by Paul E Martens / Christopher Brosnahan / Paul Kane / Lee Harris
“It’s possible, I suppose. Somewhere. It’s a big universe. But what makes you think this rocket ship is going there?”
He squeezed his eyes shut as if trying to find the words, then gave up and shook his head. “I just know it. I don’t know how or why. I just do.”
She took his hand. “It’s not enough, Gerry. Even if you’d be willing to take that kind of a chance for yourself, what about the girls? Are you willing to risk their lives?”
He wanted to tell her, there’s no risk, no danger. He wanted to tell her everything would be wonderful and they’d all live happily ever after. But was that because it was true, or because he wanted it to be true?
“You know I would never do anything to hurt you or the girls.” He felt the spaceship in the yard getting further away from him, even though he knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
“Maybe one of the others will come back someday and we’ll know for sure that it’s okay,” Marta said.
He tried to smile and squeezed her hand. “Maybe,” he said. “Someday.”
Gerry knew that was the end of the discussion. For now. But ‘someday’ could mean tomorrow, or the next day. Someday. The ship wasn’t going anywhere. Yet. He could live with the way things were. He had Marta. He had the girls. And now his dream was more than just a dream. It was real. He could go out in the backyard and touch it whenever he felt like it. He’d been waiting a long time, he could keep waiting.
*
There were three hundred twenty three spaceships around the world, waiting for people who were too afraid, or too busy, or too happy to leave the Earth. Or maybe the right people just didn’t know they were the ones to whom the invitation had been addressed.
The ship in Gerry Brignola’s backyard waited and Gerry waited with it. The ship was like an old friend. Gerry would sit on a lawn chair with a beer and talk to it, tell it what was on his mind, what was going on in his life. He told it when Heidi, then Jill went off to college, when they got married and had kids of their own.
He’d fixed a tarp over the hatch to keep out the snow and the rain and the squirrels and the birds. He trimmed the grass around the struts. It never needed painting. It remained as shiny and as silver as it had been the day it appeared.
Gerry and the ship were still waiting the day after Marta’s funeral, after the girls and the husbands and the grandkids had filled his freezer with casseroles and gone home.
Finally he was alone with the ship and his dream. And finally his dream could come true.
It hadn’t been a bad life. He loved Marta and they had been happy. His kids and grandkids had been a joy, most of the time. And always the ship had been there, waiting.
His bag was all packed. Some pictures, some books, some music. Not many clothes. Who knew what he would need where he was going?
He put the bag down on the ground next to him and looked up at the ship. The ladder seemed to have more rungs than it used to. He felt in his pocket for his pills. It would be unfortunate if his heart gave out just as he was finally getting his heart’s desire. Maybe the aliens would fix him up. Hell, they could probably make it so he would live for a long time. Maybe forever.
He started climbing, pausing often to catch his breath. He didn’t mind, it gave him the chance to savor the anticipation. He convinced himself that it was the anticipation and not the exertion that caused his heart to beat so hard.
At last he made it to the hatch. He tore away the tarp and, for the first time in a long time, looked in at the place that would be his home for ... hours? ... months? ... years? ...until he got to the new planet.
But what if the ship wouldn’t take off? What if it had been sitting there too long? What if he dropped dead? Or what if Marta or Heidi or Jill was supposed to go with him? What if he wasn’t meant to go at all?
“Knock it off,” he told himself.
He took a deep breath. He wished Marta was going with him. He wished his heart would stop pounding. He wished, most of all he wished that he and the ship would take off together for the planets, the stars, the universe.
He stepped into the ship.
The End
About the Author
Paul has had over forty stories published or accepted for publications in magazines and anthologies including Rosebud, Weird Tales, Writers of the Future XVI, I, Alien, Lowport, Golden Age SF: Tales of a Bygone Future and 3SF Magazine.
Reviews
All reviews by Paul Kane
The 4400 (Season 3)
Starring Joel Gretsch, Jacqueline McKenzie, Patrick Flueger
Paramount DVD
RRP: £39.99
When The 4400 first came along back in 2004 – was it that long ago? – it was basically a mini-series, a mystery to be solved which was tied up at the send of the first season. 4400 people had been abducted from different points in time and then suddenly came back in a big ball of light. Each of them displayed different powers, for example Shawn (Flueger) can cure people just by a laying on of the hands, Maia (Conchita Campbell) can see the future. But the question was: why? Where had the 4400 been and how come they’d need superpowers when they returned? Was it aliens, a government conspiracy? Nope. By the second season we were well aware of the fact that it was people from the future who’d hand-picked them because a disaster was going to strike. However, we were still going through the ‘power of the week’ motions. By the time The 4400 reached its third series, things had changed quite a bit…
We pick up the threads in ‘The New World’ parts one and two, where regular characters Richard and Lily Tyler (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali & previously Laura Allen) are facing a crisis. Lily’s baby, Isabelle, which was implanted in her when she was abducted, has all grown up – literally – into a shapely woman (Megalyn Echikunwoke), leaving her mother to age rapidly (and be played by none other than Tippi Hedren). Isabelle is the key to the story arc this season, as she develops god-like powers above and beyond the rest of the 4400. We were also left with the shocker cliffhanger that Jordan Collier (the ‘is he good, is he bad’ self-proclaimed saviour of the group, played by Billy Campbell) wasn’t dead at all. Trying to make head or tail of all this again are NTAC agents Tom Baldwin (Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (McKenzie).
In ‘Being Tom Baldwin’ were introduced to a 4400 who can imitate other people, and who is framing Tom for murder – while creepy Matthew Ross (Garret Dillahunt) who is helping Shawn to run the 4400 centre tells him to get to know Isabelle better, and Kevin Burkhoff (Re-Animator’s Jeffrey Combs) is showing signs of an ability after injecting himself with promicin (the drug derived from 4400’s). The following episodes ‘The Gone’ parts one and two, deal with a visitor from the future (played by Alice Krige) who takes Maia back with her, and Tom’s attempts to communicate with them, in a rather dramatic fashion.
‘Graduation Day’ sees Alana (Tom’s 4400 love interest played by Karina Lombard) trying to find out what happened to her husband and son, and Isabelle discovering that Tom has brought back a way to kill her from the future. Then in ‘The Home Front’ Alana is arrested and Tom has to face a difficult decision about her future. In ‘Blink’ Tom and Diana are tricked into taking a drug which has traces of promicin in it, and in ‘The Ballad of Kevin and Tess’ we see Burkhoff fully develop his ability while on the run with Tess (Serenity’s Summer Glau).
Following this is ‘The Starzl Mutation’, a major episode which sets the scene for the end of the third season with Jordan turning up at Shawn and Isabelle’s wedding with amnesia. This leads nicely into ‘The Gospel According to Collier’ where Tom leaks a photo of the resurrected Collier to the press and gets his son Kyle (Chad Faust) off the hook for his murder. With ‘The Terrible Swift Sword’ Collier reveals his plans to distribute promicin to the masses – with only a 50/50 chance of survival. Hence the last episode’s title ‘Fifty-Fifty’ in which Isabelle is finally stopped in her tracks and Shawn winds up in a coma.
With the fourth series currently airing on Sky, this is the perfect chance to refresh your memory about th
e season in which the story arcs really came into their own. The future revelation stuff rubbed shoulders with political intrigue and Isabelle’s antics, making this a truly memorable television event. Included on the last DVD are the documentaries The Architecture of Series Storytelling which gives us an insight into how serial genre shows are written and plotted, featuring interviews with cast, producers and writers (it’s comforting to know they have at least some idea of where all this is leading), Power’s Grid and TVFX which focuses on the special effects (see how they created a faceless Maia).
What I thought was really great was the character tree, including short snapshots of the characters given by the actors who play them, plus a gag reel and a first draft screenplay of ‘Being Tom Baldwin’. Buy this set now, in fact buy all the series, because in years to come this is going to be seen as one of the milestones.
Friday Night in the Beast House
Written by Richard Laymon
Published by Headline
RRP: £17.99 (hardback)
In the 80s and 90s, Richard Laymon was part of the spearhead of horror writers that transformed the landscape of the genre. Known for his no-compromise brand of chillers, which confronted everyday characters with the most brutal and violent of situations, his most famous works are probably the Beast House novels – which began with his first published book The Cellar (1980) and continued with The Beast House (1986) and The Midnight Tour (1998). After his tragic death in 2001, we still saw periodic Laymon novels released purely because of how prolific this writer was, and the fact that he left several manuscripts behind on his passing. Friday Night in The Beast House was actually first published the year of his death as a limited edition by Cemetery Dance, and it’s only now thanks to Headline that it’s freely available for all.
We return to Malcasa Point, scene of the original Beast House murders – which stretched back generations – and now a tourist trap for followers of the macabre. As we found out in The Midnight Tour, the house itself has been turned into a tourist attraction detailing the grisly stories of how the beasts originated and how they satisfied their carnal desires and propagated their species. Enough time has passed though for people not to take it all as seriously as they once did. Which is probably why when 16 year old Mark Matthews asks the girl of his dreams out on a date, he stupidly agrees to her one and only stipulation.
‘I want you to get me into Beast House. Tomorrow night after it closes. That’s where we’ll have our date,” Alison tells him. Like any horny teen, he agrees, and sets about trying to figure out a way to get into the house undetected and then let Alison in when all the staff have gone home. Taking the day off school and almost getting caught by the local hot-shot cop Officer Eve Chaney (who just happens to be hot in others ways as well; let’s just say Mark fantasizes about her frisking him), he breaks in and waits down in the cellar – in the mythical tunnel connecting Beast House to the old Kutch place, where the beasts were originally bred. But when he finds a souvenir from a beast murder, which may or may not be recent, Mark begins to suspect that the Beast House might not be as dormant as folk think…
Now, I’m a big fan of Laymon’s work – I’ll say that right from the start. Yes, some of his books can be more miss than hit, but on the whole you’ll get an entertaining horror ride when you read his fiction. And I love the Beast House trilogy, especially the way it parodies the tourist industry which will gladly take grisly murders and turn them into big bucks (just look at The Ripper Tours in London). The whole concept of the albino creatures themselves, in some ways human, in others monstrous, is in my opinion fascinating – and would have made excellent movies (they might still, who knows). But I think it should have been left at just three books.
Actually, it might as well have, because Friday Night in the Beast House really adds nothing to the mythos. There’s no real sense of a continuation of the storyline, nor a picking up of events after The Midnight Tour, and the bulk of the novella is taken up with Mark’s attempts at getting into the place and hiding. We’re given pages and pages of internal thought about everything from how he feels about Officer Chaney – who is introduced, only to be dropped completely – to how hungry he is and whether he’s packed any sandwiches. The action only really gets going in the final thirty pages, and even then is over far too quickly to be satisfying, with an ending that pushes the boundaries of credibility to the limit.
At £17.99 for only 154 pages you might well feel a bit cheated by this slim volume, brought out ironically to do the same thing as the Beast House attraction itself and cash in on the ‘legend’. If you’re a Laymon completist like me, though, you’ll probably still end up buying it.
Coming Next Week: Fiction: Someone Else’s Paradise by Igor Teper
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Fiction Reprint (See page 1 for details)
The Library by Christopher Brosnahan
The day my sister died, I was in the library. I was doing what I could loosely class as revision, but if I was pressed for more information, I could not honestly tell you what I was doing. I know I wasn’t exactly working, and was instead reading an article on something, but I couldn’t tell you what.
The library was a strange mixture of modern and antique. It was an old building that had been clumsily modernised some years previously, and then extended. What was originally a small library had become a multi-media centre of sorts. On the left of the building was the main research centre. Many rows of bookshelves, behind which were three rows of videos, with a row of combination video/televisions. Moving upstairs led you to the computer room, generally full of first year students discovering the online world, and final year students panic-stricken and trying to write dissertations. Moving across to the right, you began to realise just how old the building was, as you were brought directly above the main lobby, and the glass façade of the left hand side was replaced with an older, brickier, dustier feel as you went through the doors to the right. There were research books here, but they were specific to the teaching students. This led you to a glass corridor, behind which were a series of painfully old computers in the next room
It wasn’t until my third month in the university that I found the fiction section. Hidden at the back of the oldest part of the library, behind the rows of children’s texts, was a small steel spiral staircase. When you climbed this, there was a small room, four small bookshelves which housed a strange, eclectic mixture of fiction books, which seemed to be ordered with no specific logic. There was also, next to the badly cleaned window, a row of small desks with reading lamps, and old, comfortable chairs. There was something strangely familiar about this room, and it quickly became my favourite area to study, or to relax away from everybody else with a good book.
My phone was on silent, in accordance with the library rules. Normally it was my habit to keep the phone on the table, next to whatever work I was doing. Although there would be no noise, the lighting up of the display would be enough for me to be able to leave the room, and take the call. But this day, I had neglected to take my phone out of my jacket pocket, and there it remained, hung over the back of the chair I was sat on. And so I missed the most important phone call of my life.
My sister was seven months pregnant at the time, and had been declared fit and healthy by the Doctor just the week previously during her third trimester scan. Although she had broken up with the father, she was upbeat, and looking forward to the birth,. She was as scared as she was exhilarated by the prospect. My parents had fallen out with her over the pregnancy and the break up, and as a result the bond between the two of us had strengthened. She had been at the university I was now at a few years previously, and still lived nearby. Perhaps our proximity to each other was what caused her to call me, rather than an ambulance.
That night, she had been walking home, and had been attacked. The person who attacked her had taken her
purse, and had brutally beaten her when she tried to stop him. By the time she had picked herself up, and walked back to her flat, pain overcame her and she collapsed on her living room floor. She dragged herself to the phone, and rang me, and as she miscarried and bled to death over the next hour, she called me repeatedly.
She first rang within five minutes of my having sat down in the library. I didn’t check my phone until three hours later. The number of missed calls alone was enough to send terror shooting through me. Terror which gave way to grief as I stood outside the library in the rain, and listened to the messages that she had left on my voicemail. As I listened to my sister die.
The following month was spent with my family, as we grieved, fought, and generally attempted to repair the emotional wound that my sisters death had left us all with. The funeral came and went in a stunned silence. After a month, the emotional drain had become too much to keep my parents and I together, and I returned to university.
My friends had been as supportive as only true friends can be, and the faculty had been understanding. I was able to slot back into my classes, without missing too many beats, and had been assured by everybody that whatever I needed to get through the time, I would receive. But before too long, the comfort that so many people were giving me served only to make me feel more uncomfortable, and one night I decided that I had to be alone for a few hours.
My room in the halls of residence was no good. I couldn’t isolate myself when I was surrounded by people that I knew on the other side of the floor, ceiling, and the walls. And the student bar was far too crowded for me to comfortably drink myself into an anti-social stupor. So instead, for the first time since my sisters death, I found myself drawn back to that small room above the spiral staircase.