ALSO BY DON WEBB

Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time: Tales of the Bizarre

The War with the Belatrin

Webb’s Weird Wild West: Western Tales of Horror

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THESE STORIES WERE previously published as follows, and are reprinted (with minor editing, updating, and textual modifications) by permission of the author:

“The Divorce” was first published in Fear #3 (November/December 1988). Copyright © 1988, 2011 by Don Webb.

“Shrimp Anarchy” was first published in Fringeware Review #9 (1995), and republished in Serve it Forth: Cooking with Anne McCaffrey (1996). Copyright © 1995, 1996, 2011 by Don Webb.

“The Game” was first published in Bone Chilling Tales #1 (1990). Copyright © 1990, 2011 by Don Webb.

“Ring of the Red Knight” was first published in Talebones #8, Summer 1997, and has been expanded for this book. Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Don Webb.

“The Ice Palace,” “Yoga for Bolsheviks,” “What Are Best Friends For?”, “The Syringe,” “My Heart Shifting as Sand,” “The Joy of Cola,” “Our Novel,” “Diary Found in an Abandoned Studio,” and “The Thirtyers” are published here for the first time. Copyright © 2011 by Don Webb.

THE ICE PALACE

The widow MacPhearson never did anything. She was just like me, she never went out at night, never talked on the hone. Nothing.

She wasn’t doing anything the night of the Fourth, the night she was shot. I wanted to know. I wanted to know exactly what kind of nothing she was doing that night. She and I are the same age, excepting now of course she is dead, actually if she were alive she would have been six months older than me, which doesn’t matter much now, but kept us in separate grades in school.

I was retired, but she kept working. I had worked the Sears catalog show room. Doublesign, Texas had had the last Sears catalog showroom in the country. It should have been closed years ago, but a clerical error kept it going. I am fascinated by errors. Maybe the people that shot her, had meant to shoot me. Maybe they just had the wrong address. A simple computer error. I hate computers. I had to stop working just as computers came in.

Velma MacPhearson also had no truck with computers. She ran the Ice Palace, which was a place to buy soft ice cream and shakes near the state park. There weren’t many places like that left. I mean not affiliated with some big chainlike Dairy Queen. When she was working there years ago, everyone called the Ice Queen, because she had no truck with men either. She wasn’t rude to us, just a little cold, just like ice cream. But as she got old no one would have wanted her anyway, so we stopped calling her the Ice Queen. I have heard her called the Ice Bitch, but I was brought up never to call a lady things like that (even if they were true).

I wish she hadn’t been so cold to men. She would have made a good neighbor. Both of us were in bad health. Hers was worse though. She was past the time in life when you should have to stand and make a living. I think she had enough money to retire, just no one to give her permission to do so.

The sheriff said the FBI came into town after her killing. She was killed by a serial killer. I don’t know what he killed or why. Maybe it was just women that worked in the ice cream industry. Maybe just people that were Ice Bitches. I want to know.

I was at the VFW hall. I had lied about my age to get into the end of WWII. That was how my legs wound up the way they are. Which is another reason I wanted a nice neighbor. My kids pulled a mean trick on me. They both died, so that I am alone a good deal.

I know she used to watch TV, because I could hear it. I could have heard the shot, except I was at the VFW hall. We were watching the fireworks show. Last Fourth of July of the century, of the millennium. I had to listen to idiots explaining Y2K to other idiots, but it was people. I have always needed people.

People will tell you who you are.

One of my big fears is that I won’t have any people around me when it is time to pull the plug. I could fall and they could put me into one of those damn life support machines, and I could live forever.

Someone came to pull Velma’s plug.

They just walked in off the street.

I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that someone could just kill you without even knowing you. There must be a mistake. Maybe it was somebody that she shorted for change. She did that. I’ve seen her cheat a tourist out of a dime or a nickel, a quarter if she was feeling bold. They lost their quarter and they came to get her. I could live with that. It puts a price tag on human life.

She was in her bedroom on the second floor. Ever since that night I have slept in my second floor bedroom. She and her runaway husband had bought their house, but I inherited mine. In the “historic” center of downtown Doublesign. That’s because it has the old library and the post office and places for people to sell junktiques to tourists. Otherwise it would be just plain old. It isn’t very likely that you’ll meet anyone that lives in the house they were born in, but I do. I will die here.

I have been sleeping in the second floor, because all I can do is think about her death.

She was shot twice. Once by a .22 at close range and once by a kid’s dart gun. That’s how they know it was this serial killer. I wonder if they shot her with the dart gun first, or second.

Imagine if it was first. You know someone has broken into your house. They had come in through a window facing the backyard. She must have heard them come up the stairs. She probably screamed, and then whup she is hit with a dart. She must have been so relieved. It was all a joke, a prank, and then blammo a real bullet into her head making a third eye.

I saw her when they took her away. I wanted it all from my upstairs window. Then the sheriff came to talk me about it. I had been down at the VFW Hall listening to a recorded version of Elvis signing “Dixie.” So mainly he told me about it, rather than me answering his questions. He called her “the Ice Bitch.”

I don’t know what is wrong with ice. Many of my friends have moved out of Texas because they can’t take the heat. They are living with their kids in some cool town. Those that live here, spend all their time inside, with their air conditioners turned up so far that if they were to die, their body wouldn’t be in any danger of rotting. It seems a safer way to die.

I bet her body was very cool, when they carried it out.

I can’t get this place very cool. It’s those damn high ceilings. You see they used to build ceilings very, very high to encourage circulation of air. This was a cool house in my grandfather’s time. But I can run my AC all the time and It doesn’t get cool. I think about cool things when I am going to sleep. I think of icy mountain springs, and snow and ice cream. I think about the soft ice cream down at the Ice Palace. Before I got diabetes, I used to dream of just sticking my mouth under the spigot and letting the thick stream of soft ice cream fill me up, make me good and cool.

I always envied her her job at the Ice Palace. I used to work in a catalog showroom. That meant mainly I helped people look things up in a catalog and then order them. That what webpages do now. Sometimes people were happy when they used my service. They were ordering swing sets for the children or luggage for a round-the-world trip. But sometimes they were unhappy. They ordered home repairs, or equipment that let them use the tub safely and so forth. But I was never there when they would get their stuff. I never got to see the real smile—the smile of ownership—of material culture. All I got was vague smiles of hope. This was something that Mrs. MacPhearson had over all of us. Everyone is happy to buy ice cream. Even the little kids she used to be mean to, were still happy to buy ice cream. I don’t think you can look at an ice cream cone and be unhappy.

I have seen many unhappy people.

Constance, my wife, was unhappy. I saw her unhappy face for many years, and everything I did, everything I tried, made her more unhappy. She died young, escaping me the way Velma’s husband did her. Of course he didn’t die. He just bought the Ice Palace and then ran off and left her to pay for it for many years. It wasn’t the Ice Palace to start with it, it was the Golden Bucket and sold chicken. It never did well, but the Ice Palace did OK. It even did OK enough for her to have one or two young girls work there with her in the summer. It didn’t do crap in the winter, but she would be down there. I have driven by when there was snow on the ground and seen the widow’s unhappy face, just staring at the snow. She would be open all day for that one cup of coffee she would sell. But she didn’t have anything else. All she had was the Ice Palace. She lived across the street from the library and didn’t go. She didn’t even allow herself cable TV. Up every morning to wash it up, and then serve the pre-lunch crowd of farmers that came in to drink coffee, and once-in-a-great-while have a single ice cream cone. Then lunch. Local people. The afternoons filled with tourists back from the state park. Small dinner trade, then the local kids out riding around. Everyday she knew what she had to do.

I don’t know what I have to do. I don’t wake up in the morning with a plan. Someday I go to the barber, some days I cut my grass. I take some of the old men, who are worse off than me, to the doctor. I get my car serviced. Time flies by. It seems like every week, I’m getting my car serviced. My life was never as full as the widow MacPhearson’s. Maybe that was why they shot her. Maybe she had used her share of life’s resources. Maybe there’s only so many new faces you get to see, so many people that you talk to. Then some agency in the world intervenes. But probably not with a.22, probably such cosmic allotments are determined by angels.

I don’t know about angels. I have never been sure about God. I’ve thought I should drag my butt down to church, so I would get a chance to meet people, talk with people. I think it has been ten years since anyone stepped into my house. I mean other than a plumber.

I wonder if Velma thought about God, when they shot her.

She knew she was going to be shot that’s the important part. She had been sitting at the swivel chair at her desk in the bedroom. She would have swiveled argon as they came up the stairs. They had clipped off her power. Things were dark. I bet she was getting up the steam to go downstairs and check her fuse box. Her wiring was bad, like every house on this block, they hadn’t figured on people having washing machines and dishwashers and satellite TV. She probably had already turned around, with that very resolved and determined face she had for everything, and was about to get up. She would have seen them head first. She would have known if she knew them.

If the FBI is right, she would have known that she didn’t know them. So she had to know she was going to die. People don’t show up in the dark to give you flowers.

She could have seen the cold barrel of the gun. The light from the street light would have let her see it. I have measured this. My own bedroom is just as far from the streetlight. I have tried to make it just like hers. I turnoff all the lights and then I try out different things with mirrors and stopwatches. I want to know how long she had to think about it. She couldn’t have time to think all the things I’ve thought about it. I’ve had weeks and weeks. I suspect that she had less than a minute, from when she saw them to the bullet entering her forehead.

She didn’t get up. She was sitting when the bullet struck. Maybe she was really defiant, refusing to get up for some hooligan that had disturbed her house. Maybe she was afraid. I’ve got to know what she thought. That way I’m prepared. I can’t imagine an event like that happening. How can you die and not be prepared? So I try out things.

I got the key to her house.

No one knows this. I did not tell the sheriff. Long ago she gave a key to my wife, so that my wife could carry in the mail and newspaper; when Velma had to go to Ohio that time and take care of her sister. My wife never gave the key back.

I remembered it a few days after the shooting. The FBI had come and gone and the sheriff was done with the place. There would be some months before the county would figure out who the house belonged to. So it just set there full of darkness and mystery.

One night I waited till two in the morning and then I went in. I took a little flashlight and made my way up the stairs. I went to her swivel chair and I sat down in it, swiveling around each time the hose settled, trying to imagine the killer coming up the stairs in the dark. I could see his head; it was almost like he was there, but I didn’t know what I would think. What would my last thoughts be, if I knew they would be my last thoughts. I wondered if she would have thought of her husband that had abandoned her forty years ago.

Just think of it. She was with that guy for six, seven months and that was what had shaped her whole life. It gave her the Ice Palace. It gave her a reputation as a woman that men run away from. It gave her every unhappy day. All the other six months, all the half years since had done so much less, except for the night of the Fourth. Perhaps it set her free.

I have been back in the house more often. At first I was very careful. I would late until early morning. Some mornings I couldn’t do it. I would fall asleep about midnight, and then when I opened my eyes, rosy-fingered dawn had taken the sky. I realized though, that no could see me enter from the back of her house, anyway. Just as no one had seen the killer enter. I would just wait until nightfall.

The house was hot, since there was no power and therefore no AC. I really thought a good deal about ice cream. Someone had emptied out the refrigerator. I guess that is lagniappe for the sheriff. Since the crime investigation is over I can touch things. I touch her desk, I lay in her bed. Sometimes I get down on all fours and touch the bloodstain on the carpet with my forehead. I listen. Thing are very quiet in the house, so you can hear anything. I heard a leaf from one of her big maples hit the roof. In a few months it will be autumn. Soon the house will belong to somebody. Maybe the county can claim it, but it will stop being empty. Stop being our house.

I wish she could tell me what she thought.

I tried to find out things from the sheriff about the investigation, but he either knew nothing, or told me nothing. I found out that he talked about me. There’s a bar in town called the Shamrock, and I went there the night in August when it had been over a hundred that day and I needed something cool. I hadn’t been in years, and the bartender told me that the sheriff said I was obsessed about the case. Implied I was in love with the widow MacPhearson.I laughed. He laughed. I ain’t never going in there again.

I’m not in love with her. I just want to know what she thought. I lived next to her for forty years. I don’t know what she thought.

We were both the same. We never took vacations. We we’re born here. We never left the city except briefly. We looked out at the same street. We knew the same people. We read Reader’s Digest and the TV Guide. We shopped at the Sac-n-Pac and the HEB. Watered our lawns on the same days. Everyday she would say to me, “Good Evening Mr. Clemens.” Most of the year, she would add, “Hot enough for you?” I would say “Good Evening Mrs. MacPhearson, can’t complain and it wouldn’t do any good if I did.” I never asked her what would happen if suddenly some were to kill her. Kill her with a real bullet and then bounce a dart off of her. I never asked what she would be thinking of. Suddenly it was dark, darker than it had been for forty years since her husband ran out on her, dark. She would be assessing whether or not to bother to try and fix the lights, and habit and “common sense” would say, “yes, go fix the lights.” Then she would hear the killer’s footsteps. Come at last, after all those years of waiting. She may have had time to straighten her hair. Time to formulate one last greeting. No, she would have been silent. Silent like I am every night as I sit in her chair. She would have turned to face them. She had forty years to prepare. Up till the last minute, she would have thought that it could have been him, coming back after all those years to thank her for keeping their dream alive after so many miserable lonely mornings. Thank you, honey. And she could have told him—what? Which of the many speeches prepared for over the years.

But it wasn’t him. Just some random person, like any of the faces that she saw in the Ice Palace everyday. Then she had a moment for her last thought on earth.

I pray every night when I sit here, that her last thought was of ice cream, thick and flowing from the spigot, flowing on into eternity.

SHRIMP ANARCHY

1½ cup onion

1 cup celery

2 medium green peppers

4 cloves garlic

1 lb. cleaned raw shrimp

¼ cup margarine

2 cups tomato sauce

1 cup water

2 tsps. minced parsley

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. Cayenne pepper

2 bay leaves

3 cups rice (prepare separately)

Chop onion, celery, peppers, and garlic. Cook in margarine fat for about five minutes. Remove from heat; stir in tomato sauce, water and seasonings. Simmer about ten minutes. Add shrimp, cover and cook for ten to twenty minutes until shrimp are pink and tender. Serve over hot rice.

While shrimp are in preparation have your local troop perform the following actions:

I. Begin calling all local branches of the federal government and tell them that their department has come under fire in the national budget cutting process. Advise them that the only hope for their jobs is an immediate flight to Washington to testify before the Senate finance committee. The bureaucrats will then flee their offices. As they abandon their offices, send paint crews to rename the offices for plumbing and artistic firms. Change locks. The resulting confusion will end federal control of your area.

II. Blow up all cable TV facilities in your area. Call all local TV stations. Threaten them with destruction unless they agree to show nothing but the “What Makes Auntie Freeze?” episode of My Mother the Car. This will cause all but the most brain damaged among the local populace to turn off their sets and begin to think. For those who still remain addicted to the tube, there isn’t any hope anyway.

III. Call up all the local schools, identifying yourselves as the local fire Marshall, tell them it is time for an impromptu fire drill. Call up all firms which provide ice cream refreshments from trucks. Tell the trucks to head to the schools, that a special school holiday has just been declared and the kids will want to celebrate. Remind them to announce the holiday over their loud speakers as the they approach the schools.

IV. Call the local churches, synagogues and mosques. Tell them that the largest churches in the city have started a raffle program that gives money to a random church goer. Ask them if they have a statement on the how much money They would pay to have someone to attend their church. Tell them that all the other churches are making statements at the local radio stations. Call all the local radio stations and tell them that church groups are making a hostile march on them en masse. Tell the radio stations the only way to avoid religious attack is to quickly found their own religions and start broadcasting them right away. Tell them that the churches won’t attack their own. This will cause the state’s greatest ally in enslavement, the churches, and the state’s second greatest ally, the media to fight amongst themselves.

V. Call up local government offices and tell them that the feds are planning to absorb all their functions in a few days. Say that the governor/mayor has said that the only way folks may keep their jobs is if they picket all federal buildings, with placards marked “Power to the People!”. The federals will have all left, and the arriving picketers will be picketing the locksmiths and painting crews. Call the local newspapers and ask them why all our local government is downtown picketing honest working men and women? Why is local government opposed to Labor? Express a hope that the local newspaper will cover the story, since all the radio seems to talk about any more is religion.

VI. Call the police and announce that the biggest shopping mall in town is offering a free fifty dollar gift certificate to the first two hundred police men who show up in uniform at the mall. Call all the malls and tell them that the police are in a state of revolt, and are coming to mall after mall to loot freely. If they doubt the story call up the biggest mall and ask if the police are coming in number. Tell them that to avoid panic, they should leave the malls—keeping all the doors open and hope that the police will take what they want and just go away. Tell to the homeless in your neighborhoods, that it’s a good day to visit the malls for a clothing upgrade.

VII. At this point shrimp will be done, go home, eat shrimp, start next batch.

VIII. Go to all the empty churches, synagogues, and mosques. Put large hand lettered signs on each. “Going out of Business sale! All furniture free for hauling.” Give everyone that shows up some of those anarchists zines,you’ve been storing for years. Numerous copies of The Stars My Destination are also nice gifts. Help people loot the churches, synagogues, and mosques. Tell each one of them, “Well we’re going to have start figuring this stuff out for ourselves now.” Mention that all the local government offices have gone out of business too, and that everything there’s free as well.

IX. Get a large electromagnetic crane, such as the kind used in car demolition lots. Use its mighty magnetic field to wipe away all records at banks, courthouses, and taxation offices.

X. Storm the electric power station. Turn all power of in the city for twenty three minutes.

XI. In the instability that will follow use your judgment and creativity to change a mindless falling away of the system into an individualistic small scale society unlike any that have existed in history save for our dreams. Some ice-cream would be nice too, since the shrimp burns a little. Maybe served with out anarchy. Serves four.

THE GAME

In all other respects he is a benevolent conformist. He decided that all men are allowed one vice. Open or hidden. The best vices—although, he would admit that one doesn’t rationally choose one’s vices—the best vices are the ones that do not destroy the practitioner or permanently injure his victim. Although he gave little thought to his victims. He dealt in fear. He stalked women. He never did anything to his victims. He never even caught them. Or attempted to do these things. Or thought of these things.

Anytime can be a beginning. He would sit on a bench in a park (or an airport, or a shopping mall) and wait. Something would catch his eye. A startling silhouette or a dress ablaze with purple. Then he would rise—quietly, discreetly. He would follow the woman. Never women or a woman with a man or men. Such things could lead to consequences that could disturb his real life. His eight-to-five job forty-nine weeks a year. He relished the backward glance. He could detect the whole continuum: notice, curiosity, confirmation, alarum, fear, flight. The women didn’t cry out to security guards or passersby. He never pressed that close. If she paused to study mannequins, he paused to review the wares of B. Dalton. If she stopped for a drink in a fountain, he would admire the maidenhair tree. If she ran, he would return to his bench. Never, never run in public. The woman would go to her car, he to his (in his college days a ten-speed racing bike sufficed). He would follow her to her house or apartment through labyrinthine suburbs and careful turning tricks. The more elusive she was the greater his excitement. He can’t stand it when some great event occurs and interferes with his ploys.

Today, this brilliant Friday, seemed as good a day as any. Summer chases could be very long as wily women led him into the twilight. He sat on a boulder in a pocket park in LaGrange Park. He waited. It had been a busy day bristling with office politics, vague corporate depravities, and hour-long calls to Japan. All of this tension slid from his back into the gray slate. He was ready. He spotted a young woman feeding pigeons. She looked intelligent, enough. Hope she doesn’t live here. She looked up and smiled. He smiled. She glanced up from time to time. Each time she caught his eye. Nervousness began. She quick walked to her car—a red BMW a sign of upward mobility and great resourcefulness. Good.

He went to his baby blue Continental—slightly revved up—slightly improved. A man has to spend money on his secret vice. That’s how you measure his devotion to it.

To his glee, she quickly left LaGrange Park heading northward for the lake. She might even be from out of town. Illinois plates. Soon they were on the Miracle Mile.

Traffic was very dense today. Soon everything came to a standstill. Something had gone wrong. Her car was two cars ahead. He could see her watch him in her mirror. This wasn’t how the game was played. It wasn’t any fun anymore.

He resolved that when things started up again he’d just drive straight home. Unless she followed him. No that was unthinkable. People began turning off their motors. He checked his tank—one quarter full. With the modifications the LTD consumed great quantities of gas. He turned off his car missing the air conditioning instantly. Windows went down everywhere. Not his. When he played the game he liked to feel cut off. Remote. Frankly he felt dirty. There’s a lot of dirt in a solitary vice, a vice that no one else even thinks of—let alone practices.

People began to talk. No doubt filling the silence with the cheap inventiveness of the bored commuter. He could hear the waves of the lake. It had been a long time since he had heard them. How long? Memory seemed uncertain. He was losing touch. Too much detritus from the gray world of the office. How could you tell Monday from Wednesday, or March from May? How could you tell what happened in which May or how many Mays had gone by? He needed real experiences. He would do the things he’d done as a child. He would begin as soon as this traffic jam was over.

No boats on the lake today. Some people, some irresponsible people had begun to leave their cars. How would these vehicles ever get moving if some of them were abandoned—blocking key lanes? He began to inventory his childhood experiences deciding which to re-create first.

Perhaps a noise, a siren or a gong sounded during his reverie. Everyone seemed to be leaving his or her cars. Let them. He had a good idea. When they were gone he would walk up to the young woman. Make a contact for once. A real human contact. In only seconds all the cars were empty. He walked to the BMW. It, too, was empty. He had expected her to stay, although he wasn’t sure why.

Suddenly he was afraid. A child of the nuclear generation he could imagine only one disaster. He ran for the nearest building, a tall round hotel topped with a rotating restaurant. It looked like a giant child-proof bottle. The lobby was empty. No emergency instructions crackled over the PA system. He went to the elevator. He must get down. To the core of the earth. It arrived and he descended to the sub-basement. Fluorescent light showed a jungle of brightly painted pipes. Maybe it was safe here.

Where was everybody? He returned to the lobby. He shouted. Shouting did not come easily to him. He had to warm up to it with several half-shouts. Finally he achieved full volume. No one here. At least, no one answered him. He walked to his car. The radio stations were off the air, except for one FM easy-listening station that was entirely automatic.

He came back to the hotel. He borrowed a room key. TV was still going. It lasted about half an hour. He locked his room but he didn’t know what he locked it against. He read What to Do in Chicago and the Book of Revelations. The lights flickered about nine and then went out. He was hungry. He made his way in the dark to a vending machine. He smashed the glass with a chair and picked up the display candy and peanut butter-filled crackers. He unwrapped them carefully—feeling the chocolate with his blind fingers afraid of swallowing a fragment of glass. He returned to his room, drank a lot of water, and locked his door.

The next day he ascended the fire stairs to the restaurant and ate a smoked chicken from a warming refrigerator. He watched the still city. The empty lake.

He decided he was singularly deficient of survival skills. He neither hunted nor fished. When he ran out of food—he would visit a nearby pharmacy.

The phone was dead.

He hadn’t thought of it ’til now.

He returned to his room. He could steal everything. He could be the wealthiest man in the world. Tomorrow he would explore things.

He went to all the shops of the Miracle Mile—seeing all the luxuries his life had denied him.

On the third day he woke to the sounds of motors starting. He ran out of his room. People had returned.

They were silent. They avoided his eyes.

He would never, never bridge the gap.

YOGA FOR BOLSHEVIKS

WHAT ARE BEST

RING OF THE RED KNIGHT

I hadn’t liked the old man. Winslow Carvenell was a nuisance. Always measuring the border between our garden plots with a ruler—as though fearful a single tomato of mine might have cast a shadow over his roses. He was the most disagreeable sort of neighbor, and except for our mutual interest in the magical arts there was little in common between us. Neither of us were great enchanters, neither had great wealth. I had made my own through hard work and study, but an accident of birth had made my neighbor poorer than his kin.

But I was grieved when I heard he died and fearful when I heard it was murder. After all, he lived next door.

Shina, his maid, had found him with a cut from ear to ear. Someone had murdered him in his sleep. The maid, being resourceful, had called upon the constable before alarming the neighborhood. I heard of old Winslow’s death from him, but I knew I would hear all the gory details from her—for Shina had once been a love of mine.

Constable Gager arrived just as I was heading off for the Academy where I taught classes in thaumaturgy, beginning philosophy of magic, and magical epistemology. The constable had been a student of mine, years ago. I had failed him because he was too lazy to apply himself. He had improved with the passing of years, but his hatred for me had certainly not diminished. Such is often a teacher’s fate. He was suspicious of the fact that I had heard nothing, and advised me grimly not to leave town.

I was late for class, and some of my students had walked. So I conjured a small pink cloud in my likeness and sent it off to the tavern where they were sure to have gathered. It rounded them up in a few minutes, and I gave a fairly good lecture on beginning invisibility.

Shina was waiting for me when I got home. I had given her the word which unlocked my door when we were an “item” years before.

“It was awful, Robert,” she said. “He was slumped over his writing desk his throat slit from ear to ear. His journal is ruined, who knows how many years of research on his family is gone.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

“Winslow didn’t have an enemy in the world. Oh you and he argued over trifles, and Dieter Betz over at Miracle University argued over how to decipher certain ancient texts, and he’s never been too sweet on his nephew, which is sad since the Count will be paying for his funeral.”

“William pays for everything after all. Did Winslow have anything to bequeath?”

“His books and scrolls will go to the University. William came by and said he’d pay my salary for another month and that I could have any personal effects I wanted.”

“I’m really sorry, Shina, if there’s anything I can do—” That is probably the oldest incantation in mankind’s repertory—its magic had been used up centuries before Atlantis sank beneath the waves. But she put her head on my shoulder and cried softly for a very long time. I saw quite a few silver hairs in her blond hair and wondered how I had become an old scholar. Where was the young wizard I once was? How long had I played the part of aging scholar-mage?

* * * * * * *

The next day Count William paid me a visit. William was Winslow’s nephew. William was the son of Rudolfo, the older of twin brothers. Rudolfo got the title and lands by arriving four minutes before his brother. Winslow got a scholar’s salary and a small house from the university—one of the Count’s favorite charities. William was a good Count, I suppose, he gave great feasts and his costume parties in Carnival season were well known. He dropped by my humble home to borrow texts, commission poetry or merely to give brandies and wines. But I never stood in his presence without knowing to my very bones that I was in front of the man who owned me. It is said the mark of a good ruler is that their presence makes you want to serve, but that a poor ruler merely makes you know that you serve.

Count William asked if I would deliver Winslow’s eulogy. I accepted. He also told me that Constable Gager had a lead on the case. Someone had seen the murderer leaving Winslow’s home.

It would be a grand funeral, promised Count William, he would spare no expense.

I began to work on Winslow’s eulogy. As is always the case when someone dies, I wished that I had paid more attention to him in the living years. His scholarship had been great. I really wished that he had finished his history of his own family.

I was pondering this loss to learning when Shina came running into my yard. I let her in.

“Robert. It wasn’t you, was it? Tell me you didn’t kill him.”

“Of course I didn’t kill him. Why would you think something that crazy?”

She reached out her right hand to me, opening it from the fist it had been. In her palm was the ring of the red knight.

“Have you told anyone?” I asked.

“No. Not yet. If you didn’t do it, someone wants it to look like you did. I found it under the table; I was cleaning up the house. I didn’t know if I should take it to you or to Gager.”

I reached for the ring, but she made the fist again.

“You’ve got to give it to me—so I can figure out what’s going on.”

“What if you did drop it?”

“Shina, you know me.”

“I know. I don’t know. What are the rules for murder and friendship? I don’t know. I should take it to Gager.”

“If you do, you’ll be putting a noose around my neck. Leave it with me for a night, I may be able to get the ring to talk.”

“You’re not that powerful a wizard, Robert, you know that.”

“Sometimes a person can be pretty powerful if his life is in danger.”

She started to release the ring.

“You must promise me,” she said, “that you’ll give me the ring tomorrow. I can say I just found it. I don’t want to be jailed for having interfered with a criminal case.”

“I promise.”

She handed me the ring, a simple circle of red gold with the word “judge” written in the High Speech. She made me promise several more times. She was scared, but I was terrified.

The red knight, Sir Starkad, had been a harsh man. My father, the swineherd, used to say that the best words that could be spoken of a man were “He was tough, but fair.” Starkad would not have needed “fair”—his justice was harsh.

* * * * * * *

Let me tell you about the ring. Last year at Carnival, Count William invited all of us poor teachers to a great costume ball and feast. Now, as you know, a scholar will not pass up a free meal for any reason. I dressed up as Sir Starkad, the founder of the Count’s family. I had a replica of the ring made as a magical focus so that I could conjure up the rest of the costume. I had even won a small prize for best costume (historical).

Winslow, the only person to attend the party without costume, had nothing but bad things to say about my choice. Who was I, a commoner, to wear (even in sport) the arms of a noble family? Count William announced a special prize for his uncle: Best Curmudgeon.

A few months after Carnival, I was looking for the ring. I wanted to melt it down for the gold so I could buy a particularly wonderful set of scrolls from Mordrake. I couldn’t find the ring, and chalked up the loss to my messy bachelor life. I hadn’t thought to tell anyone of my loss. Not that it would matter. The ring at the site of Winslow’s murder could convince any jury. He had complained widely of my presumption in wearing it.

In one of my books of magic was a spell to open the mouth of objects. It would cause a thing to reveal its history. A very advanced spell, this—but if I could discover the killer, I might be able to slip the noose. I hated the killer whoever she or he was. He (or she) had stolen my best enemy and wanted to frame me.

The spell was a simple one. It involved a red oil lamp with a wick upon which had been written certain characters and a few barbarous names. I performed it an hour after sunset. Nothing happened. I put a new wick in the lamp and tried again, pouring all of my magical strength into the operation. Nothing happened.

I felt weak and sad. I blew out the lamp, leaving the ring on my writing desk. I walked heavily over to my cot and threw myself down to sleep. I dozed off quickly. Then I heard or thought I heard the chair at my writing desk being pushed back. I couldn’t see in the darkness of my house, but I felt like someone was sitting at my table. I thought I heard someone writing.

“Shina?”

Nothing.

“Winslow?”

Still nothing.

I sprang up and ran over to the desk. No one seemed to be there. I lit a candle. No one there. But didn’t I leave the ring near the center of the table?

I decided I was having a really bad case of nerves. I left the candle lit and returned to bed. Amazingly I fell asleep again, as if something in the room drove away consciousness.

I dreamed a little dream. I dreamt first of rings. Rich noble rings sparkling with gems of this and other worlds. Poor couples’ wedding bands. Slaves rings from the southern deserts. Each of them rolling endlessly through the night. Each of them a symbol of something the wearer was bound to. Each rolling like the cycles of our lives from birth to death to be given to another in another life. Rolling along, controlling the paths of the life of the person wearing them. I was somewhere far above them watching them as bodiless observer, but I began to sink toward them, and the sound of their rolling grew into a great roar. I feared I would land among them and be worn to bits by their endless rolling. By this time I was thinking that the rings and all they implied ruled mankind. Who was the first to pledge his troth over a band of metal? Once that pledge was made, we lived in a world of meanings, a world where things could be done with words like “I do” or “I swear.” I was falling into the great river of rings which had rolled since my ancestors’ ancestors had decided to live by Law. How could I withstand that force? I had avoided the force by becoming a scholar, a semi-recluse, but now that world of men—with its endless rings—would have me.

I fell but as is the way of dreams, merely woke. I was awake for an instant thinking that I saw something sparkle upon my desk and then I returned to sleep.

I must have slept a great while for I know that my second dream was near dawn.

I dreamt I was at a masked ball in Count William’s home. I was dressed as the red knight, but there was another red knight. I approached this man angry at having my costume aped. The other red knight lurked in the shadows. When I came upon him I saw that his armor was not the festive stuff of Carnival fantasy. Battle had left its mark.

He raised his visor and I saw in inexpressible sadness in his gray eyes. I wanted to say something to offer some assurance to this man who suddenly seemed like a brother to me. I thought he has chosen the world of rings, not a do-nothing scholar like me. He lowered his visor and made his way through the crowd toward the throne. Some grave matter of state was unfolding.

I thought to follow him, but the masked crowd seemed suddenly thicker and noisier. I doubted that I could pass through them.

I looked for a pathway close to the walls. It was then I saw old Winslow sitting at his writing desk penning a manuscript. I’ll tell him that I’m sorry he’s dead, I thought, for such thoughts are in the way of dreams.

I made my way to him.

He was writing in his usual beautiful hand:

A History of the Carvenells

The first of the line prepares the last of the line’s doom.

* * * * * * *

I woke suddenly because something cold touched my cheek. Rolled over my cheek. The candle had gone out. I sprang out of bed looking for what had touched me. I threw my bedding aside on the floor feeling for something small. I found nothing. Then I went and got a candle, my fingers shaking as I put flint to steel. By its light I saw nothing, but the ring was gone from the desk.

I began lighting candles. I would flood my small house with light. I must find the ring before tomorrow. I had no doubt that Shina, already unsure in her resolve to let me have the ring, would tell Constable Gager of her find.

I went through every nook and cranny. I unrolled my scrolls, threw down my books, forced my fingers into every chink in the walls. I looked under my washbasin, in my glasses, among my silverware. It was nowhere. The ring had rolled away, and with it no doubt any chance of my avoiding the noose.

I resolved right away to pack and leave the country. I could perhaps manage a spell to fly away—of course I would have to leave most of my treasures here. My precious books and scrolls! The wealth of a lifetime of learning.

I was packing a satchel when the knocking began. I had never heard so loud a series of knocks in my life.

“Open up, Robert Griffith. I have come to arrest you for the murder of Winslow Carvenell. If you don’t open this door, I shall break it down.”

I uttered the word, which opened the door.

“Caught you before you could leave!” boomed Constable Gager.

With him were Count William, a tear-stained Shina, and a burly peasant man I’d seen once in the farmer’s market.

“This man says he saw a figure dressed in red armor leaving the home of Winslow Carvenell and going toward your door. When I questioned Shina Auw she broke down and confessed having found the ring from your costume at the scene of the murder, and giving you said ring during a period of poor judgment.”

I had to hand it to Gager, a lesser man couldn’t have boomed his way through an utterance so long. At least if I am hung swiftly, I thought, I would not have to listen to his annoying voice too long.

“Where is the ring that Shina Auw gave you?” asked Gager.

I was pondering the reply when Count William walking past the constable said, “Here. On his desk.”

There was the ring all right. Had it been there all along mocking the mind I was clearly losing?

The Count walked to my desk. He reached to grab it, when it seemed the ring of its own accord rolled over and slipped onto his hand.

“No,” he said, “It’s a trick. It isn’t my ring. It’s his. I didn’t steal it from him. I didn’t.”

The Count’s face was white with fear. He was trying to pull off the ring but couldn’t manage it. Blood poured from his finger.

The Constable hesitated, not know whether to grab the Count or me or both.

The Count’s struggle was both comic and terrifying. He bellowed in pain and rolled on the floor as thought fighting a score of men. A huge bear of a man—his fight against a simple band of gold made no sense. I have heard few men be really afraid. Men talk about fear, or whisper about their fears, but only animals whimpered like this. I was appalled and enthralled.

The Count said, “I’ll confess. I killed him.. Just get the ring off. It bites.”

The Constable ordered me to remove my spell from the ring. I started to say that I hadn’t put any spell on it, but then I remembered my failed invocation from the night before. I said a couple of words to end the enchantment.

The ring came off, and the Constable took the Count away. The ring had bitten the Count severely; his finger was hanging on only by a scrap of bloody skin. I guess the enchantment had opened its mouth.

Over the next few months we learned the story. Winslow Carvenell had discovered a document describing the birth of the twins. The first-born twin had a large birthmark on his back, the younger was unblemished. Winslow, with the ugly strawberry-colored blotch on his left shoulder, was the true heir. The doctor who had delivered the children had mixed up the details later, and the old count was happier with an unblemished heir anyway.

Winslow had approached William asking for the title and lands. After all, Winslow would only get to enjoy it for a few years, and then it would pass back to William. William didn’t want to relinquish power—even for a few months to the grumpy old scholar. He decided to slay his uncle.

He knew that I had often quarreled with old Winslow. One day the Count had visited me hoping to find some way to incriminate me. I remember he had asked to borrow some ancient book of poetry, as I had searched among my badly organized library he noted that I was using the ring as a paperweight. This proved to him that I didn’t know the value of gold, and was therefore unworthy of it. Or at least was unaware if it. He stole the ring to plant in the scene of his crime.

William resides in the king’s dungeons, where I hear he has very bad dreams. The fonder of the line, the red knight, had been known for fearsome forms of justice. Apparently William dreams himself as a guest in his ancestor’s dungeon-courts.

I live much as I did before, but increasingly wonder if I should die ring-less. Now that I have penned this little story, perhaps I should try a sonnet for Shina.

Shall I compare thee to the mystery of dream?

Thou are more mysterious and more rare.

A good start....

THE SYRINGE

Mr. Randolph Holland’s prize possession was an old-style glass hypodermic syringe. It had served him and his habit well for twenty-five years. Despite what you may have read on the subject, junkies can live a very long time—long, anonymous, gray lives in cheap boarding houses—with two-bit jobs which have only the function of serving the monkey. Such syringes used to be the rule, but plastic with its disposability now dominated the market.

“Never misses the vein,” he used to boast. “Always hits blood.”

Mr. Randolph Holland not only lost his prize possession but also his life (although in a sense he had lost it years before) to a pair of the street thugs named Crazy Eddy and Rico.

“Man, this guy didn’t have shit,” said Eddy cleaning out the boarding room with leisure. Mr. Holland had been quiet about his going, so the boys weren’t worried that his neighbors would be dropping in. They had watched the old junkie.

“Let’s pull him off the bed,” said Rico. “We can stay here for a while, sell his shit tonight.”

They pulled him off the bed. Rico took out a package of condoms and they amused themselves.

Later as night fell, Rico asked, “You want to shoot up his stash? There ain’t enough to sell.”

“Nah, I don’t do that stuff. Makes you too slow.”

Rico was more catholic in his tastes than Eddy. As he prepared his fix, he said, “I ain’t never seen a syringe like this. I bet that old cocksucker used this for years man. Look the metal’s green on the handle. I wouldn t stick it in me.”

“I washed it man. What are you worried about. Maybe it’s haunted. Maybe it’s used to biting the blood of the living every night.” Rico managed a pretty good Lugosi for the word blood. He filled the syringe from the spoon, and tied off his right forearm.

“Don’t talk that stuff with him stuffed under the bed.”

“We didn’t wake him up before, we’re not going to wake him up now.”

Rico went to shoot up. Suddenly his arm jerked and the syringe plunged full into his shoulder.

“Shit.”

He injected the entire contents and then pulled at the hypo. The plunger on the back came out and blood pouredf rom the device.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

He was loud, very LOUD.

All Eddy could think of to do was hit hard. Ring his bells. Quiet him down. He punched Rico’s nose, and Rico fell.

Eddy didn’t even breathe for a while. Just listened. There were people talking, and toilets flushing, and TVs—but no knock on the door.

He checked Rico. Rico was not going to get up.

He would stay here a few hours, then clear. He gathered up the money from the two bodies, and he turned off the lights so it would look like no one was home.

It was a long wait. Everytime he heard somebody in the hall, he damn near pissed himself. All he could think of was “drinks the blood of the living.” What a stupid bastard to say something like that. Better not think it too much.

He wondered how many times the needle had tasted blood. Once a night for—he couldn’t figure it out. When would the blood become a habit for the needle, like junk for the junky?

Something rolled in the floor. Someone had kicked the needle. Oh god, should he risk the light. Stupid son of a bitch. Stupid—

That was his last clear thought as he felt the needle prick his arm.

MY HEART

THE JOY OF COLA

It was Austin, Texas, but it could have been anywhere in the shadow worlds.

The crazy kids were the same age as Bill. They lived across the street in the dirtiest worst smelling house he had ever seen., It had a graywater system that meant they used their bathwater to poop in, and they only flushed when there was a lot of poop and the whole damn house smelled like ma privy. The kids were activists. The leader of the pack was some girl that got books for prisoners. Project Inside Out or Upside Down or some damn thing. Not educational books, books by Stephen King and murder mysteries. Yeah those guys need that. They were in prison, they aren’t supposed to read.

Bill never had any damn time to read. He worked for $10.00 an hour which meant he could pay his mortgage, buy his diabetes medicine and have basic cable. He used to read. The girl had come by yesterday asking him for used paperbacks. He had offered her The Book of Mormon. He wasn’t Mormon, but the kids further down the street kept dropping them off. The girl was offended and went off about loving prisoners. He shut the door in her face.

He plopped down in his cheap (bur clean!) recliner and watched TV. It was from another planet where you could achieve bliss by drinking Pepsi. There was this girl with a pierced navel dancing. It was the girl from across the street. He had seen that navel. She must be rich. Some trendy star that was slumming in the gray water swamp. The Joy of Pepsi. He thought about jacking off to the image, but was too tired and just went to sleep.The next morning he had a plan. He would kidnap the girl, and hold her hostage to Pepsi. He wouldn’t be hard ass about it. He didn’t want her to suffer. For the first time in three years he called in sick, and then he went to New Atlantis Used Books and bought all of the Stephen King and Rex Hull books. He read the sections on kidnapping in the Hull books and bought the duct tape. He put the soap in the sock and then he put a letter in their mailbox asking that Brittany drop by he had books for her. Then he went out and bought a case of Pepsi and one of Pepsi Light.

It was four in the afternoon when she came by. Her long red hair was done up in the filthiest dreds he had ever seen. A little pus oozed out around her navel ring.

“Come in.” he said, “The books are in the back.”

She followed him back to his bedroom, which no woman had done in two years. He pulled the sock form one pocket and the soap from another pocket and put the soap in the sock. She crossed the threshold and he swung.

She didn’t have the decency to fall down, just yelled. The filth and ropes of her hair probably softened the blow. He had to swing twice (and twice as hard ) to knock her out,. She had been beginning to turn, so the last blow hit just above her left eye and broke the skin. She was a vegan, so she didn’t weigh much. He picked her up and put her in the old straight back chair that had belonged to his grandmother. He thought of it as the only nice thing that he owned, not understanding it had been poor people’s furniture when she had bought it during the great depression.

He taped a funnel to her mouth so he would be to pour in the Pepsi. Then he tied a rope around her to be extra sure she couldn’t escape, when she came to.

He figured it would be a bad idea to call from home. So he went to the 7-11. Not the close 7-11, he wasn’t that dumb. He carried a can of Pepsi with him to call the 1-800 number for questions or concerns.

The phone tree presented him with many options: * For an extension; 1 For information about products, 2 For an explanation of how coke is different than Pepsi; 4 How to buy Pepsi products; 5 How to tell if you were a member of the Pepsi generation; 6 How to register complaints against Pepsi truck drivers; 7 How to register complaints about dead mice in bottles; 8 How to register complaints about other foreign objects in bottles; 9 How to present claim about kidnapping Brittany Spears. He pushed 9.

“Sorry, but our records show that Ms. Spears has not been kidnapped today, so we can not process kidnapping claims.”

The recorded voice crushed Bill. He could not believe it. Perhaps he had been too hasty, perhaps there were other young women with pierced navels. He had missed a day of work in tight economy, which wasn’t good, and he should probably have to let the girl go. Keeping for a sex-slave would mean cleaning and feeding her. He hadn’t even let her go to the bathroom. Probably if he let her use his clean good-smelling bathroom she would be so happy that she would forget the little kidnapping incident.

He felt really tired and victimized by the time he got home. He wanted to nap, but decided to let the girl go.

She looked mad, so he through he would talk to her and then let her go to the bathroom, and then everything would be OK.

“Look,” he said. “I know you probably aren’t very happy right now. But I’ll give you the books and I’m going to let you poop in my bathroom, and everything will be swell. I had a little senior moment and I thought you were Brittany Spears.”

When he said Brittany Spears, her eyes softened and see looked sad.

He pulled the duct tape from her mouth.

“I am Brittany Spears.” She said.

“No. The phone message says you’re not.”

“That’s because I have been out of circulation long enough, shit-head.” She said affectionately. “Just keep me for a few more hours and you can get a quarter mil.”

“It’s not really money that I want.” Said Bill.

“I know, baby.” She said, “Can you say what you really want?”

“I. I. I. Well money would make it better.” Bill finally said.

“That’s because money partakes of the Real.” Said Brittany.

“What I really want is someone to love me enough to give me used Stephen King books.”

“I Love you. I so Love this world that I send images of the Real World I come from into it.”

“I don’t understand.” Said Bill.

“Here put your head on shoulder and I will tell about the Real World.”

Bill put his head on her shoulder, which wasn’t easy since he kneel down by the chair she was tied in. And so Brittany told Bill of the Real World. In the Real World people danced when they drank a good beverage. Everyone was healthy and good looking. Cars drove through endless fields on bright starry nights. Little lizards helped you get car insurance, and little dogs helped you have great intercultural dining experiences, and everyplace was really and truly Disneyland.

“People from your world discovered the Real World when they invented television. There are no TV channels,. No broadcasting. We came up with those myths, so you wouldn’t feel bad watching the Real World. The Real World is commercials.”

“But why would you ever leave?”

“Your world is very interesting to us. It’s like a roller-coaster. Besides you people treat us well.”

“But you’re living in a dump.”

“It’s just a game for me. You’ve heard of other people from my world that live among you. For example the cast of Different Strokes.”

“Is there anyway I can go to your world?”

“Of course Bill, we discover people all the time. Take the rope and off so that I can get out of this chair.”

“Oh right. Sorry.”

Brittany stood up and rubbed her wrists. Then she stretched her knees and arced her legs.

“What you have to do Bill is drink all of that Pepsi while I dance.”

As soon as she started dancing she looked better. Her thick dreds become long flowing hair. Her dirty kin became clean. The pus vanished from her navel ring. By the time Bill was on his third Pepsi he could hear the music. His house seemed larger. His furniture became bigger, newer, more conformable, more fashionable. The air smelled better. He drank and drank and drank; although it became harder with each can. There were other people dancing with Brittany now. The roof of his house vanished and above was the bluest sky he had ever seen, with more perfect white sun above. The birds sang in time with swelling music. Flowers began to grow out of his floor. He drank and drank and drank. It really hurt. The President was walking up and beside him the Pope was roller-skating. People of all colors were dancing together. Good looking people. People better looking than anybody he had ever seen. He drank and drank. Soon the case would be finished. Boy did it hurt. He really needed to go to the bathroom. He hoped they had bathrooms in the Real World. There was a talking lizard. There was the talking dog. It was all too wonderful. He could see the Pillsbury Doughboy in the distance dancing, dancing, dancing. One more can. He popped the top. He took a slug.

Bill’s gut exploded. He had a moment to look down at the ragged hole that blood and Pepsi were gushing out of. Then he died and slowly began to fade from the Real World.

Brittany and her friends were laughing, but with his last breath he thought that he could detect some compassion in her voice. Maybe not enough to buy him a used copy of The Shining, but at least Carrie or one of the short story collections.

OUR NOVEL

Upon my recent diagnosis with Carson’s Syndrome, I realized that it was time to talk about the creation of Wilson Is Not Toast, which has the dubious distinction of being mentioned in every book on the oddball novels of the early twenty first century. Wilson is Not Toast did very well, even being a Mystery Club Book of the Month and having translations into twenty languages and adaptations for the WWW, film, TV and other media. If you are at all a mystery reader, you probably have a copy at home. What makes WINT so interesting is that it had eleven co-authors. Jointly written books seldom do well, but the author list for WINT has several other peculiarities. Firstly all of the authors had had only publishing credit before the publication of WINT, in a regionally distributed short story collection, which was aptly described as “dreadful vanity publishing at its worst.” Secondly despite the huge success of the book only three of the writers went on to publish anything thereafter and their minor attempts were frankly published because of their connection with the successful Wilson Is Not Toast. I was the best published of the three.

I am Moses Gubb, and I on from my success with WINT into a writing “career” of seven mystery short stories and cookbook of recipes by mystery/thriller writers Sleuth Stew. I am very grateful to the editors of Has-Beens on Parade for this opportunity to share these reminiscences from my early career. I know that many people would be offended at being solicited by such a fanzine, but I am not in total denial on my lack of writing success, and I feel that my work in WINT is one of the most satisfying of my life.

First let me tell you a little about myself. Not that I was born and so forth, you probably have a good idea about that, no I want to explain the late twentieth century to you. Everyone wanted to be a writer, because a good deal of effort in the craft seemed to have been removed. My mother had told me with horror that in her first job she had a manual typewriter. It was one of those tales of “how bad it was” that ranked up there with the idea of a TV without remote control. There were all kinds of software in those days that helped you write. They formatted the text, they prompted you with both words and plot, and they even encouraged you if you stopped writing due to some from of block. I remember when the first time my computer got the (as it was then called) World Wide Web. It was as much of a breakthrough then as doing away with keyboards had been a few years before.

My job1 or as we said then, my job, was a manager of a video store in Austin, Texas. It was the “cool” video store next to New Atlantis, which was a used bookstore, and a bar called the Decline of West. It didn’t pay for shit, but it did bring in a steady group of artistic people. Austin was sort of a writers’ colony in those days. You couldn’t spit without hitting a published author. I know because I spit a lot, mainly just at the people walking by into Violet Crown Videos. My girlfriend worked for me and made even less. We considered ourselves to be as cool as our videos. But we had one tragic secret. Unlike our clientele, we hadn’t achieved in any art form. Now we were smart enough to see writers don’t have any money, or they wouldn’t have grumbled so at the dollar a day late fee on their DVD’s (I’m guessing that the readership of HBOP is historically savvy enough to pick up on most of my quaint terms. If they ain’t that’s too bad because I’m not being paid for this). But everyone was working on something. Neal, the stock boy, was working on a screenplay, Susan on her novel and Tagi on an opera. Belinda, my girlfriend, had done some painting that we used to fix a whole in the roof of our garage. I had learned to play “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar, and even worked in a band that got to play at a couple of parties, until some drunk guy threw our drummer into the river. But we began to get the wannabe spirit.

How tough could writing be? After all, New Atlantis was filled with it, clearly most of it turned out by people less smart than us, if not in fact less talented. I asked Mary Denning, a founder of the Contrarians, a school of Austin writers, what her secret was. “Persistence.” She said. I figured I could try that awhile, at least until it got boring. Picking what to write was the next hurdle. I asked all the writers that came in, what sold, and they all said mysteries. So I got some mystery writing software, and I took off. My first novel was entitled The Woman with Three Breasts. I thought my grand climax was stunning, “She gazed horrified at one of three breasts. It was made of wax.” It took me months to write and despite my sending it to three or four publishers I couldn’t sell it. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at short fiction. That way I wouldn’t spend so long at creating the thing.

Meantime Belinda was trying a more social approach she had joined a group of people that wanted to write mysteries called People Who Want to Write Mysteries (PWWtWM) or as they affectionately called it, “Pootem,” The group brought famous people in the field of mystery writing to Austin—agents and publishers and such—which would surely snap up some of the locally produced delicacies. So we both attended and shelled out money for workshops. We watched other people being published left and right. In fact at out first workshop the woman who had set to the left of me and the man who had sat to the right of me, both sold a mystery novel in a month.

Was there some cosmic conspiracy against us?

I wrote many short stories in those days,” The Dairy Queen Murders,” “The Jell-O Slayer,” “The Pork and Bean Menace.” But none of them sold. One was even returned to me with a thin pencil scrawl “It’s the food guy again.” I would show them. I tired writing about drinks.

About this time Horace Greenslau came on the scene. Horace appeared in the form of unsolicited e-mail (or as we called in those halcyon days “Spam.”) Horace presented him self to the brethren and cistern of Pootem as a wily old publisher with many tricks up his ink stained sleeves. He pointed out two facts. Fact number one: the second sale is easier to make than the first, so if you want to be a published author, the best thing you can be is already published. Fact number two: you don’t have to pay dead guys anything but respect. His emails to Pootem just talked about these ideas, he said he just kept thinking about them.

So one day I sent a note to this list saying why not put them together? You could put a book that was half stuff by dead guys that you didn’t have to pay any money to, and half by living guys that were first time writers.

What a great idea! Wrote Greenslau.

It became his project at once. He had spots for eleven writers, to mixed with eleven classics of detection. It would be called Mystery Classics. He had some has-been guy, D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Fawn Trilogy, on hand to write an intro for five hindered smackers. He would mention the twenty tales one by one and thus give illusion that the new guys ranked up there with Chandler, Borges, Doyle, and so forth. The classics were great from literary to hard-boiled, impressionistic to great logic tales. There was only one rub.

Money.

He didn’t want to do it as a vanity press, no that was evil. He simply needed each of his writers to buy—say—two hundred copies. They could easily sell them to libraries, specialty shops, their friends and relatives. What proud momma wouldn’t buy a book that listed her baby son after Agatha Christie? He would sell the rest.

I know what you are thinking. Well it’s easy to think things like that when fame isn’t around the corner and some guy is telling you that can sell two hundred books.

Belinda and I figured it this way. I could put a display of the books for sake at the store, plus I could take a suitcase full of them to our family reunions, then when the store sold off its used videos at the flea market in the spring I could sell a few more copies then. Before long we could sell our four hundred.

So we coughed up the cash and we wrote out tales. Mine was “The Butcher Wore Red” and hers was “The Video Store Murders.” Nine other people in Pootem likewise coughed up the cash.

The books took a long time to materialize. Since we had never met him in the flesh, we began to wonder if we had been scammed.

When the books did show up, they were as nicely produced as we had imagined for the rather hefty price we had put out. Belinda and I had visualized them as leather bound with gilt lettering and quaint illustrations (at least for the real classics). Greenslau had also asked each of us for a black-and-white photo. I guess he had merely asked for his collection, there weren’t any picture in the book.

Bowen’s introduction was little weird too. He had very perceptive things about the classic tales, but made fun of us. For example, “In Moses Gubb’s ‘The Bucher Wore Red’ we see an interesting attempt to turn a food obsession into a tale of detection. Although the astute reader will have guessed the identity of the killer long before the end of the tale, his obsessive writing will have a special appeal for a certain type of reader interested in the workings of the authorial mind.” Sad to say, mine was not the worst.

But it was a book. It had an ISBN number. It, for the most part, spelled out names right, and it was a hardback, not something easily recycled. It would live on in libraries and bookshelves of our friends.

To my surprise and initial glee, I was listed as the editor. Greenslau had sent a note when everyone’s book was delivered reminding him or her it had been my idea.

The local paper reviewed us. The reviewer liked all the things the dead people had written. It called the editor “only half bad.”

Our relatives did buy copies. But our friends couldn’t afford them. Local specialty shops like Adventures in Crime and Space were willing to buy a couple, but the look of pity in the eyes of the owner didn’t make us feel very good.

You know, nobody buys expensive anthologies at flea markets. But some people did ask us on advice on how to get published. Then I started getting little nasty notes from my fellow authors. They had all laid out nearly three thousand dollars apparently for the purpose of loosing closet space. Nobody blamed Greenslau; everyone remembered that I had thought it up. Your most noble moments may be like the seeds of a dandelion, but e-mail lives forever. (Well at least it did in those uncivilized days).

A year passed. We did our best to sell copies. One of our members a dentist did sell his off to his clients, but he offered them a price break on his services. The few books we gave away as review copies showed up in used bookstores around town, anchors in the cheap bins. I lost my friends in the group. I lost Belinda for other reasons, but when she left me her copies of the book stayed in the garage. Fine. I made a pile of them and propped up a roof beam.

I became guilty. I felt that it was my fault. The least I could do was buy up the cheap copies of the books around town. They usually went for one or two bucks. I made a game of it, wearing dark glasses and pulling a hat over my face, I would go out and bag a few on nights of the new moon.

I don’t know how many copies I had bought before I discovered that there were variant editions of Mystery Classics. One night I opened one up. There were tales by the eleven masters and eleven people I had never heard of. There was an introduction by D. B. Bowen for eleven writers—all of whom lived in Houston, Texas.

So I went out in my garage. The books looked the same on the outside, but close inspection soon reveled that I owned the Santa Fe, Dallas, and Anchorage versions of Mystery Classics. I drove to the copy shop and began shooting copies of the alternate title pages. Each edition had its own editor, some fall guy (or in the case of Anchorage fall gal) that had had the same “brilliant” idea that I had had. I spent all night addressing envelopes. I wanted all the Austin writers to know. To know that I hadn’t done it. To know that somewhere Mr. Greenslau was traveling from town to town raking the dough from would be writers. I had to use snail mail; they wouldn’t take my calls anymore.

At first my fellow writers weren’t concerned. Most of them apologized to me. We talked a little about contacting the other victims, but mainly we were embarrassed. Most of us had had friends that had warned us that the whole thing smelled like a scam, and we were embarrassed. But Belinda changed all that. She set up a mailing list for us all and she wrote a really impassioned letter about how I had been screwed over. She told them that I had paid for her books, and that I had bought all the copies, and that I had taken all their abuse (including hers), and that I had let them know what had happened. She was really mad at Greenslau, and when people realized that I was out over six thousand dollars, they got mad to.

I think it was Dr. Ellison, the dentist, who suggested that we should get our revenge. We agreed early on but we didn’t know how.

Belinda began researching the place that had printed all the books it was in Polk City, Iowa. Other than printing Mystery Classics, they did Bibles in Spanish and menus. Their equipment was old, and the CM line kept them going. They were very friendly, and were glad to give her a list of cities that had had CMs made up. We looked it over. Greenslau had neglected New Orleans. We couldn’t guess why, maybe he thought the bunco squad there was too good. So we got a local ISP and we made a group Crescent City Crime Writers. We got us a webpage, we took out some ads in the New Orleans Picayune, and we mentioned our name on a few mystery news groups. We had people that wanted to join of course, but we told them that we had already filled our meeting space—some unspecified loft on Canal Street and that it would be a while before we were taking members, but they were free to chat. We adopted pseudonyms, we chatted, and we even learned some things about the city of New Orleans and its rich mystery tradition. Eventually someone made the observation that it is sure to easy to get published if you already are published. His name was Reds law. Mr.Redslaw went on to tell us that the reasons dead guys are reprinted is that they sell and you don’t have to pay them.

Therefore, I went on-line as Mr. Phineas Thibodaux, an honest but poor man of the parishes with a great marketing strategy....

Mr. Redslaw thought my notion of an anthology of half classic and half virgin talent was nothing short of genius. He said he could get a has-been writer, a Mr. D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Trilogy, would write an introduction.

Here is where we made our move. We said that we wanted to meet him, Mr. Bowen, of course. We had figured out that much.

At first there was reluctance. Redslaw told us that Bowen was reclusive, alcoholic, etc. We stuck to our guns, and Belinda had a brilliant idea. She researched Bowen. He had written five avant-garde novels in the eighties. The CTT had been marginally successful. He had been on the list of several critics as the young writer to watch. He had speaking tours, was a minor TV celeb, but each novel got stranger and the readership declined. He even tried vanity publishing with—you guessed it—the Menu House in Polk City.

So in addition to our wanting to see him, we began to say good things about his work.

There isn’t the writer alive that doesn’t believe flattery. The entire strange cursed race thinks that someday their scribblings will have a place in god’s eternal bookshelf.

Our plan was a little vague. We thought that we get him in a hotel room and then just confront him and in some magical way he would pay us back the money he had sucked away.

We choose an older hotel in the French Quarter called the Roosevelt. We rented the big penthouse that had looked over Mardi-gras for almost a hundred years. It was bleak December. We told him to meet us at eight on a Wednesday night. We dressed well, and those of us who had concealed weapons permits from Texas were packing. We had no intention of killing him, just scaring him into the straight and narrow.

Belinda had a tape recorder so we could catch any confessions that might boil to the surface.

He was fifteen minutes late. We were sweating and uncomfortable. We heard the old elevator make its way to our floor. Belinda and a woman named Chandra Lee escorted him to our suite. He was older and thinner than we had thought. We had our chairs arranged in a circle, his was in the middle. He laughed when he saw it. We guessed he wouldn’t be laughing soon.

After he had set down, we all reached under our chairs and pulled out a copy of Mystery Classics, except for me I pulled our five copies—one of each of the editions I had bought. We were expecting fear or guilt.

We were disappointed.

He just asked, “So which group are you? Shreveport? Dallas? No I guess it’s too long for it to be Dallas.”

I said, “We’re Austin and we want our money back.”

“Oh that’s original,” he said, relaxing in his chair, “About as original as your fiction.” Then he laughed.

“Look Bowen, we’re not fooling around.” Said Dr. Ellison.

“Of course you are,” said Bowen, “That’s all you’ve ever done. You’re jerk-offs. What do you want from me? You said you wanted to be published. Well you got your book. It’s big, it’s fat. I bought all of you have discovered the great utility it has for propping things up. You should be as happy as a pig in slop. But no, what you wanted wasn’t to pay three thousand dollars so that your useless names would be printed along side people that would sneer at your ineptitude. But you wanted more. You are disappointed that I am not Satan. You wanted to sell your souls for fame. Well, you don’t have soul, or you could have written something worthwhile. You don’t got shit.”

“No Bowen,” I said, “We’ve got you.”

“You think your first the group that has pieced this together. You’re not, and you’re not the last. But everything I did was legal. I knew this was a confrontation when I walked down here. Night meeting in an old hotel in the French Quarter, the same old clichéd stuff that keep your fiction from selling. I just wanted to see your pathetic faces, look at you, all dressed up, all proper; does it make you feel powerful? Your little chairs all in a circle. Well I’m going now, and you can go back to your lives and tiny dreams.”

“Do you think you are a good writer, Bowen?”

“I’m no Rex Hull, but I’m OK. I’m third-rate, but my ambition is too great. So I look for eighteenth-rate scum to support me.”

He rose.

“No.” said Dr. Ellison, “We are not done with you.”

“Why what are you going to do kill me?”

“Yes.” Dr. Ellison said, “We are. Just because you aren’t expecting it. It is a sign of the triumph of our poor imaginations.

We were on him in a minute. Eleven people can over power a man in his sixties easily. Killing him is easier still.

Taking a corpse through the French Quarter is not a difficult matter when he is small. You simply stand on either side of him and tell on-lookers that he has too much to drink. In fact as we took him to my car, we passed another fellow in the same straights. Perhaps he too was dead.

We took him to my cousin’s restaurant. We sat outside until closing time. My cousin and I had an agreement. He did not ask about things that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, and I treated his life the same way.

We made Mr. D. B. Bowen into jambalaya. The other men butchered him, while I prolapsed the rice and sauce as per the recipe in my story. He was ready at dawn, and we filled up our containers with him and took him to our homes in Austin. Just before we took off, Belinda said, “Well he’s toast now.” I most emphatically denied that he was toast, and took offences at the slighting of my culinary creation. “OK,” she said, “He is not toast.”

We were prepared to be each other’s alibis when the law came by.

It never came.

Bowen did live alone. He was the alcoholic recluse he claimed to be. Eventually the residence hotel he lived in Washington must have noticed that their tenant had not returned.

The others had swore off writing, but I turned out a few tales afterward—some of which sold. I felt my fiction getting better, and attributed it to some endorphin released after revenge.

About six months later, Belinda was listening to Bowen’s speech in the Roosevelt Penthouse. She called me and said that it was very dramatic. The whole thing would make a lovely crime novel. So we broke it into eleven chapters. Each of us did our best. And unlike most of our scribbling before and after, our best was finally good enough. Sure the novel sold as something of a curiosity like Naked Came the Spy, but it did sell. We had a few minutes of fame—woefully short of the fifteen minutes that a man named Andy Warhol had promised our parent’s generation.

The success of the book, plus my modest sales before its publication inspired everyone to try writing again. We had all felt the writing we did on WINT had been smooth and beautiful. We were all able to get agents on the strengths of WINT’s sales, and we were busy turning out novel proposals. But something was wrong.

The quality left our writing. At first we hid this each from the other. All right at first we hid it form ourselves, a writer cannot bear to acknowledge that his best days may be gone—especially if his best days were about a month in length. However, by the time the movie of WINT came out, our writing was as bad as it had been in Mystery Classics; we didn’t know what had happened. Had the crime been enough to stimulate our moribund muses?

Dr. Ellison suggested a different explanation. Over half a century before, certain experiments on planaria learning had suggested that cannibalism lead to the exchange of knowledge. The planaria, a type of flatworm, were tested with a maze and their times recorded. Then the planaria were ground up and fed to a new generation, who could solve the maze in less time than their predecessors. It was speculated that their was a transference of knowledge—probably in the messenger RNA strands of the planaria The experiment was later discredited, as some researched believed that the mazes were contaminated by the smell of the flatworm’s passage and that was the guiding force. However, certain people believed that the experiments were discredited to keep universities form turning into professor-hamburger stands.

Hoc est corpus meum.

Maybe we had eaten Bowen’s talent. Unlike him we were not jaded nor overcome by a desire to be known in a limited genre—we were just people with a burning desire to write, but perhaps nothing to say. Our desire plus his RNA got one more novel out of him. It was sad that he never got the fame, which he like us, had craved. The RNA material must have peaked in us about nine months after the deed and receded nine months afterward.

Our reaction to Dr. Ellison’s theory varied. Some of us were glad at our one shot at fame and parlayed into little victories like my cookbook. Others drank themselves to death like Belinda, who could face the fact she had no talent. Of course the best known case—the one you’ve been reading this interview to see if I would mention—see I still have a few mystery writer tricks even if I am eighteenth-rate—was Dr. Ellison. One of the good dentist’s clients was Vernon Ghosh, a well-know writer of techno-thrillers. Ellison gassed him when he was in for his yearly dental visit and then cut up his body with an eye to making lasagna from it. The unfortunate visit of a young mad with a chipped tooth exposed Ellison’s attempt at cannibalism.

Ironically it lead to new interest in our work and a re-release of WINT, which has remained in print since. We all denied any understanding of his actions, and if in our black hearts we had been thinking of a similar deed, we abandoned such evils schemes.

Although not quite the youngest of our little group of wannabes I am the last to draw breath, and I will not do so for much longer. I enjoyed sharing our story for Has-Beens on Parade.

DIARY FOUND IN AN ABANDONED STUDIO

I couldn’t paint when I took the medicine.

If I laid off for a few days the images would come and I could finish a canvas, but there was always the danger that I would forget who was doing the painting, or maybe even right and wrong. So I started this diary. I’ll read it every day and write in it every day and that way I won’t get in trouble like that other time. Yesterday I prepared a canvas. Today I put my medicine aside. Tomorrow I’ll start my sketches.

Day 2. My name is Tyrone Watson. I am thirty-eight. I live in Austin, Texas. There that seems pretty sane. I don’t think it’s a good idea to kill one’s critics. Violence has no special beauty. If I want to get people, I’ll just caricature them. I work for Roberta Sais.

I started today on The Market of Values, which will be a study in blues and grays of people at some sort of carnival buying and selling things of no value. Maybe I’ll work in miniatures of Bessie Vollman’s paintings.

Day 3. Ideas are getting really slippery today. It feels great. My sketchbook is filling up and Markets coming along. Oh I forgot to do my focusing mantra.

My name is Tyrone Watson, MFA. I have had two one-man exhibitions. The last was five years ago.

There that’s in control. In fact the only control problem I have is wanting to spend all my time up here painting instead of down in the shop, but that’s normal. Artists want to do art. It’s a pity that business hours coincide with the light being good.

Day 4. Depressed today.

Day 5. Depressed today. Did nothing. Got mad.

Day 6. My name is Tyrone Watson. I am thirty-eight. I live in Austin. I had a great day. A Mr. Simon Pound had a lot to ask me about my art. Maybe I’m in for a comeback. I started to take him upstairs and show him my work in progress, but a little voice told me not to. I don’t mean a little voice like before, I just mean a hunch, that feeling of not letting people in on it until you’re ready. I got a lot done today. Market should be finished tomorrow.

Day 7. Finished Market. Not as good as I had hoped, but still that’s the essence of the artistic personality. Always dissatisfied. Like Faust. I’m starting something more free form, a response to those people who caused me so much trouble. I’m going to call it Exposed Heart. I’m not sure how to start. Well an idea suggests itself, but not a good one. My name is Tyrone Watson. I’m thirty something a painter on the go.

Day 8. Busy.

Day 9. Spent several hours with my model.

Day 10. Mr. Pound came by today. I was disappointed to learn he wasn’t an art critic. He is a retired cop. His life story seemed pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll do him after Exposed Heart which is coming along nicely thank you. It’s a little bit more gory than anything I’ve done in years.

Day 11. My name is Tyrone Watson. Today Mr. Pound came by and we discussed our life stories, which were amazingly similar. I want to get to know him because I’m going to do a picture of him called The Multidimensional Blue Lines .

He became a cop in the ’70s. His big ambition from the first was to make detective. He studied every text on criminology, took every possible course and dedicated his ife to that particular transformation, but various political forces downtown saw to it that he didn’t make the grade.

I told him how critics had ruined my two shows, particularly the second show when Bessie Vollman’s competing exhibition won such lavish praise. She had been the more “politically correct” artist. So her career took off and I managed a used bookstore for minimum wage and free studio space.

He asked if he could see my work in progress, and I told him no. I hate anyone to see something before I’m done with it. But I told him that I was interested in painting him. At first he seemed surprised, then readily agreed.

He asked me if I knew anything about the death of two art critics five years ago.

I asked him if he was still a cop.

He said that he quit the force a couple of years ago. He’d arrested too many criminals who got off on technicalities. So he quit. He was near enough retirement anyway and he had a few investments that had paid off well. He liked to keep his hand in. The police, he assured me, at least the good cops—the real force—still called him for advice.

I asked him how long he’d been interested in art. He said that every good cop is interested in art. The artistic mind and the criminal mind are very, very similar. Most criminals, he reasoned, were failed artists.

But criminals don’t have critics, I told him.

“Of course they do,” he said. “Cops, they catch inept criminals. The great criminals go free.”

I had never thought of a cop as a critic for a criminal’s art.

Day 12. Terrible dreams last night. I was too depressed to open the store.

Day 13. It’s been almost two weeks and I’m doing fine. Maybe I’m over my trouble. My name is Tyrone Watson. Elementary, my dear Watson. Someone broke into the shop last night, they didn’t take anything but I think they may have been through my studio. Both the outside door and the studio door were open. Despite this I can’t tell you how GREAT I feel. I started two different paintings this morning. I started to call the owner and tell her the shop had been broken into, but realized that would screw up my process. I painted like Picasso. I’ll stay here at night. Maybe I’ll catch my burglar and paint him. I’m ready. I’m ready for anything. I feel GREAT!

Day 14. I painted well into the night and finished my first painting; a riotous and much spangled study in purple and green called The Water People Are Talking to Me. I went out for a walk about 3:00 AM. I needed inspiration for the second piece—a study in chrome yellow called Voltman Discharges. Oh what a wonderful great buzzy great picture! Zip zzp, I say, zip zap.

Day 15. Mr. Pound came by with the news about Bessie Vollman. I felt really, really bad for a moment as though it had something to do with me. I suppose that shows I have a great soul that I can feel sorry for a rival. I asked to see the obituary notice since he was carrying the paper. Sure enough although I was Bessie’s greatest rival I wasn’t mentioned. Maybe I should send a wreath or something, after all I would be remembered a hundred years hence and she will be forgotten. Maybe I should go to the funeral to do a second painting of her.

Mr. Pound told me that he was unable to find any references to my one-man show five years ago. He said he was hoping to see some photos of my previous work. He seemed genuinely sad when I told him that it had all been purchased by Japanese investors.

Did I have unsold pieces that I might consider parting with?

Of course I had to tell him that I sold everything a few years ago when devastating poverty took hold of my life.

We all have our ups and downs, he said. He is truly a wise man for a cop.

I asked him when he would come sit for me and he became agitated. I guess the thought of sitting for eternity is frightening to some. It brings out that fear that their flaws, that one tiny flaw that everybody has, might bemagnified through the ages. After awhile all they would be would be the flaw.

My name is Vincent van Gogh and I’m one hundred and thirty-eight years old. Just kidding.

Day 16. I dreamt I was a child again. It must’ve been when I was in the sixth grade. We had an art teacher who we went to see twice a week. She gave us the assignment of drawing something on the school yard, so I drew the blue portable toilets that had been placed on the football field. I could see them from my desk if I craned my neck over. The bell rings and class is over and I was supposed to have the picture finished by the end of the period. Mrs. Elgood came over and told me to give it to her. That I could work on it Thursday. I said just a minute I could finish it and then it was done and I handed it to her, and she said, “Tyrone, there is nothing like this outside.” I told her to look and she wouldn’t look and I told her to look and she wouldn’t look so I took hold of her head and tried to make her look and I pushed her face through the glass and she bled.

Then I woke up and all I can say is you should have looked.

I re-read my entry for yesterday. I am really mad that the newspaper files have been tampered with. Maybe I’ll go paint all of them. I’ll paint every fucking critic into a corner. I was too mad to open the shop today. I heard some people knocking and the damn phone kept ringing. Ring a ding a ding until I took it off the hook. Probably the damn owner. I’ll take care of her too. You shouldn’t disturb a genius at work. There should be a law. I painted a bright red and orange painting today Angry Sun Bites Man. I’ll open up tomorrow.

Day 17. Depressed and mad.

Day 18. The police banged and banged on my door. Mr. Pound wasn’t with them. They wanted to know if I knew that Ms. Roberta Sais, who owned the Book Cellar (and who in theory is my employer) had died. No, I said, I didn’t know. Murdered, they said. No, I said, I didn’t know. I was very busy. I had to work on my paintings. I thanked them for the news. She had heirs, they said. I said I always thought she put on airs. Heirs, they said, I should close the shop until the heirs came. And I said good. I made a “Closed on Account of Death” sign and hung it in the door.

In the afternoon Mr. Pound came by and pounded on my door until I answered it. I told him we were closed.

He said he was here to pose.

I let him in to do some sketches. He started to go up stairs to my studio. I told him I do my sketches in the shop. He wasn’t easy to sketch because he kept talking. He hinted that he was a vigilante going after criminals the system might let off on some technicality—like no Miranda rights. Lots of stories of cars in the nights. For some reason I pictured them as moving silently and without headlights. “Dark of night doesn’t stop you, eh?” I asked.

He reacted violently, then chuckled, and said, “No dark of night doesn’t stop me.”

He talked a lot about criminals who made their confessions got off easily. With his pull down at the station he could help such a criminal. If the criminal doing the murders now were, say, to confess to him, he could make it very easy on the guy.

If on the other hand the current murderer were to try to weasel out—to escape from the long arm of the law—he would make it very difficult for him. He would track the murderer down and strike when the killer least expected it.

He didn’t ask to see my sketches, which was good, because I wasn’t pleased with them. When I left I tore them all up in little pieces.

I am going to sleep in the studio tonight—to protect my paintings. I am worried about them somehow.

Day 19. Today I painted The Last Innocent Man. The picture is full of big blue eyes looking everywhere. In the lower right corner is a single yellow square—representing a window. Inside an artist can be seen painting a flowery peaceful landscape. I may change the title to This Is My Skull.

Day 20. This morning I came to my senses and took my medicine. I realized I must have done some pretty bad things. I figured I’d wait for Mr. Pound, and when he came I’d confess to him. He could make it easy for me. He was my friend. I waited all day, but he didn’t show.

About six I called the downtown police station. Mr. Pound had told me that he still had friends on the force. I figured I could ask around and they could put me in touch with him. It took forever to get in touch with homicide. While I waited I cursed myself for not having got his number. Then I got Detective Blick. I asked if he knew Mr. Pound.

“Mr. Clarence Pound?” he asked.

“I’m not sure of his first name. He is a retired policeman. He had told me he still had friends on the force.”

“Let me guess, he told you that he tried to make detective but ‘political’ forces kept him from making the grade. He also said that he was a vigilante, bringing criminals to justice who had escaped their just desserts.”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“I am sorry to tell you this, sir, but Clarence Pound is a retired postal worker with some severe personality problems. Every few months he stops his medication for awhile and gets to thinking he’s some super-cop. If he’s been bothering you, let me know and we’ll pick him up and take him to his doctor.”

“No. He hasn’t been bothering me at all. Thank you.”

I hung up as he was asking “Who are—”

Mr. Pound is some kind of nut. I’ll have to be ready for him.

Day 21. I slept in the studio and he broke in. I woke up and saw him looking at my paintings. He had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

“They’re blank,” he said. “All of these canvasses just painted white.”

“No,” I said, “They’re very subtle. You must study them carefully.”

“They’re blank. You’re some kind of nut.”

“No, you’re the nut. You’re an ex-postal employee. You’re not a cop. You’ve never been a cop.”

“That’s not true.” He pointed the gun at me.

“It is true. You’re not a cop.”

Suddenly he sat down. Just sort of collapsed. He didn’t say anything for a long time. I thought about going over and taking his gun away.

Then he began to talk in a low monotone. He explained who he really was and everything became clear to me.

He is Mr. Carlos Pound, owner of a very important gallery in New York. Today we are putting my paintings into a U-Haul van. We will drive up to New York, where he’ll host a one-man show for me.

I bet we make quite a splash.

THE THIRTYERS

When the world didn’t end in the Year 2000, the Reverend Jessie Cancun was among the first people to proclaim the idea of the “Babylon Calendar.” According to Rev. Cancun, the evil forces of the Whore of Babylon had stolen the right and true calendar of the pious and replaced it in the year 1066, which was actually 1096. It was unclear to the general public why Rev. Cancun had taken the year of the Norman Conquest as the pivotal moment for the calendar hoax by the forces of Darkness. His own explanation that “1096 adds up to 16, whereas 1066 adds up to 13,” while numerically true (if there is some reason for such addition of constitute digits), seemed at best a bit odd. The same could be said of 904 and 934 for example. But Rev. Cancun did little to woo the public.

Yet his church, the Grand Convocation of the Missing Thirty, otherwise known as the Thirtyers, did not lack for members. Many, many people had been involved in one belief system or another that had seen great change as likely in 2000, if not indeed the very End of the World. And the great Psychic Depression of the Oughties contributed to his membership.

The basic tenets of the faith were five. First, the real End of the World would happen in 2030 (or, as they reckoned it, 2000). Second, the faithful needed to gather in a community that banned the evil Babylon calendar. Third, the consumption of fast foods was evil. Fourth, the taking of new names after tourist paradises was necessary—the Rev. Cancun’s birth name had been Trexler. Fifth, the avoidance of the World Wide Web, which had distracted all of us by promoting the myth of Babylon 2000, and thus tricking people out of the real End of the World. The odd nature of the beliefs (especially the tourist name-taking) gave the cult a good deal of publicity in the early Oughties. Both Rev. Cancun and his sister the Rev. Waikiki were interviewed great deal in those days, and although they avoided the WWW with great fear and loathing, a number of pages were kept about them.

But as the Psychic Renaissance of the Teens started such oddball faiths were usually forgotten, since by and large mankind had better things to do. The lure of the weird is always with us however and as the Babylon Calendar approached 2029, my editor wanted me to research the Thirtyers—see if any of them still hung on to the faith, how did they live, what were their fears at the coming millennium.

Information on the sect was very limited. The older pieces written decades before were easy to find in the GreatData Snowball, but nothing appeared after 2012. They had bought a small town in Oklahoma, the site of a bankrupt ashram. They had renamed their community 2X15, pronounced “Two ex Fifteen” apparently a private joke on Y2K, which my readers may remember as the buzzword used to describe the Millennium. Their desire to be cut off from the increasingly integrated WWW meant that didn’t even have phones or cable television. They didn’t even allow cars into their town, according to the 2012 article. I couldn’t rightly think of any appliance that wasn’t connected to the WWW. Could you imagine not being able to ask your refrigerator if it had ordered those carrots you like? They must live in a weird pre-animist world, thoroughly unlike the one we live in.

I decided to go there.

I had to find a horse, a real unmodified horse. But it was Oklahoma, after all.

The nearest town was Gilliam, Oklahoma, and nobody there knew anything about 2X15. “Nobody goes there. I think they all died or moved out a long time ago.”

I had to fully insure the horse. I was, after all, leaving to a new and unknown realm where people might keep time with knotted cords and slay one another with stone axes. I hoped that the folks of 2X15 hadn’t kept up with the ways of Babylon so they wouldn’t know that I had been modified, as at least half the world was.

I had downloaded some files on horse riding, and I setoff for the West. I had assumed that my satellite links would be active all the way there. I mean, the satellite net covers Africa and Asia and Antarctica—so I figured that Oklahoma was a sure thing.

So when the comforting voices began to fade out a few miles from the village, I was scared. I was going to be alone. I hadn’t been alone since I was seven or eight years old. I started to panic, and the horse, a chestnut gelding, felt my fear.

He galloped a little wildly, and I let out a scream. I almost fell, but grabbing the reins and concentrating on bringing the beast under control calmed me. When my horse stopped, all was quiet. I couldn’t will a message to anyone. I couldn’t ask for a map. I didn’t even know what time it was.

Have you ever not known what time it was?

Even unmodified humans have only to ask that question out loud, and something will answer—whether it is a coffee pot or their shoes.

I was in a different world. The primitive world.

This would make a great story.

I imagined billions of people downloading it.

I spurred my horse and we headed for the village of 2X15. It took me a moment to realize that the outer world was quiet as well. There were birds and insects, but no machines. As I approached the village, there were no animals. This puzzled me. I had read Rev. Waikiki’s diatribes against fast food, which any sane person would agree with now after the Burger Wars of the Twenties, but I had never seen any avocation of vegetarianism. Perhaps the cult had left the area—but how did they jam the satellite system? It could be that they had some arrangements with the folks running the system, but surely I would have found that in my researches.

When the village came in view, there was no movement on the streets, but the hanging corpses swayed in the wind.

Most light posts, trees, and flagpoles held a corpse. In other places the ropes had rotted or frayed and dumped their cargo at the base of the pole. My horse didn’t like this and whinnied with fear. I didn’t like it either, but I tied him to a tree outside of the village limits.

The road sign still stood. 2X15 No Babylon Time, No Babylon Channels Under Penalty of Death.

My first and biggest concern was that whoever had done the hangings was still around, but I saw that most of them had been hanged a long time. I immediately asked for information about corpses, and chills ran up my spine when no voice filled my head. I was truly in the Land of the Dead.

Some of the corpses were small. Children.

I walked into the town. There was a little square parking the center, overgrown and full of the oldest corpses—all mere skeletons at the base of trees, grass growing lush in their rib cages. Here is where the hangings must have started. The asphalt in the streets was rubble, and time (or some other mischievous agent) had broken many windows in the buildings.

Nothing was clearly the center of government, but there was an old post office on one side of the square. I went unhopefully, looking for some sign of what madness had over-taken the village.

The post office smelled very, very foul when I opened the doors. I realized then, that I hadn’t smelled anything from the corpses.

There wasn’t any light. I didn’t see any torches or kerosene lanterns, so I surmised that the Thirtyers had used electricity that they had generated somehow, but no one maintained the power plants any longer.

The windows were dirty, but there was enough light to see a strange statue behind the counter of an old man standing as though he were Atlas holding up the world. In front of the statue was a big book, a ledger of some sort filled with entries too cribbed to read in the dim light. I picked it up and took it outside.

They were names.

And crimes.

Randolph Riviera. Television.

Susan Las Vegas. Telephone.

Sharon Aspen. Data Download.

The first entries were written in a very legible handwriting, with dates (all thirty years too soon). But the handwriting got too large and more than a little shaky.

On the last page, I read the following.

Mary Waikiki. Vanity Search on Web 1999.

I am alone now. I can’t fight the urge to hold off my desire to speak. It is only a few months. I must be stronger. I must hold the world at bay. I must see in the Millennium.

I realized what the statue was, and I ran in.

“Rev. Cancun?” I asked.

The weird figure stirred a little.

“Can’t talk to anyone,” he said.

Than it/he tumbled forward. Suddenly my mind was filled with quiet prompts from the world-wide information system. I sent off a request for a medic, but they were too late. The Rev. Cancun had held off the world by will alone, stronger, in the end, than his flock, who had to turn to TV, and WWW, and other news. He came within two months of his 2000, and now he lives on as the most popular story of 2029.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DON WEBB was born in 1960 in Amarillo, Texas. His works range from a St. Martin Press mystery series, to poetry, and fiction and nonfiction books on the occult. He attended Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin. Don is the poster child of literary ADHD. He’s written a rock-’n’-roll song for French radio, the I-phone App “Office Ching,” and has done game design for FASA and TSR. He’s also penned a lot of horror stories. His mom says that Don is her favorite horror writer—after Ramsey Campbell! He’s been translated into twelve languages; ten of his poems have been published in Chinese in Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets.

He lives in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife Guiniviere and their cats Big Pig and Sascha. He cries at the sight of bluebonnets in the spring, the ending of the Whole Wide World, and losses of the Longhorn football team.

Table of Contents