onetusk

05:54 am: Things now.
My personal blog has moved to http://www.widgettwalls.com. I will be retooling OneTusk.com shortly. Once I get everything working as far as the feed goes, I will advise.

I've recorded my Xmas story and posted it to Needcoffee here.

Happy holidays and all of that rot.

02:57 am: The One Tusk LiveJournal, Something Else, has moved to its new home at http://somethingelse.onetusk.com. All future episodes will appear there. Episode 47 is online now, and the Season 2 closer will appear in January. Another 24 new episodes will follow hard upon.

For those who want to follow it in your LJ friends list, a feed has been setup for future episodes here. For those who take advantage of RSS, you can follow the Something Else feed here...http://www.onetusk.com/somethingelse/feed/...or the main One Tusk feed here...http://www.onetusk.com/otjournal/feed/.

Thanks for everyone's support and comments as I plowed through these things. Maybe we'll see you loitering around the new URL.

06:44 am:

Something Else: The Complete First Season

Something Odd webcomic

The Sunday Before You poetry chapbook

The Tell-Tale Heart audio

11:35 pm:

Dr. Clark was summoned to Steven's bedside when he awoke. Steven was groggy--of course. This had more to do with the sedation than the actual procedure. Patients had to be put completely under--the amount of pain that the patient would undergo, if conscious, would be easily lethal.

Dr. Clark smiled and Steven managed to return a weak copy of it. "Welcome back," the doctor told him.

Steven took a moment to let the words sink through the fog in his mind before responding, a horse whisper: "Did it...did you...?"

The question was obvious, even if only half asked. Some version of it was usually on the lips of every patient who had ever laid here in the recovery room, working to rediscover the proper control over their eyelids.

Dr. Clark nodded and smiled again, "Did we? Yes, we did. And did it? Yes, it did. The procedure was a complete success."

Steven looked on the verge of crying, mustering as much relief as his exhausted body could deliver. Sometimes they did cry. That still got to Dr. Clark, no matter how many times he saw it. "So I don't...I'm not...?"

"Your heroin addiction is gone, Steven," Dr. Clark responded. "We went in and removed the drug completely from the receptors in your brain. No cold turkey, no withdrawal. All you need is a couple of days to recover and you'll be fine."

Steven knew all of this before the procedure, of course. It always helped the patient to be reminded of what had happened, Dr. Clark had found. When one has had one's brain played with, especially on the level that the procedure worked, memories could be a little fuzzy for a while afterwards.

Steven closed his eyes and strained a bit. Dr. Clark knew what was coming but let the young man ask. "But what if..." But the question stopped again and he couldn't proceed any further.

"Even if you desired to go back on heroin, you'd be wasting your time," the doctor explained again. Then he walked forward and tapped Steven's left upper arm. "The implant we've given you will keep the drug from working for the next two years. You can...always come back and have it refreshed if you're still uncertain when the time comes."

Dr. Clark leaned forward and ruffled the young man's hair. Young man, indeed. Steven was twenty-two. Far too young to have his body as devastated by addiction as it was. Months from now, he'd be healthy again. Able to hold down a job. Have a life. A family. "But somehow I doubt you'll need it. Here," he said. The doctor produced from the side of his lab coat a sealed vial. Inside was a dark-bluish thick liquid. Someone appeared to have melted down a bruise.

"Is that?" Steven asked.

"Yes," the doctor said, still smiling. "This is your addiction, Steven. This is what it looks like following the procedure, following its extraction from your brain. Say goodbye to it, Steven. You don't need it any longer."

Steven managed a hoarse laugh. A laugh of relief, of freedom. It was marvelous to hear. "Bye," he called out to his tormentor, safe within the vial. Steven blinked a couple of times, slowly, and said in a slur, "Tired again..."

Dr. Clark nodded. "You've been through a lot. It just gets better from here. You get some sleep. I'll check on you in the morning."

Steven nodded, already half gone. Dr. Clark made his way out of the room, shutting the door softly behind him.

Judy, his nurse, was waiting for him. She handed him the clipboard and he took the stylus from behind his ear and called up the next set of charts. "Which room?" he asked.

"Room 12," Judy said simply. "He's prepped and ready for you."

Dr. Clark nodded to her and she went. Down the hall and a right-hand turn, and there was Room 12. The door recognized his thumb and allowed him to enter.

Strapped prone onto the table in the center of the room was his next patient. "Mr. Curtis Graham," Dr. Clark said, making the owner of the name give a small squeak and jump in the restraints.

Curtis' head shifted to watch Dr. Clark as the man in the lab coat paced. Shifted only a few degrees to the left, since the harness for his head restricted his movement. The patient's breathing was labored, working to breathe through his nose, his mouth pinned and held open by the leather bit. He had given up trying to work with his ankles and wrists. Either that, or the sedation was taking hold. Probably both.

"I understand you defaulted on a loan," the doctor said, consulting his clipboard. "Yes, I see the amount here. That's impressive. I assume considering who your patron is, it was a gambling debt." He sighed. "You must be utterly without hope of paying it back if you were brought here to me. Sadly, it's men like you that must be made an example of. And that's my job."

The doctor stopped, looking down at Curtis from the foot of the table. "I suppose you were told what would happen if you didn't pay up."

Curtis looked at him with wide eyes and finally nodded.

"Then," the doctor said, retrieving the vial from his pocket and holding it up, "I suppose you can imagine what this is."

Curtis looked at the vial and then began to twist in the restraints, grunting against the bit. "Settle down, Mr. Graham. Settle down this instant," the doctor said, though he made no effort to do anything but flip through more pages on the screen of his clipboard with the stylus. "It's either you or your daughter, Mr. Graham. I could have her brought in here in your place." The man's struggles ceased immediately. "She's nine, isn't she?"

Curtis' eyes began to well up with tears. Dr. Clark looked up from his clipboard and smiled thinly, "I suppose this means you've decided? Good. I'll see you after the procedure."

Dr. Clark left the room and joined Judy in the hallway again. "How much should we leave him with after the procedure?"

Dr. Clark consulted the clipboard again. "For this debt? I'd say give him a week of high quality. That's all. Let him forage for the rest."

Judy nodded, "Yes, doctor."

Dr. Clark added, "And could you please call Ishuro-san once the procedure's finished and let him know the outcome."

Judy nodded again. "Yes, doctor. Of course."

Dr. Clark flipped to his calendar and looked it over, humming to himself as he walked down the hallway to his office. Two more patients this afternoon, then dinner with his wife. Tomorrow, a half-day for golf. Then the weekend.

05:24 am:

In the end, despite the teeth gnashing and garment rending of the privacy groups, it was the over-surveillance of humanity that saved us, in my not so humble opinion. The cameras spread exponentially after the three-pronged attacks of 2008. The London and Los Angeles attacks were bad, but no one could get the satellite images of Sydney out of their heads for weeks after. And everyone was caught within a fortnight but the crew behind Sydney. Why? No surveillance, we were told.

And so, they started to go up. Everywhere. Where there were none before they appeared and where there were already some they were doubled.

Media centers in homes had cameras for two-way video chat. They were a basic feature of all displays of any kind. And it was quickly determined that, thanks to government's manipulation behind the scenes in putting chips into the centers before they were built, an exploit could be used to turn the cameras on and leave them on. And once the datastreams were there, of course, they could be hacked. And they were. If you wanted to interact with the world at all, then privacy became a thing of the past.

The thing about having something that prevalent in your life is that eventually, you'll grow used to it. And so people did. They gave up. And many of them apparently decided: you want to see everything, they said, fine...here's everything.

Normal ordinary people doing it on the couch. Doing it in the bathtub. Doing it in large groups, doing it solo. And the rest of us became riveted to our screens, whether we admitted it or not. VSS notification feeds would pop up with a new attraction in minutes, algorithims were created that could recognize the movements associated with sex and flag them for perusal by the masses. Some people left their channels open on purpose, some left them easy to hack, knowing that was part of the lure. Part of what kept it taboo. Net orgies became triumphs of coordination as hundreds of people would tune into a single feed and alternate images of the rest of them going at it like mad. Records for simultaneous orgasms were made and then broken. Five hundred twelve people on all seven continents was the last one I had heard.

And, oh, the poor porn industry. How could they possibly compete with the imagination of the ever growing crowds of sex hungry people? Nothing can compete with real people not only acting out your fantasies, but inviting you to join as well. And collaborate and improve the experience.

The walls came down. People realized their own dirty secrets weren't nearly so dirty as they imagined. There's always a bigger freak than you, sweetheart, the world says to them. And emboldened by safety in numbers, they step up and take control of their own sexual lives.

And those who wanted to put a stop to this? Who rattled on and on about family values and decency? They cited polls in which the majority of citizens wanted an end to this flagrant use of what was supposed to be keeping us safe (never mind that violent crime had plummeted once everybody became too busy playing the voyeur to kill one another) but the real numbers told the truth. One hundred million unique visitors to various and sundry sex hubs and yet you're telling us 78% of people are against this? Sure. Soon enough, they found their web histories on the Net for all to see, and their cameras, which they had been assured were secure, were of course not. When the CSPAN net feed was hacked and replaced with the Congressional Committee for Morals chairman whacking off to "Schoolgirl Petting Zoo," it was pretty much all over.

I never had a problem with this new lifestyle. You could consider me an early adopter. And, you know, I am a guy after all. So I'm an old pro and always looking for new and exciting things. The other day, my girlfriend Cheryl called my girlfriend Amanda into the media room. Cheryl's a former nun who freed herself from a convent. She kept her habit, though. And that's good for some fun. Amanda is almost completely Irish, with fire red hair and the sexiest accent you have ever heard in your life.

Cheryl had hacked a signal expecting to find a basement naked wrestling feed. Instead, a young woman in her twenties was sitting, fully clothed, staring at the screen and watching a documentary on her media center.

"She's not doing anything," Amanda pointed out.

"I know," Cheryl replied, grinning. "Fuck, that is hot."

05:31 pm:

Rarer than unlinked people are unlinked places. While I've never found any proof of this, I believe that you can discover more unlinked places in large metropolitan areas: Mexico City, Mumbai, London, and the like. This is due, according to my theory at least, to the massive amounts of life and energy concentrated in one area. Just as extremely large objects deform space with their weight, so too do such large cities deform reality.

And when I speak of an unlinked place, I don't mean a door that once in its entire existence happens to have a Mayan Empire outward post in place of Reykjavik behind it instead of a closet. Or a thin membrane that separates one reality from another with potentially lethal differences in the laws of physics lying in wait behind the door to a kitchen cabinet for all of three seconds. These things happen more often than you know.

I mean a place that truly, permanently, points to places it should not. Here's a perfect example: there is a hotel in New York City with a forgotten service elevator. The doors will only open to allow entry on the seventeenth floor and the car you find there will only take you to the sub-basement.

Of course, it's not really that building's sub-basement. It's any sub-basement of any other building in New York City, and at any time you choose to arrive there. And while that may sound like it has a limited, albeit interesting, number of potential applications, I've found that many practitioners and other unlinked individuals will give out the location and method of access to those who have discovered their secret and pester them incessantly for information.

One, an acquaintance of mine who's known to all only as Ridley, is particularly susceptible to being bothered as he can always be found in one place; he cannot move elsewhere due to the terms under which he abandoned Heaven.

Ridley told me that at one point he was accosted on his property by three young men armed with guns. Again, due to his terms, he cannot attack others, even in self-defense. The young men knew a sliver of Ridley's past and demanded access to some arcane knowledge that would help further their criminal ambitions.

Ridley calmly told the trio of the elevator, and of how it was to be used. What a way to bypass security, he told them, by suddenly appearing in the building's sub-basement without ever having to actually break in? He suggested a target as well: a famous jewelry store in Manhattan, which during the 1940s would have nowhere near the level of security it did today. Use the elevator, Ridley said, go back before they could have stopped you, and steal to your heart's content.

After the prerequisite threats to return if Ridley was lying, the men did as he suggested, and were never heard from again. What he and others always neglect to tell the source of their annoyance is that it's a one way trip. You can go to any New York sub-basement at any time during the city's history...you just can't get back.

Assuming that they were able to steal something from the store, they would have had to exit the building once it became clear the elevator wouldn't take them back. I imagine they either wound up in prison or an in asylum. Being stranded in a time different from your own is a good way to be either labeled insane or eventually driven that way. I know this better than I'd like to admit.

I can only imagine how many times that elevator has been used to that purpose. Only the once by Ridley, that I'm aware of. He's a nice enough fellow, though easily irritated. And he detests guns.

01:29 am:

The pitchman's harangue drew my attention to the scaffolding. I know not why I looked up. It's easy to be distracted, I suppose, considering the offal and ocher down here on the cobbles. The stench of the day was something that resembled wet, spoiled cabbage. Easy enough to only need the glimmer of a reason to look up.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the pitchman said again. "It falls to me to speak to you about an incredible new invention being adopted by our gracious sovereign in order that his government may keep in touch with our holdings amongst the European continent."

The man carried a cane, which he used for emphasizing gesticulations. He certainly did not need it for walking, since he was pacing back and forth across the front of the stage like some sleek predator. "Some of you, I'm sure, have family or friends, perhaps business dealings, out in Europe. So you know, or at least are aware, of the deplorable condition of the lines of communication between here and the Colonies."

This part of his pitch I knew well and could personally vouch for. My sister and her husband were in Araby on his oil estate. Easily nine or ten months would go by as a letter from one of us struggled to meet the other. And while our correspondence was always important, at least for us, I could not fathom trying to conduct governmental or other business in such a fashion.

"Imagine!" the pitchman went on, "if you could send a message and have it be received...in minutes! Imagine what that could do for his majesty's government!"

I didn't need any prodding to consider what such an increase in speed might mean. Nor did I really pause to consider the military applications of such a device.

With this, the pitchman made a gesture and a burly man stepped forward to pull a large tarpaulin down. It had been up at the back of the stage as a sort of backdrop, and revealed the devices of which he had been speaking. And it was a pair of devices, which made perfect sense, for you would need to send, yes, but have a place to send to as well.

Imagine, if you will, beginning with the legs and body of a squat harpsichord. Where the keys would be, however, there is nothing but a metal plaque. There were a number of coiled wires and cables leading from various boxes to the centerpiece of the device: a young woman's face. More than just her face, mind you, but not the whole head. Looking at one side, it became clear that head stopped right behind the ears, though the full portion of the jaw appeared to be intact. The face stared straight ahead, blankly, mouth hanging slack. Both devices were exactly the same.

"Behold: the odiscope," the barker called out. "May I have a volunteer from the audience for a demonstration?"

Perhaps I was too stricken by the strange machines in front of me, but the barker was able to part the meager crowd in front of me with a wave of his cane. "You, sir," he said, and though there was nothing wrong with the tone of his voice, it felt more like a command than a request. With the eyes of everyone upon me, my feet moved of their own accord to the steps at the side of the stage. Once on his level, he grasped my hand, shook it, and demanded of me my name.

I told him. He then asked me of any family members far away that I would talk to more often if I could. I told him of my sister in Araby and he nodded al the while. "Yes, of course, across the ocean in the Colonies, of course. Never an easy thing to get word all the way to Araby."

There was a moment's uncertain pause before he moved onto the next segment of his routine. "We have not met before now, have we?"

I said that no, I was from the town and there were no doubt several people in the street even now who could vouch for that fact. He nodded appreciatively.

"Go there...to the device on the left. Whisper something in its ear. Something you would tell your sister if you could."

I went and leaned in close to the ear of the girl's face, the one mounted on the machine. The skin at the rim of the face, that marked the demarcation between flesh and machine, was smooth and shiny, as though sealed but without use of thread of any sort. The slack in the face remained, right up until I began to speak to it, in hushed tones. I felt, rather than saw, the ear perk up. I felt some kind of odd attention fall on me.

Once I had finished with the message, I heard the face's doppleganger speak from the other side of the stage.

It is hard to relate exactly how the voice sounded. It was low and hoarse and struggling, as though it were trying to make human vocal sounds through a voice box composed of nothing but dry twigs.

"The baby had the croup last month...but is better. Hope all is well on the estate. Our love to Arthur and your girls." Then the name of myself and my wife. And as the woman-faced machine struggled to relate my message to the barker, and in turn, the rest of the onlookers, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. My words, intended with love for my sister, were reduced to whispers from some mechanical apparition.

The barker turned to me, "That was your message?"

I nodded.

"In its entirety?"

I nodded again. I was not sure if I could trust my own voice. I was afraid it might have turned to dry struggles in my own throat as well. But I need not have worried, for someone towards the front of the crowd asked my question for me: "How is this possible? What magic is this?"

The barker smiled. This was all, all of it, going according to his script, apparently. "No magic at all, good sir. We have merely taken the natural affinity of twins and amplified them via the use of these machines. Twins of either sex, male or female, though females are better for range. The crown will pay well for those families willing to sacrifice for the good of his majesty."

I made my way down from the stage, my lips and ears feeling filthy from participating in this display. I had met at least two families with twins in my time here. And one I knew would seriously consider offering up their children. The other one would not even need to consider the prospect.

I was moving slowly, as though through a pool of deep water, for the barker's companion was able to catch my arm before I could return to the comforting anonymity of the crowd. His grip was strong and he kept me from escaping.

"That's not all of them," he said in a hushed voice.

"What?" I asked him.

"That's not all of them," he said again, continuing under the rumbling of the crowd as they looked at the devices. "What, you think we would waste the rest? It's amazing what you can send long distances, you know."

I looked up and caught the barker's eye. He smiled at me. We were both in on a secret, though I didn't wish to know anymore of it.

"Fraternal twins work the best for that, though. Male/female...you know. We could arrange a demonstration of that, too," the man said. "We have someone in Londontown on call."

Somehow I managed to pull free of his grip and entered the crowd without looking back. And eventually even the booming voice of the barker was gone as well. I slept that night fitfully, and dreamed that they had split our daughter in two and were using her for...communication.

It's nightmares like that which eventually fade and are replaced with new horrors. Just like the smell on the streets. Never the same for very long. And eventually, exposed to it enough, you forget it's even there.

02:21 am:

If people ask me what's at work here, I most times don't know what to say. And not just because they hardly ever ask. It's because simply saying destiny or karma or just what goes around comes around...that's too weak a way of putting it. There are multiple forces in balance, if everything's healthy that is, and sometimes strange things happen. But you don't question it. I mean, you can--of course you can. But I don't see what good it comes to. There's things operating on a scale here that we simply can't fathom.

Like my girlfriend and I, ending up driving this cab. Nothing you can foresee, and nothing that made sense--at least not at first.

But after a while, after watching who gets into your cab and where they go, you begin to think maybe you understand. Not all of it, of course, but you understand enough to make it okay. To make it so you can get by.

The dead people are the worst. Oh sure, I could come out and say ghosts, but again that just feels wrong. You get to this level of things and you know just how useless language is, believe me.

But anyway, the dead people. You pick them up from hospitals, mostly. And for the most part all they do is say a single word: Home. And you drive them home. You don't have to ask where, you just know where, and you take them there. They don't feel like walking, and they don't know any other kind of motion besides a car, so there's us. Charon for the 21st Century, I guess.

I drop them off in front of their home, and sometimes they go inside. Sometimes they just wander off, confused and unaccepting. And sometimes they just fade away, standing right there on the sidewalk. You want to think that they're at peace, but you don't count on it. You can't.

More interesting, to me at least--Cynthia and I don't talk about our job much--are the live people. They climb into the cab and ask to go to dead places. Maybe it's the house they were born in, long since torn down to make room for condos. Maybe it's an apartment where a lover once lived, and now the building is gutted and awaiting its end. Sometimes it's even a field that's no longer there.

But it doesn't matter. Sometimes they go inside, and sometimes they too simply stand and stare, rather than enter. But they don't disappear, at least not while I'm watching. I sometimes think that it's their time and they know it, and they go to these places to be somewhere familiar when it comes. So many people simply disappear and the body is never found. That could be it.

Of course, I don't how it works for certain. I don't ask questions, as if there was anyone to ask. You take them to where they want to go, and you can drive by the same spot the next day and you see it for what it is: a caved in foundation roped and chained off. Sometimes there's a sign there promising something new to be built, sometimes there isn't.

Cynthia takes first shift, I take second shift and we're together during the late night hours. Which is nice, all things considered. Suitable reinbursement, I guess, for having to drive the cab we were killed in.

After the driver pulled the gun on us and his friend hopped out of the trunk and joined us, the rest of the evening became a blur, up until the first gunshot. It's selfish, it's horribly selfish, but I'm glad they killed me first so I didn't have to watch what followed. I know what happened, but at least I didn't have to watch it. Knowing is bad enough. I don't know how much Cynthia remembers. We don't talk about what came before often.

We found out later that they got theirs. After they got cocky and were killed by an off-duty cop halfway through their eighth couple, yes, but they got theirs. And they still do.

Because like I said, it's not karma. It's not destiny. It doesn't always make any sense. People need to go places and we take them. And we're happy to do it. We're happy to be able to do anything at this point. And I wish I could say I didn't give me satisfaction to know that the souls of those two sons of bitches weren't keeping us from ever having to fill a gas tank again. I sometimes hear their screaming in the pistons, or when the transmission switches gears. Just for a moment.

Of course, they could be doing it all the time and I'm just used to it so I tune it out.

Sometimes, when I'm out looking for a fare, or the one that I have isn't talking at all, I wonder if that's not why God setup mankind to fall in the first place. Because things work on a scale, like I said. And the power for everything has to come from somewhere. So that's what I think hell is, sometimes. An engine for His creation. Hell is just another engine.

03:56 am:
The section of the wall we guard doesn't look like much. Other places try to dress up theirs, make it look like something it's not. Out here, we always think that things should look exactly as they are whenever possible, so we've never tried to dress it up. It's the wall, that's all. And it keeps us alive.

This side doesn't impress, and here I'm not discussing aesthetics. It's only forty feet high. However, were you to climb up and look down, on the other side you would find it's five hundred feet to the valley below.

I can't tell you anything about the engineering that went into building it. It had been in place for two hundred years before my grandfather was crawling, and that's only what they say. No one knows for sure. What we do know for sure is that it's all that separates us from the were-creatures that make their home outside the wall. They would like nothing more, when the moon is bloated and full and hanging in the sky like a cancer, than to kill us, each and every man, woman and child, in our beds. So our lives revolve around this wall.

During the rest of the month, you can be lowered down to the valley floor in safety. Indeed, during the time of blank moon, we send parties to ensure our catapults and trebuchets have destroyed any devices the creatures built. It's said they're becoming smarter as the years wear on and I'm inclined to believe this. Usually it takes a couple of nights for the attacks on the wall to begin in earnest, but one month, fifty miles north of here, the first night erupted in balls of fire being rained down upon the township behind the wall.

The realization was twofold. The first was that they must have built the machines the previous month and then hid them, knowing we destroy whatever we find standing when they return to their true forms. The second...was fire. How in God's name had they come upon fire?

The attack was beaten back, though with some cost of life and property, but it proved that they were, even dimly, beginning to remember one month to the next and not forget what had happened between their transformations. And thus, could create long-term plans.

When the sun goes down on the first day--the first of eight, though I hear long ago it had been half that number--the men of the townships along the wall stand watch and wait for the attacks to come. And they do, sooner or later. We work in shifts, twelve hours of darkness on, twelve hours of daylight off. And life in the townships stops. Our women and children barricade themselves in their homes and will not let us in until we can say a passphrase chosen beforehand. My own wife, heavy with her first child, sits at home and waits for me.

We cannot spare a single man who could make the difference. No matter the profession, from the township's doctor Marc to farmers like my best friend, Thalm, all must take their stand. If any of the creatures somehow make it over the wall, it would be nearly impossible to stop them. For once the full moon is up, every animal in the valley, were-creatures all of them, look just like us. They will even steal the face of someone they have seen. I've watched through a spyglass as a mask badger transformed into the spitting image of Rorie, a man who fell from the wall into the valley during the previous month's assault. Then we poured hot oil down on the naked, pink, horrible thing before it could fully reacquaint itself with its new center of gravity. It shrieked as it died...the only sound those things can make. The passphrases keep our families safe if any of the creatures make and break for the township, wearing a human face. They can only scream and howl and batter at the doors for entrance. Or, even worse, pass on their disease to our livestock and ruin our food supply.

This is how it has always been. Thalm and I began our watch with our fathers at the age of eight. We quickly learned to work the crossbow, the catapult, the trebuchet, the firethrowers and the oil. We had our wounded, yes, but our township had never been threatened directly by the creatures. We and the wall had always stopped them. Thalm and I had stood together for nearly twenty years.

The last attack was especially troubling. The creatures had used catapults before—this was nothing new. But on the second night, they began using a different sort of ammunition. Themselves.

When the first of them hit the wall about twenty feet below the fence with a sickening, wet thud, we at first thought nothing of it. We hadn't seen what had hit. When we looked down and saw the impact point, soaked in blood, we knew something bad was happening.

During that point they had adjusted their aim and fired again. The first one over the fence cut itself on the leg but managed to land on all fours, cracking its chin open on the stone as it did so. These things are remarkably hardy dopplegangers of humans, but as I looked down at the thing that was looking up at me, I felt my heart stop in my chest.

I was looking down at a feral, grinning version of myself. They had clothed it in a shoddy rendition of my own garb and it was wearing my face.

Driven by pure instinct and revulsion, I kicked it right on the point of its wounded chin and Thalm stabbed it with the head of its spear. It shrieked as it was pierced and, convulsing and foaming, died there on the concrete.

They had created a spyglass of some sort. They had to have. They cannot see us up here. The only reason they knew Rorie's face was he had fallen. But they were trying to send over dopplegangers that could blend in long enough to infect the animals and kill as many of us as they could. God protect us.

And they kept hurling themselves. We killed three more versions of myself, and countless others from the people on the wall. Their aim was uncanny. And we had to send the majority of us into the yard below our side of the wall to slay those creatures who overshot the top. Thalm and I stood our ground on the top of the wall, even as a large boulder crashed through the fence, tearing down a large section of it so that the creatures could sail over easier.

When the moment I had been waiting for for over eight months occurred, I slipped into a mode that was like swimming through a dream. I barely was aware of what was happening. The first duplicate of Thalm careened onto the wall between the two of us. Thalm stuck the head of his spear through his double's throat and the thing went down. And I fired my crossbow—not into Thalm's heart, but as close as I could manage. He dropped to his knees, and the look on his face was something I will never forget. It wasn't shock, it was almost acceptance.

I leaned over to him and whispered in his ear the passphrase he had used at my door I don't know how many times, "Let us be glad for comfort." Then I added, "She was mine, Thalm. She was mine." And then, I pushed him over the wall. I heard him bounce twice on the way down.

The attack ended. In the chaos, no one had seen. When they asked what had happened, I merely pointed to the missing section of fence and shook my head sadly. It was accepted. These things happened when you were defending your home.

And so it continues. Our family will have a child, and the creatures beyond the wall will drop litters of their own that wish to kill that child. Humans and animals who think they are humans alike, all our lives revolve around this wall. And while the moon is diminished, we are not, so we can rest. All of us.

06:25 am:

Jesus Christ is alive and well. I know this because he's a good friend of mine, and not in the sense that some of these religious whackjobs believe he's their friend. He doesn't hang on my shoulder and tell me what to do, nor does his voice whisper things into my head. What I mean to say is that he's an accountant, he's thirty-five years old, and he lives in my building.

You wouldn't know you were looking at the son of God if you ran into him on the street. He looks normal, perfectly so--of course. He was born with dark hair but dyed it blond in college and kept it that way. He's also got that two day beard scruff going on: you know what I'm talking about, the thing that picturing in your mind right now looks stupid as hell, but he pulls it off. But no halo, no beams of light from his head, nothing. I suppose he could show them off, but he never has and I've never asked to see them.

When I moved into the building, he was already here. Lived at the end of one hallway, was nice enough but kept himself to himself. Didn't think too much of him, to be honest, except for the night that I woke up on my couch dressed just in my robe and he was sitting on the chair opposite me.

I hadn't felt like that since college: where you've been studying and going for so long that you wake up with no memory of having fallen asleep. It's terribly disorienting, and to have it happen in the privacy of your home and then find a stranger staring at you in the aftermath just puts the icing on the cake.

Joshua is his name. Of course it is, right? I asked him what he was doing in my apartment and how the hell he got in.

He gave the briefest of smiles and says, "You don't remember. Of course you don't."

When I pressed him to explain, he took me into my bathroom and I felt some dim recollection coming to the fore. The clock radio I had in my bathroom had fallen off of its perch and into the bath, bringing with it the gift of electrocution.

"I was in there," I said. I remember my mouth had gone very dry. It's odd the details that stick in your mind.

He nodded. "I brought you back. I knew you wouldn't have wanted that." With that, he nodded at the place where I had died.

We went back into the den and I poured us both drinks. I didn't even ask, I just knew I needed one and it would have been rude not to pass him one.

He told me everything. He told me who he was: the product of a virgin birth, though the girl gave that up the week after to a football player in her high school. So the miracle was muffled under a backseat quickie.

He had grown up, gone to school, gone to college, gotten a job, and moved to the city. As for bringing people back from the dead and other such biblical activities, he did that less than you might expect. He didn't run around like a superhero saving everyone, but he would step in here and there and do a good deed. When he felt it needed doing. Being God and man in one, he could turn a lot of things off, or at least down, but omniscience he couldn't tamper with. So he knew that I was going to die that night in a stupid accident involving myself and Jefferson Airplane, complicit in my death because they would have been the last thing I heard. Not a good way to go.

There, I stopped him. "So you let me die? If you knew ahead of time, why didn't you walk in when I got home from work and say, 'Oh, by the way, Bob, do yourself a favor and strap your radio to the counter'?"

He chuckled a bit. "It's hard to explain. Some things just aren't going to happen until they do." Then he started trying to explain exactly how knowing everything reconciled with knowing all possible futures and I downed half of my drink and begged him to stop. I just didn't want to have that much understanding about things.

I said, "So you save people and heal people...why haven't I seen you on the cover of the Universal Tribune then?"

He smiled, "Oh, I make people forget. It's easier that way. Otherwise, they follow you around. And that...that always causes problems."

I think at that point I finished my drink and went and got the bottle. "So why do I remember? If you are who you say you are...or not...I mean..." I had the distinct impression Joshua was telling the truth. It was just a feeling I had. But I was an atheist, and I was having problems telling the son of God that even though he was sitting in my den, I really still didn't believe in him, thanks anyway. I mean...hell, you try it. It felt like I was being a ungrateful bastard.

But he just nodded and finished the thought for me. "You don't care. I know. And that's okay. It's not like I'm offended or anything. I appreciate that." And then he finished his drink. "I don't expect you'll be following me around. And I'd like to have somebody to talk to for a change."

I asked him why he didn't just talk to his father, but he shook his head. "No, I'm his son but I'm him too. It's hard to explain, but just trust me: if I want to talk to myself I can do that in the privacy of my own apartment without having to make a collect call home or anything."

Then a thought struck me. "But, if you're here, then..."

And he knew exactly where I was going. "The Second Coming. Yes. Revelation and all that. That's already over and done with. No need to get concerned about that."

I wasn't a believer, but I was raised as a Christian, so I still remembered that according to that particular belief system, there was supposed to be some kind of event where the faithful were whisked away leaving the wicked to fend for themselves in some of kind of Mad Max movie. Or something.

He nodded and said, "The Rapture, you mean. Yes. Well, we simply decided not to go through with it."

Then he told me about meeting the Anti-Christ. They met in a open air café in Jerusalem when Joshua was twenty-eight. He had felt compelled to go to this place and knew what it must mean. So he went, and what he found waiting for him was a nervous dark-haired, pale man with glasses drinking a latte. Rather than an archenemy of mankind that needed to be fought and crushed under one's heel, the Anti-Christ looked positively terrified. He said he had a wife and a child with another on the way. And that he barely understood what was happening but that he had come there knowing what needed to be done. And he didn't want any part of it. And could he please go home to his family. Please.

Joshua told me that it was at that moment he realized that, God or not, he had a choice like everyone else. And he told the Anti-Christ--whose name was not Damien at all, it was Chris of all things--to go home to Denise and Roger and their child to be. They weren't going to do this. Not now, and probably not ever.

It was the look of relief on Chris' face that sealed it for him, Joshua said. That they didn't have to do things the same way anymore. And they could change their minds.

Joshua's a good friend. He lives by himself and stops by from time to time. We go out and grab a bite or a drink or something. But mostly he just goes to work at his office and comes home. I don't know what he does in his spare time and I don't ask. I don't ask him about much, come to think of it. He just starts talking and I listen.

Once I did ask him something, though. Something specific. I asked him if this was his plan all along. God's, I meant.

He thought about it. Thought about it for a good solid minute. Then he sipped from his beer and said, "I don't know, honestly. Isn't that the oddest thing?" And he had this terrific grin on his face when he said it.

03:15 pm:

All pianos are haunted. And the only way to hear them playing is to not listen.

I found this out by accident. When my mother died, she left me her house and everything in it. On the one hand, this meant my nomadic apartment to apartment wandering days were over. On the other hand, it meant months of cleaning out the house, which made for numerous adventures.

You see, my mother wasn't just a packrat. She didn't just save things because she could or because she was simply compelled to. She saved things because she had an emotional attachment to them. And because my mother was an emotional person, she had an emotional attachment to everything. So she saved...everything.

An entire box was filled with theatre programs from the community theatre where Broadway shows would tour. She didn't know a single person in the cast personally, but she saved them. Decades worth. Every Mother's Day card I had ever sent her, every postcard anyone had ever sent her. An entire shoebox of napkins, no doubt from special occasions. She had meticulously printed the date for each dinner on them...but with my mother gone, I could not tell you the significance of them.

And so on. Broken china plate pieces. Picture frames that were empty, not to mention pictures in which I could recognize not a single face.

I suspect you think that the point to all of this is that without my mother to hold this all together, to link these objects with memories, these objects remain simply the detritus of a life.

But no, the sad fact is that they were debris long before my mother passed. Hand her a napkin which says "6/12/63" printed on it in her own writing, and it would jog no memory for her. I think she kept these things because she knew she would not remember. That these would have to serve in lieu of memories.

And here I was, having to cull them. Having to excavate the basement den, which had been piled high with these replacement memories.

It was when I lifted up the box--which contained an almost random sampling of clippings from the local paper...1975-2005 was the date range on the cardboard--that I realized it had been sitting on a piano
bench.

More boxes moved, along with three long empty plant pots, and I uncovered my mother's piano.

I had forgotten it existed. I remember my mother telling me that her mother, who had died when I was an infant, had bought it. She told my mother that a lady should know a musical instrument. If my mother had
ever learned the piano, that knowledge had left her completely by the time I was old enough to ask her about it. As far as I could tell, it sat in the basement from the time it had been purchased until now,
serving merely as something to stack boxes on.

And I honestly didn't think of it anymore after that. It was probably going to wind up being sold. It was in good shape despite being ignored for decades, so I figured I would get a good price for it from one of
the music shops in town.

Then there was the day that I had some people working on the front walk. It had been deteriorating for some time, so I was having the concrete broken up. A brick walkway could take its place...that seemed to me nicer looking and easier to maintain.

I stepped to the window from time to time to look at their progress. The racket they were making busting up the walk was driving me up the wall. I looked out the front window with my fingers in my ears, thinking that I should spend the afternoon at the movies when...faintly, just able to be heard under the pounding from outside, I heard someone in my basement, playing the piano.

I pulled my fingers out of my ears, and listened. Nothing. Nothing but the deafening assault from outside. I went slowly downstairs but, of course, there was no one there.

I'm not one to hear things. My hearing is actually very sharp, and I've taken care not to injure my eardrums with too much loud music over the years. So this bothered me. I had heard the piano.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I backtracked to the front door. As I was putting my fingers back into my ears to try to recreate the situation, I felt like those pigeons that, if you reward them with food while they're doing a specific action, they can quickly learn to do that action in order to eat. Superstitious pigeons, is what I had thought at the time while watching the program on the Discovery Channel. And here I was, just another pigeon, following suit.

And it worked. With my fingers in my ears, I could hear the piano again. I walked downstairs and stopped right outside the doorway. I pulled my fingers out...nothing. Back in, and it was there again. Some classical piece...couldn't tell you the name of it to save my life.

I stepped in sight of the piano and the music faltered and stopped within two seconds. I tried the in-out trick with my fingers and ears, but nothing. Then I stepped back out of the doorway. I waited, and after a minute or so, the music started again.

It was like the person seated at the piano had turned to look at me, as though saying, "Yes?" and awaiting a response. When I hadn't given one, and left, the person had taken a moment to collect themselves and resumed.

Of course, the problem being that there was no person seated on the piano bench.

After a couple of minutes of listening like that, I stepped back into the room. Again, the player stopped. I did so fast enough to notice that this wasn't like a player piano or something in Disney's Haunted Mansion--the keys didn't actually move at all.

"Mom?" I asked, but then realized that couldn't be right. My mother couldn't play piano, unless in dying she regained the knowledge somehow...assuming she ever had it to begin with.

But that just felt wrong. Somehow I knew whoever was doing this was a stranger to me. "Can you talk to me at all?" I asked next.

I could just imagine the player seated on the bench, turned to one side and trying desperately to communicate with me.

I also imagined, and this is probably closest to the truth, that he was looking over his should at me and thinking, "I'm dead, I'm lucky I can still play. What, you expect to have a conversation?" And it made
sense to me.

They can't do it while we're watching and we can only hear it when we're trying not to.

I don't know how the latter works since, as most anyone human knows, fingers can only do so much to block sound from ears. But it was the act of doing it that allowed me to hear it.

I eventually brought home ear plugs. And I leave a chair outside the basement. Not that I listen all day everyday, but I have a feeling the concert keeps right on going, day or night. I sometimes like to grab a glass of wine after getting home from work, put my ear plugs in, and sit outside the doorway not-listening and relaxing.

I tried an experiment not soon after. I went downtown to the instrument store (the one who had been fated to receive the piano before I realized I couldn't sell it) after they had closed, and put ear plugs in while standing outside their front door, out of view.

I could hear them. All of them, the five or so that they had in the store. It wasn't exactly clear through a door and ear plugs both, but from what I could tell, all of them were going. They would jam together on something, then breakdown into five individual musical pieces. Even in the midst of that anarchy of sound, it was beautiful. And so, I knew. Pianos are haunted. For some reason, none of the other musical instruments joined in. Just the pianos.

I got my piano refinished, cleaned and tuned. Not that it really needed tuning. Whoever's playing it isn't even really using the keys or any of the strings, but I felt like I needed to do something.

It was when I was halfway through cleaning out the house--when I was sitting yet again with plugged ears and glass of wine and a box of odd letters to go through--that something struck me.

"Moonlight Sonata," my invisible friend was playing. I had worked to try to identify certain songs...if only I could figure out how to record a performance, but how do you record something by not recording it?

I was looking over a piece of correspondence from Europe, an American G.I. writing home to his sweetheart. The sweetheart was not my mother--this was from World War I. Nor was the sweetheart my grandmother. So far as I could tell, neither the soldier nor the recipient of the letter was a member of even a remote branch of my family.

What struck me was the idea that maybe it's not just pianos that are haunted. Maybe everything is haunted in its own way, but we can't access or be made privy to what's going on underneath. Maybe if I left this letter out on the table and went away, the woman it was sent to could get back to the business of reading it herself.

Maybe that napkin with the date printed on it...maybe my mother, or some piece of my mother, is looking it over. Touching it and reliving the date that she had forgotten in life.

I haven't been able to shake that thought, no matter how hard I try. Nor have been able to remove a single box from this house since.

06:41 am:

Bobby has a storm shelter in his backyard. Every second Thursday the door leading down into the ground doesn't lead down into the shelter, not down into the dark and the hum of the dehumidifier his parents keep down there. Instead, it takes him to Akhmiman, a desert realm where he is the exiled son of the harvest god and goddess, and it is upon his shoulders to flood the valley and ensure the crops for the coming season. Bobby is ten years old, almost eleven. His parents write him an excuse for missing every second Thursday at school, and the teacher files it away. Sometimes his homeroom teacher, Mrs. Austen, comments on how nice and bronze the little boy looks.

Every once in a while, Mrs. Austen tells a story about when she was a little girl, and from eight years old until the time of her ceasing, she was a princess, and she and her two brothers battled stone golems on a world comprised entirely of a sheer rock face. Cliffworld, they called it, and each time they stood in their Earthen parents' parlor and placed their three little hands upon the globe in the center of the room...when they said the name of their true family's bloodline, Zissige, they were back on Cliffworld, fighting away.

All the children go. Once they go the first time, off on their splendid adventures, it generally doesn't stop until the ceasing, at age fourteen.

Children like me, who simply don't go, are rare. So rare that I'm the only one in the entire school who doesn't have anything special. I can't draw a trapdoor in the air with magical chalk. I don't own a dagger that can heal the faithful. I don't have a giant panther with wings that serves as my transport while I'm serving as Lord of the Floating Gardens. No, that last one was my eldest brother, Grant. He hasn't been back there since he was fourteen, and now he's married with children and looking to see their adventures when they're old enough. But oh, Grant's stories. And the look in his eye while he tells them.

Children like me are called familiars. I would guess because everything we see and do is just that. There's nothing new, nothing strange, no magic. We just don't have any.

My parents think there's something wrong with me, and maybe there is. From age eight, they've been telling me to just be patient, sweetheart. A gryphon will arrive with instructions. Or...perhaps the Grand Archer will open the grandfather clock in the hall and beckon you to come with him (as he did for your Aunt Meg and you remember she was almost twelve when that happened darling now don't lose hope).

I write my own stories. They're not very good. They're about a young boy named Kevin whose older brother is a detective and Kevin wants to be a detective, too. So he winds up helping his brother solve mysteries. And he's pretty good at it.

The other kids think my stories are stupid. They have stories of fighting and/or befriending live dragons, of defeating warlocks in giant games of chess played across living oldwood forests. I have a story about a kid who uncovers the brains behind a bank robbery and gets the key to the city.

I guess they are kind of stupid. They're not very good. But they're the only stories I have. So I write them and put them in the drawer of my desk. Someday I'll decide what to do with them.

At school today, Rory Baker showed the class the scale mail breastplate he wore while holding the Gorvan Pass against an onslaught from an intelligent sea that had decided to take the land from the people who farmed it. He had managed to create a peace, but it was shaky, and he kept checking the crawlspace behind his closet to see when it was time to go back and check on the people. And the sea. And their truce.

As of tonight, my hero has proven a haunted house to be just another house. His brother ruffles his hair and tells him he is proud of him. His parents stand to one side and cannot speak for their joy. As I write the final words of this story and set down my pencil, I'm reaching for a tissue to keep from damaging my words. Because that's what's important. And I wish I understood why.

My name is Calvin Seeley. And I am fourteen years old.

01:26 pm:

One of the more disturbing phenomena on the rise in North America is that of polymorphic lapine abduction cases. Henry Hulland is a professor of cryptozoology and exobotany at the Lutwidge Institute.

"The first documented polymorphic lapine abduction case was in England in the 1860s. It finally made the jump across the Atlantic around a hundred years later. And it's interesting to note that the details reported back by the victims have been virtually the same in every instance. A young girl is lured down a hole by a rabbit, white pretty much across the board, though size and degree of anthropomorphism involved is variable."

What happens to the girls once they're down in the rabbit's lair?

"Well, the rabbit, which is not a rabbit at all, you see--hence the word polymorphic, of course, but we'll use the term 'rabbit' to simplify things..."

Of course.

"The rabbit stings the girl, injecting her with psychotropics, giving the genuine feel that the girl is falling into another world."

But she isn't.

"Heavens, no. That's just the onset of the hallucinations."

And the nature of these hallucinations?

"It varies, but the important thing to realize is that the rabbit is controlling everything. And because it is able to change its appearance, it can fit itself into any situation the poor girl's mind comes up with. The rabbit can even split itself into pieces, all of which are able to act as an ensemble of characters."

So in reality, the girl is...

"Blundering around in a hole in the ground talking to a rabbit that's manipulating her and her head trip by taking whatever shape it needs to."

To what ends? What does the rabbit get out of these abductions?

"Well, some say they're just mischievous creatures and this is their sick idea of fun, but as for myself, well, the girls I've interviewed have talked about giant phallic looking caterpillars and tea parties. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's really going on here."

We followed Dr. Hulland to a nest to see how he deals with the creatures. Notice the three cans of gasoline. Dr. Hulland unscrews the top off the first can and begins to pour its contents down the hole.

"Three cans are overkill, I admit, but these things are a lot like fire ants...you need to make sure you finish them the first time...otherwise it just pisses them off."

After Dr. Hulland's match was thrown down the hole, you could see the column of flame erupt upwards. Shortly thereafter, three anthropomorphic playing cards--all burning--leapt from the hole, seeking safety. Within ten yards, though, they succumbed to the flames, much like this eight of spades you see twitching at the cameraman's feet.

"They do that all the time. They always try and make a break for it. Never works."

Next: urban sprawl is bringing suburbia out into the country more each day. Dryad attacks are up over the last ten years. We'll find out what to do if you find yourself staring one down from a man who was himself impaled in an attack...right after these messages.

10:40 pm:

These kids that come into my shop nowadays, I just don't understand them. When I was their age, extreme was tattoos, piercings maybe. Now they're into all of this body modifcation bullshit.

Like slugtails. This is retro and retro's back in, of course. I remember when they first developed them as a novel way to get parapalegic folks to move around who were sick of wheelchairs. For them that couldn't afford metal walking legs, they could get one of these tails grown and grafted on. This was experimental stuff, and it was just a year later that the prices for human looking synthetic legs dropped considerably after being introduced in Japan. But some fucking rock star went back and dug out a tail and had it put on and now all the kids want one. They even put the goo glands (or whatever the hell you call them) back in, so it's like they're trailing spit behind them wherever they go.

But that's neither here nor there. Everything's got to be extreme for these kids. Like these...have you seen these? They look like rolling paper for cigarettes, yeah, but you've never had a smoke like this before. You roll in tobacco leaves or whatever...nothing happens.

But, well...you see that urn I've got up there on the shelf? Somebody's ashes are in there. You roll somebody's ashes into the paper and smoke it, and you think about what you want to see. For example, that urn has the ashes of a 18th Century explorer in it. Rare, expensive shit. Smoke that and think about the ocean, for example, and you get images from the guy's life from when he was at sea. Visions, feelings...you get everything but the smell of the memories because, after all, you're smoking, right?

But the kids they only want extreme shit. Of course. They're buying the papers and ripping off ashes from mausoleums down in Oltown, just to see what they can find. The prisons send the ashes of executed murderers back here where you can smoke a serial killer and experience their doings! Can you believe that shit?

Hell, I read on the vire the other day about a porn actress who financed her last film by selling off the rights to portions of her body after she's dead. She was already chopping bits off and growing them back for the amputee/regeneration fetish crowds, so now she's just cremating those. "Nickel bags of Tamara whatever-her-last-name-was," she called them. Smoke up a breast and think nasty thoughts...unbelievable.

You know, come to think of it, it's not the goo that the slugkids leave behind that bugs. Honestly, after a mopping it just makes the floor shine. And all the crap on the floor kinda sticks to them and they carry it out when they go. So that's pretty handy, really.

It's the goddamn noises the tail makes when they scoot over the tiles. That wet shlurping kind of noise.

It's always the little things that really annoy you, idn't it? Human nature, I guess.

10:42 pm:

I remember I had gone out to lunch with a bunch of guys from the office. Unofficial group lunches were a rarity, but we were so damn glad to see a warm, sunny day after months of cold and rain, it was a fairly unanimous decision to get out in it. The boss, Frank, liked the idea so much, we closed up shop and all decided to play hooky. Friday afternoon, the phones weren't ringing, to hell with it, right?

Chinese food, I think. Six of us went not counting Frank. Because we were all going home after eating, we all drove. If you went back to the office afterwards, it might suck you back in. Everyone drove except my friend Stan, who always carpooled with another guy and rode over with him. It was a small parking lot, but we managed to find spaces.

The meal lasted a little over an hour. When we came back to our cars, someone had papered the lot while we were inside. This happens all the time. Some new pyramid scheme or a scheme to make hundreds of dollars stuffing envelopes in the privacy of your own home...that sort of thing.

This one was on orangey-yellow paper, and sure enough, we all got one, along with many other patrons of that strip mall. "Spring Into Savings!" it said. "Yardley Square Apartments and Townhomes...1, 2 and 3 bedroom configurations. Prices starting at $599 and get the second month free!" This last part had an asterisk next to it, to indicate there were stipulations on the free second month. Perhaps you had to sign a twelve month lease. But none of us knew, because our flyers were alike in that none of them had the asterisk's meaning provided.

"Hurry!" the paper said, and there was an image of a rushing guy below that drove the point home. This cartoony gentleman was moving so fast that one hand was occupied keeping his hat on his head and his tie whipped out behind him as though he were in a wind tunnel.

Frank had reached his car first, a couple of us were standing around him, reading over his shoulder. "No hurry at all," Frank said in response. "Look at the expiration date. June...but that's fifteen years from now."

Bob had already fished out a cigarette and was puffing away at it. "Hang onto that," he said. "Wait ten years then go demand those prices. When they balk, sue for false advertising." That was Bob's answer to how to make it rich: litigation. "Swhat they get for not proofing their flyers before going to Kinko's."

Ted, one of the other guys, looked to be making some more comments about a flyer, but by that point I was driving away. I had barely glanced at mine, just tossing it into the back seat.

It wasn't until Monday that Ted saw me and he repeated to me his observation.

"Next week," he said, as though that explained everything. I had no idea what he was talking about.

"Next week what?"

"My deal expires next week," he said, grinning. He had even kept the flyer. "I guess I better hurry up and go sign up, huh?"

And so the following Thursday Frank called Bob's home after lunch came and went with no word. Bob's son answered the phone. He and his wife had come over the moment they had gotten the call about Bob's accident. He had been killed in a head-on collision with a Cadillac going the wrong way on a one way street. On impact, so at least he didn't suffer.

Once Frank told us, the same second thought hit us all. The first thought was, of course, sorrow for Bob and his family. And we liked him. He was a bit goofy, but a sweet guy and a great worker. And he loved to share stories. So he had told us all about the flyer. And his expiration date.

We couldn't be sure that they were one in the same, because all he said was "next week"...not a specific date. And the flyer wasn't in his office; we certainly weren't going to pester his now-widow about it.

We did check...and could find no trace of Yardley Square Apartments. No one had thought anything of the fact that no address or phone number was on the flyer. Just the words, the cartoon man, and the date.

We could double check all this, because Ted still had his. "Well," he said, "we'll know in eighteen months."

And we did. Ted--our resident chimney, who had tried and failed to quit more times than we could count--was diagnosed with lung cancer seven months later. And eleven months after that, he lost his battle. And yes, on the date from his flyer.

Things got a bit strange after that. And Frank became obsessed with the idea that he now knew his own dying day. At one point, after drinking too much--which he did more and more often--he decided to tumble over the side of an overpass. He reasoned--rather loudly to his companions, who could not stop him in time--that he was perfectly safe since his date was years away.

He was right. The date was absolutely correct. After the accident, he remained in a coma up until his flyer's expiration. And he was the only remaining one of us other than me by then.

They kept pestering me about my date, but I told them I had thrown the flyer away that weekend. And that was the truth. I barely even glanced at it. I could have sworn mine had no date at all, but that was a long, long time ago, and I just can't remember.

01:37 am:

There are benefits to being a pioneer in the art of cloning. Cloning itself is a science--it is in the application of that science that it transcends into art. I know, believe me, it sounds pretentious, but just bear with me.

Let me give you a practical example. You've heard of cloning, everybody's heard of it. You can get it done in a convenience store, waiting less time than it used to take to get a passport photo. Those booths? Patented. By me. Yes, that's right.

Well, you have to understand, once the patent for the technique I created expired and the whole process went generic, I had to start getting creative. So I, you know, set aside some funds to bribe the FDA, set the expectations of the public that, yes, one in five clones might not come out just right--I mean, for God's sake, the process is taking place on the same aisle as toilet paper and butane lighter refills, right? But you know, nobody complains because they usually just want them for their organs anyway.

Now...that keeps us nice and rich like we like it...but it's...I don't know, there's none of the art involved. I wanted something with a little bit more finesse.

So...clone therapy. Well, that was mine too. It seemed simple enough..as long as we can make a copy of you and recycle that copy as quickly as we used to do paper...why not use it to make people feel better?

Again, the right amount of bribe money in the right accounts, and...well, you should see some of the sessions I've seen. We've helped save marriages--women and men who really want to do somebody else other than their spouses bring in a sample of the person in question and...viola! We give them a little privacy and a few hours later (or a half hour for guys), they leave feeling better because they've gotten it out of their systems. The real person will never know that a copy of them just commited adultery in another part of town because, well, we can grow you from a piece of hair. A bit of skin. Fingernail clipping. Done. Person goes home, clone gets reduced to composite atoms, spouse is none the wiser--everybody's happy!

We've had guys who need to work out some self loathing just beat the ever-loving shit out of themselves. We've even done some more extreme therapy.

Take for instance, this young couple. Wife has had affairs. A lot of them. Serial adulterer. She'd sleep with some guy behind her husband's back for a few months and then move on. Perfectly happy at home, she just needed variety. In reality, she has a serious sex addiction and needed some help. If only someone had gotten her some.

Because, you see, he found out. He found out and was absolutely crushed. He was this big guy, but gentle and caring. He could have just...I don't know, broken her neck if he had ever let himself get mad enough. But he didn't. Not even after catching her. He blamed himself, the poor bastard. They went to counseling and tried to make it work.

Story doesn't end there, though. He's miserable...all the time. Just miserable. And he doesn't know why. Sure, she cheated on him (not that he, I don't believe, ever knew about any others but just that one) but that was behind them and they should have been happier than ever.

But he wasn't. After going to some solo therapy sessions the shrink decided that he, deep down, was furious with his wife. And he needed to get that out of his system in order to get on with things and be happy again.

Well, he couldn't bring himself to say or do anything to her. Gentle giant, remember? Loved her dearly. So one of his buddies gave her my card. I think the buddy had used my services to fulfill a fantasy he had about this pair of pop-singing twins. Won some of their hair off of eBay. Anyway, that's besides the point. Point is, he came to see me.

I listened to his story with great interest, and I knew instantly what I could do for him. I've done this before, of course. We could grow him a copy of his wife and let him take out his frustration on the copy, then go back home as though nothing had happened.

He was resistant at first, but his wife genuinely, I think, felt bad for what she had done, and had told him to do whatever it took so they could be happy again. So he engaged my services.

A few days later, he came back and we let him into a soundproofed room with the spitting image of his wife, sitting in a chair. When she sprang up to ask him what in the hell she was doing at my office, he backhanded her. I think he surprised himself by this, because he broke her jaw really nicely, but once he started up he didn't stop. He even started using the tools I had laid out on the table for him. Took the better part of an hour for him to, you know, get it all out of his system, but he did. Yes, he did.

He came out of the room covered in what was left of her and I asked him how he felt. When he said, laughing a little, that he felt better--much, much better--I told he should celebrate with a little wine. I poured, we drank, and he almost split his head open when the sedative hit him like a freight train. He was a big guy, after all, so I used a lot just to make sure he went down.

He woke up in his home to the cops breaking down his door. I had transferred him, the tools, and the remains of his wife to his bedroom. The blood was a genius touch, if I do say so myself...I was able to replicate a spare bucket to gore up the bedroom so it looked like he had actually butchered his wife there, then curled up and gone to sleep after the deed.

His story was flimsy. That was by design. I told the police yes, he had come to me to do some extreme clone therapy but I told him he had to have the clone created on our premises. As I tried to explain to the gentleman, I told the officers, who's to say that the unconscious woman you're carrying isn't your wife and not a clone? You could be trying to implicate me in an actual murder, I said. And the cops believed me. Of course they did. A lot of them had used my services before and they knew me well.

I didn't know she was married. For the whole five months she was seeing me, she never told me. She just got tired of me and moved on. I was naive, but you have to understand: working with copies of people all the time, it was nice to have a real person who loved me. It's a shame that it was all--all of it--a lie.

I have the video of the husband's "session." Like I said, it's art. True art. Sometimes, though, I want a little bit more than a video, so I grow copies of the two of them, set them up like little wind-up toys and watch it happen again. Sometimes I change out the tools, just for a little variety. I even managed to fabricate copies of their wedding rings, and I put them on them for that final touch of realism.

After she was caught, she really did turn over a new leaf, I understand. It was hard, but I don't believe she had ever gone behind his back again. Like I said, she had a serious problem with sex. It's a shame nobody ever helped her out.

09:57 pm:

It's become a weekly tradition, the corpse parade.

Since the necromancers came through their doors and took power, they've used it to try and destroy any resistance. It's been effective in its own way.

To rebel means almost certain death--and that's one thing. But that's not the end. Of course not, for that would be too easy.

Their bodies are stripped naked--whether they make the dead do this themselves or not, I admit I don't know and I don't want to know. But they arrive, every Sunday morning, led into town by our rulers. And everyone has to stand and watch the slow, shambling parade go by.

Strangely enough, you get used to that part. Seeing friends, fellow townspeople walk by as naked, hollow husks of themselves...after a few months you just become numb to it.

It's the sounds they make. The horrible, agonized sounds, as though each step they took was like being butchered all over again. Their legs, their muscles...they're dead, they shouldn't be made to walk miles for the intimidation and humiliation of their neighbors...but they are. And we've talked amongst ourselves: is it really them? Are they still in those bodies somewhere, trapped and in excruciating pain in those walking prisons?

But in the end, we know: it doesn't matter. You can't bear to see your loved ones in pain. And especially this pain.

Once through the town, they go to where the last week's dead have been, waiting and acting as though they were freezing. Only then do the previous week's parade participants gain rest: when the newcomers are made to bury them in a mass grave. Then they, in turn, wait for the next week. What must it be like, trapped in your own corpse?

They take our family and friends who dared defy them and kill them. Then they torture and humiliate them even after their deaths. And we go through this every Sunday morning, when we used to go to church. But those have been outlawed, of course.

It takes hours. And it's happening all over America, every week, just like it's happening here, right now. I can't imagine what the parades must be like in the larger cities.

My husband has just come around the corner. I still have the pistol he left me. I can't set him free. Others have tried and it never works. But I can go join him. This will be the first and last time I break a promise I made him.

11:47 pm:

There's a trick to time travel. And sooner or later, I think, anyone who's unlinked figures it out. We're rare enough that two of us hardly ever cross paths, and when we do, there's seldom any time to share information. But we live long enough to where we'll try almost anything, and time travel eventually comes up.

You see, just because you can move between realities at will doesn't mean that you can move up and down the timeline in the same fashion. In my experience, most realities simply aren't built to allow for time travel in the first place. I believe--and I am no scientist, mind you, merely a very old traveler--I believe this is because time travel can be extraordinarily dangerous--not just for the temporal travelers themselves--but for reality itself. So the best way to think about reality without time travel is like a gun with the safety on.

There are realities, though, where the safety is off. The rules work differently from place to place and some realities allow for it. There are restrictions still: in some universes you cannot go back farther than your own birth, in others if you run into yourself your trip automatically ends with you at your starting point, and so on.

When you're unlinked, and you wish to move rapidly in time, you simply cross over into a world with active time travel--of a kind that will get you where you wish to go, of course--and then go when you need to go. This is primarily used for going back in time, mind you: the timestream runs at different paces in certain universes, so to move forward rapidly you can just duck into a fast-moving world and then back to the other world.

It's funny, now that I think about it--especially how dangerous the implications of time travel can be--I don't think I've ever run into a universe that appeared to have undone itself with time travel. Usually it's something far more mundane.

For example, did I ever tell you about the world in which time travel is so costly that one of the only industries that can actually justify doing it is the pornography industry?

They discovered time travel early in this world, but it was a lot like the dive to the bottom of the Marianas Trench that finally happened in 1956 after two fatally unsuccessful attempts: it was done and simply couldn't afford financially to be done again.

Then a pornographer latched onto an idea to make extremely unique sex movies. He sent back a couple, one man and one woman, to Dealey Plaza in 1963. They arrived in a room that historical research showed as abandoned during the time of the shooting. Then they set up a camera and started having sex with the window open. They paced themselves so that they both climaxed at the sound of the gunshots.

This video was a startling success. And it made the entrpreneur who had thought of the idea very, very rich. Enough that he kept trying to outdo himself with each video: having a threesome hidden in Ford's Theater but with the assassination of President Lincoln occurring in the background, all the way up to a small lesbian orgy on a rooftop in Pompeii in full view of Vesuvius. Each time, the orgasm--or orgasms--synched up perfectly with the history-altering event.

I'm digressing. My point with this is simply that reality has precautions in place--and perhaps it only lets down its guard when it knows it can. When it knows somehow that the result will be a best-selling two-men video that takes place while the Library at Alexandria burns down around them instead of a mistake that utterly undoes life as that universe knows it.

Of course, it stands to reason that any number of the broken universes I have ventured into could have been teeming with life we would recognize, but it was the wrong kind of life, and it found itself with a gun that had the safety off.

06:11 am:

The roaches were singing. That's what woke me up.

I'm lying in bed, coming in and out of sleep, and my half-aware mind is wondering where the hell the choir is coming from. Did I leave the radio on and it somehow got tuned to some gospel station? That would explain why the singing voices sounded so high, so tinny. From the next room it sounded like a weak AM station.

So finally I get up, grab my glasses, slap them on and make my way to the kitchen.

I've got a nightlight in there so I don't bust my ass in the middle of the night getting a glass of milk. I know, I could just turn on the light, sure, but you don't turn on overhead fluorescents at three in the morning. Not if you plan on trying to go back to sleep.

So the nightlight gave me enough that I can see, once my eyes had adjusted. And what I saw was that a dozen roaches had dragged a roach motel out from under a counter and to the center of the floor. A roach was tied to the top of the motel and all the others were gathered around and they were singing, all in these weird syllables that didn't seem to mean anything.

The exception was the roach on the motel. And it didn't take his tiny, reedy voice saying over and over again, "No! You mustn't! You're all mad!" for me to figure out was going on here. It was a human sacrifice. Roach sacrifice. Whatever.

The singing stopped. A roach, one of this big, nasty mammajammas, you know, the kind you reassure yourself isn't actually in your house and yet you know they are? Yeah, that kind. He moved up to the motel and I was trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with his head. Then it struck me. He was wearing a spaghetti strand, curled up around his head like a turban or something.

I was just remembering that I had made pasta last week when he spoke, again, in the same kind of tiny voice. But he demanded respect and authority. Imagine how you would feel watching James Earl Jones deliver a speech. You know, if he were only an inch long. And wearing pasta.

"Our brother has forgotten the faces of Ul'rey'makra," the James roach boom-squeaked. Or something. It sure sounded like Ul'rey'makra.

"Ul'rey'makra," the roaches chanted. "Of the many faces," they said as one.

"And Yrtrrz, the moth with a thousand eggs," James roach said.

"Eggs, a thousand eggs," came the reply.

"And, too, Llellchandra, the blind mealworm drummer, he who sits in the drain at the center of creation."

"Drumming the beat of the cosmic heart," the roaches sighed.

"You mustn't do this!" the captive implored. Kinda like McCarthy at the end of Body Snatchers, panicky like that. Except, you know, small and on a roach motel.

"Help him, my brothers," James roach said. "Help him check in. Ul'rey'makra awaits him."

"Check in," the roaches said as one, moving closer, pushing and shoving McCarthy roach as they did so. "Check in. Only Ul'rey'makra can check you out."

And they forced McCarthy roach into the motel. Once he was inside there then came a strange mixture of sobbing and screaming, followed by silence. Then, the most booming, unnatural, bloodcurdling yet smallest laughter I had ever heard. Then, silence that remained unbroken.

This done, the roaches pushed the motel back in its place and then scattered. Me, I went back to bed.

Although I made a mental note to get some more of those roach motels. I don't know what they put in them, but I do know I used to have a hell of a lot more than a dozen roaches in this apartment.

02:18 pm:

Dear Son.

When I was much younger, I missed the island. I've never told you this before, but the reason I built this cabin on the mountainside is so I could spot it if it ever appeared again.

My brother and I had heard stories about it, from the old men in the town. While none of them had ever seen it, a grand-uncle or some such had. One man's grandfather claimed to have come ashore on the island and been welcomed by the castle's inhabitants. He even had time to attend a ball in the sprawling banquet hall. They had let him keep the tunic they gave him to wear at this ball, though the man telling the story admitted that by the time he remembered seeing the garment in question, it looked just like any other ragged shirt.

Our parents tolerated our love for these stories, but my brother Michael and I...well, we believed. And we waited for the day that we hoped would come, that it would appear out on the water, and we would row out to greet it. And then, as Michael swore, we would stay there, even after the island left. It would take us with it, he swore. And I believed him.

And it came to pass exactly as we had hoped. The island appeared and Michael went down to the boats to make for it before it left again. But I was slower than he, I was only thirteen years at the time. He reached the boats long before I and, being one of the best oarsmen even at seventeen, was entering the fog out on the water by the time I reached the shore. "Come on," he called to me, "catch up! Hurry!"

And then he vanished into the mist.

They found me in my boat, almost twenty hours later, exhausted and dehydrated. I had rowed out, fast as I could, to where I was sure the island must be, but found nothing. No island. No boat. No Michael. I hadn't stopped, though. I had rowed in a large circle in the fog, screaming his name until my voice left me.

Michael never returned. My parents forbad any more talk of the island. Michael, foolish and headstrong as he was, had chased a dream into the sea and it had killed him. So I finally agreed. But I never believed it.

I sold my parents' house after they died and built this, the place where you grew up. Your mother, God rest her soul...I told her the story once, when I felt the time was right. But she didn't understand. She came from far inland, and those who don't live near the water for a good portion of their lives simply don't understand that life here is different, living on the banks of an alien world. Such is the ocean, I tried to explain, and strange things happen at the borders between this world and others, but she didn't understand.

Regardless, finally, last week the island returned. I am older now, much older, and could not hope to row such a distance. But we are living in the future and there was no need of such exertion. I went down, climbed in my dinghy with the outboard motor, and reached the island's shore in less than an hour.

I wasn't sure what I would find. All this time, perhaps I thought Michael would be there to greet me. But as far as I could tell, it was entirely deserted. I climbed to the castle, only to find it in near ruin. Indeed, after venturing across the rusted metal drawbridge I dared not go inside. The entire structure looked ready to crumble if you but breathed on it.

I walked around the outside, however. And on the far side of the castle, I found my brother at last.

In one row of the graveyard there was a series of cairns, each marked by a crude plaque of metal and by a sword that stood implanted in the ground. The last one in the row had a sword with the word "MIKKHAIL" engraved on the blade, though worn and weathered. In worse shape was the plaque, though with some difficulty I was able to read "Pere, Sireah, Hiro."

I'm not certain what the words mean, though the first could mean father and the last could mean hero. Given what the sword must have looked like when it was new, it certainly didn't seem like it could ever have been wielded by anything other than a hero. And that was Michael. That was who he was.

I wondered why everything looked so old. It looked as though Michael--Mikkhail--had died centuries before, not anywhere near the decades he had been gone. And if he had been a father and husband, where was his family now? Where were the people who had held court at this place? Perhaps time moved at a different pace wherever this island went when it was not there.

I took a stone from my brother's grave, knelt and gave a small prayer, then went back to my boat. I did not look behind me as I made my way back here, but by the time I had climbed to our home again, the island had departed once again.

For the past few days I have sat here and turned the stone over and over in my hands and done little else.

If I had only been bigger, stronger, faster. If Michael had waited for me. If. If. If.

My brother had gone into a different land and found love and adventure and no doubt died a hero's death. I am happy for him. I am happy to know our parents were wrong and we were right all along. I am happy. Truly.

Son, I never told you any of this before because you are so like your mother, and I suppose I was afraid of what you might think. I don't know if I could have taken seeing her disbelieving eyes staring out of your face that looks so like mine.

I ask that when I am gone and you are left to take care of my effects, please ensure that the stone is buried with me. I'd like to be holding it as I pass into the next world. If you do not find it on my person, it will be on the mantle, where I keep it.

I suppose that's what I've really written you to say.

I hope this letter finds you well and in good health. I hope also that you will call at some point, when you find the time. I sometimes pass the time watching the cable TV, when it works, but that is not often. And the books have all been read.

Love,
Your father.