Episode 32- The Kill List

Voices.

Voices filtered through dark cotton as I drifted back and forth between dreams and the beginnings of consciousness. Pervasive dread prowled my reveries;  hungry night wraiths growled and salivated as they hunted me.  I pressed hard against the veil between sleep and waking, but could not break through.

"How much do we tell him, Ian?"  said a rough-edged voice.

"It's dangerous to leave anything out,"  said someone else.

"He threw himself across Sissy to save her life,"  said another.  It was Mark, I knew that voice.  "I say we tell him whatever he wants to know."

"Hate to burst your bubble," said the first man, "but he landed on her after bouncing off the floor. That's why he was stretched out across her legs.  You ought to have figured that out, cousin."

Drifting, drifting.  Desperately trying to return.  Terrible phantasms slithered through my torpidity.

"People have to know what's happening," said the second voice.  "To defend themselves."

"With what?" said the first voice.  "Besides, the government will seal this place off in a heartbeat if they know what's under their feet.  They're running all over topside right now.  If they weren't so damned blind, there wouldn't be anything left to hide.  We're the ones doing the hiding from everyone.  For their own good."

They were quiet for a moment and I panicked.  I struggled toward consciousness.

"You know the drill, Enid," said Mark.  "Government would lock this place down so they could weaponize everything they find.  But what's down there needs to stay down there.  Messing with that is liking trying to pick the locks on the gates to hell."

"And you two think if this writer writes down everything that happened we can get it out to everyone without the government shutting it down?  You remember what happened in the Middle East?  Who do you think really controls the Internet?  Ebook, print book, it won't make any difference."

"Maybe," said the one named Ian.  "But we have to take the chance.  People have to know.  This guy writes it up, publishes it and then we see what we see."

"Why don't you do that yourself?" askd Enid.

I opened my eyes to a room filled with blurry lights and shapes just as the other gave his answer.

"Because," he said, "I'd like to stay alive. Whoever writes this up will be on a kill list from day one."

Episode 31- The Door to Hell

In my unconscious state, I dreamed uneasy dreams.  I dreamed a door of stretched alien skin.  It permeated the air with the smell of burnt sulfur and bubbling green blood.

Whisperings.

Strange whisperings crawled up my back and into my brain. 

In my fever, I walked through that door as though it were not there.  Sissy was terrified of what waited deep below the tunnels and caves of Townsend Mountain.  It was an instinctive fear magnified by a dark, subconscious knowledge.  I felt it too as my wandering consciousness stepped through that membranous door.  Something disturbingly alien lay hidden behind it.

I stepped into a giant cavern where the air itself was alive with a pale neon blue light.  I saw rows and rows of automatons topped with the glass domes Sissy had described.  Red brass mechanical men stiff and upright with arms veined by cables and jointed fingers that shone like infrared fire.  They were connected by a network of glassine tubes that pulsed with an eerie white energy.  They stood at attention, connected by these tubules to a monstrosity that hung at the sheer rock face at the back of the cavern.  It was suspended twenty feet in the air like a giant spider between two metal pylons by the web of glassine tubules that were affixed to each soldier.

There was no defense against my inner compulsion to comprehend this mystery.  I had to see it.  Had to stare into the face of madness itself.

The air in the cavern, though itself alive with energy that fluoresced the vast empty space with light, seemed undisturbed by any presence for a very long time.  There was no noise in the room save for a soft electrical buzz.  Suddenly the back wall began to glow faintly with a viridian light, which quickly darkened into a purple-black incarnadine emittance so repulsive I felt the desire to turn and bolt for my life.

But my body lay unconscious on the rock floor of a dark tunnel somewhere else.

In my inchoate dream, I instead moved forward, walking through the rows of hulking automatonic soldiers, too anxious to look upward to see the dead souls twisting beneath their crystal domes. The sheer number of these mechanisms filled me with trepidation.  The unreasoning fear that one of them might come to life and recognize me as an intruder, then wake the others.

I kept my eyes on their metal feet, walking up the rows, getting closer to the thing in the center of this evil architecture.  I could not think of who built this army.  The age of their construction was indeterminate.  The fact of these hideous mechanical soldiers was chilling.  But it was the strange creature in the web of tubular light that pushed me too close to the edge of sanity.

Closer.

A moment of weakness.

I looked up at an automaton.  Saw the crystal dome and the fluid wisps that moved beneath it like lost aethyric spirits searching for surcease.  A translucent face, then another writhing within the domes as though twisted by invisible fingers.  Eyes glazed in gauzy effulgence peering back at me.

I screamed.  I ran.

I felt the floor tremor.  Saw the back wall flash raging scarlet  then subside.

I stopped and looked up.  I was only twenty feet from the suspended monstrosity.

It was a lifeless man with a ragged beard down to his chest and wild, frayed hair that hung past his shoulder.   He wore a disintegrating Confederate Civil War uniform of rock washed gray.

His head lolled to one side.  His eyelids closed as though he had been forever asleep.

To my horror, I saw that his legs had been cut off at the knees and both his arms severed at the elbows.  The pulsing glassine tubules attached  to these stumps as though his suspended form was the hideous heart of this network of glassine arteries and veins connecting the mechanical soldiers.

How long his mutilated body had hung there I cannot say.  Who had done this to him and how long ago they had so savagely murdered him I would never know.

I could not imagine his agonizing death, but hoped for his sake it had been mercilessly quick.

My nerves had reached their limit.  It was time to leave.

At just that moment his eyelids popped open and I saw that his eyes were silver slits of bright metal, as though someone long ago had dug them out and replaced them with platinum silver crescents.

He opened his mouth and screamed shattering fusillades of fury.

Episode 30- Death by Disintegration

It was the only smart thing I did that night.

I ran with my hand along the side of the tunnel to keep from smashing into rock when we came to a bend.  That's what I say now.  But I know better.  I needed to touch something that night to steady me against the black chaos of the pursuit as we went further down into the underground abyss.  We were running for our lives.  The sound of the creature's roars of rage echoed around us as the tunnel narrowed.

My lungs were hot with pain.  My legs were numb with exhaustion.

The fear of death drove me like a whip.

The monster bellowed.  It was farther back than I expected, but I ran harder.  When it bellowed again, I could sense its helpless hatred.  The sound was much further behind us.

I could hear its frothing frustration as it continued.  Further and further back still.

"Sissy," I shouted.

From somewhere up ahead, she yelled for me to shut up and keep running.

The monster's screams were getting farther and farther behind us.

"I think it's stuck," I said.

We both slowed down and then reluctantly stopped.  I leaned over with my hands on my knees.  The creature continued to bellow its frustration and rage while I tried to catch my breath.  I felt Sissy's hand on my shoulder and it startled me.  But enveloped in total blackness with a terrifying creature somewhere behind us bent on ripping us to pieces, her touch was the best thing that could have happened to me.

"You think it's really stuck?" she said.

"Maybe,"  I said.

"I hope so," she said.

It howled with manic frenzy.  I could imagine it writhing in a narrow passage, insane with the desire to break free of the rock walls that trapped it.

"It's sounds pissed off,"  I said.

"Good," she said.  "I hope it gets so mad it blows itself up."

"Not likely,"  I said.

At that moment, from far back the way we had come, a bright blue-white starburst of light exploded like an overheated transformer.  The pressure wave knocked us both backward and I caught a brief glimpse of Sissy tumbling head over heels before I hit my head on the rock floor and blacked out.

Episode 29- The Depths of Darkness

I had just turned to run when I heard Sissy fire the first shot. 

"Don't shoot, run,"  I yelled over my shoulder.

When I turned to look and see if she was following, I saw her fire another round.  An enraged, ear-busting roar came from the creature in the breach.

Another shot.  She stood straight, with her feet apart and her arms raised and locked into position like a life-size GI Jane.

One of the creatures eyes was now a liquid red pulp.  I saw a tiny hole above the other eye.

She fired again.  Again.

I saw its entire head protrude through the energy breach.  Then a thick scaly neck.  The breach widened and a giant pair of clawed hands came through followed by arms the color of copper cable.

Sissy sent a bullet straight through one of its nostrils.  It opened its mouth and screamed.

I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her back through the door.  She slammed me backward with the butt of her rifle, knocking me to the ground, then dropped to one knee and kept firing as the entire creature came through.  The floor trembled under its weight.

Sissy fired one last shot.

The creature reared up and back to its full height.  In the eerie red sparkle lights, it glowed with dark energy.  Sissy dropped the rifle and ran past me through the door and into the darkness beyond.

"Hurry up," she yelled back at me.

The beast was over twenty feet tall.  If it wasn't for the domed ceiling, it couldn't have stood up.  It was six or seven feet wide and I realized at that instant it couldn't follow me out through the door.

But first I had to make it to the door.

I started scooting backward slowly as the creature eyed me with its one good eye.  It took a step forward.  The floor shook.  I panicked, scrambled back to my feet and bolted through the door faster than I knew I could run.

A small light clicked on and I brought my hand up to protect my eyes.  Sissy now had a small halogen lamp strapped to her head.  She had me by the sleeve and was pulling me down the corridor, her camper's lamp lighting the way.   We slowed in front of a door and she reached for the handle.

There was a crash behind us and we turned in time to see the entire wall explode into pieces that bounced off the tunnel wall like defective shrapnel.  The beast's grotesque head stuck out into the hallway.  It turned away from us, then turned back, fixing on our light.

Sissy reached for the handle again.

"No," I shouted.  "Run."

She got the point.  If the monster could knock down one wall, it could knock down another.

The sound of claws raking over stone and loud, slithering rasps.  The thudding impact of its weight with each step.  We tore down the hallway like we were on fire and looking for water.

"Isn't there any place the tunnels aren't so wide?"  I shouted in between heaving gulps of air.

We came to an intersection of three tunnels.  Sissy's head swung back and forth for a moment, trying to make up her mind.

"This one,"  she said as she turned left.

The tunnel began to slant downward.

We were going from bad to worse.

Sissy slipped and went down.  I doubled back, lifted her to her feet and pulled her behind me.  She resisted and tried to turn back.

"No," I said.  "It's still back there.  Can't you hear it?"

"My rifle's back there, you idiot.  I dropped it."

The air shook with a roaring rage.

No time to go back for the rifle.

We turned and starting running.  Sissy's light went out.  The darkness descended on us again.  I could hear the creature's claws raking the rocks behind us.

A new terror suddenly seized me.  It was the complete and inexplicable conviction that no matter how horrifying the creature behind us, there was something ahead much worse worse, and I knew that it could see us coming.

Episode 28- The Breach

"Sissy,"  I said softly, "where are you?"

The malignant darkness pressed against me.   Absolute silence, cold and menacing.

"Sissy?"

"Shut up," she hissed from somewhere to my left.

I moved a step toward where I'd heard her voice.  Her fear hit me full force, the fear of being alone in a strange dark place.  It matched my own growing sense of terror.

"You feel that?"  I whispered.

"Shut up."

"The air- it's moving."

It was more than that.  It felt like the room was breathing.

Something grabbed my shirt sleeve and I almost screamed.

"That's you, isn't it?"  I asked.

"Who else?" she said in a tight voice.  "We're the only people here."

"I don't think so.  This doesn't feel right," I said.

The room grew colder, and once again I smelled ozone.  All around us, tiny pinpoints of red light began to sparkle like electrified snowflakes.  I looked toward Sissy, and could see by the light of the tiny sparks that her lips were clamped shut to keep from screaming.

In the corner of the room farthest from us, a tiny ring of angry red-purple light appeared and began to distend and widen.  Within its center I saw an undulating deeper depth of darkness.  A blast of distorted static crackled from it.  I remembered the eerie, twisted lights that had preceded the terrifying creature in the forest.  I held my breath.

"Oh shit."

"What?"

"We've got to get out of here," I said as I grabbed her arm and pulled her behind me.

"Let go of me," she said.

I kept pulling at her.

"We'll die if we don't get out of here," I said.

"There's nowhere to go except down and I ain't going down."

"What's coming out of that hole is going to be really, really bad, Sissy.  So get moving."

I'd pulled her three or four steps behind me when she dug in her heels.

"No.  Not til you tell me what's going on."

"Oh shit," I said, looking past her.

Sissy turned and saw it, too.

Beyond the angry sparkles of light, a hideous face glared at us from within the twisting oval of purple-red light.

Episode 27- Mechanical Soldiers, Part Two

"You've seen them?"  I asked.  "Hundreds of mechanical soldiers underground?"

"You think I'd make up something like that?  I ain't seen them myself, but I read the journals.  And it has what I said about being able to look in their domed glass heads and the the faces of the dead."

Sissy's pale, freckled face looked even younger than I had first thought.  She seemed almost desperate for me to believe her.

"You can think what you want," she said. "I ain't crazy."

"I never said you were," I said.  "I just wanted to know if you'd actually seen them."

"We don't go down there- women that is.  It's not safe.  Not if you want to have kids."

We were back in the room where we were supposed to meet Mark.  It was the highest point you could go in the tunnels and caves that networked beneath Townsend Mountain.  It was the size of a two car garage, with a domed, shiny metal ceiling.  There were two gun metal gray desks and four chairs.  The floor looked like linoleum salvaged from a nineteen fifties kitchen.  The room was lit by indirect lighting that ringed the base of the domed ceiling.  It was like being in an underground high school counselor's office.  We sat looking at each other across one of the desks.

"I don't get it.  You're saying that going down to wherever these automatons are could make a woman sterile or something like that?  Is that it?"

"Worse than that," she said.  "A lot worse than that."

"Like what?"

"I already told you too much," she said.  "Nobody's supposed to know.  It's just so weird down here.  It's hard to think right.  I was never here by myself til daddy had me come wait for you.  He couldn't come himself.  He had to be back at the house in case the black suits showed up looking for you.  So he sent me.  Now I went and told you too much.  This place gives me the creeps."

"Were you scared?"  I asked.  "Waiting by yourself?"

Sissy's eyes widened.

"You have that gun," I added.

"Rifle," she said.

"Okay, you have that rifle.  It's enough to scare anybody'd who try to bother you."

"I'm not afraid of anybody in these parts," she said.

"Well, then, you'd be safe from bears or wolves or whatever is in the woods at night."

"You're ignorant," she said.

"I'm sorry, I-"

"You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?"

The lights dimmed, and I smelled the sharp odor of ozone and then heard an ominous electrical crackle.

"What was that?" I asked.

She ignored my question.

"I'm not afraid of anything outside this place," she said.

"What happened to the power?" I asked.  "Why are the lights flickering?"

"The only things I'm afraid of are down there," she whispered, pointing her rifle at the floor and what lay below.

The lights dimmed until they were little more than a soft blue glow around the edge of the room's ceiling.

"Maybe there's a short in the wiring," I said nervously.

My skin felt abraded.  My mouth was dry and the skin on the back of my neck tightened with fear.

"Daddy says it happens when they dream."

"Who?" I asked.

"Up top of where we're at is the family cemetery.  Only ones buried there are the ones die down here."

"Is your dad coming soon?"  I asked.

"I don't want to die down here," she said.

The lights disappeared into a sudden, terrifying darkness.  I reached for where I had last seen her hand, but it was no longer there.

Episode 26- Mecahnical Soldiers, Part One

"What is this place?"  I asked.

I'd slept for twenty four hours.  Showered and put on clean clothes Sissy'd given me.  They were dirt-brown overalls like maintenance men wore and came complete with a utility belt but no tools.

"You're inside Townsend Mountain,"  said Sissy.  "Creepiest place in the whole USA.  Home to everyone at one time or another from from gold diggers to Civil War refugees, bootleggers, secret government scientists and underground UFO chasers.  They all came and went is what my daddy says.  Too scary to stay in for too long."

Three days ago I would have said she was crazy, but after what I'd seen in that time I was ready to believe anything.

"You want to explain that?"

"No,"  she said.  "You got to ask my dad about that.

She'd said earlier that the inside of Townsend Mountain was honeycombed with miles and miles of tunnels.  She didn't know where they all went.  Not even her Daddy Mark knew that.  What she'd made completely clear, however, was that some tunnels were safe, and some were dangerous.  Some tunnels people could go in, as she said, but they never came out.

She'd shown me eight or ten rooms that fit the description of abandoned government laboratories and offices.  The desks were still in place with papers scattered around the room like everyone left in a hurry.

"If the government was one of the groups that used to be here, aren't you afraid they'll come looking for us?  Looked like they were SWAT-teaming the whole forest when the helicopters started coming in."

Sissy shook her head.

"They long since forgot about this place. And they'd never get past the AI.  Besides, we won't be here that long.  Daddy will come and get us."

"How can you be sure the government doesn't have records of this place they can pull up on computers?"

"They haven't been here since World War II.  Whatever they were doing down here didn't turn out too well, according to daddy.  They left so quick they left everything here.  Sealed up the shaft they thought was the only way in.  Daddy says not all of them made it out alive."

"How could he know that?"  I asked.

"Daddy knows a lot," she said.

"Yeah, but how does he know so much?"

I watched her carefully.  She didn't hesitate at all before answering.  She spoke with the easy innocence of total conviction.

"'Cause he's a Mozer.  Mozer's been guarding Townsend Mountain's secrets since the Civil War."

She was sitting propped on a dull green government issue desk.  Had her legs crossed and was wearing ripped jeans that looked like they'd been a tight squeeze to put on.  Flannel shirt tied in front at the bottom and a khaki jacket thrown over one shoulder.  It it wasn't for the rifle she'd have looked safe enough.

"What secrets?"  I persisted.

"Wouldn't be secrets if I told you, now would they?"

"Fair enough.  When's your dad coming?"

"A while," she said.

"What do we do in the meantime?" I asked.  "Go exploring?"

Sissy stiffened.

"No.  That we will not do.  There's tunnels and cave that don't need anybody walking in them.  And there's doors, big strange doors made out of peculiar metals.  Nobody should ever open them.  Another thing, there's round hole some places in the tunnel that if you ain't careful you could drop right in."

"How deep are they?" I asked nervously.

"Don't know.  Nobody ever went after anyone that fell in."

"Why not?"

She was looking past me when she answered, staring at a memory she wished she could forget.

"Cause they might lead down to where they are."

"They?" I asked.

"The mechanical soldiers,"  she said.  "There's hundreds of them.  If you look in through their crystal heads you can see the dead people trapped inside."

Borgo

This is the cover in progress for my new novel "Borgo" which will be out later this year.  The fonts will be changed   to silver and pewter, but I like the cover art so much I thought I'd see what the rest of you think.

Also, my novel "The Ghost Box" will be available in two or three weeks in eBook format and then in print two months later.  "Tainted Blood" will be out in print about the same time.

Ghost Box Cover Art

Over at White Cat Publications, we're currently on version 5 of the cover art for "The Ghost Box."  In the next version, the ectoplasmic vapors will be coming more from inside the box.  Thought you might want to see what it looks like before the final version.

And we're looking for new novels to publish, so check out the guidelines and if your work meets the criteria, send it along.  We're just getting ready to announce this over at Ralan and Duotrope, but I wanted to let you know first.

Steampunk & "The Ghost Box"

My new book "The Ghost Box" is ready for print layout and cover design, for a release date early next spring.  I don't know how many books a year the rest of you write, but two or three is quite enough for me, I think!  James Patterson produces an average of 230 books per year, but I believe in all honesty that he is not a human being, but an organized work farm of alien laborers from the planet Profit.

I'd love to hear from the rest of you what your average yearly word count is.

The  covers a mixture of three genres- Steampunk, Paranormal and Science Fiction.  Maybe we should call it "Dark Urban Fantasy" and leave it at that.

"The White Death" is well underway, and is a mixture of Steampunk, Lovecraft, and Science Fiction.  A seatbelt is required when reading the book.

Next year, though, I'm sticking with one genre category per book.  How about you?