This question gets asked a lot and I think for some people it's essentially all they want. They're not in actual penmanship and don't want extraordinary expertise in it. It's just the work/job they do that requires them to write sort of neatly/legibly and fast. It's like a survival skill for them.
You cannot write super fast and expect it to be looking perfect. Similarly, you cannot write super neatly and assume that you'd be able to do it quickly. A balance between the two is crucial for sufficiently good and efficient handwriting.
The solution is to stick to the basics. Simple handwriting is fast and it could be neat and clean at the same time. Handwriting doesn't have to be fancy if you are in a time limit. To be efficient, you'll need to focus only on the things that matter.
Cursive is not fast, nor is print. What you're more proficient in makes one fast over the other. It's strange that, for some people, cursive with more loops, long flourishes and more character takes less time to write than simple letter-to-letter printing. For some, print is fast no matter how fast the cursive is for others. Learning cursive is not the solution to writing faster as this advice is thrown around all the time whenever someone asks a similar question.
Another piece of advice people give is to write smaller. You still need to do the same hand movements and efforts to complete a certain letter so it won't help that much. It's not the best thing you can do to be faster.
Picking a font for inspiration isn't necessary if speed is the priority. Making your handwriting look in a certain way similar to a font takes the second place.
If you are supposed to show your written work to someone else, being illegible is something that you don't want at all.
Certain letters don't look how they should (according to the standard letter chart which everyone knows and writes/reads) which creates legibility issues.
Improving your letter formation and making them look how they're supposed to be is a perfect starting point to boost the legibility aspect of your writing.
So one of the best advice that can be given to someone who's looking to improve their fast handwriting or handwriting in general is before making it fancy/eye-pleasing, make it fundamentally perfect. Know how each letter is to be formed up to standard. You can always add a style of your choice afterwards.
Tracing worksheets/workbooks could be a great starting point for studying letter strokes and letter formation. However, you'll need to practice with more than just worksheets on your own to be a better penman.
When writing quickly you already won't have much time to reflect on how you're doing so external help like using lined paper instead of blank would be the best thing to do. Lined paper not only makes you write in a straight line but helps you to be more consistent as you're writing between two parallel lines.

I once stumbled on what appeared to be an old chart of Pelikan nib grinds, which included stubs and obliques. Sometimes you see vintage pens from Pelikan and Montblanc for sale with those grinds, including whopping Oblique Triple Broads (O3B).
I understand why those grinds were discontinued over time. The decrease of FP use and the labour necessary to manufacture them was a nuisance to a dwindling market. However, I have the feeling those days are pretty much gone. Japanese brands offer custom grinds on regular basis (e.g. Sailor's Naginata Togi and Platinum's Music Nib) and there is a market for that outside of Asia. Pilot recently extended its Custom series with many options of grinds, which I consider is a solid indication of that.
With that in mind, I wonder why the big brands are not jumping on the competition. I think Aurora offers custom grinds, but not on regular basis. Leonardo ventured on cursive italics, but they sold out fast with no indication of returning soon. As for Pelikan and Montblanc, I don't think they are interested on that at all.
What are the impressions of the community on the matter? Hope to hear from you.

I got 16 cards yesterday and almost left some for other days / my birthday next week, but proceeded to open them all, ah haha ha ha! [Mandark laugh] It is my unbirthday, after all :D (Photos of art) <3
u/mypetitmal ~ So glad to be reconnected with you! I LOVE the stickers on the envelope!!!! Fat tiger mermaid with long brown humaney hair too, hell yeah!! And chubby tiger-shark and tiger-sloth!!!! Where did you get these? Thank you again for the whale birthday Trader Joe's card! I love the bonus stingray and elephant thingy! And the lizard! WAIT A MINUTE, is this a Thorny Devil ?!?! :D :D :D :D Also love the rainbow tie-dye hearts, beautiful happy Black mermaid, and really rad mushrooms with eyeballs !!!! And love what you wrote. I'm writing you back soon with some goodies! <3 PS: I love the song I linked so muuuuuch aaaahhhh! Are you into space themes? Or more so just Steven Universe?
u/smallgrapefroot ~ What a magnificent card! At first I thought it was a nebula then turned it and realized it was a glorious sky with moon, night clouds, stars, and sunset orange clouds and trees! Do you know the artist? I love it! And I love the blue alien mermaid sticker with xer space cake!!!! And the planet stickers and pretty washi tapes!! And the holographic sun (unfortunate yet appropriately named?) stamp!! Was that on the planet sheet? I loved those and forgot about them when thinking of my favourites! Thank you so much!!!! This shall be going up on my wall somehow !! Also the blue and purple markers are pretty, and your handwriting is really neat! May I send you a card mayhaps?
u/HeyMorganM x2 ~ 1. The "white wash" ocean wave foam in lacelike patterns photo by Clark Little postcard is so beautiful !!!! And so is the jellyfish washi tape and turtle! Thank you so much!!!! Pretty handwriting also! How I've missed handwriting!! May I send you a card sometime?

1. Ooh and thank you for the "snailed it!" cute punny card with haiku too!! Love snails! And snail mail of course :)

u/relax455 x2 ~ I gasped!! A blue and purple alien mermaid painting made into a card for meeee? I feel so lucky! Thank you so much!!!! I like that it goes with my nail polish right now! You wrote my name and "happy birthday" GORGEOUSLY! Thank you for the sentiments and for the bonus goat with flower crown card!! I love it! Is it by Goat Town like the cute flowery goat sticker on the envelope? I like that your address label has a mermaid too. May I try to send you a card?
u/RideThatBridge ~ Interesting card! Elves in outer space!? Here for it! :) What is the name of the artist or author, as I can't quite read it, don't think I know her? (Pretty teal pen though and pretty mostly-cursive writing! My handwriting varies in ways and has changed a lot throughout my life, but now I most often do slightly to maybe half cursive the most.) I love your love for her and bookstores!! I miss bookstores!! Thank you so much !! May I try to send you a card?
u/slobber_bones ~ Thank you so much for kitty sniffy plant card and for drawing me both a frog wearing a cat hat and a cat wearing a frot hat, aaaahhhh!!!! I loved your unique offer and them and decided they are best friends!! :D May I try to doodle something for you or something?! What emojis might you pick?? Or otherwise, fave things? I have your address from the postcard :)
u/DianaPenPal ~ Thank you for the pretty birthday card with gold stars and such! The purple and teal pens are lovely! Your handwriting too!! I sent yours about a week ago, really hope you like it !! Feel free to write back if you feel like it! :)
u/Rura-Penthe924 ~ Thank you for the nice card and birthday wishes!
u/hoolu123 ~ Thank you for fancy teddy bear card! Dapper indeed!! The birdies are cute and pretty flower chart! Glad you enjoyed our exchange too!
u/inkyfingerpgs ~ GASP! THE COWBOY FROGGY STICKER IS SO PRECIOUS! It's going in my sticker book!! Thank you for the kitty, puppy, and ocean themed stickers too! And for the flower birthday card and sentiments!
​
u/DaenerysWon ~ Thank you for the octopus Trader Joe's card! I especially love the expression of the happy pink octopus on the inside of the card! And I appreciate the pretty teal envelope! Or is it blue? I don't know anymore! (Been looking at so many paint samples and such and they look so different next to other colours and things!) The flying horse/rainbow cloud washi tape is very cute too! Do you like ocean / sea creature themes too?
u/Jubilan ~ Teaaaaal !! Blue cyaaaan?? I appreciate the beautiful envelope with polka dots and matching card! Did you make this? Lovely handwriting! And cute owl with moon stamp! I shall write back sometime! :)
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u/melhen16 ~ Green-cyaaaan?! :) Thank you for the envelope and the very pretty medium dark teal b-day card! I like the name on the back... "sweetzer & orange." And thank you so much for all the cute stickers!! I especially love the mermaids and animals drinking boba!! Axolotl !! :D Hope it was okay I wrote back to you last time and hope you like what I sent? May I write you again? Are you into mermaids too?
u/tiredpantyhose ~ Ooh yes, that is a beautiful medium-dark-teal card! Thank you!! The gold and teal paper is so pretty too! And I love the unicorn and star stickers!! I like the capybara in clothes on the envelope and love the puppy with heart stamp - I just saw those and really want them!! May I maybe write back sometime?
u/ninajyang ~ Thank you for the birthday card! I like your stamp :)
Got a handful today too, more thank you's soon, thank you all so very much!
​

The police car turned on its sirens behind me. I looked down the dark forest road, seeing nobody. At 2 AM in this backwoods town, everyone had already gone to bed. Or was it even 2? My head felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there. I just remember driving down an endless black road, and before that…
I rolled down the window. The police car stayed far behind me. I saw both police officers get out and crouch behind their open doors while they pointed black shotguns at my car.
“Driver!” the cop on the passenger’s side called. “Roll down your window and turn off your car. Do it now!” I already had the key turned to the accessory position rather than in ignition mode, but I quickly rolled the driver’s window down and plucked the keys out. My heart hammered in my chest and my mouth felt like sandpaper. I looked around worriedly, wondering what had caused all of this. I hadn’t killed or robbed anyone that I could remember, yet they acted like they had just caught Ted Bundy himself in a VW Bug with a kit containing a ski mask, handcuffs, a fake cast and a box of amyl nitrates.
“Driver!” the policeman droned. “Throw your keys out of the window! Do it now!” I threw the keys out the window.
“Driver! Open the door and put your hands out of the car! Get out slowly! Do it now!” Very slowly, I moved out of the car with my hands up. “Now, driver, keep your hands in the air. Do not make any sudden moves. Do NOT turn around. Do not move your hands anywhere near your body. I want you to walk backwards towards the sound of my voice. Do it now!”
I walked backwards down the dark side of the road, nearly tripping on stones and branches. I was terrified that if I fell, I would be filled with more lead than Flint, Michigan’s water supply. At that point, I had so many guns pointed at me that I felt like John Dillinger leaving a movie theater. Not to make light of the situation; at the time, I seriously thought I was going to die.
“Get on your knees and keep your hands in the air! Do it now!” I slowly got to the ground, kneeling. A few moments later, I felt my arms wrenched behind my back, painfully pulling at my shoulder. I swore in pain.
“Watch out, that fucking hurts!” I cried.
One of the cops roughly dragged me up my cuffed wrists, spinning me around to face him. He leaned close to me, whispering in my ear. I could smell the stale coffee on his breath.
“You fucking sicko. You are a real piece of garbage, you know that? What you did makes me want to throw up. The guys in prison hate people like you, and I’ll be glad to hear that you’re dead too, soon enough. You remember what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer?” He pushed me hard against the hood of the police car.
Then they brought me down to the station. On the way there, I thought back on how I got here, only catching glimpses of the truth.
***
I waited in the small concrete room, looking at the white-washed brick walls, wondering what came next. A minute later, two detectives walked into the room.
The man in the lead looked like a human walrus. He had small, watery eyes, a large bristling mustache over his thin lips, and a massive barrel-chest with a gut that pushed against the buttons of his police shirt. The buttons looked like they would fly off at any moment from the tension, yet miraculously, they stayed put.
“Hey, Gabriel,” the large man said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting down with a heaving sigh. “My name is Detective Carmichael. This is Detective Minervini-” he gestured to the other police officer sitting next to him, a thin, serious man with dark Italian features. “-and we’re here to listen. That’s all we’re doing. We just want to hear what you have to say.” I nodded.
After they read my Miranda rights, they spent the next few minutes asking me basic information, like my address, my phone number, when I moved to my current location, how many cars I had, where I worked and so on.
I’m not a stupid man. I know how such things work. The detectives try to get a baseline reading on someone by asking them various trivial details about their lives before jumping into the crime. They notice their body language, expressions, tone and speech patterns while telling the truth.
Sometimes they would bring in a lie detector test, but what they don’t tell subjects is that lie detector tests are inadmissible in court and scientifically useless. There has never been any evidence showing a polygraph can reliably determine truth from lies. Countless psychopaths have “passed” the polygraph and proved their innocence, including the Green River Killer.
But this is irrelevant, because the real purpose of the polygraph is to allow detectives to watch the subject’s body language during questioning and compare it to their baseline response. Some people get so freaked out by the idea of a polygraph that they begin mixing up stories and sweating, not realizing that their own body language betrays them more than random electrical impulses on a chart. In a sense, the polygraph is more psychological warfare than a machine, a way to fake people out before pressuring them into confessions.
“Gabriel?” Detective Minervini asked. “You still with us?” I looked up suddenly, realizing I had gotten lost in my thoughts and stopped listening to the conversation.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“Where were you today? Give us a timeline of events from the moment you woke up,” he said.
“Today…” I said contemplatively, reflecting back on the worst day of my life.
***
I woke up, groggy from not getting enough sleep. I had worked late into the previous night on a novel I was hoping to publish, vaping constantly and chugging cup after cup of coffee. Eventually, around 3 AM, I gave up on editing and decided to go to bed.
I looked at the clock, noticing it was only 8 AM. I got up, showering and making breakfast, trying to figure out what to do for the day.
I had lost my job a couple months earlier, and things had started getting desperate. I had maybe $500 in my bank account, which was all the money I had in the world to pay the rent, buy food and gas and cover all my bills. I knew I was screwed.
Over the last few weeks, I had put in hundreds of job applications. A lot of them were crap, minimum-wage or temp jobs that I would only take as a last resort.
My phone started ringing, and I looked down at the screen, seeing an unfamiliar number. A surge of hope ran through me.
“Hello?” I said. Static and chaos carried through the line. I pulled the phone away from my ear. After a couple seconds, a voice started coming through.
“Mr. Guardiani?” a female voice said.
“This is him,” I said. “Who’s calling?”
“Yes, hi, my name is Becky Mayer. I’m the head of human relations for Eyes Unlimited. We do surveillance and cameras and security, among other things. I was calling about a potential opening in our company.”
“I don’t remember ever applying to any company by that name,” I said, confused. “How did you get this number?”
“Oh, you were referred to us,” she said cryptically. “Or actually, maybe we found you online. Perhaps you put your resume on a job posting website?
“Anyways, would you be able to come in for an interview sometime today?” I asked about pay and benefits, and when she told me the job paid $25 an hour, I said I’d come down immediately. She gave me the address. I wrote it down on my phone and got changed into some nicer clothes before heading out.
I drove towards the capitol, about fifteen minutes away. My GPS started taking me into rougher and rougher neighborhoods. Used needles littered the streets and drug dealers in hoodies stood at every corner, watching cars that passed with hawk’s eyes.
“You have arrived,” the female robotic voice said as I finally pulled into an abandoned slum filled with empty factory and apartment buildings. I looked around nervously.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Who would want to have a business located here?” But I assumed the rent must be extremely cheap, at least.
I looked around, seeing a sign for “Eyes Unlimited” in grimy, white letters over a black background. All around it, the sign had hundreds of eyes painted in- reptilian, human, avian, insectoid, bovine and some others that I don’t think were from this world.
“Weird,” I muttered. I looked around, realizing there were no cars on the street. A homeless man a half-block away was stumbling around, yelling at invisible enemies. His mind had clearly gone over the brink. Dressed in tattered rags, he looked like a concentration camp inmate- emaciated, his legs and arms like twigs, his eyes sunken like the water at the bottom of a deep well.
I quickly turned away, walking down the alleyway that led to the front entrance for the business. I saw a door painted a fresh gold, a heavy contrast to the layers of filth and grime that covered all the walls and windows of the other abandoned buildings in the area.
It had a buzzer at the front, a red button that flashed on with an inner light when I pushed it. A static noise came through the speaker and then a woman’s voice came over the intercom.
“Who is this?” she said. I gave her my name, and the door immediately unlocked with a buzzing sound.
I opened it and found an empty, half-lit hallway lined with statues and paintings. Some of them were truly bizarre: half-human abominations with reptilian eyes and skin, or ghostly creatures with stretched out, screaming mouths. I stopped to examine one when a voice rang out directly behind me, making me jump.
“Do you like them?” a short, plump woman with blonde hair asked. “They have cameras in them, each and every one. No one would ever see them. Who would ever suspect a camera in a work of art such as this, right?” A work of art, I thought to myself sardonically, repressing a laugh.
“I’m Becky,” the woman said, walking up to me and stretching out her hand. She looked totally nondescript, a typical faceless office worker in an endless company.
She had a thin, white-gold necklace with a strange symbol hanging from the bottom. It looked like a grim reaper’s scythe with a slashing, diagonal line through it. The white metal of the pendant sparkled over her red blouse, and a sense of trepidation rose inside of me. Something about that symbol…
“Hi, I’m happy to finally meet you. I really like these statues with cameras you have here,” I lied. She smiled, absolutely beaming with pride.
“Yes, thank you. This is a lifetime’s work. Each piece is personally designed by an artist. Some are specially ordered by wealthier customers who don’t want gaudy cameras all over their property, so they had them hidden within statues and turned an eyesore into an aesthetic triumph,” she said. “Other times, we even have very special works go up on auction, especially the ones made by Mr. Bower.”
“Mr. Bower?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s the person you’re going to see right now,” she said, turning and opening the door. In the next room, I saw a receptionist’s desk with chairs for waiting customers or visitors. Potted plants were placed randomly throughout, and against the walls and hanging from the ceiling, I saw more of those “works of art”. One had a bloody knight carrying his own smiling, skeletal head in his armpit, the eyes dripping from their sockets.
Personally, I was not impressed, but I know there’s a market for everything. A niche company selling professionally-made artist’s statues with hidden cameras and surveillance equipment inside might appeal to only a small audience, but, with enough rich customers, why couldn’t they have a successful business?
Becky continued to talk about the office and the artists as she led me down a long, thin hallway. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead as we walked over a drab, gray carpet the color of razor-wire.
As we got to the door, I realized I hadn’t asked her the most fundamental question of all.
“So what do you guys actually do here?” I asked. “Is this a manufacturing place?” She shook her head.
“No, no, the artists have their own studios and spaces to work. This is just an office building,” she said. “We just store them here and deliver them from here. The open position I called you about involves transporting certain works of art to customers all over the region. It doesn’t require a CDL or anything, don’t worry. But Mr. Bower will tell you more.” She turned, waving. “OK, good luck!”
I felt I had a much better grasp of the situation now. This “business” was really just a Halloween store for rich people, and the job itself was just a delivery man. I looked up at the wooden door, seeing the name “Dennis Bower” engraved in the door. I knocked.
“Come in,” a high, feminine voice called, dragging the words out. I opened it, walking inside.
An extremely fat man sat behind the desk. He had all the hair on his body shaved off. His eyes looked like little pig’s eyes. In fact, he gave off a porcine presence as a whole. The pink color of his skin and the way the fat bulged at the back of his neck made him look like some kind of horrible half-human, half-pig hybrid.
His chair groaned as he shifted his massive bulk. The buttons on his white shirt looked as if they might pop off at any moment.
A glint of silver caught my eye. I saw the same necklace on the man as I had seen on Becky. Looking around the office, I saw more paintings and sculptures with hidden surveillance equipment. Some of them looked like creatures from an HP Lovecraft story, humanoid beings with green tentacles and large, intelligent eyes. Others looked like something from a ketamine nightmare, like the painting with prancing green aliens skinning people alive and wearing their faces as masks as they laughed and danced.
“You like what you see, huh?” Dennis Bower said in a high, girlish voice, a slight lisp coming out as he spoke. “I did them all myself.”
“Yes, they’re very… uh… unique,” I said, giving him a fake smile. “I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”
“Well, that’s the best compliment of all!” he said, opening a can of Coke and chugging the whole thing in one gulp. He threw the empty can in the garbage and turned to me. “So the job’s yours if you want it. I already saw your resume. You can start now. Interested?” This sudden shift caught me off guard, and I stuttered for a moment, thinking.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, OK, I guess,” I said. “Like right right now?”
“Yes. Do you have a car?” he asked. I nodded. “Good. We’ll reimburse you for any miles you drive. Gas plus wear and tear on the vehicle. That’s in addition to the $25 an hour and full benefits. After three months, you become eligible for a raise, too. Assuming your work is professional.” I nodded quickly. I felt light-headed and sweaty.
“I’ll work as many hours as you need!” I said quickly. “I could really use the money.” He smiled, nodding, showing off his small, white teeth. He licked his small, greasy lips, swiveling his head and peering around the office.
Finally, he found what he sought, and pointed at a large sculpture on a table. It had a snarling half-human half-dog on a marble foundation. The creature was gnawing on a human arm still wearing its denim sleeve. Dennis Bower said something, but I didn’t understand.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dogman,” he said again simply. I nodded, waiting for more. “That’s what that is. This guy loves Dogman crap. Anyways, this is the address.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper in a looping cursive script, ripping it in half and handing it to me. As he said goodbye, I grabbed the sculpture and started heading back out towards the decaying slum outside.
***
I had about an hour’s ride each way. After putting on Audible, I pulled off, seeing the homeless man down the street still screaming at imaginary enemies. It looked like a methamphetamine overdose, or possibly a psychotic break. Either way, I wasn’t getting involved.
Driving from the business to the address felt almost like watching a documentary on the extremes of wealth in the USA. I started at slums filled with garbage and abandoned buildings, and ended up in a rich area filled with mansions and pristine, dark forests. As I pulled onto the street Dennis Bower had written down, “Angel Trace Road,” I marveled at just how massive and ornate some of these houses were.
Most towered at least four or five stories overhead with swimming pools and mazes and statues in the yards. I saw a couple riding their own personal horses down the side of the road, and I could almost smell the money pouring off them.
Every house also had a gate and an intercom, and most also had security guards at the front. I went slow, seeing the security guards watching my car with squinted, suspicious eyes.
Finally, I pulled up at 77 Angel Trace Road. I saw a castle looming overhead with turrets that reached ten or eleven stories high. A security guard immediately got out of the booth and knocked on my window. I rolled it down and told him my name and business. He kept his hand near the holstered pistol at his side the entire time. Sighing, he went back into the guardhouse and, a moment later, the gate started rolling slowly to the side.
***
I got out of the car, holding the heavy statue under one arm. I walked up the wide, marble steps towards the front door. I was about to knock when I saw a note in spiky, nearly illegible handwriting taped to the mahogany door. I pulled it off, squinting.
“Please come in. We will be with you in a moment.” I read it, an eerie feeling coming over me. I looked back down the private road, seeing the security guard staring at me intently through the glass window of his booth. I turned and opened the door, deciding I would just go inside and wait like the note said.
A rancid smell hit me as I entered the castle. It smelled like a rodent had died in the vents and began to decompose. I wondered how people with so much money could live with that fetid odor, even for a single day. I tried to breathe through my mouth, wondering how long this would take.
I walked around the entrance hall, admiring the massive Persian carpets covering the floor and the statues and paintings covering the walls. I was staring at an old painting of sailors on a heaving ship at sea when I heard a creaking floorboard behind me. I jumped.
“Oh, you scared me,” I said, turning and then freezing in my tracks. Three people stood there, wearing black jumpsuits and medieval plague doctor masks. All of them had long, gleaming knives in their gloved hands. Silver pendants with grim reaper’s scythes and a slashing, diagonal line hung from each of their necks.
For a long moment, no one said anything. I put my hands up, but they made no move towards me.
“You can have my wallet or whatever you want,” I said. “Just take it.” I took my wallet out with barely ten dollars in the fold and threw it towards them. They didn’t react, still standing like mannequins, their eerie masks giving them the look of psychotic, nightmarish birds.
I tried to think fast. They blocked the front entrance, but there had to be countless doors on a place this size. I needed to get out and get help from the security guard.
The three masked figures slowly angled their heads to the right in unison, as if I had said something interesting. I looked around, seeing a heavy wooden chair tucked into a desk a couple feet behind me. With a rush of adrenaline, I grabbed the chair and threw it at them.
Without looking back, I sprinted away, going deeper into the house, hoping to find another exit on the sides or back before they caught up with me. I could only imagine the sensation of the knives going in, slicing through the skin as effortlessly as a diver through the water’s surface.
I ran through a pair of swinging doors into a huge, dirty kitchen with multiple ovens and countless counters and sinks. As I took in the scene, I realized the kitchen was worse than just dirty. It had evidence of atrocities and cannibalism on every surface and utensil.
A human head stared at me from the counter, its eyes half-closed. The tip of its tongue stuck out through blue, stiff lips. Worst of all, someone had cut the top of the skull off, and now the head had no brain.
On frying pans with coagulated grease and swarms of houseflies, I saw human eyeballs, tongues, kidneys and other organs, some of them cooked, some not. Dishes with bones and half-eaten, cooked limbs littered other counters. I saw mice and rats scurrying away as I sprinted past, interrupting their meal in this den of nightmares.
Someone stepped out from behind a large, steel fridge. I ran straight into them, catching a glimpse of a black jumpsuit and a gloved leather hand as I fell. They stumbled before quickly righting themselves. They jumped on top of me, and I saw the flash of a syringe as it stabbed into my neck. I fought, kicking and punching, but waves of nausea and weakness began to run through my body, and my vision started turning black, and soon, I was no more.
***
I came to for a few moments, seeing double and triple images blurring across my vision. I heard voices, as if from very far away. I saw the night sky outside through the window, the moonlight streaming down over the trees.
“So this is the new one?” someone said in a low, robotic monotone.
“Yeah, another lamb,” someone responded. “We’ll take some of his hair and make sure his fingerprints are on the scene. The ketamine should cause memory problems. He probably won’t even know how he got there when the cops finally catch up with him.”
“We might as well frame him for this place, too,” someone else said. The voices laughed.
“Sure, why not? We’ve got to find another place soon anyway.”
I remember going in and out of sleep, having strange hallucinations and visions. Time and space seemed liquid. For a while, I thought the abductors were aliens, and that their plague doctor masks were the real skin on their horrible faces.
As I sobered up a little, they finally put me in the driver’s seat of my car on an isolated side street. I still didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I could barely remember my name. I saw night had come. They left. After a while, I turned on my car and started driving.
Then I saw the flashing lights behind me, and suddenly, I started feeling very sober. I tried to remember how I had gotten there, but the truth kept slipping through my fingers, the memories fading away into darkness.
***
I gave this story to my lawyer and asked him to make sure my family received it and put it online, as a way to warn others and try to get justice. Before I did so, I slouched on the metal chair, as if a heavy weight pulled me down. The lawyer continued to speak through the round vent in the plexiglass separating us as I wrote my experiences down.
“Well, they checked out that building you talked about, this ‘Eyes Unlimited’. There’s no sign and no business there. No one has rented that space in years,” he said. “And that castle on Angel Trace Road has no security guard. In fact, that place has been empty for years. The bank foreclosed on it and no one has bought it.” I groaned.
“Right now, you’re looking at the death penalty,” he said. “The public is out for blood in this case. They’re preparing over twenty counts of first-degree murder. There were a lot of people killed in horrific ways, and they only found your DNA and fingerprints at the crime scenes…”
“But I didn’t do it!” I said. He shrugged.
“It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. Everything in life is power, and who has the will to use it.” I felt hope drain from me as I sat there, seeing the future as just a solid wall in front of me, a wall as black and empty as an endless abyss.

Chapter 1: Down Dark Tides the Glory Slides
Although its dark red stains were simple paint, the wooden circle nailed to the mast testified to a grim maritime tradition of blood sacrifice. Something must lure the winds, the sailors will explain, and it is better that one man die by an opened throat than everyone aboard succumb to slow thirst and maddening sun. At the center of this primitive ritual site, a clean cross-section of a willow, a sacrilegious nail supported the modern miracles of a thermometer and an aneroid barograph.
Further up the mast, in the crow's nest, another assurance against a dead calm and starvation shivered in the evening air, awakened by the chunky tumult of the icebreaker straining to prove its name with the painful zeal of an inadequate heir.
Kingfisher Volganin stood up and let the bedding slide off her back. Her long legs, built to wade through shore and swampland, dug into the wood for balance as she adjusted her precious leather bookbag and pushed aside her cedar trunk. She sniffed and brushed the flaking skin from under her nose. The heavy air of Samyy Severnyy's vast port smelled different than most sea fronts, too cold for the pungent scent of rotting kelp, but the acrid winds spread the unctuous odor of the Alchemists' Isle whaling lots and the fish canneries of the Royal Island. The port was quieter than most, with the cawing gulls facing heavy competition from terns, white waders, and auks both great and little.
Volganin hopped from her barrel nest on the central masthead to the bow mast's top, and to the lowest spar of its square rig. She grasped a taught loading cable, avoiding the sailors' work routes as she descended to the deck with the crane hook. The aging, three-mast warship had been refitted into a cargo ship, trading armaments for a spacious hold, block-and-tackle loading mechanisms, and an ice-breaking grill empowered by emergency boilers and the thrust of a great steam screw. The Imperator Dragomir's high center of gravity protected it from treacherous, icy scrapes but slaved it to pernicious Polar Sea weather and cursed it with a stomach-churning sway. The North's cruel wind chilled her bare legs and numbed her lips. She thought that the navigator's promise of warmer days ahead had fallen through, but the thermometer supported him. A horror gripped her as she realized that yes, this was
indeed the warmth of the Severnayan Thaw.
She struggled to find a spot in the work detail as she regained her balance and warmed herself with pumped legs and quaking shoulders. She apologized for waking late, but the crew ignored her. It was the tightest ship she had ever witnessed.
The black-coated mariners brought down the sail with a song led by an aged and respected boatswain with a stunningbasso profundo voice. She smiled at the brief show of warm humanity. After a week of long travel, their admirable professionalism shifted to an eerily, quiet solemnity. Their departure from Novoport was quite possibly the cleanest and fastest she could recall. Their discipline became off-putting, uncanny even.
“Have you ever been this far north?” she asked, interrupting the second mate's inspection of an sail painted with lucky stripes of ultramarine, sacred to the sea god Craethion. At night, the enchanted canvas darkened and twinkled with phosphorus star charts.
“Out west, once,” whispered the thin man, without pausing his scan of the deck, “But we don't come to Northernmost, Dame Kingfisher.”
“We?” she asked. “This crew?”
“Tsokiri,” he said.
She tilted her head quizzically. Northernmost was, last she heard, part of the Homelands.
One heavy-set sailor, winding a rope around his forearm, looked up at her and said, “They service foreigners from all over the Polar Sea, and further west and east. But they're enemies of Chernograd, even if they don't have the guts to act on it.”
“How can they survive up here without the capital?” she asked. “It's frozen for more than
a season.”
“Northernmost has been dying slowly, for a century,” said the Second Mate, “The port thrived, until the Vankiri armada tried to blockade. And its burning. After that, things went very...hush, hush. These Severnayans had ambitions, tried to break away from Tsokir...and then came the curse.”
“Serves them right,” said the heavy sailor. “To much of the Old Guilds in them.”
Kingfisher visited many of the ports that once belonged to the Confederation of Maritime Guilds, who retained a common tradition of elected mayors, merchants' councils, and various laws and customs. But the league's promise of mutual protection faltered when the Boreal Empire claimed Swanlands, Palantoke, and Ingeborg, and Tsokiri armies captured Lentora, the Timorats, and the Shankir. The Severnayan State, with Northernmost as its capital, was an even older alliance of northern cities and counties, absorbed into the Volgamazgan crown seven hundred years ago.
To the Throne of the Fallen, foreign rivals had always had a dangerous foothold in the empire's north.
“Curse?” Kingfisher asked. Something caught her eye through the inland fog, a thick shadow looming behind the amber haze. It was Northernmost's legendary tower of black iron, stretching at least half a kilometer into the sky. The natives say it was here before them.
“I've only heard rumors,” said the second mate, and the sailor concurred with a nod. “Ask those foreign doctors in the hold. Like I said, we don't come up here.”
Kingfisher had barely heard from them in their rickety berths in the underdeck; one spoke good Tsokiri, and another decent Merovene, but they kept to themselves, and did no work above deck. She wanted to ask what changed, what drew this ship to Northernmost, but the sailor and the second mate turned from her, driven away by the First Mate's scowl.
In stretches of sea notoriously infested with mermaids and sirens, a woman called the Captain's Wife is brought aboard, with smelling salts and horns to break their enchantments. Wayland and Merovy send out entirely female crews through the worst of them, but this is vanishingly rare elsewhere. This dangerous task, more than any, was why ship insurers and captains sought out Kingfisher's services, despite the misfortune brought by her womanhood and the malevolent winds in her veins. She could break a siren song, fight off invaders, and even pull fish, flotsam, and castaways from the blue.
Still, men usually kept their distance from her for the first few days of a voyage. But by the end of the first week, that same femininity, at least until the span of her shoulders and the top of her knee, provoked prurient remarks and offers. Not these men.
A feral part of her wished to sing to them. To draw out that lust. It wanted to join the work song and transform these labors into a bacchanal. She smothered that bestial impulse under righteous disgust and got to work as the ship maneuvered to the dock under an odd combination of falling sail and steaming mechanical oar.
A pair of men pulled a heavy canvas cloth from the anchor, a heavy stone slab rather than the traditional bowed steel weight. She had never seen such a practice, but she assumed it had something to do with the Polar Sea's ice and hearty barnacles.
She grabbed the end of a heaving line, fluttered to the dock, and returned with a pair of bulky hawsers attached to mooring winches. The heavy hauling ropes fought against her legs like constrictor snakes, animated by the winds sweeping across the coast. After choking them down against the docks and looping them through the bridles' eyes, she returned to the winches to turn the crank. She gasped and recoiled from a steam-heated crankshaft. She laughed at herself in embarrassment, the mechanism was merely unexpectedly warm, not scalding, and she should have noticed that something had de-iced the device. She then gasped again as she slipped on black ice, and spread her wings wide, accidentally ringing a silver bell mounted on a dockside lantern. She drew up the air to catch herself, to the horror of a nearby longshoreman.
The old man clutched at his chest as he steadied himself against the dock's pylon. His hands quickly snapped up, pulling his cap down and cupping his scalloped ears. He struck at the silver bell, meant to break curses, hauntings, and enchantments. Volganin tried to calm the man, but quickly realized that her continued advance would have driven the old man into the icy drink of Seal Skinners' Head.
Kingfisher called herself an alkonost when she had to, but the old man called her by her people's common names.
“Siren...” he gasped in a soft, wheezy voice. “Harpy!”
She tried to say that she meant him no harm, but the automatic winch let out a clanking howl as it drew in the sixth-rate post ship, drowning out her reassurances. She instinctively entered a deferential stance, with wings covering a downcast face. The yard-man slipped, and she forced the air behind him to cough up a salty wind. She righted the old man, and clasped his right wrist with the bend of her wings. She curled the single digit on each wing to hide its fearsome claw.
“Everything is going to be fine,” she said with a smile. “Let's unload this ship.”
The crew was already at work, and the anchor sunk below the waves with an echoing splash. A gust pushed past her, bending a few pinions, as the ships' other passengers, a pair of foreign doctors, made their way down the dock.
Kingfisher flew back to the crow's nest. The boat roared and strained and broke. Kingfisher shrieked and turned, blind and deaf above an inferno that screamed across the water and warped the wharf. The rapidly-heated wood moaned and cracked, drowning out the breaking of bones and the gasps of lungs beaten flat by the pressure wave. Frothing water surged through the dockyards and workers panicked as flayed whales rose as vengeful revenants on blood-pink tides.
The shock and updraft tossed Kingfisher towards the clouds, with such force that she strained against an outright inversion of her wings. Above the graying mists, the sea and sky blurred into a tangerine nightmare. A second blast tore through the hold, and the aft of the sundered ship splintered. Kingfisher closed her eyes as the fireball expanded. They were met with a blinding pillar of smoke when opened, and she cried out. The crowd along the shore was a riot of madmen, and she could have sworn she heard gunfire. She fluttered clear of the pillar and turned her wings to sweep outward and circle back. A second smoking pillar swirled from the corner of the port market, the militia's powder magazine ignited by the pressure wave. After wiping her eyes clean on her biceps, she turned her keen gaze to the water, searching for men to rescue.
She circled twice and found only the dead. The torn-open, the headless, the charred and the broken... and limbs, limbs everywhere. She let out a hoarse cry of distress. The smell of blood and grease the sight of gore kindled a vicious hunger within her. Small flames danced across the rippling harbor. The orange tinge to the water cooled into a soupy, golden brown that Kingfisher recognized as half-melted blubber. The voices along the shore buzzed like horseflies swarming on carrion. She dropped her water-proofed dittybag on an outcropping, tensed her wings and tightened them towards her chest, straightened her spine, and took the plunge.
The ringing in her ears died down below the surface. She heard a brief hum from the water, eerie yet gentle, like whale-song. She tried to listen for an enchanting melody, as countersinging undines was one of her duties. She ignored the strange tone upon spotting a young man floating, intact but for a superficial head wound. She hooked her head under his armpit and kicked towards the shore. She deposited the man on a beach of ice and pebbles, balled up a talon, and forced the water from his chest with a blow. She lowered her head towards his and felt his failing breath. She listened to his chest, placed her mouth over his, and set a vital wind whirling through his collapsed left lung.
Kingfisher gasped upon hearing the crack of a rifle and the cries of militiamen.
“Vulture!”
“Looter!”
“Harpy!”
She deflected the bullet with an exhausting blast of air and dove into the water. Each chilling dive was a stunning blow, with the thunderbolt alertness of arctic immersion clashing with mind-obliterating cold. She dove deeper and glimpsed the faint outline of something like a traditional bowed anchor in a broken crate swallowed up by the great darkness, her eyes easily picking up the contrasts in fields of gray and blue. Black swirls of bitumen leaked from two dozen barrels, grasping at the wreckage like a ghostly kraken. She took a quick count of the bodies, some thirty, obviously dead or hopeless. One seemingly intact man sent her panicking with the revelation of a skinless face with a boiled-away eye.
She breached the surface for another lungful and remembered her locker, tucked away in the crow's nest. She panicked again and searched for the mainmast. Its high construction saved the nest from destruction, but the search strained muscles and frayed her nerves, to the point that even a diving puffin sent her into a tizzy. The salty sea water ablated the insulating, waterproof oil on her feathers, and the universal cold suppressed her pores' capacity to replace it. The bone-deep cold came quickly, and her talons were not her own when she gripped them around her locker's handles.
She was not sure how she did it, but she found the strength to circle back and retrieve her book bag. She waded ashore on quaking limbs, and blew her nose, sneezing out a thick and bloody brine to the din of the dockside rabble. She snapped to attention as a blur of men in naval black and longshoreman's gray focused into rescue teams running chains and stretchers up the wharf and a firing squad standing dangerously still. The chill in her hollow bones fought a paradoxical war with the burning strain of back muscles as she fled from the local militiamen and the crack of their rifles. A wall of hot smoke met the icy fog, and Kingfisher dove straight into their firing line. Her glaucous wings matched their marengo coats, her pale underside, the rising smoke. Watchers along the shorefront market of Lukomorie Bay screamed and gasped. The irregulars parted and ducked as she had hoped, buying her enough time to fade into the haze of Northernmost.
She flew up the Inland Prospekt and towards the Mayoral Tower at the center of the mainland development, catching the thermal rising from the eerie heat of its black iron majesty and the mundane concrete and tar-pavement. In the harbor she acknowledged its size on an intellectual level, but up close, spiraling up a weather system created by its mere presence, the tower was confounding, terrifying. What intelligence, what forgotten empire, could have made such towers?
Kingfisher turned to the west over the fortified Merchant Court, pivoting outside the warm shadow of the Mayoral Tower. She hissed as a chilling wind rolled down from Hyperborea, the north pole's wrath impeded only by the shadow of a short mountain and the pines of the taiga. She passed over a fine set of houses in the neighborhood of Griffon's Nest, where people milled about outside, craning their necks to see the tower of smoke in the harbor.
Kingfisher came down on a scale-shingled tent-roof. She scanned her surroundings, watching for the flow of emergency traffic to the docks. In the Bereginya, a neighborhood along the Narrows that terminated in the smoldering charcoal kilns of Nine Bear Cave, she saw a tailor's shop and the Quill, a playwrights' café next to a trio of large buildings teeming with activity. The nearest, the wooden, wedge-roofed Driftwood Theatre; the furthest, a castle with a cluster of five great onion domes called the House of Wisdom, the greatest temple of the Severnayan region. Some sort of civilian rescue effort mustered here.
Between the house of gods and the arena of heroes, just a small hop across Ogre-Back Row and down Scheznik Avenue, stood a large stone building with a bochka roof, elevated half-barrels rising into a single bulky dome. Nurses stood outside, preparing triage, while runners carried supplies to shore. Kingfisher focused her eyes on its sign, “Blessed Kiril's Infirmary,” unchanged from the aged sketches of the House of Wisdom. It had a somewhat melted quality to its stone edifice, common to the area, with creamy traces on its window frames. The Alchemists' and Royal Isles are ancient calderas from the Great Northern Volcanic Ring, rich in sulfur and cinnabar. Hot-melt sulfur forms the mortar of much of the stonework, and local carpenters decorate their woodwork with inlays of molten sulfur, poured into their etchings from tinker's tools and scraped away when scarred. In this land of ever-present cold and water, the natives clung to heat and fire.
Local alchemists and priests, shamans from the Pokinutin East, doctors, naturalists, and alienists toiled here for a cure to Northernmost's medical crisis. It would be a good place, she thought, to save people.
As the hummingbird rush of her escape ebbed away, the exhaustion and killing cold ganged up on her. Her knees gave out, and her thighs rested awkwardly against her tarsi, taught and shaking like the great cables of a tall ship's mast. She shook the water from her wings, and cringed as whale oil dripped down her pinions. Wind-worn scales rubbed against each other, painfully overlapping in places, sloughing off a cheesecloth sheet of taupe skin. Her wickedly curved, syndactyl toes tightened their grip around the stony lip of a corbel decorated with a grinning gargoyle. She hopped up onto the roof and ducked tightly against the brick chimney. She nodded off, before feeling returned, and the soaked and freeing bandage on her ankle inspired a surge of panic that sent her scrambling to open her bags and trunk.
She breathed a visible sigh of relief. Her blouses were damp, but not damaged. Her cuirass and arming doublet were perfect, and the saltwater did not breach the leather case around her storybook, manual, and grimoire. More damage had been done by her talons frantically scratching into the clamps and straps. That was today's small blessing.
Kingfisher scanned for prying eyes, and quickly changed her chemise and put on the sleeveless doublet. All of her clothing had to be specially tailored; they snapped or laced together over the shoulder or side so she could dress herself by mouth and the hooked finger on her wing. She was rather embarrassed by her body; while clothed, her torso and head resembled a human woman, but a glimpse of her bare form revealed the subtle oddities. While most of her was thin and wiry, her biceps were comparable to those of a strongman's, and slabs of muscle covered her shoulder and back.
She finally slipped into the century-old cuirass and sealed its side with a slam against the brick chimney. For once, she was overjoyed that the metal plates retained heat like a smelter's kiln.
She was so cold, tired, and hungry that her eyelids appeared to have launched a coordinated effort with the stomach, torturing and blinding their foe while its ally rumbled demands. A trade mission had been dispatched to her toes, but they were halted and possibly lost on the winter march.
She peaked her head out as she finished fastening her cloak. Perhaps an hour had passed since the explosion, and the town had settled down once it was clear that the fire was confined to the waterfront. The sailor must have been brought here by now, if at all.
“Hey!” a voice cried out. “What are you doing up here?”
Kingfisher's head darted towards the source of the noise, an old, wiry man in a raggedy gray coat darkened by soot. He held a broom and a bucket in webbed hands.
“Are you the chimney sweep?” Kingfisher asked.
“I sweep the entire fucking hospital,” the man said. “You can't be up here. Get back inside.”
“Inside?” Kingfisher said.
She snorted and sneezed out another glob of sea salt and dried blood.
“I... Did a young man come in recently?”
“Young man?” he said. “What, your husband? Brother? Why'd you creep up here?”
“No, I didn't know him. A sailor, pulled up from the harbor,” she said. “There was an explosion...”
“Yeah, heard about that,” the custodian said. “Hell, I heard it. But no, I don't handle the patients, miss. Not the living ones, heh... The door is open. Get back inside. Looks like your hair's wet, you'll catch your death.”
She didn't rise.
“Can you... run a message to them? About the sailor? He was blond, a score and five years, at most. Please, sir, I will pay you two prince-heads.”
“See, I like the offer, but I don't like that you're hiding, miss,” he said. “You're sounding more and more like an assassin. Stand up.”
“I can't,” Kingfisher said.
“Why?” he barked.
She looked down and tried to think of something that wasn't truly a lie.
“I am not wearing a dress. Or breeches,” she said.
“Then get inside or you'll be dead by morning, you damn fool.”
He shuffled towards her, and she instinctively skittered backward, but could not hide the blue-gray of her wings.
He sputtered and hurled the bucket at her and retreated, his broom pointed at her like a halberd.
She fluttered out of the way and landed on the lip of the chimney, ready to use its rising warmth for a quick getaway.
“Look, look, I know how this looks–”
“You won't be singing me off this roof!” he yelled. “Back! Back!”
“I just want to know if the sailor is safe!” she shouted back.
“So you can eat him?” he yelled in a strained, reedy voice.
“No!” Kingfisher spat. “Look, call the constables or the militia. If you want me dead... let them kill me. I'm too exhausted to fight back. I only... want to know if I saved one life today.”
The old man pulled the broom back.
“I'll go ask about the matter. You stay here. Don't try any tricks,” he said.
He backed towards the door.
Before he closed it, he added, “You eat fish?”
Kingfisher nodded.
She bode her time by opening up her old storybook, Tarasov's Tales of Great Deeds and Chivalry, a thick volume of romances sung by troubadours and mistrals, legends of heroic virtue written by ancient philosophers, elfen-songs and retelling of primordial fables and titanomachies.
The old man crept outside again, with baked cod stewed with sour cream, onions, and potatoes, served on kelp in a trencher resting on a hospital blanket.
“Alright, girl, here you go, it's been steamed... the blanket, I mean. It was from a patient with a foot injury, so no need to worry... Eh, the cod's probably steamed, too,” he said. “I don't know, that ogre nurse made it.”
“Ogre nurse?” Kingfisher asked, perhaps too quietly to hear.
“Oh, your boy... I don't know, miss, he's not woken up,” he said. “But give him time, just arrived.”
Kingfisher lowered her head, shielding her face with a wing.
“He would have certainly died if you hadn't dragged him out,” he said. “You gave him a chance, at least. That's all you can do.”
Kingfisher peaked up from her fanned feathers.
“Can you eat this?” he asked.
Kingfisher mumbled aimlessly, before nodding. She cocked her head at the blade of kelp.
“Right, you sound Southern,” he noted.
“I'm from the Grand Duchy Gulf,” she said, somewhat indignantly.
A slight curl crossed the corner of his lip, and his tone soured as he asked, “Novoport?”
“Peresheyeka Derevnya,” she said. “On the north shore.”
“This is Northernmost. You're a Southerner. And that's kelp,” he said. “It won't grow in the sea, so we grow it in caves. They burn it on Alchemists' Island, for glass and soap and gunpowder. And those tinctures, for the surgeries. I mean the, uh, soda ash. But it's good for you. Especially if you ever get pregnant. Or, er, egg.”
“I will try to remember that,” she said.
“Can I set this here?” he said, setting the blanket and trencher on a rooftop steam stack.
The harpy nodded.
“You'll catch your death out here, I think.”
“Thank you,” she said, as she carefully placed the folded trencher in a leather ration bag. She watched the suspicion in his eyes warm at her unexpected politeness. “We handle wet, cold... wetness...better than Urizen's folk.”
“The blanket still has some steam heat in it,” he said, closing the trunk for her. “If you want to roost up here, I won't tell nobody, but I'm not sticking around to protect you, neither. If you want a shelter, you might look over to Shura's Inn. Middle of the Staretsy's Prospekt, dead south of the Mayoral Tower. Some of the young doctors are there. And the innkeep will be good to someone like you.”
He pointed to the southeast.
Northernmost was uncommonly easy to navigate, its roads planned from the bottom up by Imperator Svyatopolk II's builders, wide and straight for rolling lumber from the taiga or long-hauling loads from the ships. These thick roads cover and brace a network of subterranean rivers and aqueducts, carved by lime-rich water leaching out to sea from the inland karst, thaw after thaw. These bituminous, cement roads held in heat, serving as convenient thermal routes. A grid of bronze pipes allowed salamanders to pass through and warm the streets.
The necessities of logging also left Northernmost vulnerable. It was the first city she had seen without a wall or palisade, instead protected by a series of wooden towers, and raised bastions filled with ash and seashells. Kingfisher noted that all the other cities were messy whirls ebbing from a river, with streets like cracked glass.
It did, however, take her a three-lap run down the prospekt to find Shura's Inn, stopping to watch a cat with seven toes on its back paws writhe on the ground, mewling like a human infant. She'd seen many ship's cats in her career, crew mascots, and mousers, but she had never seen one behave like this. The closest she could remember was Pork N. Beans, a Waylander cat that had chimerized with a pig, who liked wallowing in mud and squealing.
Shura's Inn stood at the foot of that ancient tower. Its two-stories of brown wood vanished against its dizzying black majesty. The inn bore the typically elaborate signage of Severnayan businesses, curling thorn bushes of wrought iron and hinges that slough off the ice and cater to illiterate sailors with negative-space iconography.
It took Kingfisher a moment to puzzle out the silhouette of a troika stagecoach, as seen from the side. She usually saw them top-down. She had a twinge of anger when she read the sign. The Inn seemed to be properly called 'Eternal Flame,' or maybe 'Evening Will-o'-the-Wisp'; it was hard to read, a cursive, wiry tangle in a baroque style about two centuries out of fashion. The name was painted plainly beneath in Waylander, Merovene, Skeironic, Argaman, and Murmurish, but that was no help to Kingfisher. It was only a bit of eagle-eyed scanning that picked up the worn-down name of Shura above the door frame.
The inn had grown from a small depot, with a once detached livery barn for horses. A later overhang bridged the gap, with the added benefit of sheltering an insulated chicken coop set next to what looked to be a brick oven and smoker.
Kingfisher flapped up and down in front of the door, hoping to see through the closed slat in the window. Feverishly, she realized that midnight must be approaching, yet the sun had not set. She was going to miss the night sky, and the constellations, and the racing stars which flickered in their close circuit around the globe.
A woman in a white and red sarafan dress opened the door. Kingfisher noted that there was something vaguely familiar about her but couldn't place it.
“Hey,” she said. “We have two rooms available, one grivenka a night, breakfast in the morning, meal at night included, tea all day. There's a banya next door, tell them you came by us. And we no longer have a hosteler on hand, but still supply horses.”
“I'm a harpy,” Kingfisher said, rather bewildered that she was the one to table the issue.
“I saw the wings and claws and pieced it together, yeah,” the innkeeper said. “And I assumed you knew, so why bring it up?”
“Will it be a problem?”
“Perhaps not,” the innkeeper said.
She spoke in an artificially clear, slow way, enunciating for travelers who may not be fluent in Tsokiri. While it slipped a bit, her accent resembled something closer to a school-taught Chernogradic.
Kingfisher noticed that the other Severnayans spoke like old people, or like the rustics in her books, pronouncing syllables that people in the Gulf or Chernograd long ago slurred together, and threw in nautical terms from Waylander, Murmurish, and Rannican. While Northernmost liked the mythology of the Kochniks, hearty seasiders in icebreakers and tall fur hats, the majority of Tsokiri in the port were descendants of the Shitikmen, settlers from the balmier, downstream marshes of the Otmel who paddled northwest in their riverboats to escape the Ölek Hordes. The accent of Northernmost ironically sounds more southern and inland than those they call “southerner” or “inlander.”
The innkeeper looked at the harpy's talons. “You're not going around snatching up sailors, right?”
Kingfisher shook her head and bit her lip. It was a lie if taken literally, but she was justified in the spirit of the concern and didn't want to spend time explaining the asterisk.
She wore a leather band around her left leg for easy access to a few coins for petty spending. Three grivenka around the ankle, thirty-four in her trunk. She pulled out a silver queen's-head and presented it with her right talon. The innkeeper looked at the face of the half-grivenka coin, frowned, and pocketed it.
She gestured for Kingfisher to step inside and spoke with an older man with a deep, raspy voice. Kingfisher assumed that they were daughter and father, separated by some thirty-five years. Both had a rustic look to them, with stocky builds, wide necks, and powerful hands. Their chests were notably broad; she was buxom, and he looked like a brawler. The knot in his nose hinted at a long-healed but brutal break. In his youth, a punch from him must have been devastating, and he could probably still lay someone out, well into his late sixties or early seventies. There was still some of her hair's copper in the old man's stubble, although any remaining hair on his head hid under a river flotilla cap. It matched the coloration of their eyes, not just a light brown, but a glistening bronze that shone through narrow, heavy lids.
Kingfisher's heart sank when she noticed a gray braid bound in a silver ring hooked to the wall, a charm of Incano's hair given to those who have lost a mother or wife. The gods of Aquilo embodied contradictions – kingly Urizen was bound in chains of law and discipline, while his kindly wife Incano was the mistress of death, spinning fate with her withered left hand. Urizen was once said to be the Divine Centaur, a wild beast tamed and divided into Man and Horse by his mate, a hag who aged in reverse. Their parting, it was said, would send Urizen back into bestial madness and return Incano to the shape of an all-devouring spider. It was only the chains of civilization and the silk of life, that bound humans to their humanity.
The woman handed Kingfisher a matchbox and a hooligan lantern and said that it was complimentary, even if it wouldn't get dark out for another five fortnights. The wick hooked through the gills of the alcohol-soaked candlefish. Harvesting and preparing the invasive Thrascian eulachon was a minor industry in Northernmost, both straight from the ocean, and, preferably, out of the freshwater rivers when the larger, oilier males come upstream to spawn like salmon. Severnayan hooligan lanterns could be found far to the south, traded down the 'grease trails' along the White Meska.
The woman pointed out the mail lockers and the work board for job postings, usually teamsters, small-time laborers, and sailors. These menial listings hung below a two-tier woodcarving set with sulfur, a divine Titanomachy over a farce of pygmies fighting cranes.
The master of the house, seated and doing sums in a ledger, slightly rose from his work behind the bar and added, “If you sweep the roof, we'll give you a free night. Some snow and leaves up there... Lena won't let me make that climb anymore.”
Kingfisher agreed with a nod and a tired “tomorrow” and looked at the faces around the common room. It was late enough that most of the crowd had dispersed, but a couple of older human men were leaving the bar, stumbling on their weak legs, leaving a twitchy gnome behind. Kingfisher noted that the barwoman, in her mid-thirties, may have been the youngest native she had seen so far. The merwoman playing the spring bagatelle cabinet could be anywhere from a score to centuries old, but the latter seemed more likely. One man in the corner looked to be in his twenties, but Kingfisher assumed that he was a traveler from the Boreal Empire, with a waterproofed watchcoat and a top hat of felted black beaver fur. He read from a heavy book while drinking coffee. From across the room, Kingfisher could make out an anatomical plate demonstrating the dissection of a woman's swollen throat. He looked up to speak to the barmaid as she poured dandelion and burdock mead into a glass. He tapped on his own wrist to indicate her arthritic brace, but his voice quickly trailed off as he spotted the siren.
A hooded Acthnico sat in the opposite corner, marked by an Ouroboros armband. Kingfisher was a bit unnerved by the salamander's yellow, slitted eyes and serpentine scales, but decided that monsters in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Although she did wonder why serpentfolk were so obsessed with the snake motif; humans don't typically shape everything they own into a humanoid pattern, and she had personally never seen a reason to sit in a siren-shaped chair. But perhaps once your culture settles on a footless form as the ideal, one feels the need to hammer the point home in the face of some persistent and obvious doubts.
A bluebird crafted from wood chips hung from a large black duct that rose from the ground and terminated through the ceiling. The bird of happiness had no glue; its split pine petals interlocked like an elaborate puzzle, light enough to spin slowly as hot air rose through the inn. Kingfisher interpreted it as providence, not knowing that similar 'sun doves' hung in almost every Severnayan household.
-Word Count Capped-
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The police car turned on its sirens behind me. I looked down the dark forest road, seeing nobody. At 2 AM in this backwoods town, everyone had already gone to bed. Or was it even 2? My head felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there. I just remember driving down an endless black road, and before that…
I rolled down the window. The police car stayed far behind me. I saw both police officers get out and crouch behind their open doors while they pointed black shotguns at my car.
“Driver!” the cop on the passenger’s side called. “Roll down your window and turn off your car. Do it now!” I already had the key turned to the accessory position rather than in ignition mode, but I quickly rolled the driver’s window down and plucked the keys out. My heart hammered in my chest and my mouth felt like sandpaper. I looked around worriedly, wondering what had caused all of this. I hadn’t killed or robbed anyone that I could remember, yet they acted like they had just caught Ted Bundy himself in a VW Bug with a kit containing a ski mask, handcuffs, a fake cast and a box of amyl nitrates.
“Driver!” the policeman droned. “Throw your keys out of the window! Do it now!” I threw the keys out the window.
“Driver! Open the door and put your hands out of the car! Get out slowly! Do it now!” Very slowly, I moved out of the car with my hands up. “Now, driver, keep your hands in the air. Do not make any sudden moves. Do NOT turn around. Do not move your hands anywhere near your body. I want you to walk backwards towards the sound of my voice. Do it now!”
I walked backwards down the dark side of the road, nearly tripping on stones and branches. I was terrified that if I fell, I would be filled with more lead than Flint, Michigan’s water supply. At that point, I had so many guns pointed at me that I felt like John Dillinger leaving a movie theater. Not to make light of the situation; at the time, I seriously thought I was going to die.
“Get on your knees and keep your hands in the air! Do it now!” I slowly got to the ground, kneeling. A few moments later, I felt my arms wrenched behind my back, painfully pulling at my shoulder. I swore in pain.
“Watch out, that fucking hurts!” I cried.
One of the cops roughly dragged me up my cuffed wrists, spinning me around to face him. He leaned close to me, whispering in my ear. I could smell the stale coffee on his breath.
“You fucking sicko. You are a real piece of garbage, you know that? What you did makes me want to throw up. The guys in prison hate people like you, and I’ll be glad to hear that you’re dead too, soon enough. You remember what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer?” He pushed me hard against the hood of the police car.
Then they brought me down to the station. On the way there, I thought back on how I got here, only catching glimpses of the truth.
***
I waited in the small concrete room, looking at the white-washed brick walls, wondering what came next. A minute later, two detectives walked into the room.
The man in the lead looked like a human walrus. He had small, watery eyes, a large bristling mustache over his thin lips, and a massive barrel-chest with a gut that pushed against the buttons of his police shirt. The buttons looked like they would fly off at any moment from the tension, yet miraculously, they stayed put.
“Hey, Gabriel,” the large man said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting down with a heaving sigh. “My name is Detective Carmichael. This is Detective Minervini-” he gestured to the other police officer sitting next to him, a thin, serious man with dark Italian features. “-and we’re here to listen. That’s all we’re doing. We just want to hear what you have to say.” I nodded.
After they read my Miranda rights, they spent the next few minutes asking me basic information, like my address, my phone number, when I moved to my current location, how many cars I had, where I worked and so on.
I’m not a stupid man. I know how such things work. The detectives try to get a baseline reading on someone by asking them various trivial details about their lives before jumping into the crime. They notice their body language, expressions, tone and speech patterns while telling the truth.
Sometimes they would bring in a lie detector test, but what they don’t tell subjects is that lie detector tests are inadmissible in court and scientifically useless. There has never been any evidence showing a polygraph can reliably determine truth from lies. Countless psychopaths have “passed” the polygraph and proved their innocence, including the Green River Killer.
But this is irrelevant, because the real purpose of the polygraph is to allow detectives to watch the subject’s body language during questioning and compare it to their baseline response. Some people get so freaked out by the idea of a polygraph that they begin mixing up stories and sweating, not realizing that their own body language betrays them more than random electrical impulses on a chart. In a sense, the polygraph is more psychological warfare than a machine, a way to fake people out before pressuring them into confessions.
“Gabriel?” Detective Minervini asked. “You still with us?” I looked up suddenly, realizing I had gotten lost in my thoughts and stopped listening to the conversation.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“Where were you today? Give us a timeline of events from the moment you woke up,” he said.
“Today…” I said contemplatively, reflecting back on the worst day of my life.
***
I woke up, groggy from not getting enough sleep. I had worked late into the previous night on a novel I was hoping to publish, vaping constantly and chugging cup after cup of coffee. Eventually, around 3 AM, I gave up on editing and decided to go to bed.
I looked at the clock, noticing it was only 8 AM. I got up, showering and making breakfast, trying to figure out what to do for the day.
I had lost my job a couple months earlier, and things had started getting desperate. I had maybe $500 in my bank account, which was all the money I had in the world to pay the rent, buy food and gas and cover all my bills. I knew I was screwed.
Over the last few weeks, I had put in hundreds of job applications. A lot of them were crap, minimum-wage or temp jobs that I would only take as a last resort.
My phone started ringing, and I looked down at the screen, seeing an unfamiliar number. A surge of hope ran through me.
“Hello?” I said. Static and chaos carried through the line. I pulled the phone away from my ear. After a couple seconds, a voice started coming through.
“Mr. Guardiani?” a female voice said.
“This is him,” I said. “Who’s calling?”
“Yes, hi, my name is Becky Mayer. I’m the head of human relations for Eyes Unlimited. We do surveillance and cameras and security, among other things. I was calling about a potential opening in our company.”
“I don’t remember ever applying to any company by that name,” I said, confused. “How did you get this number?”
“Oh, you were referred to us,” she said cryptically. “Or actually, maybe we found you online. Perhaps you put your resume on a job posting website?
“Anyways, would you be able to come in for an interview sometime today?” I asked about pay and benefits, and when she told me the job paid $25 an hour, I said I’d come down immediately. She gave me the address. I wrote it down on my phone and got changed into some nicer clothes before heading out.
I drove towards the capitol, about fifteen minutes away. My GPS started taking me into rougher and rougher neighborhoods. Used needles littered the streets and drug dealers in hoodies stood at every corner, watching cars that passed with hawk’s eyes.
“You have arrived,” the female robotic voice said as I finally pulled into an abandoned slum filled with empty factory and apartment buildings. I looked around nervously.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Who would want to have a business located here?” But I assumed the rent must be extremely cheap, at least.
I looked around, seeing a sign for “Eyes Unlimited” in grimy, white letters over a black background. All around it, the sign had hundreds of eyes painted in- reptilian, human, avian, insectoid, bovine and some others that I don’t think were from this world.
“Weird,” I muttered. I looked around, realizing there were no cars on the street. A homeless man a half-block away was stumbling around, yelling at invisible enemies. His mind had clearly gone over the brink. Dressed in tattered rags, he looked like a concentration camp inmate- emaciated, his legs and arms like twigs, his eyes sunken like the water at the bottom of a deep well.
I quickly turned away, walking down the alleyway that led to the front entrance for the business. I saw a door painted a fresh gold, a heavy contrast to the layers of filth and grime that covered all the walls and windows of the other abandoned buildings in the area.
It had a buzzer at the front, a red button that flashed on with an inner light when I pushed it. A static noise came through the speaker and then a woman’s voice came over the intercom.
“Who is this?” she said. I gave her my name, and the door immediately unlocked with a buzzing sound.
I opened it and found an empty, half-lit hallway lined with statues and paintings. Some of them were truly bizarre: half-human abominations with reptilian eyes and skin, or ghostly creatures with stretched out, screaming mouths. I stopped to examine one when a voice rang out directly behind me, making me jump.
“Do you like them?” a short, plump woman with blonde hair asked. “They have cameras in them, each and every one. No one would ever see them. Who would ever suspect a camera in a work of art such as this, right?” A work of art, I thought to myself sardonically, repressing a laugh.
“I’m Becky,” the woman said, walking up to me and stretching out her hand. She looked totally nondescript, a typical faceless office worker in an endless company.
She had a thin, white-gold necklace with a strange symbol hanging from the bottom. It looked like a grim reaper’s scythe with a slashing, diagonal line through it. The white metal of the pendant sparkled over her red blouse, and a sense of trepidation rose inside of me. Something about that symbol…
“Hi, I’m happy to finally meet you. I really like these statues with cameras you have here,” I lied. She smiled, absolutely beaming with pride.
“Yes, thank you. This is a lifetime’s work. Each piece is personally designed by an artist. Some are specially ordered by wealthier customers who don’t want gaudy cameras all over their property, so they had them hidden within statues and turned an eyesore into an aesthetic triumph,” she said. “Other times, we even have very special works go up on auction, especially the ones made by Mr. Bower.”
“Mr. Bower?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s the person you’re going to see right now,” she said, turning and opening the door. In the next room, I saw a receptionist’s desk with chairs for waiting customers or visitors. Potted plants were placed randomly throughout, and against the walls and hanging from the ceiling, I saw more of those “works of art”. One had a bloody knight carrying his own smiling, skeletal head in his armpit, the eyes dripping from their sockets.
Personally, I was not impressed, but I know there’s a market for everything. A niche company selling professionally-made artist’s statues with hidden cameras and surveillance equipment inside might appeal to only a small audience, but, with enough rich customers, why couldn’t they have a successful business?
Becky continued to talk about the office and the artists as she led me down a long, thin hallway. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead as we walked over a drab, gray carpet the color of razor-wire.
As we got to the door, I realized I hadn’t asked her the most fundamental question of all.
“So what do you guys actually do here?” I asked. “Is this a manufacturing place?” She shook her head.
“No, no, the artists have their own studios and spaces to work. This is just an office building,” she said. “We just store them here and deliver them from here. The open position I called you about involves transporting certain works of art to customers all over the region. It doesn’t require a CDL or anything, don’t worry. But Mr. Bower will tell you more.” She turned, waving. “OK, good luck!”
I felt I had a much better grasp of the situation now. This “business” was really just a Halloween store for rich people, and the job itself was just a delivery man. I looked up at the wooden door, seeing the name “Dennis Bower” engraved in the door. I knocked.
“Come in,” a high, feminine voice called, dragging the words out. I opened it, walking inside.
An extremely fat man sat behind the desk. He had all the hair on his body shaved off. His eyes looked like little pig’s eyes. In fact, he gave off a porcine presence as a whole. The pink color of his skin and the way the fat bulged at the back of his neck made him look like some kind of horrible half-human, half-pig hybrid.
His chair groaned as he shifted his massive bulk. The buttons on his white shirt looked as if they might pop off at any moment.
A glint of silver caught my eye. I saw the same necklace on the man as I had seen on Becky. Looking around the office, I saw more paintings and sculptures with hidden surveillance equipment. Some of them looked like creatures from an HP Lovecraft story, humanoid beings with green tentacles and large, intelligent eyes. Others looked like something from a ketamine nightmare, like the painting with prancing green aliens skinning people alive and wearing their faces as masks as they laughed and danced.
“You like what you see, huh?” Dennis Bower said in a high, girlish voice, a slight lisp coming out as he spoke. “I did them all myself.”
“Yes, they’re very… uh… unique,” I said, giving him a fake smile. “I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”
“Well, that’s the best compliment of all!” he said, opening a can of Coke and chugging the whole thing in one gulp. He threw the empty can in the garbage and turned to me. “So the job’s yours if you want it. I already saw your resume. You can start now. Interested?” This sudden shift caught me off guard, and I stuttered for a moment, thinking.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, OK, I guess,” I said. “Like right right now?”
“Yes. Do you have a car?” he asked. I nodded. “Good. We’ll reimburse you for any miles you drive. Gas plus wear and tear on the vehicle. That’s in addition to the $25 an hour and full benefits. After three months, you become eligible for a raise, too. Assuming your work is professional.” I nodded quickly. I felt light-headed and sweaty.
“I’ll work as many hours as you need!” I said quickly. “I could really use the money.” He smiled, nodding, showing off his small, white teeth. He licked his small, greasy lips, swiveling his head and peering around the office.
Finally, he found what he sought, and pointed at a large sculpture on a table. It had a snarling half-human half-dog on a marble foundation. The creature was gnawing on a human arm still wearing its denim sleeve. Dennis Bower said something, but I didn’t understand.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dogman,” he said again simply. I nodded, waiting for more. “That’s what that is. This guy loves Dogman crap. Anyways, this is the address.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper in a looping cursive script, ripping it in half and handing it to me. As he said goodbye, I grabbed the sculpture and started heading back out towards the decaying slum outside.
***
I had about an hour’s ride each way. After putting on Audible, I pulled off, seeing the homeless man down the street still screaming at imaginary enemies. It looked like a methamphetamine overdose, or possibly a psychotic break. Either way, I wasn’t getting involved.
Driving from the business to the address felt almost like watching a documentary on the extremes of wealth in the USA. I started at slums filled with garbage and abandoned buildings, and ended up in a rich area filled with mansions and pristine, dark forests. As I pulled onto the street Dennis Bower had written down, “Angel Trace Road,” I marveled at just how massive and ornate some of these houses were.
Most towered at least four or five stories overhead with swimming pools and mazes and statues in the yards. I saw a couple riding their own personal horses down the side of the road, and I could almost smell the money pouring off them.
Every house also had a gate and an intercom, and most also had security guards at the front. I went slow, seeing the security guards watching my car with squinted, suspicious eyes.
Finally, I pulled up at 77 Angel Trace Road. I saw a castle looming overhead with turrets that reached ten or eleven stories high. A security guard immediately got out of the booth and knocked on my window. I rolled it down and told him my name and business. He kept his hand near the holstered pistol at his side the entire time. Sighing, he went back into the guardhouse and, a moment later, the gate started rolling slowly to the side.
***
I got out of the car, holding the heavy statue under one arm. I walked up the wide, marble steps towards the front door. I was about to knock when I saw a note in spiky, nearly illegible handwriting taped to the mahogany door. I pulled it off, squinting.
“Please come in. We will be with you in a moment.” I read it, an eerie feeling coming over me. I looked back down the private road, seeing the security guard staring at me intently through the glass window of his booth. I turned and opened the door, deciding I would just go inside and wait like the note said.
A rancid smell hit me as I entered the castle. It smelled like a rodent had died in the vents and began to decompose. I wondered how people with so much money could live with that fetid odor, even for a single day. I tried to breathe through my mouth, wondering how long this would take.
I walked around the entrance hall, admiring the massive Persian carpets covering the floor and the statues and paintings covering the walls. I was staring at an old painting of sailors on a heaving ship at sea when I heard a creaking floorboard behind me. I jumped.
“Oh, you scared me,” I said, turning and then freezing in my tracks. Three people stood there, wearing black jumpsuits and medieval plague doctor masks. All of them had long, gleaming knives in their gloved hands. Silver pendants with grim reaper’s scythes and a slashing, diagonal line hung from each of their necks.
For a long moment, no one said anything. I put my hands up, but they made no move towards me.
“You can have my wallet or whatever you want,” I said. “Just take it.” I took my wallet out with barely ten dollars in the fold and threw it towards them. They didn’t react, still standing like mannequins, their eerie masks giving them the look of psychotic, nightmarish birds.
I tried to think fast. They blocked the front entrance, but there had to be countless doors on a place this size. I needed to get out and get help from the security guard.
The three masked figures slowly angled their heads to the right in unison, as if I had said something interesting. I looked around, seeing a heavy wooden chair tucked into a desk a couple feet behind me. With a rush of adrenaline, I grabbed the chair and threw it at them.
Without looking back, I sprinted away, going deeper into the house, hoping to find another exit on the sides or back before they caught up with me. I could only imagine the sensation of the knives going in, slicing through the skin as effortlessly as a diver through the water’s surface.
I ran through a pair of swinging doors into a huge, dirty kitchen with multiple ovens and countless counters and sinks. As I took in the scene, I realized the kitchen was worse than just dirty. It had evidence of atrocities and cannibalism on every surface and utensil.
A human head stared at me from the counter, its eyes half-closed. The tip of its tongue stuck out through blue, stiff lips. Worst of all, someone had cut the top of the skull off, and now the head had no brain.
On frying pans with coagulated grease and swarms of houseflies, I saw human eyeballs, tongues, kidneys and other organs, some of them cooked, some not. Dishes with bones and half-eaten, cooked limbs littered other counters. I saw mice and rats scurrying away as I sprinted past, interrupting their meal in this den of nightmares.
Someone stepped out from behind a large, steel fridge. I ran straight into them, catching a glimpse of a black jumpsuit and a gloved leather hand as I fell. They stumbled before quickly righting themselves. They jumped on top of me, and I saw the flash of a syringe as it stabbed into my neck. I fought, kicking and punching, but waves of nausea and weakness began to run through my body, and my vision started turning black, and soon, I was no more.
***
I came to for a few moments, seeing double and triple images blurring across my vision. I heard voices, as if from very far away. I saw the night sky outside through the window, the moonlight streaming down over the trees.
“So this is the new one?” someone said in a low, robotic monotone.
“Yeah, another lamb,” someone responded. “We’ll take some of his hair and make sure his fingerprints are on the scene. The ketamine should cause memory problems. He probably won’t even know how he got there when the cops finally catch up with him.”
“We might as well frame him for this place, too,” someone else said. The voices laughed.
“Sure, why not? We’ve got to find another place soon anyway.”
I remember going in and out of sleep, having strange hallucinations and visions. Time and space seemed liquid. For a while, I thought the abductors were aliens, and that their plague doctor masks were the real skin on their horrible faces.
As I sobered up a little, they finally put me in the driver’s seat of my car on an isolated side street. I still didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I could barely remember my name. I saw night had come. They left. After a while, I turned on my car and started driving.
Then I saw the flashing lights behind me, and suddenly, I started feeling very sober. I tried to remember how I had gotten there, but the truth kept slipping through my fingers, the memories fading away into darkness.
***
I gave this story to my lawyer and asked him to make sure my family received it and put it online, as a way to warn others and try to get justice. Before I did so, I slouched on the metal chair, as if a heavy weight pulled me down. The lawyer continued to speak through the round vent in the plexiglass separating us as I wrote my experiences down.
“Well, they checked out that building you talked about, this ‘Eyes Unlimited’. There’s no sign and no business there. No one has rented that space in years,” he said. “And that castle on Angel Trace Road has no security guard. In fact, that place has been empty for years. The bank foreclosed on it and no one has bought it.” I groaned.
“Right now, you’re looking at the death penalty,” he said. “The public is out for blood in this case. They’re preparing over twenty counts of first-degree murder. There were a lot of people killed in horrific ways, and they only found your DNA and fingerprints at the crime scenes…”
“But I didn’t do it!” I said. He shrugged.
“It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. Everything in life is power, and who has the will to use it.” I felt hope drain from me as I sat there, seeing the future as just a solid wall in front of me, a wall as black and empty as an endless abyss.

I got tickets to see Hozier in September (!!!!) and I thought it would be fun to make a sweater based on the Wasteland Baby album cover. I'm fairly new to knitting (like 1.5 yrs in) but I have some experience with colorwork
I was wondering if anyone had any reliable sweater patterns that I could use to stick my design on?
I know I want the body to use intarsia, the sleeves to use stranded, and duplicate stitch for added details. I have like half an idea of the design but it would be helpful to have a template that I can make a chart to test ideas on
Also any tips for thin cursive lettering? Is doing it with intarsia even possible or should I do it with duplicate stitch
(Sorry if this post is a mess, I've had all this marinating in my head since November)

Thank you in advance for your feedback. Long time lurker, first time poster :)
Query Letter
Dear X,
Rowan Bailey needs a comeback. The one-time Queen of Pop has performed to sold-out stadiums and graced magazine covers for over a decade. But following the death of her rockstar father and a split from her superstar boyfriend, Rowan spirals. One very public (and drunken) meltdown later, she finds herself in rehab, dropped from her label, and desperate to return to the spotlight.
Enter Darby Kinkel: A Rowan Bailey superfan who dreams of escaping her podunk town and achieving fame like her popstar idol. Darby writes gushing letters to Rowan while the star is in rehab. And grateful for the lone fan who hasn’t given up on her, Rowan writes back. Through letters, they form an unlikely friendship - bonding over deceased dads and their shared love for all things Rowan Bailey.
But then, Darby herself is thrust into the public eye. She survives a shooting while working the fry machine at her fast-food gig. As the sole survivor, she becomes the reluctant face of the tragedy - trotted out for interviews with the news and local morning shows. Watching from afar, Rowan sees opportunity in Darby’s misfortune. She escapes rehab and flies Darby out to Hollywood, convinced a few paparazzi shots with the survivor at her side will result in a boost to her public image.
But once in L.A., Darby’s unexpected star power eclipses Rowan’s own. After signing with a Hollywood manager, Darby’s sitting for interviews with the likes of Oprah, in the studio recording her own pop single, and posing for selfies at celeb-filled parties Rowan herself can’t get into. Fueled by jealousy, Rowan sets out to destroy her once loyal fan. And soon, the two stars are careening towards a showdown that threatens to destroy them both.
SHOOTING STAR is a pitch-black satire of celebrity culture complete at 88,000 words. The darkly comedic manuscript will appeal to fans of Megan Angelo’s Followers and the 2017 film Ingrid Goes West.
Below, please find the first X pages for your review.
Thank you,
X
First 300 words
When I saw the headline, it felt like the sharp heel of a Jimmy Choo was plunged through my heart.
CALLUM McCRAY & MYSTERY MODEL: CAUGHT GETTING COZY!!!
Callum had flown to London for a music video shoot. I agreed to stay behind in L.A., try to finally start on my next album. He’d been gone for a week when the photos surfaced on TMZ.
My iPhone in my trembling hands, I clicked into the photo slideshow. Each swipe of my thumb revealed an image more disturbing than the last. There was Callum, his arm around another woman in the darkened corner of some hotel bar. She was all sharp angles and perfect symmetry. Even the legally blind would say with full confidence she looked like my identical twin. Callum always did have a thing for brunettes. In the second photo, his tattooed hand was clasped to her neck. In the third, her sharpened nails clawed at his leather jacket. The same jacket I bought him for our anniversary, just weeks before. One more swipe and there it was. The ultimate proof of Callum’s betrayal. The kiss.
Callum and I had been pop music’s It Couple, our love affair documented for two whole years across the pages of In Touch and Us Weekly. We walked red carpets together. We had each other’s names tattooed in cursive on our ring fingers. Our date nights were photographed by paparazzi then documented across hundreds of Instagram fan accounts with names like RowanAndCallumDaily and RowanCallum4Ever.
But now, every person on this planet with a reliable internet connection knew I’d been unceremoniously dumped. By flaunting his infidelity so publicly, Callum ended our relationship in the most humiliating way possible.
And how could he cheat on me?! I’m Rowan Bailey! I’m a classic triple threat. A singer, an actress, and ungodly beautiful! For a decade, I’ve been a mainstay on the Billboard charts. 46 million monthly listeners on Spotify! I’ve sold out arenas across the globe! I’m an icon, beloved by every girl and gay with a modicum of taste....

When I was in 2nd grade, my mother moved me to a different school. At the time, I had undiagnosed ADHD and also had a habit of pointing at things with my middle finger instead of my index finger.
One time, when the teachers picked us up from breakfast and walked us over to Homeroom, I saw the lunch chart on the wall. It said lunch was going to be pizza. I also knew that I had just eaten breakfast pizza.
Putting 2 and 2 together, I realized we were going to have pizza twice that day, so I turned around to my friend and pointed upward (both hands) saying "Plus Pizza!" "Plus Pizza!"
The issue is, as mentioned before, I pointed at everything with my middle finger.
So I ended up flipping everyone off with both hands, and the teacher sent me to the office with a sticky note saying what I did wrong IN CURSIVE (which at the time I fould not read). I asked her what I did, and she would not tell me, stating, "You know what you did."... But I really didn't.
After roughly 2 hours, I got bored of sitting in the office and asked if I could read a book. They brought me to the library and let me choose one before being sent back to the office with it.
Enter my mother. The school tells her that she needs to bring me home, that I will excused from the Halloween Event later that week and that she was to come back on a certain date to discuss my behavior with the assistant principal.
Fast forward to that date. I had stayed home from school for a while and when we got there the Asst. principal explained what I had done wrong.
I don't really remember the conversation but what I do remember is that at some point my mother tried to explain that I naturally pointed at things with my middle finger, and also didn't understand how it was derogatory.
The Asst. Principal responds with something along the lines of "He's manipulating you" or "He's tricking you."
I get really angry (as angry as I could for a second grader!) and tell her that she was mean, ugly, and older than my mom.
That's when she drops the bomb. I'd be going to a special school called Success where they take kids with mental problems and behavior issues.
Fast forward a year. In 3rd grade, I got diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety. I get prescribed medication for both, and from that point on, my behavior improved dramatically.
But they never took me out of "Success." Only once I moved to junior high did they put me back with the mainstream children again.
Because of this, I lack social skills I should have developed as a small child because I was not able to interact with normal kids my age and sometimes what I say offends people even though I don't mean to be rude.
I am now 13M, and I just got kicked out of AP English because the teacher got so tired of getting angry at me for being rude that she's had enough of it. Whilst sitting in the principals office I had to explain to him that I had no idea what I did wrong and he struggled to believe me because he says "He knows i'm intelligent" even though when it comes to communicating with others effectively I really don't feel like that's true.
I'm getting lower grades due to being sent to detention so often, I struggle to communicate with others, and I feel like I am not able to hit my full potential and soar higher than ever before.
Now the Junior high is threatening to send me the High school version of Success because "I can't act right" even though 99% of the times I get wrote up by teachers it's because I say something mean on accident or get angry at someone else for misunderstanding what they say.
I feel like a waste of space, and I don't know what to do anymore. My dad hates the person I've become. In his eyes, I'm a brat and constantly mean while my mother knows that I have issues and tries to work with me. I know I have potential in life, but it's like my issues are holding me back, and I just don't know what to do anymore. It's as if the entire world is against my existence.

The walls shake.
The secretive mechanisms of the machine rattle all around us; muted, like distant thunder.
The six of are gently rocked, highly conscious of the reverberations.
“…It sounds so far away”, Szymon mutters in his thick Polish accent.
I look up at him.
Kim responds with an uneasy chuckle: “I was just thinking the same thing”. The two smile at each other. Reassurance, I think. She glances at me, then adjusts her weapon.
I reach a hand to my forehead to rub away a thin sheen of sweat.
Before embarking on this particular mission, I did not admit to the others the intensity of my claustrophobia.
I grimace and look around, at the windowless inner-walls of the submarine, and I try not to think about the enormity of the weight of the water above our heads. The weight growing heavier and heavier by the minute, as we sink deeper and deeper into the depths of the Atlantic.
“Ten minutes til docking” warbles a distorted voice through the overhead speaker, accompanied by a dim red light. An unseen cloud of anxiety flows through the cabin like gas, and I scratch my jaw, discomforted and unsettled.
It reeks in here.
It smells like rank, stale pool water and sweat. Sweat with metallic undertones.
Szymon slides off his glasses, then rubs them on the material of his military fatigues, to little success. He mutters something to himself in Polish as he pushes them back up onto his nose.
The six of us have very different backgrounds, but what we share is our common station, a NATO barracks at the edge of Germany.
“Nearly time now”, says the man to my left. Blaine, a Scotsman who lives in my quarters. “Let’s get this fucken’ show on the road, shall we?”
I raise my eyebrows at him and give him a grim-half smile, but no-one replies directly.
To his left is Rudy, an American keen to tell anyone who’ll listen about his German heritage, despite having ‘O’Riley’ as a last name, which I get some personal amusement from. I’m married to a German myself, a wonderful woman called Nina, but the only actual German natives amongst us this evening are Kim, and Manny.
Kim’s a good friend of Nina’s, though we’re not actually particularly well-acquainted. I see her around the barracks but we don’t have much in common. When we speak, we tend to speak about my wife, which aside from the army is our only real point of shared investment.
Kim sometimes jokes that she knows Nina better than I do.
​
…I’m not sure how I feel about such jokes.
​
But she’s nice enough.
Beside her is the other German, born-and-bred, and that’s Manny. Currently snoozing, Manny’s an old boy. A grandson, in fact, of one of the men who helped run the, uh… ‘installations’… we’re about to visit. He’s sleeping, for now. Not sure how he manages it, but he’s a trooper.
I look down at my boots, and reflect on the objectives at hand.
​
Exit the submarine.
Enter into the bunker.
Gather intel.
Report back.
​
Simple enough, I suppose.
But the ‘bunker’ is one of several. A relic from the Second World War and kindly left behind by the Nazis… near-unreachable at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
There aren’t many pictures of these bunkers, and of the pictures that do exist it’s difficult to determine scale or size, but by all accounts the bunkers are monstrous things. Massive installations of concrete and metal and God knows what else, spread in a rough half-circle round the entrance to the Mediterranean.
Earlier today the six of us flew out from Geilenkirchen, transferred to submarine at the Lison Naval Base, and it’s been a long, miserable ride west from there.
​
Every team that goes to the bunkers reports back the same thing. That they’re no major threat, there’s nothing to be found of interest, and since they’re causing no environmental damage and pose no strategic threat, NATO might as well leave them be. Operations out into the ocean to destroy and clean-up the wreckage are expensive and time-consuming, and let’s face it- there’s always something more important to deal with than some forgotten concrete halls at the bottom of the sea.
​
Some busybody NATO pen-pusher must have noticed the bunkers were years overdue a visit, I guess, kicked up a fuss, and so the papers were shuffled and pawns moved around the board, and here we are.
​
On the way down.
​
Down, down, down into the deep.
​
I try not to think about the tight, metal confines of the submarine. I pray that I will be afforded more space to move and think and breathe when we’re actually inside the bunker.
​
The little red light by the speaker flicks back into life, and the jumbled voice comes through once again, this time louder with a whip-like electronic crackling.
“Five minutes to go”, it says, as I start with alarm.
​
Manny is frightened out of his sleep with a gasp and a raspy exclamation. He splutters out a name that I do not recognise, one that means nothing to me.
“Friedrich!” he calls out into the gloom, jumping to his feet in panic. I hear some of the bones in his legs click as he does so.
“Jesus,” Szymon mutters, reaching a hand to his chest. “Scared the life out of me”.
The eyes in the submarine regard Manny warily. This is not the first time he has had such an outburst.
“Friedrich…” Manny mumbles again, looking around the vessel at his fellow passengers, expression glazed, confusion marked across his face.
Kim reaches up for his arm. “The dreams again, Manny?” she asks, gently beckoning him back down.
Manny just stares at her for a moment, then relents, slowly sinking back onto the bench, rubbing at the grey around his temples wearily.
​
“Yes”, he replies, in German. “Yes, apologies. I don’t know what comes over me. They have been getting worse”.
“What was it this time?” Kim asks him.
He shakes his head. “It’s already fading, but… I believe it was similar to before. The people I saw in the dreamscape were none that I have ever actually met. I do not recall having ever seen them. Not in this life. In my dream, however, I knew them… I knew them all. They were- important to me. We were in a field of long grass, and there was a young man- Freidrich… He was… he was going to war”.
Kim chews her cheek a little as she considers this.
“I don’t think I expected him to come back”, Manny says quietly, as the submarine rumbles. “I knew that he was being sent to his death”.
“They’re connected to your grandfather”, Kim says with self-imposed certainty. “I’m sure of it. That’s why they’re getting worse. Ever since you volunteered to come on the mission- your subconscious knew you’d be getting closer to him, to his place of work-”
“Load of bullcrap”, Rudy chimes him, his hair flopping as he leans forward over his gun. “Kim you gotta stop with this supernatural shit. It’s all in your mind, Manny. In fact, Kim, you hit the nail on the head just now. It’s all in your subconscious, man. Just let it go. It’ll be some repressed Nazi guilt or something”. He jabs a finger towards Manny and furrows his brow. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. You aren’t guilty of any kind of Nazi crimes, just because your Grandaddy was an SS officer or whatever”.
Manny sighs wearily, he reaches his hand into a pocket and produces a handkerchief, which he uses to dab his forehead. “I am well aware of this”, he responds drily. “My grandfather was not in the SS. But I appreciate your passion on this matter”.
“Damn straight”, Rudy replies, leaning back in his seat.
​
Blaine and I exchange a look.
I can empathise at least a little with Manny’s internal struggle. Regarding his Nazi grandfather, I mean. My wife shares his burden, as her own great-grandfather was a colleague of his. They both worked together in a close capacity, I am told. Or at least, that’s what the records indicate.
​
“Prepare for docking”, crackles the voice through the speaker, and for a second or two the light in the submarine falters, shrouding us all in temporary, sickly darkness.
I suppress a shudder as we get ready to disembark, and the rumbling all around us wavers intermittently between louder, and quieter.
​
…Louder, and quieter.
​
The sounds of the engine rise to their greatest volume since we left the port at Lisbon, then fade to a soft and steady background murmur.
Blaine rises to his feet. “Let’s check this place out then, eh. The First Bunker. Reckon we’ll find anything fun?”
Syzmon joins him, stretching as he does so. “I doubt it. They recon this place every, what, ten or so years? And they’ve never brought back anything interesting. I doubt we’ll see more than a collection of dusty old Nazi ruins”.
You don’t find that interesting?” I ask, as I prepare to disembark. “Morbid, sure. But not even a little interesting?”
Szymon makes a noise of disgust and mutters something to himself. “I find no interest in the droppings of vermin”, he says, and turns away.
The cynic in me sees Szymon shoot a quick glance at Manny before he does so, and this cynical part of me is keen to interpret it with dark thoughts, but that would do the man a disservice. Szymon is a good fellow. Hard-working.
Blaine heads through the narrow inner-body of the submarine towards the ladders, and Szymon follows on behind.
Behind him goes Rudy, flicking his hair from his face, and he’s followed by Kim, and Manny. Manny places a hand on my shoulder and gives me a tired smile as he passes me by. I return it, then with a deep sigh of relief, I say goodbye to this room in the submarine, for now. I’m looking forward to a little more space to breathe.
​
One by one we ascend the ladders and out through the circular hatch in the submarine’s roof.
​
I allow in a great lungful of air as I do so, squinting through the darkness as I fumble for my torch, switching it on and joining its yellow-gold beam with the others.
We stand on the cold metal roof of the submarine, half-visible, protruding like an iron whale from the black waters below, lapping hungrily at its sides.
Ahead of us is a steel rail, and a vast concrete platform that extends into shadow.
​
The bunker, from the inside, has the look of an enormous hangar.
Kim taps my shoulder then gestures up towards the back of the hall, closer to the ceiling, and I follow her gaze and raise my light.
Our beams fall upon a colossal eagle carved into a sheet of rock, itself embedded in concrete. The eagle is angular and cold and sits proudly upon an enormous swastika.
Szymon crosses himself and spits into the water, before taking a few long steps and leaping from the edge of the submarine’s roof to the concrete platform, his boots scraping against the side.
He hauls himself up with the aid of the steel rail, and we listen to the sounds of his boots against the ground as he looks for the mechanism which will release a bridge for safer passage.
It was in the file, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find.
I glance down into the water below; the smell of salt is thick in the air.
I am unable to keep from my head the fleeting thought of a sudden slip, of tumbling down into that dark and quietly rippling water. Its softness a twisted mask to conceal the terror if its icy depth and unforgiving pull hidden away beneath.
I shiver, and look away.
A few cold moments pass and with the eventual rattling of gears and springs, a bridge begins to extend from the side of the concrete, out towards our spot on the sub.
Blaine tests it first, and then one by one we cross, joining Szymon on the platform proper.
We begin to cross the floor, making our way towards the gridded double-doors at the hall’s far end, at present only gloomy rectangles in the distance.
​
I feel very small in here. Even as a part of a team of six, I can’t help but feel… insignificant. Dwarfed by the intensity of this deserted lair.
​
“This is a sick place”, Manny says in a low voice. His eyes flash momentarily, as a stray beam of light passes across his face. “Do you feel it, Oliver?”
After a beat, I nod in agreement. There is something wrong here, something on a level I can’t quite grasp, just yet.
I glance up to the eagle as we walk beneath it.
This is no passing-fancy historical site.
“Are you alright?” I ask him.
“Yes”, he replies, “yes, for now”.
I don’t know exactly why Manny volunteered for this mission. He’s the only one who volunteered, for one thing. The rest of us were simply ordered.
I think he pulled some strings and cashed in some favours. Convinced the brass he’d be of use, given his knowledge of, and experience in decommissioning former Nazi sites and places of…
​
…
​
…of relevance.
​
It’s true what Kim was saying earlier, as well. His grandfather was a prominent Nazi. Vanished without a trace one day, there’s no record of his death; but he did work down here. At least for a time. That much is known.
One of the first recon teams down to this bunker recovered some old files. Manny’s grandfather was one of the listed names found within.
“You reckon we’ll find any bodies?” Blaine calls back over his shoulder, just a little too loud for the environment. I cringe, but Rudy replies, undeterred.
“I should think so. Might find myself a nice shiny Nazi skull to take home as a souvenir!”
We reach the metal double-doors at the end of the hall, and with a look round the group, Blaine presses his shoulder against them, and forces one open. We slip through the gap in formation, checking down the long, dark corridors that branch out before us and beside us- disappearing into the void on our left, and to our right.
“No”, Manny says, his voice echoing down between the walls. “The reports made no note of any bodies found, Nazi or otherwise. Whatever they were doing here… They didn’t stick around”.
“So then where did they go?” Szymon ponders aloud, arcing his weapon around as he steps into a deserted room nearby, perhaps once used for briefings or meetings. “They wouldn’t have just vanished into thin air”.
​
“We might see a body”, Kim says.
The group looks at her. “A man was killed during the last expedition. A soldier. French, I think”.
​
“Oh yeah”, Rudy mutters, rubbing his nose. “How’d that happen again? Freak accident, right?”
“Aye mate that’s right”, Blaine says. “That’s what I was talking about, really. Apparently the poor fucker got knocked clean cold by a falling pipe. Might have been a ceiling panel or something, actually, but whatever. The report read that he was face-down, and drowned in a puddle. When the rest of his team found him, they didn’t have the capacity to remove the fallen material, so they were forced to just leave him down here. Don’t believe he was ever recovered, since we’re the first guys to walk these corridors in over a decade”.
“They just left him down here?” Szymon asks. “That’s cold. Inhumane, almost”.
“I don’t think they had a choice, Sy”, Kim says, nudging his arm. “Maybe we’ll have to leave YOU down here!”
“Hey, not funny!” he says, but he chuckles as he does so.
​
I’m not particularly amused, myself.
​
To tell the truth, I feel sick.
Unless they’re hiding it better than we are, it’s possible that only Manny and myself are actually comprehending the weight of the monstrosity of this place.
The others haven’t really thought about it, I don’t think.
But we’re in one of six bunkers. This particular one is the easiest to reach, supposedly, so it’s the one that Command keep sending their teams to.
But something of this size… Something as massive as this, hidden away in the darkness at the bottom of the ocean. It’s hiding a secret. A terrible, frightening secret, and I don’t even know what it is.
The place is cold, and chills ripple across my exposed skin as I glance from left to right, peering into the shadows of the open doorways as we walk the length of the central corridor. Deeper into the middle of the complex.
Strategically, a bunker like this would be better off in the Mediterranean, surely. Shallower waters for easier construction. Positioned between Italy and Libya, for instance, for maximum tactical value.
But the Nazis took the time and trouble to construct it out here, in the Atlantic.
And for what?
Why would they do this?
Where did they go?
…And what exactly did they leave behind?
​
Silence falls across the group.
There is no sound but the clamping of our boots. The long, low breaths of my comrades. Echoes, round the walls.
At the very edge of my hearing a noise shivers fast down the length of the hall. My heartrate quickens and my ears sharpen.
…The simple creak of an old structure, I should think… But it almost sounds like… whispering.
An almost-imperceptible whisper at the very threshold of sound.
It’s so faint, however, that I decide not bring it up, for fear of looking like an idiot, but I share another pointed look with Kim just beside me.
​
She heard it too.
​
Maybe the others did as well.
I glance to my left as Blaine pulls his mask up and around his nose and mouth.
Szymon crosses himself, and Manny rubs his forehead. I see that it is covered in beads of sweat.
​
We press on.
​
“We’ll head to the central room, then we split into teams of two”, Blaine says through his mask. “We get this bunker checked out, we reconvene”.
He’s met with murmurs of assent as we push through another set of double-doors – smaller this time – and step into some kind of lobby. Manny produces a map and unfolds it, and it becomes clear that this lobby will, if we continue, head through into the complex’s centre.
​
We are halted however, by the strength of our own, sudden awe.
​
We stand in the entrance to a wide room with a high, domed ceiling. The walls around us are covered- much to our surprise- in plaques and paintings, and in the room’s middle is a now-dead fountain, the centrepiece of which is a colossal statue, or series of statues, depending on your perspective.
I crane my neck, struck with disbelief.
The statue depicts three men, of varying age, with expressions solemn and eyes pure white. A long and fish-like serpent carved from the same foundation winds itself between and around them, way up towards the ceiling, its jaw wide and teeth sharp.
A dark, circular symbol can be seen on the foreheads of each of the three men, stark against the relative paleness of their stone skin.
“Die Schwarze Sonne”, Manny mutters, taking a step towards the statue. He is hauntingly small by comparison.
“The Black Sun”, Szymon repeats, staring up at the centrepiece with horror.
“What does it mean?” Rudy asks, glancing around the group. “And what the hell is this thing, anyways? It ain’t in the damned report! You’d think at least ONE of the teams would have mentioned seeing something like THIS”.
“The Black Sun was one of the many symbols utilised by the SS”, Manny replies, still staring up at the great statues. “It has been employed by many cultures, but, in this instance- it was the symbol of Wewelsburg castle”. He turns to us. “The dark home of the Nazi foray into the occult. Led by none other than Heinrich Himmler”.
“Nazi occultists?” Rudy responds. Then he puts out a hand and makes a dismissive gesture. “No, no come on. Don’t mess me with that supernatural bullshit again. We’re dealing with people, here. Just ordinary, evil people”. He shoots another look up to the statue of the three men, and the creature.
“…Well”, he falters. “Maybe not that ordinary. But you catch my drift”.
Szymon grunts and shakes his head. “Not ordinary. And not people. This place is the husk for a den of long-dead rats”.
“Look come on man, I get it, you hate Nazis. You aren’t alone in this. But open your EYES”. Rudy throws an arm out to the statues beside him. “You aren’t even a LITTLE impressed? Or at least, I don’t know… curious?”
Szymon scoffs, then walks away, turning his back to the statue as he continues his passage round the perimeter of the room.
I take another long look at the statue, then head around on its left-hand side, the opposite side to Szymon.
​
I come up alongside Blaine, admiring a painting, and I stand beside him.
​
I read a little plaque on the wall, one celebrating a visit made to this bunker by Himmler in 1941, and then I consider the painting.
It is housed in a frame of dark, rich wood, and is comprised of a host of grim, swirling colours.
​
The scene, despite its lack of vibrancy, is vivid and powerful.
​
It depicts a churning sea, and it almost feels as if I am there myself.
…And in a way, I am.
Here in this bunker, at the bottom of the ocean.
​
The waves are grey and black and tinged with the darkest of blues, frothing angrily as they crash and cascade into and over each other. At the painting’s far left is the silhouette of a shadowed city of ruins, protruding faintly from the surging sea and lost behind the spiralling clouds overhead.
I am vaguely aware of a low conversation taking place between Szymon and Kim somewhere far behind me, but in the moment they are overwhelmed by the impossible roar of these silent waves.
A lighthouse stands at the far right of the painting. Its beacon is an eye, and the flash of painted gold looks out over the storm, and casts a lone, solemn beam towards the fallen city.
​
The lighthouse, upon closer inspection, is comprised of bodies.
Hundreds and hundreds of broken bodies, intertwined with torturous new purpose.
​
“It’s awful, isn’t it”, Blaine murmurs, and I am snapped back to reality with a blink.
“…Yes”, I reply after a beat. Glancing down to the little silver tag embedded in the painting’s frame.
​
‘Die Eintausend’, it’s called.
​
Or, in English:
‘The Thousand’.
“Awful”, I repeat, “but still…”
“Aye”, Blaine grunts. “It’s a quality painting”.
​
There’s a pause.
​
“Not something I’d ever hang up in my bloody bedroom, though, personally”.
​
I chuckle drily, and we move on.
​
Our footsteps are heavy against the concrete below.
“Rudy made a point just now”, I say out loud, as we walk. Blaine waits for me to continue.
“He said that the statue- this whole room, actually- it’s entirely omitted in the reports. This is meant to be an uninteresting, unassuming lobby. Instead it’s filled with intricate paintings and giant statues. Why wouldn’t this stuff have been mentioned?”
“Seems obvious to me, mate”, Blaine replies. “Because despite what Szymon says, this stuff is interesting. And when somebody finds something mysterious and interesting, everyone and their grandma wants to come and have a look”.
​
He hoists his gun a little higher, clears his throat. “I’m guessin’ that this was all omitted because the recon teams decided they didn’t want people coming down here”.
​
I swallow.
“And why would they do that, hm?” I ask him, rhetorically. “Why wouldn’t they want anyone else coming down. Why keep it all so cryptic and silent?”
Blaine shrugs. “Couldn’t say”.
“There’s something wrong down here”, I mutter. “I’m sure of it. Something very, very wrong, and every part of me hates this place”.
“Aye”, Blaine says. “I’ve started feeling a little like that myself. It’s getting worse, actually, the deeper in we go”.
I nod. “We’re going to find something terrible down here”, I finish, but to this Blaine says nothing.
Leaving the statues and the defunct fountain behind, we push through the doors at the hall’s opposite side, and head through into a long, wide room with two simple doors.
We are joined by the others.
The door on the left has a plaque that reads: “Der Kontrollraum”, and the door on the right is marked only with the same symbol on the foreheads of the stone giants.
…The Black Sun.
My stomach turns as I look upon it, and a wave of cold nausea passes through me.
My heartrate quickens, and I roll my shoulders, attempting to release some built-up tension.
​
Manny brings a hand up to his head and gasps, and the group turns to him.
“Manny”, Kim says with concern. “Are you alright?”
Manny pats her hand, then steps away, a little closer to the ‘Kontrollraum’. “I keep seeing…” he falters. “I am seeing in my head what I can only describe as ‘flashes of memory’. But the memories are not mine”. He gestures to the Kontrollraum door.
“There is a man in there”, he says simply, then looks back at us. “A dead man, I believe”. He rubs the side of his forehead. “And I have also come to believe that I was wrong, earlier. I no longer think this place is entirely deserted”. He points to the door. “A man’s last memories are held behind that door”, then he strides towards it.
“Manny!” Rudy calls out, “wait!” But the man does not. He approaches and grabs the handle, swinging the door outwards into our corridor, and shines inside his beam of light. He steps into the room, and we follow him inside.
“Christ”, Blaine mutters as we enter. “I guess you found your Nazi skull, Rudy. Why don’t you go and grab it up”.
But Rudy doesn’t respond, he simply looks down at the sight before us.
A skeleton surrounded by dust and empty cans, slumped back in a chair against the wall. The bones are wrapped up in the threads of a Nazi uniform.
​
“None of this shit is supposed to be down here”, Rudy says, eventually. “Why did Command keep all this stuff from us?”
“It’s not Command”, Blaine replies, echoing our earlier conversation. “It’s the recon teams. The recon teams write the reports”.
“So why emit all this?” Rudy says as he throws up his hands. “I don’t get it. This ain’t no ordinary bunker, and I think we’ve all realised that by now”.
Kim ignores him. “What is it, Manny?” she asks, as the man crouches down beside the skeleton.
Manny regards the remains of the Nazi. He looks to the brown, banded book on the desk beside him, and he considers the iron cross on the front of the uniform. A hint of a chain can be seen spilling from one of the front pockets, and Manny reaches over to take hold of it.
“Hey, should you be doing that?” Rudy asks, but Manny continues, and slowly draws from the uniform a golden locket, in the shape of an oak leaf. He turns it over in his hands.
“I know this man”, he says simply.
“What do you mean?” Kim asks.
“His name is Hans. He has a wife, and a young son. A son who was no older than eleven, or twelve, at his death”.
“I don’t suppose he’ll be that young any more, Manny”, Blaine grunts, giving the skeleton’s boot a light kick. A cloud of fine, white dust bursts out into the room. “I imagine he looks just his father here”.
Manny sets the locket on the desk, and Kim reaches out to open it up.
Inside is a picture of a square-jawed soldier with closely-cropped hair. Beside him is a woman, dressed in the style of the 1930s. The picture in the locket’s other half is of a young boy. The couple’s son, by the look of him.
“Jesus…” Rudy murmurs with dismay, looking from the pictures to Manny, and back. “Manny how did you know that?”
Manny stands back up with a small grunt, his legs creaking as he does, and he takes the journal on the desk up into his hands, and begins to carefully leaf through the pages.
“Even though it likely belonged to a monster of a man…” he begins, “I can never bring myself to be anything but gentle when it comes to books. I was instilled into me a deep respect for the written word”.
He cautiously turns to the very first page, and points to the name that has been written in the front margins.
‘HANS’, it reads.
“Yes”, Manny says quietly. “This is him”.
Szymon and Blaine have begun to rummage through the room. Searching through papers and charts and various records.
Most of the files have been emptied, and those that remain seem to detail only the structural side of the complex. Aspects of the engineering, and the architecture- though nothing can be found about the purpose of- or meaning behind- the intricate statues in the central lobby.
As Kim and Rudy and I talk lowly amongst ourselves, and as Manny begins to read through the journal, Szymon takes a little time to skim through a letter he finds amongst others, tucked away on a shelf.
He snorts and shakes his head, then holds the paper up for us. “Look, take a look at this”, he says, slapping the paper down onto the desk beside the skeleton. “Have a read”, he says, before jabbing his finger onto a couple of choice lines.
“This was written by the Nazi Command of the bunker”, he says. “By my guess. And it’s directed at our little rat ‘Hans’ here”.
“What is it?” asks Kim, as she leans over to read.
“It’s a promise. A false promise, that they will ‘return’ for him”, Szymon mutters. “A promise that his comrades will come back for him when they are able”.
“From where?” Blaine asks, and Szymon shrugs.
“It does not say. Does it matter? It was clearly a lie”. He kicks the legs of the skeleton a little harder than Blaine, and the skeleton slumps lower down in its chair, with another accompanying cloud of dust. “The Nazis clearly lied to him. He did his duty like a good little soldier and stayed behind to do God knows what… and they forgot all about him. And he died alone in his chair at the bottom of the sea. He got off lightly”.
Szymon grimaces and kicks the thigh of the skeleton as hard as he can, and with a shower of white mist the skeleton crumbles and collapses into a pile on the floor.
“Fuck’s sake, what’d you do that for?” Rudy splutters and coughs. “Idiot”.
“Don’t talk to me like that”, Szymon retorts, then leaves the room, shaking his head.
Manny waves a hand around his face, dispersing the dust, squinting as he scans the pages of the mysterious journal.
“Szymon’s guess seems to be correct”, he says, as he turns the pages of the journal. “This man’s job was to keep the power running. He was an engineer, and was- it would seem- tasked with repairing and maintaining the system. To prioritise where the energy should go”.
He points to passage written near the bottom of one of the pages.
“You can read this, Manny?” Rudy asks.
To his credit, the journal is written not only in German, but in intricate cursive.
Manny nods. “Of course”. He points again to the passage, and I do my best to read what is written as Manny continues: “Here he begins speaking about a necessary diversion of power, and how he dislikes how cold the bunker has become. He also makes references to fixing and repairing”.
“What kind of a guy was he?” Rudy asks.
Kim looks at him.
“You know”, Rudy says. “Beside being a Nazi”.
“He was full of pride”, Manny says as he carefully turns the pages. “It says he was one of several volunteers for this role. He was… happy to do his duty. It gave him purpose”.
We are quiet for a moment as Manny turns the pages.
“Hans expressed in this journal his excitement at being reunited with comrades. That despite the loneliness, he knew that they would return for him, when all was ready. That he too would see the truth. That he would keep the power going for as long as they needed-”
“Wait, hang on”, Blaine interrupts. “This guy kept the power on… for how long? And for what? Why exactly was he keeping this place active?”
There is pause, and Blaine looks around the room.
“Is it still active?”
To this, of course, we have no answer.
“That’s a good point though”, says Kim. “Does it say what the purpose of the bunker is in there, Manny? Does Hans write about why he had to keep the power on?”
Manny chews his tongue in thought. He flicks through another couple of pages. “His writing is somewhat cryptic in that regard. Perhaps he feared that the journal would anger his superiors. A potential breach of state secrets. He writes only that his work, ongoing, was to protect…” He points to a sentence at the bottom of a paragraph.
Despite the calligraphy, the words are quite clear:
​
“…Die Eintausend”, Manny reads aloud, and a slow, cold chill shivers across my body.
[Part 2/3]

The police car turned on its sirens behind me. I looked down the dark forest road, seeing nobody. At 2 AM in this backwoods town, everyone had already gone to bed. Or was it even 2? My head felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there. I just remember driving down an endless black road, and before that…
I rolled down the window. The police car stayed far behind me. I saw both police officers get out and crouch behind their open doors while they pointed black shotguns at my car.
“Driver!” the cop on the passenger’s side called. “Roll down your window and turn off your car. Do it now!” I already had the key turned to the accessory position rather than in ignition mode, but I quickly rolled the driver’s window down and plucked the keys out. My heart hammered in my chest and my mouth felt like sandpaper. I looked around worriedly, wondering what had caused all of this. I hadn’t killed or robbed anyone that I could remember, yet they acted like they had just caught Ted Bundy himself in a VW Bug with a kit containing a ski mask, handcuffs, a fake cast and a box of amyl nitrates.
“Driver!” the policeman droned. “Throw your keys out of the window! Do it now!” I threw the keys out the window.
“Driver! Open the door and put your hands out of the car! Get out slowly! Do it now!” Very slowly, I moved out of the car with my hands up. “Now, driver, keep your hands in the air. Do not make any sudden moves. Do NOT turn around. Do not move your hands anywhere near your body. I want you to walk backwards towards the sound of my voice. Do it now!”
I walked backwards down the dark side of the road, nearly tripping on stones and branches. I was terrified that if I fell, I would be filled with more lead than Flint, Michigan’s water supply. At that point, I had so many guns pointed at me that I felt like John Dillinger leaving a movie theater. Not to make light of the situation; at the time, I seriously thought I was going to die.
“Get on your knees and keep your hands in the air! Do it now!” I slowly got to the ground, kneeling. A few moments later, I felt my arms wrenched behind my back, painfully pulling at my shoulder. I swore in pain.
“Watch out, that fucking hurts!” I cried.
One of the cops roughly dragged me up my cuffed wrists, spinning me around to face him. He leaned close to me, whispering in my ear. I could smell the stale coffee on his breath.
“You fucking sicko. You are a real piece of garbage, you know that? What you did makes me want to throw up. The guys in prison hate people like you, and I’ll be glad to hear that you’re dead too, soon enough. You remember what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer?” He pushed me hard against the hood of the police car.
Then they brought me down to the station. On the way there, I thought back on how I got here, only catching glimpses of the truth.
***
I waited in the small concrete room, looking at the white-washed brick walls, wondering what came next. A minute later, two detectives walked into the room.
The man in the lead looked like a human walrus. He had small, watery eyes, a large bristling mustache over his thin lips, and a massive barrel-chest with a gut that pushed against the buttons of his police shirt. The buttons looked like they would fly off at any moment from the tension, yet miraculously, they stayed put.
“Hey, Gabriel,” the large man said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting down with a heaving sigh. “My name is Detective Carmichael. This is Detective Minervini-” he gestured to the other police officer sitting next to him, a thin, serious man with dark Italian features. “-and we’re here to listen. That’s all we’re doing. We just want to hear what you have to say.” I nodded.
After they read my Miranda rights, they spent the next few minutes asking me basic information, like my address, my phone number, when I moved to my current location, how many cars I had, where I worked and so on.
I’m not a stupid man. I know how such things work. The detectives try to get a baseline reading on someone by asking them various trivial details about their lives before jumping into the crime. They notice their body language, expressions, tone and speech patterns while telling the truth.
Sometimes they would bring in a lie detector test, but what they don’t tell subjects is that lie detector tests are inadmissible in court and scientifically useless. There has never been any evidence showing a polygraph can reliably determine truth from lies. Countless psychopaths have “passed” the polygraph and proved their innocence, including the Green River Killer.
But this is irrelevant, because the real purpose of the polygraph is to allow detectives to watch the subject’s body language during questioning and compare it to their baseline response. Some people get so freaked out by the idea of a polygraph that they begin mixing up stories and sweating, not realizing that their own body language betrays them more than random electrical impulses on a chart. In a sense, the polygraph is more psychological warfare than a machine, a way to fake people out before pressuring them into confessions.
“Gabriel?” Detective Minervini asked. “You still with us?” I looked up suddenly, realizing I had gotten lost in my thoughts and stopped listening to the conversation.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“Where were you today? Give us a timeline of events from the moment you woke up,” he said.
“Today…” I said contemplatively, reflecting back on the worst day of my life.
***
I woke up, groggy from not getting enough sleep. I had worked late into the previous night on a novel I was hoping to publish, vaping constantly and chugging cup after cup of coffee. Eventually, around 3 AM, I gave up on editing and decided to go to bed.
I looked at the clock, noticing it was only 8 AM. I got up, showering and making breakfast, trying to figure out what to do for the day.
I had lost my job a couple months earlier, and things had started getting desperate. I had maybe $500 in my bank account, which was all the money I had in the world to pay the rent, buy food and gas and cover all my bills. I knew I was screwed.
Over the last few weeks, I had put in hundreds of job applications. A lot of them were crap, minimum-wage or temp jobs that I would only take as a last resort.
My phone started ringing, and I looked down at the screen, seeing an unfamiliar number. A surge of hope ran through me.
“Hello?” I said. Static and chaos carried through the line. I pulled the phone away from my ear. After a couple seconds, a voice started coming through.
“Mr. Guardiani?” a female voice said.
“This is him,” I said. “Who’s calling?”
“Yes, hi, my name is Becky Mayer. I’m the head of human relations for Eyes Unlimited. We do surveillance and cameras and security, among other things. I was calling about a potential opening in our company.”
“I don’t remember ever applying to any company by that name,” I said, confused. “How did you get this number?”
“Oh, you were referred to us,” she said cryptically. “Or actually, maybe we found you online. Perhaps you put your resume on a job posting website?
“Anyways, would you be able to come in for an interview sometime today?” I asked about pay and benefits, and when she told me the job paid $25 an hour, I said I’d come down immediately. She gave me the address. I wrote it down on my phone and got changed into some nicer clothes before heading out.
I drove towards the capitol, about fifteen minutes away. My GPS started taking me into rougher and rougher neighborhoods. Used needles littered the streets and drug dealers in hoodies stood at every corner, watching cars that passed with hawk’s eyes.
“You have arrived,” the female robotic voice said as I finally pulled into an abandoned slum filled with empty factory and apartment buildings. I looked around nervously.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Who would want to have a business located here?” But I assumed the rent must be extremely cheap, at least.
I looked around, seeing a sign for “Eyes Unlimited” in grimy, white letters over a black background. All around it, the sign had hundreds of eyes painted in- reptilian, human, avian, insectoid, bovine and some others that I don’t think were from this world.
“Weird,” I muttered. I looked around, realizing there were no cars on the street. A homeless man a half-block away was stumbling around, yelling at invisible enemies. His mind had clearly gone over the brink. Dressed in tattered rags, he looked like a concentration camp inmate- emaciated, his legs and arms like twigs, his eyes sunken like the water at the bottom of a deep well.
I quickly turned away, walking down the alleyway that led to the front entrance for the business. I saw a door painted a fresh gold, a heavy contrast to the layers of filth and grime that covered all the walls and windows of the other abandoned buildings in the area.
It had a buzzer at the front, a red button that flashed on with an inner light when I pushed it. A static noise came through the speaker and then a woman’s voice came over the intercom.
“Who is this?” she said. I gave her my name, and the door immediately unlocked with a buzzing sound.
I opened it and found an empty, half-lit hallway lined with statues and paintings. Some of them were truly bizarre: half-human abominations with reptilian eyes and skin, or ghostly creatures with stretched out, screaming mouths. I stopped to examine one when a voice rang out directly behind me, making me jump.
“Do you like them?” a short, plump woman with blonde hair asked. “They have cameras in them, each and every one. No one would ever see them. Who would ever suspect a camera in a work of art such as this, right?” A work of art, I thought to myself sardonically, repressing a laugh.
“I’m Becky,” the woman said, walking up to me and stretching out her hand. She looked totally nondescript, a typical faceless office worker in an endless company.
She had a thin, white-gold necklace with a strange symbol hanging from the bottom. It looked like a grim reaper’s scythe with a slashing, diagonal line through it. The white metal of the pendant sparkled over her red blouse, and a sense of trepidation rose inside of me. Something about that symbol…
“Hi, I’m happy to finally meet you. I really like these statues with cameras you have here,” I lied. She smiled, absolutely beaming with pride.
“Yes, thank you. This is a lifetime’s work. Each piece is personally designed by an artist. Some are specially ordered by wealthier customers who don’t want gaudy cameras all over their property, so they had them hidden within statues and turned an eyesore into an aesthetic triumph,” she said. “Other times, we even have very special works go up on auction, especially the ones made by Mr. Bower.”
“Mr. Bower?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s the person you’re going to see right now,” she said, turning and opening the door. In the next room, I saw a receptionist’s desk with chairs for waiting customers or visitors. Potted plants were placed randomly throughout, and against the walls and hanging from the ceiling, I saw more of those “works of art”. One had a bloody knight carrying his own smiling, skeletal head in his armpit, the eyes dripping from their sockets.
Personally, I was not impressed, but I know there’s a market for everything. A niche company selling professionally-made artist’s statues with hidden cameras and surveillance equipment inside might appeal to only a small audience, but, with enough rich customers, why couldn’t they have a successful business?
Becky continued to talk about the office and the artists as she led me down a long, thin hallway. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead as we walked over a drab, gray carpet the color of razor-wire.
As we got to the door, I realized I hadn’t asked her the most fundamental question of all.
“So what do you guys actually do here?” I asked. “Is this a manufacturing place?” She shook her head.
“No, no, the artists have their own studios and spaces to work. This is just an office building,” she said. “We just store them here and deliver them from here. The open position I called you about involves transporting certain works of art to customers all over the region. It doesn’t require a CDL or anything, don’t worry. But Mr. Bower will tell you more.” She turned, waving. “OK, good luck!”
I felt I had a much better grasp of the situation now. This “business” was really just a Halloween store for rich people, and the job itself was just a delivery man. I looked up at the wooden door, seeing the name “Dennis Bower” engraved in the door. I knocked.
“Come in,” a high, feminine voice called, dragging the words out. I opened it, walking inside.
An extremely fat man sat behind the desk. He had all the hair on his body shaved off. His eyes looked like little pig’s eyes. In fact, he gave off a porcine presence as a whole. The pink color of his skin and the way the fat bulged at the back of his neck made him look like some kind of horrible half-human, half-pig hybrid.
His chair groaned as he shifted his massive bulk. The buttons on his white shirt looked as if they might pop off at any moment.
A glint of silver caught my eye. I saw the same necklace on the man as I had seen on Becky. Looking around the office, I saw more paintings and sculptures with hidden surveillance equipment. Some of them looked like creatures from an HP Lovecraft story, humanoid beings with green tentacles and large, intelligent eyes. Others looked like something from a ketamine nightmare, like the painting with prancing green aliens skinning people alive and wearing their faces as masks as they laughed and danced.
“You like what you see, huh?” Dennis Bower said in a high, girlish voice, a slight lisp coming out as he spoke. “I did them all myself.”
“Yes, they’re very… uh… unique,” I said, giving him a fake smile. “I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”
“Well, that’s the best compliment of all!” he said, opening a can of Coke and chugging the whole thing in one gulp. He threw the empty can in the garbage and turned to me. “So the job’s yours if you want it. I already saw your resume. You can start now. Interested?” This sudden shift caught me off guard, and I stuttered for a moment, thinking.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, OK, I guess,” I said. “Like right right now?”
“Yes. Do you have a car?” he asked. I nodded. “Good. We’ll reimburse you for any miles you drive. Gas plus wear and tear on the vehicle. That’s in addition to the $25 an hour and full benefits. After three months, you become eligible for a raise, too. Assuming your work is professional.” I nodded quickly. I felt light-headed and sweaty.
“I’ll work as many hours as you need!” I said quickly. “I could really use the money.” He smiled, nodding, showing off his small, white teeth. He licked his small, greasy lips, swiveling his head and peering around the office.
Finally, he found what he sought, and pointed at a large sculpture on a table. It had a snarling half-human half-dog on a marble foundation. The creature was gnawing on a human arm still wearing its denim sleeve. Dennis Bower said something, but I didn’t understand.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dogman,” he said again simply. I nodded, waiting for more. “That’s what that is. This guy loves Dogman crap. Anyways, this is the address.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper in a looping cursive script, ripping it in half and handing it to me. As he said goodbye, I grabbed the sculpture and started heading back out towards the decaying slum outside.
***
I had about an hour’s ride each way. After putting on Audible, I pulled off, seeing the homeless man down the street still screaming at imaginary enemies. It looked like a methamphetamine overdose, or possibly a psychotic break. Either way, I wasn’t getting involved.
Driving from the business to the address felt almost like watching a documentary on the extremes of wealth in the USA. I started at slums filled with garbage and abandoned buildings, and ended up in a rich area filled with mansions and pristine, dark forests. As I pulled onto the street Dennis Bower had written down, “Angel Trace Road,” I marveled at just how massive and ornate some of these houses were.
Most towered at least four or five stories overhead with swimming pools and mazes and statues in the yards. I saw a couple riding their own personal horses down the side of the road, and I could almost smell the money pouring off them.
Every house also had a gate and an intercom, and most also had security guards at the front. I went slow, seeing the security guards watching my car with squinted, suspicious eyes.
Finally, I pulled up at 77 Angel Trace Road. I saw a castle looming overhead with turrets that reached ten or eleven stories high. A security guard immediately got out of the booth and knocked on my window. I rolled it down and told him my name and business. He kept his hand near the holstered pistol at his side the entire time. Sighing, he went back into the guardhouse and, a moment later, the gate started rolling slowly to the side.
***
I got out of the car, holding the heavy statue under one arm. I walked up the wide, marble steps towards the front door. I was about to knock when I saw a note in spiky, nearly illegible handwriting taped to the mahogany door. I pulled it off, squinting.
“Please come in. We will be with you in a moment.” I read it, an eerie feeling coming over me. I looked back down the private road, seeing the security guard staring at me intently through the glass window of his booth. I turned and opened the door, deciding I would just go inside and wait like the note said.
A rancid smell hit me as I entered the castle. It smelled like a rodent had died in the vents and began to decompose. I wondered how people with so much money could live with that fetid odor, even for a single day. I tried to breathe through my mouth, wondering how long this would take.
I walked around the entrance hall, admiring the massive Persian carpets covering the floor and the statues and paintings covering the walls. I was staring at an old painting of sailors on a heaving ship at sea when I heard a creaking floorboard behind me. I jumped.
“Oh, you scared me,” I said, turning and then freezing in my tracks. Three people stood there, wearing black jumpsuits and medieval plague doctor masks. All of them had long, gleaming knives in their gloved hands. Silver pendants with grim reaper’s scythes and a slashing, diagonal line hung from each of their necks.
For a long moment, no one said anything. I put my hands up, but they made no move towards me.
“You can have my wallet or whatever you want,” I said. “Just take it.” I took my wallet out with barely ten dollars in the fold and threw it towards them. They didn’t react, still standing like mannequins, their eerie masks giving them the look of psychotic, nightmarish birds.
I tried to think fast. They blocked the front entrance, but there had to be countless doors on a place this size. I needed to get out and get help from the security guard.
The three masked figures slowly angled their heads to the right in unison, as if I had said something interesting. I looked around, seeing a heavy wooden chair tucked into a desk a couple feet behind me. With a rush of adrenaline, I grabbed the chair and threw it at them.
Without looking back, I sprinted away, going deeper into the house, hoping to find another exit on the sides or back before they caught up with me. I could only imagine the sensation of the knives going in, slicing through the skin as effortlessly as a diver through the water’s surface.
I ran through a pair of swinging doors into a huge, dirty kitchen with multiple ovens and countless counters and sinks. As I took in the scene, I realized the kitchen was worse than just dirty. It had evidence of atrocities and cannibalism on every surface and utensil.
A human head stared at me from the counter, its eyes half-closed. The tip of its tongue stuck out through blue, stiff lips. Worst of all, someone had cut the top of the skull off, and now the head had no brain.
On frying pans with coagulated grease and swarms of houseflies, I saw human eyeballs, tongues, kidneys and other organs, some of them cooked, some not. Dishes with bones and half-eaten, cooked limbs littered other counters. I saw mice and rats scurrying away as I sprinted past, interrupting their meal in this den of nightmares.
Someone stepped out from behind a large, steel fridge. I ran straight into them, catching a glimpse of a black jumpsuit and a gloved leather hand as I fell. They stumbled before quickly righting themselves. They jumped on top of me, and I saw the flash of a syringe as it stabbed into my neck. I fought, kicking and punching, but waves of nausea and weakness began to run through my body, and my vision started turning black, and soon, I was no more.
***
I came to for a few moments, seeing double and triple images blurring across my vision. I heard voices, as if from very far away. I saw the night sky outside through the window, the moonlight streaming down over the trees.
“So this is the new one?” someone said in a low, robotic monotone.
“Yeah, another lamb,” someone responded. “We’ll take some of his hair and make sure his fingerprints are on the scene. The ketamine should cause memory problems. He probably won’t even know how he got there when the cops finally catch up with him.”
“We might as well frame him for this place, too,” someone else said. The voices laughed.
“Sure, why not? We’ve got to find another place soon anyway.”
I remember going in and out of sleep, having strange hallucinations and visions. Time and space seemed liquid. For a while, I thought the abductors were aliens, and that their plague doctor masks were the real skin on their horrible faces.
As I sobered up a little, they finally put me in the driver’s seat of my car on an isolated side street. I still didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I could barely remember my name. I saw night had come. They left. After a while, I turned on my car and started driving.
Then I saw the flashing lights behind me, and suddenly, I started feeling very sober. I tried to remember how I had gotten there, but the truth kept slipping through my fingers, the memories fading away into darkness.
***
I gave this story to my lawyer and asked him to make sure my family received it and put it online, as a way to warn others and try to get justice. Before I did so, I slouched on the metal chair, as if a heavy weight pulled me down. The lawyer continued to speak through the round vent in the plexiglass separating us as I wrote my experiences down.
“Well, they checked out that building you talked about, this ‘Eyes Unlimited’. There’s no sign and no business there. No one has rented that space in years,” he said. “And that castle on Angel Trace Road has no security guard. In fact, that place has been empty for years. The bank foreclosed on it and no one has bought it.” I groaned.
“Right now, you’re looking at the death penalty,” he said. “The public is out for blood in this case. They’re preparing over twenty counts of first-degree murder. There were a lot of people killed in horrific ways, and they only found your DNA and fingerprints at the crime scenes…”
“But I didn’t do it!” I said. He shrugged.
“It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. Everything in life is power, and who has the will to use it.” I felt hope drain from me as I sat there, seeing the future as just a solid wall in front of me, a wall as black and empty as an endless abyss.

The police car turned on its sirens behind me. I looked down the dark forest road, seeing nobody. At 2 AM in this backwoods town, everyone had already gone to bed. Or was it even 2? My head felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there. I just remember driving down an endless black road, and before that…
I rolled down the window. The police car stayed far behind me. I saw both police officers get out and crouch behind their open doors while they pointed black shotguns at my car.
“Driver!” the cop on the passenger’s side called. “Roll down your window and turn off your car. Do it now!” I already had the key turned to the accessory position rather than in ignition mode, but I quickly rolled the driver’s window down and plucked the keys out. My heart hammered in my chest and my mouth felt like sandpaper. I looked around worriedly, wondering what had caused all of this. I hadn’t killed or robbed anyone that I could remember, yet they acted like they had just caught Ted Bundy himself in a VW Bug with a kit containing a ski mask, handcuffs, a fake cast and a box of amyl nitrates.
“Driver!” the policeman droned. “Throw your keys out of the window! Do it now!” I threw the keys out the window.
“Driver! Open the door and put your hands out of the car! Get out slowly! Do it now!” Very slowly, I moved out of the car with my hands up. “Now, driver, keep your hands in the air. Do not make any sudden moves. Do NOT turn around. Do not move your hands anywhere near your body. I want you to walk backwards towards the sound of my voice. Do it now!”
I walked backwards down the dark side of the road, nearly tripping on stones and branches. I was terrified that if I fell, I would be filled with more lead than Flint, Michigan’s water supply. At that point, I had so many guns pointed at me that I felt like John Dillinger leaving a movie theater. Not to make light of the situation; at the time, I seriously thought I was going to die.
“Get on your knees and keep your hands in the air! Do it now!” I slowly got to the ground, kneeling. A few moments later, I felt my arms wrenched behind my back, painfully pulling at my shoulder. I swore in pain.
“Watch out, that fucking hurts!” I cried.
One of the cops roughly dragged me up my cuffed wrists, spinning me around to face him. He leaned close to me, whispering in my ear. I could smell the stale coffee on his breath.
“You fucking sicko. You are a real piece of garbage, you know that? What you did makes me want to throw up. The guys in prison hate people like you, and I’ll be glad to hear that you’re dead too, soon enough. You remember what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer?” He pushed me hard against the hood of the police car.
Then they brought me down to the station. On the way there, I thought back on how I got here, only catching glimpses of the truth.
***
I waited in the small concrete room, looking at the white-washed brick walls, wondering what came next. A minute later, two detectives walked into the room.
The man in the lead looked like a human walrus. He had small, watery eyes, a large bristling mustache over his thin lips, and a massive barrel-chest with a gut that pushed against the buttons of his police shirt. The buttons looked like they would fly off at any moment from the tension, yet miraculously, they stayed put.
“Hey, Gabriel,” the large man said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting down with a heaving sigh. “My name is Detective Carmichael. This is Detective Minervini-” he gestured to the other police officer sitting next to him, a thin, serious man with dark Italian features. “-and we’re here to listen. That’s all we’re doing. We just want to hear what you have to say.” I nodded.
After they read my Miranda rights, they spent the next few minutes asking me basic information, like my address, my phone number, when I moved to my current location, how many cars I had, where I worked and so on.
I’m not a stupid man. I know how such things work. The detectives try to get a baseline reading on someone by asking them various trivial details about their lives before jumping into the crime. They notice their body language, expressions, tone and speech patterns while telling the truth.
Sometimes they would bring in a lie detector test, but what they don’t tell subjects is that lie detector tests are inadmissible in court and scientifically useless. There has never been any evidence showing a polygraph can reliably determine truth from lies. Countless psychopaths have “passed” the polygraph and proved their innocence, including the Green River Killer.
But this is irrelevant, because the real purpose of the polygraph is to allow detectives to watch the subject’s body language during questioning and compare it to their baseline response. Some people get so freaked out by the idea of a polygraph that they begin mixing up stories and sweating, not realizing that their own body language betrays them more than random electrical impulses on a chart. In a sense, the polygraph is more psychological warfare than a machine, a way to fake people out before pressuring them into confessions.
“Gabriel?” Detective Minervini asked. “You still with us?” I looked up suddenly, realizing I had gotten lost in my thoughts and stopped listening to the conversation.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“Where were you today? Give us a timeline of events from the moment you woke up,” he said.
“Today…” I said contemplatively, reflecting back on the worst day of my life.
***
I woke up, groggy from not getting enough sleep. I had worked late into the previous night on a novel I was hoping to publish, vaping constantly and chugging cup after cup of coffee. Eventually, around 3 AM, I gave up on editing and decided to go to bed.
I looked at the clock, noticing it was only 8 AM. I got up, showering and making breakfast, trying to figure out what to do for the day.
I had lost my job a couple months earlier, and things had started getting desperate. I had maybe $500 in my bank account, which was all the money I had in the world to pay the rent, buy food and gas and cover all my bills. I knew I was screwed.
Over the last few weeks, I had put in hundreds of job applications. A lot of them were crap, minimum-wage or temp jobs that I would only take as a last resort.
My phone started ringing, and I looked down at the screen, seeing an unfamiliar number. A surge of hope ran through me.
“Hello?” I said. Static and chaos carried through the line. I pulled the phone away from my ear. After a couple seconds, a voice started coming through.
“Mr. Guardiani?” a female voice said.
“This is him,” I said. “Who’s calling?”
“Yes, hi, my name is Becky Mayer. I’m the head of human relations for Eyes Unlimited. We do surveillance and cameras and security, among other things. I was calling about a potential opening in our company.”
“I don’t remember ever applying to any company by that name,” I said, confused. “How did you get this number?”
“Oh, you were referred to us,” she said cryptically. “Or actually, maybe we found you online. Perhaps you put your resume on a job posting website?
“Anyways, would you be able to come in for an interview sometime today?” I asked about pay and benefits, and when she told me the job paid $25 an hour, I said I’d come down immediately. She gave me the address. I wrote it down on my phone and got changed into some nicer clothes before heading out.
I drove towards the capitol, about fifteen minutes away. My GPS started taking me into rougher and rougher neighborhoods. Used needles littered the streets and drug dealers in hoodies stood at every corner, watching cars that passed with hawk’s eyes.
“You have arrived,” the female robotic voice said as I finally pulled into an abandoned slum filled with empty factory and apartment buildings. I looked around nervously.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Who would want to have a business located here?” But I assumed the rent must be extremely cheap, at least.
I looked around, seeing a sign for “Eyes Unlimited” in grimy, white letters over a black background. All around it, the sign had hundreds of eyes painted in- reptilian, human, avian, insectoid, bovine and some others that I don’t think were from this world.
“Weird,” I muttered. I looked around, realizing there were no cars on the street. A homeless man a half-block away was stumbling around, yelling at invisible enemies. His mind had clearly gone over the brink. Dressed in tattered rags, he looked like a concentration camp inmate- emaciated, his legs and arms like twigs, his eyes sunken like the water at the bottom of a deep well.
I quickly turned away, walking down the alleyway that led to the front entrance for the business. I saw a door painted a fresh gold, a heavy contrast to the layers of filth and grime that covered all the walls and windows of the other abandoned buildings in the area.
It had a buzzer at the front, a red button that flashed on with an inner light when I pushed it. A static noise came through the speaker and then a woman’s voice came over the intercom.
“Who is this?” she said. I gave her my name, and the door immediately unlocked with a buzzing sound.
I opened it and found an empty, half-lit hallway lined with statues and paintings. Some of them were truly bizarre: half-human abominations with reptilian eyes and skin, or ghostly creatures with stretched out, screaming mouths. I stopped to examine one when a voice rang out directly behind me, making me jump.
“Do you like them?” a short, plump woman with blonde hair asked. “They have cameras in them, each and every one. No one would ever see them. Who would ever suspect a camera in a work of art such as this, right?” A work of art, I thought to myself sardonically, repressing a laugh.
“I’m Becky,” the woman said, walking up to me and stretching out her hand. She looked totally nondescript, a typical faceless office worker in an endless company.
She had a thin, white-gold necklace with a strange symbol hanging from the bottom. It looked like a grim reaper’s scythe with a slashing, diagonal line through it. The white metal of the pendant sparkled over her red blouse, and a sense of trepidation rose inside of me. Something about that symbol…
“Hi, I’m happy to finally meet you. I really like these statues with cameras you have here,” I lied. She smiled, absolutely beaming with pride.
“Yes, thank you. This is a lifetime’s work. Each piece is personally designed by an artist. Some are specially ordered by wealthier customers who don’t want gaudy cameras all over their property, so they had them hidden within statues and turned an eyesore into an aesthetic triumph,” she said. “Other times, we even have very special works go up on auction, especially the ones made by Mr. Bower.”
“Mr. Bower?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s the person you’re going to see right now,” she said, turning and opening the door. In the next room, I saw a receptionist’s desk with chairs for waiting customers or visitors. Potted plants were placed randomly throughout, and against the walls and hanging from the ceiling, I saw more of those “works of art”. One had a bloody knight carrying his own smiling, skeletal head in his armpit, the eyes dripping from their sockets.
Personally, I was not impressed, but I know there’s a market for everything. A niche company selling professionally-made artist’s statues with hidden cameras and surveillance equipment inside might appeal to only a small audience, but, with enough rich customers, why couldn’t they have a successful business?
Becky continued to talk about the office and the artists as she led me down a long, thin hallway. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead as we walked over a drab, gray carpet the color of razor-wire.
As we got to the door, I realized I hadn’t asked her the most fundamental question of all.
“So what do you guys actually do here?” I asked. “Is this a manufacturing place?” She shook her head.
“No, no, the artists have their own studios and spaces to work. This is just an office building,” she said. “We just store them here and deliver them from here. The open position I called you about involves transporting certain works of art to customers all over the region. It doesn’t require a CDL or anything, don’t worry. But Mr. Bower will tell you more.” She turned, waving. “OK, good luck!”
I felt I had a much better grasp of the situation now. This “business” was really just a Halloween store for rich people, and the job itself was just a delivery man. I looked up at the wooden door, seeing the name “Dennis Bower” engraved in the door. I knocked.
“Come in,” a high, feminine voice called, dragging the words out. I opened it, walking inside.
An extremely fat man sat behind the desk. He had all the hair on his body shaved off. His eyes looked like little pig’s eyes. In fact, he gave off a porcine presence as a whole. The pink color of his skin and the way the fat bulged at the back of his neck made him look like some kind of horrible half-human, half-pig hybrid.
His chair groaned as he shifted his massive bulk. The buttons on his white shirt looked as if they might pop off at any moment.
A glint of silver caught my eye. I saw the same necklace on the man as I had seen on Becky. Looking around the office, I saw more paintings and sculptures with hidden surveillance equipment. Some of them looked like creatures from an HP Lovecraft story, humanoid beings with green tentacles and large, intelligent eyes. Others looked like something from a ketamine nightmare, like the painting with prancing green aliens skinning people alive and wearing their faces as masks as they laughed and danced.
“You like what you see, huh?” Dennis Bower said in a high, girlish voice, a slight lisp coming out as he spoke. “I did them all myself.”
“Yes, they’re very… uh… unique,” I said, giving him a fake smile. “I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”
“Well, that’s the best compliment of all!” he said, opening a can of Coke and chugging the whole thing in one gulp. He threw the empty can in the garbage and turned to me. “So the job’s yours if you want it. I already saw your resume. You can start now. Interested?” This sudden shift caught me off guard, and I stuttered for a moment, thinking.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, OK, I guess,” I said. “Like right right now?”
“Yes. Do you have a car?” he asked. I nodded. “Good. We’ll reimburse you for any miles you drive. Gas plus wear and tear on the vehicle. That’s in addition to the $25 an hour and full benefits. After three months, you become eligible for a raise, too. Assuming your work is professional.” I nodded quickly. I felt light-headed and sweaty.
“I’ll work as many hours as you need!” I said quickly. “I could really use the money.” He smiled, nodding, showing off his small, white teeth. He licked his small, greasy lips, swiveling his head and peering around the office.
Finally, he found what he sought, and pointed at a large sculpture on a table. It had a snarling half-human half-dog on a marble foundation. The creature was gnawing on a human arm still wearing its denim sleeve. Dennis Bower said something, but I didn’t understand.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dogman,” he said again simply. I nodded, waiting for more. “That’s what that is. This guy loves Dogman crap. Anyways, this is the address.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper in a looping cursive script, ripping it in half and handing it to me. As he said goodbye, I grabbed the sculpture and started heading back out towards the decaying slum outside.
***
I had about an hour’s ride each way. After putting on Audible, I pulled off, seeing the homeless man down the street still screaming at imaginary enemies. It looked like a methamphetamine overdose, or possibly a psychotic break. Either way, I wasn’t getting involved.
Driving from the business to the address felt almost like watching a documentary on the extremes of wealth in the USA. I started at slums filled with garbage and abandoned buildings, and ended up in a rich area filled with mansions and pristine, dark forests. As I pulled onto the street Dennis Bower had written down, “Angel Trace Road,” I marveled at just how massive and ornate some of these houses were.
Most towered at least four or five stories overhead with swimming pools and mazes and statues in the yards. I saw a couple riding their own personal horses down the side of the road, and I could almost smell the money pouring off them.
Every house also had a gate and an intercom, and most also had security guards at the front. I went slow, seeing the security guards watching my car with squinted, suspicious eyes.
Finally, I pulled up at 77 Angel Trace Road. I saw a castle looming overhead with turrets that reached ten or eleven stories high. A security guard immediately got out of the booth and knocked on my window. I rolled it down and told him my name and business. He kept his hand near the holstered pistol at his side the entire time. Sighing, he went back into the guardhouse and, a moment later, the gate started rolling slowly to the side.
***
I got out of the car, holding the heavy statue under one arm. I walked up the wide, marble steps towards the front door. I was about to knock when I saw a note in spiky, nearly illegible handwriting taped to the mahogany door. I pulled it off, squinting.
“Please come in. We will be with you in a moment.” I read it, an eerie feeling coming over me. I looked back down the private road, seeing the security guard staring at me intently through the glass window of his booth. I turned and opened the door, deciding I would just go inside and wait like the note said.
A rancid smell hit me as I entered the castle. It smelled like a rodent had died in the vents and began to decompose. I wondered how people with so much money could live with that fetid odor, even for a single day. I tried to breathe through my mouth, wondering how long this would take.
I walked around the entrance hall, admiring the massive Persian carpets covering the floor and the statues and paintings covering the walls. I was staring at an old painting of sailors on a heaving ship at sea when I heard a creaking floorboard behind me. I jumped.
“Oh, you scared me,” I said, turning and then freezing in my tracks. Three people stood there, wearing black jumpsuits and medieval plague doctor masks. All of them had long, gleaming knives in their gloved hands. Silver pendants with grim reaper’s scythes and a slashing, diagonal line hung from each of their necks.
For a long moment, no one said anything. I put my hands up, but they made no move towards me.
“You can have my wallet or whatever you want,” I said. “Just take it.” I took my wallet out with barely ten dollars in the fold and threw it towards them. They didn’t react, still standing like mannequins, their eerie masks giving them the look of psychotic, nightmarish birds.
I tried to think fast. They blocked the front entrance, but there had to be countless doors on a place this size. I needed to get out and get help from the security guard.
The three masked figures slowly angled their heads to the right in unison, as if I had said something interesting. I looked around, seeing a heavy wooden chair tucked into a desk a couple feet behind me. With a rush of adrenaline, I grabbed the chair and threw it at them.
Without looking back, I sprinted away, going deeper into the house, hoping to find another exit on the sides or back before they caught up with me. I could only imagine the sensation of the knives going in, slicing through the skin as effortlessly as a diver through the water’s surface.
I ran through a pair of swinging doors into a huge, dirty kitchen with multiple ovens and countless counters and sinks. As I took in the scene, I realized the kitchen was worse than just dirty. It had evidence of atrocities and cannibalism on every surface and utensil.
A human head stared at me from the counter, its eyes half-closed. The tip of its tongue stuck out through blue, stiff lips. Worst of all, someone had cut the top of the skull off, and now the head had no brain.
On frying pans with coagulated grease and swarms of houseflies, I saw human eyeballs, tongues, kidneys and other organs, some of them cooked, some not. Dishes with bones and half-eaten, cooked limbs littered other counters. I saw mice and rats scurrying away as I sprinted past, interrupting their meal in this den of nightmares.
Someone stepped out from behind a large, steel fridge. I ran straight into them, catching a glimpse of a black jumpsuit and a gloved leather hand as I fell. They stumbled before quickly righting themselves. They jumped on top of me, and I saw the flash of a syringe as it stabbed into my neck. I fought, kicking and punching, but waves of nausea and weakness began to run through my body, and my vision started turning black, and soon, I was no more.
***
I came to for a few moments, seeing double and triple images blurring across my vision. I heard voices, as if from very far away. I saw the night sky outside through the window, the moonlight streaming down over the trees.
“So this is the new one?” someone said in a low, robotic monotone.
“Yeah, another lamb,” someone responded. “We’ll take some of his hair and make sure his fingerprints are on the scene. The ketamine should cause memory problems. He probably won’t even know how he got there when the cops finally catch up with him.”
“We might as well frame him for this place, too,” someone else said. The voices laughed.
“Sure, why not? We’ve got to find another place soon anyway.”
I remember going in and out of sleep, having strange hallucinations and visions. Time and space seemed liquid. For a while, I thought the abductors were aliens, and that their plague doctor masks were the real skin on their horrible faces.
As I sobered up a little, they finally put me in the driver’s seat of my car on an isolated side street. I still didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I could barely remember my name. I saw night had come. They left. After a while, I turned on my car and started driving.
Then I saw the flashing lights behind me, and suddenly, I started feeling very sober. I tried to remember how I had gotten there, but the truth kept slipping through my fingers, the memories fading away into darkness.
***
I gave this story to my lawyer and asked him to make sure my family received it and put it online, as a way to warn others and try to get justice. Before I did so, I slouched on the metal chair, as if a heavy weight pulled me down. The lawyer continued to speak through the round vent in the plexiglass separating us as I wrote my experiences down.
“Well, they checked out that building you talked about, this ‘Eyes Unlimited’. There’s no sign and no business there. No one has rented that space in years,” he said. “And that castle on Angel Trace Road has no security guard. In fact, that place has been empty for years. The bank foreclosed on it and no one has bought it.” I groaned.
“Right now, you’re looking at the death penalty,” he said. “The public is out for blood in this case. They’re preparing over twenty counts of first-degree murder. There were a lot of people killed in horrific ways, and they only found your DNA and fingerprints at the crime scenes…”
“But I didn’t do it!” I said. He shrugged.
“It’s not about what you did or didn’t do. Everything in life is power, and who has the will to use it.” I felt hope drain from me as I sat there, seeing the future as just a solid wall in front of me, a wall as black and empty as an endless abyss.

Post your Who Do I Start (WDIS) questions here for your QB positions ONLY.
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The following users have helped the most people in this thread:

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aketchum339	9
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inderm88	1	2	Comment
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^{This table will be updated every ~15 minutes.}

Hi,
Perhaps you could help me to choose a shorthand system to learn?
My wife has done Folkner before and wants to revive her Forkner and learn it with me. Forkner is based on cursive which I am atrocious at so I am planning on delaying her getting back into Forkner with me as long as possible. My handwriting is affected by M.S., which I have had since 1985.
Paradoxically I am very interested in Gregg because I can see that it would eventually be an extremely fast system. I’m leaning toward Simplified, but have also seen Notehand and it’s short learning curve appeals to me. Perhaps Notehand and then Simplified?
Initially looked at Teeline, and although the geometric shapes are easy to learn and draw (not write 🙁) I hesitate with following this path because I have seen a chart of all the exceptions to the exceptions to the rules. It looks like the backend load is too high.
I have ruled out Pitman because of the hard- vs soft-line distinction. I need something I could pick up any pen/pencil and write when required.
And lastly, but only because it made my choices flow more naturally, I have seen and am very interested in T-Script. It boasts a short learning curve, is not cursive, and fast writing. My concern however are that Troab has died before his - often modified - system became popular, and that it is said to be harder to read back. I don’t relish the thought of being confined to 1..2 pdfs in 10+ years time and a tiny online community. Nothing like the wealth of Gregg materials already floating around.
So why do I want to do this? Because of M.S. my memory is atrocious. I am used to writing myself notes and todo lists, but find my current print writing way too slow.
Any ideas or recommendations?
And of course I have also looked at Orthic (nice, but perhaps not fast enough), Sweet’s Current (great online documentation), etc etc etc!

Flavor

AHEM a regular scene at a party…
Karboksyyli, carefully nonchalantly, smooves over to SlytherinBuckeye.
Karboksyyli: “Hey what’s up?”
SlytherinBuckeye: “Nothing.”
karboksyyli: “Hey you know 2Pac-man?”
SlytherinBuckeye: “I know of them.”
Karboksyyli: “Well it’s from the rapper 2pac, and also Pac-man, becoming 2pac-man… which is great, since we are a duo. So… two… pac-men.”
…………
SlytherinBuckeye: “Yeah. That’s great.”
…………….
Karboksyyli: “I’ll leave you alone forever now.”
You, probably: “Karbok? How is she doing that? She’s not even conscious!”

Meta

Banishments: u/Birdmanofbombay has been boo’d off stage! They were with the League of Evil Exes
KOs: u/bigjoe6172 has been KO’d! They were with Scott’s Friends
KOs: u/GdH64 has been KO’d! They were with Scott’s Friends
Gideon has not banned any words!
Inactivity strikes: 2
Announcement: We have tweaked the item rules of this game. One additional item has been added to the pool, while some items are no longer winnable.

Player(s)	Vote count
u/Birdmanofbombay	17
u/TheNacho_Sis	3
u/Argol2, u/GdH63, u/Meddleofmycause, u/ZerotheStoryteller	1

TOBB event: Ice skating

It’s September already, the perfect time for ice skating! (?)
Your task for L9 is to chart a path over a 5x5 grid that represents a frozen lake, starting from the bottom half (row #1) and ending at the top (row #5). You can do this either by describing your path in text, or by drawing a route and submitting it. You can take a maximum of 9 "steps" and you can't move diagonally - only up, left or right. The event can be completed by every living player who belongs to a band.

• Here is the link to the event form
• And here is a picture of the 5x5 grid in questions

Links

Voting form
Action form
Item form
Solo Round
Countdown to L10