IGMS Issue 46 Read online

  Issue 46 - July 2015

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2015 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 46 - July 2015

  * * *

  Evermore I Told the Raven

  by Ken Scholes

  The Monastery of the Parallels

  by Holly Heisey

  The Gaunt of Dennis Mallory

  by Scott M. Roberts

  Liveboy

  by Nathaniel Lee

  The Machine in My Mind

  by James Maxey

  Last Night at the Café Renaissance

  by D. Thomas Minton

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  Vintage Fiction - The Angelus Guns

  by Max Gladstone

  InterGalactic Interview With Max Gladstone

  by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Letter From The Editor

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  Evermore I Told the Raven

  by Ken Scholes

  Artwork by M. Wayne Miller

  * * *

  It was the perfect day for a funeral. Gray with a promise of rain. Mist ribboning around the headstones. And it was the perfect size -- a small baker's dozen dressed in black, some with umbrellas and some without. No music. Few words. I stood to the side and watched. When it was over, I walked back to my car.

  This was the first time I'd driven to Bradley. My last trip home had been by bus. Before that, I'd come by train and in the early years, by wagon. But now I had been home for two hours and I was ready to feel the highway mumble beneath me as I sped north and away. I climbed back into my rental after the graveside service. I'd always been out of place here and I felt it even more so now that he was dead.

  The youngest member of the funeral party separated from the rest. She was a woman -- maybe twenty -- wearing a black vintage dress all severe lines and lace. She approached my car.

  I willed myself to turn the key, fire up the engine, pull away. I'd come. I'd paid my respects. But she seemed intent upon speaking to me so I paused after sliding the key into the ignition.

  Then I sighed and rolled down the window.

  She stammered. "Are you Thomas' brother?"

  I looked at her over the rims of my sunglasses. "I am."

  "He told me to keep an eye out for you. There's something for you back at the store." She paused and I saw her cheeks flush with self-consciousness. "I worked for him."

  We'd started the store together though he'd always known I'd be the one to wander off. First with the wars and then with just the excitement of a world to see. And I'd stayed on the go, too. My ship had only been in from Hong Kong two weeks when I got the call that my brother was gone.

  "What time can I meet you there?"

  She shrugged. "You can follow me over now if you want. I'm opening late today." She pointed to a red two-door. "That's me there."

  I nodded and waited while she climbed into her car. Then, I followed her slowly out of the cemetery and onto the highway. I hadn't been home in decades but despite the growth and sprawl, the downtown stretch was instantly familiar to me. And the corner building my brother and I had chosen so many years ago. The original sign had been meticulously maintained: found brothers books and sundries.

  I pulled up front and she pulled around back. I was waiting at the front door when the lights came on and she made her way through the stacks to let me in.

  "I'm Victoria by the way," she said. She extended a hand and I shook it. Briefly.

  "Michael." She was staring at me and I tried not to notice. Instead, I glanced around the shop. It was more cluttered than I remembered it -- stacks of books and magazines colonizing the walking space between overstuffed shelves. Large tray tables filled with LPs or bagged comic books. The shiny metal espresso machine looked out of place in the room but the purring cat in the window did not.

  Victoria turned the sign around. "Would you like some coffee, Michael?"

  I turned. "No. Thank you." I shifted on my feet. Part of me wanted to stay and sift through what my brother had made of his life here. Part of me wanted to wander the streets that he and I had wandered during our childhood together here. Part of me wanted to get into my car and head back to Vancouver. There would be another ship to another place where I could vanish for a while and sort all of this out. "So what did he leave for me?"

  She dug around in a drawer behind the counter and pulled out a key-ring. She handed it to me and I stared at it in the palm of my hand. "What's the plan, boss?"

  Now it was my turn to stammer. "Plan?"

  She nodded. "It's your store now."

  I shook my head. "I don't want it." I stretched out my hand, offering her the keys. "You take it."

  Now she snorted. "I don't think so. I'm a worker bee, not a queen bee."

  I looked at the keys in my hand. "Was there a note or something to go with these?"

  "He said there was letter but I couldn't find it."

  I looked around the store. "I can't imagine why." Even the counter was awash with papers -- newspapers, bills, notes, old magazines still opened to unfinished articles of great interest at some time. I sighed again. "I guess the plan is that we clean up."

  I argued with myself about the plan as I set to work. It was at odds with the plan that had me back to Vancouver and shipping out within the next few days. Not that I had any idea where.

  Anywhere but here, I thought.

  We sorted the counter space and back office desk out in about two hours moving things into piles then reduced the piles to a single box of noteworthy items. It took three hours and then we moved into the stacks of clutter in the front of the store. The crate was buried under a flat of LPs and stacks of old pulp magazines and National Geographics. When she saw it, Victoria clapped. "Oh! We wondered where it had vanished off to."

  She pulled a claw hammer from the tool drawer and went to work prying the crate open.

  "What is it?"

  "An old statue he picked up at an estate sale. He always talked about mounting it above the door." She laughed. "But after he got it back to the store, he lost it."

  I looked around the room we'd barely made a dent in. "I wonder what other buried treasure we'll turn up?"

  She lifted the statue up from the Styrofoam peanuts it was packed in, grunting with the effort. It was a white statue of Pallas Athena.

  "Of course it is," I said. And now I knew where to find the letter. I oriented myself around the shelves of the room until I found the classics. I pulled down a leather-bound edition of Poe's collected works and found his favorite poem quickly.

  The page was marked with a folded sheath of yellow papers.

  I unfolded it, suddenly eager to see what words he'd left for me. It was the copy of the deed to the store and the property it sat on. "Well," I told her, "this isn't it."

  "So we'll continue our great quest tomorrow?"

  It's not what I wanted. I eyed my rental car through the shop's dirty front window. But the missing letter, more than the dead brother, stirred something up inside me.

  "I guess so." My uncertainty turned into resolve as I glanced again at the statue. "Yes."

  Outside, the gray moved to a deeper shade of dark as the afternoon moved toward evening. The day had slipped past us and we'd barely made a dent in the clutter that surrounded us. Victoria went to the counter and scribbled something down onto a sticky note. "Are you staying upstairs then?"

  I hadn't thought about it; I figured I'd be back in Canada by now. The last time I visited I'd only stayed a few hours and hadn't even gone up to the apartment my brother and I once shared above the store we once managed together. I looked at the deed in my hands. "I think so."

  She handed me the sticky n
ote. "The key is on your ring. This is my number if you need anything."

  I took it from her and stuck it to the deed. "Thanks, Victoria."

  "You're welcome." She smiled and it was a sad smile, her brown eyes soft with compassion. "I'm sorry about your brother."

  "Me too," I said. Though it slowly dawned on me that I felt very little. Still, her eyes told me that she felt his loss deeply. "I'm sorry for your loss, I mean."

  I saw the beginning of tears now as she tried to blink them away. "I only knew your brother for a few years. But you . . ." She took a deep breath and released it. "He was your brother."

  "Yes," I said. She kept watching me and I suspected she was looking for a response beyond my words. I said nothing.

  The silence grew awkward and she shrugged into her raincoat. "I'll see you tomorrow," she said as she slung a tattered backpack over her shoulder. "I have class until ten."

  "Tomorrow then," I said.

  I locked the back door behind her as she slipped out. Then I contemplated the stairs to the upper floor. I didn't want to make that climb; I felt the resistance in my bones. Instead, I scooped up my jacket and brought the copy of Poe with me as I slipped out into the late afternoon. I wandered the downtown sidewalks -- familiar old buildings with new shops now. The old brothel was a Thai restaurant now. The old hardware store had reincarnated as a radio station, the disc jockey sitting in a glass window where passersby could watch him work. He smiled at me as I moved down the sidewalk.

  I found a German restaurant where Dick's Barbershop used to be and went inside. The jagersnitchzel and spatzel were as good as anything I'd had in Germany and the beer was kellarkalt and sweet. While I ate, I read through Poe.

  Words had been my brother's favored mode of experiencing the world. He'd been around the world once -- a careful student taking in his stops by book first then going with a meticulous list of things to experience and see while he visited. But once around was enough for Thomas and then he was back to his place on the stool behind the counter of the store. The one time I'd watched the store for him -- the month he'd been in Paris -- I nearly went crazy from sitting still for so long.

  The world, in my mind, was to be gulped on the run letting each place surprise me with its people, its food, its customs. I didn't want to know in advance what I would see and do. I wanted to be ambushed by each place.

  We understood these differences in one another. More than that, we embraced them. And so I could be gone for decades and never once be shamed for my time away. And never once did I shame him for his time in that first home that had found and embraced us here in this place.

  I took a slice of apple strudel to go, the smell of baked apples and vanilla filling my nose as I left the restaurant. I walked back to the store past the lawn of the First Presbyterian Church. I paused as I stepped into the shadow cast by a statue. It was a bronze likeness of the man who was the closest thing we had to a father and I looked up into his face. It was Reverend McKay, shrewd as a serpent and harmless as a dove, captured perfectly in the lines of his jaw and brow. He was with the hunters who found us -- shivering from cold and fear on the side of the mountain -- and brought us back into the fledgling town on the edge of the Cascades. He was the one who named us. The Found Brothers. Thomas and Michael. And that last name stuck even after he adopted us.

  Seeing Reverend McKay brought back a flood of memory culminating in his own funeral shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. My brother and I knew by then that we were very different, that we didn't belong, but we'd yet to understand much. We still didn't, even all these years later. We knew we weren't from here. We knew we didn't age the same way they did. We also didn't get sick. We didn't experience humanity in the same way despite looking the part. The Reverend's death had been one of those realizations early on to just how "other than" my brother and I were in the small town that had adopted us.

  The sky cracked open and the rain threw itself violently down around me. I moved quickly along the sidewalk and slipped into the back door of the shop, taking the stairs slowly up into my brother's apartment.

  I let myself in, leaving the strudel on the narrow counter and making my way to the guest room I used the few times I'd visited before. The room was ready and had been for some time. A thin layer of dust coated the desk, bureau and nightstand.

  I took a cursory tour around the place, inhaling the smell of my brother and his things. It was a heavy, musty aroma. I sat, ate the strudel and read more Poe. He'd loved his books, his world of words. I fished and hunted and found my peace in the forest or on the water. The real world in my mind. Still, the irony of the poem he'd marked was not lost upon me. A man up late at night pouring over his old books seeking some truth in them that might assuage his suffering.

  And yet here I was, in my dead brother's home reading his book, fresh from his funeral, and I felt nothing at all.

  No sorrow. No sense of separation. No tears. And yet today I was more alone in this world than I had ever been before.

  Eventually, I took myself to bed and lay awake a long time wishing I felt something -- anything -- until I fell into a light and dreamless sleep.

  I was awake and walking the streets of my hometown long before dawn. The rain had let off but the fog was heavy. I eventually found a bakery and sat in the park with fresh croissants and strong black coffee until the sun rose and the fog turned pink.

  I returned to the building and forsook the stairs in favor of the store. Victoria wasn't due in for another two hours and I busied myself around the shop. My ambivalence was slowly becoming agitation and the books and heady smell of paper felt like walls that threatened to collapse upon me. I was on a ladder, mounting a shelf above the door for the statue we'd uncovered, when I heard the doorknob rattle.

  I paused and glanced down. A middle-aged woman in a raincoat and holding a briefcase stared up at me through the door's glass window. "One minute," I said.

  I climbed down and moved the ladder, unlocking the door.

  The woman stared at me. "Are you Michael Found?"

  I nodded.

  "You look much younger than your brother."

  "Yes," I told her. There was no way I could explain that to her. He'd chosen to experience old age. I hadn't. Just like he'd chosen to stay in Bradley and I'd chosen to stay on the road or at sea or uptrail or downstream. Any place that wasn't standing still.

  She blushed and extended her hand. "I'm Sandra Matthews from Matthews and Donaldson's."

  I shook her hand. "Yes. I knew your father."

  "Actually, my grandfather."

  Again, I'd found that explaining rarely helped. "Ah. Yes. My mistake."

  "I saw the lights on and thought I'd stop by. I heard you were in town. I have some things to go over with you regarding your brother and the business at some point."

  Mordecai Matthews had been one of Reverend McKay's strongest supporters. A deacon in the church and an expert marksman. He'd been with the Reverend on the day we were found. And when it became obvious that we weren't quite like our neighbors, his office became the keeper of our secret and the machine that kept our lives quietly possible.

  "I'd be happy to meet and go over everything." I said. I paused and glanced from the statue to the ladder. "Is there any chance that my brother left a letter for me in your care?"

  Sandra shook her head. "Not to my knowledge. But I can go through the file to be sure." I found myself wondering how big that file must be given how far it went back. The Found Brothers were easily their oldest clients. And Mordecai's granddaughter was processing that better than I expected. It was one thing to deal with a man my age by mail as I'd done with their offices since leaving town so long ago. It was another to look me in the eye and see what made me different from her and the rest of her kind. Something quietly unsettling that Thomas had set about repairing, learning to fit in. I'd never seen the point.

  Of course, I'd not seen the point in staying here. Or in growing old. Or dying for that matter. But Th
omas had for whatever reason. And whatever message he might've had for me was most likely lost within the apocalypse of our bookstore.

  Sandra's card materialized, cream against the lighter cream of her hand. "Call me and we'll set up an appointment."

  I took the card and slid it into my shirt pocket. "I will."

  She smiled and let herself out. I went back to the statue and the shelf I was hanging.

  I stood beneath its stare when Victoria's keys jangled in the back door. "It looks good," she said as she dropped her backpack behind the counter.

  "That's where he wanted it?" I'm not sure why it had become so important to me but it had. More urgent in the moment than even the letter. Still, that urgency was at least some kind of emotion. I glanced at Victoria.

  "Yep," she said. "That's even the shelf he picked out for it."

  We were the Found brothers. We could finish one another's sentences. And one another's projects. It was part of why not finding his last words to me was so perplexing. "I found it in the back room," I said. "I found the screws in the drawer."

  Victoria hung her coat. "Well, you're off to a good start. What next?"

  We spent the morning making more of a dent into the store, getting books up onto shelves and out of the way. She started a box of free books to put on the sidewalk, weather-permitting, and I focused on going through the scattered apocalypse of loose paper. Bills, receipts, notes, requests, doodles, forgotten napkins stained with petrified bits of jelly. And after another full day, this time the dent much more noticeable, I still had nothing from him.

  I felt the tickles of panic and wondered at it. I should feel sad. Or lost. It's how I felt when the Reverend died. But all I'd felt so far was urgency that now balanced on a sharp edge of fear. And yet it still didn't feel as if he were gone.

  We closed up and Victoria waited by the door. "How are you doing?" she asked.

  The question surprised me and I didn't want to answer. "I'm fine," I said.

  She nodded. "You're probably still in a little bit of shock over it all."