To the Woods

How hard would it be to just disappear?  How hard, to empty bank accounts, roll the cash up, slip a rubber band about it, and be off?  Just enough to get lost and not have to come back, enough to carry you to some remote section of the Pacific Northwest, where men have beards to fight back the cold and muscles that creak and groan with the wear of real work.  Could you swing an ax, pull a saw?  Could you lay waste and be content in it?  How hard would it be to stop being the people pleaser, the person out of himself always trying to impress, always worrying what others think?  Could you put down the pen and pick up a tool? Set aside the writing and the overwhelming need to sew sadness through your own life in order to have a story to tell that goes with it?  The feel of hickory in your hand, a thick hipped woman and a loyal dog, the smell of smoke in the hearth and the taste of it in your moustache as you smoke the day's last, and finest, cigarette.  How hard would it be?

How easy?

The Girl In Brown Who Walks Alone (Rough)

I held the thick black receiver in my hand and listened to the lonely, repetitive sound of the ring. Once, twice, then a voice on the other end.

"Hello?"

"Mrs. Craigmile Bolam?" I asked. "This is Detective Graye."

"Ah yes, hello detective. Have you new information for me?"

"I'm afraid not, ma'am," I had to admit. "That's why I'm calling. I'm afraid the trail has run cold."

"Is that so?" she asked, sounding only vaguely interested.

"Yes ma'am. In my professional opinion, the findings in Fiji are completely accurate. No foul play."

"And this is your final word on the subject, Detective Graye?"

"It is Mrs. Craigmile Bolam," I answered. "In my opinion, I don't believe she'll ever be found."

"Very well, Detective," she paused for a moment, her breathing heavy on the other end of the receiver. "I shall write you a check for the remainder of the money I owe you. You may pick it up within the hour." There was a click, and then the line went dead.




The Bolam house was large but in no way ornate. Just a simple, tasteful two-story home owned by people with enough money to afford the niceties but not enough to flaunt. The driveway curved from the street up to the front door and then around to the backside of the house. I left my car idling in the front, not expecting to be long inside. The day was chilly and gray with a wind that shot the cold right into your bones and then left it there for you to deal with. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my overcoat and made my way up the red brick stairs to the front door.

When I reached the door I noticed that it was slightly ajar. I toyed for a moment with the notion of walking back down to the car to retrieve the .45 I had stashed in the glove compartment, but I thought better of it. Mrs. Craigmile Bolam was expecting me. She had probably just left the door open as a way of telling me to come on inside. Nothing to worry about, I told myself. So I pushed the door open, cracking half a smile as it moaned with an eerie creek, and stepped into the foyer.

That's when the smell hit me. Wet and metallic, like liquid copper poured straight into your nostrils. It was a smell I remembered all too well from my time in the trenches. It was the wet smell of new death. Every nerve in my body shouted directions to my brain, pleading with me to turn and leave the way I'd come in. But there was three grand waiting for me somewhere in that house, and times were lean enough that I couldn't afford not to try and retrieve it, death be damned. So I looked around the front room for anything I could use as a weapon should combat become necessary. I settled on a particularly sharp looking letter opener on a table set to the right of the front door. It wasn't much, but it would do in close quarters. I gripped the handle tight, getting familiar with the weight of the thing, and began moving in the direction of the smell.

Just then a scream that would have put the fear up a banshee echoed through the house. It was piercing and full of pain, a sound of pure animal terror. Despite my better judgment I ran toward it, steeling myself against whatever depraved scene I was about to barge in on. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I turned the corner of the front parlor and charged into Mrs. Craigmile Bolam's study.

Mrs. Craigmile Bolam was crawling across the wood paneled floor on what was left of her stomach, leaving a trail of blood behind her like some nightmarish slug. Her skin had gone white as alabaster and her eyes were wide with desperation and horror. She looked right at me as she tried to pull herself away from her attacker, but I could tell that her mind didn't register that I was there. She was dying, was probably in shock, driven only by her own ingrained need for survival. My own need for survival told me to leave that room as fast as my feet could carry me, but unfortunately for me my feet wouldn't be moved. At the sight of the thing, not the person but the thing, standing above the mangled Mrs. Craigmile Bolam my entire body froze to the spot.

The creature was tall and slender and the tattered rags of an aviator's flightsuit hung on it's ghastly limbs, which God as my witness resembled more the appendages of an octopus than those of a man. The beast had a head longer and thinner than that of a human being as well, tapering back toward the top so that it appeard as though a normal skull had been somehow stretched. It's skin was nearly transparent, and the whole beastly thing shown with a sickly green light the color of a murky pond. It caught sight of me as soon as I entered the room and with uncanny speed it shambled on what might have once been legs toward my statued position. By God's mercy, at that moment Mrs. Craigmile Bolam, in the final throes of her death, rolled her hemorrhaging body onto its back and impeded the creature's movement.

The monster slowed and I took the opportunity to slip to the right and step further into the study, narrowly avoiding a lunging tentacle arm. I knew at that moment that if I didn't act I would surely perish as Mrs. Craigmile Bolam had, so with all my strength and all my speed I lunged forward and plunged the letter opener into what I took to be my adversary's throat. The impromptu blade pushed through the creature's skin in the same way a kitchen knife goes through an aspic. Wounded, the thing let out a shriek the likes of which I've not heard since, and flailed its weapon arms viciously about. I was caught with an errant blow and tossed backward into the fireplace, wrought iron tools for building and stoking fires clattering around me. My postal dagger fell loose from the creature's luminous skin, letting forth a font of thick black ichor that I could only imagine was blood.

Though wounded the abomination turned and advanced again, screeching and angry. Frightened as I was, this time I did not freeze. I simply reached out to my side and let my hand close on the satisfying weight of the cold iron poker. Whatever this thing was I had proven it could be wounded, could be made to feel pain, and that meant it could be killed. So I waited, as a spearman awaiting the charge of the mounted knight, and at the last possible second I jabbed upward and drove the poker straight through the creature's skull. It's evil declarations of animal intent were silenced instantly and the bulk of it collapsed in a near gelatinous heap before me. Not willing to take any chances, I stood and bashed the thing with the poker until it looked like little more than fabric floating in a pool of ink.

I don't know how long I stood there before I decided to move. It was probably no more than a few seconds, perhaps a minute, but it felt a lifetime to me at the time. Eventually my brain accepted what it had just seen and, iron instrument of my salvation clenched firmly in my right hand, I crossed to Mrs. Craigmile Bolam's desk. Laid out neatly on top of the thick oak desk was a check in the amount of three thousand dollars made out to Mr. Samuel Evan Graye, my Christian name, a nondescript leatherbound journal, and a pen and inkwell. I folded the check once in the middle, slipped it into the right pocket of my coat, and then peeled open the leatherbound journal. Written on the front page in exquisite black calligraphy was the following:

The Truth: Amelia Earhart, Obsidian, Ltd., and the search for the Other World

(This is the first draft of a Lovecraftian noir inspired by Amelia Earhardt. I intend to expand it and hopefully submit it to Weird Tales sometime in the near future.)

Waking the Dead: Part Three

Waking the Dead
Part Three

Marcus stood just below the mantel. Though the polished reminder of his friend was inches from his head, he couldn't bring himself to turn and look at it. Whatever was inside wasn't the girl he was meant to wake. Julia was a vibrant, vivacious, full-figured woman. That thing on the mantel was just an ashtray.

He reached into his coat pocket, running his fingers over the thin stock of the index cards he'd slipped inside. The cards were meant to express what Julia had meant to him. Marcus hated every word of it. To him the cards were as void of life as the urn on the mantel. They could say anything he wanted them to but it wasn't enough. The card about meeting Julia his second year of college didn't really capture the way her laugh had been so infectious. Marcus could write volumes about the first time he tasted her banana bread pudding, but it wouldn't convey the way the smell of it from the oven made your head spin. He could fill twenty cards with how her humor and her cooking had got him through the lean years of his illness, but it wouldn't dull the pain.

Marcus pulled the cards from his coat and shuffled them nervously. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amy approaching. She gently touched his arm.

"It's time."

He found a smile for her. Maybe between the two of them they'd find Julia's strength.

Waking the Dead: Part Two

Waking the Dead
Part Two

Amy excused herself from the small talk that had sprung up around the living room sofa. Those people were her family, but their need to silence their real feelings with idle chat was driving her crazy. She had to get away. So Amy made her way into the kitchen and was thankful to see it was empty for the first time in days.

The kitchen table was covered with half-eaten casseroles, desserts, deli-trays, the gastronomic detritus that marked a Southern house in mourning. She pulled a plastic spoon from a nearby box, peeled back the tinfoil loosely covering a dish of banana pudding, and scooped out a bite This was Aunt Milly's, she'd recognize it anywhere.

When she and Julia had been kids, their parents would send them to their Aunt's on a weekend just so they could have some privacy. Aunt Milly had always gone out of her way to make the time seem like an adventure and the girls had loved her for it. They would go on nature walks, watch scary movies, and gorge themselves on Milly's homemade delights. It was those weekends at Milly's that had inspired Julia to attend culinary school in Atlanta, to open her own restaurant in Athens.

Amy spooned more of the pudding into her mouth, tasting the familiar flavors of wafers, fresh bananas, walnuts, and there at her mother's table, tasting her sister's favorite dessert from her Aunt's kitchen, Amy finally allowed herself to cry.

Waking the Dead: Part One

Thomas stood at the back of the room, clutching in his fist a glass of watered down drink that had once been a scotch on the rocks. He felt numb all over and if someone had simply knocked the tepid drink from his hand it's likely he would not have reacted at all. Thomas hadn't reacted to a thing in three weeks. He'd tried, to be certain, but it was as if any ability to register love or loss or hope or pain or joy or sadness had left the world three weeks earlier, had checked out along with Julia. He'd tried getting drunk, tried fighting walls, and in one fit of desperate stupidity he'd even tried putting cigarettes out on his leg. Nothing worked. He was a living statue, a golem stripped of the spark of life.

He watched the room, his eyes glazed, his legs and feet aching. He felt as if he'd not sat down in months, years. People walked past him, turning eyes void of any real understanding on his lifeless form. He was a stranger amongst them, still too new to their world for any of them to offer true comfort, not that there was any true comfort to be had. So they shuffled quickly past, museum goers moving briskly past a wall littered with art they couldn't possibly understand.

The golem stood silent.

--This was the first of a three part exercise. We had to write one 250 word entry a piece about a friend, a family member, and a significant other. I envisioned a funeral where all three were the same person and the stories were being told from the point of view of the people related to the deceased. This is the first, the significant other.--

The Funambulist

Circus performers are a strange lot. More than a few of them still practice the old ways of the hex and the deck and the augur. “There are still gypsies in these tents,” warned Maksim Morozov’s mother when he was very young. “And their mad ways are still a currency of note in the realm behind the world.”

His mother was a dancer, the kind that men paid money to see, but Maksim knew that she had been something more at one point. Her advancing years could not hide the grace and the skill that coursed through her veins. Sometimes he would sit up late, watching her through the curtains that divided his bedroom and the rest of their trailer, in that twilight hour when she thought nobody else could see. It was during these times that she would dance for herself, moving to an ancient rhythm that only she could hear. He had once seen a leaf caught in an updraft, dancing like a fairy cast in candy apple red and sunrise gold. It was of this leaf that Maksim thought when he saw his mother dance.

Life in an American circus in the 1920s was no doubt difficult, but Maksim never knew want or worry. Indeed, there could be no greater place for a boy to grow up. The life of a circus boy was full of adventure and excitement. While other boys had dogs for pets, young Maksim had elephants and monkeys. Most children had aunts and uncles of a fairly dull disposition, but young Maksim was raised by such oddities as bearded Aunt Helga and Uncle Tobias the Terrible. And where most children were made to sleep in beds so stationary they must have been like unto rocks on the banks of a rushing river, young Maksim made his bed in the belly of a lumbering iron giant. It was all so terribly exciting.

Maksim’s mother worried it was too exciting. By the time the boy was fourteen and puberty was beginning to usurp what had once been the simple rule of mother’s love, Maksim was too interested in the world he’d grown up in to be dissuaded from becoming a living part of it. You see, for Maksim’s mother, the circus was a means to an end. After Maksim’s father had been taken from them during the Revolution, Maksim’s mother had managed to ferry them out of the country and into the brave new world of America. She had been a ballerina in the Mother Country, young Russia’s rising star, Alena Morozov. The revolution had changed all that, had changed everything, and had driven her to the shores of this mad land where her skill mattered far less than the curve of her body. So she danced, amongst other things, to keep meat on the bones of her young son.

So when Maksim told his mother that he was going to join the circus as a tightrope walker she was disappointed but not surprised. Her first instinct was to forbid him, and if that did not work then to simply run away with him. Anything, she thought, to keep him from this life she’d been forced into. But she saw the look of happiness in the boy’s eyes when he talked about the wire. And she could remember back, as early as his first steps, Maksim had been of excellent foot. He was like his mother more than a bit. She had hoped one day to save enough money to take them away from this, to perhaps enroll her son in a school somewhere, but she knew in her heart it was not to be. Maksim Morozov, Maksim Morrison since passing through the cold yet welcoming arms of Ellis Island, was destined to touch the heavens. What sort of mother would stop him?

So at the young age of fourteen Maksim began his training. He apprenticed under the circus’ resident tightrope walker, Giovanni the Great. Giovanni had been balancing on high wires for over twenty years. He had talent, but he never mastered much beyond the tightrope. He had once, years before, attempted to juggle scimitars on the slack wire. The results were bloody and embarrassing, costing him two good fingers from his right hand. So it was the pole and the high wire for Giovanni the Great, who really was no more than Giovanni the Adequate. Still, his tutelage proved invaluable. For what Giovanni lacked in skill he made up for in charisma. Audiences loved him, women loved him, even men seemed to love him. Giovanni recognized very early that Maksim was of superior skill, that there was something truly magical about the boy. So he sought to teach him what he knew best; the art of seduction.

In a relationship that can only be described as Dionysian, Giovanni taught the beautiful young Maksim all he knew about pleasure. Under Giovanni’s watchful eye, Maksim learned to appreciate wine, good food, fine tobacco, the rigidness of a man’s arms, the firmness of a woman’s supple breast, the taste of sweat beading on flesh. By age sixteen, when Maksim would first climb the tall ladder, the wire was the only thing in that circus he had yet to conquer.

And conquer it he did. Within six months of walking the wire Maksim had surpassed his teacher. Within a year, Giovanni was all but a memory, content to smoke opium with the Chinese coolies hired to help strike the tents and to engage in various acts of debauchery with Maria the Tattooed Lady. The wire, the audience, belonged to Maksim. It was a meteoric rise to fame. He did everything Giovanni never could. He juggled fire and swords on the slack wire and rode the unicycle across the high wire. Each performance brought something new, something daring. His legend spread throughout the country and his coffers grew fat with the money of the tossers. By nineteen, his mother never had to remove a stitch of clothing for money again.

This wild ride continued for two more years, until three weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Maksim’s mother collapsed from exhaustion. For three more weeks he stayed by her side, his hand in hers, crying soft tears when he remembered her grace. On the seventh week after his twenty-first birthday, she passed. Three months later, Maksim Morozov, Maksim Morrison, Maximus the Magnificent, made unto her a grand tribute.

Maksim had a wire constructed from New York to Canada, spanning the roaring, churning power of the great Niagara Falls. It was to be his greatest feat of balancing skill. Newspaper and radio reporters from across the country, indeed from across the world, came to follow Maksim’s most dangerous performance yet. At the outset, Maksim discarded the long pole, the tool of high wire walkers, choosing instead to try to conquer the falls with his own natural skill. All in attendance thought him mad, but if you could have asked Maksim he would have told you he’d never felt calmer in his life. On October 7, 1930, Maksim Morozov walked the falls and all who saw it were forever changed by his grace.

When he reached the other side of the wire and stepped off into Canada, a reporter was waiting to ask him the question on everyone’s mind.

“Maximus, before you walked the wire you decided to disregard the pole, your guiding tool. What made you decide you no longer needed it?”

“My mother,” was the answer he gave. “She taught me the only thing I ever needed to know.”

“What was that, Maximus? What did she teach you?”

Maksim paused for a moment, taking a long look at the falls beneath him and the great expanse of light blue sky above. Then he answered.

“Balance. She taught me balance.”


--This is my most recent piece for the guild workshop. In my opinion it's the best thing I've ever written. It was extremely well-received by my peers. Their responses to the piece have inspired me to revisit the character in my mind. This week I've been thinking of ways to stretch this into a full length work of fiction. The working title is Maximus the Magnificent and the Devil's Arcade. Who wouldn't want to read a book with that title, right? I am aware that the main character's name is repeated a bit too much and that in further edits I should try and correct that. Still, I think this is a very strong short story. It took me an hour to write, slightly less than that for first edit.--

Brett

General Shiva

The reporters sounded like the quacking of hungry water fowl to Supreme Commander Darius Jackson. He felt for all the world like some sort of abomination when he looked out at the sea of muckrakers in the auditorium. Their digi-recorders sucked up every sound, their hover-cams every movement. He was a monster on display, a killer with five gold stars, and the madding crowd was screaming for the blood of answers. Commander Jackson leaned heavy on the podium, laughing to himself that the most difficult part of his job, dealing with the press, was something they barely covered in officer school. He was a man of unparalleled tactics, but when it came to a mass of desperate writers he was as lost as a first year cadet. Finally, one of the reporters' voices shot through the noise with a question so challenging that it silenced the crowd.

"Commander, your decision to use kinetic bombardment against the Shoap homeworld quite likely saved the human race. How does it feel to trade our lives for theirs?"

Jackson glanced at his digital reader, at the list of prepared responses illuminated there. The response to this particular question was simply No Comment. He mouthed the words silently as his eyes passed over them. No comment. Then the Commander looked up at that collection of curious writers and their hovering, unemotional companions and gave them an answer that his superiors would certainly not have approved of.

"Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."


--This was the first piece I wrote for the writers guild I'm currently a part of. It was a quick, 250 word exercise that had to use the word Shoap (the name of the guild). Surprisingly, this is the only thing I've written so far that could be qualified as science fiction. It's the weakest piece from the stuff I've done recently, but I do like that it at least hints at a larger, richer story. Also, kinetic bombardment is cool.--

Brett