Gregory Adams's Blog
May 10, 2017
The Bottle
"Where is the crew?" the Dane called out. I could hear the superstition in his voice, the little coward.
The small ship rocked with another big wave, and the lantern swung in the Dane's hand. "I checked the crew cabins," he said. "There's no one in them, no sign of a living soul."
"Give me the light," I said, taking it from him. "Show me."
The Dane knew his boats. He led me straight to the crew quarters. They were empty, as he had said. The chests had been thrown open, some of the goods scattered. "Looks like someone beat us to it," I said.
"That was me," the Dane confessed. Looting on his own, and no shame in his voice.
Alvaro came in, then. "No sign of anyone on board," he said. "Damnedest thing."
"I don't need your opinion, Mr. Alvaro," I said. "Grab everything that we can carry." As I spoke, there was a great wailing screech as the sea dragged the hull of one ship against the other. "Be quick about it."
My men were good pirates, and the empty ship had them scared. They had the place apart in no time.
We took the swag and locked it down. I wasn't about to be divvying it up by lantern light. Then we set the sails and posted watches. It had been too dark to tell much about the boat we'd boarded, and I wanted to be as far from it as we could come daybreak. Anyone could be looking for it.
Come morning, I was in poor shape. I had been awake half the night with dreams. Not nightmares, but dreams, dreams of my wife and daughter. I dream about them frequently, but until that night I have only been able to see them at the bottom of the sea, long hair waving in the current, fish at their eyes. Any memory of them alive had been lost to me, hidden behind how I had seen them last, and how I knew them to be now. The misery of seeing them again whole, but forever lost to me, left me shaken. Some of the other men looked as bad, save the African Jamaal.
We went at once to sorting the swag. We had no trouble with it until the bottle, a blue glass bottle, empty as far as I could tell, and stopped with a cork that still bore tooth marks where it had been pulled. The Dane wanted it at once. He had been quiet throughout, while I held things up, asked who was for what, and Mr. Alvaro kept record. There were only six of us so it went fast until we got to the bottle. The Dane put up then, and he did so with vigor.
"Who even rescued such a thing?" I asked, holding the bottle up to the sun to look through it. It was empty, as I said.
"That's would be mine, Captain." The Dane said. He wanted it so bad that I wanted to keep it back from him. It's easy to want to make the Dane suffer, with his small size and rotting nose.
"What for?" I asked. "There's nothing in it."
The Dane swallowed something and kept his hands out. "That's all I'm asking, Captain," The rest of the crew was watching me. He hadn't asked for anything else, so I threw him the bottle, although doing this pained me. As it flew towards him, I saw the crew all look after it. I hadn’t been me they'd been watching; it was the bottle.
The Dane went below with his prize. We went through the rest of the swag, but the life had gone from us. When we were done, I retired to my cabin. There were clouds off of the bow, but Mr. Alvaro could manage for a while.
I dreamed of them again. And this time, I knew where they were. I woke up. The ship was rolling, and I could hear rain. I put on my cutlass and my pistols.
Mr. Alvaro was dead outside my cabin, a dagger in his chest. I stepped over him without a thought. I went topside, where the rain was whipping across the deck like grapeshot. Two other crewmen were here, dead, but I didn't look to see how they died. The wet sails were creaking and would tear from their own weight soon, but I would be off the ship before then.
I had seen it in the dream; the blue-glass bottle was a door, and it would take me to my wife, my child.
I found Jamaal and the Dane struggling by the rail. Jamaal had the bottle in one hand. He was trying to hold the Dane off with the other. I shot the Dane in the back, the crack and boom of the pistol almost lost in the shriek of the storm. The Dane slid down Jamaal, his fingers clutching at him. The Dane pulled Jamaal's shirt off. I saw he was wearing the spirit bag he swore protected him from devils, hags, what have you.
The African saw me and called out. "Captain, the men have gone mad! It's this bottle," he said. "Alvaro tried to take it from the Dane, he said it was full of gold. The Dane swore it was full of women. They fought for it like dogs, Captain. It's empty, but they killed each other for it." I pulled another pistol and shot Jamaal in the chest. The spirit bag exploded. I watched Jamaal's eyes go wide, see death, and then, as they faded, see something else. Something curious.
I crossed the deck, grabbing the bottle as it rolled from his grasp. I pulled the cork free with my teeth and put my eye to the rim.
We were all wrong. The bottle is not full of gold or women, and it is not a door.
It is a mouth, and it is full of teeth.
The End
The Bottle is a story from The River Above: Thirteen Strange Stories by Gregory Adams available in paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com
The River Above: And Other Strange Stories
The small ship rocked with another big wave, and the lantern swung in the Dane's hand. "I checked the crew cabins," he said. "There's no one in them, no sign of a living soul."
"Give me the light," I said, taking it from him. "Show me."
The Dane knew his boats. He led me straight to the crew quarters. They were empty, as he had said. The chests had been thrown open, some of the goods scattered. "Looks like someone beat us to it," I said.
"That was me," the Dane confessed. Looting on his own, and no shame in his voice.
Alvaro came in, then. "No sign of anyone on board," he said. "Damnedest thing."
"I don't need your opinion, Mr. Alvaro," I said. "Grab everything that we can carry." As I spoke, there was a great wailing screech as the sea dragged the hull of one ship against the other. "Be quick about it."
My men were good pirates, and the empty ship had them scared. They had the place apart in no time.
We took the swag and locked it down. I wasn't about to be divvying it up by lantern light. Then we set the sails and posted watches. It had been too dark to tell much about the boat we'd boarded, and I wanted to be as far from it as we could come daybreak. Anyone could be looking for it.
Come morning, I was in poor shape. I had been awake half the night with dreams. Not nightmares, but dreams, dreams of my wife and daughter. I dream about them frequently, but until that night I have only been able to see them at the bottom of the sea, long hair waving in the current, fish at their eyes. Any memory of them alive had been lost to me, hidden behind how I had seen them last, and how I knew them to be now. The misery of seeing them again whole, but forever lost to me, left me shaken. Some of the other men looked as bad, save the African Jamaal.
We went at once to sorting the swag. We had no trouble with it until the bottle, a blue glass bottle, empty as far as I could tell, and stopped with a cork that still bore tooth marks where it had been pulled. The Dane wanted it at once. He had been quiet throughout, while I held things up, asked who was for what, and Mr. Alvaro kept record. There were only six of us so it went fast until we got to the bottle. The Dane put up then, and he did so with vigor.
"Who even rescued such a thing?" I asked, holding the bottle up to the sun to look through it. It was empty, as I said.
"That's would be mine, Captain." The Dane said. He wanted it so bad that I wanted to keep it back from him. It's easy to want to make the Dane suffer, with his small size and rotting nose.
"What for?" I asked. "There's nothing in it."
The Dane swallowed something and kept his hands out. "That's all I'm asking, Captain," The rest of the crew was watching me. He hadn't asked for anything else, so I threw him the bottle, although doing this pained me. As it flew towards him, I saw the crew all look after it. I hadn’t been me they'd been watching; it was the bottle.
The Dane went below with his prize. We went through the rest of the swag, but the life had gone from us. When we were done, I retired to my cabin. There were clouds off of the bow, but Mr. Alvaro could manage for a while.
I dreamed of them again. And this time, I knew where they were. I woke up. The ship was rolling, and I could hear rain. I put on my cutlass and my pistols.
Mr. Alvaro was dead outside my cabin, a dagger in his chest. I stepped over him without a thought. I went topside, where the rain was whipping across the deck like grapeshot. Two other crewmen were here, dead, but I didn't look to see how they died. The wet sails were creaking and would tear from their own weight soon, but I would be off the ship before then.
I had seen it in the dream; the blue-glass bottle was a door, and it would take me to my wife, my child.
I found Jamaal and the Dane struggling by the rail. Jamaal had the bottle in one hand. He was trying to hold the Dane off with the other. I shot the Dane in the back, the crack and boom of the pistol almost lost in the shriek of the storm. The Dane slid down Jamaal, his fingers clutching at him. The Dane pulled Jamaal's shirt off. I saw he was wearing the spirit bag he swore protected him from devils, hags, what have you.
The African saw me and called out. "Captain, the men have gone mad! It's this bottle," he said. "Alvaro tried to take it from the Dane, he said it was full of gold. The Dane swore it was full of women. They fought for it like dogs, Captain. It's empty, but they killed each other for it." I pulled another pistol and shot Jamaal in the chest. The spirit bag exploded. I watched Jamaal's eyes go wide, see death, and then, as they faded, see something else. Something curious.
I crossed the deck, grabbing the bottle as it rolled from his grasp. I pulled the cork free with my teeth and put my eye to the rim.
We were all wrong. The bottle is not full of gold or women, and it is not a door.
It is a mouth, and it is full of teeth.
The End
The Bottle is a story from The River Above: Thirteen Strange Stories by Gregory Adams available in paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com
The River Above: And Other Strange Stories
May 3, 2017
Dun Dun Dah Dah Dun
Upon his return from the bleak wastelands of mankind’s possible pasts, Terence Lommi was the most famous man on Earth.
Every living soul knew his name, had been told how he had braved the great magnetic fields that separated the ages and changed time so that the world would not suffer the looming apocalypse. This one man, through bravery and recklessness beyond even that of the most revered hero of mankind’s past, had saved all of humanity and made the world whole again.
He had done this at immeasurable cost to himself.
“No change.”
Dr. Osborne sighed in frustration. His patient--the greatest hero mankind had ever known--stood motionless before him.
“So let’s sum up,” Dr. Osborne said. “We have no evidence of pulmonary or cardiovascular activity. No muscular response to any stimulus, only a brain wave pattern that is concurrent with that of a living human being, correct?”
“That’s right doctor.” his aide replied.
“What haven’t we tried?”
“How about an oil can?”
Dr. Osborne laughed in spite of himself. Everyone in this room had been narrowly spared death by nuclear fireball. There was bound to be some giddiness among them.
Terence Lommi heard their laughter. His passage through the great magnetic fields had changed him in ways no one could have imagined, but it had not killed him. Although his body was no longer flesh and bone, he could hear, could see, could comprehend what was happening outside of his iron prison in ways no other mortal had ever experienced.
What the doctors did not know and could never understand, was that Terence’s relationship with Time itself had been irreversibly changed. He could see Time now: could see how it surrounded him like a cocoon of brittle glass. Should Terence move the slightest, even to speak, he would disturb that careful arrangement, and alter the past and the future. The present he had given so much to preserve would be again changed.
He had given his humanity so that the final war would be averted. He dares not move for fear of disturbing what he had built at such sacrifice.
Five years passed. Nothing could be done with Terence. It was decided that what had come back through the magnetic fields wasn’t Terence at all, but some kind of simulacrum, a residue of that hero’s passage through time. Brain waves could be measured, but consciousness was impossible in a body composed of an indestructible alien iron alloy. Thought required life, and life required the motion of biological processes. The iron form, it was decided, could not have one without the other. It was clear that Terence Lommi had sacrificed his life to save humanity, and this hard truth was eventually accepted even by those slow to concede hope.
It seemed fitting that the iron echo of Terence Lommi as the world had known him should be put in a place of honor. The largest crowd of humanity ever assembled gathered to witness the dedication of the monument to Terence, with the hero’s own metal form at the center of the memorial. Terence heard the words commemorating his achievement, and his gratitude at their appreciation pushed back the fear and the madness, for a while.
A decade passed.
Terence well understood the correlation between his position in space and human history’s place in time. When sailing through the endless shadows of Earth’s possible pasts, he had made changes to the flow of time that defused the inevitability of a nuclear holocaust, but the price for the persistence of the future he had made was his own liberty. He was the only residue of the old future in this new present, and his slightest action could cause ruptures along the timeline that may well doom humanity anew.
Lost to his thoughts and the non-Euclidian madness of the universe his impossible, organic-steel senses perceived, Terence might have supposed there was some relationship between his own mental state and the well-being of humanity, but the truth was far less esoteric.
The war he had prevented had nearly happened due to the accumulated actions of all of humanity. Terence had put the train of history upon new tracks, but the engine that drove human events still ran on the same fuel and was guided by similar hands. Within ten years, Terence’s contribution had lost its meaning, and the second chance he had afforded humanity had fatally decayed.
His steel body stood atop a pillar in a square that for years had seen tens of thousands of visitors, each here to thank the man who had given all to save them. Across the decade, however, the visits became fewer as the scattered seeds of the averted war took hold and sprouted anew. Fifteen years after the experiment that had reversed six hours of nuclear exchange by 23 nations, the world was once again on the brink, Terence Lommi was all but forgotten, and he was now irretrievably insane.
A running gun battle was being fought around the monument when Terence took his first step in nearly two decades. All around him, invisible panes of space/time, two-dimensional manifestations of possibility shattered and as each broke, some part of the world changed. Cities became forests, deserts became seas, the dead rose, the living died, whole species disappeared to be replaced by impossible horrors that had no place in the settled world man had come to accept as reality.
And as Terence walked, with fury at his wasted sacrifice the only emotion strong enough to remain afloat in the turbulent seas of his madness, he served his warrior’s duty. He took a rotary Vulcan gun from a soldier who shook in impudent fear at the sight of the walking steel messiah, and Terence Lommi began killing.
There was only one sliver of identity left to Terence, and he gave it voice, loud and strong, louder even than the working gun that claimed the lives of the men and women, the children he had once saved.
“I...” he shouted with all the volume his steel lungs could give, “AM IRON MAN!”
The End
Every living soul knew his name, had been told how he had braved the great magnetic fields that separated the ages and changed time so that the world would not suffer the looming apocalypse. This one man, through bravery and recklessness beyond even that of the most revered hero of mankind’s past, had saved all of humanity and made the world whole again.
He had done this at immeasurable cost to himself.
“No change.”
Dr. Osborne sighed in frustration. His patient--the greatest hero mankind had ever known--stood motionless before him.
“So let’s sum up,” Dr. Osborne said. “We have no evidence of pulmonary or cardiovascular activity. No muscular response to any stimulus, only a brain wave pattern that is concurrent with that of a living human being, correct?”
“That’s right doctor.” his aide replied.
“What haven’t we tried?”
“How about an oil can?”
Dr. Osborne laughed in spite of himself. Everyone in this room had been narrowly spared death by nuclear fireball. There was bound to be some giddiness among them.
Terence Lommi heard their laughter. His passage through the great magnetic fields had changed him in ways no one could have imagined, but it had not killed him. Although his body was no longer flesh and bone, he could hear, could see, could comprehend what was happening outside of his iron prison in ways no other mortal had ever experienced.
What the doctors did not know and could never understand, was that Terence’s relationship with Time itself had been irreversibly changed. He could see Time now: could see how it surrounded him like a cocoon of brittle glass. Should Terence move the slightest, even to speak, he would disturb that careful arrangement, and alter the past and the future. The present he had given so much to preserve would be again changed.
He had given his humanity so that the final war would be averted. He dares not move for fear of disturbing what he had built at such sacrifice.
Five years passed. Nothing could be done with Terence. It was decided that what had come back through the magnetic fields wasn’t Terence at all, but some kind of simulacrum, a residue of that hero’s passage through time. Brain waves could be measured, but consciousness was impossible in a body composed of an indestructible alien iron alloy. Thought required life, and life required the motion of biological processes. The iron form, it was decided, could not have one without the other. It was clear that Terence Lommi had sacrificed his life to save humanity, and this hard truth was eventually accepted even by those slow to concede hope.
It seemed fitting that the iron echo of Terence Lommi as the world had known him should be put in a place of honor. The largest crowd of humanity ever assembled gathered to witness the dedication of the monument to Terence, with the hero’s own metal form at the center of the memorial. Terence heard the words commemorating his achievement, and his gratitude at their appreciation pushed back the fear and the madness, for a while.
A decade passed.
Terence well understood the correlation between his position in space and human history’s place in time. When sailing through the endless shadows of Earth’s possible pasts, he had made changes to the flow of time that defused the inevitability of a nuclear holocaust, but the price for the persistence of the future he had made was his own liberty. He was the only residue of the old future in this new present, and his slightest action could cause ruptures along the timeline that may well doom humanity anew.
Lost to his thoughts and the non-Euclidian madness of the universe his impossible, organic-steel senses perceived, Terence might have supposed there was some relationship between his own mental state and the well-being of humanity, but the truth was far less esoteric.
The war he had prevented had nearly happened due to the accumulated actions of all of humanity. Terence had put the train of history upon new tracks, but the engine that drove human events still ran on the same fuel and was guided by similar hands. Within ten years, Terence’s contribution had lost its meaning, and the second chance he had afforded humanity had fatally decayed.
His steel body stood atop a pillar in a square that for years had seen tens of thousands of visitors, each here to thank the man who had given all to save them. Across the decade, however, the visits became fewer as the scattered seeds of the averted war took hold and sprouted anew. Fifteen years after the experiment that had reversed six hours of nuclear exchange by 23 nations, the world was once again on the brink, Terence Lommi was all but forgotten, and he was now irretrievably insane.
A running gun battle was being fought around the monument when Terence took his first step in nearly two decades. All around him, invisible panes of space/time, two-dimensional manifestations of possibility shattered and as each broke, some part of the world changed. Cities became forests, deserts became seas, the dead rose, the living died, whole species disappeared to be replaced by impossible horrors that had no place in the settled world man had come to accept as reality.
And as Terence walked, with fury at his wasted sacrifice the only emotion strong enough to remain afloat in the turbulent seas of his madness, he served his warrior’s duty. He took a rotary Vulcan gun from a soldier who shook in impudent fear at the sight of the walking steel messiah, and Terence Lommi began killing.
There was only one sliver of identity left to Terence, and he gave it voice, loud and strong, louder even than the working gun that claimed the lives of the men and women, the children he had once saved.
“I...” he shouted with all the volume his steel lungs could give, “AM IRON MAN!”
The End
April 23, 2017
Happy Birthday The River Above!
Happy Birthday to my second short story collection The River Above! 13 strange stories by me and 9 wonderful illustrations by seven brilliant artists first published on this day in 2016. I'm proud of the stories in this book and it was a tremendous privilege to collaborate with the artists and designers who made it possible to achieve the polished, professional book I had envisioned.
I'll share some excerpts and share higher resolution images of the illustrations in the coming weeks. The book is on Amazon as a paperback and in a Kindle edition.
I'll share some excerpts and share higher resolution images of the illustrations in the coming weeks. The book is on Amazon as a paperback and in a Kindle edition.
April 19, 2017
Trees, Wind, Insects
Day One
I think I made good time today- at least twenty miles, which is no joke with the pack I’m carrying and the terrain I’m covering. I might have gone further, but when I found a shelter I decided to stop here for the night because I don’t know where the next one will be. I have to laugh - eight good hours of hiking and the AT maps are already useless. Where’s the next shelter? The maps do not say.
It puts me in mind of what the cabbie said when he let me off at the foot of Mount Springer this morning:
“You can say Route 95 runs from Georgia to Maine; you can say that the Appalachian Mountains run that distance because both of those things do run it, in solid, unbroken chains. But to say that the Appalachian Trail runs that way, that’s less certain.”
I asked him why he thought the trail didn’t really go all the way to Maine.
“The trail’s not one thing is all,” he said. “It’s scores of little trails, maybe hundreds, all broken up and tied together at places, but it’s more stepping stones than a bridge, and the space between those stones can be wide.” He added about six ‘i’s’ to wide, dragging the word out – ‘wiiiiide.’
I asked him if many folks were coming to the trail now and he said it was slow, which didn’t surprise me, the way things are.
Morning: Second Day
No other hikers stopped at my shelter last night, which was a surprise. I rested for about eleven hours, which seems like a long time. Then again, I’m probably better off. I’d worry they had the flu and they would worry that I did. H5N1 had killed conversation even more swiftly than it had killed people.
Evening, Second Day
Traces of people today, some litter, tracks of some solid hiking boots, probably brand new, stamped in the softening mud of the trail. Someone’s just ahead of me, I think. It was warmer, today. Spring is coming.
Morning, Third Day
My third day without news of any kind. I could switch on the radio, but for what? To hear the latest H5N1 death tolls? Or to hear if there had been any more follow-up attacks? D.C. was the last I heard. America is sick and her enemies know it. We look back at 2001, and think of it as the good old days.
God, it’s so peaceful out here. Trees, wind, insects.
Evening, Seventh Day
Just three days to get bored of the writing ritual? I guess it was more than boredom—writing was just turning over all the things I came to the trail to forget.
I am guessing there was another attack because I haven’t heard any planes overhead for days and days.
The maps are more useless than I had imagined. I am on the trail, I know, I must be—there’s been no other trail to take!--but I haven’t seen another person. Not one. Even the footprints are gone. There must have been a way off of the trail I’m following, and that mysterious person ahead of me took it.
I look back at my notes and see I mentioned it getting warmer. Well, that is certainly the case! I thought February in Georgia would be cool here in the mountains. It’s not. It was in the 80’s yesterday, and as to the mountains, the trail runs along flat and true, as if I have descended into some lowlands that, according to my useless maps, simply should not be here.
The insects are tremendous, both in number and in size.
Morning, Tenth Day
I haven’t seen a glimpse of civilization- just the trail, well defined and easy to follow, but the blazes have disappeared, I can’t recall the last one I saw.
No shelters either. No boot prints, litter, traffic sounds, airplanes. Last night I looked up at the stars, hoping to catch sight of a satellite winking as it passed along. No luck.
I feel lightheaded. Maybe I brought the flu here with me.
Morning, Fifteenth Day
Over 100 degrees today.
A fallen tree bigger around than a city bus blocked the trail today. I had to climb it—climb the trunk of a fallen tree! The ridges of the bark were so deep it was like scaling a ladder. When I dropped down to the other side I startled a pillbug bigger than my head. I don’t know which one of us was more frightened. I checked my field guide but found no match for the animal or the tree, although some poking around in the thick fern cover that grows in the shadows of these giant trees turned up many other examples of the giant pillbugs.
The days are getting shorter, by my measure. Twelve hours of daylight, eleven hours of darkness- that’s just 23 hours.
I must be sicker than I feel.
Day 21
I have reached a sea. It is broad, shallow and warm. As I approached the slowly rippling shore, more pillbugs scattered at the tremors of my footsteps, fleeing into the water. The husk of some great scorpion-like creature lolled in the gentle surf – the cast-off carapace of a lobster nearly as long as I am tall. Dragonflies the size of eagles skim the surface.
I tasted the water and confirmed the salinity.
I walked the beach for several miles. I saw no sign of people anywhere. Nor did I see any birds, animals, or fish.
I followed my own footprints back to where I came out of the dense forest and onto the beach, but there is no trail, not even a game trail. My tracks say I stepped from a tightly woven wall of foliage onto the shore of an impossible ocean, haunted by gigantic insects and filled with man-sized scorpions, where the days are shorter and the air is so rich with oxygen that I feel lightheaded.
Not the world I know, but the one where the mountains were born.
Just trees, wind, insects.
I think I’m lost.
The End
I think I made good time today- at least twenty miles, which is no joke with the pack I’m carrying and the terrain I’m covering. I might have gone further, but when I found a shelter I decided to stop here for the night because I don’t know where the next one will be. I have to laugh - eight good hours of hiking and the AT maps are already useless. Where’s the next shelter? The maps do not say.
It puts me in mind of what the cabbie said when he let me off at the foot of Mount Springer this morning:
“You can say Route 95 runs from Georgia to Maine; you can say that the Appalachian Mountains run that distance because both of those things do run it, in solid, unbroken chains. But to say that the Appalachian Trail runs that way, that’s less certain.”
I asked him why he thought the trail didn’t really go all the way to Maine.
“The trail’s not one thing is all,” he said. “It’s scores of little trails, maybe hundreds, all broken up and tied together at places, but it’s more stepping stones than a bridge, and the space between those stones can be wide.” He added about six ‘i’s’ to wide, dragging the word out – ‘wiiiiide.’
I asked him if many folks were coming to the trail now and he said it was slow, which didn’t surprise me, the way things are.
Morning: Second Day
No other hikers stopped at my shelter last night, which was a surprise. I rested for about eleven hours, which seems like a long time. Then again, I’m probably better off. I’d worry they had the flu and they would worry that I did. H5N1 had killed conversation even more swiftly than it had killed people.
Evening, Second Day
Traces of people today, some litter, tracks of some solid hiking boots, probably brand new, stamped in the softening mud of the trail. Someone’s just ahead of me, I think. It was warmer, today. Spring is coming.
Morning, Third Day
My third day without news of any kind. I could switch on the radio, but for what? To hear the latest H5N1 death tolls? Or to hear if there had been any more follow-up attacks? D.C. was the last I heard. America is sick and her enemies know it. We look back at 2001, and think of it as the good old days.
God, it’s so peaceful out here. Trees, wind, insects.
Evening, Seventh Day
Just three days to get bored of the writing ritual? I guess it was more than boredom—writing was just turning over all the things I came to the trail to forget.
I am guessing there was another attack because I haven’t heard any planes overhead for days and days.
The maps are more useless than I had imagined. I am on the trail, I know, I must be—there’s been no other trail to take!--but I haven’t seen another person. Not one. Even the footprints are gone. There must have been a way off of the trail I’m following, and that mysterious person ahead of me took it.
I look back at my notes and see I mentioned it getting warmer. Well, that is certainly the case! I thought February in Georgia would be cool here in the mountains. It’s not. It was in the 80’s yesterday, and as to the mountains, the trail runs along flat and true, as if I have descended into some lowlands that, according to my useless maps, simply should not be here.
The insects are tremendous, both in number and in size.
Morning, Tenth Day
I haven’t seen a glimpse of civilization- just the trail, well defined and easy to follow, but the blazes have disappeared, I can’t recall the last one I saw.
No shelters either. No boot prints, litter, traffic sounds, airplanes. Last night I looked up at the stars, hoping to catch sight of a satellite winking as it passed along. No luck.
I feel lightheaded. Maybe I brought the flu here with me.
Morning, Fifteenth Day
Over 100 degrees today.
A fallen tree bigger around than a city bus blocked the trail today. I had to climb it—climb the trunk of a fallen tree! The ridges of the bark were so deep it was like scaling a ladder. When I dropped down to the other side I startled a pillbug bigger than my head. I don’t know which one of us was more frightened. I checked my field guide but found no match for the animal or the tree, although some poking around in the thick fern cover that grows in the shadows of these giant trees turned up many other examples of the giant pillbugs.
The days are getting shorter, by my measure. Twelve hours of daylight, eleven hours of darkness- that’s just 23 hours.
I must be sicker than I feel.
Day 21
I have reached a sea. It is broad, shallow and warm. As I approached the slowly rippling shore, more pillbugs scattered at the tremors of my footsteps, fleeing into the water. The husk of some great scorpion-like creature lolled in the gentle surf – the cast-off carapace of a lobster nearly as long as I am tall. Dragonflies the size of eagles skim the surface.
I tasted the water and confirmed the salinity.
I walked the beach for several miles. I saw no sign of people anywhere. Nor did I see any birds, animals, or fish.
I followed my own footprints back to where I came out of the dense forest and onto the beach, but there is no trail, not even a game trail. My tracks say I stepped from a tightly woven wall of foliage onto the shore of an impossible ocean, haunted by gigantic insects and filled with man-sized scorpions, where the days are shorter and the air is so rich with oxygen that I feel lightheaded.
Not the world I know, but the one where the mountains were born.
Just trees, wind, insects.
I think I’m lost.
The End
April 12, 2017
Bellyfull
Jon was surprised and a little embarrassed when Gwen caught the fish. The fishing tackle she'd found in the lifeboat supplies had seemed so absurd: absurd that anyone could catch a fish on such a simple rig; absurd that anyone would be lost at sea in a modern lifeboat would turn to fishing to survive; absurd that two of them in a lifeboat built for twenty-five would go through the rations quickly enough for a few mouthfuls of raw Atlantic herring to seem appetizing. But here Gwen was, her thin fingers working the line as it slid against the gunwale of the partially open lifeboat, determined to drag whatever was thrashing on the end of the line aboard.
They had been adrift for five days, maybe as long as a week. Their midsized cruise ship, The Merriweather, had gone down somewhere between North Carolina and Bermuda. At least Jon believed it had gone down: it had been late at night; they had been terribly drunk, screwing on one of the deck chairs. There had been an explosion--that much he remembered--a bright spear of petrol flame bursting out of the side of the ship and setting the sea ablaze. Every alarm imaginable had gone off even as the deck was smothered in roiling black smoke.
Jon and Gwen were already been on the foredeck when the explosion rocked the ship. They had sprinted for the lifeboat, Gwen in a bikini top and a loose wrap, Jon in khaki shorts with his genitals hanging out the fly. They climbed in, waited for others, waited for crewmembers. They heard screams. They heard another rumbling boom. In a terrified haze, Jon followed the six clearly illustrated steps to launching the boat. It fell into the sea with a jarring, molar-rattling BANG. He thought they were going to roll over, realized he was hanging onto a railing with one hand, stuffing himself back into his shorts with the other. The Merriweather thumped into the lifeboat, knocking it aside, the two hulls sliding against one another with a scream Gwen was trying to match with her own. Jon thought he felt another boom shake both vessels: The Merriweather, 100 passengers, 22 crew including entertainers, wait staff, and cleaning crew, was absolutely going down.
But maybe it hadn’t.
When the ship had cleared the side of the lifeboat, it had chugged steadily along, aflame, billowing smoke, but neither listing nor slowing, the lights of the bridge and upper decks burning stoically as the alarms blared and the three other lifeboats remained steadfastly secured to their moorings.
The sea was small but enough to keep Jon and Gwen off of their decidedly not seaworthy legs. They huddled together against the rail, terrified and desperately ill, watching the burning Merriweather, their only source of light in the dark night, steam away towards an invisible horizon.
Jon was passed out before the glow disappeared; Gwen watched it shrink to a tear-blurred speck that slid smoothly over the edge of the world and vanished.
She hadn’t been keeping track, not really, but it occurred to her that this was like her and Jon’s fifth date, and their first overnight trip together.
Days passed. Absurd days, Jon would have insisted. They were in the Atlantic, between North Carolina and Bermuda. He knew shit about the sea and less about shipping lanes, but this had to be some kind of high traffic area. They’d done all the lifeboat things: activated beacons, dropped dyes, fired flares, set up radar reflectors. Well, Gwen had done it all. Rescue, Jon was absolutely convinced, was only hours away. Such chores were a waste of time.
Five days or maybe a week along, they've not seen another boat. They'd not spied any land. They ate survival wafers and drank water that tasted like tin. Gwen set up the rain-catching equipment, even though there were no clouds. Then she’d started fishing,
Her fist fish was either a herring or a polk. Jon had seen something like them in the seafood case at the grocer; lifeless eyes watching him from a bed of ice. This one watched him as well even as Grew laid it out on the bench. She still wore the bikini top and had improvised a sarong out of a silver survival blanket. She was twenty-seven, blonde, broad-faced and fit as an Olympian. Jon was careful about his diet, and this lifeboat situation was the longest he’d skipped the gym in nearly a year, but he was painfully aware the difference in their BMI. Still, that might be a feature instead of a bug if they somehow went not-rescued for absurd weeks or impossible months.
“I’m not eating any more biscuits,” she said. “this is real protein. We’ll need our strength if this keeps up.”
It won’t keep up, Jon thought but did not say. He was tired of hearing himself say rescue was but hours off, but he still believed it.
Gwen worked as a sales associate for a major hotel chain, but she’d taken dozens of culinary courses while pursuing her Hotels and Hospitality major. She wasn’t afraid of cleaning or eating a raw fish, even though every fish she’d cleaned until this moment was long dead. That seemed easily achieved. She took the small fish, about the length of her hand and wrist, and thudded the head against the bench.
The lifeboat supplies had a steel folding knife. “Help me with this,” Gwen said as she put the fish down on the bench that ran around the hull of the boat.
“What, should I boil some rice?” Jon asked. “Maybe get some dry seaweed?” He stayed where he was, crouched in the covered part of the boat. He didn’t want raw fish. He didn’t want to watch Gwen kill and gut something either. He turned away but turned back when he heard a curious sound, like the jangle of car keys, dropped onto the floor of the boat.
That’s just what it was.
“They were in the fish,” Gwen said, holding up the set of keys. She’d dunked them in the ocean, so they were clean of blood and slime. “I think that’s a boat key,” she said, pointing to a larger one that Jon would have guessed went to an import. “I think that’s the boat key.”
“Why, because it has a Merriweather keychain?”
“The ship went down; it must have. The fish are eating the debris. We might find something that could help us.”
“Gwen, listen to yourself,” Jon said m straining to sound reasonable. Was sea madness a thing? And when did it set in? How many days adrift? 5 days? A week?
She didn’t want to argue. There was something about the chrome key, largest of the three on the ring, the other two clearly for doorways or lockers, that told her it was the ignition key for the ship they had fled. There was also a small aluminum ring on the larger coil, and her imagination, she saw that one attached to a long rubber sponge, to float if dropped in the water. It had been floating like that when the fish saw the flash of silver and ate it.
But she couldn't prove it and her suppositions weren’t what was important at that moment.
“We need more fish,” she said, and that seemed to settle the matter. It wasn’t like they had anything better to do anyway.
The next fish was larger. Gwen slit the belly open, and there was another clatter. Jon watched in confusion as a CD case fell out onto the deck. Gwen picked it up; brushed away the goo. “Heaven on Earth,” she said, “Belinda Carlisle.” She opened the case; the disc was inside. “1987,” she said. “This is older than I am.”
She handed it to Jon, who accepted it in stunned obedience. Hands now free, she began digging around in the fish. Jin watched the thing’s mouth, and eyes shift as she contorted the abdomen. It was like watching a puppet work. Her hand came out with a sealed deck of playing cards, bearing the logo of the Lumière Place Casino in Saint Louis.
“Shit I was hoping for a cell phone,” Gwen said as she handed the deck of cards to him.
“This is insane,” Jon said. Apart from their being far, far away from Saint Louis, thus making the discovery of the cards unlikely the point of incalculable, of what possible goo would a cell phone be? The lifeboat had a beacon, and he doubted there were any towers nearby. They were already doing all the wireless outreach that could be expected.
Gwen stood up straight and held that posture without effort. She had more or less acclimated to the rocking of the boat. “We need to catch more fish,” Gwen said with determination. The CD was forgotten as she began sorting through the supply box, emerging with 50 feet of nylon rope and a roll of waterproof tape. “Bigger fish,” she said as she took the folding knife, and, using the waterproof tape, shaped it into a hook slightly larger than a paperback book.
“This is insane,” Jon repeated. “If you catch a fish that big, it will pull you overboard.”
“No it won’t,” Gwen replied. The lifeboat had two cleats fixed to the bow. She tied the rope off on the port side, wrapped it a few times then ran it to starboard and did the same, making a long loop that she hoped would disperse the weight of any fish hooked on the knife. “I need bait,” she said aloud. She looked at the fish she’d just gutted, but intuition warned her off of that obvious choice. Everything she’d caught so far, she’d caught using a silver or flashing lure, and she superstitiously wanted to trust to that luck. Besides, she wanted to eat that fish.
She took the Belinda Carlisle CD, taped it to the improvised fish hook.
“Gwen, don’t,” Jon said, almost pleading. She looked out at the water. The sun was setting, beautifully. She remembered how on their second night, he’d gotten amorous, still seeing this as a minor change of plan in their romantic getaway. She’d rebuffed him, then, and realized that while they’d been two people literally in the same boat, they were having distinctly different castaway experiences.
She set the hook and disc down. “Want to play some cards?” she asked.
He did. And they passed a pleasant evening, with a meal of raw fish and survival wafers. They even used the last of their glow sticks to keep the game going after the lingering sunset finally expired.
They always slept close to share warmth, but this time there was more to it than that.
Gwen was up before first light, preparing the hook and line. Jon said nothing.
The next fish weighed hundreds of pounds. It fought with terrible strength against the knife in its jaw, pulling the lifeboat through the water in starts and jerks. It seemed impossible that the nylon cord would hold, and Jon was frightened that Gwen would lose a finger or even a hand as she worked the line.
She was smart, however, and her hands were swift as she waited for slack in the cord as the great fish turned about and then with lightning speed she bound the cord around the cleat, shortening the line and bringing the fish nearer to the boat.
After two hours, the cord was less than ten feet long, and the fish frequently broke the surface alongside the lifeboat. Jon was terrified of the size of it, the strength of it, the puzzlement and fear he could see in the thing’s colossal eye as it rolled and splashed alongside. He was watching the eye when Gwen took a collapsible aluminum oar and jabbed the end of it into the fish's brain.
The thing died messily, kept fighting for long minutes.
Jon at first refused to help bring it aboard. But when she saw that she wasn’t going to give up, even though the fish likely outweighed her by a hundred pounds, he relented. They had their fingers in the monstrous fish’s gills. Jon thought the thing’s head would come right off, but they got it aboard. It took a long time, and it was exhausting. They were covered with blood and slime.
Gwen reached her arm deep within the fish’s torn and bloodied jaw and, after much struggle, withdrew the knife. The ball of tape that held it in a hook shape kept her from opening it. She plucked uselessly at the tape, exhausted, overwhelmed by what she had achieved. “I need a knife,’ she said weakly and laughed.
The sun was almost up. The light was still strange; it had been ten days, or maybe two weeks, and Jon had seen the sun come up over the Atlantic almost every one of those days, but he was still amazed by the strange way the new day shone off of the water and waves. He turned away from it and watched Gwen turn the hook in her hand and prepare to gut the dead fish. It would befoul the lifeboat, but there was no stopping her, he knew. And besides, there was nothing else to do.
The knife went in, and gore gushed out. The fish was filled with oddities, which they would examine and catalog in time: several mismatched china plates. A pair of gardening shears, the blades still wrapped in plastic. Three shotgun shells.
But something was moving in the entrails as well. Fitfully, without strength but undeniably alive.
Gwen picked the red-smeared thing up.
It was an infant. Eyes closed, hands grasping weakly.
“Oh my god,” she said, and looked at Jon, her eyes wide.
Jon stepped forward. It wasn’t breathing. Without thinking, he slid a finger into the time mouth and cleared the airway. The child—a boy—began wailing. Again, weakly.
“What do we do now?” Gwen asked.
The End
They had been adrift for five days, maybe as long as a week. Their midsized cruise ship, The Merriweather, had gone down somewhere between North Carolina and Bermuda. At least Jon believed it had gone down: it had been late at night; they had been terribly drunk, screwing on one of the deck chairs. There had been an explosion--that much he remembered--a bright spear of petrol flame bursting out of the side of the ship and setting the sea ablaze. Every alarm imaginable had gone off even as the deck was smothered in roiling black smoke.
Jon and Gwen were already been on the foredeck when the explosion rocked the ship. They had sprinted for the lifeboat, Gwen in a bikini top and a loose wrap, Jon in khaki shorts with his genitals hanging out the fly. They climbed in, waited for others, waited for crewmembers. They heard screams. They heard another rumbling boom. In a terrified haze, Jon followed the six clearly illustrated steps to launching the boat. It fell into the sea with a jarring, molar-rattling BANG. He thought they were going to roll over, realized he was hanging onto a railing with one hand, stuffing himself back into his shorts with the other. The Merriweather thumped into the lifeboat, knocking it aside, the two hulls sliding against one another with a scream Gwen was trying to match with her own. Jon thought he felt another boom shake both vessels: The Merriweather, 100 passengers, 22 crew including entertainers, wait staff, and cleaning crew, was absolutely going down.
But maybe it hadn’t.
When the ship had cleared the side of the lifeboat, it had chugged steadily along, aflame, billowing smoke, but neither listing nor slowing, the lights of the bridge and upper decks burning stoically as the alarms blared and the three other lifeboats remained steadfastly secured to their moorings.
The sea was small but enough to keep Jon and Gwen off of their decidedly not seaworthy legs. They huddled together against the rail, terrified and desperately ill, watching the burning Merriweather, their only source of light in the dark night, steam away towards an invisible horizon.
Jon was passed out before the glow disappeared; Gwen watched it shrink to a tear-blurred speck that slid smoothly over the edge of the world and vanished.
She hadn’t been keeping track, not really, but it occurred to her that this was like her and Jon’s fifth date, and their first overnight trip together.
Days passed. Absurd days, Jon would have insisted. They were in the Atlantic, between North Carolina and Bermuda. He knew shit about the sea and less about shipping lanes, but this had to be some kind of high traffic area. They’d done all the lifeboat things: activated beacons, dropped dyes, fired flares, set up radar reflectors. Well, Gwen had done it all. Rescue, Jon was absolutely convinced, was only hours away. Such chores were a waste of time.
Five days or maybe a week along, they've not seen another boat. They'd not spied any land. They ate survival wafers and drank water that tasted like tin. Gwen set up the rain-catching equipment, even though there were no clouds. Then she’d started fishing,
Her fist fish was either a herring or a polk. Jon had seen something like them in the seafood case at the grocer; lifeless eyes watching him from a bed of ice. This one watched him as well even as Grew laid it out on the bench. She still wore the bikini top and had improvised a sarong out of a silver survival blanket. She was twenty-seven, blonde, broad-faced and fit as an Olympian. Jon was careful about his diet, and this lifeboat situation was the longest he’d skipped the gym in nearly a year, but he was painfully aware the difference in their BMI. Still, that might be a feature instead of a bug if they somehow went not-rescued for absurd weeks or impossible months.
“I’m not eating any more biscuits,” she said. “this is real protein. We’ll need our strength if this keeps up.”
It won’t keep up, Jon thought but did not say. He was tired of hearing himself say rescue was but hours off, but he still believed it.
Gwen worked as a sales associate for a major hotel chain, but she’d taken dozens of culinary courses while pursuing her Hotels and Hospitality major. She wasn’t afraid of cleaning or eating a raw fish, even though every fish she’d cleaned until this moment was long dead. That seemed easily achieved. She took the small fish, about the length of her hand and wrist, and thudded the head against the bench.
The lifeboat supplies had a steel folding knife. “Help me with this,” Gwen said as she put the fish down on the bench that ran around the hull of the boat.
“What, should I boil some rice?” Jon asked. “Maybe get some dry seaweed?” He stayed where he was, crouched in the covered part of the boat. He didn’t want raw fish. He didn’t want to watch Gwen kill and gut something either. He turned away but turned back when he heard a curious sound, like the jangle of car keys, dropped onto the floor of the boat.
That’s just what it was.
“They were in the fish,” Gwen said, holding up the set of keys. She’d dunked them in the ocean, so they were clean of blood and slime. “I think that’s a boat key,” she said, pointing to a larger one that Jon would have guessed went to an import. “I think that’s the boat key.”
“Why, because it has a Merriweather keychain?”
“The ship went down; it must have. The fish are eating the debris. We might find something that could help us.”
“Gwen, listen to yourself,” Jon said m straining to sound reasonable. Was sea madness a thing? And when did it set in? How many days adrift? 5 days? A week?
She didn’t want to argue. There was something about the chrome key, largest of the three on the ring, the other two clearly for doorways or lockers, that told her it was the ignition key for the ship they had fled. There was also a small aluminum ring on the larger coil, and her imagination, she saw that one attached to a long rubber sponge, to float if dropped in the water. It had been floating like that when the fish saw the flash of silver and ate it.
But she couldn't prove it and her suppositions weren’t what was important at that moment.
“We need more fish,” she said, and that seemed to settle the matter. It wasn’t like they had anything better to do anyway.
The next fish was larger. Gwen slit the belly open, and there was another clatter. Jon watched in confusion as a CD case fell out onto the deck. Gwen picked it up; brushed away the goo. “Heaven on Earth,” she said, “Belinda Carlisle.” She opened the case; the disc was inside. “1987,” she said. “This is older than I am.”
She handed it to Jon, who accepted it in stunned obedience. Hands now free, she began digging around in the fish. Jin watched the thing’s mouth, and eyes shift as she contorted the abdomen. It was like watching a puppet work. Her hand came out with a sealed deck of playing cards, bearing the logo of the Lumière Place Casino in Saint Louis.
“Shit I was hoping for a cell phone,” Gwen said as she handed the deck of cards to him.
“This is insane,” Jon said. Apart from their being far, far away from Saint Louis, thus making the discovery of the cards unlikely the point of incalculable, of what possible goo would a cell phone be? The lifeboat had a beacon, and he doubted there were any towers nearby. They were already doing all the wireless outreach that could be expected.
Gwen stood up straight and held that posture without effort. She had more or less acclimated to the rocking of the boat. “We need to catch more fish,” Gwen said with determination. The CD was forgotten as she began sorting through the supply box, emerging with 50 feet of nylon rope and a roll of waterproof tape. “Bigger fish,” she said as she took the folding knife, and, using the waterproof tape, shaped it into a hook slightly larger than a paperback book.
“This is insane,” Jon repeated. “If you catch a fish that big, it will pull you overboard.”
“No it won’t,” Gwen replied. The lifeboat had two cleats fixed to the bow. She tied the rope off on the port side, wrapped it a few times then ran it to starboard and did the same, making a long loop that she hoped would disperse the weight of any fish hooked on the knife. “I need bait,” she said aloud. She looked at the fish she’d just gutted, but intuition warned her off of that obvious choice. Everything she’d caught so far, she’d caught using a silver or flashing lure, and she superstitiously wanted to trust to that luck. Besides, she wanted to eat that fish.
She took the Belinda Carlisle CD, taped it to the improvised fish hook.
“Gwen, don’t,” Jon said, almost pleading. She looked out at the water. The sun was setting, beautifully. She remembered how on their second night, he’d gotten amorous, still seeing this as a minor change of plan in their romantic getaway. She’d rebuffed him, then, and realized that while they’d been two people literally in the same boat, they were having distinctly different castaway experiences.
She set the hook and disc down. “Want to play some cards?” she asked.
He did. And they passed a pleasant evening, with a meal of raw fish and survival wafers. They even used the last of their glow sticks to keep the game going after the lingering sunset finally expired.
They always slept close to share warmth, but this time there was more to it than that.
Gwen was up before first light, preparing the hook and line. Jon said nothing.
The next fish weighed hundreds of pounds. It fought with terrible strength against the knife in its jaw, pulling the lifeboat through the water in starts and jerks. It seemed impossible that the nylon cord would hold, and Jon was frightened that Gwen would lose a finger or even a hand as she worked the line.
She was smart, however, and her hands were swift as she waited for slack in the cord as the great fish turned about and then with lightning speed she bound the cord around the cleat, shortening the line and bringing the fish nearer to the boat.
After two hours, the cord was less than ten feet long, and the fish frequently broke the surface alongside the lifeboat. Jon was terrified of the size of it, the strength of it, the puzzlement and fear he could see in the thing’s colossal eye as it rolled and splashed alongside. He was watching the eye when Gwen took a collapsible aluminum oar and jabbed the end of it into the fish's brain.
The thing died messily, kept fighting for long minutes.
Jon at first refused to help bring it aboard. But when she saw that she wasn’t going to give up, even though the fish likely outweighed her by a hundred pounds, he relented. They had their fingers in the monstrous fish’s gills. Jon thought the thing’s head would come right off, but they got it aboard. It took a long time, and it was exhausting. They were covered with blood and slime.
Gwen reached her arm deep within the fish’s torn and bloodied jaw and, after much struggle, withdrew the knife. The ball of tape that held it in a hook shape kept her from opening it. She plucked uselessly at the tape, exhausted, overwhelmed by what she had achieved. “I need a knife,’ she said weakly and laughed.
The sun was almost up. The light was still strange; it had been ten days, or maybe two weeks, and Jon had seen the sun come up over the Atlantic almost every one of those days, but he was still amazed by the strange way the new day shone off of the water and waves. He turned away from it and watched Gwen turn the hook in her hand and prepare to gut the dead fish. It would befoul the lifeboat, but there was no stopping her, he knew. And besides, there was nothing else to do.
The knife went in, and gore gushed out. The fish was filled with oddities, which they would examine and catalog in time: several mismatched china plates. A pair of gardening shears, the blades still wrapped in plastic. Three shotgun shells.
But something was moving in the entrails as well. Fitfully, without strength but undeniably alive.
Gwen picked the red-smeared thing up.
It was an infant. Eyes closed, hands grasping weakly.
“Oh my god,” she said, and looked at Jon, her eyes wide.
Jon stepped forward. It wasn’t breathing. Without thinking, he slid a finger into the time mouth and cleared the airway. The child—a boy—began wailing. Again, weakly.
“What do we do now?” Gwen asked.
The End
April 5, 2017
Granted: Conclusion
“That’s a hell of a story, Timothy,” Percy said almost twenty minutes later. “Hell of a story. Mine’s not that different, all and all. Had me a bit more luck in finding a blue instead of a red, but there’s nothing for that. Not like these bottles are labeled.
“Now, I know I’ve been riding on my Virginia accent, but it’s time for some truth, here. I was Virginia born, in what’s still Virginia. And I was a Union boy. I was just a corporal in the Army of the Potomac, and I’m sad to say the only action I saw was dropping my rifle and tearing like hell out of First Manassas. To my good fortune I wasn’t shot for cowardice, and mostly I got marched around in circles for the next few months before I found the bottle in the rail bed as I’d described. When I saw it was a genie--” Blue gave a stifled cough. It was less interruptive than the thunder of a close lightning strike. Percy corrected himself. “I saw it was a djinn like in Arabian Knights, and well I made my wish. My one wish.”
“To live forever?” Timothy asked. “Is that how you’re so old and all?”
“Nosir” Percy answered. “My shameful behavior at my only engagement weighed on me, and you know, I was there because the thing mattered to me. The splitting of the Union, and the plight of the slaves. It all mattered to me, and I wanted to preserve one and fix the other. But I wanted to do it, I didn’t want this magic blue angel to do it with a nod of his head.” And maybe I didn’t trust him was left unsaid for the ten-thousandth time in the telling of this tale. “So I made my wish. I said I wanted long life in service to the Union. And he said granted.”
“So what happened?” Timothy asked. “Did Lee surrender next day or something?”
“Oh God no,” Percy said. “This was early on, before Vicksburg, before Gettysburg, even before Wilderness. McClellan was still in command, and my tired feet told me that man wasn’t going to win any wars. Marching us in circles was more his style. No, I didn’t feel any different and the war didn’t end, but Blue didn’t vanish either, and he went with me to my commander, and then we went to Tucker and then I was shipped by train to McClellan. There it almost ended because he put a terrible pressure on me to end the war and—get this—wish HIM President, and not in that order, let me tell you. Anyway, President Lincoln got wind of the matter, and I was brought to him over McClellan’s objections, and that’s where my life took shape.”
“I’m not sure I’m believing any of this,” Timothy said.
“Timothy, hear me out:” Percy began. He’d read what the DIA man had found on Timothy Dauterive, and thought it was time to put that knowledge into play. “You’re a high school dropout who works off the books for a Polk County demolition company, and now you’re on an orbital weapons platform with your finger on the trigger of a gun that could erase everything south of Lake Okeechobee with one shot, so please, just take me at my word for a minute or two, alright?”
Percy took the responding silence as permission to continue. “President Lincoln didn’t ask for the things General McClellan did. He never asked for anything from Blue or me, and I knew the man through the war and for the remained of his days. He said if things like Blue were out there, and if they could be compelled by any mortal who discovered them, well then there was only one force on earth that could counter the happenstance of their will.”
“God?” Timothy asked.
“President Lincoln used words carefully, and I was quoting his exact words. He said ‘on earth,' not ‘of Heaven.’ Say what you will about the man, but he was terribly wise. He forwent the swift solution and said to me ‘Percival Coyle, you serve the Union, and as your Supreme Commander I put you in the following service: you are to use those two remaining wishes only in defense and preservation of the Union, and only against otherworldly forces. Do you see it, Timothy? My job is to use my wishes to prevent or repair damages done by folk such as you. I have kept my word through all of this time, and I have not asked the djinn to work against any terrible moment that was the made by the will of men, and men alone. I left Abraham Lincoln shot, I didn’t undo Pearl Harbor, I let John Kennedy die in Dallas. I let Vietnam run on and on, and I didn’t stop those planes in ‘01 because Abraham Lincoln had told me I could only use my wishes to stop people like you.”
“So wait,” Timmy said, wrestling with the message. “You have TWO wishes left?”
“I do,” Percy said. “Fire those rods and I will ask Blue here to send them back to you. You’ll die alone in space, and not one person in Florida or anywhere else you wish to target will even know you were up there.”
“Ok wish me down then,” Timmy said with great urgency. He’d clearly lost his battle with fear of being stranded.
“I will not do that,” Percy said, his voice iron. “I will not use my wishes to save you.” This was the worst part, the most terrible part: when the people who had put themselves in horrible straights through greed, selfishness and hate begged for Percy to save them. Abraham Lincoln had never begged. Edith Wilson had asked once: Will you help my husband —and Percy had wept at her choice of words, will you, not can you, because of course, he could have, but Percy had declined. Franklin Roosevelt had never asked to walk. Hell, God-damn Richard Nixon had never asked Percy to wish his troubles away. They’d all seen Blue and understood that the djinn could fix their problems. But they hadn’t risen to the office of President of the United States so some second-rate angel could fix the troubles people had made. They saw Percy and Blue for what there were: tools to clear up trouble that wasn’t of human design, and nothing more.
“I’m sitting with a man from the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Percy said. “These people are like the CIA and Homeland Security on steroids, and they are turning every resource, EVERY RESOURCE, to getting you down safely.” The DIA man, on the phone and muttering in what sounded like Mandarin, nodded and gave a thumbs up. “They’ll get you down. You and I will meet in person. I am looking forward to that.” This was Percy’s first intentional lie, and even it was only a half falsehood, Timothy sounds like a genuine moron but there was no other living soul who had entered into a contract as he had, and such rare fraternity was something he genuinely missed.
“Okay these CIA guys on steroids have twelve hours,” Timothy said.
“Timothy, listen to me,” Percy said. “You can not make demands on us. You are out of wishes. The red is laughing at you as he waits for you to die of thirst, hunger or asphyxiation.”
“I still have this gun!” Timothy insisted.
“Yes but you’re out of choices,” Percy said. “It’s just Tuesday morning, and there’s only one way this ends with you seeing Sunday: you cooperate with these men, and they get you down. Then they take care of you likely for the rest of your life.”
“How’s that?” Timothy asked. “They’ll put me in jail?”
“Not jail, Timothy, but they do keep you close. There’s just two people alive who have had congress with these beings: you and I. They’ll want to know every detail; you won’t believe the detail they’ll get into. They’ll run a thousand tests on you. They’ll want to know, Why you, and How has it changed you? And they’ll need your cooperation to get it all accurate. I’ve seen it before Timothy, several times. We get over this matter with you threatening to destroy everyone you don’t like, and you’ll see some benefit come out of it, I promise you. You’ll not have to swing a crowbar for a payday again or come home covered in plaster dust.” You’ll never see home again most likely Percy thought, but again he left these unpleasant thoughts unspoken.
Beside him, Blue sat idle, clearly bored. A red light began to flash: they were descending. Percy stayed on the phone with Timothy until it was time to disembark. He was kept busy with carrot and stick, but by the time he passed the handling of Timothy over to someone who could address the technical issues the man’s rescue, Percy felt like he had matters in hand.
#
Blue could disappear anytime he wanted, and Percy sometimes went years without seeing the djinn. Blue was sticking around now, and that wasn’t a complete surprise. The djinn’s presence reassured the President and his staff, and that reassurance could be seen as part of the conditions of Percy’s long ago and swiftly formulated wish.
“Do you know him, this red?” Percy asked Big Blue as they crossed to the elevator that would take them down to whatever room had been prepared for them near the President’s own quarters. There they would wait until Timothy Dauterive was safely off his orbital weapons platform.
It was likely a futile question. Blue hardly ever spoke. To Percy’s complete lack of surprise, the hulking djinn gave a wry smile and a shrug. Are you the red? Percy silently asked. Is all of this your doing?
Percy had been afforded a long time to consider his situation. The djinn could clearly do the impossible; Percy’s own long life was more than evidence of this. And he’d seen things, things other wishes had conjured, things that boggled the mind, things that became even more stunning as each new discovery of this dazzling modern age pulled back the curtain a bit further on how the universe operated.
When Percy had been working for President Kennedy, he’d been introduced to a scientist and an author named Sagan. President Kennedy had introduced Percy to several such luminaries hoping to get a bead on whatever Blue actually was. He’d had a lot of faith in the state of American science of the age, well-founded faith, Percy supposed, given the success of the space program. But now in the 21st century, he could see those noble men of the 1960’s were blindfolded and playing with tinker toys. He supposed if he lived another 100 years he’d feel the same about 2016.
Sagan hadn’t met Blue. There was no emergency, and Blue kept his noncrucial appearances to a minimum. Sagan, a turtlenecked inquisitive presence that smelt of tobacco and positively glowed with energy, had asked many of the usual questions the people asked Percy when the first met, but he asked them without the smirking disbelief Percy had been enduring for a century. Carl Sagan immediately accepted that Percy was telling the truth, perhaps because the President (who did not join them for this talk, and to Percy's knowledge never met Sagan) so clearly believed it.
The meeting, held in an informal setting in one of the many federal properties in Virginia, involved comfortable chairs and pots of steaming hot tea. There were wafers and other snacks on a porcelain dish, the dish itself on a fine doily, and that on a dark-stained colonial end table, but Professor Sagan’s conversation was too swift to allow Percy time to chew.
“I wonder about your brain,” Professor Sagan said. Percy was taken aback: the conversation had moved on from the subject of Big Blue and on to questions about Percy’s experiences and memories of over one hundred years of life. Percy always answered these as best as he was able, but there wasn’t a tremendous amount detail he possessed that he would consider being fascinating. The 19th Century was well documented, after all. And in fairness, he couldn’t recall all that many details of his distant youth. That forgetfulness had seemed natural to him, but Sagan was putting this in a new perspective.
“The human brain has evolved to hold a certain amount of memory,” he said. “It’s clear that the djinni has altered your physiology, perhaps a massive degree, to preserve you so well across such a long period, and I wonder if that extends to the actual physical makeup of your brain?” The professor was staring at Percy’s forehead with unnerving intensity. “The Russians are developing a Hahn Echo machine, and I wonder what such imaging would show us about your limbic system. Not to put it too bluntly, I wonder how you're able to hold a gallon of memories in a pint glass.” He smiled at this, but Percy felt himself turning a little green. He’d often speculated about what might have been going on inside of him to compensate for his being a centenarian with the appearance and characteristics of a 26-year-old, but that didn’t make the topic of ‘massive’ alterations to his body any more comfortable to discuss.
Perhaps Sagan recognized this, as he changed the subject. “Where does this djinni (nailing the pronunciation, something Percy hadn’t done to Blue’s satisfaction until two decades into their association) go when he’s not here? Not back into the bottle, surely?”
Percy had no idea here the djinni went or what it did when it wasn’t attended to him, and in their years of association that speculation had grown to include having no idea where else the jinn might be even when it was attending to him. The idea that Blue must abide by any known laws of physics was one that Percy had given up on long ago.
But Sagan made it clear that he fervently believed Blue to be understandable. “We just don’t know yet how he does what he does,” Sagan said. “In the infancy of our race, we didn’t know how the sun burned or how the stars moved or how we are able to remember what happened to us yesterday. All of that was magic to us for most of our time as a species. Now we understand some of the truth of these processes but not all there is to know. The djinn simply understands the workings of creation better than we do.”
“But he grants wishes,” Percy had said. “He has a will of his own, but he does what I ask him to.”
“Then make him appear.” Sagan had said.
“I can’t,” Percy replied. “Not without wrongly discharging my duty to the Union.”
“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan answered. “Or, if we accept that his presence gives proof to the presence of a Creator, then he does what the Creator wishes. But whatever it is that determines the djinni’s behavior is just another discoverable unknown. At this point, we simply don’t understand why Blue does what he does any more than we understand the how of his actions. But I have absolute faith that all of this can be explained, and will one day be understood. Perhaps if the American Union persists long enough, you’ll get to know the answer.” Sagan had been buoyant, but a shadow fell over his expression when he added: “I envy you, and your long life. But then again, it may be a foolish envy.”
They’d passed the remaining hour pleasantly enough, and Percy had never seen Professor Sagan again. He was never given the Professor’s report and didn’t know what conclusions had been reached, if any.
That long-ago conversation had shaken Percy up. Since then, he had begun to look at his relationship with Blue differently.
Every human being he’d encountered who’d had a wish granted had suffered in some way; many had died as a result. He’d been waiting for the shoe to drop with his own situation, but it never had. In a century and a half, he’d never been presented with a conundrum that actually required his other wishes to be employed. To my knowledge was the unspoken paranoid raving.
There were events he half remembered, glimpses like dreams that sometimes made him wonder if every trial he’d faced actually had been solved like this afternoon’s one had, with a sensible talk and the threat of magical ammunition, where his opponent had already spent their rounds. Percy could almost remember troubles that perhaps had happened, but… had they? Too many crises to account for the two wishes he routinely traded on: steel monsters on San Juan Hill; U.S. currency bearing the faces of Poe, Whitman, and Stowe; a modern New York where no building rose above three stories; President Rothschild…
The elevator doors opened. They were far underground. Blue had disappeared, something Percy had failed to notice while lost in his brown study. A Secret Serviceman with a machine gun dangling from a strap waited to escort Percy to his quarters.
Do I actually HAVE any wishes left? Percy asked as they walked down the narrow corridor, patriotic emblems lining the white walls. If not, what is Blue doing to me?
“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan had said. “But we simply don’t understand what that is any more than we do the how.”
Percy’s attendant opened the door to his quarters, which Percy knew would be remarkably similar to his own home in Virginia. Someone in the DIA thought it would relax Percy if his many safe locations looked like his own residence. In the instant before the light was switched on, Percy thought he could see yellow eyes glowing in the high-backed padded chair in the corner, but then the lights were on the chair was plainly empty.
THE END
“Now, I know I’ve been riding on my Virginia accent, but it’s time for some truth, here. I was Virginia born, in what’s still Virginia. And I was a Union boy. I was just a corporal in the Army of the Potomac, and I’m sad to say the only action I saw was dropping my rifle and tearing like hell out of First Manassas. To my good fortune I wasn’t shot for cowardice, and mostly I got marched around in circles for the next few months before I found the bottle in the rail bed as I’d described. When I saw it was a genie--” Blue gave a stifled cough. It was less interruptive than the thunder of a close lightning strike. Percy corrected himself. “I saw it was a djinn like in Arabian Knights, and well I made my wish. My one wish.”
“To live forever?” Timothy asked. “Is that how you’re so old and all?”
“Nosir” Percy answered. “My shameful behavior at my only engagement weighed on me, and you know, I was there because the thing mattered to me. The splitting of the Union, and the plight of the slaves. It all mattered to me, and I wanted to preserve one and fix the other. But I wanted to do it, I didn’t want this magic blue angel to do it with a nod of his head.” And maybe I didn’t trust him was left unsaid for the ten-thousandth time in the telling of this tale. “So I made my wish. I said I wanted long life in service to the Union. And he said granted.”
“So what happened?” Timothy asked. “Did Lee surrender next day or something?”
“Oh God no,” Percy said. “This was early on, before Vicksburg, before Gettysburg, even before Wilderness. McClellan was still in command, and my tired feet told me that man wasn’t going to win any wars. Marching us in circles was more his style. No, I didn’t feel any different and the war didn’t end, but Blue didn’t vanish either, and he went with me to my commander, and then we went to Tucker and then I was shipped by train to McClellan. There it almost ended because he put a terrible pressure on me to end the war and—get this—wish HIM President, and not in that order, let me tell you. Anyway, President Lincoln got wind of the matter, and I was brought to him over McClellan’s objections, and that’s where my life took shape.”
“I’m not sure I’m believing any of this,” Timothy said.
“Timothy, hear me out:” Percy began. He’d read what the DIA man had found on Timothy Dauterive, and thought it was time to put that knowledge into play. “You’re a high school dropout who works off the books for a Polk County demolition company, and now you’re on an orbital weapons platform with your finger on the trigger of a gun that could erase everything south of Lake Okeechobee with one shot, so please, just take me at my word for a minute or two, alright?”
Percy took the responding silence as permission to continue. “President Lincoln didn’t ask for the things General McClellan did. He never asked for anything from Blue or me, and I knew the man through the war and for the remained of his days. He said if things like Blue were out there, and if they could be compelled by any mortal who discovered them, well then there was only one force on earth that could counter the happenstance of their will.”
“God?” Timothy asked.
“President Lincoln used words carefully, and I was quoting his exact words. He said ‘on earth,' not ‘of Heaven.’ Say what you will about the man, but he was terribly wise. He forwent the swift solution and said to me ‘Percival Coyle, you serve the Union, and as your Supreme Commander I put you in the following service: you are to use those two remaining wishes only in defense and preservation of the Union, and only against otherworldly forces. Do you see it, Timothy? My job is to use my wishes to prevent or repair damages done by folk such as you. I have kept my word through all of this time, and I have not asked the djinn to work against any terrible moment that was the made by the will of men, and men alone. I left Abraham Lincoln shot, I didn’t undo Pearl Harbor, I let John Kennedy die in Dallas. I let Vietnam run on and on, and I didn’t stop those planes in ‘01 because Abraham Lincoln had told me I could only use my wishes to stop people like you.”
“So wait,” Timmy said, wrestling with the message. “You have TWO wishes left?”
“I do,” Percy said. “Fire those rods and I will ask Blue here to send them back to you. You’ll die alone in space, and not one person in Florida or anywhere else you wish to target will even know you were up there.”
“Ok wish me down then,” Timmy said with great urgency. He’d clearly lost his battle with fear of being stranded.
“I will not do that,” Percy said, his voice iron. “I will not use my wishes to save you.” This was the worst part, the most terrible part: when the people who had put themselves in horrible straights through greed, selfishness and hate begged for Percy to save them. Abraham Lincoln had never begged. Edith Wilson had asked once: Will you help my husband —and Percy had wept at her choice of words, will you, not can you, because of course, he could have, but Percy had declined. Franklin Roosevelt had never asked to walk. Hell, God-damn Richard Nixon had never asked Percy to wish his troubles away. They’d all seen Blue and understood that the djinn could fix their problems. But they hadn’t risen to the office of President of the United States so some second-rate angel could fix the troubles people had made. They saw Percy and Blue for what there were: tools to clear up trouble that wasn’t of human design, and nothing more.
“I’m sitting with a man from the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Percy said. “These people are like the CIA and Homeland Security on steroids, and they are turning every resource, EVERY RESOURCE, to getting you down safely.” The DIA man, on the phone and muttering in what sounded like Mandarin, nodded and gave a thumbs up. “They’ll get you down. You and I will meet in person. I am looking forward to that.” This was Percy’s first intentional lie, and even it was only a half falsehood, Timothy sounds like a genuine moron but there was no other living soul who had entered into a contract as he had, and such rare fraternity was something he genuinely missed.
“Okay these CIA guys on steroids have twelve hours,” Timothy said.
“Timothy, listen to me,” Percy said. “You can not make demands on us. You are out of wishes. The red is laughing at you as he waits for you to die of thirst, hunger or asphyxiation.”
“I still have this gun!” Timothy insisted.
“Yes but you’re out of choices,” Percy said. “It’s just Tuesday morning, and there’s only one way this ends with you seeing Sunday: you cooperate with these men, and they get you down. Then they take care of you likely for the rest of your life.”
“How’s that?” Timothy asked. “They’ll put me in jail?”
“Not jail, Timothy, but they do keep you close. There’s just two people alive who have had congress with these beings: you and I. They’ll want to know every detail; you won’t believe the detail they’ll get into. They’ll run a thousand tests on you. They’ll want to know, Why you, and How has it changed you? And they’ll need your cooperation to get it all accurate. I’ve seen it before Timothy, several times. We get over this matter with you threatening to destroy everyone you don’t like, and you’ll see some benefit come out of it, I promise you. You’ll not have to swing a crowbar for a payday again or come home covered in plaster dust.” You’ll never see home again most likely Percy thought, but again he left these unpleasant thoughts unspoken.
Beside him, Blue sat idle, clearly bored. A red light began to flash: they were descending. Percy stayed on the phone with Timothy until it was time to disembark. He was kept busy with carrot and stick, but by the time he passed the handling of Timothy over to someone who could address the technical issues the man’s rescue, Percy felt like he had matters in hand.
#
Blue could disappear anytime he wanted, and Percy sometimes went years without seeing the djinn. Blue was sticking around now, and that wasn’t a complete surprise. The djinn’s presence reassured the President and his staff, and that reassurance could be seen as part of the conditions of Percy’s long ago and swiftly formulated wish.
“Do you know him, this red?” Percy asked Big Blue as they crossed to the elevator that would take them down to whatever room had been prepared for them near the President’s own quarters. There they would wait until Timothy Dauterive was safely off his orbital weapons platform.
It was likely a futile question. Blue hardly ever spoke. To Percy’s complete lack of surprise, the hulking djinn gave a wry smile and a shrug. Are you the red? Percy silently asked. Is all of this your doing?
Percy had been afforded a long time to consider his situation. The djinn could clearly do the impossible; Percy’s own long life was more than evidence of this. And he’d seen things, things other wishes had conjured, things that boggled the mind, things that became even more stunning as each new discovery of this dazzling modern age pulled back the curtain a bit further on how the universe operated.
When Percy had been working for President Kennedy, he’d been introduced to a scientist and an author named Sagan. President Kennedy had introduced Percy to several such luminaries hoping to get a bead on whatever Blue actually was. He’d had a lot of faith in the state of American science of the age, well-founded faith, Percy supposed, given the success of the space program. But now in the 21st century, he could see those noble men of the 1960’s were blindfolded and playing with tinker toys. He supposed if he lived another 100 years he’d feel the same about 2016.
Sagan hadn’t met Blue. There was no emergency, and Blue kept his noncrucial appearances to a minimum. Sagan, a turtlenecked inquisitive presence that smelt of tobacco and positively glowed with energy, had asked many of the usual questions the people asked Percy when the first met, but he asked them without the smirking disbelief Percy had been enduring for a century. Carl Sagan immediately accepted that Percy was telling the truth, perhaps because the President (who did not join them for this talk, and to Percy's knowledge never met Sagan) so clearly believed it.
The meeting, held in an informal setting in one of the many federal properties in Virginia, involved comfortable chairs and pots of steaming hot tea. There were wafers and other snacks on a porcelain dish, the dish itself on a fine doily, and that on a dark-stained colonial end table, but Professor Sagan’s conversation was too swift to allow Percy time to chew.
“I wonder about your brain,” Professor Sagan said. Percy was taken aback: the conversation had moved on from the subject of Big Blue and on to questions about Percy’s experiences and memories of over one hundred years of life. Percy always answered these as best as he was able, but there wasn’t a tremendous amount detail he possessed that he would consider being fascinating. The 19th Century was well documented, after all. And in fairness, he couldn’t recall all that many details of his distant youth. That forgetfulness had seemed natural to him, but Sagan was putting this in a new perspective.
“The human brain has evolved to hold a certain amount of memory,” he said. “It’s clear that the djinni has altered your physiology, perhaps a massive degree, to preserve you so well across such a long period, and I wonder if that extends to the actual physical makeup of your brain?” The professor was staring at Percy’s forehead with unnerving intensity. “The Russians are developing a Hahn Echo machine, and I wonder what such imaging would show us about your limbic system. Not to put it too bluntly, I wonder how you're able to hold a gallon of memories in a pint glass.” He smiled at this, but Percy felt himself turning a little green. He’d often speculated about what might have been going on inside of him to compensate for his being a centenarian with the appearance and characteristics of a 26-year-old, but that didn’t make the topic of ‘massive’ alterations to his body any more comfortable to discuss.
Perhaps Sagan recognized this, as he changed the subject. “Where does this djinni (nailing the pronunciation, something Percy hadn’t done to Blue’s satisfaction until two decades into their association) go when he’s not here? Not back into the bottle, surely?”
Percy had no idea here the djinni went or what it did when it wasn’t attended to him, and in their years of association that speculation had grown to include having no idea where else the jinn might be even when it was attending to him. The idea that Blue must abide by any known laws of physics was one that Percy had given up on long ago.
But Sagan made it clear that he fervently believed Blue to be understandable. “We just don’t know yet how he does what he does,” Sagan said. “In the infancy of our race, we didn’t know how the sun burned or how the stars moved or how we are able to remember what happened to us yesterday. All of that was magic to us for most of our time as a species. Now we understand some of the truth of these processes but not all there is to know. The djinn simply understands the workings of creation better than we do.”
“But he grants wishes,” Percy had said. “He has a will of his own, but he does what I ask him to.”
“Then make him appear.” Sagan had said.
“I can’t,” Percy replied. “Not without wrongly discharging my duty to the Union.”
“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan answered. “Or, if we accept that his presence gives proof to the presence of a Creator, then he does what the Creator wishes. But whatever it is that determines the djinni’s behavior is just another discoverable unknown. At this point, we simply don’t understand why Blue does what he does any more than we understand the how of his actions. But I have absolute faith that all of this can be explained, and will one day be understood. Perhaps if the American Union persists long enough, you’ll get to know the answer.” Sagan had been buoyant, but a shadow fell over his expression when he added: “I envy you, and your long life. But then again, it may be a foolish envy.”
They’d passed the remaining hour pleasantly enough, and Percy had never seen Professor Sagan again. He was never given the Professor’s report and didn’t know what conclusions had been reached, if any.
That long-ago conversation had shaken Percy up. Since then, he had begun to look at his relationship with Blue differently.
Every human being he’d encountered who’d had a wish granted had suffered in some way; many had died as a result. He’d been waiting for the shoe to drop with his own situation, but it never had. In a century and a half, he’d never been presented with a conundrum that actually required his other wishes to be employed. To my knowledge was the unspoken paranoid raving.
There were events he half remembered, glimpses like dreams that sometimes made him wonder if every trial he’d faced actually had been solved like this afternoon’s one had, with a sensible talk and the threat of magical ammunition, where his opponent had already spent their rounds. Percy could almost remember troubles that perhaps had happened, but… had they? Too many crises to account for the two wishes he routinely traded on: steel monsters on San Juan Hill; U.S. currency bearing the faces of Poe, Whitman, and Stowe; a modern New York where no building rose above three stories; President Rothschild…
The elevator doors opened. They were far underground. Blue had disappeared, something Percy had failed to notice while lost in his brown study. A Secret Serviceman with a machine gun dangling from a strap waited to escort Percy to his quarters.
Do I actually HAVE any wishes left? Percy asked as they walked down the narrow corridor, patriotic emblems lining the white walls. If not, what is Blue doing to me?
“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan had said. “But we simply don’t understand what that is any more than we do the how.”
Percy’s attendant opened the door to his quarters, which Percy knew would be remarkably similar to his own home in Virginia. Someone in the DIA thought it would relax Percy if his many safe locations looked like his own residence. In the instant before the light was switched on, Percy thought he could see yellow eyes glowing in the high-backed padded chair in the corner, but then the lights were on the chair was plainly empty.
THE END
March 29, 2017
Granted: Part One
The telephone gave an angry, restless buzz. Percy Coyle was awake at once. The phone stood on a small cradle on a nightstand beside his bed, and it only went off once every few years. It was a direct line to the President of the United States.
“Percy, sorry to wake you.” the President said. “But the boys in SAC are telling me we have something that wasn’t there before. Sounds like it might be in your province.”
The President was half Negro and that both delighted and amazed Percy. Such a thing had been entirely unthinkable when he had entered the service. “Thank you, sir.” He sat up in bed and swung his feet down to the carpeted floor. He didn’t have to worry about disturbing a spouse; Percy lived alone. “I’ll be right in. And as I’ve mentioned when we were introduced, Sir, there’s no need for you to call me yourself. I’m just another soldier after all.”
Percy could hear President smile. “It’s tradition, Percy, and my pleasure. Give my best to Big Blue.”
“Will do, Sir,” Percy said as he disconnected. It was a newer tradition, to be sure. Hayes never came and knocked on Percy’s door, and he’d helped that President twice.
Percy could already sense that Big Blue was in the dark room with him, likely seated in the high-backed chair in the southeast corner of the large bedroom that was his favorite. Percy knew it even before he saw the faint glow of the being’s large yellow eyes.
#
“It’s satellite,” the DIA man explained. “Or maybe a space station. It’s quite sizable.” Percy was in the back of a long limousine, part of a motorcade speeding to the nearest airfield. The spinning lights of their police escort gave a surreal impression to the scene, but Percy supposed that was him showing his age. The Defense Intelligence Agency man was clearly intimidated by Code Name: Big Blue, who reclined beside Percy, taking no part in the debriefing, because of course, he knew all of this already.
“The UFO appeared just three hours ago, in a geosynchronous orbit over the Southeastern United States, specifically the southeast. Florida would be the most exact positioning we could give at this time.”
“Any communication from it yet?” Percy asked.
The DIA man smirked. “It hasn’t stopped, actually. One individual, American by his speech, we guess about 30 years old, but he refuses to use a video channel of any kind, although we have to assume he has the means. Here’s a transcript of what’s been broadcast to us.”
Percy shook his head. “Are other people seeing this?” he asked. “On their televisions or their computers? Or their telephones, their smart telephones?”
“No sir.” the DIA man replied. “His beef--well, he has many beeves it seems, but his main beef seems to be with the United States Government. He called the FBI offices in Miami and was transferred to us when we put the UFO and what he was saying together. He’s been saying all this into their phone lines.”
“Boy, he does go on,” Percy remarked as he fanned the pages he’d been handed.
“He is claiming that if we do not comply with his demands, he’ll begin tungsten rod bombardment of the Eastern Seaboard.” He looked up sheepishly. “Ae you familiar with this sort of weapon?”
“It’s got ‘bombardment’ in the name I assume it’s a kind of missile or nuclear bomb or some such? Launched from space?” Percy could see from the man’s expression that this description was wrong, and the man was aching to explain, but there wasn’t time for such indulgences. “I get it; he has a powerful weapon, and he’ll kill a lot of people if he fires it.” The DIA man nodded. “Okay, what else have we been doing so far?”
“Mostly we’ve been stalling him, but frankly, I’m not sure why he hasn’t done what he’s threatened because we’ve given him nothing concrete yet.” As he spoke the limo jumped as it passed over the tracks of the sliding gate to Langley Field. “We suspect he may not have the weapons he claims.”
Percy shook his head. “No, he has the weapon. They always have the weapon. But he certainly missed something.” Percy was quiet for a heartbeat, then said: “He can’t get down.”
Big Blue smiled from beneath his oversized wraparound sunglasses. “HE CANNOT GET DOWN!” he echoed in his vast, rumbling voice. Then he laughed so ferociously the limo shook. Percy was long accustomed to such outbursts, but his heart went out to the DIA man as he turned sheet white.
“Okay just get me on the telephone with this one,” Percy said, relieved. He hated flying. “No need to fly anywhere. I’ll talk him down.”
“We can do that on the plane,” the DNI man said. He started to say ‘The President wants you nearby,’ but was drowned out as Big Blue said the same words along with him, only far, far more loudly and with tremendous mirth.
#
“Good morning, sir,” Percy said into the microphone. He was on a plane headed to an undisclosed location where the President and his family had been taken, presumably far away from the East Coast. This had become routine: a credible Code Name: Blue threat emerged, and Percy found himself shuttled to close proximity to the President as a safety measure. It was believed that Percy couldn’t be killed, and, therefore, any location he was at became that much safer, although Percy himself thought this an absurd interpretation of the circumstances. “My name is Percy Coyle, and I am a captain in the United States Army.”
“You’re not the President!” the enraged man in orbit high above Florida replied. His southern accent was pronounced, and his fury caused the speaker to crackle.
Percy was undaunted. “That’s true, sir, but we believe that this development falls under my expertise. Just a few questions and if I’m wrong, well, I’m sure whoever follows after me will be more agreeable to your terms.” The angry man in the satellite started to interrupt but choked on his words when Percy said: “So, was the djinn you found in a lamp or a bottle?”
The transcript would show seventeen seconds of silence before the man answered, hesitantly, “It was a genie. It was in a bottle.”
“That’s interesting. We haven’t seen a bottle in almost 50 years. Mine was in a bottle also. Was yours blue?”
“No he wasn’t blue.” was the reply. “Red. Red like fire.”
The DIA man flipped through a binder filled with laminated images and illustrations, but Percy waved him off. He knew what red meant, knew as well as anyone alive did. “Okay, that’s one angry djinni you have there. You might call it a genie, and that’s fine, but they prefer djinn, and manners are important to these beings. Now, is the red djinni still with you?”
“No, he left. What was your name again?”
“I’m Percy Coyle. I work for the federal government.”
“How come I never heard of you?”
“What I do is top secret,” Percy said. “All of this sort of thing, this magic business, is top secret. I do have to ask, are you a Christian?”
“Yessir, I am.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Jinn were created by God from smokeless fire, whereas He created us from mud and earth. You’ve committed no great sin and dealing with such a being, but I do recommend bringing it up at your next confession. I’m not one to judge, but it seems like you may have acted a bit selfishly.”
“I don’t go to church much anymore,” the voice replied.
All of this was very encouraging to Percy, but it was far too early to feel confident. The demands had stopped, and the man hadn’t once mentioned firing a tungsten rod barrage. Percy felt he’d connected enough to move on to more personal questions. “Maybe I can know your name, now, sir? We are part of a very exclusive club, after all.”
“I’m Timothy Dauterive. I’m from Sarasota County.”
“Thank you, Timothy. I’ve been to Florida, it's great country, especially on the Gulf side.” Beside Percy, the DIA man punched Timothy’s name into a computer and data began spewing out of the printer.
“Thank you,” Timothy said, clearly perplexed by the direction the conversation was taking.
“So why a satellite?” Percy asked.
Seven seconds of silence. “It was the genie’s idea, I guess,” Timothy confessed. “I just wanted to change things, make America better, and he said I was going about it wrong.”
“He said if you wish for one thing to be the way you want it, then wish is gone, but if you wish for a way to make things the way you want them, you can change whatever you want to change. Does that sound about right?”
“Yeah, he said something like that. This space station here, I can, I don’t know, hold the whole world hostage. He said no one else had anything like it. I’d be the man in charge.”
“Yup, I see how that makes sense. Did that take all three wishes? The space station?”
Eleven seconds of silence. “It did. One to make it, one to put the weapons on it…”
“And one to get up there,” Percy said. “It’s not your fault, Thomas. The red ones, they are angry, and that anger makes them, well, duplicitous isn’t too strong a word.” He snuck a quick glance at Blue, who didn’t like anyone insulting any breed of djinn. Blue didn’t return the glance, seemingly absorbed in the dials and switches of the onboard radar station of the C-130, much to the consternation of a naval officer standing nearby, but of course, no one asked the hulking djinni to stop touching things.
“Now you say you’re a Christian so I need you to understand this: djinn are not devils or demons, so you haven’t committed a mortal sin in dealing with one of these fellows. But please understand that like devils these red djinnis have a powerful dislike for mortals. Well, to be honest, it is the dislike that makes them red, but you couldn’t know that; this isn’t a thing they teach in school or church.” Percy was starting to enjoy this. He’d favored a Southern accent in his youth but had learned to disguise it when he’d enrolled in The Army of the Potomac and had done so ever since, even when he’d met the southern Presidents, like Carter or the second Johnson, the one from Texas. This Timothy character was so unabashedly Southern that Percy felt the old words and patterns returning as they spoke.
“Was yours red?” Timothy asked.
“No, Timothy I was fortunate. I got a blue one. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but he didn’t mistreat me in any way.” As far as I know, Percy thought but did not confess. “I’m of a mind, Timothy, that believes you want to get down from there. Back to Earth.”
Timothy began to rage again, but only at about 20% of his peak. “I’m not giving this place up until they do what I ask.”
“I understand how you feel,” Percy said. “But you do want to get back here, back to solid ground.” Percy paused for a moment. “Do you have gravity in that place?”
“No,” Timothy replied, putting great frustration into the syllable. “My boots stick to the floor, with Velcro, it’s called? You know the stuff? Sounds like I’m tearing my pants every step. Mostly I float around. It’s not bad.” he added without much conviction.
“Okay, now how about food? Water?” Percy paused, silently exploring how to best serve delicacy with his next question, and then went with “Facilities?”
“Yes! Of course this thing has a toilet!” Timothy replied. Big Blue laughed. “Who the hell is that?” Timothy shouted, rage suddenly at nearing 80% of peak.
Percy sighed. “That’s Blue. I don’t know his actual name, these beings are careful about their names. He’s why I asked if the red was still with you. Blue is the jinn I found. He stuck around, and he helps me sometimes.” This wasn’t entirely true. In their long association, Blue had provided exactly one service: convincing every important federal personage since President Lincoln’s Secretary of War that what Percy Coyle had to say was gospel truth, and Blue accomplished that simply by being there. An almost ten feet tall, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, black-bearded being with a lower body that often trailed away into a swirling funnel of blue smoke was a difficult sight to dismiss.
“Blue is my partner in our work.” Percy continued. “I was born in 1844, in Virginia, as I’ve said. When the South rose up, I left my home and went north, to fight for the Union. This may put you and me at odds, I suppose, but I never shot anyone so I certainly didn’t serve with any distinction. I was under General Tucker when I found the bottle. We were tearing up railroad tracks in Maryland, and there it was, buried in the ground under the rails. A blue bottle with silver, I don’t know, filigree I guess all over it. It looked expensive, and when I picked it up it felt like it was made of clay instead of glass, and there was something inside of it. It was heavy.”
“Mine too!” Timothy replied. “It was in this house. The lady who owned it had died and we were going to demo the place and…”
Percy let him run on. The finding of the object was always tedious. It was more interesting when the wish had been made on a penny tossed in a well or even an errant ladybug, practices which rarely but occasionally sent work his way. Djinn Percy could understand, at least somewhat. They were oddball creatures with a strange relationship with the laws of the physical world, but they were beings with a will and intelligence. Sure, they often willfully warped the meaning of the gifts they bestowed, but you could attribute the results to the thought process of a living being. Those other means of having a wish granted, however, and the idea that they could ever work at all, flabbergasted him.
Timothy finally got around to discussing the red and Percy tuned in.
“There he was, this giant red fellow, with red and yellow hair like that crazy TV chef? Asking what I wanted, saying it could be anything. So first, I said, ‘OK, let’s get rid of all these Cubans, Mexicans, Haitians, all these illegals cluttering up our country.’ And he was like, ‘Sure but they’ll be new ones here next week…”
Percy put his hand over the microphone and turned to the DIA man. “Can you get him down safely?” he whispered. “Like, with a rocket or something?”
The DIA man shrugged and swiped a number into his phone.
Percy leaned back in his own seat and waited for Timothy to run out of story. Eventually, his turn to talk would come.
To Be Concluded
“Percy, sorry to wake you.” the President said. “But the boys in SAC are telling me we have something that wasn’t there before. Sounds like it might be in your province.”
The President was half Negro and that both delighted and amazed Percy. Such a thing had been entirely unthinkable when he had entered the service. “Thank you, sir.” He sat up in bed and swung his feet down to the carpeted floor. He didn’t have to worry about disturbing a spouse; Percy lived alone. “I’ll be right in. And as I’ve mentioned when we were introduced, Sir, there’s no need for you to call me yourself. I’m just another soldier after all.”
Percy could hear President smile. “It’s tradition, Percy, and my pleasure. Give my best to Big Blue.”
“Will do, Sir,” Percy said as he disconnected. It was a newer tradition, to be sure. Hayes never came and knocked on Percy’s door, and he’d helped that President twice.
Percy could already sense that Big Blue was in the dark room with him, likely seated in the high-backed chair in the southeast corner of the large bedroom that was his favorite. Percy knew it even before he saw the faint glow of the being’s large yellow eyes.
#
“It’s satellite,” the DIA man explained. “Or maybe a space station. It’s quite sizable.” Percy was in the back of a long limousine, part of a motorcade speeding to the nearest airfield. The spinning lights of their police escort gave a surreal impression to the scene, but Percy supposed that was him showing his age. The Defense Intelligence Agency man was clearly intimidated by Code Name: Big Blue, who reclined beside Percy, taking no part in the debriefing, because of course, he knew all of this already.
“The UFO appeared just three hours ago, in a geosynchronous orbit over the Southeastern United States, specifically the southeast. Florida would be the most exact positioning we could give at this time.”
“Any communication from it yet?” Percy asked.
The DIA man smirked. “It hasn’t stopped, actually. One individual, American by his speech, we guess about 30 years old, but he refuses to use a video channel of any kind, although we have to assume he has the means. Here’s a transcript of what’s been broadcast to us.”
Percy shook his head. “Are other people seeing this?” he asked. “On their televisions or their computers? Or their telephones, their smart telephones?”
“No sir.” the DIA man replied. “His beef--well, he has many beeves it seems, but his main beef seems to be with the United States Government. He called the FBI offices in Miami and was transferred to us when we put the UFO and what he was saying together. He’s been saying all this into their phone lines.”
“Boy, he does go on,” Percy remarked as he fanned the pages he’d been handed.
“He is claiming that if we do not comply with his demands, he’ll begin tungsten rod bombardment of the Eastern Seaboard.” He looked up sheepishly. “Ae you familiar with this sort of weapon?”
“It’s got ‘bombardment’ in the name I assume it’s a kind of missile or nuclear bomb or some such? Launched from space?” Percy could see from the man’s expression that this description was wrong, and the man was aching to explain, but there wasn’t time for such indulgences. “I get it; he has a powerful weapon, and he’ll kill a lot of people if he fires it.” The DIA man nodded. “Okay, what else have we been doing so far?”
“Mostly we’ve been stalling him, but frankly, I’m not sure why he hasn’t done what he’s threatened because we’ve given him nothing concrete yet.” As he spoke the limo jumped as it passed over the tracks of the sliding gate to Langley Field. “We suspect he may not have the weapons he claims.”
Percy shook his head. “No, he has the weapon. They always have the weapon. But he certainly missed something.” Percy was quiet for a heartbeat, then said: “He can’t get down.”
Big Blue smiled from beneath his oversized wraparound sunglasses. “HE CANNOT GET DOWN!” he echoed in his vast, rumbling voice. Then he laughed so ferociously the limo shook. Percy was long accustomed to such outbursts, but his heart went out to the DIA man as he turned sheet white.
“Okay just get me on the telephone with this one,” Percy said, relieved. He hated flying. “No need to fly anywhere. I’ll talk him down.”
“We can do that on the plane,” the DNI man said. He started to say ‘The President wants you nearby,’ but was drowned out as Big Blue said the same words along with him, only far, far more loudly and with tremendous mirth.
#
“Good morning, sir,” Percy said into the microphone. He was on a plane headed to an undisclosed location where the President and his family had been taken, presumably far away from the East Coast. This had become routine: a credible Code Name: Blue threat emerged, and Percy found himself shuttled to close proximity to the President as a safety measure. It was believed that Percy couldn’t be killed, and, therefore, any location he was at became that much safer, although Percy himself thought this an absurd interpretation of the circumstances. “My name is Percy Coyle, and I am a captain in the United States Army.”
“You’re not the President!” the enraged man in orbit high above Florida replied. His southern accent was pronounced, and his fury caused the speaker to crackle.
Percy was undaunted. “That’s true, sir, but we believe that this development falls under my expertise. Just a few questions and if I’m wrong, well, I’m sure whoever follows after me will be more agreeable to your terms.” The angry man in the satellite started to interrupt but choked on his words when Percy said: “So, was the djinn you found in a lamp or a bottle?”
The transcript would show seventeen seconds of silence before the man answered, hesitantly, “It was a genie. It was in a bottle.”
“That’s interesting. We haven’t seen a bottle in almost 50 years. Mine was in a bottle also. Was yours blue?”
“No he wasn’t blue.” was the reply. “Red. Red like fire.”
The DIA man flipped through a binder filled with laminated images and illustrations, but Percy waved him off. He knew what red meant, knew as well as anyone alive did. “Okay, that’s one angry djinni you have there. You might call it a genie, and that’s fine, but they prefer djinn, and manners are important to these beings. Now, is the red djinni still with you?”
“No, he left. What was your name again?”
“I’m Percy Coyle. I work for the federal government.”
“How come I never heard of you?”
“What I do is top secret,” Percy said. “All of this sort of thing, this magic business, is top secret. I do have to ask, are you a Christian?”
“Yessir, I am.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Jinn were created by God from smokeless fire, whereas He created us from mud and earth. You’ve committed no great sin and dealing with such a being, but I do recommend bringing it up at your next confession. I’m not one to judge, but it seems like you may have acted a bit selfishly.”
“I don’t go to church much anymore,” the voice replied.
All of this was very encouraging to Percy, but it was far too early to feel confident. The demands had stopped, and the man hadn’t once mentioned firing a tungsten rod barrage. Percy felt he’d connected enough to move on to more personal questions. “Maybe I can know your name, now, sir? We are part of a very exclusive club, after all.”
“I’m Timothy Dauterive. I’m from Sarasota County.”
“Thank you, Timothy. I’ve been to Florida, it's great country, especially on the Gulf side.” Beside Percy, the DIA man punched Timothy’s name into a computer and data began spewing out of the printer.
“Thank you,” Timothy said, clearly perplexed by the direction the conversation was taking.
“So why a satellite?” Percy asked.
Seven seconds of silence. “It was the genie’s idea, I guess,” Timothy confessed. “I just wanted to change things, make America better, and he said I was going about it wrong.”
“He said if you wish for one thing to be the way you want it, then wish is gone, but if you wish for a way to make things the way you want them, you can change whatever you want to change. Does that sound about right?”
“Yeah, he said something like that. This space station here, I can, I don’t know, hold the whole world hostage. He said no one else had anything like it. I’d be the man in charge.”
“Yup, I see how that makes sense. Did that take all three wishes? The space station?”
Eleven seconds of silence. “It did. One to make it, one to put the weapons on it…”
“And one to get up there,” Percy said. “It’s not your fault, Thomas. The red ones, they are angry, and that anger makes them, well, duplicitous isn’t too strong a word.” He snuck a quick glance at Blue, who didn’t like anyone insulting any breed of djinn. Blue didn’t return the glance, seemingly absorbed in the dials and switches of the onboard radar station of the C-130, much to the consternation of a naval officer standing nearby, but of course, no one asked the hulking djinni to stop touching things.
“Now you say you’re a Christian so I need you to understand this: djinn are not devils or demons, so you haven’t committed a mortal sin in dealing with one of these fellows. But please understand that like devils these red djinnis have a powerful dislike for mortals. Well, to be honest, it is the dislike that makes them red, but you couldn’t know that; this isn’t a thing they teach in school or church.” Percy was starting to enjoy this. He’d favored a Southern accent in his youth but had learned to disguise it when he’d enrolled in The Army of the Potomac and had done so ever since, even when he’d met the southern Presidents, like Carter or the second Johnson, the one from Texas. This Timothy character was so unabashedly Southern that Percy felt the old words and patterns returning as they spoke.
“Was yours red?” Timothy asked.
“No, Timothy I was fortunate. I got a blue one. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but he didn’t mistreat me in any way.” As far as I know, Percy thought but did not confess. “I’m of a mind, Timothy, that believes you want to get down from there. Back to Earth.”
Timothy began to rage again, but only at about 20% of his peak. “I’m not giving this place up until they do what I ask.”
“I understand how you feel,” Percy said. “But you do want to get back here, back to solid ground.” Percy paused for a moment. “Do you have gravity in that place?”
“No,” Timothy replied, putting great frustration into the syllable. “My boots stick to the floor, with Velcro, it’s called? You know the stuff? Sounds like I’m tearing my pants every step. Mostly I float around. It’s not bad.” he added without much conviction.
“Okay, now how about food? Water?” Percy paused, silently exploring how to best serve delicacy with his next question, and then went with “Facilities?”
“Yes! Of course this thing has a toilet!” Timothy replied. Big Blue laughed. “Who the hell is that?” Timothy shouted, rage suddenly at nearing 80% of peak.
Percy sighed. “That’s Blue. I don’t know his actual name, these beings are careful about their names. He’s why I asked if the red was still with you. Blue is the jinn I found. He stuck around, and he helps me sometimes.” This wasn’t entirely true. In their long association, Blue had provided exactly one service: convincing every important federal personage since President Lincoln’s Secretary of War that what Percy Coyle had to say was gospel truth, and Blue accomplished that simply by being there. An almost ten feet tall, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, black-bearded being with a lower body that often trailed away into a swirling funnel of blue smoke was a difficult sight to dismiss.
“Blue is my partner in our work.” Percy continued. “I was born in 1844, in Virginia, as I’ve said. When the South rose up, I left my home and went north, to fight for the Union. This may put you and me at odds, I suppose, but I never shot anyone so I certainly didn’t serve with any distinction. I was under General Tucker when I found the bottle. We were tearing up railroad tracks in Maryland, and there it was, buried in the ground under the rails. A blue bottle with silver, I don’t know, filigree I guess all over it. It looked expensive, and when I picked it up it felt like it was made of clay instead of glass, and there was something inside of it. It was heavy.”
“Mine too!” Timothy replied. “It was in this house. The lady who owned it had died and we were going to demo the place and…”
Percy let him run on. The finding of the object was always tedious. It was more interesting when the wish had been made on a penny tossed in a well or even an errant ladybug, practices which rarely but occasionally sent work his way. Djinn Percy could understand, at least somewhat. They were oddball creatures with a strange relationship with the laws of the physical world, but they were beings with a will and intelligence. Sure, they often willfully warped the meaning of the gifts they bestowed, but you could attribute the results to the thought process of a living being. Those other means of having a wish granted, however, and the idea that they could ever work at all, flabbergasted him.
Timothy finally got around to discussing the red and Percy tuned in.
“There he was, this giant red fellow, with red and yellow hair like that crazy TV chef? Asking what I wanted, saying it could be anything. So first, I said, ‘OK, let’s get rid of all these Cubans, Mexicans, Haitians, all these illegals cluttering up our country.’ And he was like, ‘Sure but they’ll be new ones here next week…”
Percy put his hand over the microphone and turned to the DIA man. “Can you get him down safely?” he whispered. “Like, with a rocket or something?”
The DIA man shrugged and swiped a number into his phone.
Percy leaned back in his own seat and waited for Timothy to run out of story. Eventually, his turn to talk would come.
To Be Concluded
March 22, 2017
The Garage Sale on Azathoth Road
Short fiction from One Day in Hell
The car horn shocked Phillip out of bed. He grabbed his watch from the nightstand: 7:30 am, Saturday morning. The horn sounded again. Veronica's arm came up out of the blankets to smack clumsily at the alarm clock.
"Idiot," Phillip whispered. He went to the window. A car parked on his lawn was blocked in by another parked on the sidewalk.
Phillip pulled on some clothes and ran down the steps, ready to raise some hell, and that was when he saw that his neighbors were having a garage sale.
Phillip again cursed the day he had let Veronica talk him into buying property so near the edge of the Pleasant Valley Condominiums, so close to giant Hammer-horror reject that was the ancient Akeley house. Once outside, he could see that there were cars lined up and down both sides of Azathoth Road. Each disgorged the typical early-morning garage sale shoppers—decrepit men, shrunken women. The entire block smelled of old people. It was enough to make Phillip gag, but he internalized the reflex, using the urge to stoke his anger instead.
Phillip was storming up the cracked slate Akeley walkway, dodging the shopping dead at every step, when a voice croaked, "Can I help you?"
Phillip turned and saw an old, old man – not Akeley himself, but some decrepit relation-- standing behind one of the shoddy tables that dribbled down the piebald front lawn as if the house had projectile vomited its own dust-shrouded insides into the open air.
"You can help me by shoving this sale-" was as far as Phillip got, because he saw something, then: a large glass jar filled with piss-yellow suspension, with a biological specimen floating within.
The fluid was murky, but Phillip could see this much. The thing was about seven inches long, conical, a pair of tentacles dangled from the half-flattened spiral shell. There were bumps on each side that might be eyes.
"That there," Phillip said. "How much?"
"This?" the old man said, bloodless lips twisting into a horrid salesman’s grin. "Expensive."
The old man thought expensive meant $50. By 8:00 a.m. Phillip had bought the jar, put coffee on, and had the laptop open on the kitchen table, busy tracking his hunch down.
Phillip had made his fortune in insurance, but in his awkward teen years, he had been something of an amateur paleontologist, and he still retained a few facts. He thought he had a good idea what the thing in the jar was. If he was correct, then expensive wasn't the word.
Veronica came down. "Why are people parking on our lawn?" Receiving no answer from Phillip, she crossed to the bay windows in the living room and peered through the lace curtains. As she watched, an old man came running from Akeley's yard, carrying some small object in his hands. His expression shone in an overzealous parody of an all-consuming joy.
She closed the curtain and saw the jar. "What is that?" Just the sight of the dust-covered thing brought up memories of a dark corner in her grandfather's barn in Utah, where something she didn't like to think about had happened to her when she was young. "I don't like it," she said.
"You don't have to like it," Phillip said as looked swiftly from the jar to the laptop and back again. "It just has to be what I think it is."
"And what do you think it is?" She poured herself a cup of coffee.
"I think it's a hyolithid."
Veronica's unpleasant memory of the barn wouldn't fade: cobwebs, the faint odor of long-dead horses, a pressing down she did not want but could not successfully resist. "Who cares?" she asked.
Phillip looked up. "Honey, hyolithids went extinct millions of years before the dinosaurs. This thing could be priceless. But it could also be a more recent organism, like a screw shell." Phillip had only just learned about the screwshell mollusk via Google. Now he thought he might be out $50.00
"So take it out and look at it." Even as she spoke, Veronica realized that she didn't want to see the thing any better.
Phillip didn't answer. He knew that a preserved specimen might disintegrate if exposed to air. But what bothered him even more was what old man Akeley had said when he sold him the jar:
"This is one place," he had said, holding up a large, tattered book from the table. "This is another," he swept his arm to encompass the yard, the neighborhood, the world. "This is in between." He tapped the jar with his free hand. "Never open it," he said, "never go inside."
The warning stayed with Phillip, a thick, warm presence in his mind.
"You're afraid," Veronica taunted. She blamed Phillip for resurrecting her unpleasant memory.
Outside, there came the sound of a car crunching into another, then shouting, then a loud, keening scream that climbed higher and higher, until it soared past the range of hearing, but the wail could still be felt, making words, calling names Veronica had never heard but somehow knew. Another, deeper chill swept through her, an inexplicable terror building in layers from deep inside herself.
Phillip fetched a pair of salad tongs from a drawer.
Veronica watched. A tear seeped from her left eye.
Phillip opened the jar. The room filled instantly with a crushing saltwater reek. Veronica thought of the Great Salt Lake she had visited many times while as a girl: sunken and flat, steaming in high summer like a miles-wide organism cooking in the summer sun.
Phillip removed the specimen. The hard spiral shell gleamed in the energy-efficient fluorescent lights. What Phillip though might be eyes bulged out from beneath the shell like stippled warts. One split open, revealing a moist black sphere that orientated towards him.
Phillip dropped the tongs and stepped backward, his foot coming down into the suck of rushing water. He looked down: a pale, viscous liquid was pouring into the kitchen from the seam where the wall met the floor, rising fast as the sea flooding a holed ship. The ooze was clear, hot as blood, filled with wriggling life--worms that had teeth, eyes, faces-
Veronica saw no water, no creatures. She watched Phillip scream and leap about the room as if the floor were suddenly burning hot. The specimen landed on the table and lay there inert – a dead, rotting thing. Veronica suddenly had to vomit.
She ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her threw up into the toilet until she collapsed.
Veronica hadn't turned on the light, and the bathroom had no windows. She lay there in the dark, gasping. She listened to the thrashing sounds coming from the kitchen. Something huge -the refrigerator?- toppled over.
The smell of the jar clung to her. Veronica panted, each breath tasting like the sea.
Suddenly Phillip was in the room with her.
The door did not open, there was no sound, yet there was a presence she could not mistake. She heard the wet struggling of gills laboring with air, the stench of rotting fish stung her eyes, there was a pressing down-
The End
The car horn shocked Phillip out of bed. He grabbed his watch from the nightstand: 7:30 am, Saturday morning. The horn sounded again. Veronica's arm came up out of the blankets to smack clumsily at the alarm clock.
"Idiot," Phillip whispered. He went to the window. A car parked on his lawn was blocked in by another parked on the sidewalk.
Phillip pulled on some clothes and ran down the steps, ready to raise some hell, and that was when he saw that his neighbors were having a garage sale.
Phillip again cursed the day he had let Veronica talk him into buying property so near the edge of the Pleasant Valley Condominiums, so close to giant Hammer-horror reject that was the ancient Akeley house. Once outside, he could see that there were cars lined up and down both sides of Azathoth Road. Each disgorged the typical early-morning garage sale shoppers—decrepit men, shrunken women. The entire block smelled of old people. It was enough to make Phillip gag, but he internalized the reflex, using the urge to stoke his anger instead.
Phillip was storming up the cracked slate Akeley walkway, dodging the shopping dead at every step, when a voice croaked, "Can I help you?"
Phillip turned and saw an old, old man – not Akeley himself, but some decrepit relation-- standing behind one of the shoddy tables that dribbled down the piebald front lawn as if the house had projectile vomited its own dust-shrouded insides into the open air.
"You can help me by shoving this sale-" was as far as Phillip got, because he saw something, then: a large glass jar filled with piss-yellow suspension, with a biological specimen floating within.
The fluid was murky, but Phillip could see this much. The thing was about seven inches long, conical, a pair of tentacles dangled from the half-flattened spiral shell. There were bumps on each side that might be eyes.
"That there," Phillip said. "How much?"
"This?" the old man said, bloodless lips twisting into a horrid salesman’s grin. "Expensive."
The old man thought expensive meant $50. By 8:00 a.m. Phillip had bought the jar, put coffee on, and had the laptop open on the kitchen table, busy tracking his hunch down.
Phillip had made his fortune in insurance, but in his awkward teen years, he had been something of an amateur paleontologist, and he still retained a few facts. He thought he had a good idea what the thing in the jar was. If he was correct, then expensive wasn't the word.
Veronica came down. "Why are people parking on our lawn?" Receiving no answer from Phillip, she crossed to the bay windows in the living room and peered through the lace curtains. As she watched, an old man came running from Akeley's yard, carrying some small object in his hands. His expression shone in an overzealous parody of an all-consuming joy.
She closed the curtain and saw the jar. "What is that?" Just the sight of the dust-covered thing brought up memories of a dark corner in her grandfather's barn in Utah, where something she didn't like to think about had happened to her when she was young. "I don't like it," she said.
"You don't have to like it," Phillip said as looked swiftly from the jar to the laptop and back again. "It just has to be what I think it is."
"And what do you think it is?" She poured herself a cup of coffee.
"I think it's a hyolithid."
Veronica's unpleasant memory of the barn wouldn't fade: cobwebs, the faint odor of long-dead horses, a pressing down she did not want but could not successfully resist. "Who cares?" she asked.
Phillip looked up. "Honey, hyolithids went extinct millions of years before the dinosaurs. This thing could be priceless. But it could also be a more recent organism, like a screw shell." Phillip had only just learned about the screwshell mollusk via Google. Now he thought he might be out $50.00
"So take it out and look at it." Even as she spoke, Veronica realized that she didn't want to see the thing any better.
Phillip didn't answer. He knew that a preserved specimen might disintegrate if exposed to air. But what bothered him even more was what old man Akeley had said when he sold him the jar:
"This is one place," he had said, holding up a large, tattered book from the table. "This is another," he swept his arm to encompass the yard, the neighborhood, the world. "This is in between." He tapped the jar with his free hand. "Never open it," he said, "never go inside."
The warning stayed with Phillip, a thick, warm presence in his mind.
"You're afraid," Veronica taunted. She blamed Phillip for resurrecting her unpleasant memory.
Outside, there came the sound of a car crunching into another, then shouting, then a loud, keening scream that climbed higher and higher, until it soared past the range of hearing, but the wail could still be felt, making words, calling names Veronica had never heard but somehow knew. Another, deeper chill swept through her, an inexplicable terror building in layers from deep inside herself.
Phillip fetched a pair of salad tongs from a drawer.
Veronica watched. A tear seeped from her left eye.
Phillip opened the jar. The room filled instantly with a crushing saltwater reek. Veronica thought of the Great Salt Lake she had visited many times while as a girl: sunken and flat, steaming in high summer like a miles-wide organism cooking in the summer sun.
Phillip removed the specimen. The hard spiral shell gleamed in the energy-efficient fluorescent lights. What Phillip though might be eyes bulged out from beneath the shell like stippled warts. One split open, revealing a moist black sphere that orientated towards him.
Phillip dropped the tongs and stepped backward, his foot coming down into the suck of rushing water. He looked down: a pale, viscous liquid was pouring into the kitchen from the seam where the wall met the floor, rising fast as the sea flooding a holed ship. The ooze was clear, hot as blood, filled with wriggling life--worms that had teeth, eyes, faces-
Veronica saw no water, no creatures. She watched Phillip scream and leap about the room as if the floor were suddenly burning hot. The specimen landed on the table and lay there inert – a dead, rotting thing. Veronica suddenly had to vomit.
She ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her threw up into the toilet until she collapsed.
Veronica hadn't turned on the light, and the bathroom had no windows. She lay there in the dark, gasping. She listened to the thrashing sounds coming from the kitchen. Something huge -the refrigerator?- toppled over.
The smell of the jar clung to her. Veronica panted, each breath tasting like the sea.
Suddenly Phillip was in the room with her.
The door did not open, there was no sound, yet there was a presence she could not mistake. She heard the wet struggling of gills laboring with air, the stench of rotting fish stung her eyes, there was a pressing down-
The End
March 9, 2017
Fiction: Let's See If I Follow
Paul sits at Mark’s kitchen table. “I think I’m going crazy,” he says again.
Mark is glad to hear this. At least, it isn’t his imagination. He thinks Paul might be going crazy as well.
“Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been?” Mark asks.
Paul’s eyes come up: red, bagged, bright: “I’ve been trying to catch up with him, to catch a glimpse of him.”
“Of who?”
“The one who keeps following me. Always right behind me. Close.”
“Someone is following you?”
“Yes,” Paul replies. “I get into my car, I turn on my headlights, and headlights come on behind me. They follow me, close, but there’s never a car there when I stop.” He is talking quickly, but then he slows down. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.” He speaks these words gently, with care.
“No,” Mark lies. “No, I won’t.”
Paul looks uncertain, but then he takes the step: “I think it’s me.”
“I don’t understand,” says Mark.
“It’s my car,” Paul replies. “My car is following me, somehow, with me in it. It’s the same model, same year, same everything. The person driving it, I can’t make him out too well, but…” Another pause. “He looks like me,” Paul continues, voice falling to a ragged half-whisper. “I can’t see him very well, but the hair’s the same. His silhouette looks like mine.”
Paul’s breathing oscillates. Mark is no doctor, but he would guess his friend is close to a breakdown or maybe something worse. Mark feels a slight tickle of fear.
“He gets out of the car, too. When I was at the dry cleaners yesterday, I forgot to get a ticket, I went back in, and the clerk looked at me like I was crazy. He said I just came in for the ticket, that he had just given it to me a moment ago. I searched my pockets, Mark, but no ticket." Paul’s hands turn out his pockets. They are empty – no ticket. "They won’t give me my clothes back without a ticket, Mark.”
Mark doesn’t know what to say.
“Can you do me a favor?” Paul asks.
“Sure,” Mark replies. He hopes that his voice sounds natural.
“Look out at the driveway. See if there’s a car behind mine.”
A swift moment, not more than the space of a heartbeat, passes before Mark answers. He doesn’t want to turn his back on Paul. They are in the kitchen, surrounded by knives, pans, steel chairs, wine rack filled with heavy bottles.
Faith wins out. He looks out the window. Paul’s Nissan sits alone beneath the streetlight. He turns back. Paul hasn’t moved. “I don’t see one.”
“Now watch,” Paul begins. “I’m going to go and start it up. I’m going to drive around the block. Watch for another car, just like mine. Here,” Paul reaches up, takes a wine bottle from the rack on the countertop. He reads the label. “Now, if I come back in, and I don’t have a bottle of merlot, you’ll know it’s not me.”
“Paul,” Mark begins weakly, “who else would it be?”
Paul’s expression goes blank. “I don’t know.” The words are lifeless.
Paul steps through the door. Mark is at once flooded with relief.
As he promised, Mark watches through the small window. Paul stops beside the driver’s side door of his car. He looks up, sees Mark framed in the small yellow glow of the kitchen window, and waves the bottle in his hand.
Mark watches as Paul gets into the car, listens as he starts the engine. The headlights come on, lighting the driveway and yard. All is well.
There is a sudden flash of motion by the corner of the house; a small, dark flutter, as if someone had been turning near the stairs that lead up to Mark’s apartment, but it is gone too quickly for Mark to be certain that he had seen anything at all.
Paul is still in the driveway, looking up: Mark can see him clearly. The interior of the car seems very bright – almost as if there is another car just behind him, headlights on. Paul backs out of the driveway, the strange illumination staying with him.
The kitchen door opens. Mark spins around: Paul is in the doorway. He wears the same manic intensity, but there is a difference: where there had been wretchedness, there is now panic. Where there had been fear, there is now rage. Paul shakes with emotion. Mark sees he’s not carrying a wine bottle.
“Where is he?” Paul shouts.
“How?” is all Mark can manage. He looks out the window. The Nissan sits in the driveway, dark and quiet. The strange light is gone.
“I asked you WHERE IS HE!” Paul shouts. He sweeps the full drying rack off of the counter. Dishes shatter on the floor. “It’s making me crazy…” His voice hitches; a sob escapes along with the words. “He’s always one step ahead of me…”
“You just left…” Mark replies. He stands up and moves behind the chair, fingers searching for a hold.
“I know he’s been here,” Paul shouts as he kicks the chair away. “I saw his car in the driveway!” His eyes twitch: his hand flashes out to the wine rack and comes back gripping a bottle by the neck. “Last chance, Mark. Where is he?”
Mark has no answer, but Paul isn’t waiting for one. The bottle comes down. Mark is blinded by glass, wine, and pain. Paul begins stabbing with the ragged neck of the bottle. He is screaming “One step ahead!” but doesn’t seem to be aware of it.
Mark is screaming as well, but Paul notices this even less. He ignores Mark’s fingers as they tear at his clothes, ripping buttons and spilling his pockets. A dry cleaning ticket sticks to Mark’s bloody palm.
Mark is glad to hear this. At least, it isn’t his imagination. He thinks Paul might be going crazy as well.
“Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been?” Mark asks.
Paul’s eyes come up: red, bagged, bright: “I’ve been trying to catch up with him, to catch a glimpse of him.”
“Of who?”
“The one who keeps following me. Always right behind me. Close.”
“Someone is following you?”
“Yes,” Paul replies. “I get into my car, I turn on my headlights, and headlights come on behind me. They follow me, close, but there’s never a car there when I stop.” He is talking quickly, but then he slows down. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.” He speaks these words gently, with care.
“No,” Mark lies. “No, I won’t.”
Paul looks uncertain, but then he takes the step: “I think it’s me.”
“I don’t understand,” says Mark.
“It’s my car,” Paul replies. “My car is following me, somehow, with me in it. It’s the same model, same year, same everything. The person driving it, I can’t make him out too well, but…” Another pause. “He looks like me,” Paul continues, voice falling to a ragged half-whisper. “I can’t see him very well, but the hair’s the same. His silhouette looks like mine.”
Paul’s breathing oscillates. Mark is no doctor, but he would guess his friend is close to a breakdown or maybe something worse. Mark feels a slight tickle of fear.
“He gets out of the car, too. When I was at the dry cleaners yesterday, I forgot to get a ticket, I went back in, and the clerk looked at me like I was crazy. He said I just came in for the ticket, that he had just given it to me a moment ago. I searched my pockets, Mark, but no ticket." Paul’s hands turn out his pockets. They are empty – no ticket. "They won’t give me my clothes back without a ticket, Mark.”
Mark doesn’t know what to say.
“Can you do me a favor?” Paul asks.
“Sure,” Mark replies. He hopes that his voice sounds natural.
“Look out at the driveway. See if there’s a car behind mine.”
A swift moment, not more than the space of a heartbeat, passes before Mark answers. He doesn’t want to turn his back on Paul. They are in the kitchen, surrounded by knives, pans, steel chairs, wine rack filled with heavy bottles.
Faith wins out. He looks out the window. Paul’s Nissan sits alone beneath the streetlight. He turns back. Paul hasn’t moved. “I don’t see one.”
“Now watch,” Paul begins. “I’m going to go and start it up. I’m going to drive around the block. Watch for another car, just like mine. Here,” Paul reaches up, takes a wine bottle from the rack on the countertop. He reads the label. “Now, if I come back in, and I don’t have a bottle of merlot, you’ll know it’s not me.”
“Paul,” Mark begins weakly, “who else would it be?”
Paul’s expression goes blank. “I don’t know.” The words are lifeless.
Paul steps through the door. Mark is at once flooded with relief.
As he promised, Mark watches through the small window. Paul stops beside the driver’s side door of his car. He looks up, sees Mark framed in the small yellow glow of the kitchen window, and waves the bottle in his hand.
Mark watches as Paul gets into the car, listens as he starts the engine. The headlights come on, lighting the driveway and yard. All is well.
There is a sudden flash of motion by the corner of the house; a small, dark flutter, as if someone had been turning near the stairs that lead up to Mark’s apartment, but it is gone too quickly for Mark to be certain that he had seen anything at all.
Paul is still in the driveway, looking up: Mark can see him clearly. The interior of the car seems very bright – almost as if there is another car just behind him, headlights on. Paul backs out of the driveway, the strange illumination staying with him.
The kitchen door opens. Mark spins around: Paul is in the doorway. He wears the same manic intensity, but there is a difference: where there had been wretchedness, there is now panic. Where there had been fear, there is now rage. Paul shakes with emotion. Mark sees he’s not carrying a wine bottle.
“Where is he?” Paul shouts.
“How?” is all Mark can manage. He looks out the window. The Nissan sits in the driveway, dark and quiet. The strange light is gone.
“I asked you WHERE IS HE!” Paul shouts. He sweeps the full drying rack off of the counter. Dishes shatter on the floor. “It’s making me crazy…” His voice hitches; a sob escapes along with the words. “He’s always one step ahead of me…”
“You just left…” Mark replies. He stands up and moves behind the chair, fingers searching for a hold.
“I know he’s been here,” Paul shouts as he kicks the chair away. “I saw his car in the driveway!” His eyes twitch: his hand flashes out to the wine rack and comes back gripping a bottle by the neck. “Last chance, Mark. Where is he?”
Mark has no answer, but Paul isn’t waiting for one. The bottle comes down. Mark is blinded by glass, wine, and pain. Paul begins stabbing with the ragged neck of the bottle. He is screaming “One step ahead!” but doesn’t seem to be aware of it.
Mark is screaming as well, but Paul notices this even less. He ignores Mark’s fingers as they tear at his clothes, ripping buttons and spilling his pockets. A dry cleaning ticket sticks to Mark’s bloody palm.
March 1, 2017
Small Apes
"I don't think I can go in there today," Patricia said. It was two in the afternoon. She was due at the airport at four pm, to feed and water any animals that were in quarantine. She had already skipped their morning feeding.
"What do you mean?" Dr. Nelson asked. He sounded irritated. Patricia thought she could hear activity in the background, his family, probably. It was the Fourth of July; they might be having a barbecue. "Are you calling in sick?"
"No," Patricia replied doubtfully.
"So what is it, then?" Dr. Nelson was on call but didn't like being paged. She had been a little scared to page him, no matter how close they had become, or how bizarre things were in the warehouse.
"It's the monkeys," she said. She could picture the warehouse as she spoke: a long, narrow, cinder-block building with a corrugated steel roof. The walls and ceiling were painted white, with two rows of florescent lights hanging down from the steel rafters. There were three rows of cages: molded fiberglass crates with steel doors running along both walls, and a row of freestanding steel cages down the middle. The center row was where the monkeys were kept. "Every day I go in there, there are more monkeys."
"Huh." Dr. Nelson replied. The edge was gone from his voice. "Were we expecting additional intakes?"
"I don't know." Her voice was near whining. "There something wrong with them, though. Every day there's more of them, sometimes and they're all crammed into the cages. Yesterday there were five macaques in one cage." She remembered how that had looked: fur and fingers sticking out from the bars, one monkey pressed against the wire, mouth open, sharp canines jutting out like a rattlesnake being milked. "They were dead."
"Five dead monkeys?" he asked. The quarantine was a formality; nothing was expected to be wrong with these animals.
"There were more dead ones than that," she said. "I left you a message. On your service." She knew then that he hadn't checked it. He was with his family and didn't want to talk to her. She was someone he only thought of when his wife wasn't around.
"How many dead monkeys?" Dr. Nelson asked, choosing to overlook the issue of the voice mail he hadn't listened to. For a moment, Patricia could hear another voice, a woman speaking very close to the phone. Mrs. Nelson, perhaps? Patricia tried to imagine what the doctor's wife would look like.
"About twenty," Patricia said. She remembered taking their bodies from the cages, some warm and sickeningly limp, others rigid and cold.
"Patricia, we only had thirteen macaques altogether."
"I know!" she shouted. "That's what I'm saying. There are more and more monkeys every day!"
"Patricia," Dr. Nelson said, his voice searching for that authoritative tone that bosses must have. "That's impossible."
Impossible or not, that was what had been happening. The first few weeks of the job had been completely uneventful, if unpleasant. She disliked the long drive out to the airport, and how the warehouse smelled. There was a giant air conditioner on the roof that kept the animals comfortable even in the fierce July heat, but the re-circulating air was tainted with the odors of urine, feces, and fur.
On Wednesday, there had been a total of 13 of crab-eating macaques, each in their own cage, leaving most of the cages empty. The monkeys were the only animals in quarantine at the time, which she had been told was odd, as there were usually a few dogs and cats under rabies observation. Maybe it was the lack of work that had led to her and Dr. Nelson carrying on as they had.
Patricia had gone up and down the rows, feeding and watering the animals, observing their general condition, levels of alertness, all sorts of things. These monkeys had been bred on a farm and were used to being handled, but they still frightened her, a little. She was in her second year of a pre-veterinary program, and animals still frightened her sometimes, especially big ones, like horses, but especially human-looking ones, like macaques.
On Thursday morning, there had been 27 macaques, sometimes two in a cage, which was strictly against policy. It was possible that another shipment had come in during the night, but there were 60 cages. There was no reason to pack the monkeys together like that. She thought someone had made a mistake, and she separated the monkeys out. The monkeys called and hooted as she moved them. Some had struggled, but none had bitten her. Patricia was careful not to challenge them by looking into their eyes.
Then, on Friday morning, there were 64 monkeys in the room. A few of the cages were still empty, while others had two or even more monkeys in them. Some of the monkeys were dead, four or five crammed into a cage. This was not normal; this couldn't have been a mistake. She had bagged them and put them in the freezer. Then she paged Dr. Nelson and left a message.
She had thought about it all last night. She didn't know where the monkeys were coming from, but if things went as they had been going, there would be perhaps 200 monkeys in there today, and the cages couldn't hold that many. The cages would be split open, the animals loose. She saw it in her mind, the warehouse crowded with running, hooting, fighting macaques. She couldn't go back there.
Patricia had skipped the morning feeding, and had haunted her studio apartment, the air conditioner whirring, the radio on, waiting for Dr. Nelson to call. The bright Fourth of July sun leaked in through the blinds. Puerto Rican kids were running up and down the narrow street, lighting off firecrackers. When noontime came, and Dr. Nelson still hadn't called her, Patricia had texted him with her telephone number and added 911 at the end.
"So they didn't get fed or watered this morning?" Dr. Nelson asked, growing angry, now. She knew he was regretting what their other relationship had done to their boss/employee dynamic.
"No," she confessed quietly. "I couldn't go in." She sounded very small to her own ears.
"God damn it," Dr. Nelson said, not really to her, but about her, she knew. "I'll call you later." He hung up the phone.
"Thirteen macaques." Dr. Nelson said. She could hear that he was on a cell phone, and he was driving. He hadn't given her his cell phone number, just the pager. "A little hungry, but fine."
"But that's impossible!" Patricia said. "Did you check the freezer?"
"Of course I did." Dr. Nelson replied. He was angry; she could hear it in his voice. The cell phone crackled. "There were no dead monkeys in there, and there were 13 monkeys in the cages, just like there should be," he said.
He had to be lying. But why would he?
"Listen, Patricia, the job was to for you to take care of these animals over weekends and on my days off," he said. "I'm not certain what you thought was happening there, but I think this might be the wrong job for you. I'll send you your last check." There was a long pause. She could hear the car rolling, the burnt summer air flowing in through the open window. "Sorry that this didn't work out." Dr. Nelson disconnected.
Patricia felt simultaneous stabs of fear and relief. She wouldn't have to see him anymore. She had wanted something to happen between them, but a relationship with a married man was a bad idea. And there was no job, now, either. She had gotten out of that as well.
But what about the monkeys? She hadn't imagined them, she was certain. Dr. Nelson must have been lying, to cover up gross negligence on someone's part. But who could be so cruel as to cram those monkeys down into the cage as she had found them? She pictured it, a large man wearing a brown denim jacket and heavy black gloves shoving one more monkey down into an already crowded cage. It was worse than inhuman.
There was a crash from the bathroom. Patricia spun her head around. She knew from the sound that it was the glass she used when brushing her teeth, falling from the sink and shattering on the tile floor. She rose from the bed and crossed the bedroom, slowly. The bathroom door was nearly closed and allowed just a sliver of sunlight to fall into the dark hall. Shadows crossed the light, perhaps curtains blowing in the breeze of an open window.
There was another crash, followed by the stuttered growl of the shower curtain being ripped down. There was a noise behind her. Patricia spun and saw two crab-eating macaques sitting atop her computer monitor, staring at her with their small black animal eyes. Soundlessly, one monkey opened its mouth, revealing two sets of long canines in what seemed to be a yawn but Patricia knew was a challenge. She looked away reflexively, not wanting to confront the animal, and saw that here were two more monkeys on her bed, in the posture of grooming. They stopped and looked at her, dark eyes glittering.
She heard the cabinet doors in the kitchen creak open, then glassware tumbling out and shattering. This was followed by an excited, animal scream. The monkeys in the room with her screamed in answer, she spun again, there were more monkeys in the room now, hanging from the blinds, on the computer chair, under the desk. They set up a din of screeching and wailing, each calling out a warning of some threat they all had simultaneously spotted, such as a snake or a jaguar. Patricia ran for the front door, only a handful of steps in her studio apartment. She glanced into the kitchenette. Monkeys lined the horizontal surfaces, packed together like commuters on a rush-hour train. Three more monkeys hung precariously from the overhead light. As she watched, the oven door fell open and dead monkeys spilled out, their fur singed, their faces bloated from gas.
Patricia retched, and pulled open the front door.
The doorway was filled with monkeys, pressed together as they had been in the cages, some already asphyxiated, other struggling against the weight of the monkeys above. Patricia threw her hands up and screamed. The monkeys spilled into the apartment, cresting over her like a wave. She struggled against them, her hands pushing out against fur, fingers and teeth. The sheer weight of numbers bore her down, and she collapsed. The monkeys kept pouring in. More and more were being piled on, it was as if the entire apartment building had been stuffed with monkeys and her open door was a drain in at the bottom. When she tried to scream again, her mouth was instantly filled with soft, furry flesh.
Patricia struggled and kicked as the monkeys struggled and kicked. Fingers clutched and pulled at her, and the weight of their countless small bodies began to press down upon her. The air was getting harder to pull in; it tasted of cages and pellets and wet fur. The monkeys against her were mostly dead, now, and the cries of the living were growing fainter and fainter.
She opened one eye. A small glimmer of light bled down from above, the beam broken by the monkeys being piled on top. Patricia could see that a monkey close to her was still alive. Its mouth was open just a little and its nostrils flared with each excited breath. She watched its dark eye dart as the weight of the monkeys above it pressed down.
Then the light was gone.
THE END
"What do you mean?" Dr. Nelson asked. He sounded irritated. Patricia thought she could hear activity in the background, his family, probably. It was the Fourth of July; they might be having a barbecue. "Are you calling in sick?"
"No," Patricia replied doubtfully.
"So what is it, then?" Dr. Nelson was on call but didn't like being paged. She had been a little scared to page him, no matter how close they had become, or how bizarre things were in the warehouse.
"It's the monkeys," she said. She could picture the warehouse as she spoke: a long, narrow, cinder-block building with a corrugated steel roof. The walls and ceiling were painted white, with two rows of florescent lights hanging down from the steel rafters. There were three rows of cages: molded fiberglass crates with steel doors running along both walls, and a row of freestanding steel cages down the middle. The center row was where the monkeys were kept. "Every day I go in there, there are more monkeys."
"Huh." Dr. Nelson replied. The edge was gone from his voice. "Were we expecting additional intakes?"
"I don't know." Her voice was near whining. "There something wrong with them, though. Every day there's more of them, sometimes and they're all crammed into the cages. Yesterday there were five macaques in one cage." She remembered how that had looked: fur and fingers sticking out from the bars, one monkey pressed against the wire, mouth open, sharp canines jutting out like a rattlesnake being milked. "They were dead."
"Five dead monkeys?" he asked. The quarantine was a formality; nothing was expected to be wrong with these animals.
"There were more dead ones than that," she said. "I left you a message. On your service." She knew then that he hadn't checked it. He was with his family and didn't want to talk to her. She was someone he only thought of when his wife wasn't around.
"How many dead monkeys?" Dr. Nelson asked, choosing to overlook the issue of the voice mail he hadn't listened to. For a moment, Patricia could hear another voice, a woman speaking very close to the phone. Mrs. Nelson, perhaps? Patricia tried to imagine what the doctor's wife would look like.
"About twenty," Patricia said. She remembered taking their bodies from the cages, some warm and sickeningly limp, others rigid and cold.
"Patricia, we only had thirteen macaques altogether."
"I know!" she shouted. "That's what I'm saying. There are more and more monkeys every day!"
"Patricia," Dr. Nelson said, his voice searching for that authoritative tone that bosses must have. "That's impossible."
Impossible or not, that was what had been happening. The first few weeks of the job had been completely uneventful, if unpleasant. She disliked the long drive out to the airport, and how the warehouse smelled. There was a giant air conditioner on the roof that kept the animals comfortable even in the fierce July heat, but the re-circulating air was tainted with the odors of urine, feces, and fur.
On Wednesday, there had been a total of 13 of crab-eating macaques, each in their own cage, leaving most of the cages empty. The monkeys were the only animals in quarantine at the time, which she had been told was odd, as there were usually a few dogs and cats under rabies observation. Maybe it was the lack of work that had led to her and Dr. Nelson carrying on as they had.
Patricia had gone up and down the rows, feeding and watering the animals, observing their general condition, levels of alertness, all sorts of things. These monkeys had been bred on a farm and were used to being handled, but they still frightened her, a little. She was in her second year of a pre-veterinary program, and animals still frightened her sometimes, especially big ones, like horses, but especially human-looking ones, like macaques.
On Thursday morning, there had been 27 macaques, sometimes two in a cage, which was strictly against policy. It was possible that another shipment had come in during the night, but there were 60 cages. There was no reason to pack the monkeys together like that. She thought someone had made a mistake, and she separated the monkeys out. The monkeys called and hooted as she moved them. Some had struggled, but none had bitten her. Patricia was careful not to challenge them by looking into their eyes.
Then, on Friday morning, there were 64 monkeys in the room. A few of the cages were still empty, while others had two or even more monkeys in them. Some of the monkeys were dead, four or five crammed into a cage. This was not normal; this couldn't have been a mistake. She had bagged them and put them in the freezer. Then she paged Dr. Nelson and left a message.
She had thought about it all last night. She didn't know where the monkeys were coming from, but if things went as they had been going, there would be perhaps 200 monkeys in there today, and the cages couldn't hold that many. The cages would be split open, the animals loose. She saw it in her mind, the warehouse crowded with running, hooting, fighting macaques. She couldn't go back there.
Patricia had skipped the morning feeding, and had haunted her studio apartment, the air conditioner whirring, the radio on, waiting for Dr. Nelson to call. The bright Fourth of July sun leaked in through the blinds. Puerto Rican kids were running up and down the narrow street, lighting off firecrackers. When noontime came, and Dr. Nelson still hadn't called her, Patricia had texted him with her telephone number and added 911 at the end.
"So they didn't get fed or watered this morning?" Dr. Nelson asked, growing angry, now. She knew he was regretting what their other relationship had done to their boss/employee dynamic.
"No," she confessed quietly. "I couldn't go in." She sounded very small to her own ears.
"God damn it," Dr. Nelson said, not really to her, but about her, she knew. "I'll call you later." He hung up the phone.
"Thirteen macaques." Dr. Nelson said. She could hear that he was on a cell phone, and he was driving. He hadn't given her his cell phone number, just the pager. "A little hungry, but fine."
"But that's impossible!" Patricia said. "Did you check the freezer?"
"Of course I did." Dr. Nelson replied. He was angry; she could hear it in his voice. The cell phone crackled. "There were no dead monkeys in there, and there were 13 monkeys in the cages, just like there should be," he said.
He had to be lying. But why would he?
"Listen, Patricia, the job was to for you to take care of these animals over weekends and on my days off," he said. "I'm not certain what you thought was happening there, but I think this might be the wrong job for you. I'll send you your last check." There was a long pause. She could hear the car rolling, the burnt summer air flowing in through the open window. "Sorry that this didn't work out." Dr. Nelson disconnected.
Patricia felt simultaneous stabs of fear and relief. She wouldn't have to see him anymore. She had wanted something to happen between them, but a relationship with a married man was a bad idea. And there was no job, now, either. She had gotten out of that as well.
But what about the monkeys? She hadn't imagined them, she was certain. Dr. Nelson must have been lying, to cover up gross negligence on someone's part. But who could be so cruel as to cram those monkeys down into the cage as she had found them? She pictured it, a large man wearing a brown denim jacket and heavy black gloves shoving one more monkey down into an already crowded cage. It was worse than inhuman.
There was a crash from the bathroom. Patricia spun her head around. She knew from the sound that it was the glass she used when brushing her teeth, falling from the sink and shattering on the tile floor. She rose from the bed and crossed the bedroom, slowly. The bathroom door was nearly closed and allowed just a sliver of sunlight to fall into the dark hall. Shadows crossed the light, perhaps curtains blowing in the breeze of an open window.
There was another crash, followed by the stuttered growl of the shower curtain being ripped down. There was a noise behind her. Patricia spun and saw two crab-eating macaques sitting atop her computer monitor, staring at her with their small black animal eyes. Soundlessly, one monkey opened its mouth, revealing two sets of long canines in what seemed to be a yawn but Patricia knew was a challenge. She looked away reflexively, not wanting to confront the animal, and saw that here were two more monkeys on her bed, in the posture of grooming. They stopped and looked at her, dark eyes glittering.
She heard the cabinet doors in the kitchen creak open, then glassware tumbling out and shattering. This was followed by an excited, animal scream. The monkeys in the room with her screamed in answer, she spun again, there were more monkeys in the room now, hanging from the blinds, on the computer chair, under the desk. They set up a din of screeching and wailing, each calling out a warning of some threat they all had simultaneously spotted, such as a snake or a jaguar. Patricia ran for the front door, only a handful of steps in her studio apartment. She glanced into the kitchenette. Monkeys lined the horizontal surfaces, packed together like commuters on a rush-hour train. Three more monkeys hung precariously from the overhead light. As she watched, the oven door fell open and dead monkeys spilled out, their fur singed, their faces bloated from gas.
Patricia retched, and pulled open the front door.
The doorway was filled with monkeys, pressed together as they had been in the cages, some already asphyxiated, other struggling against the weight of the monkeys above. Patricia threw her hands up and screamed. The monkeys spilled into the apartment, cresting over her like a wave. She struggled against them, her hands pushing out against fur, fingers and teeth. The sheer weight of numbers bore her down, and she collapsed. The monkeys kept pouring in. More and more were being piled on, it was as if the entire apartment building had been stuffed with monkeys and her open door was a drain in at the bottom. When she tried to scream again, her mouth was instantly filled with soft, furry flesh.
Patricia struggled and kicked as the monkeys struggled and kicked. Fingers clutched and pulled at her, and the weight of their countless small bodies began to press down upon her. The air was getting harder to pull in; it tasted of cages and pellets and wet fur. The monkeys against her were mostly dead, now, and the cries of the living were growing fainter and fainter.
She opened one eye. A small glimmer of light bled down from above, the beam broken by the monkeys being piled on top. Patricia could see that a monkey close to her was still alive. Its mouth was open just a little and its nostrils flared with each excited breath. She watched its dark eye dart as the weight of the monkeys above it pressed down.
Then the light was gone.
THE END
