Temporary Anne Conclusion

The FINAL DAY of the Temporary Anne Blog tour, and the thrilling conclusion of This Is How I..., the horror story YOU HELPED WRITE.

If you haven't already picked it up, check out Temporary Anne, the story of a woman too evil to stay out of Hell, but too evil to go there, either!  CLICK HERE TO GET IT FREE.

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"This is how I... die," I said to Betty and The Bearded Man.

********************

A dragon, no, not a dragon, more of a snake but it's got wings, and the wings have heads on them and the heads have little teeth that are made up of screaming people, homonculi serving as daggersharp teeth to chew me up even as they bemoan their fate my GOD what kind of person was I?

******************* The Beast: it is dying.  I reach out a hand to it, hold its tentacle in mine.  It tried to help me.  One more inch -- one more half-inch, and we'd have done it.

*******************

"No..." The Bearded Man says.

"No?" I ask.

"You died a long time ago, honey," Betty White tells me.

*******************

Somewhere her lightsaber is vorping its way through hordes of zombies, and I am embarrassed at the part of me that thought them up.  I am better than that  I can taste the second bite of Twinkie she gave me, before they joined even more mes back together and I became too insubstantial again -- not able to touch that world but only to fight in the world of dreams... nightmares ... that lay beyond the bottom of the pit, in the cavern where my body...

*******************

There's the Drum Major.  It was a blonde wig.  She's a redhead.  She's running towards me. Her hat is off, and open, and I am proud that I created HER.   She's reaching into the hat, her bag of tricks, she's got something, and then

dartdartdartdartdartdartdartdartdartdardartdartdartdartdardartdartdartdartdardartdartdartdartdart she is torn into by a million tiny bees, bees made of ice, bees with poisonous honey breath and murderous multifaceted eyes, bees burrowing through her body and tearing her to pieces, her hat falling next to me.

*******************

"This is how I... save the world!" I shout around the mouthful of Snickers that is really just my fevered memories of Snickers, the last taste of a world I now know I left behind long, long ago, and I charge out of the darkness into the cavern beyond, where I am immediately body-slammed to the ground by a fist that is as big as a house and before I can react it is wrapped around me and picking me up, up up upupupupupUP to a mouth that is big enough to eat a house and the mouth, full of rotten teeth in the rotten jaw of a rotting corpse of a giant, is grinning at me.  "THIS IS HOW YOU DIE!" it shouts.

*******************

"I... did." I say.  It's not a question.  I know what they're telling me is the truth.

hereherehereanotheroneanotheroneanotheronegetthemtogethergetthemtogetherthiswillhelpthiswillhelhereherehereanotheroneanotheroneanotheronegetthemtogethergetthemtogetherthiswillhelpthiswillhelphereherehereanotheroneanotheroneanotheronegetthemtogethergetthemtogetherthiswillhelpthiswillhelp

The baby spiders -- now nearly as big as me, they grow up so fast! -- press another ghost of me into the ghost of me that stands before them.  My memories of this one, the other me that the other me created and sent out into the world, at the bidding of... don't think about it... meld together.  This one was evil, many of them would be, this one pressing into my mind images of slaughter: a schoolyard... a gun...

"No..." I gasp.

"You..." The Bearded Man says "Are history's greatest monster."

"Noooooo...." I say, again.

It's not a question.  I know what they're telling me is the truth.

*******************

This body cannot be harmed, though, and once I am in the cavern and I realize that these are my creations I begin to take charge even as I also try to wrestle control back from me:  the giant hand I cause to pass through me, and I bend the rocks to my will: stalagmites  grow into soldiers made of rock and they grab the monsters that are attacking me, and I am back up off my back, ready to charge forward.  The giant that grabbed me is pulled to the ground by my newest minions, swarming over it with clunky creaky rocky steps, pressing it into the ground.  I follow their surge and charge up the chest of the giant, pausing at its face.

"This... ends here," I vow, staring into its eyes.

*******************

It will end here.  One way or the other it will end here.  I just didn't want it to end this way.

The drum major falls beside me.  Her eyes already glassy.  The Beast presses a tentacle to her forehead, then stops moving.

Around me, the baby spiders -- I was once afraid of them! -- begin to fall to the ground, their bodies dessicated and already turning to ash.  Above me, the inferno begins to rage into a fireball and I see the ground begin to open up.

Am I too strong even for myself?

here 

What was that?

here

Was that a bagpipe?

A whisper?

Through tiny fangs?

here

It's...

*******************

"It was over a hundred years ago that you realized what happened to you.  You thought at first you went mad," The Bearded Man, who is my own creation, tells me -- my own psyche talking back to me as another ghost is pressed into me.

"Nooooo," I say.  I want no more but I know it is necessary.  I have sent these spiders out into the world to gather me and bring me here, all of me, in the hopes that my fragmented deranged soul can overcome the mindless -- no, the too mindful -- horror that awaits beyond this dark pit.

A bomb. Strapped to my chest. I walk into a market.  God no no no A flash of light and then body parts.

The monsters in my mind, brought to life in various guises, each one unleashing more and more evil into the world, ripping open the gash between this world and others, letting more and more evil in to our world in an effort to end it -- end humanity and allow for something far, far worse to take over this universe.

I was a conduit! I want to protest, but it doesn't matter whether the evil we do is to further our own ends or to further someone else's.

"You tried to end it," Betty White tells me.

Why would I create her?  Of all the annoying ways to tell myself what is going on.

*******************

Past the head of the giant my stone army rages forward, tearing into lions made of thorns and tigers made of ice, the ravings of a madman I know only all too well, for he is me.

I leap from the giant's forehead towards the center of the cavern: what fear does a ghost have of falling, of heights, of anything?  My only worry is that having died, many times over, this time I will not finish the job and will not therefore redeem myself in some small measure for the awful things I have done over and over and over, both myself and the thoughts I have sent out into the world.

*******************

"I remember," I say. "This is how I... started it."

"Yes," says Betty.

"Shut up," I tell her.  "You're a figment of my imagination."  I turn to The Bearded Man.

"So am I," he tells me.

"I like you better.  You gave me Snickers."

Betty looks hurt.  I ignore her. The Bearded Man says "What do you want to know?"

'"I don't need to know anything. Will you tell the world?"

"About you?"

An explosion rocks the pit.  He turns on a television that wasn't there a moment before, but that's a small thing for me to create, now, I suppose.  We see a city, leveled by an explosion. In the midst of it I stand, clothing torn to shreds, holding a rocket launcher.  Behind me, serpents forty feet long writhe and spit poison.

"I think they already know," he says.

A small glow is starting to pierce the darkness.

"Is that..." I start to ask.

The Bearded Man nods.  "It's time to go."

The baby spiders have found two more copies of me, out in the world: they can gather up all the simulacra I have made, keep gathering them, but cannot do anything about the nonhuman monsters I have let into the world, all these copies of me going out to do evil, to rend the fabric of existence so that the nightmares banished eons ago from our world could come back.

I remember the first story I ever wrote -- one of the copies must have known of it, have existed when I wrote it, before I went mad, before my family was killed by my own creations, before I saw the monsters all the time and tried to avoid this fate by taking my own life, hanging myself in my spare bedroom one night, only to walk away from my dead body, a ghost that could replicate itself over and over and send its own ghostly nightmares out into the world to do evil -- and to become more solid the more were created.

******************************

I remember the first story I ever created, as I jump, and now I have a second worry.

It is there.

But first I see me -- my old body, the body I walked away from a hundred years ago, the body I hung with a clothesline after everyone I loved had been killed by a shadowy fevered dream that escaped from my study.  

I am hanging, upside down, barely recognizable, my shock of hair clinging to a dessicated corpse that wouldn't exist at all if it were not for this cavern where my body has been taken.  I am dead, a corpse, a ragged thing that shouldn't be at all.

And I am talking.

Through teeth that are barely held into the jaw I am shouting things, the names of monsters I can scarcely imagine existing, descriptions of horrors that would have caused my brain to flee in terror if it hadn't already done that long ago.

"It has ten legs and three heads and the body of an ogre but it is made of fire and it leaps onto a New York Street" my body is wailing, and I nearly quail at the thought of what I am doing and then I hear a whisper "But it leaves the girl alone and dives into the sewer" and I think: I AM TRYING, even now, even in death gone on too long, I AM TRYING and then a howl of rage and I turn.

I remember the first story I ever created, and now I have only one worry.

*****************************

"This is not how it is going to end..." I grit my teeth.  The fireball is opening up the gap between our world where humans have lived for as long as this because so long ago our ancestors took all these evil things and sent them away and now I have let them back in but I. WILL. NOT. BE. THE. UNDOING. OF. HUMANITY.

I stretch my arm.

I roll over.

I lift my ghostly body, somehow pressing my hands against the bloody, hot floor of the cavern after the battle has already ended and the war has just begun.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" I yell through lips that cannot feel the air, and I stand.

Off to the side I can see a few of the spiders -- once my enemy, the reason that it did not suspect that I was using them to gather me up, my greatest fear become my greatest tool: who would have expected that a man who made a running joke of his hatred of spiders would invest them with the power to kidnap all the parts of his spirit and bring them back, to kill him?

I stand and hope the spiders can reach me with one more me.

******************************

"Go," The Bearded Man says.

"Go!" Betty White yells, and we jump from the darkness into the cavern.

I pause for one moment, as they leap ahead of me, as the spiders press in to do battle.

I urge The Beast forward.  I think long enough to bring the Drum Major and her magic hat back, and wish her luck as she, too heads into the cavern.

And then I bring them back one last time.

I turn around and see my two daughters, my wife, my baby boy.  They are glowing and crying behind me.  I know they are real, and not.

"I'm sorry," I tell them.

"But I'm trying to make it right, again," I tell them.

I know they are in Heaven, the first of my victims, but I know that if I fail not even Heaven will be safe.

They wave to me and then they are gone.

Again.

**********************************

When I am able to turn away from my body I see it -- the thing that has taken my actual body and animated it, made it tell stories for years, decades, made it tell story after story after story down here in this cavern below the earth, made it tell stories of men who killed their families and saboteurs who caused bridges to fall and stories about drunks who blew up bars, the stories getting wilder and wilder and more and more full of phantasms and night fiends, each story increasing by a little the evil in the world and each story allowing the next to be worse.

It is almost beyond description and only the tiniest part of its insect-like body even protrudes into our world yet, the head and a few of its legs, a mantis born of reptiles but with the wings of a fallen angel, a horror so ancient it predates the devils our religions have made up.  How it knew of me -- or maybe others like me? -- I may never know, but I instantly recognized it in the most primal part of my brain, the part that is still animal, the part that must have watched this thing stalk the earth in a time before my ancestors walked upright, in a time before my witch doctor, shaman predecessors found a way to wall it off from us.

So we could survive.

The Beast attacks it first, its tentacles whipping around, its mouths grasping, and my stone army, unafraid, is on it, then, pushing and beating and jumping, and I am holding a sword, suddenly, cold metal and steel and I run and tumble and leap and I first cut my own body down, watching the bones sag and crumble and fall apart, my skull, my tortured skull still shouting out the stories, trying here and there to mitigate them -- my own body is not so evil as I thought, feared, it might be -- and I hug it to me, trying to press my spirit into the dead flesh, to kill us all together, but I am not enough, yet, I need more of mes to complete me.

Then it is upon me, The Beast savagely wounded and dragging along behind it and I spin around, my sworn flashing in a skill I didn't have until I decided I did.  There in the gloom I make my last stand, a ghost with a sword standing over his own fallen body, hoping to grievously wound a foul thing that wants this world back.

It lunges at me.

I leap and stab, aiming for an eye.

It grabs me in its mouth, ridges of razor-sharp bone somehow cutting through the ether I am made of, and I feel energy escaping from me exactly as if it were blood.

I fall, laying across my body.

The Beast gives up, its life almost done, and falls beside me.

I see the Drum Major running towards it.

**************************************

It stands above me, now, paying no attention to my feeble howls.  My body, below my feet, continues to mumble stories of cities being engulfed in flame, of killer bees with human faces stabbing men in army uniforms.  Here and there I hear a word of kindness, but this must end.

It is widening the flaming gap through which all the others will come, its own kind, to take over first our world and then the next.

The spider is halfway here, dragging with it another spirit-me.  Will it be enough?

Through the flaming portal at the top of the cavern tendrils appear.

I urge the spider to hurry.

It pauses and looks down.

Now I unleash my only power, creating image upon image upon image of my own creations -- I am too ghostly now to make them physical but maybe I can confuse it, and the cavern is filled with angry trees gnashing wooden teeth, with demons hunkering over spiky tails, with ghosts and pirates and a headless Stephen King holding a tommygun to a clown's head, anything I can think of and it works: it pauses, long enough, and the spider is there.

I pat its head.

"You did good," I say.  The ghost it has looks at me, confused, and then I grasp its hand and we are joined.

This one was a good one -- one of the few my body was able to create.  It was a doctor. It saved a baby being born.

It is enough. I grab my body, press it to me, and it stops talking.

Mid-sentence iit crumbles into dust, and so do I, and I see the flaming portal closing, it being dragged back through because the evil was not yet enough, here, to open it up.  I have saved the world, my last words fading into the now-silent, empty cavern that almost was used to let every nightmare ever back into our world, and the echoes will last forever, down there, of my last words:

"This is how I...":

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And that's the story.  Go buy Temporary Anne today!  It's great!

A Personal History of Emma Earl

This is a deleted scene from Volume 8 that provides a mini-biography of Dr. Emma Earl, at least her early years.  There was more to this scene but it would contain too many spoilers.

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             My name is Dr. Emma Jane Earl.  I was born October 31, 1980.  It was exactly one year after my friend Becky was born.  When we were little, we used to have our birthday parties at the same time.  Mom bought gifts for both of us:  Barbie dolls for Becky and books for me.  Maybe I didn’t get as much then as I could have, but I never minded.  I was always happy that Becky was happy.  You see, Becky’s mother didn’t ever throw her a party; she didn’t even remember when Becky’s birthday was and Becky never asked her for any gifts.  Mom said it was because Becky’s mom was abusive.  I knew what “abusive” meant in the dictionary sense, but it was much later that I understood it in a real sense.

            But I digress.  You don’t want me to write about Becky.  The object is to write my personal history.  From what Mom told me, I was a good girl right from the start.  I hardly ever kicked her, to the point where she sometimes worried that I might not be alive.  When it came time for me to be born, I came out so quickly that the doctor was still scrubbing.  The drugs they’d given Mom hadn’t even started to work yet, not that she needed them.

            My first memory is from before I was a year old.  I remember her holding me in her arms, rocking me to sleep.  Mom was singing an old Fleetwood Mac song to me; I found out later it was “Landslide.”  I always found this odd because Mom never really listened to pop music.  I never got a chance to ask her if there was any hidden significance to this.  You know why, but I’m trying to write this in chronological order, so I’ll talk more about that later.

            Being such a good girl, I potty trained myself before I was a year old.  Another of my oldest memories is of splashing around in the toilet, happy as a clam while Mom and Dad look down at me, laughing to the point they cried.  Mom picked me out of the toilet, wrapped me in a towel and said, “Baby, that water’s not for playing in.”

            Mom always called me “baby” even after I was no longer a baby.  At first this annoyed me because like every little girl I thought I was practically an adult.  We were shopping in the supermarket when I was three when I threw my only tantrum.  Mom held up a bag of frozen peas and said, “Do you want peas for dinner tonight, baby?”

            I stamped my foot and shouted, “Stop calling me a baby!  I’m twee yeaws owd!”  [I’m trying to capture phonetically how my childhood lisp sounded, but this may not be entirely accurate.]

            Mom didn’t hit me or even look embarrassed.  She was always cool under pressure.  She knew that on those rare occasions when I got angry, she could appeal to my sense of reason.  She bent down and said, “You’ll always be my baby.  No matter how big you get, you’ll always be my baby.”  I cried and apologized to her.  She picked me up to hug me and then asked as calmly as if nothing had happened, “Do you want peas tonight?”

            I always think Mom wanted another baby.  She came from an old-school Catholic family where before her generation, six children was the minimum.  Even Grandma Emily had four children, though only Aunt Gladys and my mother survived.  But coming from an old-school Catholic family, Mom didn’t want to get pregnant before she was married and she didn’t get married until she was thirty-two.  I came along a year later and I think Mom knew I was such a handful that she didn’t want to have another child until I was well-adjusted.

            I’m sorry to digress again.  When I said that I was a handful, I don’t mean in the traditional sense.  I only threw that one tantrum in the supermarket.  The rest of the time I was quiet, cheerful, and obedient.  I could read by the time I was two years old.  By the time I was three I could read at an adult level.  Mom took me to the Parkdale library every week, following behind me with a basket to carry the books, most of which I couldn’t lift myself yet.  When the Parkdale library ran out, we began taking the bus into the city to get books from the Rampart City library.  Browsing those rows of dusty old books for me felt like when other kids went to the toy store.

            I might have become a librarian if not for that visit to the Plaine Museum.  This was a special treat because Daddy had just been made a full partner in his accounting firm.  I don’t know whose idea it was to go, but I suspect it was Mom’s.  She knew from all those trips to the libraries that I loved to learn.

            Every time I go through the main doors of the Plaine Museum I feel three years old again.  I look up at the vaulted ceiling with the light pouring through it and it seems so impossibly far away.  (I’ve never been religious, but I’ve always thought this must be what it feels like for people to walk into a grand old cathedral like Notre Dame or maybe the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.)  Daddy picked me up and put me on his shoulders as we went up to the ticket counter.  I tried to reach the ceiling, but it was still so far away.

            Daddy carried me over to Alex the mastodon’s skeleton.  There are a lot of other creatures bigger and more impressive than a mastodon—a Tyrannosaurus Rex for example—but to me at the time Alex was so impossibly huge that I didn’t think anything like that could possibly exist.  So I asked Daddy if I could touch it.  “Sorry, honey, it’s not allowed.”

            There was a nice old janitor who worked there named Percival Graves who changed my life forever that day.  He was sweeping at the time and he must have heard me.  He came up to stand by my parents and slyly said that he needed to sweep up by Alex.  He conveniently lowered the velvet rope so that Daddy could get close enough for me to touch Alex’s tusk.  I marveled at how cold it felt, but I knew then that Alex was real.  And though I didn’t really understand it at the time, I knew I wanted to spend my life unraveling mysteries like what happened to the mastodons.

            People ask me all the time why I study meteors.  Sometimes they ask this politely and sometimes they ask it because they want to know why someone so gifted is wasting her life looking at rocks when I should be curing cancer or something like that.  Usually I just tell them that I think meteors are interesting.  The better explanation is that meteors are like Alex’s tusk:  part of something so much greater and yet something that we don’t fully understand.  Meteors help us to understand our planet, our solar system, and our universe.  If we can ever understand those, we’ll be able to figure the rest out.

            That might be more poetic than what you’re looking for here.  Science is the one thing that I find I can get poetic about.  Ever since that day in the Plaine Museum I’ve been in love with science, with the study of new ideas… 

            …I think Mom thought I loved science a little too much.  When other kids went to the park they would play on the equipment or play games with the other kids.  I sat on a blanket, reading a book.  One time a little girl asked me to play with them.  I didn’t really want to, but Mom encouraged me.  They were going to play hide-and-go-seek.  They all laughed at me when I asked how to play.  The girl who’d invited me over explained the rules and then declared that I would be “it.”  I had to count to a hundred and then go look for them.  This I did so easily and matter-of-factly that the other children accused me of cheating.  This upset me, because to me cheating was akin to lying, something I never, ever did.  I ran crying back to Mom and we went home.  No one asked me to play at the park again…

            …Even though I was only four, my parents enrolled me in kindergarten.  If they had the money, my parents might have enrolled me in a fancy private school, but even as a full partner, Daddy wasn’t rich and Mom had given up her chair with the opera company to raise me.  So I went to the local public school.  I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into.  I thought it would be fun.

            It wasn’t fun, at least not at first.  The other kids made fun of me for being little, for having red hair, and for having a lisp.  Mom had tried to prepare me for this, telling me that I should be nice to the other kids, to give them a chance.  They didn’t give me a chance, essentially shunning me after that.  I didn’t do myself any favors by answering the teacher’s questions honestly.  It wasn’t until later in life that I learned intelligence isn’t always valued.

            So I guess it made sense for Becky and I to become friends.  She was just as much of an outcast as I was.  She was fat even for a five-year-old.  Her pigtails were always crooked because her older sister did them.  Her clothes—handed down from her thinner sister—didn’t fit.  The other kids would have ridden her mercilessly if not for having a better target in me.

            I didn’t set out to make friends with Becky.  It was just a coincidence that the teacher chose chocolate chip cookies for our snack.  I’m allergic to chocolate—which I found out when I was two when Aunt Gladys brought me a box of chocolate-covered crickets from Africa—so I thought I would offer them to Becky because she looked sad. 

            We didn’t hit it off right then.  That came when the other children wouldn’t let me nap near them, saying that I would probably wet myself.  Becky stood up for me, the first of many times that she did so.  We’ve been friends ever since…

            …We’re finally getting up to the moment you probably will concern yourself with the most.  Over the years I’ve thought about the sequence of events leading up to that event and I’ve marveled at how the slightest events can bring about something so tragic.

            It all started with a lamp.  When I was five Mom gave me a lamp, the base of which was shaped like a cat in a ballerina costume.  I think she gave it to me because I had made a friend and had proven that I could be a normal little girl.  Most people would probably think the lamp tacky, but it was one of Mom’s most cherished possessions.  Grandma Emily had given it to her when she was a little girl after Mom said she wanted to be a ballerina.  (Ultimately, since Mom didn’t have the body of a dancer, she had learned to play the music the ballerinas danced to.)  Her passing it on to me was in her mind a sort of rite of passage.  I didn’t really understand the significance, but I knew there was something important about it.

            I didn’t mean to break the lamp.  Sometimes, though, late at night, I’ll wonder if maybe I had some subconscious desire to hurt Mom.  I don’t think so.  I think it was just an accident.  I was reading late, I took off my glasses to put on the nightstand, and then I tipped it over.  Another child would have tried to cover up the evidence, but I went to my parents’s bedroom and knocked on the door—not because I worried they were having sex but because I was polite.  Mom opened the door and asked what was wrong.  “I broke your lamp.  I’m sorry.”

            When Mom ran into the bedroom I sensed this was worse than I’d thought.  I found Mom in the bedroom, kneeling over the pieces.  She held the cat’s head and shoulders in her hand while she cried.  “Mommy, are you all right?”

            She wasn’t angry with me, though I wished she had been.  Instead she turned to me and said, “Oh, Emma, how could you?”  It was the first time I’d really hurt my mother.  She had thought I was responsible enough to care for her most cherished childhood possession—I wasn’t.

            I had never been grounded before.  I didn’t even understand the concept.  For most kids that would have meant no television or video games.  I didn’t watch TV—except for the occasional PBS documentary—and we didn’t have a video game system.  For me, grounding meant that I would be limited to books for my schoolwork and I couldn’t play with Becky for two weeks.  (Becky still came over to watch TV—Mom didn’t want to punish her for my mistake.)

            I was still angry about this when Jimmy Gates showed up at lunch.  He was the bully in our third grade class, thanks to being held back due to his poor grades.  Usually Becky and I would surrender our lunches to him for him to take what he wanted, which was never much since Mom only packed healthy foods for Becky and I.

            That day I decided I wasn’t going to give in to him anymore.  I fought back.  At first I was winning, having taken him by surprise.  While I was tall for my age, I was still the youngest in the class and thus he probably thought I was the weakest, the one who wouldn’t try to fight back.  Once he recovered from this initial shock, the fight turned his way.

            It wasn’t a surprise that Jimmy carried a switchblade; Becky and I had seen him showing it to other kids.  It did come as a surprise that he would use it on me.  I don’t think he wanted to kill me, just to scare me.  First he wanted to humiliate me by cutting off one of my pigtails to keep as his trophy.  What he planned to do after that I have no idea.  Probably he would have just threatened me with the knife.  At most he might have made a superficial cut to make me bleed a little, to get me to scream.

            Once again Becky came to my defense.  She couldn’t beat Jimmy, so she ran and got the teacher, who managed to stop the fight.  But for me that wasn’t the end of it.  I cried all the way home.  Mom thought I was worried about how my hair would look, promising that we would get it cut so no one would notice.  And to some extent she was right; as a little girl I was vain about my red hair because it was unique and therefore special—like me.

            What most bothered me was realizing my own mortality.  My parents had always kept a buffer between me and Mr. Death.  My grandparents all were dead before I was born.  Of my other in-laws, Aunt Gladys was the only one who ever came to visit, the rest having disowned my parents for turning their backs on their separate faiths.  Aunt Gladys was always healthy and vibrant and even though she was older than Mom, she never seemed old.  My parents didn’t let me have any pets, I think because they knew how upset I would be should my doggy or kitty get sick or die.  So I was completely unprepared to deal with the thoughts that popped into my head about what Jimmy might have done to me with the knife.

            It was because I was so distraught over this that Mom rescinded the grounding.  At that point it didn’t matter since I was spending all of my time in bed, most of that sleeping and the rest of it crying.  The lisp I had worked to get rid of in first grade returned.  I developed bad habits I had never exhibited before like wetting the bed.  I refused to go outside.

            With me rapidly becoming an eight-year-old agoraphobic, could anyone blame her for trying to get me out of the house?  She knew the carrot to dangle in front of me:  science.  Dr. Cathy Gerritt was giving a lecture at the planetarium called “The Big Bang:  New Revelations on Old Science.”  Mom knew I had a copy of Dr. Gerritt’s book; she had bought it for my seventh birthday.  She was right that I couldn’t turn down an opportunity like this.

            As I said, I was vain about my hair in those days.  Mom took me to her salon, where they tried to balance my hair out, but the end result was so short that I looked like a boy.  I might have canceled except Daddy had already bought the tickets and I really did want to go.  To try and assuage my fears, Mom dressed me in my nicest dress, the pink one I wore to birthday parties and such—on those rare instances when I was invited.  She even managed to get a bow in my short hair.  “No one will think you’re a boy now,” she said and I agreed.

            The presentation itself went fine.  Mom made sure we got seats up front so that I wouldn’t have to try seeing over the grown-ups.  The deference the adults showed me I attributed to being a kid.  The other explanation came later when Mom took me up to have Dr. Gerritt sign my book.  Dr. Gerritt is a very nice woman—I still see her sometimes at conferences—and I know she didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.  And really it was a simple mistake to make; with my short hair and pasty redhead complexion, anyone could have made the same mistake.

            I turned shy as we went on the stage, so that Mom had to speak for me.  She asked Dr. Gerritt if she could sign the book for me.  Dr. Gerritt agreed and signed it.  Then she complimented me on being such a brave little girl.  I might have thought nothing of this if she hadn’t mentioned how her niece had leukemia and was confined to bed.

            A mistake like that wouldn’t have bothered me these days.  But back then I was feeling insecure because of my vanity.  On the way home I cried.  I didn’t want to go back to school because I knew the kids there would make fun of me for how I looked.  It was because I was so upset that I was lying on the backseat when it happened.

            The car hit Daddy’s side, hitting him almost straight on.  If I had been sitting up, I would have been forced to see him die.  As it was, I only had to see the aftermath, of him slumped over the steering wheel.  I saw the blood and feared the worst.  Mom tried to comfort me, telling me that Daddy was just taking a nap.

            What she did next saved my life.  She told me to lie down and no matter what not to move or make a sound.  I don’t know if she knew what would happen, but I think maybe she had some idea.  She tried to sound cheerful, saying that she was just going to make a phone call.  She never came back.  They shot her so that she couldn’t call the police.

            I heard the gunshots.  I had never heard a gun before, but I knew that’s what these were.  And I knew who had been shot.  I knew Mom was dead just like I knew Daddy was dead.  I didn’t scream or jump out of the car, though.  I was a good girl…

Tales of the Scarlet Knight: The Timeline

In case you've been wondering when everything in the series takes place, here's a breakdown, though the dates are not exact.  Really when I wrote most of the series in 2009-2010 I backdated it so the entire series would end at what was almost present day back then.  I did have to write all this out at some point to keep track of how old characters were supposed to be for each story.  I wish I could find those notes since I had it all worked out with how much time passed during the stories so it would be more exact.  But for now I'll just wing it.




Volume 0:  Dark Origins:  Circa 2000 BC or BCE or however they say it nowadays
Volume 1:  A Hero's Journey:  August 2000
Volume 2:  Time Enough to Say Goodbye:  +18 months May 2002
Volume 3:  The Hazards of Love:  +42 months September 2005
Volume 4:  Change of Heart:  +9 months June 2006
Volume 5:  Imperfect Love: +12 months June 2007
Volume 6:  Future Shock: +6 months December 2007 (though much of the story is +20 years and other parts are -54 years)
Volume 7:  Living Sacrifice: +24 months January 2010
Volume 8:  The Heart of Emma Earl: +0 January 2010

A couple of important dates for the series:
October 31, 1980:  Emma Earl's birthday
October 31, 1979:  Becky Beech's birthday 

A HERO'S JOURNEY: THE ILLUSTRATED CHAPTER 3

As promised here's Chapter 3!  This is the last chapter I can legally post, so there won't be any more.  You'll just have to buy the book to read the rest!  Anyway, this one I think is another shorter one.  Becky finally gets into the story, as does Detective Donovan.  Hooray!  That's pretty much all the main players.
#

Chapter 3

While at Northwestern, Emma had taken up jogging to help keep her body in shape and her mind clear.  A break from the books and the lab sometimes helped her to gain perspective on things.

She hadn’t gone jogging since returning to Rampart City.  Becky had cautioned her against running in the neighborhood—unless someone was chasing her—and to avoid Robinson Park, which had become a hangout for the various gangs in the city.  But it would probably be safe enough to run around the block near the museum.

Emma Earl

She had prepared for this contingency, bringing her running clothes with her.  She changed into the purple Northwestern T-shirt that had become faded and stained with sweat from repeated use and a pair of yellow shorts that helped her remain visible in the early morning or evening.  From her purse she also took out a pair of prescription sports goggles so her glasses wouldn’t fall off and break.

She used the staff elevator down to the first floor and then snuck out the back door.  At a park bench, she began to stretch out her muscles so she wouldn’t pull anything.  As she stretched her quads when she heard a familiar voice.  “Getting a little exercise?” Dr. Dreyfus said.

She turned around and saw him dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and goggles as well.  In his case the T-shirt was a gray Cornell one and his shorts bright red.  The shorts gave her a good view of his muscular calves, especially when he began to stretch next to her.  She felt her cheeks turn warm at this.  “You too?” she asked.

Dan Dreyfus

“Oh, sure.  Don’t want to get soft.”

“No, I guess not.”

"Not that you have to worry about that.  You could probably put on a few pounds.”  Dr. Dreyfus looked down at his feet; his cheeks turned red as well.  “I didn’t mean that you’re too thin, like anorexic or anything.”

“No, it’s fine.  I know what you meant.”

“Would you mind if I run with you?  Safety in numbers.”

“Sure,” she said.  As they set out, though, she kept her eyes on her feet, so she wouldn’t trip over them and embarrass herself in front of him.

“How do you like this place so far?” he asked.

“I love it.  I’m very happy to be here.”

“The pay isn’t the greatest, but it’s a really respected organization,” he said.  He easily kept pace with her.  “That’s the kind of thing that looks good on your résumé later on.”

“I’m not planning on going anywhere.”

Dr. Dreyfus nearly tripped over his feet and blushed again.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it quite like that.  I just meant if you ever want to work anywhere else, this will be good experience.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“About five years.  Most of that was in the field, though.”

“In Egypt?”

“That’s right.”

“You were the one who found Karlak II?”

“Not just me personally.  The whole team was involved, but yes.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“It was.”  They rounded a corner and weaved through a group of people at a bus stop.  “I was starting to think I wouldn’t find anything and the director would fire me.  Then one day we brushed aside some dirt and found the entrance to the tomb.  It was there the whole time, pretty much beneath our noses.”

“That’s great,” Emma said.  She had found some meteor fragments in Montana during her fieldwork for her doctorate, but that had been a relatively minor discovery.

“Yeah, and what’s even better is now the whole world is going to find out about it.  When people think about Egypt, all they think of is the pyramids and mummies.  Now we can tell them the whole story from the beginning.”

She admired how passionately Dr. Dreyfus cared about this, how evident his love for this ancient culture was.  She felt that way about meteors, about how they broadened human understanding of the universe.  This made her think of the strange black object Dr. Dreyfus had brought to her.  That might really broaden human understanding of the universe—if she could figure out what the heck it was.

“So you’re going through with the exhibit now?” she asked.

“Now that we have Karlak’s sarcophagus, yes.  It won’t be quite as good as I’d hoped, but it should still be pretty impressive.”  She almost tripped over Dr. Dreyfus when he came to a stop. 

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, nothing like that.  It’s just that before we open the exhibit to the public, there’s going to be a charity preview.  On Saturday night.  I thought if you didn’t have any plans, you might like to go with me.”

Emma stared at him; her eyes widened behind the goggles.  Was he asking her out on a date?  Interoffice romances were against the museum’s policies; she could quote the page to him from memory.  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.  “Dating a coworker is against the rules.”

“Oh, right, that’s true.  But it doesn’t have to be a date, does it?  You could go as a colleague.”

“I don’t know—”

“Come on, it would let me pay you back for the work you’ve done on that thing.”

She considered this for a moment.  It did sound like fun, especially with Dr. Dreyfus.  And yet there would probably be a lot of her coworkers there; she and Dr. Dreyfus could both be fired.  But if they weren’t going as a couple, just as colleagues—

“I suppose that would be all right,” she said.  “Just as colleagues, though.”

“I understand.”  He gave her one of those smiles that reduced her to a pool of jelly.

With that settled, they resumed their run in silence.  They reached the bench where they started at the same time.  In most everything they seemed evenly matched, as if meant for each other.

***

The office for Roy Lintner’s mayoral campaign was just as two-faced as the man himself.  The main office—the one for show—was in an abandoned store on the ground floor of the Archlinger Building across from City Hall.  This office had a select few people on phones and lots of signs, patriotic bunting, and balloons.

Becky Beech

The real office was down in the basement.  That was where the grunt work was done by lowly “volunteers” like Becky Beech.  Here they worked at rusty metal desks dating from World War II to stuff envelopes and make phone calls.  Becky didn’t have a pleasant enough voice for phone calls, so she stuck to filling envelopes.  It was a monotonous task, especially with only the dim fluorescent lights overhead.  The checks she received every two weeks and the promise of three credits towards her political science degree made the drudgery slightly more worthwhile.

A few of the other “volunteers” had already defected from the campaign.  They were the lucky ones, Becky thought as she stuffed another envelope that would probably wind up in the trash.  This meant more work for her to try and keep up with Lintner’s impossible demands.  Rampart City had a population of nearly nine million and apparently he wanted to send a brochure to every one of them.

Connie

“You’re still here?” Becky asked Connie, with whom she shared the desk.

“Until the bitter end,” she said.  “It’s better than nothing.”

“True.” 

“Lintner treats us like shit, but at least he doesn’t grab our asses like my last boss.”

“He probably does that to the girls upstairs.”

As they laughed at this, the front door burst open.  Police clad in bulletproof vests and with handguns at the ready swarmed through the door.  At the head of them was a woman with short dark hair and blue eyes that seemed focused on Becky.  “Everyone stay where you are and put your hands up.  This is a raid,” the woman said.  The uniformed officers behind her began to scatter around the room.

“What’s going on here?” Becky asked.

“Are you Roy Lintner or his chief of staff?”

“No—”

“Then shut up, Fatty.”

“Fatty?”  Becky leaped to her feet and glared back at the woman.  “Why you—”

Det. Donovan

She didn’t get a chance to finish as the woman came around the desk and pinned Becky’s arm behind her in the blink of an eye.  The cop leaned Becky forward, so that her head was on a pile of envelopes to be sealed.  “Listen up, Tubby,” the woman hissed.  She produced a badge that identified her as Detective Charlotte Donovan of the Rampart City Police Department.  “Unless you want to go to jail, keep your mouth shut.”

“Let her go,” Connie said.  “She didn’t do anything.”

“Keep out of this, Short Stuff,” Detective Donovan hissed.

“You hurt her, and I’ll report you to your supervisors.”

For a moment Becky thought Donovan would put a bullet in both of them.  Instead, the detective let her up.  “Get your asses onto the loading docks.”  Detective Donovan raised her voice.  “That goes for all of you.  Get on the loading dock until we’re done.”  She turned to one of the uniformed cops.  “Sergeant, get a couple guys and watch them.  They so much as sneeze, put a bullet in them.”

Becky wanted to argue, but she knew the Rampart City Police Department by reputation.  They made the LAPD look like Boy Scouts.  There might have been more angst in the city, except the cops didn’t discriminate when it came to police brutality.  Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or anything else wouldn’t matter to them; be at the wrong place at the wrong time and you’d wind up eating a baton. 

That this same Rampart City Police Department hadn’t ever found who killed Emma’s parents didn’t endear them to Becky either.  The cops had of course promised to do everything in their power, though in a city as large and ridden with crime as this one, it was almost impossible to find two killers without a positive ID.

The cops herded them onto the loading dock, where they milled about like cattle as they waited for the raid to be over.  Becky wasn’t a crime expert, but even she knew what they wanted:  Lintner’s campaign finance records.  They were probably looking for illegal donations on a tip from Lintner’s opponent, not that he needed to stoop to that to defeat Lintner at this point.

Roy Lintner

She heard Lintner well before she saw him.  “What the hell is going on here?” he roared.  After a moment of silence, Lintner said, “That’s crazy!  Everything I’ve done is perfectly legal.”

There were a few more minutes of silence before Lintner appeared on the loading dock, his face even redder than usual.  “All right, you assholes, get back to work!  We’ve still got a campaign to win!”

As was their style, the police had left the office a complete mess.  “Goddamned cops,” Connie muttered as they set to work on cleaning up.

“Thanks for sticking up for me,” Becky said.

“It’s all right.  I know how these people are.  Bunch of cowards.”  They finished cleaning up around their desk in silence.  Then Connie asked, “You want to get a drink after work?  I could really use one after this.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t.  I’m meeting a friend for dinner.”

“A boyfriend?” Connie asked with a mischievous grin.

“No, my friend Emma.  She’s my roommate now too.”

“She could come with us.”

Becky shook her head.  “Emma doesn’t drink.  And she wouldn’t like me drinking either.”

“She religious or something?”

“Nothing like that,” Becky said.  She tried to think of how to explain it.  “She’s nice, if you know what I mean.”

“Kind of a goody-two-shoes?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” Becky said.  “She’s kind of shy too.  She wouldn’t like it if I sprung a stranger on her.”

“That’s all right.  Another time, then.”

“Sure,” Becky said and then they got back to work.

***

They met at a restaurant in Rampart City’s Chinatown.  Emma wasn’t strictly a vegetarian, but she avoided meat because of the fat and calories.  So while Becky ordered a plate of cashew chicken, Emma ordered stir fried vegetables and rice.

Becky took a sip of her Pepsi and then said, “The police paid Lintner’s office a little visit today.”

Emma nearly spat out a mouthful of tea.  “The police?  What for?”

“I’m not sure.  They weren’t too forthcoming.”

“Was anyone arrested?”

“Not yet.  This apparently was more of a search and seizure thing.”

“That’s terrible.  Are you going to quit?”

Becky shrugged.  “I doubt it.  I have to stick this out until the end if I want those credits.”

“Maybe if you talk to your professor you can still get the credits, or you can work for someone else.  There are other candidates, aren’t there?”

“It’s a little late for that.”  Becky took another sip of her drink and then smiled.  “Hey, don’t worry about it.  It’s not me they’re after.  And I doubt Lintner is going to shoot it out with them.”

Emma tried not to let the awful memories surge back to the surface.  “No, I suppose not.”

“How about we talk about something happier?  How are things going at the museum?”

“Fine,” Emma said.  She forced a smile to her face.  “One of my coworkers asked me to go with him to a presentation on Saturday night.”

“Like a date?” Becky asked.

Emma’s face turned warm at this; she tried to calm herself with a sip of tea.  “It’s not a date.  We’re just going as colleagues.”

“But you’re going together?”

“Yes.”

“And will there be dinner and dancing?”

“Maybe dinner, but I don’t think there will be any dancing.”

“Still sounds like a date to me.”

“It’s not like that.  Dr. Deyfus and I are just colleagues.”

“So why did he ask you to go with him?  Is he married or something?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you like him?”

“He’s a very nice man.”  The realization of what she’d said set in as Becky grinned.  “But it’s not like that!”

Becky reached across the table to pat Emma’s arm.  “Come on, I’m just teasing.  I think it’s great you’ve got a friend—or colleague, whatever you want to call it.”

“Thanks.”  They ate their dinner with just some idle conversation about the election and the museum.  They stayed away from the police raid and the presentation to avoid any more awkward moments. 

They took the bus home, Emma too tired to go out to Parkdale to visit Aunt Gladys and Mr. Graves tonight.  Though she usually didn’t watch television, she sank into one of the beanbag chairs in the living room, Becky in the one next to her.  They watched An Affair to Remember, an old movie they had watched a number of times growing up.  Only this time Emma cast herself as Deborah Kerr and Dr. Dreyfus as Cary Grant.  Becky fell asleep halfway through, before the final kiss at the end.  Emma closed her eyes and imagined what Dr. Dreyfus’s lips would feel like when pressed to hers.