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ISSN 1757-5419 Issue 27 – 2015 Edited by Sheri White
Editorial By Sheri White
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House of the Immortals By Evan Hanson Kells Illustrated By Joe Young
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After Life By Zed Amadeo Illustrated By Jeffrey James Oleniacz
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When Death Takes Hold By Ian Sputnik
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Revival is Waiting By Dave Henry
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Tristan’s Equation By Erik Hofstatter
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And Drown Melancholy By Scarlett R. Algee Illustrated By ODESSOS
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A Quiet Place By Brad Galloway
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Officer Material By Anthony J. Langford
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XMAS By Calvin Demmer
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Cover By - Maggie Ivy - www.maggieivy.com Proof-read By Sheri White All material contained within the pages of this magazine and associated websites is copyright of Morpheus Tales. All Rights Reserved. No material contained herein can be copied or otherwise used without the express permission of the copyright holders.
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Ray wanted to sound intimidating. But when he opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was a long, wheezing cough. The same one that had plagued him for weeks. The saffron-robed monk seated before him waited patiently while Ray gathered himself. “Do you know why I’m here?” Ray finally asked. The monk smiled. “Certainly not for the climate,” he answered. Ray felt hot rage kindle in his gut. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed his watering eyes. Then he put it away, drew his pistol, and pointed it at the monk’s face. “I’ll ask again. Do you know why I’m here?” The monk sighed. “Of course. You want the elixir.” “It’s real?” “As real as anything else. I made some this morning, just for you.” “How’d you know I was coming?” “I have informants in the village. Whenever strangers ask about the monastery, they tell me.” Ray sneered. Monastery was far too nice a word for this dump. He sat inside the leastdecrepit of three ancient stone buildings ringed by a ridiculously high wall pocked with tattered, faded prayer flags. That morning he’d hiked two miles from the nearest town, struck an enormous bell outside the compound’s metal gate and waited. It seemed like forever. The bitter mountain wind sliced through his frail body and the thin air tortured his failing lungs. It occurred to him, as he stood there, that he hadn’t the strength to get back to the village. If no one answered his call he was finished. But someone finally did. With a loud groan the gate opened. The monk helped Ray indoors, where they now sat on opposite sides of a rough wooden table. His host gave him a cup of tea – Western style, not that horrible, stomach-turning butter tea the locals drank. Ray savoured its warmth, rested until he felt a bit like his old self, then pulled his pistol and got down to business. “You all alone up here?” he asked. “Not entirely. There are others. More than you’d think. Most of this complex is underground. Would you like a tour?” “No thanks. I’ve seen enough Buddhist crap.” “This isn’t a Buddhist temple. Far from it. But it suits us for outsiders to mistake it for one. If I may ask, how did you hear about us?” Ray flashed back six months to a seedy New Jersey hotel room where he’d cornered a guy who’d skipped out on a gambling debt. Ray recalled the man’s expression when he shot him in the left leg. The memory made him smile. “I can trade for my life,” the man gasped as he lay crumpled on the threadbare carpet. “I know the secret of immortality. I really do.” Ray enjoyed listening to people plead for their lives, so he let his victim talk. His prey told him that while visiting Nepal on a “spirit journey” he heard about a place in the mountains where the residents live forever. He hiked to within sight of its walls, then lost his nerve and turned back. “I took a GPS reading,” the man said desperately. He extracted a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and offered it to Ray. “Please,” he said. “For my life.” Ray shot him twice in the chest. Then, for reasons that still eluded him, he picked up the paper and tucked it in his wallet. The note rode around with him for weeks, ignored. He fished it out shortly after his doctor told him he had advanced, inoperable lung cancer. Ray decided, then and there, to pay this place a visit. Because a long shot was his only shot. 3
When he finally pulled the trigger, only I knew why. His death was all the community talked about for the longest time. Yet out of all of the family members and acquaintances mourning his loss, no one knew the truth except for me. Not even his parents could explain what had led up to his final, fatal action. Everyone had always called Frank a freak. I was the one who had the honour of calling him a friend. Most people thought that he was just being difficult. They saw Frank as a teenage boy who didn’t get enough attention from his parents, leaving him desperate enough to make up the wild stories that he told. Frank and I met in an afterschool program for students who needed extra help to get their schoolwork done. We wound up there for different reasons. He couldn’t concentrate during the day because he could never get a good night’s rest. I had trouble getting work done because my anxiety disorder was too busy cramming my mind with uncontrollable, disquieting thoughts. Regardless of the reasons, we were brought together by our shared label of “weirdo,” given to us by our peers. Our initial bonding experience consisted of us discussing our insomnia: he lying awake at night because he was too afraid of what sleep would bring; I unable to sleep because I couldn’t take my mind off of whatever terrible event might happen to me the next day. Frank told me his true story during one of those sessions. Just like everyone else, I didn’t believe him at first. Not until he started coming to school day after day, week after week, with the same distraught look in his eyes. Most kids cry when they go to bed because they’re afraid of the boogeyman. Frank cried because he knew that it would only be a matter of time before his horrific night-time experiences would begin. Doctors had given him various diagnoses over the years to explain his insomnia, none of which provided a satisfactory explanation for his affliction. As a child, he often dreamed of people suffering some injury, whether by accident or at the hand of someone else. His “gift” worsened with age, and the terrors he saw matured as he did. Before he died, he was regularly seeing bloody murders or graphic violence. The one thread tying his visions together was that he never recognized the people within them. He thought that he had only been having vivid nightmares, and didn’t realize that he was seeing the future until a news story about a solved murder matched one of the visions he had experienced many months prior. He was never able to connect all of his nightmares to actual events, and after a certain point, he stopped trying. As a teenager, he had made the futile realization that it didn’t matter what he did with the information his dreams revealed to him. They were never specific enough in time or place to allow him to help anyone. Frank called his experiences “nightmares,” although that was a false term. His visions were never confined to the night. If he closed his eyes for too long during the day, or allowed himself to drift off in class from lack of sleep the night before, he would soon jerk awake under the weight of his visions. I could never fully empathize with his struggles, but as his only friend, I felt the strongest sympathy. That day Frank had come into school looking as dishevelled as he usually did. He spent the entirety of class staring forward with his eyes glazed over. At the end of the day, just as everyone else was gathering their things to go, he turned to me. “I finally understand,” he said. “Understand what?” I asked. “There is no hope,” he continued. “For people like us. Not here. Not there. Nowhere.” “Frank,” I asked, “what are you talking about?” “I know what I’m supposed to do now,” he said. By then, the classroom was empty. “What did you see last night?” I asked him. 4
Adam stood on the riverbank and looked out across the water. It was choppy, and dark from the silt that had been deposited over the centuries in the large bowl of Black Water Cove. A natural dumping ground for the river’s waste just before the water ran out to sea, the large bend and thick growth of underwater foliage on this stretch sifting through the river’s flow and picking out the debris, like a fine comb. The only thing that made it look black was the moonless night. Black Water Cove, what a joke. It should’ve been called Brown/Green Water Cove, judging from the look of it by daylight. The rain had started beating down and the wind blew it into his face, each spray of water stinging his skin like a swarm of biting insects. He pulled his collar up around his neck—a mundane gesture considering his intentions on that dark, damp, miserable night. It was no coincidence that he should be looking out across the rolling waves of what the locals called Suicide Riviera. The bow in the river, married with the sudden drop in the river floor in this area, made for a treacherous expanse of water. Swimming was banned here, and for good reason. Over the decades many a hapless bather had been taken by surprise by the fast flow and violent undercurrents, and been dragged to the bottom to drown in its murky depths. Often, the bodies were never recovered; perhaps dragged out to sea, perhaps lying at the bottom of the dense mud- and reed-covered bed. This had attracted another kind of tourist: the suicidal type. On many occasions, the local authorities were called to the river’s edge to a pile of clothes, sometimes accompanied by a note, that had been found by an early-morning dog walker. Adam had lost his job several months ago. Streamlining, they had called it, though pennypinching was more like it. With the state of the economy, his prospects of finding any other employment were bleak at best. The ensuing financial difficulties in his life had caused much strain between him and his girlfriend, Sue. After weeks of arguing, it was no surprise when he returned home, from another fruitless mission to find work, to find her gone. He might have coped better with this if he could have talked his problems over, but Adam had no close family and had always found it difficult to make friends. He was very much a loner. Now he found himself looking out across this miserable scene, or as far out as the dark night would allow. His shoes were encased in mud, his jacket and trousers soaked in freezing cold rainwater. How many people had stood in this exact same spot, thinking the exact same thoughts, before taking their last steps into oblivion?
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The bottle of wine shattered across the faded hardwood floor, casting a puddle of merlot that resembled blood splattered during a murder scene. “It’s like none of this shit even matters.” He slammed his fist to the table. “What do you mean, Alex?” “All I try to do is get you to love me, and what do I get?” “I will try to learn.” “This isn’t about learning,” he said, wiping the blood from his knuckles. “This is about you and me, Mia!” “I will be sure to learn how—” “Stop!” Alex interrupted. Instantly, the android with coiled, auburn hair fell limp. She appeared comatose, lolled over the table. Her oceanic eyes blankly stared across the apartment. A short, orange sundress draped over her pallid, synthetic skin. The man sighed; the floorboards creaked with each step closer to the female android. He held her wrists and weighed the benefits and consequences of loving an android rather than a human. For three years, he comforted himself in the companionship of a programmed lover. He rubbed his temples, remembering the years before he purchased the android, when he meandered in a cypher of terminal relationships and perpetual sorrow. He recalled the tears he shed over decisions he never controlled. He reached toward the limp girl’s neck, opening a small hatch containing a processor. Diodes of light blinked across a spectrum of wires connecting surges from one circuit to another. He modified her systems in a futile attempt to replicate a sensation of love. He twisted a screw behind coloured wires with a fork from the table. Alex considered if he truly loved the android named Mia. Could someone actually love a robot? The idea seemed ridiculous, like loving a heap of scrap metal. Still, he could not deny the uncanny sensation he felt about her; a swelling tide of passion that swayed through love, lust, envy, and anger. If only the feeling were mutual instead of mired in uncertainty. He closed the panel on her nape. “Start!” The torso of the girl straightened, compressed, and relaxed. “I apologize, Alex. I did not mean to fall asleep.” “Perfectly fine,” he said, hovering over her shoulder. “I don’t mind.” ### Behind the veil of cobwebs in the dimly lit apartment, the couple watched television. A centipede crawled across the floor. Muffled voices could be heard through the thin walls. A commercial advertised surrogate robots that replaced dead relatives. “...you can’t even tell the difference,” the ad said. “And try our newest product that replicates emotion in the most stoic modes. Ask your Cybertrican Doctor today.” Alex reached for Mia’s hand; her palm felt cold and lifeless. She turned her head from the flashing pixels of the convex screen to Alex’s undefined expression that seemed to waver between depression and infatuation. “What are you thinking about?” Mia asked. “Nothing. Just... You understand how much I care about you, right?” “I understand that is my purpose. To care and be cared for.” “No, it’s more than just that...” Alex considered how he could convey both how he felt and explain the emotion to a machine with default memories and replicated behaviours. Would reprogramming her actually make her love him? If she were human she could understand what cannot be explained. “I need you, Mia. Every time I think of you I— Wait. Stop!” The girl slipped into a catatonic idle. 6
Tristan’s eyes snapped shut. His clammy palms cupped over his ears—slowly anticipating the dreadful announcement. Every three minutes for the last four hours, the transistor radio located on the top shelf (and out of his short reach) would broadcast a sequence of numbers. A sequence that he loathed—a sequence that drove him insane. The cacophonous speaker rattled and a thunderous voice proclaimed the following digits: (15,5,8, 9 – 10) Tristan pressed harder on his ears. Silence dominated all. The broadcast was over for the next three minutes. Eight-year old Tristan paced around the white room. Why are they repeating these numbers? What do they mean? Why am I here? What do they want me to do? He approached the mahogany desk, covered with all sorts of mathematical equations and calculations. He picked up one of the papers and looked at it again. It showed the following diagram:
Tristan blinked, attempting to re-focus his eyes. The drawing made no sense no matter how long or hard he stared at it. The strict voice repeated again: (15,5,8, 9 – 10) No! Please, no more... Tristan started to weep.
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The headache has lasted nineteen days. Nineteen days. Charlotte can count every one of them. It had started the day after she’d spiked her Coke a little too vigorously and stumbled into the pond at the company picnic: an insidious little pressure behind her eyes and above her upper teeth. Sinuses, she’d thought, the consequence of snorting out a noseful of stinking, muddy water. It had taken two days to get the gritty feeling out of her mouth and the eye-watering bouquet of algae and catfish out of her nasal cavities. By then, she’d realized it wasn’t her sinuses. ### Migraine. That’s been the consensus, over the last seventeen days, of two general practitioners and a neurologist. Charlotte’s inclined to agree with them; she doesn’t have the throatquivering nausea, not yet, but the auras are there, little flecks and zags of colour that flit in and out of the edges of her vision like UFOs, eluding her most concentrated efforts to focus on them, jiggling and dancing with every throb between her temples. The pain’s there too, rasping at the backs of her eyeballs, thrumming between her teeth, jackhammering the inside of her skull so hard she expects to blow out bone dust with every breath. The doctors’ solutions had been bed rest, Tylenol, and time; Charlotte’s boss had watched her zombie-shuffle into work, glazed and tightjawed, right up until yesterday and had suggested a week off instead. That suits Charlotte fine: it lets her sit home in constant dark and slug down the pain with booze and the oxycodone left over from last year’s dental surgery. Not the wisest combination, she knows, but it’s the only thing yet that’s even taken the edge off. Charlotte lolls in her overstuffed recliner, her third extra-tall double-strength rum and Coke close at hand, waiting for the pill she’d sucked down to kick in. The late-night news program is the only thing she’s found that isn’t too bright or too loud; she’s got the volume low, just enough to pick up, to occupy the one sliver of her brain that isn’t threatening to explode from her ears. Even now, at midnight, with all the blinds closed and all the lights off, she can only squint in agony at the screen for a second before giving up and closing her eyes. “Now for an update. Medical researchers believe they may have found a parasite responsible for the nation’s recent outbreak of drowning deaths. Some of the footage you’re about to see may be disturbing to some viewers.” Charlotte slits one puffy eye open, then the other. The news anchor is a bottle blonde with a weary gaze, and her voice has pitched up with urgency. Nearly two hundred people have drowned across the country in a month, all of them seemingly accidental, all baffling. There’d been talk about it at the office three weeks ago, when the number had been a few dozen, rumours and jokes about some secret cult urging its members to suicide in pools and bathtubs; she’d even had a few barbs thrown her own way after the pond incident, suggesting she circle her backyard pool with a padlocked fence just in case God or aliens gave her the urge. The scene switches to a bearded bald man, Dr Something-or-other, wearing a lab coat over his suit in a book-crammed office, and Charlotte tries to focus. “Surgeons have extracted worms from the brains of some recent victims.” His voice is flat with practice, and the scene cuts away, to the shore of a lake. Somewhere in Tennessee, if Charlotte’s cramping brain reads the caption right. The voiceover continues: “The specimens haven’t yet been positively identified, but there are early signs that they may be a species closely related to Spinochordodes tellinii, a hairworm known to cause similar behavior in ...”
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The pick struck the earth like a long thin needle breaking skin to provide badly needed relief only heroin could provide. Sarah hadn’t had any heroin for four years though, but she never forgot the relief it had brought her. David’s shovel scooped away the earth and he tossed it carelessly over his shoulder. The yard was empty, at least of living people. No one would care what they were doing. Standing like grey sentinels, only the stones bore witness to their task, watching as her pick broke up the earth above the grave and his shovel scooped away at the dirt. There were no sounds save their work and grunts—like lovers who had long ago lost their passion for each other and life. This was a quiet place. They had been digging for about an hour; they had sunk up to their knees in the hole. Thirsty, David went to get water from their cooler. Sarah wished he wouldn’t, every bottle of water was precious now, but there was no denying that they were working hard. Working hard or hardly working? It was one of those stupid jokes people would say back when there was time to make stupid jokes. “Here, you need some too,” David said. In one hand he held out the bottle of water, now half empty, and in the other was a packet of salt from the diner. “Take the salt too, it’ll help keep you hydrated.” Sarah didn’t want to stop, she didn’t want to take a break, not until the job was done but David insisted. Dropping the pick on the ground beside the hole she took the water and salt. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. She had always been convinced that if the world were going to end, it would end in winter, not in the middle of the hottest summer on record. David sat beside her, his bare arms shining. She could smell his body odor; it’d been a week since either of them had a shower. She saw his nose wrinkle when he got too close to her too. Clean, hot water would be her heroin now. They sat in silence. They worked in silence. Nothing needed to be said. Their plans for the future couldn’t be made until this was done. This last thing she had to see. Chunk! The shovel hit something solid. “We’re there,” David said. It didn’t need to be said, but perhaps he just needed to hear something, anything other than the rhythm of their work. It only took a few minutes of him scooping the dirt away from the coffin—it not being very big and all—until finally the top half showed clearly and could be opened.
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Based on a young soldier’s diary account during WWIII.
Be careful. They mould you into what they want. They’ll tell you anything, but not the real thing. Only the promise of adventure and glory. All for the honour of serving the good people of Earth. I was like a mouse wandering into a pack of feral cats. A misguided sacrifice. No wonder they kept the truth from us. The ground is sodden by the rain, if you can call that. Heavy condensation hangs perpetually in the air. It’s so thick you can almost swipe aside the beads. It’s constantly dripping into your eyes, but we are so dirty that if you touch your face, it risks infection. It’s part of the joke, you see. The on-going irony of this place. If you don’t possess one hundred percent vision, you’re thrusting your middle finger up at fate and no one is guileless enough to do that. Not now. You could tread on one of the aliens’ poisonous corpses half buried in the mud, or fall into a toxic pit. They’re everywhere, easily misconstrued for a puddle. The landscape is open, almost desecrated. Our pre-invasion bombardment had mostly cleared it of its twisted, almost poetically perverse vegetation. Personally I’d rather fall into a pit. Death comes quickly. They’re not deep enough to drown in, not the ones we know of anyway, but once that liquid shit gets onto you, it’s over in less than an hour, though we have heard of one poor bastard surviving an agonising nine hours. Yet, if you touch the flesh of an alien, dead or alive, the end waits patiently at the bottom of a slow hideous spiral that goes on for weeks. Our lab cats were still promising a cure but the boys had given up on that utopia. Promises are hollow. Maybe we should slap them with a bit of dead skin. I bet they’d work faster then. I stomp through the ooze, with barely enough energy to continue. I’m on second point. My buddy Haken is behind me to the right, but wide enough so I can just make him out. Behind him follows the infantry line all the way back, some thirty men and women. Anand is the only person ahead of me, a Roxi thrower in his hand. We have to be constantly alert. The aliens hide in tunnels. We discovered this the hard way. The entrances are disguised as liquid-filled pits, so we can’t take a chance with any of them. Many of the pits are real, but others have false bottoms. Can you believe that? Sneaky bastards. We halt as Anand arrives at another. I cover him, as does Haken. A long bluish jet of Roxi fuel squirts into the hole, igniting the strange matter inside and converting the pit into a phosphorous glow. It will radiate for hours. It’s peculiarly alluring, in the dull perpetual grey. My eye is drawn to the right. Something sticks up through the mud. It looks like a branch. But it’s not. It’s a leg, bent backwards. Once I identify it as human, I can easily distinguish the rest of the shape beneath the muck, like someone emerging out of a dark mist. It’s a female soldier. She’s young, like the rest of us. The back of her head is missing, as though sliced off. It rests neatly on the sludge, face up. I wonder if she had time to realise that she’d been hit. Her expression is calm. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know it was coming. I hope she didn’t. None of us expect to die, or least we didn’t when we first came here. Sure, we expected some casualties. We were told that there would be, but we didn’t expect this. To be honest, I don’t expect to survive. I just hope it’s quick, like her. A good soldier. She looks like she would have been a decent person too. We’ve lost so many. I’ve seen it. Bright, confident people in their prime, taken out in the most brutal of ways. Most were with the belief that they were doing the right thing. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like to listen to a buddy that you have laughed with and discussed the future with (you’ve got to try and hang onto something, no matter how bad it gets), only to hear their screams as the septic alien cells erode their muscles and into their bones. To top it all off, the Company won’t let us put them out of their misery. Their dying is the Will of God apparently and only He can take life. I’ve also seen others become indifferent and turn away from the suffering of a friend. I can’t do that. 10
Damian Pennington heard a commotion downstairs. He rolled out of bed, straightened his superhero pajamas, and traversed the dark passageway to the top of the staircase. He was filled with a mixture of both joy and disappointment when he recognized the booming laugh. It wasn’t Santa, it was his grandfather. He began his descent, only to stop a few steps down. His mother had told him to go to bed so that Santa would have time to bring his presents. He inhaled deeply as he summoned the courage to go on, but there was a slight wheeze when he breathed. He felt his pants’ pocket, but it was empty. He had forgotten his inhaler in his bedroom--another complication he didn’t need. His grandfather’s laugh bounced all along the walls up to him, and he wondered what he was missing out on. He forgot about his mother’s warning and his heavy chest, and continued on down. He turned into the living room, and couldn’t resist smiling. It was Christmas Eve, and the Christmas tree lights lit up the world around him—no darkness. To his surprise there were already presents all around the bottom of the tree. Damian figured Santa must have visited already. He looked on the table alongside the single-seat chair near the tree: the cookies and milk he’d placed out earlier were gone, confirming his conclusion. He looked back at the presents, wanting to do some scouting so that he would know exactly where his were when he woke up. He took a step forward, as his eyes sought the biggest of the lot. A hand gripped his shoulder. Damian turned around; his mother was standing behind him. Her pretend angry face was dialed into her visage, not her serious one, where her cheeks would flare red. “What are you doing out of bed?” she asked. “The presents are here, was Santa here?” “Yes, but it’s not too late for him to fetch them if you misbehave. Now tell me, what are you doing out of bed?” “I want to see Grandpapa.” His mother frowned. “Very well, but Damian, listen. There is an animal in the kitchen, and I do not want you touching it or getting too close under any circumstances, do you understand?” Damian nodded, then stopped. “But why?” “Your asthma for one, but also because the animal is very ill.” “What animal is it?” “Go look,” his mother said, shooing him along. “Remember: no touching. And then I want you straight off to bed. You hear me?” “Yes.” ### A potent medicinal smell singed the interior of Damian’s nostrils as he entered the kitchen. He saw his grandfather and his father seated at the far side of the kitchen table, near to the backdoor. They were looking down at something, oblivious to his appearance. He strained his neck as he tried to peer over the table to see what they were looking at, but it was no use. Another idea came to his mind. Damian snuck around the table, keeping low, while hoping to get a better view before his father noticed his presence. “Do you think he’ll make it?” his father asked. “Not sure,” his grandfather said, scrunching his shoulders. “I would have taken him to the veterinarian, but the storm has already hit town, don’t want to get stuck.” “Yeah.” “If he makes it through the night, I’ll take him first thing, hopefully everything will have cleared up by then.” 11
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