late master, Apollonius of Tyana was involved.

Twenty years ago, while touring the province with Hadrian, Damis had stopped an incursion of foul little creatures that still slashed their way through Macula’s nightmares by negotiating a peace between Rome and an isolated sub-tribe of Christian Brigantes. Part of that peace had involved the secret installation of talismans in the milecastles along the border wall, to keep the things from migrating south.

Damis had petitioned the Emperor for permission to journey north to Britannia and inspect the eighty talismans. Pius had finally issued him an imperial assessor’s writ.

They had travelled thirty nine inclement miles between Maia and Vindolanda this past week. They’d found none of the talismans disturbed so far, but the intensity of Damis’ nightmares had increased. He slept little. Macula attributed it to a fever the old Assyrian had contracted from exposure to the chilly northern weather.

Macula watched the last of the auxiliaries pass up the road, drained his dregs, and rejoined Damis.

“You look like shit, old man,” he observed.

“Forthright as ever,” Damis grinned weakly.

That the old Assyrian had survived this journey at all Macula could only attribute to his Pythagorean diet and asceticism. Yet it was clear Damis had reached his limit.

“You can’t take another week of this. Let’s go to the valetudinarium.”

“Submit myself to the proddings of some Greek-hating alcoholic army bone cutter?” Damis shook his head. “No, just some warm colostrum, I think. Then we can be on our way again.”

“We should rest until the weather warms,” Macula said.

“The weather will never warm,” said a voice with a thick Brythonic accent. A youth stood over them, in a robe of dingy white sackcloth, dirty blonde hair dangling from beneath his hood.

Macula held up his cup.

“More beer, boy,” Macula growled. “And a word of advice. It’s not polite to insinuate yourself into a private conversation.”

“Are you Damis of Nineveh?” the youth asked, ignoring Macula.

Damis looked up.

“Do you know me?”

“I’m Gildas, son of Driskell, smith of the Textoverdi.”

“Tex-to-ver-di,” Damis repeated slowly.

“You came here one dark night, when I was a boy,” said Gildas. “You took shelter in my father’s hut.”

Macula looked hard at the young man now, going over the coincidence in his mind. He had just been thinking of that dark night twenty years ago, when he and Damis had hid in a Brigante roundhouse near here. He still remembered the smell of unwashed bodies and peat fire, and vaguely, the frightened eyes of a dingy little boy peering out behind the skirt of his mother.

“I remember,” said Damis. “Please.”

Gildas sat between them.

“The Bishop of Albion, Josaphus ben Joseph, was killed that night,” Gildas went on, in a conspiratorial tone. He looked about quickly, then took from his tunic a rude bit of wood shaped into a fanciful representation of a fish; an icthys, the sign of the Christians.

Macula remembered Josaphus too; a priest of that Jewish sect, slain by an overexcited centurion. Before dying, Josaphus had taught Damis the charm that now warded every mile of the Wall.

“This was his?” Damis said, reaching out to touch the holy symbol.

“The very one,” Gildas confirmed, returning it to his tunic.

“Has the Wall failed?” Damis asked anxiously, gripping Gildas’ upper arm.

“Against that which threatens Britannia now, it could never hope to stand,” said Gildas, producing a leather pouch from his cloak.

As he undid the strings, Damis and Macula leaned closer to see.

Gildas removed a small wooden box from the pouch, and from that, using the folds of the leather, he gingerly lifted out a foggy white stone with a bright purple glow in its center. He set it on the table.

“Some kind of jewel?” Macula asked.

Damis touched it, but recoiled and hissed, jamming his fingers into his mouth. He stared in shock at Gildas, then drew the sleeve of his tunic over his hand, as though he were touching a pan hot from an oven, and held the stone up to the lamplight.

There was a purple flower perfectly preserved in the center.

“Ice,” Damis said in hushed awe. “Ice that does not melt. So cold, it burns.”

“A Caledonian was found with this, on the banks of the Verda,” said Gildas, “skin blackened, half-frozen. Before he died, he spoke of a living light moving south, like the pillar of flame that guided the Hebrews. Anything caught by it, anything that breathes in the air, animals, men, even the birds of the sky,” he snapped his fingers and stabbed at the frozen flower. “Like this.”

“What is it?” Damis mumbled.

“Bishop Alain believes Satan is marching up from the coldest depths of hell, to punish those who have strayed from Christ,” said Gildas.

Macula was vaguely aware that Satan was a vindictive underworld god in the Christian pantheon.

“Have you strayed?” Damis asked.

Damis was no Christian, but the cult was something of a hobby for him.

Like most good Romans, Macula didn’t care overly for Christians. Jews were at least tolerable in that they kept their unbearable self-righteousness to themselves. Macula had mashed the nose of a zealot named Justin when the fanatic had tried to lead a frothing mob to vandalize the talisman shop over some heretical symposium Damis had hosted there with his mind-numbingly loquacious Christian philosopher friends Valentinus, Marcion, and Cerdo.

Yet by his own adventures with Damis, he knew the Christian god was as real as any other.

“Some of us have begun worshipping the old goddess Satiada again,” said Gildas, “with blood sacrifices led by a strange White Lady. Bishop Alain says that Satiada is a name by which Satan goes, and that the White Lady is the Whore of Babylon.”

That, at least, sounded interesting to Macula.

“My father told me you were a very wise man,” Gildas finished. “When I learned you had returned, I had to find you. Will you help?”

Macula grimaced over the boy’s shoulder and shook his head furiously at Damis.

“Macula,” said Damis, “it is nearly the start of the campaign season. How many of the provincial legions has Lollius Urbicus committed to the drive against the Caledonians?”

Macula lowered his eyes. All along the Wall the talk among the soldiers had been about the governor’s preparations for Pius’ expansion of the northern border.

“All three,” he said. Nearly fifteen thousand men, to say nothing of auxiliaries. He had an image of those men encased in ice like this purple flower.

“I don’t want to die in Britannia, old man,” Macula sighed.

Merkabah Rider Shirts

T-shirts featuring Juri Umagami’s art for the Merkabah Rider series are available on Teepublic.

Just a heads up that the Have Glyphs Will Travel shirts are on sale for thirteen bucks for the next two days.

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The Adventure of The Three Rippers in Sherlock Holmes And The Occult Detectives Vol. 1

Berlanger Books is holding a Kickstarter to fun their new two volume series of stories featuring Sherlock Holmes interacting with a variety of occult detectives.

Fans of Terovolas may recall Professor Abraham Van Helsing making an aside reference to having crossed paths with Holmes and Watson.  In Volume 1 of this new series, you’ll learn the particulars of that momentous meeting, as it features Van Helsing and Holmes in ‘The Adventure of The Three Rippers.’

This takes place in 1888, a number of years before the events of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Terovolas of course, and features a excerpts from Van Helsing’s papers relating to his heretofore unrevealed pursuit of a lunatic who attacked his wife, who was a long time patient at the Het Dolhuys facility in Haarlem.

This entry gives us an intimate look at the brilliant professor’s mindset at the time.

——————-

From the Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing (translated from the original Dutch)

5th November.

Van Voorhees yet eludes me. My sabbatical from the university draws to a close. I have secured an engagement lecturing The Physiological Society Friday morning which will extend my stay in London, but it is not enough. God, am I to be foiled in the end by lack of resources? Inspector Swanson has promised to solicit my services should the need arise, yet I know he is dubious of their worth. My room here is fast draining my funds. I am tempted to take up John’s kindly offer to stay in Purfleet, but I fear it would take me far from my purpose. Van Voorhees is very near. Three days until the eighth. He must strike again.

I had a peculiar dream last night. I saw his face, tiny in the corner of the eye of the guiltless, wretched janitor, a scheming homunculus leering as he directed the blade toward my dear wife’s throat like a man looking out of the glass in a pilot house.

In the manner of dreams, I next saw the honey-colored Anglican peripteros with its prominent circular spire, which has been my daily scenery since my arrival here in Marleybone. Majestic between the Corinthian pillars, like the legendary quarry of Wodan’s hunt, a great hooved, pitch-black stag stood pawing the stone steps.

I awoke to the sonorous bell of All Soul’s echoing the call to morning mass across the street.

I shall take the air. It is frustrating to know he is somewhere in this city, one among millions and yet, is there any more vile? He is a devil inside a man inside a man. But which man? Or which woman, for that matter?

He watches the women as I watch for him, both of us eager to be about our work.

If I could but predict his next act – but I am no medium, and even less a detective.

God grant me aid.

——————————–

Of course, this story also concerns the legendary Sherlock Holmes, and as such, I have supplemented Van Helsing’s journal entries with the writings of his longtime colleague Dr. John Hamish Watson as they pertain to Van Helsing’s London adventure, to corroborate the validity of the Professor’s account.

I must here express my gratitude to the Watson family estate for allowing me access to these previously unpublished writings, which, due to their fantastic nature, were never relinquished to Holmes’ unofficial biographer at The Strand, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even though they shed light on the activities of London’s most famous consulting detective during the events of one of the city’s most heinous crime sprees.

——————–

The alacritous ricochet of a violin bounded up Baker Street as I strolled toward our rooms. I noticed more than a few of the passersby touching their ears and grimacing as they directed their collective annoyance up at the open window of 221B, where I discerned the silhouette of Holmes sawing furiously at his instrument.

Paganini’s Arpeggio is of course, not readily to the layman’s taste, even when played expertly. I confess to not being fond of it myself. There was something to Holmes’ playing this afternoon which added to its discordance. By the time I had ascended the stair and come into the drawing room, I knew what.

He was in his shirt sleeves, and the morocco case sat open on the mantelpiece.

My friend had been in a state of idle melancholy for the better part of a week, due to some matter which he would not confide in me. I perceived it was related to the infamous Ripper case.

Holmes of course, had been involved in the affair prior to our departure for Dartmoor, back when the fledgling killer’s tally yet numbered two. He had been summarily dismissed from the investigation after a row with Sir Charles Warren, the Chief Commissioner. Two years ago, Sir Charles’ near-fanatic enforcement of an edict to muzzle dogs had resulted in an overzealous constable clubbing one pitiable cur to death on our very stoop. The incident had soured Holmes on the man. Displeased with Sir Charles’ comparatively middling dedication to the Ripper case, Holmes had excoriated him that if he only pursued the murderer with as much zeal as he chased down stray dogs, the women of Whitechapel could breathe easy.

There was assuredly a political element to his dismissal as well. The police simply did not want their most famous case solved by a civilian.

I knew though, that Holmes had in some way defied the injunction, and kept me at arms’ length during his private investigations so as to shield me from reprimand should they be discovered.

He had been in constant contact with some person or persons very close to the case. I had seen him scrutinizing the handwriting of the letters reportedly sent by the killer to the Central News Agency, which he received via courier, and a driver I privately questioned admitted to me that Holmes had visited Whitechapel so many nights in the past few weeks he was worried his passenger might actually be the Ripper.

Since the end of October, however, Holmes had retreated into indolence, or rather, as much indolence as his vigorous mind was capable of. He pored over his volumes, scraped at his violin, and succumbed to his more unworthy habits.

As I took off my coat, I surreptitiously peered into the morocco case and saw that the last of his tinctures was drained.

He stopped his playing upon perceiving me, and sparing one last look out the window, returned his instrument to its case.

“We shall have a new problem before us soon, Watson,” he said without preamble, rolling down his left sleeve and shouldering into his jacket.

“Ah?” I replied, and privately thought that a new conundrum to occupy Holmes’ troubled brain could not come fast enough. “How soon?”

Presently there was a knock on the chamber door. Holmes allowed himself a thin smile and bid the client enter as he settled into his chair.

An extraordinary looking gentleman entered. He wore shoulder length hair and a drooping, insistent mustache, and was dressed in a fringed top coat of tanned leather, and knee high gaiters of yellow deerskin, over dungaree trousers and a pair of high heeled boots. His bibbed shirt front was adorned with a number of badges, so many that one had retired to the crown of his wide brimmed hat, which the man wore cocked at a slant. I should say that a colorful kerchief tied about his neck capped off his unique appearance, but that honor surely belonged to the shining, overlarge, ivory-handled revolver thrust brazenly through his wide belt.

The man doffed his hat upon entering. His smile barely poked out from behind his whiskers.

“Which of you gentlemen is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” he drawled slowly, in the manner of an American.

”I am,” Holmes confirmed. “May I present Dr. John Watson?”

The man bobbed his chin at me.

“Watson,” Holmes said, “this is Colonel Joe Shelley of Austin, Texas, proprietor of Mexican Joe’s Western Wilds of America review, opening in Sheffield tomorrow. Please sit down, Colonel, and tell me about this missing Sioux Indian of yours. He’s only been with your show five months, so he’s not the man who shot you. Why would a Red Indian who doesn’t speak a word of English go wandering the streets of London?”

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The colonel stood dumbstruck.

“By God you are Sherlock Holmes! They told me you’d know who I was and what I was after before I sat down.”

“They?” I ventured.

“Mr. Barker and Mr. Levillard,” said the colonel.

“Monsieur le Villard,” Holmes corrected him.

“’At’s ‘im! They told me if’n I ever found myself in a bind you was the one to go to. But now, sir,” he said, dragging the stool from Holmes’ workbench and perching on it, “you must tell me how you came by all that.”

Holmes nodded and settled back in his chair.

——————————

If there were ever doubts about the veracity of my claims as to the historicity of Professor Abraham Van Helsing after the publication of Terovolas (and there were), I cannot help but think that the publication of this new account, which involves such documented historical personages as Colonel Joe Shelley, the poet Francis Thompson, Mrs. Alice Meynell and the famous Lakota prophet Black Elk, will surely vindicate my previous efforts.

The book is currently funding via Kickstarter…

Happy Birthday, Dad.

The train my dad’s been waiting for finally pulled into the station last Thursday, January 23rd.

My mom said he had a smile on his face when he went. Maybe my grandfather stepped onto the platform to bring him on board. The smiling father he never knew, and only heard for the first time last year, on his last Father’s Day. 

I’ve heard the horror stories of lots of people, the stories of angry, drunken, or absent fathers.

My dad never gave me any of those stories to tell. The hardest thing he ever put me through was his own death. I love him dearly and miss him sorely. I never knew a better man. He was faithful, loving, and kind. He and my mom took me all over this country, taught me to love history and to cleave to each other, and to always pull over when someone needs help .

The last movie we watched together was The Shootist, which funny enough, took place from January 22nd-29th. The last week of the main character, JB Books’ life, the last movie of John Wayne’s career. I somehow always thought my dad would die somewhere in this span of dates, if not on his actual birthday. It’s fitting. The 22nd was Robert E. Howard’s birthday too, and the line, “gigantic mirths and gigantic melancholies” keeps making me think of Dad.

Today, the 27th, is his birthday. Last night I opened the fridge and saw a single bottle of Beck’s, his favorite beer and just lost it. It’s the last one left in the house. Mom says I should drink it today. I don’t know. I feel like he’d want me to get rid of all the Coronas in the downstairs fridge he bought for me. He called them creek water, and was always asking me when I was gonna finish ’em. I’d tell him to drink them with me.

“Noooo thank you,” he’d demure.

The last thing he said to me from his bed a couple weeks ago as I went to the door was;

“I love ya Ed. I’m gonna miss you.”

He never forgot me. Even when he was forgetting everything my Dad never forgot me.

“I love you too, Dad,” I said. “I’m gonna miss you too. Just promise to come and get me when it’s my turn.”

“I promise,” he said.

If he was ever afraid, I never saw it.

Mom said once before he fell unconscious he worried that he “had to finish that thing for Ed.” I don’t know what he was thinking about. He didn’t leave anything undone. Except for my mother, I’m a son no more. As far as I’m concerned, my Dad fulfilled his duty to me magnificently.

I hope now that he is with his own father. Now that I am without him, as I told him, I will live the rest of my life trying to be the father to my kids that he was to me. I hope now that he’s somewhere enjoying being the son he never got the chance to be, running with his dogs and his dad.

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https://www.boersmafuneralhome.com/obituary/Edward-Erdelac

What’s Coming In 2020

OK what to look forward to from your humble bookwright in 2020.

First on the docket, I’m pleased to announce my first Lovecraftian fiction collection, That At Which Dogs Howl And Others will be coming out from Alan Bahr’s Raven Canticle Press. Look for that in the first quarter of the year.

Next up, the reprint of Merkabah Rider 4: Once Upon A Time In The Weird West, with new interior art by M. Wayne Miller and a killer cover by Juri Umagami based on this classic poster from The Shootist –

I’ll be returning to Professor Abraham Van Helsing in a small way with The Adventure Of The Five Rippers, in Sherlock Holmes And The Occult Detectives from Belanger Books. Maybe this will kick me in the harkness and I’ll finally get a second Van Helsing Papers book finished. So if you want more Van Helsing, let me know.

Finally, from the pages of Occult Detective Quarterly, my 70’s Harlem occult PI John Conquer will be making his independent debut in a collection. Conquer: Calm, Cool, Collected, hopefully by the end of the year.

If you missed out on April Moon Books’ Bond Unknown, in which my 60’s era Lovecraftian James Bond novelette Mindbreaker appeared, I’m serializing it all this year on my Patreon, so head over there and kick a fin if you wanna read that.

Hope you lovely readers have a pleasant 2020. I’ll do my best to augment it for you.

Waiting

My dad is waiting for a train, he tells me.

“Where’s it going?” I ask.

“Anywhere else,” he says. “Where is it already?”

“I guess it’s been delayed?” I venture.

“Yeah,” he says, slowly. “Maybe I can talk to the stationmaster. Do you think he ever comes down here for people who are stuck waiting?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

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Maybe he only comes down for relatives. I’m reminded how much I despise nepotism. Angels roll away the stone from Christ’s tomb. He says all his goodbyes and ascends bodily. Abrams’ kid gets to write Spider-Man. My dad’s stuck waiting at the station.

The station is a hospital bed in the living room. He lies beneath the covers, wrapped in plastic. He hasn’t been able to get up in three weeks now. He tries sometimes. And sometimes he cries.

“It just gets old. Waiting,” he explains.

He’s not sure what’s happened to him.  Back in the 80’s he was involved in a siege in Calumet City, where we’re from. A man locked himself in his house with an arsenal and a gas mask.

I can still remember his car roaring into the driveway that day.

A friend and I were watching cartoons, and he stormed past us in his cream colored blazer and brown slacks and tie. He was plainclothes then, in juvenile division, and he had a mustache as I guess all cops are obligated to sport once in their lives.

He runs upstairs, and a minute later comes down with a shotgun I didn’t know he had.

“What’s goin’ on, Dad?” I ask.

“Shooting,” he says, and runs back outside to his car. He goes flying backwards down the driveway and swerves into the street, then goes off, blue mars light flashing on the dash. It’s like Starsky and Hutch.

My friend and I look at each other, wide-eyed.

“Coooool!” we exclaim, like kids in an 80’s movie.

It never occurred to me he was in danger till this moment.

That night we glimpse him on the TV news, crouched behind a parked squad car, shouting to an officer who’s come to the house once or twice.

The camera cuts to a SWAT guy shooting out a streetlight. In hindsight, I don’t know why the city didn’t just turn the power off. My mom tells me the fire department got pissed because of all the broken glass that rained down on the parked hook and ladder truck. They had to pick it all out.

What I most remember is the remote anchorman mispronouncing a local Mexican restaurant as Pee Pee’s.

But now my dad insists he was shot that night. That’s why he can’t get out of bed, why everything’s sore.

And my mom has to explain to him about the stroke again. She does it three or four times a day. Every time he wakes up from the long, feline sleeps he spends most of his time in now.

My dad was building a model railroad. It was a mockup of the Santa Fe line, with stops in Indiana and New Mexico. There are red stone mountains, a family of bears fishing in a stream. There’s an Italian restaurant he had me name.

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It will never be completed. Recently I read about Rod Stewart finishing his layout. It made me angry and sad.

[image error]Anyway, some of his train buddies, themselves 70 year old men, came over before we flew out here to visit for the holidays, and set up the old Lionel train and track that used to loop around the Christmas tree when I was a kid. I run it a few times for my kids.

My mom says the sound of it is what’s making him think he’s in a train station.

My kids are making a racket. They take polaroids with him from Willow’s new instant camera. I don’t know why she wants an instant camera in this digital age. It’s retro, I guess. She’s only nine. Does she care about that?

My dad says he can’t see the flashes.

It must be very like a busy train station, all the noise. All the people coming and going for Christmas dinner. Saying goodbye to him. But we all leave and he stays.

Tonight I helped him lie in his own bed with my mom. Just one night, while I’m here and can help her lift him into the wheelchair. He’s lighter than before, his legs thin and pale, but because he has no facility, he’s still hard to pick up.

My mom tells him she’s going to shut the light out. After she does, she asks him if it’s alright. He doesn’t know what’s changed.

When I have the remote, we watch a lot of Barney Miller. Or rather he listens to it. Smiles now and then at Harris and Wojo and Yemana.

He asked to watch a war movie for some reason today and my mom puts on Windtalkers. It’s a lot of shooting and yelling. I don’t know what he’s getting out of it, ’cause he can’t see this crazy Jon Woo bullet ballet unfold.



He’s asleep by the end, and my mom puts on In The Heat of The Night. The show, not the movie.

I doze off. When I wake up he’s crying, asking again why he can’t get up. My mom counsels him to let go. In the moment I feel like she’s being selfish, wanting it to be over with. I know that’s not it though. She hates to see him in anguish, without his dignity.

I think he could go on for a long time yet like this. He’s strong. Even laid low, he’s very strong.

He doesn’t want to leave her, he keeps saying. He’ll miss her too much.

I still don’t get the sense that he’s afraid.

 

Merkabah Rider Hanukkah Sale

Happy Hanukkah! All three Merkabah Rider books are on sale for the next seven days and nights!

In Closing

Sitting in my parents’ house, listening to my father sleep.

He’s entered the last stage of his life. After three years of getting back up from various knockdowns that have gradually sapped his strength and mobility and dignity, a stroke has taken from him his memories.

He lives only in moments now. He recognizes everybody, can joke a bit, but being mostly blind, he’s startled every time he opens his eyes and sees me standing there. Once, he asked if I was God.

My parents built this beautiful house together after years of living under the roof of my disapproving grandmother, and later in homes that were never quite what they’d hoped for.

“I’m a failure,” my dad says.

“You just don’t remember your successes,” I tell him.

“What are they?”

I say me. Maybe I’m heady from being mistaken for God earlier. But I quickly add my children, and the good memories everyone has of him, and the good police officer he was. He was policeman of the year in Calumet City, and I remember an abducted child who would only speak to him.

And then he recalls, randomly, with some prompting from mom, his early years as a traffic accident investigator, home and sleeping after double shifts, and failing to answer a dispatch call for him to come out to yet another collision. My mom says she’s to blame, as she told the dispatcher he wasn’t coming out, even when a squad arrived in the driveway with two other investigators to get him.

“He’s not coming out,” my ma said.

“What do you mean he’s not coming out?” said the dispatcher.

“He’s done two shifts. He’s been awake for twenty four hours and there are two guys sitting outside the house that can do it. One was out fishing at four in the morning. You don’t need him,” my ma said. “So that my fault,” she tells him. “I told him to tell them his wife didn’t wake him up, that he didn’t hear the phone,” she tells me.

“It was my watch,” my dad groans.

He was the father my friends admired.  The one who has always made me feel confounded when people – even my own stepson – tell their stories of the terrible father figures they had growing up.

He’s always been my hero. Simple, forthright, upstanding even when everybody around him wasn’t. He led me and my mom across this country, over the battlefields of Gettysburg and through Monument Valley and in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, down into the Grand Canyon and Mammoth Cave and dozens of other places I probably never appreciated as a kid, but which make me reluctant to leave this country now even when it seems like the right thing to do for my kids. The Land of The Lost my parents called our vacations.

I will never have another Thanksgiving with us all together.

This house used to be full of racing kids and my drunken friends on holidays. It’s so empty. So beautiful and empty, surrounded by snow.  No one comes to see them.

My ma says the house doesn’t mean anything to her anymore, without being able to share it with my dad.

“I don’t want to take care of it. It’s too much. And I’m afraid of snakes.”

When they built it, we buried my eldest daughter’s umbilical chord in the front yard and my mom planted her namesake magnolia tree over it.

I always thought one day we’d live here.

But Nolie’s a California girl through and through, and I don’t see living in rural Indiana as being the best thing for my family anymore. My kids don’t have the relationship I wanted them to have with their grandparents. It’s my fault for being so far away. If I could at least point to some grand accomplishment I’ve achieved in going away. I followed my dreams and they haven’t led anywhere.

If I could lift up this house and carry it on my back with my mom and dad and all its contents somewhere else….

If I could rewind my life and make better decisions, so I could do something other than sit here and watch him sleep while my mom gets groceries….

I can’t help thinking I’m a failure too. Even now, with all my faculties. What will I have left in the end when my dad’s done so much and can’t recall any of it?

I feel as if I’m going down in the whirl and the suck that has a hold of my father.

 

Happy Hallowmas! The Knight With Two Swords Is Free Till Tuesday

Happy Hallowmas!

I’ve made my Arthurian novel The Knight With Two Swords, a retelling of the Tale of Sir Balin and Sir Balan from Le Morte D’Arthur, free on Kindle until Tuesday.

You can read a bit more about it here. 

Merkabah Rider 3: Have Glyphs Will Travel Is Out Now!

The third book in the Merkabah Rider series is once again out everywhere, featuring a new cover by Juri Umagami and new interior art by M. Wayne Miller. Go get it!