Keep Portland Weird - Part 2

A tale of eldritch horror continues...

I brought the dread stone with me to the downtown library, that edifice of stone and books that harkened back to an earlier era where learning was king and intelligence a virtue.  Now it mostly served as a day center for the homeless, although at least they were learning something instead of shooting themselves full of poison.

I suppose I could have found what I needed on the internet.  Everything is on the internet.  But this stone called for a certain kind of reverence for the timeless art of research.  Methodical, thoughtful research.  I had to focus my mind.  Really focus it. Because if I let my thoughts about the artifact become disorganized, chaotic, then I would surely be lost. 

                 

                  I found what I was looking for – what I hoped not to find – what I dreaded being right about – in the old journal of a man named Hopley, who’d explored obscure towns and villages in New England at the turn of the 20^th century. Why the Portland Public Library had a copy of Hopley’s journal was not a mystery relevant to the current situation.

Hopley had been following the trail of a man named Gafney, who’d left behind his own journal and a mystery – a chaotic screed ranting about arcane monsters and impossible architectures, about fish people and for some reason, cats.  Gafney, it turned out, had also found some obscure papers in an attic, and had been using them to piece together a mystery of his own.  In fact, the papers that Gafney mentioned in his journal also mentioned following the trail of an obscure journal found in an attic.  Gafney, for his part, had apparently died, or committed suicide, during his quest, as had the author of the mysterious papers he found.

I was following the trail of a journal, following the trail of a journal, following the trail of some papers found in an attic, following the trail of a journal.

But I was definitely on the right track. 

The engravings on the stone matched an etching on a page of Hopley’s journal, with the inscription: “Do not ever read this aloud” scrawled underneath it.  I heeded that warning.  I knew what it said and what it portended.  What I didn’t know was what it was doing in Portland.    

To this day, I wish that Mike hadn’t handed me that stone.  I really do.  I can’t ever undo what happened.  I’m so sorry.  I’m so, so sorry for what was unleashed.  We are such tiny things.  Such tiny, fragile things, and there are so many horrible dimensions just waiting to snuff us out.  I stare out of this impossible stone parapet at the ruined city beneath me, and I weep.  Or I would weep.  I would weep.

Eldritch Horrors in my brain - I cannot escape

I've been reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft lately, and it seems that his Elder Gods have wrapped their eldritch tentacles around my feeble mind.  They have demanded that I write this story.  Here's the first chapter.  Beware: here lies madness.

Keep Portland Weird

                Well, of course this was a myth.  Portland wasn’t weird, any more than any other city in America.  It just had a reputation for weird, deserved or not, and that reputation brought self-conscious eccentrics crawling from all corners of the world to try to get in on whatever amorphous weirdness existed here. 

                And yet, was it not, perhaps, the inexorable influx of those very same eccentrics into our fair city, the mass migration that caused us to dig up the city’s land and build more and higher and more expensive apartment blocks, which led to the discovery that brought all of the horrors that followed?

                A worker at a building site found the artifact.  The site was one of the hundreds of similar projects going up all over the city – a big hole in the ground, the potential of architecture, another apartment block to replace a crumbling but charming old house.  Postmodern brutalism, that monotone jangle of glass, concrete, and steel, the skin of the 21^st century stretching itself inexorably over the city.  The building would have three floors of apartments that, even in this city’s endlessly skyrocketing housing market, would cost more to rent than a reasonable mortgage.  The bottom floor would have space for retail, and would go unleased and empty for months before it was occupied either by some inexcusably twee little coffee shop or a vintage-inspired barber who justified his exorbitant prices by giving away tiny shots of liquor to his customers. 

I suppose I am a little bit jaded about the city.  In my capacity as a possessor of several advanced degrees in the arcane and the occult, Portland had always piqued my interest – a town that existed as a tangle of temporal conflation, anachronistic meta-fashions and the fetishization of the mundane past.  Portland never embraced the present moment, preferring instead to find joy in dissecting, juggling, and recombining tropes, trinkets, and trivialities from all over the world and backwards through time.  I found a kind of derisive joy in sifting through the cultural gibberish that the town produced, and grew to love Portland all the more for it. 

But I digress.

The construction worker who found the artifact tossed it aside and continued his work.  It was his coworker, who was an old boyfriend of mine (don’t ask), who picked it up and looked it over.  Knowing somehow that I’d find it interesting, he’d put it in his pocket and brought it to me straight after his shift ended.  I, being at work, was fiddling with a fussy milk steamer and cursing the world while several waiting patrons glared at me. 

“Hey,” he said, and I looked up to find his pug nose and irritating mustache staring over the coffee machine at me.

“Busy, Mike, what’s up?”

“Oh Sean, you’re never too busy for me, darlin’,” he said in a fake Texas drawl he liked to pull out when he was trying to be clever. 

“Yeah well…shit…” The milk steamer was jammed in a way that only a milk steamer could be.  I fiddled with it. 

“Listen, I found this thing at a job site.  Thought you might want to take a gander at it,” he said.  I looked up and found him holding a gray, pentagonal stone, the size of a salad plate, smooth at the edges, with a symbol on it that immediately filled me with dread.  I forgot about the steamer and grabbed it from him. 

“Hey, I’m still waiting for my—” said someone far away who didn’t matter at the moment.  I stared at the talisman in my hand.  It couldn’t be what I thought it was.  It had to be a clever forgery. 

The symbols on it were in an ancient and dark language, a tongue unknown to modern man, and if uttered aloud might just summon –

“Sean, stop staring at whatever that is and fix the damned steamer!”  It was my manager, a fetus named Cody just out of high school who was saving up to tour Europe with his band or some other irrelevant nonsense.  I didn’t even glance up at him. 

“Shit,” he said, and ran to attend to the steamer.  I assume.  I wasn’t paying attention. 

“Where?”  I whispered the question at Mike, because the rest of my voice had run in terror from the thing in my hand. 

“65^th and Belmont.”

“I need to see that site.”

“I don’t know—”

I walked around the counter, reached out and grabbed Mike by the lapel and brought him close to my face.  His eyes widened. 

“I need…to see…that site.”  I was still whispering, but like a tornado whispers when it’s far away.  It was a whisper full of menace, urgency, the threat of destruction.   

“Ok…I’ll figure it out,” said Mike.  “Let go of me.” 

I let go of him.  He straightened his lapel. 

“Get me in,” I said in that same whisper.

“I’ll try,” he responded.  “What is it?”

“Just get me in to the site,” I said again.

Dispatches from Chelandia

I made a new thing.  It's called Dispatches from Chelandia.  It will chronicle the adventures of various people in a world I created for the novel I'm currently stuck on.  The idea is to create a serialized blog form thingy that'll allow me to create and work within my novel's world without having to figure out a beginning, middle, and end all at the same time.  Many thanks to things like Welcome to Night Vale and Scarfolk Council for giving me the idea of doing it this way.


In the future, you'll have the chance to help me build Chelandia and write the stories that take place within its borders.


Chelandia is magic, technology, satire, surrealism, funny, weird, science fiction, fantasy, a mashing together of ideas cribbed from the minds of such luminaries as China Mieville, Douglas Adams, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft. 


Come help me begin the exploration.

A spoilery Star Wars discussion space with spoilers

No text here.  All spoilers in comments.  These are my own thoughts about Star Wars.  They are spoileriffic.

SPOILERS.

Hey, here's a treat - it's a scene I just wrote in my current novel that I think is really cute.

The smile floated off of Fallo’s lips and performed an intricate dance of lust, satisfaction, bliss, and just plain old giggly, embarrassed giddiness in the air over Morra’s lumpy bed.  Fallo lay there, smoking a suggarrette (as people and imps have done from time immemorial in all universes everywhere in such circumstances), waiting for Morra, who was rummaging in his tiny kitchenette for a flagon of wine.

Morra lived in a one room flat in a crumbling building in the Second Ward.  Cracks in his walls conversed with one another in hushed tones about the impish acrobatics they’d just witnessed, and the green bulb in the ceiling flickered, making the shadows look like they were applauding.

“Hah, I knew I had one,” said Morra, and came up smiling with his flagon. 

“I never doubted it,” said Fallo. 

Morra lay back down next to Fallo and handed him the wine.  Fallo took a long pull, feeling the warm, sweet, under-aged wine swirl its way around his bloodstream.  He handed the flagon back to Morra, who took a demure sip.

“So.  Fallo Gapple.  What makes you tick?  Why are we…here?  Why me? Why you?”  Morra traced a finger along the orange skin of Fallo’s chest. 

“Why all the questions?”  Fallo took another sip of wine and settled back into the pillows.

“I need to figure you out,” said Morra. “Why would a successful imp with a nice place in the Quarter want to hang out with a bunch of revolutionaries from the Second Ward, and then why would he pick up one of those revolutionaries for a night of quite stunning sexual exploration?”

“Ganna and that scarred imp whose name I never got – they’re the ones that got me to the meeting.  You’re the one that kept me there.”

Fallo began to feel the wine flow around his reptilian brain, the alcohol cooling his blood, slowing his heart rate, relaxing him utterly.  With cold blood it was really easy to overdo it, get into a dangerous spot where the metabolism would just shut down. But a nice sip of wine now and then was a treat.  Fallo took a deep drag of sugga and exhaled, slowly, watching the multicolored cloud swirl.

Morra looked at Fallo again with that face, and Fallo kissed him.  And kissed him some more.  The flickering shadows and cracks in the walls looked away again, fearing a repeat. 

“That was nice, but you still haven’t really answered my question,” said Morra.

“What do you want from me?  You are a very sexy imp and from the first time I saw you I wanted into your work shorts.”

 Morra grinned with that grin, and Fallo was ready for round two.  He grabbed the flagon of wine from the other imp and made a move.

“Now now…let’s not gorge ourselves, shall we?”  admonished the other imp, gently pushing Fallo away.  Fallo pouted a little.  He found a spot to snuggle in a crook of the other imp’s arm. 

“So what’s next, Morra?”

“Well I thought we’d lie here for a bit and then maybe grab a bite to eat?”

“What’s there to eat around here?”

“I’ve got some leftover pastries stashed away – they’re filled with …well, maybe ‘meat’ isn’t the right word, but it’s something.”

“And when I asked ‘what’s next,’ I meant what’s next in the bigger picture.  Revolution?  Rebellion?  Who’s leading this thing?  How have all of us not been Reclaimed?  What does Ganna have up his sleeve?”

“Arms, I think.  I don’t know.  He hasn’t told me much – he hasn’t told any of us much.”

“Well he’d better start talking soon, because none of this makes sense to me.”

“I know,” said Morra, reaching over Fallo to grab the wine again.  “But we’re getting somewhere. I know we are.”

“Yeah, but where, exactly?”

“A world where imps are treated with respect and dignity.  Where there are no Reclamation officers.  Where we can, I don’t know, let’s go a little crazy here, but maybe a world where we can vote.”

“But—”

“Shush.  Wine, relaxing, cuddling.  No more politics.”

“Ok,” said Fallo.  “I’m sorry.”  He accepted the proffered wine flagon, sipping deeply.

The two imps laid there for a bit, and then they shared the leftover pastries.  Fallo’s grin floated along the ceiling, watching the two of them, dancing in a pirouette of ridiculous, over the top ecstasy that would have been embarrassing if it had actually been a visible phenomenon.  The cracks in the walls and the flickering shadows got back to the busy work of undermining the structure of the building and obscuring visibility.  The world kept turning, and the story continued on the next page.