October 14, 2012

From “Locke’s Revenant” by Jeanne Welch

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Sharon sipped her Lunabrew, the house specialty. “My brother…he died about six months ago. I’ve been trying to take care of his affairs, since I’m between jobs. Well, more than just that; I have a noncompetition clause in my old contract that keeps me from doing any job in my field for a year after I quit.”

“Well, that explains why you’ve been back in town so long,” said Ward, whose own drink was a Groenbach. “I was sure it wasn’t for the ambiance.”

“Paul worked for Sav-Mart, in the electronics section. He had a master’s degree and a ton of debt but he worked there, living through the internet and making just enough to pay the bare minimum against rent and loans even though my parents live here six months out of the year.”

“A slacker?” Ward said.

“Don’t use that word,” Sharon snapped, slamming her glass to the table. “He was my brother and he’s dead.”

Ward held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry, that…it slipped out. But you didn’t ask me here to tell me that, did you?”

“Paul lived his life online, so that’s where I’ve been trying to set his affairs straight. He left me some but not all of his passwords, and…Ward, he was an online stalker.”

“Come again?” Ward said, his expression unreadable.

Sharon held her head in her hands. “He had all these saved links, photographs, even chat logs, of a girl that lives a few hours away from here near LA. I’ve been getting some weird prank calls and messages and thought they might be from her. Ward, I called her and she had never heard of Paul.”

“So you think he was stalking her? That’s the kind of thing that happens if you dig too deeply into people, Sharon. De mortuis nil nisi bonum – speak not ill of the dead.”

“You don’t understand. Not all the messages I’ve been getting have been pranks. I think Paul may have set something in motion before he died. Something horrible, something I can’t even bring myself to understand. I’m afraid this girl, this Umbriel, is at the center of it somehow.” Sharon lifted her head as she spoke, looking directly at Ward. “She might even be in danger.”

“Paul said you might say something like that,” Ward sighed. Sharon’s blood ran cold at the words. “I told him not to worry, that I’d deflect you with my wit and charm. But that hasn’t worked, has it? And now we’re here, taking over flat beer, and things have just gotten a hell of a lot more awkward.”

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September 30, 2012

From “The Strange Life of the Unseen” by Simona Genesis

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“He was a scientist to the end. Even as a paranoid schizophrenic he tried to catalog every little pink elephant he saw and scientifically evaluate it.”

Angela ran her hands over the stack of field notebooks, many yellow with intense age and loving wear. “These?”

“Yeah. Not just his own hallucinations, either; he spent the last few years haunting every internet kookspace he could worm into, trying to get corroboration of what he was seeing and to record things that others had experienced but he hadn’t.” Jacobs tapped one of the books. “Field and collector notes, even a set of nomenclature…it would be a crowning work of scholarship if it weren’t completely insane.”

“Please don’t use that word. He was my grandfather even if he was just another kook to you.” Angela picked up one of the more recent books. “Can I read it?”

“I’m not sure if I would,” said Jacobs. “If you’re worried about preserving any sort of conception you have of him from the past.”

Angela brushed him off and opened to a random page. “Kellisande Lume. Appears as a worm building tunnels out of light in he sky above buildings that face to the southwest. Causes people to look at the pavement when they walk and gradually lose the ability to appreciate natural beauty. Driven away by strong odors of olives, clocks running backwards, and people with a vague sense of empowerment. Collects dried leaves and is 90% constructed therefrom aside from its skin. Only visible to .0001% of the population naturally as well as those who have been blind from birth and recently gained their sight.”

“It goes on like that for 127 volumes,” said Jacobs. “There’s one that lures people to their deaths by painting pictures that can’t be described out of dust motes, and one that lives in melancholy beams of sunlight grazing on the sighs of the brokenhearted.”

“Are…are you sure he was crazy?” Angela said. “Things like that really could exist, if no one could see them.”

“Listen to yourself,” Jacobs said. “Look, we brought you here for insight into your grandfather’s disappearance, not to talk metaphysics. There’s more in here, come on.

He led Angela into the adjacent library, passing through a beam of wintery midday light from an attic window above and shuddering with an involuntary sigh.

Inspired by this page.

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September 28, 2012

From “Into the Stream” by Wen Baguio

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I am among the travelers who have crossed over. I listen to their discussions on how to use their ability to alter the natural laws of this world to create beauty, peace, and harmony. But something is wrong.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be watching this as a film, seated comfortably in the world’s most avant-garde digital theater.

One of the travelers quietly slips away from the discussion. I catch a fleeting glimpse of their face and it reminds me of someone I once knew. I have forgotten their name, and everything else about them but I still remember those eyes. I follow, drawn to that stranger who is not a stranger in my confusion.

I find them standing where the water meets the land in a broad expanse of white sand. They turn to me, smile, and suddenly the surroundings are different. We are in a garden of topiary and elaborate sliding metal walls that stretches as far as I can see. It was created by them, that very moment, by bending the laws of the world.

Welcome. The words are not spoken, nor do they need to be.

I don’t understand. I reply. I’m just watching you in the film; I can’t be among you.

A curious thing, isn’t it, plunging into the sacred cenote? There are many chinks between the worlds, after all. Whether you choose to see this as anything other than a trick of dream logic…you are here.

The strange but not strange traveler holds out their hands; what should have been empty air is instead a chess set of frosted crystal with strange and elaborate pieces haphazardly set upon it. Their first move is to bring two pieces, impossibly, into the same spot at the same time.

The rules have been altered by the power of this place: the object is not to kill or capture but to embrace and love.

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September 2, 2012

From “The Borgesian Books” by Chauncey Zulema Smart

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Borges once wrote of a secret society dedicated to bring about the replacement of our world by another by methodically documenting every facet of the new world in an encyclopedia; the facts about the new world would gradually replace those of the old through substitution, forgery, and dissemination of altered or completely fictional books. After all, if books (and their successors) can be altered, and they form the only record of the world beyond what people have seen with their own eyes, to change them is to change all.

I believe that someone may have taken that tale to heart.

In my role as a regional coordinator for a major consortium of libraries, I hear a lot of scuttlebutt about books and such; in my previous life I worked for Merchant & Field Booksellers and still maintain some contacts there. Lately my librarians on the one hand and my booksellers on the other have been bringing me texts that, quite frankly, don’t make any sense.

They run the gamut from leather-bound to cheap pulp and bear realistic-sounding but totally false publishers. Real love went into their creation, unlike some of the publish-on-demand crap that bubbles up. Yet the world they describe so blithely and without elaboration is an alien one, like the place I live but in many ways completely different.

The publication dates, for one. Who would create a fake book with a date fifty or a hundred years in the future, or one using a date system (PC) that seems to have begun counting three or four years ago? I’ve read many of the titles, and they are rife with descriptions of kingdoms and empires alongside cell phones and sports cars–the sort of thing many cheap and terrible books aspire to, it’s true. I think they describe a world like ours in which most nation-states have collapsed and in which technology has largely stagnated among the ruins of a fragmented USA. Stagnation and fragmentation, or stagmentation, or fragnation if you prefer.

The kind of internal consistency I’ve seen seems to belie the theory that it’s a single kook slipping these onto shelves. It’s almost enough to make me believe that these crazyquilt places, these Beral Lands, Vativia, Eastern and Outland Empires, or the Rift actually exist somewhere.

That’s crazy of course. But is a Borgesian attempt to alter the fabric of our reality any less so, or an elaborate and expensive literary prank so obtuse that only a handful of booksellers and archivists worldwide could get the joke? Next to that, sometimes I’m willing to allow that these books, these tawdry novels and single volumes of larger works, have simply slipped through some crack from one place to another.

After all, as Borges said, what would someone in another world make of one of our encyclopedias? What would the advanced but fragmented, stagnant but vibrant places I read in these mystery books think if this writing wound up on their own computer screen?

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August 24, 2012

From “Syncope Walks the Halls” by Siobhán Burrowes

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Now Jones may just have been working the Viper Security Systems gig to pay his way through college since a twisted ankle on the practice field cost him a scholarship, but he took the job seriously. Seriously enough to have a go at investigating reports of break-ins and trespassing, anyway; he hoped to get good references for a future career in criminal justice.

Most of the work was collaring drunk freshmen hog-wild with being out from under the apron strings for the first time in 18 years. But the recent rash of calls from Schumann Hall was puzzling. The people there, Engineering and Physics mostly, tended to work long hours and a lot of calls had been coming in about intruders in the building post-9pm, when the doors were locked.

Jones would get the call, respond, and find that the caller had no memory of any intruder.

He suspected crank calls at first, at least until Dr. Chandraputra had called–there was no mistaking that accent. There was also no mistaking the fact that Chandraputra resolutely denied ever having placed the call. Viper, as the security contractor, had access to phone logs; Jones checked and found that the call had indeed been placed. Confronted with that information, Chandraputra had grown quiet and confused.

More calls arrived, gradually building until there seemed to be one every other week. The descriptions were similar: someone was rustling about the building, likely a freshman, likely a girl. They were always more annoyed than scared, and more than one had promised to shoo the offending interloper away before Jones or one of his boys could arrive.

“It’s…I remember placing the call,” one Physics adjunct said when grilled by Jones. “If I really think hard there are…snatches, you know? Images. But the more I think about it, the more I realize there’s a gap, like the time was ripped right out of my memory.”

By then, Jones had resolved to stake out the building himself. If nothing else, he could trust his own memory.

Or so he thought.

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August 16, 2012

From “Into the Vale” by Herschel Ciejka

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Many times, investigators have arrived from whatever empire, kingdom, or republic happened to control the area. Rumors bring them hence, or disappearances, or simple curiosity. The simple farmers and villagers who live nearby always tell them the same thing: do not enter the Vale.

When pressed, they avow that the Vale contains a power that molds flesh and bone, root and bark, stone and earth as if each were so much clay on a potter’s wheel. Whether the power is some sort of spirit, a natural force, or something entirely different is of no concern to those near the Vale; they see the nature of that place as unknowable and capriciously so.

They evince a belief that the Vale reshapes anything that enters it into a form that best suits its deepest and innermost nature. A record compiled by the Imperial Guard mentions a farmer claiming that every tree of the Vale was once a lazy and dissolute creature, for instance. A later document prepared by a Directorate Investigator mentions a cooper that claimed people would occasionally stumble out of the vale with no memory or identity; beings that had begun as something else that the power behind the Vale had reshaped.

Without fail, the interviewees treat the Vale in a resigned matter: they are not disturbed by their fantastic tales, and give their warnings without judgement or passion. It was a part of their lives, and if a local refused to abide by the local wisdom, their inevitable disappearance–or purported reappearance in another wildly different form–was enough to ensure that few would follow.

It is also worth noting that, also without fail, the reports of the various investigative agencies are incomplete. For even as the investigators universally dismiss the reports as superstition, they are always compelled to see for themselves. The discovery of their effects in birds’ nests and bear dens is always held up as evidence that they were waylaid and murdered by brigands and left to rot in the vale.

They never return.

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August 13, 2012

From “Aleg” by J. Alec Portgrade

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I have the sense that this has all happened before, to my father, who died in bed as a result. I’m flipping through a catalog, a mail-order catalog of dark and forbidden things, offhandedly looking for a certain item, even though I know it’s dangerous, it’s what’s caused my father’s misfortune and untimely death.

I see the item, a bracelet in the catalog, and then it’s there, I’m wearing it. The act of looking, the act of wanting–it’s the same as the act of owning, the act of having. I talk with my family, begging them for advice now that I’ve unleashed a force I couldn’t understand. A sense of dread fills me, which is borne out when I see small letters begin to appear on a piece of scrap paper on the kitchen table, written by a small and invisible hand.

“This is it, this is what happened to my father, it’s starting all over again!” I scream–a really long and drawn-out scream. My mother comforts me–maybe I should read what’s being written, maybe things won’t be the same this time. I look at the page; “aleg” is written over and over again in a sloppy hand. It’s my name, I realize with horror, or at least how my name might sound to someone eavesdropping or with a speech impediment.

More words being to appear in the same hand, all over the available space on the paper. I put out fresh sheets to help it along. Mom calls the unseen writier a “Liliputian,” though I disagree–but I haven’t any better name, so it sticks. The rest of the writing is vary vague, but it seems to be a cry for help against some sort of danger–a danger which, I realize, killed my father. I’m terrified but determined to help, to avoid his fate. I set a sketchbook in the path of the invisible writer, and suddenly it’s filled with text and brightly colored images.

I have a fleeting glimpse of a dragon in flight before I slam the book closed, fearful of what I might find.

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August 8, 2012

From “Lady of the Boon” by Bridget-Alicia Elba

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Some say she is the exiled princess of a kingdom beyond the veil of the day-to-day world, some that she is the illusory form assumed by a creature or consciousness beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the most parsimonious explanation is that she is a sorceress of the Old Order who has carefully struck deals with Time and Space to be exempt from both in exchange for some long-ago service.

When encountered, she is always dressed in foreign or exotic clothes; a Perytion shayshmyr robe in Uldar, Uldarian peasant culottes and dress in Peryt. She is always accompanied by two small figures in similar clothing but with concealed faces; they appear at first to be children but may be dwarves or even marionettes depending on the observer, the season, or the angle of the sun.

Of the travelers, farmers, and others that she meets on the road, a single question is asked: what is most precious in the world? Refusing to answer or giving an answer which displeases the asker seems to have no effect; she will pass by with a cutting remark or in total silence. An answer which intrigues her, though…that will bring the offer of a boon in exchange for a service. Someone who answers that their family is precious may be offered a larger farm; a person who favors gold may be offered a sack of it.

The boon will always turn out to cost the supplicant exactly what it was they valued. The farm will be infertile; the gold will lead to poor and bankrupting investments or be seized by highwaymen. And the boon? One year and one day after the service is rendered, the person who received it will vanish, never to be seen again.

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August 7, 2012

From “Petting the Beyond” by Altos Wexan

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I’ve known many people who’ve lost a pet, but due to the circles that I find myself in most of those people are atheists or not religious. As such, I don’t have many antecedents, many examples, to help lead me through where I find myself now. I suppose a large part of that is the fact that I haven’t lost a pet since 1998, and I haven’t lost a family member who I knew well since 1996. That’s a long time without any kind of major grief.

As such, I find myself at a crossroads about what to believe happens…afterwards. A little research has, if anything, muddled the question. My strict religious relatives would probably argue that animals don’t have souls, and they’d probably be on more doctrinally solid ground than I (to say nothing of what to think about my food as an avowed carnivore under those circumstances). The New Age concept of a “Rainbow Bridge” that links a “green meadow located this side of Heaven” with the hereafter where departed pets wait for their masters to join them isn’t satisfying either. It seems like a trite 1970s flower-power storybook; the fact that the people I know who cleave to it are also largely irreligious also has a galling quality to it.

In short, I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know that I ever will, honestly. So what’s left to me, in the face of the loss and the need to do or to feel something about it?

I think the only avenue that I can fully embrace is something I’ve already begun to do. In the face of uncertainty, take the steps you know will lead to remembrance and existence, even if only in an abstract fashion, after the sorrows of the world have been rolled back. So I’m left with art: creative writing, journal entries, photographs, and paintings. Taking pictures and collecting those from happier times. Spelling out how I feel with words and images. Incorporating what I can of the lost into a painting: a pawprint here, a pinch of fur mixed with the acrylics there.

Soul or not, heaven or not, Rainbow Bridge or not, those things will be a lasting remembrance as long as I or others are around to see them.

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August 4, 2012

From “The Mailman Paradox” by Carmen Dos Santos

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“I was living with my lazy older sister and her smarmy, scheming boyfriend. My parents’ deaths had driven a terrible wedge between us, and her boyfriend’s greed and two-faced ways made things worse. I watched as he viewed the child they had out of wedlock as a ticket to more money from the government, and I had to give him my obsolete computer, the only one I had, just to convince him to try and get me a job at the bank where he worked.”

“Tell me more.”

“All the while we were living in a run-down two-story apartment on the bad side of town. It opened onto a maze of city alleys and a small dilapidated green. I…you sure you want to hear the rest, doc? You’ve already practically got me in a straitjacket.”

“Yes, tell me everything. It’s the only way to begin the healing process.”

“Well…strange things began to happen. Choruses of whispers from the shadows. Strange rustlings. Noises I couldn’t hear but were the sort of thing that maae my loyal dog cower. And a strange mailman, not our usual guy, seemed to be standing in front of our house every time I opened the door. But he never delivered anything. I…no one else could see him, and he drew nearer each time I was at the door. He’d vanish before reaching me, a sight which always filled me with such terrible dread…”

“What happened next?”

“Finally, he made it all the way to the door before I could close it and began to speak. His voice was horrible, shocking…I slamemd the door in his face, but he simply passed through it in a flash of blue light. He began speaking to me, very strangely in that horrible voice, asking where things were (assuming that I knew what he was talking about) and cautioning me that ‘they’ were nearby and anxious to get their hands on ‘it,’ whatever ‘it is.’

“Interesting.”

“The…the conversation goes nowhere, until he barged past me into the long, thin storage and tool room at the back of the apartment. I heard him ransacking the place, looking for something. I followed him, and he was waving around a rusty screwdriver like a shiv. He shouted at me to shut the door, to be quiet (even though he was being pretty loud) for fear of attracting ‘them.’ There was a sound outside, and he nervously slid up to the door, ready to attack it. It was just my dog, doc, but…he just keeps rambling and ransacking the place. All the while it’s seeming more and more eerie, more and more familiar, then then…well…”

“Come on, don’t stop there.”

“I gradually realized, doc, that the guy was me years in the future. It was clear as day from the way he talked and the way he acted.”

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