Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, Ruby arrives at an island of calm on the sea of the shuffling undead.
Ruby Departed: The Welcome Party, Part 1 of 3
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Tonight, from the demolished basement of Skinner Co. HQ, we bring you a tale of metal landscapes, monstrous villains, and a meek prince with the power to transform into a loin-cloth ensconced warrior.
This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Gatecast!
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, at long last, we discuss the dead of Otter Rapids.
Beneath: a Thomas Blackhall Chronicle, Part 2 of 2
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Blackhall’s words began with the slow momentum of a man groping through memories, and he paused often to sip at his pine tea while it remained hot.
“In the crook of a river’s bend there was a small town of perhaps a hundred heads called Otter Rapids – well, a hundred if you were generous and cast a wide net around the hunt cabins and bush farms that collected their mail in the town’s sole commercial establishment.
“Though all trade flowed through the docks adjacent to the Globe – a venture serving as harbour, weighmaster, inn, public house, post office, and general store – the clay in the land and the fur in the weald was abundant enough to draw a steady stream of grain croppers and pelt collectors.
“Some of them had even made a success of it, and thus the township had been born fifty years previous.
“Now, operating the Globe was a supposed wise woman, Rhine Ande and her husband, Howard. Howard was the sort who made his way with a strong back and stronger opinions, though he rarely considered, until after her passing, that these opinions were little more than a parroting of his wife’s words.
“In truth it was but one of the many ways in which her husband was the result of her molding, but it was a beneficial bond for both.”
Blackhall paused in his telling as a single great knock came at the makeshift cabin door, but an upright raft of timbers bound together with tightly woven reeds. The wood trembled at the impact of the visitor’s declaration of arrival.
Sour Thistle let out a low growl, and, though Thomas at first mistook it as a sign of anger, he soon realized she was simply conveying that the intrusion would be tolerated.
Beyond the swinging entrance stood a bear of immense size. Upon its back it wore a harness of leather and wood that held aloft a platform. In turn, upon the platform had been laid a selection of firewood.
The sight pained Thomas. There were few left of the old nobility – Sour Thistle stood as a rare example of one of the survivors of the years of creeping madness – and he could not blame her for wishing to council against war. Yet Blackhall knew well enough that it was he himself who’d ended the lineage of the Bear King, and that there was no hope of seeing that gleam of intelligence in these ursine eyes – this beast who had been reduced to pack animal.
As her servants stoked the fire, Sour Thistle asked, “how did you come by this tale? The pen of some distant fabulist?”
“No,” answered Thomas, “Most I read of Howard’s journal, the rest, well, the rest I tell you first hand – but we’ll get to that.
“Rhine’s interests, as her husband recorded in his simple scratch, were as varied as the operations housed beneath the Globe’s roof. At the lack of a local broadsheet she became the source of official news flowing up river, and her shop shelves maintained an irregularly robust collection of tomes on farming, histories, and philosophy. Having set up keeping at the head of a gateway to the north had provided some interesting finds in those decades of nameless drifters and fleeing blaggards.
“Here in she found words of healing, cursing runes, and much beyond her self-taught ability to decipher.
“The results of these mystic tools were what she considered just another prong in her efforts to gain capital. Fear of superstitious reprisals kept her from brazen advertisement, but if a member of the community she deemed discrete were in need, and had the coin, she would often approach with a hex to stiffen wilting crops or a sigil to chase wolves from the edges of the lonely clearings in which the dirt-tillers lived.
“It was Rhine’s central tenant that though she acted in self-interest, in the end her actions brought betterment to the community. If she held a morality, it was that. Any she did not help had been given the opportunity, and if the coin was so important to them clearly it was within their right to keep it.
“Speaking of coin, at that time there was a great demand for bodies in the city of Kingston. A hub of education, the surgical schools and their students were more than willing to pay a decent dollar for a cadaver on which to practice.
“Though Otter Rapids’ graveyard was a simple affair in a clearing not far from the community’s single church, which itself rested directly across the muddy street from the Globe, high and heavy fences had been commissioned from Robert Tunsel, the town smith. His specialty was horseshoes and kitchenware, but the man approached the project with gusto.
“While it is not uncommon to wish some protection from the probing paws, and hungry bellies, of wild carrion feeders, this wall was intended to keep a much larger beast out.
“Two years earlier the Collins had buried their eldest daughter, a girl of sixteen who’d perished after startling a horse who’d bucked in instinctive fear. Her crushed skull had not been enough to dissuade a pair of riverborne bodysnatchers from collecting her up, one moonless October night, and carrying her chill body downstream.
“Eight months later the death of Mr. McGrath, the end result of a long bout with failing lungs, had seen a similar breach. The families, finding only each other to commiserate with, had pooled their funds to erect the barrier.”
Blackhall paused again, sipping at his tea, then continued.
“Hard to say how such a thing fit into Rine’s notion of self-interest fueling community betterment, but it is a strangely human foible to ignore all that does not support one’s own notions.
“It soon did become a communal concern, however, when the fires of typhus spread through town. No medicine, mundane or mystical, could touch the natural infection that swept up the river. Fingers were pointed, salves were applied, the old remedies were trotted out by Rhine and country wisemen alike.
“All efforts were futile.
“Fever sheds were erected, and any knowledge of the coffin ships was denied by those whose names were landed upon as likely sources. The Irish of the area, often cited as the source, were so well integrated with the families they had arrived to be reunited with that it became impossible to extricate the newcomers – even those with the longest stead grew sick.
“In the end it mattered not who the source of the diseased lice that spread the plague. More than half of the once vibrant and growing community fell ill, and, in the end, Rhine was among them.
“Worse, though the disease would soon arrive within the limits of Kingston itself, and as many bodies as the surgeons might ever have call for would soon be at the disposal of their earth-encrusted fingertips, in those early days Otter Rapids stood as a treasure trove of human flesh.
“The fiends were quick and quiet, their methods as varied and clever as the attempts to stop them. At first simple guards were posted, but with the demands of the harvest already being split by the ailing population it was no small thing to spare an able body to stand guard for the night.
“Even with such precautions taken, the flow did not cease. One sentry claimed to have been knocked flat, likely by an oar. Another spoke of his water skin being tainted with some slumber-inducing tincture, though many suspected it was simply whiskey and the man had only poisoned himself. Distracting fires ensued, strange whispers in the distance pulled sentinels into goose chases, the sound of an approaching bear threatened.
“Whatever the diversion, the cadavers were retrieved at nearly the pace they could be buried, and no change from public cemetery to private gravesite, nor rocky coverings, nor human intervention seemed capable of stopping it.
“In truth, the spread of typhus was such that soon after there were few left unexhausted enough to attempt to try.
“Howard, however, born with the luck of a stronger constitution than most of his neighbours, and with the stubbornness of a man who’d had the fortune to never encounter an obstacle he could not overcome, was determined to keep his wife safe at any cost.
“Now, that is not to say that he too did not suffer the fate of so many of his customers and acquaintances, yet when Rhine first fell ill he poured over her books, his rough education being pressed to its limit as he attempted to locate some rite or elixir that might pull her from the grave’s edge.
“Though the couple had been among those lobbying for the fever sheds, he chose instead to tend her at home, in her own bed. Between his reading he collected cold river water to cool her forehead, and the supply of pemmican and pickles that had been the major source of their seasonal traffic ran dry as he did what he could to coax them down her throat.
“In the end he was able to accomplish little beyond extending her suffering. Even as he felt the fever building within his own limbs he held her hand and watched her final exhalations. Even as the chills ran up his spine and through his limbs he dug her grave. Even as the sweat of exertion and malady churned in with the muck he pulled from her resting place, he knew he was breathing his last.
“He’d considered a simple plot alongside their rambling clapboard shop, yet the proximity to the riverway – and the nearness to the body snatchers’ picks – convinced him the communal graveyard was a spot more likely to bring her peace.
“Howard did not stop there, however. For the final words of his diary, as I found it open within their buttoned-tight store, laid out the concerns he had around his wife’s eternal slumber being disrupted, and his plan to stop any such intrusions.
“Though he’d dug the hole himself, he offered up a barrel of Liverpool salt to the Henleys – a local family who’d had the good fortune to otherwise survive the plague unscathed – to finish the job.
“Now, you must recall that this was a time of rapid internment. Worries over spreading disease and, frankly, making way for the next to fall, meant that holes were dug and filled as fast as the shovels might fall.
“Though Otter Rapids never quite reached the point of mass graves or funerary pyres, the situation on the ground was one of rot and woe.”
Though her crinkled nose and bright eyes told Blackhall clearly that his host was, at this point, deeply invested in his tale, she took a moment to interrupt his telling.
“Imagine it,” she said, “all that delectable meat being left to spoil – above ground or below, it matters not, your people should learn the beauty of a feast upon death.”
“Well,” answered Thomas, “we do often do hold a commiserating meal, but it is largely considered bad manners to feast upon the dead. Besides, disease was rampant enough at the time, there was no need to exasperate the situation by spreading it through a belly full of Uncle Bill.”
The Lady of the Forest chuckled. “Call me at your next such venture, I will gladly lend my teeth in assistance of your disposal problems.”
Attempting a half-grin that spoke of too much experience with such calamities to allow for any true black humour to show through, Blackhall continued.
“Given the great rate of collapse and interment the Henleys can hardly be blamed for not questioning why they found themselves, upon having filled over Rhine Ande’s grave, with no small amount of redundant dirt still left in Howard’s pile.
“Further, in light of the man’s loss, and the sickness pillaging the beds and fields of Otter Rapids, the Henleys might also be forgiven for not questioning further the disappearance of the man who had hired them.
“The truth likely lay dormant for a day before being quite literally uncovered.
“You may note that I have provided little information about the body snatchers plaguing the town. I can not even truly tell you their names – when I met them, they had very little to say on the matter.
“Here’s what I do know: When I arrived upon the scene I was long delayed but finally answering a summons to inquire about the matter of the missing cadavers. You must recall that, at the time, there were many theories about the disappearing corpses – most of which assumed some witchcraft or mystic aspect.
“The friend who had summoned me, unfortunately, had passed early in the spreading disaster, and perhaps it was Alfred’s demise – and the worries about his final resting place – that finally drew me to the area.
“Whatever the case, it was no arcane matter that first caught my eye, it was simply my habit of traveling the wildwoods on foot. Meals can be few and far between in such a venture, so my stomach was on constant alert for game. It was this hope for a full belly that pulled my gaze to the canoe hidden on the east bank of the river, its hull covered over with a number of downed spruce branches.
“From the craft I simply followed a trail of churned mud and snapped twigs that led me directly to the graveyard – though not without encountering a fair share of danger upon the way.
“I discerned what happened almost immediately, as the answers had been laid out like the breadcrumb trail of a child’s story. Having been forced into association with a few bodysnatchers in my time, their techniques were already familiar to me. They often, as was the case here, concentrate their efforts in a shaft beginning directly above the head of their intended victim. Though the broadsheets carry cartoon images of men having laboured to turn back the grave digger’s work, in truth it’s much easier to simply draw a single chute, shatter the uppermost portion of the coffin, and drag their prize upwards.
“With this savings in labour a successful shovelman can carry off three or four loved ones without risking the light of dusk or dawn.
“This too was the case above the Ande grave, and it was clear that one of the two partners in crime had been forced to step down into the hole for leverage in driving the blade of his shovel against the coffin-top.
“The man had the look of a habitant far from home. His red toque, heavy woven jacket, and variety of leathers told me he was likely a huntsman who’d turned his skills in silent forest-running towards creeping into graveyards.
“He was no longer silent, however. He began moaning loudly as soon as I came into sight.
“Worse still, Howard was also at hand.
“You see, though the mourning husband could not save his dying wife, he had come across a rite of resurrection, or, at least, of infection. I know you have dealt with plagues of the dead in the past – the gnashing of teeth, the rotting flesh, the milky eyes and stumbling, waving limbs.
“Yet Howard had not invoked the curse upon his wife. No, instead he had, knowing her slumber would be disturbed, prepared the symbols of ritual upon his own flesh. Who knows how long he had lain, yet alive, as the Henleys laid their spoonfuls of dirt upon his lid, but he must have been still breathing when he set Rhine beneath, placed a first layer of soil, then cast his own box into the hole and prepared as if for slumber.
“His trap, of course, was a success – though I found him, some four days later, still caught in the pinewood, he had done no small damage to the nearest intruder’s leg. The man had bled out and been feebly resurrected without ever being able to escape the tunnel into Howard’s prison.
“It was a grisly sight. Much of Howard’s grasping hands had been shredded upon the jagged hole in his tomb, but he’d feasted well in the moments before his victim’s return.”
Sour Thistle, licking her teeth, raised a brown-furred brow. “So you say, then, that Rhine’s notion of self-interest did, in the end, benefit the community? It seems as such, at least, as I have never found much further threat in anything I’ve eaten.”
Blackhall, realizing he’d been speaking more to the fire than his friend, raised his head.
“No, you misunderstand me. When Howard went into the ground more than half the town was still in good stead. Though those closest to its heart had fallen to fever, some had recovered; others had simply avoided the illness altogether.
“For the sake of clarity I have unfolded these events in the format of a sensical discovery, but it is not as if I was not already aware of the wandering cadavers as I crept into the remnants of the town. It was there, too, that I saw self-interest in action; the crush of ravenous neighbours thrashing in attempt to climb each other and consume a babe that had been tossed by doomed parents onto a shack roof, the arguments of tooth and shattered nail over those scraps of meat that the decaying mob did manage to turn up.
“It was among them that I spotted the man that must have been the pinned robber’s partner, as he too wore leathers of a courier des bois, and I pegged him as the likely source of contamination to the village at large. No doubt he had attempted to pull his partner from the pit – either so they might flee, or so that he might dispose of the trail of evidence that would lead to him.
“Whatever the case, their self-interest, combined with the Andes’ own, was enough to kill every inhabitant but the lobbed babe.
“It was while collecting supplies that I came across Howard’s journal, and it was with the book in my pocket and the babe in my left arm that I set my torch to the brush upwind and burned flat everything between myself and the river.”
Silence fell in the small shack, then the great wolverine nodded.
“There was little reward in a situation that called for taking such time and risk,” said the queen, and a knot in the flaming log before them popped.
“Even less so for the babe I carried downstream.”
“I believe I understand now.”
The last of the pine tea drained into Blackhall’s gullet.
“Then we prepare for war,” he answered, and the true thrust of their conversation began.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight we visit with old friends, both human and otherwise.
Beneath: a Thomas Blackhall Chronicle, Part 1 of 2
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
It’d been two years since Thomas Blackhall had worn a pair of snowshoes. Not coincidentally, it had also been two years since he’d departed the frontier of the Canadian north and set up a house whose study window overlooked the Lethe, and whose grounds received only enough snow each year to remind him to tell his child some tale of his wilder days.
These indications of time’s passage were important to Thomas largely because he had so little of it left.
Blackhall’s lungs were burning, his back slick with sweat beneath the thick black beaver coat he wore, and yet the great rackets upon his feet continued their rise and fall, and the smile upon his face refused to give out.
He missed the solitude, the sense of focus, the clarity of the dangers at hand. His days and nights were now filled with planning, politics, and grasping what few moments he still had with his Mairi. Yet, though it might be argued he was losing time to his slow progress even now, all of these things fell away to the simple and immediate necessities of surviving in the wilderness: Raise your left foot, put it down. Now do the same with your right. Ignore that rising pain in your calves, as you’ll only lose heat pausing to rest – and is that a wolf shadowing your progress some twenty yards to the rear?
The cabin, when he finally came to it, was of the simplest log construction. The roof was tall, but only because such had been necessitated by its lack of chimney.
There was but a single hole, high above, through which the smoke of the fire within rose.
It wasn’t that his host had no concept of grandeur, it was that she did not care for the rough constructions of men: The valley no doubt pleased her aesthetics, but the lodgings, fit for his frail human form, had likely been – to her mind – the equivalent of equipping a natural palace with an outhouse. Necessary for her guest, perhaps, but not worth dwelling upon.
As Thomas tromped down the valley’s slope his question regarding a possible companion was finally answered. A wolf, the coat along her spine a steely gray but her belly as white as the snow through which she trotted, made herself known by taking a seated position upon his tracks and issuing a single low howl that rolled across the vale.
A brace of fishers shuffled from beneath low-slung pine branches and burrows within the powder. Blackhall counted twenty among the honour guard as he approached, and, though the four legged beasts might have been manageable by boot alone if taken one at a time – and if his boots were perhaps not strapped into the caribou leather and ash pine platforms that currently kept him afloat – he knew there was little he could have done against twenty of the gnawing beasts, especially without a rifle or even the saber he once wore at his side.
Within the shack he found two blankets laid out by the fire, and upon the furthest, hunkered low on her haunches and watching the door through the flames, sat the Lady of the Woods.
“Welcome,” she said, her words delivered through fangs still decorated with the red remains of the mourning dove whose bones and feathers sat neatly collected to her left. “You are late.”
Blackhall smiled. “Yes, I’ve gotten slow in my time away, and as it happens they’ve yet to run a train this far north.”
“Oh,” she answered, “let them try. Your fellow perambulating picnics will learn the folly of sullying my view if they attempt to lay down one of their metal ribbons and drive a smoking behemoth into my domain.”
“You speak as if you’ve considered the subject before, and yet I thought you’d retreated to a quiet life of reflection?”
“Yes, and I have reflected on how much fuller I would be, and how better fertilized my grasses would find themselves, were I to encounter a team of axe-wielders and pick-swingers within the shade of my pines.”
Thomas, still grinning, slipped off the beaver coat and laid it out opposite the former dove to dry, then he lowered himself to the waiting quilt.
From beyond the breach in the roof a parade of black-eyed raccoons soon followed, peering briefly into the hole, then delivering a thick, well-chewed tree limb onto the fire below. The impacts sent sparks dancing, and, though the timber had been stripped of the snow under which it’d rested, the smoke increased briefly as the outermost layer of frost was sent into sizzling fits at the flame’s heat.
“Do you hunger?” asked the Queen of the Northlands, but Blackhall gave a polite shake of his head. Though he had eaten wild game for the vast majority of his time stomping across Upper and Lower Canada, it still unnerved him to watch his friend summon meat to her table in order to be sacrificed. The apparent joy with which most of the victims – be they quail, buck, or salmon – offered themselves up only further upset his appetite.
“No,” he answered, “though I would not, admittedly, turn away a hot beverage with which to fight back the cold. I had forgotten the taste of jerky, and the salt I’ve consumed since stepping from the comfort of my study, and Mairi’s company, will likely carry me through till I return across the border.”
Sour Thistle snorted once, and he thought it likely that she smelled the lie on his words, but was too gracious a host to say otherwise.
“So to the matter at hand then?”
“I suppose.”
“- and you insist on carrying out your mad plan?”
“What other option do I have?”
“Cut your losses.”
“Cut my losses? Do you not see that my losses are everything? I’ve damned a planet to death.”
The smoke settled and the flame grew. A row of squirrels, nimble despite their winter coats, came streaming through the rooftop hole and along the ceiling in a display of natural acrobatics. At the lead was a gray-furred beast with a small tin cup hanging from one cocked arm, and the half dozen who followed each carried a ball of snow as they scaled the knots and moss-filled gaps. Setting the dishware at the fire’s edge, the head of the parade stopped to watch its followers place their collected flakes within. Once complete the apparent leader chattered twice and the posse scattered.
Even as the frizz-haired cooks clambered again onto the ceiling, the tumult gathering in the trees reached Blackhall’s ears.
“You must look at the greater whole,” said Sour Thistle, and Thomas was not quite sure if it was meant as rejoinder to their conversation or simply a delay as the next step of her hospitality was implemented.
A single crow touched down, negotiating the hole and the flame’s heat with a sloping angle of approach and tight wing control that Blackhall’s history as a huntsman could not help but note with an approving eye – if only because he was not currently attempting to eat the newcomer.
The bird placed a single twig of pine in the cup, then it took to the air, two cracking strokes carrying it into the wind above the shack. A second avian of equal skill set down, dispensing another twig, and then another and another.
As Blackhall’s cup of pine tea came to a boil he considered his words.
“I find it funny that you, above all, are counseling peace.”
Though her friend smiled through his delivery, Sour Thistle’s eyes narrowed as she replied.
“I kill, yes, but I do it out of need. The need of my kingdom, or simply the need for food.”
“Technically I’m not killing anyone.”
“No, you set your sights on a greater crime: Politics.”
He took a long sip, his mug lingering on his lips.
Finally he set it in his lap, holding it with both palms, and said “let me tell you a story.”
He began.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
This week’s episodes are brought to you by the Mob!
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight we present a special holiday tale directed at four little meatheads above all else. We love you guys.
Reason for the Season: A Small Gift for the Skinner Co. Jr. Execs
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight we find ourselves in a chase across the holiday encrusted streets of Capital City.
Mulligan Smith in The Humbug
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
Mulligan was looking forward to December 26th. He was eager to see tinsel peeking from trash cans and garland rolling down the roadway like a shimmering tumbleweed. He was sick of dodging Salvation Army Santas and the endless flow of shoppers along the sidewalk.
For the private investigator there was no mystery left to Christmas: It was simply the annual period when he was more likely to find the spouse of a client cheating at an office party than in the dugout of the corporate softball team, but this year – this year his father was travelling and the memory of his mother, who’d always been the heart of family celebrations, seemed all too close.
Even as his feet hammered the pavement in chase, thoughts of the dead woman pushed in on his mind.
In his youth he’d known the joy of a country Christmas. The house had been tiny, but Smith Sr. had hauled in a pine he’d cut from the backlot with his own hands. It was snowing heavily that Christmas Eve, so they’d settled on popcorn and a cutthroat game of Monopoly – but as dusk fell the sound of actual bells, not just those of the endless carols playing on the kitchen radio, had reached their ears.
Mr. Abbasi, their neighbour, sat atop a rough-cornered lumber sleigh, and his horses stood blowing clouds of steam into the darkening air. The sled was no show piece – it was ancient and had been used hard in its day – but Anwaar, his wife, and Saeeda, his daughter, grinned at them from beneath heavy bundles of blankets.
In the time it had taken the boy to pull on a sweater, his blue and orange parka, and a hat, Mulligan’s mother had somehow dressed in triple layers and made enough hot chocolate to supply all involved. She had thought the boy missed her wink and grin when she elbowed the eldest Smith and produced a hidden flask with which to top his cup, but Mulligan’s eyes had been sharp even at that age.
They’d ridden between the shadowed pines, beneath the stars, for what seemed like hours, and when he’d crawled into bed that night the warmth of his comforter sent him melting into his pillow.
He’d expected little the next day. His father’s lawman’s salary was just enough to keep them in Monopoly money, and his mother had yet to find a place for herself since their move earlier in the year.
So it was that, when he awoke, he was stunned to discover the space beneath their tree packed tight with brightly coloured bricks. Mulligan had recognized both his mother and father’s hand in the quality of the wrapping, yet the handwriting marking each label was clearly that of Sadie Smith’s alone.
Each one had a date and a short five or six word note. “You are the sweetest valentine,” alongside February 14th, or simply “Spring is coming” for the bland days at the beginning of March, and each signed “Love, Mum.” The count began January 1st, and for a year Mulligan had opened one a day. Inside was always a dessert’s worth of well-sealed pastry, cake, or cookies. The selections, he would realize, had been carefully selected to age well over the course of the year, and he would never understand how she had managed to make so many varied treats without either repeating herself or having flooded the house with cooking before the date.
Another change in employment had pushed his father into a new, distant, office that year, and it would be but another before his mother was dead.
He would never know the joy or mystery of that singular Christmas again, but somehow moving to the city – a place he loved at every other time of year – had somehow made the disparity of what followed worse.
There was no sense of anticipation in the city – just people trying to sell you something. Somehow when the multi-coloured lights were strung up they only served to underline the squalor of the apartment window they were hung in.
Even laying money on if there’d be snow on any given Capital City Christmas was a sucker’s bet. Just the previous year the white had held off till the night before, then, after the children had said goodnight to their yellow lawns, and their parents had snuck out to shuffle Santa’s deposits around their tree, clouds had blotted out the stars like a World War 2 bombing raid.
As the little ones had awoken the next morning their eyes had widened at what they considered a miracle, while, not far off, their elders had made hurried phone calls, to re-arrange travel plans, and determined if they had enough in the fridge to pull together a passable feast without having to shovel themselves out for a trip to the store.
This stood, of course, exactly opposite to the year previous, in which they’d had to Trick’or’Treat in heavy jackets and could have gone bicycling in shorts on boxing day.
This season, however, the weather had decided to make its intentions plain. It was just cold enough to snow almost every day of December, but still warm enough that the flakes were quickly churned into a pool of slush that soaked boots and sent long fans of cold onto the sidewalk every time a bus pulled snug against the curb.
It was in this loose mix of ice and water that Mulligan fought to keep his feet as he ran.
The crowds didn’t help. School children, freed from the bonds of their labours, lingered on the sidewalks, their attentions either absorbed in conversation with each other or locked on the glass of the displays demonstrating the year’s greatest passions. Office dwellers, their expensive shoes and pant legs in endless combat with the muck and water, worked hard to ignore the cheer of the season as they moved with annoyed self-importance between meetings or overpriced coffee counters. Overwhelmed fathers and mothers attempted to maneuver oversized packages from storefront to car trunk.
All of the trappings of the season abounded, but to Smith they seemed no more real than the mannequins in the windows. There was no sense of mystery here, there were only the usual people going through the usual motions as dictated by the changes in their shopping soundtrack.
Yet Mulligan had eyes only for one man: The fellow in red turning to sprint into an alley a half-block up from the riotous Williams-Sonoma that the private investigator was currently trying to thread his way past.
Even if the crowd had somehow not noticed the fire-engine coloured suit and trailing hat, the PI’s target was a big man, tall and with enough meat on his bones to convince people they ought to shuffle aside. Mulligan, however, was having to employ his elbows liberally.
“Yeah, Happy Fackin’ Holidays to you too, dog fondler,” a woman in a denim jacket answered as he leveraged off of her right shoulder to push past a drifting baby stroller. He was fairly sure his apology was lost in the din of the competing Christmas carols blasting from the stores, but he made the effort anyhow.
The alley – tucked between The Mongol Gourd, a teppanyaki restaurant catering to vegans, and The Sprint Store, a running equipment place that had taken over a cellphone shop without changing much of the signage or fixings – was littered with cardboard boxes, reduced to mush by the sleet, and vegetable husks that had been pushed across the pavement by winter winds.
Despite his attempt to make the same turn as the long-limbed St. Nick, Smith’s sneakers lost traction. Sliding across a patch of frozen bean pods, he came to stop against a chill brick wall. His hoodie’s sleeve, already overwhelmed by the cold, provided little protection against the rough surface, but Mulligan considered the scratches along his forearm a fair trade for having avoided landing face-first against the grating surface.
However, by the time he’d recovered from the failed course change Santa had disappeared to the left.
With a sigh the detective pushed off, again picking up speed but now almost wishing the shoppers were crowding this space as well, if only so that he might use them as handholds as he slid his way across the trash-covered cement.
The next turn brought mixed results. This new artery – a back lane that had once been used for deliveries but now saw most of its traffic from loitering staff smoking away their work breaks – was salted down to the blacktop and wide enough to keep most of the garbage piled in the corners or against the business that faced onto it.
Still, Kringle’s long legs covered twice Smith’s pace at a step, and he was turning off into an open backdoor before Mulligan could recover enough breath to shout.
It struck the detective that this was nearly the perfect metaphor for the season. Here he was, just trying to return a dropped gift, and it was the crowds, the sidewalk bell ringers, the endless howl of carols, that had kept him from accomplishing a simple act of kindness.
Where the jolly old elf was off to in such a rush Smith could not say for sure, yet, in truth, he thought it obvious. The gift box he’d scooped from the sidewalk before beginning his sprint was just small enough to be expensive, and it was an easy season in which to propose – though also one in which it was not so easy to reach pre-scheduled romantic encounters.
It all seemed a little cliche – a little obvious – to the off-duty private investigator, and he briefly considered stopping the chase and pawning the thing. He could consider it an early Christmas present to himself. Yet, even while not seriously entertaining the thought, he could feel his mother frowning at him from the depths of his memory. Though there was no one watching when he plunged through the backdoor, Mulligan still offered Sadie Smith an “I’m just kidding” shrug as he surveyed the scene.
A short hall led to the main street, but to his left a flight of grimy stairs rose to a second floor, and the heavy tread above sounded suspiciously Claus-esque.
He took the steps two at a time and entered another hallway, this one providing access to three doors – apparently apartments.
Santa stood at the furthest, waiting for Mulligan’s arrival.
“I -” said the PI, digging for the package in his hoodie’s right pocket, but before he could fish it out the man winked and stepped across the threshold.
Smith followed.
Beyond was not a full apartment, as he’d expected, but a single room, its ceiling low at its midpoint due to the angle of the building’s roof. Lit by a single yellow bulb, he guessed the space had perhaps once been used for storage for the shops below. Now it appeared to have stood empty at least a decade.
Claus’ crossing was clearly tracked in the dust that covered the wood-slat floor. His steps moved directly towards a blank wall, and there they seemed to stop – yet, from the entrance, Mulligan could see there seemed to be something leaning against wall trim at the point where the footprints ceased.
Having to stoop against the encroaching ceiling, Mulligan reached the same spot in the windowless room, picked up the toy he found there, and turned back to the single door.
He stood a long while, one foot in the chamber, one foot without, staring at the tiny chimney he’d collected.
His mind fought with him on the matter. How could so large a fellow disappear from a room with no other openings? Surely the chimney was just a coincidence, or perhaps more likely a joke. A joke by someone with knowledge of some sort of secret exit he couldn’t ascertain.
Though it seemed a stretch, in the end he wasn’t sure it mattered. He’d lost nothing more than twenty minutes, and if he could ever convince himself to tell the tale in public it would at least be worth a laugh from Walmart Mike.
It was at that point in his train of thought that Smith remembered the brightly wrapped present.
Flipping it about in his fingers he realized there was a slip of a tag attached. He briefly wondered if he might find some hint to St. Nick’s true identity in its handwritten text.
Instead he found only the date of the following Christmas and crisp-lettered penciling that read: “No peeking, Snoopy. Love, Mum.”
He stood a while longer, his fingers tracing the familiar loops and lines with his fingernail, and his eyes began to sting even as his lips gave up fighting against his the grin pushing its way onto his face.
Smith could not say how it had happened. He could not provide even a theory. He knew only the truth of what he held.
After a year’s worth of telling the the story he would have to decide if he’d actually open the package, yet even before he’d left the building Mulligan knew the stranger had given him a greater gift: A mystery the detective could not solve.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight we visit a series of gamblers and the strands upon which they walk.
The Web
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
“It’s a decent gig as long as you’re the spider and not the fly,” said Baldy, his elbow on the bar. He spoke with his head at a tilt, a distantly ringing phone at his ear.
Despite his name, the man with the blue towel over his shoulder still maintained a full head of jet-black hair. The title had stuck after he’d found himself, years earlier, holding a razor after losing a small-time bet. Across the mahogany sat his cousin, ten years his junior. They shared the same round face, though her close-cropped scalp was lined instead with blond stubble.
“I just don’t get it,” she replied, lowering her Yuengling to her cardboard coaster. “Everyone here bets on the Hydras. Doesn’t matter if they’re having a good year or a bad year, every drunk in a red jersey is laying down his money on the home team. Now, that’s fine when Ahmed Ribbons has his ribs shattered in the middle of the summer and you’re rolling in money, but what happens – like three years ago – when they actually have a decent season? Don’t you get cleaned out?”
As she finished her question, however, someone picked up at the far end of Baldy’s call.
He raised a finger to pause the conversation.
* * *
In Boston a man named Zucco, his left arm arm clipped at the elbow and his accent holding a hint of Dublin, was wrangling an ancient phone receiver while watching a pair of teens being idiots around a very expensive pool table – it was but one of the thirty in the two-story hall, but it was the only one currently in danger of having its felt gouged.
Grunting a series of agreements to Baldy’s cross-country questions, Zucco split his attentions in case he should have to cover the microphone and shout at the kids.
For the thirteenth time that day he wished his Uncle would let him switch the phone over to something a little more modern – at least something portable. Yet they’d been using the four-line system for thirty years and the old man claimed he hadn’t made his money by messing with a successful recipe.
Signing off on the call with a final snort, Zucco leaned towards his large black book and recorded the bets Baldy had just placed.
“More juice on the Celtics?” asked Matt the Mick.
Matt the Mick was a rarity in the establishment. Despite years of loyalty as a patron – and despite being fully aware of the backroom dealings that took place there – Mick only came for the snooker. His hustle was all in his stick.
“Yeah,” answered Zucco, his eyes still on the teens. “A fellow turf accountant pushing some of the money he’s collected on the Hydras game tonight onto the green.”
“Huh,” replied the Mick, “but aren’t the Hydras up by a thousand goddamn points?”
“Doesn’t matter. Guy like that doesn’t want the exposure, he just wants his vig – his cut from the loss. When those thousand goddamn points were determined there was a bit of extra stretch put in ‘em so that no matter what the loser pays an extra percentage. Think of it as the bookie’s fee.
“Now, my friend there’s bein’ flooded with bets by the locals, who of course are all laying money on their hopes and dreams, not the actual likely outcome of the goddamn game. My chum calls me up to balance his take against the guys I’ve got locally hoping and dreaming that it’s gonna be the Celtics, and that covers his ass in the long term.
“He doesn’t actually care which team wins – he wants to balance his bets against each other so he can get a reliable paycheck out of his slice.”
Matt shrugged. “Sure, but if you’re taking bets from other fellas in your line of work on top of your own pool, doesn’t that put you in an even bigger shark tank? What if they want to lay bets you can’t match off against locals?”
“Well, actually, that reminds me: I gotta make a call,” replied Zucco.
Before he could pick up the phone, however, the sound of a dragging cue, and the ripping of felt, reached his ears.
* * *
Five minutes later a phone rang in a small stripmall office on the west coast. There was no alternate pretense to this room, no legitimate business it paraded as. The windows that fronted onto the pavement were frosted, and no signage had been hung beyond its perennially locked door.
This backroom was better equipped than Zucco’s poolhall – a single long desk carried a bank of four lines, each connected to a wireless headset and labelled with a colour sticker so that the identical units could be told apart for charging. Ahead of each phone sat a quick-handed operator, their fingers hovering over their laptops’ keyboards and touchpads. They said little as they responded to the incoming calls, their attentions instead focused on accurately capturing the numbers they were punching into spreadsheets.
What little response they did make was almost always in the form of numbers.
“Four-to-one.”
“Seven points over.”
“That’s three million total.”
Though the group had been working together for months, it was rare that all four found themselves in a moment all were simultaneously unoccupied, and what little conversation they exchanged usually happened before or after shift.
For the first time that night, however, a pause came.
Michigan, who refused to use his real name, Byron, had anticipated this moment for weeks. There were no assigned stations – time of arrival generally dictated the order of their seating.
This was why it had taken so long to finally be able to pose his pressing question: Rosario simply hadn’t been sitting alongside him.
Leaning into the silence, he put a hand on her elbow.
“Steaks and a movie after the night’s done? I know a great chophouse.”
“Well,” answered Rosario, her L dragging in hopes that it might be interrupted by an incoming call. She’d suspected something like this might be coming, after Byron had delivered a few unwanted compliments regarding the tightness of her jeans, and so she’d been avoiding him for weeks.
Rosario thought of herself as a serious person. The people they worked for, she knew, were also very serious, and she hoped one day to do something with them more lucrative than juggling numbers in a strip mall.
There was nothing wrong with Michigan, exactly – he simply wasn’t serious.
She had a career to consider, and being a woman only doubled her need to stay focused. It might be organized crime, but it wasn’t so organized that it felt any need to pay attention to equal hiring practices.
Before the next bet might be laid, or she might arrive at a deflection, the cheap green carpet beneath their feet began to fold. It was as if an illusion at first, the far end of the room rising while Michigan and Rosario watched, but then the wheels on their surprised coworkers’ chairs were overtaken by gravity, and they rolled towards the open-mouthed observers.
Though the bookies had long considered their phone lines the humming silk of their web, they had not known that in the end – in all ends – there was always a greater spider.
As an uncountable mass of refracting eyes burst from its ancient egg sack all debts were cancelled, and yet all was still lost at the rising of Kar’Wick the Spider-God.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Tonight we present Ruby Departed: The Welcome Party, Part 1 of 3
Welcome to Flash Pulp Special Episode #39.
Welcome to Flash Pulp Special Episode #38.
“Fever sheds were erected, and any knowledge of the coffin ships was denied by those whose names were landed upon as likely sources. The Irish of the area, often cited as the source, were so well integrated with the families they had arrived to be reunited with that it became impossible to extricate the newcomers – even those with the longest stead grew sick.
Tonight we present Beneath: a Thomas Blackhall Chronicle, Part 1 of 2
He missed the solitude, the sense of focus, the clarity of the dangers at hand. His days and nights were now filled with planning, politics, and grasping what few moments he still had with his Mairi. Yet, though it might be argued he was losing time to his slow progress even now, all of these things fell away to the simple and immediate necessities of surviving in the wilderness: Raise your left foot, put it down. Now do the same with your right. Ignore that rising pain in your calves, as you’ll only lose heat pausing to rest – and is that a wolf shadowing your progress some twenty yards to the rear?
Though the group had been working together for months, it was rare that all four found themselves in a moment all were simultaneously unoccupied, and what little conversation they exchanged usually happened before or after shift.