Hybrid Fiction, Issue 1

Copyright Š 2020 Hybrid Fiction. All material appearing in Hybrid Fiction is copyright. Reproduction in whole or part is not permitted without permission in writing from the editor. All characters and events are fictitious. The publisher bears no responsibility and accepts no liability for the work herein.

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Table of Contents “Oh God, Not Again” by Jon Lasser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 What happens when a teleportation device goes wrong, and who handles the grief?

“The High City” by Bill Davidson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Sara and her daughter live in an ancient city perched on a column high above a scorched world. When disaster strikes, it becomes clear that nothing was ever as it seems.

“The Magic Black Pearl” by John H. Dromey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 A homicide detective investigates a fatal assault involving a coveted black pearl. As the case progresses, he can’t help but wonder whether or not the reputed magical properties of the pearl are real.

“Debrief” by Marc Rene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Inspired by our constant attempts to understand and face the unknown. Once we debrief, learn, and understand, we are able to grow stronger and prepare to take on even greater challenges.

“Ear Worm” by Lena Ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A young man named Elmer battles an alien ear worm intent on taking over Earth.

“A Hard Peace” by Eric Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 A down on his luck veteran can’t put the war behind him. When an old comrade offers him a once-in-alifetime job tracking down a dangerous weapon, he realizes he’s not the only one.

“Driving with Attitude” by Nestor Delfino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 In the near future, good driving companions will be easy to come by—although they might be a bit annoying.

“Darker” by Naomi Reinhart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Spelunking in a dragon’s cave.

“The Empty Garden” by Nathan Alling Long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 A young girl, raised by her artist father, is left to explore her new urban neighborhood on her own and discovers a mysterious walled-in garden with no apparent entrance.

“Aidis” by Bonnie Van Wormer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 A confused girl tries to figure out where she is, stumbling through memories of a hazy past and vague surroundings.

“Ghost Drive” by David Tallerman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 In a Victorian England that never was, Dolores Pulcifer flings herself and her experimental aircraft the Morgana into the final confrontation between a corrupt British empire and the vengeful forces of its American colonies.

“Eddie’s Dead, Baby!” by Eden Richards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Cyrus, a Necromancer, draws energy off of Eddie, his undead outlaw familiar, as they flee a city in the desert on a motorcycle while pursued by another mage.

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OH GOD, NOT AGAIN

By Jon Lasser

Lilly groaned when the teleportal burped and Tristan staggered through. No good deed went unpunished, she thought, but what a selfish thought that was.

Tristan raised what was left of his arms and opened his mouth, as if to ask where the rest of him had arrived, where his hands and his guts had gone, then collapsed onto what must have been an expensive carpet, and until recently a valuable one as well.

"Oh God." Hank ran over to Tristan and knelt beside him, right in the hazmat puddle. "Not again, Tristan—Oh, Tristan. I'm here, darling." He lifted Tristan's hand and kissed it softly, then turned away and wiped tears from his own cheek. In the dim light, Lilly could hardly make out the smear of Tristan's blood against Hank's dark skin. Hank turned toward her. "He's out cold.

Again."

Lilly blinked away the troubleshooting guide from her in-eye display and put down her multimeter. She helped Hank drag his glitched-out husband to the low wooden bed in the center of the tiny, but richly furnished, studio apartment. Things that shouldn't have been on his outside squished. Lilly wiped the sweat from her eyes. He was too heavy. Company policy said leave biohazards for the EMTs, and per their orders, she should be on the way to her next call, but sometimes the human element took precedence.

Two of the EMTs walked in from the hall. The short one in charge sat on the floor and took vital signs, then injected Tristan with something. How he could take so long to die with so much of him missing was a mystery to Lilly. Hank knelt by Tristan's side. He held his hand and whispered softly. Lilly reviewed the teleportal's latest diagnostic report.

She looked up when the hum began. Hank jolted as though coming awake.

"Oh God, no. Not again." Hank ran over to the teleportal's face in time for Tristan to stumble through for the eleventh time. Lilly stepped over to steady Hank who didn't look back as the EMTs dragged the previous body out into the hall.

Lilly brought the diagnostics back up. Hank, sobbing, knelt beside her in Tristan's blood again. It rippled away and made room. Those were some fancy jeans he had on.

"Can you fix it?" Hank asked. Not "Can't you fix him?" the way some people did, but it was Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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the same question.

"The diagnostics say nothing's broken." She shook her head. "It's like I said when I got here.

The team back at the office insists it isn't a warranty issue." She dropped her voice, even though nobody was listening. "You don't have an extended coverage plan. I shouldn't be here. But sometimes they miss something, so I'm going to double-check for you."

"They miss something?"

"Nobody's perfect." And Senior Internal Support's budget for legal settlements was limited, so it was always in their interest to make it a non-warranty issue. Lilly gestured toward the closet. "Where was he coming from?"

"Bardhaman. Outside where Kolkata used to be. He was picking up dinner. We were going to eat with some friends in—" Lilly glanced up as the EMTs carried the latest body into the hall. "Is Bardhaman on the certified list? The company won't cover—" The short EMT stepped over a bloodstain. Her hand fluttered as it lit on Hank's shoulder.

"I'm sorry. We're down to our last syringe." She cocked her head, as though listening through an earpiece for the right words to say. "They only give us twelve at a time. We're not allowed to keep more in the ambulance."

Not enough for a man dying repeatedly in a teleportal malfunction.

"Can't you just bring more in? There's a teleportal down the street—" The EMT shook her head. "Controlled substances act. We'd need a doctor to prescribe it."

She made a show of checking her watch.

"Your end looks to be fine, so the problem's in Bardhaman..." Lilly shook her head. If Tristan's image got corrupted after they dematerialized him, there wasn't any hope. She put her hand on Hank's. "It's time to shut it down."

"How do you know it's not here? You said—" "I know. I looked. This all checks out." They'd fine Lilly for staying this long, but they'd fire her if she didn't do the paperwork right. She blinked up the employee handbook on her eyepiece and read aloud. "I cannot make a legal determination as to whether the incident occurred at the deaccession point or at the reaccession point. Thus—" He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. "It's occurring right here, can't you see? Right here." He stared at her, away, at her again, his irises blurry behind tear-clouded contact lenses.

She put her hands on Hank's shoulders but as required, read the words from her virtual display. "Please consider this formal notification that assault of a licensed technician is a crime."

Whatever asshole wrote the handbook had never lost a loved one. Not like this. Hank hadn't meant any harm. She blinked away the manual and its legal boilerplate, then ran her hands down from Hank's shoulders all the way to his own chilly hands. She held them tightly.

"Let him go," she whispered. "Let him go."

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"Once more. Let me say goodbye."

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Her first time on a job like this, she'd been just as confused, just as focused on her own pain. Stuck in her own loop, as Tristan and Hank were stuck in theirs. The assholes who wrote the Field Manual could never have seen a glitched-out body with their own eyes, someone's husband, someone's daughter coming home in parts. They wouldn't know the right thing if it bit them in the ass. Helping people let go was an art, not a science. It didn't respect warranties or legal obligations, and it sure as hell didn't follow a script.

"You might not be afraid any more—" "Like hell. Every time is like the first time. Every time I think—" His voice caught, and he turned away from her. Did he see it now? What Tristan felt?

"For him, it's always the first time." Lilly stood and helped Hank to his feet. She led him to the empty bed, its sheets streaked brown with blood.

Hank groaned and lay down. Lilly nodded to the short EMT who whispered in his ear. He nodded, and the EMT gave him half a syringe to help him rest.

Lilly shut down the teleportal. Tristan had said enough goodbyes today. If images had souls, she hoped that his found peace,

and that Hank

dreamed of him with all his

parts in place.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

THE HIGH CITY

By Bill Davidson

Sara had lived all her life in the High City but had never seen it from afar. Still, she was confident she knew exactly what it looked like. She would explain it to Petra like this—put your forearms together and raise them high, hands curled open as though holding something safe.

Sometimes she would actually hold something, like a glass bowl.

Petra would play along, kneeling before her mother in the candlelight to put her finger at a point near the top of the bowl, maybe a third of the way down. “And we live here.”

“Just a bit higher, honey.”

Petra, dark-haired like her mother but skinny, all elbows and knees in her rough smock, frowned.

“Mrs. Teed says the city is more like a rose. That’s why sometimes a petal will drop to the ground.”

A massive petal of stone, thick with stairs and tight alleys, densely packed homes and shops.

Cleaving from the ancient structure with every soul inside, to plummet through the clouds and shatter on the ground, far below. Feeling irritated with her daughter’s teacher, Sara turned to what was once no more than a blank wall as recently as a month ago.

Now, it was a window, opening onto the star strewn night. She put her glass down and walked there, leaning on the rail to gaze out at the open sky. She marvelled at this astonishing sight, still slightly overwhelmed to live within the city and yet be able to see outside. The sky, as Petra liked to say, went on forever.

The other side of the rail wasn’t the abyss—not quite. There was a set of stone stairs, climbing past, narrow and steep and clinging stubbornly to the side of the structure. They led upwards to her left, rising towards a door, or curved downwards out of sight, even if she leaned out to try to see where they led. Perhaps they simply crumbled to nothing.

Before the collapse, Sara had known nothing of these stairs or the door, which was stark white and squared off like nothing else in this city of curves and angles. Nobody could ever know the labyrinth of dwellings and passageways that jumbled and crawled over each other inside the High City. The ancient stonemasons who built this place, whoever they were, had Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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made no plans, or if they had, they were as lost and forgotten as the builders themselves.

Sara had seen no one using the stairs, and for all she knew, the door itself was just a remnant of what was here before and might lead to nothing more than a deadfall. Such a thing was not unknown.

She had warned Petra, don’t trust a foot on those steps. Even the thought of her daughter on that edge made her almost physically sick.

Petra joined her on the veranda and linked her arm to gaze companionably into the distance. At only eight years old, she could just see over the rail, and after a few seconds, she turned her big dark eyes to her mother.

“Are you ever scared, Mummy?”

Sara didn’t have to ask of what. She stomped her foot on the flagstone, twice, as hard as she could.

“The High City is the safest place in all the world, honey. It will keep us safe forever.”

She pulled her daughter to her, wanting her close and not wanting her to see the tears that had started in her eyes. She turned again to the starry million miles.

“What’s more we have a home on the outside, girl. Something your Mrs. Teed would do well to wish for herself.”  That night, Sara had the nightmare, the one that had dogged her for years now. It began, as always, with light—blinding and white.

In real-life, Sara lived with the gentle amber glow of candles and lamps, the yellow of sunshine, and the blue of the sky. Real light was never white.

In her dream, though, everything was bleached of colour by a harsh whiteness that seemed to hold her flat so that she couldn’t move so much as a finger. As unnaturally bright as it was, she could discern the shape of what could only be people moving and looming over her. She could hear hard voices and alien tones and chirps of sound that owed nothing to reality as there was nothing on earth that could make such noises. If she focused, she could almost make out words, but they were whispered, sly and low. In this dream world, she knew nothing about her surroundings or herself—nothing except for the worst thing that could ever be known. Petra was dead.

When she woke in the morning, Sara did what she always did after she’d had the dream. She crept across to her daughter’s cot to find her pink and healthy and sleeping. She squatted, having to watch the girl’s narrow chest rise and fall more than once before her disquiet could be banished. Even then, it didn’t fade entirely as anxiety for Petra was Sara’s natural state. She swept a lock of long black hair from her daughter’s face, but carefully, that she would not wake her.

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the ancient stone, and water was cascading from the sides while the internal falls would be in full spout, flowing down to the Great Lake.

Sara walked to the edge of heaven and looked into the blue, dipping her cup into a jug of fresh rainwater she kept there. She leaned on the rail and breathed deeply, enjoying the morning sun on her face. For once there was no haze of mist or cloud stretching out below, and Sara smiled to gaze at the dramatic shapes of the mountains on the horizon.

Some believed the old tale that the High City had once been a mountain itself, the highest in all the world, carved into a great pillar to hold a city safe, a mile above the burning earth.

Certainly, the ground below seemed charred and featureless and, so far as she knew, nobody had ever attempted to walk the ancient stairway all the way to the foot.

Sara didn’t like to dwell on that, because in a way she couldn’t understand, it caught the ragged edge of her nightmare. So, when a trio of gliders soared out from the city, she gratefully turned her attention to them.

They flew effortlessly; the thermals pushing their brightly painted wings so that they rose higher as they went. As always when she saw the gliders, it lifted her spirits and she shaded her eyes, smiling broadly. Also as always, she tried to put herself there, imagine what it would be like to soar so far clear of the city, free and without a care. Still, it gave her a strange twinge of nervousness, just to think of being someplace where the city did not surround her, and where she might fall.

She fixed all her attention on one slim woman, watching as she turned and tilted her wing in graceful loops before rising, weightless in the sky.

“One day,” she whispered, “I will fly.”

After their usual simple breakfast, Sara and Petra lit their lamps and left the house, following the curving corridor into a labyrinth that would have been solid dark were it not for people about their business, each of them with their own lamp. Sara and Petra trotted up one set of steps then down another, following path after path until the way became lighter and they emerged onto a blindingly sunlit deck.

If the High City could be described as a gigantic rose, it was fully open, and its centre was a massive confusion of green terraces and waterfalls tumbling over vegetation and stone to where the Great Lake glimmered in the sun.

Dousing their lamps, Sara and Petra kissed briefly, then parted ways—Petra to her dance school while her mother began the long climb to the family farm on a terrace in the upper reaches of the city. It was not a large plot, but the soil was rich and it was well favoured for both sun and water, ideal for orange and avocado trees and other fruit.

Other small-holders were already sweating in the sun, hoeing and weeding—the daily toil of a farmer. One or two lifted a hand to Sara as she passed, some even grunted, but nobody went so far as to pass the time of day, which was all fine and well. Farmers, more than other people, seemed comfortable with silence.

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Sara spent a long, back-breaking morning picking fruit and soon enough, had to ferry fully loaded baskets down to market, which was no easier on the back and a lot harder on her burning leg muscles. The market, in the mid-afternoon, was a busy and bustling place, filled with the voices of traders calling and customers haggling, and the scent of fish, fresh from the lake.

Other stalls held pungent spices, lamp oil or candles, cloth to make clothes, and leather for shoes.

Sara delivered her last basket and agreed terms with Master John, her factor. John was an old and stooped man who seldom smiled, but had been the family factor since she had been a girl, and was scrupulously fair.

After they had completed their dealing, the old man fixed her with a strange, lopsided look, squinting in the sun. Clearly, a question was coming and she felt she knew what it would be. It was the same one everybody asked.

“I don’t want to appear rude, my dear, but may I enquire what it was like?”

Even though she didn’t have to ask, still she did. “What what was like?”

“You were at home, were you not, when part of our city peeled away?”

She nodded. “It was a night like any other. Petra and I were getting ready for bed.”

“Ah. Just so. I see it in my mind’s eye. And what, if you are able to speak of it, did you hear?

Was there a prodigious great rumbling and a-quaking?”

In truth, Sara did not like to speak of it, and far less recall the sound of her neighbours’ homes shearing away from the great ball of the city. Her mind sometimes balked altogether, but she had learned that she could talk about it, using words that she herself managed not to dwell upon.

“It didn’t rumble or quake, as you would imagine, Master John.”

The man’s eyes came open and he leaned in, the better to hear this from one who had experienced it herself, and so recently.

“No?” “No. The first sound…” And now she did wince from the memory. “…Was as much like a shriek as anything else. A terror of the soul.”

John put his hand over his mouth, eyes opening even wider. “A shriek? As though the city was crying out in pain?”

“Just so. Then a strange crumpling noise, and huge shatterings of glass, all so loud that I heard it in my bones.”

The old man shook his head. “It sounds like a great horror. What on earth did you do, dear?”

“My thought was only of Petra. I dragged her from her cot, and we stood dumfounded to watch the far wall of our little house move away from us, dust and crumbs of stone filling the air.

It moved away and came back. Moved and came back. Then, it simply fell, and where there were once shops and houses there was only the sky.”

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Sara stuttered to a halt, finding that she had done exactly what she had set out to avoid. She had let the memory of that night come fully to her mind, and as always, it dragged with it the ragged edge of nightmare—herself lying on a

bed in the white room.

“Sara! Sara!”

She came back to herself to find Master John before her, his old fingers curling on her upper arms and something like panic in his face. Others were turning to see what was wrong.

She put her hands up, trying to reassure him. “Don’t worry.

Everything is alright.”

But it was very far from alright. In all the times she had suffered through that horrible dream of over-white light, it had never occurred to her that she was in a room. Or that she had been lying on a bed.

John was falling over himself to apologise. “I should never have pried, my dear. I curse myself for an old fool.”  That night, Sara stayed awake long after Petra had fallen asleep, dousing her lamp to sit in starlight on her veranda. The mountains were a ragged line of velvet black below the great wheel of the stars.

A sound then froze her where she sat—footsteps on the stairway below. The steps were slow, which was hardly surprising as the climber’s feet could only be inches from a crumbling edge and black mile of sky, but they were also laboured, and accompanied by a rhythmic grunt and gasp. The climber sounded close to the end of their strength.

Sara held her breath as the top of a man’s drooping head came into view. Another grunting step and she could see his face, and what a strange face it was. He had no beard, this man, despite having grey hair, which itself had been cropped tight to his head. Sara had heard of people shaving and cutting their hair, but had never, in all her life, seen such an oddity.

His clothes, too, were unlike anything she had ever seen, closely tailored to his body and of a Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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fine weave, dark, except for a pure white collar.

He was almost past when his eye fixed on her and widened.

“Sara. You are awake!”

Before she could reply, he seemed to recover himself. “I’m so sorry.” He said, “I didn’t see you there. And I was so…”

She held up a hand. “Don’t concern yourself, neighbour.”

The man nodded. He was, she saw, very pale, with a high forehead.

Sara pointed to the white door. “Is that where you live?”

He turned, taking a moment to look at it, before coming back to her. “Yes.” “And do you come here every night?”

“I come when I can.”

“It sounds as if you are sore tired.” Then she said, “You know my name.”

He performed a strange little bow, seeming embarrassed. “I know many things.”

She watched as he turned and continued on his way, climbing to the white door. He unlocked it and was gone.  After that night, Sara would often remain awake to see the man and pass a few words; although, he did not always come before she went to bed. She took to leaving out apples or other fruit, or sometimes the remains of a meal, and in the morning, they were always gone.

The evening before the collapse that saw her own home, the one that she thought so cosy and secure, falling to the ground, he arrived with his usual grunting and panting. He leaned on the rail to catch his breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“You must climb a long way, neighbour.”

“It is a hard climb. Thank you for your kindness.”

She smiled and dropped her eyes. “It is nothing.”

“It is something. Here.”

He slid his hand onto the rail palm down, and when he removed it, a short, flat key of shiny metal sat there. Like everything else to do with this strange man, it was unlike any key she had ever seen.

“What is this?”

He pointed up the steps to the white door. “There may come a time when you need it.”

So saying, he bowed and continued his painful walk.  The next morning, Sara woke with a question in her mind and after hurrying through her Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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chores of hoeing and weeding, began climbing.

The very highest terraces of The High City had never held a great attraction for her so windswept and sun baked were they, but now she grunted and gasped up flight after flight of steps until she stood, high atop the city, so that she could look down and see everything.

As breath-taking as that was—literally, given the wind that blew up here—that was not why she had come. Sara had always thought that the gliding folk would congregate up here, perhaps with their learned teachers, imagining them chatting and laughing as they tinkered with their frames and the workings of their wings.

And yet, here she was quite alone on a deck holding three or four gaudily painted wings.

She approached the nearest nervously, partly because she had never touched one but mainly because this deck had no rail or guide rope. It only had an edge, and that was where the wings were to be found.

The wind too seemed unreliable and wilful here, gusting fitfully from beneath the High City, so that, even without assistance from poles and canvas, she felt herself lifted. As if she weighed less up here.

She ran her hand along the wing. It felt so flimsy, and yet she had seen how a grown man could hang in the harness beneath them. Alone up here, there was nothing to stop her, she realised, nobody to tell her no. She could crouch below this bright red wing, clip herself in and in three long steps she would be flying—or falling. The idea was so intoxicating, her legs shook.

She looked around, but the deck was still deserted, except for her, the enticing wings, and the wide, wide sky. Her heartbeat so hard that it felt like it was in her throat. She could do it, now. She could fly.

But no, enough of such fancies. She lived, she knew, not for herself. She lived for Petra.

Puffing a shuddering breath into the wind, she took a long step back away from the edge.

Then another and another.  It was later than usual when she and Petra arrived home that evening, and Sara was distracted. The school had put on one of its regular shows, and this time, Petra had been allowed a solo dance that all had admired.

It was nothing unusual for Sara to find her eyes full of tears when watching her skinny daughter on stage. Of course, she knew every step, having had to witness the performance over and over a hundred times, something the parent of any performer must put up with. So, she had seen it through from clumsy stumbles to wrong turns and forgotten moves to virtually perfect.

But it was different seeing Petra on stage. What mother would not hold herself tight and then feel her chest all but split with pride when it went well? Petra the smallest on the stage, and yet the centre of everything.

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before the performance. Sara knew them well enough by now, knew their names at any rate, but she had skirted the group with the briefest nod and quickly took her seat, and nobody tried to seek her out. They had learned not to, she understood that well enough.

When coming home, it had been beyond the little girl to simply walk. She bounced and twirled along the passageway, skipping and hopping in the dim light of her mother’s lamp, humming the song she had danced to. When she reached the door to their little home, she burst straight through, and the sudden gust of wind from the open window blew Sara’s lamp out, leaving them in darkness.

Darkness should not frighten a citizen of the High City. It was the natural state, but Sara cried out. She stepped through the door and swept her hand across the wall to her right, searching.

Light flashed and flickered in the centre of the room where Petra squatted with a flint over the now-lit table lamp. She put her head to one side and stared and her mother, who stood frozen, her hand caught, still in the act of sweeping the wall by the door.

“What are you looking for, Mummy?”

Sara stared at the wall and her hand questing for something only it seemed to know about and almost caught a memory, but it was gone.

She laughed and stepped all the way into the room. “I’m just being silly. Will you do your dance again right through? Just for me this time.”

Petra rolled her eyes as though this were a great trial and favour to ask. Then, she started dancing. Sara moved to sit on her low couch, pouring herself a glass of wine and smiling as her daughter danced and twirled, framed against a violet evening sky.

Petra had just finished her last pirouette when the sound Sara feared above all others came—a shriek so loud that she felt it in her heart. With a deep trembling and shaking, a crack opened across the floor inches in front of her toes. Between her and Petra.

For a second she stared at her daughter, who had fallen against the veranda rail and was staring back at her. The crack opened further, a finger’s span, a hand’s, the floor of her home angling away from her, and Petra with it.

Sara straightened as the rocking slice of stone came back, the crack grinding closed again, and stretched her arms out.

“Run to me, honey!”

Petra wasn’t about to run. That much was obvious. She squatted against the rail and was holding tight, her eyes so wide that white showed all the way around. So, it was Sara who ran to her as the world shrieked once more and tipped around her. The noise filled the air as the floor angled away again.

By the time she reached her daughter, the angle was so steep it was hard to stay upright.

She fell, ramming against the rail with Petra now in her arms, the girl clinging hard.

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The stairs below were already crumbling, falling away. The steps above the rail, though, looked the same as ever. Ignoring her desperate squeals, Sara tore Petra’s hands away and screamed at her to grab on. Then, she threw her daughter from her with all the strength that desperation could offer, over the rail and at the higher steps.

The girl bounced and skittered sideways, her legs sliding dangerously out into space. She scrabbled hard, though, and caught herself, pressing her face against the stone as she scrambled fully onto the steps.

The house was falling. Sara could feel it. She was about to jump herself, not sure if she could make the widening gap, when she thought about the key. In the moment her eye fell upon it, it slid from the rail. Sara snatched at it, catching it in her fingers. Then, she made her own desperate leap.

The collision of bone against stone sparkled throughout her body, knocking the breath from her, but she held on. She squeezed her eyes shut as the wind and dust from the fall of stone behind her and swept across. Seconds ticked by before the shuddering crash from far below reached her.

Mother and daughter lay for a while, panting, clutching onto a stairway that led down to nothing. Finally, though, Sara rose, but gingerly, not wanting to give these narrow steps an excuse to ease loose and fall.

Together, they gained their shaky knees and then their feet, and climbed. The door, once they reached it, was made of neither stone nor wood. Its surface was smooth white and unnaturally flat and shiny. Sara slid the key into a slot of metal where it clicked with weird precision, opening the door silently.

Behind was a passageway, but it did not look like any passageway Sara had known. It was lit, but no torches could be seen, and the walls were straight and flat. Petra bent to touch the slick floor, then stood, grimacing and rubbing her hand on her smock.

“I don’t like this place, Mummy.”

“Neither do I.” “I don’t even know what it’s made of.”

There was nothing for it, though, but to walk the unending passage. It did not wind, nor climb nor fall. And it did not change.

After a while, both of them clinging tight to one another, came to a set of double doors of glazed glass that could not be seen through. Light shone through, though, and it was bare white.

Sara didn’t know how long she stood there before she became aware that Petra was shaking her and calling her name.

“What?”

Her daughter was crying hard, looking terrified. “Mummy!”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Davidson

"The High City"

“What?”

“We have to go through.”

She shook her head. “I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

Sara couldn’t give her answer, because it was my nightmare is in there. The one in which you

are dead, my love.

Still, she could not stand here forever, so she placed her hand against the door and pushed.

Sara and Petra shuffled into a room of enormous whiteness, clinging even tighter. The room was mid-sized and so bright that it was hard to see anything clearly.

Just like her dream—except that her daughter was there, alive and as solid and clear as ever she had been. She was also, plainly, terrified.

She whispered, “What are those sounds, Mummy?”

Sara had never been able to comprehend the noises in her dream, and she couldn’t now.

Unable for the moment to speak, she shook her head, then nodded to the far side of the room where a black rectangle of sky showed.

Together, keeping to the wall, they sidled along, neither of them wanting to cross the central space. Even though it was no great way, it took a long time because they were both so slow and scared. When they reached it, Sara’s knees almost gave way. She had used all her internal strength, hoping against everything that this was the way out, but there was no escape. It was a deadfall.

She stood for a moment with her toes on the threshold of the night, clutching Petra close, then turned to look down at her. This was her dream, her terrible nightmare, and yet the girl lived. Her daughter’s tearstained face stared up into hers, willing her to find an answer.

Together, they turned back to the terrible room.

“What is this place?”

Petra’s voice was so tiny that Sara could barely hear it, but she did hear another voice when it suddenly spoke, talking low. Although she could not see who was speaking, she recognised it as the climbing man.

Who whispered, “Be ready. I think she might be waking.”

For an instant, no more than that, Sara thought she could see shadowy figures moving around, a mirage of white on white.

The man’s voice came again, a questioning whisper, but louder as though he was closing in.

“Sara?”

Feeling that time was running out, she dropped to her knees, bringing her daughter around to face her. “Do you trust me?”

The girl’s eyes were wet and terrified. Still, she nodded.

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"The High City"

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The sky was black, but the light in the room was so harsh and white that it blotted out the stars. Sara stood and hoisted her daughter, feeling the wiry dancer’s legs instantly clamping tight around her waist.

She kissed her, letting her lips linger on Petra’s beautiful, soft brow. Then she pushed the girl’s face into the crook of her neck and ran towards the darkness. For a second, there were chirps and beeps and panicked voices, but then they were flying, far out in the night.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

THE MAGIC BLACK PEARL

By John Dromey

Sunlit by day and candlelit by night, Hippolyte Crane’s Enchanted Emporium had a reputation for being dark in more ways than one. The diurnal solar rays had to fight their way through heavy curtains. The nocturnal wax-embedded glowing wicks did not keep each other company. Instead, they were widely spaced around the store.

Rumor had it the proprietress never slept. Leastways, she always seemed to be looming over the shoulders of customers when questions arose or hovering near the cash register when a purchase was imminent.

Day or night, timorous patrons could roam the murky aisles in relative obscurity. The dark passages were uncluttered.

In sharp contrast to an overall atmosphere of gloom and doom, energy-efficient electric lights with brief time delay switches—triggered, as needed, by pressure detectors under the floorboards—illuminated merchandise of interest. Most of the stock in trade was sinister, either in origin or design.

The majority of the intermittently well-lit display cases were unlocked. Their window-grade glass covers were designed to keep out dust, nothing more. The appearance of easy pickings for sticky-fingered shoppers was deceptive. For miscreants in the know, that simple fact was abundantly clear by news circulating on the underground grapevine. Reputedly, the statuesque owner had punitively shapeshifted one of their larcenous number into a rat. Afterwards, his fellow smash-and-grab thieves avoided the place like the plague. With good reason. While in his rodent state, the unsuccessful robber supposedly visited his fence seeking sympathy. A flea hopped from one to the other, and the receiver of stolen goods later succumbed to the Black Death. Word got around. Savvy shoplifters stayed away in droves.  “Is that a genuine, natural black pearl?” a browser asked.

“It is,” Hippolyte said.

“May I examine it more closely?”

“No.” Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Dromey

"The Magic Black Pearl"

18

“Why not?”

“Strict orders from the owner. The pearl is here on consignment.”

“What if there’s a hidden blemish?”

“I assure you the pearl is flawless. In appearance, at least. I can’t speak with authority about its other attributes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Other enchanted items of its ilk—genies in bottles, for instance—are often associated with the granting of three wishes. This organic gemstone is different. Allegedly, its occult power source entertains only one wish from each individual holder of the pearl. In addition, it grants only every third wish. Bad luck for both the preceding and the following two supplicants. Really bad luck.”

“I want it anyway. I know just the person to give it to. The listed price, however, is exorbitant.

Will the owner take less?”

“I can ask her.”

“I’ll be back.”  “I’m here for the black pearl provided the price has been reduced.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s no longer available. A man came in and paid the full price without haggling. No questions asked. He wouldn’t even listen to my warnings of potential danger.”

“Who was he?”

“I probably shouldn’t say. Customer confidentiality and all.”

“Was he a wizard?”

“No.” “In that case, I’m willing to offer a finder’s fee for information on the holder of a black pearl reputed to have magical properties.”

“That’s different. Get out your wallet. I’ll get you his name and address.”  Chet Baker turned up unannounced at Lloyd Byron’s modest bungalow which was located at the end of a cul-de-sac. The visitor used the striker on the door’s antique brass knocker to announce his arrival.

The owner opened the door a crack and peaked out at the unfamiliar caller. “Go away.”

The latter leaned his full weight against the oaken panels and forced the door open. Once inside, Chet wasted no time with small talk. “I’m here for the pearl. Hand it over.”

“Not on your life. I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to ask for.”

“Where is it?”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Dromey

"The Magic Black Pearl"

“I’m not telling.”

“I’ll find it for myself then.”

The intruder tied Lloyd hand and foot and left him sitting in an easy chair to observe a thorough search of the room he occupied and to listen to the—at times—raucous ransacking of the rest of the house that followed.

Chet returned to the front room empty-handed. A double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall near a fireplace. He picked up the firearm.

“I wish you’d go away!” Lloyd cried.

“Oh, oh. I think you just used up your wish. It didn’t work, though. I’m still here.” He pointed the shotgun at his captive’s legs and pulled back the hammer for the first barrel.

“It’s loaded with blanks,” Lloyd said.

Chet pulled the trigger. “You were right. Smoke and noise, but no damage. I wish this had turned out differently.” He raised the shotgun to point at Lloyd’s chest and pulled back the other hammer.

“No, don’t shoot! I’ll tell you!”

“This is fun,” Chet said. He pulled the second trigger. His target slumped down in the chair and played dead.

At first, the shooter wondered if the crimson spot on Lloyd’s chest was an indication the wadding for the shell was made of red paper. The homeowner’s death rattle told a different story.

Chet tried to flee the scene, but he was stopped by a patrol officer responding to a noise complaint.  Detective Jacobs interviewed Chet Baker at length.

Later, the homicide investigator consulted with the medical examiner Dr. Miriam Webster.

“Cause of death was a black pearl penetrating the heart of the deceased.”

“That’s consistent with the shooter’s story. He was seeking to steal an enchanted gemstone reputed to grant every third wish. According to his somewhat convoluted tale, unbeknownst to him, before his arrival the pearl was concealed in the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with blanks. While he was there, the homeowner made a trivial wish which didn’t come true.

When Chet picked up the shotgun, he became a temporary albeit unwitting possessor of the pearl. He, too, made an off-the-cuff wish which was not granted. As a result, the enchanted pearl not only scorned their two wishes but sent extremely bad luck their way, effectively making both of them victims. That is, one was killed by the shotgun which functioned as a muzzleloader, and the one who pulled the trigger is likely headed to prison for life. Where’s the pearl now?”

“It’s in the evidence locker.”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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Dromey

"The Magic Black Pearl"

20

“By the way, I don’t suppose you’ve made a wish anytime lately, have you, Miriam?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. I have a ritual. At the beginning of every post mortem exam, I cross my gloved fingers and make a wish.”

The detective struggled to hide his disappointment. “I’m curious. What do you wish for?”

“Well, if you must know, I hope someday soon I’ll win a big jackpot and never have to perform another autopsy in my life.”

“Have you played the lottery recently?”

“Sure. I have a mega-millions ticket in my pocket right now.”

Detective Jacobs looked at his watch. “The drawing should be over by now. Don’t hold your breath, but—if I were you—I’d check the winning numbers.”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

EAR WORM

By Lena Ng

Elmer, for the sixty-third time that day, hummed that stupid song in his head out loud.

“Tooda do, tooda dee, tooda doodle do,” he sang. He hummed it as he filled the coffee machine. He hummed it as he took a shower. He aggravated everyone around him on the bus and while waiting in line at the Value Mart. Damn earworm, as his mother would say, for a snippet of song stuck in a mental loop. It played over and over in his mind. In some faint way, Elmer knew how annoying he was. But he couldn’t get it out of his head.

He was humming that blasted song later that evening as he was emptying the dishwasher. In the middle of the refrain— CRASH Something big had banged against the house. It rattled the aluminum siding. A discharge of blue light filled his country-style kitchen. Cautiously, he peered out the kitchen window.

Squinting against the blue light, Elmer stared at the smoking hole in his yard, the grass flattened and burnt. A large rock, glowing a faint blue with a surface pocked with craters and larger than his head, indented the centre of his carefully manicured yard. A meteorite with an interesting, radiation-blue glow.

Elmer’s heart leapt with excitement. A gift from the cosmos. And it could hold aliens. Aliens!

All his life he had awaited their arrival. He had the tinfoil hats (which he shaped into antennae, all the better to hear them with), the bug-eyed, big-headed plastic models, and the complete series of The X-Files on DVD, lovingly watched and re-watched as he had developed—as most fans had—a fierce crush on Dana Scully. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he—Elmer P. Elmsdale— discovered extraterrestrial life?

He threw off his apron as he raced from the house. Elmer stood at the edge of the smoking hole and stooped to examine his find. A beautiful, smoking, glowing rock. As the smoke dissipated and the glow slowly dampened, Elmer extended a hand and cautiously touched the rock. Warm, but not hot. Rough. He placed a hand on either side of the rock and loosened it from his yard. It wasn’t too heavy when he picked it up and brought it back into the house.  On the coffee table, the blue light faded away at last. “Hello?” Elmer called out to the rock.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Ng

"Ear Worm"

“Is there anybody in there?” He studied the rock from every angle—from eye level on the coffee table, from directly overhead, from lying on the floor. He examined it with a magnifying glass.

He peered into its crevasses. He poked, with a pencil, its craters. He rocked it and tapped it and turned it over and over.

Just as Elmer was about to give up and go to bed, a trio of tiny eyes on a tiny round head burst out of the rock. It was as if someone glued a triangle of plastic eyes on the head of a blue earthworm. Elmer shrank back. The worm did as well. Elmer leaned forward. “Hi, little guy,” Elmer cooed. “Don’t be frightened.”

The worm made a trilling sound as it again poked out of the rock. “Aww,” Elmer said. “You have nothing to worry about, I come in pe—” Emitting a small cloud, the worm shot out of the rock. Elmer felt a slimy jolt and an alarming wriggle. He clapped a hand over his ear. What the heck? Damn thing invaded his ear canal. He poked in his pinky and rooted around. <Cut that out,> the voice inside his ear said.

Elmer and his little finger halted. He plucked his finger out of his ear. “Uhh, what’s going on?”

A small, unnerving waggle. < I’m a traveller exploring the galaxy.> “Does it have to be in my ear?” <It’s a fast and easy way to get around. No limbs, you see. Undetectable, too. Most people are hostile to aliens, human or otherwise. All this ‘alien abduction’ and ‘they’re stealing our jobs’ business giving us a bad rap.> Elmer thought about what the worm said, and it seemed to make sense. “What do you want me to do?” <Just go about your day. We can start in the morning.> Elmer went upstairs and tried to get some sleep. In the comforts of Elmer's ear canal, the worm gave a light, trilling snore.  Elmer staggered into the bathroom. He turned on the shower. After running for two minutes, the glass shower doors began to steam up. Worm or no worm, Elmer couldn’t help but relax while standing under the hot water. “Tooda do, tooda dee, tooda doodle do,” he sang as he soaped away.

As Elmer dried off, his singing filled the small bathroom. As he started shaving, the worm popped its head out, assessing them both in the steamy mirror. <Why are you singing that song all the time?> “I’ve got an earworm.” <Another one?> “It’s deep in my brain, and I can’t get rid of it.”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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"Ear Worm"

24

Elmer felt the alien worm pop back into his ear. It squirmed, burrowing deeper. <How did it get in there?> Elmer’s nerves went off like a five-alarm fire. “My brain? What's it to ya?” <Just askin’. Not like we're trying to take over Earth.> "WHAT?" <Haha,> the worm laughed weakly with a trio of shifty eyes.  Elmer spent the next day announcing his exciting discovery. He called up his parents who listened patiently. He resurrected a long-abandoned blog. He posted it on Facebook and got thirty-seven “Likes.” He called NASA and left a voicemail.

Over the next week, Elmer showed the worm the town. They went to the aquarium and ogled the octopuses. They skipped on the freshly-cut grass in the park, carefree as little girls.

They munched on popcorn at the movies. They browsed for avocados at the farmer's market; they puzzled over post-modern art at the gallery; they cruised through the Science Center, where, when asked about its home planet, the worm vaguely waved to the space left of Neptune.

But, after two weeks, like the saying of fish and guests, the worm overstayed its welcome.

The constant tickle of the alien grew into a deep-seated itch, a rash which seemed to extend into Elmer's brain.

After another busy day of sight-seeing, an exhausted Elmer asked, while flopping on the couch, "When are you going?" The itching was slowly driving him crazy. Maybe the worm shed a protein that sensitized him over time. He had taken to walking around with a Q-tip in his ear, disregarding his ridiculousness.

In contrast, the alien worm stretched out in its comfortably-warm, ear canal abode. <Thanks for taking me around. I really like it here. I think I'll stay.> "In my ear?" <Why not?> "You can't stay there." <Why not?> "Because you're itchy and wiggly and you talk all the time. No offense." <You constantly hum to yourself and you smell like salami and—I don’t even have hands— but I know you scratch yourself in terrible places. No offense.> Elmer jammed the Q-tip around in his ear. The worm stretched, dodged, and ducked. "You get out, or I'll get you out."

The worm crawled in deeper than Elmer's Q-tip dared to follow. <Make me.> Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Ng

"Ear Worm"

 Deep in the emergency room, surrounded by impatient, suffering patients, Elmer was causing a commotion. He was screaming, "I said, get out, get out, GET OUT!" Each “get out” was punctuated with a punch, from Elmer's own fist, to the side of Elmer's own head. The triage nurse, wearing a starched white cap and uniform, pretended to review some paperwork as she inched her hand under the desk to the panic button.

Elmer realized the rest of the patients were staring at him. He snatched the paperwork from the triage desk and shuffled to an empty seat in the crowded waiting room, digging fruitlessly with his finger into the offending ear.

A few seats over, nudging his son, an annoyed dad pointed at Elmer and said in a loud stage whisper, "And that's why you don't stick anything in your ear."

The alien worm started giggling. <Guess you didn't listen to your dad.> "You leave my dad out of this." <Your momma…> "YOU LEAVE HER OUT OF THIS!” Elmer roared. More shocked stares, and Elmer muttered through the side of his mouth, “Can you keep it down? Everyone thinks I’m crazy.” <If you had some discretion, people would think you were talking on a cell phone.> “You know about cell phones?” <I'm a talking, travelling, interplanetary worm. We're waaaay past cell phones.> Finally, Elmer's name was called to be assessed by the physician. A gangly, cadaverous doctor ushered him into an evaluation room with a white tiled floor and glaring fluorescent lights. After Elmer nervously settled into the examination chair, the doctor intoned, "From all the screaming and punching in the waiting room, you sound like you're having a psychotic break.

How long have you been hearing voices?"

Elmer gripped the chair's padded arms like he was riding a rollercoaster at Disneyland. "I'm not crazy, just look in my effing ear!" <Haha, earth fool. Think you can get rid of me so easily?> "Get out of there!" <Never!> Humoring the bellowing, belligerent nutcase, the doctor hummed to himself as he calmly poked at Elmer's ear canal with his medical tools. His invading utensils halted. "What do we have here?" He gave an excited chuckle. "A blue-coloured parasite. Don't see one of those every day."

The doctor rummaged in a drawer for a syringe of lidocaine which would kill the worm, and a stainless steel hook.

Elmer felt a shotgun blast of air as the worm burst from his ear. As though the worm had pulled a parachute's ripcord, in an eruption of tremendous growth, the alien worm transformed into a massive, three-eyed, Jabba-the-Hut-sized slugbeast. It stretched open its cavernous Hybrid Fiction February 2020

25

Ng

"Ear Worm"

26

mouth and— GULP The corpse-like doctor disappeared down the alien worm's gaping black hole of a maw.

The explosion of air shot Elmer across the room. The room went black as his head bounced off a wall. He felt the cold tiles slam into his face as his cheek hit the floor.  Blink.

Blink blink.

Blink blink blink.

With the palm of his hand, Elmer smeared crusty saliva across his swollen face as he picked himself off from the floor. Surgical instruments lay scattered all around him. No one in the room but him. Elmer slowly straightened with a rusty bike-chain creak. Like the doctor said, he must've had a psychotic break. But everything was okay now. Everything was okay now. He had stopped hallucinating. No more annoying alien worm, no more massive slugbeast…

But still an itchy ear… <Burp> The sounds was real quiet, like a belch in church.

"How the hell are you still in my ear?" Elmer grabbed a surgical pick which looked like a thin dagger from the floor. If the alien worm was gonna eat the damn doctor, he was going to have to spear the worm himself. With the sharp pick positioned at the entrance of his ear canal, like a fencer, Elmer delicately lunged the pick to the left. Then he angled the instrument and parried to the right. All the while the worm wiggled samba. Finally, he felt the squirmy body press up against the bottom of his ear canal. He made a desperate stab and— "AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!"

Elmer had punctured his eardrum. The horrific pain was like—obviously—an icepick to the head. He squeezed his eyes shut as he clapped his hand over the injured ear. Seizing the advantage, the worm swiftly slipped slimily through the rupture and burrowed into Elmer's brain.  Staring directly ahead, in a zombie-like trance, Elmer monotonously murmured, "Tooda do,

tooda dee, tooda doodle do," as he flashed the green laser light from the black-shingled roof of his house. The pattern of flashes, translated from alien Morse code, was an interstellar version of, "Come on in, the water is fine." Throughout the cosmos, an array of lights flashed back.

Satisfied its work was done, the alien worm gnawed further into Elmer's brain. Searching for a mate, it tunneled deeper, leaving chewed-out worm trails as it crawled high and low in dogged pursuit of the other, elusive, singing earworm.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

A HARD PEACE

By Eric Lewis

They say war's hell, but peace ain't no picnic neither when you're on the losing side.

The thought often niggled at the back of Mauric's brain but tonight it stood front and center as the veteran crouched in the roadside ditch, ankle-deep in muddy water. It ain't about the

money, he told himself again. Ambushing the approaching tax wagon was more his own little act of rebellion, of keeping alive some small part of the war lost so decisively a year ago. But the money's nice, too.

Mauric held his old service pistol close as the steam wagon trundled down the road, a guard with a long gun perched on top. He ran along the ditch to keep even with it, eyes fixed on that gun barrel and praying the moonless night would hide his approach.

Here we go, nice ‘n easy now...

“Oof!” He fell back splashing as he slammed into something in the ditch he hadn't seen. No, someone.

An angry female voice hissed back at him. “Who the hells are you?”

Mauric could just make out a cloth mask pulled across the face hovering over him in the dark. Great, he thought, competition. “Me? I’m the one gonna rob this here cash. Get your own!”

“Who’s there?” The shout echoed from the wagon.

“Now you’ve done it,” said the masked woman, “run!”

Mauric hesitated, thinking he recognized the voice. A shot rang out, and water exploded between the two of them as he dove aside. The wagon picked up speed and was soon gone, but they hugged the ground a few moments more just in case.

“Thanks a lot,” the woman snapped finally. “You know how much coin you just cost me?”

Mauric spat out a clod of wet grass. “Yeah, as it just so happens, I know exactly how much— Wait, I know you. Is that... Rin? Captain Rinalda, Duke’s Seventh?”

“Who the f—Mauric?”

She ripped off the mask, and Mauric smiled.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Lewis

"A Hard Peace"

28

“Rin you old ballbuster! I can't believe it, ain’t seen you since the Fall. Powerful luck, meetin' out here. How are ya Cap'n?”

Rinalda sighed. “I’m as you see—one more sad story among ten thousand. Looks like we had the same idea. Sorry to ruin your little heist.” She nodded at his dripping wet pistol. “Also, your powder.”

“This? Well no problem there. I, uh, couldn't afford any actual ammunition. It was just for, you know, intimidation.”

“You were going to rob a government tax wagon with an empty gun?”

“I suppose I should just sell it,” said Mauric. “Sentimental value, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Rin rubbed her chin as though already formulating some new scheme. “Don't go and sell it just yet. Tell you the truth, this is more a side job than anything. Come on, let’s get a drink. My treat. I might have a better opportunity for you.”  “To the Duke!”

Rin knocked her mug against Mauric's. “Aye, to 'im, gods rest his soul. And to all of us. A year since the Fall, and we haven't hit the ground yet.” The tap house was one popular with rebel veterans where they could speak freely. A few lone drinkers even joined in the toast from afar.

“Huh,” remarked Mauric, “didn't think there were so many of us left. That last battle...” He ran a finger down the scar that marred his cheek. “I looked for you after.”

Rin shook her head. “No point in that. After the walls blew, I spent two days under the rubble before someone pulled me out. First thing they told me was that the Duke was dead, the war was over, and we lost. Wanted to crawl right back under there.”

“It was the Vril,” Mauric snarled, “the damned Vril. It just kept coming, a thimbleful blasting like ten kegs of powder! How can something like that even exist? I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes. Green fire everywhere, explosions. I was laid up a month in a Polytheon temple with burns. Turned the place into a hospital to hold us all.”

“It's the only magic left in the world,” Rin agreed. “Black magic.” She raised her mug again in a mock salute. “All hail the stuff, and the hellsent alchemists who make it. Which brings me to my proposal.”

Mauric raised an eyebrow. “You wanna get married?”

“A business proposal, you simple bastard. Knocking over cash wagons is just to keep busy.

My real job, well...” Rin leaned in close. “I'm working for the Cryptarch now.”

Mauric choked on his beer, spraying the table. “What?! The Queen's spymaster? The enemy?

How could you?”

“Keep your voice down! Listen, the war's got to end sometime—” “For you maybe.”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Lewis

"A Hard Peace"

“—and the pay's good. You know how hard it is for veterans to find work these days. They can smell it on us you know. The defeat. Same way dogs can smell fear. Fighting my mates for day jobs on the docks, hauling coal for food scraps... I'm done with all that, even if it means taking the Queen's coin. But the job I'm working now, I need a hand I can count on.”

“I can't be hearin' this,” said Mauric through gritted teeth. “What job? Spying on our own, informing on anyone ain't properly loyal?”

“Nothing like that. You're right about Vril, it's the worst weapon of our age. You could win wars with it and nothing else. But a lot got lost after the Fall, stolen in the fog of battle, whatever. Dangerous stuff in the wrong hands.”

Mauric sneered. “You mean hands like mine? It'd turn a pretty penny on the black market, certain.”

“Worse than yours.” Rinalda lowered her voice to a whisper. “You've heard of the Duke's Fist?”

“Sure,” Mauric nodded, “guerrillas. They carry on the war. Hit and run raids, throats cut in the night, that sort o' thing. Some folk might call 'em heroes.”

“And you?”

Mauric tried to look Rin in the eye and failed. “I admit I thought about joining once. In my darkest hour. Maybe more than once. Wait, you don't think I'm involved in any of that?”

Rin waved dismissively. “Nah, if you were you wouldn't waste time playing highwayman. The Fist is a menace to everyone, and their lost cause just inspires more hatred against folk like us.

Now the Cryptarch hears they're trying to get ahold of that missing Vril. My job's just to try and save some lives by getting to it before they do. I've got some contacts, but I need someone I trust watching my back. Someone from the old days. If we pull this off, we'll be set for life, but you'd need to put politics aside. Interested?”

A year of desperation came out with Mauric's heavy sigh. Maybe it is about the money after

all.  “He ain’t gonna show.” Mauric shifted his weight from one foot to the other, nervous. “Ain’t no one out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“He’ll show. Just keep that powder dry.”

Weeks of paranoid messages back and forth, and more than one bribed official, had finally arranged a meeting with the dealer. They waited among the crumbled stones of a dead noble’s estate—one of the few loyal to the Duke to the end. A mist over the surrounding moor obscured the nearby hills, giving the ruins a dreamlike quality. By afternoon a gray drizzle had the two crowded under an eave. Then the rain stopped, and they continued waiting in silence.

Mauric was about to question the wisdom of their soggy vigil when a far-off splash echoed.

Rin pointed to a spot in the hazy distance. “Hey,” she said, “look there.”

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Mauric had to squint, but someone was coming, and not doing a good job of hiding it. They kept to the low areas, meaning to the puddles, sloshing towards the broken walls of the estate.

At last the figure shuffled muddily through the remains of a doorway to find two pistols suddenly pressed to either side of his head.

“What the—Wait!”

“Just being cautious,” said Rin. “I hear there are criminals out and about, can you believe it?

Let’s see those hands now. Make sure we’re all friendlified.”

Mauric frisked the gaunt, middle-aged dealer, turning up only an old flintlock. “That’s it,” Mauric nodded before dumping the powder and tossing it aside.

“Funny definition of friendly,” the man growled. “I got more cause to fear than you. I’m just selling this cursed stuff. You’re the ones buying, for who knows what nasty purpose.”

Rin holstered her weapon with a smirk. “Do you care?”

“Not long as I get out of this with a heavier purse and guts intact. Vril's stashed safe nearby. I wanna see you got the shine to buy it first.”

“Relax,” said Mauric, “we’re with the Cryptarch, here to keep it safe from less friendly buyers.”

The man let out a breath so heavy you could almost hear his bowels unclench. “Oh, thank the gods! Say, you ain’t gonna arrest me, are you? I'm just a small businessman—” “We’re no Investigators,” Rin replied with irritation, “less hassle to just buy it back on the sly.

Can we get on with this?” She opened a satchel slung over her shoulder. Her fist went in and came out dripping silver with a little gold mixed in, the shower of coins clinking as she dropped them back into the bag. “As agreed.”

“Sure, sure. Boy, am I relieved. I mean, no offense but from the look o’ you I’d have guessed you was with those Fist terrorists. Lousy lot, all them rebel slime. Ask me, the Queen should’ve had every one of ‘em crossified. Be a good example to others, and they wouldn’t be stealing jobs from decent loyal folk, am I right?”

Mauric grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt, snarling. “You wanna watch your mouth.”

“Hold on, business before pleasure,” Rin interjected. “I showed you the coin, now lead us to the merchandise.”

“Well now,” said the dealer, licking his lips, “now that you mention it... The price just went up.”

“What?!”

“You wanna rough me up like some inbred rebel, it’ll cost you! Besides, if the Cryptarch wants the stuff it means demand’s higher than previous. He can afford it.”

Rinalda again put a hand to her pistol, her entire demeanor suddenly altered. “You greedy piece of...”

“It ain’t your own money, what’s the problem? Skim off the top for yourself if you like, but Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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it’s going to be half again of what you got there. How bad you really want it, eh?”

“You...” Mauric shoved the dealer up against the decayed bricks, and this time Rin made no move to stop him. The man reached deep into his breeches and came out with a small knife. He raised it to stab Mauric in the neck when a deafening explosion sent the dealer hurling against a wall, his shoulder blasted into a red mess.

Mauric pressed his hands to his ears, and by the time the ringing faded, Rin was holding her pistol by the barrel, heedless of the heat from the shot and bludgeoning the dealer until he fell screaming. Until brains speckled the wall and spilled onto the ground. “Gods wept... Rin, what the hells?”

Rin stood with teeth bared, admiring her handiwork with furious relish. “Was it worth it?

Huh? Running your mouth and trying to rob us blind!” One more kick to the mostly headless corpse and the knife fell from a dead hand. She cast a glance at Mauric. “How’d you miss that?”

Mauric stood agape, almost not believing what'd happened. “Rin, what... Are you crazy?”

She shrugged with a blood-spattered grimace. “Sorry, guess I got a little carried away. But you heard what he tried to do!”

“Carried away?” A terror began to creep into Mauric's guts. Had his old captain gone crazy?

Had he made a horrible mistake? “But, he was right. The Cryptarch wouldn't miss a little more silver. What do we care?”

“Hey,” Rin said with a frown, “we got a job to do, and it was I hired you to help me.”

“Except we’ll never get the Vril now.”

Rin glanced down at the mess she'd made. “Check what’s left of the body. Maybe there’s some sign of where he hid it.”

They went through every stitch of clothing, every pocket. Nothing. They were about to give up when Mauric held the man’s coat close enough to smell something underneath the blood and gunpowder. “Wait,” he said, “what’s this?”

“What?”

“It-it’s incense. Like, from a Polytheon temple.”

Rin leaned in and inhaled. “I smell it too, but I doubt he’s a brother of the cloister. You think that’s where he was before here?”

“It’s fresh, and his clothes ain’t wet from the rain, meaning somewhere close by.”

“Meaning our Vril is too.” Rin hefted her satchel of coin with a cackle. “Good work, we’ll come out of this smelling sweet yet!” She began stomping away through the marshy wet.

“But—” “Come on!”

Mauric spared only a moment to glance back at the ruin of the dealer in the ruin of the estate, struck with the certainty that he’d gotten into something far beyond his pay grade.

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 Rinalda stood atop a rocky outcropping staring at the small temple, Mauric just behind.

Lights flickered inside, the night air heavy with the incense that’d led them there.

“What if it ain’t here?”

“It’s here,” Rin growled, “I can smell it. At last...”

Mauric swallowed back another nervous twinge. “Then let’s hope the Cryptarch keeps his word and pays us.”

“Yes yes, we’ll be very well paid. Now come.” She took hold of one of the iron rings hung from the large oaken front door. “Alright, together on three.”

At Rin’s signal they yanked both doors open, and she whipped out her gun while they were still swinging outward. They were greeted with the candlelit faces of a half-dozen brown-robed temple brothers in the middle of evening prayers.

“Real subtle, Rin,” remarked Mauric, creeping toward the shocked brothers with hands outward. “Uh, sorry to be interruptin’ your religiosity and such, but we’re here on the business of the Queen’s Cryptarch.”

“We seek a criminal!” Rin lowered her weapon only a few inches. “You may all be in terrible danger. You will assist!”

Mauric briefly described the dealer until the prior stepped forward, undeterred by the weaponry. “Perhaps you mean the odd fellow we’ve had staying in the cellar below the nave. We lodge travelers regularly, but he paid a ridiculous amount for the space and ordered that no others intrude. Given the economy since the war, we certainly couldn’t well refuse.”

“Uhuh,” replied Mauric, “show us.”

A shaft of light pierced the blackness made into a slithering serpent by the billows of dust kicked up by the cellar door’s creaky opening. Rin charged into the gloom, while Mauric held a little oil lamp and followed at a more careful pace.

He caught up to Rin curled up in a corner like a cave troll, caressing something—a quarter cask. There were five or six set around a pallet on the cellar floor, each marked with death’s head warnings and royal seals. A few individual bombs the size of chestnuts littered the space around them. “It’s here,” said Rin with triumphant joy, “the Vril’s actually here! By the gods, Mauric, we

got it!” She laughed like a lunatic, ecstatic.

Mauric set the lamp on a shelf set into the wall. “We’ll need mules to transport it. Might be able to borrow some off the brothers...”

Rin snapped her head up. “Ah, yes. The brothers, I almost forgot! Good thinking.”

“What?”

Rin stood. “Stay here and guard the Vril, there’s something I need to take care of.” As she passed, Rin reached for Mauric’s waist and plucked out his pistol.

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“It's my ammo anyway. Stay here!” Rin bounded back up the stairs two at a time. Mauric supposed he should’ve known what was going to happen next. Maybe he did but couldn’t accept it until the shots echoed in the cavernous temple nave. He jumped at the first one.

“No!” Screams, curses, pleads, and more shots. Dull thuds on stone. Mauric broke his stunned paralysis and ran out of the cellar.

He’d spilled his share of blood during the war, but the sight of the temple brothers splayed out on the floor shot, hacked, and beaten with such rapid violence still made him stagger. Red splashes coated the altar and flowed into the pews. One fellow yet struggled, clinging to life on the ground as Mauric had seen so many friends and enemies do on that terrible day the year before. Rin stood over all this, pistols smoking. “I told you to stay down there.”

“W-what did you just do?”

“I had to,” she said panting, finishing off the last monk with a knife to the throat. “No one could know about this. No witnesses.”

“What? Why not? You murdered the whole lot of ‘em!”

“Casualties,” Rin replied with obscene levity, the blood of six men adorning her smile. “We know all about those, don't we? Now let’s get that Vril loaded.” She strode past Mauric and down into the cellar. Mauric’s mind raced, and the stink of entrails, voided bowels, and incense made his stomach churn. By the time he recovered, Rin had gathered the casks near the temple door. “Help me,” she insisted, “I’m not doing this all myself. See if you can find that mule!”

Instead Mauric followed her back into the cellar where only the pile of bombs remained.

“Rin.” “Godsdammit, what?”

“You’re not really working for the Cryptarch, are you?”

A pause. The two old comrades locked eyes, and then Rin grinned. “Guess there's no point in keeping up the act now. No. No I am not. Care to guess?”

“The Duke’s Fist.”

Rin nodded. “Ten points to the pretty lad.”

“And that night in the ditch, with the tax wagon...”

“A setup. Sorry for the con, but I had to be sure about you. Consider it your audition.

And just look what we accomplished! With this Vril we can finally hit back hard at the Queen.”

Mauric shook his head, incredulous. “For what? Rin, the Duke is dead.”

“So? We’ll find another. What matters is the cause! Think about it, no more begging for scraps, no more humiliation, no more defeat. Just like you wanted!”

“Like I wanted!”

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“Join us brother, I know you want to; you’re a true believer, too. We’ll win eventually, and you know why?”

Mauric nodded. “Because you’ll do whatever it takes.”

Rinalda pumped her fist in the musty air. “Yeah! See, you understand. There’s more Vril floating around out there, you know. We can do this, we can win.”

“Rin...”

“You’re in, aren’t you?” She held her arms wide as though inviting Mauric to embrace.

“Tell me you are.”

Mauric’s hand went to his waist, only to remember that Rin had taken his pistol. He looked at the Vril bombs, so small but so powerful. It was tempting. In my darkest hour... But in his darkest hour he’d not been surrounded by a lifetime’s fortune in stolen magic, had he?

Faces flashed through his memory: enemies, men who’d denied him work, who’d spit on him. Dogs he’d fought for the marrow in bones from the trash. The dealer. And the murdered monks above them, their mangled forms morphed into the temple sisters who’d tended his Vril burns after the Fall.

He hefted the oil lamp from its alcove as he shook his head. “Sorry, Rin, but you were right before. The war’s got to end some time.” Mauric hurled the lamp at Rin’s feet where it shattered, coating the bombs with flaming oil. He turned and raced up the stairs while Rin stared down at the conflagration in shock.

“Oh, you simple bast—” The superheated Vril in the bombs ignited, vaporizing the cellar and everything inside.

The explosion blew half the temple to rubble and set the rest aflame with a sickly green glow. Mauric dodged falling stones and burning embers to gather up the surviving casks, fleeing the inferno with tears in his eyes. 

Sometimes there ain't no good choices, only bad ones and worse.

The thought often niggled at the back of Mauric’s mind but today it stood front and center as he walked into an opulent city office, ignoring a secretary’s stunned expression at the laden pack mule he’d brought into the building. “I’d like to see the Cryptarch. I have something I think just might interest him.”

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

DRIVING WITH ATTITUDE

By Nestor Delfino

There, a taxi just pulled away. Can’t you see it? Go! I saw it! Relax Myra, will you? We’ve still got time. Mr. Singh’s flight has just landed, so he won’t be out of the terminal just yet.

You didn’t seem very alert that’s why I pointed it out.

Alright. Do me a favor Myra, when Mr. Singh gets in the car remain in your best behavior.

We need his money. If we make a good impression, the company will take off.

Couldn’t he just hail a taxi? His office is not that far from here. I hope you realize that at this hour we’re going to hit traffic.

Myra, please. Try your best not to complain, ok? And let me do the talking. Ah, there he is.

He came out faster than I thought.

See, see?

Hush! Welcome, Mr. Singh. I hope you had a pleasant flight.

A decent flight thank you, Mr. Watson.

Let me get your luggage. Please take a seat in the back. You’ll see better from there.

Thank you. Oh, you must be Myra. I’ve heard so much about you. Pleasure to meet you.

Pleasure’s all mine. But we have to go now, we must beat rush hour traffic.

Watch it! Guy on a bike! Guy on a bike!

I saw him! Will you relax?

Left turn coming up, Pastor Avenue. Turn now!

What’s gotten into you?

Is this how it usually goes?

My wife and partner has been extremely busy all week, and she didn’t anticipate I’d ask her to come with us for the demonstration.

It’s not my fault you’re such a horrible driver, “Mr. Watson.”

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How long will this demonstration take?

About thirty minutes as we make our way to your office, sir. Unless Myra becomes so unbearable that we have to get out of the car.

Turn right here! Can you not read the signs? It was clearly marked! Right lane must turn!

Why are you laughing? Do you think this is funny? That man is distracting you! Pay attention while you’re driving!

Forgive me for distracting you, Mr. Watson. What sort of an investment are you looking for, exactly?

That’s something we can discuss at length at your office, sir.

Green light! You have a green light! What are you waiting for? Go! I need a ballpark figure before going to my office.

Watch your speed! You’re going over the limit! Stop negotiating and concentrate! Do you want to get us into an accident, is that it?

Could you ask your, um… partner to lower her voice? I’m getting a headache.

You might try asking her yourself, sir, although I can’t guarantee your chances of success.

Myra, could you please stop yelling?

Yelling?! Who’s yelling? I’m certainly not yelling, sir! Perhaps you are the one yelling! Now make a left at the next light. Bear’s Avenue. Why’s that funny? You’re laughing again! Why do you always do this to me?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You did, indeed. But getting back to our conversation, what amount are you after?

Depending on the figure, I may have to consult with my partners.

Watch that car! It’s invading our lane! Now get to the left lane. Another left turn coming up at Evans Avenue. Do it before that truck cuts us off!

It’s not just about the money; it’s about commitment to a long-term relation— Switch to the right lane immediately! Hit the gas! Do it! Now switch back to the left lane and slow down!

My god! We barely missed a truck that just rolled over! Did you see that?

Phew! I was busy avoiding our own rollover, but yes, I saw it in the rearview mirror. It crushed a small car! Look at the mess piling up behind it!

Myra, how did you foresee that?

It was obvious. The truck’s speed and the way it swiveled from left to right. Didn’t you see it?

Don’t either of you have eyes? Why, I should be the one driving! Now turn left at Erindale Station Road. Good. Here we are, gentlemen. And we avoided the worst of rush hour traffic, thanks to yours truly.

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Is this where your office is? A dilapidated warehouse?

It’s not precisely my office, but this old warehouse does belong to my investment firm. Soon we’ll tear it down to make room for an industrial park.

I don’t understand. Why did you bring us here?

Call it a test, if you will. I didn’t want you pestering me at my office if I didn’t like what I saw.

And did you like what you saw?

I most certainly did. Especially the part when we avoided a serious accident.

So, are you going to talk to your partners about my business proposition, then?

There’s no need; I’m perfectly able to make that decision on my own. What you have here is revolutionary to say the least, and I certainly want my firm to be involved. Let’s go to my office right away. It’s about 45 minutes from here.

That’s great news! Just tell Myra the address.

Hold your horses. You told me over the phone that you had created a set of… personalities.

Could you pick a more congenial one?

I heard that! I heard you! Is this how you thank me for saving your life back there? I think you should get out of this vehicle now, sir! I think you(Beep-beep-beep) Thank you, Mr. Watson. Exactly how many personalities does your “Intelligent Navigator” have?

So far, the driving instructor, the husband, the kid, and the wife whom you’ve just met.

Then, if you don’t mind my asking, why did you pick such an annoying character for your pitch?

Honestly, sir, the other ones are not ready yet. Only the wife, with all its peculiarities, passed all our quality assurance tests… Shall I turn her on and ask her to guide us to your office?

Mr. Watson, how about you let me drive?

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THE EMPTY GARDEN

By Nathan Alling Long

Nina had moved into the industrial neighborhood with her father at the start of summer and had explored it every day since. She was only twelve but was used to spending hours on her own. Her parents were both artists and had taught her to read at an early age, expecting her to entertain herself with books while they worked in their studios, their doors open, so they could hear if she got in trouble or needed them.

When she was seven, her father’s career began to take off, and in defiance, or anger or selfpreservation, her mother moved out, forcing Nina’s father to raise her alone, so her mother could concentrate on her own art. Nina locked herself in her room and cried for weeks, barely eating. She refused to go to school.

Then, one morning, she woke dry-eyed and decided that she would imagine that her mother had never existed. She didn’t want to go back to school, for she didn’t want to have to explain to her friends where her mother had gone, and she didn’t want to come home one day to discover that her father had disappeared as well. She told her father that she wanted to stay home and read, that all she needed to learn could be found in books and on the internet. She was a bright child and had learned far beyond what they were teaching in third grade. Her father, who was suspicious of public education anyway and was worried about Nina since her mother left, agreed. Every month, he gave her a long list of books his bookstore friend recommended, and at every meal she asked questions about one of them and talked about what she had learned.

From that day on, Nina was homeschooled, and rather than play with other children, she learned to play on her own. Otherwise, she talked to her father’s friends, almost all artists, who came over most evenings. They adored her and often brought her gifts of watercolors, tiny sculptures of animals, and once, a mobile of silver stars and spoons.

When she was eleven, her father got a call from an emergency room doctor telling him his wife—they had never divorced—had passed away from an aneurism. He tried to explain this to Nina, what it meant that her mother had died, but she said that to her her mother was already dead. “This is different,” he said, but she shook her head and said, “No, it isn’t.” He tried to take her to the funeral, but she didn’t want to go, didn’t want to see her mother’s body. It was then that he decided to move them to the other side of the city, away from the past. And so, she had Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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come to this new neighborhood knowing no one at all.

Nina and her father lived on the entire second floor of a former spindle factory—now rented out to artists. In the back third of their space, he made sculptures of wood and fabric and found objects. He’d built two bedrooms on either side of the bathroom in the middle section. The front third of the space was open, a kitchen and living room separated by a large table made of barn wood and saw horses over a Persian rug. Nina often pretended to give tours to imaginary friends, pointing out the library (a line of bookshelves her father had constructed), the play room (the round rug where she was allowed to keep her books and toys), and the entrance way where a coat rack and a wooden box held shoes, etc.

If her father focused on assembling together unusual objects, studying their texture and shape, the way they might talk to each other, Nina found herself drawn to spaces, what they contained, how they changed, the way they made you feel. She loved this new space, a space entirely her father’s and hers. When she was not reading, Nina went out exploring her neighborhood, having decided, for a geography project, to map everything she saw around her.

Though it was an industrial area, with scattered tenants, her father let her explore it during the day as long as she took her cell phone with her and was never gone more than a few hours.

Every day, she walked and observed, then came home and sketched on sheets of transparent paper new details she’d learned about the neighborhood—where she’d seen animals, where water puddled after rain, where graffiti was drawn and what it said. Soon, her map grew thick with sheets, an encyclopedia about the streets and alleys, the shops and buildings and abandoned lots around her home.

But of all the intriguing nooks and crannies of this industrial neighborhood, what intrigued Nina the most was a wall. It stood over ten feet tall, was immaculately painted a soft white, and wrapped around the end of the thin block, attaching itself to a large abandoned warehouse at each end so that there was no way to get a glimpse of what was behind it. Though she circled the block several times, Nina could find no way into the space. The wall had no doors or windows. She’d just finished reading The Secret Garden and wondered if there might be a garden hidden behind the concrete. She wondered if one could get to it from inside the warehouse, or if it was closed off completely. On her map, it remained a blank space with a tiny question mark in the center.  Several months after they had moved in, on a late summer night, Nina was sleeping in her loft, with the window open to let in the breeze, when she woke to a terrible crash. She felt a tremor and sat up. She looked out her window and listened, but heard only the sounds of the night—the hum of the street lights, the roar of a plane high overhead, and the rumble of the subway deep underground. She listened harder and heard a cicada clinging to a street tree somewhere and the buzz of neon from the dry cleaner’s sign on the corner. But she knew something was not right. Despite those noises, the night seemed too silent as though something had disappeared forever into it. She went into the hall, expecting her father to come Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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out, but he slept on. He was always a heavy sleeper, especially on nights he drank whiskey before bed.

Nina decided to investigate. She put on pants, a T-shirt, and sandals, unlocked the front door, and closed the door quietly behind her. She stood a moment in the dark stairwell to adjust to the light. Her father stored found objects along the side of the stairs, things he might one day use for sculptures, and she didn’t want to knock one over. She gripped the railing and walked down each step carefully. She was so curious to discover what had made the sound, she had not thought to be scared.

Nina unlocked the three locks on the front door, opened the door, and looked out across the empty street, illuminated by tired streetlights and store signs, and saw the city center as it lit the entire sky in a cloudy orange glow far in the distance. “Oh,” she said. She had never looked at her neighborhood in the still of night. She studied the edges of where the street lights shone, the shadows they cast, the closed shops with their lights still on. She would draw all this on a new layer over her map. She turned the corner, heading to the left where she was certain the sound had come.

Before Nina saw what had happened, she heard steam hiss out of a car engine. Then she saw the car, which had run front-first into the ten-foot wall—the secret garden wall. A young man, perhaps still a teenager, lay slumped in the driver’s seat, and beside him lay a boy, no older than Nina, crumpled and bleeding in the passenger’s side. Despite the hissing steam, Nina felt wrapped in a strange stillness as though the streetlights shinning down on her had stopped all motion and time. The night felt as quiet as a gallery.

She stepped cautiously up to the hissing car and tapped on the driver’s side window.

“Hello?” she said. “Hello?” The driver did not respond, did not move at all. The blue-green glass that separated her from the young man seemed a membrane between worlds, one that, if she entered it, she might become as lifeless as he was. Nina walked to the other side of the car and then stepped back when she saw blood on the windshield in front of the younger boy, saw his forehead full of blood and glass. Somehow, she was not scared. There in the middle of the night, the accident seemed unreal, more like a finely detailed installation, like things she’d seen at galleries her father took her to. That car, those bodies, the blood—they all seemed to have been placed there intentionally, in a street she otherwise knew to be quiet and uneventful. Perhaps if she had witnessed the crash, or if one of the boys had moved or cried out, it would have seemed real and she might have screamed. But as it was, the two boys lay silently within the car, more like wax sculptures than bodies. Still, she did not want to get close when she saw that the younger boy’s window was open. She feared his spirit could slip out and hers could slip in—then she might be caught in the wreck forever.

A part of Nina wanted to scream, but she feared others would come out and somehow blamed her for this terrible thing. Instead, she walked to the front of the car and looked at where it had hit the wall. Several concrete blocks were shattered, others had caved in. She peered through the hole into the secret space. Then she leapt back. What she saw was more Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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terrifying than the accident itself.

Behind the wall was nothing, a darkness so complete, the streetlights above did nothing to illuminate it. She could not see ground or buildings or sky. It was as though nothing at all, not even time itself, existed beyond the wall. Then she felt in the center of her body a tiny seed of that same darkness, alive within her, within everything. She felt how it had awoken, the way a seed awakens underground, when sensing the heat of the sun.

Nina ran home, shaking as she ran up the stairs and put the key in the door. She cried in front of her father’s room, banging on his door. Though it was not locked, she was too frightened to open it, afraid somehow that behind his door might exist the same nothingness.

“What is it? What is it?” her father said. He wore only underwear and his face looked like a wrinkled shirt. What could she say? What could she tell him? “There’s an accident and I saw…”

She tried to say more, but she choked up in tears. “A bad dream?” he said, to which she screamed hoarsely, “No!” “Okay, okay,” he said and rubbed her back. “Calm down. Let me get on some pants.”

They went out into the night together. Even though she didn’t want to go back, she didn’t want him to go alone, afraid he might be sucked into the nothingness. He did not ask her if she had anything to do with the doors being unlocked, but she could tell that he did not know what to believe. And when they turned the corner, there it was—the car with the two boys in it. Her father seemed more shocked than she had been.

“My god,” he said, then yelled into the car, to see if either boy might respond. And when they didn’t, he called 911 and stepped back to the curb where Nina had stood so that neither of them could see into the darkness beyond the wall. She held onto him as he hugged her and stroked her hair, both of them waiting for the ambulance and the police to arrive. And once they did, her father took her home and put her to bed.

Nina did not leave the studio the following day. She tried to concentrate on her school work, but only thought back to the previous night. She traced the accident, highlighted in red, and the damaged wall on a new piece of transparent paper, and throughout the day kept pulling out the map to add new details. That night, she dreamt the two boys had come over to her house to play. She was holding the younger boy’s hand as she showed them the separate “rooms” in her home. She was about to take them into her bedroom when her mother appeared and pulled the boy’s hand from Nina’s. “They’re mine,” her mother said, then led the two boys into darkness.

Nina woke, feeling her body press against her bedroom wall, as if trying to back away from what she’d seen. Above her, the mobile of stars and spoons stirred. The dream made her feel such dark thoughts, things she had never felt before. As she stared out her window, she wondered if what was behind the wall had caused the dream. She imagined the darkness spreading throughout her neighborhood, across the whole city. She suddenly understood that it was her responsibility to watch it, to make sure it did not take over everything.

She waited until the brightest point of the day, then ventured back to the wall, to confront what lay behind the wall. As she descended the stairs of her building, she wondered if perhaps Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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she’d find nothing usual behind the wall, that she had simply imagined it. But as she walked toward the intersection, she felt a fear that no amount of hope could erase.

When Nina turned the corner, she was surprised to see that the car was gone—she knew that they would not leave it there, but the image had remained fixed in her mind. More startling was that the wall had been completely repaired and repainted as if nothing had happened at all.

It was both comforting and unsettling, for now she couldn’t be sure if what she’d seen behind the wall was real.

When Nina drew close, she saw two teddy bears, a bouquet of fresh flowers in a mason jar, and a few candles, half burned down, against the wall. A memorial to the boys. She would add these details to her map, to lay on top of the image of their car and the hole. She wondered, then, if perhaps the people who brought these things knew what was behind the wall, if they had repaired it and had created an offering to help keep the nothingness away.

Nina picked up a few pieces of safety glass, which felt like large grains of sand in her hand, and as she pressed her fingers into them, she felt the tiny pricks from the edges. Taking in that small pain made her feel as though she had a new strength, a larger understanding of how things were in the world: not all good, not all bad. She walked back home, standing taller, holding the glass wrapped in her hand.

A couple of days later, Nina returned and discovered that someone had spray painted, in giant bright yellow curled letters, the word Rejoice! It looked almost like an advertisement for a soft drink or laundry detergent, it was so bright and cheerful. It did not make sense to her how anyone could write such a word where such a terrible thing had happened. Was it just a coincidence that the artist had chosen that wall? Was someone trying to hide what had happened? Did some dark force rejoice in the accident? She sat across the street from the wall, in the shade of a sycamore tree—her favorite kind of tree—and stared at the word for a long time.

Each day Nina came back to that same spot, bringing her books, hoping to catch someone making changes to the wall. She spent her days out there reading and looking up whenever a car or person passed. Sometimes, she walked around the area, looking again for a way into what she now called the empty garden, or a fire escape or roof she might climb to look down into the space. She even went home once and snuck up on their roof, but she could not see into the walled in space. Other times, she searched the intersection for more debris from the accident.

Once she found a sliver of rearview mirror and another time, a plastic toy soldier, which she decided had been the younger boy’s, though it was unlikely that it could have been thrown so far. She added the mirror and the soldier to the shrine.

Throughout the day, she checked in with her father who worked long hours in his studio.

She told him that she’d been out in the neighborhood, working on her map. She didn’t mention the wall. Sometimes, he would simply mutter, “Okay,” to her and let her go back out, but other times he’d break from his work, as though she had woken him from a dream, and suggest they make lunch, or he’d take her to the café down the block where he would get an espresso and Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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she could have an iced vanilla steamer, her favorite. But her mind never completely stopped thinking about the emptiness she had seen that night and what she should do about it.  After a few weeks, autumn slipped into the city, but the wall didn’t change. Sitting by the sycamore tree, Nina began to wonder if things had happened differently than the way she remembered. She had woken in the middle of the night, and all alone had witnessed a horrific thing—but had she taken the darkness of the boys’ deaths and placed it on the space beyond the wall, the empty garden?

Then one day a woman pulled up to the curb by the wall and stepped out of her car. As she bent to light the candle at the shrine, Nina knew that this woman must be related to the boys.

She wanted to go up and tell her she had seen the accident—or rather seen the car moments after, had looked at the two young boys, still and dead in their seats. But she was afraid, and as she considered what words to say, she realized that they all sounded awkward and wrong.

At first it seemed strange that the woman would not get out of the car. It was not a bad neighborhood, and right now, it was in full sunlight. But then Nina wondered if the woman knew something about the wall that made her cautious. If she did, Nina wanted to know. She was old enough that she should not be afraid to approach strangers, especially women. If Nina were responsible for the wall, for what lay behind it, she needed to be brave.

She stood up and crossed the street. “Hello,” she said.

The woman turned her head. She was slim and wore a dark rain coat, though it was not raining. It seemed like something she might wear all the time, a piece of clothing that defined her. “Hello,” the woman said as she got out of the car but did not move from the open door.

“What are you doing out here all alone?”

“Oh, I live here,” Nina said. “Well, not here, but around the corner. My father was the one who called the police that night.” Nina offered a sad smile, of sympathy, though already she was afraid of what the woman might say, what she might ask her. So, instead, she asked the woman, “Are you their mother? The boys’, I mean?”

“Yes,” the woman said. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, she was looking away, back toward her car. “They took the car, my oldest son, who only had a learning permit, and went for a ride. I suppose he was showing off to his younger brother. They weren’t wearing seatbelts, though we’d always made them wear them.”

I know, Nina wanted to say. I saw them, I saw them first. But of course she could not say that.

She furrowed her brow. Everything felt so terrible and complicated. Though she often talked with her father’s friends—artists who confided all kinds of things to her because she was curious and looked much older than her age—she did not know what to say to the woman.

“I’m sorry,” is what Nina finally said. “I can’t imagine how it must be.” She closed her eyes a moment, trying to recall the boy’s faces, but what she saw was not the boys as they appeared in the car, but the image of the boys from her dream. When she opened her eyes, the woman was Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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still standing silently. It seemed to Nina as though she was about to say goodbye, to slip into her car and disappear. “It’s not your fault,” she found herself saying—it was something her father had said to her back when her mother left. “And it’s not their fault either.”

“No?” said the woman. She seemed to believe Nina, to sense that what Nina had said was not merely a comforting phrase. “What do you know?” the woman asked, turning back to Nina with a fierceness that startled her. “Can you tell me why it happened?”

Nina stepped back. “I don’t know,” she said. “I heard the crash, then woke my father up.” She felt that this version of the story would make the most sense. She was surprised when the woman said, “But tell me, just before the crash, or after, did you hear anything unusual?”

“I was asleep,” Nina said. “But I remember, there was a silence, a strange silence. I mean, there were night sounds, but something was missing.”

“Yes,” the woman said, softly. “That makes sense. And did you see the accident? After it happened, I mean.”

But before Nina could answer, the woman started talking again. “See, I came here hours later, after going to the hospital and seeing the bodies. After crying in my car, I left the hospital and drove as fast as I could, hoping I, too, would crash. I didn’t want to live. I wanted it all to be over for me as well.” She talked to Nina as though Nina were the adult and she the child, as though she had had no one to talk to about all of this. “I had the address of this place, and I was both racing toward it and hoping I would never reach it. Do you understand?”

Nina simply nodded as she usually did when her father’s friends got a little drunk and began to confess intense experience—a break up, a fight with another artist, how they had lost their job. She was never bothered by such stories.

“But it’s hard to do it intentionally,” the woman went on, “to force my car off the road. It goes against everything you’re taught when learning to drive. Then I thought how I could kill someone else in the process, so I slowed down. When I finally got here, I parked and sat in the car. It wasn’t even dawn.”

Nina was quiet. She glanced behind the woman at the wall, as though it might have had some part in this woman’s story, in her almost killing herself. She stared at its repaired surface and the brightly painted word Rejoice!

The woman talked on. “Then I got out and walked over here. Before I saw the tire marks or the shards of glass, I knew this was where it had happened. I just felt it. There was a particular silence, like you said.”

“Yes,” Nina said, “and you must have seen the wall, how it was damaged, the hole in it.” Nina shuddered thinking about it, just saying those words out loud, but she wanted to let the woman know that she had seen what was behind the wall.

“That’s the strange thing,” the woman said softly, “there was no other sign of the crash, no broken streetlight, no scrapes, or damaged wall. I felt the glass grinding under my shoes, but I could not tell what they hit.”

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Nina stared at the woman, then back at the wall. This meant that the woman hadn’t seen the emptiness. Yet there had been a hole, a large hole. She had an unsettling thought then: What if the wall had repaired itself? What if the wall was listening at this moment, and if by standing here, between the car and the wall, she and the woman were putting themselves in danger?

Nina imagined another car running down the street and into the woman’s car, pinning them to the wall. “Please,” she said suddenly, “can we go over there to the tree?”

“Of course,” the woman said, closing her car door. “Someone must have come and repaired the wall, though who would do such a thing so late at night? Maybe there is something valuable behind it, like a museum or a bank?”

“Maybe,” said Nina, “but there’s nothing like those things around here.” She brought the woman under the sycamore and stood so that she could keep an eye on all the streets. “I know this neighborhood really well,” she said. “I’ve mapped it all out. There aren’t any businesses like that over here, though I don’t know what’s behind the wall.”

“That’s very strange,” said the woman. Nina wanted so badly to tell her what she had seen, but why make the woman fear what Nina feared? Hadn’t the woman felt enough pain already?

Nina came to understand, then, that one way she could contain the nothingness was by not talking about it to others.

The woman, however, kept talking about the wall. “It’s as though it fixed itself,” she said. Yes, Nina thought, exactly. “It’s like a miracle,” the woman added, which startled Nina. “And then this word, Rejoice, appearing,” the woman went on. “At first I was angry that someone had painted that word here. If you look closely, you can see where I tried to scratch it away with my key. But as I did, I began to feel a change within me. The word is so large, so beautifully done, so positive. As I fought against it, it somehow reminded me how lucky I was to be alive, that despite what horrible thing happened here, there are things in the world to love.” She paused, then said, as if just to herself, “I was lucky to have had my sons, to have known them and cared for them so long.” And in a final whisper, she murmured, “Several of my friends couldn’t conceive at all.”

Nina stood there silent, taking in the woman’s words. For some reason, she imagined her mother being one of those women, who could not have children, which, when she thought about it, would mean that Nina would not have been born, would not have been there at this moment. Nina would be nothing, her mother, an empty garden. The thought made her shake.

She looked then at the wall with that singular word painted on it. If what was behind it was a nothingness, something that existed even before time, somehow, everything else around her— the walls, the buildings, the streets, her neighborhood, the whole city— ad come into being despite it. The wall, and whoever or however it was repaired, was a good thing. And the word on it was a good thing as well.

She looked back at the woman who was now crying and laughing in a strange, terrible joy.

Nina came up and hugged her, because she could not think of what else to do. The woman held her tightly, for a long time, and Nina knew that, for the woman, it was as if she were holding her Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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sons as much as Nina. As she stood there, her face lost in the dark folds of the woman’s raincoat, she remembered how it was on those rare moments when her mother stopped her work and held her in her lap. It was a feeling that could not be put on any map.

That evening, her father made them sandwiches for dinner—melted parmesan on rye with tomatoes and lettuce added just at the end so the vegetables didn’t wilt, the way Nina liked it— and served it at the table made of rough boards. Nina sat quietly across from him as he ate and drank a glass of wine. After a few minutes, when he noticed that she had not touched her food, her father said, “What’s up, my little pup?”

Nina looked up at him and set down her fork. She started to cry. She had wanted to hold everything in, everything she had seen and worried about, and learned, but it was too much for her. After all, she was only twelve. She told her father then about how she had gone out that night and seen the boys, about how she had spent the summer watching the wall, and about the woman she’d met that afternoon. She told him everything, except about the nothingness itself.

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AIDIS

By Bonnie Van Wormer

I walked slowly through the mist and the intense silence that surrounded me. My muscles were tense, ready to bolt at a second’s warning. I desperately hoped nothing would attack. My mind went through all the worst scenarios.

“A strange beast might decide I look tasty. The shadows might come alive and try to suffocate me. This mist might turn out to be toxic and kill me.”

After a few minutes of these kinds of thoughts, I was sure I was destined to die very soon.

“Yet, what could be worse than this?”

I shook that away, only for it to be replaced with memories. They were memories I had not thought of since I arrived in this strange, dark place. I didn’t want to remember, but it was better than letting my mind wander through irrational fears.

I was in a car, driving to the movie theater. I was tired, really tired.

Pain quickly brought my thoughts away from the memories, which all of a sudden, seemed so far away, so foggy. I felt hot and couldn't see the source. It was not a summer’s day hot—or even a baking in the car hot. It was a heat so intense, so horrible, it felt as if I were scorching, dying. This land seemed to have no sun. It was all gloom. The fog hung heavily on me, clinging to my hair, my clothes, and my skin. I felt as if it were smothering me. Maybe the heat came from the mist.

The heat was not the only thing causing me pain. There was something else I couldn't identify. Something much, much worse.

I sighed and tried, once again, to think of the past in order to avert my thoughts from my present predicament.

“Maybe,” I thought, “hidden somewhere in my memories is a way to escape—or at least some way of knowing where I am.”

I tried to remember but my memories were slipping away as if they were a dream and this place was reality. I latched on to the first memory that entered my mind.

I was at a building. I was bored. Someone I ought to have recognized was sitting next to me.

Everyone stood and began to make strange noises I could no longer identify. Someone was speaking words I could no longer recall. All I remembered was that I did not wish to hear them.

Now I strive to think what they were.

My mind came back to the present as I realized the pain worse than heat was loneliness, though I was not alone. I knew I wasn’t. Even though I could not see anyone around me, I felt the presence of countless people.

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“Why then do I feel more isolated than I have ever felt before in my life?”

I felt empty, like I desperately needed something, but had no way of getting it. My mind began to chastise me. It could not help but to chastise me. It told me I would not have been alone, or have felt these feelings, if only I had listened. It screamed at me, saying, “You should have paid attention!”

It told me I should have accepted the truth while I could.

“But what truth should I have accepted?”

I could not remember.

I was in a hospital. I saw people standing around me.

I shook my head. The order in which I remembered things seemed wrong.

“What had happened first? Was it the pain caused by the heat, the loneliness, and even the mist around me? Was it the great Being who had judged me? Was it the giant room in which I had been so afraid, and my thoughts had been so exposed? Was it the hospital room? Was it the crash of metal against metal? Was it my defiance, and at the same time, the despair I felt when I was condemned to live here?”

Then it all came back—for a moment. I could see the fire around me. I could hear the crackling roar of the flames as they devoured everything. I knew where I was.

I sat down hard—too shocked to stand. The tree I sat under was dead, its branches clawing at the night sky, or what would have been the sky if there had been any stars.

My memories all came rushing back in an overwhelming storm. I held my head in my hands. It was too much. Now I longed to forget. I would rather spend eternity in mindless wandering.

Then in an instant it was gone. I couldn’t remember. I wiped away the tears, confused, and walked on. I desperately hoped nothing would attack. My mind went through all the worst scenarios.

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GHOST DRIVE

By David Tallerman

Dolores sees the Iroquois as a distant mote against the sun. There will be other airships in its orbit, she knows: certainly the Oneida and the Tuscarora, if they survived the battle over the sea that's been fought throughout the night. And on the Empire's side, the defenders will have gathered a whole menagerie of aircraft, everything that they have left.

She thinks the shimmers she occasionally catches must be biplanes and triplanes, and are those nearer specks balloons? Britannia, too, will be fielding its airships, smaller craft such as the Percival and, if the winds have favoured its journey from Yorvik, the venerable goliath that is the Pendragon.

None of it will matter. No weapon in the Empire's arsenal will stop the Iroquois. It's the greatest innovation of its age, the culmination of a decade's bold invention, driven by desperation and the colonies' unquenchable desire for freedom at any cost.

Dolores stares through fogged goggles and streaming eyes at the mechanism before her, its workings jutting from the shell of her monoplane's burnished nose. Well, she reflects, perhaps not quite the greatest innovation. But that moment's pride is a weakness she can't afford, since it makes her think of her grandfather, and in so doing unleashes memories she's fought for every moment of the flight here to restrain.

Too late. Those memories have been lying in wait; she could only have resisted them for so long. And as Dolores opens the Morgana's throttle further, she can feel the recent past cleaving beneath her, opening like a sinkhole...  There were eight people around the table.

In pride of place sat Mrs. Cosmos, her plump features shadowed by a black veil draping from the brim of her equally black hat and spilling onto the velveteen folds of her dress—also, of course, black.

Opposite her sat Professor Hugo Pulcifer. He was trying not to attract attention to himself, but reticence didn't naturally suit him. Professor Pulcifer was famous thereabouts both for his genius and his eccentricity, and—with his ever-present calabash pipe perched on the table in front of him, his billow of beard and ill-pressed suit, both as snowy white as Mrs. Cosmos's wardrobe was crow black—couldn't but inspire interest. Or so Dolores thought. From her seat by the fire, it wasn't the intelligence in her grandfather's face that drew her, nor the lively dance of his eyes, but the kindness she saw there. He had taken her in when no one else would, and for three years had been her guardian, just as she had become his one trusted assistant.

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Of the other six around the table, there was an equal number of men and women. All were dressed plainly and all were sheepish. Each had paid to be here and placed themselves at considerable risk, for the Empire did not approve of spiritualism. It wasn't that it objected to communion with the dead, as such, but rather that it sanctioned carefully which of those who'd passed on should be allowed a voice.

They were well into the séance by the time it began—that crisis which ended Dolores's old life. They'd moved past the early drama, the bangings and whisperings, trappings which were for show and contributed nothing. Neither, for that matter, did Mrs. Cosmos, whose real name was Agatha Dudley and whose regular appointment was as the professor's cook. However, had the six at the table known the truth, they wouldn't have come. Had they known it wasn't occultism but science, and specifically the machinery disguised within the tabletop and ceiling, that produced the phenomena they witnessed, they would not have been so eager to accept it. Had they understood that their presence served not musty mysticism but the betterment of mankind, they'd probably have been in an uproar. Such was the state of intellectualism at the heart of His Imperial Majesty's crumbling empire.

At any rate, the professor's audience were getting their money's worth. The manifestation was almost complete. From each of those gathered around the table coursed intangible tendrils, viscous and green as threads of lime-tinctured glue, and where they combined, a figure was taking form. It hovered about the table's lacquered top, something like a sculpture of already melting ice, and if one concentrated, it was possible to discern the smudged impression of features.

Dolores had watched this ritual often enough for its bizarreness to seem merely odd. She knew that what hung over them was no manifestation from beyond the veil, was indeed naught but canny showmanship. The Professor had his own motives, and they were to do with preserving the living rather than interrogating the dead. The materialization might be a sham, but the substance that created it was real, and it was needed.

The knock at the door made Dolores jump. The ghostly figure wavered, swimming briefly out of focus. Her grandfather paused to lean in her direction—though, disconcertingly, emerald ectoplasm continued to stream from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. "Doll," he whispered, "answer that, won't you?"

"Who can it be?" she asked. There were no vacant spaces at the table.

"I hope it will be the investigators from the Ordo," her grandfather said, his voice still lowered so that only she could hear. "I hadn't expected them this soon."

He'd spoken the name as if it were a triviality, but at that one word, Dolores's blood had run cold. "The Ordo?" she repeated, desperate to have heard wrongly.

"Responding to my latest telegram," her grandfather agreed. "There was sufficient proof in there that they couldn't possibly ignore me this time. No more languishing on the intellectual fringes of the Empire, my dear. No more experimenting without purpose." He chuckled, and then, when someone at the farther end of the table cleared their throat in protest, looked stern.

"Now hurry, please. It won't do to keep them waiting." And her grandfather turned back to his mock séance as though visits from the Ordo were a routine concern.

Dolores made it to the hallway. She felt every bit as mesmerized as Mrs. Cosmos pretended to be. One of her grandfather's most stubborn eccentricities was his faith in the basic integrity of the Empire when all evidence screamed to the contrary. What if she simply didn't answer? But Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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the knocking was insistent. She stumbled the last distance; the doorknob was cold inside her fingers.

There were four of them there in her grandfather's small front garden, four men of the Ordo ab Mortuus Regum. Nothing about them was quite normal. Their postures were too gangling, their stovepipe hats too tall, their cloaks too long and darker even than the invented Mrs. Cosmos's coal-black wardrobe. But it was the masks she couldn't look away from: featureless except for their eye slits, inexplicably bulky, and when she listened, she was positive that they ticked faintly with the implication of gears turning.

The foremost Ordo man leaned forward and spoke. At least, words came from behind his mask. "HUGO PULCIFER," he declaimed. There was no intonation to clarify whether it was question, command, or statement, only the faint whirr of clockwork.

Her knees were sponge soft. "He's not in at present," Dolores said. "If you could call another—” But by then they were pushing past, and she was cringing aside, filled with sudden, childish horror at the prospect of their touch. There came noises of surprise from the drawing room, which in an instant had changed to cries and to sobs of protest. But the men from the Ordo said nothing. There was a crash and a scream, hurriedly curtailed. Dolores heard running feet, and a guest from the séance burst by, naked panic on his features.

That drew her back to reality. As she darted up the hallway, a second guest dashed past, one of the women, her eyes lurid with fear. Dolores ignored her. She could hear her grandfather protesting, pitifully indignant and disbelieving. She could hear his breathlessness, even before she forced her way through the door.

But by the time she saw him, her grandfather's objections were spent. He had fallen from his chair, or else had been pushed. He was grasping with one hand for the table, his breath coming in rasps. His face, somehow, was pale and flushed at once, and yet, obscenely, the green stream that floated from his mouth and nostrils remained uninterrupted.

Dolores fell to her knees. Her grandfather's other hand was cupped over his heart, and she held it, as though by doing so she could encourage the organ beneath. She had no doubt it was that which had failed him. Her grandfather's strengths were many, but his heart had never been among them.

His head lolled toward her, and she thought at first that his frantic grey eyes were staring through her. Then her grandfather's lips trembled. He whispered, "Doll..." And finally, the tendrils of ectoplasm clinging to his ashen features faded.

All Dolores could think in that moment was how she'd always hated the nickname, and how she'd never told him, how she'd been afraid to hurt his feelings. But now it no longer mattered.

Now nothing could harm her grandfather again.  One of the balloonists on the horizon of the fighting is signalling her. At this range, Dolores can't follow the intricacies of his rapid semaphore, but she can guess at the gist, given that the Morgana bears no insignia to ally it to either the colonial insurgents or the Imperial defenders.

With no co-pilot to signal back, Dolores has to hope her actions will speak for her.

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as the Morgana.

Dolores wipes mist from her goggles and nudges the throttle further. The engine is glowing the green of oxidised copper, and wisps of the same vivid shade trail to knot in the surrounding cloud. It looks weird and improbable, all the more so because she's aware of exactly what's producing that uncanny glow.

The ghost drive is beginning to overheat.

The name her grandfather chose, while possessed of a certain poetic illogic, is a misnomer.

Dolores knows, as he knew, that what others call ectoplasm is a phenomenon both natural and explicable: biological energy given mass and dimension. It can be extracted, can be stored, and therefore can be harnessed. It happens also to be a source of power a hundred times more potent and efficient than the crude engines of steam and gears that motivate the craft around her. And even if it weren't, the Morgana is a masterpiece of aeronautical design.

All of this Dolores announces to the balloonist scout by passing him at a distance of mere inches and at shocking speed: an unwise move, perhaps, but she feels such fierce pride in her grandfather's work, not to mention her own airmanship. Gaining a glimpse of reddish-brown skin, she wonders if he's of the Native American peoples, formerly bitter enemies to the insurgents and now their staunchest allies. With Ireland in their hands, Canada sure to surrender soon, and much of Europe falling into line, it seems the insurgency has little these days but allies. Maybe Dolores might sympathize, too, if only their methods were less tyrannical.

Ahead, the fight is escalating. It isn't entirely one-sided as yet. The Tuscarora is in flames and descending fast, twenty triplanes drifting about it like moths around a gaslight, or else like a stubborn hive of wasps, in that they've stung the airship from the sky with a thousand superheated barbs. But Dolores sees, as they can't, that their victory is minor and temporary. The lumbering bulk of the Iroquois is at last entering the fray, and as she draws nearer, Dolores can't quite believe the scale of the thing. If she tilts her head, she can make out the Pendragon, formerly the largest airship ever built, and it would fit thrice within the Iroquois. Nor is that bulk for show. In fact, its scale serves a single purpose: to carry more and deadlier armaments.

She sees those also. The Iroquois's cabin veritably bristles. With a roar, its forward cannon opens up, the biggest gun to have been made airborne. Upon its flanks, the new cyclic repeaters add their voices; from where Dolores is, she can hear their hellish chatter as a muted tectonic rumbling. One of the Imperial triplanes reels and tumbles, another billows smoke, and then suddenly they're falling in twos and threes. They're too slow to evade the Iroquois's assault, and if they could, their own bullets would still be powerless to penetrate the dense fabrics or to ignite the experimental gases of its gargantuan balloon.

The Iroquois is inexorable. Its fire is concentrated on the Pendragon, once the greatest miracle of modern aircraft, now a relic meeting its successor. For decades, the Empire has turned nostalgia into worship, obsessing over dead kings and antique epochs. In this confrontation, the future has arrived for its reckoning. The Pendragon is belching oily vapour from its cabin, struggling through a sky that seems practically to blaze around it as its sister craft gather belatedly in its defence.

None of them have a hope. Not one of the Empire's airships has the mobility to outmanoeuvre the Iroquois's gunners nor the raw power to deal it meaningful damage. Nothing in the sky today can stand against it.

Nothing, that is, besides Dolores and her Morgana.

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And she's close. In seconds, her astonishing speed will convey her within range. With the fight in front of them and whatever warnings the scouts may have sent presumably entangled in the chaos of their communications, its crew are unaware. Contrariwise, the Iroquois's size makes it impossible to miss, and Dolores knows that her grandfather's ammunition, imbued with the same weird energies that propel the Morgana, will wreak damage that mere slugs of hot lead could never accomplish.

Except, now that the occasion is on her, she finds she can't pull the trigger.

She's fooled herself. She'd thought she was brave, enough to risk her life in coming here, in driving the Morgana far beyond its tested limits. She'd thought she was fearless and unselfish enough to hazard herself to protect those helpless multitudes crammed into the warrens of Yorvik. And she is brave and fearless and unselfish, she's too angry not to be. But the one quality she lacks is the one she needs, in this instant, to possess. Only now, with her personal Rubicon behind her, does Dolores Pulcifer recognise that she's no killer.  The men of the Ordo ab Mortuus Regum, if men they were, paid her no heed.

They were too occupied with destruction. They inflicted it calmly, without aggression and seemingly without interest. They'd already levered the tabletop off to reveal the delicate pipes and tubes and mechanisms underneath. They had holed the walls and, where they could reach with the aid of chairs, the ceiling. This they did carelessly, using their own gloved hands.

Dolores hated to abandon her grandfather. But no, her grandfather's body was all she held, and if she stayed, it would be to watch the desecration of their years of work together. That notion was unendurable. Hugo Pulcifer had gone ignored by the Empire for half a century, denied by accidents of birth the place in the science caste his genius should have brought, his loyalty unshaken to the last. And when, finally, the Empire chose to notice him, it was to break and pillage, while war raged above their very shores. Dolores could do nothing for her grandfather, but she could ensure that these monsters didn't steal his memory as they had his life.

None of them turned to look as she sprinted from the room. She was a chit of a girl, after all.

How could they guess that she was sole inheritor of her grandfather's secrets? In the library, she stretched on tiptoes for one particular volume—the Malory, its spine curiously worn—and a section of shelving swung inward. Beyond, gas lamps woke to offer flickering illumination.

Dolores drew the door shut and descended the stairs three at a time. They led downward into the earth, and after innumerable turns, opened upon an underground chamber so large that, even having spent more hours there than she could count, the view still dizzied her.

Given so mind-bogglingly huge a space, it was perhaps remarkable that her grandfather had managed to fill as much of it as he had. Though he had his workshop upstairs, he'd merely tinkered there; here was where the real work had been done. There were half a dozen collapsible tables, each buried beneath mounds of cogs and wires, vials and screws. The air was redolent with the mellowness of her grandfather's pipe smoke, and the scent made tears bead in her eyes.

To distract herself, Dolores looked onward, to where—perched at the beginning of its launchway, nose jutting toward the cliffside cave mouth—the Morgana sat waiting. A length of flexible tubing connected the aeroplane to the machinery in the deepest recesses of the cave, which in turn was joined by further pipes to the ceiling and thus eventually to the mechanisms in Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Tallerman

"Ghost Drive"

the drawing room that the men of the Ordo were so vigorously disassembling.

Through the tube's translucent skin, she could see clearly the swirling jade vapours within.

Dolores had had no plan as she'd fled the drawing room nor as she'd bolted down the worn stone steps. It was as her gaze was drawn to the ticker-tape machine on the nearest workbench that her thoughts began to take form.

Her grandfather had allowed her to be the Morgana's test pilot because he'd had no one else. He'd never meant for Dolores to fly his greatest and deadliest accomplishment in earnest.

His intention, driven by faith in rulers who couldn't possibly warrant it, had been to turn the Morgana, and his research, over to the Empire the moment he was satisfied that it was ready. It was to be the weapon that snatched victory from defeat, the technology that preserved Britannia's future and resisted the tidal waves of change.

Except that the Empire had betrayed Hugo Pulcifer. And as Dolores bent to consult the fluttering ticker tape, she realised that, if they hadn't, fate would have forced her grandfather's hand regardless. To tap into the Empire's communications had been child's play for him, and for months the two of them had followed the course of the war, witnessing the horrifying truth where most outside the highest echelons of the state lived in imposed ignorance. Yet the news Dolores saw then was worse than her hard-learned cynicism could have predicted.

Though they'd caught rumours of the currently week-long battle over the Irish Sea, it had occurred in a cloud of such paranoiac secrecy as to defy even her grandfather's brilliance. This message, however, had been sent unencrypted. The spooling ticker tape read: BATTLE LOST. WEST COAST DEFENCES FALLEN. FALL BACK TO PROTECT CAPITAL. IROQUOIS INBOUND. Her grandfather had been right. The war would be lost, and lost within hours, without the fruit of his labours to preserve the day. But he had been wrong also. For it would be no Empiretrained pilot behind the stick of the Morgana, and Dolores's first true test would be a trial by fire. ď&#x201A;&#x161;ď&#x201A;&#x203A; The Iroquois has spotted her.

That Dolores hasn't fired on them means little, that she doesn't bear the Empire's insignia even less. Here they are, miles from the capital, about to end a century of intermittent warfare once and for all. The insurgents will take no chances.

One of the rotating guns is first to open up on her. A twitch of the control lever carries the

Morgana effortlessly aside, but Dolores can see other weapons shifting in their orbits, following her like intrigued eyes. The Morgana may be uniquely fast, but under concentrated fire, her survival will inevitably come down to luck, and luck can only endure for so long. Either Dolores stays to fight or else she admits her weakness, accepting that her conscience will have to bear the deaths of thousands upon thousands.

Yet she can't fight. It isn't in her. And knowing she has no choice that won't leave blood on her hands is so paralysing that she can hardly concentrate to fly. She needs to pull up, to escape, but the weight of that action's repercussions makes her limbs intolerably heavy. It's all she can do to keep dodging, amid a sky that seems to consist more of burnished lead than air.

Before her, the exposed mechanism of the ghost drive glows a ferocious green that mists the air around it. Maybe it will soon fail, or explode, and save her from this impossible decision.

Even that prospect disturbs Dolores less than it should, since, at the same time, she's certain she Hybrid Fiction February 2020

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can smell something, a pungency at once strange and utterly familiar.

As if startled from a dream, she registers to her alarm that, lost in concentrating on that peculiar odour, she's barely been bothering to fly. Nevertheless, somehow the Morgana remains unscathed. And Dolores has placed the smell now; amazing, really, that she didn't recognise it immediately.

It's pipe smoke. It's her grandfather's pipe smoke.

Only then does she comprehend that she genuinely isn't flying anymore. Her hands aren't on the control stick. However, tendrils of green lick at the open cabin, clutching like fingers, and perhaps she ought to be frightened, but that smell calms her, as it always has. Her grandfather is with her, or some aspect of him anyway, some residue that was siphoned in the moment of his death, to pass through tubes and pipes and mechanisms and into his creation. She can feel him as surely as though he were sitting behind her shoulder.

No hand is on the stick. No finger rests on the trigger. Yet her small craft weaves its course through searing death, and as the vastness of the Iroquois fills Dolores's vision, green fire licks from the Morgana's nose to seer two ragged lines that strafe balloon and cockpit, leaving oozing smoke in their wake.

"Thank you," Dolores whispers to the presence she knows is already vanishing, dissolving into the ether. And she draws the Morgana aside, away from this place of violence and horror, as the torn shell of the Iroquois begins its final descent toward the earth. ď&#x201A;&#x161;ď&#x201A;&#x203A; Dolores leaves the Morgana via another of her grandfather's innovations: the parachute he redesigned to be so small as to fit within the backpack she currently wears. Such is her faith in him that the fact it hasn't been tested scarcely troubles her, and sure enough, it works precisely as it should. Drifting like a dandelion seed upon the air, she watches the Morgana fly onward.

Dolores pinned the pedals, tying the flight stick with her scarf. The Morgana will continue out to sea until the ghost drive exhausts the last of its curious energies, and then will dive beneath the waves and be borne to the dark ocean bed.

From here on, the Empire can fight their own battles, and win or lose as they see fit. They are tyrants, and what they need to be educated in is humility, not how to make better weapons.

With solid ground again beneath her boots and her parachute bundled and cast into the waves, Dolores chooses a direction and starts walking. She isn't afraid, not for herself and not any longer for her grandfather's legacy. She understands now that it could never have been among the things the Ordo ab Mortuus Regum stole and destroyed.

Wherever her steps lead her, she'll find a way to be useful. Whatever world arises from this conflict, it will need good engineers. And Dolores Pulcifer learned from the finest.

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

Until next time...

About the authors and artists...  Jon Lasser lives in Seattle, WA with his wife and two children. He is a graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Diabolical Plots; Galaxy’s Edge; Untethered: A Magic iPhone Anthology; and elsewhere. Contact: twoideas.org or Twitter as @disappearinjon  Bill Davidson is a Scottish writer of mainly horror and fantasy. In the last three years, he has placed stories with well over forty good publications around the world, including Ellen Datlow’s highly regarded Best Horror of the Year. Contact: billdavidsonwriting.com or @bill_davidson57  John H. Dromey was born in northeast Missouri.

He enjoys reading and writing in a variety of genres.

He’s had short fiction published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly Magazine, Stupefying Stories Showcase, Thriller Magazine, Unfit Magazine, and elsewhere, as well as in numerous anthologies, including Chilling Horror Short Stories (Flame Tree Publishing, 2015).  Marc Rene is a self-taught artist with a background in design. His mentors include noted artists J.H. Williams III, Darick Robertson, and Steven T. Seagle. Rene’s credits include work for Cartoon Network, Disney, Creative Juices Design, the San Jose Sabercats, Public Speaking Los Angeles, the National Forensics Association, Fry’s Electronics, COGnitive Gaming, NACL eSports, and comedian Sammy Obeid. Rene has worked on several graphic novel projects: NICE from American Gothic Press, Slugger by Ben Pyle, and iHolmes by Michael Lent. Contact: Instagram marcrene_art, Twitter @marcusRhill, or Facebook www.facebook.com/marcreneart  Lena Ng is from Toronto, Ontario. She has short stories in close to three dozen publications including Amazing Stories. Her 2020 forthcoming publications include Mother Ghost’s Grimm, BeerBattered Shrimp, The Bronzeville Bee, What Monsters Do For Love, Schlock Magazine, and The London Reader. Under an Autumn Moon is her short story collection. She is currently seeking a publisher for her novel, Darkness Beckons, a Gothic romance.

Contact: scarystorygirl@hotmail.com



Eric Lewis is a research scientist weathering the latest rounds of mergers and layoffs. His short fiction has been published in Nature, Electric Spec, Bards & Sages Quarterly, the anthologies Into Darkness Peering, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 and Crash Code, the short story collection Tricks of the Blade as well as other venues. His debut novel The Heron Kings is due out in April from Flame Tree Press. Contact: ericlewis.ink, Twitter @TheHeronKing, or Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/EricLewis/e/B07S4MPRSC/

 Nestor Delfino is a science fiction and fantasy author, writing from his home in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he lives with his wife. He is a software developer and works in Toronto. His work has been published by AE The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Hypnos Magazine, Far Orbit Apogee Anthology, Bards and Sages, Kzine, Asymmetry, The New Accelerator, Polar Borealis, Future Visions, Youth Imagination Magazine, Aurora Wolf, Alban Lake Publishing, and The Literary Hatchet, among others. He has received four Honorable Mention awards from the Writers of the Future contest. Contact: http://nestordelfino.com/  Naomi Reinhart is a recent graduate of AUArts with a passion for narrative within her art. Naomi works primarily in multimedia, combining traditional inking with photoshop colours and textures to draw illustrations with a unique feel and vibrance.

Naomi’s art is influenced by her love of comics and artists such as H.R. Giger, Frank Miller, and David Levi. Contact information: n.reinhart@live.ca, naomireinhart.com, or Instagram @normykinzilla.  Nathan Alling Long's work has appeared on NPR and in over 100 journals and anthologies including Tin House, Queer Sci Fi, and Speculative City. Their collection of 50 stories, The Origin of Doubt, was a 2019 Lambda finalist. (“The Empty Garden” was first inspired by and written for a contest for Owl Creek Press.) Contact: https://blogs.stockton.edu/longn/  Bonnie Van Wormer was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and traveled to many different States as a small child. When she was four, her parents settled in Chihuahua, Mexico where she grew up with her five siblings. There she attended a cross-cultural school, graduated, and is currently studying at a Bible College. Contact: bonnie_joy@icloud.com Hybrid Fiction February 2020

 David Tallerman is the author of the horror thriller A Savage Generation and crime drama The Bad Neighbour, ongoing fantasy series The Black River Chronicles, the Tales of Easie Damasco trilogy, and the sci-fi novella Patchwerk. His comic work includes the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science with Bob Molesworth. David's short fiction has appeared in around eighty markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

A number of his best dark fantasy stories were gathered together in his debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories. Contact: davidtallerman.co.uk

Hybrid Fiction February 2020

 Eden “Eddie” Richards is an artist trained in mixed media from youth and an avid writer and roleplayer. Hybrid fiction is their personal favorite genre, pulling bits and pieces from different centuries and styles of fiction to craft something they’re truly passionate about. Contact: noedenart@gmail.com or Twitter @noedenart

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