Amazing Stories 88th Anniversary Issue: Amazing Stories April 2014

by Unknown

  “But, demons?” the newspaper insisted.

  Van der Whall sighed. “Have you ever been to City Hall?”

  “Try to contact it through the QED,” the newspaper commanded.

  Sitting in his kitchen in North York, Van der Whall reluctantly closed his eyes and listened for the voices of conscious matter that spoke through the Quantum Entanglement Dimension. They never took long in coming. He asked around, but found that neither the winged creature nor any of the winged creature’s constituent parts was willing to respond to his queries. “Come on! Pick up! Pick up!” Van der Whall psychically shouted (proving that even people with the most experience with a new technology still fall into the trap of thinking about it using metaphors of existing technologies). Still, nothing.

  “Strange, eh?” the newspaper commented.

  Van der Whall refused to be goaded into being interested. “It says here that this creature can be found in Kensington Market.”

  “So?”

  “So, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I go back there. The last time I was in Kensington, Frances had dragged me to an art exhibition featuring reproductions of classic paintings on rotting cabbages. Going there is like stepping into the 1960s—it’s the land progress forgot.” Van der Whall shuddered at the memory.

  Before the newspaper could argue with him, the radio turned itself on. “…vortex has appeared in the sky above Baldwin Street,” a voice on the radio was saying.

  “Baldwin…” the newspaper mused. “Isn’t that also in Kensington Market?”

  “Scientists have no explanation for what is causing the vortex,” the voice on the radio continued.

  “Not interested,” Van der Whall insisted. “The red, yellow and blue signs and brick building facades make me queasy. I mean, Buddhists sold their temple in the neighbourhood to condo developers. What does it say about a neighbourhood that Buddhists don’t want to live there?”

  “…not like anything I have ever seen before,” another voice on the radio was saying. “There are no atmospheric conditions that would explain it. It’s like a…portal just opened up in the sky!”

  Van der Whall was about to instruct his ears to stop listening to the radio when the television in the den turned on and started blaring: “…most unusual murder case that the city has ever seen.”

  Shaking his head, Van der Whall walked into the den. Two blocks of Augusta (which, he noted, was in Kensington Market) had been cordoned off by police vehicles and crime scene tape. A couple of uniformed officers were questioning individuals at various points outside the cordon. Others, including Freya, were making sure nobody got past the police tape. On the street, a civilian was bent over the body of a dead woman, poking it with a pencil. (Scenes like this were where the well-known piece of folk wisdom “Never ask a crime scene investigator for a pencil!” came from.) The dead woman looked to be in her twenties, but she was wearing a plain sundress and the orthopedic stockings and clunky, sensible shoes of an eighty year old. Van der Whall thought nothing of it: Kensington Market was the designated “Bohemian Area of Town.” A simple business suit would seem exotic here. What did get his attention was the arrow that was embedded firmly in her blood soaked chest: it didn’t so much shine as vibrate through every colour of the spectrum and back again.

  “Curious, wouldn’t you say?” the newspaper prodded.

  “Umm, yeah, sure, a little,” Van der Whall mumbled.

  “You could never pass by a good mystery,” the newspaper added.

  That’s news? Van der Whall thought as, gritting his teeth, he headed towards the door of the apartment.

  Van der Whall used his good relations with the atoms in the atmosphere to fly to the scene of the crime. One of the perks of being an object psychologist in a post-Singularity world was avoiding traffic. He flew over the winged creature, who had an entourage of a dozen mostly young, mostly colourfully dressed people.

  He doubled the speed with which he flew to the crime scene.

  “Looks like you’ve got a messy femicide on your hands,” Van der Whall commented to Freya. “Any idea what the murder weapon is?”

  Freya hesitated. “It’s a pretty nutty idea…” she meekly offered.

  “I’m good with pretty nutty.”

  “Really nutty.”

  “With respect to The Hollies, really nutty is the air that I breathe.”

  “More like batshit crazy.”

  “Batshit crazy is the town where I was born, grew up and now live,” Van der Whall stated. Then, seeing his health points dwindle under Freya’s angry glare, he added: “But, ah, never when I’m with Frances. Our relationship takes place in Sanityville—it’s the very definition of the country of Stable.”

  “Cupid’s arrow,” Freya said under her breath. Raising her voice, she continued: “That’s not an official cause of death—it’s just an idea some of us have been batting around. Get me?”

  Van der Whall nodded, “Do you want me to confirm that for you?”

  “You can do that?”

  “Give me a moment…”

  Van der Whall sat down on the curb. (Did I mention that it was a bright, sunny summer’s day? No? Oh. Well, it was.) Closing his eyes, he let his mind drift towards the Quantum Entanglement Dimension. The arrow, like the winged creature, refused to talk to him. He tried the body of the woman, but it wouldn’t talk to him, either. He was stymied for a minute; then, Van der Whall tried to contact some of the skin atoms that had coalesced around the woman. Finally, a stray carbon atom said, “Yeah, what can I do for you?”

  They had a long conversation. When he returned to the physical world, Van der Whall stated, “It’s not Cupid’s arrow.”

  “That’s a relief,” Freya replied.

  “It’s the arrow of time,” Van der Whall informed her.

  Freya nearly choked, and she wasn’t even drinking anything. “Excuse me?”

  “Have you noticed that the woman is dressed like an eighty year-old?”

  “I thought it was just the neighbourhood.”

  “Me, too. At first. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. When she was killed, she really was eighty years old. The arrow of time is causing her body to slowly age backwards.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  Van der Whall considered returning to the geographical metaphor in response, but figured that that ship had pretty much sailed. To the unwelcome continent of Crazy. “Did you have somebody photograph the body?” he asked instead.

  “Yeah. About twenty minutes ago. Why?”

  “Have them photograph it again in an hour. I think you’ll begin to see what I’m talking about.”

  Freya mulled this over. “Assuming that what you’re telling me is right, what happens when the body regresses to a point before she was born?”

  Van der Whall shrugged. He considered telling her that there was a strong possibility that all traces of the woman would be erased from living memory, making the whole investigation as if it had never happened. But, really, what would be the point? If he was right, she wouldn’t remember. And if he was wrong, it would be one more thing she would hold against him. “If I was you, I’d try to solve this case as quickly as possible,” Van der Whall advised.

  With a barely audible “Thanks,” Freya went in search of the lead detective on the case. Van der Whall nodded his “You’re welcome.” This was about as civil as the relationship between Van der Whall and Frances’ immediate family got.

  Van der Whall was considering investigating the vortex—at least it didn’t have an entourage—when his eye was caught by the window of the Things and Stuff previously loved clothing store. In it was a book. But, it wasn’t just any book—just any book wouldn’t have been of any interest to him. It was an old paperback with a coffee stain on the cover, which was missing a corner. The book was called Weird Stories, Strangely Told. The author’s name was Emmanuel Drabeck. The cover illustration was garish—lots of bright reds and yellows. It depicted a scantily clad woman on her knees, using her h
ands in an attempt to shield herself from a winged creature. But, it wasn’t just any winged creature—just any winged creature wouldn’t have been of any interest to him. No, it was the winged creature the newspaper had so desperately tried to bring to his attention.

  Van der Whall ran into the store, almost knocking over a rack of tie-died mukluks. He went up to the counter where a painfully skinny woman with hair the colour (and texture) of straw who wore ornate bracelets that appeared to weigh more than she did sat listening to a yodeling mix tape while disinterestedly reading The Wall Street Journal. “You have a book in the window,” Van der Whall said.

  The woman looked up, hopeful that Van der Whall would be marginally less boring than the business newspaper. “Yeah,” she responded. “So?”

  “How much is it?”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “It’s not for sale?”

  The woman shook her head. As it turned out, this conversation was not in any way less boring than the business newspaper, but she felt kind of committed to seeing it through to the end.

  “Why not?” Van der Whall asked.

  “It’s part of the store’s ambience,” the woman told him.

  Van der Whall looked around. He saw Campbell’s soup can sweater vests and tuxedos with rhinestones and fringes. The past, he thought to himself. Not only do they do things differently there, but they do them in really bizarre clothes! He thought, uncharitably, that a flash fire would help the ambience of the store.

  Fortunately, buying the book wasn’t necessary. Van der Whall closed his eyes and drifted towards the Quantum Entanglement Dimension. “Are you having a seizure, man?” the woman behind the counter asked. “It happened to my uncle Buford once, and he hadn’t done crack in over three months!” But, her voice had already faded to one of many, and not the one that Van der Whall wanted to pay attention to.

  He found the book. It told him that it was a collection of short stories that had been published in 1954 as an Ace paperback original. Within a year, it went out of print, having sold a mere 127 copies. The particular copy in the storefront window had been purchased by Arthur C. Clarke and sat on a shelf of books for over 40 years; after his death, it was passed on from relative to relative, then garage sale to garage sale until it ended up in the window of Things and Stuff. Sadly, in all that time and through all those hands, the book had gone unread. One of the stories, “The Monsters are Welcome on Maple Street,” was about a nameless winged creature who is accepted into mainstream culture. The title story, “Weird Stories, Strangely Told,” was about a woman who was crossing the street when she was struck down by the arrow of time.

  Van der Whall took a moment to ask the atoms around the dead woman’s body how long it had existed. They said they had started to interact with her the evening before. When he asked why they would come together to re-enact a scene from a book, the atoms, who were really bystanders to the whole affair, metaphorically shrugged.

  Van der Whall returned his attention to the book. It contained seventeen stories of various lengths. These included: “In Our Image,” a story about a robot who left its factory assembly line job to discover why people like chocolate bars, which was made up almost entirely of descriptions of something called “The Twenty-three Laws of Non-human Intelligence;” “It’s Not the Ray that Kills You, It’s the Hole,” a story that followed the life of a ray gun from the time it left the Acme Advanced Weapons factory to the time the alien ship it was being reverse-engineered on was blown up, flinging the gun into space where its decaying orbit allowed it to fall into an alien sun 600,000 years later, a story that showed all the lives, human or alien, that, for good or ill, the ray gun had touched; “Team Player,” about the first time the NHL draft included a team from Hell; “The Kindness Killings,” a story in which aliens get human beings to fight each other over escalating acts of kindness as a way to soften them up for an invasion; “Charlie Farquharson’s Inner Space Adventure,” where a country bumpkin was—whoa! Hold on a moment! Hold on just a moment!

  Alarm bells went off in Van der Whall’s head. Either that, or spending too much time in the Quantum Entanglement Dimension made his ears ring. Either way, he took a moment to clear his head of the noise. If, as he now suspected, stories out of the book were manifesting themselves in the real world, it was only a matter of time before there was an alien invasion of Earth. That…could be kind of cool, he thought. You never see Toronto being the locus of an alien invasion in the movies! But, then he thought of all the death and destruction and human suffering and such, and he decided that, on balance, it would probably be better for him to stop it before it happened.

  It occurred to Van der Whall that the author of the stories, Emmanuel Drabeck, might have some insight into how they were seeping into the real world. Through the QED, he looked up Drabeck’s Wikipedia page; it was short and did not appear to have been updated in a long time, but Van der Whall chose to believe what it said about Drabeck still being alive because, well, it wouldn’t have been helpful if he wasn’t. Van der Whall queried the QED and found that Drabeck was still alive, if you can call it that: he had had a heart attack two months earlier and had been lying in a coma in a Buffalo hospital ever since.

  Drabeck had a heart attack at around the same time as the winged creature first made an appearance in Toronto. Coincidence, or…

  Through the Quantum Entanglement Dimension, Van der Whall delicately probed Drabeck’s synapses for signs of answers. He came across a memory of a kid clutching a pulp magazine being bullied at school. Van der Whall tactfully moved on, but soon came across a memory of a middle aged man clutching a book by Robert J. Sawyer being bullied by students at the school at which he taught. Note to self: Van der Whall thought, does our core personality ever really change?

  Eventually, Van der Whall found his way to a group of synapses that, at first, seemed to represent a denuded urban landscape with blocky, low-res buildings and few people. Standing in front of him was a Platonic ideal of the man he had come across in Drabeck’s memories: in his mid-twenties, with a perfectly sculpted physique, strong cheekbones and piercing brown eyes.

  “Mister Drabeck?” Van der Whall asked.

  “Duck!” the man shouted. He pulled out a ray gun and, shooting past Van der Whall’s shoulder, blew the head off a unicorn that had been stampeding towards them. “Unicorns!” he muttered. “Vicious bastards!” (As anybody who had read Emmanuel Drabeck’s short story “It’s Always the Quiet Ones” would know.)

  Drabeck holstered his gun and cocked his head at Van der Whall, making the object psychologist feel like he was the one out of place in this world. “Do I…know you?” Drabeck asked.

  “We’ve never met,” Van der Whall allowed. “My name is Antonio Van der Whall. I’m an object psychologist.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I…I don’t know how to tell you this,” Van der Whall hesitated. “But, you had a heart attack a couple of months ago, and you’re lying in a coma in a hospital bed.”

  “Oh, that’s not possible,” Drabeck laughed.

  “No?”

  “Absolutely not,” Drabeck insisted with a sweep of his arm. “I already died and went to heaven.” Before Van der Whall could formulate a response to this, Drabeck asked, “Care for a drink?”

  Even before Van der Whall could say, “Sure,” a building materialized in front of them. It had a sign that read “Café” and a patio with simple furniture. Beyond that, the details, like those of most of the other objects in the world, were sketchy. Drabeck waved a hand towards a seat at a table as he sat down opposite. Van der Whall sat.

  “Okay. Here’s the thing,” Van der Whall started. Before he could actually get to the thing, however, a cranky, wheezy robot with a lot of exposed pistons walked up to them and asked if it could take their order. Drabeck ordered an Earl Grey tea. Curious to see what would happen, Van der Whall ordered a Blunted Stingray. When the robot said it did not have that drink in its database, Van der Whall
threw the names of half a dozen alcoholic beverages at it.

  “Very good,” the robot said when Van der Whall had finally given it the name of a drink it recognized. “Gentlemen, in addition to being a waiter, I am also doing a survey for the Hershey Corporation. I was wondering if you would mind taking a moment to answer a few questions about how much you enjoy eating chocolate…”

  Drabeck shooed the robot away with a wave of his hand. Its wheezing seemed dejected as it slunk away.

  “Okay, the thing is—” Van der Whall started again. Before he got to the thing, however, another thought occurred to him: “Pardon me, but I have to ask: in the story ‘The Monsters are Welcome on Maple Street,’ why didn’t you give the winged creature a name?”

  “Wow,” Drabeck answered. “I haven’t thought of my science fiction writing in years. In answer to your question…well…names are power. I didn’t want to give other creatures in the story that much power over the character.”

  “But you didn’t even assign it a gender.”

  “I didn’t want the reader to think of the winged creature as male or female because each has connotations that I believed to be inappropriate for the character. But I couldn’t bring myself to call the character ‘it’—that seemed too impersonal.”

  “But, calling it ‘the winged creature’ throughout the story made the prose kind of stilted, don’t you think?”

  Drabeck shrugged. “It was the 1950s,” he stated. “Style wasn’t much of an issue back then.”

  Van der Whall conceded the point. Then, finally, he got to the thing, explaining to Drabeck that somehow stories out of his books had been manifesting in the real world.

  “Great idea,” Drabeck marveled. “I wish I had thought of it.”

  “Can you stop it?” Van der Whall asked.

  Drabeck shrugged. “I didn’t know I was causing it. I’m having a hard time believing I’m still alive.”

  “Maybe so,” Van der Whall insisted, “but, my guess would be that you are somehow exerting your will on the world through your books, convincing atoms to make things out of your stories real. If that’s true, then you must be able to—”