A NEW TERROR BORN IN DEATH

 

ANCIENT EVIL NEVER LOOKED SO BEAUTIFUL

 

http://www.audible.com.au/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Death-in-the-House-of-Life-Audiobook/B00NLQSB0G

 

 

Older than the Sphinx

Deadlier than the Colors out of Space

 

Meilori Shinseen is the most

dangerous creature on this planet ...

 

And beloved to the cursed lawman,

Captain Samuel McCord.

 

What will he do when she

enters the desert wastes of 1895 Egypt

in search

of the lost facets of her nature

even she found reprehensible?

 

Join McCord and his companions:

Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain,

Oscar Wilde, Ada Byron

and

Winston Churchill

 

As McCord tries to walk the razor's edge

between love and honor.

 

Will he succeed?

 

Listen to Robert Rossman's

thrilling narration of

DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE

and find out.

 

"Oh, if when you died,

you were only dead."

- Meilori Shinseen

A BLACK WIND BLOWS

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N758R96

 

“All of us have a path to follow, and that path begins in the heart.”

           - Samuel McCord  {a supernatural LONGMIRE}

 

          The world is filled with mystery and shadow.

 

What is life?  The years bring us the conceit that we grasp life.       

 

What we grasp is but illusion.

 

Childlike we seize a fistful of seawater and say we hold the ocean.  And even that slips through our grasping fingers.

 

As the ocean holds depths Man will never see so does Life.

 

But one cursed man has seen more than most.  And the enemies he has made doing so are now trying to un-make him.

 

From the undead halls of power in colonial Washington, D.C. to the bloody plains of India to the mystery-shrouded deserts of Egypt, Texas Ranger Captain Samuel McCord is spoken of in whispers lest he take notice of the speakers.

 

Follow his cursed footsteps from 1826 and the death bed of President John Adams to the blood stained hills and ravines of 1857 India. 

 

 

And finally to 1895 Cairo and the far deserts wastes of Egypt. 

 

 

Some fool has disturbed the sleep of something that should never have been awakened. 

 

 

And it is up to McCord, his deadly wife, Meilori Shinseen, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Nikola Tesla, and Lt. Winston Churchill to keep the world from slipping into a new Dark Age of madness and death.

 

But this time, the past has caught up with McCord in the form of the undead Abigail Adams and the revenant Empress Theodora of the Unholy Roman Empire.

 

 

Worse, an ancient Pestilence in the body of a mummy child now reaches out for him and those he loves.

 

And his friends and even the world itself may pay the terrible price if he cannot be more than what he believes he can be.

Don't forget

HIBBS THE CUB WITH NO CLUE

only 99 cents

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MT8DNLY/ref=docs-os-doi_0

 

WEP_A picture is worth 1000 words: Haunted Desert

I am giving my entry for the WEP challenge this month a bit early

(Who knows the way my luck is going!):

{455 Words}

Excerpt from THE STARS BLEED AT MIDNIGHT

An illustrious company of adventurers are out to find the time-lost city of Amarna in 1895,

little knowing it a trap laid by Samuel McCord's most deadly enemy.

AT NIGHT, MAN IS NOT THE ONLY MONSTER

A sudden hush settled heavy on the sands.  I almost felt it weigh down upon my shoulders.  A physical silence like a roaring wind enveloped all of us.  The Ningyo bodyguards proved to be more than killers. 

They were as adept at desert clearing as much as Meilori’s diggers.  Particles of shimmering sand rode the Ningyo-made winds, looking nothing so much as mourning ghosts of some lost, accursed antiquity in the twilight.

Abigail Adam’s fingers went to her open mouth.  In fact, everyone stood stunned, looking at the desert sand being scoured in front of us to make a level plain large enough to contain some haunted mansion like the House of Usher.

Nikola Tesla stood death-still with some glittering machine in his large hands.  He aimed it at the heap of scarlet material that was our tent.  It slowly fluttered and fluffed as if it were some strange creature out of nightmare just awakening.  Tesla raised the machine, and the enormous tent spread out and up, its fabric wings flaring out with a leathery rustling.

Sammy Clemens’s daughters cried out and stumbled backwards.  Howard Carter made a sound much like them and followed their example.  Winston Churchill, his fist on the hilt of his sword, stepped towards Lucy.  Abigail noticed his movements with a grim smile.  She led Lucy back slowly a few steps. 

Oscar Wilde and Sammy, long grown used to Tesla’s marvels, just stepped back prudently, their eyes admiring the crimson fabric sweeping out and around.  The burnished, sharp stakes jutted abruptly from its bottom like a netherworld raptor preparing to strike.

Meilori flowed beside me, her Sphinx face glowing, “Is not my Wizard a wonder, Samuel?”

“Yes, he certainly is.”

But I was filled with wonder myself over something else entire.  Why had Meilori chosen this site to set up our tent?  We could have gone on for an hour more.

It was remote in the desert wastes this nameless ruin, crumbling and inarticulate with pillars wind-scoured of inscription, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been like this before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked.

There was no legend so old as to give these ruins a name, or to recall that they were ever alive; but these ruins were spoken of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by Bedouins in their tents, praying softly to Allah for protection.

I have always known that I was an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.  But these ruins whispered to me that mankind was a stranger to the times when they were first shaped by hands that were not hands.

THERE IS IN THE NIGHT THE RUSTLE AS IF OF WINGS

From the living nightmare world of a 12 year old Sammy Clemens in Missouri 

to

a nocturnal campfire visit from Pele beside a 31 year old Mark Twain in the Sandwich Islands 

to

a cursed archaeological dig in 1895 Egypt with Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Nikola Tesla, and his alien wife, Empress Meilori Shinseen

Samuel McCord has seen untold horrors.

The worst is yet to be unveiled: the monster within the woman he loves with all his heart.

The End is coming.  The portents murmur in the stars.  Death is on the breeze, and madness dances in the darkness.

Awakened Evil slithers from its opened crypt.

Can one cursed Texas Ranger manage to save the world AND his marriage?

The answers are in the next SAMUEL McCORD adventure:

COMING SOON

DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE

{Cover courtesy of the genius of Leonora Roy}

It is the time of death, disease, and war in Egypt --

normal conditions for all of its 5000 year history.

The year is 1895.  Ten years earlier General Gordon died in the seige of Khartoum, fighting alongside McCord-Pasha. 

Six months later,  Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi died mysteriously.

Many whispered, "McCord-Pasha still lives."

In 1895, cholera has killed 150,000 -- among them those who would enslave the peasants and seize the land for themselves.

The whispers increase, "McCord-Pasha is angry."

Lady Meilori Shinseen, millennia ago called Sekhmet, merely smiles.

It was said that her breath formed the desert. As a Ningyo, able to manipulate all fluids, Sekhmet and her people happily drained the land dry.

Now, Sekhmet has returned for her aegis and should she succeed, nations will tremble before her and thousands die.

And with the genius, Nikola Tesla, at her side, Sekhmet may well possess her aegis again.

McCord-Pasha has to think of a way to save the world without destroying his marriage

while keeping British operatives from re-capturing Oscar Wilde, whom he and Samuel Clemens just broke out of Reading Goal.

But beneath the ruins of Tanis slumbers Something that should never be awakened.

Once again, the world is on the brink of Chaos with only the wits and courage of McCord-Pasha to push it back.

This November I will be working on this novel.  Not for NaNoWriMo. 

This novel has seized me, and it will not let me go.  Wish me luck on it.  I will still write my posts never fear.  :-)

W is for OSCAR WILDE_Lost and Found in the Past

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

(16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900)

was an Irish writer and poet.

After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.

Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.

But not in my mythos. Oscar is all too alive, holding court in his own chambers deep within the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

Here is an excerpt of Sam McCord visiting him for what may be the last time from CREOLE KNIGHTS:


I looked around me. Everyone was so caught up in their own words and thoughts that they hadn't even noticed my arrival.

Oscar, dressed as always as the most colorful of peacocks but as tall as an ostrich, was bending his head next to the hot sunset of Cora's hair.

He laughed. Then, he smiled and spoke to both the courtesan and de Morny in a gossip’s whisper.

"You ask what I stole from the good Captain. Why his words, of course. One evening I spied what he was writing to his beloved Meilori and quite brazenly used them in my letter to my wife, Constance, that I was writing at the same time."

Cora hushed, "You actually read one of his love letters to Lady Meilori?"

"Indeed and borrowed from it quite boldly. What were those words now? Ah, yes:

'What can I tell you by letter? Nothing that I would tell you in person. The message of love travels not by pen and ink. Your presence here would not make you any more real, for I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine but mingled in some strange way with yours. I feel incomplete without you. Always and Forever, Samuel.'"

 "Of course I signed my own --"

Oscar tilted his head, stiffened as he heard the chiming of my spurs. His eyes met mine. He turned pale.

"S-Sam, I meant no harm."

"None taken, Ostrich. In fact, I'm honored that a poet like yourself didn't feel diminished borrowing from an weary pilgrim like me."

Cora's fingers went to her mouth. "Sam, you look --"

"--like hell? You just came from the Demeter. Me? I came here through my night club in New Orleans ... a few years after that voyage."

Comte de Morny wasn't called the shark of Paris for nothing. His mind was quick. His eyes even quicker.

"How few would that be, Captain? Your face seems about the same. But your eyes ...."

"They've seen a few more sights than they wanted, Comte."

Oscar looked uncomfortable. "You can't blame them for being curious, Uncle Sam. It never hurts to ask."

I made a face. "Unless you ask for hurt."

Oscar looked pained. "I would not have had you heard me talk about Meilori, Sam. I know when she left you seven years ago --"

Cora looked shocked. "S-She left you? But you and she are so much in love."

Oscar snorted, "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

Cora frowned, "You two are married? And still she left you?"

I shrugged. "She seems to think my heart left her first."

Cora's long fingers tenderly touched my cheek, staring up at me. "No one who could see the loss in your eyes would believe that."

Oscar sighed, "One of the many things you learn in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be."

DeMorny cocked his balding head. "Meaning?"

"Meaning that selfishness is not living as one wishes but demanding that others live that way as well. Meilori wanted Sam to be both what he is and what she wanted him to be. An impossible demand."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe I threw away a treasure because I wasn't smart enough to find a way to keep it."

Oscar's sad eyes bored into mine. "Ordinary riches can be stolen or lost. Real riches cannot. In your soul, Sam, are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. Not even by you. The love you still have for Meilori is one of those things."

I grasped his shoulder firm. "That's why I come here, Ostrich. You help put things into perspective for me."
***

OSCAR WILDE VERSUS GORE VIDAL

*

{Read D.G. Hudson's fun reviews of LEGEND & END OF DAYS!

http://dghudson-rainwriting.blogspot.ca/2012/08/book-review-roland-yoemans-and-new.html }

I was writing in the dim interior of the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

I heard a mellow yet deep voice to my right. "Dear boy, don't tell me you're still persisting to write?"

I looked up. Gore Vidal. Or rather his ghost, looking rather dapper as young as me.

He sat down, leaned next to me, reading what I had just written on THREE SPIRIT KNIGHT, and shook his head.

"My boy, half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President."

I smiled. "Let's hope it's the same half."

He slapped my arm. "You're stealing from me!"

"Steal from the best Oscar Wilde always said."

He leaned and scanned my laptop screen again, nodding. "You have your own distinct sytle. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

I made a face. "And it's gotten me so far."

Gore raised a long forefinger in admonition. "I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on or move out.”

I nodded and sighed, "It's just that sometimes I get depressed."

Gore smiled sadly. "As do I, my boy. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too.

Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action:

you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

He tapped my laptop screen. "But words like those of your friends and you give me hope. How marvelous good books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

I asked, "What would be your advice to my writing friends, sir?"

He smiled wickedly, “Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

He winked at me. “You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big.

It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account.

You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. The trick is to write one after another.”

He looked off into the bronze mists of Meilori's. “The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time.

Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise.

I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page.

Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences.

Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.”

A tall ghost sat down on the other side of me. Oscar Wilde. He laughed.

"Roland, as a young man in the South, you are in a splendid position to write great novels. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”

Gore's eyebrow rose. "I said that!"

Oscar smiled wide. "As I have been quoted: if you are going to steal, steal from the best. Go on. Admit it. I'm your hero, Gore."

Gore gave Oscar a look that would have curdled vinegar. " Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me, thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."

Oscar pouted, "You think me nothing but a gossip."

Gore relented, "Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

Oscar laughed deeply, "Oh, the gossip about me is definitely true ... if it is bad."

Gore looked sadly at my laptop screen again. "It is all a waste, you know."

"What, sir?"

"Your striving for quality, for uniqueness. In the case of the new writers, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant,

we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books,

pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

I said, "People still read, sir."

Gore nodded grimly, "The fad of the moment is what they read. Not to think, not to reflect, but to be aroused."

Oscar shook his head firmly. “The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death.

The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.”

Gore grumbled, "You just stole my words again!"

Oscar nodded, "Because you seemed to have forgotten them. We writers exist to be the 300 Spartans in the tide of ignorance and hopelessness."

I raised an eyebrow. "I thought it was to be on the best seller list."

Oscar laughed, "That, too!"

*{As the restrictions on this collection expired in 1986, the Library of Congress believes this image is in the public domain.
However, the Carl Van Vechten estate has asked that use of Van Vechten's photographs "preserve the integrity" of his work, i.e,

that photographs not be colorized or cropped, and that proper credit is given to the photographer. Such has been respectfully done.}

ELIZABETH MUELLER interviewed at MEILORI'S by OSCAR WILDE!

http://elizabethmueller.blogspot.com/

It was the witching hour at Meilori’s. The shadows flirted with the dim shapes of the customers at their tables as if the Night were somehow trying to seduce them.

Elizabeth Mueller sat erect and watchful, her author’s eyes studying every facial expression and social interaction for future use. “This is quite a place.”

To my right, Samuel McCord smiled. “No harm will come to you at my table, Miss Elizabeth.”

“Just Elizabeth,” she smiled, then jerked in shock as a tall man in Victorian evening clothes sat down beside her to elegantly kiss her hand.

“Oscar Wilde at your service,” he beamed.

“Hey, Oscar, this is my interview,” I began.

He carelessly waved at me, then turned to Elizabeth. “Do not mind Roland. He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.”

Sam sighed, “This is an interview with Miss Mueller about HER book.”

Oscar nodded, “Of course that is why I came … to do it correctly.”

He smiled at Elizabeth. “Be not alarmed. We are but the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.”

Oscar sighed, “When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

His blue eyes fixed on Elizabeth. “Growing up, my dear, what were your hobbies? And why on Earth did you include writing?”

“Ah, as a young child, I spent a lot of my time roller-skating around my neighborhood with my friends. We did tons of dramatic pretending that carried over a timeframe of weeks!”

“Really? I am somewhat of a playwright myself. What else?”

“I also enjoyed telling stories with paper puppets I made, with Barbie or My Little Pony, or through daydreaming. Most of all, I loved drawing—still do. I drew stories on 24X18 inch sheets of paper until the pile grew into an inch thick.”

Oscar looked into the shadows. “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”

Elizabeth patted his hand gently, and he smiled down on her. “Do you remember your own writing process? Did you ever get discouraged like I so often do?”

Elizabeth said, “My process consisted of letting loose my muse. She led me into every which direction that gave me the freedom to do anything I wanted on paper. The only time I became discouraged was when I wrote my first short story and showed it to my sister. I was devastated because, rather than share her enthusiasm for such a fantastic story, she put on her editor’s cap and scribbled away—I was only 11!”

Oscar nodded. “The most destructive critics are those closest to you. Still, how have you changed over the years from the first time you wrote a book? How have you stayed the same?”

“My plot development has deepened as well as my characters, and of course, my grammatical skills have matured, too. My first full-length novel is poetic prose because that was what I got into in high school. I’ve stayed the same as in that the magic for writing has never died for me!”

Oscar studied her closely. “Art is a symbol because Man is a symbol. In a strange twilight, man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his own image, he cannot understand it. In what genre are you seeking yours?”

Elizabeth paused a moment then said, “In what they call Young Adult. I didn’t start paying attention to YA until 6 years ago when a good friend of mine explained her reasons:

YA was a whole lot cleaner in a comparative view to adult books. This piqued my interest because it was then that I was tiring of all the explicitness. I kept running into it in adult romance—and I love romance. I want to keep my books clean and worthy for everyone, especially young people.”

Oscar sighed, “Ah, yes, I fear my most scandalous work would prove quite tame these days.”

He laughed. “Speaking of which, I am often compared to my Dorian Gray. Who would you be in your DARKSPELL?”

“Winter Sky would be the character I’d love to live her story through. She faces so many obstacles and incidences that shake her conviction, but she holds tight to her true self and comes out the heroine. I truly admire people who face many awful hardships and still remain strong and faithful.”

Oscar’s sad eyes lit up as he spotted the pages in Elizabeth’s hands. “Oh, your book! May I read a passage aloud?”

“I- I would be honored.”

In his rich Irish baritone, Oscar read :

“Alex reached out and took my hands. A spark of magic passed between us. I didn’t resist, and his gaze deepened. Another wave tore through me, and I felt his powerful drive to protect me and the desire to share the rest of his life with me. I could see forever. Eternity was wide and deep.

I would never be alone again.

Having tasted Alex so strongly, so close, so dear, left me empty; a starving sensation that could only be filled by him. I had no idea he felt so intensely for me. His love washed away all doubt from me.

I leaned into Alex as my world spun fast on a crooked axis. I breathed him in. I was intoxicated with his burning hold. I was so alive. Every sound was louder; the wind richer as it flowed through me. I was so free, so alive, so untainted by any wicked thing. I closed my eyes, shivering with desire, and imagined the breeze encircling us; bringing us to our feet and drawing us closer like a child’s ribbon.”

Oscar suddenly sprang up, the typed pages clutched against his chest.

“What are you doing?,” cried Elizabeth.

“Why, I’m stealing your delightful words. Shaw did it to me all the time.”

“You can’t do this!,” she shouted at his retreating figure.

She turned to me. “C-Can he?”

A flurry of stardust settled on the table, forming into a book entitled, DARKSPELL by Oscar Wilde.

As Elizabeth let out a sharp “Yeep,” Samuel chuckled, “Oscar’s just funning with you, ma’am.”

Elizabeth poked a forefinger into the book. “This is not funning. This is criminal!”

She shot to her feet. “This has been the most infuriating interview I have ever had!”

Father Renfield appeared at her side. “I will personally see that not one of those purloined volumes leaves Meilori’s.”

Elizabeth relaxed. “I feel better hearing that, Father.”

Renfield smiled wide, exposing his long, sharp canines. “Call me Padre.”

Elizabeth hushed, “A vampire priest? I am so out of here!”

Victor Standish, settling into her empty chair as Elizabeth fled Meilori’s, flashed his gypsy smile. “Another satisfied customer.”

Samuel cocked an eyebrow. “You think?”

Victor laughed, “No.”

I groaned. Life with my creations was going to be the death of me. I rose to catch up to Elizabeth and apologize.

F is for FLASH FICTION_THE DREAMER'S PUNISHMENT

For a great review of my novel, THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS, go to Donna Hole's blog :

http://donnahole.blogspot.com/2011/04/drawing-on-mythology.html

SAM IN A FLASH (fiction)_ THE DREAMER'S PUNISHMENT

{From the journal of Captain Samuel McCord} :

What did Oscar Wilde write me that time?

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight,

and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

The house is dark, its empty windows more like vacant eyes than dirty glass.

They give the building the look of some huge, discarded skull of a lost god.

I don't like this. Lt. Trifle (yes, that's her name,

and the main reason she got a black belt in Karate)

called me out here in the middle of nowhere.

Nowhere being on the outskirts of Metairie --

which is on the outskirts of New Orleans --

which, itself, is on the outskirts of Hell if you listen to some preachers.

She said I was needed out here and then hung up.

Or got the phone snatched out of her hand.

I came as soon as I could.

Was I in time? Time. I could stop it for awhile --

if I was willing to pay the price.

I was. It hurt like hell. I deserved worse.

Ask a thousand widows what the undead Captain Samuel McCord deserved, and they'd tell you the same thing.

The time-snared air felt like heavy invisible water pressing in against me. I endured.

It's what I do.

I made my way to the back of the house. I tried to cat-foot in out of instinct.

Reality trumped instinct.

The weight of frozen time made each step feel as if I were lifting the weight of the world. Cat-footing was out.

Lumbering like a dinosaur with arthritis was all I could manage. I smiled like the wolf I felt.

Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.

And time was mine. For as long as I could endure the pain.

The house of shadows was deserted. No furniture. Lots of needles. Lots of spoons. Discarded rubber tubing.

A crack house.

I made it to the front room.

It wasn't empty. A young punk had Trifle dead to rights.

Mostly dead if I didn't act fast.

How he got the drop on her was obvious. She was cradling an unconscious, feverish girl. Trifle's heart had blind-sided her.

I released time.

The addict yelped in surprise. He jerked his gun towards me.

I smiled and spoke low, hearing the thunder sent by the Turquoise Woman above me.

"How young can you die of old age?"

"What the fuck?," he frowned.

Sad last words.

I answered my own question.

I sped up time all around him. He squealed, squirmed, shouted, then wheezed into raspy coughing. He aged into an old man in seconds.

As he fell, he crumbled into dust right in front of Trifle. The moon caressed the hot sunset of her hair as she looked down, the beauty of her pale face twisted into ugliness by horror.

The mound of dust started to disappear in the faint breath of the stale breeze. She turned hollow eyes to me.

"You're a monster," she husked.

What had Oliver Goldsmith written to me?

I remembered : Silence gives consent.

I left without saying a word. *********************************

BLOOD WILL TELL_ DARE YOU LISTEN?

Life is never fair. And perhaps it is a good thing for us that it is not.
-Oscar Wilde

In connection with my blog anniversary yesterday, several of my friends have emailed me asking just what a blood courier (my day job, ah, night one, too) is.

Others have suggested that I write a story on it. So I did.

It is called BLOOD WILL TELL. When we think evolution, we think of the life forms we can see. But what if evolution would occur on the microscopic level?

What if red blood cells achieved intelligence? Would they be happy at the world in which they find themselves? And if they didn't, what might they do?

In my story intelligent blood is starting an offensive against Man.

One lone telepath finds himself a helpless spectator as the race of Man is subjugated. When the war is over, and he finds himself totally alone,

how can he go on and why?

Here is a snippet of BLOOD WILL TELL in which the protagonist is explaining why a telepath has a hard time in finding a job where he can function without going insane :



Numbers proved comforting. Black and white. Zero and one. Computers were safe.

Sadly, I just was less than stellar when it came to technology. Concepts I could handle. But anything hands-on proved disasterous.

Another way of paying the bills went the way of the fifty cent coke. No matter what job I chose, I had to deal with people and their thoughts, lusts, and fears that clawed at me.

My forty-first birthday found me working for Helping Hearts, the blood center that serviced Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana.

I had always thought that each hospital had their own vast supply of blood.

I had been wrong. Hospitals only kept a small roster of blood types and an even smaller supply of the more rare blood component called platelets, used to stop bleeding. Helping Hearts was to hospitals what the mint was to banks.

And I was a courier for the blood mint.

Say a premature baby needed a random platelet across town. Off went my pager, and down the road I would go to the blood center, charge out the blood, and drive it to the ill baby.

Did a cancer patient in Jennings need a pheresis, a larger bag of platelets? Off went the pager again, and an hour later, the cancer patient was being transfused with the needed blood.

I was finally helping people without being near them and their clawing thoughts for very long.

I had found some small measure of peace. No answers, but I had given up on that dream of youth. Unfortunately, some dreams become nightmares.

And some nightmares kill.

Christmas Eve found me on call. The day was half over, and I felt run over. DeRidder, Jennings, Kinder. The major hospitals from all three of those small towns had called me for blood, one right after another.

It had taken me nearly the whole night to answer all three calls. And I had no sooner collapsed in my chair in my efficiency apartment than the pager wailed on my belt yet again.

But this time, it was a friend. Kim Marcotte. Her husband, another good friend, had just had a terrible motorcycle accident the night before. Recovering from surgery, he was asking for me, half crazed with fear.

I sucked in a ragged breath. Robert was a good friend, so good that he had been the only one I had ever trusted enough with my secret.

I could've driven the way to the hospital blind-folded, which was lucky considering how hard it was raining. I found Kim near beside herself.

Looking as if she had aged five years, she stood outside his door, wringing her hands and waiting for me to arrive so she could talk to me in private.

Kim reached out to me with both hands. I flinched at the intensity of her thought : 'Oh, God, let Luke be able to help Bob!'

"They're going to put him on the psychiatric floor, Luke. The damn psycho ward! You're his best friend. He's always said the best thing that ever came out of his being a tech for Gambro was when he and you met at Helping Hearts. If anyone can reach him now, it's you. Please help him.”

I had seen Robert go through hell and not put up a whimper. Something had to be terribly wrong. Maybe beyond my ability to help wrong. I hate it when I'm right.

My head pounding from the cascade of howling thoughts from Robert and the others on the same floor, I walked into the private room.

I pulled up short. He looked like hell. His right leg and arm were broken.

The whole right side of his face bandaged. His left eye reached out to me in fear and hope. I flinched from the impact of his acid emotions.

"Luke! Thank God, you've come."

I walked over to his bed and squeezed his good hand. "You called. I came. How can I help?"

His lower lip started to tremble, and a gnawing buzzing like hungry wasps erupted inside my head.

In all my life, I had never heard anything like it. He looked hollow-eyed at me.

"You hear them, don't you?"

"Them?"

"Don't fold on me, Luke. I never told anybody your secret. But I know you hear my thoughts."

His voice went low and shaky. "You hear them. Oh, God, tell me you hear them."

I squeezed his hand harder. "I hear the buzzing, Robert. But you took a pretty hard whack to the head. I don't know what a concussion sounds like, but ---"

"But shit, man! I've banged my damn head before. This is different. The buzzing's from ... from ..."

"From what?"

He nodded to the blood bag on the pole above his bed and stared fearfully at the tubing connected to his arm. "From this damn blood."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Do I fucking look like I'm kidding? With each drop, I feel them eating away at me. It’s like a fire in my blood! The longer I lay here, the less of me there is."

He wailed, "Oh, God, pretty soon there'll be nothing of me left!"

I reached up and turned the wheel to the blood line, shutting off the flow. He sucked in a shallow breath and slowly shook his head.

He looked like he was about to cry. I hiked up my right shoulder from the pain of his despair eating into me.

"It's too late, man. There's too much of it in me. And not enough me.”

I went sick as the buzzing from inside his head grew louder, and the "Robert" I knew grew fainter. I was scared, dry mouth, heart racing sacred. I had never run into anything like this before.

For the first time in my entire life, I went within myself and focused one word into his mind with all I had. It was a shot in the dark, but it was all I could think of.

He took my hand, still on the small wheel shutting off the blood, and squeezed weakly. "T-Thanks for being with me at the en---"

The fear dropped from his face like a stone, and the life left his eyes. "Robert" disappeared from my mind, only the buzzing remained.

He moved my fingers from the wheel, turning the blood back on.

"All better now," he smiled in a voice that almost sounded like the Robert I knew. Almost.

Right then, the pager on my belt went off, and I jumped what felt a foot. I grabbed at it with suddenly clumsy fingers and finally managed to turn the damn thing off. I checked the number.

"Women and Children's Hospital."

Robert pulled his lips up in what wouldn't have passed for a smile in a morgue.

"Ah, a baby needs blood. We like to get them young. Better hurry off. And do be careful out in that rain, hear?"

I slowly got up on legs that seemed to have become wood. "We who?"

Flecks of something alien gleamed in his eyes.

"Why anyone who wants to bring order out of chaos. Better hurry. We wouldn't want to lose a baby now, would we?"

"No," I whispered. "I've already lost enough tonight as it is."

The smile got wider, colder. "Tell Kim to come in, will you?"

I turned and got the hell out of the room. Kim met me at the door, her blue eyes hollows of worry. She grabbed my hands in a vise of wiry fingers.

"H-How is he?"

I struggled to keep my face calm. "He's ... He's not afraid anymore."

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

CHAPTER TEN : HE WHO LIVES MORE LIVES THAN ONE

{“He who lives more lives than one …

More deaths than one must die."

- Oscar Wilde.}

The dying man and I were in a glade so beautiful it seemed wrong somehow that death was soon to come here. I bent by him. He looked to have been stabbed at least six times.

"Is there a doctor close-by here?," I asked.

His glazed eyes worked to focus on me. "Y-You speak French with a German accent."

"I what?"

Marlene's voice murmured inside my mind. "You will go nowhere that I will not follow, Liebchen. I know French so you speak it ... but you speak it as I do."

Mark Twain's voice snapped right after hers. "Dang it, woman. He needs to know that you linked our minds together with that little trick back at Meilori's."

The dying man clutched my right wrist. "Leave me to the death my whole life has earned. Just save my wife and daughter. Please."

"I won't leave you to die."

His face grew ugly. "Then, you leave my wife and daughter to be raped and murdered. Go, damn you!"

I gnawed my lower lip, then sighed, "Well, since you asked so nice."

I rose slow and reluctant. "Which way?"

Marlene whispered to me :"The right, the path away from your heart."

"Of course."

The man called out, "Wait! You'll need this."

He tossed me his sword. As it sailed through the air, I felt the spirit of Marlene take me at the sight of it.

Without thought, I snatched it fluid and quick, slashing it through the air in a figure eight pattern as I had seen her do so many times.

The man sagged his back against the side of a tree. "So you have some skill with a blade? You will need it. The cardinal's men are dogs, but they are also the best swordsmen in France."

That explained the six wounds. They had jumped him all at once. Cowards.

"France must be hard up," I muttered.

I had a sword in each hand, and I still felt naked. I looked to the path to my right, then back to the man. I went cold. He was already dead. I sighed. I seemed to always fall short.

Mark Twain's words were like a hand on the shoulder :"He died with hope, son."

I nodded. "Now, it's up to me to make sure it wasn't a false one."

I headed off down the narrow path to my right. I smiled bitterly. For one of the few times in my life I knew where I was going. But as with most of my life, I hadn't a clue what would happen when I got there.

The trees were thick on either side of me. I flicked my eyes left, then right. Ambushes seemed to be in my blood. But for once, they weren't in the cards.

I walked under a lush canopy of heavy oak branches. Golden shafts of light, seemingly shot from Apollo’s bow, pierced the beautiful mock twilight of the place.
A lance of burning gold light suddenly speared to my left as a branch above me shifted in the breeze.

I was entranced. Never had I seen such a lovely sight, the specks of dust floating magically in it, doing their slow dance of awakening. The whole glade seemed to fade into oblivion as I stared at this lone spear of bright light, for I was not seeing by the light, I was only seeing the light itself.

Echoes of Plato whispered to my mind. Mark Twain started to growl something, but Marlene hushed him with a sharp hiss. No fool he, Mark Twain swallowed his words.

Marlene murmured in my head, “Clemens, can you not see the miracle here? Death is all about Roland, yet still he possesses the curiosity of an innocent child.”

I both heard and did not hear my friends. I walked closer to the sunbeam. I put my face right up to the shimmering light, stepping fluidly into it, and turned so that the beam fell across my eyes.

I looked up and hushed in a breath. Now, the beam had disappeared. Through the crack at the top of the oak canopy, I saw a sky washed clear and bright blue by recent rains.

"Of course," I smiled. "Seeing the light is one thing, while seeing by the light is something else entirely. I’ve been a fool."

“You’re still being one, son,” snapped Mark Twain.

“No, you don’t understand, sir. I’ve been looking at this situation from the wrong angle all along.”

Marlene whispered, “You know who killed Papa?”

I shook my head. “No, but I think I know part of the reason why.”

Both Marlene and Mark spoke as one, “Why?”

Just then a little girl screamed.

I shook my head. “No time. Like Sam said – fight now, fuss later.”

An idea hit me. I stopped, stabbing the man's sword into the grass to free my left hand, and tore out the mangled notepad I always carried in my jeans at night to write down a meaningful dream.

Mark Twain snapped, "This is no time for reminiscences, boy!"

Marlene urged, "What he said, Liebling."

“I think I know who that man’s daughter is.”

Mark Twain snapped, “Act or trump, son. But get on the stick!”

“That haunted woman dressed like Marie Antoinette back at Meilori’s. I believe that little girl over there is her when things went terribly wrong for her.”

Mark Twain spoke as if ill. “Then, write what you got to write, son, if you think it will help her.”

"Marlene, you told me what I wrote took on flesh, right?"

I wrote on the wrinkled page : "Marlene's saber was magic. Whatever it cut suffered the ailment uttered by the wielder."

Marlene sighed, "What pestilence would your soft heart have it inflict? Athlete's foot?"

As the screaming got more frenzied, I smiled mean. "Funny, you should mention feet. I want it to inflict them with 'both left feet' and 'all thumbs.' Literally."

A woman began to scream, and Mark Twain said, "Some rabid dogs are better off put down."

I got up and shook my head as I headed towards the sounds of struggling. "I have to make a little girl learn to laugh again."

Mark Twain chuckled, "I like the way you think, Roland. Save the girl and her spirit at the same time."

Marlene groaned, "Men! You are hopeless romantics."

From the sound of the scuffling, I was just a few feet from the cardinal's men.

I sucked in a breath. After Marlowe, I had sworn never to kill again. I handled a blade like a slippery butter knife. And I was about to go up against men who would kill a mother, then rape her daughter.

I was long on trouble and short on any clue of how to get out of it. In other words, things were as they always had been.

I pulled back my shoulders. I felt my face become the stone my heart felt. Time to teach a little girl how to laugh again.
***********************

BLOOD WILL TELL

Life is never fair. And perhaps it is a good thing for us that it is not.
-Oscar Wilde

Several of my friends have emailed me asking just what a blood courier is. Others have suggested that I write a story on it. So I did.

It is called BLOOD WILL TELL. When we think evolution, we think of the life forms we can see. But what if evolution would occur on the microscopic level? What if red blood cells achieved intelligence? Would they be happy at the world in which they find themselves? And if they didn't, what might they do?

In my story intelligent blood is starting an offensive against Man. One lone telepath finds himself a helpless spectator as the race of Man is subjugated. When the war is over, and he finds himself totally alone, how can he go on and why?

Here is a snippet of BLOOD WILL TELL in which the protagonist is explaining why a telepath has a hard time in finding a job where he can function without going insane :



Numbers proved comforting. Black and white. Zero and one. Computers were safe. Sadly, I just was less than stellar when it came to technology. Concepts I could handle. But anything hands-on proved disasterous. Another way of paying the bills went the way of the fifty cent coke. No matter what job I chose, I had to deal with people and their thoughts, lusts, and fears that clawed at me.

My forty-first birthday found me working for Healthshare, the blood center that serviced Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. I had always thought that each hospital had their own vast supply of blood. I had been wrong. Hospitals only kept a small roster of blood types and an even smaller supply of the more rare blood component called platelets, used to stop bleeding. Healthshare was to hospitals what the mint was to banks.

And I was a courier for the blood mint. Say a premature baby needed a random platelet across town. Off went my pager, and down the road I would go to the blood center, charge out the blood, and drive it to the ill baby. Did a cancer patient in Jennings need a pheresis, a larger bag of platelets? Off went the pager again, and an hour later, the cancer patient was being transfused with the needed blood. I was finally helping people without being near them and their clawing thoughts for very long.

I had found some small measure of peace. No answers, but I had given up on that dream of youth. Unfortunately, some dreams become nightmares. And some nightmares kill.

Christmas Eve found me on call. The day was half over, and I felt run over. DeRidder, Jennings, Kinder. The major hospitals from all three of those small towns had called me for blood, one right after another. It had taken me nearly the whole night to answer all three calls. And I had no sooner collapsed in my chair in my efficiency apartment than the pager wailed on my belt yet again.

But this time, it was a friend. Kim Marcotte. Her husband, another good friend, had just had a terrible motorcycle accident the night before. Recovering from surgery, he was asking for me, half crazed with fear. I sucked in a ragged breath. Robert was a good friend, so good that he had been the only one I had ever trusted enough with my secret.

I could've driven the way to the hospital blind-folded, which was lucky considering how hard it was raining. I found Kim near beside herself. Looking as if she had aged five years, she stood outside his door, wringing her hands and waiting for me to arrive so she could talk to me in private.

Kim reached out to me with both hands. I flinched at the intensity of her thought : 'Oh, God, let Luke be able to help Bob!'

"They're going to put him on the psychiatric floor, Luke. The damn psycho ward! You're his best friend. He's always said the best thing that ever came out of his being a tech for Gambro was when he and you met at Healthshare. If anyone can reach him now, it's you. Please help him.”

I had seen Robert go through hell and not put up a whimper. Something had to be terribly wrong. Maybe beyond my ability to help wrong. I hate it when I'm right.

My head pounding from the cascade of howling thoughts from Robert and the others on the same floor, I walked into the private room. I pulled up short. He looked like hell. His right leg and arm were broken. The whole right side of his face bandaged. His left eye reached out to me in fear and hope. I flinched from the impact of his acid emotions.

"Luke! Thank God, you've come."

I walked over to his bed and squeezed his good hand. "You called. I came. How can I help?"

His lower lip started to tremble, and a gnawing buzzing like hungry wasps erupted inside my head. In all my life, I had never heard anything like it. He looked hollow-eyed at me.

"You hear them, don't you?"

"Them?"

"Don't fold on me, Luke. I never told anybody your secret. But I know you hear my thoughts."

His voice went low and shaky. "You hear them. Oh, God, tell me you hear them."

I squeezed his hand harder. "I hear the buzzing, Robert. But you took a pretty hard whack to the head. I don't know what a concussion sounds like, but ---"

"But shit, man! I've banged my damn head before. This is different. The buzzing's from ... from ..."

"From what?"

He nodded to the blood bag on the pole above his bed and stared fearfully at the tubing connected to his arm. "From this damn blood."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Do I fucking look like I'm kidding? With each drop, I feel them eating away at me. It’s like a fire in my blood! The longer I lay here, the less of me there is."

He wailed, "Oh, God, pretty soon there'll be nothing of me left!"

I reached up and turned the wheel to the blood line, shutting off the flow. He sucked in a shallow breath and slowly shook his head. He looked like he was about to cry. I hiked up my right shoulder from the pain of his despair eating into me.

"It's too late, man. There's too much of it in me. And not enough me.”

I went sick as the buzzing from inside his head grew louder, and the "Robert" I knew grew fainter. I was scared, dry mouth, heart racing sacred. I had never run into anything like this before. For the first time in my entire life, I went within myself and focused one word into his mind with all I had. It was a shot in the dark, but it was all I could think of.

He took my hand, still on the small wheel shutting off the blood, and squeezed weakly. "T-Thanks for being with me at the en---"

The fear dropped from his face like a stone, and the life left his eyes. "Robert" disappeared from my mind, only the buzzing remained. He moved my fingers from the wheel, turning the blood back on.

"All better now," he smiled in a voice that almost sounded like the Robert I knew. Almost.

Right then, the pager on my belt went off, and I jumped what felt a foot. I grabbed at it with suddenly clumsy fingers and finally managed to turn the damn thing off. I checked the number.

"Women and Children's Hospital."

Robert pulled his lips up in what wouldn't have passed for a smile in a morgue. "Ah, a baby needs blood. We like to get them young. Better hurry off. And do be careful out in that rain, hear?"

I slowly got up on legs that seemed to have become wood. "We who?"

Flecks of something alien gleamed in his eyes. "Why anyone who wants to bring order out of chaos. Better hurry. We wouldn't want to lose a baby now, would we?"

"No," I whispered. "I've already lost enough tonight as it is."

The smile got wider, colder. "Tell Kim to come in, will you?"

I turned and got the hell out of the room. Kim met me at the door, her blue eyes hollows of worry. She grabbed my hands in a vise of wiry fingers.

"H-How is he?"

I struggled to keep my face calm. "He's ... He's not afraid anymore."

*********************
Here is a music video of a song that plays an important part in the ending of my story