Two

Colin Davis hunched over his notebook and tried to think of a word that meant the same thing as “hairy.” He’d already used “hirsute” a couple of times and he needed to emphasize his monster’s increasing… hairiness. Chewing his pencil didn’t help. Neither did the chattering of the abundant crowd at Pizza Haven and, most unhelpful of all, the nearness of Tanya Dougherty, waitress and Goddess of Beauty, who was leaning over, resting her elbows on a table just in front of him, charming the college guys with her low-cut front and knocking his concentration into a ditch with the perky round perfection of her tartan-miniskirt-clad behind.

Colin squeezed his eyes shut and envisioned his hairy monster, willing the word to come. It wouldn’t. He was going to have to break down and buy a paperback thesaurus.

“’sup, Col?” The voice was sweet and a little husky, like honey over a spoonful of cornflakes.

Colin opened his eyes and smiled, willing himself not to blush, which worked as well as willing the missing word to appear had. “Hey, Tanya. Not much, I guess. Just waiting for a delivery call.”

Tanya took a lean on the nearest table. “Just running from job to job, like always. Still writing, I see.”

“You got it. It’s the only thing I’m good at, so I guess I’d better do it, right?”

She gave him a smack on the back of the head with her order pad. “Don’t talk that way. Shoot, you’re so lucky. The other delivery guys, Doc makes them bus tables and stuff if there’s no calls. He lets you sit here and write.”

“I know. He’s amazing. He says he wants to support my dream. Never has told me why, though.”

“He’s a sweetie, even though he tries to act like he’s not. All right, hon, let me get back to work. Good luck with your story.”

“Thanks. Hey, do you know a word for ‘hairy’?”

“’Shaggy,’ maybe?”

Colin scanned the paragraph. “Yeah. I think that might work. Thanks!”

“All in a night’s work. I’m not even going to make you tip me.” Tanya sashayed away, whistling, the tartan switching left, right, left, right in a betwitching rhythm as old as mammal-kind.

Colin watched her go. Then, when she was out of sight, he bent over his notebook again freshly inspired. His concentration was again broken again, though, by a shout from the order window behind him [firm up Colin’s placement in the restaurant].

“Davis! Time to stop composing and start delivering. I got three for central Buckhead.”

Colin slapped his notebook shut and jumped up. If Doc was going to let him write as work, he was going to be Mr. Alacrity when he was needed. “Ready!” he said, snapping on his helmet. In two minutes he was piloting his Chinese scooter down the street, three pizzas bungeed to the rear cargo rack.

***

            The house was the biggest one in a neighborhood of giants, an imposing marble job with a formal boxwood garden sloping up to it. He knew the place; they ordered pizzas here every month or so. The driveway was gated and the drill was for him to use the call box to summon a creepy little guy who would complete the transaction through the window of a gatehouse, rather than admitting him to the property.

But this time was different. The little guy ordered him to drive in and bring the pizzas to the front door and the gates swung open for Colin to enter. Colin twisted the scooter’s accelerator and drove slowly up the drive, which was a good tenth of a mile long. He wanted to take it all in and remember it—there was a story scene or six in this place, no doubt.

The front door was ten feet high if it was an inch and emblazoned with a coat of arms that featured a mounted knight carrying a lance, who, instead of wearing a helmet, had on some kind of fedora. It swung open without a sound, revealing the little guy from the gatehouse, wearing a tuxedo with a morning coat. He smiled, if you could call it that—it more like a chimp baring its teeth.

“Prompt and polite, as usual. You’ve quite a reputation here, young man, for your excellent service. Please come in. Mr. Templeton-Smythe would like to thank you himself and, I believe, give you a generous tip.”

Colin almost tripped on the doorframe as he walked in. The entrance hall, tiled in exquisite black and white marble was vast, with its ceiling soaring more than two stories overhead. A staircase curved upward, leading to a gallery above. Through open doors on his right, he could see a library appointed with dark leather furniture and shelves crammed with books. To his left, a double door was shut, showing off the grain of a dark wood he guessed was mahogany.

“Wow. I mean, gosh. What a beautiful home.”

“It is fine, isn’t it? Mr. Templeton-Hyde has excellent taste and has gone to great lengths to achieve his vision for this place. Now, if you’ll follow me, he is waiting in the drawing room with a few guests.”

Colin rebalanced the pizzas and followed Brumby toward the double doors. “It’s kind of nice to know a wealthy man like Mr. Templeton-Hyde likes pizza. Makes you think we’re all basically the same, you know?”

Brumby chuckled… or was he clearing his throat. “Pizza does have a universal appeal, Mr… My apologies, I neglected to get your name, young man.”

“Colin. Colin Davis.”

“Very good. Colin Davis. I am Brumby. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Brumby opened one of the doors and motioned Colin in ahead of him. “Mr. Colin Davis!” he announced.

Colin entered the room, stepping carefully in the candlelight to avoid tripping again. A circle of about half a dozen men, all dressed in what looked like choir robes, stood in the middle of the room, were repeating a chant, but broke off less than a second after his entry. A tall, jowly man in a robe that belonged on a comic-book Merlin and a black fedora like the one on the front door stepped forward.

“What is the meaning of this?” he said.

“Pizzas, sir. From Pizza Haven? Three house specials, no bacon?”

“I didn’t order any…”

“Beg pardon, sir. The summoning.”

“What are you on about? It’s not completed yet. We’ve already tried three times.”

“Begging your pardon most deeply, sir. It has worked, as you can see.”

The light of understanding dawned on the jowly man’s face. “Brilliant! How very unexpected.”

Colin loudly cleared his throat. “Is anyone going to take these pizzas? And pay for them? And Mr. Brumby said something about a tip.”

“Here’s a tip for you, young man. Have a care whose home you enter,” said Jowly.

“But…”

Colin never finished his sentence. He heard a swish and a thump, and a sharp pain exploded behind his ear. His saw a sudden vision of Tanya’s skirt switching to and fro, and then a field of scarlet. After that, there was nothing.

Ty: Hello, Kron. Been a while since we’ve seen one another.

Kron: Hrrm.

Ty: What’s that supposed to mean?

Kron: It means you are wasting my time, and it means it has not been that long since we have seen one another. You were just proofreading the Demon Chains novel.

Ty: Well, yeah, but I guess I meant it’s been a while since we were … uh … writing together. After all, it’s been a month or so since I finished writing Demon Chains.

Kron: Fine. Be on your way, then.

Ty: But I just got here!

Kron: Which means you can turn right around and leave.

Ty: Why are you being this way? Why so obstinate?

Kron: You created me. You should know.

Ty: Um, well, I realize you probably don’t like me very much.

Kron: True.

Ty: But I guess it’s not because I put you in perilous situations.

Kron: Again, true.

Ty: You probably don’t like me because –

Kron: Because you are wasting my time.

Ty (smirking): Oh, yeah? What else do you have to do? I’m the one who sends you off on your adventures, and since finishing Demon Chains, I’ve yet to send you on another one.

Kron: Just because you are not forcing me to face down demons, cannibals or dark wizards does not mean I do not have other things to do. In fact, I have better things to do than talk with you.

Ty (whining): But I’m your creator!

Kron: You are also a writer, which is a notoriously wasteful way to spend one’s life.

Ty: What do you mean?

Kron: What, exactly, do you do to make the world a better place? Do you go out of your way to help your fellow man? Do you –

Ty: Now hold on a minute! I might spend my days and nights in front of a keyboard, but I try to entertain others with my prose, and from time to time I try to say something important about humanity, the universe, etc.

Kron: Which accomplishes nothing. Words, words and more words.

Ty: There’s nothing wrong with trying to entertain people!

Kron: Except you could be out there saving lives.

Ty: Well, excuse me if I’m not two hundred pounds of solid muscle with a big sword hanging on my back, and trained in the arts of melee from a dozen different nations!

Kron: You forgot about my years of training in alchemy, languages, and all manners of thwarting magic.

Ty: Yeah, you’re a regular Batm –

Kron: Don’t say it!

Ty: Say what?

Kron: You know what! Bruce and I are only distantly related. I am not based upon him.

Ty: I guess. I suppose you also have a little Frank Castle in you, and some Mack Bolan. Maybe even a smidgen of Max Rockatansky.

Kron: I have no idea who those people are.

Ty: That’s what Wikipedia is for. Look it up.

Kron: What?!? Look, I have to go. There are street scum needing beaten up, and monsters that need killing.

Ty: I suppose you’re the man for the job.

Kron: I am.

Ty: Okay, okay. I get the picture.

Kron: The what?

Ty: Nevermind. Maybe you’ll find out some day if I ever send you into the future or into my world.

Kron (grinning, all teeth): That would be interesting.

Ty: How so?

Kron: Because then I could hunt down you.

Ty (gulping): Okay, uh … that’s enough for the day, I think. We’ve taken up enough space on Carson’s blog. Um, Carson, thanks for putting up with our nonsense, and I look forward to any replies to this post.

Kron: You forgot to say goodbye, idiot.

Ty: Okay. Goodbye, idiot.

Kron: Hrrm.

Special Note: Don’t let this post distract you from the February 9th guest post from Ty Johnston, who is a real, live, successful fantasy writer.

One

Alistair Hyde Naycock Templeton-Smythe was incensed. He had found a spot on his robe, a patch about two inches square where the deep purple of the velvet had somehow faded to a shade lighter. Negligence is what it was. It was all these foreigners that had taken over the dry-cleaning business. They bought everything they wore at Wal-Mart—what did they know about fine fabrics, or care? Your money was all they wanted, with their exorbitant prices and their pretending not to speak good English. Daddy had moved the family to America for lower taxes and bigger business, not to be robbed blind by the offspring of inferior peoples.

“Brumby!” he shouted. “Brumby, to me! Instantly!”

Templeton-Smythe heard the little man’s thumping run in the hallway and in a moment his tentative knock. “Sir?” came the quavering voice, “You called?”

“Of course I called! Come in here at once.”

Brumby, a diminutive man with a hooked nose and large, watery eyes, complied. “Sir?”

Templeton-Smythe shook the offending fold of cloth under his house-boy’s nose. “What is this, Brumby? How did this happen?”

Brumby peered closely at the robe, inclining his head until the tip of his nose almost touched it. “’This,’ um, sir? My apologies, but what is ‘this’?”

“Are you blind, man? It’s got a stain. You took it to be cleaned, therefore I expect you to have an explanation, which I am even now awaiting.”

Brumby licked his lips. “It’s always been there, sir.”

Templeton-Smythe began tapping his foot on the floor.

“The faded spot, sir. Always been there. You recall this was an e-Bay purchase. ‘Nearly new,’ I believe was the description.”

Templeton-Smythe’s tapping foot snapped up and delivered a sharp kick to Brumby’s shin. The little man grimaced, but did not cry out. “Damn you, Brumby, for allowing such a thing to happen. E-Bay, indeed. Have this rag burned. Now bring me my second-best robe, the one with the crescent moons and stars. A fellow wants to look his best when he’s conjuring wealth, power and immortality, don’t you agree?”

“To be sure, sir.”

The foot-tapping resumed. Brumby scuttled to the walk-in closet and after a few moments’ rummaging brought out the robe. It was dark burgundy decorated with loud yellow stars and half-moons. Some of the moons had scowling faces. Templeton-Smythe inspected it and wrinkled his nose.

“A bit musty, isn’t it?”

Brumby rubbed one palm against the other. “It’s just back from the cleaners, sir, as of Thursday.”

“Hmph. You’ll find us a new cleaner, Brumby. White people such as ourselves. And none of these recent Eastern Eurpoean imports who haven’t shed their accents yet. I don’t care how far you have to drive.”

“Is a Southern accent acceptable, sir?”

Templeton-Smythe raised an eybrow. “Are you mocking me, Brumby?”

The little man took a step back. “Oh, no, sir. It’s just that I may know of a place, but the owners possess that particular, um, patois.”

“Very well. Southern will do, as long as it’s a refined accent. I won’t have any white trash cleaning for me, either. Understand?”

“Yes, indeed, sir.”

“Then get out and make ready to receive our guests.”

Brumby bowed deeply and left the room, shutting the door softly behind him. At the end of the hallway, he paused at the head of the stairs and uttered a low growl. A wisp of acrid gray smoke drifted out of his left ear.

“By the bowels of Beelzebub,” he muttered. “I yearn for the day our positions are reversed, Alistair Hyde Naycock Templeton-Smythe.” He took a deep breath then and hurried downstairs to prepare for the coven’s arrival.

***

            Having shed the annoying company of the help, Templeton-Smythe went to the flat-screen TV opposite his bed, applied pressure to its top right corner and then stretched to apply equal pressure to the lower left corner. There was a faint click and when he stepped away from the TV it swung away from the wall, revealing a safe behind it.

Templeton-Smythe worked the combination, which required a dial, a keypad and a fingerprint scan, and removed a stick, shaved of all its bark and inscribed with a repeating series of runes. He held the stick close to his lips, whispered a phrase to it and then inserted the tip of it into his left ear for a count of three. He then put everything back and as the TV clicked into place against the wall, a panel in the floor slid open revealing another safe like the first.

Inside the floor safe was a panama hat, size 8 ½, black. Templeton-Smythe knelt, lifted the hat from its hiding place, placed it gingerly on his head and went to stand before the mirror, where he adjusted the chapeau until it was securely centered on top of his head

Templeton-Smythe’s little group of cohorts was called The Coven of the Black Hat in honor of the genuine magical artifact now adorning his pate. It had been dyed black by the original owner, an Ecuadorian shaman that Grandfather Templeton-Smythe had procured it from while scouting mining properties early in the twentieth century. That the old man had procured it by means of murdering the shaman was a closely held family secret, as was the belief that the hat’s dire origins had increased its powers. Grandfather had also acquired a servant on the hat expedition, a man by the name of Dominick Brumby. A Brumby had been in the service of the Templeton-Smythe patriarch ever since.

Templeton-Smythe took the burgundy cloak from the bed, fastened it around his shoulders and practiced swirling it in front of the mirror while making a series faces he found stern, or mysterious, or both.

“Brilliant,” he said. “No wonder they follow me so willingly.” He double checked the robe for spots and the hat for centeredness, and then headed downstairs to greet his guest and start the night’s festivities.

***

            To become a member of The Coven of the Black Panama Hat, one had to meet strict requirements. You had to be a bosom friend, benefactor, or essential business associate of Alistair Hyde Naycock Templeton-Smythe, the permanent High Priest. This was not an easy hurdle to jump as the man circulated only in the most stratoshperic of circles. You had to be white, in the Western European sense of the term, which seemed an easier mark to hit at first but often proved to be more difficult when you were subjected to the required DNA trace. You had to be eminent in your field, which was required to be one that might be of some benefit to Templeton-Smythe. These restrictions kept membership in the coven small, but potent, which was just the way he liked it.

Brumby had already ushered the members into the drawing room, where they were drinking ancient scotch and speculating in low voices about the business of the evening. Templeton-Smythe paused outside the closed doors and whispered an incantation, a glamour to give him an added appearance of puissance. It’s working, he thought, feeling a tingling beginning where the hat touched his head and travelling all the way down to his toes. It was both warm like whiskey in the belly and cold like a raw winter wind. It also gave him a raging boner.

He threw the doors open, spreading the folds of his cloak open like a pair of blood-red wings. As one, the coven stepped back, gasping, open-mouthed at the vision of magical power before them. All that is, except for Pepper Hynes Jernigan, of the Virginia Jernigans, who had been standing just inside the doors. He dropped his glass, which shattered on the marble floor and then fell over on the shards, which shredded his hands when he threw them out to catch himself. Jernigan’s howls of pain and the smear of his blood on the tiles distracted the coven members and spoiled the grand effect, glamour or no glamour.

“Do get up, Jernigan, you great clot,” the High Priest said. “Brumby! Cleaning! Instantly!”

Brumby appeared with a Dyson vacuum cleaner, mop and bucket. He helped the unfortunate Jernigan to his feet and shook his head at the mess. “Blood on the tiles, sir. Not particularly good for tonight’s, um, effort, sir. Incompatible.”

Templeton-Smythe raised his boot to give Brumby a kick in the pants, but thought better of it and settled for bad temper instead. “Don’t lecture me, you houseboy. Make this mess go away so that we may begin. In the meantime, let the candles be lit.”

The coven members, with the exception of Jernigan, who was busy extracting tiny shards of glass from his hands, dispersed throughout the room to light a series of black candles. Brumby finished his work and switched off the electric lights, leaving the room in flickering dimness.

Templeton-Smythe swished his cloak and stepped to the center of the room. “Wizards of the Black Hat, let us gather as one,” he said.

The coven did as they were bid, joining hands around the High Priest, who knelt and drew a wide circle on the floor and a pentagram in its center. Then he rose and turned slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees as he addressed them.

“Tonight, my wizards, we take the first step towards untold wealth, power and, perhaps, immortality. Tonight, we take the first step in a series of summoning that will lead us to command of legions of dark beings. With them at our beck and call, our influence will be limitless. We will build the world we all envision.”

“I hope it includes sutures,” Jernigan carped.

“Sutures, Jernigan? We’ll do better than that! What about a new hand? What about four new arms with hands that can crush skulls?”

“I’m in,” said Jernigan.

“Then let us continue. Tonight we summon a victim, a sacrifice to the darks gods. Concentrate. Imagine a young man, here in the unholy circle, at our mercy. Now, chant with me! O-rah-mey-dah-koo-cha! O-rah-mey-dah-koo-cha!”

The chant rose in volume and intensity. The faces of the coven were pinched in scowling concentration. Glass rattled in windows, a chill breeze arose in the room and Templeton-Smythe felt the black hat quivering on his head.

In the library, on the far side of the entrance hall, Brumby raised a telephone handset to his ear and dialed. “Pizza Haven? Yes, this is Dominick Brumby, I’m on file. Right. Could you deliver me three large house specials, no bacon? Thank you. Oh, and is that nice young man on the motorbike delivering tonight? That’s wonderful. He’s always so polite and prompt. Good-bye now.”

Brumby hung up the phone. “O-rah-mey-dah-koo-cha, indeed,” he said to the bookshelves.

Also, I’ve been reading Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris, which has some dandy tips of filling in plot crevasses and that inspired me to give the story another look. I haven’t finished NYN yet, but since it goaded me into doing something, it must have something going for it; I’ll let you have my final word when I’m finished reading it. (No doubt you’ll all be waiting breathlessly for that.)

Planning, while it’s fun, is nowhere near as fun as writing is. I keep getting pulled off the planning task by the compulsion to write scenes one after another, to get on with it. The problem is, that’s what I’ve tried before and I’ve always written myself into a dead end that way.

So, how to make planning fun enough to keep me from jumping into the writing work? Buy a new toy, of course. If you’re a nerd like me you buy a new piece of software.

In this case I bought myself a license for SuperNoteCard, which enables you to create stacks of virtual index cards on the PC or Mac. You can create multiple decks, categories, cards, relationships between deck and cards and relationships between relationships. You can color-code and annotate. You can distinguish specific “Factors” in your story, factors being people, places and things that “factor” into your story. You can plan your head off with this thing!

I created all my cards from existing materials and came up with nearly three hundred, counting all the duplicates. That exercise alone was enough to help me see I was building the fiction equivalent of spaghetti code (software code with logic that twists and turns on itself like a pile of spaghetti noodles). Now that I’m able to step back and look at the thing from a higher level, through the cards, I’m better able to trim fat and organize the story. At least that’s the way it appears at the moment.

That’s it from the trenches for now. Here’s a picture of SuperNoteCard in action:

Gloriana Jackson Park stepped out of her hut and took a deep breath of the rain-fresh air. The daily downpour had just cleared and the birds and monkeys were loud in the treetops again, filling her glen with chattering and song. Higher on the ridge and to the north a waterfall crashed over a cliff face into a broad stream that flowed to the Amazon.

She did her usual afternoon tasks, checking the food supplies for rot or infestations of insects, cutting away vines and other vegetation that daily attempted to overrun her little home, tended her patch of yams and her two pigs, Bacon and Loin. Bacon was getting big; he would be an ex-pig pretty soon.

The chores took up most of the remaining daylight. As the shadows began to lengthen, she poured herself a cup of banana beer, lit a candle on her porch and sat down in a hand-made chair to wait for customers. As the beer warmed her blood she felt a great sense of contentment. It was good to live alone and to do it in the rainforest of beautiful Ecuador, her adopted homeland.

It had been clear from birth which of her parents Gloriana too after: her mother, Gloriana Jackson, who had at one time or another been an artist’s model in Nice, a supporting actress in B-movies, a bush pilot and the pastry chef at a notorious, high-class bordello, where she had turned out cakes representing every body part imaginable along with a surprising number of ordinary glazed doughnuts. The elder Gloriana had settled down, married and had a family for two reasons: one, she was tired; two, it was one of the few things she hadn’t already tried.

Kyong Park, or just Mr. Park, as he insisted the family call him after the night Gloriana the Elder had pantsed him in the airport and Gloriana Jr. had laughed and he’d decided he needed more respect from those who depended on his financial support, was an operating room nurse. He was a man who thrived on order and who often wondered why he had married his high-flying wife, but then the sunlight would catch her abundant brassy curls flying every which-way in the wind, or she would whisper to him in that husky voice of hers and he would remember. She brought a little much-needed chaos into his world of propriety.

Mr. Park’s tolerance of chaos was zero, however, when it came to his little Glo. She was the apple of his eye and he wanted her to have every success, and that meant sacrificing everything fun. While other children played outside, little Glo did her homework a second or third time and completed the extra lessons her father assigned. Her physical recreation was limited to taekwondo classes three times a week. While other girls went on dates, little Glo stayed home practicing viola and piano and learning computer programming languages. When other girls went off to co-ed colleges where they could go to parties and have boyfriends, little Glo was sent to a Baptist institution where all dates were chaperoned and anything beyond kissing on the cheek required an act of Congress.

Thanks to her mother, young Gloriana’s life was not completely bleak. On the contrary, because Mr. Park couldn’t be watching her all the time, little Glo, with the help of her mom, learned the joys of Sneaking Around on the Old Man. Many extra-homework times were spent shopping, having ice cream, or bungee jumping. Educational mother-daughter field trips often ended with Glo at a sleepover and Gloriana soaking in a spa tub at the Hilton. So, although there were fences thrown up all around her, Glo got to develop her wild side.

Unfortunately, from Glo’s perspective, there was nothing her mother could do about the college. Mr. Park insisted it was his daughter’s only option, unless she wanted to move out of the house and go out on her own immediately, with just the clothes on her back. Gloriana the Elder, who knew how important college was, told her daughter to do it for her father, who loved her so much, and reminded her that she could always Sneak Around.

And so Gloriana Jackson Park went to the Baptist college for four years, majored in pre-med and became class valedictorian. Upon graduation, an aunt gave her a large cash gift to help her get started in life. Two months later, Gloriana, after an emotional farewell with her parents, boarded a plane with this cash gift, supposedly to begin training in a prestigious west coast medical program. Instead, she changed routes in Atlanta. Her destination: adventure.

Adventure, it turned out, was a much harsher mistress than Gloriana had bargained for. It chewed her up and spit her out, in the process souring her on the thrills the big world could offer. Seeking something deeper, she took herself to a Buddhist nunnery in the forests of Thailand. There she drank deeply from the fountains of ancient wisdom and meditation, but enlightenment eluded her. Try as she might, she was unable to achieve the free and easy state of equanimity she saw in so many of her fellow nuns.

And then she tried mushrooms.

One night, in a fit of frustration, Gloriana had put on her old jeans and a t-shirt and gone out to get drunk in the nearest village. At the pub there she had met a fellow American, an English-language teacher in Bangkok, out seeing the country. He was attractive enough and she was drunk enough and it had been any number of months, so in short order Gloriana found herself in bed with the guy, whose name she never could remember, howling at the moon. After their second round he had offered her a handful of desiccated mushrooms, saying simply, “Try these.”

Enlightenment followed soon thereafter. She saw the oneness of everything as plainly as the words on the page of a children’s picture book. She saw her path, as well. Not for Gloriana the sedate life of work and meditation—that had been her mistake; it was alien to her nature. She was built for spiritual ecstasy and she would seek it out the world over. She would become the world’s leading practitioner and authority.

Her search brought her to Ecuador, first to the urban shamans and then to the rain forest and the Indians who lived there. Here, for the first time, she became another creature. She took on the body of a black panther and prowled the forest floor. She became a sloth and climbed slowly in the treetops. She became a bird and soared above the canopy. Indians from all the tribes stood in awe of her. They taught her everything they knew of shamanic lore and Gloriana, with the knowledge gained on her global travels and studies, took it further.

It was in the quiet of the upper forest she felt closest to the motive spirit of the universe, and so she moved there, to live alone in contemplation, eking out a meager living by subsistence farming and providing her shamanic services to all who needed her help.

Adrasteia mounted the steps to the palace with a reluctant gait, wondering what she’d be asked to do this time. Sometimes her task would be to simply listen to Her Lord’s ravings and nod her head in agreement to everything; other times he would force her to commit multiple perversions to satisfy his jaded, violent tastes. Worst of all were the times he asked her to spy or betray or both for him; these were the things that ripped fresh tears in her already threadbare soul. But it wasn’t worth even thinking about, she reminded herself. He was Lord Satan, and she had no choice but to obey him.

The hall was empty when she arrived. Not even the great throne was there; the only furniture was a pair of armchairs with a small table between them. It was a most un-satanic arrangement and she wondered what the dark one was up to now.

“Great Asclepius,” she whispered, “if there is healing to do here, let me do it; if not, grant me your protection and the protection of your father Apollo, that I might be kept safe to heal another day.”

She was not sure if her prayers could be heard from the depths of Hell, or indeed if Asclepius or Apollo still existed to hear them, so long had it been since an answer had come to her, but she held stubbornly to the practice. If nothing else, it gave her strength to get through the string of awful moments that was life in the abyss.

Sighing, Adrasteia knelt on the stone floor before the armchairs to wait. As she settled in, she noticed a narrow drawer set in the table. Long experience had taught her never to let an opportunity pass to investigate anything that might offer a tool for comfort or survival. Hell, for all its power, was not a tight ship, and anything could have been left in the drawer. After looking carefully in all directions for observers, she tiptoed over to the table and pulled on the drawer handle. The drawer stuck, and then scraped open, warped wood squeaking against warped wood.

She looked around again, heart in her mouth, waiting for some minion to jump out at her, crying foul, but there was none. Only when she felt reasonably safe did she look into the drawer.

There wasn’t much there—just a length of cotton string and a wadded-up bit of parchment—but she took them both and tucked them into a fold of her toga. The strangest things could turn out to be handy in Hell, and she never missed an opportunity to add to the collection hidden away in her chamber. Adrasteia pushed on the drawer to shut it. It stuck. She shook it and tried again—still no movement. She banged on it with her small fists, but it stayed fast.

Footsteps, echoing and metallic, were coming toward the throne room—His Lordship. Adrasteia grasped the drawer pull in both hands and shook the drawer until the whole table lifted off the floor and banged back down. Suddenly, the drawer shot back into place with such force that it nearly capsized the table and took Adrasteia with it. She pulled a muscle in her back bringing everything back into balance and righting the table. She resumed her place on the floor, chest heaving, an eyeblink before Lord Satan entered the room.

Alistair Hyde Naycock Templeton-Smythe was incensed. He had found a spot on his robe, a patch about two inches square where the deep purple of the velvet had somehow faded to a shade lighter. Negligence is what it was. It was all these foreigners that had taken over the dry-cleaning business. They bought everything they wore at Wal-Mart—what did they know about fine fabrics, or care? Your money was all they wanted, with their exorbitant prices and their pretending not to speak good English. Daddy had moved the family to America for lower taxes and bigger business, not to be robbed blind by the offspring of inferior peoples.

“Brumby!” he shouted. “Brumby, to me! Instantly!”

Templeton-Smythe heard the little man’s thumping run in the hallway and in a moment his tentative knock. “Sir?” came the quavering voice, “You called?”

“Of course I called! Come in here at once.”

Brumby, a diminutive man with a hooked nose and large, watery eyes, complied. “Sir?”

Templeton-Smythe shook the offending fold of cloth under his house-boy’s nose. “What is this, Brumby? How did this happen?”

Brumby peered closely at the robe, inclining his head until the tip of his nose almost touched it. “’This,’ um, sir? My apologies, but what is ‘this’?”

“Are you blind, man? It’s got a stain. You took it to be cleaned, therefore I expect you to have an explanation, which I am even now awaiting.”

Brumby licked his lips. “It’s always been there, sir.”

Templeton-Smythe began tapping his foot on the floor.

“The faded spot, sir. Always been there. You recall this was an e-Bay purchase. ‘Nearly new,’ I believe was the description.”

Templeton-Smythe’s tapping foot snapped up and delivered a sharp kick to Brumby’s shin. The little man grimaced, but did not cry out. “Damn you, Brumby, for allowing such a thing to happen. E-Bay, indeed. Have this rag burned. Now bring me my second-best robe, the one with the crescent moons and stars. A fellow wants to look his best when he’s conjuring wealth, power and immortality, don’t you agree?”

“To be sure, sir.”

Satan perched on the low stone wall over Digger’s Pit, his buttocks hanging well over the wall’s back edge, and flexed his bowels. Nothing came of it—nothing ever did, for it was his nature only to consume, never giving back—but once in a while he liked to come to this lonely spot and just imagine he could defecate. It helped him think, and if ever there was a time for thinking, it was now.

His entire game was about to change and he wasn’t going to go about the matter lightly. In Heaven, the Old Man had taken his eye off the ball, leaving the administration of things to an increasingly arrogant, overconfident and complacent band of angels. Some rumors said The One of One Thousand Names was busy building a new improved, universe; others said he was deep in planning the next phase of this one, some sort of spring cleaning; others said he was simply dead and the angels were covering it up. It didn’t really matter what the truth was. What mattered was that if Satan was going to change things, there was truly no time like the present.

Satan strained, felt a momentary disappointment, then the familiar relaxation. True, he could only inhale, as it were, but that was all right. It had been ordained that way and so the function was correct, suitable. Everything he could ever think of that had been ordained—and he had thought of nearly everything—worked as it should. The stars followed their courses as they should, dying as needed, coming to life as needed, regulating the temperature of the universe so that it was correct for any given moment in time. The physical rules governing the way the universe was held together kept its countless particles in proper relation to one another, ensuring the Old Man had an orderly space within his dominions, including Satan’s dark one.

In many ways, it was an admirable job, he had to admit, and who would know better? He had helped construct it when he was an angel. But the fly in the ointment, the one that had started to corrode the relationship between him and the Old Man in the first place, ultimately leading to the Grand Rebellion, was free will.

All the most intelligent species throughout the universe—Danans in the skies of Erintea, Schlacnossts in the earthy depths of Morrunduntan, Piscenians roaming the endless waters of Hooalchanniz, Humans walking the surfaces of Earth, had all been granted free will. They could choose how to organize themselves, how to express their feelings and thoughts, how to conceive of and worship the Old Man—they could even deny the Old Man’s existence, if they chose.

And what had it led to, all this freedom? The worst kind of chaos. Instead of following the path that would have been most natural, had all things been ordained properly, and quickly having one absolute ruler for each world—the strongest individual—all these beings had disintegrated into factions based on the most absurd guidelines—language, ancestry, features of the land, even their ways of honoring the Old Man. They were so busy bumbling about, fighting each other, making up new rules every two seconds and rebelling against the natural order of the worlds they’d been given to live on that their development was severely delayed and none of them, not one, had evolved to the point where they could be of genuine value to the universe—to its upkeep, its building, the recording of its history—absolutely nothing.

To his way of thinking—and he knew he was right—the proper way was to ordain everything. Find the strongest being on each world, ordain them as absolute ruler, back them up and oh, the strides they would make. In mere millennia they would be fit for service—service to him. And when all the beings on all the worlds served him, they would offer him sacrifice upon sacrifice, and he would feast and feast until at last the wailing hunger in him was satisfied.

 Tanya Dougherty made sure her pen still had ink, stuck her order tablet in the waistband of her skirt and perched on the edge of a tablet to wait for customers. Like they were going to have any. Doc was such a bastard, opening on Christmas. Anybody going out today was going to go for Chinese, not pizza—it was traditional. Just because he didn’t have a life he didn’t want anyone else to have one, either. Still, she needed the hours and the tips, if there were any. Life in the big city wasn’t cheap.

She’d come to the city a year ago from a little country place call Rathbun Corners. She didn’t have anything particular in mind when she’d moved, just that she was going to die of boredom if she stayed home. Mama had cried when she’d packed up her old Corolla—she’d saved up money from odd jobs for three years to get it—and her little sisters had clung to her, but she had been resolute. The city had been calling her like a siren ever since she’d been a little girl.

Now, after a year, there were times when Rathbun Corners didn’t look so bad. She held down two jobs, the one at Pizza Haven and another one as a shampoo girl at the Hair Apparent salon. Her apartment was two rooms, one of which was the kitchen, and a bathroom. It was cheap in the general scheme of things, but even so, what with gas, utilities and food she found herself scraping the bottom of the barrel at the end of every pay period. Some weeks it was only the fact that Doc let them have free cokes and spaghetti that had kept her from starving to death.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have other options. She was a pretty girl, tall with a slender hourglass shape, bright green eyes and dark hair that cascaded over her shoulders and behaved itself with very little effort on her part. One day, walking home from the drug store, she’d met a man who’d handed her his card and asked her if she’d like to make $1,000 a night, “dancing.”

“I might be from the country, but I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” she’d said. “I am not interested in stripping and I’d appreciate it if you would take your creepy ass away from me.”

“Oh, now, come on, baby, think about it a second,” the guy had said. Then he had stroked her arm.

She’d let him have it with a snap-kick to the nuts. It had brought him to the floor. “One thing about my little hometown being so boring—a lot of kids go up the road to the karate school in Riceborough. I went and liked it so much I went twice a week for six years and practiced at home, too. Touch me again and I’ll show you some more of what I learned.”

She hadn’t been able to land a job as an instructor yet—there was lots of competition and most schools in town hired their own graduates—but she kept looking and in the meantime practiced in an abandoned warehouse near her apartment.

It was a hard life and sometimes she thought about going home, but there was a sense of promise about the city that kept her there, a feeling that something wonderful and amazing was just around the corner. Maybe a great new job. Maybe a cute boyfriend who’d be sweet to her. There was no telling, but she couldn’t shake the feeling, didn’t want to. She loved the lights, the traffic, the bustle of the great, big town.

                Colin Davis wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck and shivered at the thought of the ride ahead of him. Christmas Day, as far as he was concerned, was a day to spend with family during the day and with a good book and a tumbler of scotch in the evening, not to be delivering pizzas. But, he needed the job at Pizza Haven—not just because of the money, but because he could get away with plenty of writing there when he wasn’t driving—so if Doc wanted to open on Christmas Day and asked him to work delivery, he would. Besides, he kind of liked the crusty old fart. And it wasn’t like Christmas with the fam was such great shakes, anyway. It was, in fact, usually so bad that he’d told them work would keep him from showing up at all this year.

Even his scooter, a little Chinese job, seemed reluctant to go to work today. Never a breeze to start, the thing took five solid minutes of coaxing before it finally decided to come to life. When it did awaken, it coughed and shuddered like an old man with influenza. Only when it settled into its customary putt-putt-whine did Colin dare pull it into the street. The last thing he needed was for the two-wheeler to go scootless on him in the middle of traffic—it had happened before, and the ensuing screeching of brakes and honking of horns so close to his unprotected frame had not been something he cared to repeat.

It was bitterly cold. Even bundled up as he was and driving slowly as he could without getting run over, the chill, made worse by the wind of the scooter’s passage, bit into him like a wolf. In two blocks he had goose bumps; in four he was shivering; in six his ears and fingers were shouting with pain. By the time he reached his parking spot in the alley behind Pizza Haven he felt as though he’d crossed the Antarctic by dogsled. He climbed stiffly off the bike, found a place out of the wind behind a pair of trash cans and sat down on the asphalt to shiver and write until Doc showed up.

Words were coming hard the last couple of weeks. He knew why—he was trying to write a story about romance and it was something he didn’t know very much about. There had been a girlfriend or two along the way, for a few months at a stretch, and some hookups briefer than that, but nothing like the passionate, long-term thing he dreamed about and wanted to dramatize in prose.

Thoughts of romance always brought up thoughts of Tanya these days. She waitressed nights at the Haven, so he saw her often, a beauty with long legs and green eyes bright as a cat’s. They were on friendly terms, but she was always a little aloof, and Colin figured she was just way out of his league. That didn’t keep him from daydreaming about her, though, or following her with his eyes when she wasn’t looking, watching the easy swing of her skirt as she went about her work.

Well, enough of that. Mental pictures of pretty waitresses weren’t going to get any fiction written. Colin gave his head a good shake, flexed his interlaced fingers and then took up a well-chewed pencil, waiting for the first word to come. It was “trembling.”

That was as far as he got. Something nudged his buttock and he looked up.

“Hey, Colin. Doc not here yet, I guess?”

“Hi, Tan. Nope, no Doc yet. How’s it going?”

“Okay. I drove over to Rathbun Corners last night and spent most of today doing Christmas with my mama and all. How ‘bout you?”

“Best Christmas ever. I told my family I couldn’t join in the reindeer games because I had to work. Spent the day sleeping in, reading and writing.”

“All by yourself, you mean? On Christmas?”

“It beats the thing with my family by a light year. My sisters hate each other, so they start fighting pretty early, and then my mom tries to calm things down, which gets them mad at her, so she gets mad and starts yelling. That makes my dad crazy, so he starts hitting the Jim Beam and things pretty much go downhill from there, with me catching hell for not going to law school or medical school or business school or something ‘useful’ instead of wasting my time trying to be a writer. And the food’s lousy, too.”

“Well, you can come home with me next year. Mama’s a great cook and we all get along just fine most of the time.”

Colin blushed. “Wow, well… thanks, Tan. That’s really sweet.”

He bent over his notebook, afraid to look at her again. Now a tidal wave of words was coming.