Old and Lovely

She sleeps, this city. She sleeps and dreams, deep, slow, old dreams of better days gone by. I alone wander her streets, stumbling and mumbling and drunk. I love her, in my bones and my soul, I love her. Few do, anymore. I get angry to think of how far they've let her fall, how dirty her streets have become, how cluttered and shuttered and dank her alleys, how burned out and infested and forgotten her once-proud homes. I was born here, back in the glory days when that filthy rich old anti-Semite Henry Ford was building his empire out of desperate men and black-skinned migrants and paying them top wages. I picked pockets here and snuck smokes and did the dirty for the first time with sweet, smooth-skinned Millie Janowski. Oh God, I remember that night clear as crystal. Just kids, we were, young and fumbling and wet-palmed and eager. In the corner of a derelict factory at the edges of town on a rucked quilt we clutched at each other and clumsily kissed; in the dim, diffused glow of the moonlight through dusty windows we loved each other...I say loved, but at such a tender age is it really love?

I lean against a rough brick wall and swig from the paper-wrapped bottle, bathed in the sickly yellow glow of a streetlamp. The memories are flooding back tonight, for some reason. There are nights like this, where the cars are few and sirens distant, when I feel like I'm the only one left here to love this once-great city, when memory seems to beat in my veins in place of blood, remembrance in place of breath. I take another swig, stumble a bit further and slump into my pile of newspapers and boxes, let the huge, hovering history of this place lower itself over me and take me away with its succubus kiss.

Maybe it's me who's dreaming, instead of the city. Maybe the liquor has taken me away to when I was young and strong and full of verve and vigor and the future lay before me waiting to be plundered. Instead of sirens and gunshots and oppressive silence, I hear laughter and tinkling glasses and music from bars and nightclubs, I see couples wandering down clean streets wearing their about-town best, furs and fedoras, black-and-white oxfords and patent-leather pumps. I am barely a teenager, lurking in shadows with my best buddies, all older than me, cupping smokes like we see the union boys do, like the ex-GI's with Omaha Beach and Battle of The Bulge glittering hard and cold in their eyes. We pretend to be rough and tough, slug a drunk and take his change for cheap booze, we tumble gals in the back of rusted-out old Packards, we have this city as our oyster and we plunder it for all we can.

One night I'm lying in bed and voices are loud at the front door. Pop never came home from work. A factory accident, I never knew exactly what. Ma does her best, odd jobs and late shifts, but its never enough. When I'm sixteen and Mary is fourteen, Ma just vanishes, gone one morning with a suitcase and a traveling salesman, leaves a few bucks on the stove and not even a note. Mary ain't long behind her, takes up with a rich banker sort, gets by on looks and loose legs. I see her from time to time, then I don't no more and it's just me, scraping by. I hear about Korea, sign up, travel to a foreign land on a floating tin can full of old vets and scared boys.

It's hell, a pure and blood-soaked hell of rice paddies and dead men on obscure hills. I live through it, physically. My soul is never the same. I block out the memories when I get home, but I can't ever shake the nightmares. I take up the bottle to drown them out. Eventually I find a factory job and a woman. She was long-legged and buxom, sweet as sugar and soft as silk and sinful in the sack. Too good for me and my dreams of lost legs and spattered gore, my tall, vanishing bottles of golden whiskey that slowly eat away my soul. She loves me as best she can, as long as she can, but it's no use. She packs a valise, just like Ma, and flies to Hollywood in the arms of a producer with small round sunglasses and bell-bottoms.

The beginning of the end, that was. It began the slow inevitable descent into self-made hell. More whiskey, a bottle a day most days, then a little pot and a little coke, just every now and again with bar buddies and fellow vets, and then my boss at the Ford plant found me passed out one day, skunk drunk and high as a kite in the bathroom, and that was that. I just stopped trying, if I'm being honest. The bank took the house and I lived in my beat-up old F-150, until that got stolen. It seemed easiest to just let go, to abandon myself into what I had wrought for myself.

She's all I've got now, this old and lovely city. When I lost everything she took me in, gave me a home in her hidden places. I've watched her change and sicken and crumble over the years, and I grieve for her. She was a brilliant and vibrant place and she's gone to seed now but still she succors me and comforts me. I walk her streets, wide and straight and complex and variegated, I sit on park benches and take in the architecture, the doric columns and corbelled arches and intricately carved capstones, all the many features from when they still put such artistic touches on buildings; I admire too the high-walled canyons of glass and steel echoing with modernity and the ageless curses and loud laughter and idling engines. I stomp drunk and oblivious through the riverside park with the giant disembodied fist and huddle with a hoarded smoke near the Spirit of Detroit statue and watch as masses pour out from Cobo and the Joe Louis. I remember the way she was when she was Motown, thriving and rocking with new and fresh and dynamic music, a city unlike anywhere else.

Oh Detroit, I mourn for you. I weep for you. But I have hope for you.

The young and idealistic are pushing and straining against the downward slide, they're revamping and reusing; I watch her gaining clean new edges in slow increments, I get sudden glimpses of new beauty cropping up in unlikely places. I have hope that in time, she will regain and surpass her old glory.

I won't be around to see it though. There's a chill in my bones now, a deep, penetrating, unreachable cold in the core of me. It spreads, every day, every month. I cannot shake it, cannot warm it or drink it away. I lie awake at night, cold and alone, and I remember.

The sky is black now, flecked with flurrying white flakes of bitter, killing cold snow. I'm huddled in a corner, shivering. I'm not afraid, though. My time has come, and I welcome it. I slump farther down, sliding helplessly until I'm lying down and my face is pointed heavenward. The cold in my bones has spread until it has consumed me from the inside out. I am ready.

Just...remember me, Detroit. I've lain in your streets and sung your praises silently, I've wandered up and down Woodward and whispered my devotion to you, my home. I am forgotten, I know, by the living, by the flesh and blood and bone who rush around me, oblivious and self-absorbed. I am lost to the river of the past, I am remembered only by shades, mourned only by ghosts. So I ask you, Detroit, to remember me as I fall away. I die, and I sing to you a paean, an elegy.

I am floating, drifting. I see the shape of her, from above. I'm not cold anymore. Time flows past me, for I have stepped beyond its banks, and I see in stop-motion glimpses her future stretched out like unfinished road; the fragments I am allowed to see give me peace and my song changes, becomes a tribute.

I take him in to me, swallow his bones, digest his memory. He is gone, forgotten by all but me. I cannot speak in the quick shifting words of the men and women who walk my streets and dwell in my buildings, but I speak of him, nonetheless, in my own slow, heavy language. He is there, among them, in the grizzled beards and dirt-smudged cheeks, in the layers of clothes and shopping carts, in the forgotten names and haunting, tragic stories. That is him, on the park bench, him shuffling and silent and lonely in the shadows. He won't be forgotten, not entirely, for he is part of me.

Bathsheba

I cannot get her out of my head. She haunts me, waking and dreaming. I see her, in that one momentary vision, stolen and hoarded away in my soul. I see the copper basin, plain and unadorned, each hammer-dent visible. The basin is large and full of steaming water, sitting in a pool of sunlight in a courtyard, surrounded by date palms and ferns, lilies and jasmine. I see the maidservant pour the last bucket of heated water into the basin and curtsy to someone just out of view. I am standing on a private rooftop at the edge of my palace where it borders the homes of the modestly wealthy; I am alone in the palace except for a few servants. I see her now, she has approached the basin and is standing next to it staring off into middle distance as she lets down her hair from its elaborate braid. Her hair spills down in long black waves, shimmering in the bright morning sunlight, deep lustrous black like raven’s wings, like starless night. Her shift is white, pure, spotless linen, so finely woven as to be nearly translucent, pressed by a slight breeze against her body, young and lush and nubile.

I stand on my courtyard and watch her, spying, feeling the guilt burn in my chest, tangling with desire and excitement. I stand and watch her, unable to turn away, knowing I should. She leans over and dips a hand in the water, lifts a cupped palm-full, watches the drops fall and I can see the prism-reflections as the sun catches them and they shine like slow-falling diamonds, splashing down to send ripples running to the edge. She shrugs out of her shift and lets the material fall gently to the marble tile at her feet in heap around her delicate ankles. She stands bare in the sunlight, unashamed, thinking herself alone and unwatched.

I was transfixed, hypnotized by her beauty.

Her skin was flawless and tanned, her flesh firm, her breasts high and full and swaying slightly as she stepped away from the shift piled on the tile floor. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest, her head turned to look over her shoulder with her weight back on one leg, the other slightly bent. She stood for several moments in that pose of feminine grace, just long enough to burn that ones single memory in my mind for all time, then stepped into the basin and sat down, dipped her head backward into the water, back arched in a parabola, her hair spreading in the water like an ink-stain on pure white paper. She bathed herself slowly, leisurely, enjoying the warmth, calling once for more hot water, luxuriating in the day's dawning brilliance. I watched her the entire time, feeling all the while a hot burning pit of shame searing my soul. At last she rose and toweled herself off and stepped back into her robe, the thin material clinging to her still-damp skin, tantalizing me yet more. Then she was gone from view and I felt a hollowness within me, a burgeoning hunger in my gut for that woman, that vision of perfection, the epitome of womanhood.

I returned to my chamber, slumped into a chair and called for strong wine, not even acknowledging the servants as they bowed, exiting. The day was long, full of images of the woman I had seen, consuming my attention so that I gave little thought to the business brought before me. By day's end I was nearly feverish. I had to have her. I fought against it with all my strength, but found myself powerless against the tide of desire that was sweeping away my good reason.

Wine clouded my sight and my mind as I flopped to my bed and fell into a restless, dream-shattered sleep. I dreamed of her in a thousand scenes, but the one dream that has stayed with me, to this day, is also a dream that haunts with its vividness, its lurid reality. I woke, in the dream, from a drunken slumber tangled in sweat-sodden sheets to see her in the doorway of my chamber, outlined by flickering torch light. She came to me, in the dream, swaying seductively towards me, hair loose and gleaming dully. She untied the neck of the shift so that the V of her breast showed silver in the moonlight streaming in from the open window, shrugged off the shift in that lithe, sensual movement that sent shivers down my spine. She came over to me and put a hand to my face, eyes large limpid pools of soil-brown, pressed herself against me. I reached up a hand and ran it down the curving line of warm silken skin from strong legs like pillars, to hips full and firm to the swell of her breast to the hollow at her neck, where I placed a soft and gentle kiss...

And then I woke up, alone, sweating, chest heaving, a gut-wrenching sense of loss ripping through me.

I ached. I was filled with longing, overcome by obsession....

These dreams, these awful, sweet fantasies, they are nearly nightmares, now. Days have passed, filled to saturation with dreams and thoughts of her. I wake, soaked in sweat, steeped in a pall of all-consuming obsession that I cannot contain, that I know will lead me to sin.

God, help me. I am bewitched. Waking or dreaming, I have but to close my eyes and I am whisked away to some far pasture bathed in the sun, a lush green valley ringing with birdsong and eagle cry, sheep bleating softly and a breeze blowing, the grass waving their million hands heavenward. She is there with me in that place, resting against my chest as we lay in the shadow of a tree, wine-muzzy and love-sated, content and alone in that paradise. The heavy weight of the crown is cast aside, the burden of the nation is lifted, if only for an afternoon.

My mind races and my blood boils, caught up in the burning web of that fictive memory. I lay awake all night, tangled in sweat-soiled sheets, my forehead fevered in the coolth of my marble hall; I am restive, restless, reckless. I pace my room furiously, waging a war in my soul.

I must have her. I must. I am king, I cannot be refused. She will be mine, and no alternative will be countenanced.

Servants bring word that her name is Bathsheba. Bathsheba. They say also that she is married to a soldier, a Hittite named Uriah. My desire and my guilt wage a heavy and fearsome war within me, and I fear my righteousness shall be defeated.

She comes! I have sent messengers to bring her to me. It won't be long now, and I will have this woman, this treasure. My limbs tingle with anticipation, my brow is sweating. I pace my throne room restlessly, a lion in a cage, silent on massive padded feet, crossing and recrossing, roaring and rumbling as it stares out between the bars of its prison.

She stands now in the doorway of my throne room, garbed in a simple, becoming dress of green linen, inexpensive but tightly fitted, clinging to every curve. My mouth goes dry at the sight of her, my groin tightens with desire. I clench the armrest of my throne so tightly I hear the wood creak under my grip. She approaches the dais, timid and confused. Her long black hair is loose around her shoulders, her head covered by a piece of cloth that matches her dress. She kneels before me, head down. I can see her hands trembling.

“You sent for me, my lord King?” Her voice is low, musical.

“Rise, come here.” It is difficult for me to speak. My voice is thick, my words come slowly, my breaths are long and deep. She rises, climbs the dais, lifts her eyes to mine, hesitantly, then more boldly. I can see in her eyes that she is confused, but unafraid. She stands barely a foot away now, and I stare at her greedily, hungrily. She returns my gaze, and I see comprehension dawning on her face.

I rise from my throne, take her hand in mine, lead her to my chamber, dismiss the servants. Her hand is warm and dry, steady. She knows what is happening. She doesn't resist, doesn't speak a word of refusal. I've seen the look in the eyes of servant girls when the soldiers take them to their rooms, some of them go willingly, their eyes shimmer with eagerness, others, those with husbands or lovers, go less willingly, and I can see in those eyes the unspoken “no” clear and apparent. I turn my head to look at Bathsheba, and I see no demurral in her eyes. She must see the question in my glance, for she squeezes my fingers, lifts her head proudly.

We arrive at my chambers and I sit on the bed. She stands before me, and I am burning like a torch, more alive than ever, as full of life and energy as before a battle. My vision, my fantasy, the dreams that have haunted me for a week are become reality. She reaches for me, pulls at my belt, removes my tunic. The afternoon sunlight streams in through a window, bathes her in a pool of gold as she undresses. I can see lust beginning to well up in her eyes, in the shallow panting of her breath, in the way she leans over me, circles her arms around my neck.

Her breath smells of mint, her hair of jasmine.

The moon is high and the stars bright when she leaves me. I walk to her to a postern gate not far from her own doorway. She kisses me, briefly, like a lightning bolt.

“What now, my lord king?”

“I will send for you.” She curtsied, darted across the street and was gone into the shadows.

I stood there in the street, concealed in a shadow, for a long time, watching the moon descend slowly, thinking.

A month later, a servant hands me a slip of parchment folded into quarters. I unfold it, read the single line written in a neat, feminine hand.

I am pregnant.

I fall back against my throne, panic welling in my stomach like bile, now it grips my heart, now is rising to burn my throat. She is with child? What have I done?

A plan takes shape and I call for writing materials and a fast messenger. I pen a note to Joab, telling him to send me Uriah, the husband. Her husband. I suppress a pang of guilt as I watch the rider bear the note eastward to Rabbah.

Uriah arrives, dusty from travel, a bandage around his arm, spotted red with blood. He is a tall, dusky, unattractive warrior. He has a hard face, his eyes tell of many battles, his scars tell the story of an accomplished fighter. I ask him how the siege of Rabbah fares, and Joab. He describes the battle in short, succinct statements, little imagination or poetry to his descriptions, just the details and facts of a life-long soldier. I send him home to wash his feet, send him gift as a mark of my favor.

Servants tell me that he refused to go home, sleeping instead with the servants.

I summon him, saying to him and he explains: “The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.”

I grudgingly respect this man, this poor doomed soldier. He is honorable, courageous, determined. What must be done, must be done. He stays with me for two more days, at my insistence. We drink skinfuls of wine, share war stories, compare scars and sword techniques. I can sense him beginning to question his presence with me, however. At the end of the second day, I send him back to Rabbah with a sealed letter for Joab:

Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he might be struck down and die.

Word came, a month later. Uriah was dead, fallen valiantly in battle. I send for Bathsheba. I tell her myself. To lessen the blow? Perhaps. “Your husband is dead," I say.

She stands shocked for many long moments, her lovely face blank. She sinks down to her knees, tears her garment down the middle. Even in her visible grief, my lust warms. She laments loudly, returns to her home to observe the period of mourning. When the mourning is done, I send for her again, and she comes to me.

We lay in my bed, drowsing and talking of such things as lovers do, after. She lifts up on an elbow, her hair a curtain of black against her skin, against mine. Her eyes presage a hard question. “Did you do it, David?” She asks me, her eyes demanding truth. I know what she is asking me. I cannot deny her this. I cannot meet her eyes as I struggle to admit it to her.

“Yes.” The single word of affirmation sits heavily between us. I force myself to say it all, to put it in words. “I sent him to the siege at Rabbah. He fought like a wounded tiger, I am told. He was struck by arrows taking the gate. He died like a man, like an honorable warrior.”

“Why?”

“I saw you bathing, once. From that balcony, right there. I saw you, and I had to have you. And I now I do.” She is at a loss for words. “Did you love him?”

She thinks carefully before answering. “He was a good man. Kind, in his way.”

“You did not answer the question.”

“Yes, I loved him, I suppose. It was a marriage made by my father, when I was more girl than woman. I learned to care for him, in time. He took care of me, he was gentle with me. He was a warrior, though, through and through, and the son of a warrior. Tenderness, affection, gestures of love were...unlike him. And there were many battles far afield. There were many days spent alone.”

I feel something sharp bite my spirit. Guilt, that ravening beast, lurks. I push it away, bear up under the pang until it subsides. I turn to her, take in her beauty, and I forget the beast within.

She bears me a child, a son. He is as lovely and perfect as his mother.

Nathan, the prophet, has come to me. He stands before me, tall, strong, dark from days in the sun, work-rough hands, hair long and wild and his eyes full of fury, righteous anger. He tells me a story of a rich man with many sheep who steals the single ewe lamb that belonged to a poor man. I become angry at the avarice of the rich man, until Nathan tells me that I am the rich man. He rails against me, reminds me of all that the Lord has given me. The Lord God of Israel speaks to me, from Nathan's mouth. I hear His words, and I feel the guilt I have been denying, that I have been hiding in my heart, and it wells up within me, a tide I cannot any longer hold back. It overtakes me, squeezes my heart until it cracks. At Nathan's last words, it breaks: “Nevertheless,” he says to me in a voice heavy and sepulchral, “because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child who is born to you shall die.” He pins me to my throne with his piercing, penetrating gaze, then turns away and leaves, abandoning me to my guilt.

The child, my precious baby, has died. I can even now, as I sit in darkened room, weeping, hear the child piteous cries, weak with fever. I pleaded with the Lord, fasted, lay on the ground and begged Him to spare the child and punish me, but after seven days, seven long, endless days of agony and guilt, the child died. It was nameless, buried in a shallow grave under a tree in a palace garden.

Bathsheba lays in our bed, alone. The pillow is wet with tears, her lustrous hair is tangled and matted, a heavy curtain blocks the sunlight, closing her in with her pain. It breaks my heart further to her thus. I go in to her, lay down next to her, take her lovely face in my spear-roughened hands, kiss her deeply.

“Will God give us another baby, David?” Her eyes glisten, search mine. I do not know, and I cannot speak to say so. She sense my doubt, weeps against my shoulder.

I stand on a balcony, look down into a courtyard. My son, Solomon, sits in the dust next to a splashing fountain. I watch him as he struggles to his feet, wobbles, balances, toddles to Bathsheba, chubby arms outstretched. I feel joy spring up in my heart, welling up like the fountain below. The deep waters of joy, however, are salted still with the knowledge of the child who is not here, who should be sitting on Bathsheba's lap as little Solomon learns to walk, laughing and clapping perfect little hands.

Bathsheba turns and looks up at me, sensing my presence. She smiles at me. Motherhood has made her lovelier still.

Border War (a Dez Marlowe story)

Dez's heart was in his throat. Again. If he wasn't too terrified to think, he'd be tired of being terrified. The dragonfly girl was clutching him with one arm and both legs, soaring thousands of feet in the air. She'd marched him through the flower forest, which turned out to be a few hundred acres of the giant flowers planted in orderly rows on a mountain-top. Firayla, the girl-creature, had call it “the Harvest.” At the edge of the forest the ground dropped away precipitously. Dez glanced over the edge and saw, hundreds of feet down, splotches of gray cloud. Without a word of warning, Firayla had wrapped her arms around him from behind and leaped into the air, springing a dozen feet aloft with Dez in her grip as if he were weightless. Her wings buzzed above him, loud even over the rushing wind in his ears, pushing them away from the rock face. Once clear, her wings went still and they fell downwards, plummeting straight down, parallel to the sheer cliff wall, a scream caught in his throat. Once through the cloud bank Dez saw the world spread out like a map. They were above a mountain chain, knife-sharp spikes of rock with an ocean to one side, an endless expanse of blue, diamond-studded in the sun, to other fields and forests, rivers and lakes, and in the distance, what might have been a city.

Dez heard a piercing screech, like an eagle's cry, from off to the left. Firayla uttered a word that Dez couldn't make out, but that sounded much like a curse. She twisted in the air and Dez saw a flying beast that looked like a cross between a baboon and a vulture, quadrupedal and furry, with a long, hairless pink neck topped by a dog-muzzled face and wide, feathered wings. The thing was rocketing towards them, clawed legs and arms outstretched, teeth gnashing. Firayla put her mouth to Dez's ear and said “I cannot fight off this demon-thing as well as hold you. Do not panic, I will catch you.” Catch him? She let him go, put her feet to his midsection and pushed off of him, soaring away. Falling downwards on his back, Dez watched as Firayla and the baboon-vulture fought an aerial battle unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Firayla reached behind her between her wings and drew a short spear with a wide, leaf-shaped blade, at the same time firing gouts of purplish flame from her pistol-like weapon. The balls of fire hit the creature, knocked it spinning, but it righted itself almost immediately, lashing out at Firayla and catching her across the torso with a claw, loosing a ribbon of blood. Firayla spun away, slicing at it with her spear. The thing set its wings, abruptly stopping its flight, bellowing at Firayla, who fired twice more at it. Her accuracy, considering she was in flight and bleeding, was impeccable. One bolt of purple flame hit it in the chest, the other in the head. It cawed weakly, fluttered its wings and plummeted to the ground. Firayla wasn't satisfied apparently, for she curled in the air like a swimmer reversing directions and flew after it, decapitated it with her spear. She righted herself and hovered in place, watching it fall for a moment. The entire melee had taken less than a minute, and there was still several thousand feet between Dez and the ground, but it was hard not to panic as he free-fell helplessly. Firayla returned her spear to its place between her wings and flew down after Dez, matched his speed and caught him easily in her arms.

She flew them swiftly across the landscape, passing over forests of trees whose foliage was blue rather than green, furrowed fields, terraced hillsides, small villages of low round huts streaming smoke. They approached a high stone wall stretched across the landscape, broken by crenelated guard-towers every mile or so, and it was towards one of these that Firayla was aimed. She stopped a foot above the wall, hovering in place, dropped Dez and alighted next to him. From the guard-tower several soldiers emerged, each of them easily seven feet tall, heavily muscled, their skin green like Firayla's but of varied shades. They too had two pairs of dragonfly wings, iridescent, translucent, tapered, held perpendicular to their bodies. They each held spears in their hands, ten-foot long versions of the leaf-bladed short-spear that Firayla used on the flying beast, and the same pistol-like weapon.

“What do you have there, Firayla?” One of them asked. Dez pegged him for the ranking soldier, as he wore intricate, brightly-painted armor, standing out conspicuously from the drab, unadorned armor of the other soldiers.

“His name is Dez. He calls himself a 'human'. I found him while patrolling the north Harvest.”

“What was he doing there? And how did he get there? He cannot fly, I assume, since you bore him here?”

“Correct sir. He was just there, walking, looking lost.”

The guard-captain approached him, circled him as Firayla had done, examining him carefully. “What should we do with him, do you think?”

“I don't know, sir. That's why I brought him here. I couldn't very well leave him there, but he wasn't doing anything harmful to the harvest, so I couldn't just kill him.”

“No, I suppose you did well enough.”

“How did you get here, human?”

“I...” Dez realized he had no idea how to explain what had happened to him. Lie? Screw it. Might as well tell the truth. “I don't know. I was on my world, or home plane, or...I don't know what to call it. I don't even know what this place is, or where, or when. What happened was, I had a scroll that made time go backwards, and then a giant snake appeared and took me outside of time, to a place between the stars, and then we were here, in a forest of giant flowers and the snake jumped into the air and turned into this giant manta ray thing...” That sounded nuts, said out loud.

The guard stared at him. “You are deranged.”

“No! I know it sounds crazy, and I don't get it either, but here I am. Wherever here is.”

“You are on the border between the Kingdom of Coriolis and the Wilds of Arnam. You have appeared at a bad time, I fear. There is about to be a war at this wall, and you will be part of it, it seems.” He pointed with his spear at a long dark moving line spreading from one end of the horizon to the other. “That is the horde of the Barren Queen, Empress of Arnam.”

The Serpent (a Dez Marlowe story)

It had all started with Orson, the homeless veteran that had turned out to be a Djinn. Dez had drunk from the bottle of ambrosia, tilted the bottle to his lips and drank deeply. The liquor had tasted of honey and sunlight, it had tasted of ancient power and impossible dreams. Dez had taken the bottle home with him, gulping it greedily, hearing Orson's voice in his head: Not so fast, boy. Powerful, ancient stuff that is, the drink of the gods. It'll do strange things to you.

Dez didn't listen, drank the whole bottle. He'd woken up months later in Cairo, Egypt, wearing a keffiyeh and the robes of a Bedouin, speaking fluent Arabic. He bore scars on his body, knife-wounds, teeth- and claw-marks. The last time Dez had felt an overwhelming desire to do something he couldn’t explain had been in a rare bookstore in London. He had come across an ancient volume and felt these same sensations. Dez had opened it and the words written on the first page had seemed to wriggle, to twist slightly. He stared at them and found himself unable to look away, found himself falling forward, pulled into the lines and curves of the runes, heard a hum in his ear that weakened him, a low haunting melody that entranced me hypnotized him, caught him like a fish on a hook. Dez had tried to pull away, in vain. The harder he struggled to close the book, the deeper he fell into the runes, the more entrancing became the melody in his ear. He was at right turns to reality, his name, his identity was sliding away, his present was draining into the book and he could do nothing to stop it. He had been saved my a hand gently but firmly snatching the book away.

“That’s a right dangerous tome, that is. Best put it up, I should.” The man had looked into Dez's eyes with a penetrating gray stare. “You’ll be fine, I expect, but I’d not go poking into strange books like this no more, if I were you. There’s things out there hidden away in books, things you may not like, things old and powerful, things dangerous and real, whether you believe in ’em or not.” He tapped my shoulder. “This here isn’t all there is to the world, this flesh and blood and bone.”

There had been other books after that, other cities and other warnings. He met strange people, a woman with a voice that sang songs in a voice echoing back on itself in bizarre harmonics, a girl-child that traced the lines on his palm like a fortune-teller and where her fingertip touched him the creases ignited into painless flame, and she spoke to Dez strange and unbelievable prophesies. He ignored the warnings, hunted the books that spoke to him in whispers and songs, found them in the oddest and most obscure places on the map, traveling all over the globe on his savings and trust fund and inheritance, when that ran out working odd jobs that left him stranded in strange cities for months until he could afford to move on. He never sent post cards, never wrote or called, for he had no one to write, no one to call. Each book led another, following clues from the text like a detective. The books and scrolls and codices were always in the same script that seemed at the first and second glance to be utterly alien and bizarre, then after a few minutes of study, seemed to inexplicably shift and writhe, to rearrange into words he could read.

Then came the Scroll of Hours, as he began calling it. He used it to win the lottery, in a small Midwest American town off of I-80; he used it for a myriad of purposes, some innocent, some more nefarious. He never rolled back any more than a few hours at a time. Some silent voice in his gut told him to peel back Time too far would be dangerous. He tried convincing himself that he had watched Back to the Future too many times, but he couldn't shake the feeling.

He hadn't banked on the intervention of Fate, however. Or whatever it was that happened. An accident maybe. He was hitchhiking on a two-lane highway in Missouri, he had sat down a few dozen feet away from the road under the shade of a massive, spreading oak tree. The scroll, even after months had passed, still pulled at him, still called to him from the case in his bag where he kept it. He found himself, there under the oak tree, pulling it out and looking at it. He hadn't planned on opening it, really. He had no agenda, nothing to do with its weird power. He was just holding it in his hands, staring at it, letting it's subtle call wash over him. It was the snake that had caused the whole mess, a giant python or something, an anaconda, a huge constrictor of some sort. At first he thought maybe he had fallen asleep, or was having a flashback...but it slithered up to him to him from out of nowhere, just suddenly lifted its head from the grass and stared at him with slitted eyes. He was frozen for a moment, transfixed to the spot by the piercing yellow alien gaze. He felt strange, inhuman thoughts, like Orson's voice in his head when he drank the ambrosia, but the voice was scaly and cold and and slow, its thoughts ancient and incomprehensible. The snake moved closer to him, flickering its tongue out, so close it brushed his boot. Dez leaped to his feet and pressed his back against the wall, the scroll held in one hand...

One end of the scroll left his grip and fell to the ground. Dez watched it happen in slow motion, swearing under his breath even as it hit the ground, and rolled away from him. The scroll was open several feet now, and the snake was wrapping itself around him, coiling him in inescapable bands of steel. It didn't constrict, totally, just held him immobile with its head inches from his own.

Stupid human, he heard it say, silently. Stupid, foolish, blind human. You meddle with matters far beyond your comprehension. It falls to me, of course, to rescue you from your own idiocy. You are truly like a lamb wandering amongst a pride of sleeping lions, blithely unaware of your own folly. Close your eyes, human. When Dez failed to obey, the rings of iron around his body tightened in warning. Close your eyes! To watch a few meager hours roll away is well and good and harmless. If you were to watch as hundreds of years flow in reverse you would rip away layers of your psyche. You have already done irreparable damage yourself.

Of course, Dez looked around him. The constellations whirled and span and jumped and gyrated, the sun and moon circled, day and night alternated in pulsing strobe-light flashes. Trees shrank and storms raged for violent microseconds. Dez felt something in his head warp slightly, and he squeezed his eyes shut. What is done is done, and cannot be take back. The Scroll of Hours only functions in one direction, but you wouldn't have thought of that. Dez had, actually, considered that, and that was one reason he'd never experimented with longer periods of time.

Then things got truly strange. Dez felt the coils of the serpent that wound around him heat and melt, fuse with him at an atomic level, felt the ground tremble and heard the heavens roar like a rushing wind, heard the stars sing in angel voices, heard the thoughts of millions of people crashing in his skull in a telepathic deluge. Panic hacked at his soul, confusion and disorientation and fear distilled in his gut in a harsh burning concoction and all Dez could do was keep his eyes shut tight and hold to the fragmented train of his own thoughts that were drowning in the welter of sensation amid and within him.

The serpent's voice returned, and now instead of seeming alien and frightening its voice like scales on rock comforted him. Keep calm, now. As you have wrought this, so you must bear it.

What's happening? He asked​​ it.

It is not explainable in human language. I have brought you outside of time, into a place that it...between.

Between what? Dez had an image of being plucked out a rushing river and suspended above it.

Your mental image is not far off. To think of it thus will not lead you astray.

Who are you? He asked the serpent. What are you?

Nothing you would understand. As a child cannot grasp the complexities of the adult world with its abstract concepts and tangled issues, so you cannot grasp what beings exist beyond your ken. Leviathans writhe in the spaces outside the streaming of time, monsters lurk in the dimensions beneath your reality. And you, in your hubris, have plunged headfirst to swim amongst those creatures. I am one of them, but unlike many others you will encounter, I will not devour you.

Why are you helping me? The fear of the unknown that had Dez in its grip escalated with the serpent's talk of leviathans and monsters. He had always thought himself a rational, un-superstitious man who refused to believe in what he couldn't see or touch. The last months, however, had cured him of that. And now here he was, outside of Time itself clenched in the coils of a serpent that Dez suspected was far more than a simple snake.

If you were driving down a highway and saw a little child tottering on unsteady legs between the rushing cars, would you not stop and help it? The voice faded then, leaving Dez alone in his mind and full of questions.

He opened his eyes, slowly, and what he saw sent his brain reeling dizzily. All around was darkness, black and void, pierced by points of lurid light, bright and blinding pinpricks in the darkness, as if the stars up close were not balls of burning chemicals but holes in a curtain across the brilliance of eternity. The light emitted cast shadows across the universe, monstrous shapes that lumbered and scuttled and slithered, shades that may have evil and darkness given substance, or may have been the true shadows of creatures beyond imagination, horror and nightmare made real. There was no orientation of up and down or left and right, no surface at all, only beings, things carving through the darkness like eels in the deepest corners of the ocean. Dez moaned, shut his eyes, but it was too late, he had seen what lay beyond, and it had seen him, the darkness itself seemed to possess a will and a hunger and now it had his scent in its nostrils, it had the tang of his blood on its tongue and the shapes were the darkness, the creatures were the talons stretched out by the slavering dark all around him, the blackness that licked his skin, lapped at the pools of his soul. He shivered in the grip of the serpent's coils that were suddenly separate from him, untangled from the essence of him and were again silken steel cables imprisoning him. He was grateful for the serpent now. It tightened around him relentlessly implacably until he passed out of consciousness.

When he awoke again he was lying down. He drifted slowly upwards from slumber out of the tangled shreds of nightmare that clung to him like cobwebs. A dream, it was all a dream, he thought. You would be so lucky, came the serpent's voice. He lay still, taking stock. Everything seemed to work, but he was stiff and sore, like he'd been in a fight. The serpent was stretched out next to him, easily thirty feet long and almost a foot in diameter. I could not return you to your native time and place. At least here you have the possibility of survival in some semblance of normality.

Dez sat up and looked around. It seemed a normal enough place, could've been an old growth forest in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon or somewhere like that. But as he looked around more carefully, he noticed several significant details that told him this assuredly was not Oregon. There were trees, or things like trees, towering around him. They weren't trees though, they were like like god-sized flowers, green smooth cylindrical trunks hundreds of feet high topped by bursts of colorful spreading foliage, massive petals of vivid blue and purple and green and yellow and orange and colors Dez didn't have names for. The flower-trees were odd in another respect: they weren't rooted in the ground, but instead were anchored to earth by a few wisps of white thread-like substance, so that the whole plant drifted loosely, like a boat tethered to a dock. The whole forest moved in syncopated swaying harmony, a hypnotic world of color and motion.

“Where are we?” He asked out loud.

“We are...I do not know if I can explain it. Another dimension, another time and place.” The snake was speaking out loud, and its voice sounded precisely the same as it did in Dez's head. “It is like the fantasy stories you read as a child. We in a place that is a long time ago and far, far away from anything you have ever known. It is the only place I could find that bears any resemblance to your home. It is vastly different, however, and it will tax you sorely to adjust. I cannot stay here any longer. Good luck, Dez Marlowe, and goodbye.” The serpent writhed itself into a knot and burst into the air, transforming as it rose, turning into something like a manta ray but translucent and the size of a passenger jet. It pulsed itself once, refracted the sunlight that passed through it into a rainbow that bathed the world in color, then vanished.

Dez sat stunned and staring at the strange new world around him as a welter of emotions rioted within him. Eventually he stood up and started walking, picking a direction at random. He'd been walking for what felt like half an hour when he felt the curious sensation of being watched. He stopped, suddenly sure that someone, or something, was nearby and watching him.

“What are you?” A voice came from high above him, lilting, musical, high and feminine. Dez looked up. The creature above him was definitely a female. She clung to the stalk of the flower-tree about twenty feet up from the ground, one lithe arm wrapped around the trunk, the other pointing some sort of weapon at him. She was bipedal, appeared to be about six feet tall, with green skin a few shades darker than the stalk of the tree. Her hair was pure white, long and and fine and flowing in the ever-blowing wind. She also had long wings appended to her back, two sets, thin and pointed like a dragonfly. She leaped to the ground, flitting her wings lightly to slow her fall; she landed on her toes and circled Dez warily, her weapon, a short, thin, straight length of tubular metal, looking for all the world like a pistol. Whatever it was, whatever it did, the way she kept it pointed at him made Dez positive it was a weapon of some kind.

“My name is Dez,” he said.

“What is a...dez?” She asked. Despite the fact that he understood what she was saying, Dez had the distinct feeling that they were not speaking the same language, but he couldn't explain to himself any better than that.

“Dez is my name, it's...how you call me. I am a person...a human.”

“Ah,” she said. She lowered the gun, or what Dez now thought of as a gun. “Well, human named Dez, you should not be here. This is not a good place. You must come with me.”

“I must?”

“Yes. You are my prisoner. Unless you wish to be no longer living?” Well. In trouble already. Wonderful.

A Fragment of Youth

Local bar low-ceilinged and loud
Kitsch and Christmas lights in April
Drunks laughing and dancing to the deafening band
God this song brings me back 15 years
To when love wasn't really love at all
Just tingling fingers and long glances
Mush and nonsense from innocent kids
New and strange and exciting
When responsibility was a four-letter word
And all we knew was
Long car rides and your dad's jazz stations
Playing just loud enough to cover our conversation
Then he changes the station and this song plays
And we sing along in low voices
Just whispers in the summer wind
And I hear this song now
So many many years later
And I swear for a split second
I'm that kid again
It's a strange feeling
A fragment of youth and innocence
Briefly superimposed over maturity and age
Like a lightbulb suddenly burned out
Leaving an after-image of the room as it was
Then the song ends and the moment is banished
I shake my head and drink my beer
Let the moment the image
Float back down the swift torrent of memory

The Scroll of Hours (a Dez Marlowe story)

Dez Marlowe found the scroll in a glass case of a curio shop. It was unassuming, a simple scroll of vellum next to a rusted dagger, some arrowheads and old coins and a scratched silver cigarette case. The proprietor of the shop—a balding man, skeletal, parchment-like skin, smoking a long cigarillo—could only say that someone had sold it to him many years ago, for one hundred dollars. He had given it a cursory examination then forgotten it until Dez walked in and saw it. “I’ll let you have it for one-fifty,” the proprietor said, “I don’t have any idea what it is, or what the writing on it means. It could be rare and valuable, it could be a list of farm tools. I had a linguist look at it once, a few years back. He said it was no language he’d ever seen before. So, one-fifty, and good luck.”

Dez asked to see it, and as soon as he had it in his hands he knew he had found what he was looking for. The scroll felt heavy in his palm, heavier than reality, whispering to Dez in a susurrus audible only to him, he knew.

“Don’t you wanna open it first?” The shop-owner asked.

Dez shook his head and left, holding the scroll close, cradling it against his chest. “Weirdo,” he heard the proprietor say as he left. Dez didn’t know how to tell him what he was feeling as he held the scroll in his palm. He couldn’t define it himself. He was afraid of it, drawn to it. He had crossed continents looking for scrolls and books like this.

He walked down the street to his car and drove back to his hotel room, glancing at the scroll sitting on the passenger seat, waiting for him to unroll it. Dez resisted. Setting it gently on the bed, Dez kicked off his shoes, sat down next to the scroll, reached for it, stopped. Not yet. The desire to unroll the scroll was beginning to dominate his thoughts, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t know what the scroll was, exactly, but he recognized the feeling it engendered within him, the sense of premonition, the warm tingling creeping sensation like static electricity crawling up his flesh when he touched it. He had found several other texts like this one. He always found them in small, out-of-the-way bookshops and antique stores. None of them were ever the same, and few had ever amounted to much. He was searching for information that would explain what had happened to him at that bus stop back in Detroit. So far, all he had discovered was a plethora of legends and myths and stories about Djinns and Ifrits, but next to nothing that would truly explain the terrifying, incredible being he had encountered, or what had happened to Dez in the months since then.

In the hotel room Dez opened his newest acquisition a few inches. The markings on it were a mixture of Arabic cursive lines and dots, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Hebrew runic shapes. Dez stared at the shapes, trying to make sense of them and failing. Then the writing began to blur and shift, as if Dez was staring at it too hard, yet when he looked away and back down, the markings were still trembling and distorting. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head, pressed his fingers to his temples, yet the bizarre writing only increased their inexplicable dance. Nothing like this had ever happened before in any of the texts he had found to date. They had all been in Arabic and he'd had to have them translated. He'd thought the tingling warmth when he'd held them had been his own excitement, but now he wasn't so sure.

Dez rolled the scroll closed, stood up and went out to the balcony of the hotel, lit a cigarette and held the scroll in his hand, staring at it and wondering what it would do.

“Screw it,” Dez mumbled to himself. He clamped his cigarette between his teeth and unrolled the scroll, waiting for the glyphs to rearrange themselves. Around him, the evening air grew warmer. He unrolled the scroll further; the sun seemed brighter, somehow, despite the late evening hour when it should be setting. He looked up, and noticed a few odd details: a few souks, which had been closed for the day, were now open, a shadow cast across the market square by building had moved backwards across the square. Dez glanced down at his watch: 6:59. He was been sure the alarm clock in the hotel room had read 7:15. Maybe not. It had been a long day, and the sweltering heat of Jordan had taken its toll. Dez dragged on his cigarette one last time and tossed off the balcony, opened the scroll further. This time there was no doubt...

The sun lifted upwards in the sky, shadows rolled and lightened, crowds swirled and reversed in time-lapse, the watch on Dez's wrist counted backwards, 6:36...6:12...5:56. Dez slumped against the rail of the balcony, light-headed, still holding the scroll open. He pulled it open an inch further, and instantly time rolled back even further, his watch now reading 5:35, the sun well above the tops of the buildings now.

“What the hell?” Dez looked down at the people beneath him, but none seemed to notice anything amiss, scurrying across the square and along the streets as if nothing had happened. Maybe it hadn't, to them, Dez realized. Dez returned his gaze to the scroll held open before him. The words were now intelligible to him, some sort of prayer or incantation. He scanned the text visible to him, but it didn't say anything about time, only the will of Allah and the words of Mohammed to the faithful.

Dez rolled the scroll closed and as he did so time snapped back to its original moment, before he'd ever opened it, 7:16 p.m.

This could make things interesting.

Spark of Apocalypse

It all started with a girl, as so many things do. She was young, beautiful, curious, slightly naive and idealistic, and such women have been the downfall of nations. So proved this woman to be. She had a name, once, something ordinary and forgotten. Now, her only name is Pandora. This Pandora, like the one from ancient mythology, opened a box and let evil loose upon the world. Only, this Pandora was the box. The evil she loosed wasn't contained in a clay amphora, no, this box was far more commonplace: the human mind. In the oldest stories, Pandora was given a sealed jar and told not not open it under any circumstances. So, of course, consumed by natural curiosity, Pandora opened it. When she did so, out rushed all the evils of the world.

This new Pandora was a chemical engineering major, back when such quaint things as universities still existed. She found a way to do something incredible, like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel. It had been said that people only used 30% of their brain, so this girl, being young and idealistic, found a way to unlock that elusive 70%. She tested it on herself, being young and naïve. She was right, in that she unlocked the rest of her brain using her chemicals and compounds, and she was right in that she found herself capable of things far beyond imagination. People had theorized in books and movies what would happen: telekinesis, telepathy, empathy, perfection, terrible and wonderful things.

Terrible, and wonderful, indeed. Telepathy, telekinesis...yes, she discovered these, and found them to be burdens; the weightiest burden Pandora unlocked was immortality. She created the ability to put off sickness, invented regenerative techniques to stave away Death's specter, she developed all this, and more. But, like the ancient Pandora, what she opened couldn't then be closed. She took a lover, our postmodern Pandora, a courageous, foolish man, and together they conceived a child, and that child had control over its entire brain. And so it went. Children born thereafter were able to do nearly anything they wished...except exercise restraint.

The purpose, it became clear, for that millennial restriction on the human brain was to protect mankind from itself, to protect men from themselves and each other: nearly infinite power, but no understanding of the forces wielded...the result was apocalypse. Not by nuclear holocaust, or melted polar caps, or meteoroids, but because of one ambitious girl who thought she could unlock the mysteries of the human brain. So then, men murdered each other with bare hands, with lasers and plasma rifles and fission bombs and empath hunters, with hate and hunger and overcrowding.

See her now: stumbling across a blasted plateau, bare feet catching on bleached bones buried in the soil, hair thick and youthful still, lovely face unlined by age, yet heavy and haunted with grief. She carries in her gut the thickest of gall stones: the knowledge that she wreaked this havoc, she created this hell, the road to which was paved by that commonest of stones, good intention. She cannot forget and she cannot die, while her lover lays long rotted in the wind-scoured soil, her descendants stare out from caves in hillsides, lope through empty streets of skeletal cities, gaunt and gangrenous apparitions. Pandora, who carried in her synapses the spark of Apocalypse, now wanders Earth trailing the ghosts of mankind behind her in an ethereal skein of sorrow, palpable to her senses as voices singing elegies and curses to her ceaselessly. She weeps, and regrets, but she cannot close the box she has opened.