Excerpt: The Whole Package Deal

Jules was sitting at a poker table in a well-lit casino. He knew he was dreaming. He could feel the players looking at him, waiting for his play. He could taste the sour leftovers of a cocktail on his tongue and smell the aroma of expensive cigars in the air. He had yet to check his hand and everyone was waiting for him to bet or fold. Turning over his cards he was aghast to see that the pictures on the cards were not Kings, Queens, and Jacks, but rather mutilated children, and the suites were implements of torture and death. Looking over the top of his cards at the table he realized that the chips in the pot were circular pieces of skull, some of which were spider-webbed with thin dark veins. He wasn't sure how to react. A part of him was horrified, while another part of him was concerned about his facial expression giving away his hand. A man directly across the table smiled a wide toothy grin. Jules noticed dark, brown chunks between the man's teeth. His eyes darted down to a small portable tray near the man, where a plate of steaming severed fingers was piled like some kind of macabre Halloween appetizer. The man eagerly gobbled the flesh from a finger which he had fished from the plate, taking time to first pry the fingernail loose with his front teeth. After licking the bone clean he tossed it back onto the plate and cleared his throat.

Excerpt: "Emails from Infinity"

Squeezing into a space between two walls, shimming sideways I become shrink-wrapped in cobwebs, a cocooned figure dusted with pulverized plaster raining down from above. Deeper still I notice an opening in the wall space ahead, a hard lean and push and I’m in a clothing rack at a shopping mall. Stepping from the hanging clothes I’m surrounded by bustling customers and blinded by bright halogen lights. Recoiling at the hordes of people and the normalcy of the surroundings I venture back into the clothing rack. This time there is no wall space, rather a vast defunct nuclear power plant perched on a polluted shoreline, where silvery water laps against soot-colored sand.

Excerpt: The Gamble

Cecilia cleaved the night in her Lexus―a shiny black knife parting the darkness. She had no concern for the hunt, just her cash prize, she wasn’t greedy. She was speeding, though not enough to draw attention from cops. She glanced down at the GPS just in time to feel the impact of her opponent’s car shouldering into her passenger side, pushing her forcefully into the guardrail. Toe on the brake and she dropped back, leaning heavily on the steering wheel and hoping for a three-lane merge to the nearest off-ramp. Her opponent was quick and intercepted her mid-swerve, again corralling her to the left side of the freeway. A quick heel-toe combination, brake then gas, her opponent on her bumper and it was too late. The PIT maneuver spun her and the world became a wrenching blur of stringy light wrapping the darkness. Her car tore through the guardrail with a wild metallic scream, the impact snapping her teeth shut on her tongue. Then she was flying. Time passed, she could tell, though it felt as if she had just blinked. She was still spinning, yet her eyes told a different story. The passenger window shook inward, sparkling like ice. Her black evening dress pulled taut against her skin as the fabric bunched between knuckles thrust near her face. The passenger window’s jagged teeth bit at her as she was pulled through. The smell of Old Spice hung heavy and a black gun-barrel-eye stared at her indifferently, then nothing.

Excerpt: Emails from Infinity

Starting at a very young age I was taken from my body while I slept, yet I am not a typical abductee. I wasn’t struck with a beam of white light and levitated into a spaceship. I wasn’t visited by grey-skinned creatures with enormous oval eyes bent on investigating my body with an anal probe. My experience of abduction was different. The process of falling asleep and dreaming opened a doorway―a passage between parallel dimensions.

One of my first memories: lying in my crib in my dark bedroom I became aware of a presence in my closet. This “Something” was peering at me through the gap in the closet doors. Its two eyes blazed, one on top of the other as if its head hung on a broken neck. I was immediately coated in hot sweat. My stomach churned and hardened. Blood throbbed in my temples as alarms in my mind screamed, urging me to get away, but I was unable to move. Its gaze had paralyzed me. The Something in my closet was not alone. A spidery thing appeared on the ceiling directly above my head. It hung in the air, a prickly dark ball, a tangled wad of living hair. As I cowered, eyes bulging from my face, it descended towards me. Stomach acid boiled into my throat. My small hands clutched at my favorite red and white Pinocchio blanket, I couldn’t move.

There was a sensation of knowing but not one of understanding. I knew that this thing was guided by The Something in my closet; it had been sent by The Something. As it came near hair prickled my lips and I was swept away from my room, sucked from the body that lay in my bed. I passed briefly through vast hollow darkness; then I was flying over a flat landscape that stretched endlessly in all directions. I hung upside down and helpless below a dark shape, my head too close to the coarse landscape, any closer, and my face would be erased. I flew at such a speed that my teeth chattered together hard enough to shatter, and my skin felt as if it would be torn off. I thought I might vomit from the pressure.  

It’s hard to describe the horror of a place that has no boundaries, a place that goes on forever. Think for a moment of the worst thing you can conceive of, rape perhaps or torture. I flew ever closer to the embodiment of the most terrible thing I could imagine, something worse than rape or torture, a place of raw emotion. Yet there was something else, something beyond my years. I would come to know this as fear of death. The understanding that we all owe a death and that my own was and continues to stalk me. This flight would become a recurring experience for me for many years.