Writer's Journal

He sat on a low stone wall, and checked the safety on his gun. The sky above was gray streaked with black, and there was a distant sound of thunder, though the air smelled as dry as a desert.

The burned out shell of the church stood before ex-deputy Connors, an ancient stone skeleton of a building. He could feel a ball of ice in his gut as he considered it.

Tucking his gun into his coat, he hopped to his feet and headed up the hill.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and put one in his mouth. He tucked the pack back into his pocket, and pulled out a lighter.

The gun stayed in his right hand the whole time.

Looking down into the pit, Connors took in the whole scene, the oldest example of the county’s aberrancy.

The cellar of the church was filled with a half-a-foot of brackish ash-saturated water. Dozens of round white stones stuck up through it, floating like frog’s eggs.

Connors blinked, and acknowledged what they were: skulls.

At one end of the cellar was a broken statue, something like a man, but malformed and bulging. No eikon he had ever seen resembled that shape, no representation of Christ on the cross was so loathsome.

There was a low altar in front of the statue, with a mildewed cask sitting in the middle of it.

He screwed his eyes shut, and turned away. He holstered his gun before walking down the hill toward his car. He pulled out two large gas cans, and carried them up to the church before tossing them in.

He repeated the process twice, tossing the large jugs of gasoline into the water.

Producing his gun, he put a hole in each, spilling the contents into the ashen muck at the bottom. He flicked his cigarette butt down in, and was disappointed when nothing caught fire. The stink of the fumes was almost overpowering.

He made one final trip down to his car, and retrieved a road flare from the boot of his car and lit it before tossing it in.

Connors watched as the fire spread, and began to consume the remains of the church.

Well, here’s the new one.  A little short, and a little late, but I like to think that certain things begin to become clearer–or at least more compelling–in this episode.

Cicatriz Episode 3×02

Also, Jave was correct in the comment on the backmatter for the last bit.  The quote does come from Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.  The reason for that should be made clear in this chapter.

I uploaded these the past two fridays:

Acting as a Wave 1

Acting as a Wave 2

Now, I present the third and final installment of the interlude:

Acting as a Wave 3

I’m going out of town next Thursday, but I will do my damndest to have Cicatriz 3×01 up for your reading enjoyment.

(Not quite where I want it to be.  This might be a bit more interesting if the characters were more concrete.  Unfortunately, I didn’t.  I need to remember that for the future.)

The earth shook as if in the grip of a seizure. Something vast and living was moving down beneath the ground.

The seven insurgents sought refuge under a theatre marquee, as they watched a pair of horse-sized insects dogfight with an F-15 high above. The giant bugs had heads that terminated in a mass of tendrils and cilia; every now and then, they would get close enough to the jet and vomit forth a stream of white fluid that scoured the fuselage.

The insurgents—because it’s impossible to be an army with no command—waited. The sound of cracking asphalt and collapsing buildings told them that the burrower was coming to the surface.

One of their number came forward, and raised up the RPG launcher that he’d been carrying for this purpose. Originally, he’d had eight shots. Now, a mere three remained.

The burrower burst from the ground, three blocks away, like a living skyscraper. Its great, dark bulk reared up into the sky, and it snatched at the jet with its tentacular head, only managing to snare and devour one of the insects.

It had four rows of jointed legs, placed equidistant around its body, and the white, basic substance that the bugs vomited dripped from its head.

“Now!” the lieutenant shouted.

The soldier pulled the trigger, and the grenade streaked toward the burrower, striking it in the gap between two plates. A gout of black blood spurted from the wound, the oily substance hissing and burning when it struck concrete.

Immediately, the thing began to withdraw, pulling back underground. It rotated as it descended, spreading its blood in a ring around the opening of the hole, melting the asphalt, concrete, metal and plastic into a plug.

The insurgents breathed a sigh of relief, and their lieutenant growled.

“Stay on your toes. We aren’t in Long Island, yet.”

A special treat to thank you all.  Granted, we’re actually around 1,497 hits, but I think we’ll hit it today.

Now, here it is, a short story of mine that was originally written last year in one quick 24-hour burn, then put in a drawer until now.

The Necronaut

EDIT:  1,500 GET!

In which terrible things occur.

Cicatriz Episode 2×06

This brings the second season to an end.  About halfway through.

I understand that it isn’t terribly common, but you have to believe me.

I got struck by a lightning bolt not six weeks ago, but wasn’t really burned. The doctors were confused as all hell, because only my hair was singed.

They did a CT scan, and found that my pineal gland had swollen up to three times the size it had been previously.

“What does that mean?” I asked the endocrinologist.

He shrugged, and made an indistinct noise, before they sent me on my way.

The city looked strange, as I headed home. Like something was layered over it: a strange, indistinct image. Ghostly figures walked through the crowds, and stumbled through the streets.

One of the ghostly things leaped out in front of my car, and flashed into being for a second.

It was a man with too-long limbs, and a face made out of zippers set into his flesh.

My car slammed into him, and he collapsed, seemingly dead, and was gone.

When I got home, I locked my door, and barricaded myself in.

There are others out there, things that look like they might’ve been normal once, but seem to have forgotten all the intuitive knowledge they had of anatomy.

I knew this would only be temporary, I would have to eat. I’d have to go to work.

But I lasted for three days, nonetheless.

Things scratched at my walls, and I retreated toward the middle of my house, to the bathroom, with no outside windows.

I slept in the bathtub.

Soon, though, I heard more scratching, from inside the bathroom closet. Opening the closet door, I found myself in a hallway that I had never seen before, with a single doorway at the end.

A faint light came from underneath it.

I think I’m going through. If I’m just crazy, please check the bathroom closet.

Dr. Heinz’s case file said nothing about his engineering credentials, the infiltrator noted. He was supposed to be a mathematician.

The cabin had been easy enough to approach. The infiltrator was more used to having to deal with henchman after henchman, probably getting captured somewhere along the way, to have a master plan explained to him and then a dashing final battle after his escape. Possibly over a vat of boiling acid, or something.

In comparison, the sedate walk in the woods was rather pleasant. The closest thing he saw to a henchman was a opossum that hissed and slunk off into the dark.

He’d been briefed on the security system, and it would be simple enough to bypass. He pulled a black sheet from his bag, and unfurled it. He held it out in front of him, hanging down vertically before him.

The infiltrator slowly approached the cabin. When he stood beneath the motion detector, he dropped the sheet, drew his wire cutters, and disabled the machine.

A light came through the window. A chalkboard covered one wall of the cabin, from end-to-end, at least from the vantagepoint of the window.

Dr. Heinz was a ruin of a man: once a tall, chubby man with bright eyes and a shock of white hair, now he was stooped and underweight, with dark circles beneath his eyes. His hair was falling out, and the infiltrator thought he could see a tooth sitting on the table.

The doctor was using a soldering iron inside some kind of casing. A small metal sphere with blue lights sat next to it. The infiltrator assumed it was something hot, due to the waves of heat distortion pouring off of it.

Stepping back, the infiltrator drew his handgun, raised it and drew a bead on the doctor. He exhaled slowly, and squeezed the trigger. The first bullet shattered the window. The second would have hit the doctor in the head, if the blue sphere hadn’t flashed, sending the bullet back along its trajectory, lodging it in the infiltrator’s shoulder.

When he came to, he was sitting at the doctor’s kitchen table, a mug of stew sitting on the table in front of him. The Doctor was rewiring the contents of the metal case—it had probably once belonged to the tower of a home computer, but its innards had been ripped out and replaced.

The blue sphere flashed menacingly.

“Oh, good, your up,” the doctor said.

“What happened?” the infiltrator asked.

“You tried to shoot me, but my device here deflected the bullets back at you.”

“How?”

The doctor shrugged.

“Ever since I started working on this theorem…” the doctor made a vague gesture by his left ear.

“What is it?”

The doctor looked at him sharply.

“I found something. It’s…hard…I can’t explain.”

The doctor stepped back from the machine, and stepped over to the blackboard.

“let’s start over here…”

The doctor’s voice faded into dull white noise, and the meaning behind the symbols on the board gradually became clear to the infiltrator.

The first thing that became clear to him was the nature of infinity. His eyelids went slack, and his nose began to bleed.

The second thing that became clear was the fact that the world he knew was simply the representation of certain mathematical structures that existed in a sort of platonic space. His mouth went dry, and his eyes stopped producing tears.

The third and final thing that entered his mind was the knowledge that there were things living in that platonic space, and the knowledge that a particular one of them was represented there, beyond the board. A tremor shot through his limbs.

“You see?”

“I need a ring-spanner wrench and a voltimeter,” the infiltrator said, his voice hoarse.

“I knew you were going to say that,” Dr. Heinz said, “help yourself. You know where they are, right?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

(This one honestly owes a bit to the indie videogame Yume Nikki, though mostly in tone.  If you’re unfamiliar, look it up and prepare to be confused and unsettled for a good length of time.)

I woke up in a dark city, with no idea how I had arrived.

The buildings stretched upward toward the clouds, and only one in three street lamps shone down. In the distance to either direction, I could see traffic signals.

Upon waking, I stumbled, emerging from the alleyway onto the street. There were no doors on street level, only the odd alleyway. High above, there were windows, but the angle and distance meant that I couldn’t see into any of them.

I looked behind me, and saw only a wall of shadow. Picking up a piece of broken concrete off the ground, I tossed it into the dark.

Nothing.

Just the sound of nothing.

The conspicuous absence of sound.

I picked a direction and walked toward the traffic signal, which had been showing green the entire time I’d been here.

There was no sound of traffic, but even the lack of normal sounds was better than that horrible sound of nothing. Just thinking about it made me feel like my hands were wrist deep in chalk dust.

As I approached the green light, I could see other ones appearing behind it, in a great line leading away, into the dark, beckoning me onward.

As I neared the intersection, the lights furthest away, but still in my line of sight, began turning red, and then the next closest, and the next.

In a small handful of heartbeats, I stood beneath a red light.

Turning around, I saw the other one flicker to red.

Dark figures stepped out of every alleyway, and stood stock still.

I approached the closest one, which didn’t seem to respond. My feet were spread wide, and I moved in a partial crouch, prepared to jump back at a moment’s notice.

It was hard to see the figure’s featured in the dark, but in the faint red glow of the traffic signals, the face was indistinct.

“Excuse me?” I ask, reaching out a hand.

The head swung towards me, revealing only a blank space where its face should be.

Its hand shot out, and touched the back of mine, immediately, the sound of nothing vanished, replaced by a rising wall of electronic noise.

(This is part of something longer.  I didn’t have a proper piece of flash fiction to show you all, and I hope this suffices.)

The Speculum opened up in a terminal in the underground, around 4AM on a Wednesday morning.

My phone rang and rang, until I put the damn thing to my ear. Maybe if I put it in a pot of boiling water it would turn off.

“Yank, there’s a Speculum in Blackfriar’s,” Ashley said from the other end. Hearing a Scots accent when you first wake up is a little disorienting, in my opinion. You’d think I’d be used to it, by now.

I got up, put on my gear—which I always thought made me look like an exterminator, and an overzealous one, at that, thanks to the sidearm—and slung a long jacket around my shoulders to make it less conspicuous.

The cab ride took too long. I like the cab men in London more than anywhere else, but I seemed to have trouble communicating with them the need for urgency.

And, like everyone on this damned island, they insisted on calling me “Yank.”

I got there almost thirty minutes later, showed my card to the guard on duty, and headed down into the station. It took me a few seconds to realize that they’d turned the escalators off.

Going down in, I took off my coat, and tossed it on the pile where the other three had left theirs. Men in hazmat suits put dead civies and soldiers into body bags. Other things were being gathered into lead-lined cases.

The Speculum stood in the middle of the tracks, slantwise across them. It was almost three meters wide, and stretched up to the ceiling. A paper-thin wall of something that looks like murky water.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

“You en’t been here?” Ashley asked, looking over at me.

“You just called me,” I pointed out.

She was a year or so older than me, and her red hair—what she’d grown, anyway—had been gathered in a short tail behind her head.

“That you did,” Margaret pointed out to her. Her black hair had been shorn almost completely off, and she dropped a cigarette to the ground and stomped it out. One of the privileges of our position—she was allowed to smoke on-site. Everyone else wore hazmat gear.

“We’h all a little sleep-deprived,” James said, “let’s just ge’ in an ge’ out, befo’ we all head home and forget this happened, aright?”

I nodded.

He wasn’t dressed like the rest of us—I assumed he would be the anchor. He wore trousers and a heavy vest made out of neoprene, with a long cord coming out the back. A technician had already plugged him in.

James hopped down to the tracks, and stood next to the Speculum.

We all got down to the tracks, and ordered from strongest to weakest: Ashley, Margaret, and me. Filing towards the Speculum, we slapped James’ outstretched hand as we passed. As soon as contact was made, our noses flooded with the scent of almonds.

“Heading in,” Ashley said, as she stepped through the Speculum, pulling on her gas mask and drawing her gun.

“Going through,” Margaret said, stepping up to the hole in the world. She put on her mask and stepping through.

After anchoring to James, I checked the magazine of my pistol, and pulled my mask on.

“Oi, Yank,” he said.

I turned back to look at him.

“Try not to get you’ ass kicked, a’right?”

I gave him the thumbs up, hoping that in Liverpool the gesture had some obscene and rude connotation, and stepped through the Speculum.