From now, until I hit 5000 fans, I'll be writing short stories at least three times a week, and letting you choose the writing prompt! Look for the contest on my blog to enter!
The book was heavy and over-sized. The cover, hinged in leather, with a leather hasp, was hard and crackled with energy to the touch, after twenty years of searching, I'd found it! I looked around the basement.
Original digitized hand drawing and photo collage by Mark R. Morris Jr
The only other person, besides me, was an old man rummaging through a box full of baby food jars filled with miscellaneous hardware. I looked back at the pile of books. There wasn't anything else here of interest.
I'd known, somehow, this book was in this house and I'd waited nearly five years, since discovering the connection, for the owner to pass away and his belongings to be drug out on the driveway, hoping no one would discover its significance.
A sign at the foot of the stairs read, paperbacks $1, hardbacks $2, I'd have paid a thousand times that for this one. I'd dared a peak, and there were the familiar runes I'd been seeking for almost two decades.
"That will be $2," said the pasty, chubby man behind the card table near the front door. I handed over the cash, he offered a receipt and a brown paper grocery sack, which I gladly accepted. I tucked my find into the bag, the bottom edge peeking out just a little.
Once at my car, I slid the package into the back seat and covered it with a blanket I kept there. You could never tell who might be watching. There weren't many of us left, who would understand the book's worth, but that hadn't stopped them taking the last one!
"We'll be through in an hour or so, son," my father had said. "Then, you wait until you feel the vibration is right, and follow us. It has to be properly charged before you come and the four of us will just about drain it, if my calculations are correct. The Simms family will be together again soon!"
I slid behind the steering wheel and started the car.
"Hi son," my father materialized in my passenger seat, as he had a habit of doing from time to time, since disappearing through the transdimensional vortex, into Translantia nearly twenty years ago. I'd been fifteen at the time. "I see you've found it, you know what that means?"
I didn't answer him. I'd grown to realize he just popped in to talk, not listen. He rarely acknowledged any response, so I just quit responding.
"You have no excuse not to visit me and your mother," he said.
Before I could turn to reply to this, he was gone. As usual. There was a slight metallic taste in the air, and a bit of residual plasmic energy sizzled in the space above the seat, causing my hair to stand on end.
The first time he'd done that was just a few hours after he, my mother and my two younger sister had disappeared, into the pages of a book just like the one I'd uncovered today. But, it was too late.
"Son, we're waiting for you, is there a problem?" he'd asked.
"Yeah, dad, the Black Squad took the gate," I'd explained.
The Black Squad was the name we'd given to a group of men who followed us, anytime we were working on anything to do with Translantia. Shadow government types, dad figured. I didn't know. But, moments after he'd jumped, they busted in our front door and stormed down the basement stairs, guns drawn. I'd had no choice, but to let them take it.
"We'll see this safely destroyed. Young man, we read the plasmic energy discharge from this basement moments ago, you're lucky you're still here, people have been known to disappear into these things and never come back," the apparent leader had said.
They'd made a quick sweep of the basement, and left. I'd gone to live with my aunt. I told her everything. She had me committed until my eighteenth birthday and after three years, six doctors and more than a dozen drug regimens, even I wasn't sure what I'd seen that day.
All I knew was, I wanted them back. I'd lived alone since, running a discord channel and gift shop for Translantian "artifacts" that steampunk fans liked. They were mostly fake. I'd sold the only two real things I'd had to sell right after getting out of the hospital.
Fortunately, dad had paid off the house, and his life insurance policy had paid on all four of them, after seven years, so I didn't need to make much. It was all about to change. I could bring them back from never never land and...
"What do you think you're doing with that book?" a voice said, from the corner of my basement, the same basement my family had disappeared from two decades previously. At first, I thought it was my dad, but a much larger man stepped out of the shadows.
He wore a leather trench coat and a tall tophat, with a mechanical monacle. Like something straight out of a Lovecraft novel. That's the way they were, whenever they showed up;. I'd been visited by a few over the years, Translantians.
I bent back over the book, ignoring him. They never took on a corporeal form here, more like a really solid hologram. But something was different. A large dagger plunged into the pages of the book, nearly engulfed in his huge fist.
"I said, what are you doing with my book, Simms?" He asked.
"Your book? I bought it!" I said.
"Well, be that as it may, I am the right owner, and guardian of this Translantian Atlas and I repeat my former question. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you're beginning to wear me thin already, and we've only just me, the book, what are you doing?"
"Opening the gate," I said.
"Oh, really? Just like that?" he asked.
"Well, no, first, I'll translate this Compass rose, then, I'll construct the model, then I'll recite cypher, then I'll open the gate," I said.
His eyes narrowed. "Your father said you were smart enough."
"I'm busy," I said.
The stranger picked me up, turned me away from the workbench, and the atlas, and set me down. I decided to be more polite to my knife wielding guest. I obviously couldn't fight him.
"What will do, my friend, once you've managed to open this transdimensional portal?" he asked.
I refused to show fear. "I'll walk into Translantia."
He laughed. "Really? Just like that?"
"I've seen it done," I said.
"Oh, you mean your father's rather clumsy attempt back in '03? Yes, well, dear chap, the bit you missed, was us hunting all of his pieces, when the transdimensional vortex ripped him to shreds and scattered him halfway across the multiverse. It wasn't pretty," the guardian said.
"So, I've been sent to make sure you don't muck it up, and to destroy this gate once you're passed," he said.
He leaned his head on his hands, his elbows on the workbench. He took the knife and cut out a thin slice of the notebook paper I'd been translating on.
"That bit's wrong. Trust me, you don't want to go there," he said.
"Fine. Can you help me?" I asked.
"Oh, I suppose I could,but just why do you want to go?" he asked.
I wasn't sure if "To rescue my family" was a correct response, so I pretended to ignore him.
"You know this is a one way ticket, don't you?" he asked.
"Look, I'm rather busy at the moment, and if you're not going to help, kindly shut up and let me get on with it," I said.
He did. Which was more disconcerting than his talking. That happens sometimes. Some people seem more threatening doing absolutely nothing, than in a murderous rage. He had perfected it.
"Fine. Could you at least tell me if I'm on the right track?" I asked.
"Well, I could and I think I will, because I rather like your parents, and what you're doing here is going to make a horrible mess of someone they are rather fond of, if I can't see the attraction myself," he said. "Erase those return coordinates. Perhaps you missed the part where I'm out to destroy this gate once you're through."
"Then how will I get back to the real world?"
He snorted, and chuckled. "The real world, old boy, what you mean this dump?"
"Look, I get it, you're backwards where you come from, so you can't possibly understand, but I intend to rescue my parents from that archaic hell hole you've trapped them in," I said.
He chuckled again. "Oh, good show, good show! Well then, don't let me stop you, although, attempting to exit through those coordinates will be, shall I say, a tad inconvenient for you. Once the gate is gone, it would be like throwing a metaphorical frog, into a cosmic blender, and by frog, I mean you."
"Well, I guess I'll have to make sure the gate isn't damaged then," I said.
I leaned into the work bench and reached underneath, drawing a concealed pistol I'd left there for just such a purpose.
He laughed. "Hold out your hand," he said.
I did. He dropped sixteen brass casings into it. I dropped the empty shells on the work bench and drew back the pistol's slide, there was nothing in the chamber.My hands moved automatically, sliding the clip from the weapon, it was empty.
"But, where are the actual bullets?" I asked.
He opened his other hand to reveal sixteen, copper jacketed, hollow point slugs, and a handful of black powder.
I snatched the knife from the table and moved toward him.
"Oh, you are a determined little fellow, aren't you?" he said, from behind me.
"This has been fun, but I'm afraid our time is up and I must bid you a fond farewell!" he said.
"Fine, but know this, when I get to Translantia..."
He was gone.
I turned back to the workbench, so was the book.
READ ONE OF MY LATEST SHORT STORIES "The Seraph of Szechuan"
