The Norman Parker Wildlife Experience has a rare new species on display…
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A Pentacle Between Tentacles (or PDF)
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So where I work’s ain’t exactly a zoo but it ain’t exactly not a zoo, if you catch my drift. It’s called the Norman Parker Wildlife Experience because that’s exactly what it is—an experience. People come along and get to see all sortsa critters they’d not normally see in their day-to-day.
We got leopards and zebras and even a mean old elephant they call Frank that fell off the back of a circus wagon or something. There’s all sorts of stories about Frank, like they say he’s at least one-hundred years old, but I don’t believe it. We also have an aviary, an aquarium and a reptile house and though I’m not much of a fan of those snakes I wouldn’t mind them wrapped around my feet as a fancy pair o’ shoes.
Three students travel to a distant land to participate in an archaeological survey of an ancient, mysterious wall.
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Wall of Tet (or PDF)
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“You and your ridiculous ideas,” Alice’s voice lilted as the carriage rumbled across the rough, unpaved roads. Magnavius ignored her and instead concentrated on the other sounds: the way the carriage groaned and creaked around them as it struggled to absorb the impacts of the road.
The carriage leaned and all three passengers were forced to bend in the opposite direction so as to stay upright on their seats. This forced Chisholm to glance up from the book he was reading and he glanced between his travelling companions with a wry smile.
The squirrels are not what they seem…
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Jameson North walked the woods almost every day for going-on fifty years. He liked to walk. Each day, around mid-morning, he’d say goodbye to his wife Elsie and follow the meandering stepping stones from the house to the trees. Then he’d follow the trees out to the main road: Pine Tree Drive.
There wasn’t much traffic. Occasionally a logging truck or lost tourist would pass by. Sometimes it was somebody he knew—Sheriff Austin, Ray or Martha Bertram, John Johnson Senior (his son was a deputy now, if you could believe it)—and they’d lean on their horn as they passed and he’d greet them with a brisk wave.
Science is the domain of the great and powerful men of the Faculty; or so they think. But a murder is about to change everything.
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The night of the murder had a strange drawn-out quality, but the days that followed were worse: a subdued numbness set upon the Faculty that none of us could shake.
None had known the woman particularly well–although she had indeed brought us tea every mid-morning and fruit cakes in the evening. And now, of course, she was dead.
The Asylum stands separate from other worlds. It is a broken-down, ruined place where there are no patients–only prisoners.
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Legacy Asylum (or PDF)
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On a hill overlooking that great unwashed city called Legacy—that crumbled-down, tumbled-down metropolis—a single light flickers, behind a smeary, barred window. Beyond those panes of gloomy glass, in a room almost empty except for a bed and a dirty mattress, a Madman sits with his back against the wall.
The walls here are green with mould and rot and damp that rises and lingers. It is a clinging, festering, fetid filth that cannot be bleached away. It is a dank and stinking foulness that constitutes more of the building than the stone and metal.
Long ago, in a forgotten prehistory, the Earth was ravaged by the so-called Demon War. A time traveller, named Chatravati, stands on a plateau and reminisces about a future in which he is yet to be born.
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Chatravati (or PDF)
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The warm breeze carried with it the scents of the plateau below. It was an acrid smell of sweat and decay, of gunpowder and poison and of corpses that rotted in the sweltering heat beneath the thunderclouds.
It had been said that the demons were constructing temples out of carcasses, enormous ziggurats of flesh and bone and face.
Childhood memories of impossible things; and a stormwater drain that leads to another world.
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The streets take on a different character at night. During the day the roads seem purposeful: vehicles crowd the lanes transporting goods and school children. But as daylight fades and the houses bloom—however briefly—like lanterns, each doorway inevitably plunges towards its own particular darkness.
There is the droning of traffic somewhere, but not here. The sound lingers like a ghost recording, the radio of a distant neighbour. Context is stripped from the houses like the flaking paint and the overturned scooters resting in the tall grass. The footpath becomes an eerie mirror of long shadows that lengthen and fold in on one another like alien origami, all big heads and long fingers.
Malin sells muffins. She’s also the most important person in the universe.
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Tick, clunk, and all those other sounds of a dreary afternoon where the volume on the television is turned down to a barely audible murmur and the world outside the window passes by with the hiss of upswept rain: pitter-patter, whoosh.
More rain meant less customers. Malin sighed (prettily, she hoped), adding another noise to the hazy daze. She wouldn’t mind having someone to talk to on a day like this, to have something new to occupy her mind for a moment or two… anything to save her from having to read about the grape-seed diet, another pregnant celebrity, or those awful copy-pasted horoscopes all over again.
