Thrown by that horse, was his first jumbled thought. That worthless roan. He was not a terrible horseman; but that mare had looked at him with almost a feverish eye, and fought the bit. But deep as he was in the opium, and deep as his infatuation was with Mary Henneman (whose father owned this land for miles around), he had jerked the reins and imposed his will upon the beast. Now she had had her revenge.

With great effort, Gowan MacMillan lifted his head and looked down at his body, aware of profound pain through the haze of the drug – grave bodily injury – his leg especially. He saw the blood soaking his gray trousers below the knee, lay his head back and croaked, “Help.” With that he was exhausted, and closed his eyes. He could just fall back asleep – that was the wonder of laudanum. Whatever your condition, the tincture laid a calming hand upon your brow and said, “It’s all right, it’s always been all right, everything will always be all right.” Sweet Mother Poppy.

No, dear God. You could bleed out as you lie here, you idiot. The others may not even know where you are. With a great effort, he opened his eyes again, looked up at the forest canopy – the strangely thick and verdant forest canopy – and yelled with what strength he could muster, “Help! HELP!” Continue reading →

Reverently, Dr. Philippe Joubert placed his hand against the unyielding surface of the Worldwall. It was perfectly smooth, perfectly even, and in the midday light revealed their reflections readily; but up close it had a translucent quality – a smoky gray depth not apparent from a distance. “Like glass,” he breathed.

“Some say it’s made of pure diamond,” Durmoth reflected.

“A diamond ring around the world,” said MacMillan. “To mark what union, I wonder?”

Sykes laughed. “Ever the poet. It doesn’t look like any kind of metaphor to me.”

“And you, madame?” Joubert asked Bisette, who had pulled off a glove to stroke the wall delicately with her fingertips. “Are you impressed?”

“Impressed, yes,” she allowed, craning her head back at its nearly inconceivably height. Withdrawing, she pulled her glove back on. “But undaunted.”

Joubert clapped his hands once in admiration, laughing. “Bravo! Just so! Our patroness shows us the spirit, gentlemen. Onward and upward!” Continue reading →

When they reached the port of Tewabo, just a hundred and eighty miles north of the Worldwall, Joubert brought out two bottles of an excellent Almithean wine he had been hiding somewhere. He poured a modest glass for each present in the company chief’s dining room (minus the seamstress, who had recently embraced teetotalism), raised his own and said, “It may seem that our greatest obstacles are ahead, especially that single great obstruction that cuts our world in twain. But in reality our greatest difficulties are now behind us. We have travelled across the first the Galling Sea and then the Rolonia. It has been an impressive and instructive journey, such as few have made.

“But before we could set off, we had to assemble our supporters, convince and cajole those with wealth to part with it, not for hope of material gain, but for knowledge and glory. And even before that, we had to defy gravity itself, using our science to set humanity free from the mud from which it arose.”

Prolix bastard, Richard Durmoth thought, not for the first time. His eyes flicked across the table to the seamstress, Bisette, who refused to meet his gaze. Continue reading →

Her adoptive parents always said that Lili was a special girl, and on her fourth birthday they bought her a special toy. The box was quite heavy and half as large as she was, and when she tore open the wrapping, the cardboard came to life with animations, a cartoon bear speaking in a cartoon voice. “Hi there!” he said. “Are you Lili?”

“How does it know my name?” she said to her mother, amazed.

“It’s nanotech, baby. And we told the company when we bought it. Go ahead, answer. What’s your name?”

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It was a near thing, killing Gar. “GAR EAT!” he shouted, huge legs striding faster now, bigger than the biggest stalagmites, great feet shaking the ground. Eri ran for her life down the valley of the Bone Maze, approaching the pores where her own tribe lived. Probably the braver ones were crouched at the entrances now, expecting to see a gruesome end to the cleverest, fleetest, most redheaded kid they knew.

She looked back and gasped. Gar was running crouched over, his single great red eye fixated, mouth open in an avid smile to reveal teeth that would have shamed a dead dog. She was fast, but no one could sprint faster than a giant eighty feet tall. “GAR CATCH!” he roared, delighted with himself.

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As the red-hot brand touched his forehead, Bering did not stop singing; to do so would mean ejection from the pilgrimage, and an ignoble end to eight bone-wearying years of study, devotions and ceaseless deception. But the pain was incredible, like a lightning bolt from the hand of God, and involuntarily his deep baritone rose two octaves to a startling wail.

“Marked are you forever, forever are you marked,” intoned the preceptor, Marad, plunging the brand into the waiting bucket. Behind Bering, screened from the chancel, twelve other initiates still waited their turn, spared the sight of the pain that awaited them but not the smell, steam mingling with the potent scents of myrrh, hot metal, charcoal and charred flesh, a thick and heady miasma. Don’t pass out! Eight years you’ve spent!

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Note: This story follows upon an earlier one, “Jack in the Box.” Read it here.

In those halcyon days before the world ended, Jack had only two speeds: dead asleep or running full tilt. Even compared to other little boys he ran a lot, and ran fast, whether in a school hallway or on a soccer field. Now, on his first day in Hawaii, he flew across the sand to where his father, Lew, reclined on the beach. “Dad! I think there’s turtles over here!”

Lew chuckled. “Well, why don’t you go look at them?”

“They’re in the water.”

“So?”

“What if they bite me?”

“Sea turtles don’t bite.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Okay, I’m going to go look at them!” And with that he ran back, kicking up sand behind him, a four-foot whirlwind of joie de vivre. He was eight years old. Lew’s eyes misted, thinking of what was coming. Continue reading →

Among the fifty-three paintings bequeathed the world by artist and architect Edgar John Pettegree, one stands anomalous: Flat River, dated just weeks before his death in 1917. While nearly his whole oeuvre is infused with an architect’s eye for detail, Flat River appears to break with his previous work, eschewing realism for a hallucinatory, proto-Surrealist view of another world, often claimed to present a Blakeian vision of the voyage of the soul through the afterlife, painted in eerie premonition of his own death. However, as I will show, Pettegree himself regarded it as no mere visual metaphor, but a depiction of an actual repository of human souls, accessible via the occult powers of a former employer, silver baron Henry Magorian. That this indicated a precipitous collapse of Pettegree’s sanity cannot be doubted; but it is also true that far from sinking into a lax or vague imaginative effort, he applied the same rigor of craftsmanship to his final painting as in all his prior works. Continue reading →