Chains. They’re the only thing I recognize. Here in this dark, so thick it chokes, these chains are both jailer and savior. I’ve been here so long now, I’ve lost track of everything. When they first threw me in here, the day the chains went on and the lights went out, I tried counting to keep track of the time. First in my head, then out loud. But eventually I fell asleep, and when I awoke I could no longer tell what time it was. That first night, I didn’t dream.

In a lot of ways, it was the best night I can remember.

In the dark, you go to sleep and you wake up, but you can never tell if you’re really awake. I think my eyes are closed, but it looks the same even when I think they’re not. I’m not sure anymore. Heavy on my wrists, old iron manacles locked and bolted. Chains running to two eyelets driven deep into the stone. I saw them on the day they put me here. How long ago was it now, I wonder? A day? Two? A week? Years? Who can say? I don’t even know if my eyes are open.

Its the dreams that are the worst. You go to sleep, you think you wake up but you’re not really sure. And then something moves in the darkness. The air shifts. Something scrapes. Skin on stone. Wet on dry. I feel the air move. Is something there? Is it my imagination? Is it a rat? Have they put something in here with me while I slept? Am I still asleep? Dreaming, right now? I try to wake up. I don’t feel any different. Am I awake? Then I hear the subtle clinking of the links together. And I’m relieved.

The chains. They hold me here, and yet at the same time they rescue me from the darkness by their very presence.

And then someone comes out of the darkness. A woman. I think I know her. She approaches, and I know I do. She is my wife, on the day we met. Dripping wet from her fall into the pond; shivering from the cold she comes to me. Embarrassed. Eyes downcast. Blushing as I offer her my coat. I hear the chains move as I hold it out to her, dragging against the stone. Chains? I don’t remember chains that day. I remember the birds. I remember her smell. Her white shoes. The sky so blue it hurt.

A serpent slithers between her feet. No. Thats not right. There were no snakes at the park that day. But it is there anyways, curling now around one of her legs. Its enormous. I can’t see its tail because of the dark. It just keeps coming, coil after coil, encircling the woman who would be my wife. No. This isn’t how it happened. Its not. “No!” I scream at the snake and the dark, but it ignores me, choosing instead to loop itself around her again. Her legs are gone now, buried beneath the massive body. Her waist is consumed by its writhing and still the snake climbs ever higher. I don’t want to watch so I try to shut my eyes, to look away. But the vision doesn’t go away. Its squeezing now, and she’s dying; her face first red then purple as she tries to draw breath. Her ribs are cracking, eyes bulging from their sockets. I’m screaming, hot tears streaming down my face as I watch her choked before me, the snake rearing up at last to strike. It hisses as it does, unhinging its jaw to better fit her head into its mouth. I’m straining at the chains, begging, pleading in unintelligible incantations for the horror to stop.

And it does.

I’m on my back.

I think.

It feels like there are stones beneath me. I move each arm carefully and there is soft restraint to my movements. The chains are still there, still holding me like a lamb for slaughter or a penitent wretch before the altar. I don’t know which.

You miss simple things. You miss the wind. You miss the heat of the day. I’d more gladly bake in the driest desert than stay here another moment. Perhaps thats it. Perhaps I’m in a desert right now, so delirious from thirst that I’ve begun to hallucinate this prison. I stretch out my hands for the pail of water and find it where it always is, half full, cool to touch and taste. Every day it leaves and every day it returns full. It is the only way I mark time. It brings with it a bowl of what I think is bread, it feels like bread, floating on the top. This is what time has become for me. Bucket-leaving and bucket-returning. It is the only time an exterior influence breaks my days. I have no way of knowing if my captors remove it at the same time every day, or if it is at different times. To me its all the same. The bucket leaves, and it is dark, and the bucket returns, and it is still dark.

The bucket leaves through a hole in the roof. At least I think thats where it goes. There is a rope tied to the handle that ascends towards the ceiling, and when its bucket-leaving the rope becomes taught and it rises beyond my head. My chains keep me from reaching above my head, so I am unsure if there is a hole or if it leaves by some other method. For awhile I kept the bowls the bread arrived in, hoping I might contrive from them some means of escape. But after weeks (Hours? Years?) of working with them I gave up. They did nothing against the stone or the chains and I was unable to break them to fashion any sort of tool. If I could have, it would have been a daring escape.

I’m here for a crime long forgotten. I spoke out against someone, I think. Perhaps it was a man. Or a government? I dissented. I disobeyed. I disagreed with their actions; their ‘policies.’ But what good is one man against a system? You can’t match power no matter your determination. These chains are the proof. No one was more dedicated to the cause than I. And yet here I am. No daring rescuers to save me, no uprising on my behalf. Just an old forgotten man chained to a hole somewhere they can forget about. And forgotten they have.

My water is gone. My food is gone. It feels like its been days since I’ve eaten. I would have rationed it if I knew it was going to stop coming, but how would I know? I hear nothing save for the chains and my mumblings. A little boy comes from a corner to hand me a loaf, but a crow snatches it from our hands before I can take it. Crying, he melts into the darkness as the crow flies off with his prize. Thank you my little friend. At least you tried.

A scraping sound. Not bucket-leaving. Something different. Another dream? Am I awake this time?

Bumps. Jingles. Clanks. More Scraping.

And then light.

I shout from the shock of it. Unintelligible words pour forth as it cuts a line through the darkness. Its been so long I’d forgotten what light looked like. But there it is, standing in front of me like a razor-thin ghost. Haunting me. Welcoming me into its ranks of dead, perhaps?

But no! It is spreading! The scraping brings it, grows it, spills it as it crawls. The stones, so heavy with the dark they too have forgotten it moan for its alightment, drinking it in like a river. Warming to its touch. Dismal shale and yet in their visibility more beautiful than the skies of Andromeda.

And then, the unthinkable. With a final groan the light gives birth to a doorway and a shadow. The monsters who share my cell howl at this insolence, furious at the intrusion. The doorway, as the light before it, has come bearing gifts. A cool sweet breeze ushered in by its rending of the dark claws at my skin igniting a thousand lost memories at once; bright hot suns burning just beyond touch. I shudder from their birth.

“Here!” shouts the shadow of the doorway and I fall as a dead man from the sound. My ears have long since lost their meaning and so to be so violently attacked is both shocking and profane. Yet, though I fall back, my chains keeping me from splitting my head, the shadow lets loose with still another ejaculation.

“I’ve found another one! Bring the Marshall!!”

Language. Dancing and free. Known and yet so foreign to me after so many bucket-leaving and bucket-returnings. I scarce know how to respond to this apparition.

Clacking. Steel on stone. I have heard this enough in my time to know it. It grows in fierceness and complexity. The doorway and its light grows dark again, but this time it is from crowding shadows. The dying light pierces my heart, but the shadows persist.

“Here now,” one of the black blobs says in a commanding tone, “can you speak sir?”

The monsters cannot contain themselves any longer. The light of the doorway had relegated them to the dark of the corners but now they brave it, smoking and burning as they do, for they see their prize slipping.

“It is your jailers, come to finish you!” one squeals, curling its tentacles around the chains to creep towards me, collapsing eyes pouring puss and ichor.

“Our masters have come to take you,” says another, row upon row of teeth glinting hungrily.

“No, its the devil and his minions! Flee! Flee!” says a third, taking flight up the hole for the bucket, which I can now see.

“Sir,” one of the shadows says again, stepping toward me, into my cell, “sir, can you speak? Alphonz! Get some light in here!” it yells.

“Here sir,” another says, glowing light blossoming from somewhere within it and flying across the cell to spread itself haphazardly.

I cannot remember when I have seen so much.

The sticks of illumination the shadow threw shed a soft green light. By it I can now see that the shadow before me is no shadow, but a man. Only he is not just a man. He is a conquistador. A god among men. A warrior-poet, commander of legions. His bladed helm gleams in the light, his breastplate reflecting me as an amorphous blob. His arms armored but free moving; his legs as well.

It is his boots that tell his tale. His boots are dented, tarnished, nicked in a hundred places. They are boots of a man who has seen much, traveled far, and destroyed many. The boots of a savior. Or executioner.

His face, still shadowed by his helm, remains a mystery. I cannot judge his intentions.

Words seem foreign. My lips, lazy with disuse, have trouble forming them.

“I…. I can speak,” I try.

The conquistador kneels at my side. I can smell war on his clothes.

“Your captors fled days ago. Monsters. They knew we were coming it seems. How long have you been here?”

“I…do not know,” I say, tongue fumbling each word.

“No matter, we will learn that soon enough.” He claps a strong hand onto my shoulder and smiles at me, trimmed goatee rising as thought saluting me. “You are a free man, sir.”

Tears bubble from my eyes. I reach to wipe them away and the chains pull at my hands, feebly clutching to their fading power over me.

“Delnachio!” the conquistador says over his shoulder to one of the shadows in the door, “cut these chains off this man at once. He comes with us.”

A shadow steps forward and soon I go with them.

But the chains remain behind.

3 AM. Greek Town. I’m standing on the roof of a parking garage, overlooking the neon. Its one of the few places that seems safe to walk around Detroit at three in the morning, so I like it here. I’m with a girl, someone I met. She’ll probably end up abandoning me for something different. I’m already getting used to the idea. It happens so often its like they get a merit badge for it or something.

Its been a few weeks since my ‘encounter’ with that whatever-it-was. Spider Man? Body Snatcher? Who knows. I haven’t decided yet whether I think its an alien or a monster. When it comes down to it I guess it doesn’t matter. Its off in the woods being monster-y, and I’ve got music to write.

I just released my fourth single, “Throw Away” out into the big bad world. If people knew what it was about they’d probably give me a Nobel Prize just for surviving it. But they don’t ask, and I don’t tell.

Have I told anybody about the monster? Hell no. Lets consider my options: I call the police. Tell them there’s a crazy human-impersonating THING out running around the woods of Detroit. At best I get fined for “pranks.” At worst, I get shipped to a mental institution. And while I should probably be in one anyway, when it happens it will be on MY terms.

As it is the pathetic excuse for police here have already demonstrated their intense and unjustified hatred for me. I get pulled over at least once a month. Not for speeding, or anything illegal, mind you. When I asked the officer what the problem was the last time it happened, his question was “Do both you have jawbs?” (I had a different girl with me in the car at the time.)

Excuse me?” I asked, more than a little confused as how my employment status had anything to do with this guy protecting or serving.

Jawbs,” he said slower, presumably so I could hear more clearly how stupid he sounded, “Do you two have jawbs?”

Um… yes,” I told him.

Detroit cops. Proven worthless since 1865.

So no, I haven’t told anyone. It wouldn’t do anyone any good. Least of all me.

Which is usually how it is anyways.

After Greek Town I drop the girl off. A quick make-out session fails miserably so I head off to the supermarket. I’ve landed a couple movie trailers, but ASCAP takes months to pay out, so for the next few days until I see some fundage from my releases its sardines and rice for lunch and dinner.

Ah, to be a rockstar. If people only knew.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but supermarkets are pretty depressing. Here is shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle, of products brightly packaged in an attempt to manipulate you into buying them. They’re one huge monument to who can trick you better.

Changing three CMYK values will cause you to be more sympathetic to that box of crackers. It cost them three trillion dollars to figure that out, but don’t worry, you’ll pay them back in spades for it, and think you’re getting a deal.

But I’m not here for crackers.

In the canned meats aisle I give the various fishes a good once over. No one ever teaches you how to shopped for canned fish. Its like aluminum-tinned russian roulette. Pull the wrong trigger, twist the wrong key, and you’ll sure as hell regret it. I make my choice (because I like the blue color of the mascot) and turn to head for the checkout.

But there’s a guy standing in my way.

Scratch that.

There’s a guy standing almost ON TOP of me.

I don’t know how I didn’t hear him come up next to me. I’ve got pretty good ears and an overdeveloped (I call that “healthy”) sense of paranoia. But he’s here and I’m almost running into him so my step falters and I take a step back to avoid it.

He just smiles, squints one eye, and points right at me.

Hey, don’t I know you?” he says.

This dude does not smell right. He’s got a filthy corduroy jacket on that was probably beige at one time over a dark blue sweatshirt thats missing all of whatever lettering used to be on it except an  “E” and part of what I’m guessing is an “S.” His jeans are stained with God-knows-what-but-it-was-reddish-brown and frayed and torn in all kinds of places that are probably uncomfortable given the temperature outside. And his shoes…

His shoes are brand new. White running shoes. No swoosh, look generic, but still clean as a whistle. I resist the natural urge to step on them.

I think I’d remember if we’d met before,” I tell him. “Sorry for almost running into you.”

I make the move to pass him, but he’s having none of it. He side-steps so he stays in front of me, scratching his three day old beard and squinting at me again.

Yeah…” He says, “You’re that Blues Trolley guy.”

Blue Stahli,” I correct him, already wishing I wasn’t having this conversation.

Yeah, yeah! Man I saw you at a coffee house a few weeks back.”

I remember all five of the people who were at that coffee shop, and this dude was none of them.

I…I was outside in the alley,” he continues. “You probably didn’t see me. But I heard all your songs. Wanted to meet you afterwards but you were talking to that girl. Didn’t wanna be a cock block.”

Fantastic. Exactly what I need more of in my life: Considerate vagrants.

Listen, I wanted to tell you…” he stops. I’m guessing he’s choosing his words carefully.

Your voice is kind of sissy.”

He shoves out his hand which is as dirty as his clothes. “I’m Mort. Mort Greenley. Its good ‘ta meet you.”

Something in me resigns itself to my fate. I grasp Mort’s hand. “Hi there Mort. I’m Bret.”

Hi Bret,” Mort says.

His face does this weird twist and my stomach instinctively drops to my balls. Mort tightens his grip into a death-clasp and jerks me suddenly into an aromatic and extremely awkward embrace,  throwing his free arm around my neck so I can’t pull away. (Which believe me, I’m trying to do.)

I know you saw one of ‘em,” He hisses into my ear.

THAT gets my attention. I stop struggling and he lets me stumble back into my own personal space. I open my mouth to speak but he holds up his hand.

Not here. Out back,” He says with gravity, turing on his new sneakers and disappearing around the corner of the aisle.

I have a scale I measure bums on. I had a lot of opportunity to develop it when I worked at a downtown coffee shop back in Phoenix.  On one end you have your ‘normal bums,’ the guys who either choose to live that way or have the kind of luck that I would refer to as “a good day.” On the other end you have your batshit crazy ones, the ones who’s jars just don’t hold any marbles. Mort was fairly normal according to the scale. He certainly didn’t meet nickname status like some of my favorites from back home such as“The Thruster,” or “Bird Lady.” I didn’t really trust him but I figured a back alley meeting for a little more information on what the hell had happened a few weeks ago was worth the risk. I headed to the checkout to pay for my rice and sardines.

Mort was waiting for me behind the store.

Mort was also not alone.

He had two other guys with him. From their state of dress I’d guess they were also fairly homeless. One had a dirty “formerly black” trenchcoat on over a couple of old christmas sweaters and a few pairs of sweatpants. His shoes were definitely not new. The other guy looked a little bit cleaner, but not by much; curly salt and pepper hair frizzed out in all directions, gray vinyl ski pants and a hoodie sweatshirt in about as good a shape as Mort’s. I couldn’t help but feel a certain disgust at the realization that Detroit humiliated even its homeless. These guy were dressed bad; even for bums.

This is the guy Jim. The guy from the car,” Mort pointed at me as I approached. “Bret this is Jim and Reggie. Jim told me about that thing you saw. He saw it too.”

What’s proper etiquette for saying ‘hi’ to a group of homeless guys in a dimly lit alley? You’d think I’d know this by now.

Evening gentlemen.”

Th…thats him! H…he’s the guy!” trenchcoat guy stutters out. The guy’s eyes looked like his skull was trying to squeeze them out like a couple of boiled eggs.

It was about this time that my paranoia kicked in like a mule. Here I was standing in an alleyway with a single dying streetlight talking to three guys about a creature I didn’t know the first thing about. Maybe they were connected to it somehow. Maybe they were talking to me to make sure I was ‘the guy’ before the lead pipes and boards with nails came out and I ended up another tragic Detroit statistic.

I th…th…think this is yuh…yours,” he says, interrupting my considerations and holding out something from his pocket.

My cellphone.

Jim found that after you cooked the critter and took off,” Mort said, pointing to the outstretched phone.

I muh…made a couple of calls. But they wuh…weren’t long distance or nothin,”

I took the phone from Jim and held it up to the light. It was scuffed from its tumble down the embankment that night but otherwise fine. I flipped it open but the screen stayed dark.

Battery’s duh…duh…dead,” Jim explained. “They duh….don’t last long in the cold.”

I put the phone back in my pocket, making a mental note to soak it in a gallon of bleach when I got back to the apartment.

Thanks,” I told Jim the bum.

People’ve been disappearing,” Mort said, looking at me. “Out on the streets, you get t’know people. We all stake our territory and do our best not to get in each other’s way. But you help each other out too. If someone’s handing out food or blankets and you find out about it, you let the others around you know. Its kind of a code.”

Lately though, its been different. People just vanish. One night they’ll be at their spot, the next night ‘poof!’ gone. So we got to talking. Started trying to get people to group up before they bed down. Then a few weeks ago while Jim there was settling in a drainage pipe he saw you and that creature. We’ve been looking for you ever since. We’d hoped…” he licked his lips, his breath rising like a cloud, “We’d hoped you might know something.”

I told Mort you had hair like a fuh…fuh…faggot!” Jim says, obviously pleased they found me.

I weigh my words carefully in silence while the bums look on. What do I really have to tell them? I didn’t know the first thing about the monster. It had showed up, tricked me, ripped its face off and tried to eat me. End of story.

I’m not sure how much help I can be,” I start. “The thing…”

I stop there.

Something isn’t right, and I know it.

There’s a new noise in the alley. Thats whats doing it. A sort of scraping dragging noise. I think it must have started while Mort was speaking and I’m just now realizing that its both picking up speed and getting closer. The bum’s are hearing it now too. They start glancing around, no longer concerned about what I might say. My paranoia kicks my heart into high gear. Jim’s eyes look like they’re gonna shoot out of his head. Mort bends down and picks up a piece of a broken pallet with a couple rusty nails jutting out of it.

Who’s there!” he yells, his voice echoing into the darkness.

We wait. I got the shit kicked out of me in all kinds of ways growing up, so I’m ready to get right the fuck out of here. I don’t have any kind of training to take someone on in a fair fight so I rely on speed and nerd rage, both of which I’ve made very good use of in the past.

The guy steps into the edge of the orange flickering light. He’s got a trenchcoat on like my buddy Jim and a knitted beanie pulled down almost to his nose. My “time to go” meters shoot through the roof.

Whossat? Barry?” Mort hisses.

Then a lot of things happen at once.

The guy throws his coat off and rushes us. Only its not a “guy” its… mouths. Hundreds of mouths. Maybe thousands. All snapping, chomping, gnashing silently. Covering a body shaped like a naked fat dude with really skinny legs. And I mean COVERING. There are mouths on its legs; mouths covering its bulbous jiggling torso; mouths all over the arms so the thing doesn’t even have hands, more like a couple of fleshy snapping tentacles.

And then there’s the head. Its shaped like a human head, but everywhere there’s supposed to be a hole there’s mouths. Mouths in where the eyes go; mouths where the ears go; and something that seemed even more horrific, a mouth where the mouth went.

With lipstick around it.

The thing pounced onto Jim. Full on belly-flop.  Jim started screaming and blood started shooting out from all directions.

Mort yelled “FUUUUUUUUUCK!” and splintered the piece of pallet across the thing’s back. His bravery was rewarded by the thing wrapping one of its arms around his head and putting him into a headlock. I can’t really describe the sound a dozen mouths makes as they tear into a man’s face, but it was covered quickly by Mort’s screams so I didn’t hear it long.
Something funny clicked in me and it was like I was suddenly outside of myself, watching this all happen. I watched me swing my plastic grocery bag full of tuna cans at the thing like a morning star. As soon as the bag touched the thing a bunch of mouths shredded it and the cans went scattering in different directions down the alley.

Then me and Reggie were running, sprinting towards the end of the alley. I could still hear Mort screaming, but Jim had stopped. The me-outside-of-me knew this was probably a really bad sign.

Fifty feet.

Forty feet.

Thirty five.

Mort stops screaming too.

Thirty.

Twenty five.

Reggie’s not beside me anymore.

Twenty.

Ten.

Silence.

I burst out of the alley, arms pumping like an Olympic sprinter. I run as fast as I can to the front of the store. The automatic doors almost don’t make it out of my way.

“Call the cops!” I yell at the nearest cashier. “There’s a thing in the alley! Its killing people!”

She looks at me for a second, half-gallon of milk in her hand, and then goes back to swiping.

“Did you not fucking hear me?” I yell, “People are DYING back there!”

A dude with a combover comes out of an office behind the lotto counter and heads my direction. I can read the look in his eyes perfectly. It says “Great. Another whack-job hopped up on meth.”

“You gotta… you gotta call the cops,” I tell him, out of breath from my escape. “There’s something in the alley behind the store. Its killing people!”

“Okay okay, calm down,” the dude, who I’m guessing is named ‘Bill’ if his managerial vest and nametag were any indication, says. “Lets go have a look.”

“Did you not hear me? Bad things! Dead people!”

“I need to see it for myself before I call the police. Its policy,” Manager Bill tells me, hoisting up a 3-cell Maglight. “Lets go.”

Against my better judgement I go with him. Its a tough sell to the 80% of me that’s still in “Oh Shit!” mode, but I know we need dudes with guns and we need them fast. Manager Bill and his delusions of grandeur walks about five paces ahead of me, flashlight on even though we can still see clearly thanks to the light from the storefront.

We round the corner of the store and keep heading for the alley. The closer we get the faster I’m breathing.

We reach the final corner and I grab Manager Bill’s arm to try and get him to go slower but he shakes me off and marches around it like the pompous ass he probably is. I slowly walk up behind him.

And see nothing.

The alley is empty. No body parts. No blood. No dead bums. No monsters. Nothing.  Just a dying orange streetlight, some boxes, and a lot of loose garbage. Manager Bill calls me a couple choice names he reserves for people who waste his time and takes off back to the store. I’m left standing there, totally stupefied.

Am I losing it?

Am I seeing things again?

Did I even meet Norm in the store in the first place?

I don’t know how long I stood there.  When you think you’re losing your mind you start to spend extra time thinking about things to make sure they don’t sound too crazy.

I’d almost come to the conclusion that I’d made it all up when I saw it. A glimmer of cleanliness amongst all the garbage. I approached it slowly, still wondering if the mouth-thing was going to jump out again and finish me off.

I kicked the cardboard boxes and empty energy drinks aside and there, buried beneath it all, hardly visible, was a formerly clean generic white running shoe.

It was almost completely covered in motor oil.

That shifted things in me. A lot. I started looking around the alley, realizing that there was a LOT more puddles of oil than when I had been back there earlier.

Almost like someone had come along and poured it back there.

I don’t know if hyperventilating is the right word for what I did. Panic came back tenfold. Not only had the mouth-thing killed the bums but SOMEONE HAD COVERED IT UP.

…and I was the only one who knew about it.
My phone rang and I flipped it open, hoping it was the girl from earlier. I wouldn’t tell her what had happened, of course, but I needed some sort of anchor to reality.

“Hello?” I said into the handset.

Now I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. Jim had told me the battery was completely dead. I eventually remembered he had said that.

After I woke up in my car.

Two days later.

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

It’s happened again! Another brilliant track from Blue Stahli, and another “More Mundane Adventures of Blue Stahli” written by yours truly featured in the Special Edition. “Anti-You” is a ‘cyberpunk rooftop samurai swordfight from the year  2130 for your ears’ and I know if you enjoy anything here at STRANGITIES you’ll eat this track up. (The Special Edition also contains “Burning Bridges” which is an alternate version of Anti-You that I am particularly fond of.)

I’ll be releasing “The More Mundane Adventures of Blue Stahli: Episode II” here at the end of next week, so you’ll still be able to get your new STRANGITIES fix even if you don’t end up springing for the track. But I’ll tell you: you really should.

Now you can get STRANGITIES on your eReader! I’ve released “Strangities – Volume I” and “Strangities – Volume II” over at smashwords.com which has an eBook format for pretty much every eBook reader out there. Sure, they’re not quite as pretty as the PDF versions hosted here, but they’re portable, and they make great gifts for that cousin you just don’t understand.

Sara: I’m bored. Tell me a story.

Me: Once there was a girl named Sara. Sara’s hands were very cold but she refused to listen to the advice of one of her wisest friends and stick them down her pants, so her hands became so cold they broke off at the wrists. Without hands she could no longer type, so she lost her job. Without a job she couldn’t pay her bills so she was kicked out of the house she lived in. With no house and no money she was forced to live on the street, prostituting herself in order to eat. Eventually she became too old and men no longer desired her, even the disgusting men who visited prostitutes. So she died in a gutter somewhere and was buried in a unmarked mass grave. All because she refused to listen to her brilliant friend Collin. The End.

Sara: ….wow.

It started in the bathroom at work. Which is a pretty nice place. The bathroom, I mean. Its got floor to ceiling hard wood doors, granite floors and countertops, automated soap, faucet, and paper towels. The works. I guess they have to have nice bathrooms, considering where its at. People from a certain tax bracket expect things to be a certain way.

I work in a nice part of town. An expensive part of town. I’m not rich but most of the people I deal with are. So the building I work in has to have stuff like granite and dark wood. No big deal to me; its nice getting some of the perks of being around rich people.

So like I said, it started in the bathroom. I had just finished ahem doing my business in one of the stalls when I noticed some green around the cuticles on my right hand. At the time I thought it was a little weird, but I didn’t think anything of it. Could have been a lot of different things. I could have sneezed on my hand, or it could have been from pulling weeds. All kinds of options. Nothing to worry about.

But back at my computer, it didn’t go away. It got worse. I started to get green stuff around the cuticles of my left hand too. Soon my fingernails were all ringed with the stuff. I used some napkins leftover from lunch to wipe it away, but it just kept coming back. This green kinda sticky…goo. I don’t know what else to call it. Every time I’d wipe it off more would come back. By the end of the day there was enough of it oozing out that it was starting to get on things. My mouse. My keyboard. Little spots of it on my desk and my phone. I was freaked out so I didn’t say anything to my co-workers. Its hard enough being the new guy, but to start leaking something is just a whole new level of career suicide. I went and grabbed an extra roll of paper towels and kept my mouth shut until it was quitting time.

The drive home was awful. The green goo was slowly and actively leaking from my fingernails. Kinda like congealing blood. Thick and real slow like. I used the rest of the roll of paper towels just trying to get home to my apartment, wiping one hand, then the other, then the steering wheel so my hands wouldn’t slip off. Far too much multitasking to be safe, but I made it home anyways.

I stayed home that night, obviously. No going out like that. The goop was flowing so fast at that point that when I’d reach for something too fast a little bit of it would fling off my fingers like water drops, splattering some other surface. TV and microwaved dinner were my only companions that first night. I probably should have called a doctor but my co-pay was more than I had in the bank account and I was out of sick days at work; so that wasn’t going to happen. What I knew WOULD happen is that I was going into work the next day. I only had to make it through and then it would be the weekend and I would be fine.

Then, a breakthrough! I took a shower before bed, and the goo stopped. Washed away and no more green showed up. Man, I was stoked, let me tell you. Even with all the weirdness of that first day I went to bed in a good mood.

That was Thursday.

The first thing I felt when I woke up Friday morning was “moist.” Its that feeling you have when you’ve soaked your pillow the night before in drool. Even before you open your eyes there’s this wet feeling. Some of it dried to your face. The rest of it dampening your pillow. I assumed when I woke up this is what had happened. But as my eyes adjusted to the harsh sunlight streaming through my apartment window, it was clear that drool was not what I was soaked in.

The green goo had returned.

My bed was covered in the stuff. It had stained everything. Sheets, bedspread, pillows, pillowcases, pajamas; all of it streaked with dried green crust or still damp with the stuff. My fingers were in little better shape. It was oozing out so quick now I couldn’t see my fingernails. My fingertips were constantly green and wet, like I’d stuck all my digits into green olives. Only the olives were made out of melting green jelly.

I knew I needed to go to a doctor; there was obviously something wrong. But I had a conflicting problem. My rent was due in a week and without sick days missing a day at work would cause me to miss out on the money I needed to pay it. So I decided to suck it up and go. It was only one day I had to make it through, after all. Then I would have two whole days over the weekend to deal with whatever the hell was going on. I grabbed a bag of cotton balls and a roll of medical tape from the bathroom, taped up my fingers in fantastically absorbent cotton, and pulled gloves on over the whole setup. It was late November so I knew I could get away with the gloves. The plan was to work all day, changing out the cotton balls as needed. It was a good plan, and I threw the bag of cotton balls and the tape into my backpack, proud of my industriousness.

I was fine for the first part of the day. The cotton ball / tape combo worked great. I was able to type on my computer relatively well, and I got enough work done to escape notice from the company’s monitoring software. I started to assure myself I’d make it through. After all, things weren’t getting worse.

Only they were.

One of the guys I work with, Brad, was the first to notice it.

“Geez, Pinder, if you’re getting THAT hot, maybe you should take the gloves off?” he commented as he breezed past me down a row of cubicles. Confused, I detoured from my destination to the men’s room where this had all started and checked myself out in the mirror.

I was wearing a blue long sleeve shirt, so the stains under my arms just looked like sweat, as if I had played basketball or something during my lunch. Except I wasn’t hot. At all. Worried, I went into an empty stall and undid my shirt, checking out my undershirt.

Both armpits were wet and green.

My stomach dropped to my crotch. For a second I hoped that I had stopped the flow from my fingers and redirected it somehow. It would be a lot easier to shove a bunch of toilet paper under my arms and act like nothing was going on. The gloves came off and so did the tape and cotton balls.

It was then I decided to go to urgent care.

There’s not much to tell about urgent care, really. The doctor took one look at my hands and said “Uhhhhhhhhhhh….. you need to go to the hospital.” Of course, they still took my fifty bucks. Thanks for the help. They DID ask me if I wanted a ambulance, but I declined. The credit card came out, I sank deeper into debt, and off I drove to the hospital.

The emergency room doctor thought I was some kind of joke. Evidentially it was his birthday. Good for him. He called for a specialist, who took one look at me and called for three more. I was x-rayed and scanned and imaged and prodded every way they could come up with. And after they looked at their results they couldn’t come up with anything. Seemed to me like they were a lot better at coming up for ways to look for problems than actually coming up with solutions. Hours later I was admitted and resting in my own bed as comfortably as you can be in a hospital bed. The pulse monitor kept coming off my finger from all the goo so they ended up putting it on my toe – which helped to further humiliate me, though I’m not sure why.

That first night in the hospital I had strange dreams. Creeping monsters, faces in the dark, bizarre aboriginal rituals around campfires piled high with bones… freaky stuff. I don’t think they were important at all, but I remember them anyways.

In the morning I woke up to a guy who looked like Colonel Sanders standing at the foot of my bed, reading my chart. Seriously, spitting image of the chicken guy. He had on a grey suit with a white collared shirt underneath, and one of those weird little bow-tie-but-not-bow-tie ties on. His white hair was going crazy in every direction and he had this fantastic sculpted goatee with his mustache curled just so at the tips. I was instantly jealous of his facial hair grooming abilities.

“Ah Mister Pinder. Good, you’re awake,” He said, closing the chart and sticking it under his arm.

“I’m Doctor Vandeervan. Doctor Pruitt called me last night and thought I might be able to help you.” (Doctor Pruitt was evidentially one of the steady stream of doctor-types who had come through the night before.)

“It’d be nice if someone could,” I told him. “I’m a prize winning paper waiting to happen.”

He chuckled at that. “Yes well that’s not quite why I’m here, but now that you mention it, that might not be a bad idea,” He said with a wink. “Now I know you’ve answered this several times already, but for my own sake could you tell me when these symptoms started?”

I sighed, and went over my speech that had become well rehearsed by now. “My symptoms started two days ago with some of the green stuff coming out from around my fingernails. I thought it had went away when I took a shower, but it came back sometime during that first night. My armpits started yesterday, and that’s when I decided to see a doctor.”

Vandeervan was looking down at a notebook, making notes. Without looking up he asked, “And your scalp?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Excuse me?”

“When did the secretions start from your scalp?” He asked, looking up from his notebook quizzically.

“Its started from my head now?”

He walked over to a row of cabinets and pulled out a small handheld mirror. He returned and handed it to me. “See for yourself.”

He was right. My hairline was crusted along its entirety with what looked like dried lime snot. Looking closer I could see the green stuff covering my head, small droplets of it clinging to the base of each hair at the follicle. I cursed under my breath.

“That must have started last night,” I said with a frown.

“Hmmm,” He grunted in that pretentious way all doctors do, scribbling more notes.

“So how ’bout it doc? What’s your prognosis?”

He looked up and closed his notebook, secreting it in a back pocket somewhere. “With your permission I’d like to have you transferred to the private hospital I work on staff at. Its called ‘Winter’s Rest Experimental Care Facility’. Its just outside the city limits.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“At Winter’s Rest we can afford to give you care for no cost to you. We’re supported by numerous philanthropic research groups. In fact the institute was started to try and help people with unique conditions… such as yours.”

For the first time I felt a glimmer of hope. “You’ve seen this before then?”

“No no, nothing like this. But we’ve been highly successful dealing with medical oddities that, while not similar to your case as far as symptoms go, have been equally unique.”

“For free huh?”

“Well, not entirely free. We keep your medical records. And we have various proprietary diagnoses instruments that you’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement about before we can use them on you.”

“But I don’t pay for my stay?”

“Not a penny. In fact with a few extra forms, I may even be able to get them to cover your stay here as well.”

I know. You’re shaking your head right now saying “Don’t trust him. Its too good to be true.” I had the same thoughts at the time. One of my granddad’s favorite sayings was “If its too good to be true it probably is.” But what else could I really have done? Stay at the hospital where they had no idea what to do with me other than waterproof pillows and gauze changes ten times a day? Every day I was in that bed it was costing me thousands of dollars I didn’t have. So I signed on the dotted line (and initialed next to several different paragraphs) and off we went to Winter’s Rest Experimental Care Facility.

Situated on fifteen acres of green sloping hills surrounded by thick pine trees and a red brick fence, the Winter’s Rest grounds looked like what you might imagine the run-down sanitariums in horror movies looked like BEFORE they were run down. Everything was immaculate. The floors were immaculate. The walls were immaculate. The manicured lawns were immaculate. Even the leaves on the trees were immaculate. Outside it was ivy league and old money. Inside it was sterile and white. Its the kind of place you imagine celebrity hospitals to look like. And I was being wheeled through its halls to my private room like a rockstar in rehab.

“Is there anything else I can get you Mister Pinder?” Delia, the nurse who had been pushing my wheelchair, asked me. Her white nurse skirt was about an inch shorter than I hoped it would be.

“No thank you, Delia” I said, relishing her name.

“The call button is right here,” she said, indicating a red button next to the lightswitch by the door. “I’ll be back in an hour to change your bandages. If you need anything in the meantime please don’t hesitate to call.”

“Thank you Delia.”

“My pleasure,” she said with a nod, and left.

The room was spartan but luxurious. Next to the obviously top-of-the-line hospital bed there was a solid dark wood nightstand with three drawers. The closet and bathroom had matching wood doors. The floor was hardwood as well, but a shade or two lighter than the nightstand and the doors.

The ambulance had dropped me off just outside the ‘Admittance’ doors. Doctor Vandeervan had taken me back to a private room and introduced me to Delia and given her instructions for my admitting. He had left and Delia took over from there, bandaging up my hands and armpits with gauze after taking a few jars worth of samples of the green goo. My hair was now slick with the stuff, like I had used way too much hair gel, but there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it so I just kept it slicked back with a comb, banging the goo out into a trash can. Probably not the safest thing to do from a biohazard standpoint, but I was doing my best not to collapse into a sobbing ball of terror and it helped to maintain some sense of normalcy, so I did it.

That first night at Winter’s Rest was very different from my night in the regular hospital. There were no nurses coming into the room every hour. The staff left me alone and let me sleep. Part of me still held out hope that it was all some sort of intricately woven nightmare, and that I would wake up back in my apartment on Thursday morning, ready to head to work.

Doctor Vandeervan was waiting for me again when I woke up for my second day at Winter’s Rest. Waking up to him was really beginning to creep me out, but I avoided broaching the subject on the justification that I was getting free hospital care. Delia appeared at the doorway a few moments later and asked me if I wanted her to remove the bandages from my head. (She had suggested bandaging my head with gauze and then wearing a showercap so I could sleep more comfortably the night before. I had agreed just so she’d get close to me, but I have to admit, her idea had worked out well.) I agreed and Doctor Vandeervan had nodded, so she began unwinding the gauze while Vandeervan launched into his doctor talk.

“Mister Pinder…” he started.

“Doc, if I’m gonna be here awhile you might as well call me Sam,” I interrupted him.

He nodded and continued “Sam, I sent some of the samples of your emission to a few of our test facilities before I left last night. As a rule we don’t include any identifying information about you, if you’re concerned about that.”

“Not really,” I replied with a shrug. “Did any of them find anything?”

“Actually, yes. They did. One of the researchers at our Germany facility came up with a ninety-eight percent chemical match for the substance you’re emitting. We don’t know what it means just yet, and we’re quite puzzled by the how, but we at least now have a good grasp on the WHAT. And that is a much better starting point than we have with most of our patients.”

“Wow, ninety-eight percent, huh? Sounds close enough to me. What is it?”

“That’s the puzzling thing. Let me ask you, have you had any contact with strange plants lately?” He furrowed his bushy white eyebrows at me quizzically.

“Strange plants?” Where was he going with this? “No. The only time I’ve come close to a plant is the corn I ate on Tuesday. I’d hardly call it strange.”

“I see. Where did you eat this corn at?”

“A bar and grill place. Some friends took me out to celebrate their new baby. Do you think the corn had something to do with it?”

“Possibly. We’ll have to check it out. I’ll need the address from you. Mister Pinder. Sam. The green gel you’ve begun ‘leaking’ for want of a better term is a form of one of the most common substances in plants called ‘chlorophyl.’ Do you know what chlorophyl is?”

“Sure. Its like plant’s version of blood. Its how they function. Carries sunlight and nutrients and stuff to where they need to go.”

“That’s a fairly broad assessment, but it will function for this discussion. Well Sam, it appears some of your glands have begun producing a form of chlorophyl.”

I thought about that for a few minutes while Vandeervan stood there, looking proper. There were obviously a few million questions I had, so I tried to pick some of the better ones.

“There’s no way to reverse it?”

“As of now, no.” He shook his head apologetically. “That’s not to say we won’t figure out how to down the road, but right now I would recommend resigning yourself to being in some form of institution like Winter’s Rest for a very long time. We’ve never seen this before, and have no clue how to even to begin to approach it.”

“Well at least you’re not sugar coating it,” I said with as much of a smile I could muster. I had a feeling my sense of humor was about to become very important to me.

“I thought under the circumstances you’d appreciate me being candid,” Vandeervan replied.

“Wow. Ok.” I blew out a big mouthful of air. “Am I done? Is it going to get worse?”

“Our Tokyo location ran a few initial simulations. Its not promising.”

“How bad?”

“From what we can tell from the MRIs and other scans done at your previous hospital your body is slowly succumbing to whatever transformation process you’re experiencing. Your underarms seem to indicate, for instance, that your sweat glands are succumbing to the genesis. In the simulation that led to the substance emerging from anywhere on your body which might produce sweat.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “So wherever sweat came out, the goo is gonna come out now?”

“That’s what it looks like. But its only a simulation. It could be wrong.”

“So I could end up covered in the stuff. Like some sort of green goo monster.”

“Like I said, its only…..”

“I know, its only a simulation.” I interrupted him. I was having a hard time keeping my anger in check at this point. “Is that what the simulation said?”

“Yes,” Vandeervan nodded.

“Ok…” I thought for a bit. I was going to become the ‘Goo Creature From Beyond.’ No more girlfriends. No more job. No more apartment. No more human contact outside hospital staff. Loss of everything. My entire life, gone. Drowned under a sticky green gel my body just couldn’t stop producing.

“Options?” I asked. “Do I have any options?”

“Right now I would say your best option is to stay here and help us with our tests. I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions other than that at the moment.”

“Am I free to leave?”

“You are. But I would advise against it,” Vandeervan shook his head at this. “Right now I’d say you’re in the best hands you can possibly be in. Remove yourself from that, and there’s no telling what could happen. We don’t even know if you’re contagious.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

“I went to work both Thursday and Friday. I had contact with lots of people there.”

“Did you go anywhere else?”

“No. Thursday evening I stayed in, and Friday I went to the hospital after working for half the day.”

“So we’ll need to check your coworkers as well as the restaurant,” Vandeervan said this nodding in a suggestive way to Delia, who nodded back, leaving the room.

“Am I going to die?” The question came out before I really considered asking it.

“Eventually. But our research so far doesn’t seem to indicate your condition is fatal. I’m sure depending on your mood this will alternately be both a positive and negative thing.” Vandeervan paused. “You won’t see me very often from this point on, Sam. I’ll be too busy in the lab working on your problem to stop in for a chat. Under the circumstances, I hope you’ll appreciate this.”

I nodded to this, still working on my new nickname. The Green Goo……. Goo Ferigno….

Vandeervan continued. “Delia will be primarily handling your care until she goes on maternity leave in a few months. I’m sure you’ll meet her replacement long before she’s actually gone. You’ll also have a weekly visit from our empathy counselor, Ben Willis.”

“Empathy counselor? What’s that? Some kind of shrink?”

“He’s paid to be your friend.”

“Just like that huh?” I already didn’t like the guy.

“Just like that” Vandeervan nodded. “Please understand that while we do have other patients here, we try to keep you isolated from each other. This isn’t to prevent relationships from forming, but rather our best attempt to protect you, given the unique nature of your various maladies.”

“Two mutants cross-breeding is bad for business huh?” I asked, cracking a smile once more.

“Something like that. I’ll leave you to get settled a little better. Try to define a routine of sorts, we’ve found it helps the frustration of voluntary imprisonment. If we discover anything new, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks doc. I’ll do that. Places to go, people to goo…”

Those first few weeks were the easiest, looking back on it. I did my best to create a routine to follow. Get up, throw all my green-stained bedsheets and pillows into a laundry bin. Brush my teeth. Not a lot of point in combing my hair, so I’d throw on my 50% plastic 50% cotton hospital pajamas and go about my day.

There were some bright spots. Ben Willis the empathy councillor was actually a pretty cool guy. I genuinely liked him after our second visit. I also got to use all of the hospital’s extra-curricular facilities every day if I wanted. Winter’s Rest provided a big screen, video games, on demand movie collection, all delivered to my room. They also had a library, gymnasium, workout room, and cafe with a professional chef.

The phone call home was my first real breakdown. After two weeks I realized my parents had no clue what was going on. I didn’t have a phone in my room, but there was a monitored courtesy phone in some of the hallways so I chose one of those and dialed the number. My mom picked up.

“Hey mom. Its me.”

“Hi sweetie! I was beginning to get worried about you. You haven’t called in weeks.”

“Yeah I know. About that. I’m kinda… sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean?”

Vandeervan had warned me against telling anyone too much about my condition. Not because it was necessarily a secret, he said, but because of how the media might skew things if information about me got out. The tabloids would have a feeding frenzy over me and my family would be caught in the middle of it.

“I’ve got some kind of rare disease. They don’t even have a name for it. I have to be in isolation for it.”

“Isolation?” I could hear that tightness creep up in her voice she got when she got really worried about something. “What do you mean isolation? We can at least come and see you, can’t we?”

“No mom, you really can’t. Its bad. Calling you is the best I can do, and I can’t even do that very often.”

“Will, get on the phone!” I hear my mom shout into the background, “There’s something wrong with Sam!”

There’s a click and then my dad’s voice. “Sam? What’s going on?”

“He says he’s got some kind of a disease. He’s in isolation.” Mom started to get choked up now, which made it harder for me to keep it together.

“Isolation?” my dad asks.

“Mom, listen, they don’t think its fatal. They’re running tests now to try and find a cure.”

“How long?” dad asks.

“How long what?”

“How long until they know if they can cure you?”

“I don’t know dad. They’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“If they’ve never seen anything like it before how do they know its not fatal?” mom says. I can hear the tears in her voice now.

“Its just…. not like that mom. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Where are you at? We’ll come to you.”

“You can’t dad. Its like a…. a permanent isolation. No visitors, period. They don’t know if I’m contagious yet. They don’t think I am, but they don’t know.”

A robotic sounding female voice came on the line and said “Your courtesy call will be disconnected in one minute.”

Mom really lost it at that point.

“Mom, listen, I wanted to let you know that I’m fine. Other than the thing, I mean. I’m fine. They’re taking really good care of me and its not costing me a dime. Its like an experimental hospital.”

“Your courtesy call will be disconnected in fifteen seconds,” robot girl told us.

“What’s the name of the hospital?” my dad said. I could hear the military creeping into his voice. He’d gone into ‘marine mode.’

“Winter’s Rest. You can’t come and visit dad. They won’t let you.”

“I know Sam, but can we at least send you things?”

Click

The line went dead.

I’m not gonna lie – the weeks that followed after that weren’t good ones. The reality that I might never be leaving Winter’s Rest, never seeing my family or falling in love of having kids, took a tremendous toll. I refused tests, and told Ben to take a hike when he’d come for our sessions. The staff seemed used to this kind of thing and gave me my space.

Delia, my smoking hot nurse, eventually got too big with baby to work and went on leave. She was replaced by Brittney, who was no slouch in the looks department. Part of me wanted to ask Vandeervan what their interview process was like for these girls.

My condition worsened right along the lines they theorized. The goo started coming out of every pore of my body. I was constantly covered in the stuff. As disgusting as it was I eventually got use to feeling wet and sticky all the time. Some times when I was asleep I would dream I was normal again and it felt strange. A year passed with little change. Vandeervan would update me whenever the research arm had made progress, which wasn’t very often. Even with trying to keep my spirits up I still put on a lot of weight; it wasn’t like I had to worry about looking good for anyone.

Then, two months after my year anniversary of coming to Winter’s Rest, Vandeervan showed up while I was sitting in bed in the middle of the afternoon. It threw me off because if he had occasion to visit he would do it in the morning. I’d never once seen the man past eleven o’clock.

“Sam,” He said, “I have news.”

I tried not to get my hopes up, but couldn’t help it. He’d never gotten close to that phrase before.

“Give it to me straight, doc. Is it a cure?”

“No,” he said, “not a cure, but its something else for you to think about.”

Disappointment was already sucking me down. I didn’t really care what he had to say next and we both knew it. He waited for a few moments before pressing on.

“We’ve had a breakthrough concerning the compound you’re producing. We can’t cure you yet, but we’ve discovered an incredible use for it. I know that comes as little consolation to you, but hear me out. Sam…” he paused. I’d never seen him like this. He was almost excited. “You could very well be the key to all the world’s problems.”

“Me? Like this?”

“Our Tokyo lab has preformed three successful tests using a slightly refined version of your offal to power electrical generators. In the first test they powered their headquarters. The second they powered an entire town. In the third… in the third they powered an entire city for twenty-four hours.”

“A city. What city?”

“Portland. Sam, they powered all of Portland using only a gallon of extract. Do you know what that means?”

I did. I put out gallons of the stuff a day. We’d developed a sort of squeegee routine I would do several times a day, scraping as much goo as I could get off me into my modified shower. If they ran all of Portland on a gallon of my green goop, they could run half the United States off of the stuff I scraped off in a single day.

“Wow. Um, ok. So… what… um… what do we do?”

“That is up to you. I’m sure you’ve expected that the care we provide here came with stipulations. Now that we’ve come against something like this, I think its time we discuss them.”

“As I told you when you came here, Winter’s Rest is funded by various philanthropic research groups. The primary one of these funds is the Ostrich-Rein Foundation, which sells technology we develop here at Winter’s Rest and other locations. Some times in our efforts to cure our patients we make discoveries such as this one concerning you. Our sales of these technologies is what keeps us in business and able to care for you so comfortably.”

“So you’re telling me you pay for all of this by developing different technologies based upon your patient’s conditions here.”

“Exactly.”

“And so you need my permission to continue developing this technology since it’s a direct result of my condition.”

“Not quite like that. You gave us that permission when you signed yourself into Winter’s Rest. No no, what we need to talk about is how willing you’re going to be in helping with the process.”

I was getting confused. “I thought I’d been pretty good about helping with the process. We do the routine every day.”

“Oh you have been. But with this news we’re going to have to modify how we do things. Change things up. For starters we’ll need to move you to our Kansas facility where construction of a new generating station has already begun.”

“Hold on,” I stopped him. “Doctor Vandeervan I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I don’t want to stay like this forever. I don’t want to be a battery. I want to have a life. What about a cure? Where are we with that?”

“A cure?” His bushy white eyebrows crinkled together. “Sam, this technology could change the world. An end to war, famine, disease. We’re talking TRILLIONS of dollars here. Maybe even more. You are the key to free energy. Literally the savior of human kind. And you’re going to ask me to cure you from that?”

“Well…. yeah. I guess thats what I’m asking. Can’t you figure out another way to produce this stuff?” I flicked some of the green gel onto the floor with a sucking plop for emphasis.

“We’re not even close to a cure. Or another way to produce the liquid.”

It started to dawn on me that THIS was what he was asking about when he asked how willing I was going to be to help. Vandeervan and the rest of his eggheads saw this stuff coming out of me as their greatest achievement. They would go down in history as the men who pioneered a new world, with me secretly at the heart of their empire. I was a big fat gooey money machine to them. They didn’t want to cure me; they wanted me to stay this way!

He must have seen the clarity starting to bloom on my face because he seemed to change tactics.

“You’d be a rich man, Sam. They’re willing to pay you ten percent of all profits brought in from the project. You’d be the wealthiest man in the world almost overnight.”

I thought about that. “Could I go home?”

“What?”

“Could I go back to my home? See my family. Get married. Have kids. A job. A normal life?”

“No that would be impossible. In order to…”

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m saying no. I’m not willing to do it then. If I can’t be a person, if all I can be is a goo monster, what good does money do me?”

“You’re serious?”

“Dead serious. I’m not cooperating.”

Vandeervan just started at me. The surprise on his face at being turned down was clear.

“I’m sorry you feel that way Sam. Its most distressing. It means we’ll have to take stronger measures.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean stronger measures?”

“Sam Pinder, I’m declaring you mentally unfit to make decisions for yourself due to your deteriorating condition. As your caregiver it is my responsibility to see to it that you do not harm yourself or others and as such I’m recommending that you be sedated and transferred to our Kansas facility for further treatment. Brittney please note the date and time in the patient’s chart.”

“Yes doctor,” Brittney said from behind me.

“Woah, now hold on there doc. I’m not unfit to do anything. Don’t get upset just because I…”

That’s the last thing I remember saying.

I do wake up, every once in awhile. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Its some sort of tank. I float in it, totally immersed in the green goo. They’ve got an oxygen mask on me, and IVs running into my arms to keep me alive.

I can’t see much beyond the walls of the tank. Just the dark. I’m guessing its a big facility, if Vandeervan and his cronies were able to do all they wanted. One time I tried to pull it all off and kill myself, but I just woke up in it all again so I don’t think they’re going to let me drown.

So here I am, savior of the world. Bringer of free energy to all. The heart of change. The ultimate in green technology.

Just don’t ask where it comes from.

I’ve been listening to Ladyhawke a lot lately. She did a fantastic job capturing that elusive “feel” that the 80’s had. So much so that her album seems more like a great soundtrack than a plain old album. One night while driving home from my weekly poker game (while blasting the album with the windows down) I started to really wonder “What would a movie with this soundtrack look like?” So in my best attempt to retain that fantastic spirit of the 80’s, when even the lousy movies were awesome, here is the synopsis I came up with for “Ladyhawke & The Living Dead.”

Ladyhawke & The Living Dead

Samantha Mills was your normal small town teenage girl with big dreams. She went to Hollywood hoping to become a star and got more than she bargained for. Backstage at a Curries concert she met her rock idol, Raz, who took a liking to her. So much so he promised to make her into what he was. Problem was, Raz wasn’t only a god on guitar, Raz was also a vampire. Now, a screaming banshee on the axe in her own right, Samantha has returned with her own band “Ladyhawke & The Living Dead” to the town she grew up in to play a benefit concert for the town church where her brother pastors, leaving a trail of woozy groupies in her wake.

Rumor has it a scout for Island Records will be in the crowd. But as the curtain rises, so does the body count. Fans start turning up dead. Even worse, Sam is attacked by a couple of vampires and barely escapes. As the band takes the stage to play the second half of their set, Sam drinks enough from her brother to allow her to see what he sees and communicate telepathically with him, and then sends her brother to unravel the mystery of the murders and her attackers.

The story comes to a head as the scout for Island turns out to be the vampire thats been killing everyone and turning some into vampire slaves to hunt Sam. She too had been turned by Raz before he shunned her for his new turnee. (Samantha) The scout, Melanie Beckheart, had learned enough to know that the turnee had something to do with “Ladyhawke & The Living Dead” so she had begun following behind their tour, trying to learn more. But her patience had run out, so she had chosen this night to end it by killing the band. But when the attack on Samantha by some of her turned zombies failed, she had been forced to feed & to try and form another plan.

Sam’s brother, Isaac, discovers this independently and finds Melanie on the catwalk scaffolding above the band. Seeking to confront her, she grabs him by the throat and hoists him into the air. Sam, playing their last song, sees this, smashes her guitar, and then runs to the edge of the stage, severing the rope to the curtain. The curtain falls, jerking Sam upward into the air. Holding the splintered neck of her guitar, Sam impales Melanie as the curtain hits the stage, stopping her ascent. In the end, Sam saves her brother, the concert pays for the new church, and a scout from Atlantic no one knew was in the crowd signs the band. As the Atlantic rep closes the door to the band’s dressing room he smiles, showing off a gleaming sharpened incisor.

“Did you bring it?” Molly Shin asked.

“Yup. Got it in my bag. Lets wait until your parents go to sleep,” Britney MacTerrit replied.

The girls were having a sleepover. They had become friends Freshman year of High School after wearing the same concert t-shirt to school one day. (The Penitent Seven – “Hell Eats Your Face” Tour 2009.) Now, a few months into their Sophomore year, the girls were nigh inseparable. At school they were called “The Black Twins.” Not because of their skintone, (Molly was third generation Chinese immigrant, Britney was a Scotch-Irish mutt) but because of their fashion choices. The girls always wore black. Black jeans. Black shirts (usually music-related.) Black boots. Black bras. Black makeup. Every day. Most kids steered clear of them which was fine by the girls; they had each other.

“Awesome! Can I see it?”

“Not until your parents are asleep!” Britney hissed, clutching her backpack to her chest as if it were filled with precious treasure. “I’ll totally get in trouble if my parents find out I took grandma’s book.”

‘Grandma’s Book,’ as Britney referred to it, was a leather-bound handwritten copy of ‘The Rites of Suffolk’ which had been passed down through her family for generations. The book was said to be a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, which had played a large part in causing the unrest that eventually erupted into the Salem Witch Trials. Within the MacTerrit family it was whispered that their ancestors had been one of three families who authored the book, searching out demonic spirits and learning to harness their power. The threat of the book had kept MacTerrit children going to bed on time and eating their vegetables for generations. Britney had only been seven when her grandmother had died, entrusting the book to Britney’s father, and had always wondered if the stories were true or not. Her father had always rolled his eyes whenever she had asked him about it, but nevertheless he had kept it in the center of his study on a raised wooden pedestal encased in glass, and had instructed his children to never touch it. But Britney had broken that rule tonight.

“Have you looked at it at all?” Molly asked, staring at Britney’s embraced backpack.

“No. I promised I’d wait for you didn’t I?” Britney huffed at Molly’s question. “Now come on. Lets go watch some movies to help the time go quicker.”

The girls ran down the stairs and fired up the television in the family room, passing the time eating pizza, mocking their schoolmates, and watching an October Monster-Moviefest. Molly’s parents busied themselves in the kitchen and living room, leaving the girls to themselves as much as possible. Hours crept by and the bloodied body count rose on the TV until Molly’s mother inevitably appeared at the doorway.

“Molly, your father and I are going to bed. You girls try not to stay up too late ok? We’ve got your grandmother’s birthday party tomorrow afternoon.”

“Ok mom,” Molly said.

“Yes misses Shin!” Britney echoed enthusiastically.

The girls waited in agony for the length of one more full movie before shutting things down and heading upstairs. Britney changed into her pajamas in the bathroom while Molly changed into her own in her room. When Britney had finished she joined Molly and they sat on the floor of the room, the backpack between them.

“Are you ready?” Britney asked.

“Yes. Wait!” Molly held out her hand and climbed to her feet. Creeping slowly down the upstairs hallway she pressed her ear against her parent’s door. She couldn’t hear anything, so she returned to Britney.

“Ok, just wanted to make sure. Ok. Lets see it.”

Britney unzipped the backpack with as much embellishment as she could muster, calmly pulling the zipper across its mouth, smiling as the teeth separated slowly. Molly rolled her eyes impatiently.

“Oh come on, hurry up!” She whispered.

“Ok ok,” Britney pouted, jerking the zipper the rest of the way open with a quick swipe. She reached into the backpack with both hands and very carefully lifted the book free.

“Wow…” Molly breathed in awe.

“I know, right? Way cool, huh. No more Ouija boards and library books for us, sister. This is the real deal. Did you get your dad’s camera?”

Molly hadn’t taken her eyes off the book. “Huh? Oh right. Yeah I got it. I hid it in my desk. But we HAVE to put it back before he gets up. I know he’ll want to use it for my grandma’s party.”

“I don’t think it will take us that long to shoot all the pages. I just hope the pictures will turn out ok.”

“Well…” Molly said, resting her chin on her fists, “We COULD copy some of the spells down in notebooks. That way if the pictures don’t turn out we’d at least have SOMETHING.”

“Ooh. Good idea,” Britney said. “Do you have any?”

“Yeah, hold on I’ll get them,” Molly said, hoisting herself up from the floor and padding across to her desk. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a nylon camera bag and a handful of spiral-bound notebooks.

“Pens too!” Britney reminded her.

Molly froze and turned back to the desk, grabbing a can full of pens from the desktop and then returning to sit cross legged across from Britney once more.

Britney exhaled heavily. “Ok,” she said, taking the cover of the book between two fingers. “Lets do this.”

Gently she bent the cracked leather cover back from the first page of the book. Placing her hand against the interior fold, she smoothed the book open. There, scrawled in fading ink on yellowing parchment paper was a small section of text with several hand-drawn diagrams of what looked like a doll of some sort. It was clear the drawings were a pattern, showing the object’s assembly step by step.

“Wow…” Molly said breathlessly.

“Waaaaaaay cool,” Britney agreed.

Slowly, the girls crept through the book page by page, photographing each one before turning carefully to the next. They had almost approached the halfway point when Molly piped up.

“I can’t stand it anymore. I want to try one.”

“Try what? One of the spells?” Britney asked.

“Yeah. Lets do it. Just to see.”

“Ok,” Britney agreed. “Which one should we try?”

“I dunno. How about the first one? It was really short. Maybe they put it in order, like easiest to hardest.”

“Ok,” Britney said, turning gingerly back to the first page. Both girls leaned in to get a better look at the faded text. Molly read it out loud.

“Ritual of the Strawman: Fold seven pieces of straw upon themselves so they are bent in half but not broken. Tie these near the top to create a bulb. This will be the head. Then take another piece of straw and wind it sunwise around the folded straw to create your arms. Finally, tie the bottom off at the center of another length of ribbon, allowing the ends to dangle down on either side, creating the creature’s legs. Take your strawman between your thumb and forefinger and hold it between yourself and your subject. With one eye closed and arm outstretched block the subject from view with your strawman and repeat the incantation ‘Venis vollum tol curio gil’ three times. Your strawman will now be empowered and you can control your subject’s movement freely.”

“Well that won’t work,” Brittney sighed, irritated. “We don’t have any straw.”

Molly got a big grin on her face. “Oh yes we do-ooh!” she said in a sing-song voice. “My mom has some in her craft room. Sometimes she uses it to stuff dolls and stuff. I bet she even has red ribbon.” She pushed herself up from the floor excitedly and quietly crept out the door.

Britney paged carefully through the book while she waited. When Molly returned she had two shoebox-sized plastic boxes under her arm.

“These should be them,” She said, setting them on the ground and undoing the plastic clasps that held the lids on.

Britney grabbed the box filled with straw and began sorting through it piece by piece, looking for the longest strands she could find, while Molly placed the box of ribbon on her lap and began pulling out different spools.

“Do you think it matters how wide the ribbon is?” Molly asked, eyeing a thick crimson spool.

“I dunno. We should probably try to match it as close to the pictures as possible. But I think with this old school stuff it doesn’t matter much. It was all about using what you had lying around. Twigs and animals and stuff, you know?”

“Ok,” Molly said. Satisfied with her selection she replaced the lid on the ribbon box.

The girls laid out their materials before them, both grinning with excitement.

“Do you want to do it or should I?” Molly asked.

“I’ll do it,” Britney said. “After all, its MY grandma’s book. Its in our blood.”

Molly nodded in mute agreement.

Gently, Britney chose several strands of straw from the pile she had made on the floor. Lining them up side by side, she folded them over on themselves as carefully as she could. Pinching their ends together she selected the longest piece she had found and wound it carefully around the others, leaving a bulge at the top just as the book had said. Molly handed her a length of ribbon she had trimmed from the spool at her feet and Britney adjusted her grip on the strawman so she could tie this carefully around its loose ends. When she was done she held it up for Molly to see.

“What do you think?”

“Looks perfect!” Molly said. “Now we just need someone to try it on.”

“How about YOU!” Britney cackled, thrusting the strawman towards Molly. “Ominama ominama ominama!”

“Nooooooooooooooooo!” Molly screamed in mock horror. “Don’t make me your zombie slave!”

The girls both giggled at this, the excitement at performing a REAL spell making them giddy. An echoing scraping from outside the house quickly subdued their mirth.

“What was THAT?” Britney whispered urgently.

“I don’t know!” Molly whispered back. “It came from outside!”

Another sharp scrape caused both girls to jump. Strawman clutched tightly in Britney’s hand, they scurried over against the wall under Molly’s window on all fours. Slowly they raised up together to peek around either side of the window frame into the dark.

Snow was gently falling outside, adding a new layer of white to the piled flurries already thick on the ground. In the darkness of the early morning hours the neighborhood slept, save for the lone figure across the street and two houses down from Molly’s house. Another loud scrape echoed off the surrounding houses as he plunged his snow shovel into the newly-formed drift building across his walk and tossed the frozen pile off to one side.

Molly and Britney exchanged looks as the neighbor plunged his shovel through the soft white snow to throw another load to the side.

“How about him?” Britney asked.

Molly nodded excitedly.

Grabbing the book the girls returned together to the window. Molly held the book with one hand and a flashlight with the other so Britney could read the incantation. Holding the strawman at arm’s length so it covered the man outside from view, Britney licked her lips and began the spell.

“Venis vollum tol curio gil. Venis vollum tol curio gil. Venis vollum tol curio gil!” she whispered to the strawman.

Both girls waited for something to happen. Nothing did.

“Suck,” Britney said.

“Hold on,” Molly told her. Reaching out to the strawman still held between Britney’s fingers, Molly flicked one of the ribbon legs.

Across the street, the neighbor’s leg kicked out violently, throwing him onto his back with a yelp.

Both girls exchanged another look.

“Wicked,” Molly said.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cool,” Britney agreed. She took the two straw arms of the strawman and began to bob it back and forth between her hands. “Doop de doop de doo,” she said in a childlike voice.

Across the street the neighbor, who had just regained his footing, began flopping from leg to leg in a coarse dance, mimicking the strawman’s movements.

“Oh my gawd this is soooo sweet!” Molly chirped excitedly.

“Completely,” Britney agreed. “Ok so we know the book is real. Lets get the rest of the pictures. Then we can try some of the other stuff.”

“Ok,” Molly nodded. “I want to do one next.”

Britney took the strawman’s head, suspending it aloft from her thumb and forefinger. “Ok, deal,” she said, and flicked the strawman across the room like a paper football.

Across the street, Molly’s neighbor flew screaming into the air, smashing head-first into a sedan parked a hundred feet away.

Both girls froze in mute horror, staring out the window. The man’s torso and legs protruded from the mangled windshield, the hole he had punched on impact forming a sort of jagged spiderwebbed mouth. Shards of glass glinted orange in the streetlight, obscured in places by swaths of blood black with night.

Each girl silently willed the man to move, but the legs hung limp, sprawled out across the dented hood of the car. A dog began barking, its sharp rasps echoing off the rows of houses. A porch light flicked on at the house the sedan was in front of.

Both girls dropped to Molly’s floor, pressing their backs against the wall.
“Oh my gawd,” Molly said breathlessly. “Ohmygawdohmygawdohmygawdohmygawd!”

Tears welled up in Britney’s eyes.

“I didn’t…” she started, voice cracking. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them.

“What do we do?” Molly asked. “What do we do?”

Britney said nothing. The tears that pooled at the corners of her eyes began rolling one after the other down her face.

Outside there was a shout. “FUCK! Honey call nine one one!”

The night blurred after that. Fragments stuck out. A siren screamed from somewhere in the city, raising in pitch as it approached. More voices began drifting up from the street as neighbors, awoken by the noise and the subsequent shouting, began taking to the street to survey the scene. There was a snatch and a click as Molly’s parent’s door opened, Molly’s father’s heavy footfalls treading past the girls and down the stairs. Britney jerked upright as they heard the front door close.

“Brit what do we do?” Molly hissed.

Britney sniffed and wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Nothing,” she said. “We don’t know what happened. We were asleep. Put the camera away and get in bed.

“But Britney! We…” Molly lowered her voice to a whisper, “we killed him.”

“No we DIDN’T Molly,” Britney’s eyes flashed angry. “We were ASLEEP. Now get in bed. They’re going to ask us if we saw anything. We didn’t. We were asleep.”

The girls quietly put away their supplies from the evening. Britney tucked the old book back into her backpack. Molly got into her bed while Britney unrolled her sleeping bag and slid inside.

Time crept by. Each girl kept her eyes pressed shut, willing the awful events of the evening to dissipate like a dream. Eventually they both fell asleep, shock and sorrow taking their toll. So when Molly’s father came to wake them their bleary eyed confusion was honest.

“Girls, wake up. I need to talk to you,” He said.

The girls sat up, squinting at him with tired eyes.

“There is a police officer down stairs. Evidentially someone was killed in our neighborhood tonight. Some kind of car accident. I told him you were having a sleepover so he would like to know if either of you saw anything.

“No Mister Shin. We’ve been asleep for awhile now,” Britney replied with sleep-cracked voice.

Molly nodded her agreement.

“Ok I’ll tell him that. Thanks girls. Go back to sleep.”

Britney said very little to Molly the next morning. They ate their breakfast in silence at the dinner table with Molly’s mother, father, and brother, who was flipping through cartoons on the television while he spooned cereal into his mouth. As he changed from channel to channel there was a brief flash of Molly’s neighborhood.

“Wait, go back to that,” Molly’s father told him.

“…appalling crime in this quiet neighborhood has police baffled,” the newscaster was saying. “Police reports say a man was found in the early morning hours thrown through the windshield of a nearby car. Reports also say that the back of the man’s skull,” the newscaster paused for dramatic effect, “…had been crushed.”

Molly whimpered. Britney shot her a warning look.

The newscaster continued, “I spoke to Police Sergeant Jose’ Rameriez who had this to say.”

The TV changed to a shot of an overweight hispanic man in a police uniform. “We are currently investigating a violent crime that took place in the early morning hours. At this time all I can tell you is that the victim lived nearby and we are asking the public that if they saw anything relating to this incident to please call and speak to an officer.”

Britney’s mother came to pick her up shortly after breakfast. The girls didn’t talk at all throughout Sunday. When school rolled around Monday morning Molly was there but Britney wasn’t. After finishing her dinner, Molly called Britney. Her phone went to the answering machine twice before she answered.

“What?” Britney asked.

“You weren’t at school today,” Molly said.

“I didn’t feel good. I asked my mom if I could stay home.”

“Brit…” Molly trailed off. “What are we gonna do?”

“Nothing Molly. We’re going to do nothing. Because nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened?” Molly asked, voice getting shrill with emotion, “What do you mean nothing happened?”

“Nothing HAPPENED Molly,” Britney said sharply. “I came over, we watched some movies, we talked for a bit, we went to sleep. Thats it. End of story.”

“I know thats what you want to tell our parents,” Molly said, “but I thought…well, I just thought…”

“You thought what?” Britney’s voice grew cold and flat with anger, “You thought we could talk about it? You were the one that wanted me to bring the book.”

Molly didn’t like her insinuation. “I wanted you to bring the book. I didn’t want you to KILL somebody!”

“I didn’t kill anyone. We don’t know what happened. It could have been anything.”

“But…”

“Molly, stop it. We’re not talking about it anymore.”

“But Brit…”

“NO Molly!” Britney yelled at her. They both sat on the line silent for a few seconds. Britney spoke again first.

“I’m sorry. I… I just can’t talk about it. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I just want to forget the whole thing, ok?”

Molly agreed and they hung up. But she couldn’t forget about it. She started having nightmares, jolting awake sweating in the middle of the night. A week passed, then another, with her sleeping less and less.

Britney began missing school. Sometimes she’d have her mother call, and sometimes she’d just skip or leave campus in the middle of the day. Molly heard rumors start to drift around campus that Britney was pregnant or that she’d caught an STD, but she knew the real reason. When Brit was there they still ate together but rarely spoke. Their nightly phonecalls to each other stopped completely. Then, three weeks after their sleepover with the strawman, Britney called Molly.

“Hey,” Britney said.

“Hey,” Molly replied.

“So my parents are going out of town for the weekend. They won’t be back until Tuesday. I thought you might want to come stay with me.”

“My parents would never go for that. You know what they’re like,” Molly rolled her eyes at the suggestion.

“So don’t tell them,” Britney said matter-of-factly. “I found something else I want to try.”

That sent a shiver through Molly. “What do you mean, ‘you found something you want to try’?”

“In the book,” was Britney’s reply.

Molly choked up. “Brit…”

“Come on. I can’t do it alone.”

Molly was quiet for a few moments.

“Please Molly? I really need your help.”

Molly shook her head. “No Brit. I… I don’t want to mess with that stuff anymore. I just want to go back to how it was before.”

“Fine. Whatever. We’re done. Have a nice life,” Britney flashed heated and then gone as she hung up.

That was the last time Molly talked to Britney. Her parents found her in the upstairs bathtub when they returned from their trip Tuesday evening. She had slit one of her forearms open with a razorblade, allowing her blood to mix with the bathwater she sat in. There was no suicide note, but she had left her father’s office in ruins. The glass case the book had been held in was toppled and shattered. Pages of the book were torn and thrown  all around the room. The cover had been thrown into the fireplace and burned.

When the police talked to Molly, she broke down and told them everything. The book, the sleepover, the strawman, and the neighbor. All of it. The police wrote off her confession as a traumatized teen begging for attention.

After all, magic isn’t real.

www.bluestahli.com

You may notice a sudden glut of posts. Do not be alarmed. In efforts to make STRANGITIES.com a little more mobile-friendly (in the interim while I put together a specific mobile site,) I’ve loaded each short story as its own post. No more waiting for PDFs to load. Hooray!

Collateral damage was the newer posts got shoved way down to the bottom. But going forward this will be for the best. I promise you. And to prove my commitment, here is a fantastic short film called “The Brainwashers” by Patrick Bouchard. I caught this on my iPhone thanks to the NFB of Canada’s fantastic free iPhone app.

My newest short story “Strawman” is nearing completion. You’ll have it in time for Halloween. Keep your eyes here and follow the twitter feed where I do most of my updating.