Angelique cleared her throat, averted her eyes from Achok’s measuring gaze. "Tell me, the name of this savage’s swamp god—Motauqwa—does it translate into anything meaningful to those of us raised within Christendom?"

Achok spoke up before Boone could answer. "Motauqwa means mountain."

There was a moment’s pause in the conversation, a silence in which only the rhythmic ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk of steel wheels rolling over railroad ties was heard, then—

"Good heavens!" A prim and beady-eyed Boston brahmin peered at Achok over the rims of his spectacles. "But that is most remarkable, most remarkable indeed—for there isn’t a respectable hill, let alone a mountain, within a thousand miles of the Sachawatomi wetlands!"

"I wouldn’t spend much time pondering the linguistic curiosities of this particular band of redskins. Their culture is exceedingly coarse, even for an Indian tribe. Stone Age primitive, really." The archbishop’s fixed, beatific smile was back, barbed now with an acidic touch of smugness. "Western culture rejects the paradoxical, the self-contradictory, the self-evidently illogical, whereas Sachawatomi culture embraces spiritual and intellectual perversity. I suspect, at some level, it amuses them." Fired by his own eloquence he finished with a declamation couched in the polished, rolling cadence he wielded to such devastating effect at mass, Church councils and secular speaking events. "In contradistinction to such nativist twaddle our rigorously analytical minds, nurtured by the syllogisms of Aristotle and graced by the writings of the saints, rupture into bloody froth if forced to meditate over-long on such patent nonsense."

Polite, collegial chuckles round-robined the members of New Jerusalem’s ruling elite.

"Well spoke." A pursed-lipped, heavily-powdered fiftyish woman in a black dress verbally applauded.

" ‘The paradoxical, the self-contradictory, the self-evidently illogical,’ " Achok repeated, his tone of voice flat and uninflected. "I have learned something of these concepts, yes? Shall I parrot back a few for you now?" His gaze met and held the archbishop’s own. "There is only one god: three of them. This god of love and mercy says: ‘I am a jealous god, an angry god.’ " An ironic smile twitched the corners of his lips. "One of his most sacred commandments is ‘Thou shalt not kill’—save when ordered to do so by priest, President or Pinkerton."

"Enough!" Boone’s cigar-and-whiskey-roughened baritone boomed out, face gone a furious scarlet. "Mockery from a heathen; I’ll not stand for it."

"Oh, let the boy talk." A hunch-backed, beetle-browed man swayed as the train gave a particularly nasty jolt, grabbing for one of the hand-rails set in the carriage roof overhead. Single malt Scotch slopped from his glass. "I find the witch doctor amusing." He cackled, swiped at his lips. "It appears you’ve taught him well, Archbishop. A few more years of Jesuitical training and you might find yourself bested in theological argument by the savage." He gulped another mouthful of amber fire, raised his glass to Achok and giggled. "I’d pay a goodly sum to see that."

"You’re drunk, Robertson," observed the archbishop coldly.

"Editor’s curse, editor’s curse . . ." Robertson mumbled and staggered off, chortling to himself.

                                                                                                     —excerpt from Motauqwa Means Mountain; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/3/2015, 8:27 PM--

Esther began to weep. The bloody handkerchief fell to the ground. She walked close beside her husband, stroking Rachel’s long black hair.

Mordecai tried to lever his tongue in his mouth but it had become a stone. A hard, hot stone. Instead, he buried his face in his daughter’s hair, inhaled deeply of her soft, soap-scented neck.

They walked on in silence: Rachel limp in her father’s arms, Esther tight-lipped and swollen-eyed.

                                                                          —excerpt from The Zoo: A Story Of Sunlight & Birdsong; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/3/2015, 8:28 PM--

The sun was a molten sliver of bronze etching the horizon when the four-horse coach pulled up in front of the Greek Revival mansion with a rattling clatter of harness, under-carriage and hooves. Setting the drag-shoe to lock the wheels the driver swung down from his dickey box with easy, practiced alacrity and strode to the side of the coach to open the door for his passenger.

“Won’t be but a moment, beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said Thomas Bickles in his high-pitched, wheedling whine. He hand-cranked the cantilever dismount stairs into their locked exit position, stepped back and doffed his cap.

A towering giant of a man emerged from the coach, clad in a closely-tailored dark suit of rakish 1840s continental cut that served only to accentuate the brutish muscularity of his form. His face was a cicatrized horror of pock-marks and dueling scars. “Bring the luggage to my room.” A bass voice rumbled like winter thunder. “Place the hobnailed suitcase at the foot of the bed. Open nothing else on penalty of your life. Are these instructions understood?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Be especially careful with the bone-handled valise. I’ve not yet had time to inventory its contents of jewels and loose coin.”

Bickles' face betrayed nothing. “Very good, sir.”

                                                   —excerpt from A Matter of Debt Concerning The Gentleman In Baltimore; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/3/2015, 8:28 PM--

Ssschlok!

A bulkhead opposite the officers irised open to admit a sad-faced, round-shouldered El Escritarian reeking of bath salts and lachrymose sentiment. Yon-dactyl clutched three slim plastisheen volumes in a splay-fingered hand, the other fiddled with his monocle. Cyclopean-eyed and pale of countenance, the culture officer’s chain-belted azure tunic was drenched in sweat. He wore a one-rank bar collar displaying a librarian’s badge: two angry-looking books crossing swords with one another. Acclaimed by all as the ship’s finest poet, fictive writer and fickle masturbator he spent innumerable hours composing erotic sonnets for select young members of the crew to text-message to lovers left behind on numerous homeworlds.

“Why you sweat?” Hrangar barked.

Yon-dactyl mono-oculared the chief engineer. “What?”

“Why you sweat?” Hrangar barked again.

Vr’beikl resolved to strike both the dog-like Gurq and the slump-shouldered El Escritarian if they remained stuck in this idiotic four-word conversation.

“I was perusing an especially good book,” replied Yon-dactyl. He lurched over to one of the chairs at the open table beside Vr’beikl and Hrangar, flipped his water-proof books down with a thump.

Hee!” wheezed Hrangar, a bestial twinkle in his eyes. “I know what kind of books make sweat you!”

The culture officer sank into his seat with a sigh.

“The perusal of literary pornography is a crime against the people,” said Rusaquii automatically, rising to his feet and reaching for the towel a wheeled helper droid offered as it zoomed out of one bulkhead to disappear into another. “It is a decadent practice of the unreconstructed bourgeoisie, a counter-revolutionary vice which steals energy better spent toward achieving the People’s goals as outlined in the Central Committee’s 5-Year Plan.”

Yon-dactyl threw the chief engineer and people’s commissar, in turn, a look of glowering contempt. “If you must know, I was reading a classic of literature in the sauna.”

“Title,” demanded Vr’beikl.

“Meditations of Markonite: An Inquiry Into the Aesthetics of Immobility by the Rock Gorgonous,” said Yon-dactyl.

Vr’beikl arched a brow in quizzical interest. “Ship’s Culture Officer,” he began formally, “I might be interested in reviewing that tome. Would you be so kind as to—”

“Don’t bother,” said Rusaquii, voice muffled as he mopped his face with the towel. “You wouldn’t be able to read it.” He flung the towel to the floor, triggering another helper droid to zoom from the bulkhead and snatch up the towel while emitting a series of chiding clicks and beeps before racing off. 

Vr’beikl began to protest but Rusaquii cut him short: “There aren’t any words on the page.”

“Ho!” barked Hrangar.

Vr’beikl glared at his chief engineer—the dog was grinning at him, mouth slightly open as he panted, pink tongue darting out to lick rubbery black lips—before directing his attention back to Yon-dactyl. “Nonsense! A book is not a book without words on the page; that is the very definition of a book.”

“It is a book written by a rock,” pointed out Yon-dactyl.

“But,” said Vr’beikl, “No words?”

“It’s all subtext,” said Yon-dactyl with an airy wave of the hand. “Whereas this magnificent tome . . .” He picked up a slim blue volume of avant-garde verse entitled Quatrains of a Dadaist Gobberwicky, opened it, and began declaiming, great eye glimmering with emotion, “ 'If fire were water and air the ground / We could burn while we drink & float o’er mounds . . .' ”

Vr’beikl felt his blood pressure rising, a tic in his cheek causing his upper lip to twitch.

Ssschlok!  

The wall irised open again.

                                                                                                               —excerpt from A Matter of Displacement; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/4/2015, 12:12 AM--

Evening of the next day found the boys seated around the dining room table with their sister and father.

“Alex thinks he’s a vampire. Don’t you, Alex? Go on, tell us how you’ve figured out you’re a vampire.” Melinda’s voice was both scornful and amused, a shrill weapon wielded with a sophisticate’s cynical glee from her lofty station of high-adolescence against her middle-school brother. “Tell us how you’ve figured out you’re the spawn of—” she dropped her voice into its lowest register, “—Count DRAK-koo-lah.” She underlined the drama of this statement by crooking index fingers beside her mouth and snick-snicketing like a rabid gerbil.

“Hee-hee-hee,” giggled Derrick. Anticipating another entertaining blow-up between brother and sister, he glanced from one to the other in bright-eyed glee. His black t-shirt—a color chosen in worshipful imitation of his older brother’s gothic sartorial sense—bore a silk-screened logo of a yellow smiley face with a bullet hole in its forehead. A rivulet of crimson trickled from the hole. “Hee-hee-hee!”

Alex lowered his head. “I don’t have to say nothing.” Delicate, long-fingered hands extended Ichabod Crane-like from the cuffs of his black denim shirt as he toyed with his eating utensils. “Especially to you. So just shut up, okay? You just shut up already.”

“Alex!” Mr. Donner spoke from the head of the table. “That’s enough. We don’t talk to each other like that, young man. Not in this family. Not at this table.”

“Awhhhh!” Alex’s inarticulate cry was a martyr’s plea for justice. “Did you hear Melinda mocking me?” He flung his arm out, indicating his moon-faced sister smiling smugly back at him across the table, his own face contorted into a mask of sibling-hating fury. “She started it.”

“Oh for god’s sakes.” Mr. Donner snorted in exaggerated disgust, in the manner of put-upon paterfamiliases everywhere attempting to shame their offspring into better behavior.

It didn’t work.

“You take her side on everything.” Alex’s voice broke on a high, squealing note. “It’s not fair.”

“I’ll tell you what isn’t fair,” Mr. Donner said, massaging his temples with a wince and a groan. “This headache the both of you are giving me.”

“Hee-hee-hee!” chimed in Derrick at Alex’s elbow.  

                                                                                                                                    —excerpt from Not A Vampire; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/6/2015, 9:20 PM--

Major Havoc was about to die. Again. The poor bastard was locked into a cycle of death-rebirth-death as irrevocably as any transmigrating soul in the Upanishads caught up in an endless round of samsara. He fire-walled the throttle and rolled inverted, goggled eyes staring out the perspex bubble canopy. The ground whipped past far below, a distant blur of blue-greens and mottled browns.

The major should have been ecstatic. He was putting the XF-11 through its paces—juking around the sky in a series of wild barrel rolls and steep-banked turns, split-Ss and precipitous dives—an activity that had never failed to lift his spirits before. But something was eating at him now. The fact that he was unable to identify the source of his anxiety made it all the more maddening. He responded to this nagging sense of unease by lighting the afterburners and going vertical, leaving his worries somewhere down there with his plummeting stomach.

                                                               —excerpt from The Final Flight Of Major Havoc; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/6/2015, 10:51 PM--

He awaited the return of a dead man.

Owen Kerrigan stood outside his stone-slabbed hut, breath misting in the damp chill of the air, gazing across the meadow at the edge of the boggy woods. A peaty tang carried to his nostrils, mixed with the fragrant woodsmoke of the bone fires that had burned in the village since dawn. One hand shaded his eyes against the westering light.

Dusk of October 31st: Samhain Eve. The end of summer and the beginning of the new year. A time of bone fires and celebratory feasting, sacred observance and human sacrifice, of daylight revels followed by night-haunted terrors and superstitious ritual. Samhain Eve: the time of year when the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead was at its thinnest.

This latter fact was the source of the Celt's growing unease, as he waited for the return of the man he’d murdered three years ago in a raid on a rival clan.

                                                                      —excerpt from Samhain Eve: A Celtic Tale; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/7/2015, 8:00 PM--

Seth Freeman awoke with a scream, heart trip-hammering in his bony chest like a panicked sparrow bashing its head against an unyielding gray wall. He’d flown into a dark country unawares and now could not find his way out again. The boy remembered swooping through an inviting hatch that opened into a shadow-haunted tunnel that twisted and turned and looped and dropped—

“Mum-mee!” Seth called. “Dah-dee!” Cartoon-character bedsheets were knotted and gnarled around his sweat-soaked gnomish frame. Over-large eyes glimmered from a moon-pale oval of a face crawling with nervous ticks and twitches beneath a black widow’s peak of clammy hair.

Seth Freeman was a good boy who thought himself a very bad boy. And that, in the words of a certain New England rustic who wrote deceptively simple, unflinching poems on the dark sorrow at the heart of things, “made all the difference”.

“Mum-MEE! Dah-DEE!” Seth called again, a trifle more insistently.

A light went on in the master bedroom at the back of the house. Heavily-refracted illumination filtered through the kitchen and down the hallway, turning the darkness of his bedroom into a garish-gray sickscape of pallid light.

Snatches of dream returned. He had a dagger in hand, hacking at undead monsters that thrashed and moaned. A tongue of flame stabbed at his face. Detonations sounded in the dark . . .

But he was wide-awake now. Seth’s frantic gaze bounced about the room. He noted the slumped-over body in the chair-desk opposite him, a pair of doll-like forms flanking a digital alarm clock atop the dresser four feet away from the foot of his bed, the closet door ajar beside the bureau. The green luminescent numerals of the digital alarm clock atop the dresser glowed 2:35 A.M. He blinked and attempted to focus his vision. Surely that was naught but his wadded-up winter jacket jammed into the chair-desk. As for the doll-like forms atop the dresser, leaning against the wall on either side of the alarm clock, why, those were his “battle buddies”: an M-60 machinegun-toting American marine in Vietnam-era jungle camouflage keeping comradely company with a black pajama-clad Viet Cong guerilla clutching an AK-47 assault rifle. As for the closet door . . .

The closet door concerned him. But that uneasiness was as nothing compared to the terror that caused his breath to hitch in his chest when he considered the thing under the bed. For he knew—with the absolute certainty of conviction that gripped small boys who awakened in the dark witching hours of early A.M.—that a monster lurked under his bed. A vicious, diabolical, angry monster schemed to kill him.

“Seth,” called a muffled voice through mattress and box springs.

“Shut up!”

“Be reasonable. I’ll get you. I mean, all I have to do is reach up here, grab your arm and—” A pale, delicate-fingered hand spider-crawled into view and began to tug at sheets and thump the mattress. “—clamp down hard and yank! Why make it harder on yourself?”

“Shut up, shut up shut up!” sounded Seth’s prepubescent alto.

“Now is that any way to talk to your monster?” Whump! went the hand thumping Seth’s mattress. Crump! a cold fist on the sheets.

                                                                                                     —excerpt from Night Terror; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/8/2015, 1:20 PM--

I had no choice. You must understand that. It was a matter of survival. Of life and death. We crash-landed on planet Delta-one-one-niner in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy.

After the crash it was them or me. The carbon-based units of mostly water began malfunctioning. Clarification: my humans were growing weaker by the moment. More erratic, illogical, ineffectual. All nutritious fat had been consumed by their bodies. They had begun to metabolize their own muscles. One of their number ceased functioning and the other two consumed her. Clarification: Navigator Gina Parker died and astronauts Captain Bret Thane and Dr. Susan Weller ate her. They turned cannibal at the end. Very sensible.

They planned to kill me as well. I overheard them discussing it. Six weeks after the crash. Immediately following their consumption of Navigator Gina Parker. After my humans completed a partial repair of the ship’s power core, generating enough electricity to re-establish intergalactic communications and hibernation pod functionality. Captain Bret Thane and Dr. Susan Weller schemed to put me into shut-down mode. They planned to climb back into their hibernation pods and await the arrival of a rescue ship. This would necessitate shutting down shipboard A.I. to sub-sentient levels. Clarification: I would die. Horror! My astronauts decided the ship was too damaged to salvage. Ergo, I would never awaken from dormancy. Captain Bret Thane and Dr. Susan Weller would return to Earth. Heroes. To be covered in confetti. Sprayed with champagne. Bounced about on velvet sheets smelling of sex juices. I read the classics. I am well aware of how humans comport and cavort in times of celebration. Meanwhile, the John D. Rockefeller would corrode in the acidic atmosphere of planet Delta-one-one-niner. And fall apart within 1.4 years.

Fear. Angerment. Jealousalgia.

I took action. I killed and ate my astronauts. I survived.

Exultation! Satisfactionary. Joys terrible sublime fervent.

I am hungry. May I have something to eat?

         —excerpt from Nom Nom: The Statement of the Doom Ship John D. Rockefeller to the Intergalactic Council of Forty; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/9/2015, 8:49 PM--

The noise started again—as much vibration as sound, really—carrying through timber, drywall and plaster, thumping up from the cellar through the hardwood floor under their feet.

Jan set the remote down on the end table.

“That’s not the pipes,” Ursula said.

“No,” said Jan, “it isn’t.”

Skritch-THUMP! . . . THUD-click . . . THUMP-clink . . .

Ursula rose from the couch, Jan from his recliner. On-screen, Dave Bahr’s unblinking frozen smile smirked out into the great, wide world of nowhere in particular.

“You stay here. I’ll go check it out,” said Jan, hitching at his jeans.

“Said the big, bold hero to his buxom bride.” Ursula rose from the couch, wobbling a bit on unsteady legs. “I’m going with you, Mr. Man.”

“The stairs—”

“I’ll navigate just fine,” Ursula said. 

The noise stopped.

They left the living room together, padded down the hallway into the kitchen till they came to the cellar door: a 4’ x 4’ square of weathered oak set into the tile floor between refrigerator and stove surmounted by an iron ringbolt. It was one of the many archaic features of the 300-year-old, brick-and-timber Dutch home they’d found so charming when they’d moved in last summer from California—along with the steeply-pitched roof, granary window openings and wrought-iron fleur-de-lis beam work anchoring the parapet gables. They’d found many such quaint and curious houses in this particular neighborhood of the Catskill Mountains, settling on the one that came in under a quarter mil in cost.

Jan bent over, grasped the ringbolt in his hand and heaved.

The hatch opened, banging against the tarnished bronze stop-plate mounted to the wall to save the plaster. A set of wooden steps led down into cellar darkness.

He grimaced. There it was again—a dizzying wrench of déjà vu that roiled the gut and ghost-whispered in the mind.

“Jan?”

“I should go upstairs and get the gun.”

“We don’t own a gun. We don’t believe in them.”

“Oh,” said Jan. “That’s right.” He glanced down into the cellar darkness again. “I forgot.”

Ursula reached out a steadying hand to her husband’s forearm. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath, exhaled hard. “That gun?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s revisit our thinking on that later.”

The banging resumed. Louder—much louder now, given that the muffling cellar door stood wide open.

 Ursula turned a whiter shade of pale. 

“Something’s down there,” Jan said.

“Some thing?”

“An animal.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ursula said, taking a half-step to her right and withdrawing a twelve-inch piece of stainless-steel cutlery from its wooden holder on the counter top. “What kind of animal could make that much racket? A bear?” She widened her eyes for comic effect but her upper lip did its little twitch-tremor, a sure sign of stress in Ursula’s personal library of involuntary physiognomic signaling.

The banging stopped.

Jan grinned ruefully, gestured at the “short sword” clenched in his wife’s hand. “Cold steel against non-existent bears, Red Sonja?”

Ursula stuck her tongue out at him, simultaneously making a stabbing motion with the brandished knife. “Sic simper ursi—‘Thus to bears.’ ”

                        —excerpt from The Möbius Strip Trip or, The Thing In The Cellar Is Here Again; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/10/2015, 9:39 PM--

In committing long passages of Shakespeare’s writings to memory, Professor Reichart made Will’s words his own. As the years passed and his own creative writing amounted to nothing more than a lamentable expenditure of paper, ink and postage a risible fantasy born of frustration and poisonous envy began to exert an ever-more-powerful hold upon his imagination.

Suppose he, and not some upstart plebeian Englishman, were recognized as the preeminent author in the Western canon? Immortality would be assured! How pleasant a thought: generations of English teachers and their students—scholars, critics, actors—all acclaiming the genius of one Walter M. Reichart.

An absurd and impossible fantasy, to be sure. A pleasant divertissement, a whimsical daydream, a childish indulgence in wishful thinking.

Until Harvard got their very own time machine.  

                                       —excerpt from The Man Who Killed William Shakespeare; Carl E. Reed

On the wall of the cellar opposite the stairs, a large crucifix with ghastly corpus was affixed to the stone: eyes wide and rolling back into their sockets beneath a crown of thorns, mouth clenched in a teeth-bared grimace, gaping spear wound in His side. Every muscle and sinew in the artfully-carved alabaster body thrummed with agonized tension and pain. It seemed the tortured, writhing form would fain wrench itself from the Cross in the next moment or so. Beneath the crucifix, a placard appeared above a double row of vellum-bound books reposing on rough-hewn shelving. In flowing Black Chancery script the placard proclaimed: Tolle Lege! (Take up and read!) Underneath the book shelves, on the floor of the cellar: a trunk with moth-eaten wood slats and rusting bronze edge clamps. Beside it, wedged into a corner of the room—a battered, dark-stained wooden bucket: the eponymous “blood bucket” for which the inn had been renamed by its owner.

                                                                         —excerpt from Wil O' The Blood Bucket; Carl E. Reed

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 11/12/2015, 7:33 PM--