by Steven Welch
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2018 Steven Welch
Cover art and interior formatting by Damonza
Published by Cave Branch Press
Also by Steven Welch
Elise and The Astonishing Aquanauts
Print ISBN - 978-0-9968014-2-3
E Book ISBN - 978-0-9968014-3-0
Cheers to the astonishing Stars of Florida Waterski Team. Thank you for fueling adventures without end.
For Cindy
Table of Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN THE PANTHEON, PARIS, FRANCE
THE TURN
PARIS - ONE MONTH AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
CHAMONIX - ONE YEAR AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
NEW ORLEANS - FOUR YEARS AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
BROOKLYN - FIVE YEARS AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
AQABA - FIVE YEARS AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
TERRY’S PLACE
THE GIRL WHO SAVES THINGS
THE HIGH PLACE
THE SUMMIT
THE CHECK POINT
ATLANTIC
SKY KRILL
ISLE D’OUESSANT
THE OLD SHOP
THE CHILD WITH MANY ARMS
THE LOUVRE
THE SHORTWAVE
THE RED BLOSSOM
THE OYSTER ATE MY BABY
THE TANK GARDEN
THE DINNER
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
THE MESSAGE
POLLINATION
SPLATTER
THE TRUCK
THE SPIDERS OF EILAT
THE SHIP THAT BREATHES
ONTO HELLNADO PLAIN
THE BLACK PILLAR
THE REST STOP
THE SEWERS OF PARIS
A MATTER OF TRUST
THE FIFTEEN
THE PYRAMID OF BONE
THE EYES OF THE OCTO-THING
THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES
THE PANTHEON
THE ALADDIN VAULT
THE HAT
THE HORRIBLE DEATH
THE SECRET THINGS
THE MOUTH OF THE MUSEUM
SENTIENT
THE FIERY PUDDLES
SOMEWHERE ELSE
RIGHT AS RAIN
THE DAY THEY STOLE THE SEA
LES SCAPHANDRIERS
THE SWARM
TO UNMAKE THE WORLD
THE ARSENAL
JACK THE DREAM BUTCHER
THE LAST STAND OF ELISE ST. JACQUES
THE ZOMBIE HEART
TELL THE TRUTH
THE FIRES OF THE SEINE
IMAGINATION
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Steven Welch was raised on comic books and pulp paperbacks, sitting on his Mom’s lap in a small apartment in Ankara, Turkey. He saw his first film, “King Kong Escapes,” in a Turkish theater. Nothing like catching a little Japanese monster movie action as a toddler in downtown Ankara, late 1960s. That left a mark.
He’s been a theme park creative director, radio morning show host, actor, convenience store clerk on the midnight shift, improv comedian, and line cook. Welch has had the good fortune to travel from Ecuador to India doing something incredibly unlikely, announcing water-ski shows, with the Stars of Florida - a roving band of water-ski warriors, mystical drinking shamans, and renegade cultural emissaries.
His wife Cindy and his daughter Sammi are his light.
Elise and The Butcher of Dreams is his second book.
Elise and The Butcher of Dreams
by Steven Welch
A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN THE PANTHEON, PARIS, FRANCE
We are Les Scaphandriers, The Astonishing Aquanauts, and we are impossible.
Remember this.
I love you my sweet and fearsome girl.
THE TURN
If you could see Earth from space at that moment when the ocean came back, here is what you would have seen.
The Blue Planet, dry for ten years, was an ashen globe in the blackness, no clouds, just the dark graffiti of mountains and canyons. You would not recognize the places you think you know without their being nestled in the once seemingly limitless waters of Earth. You would see just another dead world, not unlike Earth’s Moon or Mars, only there was still a haze of atmosphere and in that was the dust of everything that had come before.
Yes, the atmosphere was still there, but it was bleeding away. In a few years, had things continued down that road, the atmosphere would be nothing but a thin layer of gases barely present enough to keep the smallest things alive.
There were pockets of water, yes, in lakes here and there, some almost large enough to see from your vantage point in space, but these were growing ever smaller, the slender ring of green around them where plants could still survive was thinner by the day.
There was the mud of the ocean basin but that was caked and dry on the surface and great dust storms moved through the canyons that once were the abyss.
The Earth was in hospice and would soon be a place where no living thing would want to stay.
But then came the moment when portals like great soulless eyes opened around the world, some as small as a mountain and some large enough to see from space. Hundred, thousands, even more. And these portals connected Earth and a distant world called Orcanum in that moment so their waters could once again flow.
The ocean came back through these black holes in the fabric of reality.
She would once more be the Blue Planet.
Survivors knew the death and rebirth as The Turn.
Of course, once you’ve put a hole in a thing it is never quite as strong as before, and those holes, those rips in our universe, were deep and grievous wounds.
PARIS - ONE MONTH AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
Twelve-year-old Elise St. Jacques ran fast along the labyrinthine halls of L’Académie des Aquanauts beneath the desolate streets of Paris, France. She wore a blue jumpsuit with yellow piping and her name was stitched in gold above her heart.
The mahogany and stone walls of L’Académie were a maze, a riddle of blind turns and twisting corridors and endless book-lined shelves with mystery around every oaken corner.
So many artifacts, so many volumes, so many maps, so much of that which was odd and weird and unexpected.
She nearly bumped into the bamboo and balsa model of Le Grand Menton, or The Hardened Chin, the curiously named ship captained by Les Scaphandriers to the discovery of a vast methane sea off the coast of Tasmania. The intricate wooden replica was nearly twice as tall as Elise.
If she knocked it over there would be hell to pay.
Elise hurried. She heard voices in the distance, around three corners, past the spacious aviary now devoid of birds, and beyond the room where animatronic sea monkeys carved of oak performed a pantomime trapeze routine.
Faster. Past the book cases higher than a street post and stacked with volumes on every known and quite a few arcane subjects. Left turn at the copper and brick dive lockers, then right again past the plastic larch that played the entire Pink Floyd musical catalogue through a loudspeaker shaped like a squirrel.
Almost there.
Through the Chamber of Anchors. Hard left at Pablo Picasso’s rarely seen portrait of Josephine Baker baking a naughty cake. Below and under the “Passage of Tiny People.”
Voilà.
“What did I miss? Sorry. Crap. Hi.”
Heads turned, gave her a glance, then turned back to Zuzu.
Zuzu stood
before the group with her broad back to an aquarium that was nearly three stories high, a circular wonder of clear water and vibrant coral, of creatures from our world and from another as well. Solar energy powered the great grid of lights above the water and brought sunlight down into this artificial ocean in shafts of shifting turquoise and white.
In the aquarium there were crabs the color of roses and silver fish that circled and boiled into a ball and emerald eels with great jaws that poked out of the coral as if gasping for air. There was a cuttlefish that turned colors as quickly as a blink and had eyes that seemed to judge. There were rock shrimp from the planet Orcanum that would make the sound of an electric guitar when pulled from the water and tasted, when steamed, like cotton candy and gin.
The ripples of light refracting from the aquarium and the glass danced along Zuzu’s shoulders. She was tall and thick, with hair pulled out into a ponytail that dangled from the right side of her head.
There was no hair on the left side of her head.
Her face. It was strong and noble but scarred and the skin on the left was a web of weeping pink tissue. Burned and healing but the healing came slowly. Eyes the color of an angry sea stared out at the seventeen men, women, and children who sat on folding chairs in front of her.
It was a diverse mix as Paris was before The Turn. Different colors, faiths, ages, genders, and beliefs.
There were others in the city but not many. Most of humanity was killed and eaten by the things that came through the holes in the universe in the days just after the sea was stolen. Bit of a blessing in that, though, as the ocean provides Earth with much of its oxygen so in a way the deaths of billions allowed the few to survive as the air grew more thin month after month.
That was then, though, and this was now and these seventeen had come to hear the story of how the waters were brought back to the Seine.
“I was there when the world ended and I was there when it came back,” Zuzu said, “and I’ll tell you the truth of it so you can let others know what happened. There’ll be questions, and I’m not one for words, so this comes out once and then we move on. But you tell them, you tell those you meet as you travel, tell them the truth of it. Because what’s done is done. And we all owe this girl and my old friend Jules Valiance a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid, not by all the wine and ammunition on Earth. He’s dead, and she’s here, and we’re alive because of them. So, that’s that.”
An octopus the size of a cat slithered out of the aquarium and made its way down the glass. The group murmured and shifted where they sat but Zuzu did not move. The creature was odd, with what looked like hands and feet at the tips of his arms, and his skin rippled as if animated.
The cephalopod came to rest next to Elise and looked up at Zuzu with intelligent eyes.
Zuzu smiled slightly and winked at the creature.
He winked back. This was the Octo-Thing, and he came from a world far away.
“Now,” Zuzu said, “there’s work to do. Some of it has started but most hasn’t. There were great and beautiful things once, all over the world, and I know you remember them. While much of it is gone, swept away in dust storms or sucked up by those things that stole from our world, some of it is still there. Books and paintings and records and toys and whistles and clever contraptions of an erotic nature. We will go out into the world and save the marvelous things. A true Aquanaut adventure.”
Elise raised her hand.
Zuzu pursed her lips and stared at Elise. “Yes?”
“When do you get to the part about me?”
There was laughter and Elise made a “get on with it” gesture to Zuzu.
And so the men and women who were there that day listened to Zuzu as she told the story of The Astonishing Aquanauts and how there had been a horrible mistake that killed billions and then a grand adventure to save two worlds. There had been a girl who was overlooked by time, monsters of great cruelty and doomed heroes, an Aquaboggin that came to life, and a pirate ship made of emerald star glass with sails torn from a great swath of the legendary Fabric of Eternity.
It was quite a story and would have been impossible to believe had they not all lived through some of it.
When Zuzu finished, there was silence for a long moment, then someone passed wind and that made Elise laugh, and then there was a great round of applause.
The applause was, to be clear, for Zuzu and her story, not the passing of wind, and it might have been the first round of applause that our world had known in ten years.
Then those people did as they were told. Some were assigned tasks, to gather and to protect. Others were timid and chose to hide away, some were bold and forged their own way into the new world. But all went out and told the truth to everyone they met.
Still, just because something is true doesn’t make it easy to understand. The truth can be feared, misunderstood, and twisted until it becomes something else altogether.
The daring and peculiar tale of Elise and Jules and their adventure to save two worlds spread to campfires and dinner tables far and wide. As it traveled the story changed, as stories do, depending on who was doing the telling.
That’s how legends begin and that’s how they spread.
CHAMONIX - ONE YEAR AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK
The snow dusted Elise’s blue jumpsuit.
Zuzu smiled at the flakes drifting in the clean air.
They had not seen snow in many years.
The great circulatory system that powered life on Earth was stirring and circulating once again. More water, more oxygen, more wind and rain and mist. Now snow.
The surrounding ground was thick with green grass and flowers. These came back quickly with the rains as if the seeds were dormant beneath the dry ground and just waiting for that first kiss of water.
The French Alps could be seen in the distance. The great Mont Blanc was the highest of them all and there was snow on her peak where the tourists had once gone to climb and gasp and gaze off into Italy and beyond.
Oh, and that air, that crisp air. It had none of the dust that had plagued the skies after The Turn. The great masses of air that swept around the planet were adept at cleaning up the mess.
Mountains with snow-capped peaks, meadows of grass and flowers, pure air, snow on their jumpsuits. Elise and Zuzu would have been in bliss as they hiked along the babbling brook were they not pursued by carnivorous millipedes the size of cows.
Their mission to find and secure a first edition copy of Chattanooga, a volume of poetry by Ishmael Reed, had been a success. At least until they emerged from the remains of the old bookstore to find giant hungry arthropods waiting at the curb.
So much for archery class, thought Elise. Now it’s for real, I guess.
Zuzu’s hunting rifle was back in the little chalet they were using for a base, resting on the back of a carved oaken chair and doing nobody any good.
They ran fast along the brook and did not look back. The millipedes were just as fast and there was no telling if the things would run out of energy soon.
“If we only had a living ship with jet engines and machine guns,” Elise said as she ran.
“Shut it,” said Zuzu.
Well, thought Elise, might as well give the training a go.
She ducked behind a tall pine and pulled a bolt from her quill. The crossbow was a strong one with a string she could barely draw.
Elise was doing well in target practice but targets didn’t have teeth and a thousand legs.
She notched the bolt and took quick aim.
Zuzu slammed to a stop and started to shout a profanity back at Elise.
The bolt flew fast and true. The titanium tip pierced the thick hide of the creature with a sound like a thumb being pulled from a pie.
Elise notched another arrow and fired again.
A miss.
“Idiot,” Zuzu said, while still admiring the accuracy.
These were sand millipedes, and they were dangerous but dim. Zuzu did not think they wer
e flotsam of Orcanum, she felt that these things were a part of the invasion force that pillaged Earth at The Turn. These things and others like it came with the ships known by humanity as Razors. The millipedes were creatures of a dry planet, not an ocean world like Orcanum, and so they hid in mounds of dirt or deep in sandy pits waiting for prey.
Oh, thought Zuzu.
She grabbed Elise by the back of her Aquanaut jumpsuit and ran with her into the brook. The water was up to their waist and cold, so cold it felt like fire where it met their exposed skin.
Elise held her draw on the bow, focused on the sand millipede that wriggled and undulated along the bank of the running water.
“Oh,” said Elise.
The creatures did not move toward them.
“They don’t like water.”
Zuzu and Elise walked back the way they came and stayed in the middle of the brook as they went. The water was deep enough and soon the millipedes forgot about the chase and wandered off.
Zuzu and Elise did not speak until they were back in their chalet. The blaze of the fireplace was warm as they rested and ate soup Zuzu prepared from a prepackaged meal kit.
“You’re good with a bow,” Zuzu said.
“I can get better.”
“Yes, and you will get better. So, tomorrow we train with our rifles. Change it up.”
“I’m already better than you with the rifle.”
Zuzu shrugged.
“Not saying much. Be better than me with a knife and we’ll have accomplished something with your training, I think.”
“Seriously, why don’t we fly the Aquaboggin on these trips? And when will you teach me to fly?”
“We travel by land to learn as we go. And pilot training can begin when we’re back in Paris,” said Zuzu.
“I’ll be a better pilot than you.”
“Shit.”
Elise laughed, and the sun descended below Mont Blanc as the snow fell harder.
“I want to see the rest of the world.”
“You will,” said Zuzu, “there’s time. France now, then the world, yes?”