Dave Zeltserman's Blog, page 24

MIND PRISON: Part 2

(MIND PRISON is also available as a kindle eBook. The story will be presented on this blog over the next four days)

Part 2
I was fifteen minutes late and I could see Svetlana through the restaurant window, her dark beautiful face smoldering with anger. She had gotten up from her table and was buttoning her suede jacket. Of course, any restaurant manager would seat her by the window. She was so damn beautiful. Long black hair, dazzling green eyes, a thin athletic body that only a twenty-five year old could have, and legs that could stop a man’s heart. I felt lightheaded just looking at her. I knocked on the plate glass window and her eyes seethed as she glanced at me. Then she looked away and left the table.I caught her as she rushed from the restaurant. “You told me twelve thirty,” she said coolly, her voice thick with a Russian accent. She pulled her arm free from my hand and started to walk quickly away. Along with her suede jacket, she was wearing a short black skirt and suede boots that went half way up to her knees. I watched her for a moment and felt dizzy. I don’t think I ever wanted anyone as badly as I wanted her right then.I ran up to her about the time she was opening the door to her BMW convertible; a car I had bought her after our first month together. “Please, Svetlana,” I said, “I couldn’t help it. I had a meeting that ran late.”“I don’t know why I agreed to see you,” she said. “There’s nothing left to say.”“Please,” I pleaded.She stood quietly for a moment. Her eyes seemed to soften. “Okay,” she said, “you can get in but I don’t know what good it will do.”She got into the driver’s seat and I joined her on the passenger side. As she drove I looked at her profile and felt a lump form in my throat. “You’re all I can think about,” I said.I reached over to kiss her, but she pushed me away. “Nothing has changed,” she said dispassionately. “I’m not going to be just your mistress.”“You love me too, don’t you?” I asked.She sat quietly for a long moment, her eyes focused on the road. “It doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “You’re married.”“I can’t divorce Cheryl. I’ve told you that. She’s funding my research. But if you could just wait three years, four at the tops—”“I’m not waiting three years. I want to enjoy life now while I’m young, with or without you.”We sat silently after that. My heart ached as I looked at her. I wanted more than anything to taste her lips and to hold her body. Svetlana, though, just stared straight ahead, a harsh determination hardening her face. After a long time she broke the silence.“If your wife would disappear everything would be fine,” she said at last.I didn’t say anything.“You don’t love her,” she said. “I remember all the times you told me she’d be miserable without you. That you didn’t even think she could live without you. You’d be doing her a kindness.”I didn’t say anything. Of course I had been thinking the same thing for months. About how much better everything would be if Cheryl didn’t exist.“If it wasn’t for your wife, I’d be all yours. Body and soul,” she said.“It wouldn’t work,” I said quietly. “The police would know it was me.”Svetlana kept staring straight ahead, her face hard and beautiful. I noticed the whites of her knuckles as she gripped the wheel with her small hands.“Let me think about that,” she said after a long while.
Part 3 tomorrow

MIND PRISON: Part 1

(MIND PRISON is also available as a kindle eBook. The story will be presented on this blog over the next four days)

Part 1 I could tell from their faces that they weren’t going to be receptive, but it didn’t matter. I already had the Governor sold and the Governor’s council sold, and more importantly, I had the State Senate President sold. The best these five could do was put up a speed bump.I introduced myself as Graham Winston and gave them my credentials: PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and top of my class at Harvard Medical. Before I could start the presentation, a heavyset woman, her voice trembling with moral indignation, stopped me.“Dr. Winston,” she asked, “don’t you consider what you’re doing inhuman?”“And why would that be?”“Because,” she said, her pitch rising, “what you are proposing is to warehouse human beings. Basically, you want to pen prisoners up as if they were nothing but fatted calves!”I gave her and her companions a hard look. I already had approval to start the clinical trials and I didn’t really need their support. This was a waste of time. I felt a little anxious as I glanced at my watch. It was eleven o’clock and I was supposed to meet Svetlana at twelve thirty. It had taken me a week to convince her to see me and I couldn’t afford to let this meeting mess that up. I politely told the woman that I believed what I was proposing was far more humane than the system that was currently in place. I asked if she could withhold judgment and questions until I was done with my presentation. I could tell she didn’t appreciate my answer, but she forced her mouth shut.I went through the slides showing the financial and social benefits, and they really were dramatic. It costs eighty thousand dollars a year in Massachusetts to house an inmate in a maximum security prison and my proposed system would reduce that to less than ten thousand dollars. The social benefits were equally dramatic. Every year violent criminals were either released early or given reduced sentences because of lack of prison space. With my system there would never be any space problems. My audience, though, sat stone-faced through my presentation.As I wrapped up the slides, a bony man in his early fifties with pale fish eyes, started to question the moral integrity of what I was proposing. I stopped him and asked if I could answer him after the demo. He looked insulted, but agreed to wait.I led them from the conference room to the lab. In the middle of the lab, a purebred boxer lay in a container with about a dozen electrodes attached to its body. A catheter was also attached, as was an intravenous feeding tube. Several optical wires, each the width of a single human hair, ran out of the dog’s skull. The animal appeared to be asleep. One of my audience members let out a gasp. I ignored her and inserted a tape into the VCR.“This specimen was chosen,” I said, “because of his antisocial and aggressive behavior. This video was taken hours before attaching the dog to the MP100—or Mind Prison system.”The video showed the dog being taken into a room with several other dogs. Almost immediately, the boxer forced itself on one of the smaller dogs and tried to mount it. And just as quickly it lunged at one of the other dogs. Fortunately, I had a firm grip of his leash and was able to keep him from doing any damage. The video ended with me throwing a Frisbee to the animal, which he watched with indifference.I turned off the video and walked over to the dog.“He’s been connected to the system for a week now,” I said, as I scratched him behind one of his ears. “Technology has existed for several years which converts digital images to rudimentary signals that the brain can process. This has proven helpful to the blind. My technology is a revolutionary improvement over that. What I’m doing is converting complex computer images to impulses that are fed directly into the prefrontal cortex, right angular gyrus, amygdala, and hippocampus areas of the brain. This in effect allows me to simulate consciousness.” I turned on a flat-panel monitor that sat above the dog. The images on it showed a Black Labrador being thrown a Frisbee. The Labrador chased after it and caught it in mid-flight. He then brought it back to his owner and dropped it at his feet and barked. Simultaneously, the boxer made a slight noise.“The test subject is right now experiencing what is being shown on the monitor. Although it’s nothing but a computer simulation, as far as he’s concerned, he’s chasing and catching Frisbees. We call these simulations scripts. The Labrador script has been running for two days. A two-day script, though, might actually simulate a month or more of activity. The script we ran before this was of a Basset Hound. In that one the dog spent his time socializing with other dogs and their owners.”I looked at my watch and saw it was almost twelve. I had to hurry things up. I started removing the electrodes, catheter, and feeding tube from the boxer. I then used a special instrument to remove the optical wires from his skull. The dog opened his eyes and then pushed himself up and jumped off the table. He was wagging his tail, greeting the stunned members of my audience. He was quite a bit different from the vicious beast they had seen in the video. I took a Frisbee from a shelf, called the dog over, and then gave the Frisbee a short toss. The dog took off and caught it in mid-air. He then brought it back to me and dropped it at my feet and let loose with a bark, his tail wagging a mile a minute.The bony guy with the fish eyes seemed impressed. “Can this rehabilitate prisoners?” he asked.“They’re going to be spending their days living productive and enriching lives. Yes, it should be a positive influence on them.”He thought about that, and asked, “If the prisoners are going to be lying for years at a time, how do you, uh, keep their muscles from atrophying?”“We electrically stimulate the muscles,” I said. “Muscle stimulation, feeding, cleaning, and health monitoring are all automated.” I showed a thin smile. “The average prisoner will be healthier when they leave than when they entered.”I had won most of them over, but not the heavyset woman. Her eyes were shining brightly with moral superiority. “What type of existence could they possibly have,” she demanded, “if they’re simply plugged into a computer with all free will and thought taken away from them?”“What type of life do they have now?” I asked. “Prisoners lives are filled with boredom, drugs, brutality, and worse. We’re developing scripts to let them live as Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, and countless other great thinkers and artists. We’ll allow them to spend their days discovering the theory of relativity, inventing the light bulb, or writing Tom Sawyer. And every few days a new script will be selected and a new adventure will begin. What we’re offering is paradise.”The woman started to argue with me but I held up my hand. “I have someplace else I have to be,” I said. “My assistant, Dr. Allison Hanson, will answer any further questions you may have.” I called Hanson on the phone and less than a minute later, as arranged, she entered the lab with several small dogs on leashes. The dogs backed up at the sight of the boxer, but the boxer ambled over to them civilly and wagged his tail.I introduced Dr. Hanson to my audience and then left.
Part 2 tomorrow

The horrible truth behind THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS

I've been dreading this moment, but it's about time I come clean and tell the truth about THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS.Two and a half years ago I was doing a book reading for Monster at a Newton, Massachusetts bookstore, and a kid who had sat in rapt attendance approached me afterwards. The kid  had his hair dyed bright green, and his all-black Goth attire made his pale face look almost ghostly. His name turned out to be Curt Tucker. He was 14, had aspirations to be a writer, and shared my love of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales. For four months following the reading, Curt and I traded emails where I attempted to do the mentoring thing and offer encouragement to a very young and fledgling author, and as often happens in situations like this the emails from Curt tailed off. Then 9 months later he surprised me by showing up at my door to hand me a package. He seemed scared and didn’t much want to talk, only asking me to read what was inside the package and to see if I could get it published, telling me that it was important that I do so.  Before I could ask him anything else, he was on his bike, peddling away. It was all very odd. While I was curious about this encounter, I was in the middle of writing a new horror novel that I was deeply into, and so all I did was give the contents of the package a quick cursory look, saw that it was some sort of journal, and stuck it in a pile of things to read. It wasn’t until five months later that I picked it up again and gave it a thorough reading. At that time the name on the journal, Henry Dudlow, seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before. As I read more of the journal, I remembered. About a month or so before Curt had delivered the package, a story had broken about a grisly murder outside of Boston that a 15 year-old Newton kid named Henry Dudlow was suspected of committing. The story, though, quickly died after that one day with no follow up stories, and like a lot of other people I’d forgotten about it. Here’s the strange thing about it: I could swear that this is all true—that I saw the story on at least two Boston newspaper websites—but when I tried searching these newspaper websites, there was nothing. The story has been scrubbed clean, unless I was somehow imagining it.
Here’s where the story gets odder. Any record of Henry Dudlow also appeared to be scrubbed clean. I tracked down his parents, and they insisted they never had a child named Henry or otherwise, but there was something very off in their expressions when they made their claims. After my short and bizarre meeting with them, I tracked Curt down again, and he was now insisting he never gave me anything, but he also seemed badly frightened as he did so.
At this point I wasn’t sure what to believe. I had this journal written by Henry Dudlow, except Henry supposedly never existed, and the kid who delivered the journal to me seemed almost desperate in his claims of not having done so. Was this a hoax or something else? I knew the journal physically existed—my wife and others verified it—so I wasn’t delusional about its existence. All in all I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and I had to keep digging into it. For several weeks I came up empty, and I started questioning my own sanity. If Henry Dudlow truly never existed, yet I vividly remembered that murder story breaking and now had in my possession what was supposed to be his journal, was it possible that I wrote the journal myself without ever realizing it, and fantasized all the rest of it? I wasn’t quite sure what to think until I found Sally Freeman. When I asked her about Henry I could see for a brief moment that she was going to deny his existence like everyone else had, but then tears welled up in her eyes, and rather grim-faced and defiantly she told me that Henry was real. “His journal is real,” she insisted, “don’t believe what they’re telling you.” I hadn’t told Sally about the journal, and fortunately I recorded her conversation, which allowed my wife to verify it, so at least I proved I wasn’t insane. At least I knew that much. But I was still left with the question whether the journal was real or a hoax. Shortly after meeting with Sally, something happened to tilt this answer more toward the former. While the same people (or demons??) who cleansed any record of Henry ever existing attempted to do the same with Henry’s neighbor, Mr. Hanley, they made one mistake. They forgot about the same newspaper photo that freaked Henry out so much—the one with Hanley in the background carrying a large bulky package wrapped in white butcher’s paper—and I now have it!
I still couldn’t claim the journal was legit—even if Henry Dudlow wrote it, it could still be a hoax or delusional fantasies—but I couldn’t shake the thought that it could be real and for the sake of the world it needed to be out there. For that reason I took it to my publisher and begged them to publish it. I wanted them to attribute the novel to Henry, but since they couldn’t find any record of him ever existing, for legal reasons they’d only publish it as a fictional novel with me as the author. While I felt a bit funny about those terms, getting Henry’s journal out into the world seemed too important not to agree. I just have to pray that this all turns out to be an elaborate hoax. I think we all have to pray for that.
(Note. This shameful confession was earlier published on Tony Black's Pulp Pusher website)

Bullet of Prose #26 from BLOOD CRIMES

Christ, it was bad. His heroin withdrawal was like heaven on earth compared to the sickness. Serena’s posse must’ve carried him out of the club and taken him to her converted hotel in Union Square, at least that’s probably what happened, because he had no memory of it. The only thing he could remember clearly about the next twenty-four hours was the intense agony he went through. It was unlike anything imaginable—as if every fiber of his body was on fire and being pulled apart. How he, or any of the other vampires, survived the infection stage without going insane was beyond him. Only fragments of that time stuck in his consciousness. The swatches that survived in his brain were things from a horror movie. Images fading in and out. Him in wrist and ankle restraints. Being fed blood through a baby bottle. Him greedily sucking on it, his throat so damn dry as if it had been burnt with a flame. The vampire who he would later learn was Metcalf arguing with Serena about him, claiming she had no right to infect anyone without his permission, and her insisting she had every right to her toys. Metcalf appearing with a samurai sword and slicing off the legs of one of her posse, telling her that he needed to maintain the status quo. Those legs that were sliced off continuing to move on their own while Metcalf cut off the vampire’s arms, then carrying away what was left, the whole time the bloody thing screaming like a banshee.

Bullet of Prose #25 from BLOOD CRIMES

Three and a half years ago they had a club date in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. A little hole in the wall basement nightclub that could hold maybe a hundred people, and somehow managed to squeeze in twice that amount to hear them. Elise was on fire that night and the band was hitting on all cylinders. Normally it would’ve been one of those magical nights where as band manager Jim would be able to just sit back and enjoy the ride, but he couldn’t concentrate on the music. Not with this wild looking dame standing maybe twenty feet from him. And not with the way she was staring at him. Jesus, she was something, sexy as hell in a matching yellow skintight leather pants and vest that left little to the imagination. Narrow hips and long legs and green eyes that could’ve been lasers the way they pierced through him. He wouldn’t exactly say she was gorgeous—she had this weird cat-like look about her, but every time he’d look over and meet her eyes and catch her thin impish smile, he’d feel himself growing as hard as a brick between his legs. It was embarrassing, and he couldn’t explain it. He tried not to look in her direction. His sixth sense told him to stay the fuck away. He found himself sweating, tensing, praying that she’d keep her distance. A hand touched his shoulder, then the feel of her lips brushing against his ear. It froze him. She whispered her name to him, told him that she had her eye on him for the longest time and that she was completely mesmerized by him. He knew she was mocking him, but her being so close to him left his head pounding.

Bullet of Prose #24 from BLOOD CRIMES

That day started off worse than most of the others. He had hooked up the night before with another addict, a deathly thin blonde woman about twenty years older than him. He didn’t remember much about her other than how damn hollow her eyes looked, how her lips were so unnaturally pale with this hint of blue tingeing them and how hard it was for her to find a vein to tap. When he woke up the next morning she was gone along with his roll of over three grand and his stash. There was nothing in her apartment worth any money. She wasn’t coming back. His cash and junk were long gone. He was just lucky she didn’t take his clothes, and even luckier she didn’t take his army-issued boots. He sat on the floor for a long time holding his head, needing a fix as badly as he ever did. Eventually the stench of garbage got to him and he staggered out of the apartment.

Bullet of Prose #23 from BLOOD CRIMES

Faces of the perverts and rapists and sociopaths that Jim had killed over the last three years blurred in his mind into something generic, something almost cartoonish. Outside of that first thug who attacked Carol in Newark, it was hard for him to recall any of them. Even the latest one from only several hours before. Their faces just kept fading in and out, never quite coming into focus. He forced himself to concentrate, to try to picture what at least one of them looked like, but couldn’t do it. Whenever he came close, the image would morph into Bluto from those old Popeye cartoons. Giving up, he forced himself to count how many of these predators he had killed since hooking up with Carol. It took a while but he came up with a number—a hundred and ten, plus the two vampires that Serena had sicced on him. Fuck. If this kept up and he lived to a ripe old age he could go down as one of the deadliest serial killers in history, or the most successful vigilante, depending on your point of view. The fact that these were all violent sociopathic thugs, the worst that humanity had to offer, only slightly helped to ease his conscience. No matter how hard he tried convincing himself otherwise, it still came down to that he was robbing them of any chance of redemption. Even though he had to kill them for his survival, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it if they weren’t trying to hurt Carol. Not that he hadn’t killed before becoming a vampire.

Bullet of Prose #22 from Blood Crimes

She knew the bartender was right, that Duane would be out there waiting for her. She had done this enough times to know that, and besides, Jim’s intuition with these things was almost never wrong. She walked briskly away from the bar. It didn’t take long before she could feel Duane’s presence and imagine the soft padding of his running shoes as he raced to catch up to her. Good. This was what Jim needed before he could feed and, just as badly, this was what she needed. She needed to be brought back to that moment of helplessness from three years ago when that punk scumbag ripped off her clothes so he could bend her over and violate her. She needed that feeling so she’d have no remorse for Duane, and more importantly, so she could enjoy what was going to happen to him.

Bullet of Prose #21 from BLOOD CRIMES

The other vampires nodded. Ninotchka’s was the current flavor of the month—one of Manhattan’s trendiest hotspots. In another hour or so the place would be jammed tight with the rich and beautiful crowd. The thought of being squeezed in among all that warm, hot flesh was intoxicating to Serena. She’d be so close to them she’d be able to hear their blood pulsating through their veins and their hearts beating like mad. Not that she would be feeding on any of them. The heroin would keep her hunger suppressed, besides she had a large enough supply of fresh blood as it was. Early on before Metcalf moved to the west coast, they maintained “cattle pens” and milked their cattle each day. Serena never liked that, it was such a bother having to dispose of the used up bodies. Once Metcalf left, she came to other arrangements, first buying blood under the table from several blood banks, then infecting her sources when they eventually tried to discontinue their arrangements. Enough blood was being delivered each day to keep the twenty-two vampires in the house well fed. All in all, she was much happier with the arrangement.

Bullet of Prose #20 from THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS

Celebrating THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS being released in the UK with another bullet of prose.

A new student was brought into our homeroom. Supposedly his name is Connor Devin, and the story we were told is that he had just moved to the area. They didn’t tell us where he lived before, and Devin didn’t volunteer the information, but I knew where he really came from. Hell. Because Connor Devin is a demon. And I know it’s no accident that he was put in my homeroom—not with the way he took a desk one row directly behind me, and not with the way I could feel his demon eyes burning into the back of my neck. And for the pièce de résistance. He’s in every single class I’m in. Every single damn one!