Writer's Journal

(Every now and then, I go here to mine ideas.  It’s a transcript of H.P. Lovecraft’s commonplace book.  Many got used, but some never really were.  And some are really good; for example, Juan Santapau did a brilliant riff on #117.  So, here’s my attempt at #112.)

Old Pete lived in the caretaker’s cottage by the graveyard, and had for as long as anyone could recall. Most people were barely aware of him, only noticing him when he was out mowing or cleaning the gravestones. The strange rail-thin figure with fishbelly-white skin and long, spidery fingers never bothered anyone.

He never went into town. Never touched a drop of liquor, always politely declined any invitation, and never seemed to buy anything. Not even food.

But still, no one thought it odd. He received a lot of packages, so they assumed he must have some kind of special diet that required him to spend his tiny stipend over the internet.

All of this led to the town’s children to assume terrible things about him. Every Halloween, a group of them would go up and creep through his rosebushes, peering into the windows and trying to get into the cellar.

Every time, Old Pete would appear out of nowhere and give them a terrible scare, with that cold, cold smile of his. Every now and then he’d be a little late, and someone would’ve managed to jimmy the lock on his cellar door, and Old Pete wouldn’t give him his smile.

He’d just appear out of nowhere, his shovel with the filed blade on his shoulder, and scowl at the children. The parents never punished their children for these transgressions. After all, many of them remembered their own misadventures on Old Pete’s property.

Last Halloween, it wasn’t a group of children, but a bunch of teenagers with crowbars. All of them were young men who’d managed to get into his basement and held a grudge against him. Tommy Jenkins even had a scar on the back of his hand from the blade of the shovel, from when he tried to rush Old Pete and knock him down.

They’d broken into his cellar, and laid an ambush for him, waiting for him to come down and threaten the interloping children.

When Old Pete came down, two of them, Tommy and Frank, jumped him and did their best to wrestle the shovel from his hands like alabaster spiders. It took a while, but they managed to get it away.

Then Old Pete stopped acting nice.

He bit Tommy, taking a chunk out of the boy’s arm, leaving a great, weeping sore.

That was it. The four of them, Tommy, Frank, John, and Keith, set to beating the old man with his own shovel and a pair of crowbars.

It took them an hour to get him to stop moving. The old man’s wounds smelled septic and leaked blood so black as to be almost green. He stopped twitching, breathing shallowly, but his eyes never shut. They just stared up at the ceiling, one of them swelling shut.

The four ransacked the cellar, finding the secret room in the back where all the kids said that Pete carved up dead bodies for his food.

They found nothing of the sort.

There were four bathtubs, three full of foul-smelling liquid, each with a pale silhouette under the dark green surface. At the head of each was a car battery, wired up to feed an electric charge into the tub.

The last one was set up to drain into an industrial drum, and around it were ancient bloodstains.

Before the boys could explore further, one of the tubs bubbled, and a hand emerged. Spidery. Fishbelly pale.

The four ran, screaming from the house.

(anyone understand the title, without Wikipedia or Google?)

Naomi Arnold was roughly midway through her life, when she realized that she was actually dead, simultaneously, she realized that she was not really a woman named “Naomi Watts.” This flash of insight came as she sat in the laundromat, and watched her whites swirl around inside the machine.

This moment of intuition revealed to her that she was actually a hallucination. The mind hallucinating Naomi Watts belonged to an elderly man named Phillip Colonomos, who, grieving over his wife’s death, had taken a fifth of bourbon and a bottle of sleeping pills. As Phillip lay on his bed, waiting for death to come, his eyes defocused, and he had visions of things that had been and things that might have been.

Naomi was also aware of one of the “had-beens” that Phillip discovered: In truth, he was a figment of a car crash victim, who lie mangled in the street. Her name was Mary Hansen, and she was barely twenty-five years old. She had left her car in the bar parking lot, and begun walking home. One of the less intelligent patrons hadn’t followed her example.

As Mary shuddered, cooling, she hallucinated Phillip into existence, but also became aware that she was in fact a—

The buzzer on the washing machine went off.

Naomi/Phillip/Mary stood up, emptied it out, and moved the contents to the drier before returning to her magazine.

On Michaelmas, when there’s no visible moon, you can get into the Old House. It’s the only time the doors are unlocked and opened, and they remain open until nine people have come in. Then they close up, locking tight, until a winner is selected.

Sure, it’s haunted. That’s kind of the point. You’re supposed to go in and wait things out. That’s how you win.

There are rules to it, though. Like the aforementioned Michaelmas thing.

The First Rule is that nine, and only nine, people can enter the Old House at the same time. If eight people are inside, and a pair of conjoined twins try to enter, the door will simply keep slamming until they aren’t conjoined.

The Second Rule is that only strangers may share the house at any given time. If you personally know someone currently inside, then the door will slam in your face. Generally, it’s held to be first-come, first-served.

The Third Rule is that you can only ask for the prize once. If you ask twice, then it will surely be denied to you.

The fourth rule is that you must come as silently as possible. No cars, no motorcycles, no scooters. You walk. If there’s a thunderstorm, you can ride a bicycle, but nothing else.

The Fifth Rule is that you are not allowed to sleep in the Old House. If you try, chances are you’ll not wake up. This is the only rule broken every time.

I remember hearing about a winner back in the middle of the last century. The police found him sitting on the steps in front of the Old House.

He sat there, staring forward, grinning as he sang a song in the most beautiful tenor the police had ever heard. His left sleeve was empty, red, and wet.

“Sir, sir, are you alright?” a policeman asked.

He stopped singing, and turned his head towards the policeman, and said:

“The flies are bothering my stump.”

They wrapped him in a blanket, and walked him to the car. The doctor capped the stump, and left it. Throughout the whole operation, his patient was singing sections of Carmen under his voice.

One other time, a girl of no more than sixteen won, she was found walking along the road, placing a hand on each tree. She had been struck blind, but she was smiling. Two years later, she went off to Brown University, and she eventually became a prestigious lawyer.

No one knows what happens to the losers. They’re just gone, afterward.

And no one tells what sort of contest is held, whether the winner must kill the losers, or if they just stay awake as long as they can, the sleepers gradually disappearing.

No one knows.

But every (roughly) eight years, eight people vanish, and one reappears bearing the scars of the experience.

And a bright, cheery smile.

The next one’s in six years, the house will probably be hungry, by then.

(For those of you I don’t know on Facebook, I started up a fan page for my writing.  You can find it here.  At least I hope that words like it’s supposed to.)

There was a diner in the warehouse district. The Runaway sat in a small booth in the far corner, away from the three men sitting at the counter. She drank her foul-tasting coffee, and tried not to look at anything, waiting for the parts of her brain that deal with the senses worming their way into her skull to spin and catch and start the processes of conscious thought.

Until then, she had:

the babble of conversation spilling through the air and filling her ears,

The the feel of the poorly-upholstered seat beneath and behind her, the formica on her forearms, and the porcelain coffee cup between her fingers,

the reflection of the harsh, gray light penetrating the windows, the marred reflection of the ceiling in a puddle of recently spilled cream of chicken soup on the floor, the empty seat across from her.

Something caught in her mind, two dollars of payment and tip were left on the table, and she headed out. One last thing before the Runaway could continue with her mission.

She glanced around, as she walked on, and spotted a dishwasher crouched in the alleyway, half-sitting on a milk crate. Dangling from his lips was a cigarette that had just been lit.

“Excuse me,” the Runaway asked, “could I bum a cigarette?”

He took one out, and put it behind his ear, before tossing it to her, there were three left in it.

“Take ‘em,” he said, around the one in his mouth, “god knows I don’t need them.”

She patted her pockets down for a lighter, and eventually took his offered match.

“Never seen you before,” he said.

“Never been here before,” she replied.

“Waitress says you’re probably a runaway,” the man said.

“And?”

“She wants to call the cops. Thinks its some great service. Happens at least once a week, because of where we are.”

“I’m June,” she said.

“Jesús.”

“I am,” she said.

“Am what?”

“A runaway.”

Jesús shrugged, “I figured, but I’m not getting involved unless asked. Where you headed next?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should probably figure out a destination,” he said.

“I know.”

“So, any ideas?”

“Probably east coast. Somewhere warm.”

“Carolinas?”

She thought for a moment, and nodded.

He closed his eyes, and rested his head on the side wall of the diner.

“Know how to get to the bus station?”

“Not really.”

“Do you need help getting there?”

“Okay.”

He stood up and put out his cigarette. He took off his hairnet and his apron, and threw them in the side door.

“I’m off, anyway,” he said.

The two of them walked a distance in the late afternoon light. She gave him a broad berth, walking outside of arm’s reach, and with an eye toward escape at all times.

“It’s just a block or two, this way. Left at that light, then right on the corner.”

The dishwasher paused for a second, thinking. He looked over at her, then at a building across the street.

“I’ve got an errand to run, you know where to go.”

The dishwasher headed for the building he’d glanced at, waved goodbye, and walked in.

She looked both ways, something else caught in her brain. The bus station would still be there in ten minutes. She stepped into the alleyway, scanned it and looked for danger.

Not seeing anything, she stood on her toes, and glanced through the window.

The people in there were dirty-looking, and dressed in rags, as if they’d been driven from their homes. Some slept in piles on the floor, others seemed to be kneeling in prayer. Near one end of the room, a jaundiced man sat in an ornate chair.

He and the dishwasher were exchanging words; the time each spoke gradually became shorter and shorter, until they were shouting indistinctly at one another.

She watched as the man, Jesús, produced a gun and aimed it at the other. For a long moment, there was silence, and he spoke again through clenched teeth.

The man in the chair took a long time to reply.

And when he did, Jesús pulled the trigger.

“Everybody on the ground!” the man in the ski-mask with the BJMN logo on the face shouted.  The security guard, who had been informed of the situation, simply sat on the ground and continued to read his paper.

Brett Jones (watching security footage, laughing):  So, this was around the time everyone started to incorporate themselves.  You know, slightly more complex taxes, but you make more money and you’ve got more rights, under the American system.

The man in the ski-mask vaulted over the counter and held out the BJMN-screenprinted bags to the cashieres, before rattling of the nigh-incomprehensible series of words that his lawyer had taught him, a sort of magical charm against legal retribution.

Brett Jones:  I was something weird, though, the first one-man multinational.  It was really ingenious, and I’ve got to thank my accountant for the idea.  Afterward, my lawyer and I began jetting all around South America and East Asia to make things work.

“This is a hostile and unannounced capital redistribution situation in which the party of the second part (that is, the bank) will give to the party of the first part (that is, the wearer of the BJMN face mask) no amount lesser or greater than one tenth of assets currently available on the premises.  Due to the nature of Brett Jones Multinational, this agent, the cause of this extra-financial transfer of funds is not vulnerable to prosecution so long as A) no more than one-tenth of available assets are taken, B) the wearer of the BJMN face mask does not fire on an unarmed civilian, and does not provoke any armed personnel of the bank, and C) it occurs within a minute and a half of the time printed on the notice.  It is now…2:11 PM and fifteen seconds.  Your recordings should show that this robbery started at roughly 2:10, which is the time on the notice currently in possession of your security guard.  Now.  Please fill these bags with bills, no ink packets, or anything of the sort, though it doesn’t matter if they’re consecutive.”

Brett Jones:  I bought a small parcel of land in Ecuador, a bit in Mexico, one in Colombia, another in Japan, a square foot in China, and I’m renting an appartment in a small Indonesian city for pennies a month.  Due to the interface of the laws in these five countries, we were able to set it up so that it would be impossible to prosecute me for crimes.  We set it up so that the prosecution would just spin their wheels and get nowhere, acruing legal fees in six different countries.

The man in the BJMN facemask was writing out the receipt and giving the bank manager a copy and an informational packet.

“Now, this gives you all the information you need on the subject, and yes, your insurance will cover this.”

“Could I claim insurance money for psychological trauma?”

“I don’t see why not, Mister Manager.  Also, another important bit, this robbery will not be repeated unless it falls under different management, and due to the intricacies of International Law, anyone else robbing this bank will be considered a criminal in several South American nations, including Mexico, China, Japan, and Indonesia.  Simply contact my lawyer and inform him of the situation.”

Brett Jones (seriously):  Now I’d like to point out that this wasn’t simple greed.  BJMN was my second self-incorporation, and was essentially set up to buy back the rights of my first incorporation, Brett Jones United.  It was pretty nasty, really.  I was an idiot, and sold shares to pay for some medical and housing bills, as well as to cover student loans.  I was intending to hold on to 501 of the 10000 shares, but there were unseen issues, and I had to sell too much, and was forced into several business deals I didn’t want.  The Mob actually began using me to launder money.  Thus BJMN was born, which effectively used money I took from banks to enact a hostile takeover of BJU.  As long as I could buy back some of the shares and get my Lawyer to work some more of his black magic, I could get everything right as rain, again.

“Now remember,” the man in the BJMN mask shouted, “you all saw me, everything was perfectly above-the-table, and no one got hurt.  In fact…” he checks his watch, “…this has been the fastest one thus far.  Good job, everyone.  Why don’t we give them a round of applause, folks?”

People thought the Large Hadron Colider would end the world, but they weren’t wholly right.  It did end the world, but not by sucking us all into a black hole, or violating causality, or creating Strange Matter.  Instead, on a night in early 2012, after all the hubub had died down and the scientists were rewriting the rules yet again, beefing up the magnets and deciding:

“Let’s try colliding some of those neutralinos we bottled last November.  That’d be good for a laugh.”

So they did.

And at that moment, the old world ended and a new one began, if only because a drop of bird shit hit the building at the exact right spot to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the equation.  There was a sound not like a baseball going through a large glass window:  what was produced was a rip in space and time.

On the other side was the world of the dead, a vast gray wasteland, occupied by wandering ghosts.  They released a statement on the matter:  “LHC opens portal to Hades.”

Some Christians (most of them American, and not up on their Greek mythology) took this as proof that Science is Evil:  “Question:  You mean you opened up a portal to hell?”

The academy had a concise,though multi-part answer for them:  “Two Points:  First, No.  Second, Shut up.”

NATO immediately claimed ownership of the portal, which was moved to a secure bunker in western Germany.  Immediately, a task-force was sent in to kill Hitler a second time; after discovering that he, like the other inhabitants of the underworld, was incapable of communication, and spent most of his time wandering around in a daze, they promptly shot him, declared “Mission Accomplished!” and locked the door, taking a photograph of him during the approximately twenty seconds he was “double-dead.”

That would’ve been the end of that if the portal didn’t start growing.  The edges of reality began flaking off and falling into the Underworld, shards of color could be seen on the ground in Hades.  Some shades picked them up, and gained rudimentary vocabularies.  Some of them came through the portal and wandered around inside the bunker for a bit, gradually picking up more and more Reality and beginning to go back through and drag other shades through.

The United States, fearing of a “Legion of Doom” made up of (the apparently resurrected) Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, John Wilkes Boothe, Genghis Khan and Benedict Arnold (some more humorous ideas included “evil Gandhi” and Miss O’Leary’s Cow,) insisted on the right to bomb the Underworld.  Needless to say, Germany refused.

War was inevitable, if only because it seemed to most people that we were being invaded by legions of the damned.  Made up of people that would get up twenty seconds after dealt a fatal blow unless you completely destroyed the body.  Thankfully, they could be distinguished from normal people due to their constant, slow leak of neutralinos.  Detectors were built, and mounted on compact flame-throwers.  NATO troops combed the countryside and nearby cities, dragging loved ones who had returned from the Great Beyond to see their families and sweethearts out into the streets, and incinerating them on the spot.

Eventually, in August 2012, it was determined that a large number of the Shades were actually coming back–their destroyed bodies were simply recreated in Hades, and it was found that a small population of women were carrying children that emitted a weak neutralino signature.  It was decided that it was time to Nuke the Underworld.

The bunker was stormed; infantrymen blew open the doors and combat engineers perforated the ceiling.  Napalm was dropped on it after the infantry had withdrawn, burning all the inhabitants alive/undead.  German Special Forces and a group of U.S. Army Rangers took a French nuclear device into the portal room and dropped it through.  It was on a timer, giving them plenty of time for evacuation.

When the bomb detonated, its color was off, and there was no sound.  No audible sound; detectors in the Atlantic Ocean designed to detect whale song went crazy.

And that night, the stars began to go out, one by one.

When the Visitors came, it was the best of all possible worlds.

They descended from the skies in silvery ships, and settled over every major city (as well as a small patch of ice in Antarctica before disappointedly moving on,) broadcasting a message of peace, first in Dravidian and ancient Egyptian, then in an archaic form of greek, finally, they puzzled out Cantonese and Portuguese, and a dialogue began.

They didn’t want our water or minerals, or anything of the sort; such things could more easily be found elsewhere.  Instead, they came for our literature, our television, our music, and our philosophy.  For copies of books, they traded wonders: medical technology, computers, and energy sources to solve all our problems.

In return, they just wanted our culture.  Some of them, members of all races, sat in on college classrooms.  At Duke University, a twelve-foot tall creature with fins and scales listened to lectures on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, cooing and laughing at odd points in time.  The undergraduates didn’t look at him, just staring ahead with slightly uncomfortable faces and unblinking eyes.

In Oxford, an octopus-like creature with blue skin and twelve arms floated near the ceiling, listening to lectures on Orwell.  The students even managed to convince it to participate in a rugby game, in which it scored thrice; in no small part because the opposing team had no idea how to tackle a flying squid.

The best of all possible worlds, just as we’d hoped.

Then, one day some six years later, the visitors’ ships had ascended into the sky, leaving none of their number behind.

“Thank you for your culture,” they signalled, “we’ll be back in another six thousand years, after we’ve made the rounds again.  Maybe next time, you’ll be ready for membership.”

With that, an electromagnetic pulse passed through the planet, interfering with the world’s magnetic field and all of the electronic devices within.  Our computers died; then the bombs came, levelling every city with more than a million people.

And then: silence.  The survivors knew then what Atlantis and Troy had known, what the pre-dynastic egyptians had learned, what the ancient Dravidians understood.  The harvest had come, and the crops had been taken to market; then the used-up plants had been gathered and thrown to the fire, the ashes used to fertilize the fields.

And in several millenia, maybe we would no longer trust the rugby-playing squid from the skies.

(First flash fiction since I started NaNoWriMo…might not finish.  I’ll try, though.)

Atlantis didn’t sink.  The Good Doctor dropped an Ontology Bomb on it in 1994.

I know this, because I remember; no one else does.  The newspapers didn’t report it, and all of our history books changed.  It was one of the earlier attempts with the technology, so some of us still remember it.

In May of 1998, another O-Bomb was set off, this time in Mu.  The entire continent, gone.  Even fewer people remember it.  I saw news footage of it; one moment, I’m watching an obsidian sun rise over cities of crystal spires, with bamboo zeppelins drifting between them; the next I’m watching some boring tripe about some woman named Lewinsky.

The Good Doctor isn’t a terrorist.  The Good Doctor is a Wrecker; not interested in being known for any misdeeds, simply reveling in the changes wrought on history and the chaos engendered by it.

I manage to find a discussion board on the internet, in early 2001, populated by those who Remember.

>>Ultima Thule, Uncreated in April 1980.  I don’t know why I’m speaking French, and I go to Mass every Sunday, now.  All my early memories are in German, I remember drinking mead out of horns and offering sacrifices to Odin.

>>Cibola, Uncreated in June of 1976.  Now I live on a Reservation in Arizona, and my people didn’t know about metalworking until the anglos came.  I remember watching the moon landing when I was 8, back in 1954.  What happened?

>>My home town was Uncreated Last week.  I was away on business, at the time.  I had a wife and two children; I was a respected member of the community.  Now I sleep in public parks and have to use the Library computers.  I’m forgetting my hometown’s name, my wife’s face.  I don’t know what’s happening, please.

The Good Doctor takes everything away from us, learning to make clean amputations from the realm of causality.  Everytime a bomb is dropped, a black egg is left behind, an Inkstone.

The Good Doctor has eyes everywhere, men and women waiting, preparing to rush in an take the stones from the sites of destruction, and ship them to a P.O. Box.  Sometimes in Montana, sometimes in Marakesh, sometimes elsewhere.

It changes everyime a bomb is dropped.

I know you don’t believe me.  I know you don’t.  But please, believe this.  If you see people vanishing, if the mailman doesn’t come for more than two days at a time, if you don’t see your neighbor walking his dog for a week, if your husband or wife disappears without leaving a note:  Get the hell out of town.

Don’t believe me, but trust me.

(This is probably the product of reading way too much criticism on a particular author, lately.  Not going to go into who; some of you will be able to figure it out despite the text, the rest of you might be unfamiliar.)

I stand and watch the living thunderhead rise from the blackened, broken earth, seeping out of the cracks like oil.

Progenetoi. Something in the root of my mind screamed the name to me. One of Blake’s “giants who formed this world into sensuous existence” I knew it as.

The iron-black anvil-cloud stretches out an arm that reaches to the horizon. Another joins it in the opposite direction. I see it straining to pull free of its prison of stone and soil.

Countless eyes open, and a mouth gapes, its teeth like skyscrapers.

Progenetoi. Progenitors. Why do I name it thus?

My feet are rooted to the ground; what use is running from something that stands at the center of the world? That reaches to the edge of it?

I call it a thunderhead, but it is not insubstantial like the clouds that part around its great and shapeless head. Its shadow is heavy like lead, and the thing that casts it is more real than I.

The Giant stretched upward, planting one deceptively slender leg, so thin that it should not be able to stand.

Logic fails. The ground stands firm.

Each breath it draws is like a thunderclap, an earthquake, a hurricane-gust.

Yet, I can hear hooves.

Turning, I see a column of figures, lead by knights in armor; they are insubstantial, like mist in the morning sun.

Behind them, I see Shakespeare’s fairy host, and Marlowe’s demon horde; the gunslingers and Indian braves of American folklore; the citizen-soldiers and identical idealized workers of Soviet Agitprop; Zulu warriors with their spears gleaming in the sunlight, and countless others.

They march along the blacktop road, riding into a fateful, hopeless battle. The dreams of humankind streaming down the road towards the most material of enemies.

Unable to join them, I lay down in the dust by the side of the street, and close my eyes. I have a duty of my own, and in dreams begin all responsibility.

(I don’t like spiders; I hate them, in fact.  But the gut reaction we have to them is interesting: That revulsion that wells up out of the lizard brain and causes our limbs to do things that we don’t consciously choose.  I’ve been thinking a lot about that feeling, lately, and trying to tap into it.  So, here’s a story about spiders.)

I spent a lot of time on the porch swing of my old house, smoking cigarettes and engaging in a war of attrition with the spiders that had colonized the sagging brick-and-concrete structure.

They’d climb up and spin webs on the swing, and I’d blow cigarette smoke at them, watching as they grow drunken and spin strange, abstract webs in a nicotine-induced stupor.  After a few days, they’d disappear, only to be replaced inside of a week with another one.  Maybe a bit bigger, maybe a bit smaller, maybe colored a little different.

I hated spiders, but I wasn’t going to do anything but blow smoke on them.

Well, almost.

One night, the spider champion climbed up on my porch.  This giant bastard with knuckles on his legs and a mean look to it.  Surprised, I jumped up, shouting profanity as it got closer–being barefoot didn’t make me feel safer around it–I just imagined that it would find my exposed flesh all that much more enticing, after all, there was no chitin to protect it.

So I grabbed the snow shovel that leaned against the house, and tried to pick it up, so I could fling it out into the yard, where it could subsist on flies and squirrels, or whatever giant spiders ate.  It skittered away, and I chased after it; when I finally picked it up, it came towards me, up the handle of the shovel.

I dropped it with a thunderous clang.

My drinking buddy, who had come along with a deuce of some cheap beer he’d gotten from Zap’s, the convenience store two blocks away that had to close due to fire damage a day after they started selling barbecue, picked up a can of lighter fluid.

He attempted the same tactic I’d tried on smaller spiders, attempting to surround it with noxious fumes in the hope of driving it away.  This didn’t work.

My roommate came out to investigate the commotion, and discovered that we were smoking, drinking, and spraying lighter fluid on what could only be a wild tarrantula.

He took the logical next step, retrieved the pointer lighter and made an end of things.

Of course, having seen the movie “Arachnophobia” I figured this was a terrible move, and jumped up on the wall of the porch, away from the burning death-spider.

It sat there and died.  When it burned out, I picked it up with the shovel and threw it out in the yard, feeling bad for having panicked and having a hand in killing it.