How long this continued, I can't say. Aside from the passing of seasons, I'd long since lost the ability to track time. I believe it was my longest period of awareness since dying, but that may be just the effect of feeling so much so intensely. At first I didn't even notice the dizzy sensation coming over me. I'd become lost in the endless pulling. Once I noticed it, I fought hopelessly, struggling as though trying to fight off sleep. I lost, inevitably. As I faded out I hoped to never return again.
#
There was coldness, but little else. No pain, nor any pressure. I heard the wind. Somewhere a television played too loudly. I opened my eyes to a cloudy sky. The leaves had almost gone. Everything was damp. I rose from the pavement. I'd returned to my place along the road. All trace of the slanger attack was gone, vanished along with my friend Johnny Nils and all the others from the shore. No bodies, no blood, only the chill of early winter.
It's been many years since then. Only one person has died on the shore, a young man who spends his time leering at younger girls. None at all have died on the road. I've seen the evidence of a few accidents, but I suppose they die closer to a hospital now if they pass at all. I've worked on my balance some, trying to improve my odds. It's a foolish waste of time, but I have nothing else to spend it on.
The night has returned, and the moon is absent. I look to the support pole that once saved me, and there's little hope there. A year ago, the old benches were removed to be refurbished. They were reinstalled just last week, but unless objects outside of our range behave differently, it'll be at least another two weeks before I can touch it. The first sea slanger has emerged from the surf, and there is little chance that I will survive. I kick off my sandals, turn on my Walkman, and await their coming. The Go-Go's shout that they have the beat. I plan to keep it with them for as long as I can.
* * *
May Elsbeth Wind of Jeffrey's Creek died of injuries incurred in a traffic accident on Shore Road, in the village of Jeffrey's Creek, on July 22nd, 1987. A student of Manchester Essex High School, she was just 17 years old. She enjoyed learning and had been planning to attend Miskatonic University in the fall to pursue a degree in Communications. She is survived by her parents, Gabriel Bernard Wind and Elsbeth Anna Wind.
* * *
Sean Frost is a software developer in Michigan, who has always been torn between skepticism of the paranormal and the alluring prospect of haunting people. His writing has appeared in Mad Scientist Journal and in the comics "Dope Fiends of the Zombie Cafe" and "Wild Women of the Kitty-Kat Galaxy." Sean lives with four demanding cats and one very understanding wife.
* * *
Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star
An account by Melissa Li, as provided by Sanford Allen
* * *
Halfway down the Salamander Drake's landing ladder, the reek of Earth air hit me in a way it hadn't in years. The sweet, nauseating odor of something long dead and recently unearthed lurked just below the chemical burn of the smog.
Wincing, I pulled on my respirator mask and gulped in a deep breath. Even recycled air from the ship's storage tanks was a welcome respite.
My fares, however--a dozen artists from the InterLogic orbital--milled at the base of the landing gear, breathing in the putrescence like they were swirling fine wine. Unbelievably, they joked and laughed, pointing at the deserted city looming in the blanket of stinking ochre smog.
A pair of them panned the distant ruin with media recorders. A middle-aged woman broke off from the group to examine the rusted corpse of a passenger car on the roadside.
I touched the com button on my belt. "Clement, are you sure the atmospheric reading's acceptable? It smells like a dead dog's asshole out here, and I don't think any of these rubberneckers are going to use their masks."
"Yes, ma'am. Double checked it at landing," the navigator rang back from the bridge, his voice tinny in my earpiece. "They're safe for the rest of the day, probably even a few. Unless the sensors are falling apart, like everything else on your ship."
Touché. Something broke every time we took the Drake out. She needed an overhaul, but shuttling sightseers down from the orbitals wasn't exactly fattening my account.
"You and Singh pool your cash, buy me out," I said. "I'd love to stop worrying about where the money for maintenance and inspections is going to come from." I paused for effect. "Ah, but that would require you to save your money instead of flushing it away in the sensory tanks, wouldn't it?"
I clicked off my com before Clement could mount a comeback, slid the rest of the way down the ladder.
Singh, who'd also wisely pulled on his respirator, cradled a submachine gun and looked over the map he'd pulled up on his mobile pedia. A warm wind skittered a herd of bleached plastic bags across the road.
"Why the hell they want to see this place?" he asked. "There are a shit ton of cities on the East Coast with more impressive ruins."
The remains of Arkham, Massachusetts, looked plenty grim from our landing site. Leaning streetlights canopied the road into town like the protruding ribs of a decaying beast. High, rotten awnings of once-stately homes jutted through the smog like skeletal fingers tearing open a funeral shroud.
Still, Singh was right. It lacked the scale and stately decay of Boston, even Baltimore. When one had a whole dead planet to choose from, Arkham struck me as positively quaint.
"Artists." I shrugged.
One of said artists, Booth--no first name, just Booth--approached, arm around a young woman with a shark fin of orange hair and faintly luminescent tattoos of snakes twining up her pale arms. A pleased grin peeked through Booth's dense blonde beard. The rising wind whipped his shoulder-length hair, streaked gray at the temples.
"What do you think of that view?" Booth asked me. He stood close. His gray eyes reminded me of deep, icy water.
"I've seen more impressive, but it's the one you asked for," I said. "Don't any of you want to use your respirators?"
"And obscure reality?" Booth shook his head like I was the crazy one. "No, we're here to see where humanity came from. Where some of us are destined to end up."
Shark Fin smiled up at Booth and bit her lip. She played with the hem of his two-decades-out-of-date Cossack jacket.
"You'll be accompanying us, Melissa?" Booth must have picked up my first name from the shuttle contract.
"Captain Li would be fine," I said, eager to throttle back the familiarity. "And no, I'm not. Singh takes it from here. Clement and I will be on the ship in radio contact. You've got about six hours before nightfall, so enjoy your time."
Booth, a virtual-installation artist of some renown, had been my contact, paid to reserve the ship. He also clearly led the entourage. On the ride down, the other artists hung on his every pronouncement like he was some kind of religious figure. Reading the group's body language, I sensed Shark Fin wasn't the only one sleeping with him.
Too hairy and a little soft around the middle, Booth wasn't conventionally handsome, but he did possess a rugged charisma. Maybe it was his steely confidence or those gray eyes.
"Pity I couldn't talk you into letting us experience night here," he said. "Darkness is transformative."
"It's also not safe. This city's been crumbling for almost a hundred years. Not the best place to stumble around in after nightfall. Stick with Singh and be back when he says it's time."
My jaw tensed. I'd been over this with him when he chartered the ship, not to mention a couple more times on the 48-hour trip.
"What if I increase the payment?" Booth asked. He reached into his jacket. "Great art requires risk. How much to let us take a little risk?"
I took a deep breath, thinking of the Drake's waiting repairs. Then I pushed them out of my mind. I'd already lost cargo certification. If I let a load of rubberneckers die, I'd lose my shuttle papers too.
"I don't gamble with passengers' lives."
"How much?" Booth asked again.
The woman who'd broken off to examine the rusted car wandered back, now w
earing her respirator. Its white rubber straps crisscrossed her close-cropped silver hair. I read irritation on her creasing brow.
"Give her a break, Booth," she said. "Six hours is enough."
Booth let his hand drop. "Alright, Aria, I guess six hours will have to do. Hope that's long enough for us to collect what we came for."
"Plenty," Aria said.
At least someone in Booth's clique had sense.
I nodded to Singh. "Take them into the city, show them whatever sights they're after. See you at seventeen-hundred hours."
"Sure you won't join us, Melissa?" Booth locked eyes with me. The cold water became unfathomably deep.
Shark Fin giggled.
"Sure as I've ever been." I turned and walked to the ladder.
The group's departing footfall sounded behind me, and someone began whistling a slow, longing song. It sounded old, flowing out in a languid pace clearly not of this century.
I looked over my shoulder, watched the group follow the road into town. Booth ambled at its rear, hands behind his back. He continued the ghostly melody, finishing it in a high, raspy voice.
"I recognize ma true love, underneath the tiny orbs of light," he sang as he and the others disappeared behind a dense curtain of smog.
#
Back on the bridge, I shed the respirator and dropped it next to my station.
Clement lay reclined in his seat, head swallowed by his immersion helmet, a shiny plastic job crafted to look like a beetle head, replete with curving mandibles. The fingers of his mesh action gloves moved as if he was casting some kind of incantation.
I never asked what kind of mock life Clement lived in the tanks--Roman gladiator, high-seas buccaneer, pleasure android--and he never volunteered it. Whatever his escape, he sure couldn't get enough of it. There wasn't much down time on the Drake, but what there was, he spent in his helmet, lost in a surrogate world.
I stood over him for a minute then rapped on the plastic enclosure. "Can Clement come out and play?" I asked, hoping I'd spoken loud enough to cut through its internal sound system.
He slid off the helmet, blinking. His hair, charged with static electricity, was a wild thicket.
"You could have used the com," he said.
"I don't have mine turned on." I plopped into my own chair.
"Yeah, noticed that earlier."
I sunk into my chair and put my feet up on the instrument panel. "What do you know about Booth, our fare?"
"I pediaed him," Clement said. "He's pretty well-known for virtual installations. Got pieces in the Thorsten-Gage museum's online collection. I guess that's a pretty big deal."
"Ever check them out?"
"The installations? I dropped into the one linked from his pedia entry. On the ride down, he asked me if I'd visited it."
Booth had done the same to me--a couple times, in fact. It seemed odd that an artist of his stature would care what the crew of a surface shuttle thought of his work.
"So, what'd you make of it?" I asked.
Clement shrugged. "Not much. You just walk around some big stone monoliths. The audio was kind of trippy--super 360--but I kept waiting for something to happen."
"Art, in other words?"
"Art." Clement stood, grabbing his helmet in his still-gloved hands. "Since you've got things covered from here, I'll be in my cabin."
He wasn't asking permission to leave so much as informing me he was off to shirk his duties. I was as bad at managing personnel as I was at keeping a ship maintained.
The door hissed shut behind him.
Leaning over my monitor, I keyed up the ship's pedia and opened Booth's entry.
I skimmed the text, which Clement had synopsized adequately. Booth had done well for himself--accolades and impressive earnings--but he'd walked away from his career around the time he nipped at celebrity status, said he was more interested in exploring spiritual matters. He hadn't shown in five years and instead spent his energy on an artist's collective he founded on the InterLogic orbital.
The last bit explained the entourage I'd ferried to Arkham, even if it didn't explain their destination.
The entry only had a single link to a Booth installation, something called "New Blood." The rest, I guessed, were hidden behind firewalls in corporate collections. I slid my own immersion helmet from its spot beside my monitor and pulled on my gloves.
I wasn't much on virtual reality, but the helmet sometimes came in handy when steering the ship into the snug landings at older orbitals.
Flipping up my palm to activate the rig, I plummeted into Booth's creation. After a few seconds of disorienting weightlessness, I found myself standing in a thick bank of mist. A ghostly light gave it a bluish, almost metallic, cast. I couldn't pinpoint the source.
I played with the hand controls--they seemed standard--and wandered into the fog. Faint sounds teased me from the distance. Water dripped somewhere to my left and a corresponding echo, barely audible, patted deep behind me. It gave the impression I was in an immense cavern. Somewhere much farther ahead, I sensed a faint, almost imperceptible rushing sound, like water through a pipe.
Clement had been right. Booth knew how to design sound.
I ventured further into the fog, trying to hone in on the sound of the rushing water. My eyes adjusted and I made out immense dark rectangles in the mist. One loomed a few feet ahead. I touched its greenish-gray stone surface. It felt smooth and cool, gave enough resistance to my palm that it could have been real.
Looking up, I realized the top of the towering slab disappeared into the mist. I skirted the bottom, feeling my way until, ten or twelve feet later, I found its edge. My mouth grew dry and something prickled along my scalp.
My mind knew I was wandering a virtual world, but my body steeled itself for what waited around the corner. The experience was way more immersive than the ship's landing interface. Booth could design more than sound.
I peered around the edge. More giant smooth stones lay in the distance, like buildings in a jumbled, madly designed city. Some were simple monoliths or pylons, others faceted like cut gems. They all rose high enough to disappear into the blue-tinged fog. I couldn't see a road or path leading through them, and none had doors, windows, or other openings.
A chill spread down my neck and shoulders. I stepped around the slab and moved toward the rest of the stones. A sharp cracking noise sounded directly in front of me. I paused long enough to place the source--an octagonal stone a few yards ahead. At first, the sound reminded me of an eggshell splitting, but as it continued it became wet, more like the tearing of flesh.
Another sound joined it--the frenzied scuttling of a million insect legs. It grew deafening, loud enough I felt it in my teeth. I tried to cover my ears, felt my hands bang against the immersion helmet.
And I fell out of Booth's world.
Pulse surging, I pried off my helmet. I shuddered and rubbed my arms as if trying to brush away scurrying bugs. It took a few seconds of blinking my eyes to register the bridge's banks of monitors and control panels, segue back to reality.
The red com light blinked bright on my monitor. Singh had tried to contact me on the ship's channel. Odd I hadn't heard it over the com. Maybe the immersion had been so deep, I hadn't paid attention.
I peeled off my gloves and called him back.
"Damn, Li, where you been?" he asked when he picked up.
"Away from the controls."
"I was just trying to checking in."
"Everything OK?"
"Guess so," Singh said. "Apparently Booth had some kind of itinerary he didn't tell us about. Seems like he's mapped the place out, knew exactly where he wanted to go. We're in some old mansion. I've just been sitting here the past couple of hours watching him and the rest of the Bizarre Brigade go through someone's library."
A couple of hours? It couldn't have been that long. I'd only spent five, maybe ten, minutes wandering Booth's installation. I looked down at the time in the corner of my monitor and realized Sin
gh was right.
"You there, Li?"
"Yeah," I said, snapping back to the conversation. "A library? They found terminals down there?"
"No. A library, as in books, the old paper kind." Pixels danced across the bridge's view screen as Singh switched on his respirator rig's camera. They gradually coalesced into a grainy image. His time and atmospheric readings crawled across the bottom of the screen.
"Check this out." Singh's hands turned one of the books. Its ancient leather cover cracked and peeled like diseased skin. He flipped it open, showed off its brittle brown pages. He flipped to one with a line drawing of a human nude.
The feed was weak, still cut through with pixelated starbursts. I squinted to make out the details.
The drawing depicted a hairless body split throat to genitals. Singh's finger traced something inside the opened cavity, just below the exposed ribcage. A thick, segmented thing like an enormous centipede filled the space where the gut should be.
The scuttling sound from Booth's installation tickled the base of my skull. My stomach seized.
"Some kind of twentieth century pseudo-science?" Singh asked. He flipped the camera on himself. "There's a ton of these weird books. I guess we're staying put while they look through them."
I frowned, feeling more uneasy about Booth by the second. "Just get them back before nightfall."
I reached down to switch off the feed but stopped myself.
"Singh, did you look at Booth's installation?"
"That thing he kept mentioning on the ship?" Singh asked. "Nah, why?"
"Forget it. See you at seventeen hundred, and be careful."
That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Page 24
