by Daniel Kozuh
Contents
LINGERIA: Book One of One
Copyright
Dedication
Books in the Lingeria Series
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
About The Author
LINGERIA
Book One of One
By Daniel Kozuh
Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Kozuh
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover Illustration by Rocky Negron, 2019
Back Cover Illustration by
Davies, Charles Maurice (1875) Love Lyrics and Valentine Verses, for young and old. The British library, London. Retrieved https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2019
ISBN 9781797815541
First Edition
@kØzuh@LingeriaBook
For My Wife, Sarah.
This is all her fault.
Books in the Lingeria Series:
Book 1: Tales of Lingeria
Book 2: The Goblin Assassin
Book 3: The Palladium Gauntlet
Book 4: Quest of Fire
Book 5: The Forest Vigil
Book 6: The Light Extinguished
Book 7: Unfortunate Immortals
Book 8: Sinister Awakening
Book 9: The Basilisk Unfurls
Book 10: The Emerald Pendulum
Book 11: A Crippled Wolf
Book 12: The Mastaba Tablet
Book 13: The Shattered Capstone
Book 14: Secreted Echelon
Book 15: River of Raael
Book 16: The Somethingorother
[Tentative Title; Unfinished and Unedited]
PROLOGUE
The world of Lingeria had existed for eons before our story takes place. The land had survived famine, war, plague, and natural disaster to evolve into this crisp autumnal day. Creatures and societies had birthed and died; cultures that are wholly unknown to the living residents of Lingeria – whose stories will unfortunately never be told – are buried under the sediment of dirt and time. The world hadn’t decided if it will keep its current occupants. No matter what may live upon its grasses, Lingeria will always survive.
- Tales of Lingeria: Chapter 1, Page 1
The wizard stood in his hall of doors. On every inch of wall space in the cavernous room there hung a different door: from standard wooded doors to dungeon doors to barn doors reaching up to the twenty-foot high ceiling. Each of them was functional – they all had hinges, driven into the wall with sturdy steel spikes.
Past portly and into obese, the gap at the bottom of the wizard’s robes exposed his pale calves which had no ankle but rather a tight roll of fat that creased around his swollen feet. He had anxious eyes, long black hair that resembled burnt hay, and a wispy beard which did little to hide his many chins.
The main, practical, entry behind the wizard was pushed opened and an aged goblin entered. The goblin had black eyes, which were surrounded by dry, cracked wrinkles. His skin was green and scaly, and he had a long, pointed nose that drooped towards his chin. He dragged with him yet another door. This one was simple – white, with five vertical battens, three ledges with a diagonal support between them, and a brass knob on only one side.
“Um …” The wizard searched the wall for a free space, “I guess, put it on the floor.”
Doing as he was told, the goblin simply took his hands off the door and let it fall to the ground. It landed with a bang, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
The wizard glanced at the goblin with annoyance. He took out a kerchief and batted it around in front of his face, swatting off the dust particles. “Come on,” the wizard snapped. “On with it!”
With a groan, the goblin knelt to the ground and pulled four long nails from his pocket. He pressed the loose side of the door hinge to the cement floor, lifted his hammer, and drove the first nail into the ground like a railroad spike. The sound of each thwack bounced around the empty room until all four tacks were in place and the door was mounted.
The ancient goblin stood up slowly and brushed off his pant legs.
The wizard retrieved a small, leather journal from somewhere within the folds of his robes and flipped through pages of handwritten notes. He came to the last entry and cleared his throat.
The goblin unconsciously backed away from the door on the floor.
“Here goes,” the wizard started. “Adtevři bohy fracaldo quodeře. Autorc tenvo vydejti forse snynis. Prassetlo mecumnou. Buďeritis můjhi regekrál!” The words felt clunky and unnatural, sticking in the back of the wizard’s throat like mucus. When he was finished, he shot his arm out towards the door and splayed his fingers.
The door jolted, as if a strong gust of wind had blown against it from the under side of the door. Both goblin and wizard jumped.
“Go ahead, open it,” the wizard commanded.
The goblin looked at his master with a panicked sneer but, ultimately, he did approach the door. He bent forward and gripped the knob. Then, he yanked the door open and quickly retreated to the opposite side of the room.
Behind the door, where there once was floor, was a rectangle of black; an entrance to the unknown, silence and void.
“At least nothing came out this time,” the wizard said, with relief. The goblin touched the long scar on this side of his neck in remembrance. “Go get the prisoner.”
The goblin retreated from the room and returned moments later, dragging a man only half his height, even taking into account his mound of curly grey hair. The squat little man was bound at the wrists and was resisting every step, making the goblin carry his full weight, his bare feet kicking at the slick stone ground.
The goblin threw the tiny man in front of the hole in the floor.
“No! Please, no!” the man begged! “Show mercy.”
The wizard tsked. “This is mercy. For your subversion, you were scheduled for execution, weren’t not? And yet, here I am, setting you free. If you survive, your sentence is commuted.”
“Please, sir!” The little man was crying now. “No one has ever returned!”
“Send him in,” sang the wizard.
The goblin lifted his leg and kicked the man between the shoulder blades, sending him to the ground and through the door. The man was immediately swallowed by the darkness. His screams muted moments later. They did not fade away, instead cutting off, abruptly.
Both the wizard and goblin approached the hole timidly and peered in to see if anything had changed. The hole was silent.
“Well, crap,” the wizard said. “That one didn’t work. Any luck finding the book?”
“No, sir,” The goblin said with a grunt, lifting the door and letting it fall closed over the portal. “The elves are being most uncooperative.”
The two walked out of the room.
“Have the carpenters start another door,” the wizard told the goblin. “Oh, let’s try something gothic with, like, an arch at the top.”
****
Elsewhere, a man stood before a congregation in
a simple cedar-built church. He wore a sturdy black suit, cut so tight it exacerbated his bird-like build. The attendees sat on creaky, backless pews, fanning themselves. Their pastor held aloft a massive, ornate hardcover book.
“A reading,” he started, opening the book to where a silken ribbon had been laid, “From the Book Quest of Fire, chapter twelve, page eight hundred and eighty-nine, lines ten through thirteen.”
The parishioners stood. They wore threadbare homespun clothing; women in modest, pattern-less dresses and stiff kapps; men with greased back hair, simple white shirts tucked into black dungarees. They held their wide-brimmed hats on their laps.
“Kroü stood on the precipice of the castle’s hold,” the pastor read, with aggressive enunciation. “Before him, there was an army of giants, savage warriors upon armor plated Rhidonodons, one hundred squadrons of precise archers, and almost certain death. An anonymous solider stood beside him. Kroü could hear the man’s armor rattling with nerves. ‘Be brave,’ Kroü said, perhaps also talking to himself, ‘For all men die but the fortunate ones choose how it shall happen.’ This is our Author’s word of sent from the sky, in perpetuity, forever and ever. The end.”
“The end,” chorused the crowd as they sat.
“Friends,” the preacher began, “These are indeed grave times in our world. But I ask you not to fret, for The Author has a plan. A plan for each and every one of us, written down in his stories not yet revealed. I am reminded now of the fable of the dragon and the manticore. You see, there once was a dragon –”
The doors at the back of the church burst open and a languished farmer stood silhouetted, his long shadow cast down the aisle. His haggard face dripped with sweat and his eyes were distended and wild.
“It is here,” the farmer yelled! “It has arrived in Larrowton!”
The churchgoers jumped to their feet at this announcement, frightened and confused. Some made to head for the exits. Others seemed to feel safer moving closer to the pulpit. The farmer turned and slammed the doors closed, sealing them shut with a thick wooden plank.
The minister put his hand in the air. “People, people, please everyone just calm down!”
The sunlight – that up until this point had tossed gentle colors around the room, through the two stained-glass windows – abruptly faded into dusk and then utter darkness, as though the sun remembered he had more pressing matters to attend to, on the other side of the world.
When the sun disappeared completely, so did the chatter. Everyone stood silently, huddled in the center of the nave, their eyes flicking from the windows to the ceiling. Women pulled their children into them, or bounced their babies, hushing them softly. The men stood on the outside of the ring, fists clenched, ready to fight this unseen terror. The rustic wooden structure around them moaned and popped under the pressure of external forces.
No doors were found unlocked, or windows pushed open. There were no signs of forced entry, into or out of the church. However, the next day, when the unspiritual Larrowton villagers destroyed the stained-glass windows in order the gain access to the church, they found a pile of corpses; grey, aged and cursed, covered in blotchy nevi and grotesque tumors, their hair and nails grown to intolerable lengths. While most who entered the church only a day ago were youthful, what was found was a mass grave of geriatrics – not a child’s body among them… all desiccated and mummified, as if having decomposed for years.
ONE
The barbarian mashed his yellowed teeth together as the arrowhead burned close to his heart. He gripped the fletching and yanked the projectile from his breast; blood cascaded down his torso and pooled in the dirt. The battle raged around him, everyone too consumed in the fight to notice that he had fallen. He was but one of many who had been felled by the enemy. Surrounded by hundreds of souls, he died alone.
- Tales of Lingeria: A Crippled Wolf, Chapter 15
The whiskey was soaking into the plush green rug. Cloudy ice cubes cluttered around the dark stain like snowcapped mountains rising out of a fuzzy, manicured forest.
A man, with sharp stubble smeared across his chin, stared at the wreckage; a tear zig-zagged its way through the bristle. That was it. That was the final straw. His lumbering attempt to set his glass on a curiously swirling coffee table had failed and now his chin quivered at the thought of having to blot the alcohol from the carpet.
“A rag. Oh, god, I’ll have to get up and find a rag,” the man thought.
The couch he sat on was in the center of a giant alpine living room that still presented an echo, no matter the volume of stuff with which he filled it. The east wall of this modern neo-log-mansion was completely comprised of pristine glass window panes, framing an expensive view of the Smoky Mountains. It was snowing hard today – rather rare for this early in December – but he didn't appreciate this meteorological anomaly. Which was too bad, because it was quite lovely.
Taking up most of the opposite wall, mounted above an overused liquor cabinet, was an enormous, laser-cut, topographically-accurate, representation of Lingeria. A land of the man’s own imagination. A smaller version of that very map could be found spanning the first two pages of every volume of his most celebrated works. Collected, they were known as Tales of Lingeria. The map was actually just an inverted map of the country of Slovenia, rotated fifteen degrees clockwise.
Norman Halliday had been crying for a few days now – to the extent that the single tear on his cheek was quite a miracle. Lately, his tears were dry. Mostly, he dry-heaved on the couch – guttural belches of emotion.
His bulky bathrobe hadn’t been removed in several days, or maybe weeks. Underneath that: a lonely pair of boxers desperate to be put out of their misery. Norman had grown even gaunter that usual – a typically svelte man, he had taken up running years ago, in an effort to avoid writing. Anything to avoid actually writing. Running became like a wrinkle on his forehead; dug in over time and irreversible. Even now, in the depth of his depression, he was out at five a.m., jogging down a rural highway for ten miles; only to slip back into his plush robe, sweaty and un-showered. Moreover, now that he found food a rather unnecessary blockage for the alcohol, he lost even more weight, resembling a figurine a child would make out of pipe-cleaners. His saffron hair splayed out in every direction; the ‘m’ shaped hairline slowly capitalizing itself with age. Swollen purple loops hung under his hazel eyes like filled saddlebags, and his hawkish nose was beginning to bloom with gin blossoms.
Aside from jogging, drinking, and crying, Norman’s other diversion was baseball. While once passionate, he had now become utterly obsessed with the game. He would watch or listen to any game that happened to be playing at that moment; professional, semi-professional, or anything with a bat and a ball, from Town Team to Latin American. His latest obsession was sitting in front of his laptop watching illegal streams of the Korean Baseball Organization League until dawn, informally rooting for The Sokcho Squids. One particularly drunken night led to a Sokcho Squids jersey arriving in his mailbox three-to-five weeks later. He would pore over box scores in newspapers and on websites, and his shelves were filled with more books on baseball history than fiction. He would often fantasize about quitting writing altogether and becoming a baseball scout, traveling to remote villages in South America to find the next great arm.
He didn't have the energy to clean up his spilled booze. Luckily, the shrewd nose of his coonhound, Calamity Jane (who had been audibly snoring in front of the fireplace), caught the sharp scent. She lifted her once golden-brown face, now spritzed with white, and then stood her awkward body up; her old joints popped and cracked like the fire itself. She limped over to the darkened spot in the rug. Her sagging eyelids judged Norman as she lapped up the reward, a welcome treat to which she had grown accustomed. In fact, lately, the mere sound of the safety seal cracking on a J&B topper caused her to drool. Her tail thumped on the floor in a Pavlovian response.
Norman had hand-written his note on a yellow legal pad, actually he had written three of
them and heavily edited the last. Finally, like most of what he wrote lately, he sent the whole pad into the fire and watched it shrivel and crackle away, like his creative drive. He finally opted to type out, "I'm Sorry" on a single sheet of thick, eighty-pound, cream-colored cotton-bond paper and left it in the reel of his IBM Selectric typewriter – a gift from his editor, Iris, after winning the Hugo Award.
It was all over-dramatic, he knew, but then again, so was suicide.
As Calamity Jane dug her black nose into the carpet to suck up the last drops of whiskey, Norman finally found the energy to push himself off the couch. He shuffled into the kitchen and lifted the top of the stove range. With a heavy, lazy breath, Norman snuffed out the pilot light, pleased that he didn't choose the wood-burning stove as the interior designer suggested. Norman was not nearly religious enough to symbolically set himself on fire.
His twiggy index finger stabbed at the stove's control panel until he heard the hiss of gas filling the oven's cavity. He pulled at the oven handle and let its weight take it the rest of the way, falling open with a padded bounce. Norman got to his knees, using his plush bathrobe to pad his stance, and awkwardly slid his head into the stove. He had to remove two of the racks to accommodate his equine cranium – a final insult to the injury that was his life.
Crammed into the stove, he took in lungfuls of the propane gas, smelling the slimy, putrid additive Ethyl Mercaptan (something he remembered from an unused bit of research for an unwritten book about a haunted spaceship). He closed his eyes and waited for a final sleep to take over. His brain wandered. He pondered naming a character “Ethel Mercaptan”.
