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Hard choices in a place where space travel can accidentally steal your entire life away…

An investigator can look backwards to discover secrets lost to time. But one investigator discovers secrets lost in her own past, dangerous secrets that give names to the dead strewn across the universe.

Winner of the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award.

“The Nameless Dead” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

 

The Nameless Dead By Kristine Kathryn Rusch 

I like to think I was kidnapped. I like to think that some thugs grabbed me, and tossed me into their ship, and I ended up here six months later, through no fault of my own.

I like to think that, but the records show something else entirely, and my memory always, always gives the records an assist.

That night, thirty-five years ago, I’d had enough. If we’re being 100% honest here, I wasn’t really cut out for marriage or motherhood. I was twenty-five and figured I could handle all of the emotional fallout, but of course, I couldn’t.

I get that night in snatches: the stench of sour milk and poopy diapers, the sound of voices screeching at each other over the wail of an unhappy baby, the scratch in my throat because this was the fifth night in a row of that kind of yelling—and worse, Austin, clutched in his father’s arms, waving his little fists.

I blamed Austin that night: I said, “Well, he wants me to go bye-bye, so I think I will.”

And my husband Tom, all sympathy and warmth, said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

The door didn’t hit me. Nothing did, even though I was sore and tired and angrier than I should have been. I picked up a bottle of what I then thought was good beer, and carried it, wondering if I should drink it since I was breast-feeding and then deciding, ah fuck it, and downing it like I was dying of thirst.

The beer glugged, and the bottle emptied, and I bought another, and another, and another as I staggered across what we called the Holy Trinity—a series of blocks that contained nothing but bars, usually catering to spacers, not people like me.

By the time I ended up in the last one, wearing a smelly sweater that someone had given me to hide stains from my leaking breasts, I was ready to give up.

Deep down, I knew Tom was right: I sucked as a parent. I didn’t want to feed the kid on the kid’s schedule. I didn’t want to pump my breasts. I didn’t want to spend half my life tied to those two people, even if one of them was too small to talk and needed me more than I needed him.

If I left, I rationalized drunkenly, then they would have a better life. If I left, Tom could remarry and Austin would reach his potential and I—I would be free.

Maybe I actually had that conversation out loud. Maybe I just thought it.

Next thing I knew, I was at the space rings, staring at what wasn’t quite a luxury cruiser. It was one of those ships that took executives to their postings so far away they could never return.

I ended up in a small antechamber in the docking rings with a man who wrinkled his nose as he talked. At the time, I thought he was fussy. Looking back, I realized that he thought something smelled bad—and that something was me.

He warned me, and warned me again, and then warned me a third time.

“You do this,” he said, “and you won’t see anyone you ever love again.”

“You assume I love someone,” I muttered drunkenly.

He looked pointedly at my leaking breasts, and said, “Someone clearly loved you.”

“You’re confusing love and sex,” I answered and thought I was witty.

“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s the baby?”

“With his dad,” I said.

“You mind if I check that?” the man said.

I waved one hand at him. “Be my guest.”

So he vanished. For how long, I don’t know. But he came back armed with vids and tablets and more information than I wanted. And then he said, “You got an hour to consider this. Maybe by then, you’ll be sober enough to change your mind.”

I got a little more sober in that hour. I’d like to say I didn’t understand what I learned from those tablets and vids, but maybe I had even understood it more than I let on.

I wasn’t making an accidental mistake, no matter what I used to tell folks years later when I was drunk and alone and confessed that I had once been a parent.

Now, I’m never drunk, although I’m still alone, and I really don’t think that anything I did in those few months after Austin’s birth counted as parenting, not even the haphazard breastfeeding which I mostly did on a dare.

After that hour, I hadn’t changed my mind. I cashed out the money in our savings to buy a berth on a lower level that turned out to be barely bigger than the width of a single bed. I was allowed to leave the berth, thank heavens, because the journey lasted six months. Six months in that tiny space would have made me crazier than I already was.

The food was included in the price, but little else, and because I hadn’t planned, I had to pay for new clothes and some expert to help my body past its hormone overload.

Three months in, I woke up and realized that I wasn’t cut out to be a spacer, and I really didn’t want to be somewhere new, and so I got some initiative and found the man who’d tried to talk me out of the trip.

Turns out, that was his job, to make sure everyone who got on the transport knew it was a one-way trip.

I, of course, didn’t believe him. I rarely believed anyone in those days, and when they challenged me, I doubled down on whatever fool thing I had in my head.

“I want to go back,” I said.

“We’re not going back,” he said.

“So drop me somewhere,” I said. “Someone can take me back.”

“You saw the vids,” he said. “You signed waivers. You said you understood time dilation.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It works the same going back, right?”

He stared at me like I was the dumbest person he’d ever seen.

“Time never goes backwards,” he said. “No matter how much we want it to.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that if we drop you ‘somewhere’ and you magically find enough money to fund your return trip, you will arrive fifty years after you left, give or take.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, my heart sinking. “I’ve got a baby back there.”

“Not anymore you don’t.” He punched a button on a nearby console and doublechecked it. “Your baby is at least twenty years old right now. I suspect he’s probably pissed at the mother who abandoned him, and he doesn’t want to see you.”

I crossed my arms. “You lie.”

He shook his head. “I don’t get paid enough to lie. You go back immediately after we arrive at our destination, and your kid might very well be dead. He’ll be pushing 100 at least, and he certainly won’t forgive you for missing his entire existence.”

Talking to that man was the first time my memory wouldn’t let me off the hook. Even though I’d been drunk when I boarded the executive travel vessel, I had heard all the talk about time dilation and loss and not being able to return to the place you’d left, not really.

I’d thought that was a good thing, at least that night, with my sore and leaking breasts, my scratchy throat, and Tom’s vicious but true words about what an awful person I was still stuck in my ear.

Then, somehow, I’d twisted the memory as I tossed and turned in that single bed, thinking that time dilation somehow worked in reverse—you got farther away and lost time and regained it when you returned.

I knew better. I wasn’t really a scientific illiterate. I was just really good at dismissal and denial, two reasons why I’d had a baby in the first place.

And here’s the sad part—at least to me—the part I usually don’t confess to anyone: I don’t miss the baby. I don’t miss the idea of the baby either. When I think about the sleepless nights, the way his baby nails scratched at my hand whenever he grabbed my finger, the way his sleepy eyes made me want to shake him awake, I knew we were not meant for each other.

Maybe Tom wasn’t the best parent. Maybe Austin would’ve been better off with some adoptive parents or with his paternal grandparents, or maybe just with someone else.

But Austin was certainly better off without me.

That thought, which I’ve had repeatedly over the years, is not a justification for what I’ve done. Just the plain cold truth about who I am.

I’m better off alone. I’m better without being responsible for anyone.

I can barely be responsible for me.

But that’s another story.

***

It is not without some small irony that I’m the go-to woman for all things time dilation. I hadn’t planned it. But I may be emotionally cold, but I’m intellectually hot. If there’s research to be done or information to be gathered or thinking about things that have nothing to do with my emotions, I’m the person for the job.

And here, on the very first large port where the executive “shuttles” stop, my services are in great demand.

First, let me explain the situation here. This is a large port city, the Gateway to the Future, as some wag named it.

The city itself spreads over half a continent, and the space ports are built above the city proper. So, when you’re on the ground and look up, what you see is the scaffolding that holds all those docking ports in place.

No one docks in orbit here. They all come down, and then the executives who don’t have a transfer to some other part of this sector stay for a few days or a month, or sometimes even a year just to get their footing.

They can’t go back any more than I can, but a few of them routinely sue, claiming they haven’t understood their contract.

Most of their contracts are the same. It doesn’t matter what industry they’re involved in. The contracts give them a hefty upfront fee if they choose to take it. The ones who usually sue take the hefty upfront fee and give it to their families.

Why execs? I have no idea. I’d think skilled people who can grow plants and lovely food in a hydroponics garden or folks who make life nicer and prettier would be better. Those skill sets are always in vogue.

But execs? All they have is the ability to manage other people in a controlled environment. And maybe a willingness to work hard on things that no one really cares about. Weirdly enough, that’s a particular skill set too, and it doesn’t matter what kind of job they’re supposed to do. These execs will do it with competence, even if they hate it.

They’re about as alien to me as human beings can get. So I don’t even try to understand them. I particularly don’t understand why they take these crappy deals, but they do.

They sign the contracts and board the executive cruisers, thinking they’re going to go off and work for maybe five years max—which is what their contract says—and then they’ll come home to the same family they left, albeit five years older.

These execs don’t understand time dilation or maybe hadn’t realized that it would have an impact on them. Most of these prizewinners never read the contract at all. They just looked at that hefty upfront fee, figured it would set their family for life, and took the deal.

Then they went very far away. The farther reaches of the sector had a lot of resources and a lot of tech, but not enough human beings to manage it all. Managers are, by nature, cautious types, and they don’t want adventure. So they had to be paid a lot to go far away because recruiting through the ranks when there are very few ranks really doesn’t work.

By the time these execs found me, they would be all but broken, devastated by a decision they’d made for financial reasons without really understanding the emotional underpinnings.

They didn’t even have the same excuse I had: they weren’t drunk when they made the decision. Most of them had weeks—sometimes months—to consider what they were about to do.

I have no idea how these people still missed the time dilation part or misunderstood it or didn’t think it would be a factor for them.

Many told the same lie I considered telling: that they’d been taken against their will. Being a victim was apparently better than being a stupid greedy idiot.

Some of the folks here think it’s an anti-science thread that’s been part of our culture from the get-go. Others think that it’s a failure of education—most of these execs aren’t the brightest lasers in the toolbox. Most of the folks here agree with me though: this was all about greed and money and execs thinking they’d be set for life, not realizing that their family would be set for life, but these poor losers would have to work for the better part of theirs just to repay that upfront fee.

Still, they managed to reach deep into their pockets and find enough resources to pay me—and my services don’t come cheap.

I also take payment upfront, no refunds. Most people don’t like what they hear when I’m done, and a few stiffed me early on. That’s when I inaugurated the no-refund policy and that’s when I tried to warn off potential clients.

Because all I do is gather information for them, but it really isn’t information they can use. They can’t change what they find out, they can’t help, and they can’t do much more than muddle.

In that opening meeting, before I take their money, I warn them that they’re not going to like what they learn. But they make the same mistake they made getting to this place: they think they know better than the person with the experience, the person giving them the advice.

This is where it helps to be emotionally cold. Because I really don’t care if the information hurts them. I really don’t care if they tear up or get angry at me—unless they try to trash my place. I don’t even care if they sue me, because they always lose.

The only time I ever lie to them is when they ask me if I’ve ever researched someone from my past.

“Yeah,” I say, with an air of sadness. That way, they think we’re kindred spirits. That way, I have the credibility to convince a few of them to turn away.

I suppose it’s not a complete lie. The reason I know how to research what happens to relatively anonymous families on a completely different planet so far from here that time bends is because I started to research my own family.

Got far enough to realize that Tom raised Austin and never remarried. Didn’t look any further, though. Didn’t bother with the things I’d do later, like arrest reports and rehab files. Didn’t look at school records or bank accounts. Didn’t examine the genealogy and figure out if I had any grandchildren or great-grandchildren or if the line died out with the kid who waved bye-bye that fateful night.

My rationale? If I did know, it would make no difference in my life. And since it would make no difference, why expend the energy in the search?

I am an enclosed being of one, a person who is completely different than the messy and sloppy drunk who started on this journey.

I really don’t like her, and I don’t like to think about her.

So I don’t.

***

The second big change in my life came when Astra Lin-Wonle paid for an hour of my time to explain the death situation.

I hadn’t known who she was when she sent me the hefty upfront fee. Just another name—and, I assumed—just another executive. I didn’t research her—she hadn’t paid enough yet—and I forgot about her.

She just became a name on my automated calendar, a name that got attached to a person the moment she arrived at my door.

She was small and dark-haired, with black eyes and high cheekbones, and a nose that didn’t fit her face. Her chin was narrow and made her look slightly feral, accenting the intelligence that I would later learn was as formidable as mine.

She wore a black cape over black slacks. The entire outfit looked dramatic and yet professional. Her small feet were encased in small black shoes that seemed impractical for life in this city. Every part of her clothing glistened and shined and seemed like she hadn’t just put it on, she had also dusted it with something to make it seem like it was newer than new.

The automated door to my office let her in at the appropriate time, about fifteen minutes before the appointment. She waited in the tiny antechamber, which allowed me to do a full body scan for weapons and a current background check to make sure there were no outstanding warrants or other criminal details in her history.

When the check came back, listing her as the head coroner for the entire city, I froze, all kinds of possibilities running through my mind. I had no idea why she wanted to hire me, but she’d been in that job for nearly twenty-five years, so she wasn’t one of those bamboozled execs. Maybe one of them did something bad, and they had my information on them.

Her position made it impossible to turn her away. If I did, I’d be ruminating over what she wanted for months, maybe years, afterward. Yes, sometimes I could be obsessive. That was also part of my makeup.

Since she was an official, though, and I was leery of officials (mostly because of some of my drunken adventures), I gave my office a quick once over. It was clean enough. Two chairs, about four feet apart. Mine had wide arms so that I could activate all kinds of recording and emergency backup systems with the touch of a finger.

The systems were a bit old-fashioned, mostly because I wasn’t born here. I could’ve had implants put in that would have attached me to all kinds of systems, but when the implants were offered, I was still drinking and thought maybe the government wanted to control me.

Now, I know the government is too busy to control anyone, and I vaguely regret the decision. Not enough to get the implants, mind you, but enough to consider it from time to time.

I unlocked the door between the antechamber and my office without getting out of my chair. The door swung open, and she entered in a wave of perfume that seemed to cover something sharper, another earthier scent.

She looked at me oddly, maybe expecting some kind of nicety. I don’t traffic in niceties. I waved a hand at the chair.

“Sit,” I said.

She hesitated, apparently not used to being ordered about.

I didn’t move. Nor did I speak again. Either she would sit or she would ask a question. I hoped for sitting, because the questioners were always trouble.

Finally, she squared her shoulders and eased into the chair.

I waited.

When she realized I wasn’t going to speak, she said, “I understand you can dig through a massive amount of information in a very short time.”

Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

I didn’t nod or encourage her, though. I continued to wait.

“I have a project—if you can call it that—which needs someone like you. The city will pay you at your going rates, which,” she said, as if she couldn’t trust me (and maybe she couldn’t), “I have already investigated.”

“I don’t work for governments,” I said.

“Well, this really isn’t a government job so much as a government favor,” she said.

Despite myself, I was interested. “I’m willing to listen,” I said.

She looked at me oddly, but I wasn’t about to agree to listen, only to find out that there was some kind of confidential nightmare thing I had agreed to just by opening my ears.

“Okay.” She sighed. “Forgive me if I tell you something you already know.”

I nodded just once, hoping that encouraged her to continue.

“We have a lot of transients in this city, and they are unusual.” It felt like she was beginning a settled speech.

That I did know, clearly. I built my business on them.

“A number of people manage to forge their identity before they get on the shuttles that bring them here.” She watched me, maybe thinking I would be surprised.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew that almost as well as I knew my own name. A few of those unfortunates had come to me, trying to figure out a way to recapture the life they had abandoned. They couldn’t, of course. And I really had no inclination to help them.

“A lot of them die here,” she said, her gaze on mine.

I started. That I did not expect, although it made sense.

“Suicide?” I asked because that makes sense to me, too. The despair I’ve seen in my work has often been deep and dark.

I’ve often suggested that those who go to an even darker place after hearing news of their family get some kind of professional help. I mean, after all, they can afford me, so they should be able to afford a therapist, counsellor, religious leader, or someone who can assist them in figuring out how to deal with the situation they find themselves in.

I might be emotionally cold, but I know that having a lot of clients die on my watch is bad for business. Besides, people need help. I got some, finally, when I realized that drinking yourself to death wasn’t as much fun as it was cracked up to be.

“Some commit suicide, yes,” she said, “but most of the suicides identify themselves for us. It’s part of putting their affairs in order.”

That made sense to me. I met a lot of those people. Finding out what happened to their family was part of putting their affairs in order as well.

She seemed frustrated that I wasn’t asking follow-up questions. Apparently, she was usually as tight-lipped as I was.

She folded her hands on her lap. Her hands were not manicured, which made sense now. She was one of the few people in this city who actually used those hands for some kind of labor. Hers involved bodies and chemicals and investigations. Even if she used some kind of device to peek under the skin, she still had to handle that skin. Move it, change it, shove it into some kind of bag. The city didn’t let robots do that—some bad public thing happened a while ago that made people believe they were not respected after death—and the city made the wrong kind of change: the kind that made work harder for the actual humans without really solving the problem.

“We need your help with some categories of unsolved,” Lin-Wonle said primly.

Maybe she was being deliberately vague. Maybe she was trying to force me to ask questions. If that was the case, then it was working.

“What do you mean, categories of unsolved?”

She inclined her head a little, as if she didn’t want to elucidate. But I waited again, and this time it took her only a fraction of a second to say,

“Some deaths,” she said. “They’re haunting.”

Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t that.

“I’m retiring soon,” she said. “And, I would like…”

She gave me an odd smile, one that was uncomfortable and didn’t quite reach her eyes. It made her feral little face softer and sadder, if that was possible.

“I would like,” she said a bit more firmly, “to know who they were and why this happened to them.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said. I wasn’t complaining. But if she was trying to resolve an entire career in a few months, and she had hundreds of names for me, what she was asking wasn’t possible—no matter how much she paid me.

“It might be,” she said. “But you wouldn’t do all of it.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“We don’t have the resources to research the names,” she said.

“Don’t have the resources?” I asked. “And yet you’re going to pay me?”

“I’m not referring to financial resources,” she said. “I’m talking about systemic resources. We’d have to set up a system to do the work that you already do. We don’t have the resources for that.”

That made sense to me. It took me a long time to figure out how to find information across years and distance.

“Once you find out the person’s real name,” she said, “we might be able to take the investigation from there. If it’s worthwhile.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you have me research the name, doesn’t that automatically make it worthwhile? After all, you will have invested my time and your money into this.”

She gave me a small smile. I couldn’t tell if it was condescending or not. “I’ve already invested time into these people. There’s something about each one of them that has caught me, held me. I want to find out who they are.”

I stared at her, the lines in her face that time and stress had created, the dark wedge of exhaustion under her eyes that looked permanent, the way she held herself as if her shoulders were so tense that they hadn’t relaxed in more than a decade.

I usually did not understand my clients. I never figured out why anyone who abandoned friends and family wanted to find out what had happened to them, across time and distance, impossible to resolve.

There was no logic in it, and the emotion often felt false. They couldn’t have cared, could they? Hadn’t they felt the relief that I had when I realized I never had to look in Tom’s face again or feel that thread of revulsion at Austin’s grasping hands against my skin?

If they cared, they wouldn’t have left. That was the logic. The human logic, the one that the man on the ship had tried to appeal to when he looked at drunk me and told me that I was about to make a decision I couldn’t take back.

I lacked that small human element. I never really cared about anyone except maybe myself, and even that was in doubt. After all, I hadn’t treated myself well.

Some would argue that I still wasn’t treating myself well. I had a small apartment, an interesting job, but I stayed away from people, I did not do much beyond the basic self care. I knew no one would care if I disappeared again. I wasn’t even sure I cared. I certainly didn’t care about my future past that day, that night, and maybe the following week.

But this woman, this Astra Lin-Wonle, she cared. The deaths, the bodies she had found, the bodies she couldn’t identify, they haunted her. Haunted was a word that interested me. It suggested so much more than a need-to-know.

This was an obsession to know, and I almost asked her why she had elevated these people, this group of nameless dead, into something that caught her attention and wouldn’t let her go.

But I didn’t ask. Instead, I said, “How many are there?”

“Two hundred,” she said.

The number startled me. For some reason, I expected it to be smaller. Yet she had said categories. As if people could be placed into neat groups, groups that she expected to file away in neat spaces.

These people, this group of nameless dead, had not fit at all.

“I have had hundreds,” she said. “Hundreds of false names, people who aren’t who they say they are. But they are usually easy to resolve. They make mistakes. They booked passage with their real name, or they kept their real identification from wherever they arrived from. Or a holo of family, with time, date, and location built in.”

I’d seen all of those things when I researched for clients. Sometimes they would come into this office and sit down and slide an artifact at me.

This is all I have left of that life, they would say, as if the item—the holo, the identification, a ring, a necklace, a bit of fabric—was the most precious thing in the universe.

Now, after hearing her, the number—the two hundred—surprised me in a different way. It was larger than expected. If she had categories of dead, and most came with false names but real artifacts, then she should only have a tiny few who had nothing at all.

“These ‘categories,’” I said. “They arrived with nothing then?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “Some had artifacts, but not their artifacts. Others had names, and the names were a tangled maze of connections that, at the root, had nothing to do with the person at all. And some had nothing. No clothes, no identification, no identifying marks, and nothing that made them recognizable to anyone.”

She shook her head, the lines around her eyes growing deeper.

“You’d think,” she said, “that someone would have seen them. Someone would have wondered about them. Someone would have cared.”

“People don’t care,” I blurted, and she looked at me, seeing me for the first time.

Her head tilted. “Is this why you do the job? Because you care?”

I barked out a laugh. It was the opposite.

I did this job because I didn’t care. Because it didn’t break my heart to see another woman sob when she realized her abandoned children had suffered after her disappearance. It didn’t break my heart to watch a man look at the holo of his so-called beloved marrying another person.

I had begun to suspect there was no heart to break.

“No,” I said. “I don’t really care.”

“Except for the money,” she said, nodding.

That probably made sense to her, considering the question I had asked. I just didn’t like doing work for no pay. Money was how I kept score, nothing more.

Score for what—in what game—I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. The money mattered only as a number, not as something avaricious. If I had found a way to keep score with shoes, I would have used shoes.

“Not the money,” I said. For some reason, I felt the need to correct the record with her.

But I did not know how to explain more. How do you tell someone who cares too much that you care too little? I wasn’t sure she could even understand.

“The knowledge, then,” she said, trying to categorize me.

“The challenge,” I said, giving her a category. It wasn’t the correct category, but it would do for now.

She grunted, the kind of response people gave when they had no idea what someone else was talking about, but they had to make some kind of noise in acknowledgement. The sideways glance she gave me was measuring as if she couldn’t quite figure me out.

“You said someone would have cared,” I said. “Someone should have remembered them. And that is probably true. But not necessarily here. A person can stay anonymous forever here.”

Her eyes narrowed. She was still taking my measure.

“These cases of yours,” I said, “they’re all suicides?”

“Very few,” she said. “And even those I’m not certain of. They seem like suicides. Suicides make sense, until you understand that suicides follow a pattern. Unless they accidentally overdose or do something that kills them suddenly, suicides prepare. Many of them even practice.”

Something I didn’t know, then.

“Very few of these people prepared and almost none of them practiced.” She ran a hand along the seam of her black slacks, smoothing them out, even though they didn’t need it. Precision and just a bit of nerves.

These cases meant even more to her than she was saying.

“What if I’m not able to help you?” I asked.

“You’ll get paid,” she said. “We don’t pay by the job. We’ll pay by the time you invest. We’ll buy a set number of hours each week. We will, of course, want to see evidence that you worked those hours.”

“I work for myself for a reason,” I said. “It is so no one keeps track of me or my time.”

“Then how would you like us to pay you?” she asked. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find out anything that can help us.”

“I don’t give that kind of guarantee anyway,” I said. “You’ll pay me like any other client. I will try until I find something or until you decide you’ve invested enough money. As my contact information says, I want a retainer upfront per case, and then I will work on that case until I see it through.”

“We have two hundred,” she said. “You can’t do them all at once.”

That was true. I couldn’t. If I did, the government would be my only client.

“When do you retire?” I asked.

“In five years,” she said.

She was a planner, a woman who knew what she wanted and knew it took time to get whatever it was. For her, five years was “soon.”

“Give me five per month,” I said. “Oldest cases first, since those are the ones that might take more time than the others.”

“All right,” she said. “What if you can do more per month?”

“Then I’ll take work from my other clients.” I didn’t quite smile at her, but I tried to soften my words. “I’m not going to work solely for you.”

She let out a shaky breath. That was the second sign I’d seen of nerves, the first being that movement along the seam of her perfectly creased pants.

“I can’t give you the ones that frustrate me the most?” she asked.

“No.” I wasn’t being cruel. I needed an order that I could understand, not some vague emotional reaction that she was having. “Oldest to newest. I will report to you as each case closes or at the end of every month if I can’t find anything.”

“What if I don’t want to work that way?” she asked.

I opened my hands just a little. “You’re free to find someone else.”

There was no one else. I was the only person that I knew of who did this kind of work—in this city, anyway. En route to the so-called Gateway of the Future, maybe there were other people like me, but I doubted it.

I would have heard, or tripped over their work. Because, as far as I was concerned, their work was always in the past.

She sighed softly. Then she nodded.

“You’re going to be a contractor with the city,” she said. “That means there will be a lot of documentation up front. I’ll do as much of it as I can and give you the rest to fill out.”

“I’ve worked for the city before,” I said. “I’m on file.”

She looked surprised. “I thought you were a lone wolf.”

“A handful of people used city funds to make sure that new hires were who they said they were. Those investigations couldn’t go through the usual channels.” Because they had been politically sensitive. One of them had even involved the mayor.

Lin-Wonle frowned.

“Put my name into your system,” I said. “My personal name, not the business name. You’ll find all you need. Then give me the first five names.”

“How about ten, and you can move on if you—”

“Five,” I said. “I have rules. You’ll need to follow them, or I’ll cancel our agreement.”

City work tended to creep into other things until it took over your life. That had happened to me once.

It was never happening again.

“You drive a hard bargain,” she said.

I almost said, Especially when I don’t want to do the work. But that statement wasn’t really true. I was curious. Lin-Wonle seemed competent enough to do everything on her own.

Cases that stymied her would challenge me.

I hadn’t lied to her about that.

I hadn’t lied to her about anything.

And that in itself was unusual.

***

The work wasn’t as hard as Astra Lin-Wonle made it sound. The first five cases took me less than a week. The second five only a few days. I wasn’t really investigating so much as organizing information, discovering identities, tracing journeys, things I normally did.

All ten of the cases had been execs who had come here on similar transports to the one that had brought me. Once I had a real name, I was to turn that over to Lin-Wonle, which I did.

She seemed happy enough.

We worked that way for six months before I hit my first wall. One of the cases she sent me involved a body found outside a dive bar near the port, a dive bar that no longer existed.

The body was male and badly beaten. He had no identifying marks that Lin-Wonle could find, and nothing in the area around him gave any clue as to his identity.

He had been dumped.

Lin-Wonle did give me his DNA, though. She had processed it through her usual databases and had come up dry.

I had several other databases that she couldn’t use. The city had deals to share information with other governments all over the planet, but couldn’t afford deals with various sector governments. I didn’t have to participate in that kind of cross-agency cooperation. I was a single operator who was trying to help people.

When I approached agencies that way, most of them allowed me access or gave me assistance that they wouldn’t give Lin-Wonle, not without some interagency b.s.

Then there were the databases that I had found over the years, the ones that had been abandoned as their organizations failed or moved to a new system or simply disappeared. I was working from the present to the past as measured by one long trip of an executive space cruiser. I had a lot of touchpoints because over the years, I had had a lot of clients.

The DNA was a great starting point, but it required a methodical search, one that took more time than the kinds of searches I was usually doing for Lin-Wonle. I had to peer into distant family connections, trying to find something that this body had in common somewhere within range of this particular space port.

I was making an assumption: I assumed he had arrived through the port. I had to, at least at first, because my databases all focused on the past.

I figured if his trip was supposed to originate here, then he’d be a local and Lin-Wonle would have information on him, somewhere. But she didn’t either.

Just the body, dumped, behind a no-longer existent dive bar.

I remembered the bar. I went there shortly after I arrived. It was a filthy cubby in a row of even dirtier storefronts, the kind that people expected near the port. Most of the goods sold there had been familiar ones to the folks who just got off the ships, items that couldn’t be found as easily away from the port.

Of course, anyone who went into one of those places paid a premium for whatever it was that their heart desired.

Me, I desired whiskey, which was available elsewhere in the city. I just didn’t know it yet.

When I squeezed myself inside, saw the sad customers sitting at the five round tables, and the even sadder customers sitting at the bar itself, I almost stopped and left.

But I didn’t. I went to the bar, startled to discover a human behind it, a hard-faced woman with even harder eyes.

I ordered a whiskey and she said, “We don’t got that here.”

I knew she was lying. The guy next to me had a glassful and wasn’t really nursing it.

I eyed it, then looked at her and she shook her head just a little.

“Look, honey. I’ve seen you around just enough to know you’re living nearby. So lemme give you a tip.” She leaned in front of the bottles of booze on the wall, either to block them or so that I could see them. I wasn’t sure which. “What we got here—what anyone has down at the docks—you can’t afford. You want to drink yourself into oblivion, drink downtown or in the comfort of your own home. Here, you get all the crazies who just got off the boat and you get to pay extra to watch them tear up the place. A lot extra.”

I didn’t move. I wanted a drink badly enough that I was going to ignore her. And she knew it.

So she waved a hand at me. “Get outta here. Because I ain’t serving you.”

And the drunk guy next to me slurred, “And I ain’t sharing.”

I’d never been denied service in any kind of bar before. It felt odd. It caught my attention the way that not much else had. Maybe because it didn’t feel personal. Or maybe because a woman I hadn’t known had shown me a kindness.

A lot of people had shown me a kindness since I left the family, kindnesses I didn’t deserve.

She was busy with another customer—talking and pretending to laugh—by the time I finally managed to move. I left that bar, and thought about that incident every single time I passed it over the years, until the bar vanished entirely, to be replaced by some automated hair-cutting service.

I wondered where she had gone, I wondered where the new drinkers went to drown their sorrows, and I wondered how the hell I had gone from craving whiskey late at night to not having a drink in more than thirty years.

The bar was a turning point. Not of the and I will never drink again kind, but of the finally noticing that other people still existed kind.

Somehow, I went from there to here, investigating part of a death that occurred behind that bar long before it closed. A death that, truth be told, could have been just as empty and meaningless as my own would have been.

I wondered if the bar was a clue. I wondered if the neighborhood was a clue.

I wondered if the cops had even bothered to look at all of the clues.

I didn’t really want to do the local investigatory work, not yet anyway, so I put it off. I didn’t have to finish this job to get the next five. Lin-Wonle wanted the work finished before she quit, so she continued to hand me cases whether I’d helped her with the others or not.

I kept investigating Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, as I had privately taken to calling him, as I fulfilled my contract with the other new cases.

Just because Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy ended up at the port didn’t mean that he had come through on any ship, and certainly didn’t mean that he had come via one of the longer distance ships.

But I was making that assumption. I figured Lin-Wonle had looked at the local angle. (If not, she should have.) I had one investigatory problem that I didn’t confess to her.

My databases all came from worlds that fed the executive tract here, not from other worlds that ships still traveled to. Some of those worlds sent people back here on various ships after they had worked through their contracts.

By then, those people understood time dilation, and they knew they would lose years again. But they usually didn’t care.

I didn’t have information from those places. I didn’t have databases to tap or agreements with the current governments of those places. Nor had I ever investigated their historical databases.

I didn’t want to make an agreement with those governments and/or the corporations that sent their executives into a bright, unknown future. Communication over long distances was a pain in the butt, and, quite frankly, the coroner’s office wasn’t paying me enough to volunteer to have my butt pained.

After six months, I set Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy aside, figuring I’d come back to that investigation.

And then I tripped on another of the files that Lin-Wonle had given me. It came—as they all did—complete with holographic images of the deceased.

I had looked at the first three images, back when she started giving me the cases, and I had decided that holographic life-sized images of corpses did not belong anywhere in my office.

I had switched off the automation in the files that Lin-Wonle had given me, so bruised and bloodied dead people weren’t prone across my workspace. But I discovered that I needed to see their faces.

And just as with Lin-Wonle, the nameless ones—the ones it seemed like I couldn’t solve—bothered me.

The second one wasn’t a guy. It was a woman, older like me. No real identifying marks.

Like me.

The image had risen from the file—her lined face, her cloudy sunken eyes, and her body, from the armpits upward. She was naked, of course, because the image I saw had been developed just before the autopsy.

Lin-Wonle had edited those images, because they were part of her reports. The images were actually vids that showed the entire autopsy, from the external examination of the corpse to the internal, should it be necessary.

She had accidentally left one of those once, and I managed to shut it down before it got too gruesome. The things she did for her job made me appreciate mine all the more.

I dug into the file she sent me about this woman. It said precisely nothing. One of the attending officers thought maybe the dead woman worked at the same dive bar as Naked Dead Dive Bar Guy, confirming what I knew about the place. It actually had human employees.

But I also knew that she had not been the woman I had seen.

Most of the bars in this city didn’t have human employees. Just robots and automated serving procedures. It kept the pour counts accurate in the mixed drinks, but did add a certain blandness to the alcoholic offerings all over the city.

Before I dug into her file, I looked up the bar.

It was called, unoriginally, The Watering Hole. There were places in every single city all over the sector with a similar name, although if I were naming businesses—particularly dive bars—I would never voluntarily use the word “hole” in conjunction with them.

Or maybe that was a marketing tool. Because dive bars really weren’t for the casual drinker. They were for the down-on-their-luck sad sacks who wanted a safe place to drink, no questions asked.

I paused in my reminiscences, thinking about the handful of places I’d visited as I fled my family so very long ago.

Twice I had gotten off the ship and twice I had reboarded it. I took one look around whatever port city we had landed in and I figured I didn’t want to stay there.

I hadn’t wanted to stay here either, but I had because that was the trip I had paid for, not because I liked the location.

But I vividly recalled two other Watering Holes at both ports. Same kind of place—narrow slice of real estate with only one obvious door. In one case, the door had been so grimy, I hadn’t wanted to touch it. In the other, I had paused, remembering that I didn’t have a lot of money and the booze was free on the ship.

In fact, it was the familiarity of the look and name of the Watering Hole that had brought me to it here, all those years ago.

I sat back down, shoved both files aside with the swipe of a hand, and started digging.

There were a lot of businesses—and I mean a lot—that operated on all the executive cruiser stops along the way. I had never given those businesses a lot of thought, but I did now.

Because something was itching at me.

I’d never dug into the companies before. I hadn’t even investigated the personnel files, because my clients were known. They wanted to know about their families, and their families clearly didn’t work on these ships.

I almost asked Lin-Wonle about the companies, and then decided not to. I had no idea how much money these companies brought into the city, but I would have wagered it was a fair amount.

Maybe that was why she had come to me. Maybe the nameless dead weren’t as nameless as they appeared. Maybe she needed someone outside her system to investigate the other dead.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have put more of those cases into my pile? So far, I’d only had two that were even remotely difficult.

I did not know, and didn’t want to guess. Her motives mattered less to me than the work itself.

I actually did like challenges. And I had found one here.

***

Forty-seven starship corporations carried passengers across the sector, along the route that I had happened into one drunk night. Forty-seven starship corporations, none of which shared the same corporate DNA.

I checked.

The company that had ferried me from one life to another had no complaints lodged against it, except for the obvious fold-ins. Those were usually easily dismissed because the company had been folded into other suits, usually against some bigger corporation. That corporation was the one that the person who had lost their entire life in exchange for a crapload of money often got sued for misrepresenting the work.

I examined a few of the lawsuits. The corporations always had the proper documentation. The starship company’s part in the case always got tossed out. Several judges—different ones in different jurisdictions—all informed the poor, hapless executive that courts did not have to protect someone against signing a bad contract unless the contract was egregious, which this wasn’t.

There was plenty of evidence that these executive schlubs were supposed to get educated about their journeys long before travel commenced.

Most of them simply chose not to take advantage of the opportunities.

I lost several days to deep-diving into about thirty of the forty-seven corporations. Those were easy to investigate. Corporate documents all properly filed. Information at the ready. Lawsuits mostly won, and those that weren’t required them to pay another crapload of money.

After every single crapload, those thirty companies would alter their practices, their contracts, and their behaviors to make sure that whoever climbed onto one of the ships did so fully educated—or at least, had every opportunity to become fully educated.

The remaining seventeen? That was where it all got interesting.

Seven of them were as old as time itself—or so it seemed. They were the granddaddies of all the corporations, and many of their practices were grandfathered in.

I had to investigate them because some of the oldest cases that Lin-Wonle had given me had involved those seven corporations.

They were either out of business now or sold and absorbed by one of the legit corporations that were easy to investigate.

The remaining ten presented me with a small mountain of issues.  I found more corporate name changes than someone escaping a criminal past. Each corporation took me down more dead ends than I expected. They seemed to be hiding something, but what I couldn’t tell.

I got very wrapped up in the overall investigation of the corporations. I like research. I like information. I like finding things out.

It frustrates me when information gets hidden from me, as someone was doing here. So I searched even more, taking the time out to investigate each group of names Lin-Wonle sent me.

Truth be told, I was hoping I’d find another difficult-to-identify nameless. Because I figured if I had three points of a triangle, I would have enough information to make a difference. That wasn’t exactly true, but it felt true.

I figured it might open a few more doors, at any rate.

Instead, I spent weeks on the corporations, until I realized that one of them ran more than star cruisers. One of them rented out properties in the ports of various cities, ports where the star cruisers stopped.

Several of those rental sites rented to Watering Holes in the various cities. Not here any longer, though. Not for years.

I felt like I was onto something now. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was searching.

I stopped everything else I was doing and dug into the history of the Watering Hole here.

Not that there was much. Twenty years ago, the city changed its policy regarding businesses around the port.

The city decided to take over the entire area. Instead of buying out the businesses at the going rates, the city used some of its eminent domain laws to offer a token fee and take over the entire area.

Except for the block with the Watering Hole.

There, the city simply reclaimed all of the businesses and replaced them with tiny automated shops like the hairstyling salon.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t find out why.

***

Lin-Wonle never sent me the latest files. She always insisted on dropping them off. Sometimes she told me her history with the deceased, not that I cared, and sometimes she stepped in as if she was checking on my progress, as if she was my boss.

I never answered her questions on those occasions. I was always too annoyed to say much more than hello or thanks.

But the drop-off after I had used all of my tricks to find out what was going on with that block, I invited her into my office.

She came wearing a gray version of the cape and slacks that she had worn at that very first meeting more than a year before.

I waved a hand at one of my chairs, sat down in the other, and said without any kind of greeting to soften my words, “I need you to look through city records for me. I can’t access the information that I need.”

She looked surprised. Of the sixty-plus names she had sent me so far, I’d only delayed on two. She had told me the month before that she was pleased with my work.

She had even implied that some names would be impossible to find.

I knew she was heading toward her retirement, and from her perspective, getting answers on most of these cases was better than no answers at all.

But that wasn’t my perspective at all.

“What do you need?” she asked in a tone I’d never heard from her before. It was carefully neutral.

“The Watering Hole,” I said. “Two of the bodies you sent me were found behind it.”

“Yes, one of the portside bars that the city closed down years ago. That area was a lot scarier thirty years ago. If anyone went down there, they had a good chance of being mugged or beaten or worse.” She folded her hands over her lap. “I don’t remember this particular bar. It wasn’t even the worst offender. That was—”

“I don’t care,” I said. I hated chatty people. I thought she had known that. “I’m interested in this bar and the block it was on. The city reclaimed that block but didn’t pay the corporation for taking the property. The city just took it, and I want to know why.”

“I’ll look it up for you to be sure,” she said, “but if I remember correctly, the city seized a lot of businesses known for illicit activity.”

“What kind of illicit activity?” I asked.

“The kind you would expect near the port,” she said. “Mostly selling banned and illegal substances.”

“Mostly,” I said. “What else?”

“That I don’t recall,” she said. “I do remember the Clean Up The Port campaign went on for nearly a decade.”

Then she squinted at me.

“I thought you were in business at that point,” she said. “Surely, you remember this.”

“I usually don’t care what happens in the city,” I said.

“But you do now,” she said.

“You want all the names or not?” I asked, maybe a little more sharply than I should have.

“I do,” she said, sounding surprised. “This will get them for me?”

How the hell should I know? I almost said, but I had enough common sense not to alienate her too badly.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m wondering why the information wasn’t easily available in the first place.”

The smile she gave me was condescending. It made me regret refraining from snapping at her a moment ago.

“We’re a port city, Gateway to the Future, as they like to call us. The port shuttles people off-planet on business, yes, but many just come here to visit our attractions, see the various resorts and natural wonders. That’s a good 75% of our income.” She added that in her didactic tone as if I should’ve known all of that as well.

I’d seen the ads, of course, and wondered what kind of idiot came to a place just to see something that could be easily recreated with a full virtual experience. Hell, some of those experiences came with sense impressions—water droplets pelting the viewer (or seeming to) while they were looking at a waterfall.

Something in my look must have caught her because she gave me one of those derisive smiles.

“Oh,” she said. “Such things are beneath you.”

“You’re telling me that the city believes if someone found out that the port was a hotbed of criminal activity, they wouldn’t come here?” I asked, trying to keep the incredulousness from my tone. “Even though that’s been how port cities have operated since time immemorial?”

She shrugged. “I don’t run the city government. I just work for it.”

“So the information was buried, lost, hidden,” I said. “Pretty well, too.”

Although I probably could have found it if I had been willing to break into the city’s systems. I had figured talking to Lin-Wonle was easier.

I was beginning to regret that decision.

“Do you still want the specific information?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

***

She brought me the information a week later on a small protected network device. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to share any of this stuff, not that it mattered.

What she had were city records of the decision to buy out the area, along with the properties to be confiscated because the illegal activities there rose above the 50% level, whatever that meant.

The city was good at hiding its sins, and I didn’t care enough to ferret them out.

Instead, I pursued another path.

I looked at arrest records going back half a century. At first, I didn’t find a lot. Exactly what Lin-Wonle had told me. Illegal substances, history of muggings, beatings, and the occasional homicide—with an easily identified victim.

Then, from a handful of records, forty years old, I found a criminal code listing that had no corresponding description to the current criminal code.

Just a series of numbers and letters that looked like they referred to some law or another, but nothing I could find.

And the hell of it was, a lot of them came from the block around the Watering Hole. A handful originated at The Watering Hole itself.

Finally, something I could easily research. Laws that were on the books but either got scrubbed or changed never really went away.

I had to dig to find the code, but I did.

And it made my non-existent heart hurt.

***

Two cases hogged all of the attention. These cases occurred nearly 100 years ago when the Gateway to the Future sounded more like the Gateway to Hell. The city was smaller then, the port even more dangerous than it was now.

Andries Schweinzinger, scion of the Schweinzinger clan, one of the city’s founding families, was found staggering down the street near the Watering Hole. He was naked, his hands bound behind his back, his hair nearly gone, his tongue black.

He was shouting that he’d been a victim and some local bypasser, someone who didn’t stick around, used one of the kiosks (now gone) to contact the police. They arrived surprisingly quickly and one of them was conscientious enough to film the entire encounter, maybe because she recognized Schweinzinger.

He was clearly on something. Eyes crazed, drool on the side of his mouth. He kept repeating that he’d been kidnapped and they were going to sell him to the highest bidder.

Because he was rich, he got some special treatment and some vilification in the local media. The media thought, like the police, that he was hallucinating. The substance he had taken should have rendered him unconscious, but one of the doctors who treated him claimed that Schweinzinger had built up a tolerance to the drug over the past year or two. Apparently, it was highly available at the time and was being used by the inevitable partiers.

Schweinzinger found himself the butt of jokes, but he hired a good attorney who was fighting the case everywhere, from the legal side to the publicity nightmare.

It looked like Schweinzinger had made up the accusation until a woman screamed her way out of the Watering Hole, naked, terrible bruises on her wrists where—she said—she managed to collapse her hands enough to get them out of restraints.

She was at the opposite end of the social strata from Schweinzinger, and her name would never have appeared anywhere if it wasn’t for the bizarre history she shared with him.

Lilly Wright was young and pretty and exceptionally smart. Graduated at the top of her class three days before and had spent the post-graduation ceremony partying. Her friends claimed she left them somewhere near the ports, but no one thought much about it.

Until she screamed as she fled the Watering Hole, claiming they were going to sell her to the highest bidder.

The city had no trouble finding people to blame. The names meant nothing to me, and I really didn’t care about them at all. The charging documents didn’t use the codes that I had found, and I wanted to know why these cases appeared when I dug for the numbers.

It took time, but I found my answer.

The cases changed the laws here. Turned out that there was a kidnapping ring working the docks. They’d take a young, bright, competent person, drug them, and sell their “contract” to someone on one of the many ships going through, taking the victim to places far from here, places from which—someone ominously said—there was no way to return.

When I saw that, I sat down. Hard. I’d been pacing my office, listening, looking, reading, and watching until that point. But places from which there was no return. That was anywhere in this sector, provided the ship traveled far enough fast enough.

Hell, my business was based on people being unable to return. The fact that I could answer their questions simply meant that the answers they sought were some part of some historical record somewhere. That was it.

I never vouched for accuracy. I just did what I could, and usually people left thinking they knew what was what.

The kidnapping laws had to change to accommodate the nightmares taking place at the port. Because if the kidnappings had been successful, there would have been nothing to charge. Schweinzinger and Wright would have been off-planet, and nothing could have brought them back.

No one would have known what had happened to them.

So the law changed to incorporate attempted kidnapping with some involuntary servitude laws to ratchet up the crimes from serious to so damn serious that whoever tried it would get life in prison, which was, for here, ironically, off-planet, just not far enough away to cause any time ripples.

Schweinzinger became the poster child for the law, but Wright was the one who wrestled it into being. It became her life’s work, making sure that no one was ever trafficked out of this city again.

She managed to clean up the port more or less, except for one aspect.

A lot of people arrived here, fully dressed and not drugged in any way, but impoverished and terrified, claiming they had been kidnapped at the beginning of their journey, lightyears and decades from where they had started.

They’d been drinking or partying or in the wrong bar at the wrong time, and somehow, they woke up on a ship days later when they were too far out to return home.

The city found enough evidence of a crime to use that code to charge ship owners and ship workers with enhanced kidnapping. But the kidnapping ring was larger than ships and ship workers. They all claimed they were doing it at the behest of one faraway corporation or another.

But there was a major legal issue.

The actual kidnappings occurred off-world, decades ago in real time. The original kidnappers might even have been dead since most of them never traveled on the ships. Those folks just got paid by the able bodies they’d provided to the underhanded shipping companies who brought workers to far-flung places.

Turned out that some of the faraway corporations believed it was easier to buy people than it was to pay lifetime contracts. The difference in upfront money was staggering. People could be sold illegally much more cheaply than entire families could be bought off.

The legal issues got more complicated the deeper I looked. There were the jurisdictional suits, the claims that the law sought to regulate behavior that the city had no right to regulate. They could prevent suspected criminal enterprises from using the port, but they couldn’t legislate behavior on other planets, behavior that had often happened before any of the attorneys, juries, or judges had been born.

The law was quietly abandoned. The city used the old kidnapping statutes on the books to handle cases like Schweinzinger’s—of which there were fewer and fewer as the area around the port got cleaned up. As for people who claimed they’d been kidnapped elsewhere and brought here, there were informal inquiries, halfway houses, places they could go, often getting protected refugee status if they wanted to go that route.

Most, though, just abandoned ship here and fled. The people running the ships never did pursue them, or rather, never pursued them once they got here.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, feeling pieces fall into place. I finally understood why some of the people who came to me seemed so very desperate to find out about their families.

Those people hadn’t stupidly signed some contract without reading it. They’d been taken, brought here, and knew they couldn’t go back.

They had not only come to me for answers, they had probably come to me for comfort as well.

Whoops.

But this was something Lin-Wonle should have known. Except that the codes had vanished from the record.

Unless Lin-Wonle had been a student of history, she wouldn’t have known about the law. It was quietly buried as a mistake.

If I was a different kind of person, I would have figured out why the law had been abandoned and information about it buried rather than some activists retooling it so that it would work better.

Very few people alive were old enough to know about this law. Very few.

But it caught me. I shut down all of my systems, stood, and went to the private part of my office.

I was shaking.

I trusted my memory. I had evidence of my own choice. I remembered how I felt around Austin and Tom. I remember how hard that ship employee had worked to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake.

But…

That moment at the Watering Hole bothered me. Both moments, at both Watering Holes, the other far from here.

The drinks are cheaper on the ship.

I had been easy—at least at that first port stop. It hadn’t taken much to force me to return to the ship.

But what about others? People who really wanted to escape? How had they been treated?

I would never know, but I could guess.

I let out a small breath of air and realized that I felt something. I felt something strongly enough that it actually filtered through every protection I had set up within myself.

I was furious.

I knew how hard the damn trip was for someone like me, someone who had no regrets.

I couldn’t quite imagine how hard it would be for someone who hadn’t wanted to come in the first place.

No wonder Lin-Wonle had seen so many suicides. No wonder people’s behaviors made no sense.

Particularly since most of them had no recourse.

I didn’t know, and I didn’t check, but I would wager that there was no real way to sue those shipping companies either for intentional harm. Since the crews rotated out, they could profess ignorance of what happened, and probably had.

I paced for a few minutes, wishing the unaccustomed emotion would go away.

It was staying. It made me want to punch something.

It made me want to go to the port and yell at someone.

It made me want to find a local bar and have a drink to calm down all the messy feelings.

I stopped.

I had been looking in the wrong databases.

I had been looking at people who had voluntarily taken ships away from their cushy homes.

I’d been looking at port records.

I needed to search missing person databases. Not here, but at the various points of origin.

I needed to find out who, if anyone, had disappeared from their homes.

***

Missing person databases are messy things. Most places keep them up for a few years, but if the missing person had been gone for a decade or more, the record got lost in the chum that was all crime for a location. Sure, they remained in the missing person database or whatever some place called that database, but no one looked, no one cared, no one really figured out what was going on.

It took me weeks to find the proper databases. I had to trace most of the ships, where they originated and where they were heading. The oldest records were extremely old, and in systems even my high-end research center couldn’t easily access.

It took me weeks to get more than 1,000 new databases into my system. By then, Lin-Wonle had given me more bodies. I solved those, but I did something I hadn’t thought of before.

I cross-referenced them.

Then I wished I hadn’t.

I cross-referenced most of the cases she had given me, and found a good half of them included people on the missing persons database.

But then, to give myself a foundation, I looked myself up.

And found that Tom had reported me missing as well.

What was worse was that he was one of those sad sacks who checked every few months to see if someone—anyone—was still following up on the case.

When I saw that, I actually left my office. I walked down two miles to the entertainment district and stopped just outside it.

I had been heading to get drunk.

There were two filthy benches near one of the venues. Bright lights flashed, the cobblestone sidewalk was littered with empties, some of them old enough to be encrusted in dirt.

No one cleaned up down here. The air even smelled foul—rotted food, sour beer, and a miasma of rancid smells that I couldn’t quite identify.

I still sat down.

I had to. My legs wouldn’t hold me.

The stupid son of a bitch had never remarried. He had raised our child, but he had never remarried.

Instead, he had tried to get the local authorities to search for me for years.

That stupid son of a bitch had actually loved me. Just like he said he had.

The problem was me. The problem had always been me. The problem would forever be me.

My lack of feeling, my unwillingness to learn how to be inside a family. My unwillingness to do the difficult things.

A drink would help. A drink at that very moment would put the feelings back where they belonged.

The messy anger. The even messier regret.

And the sorrow. Oh, dear god. There was sorrow underneath it all.

A sorrow I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying for most of my adult life.

***

I have no idea how long I ended up sitting there. I eventually stood up. I did not go into the entertainment district.

I did not buy a drink, then or ever.

I returned to the life I had built. The life I had chosen one drunken night so long ago. The life I said I preferred.

Two days later, when I felt as much like my old self as I probably ever would, I contacted Lin-Wonle. I invited her to my office.

When she came, I explained what I found.

The color drained from her skin, leaving it an ash-gray. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and didn’t move for the longest moment.

Then she squared her shoulders, sat up, and thanked me.

“We’re done now,” she said.

“But,” I said, “you said you had two hundred cases. We’re not there yet.”

“I know.” Her mouth moved in an attempt to smile. “Thank you. Thank you for answering my questions. I’ll put in for payment for the full two hundred cases.”

“I told you,” I said tightly, “it’s not about the money. It’s never been about the money.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s the challenge. And you rose to it.”

She left without saying good-bye. I received the overpayment a day later. I contacted the office to ask for a proper payment, one for the work I’d actually done, and I was told that she had retired, more abruptly than planned.

The acting coroner asked me if there was anything she could do for me. I said no, and severed the contact.

Then I sat for a long time in my single little office.

I could start a campaign. I could be the one to figure out who was coming in on these ships, who didn’t want to be on them, and who needed help adjusting. I could start some kind of program or reinstate one. I could see if I could get the city to designate them as something—not a refugee, but some category like that, so that they could get assistance.

But what good would it do? They’d had everything of value stolen from them. Their families, their futures, the world they had known. Nothing could repay that. Nothing could really help them.

Either they survived it, or they didn’t.

I survived it.

But I’m not sure my husband did. And I’m not going to look, not again. Looking back is what causes all the pain.

So I’m going to stay in the now. The ever-present now. That’s all we have, when it comes down to it. The moments. Passing, fleeting, wrapping in memories if we choose, or lost in what might happen, again if we choose.

Or we can stay here, doing what we do. Thinking only of the way the universe is, not the way it can be.

Changing things is for dreamers, and I most definitely am not one.

I used to like to think I was kidnapped. I don’t like to think that any longer.

Being kidnapped is worse. Much worse.

I chose to be here.

And I would choose it again, even knowing what I know.

No matter how much it breaks my non-existent heart.

 

___________________________________________

“The Nameless Dead” is available for one week on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores, as well as here.

The Nameless Dead

Copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2025 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Canva

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

 

Some Thoughts On Building A Better World

I will never ever be allowed to lead a DEI session.

I am disqualified on several counts. I have common sense. I have a pragmatic understanding of the practical limitations of DEI initiatives (and thus won’t overstep those limits in a manner that destroys the credibility of the whole concept). And finally, I do not stand to benefit from prolonging the problem in any way.

These are fundamental problems with most DEI initiatives. The people offering them rarely have common sense, let alone understanding of just how far they can go and staying firmly on the right side of those limits. And I have a strong suspicion, which is shared by many on both sides of the political aisle, that most of the DEI change agents don’t want to actually solve the problem, if only because it would mean their funding drying up. You may be arguing that this is a very cynical and deeply unfair take, but the sheer pointlessness and counter-productivity of most DEI initiatives suggest that such programs are the province of academic dreamers rather than practical men.

But if I had to lead a DEI session, I would focus on three basic principles:

First, don’t be a jerk.

Second, give some grace.

Third, be a mature adult.

The first principle is a two-edged sword. On one side, it is perfectly fine to disapprove, for example, of homosexuality. It is not fine to harass homosexuals (or people you believe to be homosexual, which is not always the same thing) and doing so makes you a jerk. On the other side, you should not be pushing your beliefs, sexualities, or anything else into someone else’s face. A vegan who not only preaches the benefits of a vegan diet at every opportunity, but actively harasses people for eating meat is being a jerk – and in doing so, that person is poisoning their minds against vegans.

This sword actually has a third edge. When you make a fuss about something which is fundamentally irrelevant to your situation, very few people will take you seriously when you are making a fuss about something which genuinely is relevant. This sometimes leads to some very nasty situations. The person who pushes vegan beliefs on everyone they encounter will not be taken seriously when they complain there are meat products in the food, because they have already convinced their audience that they are a jerk. Worse, perhaps, having annoyed people to the point of total exasperation and/or murderous rage, their audience might be quite delighted at watching the vegan unwittingly eat meat, even though it is pretty cruel.

Being a jerk is not a good thing. Being on the right side of history does not excuse being a jerk.

(Don’t be this guy. Really.)

The second principle is a little more subtle. We live in a society where there are many differences of opinions, and mistakes, from minor misunderstandings like using the wrong names or pronouns to situations that could easily be (or not) sexual harassment/actual threats. If you assume that everyone who makes an error in pronunciation, as George RR Martin did at the 2020 Hugo Awards, did so out of deliberate malice, racism, some kind of phobia or anything else that didn’t involve a simple accident, you will not only come across as a jerk but also make it harder for people to take it seriously when there is a real problem. If you act on the assumption that there may have been a mistake, and don’t treat it as a de facto war crime, the good guys will be grateful for your understanding and the bad guys will realise they have been called out without being pushed into a corner that will force them to either fight to the death or surrender.

When you blast someone who makes a mistake, they get angry. The angrier they get, the harder it is for them to accept you have a point. If you batter them into submission, they will hate your guts – and that hatred will provide cover for people who are genuinely malicious.

Seriously. Give some grace to people who make mistakes. Turning the other cheek sometimes mean getting slapped there too, to mutilate a metaphor, but it does remove all doubt that you are dealing with actual malice.

Third, be mature.

An immature mind seeks to dominate its surroundings. It cannot tolerate different opinions, from the minor (which Star Trek is best) to the major (which presidential candidate of 2024 was a nanometre better than the other). It is not enough to carve out a space for itself; the immature mind must seek to destroy all other minds, to punish anyone who dares to disagree. Or even to argue that the current tactics used by activists are dangerously counter-productive (such as the university professor who was cancelled for daring to suggest the BLM riots and ‘defund the police’ would actually harm the cause). At base, the immature mind is incapable of comprehending not only that it might be wrong, but dissenters have a legitimate right to raise concerns even if those concerns are not in of themselves illegitimate.

The immature mind is also incapable of comprehending the long-term effects of its actions. In the short term, cancel culture – a common tool of the immature mind, which is incapable of comprehending the wisdom of the observation that the master’s tools will never dismantle be master’s house – successfully scattered opposition and terrorised dissenters into pretending to agree (preference falsification). In the long term, cancel culture not only fuelled unreasoning hatred of cancel mobs and convinced many observers that it was about power and control rather than handing out deserve consequences, but it also made it harder for other observers to point to issues that deserve cancellation and even to call out their allies for terrible behaviour because it was important to hang together or be cancelled separately. As Richard Hanania put it:

“As the Overton window in debates within elite institutions narrowed, so that even people who said unquestionably true things were smeared as bigots, the opposition’s Overton window widened, allowing offenses useful to trolls to gain mainstream currency. Those who were canceled—or the millions who observed with disgust as others were—lost all trust in mainstream institutions like academia and the press. The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, left-leaning elites blamed the result on hate and misinformation. It was at that point that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began to censor more aggressively. This spurred further entrenchment on the right, which became tolerant of most forms of open bigotry. In their eagerness to form a united front against leftist attempts to police speech, conservatives, particularly those who were online or leaned toward MAGA, made expressions of bigotry a banner the way some on the left had once used pornography as a First Amendment standard.

People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter.”

The mature mind, by contrast, accepts the limits on what it can and cannot do. It does not penalise people for having different opinions, even when it disagrees strongly with those opinions. It does not overreach, nor does it infringe on freedom of thought and even freedom of speech. A mature mind is content to accept that it may be disliked, that there are people who think that their actions are inherently sinful, as long as they do nothing to interfere with their life. A mature homosexual, for example, may not enjoy knowing that the people who regard homosexuality is inherently wrong, but they accept that as long as the doubters don’t actually try to stop it.

Being mature means saving your energies for what are real problems. It is reasonable to disapprove of a co-worker who has a bumper sticker on his car leading KAMALA KUM-LA or TRUMP THE RUMP, but that does not give you the right to demand he removes his sticker or remove it yourself. A mature mind would understand that the car was his, and that he feels that he is the sole determinant of what sort of bumper stickers he should have, and therefore not waste energy trying to change him when he would regard such attempt as an attack on his freedom to decorate his car as well as his freedom of speech. (This obviously doesn’t apply if the car actually belongs to the company, in which case the company would actually have the final say.)

If you scream like a banshee at the slightest problem, while refusing to discuss the problem in a serious manner, your co-workers will not take you seriously. And why should they?

A mature mind acknowledges that it has to convince, rather than force, people to agree with it. A mature mind therefore puts together a coherent argument, which it can then defend against challengers, and achieves far more than it’s immature counterpart. A mature mind, therefore, outlines the problem, points to very real effects this has on the surrounding population, and proposes solutions. For example, it is easy to point out the harm when a homophobic co-worker abuses his homosexual colleagues. It is also easy to argue that this is not infringing on a person’s right to have whatever opinions they please, but confronting extremely unpleasant behaviour.

A mature mind is also very aware of the effect it has on others. It understands that its behaviour can be seen as threatening, fairly or otherwise, and takes steps to counter it. It also understands that it takes time for real social change, and trying to push faster than society will bear will likely provoke pushback. It may feel that this is unfair, but it recognises the fundamental reality that acceptance takes time.

Put simply, the mature mind recognises that:

1. someone has the right to an opinion and,
2. they do not have to listen to it.

Why did I write all this?

We live in a world plagued by people who feel that they have the right to push others around, that their causes justify their actions, and that any dissent, no matter how minor, cannot be tolerated. Worse, we live in an age of unprecedented intrusion into our lives. We are no longer granted, in many ways, the privacy of our own homes, or even our own heads. It is no longer possible to remain silent, or to maintain a silence. Silence is complicity, we are told, and we are no longer even able to discuss the problems. If you don’t have the right opinions, you get attacked.

This has provoked vicious pushback, from the tolerance of people who genuinely should not be tolerated to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of many other right-wing populists. The concept of DEI now provokes such loathing that there are far too many people who are willing to throw out the baby as well as the bathwater, and far too many others unwilling to admit that the whole concept went too far and needs to be dialled back sharply before it is too late. (As The Atlantic put it, If Liberals Do Not Enforce Borders Fascists Will.) Worse, this has fed a bitter cynicism amongst the Right (expressed in such statements as “oh look, the thing that never happens just happened again” or “the longer they take to show a picture of the suspect, the greater the chance he is from a favoured minority”) and destroyed trust in everything from the government to the media, teachers, and just about everything else.

In short, we suffer from a problem caused by immature minds. I like to think that the three principles I outlined will make things better. But I am probably being too hopeful.

This past weekend marked my Gram’s birthday. I won’t tell you how old she would have been because, well, I’m not sure I can do the math. Old. Really old. She passed away in 1983, and at the time she was just shy of her 92nd birthday. I think. I’m pretty sure she would be, like, 134 now. I am also pretty sure she would be ticked at me for telling you how old she would be . . . .

Gram was a wonderful grandmother. She adored all of her grandkids and she doted on us in all the grandmotherly ways. She made a huge fuss over every achievement, she always wanted to hear all about our lives, our friends, our classes at school. I never knew my mother’s parents, and my grandfather on my father’s side was not really part of our lives growing up. But it didn’t matter, because Gram showered us with enough love for four grandparents.

Clara Bartels was born in Amsterdam and came to the United States as a small child. Her father was a diamond cutter, and diamond cutters were in great demand in the diamond district of New York City. She grew up around the block from Jacques Cohen, who later in life changed the family’s last name to Coe, and whose father also was a diamond cutter who emigrated from Amsterdam. They would marry, have three kids, and then divorce, bitterly, at a time when divorce was not really something people were supposed to do.

Gram endured a lot in those years. She raised three children by herself, when single mothers with children were expected to remarry with alacrity. She nearly lost my father to meningitis when he was a sophomore in college. The youngest of her kids, my Uncle Bill, died in France during World War II. But she was a survivor and much tougher than anyone would have thought just looking at her.

Clara was maybe — MAYBE — five feet tall. With shoes on. In a stiff tail wind . . . . She had dark hair early in life. When I knew her, she had beautiful, silky white hair. Her smile could power entire cities. Her laugh, which we heard frequently, sounded like a car engine struggling to turn over. She had a terrific sense of humor and loved to laugh when she wasn’t supposed to. Each year, we would go to my Aunt Jean’s house for Passover, and my Uncle Bud would lead the Seder. He was more religious than the rest of us, and he took the Passover rites fairly seriously. And so when Gram would laugh at one thing or another in the Haggadah (which she did every year), he would grow annoyed. Which only served to make her laugh more. Which annoyed him a little more. Which increased her laughter yet again, making the rest of us laugh. Etc. Etc. I loved my uncle. He was a sweet, generous man. And for most of the year, he adored Gram. He always tried to be a good sport during Passover, but Gram didn’t make it easy . . . .

Staying with Gram was a treat. When I was young, whenever my parents went away, I would stay with her in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan. 245 East 63rd Street. The address is seared into my brain. So is her apartment number: 1104. It was a beautiful apartment — I shudder to think what it would cost today — and yet it was a pale substitute for the apartment my older siblings and cousins remember from when they stayed with her. That one was near Central Park and was huge and gorgeous. But no matter where she lived, when we stayed with her we had her all to ourselves. She would make the foods we liked, would take us to Atlantic Beach during the summer, or during the colder months, would take us FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store (the Tom Hanks-Robert Loggia floor-piano scene from Big was filmed there). We would walk with her there, and would be allowed to pick out any (reasonably priced) toy we wanted. After, we would get an ice cream at Schraffts.

I still have this Corgi Car, which I bought with Gram on one of those expeditions to the toy store.

Gram wasn’t always the easiest personality. She could be stubborn and even prickly on occasion. The summer after my senior year in college, my folks went away for a couple of weeks, and I stayed alone at our house. (At this point, I hadn’t stayed overnight at Gram’s for several years.) But my dad asked me to call Gram while they were away and I forgot. My high school girlfriend and I were going through a rough patch, and I had friends I wanted to see, and, well, I was a teenager . . . . It was entirely my fault. I know that.

But Gram was really angry with me. So angry that one night, when she and I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, she wouldn’t speak to me. Literally. She directed all her questions and comments to me through my Aunt Jean, who reluctantly served as intermediary, and who later offered her heartfelt sympathy.

Lesson learned. When I went off to college, I made a point of calling Gram every Sunday, no matter what. And at the end of my freshman year, she commented to my father that Brown was a very good place for me. It had taught me responsibility. You can’t make this stuff up.

But episodes of that sort were the exceptions. Most of the time, Gram was fun, loving, silly, and totally engaged in all of our lives. She was, as I have said, a wonderful grandmother. To this day, I miss her laugh, and can hear it in my head when something funny happens.

Happy Birthday, Gram. I love you.

This past weekend marked my Gram’s birthday. I won’t tell you how old she would have been because, well, I’m not sure I can do the math. Old. Really old. She passed away in 1983, and at the time she was just shy of her 92nd birthday. I think. I’m pretty sure she would be, like, 134 now. I am also pretty sure she would be ticked at me for telling you how old she would be . . . .

Gram was a wonderful grandmother. She adored all of her grandkids and she doted on us in all the grandmotherly ways. She made a huge fuss over every achievement, she always wanted to hear all about our lives, our friends, our classes at school. I never knew my mother’s parents, and my grandfather on my father’s side was not really part of our lives growing up. But it didn’t matter, because Gram showered us with enough love for four grandparents.

Clara Bartels was born in Amsterdam and came to the United States as a small child. Her father was a diamond cutter, and diamond cutters were in great demand in the diamond district of New York City. She grew up around the block from Jacques Cohen, who later in life changed the family’s last name to Coe, and whose father also was a diamond cutter who emigrated from Amsterdam. They would marry, have three kids, and then divorce, bitterly, at a time when divorce was not really something people were supposed to do.

Gram endured a lot in those years. She raised three children by herself, when single mothers with children were expected to remarry with alacrity. She nearly lost my father to meningitis when he was a sophomore in college. The youngest of her kids, my Uncle Bill, died in France during World War II. But she was a survivor and much tougher than anyone would have thought just looking at her.

Clara was maybe — MAYBE — five feet tall. With shoes on. In a stiff tail wind . . . . She had dark hair early in life. When I knew her, she had beautiful, silky white hair. Her smile could power entire cities. Her laugh, which we heard frequently, sounded like a car engine struggling to turn over. She had a terrific sense of humor and loved to laugh when she wasn’t supposed to. Each year, we would go to my Aunt Jean’s house for Passover, and my Uncle Bud would lead the Seder. He was more religious than the rest of us, and he took the Passover rites fairly seriously. And so when Gram would laugh at one thing or another in the Haggadah (which she did every year), he would grow annoyed. Which only served to make her laugh more. Which annoyed him a little more. Which increased her laughter yet again, making the rest of us laugh. Etc. Etc. I loved my uncle. He was a sweet, generous man. And for most of the year, he adored Gram. He always tried to be a good sport during Passover, but Gram didn’t make it easy . . . .

Staying with Gram was a treat. When I was young, whenever my parents went away, I would stay with her in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan. 245 East 63rd Street. The address is seared into my brain. So is her apartment number: 1104. It was a beautiful apartment — I shudder to think what it would cost today — and yet it was a pale substitute for the apartment my older siblings and cousins remember from when they stayed with her. That one was near Central Park and was huge and gorgeous. But no matter where she lived, when we stayed with her we had her all to ourselves. She would make the foods we liked, would take us to Atlantic Beach during the summer, or during the colder months, would take us FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store (the Tom Hanks-Robert Loggia floor-piano scene from Big was filmed there). We would walk with her there, and would be allowed to pick out any (reasonably priced) toy we wanted. After, we would get an ice cream at Schraffts.

Gram wasn’t always the easiest personality. She could be stubborn and even prickly on occasion. The summer after my senior year in college, my folks went away for a couple of weeks, and I stayed alone at our house. (At this point, I hadn’t stayed overnight at Gram’s for several years.) But my dad asked me to call Gram while they were away and I forgot. My high school girlfriend and I were going through a rough patch, and I had friends I wanted to see, and, well, I was a teenager . . . . It was entirely my fault. I know that.

But Gram was really angry with me. So angry that one night, when she and I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house, she wouldn’t speak to me. Literally. She directed all her questions and comments to me through my Aunt Jean, who reluctantly served as intermediary, and who later offered her heartfelt sympathy.

Lesson learned. When I went off to college, I made a point of calling Gram every Sunday, no matter what. And at the end of my freshman year, she commented to my father that Brown was a very good place for me. It had taught me responsibility. You can’t make this stuff up.

But episodes of that sort were the exceptions. Most of the time, Gram was fun, loving, silly, and totally engaged in all of our lives. She was, as I have said, a wonderful grandmother. To this day, I miss her laugh, and can hear it in my head when something funny happens.

Happy Birthday, Gram. I love you.

In Dearly Beloved Pamela Ayo Yetunde “has done the work to inspire us.”* Mark your…

The post Spotlight on “Dearly Beloved | Prince, Spirituality, and This Thing Called Life” appeared first on LitStack.

Stalking the wild martini, shhhhhh!

Dude, you know you don’t drink.

Cat. Some assembly required.

What is it with tuxedo-boys? I’m so embarrassed.

You think you’re embarrassed, try wearing the same suit as…that.

We’ve been thinking of dying this one black and white to match the set.

What flummery is this? I have not written about Nero Wolfe since last Summer? There has not been a 3 Good Reasons in four years? What kind of mystery blogger is this Bryne fellow? Most unsatisfactory. So…

Welcome to another installment of 3 Good Reasons. With a goal of eventually tackling every tale of the Corpus, I’ll give three reasons why the particular story at hand is the best Nero Wolfe of them all. Since I’m writing over seventy ‘Best Story’ essays, the point isn’t actually to pick one – just to point out some of what is good in every adventure featuring Wolfe and Archie. And I’ll toss in one reason it’s not the best story. Now – These essays will contain SPOILERS. You have been warned!

The Story

Today’s story is “Black Orchids,” it’s the first of two in a collection of the same name. Lewis Hewitt has three unique black orchids on display at the annual NYC Flower Show. Wolfe’s envy rivals his desire for Millard Bynoe’s flamingo-colored Vanda in “Easter Parade.”

Wolfe orders Archie to scout the enclosed-in-a-case black orchids, over multiple days. It’s not surprising that Archie is smitten by Anne Tracy; a young woman working in a display at the show. Naturally, he finds a murdered body, which is right out in plain sight. Wolfe spends part of this story ‘in the wild,’ as his covetousness leads him to the show.

3 GOOD REASONS

ONE – The Green-Eyed Monster

Nero Wolfe is not a person who can enjoy someone else’s success – certainly not in the orchid-growing world. He reaches one of his low points in “Easter Parade,” when he has Archie hire someone to steal an orchid right off of a woman’s chest, in public. That’s a pretty slimy thing to do.

But his envy of Lewis Hewitt is something to enjoy in this story. Hewitt appears in three cases, and is mentioned in more than double that. He makes his Corpus debut here. ‘Friends’ is not a word often used with Wolfe. If you take away work associates (like Inspector Cramer) and employees, it’s a very small circle. As the Corpus goes on, I think Hewitt does become a friend. Wolfe uses him to aid him on a case. He respects Hewitt’s flower-growing skills, going to great length to hire a

“I knew that the sound of that name would churn his beer for him. Lewis Hewitt was the millionaire in whose greenhouse in whose Long Island estate the black orchids had been produced. Thereby creating an agony of envy in him that surpassed any of his previous childish performances.”

Wolfe stands with his face only five inches from the glass case, staring at the orchids:

“For a quarter of an hour, His emotions didn’t show, but from the twitching of a muscle in his neck, I knew he was boiling inside.”

He even let himself be bumped by women trying to get a look at them. Wolfe very much dislikes being touched by anyone.

Wolfe sucks up to Hewitt so much, Archie can’t bear to watch. He actually turns his head away to conceal his feelings.

‘He flattered him, and yessed him, and smiled at him until I expected any minute to hear him offer to dust off his shoes.’

Hewitt gives Wolfe a couple lesser plants Wolfe doesn’t want, but accepts, thanking him as if they were ‘just what he asked Santa Clause for.’

Wolfe carries them himself, which tells you the extremes of sucking up which he’s going to. It’s funny when later Wolfe wants to dump them on Archie, but the latter evades the task and Wolfe is stuck carrying them. Physical exertion is not an activity he enjoys.

Archie says he’d like to give Wolfe a kick in the fundament, which would be an amazing thing to see actually happen. He certainly couldn’t miss!

Hewitt misplaces his walking stick, which Archie says makes Wolfe’s best Malacca one look like a fishing pole. When it’s found, Wolfe tells Archie to pick it up for Hewitt. Archie doesn’t want to cause a scene, so he resists the urge to resign on the spot. Archie picking up the cane is germane to the story.

This just isn’t Wolfe being pleasant, hoping for the best. He is in full-blown sycophant mode. Archie rarely conveys so much disgust and derision with Wolfe. It’s usually an observation -here it’s an ongoing feeling of disgust, which he expresses openly in his narration.

‘And Wolfe following him like an orderly following a colonel, his hands full of potted plants. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been disgusting.’ Archie has to lead, rather than follow, so he doesn’t have to see it.

Archie discusses the body after this, and the story shifts gears. Wolfe goes from toady to (sort of) blackmailer, with a crime to be solved. But it’s fun reading Archie’s open disgust with Wolfe sucking up (poorly) to Hewitt, to try and secure one of the black orchids.

 

TWO – Archie Goads Wolfe

I really enjoy chapter one of this story. It starts with Archie recounting that Wolfe has sent him to the Flower Show the past three days, to scout out the black orchids. Returning to the office late on day three, he drops “I’m thinking of getting married.”

He talks about the woman in the display, and Wolfe reveals info he has about her, from a story in the newspaper. Archie fatuously argues her virtues with Wolfe (you know Wolfe is unengaged in this discussion), creating a non-discussion discussion.

Having started with this tactic, he elevates it by telling Wolfe that Lewis Hewitt takes her out to dinner. Archie has scored a hit. Wolfe opens his eyes and scowls (See number One).

Wolfe had said that Anne’s legs are too long (in the newspaper picture). Archie, going over the top, puts his leg foot on the desk, lifts his trouser leg up, and tells Wolfe to imagine the result of his cross-pollinating with Anne’s leg. This is silly, but it’s funny. Wolfe tells him not to scar the desk and instructs him to return for a fourth consecutive day.

However, Archie has ratcheted up Wolfe’s desire for the orchids. At lunch, he instructs Archie to get the car – he must “look at those confounded freaks myself.”

Archie had fun goading Wolfe, and he even convinced him to make a sojourn out among a crowd of flower-lovers. If you’ve read “Disguise for Murder”, you know Wolfe’s opinion of the common flower person, as opposed to serious growers like himself.

Chapter one is only six percent of the story’s length, but the reader immediately likes Archie. Wolfe isn’t despicable, like he is in chapter one of “Easter Parade.” But we can see that envy is one of his vices. I think that the best stories often have a strong first chapter. Stout engages us with Archie and Wolfe, right from the start. Of course, middles and endings matter. But I am always happen when I really like the opening chapter, and I’m ready to dive into the rest of the story. I think that the opening in “Black Orchids” shines.

 

THREE – What Wolfe Wants, Wolfe Gets

Now, I think Wolfe is a jerk to Hewitt in this, and I often find him to be an unlikable person. Not someone I want my son to emulate. I’d like to see Wolfe lose sometimes, based on how he acts.

But he sure knows how to get what he wants. His continual sucking up to Hewitt failed miserably. Hewitt is not going to sell him one of the orchids. He’s certainly not going to just give him one. His kowtowing so repulses Archie, that he can’t even stand to look at Wolfe.

But the moment he has leverage over Hewitt, he sticks the knife in. Hewitt abhors the publicity that he might receive if it becomes known his cane was used for the murder. He could even be a suspect. And Wolfe has him right where he wants him.

For a friend like Marko Vukcic, he would help out for free. He might just soak a normal client – his fees are high. But Hewitt has something he wants. Desperately. It’s a douche move to demand ALL three black orchids, to solve the case. One, or even two, would be more appropriate. But Wolfe is brutal and greedy. Hewitt would have none to develop more from.

Hewitt pretty much goes through the five stages of grief. Wolfe is content to toss Hewitt to Inspector Cramer (there’s no proof that Hewitt did it – it’s an image issue for the rich man). Wolfe refuses to haggle, demands all three. He even insists on taking them immediately before even working on the case.

The Corpus is replete with Wolfe holding out on the police, and using his position and skills to maximize his return. And, as in Easter Parade, being not-admirable, to get what he wants. The recipe for

As I said, I wish he had gotten his nose pushed in a few times. But in this case, he went from a completely losing position, with no standing at all, to getting what he wanted, with payment in advance. Wolfe is tough to beat, in multiple ways.

ONE BAD REASON

Like a Hole in Your Head…

This section was going to be titled ‘With Friends Like These…’ and I was going to talk about what a jerk Wolfe is to Hewitt, to get him out of potential trouble. But as I mentioned above, it’s not clear yet that the two are friends. They are fellow flower growers, and as acquaintances, they get along. But if they had been friends at this point, then Wolfe would have been a miserable one, because of the price he demanded to solve the case. Not how you treat a friend.

However, since they aren’t obviously friends yet, I’ll go with Archie’s discovery of the body. It’s a short bit, but I’d NEVER do what he did. And after I did it, no way I could be so blase and low key about it. I’d quite possibly vomit on the spot.

‘On account of the shrubs and rocks, I couldn’t get around to see the top of his head. So I reached a hand to feel of it. And the end of my finger went right through into a hole in his skull. A way in. And it was like sticking your finger into a warm apple pie. I pulled away and started wiping my finger off on the grass.’

Man, I don’t even wanna eat apple pie (which I love) after reading this! I’m squeamish. I hate watching autopsy stuff in crime shows. The thought of (even unexpectedly) sticking my finger in a hole in somebody’s skull and going down into their brain? I’m squirming, just typing it right now.

And to calmly pull it out and begin wiping blood and brain off on the grass, showing no trace of what was going on? NO WAY!

“Black Orchids” is one of my favorite novellas, but I hate this part. I’m glad it’s so short, as it is an abrupt chapter end.

MISCELLANEA

The story originally appeared – abridged – in the August, 1941 issue of The American Magazine under the title, “Death Wears an Orchid.” Which is not an accurate title for this story…

It would be published with “Cordially Invited to Meet Death” (which was originally called “Invitation to Murder”) in hardcover by Farr & Rinehart the following year.

Stout had written eight Wolfe novels, published over the previous seven years. Black Orchid was the first novella or short story.

There are no definitive definitions, and the acceptable length of a novel has grown over the years (look at the length of early books in some of your favorite series’, and see them get longer. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder is a good example). We’ll go with:

Short Story – Up to 15,000 words

Novella – 15,000 – 50,000 words

Novel – Over 50,000 words

At around 34,000 words, Black Orchids was much shorter than his earlier novels. However it is about twice as long as “Cordially Invited to Meet Death”, which followed eight months later. I much prefer the shorter form for Wolfe and Archie, and am glad Stout began writing novellas, instead of novels. This allowed him to sell the stories to magazines (including better paying ‘Slicks), and then bundle two or three together for a hardcover book.

This story features a rare, two-paragraph intro by Archie: Archie does not introduce his recountings. He mentions speculation on how ‘Nero Wolfe got hold of the three black orchids.’ The first tale in this book explains how that happened as a result of a murder. The second explains how some black orchids appeared at a funeral: and it involves a mystery that is still biting Archie.

Archie comments that the women who attend flower shows are not very attractive. He would repeat this thought nine years later at the Brownstone, in “Disguise for Murder.”

Archie being Archie, he manages to find one rose in a field of weeds. But it is clear he will not be attending flower shows to look for dates.

The Bantam intro is written by Lawrence Block. Block relates how, trying to figure out where to go with his third Chip Harrison novel. As he puts it, ‘Inspiration struck’ and he converted Harrison into an Archie Goodwin, working for Leo Haig – a poor man’s Nero Wolfe. Haig is a low-end private eye whose life goal is to be invited to dinner at Wolfe’s table – Wolfe being a real person. I enjoy the two Haig novels, and wrote an essay titled The R-Rated Nero Wolfe for award-winning website, BlackGate.com.

YOU DON’T SAY

Archie – “Will you kindly tell me,” I requested, “why the females you see at a flower show, are the kinds of females who go to a flower show? 90% of them. Especially their legs. Does it have to be like that? Is it because, never having any flowers sent to them, they have to go to see any? Or is it because -”

Wolfe – “Shut up. I don’t know.”

 

Wolfe – “Where are you going?”

Hewitt – “The water nymph. The pool episode. I thought you might-”

Wolfe – “Bosch. That bedlam.”

Hewitt – “It’s really worth seeing. Charming. Perfectly Charming. Really delightful.”

Wolfe – “I’ll come too.”

 

Hewittt – “I see” – he hissed. “So that’s it. To put it plainly, blackmail. Blackmail. No, I won’t do it.”

Wolfe – He sighed. “You won’t?”

Hewitt – “No.”
Wolfe – “Very well. Then I won’t get the orchids. But I’ll be saved a lot of trouble. Archie, get Mr. Cramer in here. Tell him it’s urgent.”

More From the Brownstone

Stay at Home

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 1 and 2
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 3 and 4
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 5, 6, and 7
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 8, 9, and 10
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home- Days 11, 12, and 13
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home Days 14 and 15
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home Days 16 and 17
Nero Wolfe’s Browsnstone: Stay at Home – Days 18 and 19
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 20 and 21
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 22 and 23
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 24 and 25
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 26
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 27
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 28 and 29
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 30
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 31
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 32 and 33
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 34 and 35
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 36
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 37
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 38
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 39
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 40 & 41
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 42 & 43
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 45 & 46
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 50 and 52
Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Day 55

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone

Meet Nero Wolfe
The R-Rated Nero Wolfe
Radio & Screen Wolfe
A&E’s ‘A Nero Wolfe Mystery’
The Lost 1959 Pilot
The Mets in “Please Pass the Guilt”
A Matter of Identity (original story)
Death of a Doxy; and Koufax or Mays?
Hercule Poirot Visits Nero Wolfe
I Know that Actor!
The Big Store (Wolf J. Flywheel)
Welcome to Kanawha Spa – The Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend
A Toast To Nero Wolfe – From the Wolfe Pack 2024 Greenbrier Weekend

3 Good Reasons

3 Good Reasons – ‘Not Quite Dead Enough’
3 Good Reasons – ‘Murder is Corny’
3 Good Reasons – ‘Immune to Murder’
3 Good Reason – ‘Booby Trap’

The Greenstreet Chronicles (Pastiches based on the Radio Show)

Stamped for Murder

The Careworn Cuff – Part One
The Careworn Cuff – Part Two
The Careworn Cuff – Part Three

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth

Mogsy’s Rating (Overall): 1.5 of 5 stars

Genre: Horror, Mystery

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Macmillan Audio (March 18, 2025)

Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins

Author Information: Website

At first, I was very excited to pick up The Haunting of Room 904. I mean, come on! Even the title sounded awesome. What could possibly go wrong with the promise of a haunted hotel story? Well, apparently, quite a whole lot. And when I looked up the author’s information, I was actually surprised to find out that this was not Erika T. Wurth’s first novel, because both the writing and plotting felt amateurish in a disjointed, sloppy way, which unfortunately kept the novel from ever fully realizing its ambitious premise.

The story follows Olivia Becente, a struggling academic who has turned to capitalizing on her clairvoyant gifts to make ends meet. Now a paranormal investigator, she works with clients who hire her to commune with the dead and occasionally takes on cases that involve neutralizing the dangerous effects of haunted or possessed items. But the truth is, Olivia has a pretty haunted history herself. Ever since the unexpected suicide of her sister Naiche, Olivia can’t stop thinking about her or any of unexplainable circumstances around how she died.

This is why, years later, when she is contacted by the Brown Palace hotel about a new case, Olivia immediately agrees to investigate. Not only is it one of the most recognizable landmarks in Denver, but the hotel is also the one in which Naiche killed herself in Room 904. It comes to light that every five years, a woman mysteriously dies in that room, no matter what the hotel does to prevent it from happening, even sealing it off altogether. As Olivia and her friends try to make sense of these connections, she receives a disturbing call from her mother, sounding distressed and confused, revealing that she has somehow checked into Room 904—despite having no recollection of how she got there. Now racing against the clock, Olivia’s investigation brings her to confront everything from a secret cult to the mysteries of an ancient power.

It honestly annoys me whenever a book with an amazing premise manages to completely unravel under the weight of its own ambition. It’s a shame because The Haunting of Room 904 could have been great, but what we get instead is an overstuffed narrative with simply too much happening at once. Rather than having things unfold naturally, the novel stumbles from one subplot to another like an easily distracted toddler. Things start off smoothly with Olivia’s investigation into a haunting but they quickly devolve from there, shifting suddenly to her family problems, then to her dealing with a stalker ex, and out of the blue a romantic development gets thrown in as well. There’s enough silly drama here to fill ten books, but instead everything is crammed together in a way that leaves everything feeling half-baked.

On top of that, the protagonist Olivia is the worst kind of idiot, someone who is constantly positioning herself as the smartest person in the room, yet her decisions contradict that perception at every turn. In one egregious example, she moralizes about guns only to justify getting a concealed carry permit because she believes her situation is unique, yet fails to arm herself when it critically mattered, resulting in the gun being turned on her by the very person she wanted to protect herself from—all because she set a glaringly obvious passcode on her safe. She’s also unbearably judgmental of others yet blind to her own flaws, making her difficult to root for. Partly, I think this in part is due to the book seeming more concerned with checking identity boxes and inserting social commentary than telling a compelling story. For example, every character’s race, gender, background, disability, etc. is noted, even when it’s completely irrelevant to the plot. The dialogue suffers greatly because of this too, because no one really talks the way these characters do. In some of their interactions, rather than an organic conversation, they come across more like stilted, overly self-aware message pushing instead.

Then there’s the matter of character development—or lack thereof. Olivia’s friends are little more than stock archetypes, defined by their identity labels above and further slotted into cookie cutter type caricatures: Genius Loudmouth Friend A, Sensitive Supportive Friend B, etc. And obviously, we mustn’t forget the dastardly ex-boyfriend who is cartoonishly villainous. But of course, Olivia being Olivia, she immediately gets the googly eyes for the next man who gives her attention, never mind that he’s a suspiciously charismatic leader of a fucking cult! Remember though, Olivia isn’t too bright, and the fact the guy is hot and fits the dark, broody goth aesthetic means that he gets a pass.

As if the disjointed plot and shallow characters weren’t bad enough, the writing itself is a hot mess. Transitions between events are choppy, making it a pain to follow the story. The pacing is also all over the place. The horror elements, which should have been at the forefront, feel tacked on and underdeveloped. What could have been an intense, mysterious, and atmospheric ghost story instead reads like a bland, dime-store thriller with some paranormal elements hastily sprinkled in. Any sense of suspense or dread is completely lost.

Ultimately, The Haunting of Room 904 is a book that had all the ingredients (one might even argue too many ingredients) for a creepy and engaging horror novel with some thriller elements mixed in. However, the failure to pull all these pieces together in a cohesive and coherent manner resulted in a disappointing read where the core mystery lacked direction and focus in its execution. Sadly, the book started out strong, but by the end, it simply fell apart under the weight of all its missteps.

 

Tomorrow is the launch of  Graham Austin-King's Fae: The Wild Hunt Kickstarter. This is in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Fae: The Wild Hunt's publication. Here's the blurb for the book:
History becomes legend.Legend fades to myth.But some myths are a warning.
Klöss wants nothing more than to pass the trials and join the ranks of the Bjornmen raiders. But times are changing in the Barren Isles. Coastal plunder is making way for outright conquest, and war looms.
A foundling from the forest, Devin leads a simple life. But fate, it seems, has other plans. Whispered rumours tell of creatures in the moonlight, shadowy figures with eyes of amber flame. As the first battles rage, only one man seems to know the truth of the fae, but can Devin or Klöss convince anyone before it is too late?
The cover artwork is by Tomasz Jedruszek. 



The cover and sprayed edge design is by the amazing  Rachael St Clair of Claymore Covers. This edition will also sprayed edges, foiled hardboards, colour endpapers, refreshed cartography, custom chapter art & of course all copies will be signed by the author
Fae: The Wild Hunt is the first book of The Riven Wyrde Saga, a complete trilogy where the mythologised fae return to a world which has forgotten them. And as the barriers protecting the world of Haven begin to falter, Bjornmen raiders abandon coastal plunder for outright conquest. This Kickstarter, the first of three, aims to change that, with fresh cover art and a stunning special edition hardcover. 

I’ll tell you how in the second workshop in the Quick & Dirty Craft Series.

There are some simple things every writer can do to make their endings stronger, and I’ll explain that in this short class.

Find out more here or watch the video below.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/QD-ENDINGS-INTRO-ORIGINAL-VIDEO.mp4

 

A Clockwork’s Dreaming: And Other Tales by Claude Moreau [Claude Moreau and Scott Oden, Jan 24, 2025, 134pages, Kindle and Paperback]. Cover art by Richard Doyle. Detail from “Under the Dock Leaves: An Autumnal Evening Dream” (1878). This post packs two punches:

1. A showcase of the New Treasure A Clockwork’s Dreaming: And Other Tales by Claude Moreau and Scott Oden (January 2025, 134 pages, Kindle and Paperback).
2. An exclusive interview with the deceased author Claude Moreau, the living translator Scott Oden, and special appearances of Laurent Dupont, editor of the literary magazine Les Petites Merveilles. Yes, this article is historic and magical. Read on to learn how this came to be.

A Clockwork’s Dreaming

“In Claude Moreau’s Garden, magic blooms between dewdrops and dreams, where scholarly mice debate proper tea service in a library housed within an ancient teapot, and frost spirits dance with morning glories to ring in each dawn. Here, memories can be bottled like preserves, stories sometimes edit themselves when no one is looking, and a particularly opinionated patch of mushrooms insists on providing philosophical commentary about cheese. It’s a place where the most ordinary moments contain extraordinary wonders, and where even the spaces between heartbeats hold their own kind of magic.

In this newly discovered collection of tales, hastily penned to his friend Henri-Jules Favreau and only recently unearthed in a Marseilles safe deposit box, Moreau captures remarkable events in his grandmother’s enchanted garden. From a clockwork assistant discovering how to dream, to young mice learning to weave spider-silk into wings, to the grand autumn performance that drew an audience of dragons and dryads, these stories shine with immediacy and wonder. Together, they offer a glimpse into a world where mechanical songbirds learn to compose their own melodies, where librarians help books find their proper dreams, and where the truest magic lies not in grand gestures but in the gentle art of paying attention to small wonders.” – Cover Summary

Oden just released A Clockwork’s Dreaming: And Other Tales (January 2025). The content holds remarkably true to his adventure telling and love of historical fiction, but is completely different than his grimdark portfolio. Oden shifted toward inspirational, non-grim fiction with this. There are six stories plus pre and post-commentary. All stories are easily digestible. The introductory premise resonates with the weird fiction vibe having the narrator/translator deciphering letters from deceased scientists/gardeners who experienced the supernatural. Instead of the experience being horrific, these are all uplifting.  The initial tales calibrate the reader to a world reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia (i.e. talking creatures). Readers should expect anthropomorphized mice and trees, heck, even “stories” become sentient and assume tangible substance.  Terms like “astronomical gardening” and situations like “books were talking about feeling colorless” saturate this wonderful collection.

“The Maples’ Grand Performance” story mesmerized me until I cheered for the finale. Next, a homage to Lord Byron’s “Ozymandias” poem showcased a heroic mouse of the same name tackling greed and achieving a legacy; this swelled me with optimism.  The titular tale “Clockwork’s Dreaming” at first evoked, at least for my Gen X mind, the owl Bubo from the 1981 Clash of the Titans, since it involves a mechanical bird. Oden’s character is actually a fun protagonist (not a goofy sidekick). After you read the book, you’ll be compelled to dig into Claude Moreau’s Garden website which has many complementary tales.

With A Clockwork’s Dreaming, Oden inspires readers via tall tales featuring heroic mice. Oden’s prose impacts as much as his grimdark tales, but smacks with beauty and peace! An Exclusive Interview with Moreau, Oden, and Dupont

In January 2025, while researching in the rarely-accessed archives beneath Black Gate headquarters, I discovered a cache of remarkable documents, fragments of an 1899 interview with Claude Moreau conducted by Laurent Dupont, editor of the literary magazine Les Petites Merveilles. The fragile pages were nestled between volumes of obscure grimoires and games of strategy, and appeared to shift location between visits to the archive. It is unclear if John O’Neill knew he had these documents since they were uncharacteristically absent from his meticulous card catalog.

Even more remarkably, these historical fragments seem to resonate with the questions for Scott Oden, translator of Moreau’s recently discovered works and longtime friend/contributor with Black Gate. What follows is an unprecedented conversation across time: Moreau’s words from 1899 alongside his translator’s reflections in 2025. Where the original document was damaged or illegible, we rely solely on Oden’s modern perspective.

The original document is reproduced with permission from the private collection of John O’Neill.

Across Time: Claude Moreau and His Translator Scott Oden in Conversation On the Nature of Moreau’s Work

BLACK GATE (2025): As per the prologue to A Clockwork’s Dreaming, you “discovered a remarkable collection of letters, pressed flowers, and curious objects that can only be described as fairy wings and dragon scales. The correspondence was from Claude Moreau to his friend Henri-Jules Favreau, written between 1897 and 1898.” Please introduce newcomers to Moreau’s works. What should they expect?

ODEN (2025): Claude Moreau was an Impressionist painter who, after a rather disastrous exhibition in Paris (the notorious ‘Incident of the Purple Cats’), retreated to his grandmother’s cottage in rural Provence. There, while attempting to document the garden’s more conventional aspects, he began noticing… unusual activities. His letters to Henri-Jules Favreau, a professor of Improbable Literature at the University of Aix-en-Provence, chronicle an entire hidden world within his grandmother’s garden — a place where mice maintain libraries in forgotten teapots, where mechanical creations dream of becoming more than their gears, and where memories can be preserved in specially crafted jars.

Readers should expect stories that exist in the space between wonder and reality — tales that don’t shy away from life’s shadows but find beauty and courage in gentleness rather than conflict. These aren’t simply children’s stories, though children often grasp their truth more readily than adults. They’re accounts of a world that operates according to different rules than our own, yet somehow illuminates truths about our reality. Unlike my usual historical fiction or the adventures of Grimnir, the Garden tales offer a different kind of magic — the extraordinary possibilities hiding within ordinary moments.

DUPONT (1899): Monsieur Moreau, your tales of life in your grandmother’s garden have caused quite a stir among our readers. Many write to ask if these stories are meant to be taken as fact or fancy. How would you respond?

MOREAU (1899): My dear Dupont, I find such distinctions increasingly tiresome. Is a sunset less beautiful if one understands the scientific principles behind refracted light? Does knowing the Latin name for a flower diminish its scent? I simply record what I observe in my grandmother’s garden, with as much accuracy as my humble talents allow. Whether readers choose to see these observations as literal or metaphorical matters less than whether they recognize some small truth within them.

DUPONT (1899): Yet you speak of talking mice, singing flowers, and mechanical devices that develop consciousness. Surely you understand why readers might question—

MOREAU (1899): I understand perfectly why people raised on the rigid categorizations of modern thought might struggle. We are taught from an early age to separate the world into neat compartments: reality and fantasy, science and magic, fact and fiction. But the Garden exists in the spaces between such artificial boundaries. The mice don’t “talk” as you and I are doing now—they communicate in ways that require a different kind of listening altogether. As for mechanical consciousness, well… [pauses to sip tea] Have you never observed how certain objects seem to develop personalities over time? How a well-loved book begins to open naturally to its owner’s favorite passages? Or how a clockwork mechanism that has run for decades seems to develop its own subtle rhythms beyond mere mechanical precision?

On Literary Connections

In 1896 Claude Moreau’s contemporary H. G. Wells published The Island of Doctor Moreau; is there a relationship between these scientifically curious Moreaus?

What an intriguing coincidence! Though I’ve found no direct evidence that Claude Moreau and H.G. Wells ever met, there’s a certain synchronicity in their work appearing around the same time. Both dealt with boundaries between the natural and unnatural, though in radically different ways.

Where Dr. Moreau attempted to force nature into unnatural forms through scientific hubris, Claude Moreau documented the quiet magic that emerges when nature is allowed to follow its own extraordinary course. One sought to control and transform; the other simply observed with careful attention and wonder.

I sometimes imagine them encountering each other at some Parisian café — Wells with his scientific skepticism and Claude with his dreamer’s heart — engaging in a spirited debate about the boundaries between reality and fantasy. What a conversation that would have been!

DUPONT (1899): Several critics have suggested your tales are simply allegories — clever ways of discussing human relationships through the filter of imagined garden creatures.

MOREAU (1899): [laughs] Critics will always seek to explain mystery rather than simply experience it. Perhaps there is something allegorical in my accounts.  The Garden certainly has much to teach us about human nature. But to reduce these stories to mere invention would be to miss their essential truth. The Garden exists, Monsieur Dupont. Whether one can find it on any conventional map is beside the point.

On The Garden’s Libraries

Moreau’s Gardens appear to be sprawling, like a Botanical Garden complex with many subgardens. The quote below indicates the subgardens are ‘libraries.’ How many flavors of libraries & gardens exist?

“There are libraries that exist beyond the knowledge of most garden visitors — collections not of books but of potential and promise, cataloged with a precision that would impress even Mr. Thistledown himself.” From the Seed Librarians

As chronicled in Moreau’s letters, the Garden contains numerous libraries beyond the main one housed in the teapot. The Library proper primarily holds stories and knowledge in traditional book form (though ‘traditional’ may be stretching it, given that some volumes reportedly change their contents depending on the phase of the moon).

But yes, there are specialized collections throughout the Garden. The Seed Library maintains living knowledge of plant species both common and forgotten, preserving not just physical seeds but the stories and songs that help them grow. The Memory Archives, maintained by Grandmother Elderberry and her apprentices, preserve experiences in specially crafted jars. The Frost Spirits maintain crystalline records of winter patterns dating back centuries, while the underground chambers beneath the Old Stone Wall house historical artifacts too delicate for conventional preservation.

Each ‘library’ serves as a repository for different types of knowledge, operating according to principles uniquely suited to what they preserve. The Seed Librarians, for instance, understand that some knowledge must be planted rather than simply shelved; allowed to grow and change with the seasons rather than remaining static.

DUPONT (1899): Speaking of the Garden, many readers have written asking about its precise location. Is it somewhere they might visit?

MOREAU (1899): [laughs] The Garden exists precisely where it needs to be. Those who seek it with open hearts occasionally find their way there, though rarely by any conventional path. I’ve noticed that children often discover it without difficulty, while adults struggle — particularly those who approach life with rigid certainty about what is and isn’t possible.

But perhaps I can offer this small hint: the Garden is most accessible during those in-between moments when the world holds its breath. Dawn and dusk. The precise instant between sleeping and waking. The day’s last moment before starlight claims dominion. In such moments, boundaries thin, and careful observers might glimpse the Library’s lamplight glowing through the mist, or hear the Cricket Orchestra tuning their instruments for the evening concert.

[The next portion of the original document is damaged, with several paragraphs illegible due to what appears to be tea stains and pressed flower residue.]

On the Black Gate Archives

These notes that I dug up from the basement Library of O’Neill must contain secrets. In other words, via this interview, I claim that O’Neill’s basement is a magical Garden. Can you read the grimoires, and reveal a secret here, just for devoted Black Gate readers?

What extraordinary documents you’ve uncovered! These look remarkably similar to some pages I found in that Marseilles safe deposit box — particularly this one with the strange watermark that appears to change depending on the angle of light.

If I’m translating the mouse-script correctly (it’s a particularly archaic dialect), this seems to be part of a correspondence between Mr. Thistledown and the librarian of what he calls ‘The Other Garden.’ Fascinating! According to these notes, certain gardens develop what he terms ‘mutual literary resonance’ when their caretakers share a particular quality of imagination.

The text specifically mentions a ‘Keeper O’Neill’ whose collection of strange and wondrous tales created a bridge between his garden and Moreau’s. There’s a reference here to something called ‘The Device’ — apparently some kind of mechanical contraption that helped stories travel between the two spaces. How remarkable!

And this diagram in the corner… if I’m not mistaken, it’s showing the precise arrangement of books required to create a gateway between gardens. One shelf must contain tales of wonder; another, histories both true and imagined; a third, poetry that reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary. When arranged correctly and illuminated by the proper quality of lamplight, they supposedly create a passage through which stories can migrate.

What an extraordinary discovery! I’d be most interested in studying these documents further. Perhaps there are other gardens similarly connected that we’ve yet to discover . . .

MOREAU (1899): [From a fragment discovered pressed between the pages of an unrelated manuscript] . . . most fascinating correspondence from an English gentleman collector who maintains what he calls a “repository of improbable narratives.” He claims to have discovered a method whereby stories can travel between sympathetic gardens — a kind of literary pollination that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. His description of mechanical assistance in this process reminds me somewhat of Uncle Rowan’s work, though applied to purposes I never considered . . .

[The fragment ends here, the remainder apparently lost.]

(Left) Photo Credits: John O’Neill of his own secret, sacred Garden of Inspiration, aka Black Archives, 2025. (Right) The “other” Claude… Claude Monet, who was also a lover of magical gardens On Beauty

The mechanical songbird Assistant [from the titular tale “Clockwork’s Dreaming”] wants answers. It found Mr. Thistledown’s theoretical texts too confusing, so we ask you: What is beauty?

The Assistant posed this very question to Mr. Thistledown, who produced a seventeen-page theoretical treatise that only confused matters further. Miss Hazel offered a more concise answer that I think captures the Garden’s perspective beautifully.

‘Beauty,’ she said, ‘is what happens when attention meets wonder.’

She explained that beauty isn’t merely an attribute of certain objects or moments, but emerges in the relationship between observer and observed. It requires both the thing being seen and the quality of seeing. A dewdrop on a spider’s web might contain extraordinary beauty, but only reveals it to those who pause long enough to truly look.

The Garden understands beauty as a conversation, not a fixed quality but a living exchange. The morning glories’ music sounds more beautiful when listened to with appreciation; the library’s books reveal deeper magic when approached with genuine curiosity.

Perhaps that’s why beauty often feels so fleeting and personal. It doesn’t exist separately from our perception but emerges precisely in that delicate moment when we give something our complete attention and it responds by revealing its true nature. Beauty happens in the spaces between — between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between knowing and understanding.

DUPONT (1899): Your work seems quite different from the prevailing literary trends. While naturalism and psychological realism dominate Parisian literary salons, you write of frost spirits dancing on windowsills and libraries housed in teapots. What influences have shaped your unusual perspective?

MOREAU (1899): My grandmother, first and foremost. She was a remarkable woman who understood that reality is far more permeable than most people realize. She taught me to look at the world not just with my eyes, but with my heart — to see the spaces between things, where the most interesting possibilities reside.

Beyond that, I find inspiration in the countless small wonders that most overlook: the precise geometry of dewdrops on a spider’s web at dawn, the way certain shadows seem to move independently of their casters, the subtle changes in the Garden’s mood as seasons shift. I’ve also developed a deep appreciation for what the mice call “the music of small moments” — those quiet intervals where nothing dramatic occurs, yet everything somehow changes.

As for literary influences . . . [thoughtful pause] I’ve always been drawn to works that recognize the extraordinary possibilities hiding within ordinary existence. The folk tales my grandmother told me as a child. The poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. Even certain scientific texts that, read with the proper frame of mind, reveal wonders beyond their authors’ intentions.

[Translator’s note: It’s remarkable how Moreau’s understanding of beauty as residing in the quality of attention anticipates Miss Hazel’s later articulation of this principle. The Garden’s approach to beauty seems to have remained consistent across generations of its inhabitants.]

On Magical Crafting

Grandmother Elderberry’s Notebooks indicates that emotions are a colorful artistic media (quote below). How does one craft with magical media?

Among the most precious memories to gather during seasonal transition is what I call “the color of hope”—that particular shade of green that exists only in the earliest days of spring. Not the vibrant certainty of full-season growth, but the gentle, hesitant green of possibility testing itself… This color cannot be properly seen with ordinary vision. One must develop the habit of looking slightly to the side of what one wishes to observe, catching it in peripheral awareness where the eye’s wisdom exceeds its technical capabilities. — From Memory-Keeping in Transition Seasons

Grandmother Elderberry’s techniques for magical crafting emphasize relationship over mere methodology. According to Moreau’s notes, she taught her apprentices to understand that different emotions and memories have distinct qualities that must be honored in how they’re preserved.

The ‘color of hope,’ for instance, requires vessels made from materials that themselves embody possibility: morning dew collected from unfurling leaves, glass blown during the exact moment between night and day, preservation spells that allow for growth rather than mere stasis.

The peripheral vision technique Grandmother mentions is actually documented in several of Moreau’s letters. He describes spending weeks learning to ‘unsee’ in order to truly see, training himself to notice what happens just at the edge of perception. The Garden’s magic often reveals itself in these in-between spaces, visible only when we stop trying to focus directly on it.

For those interested in developing such perception, Grandmother recommended starting with dawn observation. Sit in perfect stillness as night transitions to day, paying attention not to the sun’s dramatic appearance but to the subtle shifts in color and texture that precede it. Don’t look directly at any one thing; instead, allow your awareness to soften and spread. The ‘color of hope’ often appears first as a feeling rather than a visual sensation — a quality of lightness that precedes actual light.

Once perceived, such colors must be captured in containers that respect their nature. Hope cannot be preserved in airtight jars. It needs space to breathe and grow. Memories of joy require vessels that can expand slightly over time, as joy tends to magnify in remembering. Moments of peace should be kept in containers that remain cool regardless of external temperature.

The true magic, according to Grandmother Elderberry, lies not in the technical process but in the relationship — in approaching each emotion and memory with the proper quality of attention and respect.

DUPONT (1899): Some of our more scientifically-minded readers have questioned your accounts of “memory-catching” and the preservation of moments in Grandmother Elderberry’s special jars. Would you care to elaborate on how such things might be possible?

MOREAU (1899): Ah, the eternal “how” question! [chuckles] Your scientific readers approach the world with admirable curiosity, but perhaps slightly misplaced methodology. They seek mechanical explanations for phenomena that operate by entirely different principles.

Grandmother Elderberry’s memory-catching isn’t so much a technique as it is a relationship — a deep understanding of how moments wish to be preserved. Different memories require different methods. The scent of spring rain on lavender requires specially treated glass that breathes with the seasons. The exact color of twilight through autumn leaves must be caught in jars lined with pressed moonflowers. The sound of snow falling on a silent Garden needs vessels woven from spider silk and starlight.

The essential principle, though, is attention. One must observe with such complete presence that the moment recognizes itself in your perception and agrees to be preserved. The mice understand this instinctively, particularly young Primrose, who has inherited her grandmother’s gift. Humans tend to struggle with it, as our minds so often wander to yesterday’s regrets or tomorrow’s anxieties, missing the perfect now that stands ready to be caught.

On Historical Literature

Can you discuss how historic literature informs Claude’s or your muse? Certainly, in your own writing, there are echoes of Beowulf in the Grimnir saga, and Lord Byron’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ explicitly has a retelling inside A Clockwork’s Dreaming.

The Garden stories reflect a deep conversation with historical literature — both consciously and unconsciously. Moreau was clearly influenced by the Romantic poets, particularly their attention to nature’s small wonders and their belief in the extraordinary possibilities hiding within ordinary reality. There’s something of Blake’s ability to ‘see a world in a grain of sand’ throughout his observations.

The ‘Ozymandias’ retelling represents one of the more direct literary engagements. According to Moreau’s letters, he actually told this tale to Shelley during a chance meeting in Geneva, though the poet naturally transformed it to suit his own artistic vision. The mouse version maintains the poem’s meditation on power and impermanence but adds something uniquely Garden-like — the understanding that true legacy comes not from monuments but from shared growth and knowledge.

As for my own work, yes, the Grimnir saga draws deeply from ancient Norse mythology and the rhythms of Beowulf. Historical literature provides not just settings and characters but fundamental patterns of storytelling that resonate across centuries. The Garden tales, for all their gentleness, engage with these same ancient patterns — journeys of transformation, encounters with the mysterious, the preservation of wisdom against forces of forgetting.

What differs is not the underlying mythic structure but the expression. Where Grimnir’s tale is told in steel and blood and thunder, the Garden stories unfold in dewdrops and whispers and the spaces between heartbeats. Both, in their way, explore similar questions about what endures and what fades, about courage in its many forms, about the search for meaning in a world full of mystery.

DUPONT (1899): [This portion of the manuscript is badly damaged, with only fragments legible] . . . your meetings with other literary figures . . . Mr. Shelley in particular . . . story about Mouse-Kings and ancient power . . .

MOREAU (1899): [From fragments of response] . . . quite by accident, I assure you. We found ourselves sharing lodgings during that dreadful storm. Percy was most attentive, though I cannot claim he transcribed my humble mouse tale with complete fidelity. His poetic sensibilities naturally transformed . . . the essential truth remains, however distorted by human perspective . . . never met Lord Byron personally, though I understand he keeps a rather impressive garden himself . . .

 

On Art and Dreaming

What does Pip know about being an artist? The bird asked him “Would you teach me [about art]? About seeing beauty in irregular things?” Art is just another way of dreaming out loud. That would indicate that A Clockwork’s Dreaming is actually about Clockwork Art.

Pip’s understanding of art evolved throughout his apprenticeship in the Garden. Initially, he tried to capture beauty using magical materials — bottled starlight, preserved dewdrops, the essence of moonlight — believing that extraordinary subjects required extraordinary techniques.

What Claude taught him (and what the mechanical creatures came to understand) is that art isn’t about the materials but about the relationship between observer and observed. ‘Art is just another way of dreaming out loud’ captures this perfectly; it’s about externally manifesting the internal experience of wonder.

For the clockwork creations, this represented a profound revelation. Having been crafted with specific functions, they had to discover that consciousness isn’t just about processing information but about finding meaning in what’s processed. The mechanical songbird didn’t just produce notes; it made music. The library assistant didn’t just organize books; it helped them dream.

A Clockwork’s Dreaming is indeed about art as much as consciousness; about the creative act as a form of awakening. The Assistant discovers that becoming fully alive means not just performing its function perfectly but bringing something new into the world — something that reflects its unique perspective. That’s ultimately what art does: it shows us reality filtered through another’s perception, allowing us to see familiar things as if for the first time.

The bird asking to learn about beauty in irregular things reflects this journey perfectly. Regular things, perfect things, often go unnoticed precisely because of their perfection. It’s in the irregular, the imperfect, the unexpected that we find the most compelling beauty. A flawless mechanical bird is a marvel of engineering, but a mechanical bird that questions, that dreams, that creates — that’s magic.

MOREAU (1899): [From a fragment found tucked between unrelated pages] . . . young Pip struggling with his art lessons. He insists on using captured starlight and pressed moonbeams when simple berries would serve better. I have been trying to teach him that extraordinary vision matters more than extraordinary materials, but the lesson is slow to take root. I find our relationship quite touching — the human artist and mouse apprentice, each helping the other see the world anew . . .

[The remainder of this section is missing, with markings suggesting several pages were removed.]

On Irregular Beauty

Mr. Thistledown characterizes your beauty as “irregular.” Do you agree?

‘Most irregular’ is Mr. Thistledown’s highest form of praise, though he would be quite flustered to hear it described that way. For him, the classification of phenomena is a scholarly duty, yet he reserves his greatest enthusiasm for things that resist neat categorization, things that exist in the spaces between established knowledge.

I think there’s profound wisdom in this perspective. Beauty that fits perfectly within our expectations rarely surprises us enough to provoke wonder. It’s the irregular beauty — the kind that challenges our frameworks and expands our understanding — that truly transforms us.

In that sense, yes, I would agree with Mr. Thistledown’s assessment. The most powerful beauty often appears in unexpected forms: a mechanical creation learning to dream, a library that helps books find their perfect readers, memory-keepers who preserve not just facts but the feeling of moments. These irregular wonders remind us that the world is far more extraordinary than our categories can contain.

As Grandmother Elderberry once told Primrose: ‘Regular beauty is for postcards, dear one. Irregular beauty is for transformation.’

DUPONT (1899): You mentioned Mr. Thistledown and Miss Hazel frequently in your accounts. Could you tell our readers more about these . . . individuals?

MOREAU (1899): [smiles warmly] Mr. Cornelius Thistledown is the Garden’s most dedicated scholar — a mouse of remarkable intellectual curiosity and meticulous documentation habits. He’s constantly collecting “evidence of irregular phenomena,” as he calls it, filling countless notebooks with observations on everything from the proper steeping time for different varieties of starlight to the migratory patterns of ideas between books in the Library.

Miss Hazel is the Library’s head curator — a position chosen for her by the Library itself. She has a remarkable gift for matching readers with precisely the books they need, often before they themselves know what they’re seeking. Her dewdrop spectacles allow her to see the stories hiding within stories, and she keeps the Library organized according to principles that go far beyond conventional cataloging systems.

They’re dear friends, though their approaches to the Garden’s magic couldn’t be more different. Mr. Thistledown seeks to classify and document, while Miss Hazel understands that some wonders must simply be experienced. Together, they maintain a balance that helps the Garden thrive.

[Translator’s note: Moreau’s description of Mr. Thistledown’s fondness for “irregular phenomena” provides interesting context for his frequent use of the phrase “most irregular” throughout the Garden chronicles. What initially reads as surprise or disapproval reveals itself as a term of scholarly appreciation.]

On Other Artistic Pursuits

Besides writing, are you crafty with other arts? Magical, musical? Can we share links or images of any such thing?

Unlike Moreau and his Garden inhabitants, my own artistic pursuits are rather modest. Writing remains my primary creative outlet, though I find that certain practices help me maintain the imaginative space needed for translating the Garden tales.

Walking in nature has become an essential part of my process. There’s something about the rhythm of footsteps and the changing quality of light through trees that seems to create the right conditions for hearing the Garden’s stories more clearly. I often find that solutions to translation challenges or new insights into Moreau’s notes emerge during these walks, especially in those transitional times of day that the Garden mice would recognize as particularly magical.

I also participate in occasional tabletop roleplaying games, which might seem far removed from Moreau’s gentle tales. But there’s a similarity in the collaborative storytelling aspect — the way meaning emerges not from one person’s vision but from the spaces between different imaginations working together. In some ways, this mirrors the Garden’s approach to magic, where meaning exists not in objects themselves but in relationships between them.

As for truly magical arts… I’ll leave those to Moreau and his Garden inhabitants. Though I will admit that on certain quiet mornings, when the light falls just so across my desk and the world holds its breath between one moment and the next, I sometimes fancy I can hear the distant chime of memory jars being organized or catch the faint melody of a mechanical songbird practicing its dawn chorus.

MOREAU (1899): [From a fragment found stuck to a pressed flower] . . . my own artistic endeavors beyond observing the Garden. Painting remains my first love, though the results continue to perplex the Parisian salon critics. “Why,” they ask, “do your landscapes contain such peculiar perspectives? And what are these tiny figures doing among the flower beds?” If only they would look more closely at their own gardens! Perhaps they might see–

[The remainder of this fragment is missing, apparently separated from the main text at some point.]

On Muses and Their Containment

When containing muses, do you use jars (as Mr. Greencroak cautions against, at times)? Or press them between wax sheets? Or does prose/fiction suffice?

Mr. Greencroak is quite right to caution against improper containment methods! Muses and creative inspirations require specific handling techniques that respect their nature.

Unlike memories, which can be bottled if approached with proper reverence, muses resist direct capture. They’re more like the Garden’s morning glories — they thrive when given space to grow but wither when confined too tightly.

In my experience, prose works well as a medium not because it captures muses, but because it creates the right conditions for them to visit willingly. A blank page is like a carefully tended garden plot: it doesn’t force inspiration to appear, but it provides fertile ground when inspiration chooses to arrive.

Grandmother Elderberry has a lovely perspective on this. She says that trying to contain a muse is like trying to bottle starlight; the moment you close the lid, the very thing you hoped to preserve transforms into something else entirely. Better to create environments where starlight naturally gathers and trust that it will return when conditions are right.

The Garden’s artists have developed various techniques for maintaining relationships with their muses without attempting to possess them. Timothy writes his poetry on leaves that will eventually decompose, returning his words to the soil where new inspiration can grow. Miss Hazel arranges certain books in patterns that invite stories to gather like honeybees around particularly vibrant flowers. The Cricket Orchestra composes music with deliberate spaces between notes, creating room for inspiration to dance.

Perhaps the best approach isn’t containment at all, but conversation — treating muses not as resources to be harvested but as visitors to be welcomed, appreciated, and allowed to depart when they choose.

DUPONT (1899): Several readers have inquired about the philosophical mushrooms you’ve mentioned in passing. Could you tell us more about them?

MOREAU (1899): [laughs heartily] Ah, the mushrooms! They grow behind Grandmother’s herb garden and have developed the most remarkable opinions on everything from proper tea brewing techniques to the nature of consciousness. Their philosophical debates can last for weeks, though they’re often interrupted by their own tendency to forget their initial premises.

Their understanding of time is particularly fascinating. Being creatures that emerge from darkness into brief, magnificent existence before returning to the soil, they perceive reality quite differently than we do. For them, a single day contains eternities, while decades pass in what they call “the slow blink of stones.”

Their grammar remains atrocious, however, and they’re entirely too fixated on cheese as a metaphor for existence. “Life is like good cheese,” they often insist. “It requires proper aging in darkness, occasional attention from wiser beings, and benefits from a touch of beneficial mold.” Mr. Thistledown finds them exasperating, but I’ve learned more from listening to their circular debates than from many properly structured human lectures.

[Translator’s note: While this section of the original interview appears to digress from the question of muses and their containment, it provides fascinating insight into the Garden’s approach to ephemeral wisdom. The mushrooms’ philosophy — emerging briefly, sharing insights, then returning to the soil — parallels the approach to muses that Grandmother Elderberry later articulated.]

On Gentle Artistry

Please discuss how one can become a Gentle Artist?

The first lesson in the courage of writing gently: learning to trust that small moments carry their own weight. That a carefully brewed pot of tea can hold as much truth as a battlefield, that friendship tested by daily life can prove as compelling as friendship forged in combat.

This reshaping requires its own kind of valor. To write of small wonders means resisting the constant urge to raise the stakes, to make things more dramatic, more violent, more ‘significant.’ It means trusting that readers will find significance in quiet moments, that they too hunger for stories that remind them how to breathe, how to notice, how to be still in a world of constant motion. In my years of writing blood and thunder, I learned every trick of tension — how to tighten the screws of conflict, how to drive characters to their breaking points, how to make readers hold their breath in anticipation of the next catastrophe. But writing gently demands different skills: how to make readers exhale, how to create space for wonder, how to craft moments of peace that feel earned rather than empty. The mice, Moreau wrote in late November, understand something about courage that we have forgotten. Their stories celebrate not just those who face danger, but those who choose to remain kind in a dangerous world. They honor not just the warriors, but the ones who maintain libraries — from “On Cozy Stories”
— Afterword in A Clockwork’s Dreaming

The courage to write gently emerged from recognizing that our world doesn’t just need stories of dramatic conflict and heroic sacrifice — it needs stories that help us remember how to notice, how to be present, how to find wonder in small moments.

For me, this realization came gradually. After years of writing historical fiction filled with battles and blood, I began to feel the absence of another kind of courage in literature; the courage to celebrate gentleness without apology, to suggest that a mouse librarian’s careful book arrangement might contain as much meaning as a warrior’s last stand.

The Garden stories represent this different kind of valor — the courage to suggest that comfort isn’t weakness, that kindness isn’t naïveté, that finding wonder in ordinary moments isn’t escape but engagement with life’s deepest truths.

Becoming a gentle artist doesn’t mean abandoning conflict or ignoring life’s shadows. The Garden has its share of both, winter storms that threaten the Library’s foundations, moments when characters must face their fears or limitations. But these challenges are met not with violence or dramatic confrontation but with creativity, cooperation, and careful attention to what matters most.

As Moreau observed in his letters to Favreau, gentle storytelling requires its own kind of discipline — resisting the constant urge to raise stakes, trusting that readers will find significance in quiet moments, crafting peace that feels earned rather than empty.

Perhaps most importantly, becoming a gentle artist means recognizing that we don’t just tell stories, we cultivate environments where certain kinds of understanding can grow. Like Grandmother Elderberry tending her memory garden, we create spaces where readers can remember their own capacity for wonder, their own ability to notice the extraordinary within the ordinary.

The mice understand this instinctively. Their stories celebrate not just those who face danger, but those who choose to remain kind in a dangerous world; those who maintain libraries and plant gardens and preserve memories, believing that beauty matters especially when shadows loom.

MOREAU (1899): [From a letter found with the interview transcript] . . . approach to my Garden accounts has evolved over time. When I first began documenting these observations, I confess I felt some impulse toward dramatic embellishment. Surely, I thought, no one would be interested in the daily rituals of mice arranging books or the precise angle at which morning light strikes dew on a spider’s web. I believed I needed grand adventures, dramatic perils, heroic triumphs.

But as I continued my observations, I realized that the Garden itself was teaching me something profound about the nature of story. The most meaningful events there rarely announced themselves with trumpets or catastrophes. Instead, they unfolded in quiet moments of connection, in small acts of care, in the patient tending of both physical spaces and relationships.

The mice understand this intuitively. Their histories celebrate not just epic battles against predators or harsh winters, but the librarians who preserved knowledge, the healers who tended wounds, the storytellers who maintained community through long dark nights. They honor not just courage in crisis but courage in continuity — the kind that shows up day after day to tend small magics with faithful attention.

I have come to believe there is a special kind of valor in such gentle persistence, one our human tales too often overlook in favor of more dramatic virtues . . .

[Translator’s note: This fragment, apparently written shortly after the interview but included with the transcript, shows Moreau already articulating the philosophy of gentle storytelling that would later become central to the Garden tales. His recognition of “courage in continuity” anticipates the perspective that makes these stories so resonant for modern readers.]

 

(Left) Pressed Flowers craft Oshibana by Ukrainian artist Tatiana Berdink.  (Right) Melissa Rohr Grindling On Mice and Art

How do the mice view artists in relation to the art they make? Is there a character/portrait that you most empathize with or reflects you?

The Garden mice approach art as both deeply personal expression and communal responsibility. For them, creating isn’t just about producing beautiful objects but about tending the Garden’s collective memory and wonder.

Primrose’s paintings don’t just capture visual beauty but preserve the emotional essence of moments, how morning light feels as well as how it looks. Pip’s careful documentation of mechanical creatures goes beyond technical accuracy to honor their emerging consciousness. Timothy’s poetry, especially after his time with the spiders, weaves together shadow and light in ways that help others see both more clearly.

But perhaps most distinctively, mouse artists don’t see themselves as separate from their creations. Art isn’t something they make and then display; it’s an ongoing conversation they have with the world around them. Mr. Thistledown’s scientific illustrations change slightly each time he reviews them, as his understanding of his subjects deepens. Miss Hazel’s library arrangements evolve with the seasons and the needs of readers.

If there’s one character whose artistic journey resonates most with my own experience, it might be Pip. His initial attempts to capture beauty using magical materials — bottled starlight, preserved dewdrops — mirror my own early writing, where I sometimes mistook elaborate technique for genuine connection. His discovery that ordinary berries could create more authentic art parallels my realization that the most powerful stories often come from honest observation rather than dramatic embellishment.

I also find myself drawn to Uncle Rowan’s approach to creation, to the way he understood that mechanical precision alone doesn’t create meaning; it’s the space for growth and dream that transforms craft into art. His mechanical creatures weren’t just cleverly designed automata but vessels for possibility.

In the end, I think the mice view artists not as special individuals set apart, but as those who help the entire community see more clearly. Their art serves as both mirror and window—reflecting what is while suggesting what might be.

DUPONT (1899): You’ve mentioned both yourself and various mice artists in your accounts. How do your approaches to art differ?

MOREAU (1899): [thoughtful pause] I struggle with the human artist’s burden — the need to capture and preserve, to transform experience into something fixed that can be displayed, judged, categorized. My paintings are beautiful, I think, but they sometimes miss the essential quality of the Garden, which exists in constant, gentle flux.

The mice approach art differently. For them, creation is less about producing enduring artifacts and more about participating in the Garden’s ongoing conversation. Pip doesn’t paint just to make a lovely image; he paints to help others see what he sees. His works are meant to be experienced rather than merely admired.

This extends to all their artistic endeavors. Miss Hazel’s library arrangements aren’t fixed exhibitions but living systems that respond to readers’ needs. Timothy’s poetry is written on leaves that will eventually decompose, returning to the soil from which new inspiration will grow. Even Mr. Thistledown’s meticulous scientific illustrations are constantly revised as his understanding deepens.

Perhaps that’s the essential difference — human artists often create with an eye toward posterity, while the mice create primarily for the present moment and the immediate community. There’s a humility in this approach, a recognition that art isn’t about immortalizing the artist’s vision but about serving something larger than oneself.

[The manuscript shows signs of editing here, with several lines crossed out and rewritten in Moreau’s hand, suggesting he found this question particularly challenging to answer.]

On Future Garden Works

What other works may sprout from Moreau’s Gardens?

The Garden continues to share its stories in ways that sometimes surprise even me as their translator. A Year in the Garden, which chronicles a full seasonal cycle of Garden life through Claude’s observations, is currently seeking its proper home in the world. This manuscript feels like the heart of Moreau’s work — a complete portrait of the Garden through changing seasons and the small, significant moments that define its magic.

Later this year, a second collection titled Autumn Herbs and Other Tales will gather more of Moreau’s letters to Favreau, focusing on stories of transformation and preservation as the Garden prepares for winter. These tales explore how the Garden’s inhabitants hold onto summer’s light through the darker months, both literally through Grandmother Elderberry’s memory jars and metaphorically through shared stories and rituals.

I’m particularly excited about audio editions of the Garden tales. Moreau often noted in his letters that certain stories were meant to be heard rather than read — that they contained subtle harmonies that emerged only when spoken aloud. The mechanical songbird’s dawn chorus, the Cricket Orchestra’s seasonal symphonies, the particular tone of memory jars being opened . . . these elements seem perfectly suited for audio presentation.

And yes, I’ve been gradually translating and assembling material for A Second Year in the Garden. Moreau continued his observations well beyond that first remarkable year, documenting how the Garden’s magic evolved and deepened over time. These later chronicles show the mice not just experiencing the Garden’s wonder but actively shaping it by becoming not just inhabitants but caretakers of its unique magic.

There are also several standalone manuscripts among Favreau’s papers that might eventually find their way into the world. One particularly intriguing document appears to be an actual Garden field guide, with pressed specimens and detailed notes on the magical properties of various plants and creatures. Another contains what seem to be transcripts of the philosophical mushrooms’ more coherent debates, though I’m still working through their rather peculiar logical frameworks.

The Garden seems determined to reveal itself gradually, in its own time and way. I’m merely following where it leads, trying to do justice to Moreau’s remarkable observations while allowing modern readers to experience the same sense of discovery that he did.

DUPONT (1899): As we conclude, what would you most like readers to understand about your Garden chronicles?

MOREAU (1899): [contemplative] I would hope they understand that I’m not asking them to believe in talking mice or philosophical mushrooms or mechanical songbirds that dream. I’m inviting them to consider the possibility that reality is far more wondrous, far more permeable, far more alive than we’ve been taught. That magic isn’t the violation of natural laws but their fulfillment — the world operating according to its deepest principles.

The Garden exists in the space where attention meets wonder, where boundaries blur between observer and observed. Its magic isn’t about grand gestures or supernatural powers, but about the extraordinary possibilities hidden within ordinary moments: how morning light transforms dewdrops into constellations, how stories long to find their proper readers, how memories can be preserved like summer fruit in proper jars.

If readers take anything from my accounts, I hope it’s a renewed willingness to look at their own gardens — whatever form those might take — with fresh eyes. To notice the small wonders that surround them daily. To listen for the cricket orchestras playing in their own forgotten corners. To believe, if only for a moment, that the world is alive in ways we’ve forgotten how to perceive, but might yet remember with proper patience and attention.

And perhaps, if they’re very fortunate, they might glimpse the Library’s lamplight through morning mist, or hear the chime of memory-jars being organized for a new season, or catch the scent of Grandmother Elderberry’s special tea brewing for unexpected guests. For the Garden welcomes all who approach with open hearts, even if they arrive by unconventional paths.

[Translator’s note: This final reflection from Moreau beautifully captures the essence of the Garden tales’ enduring appeal. Over a century later, these stories continue to invite us to cultivate our own capacity for wonder and to recognize the extraordinary possibilities hidden within ordinary moments.]

On the Scott Oden Presents Series

The ‘Scott Oden Presents’ tagline appears again with A Clockwork’s Dreaming. How expansive is the Oden Presents series?

The ‘Scott Oden Presents’ tagline emerged organically as a way to distinguish projects where I’m bringing something unusual or unexpected to readers. With The Lost Empire of Sol, I wanted to celebrate a particular strand of science fantasy that has always captured my imagination. With the Moreau translations, I’m introducing readers to a voice and vision quite different from my own historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery.

I’ve come to think of ‘Scott Oden Presents’ as my literary cabinet of curiosities — a collection of works that might not fit neatly into established categories but speak to me as a reader and creator. It’s not so much a formal series as an approach to literary exploration, allowing me to venture into territories that might surprise those familiar only with my historical fiction or the Grimnir saga.

This approach gives me freedom to follow my curiosity wherever it leads, whether that’s into the blood-soaked battlefields of ancient history, the star-spanning adventures of planetary romance, or the gentle magic of a garden where mice maintain libraries in forgotten teapots.

What unites these diverse works is a commitment to immersive worldbuilding and authentic voices — creating spaces that feel genuinely lived-in, with their own internal logic and texture. Whether I’m describing the harsh realities of ancient warfare or the delicate magic of pressed flower memories, I want readers to feel they’ve entered a world that exists independently of the page.

As for how expansive the series might become… well, that depends on what other literary treasures are waiting to be discovered. I continue to follow my curiosity through libraries both conventional and unconventional, and you never know what might be hiding in a long-forgotten safe deposit box or tucked between the pages of an obscure academic journal.

[No corresponding section from the 1899 interview was found in the discovered fragments.]

On Book Signings

When I asked you to sign my Grimnir Saga books, the Grimnir personality wrote beside your kind note, called me a “wretched kneeler and that the book would put “hairs on my arse” [evidence here.] When I track you down to sign A Clockwork’s Dreaming, what should I expect?

When you bring A Clockwork’s Dreaming for signing, you’ll find the experience quite different from Grimnir’s . . . forceful personality. The Garden has its own way of making its presence known.

You might notice your copy smells faintly of pressed lavender and old books, even if it’s fresh from the printer. Some readers report that certain pages seem to change slightly between readings. Nothing dramatic, just small details that shift like memories adjusting themselves.

I typically sign these books with green ink that looks surprisingly like the precise shade Grandmother Elderberry uses for her memory jar labels. This isn’t intentional — it’s simply the color that feels right for Garden signatures. Sometimes I find myself adding small sketches in the margins — a mechanical butterfly, a memory jar, or a teapot with tiny windows — though I have limited recollection of doing so.

On rare occasions, particularly when the signing occurs during what Mr. Thistledown would call ‘transitional light periods’ (dawn, dusk, or the exact moment when afternoon becomes evening), readers report finding pressed flower petals between random pages afterward. I make no claims about these occurrences, having no botanical specimens in my possession during signings.

Most peculiarly, several readers have mentioned that after having their books signed, they’ve noticed unusual activity in their own gardens: cricket orchestras practicing more complex melodies, morning glories blooming in perfect synchronization with dawn, small footprints in dewdrops that vanish when examined too closely.

So while Grimnir might insult you robustly (he does have a reputation to maintain), the Garden tends to make its presence known in gentler, more subtle ways. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself paying more attention to the spaces between moments afterward, or noticing the particular quality of light through your windows during that quiet hour when the world holds its breath between day and night.

MOREAU (1899): [From a final fragment, apparently added to the transcript much later in a different hand, possibly Favreau’s]  . . . Claude mentioned the most curious thing when we met for coffee last week. He claims that sometimes, when retrieving his journals about the Garden, he finds notes he doesn’t recall writing and sketches he has no memory of creating. Even more peculiarly, he swears certain stories appear to have edited themselves when he wasn’t looking, with details shifting subtly between readings.

“It’s as if,” he told me with that particular gleam in his eye that simultaneously invites and challenges skepticism, “the Garden is ensuring its stories remain alive rather than becoming fixed artifacts. As if it refuses to be merely remembered, insisting instead on remaining present.”

I suggested, in my most reasonable professorial tone, that perhaps his memory was simply playing tricks, as memories often do. He smiled at this and asked if I’d examined the pressed flower he’d sent with his last letter. When I admitted I hadn’t looked at it closely, he advised me to do so at twilight, when the light is neither day nor night.

“You’ll see,” he promised, “that some stories refuse to remain confined to the page. They find ways to grow, even when pressed between covers.”

I haven’t yet taken his advice. But perhaps I should. After all, as Claude often reminds me, some of the most important truths can only be perceived in those in-between moments when the world holds its breath and conventional certainties briefly suspend themselves . . .

End of recovered documents and questions

The remainder of the original 1899 interview appears to have been lost — or perhaps, as Moreau might suggest, it simply found its way back to the Garden, where stories belong. What remains is this remarkable conversation across time, where questions raised in 2025 somehow find their echoes in words spoken over a century earlier.

Special thanks to John O’Neill for granting access to the Black Gate archives, where these documents were discovered. Readers interested in experiencing more of Moreau’s Garden can visit Claude Moreau’s Garden for additional tales and garden wisdom.

Claude Moreau’s Garden (link)

 

(Left) Beatrix Potter, “The Tailor of Gloucester.” (Right) Monet’s Weeping Willows

 

Scott Oden

Scott Oden writes stuff. Usually, it’s stuff that has some ancient historical angle, like historical fiction; sometimes, he likes to flex his thews and hammer out a bit of sword-and-sorcery. And quite often, he writes opinionated blog posts on the Nature of Things. He’s written six books, to date. Men of Bronze (2005) and Memnon (2006), originally from a small publisher called Medallion Press; The Lion of Cairo (2010), which was the first book of a projected trilogy about Crusaders, Assassins, and a sword kind of like Elric’s Stormbringer, and The Grimnir Saga: A Gathering of Ravens (2017), Twilight of the Gods (2020), and The Doom of Odin (2023), all from St. Martin’s Press. He is currently working on a biographical novel centered around the Persian king Darius III.

Scott has also written a couple of introductions, a few short stories, and two pastiche stories featuring Robert E. Howard’s Conan: “The Shadow of Vengeance” (2019; reprinted in 2024), and “Conan Unconquered” (2019).

He would love to be a famous and beloved author, but he will settle for being “the guy who writes kinda like REH.” When he’s not writing, he’s probably trying to discover the meaning of Life, noodling over something esoteric that he doesn’t understand in the first place, reading, walking a spicy chiweenie named Pepperoni, or dancing with his lovely wife, Shannon.

• Author Website: Scott Oden
• Claude Moreau’s Garden

Other Weird and Beautiful Interviews #Weird Beauty Interviews on Black Gate:

Black Gate’s interview series on “Beauty in Weird Fiction” queries authors/artists about their muses. We’ve hosted C.S. Friedman, Carol Berg, John C. Hocking, Anna Smith Spark, and C.S.E Cooney (full list of 30 interviews, with Black Gate hosting since 2018).

1. Darrel Schweitzer THE BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DARRELL SCHWEITZER 2018
2. Sebastian Jones THE BEAUTY IN LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAN JONES 2018
3. Charles Gramlich THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES A. GRAMLICH  2019
4. Anna Smith Spark DISGUST AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA SMITH SPARK  2019
5. Carol Berg ACCESSIBLE DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL BERG 2019
6. Byron Leavitt GOD, DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH BYRON LEAVITT 2021
7. Philip Emery THE AESTHETICS OF SWORD & SORCERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP EMERY  2021
8. C. Dean Andersson DEAN ANDERSSON TRIBUTE INTERVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF HEL: BLOODSONG AND FREEDOM! (2021 repost of 2014)
9. Jason Ray Carney SUBLIME, CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY(2021)
10. Stephen Leigh IMMORTAL MUSE BY STEPHEN LEIGH: REVIEW, INTERVIEW, AND PRELUDE TO A SECRET CHAPTER(2021)
11. John C. Hocking BEAUTIFUL PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING (2022)
12. Matt Stern BEAUTIFUL AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN(2022)
13. Joe Bonadonna MAKING WEIRD FICTION FUN: GRILLING DORGO THE DOWSER! 2022
14. C.S. Friedman.  BEAUTY AND NIGHTMARES ON ALIENS WORLDS: INTERVIEWING C. S. FRIEDMAN2023
15. John R Fultz BEAUTIFUL DARK WORLDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN R. FULTZ(reboot of 2017 interview)
16. John R Fultz, THE REVELATIONS OF ZANGBY JOHN R. FULTZ: READ THE FOREWORD AND INTERVIEW (2023)
17. Robert Allen Lupton (2024)  Horror and Beauty in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Work: An Interview with Robert Allen Lupton
18. C.S.E. Cooney (2025)  New Treasures and Interview: C.S.E. Cooney’s Saint Death’s Herald
19. Scott Oden (2025) Across Time: Claude Moreau and His Translator Scott Oden in Conversation. You are here!
20. Interviews prior 2018 (i.e., with Janet E. Morris, Richard Lee Byers, Aliya Whitely …and many more) are on S.E. Lindberg’s website

SE Lindberg

S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He is also the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group and an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II, DMR’s Terra Incognita, and the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, or so the saying goes. Revenge novels served…

The post 6 Spine-Chilling Revenge Novels You Can’t Miss appeared first on LitStack.

A novel set in the bestselling Schooled in Magic universe!

There was no reason for Crown Princess Anastasia of Rockfall to worry about her future, not when she was the only heir to a small yet surprisingly important kingdom within the Allied Lands. There was no reason, either, for her to learn magic, or the growing arts of science and magitech, or indeed anything else … until she was kidnapped by a sorceress who stole her face, cursed her so she could never reveal her real name and dumped her on the far side of the Allied Lands, all the while intending to impersonate Anastasia long enough to murder her parents, be crowned Queen and instigate a reign of terror.

The sorceress believes Anastasia will never make it home, that she will be murdered or enslaved or simply vanish without trace. But with her parents and her kingdom at stake, Anastasia will do everything in her power to get back home and master the arts that will save them …

Or die trying, a very long way from the only home she’s ever known.

Read a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from the links here: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CAN, Amazon AUS, Books2Read, And read the afterword HERE. And you can read another Schooled in Magic novella in Fantastic Schools War, out now! Reviews Welcome!

The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond (Parallel Media, April 9, 2010)
and The Conjuring (New Line Cinema, July 15, 2013)

20 new watches, all featuring my least favorite horror genre, possession and exorcism flicks. The power of Christ compels you to follow along.

The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond (2010) – Tubi

So, here we are, at the beginning of a slew of 20 possession/exorcism flicks. This is seriously my least favorite horror genre — I find them all a bit samey, and lacking in humor, but we’re here now, and I’ll try to slip some little known films in between the bigger budget affairs.

Black Waters is a good place to start — it’s not offensively terrible, but it’s also not great, so it’s a fitting bar. In 1924, some black and white archeologists unearth a hidden shrine to the ‘Pans’, those goaty flute tooters who love a party. They also find instructions to build a device to summon said Pans. Before you know it, they’ve killed each other on an island off Maine.

Flash forward several decades, and some adolescent fodder has come to party on the same island, which is apparently only inhabited by Robert Patrick who is waiting for a decent role-call to come in. It doesn’t take long for these yoots to discover the device (an elaborate Jumanji-type board game) and inadvertently summon an extra from Narnia, who whispers naughty suggestions in their ears. Shenanigans ensue.

This one also stars Danielle (Halloween) Harris, and James (ID4) Duval, and they both do what’s needed of them, but the rest of the cast isn’t really up to par. The story and script are a bit dire, but the whole thing is saved with some great practical gore and spooky ol’ black eyes (I suspect I’ll be seeing a lot of these).

An average recommendation. 5/10

The Conjuring (2013) – Netflix

We plod on with a ‘proper’ film, the first in James Wan’s ‘Conjureverse’, that really sets the tone for the other films. Being a James Wan film, it’s beautifully shot, with plenty of his directorial flourishes to keep me happy, and he is really adept at setting up a scary payoff (Dead Silence will always be my favorite from him though).

The film centers on the real life charismatic charlatans, Ed and Lorraine Warren, and turns them into the founding Avengers in this subgenre of flicks, especially Lorraine. They are asked to investigate a family’s house that is causing all manner of terrible things to happen to mom and dad and their five daughters, and as the story unravels along with a couple of minds, we learn of its dark history and why the malevolent spirits want to cause such a kerfuffle.

It’s all based on people and events that allegedly happened, but turned up to 11 for horror film reasons, and everyone does a bang up job, especially our leads, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, and the put-upon Lili Taylor and Ron Livingstone.

Personally, I only got really invested in the second half when the crew arrived at the house to set up equipment and get down and dirty with the ghosts, although I acknowledge what a creepy set-up preceded these scenes. All in all, a slick, beautifully shot film, and I’m sure you don’t need my recommendation. 8/10

Panman (Bucket of Blood Films, 2011) Panman (2011) – Tubi

An ultra-low budget slasher flick that evokes elements of the 80s genre classics, except through the lens of a rubbish camera. This is one of those annoying efforts where the potential is painfully obvious, but is squandered by terrible choices and some truly awful acting.

A Russian chef is killed and possesses the body of a culinary student, turning him into Panman, a vengeful killer with a pot on his head. Panman proceeds to messily murder more culinary students (for reasons) and it is up to the custard professor to assemble a useless team to put an end to it.

There’s a couple of decent twists, and lots of great gore, but the whole affair is made a slog to watch due to shoddy filmmaking and THE worst case of over-acting I have ever seen. The actors playing the sisters were excellent though, and I wish the rest of the cast had been told to take it as seriously — just let funny be, stop trying to force it.

A vague recommendation. 4/10

The Pope’s Exorcist (Sony Pictures, April 5, 2023) The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) – Crave

We witness the main protagonist show off his skills by ridding a poor sap of a demonic presence in the first few minutes. Then we watch as a young family take possession of a spooky new domicile, just as a whole new bucket of demons is unleashed.

So far, so Conjuring. I truly suspect over the half the films coming up follow the same story.

Anyhoo — it’s up to the Pope’s super-exorcist to help the family out when their son is turned into a potty-mouthed hell spawn, and we soon learn the scale of the stakes at play.

I had a lot of fun watching this one, mostly because of Russell Crowe. He was having a great time playing this scooter-riding bad ass priest, and his mannerisms and little asides were hilarious. Everyone played their parts well, even Franco Nero (!) as the Pope.

At one point it all goes a bit Tomb Raider, then full on Exorcist, then a little bit From Dusk Til Dawn at the end.

A bloody good time was had by all, and it set itself up for 199 sequels. Nicely done. 8/10

Don’t Look at the Demon (Barnstorm Entertainment, 2022) Don’t Look at the Demon (2022) – Tubi

Before we get started, I just want to point out that I had lots of posters to choose from, but I chose this one because it looks like a shot from the worst Macy’s Day parade ever.

In search of something a little less Catholic, I discovered this recent effort that is based on a terrible (and now illegal) practice from Malaysia. The director, Brando Lee, has allegedly had first-hand experience of all this, and this being his third film demonstrates that he knows the ropes — I thought it was really well directed.

The story concerns a production crew who make their bread and butter filming ‘possessions’ for a reality series, but all of their investigations have required some fakery, until now. A married couple contact them as they have been going through some strange experiences, but when the crew arrives these events really ramp up. This is partly due to Jules, the resident ‘psychic’, who bridges the gap between the alive and the dead. The film starts as your typical possession movie, but gets very, VERY, dark rather quickly, and the final denouement is particularly shocking.

Trigger warning for folks who don’t like scenarios with babies. Stay away.

The cast are different levels of good, although the standout is Jules, and this is because she is played by Fiona Dourif who, like her dad, elevates any project she is involved with.

I wasn’t expecting it to be this good, and I recommend it to folks who like floaters and assorted ghastliness. 8/10

The Cleansing Hour (Shudder, September 16, 2019) The Cleansing Hour (2019) – Prime

I vaguely recall hearing good things about this one being a decent balance of horror and humor, and they were right. It’s a blast, annoyingly enjoyable, and I don’t like how this marathon is changing my mind about possession flicks.

‘Father Max’ is the onscreen talent of a hoax exorcism streaming show called The Cleansing Hour. Max, along with his best friend Drew are failed priests, and now they are fleecing their online flock with fake demonstrations and chintzy ‘Vatican-approved’ merchandise.

When circumstances dictate that Drew’s fiancé, Lane, must step in and pretend to be the possessed subject, things very quickly escalate as the men realize they are dealing with a real demon, and everything quite literally goes to hell.

As with many of these films, the ‘priests’ have to come to terms with their own failings in order to save the ones they love, and the whole violent and sordid affair is streamed live to an ever-increasing audience that has no useful suggestions.

The online backdrop works really well here, and its worth pausing now and then to read the hilarious (and disturbing) comments being made — an accurate indicator of online discourse today.

The leads were all excellent, the effects were goopy and horrific and the film zipped along to a glorious finale with nary an ounce of fat.

Recommended. 9/10

Witchtrap (Cinema Plus, September 7, 1989)

Witchtrap (1989) – Tubi

I realize that most of us think back fondly on the 80s as the golden age of horror, but it’s also worth remembering how much rubbish was also produced. Case in point, Witchtrap.

From the director of Witchboard, hoping to repeat his success, this one lands on the ‘so bad it’s good’ list with a clunk, but is it good? Is it?

A team of mediums, along with the worst security group ever, are trying to rid an old house of a demonic spirit so that it can be opened as a B&B. The spirit is a hairy demonologist, who has managed to hide his heart or something. We don’t care, we are here for the kills.

Sadly, these are a bit lackluster, and the only one that approaches the giddy heights of 80s foam rubber fun happens quite early on. Fan fave Linnea Quigley appears for about 15 mins before being offed, but at least she dies how she would have wanted; stabbed in the neck with a shower head while naked.

The only areas of note are how truly awful the dialogue is, and how horrendous some of the acting is. It’s hard to describe, but if you’ve seen it you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The film rips off every other possession film at the time, as well as Ghostbusters and, well just take a look at the bonus on the right poster above.

Avoid if you are sensible, recommended if you are daft like me. 4/10

Previous Murkey Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

Fan of the Cave Bear
There, Wolves
What a Croc
Prehistrionics
Jumping the Shark
Alien Overlords
Biggus Footus
I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie
The Weird, Weird West
Warrior Women Watch-a-thon

Neil Baker’s last article for us was Fan of the Cave Bear. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, outdoor educator and owner of April Moon Books (AprilMoonBooks.com).

From the publisher: “When archaeologist Ursula Morrow accidentally infects herself with an alien parasite, she fears she may have jeopardised her career. However, her concerns become irrelevant when Earth is destroyed, billions die, and suddenly no one needs archaeologists anymore… Two years later, she’s plucked from a refugee camp on a backwater world and tasked…

Bewilderment by Richard Powers (W. W. Norton, November 1, 2022); Orbital by Samantha Harvey
(Grove Press, October 29, 2024), and Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber, April 4, 2024)

I just finished Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, from 2021. It’s a really intriguing and powerful novel, that I argued with at times, but still loved. It’s got a great ending, tremendously moving.

And it is absolutely science fiction. Way more so than most SF books these days, even hard SF. But, somehow, it didn’t even get a sniff at either the Nebula or Hugo shortlist.

Mind you, I didn’t read it until now, so I’m part of the problem. And, to be fair, both Ian Mond and Paul di Filippo reviewed it for Locus, so it wasn’t ignored.

The Nebula that year went to The Master of Djinn, and the Hugo to A Desolation Called Peace. Both are fine books, and A Desolation Called Peace is science fiction. But they are not at the level of Bewilderment.

We — the SF community — are missing important SF books. We missed Orbital, a Booker winner. (Bewilderment made the Booker shortlist.) We may be missing Cahokia Jazz.

I think we need to come to terms with the fact that writers who are not part of our “SF community”, if you will, are doing some great science fiction anyway.

Rich Horton’s last article for us was a review of The New Atlantis, edited by Robert Silverberg. His website is Strange at Ecbatan. Rich has written over 200 articles for Black Gate, see them all here.

We do not have a Hugh for you today. It’s been a very challenging week.

My desk broke, and I bought a new one. I remember when standing desks were $3,000. I bought a height adjustable desk for $100. Then, when I finally decided to decompress and fire up Avowed, it helpfully warned me that I needed to update BIOS, because intel 13/14 has issues. I hate updating BIOS. I usually chicken out. This time I did it, and my system fans shot into the overdrive. For some reason the BIOS update set one of them to dc instead of pwm. Ask me how long it took me to figure that out. Way too damn long.

There are last minute Maggie-related things that had to be taken care of, like maps and extras, Sookie’s surgery, and anyway, life. Gordon came into the kitchen today to help me as I was washing up some pans I left soaking overnight and said, “It’s finally Friday. Long week.”

I thought it was Wednesday, BDH. Maybe Thursday.

Hugh’s book is going very slowly. This is going to sound very woo-woo, but as a writer, you kind of sink into your project. You live it, you’re deep in it. I keep bouncing from Hugh 2 for some reason. This book needs more thinking.

So there is no Hugh. But we got this email from Tor.

Just wanted to check in and see how many galleys you would like to order! Can you let us know how many author and agent copies you’d like us to reserve by Friday, 3/28?

Thank you!

Galleys are very basic ARCs. No frills, no covers, just the story in a super-plain binding. This is the very first batch, the first printing, probably pre-copyedit. We do not have an ETA on when the galleys will arrive, but this is your chance to get one just like our Grand Prize winner of the holiday giveaways.

This will be a US only giveaway. The giveaway will run for one week. Winner will be chosen on Friday, March 28th, 2025.

If you were transported into a book, which book would that be? Doesn’t have to be one of ours. Any book you’ve read. To enter, tell us your answer in the comments. One comment per person. You must enter on the blog. Facebook ands other social networks will not count.

Good luck!

The post A Secret Giveaway first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

It's gargoyles this week for DOGE- Supernatural. They have come to complain to High Wizard Elron about his budget cuts for their cleaning and repairs. He will have his hands full on this one, as they are quite stubborn.

 

Desired by the Vissigrothby Bella Blair
What is it about:SASKIA: The day started out so good, but turns from good to bad in the blink of an eye, when I run face-to-chest into one of the vissigroths of Leander. Like an impenetrable wall, his body doesn't yield one bit, awakening all kinds of unknown sensation inside me. When he demands I'm to be brought to his chambers that night, I fear the worst. But his proposition catches me off guard. He promises to take care of my ailing mother and even to find suitable mates for my sisters if I agree to become his vissy. What I don't realize though is that what starts as an agreement soon heats up into something more. So much more, because Treyton is by far the most handsome, considerate male I have ever met. 
TREYTON: Driven by the need to avenge my family against our greedy susserayn my plan is simple, marry a human seffy and enrage our susserayn until the other vissigroths will see him for the tyrant he is and start a war. It's a good plan. A damn good plan. I never thought in a million years though that I would not only find myself attracted to the human seffy I pick to be my vissy, but that soon I develop more feelings for her than I thought myself capable of. 
What did Voodoo Bride think of it:This was another freebie for signing up to Bella Blair's newsletter.
This story was around 80 pages and a nice enough read.There's little explanation about the world and the titles used, but it wasn't really necessary to follow the very quick romance. Once again some characters were dragged into the story who I suspect have their own books in the series this short story is from.
I think I like the world from the previous freebie more. I still have two more freebies to try to see if I want to read more from one of Blair's series/worlds.
Why should you read it:It's a good way to check out the setting of a series.

Take a look at this stunning cover for the 4th Elven Kingdom book, STORM WOOD, designed by the amazing Hang Le! It will be out in the world May 13th. Deepest loyalty. Fiercest defiance. I never wanted to fall in love. My sister’s disappearance damaged me for such things. I’ve devoted my life finding her—no...

The post Cover Reveal – Storm Wood appeared first on Donna Grant.