Crocodile Tears
Have you ever felt as though everyone is in on the joke except you? That the world is laughing at you, not with you?
Joey the Clown has hung up his frightwig and ceremonially burnt his tiny automobile, retiring from a life of cutting capers, mockery and merry making and now resides in the ruins of the Ullavec Tower, content to dream of happier times before the world was undone by his oldest friend.
It has been three centuries since Kaspar Punchinello ushered in the Age of Misrule by slaying the Devil and the Angel Of Death. Well, maybe three centuries, or maybe three days, depending on whom you ask. Time is inconstant and fickle now, one of the many concepts which have been weakened or rendered irrelevant by Kaspar’s final victory. The Cosmic Balance has been utterly upset and all laws are subject to mutation. Humankind is immortal and everybody can do as they wish without fear of punishment or censure. Every day is a holiday, and Queen Judy cooks sausages for all and sundry while Pretty Polly rocks the bonny baby. THAT’S THE WAY TO DO IT!
Try as he might, Joey cannot evade the unquiet shades of Jack Ketch and Pete the Policeman, who ceaselessly flutter distressed and mothlike around the tower windows, continually murmuring about violations of causality and clamouring for their murders to be avenged. It is all the fault of that scoundrel the old Falconer of course, for it was he who bestowed upon Kaspar the sceptre of force and fire, hoping that Kaspar would use it to attack Dame Sobek, whom the Falconer suspects has captured and imprisoned his four sons.
Kaspar betrayed him, as he has betrayed all who knew him.
Who can save us from the terrible twin curses of immortality and boundless freedom? The post of Grim Reaper is vacant, and his mighty scythe lies idle, but before he can wield the blade, the clown must prove himself a worthy successor. He who would harvest souls must make many, many sacrifices.
To restore the balance, Joey will need the assistance and wisdom of both the Queen of the Nile, her Red Headed King and the Master of Hawks, but how can he gain the support of both parties when the Weeping Queen and the old Falconer are locked in a bitter family feud? The fool’s quest will take him from the City of the Pillars baking under the harsh red light of a dying sun, to the sunken and submersed remains which are Drowned Paris, on to the uttermost ends of the Earth.
Joey will need all his trickery to evade fates worse than death — is he a match for Set’s game? The way forward will be arduous and nobody can be trusted, but when reality has become a joke, isn’t it best to skip to the Punchline?
I Was A Middle School Zombie Hunter
Ben was your everyday Fifth grader, happier to be running around on the playground than sitting in class. But he was a good student overall, reading at a high school reading level, proficient in math, and actively curious in the history of his town.
One day while poking around the dusty shelves of the G.A. Romero Middle School Library Ben came across an odd little volume of local folklore. It spoke of strange goings on in his town, mysterious lights, weird noises, missing persons, ghostly apparitions of people and animals lurking around the local cemetery. There were handwritten notes in the book and crudely drawn maps. But two things caught Ben’s attention: the map showing that his middle school sat atop what was once a prison graveyard, and the mummified tongue that had been used as a bookmark in the odd volume of local folklore. Strange things were afoot at G. A. Romero Middle School.
Ben wasn’t sure who to trust with his newly found knowledge, so he confided in his younger brother Sam, who also had a sharp and curious mind. They conducted several surreptitious playground investigations, excavating sandboxes, digging under swing-sets, and surveying from atop monkey-bars. But other than a few marbles, soda cans, Matchbox cars and a retainer, they found nothing.
After much debate they both decided to ask Mrs. Wright, Ben’s Fifth grade teacher, if she knew anything about the odd volume of local folklore and the stories therein. She was at a loss as well, but assured them she would ask around at the next PTA meeting the following Thursday.
By Friday Mrs. Wright had disappeared.
By Saturday all the local cats and dogs had fled.
By Sunday the birds stopped singing.
Monday was tater-tot day at school, all was right with the world.
By Tuesday the dead started to rise from beneath the sandbox and the swing-set and the monkey-bars.
By Wednesday all the parents had disappeared.
By Thursday Ben and Sam had scoured their garage and were ready to hunt some zombies. Baseball bats — check. Hockey masks — check. Football pads — check. Lighter fluid and matches — check. Bandanas — check. Chewing gum — check.
By Friday Ben and Sam realized that they were the only living things left in the town of Ed Woods. By Friday they realized that the zombies were only a precursor to a bigger threat. By Friday they realized that the aliens were invading. By Friday Ben and Sam realized that they weren’t protagonists in a children’s story at all, but more like something written by Lovecraft, or King, or Barker, or worst still, Powers. No one ever came out of a Powers’ story unscathed.
By Friday Ben and Sam realized they were really in trouble.
Exhalations of the Exiled
When Marcus Granger is made executor for his late Aunt’s estate (after her tragic overdose on prescription painkillers), he sees it as an opportunity to learn about an enigmatic woman who made a strong impression on him during his childhood. It was Aunty Lilian who first introduced him to the field of Natural History and influenced his choice to become a biologist. Her intense interest, bordering on obsession, sparked Marcus’s own fascination with invertebrates.
He is distressed to find that the old lady’s house has been burgled and most of her library stolen. While doing his best to tidy up the damage, Marcus discovers a key taped to the back of a bookcase, and eventually finds a matching lock in a desk drawer located in the attic. The drawer contains his Aunt’s diary, and also a notebook addressed to Marcus.
After dissuading various callers who claim to be evangelists or cleaning products salesmen, and fielding some very odd telephone calls from what he assumes are mischievous children, Marcus turns his attention to the two books.
Aside from recording Lilian’s ongoing struggle with terrible migraine-like headaches, the diary makes very little sense — presumably the various references to "Ordines Descendens" are connected to his Aunt’s ongoing study of various aspects of Invertebrate biology, but what about the garbled paragraphs mentioning the Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass and the speculation that the moon called Phobos is actually a hollow construct?
Maybe the brain tumour had started to affect his aunt’s thought processes? A very sad business.
In stark contrast the information contained in the notebook is clear and concise and invites Marcus to a self storage facility on the outskirts of town containing a strange wooden machine which appears to use living snails as components. Marcus switches on the machine, but can’t detect any activity or understand what it was built to accomplish.
When leaving the building to travel to the next address on the list, Marcus feels like he is being followed, but can’t seem to see his pursuer, even when he doubles back.
The headache kicks in when he is still a mile away from the aquarium house his Aunt subsidized, distorting his vision alarmingly, so Marcus stops the car and decides to walk. Soon after, Marcus begins to experience some disturbing auditory hallucinations akin to whispering voices, and at last starts to grasp the nature of his Aunt’s least visible, but most important legacy...
Paut Lines
Menekrates has a problem.
He is utterly and completely lost. As archisomatophylax to Pharaoh Akhenaten, he was chosen by Akhenaten himself to take five Canopic jars containing the ib-akh of Anupu, Asar, Heru, Tehuti, and Set "past the ends of the Earth and out of sight of the One True God Aten". After a deadly and bewildering sea voyage he finds himself wandering a strange, scarred land.
Jack Walker has a hobby.
As an engineer, Jack was fascinated by primitive building techniques. Now retired, he delights in showing how he can move concrete slabs weighing several tons using nothing more than a lever and fulcrum. He was amazed when he was hired to build a full scale replica of Stonehenge in a remote field in Western Pennsylvania. He was curious why the customer demanded that he use no iron in its construction. He never asked why the customer insisted that the last capstone be placed on the Summer Solstice. He didn’t know that his Stonehenge was sited on the exact junction of North America’s five supernatural ley lines.
Alex MacCormick has a dilemma.
For years she has been studying the rapid spread of astronomically aligned major architecture among ancient Anasazi cultures. Ground penetrating radar revealed a previously unknown settlement near the ruins at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Weeks of painstaking work rewarded her team with the discovery of a small burial chamber. In it were located five jars decorated with tarnished silvery markings in what were unquestionably Old Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphics. The lids were instantly recognizable; Anubis, Osiris, Horus, Thoth and Set. What the hell are they doing here?
Manny Begay has a headache.
He is a Hatałii, working with the MacCormick team as an adviser and representative for the Navajo nation, ensuring that any artifacts or human remains be treated according to tribal law. The headaches began sixteen days ago when the strange jars were discovered. The designs on them are oddly painful to look at - yet at the same time he feels as if he can almost understand them.
Moonrise over Western Pennsylvania.
Jack Walker is surprised at the number of people who have showed up to watch him place the final stone. There are campfires, people beating drums, dancing, some with clothes, some with less. As the full moon rises higher into the sky over the re-created ancient monument, those who chance to look up might wonder at the swirling funnel of disturbed air pulsing in rhythm with the drumbeats.
1500 miles away, the moon begins to rise over New Mexico. Mary MacCormick looks up, amazed as always at the stark beauty of the Earth’s oldest companion over the Southwestern desert. Moonlight strikes the ancient, puzzling jars. The silvery markings seem to give back the light - then they begin to glow on their own, as full moonlight illuminates the sacred jars for the first time in over four thousand years. Manny Begay’s shrieks split the night as the jars burst open.
Cross Contamination
Its 3058 and the first metropolis class spacefaring habitat Donnikam is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its inception and also the founding of the latest metropolis class habitat, the Metilaw.
However, in the midst of the celebrations, tragedy strikes as a woman is slain on the terrain outside the city walls of Donnikam
When Investigator Benedict is woken several months ahead of schedule, he knows the case being assigned to him must be important. Of five students who went on an expedition to the eastern Mevedoc foothills, four are missing and one is a corpse.
Benedict is instructed to find out what happened to the hikers, but unusually, is told to report directly to a Major — Prefect in the Kingdom Defence Force rather than to his usual superior in the Population Management dept. The case seems to be politically sensitive, and important enough to attract the attention of the hierarchy who oversee the habitat.
At first, Benedict finds evidence suggesting a crime of passion — two of the students, Andre Havisk and Iason Veen, were rivals for the affections of Mischa Patavin, and it appears that one of them murdered her. However, as the investigation progresses, Benedict becomes aware of many sudden "dead ends", and it becomes evident that someone has been tampering with evidence and silencing potential witnesses.
Benedict realises that he is working in opposition to at least one unseen opponent whose mission is to muddy the waters and lay false trails, but he rises to what he sees as a challenge and starts to investigate the cover up in addition to the original murder and disappearances. Did the students witness something which they could not be permitted to talk about?
The situation gets stranger when Benedict sees a person who looks identical to Mischa Patavin in the middle of a crowd of afternoon shoppers. If Mischa is alive, what exactly does Benedict have in container 32 in the city morgue?
However, it is only when Benedict receives a verbal threat from what appears to be a talking rat, and narrowly escapes a bizarre "accident" that he realises that he may be out of his depth, and that he is risking not just his career, but his life.
Red Hair’s Thirst (first book in the Rift series)
Jeff Harris, a Nevada State Police forensic specialist haunted by a childhood loss, begins his involvement in a terrifying mystery when he notes the unusual properties and behavior of a single strand of red hair, a dry island in a pool of blood, at a crime scene outside Las Vegas. His team is on the trail of a prostitute-turned-serial killer, but strange occurrences near the crime scenes and at his lab force him to consider the impossible: An ancient goddess has reemerged, and she demands worship, and blood, as tribute.
Red Hair — Jeff’s name for her — has plagued humanity before. Her path of destruction (its evidence preserved by a secret order of religiouse) follows cataclysmic disruptions of our atmosphere: Krakatoa, Tunguska, a suppressed Middle Ages meteorite fall on an island north of Antwerp. Sister Marguerite, a member of the Beguinage du chauve vigilant, has been sent to America to find Red Hair before her victims – undead acolytes from Tunguska — rise from their century-long sleep. Together, Jeff and Marguerite discover Red Hair’s history on Earth, from her early possession of European tribes to the myths and legends that still bear her stamp. Of her latest foray into humanity, they learn that the 1954 Operation Gemini test of paired fission/hydrogen bombs opened the door for Red Hair wider than it has ever been, yet her re-emergence has been stalled by an injury taking decades to heal. Finally, Red Hair is restored, ready... and ravenous. And she now has our century’s systems of speed and stealth on her side....
As Jeff and the Beguines race against the clock, Red Hair evades and anticipates their moves through a surprising and horrific device — an unsleeping spy Jeff never suspects — and gains unthinkable allies, linked to her by a prior hellish Rift incursion.
Red Hair’s rampage, the rise of her savage faithful and Jeff’s re-awakened grief all come to a horrific climax, as he and the Beguinage shock troops learn the shattering truth regarding Red Hair and her apocalyptic purpose. At their showdown at the Nevada Test Site, with powers formidable, Red Hair summons a force more dread and deadly than herself, with the help of her undead acolytes across the globe – in desperate pursuit of the deadliest weapon of all: Her Name.
Shakespeare’s Inferno
Graz Austria.1595.
Hans Treffen, a metallurgist working in his lab late at night is approached by a man with a design for a model that he wishes to be built. It is an unusual geometrical abstract. The man demands secrecy regarding the project but he tells the metallurgist that his name is Johannes Kepler and that the model represents the geometrical basis of the solar system and, possibly, the universe itself.
Using a fine ore that he had been saving for a special use, Treffen constructs the model — inspired to endow the inner polyhedra with the capacity to rotate even though Kepler’s designs do not call for it. However, when the final polyhedron is put into place he becomes dumbstruck as each of them begins to rotate on their own, spinning faster than any draft or angular imbalance would account for.
As they spin Treffen is certain that he hears a strange voice coming from the model and sees small vagrant shadowy forms cowering near it. He rushes to contact Kepler and soon the both of them become obsessed with trying to solve its mystery, but in secret, for they both realize that if caught they could both spend the rest of their lives in jail, or worse, for ’communicating with demons’.
For weeks they cautiously study the model and its attendant shadows, and listen to its strange unintelligible voice without gaining any headway until one night Treffen walks by it with a hot brazier. The spinning quickly accelerates and the words of the voice become discernible. It speaks in English, "I am thy father’s spirit".
They do not immediately grasp the significance of the words or of the behavior of the model in relation to heat. They cannot possibly know of the relationship between the model and of a budding playwright from Stratford-on-Avon at its mercy. They have yet to realize its connection to a New World Order built around the spilling of human blood and the insidious manipulation of human events by a secret society that blindly obeys orders from that playwright through a dark code hidden within the words of his plays.
But they soon come to know that they have in their possession a device that not only is capable of creating a Utopia for humanity but is capable of destroying it in the process and the both of them are thrown into a bizarre and ruthless series of events that will lead Treffen to the Globe Theatre in London and Kepler to the Rosicrucian doorstep of Sir Francis Bacon.
One of them believes that the device can be used for good, the other believes that it should be destroyed.
Neither one of them knows that there is a second device that has been in existence for the last six years.
And neither one of them is aware that they have both been marked for death by a man named William Shakespeare.
Bibliomechanica
On the corner of Oak and Apothecary, just outside of Verne Books, a street musician played as Ethan Weller walked past. Three weeks ago Ethan had joined the reading group that met at the bookshop, and each Wednesday without fail, the thin man of indeterminate age stood on the street corner, clad in an outlandish combination of leather and rags. The lilting tune from his instrument — which by Ethan’s semi-educated guesswork was a mandola with round antique typewriter keys scattered across the lower half of its body — seemed to repel rather than attract passers-by. The melody wasn’t altogether unpleasant, but it unnerved Ethan — and presumably everyone else — with its wavering tone. Nevertheless he tossed a few coins in the instrument case as he walked by.
The shop’s owner, Gemma Verne, was a pale-skinned, twenty-something goddess: dark of hair, eyes, and demeanor. Ethan had been captivated at first sight. The shop was closed to customers on Wednesdays, allowing Gemma to emerge from behind the counter and join the other members of the book club at the worn mahogany table crammed into the shop’s back room.
Much of the shop was devoted, predictably, to rows of mismatched shelves overflowing with volumes of all ages, sizes, colors and bindings. But an almost equal space was filled with clockwork machinery — gears and chains, pistons and pendulums, spinning brass and oscillating steel. The acrid tang of metal and oil competed with the scent of dusty pages in the bookshop’s compact interior. And there was something more — a looming presence permeated the shop from below — an oppressive force with an irregular pulse that mingled with both the quiet clacking of cogs and the disturbing melody heard faintly from outside. The rhythm formed an unsettling yet somehow appropriate backdrop to discussions of literature from Dickens to Dick.
Old Frank Larrikan, the most outspoken group member, had bluntly asked what a pretty young girl like Gemma was doing running a stuffy old bookstore, and why was it half-filled with absurd mechanisms of obscure purpose? Gemma volunteered only that she’d inherited the eponymous shop from her father, machinery and all. The youthful but sophisticated Tillman Moy had confided conspiratorially to Ethan that Gemma had been forbidden by the elder Verne on his deathbed from ever selling the shop — she was virtually a prisoner here, bound by her sense of duty and perhaps by something stronger.
If the palpable and ominous force beneath the shop hadn’t been evidence enough, when the firefighters arrived that night with sirens blaring and hammered on the door, it became clear that Newsome Verne’s legacy was something more sinister than an old man’s desire for his daughter and his bookshop to carry on without him. For although the smoke and fire from the burning building had been reported by multiple witnesses for miles around, the reading group had noted nothing of the sort; in fact the bewildered firemen found no indication that any fire had taken place at the shop, this Wednesday or ever.
The Enduring Sadness
Colin was working late when the deck of cards appeared on his workbench.
The first card was the King of Hearts, and Colin wasn’t surprised when the King asked him to do a favor.
Colin soon finds himself in Arles, in the south of France. His talks with Gauguin and Van Gogh in their little yellow house would lead him to the first of his discoveries and the key to the rest of his journey.
As for the favor asked of him by the King of Hearts, Colin didn’t know how he was going to find a man named Jack Kennedy. However, the King of Hearts was adamant that Kennedy get a message, no matter what the cost or how difficult the task might seem.
The Queen of Spades would present a request no less taxing. And, despite his numerous talks with Van Gogh, Colin had no idea how he would acquire the code which had been hidden in a painting of roses. Even harder, the code supposedly could only be read if the pigments faded ’ a process which could only occur over the course of a hundred years.
Thus begins Colin Thurston’s journey through the present and past ’ all the while hurtling toward the future. Colin will encounter Cheshire Cats, an egotistical deck of cards, Presidents and their assassins, and the first astronauts ’ who flew some two-hundred years ago.
The Enduring Sadness combines the dizzying pace of The Anubis Gates with the technical wizardry of Declare and Three Days to Never.
Colin’s tale is a spellbinding adventure mixing high science with a dash of fantasy and providing the reader with a rip-roaring roller coaster of a story. Spanning centuries - from the dirty streets of 1800’s London hot on the trail of Jack the Ripper — to the bustling crash of 2004’s hectic Washington, DC where Colin finds himself face to face with the very painting he thought would never fade, this amazing story grabs on and doesn’t let go even after the last page has been turned.
"La tristesse durera tou jours." — Vincent Van Gogh