by Rob Rosen
“You think it’s the nepenthe that’s stopping him from remembering the message?” the second man asked.
“Yes.”
“Keep at it until you have the answer.”
“Affirmative.”
Marcus turned around. The bedroom door closed behind him. The astral-version of Jasper ducked down behind the base of the window frame.
“Is somebody there?” Astral-Marcus demanded.
Movement stirred beyond the windows. Astral-Jasper waited. When he dared to look again, there was only one Marcus, naked beside his sleeping form. Jasper’s consciousness slammed back into his body. He gasped himself awake.
A hand tenderly pulled him close. “You okay, Jazz?” Marcus asked.
“Just a dream,” Jasper said.
Except that he knew better now. It was no more of a dream than Tom Gudmunson, his real husband.
He settled within Marcus’s embrace and attempted to remember what he knew while putting on his best face, because there were clearly eyes watching, ears listening.
Get up. Walk. Then run.
Jasper was certain that to go anywhere beyond the limits of the perfect hedges would invite trouble—and painful trouble at that.
He sat at the desk, gazing at the tablet’s screen. Marcus appeared as a ghostly reflection and moved closer. Big hands settled on Jasper’s shoulders and began to massage. Jasper imagined the ease in which they could encircle his throat.
“How goes work, Jazz?”
The smile he’d practiced appeared. “Good, thanks.”
“Making progress?”
“I think so.”
“It might help to talk it over. What do you call it in writer-speak? Spitballing?”
Jasper nodded.
“We can spitball. And then you can lather your spit all over my balls upstairs.”
Marcus leaned down and scattered hot kisses over the back of Jasper’s neck that left him feeling cold.
“What’s the message in the signal?”
Ice formed within Jasper’s blood. Along with observations like the medication in his food and the certainty of guards waiting beyond the yews and trimmed juniper hedges, he guessed Marcus was special forces, meaning it would take more than hitting him over the head with the tablet to neutralize the threat. Still, the temptation was there.
“I’m thinking, maybe, it’s a reiteration of the Golden Rule. You know, that whole ‘love one another’ thing. Doing unto others as you’d like done unto you.”
The face leaning over his shoulder reflected an unflattering expression on the tablet’s screen. “Seriously? That’s the best you can come up with?”
“You asked,” Jasper said.
Marcus snorted in response. Jasper inhaled more of his fake husband’s synthetic smell. Since his trip out the window, he’d come to think of Marcus’s scent not as body spray in the traditional understanding, but as some sort of chemical inhibitor, sprayed on as a decontaminant.
And about the signal, the message?
That part, too, was real. He and Gudmunson, in the wilds of the Thirteen-Mile Woods, on a hot summer night, sweating, fucking—oh, yes, Gudmunson’s hot male scent and the taste of his skin were powerful anchors in this house of lies. In that moment of supreme joy when Gudmunson’s uncircumcised cock levitated Jasper’s consciousness up from the tent, into the moonlit sky, someone or something up there had noticed. A message, yes.
He faced Marcus—likely not the soldier’s real name, simply more window dressing—and waited for one of them to blink. The eyes in the screen radiated pure malevolence.
“Get back to work,” Marcus said. “Figure it out. And fast.”
The hands on his shoulders offered one final rub that verged on painful. Mercifully, Marcus exited the den. The eyes and ears, Jasper was sure, remained.
Gudmunson was gone, Jasper typed. But he knew his true husband was out there, looking for him, and that they’d be reunited. Soon.
Jasper closed his eyes and listened to the message.
The melody of words alien to his ears but familiar to his heart—deeper, to his soul—carried him along, out the window and over the flower gardens. It wasn’t flying so much as projecting forward, with dream-arms spread like invisible wings.
Over the pool, which glittered in the moonlight, Jasper saw the house for what it really was: a residential-sized clean room where everything was orderly and sterile. Three black vehicles guarded its boundaries. Beyond the hedges, desolate desert and a cattle fence loomed.
Past the desert and the lost places where people existed more than they lived, his heart and soul tracked the pulses of arousal until the light and heat grew unmistakable, a reenactment of the original Big Bang that first gave life to the universe. There was a motel on the outskirts of those drab desert homesteads. He was close now, so close.
“Gudmunson,” Jasper called.
His astral-self hastened forward. Jasper was conscious of his astral-erection, thick and aching for release. He’d transformed into something that was complete arousal, all-cock.
He passed through the wall and entered the motel room, a place of scratchy burnt-umber blankets and loud televisions. Gudmunson’s service weapon sat on the bed beside a satellite phone and a stack of maps.
Gudmunson stood with his back to Astral-Jasper, clad only in blue jeans, unbuttoned, barely zipped. With even more certainty than details about fine china and stemware behind cabinets at the clean-room-house in the desert, Jasper knew Gudmunson was studying a favorite photograph of them together, taken at Jasper’s surprise birthday party two years before their date with cosmic destiny in Thirteen-Mile Woods.
Jasper studied Gudmunson’s naked back, his big bare feet on the old linoleum. His desire doubled. The tall man turned, and his handsomeness, with its many imperfections, made Jasper’s astral soul pulse.
“Jazz,” Gudmunson gasped.
“I’m here. Do you see me?”
At first, Gudmunson didn’t. Then Jasper wound his feathery arms around Gudmunson’s warm and sweating torso, and he breathed deeply of his real man’s scent. Astral fingers slid into the lush thatch of dark pubic hair exposed at the open front of Gudmunson’s jeans, and groped the familiar destinations of furry cock and even furrier balls. Gudmunson’s feet—big and handsome and smelling of buttery sweat, as a real man’s should—activated Jasper’s carnal emotions to their fullest. How could he have doubted the man’s existence?
“Now I do, I think,” Gudmunson said. “But—”
“Look for me with your heart.”
The glow suddenly dimmed enough that both were able to see one another clearly, and then Jasper was there, corporal.
“Jazz, babe.” Gudmunson turned around and drew him close. “I’ve been looking for you since they stole you from our bed.”
They kissed, and the crush of Gudmunson’s lips over his drove out the last trace of Marcus’s spell. Through words and telepathy, Jasper shared what had happened, what he now knew had happened, all of it flooding back to him: his ‘gold-farming’ at the hands of Government or global agents; days of brainwashing, like they do to refugees in Chinese prison camps, forced to play video games until they snap and believe they’re living the scenario in real life; the clean-room-house; Marcus.
Gudmunson’s twin emerald gemstone eyes captured Jasper’s. “I’m gonna kill that fucker.”
Jasper placed a single finger against Gudmunson’s unshaved mouth. “Wait, the signal…”
Gudmunson cupped the sides of Jasper’s face in strong hands, hands that knew surprising gentleness.
“That light in the woods the night all this started. It was a message. More than that, an invitation.”
“From who?”
Jasper shrugged. “Someone up there, from the direction of Canaris Proxima Ioni. They didn’t contact the government. They reached out specifically to me, hoping I could help them.”
“I have to save you, Jazz. Tell me where they took you, and I’ll fuck-knuckle that fake hu
sband up for what he did to you.”
“The message,” Jasper said. “I think it was a roadmap, showing me how to go there. To Canaris. Their version of interstellar space travel between our star system and theirs. But it can also take me anywhere I want to go. That’s why they want to know it. I saw Marcus use the ability, too. But not like me. And he can’t maintain the projection for long. It’s as if they back-engineered it only so far. If they get the technology, I have a feeling we’re all doomed.”
Gudmunson ran his fingers through Jasper’s hair.
“I can take us there,” he continued. “You and I, Gudmunson, to Canaris, to anywhere else. We can go far, far from this place together. Just say the word.”
“Okay, but first we’re taking a detour.”
Jasper blinked. For a terrible second or two, he worried the encounter had been a dream, wishful thinking. The bedroom with the minimalist furniture and mirror filled with prying eyes and listening ears solidified around him.
“Where have you been?” a man’s voice demanded. It was Marcus.
Jasper sat up quickly and was dragged out of the bed and to his feet by hands that showed their capacity for inflicting pain. He faced the perfectly handsome man, now also revealed as perfectly dangerous.
“Tell me, Jazz, or I promise I’m gonna hurt you!”
“I don’t think so,” Gudmunson barked.
Marcus released Jasper and spun around. “Who the fuck are you?”
“His husband. The real one, dickhead.”
And then Gudmunson threw the first punch.
Thankfully, he also threw the last one.
THE OTHER SIDE
Rob Rosen
I woke up feeling strange. That is to say, I hadn’t fallen asleep in this house, and so waking up in it was, well, like I said, strange. Plus, there was something about the place, something off. It was old and rickety, cobwebbed and musty. Somewhere there was a maid who wasn’t getting her Christmas bonus. Still, it had its charms. For instance…
Nope, utterly charmless. My bad.
I looked around. Maybe there was a clue somewhere as to why I was waking up there. I walked from empty room to empty room in silence. Even the mice seemed smart enough to stay away. An errant bird peep? Nope. Nada. Just me and an empty old house that had seen better days. Probably in…
Nope. No better days. Place was a nightmare. Again, my bad.
And then I heard it, a noise. Finally. Perhaps it was a floorboard creak, a squeaky shoe. Whatever it was it was coming from downstairs, the sound muffled by the distance it had to travel. Maybe, I hoped—well, prayed was more like it—that whoever was down there could shed some light on my predicament. Or offer me a ride home. Or not bludgeon me to death, which, I believe, is what happens in old, rickety, nightmarish houses. Hollywood hype? Sure, but I was erring on the side of caution. Which is to say, I wasn’t barreling down there yelling, “SURPRISE!”
And so I tiptoed out of the room I found myself in and headed down the hallway. I still felt strange, but at least help—fingers crossed—was on the way. Plus, did anyone really bludgeon folks these days? Shoot folks, sure, but bludgeon them, not so much. I gulped at the thought of the former. Actually, I gulped at the thought of both, because I was alone and quite defenseless. Quick wit, after all, does not a good shiv make.
In any case, I made it to the stairwell. The sound was clearer now, echoing off the walls from the first floor. Or maybe it was the second floor. How many floors did this old, rickety, nightmarish house have? I didn’t have a clue. I turned around and quickly moved to a window. “Two,” I whispered as I stared at the car parked out front. “A Beemer.” I sighed in relief. I mean, bludgeoners didn’t drive Beemers. Mainly because blood is a bitch to get out of imported leather seats. Or so I was guessing.
My eyes moved left and right. The house was on a hill, surrounded by trees, most of them lifeless and brown. No neighbors, no birds, not even a prancing chipmunk. Guess they were all smart enough to stay away. So what was my excuse?
Again I turned and made my way to the stairwell. Dust covered the ancient wooden railing. Dust and cobwebs. So, yeah, there we were: me and some spiders and someone who drove a BMW who was presumably not a bludgeoner. I now crossed my toes for good luck, to match my fingers. Eyes? No, because Mama always told me never to cross my eyes, in case they got stuck. Not a good look, no. And, yes, I was delaying going downstairs. Fear can do that to a person, you know. Strike that; let’s make it FEAR! Yes, better. Or worse. Depending on if your glass was half full or not. Me, I had no glass, which, broken, might’ve indeed made a good shiv. Too bad for me.
In any case, someone was down there, and so down there is where I went. Slowly and silently I crept, until, at last, I was at the bottom of the stairwell, the sound even louder now, off to the left somewhere. Eyes peeled, to the left I strode.
And there, at last, was the Beemer driver.
It was a man. He was leaning over something, something I couldn’t quite make out. He had on jeans and sneakers, a flannel shirt. His hair was short and brown. Apart from that, nothing. And then he stood and turned around. My eyes went wide. His eyes went wide. His were bluer than the sky on a perfect autumn day. He was handsome, late-forties looking. His mouth hung open. Mine did too when I realized what he’d been leaning over.
“That a…a body?” I squeaked out.
He nodded. He didn’t speak. It was creepy the way he stared. Strange would’ve been the word, seeing as it’d worked so well for everything else that day.
“You, uh, kill that guy?” I then asked.
His nodding stopped mid-nod and turned to a shake, head moving side to side instead of up and down. His eyes stayed wide, mouth still agape. He pointed my way. Actually, he pointed right at me.
“Me?” I said. “I killed that guy?” I gulped and matched his head shake with one of my own. “Nuh uh.” I looked over at the stairwell. “I couldn’t even squash a spider.” And still he kept pointing and gaping and shaking. Except all of him was shaking now. Like I said, creepy. And strange. I mean, it was awfully cold in that old, rickety, nightmarish house, but not cold enough to cause someone to shake like that.
He turned and stared down at the body. Curiosity took a stranglehold on my cat, and so I moved in and also stared down. “Oh,” was all I could say.
I looked at him. He looked at me. At last he spoke, his voice deep, resonating. “Sorry,” he croaked.
And still my head shook. I didn’t know how to reply. Still, things were awkward enough, and so I said, “At least I make a nice-looking corpse.”
He grinned. “You always did have a sick sense of humor, Steve.”
I froze. “You…you know me?”
He sighed. “You don’t remember?”
“Nope. Bad day, I suppose. Shock maybe?”
He reached his hand across the small gap that separated us. He meant to touch my cheek, but his hand kept right on slicing through the air, through me. Did I mention creepy? Because it bears repeating. “We were married three years ago,” he told me.
I stared at the ring on his finger. I stared at my finger, too. I stared at it and through it. I didn’t remember him or it or me. Or maybe I did, but it was like a memory in the back of my head, a blur, barely an image. “Happily married?” I thought to ask, seeing as I was, um, not all that happy anymore, apparently. Dead. Dead was what I was. Uck.
“Very,” he replied, with a heavy sigh. “Until the cancer took hold.”
Now that word I knew. That word sliced through. And not through the air so much as through me, through my memories, like a root seeking water. And then I remembered why I woke up in that nightmarish house in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to be a burden anymore. And as my eyes landed on the bottle in his hand, I knew what I had done to accomplish that.
“How did you find me?” I thought to ask, our eyes still locked. It was like looking into an endless ocean. And being dead, trust me, I knew of endless.
“GPS tracker in
your car,” he replied. “It’s parked out back.”
I frowned. I was free. He wasn’t. “Sorry, Mack. Sorry you were too late.”
His grin returned, which was also strange, given the circumstances. “Nope.”
I pointed at my lifeless body. “Yep.”
He shook the bottle in his hand. By the sound of it, or not the sound of it, it was empty. “Nope.”
I gasped. Or at least tried to. Without lungs, it wasn’t an easy thing to do. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
He shrugged. “Why not? You did it first.”
“True, but I had a reason.”
He pointed to the body, to my body. Uck again. “I had a reason, too.”
And then the smile on his face vanished. He grabbed his stomach. His body sank in on itself and fell over on top of mine. Then there was that deafening silence again. I blinked. I blinked again. It’d happened so fast. One minute there was that sea of blue, then nothing. I crouched down beside him. “Mack!” I hollered, trying to shake him. My hand swiped right on through. “Mack!”
“Quiet,” I then heard. “You’ll wake the dead.”
I jumped, turned. “That’s just an expression.”
He shrugged as he moved toward me. “You sure about that?”
He smiled. I smiled. Then I frowned again. “I had to die, Mack. You didn’t.”
He was now standing in front of me. “You sure about that?”
I reached my hand up to touch his cheek. My hand made three-two-one contact. I jumped. He jumped. My hand returned to his cheek. It felt real. It felt like Mack. “Huh,” I said.
He held my hand. A spark ran up my back. He laughed. The sound shook me to the core. “So now we’ll haunt this place for all eternity?” His laugh amped up a notch. “What, you couldn’t have picked a nice beach resort to off yourself in?”
I pointed around the house, which suddenly didn’t seem so nightmarish now that he was in it with me. “More theatrical out here, don’t you think?”
He grinned. He looked at peace. His mouth found mine. His lips were surprisingly warm, his tongue somehow wet. It was as if we were alive again. Alive in death. You know the drill: STRANGE! Though strangely nice as well. Sure, we were dead, but dead and together and cancer free, and though I should’ve felt guilty, somehow guilt was the farthest thought from my head.
