Monday 29 October 2012

To Wish For Empty Skies


thethemeis: The Unexpected
theauthoris: Ben Hayes

   We expected to find hyperspace.
   We never imagined what we would find there.

   In 2203, humanity finally cracked the interstellar travel problem. The discovery of sixthspace, and the Cao-Mulciber drive allowed us to make trips of hundreds of lightyears in just a few days.

   With space suddenly so much smaller, we found human-habitable planets. Not many, but enough. Within decades, our species was at last proof against sudden extinction, no longer at the mercy of Earth's fate.

   What we did not find, was life.
   There were no intelligent aliens - no interstellar federation waiting to welcome us, no rogue AIs lying in wait to subjugate us, nothing but the occasional bit of native fauna.

   And we wondered why.
   Why, on all these worlds, worlds we knew could sustain life, we found none other.

   And then the first ship vanished.

   The Sanssouci, a bulk transport ship carrying food, medicine, and three-and-a-half thousand souls. It left Earth bound for Guangzhe colony, dropped into sixthspace eight days out, and was never seen again.

   We didn't realise. Didn't guess what had begun.
   Three more ships vanished, before we finally understood.

   The recording is historical, and not one person has forgotten the moment they heard it.

   "This is the Los Rheas. We jumped from Nuevos Angeles, en route to Grace's Shore. There is... we were attacked. There is something in sixthspace. Do you understand? Sixthspace is not empty."

   Two days later, the colony on Grace's Shore was gone.
   All trace of it, every person, every building, every dropped crisp-packet. They made no transmissions, and there was no warning. They simply vanished.

   It didn't take long for us to guess what had happened.
   Something had followed the Los Rheas, divined its destination. Something terrible.
   The government ordered an immediate moratorium on sixthspace travel.
   People panicked. Trying desperately to get home to their families, they hijacked ships, bought passage with smugglers and black-marketeers. And in doing so, they made a trail.

   Earth was lost almost instantly. It was too large, too well known. People flocked there in droves, and it must have burned like a beacon in the vast, grey expanse of sixthspace. Billions upon billions of people, gone. The great colonies, too. Lincolnsheim. Albion. Tien-sha. All wiped clean, as people led fate to them.

   And so we are come to this, a last few scant handfuls of humanity, clinging precariously to our most distant and most desolate worlds, the places to which no-one wished to flee.

   We left no traces, no Ozymandias amidst the shifting sands. In eons to come, if explorers of another race should ever land upon our birthworld, will they too wonder at its emptiness, and think themselves alone among the stars?

   We know now why we found no other life.
   And every day, we watch the skies and pray that no-one comes.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Scud

thethemeis: The Unexpected
theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   Scud Presley has a tooth missing where it just never came through in the top right hand corner of his smile, and he tongues the hole where it should be as he struts from his black imported Mustang to the door of the greasy spoon café just off the M1. His car bleeps twice as he presses the button on his key fob without looking back, and he grins as he strides through the door into the humidity of the café because today has been a good day. Every day is a good day for Scud Presley, and when you look at his pockmarked face with its smug grin and its frame of slicked back hair, you know it without having to be told.

   The door closes itself slowly behind Scud, jingling for a second time on its journey back towards its frame, and Scud takes a seat at a table by the window. He doesn’t realise that this isn’t the kind of place that does table service, or he just doesn’t care, as he slouches in the seat and engrosses himself in a newspaper that lies on the table. With his eyes glued to the page, he lifts his left hand above his head and clicks his fingers loudly.

   The young girl behind the counter, Sandra Batten, chewing gum, remains behind the counter. She raises an eyebrow at Scud Presley that is not heeded.

   At least a minute passes, and Sandra begins to inspect her nails once more, as she stands with her hip leaning against the counter in the café that is empty but for one man reading a newspaper in a lumberjack’s shirt open to the belly button and jeans so tight that the outline of his penis would be visible a hundred metres away. Noticing that he has no tea, coffee or food in front of him, the man clicks his fingers again, this time lifting his eyes from the page to meet Sandra Batten’s, grinning his holey grin.

   ‘Any chance of some service, love?’ He asks, ‘Or are you too… busy?’ He gestures sarcastically toward the other empty tables in the restaurant.

   Huffing loudly, Sandra pushes herself away from the counter and drags her feet around the work surface and across the linoleum of the restaurant floor to reach the airspace beside Scud Presley’s table. She stands filing her nails and not looking down at the man, who even from this distance reeks of supermarket-bought cologne. Despite being desperate to order ten seconds ago, Scud seems not to be so hungry now, chewing his gum noisily and staring at the page of his newspaper like it holds the answers to all his problems.

   ‘Look, do you want to order anythi–’

   ‘Would you look at this?’ He holds the page up so she can see the picture. ‘This kid is fourteen years old, and he’s broken the hundred metre world record. Do you know what the hundred metre record is? Well, it’s about nine seconds. But this kid does it in eight seconds. Eight seconds. They’ve had Guinness in and everything; he really does it.’

   Sandra just watches his face, popping her gum. He grins up at her.

   ‘I like your lipstick. What is that, Blood Red? Midnight Maroon?’

   Sandra Batten raises an eyebrow.

   Scud’s smile doesn’t drop. 

   ‘Would you like to see a card trick?’ Scud Presley lifts one buttock from the hard seat of the café booth to fish in his back pocket for his pack of cards. ‘Sit down.’

   Rolling her eyes and sighing loudly for just about the millionth time, Sandra takes a seat opposite Scud in the booth. As she sits down, the apron she wears folds unflatteringly so that her chest looks flat and her stomach appears to bulge, but Scud has already seen that even in her standard-issue dinner lady scrubs and paper apron, her body is shapely and has curves in all but some of the right places. Smiling his smile at her and tonguing his gum, he splays the pack of cards between them.

   ‘What’s your name? Do you have a name?’

   Sandra masticates a little more, then pops her gum.

   ‘Sandra.’

   Scud’s hands open up like a bowl between the two, begging to be filled with more information. ‘Sandra what?’

   Sandra’s eyes narrow, and she chews some more before replying, ‘Sandra Batten.’

   ‘Look at me, I’m Sandra B…’

   Sandra B rolls her eyes and allows them to fall on an indeterminate spot outside of the window.

   ‘My name’s Scud Presley,’ he continues, displacing and replacing the cigarette behind his ear, ‘and I’m very pleased to meet you, Sandra Batten. Pick a card.’

   Sandra takes a card and shields it from Scud’s view. The card is the five of diamonds.

   ‘Do you have a pen?’ Asks Scud, tapping the edges of the rest of the cards in the pack and leaning across the table as if part of him wants to peek at Sandra’s card or look down her top or something. Sandra just stares at him with one eyebrow raised, as she reaches into the pocket of her uniform and pulls out an eyeliner pencil. ‘Right,’ continues Scud, ‘I want you to write something on that card. Your favourite line of poetry, your address, your bra size, something like that. But don’t let me see it.’

   For the first time, Sandra smiles a toothy smile at Scud, and doesn’t take her eyes off him as she jots something down on the face of the playing card.

   ‘Now fold it up, so I have no way of telling what you’ve written. Fold it right up.’

   He rolls up the sleeve of his right arm.

   ‘Like this?’

   ‘Exactly. Hand it back to me.’

   Fishing his lighter from the same pocket as the cards, he lights up his cigarette before taking the folded card back from Sandra and pressing it to the inside of his right wrist.

   ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ Sandra drones, ‘it’s against the law.’

   He holds his finger up at her, and she falls quiet. With the folded playing card still resting on the soft skin of his wrist, he takes the cigarette from his mouth. Grinning at Sandra, he drives the hot end of the cigarette through the playing card and into his wrist, where it hisses and streams grey smoke up in ribbons around their faces. Sandra winces, watching him burn the paper and his wrist skin.

   When the fire on the card and the cigarette has died, he rubs the card with its burnt hole in the centre up and down his wrist, so that his skin is blackened by the ash. Sandra’s face is contorted into a shocked grimace, unsure of whether she wants to spend any more time sat opposite this obvious psychopath.

   After eating the burnt playing card and the cigarette in one gulp, Scud blows the excess ash from his charcoal wrist, revealing words written in deep black across his skin. The words read FUCK YOU, in a womanly scrawl.

   ‘Is that what you wrote on the card?’ Scud asks.

   Sandra nods, her eyes wide but her mouth back to the same old cow-chew rotation.

   ‘And your card,’ says Presley, stroking his chin and tonguing the hole where his tooth should be as if trying to taste the identity of her card, ‘was the nine of clubs.’

   ‘…No.’

   ‘Oh. The six of hearts?’

   ‘No, it was the –’

   ‘Don’t tell me. I’ll get it.’

   While he tongues his hole and feigns deep thought, Sandra’s amazement wanes, along with her interest. 

   ‘Look, mate, do you want any food or what? I’m gonna go and sit back over there now.’

   ‘I’ll have a fry up. The works. Everything you’ve got. Oh, and a tea – strong and dark, like me.’ Scud winks, and then grins. 

   Sandra shakes her head and chuckles to herself as she walks back to the till, and Scud can’t be sure if she’s laughing at him or with his astounding trick, and he doesn’t care either way. All publicity is good publicity.

   ‘Oh, I’ve got it,’ he shouts, clapping his hands together, as she reaches the counter.

   She doesn’t need to hear his guess – she has already spotted the playing card on the work surface. Unfolded but still wearing its creases, intact but still sporting four holes with charred, black edges, it sits there staring at her from the counter.

   ‘It was the five of diamonds, wasn’t it.’

   Sandra nods, not taking her eyes from the burnt up five of diamonds.

   ‘God, you’ve got a nice arse. I mean, even in that ugly outfit. I just want to pound it.’

   ‘What?’ Sandra’s eyes dart from the five of diamonds to the king of sleaze in an instant.

   ‘Nothing.’

*

   Sandra B places the all-day breakfast plate in front of Scud with a clink, and sets his tea down next to it. He grins up at her, but she doesn’t pay him even the tiniest morsel of attention. She stares out of the window that he has his back to, watching the cars speed past on the motorway a couple of hundred metres away. After she has delivered his meal, she lights up a cigarette and stands at the window looking out, her left arm across her stomach and her right leaning on her left, holding the cigarette. For a while, the two people coexist in silence, their soundtrack the hiss of the piping hot chip fat in the kitchen behind the counter and the scrape of Scud Presley’s cutlery against his plate.

   ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke in here?’ He finally says, his mouth full of fried food. ‘I thought it was against the law?’

   Sandra’s eyes mope from the window to Scud’s pupils as she sticks the fag into her mouth and sucks on it hard, illuminating the end and sending a stream of grey, sweet-smelling smoke into the air around her head.

   ‘It is.’

   Her gaze returns to middle distance beyond the café’s glass façade.

   ‘Is that your car?’ Sandra asks, blowing smoke through her nose and pointing at the black Mustang parked outside. Scud turns in his seat to look at the car she’s pointing at, knowing fully well that the car park would be empty were it not for his car.

   ‘Yeah. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’

   ‘It’s a she?’

   ‘Aren’t all cars? Isn’t everything? Who run the world? Girls.’

   Sandra smiles at Scud – a false, empty smile – and crosses the floor to stub out her cigarette on the side of his plate.

   ‘Are you finished?’

   He grins at her while still chewing the last of his food, relishing the game they’re playing with each other. Once again for Scud Presley, this has been a cinch – at the click of his fingers, they’d be doing the no pants dance. ‘Yeah,’ he replies, wiping his hands with the one-ply napkins that the box on his table provides, ‘thanks.’

   As she walks back toward the counter, Sandra speaks to Scud at a barely audible mumble, as if he were a voice in her head. ‘So how could you afford a car like that?’

   ‘I have rich parents. They gave me money for university, so I spent it on the car. Then they gave me money for university again, and I spent it on insurance for my new car, and clothes. Next time they give me money for university, I might go to university.’ Scud has rolled up the napkins he used to wipe his hands into a tight ball, and he bounces it on the table in front of him as he leans forward to project his voice across the café.

   ‘Hm,’ Sandra chuckles, short and sharp, as she emerges from the kitchen where she has dumped the dirty plate into the dishwasher. She returns to her stool and continues to file her nails. ‘So you’re university age, are you? Like, eighteen, nineteen?’

   ‘I’m twenty-five.’

   ‘Wow.’ Sandra’s intonation says wow like this news has impressed or surprised her, but her eyes widening and rolling around in their sockets before returning to her nails tell a very different story.

   Silence descends upon the room.

   ‘Oi, Sandra?’

   ‘Yeah?’

   ‘Do you want to fuck?’

   Sandra’s jaw drops, and her eyes fix on Scud’s. ‘Excuse me?’

   ‘I said: do… you want… to fuck?’

   ‘Okay.’

*

   ‘Okay, let’s do it here,’ Sandra says, still chewing her stale old chewing gum and pointing at the edge of the deep fat fryer.

   ‘Won’t you get burned?’ Asks Scud, undoing his belt and still grinning his brainless grin.

   ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine. I have the shelves to lean on, anyway.’

   The deep fat fryer is basically a big metal sink with a thick rim and scalding hot contents, incessantly fizzing and crackling like how one would imagine one’s face cooking in a forest fire. There are three shelves above it, bare but for a few metal mugs, a colander, three ladles and a box of rat poison pellets. Standing in front of it, Sandra drops her panties to the ground without revealing even a square inch of buttock below her skirt, and spreads her legs a little as she bends forwards slightly to lean on a shelf. 

   ‘Yeah, this’ll work,’ she says, without turning her head back to Scud.

   A television on the counter that Scud hadn’t even noticed before this precise moment begins to play a song about frigidity from the musical Grease. He grins at the box and grabs his member with his tattooed hand, feeling its weight and thickness and remaining very impressed with himself, as he steps forward and lines himself up with the gap between Sandra Batten’s legs. 

   ‘Oh, wait a second,’ Sandra sighs, as if ruing her forgetfulness, just as Scud’s tip makes first contact with her soft, warm flesh.

   Scud grins, assuming Sandra wants to remove her clothes or hitch up her skirt further or open herself up wider for his girth. Women.

   Sandra, however, takes a metal cup from the shelf that her fingers have been gripping, and dips it into the molten chip fat. Her cup full of hissing, popping heat, she turns to Scud, and grins back at him. She winks, kisses the air between them, and pours the searing fat all over his erection.

   As Scud screams in pain and writhes on the floor of the kitchen, unable even to climb back onto his knees, Sandra pulls on her knickers, returns to her position behind the counter, tosses a new chewing gum into her mouth, and continues to file her nails.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

The Heroes Law

thethemeis: Heroes
theauthoris: Luke Stephenson

   Alison picked up the Hero Blade. It was short, more akin to a dagger than anything else. It shone brightly in the light cast through the temple roof, as if it were made of diamond; which of course it was - partially. Most of the blade was folded steel, but the last inch or so that formed the edge was diamond. Alison gave it a twirl to feel the weight and balance; her movement was clumsy as the balance of the Blade was very different than her son’s wooden one. Still, she didn't cut any of her limbs off, so that was a start.

   Very nice,” said a voice from below. The tone was sarcastic. Alison glanced down the altar’s stone steps to see the middle aged clerk pausing from his notes to observe her. Like all Hero Temple clerks, he was a priest from the local church, given this work detail in order to complete his mandatory ‘community’ hours for that week. He was beginning to grey, and his face was covered in lines; caused in equal measure by forty years of brow furrowed in annoyance and raised in judgement or disapproval. Alison rolled her eyes and sheathed the Blade, before slinging the Hero Shield onto her back and donning the Hero Cap.

   As Alison descended from the altar, the surly priest rolled up the parchment he had been working on and dripped onto it the wax from a nearby candle, forming a crude seal. “Take this writ to town hall,” he said, presenting the scroll to her. “The clerk there will fetch you the Hero Journal from the library. Add to it as you need to.”

   “I will be sure to treat it with the respect it deserves,” Alison said.

   The priest scoffed. “Then you’ll be paying for the new one.”

   Messy stacks of armour were visible on the rows of old, splintered racks behind the clerk. There was no elaborate decoration or even any signs of particularly skilful craftsmanship, but there were all kinds of pieces  here to suit warriors of any size, strength and discipline. It was Hero Armour. Following her gaze, the priest took a new piece of parchment from the pile at the side of his desk. “You want some armour then?” he asked.

   Alison nodded.

   “Five sovereigns.”

   She looked at the priest in surprise, trying to gauge his expression. Could a man of God be trying to cheat her? “You charge for the Armour?”

   “Absolutely,” he said sternly.

   “You would charge the Hero for her Armour?”

   “Don’t speak of it with such ill deserved reverence,” the priest spat, waving his hand dismissively. “There is nothing whatsoever in the prophecies regarding armour. Diamond tipped sword? Yes. Shield? Yes. Hat? Absolutely. The Seer dedicates an entire chapter to getting the hat right. But not a single florid verse about armour.

   “What you see here is bought and paid for by the town treasury, to aid the Hero in the Quest. His Lordship used to provide it for free, but a few dishonest heroes and half our stock had been sold to travelling merchants. So now we charge market prices. Five. Sovereigns.”

   He made a point of speaking more slowly and clearly for the last two words for emphasis, leaning forward and looking Alison firmly in the eye. Sighing, she broke his gaze and held her hands up, defeated. “Fine,” she declared in exasperation. “No Hero Armour.”

***

   It was a nice day to begin the Quest. Hooves clopped on the cobblestones of the main road, their wearers pulling a wagon piled high with straw on the way to one of the new roofs being thatched near the fields. A faintly sweet aroma drifted on the breeze, most likely from the freshly baked bread being prepared for market; a pleasant - if brief - respite from the smell the farms would produce once the heat caught them in earnest. Alison descended the steep temple steps, smiling as she heard a familiar laugh from nearby. “Got you, demon!” the voice cried.

   A young dark-haired boy stepped out from the shade of the temple, his arms folded. “No fair,” he complained, “my sword broke. I woulda beat you otherwise.”

   “No way!” the first voice said, joining his friend on the road. “My mum’s the Hero! You know what that means? It means God’s watching over us, so we can’t lose at anything!”

   Alison ruffled her son’s short, already scruffy hair. “Now Rupert,” she said, “you know that’s not how it works.”

   Rupert grinned, showing off a missing tooth caused by one of his more recent duels where the Lord’s attentions must have been elsewhere. “Well,” he said, “it’s either that or Billy has to admit I’m a better soldier than him!”

   The other boy stuck his tongue out. “I’ll just have to beat you next week then!” He ran off in the direction of the fields where his family would be working. Rupert took his mother’s hand as they began to walk, eyeing the dagger with scarcely concealed awe.

   “Are you gonna kill demons with that?” he asked in a high pitched voice.

   Alison nodded. “If they come, but they haven’t in a while.” She waved to a couple passing the other way, and some townspeople would touch their caps as a mark of respect as she passed; one of the farmer’s wives even gave her a loaf of fresh bread from her basket, and similar offerings followed in the form of eggs and milk. It was nice being the Hero.

***

   Derren set three grubby tankards on what remained of the old table; withstanding years of fights and constant use by heavyset farmers, smiths and masons had taken its toll, leaving the legs odd lengths and the surface cracked and uneven. It had been a long day working on the roof of a new house; he was covered in sweat and his muscles ached something fierce, so the prospect of a few drinks with his workmate was a welcome one. The third tankard was for someone who wouldn’t usually be found in the tavern once it was dark, lest the drunken men leer and grope, but doing something like that to the Hero was likely to earn a sore night in a jail cell.

   “So,” Alison began, wincing slightly as she sipped her ale, “what was it like for you?”

   John rolled his eyes as his friend grinned beside him, eager to tell the tale for the hundredth time. Perhaps the demons would come this week, and somebody else could finally claim the bragging rights for besting them.

   “I got a knock on m’door about... three months ago,” Derren said, scratching his scruffy black beard as he tried to organise his thoughts. “It was one of them chaps from town hall, who works for Lord Tellop. Tells me it’s my turn on Hero Duty! I’ve never picked up a sword in my life, but I go to the temple, grab the stuff and part with a couple o’ coin for the armour-"

   “Hang on,” Alison interrupted, “How much did you say the armour was?”

   “Er, two sovereigns I think.”

   Annoyance and amusement fought for dominance in Alison’s mind, resulting in her making the sound of something in between that was neither chuckle nor curse. “I knew that shady priest was scamming me,” she said.

   John shrugged, hiding his smirk behind his drink. “Got to pay for those fancy windows somehow.”

   “Anyway,” Derren said in his deep voice, obviously annoyed at the interruption, “them demons hadn't shown up in almost six months right? So I weren't expecting much. But then on the third night, I start hearing  screams from down by the bakery, and smoke too.

   “So I get over there sharpish, right? And there are these creatures there, right? You’ve probably caught glimpses of ‘em at least during one of the attacks, but they’re just like the priests tell you about: tall and thin, covered in fire, curly horns, pointy tails and these long claw things that shred skin ‘n’ bone like it were straw. They’ve even got them legs like on goats.”

   Alison’s skin crawled at the description, she had never actually seen one of the demons herself; she’d heard rumours but never expecting to hear they were true from a man who had actually fought them. Derren looked her in the eye and spoke softly as he continued.

   “As soon as they saw me, all of ‘em - to a man, if you could call ‘em that – come right for me. Snarlin’ and screamin’ and swingin’ them claws around in a frenzy. I just stand there in a cold sweat as they run my way. I ent never held a weapon before in my life, and I’ve no idea what I’m doing. The first one comes close, and I just swing. Don’t think about aim or gettin’ a good stance – I just swing, and this thing’s head comes right off. The next one claws at my armour and barely scratches it, so I kick it hard in the belly, and it slams against a wall and breaks its back.”

   Alison had edged forward on her seat, eyes wide as she hung onto Derren’s every word, captivated. John was absent-mindedly nudging at a ladybug that had made its way onto the table. Derren took a drink and leaned back on his stool before continuing.

   “There’s about a dozen of them,” he said, “all just swarming me, and I just swing like a madman... but they can’t touch me. See this?” He pulled the matted hair back that was hanging over the left side of his face to reveal a long scar close to his ear. “That’s all they could do.”

   How?” Alison asked in a stunned whisper.

   “God or somethin’ ennit?”

   “It’s destiny.” John cut in, catching Alison’s eye. “You ever read the Seer’s prophecies?”

   Alison shook her head. She had heard of the Seer, the prophecies and how they were somehow attached to the way a new Hero was selected for the town each week. But the contents of these prophecies weren’t widely known; Hero Duty was the law, and you followed the law or went to prison - simple.

   “Well, me neither,” John said. “And they don’t like to talk about it at church – seeing the future supposedly being a sign of the devil or some such like that. But I have heard about it from someone who has.”

   “And?”

   “The Seer lived a few hundred years ago, and started writing down his predictions. Really precise stuff as well, exact days and names of folk involved. To start with no one took him seriously, but eventually, they started coming true – every single one.

   “Now, I dunno if he were possessed or had some kind of divine power, all I know is that his power was real, and one of his predictions spoke of demons plaguing the land. Every so often for two hundred years they would come, and a Hero would rise to aid the people, slaying the demons and saving the town. The prophecy described the Hero’s weapon, shield and hat – and as long as the Hero lived, the town would be safe.”

   “But, nobody could live for that long.” Alison said as John paused to finish his drink. Derren grunted in agreement as a serving girl brought him another tankard – she had been doing this since the first round and he was beginning to acquire quite the collection.

   “Of course not; which is exactly why Lord Tellop is such a genius. He realised that as long as the prophecy was never contradicted, the town would always be safe. One hero may live for sixty years; become a strong and wise fighter and save the people from demons. But he could also be a danger, install himself governor by force, and would eventually die and leave the town at risk.

   “Have a different Hero each week, on the other hand, and you keep the town safe indefinitely. When fighting demons the Hero is protected by God or fate; when they grow old and die the town is still safe. That’s why Lord Tellop passed the Heroes Law.”

   The table shook with a small thud as Derren slumped onto it, dribbling slightly and beginning to snore. “God Almighty,” cursed John. “This is why I don’t usually talk much. Let his lips still for more than a moment and they’ll be slurping half the ale in the land, and twice as much as he can hold.” He downed what was left in his own drink before standing up and slinging his friends arm over his shoulder, pulling the sleeping Derren onto his feet.

   “Best get the lad home,” said John. “His missus’ll kill me if I let him have any more.” He smiled at Alison as he turned for the door. “Take care this week, love. If you see any demons, just keep calm. They can’t do a rutting thing to you.”

***

   Alison set down the Hero Blade. The sun was out again, but the steel and diamond did not shine. She had cleaned it the best she could, but she had waited too long after the fight, and the blood had dried. But no matter - the temple clerks would take care of the rest.

   She set down the Hero Shield. Fresh claw marks cut deep into the metal, and almost the whole top third was missing where a demon’s head had struck. A new one would have to be wrought quickly; until the shield matched the prophecy, the town would be unprotected. Hopefully it would be many more months before the demons came again.

   The Hero Cap was more or less untouched. There had been one terrifying moment when it threatened to be knocked from her head, but it had resisted. Alison wondered whether fate would still consider her the Hero if it had fallen. Would she still be protected by God’s hand, or would she have been slain as those terrible claws finally struck true? The thought made her feel nauseous.

   In the end, everything had happened just as Derren and John had said. She couldn’t decide if she was doing her part to realise destiny or to trick it; either way she had stood her ground against a demonic horde, and won. She had swung and moved wildly, bearing naught but a few scratches and a broken shield as wounds. She didn’t feel heroic though; heroes didn’t panic and scream. Heroes didn’t cry once the villain was slain. She was a hero because some force she didn’t understand and some law had magically kept her safe.

   But as she laid the Hero Cap upon the altar and left the temple, the surly priest from her first visit smiled at her and bowed. He had been close by when the attack came, and her presence had kept him safe. Rupert awaited her outside the temple doors, smiling his gappy smile – safe, thanks to the Hero. At that moment she was content; it didn’t matter if she felt heroic or not. It didn’t matter if it was due to skill, providence or God. The demons were gone; her town and her son were safe.

   And that was enough.

Friday 12 October 2012

A Whole Different Set of Heroes

thethemeis: Heroes
theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   People are always banging on about superheroes, or sporting heroes, or heroes of the arts, or the heroes that keep our streets safe and treat us when we’re sick. Except for the fictional among that list, I think we’d all agree that all of those people are heroes. Of course they are. But they’re not my heroes. I have a whole different set of heroes. I’d like to tell you my friend’s story, so that you’ll see who I mean.
   Two years ago, my friend was a completely normal, confident, carefree young man. He had issues with commitment because he took a break-up disproportionately badly a year before that, and probably various other small issues too; but as I’ve often discussed, too often all that makes each of us unique is the different emotional baggage we carry around, and how we choose to deal with it. What I’m trying to say is that I felt like my friend was a fairly well-rounded individual, albeit damaged to the same degree as anyone you’d give a polite smile to as you passed them in the street.
   But then, something snapped. Up in his head, something short-circuited, and everything started to grow gradually darker. At first, it just felt like a niggling worry about driving. Was I caught speeding on that journey? He’d start to wonder as he parked up. Did I tap the wing mirror of one of those parked cars I passed? Small worries with small consequences, I’m sure you’ll agree. But as the weeks went on, he noticed that these worries were starting the mingle with his lively imagination, creating new concerns that any ordinary driver never even considers. I passed a motorcyclist on the way here – is there a chance that I could have hit him, and not realised?
   I remember a woman crossing the road with a buggy as I passed. I hope I didn’t hit that buggy. I don’t want to be responsible for killing a baby.
   These thoughts would play on my friend’s mind until he managed to fall asleep, or he revisited the scene of the imagined crime to check that there was no blood on the road. This happened on numerous occasions; he even sometimes had to take strange, convoluted routes when driving me and others places, just so that he could pass a particular location that had played host to one of these events. It ended up that most of the time when he was not driving his car, he spent fearing the next time he had to drive his car or fearing the imaginary consequences of the last time he drove it. Something was starting to take hold of him, but it was only just beginning.
   He thought he could control it alone then. He Googled it, and found terms like OCD and Anxiety Disorder and Intrusive Thoughts so widespread that it seemed to him that half the world felt the same way, although simultaneously he felt like he knew that he was completely alone. He felt like by knowing what it was, he had it under control. He knew what his mind was up to, so it couldn’t get past him anymore.
   But soon enough, this gradual darkening spread from his driving to other areas of his life. He started to fear strangers who looked at him in peculiar ways. Why, if they were complete strangers, were they looking at him as if they knew him? Or as if he had done something wrong? Were they following him? Had they been following him for a while? How on earth could he escape their pursuit of him? These all sound like ridiculous questions, but my friend would have conversations exactly like this one with himself in his head on an almost daily basis. He would even regularly change the routes he took when walking to destinations regularly visited, for the sake of throwing off those who were out to spy on him. He refused to keep a steady routine, out of fear that it would be learned and mimicked by those conspiring against him.
   Then he started to question why he thought people would be after him, and his only answer was that he was somehow evil, and deserved to be punished. His paranoia was so intense, so real to him, that the only logical conclusion was that he deserved it. He knew that it was all in his head, this conspiracy of the world’s against his mental state, but it had wormed its way so deep that he thought it must be based on some mistakes he had made in his past that he can never take back. So he began to turn on himself.
   It must have been something he did on the Internet, he concluded. So he forbade himself from visiting the Web. When he couldn’t use social media, it must have been something he said via text message, or something he said in a phone call. So suddenly, he wasn’t allowed to use those either. In fact, messages received from either of these media would arouse suspicion in my friend almost immediately. Who just sent him a text? Why would they want him? Are they out to get him? Why can’t they just leave him alone?
   His friends couldn’t be trusted. At some point in his years of knowing them, he had wronged each one to some degree, just as we all have; and in his head, they had coordinated their revenge so that they would all strike at once. As for contact from people who weren’t even his friends anymore because of some disagreement long ago, contact from them would cause him to lock himself in his bedroom with a turned-off phone and covers over his head for a whole day.
   He wasn’t safe anywhere, was his warped conclusion; and the most punishing part for him was that he knew just how warped it was. The old him still existed, trapped inside of his mind, whispering to him that this was all ridiculous, and that these fears that had grown out of nowhere were without basis and shouldn’t be taking so much of his time. There was a battle raging in his mind every minute of the day, a crippling battle that his rational side would never win alone. At the point when he couldn’t confidently leave his house without feeling scared of being murdered, just after the stage where he began to fear that people he made eye contact with could read his thoughts and would see the darkness in his soul and hate him for it… that’s when he decided to take action.
   And now, just twenty months after all this started, my friend is very nearly back to his old self. He can drive long distances, and leave the car with only a niggling worry nibbling at his mind. An hour later, it’s out of his mind. He can make eye contact with strangers, even smile at them, without even giving it a second thought. He is changed in subtle, irreversible ways; but he is stronger than he has been in over a year, and the only way is up. He still can’t keep a girlfriend (they become too close for comfort), and he still has to check seats or patches of floor where has recently been sitting or standing before he leaves them, to ensure that he hasn’t dropped anything with his address on for his future murderers to pick up; but these things will bow to him once more. He has a long way to go, but the way he has already come was much longer, so he knows now that he can make the journey.
   So who are my friend’s heroes? Who are my heroes? They’re the people who were there for my friend. They’re my friend’s family. My friend’s network of nearest and dearest (even those that he feared to be working with the enemy, in those darkest days). His counsellor, that impartial ear that was just there to listen, to provide perspective, to help whenever it was needed; to her, he owes a great deal. But most of all, my biggest hero is my friend himself. He found the strength to face that demon, and although he still has some way to go to beat it, he knows he can do it, and I know he will.
   If you ever needed proof that these things can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere, then my friend is that proof. But he’s also proof that with support, love and strength, it can be overcome.

   World Mental Health Day is every October 10; but that doesn’t mean we should forget mental health issues the rest of the year. It’s time for all of us to educate ourselves and support those who are suffering.

Friday 5 October 2012

Conservation of Momentum


thethemeis: An Impulse
 theauthoris: Gary Sykes-Blythe

   Down, deep in the dark, is where the world is cold and ancient and the animals are more than monsters. Pasty white things are there, translucent teeth that glow with nacreous inner light and ghostly, nightmarish leeching creatures that suck the good from the bodies of long dead victims of time and current. Beings with gleaming black saucer eyes that have never seen the sun’s rays, never heard the wind or known the solid sand at the bottom of the endless, sunless night of the deep sea, lurk to feast on the weak and floating.

   Great circus rays sweep majestically through the columns of water and cold and silence. They fly through the endless night, hoovering the swimming things with spines and crunchy shells that hang, unknowing, waiting for death. In huge flights they cruise the depths and surf the great currents that wind around the world and disturbing leaf-blown clouds of indolent jellyfish that flash irritation, or lust, or longing.

   Deep, deep in the black, where the sunless night rolls without incident to life’s end, the boneless bodies bend and deform under the weight of all of the water in the sea; where the all-night grows so cold that water would freeze, if it only had the space to do it. Small flashes of gleaming, tiny filament hairs along the outer edges of combs and bowls and jellied shapes uncountable that flock together in the dense night to drift and tumble.

   Yet deeper, down to the tallest tips of the spires of the deep-sea floor, where the monstrous many jointed things crawl and scurry. The insect-like beings, not crabs nor even lice, but some greater ancestor’s declined offspring that fell from the youth and glory of the world, clinging to the towers of rock and slime. Busily they clean the skin of the towers of particles of dead flesh, scraps of glowing worms and the waste of the above-place. There are no bones here, no spines of calcified scaffolding to hang meat on, just the sludgy soup of ooze that clings to the spires in the night.

   Deeper. Near the bottom now. The bases of the spires reveal further sub-columns. Mysterious and warm, the energy of the raw Earth spills into the sea here in choking, boiling pseudo-smoke. Bacteria, worms and half-cooked shrimp strut amongst the shimmering and torrid fluid, where nutrients still full of mineral flavour sustain diversity so far, far away from the sun and the air and the days and time.

   Somewhere, perhaps far or near it is difficult to judge, there is massive movement. The sounds of concrete clicks of a hideous clipping, scything beak bounce around the spires from deep inside. The thing ruminates and considers. It has a deep, alien intelligence that would embarrass Cthulu and shame Kraken, Scylla and Charybdis. The water shakes and heaves as great pressure waves rock and pulse through the dark. The rhythmic rush of water waxes rapidly;  the sensitive and delicate boneless life flinches away as it sweeps overhead or underneath. Hard waves of current, given the power to smash by the colossal force of the movement, crack and splinter the tiny minds of the blind and thoughtless life. The rush passes. Were there eyes that could see, those brave enough to glance toward the thing would see some darker shadow, longer than the night and trailing hideous fingers behind.

***

   The whale knows all things as he falls. He sees all with his voice and knows their density and direction with his ears and in his bones. He dismisses them idly as unworthy of his attention and chases the thing, altering the angle of his descent to glide silently from above onto the beast. The ribs of the whale are crushed, but the feeling is not at all of pain. It is simply sensation. The gases that would normally hold the space were pushed, much further towards the surface, into the blood of the whale.

   Head down, the whale descends like a fallen star in the mythic sky above. He falls elegantly and smoothly, as loud as time and as hungry.

   The whale searches in the night as he faces down into the gloom. It has taken just five minutes to plunge the height of the ocean, through the saline layers of sterile sea and drifting sheets of empty, useless life. He hunts. He knows it has been here. He can sense the ammonia in the water of its blood. He can see the shape of its wake in the water with his voice. He sees the blooms of disturbed water that the thing uses to push, to impel, to breathe and to fly. The pulsed clouds of disturbed water stank of ink and unclean things that have never breathed the air. Somewhere in the tightly focussed hunting brain of the whale there was a sense of excitement; a delicate flare of pleasure clouds the mind of the whale. The whale flexes for the first time in minutes and the sensation of crushing shifts slightly with the muscle change. The mighty tail sweeps once up and then immediately down and the whale surges forward, launching the soft bodies away into the black behind him. Across the brain of the whale there is only patient, icy calm. He follows the ammonia stink and the wake of the thing.

   The whale pursues the thing for some minutes through towers and chimneys of rock and sludge. As he sweeps his voice across the sea, he sees the outline of the hard, the solid and the tangible as well as the ephemeral and delicate. His brain notes with vague interest a cluster of bones that recline across the seabed. A cheerful whale skull, like ancient sculpture, is a definite and fixed point in a void without solidity or landmarks. The whale does not feel sadness as he piston-hard pumps his tail, each sweep accelerating and stirring thick cloudy soup for arthropods, bacteria and yet more bizarre life. He jinks like a motorcyclist through the high architecture of the seabed and pursues the thing always, dogged like a wolf and patient as a snake. The gap closes slowly, so slowly, but the whale has time. By some sense he knows that he has breath enough.

***
 
   The thing sweeps gigantic, meter-wide eyes into the dark. ‘It’ is female. She feels that something is not at all correct. She is the queen of the boneless beings in the night. She knows there is no force in this ocean that could match her speed, her strength or her cunning. She clenches anew the aperture that pushes her body through the sea. A colossal valve, the size of a car, heaves water through a vast cavity into her body and out again with a gigantic pulsing force that surges her through the water, only to draw in again and surge anew. Rhythmic and powerful she cruises along the seabed like a vast torpedo. Smaller squid and the mutant-horror fish that live at such depth scurry from her dim sight. She does not slow as magnificent, fleshy tentacles like the trunks of trees delicately pluck at morsels of food, waste and foetid matter that she tastes with her fingertips. Were it light enough to see, she would be seen to shimmer and glow, not with light, but some other thing that bulged from her body. Her mottled colours, so many unseen shades and hues, communicate her sexual power and her anger. She sings in colour all along her body, first pleasure with food, then, suddenly, anger. That feeling again: an intangible sense of wrong, but much more distinct now.

   She felt it again much sooner the next time, too. Like a shudder, but from somewhere outside. A tangible vibration that shivered through her boneless, jelly body.

***

   The whale pushes his voice out again and again. He’s sure he can sense the shape, but it is too indistinct. So much like the water, so soft and pointless, and delicious. His steady calm heartbeat picks up by a beat or two a minute. In his excitement he flexes harder and faster into the endless night. He can almost sense the thing. So close...

***

   The thing in its dark deep and ancient mind felt something familiar from the past.  Her vast, attuned brain flickered recollection and the vibrant sensory organs on either side of her head, massively disproportional to her body. She felt uneasy and accelerated the pulsing and fled. The giant of the seas and monster of the deep was afraid. The feeling swept over again, the shudder, so much more intense now. It raked along her length like a sonic harpoon. 

   Sonic.

   Sound.

   Harpoon.

   The steady slow mind of the squid began to form connections and links; without thought she accelerated further still. The opening in her body throbbing and pulsing to impel the shape through the water with elegant, efficient jet propulsion. She knows there is a predator and she feels the unfamiliar sting of fear again. This is unusual. She is the queen of the boneless things and there should be no challenge to her midnight majesty. The sound  is growing all the time until her mind is full of it. Even without ears or bones she feels it deep and hears it all across her brain. Her skin pulses red, then violet, then white, then red in a hostile and invisible display. She is chased by the fearsome sounds into the night.

***

   The whale quickens his pulses of sound, now trying to use them as much as a weapon, a whip to harry his prey as he chases. He arches his back to change the angle of approach and swoops through the dense night. His jaw now opens and closes rhythmically in his urgency. Clack; clack. He attacks with the cannon of his voice again and again, causing the thing to turn left, and now right, as it is driven in flight. It knows the whale is coming, all ambush pretence abandoned he closes for the kill.

   As he closes behind the squid, he turns hard to the right and then cuts back to the left. The squid with an eye so gigantic that it dimly perceives even down in the gloom, sees the flashing white of the whale teeth far too late.

   The whale’s gigantic snapping mouth clamps onto the squid just a few metres behind it’s gigantic staring eye. The response is sudden and dramatic. A violent shuddering, thrashing struggle begins as the whale slashes and crushes using his teeth and bones and strength whilst the squid rakes at the flesh of the whale’s underside and claws at his eye and blowhole. They embrace in a death grip and twist and turn as they sink. Ink blossoms in submarine fountains from the battling masses.

   Blood bursts into the water, perhaps also more ink, and the whale shrieks. It could be rage or pain or both. He thrashes his head from side to side as he uses his teeth to rasp away the quivering, greasy skin of the squid. Blood, ammonia and bitterness tasting fluid floods the sea around and a sudden cloud of mites, worms and bottom feeding monstrosities swarm around to seize the richly flavoured blood, ink and waste.

***

   The queen of the boneless things squirms horribly in her mortal agony. For the first time she feels the solid, hard teeth of a surface predator. For the first time she feels the strength of the endoskeleton and the muscle and vigour of the warm, air-breathing world. She fights for her life, she wraps her arms around the whale in a loving embrace and claws and wrenches and rends his flesh. Some part of her mind knows that the whale cannot stay underwater for long, that it is a stranger and unwelcome so far down, but she feels her strength wane.

   She pushes hard with the jet inside her body and tries to pulse away to safety. Dextrously she scratches and rakes with all of her limbs at once. She gouges a deep gash in some part of the whale that she can reach with her beak, but when she tastes the blood she knows the wound will not be enough.

   Enraged, the whale thrashes and writhes all the more. The water all around them churns and swirls as the whale shifts his grip with his teeth. Now, the rows of hard teeth are right over the eyes of the squid. Ink jets all around to turn the water yet darker and the whale tastes it. Deep inside, the squid feels the vibration as the whale shrieks and calls in triumph and glee. He crushes down hard on the turgid mass of the great eye of the squid. He increases the pressure, again, again, again. Tentacles whip and tear at his skin, but he grips harder with his jaws.

   Pop.

***

   He feels her body quiver, a last gasp of ejected ink and then she relaxes with what would be a sigh on the surface. Her great bulging propeller-pulse generator fell slack. She is just a tube of meat to him. He chomps through her body now and swallows gigantic bites whole.

   He slowly begins to swim upward, relaxed, content and happy. He looks upward to the lesser dark and thinks of breath.

Thursday 4 October 2012

Michael

thethemeis: An Impulse
theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   ‘He hit my mum, so I killed him,’ is what I tell the officers. I don’t take my eyes off the wooden tabletop, where I’ve been studying the shape of the grain for the past half hour. 

   ‘Oh, come on, son. You expect us to believe that?’ one of them growls, removing his glasses to rub his wrinkly, loose eyelids with his liver-spotted, veiny hand. ‘Tell us what really happened, or we can’t help you.’

   What really happened is this: he hit my mum, so I killed him. That limp dick Michael and his goddamn ugly dog that he used to drag round to our house every time he felt like visiting, I stuck a knife into both of their throats. The dog’s first, and then his. And I don’t regret it. I’d do the same again to any mother fucker who tried laying a hand on my mum after today. I’d do it to a million more people. 

   ‘He hit my mum, so I killed him,’ I repeat. 

   The two policemen sigh in unison. 

   That cocksucker Michael, he used to stroll into our flat three times a week or more to poke my mum in the other room, while I had to sit and watch his stinking filthy dog for him, all drooling and panting and boss-eyed there in the living room, expecting treats from me when it was all I could do not to run a bath to drown it in. I’d hear the headboard banging against the thin wall between the living room and bedroom for about five minutes, then I’d hear his awful grunt, and four minutes later Michael would come swaggering back into the lounge zipping up his flies. ‘Put the football on, boy,’ he’d say to me every week, and I’d never put the football on, even if I wanted to watch it too.

   Until, that is, my mother came back into the room a minute or two after. Pulling on her dressing gown and looking more fragile every time, she’d say, ‘Put the football on, love; Michael’s a guest.’ Only then would I put it on. Because my mother is a saint. 

   But this night, he’d grown too big for his boots. He’d won a bet with his friend Phil from the timber yard that Tottenham would win the league nearly a year ago for two grand, and that day had been the first time he’d seen Phil since the Saturday, when they’d topped the division by four clear points. Two grand richer and thinking his dick was so long that it dragged along the floor behind him, Michael had practically knocked the floor of our flat down on entry. Even his dog was feeding off his excitement, sniffing around the chair legs and wagging its tail like a helicopter ready to take off. ‘Pet the dog, squirt,’ he’d grunted to seventeen year old me, ‘while I go and pet the pussy.’

   I looked up from the text message I was writing and glared at the fat prick. ‘Fuck you, Mickey.’

   ‘Call me that again,’ he snarled, ‘and I’ll kill her, then you.’ He grinned, and wandered into my mum’s room, where she was already waiting for him, undoing his flies noisily on the way.

   Later, as we watched some football highlights show on TV showing clips from sixties football matches as if they happened last week, he prodded my mum in the breast harshly. ‘Get me a beer,’ he burped. She got up without half a second of hesitation, a painful reminder for me of how she used to behave back when my father used to beat her senseless for leaving the washing up too long. I winced at the memory, and shot the bulging fuck a look that would have turned him to stone if he wasn’t already jelly.

   ‘Mum, sit down,’ I snapped. ‘Mickey, you’re gonna say please before my mother does anything for you, or you’re gonna get up off of your lardy arse and do it your fucking self.’

   ‘It’s okay, love,’ my mum murmured, weakly.

   ‘No, it’s not. Can you hear me, flabby? Didn’t they teach manners in Cunt School?’

   Presumably because I’m really starting to fill out now, my shoulders are pushing outwards and my arms hardening from all the rugby, fatboy knew he couldn’t start on me. So he went for her.

   ‘Are you gonna let this scrawny little shit speak to me like that?’ He roared, already bright red from the blood rushing to his face.

   ‘Now, boys, come on, I mean –’

   ‘Scrawny little what?’ I stood from my chair.

   He got up to meet me, but still focused his attention on my mum. ‘After all I’ve done for you, you’re just gonna stand there and watch your little bastard disrespect me?’

   ‘Please, Michael, he’s just a boy, he doesn’t know what he’s –’

   ‘Oh, I know perfectly what I’m saying. You’re a fat loser, Mickey, and my mum could do a hundred times better than you or anyone you’ve ever even met. You need to get the fuck out of our flat, before I put a hole in you.’

   ‘And now he’s allowed to threaten me? The product of some cheap slag and the mechanic what killed himself gets to tell me what to do, and you’re not gonna do anything about it?’

   It had been boiling up for months. Years, even. We’d never liked each other, and this was just all the pressure that had been kept below the surface revealing itself with violent force, over something as small as a beer. I wasn’t going to back down, because I knew I could beat the shit out of him if I wanted; and he wasn’t going to face me, because he knew it too.

   ‘Michael, come on, calm down,’ my mum begged.

   I should calm down? You’re telling me to calm down?!’ He bellowed back, raising a hand already.

   ‘Get out, Mickey,’ I growled, through gritted teeth.

   ‘Michael, please,’ my mum sobbed, her tears pouring out as if a dam had burst in her eyelids.

   ‘Oh, shut the fuck up,’ he grunted, landing the backhand on the word ‘fuck’.

   It was just a light tap, really. The kind of whack you might see on a soap. She barely even bruised afterward, but at the time the slapping sound rang like a thunderclap through the whole building.

   And that’s when I snapped. I fell silent with the room, and the anger seemed to release itself all at that one moment in a simple sigh, like what I was to do from now on was actually a sensible and dispassionate series of actions, when in fact they were the climax of all the rage I’d ever stored inside me. Like an automaton, I walked out of the room to the kitchen, the sound of my mother’s sobs as a backdrop, and retrieved the sharpest bread knife I could find. It all felt so serene, so calm and slow, that I could have been bobbing along on a sleepy sea and I would not have been any less troubled. 

   Noticing that the damn dog had followed me, I left it dead on the kitchen floor without even stopping to think about what I was doing. Before the body had even hit the floor, I stalked out of the room back to our living room, the smell of that dog hitting me in the face as soon as I stepped near the spot where it had been laying all night.

   Michael was standing there holding his hand, out of breath from the strain of swiping it through the air, and looking down at the floor in regret. As I re-entered the room, he looked up at me with a smug expression, as if he had taught me a lesson I would never forget. Of course, he had; but it wasn’t the one that he thought he had taught. He wore that expression right up until the moment that I was one step away from him, and drawing the knife out of my sleeve; that’s when it turned into a gurn of intense fear, which pleased me much more. With the precision and speed of a furious scorpion’s tail, my arm thrust the blade into his throat a total of seven times, before my mother had even opened her eyes to notice. Then I left the flat and handed myself in.

   I don’t mind that they don’t believe me. I guess I seem so nervous and quiet most of the time that it looks like I’d never commit murder. But I don’t see who else they can accuse, so they’ll have to believe me some time or other. I’ll just sit here ‘til they do.

   ‘So,’ one of the coppers sighs, turning his paper coffee cup in his hand, ‘tell us one more time. What exactly happened?’

   I roll my eyes. ‘He hit my mum, so I killed him.’