Chuck Miller, celebrated author of such classics as "Gotham X" and others, has launched his own fictional universe.
http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/
BLACK CENTIPEDE PRESS brings you stories from the world of "The Optimist," created and written by Chuck Miller. It is a world populated by strange superheroes, pulp magazine adventurers, unbelieveable villains, malevolent ghosts, and freaks of all kinds. Ongoing series include "The Optimist," "Tales of the Black Centipede," "Vionna Valis and the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee," "Doctor Unknown Jr.," and many more to come. Our blog also features not-for-profit "fan fiction" featuring Batman, The X-Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (These characters are not owned by Chuck Miller/BCP, and are presented as tributes/free entertainment), music, humor and other surprises.
"If the mark of a good story is that the reader doesn't want it to end, you've written another winner. I think you've found yourself an unexplored niche and it should do well for you."
-- Alan Grant (Batman, Judge Dredd, the Demon, and others too numerous to mention)
"Chuck Miller is by far one of the greatest unknown writers in America today. Whether he's weaving intricate tales with characters you're familiar with, or creating new ones, his stories are always fun and draw you in immediately." --Gwen Bishop (Publisher, ARTS in Alabama)
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Dr. Dana Marie Laveau Unknown, PhD, is an incredibly accomplished practitioner of the mystic arts, having attained the status of Level Twelve Magus shortly after her 22nd birthday. She is the daughter of Raoul Deveraux Unknown, the well-known sorcerer/superhero/certified public accountant known as Dr. Unknown. The original Doctor Unknown retired several years ago, after a traumatic incident in which he accidentally destroyed the planet Earth and a large portion of the solar system. Though he and Dana were able to successfully reboot the time stream, thus more or less erasing the episode from history, the experience left him a shattered man.
Dana Unknown has taken over her father's former duties, sometimes humorously referring to herself as "Doctor Unknown Junior."
She played a key role in the events described in The Optimist Book One: You Don't Know Jack, aiding Jack Christian, the Black Centipede and Vionna Valis in their battle with the putative ghost of Jack the Ripper.
Doctor Unknown Junior will star in her own series of short stories from Black Centipede Press, beginning in January of 2011. We invite you to become acquainted with her via these excerpts from the above-mentioned novel. (First-person narrative by Jack Christian)
**********
We got into Dana's car and started off. We had what they call an uncomfortable silence going on, and I hate those, so I asked her a question, just to be saying something.
"So, is your family name really 'Unknown?' I've always wondered about that."
"No," she replied. "I mean, yeah it is now, but Dad had his name legally changed to that a long time ago. Before I was born. When he decided he wanted to be a superhero as well as a Magus and a CPA. He was a notary public, too. Anyhow, he wanted something that said 'superhero sorcerer.' He was big into marketing."
"That's what I figured. As superhero sorcerer names go, it isn't a bad one. It's a little awkward, but I suppose all the obvious ones were taken. So what was the original family name?"
"I'd rather not tell you."
"Why not?"
"You'd laugh."
"I would not."
"You would. I know you would."
"I won't, I swear to God. If I do, you can kill me. I won't laugh, Dana."
"Well... Okay, I'll tell you. The original family name was Macabre."
Of course, I immediately proved that Dana had been right about what I would do. I had to hand it to her. Fortunately, before any talk of retribution could commence, we arrived at our destination.
**********
Dana stood still for a few seconds, her eyes screwed shut, biting her lower lip. “Crap,” she whispered. “This is like… Crap…”
“Yes,” I agreed, kicking at a little pile of dry white dog-doo. “It certainly is.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head in annoyance. She opened her eyes. “None of your flippancy, please. This patch of ground is… really, really ****ed up.”
“Well, see, that’s why you need a Twelfth Level Magus on these trips, so you can get all the technical terms for things.”
“You’re gonna want to quit being snarky,” she said distractedly. I didn’t know what “snarky” was, but I didn’t think I was being it. I had intended the remark as a good-natured jibe, almost a sort of peace offering. But she must have found a barb in it. People frequently do that with me.
I took another pull from my bottle. To my astonishment, Dana snatched it away from me and gulped down a healthy slug of her own. She wiped her lips with her sleeve and handed the bottle back.
“Maybe I’m too judgmental,” she said, gazing out over the lot. “Some stuff is a lot easier to take if you’ve got a bellyful of cleaning fluid.”
“That ‘cleaning fluid’ is 28 bucks a quart, Dana.”
“That’s unconscionable. Only a moron would put that gunk into his body. I wouldn’t embalm a corpse with it.”
My name is probably Vionna Valis. I don't know what nationality that is, so don't ask. I don't know, and I've never heard of anyone else that has it for a name. Either one of them-- Vionna or Valis. They seem to have come from nowhere. Just like I myself sometimes seem.
I am, as my adopted brother Jack says, something of an enigma, even to myself. I believe I am approximately nineteen years old, but I can't be sure of that, any more than I can be absolutely sure my name is really Vionna Valis. I have a birth certificate that proves both of those things, but that could have come from anywhere. I can't vouch for anything because I have these huge holes in my memory. Also, I tend to get confused because I am not alone inside my head.
I don’t remember much of anything about my own life prior to a couple of years ago. I don’t know why. That’s strange enough, but on top of that, I have some kind of something living inside my head that makes me know and remember things that never happened to me. I always find out later that the things I remember really did happen at some point in the past, but I was nowhere near them at the time. Often, I wasn’t even born yet. Whatever he or she or it is, this thing, I call it my “roommate.”
And that's enough about all THAT for right now. I have a WHOLE lot of what they call “backstory,” and so does everybody else I hang out with. But most of it is not really necessary for you to know in order to read and follow this story.
Not too long ago, I and five of my friends opened up our own detective agency. My five friends have some fairly awesome psychic powers, which are very helpful, and I have whatever it is that I’ve got, which is sometimes helpful, so we figured we might as well do something with all that.
The name of our agency is the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. I better explain why that is. This is more backstory, but I’ll make it quick.
My five friends’ names are Mary Jane Kelly, Catherine Eddowes, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Polly Nichols. If those names sound familiar to you, it is because they were all murdered back in 1888 by Jack the Ripper. There have been tons of books about the Ripper, and their names have appeared in all of them.
To put it all in a nutshell, a while back me and some other friends of mine—My brother Jack, a man called the Black Centipede, and a young woman known as Doctor Unknown-- were having trouble with something we thought was the ghost of the actual Jack the Ripper. We needed to find him and do something about him, and one of my friends got the idea that we ought to try to summon up the spirits of his victims in the hope that they might lend a hand. So we did this weird magic ritual, sort of like a séance, and it worked. And because of a strange set of circumstances, the girls returned, not as bodiless spirits, but as real flesh and blood human women. (Editor’s note: See The Optimist, Book One: You Don’t Know Jack, 2010 Black Centipede Press)
The girls don’t remember anything about being dead. They say they don’t think they blocked it out of their minds because it was unpleasant or scary or anything. They figure there are just some things that won’t fit inside a person’s head when they’re on this side of the line between life and death. The human brain is wired up for just so much and no more.
Anyhow, I was explaining the name of our agency. Whitechapel is an area in the city of London, England, in which the girls were all murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was a committee that was formed at that time in order to be vigilant over Whitechapel. Obviously they didn’t do all that great a job. But the girls say the people who did it meant well, and one of them, George Lusk, had a pretty traumatic experience on account of it—the Ripper mailed him half of the kidney he cut out of Cathy Eddowes—so they thought the name should be given a second chance to redeem itself or something, which is fine with me, I didn’t have any better ideas.
Mary Kelly, the last victim that got killed, is the most outgoing of the girls and the smartest one, too. She is a natural leader, and that is the role she has in the agency. I am a natural person who does a lot more than she gets credit for but doesn’t complain about it because she doesn’t really care, just so she gets the job done, so I am like a combination of secretary and second-in-command, even though I do more actual work than Mary. But I don’t mean that in a bad way, because, like I said, I'm a natural.
Well, I guess that's pretty much all you need. So let's get going.
ONE
It was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon when the peculiar Mister Keel left our office. Our brand new office, to which he had been the first genuine paying client visitor. I got up from my desk and went to the wall safe to put away the cash retainer he’d given us. Two thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills!
Mary Kelly, sitting at her desk, messing with her computer, turned to me and said, “What a queer fellow.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, closing the safe and going back to my own desk. “He’s married. To a woman and everything.” I held up the eight by ten glossy portrait Mr. Keel had given me of his wife Janet.
“I don’t… Oh, I see. “ Mary sighed. “Vionna, I shall never get accustomed to the way certain innocuous words from my era have been hijacked into conveying more… controversial meanings. The other day when I told Jack he was looking exceptionally happy—using a word I had every reason to believe meant that and nothing more—he looked at me as though he might like to take my head off.”
“Oh, I knew what you meant, I was just joking.” (I don’t like to tell lies, but since I knew Mary didn’t believe me, it didn’t really count.)
And she was right about our visitor. Client, I should say. Mister Keel had been a real oddball. He’d shown up out of the blue at 3:45, knocking on our door and asking if this was the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee Detective Agency. I told him it was, because it is, though we have not yet put up our little sign on the door.
“I have a rather embarrassing problem, and I hope you might be able to render some discreet assistance,” he said, after I had answered the door and he had introduced himself. I said I bet we could, that’s what we’re here for, and why don’t you come into the office?
I should mention that our headquarters is in an old brownstone house downtown on West 35th Street. It actually belongs to Dr. Dana Unknown, a great friend of ours, who rents it to us for practically nothing compared to what people charge for apartments and things these days. It’s a great house, and it is very close to an important place that is so secret, I can’t even tell you what it is, much less where it’s located.
Anyhow, Mr. Keel followed me a short way down the hall and into our business office. I’m not very tall, and Mister Keel was shorter than me. In fact, he seemed kind of delicate all over. Very skinny, not much color in his face. I was really surprised when I shook hands with him and found out that he had a good, solid grip, even though his hands were small and looked about as rugged as bone china. Not only did he have a grip, but I got the idea he wasn’t using much of it, and if he chose to apply the whole thing, I might end up being the one with a hand that looked like some fine china that had been dropped onto a hard floor.
I introduced him to Mary Kelly, who was the only other member of the agency present at the time, other than myself. The rest of the girls were busy that day getting enrolled at a community college. Having assimilated the fact that they are now in the 21st century to stay, they decided they wanted to get the most out of it. One way in which we are better than 1888 is that women are allowed to do more things. Mary Kelly, who got more education than most girls did back when she was alive in the 19th century, decided to work with the detective agency full-time and further her education later on.
Mr. Keel’s eyes darted around the office in a strange way. He reminded me of a rabbit, or possibly a small dog. I had the idea that he’d like to go around sniffing everything if he could get away with it.
I told him to sit down, and he sat. Sort of like a dog.
“I don’t really know how to say this, so I’ll just say it,” he said, making it sound like he was apologizing for something. “I’ve never had… Well, It’s my wife, you see. Here, I have a picture of her.”
He opened a large manila envelope he was carrying and handed me the photo I described earlier.
He cleared his throat and said, “To be quite blunt, miss, I suspect that she is being unfaithful.
“For almost a year now, there have been peculiar occurrences. They seem to happen about once a month. I will awaken in the morning feeling peculiarly groggy, as though I had a hangover. However, I do not drink and never have.
“On these same mornings, my wife will invariably be in a state of some disarray. More than once, her feet have been muddy, as though she were walking around barefoot out of doors. She denies any knowledge and does not even bother to offer a plausible explanation.”
“Have you any other grounds for suspicion?” Mary asked.
“My dear,” he said, “if what I have told you so far is insufficient, I don’t know what else I should be expected to produce.”
“But why do you suspect adultery, specifically? Surely these things could admit of other explanations.” Mary is really good at this stuff.
“Perhaps. But, whatever is at the root of it, I think one would be hard pressed to find a benign explanation for these events. Whatever is happening, I’d like to know about it.”
He had a point.
“You have a point,” I said. I turned to Mary. “He has a point, Mary. What you sound like you’re suggesting, Mr. Keel, is that your wife drugs you in your sleep and then sneaks out for whatever, knowing you won’t wake up and notice she’s gone.”
“That crossed my mind, yes.”
“Have you asked her?” Mary wanted to know.
“I have. She admits nothing and denies nothing. Nor, as I say, does she even bother to fabricate some innocent explanation. When I speak of it, she says nothing at all.”
“Hm,” I said. “Curiouser and curiouser. It sounds like the game’s afoot.” (I picked up those phrases from a couple of Jack’s books that I read. I like the way they sound, and I think it impresses people when you talk like that.)
“Well,” Mr. Keel said, “if things run true to form, we are due for another incident within the next week at most. Are you interested in taking the case?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t…” Mary said.
“YES,” I said louder, giving Mary a look. “We’d be glad to.”
“Splendid,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He reached into his pocket and produced the wad of bills I told you about earlier. Along with them, he gave me the photo of Janet Keel, which is what his wife’s name was, and a card with directions to his house.
After he left, and also after the little scene that started this chapter, Mary presented me with her misgivings.
“I don’t know that I approve of this, Vionna,” she said. “A divorce action? Adultery? Isn’t that rather tawdry?”
“I can’t say, since I don’t know what that word means. But I do know the meaning of the word lucrative, and that is what we have in our safe right now. “
“You have a mercenary streak that surprises me.”
“Heck, Mary, we’re just starting out. We can’t afford to turn anybody away who comes to us suggesting anything that isn’t illegal. He isn’t asking us to kill her.”
She said nothing to that. I could see she was working on swallowing the whole idea. Once she got it down past her windpipe, she asked, “How do we go about this?”
“We put her under surveillance,” I said.
“How does that work?”
“Well, we go where they live and we just sit and watch.”
“That seems simple enough. Have you done this often?”
“Never. But how difficult can it be? We go and keep an eye on the house. If she sneaks out, we follow her. We have cameras, and if we catch her doing, you know, whatever, we take a picture of it.”
Mary shook her head. “That seems awfully sordid.”
I had to agree.
“I have to agree,” I said, “but sometimes you have to do stuff you’d rather not. Anyhow, if she really is deceiving her husband, he has a right to know, don’t you think?”
“I suppose...”
TWO
And she kept on supposing for the next day or so. She talked herself out of it a dozen times. I talked her back into it 13 times. (That includes her not wanting to do it in the first place, which isn't the same thing as talking herself out of it, in case you think that whole thing doesn't add up right.)
The Keel house was sort of out in the country east of Zenith. The house stood by itself in the middle of a good-sized bit of land, surrounded by woods on all sides. A narrow dirt driveway went from the main road, through the woods, and curved around to the front of the house.
We decided we could keep an eye on the place from a distance. If she came out and got into a car, we could follow. We had all kinds of high-powered binoculars and spy cameras and various things like that. There were woods all around the house, so we could hide in those and observe from different vantage points. Mary took up a position to the north of the house, and I took the south.
The first night, nothing happened. Mary amused herself with a little hand-held video game, which she found fascinating, having lived the biggest part of her life over a hundred years ago. I was trying to learn how to knit, for some reason, so I brought that junk with me. Our first night out, Mary scored a million points on Space Invaders and I ruined most of a whole ball of yarn. As dismal a failure as the time I tried to learn to juggle.
The same nothing happened on the second night. But the third night was the charm.
It was way after midnight. It was very dark out there, and very quiet. I was in a condition closer to falling asleep than a professional detective ought to get while she’s on a job.
“Vionna,” came Mary’s voice over the walkie-talkie. “I’m seeing something I do not understand. Can you help me?”
“I’ll try. What is it?”
“I have no idea.”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay… You’re making this kind of difficult.”
“Tell me, is there any such thing as an airplane that has no wings and makes no noise?”
“There might be.”
“Are they very common?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Nor would I. I don’t suppose you know of any kind of aircraft that is perfectly round and glows all over with a sort of bluish-green color?”
“Can’t say that I do. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Well, if you’d care to, you’re in luck. It just passed almost directly over my head and is moving toward the house. If you stand up and train your binoculars in this direction, you should catch sight of it. It’s only about twenty feet off the ground.”
So I did that. It took me a second to find the thing, you know how when you’re looking through binoculars everything is fuzzy and jerky and hard to focus on. I saw it. I got it in my field of view and held my hands and head as still as I could.
It looked like a smaller, greenish-blue moon. I looked quickly back over my shoulder at the actual moon, which was right where it was supposed to be, and hadn’t strayed away and changed color.
I looked back at the thing and saw that it was more of a disk shape than a sphere, and was totally smooth, which the moon is not. I couldn’t tell what the thing was made of. From where I was standing, it appeared to be right over the Keels’ house.
“This is weird,” I said into my walkie-talkie.
“That’s the word I would use,” Mary replied. “I believe it has stopped moving now. It looks to be right over the house. Yes, the green light is shining down on the roof, I can see it.”
“Well.”
“Yes. What do we do?”
I had no idea what to do.
“I have no idea what to do,” I said.
“So this is not some object that is common—or even uncommon, but known—in the 21st century?”
“Nope. What it looks like is a flying saucer.”
“So you ARE familiar with it?”
“Nope. A flying saucer is a thing that some people think exists and other people think doesn’t exist. A lot of people that do think they exist believe they come from other planets. I don’t know one way or the other. I’ve never thought about it much. I’m just saying that thing there is what one is supposed to look like.”
While we talked about it, the flying saucer hovered over the top of the house, drifting very slightly back and forth, like a toy balloon in a slight breeze. It was certainly strange-looking. I closed my eyes and asked if my “roommate” knew anything about this, but all I got was nothing.
I was about to say something else to Mary, but something started happening that made me forget what it was, and that I cared about it. Three little figures came drifting out of the flying saucer. They were shaped more or less like human beings, except that their heads were too big and their arms and legs too thin.
“I’ll be darned,” I said out loud. Mary’s voice came through the walkie-talkie, saying something I’d prefer not to write down. She said it again. Then she said something different which I am also not going to write down. Finally, she said something I don’t mind writing down:
“Are those creatures from other planets, Vionna?”
“They don’t look like they’re from around here,” I replied, jinking the binoculars around to try and get a better look at them. They were bathed in green light, so I couldn’t tell what their actual color was. They were small, and they had big, dark eyes, and they were drifting down toward the house. They drifted down toward the window of the Keels’ bedroom, then drifted right on in, passing right through the glass without breaking it, as though either they or the glass weren’t really there. But I was pretty sure both they and the glass really were.
“Gosh,” I said, “that isn’t supposed to happen.”
“Those creatures appear to have passed through solid matter, Vionna.”
“Yes, and I don’t think you can… Oh, wow! Look, Mary! They’re doing it again!”
The three little creatures emerged through the window, the same way they’d gone in. Not only that, but they had added a fourth member to their group.
Mrs. Keel.
In way less time that it is taking me to write about it, the creatures disappeared back into the flying saucer with Mrs. Keel. Then the flying saucer itself zoomed straight up into the air and was gone.
I lowered my binoculars and just stood there for about a minute, trying to figure out what to do or think about doing. It seemed like I had nothing in my head. I wished Jack were there, even though he wouldn’t know any more about it than I did, probably. But it would have made me feel better because he’s really good at pretending he isn’t scared or confused, something I am lousy at.
I drifted for a short time, until Mary’s voice squawking at me through the walkie-talkie brought me back to reality, if that’s what this was.
“What the effing geedee eff was that? My lord, it was like one of those motion pictures where they use trick cameras and tiny models and things to make it appear that something impossible is happening. Like the one we watched about the giant reptile that lay siege to that city in Japan.”
Now, Mary seems not to have to pretend not to be scared or confused. I don’t think anything frightens her, and she’s so smart it’s scary.
I said “Uh-huh,” which was all I could think of.
“What shall we do, Vionna?”
I said, “Um,” which was all I could think of.
“We should go down to the house.”
“Yes,” I said, and started walking in that direction, thankful I had something I knew I could do. Moving around to the side of the house, I got a closer look at the red van. There was something not right with it. It was beat-up and junky-looking, with rust spots all over it and everything, but it was CLEAN. There was no dust on it, and none of the pine tar that should have been there if it had just been sitting in that spot for however long. I was kind of proud of myself for noticing this, though I didn’t think it really had anything to do with anything. I have been trying, with the help of Jack and the Centipede—to learn how to observe things, and take note of various features of my surroundings, whether or not they seem important.
And by mentioning the van, I am also practicing a literary device known as “foreshadowing.” You probably already figured that the van will be important later, since I’m bothering to mention it in the midst of all this other weird stuff. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m new to the writing game and trying to figure things out. Really, it doesn’t much matter, because the van’s not THAT important. Compared to the stuff that IS important, the van is "small beer," as Mary often calls things that don't matter much. Plus which, the whole story is only about 30 pages long, and we’re halfway through it now anyhow.
“We’d best check on Mr. Keel,” Mary said. We went and found the door key where he told us it would be., and let ourselves into the dark, quiet house. Up the stairs we went, to the bedroom.
There we saw Mr. Keel, occupying one half of a king-sized bed. I shined a flashlight on him while Mary poked his shoulder with her finger.
“Mr. Keel, sir,” she said. “Wake up. It is Vionna Valis and Mary Kelly, the detectives you hired.”
No response at all from him. We made sure he was breathing, then we poked and tickled and slapped and shouted at him, but he did not wake up.
“Drugged,” I said. “I guess he was right about that part of it, anyhow.”
“Maybe he was drugged,” Mary said, glancing around the room. She sounded a little dubious about it. “There’s something in the air, here, Vionna. Something very strange.”
I sniffed several times. “I don’t smell anything,” I said.
Mary shook her head. “That isn’t what I mean.” Her eyes were darting all over the place. “It just… FEELS strange. Like… I don’t know.”
Now that she mentioned it, I began to sense something myself. But I could have been imagining it in the wake of the scene we had witnessed outside. I wouldn’t trust how I felt about anything at that moment. My little flashlight suddenly winked out. I shook it, as though that would do anything, then I shrugged and stuck it back in my pocket.
“I think we should call an ambulance,” I said, taking my cell phone out of my other pocket. “I don’t want to take any chances with a man’s life.”
The phone was dead. It didn’t even light up when I opened the cover.
“That’s odd,” I said. “I just recharged this thing before we left the office. That was no more than four hours ago.” I glanced at my watch to confirm this, and found that it, too, was dead. The digital display was blank.
“Well.” I stood there for a moment, utterly silent. Had it been up to me, I might still be there like that to this day, but something happened. The room seemed to be turning green. We saw a green glow coming through the window from somewhere up above, getting rapidly brighter. Mary and I looked at one another, and somehow silently agreed that we needed to get the heck out of there.
We both raced out of the bedroom and down the stairs, in some kind of a blind panic. Which was very strange when I thought about it later. I mean, I am not totally without fear, but I can keep my wits together in a crisis, and Mary is even better at it than I am. But that night, we were like a couple of cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on. We tore out of there so fast, in the dark, it’s a wonder we didn’t break our necks. I almost screamed, and Mary let out something that sounded like a whimper, which is the very last thing I'd expect to hear from Mary Jane Kelly.
We burst through the front door and down the steps into the yard. I glanced up and saw the flying saucer hovering over the house again, looking about a million times bigger than it had before. My head hurt and I wanted to scream or start crying, but what I actually did do was pass out.
FOUR
When I woke up it was still dark, and I didn’t know what was going on. I groped in my pocket for my flashlight, found it, and turned it on. It worked. I shined it on my watch, which was also working, but all it could tell me was “12:00” over and over again.
I felt like sand had been poured into my head through the spaces around my eyeballs. I was greatly relieved to find Mary lying next to me when I shined the light around. I sat up and scooted over next to her, pulling on her shoulders to get her into a sitting position, and also hopefully to wake her up.
I don’t know what you call it when you whisper as loud as you possibly can; it couldn’t be called shouting, but it ought to have some kind of name other than “whispering as loud as you possibly can.”
Well, whatever it is, I was doing it right into her ear. “Mary,” I whispouted, “are you okay? Wake up.” I had her upper body almost vertical. Her eyelids started fluttering. “Mary!” I shoutspered.
She opened her eyes and squinted at me. “Vionna? What in the blank just happened to us? I feel like my head has been run over by a blanking lorry.”
I didn’t know what a lorry was, and I said so. I had a picture in my head of something that looked like a small giraffe with his neck painted to look like a barber pole.
“A truck, dear,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “It’s what they call a truck in England.”
“I didn’t think there were any trucks in 1888.”
“There were large wagons that were like trucks. The word, I gather, carried over from that time.”
“Oh.”
Mary blinked several times and then focused on me. “Vionna, why are we sitting here discussing etymology? I would think we’d have more pressing concerns.”
“Oh crap, you’re right.” From the time I woke up until that moment, our situation had slipped my mind somehow. I remembered it all and looked around us. We were right at the edge of the woods, up under some of the smaller trees, a hundred yards from the house.
We checked on the house and found it occupied by the correct number of people. We gathered up our equipment and junk and went home. I noticed the van was gone, but the fact just barely registered, and I forgot about it pretty quickly.
We dragged our bedraggled selves back to the office, to our respective bedrooms, and to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later, and Mary came out of her room shortly after that. She found me in the kitchen. I was sitting with the other four members of our agency. They were telling me about their experiences of the previous day. Each of them had selected a subject she intended to specialize in, and had selected classes based on it. I don’t know how they arrived at these things—they may very well have drawn slips of paper from a hat-- but they were as follows:
We talked about all that for a while after Mary showed up, then she and I told the girls about our own recent experiences.
“That is certainly very queer,” said Cathy.
“No, dear,” Mary said. “The meaning of that word has changed. You must call it ‘gay.’”
“Actually,” I said, “in this case the right word would be ‘weird.’ Gay is something else entirely.”
“Gay means ‘happy,’” said Liz.
“No, Liz,” Mary said. “It now means ‘buggery.’”
“Oh dear!” Annie exclaimed.
“Stop!” I said, louder than I had intended to. “We are not discussing entomology. We’re talking about the weird, gay, queer events of last night.” And I plowed on through the rest of the story, right up to the point where we got back home.
“So,” Liz said, after we had finished telling them everything, “you have no idea what happened after you blacked out?”
“None at all,” Mary confirmed.
“And we also don’t know why we went into such a panic,” I said. “That isn’t like us at all.”
“It was unnatural,” Mary said. “Everything seemed strange. And all of our electrical equipment stopped working at the same time.”
“Yes, it did,” I said. “Except… Our walkie-talkies. We were using them the first time we saw the saucer, and they were okay.”
“Mine gave out some static when the saucer passed above me, but that stopped when it got further away.”
“We were far enough away…” I thought of something and jumped up and ran out of the room. I came back with one of the small digital cameras we’d taken with us.
“This camera,” I said, “is the one I attached to a tree and left pointed at the house. It was programmed to take a picture every 20 seconds. Let’s have a look.”
I pulled up the menu on the little screen as Mary and the girls clustered around me. We looked at the pictures, one by one. They were puzzling. We eliminated the ones that showed nothing, or repeated what the others showed. We were left with this:
1. The saucer hovering over the house.
2. Three men emerging from the van.
3. The saucer hovering over the house again.
4. The three men heading back in the direction of the van, carrying something we could not identify.
5. The three men going back into the house, carrying the same or an identical something. In this photo, there was a fourth human standing in the doorway, watching the proceedings. Janet Keel.
6. The house with no saucer hovering over it.
“Well,” I said.
“I can make nothing of that,” Mary said.
“Nor can I,” I said. I should mention that Mr. Keel had called three or four times during the day. I had asked the girls to take messages, telling him Mary and I were out investigating. Having no idea what happened to us, I didn’t intend to report anything to our client until we had something that made sense.
“All I can think of,” I said, after turning it over in my head for a long time and discussing it with everyone from a hundred different angles, “is to confront Janet Keel with these photos. There she stands in the doorway in photo number five. She must know what this is all about. I say we simply go to her and ask.”
Replies
Dr. Dana Marie Laveau Unknown, PhD, is an incredibly accomplished practitioner of the mystic arts, having attained the status of Level Twelve Magus shortly after her 22nd birthday. She is the daughter of Raoul Deveraux Unknown, the well-known sorcerer/superhero/certified public accountant known as Dr. Unknown. The original Doctor Unknown retired several years ago, after a traumatic incident in which he accidentally destroyed the planet Earth and a large portion of the solar system. Though he and Dana were able to successfully reboot the time stream, thus more or less erasing the episode from history, the experience left him a shattered man.
Dana Unknown has taken over her father's former duties, sometimes humorously referring to herself as "Doctor Unknown Junior."
She played a key role in the events described in The Optimist Book One: You Don't Know Jack, aiding Jack Christian, the Black Centipede and Vionna Valis in their battle with the putative ghost of Jack the Ripper.
Doctor Unknown Junior will star in her own series of short stories from Black Centipede Press, beginning in January of 2011. We invite you to become acquainted with her via these excerpts from the above-mentioned novel. (First-person narrative by Jack Christian)
**********
We got into Dana's car and started off. We had what they call an uncomfortable silence going on, and I hate those, so I asked her a question, just to be saying something.
"So, is your family name really 'Unknown?' I've always wondered about that."
"No," she replied. "I mean, yeah it is now, but Dad had his name legally changed to that a long time ago. Before I was born. When he decided he wanted to be a superhero as well as a Magus and a CPA. He was a notary public, too. Anyhow, he wanted something that said 'superhero sorcerer.' He was big into marketing."
"That's what I figured. As superhero sorcerer names go, it isn't a bad one. It's a little awkward, but I suppose all the obvious ones were taken. So what was the original family name?"
"I'd rather not tell you."
"Why not?"
"You'd laugh."
"I would not."
"You would. I know you would."
"I won't, I swear to God. If I do, you can kill me. I won't laugh, Dana."
"Well... Okay, I'll tell you. The original family name was Macabre."
Of course, I immediately proved that Dana had been right about what I would do. I had to hand it to her. Fortunately, before any talk of retribution could commence, we arrived at our destination.
**********
Dana stood still for a few seconds, her eyes screwed shut, biting her lower lip. “Crap,” she whispered. “This is like… Crap…”
“Yes,” I agreed, kicking at a little pile of dry white dog-doo. “It certainly is.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head in annoyance. She opened her eyes. “None of your flippancy, please. This patch of ground is… really, really ****ed up.”
“Well, see, that’s why you need a Twelfth Level Magus on these trips, so you can get all the technical terms for things.”
“You’re gonna want to quit being snarky,” she said distractedly. I didn’t know what “snarky” was, but I didn’t think I was being it. I had intended the remark as a good-natured jibe, almost a sort of peace offering. But she must have found a barb in it. People frequently do that with me.
I took another pull from my bottle. To my astonishment, Dana snatched it away from me and gulped down a healthy slug of her own. She wiped her lips with her sleeve and handed the bottle back.
“Maybe I’m too judgmental,” she said, gazing out over the lot. “Some stuff is a lot easier to take if you’ve got a bellyful of cleaning fluid.”
“That ‘cleaning fluid’ is 28 bucks a quart, Dana.”
“That’s unconscionable. Only a moron would put that gunk into his body. I wouldn’t embalm a corpse with it.”
“You want some more?”
“Hell yeah.”
**********
http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/2010/08/meet-cast-of-optimist...
Doctor Hmmm? said:
"CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A KIND WE'D RATHER NOT THINK ABOUT"
or
"Maybe We Should Just Let the Truth STAY Out There"
BY CHUCK MILLER
COPYRIGHT 2010, CHUCK MILLER/BLACK CENTIPEDE PRESS
INTRODUCTION
My name is probably Vionna Valis. I don't know what nationality that is, so don't ask. I don't know, and I've never heard of anyone else that has it for a name. Either one of them-- Vionna or Valis. They seem to have come from nowhere. Just like I myself sometimes seem.
I am, as my adopted brother Jack says, something of an enigma, even to myself. I believe I am approximately nineteen years old, but I can't be sure of that, any more than I can be absolutely sure my name is really Vionna Valis. I have a birth certificate that proves both of those things, but that could have come from anywhere. I can't vouch for anything because I have these huge holes in my memory. Also, I tend to get confused because I am not alone inside my head.
I don’t remember much of anything about my own life prior to a couple of years ago. I don’t know why. That’s strange enough, but on top of that, I have some kind of something living inside my head that makes me know and remember things that never happened to me. I always find out later that the things I remember really did happen at some point in the past, but I was nowhere near them at the time. Often, I wasn’t even born yet. Whatever he or she or it is, this thing, I call it my “roommate.”
And that's enough about all THAT for right now. I have a WHOLE lot of what they call “backstory,” and so does everybody else I hang out with. But most of it is not really necessary for you to know in order to read and follow this story.
Not too long ago, I and five of my friends opened up our own detective agency. My five friends have some fairly awesome psychic powers, which are very helpful, and I have whatever it is that I’ve got, which is sometimes helpful, so we figured we might as well do something with all that.
The name of our agency is the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. I better explain why that is. This is more backstory, but I’ll make it quick.
My five friends’ names are Mary Jane Kelly, Catherine Eddowes, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Polly Nichols. If those names sound familiar to you, it is because they were all murdered back in 1888 by Jack the Ripper. There have been tons of books about the Ripper, and their names have appeared in all of them.
To put it all in a nutshell, a while back me and some other friends of mine—My brother Jack, a man called the Black Centipede, and a young woman known as Doctor Unknown-- were having trouble with something we thought was the ghost of the actual Jack the Ripper. We needed to find him and do something about him, and one of my friends got the idea that we ought to try to summon up the spirits of his victims in the hope that they might lend a hand. So we did this weird magic ritual, sort of like a séance, and it worked. And because of a strange set of circumstances, the girls returned, not as bodiless spirits, but as real flesh and blood human women. (Editor’s note: See The Optimist, Book One: You Don’t Know Jack, 2010 Black Centipede Press)
The girls don’t remember anything about being dead. They say they don’t think they blocked it out of their minds because it was unpleasant or scary or anything. They figure there are just some things that won’t fit inside a person’s head when they’re on this side of the line between life and death. The human brain is wired up for just so much and no more.
Anyhow, I was explaining the name of our agency. Whitechapel is an area in the city of London, England, in which the girls were all murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was a committee that was formed at that time in order to be vigilant over Whitechapel. Obviously they didn’t do all that great a job. But the girls say the people who did it meant well, and one of them, George Lusk, had a pretty traumatic experience on account of it—the Ripper mailed him half of the kidney he cut out of Cathy Eddowes—so they thought the name should be given a second chance to redeem itself or something, which is fine with me, I didn’t have any better ideas.
Mary Kelly, the last victim that got killed, is the most outgoing of the girls and the smartest one, too. She is a natural leader, and that is the role she has in the agency. I am a natural person who does a lot more than she gets credit for but doesn’t complain about it because she doesn’t really care, just so she gets the job done, so I am like a combination of secretary and second-in-command, even though I do more actual work than Mary. But I don’t mean that in a bad way, because, like I said, I'm a natural.
Well, I guess that's pretty much all you need. So let's get going.
ONE
It was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon when the peculiar Mister Keel left our office. Our brand new office, to which he had been the first genuine paying client visitor. I got up from my desk and went to the wall safe to put away the cash retainer he’d given us. Two thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills!
Mary Kelly, sitting at her desk, messing with her computer, turned to me and said, “What a queer fellow.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, closing the safe and going back to my own desk. “He’s married. To a woman and everything.” I held up the eight by ten glossy portrait Mr. Keel had given me of his wife Janet.
“I don’t… Oh, I see. “ Mary sighed. “Vionna, I shall never get accustomed to the way certain innocuous words from my era have been hijacked into conveying more… controversial meanings. The other day when I told Jack he was looking exceptionally happy—using a word I had every reason to believe meant that and nothing more—he looked at me as though he might like to take my head off.”
“Oh, I knew what you meant, I was just joking.” (I don’t like to tell lies, but since I knew Mary didn’t believe me, it didn’t really count.)
And she was right about our visitor. Client, I should say. Mister Keel had been a real oddball. He’d shown up out of the blue at 3:45, knocking on our door and asking if this was the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee Detective Agency. I told him it was, because it is, though we have not yet put up our little sign on the door.
“I have a rather embarrassing problem, and I hope you might be able to render some discreet assistance,” he said, after I had answered the door and he had introduced himself. I said I bet we could, that’s what we’re here for, and why don’t you come into the office?
I should mention that our headquarters is in an old brownstone house downtown on West 35th Street. It actually belongs to Dr. Dana Unknown, a great friend of ours, who rents it to us for practically nothing compared to what people charge for apartments and things these days. It’s a great house, and it is very close to an important place that is so secret, I can’t even tell you what it is, much less where it’s located.
Anyhow, Mr. Keel followed me a short way down the hall and into our business office. I’m not very tall, and Mister Keel was shorter than me. In fact, he seemed kind of delicate all over. Very skinny, not much color in his face. I was really surprised when I shook hands with him and found out that he had a good, solid grip, even though his hands were small and looked about as rugged as bone china. Not only did he have a grip, but I got the idea he wasn’t using much of it, and if he chose to apply the whole thing, I might end up being the one with a hand that looked like some fine china that had been dropped onto a hard floor.
I introduced him to Mary Kelly, who was the only other member of the agency present at the time, other than myself. The rest of the girls were busy that day getting enrolled at a community college. Having assimilated the fact that they are now in the 21st century to stay, they decided they wanted to get the most out of it. One way in which we are better than 1888 is that women are allowed to do more things. Mary Kelly, who got more education than most girls did back when she was alive in the 19th century, decided to work with the detective agency full-time and further her education later on.
Mr. Keel’s eyes darted around the office in a strange way. He reminded me of a rabbit, or possibly a small dog. I had the idea that he’d like to go around sniffing everything if he could get away with it.
I told him to sit down, and he sat. Sort of like a dog.
“I don’t really know how to say this, so I’ll just say it,” he said, making it sound like he was apologizing for something. “I’ve never had… Well, It’s my wife, you see. Here, I have a picture of her.”
He opened a large manila envelope he was carrying and handed me the photo I described earlier.
He cleared his throat and said, “To be quite blunt, miss, I suspect that she is being unfaithful.
“For almost a year now, there have been peculiar occurrences. They seem to happen about once a month. I will awaken in the morning feeling peculiarly groggy, as though I had a hangover. However, I do not drink and never have.
“On these same mornings, my wife will invariably be in a state of some disarray. More than once, her feet have been muddy, as though she were walking around barefoot out of doors. She denies any knowledge and does not even bother to offer a plausible explanation.”
“Have you any other grounds for suspicion?” Mary asked.
“My dear,” he said, “if what I have told you so far is insufficient, I don’t know what else I should be expected to produce.”
“But why do you suspect adultery, specifically? Surely these things could admit of other explanations.” Mary is really good at this stuff.
“Perhaps. But, whatever is at the root of it, I think one would be hard pressed to find a benign explanation for these events. Whatever is happening, I’d like to know about it.”
He had a point.
“You have a point,” I said. I turned to Mary. “He has a point, Mary. What you sound like you’re suggesting, Mr. Keel, is that your wife drugs you in your sleep and then sneaks out for whatever, knowing you won’t wake up and notice she’s gone.”
“That crossed my mind, yes.”
“Have you asked her?” Mary wanted to know.
“I have. She admits nothing and denies nothing. Nor, as I say, does she even bother to fabricate some innocent explanation. When I speak of it, she says nothing at all.”
“Hm,” I said. “Curiouser and curiouser. It sounds like the game’s afoot.” (I picked up those phrases from a couple of Jack’s books that I read. I like the way they sound, and I think it impresses people when you talk like that.)
“Well,” Mr. Keel said, “if things run true to form, we are due for another incident within the next week at most. Are you interested in taking the case?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t…” Mary said.
“YES,” I said louder, giving Mary a look. “We’d be glad to.”
“Splendid,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He reached into his pocket and produced the wad of bills I told you about earlier. Along with them, he gave me the photo of Janet Keel, which is what his wife’s name was, and a card with directions to his house.
After he left, and also after the little scene that started this chapter, Mary presented me with her misgivings.
“I don’t know that I approve of this, Vionna,” she said. “A divorce action? Adultery? Isn’t that rather tawdry?”
“I can’t say, since I don’t know what that word means. But I do know the meaning of the word lucrative, and that is what we have in our safe right now. “
“You have a mercenary streak that surprises me.”
“Heck, Mary, we’re just starting out. We can’t afford to turn anybody away who comes to us suggesting anything that isn’t illegal. He isn’t asking us to kill her.”
She said nothing to that. I could see she was working on swallowing the whole idea. Once she got it down past her windpipe, she asked, “How do we go about this?”
“We put her under surveillance,” I said.
“How does that work?”
“Well, we go where they live and we just sit and watch.”
“That seems simple enough. Have you done this often?”
“Never. But how difficult can it be? We go and keep an eye on the house. If she sneaks out, we follow her. We have cameras, and if we catch her doing, you know, whatever, we take a picture of it.”
Mary shook her head. “That seems awfully sordid.”
I had to agree.
“I have to agree,” I said, “but sometimes you have to do stuff you’d rather not. Anyhow, if she really is deceiving her husband, he has a right to know, don’t you think?”
“I suppose...”
TWO
And she kept on supposing for the next day or so. She talked herself out of it a dozen times. I talked her back into it 13 times. (That includes her not wanting to do it in the first place, which isn't the same thing as talking herself out of it, in case you think that whole thing doesn't add up right.)
The Keel house was sort of out in the country east of Zenith. The house stood by itself in the middle of a good-sized bit of land, surrounded by woods on all sides. A narrow dirt driveway went from the main road, through the woods, and curved around to the front of the house.
We decided we could keep an eye on the place from a distance. If she came out and got into a car, we could follow. We had all kinds of high-powered binoculars and spy cameras and various things like that. There were woods all around the house, so we could hide in those and observe from different vantage points. Mary took up a position to the north of the house, and I took the south.
The first night, nothing happened. Mary amused herself with a little hand-held video game, which she found fascinating, having lived the biggest part of her life over a hundred years ago. I was trying to learn how to knit, for some reason, so I brought that junk with me. Our first night out, Mary scored a million points on Space Invaders and I ruined most of a whole ball of yarn. As dismal a failure as the time I tried to learn to juggle.
The same nothing happened on the second night. But the third night was the charm.
It was way after midnight. It was very dark out there, and very quiet. I was in a condition closer to falling asleep than a professional detective ought to get while she’s on a job.
“Vionna,” came Mary’s voice over the walkie-talkie. “I’m seeing something I do not understand. Can you help me?”
“I’ll try. What is it?”
“I have no idea.”
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay… You’re making this kind of difficult.”
“Tell me, is there any such thing as an airplane that has no wings and makes no noise?”
“There might be.”
“Are they very common?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Nor would I. I don’t suppose you know of any kind of aircraft that is perfectly round and glows all over with a sort of bluish-green color?”
“Can’t say that I do. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Well, if you’d care to, you’re in luck. It just passed almost directly over my head and is moving toward the house. If you stand up and train your binoculars in this direction, you should catch sight of it. It’s only about twenty feet off the ground.”
So I did that. It took me a second to find the thing, you know how when you’re looking through binoculars everything is fuzzy and jerky and hard to focus on. I saw it. I got it in my field of view and held my hands and head as still as I could.
It looked like a smaller, greenish-blue moon. I looked quickly back over my shoulder at the actual moon, which was right where it was supposed to be, and hadn’t strayed away and changed color.
I looked back at the thing and saw that it was more of a disk shape than a sphere, and was totally smooth, which the moon is not. I couldn’t tell what the thing was made of. From where I was standing, it appeared to be right over the Keels’ house.
“This is weird,” I said into my walkie-talkie.
“That’s the word I would use,” Mary replied. “I believe it has stopped moving now. It looks to be right over the house. Yes, the green light is shining down on the roof, I can see it.”
“Well.”
“Yes. What do we do?”
I had no idea what to do.
“I have no idea what to do,” I said.
“So this is not some object that is common—or even uncommon, but known—in the 21st century?”
“Nope. What it looks like is a flying saucer.”
“So you ARE familiar with it?”
“Nope. A flying saucer is a thing that some people think exists and other people think doesn’t exist. A lot of people that do think they exist believe they come from other planets. I don’t know one way or the other. I’ve never thought about it much. I’m just saying that thing there is what one is supposed to look like.”
While we talked about it, the flying saucer hovered over the top of the house, drifting very slightly back and forth, like a toy balloon in a slight breeze. It was certainly strange-looking. I closed my eyes and asked if my “roommate” knew anything about this, but all I got was nothing.
I was about to say something else to Mary, but something started happening that made me forget what it was, and that I cared about it. Three little figures came drifting out of the flying saucer. They were shaped more or less like human beings, except that their heads were too big and their arms and legs too thin.
“I’ll be darned,” I said out loud. Mary’s voice came through the walkie-talkie, saying something I’d prefer not to write down. She said it again. Then she said something different which I am also not going to write down. Finally, she said something I don’t mind writing down:
“Are those creatures from other planets, Vionna?”
“They don’t look like they’re from around here,” I replied, jinking the binoculars around to try and get a better look at them. They were bathed in green light, so I couldn’t tell what their actual color was. They were small, and they had big, dark eyes, and they were drifting down toward the house. They drifted down toward the window of the Keels’ bedroom, then drifted right on in, passing right through the glass without breaking it, as though either they or the glass weren’t really there. But I was pretty sure both they and the glass really were.
“Gosh,” I said, “that isn’t supposed to happen.”
“Those creatures appear to have passed through solid matter, Vionna.”
“Yes, and I don’t think you can… Oh, wow! Look, Mary! They’re doing it again!”
The three little creatures emerged through the window, the same way they’d gone in. Not only that, but they had added a fourth member to their group.
Mrs. Keel.
In way less time that it is taking me to write about it, the creatures disappeared back into the flying saucer with Mrs. Keel. Then the flying saucer itself zoomed straight up into the air and was gone.
I lowered my binoculars and just stood there for about a minute, trying to figure out what to do or think about doing. It seemed like I had nothing in my head. I wished Jack were there, even though he wouldn’t know any more about it than I did, probably. But it would have made me feel better because he’s really good at pretending he isn’t scared or confused, something I am lousy at.
I drifted for a short time, until Mary’s voice squawking at me through the walkie-talkie brought me back to reality, if that’s what this was.
“What the effing geedee eff was that? My lord, it was like one of those motion pictures where they use trick cameras and tiny models and things to make it appear that something impossible is happening. Like the one we watched about the giant reptile that lay siege to that city in Japan.”
Now, Mary seems not to have to pretend not to be scared or confused. I don’t think anything frightens her, and she’s so smart it’s scary.
I said “Uh-huh,” which was all I could think of.
“What shall we do, Vionna?”
I said, “Um,” which was all I could think of.
“We should go down to the house.”
“Yes,” I said, and started walking in that direction, thankful I had something I knew I could do. Moving around to the side of the house, I got a closer look at the red van. There was something not right with it. It was beat-up and junky-looking, with rust spots all over it and everything, but it was CLEAN. There was no dust on it, and none of the pine tar that should have been there if it had just been sitting in that spot for however long. I was kind of proud of myself for noticing this, though I didn’t think it really had anything to do with anything. I have been trying, with the help of Jack and the Centipede—to learn how to observe things, and take note of various features of my surroundings, whether or not they seem important.
And by mentioning the van, I am also practicing a literary device known as “foreshadowing.” You probably already figured that the van will be important later, since I’m bothering to mention it in the midst of all this other weird stuff. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m new to the writing game and trying to figure things out. Really, it doesn’t much matter, because the van’s not THAT important. Compared to the stuff that IS important, the van is "small beer," as Mary often calls things that don't matter much. Plus which, the whole story is only about 30 pages long, and we’re halfway through it now anyhow.
“We’d best check on Mr. Keel,” Mary said. We went and found the door key where he told us it would be., and let ourselves into the dark, quiet house. Up the stairs we went, to the bedroom.
There we saw Mr. Keel, occupying one half of a king-sized bed. I shined a flashlight on him while Mary poked his shoulder with her finger.
“Mr. Keel, sir,” she said. “Wake up. It is Vionna Valis and Mary Kelly, the detectives you hired.”
No response at all from him. We made sure he was breathing, then we poked and tickled and slapped and shouted at him, but he did not wake up.
“Drugged,” I said. “I guess he was right about that part of it, anyhow.”
“Maybe he was drugged,” Mary said, glancing around the room. She sounded a little dubious about it. “There’s something in the air, here, Vionna. Something very strange.”
I sniffed several times. “I don’t smell anything,” I said.
Mary shook her head. “That isn’t what I mean.” Her eyes were darting all over the place. “It just… FEELS strange. Like… I don’t know.”
Now that she mentioned it, I began to sense something myself. But I could have been imagining it in the wake of the scene we had witnessed outside. I wouldn’t trust how I felt about anything at that moment. My little flashlight suddenly winked out. I shook it, as though that would do anything, then I shrugged and stuck it back in my pocket.
“I think we should call an ambulance,” I said, taking my cell phone out of my other pocket. “I don’t want to take any chances with a man’s life.”
The phone was dead. It didn’t even light up when I opened the cover.
“That’s odd,” I said. “I just recharged this thing before we left the office. That was no more than four hours ago.” I glanced at my watch to confirm this, and found that it, too, was dead. The digital display was blank.
“Well.” I stood there for a moment, utterly silent. Had it been up to me, I might still be there like that to this day, but something happened. The room seemed to be turning green. We saw a green glow coming through the window from somewhere up above, getting rapidly brighter. Mary and I looked at one another, and somehow silently agreed that we needed to get the heck out of there.
We both raced out of the bedroom and down the stairs, in some kind of a blind panic. Which was very strange when I thought about it later. I mean, I am not totally without fear, but I can keep my wits together in a crisis, and Mary is even better at it than I am. But that night, we were like a couple of cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on. We tore out of there so fast, in the dark, it’s a wonder we didn’t break our necks. I almost screamed, and Mary let out something that sounded like a whimper, which is the very last thing I'd expect to hear from Mary Jane Kelly.
We burst through the front door and down the steps into the yard. I glanced up and saw the flying saucer hovering over the house again, looking about a million times bigger than it had before. My head hurt and I wanted to scream or start crying, but what I actually did do was pass out.
FOUR
When I woke up it was still dark, and I didn’t know what was going on. I groped in my pocket for my flashlight, found it, and turned it on. It worked. I shined it on my watch, which was also working, but all it could tell me was “12:00” over and over again.
I felt like sand had been poured into my head through the spaces around my eyeballs. I was greatly relieved to find Mary lying next to me when I shined the light around. I sat up and scooted over next to her, pulling on her shoulders to get her into a sitting position, and also hopefully to wake her up.
I don’t know what you call it when you whisper as loud as you possibly can; it couldn’t be called shouting, but it ought to have some kind of name other than “whispering as loud as you possibly can.”
Well, whatever it is, I was doing it right into her ear. “Mary,” I whispouted, “are you okay? Wake up.” I had her upper body almost vertical. Her eyelids started fluttering. “Mary!” I shoutspered.
She opened her eyes and squinted at me. “Vionna? What in the blank just happened to us? I feel like my head has been run over by a blanking lorry.”
I didn’t know what a lorry was, and I said so. I had a picture in my head of something that looked like a small giraffe with his neck painted to look like a barber pole.
“A truck, dear,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “It’s what they call a truck in England.”
“I didn’t think there were any trucks in 1888.”
“There were large wagons that were like trucks. The word, I gather, carried over from that time.”
“Oh.”
Mary blinked several times and then focused on me. “Vionna, why are we sitting here discussing etymology? I would think we’d have more pressing concerns.”
“Oh crap, you’re right.” From the time I woke up until that moment, our situation had slipped my mind somehow. I remembered it all and looked around us. We were right at the edge of the woods, up under some of the smaller trees, a hundred yards from the house.
We checked on the house and found it occupied by the correct number of people. We gathered up our equipment and junk and went home. I noticed the van was gone, but the fact just barely registered, and I forgot about it pretty quickly.
We dragged our bedraggled selves back to the office, to our respective bedrooms, and to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later, and Mary came out of her room shortly after that. She found me in the kitchen. I was sitting with the other four members of our agency. They were telling me about their experiences of the previous day. Each of them had selected a subject she intended to specialize in, and had selected classes based on it. I don’t know how they arrived at these things—they may very well have drawn slips of paper from a hat-- but they were as follows:
Annie Chapman - Chemistry
Polly Nichols - Construction Engineering
Liz Stride - Electrical Engineering
Cathy Eddowes - Archaeology/Geology
We talked about all that for a while after Mary showed up, then she and I told the girls about our own recent experiences.
“That is certainly very queer,” said Cathy.
“No, dear,” Mary said. “The meaning of that word has changed. You must call it ‘gay.’”
“Actually,” I said, “in this case the right word would be ‘weird.’ Gay is something else entirely.”
“Gay means ‘happy,’” said Liz.
“No, Liz,” Mary said. “It now means ‘buggery.’”
“Oh dear!” Annie exclaimed.
“Stop!” I said, louder than I had intended to. “We are not discussing entomology. We’re talking about the weird, gay, queer events of last night.” And I plowed on through the rest of the story, right up to the point where we got back home.
“So,” Liz said, after we had finished telling them everything, “you have no idea what happened after you blacked out?”
“None at all,” Mary confirmed.
“And we also don’t know why we went into such a panic,” I said. “That isn’t like us at all.”
“It was unnatural,” Mary said. “Everything seemed strange. And all of our electrical equipment stopped working at the same time.”
“Yes, it did,” I said. “Except… Our walkie-talkies. We were using them the first time we saw the saucer, and they were okay.”
“Mine gave out some static when the saucer passed above me, but that stopped when it got further away.”
“We were far enough away…” I thought of something and jumped up and ran out of the room. I came back with one of the small digital cameras we’d taken with us.
“This camera,” I said, “is the one I attached to a tree and left pointed at the house. It was programmed to take a picture every 20 seconds. Let’s have a look.”
I pulled up the menu on the little screen as Mary and the girls clustered around me. We looked at the pictures, one by one. They were puzzling. We eliminated the ones that showed nothing, or repeated what the others showed. We were left with this:
1. The saucer hovering over the house.
2. Three men emerging from the van.
3. The saucer hovering over the house again.
4. The three men heading back in the direction of the van, carrying something we could not identify.
5. The three men going back into the house, carrying the same or an identical something. In this photo, there was a fourth human standing in the doorway, watching the proceedings. Janet Keel.
6. The house with no saucer hovering over it.
“Well,” I said.
“I can make nothing of that,” Mary said.
“Nor can I,” I said. I should mention that Mr. Keel had called three or four times during the day. I had asked the girls to take messages, telling him Mary and I were out investigating. Having no idea what happened to us, I didn’t intend to report anything to our client until we had something that made sense.
“All I can think of,” I said, after turning it over in my head for a long time and discussing it with everyone from a hundred different angles, “is to confront Janet Keel with these photos. There she stands in the doorway in photo number five. She must know what this is all about. I say we simply go to her and ask.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Liz asked.
“Probably not, but I don’t know what else to do.”
GO TO PART TWO:
http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/2010/09/vionna-valis-and-whit...