September 22, 2010
Bridging the Gap.
They stopped at the end of the bridge and stared.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Jetta snapped. “Of course we just happen to run across the Grand Canyon’s long-lost cousin, and of course the only way across it is some rickety bridge.”
“You wanna go back?” Kathleen asked, glaring at the doctor.
“Will it even hold our weight?” Jetta retorted.
It was a fair question, Beowulf thought as he knelt to examine the wooden planks. They really didn’t look stable. A faint rustle caught Beowulf’s attention, and he turned to see Nathan -
- Who was watching Jacob.
Who was approaching the really-horribly-cliched bridge with studied nonchalance. He stepped onto the end, and the resultant protest of aged wood was enough to end the burgeoning argument behind him.
“Uh, Jacob?” Kathleen reached out to pull her former student back.
He turned to look at her, strange magic rippling around the edges of his contacts. “If it holds my weight, it’ll hold all of you.” That said, he slipped off his gloves and casually strolled out over the canyon.
He got a little over a third of the way when the whole bridge splintered apart.
Jacob Carter plummeted like a stone.
- And massive tentacles erupted out of the canyon not ten seconds later, twining around outcroppings, the posts that had formerly anchored the bridge, and half the trees … on both sides of the gap. The eldritch-horror-usually-known-as-Jacob levered himself onto the opposing wall, then beckoned to the others with one shy pseudopod.
Jetta and Kathleen looked at each other. “That works,” the professor said.
Not Another Bad Advice Column.
ASK ANYTHING
the weekly advice column
So I’m in love with this woman, right? And I know she likes me as a friend – I’m like the only person she hangs around with at all - but how can I tell her I’m looking for more? I mean, I don’t want to ruin our relationship or anything.
–Lonely in Wallachia
Dear Lonely,
She’s been into women longer than you’ve been alive. Did it ever occur to you that taking you with her on impalements was supposed to be suggestive? Just kiss her already.
HELP! My boss is nuts!
–Freaked Out in Arkham
Dear Freak,
You just figured this out? You know she knows you wrote this, right?
If you want a new job, there’s an opening in Antarctica.
Oh. Wait.
This is totally un-PC, but I don’t know what my roommate is and it’s freaking me out, especially since I think he (she? it?) is hitting on me.
–The Thing Formerly Outside the Window
Dear Thing,
Given the number of things of all kinds you’ve slept with, I don’t think it really matters, does it? If it really is bothering you and your roomie won’t give you a straight answer (and he won’t), try hiding all his clothes next time he’s in the shower.
Then you get to see whether you’re immune to his maddening flute or not.
Help! My husband’s begun writing really snarky advice columns on the sly, and his coworkers are starting to get suspicious. What do I say?
–Your Loving Spouse
Dearest husband,
I can’t believe my editor let your letter run. Please tell me you didn’t bribe him with our retirement savings…
The Rose Queen.
He emerged from the claustrophobic tunnel into a large, low-ceilinged rock chamber. Nervously, he stepped over the threshold, and the reed torches on either side of the door lit up. Ghostfire flared from sconce to sconce, making the whole room seem, eerily, as if it were underwater. Fog curled and eddied about the thick, unadorned colums ringing the center of the chamber.
Slowly, nervous for reasons he couldn’t quite place, the man crept forward. He followed the path outside the columns, flinching at every spark and shimmer in the shiny, smoky stone, peering in between the columns as he went. He saw nothing inside, except flickers of fog tinged bluish by the torches.
Finally, he was back at the start. He noticed, surprised, that the door he’d entered by was framed by massive twisted gates that looked sort of like steel and sort of like some darker, shinier metal. They took in the blue torchlight and reflected it back in harsh white glints; he turned away.
A white path, shimmering faintly in the ghostfire, drew his attention to where it passed between two columns, quickly obscured but never quite hidden by the gloom in the central circle. Curiously, he followed it in to the heart of the chamber.
The path ended in the middle of a circle; looking about him he could see a tight thin spiral in a dull, earthen rainbow inlaid on the floor; the center lay beneath his feet. The fog flowed more freely now, almost frantically, and a low, whistling moan rose and fell, turned sinister by the echoes emanating from hidden niches.
He almost turned and fled, but the path was gone, and there was nothing beyond the columns but star-flecked blackness, and the stars were of ghostfire and witchlight. Heart hammering, he turned to look at the columns immediately across the way, and what stood between them.
It was a throne. An empty one, he noticed with near-hysterical relief, a massive black basalt throne carved in a severe square style, as if the makers were going for the most imposing and most blocky chair in the world. Two smaller basalt steps, inlaid on top with a shiny stone that looked like obsidian or quartz, led up to its base.
He couldn’t really look away, but sent skittering glances around the room anyway, trying to find any glimmer of true light, any glimmer of a way out.
Something was rustling in the darkness past the columns.
On the throne, the carved roses that weren’t there a minute ago were moving, sliding up and into the seat, and he realized that someone was coming. He sent one last nervous glance around the chamber, then steeled himself and looked at the thing across from him.
Two lights flared, the sulfurous yellow of werelight, and then there was someone there.
The rustling stopped. The moan subsided, and the fog ceased thrashing, rotating lazily about the tops of the columns. The roses vanished, and as the figure on the throne raised a hand, the ghostfire leapt from the torches and flowed like water around the spiral, lighting up the whole center as if it were a blue noon.
The whole room suddenly looked painfully normal, if an impressive display of rock-carving. The figure on the throne was revealed to be a short woman dressed in horribly frayed jeans and scuffed shoes and a really unfortunately-colored plaid shirt with a rip in the elbow. Red hair hung in tangled curls in front of her face, and there was dirt all over her hands.
Yet she sat on the throne like she owned it, and looked at him as if he were the one beneath her notice. She stared at him with pus-yellow eyes as if waiting for obeisance, as if she really were some kind of queen and obeisance was her due.
His lip curled into an involuntary sneer, and he turned on his heel, but the spiral spun around him and he found himself facing the scruffy woman again.
She had changed, in the mere second he hadn’t been watching. Her hair had twisted itself into smooth curls, and her clothes looked as if they had just come off the rack. Her shirt was no longer a hideous combination of all shades neon, but a subtle interweaving of reds and pinks, whites and yellows, and hints of purples and coppers, run through with shots of pure black and deep blue. The dirt under her nails was beginning to look uncomfortably like blood.
Her hair seemed to be putting forth leaves. Her eyes were glowing, lit from within by an unholy werelight.
She opened her mouth to speak, and her teeth were the thorns of roses.
“You have been weighed. You have been measured. And you have been found wanting.”
And before he could so much as twitch, the fog screamed and descended, and with a great grinding groan the spiral pulled itself apart, and he fell into darkness.
Far above, the ghostfire melted into sunlight.
Road.
All stories start on a road.
Oh, sure, you can set one somewhere else, for a bit or the whole thing, but no story really starts until someone gets out and goes somewhere. And it’s pretty well known that the longer the road, the better the story, as long as the teller hasn’t decided to be totally stupid and describe every fucking flower and pretty sunrise on the way.
But did you ever wonder why? Why stories need roads? ‘Cause you need people to do things, you’re thinking, but you can do things in your own damn house. And it’s not just ’cause you need people to go places, either, ’cause you can go tromp through the woods to get someplace, or do like my damn sister does and just jump in through people’s windows.
You need a road because stories need life. And life is a road.
Hell of a Way to End a Meeting.
There was the sound of massive air displacement, and floor supports giving way in protest, and then something falling neatly into one of the lab rooms from the room above.
All conversation ceased. Curious (not concerned, dammit, this was Arkham and they were totally used to the weird shit, dammit!) heads turned. Even Francis had wheeled around to stare warily at the door.
Kathleen, the only truly apathetic person in the room, rolled her eyes and yanked the door open.
A thick tentacle, still wearing Jacob’s hat, whipped at the door almost fast enough to shut it, but Kathleen got her foot in first.
Jacob stopped and pulled his tentacles and other undefinable things back into the shadows. Some vaguely not-colored eyes stared out of the darkness at the assorted observers.
Shyly, he waved a tentacle.
Beowulf turned to the rest of the group. “Meeting adjourned, then?” he said cheerily, and the assembled professors nodded and left before they quite realized what they were doing.
Kathleen snorted. “Pull that again next month, ok?” she ordered Jacob, pivoting on her heel. “A couple more incidents and they’ll give up on staff meetings entirely.”
Smile.
Kathleen was not a sentimental person. No one who taught college kids was, not if they didn’t want to get eaten alive by their students.
But even she had to admit it was worth seeing Nathan smile. And not that razor-sharp one he occasionally pulled on the unwary – though that was worth it for entirely different reasons.
No, every so often the dear ambassador would look at his husband and just smile, and it wasn’t so much an expression as an unveiling.
Kathleen remembered something a former student-turned-sculptor had told her once: in explaining her art, she’d said the point wasn’t to make something out of the stone, but find what the stone already held and help reveal it. It seemed an apt comparison.
It always started with his eyes. They’d crinkle at the corners and light up a bit, like they would normally when he was not-smiling at people, and then it was like they did that but more, and his eyes would go from tarnished gold to molten, and then like an avalanche it was all over before it had even gotten properly started, and the smile would pull the corners of his mouth inexorably upwards until he’d shyly duck his head and the whole expression slid into place and as he relaxed into it you’d suddenly realize he was smiling.
You could almost see what he would have (should have) been, before. Just before. And damn, but if Kathleen didn’t want to find that city, and hunt down its lost souls, and turn them loose for the Hunt. Even if they weren’t friends ’til after, no one got away with hurting hers like that.
But it was worth it, in an odd way, to watch that smile. Warmed her nonexistent heart, it did.
November 21, 2008
The Good Neighbor.
The insistent knocking threatens to tear down your door – you can actually see the frame shuddering. You hasten to open it.
A short angry redhead stares up at you. “Took you long enough,” she grunts, shoving past you uninvited. She is already in your kitchen by the time you close the door.
You are more than a little angry at this stranger, especially when she starts going through your fridge. But you say nothing, except to offer her a drink, which she accepts with a curtness that is more than a little rude.
You turn away to get a glass down from the cabinet, and as you bring it down in front of your face, you catch a fleeting glimpse of the stranger’s reflection: a shambling thing of thorny vines and roses with naked eyeballs peering in all directions including right at you and a glint of something at her core that could be an apple or could be a star, but the image is gone before you can tell for sure.
She leaves after drinking your milk and eating your bread, and for weeks afterward neither runs out and you find rose petals in the oddest places.
May 8, 2008
A bit of randomness.
The madman aimed the gun. Kathleen unsheathed her knives and prepared to jump at him.
A thin stream of white-hot flames shot past her ear, roasting the madman before he could squeeze off a shot. Kathleen blinked and turned.
Dr. Cain stood behind her, coughing slightly. He clicked his tongue, then said, “What no one tells you is that your mouth tastes like a charcoal briquette for hours afterwards.” He coughed again.
Kathleen stared, then dug around in her pocket and wordlessly handed him a peppermint.
Detective Jones stuck her head out of the car’s window. “I don’t want to know how you know what a charcoal briquette tastes like.”
Cain stuck his tongue out at her, popped the mint in his mouth, and walked off, hands in his pockets and nose in the air.
April 10, 2008
Testing.
Distracted, Kathleen swung the knife. It missed the carrot and cleaved into her hand –
- Or would have, if it hadn’t simply halted at her skin. Blinking, Kathleen pulled the knife back.
There wasn’t even a red mark. There should have been a deep gash.
Kathleen turned, and punched the window. Glass shards flew everywhere, cutting her curtains to shreds. She pulled back her fist and stared at it. Once more, there was not even a mark.
Third time’s the charm, thought the redhead as she reversed the knife in her grip. She plunged the blade into her eye.
It stopped suddenly, resting with only the faintest pressure on her cornea. Kathleen’s strongest push couldn’t force the blade further.
Slowly, Kathleen lowered the knife and smiled.
In the Hospital.
When Kathleen O’Neill woke up, she was no longer ill. She knew this as certainly as she knew her own name.
The earsplitting shriek of the monitors around Kathleen’s bed was getting on her nerves. If she was well, then there was no reason to stay in the hospital any longer. Kathleen stepped out into the hall.
Two nurses moved to intercept Kathleen. When they were ignored, their polite this-is-for-your-own-good masks crumbled, and they began moving rapidly towards her. Kathleen promptly changed course, walked over to the window, and dove out of the hospital’s seventh story and into the nighttime gloom.
The nurses ran for the window. Far below them, Kathleen stood up and walked off toward Main Street, brushing glass shards off her hospital gown. There was no blood on the window or on the concrete below.
The two nurses looked at each other, then went back to call the doctor.
