by Aaron French
“You got something in your pocket, or you just happy to see me?” She dropped her bags and strutted forward, smiling. Her voice carried a sultry note that Roger recognized as arousal.
He mumbled another “Oh um,” and then her hands were working on his belt.
“I take it you’re feeling better,” she said, and his pants came open and the hands on him, he forgetting both the money and the unlikely circumstances of this encounter.
She led him upstairs and past the study just pilfered and into their bedroom, where she undressed, and had him twice. Roger found her a perfect facsimile of his wife, down to her softest fold, yet the sex was the best in years. The cab arrived shortly after.
Roger reclaimed his laden pants, leaving her satisfied and dozing, but before he could abscond, he noticed something on a table: a digital camera, of the same manufacture as that which had sent him here. He looked at it longer than he had time for, then jolted outside and boarded the cab.
***
Roger directed the driver to the bank where he had invested his and his wife’s savings, and the man drove. Once there, Roger paid with a hundred-dollar note taken from the safe money and told the cabbie he could expect another if he waited. The cabbie waited.
Roger spoke first to a teller and then the manager, who escorted him into a small room where he waited almost an hour. He was eventually rewarded an attractive attaché briefcase containing many cashbricks.
Roger thanked those who had serviced him and then back to the cab, a spring in his step. He was feeling good so he slipped the cabbie triple the promised sum and bade him back to Roger’s home, except a half mile further down. The cabbie said yessir, and drove.
***
It was late afternoon when the cab arrived at the trailer, a shape in the driveway, what resolved into Roger’s red pickup truck. His eyes glassed and he remained in the cab long after it had stopped, drumming his fingers. The driver waited patiently.
Roger at last broke from his selah and tendered another hundred and left without returning the cabbie’s gratitude. The cab pulled off as Roger walked on eggshells to the dormant truck. It was empty, but this assuaged him none: there was a filled gas can in the bed, and the door to the trailer was open.
“Sumbitch,” Roger said aloud, and snuck to the trailer. The briefcase bumped his knee.
He shivered up the steps and through the door, sweating morbidly. After confirming the living room and kitchen empty, he bellied against a wall and peeked into the hallway. Nothing.
He all at once sprinted for the bedroom, thudding threadbare carpet, but then gave pause in the doorway, looking skyward: the panel was open, and he couldn’t remember leaving it so. He drummed his fingers over the briefcase, then mounted the dresser.
The case went first, then him, struggling and panting as if dying or just born. The other panel awaited and he dropped the briefcase through before following it, winded and crying sweat. He darted out the bedroom and down the hallway that would soon be in flames, but the living room stopped him dead: his doppelganger awaited, framed in the front door, an identical briefcase in one hand.
The other Roger froze perfectly and the men exchanged a bald study of one another, lost in the absurdity still unfolding. Neither breathed nor blinked, eyes growing only wider. Then came gestures and screaming. Roger twice screamed his lungs empty, trying to speak but failing, his double showing no greater success.
The two continued this for a time, as though in contest, then by slow degrees quieted and stood staring. A rumor of violence passed between them, and it was clear that only one Roger would be leaving the trailer. Their eyebrows twitched in concert, and in precisely the same trajectory.
In a gunshot instant, the Rogers dropped their monies and charged, hands terrible, neck cords taut, teeth bared in strange smiles. Time stopped, and Roger realized, distantly, that he seemed to be rushing a mirror when there was none. His thoughts drew fractally long and he wondered what it would feel like, attacking his own flesh, spilling his own blood, warring the body known to him so well. An unreality to it, much like a drug.
When the two met, however, there was no bloodshed, but a wondrous sound as never was, thunder multiplied. Roger had time to register the sickly sweat of the other him’s throat, then a flash and heat, queer rumblings from the world at large, and he knew no more.
There was one final, untold shriek as the universe absolved itself, then all things ceased to be, in either man’s world and all others, darkness and silence forever.
Amen.
About the author: A. A. Garrison is a twenty-seven-year-old man living in the mountains of North Carolina, writing and landscaping. His work has appeared in various ’zines, anthologies, and web journals. His website is http://synchroshock.blogspot.com.
Amends for an Earlier Summer
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
You’re late for your midnight date, the séance you didn’t really want to attend.
You put on your ceremonial tattered black clothing and your tarnished silver jewelry, in the changing room, and then you followed the map that revealed the sidewinder-shaped gravel path. These woods are familiar. There are many paths that lead many places, but your sense of direction could’ve saved Amelia Earhart or launched an era of underground prisonbreaks.
That’s the thing about magic—you can shatter the chains from their moorings, unleashing cause and effect from a fortnight’s worth of bindings—but you’ll still have to pay the costs: now, in the morning, or sometime next year. Karmic creditors aren’t greedy, merely automated, organized and willing to wait. You can pay them now or you can pay them later...
It’s like how a guilty conscience can surge all the way from the future into the past, just because it wants to clasp pretty things in its wraith-cold hands. You can try to shake the trembling grip of the ectoplasmic touch, but it’s a charade.
Really, it’s times like these when you learn to embrace the mix of guilt, anticipation and dread. Eventually, you even learn to love times like these.
Finding the shore and the dock, hearing the lap of the lake, you remember that you’re near Five Mile Point. You wonder how these things are measured. What if the lake expands in a certain direction? Do they recalibrate? Is it the northernmost point? The southeasternmost? Some random and arbitrary point that involves where a local celebrity, or perhaps the pet wolf of a local celebrity, peed on a particularly auspicious—or even windy—morning?
Do small towns go to war over who gets to begin the count that measures the points of a lake?
All sorts of ideas tackle you as you wish you wore more tattered clothing. To be more tattered would seem humble or penitent, in not quite the same way that the least-dressed-up person at a party is sometimes the one with the least to prove.
Other times, the least-dressed person is getting paid to be the least-dressed, or they are a degenerate. Or they’re dying—or far too aloof, which is kind of like dying—and they don’t care what other people think.
Or maybe even the dead care what people think. At the moment, the dying being deeply attached is more likely. The dead finally tracking you down and wanting to do a lot more than make you black and blue seems a quasi-likely possibility, but you decide not to dwell on it.
The invitation to this little party said all the things you like to read. It made you feel special and dreamy and appreciated. Some would argue that it also granted you a small measure of the anticipation that you’re learning to love. You sensed the harbingers, the crossing of destinies. Fairly recently, you wrote a poem about how it’s okay to be guilty, how it’s okay to suffer for your crimes. It was a lousy poem that compared losing cellphone reception to composing a symphony about unrequited love, but it made you feel slightly better. It granted a modicum of comfort.
So, at your best, you knew they might know what you’d done, but you figured it might also be time for nasty bygones to be turned into even nastier bygones... but the invitation to this little séance was so extremely well-wo
rded that you were finally willing to consider making amends. Conversely, at your worst, you knew that you were from a small town. You didn’t have any plans for running away. You’d heard how people squatted in rundown apartment buildings in cities, but you didn’t have that option. All you could’ve done was hide in the woods. And someone, maybe far crueler than the specters you’re probably about to meet, would find you in those woods.
Is that your pulse pounding? Is there a vague tremble of involuntary motion starting at your brow and worming all the way around to the base of your neck? Are you getting scared or is it just a tension headache?
As you reach the rocky shore and wish you’d worn shoes or thick socks, you see three or four shimmering and shadowy forms out on the dock. The early morning air smells of sulfur and vengeance and the unidentifiable figures are chanting a song you used to love about a dancing man who was named Che and used to do the cha-cha.
No part of you is dying or numb, yet.
This is different from the changing room, where you wondered what you would change into. It’s okay, most people are guilty, especially when they’re full of tears and about to meet strangers who already know them, fretting about things they’ve done in their past that were horrible and snap-decision wrong. It’s just a form of consumption. Many acts find purchase and chew at people; it’s the nature of being human.
Sure, you feel like you’re a tiny morsel, lying atop a set of extremely large molars. You’re hoping to be swallowed whole, knowing that the grinding would probably hurt more all at once than the gradual misery of being worried at by peristalsis or slowly singed by digestive fluids.
What should you have changed into? Someone who wasn’t condemned? Someone who hadn’t done bad things? Don’t worry, just remember your Aunt from another country who swore to console you no matter what. Feel the rock of her bosom. Remember the accented songs, riddles and unusual stories. They might comfort you when you really need comforting, or provide succor to someone who really needs some succor...
Your Aunt from far away would’ve wanted you to grow up in a place where you couldn’t have hurt anyone. A better place, where every single creature was protected.
You’re hiding in the shadows, but the figures out on the dock know you’re there. They know you’ve accepted their invitation. The song has reached the point where everyone goes, “Che likes to do the cha-cha, dude... doo dah... Che goes cha, cha, cha.”
You forget about how you wish you brought your shoes, even though you think you had them just a minute ago.
Would you change into a bird? A seagull or a pigeon? A hawk or an osprey? If you choose to pretend that you’re a pigeon, don’t try to survive in an urban setting. The pigeons who try to make it in the big cities are half-trampled by the pedestrians. The pickings sometimes look good, but the air and sound pollution, and the fact that people kick you and cars don’t care whether they strike you or not, they add up to bad things. You have to live in weird places.
It’s a harsh metaphor, and entire unions of women and men will be enraged, but being a pigeon in a city is like being a stewardess or steward. There are a billion ways to tie a neckerchief and it’s hard to put on make-up and be friendly in a tightly enclosed space with diminished oxygen, but—regardless—many people still think a stewardess is nothing more than a waitress in the sky. People who would rarely do drugs at a place like a bank or post office get in the bathroom of an airplane, tie one off and shoot up, and then bang on the wall until the steward shows up and takes their drink order, the one for the Scotch and Soda.
You know these things. You know that a pigeon is more than a rat that can fly and that a steward or stewardess is more than a sky waitress. If you think about it really hard, you’ll realize that even rats are important. Rats are creatures of the Goddesses and Gods and we’ll miss them when they’re gone.
You probably even know that the world is a difficult and infuriating place. You know that you’ve been to this dock many times before—but only by daylight because the Five Mile Point (if it really is the Five Mile Point) closes at nightfall and opens at nine in the morning.
You wonder if they measure these mile points by the curvy shore or the round road that encircles the lake.
It’s not even sunrise. The water’s black, foreboding and appears infinitely inky and deep. Actually, you were here once before when they were closed and, no matter how much you want to hide from it, that time when you snuck in before and did bad things is why you were summoned here tonight.
You’ve been to this park called Fairy Springs and watched older women lie on their stomach, untie their bikini top and then get startled, jumping up exposed. You’ve seen men with mismatched socks, as if they’d gotten dressed in the dark, ball those socks into such accidental knots that they decided they could never be undone.
Yeah, you’ve watched grown men throw their socks into the lake because they couldn’t unball them.
And it gets worse. You’ve watched water-skiers who were going in opposite directions get their ropes tangled, heads half-detached by the burn of ropes before they were rushed to the hospital. You’ve been on a school bus that was struck by several hours’ worth of lightning and were even finally removed from that school when the football coach took you and a few other kids into a storage shed and made you do maturity rituals that culminated in far too many pushups and hot, sharpened coathangers being shoved between your ribs. And—only because you were a dutiful child and raised under circumstances that would’ve demagnetized even the most true of moral compasses—took two strange children to this very dock and set them adrift.
Because the sister of your favorite Aunt told you to, of course. Said they were bad seeds and everyone had to contribute to the purification. You used to cling to that excuse like it was a life preserver, but now the mere idea makes you itchy. The clump of stress that started at your brow has wriggled down into your back. It’s starting to impair your gait.
Even though it all used to strike you as technicalities, you finally see that it’ll never absolve you. You were the one who held both of them by their little hairless skulls and laid them into the lake.
Soundlessly, probably because of the ground-up Phenobarbital in their applesauce, they sank.
Any reputable expert in child psychology would surmise that the children wanted to live. They’d probably be right. The same expert would try to tell you that you were brainwashed by a sick, cloistered society that tortured you until you succumbed to its desperate wishes and agreed to do its evil bidding.
Picture the expert, inside your head, telling you that you didn’t know right from wrong and then decide the truth.
Maybe you should backtrack to the changing room and turn yourself into a big old crow or buzzard. At the moment, noticing that the long song about love, loss and the cha-cha has finally come to an end, the sun just starting to crest the mountain they call The Sleeping Lion, starting to warm the air, you don’t even feel worthy of being a vulture.
Eating the dead seems despicably hard when you did the killing and it was years ago. Butchery takes some time to bring maggots, but that doesn’t mean the maggots are impatient. Butchery waits without tension just like the creditors. And it took you a long time, but you’ve surmised that this séance is your invitation to judgment.
You place your first guilty and trembling foot on the wooden dock, feeling it swoosh a bit, spongy for how the floating structure rests on the lake. The muscle pain has spread so systemically that you can barely walk or keep yourself upright. You can see that there are three human-shaped forms, all dressed in hooded robes that are as stained and torn as the one you’re wearing.
The dock is rocking more fiercely and so are you. Your body is so messed up that you can barely make it to the end of the dock.
One figure looks more familiar than you expected, not a stranger at all and the other two are more grown-up than you would’ve thought... not looking any more like children than you did when you last saw a mirror. Their sm
iles aren’t anywhere near as waterlogged as you would’ve expected.
So here they are. By a small fire, for ceremony rather than light or warmth, your Aunt Basilica, favorite sister of your Aunt Trepidatia, is whispering to Samantha Devereaux and Jeremy Googachu.
By the laughter and gestures of greeting, they’re very happy to see you. They’ve been waiting for this moment to arrive.
About the author: Geoffrey H. Goodwin’s fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Rabid Transit, and Prime’s anthologies Running with the Pack and Phantom, among others. His nonfiction has appeared in Weird Tales, the webzine Bookslut, and Tor’s website.
Sanctuary of the Damned
Cynthia D. Witherspoon
The purple bruising that covered my arms spread quickly enough to cover my hands within a matter of days and soon became my death sentence. No fancy trial, no dramatic duel to right a wrong done against me, nor any glorious battle where I’d fallen declaring my love for Italy. Just a simple bruising that would not disappear marked me as an enemy to be condemned amongst my peers.
Tried though I might, no apothecary created a powder strong enough to cover the darkening skin, and no leather worker with the thinnest calfskin could fashion a set of gloves gentle enough to ease the aching of my bones long enough to escape notice in the streets of Venice, which were still skittish after the last outbreak of the Black Death some two years before. Thus, I was forced to conceal my ailment within the confines provided by my linen cloak, praying to Our Dear Lady the Virgin that the skin would heal back to its former pale shade.
Yet, just as with all the others – some forty-six thousand dead – the Virgin had determined that I was unfit to serve in Her Church or Her army; Her holy ears deaf to my pleas whispered against the cold stone of the Chapel floor each morning and night since I had discovered the symptom. Although I had begun my life in seminary, leaving only to fight Italy’s war, the Devil had been able to sink his teeth into my soul and hold tight. Perhaps it occurred one night over the gambling table. Or perhaps while I enjoyed the pleasures offered by the captured French women. It was of little matter now; the whens and the whys. I was slated to die, and soon, of a very painful death.