Fiction

I wrote this a loooong time ago when I was really, really young. AND IT SHOWS. Still, I have some affection for this piece.

The Hollow Men

The Syndicate

Mind-eaters and soul-stealers, drug-dealers and drop-outs, minor miracles for small-time sinners, endless cycles and mean gray walls: It squatted gray and lifeless against the moon-lit horizon, behind a chain link fence designed to contain giants, to repel behemoths, soaring up beyond reason. It squatted three stories high, speckled in graffiti, grinning lopsidedly with teeth made up of windows which didn’t open. We stared at it long enough, surprised, I guess, by how strange it looked at night. I sucked on a cigarette, waiting for someone to move, feeling the wind stick its fingers into me, testing the surface tension.

The fence was easy. There had been talk, back when I’d been a freshman, of putting wire up on top of the fence. But it had never materialized, and the fence remained toothless. It was easy. Get a good running start, jump, grab hold, get set. pull up, hand over hand. Flip your legs over, brace yourself, and drop down. Less than a minute, and we stood panting in the courtyard.

There were four of us. Me. Gail, in black jeans, boots, and leather jacket. Henry, in front as always, blue eyes and little else. Kevin hulking in the rear. Our breath steamed in front of us nervously. We were surrounded by broken rules, swimming in the thick grease of guilt, and all we could do was smile at each other. It lay shattered at our feet and we grinned at our reflections in the shards and reveled that we had the power to cause it. Then Henry took off and we followed.

The side boiler-room door out back was still propped just so slightly open. Bill the mumbling old man who cleaned the place on good days hadn’t bothered to check it, as usual. Old bill could be counted on for two things: to be asleep by two every day, and to steal dirty magazines from our lockers. With that he was clockwork.

We slipped in and shut it behind us, making our way out of the works and into the lockers, dark and damp, foreign all of a sudden. We didn’t take our time. Working on fear and determination, we cut through the halls by memory and broke into the printing office with Henry’s screwdriver -push, pull, watch for falling wood chips.

I grabbed the paper, three packs of five hundred, from the side closet. Gail prepped the copier and set it up. The whine of its warm-up was ear-shattering. Kevin searched for the copy codes, popping open desk drawers with hard snaps of his own screwdriver, finally digging them up. Henry just watched, smoothing out the original.

Gail stepped back, Kev punched in the pass code, programmed fifteen hundred, and I loaded up the paper trays. We turned to Henry, and he was just grinning, watching us, looking crazy, his flashlight pointed up at his face and all the wrong shadows around his eyes. Then he slapped the page down and pressed start. The room filled with snapshot lightning, and we waited, getting nervous. nothing happened. Minor miracles for small-time sinners.

Done, we split up. We papered the place. We had to wade through papers to get out. Outside the gate, we checked time. Twenty minutes, exactly. henry joked that it took him longer to take a shit. It was his way of complimenting us. Then we each went home and forgot we’d seen each other.

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Here’s an unpublished story from a few years ago. The meaning of the title is, frankly, forgotten by this writer. WHo forgets a lot of things.

The Witch King of Angmar

by Jeff Somers

WHEN the report that the Beckels Sphere had become unstable, it preempted and interrupted every broadcast in the world. All the uplinks were seized by priority interrupts, and no one complained. I was with Denise, sharing a bottle of wine, when the hulking monitor in the corner of her living room came to life without warning, the looped report stating in clipped, computer-modulated sentences that the world was going to end now, it was unavoidable. Denise took my hand. We were both trembling.

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The Void is Ever Eager

by Jeff Somers

I sat in the dark and listened for Ellie, keeping perfectly still. It seemed very important, suddenly, that I stay perfectly still. No twitch, no shifting of weight—just the maintenance of equilibrium in the dark, quiet room. I had never sat in the overstuffed chair we kept in the corner. I’d seen people sit in it at parties, but always I’d had a vague sense of discomfort about the chair. Sometimes the shape of things tells you something about them, and this chair had just never looked comfortable, and time is precious, I didn’t want to waste it on an uncomfortable experience. Besides, it was out of the way in the room: You couldn’t see the television, or reach anything of us. Sitting in it, you were an island.

In the dark, as my eyes adjusted, the room took on a familiar layout with unfamiliar textures. Everything smooth, rubbed off.

In the light the room had warmth, because Ellie knew what she was doing when it came to decorating. She chose fabrics well, understanding that how something felt to you was just as important as how it looked. In the dark, though, all the lines and pills and deep furrows were lost: Everything was made of dark metal, cold and smooth.

Parts of me were going numb, but I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to get river muck on the chair.

###

Three months before, almost to the day, I’d been at a party in the same room, just about everyone that my wife and I knew gathered into one house and given finger foods and alcohol. We liked things casual, and insisted that anyone who wished could bring someone along, no need to call, no need to clear it with the hosts. We liked crowded parties, lots of noise, spilled drinks, people meeting new people. We didn’t want ten people standing around politely, smiling until their faces cracked.

When people brought friends things got looser and more casual. So, I didn’t know a lot of the people attending my own party, but that wasn’t unusual.

I’d met her, Veronica Sawl, in this very room.

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This story was published in From the Asylum in July 2006.

No Stranger to Frustration

by Jeff Somers

IT WAS the fourth of July again, and the Indians next door were playing music at top volume in their yard. Mister Carrol thought it sounded like a lot of cats being killed, slowly. He stood on the roof looking out across the city, across the river to the other city, smoking a cigarette and feeling the warm roof under his bare feet. The air was still but not oppressive, hanging but not pushing, clear and thin. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and contributed his own minor pollution to the atmosphere.

He glanced down at the backyard. It was overgrown with trees and weeds and rusting metal, completely untended and as wild as yards got in the city. It was a small, dark jungle, surrounded by neat and careful yards, yards with gardens, yards with tended lawns.

Mister Carrol sighed, flicking his cigarette into the night. He just hadn’t had the energy to deal with the yard recently.

He put his hands in his pockets, nodded to himself, and stepped off the roof.

The Indians next door, drunk on cheap domestic beer, heard something big and heavy crash through the trees and hit one of the rusting old bicycles in their neighbor’s yard, but the music drowned most of the noise out, and none of them heard the soft laughter that persisted for a few minutes after. They discussed the crash and finally one man got up and padded, none too steadily, over to the fence.

He returned a moment later, shaking his head, and retrieved his beer. “That man is crazy,” he said to the other men. “He is lying in his backyard, laughing to himself.”

They nodded, sagely.

* * * * *

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