Merrylander sat in the middle of the Vestibule, motionless. Around her one hundred and twenty-three Merrylanders puttered about; performing chores and duties with singular determination. A frail Merrylander stood in the farthest corner, organizing the silverware drawer of the eating area. A young Merrylander, fresh and plump with the last remnants of baby fat walked to and fro with a baby in her arms. This baby Merrylander squealed and coughed in a haze of half-awareness.

One hundred and twenty-three Merrylanders; each of a different age. Merrylander, our Merrylander, sat as a stranger among them. In thirty-six days, she reasoned, there would be one-hundred and twenty-four Merrylanders. And in another year, there would be one-hundred and twenty-five; perhaps. How long would she live? she had wondered, forty-one Merrylanders ago.

Of course other questions had been asked by Merrylander long ago. When there were only two Merrylanders, she asked what’s going on here? When younger Merrylanders succeeded older Merrylanders, our Merrylander had wondered to herself just what did that mean? And when our Merrylander had opened her eyes in the Vestibule for the very first time, she had wondered aloud: Where am I? And later: why am I unable to leave?

But as the room filled with her kind, these questions became less and less important. To see her lifeline drawn around her in pulsing, breathing relief brought Merrylander a sort of grim fascination. And so, over time and plurality, Merrylander became an observer on the sidelines of her existence; watching time’s scars emerge and disappear.

*           *           *

Thirty-six days later, Merrylander awoke to find a one hundred and twenty-fourth Merrylander in the Vestibule.

Our Merrylander had taken to sleeping in her chair. It was large and overstuffed and the sort of place a person could just drift in and out of consciousness on a warm sunny summer afternoon. After one hundred and now-twenty four Merrylanders, the first one had seen little point in leaving her comfortable observational perch.

The new Merrylander, the one hundred and twenty fourth Merrylander, sat motionless on the edge the first Merrylander’s bed. To save space, the architect of the Vestibule had recessed the bed into the wall, and so this new Merrylander sat in the overhang’s deep shadows. Only her face, sharply etched by time was visible to the first Merrylander. This new-yet very old Merrylander sat motionless on the bed, watching our Merrylander intently.

Until now the other Merrylanders had ignored the first. They walked around her, moved to avoid her, but never made eye contact nor interacted with her in any meaningful way. This had been fine by the first Merrylander, who had no interest in the others beyond observation. She therefore found this new Merrylander’s interest in her disquieting.

Merrylander stood up, perhaps for the first time in decades, and walked toward the new inhabitant. This new Merrylander seemed to look through her, and it wasn’t until our Merrylander moved to sidestep a scampering Merrylander of age three that our Merrylander realized that the newcomer’s gaze was not fixed on her, but on the chair.

Each Merrylander had a purpose, the first had noticed. Over the years our Merrylander had realized that each new Merrylander that appeared in the Vestibule would engage herself in whatever activity had or would possibly consume that particular Merrylander during that particular moment of Merrylander’s past or future. Seven year old Merrylander did nothing but draw trees with a box of crayons. Eighteen year old Merrylander listened to music and danced. Merrylander age thirty-three spent a good deal of her time sexually gratifying herself. The more matronly Merrylanders of fifty-two through sixty-seven took turns breaking from their individual pursuits to shepherd the younger Merrylanders away from thirty-three. Indeed, most of the older Merrylanders took particular interest in the child Merrylanders; watching them with fondness and occasionally playing games with them.

This new Merrylander, however, didn’t seem to have a purpose or an activity. In fact, although this new Merrylander seemed to be older than any of the other Merrylanders, she took no interest in the activities of the children. If anything, they seemed to depress her.

For the first seven days after her arrival, she spent all of her time studying the chair in the center of the Vestibule. Her attention singularly fixated on it: touching it, prodding it with her time-twisted fingers.

Several weeks of this and our Merrylander had given up trying to understand this new one. She sat in the chair almost out of stubbornness now, and did her best to ignore the newcomer as she hovered about. But as time wore on, this newest Merrylander became more visibly agitated. She seemed to want desperately to sit in the chair. She would point at it, move very very close to it, her hands brushing the armrests.

And so, after three weeks our first Merrylander relented. The newest, yet very very old Merrylander had been particularly anxious that day, nearly frantic. She had spent the entire day cautiously approaching the chair in the same fashion as a cat prepares to jump into a counter top. This so bothered our Merrylander that she sprang from the chair quite rapidly, her nerves twanging with burnt irritation.

The elder Merrylander strode quickly past the first Merrylander and immediately dropped herself into the chair. She reached a bent finger towards an armrest and, much to the first Merrylander’s surprise, flipped open a small panel.

She peered over chair. Inside the armrest was a mass of orange wires and metal coils, all glistening with frost that drifted out of the armrest in lazy swirls of steam. The elderly Merrylander pulled from her pockets several small tools; like those of a watchmaker. The first Merrylander watched her elder counterpart as she worked.

The first Merrylander had no way of telling time; an irony that was not lost on her. She could count days based on when she fell asleep and based on her body’s general rhythms. She counted the years based on the appearance of each new Merrylander, which always seemed to coincide with her count of 365 days. But she could never be any more precise than that. Had her circumstances been otherwise, she would have noted that only three hours and fifty-seven minutes had passed when everything seemed to bleep.

This bleep was followed by a second, more stomach-churning bleep.

Then there was the feeling of one-hundred and twenty-four metal train-cars thundering together at a rail-stop. The Vestibule shook violently now, and the walls began to rotate. Faster and faster, blurring white as they melted away.

One by one the Merrylanders in the room began to fade. Thin wisps of vague colors pulled apart like spun sugar until only the first and the last Merrylanders remained. And the floor around the chair became hot; very hot.

Terror gripped the first Merrylander as her counterparts in time disappeared one by one. She wanted desperately to press her back into a corner and cover her eyes, but all around her the walls flew at great speeds, and the room grew so bright that she wondered if covering her eyes would do anything at all.

Wind from the spinning walls and the shimmering heat whipped at the first Merrylander as she tried to maintain her balance. The elder Merrylander sat, seemingly unaware of what was transpiring around her. Her eyes locked on a small screen that had folded discretely out from the other armrest. As the first Merrylander clawed at the back of the chair for support, she saw herself on the screen as she was right now.

But something was wrong. The picture was moving backwards, faster and faster, like a film played in reverse. Seconds fell away into minutes and then days into years. And when the film finally slowed, dropping back to minutes and then seconds, it displayed an image of such serenity as to throw the current chaos of the Vestibule into stark contrast. On the screen sat Merrylander; our Merrylander. The very first Merrylander. She was alone. She was asleep.

The room spun faster now, fire and light and heat and sound pummeled our Merrylander as she tried desperately to keep her eyes open, to understand what the eldest Merrylander was watching. Her hands dug into the soft fabric of the chair-back and pulled herself close. She was close enough now to see a small numerical display in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. And as the image of the first Merrylander sat sleeping on the screen in the very same chair that the eldest Merrylander currently occupied, our Merrylander watched the number tick down to zero.

The very last thing that the two Merrylanders saw on the screen lasted one tenth of one tenth of a second. On the screen in the armrest of the chair flashed the image of themselves, the eldest seated and the first standing behind her. They were watching themselves on a screen stretching to infinity as the Vestibule spun around them. And the numerical display in the lower right-hand corner ticked forward by one tenth of one tenth of a second.

Merrylander awoke. She found herself in a large, overstuffed chair in the center of a cylindrical metal room. She as alone. And she she wondered, aloud, how she had gotten there.

Share/Bookmark

*     *     *

Archibald Lark was a brute of a man. Not particularly tall, mind you, nor particularly muscular, but there was something in the way he carried himself that evoked a looming quality. Archibald Lark was also a smart man, though not a man of letters nor worldly travel. An electrical engineer by trade, Lark was employed by the state at one of the hydroelectric plants that had sprung up in this modern age. And, while not a man of formal education, Lark’s particular expertise in the burgeoning field of electricity gave him the freedom to indulge in his tendency to tinker. At a time when the electric current and radio wave were a blazing future, the modest dwelling of one Archibald Lark tinkled like a galaxy with the glitter of glass and crystal, wire and fixture.

This displeased his wife.

Ingrid was an uncomplicated woman. The daughter of an Estonian swine herd, she had spent most of her life in rustic simplicity. She had no schooling to speak of and it was only by an unlikely turn of fate that she happened to find herself in the same San Franciscan library as Archibald those many years ago. At the time, the wife of an electronasist seemed a winning prospect. She had visions of a life of leisure and plenty; clockwork contraptions and radiographic machinations doing the work of a hundred Finns.

The reality proved far different. She lived in a shabby two-room apartment in the poorest district with a man who came home from work smelling of chemicals and ozone. And when she complained, which was often, he would bellow and rage about the house like a beast.

But he never hit her. Not only because it is an evil thing, morally corrupt and sinful. Lark never hit his wife because of the glass. Hand-blown tubes and glass bells hung from leather straps. Pipes bent at primal angles and into obscene curves and stained with all manor of fluids littered every available table surface and countertop. Dirty fistfuls of galena rock lay scattered in every conceivable location. And out of these many transparent things were protuberances of wire and antenna; cobbling together what would otherwise be mere detritus into machines of extreme fragility and indeterminate function.

And herein lay the problem for poor Archibald Lark. While his intelligence was profound, his formal education was lacking. He understood structure but not function. He could construct a cathode tube and make the light within it dance, but he could not control it. And the radio waves that he captured by running a current through his galena-crystal antenna seemed devoid of form or meaning. But he could capture them, all the same.

Indeed the flickering tubes and crackling static permeated the Lark dwelling. Even when powered down, there seemed at times to be a steady hum just beyond hearing. And when the machinations were activated, the collection of light and sound created such a cacophony as to drive Ingrid to exasperation.

But for Archibald, there was something soothing about these odd lights and sounds. Something calming that spoke to the most primitive parts of his brain. At first, when he passed current through the gasses in the tubes, it was only out of academic curiosity. The crystal radio radios were simply tools for divining the music of the spheres. He sat staring into his creations for hours, bathed in their strange lights and sounds. And the more he sat, watching and listening, the more it seemed to him that the random patterns of light and static were not random at all. While viewed independently they seemed to dance and tick at random, but together their appeared to be an interaction; a back and forth. Fascination took hold of Lark, and he found himself locked in observation for hours upon hours.

So entranced had Lark become that he took to leaving the machines running all day. That strange hum just beyond human recognition burned itself into the walls and floorboards. The radio signals swirled and chattered with an increasing intensity that visibly agitated Lark’s long-suffering wife. But Lark didn’t notice. There was something about the light he was producing amid the gasses of the cathode tubes that rippled the most sensitive cells of his mind. That was the key, he thought. The light. The flickering light. No longer did it seem an even give and take between the cathode tubes and the radio static. No, Lark began to realize that the wild arcs of static were a response to what he had summoned in his many glass bells. The radio signals, sounds of shape and form far removed from our experience, were frantic cries of alarm.

Thoughts of these strange interplays plagued him at work. During his free time he worked to construct a portable cathode tube, a glass bell contained in a copper and steel case that measured approximately the size of a dime novel. To the back of it he affixed a small crystal radio; a simple affair that consisted of a rudimentary receiver and iron aerial. He kept these at work with him always, periodically stealing glances into the shimmering blue light and watching it dance to the tune of the faint radio static.

That’s how it all started, really. It was that blue light; that damnadible blue light. Archibald Lark was not the first person to construct a cathode tube, yet no other person of science has reported the particular calamity that befell Lark. Lark was special. For reasons that no human being will likely comprehend, Lark was chosen by things that do not exist in material space. Long, sharp thing covered in eyes; like a moth’s eyes. Broad, curved eyes that reflect all the light they take in through bands of lifeless blue.

Lark looked into his device, and these things looked back; their terrible eyes pulling at the recessed parts of his brain.

They made him do things.

Little things, as first. At work Lark would find himself turning dials and adjusting levers unthinkingly, spending more and more time in the recesses of the generator building with little memory as to what he did. He would remember closing the large steel doors and staring blindly into his device; into the blue light that shined back.

At home things steadily worsened. That strange hum, just beyond the realm of human recognition, addled the subconscious mind of Ingrid Lark. Her annoyance with her husband’s troublesome hobby distilled itself into raw hatred. When she dusted their apartment, running the course cloth along the tubes and fixtures of Archibald’s work, she wished for the strength to smash them into a million parts. But she didn’t dare. She didn’t understand these things, and her fear of what she might unleash overtook her aversion.

While simple, she was not unaware of the uncanny interactions between the flickering shades in the cathode tubes and the snaps and ticks of the radio devices. But there was something more. When she dropped her dusting rag between the brass and steel of one of the larger cathode tubes, she noticed little electric jolts strike the particles of duct the rag had collected. It wasn’t dust at all; it was, she noted, a fine and nearly transparent blue powder. And it seemed to cover the apartment. She had to look very closely to see it; otherwise it could be mistaken for the natural grime and cast of particulate that one finds from normal day-to-day activity.

And she noticed something else. When the same rag was brought near the transmitter of the larger radio gear, the static that was transmitted became a painful tear of high-pitched noises. And when she dusted them clean, the static settled into a distant chatter.
Her husband had not noticed these things, because he was so entranced by the flicker of the lights as to render the rest of the world a whisper. And also because he spent more and more of his free time in the lower levels of his workplace. And finally because Archibald was covered in the same pale blue powder.

For three days Archibald Lark didn’t come home from work. Ingrid stopped by the electrical plant on the first day and asked after him. The plant manager told her that he had not checked in. By the second day she was truly worried, and contacted the police. They were dismissive. By the third day she was in a state of panic. As a desperate resort, she pounded on the door of her neighbor, a kindly writer of historical reportage named Jackson Elias. Elias did his very best to consol Ingrid and, when she was properly calm, he took her to Archibald’s place of employ. The plant manager once more insisted that Mr. Lark had not signed in for work, but Elias proved a smooth negotiator and convinced the manager to search the plant.

Into the very pit of the plant they searched. Through every riveted corridor and every dial and lever-lined utility room. And as they reached the very deepest level an unease spread amongst them. The plant manager, a thick and stocky fellow, twitched about like a rodent out at night. Ingrid felt it too, like a musical note that was being steadily played at an unnaturally high pitch; to high to hear but not too high to feel resonate in your bones.  But Elies, a man of reason and logic, felt no such thing. His unease was the unease of the present, the quite pedestrian sensation that accompanies any challenging task.

And so it was that these three came upon a room with a large steel door. A large metal wheel protruded from the door’s center; like the face of a vault. And from beneath the door drifted out the a soft blue glow of particular hue. The plant manager rapped on it loudly, inquiring in a quavering voice as to the room’s occupant. There was no response. Elies tried this time, speaking in measured, resonate tones and applying the lubricant of friendship to wrest a response. There was none. At an impasse, the two men grasped the wheel and gave a heroic struggle. Slowly, they succeeded in loosening the mechanism. With the added effort of Ingrid, they pulled the heavy door back.

Archibald Lark sat in a feral crouch at the far end of the room, wreathed in unearthly light. Vast tendrils of blue glow swam across the tar-black floor, sinking into cracks and fissures. And surrounding these blasphemous ropes of light was the mockery of a twinkling galaxy. Tiny blue stars blinked from within a hundred glass jars. Cathode tubes littered the floor, each one containing the twisted flicker of that blue light. And Lark, the poor beast, he was wan and sickly, his hands devoured by madness and starvation into skeletal claws. His eyes sat sunken and dull, his mouth drawn into a disquieting smile.

Ingrid rushed to her husband, embracing his ravaged form. A cloud of dust many days thick exploded from his clothes. Lark mumbled now and Ingrid tried to lift him to his feet. Elies ran to her aid, hefting Lark towards the door. Lark struggled, pathetically, trying to turn back; his withered feet scrabbling at the ground. With each cloud of dust that wafted away, the clearer his mind became.

The plant manager stayed rooted to the spot; his eyes transfixed by the tendrils of light as they seeped into the ground.

“The water!” He shouted. Elies and Ingrid stumbled. Lark wriggled free and mumbled louder.

On his hands lark crawled to the nearest tendril of blue light. He swiped at it, spreading the glowing powder but not destroying it. He swiped feebly at another tendril

The plant manager along the wall, throwing levers and readjusting dials in a frantic effort of divert the hydroelectric plant‘s flow. To prevent this strange thing from entering the river.

Elies and Ingrid looked at each other in alarm. Then without a word, they ran to the many bell jars and cathode tubs and began kicking them against the walls. They popped and crackled as they shattered, tiny electric arcs bursting from the dying lights within.

They had stopped up this strange thing’s source, but the tendrils continued to snake into the ground. Lark looked about in mad desperation. Ingrid gasped. From the recesses of Lark’s tattered jacket came a flash of brilliant blue. He looked down with a start, remembering his pocket cathode tube. Pulling it out, Lark’s face was lit by the glowing ball of gas. It filled the tube completely; seeming to press itself against the glass in an effort to escape its confines. And as the brilliant flicker writhed within it’s enclosures, the curvature of the glass revealed to Lark an unholy magnification; millions of small emerald eyes. Like moth’s eyes.

With a shriek Lark hurled the device to the ground. The simple crystal radio attached to the back crackled to life, jarred by the fall. In an instant the crackle whined into an ear-splitting wail. It was a sound as terrible and as old as the stars themselves and it’s strange ululations seemed to tormented the pale blue monstrosities. The blue tendrils on the ground rippled and contorted with desperate energy before exploding into mists of fine grey powder. The glowing gas in the portable cathode tube flickered to darker shades of blue, then green and yellow. The radio winked silent. Lark picked up the device carefully, and switched it off.

Ingrid has long since left Archibald. His strange and, fortunately temporary transformation rattled her to her very core. And while the strange dust and glittering light back at the apartment has dissipated upon their arrival, the memory of the events would forever stain her mind.

Lark lost his job as well. The plant manager did not understand the preternatural forces that compelled Lark to act in the way he did, and summarily dismissed.

It was Jackson Elies who turned out to be Archibald’s truest friend. While Elies saw only rational explanations for what had occurred; perhaps a dangerous mix of chemicals whose fumes had addled Lark’s faculties; Elies nonetheless helped Lark start a new life in New England. Elies didn’t approve when Lark told him he would become an investigator of the supernatural. But Elies didn’t understand the difficulties of getting work at another plant. Nor did he understand the fear that struggled in the most primitive parts of Lark’s mind.

Sure the paranormal trade was mostly bunk, but a clever sort, with a little know-how could eek out a dishonest living. And it was would be worth it, after all. It would be worth it to learn more, to find out what had happened to him.

After all, Elies hadn’t seen the eyes. The millions of pale blue eyes.

The End

Share/Bookmark

3) Start crude, and then work on refining When I first tried writing a short story a week, I found that I was having a lot of trouble with the basic shape of the short story — my efforts at short fiction often meandered a lot, featuring scenes that didn’t add anything to the story. Often, I would realize at length that the story really started on page five, or that one of the many strands I’d layered in really was the story. So one experiment that I tried was writing stories that were very basic.

Here’s what I mean: try starting your story with the central problem cropping up in the first sentence. Like “At first, Admiral Apoplexy thought the glowing warning light on the flight console was just one more bit of disco mood bling, but soon he noticed the words COLLISION IMMINENT written under it.” And then resolve that conflict in the very last sentence, like “At last, the hundreds of danger indicators had stopped their insane strobing, and normal atmosphere and gravity were restored. Admiral Apoplexy looked at the beloved Gloria Gaynor record he’d had to sacrifice to save the ship, lying in jagged black vinyl pieces on the space-capsule floor. And wept.”

[...]

READ MOREShare/Bookmark