S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 14

A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nine, Pt. 2

Salem, MA; July, 2016.

Zoe focused on the magic, tried to push her will into and through it. The door at the top of the staircase swung open. Sweat dripped from Zoe’s face. She struggled to keep her breath quiet. Closing her eyes, she brought her sixth sense to the fore. She needed to feel the threads of the magic. At the basement threshold, a woman spoke: “So? You’re so sure it’s a false alarm, you go first.”

“You think they’d go straight to the basement?” the apparently-Frank asked.

“Why else break in at all?”

“And you’re sure you felt it?”

“Can you just check the basement?”

The hesitance and argument only lasted seconds, but Zoe had found herself in an economy where seconds mattered. Her lungs burned. She took a deep breath, straining for control. Her sixth sense brushed up against the shape of the spell she needed to access. She dug in. A cramp sliced up her left flank, knots twisted and tightened around her hips. Gritting her teeth, she strangled a groan.

Heavy footfalls began their descent.

Zoe lurched forward, veins bulging. Tears rimmed her eyes from sheer effort. She swallowed gooey spit down a cracked-sand throat. She took a deep breath. Pushing her willpower out, she dug into the sigil beneath her knees. She tangled herself in the threads of the magic.

It felt like the spell took. She was too dizzy to feel sure.

Blinking away a sea of headrush, Zoe saw Frank at the bottom of the stairs. He was shorter than he sounded—maybe five seven, around Zoe’s height—but wore the shaped, taut musculature of someone familiar with intense physical training. Dirty blond haired and blue-eyed, he wore pajama pants, a tanktop, and a kevlar vest. A pendant draped at his clavicle hummed with some kind of enchantment. Zoe couldn’t tell what.

Frank squinted around the basement. “Hit the lights, yeah?”

“Invoke nightsight.”

“Fuck this. Nobody’s here.” Frank turned for the stairs.

The light flicked on. Darkness glowed to dimness, the few living bulbs buzzing through the last of their filaments. They flickered, hummed, and stabilized. Frank nodded, grunting, and turned back to the basement. He carried a 9mm machine pistol, not of Malleus make. Zoe grasped her own sidearm’s grip, not sure where Frank had stowed his before that moment, not sure how he’d gotten his hands on it so quickly.

As Frank stepped cautiously into the ritual space, a slender, blond, blue-eyed woman followed. Appropriately paranoid for the goings-on, she wore a knife-resistant bodysuit under a kevlar vest. In Zoe’s sixth sense, she felt a couple wards shielding the woman.

“Shit,” Frank muttered, reaching for a belt he wasn’t wearing. “Lacey, you got a—”

Apparently-Lacey turned on a flashlight, burning dimness to brightness wherever she brought the beam to bear.

“Thanks.”

Lacey nodded, squinting around the dimness herself. Frank approached the furnace, the water heater. The shadows behind it. Zoe took a deep breath, index finger on the trigger guard.

“I don’t see shit,” Frank muttered. “No one’s down here.”

Lacey, also suddenly-armed, swept the flashlight beam across the far wall. Lowering her machine pistol to her side, she frowned back up the stairs. “We’ll have to clear the place floor by floor, double back…”

“Jesus, Lace, it was probably just a nightmare.”

“Hold it.”

The flashlight beam swept the furnace, the heater, a series of wards and seals, an old toolbox squatting next to the stairwell. Zoe kept one hand pressed to the floor and the other wrapped around the grip of her sidearm. She held a breath.

“Yeah?” Frank grunted.

“Nothing.” Lacey brought the flashlight elsewhere. “Let’s go wake the others.”

“Fine.” Frank turned away from the furnace and worked his jaw as he scanned the rest of the basement. “For the record, I think you just had a nightmare or something.”

“I’m in charge of wards, so we do a full sweep on my say-so. And I say so.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” Frank met Lacey and passed her, starting upstairs.

“Contact B team,” Lacey added, still squinting at the basement. “Tell them we might have interference.”

“Sure. First thing in the morning.”

Lacey scowled, brow knit, machine pistol at one hip and flashlight at the other. “I swear I felt something. Something broke the perimeter ward, I’m…” she sighed, turned back toward the staircase. “We’ll put them on alert, anyway. After the sweep.”

They ascended, the basement door closing in their wake. Zoe sat back, collapsed into a wall, and buried her sweat-slick face in her palms. Close. Too close.

(every story ends the)

She stood on shaky, sprint-worn legs. Tapping into the property’s wards against outside notice had drained her near empty. Folding part of the spell around her body as a shield against Frank and Lacey had exhausted her further. Bracing herself left-handed against a wall, she waited for the headrush to pass. Took a few deep breaths. Pushed off.

She smudged some of the chalk around the largest curse, the jerry-rigged ‘death curse,’ but didn’t have energy to do more than cost them a couple of hours of work. At the top of the steps, she stopped. Left hand on the doorknob, right hand gripping her pistol, she listened. She heard movement muffled through the second floor, grumbling voices, closets opening…

Did anyone wait on the first floor?

Nobody she heard.

Through the door, around the corner, a kitchen, a laundry room, a mudroom, a back door. Through that, a screen door, a fence—the screen door snapped shut. Zoe jumped on the fence and climbed. In the house, movement reoriented toward the loud, fast yawp of the screen. Zoe clambered up over the fence. Shouts echoed from the house.

Landing on the other side of the chainlink, Zoe rushed down a narrow alley of parking lot back to the street. Behind her, the screen snapped again. Somewhere, car keys turned over an engine. Zoe sprinted across the street into another yard. Through that, over another fence, across another street; she turned left at the face of a four-floor brick apartment building, an immediate right down another parking-alleyway and into a normal-sized parking lot. The backs of two other apartment buildings and a row of tiny duplexes walled the lot.

Zoe sank into shadows, as far from the building and lot lights as she could get.

She coughed and spat up a phlegmatic smoker’s hock. She wiped her lips backhanded and coughed a couple more times, leaning into shadow. Her breath roughed through her, her heart rattled her bones. Pulling her sidearm from her holster she sank down, crouching. She tried to quiet her breath but couldn’t. Her lungs ached, her legs ached. She felt suddenly unsure if she could stand back up.

A car passed, its windows too dark to show passengers.

Zoe waited, breath starting to slow, heart rate calming…

The same car passed again, heading the other way.

Zoe waited. She holstered her gun to wipe slick-sweaty palms against her coat; unholstered the gun again. Her pounding heart sighed, slowing, and her breath filled her habit-choked lungs. She stood, knees creaking, thighs burning, and peered down the parking-alley in both directions. Sticking to the shadows, she approached the alley exit. Waited.

For a long time, nothing else happened.

Still shaking from adrenaline, even as her breath and pulse normalized, she shivered out of the alley and into the night. No matter how many wrong turns and double-backs she made, she couldn’t shake the sense of being watched. She spent two hours lurking the Salem night, waiting for a counterattack that never came.

She headed back toward her rental car, glancing periodically overshoulder.

The Belgian’s crew were the ‘A team.’ They led the run against Jill. With Malleus’ tacit permission, she guessed, they’d been working in the area before the Board even alerted any other organization.

Malleus didn’t have to worry about its SOP if someone else did the dirty work.

She lit a clove and put it out again. Dawn leaked over the horizon. The sense of surveillance oozed away with the sun.

Zoe parked two blocks from her newest room.

She had to get to those people.

How?

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nine, Pt. 1

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

You practice.

The grimoire begins with a small selection of ‘test’ spells, ritualized cantrips subtextually meant to strengthen and inoculate your sixth sense against the physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma associated with witnessing supernatural or paranormal events as-they-really-happen. Within a few months, you can get these spells to work an average of seven out of ten castings. You do not know that this is not impressive, that this is considered ‘normal’ by the People In the Know. You also do not know that the practitioners for whom this is ‘normal’ have all received structured, formal training. The People In the Know do not afford training to unknown nobodies such as yourself.

In this way, your expertise is quite ab-normal.

You practice. Even though every story ends the same way, you practice.

(we’re/they’re/it’s sorry, but they do)

Nobody knew how dreamer worked. Least of all Omar. It buzzed beehive in the honeycomb of his cortex. It sang cosmic lullabies along the sinewy chords of his synaptic instrument. He vibrated at the frequency that dissolved him. He dissolved. The trillion disparate fractals of Omar splintered and danced through the no-place every-place. Zoe was in him, he was in her, she was him, he was her—they were the Summoner and so are you, practicing.

How did dreamer work?

Maybe some things are unknowable. The myriad layered infinity needs some mystery, after all.

You try to show other people. “No, you don’t understand, I can prove it.” The flare sizzles in the air, blinding-bright, and you’ve strengthened your sixth sense so much you don’t even flinch at the sight. You gesture. “What?” your friend asks, clueless. “You didn’t see it?” you ask. “See what?” You play it off as nothing, just a joke. Sometimes a joke is an important thing wearing the mask of unimportance.

It happens by accident. Some of that growing frustration and buried pain seeps into the spell and the flare flies into your colleague’s face. She screams, flailing at it. It does no harm, unable to, and fizzles out. For seconds she stares at the wisps of silver-white smoke still illuminated even as they vanish. “What was that?” she asks. You do not know what a sixth sense is and you do not understand what lets her see it. You smile, happy to answer. She is not happy to know.

You run out of friends and colleagues to run the test on. You seek people out online.

One person seizes and foams at the mouth at the sight of the flare. It seems to you that everyone at least notices the spell when you fire it directly at them. You aim it at them on purpose. All of them witness it, if only for a moment. Seconds later, some remember nothing. Some take a few deep breaths and blink and simply forget, others seize and sputter, twitch and tic. During the second such incident, you try to help the woman spasming and spittle-hissing on the floor. But she doesn’t need help. None of them do. Their minds reject or replace the stimuli. It just takes time.

One man starts screaming and hitting you after witnessing the flare. You push him off and throw him into the wall and when he rebounds wide-eyed he sprints back upstairs and out of the building. He screams the whole time. You don’t know this, but he eventually undergoes sixty days of inpatient psychotherapy before returning to his almost-normal life. You don’t know this, either: he doesn’t remember you at all.

You find only two people who seem able to see and recall the flare—your colleague from weeks ago and another woman you discover through an occult forum. You don’t know why. Why would you, poor thing? But you know that magic can change the world.

Turning pages deeper into the grimoire, you begin building small constructs. The magic drains you, leaves you sweat-puddled and panting, aching from head to toe, but it works. You build a rat Construct, attaching extra tails between its forelegs and giving them prehensile flexibility. As all sometimes-capitalized Constructs, it obeys. It gathers tools and supplies from around the apartment and surrounding area while you work. The ritual that gave it life took nine hours and the rat-minion survives for six days. When it dies, the added tails slowly unravel. Minutes after its death, no trace of them remains. The rat rots faster than it ought to.

You make two more.

The fourth Construct you make isn’t a rat. You show it to the woman from the occult forum. She’s stunned and impressed, at first. Then nervous. Her nervousness itches at you. What’s to be afraid of? This is magic. This is animate flesh. Something like this could change everything. “Where did you get the cat?” she asks.

“Where did I get the fucking cat!?”

What a minuscule concern.

Everyone knew that magic had a cost. Everyone.

What is it worth to change the world? A person might as well ask what it might be worth it to save the world—everything. A utopia is a priceless thing. Do the ends justify the means? A question for second-generation utopians.

You can do this. Can you? You certainly believe you can.

“How?” Omar and Zoe and Sung-ho ask. “How?”

They slingshot out of your history. They drift and spin in the no-place every-place.

Fade in. EXT. ALLEYWAY, SLATE RAINY EVENING MELTING INTO NIGHT.

Behold, a pale horse, white paint scrawled on concrete. Leaking garbage bags drooled bio-color. Behind a restaurant, a sigil hummed with magic. A number of rats roved the alley, not-quite-right. They attended the sign.

Fade out.

Omar smashcut Zoe smashcut Omar smashcut—

—and where did Sung-ho go?—

(every story)

Jill smashed the mirror, screaming. Microsplinters chewed her knuckles red. A shard already cracked into other shards fractal-fell into the basin. Jill grabbed it. Elsewhere in the maze-like and magic-twisted house, she heard gunfire. Clutching the fractal-glass so hard it drew blood, Jill howled out of the bathroom. Would she ever be free of this? Would Zoe?

—s m a s h c u t—

What does it cost to change the world? It costs the story a different ending, and

—we’re/they’re/it’s sorry, but—

—the story might read differently if—

(if)

In your dreams, a saw of teeth tore reality open. All sorts of magic spilled out, Prometheus-Pandora, undeniable and unreturnable. No take-backsies. You put your arm in the wound just to feel it. Its tongue sandpapered your skin, the scab a maw, the wound, lips. This is the thing that eats the veil.

You wondered the cost of changing the world?

Someone has to rewrite the book.

Zoe jerked awake, momentarily lost in the lunatic sensation of being and having been multiple people and things and places and times during the dreamer vision. She yelped from the overwhelm and rolled onto her side, panting. Vague commotion dopplered around her but she couldn’t understand it through the vision’s dissipation. Still heaving for sweet blessed air, she pulled her notebook toward her and started writing. The commotion crescendo’d, voices joining noise. She couldn’t understand it, yet. Words appeared on the page. She didn’t stop to read. Every good agent knew that the important thing was recording everything. Interpretation came later.

The noise sharpened, her mind-brain-soul-ego catching up to her waking body.

Her writing slowed, her tethers to the vision unraveled by urgent sound. Droplets of sweat splatted the page, blurring some of the ink. The pen hesitated. She recognized Seo-yeon shouting something in Korean. She stopped writing. Turning, she saw Sung-ho standing up, his own notebook abandoned. He wiped sweat from his face backhanded. At the foot of the basement stairs, they’d left their sidearms in a plastic container just in case the Summoner somehow knew powerful psychic and dream arcana. Sung-ho rushed over to it speechless, grabbed his gun from inside, and started up the steps.

Dropping her pen, Zoe followed.

“Dad!” Hyun-jung called out, above. “What the fuck is that!?”

Zoe grabbed her pistol from the bin. Paused. Looked back.

Omar laid out on top of his sleeping bag, eyes roving behind their lids. His lips moved in rapid-fire syllables but Zoe couldn’t hear anything he whispered—if he whispered anything at all—over the cavalcade clattering from upstairs. He seized, back arching, and strained against some unpleasant span of vision. A groan stretched out of him.

How strong had his sixth sense really become? How long could he stay inside a dreamer vision and safely make it back out again?

Zoe stood frozen, one foot on the basement landing and the other on the next step up. Omar’s lips pressed into a line. A plaintive whine bobbed his Adam’s apple.

Upstairs, something crashed to the floor. Inhuman vocal chords snarled.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 3

Salem, MA; July, 2016.

Zoe had tracked the crew for several days. They worked for either Malleus or the Belgian’s council, she hadn’t figured out which. They handled the spellcraft while their B-team buzzed Jill and Darnell’s house, doing performative drive-bys and glowing their headlights from the shadows. So far, everything had aligned with Zoe’s expectations. The slow campaign of psychological terrorism and constant, low-level mystical attacks followed SOP close enough to the letter for the breaches and bifurcations to seem like honest mistakes. This was what they did.

Zoe had never led up a civilian anti-personnel gig, herself, but she’d read the documentation.

People didn’t kill people, anymore. Especially not in civilian arenas, places where police and mundane investigative agencies would bring scrutiny to the crime. Instead, different in-field agents performed rigorous surveillance and espionage activities. They collected data, since all data had use, but the real purpose was to instill paranoia and fear in their subjects. Ideally, the subject would report these things to friends, family members, or local authorities. Over time, the nature of the carefully scripted ‘crying wolf’ led the subject’s credibility to decline. This dismantled the subject’s ability to reach out, communicate, and organize resistance. More importantly, paranoia tended to generate more paranoia.

The FBI never followed Earnest Hemingway. They never followed him right up until he put a bullet in his head.

Meanwhile, the primary members of the anti-personnel squad worked on magical approaches. With most civilians, this meant psychic and dream magic, minor illusions to further their paranoia, and basic bad luck hexes, curses weakening their immune systems, and other subtle but increasingly destructive spells aimed at attenuating their targets physically, mentally, and spiritually.

According to SOP regarding the neutralization of entities possessing human-like consciousness, a sentient target was ‘neutralized’ when their avenues for attack were cut off and their means of recovery prohibitively limited. Sometimes this meant homelessness, sometimes institutionalization, sometimes prison—sometimes just flat-broke, beat-up, make-it-stop concession. Very rarely did it end with death. When it did, it seldom mattered. Suicides didn’t threaten the same scrutiny that homicides did.

Working anti-personnel for rogue agents, known terrorists, and active necromancers was much easier, both morally and practically. SOP for those gigs involved extensive research on the eradication of evidence, mundane and otherwise. There were fewer steps.

The group Zoe had tracked had rented a small house about five miles from Jill’s. Approaching, Zoe felt the ritual space in her sixth sense. It was subtle but her sixth sense was sharp. In the basement, an accretion of supernatural energy thrummed her sensory periphery. She felt it like a gentle tug pulling her inside. So gentle she barely noticed it; but she did.

The property’s narrow yard and short fence provided little cover for breaking and entering. Clad in all-black, bullet-resistant helmet over armored leather jacket over armor-reinforced pants, she clung to the shadows and crept to the rear of the building. Just after three in the morning, no lights shone down from the surrounding windows.

Shouldering her quick-kit to the gray-white cement backing the house, she withdrew a set of lockpicks and unrolled them. Even with her mystically-enhanced eyesight she had to squint to see in the deep dark of the cloud-swaddled night. She got to work on the back door. She’d learned, at some point, that the mundane act of picking locks took a fraction of the time it took magic to accomplish the same feat. So she’d taken lessons.

The lock unlatched. She paused, packing the lockpicks back up. Focusing on her sixth sense, she closed her eyes and reached out. She searched for a ward, an alarm or a trap that might trigger when someone invaded their space or entered uninvited or crossed a specific threshold. Magic crackled inside the house. She couldn’t feel a particular warding spell but she couldn’t find certainty that one didn’t wait for her, either.

She pushed the door open.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happening meant little. Most wards weren’t traps. Just because she didn’t feel a ward go off, and just because none of the magical effects specifically targeted or affected her, didn’t prove a ward hadn’t triggered. It didn’t prove anything at all, except that she’d broken into her enemy’s house and nothing bad had happened to her yet.

Crouching, she found herself in a kitchen. She maneuvered the walking space slowly, listening for movement, a footstep, a dog’s huff, something. She heard nothing. Closing her eyes, again, she attuned herself to her sixth sense. She felt no jolt of warning or thrum of foreshadowing. She felt several spells active in the vicinity. She felt magic buzzing in the basement.

Opening her eyes, she moved toward what felt like the direction of the ritual space.

A lot of practitioners in Zoe’s realm of esoteric espionage used basements as ritual spaces. A basement represented a large chamber, private, that society demanded neither to intrude nor witness; a part of a building so frequently windowless that nobody ever questioned its windowlessness. It didn’t surprise Zoe that a group of well-trained mystical operatives would use a rented basement for their local spellcraft.

What surprised her was what she saw when she crept through the basement door and peered down.

“Holy shit,” she whispered to nobody, her hand reaching for an amulet she’d brought for the job. The jewelry had been imbued some generations ago with a simple ward, a slight bit of magic that gently muffled all the sounds its wearer made. The techniques used to enchant the necklace were so old that only Jill knew how to renew the ward, so its effectiveness had grown dubious over the years. She hadn’t touched it for that reason, anyway. She’d touched it instinctively. She’d touched it because she’d needed to touch something after what she’d seen.

The sheer volume of paranormal power contained in the chamber overwhelmed her sixth sense. She tried to shove the panic-sensations into the back of her mind, tried to make sense of the spellcraft beyond the mere mass of it. Whoever these practitioners were, whatever organization they worked for, they did not trifle.

Zoe closed the basement door behind her. Relying on the invocation that lent her nightsight, not wanting to turn on her phone’s flashlight even noiselessly in the basement, she descended. Her sixth sense hammered at the back of her skull, demanding attention. She controlled it. She focused on the evidence.

She recognized some of the glyphs and sigils. Every practitioner had their own spin, their own calligraphy, but it was all variations on a theme. When a practitioner discovered something that worked well, that saved some degree of time or effort in the laborsome task of spellcrafting, everyone else started using the same short-cut ASAP.

Historically, this practice had led to a significant amount of cultural appropriation and, eventually, cultural exchange. It turned out, whatever magic was, it responded to earnestness. A practitioner couldn’t benefit from, for example, a faith-based warding short-cut without developing in themselves a knowledge of and respect for the faith that originated it. Magic didn’t abide vacancy, irony, or disdain.

So, over centuries, most high-level practitioners became pseudo-culture vultures.

(Were there seven keys, a secret doctrine? So much more than that.)

Also over centuries, all the numerous short-cuts discovered for numerous spells solidified into a recognizable set of sigils, items, and behaviors. Examining them closely enough could tell a practitioner what spells might hum and stir in the ozone-stink air, what loose threads of reality awaited tugging, sometimes even what trigger might set something off.

Zoe picked out a couple scrying spells, mystical means of long-range spying, but she doubted they were strong enough to pierce the wards ensconcing Jill’s house. The team renting the house had also constructed several psychic assaults, mostly in the form of nightmare curses meant to cause sleeplessness.

Nightmares and paranoia hexes were small potatoes, they affected very little in terms of physical reality, and so the team had been able to hyper-charge the sigils and get them through Jill’s defenses. Judging from the sigils, glyphs, crystals, and burnt offerings, Zoe figured that four people in the Briar-Tims household suffered nightly terrors, and five suffered from a faint, background sense of growing dread, the spell subtly altering their hormonal levels and sending a mystic hum through their bodies at an inaudible 18hz. For efficiency’s sake, Zoe imagined the team aimed for as much overlap as possible.

She found a few wards, all of them well-attended. They’d used the standard perimeter defenses to shield themselves from non-human interlopers, outside entities, and other supernatural and paranormal threats, but all the other wards she found served the purpose of obscuring the place from notice. Maybe that explained how faintly she’d first felt so much powerful and concentrated magic. Maybe.

The death curse stopped her in her tracks.

SOP didn’t include death curses.

She bent low, examining the sigil, its smaller surrounding glyphs, the narrow runes painted and dug into the unfinished cement around those…

It was definitely a death curse.

Magic couldn’t guarantee things like death. Few practitioners attempted true death curses in the modern age—a true death curse, the kind that later appeared as aneurysms or accidental death, took practitioners months or years to charge and cast, and even then they only worked in about twelve percent of known cases. To truly guarantee someone’s death through supernatural means alone, a practitioner of Zoe’s level would have to invest between six and nine years of ritual, each day requiring two to three hours of spellcraft. In the modern age, people mostly just shot each other or paid other people to shoot each other for them.

And so, in modern parlance, a ‘death curse’ was just a curse that altered probability fields and other accretions of million-variable vectors (sometimes mistaken for ‘luck’) to drastically enhance the chances that a target would come to some sort of physical or psychological harm. It was still very much not part of protocol.

Except…

Zoe felt stupid, realizing.

It wasn’t part of Malleus protocol.

But there was an organization in their world, aligned with Malleus, that Malleus loved to criticize over their ‘uncivilized’ tactics. The Belgian’s initiative, his council of twelve, took a much more conservative and aggressive stance on secrecy issues. A more violent stance, too.

How convenient, she mentally sneered.

How useful, she mentally corrected.

Standing, she peered at the basement ceiling. Had she heard something? She waited, ears burning. No sound muffled through, no floorboard creaked. She rolled her neck, cracked her knuckles. She had to sabotage the death curse, at least. Immediately. Before leaving.

Luckily, magic tended to be a tenuous thing. A person with training could dismantle someone else’s spell in a fraction of the time it took to build up.

Zoe had a lot of training.

Flexing her hands, fingers interlocked, she froze.

She’d definitely heard something that time. A footstep. Two. Three, four—two pairs of footsteps.

She clutched the grip of her sidearm and scanned the basement for cover.

“You sure you felt something?” a groggy male voice asked.

“Yes,” a woman replied, sharp and awake. “I felt it.”

“Okay, where?”

“‘Where?’ I don’t know, Frank. Someone broke a perimeter ward.”

“Okay, but where are they?”

“Somewhere inside the perimeter. Jesus.”

The groggy male, apparently Frank, grumbled. “I just thought maybe you had more specifics.”

Zoe pulled her sidearm from its holster. Little cover existed in the basement; the team had cleared most of it out to make room for ritual use. A water heater and furnace boiled in a corner. She pursed her lips.

The basement doorknob twisted.

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 2

Wilmington, NC; July, 1997.

every story ends the same way—

Jill plummeted through chaos and Zoe plummeted after. Zoe struggled to grab onto something, a memory or a thought or a place, something material that attached Jill back to the world outside the spell—but she’d mostly practiced this in a controlled setting and suddenly everything whipped passed them so quickly she couldn’t pull sense out of any of it.

—we’re sorry, but they do—

Threads of tar-like black criss-crossed the bottomless plummet. They dripped in oil and viscera rotted to liquescence. Shapes twitched and waited in the dark, million-eyed and hungry. Jill landed on a string of sticky sable and twisted around.

A spiderleg dropped from the darkness and speared her.

“Help!” Jill screamed.

Not a spiderleg, though. A mess of old syringes taped together, the needle tip of the last one eighteen inches long and circumferenced wrist-thick. It slammed through Jill’s shoulder as Jill screamed again. Zoe tried to maneuver the sticky-tacky web toward her. This wasn’t a memory. A nightmare? Jill kicked and thrashed, trying to pull her shoulder away from the syringe. The syringe-limb retracted.

Zoe leapt. Her hands found Jill’s ankles. The extra weight drew a throat-tearing shriek from Jill.

And then—

In a high school history class not long before Jonathan’s funeral and so not long before Jill’s first dose of heroin, Jill raised her hand. “Excuse me, but what kind of psycho piles rocks on a guy until he dies?”

“While now we understand that witches aren’t real,” the teacher said, sitting on a broad desk in front of the chalkboard, “back then, they were believed to exist. They were believed to be monstrous agents of Satan.”

“So?”

The teacher’s eyelids fluttered. “What?”

“Geraldo Rivera would probably think I’m an agent of Satan—are you gonna hang me?”

“Obviously not, but that’s largely because of our modern perspective.”

“I guess what I’m really asking is…what crimes did they commit? Like what did Margaret Jones do besides screw up at work and hang out with her cat too much?”

“Again, from our perspective, that’s probably what happened. But back then, she’d been accused of witchcraft, which means she could have done any number of things.”

Jill snorted. “Drain the life from her patients with her ‘withering touch?’”

“If you believe in witchcraft, maybe.”

“So they didn’t have any charges against her unless she was a witch?”

The teacher nodded. “Yes.”

“And their proof that she was a witch was that she did these things they couldn’t charge her with?”

“Essentially.”

“Okay. And was anyone ever accused of being a good witch?”

“A…what? I don’t think so.”

“So a witch was by necessity a sinister or evil thing to be?”

The teacher laughed. “Again, we’re still fundamentally talking about people who believed in witches. Although, Gillian, your point does bring me to today’s in-class activity…”

every story

every (never)

Tumbling again, Zoe caught a strand of slick gross and pulled herself back onto the web. A lacquered, voidglowing platform grew from the bundling web. She stepped up onto it. In the unclear distance, Jill stood facing a mirror, her back to Zoe. From the darkness overhead, four syringe-limbs jabbed into Jill’s upper back at regular intervals, taking turns.

“What you are is always more important than who you are,” Jill snarled at the mirror. “Ask anyone. It’s humankind. Remember Jonathan? Who was he? What. Was is gone, whoever lived in it corpsed over into nothing. Jonathan’s nothing.”

Zoe hesitated. She hardly remembered Jonathan. She hadn’t known him very well. Three years older than Jill, they’d rarely shared social circles, and Zoe had started training two years before Jill had. By the time Jonathan had been important to Jill, Zoe had long exited Jill’s regular social domain.

But she remembered Jill crying when he’d killed himself. If her investigative timelines proved correct, Jill’s first injection happened only weeks after Jonathan’s funeral.

Although, in fairness, Jill’s first time hadn’t been entirely consensual.

Depending on when chemical dependency first triggered, maybe her second time hadn’t been entirely consensual, either…

“You’ll never be free of this,” Jill growled. “Never. You’re a what, first. You thing. ‘Witch.’ And with hips and tits like those, you’re a what, second, too. Lustsuck cum-magnet. If nobody else looks for a ‘who’ or sees a ‘who’ then how do you know that you have one? Maybe you don’t. Maybe under the surface there’s nothing. Maybe, under the surface, there’s just me.”

“Jill?” Zoe’s voice cracked. She stood ten feet from her sister, hesitant.

“Fuckhole. Witchcunt. Cold as a hot pair of tits, look at you. Thou shalt not suffer a slut to love.”

Zoe kept walking. She wished for her satchel of tricks, her on-the-go cantrips, her gun.

“You’re a what-thing until you’re nothing, corpse. Just meat to verb.”

Only six feet behind Jill, Zoe started whispering an incantation.

“You want to change the world?” Jill pouted at her reflection. “Boo-hoo, Jill wants to change the world. Well, you can’t. Go ahead, try. But the world’s going to break your jaw and rape you. And when it’s finished beating and fucking you into the ground, it’ll leave you there, crushed, until the rats get hungry.”

Zoe imagined layers of magic folding in on themselves into a knife. Her parched throat lost a syllable in the incantation and she paused. Swallowed. Picked up again. She dropped into a sprinter’s stance, focusing her energy.

“The world wins,” Jill said. “The world always wins. Why hurt yourself so much trying to fight it? Don’t let them burn you. There’s such a better way to go.”

Jill pulled a syringe out of the mirror.

The four spider-syringe-limbs stopped jabbing her, their bloodied needletips hovering. Elsewhere in the darkness around them, more needles clattered their bits together giddily.

“Just rest for a little while,” Jill said. “Worst case scenario, you won’t have to feel it when the world does it rough.”

Zoe felt another memory bulb up from the ground beneath her. Shards of it cut through the black webbing. The mirror reformed into a vanity, the one Jill had used in high school. The web began unraveling, bit by bit becoming Gillian’s high school bedroom.

The first time she’d used? No, Zoe knew that grim tale.

The first time she’d used alone? Maybe.

She couldn’t risk things going deeper.

Zoe exploded from the sprinter’s stance, the last syllable of the spell leaving her lips in a pant. The energy focused, the spell hewn, Zoe rushed at Jill from behind. Syringe-in-hand, Jill turned with wide eyes—too slowly. Zoe crash-tackled into her, sprawling them both through the strange void transitioning memories.

Zoe triggered her spell. The nightmares, dreams, and memories clouding Jill’s mind split apart. Moonlight spilled through the broadening gaps. She pulled.

The air reeked of ozone and static-sizzle-burnt with energy. Zoe bucked back from Jill’s chair and slammed into the opposite wall. With a shout, Jill rocked onto her side, the chair legs snapping all at the same time. The table jumped a few inches in the air and landed again. The ozone stench clung dusty inside of Zoe’s nostrils as she pushed herself back up.

The First Confessional seemed charged.

“Jill?” Zoe asked.

Jill spat a gray chunk of meatlike goo onto the floor. Mostly the shade of wrecked cinder, veins of white and black marbled it. A viscous, similarly-shaded liquid followed, first in a sharp puke of vomitus and then in a drool.

“Jill?” Zoe repeated, standing now. “Jill?”

“Ugh…” Jill groaned, wiping at her spew-stained face with her bound hands. “Ugh, fuck…what was that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Jill spat more. “Is the Confessional ready?”

“It’s ready.”

“Could you untie me?”

“Jill…we have to talk.”

“What?” Jill jerked in the broken chair, scraping it against the hardwood floor.

“Whatever that was…it’s in the spell, now. The whole ritual.”

“Zoe…”

“It felt dangerous.”

“We can’t stop.”

Zoe managed her way to Jill’s collapsed chair and starting working on the binds wrapping Jill’s waist. “We don’t know what that thing’s capable of. We don’t even know what it is.”

“Zo’.”

Working to unravel the knots tying Jill’s wrists, Zoe sighed. “What?”

“We know what it is.”

“You mean how it’s a whispering vomit-monster living in your…” she trailed off.

“In my head.” Jill confirmed.

Zoe stopped untying, the realization leaving her with nothing. “Oh.”

“You didn’t think it would go down without a fight, did you?”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 1

Oceanrest, ME; January, 2007.

Out of the grocery store parking lot, a broad traffic’d avenue, four lanes. The man raced across pumping arms, overstuffed rucksack clanking cacophonies on his back. Zoe chased. With a population just under two hundred thousand, few cars rode along the afternoon lanes. One of them blasted a horn, swerving as the man rushed and whirled around it. Zoe slowed for a second, losing the gain she’d made on his head start, and started sprinting again around the vehicle’s trunk.

They raced through a strip mall lot. A learning center, an arts and crafts boutique, one of the city’s fancier Goodwills. The man turned west, toward the Numbered District, the rectangle of blocks with numbered streets, and beyond that the Oceanrest Historic District and its narrow roads and cobbles, its alleys where cars couldn’t fit.

Did he know the city?

He cut into the Numbered District, sprinting south. Zoe tailed him. She gained, at first. His fifty foot lead grew to sixty, shrank to fifty, grew to seventy, shrank to fifty, shrank to forty, to thirty, to twenty…but after five minutes of sprinting and darting and avoiding cars and pedestrians, seventeen years of smoking started to slow her down. She still had better pace, but not ‘better’ enough.

At the edge of 1st and 1st, he crossed southwest over a set of tram tracks toward the industrial district and the docks. Zoe caught a foot on a rail and stumbled. She caught herself, balanced, and kept chasing. She’d only lost about two feet, but now she was only gaining six inches per second. And losing air.

He knew his way around. He knew the city well.

That was a bad sign.

His twenty foot lead shrank to eighteen, to sixteen, to fourteen…

A chainlink fence separated the years-unused tram tracks from the industrial district and docks proper. The man climbed. Zoe caught up before he’d reached the top of the fence. She leapt up and started after him. He rolled over the top and fell, landing sloppy and stumbling. He crashed to hands and knees, scrambling back bipedal. Zoe dropped down five feet behind him, landing cat-like, rolling with the momentum.

Fifteen feet ahead, someone had already pried open the back door to a condemned factory. The man rushed for it. Zoe rushed for him.

His five foot lead shrank to four, three…

A lance of sixth-sense cool shot down her spine. She yanked her sidearm out of her coat pocket, slowing her pace. The man cut sharply right at the yawning factory door. A monster leapt out from the darkness within. Zoe thumbed the safety and pivoted her momentum into a sidelong strafe, a spin away from the monster’s first flailing attacks.

Sculpted from inanimate objects lashed and given locomotion by magic, the thing swung arms made from sawblades and hammers, rattled legs unstably on mystically-enhanced captive bolt pistols. It pistoned a body of cinderblock and oil drum and spare parts clumsily toward her. It seemed to have no organic parts. It had no visible head or nervous system, no ligature or biological attachments.

Only amateurs built Constructs without organic parts. If the only thing that made a Construct ‘living’ was the magic, itself, that made the Construct pretty easy to kill. Biomass mattered. Even mud beat out steel as Construct materia.

Zoe kept her head low and threw her bodyweight into the thing’s center mass. Its sawblades sliced at her winter coat but didn’t graze skin—she barreled into it and sent it crashing to the ground. It struggled on its stubby bolt-pistol legs and sawblade-hammer arms to push itself upright again. The weldwork connecting its limbs to its body was weak, Zoe noticed. With a couple well-placed kicks, she tore its unreal shoulders apart and left it armless and dying on the ground. It buzzed and clattered, its bolt-pistols hissing and firing at the air. In such a state, the spell giving it movement and motivation would soon collapse to mundanity and the Construct would cease to exist.

But in the seven or eight seconds she’d spent killing it, the man—the Summoner—had vanished inside. She reached for her purse.

Paused.

She’d left her purse in the car. Obviously. Because of the running.

“Goddammit.”

Keeping her pistol close, barrel pointed groundward, she approached the gaping factory threshold. She crossed from half-fallow grass to half-ruined cement. Broken plywood boards littered the ground where someone had pried them loose from the door. The door, itself, rested in rust and dust in the dimness beyond the entryway. Zoe took a deep breath and stepped inside.

Concrete floors, dust, and rust; sunlight sliced in from tears in the structure, shining age on steel curves. Detritus strew everything, the factory’s innards tangled and torn by years of scavengers, its entire electrical system long-harvested, its valuable scraps denuded. All the vague and distant sound of the outside world fell away.

Zoe crept down a cement corridor. In the vast chamber ahead, she heard the scraping of shoe soles. How far? She couldn’t tell; they echoed, obscuring distance.

Her sixth sense itched. It told her that danger waited nearby. Sometimes a person’s sixth sense could be uncannily unhelpful.

She entered the larger, central chamber of the structure.

A spell jammed through her. At the mouth of the threshold, the Summoner had painted a sigil, charged it with magic, and imbued it with his will. Luckily, the Summoner still seemed like a relative amateur. The restraint spell tried to freeze Zoe in place but the Summoner lacked the expertise, focus, and sheer, trained willpower to make that happen.

Zoe’s will shred his in a fraction of a second. She shuddered for a moment as the spell still triggered, but its practical effects were maybe a hundredth of the desired ones.

She ducked just before two gunshots erupted from the factory dim. If the Summoner’s spell had actually worked, they’d have struck her center-mass. Since it hadn’t, they whizzed over her head and sparked against old, rotten architecture.

“Shit!” the Summoner yelped, his shoe-scrape rushing toward another exit on the opposite side of the enormous room. He was smart enough to know when he’d been outmatched.

Thumbing off the safety on her own pistol, she leapt up and gave chase.

She skidded over iced cement, leapt over some malformed piece of scavenged steel, and caught herself moments before falling. The Summoner gained ground, slamming open another door a dozen paces ahead. Rebalanced, Zoe started running again just as the man flew out into the winter light.

A rush of calm came over her. Her sixth sense spiked. Time dilated.

She slowed her pace for part of a second.

A creature flew out of the dimness to her left, another Construct, sometimes capitalized.

She pivoted, bringing her body’s momentum in an arc toward the thing, leading with the butt of her gun. As her perceptions of time accelerated to normalcy, she felt the impact. The butt of her sidearm and the length of her forearm made contact, the construct feeling like twenty-five or so pounds of solid animal muscle.

It hit the floor and rolled, hissing.

Zoe stomped on its foremost head. As its numerous claws and hardware appendages scraped at her boots and legs, she fired two silver bullets and one armor piercing round into its grotesque body. It shivered and squeaked, losing strength. She fired a final frangible round into it and the thing went still.

She sighed, out of breath. If the Summoner knew the city as well as he seemed to, she wouldn’t catch up to him now.

Removing her boot, she examined the Construct’s carcass. The Summoner had stitched together two stray cats, four rats, and two screwdriver-tipped, mechanical arms to create the three-headed, dozen-clawed grotesquery. Judging from the lack of other vermin, Zoe assumed the monster had eaten most of its convenient prey already. She left it, following the Summoner’s lead out the back door.

Far-but-not-too-far, sirens warbled toward the factory. Even in the slouched dereliction of the half-abandoned industrial district, gunfire invited scrutiny.

And scrutiny meant risk.

Scrutiny meant danger.

Zoe jogged south-southeast, first, through the industrial district and harbor’s most dilapidated and gutted avenues. At the southernmost end of the docks, broad signs advertised a marina under construction. There, the property values had dropped so low that they’d become wise investments for unwise business ideas.

Slowing to a speed walk, she cut east toward the nearest suburb. The sirens arrived at their destination, six minutes behind her. Zoe knew what they’d find—a scattering of tools, evidence of recent looting, a handful of dead animals, and signs of a struggle. If they could put a narrative together from all of it, that narrative would stick.

Slowing from speed-walk to casual stride, Zoe pulled out her phone, flipped it open, and dialed.

“Hey,” Sung-ho said. “What’s the news?”

Zoe realized she was still out of breath. She stopped walking. Inhaled.

“Zo’?” Sung-ho asked. “Hey, Zo’, you there?”

“He’s here,” she said, breathing again. “In Oceanrest.”

“What?”

“And I think he knows who we are.”

Sung-ho didn’t bother asking ‘how.’ In their world of shadows and secrets and literal magic, the question rarely garnered answers at all—and when it did, they seldom proved useful. Instead, Sung-ho’s voice dropped low and solemn. “We have to finish your ritual tonight.”

“I’m heading back now.”

“I’ll get Omar prep’d for his first dreamer vision.”

Zoe wanted to start walking again but couldn’t. “He’s not ready.”

“Well, momma bird, there’s something hungry circling our nest, so ready or not, it’s fly-time.”

“Sung-ho—”

“My daughter lives here,” his voice lost all cleverness. It became a lethal thing, a thing that cuts clean and all the way through. “And a madman might know who we are. So Omar is taking the dreamer.”

Zoe swallowed. Nodded even though Sung-ho couldn’t see it. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seven, Pt. 4

Wilmington, NC; July, 1997.

Silver-white bright shafted in from the skylight. The air hummed with magic, so much energy sizzling in the room that even the numbest sixth-sense would recognize it. Her wrists bound with silk, the real restraints mystic in nature, Jill sat on the Confessor’s end of the table. Wearing an executioner’s hood and the closest thing they had to ‘traditional armour’ (a Kevlar vest), Zoe stood behind the armchair on the opposite side.

On the table between them waited a voice recorder, mystically enhanced and backed-up with scrying spells, a blade hopefully-imbued with Jill’s will, and a light leather lash.

“Your next sin,” Zoe insisted.

A drop of sweat rolled down Jill’s slick face. Jill pursed her lips, squeezed her eyes against tears.

“Your next sin,” Zoe repeated.

“Ninety-four,” Jill said, voice attenuate from the extended ceremony. “I think it was August.”

Zoe remembered this but said nothing.

Jill swallowed, rolled her neck. She picked her bound hands up from the table and wiped some of the accumulated dampness from her face. “It was…” Jill trailed off.

Zoe unfolded her arms, gripped the back the unoccupied chair, and banged its back legs against the hardwood. Jill jumped but didn’t speak. Zoe slammed the chairlegs down again, the loud clamor echoing for microseconds afterward.

“It was—it was—it was…uh…when I ran away. The worst time, I guess.”

Zoe released the chair, neither confirming nor denying her opinion.

Jill stared at the table. “It’s when I…I took mom’s amulet and dad’s debit card and…and your trophies…”

“Look at me,” Zoe said.

Jill brought her glassy gaze up. Coughed. “Uh. So I withdrew a couple hundred dollars and I…I sold the rest of it. I was gone, I don’t know how long…”

Nine days, Zoe didn’t mention. Nine terrifying, up-all-night, crying days. Nine days of not knowing. She said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” Jill garbled. “I just couldn’t get away. I couldn’t get out.”

Zoe waited for the rest of the story. For the sake of the ritual, she couldn’t accept any apologies until after the Confessor had ‘fully described’ the ‘sin.’ Leaving the armchair behind, she stepped over to the table itself. She assessed the selection of ceremonial objects.

“I’ll finish, I’ll finish,” Jill said.

Zoe nodded but stayed at the table’s edge. She folded her hands behind her back.

“I…spent all the money. Mostly on junk. Booze and coke but mostly just…and at some point I sold the debit card. I told the guy I’d just swiped it off of someone. And then I couldn’t afford the motel room. I didn’t want to go back home. I…I called you but when you answered I just hung up.”

Three times, Zoe didn’t correct. Jill had called three times in that or similar fashion.

“I don’t—I can’t—”

Zoe unfolded her hands. “Tell the whole story.”

“The guy I sold the debit card to, he couldn’t use it, obviously, so…so…I didn’t know he recognized me, but he followed me. He found out I was staying in a tent in Tompkins. He didn’t even open the tent, he just took it down with me still inside it and started kicking.” Jill gulped, throat flexing with restraint. “I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what was happening, I just…I was trying to claw my way out of the tent, I was trying to scream—I don’t even remember if I could or not. I thought I was going to die. I thought he was going to rape me. I thought…” Jill paused, breath coming in short, fast inhalations.

“Whenever you’re ready to continue,” Zoe said.

“I don’t know how long it went on like that. Not long, I guess…but it felt like shrieking fucking forever. Then suddenly he was shouting for help, too, and I was tangled up in the tent trying to free myself. This woman, I mean this real Alphabet City butch, was hitting the guy with a baseball bat. Bright pink buzzcut, septum piercing, tattoos, big-ass keyring, the whole thing. And the guy was on the ground trying to crawl away and she kept shouting at him ‘how you like it, how you like it, how you like it.’” A faint smile weakly twitched across Jill’s lips. “After she was…done, I guess…she came over and helped me up. She knew a nurse who could come take a look at me. I went to her apartment. She told me to wait for her.”

“And…?”

“She was gone a while. I thought, you know, I thought she just wanted to fuck me or whatever. Or I told myself that. I didn’t know this woman, I didn’t know her friends…but I know those weren’t the real reasons that I…that I…”

Zoe rested a hand on the thick grip of the whip.

“I’m telling it,” Jill said. “Okay? Fuck. I’m telling it.”

Zoe nodded.

“I started to feel sick. But I was out of money. So.”

“Say it.”

“So I swiped her shit and ran, okay? I stole her VHS player, some cash, some weed I found…and I just walked out. It all added up to maybe a hundred bucks but it was a hundred bucks I didn’t have. I didn’t even spend it all before I called you. I just…I didn’t want to be the person who did what I did. But I was. I am.” Tears threatened Jill’s eyes. “And then you took me to the pawn where I’d sold all her shit and you helped me buy most of it back and when I gave it to her she just looked at me like I was…nothing. She said ‘thanks for not ripping me off but get the fuck out of my neighborhood.’”

Zoe released the whip.

“But I was back in her neighborhood two months after getting out of rehab because I—because I—‘cause I-I-I—” Jill seized, back arching into her seat. She gagged, choking on the syllable. She slammed her bound fists against the table. “Nnnnn. Nnnnn.”

Zoe walked quickly behind Jill’s chair, steadying it as Jill thrashed. She reached out and placed her hands on either side of Jill’s head, making sure she made contact with the temples. She’d only done this twice outside of a classroom.

“Never,” Jill spat, gray spittle spraying her lips. “Never.”

Zoe muttered the multi-lingual words of the spell. Her muscles twisted and knotted, her tendons strained. Her heart battered her lungs senselessly. Magic built up through her every fiber, hungry for resources. Sweat flopped her brow and slicked her back. Her words slowed down, separated by ragged pants. She barely managed the last syllables, Korean, <> before a sharp spasm ran down her right leg and nearly dropped her to the floor.

Jill seized, arching back, maw yawning as a descending pitch roughed and graveled. “You’ll never be free,” the new-yet-familiar voice snarled. “Never!”

Zoe staggered back, wiping sweat from her forehead. Nausea gyred her guts. Panting, she lunged forward and grabbed Jill’s head again. Jill thrashed, but the restraining spells and the literal restraints limited the movements. Zoe held tight. She muttered the incantation again, her heart rate climbing, chest thrumming as if nearing the end of a 500 meter race. She formed the magic in her mind, a cool pulse inward, her will becoming fascia over Jill’s, buttressing. The syllables gooey with drymouth, she reached the end of the incantation again, <> Her bicep tendon tightened, flexing her whole right arm. Her shoulder hitched, her scapulae drove toward her spine. A groan rattled out of her. She almost opened her eyes. The spell took.

“Never!” Jill screamed, her voice now the same raspy, gravely lowness of the haunting whispers...

Zoe Dove, crashing her consciousness into Jill’s.

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Short: The Oracle as We Burn

Background

A little while ago I had a rough writing day, a day where I started a bunch of short/flash projects but never took any of them very far.  A day of one-to-three sentence beginnings, where the middles and endings slipped through my fingers.  But a lovely treasure of a human being advised me to stitch all these failed attempts into a patchwork of a story, and so I did.  What emerged from this stew of beginnings is…well, weird, to say the least.  Weird and dark and chopped up.  It features non-linear time, characters-as-archetypes (or vice versa), and a strange hunt for The Boogeyman.  In terms of linear-event-narrative, well, it’s not the clearest piece I’ve ever written, I’ll give you that.  But it’s a bit of fun.  Check it out!

The Oracle as We Burn

I can’t remember – it started after we imbued the drugs with magic – the unspooling of ourselves skulls blooming – expanding into each other teeth first – the first time I saw us in the broken mirror – when did the halls here unravel? – how long have we splintered outside of time? – who made the mask? –

she flicks the ash from her cigarette

she flicks the ash from her cigarette

I ask “what does that mean?”

she unseams her lips “it’s just a cigarette, it means nothing”

but then they came for her under blood and not long after they burned the witch

Out there in the woods, a tree unfurls its roots; they are nooses. Its branches are bone. It claws at the clouds until sunlight spills out. Its decades aren’t carried in the rings of its trunk, but in the bodies hanged up unrevenged. How many children have hanged there? How many boogeymen have added to its collection of bones?

The sun slices itself open along the horizon and the sky curdles with its blood. That’s when they came.

we shot up in the corner, beneath the unflinching gaze of digital vitreous

we fell // we fall–

today is forever and the syringe is always full

I can’t remember remembering, memories shuffle together, 52 card pickup. Out there in the woods, gnarls of knotted bark blink their blackened eyes. Overhead, the CCTV blinks its squishy lens. Cataracts, cataracts.

When the Ragged Man comes over the cracked stones, when the skyscrapers drown, when the apocalypse pulls its punch, flip the coin. It tumbles to its zenith upward and pauses and you will know. When the Ragged Man comes over the desert, prepare.

we introduced alchemy to the manufacture of our recreational pills and powders – we studied the dust-dead languages – we stared into the squirming void and memorized the texture of its skin – when fighting monsters, do drugs – do not become, that’s for later – when you stare into the abyss – this overdose is nothing, we have only collapsed into the corner of the next room –

She shrieks with white phosphorous, a flare against the black. The last I saw the Oracle, she tumbled, sparking, into darkness, her last wails the mourning of dead gods.

He didn’t exist until we feared him into existence. We told the stories around campfires and flashlights and flickering candles and the universe heard our whispers and provided. When the first child went missing, I can’t remember.

there is a house at the end of the lane

go there by night, you won’t find it by day

(and when you arrive

we think that you’ll find

you ought to have just stayed away.)

strange attractors, fractal magic, loose change cointossed, observing the zenith; I see him now, we see him, we watch him lumber through tragedies licking his lips; life, uh, life finds a way; Jung, Feynman, Curie, Radium Girl; over a long enough time period, everything does indeed happen—

we midwived the boogeyman by begging the universe to make one

this is sometimes how magic works

sometime after we put the magic in the drugs, we unraveled; I don’t remember

she flicks ash and the molecules tumble like coins through the air.

52 card pickup, the Oracle burns in warcrime flare; she screams the truth and tumbles into darkness like breezecaught ash.  She flicks the cigarette.  They come to make her into an inferno.

She burns forever because every moment crystallizes into itself infinitely – our teeth are the same teeth, now, and our skin is the same skin, and we exist overlapping each other – our Venn diagram is a circle – we no longer remember – splintering outside of time, we see crystals, moments – memory serves no purpose – it all happens simultaneously, forever – how many hanged?–

52 card pickup, missing children, Oracles, boogeyman, darkness, distance and time, starlight—

what is a Tulpa?

who put on the mask, first? possessed by the whispering dark, who put on the mask? when did the first child disappear? we can’t remember – it happens, y’know?

They came for her under bloody skies as the day killed itself for night.

1967 AD

1967 BC

1945, 2001, 2296 AD

666 BC, 999 AD

the broken mirror and our reflection

when you stand outside of time you do drugs, y’know?

this does not count and Thank God It’s Forever

They came for her as she flicked ash. They came for her under sunlight suicide. She said it meant nothing.

death is nothing at all – it does not count – (we) have only slipped away into the next room – nothing has happened – everything is happening – everything happens forever – in the next room, we splinter – an overdose is nothing at all – the magic in the heroin now – we do not count – the Oracle is in the next room and we scream in phosphorous – this is nothing at all forever, we are the wise ones, the witches burnt – the children missing – the bodies hanged – the boogeyman himself, licking his lips – the truth is –

Our last memory (if “last” exists beyond its placeholder as a mere word, which it no longer does, not to us, but if it did, then our last memory) is a flare into darkness forever, a crystal scream. We burn into a star, time and distance, at daylight’s death. We spasm and jerk and foam around the lips and the magic turns our blood into phosphorous. We are so high forever and now our teeth chatter truth—

will we ever come down?  will we know if we do?

the trees claw the clouds until warcrime chemicals rain our wails upon us. we are the witch and we are the ones who burn her. she flicks ash//we flick ash. we say “it doesn’t matter” but the truth –

the first child. the fifty-second child. the scary mask, the oracle, the forever scream of the dying sun. the truth is a wail into dark, a desperate flare against the void. time and distance, every star a shriek. from the shadows, the boogeyman comes. I remember, now, when we put the magic in the heroin. now, under the cataracted glare of the bloodshot camera, which is also then, now.  now, we splinter, falling into each other teeth first. our skulls bloom and our meat sprays into rose petals. we go round the prickly pear. we see, now – we are the boogeyman and we are the children he takes away. our house is at the end of the lane. we are in the next room, the room next to you. we splinter, outside of time. you know how it is. you remember. because after we splinter, we fall together again, teeth first.

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News!! (Sad News)

Squidlings, I bring bad omens, sour news, sad news…

The Bad News

My sweet, tentacular friends, it has come time to announce that The Furies series is unlikely to see its third installment published.  This decision has been in the works for some time.

Let me first apologize, and then explain myself.  This has been a difficult and trying balancing act, and, unfortunately, I don’t believe I can pull it off.

As much as I loathe to admit it, this is, in large part, a financial decision.  While I’ve been working on selling stories, writing a podcast, and working alongside agents and editors to break into the trad-publishing scene (and the promise of a decent advance), the penniless work of The Furies has fallen by the distant wayside.  With so many other paying opportunities, and so many ideas overflowing my skull, there seems to be less and less time to work on the story that was supposed to be No Peace.

The second reason for this announcement has to do with my own drive.  Not long ago, my agent advised me to take some time off from my current Big Fucking Project and work on something else.  I went to the last draft of No Peace and…felt quite uninspired to begin the revising/rewriting process.  Instead, I ended up tooling around with other back-burnered projects and tried to hone my short story craft (I’m still bad at it.)  For 3-4 weeks I circled No Peace, but never got around to starting a new draft.  I took this as a sign.

The third reason is that, paging through the extant draft of No Peace, I struggled to figure out how to fix it.  The extant draft felt like one-and-a-half stories crammed into a single story line.  It was overcrowded, too long, and littered with too much detail.  It was the War and Peace of contemporary fantasy fiction, and I had no idea how to shorten it.  The current draft is objectively oversized (coming in at just around 600 pages) and the idea of gutting it to a normal size seemed like a tremendous amount of work…not to mention the labor of writing a second draft of such a gargantuan tale.

Reading the extant draft, I struggled with the weight of the thing–that is to say, the poignancy and prescience of the tale.  It lacks a certain ‘now-ness,’ being a book series set in an increasingly distant past, focused on issues that somehow seem less pressing at this particular cultural moment.

Lastly, it’s been several years since the release of No Grave, and No Peace still only has a first draft.  To put this into perspective, the release version of No Grave was the third revision pass of the sixth manuscript draft.  Considering my issues with length, prescience, and story with No Peace‘s extant draft, it seems silly to believe the path toward its publication would be any less fraught.  And, being blunt, I just don’t have the time to engage with that volume of work without a very different professional and financial situation.

A Silver Lining?

There is the simple silver lining: maybe, one day, given more financial stability and more time to actually sit down and write, I may return to these characters and this story.  If I do, it’s likely I’ll want to rewrite the first two books entirely, having honed my craft substantially since their release, and take it forward from there, updated.

But that is but one possible future, and it can’t be promised.

And so, the more complicated silver lining: I’ve learned a hell of a lot about writing books.  Though, sadly, I still have a lot to learn about short stories, apparently…

While plodding turtle-like through the extant draft of No Peace, I also churned out a number of other manuscripts.  Some were never finished.  Others have been read, rewritten, revised, and edited.  I’ve met agents and assistants and editors and editorial assistants and have had the whole lot of them tear my work apart like feral, froth-mouthed dogs.  This has been a keen learning experience.

I wrote an entire draft of a cyberpunk comedy while drinking.  I’ve been told that it’s hilarious but also utterly unpublishable in its current form.  I wrote four drafts of a story about an author whose self-destructive tendencies accidentally tear a hole in reality.  It’s an autobiography, obviously.  It also still needs a lot of work to be anywhere near publishable.  I’ve written fifty short stories and managed to get 5-6 of them published by people who aren’t myself.  I even wrote a podcast.

And, then, there is my work in Oceanrest.

Which brings us to…

The Future, Dark & Screaming

I’m trying not to make promises, even though promise-making is the heart of storytelling.  Every story is a series of promises we make to a reader, and every twist, reveal, or conflict is a choice to make good on that promise, or to break it, or to subvert it.

I’m subverting this entire thing by promising not to make any promises.

But here’s a promise: I’ll obviously keep writing.

(See what I did there?)

My current project, praying to break into trad-publishing, praying to take this semi-profitable hobby into a fully-fledged profession, is a little world-building venture I call Oceanrest.

I’ve written eight manuscript drafts of Oceanrest Novel #1, a novel my current agent swears we’ll be able to sell if I can shave off just a few more words.  I’ve written two manuscript drafts of Oceanrest Novel #2, because hope springs eternal.  I’ve done a skeleton-outline of Oceanrest Novel #3.  Oceanrest Novel #4, if I have my druthers, would be an updated version of the first novel I ever wrote, a project I worked on parallel to No Reflection but never felt was quite “right.”  I have five drafts of it already, and I feel like I only figured out what it was “about” on the last one.

But what makes Oceanrest special to me, as an author, is that it’s conceptually non-linear.  It’s a setting, a town, a world, where any number of stories could unfold.  Oceanrest #4, my first completed novel ever, would take place in the year 2000, for instance.  Oceanrest #1 takes place today, and #2 takes place about 15 months after that.  I have a brainstorm for a story that would take place in the 19th century.

What I need, right now, as an artiste, is flexibility.  I have faith in my current work because I’m giving myself flexibility.

And because, hopefully, my agent is right.

“Well,” you say, “we hate you, now.”

Please don’t?

If you adored the characters and storyline of The Furies, know that those characters and stories still live in my head.  If things go well in my life, The Furies will see rewrites and re-releases, and eventually continuation…but I can’t promise that, now.  I don’t have the resources.

But Nicole and Angie and Jimmy Sacrifice and Tristan and Alex and Harley are still tearing around in my skull.  Matthew Crowe and Charles Goodwin still pull marionette strings between my neurons, beneficiaries of corporate structure and privatized surveillance culture.  Parts of them will likely end up scavenged and mounted on other faces, attached to other names.  Human pain, coping, and overcoming will remain woven through my every tale.

Stick with me, please.  I promise to tell more stories.  I promise to take you on terrifying journeys.

Stay tuned.

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Radio Man I, or: A Man Wakes Up Any Morning

(Originally published as “A Man Wakes Up Any Morning” in Sanitarium Magazine, Issue #38.)

Radio Man I, or: A Man Wakes Up Any Morning

 

He woke up, again, to the same alarm as always: static hiss of radio underscoring the accentless newsman as he said, “…he went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.”  He slapped the radio off before he heard the rest of the story and pushed himself up out of bed.  Sarah shifted on the mattress next to him, an airy sigh slipping from her lips as she curled up in the covers.  She never heard the newsman, no matter how many times he said the exact same thing.  They’d had a fight about it, once.  She always heard a rock song, from Oceanrest Rock & Blues Radio.  The same song, every time…something by Nine Inch Nails, but he couldn’t remember the title.  He only ever heard the news report, the same news report, over and over again.

“Steve?” Sarah’s voice was sleepy-soft.

“Yeah?” he asked, pretending not to know the question.  Pretending not to have heard it every day for as long as he could remember, going back more days than he had any reason to keep counting.

“Could you make breakfast for the kids?  I had a late night.”

“Sure.”

The form of her was invisible beneath the sheets, but he knew she smiled.  It was a small smile, no teeth showing.  He’d maneuvered a glance at it on one of the hundreds of days that were all exactly alike.  Within minutes, she’d be back in the depths of sleep.

*****

He scrambled eggs in the frying pan.  They spat oil and sputtered as he chopped at them with the spatula.  The dog, Shep, wove between his legs excitedly, as if expecting a helping herself.  He stared at the pan, listening to the sound under the sizzling eggs.  Radio static, in crescendo.  The clock on the stove blinked to 7:35 AM.

The television flickered on in the living room.  The news anchor sounded exactly the same as the Radio Man, sounded exactly the same as his boss, sounded exactly the same as how many other people he’d met living the same day over for months on end.  The anchor leaned toward the camera, “His wife, author Sarah Clarke, was still sleeping when the slaughter began.”

He walked over to the set and turned it off.  He stared at the blank screen until the smell of burning eggs brought him back to the stove.  He swore he saw something move behind the black veil of the dead screen, but he could never make it out.

*****

He didn’t remember buying the gun.  He remembered the code to the safe, the number he punched into the keypad to unlock it, but he didn’t actually remember buying the thing.  It was as if it had always been there, waiting, whispering in his dreams.

The safe was in the closet of their bedroom, on the opposite side of the house from the twins.  He remembered it being there when he brought them all home from the hospital.  Had it been there when they’d moved in?  Had it been there when they bought the house and he carried Sarah over the threshold like a second wedding?

The question hurt his head.  He walked back to the kitchen, closing the door quietly behind him.

*****

Amy was up, first.  She came out of her room so fast she would’ve crashed right into the wall if he hadn’t been there to catch her.  He’d learned that from the first few times the day repeated: same time, every morning, Amy careened out of the room fast as a bullet right into the wall.  Being there to catch her saved him twenty minutes of crying.  It saved her a nasty knot on the side of her head, too.

“Watch it there, kiddo,” he said, smiling down at her.

She was very small and young and knew little about pain.

She pulled herself out of his hands and ran toward the kitchen table.  “You’re coming to the play tomorrow!” – not a question, a statement.  Amy had a role in the school play, and had been increasingly excited about it during the lead up.  She was bubbling over.  Except tomorrow never seemed to come.  All her enthusiasm was trapped in the present, imprisoned in the same endless morning.

“You bet,” he whispered back, knowing she couldn’t hear him.

Charlie came out of the room next, rubbing his eyes.  “I don’t wanna go.”

Steve reached down and ruffled his son’s dirty blond hair.  “Too bad, Chuckie man.”

“It’s a stupid play.”

“It’ll only be one night.  You’ll be fine.”

Charlie grumbled his way into the kitchen and sat down at the table.  He poured too much ketchup on his eggs.

*****

He brought them both a glass of milk and half of an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly.  It was what they had in the house: milk, eggs, English muffins, peanut butter, jelly, and four cans of tuna.  Groceries had been tight.  Everything had been tight since they’d discovered they were having fraternal twins instead of a single child.  It didn’t help that Sarah hadn’t had a successful book in four years.  Or any book at all.  A sales job in telecomm wasn’t enough to feed a family of four.

The debt had worried him until the calendar stopped moving.  Now it seemed like a funny joke.  If a collector called, he would cheerily give them all the appropriate information and hang up the phone, knowing nary a dime would go missing from it.  Another of the fringe benefits of not having a future.

“Never put off till tomorrow,” he muttered to himself, watching his children eat.  It was a joke he’d made, before.  It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t aging well.

“You’ll break,” the dog had the Radio Man’s voice.  Its mouth didn’t move, but Steve could hear it in his head.  “They all break, eventually.  One way or another.  What do you think you have in you?  A couple more months, maybe a year?  How long can you make the same breakfast every morning?”

He glared down at the dog and found it jumping up and down around the kitchen table.  Charlie slipped it a palm-full of egg and ruffled its ears.  The animal glanced back at Steve with mischief in its eyes.  Charlie loved the dog, of course.  Charlie couldn’t hear it whisper in his head.

*****

How many times had he done this?  How long had he fought?  How many ways could he avoid doing it?  How many times could he wake up in the same bed and hear the same news report and decide not to let it happen?

Over.  He just wanted it to be over.

*****

The bus picked the kids up a few minutes late.  8:39 instead of 8:30.  Of course, after the first few times Steve had just started taking them out to the curb at 8:35ish.  He waved them aboard the yellow bus and watched it drive away.

There was one thing he hadn’t tried, yet, but he didn’t want the kids to be home if it worked.

*****

Sarah was still sleeping when he tip-toed back into the bedroom.  He went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.  It was a 30.06 and held five bullets.  He loaded it up and listened to the safe sing static in his ears.  It was always static.  Static and the radio voice, out of every pore of the world.  The dog had the voice.  The stray cat had the voice.  The birds had the voice.  The mouse scurrying across the sidewalk had the voice.  He could hear the news report shivering beneath the earth’s skin.

But problems do have solutions.

He left the bedroom with the gun and walked out to the backyard.  It was a quiet neighborhood.  The only sound was the pop and crackle of the thing living inside the air, the rustle of leaves scratching each other like record needles.  He took a deep breath.

His teeth felt strange against the barrel, like biting into a piece of flint.  It was cold and hard and it made his enamel itch.  He closed his eyes and fumbled for the trigger with his thumb, awkwardly hunched over the gun.  He tried to block out the gritty texture and the coppery taste of metal.  He struggled not to gag.  His thumb found the curved edge of the trigger, and he heard himself whimper.

He squeezed.

*****

The radio man said, “He killed his son, first, splattering blood across scrambled eggs like watery ketchup” and Steve reached out and slammed his hand on the alarm clock.  He rolled over and pulled Sarah close to him, feeling her body ease into his.  She helped his lungs expand.  The alarm clock turned back on.  “His daughter tried to run away, screaming for her mother, but he shot her in the back of the throat before—”

He turned away from Sarah, grabbed the alarm clock, and wrenched it from the wall.  He pushed himself out of bed and threw the clock on the floor, watching its plastic pieces break apart to reveal electronic guts.  He picked up the remains and threw them down, again, watching them shatter and spin away from each other.  The floor was covered in debris.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sarah sat up in bed.

Steve swallowed air to drown the fire in his chest.  “I’m sick of it.”

Sarah seemed small in the center of the mattress, caught in the whorl of sheets.  Her voice seemed smaller still.  “My parents said…if we have to…”

He shook his head at her, bull-like, “No.  That’s not—I’m not living in a basement with two kids, the dryer banging around all night, living behind walls we make out of shower curtains.”

Moving would be a waste of time, anyway.

“Just until I finish the book,” she offered.

He took a deep breath and started picking the shattered radio pieces up from the floor.  “It’s fine,” he muttered.  He bit his tongue to stop himself from talking about the news report, the Radio Man, the repeating day.  She never believed him, anyway.  “Keep writing.  I’ll figure it out at work.  We’ll figure it out.”

He hadn’t even gone to work for months.  It seemed pointless, now.

“I’m sorry,” he dropped the radio innards into the bin at the foot of the bed.  “Just…work stress.  The boss.  We haven’t had a cost-of-living raise in years and…nevermind.  I’m just sorry, okay?”

She nodded, not replying.

“I’m so goddamned sorry.”

“Come here,” Sarah reached out with open arms, “let me hold you.”

*****

One day, to kill the monotony, he told the kids to skip school and go to the zoo with him.  He snapped at Amy when she tried to turn on the car radio, smacked her hand harder than he wanted.  She didn’t cry, but she looked up at him with wide, scared eyes.  The tape deck grinned at him, spat out a tape like a tongue.  He grabbed it and threw it out the window, watching it shatter against the road behind them.

The day was muffled and distant inside his head.  The kids jumped around and took photographs on disposable cameras, snapshots of big cats and exotic birds.  Steve tried to keep his eyes on his feet, feeling the gaze of every animal branding his skin.  Monkeys howled at him, teeth bared, “His daughter tried to run away!  His daughter tried to run away!”  Their laughter chattered in his head.  One of them threw crap at him, spattering his slacks with their shitstain.

The kids got tired and grumpy and started to whine, so he took them to lunch at a cheap burger place down the road.  His wallet was out of cash, so he paid on a credit card.  The kids’ faces got gross with condiments, their fingers sticky.  Steve wiped them off with sanitary napkins despite their arguments.  Amy was particularly against it.  “Daddy, stop!” she yelled, drawing the attention of parents at another table.  As if they were any better.  As if their children were so polite.  He wrangled Amy still and wiped her mouth with the moist towelette as she squealed.

The overhead speaker snickered at him in Radio Man static.  “The only way out is through.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Steve muttered, angrier than he wanted to sound.  He grabbed his children by the wrists and ferried them out of the restaurant.  He sat them down in the back of the car and locked them in.  He paced around the parking lot for fifteen minutes before he joined them, begging God or the Universe or anyone for an answer, for a tomorrow, for something to do.

A young woman, maybe fifteen or sixteen, walked around the side of the lot.  Bleach-white hair sat mop-like on her head, the sides shaved clean down to the scalp.  She was fatally thin and smelled of unwashed summer heat.  She scanned the parking lot until her eyes fell on him.  “Sir…?”

The stench of her made him recoil.  He fished a couple crumpled bills from his pocket.

She took the money and ferreted it away in the folds of a tattered, XXL hoodie.  “Thank you.  But that’s not what—”

He was already walking away, unlocking the driver’s side door of the car and sliding into the seat.  She stood outside the burger joint staring at him, something behind her eyes making him think about police detectives or psycho-analysts.  He turned his keys in the ignition and tried to clear her smell out of the back of his throat.

“Daddy?” Charlie asked.  “Who is that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled.  It didn’t feel like a lie.

*****

One day, he told Sarah, and she didn’t believe him.  He told his boss, and he didn’t, either.  He told a therapist and she prescribed him drugs.  He told a cop and spent the day in a cell.  He told anyone that would listen and nobody did.  There was no point in keeping it secret, day after same-day.  The Radio Man didn’t seem to care, either.

“Tell everyone!” fifty televisions called out inside a Wal-Mart, “Tell everyone and maybe they’ll start tuning in to the same channel!”

*****

Shep slept on the floor in front of the dead TV screen.  Steve stared into the flat black and drank espresso.  Something moved behind the screen, inside the darkness, he was sure of it.  He just had to see it.  It was part of an answer.  It had to be.  Because there had to be an answer and he had to find it.  He finished his fourth coffee of the morning and heard Sarah open the bedroom door.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Called out for the day,” he answered, his words caffeine-sharp.  “Needed time to think.”

He could feel the words she wanted to say, feel them like static around the hairs of his arms.  You shouldn’t skip work right now, maybe, or: we really need the money.  But she kept the words to herself and set about making her own clone of the kids’ breakfasts.  Eggs, English muffin, milk.  The tuna sat in cold cans uneaten.  He refilled his mug while she ate and sat back down in front of the screen.

“I’ll go back in tomorrow,” he said, feeling her eyes still on him.  “I just needed a day off.”

“You deserve one.  I’m sorry about…” a pause, more words unsaid, “I’ll start freelancing again.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he waited for the screen to pulse, for something to writhe inside it.

Shep roused with the smell of food.  The squeak of dog-yawn made Steve wince.  Radio Man came through Shep’s mouth: “Police won’t comment on what the man said, but one local neighbor said it was ‘disturbing.’”  The dog panted a couple times and trotted to the kitchen.

Steve kept staring at the screen.

Sarah did her writing outside, that day.  In the quiet neighborhood with the nice grass, blissfully unaware of the thing vibrating under the skin of the world.  Steve just sat in front of the television, eyes glued to the blank, endless black.  The kids came home, troubled their mother, and went to bed.  Sarah came back inside, laptop under one arm and children’s toys under the other.

“Nice show.”

“Trying to meditate.”

“Okay, then.”

She vanished into the bedroom, where he could still hear her fingernails clack against keys.  The clock ticked forward.  9:30pm, 10:00pm, 11:43pm…it rolled over to 12:00am, 12:15am, 12:23am.  Steve felt his breath get short.  It was tomorrow.  A smile crept across his face and he started giggling.  1:17am. He jumped up off the couch with a laugh and—

“…but his behavior had been bizarre leading up to the incident…” he turned over in bed and shut off the radio.  A sob wracked through his body, and something hot lashed back at it.  He stood up.

“I’m going to kill him,” he muttered, pulling on a pair of beaten sweatpants and a t-shirt from under the bed.  “I’m going out there and I’m going to kill him.”

It was such a simple solution, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t tried it, already.

*****

He walked out into the front yard and the grass smelled like disinfectant and absence.  He wasn’t sure if Sarah would follow, and it didn’t matter anyway.  In less than 24 hours she would forget anything she’d heard him mutter that morning.  For her, a rock song would play on the radio and she’d curl back up in bed.  He crossed the lawn and reached the sidewalk.

Shep was there, waiting, staring up at him.  A stray cat sat next to her, staring with the exact same eyes.  Their mouths opened at the same time and a rush of static washed through his head.  Radio Man came out of their mouths: “You can’t kill me, here.  You can’t die.  Haven’t you figured it out?  Go to the gun locker, open it, and take out the rifle.  It’s easy when you do it.  Wake up and it will be tomorrow.”

He rushed the animals and they scattered, running along green grass in different directions.  He roared after them.  When he turned back around, he saw the blond homeless girl staring at him from behind a tree.  Her hood was up, but the look and the smell were unmistakable.  “What the hell are you doing?” he snarled, stalking toward her, hands balled into fists.  “Did you follow me?  Did you follow me to my house?”

She retreated as quickly as the animals had.  Something about her didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t place what.

*****

Oceanrest Rock & Blues was in a tiny building on top of a hill northeast of town.  It took him four hours to walk there.  He could’ve taken a car, but he didn’t.  The time gave him space to breathe, to brood, to let the answer solidify in his head.  He had to kill the Radio Man.  That was the only other option.  Then it would finally be over.

He expected to find a reception desk when he threw the door open, but there wasn’t one.  There wasn’t anything.  The place had been torn apart.  A dented air vent hung from the half-collapsed ceiling, exhaling cool, sweet air into the dusty room.  The remains of four destroyed chairs lay scattered across the floor like limbs after a bomb.

His loafers were quiet against the floor as he made his way into the station.  Broken wires like nooses hung from everything.  Ceiling tiles had been pried away to reveal leaking pipes and busted vents.  Something had come through here and destroyed the place.  He found no one waiting in the hallways as he went.  The building was catacombs-empty.

The window that looked in on the recording studio dripped with opaque gray sludge.  Steve reached out and touched it, feeling it cool and mud-like oozing around his fingers.  He wiped the viscous residue on his pants and turned the corner.

The door to the studio hung open.  Static crackled from inside the room.

Steve walked in.

The Radio Man stared at him from the center of the room.  He had microphone heads as eyes and a smile that anyone in America could buy into.  He tilted his head to one side and spoke in the same voice Steve had always heard, “Do you think you’ll wake up and it will be tomorrow?”

Steve charged him and put a fist in his everyman smile.  His skin split around the Radio Man’s teeth.  Radio Man stumbled back and crashed spread-eagle on a small, worn table.  Steve rushed forward and hit him, again, this time in the throat.  Electric feedback warbled from Radio Man’s mouth, loud enough to make Steve grab his ears.

“His wife was out of the room two seconds later with a small pistol from the same safe.  She fired and hit him in the stomach.  He returned fire, spilling all her love out of her chest,” the Radio Man was back on his feet, his voice deafening in Steve’s head.  “He was found strangling his dog on the front lawn, screaming.”

Steve dove at the man and tackled him to the ground.  He was deaf and blind from all the sound, but he didn’t need to see or hear to keep punching.  He lashed out with his fists until his knuckles were broken and all his skin was flayed by splintered bone.  The Radio Man laughed through it all, bursts of static snicker and radio-persona crack-up exploding from his mangled face.  He never fought back.

When the sound died away, Steve stood up.  All the pain shrieking in his hands seemed like a distant, foggy memory.  He staggered back through the empty radio station and walked out the front door, leaving twin trails of blood in his wake, dripping off his fingers.

Outside, a bird peered down at him from the boughs of a tree.

“The only way out is through,” Radio Man’s voice teased from its beak.

*****

Amy’s play never came.  Charlie never wanted to go, anyway.  Steve ran lines with her every morning, a rehearsal for a show that would never go up.  There were always eggs and English muffins and not much else to eat.  The safe whispered static in his dreams.  The world whispered static in his daylight.  The night ate the day and yesterday ate tomorrow.  Amy and Charlie never grew older, never grew up, never complained about dating or learned about unemployment.

They smiled and laughed and sometimes they ran into walls and that was as bad as things got for them.

*****

Static sizzled under the burning eggs.  Steve’s knuckles were bone-white around the spatula handle.  How long had it been, now?  How many times had he cooked the same breakfast?

“He went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.”

Was it a threat, or a promise?  Was it the end, or the beginning?

*****

The eggs sputtered on the pan.  Shep wove between his legs.  “Go to the gun locker!” the animal yipped in Radio Man’s voice, “go to the gun locker!”

Steve picked the dog up and threw it against a wall.  It landed with a whimper on the kitchen counter.  “What the hell do you want from me!?” he screamed, grabbing the furry animal in his hands and shaking it.  “What do you want!?”

“His wife, author Sarah Clarke, was still sleeping when the slaughter began.”

He smashed the animal down against the countertop, hearing more bones splinter.  “Why are you doing this to me!?”

“You’ll break,” Radio Man’s voice was quieter, distorted, coming from a broken speaker inside the dog’s body.  “They always break.  The only way out…the only way…”

He lifted Shep’s body in the air and brought it down again, until the Radio Man stopped talking and the animal’s corpse painted his hands red.  Amy and Charlie went to stay with their aunt in Portland, and he spent the rest of the day in one of the police precincts.

*****

The voice got more persistent.  He unplugged the alarm clock and the birds outside would sing the report for hours.  The dog would bark it, the stray cat would mewl it.  The eggs started talking to him, the voice whispering beneath the sputtering oil.  The television would flick on and the Radio Man’s voice would come out of the news anchor, children’s cartoons, Tony Soprano’s mouth.  It was all he heard all the time every day.  It was in his head like a brain worm, eating his mind.

*****

He opened Sarah’s laptop and typed:

He went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.  He loaded it with five rounds and leaned it against the fridge as he cooked breakfast for his children.  He walked back to the bedroom and kissed his wife on the forehead.  She smiled faintly and turned over in bed.  The walk back to the kitchen took the longest.  It was time.  There was no way out but through.  He ruffled his children’s hair and opened the fridge to reveal empty shelves.

His wife, author Sarah Clarke, was still asleep when the slaughter began.  He killed his son, first, splattering blood across scrambled eggs like watery ketchup.  His daughter tried to run away, screaming for her mother, but he shot her in the back of the throat before she could make it to the bedroom.

His wife was out of the room two seconds later with a small pistol from the same safe.  She fired and hit him in the stomach.  He returned fire, spilling all her love out of her chest.  He was found strangling his dog on the front lawn, screaming.

Police won’t comment on what the man said, but one local neighbor said it was ‘disturbing.’  His neighbor alleges he was screaming at the dog, sobbing, “Is this enough for you?  Can this all finally be over, now?” when the first cop cars pulled up across the street.

Neighbors say Steven Clarke is a good man, but his behavior had been bizarre leading up to the incident.  He’d written a grim short story on his wife’s laptop depicting a similar scene to what happened that morning, and hadn’t been to work for two or more days.  Was it a psychotic break from reality?  One witness might know the truth: a young homeless girl found on the sidewalk across from his home, crusted white hair cresting her otherwise shaved scalp…

*****

He hit ‘snooze’ and climbed out of bed.  He pulled on a pair of boxers and a dirty t-shirt.  He went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.  He loaded it with five rounds and prayed, hands so tight around the barrel he hoped it might break.  Heat burned his cheeks as he begged the universe to intervene.  Maybe someone would remember something: maybe Sarah would find the document he left on her laptop, or his boss would remember him screaming in the office, or the cop would remember locking him up—they’d remember, and they’d stop him.  But he couldn’t keep doing it, anymore.  It had to be over.

He leaned the gun against the fridge as he cooked breakfast for his children.  He wrung his hands in front of the stove and pursed his lips in another prayer.  Shep looked up at him with microphone-head eyes, “After this, everything will be okay,” Radio Man promised.  “It’s easier than you think.  And then you’ll all be free.  All of you.  They’ll be free to dream what dreams may come.  You’ll wake up tomorrow.”

Steve opened the front door and let the dog out into the yard.  He walked back to the bedroom and kissed Sarah on the forehead.  She smiled faintly and turned over in bed.  Amy and Charlie laughed from the kitchen table.  Silverware scraped against plates.  Footsteps crunched the green grass outside, cutting across the front lawn.  Maybe it was a teenager on the way to school.  Maybe it was a cop coming to gun him down.  Maybe it was all in his head, anyway.

The walk back to the kitchen took the longest.

“Daddy,” Amy called, face covered in peanut butter and jelly, “is mom coming to the play?”

“She wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he replied, voice quivering like his guts.

Charlie rolled his eyes when Steve ruffled his hair.  The fridge was nearly empty.  Groceries had been tight for some time.  Everything had been tight for some time.  Sarah’s parents had an unfinished basement they could use for a while, but they’d have to bring their own walls.  Tuna sat uneaten in the pantry.  The sun rose at 6:45 AM and set at 8:20 PM.  Everyone breaks, eventually.

Steve licked his lips and felt a shuddering breath force its way into his lungs.  The children were very small and young and knew little about pain.  At least this way they would never have to find out.  He closed the fridge and picked up the rifle.  The only way out was through.  Maybe, if he was lucky, he would die from the stomach wound and it could all really be over.  Maybe tomorrow could be born without him in it.  Maybe the footsteps crossing the lawn were headed toward the front door.  It sounded like it.

He imagined a young homeless girl, smelling of unwashed summer, swinging the door in.  She would hold a knife in her hand and it would go up into his shoulder, on the inside, finding an artery on the way, and he would bleed out on the floor.  His family would never know why, and eventually they wouldn’t need to know why.  They would just live.

The doorknob turned.

He wrapped his finger around the trigger.

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Cosmic Horror vs. Urban Horror

Allegedly, Cosmic Horror and Urban Horror are different genres…however, as more and more authors genre-blend, genre-hop, and layer thematic motifs on top of each other, the lines have (thankfully) blurred.

They are more alike, my friends, than they are unalike.

Cosmic Horror

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is considered the godfather of Cosmic Horror the same way William Gibson is considered the godfather of Cyberpunk– they might not have invented it, but they sure as hell defined it.

Lovecraft’s main point of terror was that of smallness and unimportance.  In cosmic horror, an indifferent universe manifests itself in the form of aliens, supernatural foes, or other bizarro entities.  The tales recount the cruel indifference of space and time.  Nihilism begets mind-breaking terror.  The human brain can’t process our own unimportance, so we go mad.

Cthulhu isn’t an alien, Cthulhu is a metaphor for monstrous indifference and cosmic vastness.

Then again, monstrous indifference doesn’t need monstrous countenance.  The case of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese proves that.  So does ongoing indifference and complicity in a thousand areas of modern life.  In fact, for many people in the world, “indifference would be such a relief.” (Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom.)

Which brings us to the topic of…

Urban Horror

Urban Horror derives from Urban Gothic, which, of course, derives from general Gothicism/Victorian Gothic, etc.  We can trace the roots of this particular devil back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and, arguably, earlier.  The focus of these tales generally resides in dark flaws and sinister proclivities in human nature, usually with a supernatural bent.  Because of the genre’s usual examination of the darker threads of mankind’s cloth, the stories tend to be more personal and character-driven than the machinations of cosmic horror.

Urban Horror focuses its lens on mankind, not on the indifferent universe around us…or, well, maybe that’s not quite true.

In many Urban Horror stories, monstrous indifference is merely part of modern society.  A string of murders goes uninvestigated.  People go missing without anyone looking for them.  Often, agents of the law in such stories are either incompetent or on the take, just as likely to be working for the villain as against the villain.  In Urban Horror, widescale indifference is standard…and where indifference isn’t present, maliciousness replaces it.  In fact, the crushing indifference of cosmic horror is often just as present in its urban counterpart, but whereas indifference is a cause for terror in Lovecraftian cosmicism, it’s barely shrug-worthy in many Urban Horror tales.  Of course the universe doesn’t care–people barely care.

But, unlike in cosmic horror, the villain is almost always human, humanoid, or taking on the glamour/semblance of humanity.  The villains, you see, look just like us.  In many ways, they are us.

The Monster at the End of the Story

There are many commonalities between Cosmic and Urban Horror.  Crushing indifference, monstrous cruelty, and tragic disasters that go unnoticed.

Lovecraft has been dead some 80 years.  Frankenstein is nearly 200.

Times have changed, man.

Let’s look at the biggest difference I considered between these genres: the monster at the end of the story.  In Cosmic Horror, the monster manifests the cruel indifference of the cosmos.  In Urban Horror, the monster represents mankind’s darker natures, our perpetrated evils.  But perhaps even these beasts have more in common than we initially assume…

I’ve already written about the inhuman monsters grinding us away in their teeth, but I’ll go over it again briefly now.  There are vast monstrosities destroying people’s lives, and both the universe and the world-at-large are mostly indifferent to their deeds.  Most people could easily recall at least four of their names: War, Famine, Pestilence, Death.  But what about the hungry Lovecraftian god of Nationalism?  What about the festering, many-appendaged grotesquery of White Supremacy?  What about the crawling, fungal consciousness of Revenge, spreading its power airborne at the site of every recrimination?

Cthulhu is a metaphor, remember.  So is Dagon.

In Stephen King’s It, the monster slumbers for 27 years.  How long slumbers the ravening beast of Misogyny?  It doesn’t.

This is a story, in brief: a cult of killers ritualistically sacrifices victims to a squamous god of Nationalism.  Our protagonists find themselves drawn into the dangerous plot, twisting through a nightmare of localized madness.  The cult is routed.  The cult leader is the monster at the end of the story.  Our protagonists stop the cult leader.  The squamous god of Nationalism slumbers, but not for very long.  Our protagonists observe the night sky, understanding the smallness of their efforts against the vast shadows of mankind’s character.  An epilogue: two cultists escape, driving westward, vowing revenge against a system designed to oppress their beliefs.

Cthulhu, the Darkness of Human Nature

Something roars from an unseen sky and cataclysm rends the earth.  You hear screaming.  Rubble smolders, guttering black ash from outside your window.  An eruption deafens you, and some of the screams die in suddenly muted throats.  You scramble for an exit.  Desperate, staccato gunfire surrounds you.  An apocalypse rages through your town.  This happens, somewhere, almost every day.  The stars don’t notice.  Neither do most people.

Vincent: …you ever heard of Rwanda?

Max: Yes, I know Rwanda.

Vincent: Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody’s killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?

Max: What?

Vincent: Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whales, Greenpeace, something? No. I off one fat Angelino and you throw a hissy fit.

Max: Man, I don’t know any Rwandans.

Vincent: You don’t know the guy in the trunk, either.

—Collateral (2004)

He attacked her with a knife at 2:30 AM, to kill a woman.  She screamed, cried out, and ran.  He followed, stabbing her two more times as she shrieked, “Oh my God, he stabbed me!  Help me!”  On the ground, then, he continued stabbing.  He used both a knife and a personal appendage, his existence a force of violence against her.  A man shouted, almost directionless, “Let that girl alone!”  Moseley fled the scene with $49.  Sophia Farrar found the raped and bloodied woman and held her until police and emergency workers arrived.  The exact time of death is unclear, but the woman died either in Farrar’s arms or in the back of the ambulance, unrevivable.  At least 17 people had heard the screams or seen the attack, only 4 or 5 responded.

The earth orbits the sun, waiting to be eaten.  One day, the sun will glower its molten countenance, spread its hungry jaws, and devour the whole world’s history.

The sun is not the monster at the end of the stories.

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