"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
Over the last week or so I worked on a column that’s due this weekend, did three flash fiction stories (the two weekly ones and the monthly one for the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge) worked on a couple of other stories I have in the pile and (to my surprise!) wrote the beginning of a mystery that occurred to me after chatting with someone this afternoon.
I’m going to break with tradition here (and go against the advice of one of my favorite writers, Henry Kuttner, who advised against talking about works-in-progress) and list a few things I have in the pipe. Some I’ve started recently, some from a ways back. I’m not going to be too specific. Better writers and bloggers than I do blogs this way; maybe this will goad me into finishing more of them!
A full-length “slick fantasy” baseball story I am aiming at the Saturday Evening Post. (I actually got a nice rejection for an alternate history I sent them a while back!)
Another baseball story, this one a mystery/crime story titled “Over the Fence Is Out, Boys.” (The title is an ancient baseball song quoted in the Three Stooges theme.)
A domestic horror story titled “Please Don’t Eat the Neighbors,” for which I owe Robert Lopresti for the idea to actually write what started as a Facebook joke.
A mystery/crime story set on a prison work crew called “The Absent-Minded Convict.”
A Christmas Mystery, just revised that is going to Ellery Queen’s.
A non-genre story that is also going to the Sat. Eve Post, titled “Youth Like Summer Brave, Age Like Winter Bare.” (Title from Shakespeare.)
A science-fantasy story I dreamed up (the basic idea anyway) while driving my beat up old Chevy Nova (my first car) home from work one night in either 1983 or ’84.
And I need to start up the second of a series I DO have planned out of a mystery series set in Ancient Rome. The first of this series in in a slushpile at the moment!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a ghost story set in a tulip field involving a key.
The field was quiet, green and dotted with multicolored blooms. Chuck stared at the ornate key in his hand. The house had been here once at the edge of the tulip field in the middle of the Kansas nowhere. The key was all that was left of the house. Now, there was just the land.
“And you’re worth something,” Chuck said. “Maybe oil, maybe farming. Maybe a big hotel with a view of the open prairie.”
Chuck strode out among the tulips, not caring if he crushed any of them. What was it he heard about the house? His distant cousins had left Holland for America in the 1880s; they had built the house and planted the field, intending to raise tulips, and everything had gone wrong. The wife had killed the husband and then herself, or maybe the other way around, nobody was sure. The children had fled, they only found the daughter, and she never discussed what happened. Some of the family had tried living in the house, but had not stayed long; there were reports of strange whispering, odd lights in the house and, in a hastily-scrawled note found on the kitchen table by an aunt who decided to move back to St. Louis after only a week, a reference to “the faces in the flowers.” The house had burned just after World War One.
Stories didn’t bother Chuck. This would be only the latest property he had taken over, by hook or by crook. An oil well would fit well here. It was too bad he hadn’t had this land a month ago; it would have come in handy to bury his cousin when he’d…
Chuck smiled. The tulips did remind him of flowers he’d once seen in a cemetery.
“What the hell?” Chuck stopped and stared. The clear blue of the daytime sky stretched to the horizon, and for a moment it had parted like a fog and he had seen a Victorian house, three stories high with plenty of decoration and an awful purple color of paint. Then it was gone.
Chuck shook his head. He just wanted to inspect the old foundation which he had been told was still there. He took a breath, glanced back at his rental car and walked forward. He heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of his feet in the dirt but stared straight ahead at the blank blue sky. He glanced downward as he walked.
The flowers were bending and moving out of his way. Not uprooting, but still moving of their own volition. It couldn’t be. He stopped and glanced apprehensively behind him, expecting to see a pathway of crushed blossoms. They were standing untouched, undamaged, un-trampled. They were waving in the breeze but he couldn’t feel a breeze but he could hear a breeze. What sounded like a breeze. Whispering.
He looked down at the flowers. What had the old note said about faces? Instead he saw the flowers puckering, saw tongues licking. He began to run back the way he came, it was a shorter distance. But the field stretched on, further than he had ever seen. He dropped the key. He started screaming as he ran.
“Mommy! Come quick! There’s a man out in the tulips!”
Mrs. Van Dall turned and went over to the window, her big skirt making a breeze in the Kansas heat. She looked out the window. Nobody.
“There’s nobody there, Peter,” she said. He stared out the window.
She sighed. She had married for love, but love had vanished when they moved into this house. She hated it here.
Greg Toliver stepped off his front porch into the light from the rising full Moon.
“Here, boy! Bryan! Come on, boy!” he said whistling. “Dammit!”
They’d loved the short cartoon of the guy going after his boyfriend when he turned into a wolf under the Moon, but it was no fun when it happened for real. It hadn’t happened in a while, though. It was probably all the stress, usually Bryan kept it under control, but not tonight.
Greg going through chemotherapy had been rough on both of them, but Bryan had been the tough one. Always there, always encouraging. Driving him back and forth to his doctor’s. Not objecting when Greg had come back from the store with a six pack of beer and gotten drunk after he was told he had cancer. At least everything was looking pretty good after six months; the chemo seemed to be working. But all the worry had probably built up on Bryan and when the Moon rose that evening, zingo! He was a big, yellow-gray wolf. He’d pushed open the door and out he went.
Bryan had changed several times when they had first gotten together; he explained that it was just a matter of willpower to keep the wolf in check. Nothing dangerous, but a wolf in a neighborhood was still a wolf.
“C’mon, Bryan, dammit!” Greg wondered how much intelligence Bryan had this time. Usually when he willed the change, he kept his faculties but with a wolf’s instincts, he’d explained to Greg. Changing totally involuntarily like this probably meant the wolf had largely taken over.
But he’s still Bryan, Greg thought. He’s stressed, he’s scared, and he’s overwhelmed. What does Bryan do when he feels like that?
His car!
Greg unlocked the side door to the old wooden garage detached from the bungalow they rented. There was a doggie door on the side, just like the one on the back door just in case he was locked-out when he changed, voluntarily or involuntarily. When the full Moon did it, Bryan was a wolf for the night. Greg shut the door and listened. He heard a panting. Greg bent down under the vintage car Bryan was restoring. He always came out here to relax. Usually in coveralls, not fur. He squinted in the dim light. Bryan, the yellow-gray wolf was lying down beside the rear tire under the car, head on his forepaws, eyes looking up, glittering in the light.
“Hey, Bryan,” Greg said. “It’s okay, buddy! I know you’re stressed-out, but everything’s all right. What with everything that’s been going down this past year I’m surprised both of us haven’t turned into animals. Hey, come over here, okay? Come on?”
Bryan the wolf whimpered.
“Awwwww! I know, buddy! C’mon. This floor is cold, let’s go inside where it’s warm and I have leftover meatloaf. C’mon. C’mon. Atta boy.”
Bryan crawled over to Greg and nuzzled his face as Greg rubbed his fur.
After a few minutes, Greg stood up. “C’mon, Bryan.” The wolf wagged his tail as he followed Greg out the side door.
The Moon was high in the sky and Bryan’s belly was full of the slices of leftover meatloaf as he sat on the sofa next to Greg, head resting in Greg’s lap as the soft sound of their breathing and snoring filled the room.
Last couple of weeks I wrote bits and pieces on a few stories and did the Friday Flash fictions and started on the monthly one and just wrote up another flash story that’s going out next month. (This month, I mean! March has snuck up on me!) Also, checked over and rewrote the Christmas mystery that I will fire off in a few weeks, the one I wrote in one sitting a couple of weeks before this past Christmas.
I looked around the decorated gym; streamers and banners proclaiming “Welcome Class of 84!” And “Thirty Years Since College.” Dancing couples, loud music from a band and three girls I didn’t recognize sitting on a table probably not sipping punch. I sighed and looked around for the snack table. It felt like a hundred years since I’d been in this gym. And in my case, it was at least close to that!
“Hey! Andrew! Dude!” This was from a big guy with glasses and thinning blonde hair who I barely recognized. Dewayne Somebody-Or-Other. “You haven’t changed a bit!”
“Yes, I have,” I said smiling to myself. Thanks to some spaceships, some decelerated aging and a little time-travel. Dewayne Ross, that was the guy’s name (funky memory), had put on maybe thirty pounds, one for every year since college.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Dewayne asked.
“Um, various jobs.” I said. “Worked out of a warehouse for a while. Drove a delivery van.” Got picked by some alien overlords for a few galaxy and time-spanning missions; spent some time in the 1800s, lived through Reconstruction twice, that was no fun I thought.
“Hey! Andy! Andy Dominski!” The kid dressed in a t-shirt decorated with the logo of some band I couldn’t remember skidded up to us.
“Andrew,” I said.
“Yeah! We got a survey question, this’ll be fun,” the kid said. He pulled out a clipboard. “What class from Millington College have you used most since graduation?”
“History,” I said. “Got to do some in-depth research a while back. A long while back.” I recognized the kid; he was probably fiftyish but skinny and wore his hair long with dark glasses. He wasn’t any of the guys I’d come close to hitting on. I took advantage of his question to lose Dewayne and wander over to the table with drinks and chips. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
I sniffed the punch, couldn’t tell if it was spiked or not. I grabbed a can of soda instead and put some chips and a little sandwich with a toothpick in it on a paper plate. The band kicked into high gear and I could barely hear anything. That meant I didn’t have to pretend to know anybody I couldn’t remember. I glanced up at the ceiling. Lights played on it, making me think of a disco. I’d been in a disco one time. I was a lousy dancer. I grinned. There was something so wonderfully normal about all this. After zipping around like I was Dr. Who for a century, I really appreciated normal.
I sat down on a chair near the wall with the plate on my lap and slurped the can of soda. It was just like College or High School for that matter; going to the dance and just sitting around with my friends instead of dancing. Well, 1975 through 1984 I couldn’t have gone dancing with a guy even if I’d been out or had the nerve to ask anybody. I surveyed the dance floor; couples dancing, some I recognized. The captain of the basketball team had apparently gotten together with the head cheerleader. I smiled again and munched on the chips. I hadn’t expected to have a good time but I was!
“Hey, Andrew! Is that you?”
I looked up. Took me a second but I recognized Kenny. I’d kind of crushed on him when I was about 20.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, shaking his hand. “How you been?”
“Okay,” he said. “Went to Grad School. Got married. How about you?”
Married. Of course, I thought.
“Oh, I started working, did a lot of traveling.” I said, faking a smile.
“You look good,” Kenny said.
Oh, God you look good I thought.
“You too,” I said. “Married, huh? It suits you.”
“Hey, Ken,” came a voice behind us. “If the punch is spiked it’s watered down.”
This was from a tall, balding guy sipping a cup he’d just filled from the punchbowl.
“Oh, Andrew Dominski, this is Marc Garretson, my husband.”
The tall husband guy smiled and extended his hand. I shook it and said hi, all the while thinking It would have been nice to find out that Ken was playing on my team about, oh nineteen-eighty-two or something.
And I said it. I grinned at Kenny and said, half-jokingly, “I wish I’d known back in school!”
“Same here,” Kenny said. “But I wouldn’t have met Marc.” The two of them looked at each other the way my Mom and Dad did.
“Hey,” I said. “Would you two mind, I mean, would it be okay if Kenny, Ken and I, well, did the next dance?”
Marc laughed. “Sure, if it won’t freak everybody out! I mean, if it’s okay with Ken.”
Kenny nodded and we made our way onto the dance floor as the band slowed the music down. We held each other and danced and I don’t think anybody noticed.
“You doing okay?” Kenny asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.” The dance was worth waiting a hundred years for.
After a few blissful minutes, I waved Marc over and he took my place with Kenny. One of the other dancers stared but I didn’t care and I was sure Marc and Kenny didn’t.
I snagged another canned soda and stepped out of the gym, flashing back for an instant to all the times I’d gone through that door. I sipped my soda and stared up at the night sky, noting a couple of stars that really weren’t there anymore, just Earth was still getting their light.
“Hey, you got a cigarette?” This was somebody who’d just stepped out of the gym that I didn’t recognize.
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t smoke. It helps keep me young.”
Grandfather was sitting in his chair under the tree a ways from the house when the kids ran up to him excitedly.
“Gran’pa! We saw it! We saw three Suns in the sky!” That was the youngest girl, always excited about every new thing.
“Three!” Grandfather said.
“Yes,” said the oldest girl. “Right beside each other.”
“You didn’t look long did you?” Grandfather said. “You could hurt your eyes.”
“No, we didn’t but we saw them!” The youngest said.
“Honest,” said the oldest. “They were right up there!”
“Well, they’re gone now,” Grandfather said.
“What were they?”
“Well,” Grandfather said. “People call them Sun Dogs, and they say they’re just reflections of the sun on ice or clouds way up high. But I’ve seen them someplace besides the sky.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really!” Grandfather said. “Let’s see, I was just a boy on my Grandfather’s farm out in Western Kansas back about 1890 or so when I saw a couple of little girls I’d never seen before, running up Green Hill. The hill was covered with grass and yellow flowers that didn’t do anything but they were pretty. Anyway, I didn’t want the girls to get into trouble by running into the pasture where we kept the bull, so I called after them and when they didn’t stop I ran after them myself. I was pretty fast but they were way ahead of me and reached the top of Green Hill in no time. Probably because it wasn’t very big. I could hear their little-girl laughter and saw them run over the top of the hill and disappear down the other side. In a moment or two I was at the top of the hill and I looked all around but I couldn’t see hide nor hair of the two little girls and there was no place they could have hidden; the grass wasn’t that tall and they weren’t that fast. So I went back and I told my Grandfather and he asked me ‘Were they a little blond girl, kind of glistening in the light like the sunlight on the pond? And a little brown girl who was as clear as the dappled sunlight under the trees in summertime at noon?’ And when I said they were he told me those were the Sun Dogs come to earth, but they aren’t dogs they are the daughters of the Sun. We can’t always see them in the sky but when they come down to the ground we can see them plain as day. He told me to look in the sky and sure enough, there were two Sun Dogs side by side with Old Sol. So, that was what you two girls saw today. The Daughters of the Sun come here to run and play like little girls on the Earth do, but you can never catch up to them any more than you can catch sunlight in a bottle.”
“Wow!” “Really?” the girls said.
“Yes, really!” Grandfather said.
“Were you really that young, Gran’pa?” asked the youngest.
“Sure I was! Back about seventy years ago!”
“Gran’pa,” the oldest said. “ I saw a Moon Dog once. It was real cold and there was a big bright spot in the sky right by the Moon. Is that the Moon’s son?”
“Naaaah! That’s just a reflection of the Moon on ice or clouds way up high,” Grandfather said with a smile.
It was never a good thing when someone called your name in this place.
Jim had been sitting on the weight bench after his morning workout, rubbing his aching arms and wiping his face with a towel, watching this huge dude lift who-knows-how-much in front of a bunch of the guys in the gym when he heard the voice: “Jim Yee. You are wanted. Immediately.”
There was no intercom but Jim heard the voice clearly. The small weight room was hot and sweaty but it could be a lot worse. He stood up and glanced out the big front windows. The usual. Fire in the sky, brimstone on the ground, the stench of death everywhere.
Jim showed up at the door to the back room. It opened and a shadowy figure stood in the doorway and grinned. The teeth glistened and hurt Jim’s eyes to look at.
“We have a client for you, Mister Yee,” it said in a voice like breaking bones. “He wants much the same deal we gave you. Good looks, muscular build. You merely have to get him to sign this.” The figure held out a printed one-page contract.
“In blood.” Jim said.
“Ballpoint pen will suffice,” the figure said.
“I better get some clothes,” Jim said.
“Unnecessary,” the figure said. “Your client will like you just the way you are. You’re his type.” It grinned broader. Jim felt cold. He glanced at one of the mirrored walls of the gym. He was young, dark, lean and muscular and perpetually 23.
“When do I leave?” Jim asked folding the paper in the pocket of his black workout shorts which were the only thing he was wearing.
“Immediately,” the figure said, gesturing at him to enter the office. Jim stepped through the door.
It felt cold, the cold of hopelessness.
When Jim had first arrived there decades ago, he had expected to see cavern walls everywhere. Instead it looked like downtown Jakarta. He was usually in the weight room or in the dorm on the other side of the gym, catching a couple hours sleep. Jim was flying upward through a stone tunnel with sweltering heat. A moment later he was somewhere dark and temperate, standing on a wooden floor.
His eyes adjusted to the dim light. He was in a bedroom with a small desk lamp on a table at one side. There was a set of barbells on the floor and a calendar with a hunky model flexing and showing his muscular build. A young man was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He was skinny with thick glasses. There was an open book to one side and a pentagram drawn on the wooden floor. He stared at Jim. Jim faked a smile.
“I’m here in answer to your summons,” Jim said. “You want what I have; a body like this.” Jim tensed his muscles and showed his abs and pecs. “You can instantly be as good looking as I am.”
“Yeah?” The young man’s eyes were wide but he wasn’t scared. He reached out and touched Jim’s abs with his hand.
“Yeah,” Jim said. “I’m real. And you can be like this, but you pay…” Jim swallowed. “You pay a big price.”
“What do I do?” the young man said. “Sign my name? Dennis Scorley?”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “You just have to sign this contract.” Jim unfolded the paper from his pocket. “But you have to read through it first, or it won’t work.”
“Lemmie see,” Dennis said taking the contract over by the light. “I make this deal and I’m a hunk muscle boy immediately?”
“Immediately,” Jim said. He smiled. This was going better than he expected. And the room was nice and cool. And not humid.
Dennis looked up. “And when my, well time is up, you come collect me? Take me to…”
“Someone else collects,” Jim said. “It is a steep price.”
“Worth it,” Dennis said. “All those guys would be looking at me, wanting me. I’m signing.”
As Dennis fumbled around in a drawer for a pen, Jim took some time to look around the room. It looked familiar. Things hadn’t changed that much since he’d been living. He remembered having his whole future ahead of him.
Jim took a deep breath and grabbed the contract, tearing it up in his hands and stuffing the pieces back into his pocket. He felt a tugging at his gut.
“You don’t want a deal like this,” Jim said quickly. “It’s bad from start to finish. And you’ll be stuck in someplace with no hope, nothing but pain and hard work. Forever.”
Dennis stared openmouthed as Jim stepped backwards. A moment later, Jim was in the tunnel again, this time hurtling downward. He closed his eyes, remembering how cool the bedroom had been. How warm and wonderful life had been.
Jim stood in front of the figure at the office door. He was scared but he knew he’d made the right decision.
“Jim Yee, we misjudged you,” the figure said. “You will require more training before you are sent on assignment.” The figure’s eyes blazed a dull red.
Jim nodded.
“For now, as our usual holding area is filled, we will keep you occupied.” The figure smiled broadly, its teeth were sharp. Jim stared even though his eyes began to sting. “You will return to the weight bench and do reps. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand, nine-hundred and-ninety-nine reps to be exact.”
“Yessir,” Jim mumbled as he walked resignedly to the weight bench. He lay down, gripped the barbell with both hands and started lifting. He thought of Dennis, maybe getting a grip on his life and felt a little better.
Only did a little writing in the last few weeks. Wrote up three of the Friday Flash Fiction stories (may have covered one in the last progress report) also wrote the monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge story. Did all of these in a couple of hours each–I’m getting good at doing those in one swoop at the last minute! Also sat down to go through some of my unfinished longer stories and surprised myself by finishing a page and a third of one story that I didn’t have any intention of writing on. A week or two earlier, I wrote a page on another story that I was just reading over. In both cases, the stories had stalled and now, zap!, progress!
Also sent off and got rejections for a couple of stories and a poem. That’s not something I usually cover, but that’s progress too. And these days, in the blah mood I’m in, that’s something to commemorate.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The prompts for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a thriller set in a sewer involving a suitcase. For my two other stories about my husband-and-wife detectives the Reidels, see the links on the side or the bottom of the page.—–jsb.
The old stone sewer wasn’t that wet but it smelled and Donna Reidel was certain she heard rats in the dark. She shone the flashlight down the tunnel and saw a trickle of water running down the middle, several inches deep.
“We keep to the sides and we can stay out of that water,” Sean said. “There’s no telling…”
“No telling how deep it is,” Donna finished.
“Shine that light around, maybe we can see the…” Sean started to say but was interrupted by the noise; a clattering sound from above. Donna turned the flashlight off. When they were first married they had spent time in an old house with a tin roof on the back porch. It had hailed one night and the sound had sounded like a gun battle. That was almost what the clattering noise was like. There were several metal barriers on the ground, but hopefully the pursuers wouldn’t find the way into the old sewer which was hidden in the overgrowth.
After about ten minutes, Donna turned the light back on, and began a meticulous search.
Donna and Sean Reidel had been hired to track down information that had been stolen from an agency so secret it didn’t even give its name. All they knew was they needed to recover it before it fell into the wrong hands, which were in hot pursuit. And they needed to find it before their own government found about the lax security. The only clue to the location was a handwritten note from the thief which said something about being hidden in a “valise.” The thief’s sputtered out last words said something about a sewer. The agency had a set of waterproof suitcases and one was missing, so this was what they were looking for.
“If the water gets any deeper it’s probably hidden there,” Sean said, kicking the stream with a foot. “I was going to sing Down By the River but that might not be a good idea.” Donna smiled and nodded.
“What’s that?” Donna said after walking a few minutes shining the light from side to side.
“Newspaper,” Sean said, reaching for the paper stuck in a crack in a wall. “No, wait…music paper…this is a song! But nothing else written here…”
The clattering started again, this time from up ahead. There was a sound of something heavy being dragged and clearer sounds of voices.
“This way!” Donna said, turning off the light and grabbing Sean’s hand as he stuffed the paper into his jacket. They felt along the walls until they reached the entrance, well aware of the confused sounds from behind them and the squeaking of the rats.
When they were outside they rushed through the overgrowth to their car and drove away. Sean still had the paper in his jacket. On closer examination, the notes and words to the old waltz were a code, delivered by the Reidels to the proper hands. The information was not in a valise, but a “valse.” A waltz.
Sloppy handwriting and a mistranslation. But at least it didn’t all go down the sewer.
