And appeared to be standing on a plain pink surface. I scanned again for any hostile programs or alerts, but it was quiet here, though there was no guarantee for how long. I looked up the address and discovered I was still in the hosting site’s network. My forcible exit program had discovered the nearest allowed space, and it was Stacy’s. The real one this time.
I whooped my luck and got to work. The honeypot had been set up just in parallel to the real site, the better to fool me. Except it meant I could easily be found. I copied the files as quickly as possible and initiated the exit.
Only I couldn’t. The command wouldn’t execute. I tried to exit to anywhere else, and it wouldn’t work either. Not by normal means, nor by the forcible exit program. I examined myself, and in my panicked state, missed the tiny addition on the first go, but a detailed scan showed the dark patch on the back of my virtual shirt. The avatar had landed a blow after all. No wonder the exit program had only brought me this far. It couldn’t penetrate outside the stronghold Stacy’s enemies had created around her things.
I tried to force my real arms to pull off my mask, but it was as though they were both asleep. I tried to kick my legs, thrash, anything, but the sensations were so distant, I wasn’t sure I was doing anything at all.
Then a light so bright it hurt stung my eyes, and there was shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words. I blacked out.
¤
When I came to I was groggy and confused, but I could move again. I tried opening my eyes again, but the light gave me such a headache that I shut them again, but they’d been open long enough to see Jessica’s crying, concerned face bending over mine. Sounds resolved themselves into words again, and I finally understood she was shouting at me.
“Dad, can you hear me? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I sat up carefully with her help. In my thrashing, I’d fallen off the sofa. My gear lay next to me on the floor. I coughed and choked on the last of the gel. “Had a problem with a program.”
“Did you get trapped? By who? The burglars?” Her perspicacity of the situation both terrified me and impressed me. “You were, like, in a seizure or something. And I couldn’t talk to you. And since my phone’s busted I couldn’t go in to find you so I pulled off your gear.”
I hugged her to calm the flow of panicked words.
“You did great, honey. I’ll be fine. I just need to stay off the net awhile.”
“Someone’s trying to hurt you. Stop pretending they’re not. Don’t go back there.”
“Yes, someone’s trying, but they won’t succeed. I won’t let them.”
She searched my face for the truth. Satisfied, she stood up and helped me onto the couch.
“I just need a breather, Jess, then I’ll clean your phone before I drop you back off at your mother’s house, okay?”
“Okay. But no immersion, right?”
“Promise.”
No lie. The very idea of immersion was giving me nausea. However, there was unfinished work to do that I could complete the old fashioned way. When Jess disappeared back into her bedroom, I put away my gun, and the gear. Then I went into my room to see what I gotten for my trouble.
I logged in and found the storage space intact, with Stacy’s files still in place. I copied them locally, then erased the path that led to my computer, which I immediately disconnected from the net. I pulled open the files, and ran the de-crypter. The site had only ordinary security, so it took only the few minutes I used to change clothes before it was finished.
There were two folders. Unanswered messages from the site administrator were collected in one folder. The next folder contained unlabeled photos. The date stamp was three days after Stacy’s disappearance.
“So you knew you were in trouble,” I murmured.
Opening the folder, I flipped through the images one by one. Party photos of fun-loving Stacy, arms linked with more smiling customers. She was wearing the same dress throughout; obviously these were all taken the same night. There were several photos of her with the same older man. Not all of them had been taken at the party. As I progressed through the set, I was treated to images of Stacy and the man in various states of undress, performing sexual acts that I’m sure she charged well for.
Flipping back to the party photos where the man’s face was in clear focus, I had thought he looked familiar. Edward House, Senator, was very rich, very Republican, very married, and very born-again Christian conservative.
House was on a short-list to be the Republican candidate in the next presidential election. Compromising photos like these would destroy his chances and the rest of career as well. He definitely wouldn’t want these photos to get out. I knew now who’d financed Stacy’s lifestyle. Maybe she had wanted out of it, to be a normal person again. However, she had picked too big of a target as her sugar daddy. If she’d kept these photos for insurance, they had not been insurance enough.
I closed the file and copied it onto a portable drive, then wiped my own to reinstall from scratch. It was worse then I’d feared. To have succeeded in covering up this crime, House would have had to buy himself some cops. I couldn’t simply send this file to the police as I’d planned. It would disappear and whoever House had hired to kill Stacy would still be out there, and they knew where I lived.
¤
I had Jessica pack up her stuff so I could drive her back to her mother’s place. She couldn’t stay here.
“I’m scared for you,” said Jessica, before climbing out of the car.
“Don’t be,” I replied. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” Her wide eyes made her look a lot younger than fifteen. “I know you deal with some really rank goons.”
“The rank goons are the ones who should be scared, sweetheart. You father’s pretty tough. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. And I’ll get the apartment all cleaned up so you can come and visit again in a couple of weeks.”
“Are you sure?”
I didn’t like to lie, but there were some things you just couldn’t admit to a child. The plan was to keep the rank goons too busy to bother with me anymore.
“Positive.”
“Okay. Bye, Daddy. Love you.”
“Love you too, honey.”
I watched her walk all the way up to the door, and didn’t drive away until I was sure she was safely ensconced inside her mother’s house.
The memory of Jess’s smile kept me warm, as I sat in my car where it was parked in an empty lot overlooking the part of the river where Stacy’s body had been found. The rain had stopped, but a chill wind had risen shaking the tree branches like a thousand castanets clacking. The closed case report was on my phone, ready to send to Diane.
Maybe I needed to find a new job, one where I interacted with upstanding citizens instead of the dregs. Then I would never have to worry about not feeling safe ever again. Edward House was considered an upstanding citizen, though, and at least the dregs were grateful sometimes when you offered them a way out of their problems. The superhero instinct in me just wouldn’t die.
The sky was beginning to darken as I slumped lower in my seat, smoking my illegal cigarettes, a habit my ex-wife had always jumped down my neck for. I needed to steady my nerves. I wasn’t proud, but it seemed the least of the crimes that had been committed on this site.
The rippling water lapped at the flapping, soggy remains of the police perimeter tape which still hung from trees and fence posts near the water. I got out of the car before it became too dark, and left the windows down to evacuate the tobacco smell. I made my way carefully down through the soggy, churned-up soil to the water’s edge, to place the pink unicorn, and small spray of flowers, in the crook in the branches of a nearby tree. I wasn’t religious, and doubted that Stacy had been either, so I just gave her a minute of silence before squelching back up to my car.
When I got back inside, I picked up my phone and sent the file to Diane. Then I pulled out a disposable phone with the second file I’d compiled, and gave it one las
t quick read before sending it to the police detective in charge of Stacy’s case. I still had another copy saved on a USB key locked away in a safety deposit box as a backup, just in case. It was always possible that the police detective would get pressured from above, but maybe Stacy’s father missed her and would not rest until someone brought his daughter’s murderer to light.
As I drove away, I tossed the phone over the bridge into the water, and thought about my own little lady.
Alison Pentecost is a married mother of three young children who began a career as a research scientist before morphing into a system administrator for a few years. Now she instructs group classes at a local gym, and writes fiction in the spare moments between everything else. Her story, “The Lord of Flocks,” appeared in the September 2012 issue of STUPEFYING STORIES.
THE GREAT WORK OF MEISTER VANHOCHT
By Auston Habershaw
ROWS UPON ROWS OF LITTLE DEMON-FACES stared out from the Meister’s cupboard. Some leered, some snarled, some laughed, and others wept; some had no expression at all, and in their empty eye-sockets one might see whatever they wished. The Meister’s bony fingers floated across the shelves, brushing this face or that face, feeling the coolness of the tin or the warmth of the lacquered wood. Though the faces made no sound, they spoke to the Meister in words only he could hear.
His fingers stopped over a little imp’s grinning visage, all made from burnished brass. “Perhaps this one. Yes, this will do.”
Meister DanosVanHocht fished the face from the cupboard and shut it with a bang, as though intending to keep the other faces from escaping. Turning, he laid the little face on the counter and turned it so that it could gaze into the eyes of the young woman in the high-collared dress. She blinked down at the little empty eyes through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that she held atop her nose with a long wooden rod. She frowned. “It seems rather frightful, Meister. This is for a little boy.”
Meister VanHocht nodded sharply. “You will find, Fraulein, that small boys hold the frightful in great esteem.”
The woman kept frowning, but not at the face, now. She was frowning at something else. VanHocht could not guess what. “And this golem will persist for how long? Must it be taken in for repairs? Can it be killed?”
VanHocht placed three fingers on the counter, one after the other. “A stormheart will last for decades, particularly in a unit this small. Repairs are universally mechanical in nature, rare, and easily accomplished. Lastly, it is not alive to begin with. It is an imitation, only.”
The young woman let her spectacles fall to her side. “The priests say what you do is an affront to Hann.”
“Priests say that about anything they cannot control. Fraulein, if you please; I have much work to do.”
The young woman let her eyes drift across the counter towards the now-faceless creature crucified upon a small wire stand. It was in the shape of a man in armor, his tin greaves and paldrons whorled with engravings of hunts, hounds, and horses. His gauntlets featured articulated fingers far longer than would be proportional to his frame to allow him to grasp, manipulate, and carry that which his young master desired. “What is the charge?”
VanHocht provided the estimate; though not his greatest work, the little golem was of high quality, and the price was fair. The Fraulein, though, seemed dispirited. “This price is final?”
VanHocht’s mouth tightened at the corners. “I gave you a fair price.”
The young woman nodded once, and then took her leave. The bell to the shop door rang gaily, unaware of the irony. Meister VanHocht felt his body sag under the weight of his age; he considered sitting down, but the pain in his knees convinced him standing was, in the long term, a better course of action. His knuckles hurt, too.
VanHocht replaced the little imp’s face with all the rest and then retreated to the back of his shop. There, among the disassembled limbs and torsos of a hundred unfinished golem, he fished a bottle of port from beneath a stack of blueprints and old sketchbooks. He poured a thimbleful into a little wooden tumbler and drank it down in one swig. “Third time this week.”
He looked up at the half-finished skeleton of a mechanical dragon hanging from the low rafters, its skeletal wings fashioned from hollow bones and steel wires. With the proper material pulled over those wings and enough power, VanHocht knew he could get it to fly. Who else could do that in the city of Eddon? Who else in the world? That woman was cheap as she was dull; she was looking for a bargain, well, she would find one, all right. A cut-rate golem from Shemran and Sons, no doubt; a golem that couldn’t write, couldn’t speak, and would go dark inside of a decade. The kind of golem an Ihynishman would buy his sister-in-law to get her to co-sign a mortgage.
He took a deep breath, stretching as much as his stiff limbs would allow. He gazed across the benches full of his half-done creations, each waiting to have a stormheart planted in their chests by his steady hand. Each waiting for their semblance of a life to begin. So much work for one man to do. “If only there were more time, children.”
There never seemed to be enough time, of course. To complete the greatest of his works he would need to travel—to go to distant Kalsaar and trawl the bazaars for unique materials or to study with the mighty magi of the Arcanostrum in Saldor to perfect certain techniques of animation he needed to improve. None of those things, though, could be done without time and without money, neither of which his little shop seemed able to provide. VanHocht looked at his workshop and what accosted his eyes was not the legacy of an acknowledged master artificer and golemsmith, but the accumulated detritus of a man who had to give up greatness to preserve himself. Each way he turned revealed a brilliant project as-yet undone: a clockwork head that could do sums, its braincase collecting cobwebs in a distant corner; a spider of silver and adamant that could climb walls and whisper secrets, but with only three of its eight legs in place; a carved wooden otter made to swim and frolic in water as though real, but now dried out and pitted with age, a home for insects and mold that he ought to have thrown out years ago. All these wonders left dead and useless, passed over for mere curiosities and playthings for rich children and idle men.
VanHocht let a bitter breath rattle through his nose and then took up his cane. As he touched it, the golden lion’s head built into the topper spoke in tinkling, polytonal chimes. “Appointment at the Guildhouse, Meister Cormann, three o’cl…”
“I know, I know.” VanHocht growled, and thumped the lion’s head against the doorframe to shut it up. Even his own children reminded him of how little of his time was his own.
¤
Eddon was a city built with leather but embossed with gold. The great horselords and frontiersmen who had founded the city had wanted a place to drive their cattle to sell to foreign merchants; they plotted broad avenues and spacious grazing areas, encircling it all with a low stone wall in the manner of a great corral. Their descendants built houses and shops, mills and marketplaces. Their descendants built churches and academies, paved roads and dug sewers. At last, Eddon matured, its brash youth gone. What was left was a city carved into shape by many hands, weathered with age, wise with experience. It smelled of sawdust and smoke, of horse manure and beer.
VanHocht lived in the area known as the Schopferbezirk, but foreigners called it ‘the Toy District.’ As he hobbled along the broad wooden boardwalks, he watched Akrallians and Eretherians and Saldorians traipse through his home with sweets tucked under one arm and children being tugged along by the other. They gaped in shop windows at dioramas displaying the Eddonish’s peculiar flair for modeling, ooo-ing and ahh-ing as miniature spirit engines squealed along tiny adamant tracks through tunnels cut through papier-mâché mountains, or as animate soldiers marched in neat little lines towards miniature ramparts, their maneuvers never ending so long as they remained atop their enchanted board. He tried not to glare at them—they were his livelihood, after all—but he could not help but frown at their sunny faces and their fine clothing. ‘Dilettantes,’
he might have grumbled, were he inclined to speak Akrallian. Instead, VanHocht simply grunted and moved past, his long dark greatcoat and gray top-hat sufficient to dissuade anyone from thinking him interesting.
The Guild of Artful Builders kept its hall at the center of the Toy District. It was a large wooden house of heavy logs and with a roof of thick wooden shingles, steeply angled to deflect the heavy snows of winter. It might have been drab and ugly once, but it’s stolid, practical, very Eddon-ish bones had been obscured by centuries of woodcarvings worked into every visible surface. A riot of bearded faces—former guildmasters, or ‘Meisters’—covered the front wall, each rendered so realistically and preserved so well that VanHocht had trouble, on occasion, remembering which of the men were still alive and which had died. It didn’t help that the faces had all been enchanted to gaze at passers-by and, sometimes, speak in aphorisms their likeness had been (or was) fond of uttering. To get in the door, VanHocht had to prod his way through a semicircle of foreign gawkers with his cane. He had almost gotten through when a bright-eyed boy pointed at him and squealed. “Look! It’s one of them!”
Everyone stared and parted for him, smiling and applauding. “Maestro!” a Rhondian man said, hands in the air. “Magnificent! Amazing!”
VanHocht stopped before the door and regarded them. He tried not to glower at them, simpletons though they were. He gave a half-hearted nod of thanks. “Yes, yes.” He grumbled, not sure whether they could hear him or not over the cheers, “I’m one of the faces. I’m Meister VanHocht.”
More cheering. A score of faces, at least, gazing up at him and grinning like fools. Unable to stand it any longer, VanHocht turned his back on them and went inside.
¤
Meister Cormann was sitting in Alphod’s Nook—a perfectly circular table with a base carved in the form of a great tree and whose top showed a map of the world, from the Great Taqar to the Boundless Ocean. Old Alphod had enchanted the surface so that it lived—the seas frothed, clouds passed over the plains, snows fell upon the mountain tops, and each of the little cities of the world grew and changed with the years—sometimes sprawling outwards with new buildings and new fortresses, and other times burning and shrinking. VanHocht considered it a masterpiece unequalled by any he had seen. He knew, however, that Cormann hadn’t chosen this spot for its ingenuity. He chose it because the table was tucked away in a shadowy corner of the guild hall; it was Cormann’s favorite spot to have private conversations.
Stupefying Stories: August 2014 Page 3
