Torn Realities

by Post Mortem Press

One by one, the people who had come to this place took a knee before the strange old man. They allowed him to fetch these creatures, and place it on their head, as if he were knighting. After each crowning, they took their place by Abraham and spoke of their fate, accounting of its uniqueness.

  I lingered, my son in my arms, both of us unable to pull away. In the background, the waves crashed upon the distant shoreline of the nearby island, sounding faint. The statue leered down at them, and I saw it momentarily as a golden calf, a thing of sacrilege upon the Earth. A second glance showed it a stallion once more, and I was relieved.

  Beyond the statue, a single horse looked our way. This was the reason we had come, yet, as one graced us with its presence, we were unable to pull away from the oddities unfolding closest to us.

  A shiver of cool fell over me; the sun had set. We were now in the darkness of the ancient stone lighthouse, as it shrouded almost the entire campsite. The lighthouse lantern no longer burned, and its entrance had been locked shut, otherwise I might have run to the building. Still, I was unable to escape. I watched as three more campers were converted before my disbelieving eyes.

  I looked back across the short span of water to the shore we came from. We had come to the island by ferry, and they wouldn’t be back until daybreak. I thought of trying to swim the distance, my son in tow, but I did not dare touch the water for fear of a creature securing itself to my head. From here I could see our vehicle and longed for the comfort it provided. Alas, our only hope was fending off the people of this island, or seeking out the safety of the other. The channel would make for a challenge in us reaching the other island without having to go in the water.

  I realized it was futile, observing these people. Already more than half were converts, and more waited in line to receive this redemption. It reminded me of communion, where one awaited the wafer placed in their mouth. Even the fighting man’s wife and child were now expecting this fate. I considered soon my son and I might be the only ones left to convert, and this frightened me.

  I tugged Parker back to our campsite, trying to regain some bearing on reality. I struggled to think of a way out, taking turns looking off into the distance at our vehicle, and then over to the lonely island, inhabited only by the equine species and the statue. I longed for either destination, but knew I could reach neither without the necessity of braving the dark waters from which the creatures arose. Who knew what else might lurk within those waters, perhaps even birthing these foul beasts?

  The equine island was the closer of the two, and yet there appeared no means of reaching the island without a boat. I let my eyes linger upon the lighthouse, seeing the small balcony atop the structure. I wondered if we might be able to dive across the length of the channel. It wasn’t far; of this I was certain, but I thought it very deep. Even if we could get close it might give us enough time to reach its shores unscathed. I remained unsure if we could even come close.

  I paced about our campsite, leaving Parker staring off at the spectacle in the distance. I thought he might have been traumatized by what he was seeing. I tried to focus my thoughts on securing a means of entering the lighthouse. Then it dawned on me, and I dug through our camping gear for the battered hammer I used to fasten the tent to the ground.

  With angst, I tore through my supplies, throwing them aside until I found the thing I wanted. When I had the hammer in hand I held it to the sky like some mad warrior about to engage in battle. I actually felt as though I might end up having to use it for that specific purpose sooner or later. It would be daunting to get to the top of the tower without the others catching us.

  The hammer possessed a sudden weight I knew it hadn't had when I'd used it to put up the tent.

  I tucked the hammer into my belt loop. I pulled at my son’s arm, and he came, still dazed. He was limp, and I was tugging him along more than he was coming of his own free will, but I would have him with me every step of the way. Through the thick and thin, I would keep him safe by my side, no matter what the cost.

  We found the lighthouse and I considered the lock upon the door, readying my hammer. I took a glance to the people in the distance. Of those who had not yet been changed, they were now being forced to their knees before Abraham. Their cries of pain and terror went unheard by those already transformed, and I thought Abraham was smiling; quite happy with the work he had done thus far. He dipped his hands into the water, pulling out one of the tentacled creatures to fasten to each of their skulls.

  This perplexed me. The mere thought of it struck me as the act of some cult. As they converted all but my son and I their attention turned to us with horrifying indignation. One by one they found us, the strange little creatures upon their heads waking. Their glowing red eyes blinked off and on, as if they were somehow communicating with each other. I found myself frozen, unable to follow through with the task I had set out to finish.

  I broke free of this mesmerizing vision, and returned my focus to the lock. Bringing the hammer down upon it, I tried to bust it loose. The first two attempts proved unsuccessful, and I grew uncertain we would be able to escape. It was the third try that brought me hope, as the lock began to separate.

  From the corner of my eye I found them approaching. More so, I saw something else, and it startled me enough to draw my attention away from the door. Parker had begun walking towards these people, and the thought he might want to join them terrified me.

  "Parker?" I struck the lock, this time without looking, heard it further weaken. "Parker, get back here!"

  At this time, with the others so close, I needed to break free from the door. I lunged out, and found Parker’s wrist. He staggered backward when I pulled at his arm. I led him back to the lock and struck it, finally freeing it from the latch.

  With the door open, we entered the darkness of the lighthouse, and I went to close the door. A single foot impeded my progress.

  "What are you doing, brother?"

  Another voice joined in from behind this man. "Are you not one of us, brother?"

  Fearful of these people, I brought the hammer down on the toe of my enemy. No cry of pain came with the blow, and upon rising I found myself face to face with the tiny creature upon his head, as he continued to try to pry his way inside.

  The beast’s red glowing eyes regarded me, and I saw a hunger in them. The tentacles searched the face of its host, lowering itself closer to the bone of the man’s skull. A sick sucking sound arose from under its rubbery body, as if it were draining this man of his bodily fluids. The man’s face was gaunt, his eyes sunken and dark. Still in the background, the faint motions of water made it all so surreal.

  I turned, found Parker at the base of the stairs, his silhouette motionless in the sliver of light. I twisted the hammer, using the claw upon the foot, and forced it from blocking the door. After some work, it came free and the door shut hard upon the man’s knuckles. This severed two of his fingers, but still no cry arose from the injury.

  In the dark, I worked to maneuver the hammer through the handle, bracing the door shut. It was a temporary solution, but a solution nonetheless. Even as we ascended the stairway, I heard them clawing and banging at the door. Soon they would be inside. I needed to move fast, and surged up the spiral staircase, dragging Parker behind, who resisted more with each step we took.

  At the top of the lighthouse, I saw the moon rising, and it gave me enough light to see around the room. I found the old cobwebbed lantern, the small balcony extending out over the channel, and the equine island across the channel. From this vantage point it seemed even less likely I would be able to reach it safely; let alone while holding Parker. I saw something else too. It was out of place, and unusual.

  There was a wooden handle hidden in the corner. I approached it, thinking I might have discovered a weapon to defend myself. Yet, when I began to pull it free I discovered its true purpose. The wooden pole was long, reaching down into the base of the lighthouse. It came away easy, but only if I walked it towards the balcony. Once
there, I could see the metallic foothold at the base of the lighthouse—the place to secure one end of the pole in order to vault across.

  I pulled Parker in close, as the lower door burst open. Already, they were at the stairs by the time I freed the pole. With Parker by my side, I struggled to maneuver it into the foothold, missing several times before sticking it into place.

  They were at the top of the stairs, and I could see the glowing eyes. Panic struck me, and I moved fast, perhaps foolishly. Holding Parker tight, I lowered my chin against the top of his hat. With one arm, I took the top of the pole and thrust myself outward, off-balance, but at least on a path towards reaching the island.

  We landed with a crash, our bodies flung apart. When I lifted myself to my elbows it surprised me to find Parker already upright, his hat still upon his head.

  "You okay?" No response. The boy stared back at the lighthouse, watching the blinking red eyes.

  I worried he was having some sort of mental breakdown. I lifted him to his feet, and placed a fatherly hand upon his head, and took in a deep breath as we let our eyes linger on the others. This was when I felt it move.

  I pulled away the cap, stunned by what I already knew as the truth. When I saw its glowing eyes I wanted to scream, and somewhere deep inside of my inner being I did scream, without end. Parker’s sunken, darkened pools peered back at me with emptiness.

  I saw the moon full and bright in the sky. It beamed down on the statue of the horse, casting an odd nightly shadow upon me. It was there, in the shadow of the equine, I promised myself I would not harm my child. As I lowered him to the ground, I whispered this promise over and over, wanting to make it true, knowing it was not.

  VISIONS OF PARIN

  Joseph Williams

  You can't help but look at Joe or his work--the short story collection Detroit Macabre, published by Post-Mortem, and the upcoming collection Swinging from Stars--and see someone on the rise. It's bound to happen, you think. Joe hears the music, and he can't help but follow the piper, as he does here, which is like the brilliant science-fiction cousin to Jamie Lackey's "What Waits Out There".

  There was a name for losing your sanity in the crowded nothingness of space.

  It came from an astronaut folktale dismissed as foolishness by most of the men, and likewise contained unfortunate truths which none of them were willing to confront. But they had all heard of it, regardless, and they all used the term in one way or another.

  If a man or woman aboard a craft began to stare out into the salted universe for minutes at a time and became distracted, they had seen Parin. If they began to suffer from insomnia, instances of heightened irritation, aggression, or paranoia, they’d seen Parin.

  And if they began to scream from their very depths as though calling back across the great black sea to their home world; if they fired their weapons in the engine compartment or murdered their brothers and sisters with their hands and teeth; if they began to tear out their own eyes and tongues and carve disturbing symbols into their flesh with their own fingernails, then they hadn’t just seen Parin. They’d touched him.

  No one in the fleet was sure when this chilling mental epidemic had taken on the name of Parin, but everyone knew that it was the right name for it.

  Parin.

  A relatively mundane name. Not common by any stretch of the imagination, but not exactly uncommon anymore, either. No exotic god or goddess had borne the name before like Jupiter or Mars or Venus had, making them clichés of thought and metaphor to prove distinction across the ages. And Commander Arthur Dawson had never come in contact with it in any way, not even when his wife had been tossing around possible names for their twins.

  Yet now, out on the black sea, he was hearing more of it than he’d ever wanted, and not just by the half-joking accusations of his men that one or another among them was suffering those cursed "visions of Parin.:" He had his own reasons to ponder the phenomena seriously.

  There hadn’t been much else to think about the morning when it happened. Dawson had been in his room in the bowels of the ship after a draining workout, staring out from his window at the distant stars, trying to find his home. Every few minutes, he tore himself away from minor hypnosis and sipped at a bad cup of coffee without thought or emotion, but it never took him long to return his gaze to the unfathomable enormity. He allowed himself to be consumed by it.

  When he came up for these interludes, the usual questions asserted themselves and he would trouble over them for a while.

  How much longer would they be out wandering the Devil’s Playground?

  How many miles separated him from the warm bed where his wife slept and dreamed all too probably nightmares of his death?

  What did his children look like now, three years since he’d set eyes on them in person?

  These were the surface questions that he imagined were also on the minds of the rest of the crew. They were the usual preoccupations of men and women at sea. It was the other questions though, the deeper ones, that kept him awake at night, and being awake at night had started the questions in the first place.

  One in particular haunted him in his usually unsuccessful attempts to sleep: How could he tell whether it was night or day?

  They were in another galaxy, one devoid of clocks as far as he could tell, and it was impossible (or at least foolish) to mark each time zone and orbit through which they passed. There was a clock in the war room and one in the cockpit, one outside of the movie theater, a couple more in the library and in the cafeteria, and maybe a dozen other places throughout the vessel, but they were all just guessing by then. The ship had run into an electrical storm unlike any in recorded history out on a planet that had not yet been named (but which had henceforth been known as The Shithole or The Dirty Bitch among the crew). Even Dawson’s watch had fried, though he continued to wear it. He guessed it was a habit, but something also told him he might need it again someday.

  They’d been out of power for a little over six minutes and those had been the longest of his life. Dawson had expected to feel a new sense of purpose afterwards, like the emergency room patient who was legally dead for a time and then returns to live a more meaningful life, but that hadn’t been the case. The crew had been sure that they were all going to die before the lights returned and the oxygen began to spit through the vents once more. It was strange, but Commander Dawson was sure he had felt a little disappointment among the crew when their electrical systems had come back on line.

  Perhaps they thought it would have been better to get dying over with right then, after they’d already psyched themselves up for that dark and lonesome journey. Now that they didn’t know for sure what time it was, or whether they were sleeping through the day instead of the night or eating breakfast packets for dinner, there didn’t seem much sense in going on. All it took to turn them upside down and inside out was six minutes (unexact) of wondering whether or not dying on another planet (uncharted) would turn them into ghosts without anything or anyone to haunt but the wind and the lightning. Because they thought it had been six minutes, but it could have been six hours for all they knew. They couldn’t trust time.

  And that was only one of the questions that kept Commander Dawson awake at night. The nighttime hours, and he used that term loosely, were not for missing his wife and children (although he often imagined his wife bedding around while he was away). They were for wondering what would happen to his body if he died during a spacewalk. Would it just float there until they returned home, like a fetal corpse attached by an electronic umbilical cord to its mother? They only had one suit left for walking. The others had been lost when the insects of another godforsaken world had eaten two of the ships’ well-respected scientists. There wouldn’t be any way to release the dead from the hull, nor would anyone want to set them adrift into damnation. And they couldn’t risk taking on the bodies inside, either, because they weren’t equipped for storing corpses. There was nothing to do but hope it wouldn’t come to that.

&nbs
p; More awful questions were beginning to form when Private Matthews burst into the room so abruptly that Dawson spilled the bad coffee all over his leg.

  "There you are, sir!" Matthews panted.

  Commander Dawson groaned and tried to bite back a curse as the burn trickled down his calf. He wanted to kick the kid out right then, maybe give him a swift kick in the ass for his troubles. Teach him a lesson. In the moment, he didn’t give two cents’ worth of fuck for whatever the little shit private had to say. He wanted his goddamned leg to stop throbbing.

  "They told me to come find you. Someone’s going ape-shit on the crew deck. They think he’s going to kill someone!" Matthews exclaimed. He looked like he’d just woken up, and Dawson guessed that he’d fallen asleep at his post and missed something crucial because of it, otherwise he wouldn’t have sounded so frantic. In other words, his ass was on the line. The navy had no use for idiots like that, not with so much at stake. He was astute enough, at least, to catch on to the Commander’s anger and was making an effort to scare him into action while deflecting the blame for his intrusion elsewhere. But as they would both soon find out, there was to need to dramatize the grotesqueries that awaited them on the crew deck, and the time for action had almost certainly passed.

  "I’m not C.O. right now, Matthews. And don’t shout like that in here again."

  "I’m pretty sure it was the C.O. who sent me to get you, sir."

  The boy had calmed considerably now that the commander seemed his usual, brusque self.

  "Who’s on duty?"

  "Lieutenant Chalmers."

  The burn of the coffee had dissipated into little more than a hot throb on his inner thigh, and the urge to lash out at the boy subsided for the moment. If anyone was to blame for interrupting his rec time one hour into a thirty-six hour reprieve, it certainly wasn’t this sack-of-shit messenger boy. Lieutenant Chalmers, maybe. Whatever crazy bastard had dropped his marbles on the crew deck, absolutely. But not Tom Matthews, the frail, butt-of-every-joke, acne-scarred nobody whose facial structure alone ensured the wrath of any human being that looked upon him.