Rick Wayne's Blog, page 45

Can I ask you something?

“Can I ask you something?”

“Only if I know the answer. I wouldn’t want to disappoint a woman of your renown.”

“Why do you call me ‘my lady?’” I asked.

“Well . . .” The question seemed to surprise him, and he shifted his prickly mass as if to recline in contemplation. He was a complete gnarl of leaves and twigs. His beard was a carpet of green moss, and it wobbled when he spoke. “I don’t know. Aren’t you?”

“I was once. But that was a very long time ago.”

“I miss the very long times ago,” he said, yawning. Even his tongue was a broad leaf. “You could really stretch out in them. The times today are so curt. Never bother to stick around, as if they’ve got some better place to be. Rude, if you ask me. But what brings you out today, my lady? Another adventure?”

“I seem to have lost some of my memories,” I explained.

“No! You don’t say? That’s a terrible business. Terrible. Memories are like roots. They ought to stay where they’re planted.” He leaned closer like he wanted to tell me a secret. His face was as tall as my chest. “You know, when most people lose something, they wait until the last place to look before finding it. I like to start there. Saves time, you know. That’s important since there’s so much less of it now.”

“Well, I don’t think I have to worry about that. I’ve only ever kept my memories in one place.”

“Smart,” he said with a wink. “Very smart. Then you don’t have to worry where they’ve got off to. Have they escaped before?”

“Never.”

“Hmmm. Tricky . . .” His leafy fingers stroked his mossy beard. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with where you’ve kept them?”

“Not entirely. But I’ve given it a good once-over, and it seems sound.”

“Hm. Stolen then.”

“It appears so.”

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I lost some memories once.”

“You did? Where did you find them?”

He opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped and scowled at the heavy canopy over his head. “I don’t remember.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m afraid I shall have to keep looking.”

“Quite right. Quite right. Best not to give up, and all that. But you’d better hurry. The train is coming.”

“Train?” I looked across the overgrowth. It was identical in every direction. If there’d been a path, it had long since been swallowed by the forest. “But where is the platform?”

“The platform?” He thought for a moment. “Oh dear. I hope we haven’t lost that, too.” He pounded his heavy trunk on the ground and I nearly fell. “Get up, you lazy buggers! The lady needs to know the way.”

Fireflies blinked among the ferns. They flickered as they drifted up, like a dance of constellations. They floated on the air and gathered in groups inside the glassless street lamps that rose here and there among the trees, remnants of a bygone age. It was breathtaking—a gas-lit walk through a twilight forest.

 

wonderfully detailed art by Oscar Chichoni

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wonderfully detailed art by Oscar Chichoni

(Art) Rashed Al-Akroka Read My Mind

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Superpowers, technovillains, women in metal masks, electric motorcycles… It’s like he read my mind. If I’m ever in a position to commission a graphic version of THE MINUS FACTION, I’ll have to hire this guy. This is the closest I’ve seen to how I imagined the story.

Text below. More by the artist on his Artstation page.

Oh, and Scarab says hi.

The black lights in the dome bled the color from the room. The once-vibrant Soviet mural that filled the round wall was reduced to ashes and grays while the tiny puddle of blood that gathered on the floor turned black as tar. The dark pool widened slowly under the violet glow, fed from a single trickle that snaked down the leg of an iron chair and fell from a stray screw head. Black pearls dribbled to the ground in time with the music warbling from the horn of an old Victrola record player. A Russian baritone crooned a 1930s love song, barely audible over the crisscrossing scratches in the vinyl.

 

Как много девушек хороших,

Как много ласковых имён,

Но лишь одна из них тревожит,

Унося покой и сон,

Когда влюблён.

 

By the second verse, even the cheery orchestra was obscured by the muffled screams of the man in the iron chair.

 

Любовь нечаянно нагрянет,

Когда её совсем не ждёшь,

И каждый вечер сразу станет

Удивительно хорош.

И ты поёшь.

 

The chair’s high back was made of cross-welded bars, like a narrow cage. Metal arms on hinges swung across the front and latched on the opposite side, holding the single occupant perfectly motionless as he bit a cracked and gouged rubber pad and struggled to free himself. Iron sleeves, worn smooth from centuries of use, kept the man’s limbs fixed while a fat needle punctured his vein near the elbow and bled him in spurts into a glass jar. A bead of runoff gathered at the wound. It grew like a ruby tumor until it was large enough to break free and tumble down the man’s skin.

And still the happy Russian crooned for his young love.

 

Сердце, тебе не хочется покоя,

Сердце, как хорошо на свете жить.

Сердце, как хорошо, что ты такое!

Спасибо, сердце, что ты умеешь

так любить!

 

The song finished as the drops slowed and stopped. A single patch of static repeated over and over as the silent record spun. The metal restraints on the iron chair were loosened and the limp body slumped to the floor.

A pale, red-lipped woman in a form-fitting leather top unscrewed the blood-filled jar from the chair and sniffed it like fine wine. Her nails were manicured. Her bald head was crowned in a twirling, gold-wire headdress. A multitude of pearls swung from small hooks and dangled about as she moved her head in the dim light.

She scowled at the glass. “Needs to breathe.”

She walked past a six-foot candelabra dripping wax to a low cabinet covered in a dozen jars identical to the one in her hand. Four at the front were full. She felt each for warmth before swapping the third for the one in her hand. She swirled it like a rare vintage and watched the viscous fluid run down the side. She took a sip and walked back to the dying man. She moved his face to one side with her bare foot to get a better look at his eyes. The tips of her toes were stained with red dye. The seam at the front of her dark gown was stitched by a line of white animal teeth. An ivory-hilted dagger inside a white leather sheath hung from the sash around her hips.

“Another!” she called before taking another sip.

Metal doors, the only exit, opened with a clang. White stencils on the exterior spelled “Recreation Room” in Russian. A face-painted soldier in pilfered Soviet fatigues stood in the door and bowed silently to his lady. Then he walked to the dead man.

The ancient iron chair was bolted to the floor off-center in the round room. Candles flickered while the black lights hummed overhead and turned the red Soviet star, which filled the inside of the heavy concrete dome, into a black sun. A pair of large carrion birds, bald Asiatic condors, squawked and flapped from a T-shaped perch while water gently lapped in a lounging pool below them. As with the puddle, the violet lights turned the steaming water black. It swirled as if something large swam through it.

The carrion birds watched a smear spread across the smooth concrete floor as the drained man was dragged away. The sound of the sliding body triggered whimpering from the array of green copper cabinets on the far side of the room.

An impressive guard, well over six and a half feet with a face covered in a tanned-skin cowl, appeared in the door. At his feet was a pair of foreigners.

The pale woman raised a thin eyebrow. “Dessert? Already?” She spoke in a formal dialect of her native tongue, a rare Turkic language unknown outside of the deep holes in which her people dwelt.

“Intruders, Lady. They were caught inside the perimeter fence trying to break into our encrypted lines.”

Lady Zoya studied the prisoners as she took another sip of blood from her glass. She squinted in disgust as she swallowed. She was so sick of Chinese.

The newcomers were horribly out of place. Especially their clothes. They looked like tourists rather than mercenaries. There was an old man—European, based on his smell. His eyes were frosted and sightless, his cheeks were speckled in stubby gray, his liver-spotted scalp was bald except for several long, matted wisps that sprouted irregularly from his oblong skull. His casual clothes were simple and just as gray as the rest of him.

The pale lady took a step forward and licked the red from her upper lip. The pearls in her headdress shook and glimmered in the candlelight. The old man’s companion was female. Her head hung low. Her long, wild hair had fallen partially free of her black bandanna. It was matted, but intentionally so, almost like dreadlocks, and it obscured her face. She was also dressed casually—far too casually for the chilly steppe outside—with tight, cut-off jeans and a loose-fitting skull-print top. She looked like she’d just come back from some American mall. She was young, and the deliciously smooth skin of her arms, chest, and right leg were covered in tattoos—repeating bonelike patterns of black and deep blue that looked like they had been frozen in ice and then fractured.

Lady Zoya swirled her glass and took another drink. What to make of such a pair? “Put the woman in the chair.”

The old man would break, she figured, as soon as the girl started to scream. Lady Zoya turned to the dark water. “Grimmúr, darling. Dinner is here.”

A man’s head poked just above the surface. He squinted like an invading soldier surveying a beach. He stood straight and walked out of the pool. He was bald like his wife, and at least as pale, but with a prominent jaw, dark eyes, and bulging muscles.

The young woman’s head stayed limp as the guard fixed her to the cagelike iron chair. The squeaks of the metal restraints echoed off the concrete walls as the cowled guard locked them in place—all except the rubber-coated bite-bar.

The bald man stepped completely out of the dark pool. Water ran off his bulky arms and chest and splattered on the floor. Ritual scarring marred his chest and shoulders. Under the black lights overhead, the blood in his superficial veins and arteries fluoresced a deep violet. The light coursed through his skin like the glowing branches of a river, pulsating slightly in time with his heart. As he reached for the heavy military coat hanging from an unlit candelabra, his eyes shone green like a hunting cat’s.

He draped the dark jacket over his shoulders, leaving the rest of his body exposed. The hood and sleeves were lined with bushy fur. A red Soviet star, identical to the one on the ceiling, was sewn to the fabric just below the shoulders. The coat was too small for him, however, and barely reached the top of his knees. The left sleeve was torn in half at the elbow. Cotton batting, speckled in red, jutted from the fabric as if it had been bitten off with the previous owner still inside.

The lady swapped the records on the old Victrola by the birds’ roost, and they flapped their wings at her.

“Oh, hush,” she chided. “You can have the old one as soon as we’re done.” Then she turned to her husband. “Am I correct, darling, that you will want the woman?”

Iskhan Grimmúr took a drink from the cup his wife offered him, then licked the red from his upper lip. “Who’s the oddly-shaped one?” He motioned with a single large finger to the old man.

The impressive guard forced the intruder to his knees under the scratched and faded mural. Smiling, serene Soviet soldiers marched proudly in unison, having cast off the tyrannies of the czar depicted on the opposite side of the room.

“They were found together,” the guard explained. “Unarmed. But the woman had these in her hair.” He held out a pair of long metal pins, like knitting needles.

Grimmúr walked over and took the pins. Both were identical—three-inch silvered tips filed sharp and bent sideways at a slight angle, ends capped in tiny beetles made of blue enamel. He smiled. “Embalmer’s probes?” He examined one of the beetles closely. “Egyptian. Very expensive.” He switched to Russian and turned to his captive. “Where did you get these?”

The woman in the iron chair kept her head down. Without the pins to keep everything organized, the heavy tangles of her hair dangled loosely.

“I’m not sure she can speak, lord.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of the mask.”

“Mask?” Grimmúr scowled. He walked to the woman, grabbed a fistful of thick hair, and yanked the woman’s head up.

An angled metal mask covered her mouth and nose and wrapped around the sides of her head. It was dark. Three slatted vents opened on each side.

“You imbecile!” Lady Zoya scolded. Her voice resounded off the round concrete walls. “That should have come off the moment she was taken.”

“We tried, m’lady.” The cowled guard bowed his head. “It appears to be attached.”

“Attached?” Grimmúr scowled. “What do you mean attached? Attached to what?”

“To her insides, lord.”

Grimmúr put the pins in his jacket pocket. He held the woman’s hair with one large hand, wrapped his other around the mask, and tugged. The guard was right. It wasn’t merely fastened around her skull. It extended into her mouth, down her throat, and deep into her chest. It didn’t budge.

The man held the mask with one hand and turned the woman’s head from side to side to examine it. She didn’t resist. He looked in her eyes. They were white-blue, like ice, and shone bright under the black light, like an angel’s. She stared up at her captor without fear. Indeed, she revealed no emotion at all.

Grimmúr thumbed one of the vents. A ridge of polished metal ran along the top. A micro-wire mesh covered the thin opening. “Any idea what it’s for?”

“No, sir.”

The Iskhan leaned over and looked at her skin. She was white, maybe European. Or American. He switched to a heavily accented English. “What language do you speak, woman?”

The masked prisoner stared up at her captor. Her wild bangs hung in front of her ice-bright eyes.

Grimmúr was close enough to smell her now, but he didn’t want to believe his nose. His nostrils flared as he inhaled again.

Lady Zoya noticed him admiring her scent. “Does she have a pleasing musk, darling?”

Grimmúr scowled and shook his head. “She is crisp, like the great steppe before a winter storm.” He switched to German. “Wer bist du?”

The woman tilted her head slightly to one side. Her breath was barely audible through the mask. She said nothing. Her eyes studied the large man before crimping slightly at the corners as if smiling faintly under her mask.

Back to English. “What are you doing here? Dressed like that.”

Still nothing.

“Answer me, woman, or—”

“Oh, just drain her already.” Lady Zoya put a new record in the Victrola as the pearls in her headdress clinked against the metal frame. “Once the needle is in, she’ll tell you everything. And if she can’t stop screaming, then the old man will break.”

Grimmúr turned to the funny-shaped man. He hadn’t moved. He seemed lost. Or insane. His frosted eyes danced over the black star in the ceiling as if reading an invisible book.

Grimmúr scowled and turned back to his wife. “That is your expertise, my darling. And your true calling. I will not rob you of your great and enduring joy.”

“As you wish.” Lady Zoya was coy. She handed her husband the glass again. It was half-empty.

“You may leave us,” Grimmúr said to the guard. “Please see that any damage they have done is repaired. And inform the Supremacy we may have a new threat.”

The cowled guard bowed and left. The metal doors closed with a resounding clang, which startled the people in the copper boxes, who whimpered quietly.

The music from the record player filled the room. It was a cheery 1980s Bollywood song. Amid the scratches and bhangra beat, a woman sang in Hindi about the boy she had met that day.

Lady Zoya moved slightly with the tune. She felt the woman’s mask. She looked in her eyes. She smiled and turned the thin needle in the chair down. It punctured the woman’s elbow.

Grimmúr walked around his wife. As he moved under the black lights overhead, the blood in his superficial veins fluoresced again.

“Drink, darling. You’re glowing like a schoolgirl.” Lady Zoya saw the woman’s eyes study the photoreaction. “Porphyria,” she said in accented English. “A genetic disorder. My people cannot convert porphyrins to hemoglobin. At least, those of us of the original bloodline. So they accumulate. In our skin.” She ran her hand over her arm as the first drop of blood fell into the glass. “Porphyrins absorb light. Like heme. It’s what gives blood its dark majesty.” She took the half-emptied glass from her husband, held it up, and admired the contents—pitch black under the violet glow. Then she took a drink and handed it back. “That means our skin traps harmful rays. Sunlight . . . hurts.

“But then, the world is full of deep holes. Like this.” She motioned to the dome. “And half of every day is night. The real problem is not the sun. No. It’s finding heme.” She leaned again over her tattooed captive. She spoke softly. “Without it, we die. Slowly. Painfully. Of acute anemia.

“Over the years, we’ve tried just about everything. Cattle. Pigs. Sheep. But nothing is quite as effective as the real thing.” She removed the needle and looked for a reaction, but there was none.

“The chair you’re sitting in is over two thousand six hundred years old. It once held a great khan, a ruler of empires who thought he could—”

The old man gasped. The walls of the concrete bunker amplified the sound. He leaned back against the mural-covered wall. His gray, frosted eyes darted over the ceiling as if he were in the middle of a waking dream.

Everyone turned, but after just a moment, he stopped.

“I have it,” he said softly. The sound of his voice echoed in the quiet room. “Can we please go now?”

The muscular man squinted at him, then at the woman in the chair. “You will not go anywhere, old man. Surely you realize this place is your tomb.”

“I know you believe that, sir. I can see it in your mind. And I know to be afraid of you. I can see that as well. But I believe the young lady has other plans.”

“Is that so?” Grimmúr took a step toward the old man, but his wife stopped him with a gentle hand. She had unscrewed the glass from the chair with the first taste of blood inside. She held it by the lip and handed it to her husband. “Tell me what nationality she is. So we know where to find her family. And her friends. And everything she loves and holds dear.” She held up a finger. “But no cheating.”

“I never cheat,” Grimmúr corrected in his native tongue. “You only think I do because you don’t share my refined palate.” He wrapped his finger around the glass, then looked at it in surprise. “It’s cold.”

Zoya squinted. “What?”

Grimmúr peered in. “Her blood. It’s already chilled.”

“How?”

“Perhaps she’s cold-blooded.” The lord smirked at his wife in the dark light.

Zoya turned to the woman in the chair. Her captive’s eyes were shining with pleasure. “Darling, on second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.” The lady turned back to her husband, but the man had already tilted the glass and swallowed.

He looked at the container again as he cleared his throat. “It’s like ice.” He choked. He dropped the glass, which shattered on the concrete. He clutched at his throat, then his stomach.

“Grimmúr? What’s wrong?” The lady reached for her husband just as he collapsed to the ground, shaking violently.

No, it wasn’t shaking, Zoya realized. It was shivering. Her husband was shivering uncontrollably, as if he’d just been rescued from the wastes of winter. His eyes couldn’t focus. His pale skin turned clammy. He was freezing. From the inside out.

And just like that, he was still.

Lady Zoya pulled her helpless hands back slowly.

“Witch!” She lunged to her feet and her headdress fell to the floor. She stood over the woman, staring down, directly under a violet light. Her eyes reflected green. Her hands quivered like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her accent dripped acid. “Tell me your name, witch, so I may erase all who bear it from the earth.”

The woman in the iron chair spoke for the first time. Her voice was calm but guttural, altered not by the mask but by the mechanism that reached down her throat to her lungs. She said one word.

“Scarab.”

Lady Zoya’s pulse quickened. Her superficial veins fluoresced in a flash. She drew the serrated stone blade from the sheath at her side and grabbed her captive’s hair. A tiny drop of clear venom dangled from the knife’s tip directly over the woman’s bright-sky eyes.

“This is the venom of the crizth, a creature unknown to the surface. One drop, absorbed through the eyes, will drive you mad. Now. Tell me your real name.”

Scarab didn’t look at the blade in Zoya’s rage-filled hand or the drop of venom that bobbled at its tip. She didn’t move her ice-white eyes from her captor. Her fingers simply clenched the arm of the iron chair. The air grew cold. The little drop of venom grew pale and froze stiff. Lady Zoya saw her own breath.

And still the cold spread. Filaments of ice grew over the metal restraints. The thin puddles of bloody water on the floor turned white and shiny. Lady Zoya felt a chill reach her stained feet and creep up her spine. She shivered as she looked around her.

The entire room had started to freeze.

Then it stopped.

And the woman in the chair whispered a second name.

“Death . . .”

In one long blast from the heat sink in her lungs, she ejected everything she had absorbed. It erupted from the vents on her mask and superheated the air, which shimmered like a desert mirage. Zoya’s eyeballs boiled and popped before she could take a step. She screamed as her scalp melted like wax under a blowtorch. The bones of her cranium turned porous and evaporated, leaving nothing but a hollow, bubbling crater in place of a face.

Lady Zoya fell backward, dead. As her body hit the floor, the slaves whimpered louder in their frosted copper larders.

A warm breeze whipped around the room as hot and cold air fought for control of every open space. It made the carrion birds squawk and tussled the wisps of the old man’s hair, who turned his head to the large doors.

from Episode Five: Aftershock.

When your mom makes you get a job at the morgue but all ...

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When your mom makes you get a job at the morgue but all you want to do is eat the bodies. Art by Zach McCain.

(Fiction) Under the Basement

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05 OCT 10:45

 

The derelict house near the reservoir wasn’t only a puzzle box and likely murder scene, it was also a carcass. The ceiling and walls were caked in rot. It stank so bad that Hammond and I didn’t get past the foyer.

“Jesus, what was that?” he asked on his way back to the trunk. “It’s like the walls were sweating mucus.”

I looked up at the gabling under the eaves. I hadn’t noticed before, but one of the cutout images was a devil taking a woman from behind. His tail waved behind him. It certainly seemed like my initial impression was correct and the house predated the post-war neighborhood around it. There was no telling how old it was. There was no record of it prior to a deed transfer dated 1936. According to the city, the current owner was a kind of slumlord, a private property speculator who didn’t much care about the state of his properties, as long as they made him money. For the last 12 years, the house had been rented to one Lafcadio Pernod, which had to be just about the fakest name I’d ever heard. Transactions were conducted digitally. Funds were paid in advance—five years in advance—on condition that the house never be entered without permission.

I caught sight of something on the gravel drive, near my toe. I picked up a tiny blood-covered rock with my gloved hand and dropped it into an evidence bag from my jacket pocket.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t have forensics out here?” he asked as he slammed the trunk shut. A pair of light blue filter masks dangled from his hand.

“We will. I wanna take a look first.”

“Uh huh,” he said skeptically. “And why am I participating in this particular breach of procedure?” He handed me a flashlight and a mask. It smelled strongly of plastic.

“I want you to take a look with me.”

“Right.” He pulled his mask over his face. “Let’s just get this over with.”

The windows of the house were boarded and the interior dim. Either the previous occupant hadn’t paid the power bill or else the wiring was so old that it no longer functioned. Hammond flicked the switch back and forth to no effect. We clicked on our flashlights and a handful of roaches dove under the floorboards.

“Jesus . . .” Hammond shone his flashlight up to the ceiling of the hall. “Look at that.”

It was crisscrossed in faint hand- and footprints, as if someone had been scurrying back and forth across it on all fours.

“You sure this place is empty?” he asked.

“Pretty sure.” I started in. “But keep an eye on the ceiling just in case.”

Odd masses, like inverted volcanoes, or maybe the pillars of paper wasps, hung in the living room. They looked granular, as if someone had been chewing bits of brown paper into a mash and then spitting upward. Neither of us knew what to make of them. I shone a light in. Empty.

Hammond shook his masked head and wandered toward the small dining room. I continued into the kitchen, which looked like it dated from the 60s. I’m not sure what had been on the lone plate in the fridge, but whatever it was had since turned to rot and sprouted various colorful molds and fungus. Tendrils of the stuff grew out and along the walls of the appliance, which I shut quickly. The insects had found their way in there as well.

“Gonna check upstairs,” I said through my mask. Hammond nodded.

The steps creaked. Luckily, there were only three rooms at the top: two square bedrooms and an old-style tiled bathroom no larger than a walk-in closet. The reservoir for the toilet was mounted near the ceiling and emptied via a dangling brass chain with heavy oblong handle. The first bedroom had a sloped ceiling and was empty, save for a wire cot with no mattress. The second held a padded chair, ancient and worn. The leather was dark green and studded in brass. It sat empty, facing a wall of equally ancient televisions. Big cathode ray monsters. A couple were as large as cabinets. They were stacked on top of each other—some sideways, others upside down—in a kind of lopsided triangle. I ran my flashlight across the stack. A heavy black wire emerged from the back of each. The wires rose and gathered into a single twisted mass before fanning across the ceiling like a web and disappearing into a gap between the wall and ceiling, like a spider’s nest, just over my head. The wires seemed to be separate from the rest of the electrical system. A sole deserter left the mass. It was pinned to the wall and fell to a heavy round switch near the door. I flipped it. Nothing happened at first. Then, slowly, the televisions warmed, as if roused from deep slumber. There was only a blizzard of static on the screens, but a voice emerged. A woman with some kind of German or Nordic accent read a series of words and numbers very carefully, one at a time.

“Eleven. Crater. Cold. Seven. Nineteen. Yellow. Pilfer. Cramped. Four. Eleven. Eleven. Eleven. Annul. Fifteen. Dust. Perspicacity.”

She intoned each word calmly and deliberately, and I was mesmerized. There seemed to be no end, as if she were reading from a Bible-print tome of cyphers.

“Danger. Nine. Calumny. Red. Marriage. Seven. Seven. Tyrant. Seven.”

The voice stopped. At first I thought the signal had gone dead, but I heard faint background static. I waited, thinking she might’ve simply reached the end of a sequence, but after several more moments, nothing happened. I got the distinct sense then that I’d been spotted somehow, that she’d been reading and hadn’t noticed the stranger standing in the doorway. I wondered how many rooms like that were out there. And who else was listening.

A horn blew, deep and long—like something you’d hear in a fog or echoing off a mountain peak. It was loud but also very distant. Then the background static stopped. The line was dead.

“Har?” Hammond called from below.

“Yeah?”

“You gotta see this.”

“Coming.”

I flipped the switch again. As I stepped away, the screens faded. I glanced into the room again through the railing as I descended the steps. Two of the screens were still live, one on each side of the stack. They watched me, like eyes.

I couldn’t find Hammond downstairs.

“Basement,” he called again.

There was a door at the back of the staircase. Homemade wood-frame steps dropped to an unfinished basement, which was even darker than the rest of the house.

“Look at this,” he said. He was kneeling before a five-foot cage. “This make any sense to you?”

In the middle of the single open room was a gurney, or maybe an operating table of some kind, with four metal restraints. But no straps. The restraints were metal cylinders with a gap on one side. The gap was covered by a spring-loaded latch. All anyone had to do was lay on the table and drop their hands and feet into the braces. The table stood at the center of a set of three evenly nested circles etched into the aged concrete floor. Between the circles were two sets of binding runes of a type I’d never seen before. A second set of nested circles overlapped the first, like a Venn diagram, but whoever carved it ran out of floor and had to finish at 90-degrees on the wall. Hammond squatted at the edge looking at the cage.

“Here.” He pointed.

I walked over.

“Is it just me, or is the only way to open it from the inside?”

I knelt next to him and pulled on the grid bars. The cage was bolted to the concrete inside the center circle—completely immovable. A combination dial had been built into the floor. Hammond was right. The only way you could reach it was from the inside.

“Why would someone make something like this?” he asked in a whisper.

I shook my head as I examined the runes on the floor with my flashlight. They were of two different styles. I had never seen either.

“Jesus . . .” he sighed as his eyes followed my beam. “Look at this place.”

“Are those clothes?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He stood. “Check it out.”

In a corner, several wheeled hanging bars, like something you’d find at the dry cleaner, were stuffed with clothes.

“Look.” He pointed from one to the next. “Men’s. Women’s. Junior’s.” Under each were shoes and socks to match. “Then women’s again, but in a different size.”

He pointed to the last. Kid’s clothes.

I ran my hand along the waist of a pair of jeans. The style was recent, within the last five years at least.

“What are we dealing with here, Har?”

Craig was spooked. I could tell from his voice.

“I dunno.”

“What the hell was that crap on the ceiling in the living room?”

I shook my head.

He mumbled a curse and reached up to rub his mouth, but his hand hit the filter mask. He pulled it off. “I need some air. I’ll case the neighborhood, see if anyone saw anything.”

“Right.”

“You?” he asked, as if surprised I would remain alone in the house.

“I wanna see if this is as deep as it goes.”

He paused, like he genuinely hadn’t considered that. “You gonna be okay? You need . . .”

“Place is cold, man. Not getting any heebie-jeebies. But if I get into trouble, I’ll give you a call.”

“Right,” he said, looking at the floor. “Right,” he said again and started up the stairs. I heard them creak under his weight.

I shone my light around the open space, which surrounded the staircase at the center, and looked for anything that hinted at a door or passage. I moved boxes. I felt along the seams in the cold concrete. I tapped the slat windows, painted black. I lifted chests full of clinking glass. But there was nothing—that is, until I got to the far corner, where I found a heavy metal grate covering a rectangular opening just large enough for a human adult to squeeze through. I dropped into a small room that had been hand-carved from the earth.

Black magic is one of those things, like snuff films, that you can live your whole life without ever encountering. You know it’s probably out there, but there’s a general suspicion that most of what claims to be real is actually fake, a con, and that whatever of the real stuff exists is thankfully so rare that you’d probably never find it even if you were stupid enough to go looking. From what I’d heard, black magic wasn’t witches with cauldrons and ritual orgies and chants in dark robes. But then, I was never sure anyone really knew. Most of the rumors stretched to the unbelievable: spells that required the flesh of newborns, vivisection, liquid pain drip-distilled from the prolonged torture of animals—stories designed to shock more than anything, and I never put much faith in any of it. I never needed to.

What I found under the basement of that house made my hands sweat and my spine drip cold. It wasn’t that it was despicable, or even that it was so utterly alien. It was the depth of that alienness. The runes and markings that covered the walls weren’t simply indecipherable, they were numerous and diverse. I noted at least six distinct systems, some clearly quite a bit older than the others. Then there were the tools that hung ready-to-hand. They were oddly specific and clearly machined for some precise purpose I couldn’t fathom. If there was such a thing as surgical equipment for removing souls—or stitching them together—I surely found it in that place.

But nothing in that room was crude. It wasn’t barbaric. It was exact. Developed. And it was like nothing I’d ever seen. It spoke to an entire species of magic, an entire history, about which I knew nothing—not least, how to counter it.

I realized then that I’d been feeling very smug, that Hammond’s reaction to his first legitimate glimpse of the occult—the fear and doubt that follows an attack on your core sense of the real—had me recalling my own first forays, those initial incomprehensible adventures that had turned me into what I am, and how far I’d come since. But under that basement, I felt like I had tumbled back to the beginning of the game, that I knew nothing of the deep currents of the world, that they carried me still, just as they always had, and I clung to sanity by a single truth: whatever else happened, no one could find what was under that house. It couldn’t exist. I couldn’t let it.

Hammond didn’t run toward me when he saw. He simply walked down the street and stood next to me on the lawn and watched the fire grow.

“Got a lead,” he said.

The flames broke from the windows and curled around the roof. We could feel the heat.

“Oh?”

“One of the neighbors saw someone leave the house. Few weeks back. Bald. Carrying something heavy. They remembered because it was warm that day, and he was wearing a funny coat.”

selection from the third course of my forthcoming five-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

Part 1 will be available in a few weeks!

 

(Update) Women with Swords

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Update to one of my earlier posts, Women with Swords and Sensible Clothing. Continuing a positive trend. Art by Leesha Hannigan, Brandon Liao, Mumu Wei, Qistina Khalidah, Stepan Alekseev, Zhiyong Li, Serge Birault.

art by Denis Loebner

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art by Denis Loebner

Sunday Morning Relaxation

I’m not sure how many folks realize that Hokusai’s great wave isn’t a painting. What the artist actually created was a set of carved blocks from which color prints could be made by a master printer, such as this fellow.

a stunning play on our basic expectations of what is up ...

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a stunning play on our basic expectations of what is up and what is down by Denis Loebner

Why do you call me ‘my lady?’

“Can I ask you something?”

“Only if I know the answer. I wouldn’t want to disappoint a woman of your renown.”

“Why do you call me ‘my lady?’” I asked.

“Well . . .” The question seemed to surprise him, and he shifted his prickly mass as if to recline in contemplation. He was a complete gnarl of leaves and twigs. His beard was a carpet of green moss, and it wobbled when he spoke. “I don’t know. Aren’t you?”

“I was once. But that was a very long time ago.”

“I miss the very long times ago,” he said, yawning. Even his tongue was a broad leaf. “You could really stretch out in them. The times today are so curt. Never bother to stick around, as if they’ve got some better place to be. Rude, if you ask me. But what brings you out today, my lady? Another adventure?”

“I seem to have lost some of my memories,” I explained.

“No! You don’t say? That’s a terrible business. Terrible. Memories are like roots. They ought to stay where they’re planted.” He leaned closer like he wanted to tell me a secret. His face was as tall as my chest. “You know, when most people lose something, they wait until the last place to look before finding it. I like to start there. Saves time, you know. That’s important since there’s so much less of it now.”

“Well, I don’t think I have to worry about that. I’ve only ever kept my memories in one place.”

“Smart,” he said with a wink. “Very smart. Then you don’t have to worry where they’ve got off to. Have they escaped before?”

“Never.”

“Hmmm. Tricky . . .” His leafy fingers stroked his mossy beard. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with where you’ve kept them?”

“Not entirely. But I’ve given it a good once-over, and it seems sound.”

“Hm. Stolen then.”

“It appears so.”

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I lost some memories once.”

“You did? Where did you find them?”

He opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped and scowled at the heavy canopy over his head. “I don’t remember.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m afraid I shall have to keep looking.”

“Quite right. Quite right. Best not to give up, and all that. But you’d better hurry. The train is coming.”

“Train?” I looked across the overgrowth. It was identical in every direction. If there’d been a path, it had long since been swallowed by the forest. “But where is the platform?”

“The platform?” He thought for a moment. “Oh dear. I hope we haven’t lost that, too.” He pounded his heavy trunk on the ground and I nearly fell. “Get up, you lazy buggers! The lady needs to know the way.”

Fireflies blinked among the ferns. They flickered as they drifted up, like a dance of constellations. They floated on the air and gathered in groups inside the glassless street lamps that rose here and there among the trees, remnants of a bygone age. It was breathtaking—a gas-lit walk through a twilight forest.