“You have to help us,” the woman said.
“How does it end?”
The early afternoon flow of traffic through the boutique coffee shop was gentle but constant. It was warm outside, which got a lot of people moving along Market Street, and a decent number of those people wanted to celebrate the nice day with hot coffee in a portable cardboard cup. True, a number of them wanted iced coffee, but this was a statistically irrelevant percentage.
Oliver was just busy enough to interact briefly with new people when they appeared before him, and too busy to fully acknowledge their existences as individual beings with their own independent realities. They were known only by the names scribbled in marker on their cardboard cups, or if no name was required—if they didn’t require the services of a barista—then by their choice of bean.
He was really confused, then, when Ms. Medium French Roast took the cup he was handing over to her and then asked how it ended.
“What?” he asked, as his mind tried to catch up to the new reality, which was that Minerva was standing in front of him.
“Mad Maggie’s Midnight Madness. How does it end? Great title, by the way. Ivor will love it.”
“Ah, oh. Thanks. I didn’t…” I didn’t think you knew I worked here, Oliver was going to say, but then he would be admitting he did work there. Somehow it felt like if he said that, she would suddenly realize it. Like before that moment she might have thought he was a customer who’d jumped over the counter to assist in the pouring and distributing of caffeinated beverages. And that—again, as a customer—it just so happened he was wearing the same color Polo shirt as everyone else behind the counter.
“I didn’t write the ending yet,” he said.
“I know,” she said, flashing smile #12, which was the one where only one side of her mouth curled, in time with her eyes, which rolled upward, a display of exasperation that was only taken in jest, thanks to that smile. “I mean, how is it going to end?”
He was a little confused by the question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I won’t know until I write it.”
She laughed.
“That’s wild, Ollie. Well finish it, I wanna know.”
Adding to his confusion was that it didn’t really even occur to him that she would have read the story already, or necessarily at all. After the last meeting, Wilson sent an email blast to the woo mailing list suggesting a process change: pieces to be discussed would have to be submitted in advance of the meeting so everyone could read it ahead of time. It was pretty obvious that this imperative sprang from the fact that the prior week, Oliver brought in an overlong epic fantasy. Minerva wasn’t a member of TAWU, though, so he had no reason to think she would have read a copy. Maybe she was more intrinsic to Wilson’s process than he let on.
A significant logjam had developed behind her in line, due to this incredibly brief, non-business-related exchange. It seemed as if nobody was all that put off by the extra delay. Possibly, if one is willing to wait five to ten minutes for four ounces of espresso, one is already temperamentally prepared for an ex tempore exchange of this magnitude. Oliver still felt the pressure to keep things moving, even if it was internally applied.
“Listen, I have to—”
“Oh, yeah, thanks for the coffee.” She raised the cup as a salute, and turned to walk off. He forced himself to turn away and address the next customer’s needs, when she returned.
“Almost forgot!” Minerva said. “Pallas, tomorrow night, are you in?”
“The… what?”
“Pallas! Have you been?”
His brain couldn’t make sense of the words.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The club, the club I was telling you about. Tomorrow night?”
“Um… sure, I think. Maybe.”
“Catch me later, we’ll work it out.”
“Later.”
“At the meeting, man. See you then?”
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah.”
“Cool. Oh, and the story is great. Wilson thinks so too.”
He took the next customer’s order, and card, feeling numb and distracted, and unable to keep himself from watching Minnie leave the shop. The place—it was called the Jittery Canary, and featured a drawing of an over-caffeinated bird on all the signage—was below street level, with a patio space that was open on good days. When she left, Oliver could watch her heading past the tables and up the brick staircase to the street.
Before she did so, she stopped to have a conversation with an extremely large man, which was a little interesting only because Ollie couldn’t imagine anything she and this big hairy guy could have in common that would warrant a verbal exchange.
But, whatever. He ran the card in his hand to charge Mr. Italian Roast for his drink, checked the clock, and thought about how he was going to tell Minnie he couldn’t go to this palace place.
If Wilson liked the new story, he certainly took the long way around in saying so.
“Horror, Oliver? Honestly.” This was his first note.
“I’m not really sure what to do with that,” Ollie admitted.
Sometime between the prior week and this one, he’d arrived at the conclusion that he should be challenging his mentor’s criticisms at least a little bit. He told himself it was because Wilson was allowed to be wrong about these things—that not everything he had to say came from on high.
“Well, I don’t know. It’s so… base. Crude. Cheap.”
“Cheap?”
“Easy.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Oliver said.
“No, that isn’t what I mean. Writing is hard, we all understand that. You sat down and put together a bunch of words that when strung together made meaningful sentences that stacked up into paragraphs, and that’s great. You can hand those paragraphs over to anybody and say, here, read this, and assuming they can read, they’ll receive the information behind all those words you’ve assembled in more or less the way you wanted them to. What I’m saying is that the information you’ve chosen to convey with this gift is something other than an exploration into the human soul. You decided to communicate with their animal brain instead. You decided to try and scare them, with—I think—a ghost story. Is it a ghost story? We never get to find out.”
“It isn’t finished yet.”
“Yes, but do you imagine a ghost will eventually turn up, should you choose to finish this?”
“Yeah, I guess. I figured I’d work it out as I wrote.” Ollie had an idea of the ending, certainly, and it was unquestionably a ghost story, but it felt wrong to talk about that before it was done. “So are you saying being frightened isn’t a part of the human condition?”
“No, no, I’m saying fear is a crude component. I’m saying writing has the power to enlighten and illuminate and address, and I want you to think about aspiring for that.”
“What if I just aspire to scare the crap out of someone?”
This elicited a gentle laugh from the otherwise dead-silent members of TAWU, which also evidently woke them from their slumber.
“I have to tell you,” Jennifer said, “It… wasn’t all that scary.”
“There was dread,” Ivor said. “And it has a great title.”
Minerva, from the edge of the kitchen, covered up a laugh.
“Dread’s not bad,” Tandy said. “I mean, it’s good stuff, Ollie.”
“Just not scary,” Oliver said.
“Not… really.”
“I haven’t finished it yet. I was going to build up to a big scare.”
“Well, I thought it was scary enough,” Bibi said. “My phone rang while I was reading it, Ollie, and I jumped three feet.”
“That’s a good question, though,” Wilson said. “Is scary something universal? That’s a real challenge, right? The old gothic horror stories that used to frighten us seem pretty tame now. Weeping statues, and creaking walls in old castles just don’t do anything for us now, but maybe a moving mannequin and a haunted department store is what
’s replaced all that. But you’re never going to write something that is going to scare both Bibi and Jennifer.”
“I think it’s possible,” Oliver said.
“I’m not saying what is or isn’t possible, I’m addressing the challenges of the genre.”
“But you could say that about anything,” Tandy said. “It could be a romance someone doesn’t find romantic, or a thriller people don’t think are thrilling. The best you can expect is to get the right reaction from most readers.”
“I think just about everyone can agree that Shakespeare is exactly as brilliant as we all say he is,” Wilson said.
“Shakespeare,” Ollie repeated.
“Or, Poe. Poe is as effective now as he was a hundred years ago. We might not find his stories as disturbing as we used to, but the impact is there.”
“So you’re saying, you expect me to be as good as Shakespeare and Poe?”
“No, Oliver, I expect you to expect that from yourself. And I don’t think you’re doing that. Do you mean to finish this story?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Give it a try. I think it would be good for you to have something finished. I’m also curious to see if you can follow through on the ending.”
“How do you mean?”
“Make it scary, Oliver. Something that gives Jennifer nightmares.”
Oliver didn’t stick around. Wilson had no other notes to give, and unlike just about every other time he’d attended, TAWU had nothing else to give him, collectively. He imagined if Wilson had opened up the floor there would be more feedback to be heard, but once the group decided any formal evaluation had to wait until there was an ending, whatever else there was to be said was put aside.
It wasn’t until he’d already left the apartment and reached the street that he remembered he was supposed to be telling Minerva about his unavailability regarding any plans to go someplace. This was perhaps just as well. If she knew where he worked she had to know he wasn’t making a lot of money—unless she assumed he owned the shop or something—and therefore likely knew he couldn’t go someplace fancy on his own dime.
Or not. Oliver had known a few wealthy people in his life, and they generally showed a lack of comprehension regarding what poor really meant. She could be one of those. She could also see him as a charity case or something. He was pretty sure that would be worse than being confused with someone who could afford to go clubbing.
Either way, he wasn’t going, and he hoped she would stop asking him.
There were certain parts of the city where the rent per month and the available square footage intersected at a point allowable for someone of limited means. Oliver lived in such a space, on the sixth floor of an apartment complex, alone. It met all of his needs, which was to say that he wanted to be alone most of the time and he wanted to live in the city all of the time, and so he surrendered certain basic comforts such as an actual kitchen.
It was precisely enough space for a single bed, a hot plate, a tiny refrigerator, a shower, and a toilet. The bathroom had a door for privacy, but he found that if he wanted the door to open and close he didn’t have enough room for the refrigerator, so he took the door off the hinges and stored it in the basement. (Ironically, the basement storage for the unit was larger, per square foot, than the apartment itself.) In the unlikely event he ever brought a girl over, and that girl elected to spend the night, he would have to make some hard choices about that bathroom just because, generally speaking, I can watch you pee from the bed is not the sort of thing most women would find enticing. Probably.
It took about forty-five minutes to get home by subway from Wilson’s: one train line into the center of town, and a second one out of that center and in a slightly different direction. Oliver was nearly convinced the two locations were, geographically, a lot closer than the subway made them feel, but had yet to examine a map of the city to determine how close, and whether walking was a better idea.
On the way, he saw a couple of posters he’d never noticed before, for a place he never heard of.
M PALLAS, they read. The vertical portion of the letters doubled as ionic columns holding up a roof, underneath which, men and women in bright colors were dancing. A disco ball dangled above them.
There was fine print, no doubt featuring locational details and what-not, but while this sort of place likely appealed to a certain sub-group of people, Oliver was definitively not a member of that sub-group. He also didn’t require any directions, even if he was going, because it was an odd but well-known detail of the city that all the big nightclubs in town were located on the same strip of road. If M Pallas was as big a deal as it was being made out to be in the subway poster, it was surely located on that strip.
It was a while before he realized this was probably the place Minerva had been talking about.
The apartment building had an elevator everyone was afraid to use. It creaked and bucked like it was riding the back of something old and powerful that didn’t want it on its back. It had a habit of stopping just below where it was supposed to, such that riders had to step up to get off. At least half of the building’s inhabitants also appeared to think the elevator was haunted, although the entire building—which was well over a hundred years old already, and which could be felt to move in heavy winds—lent itself to the sense that it was inhabited by spirits.
Oliver took the stairs, which was an adventure all its own. The handrail on the third floor landing was almost completely detached, every eighth or ninth step sagged to an alarming extent, and the hallway lighting was only hypothetical in several places. But he hardly even noticed these things any more.
The light on the sixth floor had a habit of flickering. He mostly ignored this too, but it was a little harder to sometimes, because the light bled into his apartment from under the door. When he turned out all the other lights, sometimes the periodic blinking created a kind of strobe effect that was hard to sleep through.
The flickering was particularly bad on this occasion, doubly annoying because it was taking him forever to select the right key to get into his own door. It didn’t help that he had a keyring that included all of the ways to lock and unlock things in the Jittery Canary.
As he stood there, fumbling with keys, he thought he saw someone at the far end of the hallway. It was a peripheral vision sort of thing, and it was probably just a shadow, but for a half-second he thought it was a young girl, just standing there, staring at him. With that thought came the kind of fear that manifested as acid reflux and some kind of vertiginous panic, until he looked at the space and found it empty. No little girl ghost here, just his imagination messing with him.
That’s the feeling, he thought. That’s what Wilson wants me to create.
The question was, how?
He got the key right, and let himself in, and ten minutes later he’d settled down on the bed with his laptop in hand with the last words of Mad Maggie’s Midnight Madness staring at him.
He held his fingers over the keys, and waited for the words to come. They did, but they didn’t belong to this story. They went elsewhere, for another letter and the newest assignment.
Wilson’s latest letter prompt was A, and Oliver had been trying to suppress where his mind went with that, but he just couldn’t do it.
A is for alien.
Chapter Three
Alien
Nobody knew about the aliens until the attack, and by then it was much too late. But that was the nature of surprise attacks: the very best ones tended to be surprising.
The colony was the seventh one established in the Theta Quadrant Time Well. It was the most remote of the colonies, eighteen standard years from the hub. This likely made it the last, both for the lack of other potentially habitable planets in the quadrant, and for the distance. As a rule—and it was an actual rule, if one interpreted Starseed Bible as a book of rules, which most people did—local spacetime travel shouldn’t exceed a radial distance of more than twenty standards. This was
because for as long as the human race had been seeding the universe, nobody had been able to figure out how to extend the average human lifespan much more than a hundred standards.
That rule was more for the sake of the families of travelers than for travelers. A colonist leaving the hub for Hockspit—the unfortunate name of the seventh planet in the Theta Quadrant Time Well—would be devoting only eight standard years of their life to the trip. But it would be eighteen years for any of their friends or family on either side of the journey. And if it was a round-trip, forget it.
This was why most freight was moved between planets around the hub, when possible, and by drone if it had to come from the hub. It was also why, in the unlikely event something that had never happened before happened—such as aliens showing up and attacking for some reason—individual planetary colonies tended to be on their own. It wasn’t that nobody cared to help, it was that nobody could get there in time to effect meaningful change on the proceedings.
For the same reason, the colonies were typically well-defended, sometimes comically so. About half of the planet’s workers were paid by the Intergalactic Matrix, and while a significant portion of those workers performed some bureaucratic role, all were trained and equipped to perform as members of a standing army, should the need arise.
The need had never arisen before, so far as anyone on Hockspit knew. Then, on an otherwise decent afternoon, the sub-orbital perimeter disappeared.
“All right, men, lock and load!”
Sergeant Jusp loved telling his men—a group of humans consisting of both genders, but never mind that—to ‘lock and load’. It meant, get your pulse cannons ready, and was essentially meaningless, an antiquated bit of parlance that made sense back when soldiers fired bullets instead of bursts of concentrated energy from neutron blasters.
Corporal Opie Telluride nonetheless took his weapon off his back and performed a quick visual check to ensure that if he pulled the trigger, the most likely thing to happen next would be that it would fire. Short of firing it into the air, all he could do was check the energy readings and make sure he knew how to click the safety off and on. He did this, and then he put it back over his shoulder. He accompanied this with an eye-roll that did not escape the notice of Corporal Epic Wyn.
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