29 October 2015

MYSTERY HOUSE



A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story.

Suitable for children.


START HERE

The moon oozes into a starless black above the peaked and jutting roof of the place, the inky-windowed bulk of it squatting in the mist, leaning almost imperceptibly away, as if gathering itself to strike.  It's not quite what you expected, being so much more.  Like something out of a bad mid-century horror comic, dilapidated even then, but with 70 more years of decay on top of that.  Gables and gambrels and garrets, sagging shit Lovecraft would have recognized as the parts of a place people once lived, but now only where something Beyond Evil lurks.  A wrought-iron-prickled container for Things That Should Not Be, looking for all the world like the frozen head of Walt Disney sucked off the French Quarter.

They said not to come, everyone knows better than to come, but having finished that awful business with the vibrating mummy—God rest the souls of the fallen—here you are.  Recovered, mostly, except for a slight limp and the odd blackout moment, but full again with hate and a terrible resolve.

You grimace and make a crackling fist.  A rivulet of blood drips from your knuckles.

It ends tonight—the Mystery House is done.


Inventory

slight limp
hate
terrible resolve
witch-hunting kit


Do you:

WALK UP STEPS
or
CHECK AROUND BACK



You have chosen:

WALK UP STEPS

This is the kind of protesting, rotten-wood portico that could snap an ankle upon hasty retreat—just the sort of non-diabolical hero-killer that witches aren't known for, but should be.  You'd imagine it's all black magic and demon familiars and hideous transformations but it's much more likely to be shit like this, a Halloween prop shaken vigorously in the face, the backpedaling, the snapped ankle and then a quotidian monkey shanking.  Or, like that one time in Prague, an electrified bed frame suspended over a window, a bit of real-world magic that kills one while shattering the minds of everyone else within screaming and smelling distance.  You make a mental note to jump the steps should it come to that.

You take a step or two toward the door—a mildly luminescing tangle of angles that seems interested in meeting you halfway—your hand is on the baroque knocker before you realize what you've done.


Inventory

slight limp
hate
terrible resolve
witch-hunting kit
mental note


Do you:

KNOCK
or
GO TO LIQUOR STORE FOR TEQUILA AND COUGH SYRUP



You have chosen:

GO TO LIQUOR STORE FOR TEQUILA AND COUGH SYRUP

It's a well-lit and suspicious place, midnight stragglers hustling personal demons, furtive, judged and judgmental.  No real eye contact, just lots of glances.  The dude by the dumpster makes your hand itch for the Glock in your witch-hunting kit—you did remember the Glock, right?  Or was it the sawed-off?  Or was the sawed-off just the truncheon, similar in the hand and mind?  Shit shit shit.  You stand between the aisles of stuff shaped like want-holes, frozen, and what you want is to rummage the duffel and put that itchy hand on the Glock or the sawed-off and not the truncheon but there are at least six eyes glancing past you repeatedly, slashing at your equanimity, and an array of CCTV cameras that can probably see your thoughts like closed-captioning.  You take a breath and a swig of cough syrup.

"Hey, man," says the cashier, "You gonna pay for that?"

"I always do," you reply.


Inventory

slight limp
hate
terrible resolve
witch-hunting kit
tequila
cough syrup


Do you:

TALK TO CASHIER
or
GET ON WITH IT ALREADY




You have chosen:

TALK TO CASHIER

The look on his face is one you've seen before, too often, so you hit him again.  He goes down, taking the folding chair he's duct-taped to with him to the cracked basement floor.  He coughs teeth and wails.  "I told you I don't know anything!"

"So you admit you're a mindless pawn."

"What?  What pawn?!"

You give him an extra-hard boot to the tummy.  Rookie move—it's gonna take him a few minutes to recover, and in the meantime you'll get nothing useful out of him.  Just sobs and fluids.  The single bare bulb is swinging—must've bumped it with your head—making shadows lurch and pounce.  Furniture and old machines, some covered with ghost-shrouds, some naked, a mirror framed in light wood carved like bones, your face, hovering there, in terrible recognition—you've been here before.  So many times, before.

You grab him by the hair and yank him upright.  The chair's fucked, not rated for this, won't sit up straight.  "The house," you hiss, "and the witch."

The bulb gutters like flame.

His face twists.  "This place?  You're the one who brought me here!"


Inventory

slight limp
witch-hunting kit
horrible realization


Do you:

GET THE FUCK OUT
or
GET ON WITH IT ALREADY




You have chosen:

GET THE FUCK OUT

The hallways are long and dark and full of senseless furniture that's only good for architectural spreads that never show people—or for tripping intruders.  The passages twist, but not in the usual way, everything's turning on its long axis.  Three steps on the floor, a weird hop to the wall, careful not to put a leg through any doorways, then bootprints on the ceiling while dodging dead light fixtures.  You hit the front door floorwise at full steam, knocking it open and hurtle onto the porch, where you put a boot right through the middle step.

You wake on the damp ground, nightsounds all around, having pissed yourself.  Your head and ankle throb in synchrony.  The house squats, immobile, front door hanging open like a dumb mouth.


Inventory

pronounced limp
witch-hunting kit


Do you:

GET ON WITH IT ALREADY
or
GO TO BARCELONA



You have chosen:

GO TO BARCELONA

Of course, you don't really intend to go to Barcelona.  That's just code for a broken arrow situation gone FUBAR, an emergency exfil to a safehouse, probably somewhere in the Balkans.  And then a general call for reinforcements.

The flight, while at the marginal safety of 35,000 feet, does nothing to calm your nerves.  You're gonna need something to keep your head in the clouds.


Inventory

pronounced limp
jangled nerves
keister-stashed fiberglass shiv


Do you:

TROUBLE STEWARDESS FOR SLEEPING AID
or
HIJACK PLANE



You have chosen:

TROUBLE STEWARDESS FOR SLEEPING AID

Dear Penthouse Letters,

I never thought it could happen to me, but it did.  Airplane lavatories are tiny and you'd swear there wasn't enough room to cram two people together in there—let alone have enough space to disrobe sufficiently to snizzle—but you'd be surprised.  It probably has something to do with the unconscious needs of evolutionary pressure and how we're genetically inhibited from making a public space where two people can't fuck or designing pants that can't be popped, flopped or twisted quickly into a configuration that allows for genital contact.  No matter how hard we try, the ur-chemistry in our blood will always steer us back to a bang-closet and long zippers.  Even the most devout ascetic in his "don't touch it" closet, dingwallace safely mortified in a chastity belt, can get shocked erect when a servant of indeterminate gender wriggles into the space buck naked with the key.  Turns out in the deepest, darkest sub-basement of the soul there's always water on the floor, seeping, seeping.  Her hands on mine, she showed me what she liked, so we did a bunch of that.  It didn't make me as sleepy as cough syrup, which would have been nice, but it did make her wink at me for the rest of the flight.

Sincerely,

Name Withheld By Request


Inventory

pronounced limp
keister-stashed fiberglass shiv
mile-high club membership
chlamydia


Do you:

RIDE IT OUT
or
NO, REALLY—LET'S HIJACK THIS MOTHERFUCKER




You have chosen:

RIDE IT OUT

After three confusing weeks in Barcelona, you're back.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
plucky sidekick


Do you:

GET ON WITH IT ALREADY
or
TRAIN SIDEKICK



You have chosen:

GET ON WITH IT ALREADY

You stand before the night-house in the semi-protective glow of the full moon, panting and wiping the plucky sidekick's blood from your eyes.  You told him to run.  You told him to run but he had to turn and look.  They always do.  Unless you train them not to.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
dented shovel


Do you:

WALK UP STEPS
or
CHECK AROUND BACK



You have chosen:

ENTER GRAVEYARD

You're only halfway down, like three feet under the headstone, when the shovel hits a lead plug with an inscription.

THINK ABOUT IT, it says.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
dented shovel
doubt


Do you:

DIG IT UP
or
JESUS CHRIST JUST DO WHAT THE PLUG SAYS



You have chosen:

DIG IT UP

Fuck plugs.  Besides, the grave contains some dude buried head-down with a baby-skull wedged in his mouth.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
dented shovel


Do you:

REMOVE SKULL
or
NO NO NO DON'T TOUCH IT



You have chosen:

REMOVE SKULL

You could sell this shit on eBay—the plug, the bound bones, the baby skull, hell, even your underwear "worn by a grave robber during an actual grave robbery; cleaned to eBay standards".


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
dented shovel
bundle of bones
baby skull


Do you:

SELL ON EBAY
or
CALL IT A NIGHT



You have chosen:

SELL ON EBAY

Your roommate's home—still hasn't done the dishes—says he called the police.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
bundle of bones
baby skull
rage


Do you:

WAIT FOR POLICE
or
CASTIGATE ROOMMATE



You have chosen:

CASTIGATE ROOMMATE

No matter how hard you look, you can't find the parasite.  Probably shoulda laid down some plastic first.  Red and blue lights dance through the thin curtains. 


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
parasite


Do you:

KICK THE DOOR BEFORE THEY DO
or
FEIGN INNOCENCE



You have chosen:

KICK THE DOOR BEFORE THEY DO

You gun the engine of the Rhino Industries Trampler XL police vehicle and three of the six South African riot tires get air off a startled Prius, neatly crimping it in a cloud of sparkling glass.  It handles like a pig, the driver-side door is missing—which is annoying—and the radio doesn't get anything but some weird, right-wing talkshow about places you've just been.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
tomahawk
parasite
police hat
sucking chest wound


Do you:

TAKE A LEFT ON EUCLID
or
HOLY SHIT VIBRATING MUMMY



You have chosen:

TAKE A LEFT ON EUCLID

More than anything you want that hard left, away, away from what is, impossibly, him.  Popping and locking and doing his weird vibrating dance across the street, his millennia-wormed vestments snap-fluttering in a cloud behind him.  In that awful, sickening moment you realize that all those months of investigation and globetrotting, that burning swath of ruined lives you wiped from the map like so much dust, all culminating in that single, hard night beneath the pyramids, Inishka whispering in your ear "Make it count," and then she was gone, no time to scream, Doc Ambrose rising then, pages of the Book of the Dead in his fist as he barked impossible syllables you could feel in your guts and nuts to bring the whole mass of centuries down upon the Dread Pharaoh's head—all of it, all of it a monumental waste.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
parasite
sucking chest wound
regret


Do you:

SWERVE
or
THROW TOMAHA—AW SHIT IT'S GONE



You have chosen:

SWERVE

You haul on the wheel hand-over-hand and the beast groans with inertia as the shocks on one whole side compress, tires fattening with the load but keeping the road as you punch it again and bear down on the flickering thing pinned in the banks of blinding lights.  Seconds are sectioned as they swell, the ticking of every clock let out logarithmically long—longer—and then into the silence between worlds where the vibrating mummy dances his blasphemous dance.  He steps—and is gone.  He steps—

—and the grille has him for lunch, then vomits the other half into the hungry wheels where he pops into a cloud of spicy dust.


Inventory

slight limp
mile-high club membership
parasite
sucking chest wound


Do you:

DRIVE UNTIL THE SNIPER TAKES THE SHOT
or
DRIVE THE BREACHING VEHICLE TO THE MYSTERY HOUSE



You have chosen:

DRIVE THE BREACHING VEHICLE TO THE MYSTERY HOUSE

In the glare of the 18 halogens it looks like the kind of place kids go to drink and have formative experiences that'll color their first marriage, the kind of place heroin addicts go to get found dead.  Light washes evil to banality, and you realize you just shoulda burned the place down in the first paragraph.  But your reflexes are failing you—the last thing that always happens just before the end.

There are no brakes, just an aching right foot holding pedal to the metal, and at least one of choppers tethered to you by silver spotlights is live news—and man, are they ever gonna see something when you kick this hive over.  You got what you couldn't get in Barcelona, an entire sting-crazy and heavily armed cavalry riding in your wake.  Whatever boils out of that house will go straight into their teeth.  It might get you first, but what the hell, that's the end that was destined for you when you first stepped upon the path.

The light makes the whole façade a million shades of gray, everything dull but for the yawning black mouth of the doorway, an undulating deadspace that seems to shift with every jounce of the Trampler's riot-worn shocks.  The engine roars—and the house answers—slapping your blood cold, the steering wheel like ice in your fists.  Eyes frozen wide you hit the portico at speed, disintegrating it into a twin-tailed fountain of wet kindling as you plunge into the heart of the house and the darkness folds over you like a thousand nights up to no good.  No good at all.

And now you know the door was never the way in—it was the way out the whole time.



17 February 2015

The part where we're done.



Part I —  All-in on alien.

On the screens above their rainbow heads it's all tentacle sex, gaping and surging, eyes wide and watering, what happens, perhaps, when your culture gets gut-punched by two nukes.  Below it's all human-enough—people-shaped, smells unfamiliar but not outright wrong, sounds like laughter, anger, need—it's just that it's not coming through on the right channels.  The faces mean the same things, they're just unfamiliar to my uninitiated gut.  So I keep my head down and suck my noodles alone.

Barking syllables, repeated, give me the he means me jolt, repeated again because you never look up until you're sure, and when I do the other face is clearly pissed off, same family after all.  His body language is a giant sneer, and he repeats himself, this time with a two-finger poke into my shoulder that twists my skeleton.  My hand wants a gun like a prayer wants God, but they don't let you fly like that around here and my contacts were all head-shakes on the weapons part.  I decide to play dumb until I have to hit him.

I turn in my seat to free a boot from the bar rail and line it up, all sneaky-like, with his inseam.  That's when I see the tats and know this isn't random.  He barks again and I think about a chain of events that doesn't start with me getting shot, but does have me rabbiting through an Orwellian panopticon, built to prevent pretty much everything I might think of to escape.  There's a ludicrous car chase that ends with a hostage I don't want and a cartoon sniper taking the shot—

Through the super slo-mo of brains-blood-teeth-single-flapping-eye I see her step forward in the unusual direction and engage him with hot gibberish.  His face does this thing like he's been asked to fuck a three-headed dolphin and he turns with comic leisure, the leading edge of him a barely contained backhand slap.  They trade sounds and faces and postures that ratchet ever upward and finally he hits her, spinning her hair into a dark shining spiral.  She puts a hand to her face and withdraws.  He turns to ignore her and perhaps give me some, then folds his arms with the arrogance that comes from living with a tribe of thugs at your back, feet wide in genital-wagging bravado.  And then she's back with a stick produced from nowhere, the first crack across his skull almost quiet, then magnified on the second shot by his open mouth when she breaks it over his head, grabs him by the hair and pumps the jaggy end into his gargling neck three, four times.  He hits the floor and curls sideways like a gill-sprung fish where she takes an athlete's windup and kicks him in the brain hard enough to make the rest of his passing painless.  The whole thing is almost refreshingly familiar, human, humane.  Comparatively speaking.

She eyeballs everyone in the joint and they give her a radius like a force field.  "You," she says to me, "he will see you."


Part II — In through the out door.

We didn't fuck in the car, though it smelled like we might, with all the unbuttoned humanity freighting the air.  That came later at the coffin hotel where she went at it with the workmanlike enthusiasm of a bucket-list tick, all business and taking care of herself, my own orgasm slapped out of me at the last moment like a half-forgotten ellipsis dot dot dot.

"You need a better hotel.  Another driver will take you to one."  She slid into her pants and to the hatch, popped it and sat on the edge, a wilding shape.  "Clean yourself and wait for the call."

Her walk away, pulling her scent with her, was that ancient, ultimate ad:  This way to the eggs.  Loud enough to tell from the other side of a roaring river whether or not it was worth the swim.

Later.

Cigarette smoke and a ringing in my miserable head that comes from having a firearm discharged too close, these are the things they leave me with.  Instead of a finger I have the object of interest, grasped in a half-hand and bloody towel.  It's a cylinder of quartz with the top taken off at a funny angle, fine silvery-white tracings inside that hint at puzzle pieces, constructed, not flaws.  If they knew what I know, they wouldn't have left it with me, traded it for the puffs of nothing that are promises, information, gold.

When I move my mind a certain way and regard the object just so I am lopped and hollowed, sectioned, an exploded view of myself, and the shame at so few moving parts is one of those parts, making it an embarrassingly large percentage of what I am.

Time passes and I fall through places chasing understanding, ejected from the penthouse within 24 hours, then a week at the coffins, a month in an aptly named hostel, the better part of a year in the streets where no one really lives.  When understanding finally dawns in fullness, it's because I've become extenuated enough for the caverns of darkness to shine through, those dense overhead miles encompassed by my smeared gaze.  I'm the only thing that reflects anything in here and I can see that I'm done.

When it comes it's like a migraine tear, space-time jabbed and pressed into and nothing I can say can describe it—it struggles with an earnestness we would call "rage" but that doesn't even come close.  We are thin in a way it is dense and the pull of its gravitational emotion smudges the edge of what I am, permanently.


Part III — It'll come to me.

One outrageous act, it's all I can afford, all I'll have—I almost said "time for", but of course that's meaningless where I'm going, where I am.  Too many open doors showing the trajectory of my life, points connected in a neat spiral with a sudden, paper-tearing pulse off the table.  It will find me, it's only a matter of—"time" is wrong, again.

And so I open doors along the curve of the harbor, looking for that summertime past, through the uprights of the dragon-tailed torii, traditional thresholds delimiting the sacred from the profane—which side is which cannot be determined here.  I push against a current of time, following the regression of modernity, everything bulking, simplifying, steel and concrete curling into wood and paper, clothing losing the conqueror's twang for something more authentic.  

I follow a rising wind that hums with the attenuated shades of once-people, it grows to choking with their ashes as I cross into a stain upon the world, a graveyard convulsed and inverted, its underside crawling with smoking ghouls.  The air growls and grows ever hotter until it ignites into screaming tongues of flame that recede toward a mad point in the sky where they compress themselves into a sudden apocalypse of light.

It is the summer of 1945, and children play in the park.

Everything stops when they see me, their headmistress calling to gather them back across the sward.  The children's faces are unafraid, observant at the sight of me out of nowhere, my flesh a door to forever, a beacon that calls to the thing beyond for whom time itself is meat and drink.

There's a little girl ahead of the group, an outlier with a red bow at her neck, and we both run for her.  I scoop her into my arms and she is light and calm until her headmistress screams and the girl turns her little head and begins to cry, infected with terror.

"I'm sorry," I say, and let the torrent of time drag us back.


My stuttered self sets her on new grass with new children and she has only just left my hands when I am consumed






.

17 July 2013

Adventures in a Macramé Vest


When the Pharaoh pulled the first lever we knew we were pretty much boned; all we had were small arms and mummies just laugh at that shit.  The ancient, man-sized gears of the world-ending clockwork began to turn, a slow rumble more felt than heard, shaking fine veils of sand from the massive stones overhead.

Carmelita gave a warrior's cry and went at him with her tomahawk—the Pharaoh gestured, two fingers and a cocked wrist, summoning a consuming wall of snakes and flame that chewed her from the very fabric of this existence.

Tomás screamed as he emptied three mags into him, each reload a practiced blur, but it was literally just punching paper.  The Pharaoh was nothing more than a monstrous piñata, the thinnest of materials containing the mortally corrupted immaterial.

He laid a brown claw upon the final lever and I found myself shouting, unencumbered by thought—fear and the ultimate melancholy at the end of all things pulling the words from me:

"What evil is so powerful that a man can forget the warmth of companionship?"

He seemed to consider this—though his face was locked in a spiced-resin rictus, teeth curled at arid angles—his body language spoke of remembrance, of eons-effaced nights of fragrant curves in a darkness that held no terror.  Breath, of all things, rushing at an octave higher than his own; perhaps a soft curtain of hair, cassia and cinnamon on the lips, a damnable clasp giggling and darting from his seeking fingers, a puzzle finally solved in a wave of flesh to the face and the hieroglyph for motorboating.

The Pharaoh paused.  "What is that," he croaked, "to Eternity?"  But the crack in his voice echoed the flaw in his withered soul, and the end of the lever had already been set into it.

I stood at the lip of the pit containing the hungry machine and bid him come.  He hesitated, then took a shuffling step nearer.  Then another.  Side-by-side we regarded the handiwork of angry gods, vulnerable men, and things without names.

"What is this," I asked, daring to lay a trembling hand upon his weightless chest, "to that?"

He regarded the thundering orrery with paper-thin slits over glinting black and made as if to sigh—and he would have had I not made a fist to grip him by his crackling sternum first.  I pivoted and hurled him, lighter than imagination, toward the inconstant maw of machinery.  He made no sound beyond the rustle of leaves in the fall, summoned no demons in his surprise, though he did clutch at the my sleeves to reverse the drop and destroy me instead.

Luckily for all of us, I was wearing my macramé vest.

06 May 2013


The bathtub sloshes in the humid dark. It sloshes because it is filled with... liquid, a liquid that submerges and contains. A man cowers in the corner, a tiny, crumpled man, a man who fears for the end of bathtub liquid containment. He has in his possession a certain clock that can count those hours—has been counting those kernels of seconds mounded in cupped hands of minutes—since it was first constructed and wound by trembling, doom-palsied fingers. The man's fear is compounded by the essential paradox of clocks: that such devices are incapable of measuring the infinite (so it would seem, though it has never been true for anyone) ray of time, instead clipping, with their gear-work, a 12-hour segment joined at the ends like the Ouroboros wyrm. The horrid clock mocks the illusion of Eternity with the same 60 seconds, the same 60 minutes, the same 12 hours repeated for as long as the spring holds the nervous tension of those original hands. The man's true fear is not that things will end but that he must endure the anxiety of his circumstance in an unchanging, undying cycle as the bathtub sloshes in the humid dark. 

Question 1: When the alarm sounds, is it a heart attack, poop, or both?

Question 2: This is not a question: Let's involve a monkey with a radio collar (or bomb) somehow.

29 April 2013

Dean the Wisp


Dean the Wisp was thin and slight and had no idea how he got that way; he moved like a bedsheet in moonlight, flowing in a wind he couldn't feel.  Somehow he was only aware on certain nights of the year, making the years seem as weeks and the human world all around him a jittery fireworks show of lives briefly bright, bursting into existence and just as quickly withering back.  He was the legend that got broccoli et; 13-year-old girls stared into candlelit mirrors and chanted his name; creepy old men invoked him in rings of glowing campfire faces; but he was different from the rest.  Unlike loch-stranded plesiosaurs or big-footed country cousins of Man or almond-faced anal-probers Dean the Wisp was the real deal—a ghost story with a real motherfucking ghost.

Sometimes he was rooted in a vast blackness populated by dimly pulsing motes of drifting ash that twinkled like Christmas lights glimpsed through a blood-filmed eye—or maybe just stars.  With the proper effort he could separate one out from the rest and, compressing himself down through strange orders of magnitude, envelop that single bit, with a sensation not unlike pulling your head through a wet, heavy sweater, popping into sudden light and noise on the other side.

It was there that he saw her for the first time, making that face with a chain coffee, a cigarette and a purply-striped scarf, of all things.

J did not want you to call her Janet—ever—she hated the sound of her name coming out of the mouths of children, warped in just three third-grade tries to "Janetor", just another word for a pedophile with a mop.  So just J was fine, either the letter or J-A-Y but never J-A-E because that's not pronounced "jay" anyway.

J, as it turned out, had a magic ring—though she didn't know it.  She bought it at an estate sale with the crisp 50 her grandmother had just sent her inside a yellow birthday card with a kitten holding a cupcake on the front (such needless detail for something so trivial but that's the stupid shit that sticks after the fact when you've fucked ghosts and seen bodies explode into loops of meat—the mundane is the floatie you cling to in insane seas) because cash is lame and the ring looked old.

It was.  The ring was constructed at great expense and mortal peril in 221 by Li Feng, a learned master who drank mercury and never ejaculated—to conserve his vital essence—until his death in 398 by demon possession where he vomited a surfeit of the stuff from his mouth and eyes.  The event was said to have impregnated every maiden within earshot of the thunder crack of torn worlds, giving rise to a generation of difficult, wild-eyed children and mystic hobos.

So the bearer of this ring was ethnic or indistinct or whatever you want in non-ironic high-tops, bangs and pigtails, the result of generations of questionable decisions.  She stuck her gum under furniture, furtively, and worked a job job far beneath her Perfect World potential. 

She also had a ghost boyfriend.  The first time she had been slightly charmed, the second, suspicious, but lonely.  She googled it after that but it wasn't a thing so it couldn't have been fake.  Besides, the third time he might have looked different but he sure did fuck the same.  The fourth time she called him on it point blank:  "You're the same dude, aren't you."

"What?  Hey, that's crazy," he said, shifting off of the cooling wet spot.

She made the face.  "How do you even know what I'm talking about?"

"I—I really don't."

"It's cool.  Girls are into supernatural relationships these days—we're programmed for it.  I mean, Prince Charming is about as unreal as you can get; sparkly blood-drinking corpses are somehow sexy, and boy wizards are fuckable."

He snorted.  "Well, fuckable by old wizards."

"I know, right?  But it's okay.  I know it's been you the last couple times."  She snuggled into the crook of his arm, molded along the length of his body.  "Not only do you fuck the same, you keep using the same pick-up line."

"What?  No.  I'm smoother than that."

"'Hey, baby—ever fucked a ghost?'"  She shrugged.  "But hey, it works, so at least one of us is awful."

"The same line every time?" His eyes defocused, searching.  "Dammit."

Her breath was hot on his neck.  "When can I see you again?"

"Don't be in such a hurry—we have until dawn.  After that, I dunno.  You'll know when I find you."

"Cool."  She hummed contentedly.  Then, "Hey—next time I could go for some warm, brown eyes.  And actual abs; pecs like dinner plates.  And a good dick."

He arched an eyebrow.  "Uh—I'll see what I can do?"

• • •


It took years for the Chinese ghost-hunters to find them.  Years filled with an on-again/off-again pairing that suited them both and saw Dean settle into an institutionalized fitness buff and apparent escape artist like an ass into familiar jeans.  Snug and flattering, even in the places worn thin from overuse.

The black Humvee came across the night lawn at an odd angle, no lights as it slammed into the porch and killed the engine.  Doors popped and low voices muttered.

J woke with a start and Dean was already up, naked in striped street lights.  "Do you have a baseball bat," he asked, voice flat with resolve.

J coughed.  "No, I have a gun."

Dean shook his head.  "No good.  They invented gunpowder—they know all the bulletproof charms.  Do you have a toolbox."

"I have a katana," she offered, pointing to a display above the bed.

Dean was already banging around in the closet.  Downstairs the front door unbolted itself and creaked open.  "Claw hammer's better."

"If you say so."

"You'll see so.  Chinese vampires can't be cut."  He stood up, the claw hammer in his fist.  "They have to be smashed."  Dean hefted it claw-forward, then flipped it back hammerhead-first.

J blinked.  "Wait—this is gonna be bad, isn't it."

Heavy footfalls in the hall.

"Get under the bed."

A mouth of lightning ate the door, soundlessly, followed by the seeking tendrils of a Sumerian revenant hex.  Dean was impressed.  These guys did their homework—poorly.  The tendrils ignored him and the first man through the door ate three rapid hammer-blows, his look of infinite surprise decrementing into a gory underbite.  A second man pushed the first aside and tackled Dean, they hit the floor and came to grips, Dean rolling him over and jerking the hammer free to bring it down into his indistinct head when a Word of Power stunned him cold and still.


He woke to ritual dismemberment, like wearing a suit of disconnected clothes, sleeves drooping down arms, pants falling to ridiculous pieces with every move.  J was duct-taped to a folding chair, one eye swollen shut, blood all over her sleepy shirt.

There were six of them left.  One taller, older—much older—than the rest, with one crazy eye and one puckered hole in the front of his skull.  They wore black turtlenecks and ill-fitting Carharts and had snub-nosed revolvers to keep the action simple in order to thwart gremlins.  One of them had a mummified baby in a sack.

Dean dropped the ruined body and went for the others, but they were all spheres of stone.  The only one open and soft was J, her bones thin pencil lines undulating in a haze of æther-blown tissue paper.

The older, taller, one-eyed one spoke. "You know what we're here for—we will not spare you or your demon-lover."

J snorted blood out her nose.  "Then why are you even talking?  None of this matters.  Kill us, ransack the house and fuck off."  J had never been taped to a folding chair before, or beaten, for that matter, but she was finding it liberating—if she was gonna die, she could say whatever the fuck she pleased.  Besides, it was buying Dean time.  Right?

The ghost-hunters squinted at her through gemstones and broken pieces of colored glass, muttering amongst themselves.

The one-eyed Magus paused.  "That's a—peculiar thing—for a girl to say," he murmured.  Then, "Shoot her."

Without hesitation one of the men executed a flawless cross-draw and straight-armed the gun at J's head, squeezing the trigger fluidly with the extension—

Dean seized one of the ghost hunters with everything he was and hurled him at the gun as it flashed—

The bullet flattened against the ghost hunter's face as he was flung and fell, bulletproof after all.  "Hey," he said petulantly, finding his feet and scratching at the slug.

The Magus threw mystic signs, cursing in forbidden tongues.  The others cast about wildly with their gems.

"Dean," J breathed, "Who else is there with you?"

The Magus produced a tiny book of splintered pages and began flipping through it with long, vice-yellowed nails.

"I know you said it, that Hell is a solitary thing, but I don't believe you."

Someone had the mummified baby out, waving it around.

"Dean, who else is there?"

His thoughts intersected hers, not for the first time, not as completely, but just as familiar, like sunlight or a favorite pair of boots.  There's... something here calling itself "Nine-Rings-and-Thirty-Ribbons".

"'Nine-Rings-and-Thirty-Ribbons'," she repeated.

The ghost hunters, as a unit, took an involuntary step back.

"That's the one!" J yelled, "Let him through!"

I can't, Dean wavered, You're the only one, it has to be you.

J grinned bloody teeth at the Magus.  "Like I said—let him through!"

The Magus covered his good eye and there was a sudden rush, an impossible widening of everything as Nine-Rings-and-Thirty-Ribbons happened.

It was less an entity than an event—Nine-Rings tore the chi from a man and whipped another to death with it; with a word it detonated bones as the Magus ate a pound of salt, they wore halos of their own exposed brains lapped by kittens, saw their fathers consumed by dogs at the point of ejaculation, their mothers wailing and barren, the mummified baby cackling and dancing on their tessellated graves the whole time.

It was the kind of stuff you can't go back to holding hands from.

• • •


In Florida, you can fuck forever.  It has an infinite supply of the nearly dead, long lives lived until threadbare, then seized in the last gasp, miraculous, and ridden those final few miles until the grave demands its due.  Repeat with high-tops, bangs and pigtails, Viagra and golf carts, and fuck the kids who never call.

She snapped her gum and made the face, stuck it under the dash while looking him square in the eye.  "I'm drunk," she said matter-of-factly, "Let's go back to the condo and, you know."

He complied and the cart jerked and whined in the shadows of wind-fluffed palms.  Presently, he spoke.  "I just can't get it out of my head."

She scooted a high-topped foot and wrinkly gray leg onto the hood.  "What."

"Nine-Rings."

"Baby, baby, baby," she sighed, "That was a one-time thing.  You and me, we're forever."

He knew it was true.

21 December 2012

Found Wanting


Fire next time. The Good Book said so, and of course, that’s exactly what happened. The whole world blindsided, too busy with fists pressed to flesh, Western powers and third-worlders alike, blindsided by an asteroid bigger than New Hampshire. It announced the end with a fountain of fire taller than the sky, and as if bumped by the impact, nearly everyone with a nuke lit theirs off. Almost like God said so.

For Tomas, it ended in 30 breathless seconds seven miles over Barcelona. One slow moment he was licking Bloody Mary off his middle finger, watching the stewardess’ skirt tighten as she leaned—then the row of seats in front of him exploded away into hard sky, sucking the wind from his lungs as it went.

He tried to scream, but only succeeded in soiling his britches. A little yellow bag popped from the ceiling and began to beat him mercilessly about the face and neck. The bright blue sky and dark limb of Earth flickered rhythmically, like a time machine set to fast-forward.

They fell from the sky, a metal snowstorm, no two pieces alike.

Tomas gulped at the thin air, desperate to save up enough for a good, solid scream. Dear God, just one, he thought. Just let me scream once Padre, don’t let it go like this, without a sound—

He couldn’t see, it hurt to blink; he reached up with liquid hands and wiped the ice crystals from his eyes—and saw it through the flashing of sky and ground.  The grand splayed flake of a wing fluttering to and fro, falling with them; it cut sharply right, banked, then beelined right for him. He was suffused with understanding, peace, love. Warmth. Padre, I answer thy summons.

The wing stuffed itself into the passenger section, slippery.

It brought with it a tunnel of light. Tomas unbuckled himself and swirled upward toward the infinity of—

Naked people.

Naked people pressed nuts to butts, chafing. Naked strangers; naked among strangers. Everyone was there. The people held themselves in shame, men with hands cupped over flaccid members; the women with their forearms pressed against their bosoms, lone hands shielding variously furred deltas of Venus. Those few stunned and bold who walked naked did so not from innocence.

Tomas was jostled from behind, from the sides, by flesh; he forcefully rubbed up against the woman in front of him and stiffened involuntarily. She turned her head and gave him a look like a slap. Tomas blushed. “Ma’am,” he managed. Though tall, he was somewhat ugly and awkward with women; but because the Lord is merciful, he had a large and well-formed penis. He wrestled it with both hands. “Sorry,” he said to the woman.

His view of the throng of humanity was better than those of average height around him. A lumpy sea of hair spread out in all directions, fleshy arcs of faces peeping up like choppy little waves. The predominant color was a dark, tousled brown. Rising out of that tide of humanity, above it like a breaching whale, was a massive Throne. It stood empty, the seat and back glowing a deep, fading red like cooling steel. The sky beyond looked like snow.

Everyone was there. Tomas, and the whole of humanity seething, stinking, crying, huddled, some singing, occasional fistfights. Not as many people holding each other as you might expect, or hope for. They were moving slowly forward, shuffling, toward the Throne, around it. Tomas’ heart burst with sudden understanding; hope.

“Excuse me,” he asked the man next to him, “Is this the line for—”

The man punched him, bloodying his nose.

“No!” the man yelled, flecks of spittle flying, “This ain’t the fuckin’ line to get into fuckin’ Heaven!”

Tomas’ face was numb. Blood ran into his mouth. He stared.

“What he means to say,” said an old woman at his left shoulder, “Is that we’ve been judged.”

Tomas squeezed his nose. “Not me.”

The old woman frowned. “Yes, you.”

Tomas shook his head. “No. I just got here.”

At that moment they rounded the foot of the Throne, the near leg like a skyscraper, and saw the doorway with the hastily hand-lettered sign: SATAN’S RENDERING PLANT #417.

“Fuckin’ newbie!” yelled the man.

The sign stirred up a beehive in Tomas’ head. “But I didn’t, I mean, I haven’t—oh, God!” he shrilled.

The old woman was apoplectic. “Shut him up or he’ll attract one of them!”

The man grabbed Tomas in a vicious headlock, something he was obviously very good at, and enjoyed. He clamped a meaty hand over Tomas’ bloody mouth and nose. Tomas struggled, but the man dragged him forward, toward the sign, the door, with the rest of them. Tomas began to give in, by degrees, overwhelmed and drowning in a sea of surprises. It’s all just like you’ve been taught, but nothing like you had hoped... Then he saw his father, at the door, his father, the doorman, holding open the door. Tomas started, and renewed his efforts to break loose. The man bore down on him, squeezing like he knew it was the last neck he’d get to squeeze, ever. Tomas bit his hand, to the bone, and hung on. The man screamed and flung him away, threw him forward through the crowd toward his father, the doorman.

“Father,” Tomas cried, “father!”

“Ah, me! Tomas!” They embraced.

His father pushed him away, at arm’s length, and sighed. “Let me have one last look at you.” His eyes glistened.

Tomas took him in. He was naked but for a fresh smelling T-shirt with the words MY PEOPLE WENT TO JUDGMENT DAY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT printed on it. Pinned to the shirt was a little gold badge of wings, like a pilot’s medal.

Tomas’ face twisted. “What?”

His father touched the badge, smiled. “I am a Helper. This is so the others will know me. And the shirt—” he hesitated, “—the shirt is from the... Lord of Darkness, just someplace to put the pin. Considerate, I suppose...” He grimaced, then brightened. “We have to get you a job! You and me, we can be together for a little bit before, well, you know.”

The doors swung open and closed, open and closed as the people pressed through them, into—

Tomas felt his body receding from him, falling away, a dead leaf from a tree before the coming winter. “A job?” he said distantly.

“But not that one,” his father said, pointing behind him, under the Throne. “You don’t want that job. They’re getting put into new bodies, reincarnated, to go down and mop up the stragglers.” He shuddered visibly. “You don't want that job.”

The new bodies were huge, bipedal and insectoid, eyes everywhere, with scything rows of claws. As Tomas watched, several helpers dragged a "volunteer" over to the twitching body and got to work; it was like stuffing a corpse into a sleeping bag. Bright portals winked from nothingness and spun open. Screaming, the men with skins of beasts leapt through the portals back to Earth.

To Tomas, it was suddenly very funny. He wanted to laugh loud and long, slap his thighs and bare his teeth, barking. Instead, his breath hissed from him.

“Father,” he said, barely audible, “Why?”

“Why?”

“Why Hell?”

“Oh, my son. This is not the way to Hell. There is no Hell. And they aren’t going to bother building Heaven, either. God is reclaiming all, to start over. Fresh.”

Tomas snapped into his body. “But the beauty! The humanity!”

“I know. We had the greatest potential—that’s probably why we were given the opportunity. But we failed to live up to that potential."

“Father! I haven’t had my say—”

“We all have.”

“But not me! I haven't been judged yet!”

“Son,” he intoned, then pressed his lips together, “We’ve all been judged, and been found wanting.”

“But—” His father slapped him, stunned him cold. His face began to flush hot and he held it with his hand.

“We have been judged. The Lord God judged us as a whole.”

“A whole.” Tomas’ voice was flat, a dead flower pressed in a family bible, its fragrance spent.

His father’s face softened. “We didn’t make it,” he said quietly.

The crowd jostled Tomas and he was caught up in the wave of flesh, carried forward through the doors and into a short, dank hallway, his hand still pressed to his stinging face...

Judged as a whole.

The hall smelled warm and somehow comforting; it was not the warmth of brimstone ahead, but the warmth of blood-friction; the heat of beating hearts.

Found wanting.

He got occasional glimpses through the swinging doors as they shushed ceaselessly open and closed, open and closed like a chewing mouth. And inside, strobing shots of more helpers, in rubber aprons, their feet stained as if from stamping grapes.

There is no Hell; they’re not even going to bother building Heaven...

Hell is just this little hallway, the hallway before entering SATAN’S RENDERING PLANT #417. Because Hell is just knowing. Even if only for a little bit.

He squeezed his eyes shut, squeezed the tears from them, and stumbled through the doors blindly—just like everyone else.