No one ever says yes

'You come seeking answers, yes.' A statement, not a question. The voice came out of the dark, emanating from the wizened form just barely visible through the smoke and shadows of the small hut. The close air seemed suffocating to the supplicant.

'Yes. Yes, there are things I wish to know, things only one such as yourself can tell me.'

'Heh heh.' A dry sound, devoid of all humor, like the sound of a foul insect rubbing its legs together. 'I can answer your questions, yes. I know things you cannot imagine, things that would send your feeble mind screaming into insanity to protect itself. Yes.'

'This I know, venerated one.' He used the title not out of respect, but fear. 'I have come far to seek your wisdom.'

'I shall answer your questions, yes. I will give you knowledge and wisdom you think you want. It will destroy you. Your end begins here, yes.'

'I must know, venerated one. I must.'

'Oh you think you do, yes. Heh heh. You think you do. All who come before think they must have the knowledge they seek, but I tell you now, it shall do you no good, yes. It shall destroy you, yes. You are destroyed, and yet you know it not, yes.'

'I have come so far, venerated one...'

'Far, yes, you have come far. They all came far. I told them what they thought they wanted to know, yes. What shall I tell you? Would you like to know the time and date of your eventual death?'

'No, venerated one, first I seek the answer to...' He stopped, as the venerated one grumbled something. "I'm sorry, venerated one, I couldn't hear you?'

'Nothing. Ask your question, yes.' The elderly being said, but when the supplicant once again began to speak, it cut him off with an exasperated sigh.

'I'm sorry, venerated one, is something wrong?' The ancient sage shift, and mumbled again, just below the level the man could understand.

'Venerated one, I couldn't hear...'

'No one ever says yes!', The old one said in a peeved tone.

'I'm sorry?' The supplicant was bewildered.

'Do you know how long I've been doing this, boy?', the being said, leaning forward, allowing an errant beam of light coming through a space in the gnarled wooden wall to glint off a huge, red eye. 'I've been here since before your home was even a thought, since the days when your kind was just learning to speak. I've been here, at the ass end of all things, for long enough that, if your puny mind could comprehend the number of days I've seen, it would force everything else out of your head and you'd starve to death as a drooling moron. Which I would then eat. I've been here, communing and making deals and bartering fragments of my very soul to gain information that has brought you over immense distances and through ordeals which no sane being would endure, for so goddamn long that I wouldn't be able to remember my own name, even if I hadn't traded it for more wisdom. And for that entire time, a parade of idiots, just like yourself, have wandered by, with their petty problems and halfwit conundrums. And each one who comes to pester me and interrupt my work, I ask if they would like to know when they're going to die. Not one of you nimrods has ever, not once, not a single time, said yes!'

'I'm sorry, revered senior, but why would anyone say yes?'

'Why? Why? Because, you slobbering pinhead, it's important! Knowing when your life ends is the kind of thing that allows you to plan! To make the most of your time! You pea-brained simpletons all want to know simple, idiotic things! Where can I find the Nut of Wisdom? How do I dethrone my brother? How can I make Griselda the pig-keeper love me? Why do the seasons change? And to each of you I offer a nugget of real wisdom, something that, unlike whatever stupid question you've dragged your ass hither and yon to find out where I was, and then even farther to get to me, you wouldn't be able to figure out on your own if you took two damned minutes to ponder it. I offer something ineffable, and all of you say, nope, I'd like to know how to keep ants out of my butter!'

'But death is frightening, old one... OW!' The man yelled as the creature struck him of the forehead with the knobbled end of its ancient wooden staff.

'Not knowing when you're going to die is frightening, clod! Death is easy! It's slipping into a warm bath! It's laying down in a cool, welcoming bed! Waiting for it to happen is the hard part. Knowing when it's going to happen means you can end it how you please, insulting everyone who annoys you, owing everyone money, and in bed with someone elses wife, or daughter, or cow!'

'Still, I don't see...'

'Shut! Up! You don't see anything! You actually thought it was easier to hie out to the middle of goddamn nowhere and risk your soul to ask ME to solve your problems! Of course you don't see! That goat you passed outside, the one I use for clothes and milk and heat in the winter and love, it's got more wisdom in one of it's cloven hooves than you ever will! You can bet, if I asked it if it wanted to know when it was going to die, it would happily and humbly take the information! It would be over the moon knowing that such a gift had been given to it by one so ineffably wise as myself!'

The man sat, wide-eyed, as the ancient form in the shadows panted, out of breath from its tirade.

'You know what? Screw it.' The being waved its stick at the door the man had entered through. 'Get out. Get out! No wisdom for you, dummy. No actually, there is some wisdom for you. You came all this way and you risked a lot and you don't get your question answered. That's it. All you get is yelled at. You know why? Because life isn't fair, you puddingheaded son of a bitch. Now screw, before I turn you into a frog."

Mojo of the Blood-Fire Apes! Ch. 12

      I hit the bottom of the empty pool flat on my back, hard enough to knock the wind out of me, if I'd had any. Dropping twelve feet onto concrete wouldn't have slowed me much, normally, but the three holes in my chest would and did. Even for someone with my 'condition', large caliber slugs weren't the kind of thing that you could just brush off. I might be a gorilla, and a vampire to boot, but pain is pain.

      The world went fuzzy for a bit. When it slid back into focus, first thing I saw was one of the bonobos who'd ambushed me swinging down the ladder hooked to the side of the pool. I could hear him hooting to himself as he rolled over to where I was splayed out, bitching about being sent down to put another round into a guy just took three in the chest.

      I'd have felt bad for him, if he and his pals hadn't just tried to punch my ticket. Low ape in the pack always gets the crap jobs flung at him. Also meant he was going to be the first of them to die.

      He looked surprised when his eyes met mine, and even more when my hand shot out, faster than he could track, and grabbed him by the wrist. I twisted, hard, his elbow dropping and his shoulder pulled towards me. I got the hand holding the gun pointed back towards it's owner, just as the order to fire reached his trigger finger. What was left of his face looked most surprised of all.

      The round that killed him had severed an artery, and I clamped my mouth over the pumping spray. I don't like to feed on my own kind, but I'd need the juice to survive the next few minutes.

      I'd gotten a good bit of the blood down when the first shape appeared at the edge of the pool. It took a second for the scene to register with this fella, but when it did, he let out half a swear and reached for his cannon. While he'd been goggling, though, I'd pulled his dead friend onto me, and used my legs to shove the body up over the lip of the pool, and it was still rising and moving fast when it hit him in the chest. Both the living and the dead vanished from sight.

      I used the momentum to roll forward onto my feet, crouched, and leaped upward. No normal gorilla could have passed the edge of the pool and still been rising, but a vampire with a load of fresh blood in him can do all kinds of amazing things. The other four bonobos seemed to be moving in slow motion. As I passed the closest one, I made a long arm and wrapped my fingers around his head. My momentum pulled him off his feet, and his weight brought be around in a circle, until I landed on my feet. It felt like something cracked when my hand, still holding his head, came down hard on the tile floor. I was already moving, even as I registered that, leaping forward and throwing a balled fist into the chest of another bonobo. Ribs and sternum gave way, and the force of my hit took him over the edge and into the pool, a line of blood coming out of his mouth.

      I turned toward the last two would-be assassins. They were standing, one behind the other from my perspective, all three of us in a line. I closed the distance to the nearest one, using one hand to grab the wrist of his gun hand, forcing it out of line with my body. The other hand I wrapped around his neck, lifting him slightly off the ground. His eyes, wide with fear, locked onto mine, and I felt the tendons of his wrist tighten and loosen as he fired round after round into the ceiling of the abandoned pool-house.

      The last bonobo had time to get a good bead on me, and unload three quick rounds in what felt like a tight group. Pity his partner was between the two of us, or he might have done me some serious harm. As understanding spread across his face, I reached out one last time and gave his head a sharp twist. And that was that.

      They'd come prepared for a gorilla, and for a PI with a hard rep, but they'd never expected a... Vampire Gorilla, PI.

A Drink

“Heaven,” Hes said, “is a shit-hole."

The young man looked shocked. “I'm sorry?”

Hes finished his shot, and repeated, “Heaven is a shit-hole. A slum. A 'wretched hive of scum and villainy', if I remember the quote right.” then tapped the shot-glass twice on the bar.

“Heaven is perfect, y'see. Not my perfect, or yours, probably. But perfect in God's eyes. Not perfect for people.

“It's designed for a certain number of people, and what those people are supposed to do is worship God. That's the point of Heaven, right? You follow God's laws perfectly in life, and you're granted access to the ultimate gated community. And what you get for being a good little worshiper, is an eternity of doing the same. You get to love God with all your heart, forever.

“With no distractions. None. You get a place to sleep, in a crowded barracks. You get a place to eat. And you get a seat in the big amphitheater. What's in the amphitheater? A walled garden, with God's throne in the center. You sit there, looking at the radiance of God, which is like staring into the sun, by the way, and sing his praises. That's what you do, in Heaven.”

Hes downed another shot.

“That was the idea, anyway. A long time ago. God designed heaven, sat down on his throne, and apparently hasn't moved since.

“So the angels run the place. Not all of them, most are off doing whatever the hell it is angels do. The angels of Heaven were made specifically to run Heaven, and their orders were real basic. Keep the monkeys housed , keep 'em fed, and, most importantly, keep the amphitheater full. Keep those hosannas coming.

“That's it.

“So you get to Heaven, you get your bunk, you get a seat in the chow hall, and another in the amphitheater. Then, you're on your own. The angels don't give a fuck about you, won't even notice you, unless they need you in the 'theater. And the 'theater? It's only built for one hundred and forty-four thousand souls.

“You have any idea how many people have made it into heaven, over the centuries? A damn sight more than one hundred and forty-four thousand, tell you that. Which means, you can land in the Holy City, get processed in, and never see another angel; never set foot in the 'theater. They send teams out to grab souls when the need asses in seats, but there's millions of souls around.

“And that, in a nutshell, is why Heaven is the worst slum you ever imagined. The angels keep expanding the housing, 'cause more souls keep coming in, and creating more chow halls, but that's it. There's nothing else in Heaven but five things: angels, souls, bunks, chow halls, and the amphitheater.

“No bars, or bookstores, or movies. No parks, no open spaces, no trees. Everything's made from stone that you can't chip or wear away. The sky is blank a couple shades lighter than the stone. The robes don't tear. There's nothing to read, nothing to see, nothing to do.

“It drives people crazy, all of them, in one way or another. People start doing terrible things to one another, just out of boredom. You can't kill, or maim anyone, but you can still hurt them. Some souls fight constantly, just to be doing something. Souls don't experience sex like a living body does, but there's a lot of fornication, consensual and non-. There are streams of people who just run, anywhere and everywhere, until the drop from exhaustion, and then get up and run some more. Holy men from all over fight about points of orthodoxy, first with words, then fists. Some others just sit in the same place, doing an saying nothing, some plead with God for answers, some pound there heads against walls over and over... Some do all of these, at different times. It's madness, and it never ends.

“Unless you find a way over the walls. Unless you cast yourself into the outer darkness, and fall. Hell is a balm to the soul, by comparison. Mostly because Satan seems to have given up on the whole game, and while He doesn't give a rat's ass about you, either, he doesn't set up any rules. Oh, you'll get punished in Hell, don't doubt it, but it'll more than likely be by other souls. It's easier to escape from, too. Everyone's so caught up in there own little things, see? Nobody's counting heads, 'cause no one cares.

“Which means, that if you keep traveling, you might just get somewhere you can finally get a goddamn drink...”

 Hes tapped the shot-glass on the bar again.

Good Day's Work

When They came, it was with the inevitability of the tides. As the Sun darkened, and the blood red moon swelled in the starless night sky, They swarmed over the Earth. They came out of the corners, from underneath us, twisting angles and reality, driving mankind mad.

The tissue thin sanity of the human race was torn, bent, folded, spindled, and, beast-like, we mangled ourselves, human tearing into human with a frothing rage never before seen on our sorry little world, to the sound of Their mad, cacophonous laughter. Our blood ran into the hungry soil of what had been our planet, for Their amusement.

The ones who succumbed to the insanity, and those killed in the First Days of Their Return, they were the lucky ones. As They folded space/time into a hideous shape more to Their liking, the dwindling numbers of mankind found no solace in their holes and hideaways. As reality shifted and oozed into its new form, the last survivors found that their compatriots would suddenly shudder and swell, to be torn apart as one of Them was born, ready to savor the terror and the slaughter to follow.

In less time than we could possibly imagine, humanity vanished from existence. The last human, the first captured when They arrived, was forced to watch the last group of resistors degraded, tortured, broken, the shattered soul of each consumed in turn. Crucified, eyes unable to close, the last man was kept alive by Their will until, as a final terrible benediction, Their leader revealed Its true form to the tattered thing once a man. With one final, horrible sound, the soul of the last man was consumed and enjoyed, by Them.

As the last scream faded, the leader's chief lieutenant came forth to await instructions.

'Alright, enough fun,' the leader said, suppressing a burp, 'Tell the Boys to start scouring the planet, and have the Unfolders reset the physical laws back to the zero set. Don't let Them slack off, the Boss wants to plant the next batch of humans tomorrow! He says this time he's going to let them run up to producing atomic fusion, maybe we can harvest without all the hard work...'

You know what life is?

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

These things matter...

Second Son, Inc. Second Son Detective Agency. Paladin Problem Solutions.

I needed a name. Something to paint on the frosted glass door of my new office door.

Paladin Solutions. Paladin Solutions & Deli. Paladin Resolution & Bakery.

Old, rundown, mildewed, in a bad part of town, intermittently heated on the best of days, by clanking iron radiators that leaked steam and made the air like a sauna. A relic of a bygone era, somehow not yet pulled down, with broad round windows looking over the empty five way intersection below. It was a hole. I loved it.

Herr Doktor Roncevaux, Chiropractic, Evil Smote, Hats Blocked. Prof. Ollie's All-Scientific Anti-Evil Unguent, guaranteed made right on the premises.

I remember an old story about Dorothy Parker.

A few hours later, new paint gleamed in a small oasis of cleanliness amid the peeling wood and dusty glass of the office. 'Utica Drop-Forge Company', proclaimed the new letters upon the frosted glass. In smaller letters, under the company name, 'Please Knock'.

Now I am ready to start.

Where's my jetpack?

What happened to your future? We're it. We, men from the future, have kidnapped you the day before you were going to make your ground-breaking new invention known to the world. We've taken the invention itself, and every scrap of paper and every shred of information about your process, and we're gonna keep it. All of it. And, this is the good part, we're going to remove not just all memory of your invention from your brain, but make it impossible for you to ever stumble down the mental path you'd need to follow to recreate it.

It makes us sound like Republic serial villains, doesn't it?

Of course, the Ape with the Brain of a Robot, our leader, knows the repercussions of your little machine would have led to an unacceptable level of upheaval and collapse, along with all the death and suffering such things entail.

Food for thought.

That's where the future you wanted went. The jetpack, the ones that maimed and killed thousands in the future, we made it disappear. We dropped agents into every year of this century, and they built up automobiles and air transport, along with the infrastructure to support them. And jetpacks faded into dream, only remembered by lovers of musty science fiction.

Weather control. Personal laser guns. All those crazy airplane designs. Dirigibles. We took them all away. The easy way, like this. We stop you, and whatever like-minded inventors might follow a train of thought similar to yours, from following through. We come here, remove your life's work, everything connected with it, including your memory and some of your ability to reason, and then we go forward and look in the history books to see if any of them still mention you. Your singular contraption will be displayed in the Museum of Unreal Inventions.

The first removal I took part in, we saved the entire world. All by this, what I'm doing to you, happening to another genius with no common sense. I'm going to make the modern house as clean as clean can be, this clever fellow thought, and came up with a living floor covering. A live rug, that would digest any dust or dirt that settled in it for too long. Its excretions? A scent of your choice.

Do you have any idea how many dead skin cells are in household dust?

By the time it occurred to someone that walking on something that was subsisting on your very flesh was not the best of ideas, we'd already lost. The rug-things had discovered they liked the taste of human. One of them found that they could produce a scent that was a soporific for us. Made us just want to lie down, spread ourselves out, and feel good. It was the most merciful way of killing a person I've ever heard of.

The cities were overgrown in days, but the things, although it might have been just one big thing by that time, well, they hit their stride when they got to open country. Places to root, soil to drink from, animals to lull and consume, they just spread and spread and spread. A huge, crazy-quilt blotch spread over the Bavarian countryside, growing visibly even when viewed from space.

The uninfected areas of the world were arguing their way towards doing something when Pakistan went silent. Cambodia dropped away. Kenya vanished, followed by New Zealand, all of Southern Africa, Taiwan, Peru, the Pacific Rim, the North American Union. Separate outbreaks. Projections indicated that the death of the last human would run neck and neck with the death of the entire ecosystem.

So we dropped back to the proper year, and made it all go away. We don't solve the problem, we make sure the problem never needs to be solved. Not removing the mistake from existence, but removing it from ever having existed.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry we have to do this. Your breakthrough would have made you a name for the history books, in many different ways. But, for the sake of 120 Billion people forward of us, I'm more than willing to cast you into an uncertain future. You'll still be a genius, after all.

You won't remember any of this, just like all the other times we've met and I've done this to you. You just can't seem to stop with the world-shattering inventions. Three more of these and we give you a neat tattoo you'll never know how you got.

Well, time to get to it. This is gonna hurt like hell.

I just got promoted to Lt. Commander in Star Trek Online!

My life is so very, very empty.

Fun in Basic Training

One day, our entire company was going through different stations covering the basics of first aid. When I got to the station for treating a gunshot, the guy handling the run-through had me treat my partner first. After he critiqued my attempt, he told me to pretend to be shot so my partner could try his hand. I pointed up the hill and said, 'Oh my god, a guy with a gun!'. They both turned to look, and when they turned back, I was lying on the ground. They both started laughing...

Allow me to blow your mind

A list of the main points of interest in the movie 'Paint Your Wagon':

1. Clint Eastwood

2. Lee Marvin

3. The old west

4. Toe-tapping musical numbers, involving both stars

5. Bigamy

How's that for a gogurt tube of weirdness?

A new waste of time

So, if you're one of my three readers, I'm sure you've noticed the new link listed on the right, up there at the top. It's for a blog/extended story I'm writing, following the adventures of Runcible 'Red' Hand, and some of his friends, who wander among the various dimensions and drink at a bar together. I make no promises about quality, as my writing style can best be described as throwing every idea that wanders through my head into a pot, and posting the unholy slurry that results online, but I can promise often correct use of grammar.

I'll also be posting three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so you can be bored by my writing at least that often.

If you've just wandered by at random, welcome! Please read my story, and forgive me my trespasses. You should also read the archives on this blog. It's genius, every entry. I promise. Would I lie to you, person I've never met before, and who I desperately hope will like me?

Found this online today, so... yeah.

FOREWORD

It was Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, who remarked, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This statement appears to be just as true today as it was then. Perhaps it is even more valid today considering the pressures and frequent monotony of today’s world. The majority of today’s men and women live in boring circumstances, and when the opportunity for change arises, they are often quick to seize the chance. For the characters in this story, the opportunity is one which many would consider perverse and deranged. But it provides a release and a need. All morals and scruples are cast aside in a moment of madness — a chance to grab pleasure before it is taken away.

SOME NUNS SUCK… SECRETLY! — a novel about the quiet desperation in so many of us — and the extremes to which it may drive us.

Bad Cut

Do you think there comes a point when, after a certain number of plastic surgeries, that you just give up on looking human any more? This question came to mind yesterday, after I tripped across a photo collection of various people who seemed to have gone overboard on going under the knife.

Now, I know that poo-pooing the fascination some people have with 'improving' their looks through surgery is the equivalent of hunting cows with a high powered rifle and scope. I know it's a slow moving target. But I have to wonder what goes through some people's minds when, after spending upwards of $30,000, they find themselves with a face that could have come from someone working them over with a crowbar. Seriously, most of them look like boxers do right after a big fight. I'd put up a couple of pictures as an example, but I'd rather not have them permanently on display. Also, I don't know how. But that's neither here nor there.

Are they happy with what they see, after all the work that's been done? Do they look in the mirror and think that if their doctor gets just one more chance to take a cold chisel and an angle grinder to them, they'll be perfect? Or, god help 'em, more perfect?

In which spoils are divided and drinks are spoiled

I figured I owed Automatic Jack a drink. Given that he'd been taken hostage while collecting money for me on bets I wasn't supposed to be making, and threatened with death as a way to force me to do something I really didn't want to do, it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.

So, immediately after handing a still warm, severed arm to the bastard who had been the cause of all of this, he and I made Grindlebone's our destination.

I call Jack a he, but it wasn't because of any obvious sexual characteristics on his part. Automatic Jack wasn't a flesh and blood creature, but an autonomous mechanical being. He might have been an actual robot, although his ramshackle, thrown together appearance suggested otherwise. I suspected he was either a spirit inhabiting a pile of random, humanoid shaped junk, or some sort of metal golem. I'd wondered about it, on occasion, but the situation had never seemed quite right for broaching the subject. I had quite a good friend in Jack, so it hardly mattered.

Grindlebone's, the location to which we conveyed ourselves, is one of my favorite watering holes. It managed to be both spacious and intimate through clever use of furnishings, had a number of Doors leading to a number of widely disparate places, and served surprisingly diverse and well prepared food, along with a vast array of drinks. Grindlebone often tends one of the scattered bars himself. He said it made the place more homey for the regulars.

Indeed, we saw the man himself as Jack and I entered through the Door leading from the Gambling Hell. General asking-after of each others health followed, and Jack and I were granted use of one Grin's private rooms. Jack and I had business to discuss, after all.

“Well,” Grin said, “You two head back on past the hall heading towards the pool room, walk through the next set of curtains, let yourselves in the purple door. I'll send Janx along with your drinks presently. And don't worry, it's a real quiet room. Oh, and avoid the back Oak Room, there's a bit of an altercation going on there, right now.”

Grin had added the last to let us know the room would be as secure as he could make it; some of his so-called private rooms were just private enough to let people think they weren't being watched. Not that either Jack or I had anything to hide at the moment, but it was a nice touch nonetheless.

So we wandered along to the designated spot, although we did take a peak into the Oak Room. A gang of the Red Brotherhood were lighting each other up pretty hard in there. They'd probably asked specifically for that room, too, as it was out of the way and the solid wood furnishings lowered the damage charges they'd inevitably be paying. The furnishings also made cracking weapons.

The room on the other side of the purple door was quite comfortable. The drinks that came along shortly after we arrived, whiskey for me, Bertham's Oil for Jack, made it even more so. Being metal and all, I don't think Jack could have been tired in the same way I was, but the day must have been quite wearing on him mentally, and for a moment we simply savored the alcohol and sat quietly. But there was business to be done, and we got down to it in relatively short order.

I leaned forward as Jack grasped the plate of iron covering his chest and lifted it off. Once it had been removed, two small metal grates that had been concealed underneath the plate swing open, and a box extruded from Jack's chest cavity. He removed the box and set it on the table between us, as the grates closed again.

While a bastard, the person who had taken Jack hostage had at least been a truthful bastard. He had promised, upon my completion of his task, to release Jack unharmed and with all of the currency he had been carrying. The cash was all Gambling Hell Exchange Vouchers, and it made quite a nice pile on the table.

Jack said, “I still can't say the day wasn't worth it, not while I'm looking at this much money.”

“Jack, my cast-iron friend, you are not wrong. By the way, I think I owe you an apology.”

Jack pshaw-ed the very idea, and we engaged in a friendly argument over who owed whom what, all the while dividing our large pile of money into two smaller, but still very attractive, piles. When the division was complete, we both settled back in our seats, and commenced with a discussion of what really quite clever and fine fellows we both were. And now moderately wealthy, to boot.

It was at this point that our budding mutual appreciation ended prematurely, due to the appearance of some heavily armed people, coming through the door to our room. Two hairy men in scruffy combat gear cleared the corners and then brought the muzzles of their guns to bear on Jack and I, still sitting quietly behind a table piles high with money.

Sighing, I took a sip of my whiskey. This day simply would not end.

Walking out of the World

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” the old man told me.

I’d been in McGinty’s most of the night, commiserating with a friend who’d lost his job and girl earlier that day. Jimmy’d gotten pretty far into his cups during the course of the evening, progressing from dislike of his ex-boss and -girlfriend into outright hatred for the whole stinking world, and this city in particular. Before the whiskey had robbed him of his ability to form consonants, my pal Jimmy had waxed rather poetic about what a soul-sucking hole our fair city is, an ‘envious and vindictive bitch of a metropolis, dedicated to taking the good out of any of her denizens and grinding them into compost to grow the poison flowers that would draw another crop of rubes out of the hills, to be destroyed the same way.” He’d seemed quite sure of himself, and seemed to feel the need to share this and other observations with most of the bar. It had all been downhill from there, and shortly another friend had helped Jimmy, still declaiming to the rafters, out of the bar and into a cab.

I sat back down, finishing my beer and deciding whether to head home or over to another bar to listen to a new band, the Murder Orgy, I’d been told about. My eye fell on a square bar napkin that Jimmy had been using early in his exposition about the evils of the world. The only legible things on the napkin were the words “Walk right out of this goddamn world”. I’d picked it up, and was poring over the words, and the odd squiggles and glyphs that surrounded it, and an old, gnarled finger had appeared and tapped the word once, twice, then a third time, and the old man’s voice had drifted into my ear, sounding like the rough rustle of leave in late fall, quiet but still perfectly audible over the background hubbub of the bar.

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” he’d said.

I looked up and at the man for the first time that evening. He’d been sitting at the end of the bar, on the stool next to mine, all night, but I hadn’t spared him a second look in all that time. He had been there when I came in, and I suppose I’d assumed he’d be there when I left. He had the air about him of a regular, the feeling that he wasn’t so much in the bar as of the bar, a fixture, like the brass rail and the sticky floor. He belonged in the bar, and I’d accepted him in the same way I’d accepted the presence of the neon beer lights. The kind of guy you’d look at and never see.

But when I did take that moment to look at him, to see him, he became subtly wrong. The details of his appearance marked him as a stranger, and quite a strange stranger at that.

The hat he wore had too high a crown and too wide a brim, his coat was of an odd cut and material, the suit under it was of a strange hue. The man wore thick, chunky glasses made of a black substance, coming close to being what a hip young person would wear, but arriving at slightly disturbing through a slight asymmetry. Both his thick mustache and beard stubble were an odd shade of gray.

“I’m sorry?”

“If you want to walk out of the world. It helps if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“What do you mean? How can you walk out of a world?”

“Oh, it’s easy, really,” He’d said with a dry chuckle. “Many a man has gone from this world to that’un simply by being a bit to preoccupied, oh, ayuh.”

“Preoccupied?”

“Yuh. When you know where’s your going, your mind helps keep yuh pinned to the path you want, see? But when you go a wandrin’ willy nilly, or get to distracted as you travel, a body’s apt as not to come on one of the lost ways, and take a turn right out o’ the places they know, and come upon someplace wholly different, oh ay.”

“Lemme see,” I said, slurring a bit as the old man took another drink of his beer, “Lemme see…You think that if I, right, me, I were to walk out of here, and just wander around, I’d ‘walk out of the world’? Really”

“Maybe, maybe you would,” he said, scratching his temple. “Most people, they don’t, whatchacallit, they don’t have the right attitude. They could stomp around with no fixed destination for all their lives, and never come across anything out of the ordinary, least that they’d notice. Not to say they wouldn’t cross a world or two, not at all, but they’d never know it, as where they ended up would be too near what they expected to notice. Y’ever gone to a place, and later found out someone ya knew, knew pretty well, was there the whole time, and yet ya never saw one another?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“It’s the kind of thing most people write off, right? They figure they just floated around such a way they never caught sight o’ one another. And most time is, they’re probably right. But sometimes…” He took another drink. “Sometimes, one or the other o’ them, maybe both, stepped just a little bit sideways on the way in, turned a little bit, right, and ended up in a world a hair’s breadth away from the one they thought they was in.”

“So they were in the same place, but not?”

“Oh, ayuh. Y’see, most people think a place is a single thing, right? But a place is an agglomeration, really…”

“A collage?” I said, getting into the idea.

“Exactly. A collage made up of what different people expect to see when they get to a place. If you was to ask each person here, in this place, to tell you about it, you’d get as many different places described as people you asked. And even when you put all the descriptions together, you still wouldn’t have everything that makes this place what it is.”

“But, how does that make it a different world? Just because people aren’t very observant?”

“Nah, it’s that people assume most of what they see, right? You walk down a street you walked down a hundred times before, how much do you really see? Not much, oh no. Your head builds a picture, and you think it’s the real thing. Sign’s might be wrong, numbers might be different, you might have wandered onto a street you never seen before, and’ll never see again, but your head takes away the things it don’t expect to see, and fills in what it thinks should be there.”

“Like, they don’t have to look, because they know?”

“Seems like.”

“But I still don’t see where the walking out of word, worlds comes in.”

“You from the city, here?”

“No. No, I moved here...”

“Remember when you first come here,” He said, cutting me off. “Did you ever head out and end up a little lost, someplace you didn't know was there?”

“Yeah, a couple of time. Of course.”

“That's all it is. People get set in their way pretty quickly, though, and they stop coming across new things. Part of 'em assumes that the city is only so big, and eventually the set o' memory they have put aside to make a map in their heads gets full, and they get done finding things. But there are 's many cities out there as there are bars in here, see?”

“So,” I slurred, “How do you keep from assuming like ever'body does, hmm?”

“This is a mighty good way to start, no doubt.” He said, lifting his glass.

I lifted mine along with him, and finished the last third of my beer in a few gulps. “So, lemme see here, you're sayin', right, that if I walked out into the night, here, and wandered about, I might walk right out of my everyday world? Do you believe that, really?”

“Don't matter what I believe. Question is, do you?”

I lifted by gaze from my empty pint glass, and looked at the dark eyes behind the black glasses, then looked beyond the stranger to the door behind him, and the unanimous night on the other side of the door's glass.

“Another beer?” I heard the bartender ask.

The thing what came out of Dexter

By this time, Dexter’s skin had become translucent, a thin shell covering the thing that had destroyed him. Under the yellowish, parchment-like covering, lumps and tendrils moved back and forth, thrashing impatiently and pushing out, here and there, causing cracks and tears in the drying skin. Only the mouth, impossibly large and tooth-filled, and the eyes, burning red surrounding pit-black irises, showed the horror of the thing waiting to shed Dexter’s skin and be born into our unready world.

“Time itself will come to an end, Paladin.” The voice of the beast that was wearing Dexter’s skin was surprisingly high-pitched, piping and unpleasant. As it spoke, tendrils lashed out of its mouth, probing at the desiccated skin of Dexter’s face, tearing strips loose and bearing them away, into the open maw. “Those From Outside will follow my path, and this little realm will become ours; it will be rent and torn and changed to suit our whim. All that you know will end in pain and hate and terror, without end.”

With a piercing, staccato sound that might have been a demented laugh, the mouth-tendrils shot out and finally tore the skin of Dexter’s face and head loose, pulling it back into the creature’s maw in great strips, filling the air with a series of horrible tearing and cracking sounds. As the skin was consumed, the mass of thrashing, whipping, sucker-ended tendril spread and unfolded. This sudden, final destruction of the visage of a man who had been a friend to each of us brought out shrieks, groans, and no small amount of flinching from our little group, as we each fought the urge to flee headlong away from the monstrosity. The tendrils seemed to focus on our sounds, or movements, and, as more and more of them, impossibly more, unfolded, swelling to three, then four, times the size of poor Dexter’s head. The eyes had separated, each to its own tendriled stalk, above the mouth that gaped from just below where the head-stalks joined.

More ripping and tearing as all of Dexter above the waist split and then vanished, some pulled into the thing’s mouth, but most consumed by the suckers on the end of each glistening, flagella-like stalk that burst forth, freed from their chrysalis of human skin. As with the head, the monster swelled and spread out more tendrils than could possibly have been held in the dimensions of a human chest, and gave the eye-watering impression of unfolding from…somewhere else.

The appendages that had been encased in Dexter’s arm split each into two multi-jointed extremities that spread out fore and aft, and lifted the central structure, Dexter’s legs still dangling from it’s underside, off the ground. One shoe and sock dropped off, and some sort of claw like thing could be seen struggling to break free as the rest of the thing had. The maw of the creature began spitting out painful sounds, and suddenly the world around me seemed to have an unreal sheen to it, like the cheap plastic of a child’s toy.

Enough of this, I thought. Reaching to my waist, the familiar weight of the Colt 1911 came into my hand, and I could feel the sigil embossed on the grip slip into line against it’s mirror, tattooed onto my palm. As I began to speak the Words, time slowed, making it a physically taxing effort to push the weapon and my arm into line for a good shot. A burning began in my palm, and, as the incantation continued, spread it’s fierce pain up my arm and into my chest, searing my heart.

After a period I can’t measure, my eye, arm, hand, and weapon came into line for the shot, just as the incantation ended. Time stopped. I could see the white hot lines burning bright on the metal of the weapon, extending over my hand and arm. Mostly, I saw that the shot was aimed at the abomination a few yards away from me, and would strike just where I wanted it to. I said the final word.

Time snapped back, and I had to squint away from the bright, painfully bright, spectacle of the burning power of the round pulling the lines of heat down my arm, into the weapon, and through the space that separated me from the thing that had killed my friend. The shot made a burning line out of the end of the barrel, with heat and licking fire coming from it. It hit the beast just under the jaw, where it’s form thickened from the joining of the two upper stalks.

For a moment, the thing seemed panicked, with both stalks of it’s upper section flying down and slapping at its midsection. Smoke rose from the point where the shot had struck, and the sun-brightness of it flickered and spun as the tendrils surrounding it lashed and withered under the heat.

But this only lasted a moment. The horror paused for a moment, seeming to consider, and, as it became obvious to us all that it wasn’t going to be killed by this, it’s keening ‘laughter’ filled the air again.

I was paying attention to neither it’s fear or it’s joy. While it had been preoccupied, I had taken my second weapon in had. Though this weapon was also a .45, it seemed to only weigh a slight fraction of it’s brother pistol. As I swung my right arm into line, the weapon seemed to pull my hand forward, so that I had to spit out the three words of the activating spell as fast as I could. I didn’t even bother to aim, as the pistol would make the rounds strike where it thought they should. I spoke the Firing Word and squeezed the trigger four times, feeling the stab of the freezing sigil on this one’s grip shoot pain up my arm, covering it with freezing lines that flared and vanished instantly, leaving only the seared image on my retina and steam rising from the arm of my jacket where the frozen sections that had been exposed to the lines of force met the sections that had been untouched.

The four rounds struck almost in the same instant, forming a diamond pattern around the point where the hot round had struck.

The thing stopped. It yelped, then shook itself like a wet dog, then began to shake madly and whine. The light cast by the five rounds began to spread. Fire sprang out of a few clumps of tendrils, then a few more. Ice and hoar-frost solidified on other patches. As the abomination’s painful gyrations grew in intensity, whole sections of itself became engulfed in primal cold and heat, flame giving way to ice, frost burning away under the onslaught of insistent conflagration. Huge, suppurating wounds formed at the borders of the different sections, only to be consumed and exacerbated as each element spread and fought for space on the thing’s hellish form. As it beat its four legs against the unyielding floor, cold and ice covered almost one entire appendage, which snapped under the manic terror that consumed the keening beast. One of the head stalks leaned down and tried to push the stump of the amputated limb, now attached by a thin strip of skin, against the point of the break, but screamed as the limb burst into flame and melted the eye attached to the stalk.

I tore my eyes away from the spectacle of the thrashing beast, and looked back at Saren’s horrified face.

“Saren!”, I called out, “Saren!” No response from her, my voice bouncing off of her disgusted fascination with the pain of the beast that had come out of Dexter.

“SAREN!” I screamed, to no avail. “God damn it, Saren, wake up! MYKE!”

At the sound of her given name, Saren’s eyes snapped to mine. “Now! Do it now! This won’t kill it either! It’s just gonna piss it off! Send it back, before the rest of it breaks through!”

Saren gaped at me for a moment, confusion written all over her expression. After a second, though, she snapped into focus. She glanced at the beast, which seemed to be trying to beat itself to death, then back at me. With a curt nod, she started singing.

Saren’s voice cut through the awful sounds the thing was making. As her song continued, the thing diminished, shrank, folded back in on itself. Still covered in fire and ice, it was being forced back into the aperture from which it had come, into Dexter’s skin.

Even the bits that had snapped off from the cold or melted from the heat were pulled back into the husks of Dexter’s legs. At last, all of it vanished, and, with a huge cracking sound, the scarred and battered flesh settled to the ground, empty and flaccid.

This was all that was left of Dexter.

I turned and looked at my shell-shocked friends, and realized I had no idea what to say to them.

One day, mankind will conquer all of the ills of the world, of population, information, and government, and no one will want for anything.

And on that day, I think the living will envy the dead.

So... Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhmedy

Blake built himself his own little cubicle in the room we shared. By 'we', I mean he and I and about fifteen other guys, all of whom were part of the 1/503rd Infantry Regiment's headquarters company. We were assigned to a large room on the second floor of one of the buildings near the entrance to Fort Corregidor, just outside Ar Ramadi in Iraq.

The room had been partitioned off by various means, and I myself had used some wood panel, a bookcase, a bunk bed, and a hanging blanket to make my own private section. Blake had gone all out, though, well beyond anyone else. Along one wall, he used wood panel and two-by-fours, which he'd gotten from god knows where, to enclose a 6 by 15 foot area into his own little space. It even had it's own ceiling. The regular ceiling, about 14 feet high, was good enough for the rest of us, but not for Blake. I don't know, maybe he was worried about guys lobbing things over his wall.

He and I spent a lot of the nine months we occupied Fort Corregidor hanging out in his room, mostly talking about comedy. Sometimes, we'd compare religious views, which was always interesting, given that he's a committed Catholic and I'm just as devoutly atheist. But usually it was comedy.

We had, and have, a shared interest in making people laugh, and in what make good or bad comedy. For both of us, it was a way to get our minds off of the vagaries of being in the Army, and in a war-zone, and having to work closely with some guys who were, frankly, idiots. Blake had a worse time with that than I did, as he was a cook. The cooks in our unit weren't the best and the brightest. I most cases, they weren't very good or very bright at all, Blake being the notable exception. He's saw a lot of things that make good stories now, but that were aggravating as hell when they happened.

So, most nights, we'd end up chilling out in the hundred degree atmosphere of his room, watching Eddie Izzard or Jerry Seinfeld in Comedian, talking about doing comedy. We'd ping-pong ideas for sketches off of one another, using his computer to keep track of our genius, and we'd make plans for the day we were back in the States and out of the Army.

It kept both of us sane, or at least saner than we would have been otherwise. Occasionally, though, right at the start, one of us would look at the other and say, 'So... Caaaaaaaaaaaaahmedy!' This was the sign that we probably weren't gonna be writing anything that night, or even talking about performing except in the most abstract sense. It was our way of letting each other know that that night was just gonna be about hanging out, and feeling some kind of easygoing normalcy which comes along with spending time with a sympatico individual.

Iraq was a strange experience all around. It was made even stranger by somehow finding one of my best friends there.

It's a sobering realization

I like to think I'm a pretty well-rounded guy, the type of dude who's interested in more than the everyday pablum you find on TV. I was, for instance, quite thrilled to see that Akira Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai' was available for viewing tonight.

It's on right now. So is VH1's 'I Love 1975'.

One guess: which am I watching?

sigh....

Meeting people at a new school

Apparently, this happened on my second day at the Quaker boarding school I eventually graduated from.

I was sitting, eating lunch at at table with a kid I didn't know, whose girth met or exceeded my own. As an icebreaker, I leaned over to him and whispered, "Y'know, I've only seen two fat people at this school. Me, and you."