by Patti Abbott
Copyright © 2014 by BEAT to a PULP
All stories copyrighted by their respective authors.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.
The stories herein are works of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events portrayed in this collection are either products of the imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover images from iStock; Design by dMix.
Illustration of Kyle Knapp by Matt Tyszka.
PO Box 173
Freeville, New York, 13068
USA
A portion of the proceeds will go to higher education.
INTRODUCTION
--David Cranmer
THE LIZARD'S ARDENT UNIFORM
--Chris F. Holm
DUST TO DUST
--Terrie Farley Moran
TWIN TALK
--Patti Abbott
THE MALIGNANT REALITY
--Evan V. Corder
GHOSTS IN THE FOG
--Steve Weddle
THE DEBT
--Hilary Davidson
THE ZYGMA GAMBIT
--Garnett Elliott
About the Authors
Other BTAP Titles
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I'm running through a dense forest—fast. My middle-aged body strong as I soar over fallen limbs and push aside branches. I hurtle over a mound of dirt and shrubbery, and crouch down at the edge of a vast, open field as arrows begin dropping all around me. I see a castle—my destination—in the distance. Off to the right of it is a small embankment and a familiar figure motioning for me to join him. He shoots a slew of arrows for cover and I make the run while cannon fire tears up the earth near me. With my last surge of energy, I leap wildly, landing next to my nephew who'd been providing protection.
"Glad you could make it, Uncle David," he says with a grin.
I'm gasping for air but manage, "Wouldn't miss this adventure for the world, Kyle."
Together we travel on to the base of the fortress. I shudder at the sheer size of the wall that stretches high into the sky above us. I look at Kyle, his muscles are corded, flexing for the challenge of the climb. He's ready to tackle it head on.
This recurring dream has a habit of varying in interpretation. At first it represented my concern with getting Kyle's work published, in doing it right, to perfection, trying to avoid a barrage of sharp arrows of criticism, and also in getting his work out there, trying to climb that impossible castle wall of marketing and distribution. In spite of my own anxieties, I admired how he was ready for the challenge. Then, in lucid dreams the castle became death itself, my own human fear of passing over, and his brave wide-eyed fighter's stance. He had perished in a horrific house fire that twisted the steel girders on which the home stood. Could I face death with as much strength as he showed in my dream?
Dreams.
In March of 2013, Kyle and I were talking (in one of our last face-to-face conversations) in his home along Fall Creek in Freeville, New York. He was telling me how he thought that a human's nighttime voyages could be more than a breakdown of past events and a sweeping up of life's daily debris or more than learning about one's character and secret desires. He believed that dreams could be used effectively to reach one's inner creativity and, perhaps, to reach the beyond. I listened politely, careful not to appear overly disapproving of something I felt wasn't particularly plausible.
A little backstory is needed here to appreciate our relationship. It had taken awhile for Kyle and me to get back to just sitting, relaxing, and enjoying each other's company: talking poetry, books, movies, et cetera. He was coming into his own as a man and a writer, and I was slowing down from globe-trotting for my day job. During the first seven years of his life we were very close. I was the zany uncle who would swing him and his younger sister, Kayla, (who'd referred to me as a human jungle gym) high in the air, upside down, and around and around. I even got down on his pre-K level to play in our pretend rock band, The Skeletons. Years later, Kyle would cringe as we'd watch our juvenile performance on primitive VHS video, and I would laugh. In the home movie, he's wearing sunglasses and jamming on guitar, leaping from imaginary heights off his bed to the stage below and continuing to rock on while I banged away, off beat, on a tiny toy drum.
Then, at twenty-three, I entered the Army which was the beginning of a slow separation. As each year passed, my visits back home became fewer and shorter. We knew each other less and less as Kyle was growing into an adolescent. At first, we made idle chitchat, but, eventually, the silence between us filled the all-too-short visits. Our closeness had become a shadow of the days gone by.
In 2010, fate, thankfully, managed to wind back the clock's rusted hands … just a little. It would never again be how it was, but we did achieve some common ground in books and writers. Kyle introduced me to the work of Vladimir Nabokov and I turned him into a Charles Bukowski enthusiast. Some literary-minded folks might say I got the better deal but not so. Kyle and I were in agreement: a good book was a good book whether it was what is considered literary, pulp, or in the case of Buk, dirty realism. We reveled in talking about Sylvia Plath, J.D. Salinger, and the Beats. I know we were both relieved that the uncomfortable silences were filled with gratifying conversation and spirited discussions. As much as I would like to paint a picture of all sunny days, I can't because, as with most families, it was laced with struggles that barred an unfettered rapport. All considered, in a nutshell, that was our relationship from 1989–2013.
Back to March 2013 and dreams. I listened to Kyle talk about tapping into the undiscovered self and realms through our unconscious voyages, and while I did concede that I believed we can manipulate dreams for our own pleasure and use them to learn more about ourselves, I now know that he gave me a wizened look of, "There's so much more," and we moved on to other subjects.
Sadly, we didn't delve into a topic of common ground: dream journals. I had never mentioned to Kyle that years before I had kept a dream journal, and I didn't learn until after his death that he had also kept one on and off. When my sister, Meta (Kyle's mother), showed me the large stack of notebooks and papers he had left at her house, I dug through finding early poems, letters, and different versions of already published prose as I began preparing his posthumous release, Celebrations in the Ossuary. Then, farther down in the box, I came across several battered notebooks. Like an overexcited child, I yelled, "We have his dreams!" It may have sounded foolish in the moment, but for me, as someone who had missed out on so many years of his life, it gave me a chance to discover more about him on a different level—from the surreal dreamscape cultivated under cover of rapid eye movement.
This beguiling world where he lived, loved, fought, escaped mazes, and time traveled was begging to be further explored. Kyle had read the BEAT to a PULP webzine and books, and he was familiar with the work of each writer involved with this collection. With his family's blessing, I called on these friends, asking them to turn fragments of Kyle's dreams into short stories. I picked out a handful of thought-provoking lines (for this first volume: "the lizard's ardent uniform," "the laconic dust," "celebrated stomach of copper" and "two blurry rabbits," "my body was hanging from a conveyer belt meat rack being pulled into a sky," "I sold my soul to the devil for drugs," "a lonely hitchhiker was walking down the road on a sunny afternoon," "I went back in time … and
tried really hard to warn him it was the boots that he used to take-off like a space ship"), and I sent off these prompts to each writer along with a bit of insight into Kyle. The rest was up to them to create anything they imagined from the dream prompt, and they all turned in stories I know Kyle would have found positively engaging.
Only after his death did I find out that, like me, Kyle was a fan of Dr. Who, and in an episode from season three of the new series, when David Tennant, playing the famous time traveler, says, "Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person," I think of the twenty-three-year-old Kyle Joseph Knapp and the many lives he lived as a poet, naturalist, musician, son, brother, friend, and dream voyager.
He lived a robust life, and in a way he's continuing to do so … you're holding the most current example.
I hope you enjoy. He would want you to.
David Cranmer
Freeville, New York
June 2014
Kyle Williams was sleeping. He was sleeping, and this was just a dream. There was no monster in his backyard.
At least, that's what he told himself—although his eyes told him something else entirely.
His alarm clock glowed 3:17. Kyle's mother had put him to bed nearly seven hours ago. He'd been sleeping soundly until a few minutes back, when he was roused by a short, sharp rap that echoed through the night, and a subsequent lessening of the darkness all around him.
Light, faint and white like the moon's, spilled in through his bedroom window.
But tonight, Kyle knew, the moon was new. It said so on the astronomical calendar that hung above his desk. That calendar, along with his very own reflector telescope, was gift from his father—or, more accurately, a bribe—given to him shortly after they left Boston for Santa Fe.
Kyle's father had been a tenure-track professor of physics at MIT when Ardent Industries came calling, and Kyle himself had been happily ensconced in third grade at The Bellwether Academy, which he'd attended since pre-K. He wasn't present for the phone call, but he remembered afterward listening in on his parents' conversation from the upstairs landing of their Beacon Hill row house, his right cheek pressed against the balusters as he strained to hear.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Eric? Leave MIT? Uproot Kyle?"
"For the chance to have the lab of my dreams, and all the funds I'd ever need to continue my research? For the chance to prove to the world that limitless clean energy is not only theoretically possible, but attainable in our lifetime? Allie, how could I possibly turn that down?"
Apparently, he couldn't, because soon after, they packed their things and drove the family Volvo to their new home—a sprawling ranch-style house on the outskirts of Santa Fe, with russet-colored desert all around. Ardent paid to have their belongings shipped ahead of them, so when they arrived, their furniture was already set up—their dark-stained Colonial pieces looking awkward and out-of-place in this rustic, Southwestern setting. Kyle had barely spoken in the four days it took them to make the drive. He was too heartsick. He missed his old school, his old house, his old life. But when he walked into his bedroom to find amidst his old belongings, a brand new Celestron NexStar SLT Series 130 SLT telescope, his foul mood evaporated.
"I thought you might enjoy that," said his father from his doorjamb with a grin. "You'll see a lot more stars here than you ever could in Boston. Too much light pollution there to make them out, even on a clear night. But way out here, who knows what you might see?"
His father was right. In his whole life, Kyle had never seen so many stars as he had that first night. And thanks to his telescope, he soon found there was more to the night sky than he'd ever imagined. The pockmarked surface of the moon. The reddish haze of the Orion Nebula. The majesty of Saturn's rings. The monster in his backyard.
When that unearthly glow shone through his bedroom window and cast long shadows of his telescope on its tripod, he slipped out of bed and padded, barefoot and pajama-clad, over to the window for a look. What he saw was a beam of light shining down upon a figure in the darkness, some thousand feet of scrub-strewn desert away. At this distance, Kyle could make out nothing of the man—for at that point, he still assumed it was a man—so he aimed his scope in his direction. All he got for his trouble was a blurry mess. But when he dialed back the magnification and adjusted the focus, a figure resolved, standing in an undulating column of white. And that figure was not human.
It was human-sized, at least. Somewhere between five-five and six feet, Kyle guessed, although it stood in a strange, feral half-crouch, which made its full height hard to estimate. It had two arms, two legs, and a head, each in the usual place. But its skin—every inch of which was visible, on account of the creature was naked—was plated with thick, green scales like a lizard's. Its hands and feet, while broadly humanoid, terminated in nasty looking claws that glinted like onyx in the strange, pulsing light and seemed capable of retracting at will, because they twitched as if testing the air around the beast, and the ground beneath its feet. Its head, which was tilted to the heavens as though basking in the light's glow, put Kyle in mind of a boa constrictor. Its eyes glistened like puddles of black ink, occasionally clouding over for a moment when the creature blinked—translucent nictitating membranes sliding across its eyes like an eclipse viewed on fast-forward.
When Kyle looked into those eyes, he had a sudden, panicked thought the creature could see him, and he hit the floor. But when his galloping heart slowed to a trot and he screwed up the courage to peek through the eyepiece once more, he realized the lizard-beast hadn't moved: it was still staring up at the unseen light-source high above. Kyle wondered what could possibly generate so bright a beam. He followed the beam upward with his telescope until it dwindled to no more than a single strand of spider-silk bisecting the crushed velvet of the night sky, but he saw no source. He increased the magnification, and the beam widened.
Using that method—an upward tilt until the beam dwindled down to nothing followed by an increase in magnification—he followed the light back to its source, a spinning disc of deeper dark against the starry black. And as he zoomed in upon the aperture from whence the undulating beam sprang, his reflector scope amplifying the light's intensity, a strange sensation overtook Kyle. It began as a hum deep inside his inner ear, a rattle in his molars. And then, at once, he heard them.
No. Heard wasn't quite right. It was more like he and they—the creature on the ground, and the one with whom it was conversing on the ship—occupied the same headspace. Ideas flew back and forth between them in a rush, all filtered through the limited experience of Kyle's eight-year-old mind.
From the ship, an interrogative barrage of images. A four-star general, his face unseen, his chest spangled with multicolored medals. A discarded pair of coveralls, plucked off the floor. A policewoman adjusting her belt and putting on her hat.
Did you acquire the uniform?
The beast below's reply registered in Kyle's mind as a box checked on a to-do list, a big thumbs-up, a finish line proudly crossed.
Yes.
The ship, its tone somehow once more questioning: A hand bashing through glass marked IN CASE OF EMERGENCY and retrieving a fire-ax. A cartoon burglar wearing a raccoon-like mask over his eyes and tiptoeing through the darkness, a bag slung over his shoulder. A light bulb glowing ever brighter, and then bursting. Steam billowing from the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant.
What about the … and here, Kyle's mind struggled to grasp the creature's meaning. It was somewhere between power source and weapon in his mind. But before he could reconcile the images his brain had been bombarded with, the creature on the ground replied; his mother's kitchen timer approaching zero, a clock just seconds from striking midnight.
Soon.
Then, suddenly, the tone changed. The light grew … agitated somehow. Angry. Kyle's mind flooded with red-tinted images of an ear pressed against a wall, a TV cop wearing a wire.
They knew som
eone was listening.
The light blinked out, plunging Kyle into night's full dark. Kyle hit the deck, knocking over his telescope in his haste. A cold sweat broke out across his back and neck. He lay there in the darkness trembling for what seemed like forever.
Helpless. Exposed. Vulnerable.
Eventually, his fear of staying put overwhelmed his fear of moving. He belly-crawled from his spot beneath the window back to his bed, and then—gathering his courage—leapt off the floor, tossing his blankets high into the air. He landed in the boy-sized divot at the center of his mattress as they settled over him.
Kyle lay that way for hours, his fear of the lizard-beast bursting in to find him balanced somewhat by a child's faith in the mystical protection afforded by pulling the covers over one's head.
And then, as the coming sun painted orange the eastern horizon, he slept.
* * *
Kyle tossed and turned well into morning, trying in vain to catch up on the sleep the monster in his yard had stolen from him. He ignored his mother's 8 a.m. urgings to get up, and her attempts to bribe him with chocolate chip pancakes at ten. But it was no use; sleep was fleeting, and when it came, so too did nightmare visions of lizard-beasts hunting for him in the darkness—of spotlights zigzagging across the desert floor as half-seen ships above searched high and low. So instead, he lay beneath the covers, queasy from hunger and exhaustion both, but too frightened to come out.
"I'm worried about him, Eric," said his mother from just outside his door, shortly after her failed pancake bribe. "He's been in bed all morning, and refuses to come out."
"Maybe he's sick."
"He's not, as far as I can tell. His forehead felt normal, and he doesn't sound congested. I think he's … frightened?"