by Trish Telep
Sue Jean clambered back into the front seat as Chickie sped onward onto a bridge that spanned the creek. They were going so fast, she almost didn't see the BRIDGE OUT sign.
"Chickie, did you see that?"
"I saw it," he said grimly, the gaping hole in the bridge growing closer. "Boys! Crouch down as low as you can." He looked at Sue Jean. "You too."
"What're you going to do?"
"This."
Chickie turned the knob beneath the compass, and Sue Jean's cheek slapped against the window as the car went sideways. The world disappeared for a moment, Sue Jean's brain floating weightlessly in her skull, and then the world came back, and Chickie's T-bird squealed across a paved street and slammed into a trolley sign.
Sue Jean gaped at Chickie. "What just happened?"
"I told you that compass was special," he said, petting it like it was his favorite dog. "You can use it to travel in more than just the usual four directions. But there appear to be ... side effects."
Severe side effects.
Sue Jean knew what street they were on--Seventh Street--but she only knew because the street sign said so. All the buildings within one hundred yards of Chickie's car were gone, reduced to smoking rubble. But even further down the derelict street, several other abandoned buildings were on the verge of collapse, listing to and fro with an ominous groaning sound. And then, an even worse sound:
"Monsters!"
One of the boys was pointing out of the rear window at the onrushing pack of nine-lived. They were quite far behind them, but at the speed the monsters moved, they wouldn't be far behind for long.
Chickie started the car and pulled away from the trolley sign but could only limp down the street.
"What's wrong?"
"The tire's blown. We gotta run for it."
He grabbed his toolbox, and he and Sue Jean hustled the boys out of the car and ran down the dark street toward the only beacon of light--a diner called Smiley's. They willfully ignored the WHITES ONLY sign in the window.
The few people inside the diner stood at the windows watching in awe as the buildings down the road collapsed, but they weren't so awed that they didn't notice the arrival of eight colored children onto the premises.
A surly woman at the window nearest them yelled, "Get outta here. You don't belong in here." Sue Jean could barely hear her over the jukebox blasting "Tutti Frutti." The Pat Boone version, of course. They didn't even allow colored music in the diner, let alone colored people.
The boys huddled together behind Sue Jean and Chickie, scared and uncomfortable, knowing they weren't welcome.
"See why we need to have a sit-in?" Sue Jean hissed.
But Chickie wasn't paying attention. He grabbed a screwdriver from his toolbox and then jumped onto the counter and started to unscrew the shiny brass carriage clock mounted on the wall above it. A little boy sitting at the counter with a milkshake in front of him said, "Daddy? There's a colored boy standing on the counter. How come you don't ever let me stand on the counter?"
A bespectacled man in an apron came out of the back wearing a name tag that read "SMILEY" and a shocked expression at the sight of Chickie on his counter. "What the hell're you doing?" he yelled, as Chickie jumped to the floor, the clock already half dismantled. "Get outta here 'fore I call the sheriff."
"We're being chased," Sue Jean explained. "By monsters."
"Is that why the buildings're in ruins?" asked the woman at the window. Even bigotry took a backseat to monsters.
"Yes," said Sue Jean. Better they blame monsters than Chickie's weird navigational abilities.
"Wait." The woman squinted out the window. "That's just the Klan."
Sue Jean said, "No, it's not."
"Is so," said Leo. "They're white and pointy and scary. My Daddy said they were."
"Leo?" A colored man, a fry cook judging from his hat, came out of the kitchen.
So it wasn't really whites only. Smiley didn't mind colored people working for him; he just didn't want them as customers.
"Uncle Jimmy!" Leo ran into the baffled fry cook's arms.
"Why aren't you at home with Peggy?"
"Peggy's dead!"
"What?" Uncle Jimmy looked to Sue Jean for confirmation so she nodded, sadly.
"The Klan killed her," Leo cried, "and then took me and put me in a place where the sun was green."
"I don't know what y'all're involved in," said Smiley, "but I don't want any trouble in this place."
Uncle Jimmy gave Smiley a look.
"What do you want me to do?" Smiley exclaimed, his cheeks bright red. "If the Klan wants them, there's nothing I can do about it."
"It's not the Klan!" Sue Jean screamed.
"Oh my God," said the woman at the window. "She's right. It's--" She scrambled backward just as the nine-lived burst into the diner.
They slid straight for the boys, all of them, including Smiley's son at the counter.
In the commotion, Sue Jean blocked the entrance with tables; the nine-lived might have the boys now, but she was damned if they'd leave with them.
"Bash them on the heads!" she yelled. "That's their weak spot." She grabbed Chickie's trusty crowbar from the toolbox and followed her own advice. "And don't let them spit in your face!"
The diners fought with chairs, napkin dispensers--even the salt and pepper--doing their best to wrestle the boys from the monsters' grip. But it was difficult, as Sue Jean well knew, particularly with an opponent that kept regenerating.
"Daddy!"
Sue Jean turned just in time to see Smiley get thrown across the diner by the creature holding his son. She ran forward to ram the crowbar into its eye, but before she could, it spat in her face.
She dimly heard the crowbar clatter to the floor as she tried to wipe her nose and mouth clear, but the stuff had already hardened. She fell to the floor; the spit on her face like a weight, dragging her down. Her eyes were glued open; the fluorescents buzzed overhead, and "Tutti Frutti" blistered her ears. She prayed to God that she wouldn't die listening to Pat Boone.
And then, instead of fluorescents she saw Chickie standing over her holding the carriage clock he'd modified, the hands spinning backward, faster and faster.
Until she could breathe again.
Sue Jean gasped and sucked in a huge gulp of air. The slime that had been a hard suffocating mask a second ago now hovered wetly over her face, but only for a moment before it flew back into the mouth of the creature who'd hawked it up. The monster dropped Smiley's son and stood bewildered, clutching its throat and choking on its own spit.
"Good!" said Chickie. "It works." He wound the clock and, as he did, the red mechanical bird that Sue Jean had last seen in the basement was now perched on the carriage clock's ornate handle. When Chickie lifted the clock over his head, the bird began to cuckoo shrilly.
Sue Jean got to her feet as the bird's calls silenced the diner. The nine-lived froze and watched the carriage clock, watched the hands spinning, not backward this time, but forward, so fast that after a time the hands seemed to disappear altogether. As quickly as the clock was spinning, so were the nine-lived aging, shrinking into dried, withered husks. They released the boys and when the cuckoo had called twelve times, as one, the creatures fell over dead. And this time, they didn't regenerate.
As the cuckoo spread its red wooden wings and flew away through one of the diner's newly broken windows, Sue Jean waited, looking for bright, bat-signal lights to burst from their bodies, but when none did, she finally relaxed.
When Smiley hobbled over to his son and swept him into a bear hug, Chickie tucked the clock under his arm and said, "When we came here for help, you were willing to turn us over to our enemies. But when you and your boy were threatened, we helped you without being asked--Sue Jean, because she's a good person, and me because if I had just walked out of here, she would have ragged me about it for the rest of my life."
"Shallow."
"Shut up," Chickie told her. "I'm making a point."
/> "Save it, kid," said Smiley tiredly, rocking his son in his arms. "I get preached to on Sundays."
"Can I have a sundae, Daddy?" asked Smiley's son brightly, looking no worse for wear. "A milkshake won't cut it this time."
"And that," Chickie exclaimed, "is my point. I think we could all use a sundae." He sat at the counter and pulled Sue Jean down beside him. "What do you think, Mr. Smiley?"
Smiley looked around his mangled diner, at the young faces. The old ones. The dead ones. "Sundaes for everybody," he said, sounding surprised to hear the words issuing from his mouth. "On the house."
And that's how Chickie and Sue Jean and six little boys became the first coloreds ever served in Smiley's. Sue Jean thought there should have been fireworks to mark the occasion, but there weren't. Just the fire spreading outside and the fire trucks.
But it would do.
* * *
Chickie and Sue Jean waited until the parents came to claim the boys before going back to Chickie's T-bird. She watched him change the tire, noting how dinged up and windowless his car had become. But for all its battle scars, it was still a sweet ride.
After changing the tire, Chickie sat on the hood and surveyed the destruction he'd wrought: the fire coloring the sky in the distance, the wreckage of several historic buildings. "I told you everything would go to hell," he said. "And yet, I feel kinda good. I guess sometimes God dresses heaven in hell's clothes. Just for a laugh."
"Ice cream and blasphemy," said Sue Jean, resting her head on his shoulder. "The perfect end to the perfect date."
"Your sense of irony pains me, Sue Jean. Wait here a sec."
He left the car and smashed the carriage clock he'd modified under his shoe and kicked it into the gutter. Sue Jean had always known Chickie had a bit extra. Tonight she had learned just how much extra. When he came back to her, she said, "If you were a Martian, you would tell me, wouldn't you?"
"Of course not." He gave her a shocked look. "That's the kind of secret you take to your grave. And for what it's worth, humans are just as capable of destroying things as aliens. But I'm not in a destroying mood. I'm in the mood to right wrongs. To fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way."
"The ideal if not the reality," she said, knowing a few sundaes at Smiley's hadn't magically rid her town of hatred and inequality. Though it was a step in the right direction.
"I feel like altering reality," said Chickie rubbing his hands together as if he meant to tear the world apart and stitch it back together right then and there.
Since he could do just that, Sue Jean thought it prudent to turn his wondrous mind to other things. Odd, but getting Chickie Hill to be selfish wasn't something she thought he'd ever need help with.
"Know what I feel like?" she asked, and then kissed him.
"Okay, to hell with reality." He pressed her back against the hood, right in the middle of the street, and really planted one on her. When her thighs had turned to jelly, he said, "What's the score now?"
"Still zero for bravery, but full marks for passion and your newly developed social conscience. So seventy." It really wouldn't do for Chickie to become conceited.
He removed his letter sweater and helped her into it.
"Finally!" Sue Jean squealed, rolling up the sleeves and luxuriating in the rich red warmth of his love. "Now that we're going steady, I'll award you an extra five points."
"Five points? Is that all my love is worth?" Chickie kissed her again, and this time, everything turned to jelly. "Now what's the score?"
Sue Jean stretched against the hood, smiling sensuously, steam rising from Chickie's T-bird and quite possibly from her own skin. "One million." So what if he developed a big head; he deserved it. "The Earth moved. Did you feel it?"
"Yeah." He looked around. "But that was because a couple more buildings just collapsed. I mean, it wasn't me." He pulled Sue Jean to her feet and opened the car door for her.
"That's why you're squeamish about upsetting the natural order, isn't it?" she said. "I talk so lightly about changing the world, but you really could, Chickie Hill. You really could save or destroy the world."
"Sure I could," he said matter-of-factly as he got in the car and cranked the radio. "Speedo" was playing; he loved that song. "And so could you. So could anyone." Chickie laughed. "But screw it, mama. Let's just see where the road takes us."
Sue Jean settled back, caught in his orbit, not upset about the past or worried about the future. Content, for once, to simply enjoy the ride.
The Vast Machinery of Dreams
BY CAITLIN KITTREDGE
Matt Edison is the author of such serials as Lord Van Helsing, Witch Hunter and the Commander Cloud, Steward of the Skies stories, which remain the most popular tales ever serialized in this volume. Matt became this magazine's youngest writer at fourteen-years-old, and hasn't stopped since. To write to Matt, address letters c/o Strange Adventures Magazine, Box 2, 112 Derleth Street, Lovecraft, MA.
THIS IS WHAT happened:
Matt Edison met the love of his life at fourteen. Her name was Clarice, and they met in the way of young people, slowly and by torturous inches. Matt was attending a lecture given by one of the last living men to survive the Storm, one of the last men to have seen the world as it was, before witchcraft and aether and the advent of the Great Old Ones. Matt wanted to be a reporter, to go and see all these things for himself. Clarice was attending the lecture as well, and miraculously she talked with him, even though he was a townie and she attended the Lovecraft Academy.
Matt and Clarice were inseparable from that first night, when the silvery-blue glow of aether lanterns danced across the maps of the world that their speaker smacked with his pointer. It was 1915, and newsreels blared the surrender of France to the German Empire, and more fantastically, news about the shadowy, inhuman creatures that Kaiser Wilhelm held at his disposal. Necro-demons, the scientists of the Proctor Bureau called them. Human flesh twisted and remade.
The monsters interested Matt more than the dull politics about a war he was old enough to fight in, but could not discuss with his father without getting his ears boxed--though Clarice hid her eyes. She never got over her squeamishness--not until after she'd graduated from the Academy and they'd married, and she gave birth to their first child.
Matt was away, covering this and that, a stringer for the Lovecraft dailies. They named the boy Clarence Matthew, after his mother and father. They moved away from Lovecraft to the great city of New Amsterdam when Matt's article on Al Capone's trial for witchcraft attracted the attention of the Times.
They had more children. They grew old together. Clarice never looked at Matt without love in her eyes.
* * *
This is what happened:
Matt Edison is fifteen, not fourteen. Fourteen came later, when his editor, Mr. Messer, decided that, "Fifteen, hell, you're old enough to be shot by the Kaiser. Ain't nothing impressive about that. Fourteen, that's something that'll get people buying issues. Too bad you can't pass for thirteen, not with those whiskers."
Matt Edison has just been fired from his third job in as many months, as a bicycle delivery boy for the greengrocer's near his father's apartment. His bruises from falling off the enormous wheeled contraption mingle with the ones he got when George Edison, fresh from his shift as a steam ventor in the Lovecraft Engine, discovered Matt scribbling on the back of his Saturday Evening Post.
Matt doesn't know where he goes when he drifts off, just that the stories come up and they take him down, down into a drowning pool of other places and other times, people and things he's created, faces only he recognizes. He got fired from his job at the Western Union office when his boss discovered him typing up "The Adventure of the Iron Peril" on the company steno machine.
He thought of a story, about a girl who finds a garden maze behind a house--no, her grandmother's house, that she's just inherited--a rose garden overgrown and sweet with fragrance, and she steps into the maze and wakes up one hundred years in the future, a t
rick of the Great Old Ones, or maybe the grandmother is still alive and a heretic witch. She's saved by handsome Proctor agent Jimmy Slater, a recurring character in Matt's stories. Jimmy Slater is a loose cannon, not afraid to get into a slugging match with a warlock or drink a poisoned tea that will send his mind outside his body in order to rescue a dame.
Matt already knows he'll never be Jimmy Slater. He's skinny and pale, his forehead is too wide, his eyes are too small. He bleeds when he gets hit, and he can't talk to a girl without managing to stare at his shoes rather than her face. Matt will have to be satisfied with writing about Jimmy Slater, about enchanted gardens and haunted mansions, and he is.
He could start a new story with his free afternoon: "The Adventure of the Screaming Skull." He's wanted to use that title for a while. He keeps a list on an old Lovecraft jitney service map in his pocket. If his father finds it, he'll light it up with one of his cigarettes and that'll be the end of Matt Edison.
There is a letter waiting for Matt when he gets home:
Dear Mr. Edison,
I read with great interest "The Black Catacombs of Buried London," but I'm afraid at this time Strange Adventures is moving away from ghost stories and into serials like The Shadow or Allen Quartermain. Please keep us in mind for future work.
Best wishes,
H. Messer, Editor
Matt crumples the letter, then thinks better of it. Cheap paper, but the back is blank.
He decides he can't face telling his father he lost the delivery boy job. He'll try to find another one before George wonders where Matt's weekly eleven-dollar paycheck is.
He wanders the streets of Lovecraft, Old Town, where the townies like him go. Uptown is for rich people and Academy students, and Matt is neither. He was expelled for daydreaming in class--and for failing half of them because of the daydreaming.
He sees that the old Glimmerlight Theater, which used to be a real vaudeville stage but is now a movie house, is playing the sorts of movies banned in uptown. War movies in which the hero dies at the end; cheap, racy adventure serials; farces featuring women with fat lips in dressing gowns and either a very fat or very thin actor, who's supposed to be hilarious. Matt doesn't get it.