May 6, 2017

From “Find My Phone, Find Me” by M. Findlay Palmyra

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“At first it was only a few minutes, but it’s been getting longer and longer each time. Nobody says they see me when I’m…out…but I turned on the GPS on my phone to see if it could track me.”

“Uh huh,” Mike said. “And so that’s why we’re at a cell phone tower in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s where Locate My Phone says it is,” snapped Emmy.

Sure enough, a few moments’ poking around led to a phone, thankfully still in its weatherproof case, lying by the massive support girder for the cell phone array. There were no footprints in the soft earth nearby, nor were there any signs of disturbance.

“I’ll be damned,” whistled Mike. “There it is.”

“Run the GPS to see where I went while I was…out…” said Emmy. “I can’t bear to watch.”

Mike opened the app and scrolled through the data. “It says that you haven’t moved.”

“What?”

Flipping the phone over, Mike held it out. “See? 0.0 miles. It has you in your apartment until 1:01AM and then suddenly it’s here without recording a single inch of travel.”

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April 19, 2017

From “The Seadragon Queen” by Gennaro Esqueda

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It looks human enough, with feminine curves and limbs, but all made of feathery tendrils bound tight. We think that the seadragons have pressed themselves into a form similar to ours, but why? We don’t fish for them, and they’re clever enough to avoid being bycatch.

The thing–the “seadragon queen” as the boys have taken to calling it–appeared again as we were putting out our nets. It mimed some of our actions under the water but didn’t touch the food we threw. It didn’t interfere with the nets, either, but just swum around them. Even though it doesn’t–can’t have–eyes like ours, it turns its head to “look” at us.

Our gaffer knows signs–his brother can’t hear–and he’s been teaching them to the seadragon queen as it swims around us. It’s begun signing back, though he says that it’s touch to understand as its mushy “fingers” are the equivalent of an atrocious accent for signs. Since it seems determined to be near us whenever we’re netting, I’ve taken him off his duties to keep an eye on it.

The “seadragon queen” asked us for something. The gaffer says “she” just wanted some food, but she’s never shown any interest in what we’ve thrown her before. I’ve told the men that they can give her anything that we don’t need.

She asked for a knife, and the damn fools gave it to her. We needed it–they don’t come cheap–but now for the first time she has the ability to do more than fascinate the men. She can kill them.

My gaffer is gone. He disappeared sometime after lunch. He’d taught some of the linemen signs, so we’re not completely blind, but I don’t have a good feeling. Why did he have to give her that knife?

Our fishing lines have been cut, clean through. I suspected the seadragon queen until I saw the parting myself–done at an angle, like a fisherman. There’s no way she could have known that.

Three more men missing, even though I’ve set a watch. We got a report of a second seadragon-thing around the new nets, and a third. They say that they aren’t as curvy as the first one. I’m not sure what to think, but I don’t care. The boat goes up for sale tomorrow. Let the new captain figure this out.

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April 18, 2017

From “The Last Ones of the North” by T. Holson Featherston

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The last boat arrived in October, and the captain reported that the situation was desperate. A failed harvest, exhausted stocks of seals and fish, and only one serviceable vessel to collect timber from the forests beyond and below.

Our lord sent out a rescue party, but it was turned back by snow and sea ice. A second was also turned back, while a third never returned. In response, he declared that the settlement was lost, and a funeral was held for every settler that could be named.

More than a year later, in March, a relative of one of the settlers was able to fund a boat to set out in balmy weather. They found the settlement ravaged and burned, with no sign of the boat and no sign of the settlers. All that was left was an inscription, carved in what had been the great hall:

THE LAST ONES OF THE NORTH

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April 12, 2017

From “The Pundigrion” by Heidi Purington

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The Pundigrion is a book of immense power. Many have gone mad scrying deeply into its pages, expecting as they often do a mere book of very good puns. But those are a dime a dozen, from The Funomicon to The Wit’s Endgemot, and have no power over the insane (merely the inane).

But The Pundigrion works on a different principle. It open’s the reader’s mind to the inner working of language, the web of phonemes and graphemes that make up language at its most base. It tears away the veil of individual language to expose the underlying code that makes puns possible. And, in this way, it drives readers to gibbering madness.

We can trace the oldest known copy of The Pundigrion to Moshe Abraham, the Mad Israeli, who composed a scroll in Aramaic in the year 135. Taken by the victorious Romans, it was later copied in Athens into Greek and Latin by Leonidas the Loony Lacedaemonian. The Latin copy ended up in the Vatican archives, where numerous vulgate copies were made by Innocentius the Insane Italian. The Greek copy was captured by the Ottomans and sent to Constantinople, where Turkish and Arabic versions can be traced to Taranuz the Touched Turk.

In total, nine copies of The Pundigrion are known to have existed, in Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, French, German, and English. Each has had its exact whereabouts lost over time, largely because it reduces those who study it to gibbering lunatics capable of speaking only in elaborate puns. These people tend not to dispose of their estates very rationally; the 18th-century scholar Berthold the Batty Berliner tossed his copy of The Pundigrion from the dome of St Hedwig’s, for instance. It was rather quickly followed by the rest of his library, his clothes, and Berthold himself.

Chroniclers record his last words as “Singt ein Vogel auswendig? Nein, am meisten singt er vom Blatt!” A rough translation would be “Does a bird sing from memory?
No, it mostly reads from the sheet music.”

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March 29, 2017

From “Thumper” by E. Thom Pherry

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They call it “Thumper.”

You normally can’t hear it, at least not consciously. But when it’s acting up, usually in early spring or late summer, you can feel it. In your teeth, in your bones, and if you’re down at Pleasantwater lake, in the waves and ripples.

Once you hear it, once you start to notice it, you realize that everything in town matches itself to that profound bass thump when it’s at its strongest. Your heartbeat. Your breathing. Everything is synchronized in a way that feels wrong at the basement of your being.

A local guy, Jim Hatcher was his name I think, just like the famous author, used to do an AM radio broadcast about whatever was rattling in his brain. He’d go on and on about “Thumper” and his investigations into it. Kids loved listening to him because he always went wildly between “kindly folksy grandfather” and “raving lunatic” as the mood struck him.

Hatcher used to say that “Thumper” was coming from beneath Pleasantwater Lake, which I guess makes as much sense as anything. He said that there was a “stellar machine” beneath the waters, leftover from a civilization long since perished, slowly exposed by erosion. This “stellar machine” sent out “force signals” as it stirred from its slumber. Hatcher always said that he was researching what the machine was and what its signals did, but he was always coy with specifics.

When he died in his little house on the lake and they didn’t find him for two weeks…that didn’t exactly help things.

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March 14, 2017

From “Land Record #3891, 1826” by Blythe Hilson

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“There’s just one problem with these property records.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“There’s no death date for the former owner.”

“That’s no problem. You see, I never die.”

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March 12, 2017

From “Amid Neptunian Clouds” by Neil Aptman

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“No data was recovered from your skimmer,” Tallow said. “Nothing but you, and that’s a miracle in and of itself.”

“Are we still in atmo?” cried Remy. “Please tell me we’ve left.”

“No, of course not,” said Tallow. “This is a class three skimmer, it’s not capable of breaking atmo. We’re a few days out from Neptune Central Station, we can transfer you to a trans-atmo skiff there.”

“You don’t understand,” cried Remy. “The flux is still scrambling your communications. She’s still out there.”

“She? Your skimmer had an all-male crew, if I’m reading this manifest correctly.”

“We never saw more than shadows,” Remy said. “Shadows in the clouds. But there’s no other way to describe what we saw.”

“Another skimmer? Maybe a crew member from an illegal claim jumper?”

“To see it from lower atmo like that…no, no,” Remy said. “She would have had to be as big as a cruiser, or a continent. Maybe that’s why she never came close…the atmo is too thin…”

Tallow shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Behind her, a shadow of humanoid and vaguely feminine shape reared beneath the Neptunian clouds.

The second-to-last thing Tallow heard was Remy screaming.

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March 3, 2017

From “The Cloud that Came to Hobarton” by J. Horace Clambord

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Tendrils of brown clawing at the setting sun were the first sign. People wrote it off as a little incoming rain, if they noticed at all.

The second sign was an odd smell, perhaps best described as a ghost that was once a tree. People noticed this; the sensitive felt their eyes water, and the barely felt scent caused the short of breath to huff a bit. Authorities, when consulted, insisted that nothing was amiss.

Finally, a veil descended upon town, like mist. It was thick enough that the first few cars to emerge from behind it had their headlights on.

No more came.

The people were found where they lay, curled up in bed, on their couches, slumped in chairs at restaurants. They had not been suddenly overcome; cars were pulled over, loved ones were tucked in. And, aside from a few at the very edge, and those who had been away, the entire population of 817 souls never stirred again.

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February 23, 2017

From “The Ague-Born” by Geno Raub

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The disfiguration produced by the Ague was extreme, compared by those who had seen it to severe burns with the addition of inky black pustules. No one ever established a definitive cause, nor a method of transmission, nor why the disease seemed to prefer women to men in a ratio of 3:1 or more.

Most mysterious of all was the Ague’s sudden disappearance, leaving in its wake hundreds if not thousands of disfigured people, mostly young women.

Moved by their suffering, and under more than a little pressure from the local lords, the Sepulcher of the Creator created the Cloister of the Veil for them. Sufferers of the Ague were given a castle, abandoned during the Late Period, which they were able to renovate into a convent of sorts. Given land to till and animals to care for, the many women and few men were all sworn to the Sepulcher’s rules for convents, celibacy foremost among them.

They were also provided with clear linen uniforms that draped in such a way as to shield their ravaged bodies from view. The few males were ordained priests of the Sepulcher and tended to wear metal or wooden masks as a sign of their rank.

But even as the Cloister of the Veil was hailed as a success, it was full of people from all walks of life. The Ague had claimed plenty who desired nothing like a monastic life, and rumors soon began of broken vows and promiscuous behavior among the sufferers there.

And that is why an Inspector of the Sepulcher was dispatched: the rumor and fear that one of the sisters had become pregnant, and the possibility of what an Ague-borne child might bring unto the world.

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February 21, 2017

From “A Voice Crying Out in a Vacuum” by J. Ames Sakdasarian

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Gasping over the alarms in her ears, Emma pulled the handle to blow the explosive bolts on the hatch. It was the only way to get the fire under control, even though she knew that it was ultimately a futile effort. Her capsule’s systems were shot, the oxygen reserves nearly depleted, and most of the provisions had been destroyed.

Compared to that, Joris IV’s total lack of an atmosphere seemed almost trivial.

When the hatch blew, Emma scrambled outside. It was as much instinct as anything; she knew in the coldest part of her brain, the scientist part, that she was already dead and just hadn’t realized it yet. As the last bits of atmosphere inside the capsule blew away, and the parachutes settled under their own inertia, she settled against the still-warm side of her little craft.

And that’s when she heard it: a voice at once familiar and impossible.

“Mom?”

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