jamieproctor.ca

Two old men and an old woman sat in a dusty room, watching the world go by. Such as it was. It was all the world they had, it would have to be enough.
Besides, they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“I’m bored again,” said one of the men. The words were very nearly a whine, spoken in a voice completely at odds with their sullenness, a voice made for pronouncements, documentaries, and extolling the virtues of chocolates.
“You’re always bored,” said the woman. Her words were tired. She wasn’t.
The other man didn’t say anything. He didn’t even blink.
“That’s scarcely true. I loved having nothing to do back in the good old days.”
“Please, let’s not talk about the good old days again. We just did that. And they weren’t that good.”
“They were wonderful!”
“No they weren’t.”
“Well, what else IS there to talk about, eh?”
They all watched the world again. It hadn’t done anything.
“The bad times,” said the second man. His voice was dryer than a mummy’s innards, and just as expressive.
“We don’t talk about the bad times,” said the first man.
“We should,” said the second man, conserving his syllables with effortlessness that spoke of practice. “Less dull.”
“Well, those weren’t any fun at all,” said the first man. “I’m sure none of us want to think about THAT sort of thing.”

“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
The second man didn’t say anything. He also didn’t blink, because he couldn’t.
“Hell with it,” said the first man. “I’ve always wanted to know exactly how you two ended up like this. Right. So. Back in the day…”

….in the day, it was a hot, muggy late afternoon and the world was just tipping over into evening, which meant it was time for me to wake up and go get something to eat. I was feeling my years a bit, I’ll admit, but I was as stout as anyone a third my age, never mind what that upstart that chased me out of my territory had to say about it. The cheek! That land had been mine for years-on-years, and if he hadn’t landed that lucky shot and that other lucky shot and the lucky bite that had almost gotten my spine, I’d have shown him a thing or two.
Well, enough whining. I got up and then I walked off into the woods to – wait, no, I got up and then I fell over.
Oh damn, I’d forgotten about it again.
I got up while very carefully not putting any weight on my left rear leg and hobbled off into the sunset, trying not to make too much noise and failing at it, as I told myself.
“Myself,” I told myself (who, for most of my life, had been my only conversation partner – as is usual for my kind), “this is not a good time. Having this sort of problem is a bad time, and the only good thing about it is that it might be over pretty fast.”
“I agree, self,” I told self. “This isn’t good. And I haven’t eaten for too long. My ribs are starting to poke my tongue when I groom myself, and my stripes are getting dull and flat enough to look like dead grass. I need to eat.”
So I limped away to my new hunting grounds – which were much smaller and shabbier than my older ones – and focused on trying not to brush my foot on anything. It smelled funny when I broke the scab.
“This isn’t good at all, myself,” I said about an hour later, as I watched a big, healthy, juicy sambar hind bounce away into the brush with the most infuriatingly indolent shakes of her legs. “And it’s getting too familiar.”
“Be patient,” I replied. “Remember when that crocodile almost bit off your tail? You surprised it and had a good meal that night. You can turn this around too.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said, and so-

“Did you do it THAT often back then?” asked the woman.
“Do what?”
“Talking. To yourself.”
“I do it just as often now, I just do it inside my head. You two wouldn’t stop complaining, remember?”
“I don’t complain,” said the second man.
“You looked at me. It was the way you looked at me.”
The second man didn’t say anything. He just looked at him.
“Anyways, may I continue?”

-and so I went down to the river for a drink. Nasty, bitter stuff that water was; salty and as conducive to nourishment as liver to a day-old cub.

“And how nourishing is that?” asked the woman.
“Not at all. Milk is the preferred food.”
“I’m no mammal, you’ve got to tell us these things.”
“Noted and acted upon.”

And while I was at the river, sipping this dirty, brackish stuff and getting more and more frustrated by the minute – it’s one thing to die of starvation, and another to die of starvation with a mouth that feels like it’s been scrubbed with grit and insects – what did I see down across the way but a human, filling a bucket of water.
“That’s strange,” I said. “I haven’t seen those for ages.”
“Well, I did get pushed into the edges of things just now, didn’t I?” I replied. “No wonder this is bad land – salty water, wary game that runs too fast, and there’s humans. Well isn’t that just the dhole’s lunch.”
“Hah, I’d rather have dholes than humans. Look at it. Look at that ridiculous gawky thing. How can it even stand upright? And that ridiculous face! It looks like a bird had a baby with a monkey. A naked bird!”
“And an ugly monkey.”
“I don’t think it’s even seen us, so it must’ve been a blind monkey too. What a nuisance.”
“Absolutely.”
“Should we warn it off?”
“No. Let’s see what it does.”
The human filled up its bucket. Then its other bucket. Then it put them both on some sort of ridiculous stick and picked them up, shoulders sagging. Why it did that I still have no idea – it didn’t even take a drink!
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Utterly and fully.”
“Look at it, just taking up as much of that filthy rubbish as it can hold. And for what reason?”
“None at all. Infuriating, isn’t it? Look at it. Stupid. Slow.”
“Pointless.”
“Surprisingly fleshy.”
“It is, isn’t it? They aren’t that meaty normally.”
“Must be a special case.”
“Yes.”
I watched the human begin to walk away. Slowly. Oh-so-slowly.
“I think I’ll go after it.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, just in case it scares up something to eat with those clumsy feet. It might flee right into me.”
“Clever. But it’s more likely it’ll walk right into a bear or tread on a snake at this rate – only they could sleep soundly enough to not hear it coming.”
“Hah, yes. In that case, I’d best stick extra close to it.”
“Just in case something kills it, yes? Scavenged meat tastes no less sweet, and better my mouthful than someone else’s.”
“Yes.”
I moved closer now, and followed the human down its little human path, as broad and as obvious and strange-smelling as the human itself. Well-trod, it seemed – there must be many that used it. But only the one right now.
“All by itself.”
“Very brave.”
“The forest is frightening after dark, isn’t it?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, for other things. That aren’t me.”
“Because of me.”
The human tripped over a root and made some sort of stupid human noise, then looked around anxiously.
“He’s worried.”
“I wonder why? He certainly hasn’t seen me. He can’t smell me. And I KNOW he hasn’t heard me.”
“He can feel me. Anyone can feel when they’re being hunted.”
“Hunted? By me? …Well, I suppose he is.”
“How curious.”
“Yes.”
I really was very close now. I watched the human move on again, quick-stepping now, looking behind itself every few steps, breath coming faster. I could see its chest heaving as I smelt the sweatdrops.
“It’s just one human,” I said.
“Just one,” I said.
“Anyways,” I said, as I slowly bunched up my leg muscles, bringing my body to bear for a spring, “this is just what I was talking about. A turnabout. Providence.”

The story stopped there for a moment while everyone, speaker included, digested that.
“And what did it taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought. “Do you know, I’m not quite sure?” he said. “Peculiar, I know, but it seems to have slipped my mind altogether.” He growled absently to himself as he checked dusty memories. “Strange,” he decided. “I remember that it was strange.”

“That’s strange,” I said.
“I know. Barely any effort involved. I think it died before the bite.”
“Amazing.”
“Is it all gone already?”
“It seems so.”
“Well, I WAS hungry. I suppose it’s only to be expected. And besides, it wasn’t as much meat as all that. So scrawny.”
“But so much meatier than a monkey.”
“Yes.”
“Just the once, though.”
“But… one meal. That was one human, not one meal.”
“Oh surely not. A meal ends when you’re full. I don’t feel full at all, do I?”
“Not at all. I believe this trail should be followed. Yes indeed.”
The trail led me to a very strange place. Wood and stones and dirt and clay, all piled up into shapes. Like anthills. If the ants were a hundred times the size, and noisy, and smelly, and surprisingly fragile.
“I don’t like this. Too many of them. Is it possible to have a home in a place like this? So many of these things. Taking up space. Chopping up bushes and trees. Putting water in ridiculous little buckets.”
“Don’t mention the water. Just thinking about it makes me angry. It’s like an itch inside the inside of your throat’s insides. Except worse. It makes my teeth squeak.”
“Why would they want it? It’s so stupid. Look!”
A human had staggered out of one of the strange shapes. He was yawning in the darkness, and seemed to be adjusting something near his legs.
“What’s he doing out here at night when he can barely see in the daylight? That’s even stupider! These things are idiotic.”
“Yes. I’d be doing them a favour, really.”
“Absolutely.”
It gets a lot easier the second time, you know. And the third time, about two weeks later. Of course, I had to wait until I was really hungry again, to properly argue the point to myself. By the fifth or sixth time – I think? – I no longer really had that particular issue.
Tell me, do either of you really know what it means, this human word: ‘king’?

“I don’t think so.”
“No.”

I think I learned what it means, based on what we’ve all overheard since. It’s something like a mother. Except you can never get bigger than her, and instead of cuffing you if you disobey her, she kills you.
Regardless, I was king for several years, and I can tell you this: it’s a miraculous thing for your self-esteem.
I was still…a bit slow. I was still…not quite as young as I used to be. But it didn’t matter one whit. And the respect, I tell you, the respect – do you know that one moment you get, when the prey knows you’re there, and it knows it should’ve started running two seconds ago? Humans can live that moment for days. Days! More than a hundred, all thinking that same thought. For days!
I would hunt, and I would kill, and I would watch them scurry and moan for hours and hours. It was amazing, I tell you.
Two years, and dozens of humans. And truth be told, before that first kill I hadn’t been sure if I would make it another week.

“So what happened?”

Nothing unexpected, really. Good things never last.
You see, one day some new humans appeared. Humans with strange machines. Humans with strange machines that weren’t afraid.
This annoyed me. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to not be feared, for a king. So I decided to do something about that. I wasn’t even hungry that night and I planned to hunt – that’s how annoyed I was.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it was the water. The water was so terrible. A mouthful of that stuff would drive a saint to slaughter, and I had a good bellyful that night.
“The big one?” I wondered.
“Yes, the big one with the ridiculous moustache.”
“That sounds good.”
So I crept into the village – that’s what the humans called it, and I usually didn’t press them this closely, but they’d REALLY tried my patience this time – and made my way to the building that I knew the strange humans were in. They’d tied a donkey or something a good ways off, why I’m not sure. I don’t think I was even hunting anything that wasn’t a human by then, there just didn’t seem to be any satisfaction in it. Well, non-humans tended to fight back a lot harder. My station’s dignity would not be enhanced by a broken rib.
“Asleep?”
“It seems so.”
I walked in, and yes, they were asleep. And what a lovely picture they made: four of those strange men, and one other.
“Maybe not just one,” I decided.
“A good idea. After all, this isn’t quite about food, is it?”
“No. Now that you mention it, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”
“A bit. But it’s only my right.”
“It is.” And I paced forwards and let my claws slip out and I trod very heavily on a sharp thing sitting on the floor. With my injured foot.
Well, I had a good set of lungs on me still, and I used them. And deaf and blind and dumb as those men were, they couldn’t help but wake at that yowl in their ears – AND one of them was between me and the door.
“They’re just humans,” I reminded myself at the back of my mind, as I took the big one with the ridiculous moustache between my teeth. There was a lot of shouting and small, frail limbs smacking against my sides. One of them was fumbling with one of those strange machines and seemed to be ignoring me, of all things. “Just humans.” My breath caught for a moment, and I slipped on my hurt foot and landed on the floor, half-expecting to cut myself again. But the sharp thing wasn’t there. Funny, how I couldn’t catch my breath.
I realized that something was hurting an awful lot. I looked down, and the human that wasn’t strange had planted the sharp thing in my chest and was twisting it back and forth like a misplaced tooth. I wanted very much to hit him, but my legs were turning lazy. I felt tired again.
“That’s silly,” I said.
“Yes, humans don’t have teeth.”
“I think I know this one, don’t I, self? Did we take his daughter? Or his son? Maybe a wife?”
“I’m not sure, and I’m even less sure if it matters. It’s getting hard to see. Almost human-blind really.”
“Oh dear,” I said. The human in the corner had finished whatever it was his machine did and was pointing it at me, but it was just then that I couldn’t see or hear much of anything. I’m not sure what happened next.

“So what did they taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought about it. “All right,” he said. “Not fatty, though. Very lean and not a great deal of meat. You had to work at it fairly thoroughly. But why do you ask?”
“I didn’t check at the time.”
“Really? Now I’m curious. Tell us.”
“All right.”

Unlike you, she wasn’t that old when this happened.

“I wasn’t OLD. Just a bit creaky.”

I’m sure.
She was past adolescence and young adulthood and into the broad, well-worn beginning of the current that was middle age, with two litters of pups already behind her. She was well-fed enough (a second difference)

“Enough with the editorials!”

and was currently aiming to add to her bulk with a seal. Which, for those in her audience who are less enlightened

“Stop it!”

is a fatty delicious animal shaped like a rolly-polly ball of meat. They are best eaten by ramming them violently from below when they’re at the surface, so as to minimize the directions in which they can escape.
They really are very tasty.
Now, it so happens that in her eagerness to consume an especially fat and unaware seal, she perhaps was overhasty. But then again, ramming speed does not afford substantial time for doubt, and it looked seal enough until her teeth sunk into it and decided it wasn’t.

“What was it?”

Some sort of flat thing with a human on it. She’d seen humans before, and never bothered with them because they were lean and scrawny. Well, this one was scrawnier than most, and it was just disgusting. Nothing but hard bone and muscle, amazing there was any room for blood in there. Which apparently there was; quite a lot of it, in fact. It was also making some noises that were just on the upper edge of her hearing, very loudly and shrilly.
So she spat it out and swam around for a while to see what it would do. She was curious, after all. You didn’t see quite as many humans back in those days. In the end she shouldn’t have even bothered – some more of them came, dragged the flopping, leaking human into a floating thing, and left after pointing at her a lot.

“You didn’t even eat it?”

She invites her audience to consider whether they would waste stomach space on dirt and stones.
Humans did strange things, and none of it meant much to her. She didn’t think about it any further until the next day, when she bit another seal and found that it wasn’t a seal at all. It was attached to a strange sort of shiny object that got stuck in her teeth and seemed to be attached to another floating thing.
Then she was dragged up alongside it and yanked out of the water, where she suffocated in a large amount of pain for some minutes while a human tried to find her brain with a strange exploding stick, succeeding on what was probably the fourth attempt.

“That was quite horrible,” said the first man.
“It’s over and done with. At least it didn’t take too long.”
“And you said it happened the very next day? It took them simply ages to work up the nerve to interfere with my doings.”
“You’ve been here longer than I have. I guess times change.”
“For them, not us. At least, not as fast. And speaking of speed, will the sluggard here get around to speaking his part?”
The second man didn’t say anything.
“Go on then,” insisted the first man. “You’ve heard two, the least you can do is tell one.”
“You talk too much,” said the second man.
“And you talk too little. Look at us – I, myself, have had no company but my own voice and the very occasional partner-in-dalliance since my mother left me to run wild. And our esteemed lady here never knew her mother past birth.”
“Nor my children,” added the woman.
“And yet here you sit – you, who have basked with dozens – and remain the most anti-social of us all! Pray tell us, how does this come to be?”
“If I had talked as much as you two,” said the second man, “I would have been killed in annoyance.”
“Make up for lost time and give us your story,” said the first man. “We’ve got all day here.”
“Fine.”

You are large. You are old. You are one of many, many, many in your family on the riverbanks. You have outlived most of them.
There aren’t as many of you as there used to be. And one day, some humans come and drop explosives in your river. And your organs rupture against your scales and you die.

“That’s it?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” said the second man.
“What about the part where you ate them?” asked the first man. “Surely that stuck in your head.”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Not even the first time?”
“It was a long time ago. And it happened often.”
“How often?”
The second man paused to think. He did not rush.
“Often.” A verbal shrug. “It was no matter.”
“Of course it was!”
“Do you remember your first deer?”
“…no.”
“Your first seal?”
“No.”
“They are no different. Not to me.”
An uncomfortable silence reigned.
“Cowards,” said the second man, very calmly.
It reigned a little harder.
“Well, now we know better than to complain when you don’t say anything, you morbid thing,” said the first man.
“Yes.”
“Still,” he continued, wistfulness touching him, “telling the old stories… it does put the fire in your veins again, doesn’t it?”
“A bit,” agreed the woman. “A bite.”
A pause for thought. “Yes.”
“Ah yes. Nothing like the bad old days to get your heart moving – if any of us still had one of those. And revenge does make the blood stir yonder. Tell me, what is the relation of the current master of the house to my procurer again? I believe he is the great-great-nephew of that man, the one who wanted a new rug, no?”
“Yes.”
“And his father, the father of the master of the house, he did obtain our graceful lady and hang her – most fetching – set of jaws over the mantelpiece on a somewhat-gaudy plaque?”
“Yes he did. And he took my biggest tooth for a gold necklace.”
“And the man himself of this house, he would be the one who claimed our quiet friend here and had what was left of him stripped fleshless and mounted?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmmm.”

There was a space in which ugly thoughts grew and became beautiful to the mind’s eye.

“I believe I have an idea,” said the first man.
“So do I,” said the woman.
“And I,” said the second man. His voice now had a tone: irritation.
“Unity is the thing,” said the first man. “Now, I summarize our situation thus: two of us are lacking teeth, two of us are lacking a body, and two of us are lacking a proper set of skin. Coincidentally, each of us has one of these things.”
“It seems that way.”
“Yes.”
“I also notice from the time that it is a quarter to two past midnight. This would be fifteen minutes before the man of the house takes his nightly walk downstairs to empty his bladder.”
“I’ve noticed that. He’s predictable.”
The second man said nothing. He was growling (rumbling, really, a roaring bellow slowed down) at a pitch just below the perception of the human ear, and making the dust on his display stand dance.
“Now, given that we all share such common ground – even if how we view it varies,” continued the first man, “I believe that it would be to our advantage to work together. For a short time.”
“I agree.”
The growl grew deeper, and the floorboards creaked.
“We are in accord then,” said the first man. “Now, let’s get ready. We may only have one chance at this, but we can still turn this around one last time.”

“Three Old Ones,” copyright Jamie Proctor 2011.

Eyclth in the month of Broog.
I have arrived at last at the lone, dismal plod-port of this planet, and watch the trok-barge leave with great admixture of feelings. Oh! the fire of adventure, how fiercely it burns, yet how quickly is it put out by the watery slurry of loneliness! And no-where in all the uni-verse is a Splarg more alone than in that dismal backwater called by the brute natives Errth. But I am resolute, and shall not give in to despair. My splargian rationality, so cultivated by our Distinguished Tutors, persuades me of the inevitability of my success. My form is masked beneath a wunggdraclowk of fabulous ingenuity, whose techna veil shall never be pierced by the most intrusive and rude methods that the Natives possess. I am well equipped with both provisions and defensive techna, and my unburdened use of my rational minds will lead me to use both as dictated by Providence.
The secrets of this murmured-after, near-fictional city that have whispered its way to our ears even unto the hollowed halls of Melthachung will be in my many-grasp before the mooncycles wander through a full pass. I will be home by chrysalmass, and shall propose to you, dearest Frrreee, with the knowledge of Nu You’rek as gift to your father.

Tremmelith in the month of Broog.
Near-disaster, dear Frrreee! In my haste to acquire transport, I came within an inch of losing my life! Quite solicitations and the bribes of a few papery and plastic trinkets to the local gossip-mongers of the street-corners told me that the fastest means to travel north (where Nu You’rek is rumoured to lie, though none of the savages I asked could give me precise coordinates, relying as they may on their rudimentary and primitive metriks for guidance, like the careless children they are, ignorant of love and lurf as they are gifts given not naturally, but in the name of Hrrrrrfsyrup, our Lurfener and Lifesalver, He of the Unblemished and Broken Caraplating and Caresser of our Brainstems and Bodies), and anyways you are put into a very big box – made of steels, of all things! – and shipped away like plapple set for the platter at your father’s manor.
Made of steel! A most curious tale, and all the stranger that they believe it so fully. Would you credit it, sweet, mindless Frrree, that these heathen hyyu-men even dare to say that the whole of the city of Nu You’rek is crafted of such material? As if there were enough in all Splargadia to make so much as a house! One might as well claim that one could produce light with a flick of a switch, and not by focusing the implant graciously permitted to be installed in one’s forehead at the behest of the Priechery of the Provident and most kind Lurfener Hrrrrfsyrip – but of course, you are female, and thus unknowing of these things or much else, dear sweetling, since your father consumed your forebrain when you were a Splarglor. But I digress from my tale, and must continue post-haste, else this Dimling grow too lengthsome for the telethinkers to transmit and they complain to me of care-worn lobes and request additional compensations. My moneys are better spent here on bribes to the locals, for even they, in their primitive stupidity, admire and covet the splendid coins of our people.
You see, adorable Frrreee, as I searched for the terminal of this buhss, I was accosted by a dangerous mad-man, who in their ineffable and munificent stupidities, the lazy and shiftless men of the villament allowed to roam free. “Spare change, meister?” he did ask me. Yes, you hear awright, Frrreee, my honeyslurple: this madman demanded a full removal-and-replacement of my chitenholm, and did so in full public, without so much as a batted eye given in his direction. Lurfener save us from the perfidies of savages, children, and madman! I am a restrained and peaceable Splarg as you know too well, Frrreee, and yet I was scant able to prevent myself from thrashing the blackguard in twain. Only the piteous shrieks the poor wretch emitted in his sorrow and alarum, and the attendant charge of insipid would-be-sympathizers, saved him from becoming one of the Many Unfortunates who die un-slathered by the Priecheresters and are condemned to eternal Spaff. I was forced to hide amidst the dank brick jungles of the villament to escape my pursuit, and will begin to head north tomorrow on good solid feet, as the Lurf intended. By the time I return for home (hopefully laden with the treasures of knowledge and wealth that will be the key to your father’s cold, rotted middle-heart, Frrreee), the whole incident will have passed from the fickle minds of the residents and I may depart the plod-port unmolested by troubles and of carefree mind.

Temeltremmelith in the ha-month of Broog.
My pseudopodonous footpendages grow wearisome, Frrreee. The paths the locals have littered the landscape with are long and gruelling, and they are most arrogant in their presumed claim to exclusive use. I can scarcely walk down the middle without some manner of savage jabbering abuse at me from the safety of his metallic transportation – but this is the true news, and it is not just any metal, beautiful Frrreee: it is steel! Yes, steel, and I saw it with my own five eyes – no fable, no half-heard rumour, no child’s tale! Think of what this means, Frrreee! Nu You’rek may be fact and not fancy after all, your father’s moneyed lust sated, our union permitted! If even a tenth of the wealth of this city is as it is promised to be (which I can full believe, with the sheer swarming quantity of these strange steel-wheeled transports I have seen, which the locals call in their rough tongue “karrs”), I may even be able to bribe my way to a post of authoritation!
A short entry for now, sweetness – I believe that I am being given some sort of rude direction in flashing lights. One of the steel-machines is slowing to speak with me! Perhaps its driver shall be less uncouth than the common

Temellemontremmelithith in the ha-ho-month of Broog.
I apologize and beg your forgiveness, gentle, unassuming, reader, but I was accosted by the most vile of brigands, and found myself mostshackled firmly in the back of a karr before I could so much as hail-and-good-day to its brutish driver. I believe him to be even less evolved than his fellows; he is a burly, insipid fellow with a bulging jawmount and a most detestable air of superiority that would be looked upon as arrogant even in a well-assured Splarg of later years and great personal authority. In this primitive, it is putting on airs of the worst and foulest kind, and the high-handed method with which he recited his tribal chant while laying hands upon my person was quite un-appealing.
I shall dismantle and un-plate him the moment I am unshackled. You know me to not be a Splarg of violence, my honeyslurple, but this creature tests me greatly, and no rational being would disallow my use of force in reclaiming decorum.
Aha, I am to be released! I shall embark upon my punishment.

Ip in the month of Broog.
My kindest, most orificed Frrreee.
There has been little time to write this past qui-monthlette; it seems that the man I struck down occupied some manner of rank in the local community, and I was obliged to freeflee post-haste, only to be caught again and thrown into dankest, darkest imprisonment! Alas, I, like the Lurfener, am now subject to the torments of an unjust and unreasoning system supported on the backs of goons and captained by degenerate and unthinking creatures lifted high above the status to which Providence had assigned them, in its infinite and incomprehensible majesty.
After an exhaustingly long trial, I have been imprisoned in a small cell made from some manner of brittle, easily split substance, which I shall splinter with some of my techna – thankfully, the stupid Natives had not thought to frisk under my wunggdraclowk! I will begin drilling my way to freedom within the hurrr, and hope to be away and over the horizon by sunslip. This time I shall stay off the karr-trails, and proceed by celestial navigation.

Hup in the month of Broog.
Nu You’rek, Frrreee! I am here! It was nearer than I’d thought, less fleeting than I’d feared! Why, a scant detour from the plod-port – from a crash, for instance – would’ve landed me right in the heart of the shining city of steel. Yes, steel, Frrreee – the legends were true! And it is not the only one, I am assured (though with equal surety, it is stated to be the grandest of all by my informants, who, uncouth though they be, proclaim themselves experts in such things, and whose judgement we must assume to be punctilious and correct for the moment, lacking the input of those who might be said to be wiser, such as your father, may he splag for many years and live amongst the comfort of the grandchildrets, which, Dearest Frrreee, I hope that you and I will consent to provide him, together, after we embrace one another in the tender grips of matrimoistness, to the great celebration of our friends, comrades, relation and family) and then I found five of their strange dolars that they lust after just lying on the sidewalk, so rich did they consider themselves! But I digress.
I sleep in the shade of soaring spires tonight, Frrreee – cold and beautiful with wealth, so unlike the humble bioscrapers of home, with their svelte plankton ducts and plump, homey vesicles. But by tomorrow, these awful secrets will be secret no more, and warm familiarity shall illuminate the gluttering fescidness of their innardparts..

Na in the month of Broog.
Today I met with the chief of one of the great corepourette tribes – a proud group that claims one of the mightiest of the steel giants in the city. This man, by title the See-Eee-Oh, was the first of these Natives that I have found striking in any way complimentary – his features were pleasantly assymetrical, his eyes piquantly small and pleasingly beetled, and his hideous internal caraplating was coated so thoroughly in smoothed blubbermeats that its horridness was barely apparent to me throughout our meeting.
Reaching such a great man, of course, was a most difficult endeavour, even with the aid of Providence. Such bribes I paid, Frrreee! My pazzle has not been so empty of coins since I was a mere Splargar on the verge of disemsuffixation, and I confess that the empty jink-jank of its coins spent in the pursuit of knowledge has become (daringly!) sweeter a sound to my audioholes than any contented squeak of a well-stuffed wallet.
The audience went as well as could be demanded, reader. I proposed a simple trade: as many of my shiny trinkets as his people wanted for as much of their precious, sumptuous steel as they would part with. I was coy, of course – it pays little to let children and savages know how dear you value their possessions, lest they become greedy and unfair in their dealings with proper folk. I told him tall tales that would make your maticles curl, Frrreee – of how my people had so much steel that we would even use it as cutlery, or for trifling things like public transit lines, or how our very wealthiest would even fashion entire furnishings out of it! He was quite impressed, and claimed that for a modest fee, he would put me in contact with another corepour-nation that dealt heavily in that most precious of metals. I gladly doled out his payment and hailed him farewell in the patois of his people that I had learned, wishing him good luck in acquiring for himself some manner of tail (the Natives, poor, envious things that they are, lack such, even though much of Errth’s fauna does not). It seemed to please him, as he watched me leave in respectful noiseabsence.
I must make haste! It is a long walk, and my footpendages grow flurrisome with the chill of this place. I shall write again soon, fear not.

Ak in the month of Broog.
Disaster, Frrreee! After a long, nightmarish trek through the cold bowels of Noo Yourk (upon careful examination of the Native’s language patterns, I have accordingly adjusted my spelling), I finally came to the dwelling-scraper of the corepourette tribe to which I was referred, only to find them abandoning their position for the eve! I made inquiries as to what emergency could require this, but was brushed off with fearfully rolling eyes and exaggerated grimaces. No commentary could be made but for hasty, half-heard mutters, and I was ignored as they fled.
It was at this point, Frrree, where I confess that my hastefulness – always a flaw, so our family Priecherester told me – got the better of myself. “Fine,” I told myself, “so the savages flee. There is no terror in this place that cannot be weathered by a hardy Splarg as myself, and I shall conduct as fair a trade as can be enacted by any, judged true by all.” And so doing this, I left my entire wallet, plus a deed of credit, and prepared to extract the steel from the building by means of my technameantle, for miniaturiziting and carryment homewards.
I had just turned on my machinery, after gingerly destructmantling the front portalcullis, when a shrill sound began to nag at my head, just at the upper registrata of my hearment. It was most alarming, and it only seemed to grow louder as large, oddly-shaped chunks of steel began to shred their way through the walls and hurl themselves violently into the miniaturnmatorium. My attention was quickly drawn from the alarming sound and towards the imminent collapse of the ceiling upon my head – for what reason this disaster occurred I cannot say, and I must resign myself to assuming it to the mysterious demands of Providence, which to those unenlightened must often appear as fickle whims of fate. I barely managed to escapement myself through the splenchwards wall before the roof of the building collapsed, and had to take myself away at a dead run as the whole magnificent structure folded itself into a mangled ruin, cause unknown. A devastating sight, darling Frrreee – and not just for the loss of wealth, for I had a good sixteen chunks of steel in my pazzle, each originally larger than I am by approximately 12% and a good eight times my size as I appeared to the savages, swathed in my wunggdraclowk. Wealth beyond imagining was mine, but, tender-heartsed as only I can be, Frrreee, I could feel many a pang in my appendix for the poor peoples of that corepour-nation, now homeless and doomed to dispersion and extinction after the inexplicable collapse of their dwelling. Such terrors may never occur at home, Frrreee (at least, not after the great bio-gluing-edict of Hrakzefflepithecus the Fearsomely Paffed, which mandated that a house be made of sufficient firmness to withstand the loss of up to eighty percent of its superstructure on pain of decaraplating and liquefaction for use as his personal wax), and I know it is only brute ignorance that enables these tragedies, but I still feel for those poor, foolish savages, empathetic as I am.
I depart for the plod-port. I have wealth enough in steel and knowledge, and I cannot bear to stay and witness such suffering and chaos. Hark! Flashing lights! I had best abscond, lest I draw the attention of uncouth gadabouts.

Hikapeckleasophagusmackerateernapplemorgaphilldillynorperstraughgerhacklefipkipbik in the demi-qua-sali-fo-rth-meg-arung-nep-monthoidlette of Broogsquared.
My last entry for this trip on a strange place in a strange space, this Errth, Frrreee. I sit in the plod-port, awaiting a glok-barge’s preparations for return to Splargadia, and all I can think of is your darling belly-face (and your adorable little maticles – but such salacious talk would turn bright green the face of any gentle readers, and I must cease such nonsense before it flushes with embarrassment my text entire).
I have been hunted, and I have been hated. The howling mobs here understand nothing, and what they do not understand, they fear. I have brought them wealth and a hint of a much larger uni-verse, and in return, I have received naught but abuse. I suffer as the Larf did, Frrreee (praised be His ripps), and for no less worthy a cause: the bringing of knowledge. Knowledge, true, pure, brilliantly illuminating Splargian knowledge will be these people’s saviour, Frrree, and it will only be delivered if they are known to require it.
This journal will be my gift to the poor, starving creatures of this queer Errth. It is a plea to the noble society of Splarg itself to take up the burden that is its own greatness, for every soul and ha-soul within it to descend to the depths of suffering and remove it. We must tame these poor creatures, so they may be educated, so they may be lifted up from their natural lowliness into the edges of a grander society such as ours.
They must know the teachings of the Priecherester, they must know the discipline of an oversubduest such as your father and mine, and finally, when obedience and learning has been beaten into their tired, wretched hides, they must feel the pity and grace of the Lurfener, Hrrrrfsyrip, the Lifesalvener.
Only then, Frrreee, lurf of my life, may we call ourselves truly civilized: when we have given this precious gift to those below us.
The barge approaches, I must cease these scribbling squirtings and embark myself into its innards.

Yours and alls,
Ylolheim Freeeed Yalstogr III.

“Being the Dimling-Journal of his Exxorship, Ylolheim Freeeed Yalstogr III; an Account of Travels of a Youthful Splarg of Much Vigour in the Lands of the Savages,” Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

On a crisp-yet-sullen day in late August, Maxwell was taken by his parents to watch a witch being tried.
It was very straightforward, an open-and-shut case, and every bit of care had been taken to make the procedure as dull as possible for an audience. The accusations were droned rather than flung, the inquiring priest was unshaven and yawned frequently, and even the victims seemed more tired than tearful as they described how the evil eye had poisoned their livestock, soured their mouths, broken their windows, and set their children crying with fevers.
The punishment was delivered with similar apathetic thoroughness. After all and sundry had said their piece and a little bit extra, the accused was tied up with an old clothesline and dropped into a pond. The witch floated like a cork and was summarily stoned to death, making no protest and seeming only slightly more annoyed than the crowd.
“Let that be a lesson to you on wickedness,” said Maxwell’s father firmly. And Maxwell took it straight to heart: wickedness was one of two things in all the world, the other being good, straight-razor, stand-up wholesomeness. And after living thirteen years of one and seeing maybe a half-day of the other, he was fairly certain which was more interesting.
“I shall become a witch,” he announced, “and be a fearsome monster.” To himself, when he was quite certain he was alone, in the middle of the woods. He wasn’t crazy. At least, not in a directly self-destructive manner. No, about this he was serious. And he proved how serious when he made his first attempt at witchcraft that very night out behind his house, with a tiny little thimble of blood stolen from his thumb with the aid of mother’s silverware (she wouldn’t dare thrash a witch, would she?).
“I abjurr. I abjoor… I abjuu. I renounce you, Lord, our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name on earth as it whoops, I renounce you.”
He looked around. Nothing much seemed to be happening.
“I embrace you, Satan, who is the Devil,” he continued. “Our uncle who are in hell unhallowed on earth as it is in heaven no wait hell. I, uh, embrace you.”
Nothing happened some more.
“A lot,” he added.
Nothing continued to happen. He checked under his bed, just in case, and found that nothing was in plenty there too.
“God damnit,” he said, at which point his father found him and had him thrashed for swearing before turning him over to his mother for a second go-round, as payment for the vandalized silverware.
That evening, as Maxwell went to bed, he hated his parents more than he’d ever hated anything before. He hated them more than chores, than work, than his cousins, than the terrible rusty old axe he had to cut firewood with. He hated them so much that he started to choke his pillow without noticing, and as his hands clutched at an imagined father’s neck (or maybe a mother’s skull), he felt a slight hum and smelt a whiff of brimstone.
His index finger touched paper, and he carefully extracted a small missive, printed on plain white paper, with text on it in plain black ink.
Stop it.
Maxwell made a face at it, then turned it over, lured by limitless optimism.
Be careful what you wish for.
Maxwell never made a second attempt at witchcraft, but he did run away the next year, after being thrashed something like every other day for sullenness, moodiness, surliness, malign spirits, and refusal to stop sulking. His father and mother blamed it on their undue moderation in his upbringing, and forbade his younger brother from smiling.
Maxwell left Pennsylvania, and took ship to the Old World as a cabin boy and general dog’s-body. “Perhaps there,” he speculated to an able-seaman, “if not witches, the other creatures of blackest night may be easier to find.”
“Gnarr,” opined the sailor, squinting haphazardly over the rail at the foamy waters. Then he vomited.
Maxwell was filled with the desire to reprove the man for his slovenly ways, but stifled it. This was a tumultuous night, filled with Saint Elmo’s fire and waves bigger than the ship. He wondered if it had anything to do with that large pretty seagull he’d killed earlier as it perched on the bow. He’d thought it would make a nice roast for dinner, but everyone had been rather upset about it. Then the sea split open and spat out a ship masted all in black, and his thoughts were put to a second priority at best.
Her name was illegible, and her hull worn grey from age. Her crew were ghastly spectres, and they lined up every man from oldest to youngest and worked their way down the line, questioning them all.
“Will you serve?” they asked. And every man felt fear close his throat to a pinhole, and could but nod yes. From the old, old navigator to the greying captain down to the freshest-faced of the able-seamen, not a man dared say anything more.
They reached Maxwell.
“Will you serve?” croaked the spectre.
“Yes please!” said Maxwell, unable to contain his eagerness.
The spectre stared.
“If it’s no trouble,” he added.
The spectre gave him an unfathomable look, then yelled something in dutch. The captain came to his side, a broad, decayed man who looked more solid and unyielding than the deck under his feet.
“What did you say?” he asked, every syllable a restrained request for a chance to hurt something.
“Yes please can I serve thank you very much,” said Maxwell.
The captain punched him firmly in the eyesocket, and Maxwell woke up in the rotting timbers of a half-sunken hulk next to a pier. Upon disembarking, he quickly learned that he was about a century late, but he’d never considered tardiness to be as sinful as it was cracked up to be.

Maxwell travelled fast and meandered hard, skipping from village to village, hunting folklore. He slept in fairy circles and woke up with nothing but crude statements in dead languages painted on his forehead, he crafted upside-down crosses and prayed at them, only to find his socks smelling of brimstone and his shoes of sulphur. He even once ate a whole raw onion. It tasted better than he’d suspected.
His next big break came as his carriage hit a pothole in an old, terrifying road in the midst of an overcrowded Germanic forest. The coachdriver ran away into the woods and the driving rain, screamed once, and didn’t come back.
Maxwell couldn’t be happier. Well, he could’ve if his luggage hadn’t been dumped into a puddle with ambitions of pondhood when the coach overturned, but he felt that might be asking too much of life.
A beast howled. It lasted for forty-five seconds and one long lungful of blood-scented air and felt like three hours. Small things cringed deeper in their burrows, and the bats flew a little higher. Maxwell nearly urinated in his trousers from excitement, and began to dig through his soaked belongings. Spare (soaked) trousers, sextant, compass, maps of (soaked) middle Europe…
The howl sounded again, closer. And faster.
…spectacles, spare codpiece, wallet, watch…
A third time. From the volume, whatever was calling seemed to be located just inside Maxwell’s left eardrum.
Aha! The raw steak! A bit past its prime by now, but any sirloin in a storm. Maxwell rubbed it all over his torso and took a big bite just as the werewolf bounded into the fading puddle of light left by the coach’s single, dying lantern. It was as tall as he was at the shoulder and blacker than the sky and all its clouds.
Maxwell growled haplessly at it and made stiff, jerky, uncertain movements, and was immediately bowled over and had a mouthful of his jacket torn away.
“No, no, no, no! The skin, break the skin!” he cried in excitement.
The werewolf chewed its mouthful three times, swallowed, and considered him.
“Right here,” he said, pushing away the ruins of his collar. “Right on the shoulder. Upper half, if you don’t mind – just so I don’t bleed out before it sets in.”
The werewolf stared away into the trees, either deep in thought or having heard a squirrel. Then it cocked its leg, urinated on Maxwell’s already-stained trousers, and trotted off, ears pricked, leaving him to brood over another wasted opportunity and laundry bill.
By the evening’s end, things were looking up. Maxwell had somewhere dry for the night, a meal under his belt, and he was paying back the host already, so he felt no shame of obligation. True the dryness was due to the furnace two feet from the crude pallet, the meal had mostly been tripe, and the repayment in labour involved rustily and ineptly sawing through the corpses of some fifteen executed men, plus a few horses, two-thirds of a cow, and something unidentifiable that was mostly liver. As well as very nearly his own hand, on some six occasions so far.
“Pull the switch!” called the doctor, finish the last of a forty-some series of injections into their combined labour of love. “Pull it! While the storm lasts and the spark holds! Make it so!”
Maxwell pulled a switch on the enormous slab of metal and clockwork that took up half the basement.
“No no no not THAT switch! THE switch!”
Maxwell pulled the switch marked “THE switch,” and was rewarded with immediate and thorough electrocution, flashing white light, and a rich, meaty scent that brought to mind that perfectly good (if a little ripe) steak he’d ruined earlier in the night. Then the monster exploded and his hair caught fire. The doctor screamed something blasphemous that was cut out by a sudden bolt of lightning, and Maxwell woke up with no sense of smell on the roof of a little inn in Munich, without the faintest idea of how he’d got there and a searing case of tetanus. One was cured with ignorant bliss, the other with inadvertent consumption of mouldy bread.

Years passed, and Maxwell grew no less determined. He slept in the beds of self-mutilating artists and had terrible nightmares walk right past him. He plumbed his family tree’s darkest depths in castles once owned by depraved ancestors, and found in the cellars a few dead rats in the walls and some empty stills set up by squatters. He swam in dark, cursed coves from which no man had ever returned alive in skimpy bathing costumes, and was attacked by an irked bull shark, for which he received many stitches. He drank wine with men who did not, and woke up the next morning with nothing more than a hangover and a terse request to leave it’s been three days you know what they say about guests and fish.
All of this took quite a lot of time, by which Maxwell should’ve been an old man. Instead, he was merely an aged man. He blamed it on his delayed trip to Europe, feeling that the whole continent had been a waste, and struck out for distant shores and more exotic mysteries. But alas, his further travels bore no greater fruit. In Africa he participated in the hunt for a mysterious lost city and succeeded in finding only a lost village, which had fallen off the map about a decade ago and had been getting on pretty well since. In South America he found El Dorado and was kicked out for drunk and impious conduct. Among the jungles of Asia he shot (or at least was on hand while it was shot) a demon-possessed man-eating tiger that turned out to be merely rabid, although he did have the excitement of a dose of rabies to contend with after that. Near to the southern pole he found a hidden, ancient cave full of what he initially thought was a monstrous and inhuman civilization older than mankind’s most creaking nightmares, but turned out to be merely hallucinogenic spores, and his attempt at finding the Min-Min light in Australia ceased when it led him into a billabong occupied by an irate bunyip, for which he received many more stitches.
“I’m getting closer,” Maxwell told the nurse in Melbourne, as he managed to feed himself without aid. “I can feel it!”
“Yes sir,” she agreed, and caught his spoon as it missed his mouth and dove for his navel.
It came that he returned to America. The witches were long gone, yes, but there were strange things out west, things that he couldn’t wait to check. He deliberately defiled a few ancient burial grounds (he was seized by virulent diarrhoea for three years and one month), and attempted three times to become shot dishonourably in a high-noon showdown only to be repeatedly pistol-whipped. It seemed the unlife of the restless spirit was as denied to him as that of the eternally cursed.
The first world war was a nasty nuisance (he’d been planning on checking under the Vatican for sealed vaults of heresies before the knives came out), but the second was a golden opportunity for Maxwell. Rumours took him to enlistment. Hair dye got him past the recruitment officers. Incredibly awkward slang terms carried him past the critical and alert eyes of his sergeant and fellow grunts, aided by profound apathy on their part. And a carefree and amoral spirit took him away from duty and deep into the heart (or at least the lungs) of German territory, where he found a creaking bunker, lined with medical waste and fraught with horrors.
He kicked in the door with his boot. He’d been wanting to do that for almost a century, ever since he’d missed the opportunity back out west. “Stop right there!” he yelled or something very much like it, to the mouldering, decayed corpse of what had probably been a Nazi scientist.
A few forlorn hours followed. Maxwell poked around the bunker (a cut-rate, shoddy thing, barely hidden underground at all), and discovered both cause of death – crushed underneath his own giant, dial-ridden belljar set – and experimental purporse: creating a master race of biomechanical goldfish while inhaling as much nitrous oxide as could possibly be smuggled into the budget. He hadn’t gotten far, which was probably for the best – the degree proudly framed on the western wall looked to be for gothic architecture.
Maxwell left in dejection, barely remembering to set fire to the bunker on his way, and deserted somewhere farther away, where the disappointment wouldn’t follow him as much.
He searched the Himalayas, and found the abominable frostbite, much to the dismay of three of his favourite toes.
He wandered the swamps of Borneo, and found the real wild man of the forests. Who noogied-and-ran.
And at last his wandering took him to Japan, where, in the midst of lunch after a disappointing morning following traces of radiation to no avail, he felt the ground shake and his drink spill on his crotch. Stepping outside, he came face to face with a receding tail bigger than buildings and devastation that matched anything he’d seen anywhere.
“Take me!” he cried after it. It didn’t listen, and vanished around a corner. Sweating bullets and crying, he wrested a miraculously undamaged motorcycle from the grip of a dying man and sped after the creature, dodging rubble and serious, ashen-faced men with Geiger counters that clicked and whirred like cockroaches.
“Take me!” he called, spinning around a block corner. A toe loomed overhead, somewhere above it, a body measured in kilotonnes.
“TAKE ME NOW!” called Maxwell, passion filling his soul. “I EMBRACE YOU, IN THE NAME OF THE ATOM!”
The creature stepped over him and continued on his way. A crushed pedestrian moaned, and Maxwell was filled with envy and spite.
“That’s easy for YOU to say,” he muttered viciously as he stared after the retreating backside of the monster. “YOU didn’t have to work for it, oh no no, it just happened to you. You had it easy. You didn’t have to try. You didn’t spend three hundred years and more running around trying to just once, just ONCE be the lucky one, oh no you didn’t. It just happened. ‘Just happened.’ Spoiled little shit.”
The pedestrian rolled his eyes and expired, leaving Maxwell alone, bitter, and with a mild case of radiation poisoning that made some of his hair fall out and cost him one of his particularly favourite teeth (the left maxillary canine, which had long been his preferred tearing instrument during meals).
“Hard work,” he grumbled as he wandered the streets of Cairo, purchased coffin after coffin and found them empty of curses and full of useless raggedy old limbs and archaeological knick-knacks. “‘Hard work is the way the Lord will admit you into heaven, boy.’ Well thank you, father, but I’ve been working hard at this for long enough without so much as a snippet of success. Where’s my excitement?” he complained as a mummified, shambling figure revealed itself to have been an inhumed minor scribe and waved off offers of vengeance upon the defilers of its rest in favour of investigating modern accounting.
“Where’s my trauma?” he grumbled as a bestial tribe of long-lost ape-men ceremonially exiled him with flung fecal matter.
“Where’s my insight into matters beyond the ken of cautious men?!” he yelled as the eightieth ancient crumbling scroll recovered from a sealed marble vault in the Mediterranean proved to be Socratic dialogues on recipes involving olive oil. He flung it aside in a temper and paced to the window. He already knew everything about cooking with olive oil.
Maxwell gazed out over the tranquil hideousness of a New England downtown with moody negativity. Home again, after three hundred years, and not a single step taken forwards. Not one vampire bloodletting, or werewolf bite, or even a conversion into some sort of ghoulish freak. No mutation, no satanic rites, no induction into hidden societies.
Of course, no UFO abductions. That was just silly.
“It’s all rot,” he said to the countryside in general. “All of it. And especially you,” he said to his father specifically, who had quietly begun hovering behind his back. “Yes, I know you’re there! You can’t fool me that easily.”
He turned around to face him. Father was much less frightening than he remembered. Faceless, yes, but shorter, and he’d seen almost more things without faces than with by this time. “Look at you! You haven’t moved one inch since we last talked. Where’s heaven now, eh? What about your hard work?”
The ghost raised its hands and made an ambiguous gesture, then took off its head.
“Yes, yes, very frightening, father,” said Maxwell. “God, how I was I scared of you as a boy? No, no – god DAMNIT. Look at you! You’re stuck, you’re wedged, you’re in a rut! And you jammed me into one too,” he spat. He threw an antique skull belonging to a depraved ancestral man-father at the ghost just to hear it shatter. The wraithish man drew back in alarm. “Maybe not the right rut, not the one you planned, but one all the same! Well, I’m fed up with it. I’m fed up with you and all this rot! I’m THROUGH, do you hear me?” He was advancing on his father now, sending the frail old spectre back on his heels, quailing in the corner of the room. “I’m GOD. DAMNED. THROUGH.”
There was a small piff, and two things happened, the second before the first. First, the ghost vanished.
Secondly, Maxwell didn’t believe in ghosts. He also didn’t believe in witches. Or werewolves, or vampires, or himself, or much of anything. It didn’t do you any good.
“What a crock,” he muttered to himself. Hair dropped from his head like a light spring rain, whitening itself as it hit the boards. “Rot, all of it. Unheard of. Rubbish.”
Plunk, plunk plunk, out fell the teeth.
“rot,” he mumbled

The landlord was surprised when he checked in the next day; after last night’s gale he was doing the rounds to see how many windows had fallen victim. Upstairs had already cost him a fortune, and he was thinking something more modern and durable. Can’t live in the past forever, and those old windowframes were deathtraps for glass. The man leaving so suddenly was a bit of a shocker, but he’d seemed the roaming sort, and at least he’d left his wallet – a great hulking slab of leather that could’ve doubled as a steak in an emergency. The landlord upended it, and cursed a bit as something very small and indisputably not a bill fell out.
He picked it up. It was a small note of plain white paper. Printed on it in plain black ink was this:
You too.
It made his teeth itch. Almost hum. Impulsively, he turned it over, and found some more text.
Look behind you.
He did, and came face-to-teeth with the head of a somewhat elderly puritan man.

It took a long time for both of them to stop screaming.

“Persistence,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

“Now the thing is,” said Eddie, to Edward, as their pickup truck crunched its way into a resting position on the gravel driveway, “not to take things too fast. Hastiness makes mistakes. Slow and steady can’t hurt anything but patience, and we’ve got enough of that.”
Edward nodded at his father. Or maybe he was just listening to his iPhone, it was hard to tell.
“Well, I expect you’ll pick it up,” said Eddie as he swung himself out of the cabin and dug through the truck’s back. Extracting a large toolbox, he peered into it, then shut it with a satisfied grunt. “Allrighty. Pay attention.”
Ringing the doorbell produced no reply for approximately thirty seconds, after which the sound of something heavy falling end over end could be heard. There was a brief pause, and then a wincing, heavy-set man opened the door.
“Eddie North and sons,” said Eddie.
The man looked at them. “Where’re the others?” he asked, after a pause that was just long enough to be uncomfortable.
Eddie shrugged. “Give ‘em two, four years and they’ll both be in highschool and I’ll start bringing them along. Just don’t want to have to change the business name twice, you know?”
“If you say so.”
“You got a boggart in your fusebox, you said?”
The man nodded wearily as he beckoned them inside. “Alan Thompson, and yes to your question. Two weeks now. Little bastard’s got it worked out top to bottom – he turns the lights off right when I go down the stairs, pulls the plug on my computer before I can save anything, and if I use anything rechargeable he just waits until it needs a fresh shot of juice and then he gives it a power surge. I’ve been living out of my neighbour’s sockets for a week.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully as they were led to the fusebox, its flat, grey face an impenetrable mask. “Righty-o. You try dislodging it yourself?”
Alan looked embarrassed. “Yeah. I would’ve called you in sooner if I’d known it could get this bad. At first I tried chalking a circle around the fusebox and burning mistletoe, but then it just set off the fire alarms. Then one of the guys at work suggested mare’s blood, but that’s hard to get ahold of. Took me four days to beg so much as a half-pint, and when I tried to use it, the damned thing took the power out of the fridge and hasn’t let it back on since.”
Eddie nodded solemnly as he wrenched open the box and peered at its contents. “Righto. Well, I hate to bear bad news, Mister Thompson, but you’ve made no mistakes that aren’t common. See, maybe some of those tricks might’ve worked if you’d caught the little bastard right away, before he could worm a grip in, but now he’s got a firm hold on your wiring. No, we can’t win this one by playing his game anymore. Son, hand me the screwdriver. Phillips”
“’Kay,” said Edward, putting as much sullen wretchedness into the demi-word as possible. The tool was extracted and handed over – rubber-handled, with a silvery tip.
“Now the thing with your basic boggarts,” said Eddie, as he sized up the fusebox’s innards, “is that they’re scarperers. You want to get rid of them, you got to get them when they don’t expect it and nail ‘em with one go. Sir, would you mind flicking the lights on and off repeatedly, just to get its attention?”
The man hesitated, but did as asked. There was a whiff of smoke in the air and a sharp and ear-cleaning whistle erupted from the fusebox, which turned into a truncated yelp as Eddie stabbed his screwdriver viciously into it, puncturing metal and something more insubstantial. The handle hissed, and he swore and let go.
“You okay?”
“Fine, fine. They like to leave a bit of a bite for you to remember them by now and then.” Eddie sucked his fingers as he watched the screwdriver’s handle gently ooze apart, flowing down its own blade. “Damn and blast. I’ll have to fix that up over the weekend. Should be fine now, unless it left a trail for its relatives. I’ll give you some milk spiked with holy water, leave that out a few nights.”
The man looked worried. “Have you got anything less… lethal? Only I think I’ve got pixies in the back garden, and I don’t want any collateral damage.”
“Nah, they’ll be fine,” said Eddie. “A little holy water might give ‘em diarrhoea, but it’ll all come out in the end. So to say.”

“Now that,” he told Edward, as they drove away, “was an easy one. They’re not always like that, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful, take as much time as you need. Plus, on some jobs – big jobs, the ones you don’t want to screw up or some silly thing runs off with your shadow or head or something – you get paid by the hour and there’s no sense at all hurrying it then. Understand?”
A half-shrug, delivered while staring out the window. Oh well, good enough.
The next stop, he was careful to point out, also wasn’t a big deal. A regular customer, a middle-aged woman named Susan who lived just a little too close to the park and didn’t keep her security wards running in the daytime – “to save on bills,” she said. Eddie was more than happy to take the money that would’ve gone to the magitechnical company.
“It’s goblins again,” she told him morosely, leading them down to the cellar door. “I just don’t know how they do it. I turn on security as soon as the sun so much as looks at evening, everyone says they’re nocturnal, no questions asked, and the little bastards still make it in. Just don’t ask me how.”
Eddie chewed his lip as he examined the door. What may have been ambient house-sounds leaked out from behind it, hinting at something more sinister than mere settling foundations or creaky boilers. “Son, go get me the sledgehammer – back of the truck. It’s all right,” he explained hurriedly at Susan’s pained wince, “I’ll be careful. You renovated recently?”
“Yes,” she said.
“More’s the better. They like the dark and damp, so I’ll have ‘em off-kilter. And they won’t have had any time to dirty the place up to feel like home yet.” Probably, he added in the privacy of the realm underneath his baseball cap. Then, after a moment, he appended: much.
Edward returned, sledge in tow, having taken neither an offensively long amount of time nor a particularly quick go at it. Eddie felt a little twist at his heartstrings – so, he had been listening to him earlier. He took up the big rusty instrument with a grunt, and reminded himself to polish it later – there was still some congealed ichor on it from its last use, an ice troll inside an industrial ice-cream maker.
“Righto,” he said, taking off his hat and replacing it with the special one from the toolbox. “Wish me luck.” And then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, shutting it carefully behind him. The click was extraordinarily loud, and gave the impression of having cut off a number of inaudible conversations, leaving the room that special sort of quiet you can’t hear, only feel crawling across your skin.
“All right boyos,” he said, words too loud, intensifying the silent feeling of incredible creepiness, “you know how it works. I’ve got iron in my hand, you’ve got hives from nice clean furniture and carpets. Clear out or it gets messy quickly.”
A high-pitched giggle – no, giggles were for children. That was most definitely a snigger.
“Right then,” said Eddie. “Don’t say I didn’t give you little shitheads fair warning.”
He flicked the light switch and was completely unsurprised to find that it did absolutely nothing. For effect, he jiggered it up and down a few times, then started swearing softly under his breath. The sniggering sounded in the dark, maybe five feet from him, and he heard the quickly-moving pitter-patter of little flat webbed feet.
Right, he thought. That’s enough of that. He flipped the headlamp on.
The first through seventh things he saw were an assortment of screaming, terrified goblins frantically covering their light-sensitive eyes and dropping their assorted nasty little murder implements. The tenth, eighth, and ninth things were the tasteful sofas that they’d overturned and pushed together to use as makeshift lairs. Past that the details got awfully vague because he was busy and there wasn’t time to waste – walk quickly up to a spasming light-blinded goblin, bludgeon with the hilt of the sledgehammer, repeat. The seventh one had time to shake off its paralysis before he got there, and received a somewhat more businesslike and vicious soporific in exchange for most of its front teeth and quick dose of impromptu rhinoplasty.
“All clear,” he called, signalling Susan and Edward to come in with flashlights. Susan looked weary at the mess, but somewhat pleased at the relative lack of carpet-staining carnage. Edward was mildly interested, or possibly bored. It was hard to say.
“Found your culprit too,” he added. He showed her the shiny little metal loop dangling with charms that he’d yanked from the trophy-festooned vest of the chief goblin. “They swiped your keys somehow. Keep an eye on them, will you? I don’t mind the business, but I think you could use the break.”
Susan looked equal parts irritated and thankful for his concern, and waved off offers to help right furniture. They departed while she was gathering cleaning materials to rinse up the sticky black goblin nosebleed from the carpeting.

“Right,” said Eddie. “One last job – best for last too. Some lady says she’s got a changeling hiding in her plumbing. Haven’t heard of that before, but they’re little bastards, and I wouldn’t put it past them; it’s not like they can’t breathe water or fit through a u-bend.”
A shrug, one-shouldered. Good as an answer, really. Within five minutes the truck’s tires crunched on gravel, in seven they’d been escorted inside the house by a nervous-looking woman named Holly, and now they were carefully examining the toilet.
“Most likely outlet,” Eddie was explaining confidently. “Sure, they CAN squeeze ‘emselves through a faucet and into a sink, but it’d take longer, and they get bored easily. I think we’ll need the plunger for this one – hand it over.”
Edward rummaged through the box and silently, languorously handed over the ash-handled, rune-engraved plunger. Holly hovered behind them as Eddie bent low over the toilet, accepting the tool with one hand.
“Right. So what we’ve got to do here is flush ‘im out – not literally, we don’t want to get rid of him, we want to keep him here, so what we’ll do is get that scaly creeping bastard GET HIM!”
By the end of the sentence the bathroom tableau had been slightly altered. Eddie was now standing, Holly now looked at least as angry as she did worried, and Edward was being pinned headdown in the toilet bowl by both of them.
“Right,” said Eddie in a menacingly cheerful voice as Holly yanked Edward’s head out of the water, “tell me where my son is or you get plungered.”
Edward was showing his first emotion all day, a mixture of befuddlement and confusion. “Dad, what are you –” the sentence ended in brisk plunging, with all the unpleasant sounds that came with it.
“Don’t you dad me, mister. My son is a cheerful and helpful young man and you are a walking cliché that was obviously manufactured by something with only the foggiest ideas of human nature based off of wild stereotypes. Also, my son would presumably recognize his own house, own bathroom, and own mother. You didn’t even take a proper look around when you took him, did you, you little attention-deficited moron? Now spill it: where’d you stash him?”
“I don’t –“ Vigorous plunging once again commenced, this time more forcefully.
“I can keep this up all day, you shapechanging son-stealing little shit,” said Eddie. “Where is he?”
The changeling looked at least as bedraggled as resentful now, but also slightly terrified and very much out of wind. “Attic. Bound. Unharmed. Please stop. Plunging.”
Eddie nodded. “Right. Holly, could you hold this for a minute?” The nasty glint in his wife’s eyes as she accepted the plunger hinted that she may have something more unpleasant in mind, and Eddie felt something almost close to sympathy as he left for the attic. The first squelching sounds of furious plunger-hammering began immediately behind him, and he winced as he opened the attic trapdoor.
Ah, there was Edward. Tied up in the Christmas tree lights and gagged with tinsel, but otherwise apparently intact. More annoyed that injured, really, as he proved by his first words upon freedom, which were “What took you so long?”
“I didn’t realize it wasn’t you ‘till we were out of the driveway, and by then, well, why waste time? My clients expect promptness. It was a tight thing squeezing you in before lunch as it is – we may have to eat and run.”
Edward brightened up at the thought of food, at least. Well, he had missed breakfast. “What’s lunch then?”
“Sandwiches. Your mother was going to make something, but she’s a bit busy with your changeling right now and I don’t think she’ll be through making an example of him for about an hour. We may have a cleanup job when we get home.”

“Business” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

It was the flyswatter that got him in trouble in the end.  Jeremy had known it always would.
It was an ancient thing that had been owned by his grandfather, formed from some unknown metal that had been shaped with brutal lack of care into an inefficient rusty killing machine that was probably almost as dangerous to humans as it was flies.  Especially humans that were overdue on their tetanus shots.
Jeremy liked it because it made a very satisfying clanging noise whenever he brought down a fly.
The flies liked it because it let them know loud and clear wherever Jeremy was, what he was doing, and how to act accordingly.  For instance, the loud thud of the swatter being laid to rest in its drawer was the signal for the plan to start.
Jeremy was a heavy sleeper, which had, in the past, lost him two separate jobs and cost him uncountable exams, projects, and assignments.  It was once again about to bite him in the bollocks.
There were three sounds which, if he’d heard them, would’ve made the next few hours of his life much more straightforward.
The first was the slow and ominous creak of his prehistoric door being shoved open.
The second was the soft, high-pitched whispering.
The third was the scamper of a thousand tiny little legs getting closer and closer.

The end result of all this was that Jeremy woke up due to a headache and found himself to be upside-down, suspended from his unusually sturdy ceiling fan with his arms tied behind his back.
“Ow,” he said.
“Order!” called a voice.  It wasn’t a nice voice.  It wasn’t a voice that would speak kindly, or use soothing words, or reassure, or even placate.  It was the sort of voice that would speak harshly, or use words like “insolent,” or demand.  On occasion, it might venture to dictate.
It was also very, very tiny.
“I will have order or I will have this room cleared!” threatened the voice.  Jeremy looked at the floor and locked eyes with a fat spider atop a matchbox, coming up six short.
“The defendant is now awake and this court is in session, so would you all SHUT UP!” it hissed.  Jeremy found himself almost hypnotized by its manner of speech: its legs seemed to be trying to play a mixture of tag and speed tic-tac-toe with each other.
A dull murmur died at its request – the hum of hundreds of tiny little things talking to each other, and Jeremy realized that the room was crawling.  Except for the bits of it that were buzzing around in midair.  Ants, flies, spiders, the odd earwig or two… everything in the house with an exoskeleton.
“What the fuck is going on?” asked Jeremy.
The spider glared at him, and Jeremy realized with small astonishment that he could read its expressions quite clearly – a twitch of the mandible, a sudden lustre in its fifth eye, all adding up to the overall appearance of someone who hated his guts, a hatred so solidly-defined that it brute-forced its way past body language in order to shove its feelings directly into his forebrain.
“You,” said the spider, putting as much contempt as could be summoned in a single syllable, “are on trial.  Will you represent yourself, or would you like a lawyer?”
“On trial for what?”
The spider slammed four of its legs onto its matchbox stool, making it jump.  “Reply to my question with a question and I’ll have you done in for contempt of court!  Do you want a lawyer or not?”
Jeremy’s head hurt too much to handle its own thinking.  “Fine, lawyer.  Listen, the phone number’s on the fridge -”
“No!  No fancy lawyer’s tricks for you – you’ll get the same as all the rest of us.  Bring forth his lawyer!”
A small centipede sluggishly pulled itself through a knot of ants and stood at the foot of the matchbox.
“I’m here,” it said.  “Where’s my client?”
“Directly above you,” said the spider.
The centipede looked up.  “Blimey he’s a big one.  You sure about this?  I’m not sure about this.  I thought you said this job was going to be a nice, simple easy one.  You never said my client’s eyes were going to be ten times my weight.”
“He’s entitled to proper representation,” snapped the spider.  “You defend him, I adjudicate, he’s judged by a jury of his peers -” a leg was waved at a set of ants and flies, which waved back – “and then we execute him.”
“Those aren’t my peers,” said Jeremy, thickly.  All the blood rushing to his head seemed to be settling into his tongue.
“Nonsense and lies!” fumed the spider.  “Blatant denials of reality!  Near-sociopathic obliviousness!  These are your housemates, your roomies, close as family!  By god, if I had the power I would smite you down right here and now on the spot, and save the public the uproar of an execution!”
The spider’s anger was so firm that Jeremy very nearly felt it as physical warmth, tickling at his eyebrows.  He recoiled as best as he was able, and nearly swung back into the judge’s bench in the process.
“Cease struggling!” called the judge, hastily sheltering behind the matchbox.  “Bailiffs!  More restraints!”
Dozens of (somewhat smaller) spiders leapt from above and trussed Jeremy further in webbing, grousing all the while.  Several muttered what he suspected were slurs, and one spat on his eyelid as it climbed back up to the ceiling.
“If there are to be no more outbursts from the defendant,” said the spider, giving Jeremy eight of the most evil eyes he’d ever witnessed, “the trial will commence.  Will the defendant’s lawyer…. where is the defendant’s lawyer?”
The centipede was missing.  A fly in the audience volunteered that he’d run away when Jeremy had lurched on the ceiling.
“Cowardly little mangy excuse-for-an-accountant,” said the spider.  “We’ll make do!  Human, you’ll have to take his place.”
“I want a lawyer.  You said I could choose to have someone represent me!”
“And someone is, you spoiled gadabout!  You’ll just have to fill in for him.”  The spider slammed its legs again – presumably its version of a gavel.  “Now!  Order in the court!  The schedule will proceed as follows: first witness, second witness, third witness, followed by recess for dinner and finished with the proclamation of guilt.  Human, do you plead guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” said Jeremy.
“Lying, deceitful, castles-in-the-sky clod.  Very well, no one will judge you for your pathetic attempts to evade justice.  Now!  First witness.”
“Objection!” said Jeremy.
“Objection spat upon,” snarled the spider.  “Witness.”
The witness was a lamed fly, who crept up to the stand on four legs, using his one wing as a balance aid on his lop-side.
“Now,” said the spider, “is this the man who crippled you?”
“Yup,” said the fly.  She spoke slowly, as if she was afraid haste would let the words run away.
“And what did he use to commit this abominable deed?”
“Objection!” said Jeremy.
“SHUT UP!” roared the spider.  “What was his weapon!”
“Swatter,” said the fly.
“Was it THIS swatter?” asked the spider, waving a leg at Jeremy’s grandfather’s most prized possession, retrieved from its drawer and currently held under custody of a squadron of beetles on the bedside table.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said the fly.  She scratched herself.  “That all?”
“You may depart.”
“Objection!” yelled Jeremy.
“If it will make you stop talking, then by all means, object away, you vicious clod!” said the spider.  “What is it this time?  Whining about you having to pretend to be your lawyer again?  Are you uncomfortable?  Do you need a drink and a kiss and a hug?”
“You’re the prosecutor,” said Jeremy.
“Congratulations, you win a medal!  ‘Most redundantly unneeded person man in classroom for schooling!'”
“But you’re the judge!”
“If even you” – and this was a truly venomous ‘you,’ a ‘you’ that could strip paint and bleach bones – “can manage to be your lawyer and yourself at once, I think I’m perfectly capable of separating and reconcilitating the roles of out-for-your-blood psychopath of the system and unbiased and impartial official, you villainous cretin.  Now silence your yapping maw before I have the bailiffs cram webs in it!  NEXT WITNESS!”
A millipede crept forwards, one step at a time.  This took about three minutes.
“Sorry, your honour,” he said.  “Nerves.”
“Yes yes we’re all nervous now spit it out: what are your grievances with this swine?”
“Pardon, your honour?”
“Your complaints, your issues, your beefs!  What did this scumbucket do to you and yours?”
“Oh.”  The millipede scratched its head in thought.  “Uhh… well, one time, I was sitting on the front walk…”
“As you had the right to.”
“Yeah.  Yeah, as I had the right to.  And then.  And then he came walking along.”
“And who was he?”
“You know.  The guy.”
“Which guy was this?”
“The one right there.”
The spider’s mandibles were opening and closing in a very slow but stupendously hypnotic way.  “Are you referring to the defendant?”
“Yeah!  Him!”
“Good.”

“And?”
“What?”
“What did.  The defendant.  Do to.  You.”
“Oh!  Oh yeah!  Well, he stepped on me.  Cracked my carapace wiiiiide open!  Lost half my guts and now my nervous system can only run one foot at a time.  Real pain in the you-know-what, right?”
“Right.  Thank you.  Go away.”
“May I cross-examine the witness?” asked Jeremy.
“Who asked you?” said the spider.  “He’s said his piece, it’s buried you in evidence of your own guilt… I think we’re done here.  One more, let’s get the formalities over with.  Next witness!”
The spider hopped down from its matchbox and cleared its throat.  “Thank you, your honour.  Now, one -”
“You can’t be the witness, judge, AND prosecutor!” yelled Jeremy.
The spider whirled about and was sitting on his left eyelid before he could so much as blink, and by then if he’d tried, he’d have been interrupted by its teeth.
“You are the scum of the earth,” it said, in a matter of fact tone.  “You are vile, and you are worthless, and you are an inconsiderate and oversized vermin.  Every day I spun my web on your mailbox, your terrible, tacky, worthless mailbox, and every day I caught insects that would annoy you – apologies, ladies and gentlemen of the jury – and EVERY DAY WHO OPENED THAT MAILBOX EVEN THOUGH THEY KNEW DAMNED WELL THAT THEY’D NEVER GET SO MUCH AS A ROGUE FLYER?  WHO, EH?  WHOM?”  It vibrated with such passion that its fangs seemed about to cause a microscopic friction burn on Jeremy’s eyeball, then turned away in disgust.  “No more questions.  Now – court is in recess.  Everybody go get some dinner.”
The court at large nodded in acknowledgement and seized its neighbours for devouring in a businesslike manner, some being consumed themselves even as they swallowed their own meals.  A single potato chip crumb was procured for Jeremy from underneath the living room couch and forced into his mouth against his protests.
“That’s a crumb that could feed half a colony of ants, you ungrateful sot,” growled the spider.  “I bet you don’t even appreciate it, do you?  Feckless bastard.”
Jeremy thought of a half dozen things to say, then a hundred reasons not to say any of them.  Instead, he preoccuppied himself with thoughts of chips, and how tasty he found them.  Unsuccessfully.  He suspected that his crumb was actually a wad of lint.
“Court is now in session,” said the spider, brushing a few specks of fly from the bits of its face.  “Verdict is guilty.  Jury, what do you think?”
“Guilty,” chorused the five surviving members of the jury.
“Couldn’t put it better myself.  Any last words before the execution, defendant?”
“What am I charged with?” asked Jeremy.
The spider stared.  Then snorted.  Then fell over on its back and laughed, laughed, laughed, legs waving all at once.  “You don’t know?” it cackled.  “Really?  REALLY?  After all the witnesses, the maimings, the stompings, the web-crushings… after everything you’ve done, after seeing the swatter used as evidence… you still don’t know what you’re on trial for?”
Jeremy’s heart sank.  “I guess not.”
“Well,” said the spider.  “Well.”  It shook itself briskly and adjusted its matchbox.  “It’s a bit complicated, but, you see, the long and the short of it is that we’re all members of this household – as are you – and after all we’ve seen… we just think you’re sort of a waste of space.”

“A what.”
“A boring tool.  A needless drag on the property.  A lead weight.”  The spider shrugged, an expression that might’ve almost been embarrassment marring its permanent venom.  “Sounds a little silly saying it like that.  Oh well.  Executioners?  Do your duty!”
And with a one, two, three, snap went the fangs of the spiders at Jeremy’s feet, snip went the webs around his ankles, and whack onto the floor went Jeremy’s head.
This immediately revealed two glaring problems with the execution process.
First, Jeremy was a tallish man and his room was a crampedish one.  His feet had dangled from the ceiling, but his head only travelled two inches before it hit the floor.  This gave him immense back pain and a large bruise, but not much else.
Second, Jeremy was a stoutish man and his floor was a shoddy one.  The floorboards bucked, the bedside dresser jerked, and Jeremy’s grandfather’s flyswatter fell off it with a screech of rust, smearing the beetle squad with its handle, gelatinizing the audience with the shockwaves of its impact, and crushing the judge and jury to an even pulp over the mesh that looked a bit like blackcurrant jam.

Spider silk is strong stuff.  Picking his way free took Jeremy several hours.  But it gave him time to think, and time to plan.  And what he planned his way to first (once he’d rubbed some blood back into his feet) was a cup of very bad and very hot coffee.
“Must be the pesticides,” he said aloud, scalding his tongue very badly.  “I’ve got to use different pesticides.”

“A System of Checks and Balances,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

My mother was a pretty quiet lady. I was a pretty loud kid. If you filled a book with things she told me, it wouldn’t make it past chapter three. So anything she said, I tended to remember. So I remember her telling me: “stay out of those woods.”
Now, this was stranger than it sounded. For one thing, our house was surrounded by woods, and I was an outdoorsy girl from the get-go – as soon as I could walk I was finding rocks to trip over, and since home was nothing but a beaten-up, overgrown cabin and a shed with a door-squeak that could wake the dead, the farther I wandered the better. For another, she didn’t mind me wandering around out in the forests ’till just past dusk; as long as I carried the big stick with nails in it in case I ran into a bear. It wouldn’t do much to the bear, mind you, but it was a good reminder that there were things out there that could hurt you, and it kept me cautious. Sometimes.
So, it wasn’t the woods. They weren’t the problem. No, it was those woods. And here was where mom made her first mistake, because when I asked her the natural question, which was “what woods?” she told me where she meant. So I didn’t stumble into them by accident.
Then she made the second mistake, which was when I asked her “why?” she told me it wasn’t important.
Of course, first thing you do when you’re told that sort of thing, you go see what all the fuss is about.

So off I went. Mom hadn’t given me an exact distance, or a precise direction, but I knew where I was going – one of the older, more beaten-down paths led right where she’d pointed. It was right into old growth, where the trees shut out the sky and ate up the noise. Very quiet. I’d never been that deep in before, and if mom hadn’t warned me off, I probably never would’ve. Being a parent’s tough.
The boundary of where I knew I shouldn’t be was obvious. The trail went from near-gone to overgrown, and there was a blaze carved into a dead redwood that looked older than the snag itself. I kept going. After all, how was I supposed to know why I shouldn’t go there if I hadn’t been there?
It took me ten minutes to get pretty far into the off-limits area – there was some thick brush in there.
After about five, I started to notice things.
This was all gradual, mind you. It wasn’t like I took one step, two steps and BAM pins and needles up and down my arms. It was just something you noticed after a while, like that the breeze’s stopped, or that there’s a goddamned lot of flies out today.
When I did feel it – in a little clearing where a tree had died and rotted in place – it all sort of came to the surface at once. I stood there, one foot half in the air, and tried to tell what the hell was going on. It was hard to sort out, but what I remember as being the biggest thing was the air. It felt… thick. Not heavy, just thick. Like you could reach out and grab it, like it was stuffed with something. It was full. That’s what I remember the strongest. The air, straining at the seams to keep something inside.
The light was strange, too. Even filtered through a summer canopy, it was, I’m not sure, spotty. Wobbling. Like it was being passed through some sort of filter. And it was quiet, the quietest spot in the quietest depth of the forest, but it was because there was a blur over it all. Like white noise, but like breathing.
Oh, and it smelled like growing things.

I’d say I spent less than two minutes in that place before I lost my nerve and ran for it. Didn’t stop jogging until all the way back home, and I earned myself a black eye and four bruises on the way because I wouldn’t stop looking over my shoulder. Felt like something was watching me the whole way.
Mom was worried sick, of course, and scolded me up-and-down-and-all-about. If she’d known where I’d been she’d probably have done more than scold, but I told her I’d just gotten caught up in practicing skipping rocks on the creek and ran home a little too late and a little too quick. She probably wanted to believe that as much as I did, so not too many questions got asked and I got put to bed without any more sore spots than I’d given myself. Took me hours to get to sleep though. The window kept making me itch, even after I pulled the blinds on it.

That was the first time, and afterwards I pretty much followed mom’s advice and forgot about the place. Closest I’d have gotten at that age to admitting she was right about anything. So I hiked, hunted and fished and was reluctantly cattle-prodded off to school, where I learned what other people were. Whether I liked it or not.
David… hah, David was very much “liked.” Nice, but stupid. That was the age, though – I wasn’t exactly Einstein myself back then. God, we got up to some stupid things. Usually at his house – his parents both worked, and some nights they couldn’t make it home at all. Mom was always home at my place, so that was out for half the fun we wanted to have. And that didn’t really matter for a full school year. We had our routine and it worked out fine.
But David was curious. Always curious. Hell, if he was curious enough to date the crazy girl from the woods to see if she really ate raw meat and skinned her own clothes, he was curious enough to want to see firsthand if she really lived in a log cabin like everyone said. He kept asking and I kept turning him down, and finally he turned the screws on me right as summer was starting, because his family was going to go see some relatives cross-country and this-is-the-last-time-I’ll-see-you-for-what-have-you. Worked like a charm.
Mom was happy to meet him – I’d told her a little bit, just as part of the parcel of stories I gave her as reassurance that I was fitting in with the other kids. She had some half-stale raisin cookies we’d been avoiding eating for a week, David was polite and managed to eat three-quarters of one, and it was almost nice. Awkward as hell, but nice.
Then mom wants to go to bed. Early-to-rise, you know? So she asks us to keep it down thank you very much and heads to her room, and me and David, clever little idiots that we are, decide that this is the perfect time to head outside and enjoy the night, just the three of us: him, me, and Jack Daniels.
Of course, that plan was off the rails before it hit the track. I told him sound carried so we’d have to get some distance before we really relaxed, but of course we can’t wait to crack at the bottle and we’re taking swigs before the house’s lights have gotten dim behind us. Looking back, it’s pretty lucky we didn’t break our necks on the path, even with the flashlights. We sure as hell couldn’t hold them straight for very long. Must’ve given a dozen owls heart attacks.
Now, in between drinks, what we were doing kept changing. At first we were trying to make out. Then we were trying to complain about our parents – well, he was; I only had half as much material, and I got on pretty good with mom – and after that we were trying to find a really pretty spot in the woods I wanted to show him. I think we were going to make out in it, I don’t think I quite knew what was going on even then. By then the only one of us that wasn’t sloshing when we walked was mister Daniels.
So that’s the best guess I can give as to how we went off trail. I lived in those woods for years and years and never got lost once, ever. And I’m not about to count this as ‘getting lost.’ We were moved. One moment we were skirting along the edge of the old growth, and the next we were walking into that empty little clearing full of not-noise and with the moonlight filtering in all broken up. And I couldn’t smell the booze anymore. Just green growth, hanging in the too-thick air.
I sobered up fast, once I could blink enough to see where we were standing. David didn’t get it, he just asked if we were there yet… probably. I was practically carrying the poor boy by then; we’d both have probably passed out and slept ’till noon if I hadn’t caught wise right then.
So, what was the first thing I did?
Well, I giggled.
Yes, yes, very smart. Well, I’d just gotten lost in what was practically my own backyard, found myself in a place that had terrified the life out of me as a little girl, gone from smashed-flat to stone-sober inside five seconds, and was listening to my no-help-at-all boyfriend mutter something about how beautiful I was while he dribbled a little at the mouth. It was giggle or shriek, and you don’t shriek when it’s just two of you, only one awake, alone in the woods at night. It isn’t going to make you feel any better.
Now, don’t go thinking I was completely off my head yet; while I was giggling I was getting a better grip on David’s arm and generally getting him into a position where I could run like the dickens and bring him with me. And that’s when he dropped poor old mister Daniels. Smash, right on a rock, blasted right apart. And because I was a dutiful, clean (all the other girls in school made jokes about the smelly hillbilly who lived in the woods; I’d foolishly thought this would make them stop it), conscientious, stupid, stupid, stupid girl, I leaned over to pick up the biggest pieces and immediately cut myself.
Right away, the second that I felt that nasty prick in my finger, the air broke. I’m fairly sure that’s the right word for what happened: it broke. Snapped right in half and sprayed bits of light and colour everywhere, like stamping on a prism. Of course, it was night, so most of the colours were shades of grey-to-black, but it was pretty damned impressive, even so. More startling than the lightshow (fleeting though it was) was the thud you felt in your gut and your ears, because for just a little less than a second whatever it was that had made the air so heavy had been dropped right into it, and it was just as surprised as you were.
That last sentence needs a bit more explanation, I think. You see, when I’d blinked away the blindness, the first thing I saw – beyond that David was now moaning loudly and clutching his head – was a pair of big yellow eyes looking at me from just a little higher than I was. They were very large, seemed spread very wide, and I can’t remember what the pupils were like. Matter of fact, I can’t remember anything else at all, right up until I slammed the door of the house so hard that it nearly knocked mom out of bed.
We had a bit of an argument, Well, she asked me what the hell was going on while I put David to bed on the coach, then I passed out while she groused at me. I woke up in my bed, so I guess she wasn’t too cross with me. That, and she might’ve smelled the fumes and decided that I’d have enough punishment come morning whether I slept on satin or stone.
David was a bit dinged up in the morning; however I’d gotten us home, it hadn’t been without a few bumps. The poor boy looked like he’d been five rounds with an angry bobcat, and there was half a bird’s-nest stuck in his hair. A bit less of a romantic goodbye than he’d hoped for, but I suspected that after last night he wasn’t quite as upset about leaving me behind as before. The feeling was mutual. Some people like a relationship where they get to play the hero now and then, but if you ask me, anyone who needs to be dragged through the woods dead drunk at fifteen miles an hour is someone I’d rather not be sleeping with. Maybe it won’t happen twice, but once is too much. David met some other girl when he was out east anyways. Mom seemed almost upset that I didn’t need any consoling.
The biggest change from that night was that I didn’t spend as much time in the woods anymore. After ending up in the place where I shouldn’t be through god-knows-how, I wasn’t about to get one inch closer to it than I needed to. Even the brighter, noisier, younger parts of the forest put me on edge. Felt like someone was always looking over my shoulder. I didn’t tell mom any of this, of course – she’d have put it down to the drink, and that’s fair, so would most people. I wasn’t going to take that chance. And after seeing those eyes, I wasn’t going to wander outside as often. And never at night.

There’s a few things I should mention before I talk about the third time, which was maybe ten years after that.
First, a couple of dogs went missing within a week of my little adventure. Big, healthy, well-trained animals. No sign ever found, no tracks, no tire marks. Just gone from someone’s backyard without a trace. There was a good-sized search, but nobody found anything. They figured someone stole them.
A month later, another dog goes. This one was on a hunting trip, and the man swore it went into the bushes to grab a bird and never came back. Same thing: no tracks, no marks, no muss or fuss.
Three days after that a rich guy loses a horse a few miles away, and that’s what makes people start connecting dots. Given another kick by some of the hunters complaining that it’s prime time for deer and they’ve barely seen so much as a hint of antler. I think they decided it was a really smart bear at the end of it, or maybe a cougar that had balls of steel. Neither one made much sense, but they were the best ideas they had, so they took them and ran with them all over the woods, with guns, with hounds, and at one point the rich guy hired a chopper.
Of course, they didn’t find anything. Probably for the best. Nothing else went missing.
But the deer stayed scarce. After the fifth year of that, the hunters gave up and moved on.

Things were already changing by then – I’d finished school, and I was doing most of the heavy work around the house. Mom was still tough, mind you, but her spine was more oak than iron now, and she appreciated that she had someone doing the lifting for once – especially the town runs. After school, I was more used to people than she was, and the old truck was drivable enough. It also meant mom had the time to make tea more often. God, the stuff she tried… I’d swear she worked through every single plant within ten miles, and she would’ve made tea out of the animals too if she’d still had the vision to take a proper shot with our rifle (or if any of them could be found; the wildlife kept getting more skittish). If it could be dunked in boiling water, she’d put it in a mug and give it to you without warning.
Anyways, this kept on for another five years or so. Slow and steady, but not much more. What brought that to an end?
Well, I met a man.

I was coming back from a fishing trip when I met Stewart. He almost got me killed right off the bat – the clever, clever idiot had managed to find one of the almost-gone deer left in the forest for miles around, then startled the thing into the road almost immediately. It left a dent in that truck’s hood that looked like it went all the way to the pedals, and it was only sheer luck that the dent didn’t end in my forehead instead. I did my best to show Stewart exactly what I meant, and I was pretty happy that he’d been blessed with a thick skull once my temper cooled down. For a minute after he keeled over, I almost thought he wasn’t going to get up again. Left a nice little scar, though, where one of my nails caught his scalp by mistake.
So once Stewart had woken up and I apologized, we got to talking what to do about my truck. He diagnosed it as a complete write-off ten years ago and said it was a miracle the deer hadn’t just sailed right through the rust holes, I said I was really sorry about hitting him again, and we agreed that it was only fair that he drive me home and we split the deer fifty-fifty.
Mom was happy to have guests again – if anything else, it gave her someone new to inflict all her favourite teas upon. Stewart was as polite as he could be with his headache, and in general everybody had a nice time for a little while before we had to go out back and butcher a deer. It’d been a long time since me or mom had a chance to do that, and we managed to… what’s the opposite of ‘many hands make light work’ again? Cooks and broth, yes. We spoiled that broth to hell and back – the deer came through all right in the end, but it took twice as long as it should’ve and some of the cuts were shaped in pretty peculiar ways when we stashed them in the shed’s freezer. I don’t think a steak is meant to be comma-shaped.
After that, we were all just about tuckered. Barely had the energy to cook up some of the meat for a late dinner, but Stewart helped. Man knew his way around a kitchen. We talked about the truck over the evening, and Stewart volunteered to loan us his. He’d just moved in a month or two ago, he said, and he was within hiking distance if we ever needed to borrow a ride. Everything was just warming up nicely when we heard the shed door squeak.
Now, when I said that door could wake the dead, I was only exaggerating. Slightly. But that rusty wail the thing made could, at the very least, make them roll over and complain in their sleep. And right there, in the middle of that shriek of cruddy old iron, there was a noise. Somewhere between a growl and a grumble. If we’d had time to think, we’d have stopped right then, but we were all a bit caught up in the moment and were right at the doorway before our brains could get moving. At least we had the presence of mind to snatch up our guns.
We only had a single instance of face-to-face time with the thing that was already half out of the shed. Then it was leaping into the bushes. Overall impression: almost as big as the shed, very large yellow eyes, furry, probably not a bear, and very, very fast.
And right when we should’ve all been frozen and thinking what-the-hell-is-that there goes Stewart off and after the thing down the trail.
Well. Of course I had to follow him. Who knew what sort of trouble he’d get into. Maybe nobody’d gone missing hunting after this thing before, but they hadn’t been alone, it hadn’t been night-time, and they weren’t right on its heels when it was trying to eat. Besides, the brave moron would get lost out there. As well as I remembered those trails, I hadn’t walked some of them for years, and they were overgrown. Somebody had to bring him back.
That midnight run through the woods was the run home with David turned inside-out: I remember every single step I took on that path, every branch that brushed my shoulders, every thought that went through my head, all as vividly as if I’d practiced them half a dozen times over before. And I knew all along, just as I’m sure you do right now, exactly where the trail would end.
The clearing was the same as it ever was, as if nothing had changed since ten years ago when I cut myself – I could even see the glitter of glass on its floor. The only changes were in its residents: Stewart, me, and whatever our runaway visitor was.
It was a poor thing, and I don’t mean that in the isn’t-it-cute sense. I could count every one of its ribs – huge things – and its eyes were sunken and erratic. Every breath it took seemed to exhaust it more than the last, and there was less calm in the slowing of its pants than there was, well, finality. Its four long legs trembled to keep itself upright, and its chocolate-coloured fur (milk chocolate, to be precise) was marred by patches of manged skin. Its mouth was wide-open, but the fangs inside it looked about ready to drop out – one of the canines was snapped off near the root, and something was glistening unhealthily on it, mixed with the bloody remnants of our venison.
John’s rifle was low and at his side, I saw. All of us could see that it wasn’t necessary. He gave me a look that was somewhere between sad and embarrassed. All three of us were wearing something like that. Along with, in my case, probably a pretty big helping of guilt.
“Good boy,” I said, softly. Its ears twitched. They were oddly long for something its size. Reminded me of a fox. “Good boy.”
It crouched lower. Not to pounce, not to flee, not even to relax. Just because it didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
Stewart opened his mouth, and although I didn’t know precisely what words would come out, I knew that they would be stupid. Then he shut it again.
“Good boy,” I repeated, glancing at him. He gave me a look.
“Steady,” I said. I started walking towards it. It wasn’t going anywhere. “Calm now. You’ve been a long way from home for a long while, haven’t you? Brave boy.”
It sunk lower. Its belly was on the ground now, its head cocked to one side at me. A noise came out of its mouth, but it was too slight to tell whether it was a growl, purr, or hello-how-are-you.
“Good boy,” I said, picking up a little bit of glass from the ground. “I know this hurts, but it’ll just be a little more. Don’t you want to go home again? Hold still, brave boy.”
The nose twitched a little as I held the glass to its ear, but just a little. I had to stretch to reach, and its muzzle pressed into my side. Its breath was surprisingly warm.
“Good boy,” I said one last time for good luck, and I cut loose one drop. Which I let drip.
The air didn’t break. At least, not any more than it already had. It just… slid aside. To make room for whatever was pressing against it.
Nothing big, nothing new. Just different air, with a different sky, popping into place in the middle of the clearing. It was funny, how much more normal that made it seem.
One sky under one canopy: impossibly tall and green, with a sun brighter than a light in a mirror.
One wind, calm and steady up above, brushing through leaves that were odd, with the sound of a breath that didn’t end.
And that smell, that smell of deep, pure green life, all around.
Something furry and frightened scurried away in the underbrush, and I felt our visitor’s nose twitch against my stomach again.
“Good boy,” I whispered. “You’re home.”
It sighed, and I’m pretty sure that it was happy. The sigh broke. And then we were in the clearing again, where the skies overlapped and the wind blurred and the air was thick with somewhere else pressing close against it.

That was the third time. And when I moved in with Stewart two years later, there still hadn’t been a fourth. It didn’t seem right to go there. And when mom’s heart took her just before your tenth birthday, well, it didn’t feel right to stay anymore. We buried her under the flower garden she’d started – god, she could barely get dandelions to sprout, but she tried so hard that it always almost worked – and that’s when we decided to move.
So now you know what you need to know, Tommy my boy. Because someone should know about this, and now that it’s just me, we need someone else. My chest hurts a little more than I’ve let you know (thanks, mom), and it’s been getting worse since your father left last May.
I’ve left you this letter, and I’ve booked a flight. I think there’s time for a fourth now. Don’t cry too hard when you find this; you’ve always been a brave boy, and you know that nobody lasts forever. And if you ever want to find me, now you know where and how.

Goodbye.

“Evergreen,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

The sun was coming up, and watching it were three men. One with a cane, one with a hat, and one with an eyepatch. And Herbert.
Morning peeked over the valley, shaking the birds awake into an unusually cross morning chorus. Young light washed over old bones, hidden away somewhere under wrinkled coats of skin.
There was nothing to say for a while. A set of dentures were replaced. A foot was wiggled into a more comfortable spot. Shoulders shifted into a relaxed groove in a chair that was older than sin.
And then: “Say then, did I ever tell you chaps about that one job back in the sixties?”
Eyepatch and hat turned to regard the man with the cane. His name was Matthew.
“I don’t think so,” said hat.
“Don’t figure,” said eyepatch.
“Well, it was a bloody nasty one. Don’t know how it slipped my mind. You see, there was this bird -”
“Was it a cockatoo?” asked hat.
“No, no it w-”
“Because I had a cockatoo once. Cleverest bird I ever met. Saved my life at least sixteen times, and it took a bullet for me when it went. Good ol’ Alexander.”
“Martin, would you please stop interrupting me? I mean a woman. You know, a bird.”
“We used to call them broads,” said eyepatch. He scratched his nose in an aimless sort of way. “Y’know, on account of them being broader in the hips and uh, chest area. I think. Say, I met this one once, and she was -”
“Yes, Michael, but what I was saying was that there was this bird – woman – and she was in trouble.”
“So?”
“Well, she was one of ours.”
“Ah.”
“Not one of theirs.”
“Who’s ‘theirs’?” asked Martin. “The Nazis? ‘Cause I met something like half of all my girls that way. Course, the other half were double-agents. You get over it fast or you get out of the career, that’s what Dad always told me. Of course, that was after Helga. What a lady. Pity about the way we parted, what with the -”
“Listen here, I’m trying to tell a story. Can’t you lot just keep your traps shut for three damned minutes and listen to my nostalgic tale of my youth?”
“Weren’t you almost thirty by then?”
“Details! Look, this girl was in trouble. She’d been spying for us, and the reports stopped coming in. And the last message left before it all went to pot was her thinking that they’d found her out.”
“Goddamned shame,” said Michael.
“Right. So then what happens next, is the lads send me in. And I go there.”
“Where’s there?”
“Paris, I think. Or maybe it was Shanghai. I think it was. Yes, it was definitely Tokyo, or wherever else those yellow chappies lived.”
“That’s racism,” said Martin.
“Oh come off it, you can’t go two sentences without saying ‘kraut.'”
“But that’s nationalism. It’s a lot less personal. I’m just saying, I don’t feel like this porch is a safe space anymore. I can’t even say kraut without you two jumping down my throat like a bunch of Nazis.”
“Oh really, now come on, that’s downright offensive,” said Matthew, tapping his cane on the ground in irritation, irritatingly. “One of my best friends was Jewish.”
“Really? What happened to him?”
“Oh, he got promoted. Can’t be a boss and a best friend at once, you know how it was. Anyways, there I was in Rome -”
“Shanghai,” said Michael.
“-don’t talk rot, it was Rome – and I asked around. Used the girl’s oldest contacts, the ones least likely to be compromised, the ones that had passed along the news of her vanishment to us.”
“And?”
“They were compromised. Served me right up to them on a silver plate.”
“Who’s them?”
“You know. Them. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” said Martin.
“How odd. I could’ve sworn. So there I was, face-to-face with their best man in Rome, and he did me over something fierce. Boot to the breadbasket, boot to the jewels, boot to the head once I’d said for the fourth time I wasn’t saying anything… come to think of it, he may have just really enjoyed kicking people. Had excellent boots, anyways.”
“Gotta take pride in your boots,” said Michael. “Hell, I’ve worn these since I was twenty-six. Ripped ’em off the corpse of one of the soldiernaires of Slannar Slammik’s fifth legion. They fit perfect if you stuff half a rag of newspaper in the sixth-to-ninth toes, and you can kick through a brick shithouse with ’em.”
They admired Michael’s boots for a minute.
“So you were being kicked?” asked Martin.
“Was I?”
“Yes. In Rome.”
“Yes, in Tokyo. Well, the joke was on him, because while he was preoccupied with kicking me, the girl snuck up behind him and knocked him out.”
“Clever!”
“Yes, very. Told her so myself as she undid the rope, got me out the window, then made beautiful, wild, passionate love to me back in my hotel room. It was quite nice.”
“How wild and passionate was this love?” asked Martin.
“Oh, very. Quite. Distracted me perfectly from the sleeping pills she put in my tea. Woke up tied upside down to a chair with the friend we’d left behind, plus one bruise on his noggin. Rather startling, I did say. She’d triple-crossed us – defected to them to get info, then defected back to us, then defected on that after gaining my utter trust and a good shagging. Plus some of those secret documents I’d brought with me.”
“What were they about?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. I never bothered with paperwork on my missions.”
There was a pause as they admired the newly risen sun. It looked nice. The distraction continued as the manager of the nursing home – also its owner, janitor, cook, nurse, and dogsbody – brought out a light, late breakfast seasoned with salt, pepper, and bitter, hateful resentment. Matthew had thinly buttered toast; Michael had bacon n’ eggs; Martin had plain oatmeal and a thinly sliced pitaya; Herbert didn’t have anything. All was as it should be.
“So how’d you escape?” asked Martin at length, straightening his shirt and brushing away small specks of stray oatmeal, including a rogue outlier that had somehow embedded itself in his hatband.
“Eh? Oh, I don’t really remember. I think I shot someone – and then probably the girl didn’t make it. That was usually how it worked back then, most often after they put me in the middle of a silly way to die. Why, one man locked me in a room with five bears! Poor fellow was quite beside himself when I explained that the black bear is a timid, fearful creature that is quite averse to violence under most circumstances.”
“I punched one of those once,” mused Martin.
“Yeah, but you’ve punched everything on earth,” said Michael.
“No, I never punched a whale. Wonderful animals. One of my nephews helped found Greenpeace, and I made him a promise.”
“Buncha hippies.”
“Look who’s talking. Didn’t you grow your hair long back in the day?”
Michael snorted violently and scratched his eyepatch. Something unidentifiable shot out of his nose and landed in the begonias. “Y’mean back when I fought the raving horde of Klacc the Ugly? I was stuck out in the Europan Lowlands for five weeks, drinkin’ liquid helium to survive, with nothin’ to eat but a half-a-Yagg leg shared between me and fifteen starving men!”
“You never did tell us why your government sent only sixteen men to deal with that particular nuisance, old boy,” said Matthew.
“Was all we could fit in those damned model-H capsules,” said Michael. “Sixteen men, a buncha guns, the worst shit in the world you could make and still call food, and maybe half a porno mag. And we had to share the porno mag.”
“Oh I say.”
“What? No, knock it off, this’s MY story. So there we were, me ‘n my squad: the Raging Hellberries – named, ‘o course, for my grandad, uncle Wilson Hellberry, who was named for his dad, Wilbur Hellberry, who was named on account of his possessing the most horrifying and dog-ugly raspberry bush known to man on his property. I think it ate a kid’s dog once.”
“What kind of dog?”
“German shepherd.”
“Good dogs. I owned one once. Bit a Nazi’s arm clean off at the shoulder. Just rip and tear. Of course, old Bacon was part-wolverine. Very eccentric breeder.”
“Hah! One arm? At the shoulder? You shoulda seen what we found once that slug-ass capsule poked its way out to Europa. It was SUPPOSED to be a real easy-like job, right? Europa’s cake compared to Venus, or Mars, or half the hellholes we been before. Put down the capsule, step out into the capital, tell Klacc that the good ol’ U-S-A runs Europa now and he can either quit this wannabe-Stalin shit or do what we say while he goes for it. Only the capsule lands wrong. Upside-down wrong.”
“I spent an entire mission upside-down,” said Matthew, fidgeting with his cane in an absent way that was utterly devoid of energy. “Goodness me, the things it did to my digestion. I believe the issue was that the man in question had some rather interesting theories about perspective, and how to alter it, and the clarity resulting from extremely abnormal circumstances. He wanted to kidnap several world leaders and force them to live a decade each as the poorest of the poor in one another’s countries.”
“Really?” asked Martin. “What’d you do?”
“Oh, we shot him, of course. I told you, that’s how most of my missions ended.”
“If you broads could quit jabbering, I could tell you my story,” hissed Michael. “So we were upside-down, stuck in this dump of a swamp. No capital in sight, and half the guys are down to poisonous fumes by the time we get outta there. And then we double-check our coordinates – well, our egghead does it for us – and hey, we’re in the right spot. That sonuvabitch Klacc had sunk the whole danged city right into the swamp. Turns out he’s amphibious, and likes the damp. So we just get out of our beautiful little death-trap of a capsule, and bam, there’s a whole messa armed and armoured slugsingers surrounding us with mazer cannons.”
There was a pause, during which Michael reached for a small flask that he hadn’t carried at his side for over twenty years and the others pretended not to notice.
“So! We get trussed up and drug down to Klacc’s throne. And he earned that moniker straight-out, let me tell ya. None of his guys are pretty, but he’s in a league of his own. Heck, that face wasn’t pretty to start with, but then half of it went missing! So he was all who-sent-ya and I-could-crush-you and we’re stalling and pausing and killing time, because we saw ol’ ‘Juicy”s got a hold of his backup pistol.”
“Where’d he keep it?” inquired Martin.
“Drawers.”
“I used to keep mine in my left boot,” said Martin wistfully. “They never check your boots for guns. Knives, yes, but not guns. Had a beautiful little number, a model something-or-other, made by that shop in Denmark. You know the place? Owner’s daughter used to run it back when Matthew here was running around?”
“Yes, I remember her,” said Matthew with a nod. “Charming girl. Kim, wasn’t it? Or Cassandra. God, she was such a clever thing. Wicked sense of humour. And a tight little… err, yes. But I kept mine strapped to my back. Right in the hollow of the spine.”
There was a pause.
“My gun, that is.”
“Of course.”
“Right.” Michael squinted. “Wait, that wasn’t what we were talking about. Where was I?”
“I’m not at all sure.”
“Oh yeah. So we were all safe, but half the moon was hunting for us by then. We had no weapons after the breakout, and ‘Juicy’ and half the squad’s still woozy. And we’re starving. Me an’ egghead hide in a bog and wait for the pursuit to pass us by, then we jump their supply train and run off with a whole half-Yagg. The thing fed us for nearly a whole goddamned week. By the end, we could barely take a half-bite without throwing up. Wasn’t that just great?”
“Old times,” said Martin with a happy smile. “Reminds me of that Sahara crossing. Ate three camels, one after another. The last one was mostly skin.”
“Yeah, Yagg’s probably a bit meatier. But oily. So, right, after we snuck back in with the Atom Hammer -”
“The what now?”
“The Atom Hammer. Keep up, limey. So we snuck back in with it -”
“Wait, how?”
“We just did, okay? Sheesh, it ain’t rocket science. So we snuck back in with it.”
“What was it?”
“The Atom Hammer. Goddamnit, if you ain’t paying attention, I ain’t talking. Shut it. Anyways, we shot him with it.”
“Who?”
Michael threw his plastic fork at Matthew, ricocheting it from his glasses into the deck, where it stuck. “Goddamned teadrinker,” he muttered, and collapsed into a cloud of dark profanity and glares.
A late teatime emerged, borne on the skeletal fingers and oily glare of the manager. It was sandwiches: peanut butter and jam for Matthew, miscellaneous compressed meats for Michael, BLT for Martin, and nothing for Herbert. Seasoned with salt and pepper and an unpleasant hint of something vaguely toxic.
“You know…” said Martin.

“Yes?” said Matthew.
“What?”
“You know what?”
“What what?”
Matthew sighed.
“That’s not good for you, that sort of stress. You look pretty pale. Palest I’ve ever seen a living man – but the dead men, oh no. I told you two about that time in Brazil, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Michael. “There was an anteater and you wrestled it to death. Then you punched a Nazi into its mouth.”
“No, no, no; that was Argentina.” Martin shook his head. “And that was about the lab where they were trying to clone anteaters in preparation for cloning sloths in preparation for cloning horses in preparation for cloning Hitler. Brazil was about diamonds.”
“What kind of diamonds?” asked Matthew.
“The legendary kind. Y’see, it all started with a lady that walked into my office with an old book and a pretty little hat. Claimed it was a lost journal of Cortez that detailed ancient legends of the Aztecs never before written down about horrible treasures from faraway lands in the southern rainforests etcetera etcetera. Well, I just about told her to get out, but the handwriting looked proper, the pages looked to be the right age, and the hidden map in the binding seemed right. So I decided to take a look. Well, we booked a plane down to Brazil, but our pilot pulled a gun on us and tried to force us off. Wasn’t having that, so we ended up in a tussle – we took the parachutes, he took the plane down, and there it was: just me and a beautiful lady, stuck in the middle of the Amazon.”
“What kind of hat was the dame wearing?” asked Michael.
“Good question. Hmm… I think it was one of those little cute ones. Y’know, with the bows?”
“Yeah. Straw?”
“No, no. The ones that are shaped sort of like chocolate boxes.”
“Yeah, those ones!”
“Right!”
“What colour?”
Martin drummed his fingers on his chair, then shook his head in frustration. “Hell, I forget. But it was pretty, alright.”
“Yes, the girls don’t wear hats like they used to,” said Matthew wistfully. “Such a pity. Nothing more beautiful than a girl in a hat. And nothing else.”
“Shaddup, I want to hear about what happened to this broad Martin’s talking about before we go on another one of your I-knew-a-dame fantasies. So, what happened?”
“Oh, she was a Nazi. Should’ve known, really – she was probably going to rifle my corpse and guide the pilot to the spot marked on the map, only I went and got us both stranded. So she had to rely on me for help through the jungle, down the river, over the surprising and unexpected two-hundred-foot waterfall that I saw coming, and through the ancient caves into the rear entrance of the diamond mines of Xlac’Tla. Then she revealed that she’d been radioing our position, and stabbed me in the back right as her friends showed up with a couple of tanks. No idea how they got them through the rainforest. Had to run like the wind.”
“No good winds here,” complained Michael. “Y’miss ’em after you spend a couple of days on Jupiter. I tell ya, the breezes there would flay the skin right off an elephant in a wink. The bubble suits kept us from goin’ crazy, but we had to talk with sign language. Worst bit is, I can still remember a lot of it. Useless junk. Why can’t one of you two go deaf so it ain’t wasting space in my head?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Martin. “So then, after I used the seemingly useless junk – thank you for reminding me – to blow up the second tank, I cornered Gloria. She was all repentant, and contrite, and honestly-it-wasn’t-my-choice-they-have-my-father, and I didn’t listen and just shoved her into the bottomless chasm of Tix-Tlac-Ta, where her body rolled in the dust of the mines and turned paler than the finest china.”
“Steady on there lad; wasn’t that a bit harsh?” said Matthew.
“This was the sixth or seventh time that’d happened, Mike, I wasn’t about to listen to her. Fool me eight times, shame on you. Besides, I could only rescue her or the diamond dust that woke the dead. And I’d promised Dad that I’d find a way for Mom to get her last wish finished – she left us right in the middle of the sentence, and “dig up the gold, it’s burrriiieed aaat-” isn’t what you’d call a straightforward request.”
“The lady was past worrying,” said Michael. “Just take the broad, do her hard, and go home.”
“No, we’d done that earlier. In the jungle.”
Michael swore bitterly in a language meant for things with no tongues. “Christ, between you and the limey, I don’t need enemies. The one time I got laid on-job was when we went to Venus. And she had three legs. And our egghead, after the mission? Know what he told me?”
“What?” asked Martin.
“He said that wasn’t a leg. Then he wouldn’t stop laughing, no matter how hard I hit him. Screw Venus.”
A sullen silence reigned, interrupted by dinner, which was undercooked and tasted burnt. Chicken-fried steak for all, with salad (Martin, Matthew), french fries (Michael), or nothing at all and no steak (Herbert).
“And you got out okay, right?” said Michael.
“Of course I did. I’m here now, aren’t I? Lost a good shirt though. But the diamond dust made up for that. And it made up for the trek back home in a stolen Nazi plane – those krauts build good aircraft, but I’m no pilot. And it even kept me going in the bit where I got shot down by the national guard. But I’m not sure it covered the disappointment of finding out mom had gotten confused and her last words were a plot point in the mystery novel she’d been reading in her final hours.”
“What author?” asked Matthew.
“Agatha something. Doesn’t matter. All brain-trash, Dad said, and I have to agree.”
They cleaned their plates, and stared at them in melancholy as the sun began to dip below the valley wall.
“I say,” said Matthew, “all this food today has been rather bitter. I’ve half a mind to complain. Why, if it weren’t for neither of you two chaps keeling over, I’d nearly say it was cyanide.”
“I’m immune,” said Michael. “Part of the cocktail they shot into us before they dropped us onto Mons Olympus during the Plague Wars.”
“Haven’t had so much as a cold sniffle since that time I drank from the Fountain of Life,” said Martin.
They looked at their plates again.
“Cyanide, huh?” said Michael.
“Yes. You never quite forget that little almond tinge on your tongue. Very fierce.”
“Well, shit,” said Matthew.
The sun went down.
“I think,” said Martin, “that we’d better ask Herbert.”

The diamond dust pouch was old, battered, and so ingrained with its contents that it looked like something you’d have taken to a disco. It was still over half full, even after Martin fumbled the measure he took and needed a second pinch, which he dropped into Herbert’s mouth.
Herbert creaked. Herbert sighed. And as a long, slow breath filled him up, Herbert sat fully upright in his chair, the only one of the four of them with perfect posture, although his skeleton had the natural advantage of no longer being weighted down with flesh or organs.
“Hello there,” he drawled – without lips, quite a feat. “What’s fixin’?”
“Just a few questions,” said Martin. “Could you tell us if this food was poisoned?”
“Yup. You fellas make another friend?”
“It seems like it. Tell me, what’s the manager doing right now?”
“Loadin’ a shotgun. Three slugs. Y’reckon one of you buried his pappy?”
“Might have,” opined Matthew, “or near enough, at least. It’s all in the math, I’m afraid – wait fifty years and I’m sure the widows-and-orphans of our collective bodycounts have all had enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to populate a good-sized city.”
“Not mine,” said Michael. “You two were the guys dumb enough to plug people that lived on your front lawns. I kept my business off-world.”
“And I suppose that meteor last summer that killed poor Mrs. Ellbridge was just a freak coincidence?” said Matthew.
“The broad knew the risks when she slept with me.”
“If you ladies are done bickering,” said Herbert, “he’s finished loadin’. Reckon you’ll need a hand?”
“No thanks,” said Martin.
Herbert sighed, letting out most of the breath in him in one go. “Still so damned stubborn. Just as thick as the day you came lookin’ for my advice as a snot-nosed puke. Won’t ever listen to the old folks, you won’t!”
“Herbert, we ARE old.”
“Not from where I’m standin’,” said Herbert, increasingly faintly. “Where’s the six-shooter I gave you? Typical boys, throwin’ away good gifts…”
Herbert collapsed into a loose pile again.
“What?” said Martin crossly as his friends looked at him. “I pawned it after the war. I needed lunch and I didn’t speak the language, it was the best deal I could make.”
“The gentleman indoors will come through the door in a moment,” said Matthew. “Perhaps we can postpone the argument, eh what? Anybody got a plan?”
“Nah,” said Michael. “Something better.” With a grunt and a struggle, he reached into his half-wrecked pants and yanked out several dented, worn, and bent metal parts. “Now, was it long-short-long, or short-long-long…aw, close enough.” He snapped them together with a creak of angry metal, then slotted two or three fingers into the oversized trigger. “Right. Limey! Mark me a target. My depth perwhatever isn’t so great.”
“There,” said Matthew, pointing at the nursing home behind them.
Michael squirmed in his chair, held the Atom Hammer halfways over his shoulder, and pulled the trigger, missing the doorway the manager was standing in by inches and hitting the wall, which disappeared, along with both floors, the ceiling, the basement, and the porch, dropping all four of them, plus Herbert, into the begonias in the tattered remnants of their chairs.
The manager was the first to surface, spitting out flower petals. The shotgun was still clenched in his fist, and his teeth vibrated with uncontainable rage as he wobbled a sighting on Michael’s face. The Atom Hammer had slipped apart again, and the old man was cursing quietly as he reassembled it backwards.
“Excuse me,” said Matthew. The manager’s eye twitched towards him, and it was because of that that the shot that killed him went directly in a straight line from pupil to brainstem.
“Terribly sorry,” added Matthew, wincing as he rubbed his arm. “Good lord, I’d forgotten it’s a bit harder to reach back there nowadays. Still, what’d I tell you, eh? Nothing like it as a place to keep your gun. Now, would whoever’s turn it is to find a new nursing home get the car running, there’s a good lad. I feel like a nap.”

“The Good Old Days,” Copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

There were those who would call Albert Pencilgrave a filth-digging reptile, and in many ways they were not far wrong. He didn’t blink, possessed a scaly hide that kept his liquids inside him, and his presence unnerved most mammals. But those were merely superficial marks against him – once anybody got to know the man properly they realized that he was actually remarkably cold-blooded, capable of eating his own young if it benefited him, and lethargic unless in the presence of prey.
But despite these passing, bone-deep flaws of character and soul, he was still mortal. Very, very, very mortal, as his doctor seemed suspiciously pleased to tell him.
“Absolutely fatal,” he said, holding back a grin that could’ve swallowed a cantaloupe. “One thousand percent.”
“You sure?” asked Albert.
“Utterly. Your ticker’s just about worn through, mister Pencilgrave. I give it a week before it snaps. I recommend a transplant. Maybe something from a homeless man, if we can’t find a legit donor.”
“I have lots of money,” said Albert. “There’ll be a donor.”
“True,” said the doctor. “That’ll cost you a couple million or something.”
Albert frowned. His face was already a spiral of fractured skin flakes and scowl-lines, and this action nearly turned him into a Magic Eye picture. “That’s too much. Much too much. Do you have something cheaper?”
“You could try a pig,” offered the doctor. “Very fresh, picked it out myself. And tender too, just the right thing to get your fluids pumping.”
“Too fatty,” dismissed Albert. “And anyways, I don’t like knives.”
“We use scalpels,” said the doctor. “And saws.”
“I don’t like those either. I think this whole surgery thing is a bad idea.”
The doctor’s lip twitched, on the verge of a sneer. “Oh, and I suppose you’ve got a better idea of what to do about your raddled old heart, eh? Dearie me, that MBA just PERFECTLY qualifies you to self-diagnose and problem-solve, doesn’t it? Just about pays for itself, really.”
Albert thanked him coldly, made a mental note to have him ruined, and had someone drive him home. The chauffeur was a cheery young man who whistled as he turned sharp corners, and Albert suspected he might be paying him too much. Maybe he should replace him with someone more desperate.
It was only until he walked through the door of his nearest condo that Albert realized he’d just thought of his solution. But that could wait until after he fired his chauffeur. He had a special red pen for it and everything.

The hardest part wasn’t finding a volunteer. There were millions. The hard bit was figuring out the job title. “Cardiovascular assistant” went into the wastebasket, along with “fitness aide,” “arterial officer,” and, in a fit of annoyance, “heart guy.” Finally Albert decided on “cardiological supervisor,” and had a small business card printed out that would go to a mister Emmanuel Ortiz along with the salary of two hundred dollars per month and a firm threat to keep quiet about it.
He knew the exact moment that it happened – right in the middle of an email he was preparing that would crush a corporation and 60% of its workers into financial dust. His heart sank, and didn’t rise.
He smiled to himself.
“Sir?” asked his secretary, hiding his astonishment poorly.
“It’s nothing,” he said. He felt his chest, making sure that there was absolutely no pulse, and chuckled a bit. “It’s nothing.”
And in Puerto Rico, Emmanuel winced a bit as his own heartbeat took up double-time, nearly spoiling the beer he’d ordered with the first of the new money.
“Something wrong?” asked the bartender.
Emmanuel shrugged, winced again, and thought about getting his son into the United States. “I’ll get used to it.”

In retrospect, Albert was amazed he hadn’t thought of it sooner. Within the first week of his outsourcing his heart he was more energized than he’d been in the past ten years, chewing through mounds of work with the zeal of a bookworm presented with a complete high fantasy trilogy. His middle management trembled before him, his colleagues stepped softly when he spoke, and he had a sex life for the first time in fifteen years, albeit not with his wife.
It was all going well. Too well, even, which was probably why he got the cough five years later. All those long nights out working, then drinking, then working a bit more (usually on something that would have to be done all over again next morning), then heading home late at night in the damp. And of course, as the doctor pointed out with satisfaction, all the six-inch cigars.
“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” he said.
“What?”
“Chronic bronchitis and emphysema all over the place.”
“Is that even a thing nowadays?” asked Albert crossly.
“Absolutely. Smoker’s bane.”
“I thought it was for poor people with lousy tobacco.”
“No. And you’ve definitely got it. Your lungs are pretty much shot. I recommend new ones.”
“How much will that cost?”
“Oh, an awful lot,” said the doctor, licking his lips.
“No thanks,” said Albert. “I’ll work it out on my own.”
“Just like you did that heart disease, didn’t you?” said the doctor, as innocently and sweetly as a little old lady with an ice cream cone.
Albert gave the man his most sunny smile. He cringed.
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.” He drove home, and the first thing he did was remember to properly ruin the doctor’s life this time, signing in the little notes on how to get his wife to leave him and his malpractice suits drawn up with his special red pen. The second thing he did was to draw up a business card for the position of “respiratory manager.” The third thing he did was to tell one of his people to get one of their people to make someone who worked for them go find a man low on money and hefty in the lungs to sign a contract without reading it too closely, on benefits of a shiny business card and a hundred fifty a month.
Mister Daw was annoyed by the new shortness of breath he’d acquired, but he was a stubborn man, and it would take more than that to make him give up jogging.

As the decades rolled by, Albert Pencilgrave appreciated more and more just what he’d discovered. The lengthier and more slimy parts of his digestive system began to fail, and he hired a man in Patagonia to break down his nutrients for him. His aging wife cheated on him with a kind-hearted poolboy – the ungrateful whore, after all he’d done for her – and when his liver failed during the divorce (it had only been a few gallons of scotch, he didn’t see why it couldn’t handle it), he handed its duties over to a seasoned and steady hand in India.
“I feel like a new man,” he’d say for the first week after each outsourcing. “A new man altogether.” And then he’d give that little smile that didn’t seem to fit on his face properly, like a slide designed by M. C. Escher placed in the midst of an otherwise normal playground. It unnerved people, though not nearly as much as his unnatural longevity. In a job where you retired early (and rich) or died of stress (if somewhat richer), he was still packing away the dollars full-time, apparently with the only loss being his ever-wrinkling and omni-spotted skin. Which he then handed over care of to a man in Beijing.

The only real worry was when he woke up and couldn’t remember what he was doing that day. Or what his name was. Or, shortly thereafter, why he was at the doctor’s.
“Alzheimer’s,” said the doctor.
“Who are you?” asked Albert.
“Dr. Susan Gilman,” said Dr. Susan Gilman patiently, for the fifth time in ten minutes. “I’ve been your doctor for twenty years. You have severe Alzheimer’s disease, and you probably won’t make it to the end of the financial year. Is your estate in order?”
“I’ll get someone to do it,” said Albert. “I have someone who can do that, I think. We’ll figure something out.”
“There’s not much that can be done,” she said. “I can prescribe some medication to ease the way, but…”
“No buts,” said Albert. “I can deal with it on my own, anyways. Keep your medicine and its costs.”

And he dealt with it that very evening, after four aborted attempts to write notes to himself and recall how to read English. With great effort, he secured the services of a man in Borneo, and successfully outsourced his brain. For the first time in more than fifteen years, Albert Pencilgrave’s mind was clear and uncluttered.
“Good god,” he murmured as he looked over reams of dusty, unread files and an inbox that had been transplanted onto its own 500-gigabyte hard drive. “Waste! Scandalous, frivolous, worthless waste!”
He did the math – without a calculator – and his mind reeled at the sheer volume of his hard-earned money that was being siphoned away by his lazy and parasitic employees. He gave this job his health for years – and that of several dozen other people in various countries over the past forty years – he gave it his care and attention every day, and this was the thanks he got? Worthless wastrels that begged for richer retirement packages, that demanded health plans when they went toothless? Why hadn’t they saved up like he had? Why weren’t they showing initiative and asking one of their grandchildren to handle vital functions or something? They were asking for PENSIONS of all things – where were their bootstraps?! Well, this would end now.
“I must’ve been more senile than I thought,” he declared. Opening his desk drawer, he found that little red pen. An email would be more efficient, of course, but his thoughts flowed better when he composed in print – and it was so much more satisfying to sign. His secretary could scan it anyways.
Writing the letter informing everyone whose age now qualified for pensions that their services were no longer required took half an hour. Sending it to his secretary was done in minutes. The transcription and delivery, plus the actual layoffs, took approximately six hours. Which meant that after putting in an early day, Albert Pencilgrave was at home on the toilet when five people at various locations around the world were told their services were no longer required, causing them, surprisingly, to feel much heartier and haler than they’d been in years. Especially hearty, in one case.
The results at Mr. Pencilgrave’s condo, though spectacular, were not recorded until after the fact.  Thankfully, the pictures made excellent reference material for medical students. Including Mary Ortiz, whose grandfather suddenly was healthy enough to come visit.

“Organs,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.