by Alan Seeger
She only wished she’d been around back in the day, so that she could have had the chance to meet him. She very nearly felt as if she had.
Keep reading for three bonus stories from the Gatespace universe.
If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review at Amazon.com. Independent authors such as myself depend on readers’ reviews to help others learn about our books.
If you missed the first two volumes of the trilogy, look for PINBALL and REPLAY.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY:
13 BITES Vol. I – Offered for your reading pleasure: thirteen bites, thirteen snacks, if you will. Thirteen titillating tidbits of terror, treachery and trauma. Not all of them are frightening; one or two might even warm the cockles of your cold, stony heart. “13 Bites Volume I” is a collection of short stories — thirteen of them, by ten different authors — with a slightly twisted bent. From aliens to zombies, from a gypsy curse to the mind of a murderer, from shapeshifters to witches to… well, you’ll just have to see, won’t you? bit.ly/13bitesbookv1
SUMMER DREAMS – Summer is the time when we take vacations, go swimming, and generally veg out. Many people like to find some light summer reading for the long, lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. If that's you, you've come to the right place. Summer Dreams offers up fifteen stories by a dozen authors. Some are brief, and some are pleasant. Others are lengthy, and a couple of them are downright disturbing. They're all going to stay with you for a while. bit.ly/summerdreamsbook
13 BITES Vol. II – Oh, you're back for more, are you? The thirteen tales of woe, wickedness and mischief we brought you a year ago weren't sufficient to slake your thirst for terror? Fine. Here are thirteen more equally twisted stories of murder, mayhem and masquerade with which we will attempt to satisfy your bloodlust. Geez. You people.
WINTER TALES – For some, winter is a time to anticipate the string of end-of-year celebrations; once Halloween and Thanksgiving are over, the focus shifts to the winter festivals; Christmas, Chanukah, New Year’s, and for some, Kwaanza or perhaps Festivus (for the rest of us!), or just a simple celebration of the Winter Solstice.
In this slender volume, we present tales of the winter season, but some may not be what you expect. Some are lighthearted, while others are rather dark. Some involve that jolly fat man in the red fur suit, and some are a little more close to home. Whatever your situation, we hope you enjoy them, and that you have a wonderful 2015.
And coming April 2015: PLAN 559 FROM OUTER SPACE
SUMMER STORM
Originally published in the anthology “Summer Dreams,” June 2014
“Can you believe this?” said Lynne Denver, peering out of the kitchen window of the rural Montana home that she shared with her husband, Steven, and their four children. “They promised us a heavy snowfall last night, and what do you see outside?”
“Uhm… nothing?” said Steven. He was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the same window, sipping from a very sweet, very hot cup of coffee. Just like I like my women, he thought to himself as he smiled at his wife, who was both very sweet and very hot, in his opinion, anyway.
“Exactly! I was really counting on staying home today for one of the last times before spring really gets here.”
Steven raised an eyebrow. It was early May, and so spring had been here, according to the calendar, anyway, for a good six weeks, but this was Montana, and as he liked to tell the more tropically located of their friends, “The normal rules of meteorology do not necessarily apply here.” It wasn’t unusual for them to get snow, sometimes substantial amounts of it, well into the Merrie Month of May.
This year, however, it seemed that almost all the snow that had approached their area had seemed to skirt around them, and they had only had a substantial accumulation a couple of times since the first of the year, which was pretty unusual.
“You do realize,” said Steven, savoring both his coffee and his wife’s consternation, “that most people would probably rather not have a ton of snow hit us right now, right?”
“Oh, my dear, sweet man,” she smiled. “This is Montana. People here know how to deal with it when it snows. If they need to get out, they can, and they know how to handle their vehicles on the road. If the snow gets so heavy that they shouldn’t be on the road, ninety-nine percent of the people know better than to try to get out.
“What I am talking about,” she continued, “is the fact that my fellow teachers and I are tired, the end of the school year isn’t for another month, and the general consensus is that we wanted a day off.”
“You discussed this amongst yourselves, did you?” Steven grinned.
“Actually, yes,” Lynne smiled. “In the teachers’ lounge, over the last two days, all anyone talked about was the weather forecast and the prospect of having a day off. The Weather Channel was on the TV non-stop and we were all comparing the forecasts from different weather apps on our phones. They all agreed that we were going to get a heavy snow last night. What happened, I wonder?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. You know what they say about the weather.”
“No, Mr. Professional Writer,” Lynne smiled. “What do they say about the weather?”
Steven, who was working on the follow-up to his best seller Gatespace: A New Odyssey, grinned at the challenge.
“Well,” he smiled. “Carl Reiner once said, ‘A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.’”
“That’s a good one,” said Lynne, “but it doesn’t change the fact that I am still disappointed at the lack of white frozen stuff.”
Just then, their son Samuel walked into the kitchen from his room in the basement of the house.
“Hey, guys,” Sam said. He was sixteen and not a morning person. He had graduated high school the year before, two years ahead of schedule, and was rarely seen outside of his “Batcave,” the name his parents had bestowed on the sprawling basement room that he had claimed as his own. “Mom, did I hear you say you wanted it to snow?”
“Yes, son,” Lynne said. “I was looking forward to a day at home, but I guess that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” Samuel replied.
“Oh, it’s all right, Sam. Summer Break is coming up in a little over a month. I’ll get to be home for three whole months then.”
“Uh… that’s not exactly what I meant,” Samuel replied.
Lynne and Steven turned and looked at their son, unsure of what he was about to share.
“I kind of… kept it from snowing.”
Lynne and Steven glanced at each other. What?
“What are you talking about, Sam?” Steven said.
“Well… you know how I asked you for a soldering iron and a multimeter last year? And how I have been collecting broken electronics from everyone in the family since then?”
Steven glanced at his wife again. “Yeah…?”
“Well,” Samuel said, “I kind of built a machine… that keeps bad weather away.”
Now it was Lynne’s turn to look at her husband, at a loss as to what to say next.
“You what?” Steven said.
“I call it the Weatherizer,” Samuel said. “I activate the machine, and then there’s a knob that I turn to set the intensity, and I can produce a beautiful day on command.”
His parents were silent for a moment.
“You’re serious?” Steven finally said.
“Totally.”
“How does it work?”
Sam had begun to describe how he had discovered a small-scale field that emanated from a special type of cathode-ray tube in one of the pieces of junked equipment that a neighbor had given him. He had begun to experiment with it, trying things with it that it had not been designed to do. He soon came to realize that when he increased the power supplied to it from the normal 18 volts to 36, a field was generated that seemed to push all the loose dust on his desk away from the CRT.
He had become curious and wired the tube to an AC power supply wit
h a variable rheostat attached. He started with the control set at minimum, and slowly increased the voltage; 4.5, 9, 18, 36… then he entered uncharted territory.
He slowly increased the feed to 40 volts, 50… 60… 75… 90… finally to the full 110 volts. There were no apparent problems. Looking around him, he noticed that there was a sort of bubble around him, visible only because of the sheen of dust particles that danced over its surface. Hmmm.
Over the next few weeks he had experimented with connecting multiple power supplies in series or in parallel, attempting to increase the available power beyond the 110v threshold. When he dared to attempt connecting the device to the 220 line that powered the clothes dryer, it popped the circuit breaker; Samuel decided it might be wise to avoid that.
Finally he found a way to connect a bank of twenty desktop computer power supplies, stacking their outputs through a circuit of his own design, bypassing their 12v outputs so that they supplied 2200 volts.
The moment he powered up the newly boosted device, he heard a thunderclap and decided to go outside to investigate it. The sky, which had been an overcast grey just an hour before when he had gone upstairs to grab breakfast, was now a brilliant blue and devoid of clouds.
Curious, he opened his computer’s web browser and visited weather.com, pulling up the current radar map.
He was shocked to see that there appeared to be a perfect circle of clear sky centered on their house and extending for 25 miles in all directions.
He quickly shut down the device before any government investigators or black helicopters showed up and sat the rest of the day, pondering this new discovery.
Over the next few weeks he came to realize that the device was highly effective even with the power turned down considerably and would prevent snow, rain or thunderstorms for up to a ten mile radius of the house without leaving the obvious circle pattern and possibly attracting the attention of the National Weather Service or other government agencies.
It reminded him of an old Peanuts cartoon he’d seen in his dad’s collection where Linus had gone outside in the rain, looked up at the sky and recited, “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day,” whereupon the rain had stopped. Wide-eyed, Linus ran inside and found his sister Lucy, and begged her, “Hide me.”
Steven and Lynne looked at Samuel doubtfully. Could the kid actually have made a machine that could control the weather?
The next thought in Steven’s head was And if he did, can we make some money off of it somehow?
Samuel agreed to try to duplicate what he’d done, and told his father that it would take a while for him to gather the necessary hardware to assemble another unit. If the second one worked the same way as the first, he reasoned, they could begin to work toward manufacturing the units for sale.
“It seems like perhaps you’ve hit on something similar to the weather control technology that the U.S. Government allegedly has — what they call HAARP, for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.”
“Well, I don’t know if I can duplicate what I did, but I’ll give it a shot,” Sam told his father.
In the meantime, they left the original unit on 24/7 — for testing purposes, of course — turned down slightly so that the area of clear weather wasn’t a perfect, sharp circle that would arouse curiosity.
The Denver family soon became spoiled to the perfect weather that was always available around their house, and it lasted all summer long.
Then there was a bit of a snag.
By early August, Samuel had gathered enough spare parts to create a second Weatherizer unit. He assembled it and it was ready for testing on August 11.
He did make one mistake, however; he failed to shut down the original unit before attempting to activate the second one. Although he didn’t turn the intensity control up at all, the new Weatherizer drew sufficient current that both it and the original unit experienced an overload that caused a failure of some of the diodes in one crucial circuit of their main systems. When that happened, the output transformers on both units blew; there was a massive bang and sparks flew from both transformers. Components on both mainboards fried. Pretty soon, smoke was billowing and both of the units were so hot that Sam could see the gold traces on the mainboards melting and dripping into the bottom of their cases. He grabbed his fire extinguisher and hosed both units down.
Then a sound was heard that the Denvers hadn’t heard around their home since well before the summer began: a massive thunderclap that rattled the windows and shook the house. There was a crash as one of Lynne’s good wine glasses was shaken off the countertop onto the kitchen floor and shattered.
Within a few minutes, all six Denvers — Steven and Lynne, Samuel and his sisters Nicolette, Dakota and Lianne — were standing in their front yard, watching in fascination as the storm clouds gathered. It was as though all the pent-up energy that had been held back all summer had suddenly been released. Massive thunderheads were forming over the house.
“Uh-oh,” said Samuel.
A tremendous, branched bolt of lightning flashed across the sky from west to east, and all at once a drenching rain began to fall. Before they could even turn and run the twenty feet or so to the front door, the six members of the Denver family were soaked through to the skin.
The rain didn’t stop for four full days. It was as if every storm cloud in the area was attracted to Three Forks. The town fathers considered asking the Governor to send out the National Guard. It was the talk of meteorologists across the country.
In the end, Samuel got a break; nobody outside his family ever found out what caused the weather weirdness. In return, he promised his parents that he would be more careful with his experimental electronics in the future.
KNOCK, KNOCK
Originally published in the anthology “13 Bites Volume I,” October 2013
It was nearly seven o’clock on a Friday evening in the late summer, and Julia Rhodes McMahon was sitting in the living room of her rural home in the mountains of Colorado. She was alone in the house; her husband Adam had been in Chicago on a business trip for three days. He was supposed to arrive home soon. Julia felt a pang of loneliness; it was the first time they had been apart overnight since prior to their wedding sixteen months before.
The house was small; more a cabin, really, than a house. The exterior was sheathed in worn redwood planks weathered a silvery grey by the cold Colorado winters, and it was roofed with cedar shakes. It included a single bedroom with an adjoining bathroom, plus a living room and kitchen that were separated only by an island containing the sink. It was all that Julia and Adam needed at the present time, and she adored the amazing view from the small back porch, which looked out over a vista that led upwards to the snow-capped Rockies in the distance.
Tonight Julia had cheated a bit on her normally health-conscious diet and made herself a frozen pizza. She’d started to pop open a can of Diet Coke, then decided to indulge herself just a little bit more and poured a glass of red wine. If it was good enough for the Italians, it was good enough for her.
She scrolled through the satellite television menu until she ran across an intriguing entry: Bride of the Vampire, a low-budget British flick with an unknown cast and a deliciously creepy ambience filled with foggy moors, spider-webbed passageways and dimly lit corridors. It was an homage to the classic Universal and Hammer vamp films, but so ineptly directed that it was almost-but-not-quite a parody. It was, to put it simply, a bad movie — and that was just the kind of film that Julia loved. She made a bowl of microwave popcorn and settled in on the sofa.
The movie was a nice mix of wonderfully creepy and enjoyably campy at first, but after a while it became tediously repetitive and more than a little predictable. The leading character, a blonde who was a real Lucy Westenra type, seemed to fall for every devious trick that the vampire in the movie laid out for her. At first Julia felt like calling out to her, telling her, “Hey, girl, don’t go there,” or “He’s gonna nail you if you go out on the terrace,” bu
t after about thirty minutes the movie had settled into such predictability that she was rolling her eyes and felt like cheering for Count What’s-His-Name instead. After all, she was sure that he needed his blood, and if Lucy-lady was too stupid to protect her pretty little neck — not to mention the other obvious charms that the movie put on display through her filmy negligee — from the vampire’s fangs, Julia figured she deserved whatever she got.
There was a good reason that she’d never heard of this movie before; it wasn’t fun bad, it just plain sucked, and not like the Count.
Another hour went by with no sign of Adam. Julia tried calling his cell phone, but it went directly to voice mail; she figured he’d forgotten to turn it back on after he got off the airplane.
Julia finally turned off the television at about 10:30 PM and got ready for bed. She stripped and walked into the bathroom, turned on a hot, stinging shower, and lathered her blonde hair. The thought occurred to her that she was glad that she hadn’t decided to watch Psycho; Julia realized that she might have been just a little bit creeped out by being alone in a house so late at night, taking a shower.
Then she realized that, despite the movie having been laughably bad, she actually was feeling a little bit spooky. Julia finished her shower, wrapped herself in an oversized, heavy duty bath towel, and walked into the bedroom.
She looked at the wedding photo that hung on the wall of their bedroom and felt that lonely feeling stir again. “Where are you?” she said to photograph-Adam.
Julia had grown up as the oldest of three kids in a middle-class family in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and cruised through high school on her good looks. Her blue eyes and blonde hair had pretty much qualified her to wrap any guy she wanted around her little finger, and she had once thought she’d wanted nothing more than to win Homecoming Queen her senior year and marry the quarterback of the football team, but that had all gone south when she discovered that her quarterback was doing the slutty little bitch that she had thought was her best friend.
