by Rune Skelley
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Series
Offer
Previously
Prophesy
Tanner Family Tree
Part 1
Chapter One - The Frigid Night
Chapter Two - Mystical Glass Kingdom
Chapter Three - A Former Motel
Chapter Four - Alleyway at Night
Chapter Five - Secret Dream Journal
Chapter Six - Bubbles of Light
Chapter Seven - No More Secrets
Chapter Eight - The Affected Area
Chapter Nine - Buckminster University Library
Chapter Ten - In the Tower
Chapter Eleven - Threshold House Infirmary
Chapter Twelve - Grainy Squiggly Confusion
Part 2
Chapter Thirteen - Mid-Century Modern
Chapter Fourteen - Into the Storm
Chapter Fifteen - The Upstairs Room
Chapter Sixteen - Green Glass Pyramid
Chapter Seventeen - Garden of Eden
Chapter Eighteen - Affront to Reason
Chapter Nineteen - They're Just Horses
Chapter Twenty - An Incomplete Set
Chapter Twenty-One - Crossing the Threshold
Chapter Twenty-Two - Tie-Dye Fire
Chapter Twenty-Three - Rook of Rooks
Chapter Twenty-Four - The Back Yard
About the Author
Expanded Family Tree Offer
ELSEWHERE’S TWIN
a novel of sex, doppelgängers, and
the Collective Id
Rune Skelley
Copyright © 2017 Rune Skelley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-9982502-6-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-9982502-6-7
And you’ll notice that nobody is named Carazona.
The Divided Man Series
Book One: Miss Brandymoon’s Device
Book Two: Tenpenny Zen
Book Three: Elsewhere’s Twin
A Brief Divided Man Refresher
Divided Seed shall a Divided Child Beget who shall grow into a Divided Man
Fin Tanner and Kyle Tanner, half-twins, are the Divided Man of the prophecy. Rook Brandymoon is their Completer.
At the end of Miss Brandymoon’s Device
The newly reunited Fin and Rook were planning a belated honeymoon on the asteroid when they learned of Kyle’s takeover of Shaw Ministries. Kyle had torn down and rebuilt his own mind, unleashing an infectious insanity. He also possessed the cache of microtransceiver body jewelry, making him very dangerous indeed.
Fin and Rook confronted him.
Kyle and Fin battled in the cathedral, and inside Rook’s head. Rook’s mind nearly broke as she strove to ignore her connection to Kyle in order to help Fin. In the heat of battle, Kyle consumed his audience to fuel his attack. The spider aliens came to Fin’s aid. Rook’s anthropomorphized coping mechanisms, Brook and Bramble, tried to give victory to Kyle, but Rook overpowered them and plowed through Kyle’s knee, distracting him long enough for Fin to strike the decisive blow.
Together Fin and Rook exited the cathedral into a flurry of ash and snow.
At the end of Tenpenny Zen
After 12 years in suspended animation, Willow went into labor. Her contractions threw ripples through the Elsewhere and stirred up momentous events in Webster. Brad no longer consistently buffered Melissa from the patterns of meaningless trivia that plagued her, and she planned to kill both him and herself.
Through Gale, Brad learned of Willow’s whereabouts in Severin’s basement henge contraption. To stage a rescue, he used Melissa as a distraction, a tactic that worked a little too well. Melissa chose to stay at Threshold House with Severin and learn mastery of her visions, even when he told her he expected to have sex with her.
Brad freed Willow, inadvertently triggering the domino batteries. The cascade’s energies charged the henge contraption’s stone slab to white-hot, then it sank out of sight into the Elsewhere.
Willow’s labor progressed quickly, with supernatural complications. Gale chased Brad and Willow, coming across them in the blizzard in time to sacrifice herself to save Willow. Gale disappeared back to the Elsewhere from which she was born.
Happily reunited with Brad, Willow gave birth to daughter Zen in the back of his car.
Selections from Shaw’s New Revelations
Divided Seed shall a Divided Child Beget
who shall grow into a Divided Man
A hidden Plague will Dream in Men and Blind their Hearts,
and Black Dreams will descend for Twenty Years and Flood the Earth.
And utter Blackness shall prevail over the Earth
that the Hosts in Heaven not look back upon it.
They that Bear the Divided Child shall Wander Entombed,
Each cast Unseeing into a Lightless Maze of Dreams
Sundered shall be his Heart who Divides the Seed,
that it Holds not Joy but spills a Barren shadow
Those who go Forth in Chains will be called into the Firmament,
but fall and be Minions of the Pretender
A Murder of Crows shall pick clean
the bones of the Pretender and of his Legions
A Completer, an Unknowing angel with Shadowed Wings,
Shall heal the Divided Man and restore Light upon the Earth
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
THE FRIGID NIGHT
As a reporter I should be setting the record straight. I was an eyewitness to the mass slaughter at the cathedral, for fuck’s sake. I’ve got a shit-ton of inside info about Kyle’s organization. It’s a journalist’s wet dream. And now, with a career-launching opportunity dropped in my lap, I’m going to pretend none of that is true. I’m going to cover my ass, and Fin’s.
from Rook Tanner’s journal
MONDAY, NOV 6, 2000
Of course it had to be both.
Snow or sleet on its own would be bad enough, but the universe had a sense of humor, alternating between the two with startling frequency. Rook Tanner shivered. Neither she nor her husband Fin were wearing coats.
A patrol of mercenaries ran past them toward the devastated cathedral, weapons drawn. Rook knew that should be alarming, but she’d already used up her adrenaline. The mercs worked for Fin’s half-brother Kyle and would presumably be interested in whoever left him in his broken state.
“We can’t be here when they come out.” Rook tried to ignore her throbbing headache and the tang of acrid smoke in the air.
“I’ll talk to the aliens,” Fin said. A quick and traceless exit was called for. The space-spiders routinely transported people to and from the asteroid belt, so sending Fin and Rook home to Webster should be a snap.
Fin closed his tired green eyes, his forehead scrunched in concentration. Rook could see the puncture marks where she pierced his left brow on the day they met, and it made her a little sad he wouldn’t be wearing a hoop there anymore. That hoop’s hidden technology had corrupted his dreams, but it was also the thing that brought them together.
Small ice pellets settled in Fin’s dark hair as he communed with his friends on the asteroid. Rook stamped her feet and regretted her bare legs.
Fin snorted and opened his eyes. “They can’t help. They say they’re too drained from the fight.” He sounded unconvinced.
Rook threw a look at the smoldering shell of the once-grand glass cathedr
al. She wanted to be far away before the mercs came back out. “Let’s get to the highway. We’ll hitch a ride.”
Fin nodded.
They jogged across the grounds of the Shaw Ministries compound and made their way to the main road.
A stoner couple in a blue Geo Metro were the first samaritans not to take offense at their burnt carpet stench, or the bloodstains on Fin’s shirt. Rook and Fin shared the tiny back seat with a heap of food wrappers and a friendly brown dog.
The drive from Donner to Webster usually took an hour, but the hellacious winter mix pelting down on the mountain road made the going slow.
Three hours trapped in the weed-and-wet-dog-scented car with an endless supply of Phish left Rook carsick. Fin fell into an exhausted slumber, but Rook’s throbbing head and queasy stomach kept her awake. She replayed the terrifying mental battle Fin and Kyle waged in the cathedral — and in her mind — obsessing over the traitors inside her head who almost tipped the outcome into disaster.
When their clown car finally made it to Webster, they stopped for gas about a mile from Fin and Rook’s bomb shelter hideaway.
The precipitation was a mere flurry and Rook was desperate for fresh air, so they thanked their chauffeurs and set out on foot. Immediately, the snow turned into a drenching five-minute downpour, changed briefly to sleet, then settled into pinprick needles of ice. The wind knifed through Rook’s sodden black sweater and rattled her frozen hair.
“We’re almost there,” Fin said through chattering teeth.
Rook looked up at him in the illumination from a nearby porch light and smiled weakly. His lips looked as blue as hers felt. His dark hair clung to his forehead like unruly seaweed. At the base of her skull, the signal that connected her mind to his thrummed steady and comforting, and blissfully unchallenged.
Trudging along the suburban street through the slush and darkness, Rook hugged her soggy sweater tighter against herself, like pulling on wet socks for warmth.
“Chez Tanner.” Fin gestured to his father’s large, bland house, the only one on the street not lit up. He led Rook off the sidewalk into a clump of pine trees. Her go-go boots sank into a slushy, muddy quagmire, but she couldn’t care. They would soon be inside. Beyond the pines they squelched across piles of wet, compacted leaves under naked trees that afforded little protection from the wind and ice and returning rain.
“I’m so cold,” Rook finally allowed herself to complain as Fin hauled open the hatch under the bushes. He hugged her with his free arm, and she tilted her face for a kiss. His lips were frozen, but his tongue was hot and probing.
“Don’t slip,” he warned as Rook started down the long ladder.
The only light in the bomb shelter was the warm gold and red glow of Vesuvius, their lava lamp. The feeling of entering a furnace was a welcome one. Rook pulled off her dripping sweater, leaving herself topless, her nipples hard as ice. It felt good to be back in their little pocket of tastefully decorated 1950s nuclear paranoia. The hatch clanked shut and Fin climbed down to join her.
“Why, Mrs Tanner,” he said, “you seem to have lost your shirt.”
“Lose yours too, and your pants. We need to generate some body heat.”
“I like the sound of that.”
Shadows shifted. They weren’t alone.
Fin pulled Rook to him in an icy, protective embrace. A female voice behind Rook said, “Fin?”
Who was down here? No one else knew about this place. Rook squirmed, trying to turn, and Fin’s grip loosened as he said, disbelieving, “Mom?”
Rook spun around. A woman with long red hair stood beside Vesuvius, wearing a plaid bathrobe. She had elfin features, and didn’t look old enough to be Fin’s mother.
Is that the robe the aliens gave me?
Mouth hanging open, trying to decide if she was angry or not, Rook swiveled her head back and forth between her husband and this intruder.
“Mom!” Fin said again, more sure this time. He brushed past Rook and hurried to the other end of the shelter where he swept the woman into his arms.
“Fin!” Rook and the woman both said.
Fin released the woman, then hugged her again and bent to kiss her cheek. They were both crying. The woman held Fin’s face in her hands, studying him, tsking over his injuries, smiling through her tears.
Rook’s hand crept up to cover her mouth. Fin’s mother? Could it really be? She’d been missing for more than ten years. Rook stared at their joyous reunion and slowly approached, not wanting to interrupt, and not wanting to feel like such a voyeur.
Her heels clicked against the metal floor and Fin looked at her.
“Rook! This is my mom.”
Rook nodded, not knowing what to say.
“Mom, this is Rook. We’re married.”
Fin’s mother blinked in surprise.
Melting snow trickled out of Rook’s hair and down her chest, reminding her she was naked from the waist up.
“Oh!” She crossed her arms over her boobs.
“Where did you go?” Fin asked his mother. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Fin. So much better now that I’ve seen you! You’re so much older.”
Rook tore her eyes away from them. She tugged the chain to turn on the overhead light. Buried deep in a pile of clothes at the foot of the bunks she found a snug white sweater that looked cozy. She pulled it on, then sat on the bentwood chair to shed her waterlogged boots.
Fin and his mother chattered excitedly.
If I let them talk long enough, maybe they’ll forget I was standing there with my tits out.
Across the narrow aisle, the bunk was neatly made, unlike when they left. In the center lay an unfamiliar bundle. Rook pulled off her second boot, and moved to get a better look.
A baby!
She looked toward Fin and his mother, who were talking and hugging, and seemed to have forgotten she was there. Rook turned back to the baby. It looked very new, in that unfinished way babies had. It was wrapped in a towel.
Rook straightened and took a few hesitant steps toward Fin.
“Oh, good, you found a shirt,” he said. “Come here.”
Fin’s mother looked at her with a smile. Her eyes were the same green as Fin’s.
“I’m Willow,” she said. “And you’re Brook?”
Rook nodded, then shook her head. “Rook. I go by Rook.”
Willow studied her, staring at her eyes. It made Rook uncomfortable.
“Um,” Rook began. “I’m wondering about the, uh, baby over there.”
Willow smiled and Fin said, “Baby?”
“There’s a baby on the bunk,” Rook explained as Willow went and picked it up.
“Fin,” she said, “this is Zen. Your sister.”
Fin recoiled. Rook reached for him.
“She was just born tonight,” Willow said.
The hatch clunked open and a deep male voice from outside said, “Wow, the roads are horrible!”
A plastic shopping bag dropped to the floor with a muffled splat, and a pair of legs in charcoal suit pants and muddy wing-tips started down the ladder. The voice continued, “I think I got everything. Diapers and wipes, some sweats for you.” The man carried another bag in his left hand.
He reached the bottom of the ladder and turned around. His suede jacket was spattered with raindrops, but clearly expensive. Likewise the suit underneath, wet and dirty though it was. His right knee peeked through a hole in the pant leg. His dark hair was conservatively cut and graying at the temples. Rook put his age around 50. He looked like a banker or CEO, handsome but straitlaced.
When he spotted Rook and Fin his gray eyes widened in surprise. “Oh good! We were going to find you tomorrow, Fin.”
Fin took three quick strides and punched the man in the jaw.
“Fin!” Rook and Willow cried.
Willow foisted the sleeping baby into Rook’s arms and raced to separate the men.
“Brad, are you okay?” she asked.
Brad rubbed his j
aw and nodded.
“Come on, Rook,” Fin said. “We’re leaving.” He started up the ladder.
“Fin, wait,” Willow pleaded.
The awkward bundle in Rook’s hands wiggled and she didn’t know what to do. She’d never held a baby before.
“Rook,” Fin growled.
The idea of going back into the storm filled her limbs with lead, but their secret haven was no longer secret. “I’m not wearing shoes,” Rook said quietly.
Fin stopped climbing and looked fiercely at her. Her emotional reserves were drained and she felt on the verge of exhausted tears. Fin softened and came back down.
“Get some shoes. I can’t stay here.”
“Fin,” Brad said.
“I don’t want to hear it, Dad,” Fin said, the last word sharp with sarcasm.
Were the situation reversed, she wouldn’t want Fin to try to make her play nice with her own family. She had to have his back, even if it meant more snow. Rook studied Fin’s father while holding the baby out for Willow. Once unburdened she burrowed into her pile of clothes and located a pair of black heels. Not great for stomping around in the snow, but better than going barefoot.
When she got the shoes on she saw Fin unplugging Vesuvius. Brad had his arm around Willow, who cradled the baby, crying.
Fin handed Rook Vesuvius’s base and climbed out of the shelter carrying the glass capsule in his right hand.
Rook smiled apologetically at Brad and Willow, then followed her husband into the frigid night.
*** *** ***
Severin Tenpenny carried Melissa to the hammock, the closest thing to luxury in his drafty, unfinished attic. She was shapely enough, though her body was not as trim as Willow’s. He smoothed her hair back from her face. It matched Willow’s natural color, except Melissa’s golden locks contained traces of silver. Both girls inherited their pixieish looks from Gale, although Willow’s extended sojourn in the Elsewhere kept her young. Melissa looked a decade older than her twin. Severin’s lips twitched into something resembling a smile. He laid a blanket across her nudity before starting down the steps.
