What if you had a power nobody else had, and everybody wanted?

     Sutton worked the phone, pulling in contacts from far away and long ago.  If it fell apart the way it looked like it might, he would need to mobilise some people.  He didn't have many favors outstanding, but enough.  And he still held sway with enough of those people that even if they didn't strictly owe him anything, they would make themselves available.  MacFarlane in Colorado was on board, Buttcher from just up in Maine.  Buttcher had his own airfield, something which could always be handy in these situations.

     It was late, and some of the others slept regular hours.  Waking them wouldn't get them onside.  He had the straightforward ones, some of the dicier ones could wait until morning.

     Sutton put the phone away, deciding to check on progress upstairs, when there was a knock on the door and Seth came in.  "Seth," Sutton said.

     "Sir.  There are gaps in our datasets."

     Sutton rubbed his chin, considering.  "You said before.  I didn't quite believe you."

     "We knew this might happen."

     Sutton stared.  How could he have imagined that it would simple.  They had the data from du Champs, they had the data from Daniel's actual transportation.  What could be missing?  "Perhaps, then, we are at the stage where we have to ask Dr du Champs to join us."

     Seth coughed.  "There is a problem there."

     "Which is?  She should just be asleep.  Even if she's been watching the news, it wouldn't mean anything to her."

     "No sir.  I ... perhaps you should come and look."  Seth stepped back from the door.

     Sutton sighed and shook his head, but stood.

     "Really, sir, it will make more sense to see it on the feeds."

     Sutton followed Seth back upstairs to the center of operations.  Seth guided him to one of the smaller monitors in a corner of the room.

     "Is that her apartment building?" Sutton said, pointing.

     "Yes, from one of ours.  First here, though."  Seth touched a key and the image went, changing to a grainy picture that looked like a vandalized classroom.  "This is just from the University security feeds."

     "Her lab?"

     "Yes sir."

     "What happened?"

     "We're piecing that together."  Seth touched another key and the image came back to the apartment building.  "Here," Seth pointed at two trucks parked at the kerb.

     "They're ours?"

     "No sir."  Seth did something and the feed fast reversed for a moment.  He stopped when it flickered, then let it play through again.  Agents getting out of the second truck.  They ran up to the building and waited.  Seth fast forwarded briefly, then they entered.

     "Again, not ours?"

     Seth tsked with his tongue.  "No sir."

     "I see."  Sutton rubbed the bridge of his nose.  This was becoming a problem.  "Garner, perhaps?"

     "Could be.  There's nothing to suggest otherwise."

     "I suppose that we need to get ourselves down there.  Helicopter.  Five minutes."

     "Very good sir."

      Melanie followed Reg down the flight of stairs to the building's basement.  It was only a little newer than her own building, well lit, the hallways all the current fashion of pastels and faux art-deco sculpting.  At the bottom of the stairs they came to another door.  Reg used the hook up from his phone to override the lock systems and they got entry to the garage, stepping out right by the lift.  Detecting them, lights flickered on extending out across the wide area.  Only about half the spaces were occupied, but mostly they were late-model cars.  After the whole biofuel debacle, artificial gas had made big vehicles favourites again.

     "This way," Reg said.  He headed across the concrete floor towards the far corner of the garage.

     Melanie couldn't help thinking about the phone.  It wouldn't have taken much for them to track her calls and then locate his phone.  If they'd been following the bus, then they'd know they'd lost her and would use any lead they could.

     But then, she knew all that just came from the simplicity of spy movies.  Perhaps they were just following her from security cameras through the city.  She glanced back over the door they'd come through where a red LED glowed from a tiny camera.  There was no guidebook for anything they were doing.

     At the far end of the garage, Reg stopped at another door.  It was labelled with a big sign indicating it was an alarmed emergency exit.

     "Okay," she said.  "This isn't going to work."

     "Easy," Reg said.  He pulled out a debit card and slipped it into the swiper at the side.

     "Please tell me that you don't have an access card for that."

     "It's just my Bank of America card."

     "And that let's you in?"

     "Give me a moment."  He fiddled with his phone and the swiper chimed.  Reg reached out an pushed the door open.  "Voila."

     "How do you know all this stuff?"

     "You've seen my psych profile.  Lonely geek introvert.    All of us know this stuff."

     "Huh."  She followed him through to the a dark cinderblock corridor.  "And I haven't seen your profile."

     "Oh.  In that case forget everything I said.  Ever."

     "Sure."  Her new chunky phone had an LED flashlight at the tip and she turned it on, shining it down the corridor.  "Now?"

     "Um."  Reg looked back and forth.  "Right," he said.  "Along this way."

     They followed the corridor about ten yards and came to another emergency door.  Reg quickly had it unsecured and he pushed the door slightly open.  The garage was lit, but there was no one around.  They slipped through and Melanie found her car.  She coded her way in and popped the trunk.  All the equipment was still there, untouched. 

     "We got lucky, I guess," Reg said.

     Melanie grunted at him and got behind the wheel.  Reg got in the passenger side.

     "How are we going to get out?" he said.

     "The garage door opens." she pointed at the console on the dash where the apartment building garage IR was built in.  "It's-" then she realised what he meant.  The truck and doubtless others outside.

     "I'll run blocking," he said.

     "What?"

     "Give me a couple of minutes.  I'll get my car and follow you.  I'll give you a call when I'm in position."  He opened the door and leapt out.

     "What?" she called after him.  "In position?"  But he was already back through the emergency door.  She pulled the passenger door closed.  What the hell did he mean by 'in position'?

      Sutton watched the Sikorsky arrive.  Seth did nothing by half.  It was CHN-12.  Sutton had flown in them before, tidying up in Angola.  They were sleek and fast and could carry enough armament to level a small town.  Not easy to get your hands on for anything other than mandated military operations.  Seth must have been calling in some favours.

     "Nice job," Sutton said.

     Seth leaned back from the front seat of the car.  "Yeah, some of the guys like to get out for night flights so we were in luck."

     As the chopper settled, Sutton realised that all it's wing pylons were bare.  It was carrying no ordinance.  That would be part of the deal, a pilot on release for initial model training.  With the craft so light, Sutton thought, it would be fast.  Very fast.

     The helicopter's door popped open as the rotors continued spinning at speed.  They got out of the car and Sutton followed Seth over with the two other technicians they'd brought up from the operations centre.  Sutton had to bend forward into the heavy downdraft.

     When they were buckled in, the co-pilot locked the doors and clambered back into the front cabin.  The helicopter lofted itself, sending swirling clouds of dried earth up in its wash.  They were quickly over Warwick, then leaving the town behind.  Sutton was pressed back into his seat by the forward and vertical acceleration.

     He watched the lights below, dozens of cars streaming along the freeway near Warwick.  Very quickly they had altitude and the individual lights blurred into speckled lines and glows webbing out across the state.

     "What speed are we doing?" he called out.

     Seth, facing rearwards, leaned over his shoulder and called to the pilots, then noticed a headset hooked up.  He put it on and pulled the mike down, speaking into it.  Sutton smiled, watching Seth.  Good to know that there were moments when Seth didn't know everything.

     Seth pointed to another headset by Sutton and he put it on.

     "How fast?" Seth said.

     "That's what I asked."

     "Says he can't give you a speed.  Classified.  He did say that he'll have you in Philly in twelve minutes."

     "Good."  Sutton did some calculations in his head.  Warwick was probably about ninety miles from Warwick.  Figuring in take-off and approach time, the chopper was probably throwing down on the order of three hundred and fifty miles per hour.  Not shabby, Sutton thought.  He wondered how he could get one for himself.

      Daniel watched Cherie as she slowed the pick-up, coming into a town.  The others were still asleep.  Cherie looked tired.  God knows he felt it too.

     "What now?" he said.

     "We need gas.  And food."

     "What's the time?"  As he asked he saw the fluorescent clock on the dash stereo.  1:39

     "Ah," she checked her watch.  "Little before two."

     "What happened to the time?"

     "Gonna tell me you can move through time too?"

     "I just mean it's late."

     Cherie slowed further, turned into an am/pm station.

     "Wait," Daniel said.

     "What?"  She bumped the vehicle onto the forecourt.

     "We can't stop.  We're in a stolen FBI vehicle."

     Cherie pulled up at one of pumps.  "Listen.  The tank's about empty.  We won't be going anywhere if we don't-"

     "We're just going to the local police station."

     "Nuh-ah."

     Daniel sat forwards.  "Better idea, even.  We'll call them from inside."  He looked into the little store, wondering if it was locked up for the night with just a pay window.  There was a battered payphone by the doors, receiver hanging down on its cord.  He pulled out his cell.  The screen was blank.

     "Listen," Cherie said.  "We can discuss it on the road.  This is all too weird.  I don't mean the you disappearing stuff, that's a whole different level of weird.  I mean the FBI siege of the cult facility at the same time as your sister and niece get kidnapped."

     "Cults kidnap people."

     "It's not right."

     "What's not right is to keep on the road in a stolen government vehicle, now that we're safe."

     Elise stirred, sat forward a little, muttered something, then settled back, still asleep.

     Cherie held up her hand.  "You're making it worse by trying to discuss it now," she hissed.  "We need to be far away from here.  Trust me, I think there's more to this than we know.  The worst thing we can do is fall into the hands of the law enforcement people.  So you just sit here for a couple of minutes while I gas up.  Then we're getting onto a back road for a while, or going to a motel and ditching the vehicle, I haven't figured that all out yet.  But we are not sitting here at Arco arguing.  Got it?"

     Daniel said nothing and she slipped out to the concrete.  She fed some bills into the pump and dispensed the fuel.

     Another car pulled up to the pump behind them and Daniel squinted through the back windscreen.  A man in a baseball cap and jeans, the car was a Camry.  He could feel his tension lessening a little.  He was tired, drained from the rotating.  He needed to trust Cherie a little, trust her to take care of them.

     Cherie got in and started the pickup, pulling back out to the main road.  Three blocks down she pulled into the drive-through at a Carl's Jr.

     "Burger?" she asked.

     "Whatever."  He realised that he was hungry, should be hungry after everything.

     Cherie spoke into the speaker, ordering a feast, then paid with cash at the window.  She passed the bag and drinks back to Daniel and drove off.  Daniel downed a Coke in almost a single slurp through the straw.  He opened a burger and stuffed it down.

     "Mmmmhh," Lanie said, without opening her eyes.  "Jack in the Box."

     Daniel couldn't help but smile.

     Cherie had the vehicle moving at open road speed now, as they cleared the boundary of whatever little town they'd just stopped in.

     Then Lanie sat bolt upright, coming awake.  "Stuffed jalapenos?"

     "Carl's Jr," Daniel said, passing her some fries.

     "Thanks.  Where are we?"

     "Somewhere near Wharton," Cherie said.

     "Go back to sleep," Daniel said.

     "Did you get Cokes too?"  Lanie craned forwards, looking into the cupholders when Daniel had stowed the drinks.

     "Not for you.  It's late."  He'd always liked the way that Lanie was so resilient, not easily phased.  He imagined when Elise woke up she'd need a paper bag so she didn't hyperventilate.

     Lanie sighed.  "Yeah, whatever.  Can I have a burger, at least?  Didn't you get any water?"

     "Yes, no."

     "Water," Cherie said.

     "It's all right."

     "Is Mom okay?"

     "She's fine, honey."

     "Good, 'cos she'll be kind of freaked out when she wakes up."

     "Yeah."

     Lanie finished up her burger and talked for a moment, asking a few questions about the meadow and the kidnapping, before lapsing back into a sudden sleep.

     Daniel could see freeway lights ahead.  "This has probably got an FBI tracker on board," he said to Cherie.  "It'll be hooked up to their GPS stuff."

     "Huh."  She reached down to beside her seat and lifted up a small metal case with stripped wires dangling from it.

     "There were probably cameras at the gas station.  And at the fast food place.  They will have seen us.  There'll be one of those APBs out on the vehicle."

     "Good, then we'll ditch it soon.  But you need to do some talking.  Talk fast and we'll be rid of it sooner."

     "You want to know what I did, of course."

     "Lanie said something about a meadow.  What meadow?  You disappeared."

     "Yeah, I disappeared.  Went to a meadow, then brought them back the same way."

     "Tell me more about 'disappeared'."

     Daniel sighed.  "Well, we called it rotating."

Twelve years before...

     "Do it again," Melanie said.

     Daniel shook his head.  "I don't think so.  It's tiring.  Let's just watch the sunset."  They were in Bristlethorn State Park, overlooking the Lumber River.  They'd ridden down from Raleigh after lectures, found a campsite and taken an early evening hike after getting some dinner in the nearby township.

     Melanie stood up, facing him.  "Nuh.  You don't get to do that, then just beg off tired.  This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to be doing.  You disappeared."

     "Just trying to impress you.  You know, that's what guys do."

     "Guy buy flashy cars and rocks on rings to impress girls.  Anyway, I was already impressed."

     "I didn't do the rock on a ring thing though."

     "Yeah, well that would be way too fast."

     "I'm not stupid."

     A moment of silence hung between them.  Across the river a loon called as it settled for the evening.

     "But," Daniel said, "I do have a nice bike, you might have noticed."

     "I noticed, but that wasn't what impressed me."  She reached up and tapped his forehead.  "This is what I like."

     He pulled her in closer and they kissed.

     After a moment, she broke away and smiled.  "Nice try, mister, but you're not distracting me like that."

     The sun settled through the horizon and the clouds began to flare with reds and crimsons.  The river reflected the colours and more birds called.

     "Can you take me through?" she said.  "When you do it?"

     Daniel shook his head.  "No.  Just me."

     "What about your clothes?  Why don't they just fall off?  How come they go?"

     "I don't know.  I guess it's like walking.  My clothes don't drop off just because I go for a walk."

     "Okay, smarty-pants.  But you're not teleporting somewhere when you go walking.  It's all just physics."

     "Look, how many other people you know who can do this?  Maybe only three or four, so-"

     "No one.  No one else can do that."

     "I was kidding.  I've never met anyone else who can.  And I've never seen anyone on the other side either, so maybe no one else does.  Of course I hardly ever do it.  Not really since I was maybe eight or nine, when I did it lots to get away from stuff.  But then I guess I grew out of it."

     "You were just doing it to impress me?"

     "I told you that, didn't I?  Because I don't do rings and cars."

     "There you go again talking about rings."  Melanie pulled out her camera and took a picture of the sunset and river.  Then she handed the camera to Daniel.  "Take this with you then and bring back a photo."

     "I said it's tiring.  I haven't done it for a long time.  It's like a muscle, if I don't exercise then it atrophies a bit."

     "Think of this as your exercise.  Just once more.  Then maybe we can do some proper research."

     Again the silence.

     "Sorry," she said after a moment.

     "Yeah.  It's all right."  Daniel examined the camera.  "This is the button here, right?"

     She didn't say anything.  She watched him for a moment, then stared out over the river.

     "It's all right," he said.  "I'll go.  I'll do it."

     Melanie smiled, still looking across the water.  "No.  Actually, don't go.  Let's do it at a better time, when you're not tired."

     "It'll only take me a minute."

     She turned to him.  "Don't exhaust yourself.  Anyway.  The sun's about down, we should get back to the campground while we can still see our way."

     "Give me a minute," he said.

     Then he was gone again, turning and fading away as if he was standing by a trick mirror of some kind.  A cheap fairground trick, played by some carny to extract five bucks from the unsuspecting crowd.  The marks.

     Then fading in reverse, turning in the same direction as if completing a 180 degree spin, facing back towards the campground.

     "Here's your camera," he said.  He was puffing, his face flushed.

     She took it and looked at the screen, then up at him.  "You okay?"

     "Breathless," he said, then inhaled again.  "You do that to me."

     Melanie squinted up at him.  He was smiling at her.  She shook her head a little, smiled back.  "Flatterer."

     "Oh, but it's true."

     "Just let me look at the pictures, then we can talk about whether you get laid tonight or not."

     His smile faded and he inclined his head.  "That's what you think this is about?"

     "I'm kidding.  Sheesh, you think you're the only one who can joke around?"

     "Just look at the pictures."

     The Konica had a roll-out back-lit screen which doubled the size of the camera's preview panel and gave a good crisp image.  She clicked up the first one.

     A view over a river, trees on the other side.  She glanced up across the Lumber, lifted the camera to match views.  "It's the same," she said.

     "You sound disappointed."

     "Yeah well I was expecti-"

     "Look closer."

     The trees were the same, the river made the same slight bend, the ... the light was different.  No sunset.  It was full daylight.  And the trees were less dense, as if they were deciduous, just beginning to turn for Fall.  And then she saw the obvious thing, the grey grain silo that sore-thumbed itself about two miles away, sticking up from the trees, was absent in the photo.  It was as if it had been taken at a different time, two hundred years ago.  She asked him if it was that, time travel.

     "That's impossible," he said.  "Simple physics."

     The sun was well gone now, the woods darkening and the air taking on something of a chill.  "We should get back," she said, turning and starting along the path.

     The trail was hard to follow in the dim twilight, and neither of them had brought a flashlight.  Slowing with their hands in front to deflect stray branches, they saw the camp light ahead.

     "Not time travel," she said as they came to the camp.

     "Dimensions?"

     "Time.  That's more reasonable than an alternate universe."

     "No.  I remember going to the place other times, when I was young.  The topography is usually pretty similar, though the trees and plants can be different.  But never any people.  Strange shadows and animals, but no sign of humans at all.  It's a different place.  If I was going back hundreds of years there would be some evidence of people, if it was thousands then the topography would be different.  It's a different place.  I turn ninety degrees and there I am."

     "What if you're going to the future?"  She crouched and unzipped the tent, clambering inside.

     "There would still be evidence.  Even if we died out next week, there's too much stuff around that would last for thousands of years."

     She was quiet for a while.  "There's a Phd in this," she said.

     "I'm sure."

     "We could do it.  Collaborate."

     It was his turn to be quiet.  The campground was just a hundred yards off and he could hear children playing, the parents letting them exhaust themselves before putting them off to bed.  Soon he could see their tent beyond one of the campervans.

     "Spit it out," Melanie said.

     "Well.  I'd just worry that I would become like Joseph Merrick."

     "Huh?"

     "I'll explain."

     They came up the steps onto the grassed camping area.  They split up, going to the rustic bathrooms, before meeting up back at the tent.

     Daniel thumbed it open and they slipped in, stretching out on their bedrolls and sleeping bags.  "Joseph Merrick in the 1800s had a disease called neurofibro ... matosis.  Something like that.  He was just like anyone else, except that his bones grew all kinds of shapes, his organs and skin hung off him.  He started out with a doctor helping and examining him, then became an exhibit for academics, then eventually just a sideshow."

     "I remember.  I've read about him, seen the slides.  Poor man.  But, you know what?  You're wrong.  Merrick was a sideshow exhibit before the medical establishment found him.  They actually improved his quality of life."

     "Sure."  Daniel lay on his back, staring at the tent's roof.

     "But you're nothing like that."

     "No.  You're right, backwards analogy, but I would become a ... well, maybe not a sideshow, but under scrutiny, in the newsreels.  There's so much to it.  Not only the ability, but where it is that I go.  They'd want to know.  I'd get poked and prodded and probed.  Maybe they'd want to find others, want to go there, exploit it, figure out how to get there.  I don't know what, but I'm not sure that it's a good idea to look too closely."

     "How can you not want to know?"

     "Of course I want to know.  I'm desperate to know."  He rolled on his side to face her, rubbed his hand across her arm.  "I am the wound up coil of needing to know, the teeter-totter balance."

     "The bad metaphor."  She touched his hand.

     "Yes," he laughed.  "The stretched elastic, the absent father.  I would love to do all that research, but I can just see that it would be ... a can of worms."

     She laughed, leaned forwards to kiss him.  After a moment she pulled back.  "But what are you really afraid of when you go to the ninety?"

     "The ninety?"

     "Sure, we've got to call it something.  I want to see those photos on my full-sized screen."

     "You're not doing any research on them."

     "Of course not."

     "Give me the camera."  He looked behind her, at her bag.

     "Which camera?"

     "Hey."

     They tussled, scrambling around each other laughing and bumping the tent walls.  Then she was on top of him, knees against his waist, hands pinning his wrists.  "I don't seem to have it."  She grinned, bending down to kiss him.  He kissed back

     In the tent their love-making was a little awkward, as they bumped the sides and slipped off the thin air-mattresses onto the skirt, feeling the rough ground and roots below.  But they were slow and gentle and when it was over, they lay spooned holding hands.

     In the morning, she made coffee on the portable burner while he tried to shower in the open cold-water-only cubicle at the back of the toilet block.  While they were still trying to wake up, the families were getting underway, heading out for morning hikes or setting up ball games.  A couple of the campervans had left already.

     Daniel swatted at an insect on his neck as he dressed.  "I was serious, you know."

     "Oh, so I'm not just some casual thing?"

     "You know what I mean."

     She poured the coffee.  "Yeah.  At least you could let me investigate the photographs."

     He smiled, took the cup she offered.  "Okay.  As soon, though, as it turns into a sideshow I'm taking a hike."

     Melanie glanced at the trailhead.

     "Oh cut it out with the puns," he said.

     She giggled, then nodded at the tent.

     He laughed.  "You need to focus on your research, Dr Du Champs."

     "Mmm.  Your call.  Since I won't be researching you."     "Huh."  He followed her into the tent.

     Afterwards they ate muesli and deflated the tent, repacked the bike.  She drove while he clung on behind and they sprinted out of the park, heading for Raleigh.

     "I think I'm just going to look at fermions," she told him through the intercom.  North Carolina flew past in a blur of green.

     "Go East," he said.

     "I want to go through Greensboro," she told him.

     "I hate Greensboro."

     "Nonsense.  My aunt lives there."

     "So we're gonna do family now."

     "Well, you might be the father of her great-niece."

     "Oh funny."

     They hit the freeway, got into the motorcycle lane and scooted up to eighty-five.  Triple-rigs and electrics got left behind, but a group of weekend Harley riders crowded ahead of them, making them slow to seventy.  Cars began overtaking them on the inside.

     "Bored?" Melanie said.

     "Not as bored as I'll be if we visit your aunt."

     "Let's go cross-country."  She powered the bike across the lanes, skipping down an exit ramp.

     Then, suddenly they were away from traffic, back onto two-lane blacktop, back into the blur of green.  Melanie took the straights at ninety-five.

     "We'll get booked, you know," he told her.

     "I know."

     "The bike is registered to me."

     "I know."

     "You're irresponsible, you know," he said.

     "Sure."  She glanced around at him.  "I just feel so alive right now."

     Melanie felt hollow and terrified.  The feeling came across her in a rush.  He lab trashed, her apartment invaded.  Men - soldiers ... mercenaries - in her apartment above.  She leaned down onto the steering wheel, holding back tears.

     Okay, she thought.  Get it together.

     She remembered the times with Daniel.  The things he'd said about not becoming a guinea pig, about knowing there were dangers.  It was so long ago now, so many years since he'd disappeared, that she'd really forgotten.  But it was coming true, she thought.  People after her research.  Not for any scientific benefit, she knew.  You didn't steal research by home invasion.  You hacked the net.

     But her stuff wasn't on the net.

     Nor was it recorded on any piece of hardware.  Daniel had started the codes with her.  A simple algorithm that kept key pieces of data hidden behind shifted words.  Daniel in his ultimate paranoia and even after all these years she'd kept it up.  Just as well.  There were notes, but there was just one thing that held the key to her ciphers.

     Her head.

     She jerked at a sound.  An unfamiliar ring.  Her new phone.

     "Hello," she said.

     "I'm out here," Reg said.  "There's someone in the truck.  A driver.  So what I'm going to do is pull in as if I'm driving into the garage."

     "What?"

     "Listen.  Come up to the gate.  I'll flash my lights.  Use your gate opener and drive up.  I'll be out of the way by then."

     "What are you going to do?"

     "I'll back straight across the road when I see the gate coming up.  I'll block the truck in.  You head up Lexington and get out of here.  I'll meet you at my place."

     "Okay.  That's the plan, then?"

     "That's the plan.  I ... uh-oh."

     "What oh-oh?"  She saw movement by the door to the building's stairs.  Oh-oh.

     "They're coming out," Reg said.

     "Some of them are down here."

     There were three of them, fanning out from the door with military precision.  One of them touched his ear as if having trouble hearing instructions from his headset.

     "I'm getting in position now," Reg said.

     Melanie knew she couldn't start the car and make it to the gate without them seeing.  One of them was heading in her direction.

     "Reg," she said.  What she was going to ask of him was risky, she thought. 

     "Hi.  What's happening?"

     But then, she thought, he's already prepared to block the truck.  How much worse could it get for him?  Somehow she doubted that he would make it to his place.  She was fast going off this whole scheme.  Maybe let them take her and she could just tell them what she knew.

     "Melanie?"

     "Sound your horn."

     The blare of Reg's beat-up little car's horn echoed through the garage.  The soldiers all looked at the entrance, then took a step that way.

     Melanie punched the gate release.

     Nothing happened.

     You had to be closer.

     She lifted the little wedge and held it against the windscreen.

     The soldiers were moving back into their patrol formation.

     "Melanie?"

     "Do it again.  Hold it down."

     "I don't know that's a good idea.  I'm getting some attention up here."

     "Yeah, likewise down here."

     The horn echoed again.

     The soldiers began walking for the gate.

     Melanie put the phone on the passenger seat and started the car.

     As one the soldiers turned.

     She thumped the gas and the Audi leapt forward.  One handed she turned into the lane.  The middle soldier brought his gun up.

     Melanie kept the gate release against the glass, pressing again and again.  She nearly clipped the nearest soldier.  The tires squealed on the polished concrete.

     The gate stayed down.

     Someone was shouting.  Reg's horn was still blaring.

     Melanie swung the car around the end of the row of cars into the main lane.  The soldiers were all running after her now.  She kept pressing the button.  Still no movement.

     "Reg!" she shouted.  The phone was on the floor now.  She didn't know if he could hear.

     She saw the soldiers in the rearview.  Sprinting.  Close.

     Press, press.  Still nothing.

     "Reg.  Back away now."  She had to trust that he would hear.  Trust that the gate would work.  "I'm coming out fast."

     The gate began slowly winding upwards.

     A thump from the back of the car.  For a moment, she thought that they'd shot it.

     More thumping.  One of the soldiers had jumped on.  He was clinging to the rain gutter, helmet bumping the window.

     The gate crept up.  She was eighty yards distant.

     Melanie threw the car in a little left-right like a rally driver setting up for a sliding curve.  The soldier thumped again.  He clung on.

     The gate was at hood level.  She eased up on the gas a little.  Just fifty yards away.

     The side back window smashed.

     "Reg!" she yelled.

     "Give it up lady," the soldier called in a voice that seemed oddly calm.

     The gate was nearly high enough to get under.  Twenty yards.

     She did the rally move again.  The soldier grabbed her hair.

     "Bastard."

     He jerked her head back, smacking it against the headrest.

     She put the gas to the floor.  They reached the gate.

     Not quite high enough.

     The aluminum strip scraped across the roof with a sound like a harpy.  The soldier screamed as his hand was crushed against the rain gutter.

     The front bumper hit the concrete ramp with a wail of twisting metal.  The soldier fell and rolled against the side of the ramp.

     The Audi barely slowed.  The suspension complained, compressed to its limits.  Up the ramp like a rocket, the whole chassis rocked.  The car sprang across the sidewalk and Melanie had a split second to take in the scene.

     Reg parked trunk against the curb.

     Two soldiers yelling at him.

     The rest of the soldiers arrayed around the entry.

     The Audi cracked down and she threw the wheel.

     The car slid, slowly turning.  She came within a whisker of ramming Reg.  She clipped the opposite kerb the Audi absorbing the impact, riding up onto the sidewalk.

     She had a moment's view of Reg's astonished face.  Then someone fired a shot and she lost another back window.

     Melanie maneuvered onto the street and fled away.  In her rearview she saw the soldiers loading up into the truck.  Reg was pulling out, coming after her.

Top of Page

Alice

by Kelly Owen

"Has Haka told you more of Windsong and the Path of Souls?" Teche' asked.

I leaned back on the stone bench to allow the early afternoon sun to warm my face, enjoying fresh air tinted with the scent of the daffodil-like flowers pushing through the snow next to me. "Not since the day you two came up with the idea of my coming here.”

Teche’ and I were sitting outside the opening to a cave waiting for Haka to return. He had gone in a few minutes earlier to make arrangements withthe Mountain Ohr-Rey’s not quite human swordsmith, Kearlon.

Teche’ stood and began pacing, her movements the flowing water of a stream. "Each year more than a hundred Zhaka-Aren make the pilgrimage to Ohr-Rey.While eachreceives a sword like no other in the world, only a few are found deserving to walk the Path of Souls. Of all who have followed the Path, only Haka reached the Well of Jhade’. Because of this, for a time some believed him to be the Gray Warrior.”

What Teche’ said explained a lot. More than once since coming to this world I’d wondered about Haka's position in the clan. A man without visible rank, he was often deferred to when decisions were being made.

Teche seemed to guess what I was thinking. "Haka is too private a man to claim the full honor that could be his. But do not be fooled, there is a pride in him. Those who run afoul of it regret the error."

Before I could ask if that was meant to be a warning, Haka came out of the cave, the movement of his running back sized body no less fluid than Teche’s.

"Kearlon is ready,” he said.

I stood. "What do I do?"

"Enter the cavern and follow the lighted path. When it branches, continue straight ahead. Kearlon will be waiting." He put his hand on my shoulder and Teche' surprised me by touching the other. "Nune' go with you," they said together. Ritual? Or something more?

Not knowing the proper response, I nodded my thanks, then turned and entered the mountain. Beyond the opening was a cavern so vast I felt like a goldfish in an empty sea. The only light came from an artery of glowing quartz cutting across the floor. I placed my feet on the luminous trail and started walking.

It took me a good ten minutes tocross the hollow vault and reach the far wall where the path split. Following Haka’s directions, I took the middle way, entering a tunnel that seemed tight after the soaring vastness of the cavern. The passage twisted to the right, then to the left, then back again, a snake chasing its tail. The walls were decorated with runic symbols that danced in the glow of the quartz-light. Though I couldn’t read them, they seemed to hint at some unnamed doom.

  I’d begun to wonder if I’d taken the wrong opening when the tunnel emptied out into a chamber the size of a basketball arena. Next to a forge in the room’s center stood Kearlon.

Nearly seven feet tall, his impossibly thin, almost human features glowed a demonic red in the light of the glowing coals. Smoke hung in the air around him, a thunder cloud shot through with the lighting of reflected fire. I wasn't Wagnerian opera fan enough to really appreciate the setting.

Kearlon lifted a long rod of glowing metal in his gloved hand. "This is not the blade I would make the Gray Warrior," he said, his harsh baritone breaking the silence. "But it will serveuntil your return for that weapon."He extended the rod, the steel white hot half way up its length before changing to a savage, pulsing red. “Take it and hold it to the anvil.”

I approached cautiously, my face prickling from the heat of the forge, barely able to breath as I entered the haze of acrid smoke. "What do I pick it up with?"

"Your hand. He grasped the unfinished blade by its cross piece and shoved what would become the hilt towards me. "Quickly, before the fire is lost."

The only reason to jump off a bridge is to make your beneficiaries rich. So I'm damned if I know why I grabbed the shaft of hot metal. Trust? Hardly.

And yes, it hurt. But once my hand locked onto the hilt I was unable to let go. In a half trance of pain I held on while Kearlon  pounded shape and life into the metal with his hammer. I was still holding on when he quenched the glowing, new formed blade in a barrel of water. And continued to grip the weapon while he gave it its first edge on a massive grinding wheel.

How long it actually lasted I don' know. But when Kearlon finally finished I was no longer sure I could open my hand if I wanted to.

"The Path," he said, pointing towards an opening in the rock at the room's back. “Travel as far as you dare.”

I was too far gone to ask any questions. I went where he pointed. Ten steps into the tunnel, the first wave of terror hit me.

I was jerked out of my semi-comatose state by an uncontrollable fear that the mountain was coming down on me, crushing me under tons of rock. I took another step and the claustrophobia was joined by a conviction someone was stalking me. I looked back, saw nothing, then snapped my head around the other way, feeling something coming from that direction. Again, nothing. Another few steps and the cave walls began to move, undulating, a throat swallowing me. Run! A voice now screamed in my head. Turn and run before you are consumed!

I fought down the panic as I’d learned to do in the boxing ring. There’s nothing like being hit by a two-hundred pound sledgehammer of muscle to find out whether you’ll stay down or get up.

Moving forward, I began to see bodies. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Piled against the wall, half decayed faces leering at me. Faces I knew. People I knew.

I stopped in front of one, unable to move past. It was my mother, her beauty marred here and there where the flesh had fallen away revealing bone and rotting muscle. A choking sound came from within the corpse-thing, a heaving,  phlegm filled sob. Then a voice. “Leave this place. You do not belong.”

I gripped the sword and stood my ground, fighting against the terror crawling from the surrounding walls into my soul. “You’re wrong.” That was all I said. And because it was my mother telling me to stop, I moved forward.

The nightmares had lost some of their power over me. My mother’s apparition had pushed me over an emotional threshold and closed the door. The terror continued now more as a heavy burden than something eating at my guts.

As abruptly as it had begun the fear was gone. In front of me stood a pool of water, its stone sides growing seamlessly from the floor to knee height. The vein of quartz ran through it, turning the surface into a thousand sparkling lenses.

A desperate thirst gripped me and I knelt beside the pool to drink. Laying the sword aside, I dipped my cupped hands into cool water, sending waves across the mirrored surface. I closed my eyes as the liquid slid past my lips. It tasted of sunlight and fresh air.

I opened my eyes and looked at my hand, wondering how much damage had been done by the blistering heat it had endured. Nothing, not even a red mark to show that I’d held fire in my palm. I flexed my fingers, then made a fist. Other than a little stiffness, it seemed unaffected. I had to look at the sword beside me to be sure it wasn’t all a bizarre dream.

It took me a moment to work up the courage to re-enter the tunnel for the return journey, but I needn’t have bothered. My return was devoid of threat or fear. When I reached the chamber where Kearlon had forged the sword it was empty. No Kearlon, no forge, not even a trace of smoke to mark that it had ever been.

I didn't stop to search for hidden clues, I headed for the door. I retraced my steps through the twisting passage, then across that great vault of a room into the cold air and morning sunlight.

Morning? It had been mid-afternoon when I’d entered the cavern. Had I spent the entire night inside?

Haka was waiting for me. "Here.” He threw a cloak over my shoulders as I started to shiver. Then he held out a new scabbard and harness.

I looked down at the sword, a little surprised to see it. It felt weightless in my hand, an extension of my fingers. I lifted the sword towards the sheath, and the blade caught the morning sun, suddenly afire with its light. Blinking, I started to look away from the glare, then turned back, squinting to see through the silver flame in my hand.

Runes ran the blade's length, dancing in the sun-lit brightness of its surface. I was certain they’d not been there when Kearlon handed me the weapon. These were the marks I'd seen crawling across the cave wall, the same twisting shapes that had sent messages of terror. The cavern had transferred itself to my sword.

Wondering how much of this was fatigue induced hallucination, I sheathed the blade. Opening my hand, I again looked for the damage that must be there. Not so much as a blister.

"Back in Wonderland," I said, slumping onto the rock bench as the night's lack of sleep caught up with me.

"What?" Haka asked.

"Nothing, just tired."

"It is a wonder you can stand at all after two nights on the Path of Souls," Teche' said from where she stood watching.

"Two days?" I couldn't remember more than an hour, and most of that a jumble. The human brain is pretty good at blocking out memories it doesn't like.

 Haka reached out a hand and helped me to my feet, then led me towards a tent that someone had set up in my absence. Inside was a small table holding a light meal and a cot. I sat on the cot and picked up the wine cup, ignoring the food.

"Will you share your blade's chosen a name?" Haka asked.

"Name?"

"It is the tradition of the Tolde' is to share an Ohr-Rey blade's name with the clan," Teche' said. “Though you may keep it a secret if you wish.”

 “I don’t think it has a name.”

"But it must," Haka said, his face coming as close to showing surprise as I'd ever seen. He touched the hilt of his sword. "Windsong screamed its name to the cavern walls, so loud and long I hear it echo still."

A name? One leapt to mind. Crazy, completely out of place. I smiled. Well why not?

"Alice," I said, the word out of my mouth before I could retract it.

"Alice." Haka said the word slowly, measuring it, imbuing it with a dignity it didn't deserve. "What does it mean?"

"It means I don't know when to shut up," I said. It was obvious Haka took the sword naming seriously. So why hadn't I come up with something like Caesar, or Excalibur?

"Whatever the meaning," Haka said, pouring us all wine. "The blade will reach for it." He lifted his cup. "Alice, brother of Windsong."

"Sister," I mumbled, wondering which of Alice's qualities the sword would find useful. At least I'd be safe if I ran into the Queen of Hearts.

Haka and Teche' insisted I lie down, then moved outside into the early spring sunshine, taking the wine bottle with them. As I drifted off to sleep I could hear them talking.

"Did you see the blade?" Teche' said, the pitch of her voice low.

"Yes." Haka's tone remained flat, as always.

"There is only one weapon in the Clan with such marks," Teche' said. "Yours." She paused, perhaps to drink from her cup. "How far did he get?" she asked after the moment of silence.

Haka grunted something I didn't understand.

There was a long pause and I fell further towards sleep. Then another question from Teche'.

"Could he really be the Gray Warrior?"

If there was an answer, I didn't hear it.

Top of Page

APPARITION

by Josh Mayesh

      It was the onset of the tide, the eternal gentle war that seemed to speak to him in a language he understood but could not speak.  In the evening he would sneak down the embankment to the shore and prop himself up against one of the large rocks that dotted the landscape of the private beach.  At times he could hear the clinking of glass as the party would go on ignorant of his absence.  He doubted he would be missed.  Pieces of conversations would drift down to him and his mind sometimes strained to make sense of the strained sentences and muffled words it heard.  Ultimately he would fill his thoughts with images conjured up by the protective breath of the ocean air, and on the best of nights he would fall asleep soothed by the welcoming sounds of the sea. 

     Tonight however, he would not be able to find his place along the shore.  A large party had been planned and he was scheduled to work a double shift.  He was glad to make the extra money the evening would bring, but the timing could not have been worse.  The stress of the past two weeks had wreaked havoc on his relationship with Lisa and it seemed that they were no longer on good terms.  Nor would he be able to “drown his sorrows in drink” as the alcohol, unlike him, was always accounted for.  He continued to stare at his reflection in the mirror as he dressed that evening, straightening the same black tie, buttoning the old white shirt.  He paused momentarily as he combed what remained of his hair.  Something had caught his eye as he lifted his arm just over his drawn face.  He turned to look behind him and listened intently for the source of the sudden movement.  There was nothing.  Nothing save the light brush of the wind against the windows and the soft thunder like shudder it presented.  Glancing at his watch he noted that the party was due to begin in half an hour.  For six hours he would be forced to endure the repetition these parties always produced.  How he detested this job.  After the first hour he would find himself placing more effort in restraining himself from dousing the guests with their drinks than in serving them.  He remembered his friend Tony describing the job to him in glowing terms some months ago when he convinced him to apply.  How unfortunate that at that time he failed to remember how shallow his opinion of Tony was.  In all the talk about the perks provided by the exclusive club, the luxurious living quarters, the flexible hours, and most importantly for him, the private beach, never did Tony mention the exasperation and frustration that would accompany his every working moment.  He could stand the ridicule the guests would sometimes send his way, the paltry tips, and the sheer boredom of a job he felt was beneath him, but it was the people themselves that burdened him.  It was their self awarded exclusiveness and disregard for others that made him want to retch and drove him to drink.  Somewhere in his mind he knew there were other reasons that he drank, but it was so much easier to blame those “paragons of virtue” as he liked to ironically refer to them.  A light tapping at the door interrupted his thoughts.  He heard Tony calling to him, “Jerry, be up front in twenty.”  “I’ll be there” he grumbled, not hiding his frustration over having to be ready earlier than expected.  Jerry heard Tony’s steps retreat back down the hall.  Within five minutes he had finished getting dressed, but he continued to stare at his reflection in the mirror.  He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just using the moment to stare into nothingness, an irony that wasn’t lost on him as the nothingness he saw was reflected in his eyes.  He began to feel sorry for himself, as he was accustomed to doing, when he caught another glimpse of sudden movement in the mirror, this time accompanied by a thud against the window.  He turned slowly and looked towards the window but the light in his room caused a glare preventing him from seeing outside.  He heard something scraping against the screen but he knew that there were no trees on the beach to rub its branches against his window.  He assumed it was a seagull, only a bird could reach the third floor, but he remained uncomfortable in that he couldn’t see what it was, and knowing that whatever it was could possibly see him.  He turned slightly to the side, not wanting to expose his back entirely to the window and calmly walked backwards to the door.  Still staring at his reflection, although this time in the window, he raised his arm to the light switch.  As the light went out the scraping stopped simultaneously, and he could see nothing.

            He found himself in total blackness as there were no lights out on the beach to illuminate his room.  The thickness of the blackness around his eyes raised a small measure of comfort in him reminiscent of the sensation he would have at his spot along the beach.  For a moment he believed that whatever had piqued his curiosity was of a friendly nature, but that moment was soon followed by ones of doubt as his eyes became accustomed to the dark.  He had assumed that the seagull had simply flown away when he turned off the light as the scraping had ceased, but now he was able to faintly discern a large dark form, it couldn’t possibly be a seagull he surmised, hovering a few yards outside his window.  He wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him until he realized that he was unable to see the embankment just behind where the form appeared to rest.  He squinted slightly to be certain and felt his heart leap into his chest so startled was he by the loud knocking on his door.  “Jerry, get a move on” came the loud voice of Sammy the maitre d’ from outside.  Jerry quickly turned the lights back on and rushed downstairs to the party, not noticing, until a patron not so gently let him know, that his shirt was soaked with sweat.

“Unbelievable” thought Tony to himself.  He had known by the way he had muttered to him through the door that Jerry was in one of those moods again, but he hadn’t expected Sammy to get involved.  As he looked at the guests sprawled around the lounge however he realized what was putting Sammy on edge.  This was after all the night they had been talking about for months.  Every August the quaint little inn found itself host to some of the biggest names in Southern California .  Tony would tell his friends that he walked the true Walk of Fame, only in here the stars shone a little less bright.  He chuckled to himself to see an already tipsy music executive making a stink about Jerry’s lack of professionalism.  He did find it a bit odd to see Jerry so unnerved.  Jerry wasn’t exactly his idea of normal, but he was a stickler for neatness and wouldn’t be caught dead with a spot on his tie let alone a shirt soaked through.  He decided it might be a good idea to go over to Jerry and poke a little fun at him for his “horrible” lapse, but the award winning director at table number three had a date with a margarita and if Tony was ever going to make it in Hollywood he thought it best that this particular date be prompt. 

If he hadn’t been so completely mortified, Jerry would have likely been quite relieved at having been sent back to his room for a shower and change of clothes.  He knew that before long Sammy would be too engrossed in the drama downstairs to note how long it would take him to “freshen up”.  He could stay upstairs for hours and come back just in time to mop up the floors and all would be right with the world, even on a night as important as this one.  Sammy after all cared most for the first impression and knew his guests well enough to know that their last impressions were usually muddled by the hours and the drinks and the atmosphere only a maitre d’ as fine as he could provide.  But still he was mortified and he longed to cleanse himself with the spray of the ocean and the freshness of the night air. 

     As he walked upstairs to his room he kept replaying the past few moments in his mind; the insolence of the man at the bar, Sammy’s show of rage, for he knew it for what it truly was, and the burning embarrassment within him.  What bothered him most was that he felt such a strong insecurity about something he believed to be of such minor importance and yet he could not tolerate how he had appeared.  He opened the door to his room still angry at what had just transpired, and as he began to reach for the light switch he instantly remembered that he had left the light on when he rushed from the room just a short time ago.  Normally he would have just chalked this up to forgetfulness, but now he remembered the chill that had run through him when he saw the looming shadow outside his window and suddenly the darkness in his room was no longer a welcome friend.  He looked in the direction of the window, but he couldn’t see anything in front of him.  He lifted his hand in front of his face but again was unable to see anything within the utter darkness his room had become; it was as though the room had been swallowed up, and he within it.  He stood there motionless and without thought.  Somewhere inside of him a decision was made to wait until some sense would come to his assistance, but sound had gone off and vanished with sight and there was nothing for him to feel. 

Finally, after a long struggle, he was able to force his feet in the direction he was sure the window lay.  He felt as though he were a passenger sitting in the cockpit of his mind fascinated and detached watching and wondering.  Slowly he made his way forward unsure but steady.  He turned slightly to his left and felt the faint touch of the ocean breeze against his cheek.  He knew that the window had been closed when he left the room, but he now began to accept that sense would no longer be his most reliable guide and he allowed himself to follow in the path of curiosity.  Slowly he extended his arm in the direction the breeze was coming from.  He almost fell forward as where he had expected to find the wall was instead only the air around him.  He continued to move towards the window and found it odd that the fear he had felt earlier had vanished, well, maybe not quite vanished he thought to himself, only trapped far underneath the burden of his curiosity.  As he continued to move forward a strange feeling was awakening within him.  There was a familiarity in the feeling, a comfort in the darkness of the unknown.  He tried again in vain to see any of his surroundings and suddenly realized that he had been walking far too long.  The rooms were luxurious in the inn, but they were small.  This last thought stopped him cold and he could feel his body tense alerted once again to the fear that had been lying dormant within him.  The senses that had failed him before were now screaming out to him.  He could hear, faintly at first, but now distinctly the sound of dripping all around him.  He lifted his foot and brought it down quickly on the floor.  But instead of the polished hardwood floor of his room he felt the give of damp sand and heard the splash of a small puddle of water.  He turned in what he thought was the direction he had come and was surprised at what his reunion with sight brought him; easily five hundred feet away was the inn, painting a bleak silhouette against the charcoal sky.

            His immediate thought was that he must have been drinking, but he knew it to be untrue.  The truth was that he longed for a drink now more than ever and ran his tongue across his parched lips.  He muttered a soft curse to himself not so much out of fear but out of utter confusion.  He concentrated for a few moments but could not come up with any gap in time from when he had returned to his room to where he found himself now.  He decided to get a better sense of his surroundings as he was beginning to realize that everything that was happening tonight should be called into question.  Everything in sight, however, appeared ordinary.  In addition to the inn off in the distance he was able to make out the curved slope of the beach as it extended out past the point, and to his left he could see the twinkling of ships stationed far out on the water.  Frustrated, he turned back towards the inn and looked towards the third floor where his room was located.  There was something that didn’t seem right about the building, but as he took some steps closer he realized that he was unable to get a clear picture of the third floor as the nebulous shape had returned to block his view.  Had it ever left he wondered?  And at this point he found that he didn’t really seem to care.  All he wanted was to go find his point of solitude and sleep off this drunken spell he was under regardless of its non-alcoholic nature.  He began to walk off in the direction of the cove where he would spend those hours of contentment.  Tonight he needed it to be a refiner’s fire, to mix with the blanket of ocean spray and evaporate the troubles of this night.  Soon he was propped up against one of the larger steadfast looking rocks as he hoped to draw some strength from within it, and looked out at the emptiness of the night.  The breeze tousled his hair in a manner that reminded him of his father and he began to reminisce about his early childhood until exhausted, he fell asleep.

            “Tony!  Hey Tony, have you seen Jerry?”  Tony shook his head in response.  He always found it amusing that Sammy was so wrapped up in his job that he never noticed Jerry’s habitual absences, but he knew eventually the hammer was going to fall.  Jerry should have known better tonight.  “Well, go check in his room, I sent him upstairs over six hours ago.  Oh, and when you find him, tell him I want to see him.  And I guess you’d better tell him I want to see him now.”  Tony would have ordinarily found that last comment amusing, but he could hear the seriousness in Sammy’s voice and he began to worry if Jerry’s time at the inn was coming to an end.  Sammy watched as Tony made his way up the first flight of stairs and shook his head soberly.  Tonight had been too important for Jerry to pull a stunt like this.  He prided himself on the image his establishment was known for and he knew that part of that image was a family atmosphere.  His guests seemed to all share the common ground of being envied for their successes but equally pitied for their emotionless lives.  Somehow he knew this inn was the only place they truly felt at home and it pained him when he considered what he now had to do with this family’s most consistent misbehaving member.  He always found this to be the worst part of what he did, but it had to be done, some things were just---  “Brian?  Brian what’s wrong?”  Sammy’s question was addressed to his son who had come to work with him during the summer.  They would spend the early hours fishing out on the rocks, paying more attention to each other than to their lines, which is what kept them waking up early every morning.  This summer working with Brian had been one that had filled the void he had felt in his life since Maria had left, but now the look on his son’s face mimicked the one he had worn himself when he told Brian his mother had gone.  “Dad, it’s Jerry”, and his voice trembled in a way that made Sammy feel a cold sweat come over him.  “Where is he?”  Brian didn’t answer, he just motioned for his father to follow him and they walked together outside.  As they made their way to the back of the inn Sammy noticed that a small crowd of employees had gathered quietly.  None of them said a word as they waited for Sammy to approach.  He followed their gazes until he saw the bent misshapen form of Jerry sprawled on the sand beneath his third story window.  The contorted figure left no doubt that he was dead, but Sammy’s conscience, forgetting that he had not yet fired Jerry, wondered if he had caused Jerry to jump, if he had jumped.  Sammy kneeled down in the sand next to Jerry’s body, his pants soaking through at the knee as it rested in a shallow puddle of water, and it was then when he recognized the heavy stench of alcohol . . .

As he finished plodding up the final flight of stairs Tony noted how eerily quiet it was up here on the third floor.  He didn’t notice any light coming out from under Joe or Todd’s door.  He figured he’d see if Todd was still up after he sent Jerry down to Sammy; Todd had mentioned a group of guys were going surfing in the morning and Tony wanted to make sure there was an extra board for him.  He turned the corner and readied himself to knock on Jerry’s door but found it open although the light was off.  He thought for a moment that that was odd, Jerry hated his door being open, but it passed from his mind swiftly as most thoughts of Tony’s did.  “Jerry, you in here?”  He felt stupid asking this, the light was off after all, and he knew very well that Jerry had probably sulked off to the beach again.  He turned on the light just to be sure Jerry hadn’t fallen asleep and found the room to be as neat as usual.  After checking the bathroom and finding no trace of Jerry he turned to leave but stopped to fix his hair in the mirror.  He paused momentarily while lifting his hand over his face as he had caught a glimpse of something in the mirror.  He turned around, but as he saw nothing he ignored the sight and walked out of the room.  As the door closed with a thud he failed to hear the thunder like shudder of the wind against the window, nor the odd scraping that accompanied it.

Top of Page

Seduction in Benahoare

By Marcelo Worsley

From the heavens, the isle protrudes from the shiny ocean like an ugly ragged cone of volcanic scoria.

Ceridwen has fallen asleep, her head against my left arm.  Meanwhile, the stranger who sits on my right hand side keeps staring blankly ahead, deep in reverie or too shy to draw attention to himself.  For the last couple of hours, his long horsy face has remained as immobile as a statue…  I glance at the window for a few seconds and then continue reading the travel guide I bought at the airport.

In proportion to its size, La Palma (or Benahoare, as its original inhabitants named it) is one of the steepest islands in the world.  The 23.000 ft high volcano rises from the ocean floor, reaching almost 8202 ft above the waves.  An extensive and deep crater-like ridge, the National Park of Caldera de Taburiente, sunders the northern part of the island.  Looking at the pictures of the caldera (cauldron in Spanish), I can’t help thinking that a colossal hand has scooped the soft underbelly of this geological monstrosity, leaving the bare ribs exposed to the elements.

An impressive scenario for a seduction...

Craning my neck, taking care not to disturb Sleeping Beauty, I am able to observe the sea of clouds shrouding most of the island; with the top peaks baked in the tropical sun.

According to the guide, a mysterious people named Benahoaritas populated this land from antiquity.  Where they came from is still a matter of academic debate…  Whilst possibly Berbers in origin, the most outlandish theories have been put forward: from the claim that these reportedly tall blonde people were the descendents of a Germanic migration, to considering them the last remnants of Atlantis.

But the mystery thickens… 

Whoever they were, somehow they lacked navigation skills.  We have, then, a relatively sophisticated society marooned in a vertical volcanic rock, near the African continent and within view (on a clear day) of some of the other islands of the archipelago.  How did the Benahoaritas get there in the first place?  Why did they turn their backs to the ocean?  Trapped between the alien sea and the refulgent night sky, how mighty or insignificant did they feel? 

The Benahoaritas must have regarded their cliffs as the frontiers of the universe, just as they would have found their beliefs to be as natural as their soot black beaches; a perception which, considering their isolation from the rise and fall of empires, held true for so many generations of island-dwellers.  One can easily imagine them trusting their gods, customs and rites; praying to their ancestors; fighting among themselves in all-important power struggles;  believing the present to be eternal and the past legendary.  All the while, tall ships traversed the oceans, bringing forth, closer and closer, the doom of their civilization….  For, what did fate have in store for them?  Ah, this is also easy to visualize: slavery, death, degradation, terror, betrayal, and loss… The almost complete disappearance of their trace in history…

Ceridwen stirs as the plane draws a parallel line to the cliffs.  She looks at me sleepily and gazes out of the window.

‘Oh, Abe, why didn’t you wake me up?’ she complains in a whiny voice.  ‘I was looking forward to seeing La Palma from the far distance…’

I shrug my shoulders.  The stranger on my right hand side doesn’t move a muscle.

***

The hotel restaurant is full of holidaymakers flitting to and fro between tables and food stands, like busy honeybees. 

‘Are the waiters on strike?’ I ask Ceridwen as we scan the large dinning room for an empty table.

‘It’s a buffet, stupid!’ she says, leading me by the hand to a remote corner. ‘First, you sit down and order a drink; afterwards, you are free to pig out.’

My eyes focus on a pile of greasy dishes stacked in front of a gentleman who is dressed in Bermuda shorts.  Seemingly about to faint, he still has the stamina to stumble up in search of one final morsel.  Human nature never ceases to astound me…

‘Move it!’ she says. ‘A free table at a quarter to six!’

We sit down heavily, thwarting another couple who swoop by our side and continue their reconnaissance.

‘Right, you can order the drinks whilst I begin foraging’

‘Your desires are…’ she leaves me in mid sentence and enters the fray. 

Somehow, by an improbable system within the chaos, a waiter spots me at once.  He offers me a wine list, which I peruse slowly.  I am tempted to order the best Rioja in the house, but instead I request a highly alcoholic Toro wine.

Ceridwen appears precisely at the moment that the waiter is uncorking the bottle.  I look at her open-mouthed.  The waiter’s eyes sparkle with amusement.

‘What?’ she queries, red-faced.

She’s carrying two plates brimming with foodstuffs, like horns of plenty.

***

Just to gather my thoughts with a view to the plan ahead…  The hotel is most adequate: two swimming pools, equal number of restaurants, three bars, and a show every night in the foyer’s theatre.  Nonetheless, the profusion of semi-naked pensioners in every area of the compound doesn’t bode well for the logistics of what must be done.

There’s a beach beside the resort, a long and curved expanse of charred sand and pebbles.  A huge structure, like a thick column of compressed scoria, situated at the furthest point from the hotel, may offer the best romantic spot.  The monolith is lapped by the waves at high tide, and the locals have encased an urn, a Virgin Mary with child, in the inward looking face of the rock.  After nightfall, we are bound to get some privacy behind the column, sheltered from the promenade.

There is also the car I aim to hire tomorrow.  We have six days to visit the beauty spots.  In particular, I wish to climb the island-volcano and gaze up at the Milky Way.  I think we’ll leave this excursion last, in case all else fails…

***

She’s smoking again, a filthy habit that I won’t tolerate for long.  I place her gin tonic on the plastic table and help myself to one of her cigarettes.  She looks at me with amused disdain.

‘I don’t get it,’ she says. ‘You’re a twenty a day man who complains incessantly about my fifteen a day.  It all adds up to bare-faced hypocrisy…’

‘I’ll stop smoking when you do.  If you care about me, it’ll give extra motivation to quit.’

‘That’s emotional blackmail!’

‘Besides, you’re a woman and I…’

‘Not that sexist crap again, please!’

‘Listen, Ceridwen…’

‘Don’t call me like that, you know I don’t like it!’

This is all going the wrong way.  I’m an idiot.  I should be more careful.

‘It’s meant to be endearing, my Welsh enchantress…’

‘My name is EVA.  I would have hoped you had learned it by now…’

‘Well, Eva, the statistics do confirm that smoking is more harmful for the stronger sex…’

She snorts with derision.

‘And, in any case, you’ll have to quit when you have children…’

‘IF I have them, you mean. I never said I was that keen on perpetuating the species.’

Oh, no! I hate it when she talks like this; it makes me feel that the whole affair is a waste of time.

‘O.K. I won’t mention the cigarettes again.’

‘You’d better stop stealing them as well…’

I sit down beside her but she stands up and leans on the veranda’s railing.  I can sense a long-drawn-out sulk coming on.

***

This is a beautiful planet.  The sun is setting in a golden rapture.  Side by side, hand in hand, with our backs pressed against the monolith, we are dazzled by the play of long-travelling astral particles.  I take my sunglasses off and look at her.  She’s smiling in a golden hue.  Beauty has brought us back together again.  No sign left of silly arguments and careless words.  I wonder if this is the moment… I feel slightly inebriated.  The softly breaking waves provide a backdrop of soothing eternity.  My mind wanders to the Benhaoritas, the original inhabitants of this land.  I can feel their imprints standing beside us, basking in this wondrous alchemy of the elements, praying to their sun-god;  centuries before fate dressed in shiny metal, the conquistadors, set foot on this beach.

I search for the object in my pocket.  I begin the approach…but, something is wrong, she’s looking over my shoulder.

‘Hey!’ she says. ‘Haven’t we seen that guy somewhere else?’

Horsy man has entered the stage.  He stares at us for an instant, without acknowledging his airplane companions, and moves away along the beach.

‘I’m famished…Wonder what’s for dinner?’ she murmurs, breaking the spell of the moment.

***

I convinced Ceridwen to join me in a tour guide excursion to visit the archaeological remains of the Benahoaritas.  We have been shown through a small museum which displays goatskin garments and ornaments made out of shells and wood, together with pictures of mummified bodies and reconstructions of how these people’s day-to-day life could have been.  Although the natives of the island didn’t seem to have developed a written alphabet, they produced scores of rock carvings.  These are most peculiar: they consist, always, of finely etched spirals.  Some look like giant fingerprints, others like thick webs, still others, perhaps, like constellations and star systems.  When I asked the guide about their significance, she could only offer vague explanations about the possibility that these markings signalled the availability of fresh water locations. 

Nonsense… Why use such complex signs to signify the simplest of elements?  One thing is certain: the conquistadors were efficient in their brutal task, making sure that every aspect of the Benahoaritas would remain a riddle for future generations.       

***

Ceridwen is an enchantress or goddess of an ancient Welsh saga, renowned for possessing a magical cauldron that could be used to make a potion of wisdom and poetic creativity.  According to legend, she had three children: Creirwy, a maiden of great beauty; Morvran, a great warrior of brutish physical appearance; and Afagddu, whose name means “utter darkness”.  The later was so deformed and ugly that he could be construed as the epitome of evil.

***

The Milky Way is an ocean of light that beckons me home.  As Ceridwen embraces me, I search for familiar pointers amidst the stars.  My task has almost been accomplished.  It all turned out so well it could have been staged beforehand: we, happy couple, being actors in a play of romance and betrayal.

She felt slightly faint when we stepped out of the car, whether due to the altitude or the condition she’s in.  We sat down for a few minutes in this small car park for visitors, situated on the furthest point of the island, after traversing through the twists and turns of a viciously steep road.  The astronomical observatories, each grander as we approached the summit, looked alien and out of place in the deserted mountain landscape.  Ceridwen wondered where the resident scientists slept and what they did during their spare time.  I answered jokingly that the star boffins were like vampires, only leaving their shallow graves at nightfall, searching for their peculiar intellectual sustenance.  She did not laugh at this…   

We also found a path leading from the car park that follows a ridge over the Caldera de Taburiente.  The views over the cloud-covered crater were awe-inspiring.  To the southeast, on the horizon, we discovered the faint silhouette of another isle:  a deeper shade of blue seemingly floating above the sea.  We both felt as if we were giants, each of our strides reaching a summit.

According to another visitor, who spoke in English to Ceridwen, this high spot is named “El Roque de los Muchachos”, the “Rock of the Boys”.  This curious name is derived from the initiation ceremony that the male Benahoarita had to complete in order to reach adulthood.  Each boy in turn had to climb the mountain and remain on the summit for three days, fending for himself, evading the wrath of Iruene, a malignant demon shaped like a dark and hairy dog.

I waited for the right moment.  When the first star appeared in the night sky, I held her hand and bent down on my knees.  She looked at me open-mouthed.  Another couple glanced at us from a distance, smiling and nudging at each other. I asked her whether she would make me the happiest man in the heavens.  She nodded affirmatively and I gave her the ring I had kept hidden from her all these days.  It fitted, the gold shining red in the fateful dawn…             

***

It is our final dinner in the hotel.  I watch her carefully while she tries to make up her mind as to which dessert to choose.  She has piled on the pounds in this brief holiday.  Never mind, she’s never looked so beautiful to me…

She sits down heavily, placing a dish of banana sponge and ice cream on the table.

‘Stop staring, won’t you?’

‘I’m only admiring my future wife...  Is that a crime?’

‘Oh, Abe, you’re always so gallant!  Will you still love me when I am old and decrepit?’

‘You’ll never be old and decrepit, my dear.’

‘You wish…’ she says, stealing another look at her new ring.

‘Did you phone your parents to tell them the happy news?’

‘Yep,’ she replies, tucking into her dessert.  ‘Not only them.  So far, I have managed to speak to my sisters, Rose and Martin from work, and about twelve other assorted acquaintances.  I think you’ll have a shock when you get your phone bill…’

‘Right, that’s it.  The wedding’s off…’

She laughs happily, covering her mouth with her hand.

‘So, what do you want to do tonight?’ I ask her.

‘Well, I thought, being our last night here, we might as well get drunk and set fire to the hotel’

‘That sounds very romantic.’

‘It is decided, then.  And there’s another thing I have made my mind on…’

‘Yes?  What about?’

‘I have decided to give up smoking.’

She holds my hand and smiles.

***

The plane lands softly, a perfect end to a fruitful holiday. 

The tall ships have already departed, their masts bending on astral winds.  Huge sentient structures, full of purpose, immense dormitories for armies of conquistadors.  By the time my child reaches adolescence, they’ll be approaching the solar system.  Thanks to him, and to the multitude of children I’ll sire, Earth will be a different place by then.  Afagddu, together with his brothers and sisters, will spread new and terrible diseases throughout the population.  Each of my beloved will act as living and breathing laboratories of destruction.  Only they (and I, since I am not strictly alive) will be immune to their own fetid industry of death…   

Not many will survive the pandemics.  The economy will be first to fall.  Society will retreat back many centuries.  Wild nature will recover the planet’s epidermis, for the time being...  Those who remain will wish they were dead when my creators arrive.

      The airplane taxies along the runway, picking a route away from the airport.  Ceridwen holds my hand and smiles at me.  She’ll probably be the first victim of her child, when the pestilence he carries begins to disseminate, round about his tenth birthday.  I kiss her quickly on the lips.  I admit to feeling sorry for her, but she did make things difficult for me.  She’s an independent and strong-willed person.  Some time ago, I even had to resort to switching her contraceptive pills with my own brand of fertility medicines.  It’s alright now, I can sense my seed growing inside her, even though she’s ignorant of what’s happening to her own body.  The accepted marriage proposal should discourage any thought about ending the pregnancy... 

The airplane has finally stopped far from the main airport building. The passengers are getting restless.  Ceridwen looks out of the window and mutters words I cannot understand.  She seems surprised by something.  I crane over her to reach the window.  I feel cold sweat spreading over my manufactured body.  There’s a reception committee waiting for us.  I could swear I have seen people clad in protective clothing.  The captain’s suave voice asks everyone to stay seated, but one of the passengers disobeys his orders and stands up in the middle of the aisle.  He flashes an official looking ID at us, too fast for me to read the inscription.  Eva squeezes my arm and speaks excitedly in my ear: Don’t we know that guy?  Horse-face has well-honed baritone inflection.  You can tell he is used to issuing orders.  He addresses both passage and crew, but his eyes remain fixed on me.

Top of Page

The Dark Matter Machine

by Meghann McVey

Kasshi had been born without the slightest speck of magic in Teillene, the empire famed for its sorcery.  As strange compensation, her genes had given her instead, the power of prophecies.  These visions rarely occurred during her waking hours, preferring to dominate her slumber with shadowy scenes of people committing secret deeds.  Sometimes Kasshi thought she watched her mother the empress, and corridors in the Teillene palace, but many more times, she saw people she did not recognize busy at equally mysterious tasks.  All the while, a humming of discordant voices gave the dreams a nightmarish quality.  Kasshi happily forgot her nonsensical, uncanny visions, until the dream in which she saw her twin sister.

Seirya, the heir apparent, stood by her mother’s side in indigo, the hue of new stars.  Though she had only just come of age, she already stood taller than the empress, and so slender she appeared fragile. 

The empress, resplendent in firedrops and red silk, addressed a huge gathering of nobles in Teillene’s imperial audience hall.  The grand columns throughout the corridor shone as gold-flecked flame.

Behind empress and heir, a featureless machine waited. As Kasshi gazed on it, an inarticulate, menacing hum rose.  An explosion shook the hall.  Where the machine had stood, darkness roared forth, consuming empress, heir apparent, machine – all!

Kasshi woke to find her cheeks wet.  Mia, one of her attendants, stirred in her sleep.  Kasshi hoped she would not wake.  Like the rest of the servants the empress had appointed as her perpetual caretakers, they were just competent enough to keep her alive.  Kasshi had dubbed them the Idiot Brigade because they spoke over her as though her mind were as feeble as her leg.  Just because she lacked the magic powers inherent to everyone else in the empire did not mean her intellect was damaged. 

When Kasshi lowered herself to the cool tiles of her bedroom floor, one foot registered the cold; the other hung uselessly.  By the time Kasshi had limped to the doorway, Mia roused.

“Where are you going, Kasshi, dear?”  As if she were still a child, as though she did not go to Seirya’s room each morning, whether she were there or not.

There was no time to delay; Kasshi only hoped Seirya was still in her room.  Her twin must not go near the machine!

Leaning on Mia, Kasshi inched through the doorway, an arch separated from the rest of the palace by sheer curtains.  Some, the Idiot Brigade in particular, insisted that the empress had ordered the door removed out of love for Kasshi and concern for her safety.  Kasshi knew there was no possibility of that.

An artificial acacia bonsai tree languished in eternal bloom outside Seirya’s chamber.  The memory of girlhood notes they had written one another and hidden among the branches flashed through Kasshi’s mind.  How she wished Mia would walk faster!

As Kasshi raised her fist to knock, trembling overtook her entire arm so that she nearly lost her grip on Mia’s shoulder.  Mia gave her a strange look, but before she could ask anything, the door swung open.

Seirya sat at her dressing table, her mouth full of pins.  A hairbrush hung suspended in air, as well as the indigo robes Kasshi had seen in her dream. 

“Will you be able to get ready and mind your sister?” Mia asked Seirya.

Kasshi bristled.

“Of course.”  Seirya smiled around the pins.  She always possessed a calm Kasshi doubted she would find if she searched all her life. 

“Are you certain you don’t need some help getting ready?” Mia offered.  “I can –“

“I already dismissed my chambermaid,” Seirya explained.  “Why don’t you look on the main hall for a while?  The gathering for the presentation of Alecres’s machine is most impressive.”

“Well, thank you, your highness,” Mia fluttered.  “I believe I shall.” 

“I’m beginning to think servants live on gossip alone,” Kasshi muttered when the door was shut behind Mia.

“Good morning, Kasshi.” Seirya returned to her mirror and began plaiting her silver hair by hand to slow the task down somewhat.  Nonetheless, she gazed back at Kasshi through the glass.  “What is it?”

“I had a vision this morning.”  The walk to Seirya’s room had blunted somewhat the terrifying sights and feelings.  Yet, speaking of it now resurrected everything, but with renewed horror for its imminence.  Kasshi swayed and caught hold of the door handle. Seirya caught her and helped her sit down in the velvet chair near the dressing table.

When Kasshi could speak again, her voice was ragged.  “You must not help the empress with the machine today, Seirya!”

“I have no choice, Kasshi.  Mother requires me to be there, to use my magic to operate the machine.”  Seirya’s face was glass-smooth.  “And this machine is perhaps the most important invention in Teillene history!  If it works the way Alecres claims, we will have a source of boundless power.”

Despite Seirya’s excuses, Kasshi knew she had unsettled her.  She had to keep trying!  “The empress is so strange lately,” Kasshi said.  “She doesn’t eat; she wanders the corridors in the night muttering to herself.”

Seirya’s hairbrush clattered to the floor; the dress followed.  “Kasshi, how do you know this?”  Her blue eyes were wide with alarm.

Kasshi thought back to her dreams, which her attendents’ gossip had confirmed.  “The servants’ tongues wag in the corridors when they think they are alone.  Surely that does not surprise you.  But more, my dreams have shown me the empress when the rest of the palace sleeps.  She enters a secret passage, though her deeds there are inscrutable to me.”

Seirya’s face remained serene, but her voice betrayed her with a quaver.  “I cannot refuse Mother, Kasshi.  But I can enter this demonstration cautious.”

She was going to leave, Kasshi realized in a panic.  “Caution isn’t enough, Seirya!  This machine could kill you!  But if you refuse, it will not work.  The people will not criticize your choice; you are the greatest wizardess in all known Teillene history!”   

Seirya shook her head.  “I’m sorry, Kasshi, but I just don’t believe your dream.”

“I know what I saw!”

“I’m sorry, Kasshi.  But I have to go.”  And with that, Seirya was gone, teleported to what might well be her demise.

Kasshi lurched from the chair, lost her balance and fell to her knees.  Rage and despair filled her blood, fire and ice by turns.  Cursing the magic that was the birthright of every child in Teillene, save her, the cripple, Kasshi dragged herself to Seirya’s bed and pulled herself upright.  A thin sheen of sweat covered her forehead. 

There must be a way she could stop the ceremony.  Even if it were only delayed, it would be time in which she could make Seirya understand! 

Kasshi’s eyes darted frantically around Seirya’s room.  Then she saw the owl statuette mounted in the wall.  Its wings pointed northwest, to the front of the palace.  Teillene historians had spent volumes speculating why the palace, so old it was no longer known which emperor reigned during its construction, had been built with these passages.  On a boring, lonely night, Kasshi herself might have cared.  Now she thanked the unknown one who had given the order, whatever his motivation.  Kasshi hobbled to the stone owl, extra cautious, knowing that another fall would lose her time.  At last, her hands closed around the owl’s reassuring solidarity.  Kasshi pulled on it with all her strength.  Something ground deep in the heart of the walls.  Seirya’s bookshelf had moved, leaving a slender crack.  Kasshi inched toward it.  With a little wriggling, she would just fit through. 

The musty air burned Kasshi’s lungs.  She proceeded with one hand on the wall for balance and to guide her through the dark.  From the other side of the wall, she heard a thunderous rumble.  The ceremony! she realized. 

“The Dark Matter Machine is, essentially, a repository of power greater than even our Star Fire Conduit.”  Alecres, rapturously describing the wonders of his machine.

There was a pause.  When the scientist began to speak again, Kasshi could only assume that someone had asked him a question.

“What is the source of my machine’s perpetual power?  Just as light gives energy, so too does darkness.  Dark matter shall birth a new era in Teillene.”

The passage ended in a bookshelf, empty save for another owl statuette.  Kasshi gripped it; her heart beat faster.  Suddenly she was conscious of how slick her hands had become. The shelf ground against the stone floor, the treads stiff from lack of use.

“The mask on the front of the machine?  It is a decidedly eccentric meter of power.  In building it, my colleagues and I were completely faithful to Meshetal Elawes’s designs.   Unfortunately, he died before he could tell us its significance.”

Emerging from the passage into the imperial audience hall, Kasshi could hear the next question and its answer.

“As a specialist in dark matter, I would like to inquire: during your testing stages, have you found any presences in the dark matter?”

Presences?  The hair on the back of Kasshi’s neck leaped to attention, and her fingertips tingled as she came closer.  

“Life in dark matter?  Do you mean like the demons in The Space Chronicles.”  Several in the front row shared Alecres’s harsh laugh, but half-heartedly.

Kasshi glared at Alecres’s back.  The Space Chronicles, simple children’s stories, were the books with which Seirya had taught her to read.  Despite their lack of complexity, she had yet to see their morals proven wrong.

“No,” the researcher answered.  “Though I have analyzed the nature of dark matter for many years, I have been unable to definitively ascertain just what this presence is.”

“Well,” Alecres declared with alarming arrogance. “My research has shown no ‘presences’ in the dark matter.” 

It was then that Kasshi saw Alecres, really saw him, and remembered him from her fragmented dreams.  Her mind reeled from the sense of walls closing in, of understanding gained too late.  It was Alecres the empress had sneaked through the night-darkened palace halls to meet.  The machine had brought them together, had deepened their ambition so it was nearly an ideology.  Each limping step forward withered Kasshi’s courage, as she remembered the humming voices, the unknown menace empress and experimenter were so eager to introduce to Teillene. 

“It is time.”  The cultured calm of the empress’s voice did not quite hide her anticipation.  “Let us see a demonstration of your Dark Matter Machine, Alecres.”

Kasshi drew in a sharp breath.  With her next step, she stood free of the shadows, yet still unnoticed.

Alecres bowed to the empress.  “As you wish, highness.  The machine requires only the slightest input of magical energy.  Then it will seek dark matter as it passes through the planet, concentrating it in this central portion here.” Alecres pointed to a shield-shaped section at the center of the machine.  “The machine will capture it, and any with the knowledge can draw on it.”

“Seirya, if you will.”  The empress motioned gracefully to the machine

“Yes, mother.”

“Seirya!” Kasshi screamed, so loud it made her throat raw.  Heads turned, Seirya’s included.  Kasshi hobbled toward the center of the platform, past the loathesome machine itself.  She did not know what she would do at this point; all that mattered to her was that Seirya not empower the machine.

The empress swept toward her in elaborate red silk robes trimmed with gold and festooned with firedrops.  Her hair was piled high on her head in ringlets, purest silver against her golden crown.  An expectant smile had spread across her face. 

“My child, you are just in time,” the empress said so all could hear.

The words made Kasshi stumble.  Since the emperor’s death when the twins were three, the empress only acknowledged her kinship with Kasshi to boast about her benevolence, tolerance, whatever quality she wished to impress upon her listener.  Kasshi could not remember the last time she referred to the empress as “Mother.”

Suddenly Seirya was at Kasshi’s side, keeping her from falling.  Kasshi raised her eyes to her twin’s.  What’s happening?

But Seirya did not know.

“By providing us with such a bounty of energy, Alecres has challenged our empire to aspire to heights previously unthinkable.  And so my first use of it will be to heal my daughter Kasshi.”

Kasshi stiffened.  Teillene was advanced enough that the empress might have had her healed at birth.  Yet, she had never done so.      

Seirya had promised Kasshi that when she became empress, she would have her made whole.  Kasshi had resigned herself to a life of attendants and hidden readings in the library.  But now that she faced the altering of the only life she had ever known, her heart became cold with fear.

“Come, child,” the empress coaxed.  

Kasshi backed away from the empress.  As she did, she was able to see the machine for the first time.  It made her think of a hulking beast, its vitals protected with thick shell crowned in spires.  And at the center, a featureless white face stared, the black holes of its eyes strangely compelling.  Kasshi wrenched her gaze away, her blood racing as though she fled a swift pursuer.

She cast a desperate look at Seirya for help.  However, her twin was already locked in her mother’s gaze.  While Kasshi disobeyed the empress daily, albeit without her knowledge, Seirya never had.  And though Kasshi understood, could never be angered with her twin for her obedience, it made her despise the empress more.

Seirya’s magic flowed into the machine, a rain of pale blue stars.  The face on the front shimmered as though it were a mask fallen to the bottom of a sunlit pool.  And then shadows surged from the arcane rods topping the machine.  The darkness shot toward Kasshi and forced her to her knees.  Kasshi screamed as it raced through her body, rewriting the imperfect parts of her.  Then the dark energy deadened all her senses so she could not even hear herself scream or feel her heartbeat to know she still lived.  Gradually the all-encompassing absence lifted, and Kasshi came aware of the marble tiles, tomb-cold against her cheek. 

A second shadow drew Kasshi’s eye.  The empress stood over her, her arms outstretched as though she would help her rise.  Kasshi squinted.  There was something strange about the empress, a darkness that hovered around her, made her shadow stand out like dark ink eclipsing the blue tile.  Before she could come to a complete understanding, the empress drew her hands in; Kasshi was reminded of birds of prey diving for the kill.  The movement proved to be part of the empress’s spell; it jerked Kasshi upright so swiftly that the blood danced in spots before her eyes.

“Kasshi…”  Seirya stared at her as though they were strangers meeting for the first time.

“What did the Dark Matter Machine do?” Kasshi demanded. 

“See for yourself.”  The empress was all graciousness

Kasshi moved toward the empress, found herself at the imposing woman’s side in an instant.  But how?  She lifted her robes, and looking upon her legs, found them whole and strong. 

“You will see for yourself when you come to a mirror,” the empress said, “but you might easily be mistaken for Seirya now.  And that,” she turned to the nobles and science-mages silenced from shock, “was less than one millionth of the Dark Matter machine’s power.  Such a marvel Alecres has blessed us with!”  She drew a deep, shuddering breath of anticipation.  “Why, immortality will be a mere trifle to it!”

Alecres flushed and ran his hand through his hair.  “History will remember us if that happens.”

“History?  Bah!” the empress scoffed.  “If I achieve my design, history will become meaningless.  Now shall be the only time.”

Kasshi shuddered.  The empress’s eyes had never seemed so dark.  She glanced over at Seirya.  We cannot let this continue, Kasshi warned with her eyes.  This power has driven her mad.

“Alecres,” Seirya said.  “Are you aware of any dangers associated with this machine?” 

“Why, no, highness,” Alecres started to say.

The empress rounded on Seirya, a beast on the attack.  “Seirya, what an odd question!  Empower the machine again, daughter, and I will put your fears to rest.  If great feats can be mine, and I only a skilled magician, imagine what is possible for you, whose powers far surpass my own!”

Nobles in the front rows began to jostle and whisper among themselves.  Kasshi felt a surge of hope. 

“Mother, with all due respect, I do not think it is safe.”

“You will do it, Seirya.  I will not accept fear from any daughter of mine!”

“Mother!” Seirya protested.

“It is not necessary to power the machine every time, highness,” Alecres said in an oblivious attempt to be helpful.  “So long as the face retains color, anyone with the knowledge can draw on the dark energy.”

The empress’s smile complemented the greed in her eyes.  The sight made Kasshi’s breath catch in her throat. “How very kind of you to point that out, Alecres.”  Her hand moved in another arcane gesture, a hawk circling.  Kasshi reached toward the empress in an attempt to disrupt her spell, but before she could, darkness again descended on the hall, with more creeping in from the edges like fog.  Seirya screamed and fell to her knees.  An aura like black smoke surrounded her.  Kasshi’s heart twisted in pain as she wondered if her sister were now subjected to that same hell of darkness – of nothing – that had swallowed her.  Even an instant there had been terrifying.

“What have you done to her?” Kasshi demanded.

“This spell will remain until Seirya resolves to obey me.  I knew I should have kept you two apart, twins or not.  You’ve clearly been a bad influence on my obedient, precious daughter.  I can hardly believe you two share the same blood, let alone the same face.”  The empress flung both arms wide.  Alecres and the assembly, the nobles and scientists vanished entirely!  Only Seirya, the empress, and the Dark Matter machine remained.

“You will stop this!” Kasshi declared.  “Take us back to the palace!”

“No one will stop me.  Least of all you!”  Lightning flickered, rich blue against the empty blackness.

Kasshi gasped as the empress sent it arcing toward her.  Although she knew it was futile, she threw up her hands to protect her face.  As she did, a sound like shattering glass exploded in her ears.

“What?” the empress shouted. 

At first Kasshi thought the empress would hurl a second strike.  However, she merely stood there, lightning twisting and writhing through her fingers.  “Ah, that explains it.  When the Dark Matter Machine healed you, it must have shared a measure of its power with you.  Oh, such possibilities.  If this machine can bless one born without magic with the ability to block my power, imagine what it could do for me!”

“You’ll never have that chance!” Kasshi declared, though her doubt demanded to know just what she knew of magic.  Yet it was her only chance to thwart the empress’s madness.

The empress let her lightning fade.  “Do you honestly think to stand against me?”

“Yes!”  Despite her apparent confidence, Kasshi was grateful for the darkness; in it, the empress could not see how she trembled.

“Then I will send you to hell!”  An aura of palest blue surrounded the empress.  She moved her hand as though she gestured to an audience hall filled with people.  Columns of star fire rose where her fingers indicated.  Merely glancing at the blaze burned Kasshi’s eyes.  Yet, the darkness into which the empress had drawn them remained featureless, fathomless.  Kasshi shut her eyes tightly.  Tears sizzled on her cheeks.  Even with her hands covering her eyes, she could still see the fearsome pillars.  Around her, the columns sizzled with maddening heat; it was a wonder that her flesh had not boiled away.

Your hands…

A chorus of many voices pierced her mind through the roar of the star fire.  Although she had never heard them before in her life, Kasshi recognized it as the Dark Matter machine, a conglomerate of many entities that had forcibly been made part of her.

Reach forward.

Kasshi obeyed, trembling and hesitant.  And when she did, darkness fell like curtains over her eyes, screwed shut so tight, she wondered if she would ever open them.  Kasshi finally dared to and realized she stood at the center of one column.  Yet, she could look on the flames without pain; they did not touch her body.

Walk to us.  I know you have the power to feel where we are.

It was as though magnets long-hidden in the center of her forehead and in her gut had found their answering metals.  Following their pull, Kasshi glanced down at her hands.  They had become shadow.  As had the rest of her.

Certain of victory, the empress was laughing.  The sound seemed galaxies away.

Kasshi stood just behind her, out of the star fire’s reach.  Something solid materialized in her hand.  Kasshi glanced down.  Her body had returned to normal, but for the sword she held.  As her eyes moved over it, the blade seemed to change shapes, at one moment as fine and sculpted as a rapier, at the next, a wickedly serrated blade for a slow kill.

The advantage is yours, if you will have it.

Kasshi shuddered.  The empress had no idea that she had escaped the star fire columns. 

Take it! the machine insisted.  At last she will answer for the life you lived!

In those agonized seconds, the pain and humiliation Kasshi had experienced at the empress’s hands became as thorns that had dug into her heart and spread their poison through her blood.  Yet even then, Kasshi experienced a strange sense of internal division.  Part of her recognized the futility of anger with the empress and the danger of it in this situation.  But another embraced what the machine fed her, for even Seirya, her own twin, never dared speak ill of their mother.  Bittersweet, this too-long delayed empathy!

The empress is a madwoman.  Would it not be righteous to destroy her? the voices in the dark matter said again.  To do otherwise would endanger yourself anad your sister.

The machine’s justifications echoed what was in Kasshi’s own mind.  It was only right for all of Teillene was at stake.  No one need know with what feelings she had killed the empress.  The act would be righteous, though her intentions were not purely so.

Yet as Kasshi advanced on the empress with her blade, her steps silent in the roar of the starfire, a wave of energy shot through her body, awakening every nerve.  Kasshi turned to the Dark Matter Machine to see Seirya’s head and shoulders where the Dark Matter Machine’s mask usually was. 

The sword dropped from Kasshi’s hands and dissipated to smoke.  Kasshi rushed to her sister, to the machine that was consuming her.  As she did, all the starfire columns, save one, winked out.

“You still live, I see,” the empress said.  “But only from the power of this machine that you so despise.”

“Enough of this!  Lift the spell you have cast on Seirya!” Kasshi screamed.

For an instant, Kasshi dared to hope that her plea had restored the empress’s senses.  Then she saw the ropes of shadow reaching from the machine.

“You think you know how to use the magic of the Dark Matter Machine?”  The empress’s voice was low, murderous.   “Well, you shall learn from me that your methods are as primitive as stone and iron!”

Kasshi turned her back on the empress.  She cared little if she died, but Seirya would not be the machine’s repast!  Kasshi wrapped her sister in an embrace – an awkward one since the machine was taller than she was – and began to pull.

The empress, meanwhile, concluded the casting of her spell.  Kasshi bent over her sister and braced herself for untold torture in utter darkness.  But suddenly, the last pillar of starfire burned out.  In the silence an agonized scream rang out, so piercing Kasshi felt it in her own chest.  As she screamed against it, Seirya’s hand moved into hers.  Her twin made no sound, only rested her head on Kasshi’s shoulder.  Kasshi felt her sister’s tears on her neck.  But there was no time for sorrow or confusion.  It might have been hours, minutes, compressed years or days that they grappled against the Dark Matter machine in its domain.  

At last, Seirya fell free of the machine.  She and Kasshi tumbled together in a heap and lay blinking in the artificial lights of the palace. 

Amidst the surging tide of nobles’ questions demanding where the twins had gone and what had happened, Alecres’s voice came through clearly. 

“What has happened to the empress?” the mage-scientist demanded.  “Why didn’t she come back with you?”

“She drew on too much of the machine’s power.”  Kasshi’s head ached from the memory of the empress’s scream.  “After that, I do not know; I was too busy saving Seirya--”

“Kasshi, look.”  Seirya pointed.  The crown of Teillene hung from one of the machine’s spires.  Now, more than ever, they resembled the horns of a great beast.

Seirya removed the crown, and together, she and Kasshi examined it.  But for a coating of dust, the gems and gold were unharmed.  “Why didn’t it destroy the crown?”

“It must have control over how it exercises its powers,” Kasshi said.  She was debating whether to add that it had spared Seirya too, when it might have consumed her, when the machine spoke.

“Seirya…daughter…help me.”

Despite the multitude of the machine’s voices, Kasshi discerned the empress’s voice. 

“Empress!”  Alecres tensed.  “Is that you?”

“Yes, Alecres.  Alecres, so wise for your young years.  You must free me,” the machine answered in empress’s voice, and so many others. 

Kasshi looked to the machine in alarm.  Only the faintest lavender tinted the mask, and this so indistinct against the white, she almost doubted her eyes.

“Speak again, empress!  For Teillene’s sake!” Alecres urged.  “Seirya, lend the machine your power!  We might save your mother!”

Kasshi gripped her twin’s arm.  “Don’t listen to him, Seirya!  So long as color remains in the mask, the machine has power.  Until it is entirely spent, we are all in danger.”

“But the empress speaks –“ Alecres protested.

“It is the machine’s will we hear, not the empress’s!  Long ago, it absorbed her heart and mind.  That it seized her body is only completing a process largely finished already.  We must never activate the Dark Matter Machine again, nor any other devices that use dark matter.  We cannot risk that others will be consumed in this fashion.”

“A heartless, ungrateful decision, but I expected it of you, Kasshi.”  It was the empress’s whisper, but Kasshi doubted that Seirya or Alecres heard it.  She looked again to the mask, white as bone, but had it been only a moment ago? 

Alecres saw it, too, the white that signaled the fearsome machine’s return to slumber.  “Seirya,” he pleaded.

“No,” Seirya said.  “Only Kasshi has seen the matter as it is.  The time has come for all of Teillene to open her eyes.”

Alecres threw himself to the ground and wept as though Seirya had condemned him.  Though it pained her to do it, Kasshi ordered that the guards lead him away.  They could not risk the machine’s exploiting him before it was dismantled and Meshetal’s plans destroyed. 

With Alecres gone, Seirya declared her and Kasshi’s double accession, with the coronation to be held the next day.  

When the last of the nobles had departed, Kasshi and Seirya uncovered the empress’s secret room.  Books on dark matter leaned in dizzying stacks against the wall.  A monolith of a desk occupied the center of the room.  Entire handwritten volumes and computer-rendered schematics detailed the empress’s research, as well as her plans for a nightmarish empire in which light and time passed from memory.  Seirya sealed the chamber after setting a blue fire that would consume everything within.  “This room will be all that remains of Mother.  Her tomb that none shall visit,” Seirya murmured when the deed was complete.

The day’s events had tired both Seirya and Kasshi, and the following day, they would face the coronation and conferring with Alecres’s colleagues about unmaking the machine.  Nonetheless, rather than sleep, they wandered the walkway that circled the palace’s uppermost floors.  For the first time, the twins matched strides.  At length, they stopped at a balcony that offered a stunning view of the stars.

“I still cannot believe Mother is gone.”  Seirya’s voice trembled.  “And yet,” Seirya wiped her eyes with her free hand, “she was gone well before the machine destroyed her.  That woman, no, that creature seemed like Mother in every respect.  But inside…  I wonder how long the machine influenced her.”

Kasshi said nothing, but inwardly she seethed that the empress, even dead, was still able to cause such misery.  “Seirya,” Kasshi said.  “You and I will never agree about the woman you call ‘Mother.’  But I want you to remember this, despite the dreadful events of today.  In my dream, the machine killed you, as well as the empress, Alecres….everyone.  We can be grateful for one thing that happened today: the fact that you still live.”

Seirya blinked as though she had emerged from a trance.  “Thank you, Kasshi, for reminding me of what is important.”  Kasshi felt the warmth of her sister’s smile as though it were her own. 

The twins joined hands and resolved to face whatever challenges the next morning would bring, together.

Top of Page

Familiar Reflections from an Airplane Window

By Matthew Dexter

He reclines his seat, crosses those handsome ankles just below the chair in front, black dress socks beneath the pale borderline of his hairy existence. Our aisle is right above the left wing. Our airplane has at least one crying baby.

His head sinks deeper into the leather. He looks into the engine and wonders whether she felt anything, what it must feel like to die in a plane crash. Is there time to understand the horrific inevitability of the situation; that cataclysmic pulse of light through your pupils; final burst of fire? Where do the ashes fall?

He has a soft pack of Marlboro Reds sticking out of his breast pocket, Time Magazine rolled up in his right hand, brown stubble across his face like a young Jack Kerouac. His sister died on a Boeing 747 over the ocean ten years to this moment. He’s hoping he doesn't see her ghost in the shadows of the terminal. But he always does.

The engines whimper to life, we pull away from the gate. Prostate cancer has its grip on his last years on this planet, as it does mine, but what’s worse is his sister perishing without saying goodbye.

Arizona sky is indigo, butterflies settle into his stomach as the stewardess--excuse me; flight attendant--settles into her routine: “Please put your seat up sir,” she says, “we're about to take off.”

“Da ya have any ma ugh pillows?” the lady on the aisle across from us asks, blowing her nose into a miserable folded Kleenex, blue blanket over her body like a mummy.

“I'll check for you,” flight attendant says, snapping shut overhead compartments in perfect symphony with the other woman in matching uniform working the back end of the plane.

He wonders whether his sister actually lost consciousness instantly as the National Transportation Safety Board claimed in their initial reports. Since then documents have emerged from the coroner’s office stating that a couple dozen doomed passengers “could have been alive on impact…even those few miles flying on inertia, empty business class and cabin could have been within their vision…empty black ocean below.”

Flight attendant returns with her white pillow, hard as sandpaper, and he just stares out the window as we line up for take-off.

“Flight attendants, please prepare for take-off.”

A few seconds later the engines roar to life and a tear rolls down his right check as we tear down the runway, ancient aliens and demonic faces admonish his complacence and he rolls up Time tighter as we recline, purple knuckles rising into the indigo. She always enjoyed that feeling.

Did she know what would happen thirteen minutes later? Does she feel what I feel as the handsome man unbuckles his belt, stands up, budges over my groin with his elbows, bolts down the aisle, struggling to open the emergency door as flight attendants and a couple heroic men try to restrain him? Does he see that bright warm golden light?

Top of Page

Smoke

by Chris Castle

The radio whirls in and out of life; messages from the authorities are muddled as if power shifts by the week. All other stations are static now and dead. She misses the phone ins she played at night before all this began, that would keep her company and push her steadily into sleep.

There is only the view from her windows, the viewing of the bodies and the flashes of those not yet dead. Not yet dead or too far beyond death to stop running. She thought she saw one a week ago; manic and jagged a fast forward version of the junkies she used to know. She wonders if there is a rhyme or a reason to who is taken and why.

It was a joke; the woman who was forgotten about during Armageddon. She moved from thinking it to saying out loud to screaming it; sometimes she wonders if she has lost the grip she had and the windows are simply reflecting the damage inside her own head

Then the smoke. The smoke. It began billowing a few days before, as the radio finally died; even the government turned to static now; the only voice left her own. The smoke that seeped on and on, during the night and the day; as constant as the static, the sun, the moon. The smoke that made her think a change had come, a sign, a signal, hope.

She dressed in layers, ending in her winter coat. The skies were non-descript now, neither bright nor wet, both burning and falling. She wore the coat in order to slip as many knives as possible into the deep low lung pockets. Her trainers, thick jeans and her wallet, though she wondered how her nerve would hold when offered the chance of looting?

She unlocked all the doors, took a deep breath. She tied the scarf around her nose and mouth and pulled the door open. The sky was cluttered then, specks of ash heavy in the sky. She had wanted to embrace the air, the attack of the outside, but instead she found herself ducking down and walking low into the fumes and the thickness of the air.

She walked the empty streets towards the smoke. She surprised herself by not stopping to gawk at the overturned cars, the open house doors. Instead she walked towards the smoke, only really noticing the crunch of each street, the countless sprays of glass under her feet from each broken house and put down car.

She walked into the thicker smoke as she turned towards the city centre. It was pitch-black; so bad she had to put her hands out to feel her way. All the knives in the world and no flash light. She almost started to laugh. Then she turned another corner and the light was so blinding, she almost fell down onto the broken glass pavement.

A funeral pyre reaching as high as a skyscraper. Bodies piled up so high and so perfectly she had to crane her neck to see where the smoke climbed from. Every one she’d ever seen, past in the street, brushed against on a train, burning in front of her. A city of bodies being passed along and stacked by soldiers, by cranes, by an invisible army wearing white overalls and gas marks. And even before she had a chance to turn and run arms seized her, not even taking the time to shake the knives form her pockets and led her towards the pyre.

Her body became light and somehow not her own. The scarf fell away but she didn’t call out, didn’t scream. Beyond scared and crying and defeated, she kept her eyes open. And even as she was carried closer, she couldn’t help but think how beautiful it all was. How perfect the flames and how beautiful the ashes and right the bodies seemed to be, blackened and burning. As if that was their purpose, their reason and their duty. She was close enough to see their dark eyes; burnt and perfect. Then finally she reached for their arms and let herself be pulled inside.

Tethered

by Michael Shone

Douglas stretched for the ship's window, coming to a stop, twisting around.

        "What's going on, Doug?" Mikey said.

        Douglas drifted and saw his tether snagged on the exhausted satellite they'd already abandoned.  "Little problem."  He was only inches short of the airlock.

        "Yeah, I can see that from here."  Mikey waved from behind the cockpit window.  "I'll get into my suit and come grab you."

        Douglas looked at his air level.  "I'm on fifteen minutes."

        "Oh," Mikey said.  It would take at least that long to get back into the suit and cycle through the lock.

        "I'll have to cut loose."

        "No, no," Mikey yelled.  "Inertia will fling you too far off.  You're already spinning with the dead bird."

        "I can make it," Douglas said.  "If I can just swing around and cut the tether."

        "You've got a bad jet, remember."  They'd serviced all the backpacks last time they'd put in on Diemos, but Douglas's one had still been cutting out.

        "Oh, that's right.  Yeah, it's totally dead now."

        "So, what, you're going to swim over?"

        Douglas laughed.  "Gotta keep the exertion down, save oh-two."

        "Funny man."

        Douglas got his hand around onto the tether.  He could see the black remains of the satellite, spinning a little just to keep it from lurching back at the ship anytime.  In a few years it would burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, its isotopes effectively neutralized where no one would ever be endangered.

        He could see where his tether had caught, in the little crease where the gun arm had got out of alignment after the incident with the Chinese.  Douglas pulled the blade from its secure pouch and shifted to cut the rope.  It had gone slack from his movements, so he had to reel it in a little.

        "Are you trying to get back to it?" Mikey said.

        "Need the tether taut to cut."

        "Just make a loop then, if you're so insistent on cutting loose.  Hurry, we've got to light the retros to send it on its way."

        "Yeah, because with ... twelve minutes of oxy I'm going to dawdle, right."

        "You just shouldn't have stayed out so long anyway."

        "This crappy suit of yours is busted."

        "Yeah, well, if we ever make any money off a job, I'll get it repaired."

        Douglas stopped listening.  He twisted the rope into a circle and put the knife through.  "Uh-oh."

        "Uh-oh what?"

        "Um.  Lost the knife."  He could see it spinning away, glinting from the distant sun, another little Mars satellite.

        "I'm coming out."

        "Not enough time.  I'm going to pull over to the satellite and unsnag it."  Douglas grabbed along the rope and pulled himself closer, arm over arm.

        "Well how are you going to get back in then?"

        "You'll see."  He was nearly there.  He could see where the tether had gotten caught, knotted in a V where the gun mount was damaged.  He just had to reach over and pull it up.

        "I've got you at five minutes."

        "I say six."

        "Yeah, keep breathing shallow."

        Douglas saw something on the side of the satellite.  A little blue flashing light on the retro pack they'd attached to dump it.  "Hey, is this thing on auto?"

        "No.  It'll fire when I flick the countdown switch.  And then ... uh-oh."

        "What?  What uh-oh."

        "I switched it on."

        "You what?"

        "Well, you distracted me with the whole tether thing."

        "How long?"

        "Oh.  Eight seconds.  Seven."

        Douglas wrestled with the tether, but it wouldn't budge.  "Crap."

        "Jump."

        "That was my plan, but I'm still tied on."

        "Two seconds.  Jump now."

        Douglas leapt away from the satellite.  The engine ignited, flaring just ten feet from him.  The satellite accelerated quickly.  The tether went taut again.

        Douglas swung around.

        The gun moved.

        "Hey," Douglas said.

        The gun fired.

        Douglas spun away, the cauterised end of the tether flicking against his helmet.

        "Huh," Mikey said.  "Lucky I found the override controls for that old gun."

        Douglas sighed.  "I didn't think it had any power left."

        "I juiced up from the reactor.  It's leaking like Chernobyl .  Hold on, I'll come and get you."

        Douglas watched the satellite shoot away.  It wasn't heading for Jupiter, he realised.  His pendulum swing had yanked it off course.  "Please tell me it's heading for the sun."

        "I think I can reach you," Mikey said.

        Douglas could see Mars rolling along below.  They would pass over Olympus soon.  "Tell me the trajectory."  He only had a minute of air left, nominally.  He could see the bright pinprick of the retropack still firing.

        "Nearly gotcha."

        The ship came up and Douglas grabbed a rung beside the airlock.

        "Okay," Mikey said.  "Cycling you in now."

        "Where's it going?" Douglas said.

        "Down,"  Mikey said.

        "Down?"  Douglas slipped into the lock and dialled the door closed.

        "A half orbit around Mars," Mikey said, "then into the Valles."

        "We," Douglas said, snapping his helmet open and sucking air, "are gonna be in so much trouble."

Top of Page

Voyeur

By Matthew Dexter

The curtains never closed. We watched with awe as they carried on nonchalant as the moon rose higher. Hookahs smoking, hand jobs, holistic massages at midnight; house all lit up like Christmas. The plastic tree in the corner, evening it shed shadows on the linoleum. We would turn off all our lights to make it feel like the IMAX movie theatre. Mom cooked popcorn. Dad took out the telescope to add commentary about extreme close-ups. They cried, shouted, made love, lived.

The days wore on. When the sun set the neighborhood would wake as one, yawning, come alive, brewing coffee with the dawning dusk, peeping into someone else’s world. We got used to everything, naked, we shed our skin, became desensitized, expecting madness, majesty, monotony.

Months wore on, years, decades. We grew cancer, old, passed away. Nobody knew the answers to why we watched, what kept us fixated on the house all lit and alive. They wrinkled, went to sleep earlier. He grew bald, nearly deaf. She shriveled up and then down like a flower.

Their intimate moments in the kitchen were slower, more desperate. The shadows stayed the same. They made love fewer and farther in-between. Wars were waged. Politicians were assassinated. Babies were born. Neighbors came and went. Seasons changed, tides turned. No reason we needed to keep watching. One evening the lights went out for good.  

Top of Page

Forsaken Vacation

By Matthew Dexter

The hostel bed is empty,

except for a cool refreshing chill from the open window,

calling my name as raindrops fall like feathers on a tin roof in Bangladesh .

Hoping for a blanket, I wonder what happened to that girl on the street,

dragged inside the slum by the man with the face of Satan.

Praying for no more nightmares,

something rises from the ether and crawls beneath the blanket.

“Hold me tighter man,” she says.

Top of Page

Hunter of Darkness

By William Conway

I

That night

It rained that night

It was lit bright by the full moon,

Lances of pure silver stabbing the earth with luminance

You came to me that night

Silken hued, a vixen of shadow

And pleaded with me, to come with you

To go to a place heard of only in legend.

You lured me with oaths of freedom,

You promised me eternal pleasure.

You offered me the night,

And showed me dreams of dark paradise

You beckoned me,

Called to me,

Your lips drawing caresses from the wind,

But I,

I . . .

II

That night

It rained that night

It was lit by the blessed moon,

Weeping its silver tears for lost children

I came to you that night

Armored with naught but your heart, a hunter of darkness

Of all of them, I wanted you,

You, who had shown a strength beyond mere muscle.

I showed you a future that only the gods dare dream of,

A future of forbidden ecstasies,

Nirvana that others know nothing save jealousy

You hesitated, uncertain,

But I knew you would join with me,

And I waited for you, for you,

Your eyes whorls of strife,

But you,

You . . .

III

That night

It rained that night

It was lit by the accursed moon

Spewing its silver blight upon the earth.

She went to him that night

Cruel intent, a vile enchantress

She seduced him into her trance,

And we could only watch, again,

And hate him as we hated ourselves,

For our weakness,

For believing in her promises of night.

Now, self-loathing,

We are chained by her “freedom,”

And soon he will be one of us, ensnared by legendary beauty

She expected another slave,

Anticipated him,

Spinning her spell of silver,

And he,

He . . .

IV

That night.

It rained that night.

But by the light of the full moon,

As those lances of silver drove down from the abyssal night,

Shedding their luminance upon this dour earth,

You came to me,

Silken hued, the mistress of deception

You pleaded with me, to come with you

But I saw through your homespun legend

On silent ears did your lures fall,

On silent eyes did your promises fade

You offered me the night,

But by the light of the full moon

And its lances of silver,

I did finally break free of your dark paradise

You beckoned me,

Curling the shadows in command,

Your lips drawing kisses from the dark,

But I,

. . . am no patron to the night.

Top of Page

Top of Page

Top of Page