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ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 28 – January 2016 Edited by Sheri White Editorial By Sheri White
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The Superannuated Man By Todd Outcalt Illustrated By Jeffrey James Oleniacz
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Toesies By Adam Matson
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Ghosts By Andrew Roberts Illustrated By Tex McCranie
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Chocolate for Breakfast by Sharon Baillie
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The Polong By Jay Walker Illustrated By Greg Chapman
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Solid Black By Dale Terrell Illustrated By Joe Young
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The Newlyweds By John Aldrich
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Sacrifice for Resonata By Laura Widener
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Cover By – Matthew Freyer - http://www.matthewfreyerproductions.com/ Proof-read By Sheri White All material contained within the pages of this magazine and associated websites is copyright of Morpheus Tales. All Rights Reserved. No material contained herein can be copied or otherwise used without the express permission of the copyright holders.
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When Richard March opened his office door his heart skipped when the air horn blasted a shrill note. His reflexes pushed him back into the hallway momentarily before he could recover his breath amid a fluttering of party streamers and confetti. Then there were hands to shake all around. Familiar faces. “Congratulations!” “Well deserved!” “We love you, Rick!” March’s secretary threw her arms around his neck and the boss—a young punk who had been groomed in the corporate offices in Lancaster—mounted a chair, raised a glass of watery scotch, and inserted his voice into the din. “Listen up, gang. Listen up. We’re here to thank Rick for thirty-seven years of service. Hard fought. Persevered. But certainly well-deserved. In fact, we can say that Rick was one of those foundational people here at Smitz & Dunlap... a visionary, a pioneer, a patriot in every sense of the word. Some of you here today wouldn’t be who you are without Rick’s mentoring, his expertise, his friendship.” March noted tears in certain eyes, the women mostly, and when he studied his own reflection in the window overlooking the manicured campus, he could scarcely come to terms with the wrinkled face, his narrow strip of salt and pepper hair, and his thickening jaw. His party was dreamlike—and most of the memories of his thirty-seven years intact, even vivid. But his time, like his colleagues before him, had slipped away into the twilight of his years and left him standing in a pool of gratitude. Someone shoved a glass of gin and tonic into March’s hand, a single cube of ice brazenly floating on the surface, and March found himself raising his glass to toast himself as the young punk brought his speech to a rousing denouement. “And so... we lift a glass to Rick March. Creator. Inventor. Owner of patents. Good friend. Family man. Colleague. We salute you, Rick. And we bid you Godspeed.” “Hear, hear!” “All the best, Rick.” “We’ll miss you.” March suspended his glass in the air, stared hard into the convex lens of his drink, and then pulled an ample mouthful into his stomach. There could have been more than gin and tonic in the mix, but what did it matter? He was retiring. What could they do to him now? The party popped for another half hour—drinks all around, shrimp cocktails, a plate of his secretary’s gingersnap cookies—and then began to fizzle in the awkward silences of the morning as the legions began receiving their work orders, calls coming in over the intercom, bells ringing. One by one March said goodbye to his colleagues—most of them a generation or two younger, their faces still fresh with aspirations and the promise of romantic hook-ups in the mailroom. Some, it seemed, he was meeting for the very first time and few could remember the company of the early days, when the pace was slower but the work more significant. March found himself stabbing at a cocktail wiener as he contemplated the ones who had helped to establish the company. Jenkins. Toller. And Martin had been there, too—far ahead of his time in developing the electromagnetic patents that had made Smitz & Dunlap a Fortune 500 firm. March noted that the stragglers in his office were drunk, but were mostly company rookies who had not yet figured out the hierarchy of advancement. Then again, staying drunk on company time might be their best chance for promotion, especially the women who would otherwise be too tame to sleep their way to the top. March lamented these truths but took solace in his gin and tonic as he began clearing away his desk, delicately placing his varied trophies and plaques into the cardboard box that the company had provided.
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Henry and Kylie stopped their game of Monopoly as their grandfather limped into the living room. Henry, about to roll, gripped the dice in a quivering hand. For a moment the cherry-red hotels and conifer-green houses on the board became a derelict plastic ghost town. The scraping of Grampa’s foot on the wood floor sounded like the lurch of some desert creature, hobbling toward them across the dusty salt flats. Grampa sat down in his chair by the fireplace with a loud exhalation of breath. He stared at the game. “Who’s winning?” he asked. “I am,” Kylie said. Though Henry had a taller stack of money in front of him, she had more properties, including hotels on the Oranges. Henry could not take his eyes off his grandfather’s foot. Whenever Grampa entered a room Henry was frozen by the scraping dead appendage, a mystery concealed in an old brown leather shoe. The dice slipped from his hands, as if escaping, and their clatter against the board brought him back to the game. “Oh no,” he said, as he advanced his battleship token to Atlantic Avenue, where Kylie had three houses. “Eight hundred dollars!” Kylie cried. Henry grudgingly handed over the money, more than half of his loot. His sister invested the money in a fresh round of houses on the Greens, which Henry was approaching. Grampa sat in his chair and tapped his mysterious foot. “She’s gotcha on the ropes there, boy.” In the kitchen they could hear their parents preparing dinner. On his next roll Henry landed on Pennsylvania Avenue, also his sister’s territory, and was forced to liquidate his assets. Neither he nor Kylie ever surrendered in the face of bankruptcy. They always played the game to the last devastating roll, like gamblers at the craps table. In a few moments Kylie had all the money and was counting it gloatingly as Henry stared at a white row of mortgaged properties. Kylie, gripping a fistful of Monopoly dollars, took a victory lap around the board with her car token, passing a landscape of properties that belonged to her. “You’re a real tycoon,” Grampa said. Kylie smiled. Henry glanced toward the kitchen to make sure his parents were out of sight and out of hearing range. Then he leaned toward his grandfather. “Grampa, what happened to your foot?” he asked. The victorious grin disappeared from Kylie’s face. Grampa tapped his foot on the floor, a bass drum thump beneath the snare crackle of the fire. “I lost my toesies,” Grampa said. “What are toesies?” Kylie asked. “Toesies.” Grampa leaned down and pinched one of her tiny pink socks. “These are toesies.” Kylie giggled. Henry stared at his grandfather’s shoe. Was there really just a stump of a foot in there, with no toes? “How did you lose them?” Henry asked. “That’s a scary story,” Grampa said. “I can handle a scary story,” said Henry. Grampa leaned back in his chair, grinning down at the children, his grin not quite friendly or comforting. “All right,” he said. 4
There’s a ghost in the house. Something like that goes without saying. Because, of course, there’s a ghost in every house. New or old, it doesn’t matter. The dead need spaces and, just like the living, the wide-open ones aren’t the ones that bring them comfort. It isn’t just houses either, the boy knows. Cars, buses, trains. Even aeroplanes. It’s nothing to get upset about. There’s no reason to be disconcerted because you think a group of dead people — relatives or otherwise — is standing watching you get dressed. No need to be self-conscious because you think someone invisible and no longer living is sitting on the edge of the bath while you use the toilet. That would be like getting freaked out because there’s a spider or an ant or even a cheese mite in the same room. It’s all about scale, and while ghosts and the living share the same space, for the most part they exist without coinciding at all. And that’s the other thing, ghosts aren’t dead people. Leastways, not all of them. Some are, granted, but some of them are people who never existed. Not in our understood sense of the word, anyway. They’re echoes of choices and paths people never took. The boy knows that when you’re driving down the motorway late at night and suddenly feel an inexplicable chill or heightened awareness, you’ve probably just passed the spot where you died. Or would have died if you’d set off ten minutes earlier. A ghost you could be, sitting in the mangled wreck of your ghost car for the rest of eternity. Or, it might fade away as though it were never there. That’s the thing. No one knows how these things work: what comes into existence and what doesn’t, what stays and what goes. And here’s the real scary thing — what if our lives, our real actual lives, are nothing but ghosts, too? Just barely perceived shimmers in some other existence that we can only begin to dream to comprehend? And while all of this is true, it doesn’t matter here. Not to the boy, because the ghost in the house right here right now is a dead person. A dead boy to be exact. He’s eight years old. At least he was when he died. Eight years old and he has a thin smile and dark eyes that are twice as big as they should be. Sometimes the ghost-boy opens his mouth in a silent scream and inside there is as black as his eyes. The boy’s okay with that, though. He became used to the ghost-boy a long time ago and, he thinks, the ghost-boy has become used to him. Sometimes, before the ghost-boy does that screaming blackness thing with his mouth, the boy sees a mischievous play around his ghost-lips as though the two of them are complicit in this charade. Sometimes that play is even in the ghost-boy’s eyes. A tiny glint before he hooks his fingers into claws and hovers in front of the boy’s mother or father or baby sister who isn’t even tottering yet. He hangs in space in front of Mum or Dad or Eliza like a ghost-train and then he looks at the boy as if he might hold up a scorecard or drop him a wink and nod his appreciation at a job well done. The ghost-boy watches TV too, sometimes when it isn’t on. The boy isn’t sure what all this does to his theory of ghosts and the living existing totally separately in the same space. Maybe this is the exception to prove the rule. But in an existence based on collision of worlds like this, wouldn’t that exception have its own exception too and therefore cancel itself out? Like the boy says, no one knows how these things work. Lately the ghost-boy has been coming through. Into the real world, that is. The boy has seen him doing a host of mundane things and then found evidence to suggest the activity has taken place in his world, not the ghost-boy’s. Once, he watched the ghost-boy eat a bowl of cereal and then move from the living room into the kitchen. Later in the day, he saw there was an extra dish and spoon on the draining board. His mother or father (whichever of them had done the washing up) either didn’t notice or dismissed it as yesterday’s leftover, but the boy knows different. 5
“… for I have sinned.” There was a pause as the sins moved from the memory centre to the language centre of the brain. The child’s brain was small, so it should have been a fast transaction, but the sins paused for a while at the consideration centre, where she wondered if she should mention the details of the sin itself; what if it was too bad? What if the priest knew it was her? What if she went to hell? The consideration centre was left behind and the consequence station arrived at: if you don’t confess it, you’ll definitely go to hell. That much she knew to be true. The priest waited patiently like he had for three decades. Eventually the sins pulled up at her tongue and she blurted, “I pulled my sister's hair and she cried and I thought a bad word at my mum when she shouted at me.” “Are you sorry for what you have done, my child?” The priest sat on the far side of the drawn curtain. The chapel was too small to have a standard confessional box with confessor and God's envoy of forgiveness boxed like horses on a starting line. Instead, the intimate vestry served the purpose with a navy velvet curtain drawn three quarters of the length of the room. The priest sat on a comfortable reclining chair with a cup of tea on the other side of the curtain, hidden from the little ones, and listened to the inane first confessions of seven-year-old children: I spat on the ground, I forgot to say my prayers, I told a lie to my teacher, I stood on a wasp. He absolved them all, including the current hair-pulling, brain swearing anonymous girl, with the stipulation that they recite the rosary before leaving the church and “go out and sin no more.” In the small chapel 15 children quietly muttered their way through Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes. The latter being everyone's favourite because it was the shortest. The sixteenth child entered the vestry. All the children had been nervous, the timid imagining the priest glowing from within as he relayed their sins to God and taking instructions on forgiveness, while the daring imagined him on fire like the burning bush that spoke to Moses. They went into the confessional vestry with speckles of sin on their tiny virginal souls and when they left church they were clean, ready to sin again. By the time most of them had reached the boundary of the church their soul already had a splash from a sinful thought that would remain and multiply until their next spiritual floss and polishing. Child 16 was different. He wasn't nervous, but approached the event with pragmatism and belief in everything he had been taught at school and in mass. Confess your sins and God (through the priest) will forgive you. “Does thinking something bad count as a sin?” Boy 16 asked before embarking on the scripted preamble learned and practiced in class. “Not if it is a fleeting thought,” the priest assured. “The devil can whisper a thought to you, but if you quickly think about something else, something good, it isn't a sin. Is that what you do?” “Sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes I think about doing things that are bad. I didn't know it was the devil whispering though, I thought it was my head making stuff up.” The priest replaced his tea; it was cold now anyway. ”Go on.” “My mum says I can’t have chocolate for breakfast but I always want chocolate for breakfast. Why can’t I eat chocolate at breakfast time? If Mum says don’t but I think about it every morning, is the devil making me sin?” The priest drew in a breath to answer when the boy continued. “And I don't know if it's a sin to wonder what my sister's skull looks like, how could it be? I saw a funny picture on the internet of a skull and it said ‘I live inside your face,’ and I thought that was funny, that's not a sin, is it?” 6
Adira, with his rucksack slung over his shoulder, took the steps that led into the pissstinking subway. He hated taking that route, but to go around took an extra ten minutes. All he wanted to do was get home after another lonesome day at school. The subway was dull and dank, and Adira was relieved to see there were no drunken tramps lurking in the shadows, curled up in rags. He detested their putrid stench and unpredictability. Sometimes they would say nothing at all, too comatose to acknowledge the world around them and other times they would badger him for money, and on occasion, attempt to mug him. He recalled one particular occasion, still able to feel the vagrant’s grimy hands pulling at his school blazer as if it were yesterday and he could still smell the man’s pungent breath as it was exhaled in a torrent of garbled abuse. As always Adira quickened his pace through the tunnel. The faster he moved, the bigger the rectangle of daylight grew in the distance, which meant the closer he was getting to safety. He was just over halfway through the tunnel when the silhouette of a boy came into view. He was hobbling, holding his right leg as he lurched towards him and shortly after, two more figures appeared. They were yelling and gesturing aggressively. Not good. The first boy looked over his shoulder and when his head turned back ahead to face Adira, it was clear to see he was terrified. His eyes were fit to burst from their sockets, and his drawn, ashen face drenched with tears. Adira kept his head down, knowing it was safer to just ignore the boy’s plight. The estate where he lived with his grandfather was plagued by thugs, drug addicts, and gangs. Seconds after the first boy limped past, his pursuers sprinted by and just moments later there was a yelp. As much as Adira had no intention of turning, his body had other ideas. When he looked down the gloomy passage he saw the boy on the ground, the two aggressors pummelling him, their arms and legs a blur as they sent blow after blow to the boy’s body. Adira was transfixed. Walk away! his conscience yelled. The young hooligans showed no mercy, and continued to kick and punch their poor victim. High-pitched wails echoed through the subway, like pigs in a slaughter house; they soon became pained howls, then groans, until there were no sounds at all. One of the attackers finally stopped, his head turned and his eyes fixed on Adira. Adira’s feet were glued to the spot. Run. Fear rendered his body unable to obey to his brain’s commands. “What da fuck you looking at?” the thug yelled. His partner ceased his brutal beating, and he too looked at Adira. “Get him, bruv!” he shouted. They both launched themselves into a sprint, abandoning their lifeless victim. Adira was finally able to unstick the soles of his feet, and he ran. “You’re dead, bro. I is gonna fuck you up, bad.” Adira’s feet pounded the concrete as he fled the shadows of the subway. He wasn’t much of an athlete, and his heavy schoolbag didn’t help. He scrambled up a grassy bank, hands and feet scrabbling for purchase, the sound of his thundering heart pounding between his ears. Please don’t let them catch me. Adira darted between several burnt-out cars, but he could hear the patter of his chasers’ feet. They were getting closer. Two high-rise blocks appeared as he rounded a corner and he could see the door that led to his flat on the eighth floor. He prayed his grandfather was there, but there was no telling as he worked strange hours at the nearby hospital. Adira’s rucksack slipped from his shoulders, and he allowed the hindrance to crash to the floor; his life was more important than a bag of textbooks. 7
He took off in third gear. The load he had in the trailer was fewer than 25,000 pounds, there was no reason to start in second, or, god forbid, first. Didn’t even have to split the high gears. He took a drag of his cigarette and slid the Kenworth into fourth. He didn’t bother touching the clutch; that was for stopping and starting only. He stepped on the accelerator and was in fifth by the time he turned out of the truckstop and onto the highway. As he turned onto the ramp to get onto the interstate, he flipped the splitter up on the stick shift and grabbed seventh. He ashed his cigarette and then took a drag. Before he knew it, he was in ninth. This was all becoming a hair too familiar to him. He no longer had to think about RPMs, or double-clutching, even road speed and gear selection were, if anything, in the deepest parts of his mind. He was in eleventh when he pulled onto I-80 (a bona fide big road, coast to coast, border to border). He took a drag of his cigarette, ashed it again, and turned the CB radio on. “Big six one ain’t running this road no more. He’s off the interstate these days, trying to dodge them chicken coops.” He took a drink of his coffee, put it down, took another drag off his cigarette. He shifted into thirteenth, then pulled his CB microphone to his mouth and pushed in the button. “Hey, this is Rob over on the big eight-oh, eastbound, ‘bout the 276 yardstick in Nebraska. Any smokies I need to be looking for?” he asked. Static came over the radio. He set the cruise control and pulled on his cigarette. “Hey, looks like 80’s clear ’til York,” came the reply. “10-4; thanks, buddy,” Rob said, and then hung up his microphone. He took another puff off his cigarette and put it out in his ashtray. He took another drink of coffee, and then wiped his eyes. It was early. Rob had just woken up, barely an hour ago. He got up, got his cup of coffee from the truckstop, looked over his rig, and he was off. Rob wasn’t one of those drivers who wasted too much time. Hell, he had nine hours to drive roughly 300 miles, but he didn’t have too much to say to many of the other drivers at that or any other truckstop. Hell, what did they have to talk about? Their favourite trucks? Bitching about construction, or those damn morons in their four-wheelers not knowing how to keep their cars in their own lanes? There were only so many topics these guys all knew about, guaranteed. Rob settled back in his seat, set the cruise control on his truck, and lit another cigarette. He fiddled with the stereo long enough to find a good, classic country song, and let out a sigh. Two hundred and ninety more boring miles. ### Rob had just emptied his trailer in Des Moines. There were a few places around to park for the night, so he settled on one truckstop, found himself a parking spot, set his brakes, and shut his truck off. He took the last drink of his hours-old coffee, grabbed his sweatshirt, and threw it on. He climbed down out of his truck and took off towards the diner. The parking lot was dark, and it was wet. It had rained here some hours ago. He hadn’t had to drive through it, but he could tell. He could smell old oil, driven into the air by the falling rain. He could see the black reflections of lights on the asphalt. Rob spotted something on the ground. A business card. He reached down to pick it up and held it up to see it in the light. Tori’s Wrecker. He turned it over. 27.425 USB was written in pen, underneath a name. Greg. 8
Diana Applegate wondered what was keeping her newly wedded husband, Seth, so long in coming back to her. He had been in the small roadside store for the better part of fifteen minutes. She could see him through the glass doors; he was talking to the cashier and gesticulating wildly with his hands. She bit her lip in frustration: a habit her mother said would never be attractive to a man. But nonetheless, Seth had asked to marry her and they had chosen to drive to Las Vegas from Boulder, rather than catch the last plane out. God it’s hot, she thought. She grabbed an old Sears & Roebuck magazine and began to fan herself. They had pulled over at the gas station to ask directions to the nearest hotel. For the last hour they had seen only desert and she was becoming a bit nervous. Tumbleweeds drifted across the sand, carried by the wind. Not a cloud corrupted the sky. The sun beat down with unrelenting ferocity on this mid-summer day, the day of their honeymoon. She tried to relax. Suddenly, the door opened and he was by her side in the driver’s seat. He slammed it shut. “Well…we’re headed in the right direction. The guy in there told me we should arrive in Vegas by tomorrow night if we keep going. Do you mind sleeping in the car?” She shook her head. “It’s not exactly the most romantic place to sleep on our first night together. Can’t we find a hotel?” He blinked in the heat. “I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t hurt to try.” He put the car in gear and they were off. After thirty minutes of desert, he slowed the car to a crawl. A sign loomed up ahead. They both read it: NO FACILITIES NEXT 100 MILES Seth hit the dash in frustration. He swore and set back hard against the seat, spent. His wife read the sign again and looked around them. Just desert greeted her eyes, vast and standing to the sky for dozens of kilometers in all directions. Every so often distant mesas and buttes would break up the monotony. The sun beat down on them. The stillness was suffocating. She turned the air conditioner up. “What now?” she asked after a long pause. “I…I don’t know,” was all he could say. He squinted, seeing nothing but empty highway. They had not seen a car for fifteen minutes. “Our only hope is to find a hotel and go from there.” “But there’s nothing for the next one hundred miles—” “I know that!” he said shortly. “I read the sign, just like you did. We have to keep driving.” He sped up and they continued on. She said nothing, but bit her lip in apprehension. After a good hour they saw a sign up ahead reflecting the setting sun. A tall building materialized out of the heat waves that blanketed the road. Hot wind pulled at their hair through the open windows. Seth stuck his head out and squinted against the setting sun. The sign read thus: WELCOME TO THE BARRENS HOTEL “But I thought there was nothing for the next one hundred miles,” Diana said. Seth was silent, head bowed, deep in thought. A moment later he raised it and read the sign again. After doing this several times he read it yet again, but silently and to himself. When he finally spoke, it shattered the silence. His voice sounded loud. “Well, I guess we could stay here. I mean, it looks like a pretty nice place to be just off the highway. I wonder who lives there. Who could live there? Vampires?” 9
Yellow ribbons of police tape fluttered in the gust of autumn wind as they drew a fence around the small brick home. It sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac and in front of a thickly wooded area that residents never ventured into. Just hours ago, a convoy of emergency responders filled the street, casting dancing blue lights upon the bricks of nearby homes, into their windows, and across the darkness of the woods. The house was empty now. Dishes were left in the sink. Laundry filled a basket on the dining table. The hum of the refrigerator was the only audible sound. The green recliner stained with nearly dried crimson was the only sign of an evening gone wrong. The only evidence to the life ended within the walls. The investigative team was at a loss—especially Dr. Julia Abbott, as she stared at the suspect back in the interrogation room. “I can’t get anything out of her,” said Abbott. She wore a black suit adorned with a badge bearing her name and an image of her face, looking nothing like her face now lined with worry. Her training as a criminal psychologist wasn’t proving much help digging to the core of the eeriness of the case. A gray-haired man in khaki slacks and a black polo embroidered with Det. Parsons stood aside her, his face troubled as he stared through the one-way window. Beyond its pane, a little girl sat alone in the interrogation room. Her distant gaze was hidden behind a smooth red curtain of hair. Tears streamed across her freckled skin. “What about her school records?” Parsons asked. “Nothing really,” Abbott said, eyeing the manila folder she’d cast aside with frustration. “Fifth grade. Introverted. Never in trouble. Good grades. Some recent counseling for her father’s absence. Certainly nothing to indicate she’d be capable of murder.” Parsons shook his head. “The mother and father checked out fine too. Married twelve years. Both clean. Mother stayed at home and father is a truck driver. The grandmother says they had a great relationship. It just doesn’t make sense.” Abbott shuddered as she thought of the 911 call she’d listened to earlier, analyzing the little girl’s cold and stoic voice as she said: My name is Anna Rogers. I just killed my mother. ### Earlier that day, Anna sat on the floor in front of her bed, her back pushed against the wispy purple fabric of the comforter. Her arms were around her bent knees, as if her own embrace could push away the fear. It couldn’t. As long as the voice followed her, fear followed. It had come to her four months ago on her tenth birthday. She had awoken with the pure excitement that she felt on every June 21st for the surprises that would make her day stand apart from an ordinary day. Her mother Angela had promised an extra special day, and Anna only hoped that meant her father would be pausing his life on the road to spend the day with her. And it did. But she couldn’t enjoy him or the party her mother had planned, or the princess cake and gifts she’d wanted. Hello, Anna. It was a man’s voice. When she first heard it in her room as she prepared for her birthday outing, her eyes darted in every direction in search of the source, but no one was there. The voice struck her mind like an iced dagger—chilling and painful. “Hello? Who’s there?” she called out. No one was around to hear the quivering of her voice. A collection of stuffed animals and their black button eyes suddenly made her feel uneasy. You can’t see me, Anna, but I’m here. “What do you mean? Who are you?” I’m Rauldon and we’re going to become very good friends. “Hi, Rauldon. How can I hear you if I don’t see you?” 10
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