Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within

by L. J. Hachmeister

  “Are you suggesting I was one of those children?”

  Hiram considered. No, that didn’t make sense. Those children were returned to kin elsewhere, and would have been raised anything in the world other than Mormon. A one-year-old boy exposed to Mormons for a few weeks would not remember a passage from the Book of Mormon on child baptism decades later.

  “There were rumors of other children. Jacob Hamblin had adopted Indian children . . .” Hiram suddenly found himself tearing up, thinking of Michael, Yas’s and Betty’s boy he and Elmina had tried to adopt. What had Hamblin’s son been named? Albert, he thought. And if Hiram failed to keep his promise to Yas and abandoned Michael, would Yas return as a ghost to haunt him? Surely, Yas would have enough passion to be able to do that. And Yas had been one of the most spiritually powerful men Hiram had ever known.

  “Yes?”

  Hiram cleared his throat. “Not all the children were accounted for. There were rumors about why not. Some said that Jacob Hamblin’s adopted Indian children killed some of the wagon train children, or some other Indians killed them. Others said that some of the Mormons simply hid the children from the Army and raised them as their own.”

  “This is your guess, then,” Asael Johnson said. “That I was the child of one of the Baker-Fancher party. That my parents were killed in the massacre, and that I continue on the earth until I have my vengeance?”

  Hiram gripped his chi-rho amulet. “Yes.”

  “Wrong.”

  Hiram exhaled slowly, his chest tight. What, then?

  “But you are getting closer,” Asael Johnson added. “Much closer.”

  The Model T knocked around the ragged edge of a gentle, oblong hill, and a single light drifted into view. It was yellow, the warm light of an oil lantern, and it was a short distance from the road.

  “Is this Mountain Meadows?” Hiram asked. “Is that the man you’ve come to see?”

  “Yes.”

  Lost in his thoughts, Hiram nearly missed the turnoff. Slowing and turning left from graded gravel onto rutted red clay, he startled a small herd of pronghorn antelope. Their white rumps bounded away into the darkness like bouncing balls in retreat.

  Hiram parked at the house. It was a sagging, hand-built shack of red stone, with a bleached-white wooden porch slouching even further on one side. The shack was large enough to contain two rooms at most, and the light seemed to come from the back room. There was a hint of an outhouse beyond the structure. Hiram aimed his headlights at the front porch and set the hand brake.

  What was the connection between Hiram’s ghostly passenger and this rickety cabin?

  “Is this man one of the murderers?” Hiram asked. “Did he pull the trigger at Mountain Meadows?”

  “Is that a guess?” Asael Johnson’s voice was hollow and gloomy.

  Hiram shook his head. “Just a question.”

  “He wasn’t,” Johnson said. “He moved here later.”

  What kind of man moved to a massacre site? A morbid man? An obsessed man? A grieving man? An angry man?

  A man who wanted never to forget?

  “He’s dying now,” Johnson said. “Old age.”

  Who was Asael Johnson? The man in the cabin was old, but he wasn’t one of the 1857 murderers. And nevertheless, the old man had moved to the massacre site to die here alone. And Johnson was the right age to be one of the wagon train’s children, only he wasn’t.

  And now the two had unfinished business.

  “If you have no more guesses to make,” Asael Johnson suggested, “perhaps you’d like to knock on the door.”

  Hiram shut off the car and stepped out. Circling the Model T and stepping onto the porch, he felt cool sweat trickle down the small of his back. He thought of exorcism techniques, and prepared to shout the sacred names and secret words he knew that might chase the ghost away.

  The door was a slab of bleached wood, hanging ill-fit in the roughly rectangular doorway. Hiram smelled the exhaust of the Model T and the crisp tang of sagebrush. He knocked.

  There was no answer.

  Hiram turned back to the Model T and found Asael Johnson standing beside him on the porch. The ghost had taken its hat into its hands, which prompted Hiram to do the same. His hair was beginning to thin on top, and the chill night on the sweat of his scalp was shockingly cold.

  “This wasn’t your home, was it?” Hiram asked.

  “Never.”

  Hiram knocked again.

  This time, he heard a groan within. Asael Johnson watched him intently. Hiram touched his chi-rho amulet through his shirt and overalls, but resisted putting his hand on the revolver in his pocket. The hammer was on an empty chamber, so he’d have to pull the trigger twice before the weapon would shoot.

  Hopefully that would be unnecessary.

  “I’m coming in,” he called in a loud voice.

  Then he opened the door and stepped into the cabin.

  The front room held a three-legged table with a scarred and stained white linoleum surface, a cast iron stove throwing an ebbing wave of warmth against Hiram’s legs and belly, and a small bookshelf. A rag tie rug lying in the center of the floor had been walked almost to ribbons. The light from the second room was strong enough for Hiram to see photographs in cheap frames standing in a row along the shelf, beside a small stack of books.

  Lots of photographs.

  “Hello?” Hiram called. There was no answer. He stepped into the center of the room; turning, he saw Asael Johnson, standing motionless on the porch outside. Johnson’s face held no expression. Why was the ghost waiting?

  Then Hiram saw a sheet of paper tacked over the doorway. The light was too dim to read the words, but stepping close, Hiram would make out the astrological signs and the columns of Hebrew characters that told him what the sheet was: a lamen, a paper talisman much like the one protecting Hiram’s car.

  Asael Johnson wasn’t coming in because he couldn’t come in. The lamen stopped him.

  This was why Hiram had been brought to this place.

  But he wasn’t ready to play his assigned role quite yet. He wasn’t sure he should.

  He lingered to examine the photographs. They were family pictures, mostly, of different families, all old and yellowed with time. They wore nineteenth-century clothing, bonnets and corsets and frock coats and top hats.

  The photographs were almost of different families. As he looked from one photograph to the next, Hiram realized that he was seeing seven different families, all headed by the same man.

  The realization hit him like a punch to the stomach.

  Was Hiram’s own father living a shack like this, somewhere in Mexico, his bookshelf cluttered with portraits like these?

  Hiram stepped away from the shelves to catch his breath.

  “Hello?” he called again, and stepped into the second room.

  This room was smaller and held nothing but a bed and a lamp. The lamp was a brass oil lamp, sitting on the wooden floor, its flame turned down low. The bed had once been a four-poster, but one of the posts and the canopy were gone, the bed sagged toward one corner, and it was heaped with ragged wool blankets and furs. For a moment, Hiram thought he was alone, but then he saw the face.

  It protruded from one end of the pile of coverings, shrunken and shriveled like an old apple. The face was a man’s, pitted and gaunt with age, and only a few wisps of hair clung to the mottled dome of his skull. The pile of blankets rose and fell slightly, and then the man opened his eyes. Blue irises swam in glistening rheumy pools. They wandered slightly, as if the man’s attention was distracted.

  This was clearly the same man sitting as the head of the family in each of the photographs.

  And he had a long, onion-shaped nose.

  And then Hiram understood.

  “Are you a doctor?” the old man asked.

  “No,” Hiram admitted.

  “I’ve been praying for a doctor.”

  The old man closed his eyes. Was he dead? But no, the heap of furs and wool
rose and fell again.

  He walked to the door and stood just inside it, meeting Asael Johnson’s gaze. Johnson’s eyes were full of tears, glittering like the old man’s.

  “Well?” Johnson asked.

  “This is your father,” Hiram said.

  He paused, but Johnson said nothing.

  “Your mother was one of his wives. Maybe his first or second, when he was a young man. And she didn’t want to live in Utah anymore. Maybe she was the first wife, the wife of his youth, and when he proposed taking a second wife to her, she rebelled. Or maybe she found she no longer believed. Or she didn’t believe enough to live in the desert, deprived of the conveniences of civilization. And she heard there was a wagon train coming through, offering asylum for Mormons who wanted to flee.”

  Asael Johnson was a mirror image of Hiram Woolley, in some ways.

  Johnson looked down at his feet.

  “She took you with her and joined the Baker-Fancher wagon train, heading to California and a new life. Only she was killed. And then you were taken in by a Mormon family and raised as one of their own. And when the Army came through looking for taken babies, they were looking for children who had been with the wagon train. They had a list, I guess, and you weren’t on it, so you just disappeared. You were raised with the name Johnson, as a Mormon. Probably somewhere not too far from where your father lived.”

  “That’s your guess?” Johnson looked up, face expressionless.

  “At some point, the old man figured out what had happened, because he moved back here. Maybe hoping to find you and your mother. Maybe afraid of your ghosts. Maybe just feeling guilty.”

  Johnson said nothing.

  Reaching up, Hiram pried out the four tacks pinning the lamen to the wall and then took the written amulet down and folded it into quarters. “How did you find out? Did you know, in life?”

  “Yes,” Johnson said. “My dead mother came to me.”

  “In waking?”

  “In dreams. I wore a Saturn ring, and it brought her to me.”

  “You never contacted your father in life?”

  “She didn’t want me to. She wouldn’t tell me his name, and I couldn’t discover it from the records.”

  Hiram thought of Yas, and his promise. He thought of Michael, staring up at him with big brown eyes. He thought of the Goodmans, who worked hard and meant well, but had known neither Betty nor Yas Yazzie.

  “Will you stay?” Johnson asked.

  “No.” Hiram tucked the lamen into his pocket. “Whatever healing is going to happen here, you don’t need me to witness it.”

  Johnson entered the shack and Hiram exited. His boots crunched loud on the sand and pebbles as he walked to the Model T, which started on the first try, still warm from being driven earlier.

  He turned the car around and drove back to the main road. There he hesitated.

  God’s healer. The whole need no physician, but they that are sick.

  Yas Yazzie would care. So would Betty.

  Hiram took a deep breath, and turned the car back, toward Cameron, and the tribal elders, and Michael.

  BIO

  D.J. (Dave) Butler writes fantasy novels -- he's also been a lawyer, consultant, and corporate trainer. He travels to multiple comic cons every year to meet readers and talk about writing, but he spends as much time as he can at home in Utah, playing games with his three kids.

  His epic flintlock fantasy novel Witchy Winter won the 2018 AML Award for Best Novel and the 2018 Whitney Award for Best Speculative Fiction. Both Witchy Eye and Witchy Winter were finalists for the Dragon Award in 2017 and 2018 (respectively), and Witchy Eye was a preliminary nominee for the Gemmell Morningstar Award.

  His books are published Knopf (The Kidnap Plot), Baen Books (Witchy Eye), and WordFire Press (City of Saints). The character Hiram Wooley makes his novelistic appearance in the forthcoming book The Cunning Man, from Baen Books, co-written with Aaron Michael Ritchey

  Author Website: www.davidjohnbutler.com

  Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/D.J.-Butler/e/B007TOU6GS

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidJohnButler

  Myth Deeds

  Jody Lynn Nye

  BAMF!

  “Peee-yew! What a stink!” Aahz bellowed, pinching his nose with a green-scaled hand. “Are you sure you got us to the right place?”

  My eyes watered. I dashed the tears away with the back of my hand and peered around. Clouds of smoke covered everything more than a few yards away.

  “I’m sure,” I said, checking the settings on my D-hopper. I had set it to transport us from the dimension of Deva to Grizzle, although the elderly magik item had been known to go wrong on occasion. I glanced toward my four companions with a smile on my face. I had to sound confident even if I wasn’t. We had company. “Really.”

  “And this is where I will find my destiny?” Havago asked, stepping forward and thumping his armored chest with a mailed fist.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Aahz said, dismissively. “Let’s find out who’s in charge here.”

  I’d been in Grizzle only once before. Dimension-hopping was a complicated business. Some dimensions required only one step, such as from my native Klah to Deva, where the Bazaar, where the M.Y.T.H., Inc. office, my home and place of employment, operated. To reach others, you had to go through one or more intermediate steps. Grizzle happened to be a low-magik, neutral location in the middle of a cluster of high-magik or high-technology dimensions. Aahz referred to it as a “rest stop.” It had little to recommend a longer stay. No traveler really went there on purpose.

  Except now. We were on an assignment. Hand-holding, Bunny had assured me and Aahz. Havago was a Titan –a denizen of the dimension of Titania. He stood head and shoulders above me, and his toned body in its custom-fitted silver armor was impressively muscled, unlike my slim, weedy form. Gazinda, his companion, or secretary, or “here,” which is almost the only thing Havago ever said to her in my hearing, when he handed her something to keep for him, was a Titan, too, or so she said. If I had met her in the street, I would never have guessed that. Sure, she had the silver hair, golden skin, and the fanatic expression, but I could explain the latter from her utter devotion to Havago. Gazinda adored him, and let his careless comments slide. When he touched her hand by accident, I thought she was going to pass out from bliss. Not surprisingly, he had no idea she worshipped him, or maybe he took it as his due. She stood only two thirds of his height, and weighed maybe a sixth of what he did, which was to say half my weight. I had about two handspans on her, making her fairly small for a female of her type. Still, I had gone drinking with a bunch of Titans once &, and I had to assume that she could take me out with a single punch. My partner, Aahz, would have been a tougher proposition, though he was shorter than me. His bat-winged ears, scaly green skin, four-inch pointed teeth, and yellow eyes identified him as a native of the dimension Perv. Titans, among others, had learned to regard Aahz and his compatriots with wariness. Klahds like me, with a slender build, blond hair, and innocent blue eyes, were considered largely harmless, even the butt of numerous jokes.

  Havago had come to M.Y.T.H., Inc. to get help solidifying his reputation as a hero. He wanted the recognition that he was sure he deserved that had so far passed him by. The rest of us had been pretty skeptical about that aim, since most heroes are diagnosed post-mortem. The real people who do brave deeds to help others and just go on with their day afterwards don’t want any special fanfare.

  Havago wasn’t willing to wait for fame to find him. From her tiny handbag, Gazinda had pulled a massive scrapbook full of smalltime exploits that he had performed in other dimensions. I had to admit those deeds were fairly impressive: princesses (and one prince) rescued from villains or monsters, treasure restored to its rightful owners, even a couple of cats retrieved from treetops. Havago had collected a few medals and some rewards in gratitude as well as quotes Gazinda had carefully recorded for posterity. None of that seemed to have satisfied his yen of being famous ac
ross the dimensions. Gazinda pleaded with Bunny to have M.Y.T.H., Inc. take him on as a client and find him some meaningful acclaim. More for her sake than his, Bunny agreed, and assigned us to help him.

  In fact, the right job had turned up in our office almost the next minute. A Grizzly, who had mortgaged himself and half his dimension to a Deveel to get magikal passage to our office, asked for help. A monster was destroying their town, and the people were terrified. He and Bunny had negotiated a fee of one gold piece, which he swore was all that the town could afford.

  Havago couldn’t wait to set out. We had a tough time convincing him that we needed time to prepare. He fidgeted the whole time, hanging over my shoulder while I went out into town to buy necessities and helpful oddments.

  I had already taken a pretty solid dislike to Havago. Aahz shared my opinion of the big blowhard. If it hadn’t been part of my job, I wouldn’t have escorted him to the corner inn, let alone a transdimensional jump in a bid to build up the fellow’s resume of heroic derring-do. Neither would Markie, who had agreed to come along with us in case we needed backup magikal muscle. She was less than half my height and looked like an adorable little child from my dimension, dressed in a flouncy pink dress and matching shoes. Behind the precious exterior was a devious mind and some significant magikal firepower. *

  What I really resented the most was letting Havago take on a job that one of us should have handled. I might not have been the greatest or most knowledgeable about interdimensional monsters, but building up someone else’s fame on the back of ours burned me. Bunny assured me our reputation could take the hit. With the deepest of reservations, I promised I’d help Havago and the people of Grizzle at the same time.

  I tried to remember all the details that Barstow, Grizzle’s representative, had given Bunny, although it wasn’t much. The day before we arrived, something big had appeared out of nowhere and started destroying the town, and no one knew why. No one had gotten a good look at the thing, because it caused explosions and plenty of smoke. That part I could now confirm.