Obsidian Worlds

by Jason Werbeloff

  “Is this Mr. Popadopalis?”

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “Sir, I’m calling in connection with the recent passing of your distant aunt, Ms. Emily Connelworth.”

  My hand gripped the receiver.

  I stared at the name on the laptop screen as the man on the other end of the line enunciated the words in a crisp British accent.

  “You can stop right there,” I said. These damned scam-artists. “Whatever game you’re playing, I’m not.”

  “Uh, sir, I’m not sure what you mean. May I continue, sir? I think you’ll probably want to know the contents of Ms. Connelworth’s will before you –”

  I pressed the END CALL button. This spamming business was getting serious. Delivering packages to my door. Calling my phone. Not cool. Not cool at all. Was this even legal?

  “Yes, Bob,” said a voice on the television, “unfortunately all football matches have been suspended due to the recent events in Chicago. The president has declared …”

  There was a knock on the door. Three soft but distinct raps.

  Who was this now? I scrambled to find my jeans. Again. If this was another prank, someone was gonna get it.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling. I’d never seen dimples like that. Perfect indents framed her lips. Jesus, her lips. Her hair fell across her forehead in a lazy band of brunette silk.

  “I, Katya. You, Christopher?”

  I nodded, hoping that when I blinked she’d still be there. My faded pajama vest and unbrushed teeth leapt to the forefront of my mind.

  “Oh,” she cried, her cheeks beaming, “oh Christopher!” She enveloped her perfectly proportioned arms around my shoulders. My pimpled shoulders.

  I stood absolutely still, inhaling her.

  “It so good to see you, Christopher. So good.” She squeezed me tighter. When she pulled away, her cheeks were wet. “I thought today would not be.”

  “Katya? Is that your name? Katya, you seem lovely, really you do. And I’m flattered. But, have we met?”

  She buried her head in my drooping chest. “Christopher, oh Christopher!” The touch of her tears through my vest was hot and alive. “I come from Moscow to be with you.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Yes.” She dabbed away a tear with the heel of her hand. “RussianBrides.ru.” She sniffed softly. Like an award-winning lapdog.

  “Katya, maybe you’ve got the wrong address. I didn’t order –”

  “You deserve to be satisfied!” she shouted.

  Mrs. Cantor’s quizzical eyebrow appeared from the doorway of her apartment down the hall.

  “Um … yes,” I whispered. A thought crossed my mind. “Can you wait here one moment please?”

  She stroked my nipple through my pajamas. “You come back soon?”

  “Uh … yes.”

  I scuttled inside to the laptop, and … yup. There it was. Fourth email from the top in my spam box.

  Russianbrides.ru

  The phone vibrated again.

  “Mr. Popadopalis, this is Chartwell and Sons calling again about your inheritance. Ms. Connelworth’s will states …”

  There was a tap on my shoulder. “Christopher,” said Katya, “I look so forward to see you, Christopher.”

  “One moment, Katya … Look, I don’t have a relation with that surname. I think you have the wrong number.”

  “Is this Christopher Popadopalis of 406 Bantington Heights, New York?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well then, sir, this is no mistake. Ms. Connelworth has left you a quarter of her estate. After debt payments, conveyancing fees, taxes, and handling fees –”

  “Look, you’re wasting your time. Call some other sod. I know what happens next. You ask me to deposit a ‘small’ sum – a couple of thousand dollars – in your account, and then the money will be wired to me. I’ve heard this all before. Now if you wouldn’t mind, don’t call again.”

  “Sir, the amount has already –”

  I jabbed the END CALL button.

  Phew.

  I turned to my Russian mail-order bride that I hadn’t ordered. “Katya, I don’t know how this happened, but there’s been some sort of mistake. As much as I’d like –”

  Her lips were supple between mine. They tasted of mulberries.

  “Umm … Katya … oh, wow.”

  She flicked open the top button of my faded jeans.

  “Look,” I tried one last time. “I don’t think you’re in the right pl – Oh. Alright.”

  She giggled when she saw me. “So cute. American boys.”

  Why not, I thought, and grabbed the box from the waste bin. I swallowed the red pill dry.

  *

  Forty-five seconds later, sweating like a sumo-wrestler, I rolled off Katya.

  “So small when I look,” she said, her eyes round, “but when you put in … big like horse from my village.”

  I could get used to spam, I thought, as I swaggered to my desk. My new heaviness below slapped my thighs as I walked.

  I wondered what was next in my spam folder. But before I could check, a popup in the same purple and lime flashing letters told me to,

  cHeCk yOuR bAnK aCcOuNt!!!

  Why not.

  Four clicks and a one-time pin later, I stopped breathing. For a minute at least.

  I closed the site. Reopened it. Double checked the online banking address.

  “My fellow Americans, we are doing everything we can to determine what has happened to the city of Chicago and its inhabitants. So far …”

  I muted the television, and opened another browser to my online banking address. It reported the same. They all reported the same available balance. All of them.

  $54,601,245.65

  “Katya, I think we need to go shopping.”

  “Shop-ing?” she asked, uncertain of the term.

  “You’ll enjoy it.”

  “I bring my coat,” she said.

  “I’ll buy you a new one.”

  *

  You wouldn’t think so, but spending a million dollars isn’t easy. Six hours later, lying on a memory-foam mattress in the Ty Warner Penthouse at the Four Seasons, I’d managed to spend only half that much.

  “American boys know to treat a lady,” said Katya, sipping a glass of 1951 Penfolds Grange. She caressed my bulging stomach. The three gourmet chocolate slabs following the roast duck weren’t helping my figure. A bread and cheese platter occupied the lower third of the emperor-size bed. I’d been nibbling on the blue cheese for the last few minutes, while Katya told me about her village. She wasn’t interested in the cheese. “Smell like goat piss,” she’d said when room service delivered it.

  My cellphone vibrated. I’d set it to notify me for all incoming spam messages:

  TH/ PHTOS I/ TE CH/ESE ARE L/ST

  I opened the message. Scrolled until I could make out the body of the text through my cracked screen. “Holes-black dance in cheeses-blue,” it read.

  “Oh, you break phone,” said Katya, seeming genuinely distressed at the cracked screen. She licked my neck. “You go … shop-ing tomorrow for phone?”

  “Yes,” I said, and kissed her. She was so adorable, and her navel so sumptuous, I paid the nonsensical message no more attention. Not until Katya pushed me away.

  “Look!” She pointed to the cheese platter. Or what had been a cheese platter. The blue cheese – the chunk I’d been eating from – was no longer blue, nor any other color. Where the blue cheese had been was … I didn’t know how to describe it. A blob? An obsidian, empty space. It sat on the silver tray, pulsing in its non-existence. The smell of rum enveloped me.

  “What is it?” asked Katya.

  I crept toward it … toward the blob. Reached out to touch it. As my hand neared, the temperature around my fingertips plummeted. The fine black hairs on my knuckles frosted.

  But before I reached it, before I could get any closer than five inches away from the … no-thing, I felt a ripping in my chest. The cheese I’d been eating fel
l down into my gut, slashing and shredding as it went. And the cold. It was like that time I went ice-diving. But worse. Much worse. For the cold was inside me. Freezing my organs as the cheese sludged through my digestive tract.

  “Christopher!” shouted Katya. “Christopher …”

  I fell to the hypoallergenic carpet, and the cellphone fell beside me. The pain numbed, as the edges of my vision whitened. But before the snowy haze overtook me, before I blinked for the last time, I saw the message header on the cellphone screen. I saw it from an angle that smoothed out the webbed cracks.

  THE PHOTONS IN THE CHEESE ARE LOST

  The Time-Traveling Chicken Sexer

  Knysna, South Africa, Earth: 1908

  It was difficult to choose the worst quality of Agatha Wretched.

  Legend has it that her halitosis was so accomplished, the chickens she slaughtered were relieved when they met the knife. Others say it was the way she presented her monthly sermon.

  Erecting herself on the creaking Knysna Church podium, her tremendous mass thundered curses, insults, and damnations at whoever dared meet her gaze. “You!” She’d point with a trembling, sausaged finger. “You have sinned. Yes, I’m talking to you, Johnny Henderson.” The whites of little Johnny’s eyes shone wide in the morning light. “Don’t look to your mother,” Agatha boomed. “How will your mother save you from damnation?”

  Others spoke of the way she treated her husband, of unknown name. At the spritely age of thirty-six, Agatha had chosen a septuagenarian. Fortified by his oxblood bowtie and swaddled in a crumpled linen shirt, the aging man accepted Agatha’s daily abuse in his hobbling stride. Owing to his failing lungs, the elderly stoic struggled to keep pace with his wife. When he coughed too loudly, she’d lambaste him across his meager buttocks and shoulder blades, until the will to splutter was exorcised from his fragile frame.

  Nobody knew for certain how he felt about the beatings, given that he’d been mute since their wedding night. It was clear, however, that the old man adored his wife. Love swam in his milky eyes when she lumbered into the room. And as she delivered the very bowels of hell from the pulpit at the end of each month, unadulterated pride balanced on his quivering, wrinkled cheeks.

  Say what you like about Agatha Wretched and her misandry, she was blessed with a gift. Popular consensus held that Agatha could sex a chicken better than any farmer south of the Zambezi River.

  Her father was the first to notice her gift. It was her sixteenth birthday, and Agatha’s parents had thrown her a party, at which there was no attendance at all. Sullen Agatha Wretched had nothing better to do than to amble down to the chicken coop, accompanied by Lazarus, her faithful goat.

  Agatha wound her way along the meandering dirt path that began at the bottom of the garden between two ancient yellowwoods. People, thought young Agatha, were the problem. Not one of her classmates had arrived for the party. Not even Clarice, the girl with one arm.

  In a moment, she was in the forest. Dappled sunlight struggled through the dense canopy. She felt the chill of the forest as she descended the hill, toward the clearing that housed the chicken coop. Leaves and twigs crunched between her toes. Lazarus, hardly a year old back then, bounded through the forest. His stubby tail thrashed from side to side. But even while he inspected the shoots of grass permeating the undergrowth, he never dallied long enough to lose sight of his mistress.

  With every step away from the house, sixteen-year-old Agatha’s shoulders relaxed. Her jaw unclenched. There were no people in the forest. Nobody to tell her what to do. Nobody to laugh at her ‘thunder thighs’. Nobody to disturb the silence.

  She’d been to the chicken coop before, of course. To her mother’s chagrin, her father had carried her down here as a toddler. Some say the ammonia stench of the chicken feces found its way into her baby lungs, which explained her halitosis that in later years could fell a bull. No, Agatha Wretched was no stranger to the chicken coop.

  It was her refuge. When the teasing, and her father’s whippings, and the chores, and the schoolwork were too much, Agatha would find her way here. To the silent clearing in the yellowwood forest. To the chickens.

  And it was here that it happened. It was here, on her sixteenth birthday, sprawled on the filthy floor of the coop, Lazarus sniffing the chicks, that something elusive sparked in the folds of her teenage brain. It would take more than two centuries for geneticists and neurologists to determine just which synapse had fired that day. Just which synapse it was that would alter the prospects of the human race.

  What happened was this.

  Agatha, petting Lazarus mournfully, had cast her teary eyes upon the hatchlings in the far corner of the shed. It was her duty, although she hardly minded, to sort them. Her father had taught her how. She’d part the chick’s cloaca. Squeeze out the feces. Insert her baby finger, and feel around. If there was a bump, it was male. If not, female. Simple. The problem was, it was a big coop. Some days there were over a hundred chicks to sex. And a mistake was costly – place a male with the females, and laying schedules were obliterated.

  There were about a dozen chicks resting in the corner of the shed now, awaiting sexing. Why not? she thought. None of her classmates, those stupid children who never arrived at her party, could sex a chicken. The tiny creatures chirped and hopped about at the sight of her, and her heart warmed. She grasped one of the fluffy birds, squeezed, and was about to insert her little finger, when it happened.

  A strange tingle. It started in her hips. Grew and branched as it crept up her spine and over her skull. And then something in her knew. It was male. The chick was a cockerel.

  She inserted her finger anyway, to check the hunch. Sure enough, there was the bump.

  She lifted another chick, and then another, and guessed their sex. And each time, she was right. She could tell the sex by sight alone.

  At dinner that evening, she told her father about the fingerless sexing. “Impossible,” he grumbled. “No difference between a cockerel and a pullet on the outside at that age.”

  “But father,” said Agatha, “I can tell the difference.”

  He laughed. He laughed all the way down to the chicken coop the next morning. He guffawed and chortled. Hurled jibes at his daughter as they walked. “You think … hahahaha … you think you can tell!”

  But after she’d guessed the sexes of over twenty chicks correctly without inserting a finger into any of them, the mirth had drained from her father’s cheeks. “This,” he said, “is incredible.” Agatha noticed the way he looked at her just then. It was a look she hadn’t experienced. It was … respect.

  “But how?” he’d asked. “How? There’s no difference on the outside. Not I, not your grandfather, not any chicken farmer I’ve known, can tell the difference without the finger. Or at least without looking in the chick’s vent.”

  “I don’t know how, Daddy. I just know.”

  He placed an arm around her shoulder, perhaps for the first time. “My girl,” he said, “this is going to change everything.”

  Agatha sighed. That was twenty years ago. Now, standing in the chicken coop, the memory of her father long buried, she surveyed her kingdom. Lazarus was by her side. The ancient goat could barely walk now, but he still sniffed at the chicks. His tail wagged pitifully.

  No time for nostalgia, thought Agatha. There were chicks to sex. She bent her knees. There. That one in the corner was a cockerel. She was well on her way to cornering the hapless creature when something stopped her. It was something in the air. The hairs on her forearms stood on end. Her nostrils itched. She could just discern the scent of gunpowder.

  Lazarus pricked up his ears. Inhaled deeply. Stared with square eyes at a spot on the far wall of the coop.

  A light winked into existence. Brighter than any lantern Agatha had seen. And the color. A green-orange glow kindled the corner of the coop. The chicks scattered every way but toward the light, chirping their alarm.

  Agatha and Lazarus craned their necks. Their eyes narrowed
. What, thought Agatha, was this devilry? She watched the otherworldly light grow from a point no larger than the tip of her sewing needle, to an orifice the size of a bull’s testicle. But the circle of inscribed light shifted further, elongating to an oval large enough to hold her elderly husband. The thought of the man, even in the presence of this sorcery, made her angry. She cleared her throat, and spat on the ground. The thought of the doddering fool always made her spit.

  Lazarus took a step forward, his gray frame bathed in the sickly golden glow. Agatha clutched the wooden cross at her neck, and waited.

  A shoe. A leg, and then the rest of a man, stepped through. He wore a jacket just like her father used to wear, God rest his soul.

  And then another leg, twig-like, appeared from the void. A woman with a shockingly purple dress stepped into the coop. The dress was the color of the hibiscus Agatha planted annually below the house. A color she’d never seen worn by any man or woman. A color only the devil would wear.

  Agatha squeezed the wood hanging from her neck. The edges of her cross bit into her palm.

  “Are you Agatha Wretched?” asked the man. Hibiscus glanced down at the goat uncertainly. Shifted her weight from one heeled foot to the other.

  Lazarus retreated. Stood behind Agatha.

  She cleared her throat again. Spat.

  “Who asks?”

  “Agatha,” said the man with the tweed jacket, “I am Professor Slowborn. It is an honor to meet you, ma’am.” He took a step forward. “Agatha, we need your help.”

  *

  Battle of Kentucky, Earth: 2146

  Two hundred and thirty-eight years later, General Cthulhu Bravo hovered behind his desk, listening to yet more dismal news.

  “New England is lost,” said one of his aides. “And China will fall within the fortnight.”

  “The napalm was as disastrous as the nuclear solution,” said another. “Their metal soaks the land. Makes it uninhabitable indefinitely.”

  To his credit, the General suffered the steady barrage of disaster with equanimity. He dabbed his square brow. Straightened his spine in his hover-chair.