Wordsushi
award-winning author Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff
Reid Shows off his Kickass Shadow Falls T-Shirt!
Sep 2nd
Got an email from Shadow Falls fan Reid with this photo and this message “One of my favorite shirts to wear!”
Dude! That is just way too damn cool. I have a Shadow Falls T-shirt in black that I have worn out and I really like it in red so I think I’m going to have to order myself another one. I completely forgot these were available until now. I don’t make any money off them, I sell them for the lowest price Cafe Press will allow. Don’t feel like you need to buy one… unless you want to be kickass cool like Reid that is!
Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 20
Sep 2nd
CHAPTER 20
Miles stood at the edge of the settlement for hours, staring into the woods until his eyes went vacant and glassy. What he told nobody was that he was listening as the woods talked to him. Not a single person questioned the strange behavior. Miles had done the same thing nearly every day for seven years, ever since he had arrived here with Alyson.
Nearly everyone paid no mind to Miles because of the circumstances which had brought him here—the brutal death of his family and the four dozen members of their traveling party. Nonetheless it did not prevent most others in the settlement to consider Miles to be a bit strange. When called upon, Miles was a hard worker, often toiling in the vegetable fields for hours without a single complaint, but it was when they were in his company that many spoke in hushed voices that there was something about him that essentially gave them the creeps.
One man remarked to his wife that Miles had cried once for his slain parents, the day he arrived, but never did again afterwards.
In fact Miles had shunned closeness with anyone at the settlement, including Father Henri who made every attempt to be a surrogate father to the boy. Miles, however, chose to be distant, even refusing to learn the native language of his hosts. In this way he ensured that the only ones there who could communicate with him were Father Henri and his now nearly eight year-old sister Alyson.
And now that Miles had reached the age of seventeen, he had grown into a strapping young man and when he chose to go off into the woods for days by himself, nobody stopped him.
On these occasions, Father Henri would sit at night, sipping wine with a watchful eye to the woods for Miles’ return. Though he was unsure what the boy was doing, he was concerned. He had imagined on several occasions that Miles had been journeying back through the woods to the scene of the massacre. And though he himself had not ever gone, it was the day after Miles arrived that a small party of the men from the settlement made the trek to the spot Miles described in an attempt to find any other survivors.
What they had found were bodies torn to bits and a field full of four-legged and winged scavengers eager to fill their bellies with the flesh of the dead.
The clouds of blowflies that had accumulated and the decay of the corpses had made it difficult in some cases to tell man from woman. As they went from wagon to wagon the results were the same, appearing just as Miles had described.
They had even found the single victim who had died not by animal attack but by his own hand. Maggots crawled from the self-inflicted head wound and wriggled through the empty eye sockets in his skull.
Between them, the men could not decide if this one man had been lucky to take his own life or a coward for not trying to save the others.
Later they returned to the settlement and reported their findings to Father Henri. The priest asked the three men to never speak of what they had seen, certainly not to Miles. They all agreed it best be left to fade into memory.
But fade it did not, Father Henri feared. The strange boy he had partially raised was returning time and again to somehow commune with the spirits that the priest suspected haunted the boy to this day.
And even if he had known he had been even partially right, Father Henri still would not have been able to do anything to stop what was about to happen.
Once again, Miles stepped through the thicket and walked across the overgrown grass to the remains of his parents’ wagon. The seasons had ravaged it until all that remained was a rusted and rotted hulk sitting in the tall weeds.
There was no illusion in Miles’ mind. He looked out at the skeletal remains of the other wagons in the Majestyk’s party and did not see the vibrant faces that rode them when they were almost new. He saw the wrecks for what they were, splintered remnants of the past that would continue to fade with time until they were nothing but dust.
There was no nostalgia for this place, none whatsoever, for it was not the memories that brought Miles here, but the blood in the ground that had given it power. The bones of the dead had long since been dragged away, the flesh consumed but the blood of the innocent that had been spilled here in sacrifice acted like a magnet to Miles’ soul.
And over the years, as he grew older, that pull to this land grew stronger until it became the ever-consuming force of his life.
The face he wore around Father Henri and the others was a mask. They had proven very useful during a period of time when he had needed the food and shelter they could provide, but that time was soon coming to an end. He had chosen early on to not develop close relationships with those who he was certain would not live long enough to warrant the necessity.
And as dusk began to set, he stood in the field and could only imagine the thousands of lives before his family’s that had been taken here going back hundreds of years. People who had been held down onto the ground while their still beating hearts were carved out of their chests by high priests wielding razor sharp obsidian knives. Those who had been buried and burned alive, including children. The young were especially valued as sacrifices because they were thought to be pure and unspoiled and it was thought that the more they cried and wailed during their slow torturous death, the better the omen.
From his pocket he took his father’s kerchief, now slightly yellowed and wrinkled from age. What he had kept inside however, seemed as pristine as the day he’d obtained it. Gently, he picked up the single eye of his father, the one he had kept. He had given the second one to Alyson, who had shunned it for reasons Miles still did not understand.
He gazed into the eye, willing his mind to enter into the same visual pathways enchanted in the orb, to see that which his father had seen during the years preceding the journey to the new world—the same visions, Miles was convinced, contained the keys to unlock not only his destiny but that of every man, woman and child in the mortal world.
But hard as he tried, he could not bring forth the visions from the long-dead eye. The images his father had seen, that he knew his sister Alyson had seen as well, were eluding him now as they had his entire life. Frustrated, he wrapped his fingers around the eye and took a deep breath. Again he pulled every ounce of inner strength from within his body until his arms shook and his legs caved under him. Miles fell, the eye slipping from his hands onto the ground just inches away from where he lay, breathing heavily, his heart pounding with furious intensity inside his chest.
And it was there that he sobbed in the grass. The draw of this land was so great, like a giant magnet pulling upon every cell inside his body but the one thing that he felt lay behind destiny’s door continued to elude him. Inside his father’s eye was the portent of what was to come, the very thing he sacrificed his family and the families of those he brought with him on the Majestyk.
With the knife he had used all those years ago to remove those eyes from his dead father’s skull, the same knife that his father had used on him to slit the palm of his hand, Miles drew a pentagram in the dirt and placed himself inside. Again he focused his mind on the orb until the ache in his brain pounded so hard it forced him to his knees. There he stayed with his head hung low.
There had never been a moment in Miles; life quite like this, one where the feeling of utter failure washed over him with such totality.
“I’ve failed you,” he spoke out loud. Cupped in his hands, the eye rolled to its side so that only the veiny backside pointed toward Miles.
“Why do you cry?” the voice asked, startling Miles. He looked up. Silhouetted against the setting sun was the figure of what appeared to be a man coming toward him.
In the woods, Alyson carried a basket of freshly washed laundry as she walked the path back from the creek toward the settlement. Behind her rose the tuneful voice of Odile, the French girl who had found both her and Miles seven years ago in the woods. Over the years Alyson and Odile had become close friends. It was Odile who had taught Alyson her native language, though Miles did his best to make sure she learned her fair share of English, and it was Alyson whom Odile had grown to confide in and visa versa.
From Odile’s mouth came an old folk song, one about the plight of a washerwoman who ran off with a man who didn’t love her and Alyson began to laugh.
But no sooner did she start than her chuckle caught in her throat.
Miles is in danger! Go! Now! A voice in her head told her.
Before she could give it any thought she let the basket of clean wash fall to the ground and was running into the woods.
“Alyson!” Odile called after her, a little bit confused and very much concerned.
As the figure approached, Miles felt a sense of utter fear in the pit of his stomach unlike anything else he’d felt since that night his father dragged him away from the camp and into the woods.
The night of his trancendence, he often thought of it in his mind. He had never forgotten the feeling of being trapped inside the pentagram while his father chanted.
But now he again faced the unknown.
In the last seven years the voices, the ones that spoke to him from the woods, always seemed to guide him, to assure him that he would soon take his place in the changing of the world.
And as he remained frozen, on his knees, those very same voices seemed to all at once abandon him.
As did his breath for the air around him suddenly turned dry and hot, pushing toward him as if a furnace door had just been opened in his face. Each attempt Miles made to inhale seemed to burn his throat and nostrils, and it became quickly apparent that with each step the darkened figure took, the heated air Miles was breathing in was radiating from the dark figure’s body.
Miles tried to get up but his legs felt weak and useless. And suddenly, his hands began to shake as the dark figure stood over him, blocking out all the light from the sky.
“Do you kneel before me out of respect? Or do you kneel out of fear?” The figure spoke as it reached down for Miles.
Alyson ran as hard as she could until it felt as if her heart would explode. The path toward the field she had left behind as a baby seemed to open up for her guiding her way. Though she had only ventured back here once in the intervening years, it was as if something were pulling her to her brother’s side.
And as she broke through the woods into the clearing, she could see the overgrown patches of weeds that now mostly hid the skeletal remains of the rotting wooden wagons that had been left behind. But as her eyes darted back and forth, Miles was nowhere to be seen.
But she could sense him. He was here. She pushed through the weeds, feeling his presence stronger and stronger until she found him, lying bleeding and badly hurt on the ground.
“Miles!” she cried out as she went to him, pulling him to her chest to comfort him. “Who did this?”
It was hard for Miles to answer for at first he could not speak and when he finally could what came out of his mouth was a warning.
“He’s here,” Miles revealed. “The Wolf.”
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
Sep 2nd
Listen to ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
Okay, so I got my undies in a knot over what is going on in the world and decided to vent in the way I know best… on the mic. Listen and enjoy… or don’t enjoy… that’s your perogative in a free society, right?
Plus, I finally get a chance to read the excellent article written about WikiLeaks by Mathias, a German citizen who lends a certain sense of insight due to having grown up behind the iron curtain.
And I talk a bit about the really kickass James McCartney debut single premiering on UC Radio!
Listen. Comment. You know the drill.
Yan from Le Stream Rocks Out to Old Spice Guy, You Suck!
Sep 2nd
Can I tell you how much I love this? Yan Theriault from Le Stream rocks out to my song “Old Spice Guy, You Suck” on his show. Of course Yan is speaking in French and I can’t tell what he’s saying but I love watching him air drum to the tune much more than I enjoy watching myself in my cornball music video. LOL!
Go Yan, Go!
ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE THIRTEEN
Sep 1st
Previously on Angel of Death: Galen meets his father, or at least the spectre of his father, a figure who has dogged him across many lifetimes. His father warns him once again of the perils of leaving the path he has been sent down. A warning that alludes to devastating consequences if not heeded. But it is truly the influence of those seemingly closest to Galen, his brother and sister, whom the old man fears most. And almost at the same moment, those fears prove to be founded as Nena crashes a bus into the car carrying Galen away to his so-called destiny.
LISTEN TO ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE THIRTEEN
Tell me what you think. Leave a comment. I HIGHLY VALUE YOUR FEEDBACK.
Angel of Death Episode THIRTEEN commentary is available as a separate podcast download.
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Sep 1st
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Free Summer Reading: Badlands Chapter 19
Aug 30th
CHAPTER 19
I don’t believe you, screamed Galen’s mind. He looked up into Nena’s face, searching with every hope on earth that this news just wasn’t possible. His mind ran through any memory, any single thought his brain could muster to find some kind of recollection of her, of a sister, of a family, but there was nothing, not even a glimmer. He had been lied to by countless charlatans, con men and crooks looking to rook him—men and women like the Gypsy Crone who would mislead their own mothers if it meant getting what they wanted. He’d ducked their oily advances time and again based upon his intuition. However, it was impossible for Galen to admit that there wasn’t a part of him hidden deep down inside his soul that believed her.
“It’s true,” Nena told him. “You are my brother and you left us.” She held the petrified eye of William Lawton up to Galen’s face. “You have witnessed that which our father saw. Death, destruction for many. The most devastating war this world has ever seen. It is coming. And your arrival can only mean a great many wheels are in motion.”
“If I am your departed brother then why do you imprison me? Why do you whip me as if I am your mortal enemy?”
“Because, Dear Thomas, in whatever form you inhabit currently, you do not represent my brother. You may have been him at one time, but now you are much more dangerous.
“How am I a danger?” Galen croaked.
“Because there is absolutely no chance that brother Miles does not know about you being alive and you being here. What he intends to use you for is most likely something which I, and the rest of the Magus, should fear because your sudden arrival here means it has started again.”
“He doesn’t know,” the pock-marked man said and Galen’s inner reaction to hearing the man’s voice was of anger. If there was any way out of this he promised himself he would kill the bastard.
“Ah, I sense rage,” Nena said holding out her hand, palm facing toward Galen. “That is a good thing, but I do fear the part of you that is any use to me is too far buried inside the man who has become nothing but a killer.”
Momentarily, she lowered the whip, her hand relaxing.
“I know where you are headed. It’s calling to you. What do you know about the town of Shadow Falls?” she asked.
“Shadow… Falls?” he responded, his mind drifting. That had to be it, he thought. Galen realized Nena’s utterance had been the first time he had even heard the name of the place he’d seen so clearly in his mind all these many weeks. “What can you tell me?” he finally inquired.
He had been walking for close to an hour, carrying Alyson in his arms. Miles cursed the souls of those who made this happen.
Following several feet behind him was Elsibeth, the seven year-old daughter of one of the other families who had come aboard the Majestyk. Along with himself and Alyson, she was the only other survivor of the attack.
“Why?” she cried out as she sobbed. Elsibeth was inconsolable. Her parents had been eviscerated in front of her—torn apart before her very eyes. It had taken Miles hours of begging to get Elsibeth to leave the scene of the massacre. She had refused. Clutching hopelessly to her mother’s severed torso, clinging to her bosom as if she were just an infant.
Finally, he convinced Elsibeth to leave when he told her he was going without her, and she would be forced to stay here all night, all alone. Finally she agreed and almost immediately he regretted his choice to save her life.
And now, with the non-stop crying, Miles had begun to wish the predators had taken her as well for he was afraid she would upset baby Alyson.
“How much further?” whined Elsibeth as Miles continued to trudge west in the path of the setting sun.
“I don’t know,” he grumbled.
“Speak up,” mewed Elsibeth “I can’t hear-”
“I said I don’t bloody well know!” he turned and screamed. The sudden shriek of his voice caused Alyson to begin wailing and scared Elsibeth enough to make her burst into a brand new salvo of tears.
“Now look what you’ve done!” shouted Miles as he put Alyson down and tried to get her to stop bawling.
“Shhhh, shhhh. There, there…” he whispered into his sister’s face. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Elsibeth sobbed.
Miles looked up at her with her red puffy eyes from crying all day. He thought of how terrified she must have been while the attacking beasts circled her parents’ wagon and dragged them out with their dripping fangs.
And as he gazed at Elsibeth’s face he realized there had been a terrible mistake.
Her survival of the attack should not have happened, the voice in his head told him. It’s wrong. She had no part in what was to come and would only stand in the way. Alyson began to bawl louder and Miles started to wonder how he was going to feed her.
“I want to go home!” Elsibeth cried out. “I don’t want to go any further.” She plopped down on the ground and sat there crying.
It’s wrong… the voice told him. She doesn’t belong here. In our house. In our name.
“It’s going to be okay,” Miles told Elsibeth as he approached her. “I promise.”
The reach of his hands across her neck surprised Elsibeth but he had caught her between sobs so there was no air in her lungs for her to cry out. He pushed her onto the ground, squeezing tighter. Elsibeth’s mouth gaped like that of a dying fish. Her arms flailed wildly as her brain was running out of oxygen.
All around him the sounds of the woods faded away into silence. Using his thumbs, Miles applied pressure on her windpipe, feeling it crush under his fingers. Her small body bucked once, then again, and afterwards Miles could feel Elsibeth fading away. Even as her movement stopped and her gaze glassed over in a frozen stare, he held onto her neck for several more minutes until he was certain she was dead.
Very good, the voice in his head told him. Very good indeed.
And with a whoosh the sound all around him rushed back in like a crashing tide and Alyson’s braying tears cut through the air like a blade.
Miles turned to her, the small bundle of life, helpless in this world. She would be his responsibility and he resented it. There was already too much to do without the burden of a baby to deal with.
He looked down at his hands. The same ones he had just used to kill the only other person left from the Majestyk other than himself and his sister.
His hands were rock steady. He was prepared to use them for whatever was needed to accomplish his intended goals.
And with his hands he picked up baby Alyson and cradled her against his chest.
“There, there. There, there,” and slowly he rocked her until she fell back into a slumber.
Once he was sure she was sleeping, Miles gently put her down on the ground. He dragged Elsibeth away and covered her body up with sticks and leaves then went back for his sleeping sister.
And as he picked up Alyson once again and stroked her sleeping face, he heard footfalls coming toward him in the woods from the same direction he’d just come from. From where he’d taken Elsibeth’s body.
He turned to see them emerge from woods toward him. A young man holding hands with a young woman, their clothes simple and plain. To Miles they looked like farmers. As they looked up, they seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see them and they both exclaimed out loud in a language he didn’t understand.
French, Miles thought.
“Comment allez vous?” the young woman asked, her voice sounding full of concern.
Miles shook his head and, as if on cue, began bawling. His crying startled baby Alyson because she began bawling as well. “I don’t understand you,” Miles sobbed through his very convincing crocodile tears.
“Anglais,” the young French man said to the girl, motioning toward miles.
“Oui,” she responded, then whispered something to him, to which he nodded before swiftly heading back into the thick woods.
The French girl then held out her hand to Miles. “Allez,”she invited him.
The settlement had been no more than an hour’s walk and when baby Alyson had grown heavy, the French girl took her and carried her in her arms, all the while singing softly to her in a hushed and soothing voice.
Once they arrived, the French girl gave Alyson back to Miles. “Arretez vou,” she told him, motioning with her palm out for him to wait. They stood outside what Miles could tell was obviously some kind of a church.
Moments after going inside, she came back out with a man. The familiar collar around his neck identified him immediately as a man of the cloth.
“I am Father Henri,” he said to Miles in reasonably clear English.
Miles had already anticipated his next move. He wrapped his arms around Father Henri’s neck and burst into tears.
“They came out from the woods and killed everybody!” he shrieked. And judging from Father Henri’s horror-stricken face the priest completely understood the significance of it.
The French priest took the children inside the humble wooden church and as Miles entered he saw over his shoulder how the French boy had arrived and how he seemed to pretend not to notice the French girl was there also.
You two have a secret, Miles thought. Very interesting. Within minutes other women from the settlement had arrived at the Church, bringing food and blankets for the children, hovering over Miles and Alyson with bowls of warm soup, fresh bread and milk. Chattering away incessantly in French, they stroked his hair and thankfully, due to the language barrier, Miles was spared from having to repeat the lie time and again. Father Henri was the only one Miles could find who was conversant in English.
It was much later, in the church’s one-windowed back room, as the good priest was tucking Miles into a fresh straw bed that he explained.
“I attended seminary in England,” he explained. “I have been lucky in my lifetime to see many beautiful places. Africa, the Far East. I came here to this New World because I was called by a higher purpose. Maybe you and your sister were, too.”
He nodded toward Alyson who slept soundly in a wooden box that had been fashioned into a crib. Father Henri patted Miles’ head and gave the kind of smile, one full of solace, that only a priest could give. He rose, taking the room’s one candle with him, but paused before leaving to look back at Miles.
“Although it may not seem so now, maybe fate has big plans for you.”
And as Father Henri shut the door, Miles got up and tiptoed across the mostly darkened room to the makeshift crib where Alyson was sleeping. He reached down with both hands and pulled the blanket up to her neck and his touch, a familiar one for a change, must have woken her up. Her eyes opened to look at Miles and she cooed softly as he stroked her cheek with his finger.
From his own pocket came a kerchief, one monogrammed with his father’s initials. He unfolded the small bundle to reveal the eyeballs that had, until recently, belonged to his father—the ones that he personally removed.
Delicately he picked up one of the still sticky orbs between his thumb and forefinger and held it up to his sleeping sister.
“What do you see? Alyson? What do you see?” he quietly asked. “Because if the visions within are the same things that Father saw, I’m afraid the world will soon be coming to a most difficult and violent end and I believe you and I will play some kind of part in allowing it to happen.”
Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 18
Aug 26th
PART 3
THE VALLEY OF UNREST by Edgar Allen Poe
Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sunlight lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley’s restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless -
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye -
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave: – from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops.
They weep: – from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.
CHAPTER 18
She was swept up in the air, her body as limp as a rag doll. Even in the dead of night he could see it all perfectly. Her bare feet swinging back and forth slightly, toes pointed downward toward the Majestyk’s wooden deck. He kept waiting for her to open her eyes, to see the peril in front of her, but it never happened as she was lifted higher until the man holding Anne Walsh tipped her over the starboard side rail where she fell wordlessly and was swallowed whole by the churning black waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
The deed was done. As her body tumbled lifelessly into the abyss the man in the frock coat turned without so much as spotting him.
Galen came to just as the sunrise brought with it the sound of birds in flight, taking off toward the sky on their way to warmer climes. One, a single black crow had stayed behind and cawed angrily at Galen from the top of a nearby tree. From which direction Galen was not sure for this marked his third dawn in the pillory and he was unable to raise his head due to the agonizing strain that being confined in this posture had caused on his neck.
One thing for sure was Galen had been certain that crow was the same that had shown up yesterday and sat in the trees incessantly mocking him and constantly drawing closer. The bird, Galen reckoned, had already identified him as a trapped and tasty morsel and was sitting back just biding its time until Galen died and it could sup on his body.
Or perhaps if it grew impatient enough it would realize its prey was powerless to fight back and would swoop down to greedily take Galen’s eyes.
In a few hours the boy would arrive with the bucket to splash water in Galen’s face and place a palmful of wet gruel into his open mouth. The bucket boy had no fear of Galen trying to bite off his fingertips in the process for Galen was too weak to put up any kind of fight. If they had intended to squelch his bravado then they had done so quite effectively. He was currently using whatever physical strength he had left to keep himself on his feet no matter how much the muscles in his legs burned and cried out for relief. If they were to give out, his body weight against the wooden stock would surely strangle him. And with the distinct possibility that his subsequent death would only be temporary, such a hellish scenario could indeed repeat itself over and over again without end.
While his body fought desperately to remain upright, Galen’s mind battled its own demons. When darkness fell, the nightmarish visions would creep in to haunt him. He struggled to keep his eyes open, to overcome the exhaustion of it all but even so they came in the form some horrible waking dream he could not escape. His mind vacillated between moments of mental twilight and complete delirium. It was here the scene of the burning church replayed itself again and again—the screams and helpless cries.
Quickly they moved, the ones still alive. Feet shuffling down the rickety steps, their panicked voices muffled by hands and sleeves over their mouths to block the smoke from their lungs.
“Hurry!” Galen yelled and blindly they followed his every word and threw themselves into the dark, round hole in the ground desperately trying a last ditch escape from the fate that awaited in the conflagration upstairs. In their terrified voices they screamed as their bodies thudded against each other, the thick wet sounds of flesh on bone and bone on rock as they hit bottom.
That sound, Galen’s mind cried because his voice could not. That maddening sound!
Men and women falling down a well turned into the image of the body of Anne Walsh tumbling into the ocean and the man in the frock coat, his face completely visible.
But this time, it seemed as if the gaze of this very man lingered on him longer than it had in any of his other visions. This time it stared knowingly back into Galen’s eyes showing a very distinct glimmer of recognition until the vision faded into nothingness.
And as Galen’s mind cried for the images appearing before him to stop, the scene faded back into a dusty sun-beaten haze. Dozens of ruddy, red faces peered up at him as he stood above them on the gallows, their voices calling out for his neck. And in the moment the noose was being slipped over his head he saw the man standing unnoticed among the angry crowd. The man with the remains of two burnt wings protruding from his back. And Galen could only watch the man’s lips silently move but it was the man’s eyes, his dark and piercing eyes that bore into Galen’s brain, drawing the two of them together. He could see those eyes as he saw them before, turning toward him and now they were back in the church as the man cackled “Brother Thomas, do something!”
And with a whoosh, again it was all gone—the fire, the church and once more he was on the deck of the Majestyk
“Father?” Galen’s voice croaked out loud.
But there was no answer. Instead, as he blinked, he found himself again standing on the gallows with the rope around his neck, the cheering faces of Sagebrush’s poor calling out for his death.
“Father?” he asked again. But as the trapdoor opened under his feet and his head jerked upwards, this time he was vaulted back into consciousness by way of someone holding a handful of his hair.
Galen wanted to cry out but couldn’t for his mind was still trying to process the face of the hooded woman leaning forward to stare directly into his eyes. Nena cocked her head at Galen trying to read his face. Here, in the daylight, he could finally make out her pupils, which appeared like two cut pieces of raw jade.
“What did you see?” she asked.
Galen let out no answer save for a low grunt.
“I asked what did you see?” Nena bellowed.
Again Galen held his tongue, which angered Nena to the point of violence. She yanked hard on the handful of hair again, hard enough to pull a good portion of it out by the roots.
“Let him out,” she hissed.
The pock-marked man produced a set of iron keys on a ring. He opened the pillory lock and, with a grunt, lifted the heavy upper half of the stock off its frame. Immediately, Galen fell backward, slipping through the neck and wrist cutouts before collapsing on the ground.
As he lay there he could smell the reek coming from him. Nena did too because she turned her head away from him and ordered bucket boy to douse him with water from head to toe. The splash caught Galen as he gasped for air and he inhaled it into his lungs and began coughing.
I’m going to drown on bare land, he thought. The irony. He laughed and a chortle escaped his mouth.
“What is so funny?” demanded Nena.
Galen couldn’t help himself; that which started as an innocuous slip had now grown into full gales of laughter.
“I said what is so funny?” Nena roared this time, obviously losing patience.
Enraged, the man with the pock-marked face grabbed the wooden bucket from the boy’s hand and, with one swing, smashed it over Galen’s head. The boy turned his head as to not be hit with flying pieces of his former vessel.
“Shut yer goddamned mouth!” he shouted down at Galen who had been dazed and nearly knocked unconscious by the blow.
Galen groaned and tried to reach up to touch his head but his arms were so weakened by his confinement that even lifting them was impossible. Days locked in the pillory made his limbs feel as if they were now encased in stone.
All that was left of the bucket in the pock-marked man’s grip was the steel handle and he tossed that aside and grabbed Galen by one of his arms and began dragging him across the grass. Galen tried to cry out in agony as it felt as if his arm would be dislocated from its socket but when he looked up he saw he was being dragged to a circle of about two dozen men. The circle opened and the men parted to allow them inside and immediately Galen spotted the pole, which had been erected in the ground. Galen’s eyes opened wide in horror as he thought of what they had done to Maria and weakly he tried to fight and pull away. Stubbornly, he dug his heels into the dirt refusing to be moved. In his mind, he willed for his physical strength to return and with one swift movement, pulled away from his surprised captor.
Get up, dammit, his mind screamed at him and as he could feel his legs start to respond, dozens of hands were on him. The men from the circle had descended upon Galen and were pulling him upwards toward the pole. In moments he was pinned as one man lashed his hands to the pole above his head and another used a knife to cut his clothes away and stripped him naked.
“Burn them,” Nena motioned toward Galen’s stinking and fetid shirt and pants. Clothes that originally belonged to Maria’s dead husband but were now ruined by Galen’s blood, sweat and waste from being confined in them.
Galen turned his head toward Nena but the cut that had been opened up over his left eye by the bucket was oozing blood and he could not see through it.
She has something in her hand, he thought. What is it? A torch?
He tried to squint but could not make it out through his clouded vision. But as she got closer and raised her hand Galen could clearly see the whip.
Crack! The leather sounded as the lash snapped against Galen’s chest forcing his pent-up scream to birth itself from his upturned mouth.
Before the sound of Galen’s wail could die down, Nena’s whip hissed through the air, cutting a line across Galen’s stomach so deep that crimson droplets surfaced from the now raised and reddened flesh.
Again Galen screamed into the air, his head arching back straining against the veins bulging in his neck. From Nena’s other hand came something and she shoved it in Galen’s face. Flinching, he turned away. But something, a force beyond his control, pulled his gaze toward it again. Through the blood covering his vision he could see it and recoiled in horror.
In Nena’s hand was the eye, the same cursed thing he had left behind after fleeing Kansas City. But as she held it up to his face, Galen could see it was different. Whereas the eye he had killed the Gypsy Crone for was perfectly preserved, the one in Nena’s hand appeared to be chipped and yellowed with age.
He was pulled into the singular gaze of the eyeball and once more his mind flashed to a vision. One of columns of demons marching up from the depths of the abyss, their legions clashing headlong with winged warrior angels. The scorched earth left only as a scarred battlefield.
The vision was torn from his mind as Nena pulled away the eye.
“What did you see?” she demanded. As Galen’s own gaze fell to the ground, she seemed to register the answer she was looking for.
“Where did you get that evil thing?” grunted Galen weakly.
“This eye, and its twin, were carved out of the skull of my father after he put a bullet in his skull and left us in the woods to die. This eye belonged to William Lawton for I began life as his daughter Alyson and if I am not mistaken, you are my older brother Thomas.”
Whoa! 278K Hits on one TILTW Episode in 8 Days
Aug 26th
I was getting ready to upload this week’s show and took a glance at my numbers for last week and nearly fell out of my chair. Now, I’ve had a few first week episode numbers in and around the 80K range (and one 140K week) which I thought was pretty astounding considering I do zero promotion for the show and like everything else, it’s mostly just an experiment (and excuse) to hone my topical joke-writing chops. (and yes, it’s a business and a calling card as well) but faaaahhhhhk! 278,746 hits on last week’s TILTW on Mevio? Wow!
Now, I’m almost 100 percent certain the bump was caused by having the words “Model Molested” in the title but hey, I’ll take these numbers any day. But of course, all joking aside, I want to say thank you, all of you out there, for your continuing support! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you guys and girls really totally rock!
ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE TWELVE
Aug 25th
Previously on Angel of Death: Galen awakes chained up in the back seat of Darvos’ car and it is his captor who tells him they are both enemies on opposite sides of a war controlled by forces beyond their understanding. Darvos also explains why he has hunted him for several lifetimes. So that Galen can fulfil his destiny and Darvos can finally rest. But is is the new spectre before him that Galen fears most.
LISTEN TO ANGEL OF DEATH – EPISODE TWELVE
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Angel of Death – Episode 12 Commentary
Aug 25th
LISTEN TO THE ANGEL OF DEATH EPISODE 12 COMMENTARY
Plus I spend the first half hour talking about what its like to find myself kinda unexpectedly being in a TV pilot of all things.
Along with your comments, emails and some serious discussion of the underlying psychological and theological themes going on in Angel of Death
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Free Summer Reading: Badlands – Chapter 17
Aug 23rd
Previous chapters of Badlands can be found here
CHAPTER 17
Cyril’s head nodded forward. He had been on the horse for nearly twelve hours straight and time and again he jarred himself awake. It was obvious the nag was exhausted as well but Cyril pushed the beast, not caring if he killed it in the process. He was so close he could feel it. It had been four days since he’d left the town of Sagebrush, the air so thick with the reek of death that each breath choked his lungs. Everywhere he looked there were bodies, weeks dead, mostly picked clean, their sun-bleached bones laying in disarray where the scavengers had tossed them about.
The bodies left inside were a different story though. Using the heel of his boot, Cyril had kicked in the door to the town’s one hotel. Through the haze of dust he’d stirred up, he found them, the family of four huddled in the corner of the small dining area. They had been spared the scavengers by virtue of the four walls that had become their tomb, but the maggots had descended on them in force. The wriggling white shroud covering them flowed across their bodies like liquid, crawling in and out of their mouths and eye sockets with gleeful abandon as they feasted upon what was left of the rotting corpses of the man, his wife and two children still huddled in the fearful pose in which they’d been killed. Cyril could imagine their death, the wonderful moment in which the coyotes sent on their mission of vengeance had struck these folks down, tearing at their soft throats and pleading eyes.
Cyril had wrapped a kerchief soaked in a mix of water and camphor around his face to keep out the heavy odor of death as he went to the jail where they had kept Galen, first as a condemned prisoner, then later as a hanged man laying with a broken neck on the hard and dirt-packed floor. Inside, Cyril could feel Galen’s presence in the room but then stopped.
He cocked his head. There was something else. The presence of someone, no, something else that had been in the cell as well.
He closed his eyes. There was no doubt of the existence of the second being Cyril felt in the room because he could sense… fear.
Fear that could not have come from Galen due to the fact that there was no such self awareness in Altos to warrant such an emotion. Whatever the second being had been, it had come in haste and left no more than a trace of its presence. Cyril squeezed his eyes tight and tried to get a closer bead on it. He stood silently in the still air, arms outstretched to the sides, palms facing upward and willed it to happen, but could not get a clear image to coalesce in his mind. After several attempts, Cyril gave up and shut the cell door behind him as he left.
There was indeed something different about him now. Before he’d been as sensitive to such things as a dry sponge to water but now he felt as if his ability had diminished since he’d left his post at Fort Jones. The incident there had left him…
“Stop it,” he muttered to himself. The mere thought of it brought the memory of cordite to his nostrils and Cyril recoiled from it.
“Get a fucking grip,” he chided himself. But his hands were shaking. Once his work was done with Altos, he promised himself that those back in his old regiment would get the surprise of their lives when he returned.
He now looked around the deserted town.
It was this place, he thought, that was causing this temporary shift from control to a borderline insanity. This land was cursed. This town had been done a favor by its annihilation. That he was sure of.
Back at the hotel, Cyril refilled his provisions then went about setting the town aflame. With a torch in hand and several rag-stuffed bottles of whiskey liberated from one of Sagebrush’s corpse-filled saloons, Cyril began the process of returning the town back to the earth.
In less than one hour the deed had been accomplished, and as Cyril stood outside the burning schoolhouse watching his work, he fell to his knees on the ground in front of the fire and felt the heat on his face. By nightfall the dozen wooden structures that had made up this small town were little more than embers that would in short time be swallowed up by the Texas sand.
Cyril knew the direction Galen was headed. He could also sense how the horse he was riding was grateful to be leaving as well given how much looser its gait had become since exiting the town’s boundaries. The animal had been so tight, Cyril reckoned, he could have stuck a lump of coal up its ass and within moments pulled out a diamond. There was little doubt the ghosts of Sagebrush had lingered heavily in the Texas air, but Cyril knew better than to be afraid of such things. Ghosts, he knew, could not harm you; only trick you into harming yourself.
There was little about the other world that frightened Cyril. He had given himself to the powers that he served.
No, that wasn’t quite right, he thought.
He had been taken by the powers he served. There was nothing voluntary about it. He had been killed in the woods and his bones had been left to rot. He himself was a ghost by all manners of definition.
But that was not true, he thought. He was real. He was flesh and blood. He was…
Being followed.
The trail out of town had been deserted; it had been only him, the horse and dirt and rock for as far as the eye could see. But there seemed to be something else. A feeling the solitude was being broken by another being. The hairs on the back of Cyril’s hand stood up. There was a sense of something lurking at the very edge of his vision, but when he turned back, there was only the empty trail behind him. His hunter’s instinct was being piqued. It was a feeling prickling the back of his neck but he dared not look again so soon for fear of appearing aware of what it was that was watching him. Still, as Cyril rode, he could feel a pair of eyes on him, cold and dead like slime on a pond. Whatever was following was getting closer, to the point where Cyril started to believe it was almost breathing down his back.
Slowly he cocked his head, trying to catch any sound only to find there was none whatsoever, save for his own breathing. Even the light breeze blew silently past.
Ghosts, Cyril thought again. Wisps of things unseen that dared not appear before him. The air everywhere you went was full of them. Millennias worth of spirits of the dead, hiding in walls and between dark shadows at night. This plane belonged to those who walked the ether between this world and the next, unaware of their own banishment. Cyril forced his eyes into a squint to see them, like dust floating forgotten in the air, the countless dregs of the departed appeared in their indistinct forms as tricks of light or haze. Those just beyond the mortal world could do him no harm and he was far past being haunted by them or any of the faces of those whose lives he had taken.
He laid his grip on the butt of his gun and even though a little voice inside his head warned him the steel pistol and lead slugs would prove as useless as tits on a bull, feeling it underneath the palm of his hand was reassuring. And as he looked again, it hit him what he was now seeing.
Footsteps.
Fresh ones cut into the dirt between the deep ruts driven long ago into this dusty and infrequently traveled corridor.
Cyril blinked. Those tracks were not recent. Given the lack of traffic, it was still feasible this particular road must have been used at some point. Rain would have erased the footprints but as far as Cyril reckoned it had been dry here for months.
It was then that he noticed it. Suddenly it seemed the horizon was further away than usual. As if it had been pushed back while he had been watching it.
Must be the heat, he reckoned.
He had been in the sun for weeks and knew how that kind of exposure took a toll on a man. He opened his canteen and tipped it to his mouth. During the war he’d seen soldiers with heat stroke drop their weapons and run directly into the path of enemy gunfire, thinking themselves indestructible even up to the moment the bullets kissed their flesh and tore them to bloody ribbons.
Even Galen, Cyril thought. On the night he’d accompanied him into Veracruz, Altos had gone on some murderous tear after spending too much time in the…
But Cyril’s thought stopped dead for as he lowered his canteen, he saw more footsteps.
Footsteps now in front of him coming in his direction.
Not even a breath escaped him. He had been certain they had not been there before. The trail ahead had been…
Empty, Cyril thought.
Though there they were, fresh and new in the dirt stretching all the way down this narrow road for as far as the eye could see.
But whoever had owned those boots was nowhere to be found.
Cyril looked down. The prints went directly under those his horse was making but as he gazed back toward the road behind him, he frowned.
How could that be? He wondered, and stopped his horse. Getting down from his saddle, he knelt on the ground to see if his eyes had played tricks on him. But now he could see it clearly. The footsteps coming from behind him had been so new they lay on top of those just made by his horse, as if whoever had come down this road had doubled back following him.
And when Cyril felt the presence standing just behind him, he drew his pistol and sprang to his feet.
Standing in front of him was a man with what appeared to be the remains of two badly burnt wings sticking out of his back.
From the stranger’s mouth came the voice of a southern gentleman. “I don’t suppose you’d shoot someone without first hearing what they had to say to you.” The stranger grinned. “Oh I’m sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.” He laughed in a near mocking tone.
“Who are you?” Cyril asked
“Someone with a bit of information you may find important.”
“I asked who are you?” Cyril demanded. But inside he could sense that part of that answer lay in his perception of the other presence that had obviously been inside the Sagebrush jail cell with Galen.
“Well if you must ask, mah name is Ghent, Briar Ghent.” His mouth curled upward in a knowing grin. “And your name is Cyril, though you’ve gone through quite a few last names, I reckon.”
“Do not presume to know anything about…” Cyril started but was cut off.
“I know you were stationed at Fort Jones out there in the California territory when a mysterious letter caused you to try and go AWOL from your post, and that a day later you were captured by members of your own regiment who dragged you back to the commanding officer. The same Captain who had you lined up against a wall and shot by a firing squad for being a deserter. Isn’t that why it took you so long to get to Kansas City, to the man who sent you that alarming letter in the first place?”
Cyril bristled at hearing his own story told back to him with such blunt detail. Briar Ghent continued.
“Though waiting a couple of weeks wrapped in a shroud buried in shallow ground out there sure beats the heck out of laying around rotting in the woods for more than a hundred years, waiting to be needed, now don’t it?” He finished with a cackle. He reached out and pushed Cyril’s gun aside, and as their hands briefly brushed against each other, Cyril saw the flash in his mind, an image of Briar helplessly plummeting from dizzying heights in the sky, his once majestic wings now aflame.
“You see, my boy, you and I seek the same thing—a closure that will bring an end to our interminable wait on this useless world,” Briar said. “But you killing Altos will get you exactly the opposite of that which you seek.”
Cyril eyed the man before him, confused. His own senses were unsure whether he could trust Briar. But now, they were telling him what he’d already been denying since his last encounter with Miles Lawton.
Briar leaned in closer, carefully eyeing the area around them. He brought his voice down to nearly a whisper and began divulging a truth about Galen, which caused Cyril to realize that everything Miles had told him from the beginning had most certainly been a lie.
SHADOW FALLS: ANGEL OF DEATH
SHADOW FALLS
THE ART OF SURFACING
WHERE'S MY F*CKING LATTE?
Angel of Death – Episode 13 Commentary
Sep 1st
Posted by MYN in Wordsushi Blog
3 comments
LISTEN TO THE ANGEL OF DEATH EPISODE 13 COMMENTARY
Chapter 13 is all about “the curse”… Listen as I explain.
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