"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
Had a nice flurry of activity over the last two and a half weeks, writing-wise. First off, I wrote three of the regular Friday Flash Fiction stories (including one for next Friday) and one extra: The original story I wrote for August 7th was too long and too good so I sent it off to a mystery market, and wrote another short-short for FFF. Just about the same time, I found out about a monthly flash fiction contest out of Australia (that actually pays!!!) working off verbal prompts. I wrote another crime story in a couple of hours and sent it off! The NEXT night, I found another submission call for a story from a word prompt (this one from Shakespeare by way of M. R. James) and couldn’t resist a chance to do a riff on one of my favorite writers. Wrote it in a few hours and sent it off. (It was a matter of editing out some of what I’d written to make it fit the wordcount and that made it really work!) I also sent off a story I wrote last Summer for its intended market which finally opened up. And I worked on a couple of the monthly columns I do and wrote up about two others (I’m on a tear hear!) And, I got something published! Always nice to be able to update the bibliography!
My latest story “Summer Skies” (as by “Mike Mayak”) is in the July/August edition of the zine “Invoking Chaos: Summer Sun” from Puppycat Press. As good a time as any to update my author bibliography!
Bibliography for Jeff Baker
As of August 15, 2021
“Oh Henry”—-The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death. (1999)
“Back In Time” (with John R. Bogner) —– The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death (1999)
“The Pilfergeist”—-The Open Casket, KMUW Radio, October 31, 2001.
“Night Game”—-Black Petals #55, Spring 2011.
“The Problem of Cell A307”—-Over My Dead Body, (online) June 8, 2011.
“HORSE”—-Over My Dead Body (online) May 2014
“Hit One Out of the Park”—Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #8, 2012.
“No, I’m making coffee,” came the voice from behind the car. “We’re out.”
“Wha?” Truman Mackelhany said between grunts as he pushed the ancient car while holding on to the wheel.
“Yeah, I’m pushing!” Skip said through grunts behind the car. “Oh, wait! Hey! Here it goes!”
With a rumbling sound, the rebuilt 1914 Maxus Racer shuddered as it pulled onto the road after having its rear end in a ditch. Skip Fowler ran behind it and hopped in the open seat beside Truman.
“Did your Great-Grandfather have to do this a lot?” Skip asked.
“Probably!” Tru said grinning as he steered the old car down the dirt road. “You still got the map?”
“Hope so!” Skip said.
The two of them had rebuilt the old Racer, open seats, cylinder body but powerful engine and an actual storage space when they heard about the offer: ten thousand dollars to race from Chicago, through Missouri to Albuquerque along older roads on a nearly 100 year-old map in hundred-year-old cars. They had actually been pretty well-prepared for the trip, they’d rigged a top for when it rained so their “cockpit” wouldn’t get flooded. All they needed to do was get goggles. And maybe their heads examined. But Tru had wanted to do it; it was in his blood. His Great-Grandfather Marcellus Truman (“No relation to the President,”) had entered the legendary Peking-to-Paris road race in 1907 but had shown up to start the race in Paris by mistake. They had clothes, cellphones and debit cards. They’d jury rigged a charger under the steering column. The cellphones were also their car radio. They were making about 40 miles a day.
“Hey, Tru?”
“Yeah, Skip?”
“How much have we spent on this trip so far?”
“About half of what we’d get if we win the race,” Tru said.
“We turn left up ahead, and we can make it to a motel, just outside Tulsa,” Skip said.
“Yeah?” Tru said.
It started to pour. The two of them tried to pull the top up. It ripped. They looked at each other.
On the plane back to Chicago, Skip ordered a beer.
“Your Great-Grandfather would have wanted it this way,” Skip said.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The prompts for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were Historical Fiction, set in a marsh involving a necklace and/or pendant. I avoided the temptation to call this “My Favorite Marshman.” —-jeff
“You fool, Walter!” Thomas said. “First, ‘borrowing’ the Master’s jewelry to impress a woman far older and of a higher station than yourself.” (Walter was all of nineteen in that year of 1674.)
“I meant to hide it, and to claim it stolen!” Walter exclaimed.
“Stolen, yes! Now lost!” Thomas said. “Prithee, we are both lost, lest we find the ruby necklace in the marsh!”
“Nay, we are safe for the very reason the necklace is safe,” Walter said. “The reason the marsh be the perfect hiding-place! None dare venture out there and not because of loose footing! The superstitious folk of Devon fear the bogies and beasties who dwell in the marsh and mists and not just at night! Wise folk such as us know better but we are few and far between!”
“Wise, my breeches!” Thomas said. “If we were wise we would never have done like this!”
“I have hidden treasures in the marsh before and I will find this one again,” Walter said. “And our beloved master and employer is among those who would not enter the marshlands were Good King Charles II himself to offer him wine and wenches and food to party among the bogies there! But we must come up with something beyond a bogie…Aha! The Devil appeared to us…”
“Us?” Thomas said.
“Us,” said Walter. “And we used the blessed holy relic of the ruby necklace which belonged remember to the Master’s ancestress, a Holy woman who gave almost all to the Church…”
“Except the valuable ruby necklace,” Thomas said.
“And the Devil conjured the most awful beastie imaginable; a devil-dog and it gave chase, and we ran into the marsh pursued by the monstrous Hell-hound and we flung the necklace at it and the dog and necklace both vanished. The necklace now cursed, and the marsh doubly cursed.”
“Will he believe this?” Thomas said.
“He leaves money out for the elves replacing the gold miners took from them.” Walter said.
That evening, Thomas and Walter ran into the Great Hall of their Master, clothes torn and damp with marsh water, their tale ready for his credulous ears.
“Lord Harry!” they yelled. “Lord Harry Baskerville!”
Not a lot of progress on the fiction in the last two and a half weeks. Did just about a paragraph on the anthology mystery due October 31st. Started a story on the spur of the moment—wrote about half a page in a store parking lot in longhand in the spiral notebook. And I worked on the columns.
Oh, yes, the columns. I’m writing two columns now. The one on mystery short-stories (for Crippen and Landru) and the monthly column for Queer Sci fi. I’d been having trouble coming up with ideas the last few months so I brainstormed and wound up writing a bunch of columns in the last couple of weeks. About three or four for C & L are mostly done and I finished (or nearly finished) the QSF columns from August through January 2022.
Also, I proofread and tweaked a story I first started (didn’t have an ending) about six years ago. I sent that one off and also sent off a poem that I had forgotten about. I need to send off more poetry: I have a lot of it on file. And I sent off another story I’ve had around. There will be more of that next month when a market I wrote this one story for a year ago opens up—finally!
Note: I grabbed the picture for this week from the old Monday Flash Fics page from before I ever started posting there. Thanks to Brigham Vaughn for posting the original picture!
When the Wind Blows the Cradle Will Rock
by Jeff Baker
Agent Shawnna DuQuesnie stared down at the bundle of blankets in the car trunk. She glanced at the device in her hand, looked at the sleeping child wrapped in the blankets, checked the display of the device and glanced over at the group of agents standing by the van in the field in the twilight.
“Um, Paolo, would you come here a minute?” she said, gesturing.
Paolo Silva broke of his conversation and walked over. The other agent, was busy checking something inside the van.
“What’s up?” Paolo asked. “Kid still asleep? No complications with the transfer set-up are there?”
“Not really,” she said. “But see if you read this the way I do.”
She handed Paolo the device, he scrolled through the readout on the screen.
“This…looks…like…noooooo…” Paolo’s voice trailed off. He glanced over at the van.
“We can send the kid back,” Shawnna said. “He wouldn’t remember anything and he’s in the sleep-stasis mode anyway.”
“Yeah,” Paolo said. “Kidnapping kids from the past and ordering the families to pay ransom is one thing, but I never guessed…”
“We’re just lucky there was so much displacement it showed up on our monitors and we caught the guys. So we can return the kids even before any ransom messages could be sent. And he’s the last one.” Shawnna said. “Should we tell him?”
Paolo glanced at the van again. “I don’t think we have any choice,” he said. “This fits into the idea of not being able to change history because it’s already happened. Even going back into the past is a part of history. But we need to be sure.”
Shawnna cleared her throat. “Craig, could you come over here for a minute?”
Agent Craig Fischmann, tall, young and dark haired, filling out his white t-shirt like the field agent who-could-chase-down-bad-guys that he was walked over to the car they’d grabbed from the chronal kidnappers.
“Sure,” Craig said. “What’s up?”
Paolo held up a hand. “Not too close,” he said. “Check him.”
Shawnna held up the device to Craig and swiped the screen with a finger. After a moment she nodded. “It should be okay. Come over here and look in the trunk, but don’t touch anything.”
“Okay.” Craig said quizzical. He stepped over to the trunk and stared down at the sleeping bundle. After a minute he looked up. “I’ve seen that blanket before. A long time ago. It reminds me of the one that…hey…” He broke into a broad grin. “That’s…not me is it?”
“We think so.” Shawnna said. “Where were you when you were four years old?”
“Wow. I grew up in Oklahoma but that was after my folks split when I was five. Before that, I spent a lot of time at my Grandparents in Jersey City.”
“That’s the time/space co-ordinates we have, along with your own bioscan,” Shawnna said. “It’s you.”
“Wow.” Craig breathed again, grabbing the lid of the trunk as he stared down at his sleeping younger self.
“That’s why we have to ask; do you remember anything like this or anything strange happening back in 2067?” Paolo asked.
“No.” Craig said. “But I do remember that blanket. It had been my Mom’s when she was a kid. I loved that thing back then.” He looked up and grinned. “Then I discovered toy trucks and dumped the blanket!”
“So, what happens to him? I mean, me?” Craig asked.
“We send him back, and according to you, nobody will be the wiser.” Shawnna said.
“Wow,” Craig breathed. “Where’s the transfer team?”
“On their way,” Paolo said. “Just in case, you’d better get out of here.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to risk my getting zapped back twenty years when they transfer, well, Little Craig.” Craig said with another grin. “Even though I didn’t feel so much of a twinge of anything unusual over the past few days.”
“We may be worrying over nothing, but we don’t want to take a chance with either of you,” Shawna said.
“Okay. I’m outa here,” Craig said. “Should I take the van?”
“Sure,” Shawna said. “We’ll call when we get Little Craig back to 2067.”
“Great,” Craig said. He looked down at his sleeping younger self. “You have fun now, Kid. Enjoy it all while it’s happening. Childhood doesn’t last.”
Big Craig wandered over to the van as the Transfer Team vehicle pulled up to a corner of the field.
It’s evening. It’s beautiful. I can hear the water lapping the bank, if you can call a rice paddy a bank. My ancestors were here over three hundred years ago. They evacuated when the flooding began. Nobody expected it. Nobody expected the waters to recede the way they did either. Something about the Moon being a little off of its orbit and affecting the tides. That may be all bullcrap. Anyway, I’m here now. For a while at least.
Day Five:
Seriously hot today. And the first cloudless day since I got here. Sun could burn the hide right off of you. Glad I got the tent. Sweat a lot but I got to go over my notes. My Great-great-something grandfather’s letters; he was here with the Marinecor I think he called it (I can barely make out his handwriting.) The story, of course, that he met my Great-something grandmother somewhere in this area. She was evacuated and wound up where he was living across the ocean. Nice story, if it’s all true.
Day Six:
For the record, I am, what did they call it “camping,” in a tent when I have a fully stocked van with cooler and all the amenities. I want to get the feel of it, the way people lived back then. I’m cooking the stuff I have here in the cans for dinner. It’s about dusk, the sky is deep blue and I can see the stars coming out. Jupiter is bright and high overhead. The crescent Moon is following the sun behind the horizon.
Day Seven:
My Great-Something Grandfather wrote about this area and because of the Marinecor’s knack for specifics I have the old compass coordinates so I was able to find the same location and even managed to find a few landmarks Great-Something wrote about even after the landscape being underwater for two centuries. He mentioned a cave that had been used as a temple near here. Well, tonight’s dinner is something true to the historic period; a meat-product they called “spang,” if I read the handwriting correctly.
Day Eight:
Did some exploring and decided to carry the heat shield with me. Hell with historical accuracy, it’s hot! I found the hill which was buried in riverbottom mud and dirt and was hidden, until I almost walked off the top of the hill into a gully created in the interim. I think I found the cave opening, but it is too late and I want to be back at my tent before evening. Read some out of an old-style book I bought that mentions some kind of “cult” in the area that the local monks spoke against. Were the monks using the cave as a makeshift temple during the War? I’ll find out.
Day Nine:
Cleared out the opening to the cave today; am filthy. Looks like it was a temple of some sort. Large supporting columns carved with strange symbols. Will investigate tomorrow when it gets light.
Status Report, Year of the Ox:
Tracked subject from abandoned van and tent to cavern locals warn about, why they stay away from area. Local superstition; they believe the old gods brought about the flood and pushed the water back. Found LiOssah. It was his camp-site. Found him at the edge of the cavern. Identified him by his clothing. Flesh torn from body. Bones yellowed at the edges as if they had been dipped in acid and gnawed by giant rats.
Still have not found skull…
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Didn’t have a clue where this was going until I sat down to write it with only the notion of a diary or journal. The original entry made reference to “Moons,” and it wasn’t to be set on Earth! Maybe I copped-out by giving it a quickie horror story ending. Sharp-eyed readers may catch a description I borrowed from a Lovecraft story. The title was cribbed from Saturday Night Live and the late Chris Farley. —–jsb, July 21, 2021, 2:55a.m.
The Story So Far: Vampire hunters Jessie Skedderis and Shawn Rodriguez have traveled to Transylvania, accepting a mysterious invitation at what may be Castle Dracula. But the servant Wilhelm is a real vampire and has grabbed Jessie, demanding that Shawn remove his holy protection against vampires; the Blessed Star of the Kabbalah, and toss it out the window. Shawn reaches under his shirt, pulls the chain off with a painful snap and tosses it out the open window. Leaving him confronting Wilhelm who is holding the muscular Jessie effortlessly with one slender arm…
“I am,” Wilhelm said, “as you may have surmised, not one of those pitiful beings who may not expose themselves to the daylight.” His teeth glistened.
“But you don’t have your full powers until nightfall,” I said, standing by the window, fists clenched.
“He’s got those powers now,” Jessie said, squirming in the vampire’s grip.
“You are, I take it, the real Count Dracula?” I asked.
Wilhelm laughed. “I never even encountered such a person! I am the last of the vampires who have contributed to the legend of the immortal count. The servants here are under my control. It saves money on paying them salary. But my need to feed is real.” He grinned even broader.
I glanced at where Jessie had left the baseball bat. Wilhelm snarled and tossed Jessie aside. I dove, aiming straight at the vampire. I hadn’t expected to be able to tackle him but grabbing him was all I needed. I clung to his waist There was a sizzle and Wilhelm began to smoke where I was holding on to him. There was an unearthly shriek. With one hand, he pushed me away. I landed several feet away on the floor, watching the vampire stare at his smoking hand where he had grabbed me. He stared at me and snarled again. I had never seen a face more monstrous.
There was a loud crack behind him. A shadowy shape leaped out of the darkness of the room. Jessie. With half of the freshly-broken baseball bat which he plunged between the vampire’s shoulder blades. I did not think the vampire’s mouth could open any wider but it did. Teeth. And a gurgle of shock. I raced behind them and picked up the other half of the splintered baseball bat (thank God it was wood) where it had fallen after Jessie had smacked it against the stone corner of the wall. Rushing in front of them, I plunged the jagged end of the broken bat into the vampire’s chest. I expected a howl or rage, but instead there was a long, shrill squeak like the death-rattle of a huge rat.
I reached out and grabbed the vampire’s arm to push him away, and steam rose from where I touched him and his body felt mushy under his shirt. Jessie and I stepped away as the undead thing sagged and fell apart into a sickening gelatinous puddle. We stared, half expecting the puddle to morph back into Wilhelm but it just sat there.
“I’ll get the Holy Water,” Jessie said in a hoarse voice, reaching for the suitcase and the sealed metal vial we’d brought from Rome.
“Don’t use it all,” I said. “We may need it to get out of the castle, but I don’t think the castle staff are vampires. In fact if they were in his power that’s probably gone by now. But bring the bat. What’s left of it.”
I watched as Jessie sprinkled the water from the vial on the mess of clothes and putrescence. When he was done, I grabbed him and held him close.
“You feel good,” Jessie said.
“You do too,” I said.
I held Jessie for another moment. I fingered the rip in my shirtfront and the spot where I had securely taped the Blessed Star of the Kabbalah to my chest, just in case something like this would happen. A risk but worth it.
“Think there’s a motel near here?” Jessie asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But let’s call a cab and sleep on the train.”
Got some stuff done! Not what I expected to! Wrote one extra column, worked on another and wrote some on four stories and finished another for a market I’d just found out about (wound up about 1400 words) and fired it off before the weekend deadline AND heard back from the market which wants to publish the story! (Royalties, as usual, some day that will pay off!) Also worked off and on at a story I’d been doodling around with since I wrote the title and a couple of lines five years ago. To my surprise I finished the first draft! I have to read over it and tweak it but it should be about ready to send off!
authorjeffbaker 