Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

by Christopher Slatsky

  He didn’t respond.

  More like Mars Man.

  She immediately regretted the thought.

  Maybe this was an abandoned carnival. Or theme park. Something like the old L.A. Zoo hidden away in the hills. But why had Phoenix come here of all places? Without a stitch of clothing?

  And what was she covered with?

  Goddamn hippies and their weird ass sex games.

  Amy walked past the Gemini Man. This wasn’t an amusement park, but an expanse of broken down vehicles. A graveyard of scrap metal and deserted advertising statues.

  Roadside Muffler Men.

  Colossal fiberglass things, most built in Venice in the 60s to be used as advertising icons.

  Must be a dump to dispose of them. Or a place where they did repairs.

  Bird-head held a bucket of chicken out, offering a meal to weary travelers. A Uniroyal Gal that looked to have been altered into a waitress for some long closed diner stood vigil. Another giant held his arms frozen in position, as if the lost muffler would appear in his hands if he just waited everything out. The 15-foot tall rooster’s body was a dingy white, its comb still bright red. A leg had been snapped off, the stump balanced on a rusted engine block.

  Amy had seen junkyards out here in the desert before, but nothing on this scale. Strange how the place wasn’t even surrounded by a security fence.

  Hello? Bronson? I brought a case of Tenafly Viper.

  She was pretty sure the place had no rent-a-cops on duty, and even more certain that, even if there were, nobody would get her joke.

  There wasn’t any outdoor lighting, though the moon was bright enough to maneuver between the mounds of metal.

  A wasteland of American cars and trucks from different eras surrounded her. She touched the hood of what looked to be the remnants of a Plymouth Roadrunner. Kicked the tire of a crushed Pontiac Chieftain.

  Rows of broken down cars and parts collected in disorderly stacks as far as Amy could see. A graveyard of rust and broken plastic, windshields cracked into spider web displays, shredded tires, warped grilles.

  Real Route 66 Americana shit.

  She was turned around, no longer sure if the highway was at her back or in front of her.

  Something moved within the junkyard.

  Amy focused between a tunnel of twisted vintage automobiles. She wondered why some looked less like cars and more like the remains of planetary rovers.

  On the other side, through the opening, a light turned on inside an orange van.

  The night filled with the roar of metal and glass crashing down in an avalanche of debris. A massive Indian’s face suddenly filled the gap, his feather headdress a stereotypical anachronism.

  Something had given. The precariously stacked automobiles had collapsed, started an avalanche of parts that tipped the fiberglass Indian over. The clatter of glass and metal was the junkslide subsiding, not the racket from one of the Muffler Men running away.

  What the fuck else could it be?

  Amy’s field of vision was limited by the Indian head. She peered around the obstruction, through the diminished crack. She could still see the side of the van. A sliver of dusty orange.

  The vehicle’s door slid open. Dislodged a thin shape.

  Phoenix? Amy said with little conviction in her voice.

  Another form exited the van.

  Then another.

  A steady progression of shadows spread out into the junkyard.

  They were still on the other side of the wreckage, and Amy used to run track in high school—all she had to do was sprint between the trash heap on the left, straight shot to the desert, to the road beyond. Run until a car came by.

  If a car drove by.

  Every cab light inside all of the dead vehicles turned on.

  Amy wasn’t sure which way to go. Was it left then another left?

  She was discombobulated, but wasn’t about to panic like some hysterical woman in a shitty horror film.

  Fuck it. Change of plan. Monkey up the mountain of cars. Drop down on the other side.

  The growl of thousands of engines turning over echoed amongst the piles of scrap.

  She clambered over the auto graveyard. The passengers beneath her violently thrashed about in their seats as they eagerly reached out. The mountain of metal shook.

  Amy slipped, flailed in an attempt to find something to grab onto, slid down the smooth humps of vintage vehicles.

  Her leg snagged on something jagged. She fell to the ground on her side, the wind knocked out of her. The protrusion of fender that had sliced her skin wide open wobbled as if drawing attention to its culpability. A flap of knee lay against her shin.

  She struggled to climb back up. Blood made the surfaces slick and difficult to maintain a grip.

  I don’t wanna be reborn.

  Amy didn’t know why the thought wouldn’t leave her alone.

  She incrementally inched her way higher. She was calmed by the lack of any light pollution, the early morning sky so perfect and clean it was like looking at the inside of a polished bowl flecked with pinpoints of light. Something liquid about all of it, as if space was an inverted ocean and only the weird actions of gravity kept the cosmic fountains from drowning this world.

  She was comforted by the notion that the desert was where she belonged, that there were worse places to disappear.

  As she ascended the rusty heap, the junkyard’s occupants began to squawk in unison. Amy recognized their all too familiar announcement,

  WE ARE NEARING MARS!

  LANDING IS IMMINENT!

  ALECTRYOMANCER

  Rey could smell the gasoline used to set the pitch black horse on fire.

  Not the first time he’d encountered this burning horse, this vision, if vision it was. Came and went, day or night. Sickening scene unfurling before his eyes with cruel predictability.

  Others saw the horse too. Rey knew this, though they wouldn’t admit to such. Kept their heads lowered. Scratched at the dirt. The meek refused to acknowledge this violation of their world.

  Rey continued to hack at the packed soil with a short handled hoe. Thinning the lettuce, slowly moving down the rows. Acres of land extending to the base of the hills turned magenta by thickets of Chaparral Pea. All he could hear was the violent clamor of fire consuming that animal as it faded away in the direct light.

  The sun beat down with such violence the horse became a cataract on the horizon. Rey knew better than to investigate; he’d done so several times before only to find nothing left behind. Not even a scorch mark on the ground.

  He drank warm water from a canteen. There were fewer field hands working today. He turned his mind to more pressing matters. Just hours from now Little Cerefino would be fighting El Amarrador’s gamecock. Alectryomancer.

  Stuff of legend right there. The mysterious El Amarrador and his fierce stag Alectryomancer.

  He swung the hoe, gouged out portions of an earth cracked into sloppy geometric patterns. Poorly defined hexagons a child-God has clumsily scrawled across the landscape.

  Possibility of a strike had some in the camp fearing more violence. Talk of renewed vigilante attacks, like those against the CAWIU years back, was passed around. Four more laborers had disappeared in the last two days. Whether they’d abandoned the ranch to move on to other camps, headed back east, or met some criminal fate was unknown. Families came and went. Only the foreman seemed concerned about how many it’d been so far.

  Rey sat in the shade of his tent. He pulled a JONATHAN CLUB cigar box from the center of a tightly rolled blanket. Opened the lid, removed the book inside, set it on the blanket. Carefully lifted a small stack of photographs and placed them on the book. He looked down at the gaffs inside. Curved blades and thin steel honed razor sharp. All neatly arranged. At the bottom of the box, beneath it all, a glass bottle labeled Isopropyl Alcohol Rubbing Compound was securely held in place by wads of cotton, to protect against breaking if jostled.

  He randomly chose a photograph
. Gently turned it over in his hands, luxuriated in the glossy texture. Only picture he had left of his son and two daughters. Lost the one of his wife years back in the fire.

  Memory had become less reliable the longer he was away from home. Absent husband and father, past fading as he continued this grueling life of drudgery and toil. Hope for a reunion had become as rare as a can of peaches in sweet syrup. He slipped the picture into his shirt pocket, careful to keep dirt crusted hands from flaking onto the surface.

  He removed another snapshot. Anything to distract himself from the omnipresent hunger. It was a beautiful field of sunflowers, taken long ago under circumstances no longer apparent. He did recall that he and his older brother used to play hide and seek here.

  His brother would pocket a long piece of twine, loop it around a sunflower stalk, skulk as far away as the twine allowed, and then tug on it to make the plant’s head bob and sway. The misdirection fooled Rey every time. Never knew he’d been tricked until his brother admitted it the night before he left home to join the 57th Infantry Regiment.

  The photograph was a reminder of how happy he’d been back when everyone was alive and well. Poring over these pictures had become a ritual, a reassurance there’d been people he loved, a geography he’d once populated.

  But these were false representations of his past. A picture of a pretty field of flowers didn’t capture the pain of tearing his knee open on a rock that day, of dust in his eyes, the smell of the soil and sunflowers and the sound of insects in the air. These were just brief moments that didn’t convey the struggle of poverty or the emptiness that populated those long stretches when a camera wasn’t present.

  There were times he feared God had changed history to suit some divine whim. If so, these snapshots must be part of His holy conspiracy.

  This didn’t sit well with Rey. Had little use for a God that laid out all the rules beforehand but refused to play fair. Preferred the vindictive petty tyrant in the older books of the Bible. That one was reliable. Allowed mankind their dalliances and punished accordingly.

  Rey picked up the book. The burgundy cover was blank. Thin paper, like onion skin, yellowed, roughly cut edges. A journal of someone he’d known at some point? May have won it in a raffle. Maybe not. Perhaps he’d held onto it in hopes there was something within that could unlock the secrets of the burning horse. He no longer remembered.

  Didn’t know if he just forgot what he’d read every time he closed the pages, or if the words themselves bent into different shapes when he wasn’t looking.

  “You the man gonna fight Alectryomancer?” The boy stood just outside Rey’s tent. Couldn’t have been more than 8. Small even for his age, hair faded by the sun, vague familiarity to that tousled hair and set of his jaw. Wide eyes retained that vestige of innocence all children are born with and all God’s creatures have absolved shortly thereafter.

  “That’s right. El Amarrador accept my wager?” Rey placed the field of sunflowers picture back on the stack.

  “Yeah. He’s ok with them odds. He said, ‘Gambling gods ain’t benevolent. Don’t expect benevolence from no man neither.’ That’s what he said. El Amarrador is good for the cash.”

  Rey’s smile fell into a grimace. He didn’t appreciate being fooled by a little fool. “Real heavy plunger this Amarrador.” He laughed, humorless and harsh.

  “Alectryomancer will kill that goddamn gamecock a yours.”

  Rey grabbed the boy’s neck with such speed the kid didn’t have time to gasp. Stuck a thumb under his eye. Pressed hard.

  “Alectryomancer ain’t ever been beat.” The boy’s words were defiant, but his voice quavered with fear.

  “You go back to your papa or uncle or whatever he is to you and tell him he’s fucking done.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ done ‘til everything’s burnt up.” The boy gasped.

  Rey ran his thumb across the boy’s cheek, dirt under the nail leaving a line. Pressed against the tender throat.

  He imagined this face mangled by fire.

  “What are you goin’ on about?”

  “El Amarrador seen the black horse burn. I seen it too.”

  Shared visions. Something reached across the world. Spoke across vast distances from the confines of a void. Rey couldn’t understand how this could be. He leaned his thumb deeper into the boy’s neck.

  “What an awful sight a that beautiful stallion. The smell and the awful sight.” Kid cried slobbery hot tears now, moaned in terror. Pain caused him to pour his soul out—fear the contents of his bladder. “Stupid animal not even movin’ a muscle. But I know it done stealed away people from these parts. Lifted them up in the air.”

  Rey didn’t have the words to describe how the horse was more than a dumb animal; it was something eloquent that held the grandeur of the world in its grisly demise. Couldn’t elaborate on the dread that accompanied its visit, the sense of inevitability, of futility in its every manifestation.

  A portent of something incomprehensible.

  Rey looked at the child with an expression that felt foreign on his skin.

  “How do you know?”

  The boy fell from his fearsome grasp, cringing in anticipation of a blow. “I just know.”

  “You and this Amarrador better not be tryin’ to cold-deck me.”

  The boy ran. Disappeared somewhere between the jumble of gunnysacks and patchwork tents. Left a dark puddle in the dirt and the stink of scare-piss behind.

  Rey didn’t follow. His muscles ached from an accumulation of hours crouched in positions his body would never become accustomed. He sat on the pile of straw that served as a mattress, grateful he’d managed to procure a spot to sleep all alone. There’d been times he’d been forced to rent small bunkhouses with as many as 20 other men.

  He wanted to stretch out and fall asleep but the pelea de gallos was soon. He listened to a fork scrape its tines against a tin plate, scattered snores of workers already sleeping. The black horse’s frothy sweat and singed hair gasoline stench clung to his palate like grease. His stomach growled.

  How could the boy have known? He pushed the cigar box aside, opened the book. Every time he cracked the spine he found himself discovering something never seen before.

  He allowed it to fall open to a random page. It parted at a photograph he must’ve used as a bookmark at some point.

  He studied the people in the snapshot, scrutinized the masks they wore. Knew nothing of its origins, no idea why they were dressed in such a manner. The child was familiar, but most children looked the same to him. There was something ominous in their demeanor, as if the camera had caught them in the act of a ceremony that necessitated disguising themselves. Identities obscured like his God’s face.

  He turned it over to find writing on the back:

  Oh how I wish my children were near! I have always loved you, and though misfortunes necessitate a cruel benefactor, I remain [illegible smear of ink] with love and eternal grace.

  Tempus edax rerum

  It wasn’t Rey’s handwriting, though he felt as if he’d known the hand that had written it.

  He put the bookmark aside and began reading.

  NOACHIAN ANTEDILUVIAN ENGINES

  Primates were hardwired to assist in the construction of Antediluvian Engines. Phainothropus further exploited these innate primate proclivities and applied a coefficient manifestation in the genetic substrate of primate brain’s amenability to learning and manufacturing. (McConnely, John. Materials Resources and Engineering. Quantum Integrity, v. 6, issue 2).

  Saltationist (“Yahwaptationist”) advances amongst Phainothropus entities have not only been expressed as alien cognitions, per the vagaries of dualistic-hypotheses derived from mechanistic linear provocations, but also empirically demonstrated amongst proto-humans surpassing the viability of homo sapiens memory (Inoue, Sana; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees. Current Biology, v. 17, issue 23). There is a large body of work demonstrating extensive Gorilla beringei tool use in
the wild, independent of Phainothropus interference (Breuer, T., Ndoundou-Hockemba, M. and Fishlock, V. First Observation of Tool Use in Wild Gorillas. PLoS Biol 3(11)). Primate brain function is much more pronounced than Phainothropus monistic inferences have implied, purporting the deducto-hypothetical stance that proto-humans were predisposed towards the menial tasks and slave labor required to construct Antediluvian Engines in deference to Deluge-Impacts (Jarrod, Ignatius. Towards a Mechanization of Antiquity. Origin Reports v. 4, issue 8).

  The question of epistemic relativism, specifically as it relates to how a Noachic predecessor, aka Phainothropus, could communicate with primate entities or intelligences derived from esoterically-crystalline-Czochralski processes, is presented in confluence (Kramer, Janice. Integrae Naturae. Journal of Theo-syncretism, pp.488). A community comprised of Phainothropus entities most likely took up residence with proto-human colonies, proceeded to assimilate amongst the creatures, and then exploited their predilection towards engineering skills to build Antediluvian Engines in anticipation of the Flood.

  The sun was rapidly setting. It was too dark to continue reading.

  Rey held the book with limp hands.

  A dreadful weight.

  How could he have thought this nonsense had anything to do with those waking dreams of conflagrations and a horse that never died, just stood stock-still in the fields, blazing as if some internal engine churned hell in its gut? Maybe this book was a religious document, holy writ to remind him of the creeds he’d failed. Or those that had failed him.

  He retained a dim memory of mingling with the I AM folks, with various Rizalista movements. Even ran with the Divine Order of the Royal Qarm of the Great Eleven, though he was certain he hadn’t been involved in Willa Rhoads desecration way back when. He’d done things he wasn’t proud of. Gave himself up to various faiths in hopes he’d discover that kernel of piety he’d known from his youth.

  But the fire had changed everything.