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ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 20 – April 2013 Crying in the Night By Philip Roberts Illustrated By April Martin
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Mr. Armstrong’s Brother By Brent Pilkey
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Lilin By C. E. Zacherl Illustrated By C. E. Zacherl
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Subject Matter By Alec Charles Illustrated By Duane Myers
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A Dream of A Future Death By Roo Bardookie
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Cole Tarpin by David Coffman
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In Case of Emergency: Break Glass By Todd Outcalt
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All Our Petty Deformities By Jessica Lilien Illustrated By Vladimir Petkovic
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BYOB By Clay Waters
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Cover By Vladimir Petković - http://vlladimir.wix.com/vlladimir-art Proof-read By – Samuel Diamond, 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. 2
Crying in the Night By Philip Roberts The warm spring wind sent the swings in motion, the sound of rattling metal all Perry heard as he trudged down the sidewalk and up to the forgotten playground. The park itself rarely saw use since the call center had closed its doors and sent any respectable person up north or just plain away from town. Even in its glory days the four-block-wide park hadn’t been the kind of gathering place the city had thought it would be, and Perry didn’t know if he’d ever seen too many kids bothering with the swings, the large sand pit, the now rusty jungle bars. A pig, rhino, horse, and giraffe attached to springs were chipped and aged enough to look like more of a perverse version of their former selves. Standing before the jungle bars, a bag with a half-filled bottle of rum in his hand, Perry could remember playing on this equipment himself when he’d been younger and his dad had been a manager in that call center, just before the fad of safety playground equipment replaced most things like jungle bars, deemed too dangerous for any kid to play on because someone must’ve fallen and scraped his knee once. The playground had already been poorly received enough to make it not worth replacing any of this stuff. Of course, at eleven at night Perry didn’t expect or want to find any kids. With the summer heat picking up more every night he had to pull off a layer of grungy clothing on his way to the bathroom built dead center in the middle of the park beside the playground. He’d been proud of himself for remembering that place, and now he pushed open the door into the small room. He was surprised to find working water in the sink, and used it to scrub his face, brush his teeth using his finger, his eyes closed and soaked with water when he heard the child sobbing in the night. Perry lifted up his wet face with a frown and stared at a small, broken window built near the top of the wall. He had to get on his tiptoes to see out, but that’s what he did, looking over the edge towards the playground and the large sandbox. There, hunched down, face buried in his hands from the looks of it, Perry saw a little boy. The kid couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, wearing a winter jacket, from what he could tell, which was strange enough by itself given the weather, but even more strange since he hadn’t seen the boy just a few minutes earlier when he’d walked by. He stepped out into the warm night, scratching at his hairy chin, the boy still crying, making no motion to move, sitting in the middle of that sand and balling his eyes out. “Guess I should go over,” he whispered to himself, but he didn’t want to. Perry hated kids, including the two he’d been fool enough to father, even been forced to partially raise until unemployment and alcohol made sure his ex-wife didn’t want him near them, which was fine by Perry. He knew too if he went over the kid would probably cling to him, cry for help, to be shown somewhere or other, and he’d be forced to endure it all. “Could get hurt if I just leave him.” He might, his mind retorted, but it wasn’t like there were a lot of people bothering with the playground or the park, and it might teach the boy a lesson he clearly needed to be taught since he’d managed to get himself in such a position in the first place. Learning early that he was on his own could be a blessing. The reason felt more like a rationale to avoid going over there than anything else, but Perry didn’t need much more than that, so he gladly accepted it and returned to the squalor of his new temporary home. But the damn boy wouldn’t stop, just shrieking and shrieking into the night, never moving from what Perry could tell when he pulled himself up to the window. The rum dulled his mind but he couldn’t drift away. He’d slept on enough sidewalks before to be able to ignore most sounds, but that voice was so high-pitched, the tone fluctuating enough that it dug into his brain, made his head start to pound, no sleep to be had so long as the cries wouldn’t stop. 3
Mr. Armstrong’s Brother By Brent Pilkey “Mr. Armstrong, are you going to have a scary house again this Halloween?” Mr. Armstrong smiled at the little boy and asked, “A scary house? What do you mean?” Jake Updyke, as determined as only eight-year-old boys can be, explained himself. “Your house was really scary last year.” Dropping a wink to Jake’s father, Mr. Armstrong said, “But I wasn’t home on Halloween last year. I was at work.” Jake wasn’t about to be swayed. “No! You were here. You had on a mask, a really ugly, scary mask.” “A mask?” Mr. Armstrong began nodding in understanding. “That wasn’t me, Jake. That was my brother.” “Your brother?” Jake asked doubtfully. Mr. Armstrong checked up and down the sidewalk, then knelt next to the boy. “Can you keep a secret, Jake?” Jake knew from school and his parents that when an adult asked you to keep a secret, it was probably a bad thing, but Mr. Armstrong was asking him right in front of his dad. Jake looked from Mr. Armstrong—a man who had moved in just after Halloween two years ago—to his father. Ever since Halloween last year, Jake had wanted to ask Mr. Armstrong what he planned for this year, and today when helping his dad rake the leaves in the front yard, he had dragged his dad across the quiet street to talk to Mr. Armstrong. “It’s okay, Jake,” his dad said, sharing a smile Jake didn’t understand with the other adult. Mr. Armstrong lowered his voice so he was almost whispering. “My brother lives with me, but I have to keep him locked in the basement. I only let him out on Halloween.” Jake’s eyes widened so much it felt like they were about to swallow his face. “Really? In the basement?” Mr. Armstrong nodded seriously. “In the basement.” “Wow,” Jake breathed with the innocent gullibility of a child. “How come?” Once again, Mr. Armstrong checked to make sure no one was close enough to eavesdrop. Jake, believing he was about to share in a very adult secret, looked around as well. “My brother really likes Halloween, but sometimes he gets… carried away,” he finished softly, and Jake thought Mr. Armstrong sounded just a little bit scared, too. Jake threw a nervous glance over Mr. Armstrong’s shoulder at the big house sitting there so quietly. To Jake, the windows looked like sneaky eyes over the grin of the front porch. A big, hungry grin. “What did he do?” Jake whispered around a hitch in his throat. Now Mr. Armstrong didn’t sound scared, he sounded sad. “My brother likes to scare things. Cats and dogs, birds, any kind of animal. But he really likes to scare little kids. He says he can taste their fear, and it’s like candy to him.” Jake quickly checked the house again, wanting to make certain no one was coming down the front yard at him, no one that wanted to eat his fear. And Jake was feeling a little bit scared. You’re being a baby, he chided himself. It was just a house. The house where Mr. Armstrong and his brother lived. But his brother only lived in the basement. Did Mr. Armstrong keep him chained up like a bad dog? Were the chains big enough? “But he just scares them, right?” On its own, Jake’s hand reached out and grabbed hold of his father’s pant leg. “Okay, Jake, I think we should get going now.” Dimly, somewhere in the back of his eight-year-old mind, Jake heard his father speak, but he couldn’t stop listening to Mr. Armstrong. 4
Lilin By C. E. Zacherl I Rebekah opened her dew-lilted lashes. Concussed and disoriented, she mistook the wet granite she lay on for her lover’s bed, the open night air for his thick down comforter and crisp cotton sheets. At first her eyelids were slender, tentative slits that covered the swimming, disoriented orbs of her iris. Those orbs bobbed in a glazed and sickened lull, looking to find a fracture in the half-dream that held them. She let out a low, groaning exhale as her eyes opened to their full almond width in hopes to stretch the cobweb from her reason. Sensation began to pin-prick its way back through her limbs in slow heated waves, and with the feeling came an awareness of her own prostration. Her back was arched uncomfortably across the warm granite outcropping like a wilted flower (a fallen angel crumbled to the stone). Her lips, her hair, her eyes: each darkly sanguine amongst a nimbus of skinlight, doubly borrowed from solar to lunar, the pale flesh on the stone. Corpse-still, statuesque, unearthen beauty. Dazzling spheres haunted her eyes from the stars that burned brightly above. The bayou breathing its life to her wakening through the countless sounds and vibrations: insects, serpents, amphibians, and something darker, some unnamable incantation that seemed to dwell in the trees (in the stars). Helplessly, she lay surrounded by living forest and sundered swamplands. Rebekah felt like an animal left splayed for dissection, a doll on display. Her limbs quivered as she felt for wounds on her aching skull, smoothing down the Kevlar that covered her abdomen. Vulgar flashes of memory assaulted her; She’d been taken, forced, dragged. Sharp recollections, the hungry teeth of underbrush as it tore at her thighs, the same willowy limbs that now wouldn’t respond to the commands of synapse. II Her hands grew steadier as they clutched at the aches of her body. But they did not lift blood-sticky in the moonlight and she knew; whatever the source of her pain, it was internal. Beneath her she noticed the wet of the stone, the slimy slick of wanting earth. With a moss that seemed to grow into her clothing, into her. It took more effort than it should have to lift her skull. Once she had, her jaw set in frustration when she realized that the space gained between herself and the granite was unremarkable.
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Subject Matter By Alec Charles I, Jonathan Henry Adams, hereby swear that I shall not reveal or discuss the entries of this book to any man who is not a serving member of Second Branch. I understand that revealing or discussing any of the entries made within this book to those who are not serving members of Second Branch will be seen not only as treason against Her Majesty Queen Victoria and the Empire, but will be viewed as my betraying God and all of His righteousness in a bid to see the devil and his followers claim control over England. There is one thing I would just like to make clear before I begin my assignment, for I have no doubt at all that this report will be kept in the Second Branch archives; I fear no good can come from this. For the Council of Vampires to give us one of their own breed to examine as we see fit... there must be some devilish trickery behind it. I fear that we have given or will be giving them something in return, and I dread to think what it is. Also, I have been told the vampire in our possession is male. In the following report, I shall refer to him as The Subject in place of his mortal name. I do this as I have no intention or desire to humanise this foul creature in any way whatsoever. Make no mistake - the vampire species is not human, and we risk mistaking them for such at our own risk. 31st December Visited the holding area where The Subject is due to be imprisoned (the work undertaken on the sewage system has allowed Second Branch to make a number of secret bunkers, future examiner of the archives...). A solid door plated with silver opens into a long corridor illuminated via burning gas lamps. There are a total of six individual cells - placed side by side - with bars that have been laced with silver. Having been told The Subject will be placed in the sixth cell - that positioned furthest from the door - I examined what has been put in there for our prisoner. There is a coffin (note: not filled with soil of any kind) and a bed with blanket and pillow. I am curious to see which one of these The Subject will choose to slumber in. At all times, four guards will be at hand: two inside the detaining area and another two on the other side of the door. Each guard will be in possession of a silver blade, a crucifix, the Bible and a bottle of holy water. Tomorrow marks the start of a new year and The Subject’s arrival. I wonder what we will learn over these next twelve months. 1st January Hoping to catch The Subject in an active state, I arrived at the cells some two hours after sunset. On first impression, I was disappointed; The Subject looks like an Irishman of forty or so years and talks with an accent that would not seem so out of place on the streets above. He does not look worldly or wealthy. The Subject could easily be lost within a crowd. He does not possess any striking features or carry with him an aura of death and power. Finding him sitting on the bed, I asked him to stand and come close to the bars, which he did. I asked if he understood his reason for being here and he told me that he does. I asked him to open his mouth wide and he did so. Again, his teeth appeared to be far from remarkable, but he assures me they change when he is “feeding.” I asked him on what does he “feed” and he answered, without any trace of emotion: Whatever I can take hold of.” I asked The Subject how often does he “feed,” and he told me once every day or so. The Subject claims he does not kill when “feeding” and has never turned a living soul into a vampire. As I have decided it best to try and build a sense of trust on The Subject’s behalf, I did not press the vampire too hard for an exhibition of powers, but asked only the few questions already stated before making my excuses to leave. I did, however, ask for his age and was astonished when he claimed to be 89 years old. There is a chance he is being untruthful of course, for reasons unknown, but if he were telling the truth, it should not be too difficult to find records of him from the past decades. 6
A Dream of A Future Death By Roo Bardookie So many families torn apart by poverty in this bleak future. Those good souls are a blessing that will take the children in. This family took in eight children, as they had none of their own. None of them were related, and they were of the age in which to kiss and explore. Besides this, they banded together out of self-preservation, and they would deal blows with extreme consequences to those that talked badly about their new family. This is the story of the time I went against my new parents’ wishes and did ride the garbage smell elevator. Apartment and condominium cities are now great concrete places that recall a day of Soviet occupation. And we small ants go to school and work and pour from these hives and nests. So automated and so sterile, but for the ripe smell of garbage that man cannot escape from no matter what the future brought.
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Cole Tarpin by David Coffman Cole Tarpin was his name, and surely you’ve heard of him — The Cherrylingo Desperado. Enough said; you would have known to stay out of his way. He had the nature of a thunderstorm— black and gloomy, likely to explode in fire and thunder any minute. And some said: “Let him blow! At least I can tell the world I’ve been kicked in the butt by Cole Tarpin.” Don’t tarnish him with any of this silly stuff come from Cinderella — a kid nobody liked always pushed around by everyone, a kid sweet as milk and sugar whose misfortune made a rebel of him. No sir, Cole Tarpin had none of that bad luck, or would not have cared if he did. He walked and talked like God Almighty with a belly ache. No one should have wanted to stick to someone so nasty, but everybody did. Girls! He had them by the millions cruising after him, laughing at everything he said, going into fits when he told them to get lost, which he often did (he had a fulsome appetite). “Hard as nails” as one old journalist called him, and he nailed plenty to the cross. Yeah, cross because of all things he hated most were skinny-faced, sweet mouth churchies. Well, fact is he had it in for anyone who thought they were nice, churchy or not. In the final account, he didn’t have a lick of ugly. Black, wavy hair, sunny tan, and put together like a flying wedge, big shoulders and small butt. Green eyes which swamped the girls. Yeah, he had money, and no one to equal him unless it was the devil, and the devil had never scored at Cherrylingo. Get jealous! No doubt, the guys had a case of it wherever he went, and where the stories of his deeds were heard. However, in Cherrylingo there was no match for Cole Tarpin. Recall Cherrylingo? Well, it has been removed from Olympic competition, but it was once all the rage. Briefly, two teams hustled around a court with one athlete holding a cherry in his mouth and at the given opportunity squeezed the seed from the pulp to spit it at a tiny basket high up. If he missed, a teammate might catch the seed in the air with another chance to spit it in the basket. Delightful game and it long had its heroes. Undoubtedly, Cole Tarpin rated among its champions, for he could shoot the basket fifty feet away. Give him his due at the game, but what of his acclaim in almost everything, or so it seemed? He sold Bongo-Bongo Boosters for Wishful Women and thought they were drum sets; he sold buttito diapers and never had a kid; he peddled Xingu wrappers for tamales and couldn’t spell the name. Then why did all the women clutch after him -- he who mostly used his tongue for shooting cherry pits? Anyway, a clear impression was that he was fabulous at everything, and no proof other than spitting cherry seeds at high velocity. There was always a crowd surging after him, hands outstretched with oversized cherry seeds for his autograph. They shuffled twenty dollar bills into a barrel to pay for his signature. Always the minnows flocked in the wake of the shark if nothing else than to brag they had seen him. One of those in the gambolling throng hoped to lose himself in the pack; he wanted least to be noticed, to be with anyone, for he was much alone. You see, he had a particular defect; he had been born with a rubicund nose — yes, rubicund (red), due to oversized capillaries of the rhinoplasmadesmata. Of course, he never played in any games, cherrylingo or other. His first name will not be given; you would never believe it. So, his name shall be Rube. A most fortunate day for Rube, for Cole Tarpin had deigned to come down from his forty acre challis, shaped as a plump cherry, to stroll through the town. Rube found himself in the press of the crowd, thrust forward within a pace of the Cherrylingo Desperado. He had never meant to get so close when The Desperado reached out to him and, seizing his face, autographed his nose with green ink. The crowd roared into hysterical laughter, and poor Rube clapped his hands over his nose and fled to his room.
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In Case of Emergency: Break Glass By Todd Outcalt Sanders was holding a Royal Flush. He was seated at the card table with Garson and Timothy in the control room. They had been playing poker for hours and none of them had been watching the control panel. Garson was the first to smell the smoke. She went running down the corridor toward the checkpoint, ripped a fire extinguisher off the wall, and bounded back into the fray yelling, “Fire on deck two! Shut down Key Ninety!” Sanders and Timothy, both large and agile men, jumped over the conference table, sending a spray of coffee and gelatinous food onto the walls. Sanders reached for a communications-line and called in to get a status report just as the alarm began to sound—a high-pitched, shockwave of terror that set his teeth on edge and sent him into a spasm of cursing. Timothy, the first African-American to make the inter-stellar mission, reacted with calmer nerves and punched at the switch to get a reading for the Key Ninety area. “Looks like we have a breakout on Ninety!” he yelled back to Sanders, who was still waiting for the status report. “Two hundred and ninety Celsius, and rising,” he added. Sanders kicked the wall in anguish and felt his ankle twist. “Son of a—” “Ninety might also be compromised with radiation!” Timothy shouted over the din. “I need that report!” “Shut down the alarm!” Sanders screamed. “I can’t hear myself think. Go to high frequency!” Timothy punched a code into the panel and waited for the alarm to oscillate to an earsplitting whine before the frequency disappeared beyond the range of human detection. Immediately the silence turned their attentions to the black smoke that was rolling along the ceiling of the corridor like a giant serpent, twisting and turning through the network of pipes and conduits as if it had a life of its own, its giant black head opening in the conference room to swallow up the precious oxygen. “I need that report!” Timothy screeched, his finger poised over the Key Ninety controls in anticipation of a shut down. “I’m not getting through,” Sanders said. “Should I shut down?” Timothy asked. “Garson is in there!” Sanders yelled. “She went back with the extinguisher.” “Damn,” Timothy hissed. “What’s she trying to do? I’ve got three hundred Celsius now. High radiation.” “It’s her call,” Sanders reminded him. “Key Ninety is her baby.” Timothy, not one to jump at heroics, suddenly felt a stirring in his belly. “I’m going in!” he yelled. “You take the point. If we’re not back in five minutes, lock down if you don’t get that report! And if all else fails, break the glass in the emergency box!” Sanders cast a glance over his shoulder at the glass case that contained the emergency kit—a tiny black box filled with the mysterious contents that Mission Control had prepared decades before they launched. Before Sanders could voice his objection, Timothy ripped a second fire extinguisher from the wall, darted into the expanding black beast, and disappeared behind the portal outside of Key Ninety. Near the portal, the pipes began to hiss, and Sanders could hear the echo of human voices, he thought, from somewhere inside the belly of the corridor. How many were still there he wondered, besides Garson and Timothy? “Come on... come on,” he groaned into the communication receiver. “Call in. I need that report!” He dared not leave his post. Not with so much riding on the report from Mission Control.
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All Our Petty Deformities By Jessica Lilien Not everyone believed he was Jesus, but my mother did. We all called him Jesus, like we called Eleanor the Bearded Lady, even though everybody knew she was born a man, probably still had her works and everything, but it was what we called her, and Jesus was what we called him. And maybe we all knew Eleanor wasn’t necessarily a bearded lady, but there were plenty of people who thought that Jesus was Jesus, not just my mother. Not even just in the show, either. Outsiders, too. He’d gathered fans. It made Jane, who ran the show, nervous, you could tell; the fans had. He was getting a cult. Or not a cult, I guess, because he didn’t want money, and he didn’t want a bunch of wives, and he didn’t want you to give away all your possessions or stop talking to your parents. But people moved in. Not into the theatre, where Jane and Mom and me and most of the cast and crew lived, in one-room apartments on the third floor above the stage, above the audience, but into the city. Bought a house nearby that they shared, a bunch of them. I don’t think he wanted it to be a cult, but I think modern-day people didn’t know how to worship a Jesus without making it into a cult. He wore Gap jeans and t-shirts, himself, and flannels, but a lot of them wore robes and things, Birkenstocks that they bought at the mall. It was stupid, but I guess they thought it looked right. Jesus never told them it was stupid. He was nice to them, even if I think he was pretty embarrassed by them most of the time. They asked me later whether he ever claimed to be Jesus, and I was like, yes, like, duh. So they asked, “Did he ever claim to be the son of God? Did he ever claim to be Jesus-Jesus?” And I guess I couldn’t remember exactly. But he acted like Jesus, and he did miracles, and he knew the future. So when he told you that the world was going to end, you believed him. Or other people did. I didn’t. Kansas City had undergone a renaissance. There were fancy chocolatiers and fancy chefs and art galleries and stuff. We had existed before all this, and the theatre was right on the edge of the fancy part of downtown, so we were sort of grandfathered in. It was a theatre that used to be a different, fancier kind of theatre, so we still had the heart-breakingly tall green velvet curtain in front of the stage, and the ceiling was painted in angels and constellations. Jane owned it outright, and was smart enough not to sell, even though she got offers. Was smart enough to figure out that we’d be appreciated in this renaissance for what we were, or what they thought we represented, these fancy new chefs and beer connoisseurs. A half-dirty raggedy burlesque show, vaudeville, freak show in the half-okay sense of the word. The city had made us quit the snake-handling act, said it was dangerous, and made us put down HannaBelle the gorilla, who was old and scary anyway, full of mange and had lost her voice. But Jane was declaring this a renaissance for us, too, and it was around then that she hired the new kids, the pretty 20-something girls who could swallow swords and blow fire, covered in tattoos and with bangs, and it was what the audiences expected of a freak show these days, I guess, and it was also around then when Jesus came. One of the things they asked, later, was why, if Jesus was going to come back, he would come here. To Kansas City, Kansas, to work for money – and we paid him; he ate, he needed money, he was a man – to work for minimum wage in a dirty old burlesque theatre. My mom would have had an answer. She would have said that he’d come to where the sinners were, come to where there was somebody who needed saving. But there are worse sinners than we were. I don’t know why he came to us. Maybe he liked the martyrdom. Maybe he had gotten used to it somewhere along the way. We had a Hall of Monsters.
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BYOB By Clay Waters Blood Bank Horror Restaurant – The only thing scarier than the atmosphere...is the food! read the drippy red lettering on the crudely carved wooden saloon sign. A few coarsely painted demons entangled strenuously in the canopy above a stiff woodcut of a vixenish vampire-waitress. Jack feared truth in advertising as he opened the (disappointingly non-creaky) door and passed through a low, coffin-shaped hallway into the low, dark lobby, a skull-and-bones chandelier dangling oppressively, inches above his head. The Blood Bank was situated in a defunct auto garage deep down a dark street in the L.A. nabe of Silver Lake, three too many turns off Sunset to capture the tourists, the place was purportedly set to draw with wilfully ghastly dishes and cruel service. Even the hard-to-shock hipsters at Yelp! were creeped out: “A surprisingly bleak station of the cross for shower-challenged horror-convention stalkers, or a memorable mistake for hideously uninformed tourists who want to experience L.A.’s skyrocketing unsolved-murder rate ironically (bring the kids!).” It was not, Jack determined, a spot where one confidently ventured alone, especially if you were someone like Carl, a slow white nerd with a condition that made his throat puff up. A week ago a prostitute had been killed just two blocks from the restaurant. Jack had to give Carl points for huffing through a half hour of bad neighbourhoods from Elysian Park to sit at a table here by himself, a fat target for the staff’s slings and arrows. Jack felt a little peaked himself; a wee-hours errand had taken longer than anticipated and a long scalding shower had been required to make him presentable. But he’d gotten lucky with a parking spot, and even snagged a bodega’s last Los Angeles Times to see what had made it into print overnight. After the corny sign, Jack fully expected someone to leap out at him for a cheap fright, in which case Carl would be on his own again, just like he’d been at the coffee shop, before spotting Jack’s clippings and practically mugging him into coming here tonight. It was pathetically, almost criminally, easy to scare someone that way, didn’t matter if you were Gidget or Dracula. But nothing confronted him at the entrance. A small, good thing. An iron tang in the air conjured up images of dried blood and splinters, and the faint smell of sick at the down stairwell he could only hope did not emanate from the kitchen. As the space came into focus he saw the blank black wall was not smooth but distended with... lumps. Automatically Jack felt his neck, unconsciously tracing a jagged knife pattern with his fingernails. Also: a failed safety inspection post stained with various fluids; BYOB etched spikily into the tin wall; a No Smoking sign. He might like this place after all. Over the stairwell hung a noose, slightly swaying in a dank breeze. A display case showcased old torture devices and new shiny blades. Less convincing were the bloody rubber heads mounted on spikes over a shoddy simulacrum of a castle wall. Still, Jack stood staring at them quite a while and so did not hear Carl’s approach, catching only a whiff of deja vu right before the damp hand hit his shoulder - the sandy, sweated-in smell of Carl from the coffee shop. “Jack, my man!” Jack turned to grasp Carl’s offered palm. “So you made it after all. Let’s see if they’ll let us in.” Carl was still breathing heavily from his trek; a rill of sweat curled behind his ear. “Will that be a problem?” “Not if we just go with the flow.” He gave Jack a wised-up look. “You can do that, right?” “I’ll survive.” Carl frowned. Plenty of coffin-shaped tables sat empty, but it still took several minutes for the black-clad and stone silent host to brusquely seat them at a table still draped with the rancid tablecloth of the last victims. 11
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