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Someone broke a seal. 

***

Far away and away and away, down below, a man was standing at an artillery emplacement.  He was not manning it.  He was talking to the OTHER man standing at the artillery emplacement. 

“-and that’s how the computer works,” he finished.  “Now will you PLEASE go away?”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course, of course,” muttered the other man.  He scratched at his long, sweaty bird and adjusted his tall, sweaty crown a hair.  “So it’s like a REALLY big bow then, right?  Right?”
The artilleryman sighed like his soul was being sucked out through his face. 

“Oops.  No more time!  I thank you for your efforts, bowperson.”  

And lo, he whistled to his white horse that had been standing there watching everything, hopped atop it, and rode away waving his bow overhead in excitement.

***

Someone broke a seal

***

All too close and yet distant, a man sat at a computer.  He hunched too low in his chair and he tucked his elbows too close in; everything about him screamed discomfort and inside him a barely-contained rage festered and rotted like the fattest grapes on the thickest vines.  Finally he sighed, stepped back, and looked at the fruits of the last fifteen minutes. 

ybo shuld klil  eechothar

Carefully, delicately, his finger hovered above the enter key, and just as he began to press it there was a DING and fifteen thousand more tweets filled his screen, explaining that nothing mattered and fighting anything done to anyone was pointless and everything was the same everywhere so who cared who did what. 

“God-damned botfarms,” muttered the man.  Outside his window his big red horse grazed untroubled in the pasture on green grass and unmown weeds.  A giant sword made the breeze whistle softly around it, lodged to the hilt in a tree due to a particularly troubling troll. 

“DICKS,” shouted the horseman.  “Goat-begatters!  Well, to hades with it all!”  And he threw his computer out the window and marched to the field and jumped onto his horse and was bucked off his horse and yelled at his horse and jumped onto his horse again and rode away, fuming. 

Ten minutes later he came back for the sword.

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

The man stood by the edge of the fields and watched the crops grow. 

They were fat.  They were fine.  They were strong. 

They were also being fed by irreplaceable groundwater from an aquifer that had been so overdrawn it was turning into dry gravel far underneath his feet.   A thousand years of carefully-trickled rainwater undone every half-hour, gone to nourish a field of nut-trees growing ten thousand miles away from their optimum habitat.

The man scratched his beard.  Beneath him his black horse snorted and leaned closer to the trees, hoping for a snack. 

“So…if it’s a denarius for a quart of wheat…and the denarius is…about a hundred dollars?  Maybe?  …and it’s however-many nuts to the wheat grain…. And the cost of the water and the land is…”

The tiny set of scales in the man’s free hand wobbled like an arthritic drunk with inner ear damage. 

“And if the aquifer isn’t being recharged because of anthro-po-geenic climate…change?”
The scales exploded, one bowl bouncing off a tree and the other very much not bouncing as it smacked into the man’s forehead. 

“FUCK,” said the man, and by the time he’d pulled himself upright and finished swearing he knew the seal was broken and it was time. 

“Oh thank goodness,” he muttered, as he scraped bits of scale from the ground and peeled it from his forehead.  “You know,” he told his horse, “this used to be an art.”

The horse stared at him, then tried to eat the scales. 

He was delayed again. 

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

Death was busy, as he had been and was and would be forever.  But he paid attention, and the big pale horse whose legs never stopped moving changed course for a long-awaited appointment. 

***

They met up somewhere just before what passed for dawn around there.  It was the closest place, and it had coffee and a gas station and some of those little overpriced bags of chips. 

No grass though.  The horses were properly irritated.

“Maybe we could go to Megiddo?” asked the man on the white horse.  “I’m pretty sure this was all meant to go down near Megiddo.”

“They flattened it,” said the man on the red horse shortly.
“I thought they rebuilt it.”
“Oh they did.  Then they flattened it again.”
“I meant after that.”
“They flattened it again after that.”
“And-”

“And again after that too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“If you two are quite finished,” said the man atop the black horse, “perhaps we could move on?  I doubt Armageddon is still happening near Megiddo.  There are more important places these days.”

“Armageddon is really less of a place and more of a mindset,” said Death philosophically.

“And it’s just arrived?” asked the man on the black horse.
“Oh no, it’s always been around.  It just doesn’t matter much.  I think some folks were expecting it a few years ago, and some a few decades back, and others centuries before that.  As long as folks want it it’ll be there for them.  Like a nice comfy blanket.”
“So shall we just… ride around then?” asked the man on the white horse.

“If you’d like.”
“If we’d LIKE?” demanded the man on the red horse.  “We’re meant to bring forth war!  And conquest!”

“And famine,” chimed in the man on the black horse.

“And famine, if that matters,” said the man on the red horse.
“Tell me, and tell me honest,” said Death, “does it seem like they need help with those sorts of things?”

There was a sad and very very honest silence.

“I didn’t think so.”
“I was trying,” muttered the man on the red horse.
“Me too!” said the man on the white horse.

“I was trying real hard.”

“Me too!”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”
“So what are we meant to do?” demanded the man on  the black horse.  “Just… stand here and let you go off and do all  our jobs for us?”
“I haven’t done anything in a thousand years,” said Death.  “It’s really just supervising these days.  You can do it too.”
“What, just WATCH?”
“It’s all a bit big for a single artisan now.  It’s all in the mass production.  And THAT means management.”
“Management.  Management.  Management.  Yes, I do like the sound of management.”  The man on the black horse twiddled his scales around his finger.  “Tell me, do they still not touch the wine and oil these days?”
“Oh yes, oh very much yes.  But the oil’s a bit different than what you remember.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
“Learn?” scoffed Death.  “We’re management, remember.  And I’d better not see you boys rushing this one.   This is their Apocalypse, we’re just living in it, and they want a nice long slow one.   Take it as it comes and appreciate the view.

“Oh absolutely!  You should see the size of the bows they have now.”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”

Outside there was a clink. 

The shuffle had been ignorable – a stirring of the breeze, perhaps.  The creak had been dismissible – a tree settling into its bed?  But the clink?  That was metal on metal.  That was something scrabbling.  Something moving.  Something searching. 

Moe gave herself three precious seconds to pretend it was her imagination, then the clink clanked again and she pulled herself upright; slowly, so as to allow the speculation time to marinate into the meat of fear. 

Maybe it was a burglar.  Maybe it was a drunk.  Maybe it was a drunk burglar and the drunk burglar was a serial killer rapist cannibal arsonist fly fisherman.  Maybe it was a ghost.  Maybe it was a killer clown.  Maybe it was the ghost of a killer clown and the killer clown was an anatomically incorrect giant Velociraptor.  Maybe it was Mrs. Wallace from grade 10 math hauled herself out of the grave to finally get her for cheating on her final exam and getting away with it.  Unfortunately, Moe’s body was acting without her and had already made its way to her front door, where it flicked on the porch lights. 

Dazzling brightness flashed, and the being perched atop her garbage froze, illuminated now by both the light of the full moon and the light of the LED.  It was not human.  It was not an animal.  It was naked, furry, man-shaped, torso sheathed in fuzzy white and little black flip-flaps of ears.  A long muzzle protruded, and its lips peeled back from a mouthful of so many pointed teeth that it seemed absurd to imagine them fitting in its jaws at all.  Baleful eyes glared at her above the fangs, and around the trash can a long, sinuous tail lashed, bare of hair. 

“Oh,” said Moe in great disgust.  “Oh.  It’s just Wally.  Fuck off, Wally.”

Wally gaped his mouth at her, silent and unmoved.  Moe pulled off her left slipper and threw it at him. 

***

Clive stood outside in the dying embers of the afternoon as a soft breeze played around his feet and the warm sun brushed its lips against his skin and he knew that all forty-three years of his life had been preparing him for this moment. 

It had been well worth waiting for. 

Above him an early moonrise sat low in the sky, surrounded by purple and red fire in the clouds.  Inside, condiments were waiting, toppings were being sliced and pan-fried and prepared.  In his left fist dangled a big paper bag of home-baked burger buns.  In his right hand the shining steel of his mother’s razor-edged meat spatula, older than he was and twice as strong as he’d ever been.  On the lawn his children ran and laughed and bickered and flirted with their friends. 

Time to get it started. 

Clive breathed deeply of air that tasted of flowers  and warm-growing trees, lifted the lid on the barbecue, and shouted “OH GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MOTHER SHIT COCK ASS.”

A gurgling snarl rattled from under the grill, crawling free of the sleepiest, groggiest face he’d ever encountered. 

“Wally!  GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THERE RIGHT THIS GODDAMNED SECOND!”

Wally hissed and coiled himself deeper, wrapping his tail around the propane tank and clinging to the stored barbeque cover with all four limbs. 

“Sweetheart?” Clive called indoors.  “Get me a bottle of bleach and the tongs.  The big tongs.”

***

The bells had rung, the buses had left, and the playground was not quite empty.  A faint whisper of the moon peered down from a pale blue cloudless sky. 

Sure, living next to school sucked for Toby in some ways, but it also meant free recess time whenever you wanted.  The seesaws were useless but the jungle gym was the best it’d ever get and there would never, ever, ever be a lineup on the slides.  Up and down and up and down until her lungs ached.  Her mother kept saying she’d be the first six-pack-year-old. 

She wanted a break, and as she sat there on the base of the slide, breathing heavily, the air felt funny.  Not thick or heavy or damp or breezy or anything else that might herald a storm; no, it felt…inhabited.  Someone was nearby.

Someone was watching her. 

Toby thought of her options: the fox that lived under her house; the raccoon family that lived on top of the gymnasium, a big snarling alien, a cannibal serial killer arsonist fly fisherman, or worst of all, Susan.  Susan was such a bitchface. 

The slide creaked under her, and something landed nearby with a thud.  Something much bigger than Susan. 

Uh-oh. 

“Shit,” said Toby, relishing the opportunity.  The swings rustled in the wind. 

Wait.  There was no wind. 

Cautiously, slowly, aware that this was precisely the sort of thing she’d seen in movies, Toby peered around the corner of the slide, and was (at a twenty-foot distance) eyeball-to-eyeball with a fuzzy, humanoid mess hanging upside-down from the swingset by its naked prehensile tail. 

“Wally!” she exclaimed in delight. 

Wally hissed and gurgled at her, waved his limbs too enthusiastically, lost his grip, fell to the ground, and played dead until she left.

***

It was a bright, beautiful July morning when Wally Fittons woke up naked and cold behind a dumpster.  Again.

“Piss,” he said irritably.  A good three-mile walk home starkers.  At least he had a full stomach, although he didn’t like to imagine what was in it. 

Well, he’d cut through the park and be home faster.  Down the lost trails where people’s eyes didn’t pry and nobody would phone the police for public indecency AGAIN.  A charge a month was costing him a fortune. 

Off he scurried into the undergrowth, big pale buttcheeks jiggling like a drunken moon. 

***

“And you thought it was a rabbit?” asked Officer North to the sobbing third-grader.

Jeremy nodded his head.  “I just saw a flash of white and then…and then…”
“It’s alright,” said North.  Really, he shouldn’t be shooting at rabbits either, but given what the kid had seen happen he didn’t need the grief right now.  “It could’ve happened to anybody.”  He examined the little spud gun in his palm.  “We’ll have to take this as evidence, I’m sorry to say.  You’ll be reimbursed.”
“It was just a p-p-p-piece of p-potato,” whimpered Jeremy. 

“Yes, well, silver takes out a werewolf in one shot, and now it seems we’ve discovered what it is that kills a werepossum.  Some scientists may want to interview you someday.  But only if you want to.  Now let’s get you home.”

“Hello and welcome back to ‘Monster SALES of History TM,’ on the HISTORY channel!  We’ve got a fabulous line-up of freshly-cloned monsters for you in the supermarket, but their own crimes are NOTHING compared to the prices they’re going to get if they win this challenge!  Watch dictators, strongmen, warlords, generals, and tyrants struggler in the supermarket in history’s GREATEST food fight!  Here’s my co-host, Timothy Nutts!”

“Thanks Tiffany.  We’ve got all the cameras rigged up: this supermarket is under more surveillance than a Google campus!  We won’t have time to show you all the footage, but if you like share and subscribe and SMASH that donation button you can get the opportunity to buy sponsorship tiers that’ll get you access to uncut clips and slo-mo playbacks – heck, at ‘conqueror’ tier you can  even add your own custom effects to videos and meme while you stream!  Now back to Tiffany Tibbles.”

“Thanks Timothy.  Let’s cut back to the action: our shoppers are now ransacking the isles and plundering for prices!  How’s Andrew doing?”
“Not so hot, Tiffany.  At first we had high hopes for ol’ hickory but it seems ex-president Jackson has dropped out of the contest entirely!”

“Oh no!  What an upset, what an overturn.  What happened?”
“I’ve received word from the medical team that he was just passing aisle 8, read that it contained ‘Indian food,’ and burst into a screaming breakdown before every blood vessel in his brain exploded at once.”
“Aw, shucks.  Well, plenty more fish in the sea, and plenty more monsters looking for MONSTER DEALS!  Shall we check in on Josef?”

“The ‘man of steel’ himself!  After a commanding early lead, he seems to have gotten bogged down in the produce section.  It looks like a momentary stumble over explaining the price tags got his first translator purged by a carrot to the throat, and now we’re on number six, with each replacement afforded less and less time to prove their loyalty and worth!”
“Not a leadership style I’d recommend, Timothy.”
“True, but it worked for decades last time, so I can see why he’s bringing back the old favorites.  He’ll have to speed up his purge-pace if he wants to get moving again and overtake Henry!”
“Not so fast!  Kissinger’s been disqualified while we were on commercial break.”
“What?  Why?  How?  He was the crowd favourite – and as the most contemporary figure, he was statistically the most likely to understand the relative pricing of goods!”
“Seems he isn’t dead.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“He’s not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Wow.  Looks like only the good die young indeed, eh Tiffany?”

“Well, some would dispute that – such as our next contestant, Mr. Edward Teach, who passed from this world well before his three score and ten were up!”
“Decapitation isn’t usually a natural end to a long life, you’re absolutely right.  The Big B-beard himself is still a little shaky on his feet – those land legs must be fresh – but he’s making his way through the fresh fish as we speak.  Sushi stumped him but he’s got a fine eye for a fresh catch and the deals are simply….MONSTROUS.”
“Nice title drop, Tim.  But that eye twitch I’m seeing on the camera suggests Eddie might have had more than enough fish in his life already.  Which will crack first: the competition or his nerves?  Let’s find out…. in ten commercial-free minutes!”

“Right you are, Tiff!  Maybe even sooner: yet another contestant might forfeit soon!  The Khan of Khans is STILL in the starting area making a speech to the cart attendants!  Not quite sure what the gameplan is there.”
“Well, Genghis was always good at the bigger picture.  What shops harder than one monster?  One monster and a horde!  But that’s against contest rules, so…”
“Yes, I’m thinking this isn’t looking good.  And I note Adolf has left the gate!”
“The wrong way, sadly.  He quit.”
“Yes, tragically the writing was on the wall the moment he started yelling on the set.  We’ve done our best, folks, but some monsters just won’t cooperate.  Especially when they’re convinced everyone around them is a member of a jewish conspiracy plotting against them personally.”

“We’ve actually got quite a diverse selection of beliefs here now that you mention it, Tim – everything from atheism to Christianity to Tengrism!  They may agree that the corpses of others are cheap and that no mountain of bodies is too small to fulfill your personal ambitions, but when it comes to matters of faith our monsters are a truly split crowd!”
“Speak of the split, it seems that Blackbeard’s cracked up a bit just now – looking a swordfish in the eye was a step too far from him and he laid about his handlers with the bill until the security team could be called in.  His run is over, and every other contestant has disqualified, forfeited, or died!  Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach is approaching the till and will soon be qualified as History’s Greatest MONSTER SHOPPER!”

“Yes indeed!  The card’s been swiped – no pieces of eight needed here, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha ha!”
“Ahaha!  He’s putting in his password!  Wonder if it’s just eight over and over!”
“Ha ha ha!  We already made that joke, Tiffany!  Ha ha ha!”
“Shut up it’s APPROVED, yes folks, it’s APPROVED!  Now here come the bags!”

“here they come!”
“The bags!”
“Any second now!”
“The bags!”
“They should be right there!”
“The bags!”
“They should’ve been there!”
“Where ARE the bags?”
“Wait wait wait the bags are there but where are the baggers?  Where’s the attendants?  The staff are gone!  Get me eyes on the floor, where are the staff?!”

***

And onward, outside the set, outside the supermarket, past the end of the parking lot, Temujin rolled at the head of a hundred shopping carts, astride each a rogue attendant, a wallet at every hip and ferocity in every heart. 

Why constrain yourself to just one store?

Bruce!  It’s been ages, how you been man?  Me, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine and fit and fighting mad!  Yessir, life’s never been better!

Look at these delts!  These lats!  These quads!  This bod!

I got all this and a clean brain too!  Why nickles and spit, I’m a new man in every way, a better way, ever since I discovered Dr. Peter Dickenson’s much-meat diet!

Glad you asked!  It works like this:

You eat much meat.

And that’s it!  One rule, one thumb, one rule of thumb.  Simple and pure and perfect.  I love it dearly and it loves me, and I love meat and the meat loves me. 

You see, humans are carnivorous (male) creatures, and that’s at war with our herbivorous (female) selves, so it’s of material benefit to avoid vegetables in case you get cooties, which will sap and suck away your life essence and leave you feeling dead and drained inside.  That’s what gives you cooties: girl stuff.  Like vitamins. 

Yes, that’s the beauty of it!  By eating nothing but raw, filthy meat, all vitamins are avoided!  Nutrition is a scam propped up by the decadent elites to keep us all as mutton-brains, the so-called ‘sheeple’ (‘woolly thinking’ means more than it seems, you know)!  Scurvy isn’t overcome by cheating with feminine carrots and tawdry Sapphic eggplants; it’s triumphed over by red-toothed red-meat rip-and-tearing masculinity!  If your teeth fall out, it’s a sign you’re winning – that’s why I got these dentures.  See?  See?
No, look up.  There.  See?

Yes indeed indeed, those are made from REAL high-grade bear teeth!  I ordered them from an ad on Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website, and those are trusted providers who provide trustworthy provisions, trustily.  Would a doctor lie?  And not a wussy doctor who fiddle-faddles around in boring baby fields like ‘biology’ or ‘sociology’ or ‘psychology’ – he has a REAL doctorate: math!  Now that’s a MAN’S field.  So long as you aren’t counting or adding or subtracting something feminine like bananas or cucumbers.  And you aren’t doing algebra.  Mixing numbers and letters is witchery and counter-masculinatural.  You might as well eat something like….an onion.

I almost ate an onion with my raw liver yesterday: someone snuck it onto my plate.  But my keen man-senses detected its malodorous presence (the odour of pure and overwhelming doom and dread) before it reached my tongue – I quivered and drooled and gurgled and hissed manfully before I threw it to the ground and stomped on it.  Nobody’s going to use vitamins to confiscate my penis while I’M on the job!  I, and of course Dr. Peter Dickenson’s Much Meat diet (trademarked), the one tool guaranteed to order your brain by excising the vaginas from it. 

No of course the doctor isn’t sexist.  Sounds like you’ve been brainwashed by low-testosterone high-vitamin ‘slut media’ (‘slut media’ is a completely neutral term used to describe the mainstream establishment children’s cartoons encouraging women that it’s okay to be women, and if you think that’s anything other than objective fact you’re obviously projecting).  Sounds like you need real meat.  Raw meat.  Filth-ridden meat.

Of course the meat has to be filthy.  The more rancid, the better.  Meat from a plate or a box or a bin is pristine, purified.  Clean.  The REAL world is rotting and putrid, a fallen place of lies and offal, and the manliest thing you can do is chew that world up and spit it back out through your no-no place.  Simply choke down the bloodiest rags of meat you can scrape out of the forest, the fields, the office, and chase it with a shot of Dr. Peter Dickenson’s nutrinectar manessence.  I bought it on his website because he used math on it to destroy it with facts and logic. 

Facts and logic are manly because they destroy, you see.  If they don’t destroy, they aren’t manly.  The world is, as we have established, rancid and rotten, so anyone creating things in it or adding to it or god forbid working to fix it can only become infested with ‘soul-maggots,’ which will wither up their testicles and make them low-t and vitamin-riddled.  But destruction!  Devastation!  Rampaging shredding crushing thrashing crashing snorting hacking slashing RIPPING EATING GNAWING excuse me sorry I get VERY excited.  It’s all this ‘tiger blood’ medicine I buy from Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website – no, no, it’s not a scam, that’s just a name.  It’s actually made from tiger scrotum, not blood.  Anyways I’m filled with manly vigor and power after I snort it but my thoughts sometimes run away without me AHAH HA HA HA HA HA HA ha. 

Speaking of which, I’m holding you up a bit here, sorry for that, I’m just sort of excited to see someone I knew because I need to tell EVERYONE about this it’s AMAZING the way things make sense when a REAL doctor tells you things.  For instance, did you know that most ‘domestic’ animals are actually normal ‘wild’ ‘masculine’ animals that have been ‘feminized’ by ‘vitamins’?  This is what awaits mankind if we continue to suffer ‘soul-maggots’!  Luckily, the solution is plain: we must eat each other until we feel better. 

Now stop gurgling now Bruce, you’ve been squirming around awfully hard during all this and I don’t know if you’re listening or just being a fussbudget but either way I’m pretty peeved off and cheesed up with you.  Your meat will be a wriggly bucket of twitchy worms just like you, which is good because GOD I’m hungry.  But I’ve got to keep eating meat!  I ejected forty-feet of ‘soul maggots’ from myself yesterday, which only look sort of like intestines shut up if you’re brainwashed by vitamins and even if shut up they WERE my intestines I ate them right back up so it’s fine shut up shut up shut UP. 

STOP GURGLING DAMNIT SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP FACTS AND LOGIC SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

It is very hard to chew with real high-grade bear teeth.

Oh hey there Becky!  Haven’t seen you recently!  Wait, don’t run – I just HAVE to tell you about this new diet!

5/10/2021

Albrecht’s Drop stratigraphic record: location 3B

Layer 1: surface litter (5 cm)

Sticks and deciduous leaves.  Some owl pellets (contents: rodents, one skink). 

Three beer cans (age: ~4 years), one condom (unused), four lost pennies. 

Layer 2: soft-packed loam (19 cm)

Roots and decomposed leaf litter.  One mole hole (contents: an angry mole). 

One broken beer bottle and forty-three beer bottle fragments.   One beer bottle fragment contaminated by bleeding (bandaid provided: no stitches necessary).

Layer 3: hard-packed soil (37 cm)

One complete turtle shell.  An excessive amount of roots (largest diameter: 8 cm). 

Potsherds (late meadow period), reworked and worn tools (twelve scrapers, three damaged cores).  Midden layer. 

Layer 4: clay (58 cm)

Five ground and polished turtle-shell ‘mirrors.’  Fine and wispy roots. 

More potsherds (early meadow period).  An unprecedented find: a complete sphere made of solid obsidian glass, slightly chipped or cracked (long-distance trade item?).  Possible ritual site.  

Layer 5: compacted ash (28 cm)

Sudden intrusion of volcanic ash with no apparent source or cause.  Nearest active volcano is seven thousand km; nearest inactive three house six hundred km. 

One robust Homo erectus skull, no sign of other remains.  Sixteen classic Acheulean hand-axe blanks; four of which are embedded in the skull.  Possible murder, possible ritual. 

Layer 5: obsidian (1.87 m)

Massive intrusion of jumbled volcanic glass without apparent source or cause.  No past record of volcanism in area’s prehistory.  Unusual greenish tint to the obsidian with inner ‘sparkle’ that appears to be tiny flames (under 0.2 mm). 

Layer 6: lava flow (7.51 m)

Enormous magmatic intrusion.  Radiometric dating puts it ~500 mya, at least 300 my older than the surrounding limestone layers it appears to have cut through.  A geology specialist may be necessary. 

Giant spherical ‘wizard chamber’ appears to be buried under lava flow.  Top of chamber is breached by H. erectus skeleton, clutching Acheulian hand axe.  The legs of the skeleton has been burnt away by lava, the upper half appears to have been pulverized by a concussive force sufficient to reduce it to gravel while perfectly holding the original form of the bones. 

Layer 7: ‘wizard chamber’ (11.111… m [exactly])

Giant spherical room constructed entirely from interlocked basalt with two exits: a breach into layer 6 created by H. erectus skeleton and a spiral ‘stair’ leading downwards from the room’s center.  Radiometric dating proved impossible due to inexplicable failure of sampling tools to penetrate the structure.  Contact more materials specialists?  Interior of chamber is covered in faint lights that match present-day  star charts of Milky Way (contact astronomers to confirm).  Possible ritual. 

Three corpses belonging to unknown species from a unique phylum.  Basic proportions include three heads, three trunks, three legs, three long grasping appendages tipped with three eyes covered in three hardened keratinous membranes.  Corpses were outfitted in full regalia including ornaments carved from H. erectus bone, ‘wands’ of carved obsidian from layer 5, false teeth crafted from obsidian from layer 5.  Possibly ritual. 

Layer 8: ‘the murder pit’ (~100 m)

Yawning, cavernous abyss underneath the ‘wizard chamber’; exact dimensions of cavern are unknown without access to more powerful lighting equipment.  Air quality remains good due to constant screaming gale from below that sounds similar to agonized howls.  Creeping sensation of dread sinks in slowly within the hour; exposure beyond two hours is not recommended after assistant M. Townshend attempted to decapitate assistant J. Freeman with a trowel while chanting ‘justice delayed is denied.’  Behaviour persisted while restrained above-ground for another sixteen hours, after which M. Townshend apologized and asked to be set loose without further visible side effects. 

The bottom ~7 m of layer 8 are filled entirely with H. erectus remains.  Estimation of the number of individuals represented is unknown until the precise dimensions of layer 8 can be more accurately charted.  Every skull found was missing all of its teeth. 

Layer 9: ‘upside town’ (121.86 m)

Perfect 1:1 scale mirrored replica of this expedition’s dig site, including excavation and all previously described layers.  Layer 9’s ‘surface camp’ was empty and the air tasted like tinfoil after exposure for longer than ten minutes, followed by nausea. 

Forty-two hours of continuous observation in shifts showed no apparent inhabitants.

Layer 10: ‘the crevice’ (?)

During observation of layer 9, assistant P. Davison noticed a faint shimmer above the mess tent and proceeded to climb on top of it without authorization and stick her finger inside it, also without authorization.  P. Davison vanished from all observable senses for what she observed as less than a second and the rest of the expedition observed as more than a week before reappearing in midair above expedition’s mess tent during lunch. 

P. Davison reported seeing talking shapes that ‘didn’t exist’ but professes no memory of what they spoke about, or even if they spoke to her. 

Overall excavation report:

-Followup investigation strongly recommended using all institutional resources available. 

-Use caution. 

-Contact National Geographic. 

-Get more funding.

-Do not tell Professor Zebediah. 

The floor was scrubbed and grease-free; the walls were missing their usual spider-webs; that one lightbulb that outright refused to work had been bullied into submission and replaced; and there was a big broad beautiful weekend stretching out in front of the building unrolled all the way to Monday.

Sheila breathed in, tasted oil and salt, and breathed out with a smile.  Yes, it was a beautiful day in the garage. And not to be a lonely one either – down the way came the flash and shine and sheen of someone driving in a hurry because they weren’t quite sure if they’d be able to start again if they stopped. 

“Morning Ms. Palmridge!” she whistled out happily as her daughter’s fourth-grade teacher powerslid into the building on top of her battered old whitetip.  “Troubles?”
“Oh hello I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong but I was taking the turn on fifth street and it just started pulling to the right and wouldn’t stop and then it got worse and worse and then it started slamming into things all on its own and I think it lost some teeth down on Fenton!”

“Lemmesee,” said Sheila in her professional mumble, and she popped the whitetip on the nose gently.  “Open up, please.”

The oceanic whitetip tried to bite her.  She slid the jawjack into its mouth smooth as butter.  “Thank you, sir.  Nah, don’t worry about the teeth – you didn’t even lose the whole top row, see?  Those’ll grow back in no time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.  Everyone always overthinks how much damage is being done when they see teeth everywhere: those practically fix themselves before you even know they’re gone.  Better they absorb the impact than something less replaceable, like the liver.”

“Oh dear.  Is that bad?”
“Yeah, practically a third of these things are liver.  You take a real bad hit there sometimes you just have to get a new shark.”
The jawjack creaked.

“Whoops, someone’s impatient up there.   Give me a second to…ah, I see your problem!  Blocked nostril on the left side!”
“Is that bad?”
“If you don’t like uncontrollable pull to the right it is!  See, the shark tracks prey long-distance by swinging its head from side to side and veering to the direction the smell is strongest – if one nostril’s blocked, then everything it smells seems like it’s coming from the other side, and it’ll start turning.  No wonder you were pulling to the right.”

Ms. Palmridge eyed the oceanic whitetip as dubiously as it did her.  “I’ve never known much about these things.  My girlfriend handles the mechanical issues around the house and so on.”
“Oh?” said Sheila, putting down the nasal swab and giving the shark’s snout one last polish with her rag.  “Tell me: has she done any maintenance work on this lady recently?”
“I’m – well – I don’t know WHAT you’re-”

“The shark.”
“Oh.  I think so?  Last weekend, maybe.  Yes, last weekend.”
“Ahhh….I think we have our culprit.  I bet when your better half was cleaning off the hood here she inadvertently brushed some debris into the nostril.  Well, it’s less polished now but it’s clear as a whistle in there.  No more veering, the teeth’ll grow back soon.”
“Oh thank you, thank you!  How much does this-”

“Just call it a consultation; there’s plenty of time left for me to make money on the weekend.  Barely five minutes and the cost of a swab?  Nothing to bill for.  Didn’t even have to pull out any teeth shards.  Now let’s get this thing out of its mouth and you back on the road before it gets any angrier – you’ve both got places to be!”
“Yes, yes.  Thank you so much!”

The oceanic whitetip tried to take a chunk out of Sheila’s foot on its way out of the garage, but she was ready for it.  A reliable model, but they were crabby as hell.  Then it balked at the parking lot’s exit and she wondered if she’d missed something but oh.  Oh, that explained it. 

In through the exit cruised little Penny Westridge on her father’s great white, fins barely moving, each soft push of the tree-trunk-thick tail shoving the animal forwards like a lesser fish going at full throttle.  It softly lumbered up the hill and collapsed right in front of the door with a grunt. 

“Shit!”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ve got a tow cable if we need it.  Problem?”
“No fucking kidding!” said Penny, eyes twitching. 

“The problem in detail, please,” said Sheila patiently. 

“My mom’s gonna fucking ice me fucking fuck fuckity FUCK” elaborated Penny.  She made to kick at the great white’s side, then paused, foot wobbling, as its eye rolled back in its head to pure white.  “Oh god is it meant to do that FUUUUUC-”
“That’s normal,” soothed Sheila.  “Here, have a seat.  Have a drink.  Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Everything!  I just wanted to take one little ride to show Mandy I really could drive it and then we went down to the Greasy Bait to grab a drink and when I came back out it was twitching and by the time I dropped her off it was cramping at the gills and now it can barely move and it’s not even two years old mom is going to KILLLLLLLLL MEEEEEEE-”

Sheila gently prodded at the gills.  They twitched.  “Uh-huh.  Anything else happen while you were out?”
“No.  No!  I wrecked mom’s shark and I don’t even know what I did and she’s going to ki-”

“Nah.”
“Wha?”
“Nah, she won’t.  Mrs. Westrid – your mom, she keeps this baby in a nice garage, right?   Demagnetized, rubber flooring?”
“Yeah.  Oh god I borrowed her keys without her asking she’s going to KI-”

“Nah she won’t.  That makes sense.  Does the Greasy Bait have rubberized parking spaces?”
“Wha?  No.  They barely have ASPHALT.”

“Gotcha.  And are the hitching posts concrete?”
“No?  No.  No.  Metal, I think.”
Sheila chuckled and rubbed at the great white’s great nose.   It grunted at her.  “That’s it then.  She’ll be fine by the time she’s home.”
“How?  What’d I do?”
“You parked her outside her comfort zone.  These big babies, they’re a little more sensitive than they look, and they get used to their environment.  She’s used to resting in a nice stable environment with absolutely no stray electrical impulses at ALL, and you left her in the open with a bunch of strange sharks and attached to a metal pole.  She probably picked up on the ambient voltage through that and it’s just a tiny bit more than she’s used to, and if you and your girlfriend –”
“No no no she’s not my-“

“-your not-your-girlfriend took your time in there she worked herself into a tizzy over it.  This is all just aftermath of that.  She’ll be right once you get her back home and a bit of time to process it.  And tell your mom she might want to consider introducing metal elements into the garage: a shark that can’t be parked outside a sealed environment is a little bit of a sad vehicle, isn’t it?”
Penny slumped with the force of someone whose entire body had been kept upright by nervous tension.  “Ohmygod.  OHmygod.  Ohmy.  God.”
“Breathe, girl.  Breathe.”
“Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, we all do this shit at your age.  Stuff.  And don’t worry about money: that wasn’t even a consult.  You just get home now before your mom notices, eh?”

“She sleeps in on Saturdays,” said Penny weakly.  “Thank you.”
“No problem,” said Sheila.  And she watched the great white back gently out of her lot with affection.  Beautiful animal.  Pity they were so expensive these days. 

Well, there’d be time to make money over the rest of the weekend. 

Like right now, for instance.  ‘Right now’ was Lacey Newman on her shortfin mako for the sixth time in as many months, its big black eyes roiling and rattling in their sockets as it mouthed and fought against her steering. 

“Hey again, Lacey.”
“Heya Sheila.  It’s off its feed again and won’t stop fighting me when I turn it on.”
“Well, guess we’d better check the stomach first,” said Sheila as she pulled out her jawjack.  “Again.”
“Stupid thing thinks it’s a tiger shark.  This better not be another license plate it swallowed.”

“Well, could it be anything else?  These look like gastrointestinal symptoms.”

“Came home late last night and parked it on the street; could’ve been anything from that to a stray cat.”
“If it was that it’d be perfectly happy.  A little stray cat never hurt a shark.”
“Right.  Unless it was diseased.  Or a piece of metal that looked like a stray cat.  Or a tasty-looking rock.  Swear to FUCK I’m giving it the best fuel I can afford and it’s always on the lookout for more and more and MORE!”
“That’s the trouble with mackerals,” said Sheila conversationally, peering  past the long finger-like fangs and into the mako’s gullet.  “Fast cruising, great acceleration, amazing top speed, but the metabolism means they guzzle fuel.  Ah, I think I see the problem: looks like it swallowed a bit of chain-link fence and it can’t regurgitate it properly.  Gonna need to do a bit of fancy work here.  Mind passing me my long-handled pliers?  No, no, no.  The longer ones.  Longer than that.  Yes, perfect.”

“Oh these goddamned things,” hissed Lacey as Sheila worked.  “These things!  They’re such…such bullshit!  I don’t know why we put up with them like we do!”

“Can’t live without ‘em.”
“True.  And I guess it could be worse.  Just a little bit of a pain in the ass isn’t the end of the world, is it?  That’s not so bad.”

“Yes indeed,” said Sheila, staring directly at the reader, “it sure would be irresponsible to keep driving sharks around if they were directly and provably leading to some sort of vast disaster that would cause irreversible harm to us and every other living thing on the planet’s surface.”

The shortfin bit her hand.

“Ow!  Fuck!  ‘Scuse me.  That’s going to need stitches, won’t be a sec.”

“He’s coming back, you know.”
Jermaine didn’t look at his mother.  He was kneading dough, and with the amount of flour left in the house he wanted to make sure it had gone towards something worthwhile.  Attention could not be spared. 

“Just like I thought he would.  I know how he thinks, you see.  That’s why I was so important.  Necessary.  The only one that really could do that.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Jermaine risked.  The old tile counter thumped under his fists, muffled by soft dough and his own fists. 

His mother nodded vigorously, staring out over the long lake through the fog and drizzle and the horrible clouds of insects.  The mosquitos stayed away from her, even out on a deck whose screen had been gone since before Jermaine’s own children had been born.  Too tough, no juices left, who knew why. 

“He’s coming back,” she said.  “He can’t afford not to.”

“Yuh.”
“He IS, you know,” she said shortly, and stomped her foot.  The deck made a soggy sound, like a starfish trampled underfoot, and Jermaine winced at it. 

“Don’t DO that, mother.  You know about the scorpions.”
“They wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Only because they can’t reach it.  Don’t make such a ruckus out there.”

She harrumphed, but she didn’t stomp again. 

***

The bread had been good, despite Jermaine’s best efforts.  And that had been his day, such as it was.  Mother was fed, he was fed, he’d done at least one thing he could pretend was worthwhile after waking up, and the roof hadn’t collapsed on him.  Nothing left to do but see how many bug bites he could get in the course of one cigarette. 

Now if only he could persuade his head to stay quiet.  Because as he stood there, smouldering, he couldn’t stop thinking about the roof. 

And the floors. 

And the walls. 

All lovely, lovely, lovely old wood that hadn’t seen a day of repair in twenty years.  He was less scared of the scorpions underneath the porch than he was the things he couldn’t see in the walls.  Black mould?  Could be red and purple and green for all he knew. 

But mostly he’d bet it was the soft colourless mush of a creature eating itself from the inside out.  This place had been a lovely cottage, back then.  Lovely enough to pretend it was a mansion, which it did very well. 

“The president used to come here,” his mother told him.  “Your father and I used to invite him.”
“Yeah,” he said to himself.  Yeah, he knew. 

***

Jermaine had sat on the back stoop as the troopers stormed in through the pantry door, boots kicking through fancy wood panelling like cheap paper.  A stern look from the sergeant had frozen his behind to the stair, and now he was afraid that if he breathed someone would remember he was there and decide to shoot him. 

Shouts from inside had become fewer.  Whatever they were doing was finishing up. 

That was when the big car opened up, and out came the president. 

Jermaine had never seen the president before in person, but he’d seen coins and bills and a television and he knew the face when he saw it.  All jaw and jowl. 

“Hey,” said the president, and he was talking to him, Jermaine, of all people, at his house.  Maybe this was the sort of thing you were supposed to be excited about.  “Hey kid.”
Jermaine nodded, finding a compromise between obvious attentiveness and trying not to move.  “Your mother home, kid?”
Jermaine nodded before he could think about his answer.  The president laughed.  “Yes.  That’s good.  Hey, you know what she’s been up to?”
Jermaine shook his head. 

“Neither do I.  But I think that’s going to change.”
He walked into the cottage, and he ruffled Jermaine’s hair as he walked by.  Just a little harder than necessary, making his neck hurt. 

***

The pantry door had been fixed.  Come to think of it, that might have been the last part of the building to get replaced. 

Jermaine finished his cigarette in perfect harmony with the sunset; two little embers going out at once as he idled on the porch, swatting the mosquitos reflexively.  He sighed – a proper bellows of a thing, in and out and clear the lungs – and stepped back inside and almost walked into his father. 

He was eating a crude sort of sandwich over the kitchen sink, but when he saw Jermaine his eyes bulged and his food vanished into him like a magician’s scarves in reverse. 

“My boy,” he managed, and it wasn’t just the full mouth making him hoarse.  There was something wrong with his throat, something raw.  “My boy.  How are you?  Oh you’re big now.”

“No thanks to you,” said Jermaine, and it hadn’t needed any thought at all.  Of course it hadn’t; in the back of his mind he’d always been writing this moment. 

“Yes, yes I love you too my boy, my boy.”  A smile made its way out from under his moustache, shattering his face into a maze of wrinkles.  “Listen, it’s all coming together now, it’s all almost here.  I’m so proud of you, you know that?  I don’t know if I ever told you that.  Did I ever tell you that?”

“You haven’t told me anything since I was ten.”
This only stirred the old man to more vigorous agreement.  His head started jerking up and down like a drinking bird.  “Quite right.  Quite right.  Quite right.  Yes, that was cruel of me.  But listen, I’ve got it all working now.  I’ve finally gone and done it.  Get your mother.  Where’s your mother?”
“Sleeping.”
“Wake the silly bitch up, can’t she tell that we’re about to make it?”  He started to laugh now, and it sounded like someone choking a goose to death.  “I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve pulled it off, and pulled it off.  You both need to come with me before the heat is on.”

“We’re not interested,” said Jermaine, and he was telling the truth.  He was tired with all his soul now, tired just looking at the stained old thing and his manic energy and his pointless words.  He wanted to go to bed and never wake up.  “Go now.  Walk out the door and don’t come back for another forty years.”
“Are you deaf or an idiot or both, boy?  We’re rich now.  I took it, I took it from him.  It’s mine now.  I’m offering you both the chance of a lifetime, nonono I OFFERED you the chance of a lifetime and now it’s HERE, it’s DONE, it’s REAL.  I promised and I delivered.”  His hands were pawing at his sides now, feeling along his shapeless shirt and destroyed pants for something.  “I got it.  I finally got it.  I had it before and I had to put it away but I got out and got it, I got it for real.”  He shivered.  “But it’s not on me.  I put it down and it’s not on me.  Listen to me, I can –”

“Go.”  Jermaine had picked him up, when he wasn’t quite sure.  It was much easier than he’d have thought it would be, if he’d thought of it before doing it.  His father seemed to have a way of making him hasty.  “Go again, like you did before.  It should be easy.”
“No,” said the old man, his head shrinking into his neck like a turtle.  “No no no, not again!  I just got out!  I was locked up tight, you have to believe that, yes, locked up so very tight, and now you want me to go back?  You’re a cruel boy, a cruel boy from a cruel woman.  She called me mean!  She was mean!  It’s not fair!”

Jermaine threw him.  His arms weren’t as strong as they used to be and his back hurt and his tendons gave him these odd little twinges he couldn’t quite tell if he was imagining, but his father was no weightier than a cobweb so he didn’t so much as touch the stairs, floating across the marshy ground like a falling leaf.  He settled atop the vegetation with a whisper of a slosh, which was immediately buried by his shriek. 

“To hell with that!  To hell with you both!  See if I help you again!  It’s here and I’m going to get it!  I’ll get it now!  And I won’t show you!  I won’t share with you!  It was the plan but not anymore and I’ll…I’ll-”

It wasn’t a very solid door, but Jermaine slammed it anyways. 

***

“Who was that?”

Of course his mother had woken up.  She stood in the kitchen, feet bedecked in cobwebs, hair trying to escape her skull, eyes suspicious and all too alert. 

Jermaine didn’t like it when she was up this late.  She seemed smarter than he was. 

“Nobody,” he said. 
“That was your father.”

“Nobody.”
She considered this, and nodded.  “Yes.  Yes, that’s right.”

And she went back to bed, still shuffling but purposeful. 

***

There was still bread the next day, and no father.  But Jermaine needed to feel like he was doing something useful, so he took out his old line and sat on the deck casting lines through the old screen window, enjoying the closest thing to a breeze the lake could muster. 

“Your father never fished,” his mother told him.  She had taken out the least-mouldy armchair for some almost-sunlight.  “Hopeless with a rod and line, worse with a net.  But he was an archaeologist, so he was much better with a shovel.  Good for bait.”  She snickered.  “Not as good as me, though.  I did my part just fine, oh yes.  It was him that made the mess.  Got caught, sticky fingers, sticky fingers.  With fingers like that you’d think he could’ve been a better fisherman.”

Jermaine shrugged. 

“Did I ever tell you about the time we plotted against the president?  Regime change is the duty of the people, Hal told me, and since the people weren’t voting fast enough we might as well lend them a hand.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Of course that was all a lie, of course, of course.  He just wanted something shiny, selfish thing, greedy boy.”  She sighed.  “Always greedy.  Not like you, you know?  You raised your daughters to be like that, didn’t you?  Not like your father?  Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Good boy,” she said, patting his arm.  “Good boy.  Now, the president’s here, so you’d better go greet him while I put on my shoes.”
“Sure,” said Jermaine.  Then Jermaine’s ears told him that they’d been hearing an engine approach for the past five minutes.

***

The president was different from how Jermaine remembered him, standing in the kitchen with a gun uncomfortable and damp in his hand.  He had always been thick, true, but now he was fat; the kind of sleek unwrinkled fat you found on a frog’s belly, stretched and smoothed and covered in veins from living life half-marinated.  The kitchen was practically overflowing with him. 

Jermaine supposed he was different from how the president remembered him too – in the old days his eyes had sparkled, everyone had said.  Now he was a man grown and they just sat there in his skull. 

The president’s gaze met them, ignored them, passed over him smoothly and entirely, without a blink.  Jermaine was part of the scenery, part of the background. 

His mother, however, wasn’t.  And she’d found her good shoes.

“Claire,” said the president. 

“Hello!”

“Where is it?”
She shrugged.  “Don’t know.  Never found it.  Hal lost it years back, silly thing.”
“Hal escaped prison three weeks ago, first place he’d have come was here.  Tell me.”

“He didn’t trust me, you know?  Never did.  Stashed it somewhere before you came over and lied where he’d kept it.  Haven’t bothered looking in years.”

“Tell me or I’ll shoot,” said the president. 

“Oh poo, shoot what?” said Jermaine’s mother, waspishly.  “I’m nothing but leather and flint now, and this place is such a swamp I’d be amazed if your gun can fire.  Humidity’s an awful thing, isn’t it?”
“Shut up!”
“You were never one for first-hand violence anyways.  Too much work.  I agree with that, but I don’t agree with how you got other people to do it for you.  Hypocrisy is an ugly thing.”
“Shut up!” said the president.  “Shut up!  I’m not here for this, I’m not here for you, I’m not even here to shoot anyone I just want my damned jewel back!  Forty years it’s missing, now the thief breaks out, now his trail leads here, now his old bat of a hook-up is sitting on it!  I’ve had enough!  Give it back!”

“Nobody cares,” said Jermaine. 

“I came here for answers,” snapped the president, “and I’ll have-”

“NOBODY CARES,” yelled Jermaine.  “NOBODY!  Mother’s senile and father’s a pathetic runaway and YOU haven’t been in power since my oldest daughter was born, and she isn’t even in the country anymore!  The thing stolen from you has been missing for half a century?  That’s half a century it hasn’t mattered.  Nobody.  Cares.”

The president looked more like a frog than ever, so puffed up like that.  He opened his mouth to croak, but all that came out was a hiss, and THAT was drowned out by his mother’s laughter.  She sounded half her age. 

“A bitch and a bitch’s son, both ill-bred,” said the president, at last.  “You match the old place like a set of chipped dishes.  Stay here, by all means – I’ll throw away the key.  Grow mouldy together, the three of you.”

Then he turned on his heel and stomped his way down the staircase, all eighteen stone of him, and on the third step down his heel came through the wood. 

There were no splinters, there was no sawdust.  Nothing but a soggy squish at first, until the first pair of big pale claws came racing up through the hole and seized the president’s pant-leg.  He didn’t even scream he was so surprised. 

Not right away, at least. 

“The old ditch,” his mother told him, when the noises had stopped.  All the noises, from everyone.  Even the mosquitos seemed placid.  Something in the air that had been bending for decades had finally snapped. 

“Hmm?”
“The old ditch,” she repeated.  “Best take the body there before they get too tucked into him.  Or, god forbid, someone comes around.  He WAS the president, you know.  And he used to come here, back in the day.”
“Yeah, mother.”
She patted his cheek fondly.  “You’re a good boy.  Go on then.  Scoot!”

And he did, although it was no picnic lugging that much president through that much underbrush.  Every root and every branch caught a new scrap of clothing or pound of flesh, and if the president had been smooth and featureless in life he was a ragged thing indeed by the time he made it to his final resting place. 

Jermaine dragged the body over the last hump and rolled it down the slope into the old, old ditch, where it refused to sink.  Caught on something. 

He swore filthily, reached down with a stick, shoved and shoved and the disturbance floated over right side up, neck side wrong, eyes all bulgy with leeches, and in one clutched fist something gleaming. 

His father. 

***

His mother liked the jewel well enough, but she lost it every week, so he put it on the high shelf.    

“Come forth, foul dragon!”

The call is bold as brass, as audacious as a sudden sunrise, pure and sweet as a morning trumpet and I know it’s THAT time of week already. 

So I sigh, and I slither, and I coil and eel all two and a half leagues of myself throughout my caverns into a semblance of a slothful slug’s-worth of posture and sally forth to the mouth of the cave. 

“Tarry not here,” I bellow.  “This doth be mine domain, man of soft flesh and frail bone.  Begone and keep thy life,” I add, and that’s surely done it because suggesting they might value their lives at all is like a red flag to these jokers.  Don’t they have any speck of gratitude for all the trouble their mothers went to make them?

“Come forth, foul beast,” he cries, predictable as the turn of the seasons, and I sigh and I belch venomous flame down the entire hillside, scorching it to the bare earth.  Again.  Then I heave myself upright and squint down it, looking for the horse.  I like horses.  They’re good snacks, and this one’s well-trained – see it trembling there, tied to the distant tree on the moor I keep precisely for that purpose. 

I squirm out of the cave mouth, take three long writhing heaves, and am struck by a sudden pain in my rightmost heart, which is coming from the sword that’s lodged in it. 

“Got you, fiend!” cheers the small armour-covered human from somewhere beneath me, hidden in a little foxhole among the network of trenches and gutters criss-crossing the dead soil, which I now realize are filling up with an awful lot of my blood. 

Oh.  He was one of THOSE kind of heroes. 

Christ, what an asshole. 

***

I jolt out of my geography slumber at a godawful shriek, sitting bolt upright so fast that the page I’d drooled over sticks to my face and comes ripping right out of the book, ruining the work and effort of hours of careful transcription from some long-dead monk. 

“Oh DARN,” I swear carefully, employing the strongest language a lady may be expected to keep.  I’m going to get lectured on this for HOURS, and etiquette is already my least favourite class.  But that’s not my only problem – there’s footprints coming, pit-a-pat-pit-a-pat-pit-a-pat, and a big armoured man bursts into my stone cavern, covered in blood and reeking of poison and soot. 

“What ho, fair maiden!” he hollers directly into my face.  “I hath saved thee from thy doom, gadzooks and zounds!  Behold the proof!  Mine sword hath tasted a dragon’s heart, and now it speaks!”
“Hey nice to meetcha.”
“By my TROTH his tongue be as ill-mannered as a hound’s, ‘tis true.  And now we ride for your home and your father!”
“I’m not really sure I’m allowed to leave,” I manage, leaning a little farther back from the enormous blade he’s waving around excitedly.  “You should probably ask my tutor first-”

“Harken and heed, half the kingdom and your hand be my price for the deed, so needs must apace ‘fore the day grows long in the tooth,” he exclaims, grabbing my arm in one hand without asking and towing me apace through the entire cave complex.  The sunlight hurts my eyes.  “To your noble sire we doth return – we ride forth now!”

“How?” I ask. 

The knight stares down the hillside.  At its base, the dragon lies groaning atop the splintered remains of what was probably the only tree for miles.  A single sad hoof juts from underneath its belly. 

“We march forth now,” he admits. 

Christ, what an asshole. 

***

“The princess has returned!” comes the call from the town.

“The princess has returned!” comes the call from the towers.

“The princess has returned!” comes the call from my gate and wouldn’t you know it, right in the middle of court.

“We’ll pick this up later,” I sigh, and the last courtier is barely risen from the seat before the door is slammed open and in comes the smelliest thing I’ve ever seen on two legs, and I’ve observed chickens. 

“What ho!” it hollers, and oh no it’s HIM, helmet in one hand, towing my daughter in the other.  Her expression is my thoughts exactly.  “Mine adventure is successful, mine quest doth be complete!  Your fair eldest daughter is returned from the scaly clutches of that reptilian devil, and mine honour is swollen righteously with nobility and valor!  Praise me with great praise!”

“Did you kill the dragon?” I demand.

“What ho?”
“Did you kill it.”
“Mine sword did taste its heart,” he says, and unsheathes that giant meat-cleaver of his with little a care in the world.  “Now it speaks the tongue of man!  Observe!”
“Hello there, my lord,” proclaims the blade. 

“Have you been talking to this sword?” I ask my daughter, who’s wandered casually as far away from the knight as is polite when you’re one of three people in the summer court.

“There wasn’t much else in the way of company, dad,” she says.  “And I needed the etiquette practice.”

“Yes you do, clearly, since it’s much more mannered than you are.”
“What ho?” says the knight again, and my headache finally bursts. 

“You IDIOT.  You’ve gone and rescued my daughter from her education, horribly wounded her tutor – who has TWO hearts, by the way, and I sincerely bless your lack of brains and dedication in missing that detail – and put my deniable violent-adventuring-moron disposal out of commission!”

“Err.  Half the kingdom?  The maiden’s hand?”
“Megan?” I ask.

She gives him her hand, backside-first. 

“Zounds!  Ow.”
“I wouldn’t give you half the PRIVY.  You’re lucky I don’t call for the executioner right this second.  As it is, I’m going to give you a choice: you can lose your head, or you can undertake a somewhat different quest for me.  And this time I’ll be very, very, very upset if you DON’T do it properly, understand?”

His lip is trembling.  

Christ, what an asshole. 

***

“He’s coming,” my sword announces.  

“Shh!”

“Posture check.  Slump more.  Lean into the wound.  Go on.  You’ve taken a mortal dose of poison  to the face; look more sunken in the cheeks.  Did you smear soot all over your visor?  Your chest?  Your-?”

“Shh!”
“Hark!  A fellow knight!” booms out in greeting, and indeed it is another of my order, a man broad in shoulder and fierce in spirit, with blade in one hand and shield in the other and discipline and grace in both.  “And one laid low!  What has done this to thee, mine brother?”
“The dragon,” I wheeze out from trembling lips.  “The serpent’s doom has doomed me, though I brought it to its last breath ‘fore it took mine.  It groans its last farther in.  You must… the princess.”
“Say no more, noble friend,” he solemnly intones, slamming a fist to his breast.  “I will avenge thee with the beast’s death, and also name my half of the kingdom after thee.  What is thy name, fallen friend?”

“Asuckersayswhat,” provides my sword.

The knight stares at the blade in my hand.  “What?” he asks, and in that moment of complex thought – perhaps the first he’s had in many years, if he’s anything like I was six months ago – I put it through his visor. 

“Good job,” says my sword.  “Now remember to dispose of this one PROPERLY.  You left it near the river last time, and that’s no way to treat your drinking water.”
“Shh,” I repeat, fruitlessly.  There’s no way to silence a tool your job relies upon.  “Shh.”
“Shh yourself.  He left his horse down around the hillside, I can smell it; we’ll have to make a second trip.  Chop chop now – geography class is done in an hour, and after that’s etiquette.  I want to sit in on that again, I think I’m getting the hang of it.  No no, lift with your legs, not your back – do you WANT to pull something?”

I drag away the body of my brother in arms, as behind me the faint echoes of sinister reptilian whispers mutter on hydrography and erosion.  The betrayal weighs heavy on my mind even after a dozen times, though I find the physical mass of this particular brother in arms weighs heavier still.  He could’ve stood to skip more meals. 

Christ, I’m an asshole. 

The phone rang while Marley was in the shower, and it was a relief.  She’d been unable to sleep until past four in the morning, woken up twice before oversleeping, and run out of cereal.  Now that she was fumbling her way out of the nice warm water into the freezing air of the bathroom and dripping all over everywhere things couldn’t get much worse, so the rest of the day had to be pretty good. 

“Marley,” she said cheerfully. 

“Hello there, it’s your aunt Tina.  The peter piper pepper pickers are percolating puppies.”

Marley felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.  “And the kittens are kleaning Kleenex?” she inquired. 

“The dogs are dancing dachshunds in Deutschland.”

“Is the cleaner clapping clutches of the cargo coops?”
“Baseball bats are breaking beef bat batches.”

“SHIT!” said Marley, and hung up.  Her worst fears had been confirmed: she’d have to come in to work today.

That was the problem with working for the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret that even you never knew what would happen next.

***

Work was a hundred meters underneath a mountain after passing through six separate false entrances inside what looked like an abandoned and triple-condemned mineshaft, each of which was set to collapse and murder you if you put your foot in the wrong place.  It used to be seven but Hodges had forgotten to zig instead of zag a few years back. 

Past the sixth false entrance was a little keypad, which Marley pushed four buttons on to deactivate and then flipped up to reveal the REAL keypad, which needed twenty-six digits forwards and backwards.  At the end of all this the door to work opened up and she went through it and immediately had coffee spilled on her.

“JESUS.”
“Sorry, sorry, shit, sorry, sorry, shit,” said Bruce, as he haplessly watched her wipe scalding caffeine off her arm.  “We’re all a bit nervous right now.”
“And I’m sure cup number six there is helping with that?”
“Eleven.  Things are BAD.”
Marley spoke one of the four forbidden swears.  The air shivered. 

“And now I’m gonna have to report that!”
“Sorry.  They slip out.”
Bruce emitted a kettlelike whine and Marley knew there’d be no speaking to him for the rest of the morning so she left it at that and proceeded into the high security area past the cyberbotomied loborgs. 

High security was a different world.  The walls were bare stone and carefully etched with little things that weren’t words, traced in secretions.  The guards here were blind deaf-mutes who navigated by smell and nodded politely to her as she proceeded past them all into the very depths of the place, past two more secret doors and a deathtrap.

Under the deathtrap was Cell One.  She walked into it, beheld the deep-fields with their careful mushroom farms, breathed deep the fetid air of the sprawling church-settlement, and was barely missed by a hammer. 

“JESUS AGAIN.”

“Hello and good fortune,” said the woman with the hammer, who was a web of crude casts and crooked bones.  “Would you please step aside?  I am trying to break the wall you came through.”

“Escape attempts are prohibited in your contract,” said Marley, seeking comfort in bureaucracy.

“Yes, but there’s nothing wrong with breaking the wall WITHOUT escaping.  One grows hungry for more, you know.  Always more to know from the insides that the outsides keep hidden away.”
“You almost hit me!”
“And that would’ve been very tragic!  Believe me, I’ve broke into enough human insides to see all there is; nothing new would be learned in the slightest.  What good is a breaking without newness to bring?  The candle of the shatterer must be ever-hungry for fresh ruins, for in those remains may be found-”

“I’ve been told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, who’d never been much good at dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses either.

“Oh, yes.  Yes indeed.  We broke open the ceiling and it shattered inwards and broke open all of dorm sixteen, and in the fractures we found something most interesting.  Doom!  Great and powerful and all-encompassing!  Inescapable!  All-encompassing!  The likes of which have not been seen in millions of years!  Why, its cracks run through every crook and cranny of what is to come: not one living thing on this globe will be spared the force of its destruction!  Am I drooling?  You’re giving me that look.”
“Yes.”
The woman with the hammer wiped her mouth.  “Sorry.  But my, the DOOM!  Such a fine doom!  Never heard tell of its like.  It’ll crack the whole WORLD open and spill its knowledge out into every waiting palm.  We’ll all be dead, but we’ll die enlightened as nobody has ever been.  Would you like to know more?  We can start with just a single metatarsal and it’ll all be so much clearer to you, and-”

“Thank you, goodbye,” said Marley, and she locked the door a little faster than necessary. 

“Sorry about your shirt!” called the woman as the seal kicked in. 

***

Cell Two was on another level, past the snakepits and through the caltrops and the deadly mirrorballs whose light brought blindness and sickness and deathness.  Marley could walk it with her eyes shut, which she did out of necessity. 

“Goodbye,” said the man waiting for her inside the door.  His voice was a little muffled due to him wearing his long, tattered set of hooded robes entirely backwards, and facing away from her.  The room he was in was very small, very tidy, and entirely made of simple mirrors.  Opening your eyes was a nice way to nauseate yourself fatally.  They’d lost more than one careless janitor that way. 

“Hello,” said Marley.

“This is incorrect,” said the man.  “I am Hindsight.  You are Marley.   Goodbye to you.”

“I was told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, not bothering to hide her irritation. 

“We prognosticate nothing, merely look back upon the inevitable,” said Hindsight with the obnoxious placidity of a lapdog on a pillow. 

“Right.  Yes.  Okay.  What’s inevitable?”
“Everything that has been.”
“What.  Have you.  Learned.”
“Doom.  Its arrival was to be, and its arrival has passed, and it is already upon us.  There can be no stopping it for it is already here and has been for much time.”
“That isn’t helpful.”
“There is nothing to help.  The stakes were set long ago and given up well before our time.  Watch it and you watch what has come before.”

“A little proof you’ve done anything at all might be appreciated.”

A hand was waved, and not for the first time Marley noticed that the palm seemed to be on backwards.  “Your arm was stained and this endorses our accuracy.  We can see its cause by this effect.”
“Predicting things that have already happened isn’t prophecy,” said Marley, who’d thought this many times but not been cross enough to say it aloud.

Hindsight shrugged.  “Who cares about what might happen?  More things have been than will be, and what has, will be.  Or, as you’ve said someone has spoken, ‘those who forget the past are condemned.’”
“’To repeat it.’”

“I spoke correctly and fully.”

Marley wished she could slam the door in his face, but settled for the back of his head.

“Hello,” he called after her affably.  “Hello, hello.”

***

There was no door to Cell Three.  Its inhabitants didn’t believe in them.  Instead a small section of the otherwise solid stone wall was sealed with cheap unpainted drywall, which Marley broke through using the handily provided sledgehammer. 

“So,” she said to the box in the middle of the room.  “You’ve had some prophecies.”
“Yes,” said the box.  It was four feet tall and not very wide.  There was a window filled with unpleasantly sharp barbed wire.  “I looked Inside and saw.”
“Please describe them to me.”
The padlocks festooning the box shook in ecstasy.  “Inside there is disaster already arisen and the shackles are on every neck and in every mind and in every pocket and in every gas tank.  The doom came from within and it ensnared from within and soon we will all be trapped together, gloriously trapped, tied in our carbon chains to a writhing, steaming atmosphere that heaves and pants for air as we all roast in our planetary cell.  This is already here, Inside.”

Marley looked up from taking notes.  “I’m sorry…the doom you forecast is anthropogenic climate change?”
“Not ‘fore.’  Foundcast.  It is with us Inside.”

“Oh.”  She chewed on a nail.  “And the odds that one of the others were prophesizing something different are…”

“Not.”

“Oh.”

“Please reseal me properly next time.  I could feel a draft from….out there.  And take care of that shirt.  It needs to be part of you.”

Marley put up fresh drywall as carefully as she could when she left.  She needed the time to think. 

***

“Report’s done,” she told Bruce tiredly as she got out of the industrial shower.  “Pass it along.”

“Sure thing.  Was it good?”

“You know I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
“All good, just joshin’ yo-“

“And no, it wasn’t.  Just the same old crap.  And you’d better pay me for a new shirt.”

“Right.  Right!  Keep on keeping on, eh?”
Bruce fidgeted with a stapler until about ten minutes after Marley had left, then sighed a long slow wheeze as he fed the report into a fax, which would be picked up in a dropbox in a condemned building. 

That was the trouble with working in the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret nobody really cared about it. 

The woods were dark at night, but daytime was no slouch either.  There was enough timber between the children and the sun to build a spruce goose ten times over and have leftovers for a good midsummer bonfire. 

“I’m hungry,” said Henry.

“I’m tired,” said Gertie. 

“I’m cold,” said Henry. 

“We’re both cold.”
“And hungry.”
“You already said hungry.”
“Well it’s worth saying twice.”
Gertie could not argue with that, for she had not the energy to spare.  As a matter of fact she had so little energy to spare that she took a root to the toe and fell down and just kept falling, down a slope and over some more (very bumpy) roots and down a small hillock and into a clearing with sun so bright that she squinted and couldn’t have seen which way was up even if she hadn’t just taken a forest to the cranium. 

“Gertie?” called Henry. 

“Guh,” she replied. 

“Gertie, Gertie sister, are you alright?” her brother inquired anxiously as he slid down to her side. 
“I smell bread,” she said faintly.  “That’s a stroke, right?”
“No, I think it’s typhoid,” said Henry.  “Can you feel your arm?  I think your arm hurts when you have a stroke.”
“My arm is fine,” said Gertie, wincing her way upright.  “But I’m seeing a cottage made of baked bread, so that’s not good.”

“Oh no,” said Henry.  “So am I.  Well at least we’re going mad together.”
“Yes,” said Gertie.  “Let’s go mad together with some of that cottage in our stomachs too.”
So they did, handful by delicious handful, dug out with speed that only increased as the nourishing crumbs made their way down from mouth to stomachs that had only taken in stream-water and a few berries, and once they started they couldn’t stop. 

“A bit plain,” said Gertie, chewing carefully.

“A bit crunchy,” said Henry, flicking a flax seed loose from his incisors.

“A bit cheeky,” said the witch, “to go chewing up someone’s doorframe without so much as a word of ‘please.’”

She was most definitely a witch, crone from curly boot-toe and bandy legs to tattered head-shawl and snaggled teeth.  In one hand she held a frog, in the other she held a broom that still smelled of ozone and clouds.  Her eyes were fiercely young for her wrinkled face and her hands were clawed and powerful. 

“Sorry?” tried Henry.

“May we?” offered Gertie.  “We haven’t eaten in days.”

The witch shook her head slowly, tiny bones in her hair clattering like windchimes in a hurricane.  “No, no, no.  You’re doing this all wrong.  My twelve-grain cottage provides many essential nutrients, but you’ll need some protein too.  I’ve butter inside, that’ll help.  And for pity’s sake get some water in you too: the well’s out back and unlike whatever cholera-laden pond you may have found in your wanderings I can promise it’s clear and clean.  Stretch out on the lawn for a minute; I’ll bring out some blankets.”

And so Henry and Gertie spent some time in the woods being looked after while the witch called child support to investigate their stepmother and father. 

In the meantime, she had other projects. 

***

The nearby pond was not fit for drinking water.  Henry and Gertie had been most thoroughly warned off from it many times during their few weeks at the twelve-grain cottage. 

It was, however, rich in many other virtues.  Chief among them were frogs.

“Mine’s biggest,” said Henry.  

“Shh,” said Gertie, who was up to her ankles and poised with a pure and powerful focus that would have made a heron gawp. 

“Hey are you looking?” said Henry, waving his frog.  It blinked with the amphibian lack of fear and forethought typical of its clan. 

“Shhh,” hissed Gertie, snakelike, one hand poised like the viper’s very tooth. 

“You aren’t looking,” said Henry, and threw his frog to her, which she caught with her face. Much water and turmoil followed. 

“You weren’t looking,” Henry defended himself with as they toweled themselves. 

“You weren’t listening,” said Gertie.  “I said ‘shh’ and then ‘shhh’ and you didn’t listen.”
“Have you found it?” asked the witch. 

“This is the biggest frog in the pond!” said Henry, presenting his (recaptured, somewhat ruffled) frog proudly. 
“I saw a bigger one,” said Gertie.  “He screwed it up, though.”
“It wasn’t bigger.  That was just the water.  It was doing refrection.”
“Refraction, Henry,” said the witch.
“Yeah.”
“It looked bigger,” said Gertie, but there was a hint of hesitation in her voice.  “I mean, I think it did.  Sort of.”
“Biggest frog in the pond,” said Henry triumphantly.

“Fine.  Whatever.”
The witch (who was an only child) looked between them.  “Are you both sure?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay.”
“All right then.  Now, watch carefully.”
And the witch put the frog in her cauldron and snapped her fingers and clicked her heels and clucked her tongue and squinted her youthful eyes into the brew. 

“Too much widdershins,” she muttered.  “Can you two whistle three times and dance a little?”
“What kind of dance?”
“Oh, anything will do.”
Gertie did the hokey pokey.  Henry did the Macarena.  The witch reached into the cauldron and felt around. 

“Aha!” she exclaimed in triumph, and then extracted a slightly larger frog.  “Oho?  Uhm.”

“You said it would be a prince,” said Gertie.

“Maybe it was the Hokey Pokey,” suggested Henry.  “That’s not a real dance.”
“And this wasn’t the real biggest frog.  I told you it wasn’t.”
“Jerk.”
“Moron.”
“Children, please,” said the witch.

“Twit.”

“Dolt.”
“Children, PLEASE,” said the witch, clasping both hands over the frog. 

“Dumbass!”
“Shit-for-brains!”

“Children, please please PLEASE step outside for a moment,” said the witch, whose hands were now shining through with an eerie translucent glow that made their teeth ache.  “I think he’s going supercritical.  Jump in the well and use the water as a shield for a little until I say it’s safe, alright?  You can breathe through reeds.”

The two children did as they were told; although Henry did get made fun of by Gertie for how much shorter his reed was than her reed and that he would turn into a frog because of it.   When the witch finally called them back in there was still no prince, but the slightly larger frog had become dog-sized. 

“He’s stable now,” said the witch, “but I don’t think we can release him back into the pond.  You two okay with keeping track of him?”
The frog attempted to eat Henry’s foot.

“I love him,” said Gertie. 

And so it was.

***

Henry and Gertie had never been to a real castle before.  Of course, they’d never lived with a witch before either, but this was almost as interesting.  They’d never seen so many crenellations.  Or a princess, for that matter. 

“Now Henry, you can only help with this if you do exactly as I say, alright?” said the witch. 
Henry nodded. 

“Good boy.  Now, pass me the tincture.”
Henry passed the witch the little jar of tincture, a single tiny drop of which made the princess’s leg as soft and woolly and fuzzy-feeling as a sheep.

“Now pass me the scissors.”

Henry passed the witch her shears, which gently slid through the flesh of the princess without spilling a drop of blood.

“Now pass me my awl.”
Henry passed the witch her awl, which bored a neat little hole into the marrow of the princess’s leg.
“Now pass me the grub.”
Henry passed the witch her little bone-grub, which would crawl inside the leg and eat away all the foulness and leave the healthy marrow and let the princess’s blood run sweet and clear again.”
“Now pass me my thread and needle.”
Henry picked up the thread and picked up the needle and pricked his finger and then fell asleep.  He woke up to a noseful of smelling salts and a lot of sneezing.

“Sorry, Henry – I meant the OTHER needle.  That one’s a sedative,” said the witch sheepishly. 

“Actually, do you have a spare?” asked the princess, who had been taking notes on her operation.  “I’ve had awful insomnia for years.”
“Not this one; it’s too powerful,” said the witch.  “But do you have anything to hand?  I could whip up a little overnighter.”

And so it was that the princess’s sewing machine was bewitched and every evening she pricked her finger upon it and she and the whole castle had a nice refreshing eight hours of deep comfortable sleep with gentle dreams. 

Henry was smug about helping with it, but Gertie was not to be taunted.  She’d had the best time of her life counting battlements. 

***

Gertie opened the door and met the mob. 
“Hello,” she said to the mob. 

“Hello,” said the mob.  They were wielding torches.  Someone had rigged up a little model of a witch and was waving it around on a stick.  “Is the witch home?  We’ve got a bonfire rigged up.”
“Let me ask,” said Gertie.  And she shut the door bit her knuckles a little and then went off to find the witch. 

“Oh yes,” she said, putting down the loaf of twelve-grain bread that Henry had (mostly) not burned at all.  “It’s about that time of year.  Well, let’s get a move on.  You don’t want to feel left out, do you?”

So Henry and Gertie had a lovely midsummer bonfire with marshmallows and suspicious meat products in buns and lots and lots of cold cider.  The witch did the fireworks.  And if nobody involved lived happily EVER after, they at least spent most of their time pretty cheerful and content, which is good enough for anybody.