Machina Obscurum Read online

  Machina Obscurum

  A Collection of Small Shadows

  With contributions by:

  J Edward Neill

  John R. McGuire

  Chad J. Shonk

  River Fairchild

  Robert Jeffrey II

  Phil Elmore

  J.L. Clayton

  F. Charles Murdock

  Roy T. Dodd

  Interior Art by Eileen Herron, Amanda Makepeace, Damonza, and J Edward Neill

  Cover Art by J Edward Neill

  Tessera Guild Publishing

  Copyright © 2015

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1519432780

  ISBN-10: 151943278X

  Contents

  Flashes of Darkness

  The Stiletto

  Appetite

  My Ears Rang

  Short Shadows

  The Sleepers

  Phoenix

  The Jupiter Event

  Proxy: Fontane Di Roma

  Til the Last Candle Flickers

  Old Man of Tessera

  Let the Bodies

  Herald of Tessera

  Crispin

  Murgul

  And I Feel Fine

  The Crossing: Moonlit Skies

  Ice Cream

  The Journal

  The Sound of Silence

  By the Time I get to Arizona

  The Dark That Follows

  Crawl

  Machina Obscurum (translation – obscurity machine)

  W elcome to A Collection of Small Shadows.

  A long time in the making, this little book.

  It was a hot, hot summer. I’d spent most of it indoors, crunching words. I’d just about had my fill of writing epic fiction. Not sure if you know this, but locking oneself in a dark room for hours every night (for months on end) gets tiresome. Writing huge novels is grueling work. I don’t recommend it to anyone.

  Truth is—

  Sometimes you just want to write something small.

  Sometimes you want a small, swift shadow instead of a gigantic tale that never wants to end.

  Enter Machina Obscurum.

  By the time summer died, I knew what had to happen. I put out a call for fellow authors. The Write or Die Project, I called my summons. Sounds a little heavy-handed, right? At first I worried about inviting a pile of amateurs into my life. And a few turned up, to be sure. But soon enough the good’uns made themselves known. Some were authors I’d already collided with. But most were unknown to me.

  They knifed their stories through the ether.

  And this book became a reality.

  Machina Obscurum contains mostly dark tales. Mostly, but not all. It’s got flash fiction, short stories, and excerpts from larger, darker works. Some of the characters are noble, others not so much. A few of the tales are set in ancient times, while many stretch into the far and distant future. It’s like Twilight Zone in a book. You get in for a little while, get your dark on, and get out.

  The Twilight Zone. I loved that show.

  Oh, I almost forgot. Several stories in here are part of larger books. So if you like one or two, consider buying the full novel. We’ll love you all the more for it.

  J Edward Neill

  The Stiletto

  J Edward Neill

  I knew it’d be a mistake the moment it was over.

  But I did it anyway.

  He was a ghoulish old king. He’d extorted, terrorized, and murdered to fill his coffers. His brothers were thieves. His wives…both of them…were daggers in every man’s back.

  His subjects hated him. His enemies feared him. The ground he walked turned black beneath his boots. His bathwater reeked of death.

  Every family who’d even a chance at sniffing the throne, he’d exiled, poisoned, or butchered. When his cousin’s coup d’état failed, the ghoul burned the usurpers’ children alive, drowned his cousin’s mother, and hung the collaborators’ bodies from gibbets so high even the crows dared not a single sniff.

  It was time for the King to go. Everyone knew it. Everyone wanted it. His black towers had too long stood like knives on the kingdom’s throat.

  When the three exiles came to me on autumn’s second eve, I knew what they wanted. One carried a chest of silvers. The other dropped a satchel of ingots on my table. The third stood in my doorway, the moonlight shining on his back. He was a weathered, ancient thing. Twenty years in the sand had done him poorly. I smirked, my dagger folded against my wrist in case he did something stupid.

  “Lady Lusia, will you?” he asked.

  “Will I what?” I pretended not to know what he meant.

  “The Ghoul…the King…the hundred-year old nightmare haunting the eaves of every house in Lyrlech. Will you?”

  “No.” I glanced out my window. I couldn’t see the black towers, but I knew they were there.

  “Why?” asked the weathered man.

  “He’s only a few more years left in him,” I scoffed. “Not worth it. I’m too pretty for the gibbets.”

  “You don’t understand, Lusia,” he sighed. “If he dies, his brother becomes king. It’ll only get worse.”

  I considered it for a moment, then countered, “Exactly. If I kill the Ghoul, it does nothing. The noose around our necks just gets tighter.”

  “But Lusia, his family will be there. His brothers. His sons. His grandchildren. All under one roof for the first time in years.”

  “So?” I smiled.

  “You can save us,” he pleaded. “You’re the best. Everyone knows it. The Stiletto, they call you. You’re the only one who can deliver us from darkness.”

  “You’re right,” I smiled. “I can. But I won’t.”

  I got tired of waiting. I flicked my knife and split the three men neck to belly. They died quietly. Their blood drained onto the floor, but the night moved none at all.

  I knew it was a mistake the moment it was over.

  …but the Ghoul had paid me well.

  Appetite

  F. Charles Murdock

  M ai stopped the momentum of her swing with the heels of her bare feet to look up at the approaching man. He was obscured briefly by the resulting plume of grit, and as he closed in, the girl had to squint against the daylight until his shadow eclipsed the sun.

  “Hello there,” the man said, his features indiscernible even in such ample light. “What’s your name?”

  “Mai,” she said.

  “Mai, Mai, the cutie-pie,” he whispered, ending his song with a titter that betrayed the deep timbre of his voice. “And how old are you, Mai?”

  “Six.”

  He looked her over, cherishing her silky black hair and the way she clasped her tiny fingers around the chains of the swing, all the while trying to remain as still and casual as possible. He’d danced this number many times, of course, but sometimes things didn’t go as planned. Also, there were a lot of grownups at the park today and the man didn’t like adults; they were brash and unpredictable.

  “Nice to meet you, Mai,” the man asked. He shot a quick look behind him before returning his eyes to the girl. “I’m Peter.”

  “Hello.”

  “Say, where’re your parents, Mai?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied with a shrug that made her red sundress bob in the midday breeze. Another plume of dust roiled around them as she dug her feet into the sand beneath the swing. Peter watched with keen interest as it sifted through her toes, the chipped scarlet of old nail polish exciting him.

  “But only because I ran away last night. Daddy was being mean and Mommy never listens to me.”

  “Is that right?” Peter licked his lips...he couldn’t help it.

  “Yup,” she said, finally looking him in the eye. “They won’t miss
me.”

  “Poor thing,” Peter said, caressing her cheek with a trembling hand before restraining himself. The gooseflesh on her arms in the chill of his shadow was almost too much for him.

  “You think they miss me?”

  He smiled and whispered, “I’m sure they will.”

  Mai nodded, a vengeful smirk splitting her lovely face.

  “Say, Mai, do you like ice cream?” Peter offered his hand to the girl.

  “I love ice cream!” Mai squeaked. “Strawberry’s my favorite!”

  Peter hushed Mai and escorted her away from the swing. Their pace was quick but even, Peter doing his best to stave off attention. Finally, at the edge of Winter Park, he helped Mai into his car and together they drove away.

  * * *

  Now the girl was sitting on Peter’s bared chest on the floor of his hotel room, her hands stained with the blood flowing from his mangled throat.

  “Poor thing,” she said. She stepped off the body and, after a supercilious twirl, offered a dainty hand to the corpse. The ruined thing that reached up to her had once been a soul before its appetite had blackened it. Which was why Mai had chosen Peter Crowley, degenerate child molester that he was, all those months ago.

  She pulled the writhing spirit into her, savoring the taste of its evil and madness.

  Her demonic hunger sated, Mai left the corpse and walked out of the hotel room into the dead of night, wondering in which park or school or mall her next terrible meal would find her.

  My Ears Rang

  Roy T. Dodd

  M y ears rang.

  I lied next to her in bed and counted the drips of paint on the ceiling, inventoried the whispers in my ears as I balanced between the world of the waking and the sleeping. Hellish dreamscapes formed over the regular.

  She smelled of Lilac as I caressed the waving sheen of her black hair and the crescent moon set over it. I traced the hem of her angular jaw. Her pale skin is practically translucent but I’m reminded that it’s not as I watch the flickers of movement under her eyes..

  She must have been lovers with the sandman as she slept sounder than the dead, unhealthy to the eye, wilting as the fallen leaves outside our window. Our shared bed was a lie, and the dishonesty was hers. Not hers alone.

  There were other liars.

  Plenty of them.

  My ears rang.

  They bombarded me like the voices from the other side. The feedback and reverb of absent-mindedness giving way to the unseen truths of this world. The truth is the truth, and you can’t shake that. I’ve always known as much. When my father used to scold me for my active imagination.

  He didn’t get it.

  It wasn’t imagination.

  I wasn’t making it up.

  I was seeing as others couldn’t.

  I haven’t ruled him out as part of the conspiracy which has become life to me. It had become the air that I fear stolen from me, the blood that may be siphoned lest I prevent their thefts. You can’t trust liars.

  It began…

  It’s not important.

  I don’t care about the start of my story; I’m concerned with the theme and the conclusion of my arc. So I scribble this living will on a shred of her eggshell nightgown. This will be my explanation of the actions that I have chosen.

  I did no evil.

  I could do no evil greater than their deceptions. They were wrong to impose their delusions upon me. Delusional. They called me delusional. I’m not delusional. I’m certain of that. They staged some stupid mock intervention full of supposed loved ones to tell me that I imagined them being replaced. They tried to work it into my head that I was the crazy one. Capgras Syndrome Disorder was what they called it. The irrational belief that loved ones have been replaced by somebody else.

  They created a fictional disorder to disguise their actions.

  I had seen what couldn’t be seen.

  My ears rang from the first shot, they stung, the initial sound echoing back. It was my retribution for her involvement. Whatever she had become, she no longer was who she had once been as she lay beneath me soaked in the deep-seated red of our betrayals.

  There were others like her. Other pretenders eager to act as doppelgangers deceiving me.

  I didn’t have enough rounds left in the gun to dispose of all of them.

  There was only a single bullet left.

  The gunshot rang in my ear.

  The Sleepers

  J Edward Neill

  I once lived a normal life.

  When did everything change?

  Good question.

  My earliest memories are of the tower we grew up in. I was the eldest of three brothers. Mom and Dad worked for Sidus Perio, at the time the largest corporation in the world. We lived a good life. Of all the towers stretching above the clouds, ours was the tallest. Six hundred eighty floors above the street, we peered from our plaza windows and glimpsed mountains to the north, the ocean to the east, and a thousand other spires poking at the cloud cover beneath us. At night, the rest of the world faded. Above us the stars danced a ballet with hundreds of silver orbital stations, and far below the lights in every window winked to life. Feels like we’re floating in deep space, I remember thinking. “Someday you’ll see the stars even closer,” Mom used to say to me. I wish she had been wrong.

  Mom and Dad were my heroes. They were everyone’s heroes. The Vir, the people used to call them, the entertainers, star-chasers, and storytellers of deep space. You see, Sidus Perio Inc. was an extraterrestrial location and extraction service, the biggest ever. Sidus sent ships across the void, set up shop in the orbits of alien planets, and plucked samples of life from each world. Mom worked as Sidus’s top scientist, and Dad, well…he worked in the WTC division. Most people had no idea why they called it WTC. My little brothers and I used to laugh and call it the what the crap division or the where’s the cheese division. Mom and Dad never told Xander and Jack what the letters stood for. But I found out.

  In the year 4,149, everyone hoped to see the stars up close. My brothers and I were no different. I remember the night of my sixth birthday. Jack had yet to be born, but little four year-old Xander and I rode the orbit-stair all the way to our tower’s top plaza. We looked ridiculous in our air masks and way-too-big wind suits, but we didn’t care. All we wanted was to watch the stars wheel overhead. And did we ever.

  “Which one do you want?” I pointed at the billions of white pinpricks.

  “All of ‘dem,” Xander said.

  “I bet Dad could do it,” I blurted. “You know the WTC found some new xenos last week. Dad said they looked like balloons with eyes.”

  “Did they have big juicy brains?”

  “Probably.”

  “What about claws? Or big spaghetti arms coming out of their balloon butts?” Xander giggled his little head off.

  “I bet all of those,” I laughed.

  “I like the little blue ones Mom brought home.” Xander waved his skinny arms inside his wind suit. “They’re like rocks, but with arms and legs. Their black eyes are all spooky, like ‘Oooooo look at us! We’re gonna get you!’”

  Xander loved it whenever Mom brought home carbo-frozen xeno specimens. The little blue ones, Silicites, had been stripped off a world whose star had gone dark. They’d been dead thousands of years when the WTC engineers arrived, but the conditions on their weird little planet had preserved everything about them: their primitive cities, their tiny six inch-tall bodies, even their silicon carbide weapons, the little needle swords they must have used in some tiny but terrible war. Mom had shown us a pair sealed inside a box of permo-glass. All my friends were jealous.

  Back then, we kids never considered all that went into finding, extracting, and communicating with alien life. Permo-glass boxes, xeno zoos, and images captured on planets a thousand light years away were normal for us. By the time Xander was ten and Jack six, they’d seen almost everything. Every month delivered a new species, every year ten new systems teeming with bizarre
forms of life. It was a game for us to keep track of how many species Sidus Perio had subdued. We ranked them in order of awesomeness. Silicites were boring compared to the metal-eating, house-sized Borons, and Borons stupid next to air-devouring Telephers, and Telephers pitiful specks of dust next to Star-Eaters.

  I remember the first time we watched a Star-Eater. Little Jack was nine, and Dad took us to the xeno zoo. We stared at the giant screen for hours, stunned and silent, gaping with open mouths at the time-lapse cinema of a crimson Star-Eater eating a white dwarf. When it was done, the massive creature belched a cloud of radioactive vapors that wandered two solar systems away, melting a garden world to slag.

  “Could that ever happen here, on Earth?” Xander fretted.

  “Not in your lifetime,” Dad tousled Xan’s hair. “No Star-Eaters in the MW galaxy. Besides, even if there were, it’d take thousands of years for them to reach us. So let’s figure you and your brothers live to be three-hundred or so. No chance of an Eater snacking on you in such a small bit of time.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” Xander had been relieved.

  My relief had not come so easily.

  “So what xeno should we worry about?” I asked.

  I knew something was on Dad’s mind. He took way too long to answer. While everyone else in the theater dome filed out, he gazed over the front-row railing into nothingness.

  “None of them, I suppose,” he said at last.

  “None? But if the Borons came here, they’d eat our towers and ships. And if a Fire Graza ever escaped the zoo, couldn’t it melt everything it touched?”

  Dad smiled. “Borons can’t breathe our air. You know that. And the Grazas wouldn’t last an hour outside their sulfur baths.”

  “So we’re the strongest in the universe? Humans are number one?” Xander asked the question we all wanted answered.