Inventory

Maybe it was because I was standing there, on the edge of that strange clearing in the middle of an unknown forest, that brought Aunt Elsie’s statement back to me. But as I thought about it, more instances of strange event I’d been involved in, where by any reasonable standard, I should have died came to mind.

Not quite two years after Elsie had made her pronouncement about me, she’d sent me to the basement of her rat-trap of a house to find out why the sump pump hadn’t kicked in to dispose of water seeping in after a particularly heavy thunderstorm. Ten year old kids don’t know about things like ground fault interrupters, nor do they know how dangerous the lack of them can be. So I hadn’t thought twice about grabbing hold of the dangling electric light bulb to try to get more illumination of the pump while standing in water over the top of my sneaker.

I remember how my arm suddenly felt both numb and tingly at the same time, and how the hand that held the bulb didn’t want to release as I wanted it to. I did manage to open it, and it was as I stood there, shaking my arm to try to get some sort of feeling in it that I figured out why the pump hadn’t started: someone had unplugged it. Who did this, and why, I never learned, but fortunately they’d stuck the cord behind the conduit the outlet hung off of. So I was able to hold onto the dry plastic of the power cord as I plugged the pump back in, and I made damn sure not to touch anything else connected to electricity before I got back out of the filthy water.

Then there was the time in high school when I’d gone to the auto shop looking for my cousin Bennie. He wasn’t there, but a small fire had broken out in a trash can. I was at the age where I imagined myself doing something heroic, so rather than go find a fire alarm and pull it, I took the fire extinguisher that hung next to the door and decided I’d use it to put the fire out myself. It was only later, after I’d managed to get the fire out, that I realized the blazing trash can had been standing right next to a drum the shop used to store spent motor oil. Even more fun, the trash can and oil storage drum stood next to an oxy-actelyene cutting torch. Either of them could have exploded, or gone up in a ball of flames, if I had blown the flames sideways instead of putting the fire out immediately. Hell, beyond knowing that you pull the safety pin and point the nozzle towards the flames, I didn’t even know how to use the damned extinguisher. So it was pure dumb luck I didn’t get myself killed that day.

Mysticism had never been among my many failings. But standing there, reflecting on these and many other instances that sprang to mind where I could easily have died, I began to wonder if Elsie might have been right. Had I survived all those close calls because they were just the steps on the path Destiny had laid out to bring me here? And if that were true, then what purpose did all of it serve?

From my addiction to anime, I was familiar with the idea of karma following someone from one life to the next. I even knew some people who believed that their misfortune was caused by some sin they had committed in a past life. But what sort of sin could I have committed that would warrant me being condemned to what I now faced? I looked up at the leaves of the tree William MacPherson had described as odd, and saw the same unfamiliarity he had. So what could a past me have done to justify being sent to another world, for this world clearly wasn’t mine?

I couldn’t understand what could possibly cause me to be reborn and placed in the less-than-gentle care of my Aunt Elsie, to have to live through her terror, plus everything else my life had thrown at me, to bring me here. So either I had seriously pissed some Higher Power off, or Fate had decided I needed one more screwball even throw at me.

To say that neither prospect appealed to me would be an understatement. I don’t know why, but somewhere in my heart, that old spark of wanting to do something heroic sprang alive again. I’d survived everything else life had thrown in my way, so I’d do my best to try to survive this too.

“First thing, figure out what I’ve got to work with.”

I hadn’t meant to say the words aloud, but hearing them echo in that small clearing, my mind began to catalog everything I had brought with me.

My smartphone, which while useless for communicating still had use as a note taker and from the other functions its different apps could carry out.

The clothing on my back.

The comfortable pair of walking shoes I wore, which I knew wouldn’t be all that useful in the deep brush I saw under the trees.

My car, which would allow me to keep my phone charged, and myself protected from wildlife, as long as the gas held out. After that, it would become increasingly uninhabitable.

My work laptop, which contained files I would have needed to accomplish the job I’d been on, and not a hell of a lot else useful or even entertaining.

The half bottle of water I’d picked up before leaving town.

And that was it. I couldn’t imagine there was anything I could use in William’s wrecked car, not after decades of sitting her being flooded every spring. Then one thing did occur to me, but getting to it proved more difficult that I’d imagined. It took me three tries to get the trunk to open on William’s wreck, and once I got it opened, I found the water had left layers of dried soil after every flood. But after I dug through them, I found beneath them what I’d hoped to find. I was a classic tire iron, useful for loosening lug nuts and for bashing people over the head too.

So now, if I had nothing else, I at least had a weapon if the need arose for one. Strangely enough, having acquired a weapon, I found myself hoping I didn’t have to use it, not knowing who or what I might need to use it against in this strange new world.

Acursed

My brain is strange.

Seriously strange.

I’m standing in the middle of a strange clearing, next to a crashed car that shouldn’t even exist, possibly on some parallel world, and what does it do? It pops up a childhood memory

It was from when I was eight, and it was the day my Aunt Elsie told me I was cursed.

She was halfway through what in hindsight I recognize was a highball glass of gin, her second one, and she was well into the talkative phase of her nightly routine. I remember trying to figure out an excuse to leave the room, because I knew that when she got the bottom of her third glass, she’d move beyond talking into violence as she turned her anger at my Uncle Frank’s imagined infidelities against anyone who couldn’t defend themselves.

She had lowered her glass after a long, slow swallow and fixed me with a glare. “Jimmy, you’re cursed. Did you know that? It’s true! You. Are. Cursed.”

She punctuated those last three words by waving her hands. This caused the gin to slosh around enough to nearly spill, and gods protect us from what would happen if she spilled her drink. She took another draw from the glass, whether to wet her parched throat, or to keep the gin from spilling, I didn’t know. Lowering her glass again, she returned to her narrative.

“Yep, you’re cursed. You know why you’re not living with your Mom, don’t you?”

I hated it when she reminded me of why I was in her house. That didn’t stop her from letting me know one more time that she graciously let me live in her house because I was her sister’s child, and my Mom was dead.

“It’s because your Mom is dead, that’s why! My sweet little sister Meg, and you killed her.”

I remember my shock at this statement, one Elsie had never made before. But while I wasn’t old, I’d experienced enough of my aunt’s wrath to know this didn’t bode well for my chances of escaping a beating. This focus meant I would likely be the one who experienced her terrifying temper when it got loose. So as slowly as I could, I began trying to edge away from the table, and from her.

I should have known moving away slowly would work on T Rex, and in the movies. It sure hadn’t work on Elsie. She’d glared at me with a ferocity that made it clear how badly her violent nature wanted to come out. So I froze, hoping if I didn’t make any further moves, praying internally that she might find something else to focus her growing anger on.

No such luck.

She had kept her eyes fixed on me as she continued her drunken lecture. “Yeah, Meg wanted to take you out and buy you something for your first birthday. Your Aunt Fran volunteered to drive her, and they even took your big sister Terry with them. Damn!” Elsie took another slug from her glass before leaning across the table. She got her face close enough that the smell of the booze on her breath made me lean away. She follows me, relentlessly pressing her story home. “Fran might have been only 17, but she was a good driver. Not reckless like the cops said she was. Whatever happened, Fran went off the road and the car flipped Those lousy cops said she was speeding because it’d flipped over twice. Damn if she would have! They told me when they saw the car, they didn’t expect anyone in it to be alive. That’s how it should have been! You shouldn’t be alive, you worthless little shit.”

She took another drink, and this one finishes the glass off. Leaning back, and with that sort of meticulous care only someone who’s well and completely drunk could show, Elsie slowly unscrews the cap and refills the glass to the brim. The recapping had been nowhere near as smooth, but after two tries, she finally managed it. I’d remained rooted in place, filled with fear brought on from watching Elsie chase down her own fleeing kids, only to deliver a sufficiently savage beating to make up for the inconvenience of having to catch them. She took what elsewhere might have been considered a ladylike sip of gin before leaning forward to resume her rant.

“No, they found Fran still in the driver’s seat, dead with a fence post through her chest. Your mother was dead in her seat with her neck snapped. Terry had been thrown clear of the wreck, but bashed her brains out on a rock in the field the car ended up in.” She leaned closer, close enough that her nose touches mine. “And you? They said you were still sitting in your mother’s lap, not a cry, or scream from you. They said you were looking around like you were waiting for someone to pick you up. And the kick was you didn’t have a single bruise on you. Not a scratch. Not one damn sign you’d been in an accident that’d killed three other people.”

Elsie had leaned back again to take a much less dignified gulp of her gin. When she lowered it, the glass was well below half full, and I knew my window to escape was closing fast. So I played the only card I had.

“Aunt Elsie, I gotta pee. Is it okay if I go?”

The one truly terrible beating I’d ever seen in her house had been Elsie slapping and punching her oldest son after he’d peed himself. In Bennie’s defense, one of his sisters had locked herself in the bathroom, and I’d heard her laughing at her brother’s increasingly desperate pleas for her to get out. That hadn’t made a bit of difference. When he couldn’t hold it anymore, and had tried to find an empty gin bottle to pee in. When he’d found none, he’d pissed himself on the kitchen floor. Elsie had beaten her oldest like he’d committed all the sins in the Bible, then come up with a couple more. The next morning, when she’d sobered up, she at least acted like she was sorry. Not very sorry, but enough to give me hope it would convince her to let me go.

It didn’t.

Elsie’s eyes narrowed, becoming bloodshot slits of white centered around her eerily light blue eyes. “No, you don’t have to go. I know you, boy, and I know your ‘tell’, the sign that you’re lying. Right now, you’re lying your ass off. So you just keep your ass seated there, cause I’ve got a lot more to say to you. You have to understand that God has something truly unpleasant waiting for you. You aren’t going to just walk away like I wasn’t here. So you just Sit. Your. Ass. DOWN!”

It was that last shout that was Elsie’s undoing. She’d leaned back, then tried to stand so her adult height could make her dominance of a mere child like me complete. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for me, she overbalanced. I remember the shocked look on her face as she tilted ever further backwards, then she went over with a crash that cause a few scared faces to peek out from behind carefully closed doors.

I’d waited for her to rise, my fear of how such an indignity would amplify her anger nearly causing me to piss myself for real. Then I heard it, the sound that meant my life was spared.

Elsie had started snoring.

Phantoms in the machine.

Ted Freer gave his patient a smile, and as she left the exam room, tapped his tablet to see what his next appointment was about. As he scrolled through the notes, his puzzlement grew to the point where he felt it necessary to find the nurse who’d conducted the initial exam.

The small cubbyhole that served as the exam room’s nurses station was empty, so Ted walk the fifty or so feet to the main station. He took in the occupants, and seeing the nurse he needed to talk to wasn’t there, spoke to the desk nurse. “Marge, where’s Tabatha? I need to talk to her about these notes she took on my next patient.”

Marge had been a nurse longer than Ted had been a doctor, and she knew more about how the clinic operated than anyone else. “Odds are she’s down with the vampires. Why she can’t figure out Paulo isn’t interested in her, I don’t know.”

Ted knew the handsome Paulo, one of the phlebotomists, or ‘vampires’, would never pay any more than polite attention to Tabitha. The man had tried hitting on Ted shortly after the clinic had hired him, and was rumored to be dating Ahmed Kalpar, one of the other doctors. But when he walked in the lab, there she was, doing her best to flirt with the Argentinian.

“Tabatha, could you come over here for a moment? I need to talk to you about this notation on my next patient’s admission form.”

“Sure doctor, be right there.”

Tabatha said something to Paulo that caused him to chuckle, probably a joke at Ted’s expense, then beamed a smile at the gay phlebotomist before making her way to Ted. Motioning for her to walk with him, Ted started back towards the exam rooms. “I need to talk to you about this note you put on the chart of the patient in Number Six. All you put down is ‘Patient says he suffers from hallucinations.’ which would mean that he should be getting referred to one of affiliated psychiatrists. So why am I seeing him?”

“Because, Doctor, he suffers from hypoglycemia caused by underproduction of adrenaline. Specifically, he had cancer of the adrenal gland and had to have his removed. He said he’s on drugs for the condition, which you’ll see if you look at the list of medications, and has experienced episodes of severe low blood sugar before. The problem is, he says now he’s started having hallucinations during some of these low blood sugar events. And because it’s possibly related to a medical condition, as opposed to a mental disease, all sending him to a psychiatrist would accomplish having them send him right back to us. Meanwhile, he’s not getting treated for a problem that, well-”

Tabatha not only stopped talking, she stopped walking, so Ted did too. But when she didn’t start talking, Ted prodded her. “What’s the problem? What aren’t you telling me?”

Tabatha looked at Ted, then up and down the hall they stood in before stepping close to continue in a much lower voice. “That’s the thing. I asked him about his hallucinations, and he shut up. Wouldn’t say a word to me.”

Ted let his eyes roam over Tabatha. She was a slender, and he had to admit, very sexy young woman. Part of Ted wished she’d pay him the same sort of attention she paid to Paulo. “Do you think it’s because he’s embarrassed, like the hallucinations are about his sex life or something?”

Nurses had a look that Ted was sure they were taught while getting their certification. It was one they reserved for doctors who said particularly stupid things. He’d been on the receiving end of that look many times during his residency, and now he got it again, full force, from Tabatha.

“Doctor, when I graduated, my first nursing job was in an inner city clinic. It was something I’d agreed to so I could get most of my tuition paid for by the government. We had all sorts of people come through our doors. Street people covered in filth. Single moms bringing their kids in for treatment. I ended up learning four different languages so I could get the basics out of our patients. But there was one type of patient, we knew what they were in for without asking. It was usually middle-aged white guys in decent clothing, and they were always there to take advantage of the fact that the clinic did anonymous STD testing. They’d banged some streetwalker, and they wanted to make sure they didn’t take anything home but their dirty memories. None of them would admit why they wanted to be tested, they’d always stutter, or mumble, and would never look you in the eye. This guy doesn’t have any of that feel. No, he reminded me of the women who came in covered in bruises, trying to explain away their injuries without admitting their husband, or boyfriend, or whomever had beat the crap out of them. They wouldn’t talk because they were scared, and that’s what this guy feels like.” Tabatha stopped for a second before leaning in closer still. “Whatever it is he’s experiencing, it scares the hell out of him. His eyes are bloodshot, and have bags under them like he hasn’t slept for a week. And he’s constantly looking around the room, like he expects something to come out of the walls or something.”

It didn’t tell Ted what he’d hoped to learn, but it helped him understand the cryptic note better. A thought occurred to him. “You say he’s jittery and looking around the room. Are you sure he’s not on something like meth that can cause paranoia and agitation?”

“No doctor, I saw plenty of drug users too. His answers are clear, and his speech patterns are normal. He shows no outward signs of substance abuse, but if you suspect he’s not telling the truth, I can go tell Paulo you want him to draw blood for a tox screen.”

Tabatha smiled as she spoke that last sentence, and it was clear she’d rather go back to trying to persuade Paulo that girls were just as good sex partners as boys. Ted waved his hand. “No, if I decide the patient needs a blood draw, I’ll just file the order and send him over myself. Thank you, Tabatha.”

Ted watched the nurse walk away before heading back to the exam area.

He wasn’t sure what he’d find when he opened the door to Exam Six, but when he opened the door, what sat before him wasn’t anything he’d expected. “Mister-ah, Lackland, hello, I’ll be your physician today. My name’s Freer, Ted Freer. And you prefer to go by?”

The broad, pale face that turned towards him looked even worse than Tabatha had indicated. The dark rings highlighting the eyes reminded Ted more of someone who’d had their nose broken than a person lacking sleep. “Jim. The only person who ever called me James was my mother, and she only called me that when she was chewing me out.”

Ted took a seat at the small desk in the examination room and let himself smile as he answered. “I guess your mother and mine both went to the same Mom’s School, cause mine would call me Ted right up to the moment she was ready to give me hell. Then, suddenly, I was Theodore.” Taking a quick glance at the tablet to make sure he had the details, Ted continued. “So you’ve been experiencing hallucinations for three weeks now. And you told the nurse you think it’s related to your condition. Why do you think the two are linked?”

“Because I had my adrenal glands removed a little over a decade ago. It took care of the cancer, but the side effects have been, well, interesting. My body produces more insulin than I can cover with eating, and I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of low blood sugar. It mostly involves me getting anxious, and my heart starting to race. When I get that feeling, I know if I don’t eat something that boosts my sugar, I’ll get increasingly worse. All the times I’ve had these hallucinations, I’ve experienced all the other symptoms of low blood sugar, and they fade as soon as I eat some candy to boost my sugar levels up.”

It made sense, but like Tabatha, Ted got the feeling that there was something this man wasn’t saying. “Okay, Jim, so you clearly understand why this is happening, so why are you here seeing me? Why not ask for a referral to see an endocrinologist who could walk you through adjusting your medication levels?”

There was a long moment of silence, and Ted saw the other man’s eyes dart around the room before they focused back on him. “I’m here because I can’t understand why this is happening to me. I know what’s causing me to hallucinate, but what I don’t understand is why I’m hallucinating. What’s causing this? Has something changed in me, or my brain?” Jim stopped for a second, lowering his eyes again, but didn’t raise them again as he continued in a much lower voice. “Why is it that I see things, why do I feel things, that aren’t there? How come it is that sometimes I feel like in a strange place, and not my own house?”

Ted could understand why his patient was concerned, but the depth of the other man’s fear puzzled him. “Why don’t you tell me a little about what’s happening to you. You say this started three weeks ago. What happened that first time?”

Jim didn’t answer immediately. His head came up, but as his eyes again scanned the room, they passed over Ted as if he weren’t there. “It happened one night. I’ve been woken up before by my sugar dropping. Usually, I’ll wake up with my heart pounding like I’ve just finished a sprint. Sometimes, I’d have nightmares, like my subconscious was kicking me to wake up before things get worse. I could live with that, but that firs time I hallucinated, the nightmare was different. It was like I was in some video game, and my body was breaking down into individual pixels and being blowing away some strong wind. Scared the shit out of me-pardon, but it really got my attention. Anyway, I woke up and threw back the covers to get out of bed. The problem is, I didn’t feel the blanket come away from me like it normally would. No, I could feel it peeling back like it was made of individual squares coming away from my legs. Worse, my legs didn’t feel like they usually do. It was like they’d shrunk to nothing.” Jim stopped, his Adam’s apple visibly bobbing as he swallowed before continuing. “I don’t keep a lamp beside my bed. I used to until I woke up one morning to find the lamp shattered on the floor. I can only guess I knocked it down in my sleep without remembering it. Anyway, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and there was enough light coming under the door for me to see them and realize they were normal. As soon as I saw that, the feeling of them being tiny disappeared and everything was normal.”

Jim stopped again, and when he didn’t continue, Ted verbally prodded him. “I’m guessing that wasn’t the last incident. What happened next?”

The patient’s eyes had started another sweep of the room, but the question stopped them on Ted. “What happened next? Three days after that, I had another nightmare, this one way worse than the first. I was back in the video game again, but now instead of me breaking into pixels and blowing away, it was everything around me. I was standing in front of my house, and watched as it broke up and slipped away. Then the street and every other house vanished the same way. Then the sky started breaking up, bright little cracks forming between the individual squares before the tumbled away to-somewhere, I don’t know where, because I woke up. Honestly, I’m glad I woke up, because I was afraid if I saw what happened next, I’d vanish too. The funny part is, things hadn’t even started to get strange. I got up, and my body felt normal, but I hadn’t gone two steps before I ran into a wall, I do mean literally ran into it.”

Jim shook his head, like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You know how you can get around parts of your house without having to turn on a light, like your bedroom?” When Ted nodded, he continued. “I know it take five steps to get from my bed to the wall the door’s in. Yet there I was, no two steps from me bed hitting a wall. And it wasn’t the drywalled wall of my bedroom. It felt like it was made out of, I don’t know, maybe rough wood planks. I could feel the surface of it with my fingers, and even though I could see the bottom of the door, I couldn’t find a way around that wall. So I remembered I’d left my cellphone on my nightstand and got it. I powered it up, and I could see there was no wall there. So I walked back to where I’d hit it, and it was gone.”

Ted began to understand why his patient was afraid, but as disturbing as they were, they still didn’t seem terrible enough to shake this man as deeply as he seemed to have been. “Yes, that’s pretty shocking, but-”

Jim held up his hand, and when Ted stopped talking, he extended his hand towards him. “But that’s not the worst part. Far from it. Look at the third finger and tell me what you see.”

Ted took his patient’s hand and looked at the finger in question. It looked ordinary except for a long, red scratch that ran across the pad from the joint to just short of where the flesh rolled up at the end. There was a small red dot at the end of the scratch. Ted looked closer, and saw the dot was centered on a tiny dark spot, like something was stuck in the finger. He raised his eyes to meet Jim’s stare. “Looks like you’ve got a splinter or something in it. Want me to remove it?”

“Maybe later. The thing you need to know is how I got that splinter. I woke up from another nightmare, this one of me floating in space watching as the whole Earth broke into pixels and vanished. I woke up again, but this time, I turned on my phone before I got up from my bed. I didn’t run into any walls, and my body felt normal. So I went to the kitchen to drink some orange juice, which I sometimes use to raise my blood sugar.” Jim looked around the room again, like he wanted to make sure the walls were still there. “I have some glasses in a cabinet beside the fridge for situations like this. I was focusing on getting one down and reached for the fridge without looking away. That’s when I felt the rough wall again, like I’d shoved my hand against it, and I’d run my fingers against the grain. That’s when I got that scratch, and the splinter too.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just get the splinter from the fridge, or something nearby?”

“No, I couldn’t have. My fridge is all stainless steel, there’s no wood on it anywhere. And I’ve got granite counter tops, with the woodwork several inches back from the edge. So I couldn’t have gotten it from that without hitting my wrist on the edge of the counter, and the woodwork itself is smooth.”

Ted couldn’t make any sense of what he’d just heard. It was clearly impossible for this man to have picked up a splinter if the incident occurred as he described it, yet he had one. He could be lying, but what reason did he have to lie? “All right, I’ll admit it, you have me stumped. So I’ll ask you, what do you think is happening?”

Jim remained silent for a very long time, but he wasn’t still. Ted could see his whole body shaking, like he were literally quaking with fear. When he did speak, it was hardly more than a hoarse whisper. “I read a article recently that speculated this world is nothing but an elaborate video game. It postulated that each and every one of us is nothing more than a character in some stupid game. And I think my mind has begun to accept that.” He lifted his eyes and stared into Ted’s. “I think because I know what’s really happening, the game is trying to delete me, that I’m going to be ‘boxed up’ and taken out of the game before I ruin it for all the other characters. I think I’m already in the box and all that’s left is for the game master to come remove me. That’s what I think is happening.” Jim gave a humorless chuckle. “Crazy, right? Yet I expect any minute now to be removed from the game. That’s why I keep looking around, hoping I’ll see some sort of sign before I’m taken off the stage, or server, or whatever.”

It did sound crazy, but Ted wasn’t going to tell his patient that to his face. “I don’t know whether what you’re saying is crazy or not, but how about I go get something to remove that splinter, then we can talk about this some more.”

Jim smiled, nodded, and pulled his hand back. “Yeah, sure Doc. I couldn’t get the damned thing out myself, but I’ll be happy if you can get it out for me. Might make this whole office visit worthwhile.”

Ted left the exam room closing the door behind him before going to the nurse’s station. “Marge, I want you to draw up a referral for Mr. Lackland to one of our associate psychiatrists. He also needs a referral to either Doctor Orum or Sandoval for a consultation on his blood sugar problems. And where do we keep the small wounds kit? He’s got a nasty looking splinter I want to remove before I give him the news that he needs mental health counseling.”

Marge pointed to the catch-all cart that sat behind her. “The kit should be on the left side, second level down, middle of the row. He’s that bad?”

Ted retrieved the kit, checking to make sure the tweezers were in it before answering. “Yeah, he needs help. Detailed hallucinations, partial loss of connection with reality. So yeah, he needs help, now. Bring the paperwork in when you get it printed out.”

As Ted opened the door to Exam Six, he started to explain what was going to happen next. “Well, Mr. Lackland, I’ve got what I need to deal with-”

No one was in the room. The only sign that someone might have been there was the cushion of the chair Jim Lackland had been sitting in when Ted had stepped out. It still bore the slight outline of someones buttocks, but as he watched, even that faded, leaving a space bare of any sign of occupation. Ted hadn’t been watching the door the entire time, so he turned to Marge. “Did you see my patient leave?”

“Anyone coming out of that room would have had to walk past me. But what are you talking about? You’ve been on break since you gave Mrs. McMurray her three months check up. You don’t have a patient for another ten minutes.”

Ted had left his tablet in the room, but when he opened the schedule app, there was no appointment for a James Lackland listed. Yet he knew he’d talked to that deeply disturbed man.

Or had he been disturbed?

Brother Coward

The kingdom of Restoz had died three days ago.

Baird knew it was dead. After all, he’d watched it die.

Father had sent him to the top of Immus Hill to watch for the promised reinforcements from Prince Plostiv. He’d told Baird it was because he knew that of his three sons, he was the fastest rider. Even as he’d ridden old Fastten up the hillside, Baird had known that wasn’t the reason he’d been sent.

No, he’d been sent because his father knew that, in his heart, Baird was a coward. He was the smallest and youngest of the sons of King Trenust, and as a boy of fifteen Summers who hated swords and fighting in general, his father had known Baird would only be underfoot if he stayed with the rest of the army. Better by far to have him out of the way than take a man from the line to protect him from harm.

But Prince Plostiv had never come. Instead, pouring down the road from Ulteme, came the massed hordes of that dark kingdom. They came not in tens, or hundreds, or even thousands. No, they came like a swarm of ants, a seemingly endless stream of men who refused to line up and face Restoz’s meager army. No, the stream swept around the line, either turning its end inwards, or overwhelming those on the exposed flank. It made no difference what the men of Restoz did. Because just like ants, the black-clad footmen of Ulteme swirled around Restoz’s army, encircling it before closing in and destroying it not by tactics, but sheer weight of numbers.

And Baird had stood atop the hill, watching it happen, too afraid to ride down and die fighting with his family and countrymen. It was only when the last spot of color had vanished, when his father’s broad blue and red banner had fallen, that Baird had been able to move.

And what had he done?

He’d climbed atop Fastten and spurred the loyal old horse down the slope towards the empty plains of Yestra and away from the massacre as fast as his mount would run.

He’d ridden until Fastten had stopped running, then flogged the horse back into a laboring gallop that had carried him only a few more leagues. Then, like every muscle in his body had failed, Fastten had dropped, sending Baird sprawling.

Not even checking whether his mount had died or was simply incapacitated, Baird had collected his saddle bags and water skin and set off as fast as he could walk into the empty wastes of the Yestra. He walked on, hoping the army of Ulteme feared the Yestra for the same reasons all the other nations feared it, the stories of the Wandering Giant.

That first day, the sky had been clear. But clouds had gathered as he slept in the lee of a boulder, and those clouds had delivered a steady rain not long after Baird had started walking again. There was no place to shelter from it in this unpopulated place, so Baird had walked steadily onwards, pushing to put as much distance between himself and that relentless army as he could.

The rain ceased before the Sun set, but the clouds remained. And in the place of rain, they delivered a wind that passed through Baird’s soaked cloak like he wasn’t wearing it. But he kept going. Baird walked until the light faded, until he could barely see his own feet, before throwing himself down on a small knoll.

Sleep came, but in sleep, he saw the final moments of his father. His imagination, always vivid, filled in how that bloody final stand ended. His father would not have surrendered, nor would his older brothers. Like he were there, Baird saw them standing together, along with his father’s personal guards, as Ulteme’s swarming masses charged in for the kill. And in the final moment, as dozens of spears stabbed him, Baird saw his father turn towards him. He heard him speak, his familiar voice not scolding Baird, but accusing him. “Why have you deserted me, my son?”

He saw his father fall, his banner clutched in his hand, and as they struck the ground, Baird awoke. For a long moment, he stared around him in the predawn darkness, confusion and fear causing his heart to pound and his breath to come in quick gasps. There was nothing to see. Baird, and the knoll he sat on, were shrouded in a fog so thick he was not sure he would see his hand at the end of his arm if he raised it. Then, he heard and felt something: a deep, tremendous boom, so powerful the ground itself shook. A moment later, he felt and heard the same terrible sound.

Baird stood. Whatever it was that caused a sound so mighty could not be good. But which direction had it come from? He had no clue, and in a fog this thick, if he tried to run, he could just as easily run into …whatever it was, as he might run away from it. Baird drew his sword, knowing it was a sick joke that he could defend himself with it, and waited. The sound and ground shaking happened another time, perhaps even louder and more violent. Then, nothing.

In the stillness that followed, a breeze began to blow. It carried a scent Baird could not describe, like the filthiest outhouse he’d ever had to use combined with a rank animal smell that made him gag. And though it was no warmer than the bone-chilling wind of the day before, Baird shivered not from the chill it induced, but out of abject terror. He became aware of a noise that made no sense. It was like the sound of the sail on one of the trading barges that plied the River Dostag, but there were no rivers here.

The darkness began to fade as, somewhere above his shoulder, the Sun began to rise. The breeze grew with the Sun’s rising, and together, they caused the fog to begin to clear. And what he saw before him made Baird piss himself.

The stories were true. Baird hadn’t believed them, but what sane man would? The Wandering Giant, the last king of that ancient and now vanished race, stood before him leaning on his massive sword. Baird stood, frozen with fear, as the silent encounter stretch on. Then the immense form leaned towards him, one hand stretching towards him darken the ground beneath it like a thunderstorm.

Then, as silently as the movement started, it stopped. The rising wind caught the giant’s robe, and the cause of the strange flapping noise became clear. Then, from beneath the ragged hood of it’s mantle, a voice echoed. Baird would have expected a voice from such a great thing to be deep, booming like the reverberating thunder stroke. Instead, it was high-pitched, like a mighty wind whipping through tree branches. “So, human, have you come to slay me, as your kind slew my kin?”

It was too absurd to be believed. This huge creature was asking Baird if he had come to kill him? Baird, the boy who was amazed he hadn’t shit himself to compound the shame of pissing himself, would have thrown down his sword and run if he thought he could escape by doing so. He could no more kill the giant than he could bring his father and brothers back to life. Remembering how he’d run from death, how he’d abandoned everything he’d ever known, Baird found a small spark of courage. He couldn’t kill this thing, and knew he couldn’t escape it. Sheathing his sword, he spread his arms.

“No, oh Wandering Giant, I haven’t come here to kill you. I came here because I ran from a fight. I ran and left my family to die. I left any honor I might have had and fled because I’m a coward! You have nothing to fear from me.” Baird closed his eyes, admitting to one final shame, that he wasn’t able to look Death in the eyes when he came for him. “But I will not run anymore. If you fear me, kill me. It’s what I deserve for running away. It’s what I deserve for deserting my father and brothers. So go ahead, sweep me from existence as I would an errant ant.”

In that moment, and for the first time, Baird felt free. He’d never been able to admit his fear to his father or brothers. They would never have been able to accept it. But now he’d admitted it aloud, and in doing so, lifted a weight that had hung from his soul his whole life. In that moment, Baird felt free, happier than he’d ever been in his whole life. He let himself smile as he waited for death to come, ready to accept his end.

But nothing happened. The moment stretch on and on, and as it did, the euphoria Baird had felt began to slip away. Fear, then anger, rose in him. Was the giant toying with him?

Baird let his eyes open. The giant stood before him, but now he stood with his back straight, staring into the swirling fog. Then that strange voice spoke again.

“King? I was no king. I was the less than the least foot soldier in our army. When your hordes attacked us, when they poured into our lands, I did not stand with my kin. Like you, I ran. I have run and hid from your kind for all the long years since your kind overwhelmed us.” Now, from within the vast hood, came a sound Baird would never have expected: a wheezing chuckle. “So, human, it appears you and I are two of a kind. Both of us are cowards. So it will be, you will not kill me, and I will not kill you. Do we agree, human?”

Of all the violent, gory outcomes Baird had imagined since the moment he’d known the giant stood before him, this had not been one of them. But he would live through this day, and more important, he knew being a coward wasn’t something confined to himself. Bowing low to the giant, he offered his reply. “Yes, I agree. So, my fellow coward, what say you? Would you be willing to sit awhile with me while we tell each other our stories?”

Another chuckle answered him, and the giant slowly folded himself. “Aye, Brother Coward, I can think of no better way to spend such a dreary morning.”

A Review of “Johnny Lycan and the Anubis Disk”, by Wayne Turmel

So, how does an honest werewolf make a living in Chicago?

That’s just one of many questions Johnny Lycan would love to know the answer to.

Back when he was younger, being a leg-breaker and general hired muscle for the neighborhood bookie cum loan shark brought in a decent living. But Johnny soon found that the more he let his special talent for violence loose, the harder it was to get it back under control. His problem is that no matter what job he has, his violent nature has a way of asserting itself and causing him problems.

As “Johnny Lycan and the Anubis Disk” opens, Johnny is back in his old Chicago neighborhood and has managed to get something like a normal life going. Unfortunately, his former boss needs some help, and he isn’t the type of man to take no for an answer.

Johnny does the job, retrieving his former boss’ daughter from a group of rival mobsters who want to use her as leverage over her father. It’s when he goes to collect his payment for the job that he find his past has come back to bite him in the ass. Someone even more powerful than his local mobster has taken an interest in him, and like the bookie, he isn’t someone who’s going to take no for an answer.

What follows is a story that keeps the reader turning the electronic pages. Johnny soon finds out that all the weirdness he’s had in his life so far is nothing compared to the truly strange world he’s entered. From murderous relics to magic he’s been living in the presence of his whole life, Johnny has fallen down the rabbit hole, only to find it’s really his everyday life.

Wayne Turmel has written some outstanding historical fiction. His Lucca le Pou stories are works that take the reader into the world of the late Crusade era. They’re populating it with characters that live both on the page and in your mind. “Johnny Lycan and the Anubis Disk” is filled with a cast of characters you might run into any day of the week in Chicago. And just as his earlier works did, this latest novel drags you into the life of it’s main character. You see through Johnny’s eyes his battle to contain his nature, all while trying to find something normal to hang onto in an increasingly strange world. It’s a story that keeps you reading, turning the pages to find out what comes next.

I suspect that what comes after this novel will be another one featuring Johnny, or at least I hope one is in the works. Johnny is a character you want to root for, one you can see something of yourself in, even if you’re not a werewolf. He has to make decisions that aren’t always clear-cut, or morally unambiguous, but in making those decisions, he tries his best to do what he hopes is the right thing. That the result isn’t always perfect is a good reminder that life isn’t always about making perfect decisions, something we’d all do well to remember. I’m glad I read “Johnny Lycan and the Anubis Disk”, and I think if you do, you’ll be glad you read it too.

The Doorway

I have researched it for years, and each new source I find tells a different tale.

Nearly half the sources insist it doesn’t exist. To explain away the many legends of it, these writers offer up as many reasons as there are writers denying its existence.

And even among the writers who claim it does exist, there is no consistent explanation of what The Doorway In The Middle Of Nowhere is. Some dismiss it as nothing more than the doorway of some ancient structure that has long ago fallen to dust. Others insist that it is a thing of supernatural origins, created by gods, or demons, or mages of eldritch times.

But whatever it is, there are two things about it that are consistent.

The first is that every culture has stories about The Doorway, and those stories go as far back as the cultures do.

The second is that none of those cultures agrees about precisely where The Doorway is located.

But among those stories, I found four that at least agreed that The Doorway was located on the windswept plateau I have been making my way across this past week.

Why it would be here, I do not know. No roads cross this gods-forsaken land. There is nothing here but the paths made by the great red deer herds who are the sole occupants of this land. Those thread their way among the towering rock spires, passing from one small green glen to the next. The only sign that humans have been here are the odd piles of bones and the occasional fire pit left by those who come here to hunt them. What they burn, I do not know, as trees are few and far between.

I had thought myself prepared for this journey. My research has led me to travel far, and I thought myself an experienced traveler. I even hired two mules to go with my own pack horse, and loaded them all down with food. What I wasn’t smart enough to bring was fire wood.

Nor did I possess the intelligence to bring water.

I remember the last flowing water I saw. It had been nothing more than a straggling trickle of water seeping from the face of the cliff which stood guard over the last road I had ridden. It had been a broad way, like an imperial road of old Las, and had angled upward along the face of that cliff to this plateau. My water skin had been nearly empty, so I stopped to fill it. I remember thinking how strange it was that the water, though cold, had a sharp, bitter taste to it, and how I’d been tempted to empty the skin in hopes of finding better water further on. More by stupid luck than anything else, I had kept that water, and it in turn kept me alive through five days of searching for more water.

And the road…it vanished at the at the edge of the plateau, like it had been built as some mad joke intended to lure unwary travelers to follow it into this desolate hell.

I found my last water yesterday. I had been without for nearly two days when I rounded a vast boulder to find my way blocked by a boggy stretch of ground. In the early days of my wanderings over this curse land, I would have tried to cross it, confident that I could make it to the other side.

That was before I heard a deer screaming in terror.

I found it, neck-deep in a bog. I watched for a while as it struggled to extricate itself from the soggy mass it had mistakenly thought would support its weight. As I did, I came to understand that what I’d thought was grass was actually a carnivorous plant that lured animals like the deer into the bog so it could use their nutrients to keep itself alive. I spent one of my remaining arrows putting it out of its misery.

But even knowing the terrible thing that the bogs harbored didn’t stop them from being the only sources of water. So I began to drink the filthy water that welled up around their edges. The first time I did, I vomited everything in my stomach up. But my body needed water, so I was soon back at the waters edge, scooping water up with my hands and drinking it. Now, after so many times doing so, I hardly notice the rotten meat taste that permeates the water, nor do I note much any dead animals that might float nearby.

I have forgotten much of my former life. When I came here, I had been a well-regarded scholar, even if people thought my fixation on The Doorway a bit odd. Lords had accepted me in their halls. Town head-men had feasted me on the best their hamlets could offer. My clothing, if not ornate, had always been clean, as I had myself.

The last of the food I’d brought with me ran out over a week ago. Now, I subsist on deer meat, whether freshly killed by me, or scavenged from from one of the bogs, and always eaten raw. My clothing is now so covered in filth of every sort that in places it is rigid. And me? I am, if anything, even filthier than my clothing. They at least is exposed to the rain storms that lash this land, while my body is not. And my pack animals? I was not amazed to learn that mule meat is far tougher than horse flesh, but was surprised to learn that it tastes sweeter.

Perhaps I have gone mad, but even as I descend further into squalor, my desire to learn the truth drive me to continue looking for The Doorway. That, and the fact that I no long possess any idea of where I am, nor how I might find the road that had brought me here.

I now move through a landscape much different from that which I first saw. Great solid slabs rise around me, jutting from the ground at odd angles, but they are not stone. They are something I have never seen before. Many have fractured, and more than a few look as though they were torn apart.

What is strange is what those broken surfaces reveal. How can I describe it? Can you imagine a substance as hard as any rock, yet containing within it piece of rock? In some of these great slabs, the rocks are rounded, like they had once been in a river. In others, the rocks are jagged, like they’d been ripped apart by some force unimaginable before being encased in the strange new rock. And in all of them, there are pieces of metal that I am sure are iron.

And these pieces of iron are not like the rocks. No, they have all the markings of something shaped by the hand of man! They are round, often with strange indentations or ridges on their surfaces, something that no source I have ever read says happens in nature.

So now I wander among these strange sights, looking at the increasingly huge pieces of rock, or whatever it is, and wondering if these could possibly have been made by human hands. I move around a vast monolith, twice as wide as my arms could reach and perhaps four times as tall as I…to find a doorway standing before me.

It stands in another shattered piece of…whatever these things are. And while the shape would not be out of place in any dwelling a human lived in, it is far larger, a door easily three times as wide as I could reach, and five times taller than I. But it is the door that stand within it that draws the eye. It gleams like silver that is burnished by ceaseless polishing. How such a mass of metal could be gathered, and more important, how it could remain untouched by greedy hands, even in this isolated place, I do not know.

Neither these questions, nor the many warnings I remember from my sources, stop me from approaching. I have done it. I have found the location of The Doorway. And having found it, I must approach it, I must find out what it truly is.

I am five paces from it when the voice speaks.

It is an unearthly voice, one that seems to issue from the very doorway, and I, who speak five languages, can understand none of the words I hear. What does “Demon-son-all pour-tall one” mean? Is it the name of the being that created this thing? What is the meaning of “Act-of-a-shun”? Or “Be-gin-ning”? The string of words, each one different, but spoken at precise intervals, I can only think is some form of count.

Whether those words are a count or not, after a double-hand of them have been spoken, the gleaming surface vanishes. And in it’s place….I see scenes of wonder.

People walk beside what looks like a road, except it is a single smooth surface, and it runs between patches of grass greener than any I have ever seen. Stranger still, upon it go not horse and wains, but strange vehicles that move themselves. Most are closed, but a few are open, and in these, other people travel. Perhaps the closed vehicles hold people as well.

I have little time to wonder, for the scene vanishes, replaced by a one that might have come from the darkest pit of the deepest of all hells. Here the road still exists, but there are no people, no strange conveyances, and the grass is gone, replaced by blackened stubble. Another change, and now there are people, but they attack each other with no uniforms or formation like armies would possess. No, they simply seem bent on slaughtering each other. And the vision changes again. And again. And no two scenes are precisely the same, for in some, not even the strange road is present.

Now I stand close enough that I could reach out and touch them. Are they real, or are they phantoms projected by this….thing? Another scene, one in which nothing is visible but a vast sweep of chest-high grass. On impulse, I reach out…and feel an odd resistance as my hand passes within the opening. Then I am aware that the hand stretched out before me is warm, far warmer than the rest of me. I feel a breeze sweep across that hand, one the rest of me feels not, and I see the grass wave in response to it. Some of the grass brushes my hand, and I grab it before pulling my hand back. In the image, the the upper part of the grass stalk tears away, and my hand comes back to me clutching a sheaf of grass unlike any I have ever seen.

I am aware that the view changes again, revealing a flat, unrelentingly gray landscape, as if all color and features have been erased. But that barely registers with me. For out of the grass I hold crawls long green insect. I am aware that it is looking at me as intently as I at it, for like the grass, I have never seen anything like it. I see it’s legs move, then in a flash, it is gone, launching itself into the air with a noisy beating of wings.

“So what I see is real!”

I have not spoken for so long I barely recognize my own voice. But they are my words, expressing my thoughts. And I look back into the opening to see what wonders it will reveal next. The view changes again, showing a dark scene illuminated by a pale, wavering light. Even as I wonder what it shows, a fish, vast beyond any I have ever heard of, swims into view.

Both the fish and the knowledge that what I am looking at is underwater, remind me of my own condition. I have not eaten for several days, and had my last water a day ago. Could I perhaps step through the opening and take some water and food? I brought my hand back safely, so why not my whole body?

Hunger and thirst make my decision for me. I watch, waiting for a moment when the scene before me looks promising. Other images appear. What might have once been people, but are now twisted and disfigured caricatures of humanity, shamble past. Then more desolate plains, but these under a sky as black as midnight, with the stars visible even though the Sun stands in the middle of the sky. Then a view, much like the first, but instead of people, strange creatures like man-tall lizards walk the streets.

Another shift, and now another featureless plain spreads beyond my sight. But this one is covered in grass, and before me, near enough to see its water rippling, a stream flows.

“This will do.” I step forward, even as I say the words. As my hand had before, my whole body feels a pressure, like I were trying to push it through an unseen barrier stretching across the opening. Then the pressure is gone, and I fight to keep from stumbling. The shock makes me gasp, and as I do, my nostrils are filled with scents I have never experienced before. Then I realize that the air here is cooler than where I had been before, but not uncomfortably so.

I turn to see where I had been….but there is no trace of the opening here. The Doorway does not exist here. There is not a sign that the place I have just come from exists. I stretch my hand out, sweeping the space before me….and find nothing but emptiness. That is when it dawns on me that, where ever I am, here I will stay.

Was it worth it? Was finding that The Doorway was not only real, but an opening between different worlds, worth leaving my past life behind?

Yes.

I may never go back to claim the fame of proving my discovery, but I have a whole new world to explore, and all manner of new things to learn. “Yes, it was a fair trade.” I tell myself as I make my way towards the river before me to drink, perhaps catch a fish, and decide what direction to go next. Part of me wonders what strange and wondrous things I will witness here. But that is for tomorrow, and all the days yet to come.

The Reward

My life was an ordinary one.

Barring the details, it could have been lived by any other man, in any other country, in any other time.

I was born, went to school, grew up, got a job, then got married. Had kids. Had grand kids. Then the doctor gave me that long-faced announcement that I had The Big C. Mine had grown quietly in my pancreas before expanding outward to attack my other organs. He didn’t use the word hopeless to describe my chances, but his expression, his tone, they all told me it was.

The final few days were confused. Sometimes the kids were there. Other times, they were with Grace, even though she’d been dead for a decade. Those were the worst days. Every time Grace was there, her face had that disappointed look on it, like when she learned I wouldn’t get my pension because the company had used it and all the other pension contributions to buy stock back. On the final day, no one was there. I guess I couldn’t blame them. I died on a Wednesday morning, and like me, all my kids had jobs to be at.

I spent my final few moments gasping because my lungs didn’t seem to have enough air coming in. Then it was over.

Some folks insist you see a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Me, there was none of that. One moment I was staring at the cheap ceiling tiles, then I was here. In a line with lots of other rather ordinary people. On either side, all there is to see is a barren wasteland, a place covered in loose black rocks that looked like they’d come from the sloping sides of a volcano. The line stretches before me, and behind me, too far for me to see any ending to it. And we are always in motion. Not a rapid motion, more a shuffling amble, but always we move forward.

I don’t need to ask where I am. I know where I am: Hell.

There are no demons armed with pitchforks. No rising towers of flame. There are no seas of lava filled with screaming sinners. But I know this is Hell as surely as if a huge neon sign hung in the sky announcing it was.

And I knew why I was here.

My live was one compromise after another.

Every day, I’d seen things I knew were wrong, even evil, and just turned away.

I gave myself the usual excuses for not acting.

It would be too hard to change the way things were done.

Things had always been done that way.

It didn’t effect me, so why should I care?

Every time I didn’t do the right thing, every instant when I’d remained silent, had brought me to this place. Looking at the faces of those around me, I knew they were here for the same reasons. Some of them were angry, shouting that they’d done nothing to deserve this. Others wept, lamenting the chances they’d not taken to be better than they were.

But most were like me. They knew where they were and accepted it with the same stolid attitude they’d dealt with the rest of the disappointing events in their lives.

And so here we were, the vast tide of humanity trudging to our final reward for a live spent just getting by.

The Screaming Tree

It wasn’t that Ciaran and Ciara O’Breoghan were naughty children. No, there were many children who behaved naughtily among the families that made up the The O’Breoghan’s household. What made Ciaran and Ciara truly stand out was the fact that they enjoyed being naughty.

The scarlet-haired twins had heard, again and again, that they should behave ‘properly’. There father, their mother, their tutors and even their servants would remind them that they were The Future Of The Clan O’Breoghan. Ciaran was told how he would one day take his father’s place as chieftain of the clan. Ciara had heard how she would one day marry the son of one of the neighboring clan’s chieftain.

And both of them hated being told what they would do.

At ten years of age, both of them both of them wanted nothing to do with the boring necessities of becoming the people their parents wanted them to be Yet no matter how much they protested, no matter how they tried to avoid it, they’d been told that as the only surviving children of Ruari O’Breoghan, what they wanted was less important than what their clan needed.

So they had settled on gone out of their way to be annoying. In hopes that their bad behavior would cause their parents to reconsider, they made a game of finding new ways to try the patience of their servants. They tormented one tutor after another until they gave up. And as often as they could, they offended guests to their father’s hall.

Of all their acts, this caused their parents the most trouble. In Irish society, the guests of a chieftain were honored before everyone else in the household but the chieftain themselves. So the twins took great pleasure in offering offense to any and all people who guested in Ruari O’Breoghan’s hall.

Tonight’s guest was a traveling shanachie. Both twins loved the stories brought by shanachies, and their resolve to cause trouble wavered when they first heard such an important person would be visiting. Then they saw their father’s guest. He looked nothing like the other shanachies who’d visited. His robes were frayed and filthy, and the skin of his face hung in pale folds around the pale eyes of a blind man. He seemed to hang from the pair of attendants who supported him, not walk proudly to face their father as the other shanachies had. But when he spoke, in a high, squeaky voice, they found it hard to hold in the gale of laughter that arose in both of them.

“Ruari O’Breoghan, son of Rian O’Breoghan, who was son of Niall O’Breoghan, who’s father bore your name, I thank you for your gracious hospitality. May your house and clan know peace and plenty through all the years.”

Both children watched in stunned amazement as their father rose from his seat and embraced the filthy old man. “Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, son of Daithi Mac Giolla Bháin, who’s fame is know across Ireland, Scotland and even among the English, I bid you welcome. It has been far too long since you have graced this hall. I was but a boy of nine when you visited last, and I hope I may show you as much honor as my father did.”

Taking the old man’s arm over his shoulder, father helped him to a seat servants brought and set beside the fire. There the two of them fell to talking of that long ago visit, a subject neither child cared to hear of. They made to leave, but their movement drew their father’s attention. “Children, come meet our guest for tonight, the greatest shanachie in Ireland, Scotland and England, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin.”

To walk away would anger their father, and earn them banishment from the feast that was to come, so Ciaran and Ciara came forward to address the old shanachie. “We bid you welcome to this hall, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, greatest of all shanachies.” they chorused together.

Diarmuid cocked his head to one side, and an unpleasant smile spread across his toothless mouth. “Ah, I am welcome by you two, am I? I wonder where that welcome was when you were stiffing your laughter at my appearance not a moment ago?”

Ciaran and Ciara spared a quick glance, each seeing the other’s face go pale in response to their father’s face going crimson with embarrassment. Both of them began stammered attempts at apology, but their father’s voice growled out an apology that drown theirs out. “I apologize for my children’s ill manners, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin. Ciaran, Ciara, apologize to Himself, now!”

They’d only heard that tone applied to those who had gotten on the bad side of their father’s temper, and never to themselves. Bowing low, they put every bit of the chagrin they felt into their apology. “We are most humbly sorry for have offered offense to you, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin.”

They kept their faces down-turned, waiting for the acceptance of their words they expected. Instead, after a long silence, they heard a single sniff before the old man began speaking to their father again of his travels. Both of them wished to leave, but knew that until the old shanachie spoke to them, they could not, in good grace, even stand straight. He kept talking, pointedly ignoring them, and both children went from fear of their father’s reaction to anger at being so treated in their own hall. Worse, father kept up his side of the conversation, ignoring them and their plight as if they were invisible.

It wasn’t until after he’d finished a long, rambling account of his visit to the hall of the King of Connachta that Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin took notice of them. And even then, all he said to them was “Oh, you children may go.” before he launched into a story about his encounter with a Milesian trader.

Together, they raised their heads, hoping to find their father ready to rebuke the old shanachie for his lack of courtesy to them. Instead, they found their father listening with rapt attention to to the old man’s tale of the joys of wine from across the wide ocean. He did not even look towards them, leaving Ciaran and Ciara with no choice but to retire.

The shame they felt, being treated in such a manner in their own hall, felt beyond bearing. But it was nothing compared to the way the servants treated them. Like all great halls, theirs was staffed with many slaves. Some were captives taken from among the English, others people taking in battle and forced to serve those who had conquered them. All of them knew to lower their eyes and act humbly around their master and his children. Now, though, every time the children walked past a servant, there was a moment, just as their gaze slide away from them, when they saw not humbleness, but triumph. Their servant’s faces were no longer studiously blank in their presence, but held the trace of a smile, as they reveled in their tormentor’s discomfort.

That humiliation, with their father’s ignorance of their plight, raised a tide of anger in both of them they fought to contain until alone. The room they shared was the only place they could truly be alone, and once the door had closed, they both began to shout.

“How could father let him…”

“Can you believe the way that English serving girl looked at us…”

“That we could be treated so, by our own father…..”

“That old man, how dare he…”

“It’s beyond bearing, it is!”

“It cannot go unanswered!”

In that moment, as they often did, both children were struck by the same thought. They would find some way to take their revenge, not only on Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, but on all those who they thought had mistreated them. But how? No matter how much they debated the problem, neither of them could find a method for exacting their vengeance. They were brooding on the injustice of it all when the nameless old hag who tended them entered their room.

“Your father bids me remind you to be clean and properly dressed for the feast tonight. As the other servants are busy setting the table, you should be getting ready.”

Those words sparked the same thought in both of them, a thought they held inside until they were alone again.

“If we can make others laugh at that old fool…”

“….then father will have no choice but to forgive us!”

They sketched out their idea as they dressed, laughing at each new addition they came up with. Ciaran stopped in mid-laugh. “But we can’t let them know what we plan to do.”

“Of course not, brother. We must be as meek as mice and as polite as can be.”

With those words, they both banished any sign of mirth from their faces and walked side by side to the feasting hall.

Outside, the rumble of thunder told them that Taranis was busy this night, but the feasting hall shone bright with candles and fires. Father and the shanachie were already seated, but enough to the family retainers had yet to arrive that Ciaran and Ciara’s arrival could not be regarded as late. They approached the two men together, bowing low before speaking.

“Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, we most humbly offer you our apology. Our ill manners brought shame to our clan, our father and this house.”Ciaran started, and Ciara finished. “We both bid you welcome to our hall and house, and hope you will enjoy our hospitality.”

They’d practiced the speech several times, and both children thought their presentation perfect. It caused their father to smile at them like they’d just recited the epic of Fionn mac Cumhaill from memory. But Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin? His blind eyes stared at them until they as transparent as the waters of Loch na Coille Bige, and he could see their lie as clear as a great brown trout swimming just beneath the surface. Then cheerful smile spread across his face. “Of course, children, and I thank you for your kind welcome. Please, don’t bother yourself over an old man’s ill humors. It’s only natural for children to desire enjoyment. So I hope you will feast and enjoy yourself this night.”

Unnerved but happy to be free, the twins took their place at the long table to await the coming feast. Their wait was short, as all the retainers had heard that tonight one of the greatest shanachies in all the Irish lands was to entertain them. That, and the rich feast such a visit would entail were enough to draw every member of the household with a claim to a spot at The O’Breoghan’s table. When the last had taken his spot, father arose to address them all.

“Join me in welcoming our guest tonight, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin.” The crowd raised their flagons in a roar of agreement, even the twins lifted their cups of cider. After a long silence as everyone drank the great shanachie’s health, the old man rose and lifted his own flagon. “I thank you all for your welcome and kindness. But now is no time for speeches by old men like me. Eat, drink, enjoy yourselves. Sláinte!”

An even louder chorus of agreement and laughter greeted this, and as the old man settled himself again, servants began to pour into the hall bearing food. The feast that followed brought food of every type, food in quantities fit to challenge even the greatest glutton. It flowed in such a delightful manner that the twins began to enjoy themselves, even to the point of forgetting their pledge of vengeance against Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin. But no feast last forever, and as the last plates were being taken away, every flagon was topped off and their father again rose to address the hall.

“My clan, I ask you to join me again drinking the health of Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, and to ask him to grace us with the telling of one of the great tales.” The shouts that greeted this call befitted the quantity of drink and food that had gone into the assembly. They were by far the loudest of the night, and with the drink on them, the adults called out their suggestions for what tale they wished to hear.

“Tell us the tale Táin Bó Cúailnge!”

“No, tell us of the forming of the Fianna!

Please, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, tell us the tale of Oidheadh chloinne Lir!”

The old man listened to the cries, quietly smiling, until The O’Breoghan raised his hand for silence. When the voices had stilled, he turned to the shanachie. “Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, you are my guest, and it’s a poor host who demands payment for his hospitality. If you would choose to grace us with a tale, I would count it an honor beyond any I ever looked for. But I will not demand one of you, and if you decide to speak, I will not dictate to you what tale you tell.”

The old man bowed in his seat. “You honor me with your words, Ruari O’Breoghan. Truly, you and your hall know the meaning of hospitality far better than many another chieftain. But it would be a poor guest indeed who felt no need to repay such a feast as I have had this night. If you and yours will indulge me, I would tell the tale of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his many adventures.” The hall rang with approving shouts that brought a broad smile to the old shanachie’s face, but as they tapered off, his head turned towards Ciaran and Ciara. The smile became less one that of a man swept up in praise, and more like that of someone seeing a chance to do an old foe injury. “But that is a long tale, one that I will no doubt have to interrupt it to drink and ease my dry throat.” The men laughed at the joke, knowing the shanachie would drink many a flagon of beer before he finished. “And I would not expect the young ones here to stay awake through it all as courtesy would require. Ruari O’Breoghan, would it not be a wise thing to allow your children to retire for the night?”

Their father looked at them, then his guest, and the twins saw he had understood what was really being said. The old shanachie wanted them gone so they could not enjoy the telling of one of the greatest stories of all Ireland. Perhaps it was petty, but every chieftain knew how unwise it was to cross a traveling shanachie like Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin. “Perhaps you are right. Ciaran, Ciara, it is late, and you should be off to bed.”

Perhaps he expected them to be angry, and the twins were angry at how the shanachie had dismissed them out of hand. But as they rose and made their bows to their father, they also knew this would give them the perfect chance to exact their revenge on Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin. Ciaran and Ciara made their way to the door, but instead of leaving through it, they turned aside and slipped along the wall. They found a spot out of their father’s sight but visible to many of household and waited. They had to wait but a short moment. The shanachie rose from his seat to walk into the center of the hall. With a final bow to their father, he launched into the mighty tale.

“Goll, son of Daire the Red, with fame,
Son of Eochaid the Fair, of valor excellent,
Son of Cairbre the Valorous with valor,
Son of Muiredach from Finnmag.

Goll slew Luchet of the hundreds
In the battle of Cnucha, it is no falsehood:
Luchet the Fair of prowess bright
Fell by the son of Morna.”

As he spoke, Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin’s arms swept about in the sort of dramatic gestures every shanachie they’d ever seen or heard loved to use. And as he gestured, the twins imitated his every movement in silence, making their movement even more exaggerated than the shanachie’s. At first, no one noticed their antics. Then one drunk warrior caught sight of them and nudged the fellow beside him. Both of them smiled as the the sad opening rolled on.

“By him fell great Cumall
In the battle of Cnucha of the hosts.
It is for the chieftaincy of Erin’s fian
That they waged the stout battle.

The children of Morna were in the battle
And the Luagni of Tara,
Since to them belonged the leadership of the men of Ireland
By the side of every valorous king.

Victorious Cumall had a son,
Finn, bloody, of weapons hard:
Finn and Goll, great their fame,
Mightily they waged war.”

A third man noticed them, and where the first two could contain their mirth, this one watched them for only a moment before chuckling, then bursting into open laughter. No man laughed at such a moment without drawing the attention of those around him. Worse, it drew the attention of Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin, and he paused in mid-stanza, their. When he did, their father came around the pillar that had kept them hidden. Finding Ciaran and Ciara were the cause of the commotion, his face went scarlet. For a long moment, they watched their father’s face as he struggled to contain the anger that filled his voice when he finally spoke. “What mischief have you two been up to? I told you to go to your beds!”

This was not the result they’d hoped for. Ciaran tried to answer. “Father, we….we were just…”

“Enough!” Their father had never shouted at them like this before, nor had he ever looked this beside himself with anger when dealing with their past deeds. He scrubbed his broad hands over his face before shaking his head. “I have tolerated your actions in the past because I thought it caused by your mother not being here to help care for you. Clearly, I have been too lenient in dealing with you. No more. Tonight, now, you will take yourselves to the cottage Cillian Mag Aoidh. You will stay there, obeying his command and helping him with his farm, until I decide you have learned your lesson.”

That stopped both of them. Cillian Mag Aoidh was the oldest retainer of their clan they knew of, a man so old he’d taught their father the use of weapons. For this service, their grandfather had gifted him a cottage and some land overlooking a cove most of a day’s walk from the hall. Did their father truly expect them to make the walk at night?

“But father, how can we got to…”

Ciaran had no chance to finish his question. Father cut him off, his voice filled with anger. “You’ve made the walk more than once, both of you. Ill let you take your cloaks, it’s going to be a wet walk, but enough delays. You need to learn that your actions have consequences. If that means walking to an old man’s cottage in a storm, then consider it a small price to pay for the offense you have committed against this hall and your family’s name. Go! Be getting yourselves out of my sight.”

Their father stormed off to retake his seat, leaving them in a circle of shocked, silent faces. Ciarian turned to do as he was told, but Ciara, as usually, would not leave well enough alone. “This is all your fault, you filthy old beggar! Coming into our hall, disrupting our lives, and for what? So we can hear you tell a tale in your silly voice! Who’d want to hear you say anything?”

Such a blatant insult caused even Ciaran to gasp. He grabbed his sister’s arm, intent on checking her, but his words stooped in his throat when the bard turned towards them. His eyes were no longer milky white. No, now they glowed like the center of a forge as he spoke.

“And who will ever hear your voice again, disrespectful child? Lugh sees what you children do, and all the gods have heard what you say. My you both repent your words and deeds, for if you don’t, then the gods will curse you to silence from this day forward.”

Whether it was those terrible eyes, or the cold ringing voice that called so ominous a curse down upon them, the twins fled the hall as fast as their feet would carry them. Yet even as they donned their cloaks, Ciara continued to rant about what had happened. “How dare he? Try to scare us with that silly curse, will he? Like I’d be put down by the likes of him!” She was still muttering under her breath as they exited the front door and made their way through the gate. As it closed behind them, Ciaran grabbed his sister’s arm, hoping to reason with her.

“Are you mad, thinking his curse hollow? Did you not see his eyes, nor hear his voice? We need to apologize to Himself, we do.”

Ciara stopped, but listen to him? She’d never listened to him, or anyone else, once her blood was up. She shook off his hand, and stared at him for a long moment. Her voice, when she spoke, was like a whip of thorns on his soul. “Is it a brother I was born with, or a sister? Was I the only one born with any courage, or any sense of what’s right? No, we need to find a way to strike back for this insult, we do. For if we don’t, we’ll never be respected as long as we live.”

Her words drove Ciaran’s reason aside, leaving his anger to take control of him. “I’m no woman, and I’ll not have anyone say otherwise, not even you! But what can we do, now, cast out of the hall?”

“We might be cast out of the hall, for now, but there’s no one to say we can’t plan our revenge while we walk now, is there?”

With those words, the twins set out through the growing darkness, spinning out more and more elaborate plans for taking revenge upon the shanachie. But with every step they took, the darkness of the storm, until then just a threatening presence on the horizon, came closer. Taranis announced it’s arrival with a stupendous clap of thunder, followed by a roaring wind filled with rain and hail. Their cloaks did little to protect them from the assault, so Ciaran grabbed his sister’s hand and together they ran through the deluge seeking shelter. But no cottage, not even a herdsman’s lowly shelter, did they find. Again and again, Taranis’ mighty hammer struck the heavens, sending lightening down to smote the ground, and thunder to stun their ears.

Hope of shelter began to fail the twins when a huge dark shape loomed out of the rain. Changing course, they found it to be a ruined oak tree, its branches bare even though Litha was but two months passed. Ciara raised her cloak enough to tilt her head back before rounding on Ciaran. “Well, brother, this is a fine discovery you’ve made! Are you next going to lead us to a stream, so we can stay dry by drowning in it now?”

“It’s sure you’ve a tongue in your head, but no brains to go with it. At least if we can go to the downwind side, we’ll have a bit of shelter to stand in while we get our bearings. Or do you enjoy being pelted by hailstones?”

That silenced his sister, but the thing that amazed them both was the broad, dark crack they found in the mighty tree’s trunk. Ciaran reached into it, up to his shoulder, and found nothing. “I think there’s space in here for one of us, maybe both. Would you like to try getting in, or would you rather I go first?” Ciara had a deathly fear of small spaces, something her brother knew well. “No, you can go first.”

Ciaran found the crack wider at the bottom than the top, but even there, it was more like he was forcing his body through the solid wood than into an open crack. Slipping his cloak off allowed him to finally get himself into the space behind the opening. It was profoundly dark inside, but it was also dry. Better, when he sat down and stretched his legs out, his feet barely touched the opposite side of the hollow. “Come in, sister, it’s dry and there’s plenty of room for both of us.”

Ciara heard her brother’s shout, but the thought of squeezing through the narrow opening filled her with a fear she couldn’t easily overcome. Another stroke of Taranis’ hammer, this one sending a lightening bolt down on a hilltop in front of her, overcame her fear. Unlike Ciaran, she could squeeze through the crack without shedding her cloak. Her brother helped her settle in next to him, and rather than get his own cloak, they wrapped themselves in Ciara’s. Ciaran could feel his sister shivering, and knew it had little to do with the chill from their wet clothing. “I ask you, is this not better than being out in rain?”

“It is, but my heart still quivers with fear at the thought of being here. Does it not bother you, brother, to be in this small space?”

Ciaran opened his mouth, ready to deny he felt fear at all, but some deep part of him feared this place. When he answered as levelly as he could. “It does bother me, but I can set aside my fear if it means I’m not battered by hailstones while being soaked to my skin by rain.”

Ciaran should have listened to his fear. The words had just left his mouth when the crack they’d entered through closed without a sound. The noise of the storm gone, they could hear the great tree creaking, sounding so like a high, squeaky voice laughing at them. For a moment, they were stunned into silence. Then, as one person, they flung themselves at the wood, beating it with their fists, scratching at it with their fingernails. And as they tried to force the crack open, both of them screamed and screamed for help.

#

Ruari O’Breoghan’s head felt fit to burst as he untangled himself from the young Scottish serving girl he’d bedded and threw aside the bed covers. “Am I too old to be at the drink?” It was a question that made him want to prove his vigor. After a quick piss, he crawled back into bed for a morning’s roll with the fine young wench still asleep there. She was quite happy to oblige him, and after a long, breathless ride, she took his seed with joy.

Ruari lay for a while, happy to be resting, as his bed partner dressed and left. Then he rose, dressed himself, and made for the kitchen to find something to eat. There was a fine level of chatter going on, but every voice fell silent when he entered the room. That sudden silence told him something had happened, but he knew asking what would get nothing but silent evasion. “Cook, a bowl of porridge and mug of warm cider. Bring both to the small hall.”

The small hall was the oldest part of the complex that house the O’Breoghan’s. Supposedly it had been build by Ruari’s great-grandfather, but whomever built it, it was a dry, warm space on even a raw wet day like this. Cook brought Ruari’s breakfast himself, along with a spare mug of cider for himself. The two men had grown up together, Caolan being the son of a buanadha Ruari’s father had hired to train his warriors. Alone, they fell back into the informality they’d enjoyed as boys. “So, are you free to tell me what is it that the grand lord’s not supposed to know?”

Caolan took a long draw of his cider before answering. “Well, if you’ll be listening to the rumors flying through the hall, there’s many. The biggest is that when the servants went to ask what Diarmuid Mac Giolla Bháin might be wanting for breakfast, not only was his room empty, but the bed hadn’t been slept in. More interesting is the fact that the guards who were at the gate insist they never saw him leave.”

Ruari nearly choked on his mouthful of porridge. “You’re serious now?

“I am.”

“Well then, who was that telling us tales last night? Never mind. As my Da said, some things, it’s better to not know.”
“Aye, that true. But what of the twins? Will you be calling them back?”

“No matter who our guest was, spirit or flesh, their behavior was beyond bearing. No. Staying with old Cillian for a day or two will do them no harm. In any event, I wouldn’t ask anyone to make the walk on a day like today. Besides, with them out of the hall, I’ll be able to have my breakfast without being disturbed.”

Ruari was good to his word, and it wasn’t until the the Sun rose next morning in a clear sky that he sent a servant off to Cillian Mag Aoidh’s cottage. He was brooding over his children’s manners when the whey-faced servant returned to report that the children had never arrived at Cillian’s.

“What do you mean, they never arrived? Think, man! Did you see any sign of them? Any tracks?”

“And how could I find any sort of sign or track after the storm we had? The only thing that could have left a mark that survived such a rain would be a herd of cattle, and two children aren’t a herd of cattle, no matter how ill-mannered.”

It was true, and Ruari knew it. Still, where could they have gotten to? “They need to be found. Have every servant, every warrior, follow the track to Cillian Mag Aoidh’s. There’s no cliffs along the path, and I can’t see them just walking into the ocean, so look for any place they might have taken shelter.” When no one moved, he rose to bellow at them “Go, blast you all! Or do I have to lead you in a simple search for two missing children?”

For the rest of that day, and all of the next, every member of the O’Breoghan clan, and every household servant, scoured the countryside. But not one sign did they find of the missing twins. On the third day, a cattleherder’s son came to the gate. The boy carried two things: a child’s cloak like the one Ciaran had worn, and a tale of as terror so profound he could not at first tell it. Several flagons of beer loosened his tongue enough to relate how he’d gone to gather missing cattle, only to find the cloak lying beside an ancient oak tree. It had been dead as long he had been alive, but none of the local people would cut it down because it was held to be sacred. But when the boy found the cloak, the tree had been covered in fresh green leaves, like it was a young sapling. It also had something else new: a pair of burls the boy had never seen before. Two burls like a pair of faces screaming from the side of the tree.

Ruari O’Breoghan followed the cattleherder’s son to the tree. It was well away from the path his children should have been following, but on reflection, he realized that on a stormy night, it might have drawn the twin’s attention. He had never visited it before, but one look at the pair of burls protruding from its side told him all he needed to know. Even with their mouths locked forever in mid-scream, and the faces twisted in terror, he knew the faces of his children.

#

No one ever bothered what became known as the Tree of Screams. Even a thousand years later, when black Cromwell’s men made a sport of desecrating Irish holy sites, none of them would approach the towering oak. When it fell in a cyclone, the people who lived nearby hoped the dark curse that had brought it to be was dispelled. Then a sapling sprang from it’s roots, and no one was surprised to find, on it’s side, the same screaming faces.

An honest day’s pay

Paullus Lucius Decimus had been on the move, constantly looking for any sort of work, since the day he’d woken up in the abandoned building. He’d faced worse situations, like when he’d been forced to join the masses of humanity fleeing the Mongol army as it swept across eastern Europe. But even then, no one had asked any questions of a man willing to work at whatever task needed doing.

Now, facing a nation increasingly hostile to outsiders, he wondered if it were time to find somewhere else to live. He’d been in America for well over a century, and even in it’s darkest periods of xenophobia, it hadn’t been as bad as this. More than once, he’d gone to construction companies, landscapers, even restaurants, and been asked to show some form or identification. Before that strange reawakening, he’d had a decent set of false ID papers. But they’d not been on him when he came to in the filthy building.

Having been forced to it too often, he hated to resort to begging. So when Paullus heard that a so-called ‘professional’ renaissance fair was looking for help, he’d been glad for the money. He’d spent only a small part of that time in in his native land, finding it far too depressing to see the descendants of Rome taking pride in rediscovering things their ancestors had taken as a part of their daily lives. He’d spent much of that period in Persia, which had been far more interested in building on the knowledge of Rome than on trying to recreate it.

Still, he had spent enough time among the European peoples to know the clothing he was required to wear as he sold mulled wine and other food was more costume than accurate. It made him money, and he told himself that was all that was important.

Then, on the first day of the weekend, a group claiming to be sword masters began to perform. Paullus heard of them from the other workers, who thought they were fascinating. During one of the times he was allowed away from the stand he manned, he wandered down to watch an exhibition of their skills. What he saw made him stifle a belly laugh. None of the people exchanging mock sword strokes would have last a minute against a real sword master. For that matter, none of them would have fared any better against an average legionnaire. Then one man made a thrust Paullus could have avoided in his sleep, but his opponent allowed it through before staggering and falling to the imaginary wound. Shaking his head, Paullus turned away, ready to walk off. As he took his first step, he heard a loud voice behind him call out.

“We, the Swordmasters of the Kingdom of Trakonia, do hereby challenge any swordsman or swordswoman to face us. Defeat one of us, and we will acknowledge you as a worthy opponent. Defeat two of us, and we deem you an equal.” The voice paused, an all-too-obvious device to build suspense before it continued. “Defeat all three of us, and win five hundred dollars cash!”

Most of the people around him gasped, then cheered, clearly hoping to see a true fight unfold. For Paullus, who would make less than half that amount for working the entire event, it was money he intended to win. He pushed his way through the crowd to find a line of people signing their names to a list before laying down five dollars. So that’s how they make it pay, they demand an entrance fee from those who face them, then pay any winner out of the money they take. Paullus had the money to enter, but it would take everything he had. Nothing ventured, nothing gained was an idea he’d known all his life, so when his turn came to sign up, he did so with a smile on his face.

Paullus and the other contestants were herded into a small, roped off enclosure where they were to watch while they awaited their turn. Each challenger was led out of the space and offered a selection of swords provided by their opponent. That by itself bothered Paullus, who’s familiarity with Rome’s gladiatorial games reminded him that offering a bad sword to an opponent was one of the easiest ways to fix a fight. But as he watched, none of the challengers lost due to a blade the broke under an opportune blow, or warped when used.

No, all of the challengers lost because they were fools who had never handled a sword in deadly earnest. Some strove for follow the forms of dueling, and lost to the men they faced who actually knew the basics of such things. Others tried to simply beat down their opponents, and fell to disciplined sword work like any of the barbarians Paullus had faced. Then, it was his turn.

Paullus left the much emptier enclosure and approached the table covered in different styles of swords. He knew all of the classics lying before him: saber, cutlass, broadsword, rapier and many others. Only one sword caught his eye, and as he picked the gladius up from among the rest, he knew someone had put a great deal of effort into getting at least the form right. It was obviously a wooden replica, far too light to simulate the feel of a real blade. But as he gave it a tentative swing, it felt right in his hand.

He’d watched his opponent as he dispatched challenger after challenger. He was a head taller than Paullus, and had the extra reach to go with that height advantage. He was also a swaggering, over-confident fool. He loved to flip his rapier around in broad, useless flourishes, and he never resorted to any sort of footwork, stay flat on his feet through all the matches so far. This is going to be too easy.

Paullus saw his opponent smile as he walked towards him. Motioning towards the sword in Paullus’ hand, he tried to taunt him. “What, did you pick up a sword to match your manhood?”

Holding the gladius in front of him, Paullus looked it over, then smiled. “No, unlike you, I don’t need to carry a huge sword to make up my lack of manhood.” The ugly red flush that spread across the now scowling face told him he’d hit his mark. “I do have one question before we start: What are the rules of this contest?”

The scowl disappeared. “Rules? Why do you ask about…”

Paullus’ opponent didn’t get to finish his response. Two long steps were all it took for him to cross the space between them. The heavy pommel of the gladius slammed into the other man’s stomach, and he folded as the air whooshed out of him. As he fell to his knees, Paullus switched his weapon around and brought the edge whistling down to stop just short of the kneeling man’s neck. “Because I wanted to know if this means I’ve defeated you.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then the crowd roared out it’s approval as his opponent dropped his rapier. Paullus didn’t care what they thought. He lifted his eyes to the two men standing on the inside of the open area. “So, which one of you is next?”

They were polar opposites. One, a short, stout man in a knee-length coat of chain mail and armed with a sword like the Crusader’s sword Paullus had once wielded as a mercenary in the Second Crusade. The other was tall and slender, dressed like some 16^th Century fop and carrying an epee. They looked at each other, and the tall man stepped forward. “I will face you.”

Paullus hadn’t had a chance to watch this man fight, but as they faced each other, his movements made it clear he possessed more skill with his blade than the last man. Between his longer arms and the superior length of his blade, he had even more advantage in reach. But like many epee users Paullus had faced, he tended to commit himself to every stroke. He dodged two thrusts, waiting for the moment when he moved too far off his center to cover himself. As he did, Paullus shifted inside him, driving his knee into his attackers crotch.

Whatever sound he might have made was drowned out by the groan of sympathetic pain that came from the crowd. This time, Paullus didn’t spare his opponent. He drove the pommel of his sword into the back of the other man’s head, dropping him on the spot. Lifting his eyes, he swept the crowd. “This is how a real sword fight is conducted. There is only one rule: win. Win because the only alternative is death.” Fixing his eyes on the final man, he put every bit of his experience in killing into the cold voice he addressed his final opponent in the sudden silence. “So, sir, will you face me, or do you yield?”

The man in chain mail didn’t so much drop his sword as throw it aside as he shouted “I yield!”

The cheers of the crowd didn’t move Paullus at all. The only thing that truly made him smile was watching as the fat man counted out his five hundred dollars, a fine pay day for a short day’s worth of fighting. Tomorrow, and for the next few days at least, he would not have to worry about food and lodgings. After that? He slipped his hand into the pocket of the jeans he wore under his costume.

“After that will be after that” he whispered to himself as he walked through the crowd that parted before him.

What are monsters made of?

“Sarah!”

The thing in front of him did not like Pete yelling. “Thing” was the only word he could use to describe the muscular human body wearing a tattered pair of jeans and topped with a wolf’s head. It lunged forward, reaching out like a man would to grab him while it’s muzzle split open in a snarl. The teeth this revealed would shred him in an instant if he didn’t do something.

He did something. It moved like a man, but it seemed to have the mind of a wolf. Pete was able to dodge it, and as it passed, he slammed the crowbar in his hand into the back of it’s head. The thing went down, and howled like a dog as Pete brought the crowbar down again and again until it fell silent.

It wasn’t the first horror Pete had seen. Another thing, much like this one but smaller, lay in the front room of his house. A woman’s body with a cat’s head and claws lay on the steps to his house. Pete had beaten them to death too.

Now that wolf-head was dead, there was nothing between him and his daughter’s room. He stepped over the still form and advanced on the familiar door. Blood had spattered everywhere in the hall, including a thin line of drops marred the childish sunflower that decorated Sarah’s door. Pete reached out to grab the door knob, and the house shook. It wasn’t hard to understand why it was shaking. Not a block away, a giant lizard was methodically reducing Plainview Grade School to a pile of rubble.

Fuck it, Pete, be honest, that’s fucking Godzilla stomping the school to pieces.

Pete remembered staring at the giant beast through his front windshield, wondering how many kids had escaped before the walking nightmare had begun its work. Even if the kids had all escaped, he had to do something, and quick. His fingers closed around the familiar doorknob, and it opened as it always had when he twisted his wrist.

“Sarah?”

The inside of his daughter’s room was all shadows and half-light. Like him, she had trouble sleeping if there was too much light in the room. So the room’s only illumination came from a tiny strip of sunlight that leaked around the edges of a set of heavy ‘black-out’ curtains. As it often was, there was a minefield of toys and discarded cloths between Pete and the bed where Sarah lay. She gave no hint she’d heard him.

“Sarah?”

He spoke louder, hoping she’d wake, but beyond a quick toss of her head, Sarah gave no sign of having heard. Again, like him, once his daughter was asleep, waking her could be near-impossible.

“Sarah!”

Louder still, but as he spoke, a thunderous roar tore the air outside. Sounding like a cross between tearing metal and low-flying jet, it shook not just the air, it rattled the room’s windows and throbbed through Pete’s body.

And still Sarah did nothing more than toss fitfully in her sleep.

Pete threaded his way through the object on the floor to reach his daughter’s bed. Bending down, he touched her shoulder. “Sarah, it’s Daddy. Wake up honey.”

His daughter rolled away from him with an inarticulate moan, and the temperature around him drop. His next breath came out as a cloud of fog, and across the bed from him, Pete saw a dark shape forming. If the thing with a wolf’s head had been a terror, to huge blob gathering before him would be a nightmare incarnate. It towered over him, topping out just beneath the eight foot ceiling, and half as wide as Sarah’s bed was long.

Pete had seen the darkness take shape before. His daughter had been a scared three year old, and he had gone to her bedroom to check on her. Like now, he’d found her asleep already. But as he stood beside her bed, he’d watched as the shadows coalesced into a teddy bear…a teddy bear in armor, carrying a sword and shield…a teddy bear that rose and moved between Pete and his daughter like a sentry.

“Sarah, you have to wake up now!”

The guardian teddy hadn’t done anything, but the way it positioned itself between them told Pete he would not be allowed to touch his daughter. It was gone the next morning, and Sarah had no memory of it.

But a few weeks later, another child had pushed Sarah down at the playground. The child and its parent had apologized, and Sarah had seemed to accept it with no hard feelings. But that night, Pete had witnessed a black outline of something that looked like himself stalk out of the house and vanish into the night. The next day, the town was abuzz with stories of a family murdered in their sleep, each member beaten to death in their beds. It wasn’t until the local paper printed their obituaries that Pete realized the family had been that of the child who’d pushed Sarah. And no one was ever brought to trial for the crime.

The dark shape became more defined. A rounded head, a long muzzle, broad shoulders…it began to look like one of the polar bears that had so fascinated Sarah at the zoo. Another screech, like the world itself were being ripped apart, tore the air outside.

People were dying outside, just as his wife had died after telling Sarah she shouldn’t be angry all the time. A black something had ripped her to shreds as she took a bag out to the garbage, leaving no trace the police could find. After that, things had gotten worse, and Sarah seemed angry all the time, just as she had been this afternoon when she’d come home from her first day at school. And now the school was being destroyed.

Pete had to act, now, before the monstrous shape across the bed could solidify and kill him. He had to act, or more people would die.

“Please, Sarah, wake up for Daddy. Please stop this.”

Sarah didn’t wake, but the giant shape became more defined. It’s thick arms made a few tentative swings, and from deep in its broad chest, he heard a rumbling growl like a dozen angry mastiffs.

Pete’s daughter was becoming a monster. He knew that. He’d hoped she’d grow out of it. But she ‘d just become angrier.

“I love you, Sarah. Daddy will protect you from the monsters.”

His arm rose, the crowbar came down, he swung it again and again, until the monster in his daughter’s bed was dead, and he wished himself dead beside her.