by Shock Totem
He doesn’t have the chance to fire, though. Right about then, the thing we’re chasing drops almost straight down, vanishing from Callen’s display.
Through the arch. The only place it could’ve gone is through the arch.
At the skipper’s orders, Malhotra and Franks bring us around, slow and creeping, until the San Jacinto points nose-first, like a bloodhound, into that gaping maw, and the fucked-up sonar readings inside.
And yeah, they’re still fucked up. Wavering blank spots where the sounds just vanish; overlapping angles; double images; faint imagines, like some of the rocks and contours are only partly there; readings the computer won’t even try to interpret, just blotches on the screen. Callen looks like he wants to cry.
But there’s movement, too—just a hint of something swimming, flowing, climbing through and over and behind the impossible shapes.
“Helm?” I’ve never heard the skipper’s voice that quiet, yet it carries clear across the con. “All ahead one-third. Take us in after it.”
I swear I can hear half a dozen necks craning around so we can all stare at Commander Pierce.
“Skipper?” It’s Morgan, the XO, who first gave us voice. “I’m really not sure that we—”
“Are you questioning my orders, Lieutenant Commander?”
“It’s just... I—”
“Sir?” Callen again, his lips actually quivering. “Those readings... I’m not sure I can direct helm to steer us around any obstructions, not with such strange—”
“We’ll keep it slow, Seaman.”
“But—”
“Skipper, I—”
“Sir, with all respect, I really—”
“Everyone stand down!” Pierce is on his feet again, eyes wide, fists clenched so tight they’re shaking and whale-belly pale. “You saw the fucking thing attack us! You saw what it did to Hoag! That should be enough for you! You know why we have to do this!”
But we don’t, not really. And we know that he’s not telling us, either; we can all see Pierce’s eyes, wide and unblinking, flitting constantly back to Callen at the sonar station, to the headphones he’s wearing.
And I know the guys are wondering, just like I am... What the hell had the skipper heard out there? What did he know that we didn’t?
What the fuck had really happened to Hoag?
Perfectly calm once again, Pierce sits back down. “All ahead one-third,” he repeats softly.
His face ashen, Malhotra eases the throttle forward. “Ahead... Ahead one-third, aye.”
And then there’s
Confusion, fear, what the hell are we doing, the skipper’s lost it, gotta get out of here, no, gotta get after the damn thing, listen, listen, oh sweetie it’s time for bed, we love you, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring, oh God make it stop, make it shut up, make it...
...joints hurt every day, now, just a little but getting worse, probably about time to hang it up, I’ve made E-8, been Chief of the Boat for years, time to hang it up, just wish it didn’t hurt so...
...enough, definitely done, I should be home with Hazel right now, lying on top of her, feeling her hair and her breath and her boobs, not stuck in this tin can sausage-fest...
...fuck am I doing here, this ain’t what I signed on for, get these things off me, saw what they did to Hoag, oh Jesus God, I can’t stop sweating, gotta take a piss so bad...
...fit for command? I should do something, I should’ve done something, now it’s too late, now...
And it’s all me, and it’s all them, and there’s no difference, and now it’s
Pain.
Oh, God, pain like I can’t describe, agony like nothing any of us have ever felt, like nothing anyone has ever felt.
The San Jacinto moves through places that couldn’t exist; angles that didn’t line up in any geometry human minds could understand, spaces between and around and under spaces. Whatever had attacked us, it came from somewhere else, somewhere outside, and God help us, we followed it. Followed it through a corridor bound in dimensions completely unrelated to height and width and depth. Dimensions we were never made for, spaces we could never fit.
Except that we pushed too hard—and now, squeezed from directions that have no names, we fold and compress and flow until we do.
On the far end of the passage, another arch, leading back into the ocean not more than a few hundred yards from where we’d entered. We drift out, the mangled mass that was once the USS San Jacinto and her crew, and slowly settle to the ocean floor.
So we wait. Just wait, blind and deaf and silent, for the water to slowly corrode us away, until we waft apart and maybe, maybe the long and endless nothing will end.
Until then, we are denied even the feeble comfort of prayer, for not all of us believe—and even if we did, the cold steel offers us no tongue to voice our cries.
Ari Marmell is a fantasy and horror writer, with novels and short stories published through Del Rey/Spectra, Pyr Books, Wizards of the Coast, and others. His most recent novels are Thief’s Covenant and False Covenant, from Pyr Books, and Darksiders: the Abomination Vault from Del Rey.
Although born in New York, Ari has lived the vast majority of his life in Texas—first Houston (where he earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Houston), and then Austin. He lives with his wife, George, two cats, and a variety of neuroses. You can find Ari online at www.mouseferatu.com, or on Twitter @mouseferatu.
THE GIRL AND THE BLUE BURQA
by D. Thomas Mooers
It was the scarf.
That’s what set Tallena off. Looking at the little girl wrapped head to toe in blue cloth outraged her. It didn’t matter that it might be silk. The clothes were a mark of oppression, a mark of subjugation, and seeing that thrust upon a child so young was unbearable.
It didn’t take long for her anger to germinate into an idea. From there she devised a plan. It wasn’t a good plan. She did not think through all of the details.
But something had to be done.
After the Salaisuus family moved next door, Tallena struggled for weeks with the image of the small girl and her shimmering azure prison. Her name was Vika, and she would hobble over the rich green lawn, chasing butterflies in an awkward exuberance that only a toddler’s developing legs could produce.
Vika could not have been more than three years old, and each time she stopped to inspect the bright yellow roses in the Salaisuus’ garden, Tallena sensed a deep pity in her heart that refused to go away.
At first she tried to be rational. People were different. They believed different things, and Tallena Uhri was always taught that that, in and of itself, did not make them bad. So she researched all she could about the custom and tried to understand the people that embraced it.
Tallena checked out Understanding the Call, a book on Islamic customs from her school library. It told her the dress was called a “burqa.” Wearing one was an old practice that in fact predated the prophet Mohammed by three centuries. For some in the Middle East, the attire was merely an issue of propriety and modesty.
Other sources Tallena found were less sympathetic.
An article on a website argued that not every Islamic community required women don a full covering. Outside of Arabia, the practice varied, and in some western countries the outfit was even banned. One European blogger went so bold as to liken a woman in a burqa to “a prisoner behind a screen, cut off from all social life and deprived of identity.”
Prisoner.
That was the word that Tallena thought of when she first saw Vika, all wrapped up in blue. Encountering it again, in someone else’s description, only emboldened her resolve. It didn’t matter that “Salaisuus” didn’t sound like an Arabic name, or that the book said that women were not supposed to put on a burqa until puberty. Mrs. Salaisuus, if that was truly who she was, did not wear one, and for Tallena that only made matters worse.
That hypocrite, she thought. She enjoys freedom but imposes her husband’s stifling faith on a child.
<
br /> A child!
Something had to be done.
On a sunny Tuesday morning, Tallena awoke to the birds trilling and chittering well before the sun had risen above the leafy horizon into a coral washed dawn. Most of the adults in her neighborhood, Mr. Salaisuus and her parents included, would soon be leaving for work.
Tallena herself had not been feeling well that morning. That was what she told her mother. She did not have a fever, but she thought she might be sick, and did not want to go to school. She said she could get her assignments off the website and work on them later in the day, if she felt better.
Mrs. Uhri said okay.
Tallena was a good student.
And she never lied.
Her mother offered to stay home from work, but Tallena said no. She was almost an adult herself, she said. She had her own phone, and if anything went wrong she would call.
On his way out, Tallena’s father kissed her forehead and told her he hoped she felt better.
She watched him drive off, then saw her mother’s white hatchback pull out of the driveway. It was almost seven thirty.
Tallena showered, feeling the need to be clean, and got dressed. She was brushing her hair, watching the tines smooth the wet sandy tresses, when she heard Mr. Salaisuus’ car start up.
From her parent’s window she saw his dark gray SUV back onto their street and then pull away. Mrs. Salaisuus did not work.
Typical. That was probably a sin, too.
Tallena went downstairs and stood at the kitchen window, sipping orange juice and watching the Salaisuus’ backyard. There was a low hedge that marked the border between the two houses. At one point the shrubs grew thin, and in that withered brown space, Tallena was sure, there was enough room for a person to pass through.
That was how she was going to get away.
She didn’t think she needed to go far. Hide right under their noses was the plan. Later, she might try to contact social services, or maybe one of the rights groups she found online.
She knew it wasn’t much.
But something had to be done.
It was around eight thirty when Tallena heard the whisking sound of a sliding door open. Sure enough, a little figure, wrapped in bright blue stumbled onto the patio. The small girl hopped about almost like a rabbit, and Tallena smiled. When Vika went out to play, she was almost always by herself.
Alone in her silken blue jail.
The idea spun fresh black hatred, and Tallena gritted her teeth.
It was time.
She unfastened the latch to the backdoor, and hurried out around the far side of the house to the front. There, she crossed the Salaisuus’ driveway and stepped up onto their front porch.
Tallena’s fingers trembled as she pressed the golden brass button of the doorbell. When she heard footsteps from within, she dashed around to the back.
Speeding through the gap in the hedge, she found Vika in the center of the green lawn, flapping her blue sleeves like wings. Without a word, she snatched up the child and sprinted home. Tallena noted on the way how light the girl felt in her arms, yet oddly hard and boney.
They probably starve the poor thing, too!
At the backdoor, she shifted the little girl to her hip, and turned the knob. Once inside she re-latched the door, and set Vika down. Tallena looked out the window. No one was coming after them. There were no voices in the yard.
So far, so good.
Tallena took a deep breath, and let it out.
“It’s okay, Vika,” she said, kneeling down and lifting up the shiny blue veil.
The silk fabric fell away, and Tallena’s hand came up over her mouth. She saw her image reflected a hundred times in the facets of two huge black eyes. Twin feelers, side by side where the child’s nose should have been, reached out, testing, sensing.
Tallena fell back, scrambling to get away. She saw a long amber tube bristling with sticky hairs extend out. A thick clear fluid dripped from its hollow point as it stretched toward her face. Black, stalk-like legs unfolded from the furry abdomen, as the thing, not a girl, leapt upon her. Tallena shrieked.
But she was alone.
Later in the morning, when there was no answer on Tallena’s cell phone, her mother tried the house number. No one picked up, and Mrs. Uhri assumed Tallena was sleeping. She was sick after all, that was probably for the best. But, just to be safe, she decided to take an early lunch and check on how Tallena was doing.
“Tallena?”
Mrs. Uhri called out from the front door, but there was no answer. Upstairs, her daughter’s room was empty. Her bed was unmade, but there was no sign of Tallena.
Back downstairs to the kitchen, Mrs. Uhri tried to figure out where Tallena might have gone. In the middle of the floor she noticed a strange puddle upon the tiles. It was cream colored and looked almost like milk, but when she bent down to touch it, it stuck to her fingers, and smelled sharp, of ammonia.
Over her shoulder, Mrs. Uhri heard a voice cry through the open window—“Vika...Vika?”
She stood up and walked to the backdoor.
Through the screen she saw a little blue-clad figure hopping through the bushes, scurrying across the grass, faster than any little girl’s legs should carry her.
For a long time, D. Thomas Mooers avoided writing. He graduated college, worked perhaps every job known to man, and even went to law school. But at no time did writing ever leave him. The loose pages of story ideas, sketches of scenes furiously scribbled into notebooks; the unfinished “children” of his creation began to amass. Now a fresh voice in speculative fiction, Mr. Mooers has written four novels and dozens of shorter works, the latter appearing both in print and online. He presently lives in Massachusetts where he is trying to help his young stories grow up to become responsible grownup books.
DIGGING IN THE DIRT
A Conversation with Jack Ketchum
by John Boden
Jack Ketchum is an award-winning writer of dark and dastardly fiction. Horror at its most visceral and brutal.
I conducted this interview through a series of emails in the spring and early summer of 2011. I was then fortunate enough to meet Mr. Ketchum in person at Necon, a small writers’ convention held each year in Rhode Island, where I discovered him to be a polite and cordial man, soft spoken and warm.
Stephen King has proclaimed Ketchum “the scariest man in America.” Trying to work out the dark connection between the sweet man and the horrific material he crafts as the scariest man in America threatened to do my head in.
So let's get to the digging and see what I uncovered, shall we?
• • •
JB: I guess the best place to start this interview would be with the first point at which I encountered your work. I believe I read “The Box” in a Cemetery Dance anthology. A book that somehow turned up in my apartment...never a bad thing, a free book. Anyway, I recall this story punching me right in the mouth. It was horror all right, but it also carried that swaggery, subtle edginess of the old masters like Bloch, Bradbury and Beaumont. This story haunted me for weeks after I finished it.
Later I found Red, which was fantastic. Such a unique premise to tackle at novel length. After reading Offspring and The Lost, I could see how you earned a reputation as a sort of Sam Peckinpah of horror fiction, brutal and vicious, and while there are those elements, there is a huge amount of character and humanity.
I know this is a bit of a stale question, but it’s always one I find the answers to fascinating. Would you mind telling us a little about how you got to this point? What was it that made you decide on this dark path?
JK: I fell in love with fiction as a little boy, all kinds of fiction, from Black Beauty to Treasure Island, and then later, horror fiction. Poe, Lovecraft, Bloch, Sturgeon, Bradbury. The first horror novel I read was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which really got to me because I think even then I had something of a split personality. Good kid, bad kid—and I had a lot of anger. The anger never went away—a lot of it sti
ll hasn’t—but I found I could use it and tame it somewhat just by writing it down. Same as all my other feelings. I was the “sensitive” type. I had a lot of feelings.
JB: It was so nice to meet you, although briefly, at Necon last summer. It was my first ever con and a bit overwhelming, but with such a cool familial vibe. In addition to all of that, I found the panels I attended to be very enlightening, and noted that a large percentage of writers seem to have the ability to “genre-hop,” something I would imagine comes with a bit of discomfort.
My simple question after all this blathering is, how comfortable are you with your genre? Would you—or do you—do much genre hopping?
JK: Yes, I am and I do. The opening lines to my introduction to Peaceable Kingdom are something like, “I don’t know why you put up with me. As a writer I’m all over the place.” I don’t like to feel predictable. And I’m happy to see that my readers don’t seem to expect me to be.
JB: How much time do you devote to the craft? Do you set a conscious goal of X amount of words per day or just so many hours must be spent writing? I write myself, a bit, and have the worst self-discipline ever. So I’m hoping this will inspire me.
JK: That depends on what I’m doing. If I’m writing original stuff, after about four hours, tops, I go brain-dead and am likely to write myself into a hole if I don’t quit. If I’m rewriting I can go six or seven hours. I have no set word-count goals and never did.
JB: I have heard from so many writers what a gracious and friendly fellow you are, and I must say I was very thrilled with how accessible and cool you’ve been through your board and with me. I am always annoyed at fevered egos who act like they need no one or are better than everyone. In this business, I think a nurturing attitude would do mountains of good. Folks like you and John Skipp and others who have been supportive of fresh talent and champions for the good fight have done a lot for the genre.
