MK's Nervous System

St. Augustine Fountain of Youth Vampire Comedy Dream

A vampire takes a trip to St. Augustine, Florida. He's writing a book on immortality and thought he might research the Fountain of Youth myth. He stops by a comedy club in Jacksonville, Florida, on his way to St. Augustine, where he meets a comedian who is making jokes about Ponce de Leon's search for the Fountain. The vampire reaches St. Augustine later that evening and sleeps, dreaming that the comedian was an Arabian ghoul seeking to belittle the truth of the Fountain in order to prevent people from attaining everlasting life.

The comedian, that same night, dreams of a vampire who brings him to a bloody pool in a Floridian swamp and makes him drink the blood. Before them appears St. Augustine, the actual Saint, saying that the comedian now was a member of the City of the Anti-God.

St. Augustine of Hippo wrote a manuscript about a Fountain of Youth. One of his underlings, a monk who was actually a vampire, said he would seek out the Fountain. St. Augustine said he saw the Fountain in a dream, sitting in a swampy area. The monk thought this might be some place south of the desert, where wanderers had reported that there were jungles. The monk went out into the desert with a merchant to guide him. The merchant told jokes that made the monk laugh, and the monk drank the blood of the merchant at night to keep the monk alive for the journey.

A comedian is writing a novel about a man who has many unusually detailed and realistic-feeling dreams of being a traveler who drinks from the Fountain of Youth and is then turned into a vampire. The traveler then makes a sojourn to St. Augustine in Hippo, a city of North Africa, so that he can be cured of his condition, and St. Augustine baptizes him as a Christian and the traveler, this way, gains spiritual ever-lasting life.

In St. Augustine, Florida, a fake Fountain of Youth is being built. A real vampire plays a prank on tourists who visit this fake Fountain and dip their feet in it, by following them to their bed and breakfasts, hypnotizing the tourists and making them drink his blood. The tourists then wake up from their sleep having had vaguely scary dreams, and find themselves now with a thirst for blood. As time goes on, they discover they have also become immortal and wonder if the Fountain wasn't fake after all.

Vampire bats that have migrated from Mexico drink the blood of homeless people and drunks who have fallen asleep outside in St. Augustine and surrounding places in Florida. One homeless man fell asleep by a fountain in the Old City area of St. Augustine one night, and dreamed he was guarding the Fountain of Youth from Ponce de Leon. In the dream, he and Ponce get into a fight in front of the Fountain and kill each other, inches away from the water that will make them immortal. Someone comes along and throws the bones into the Fountain on a whim and the homeless man and Ponce are regenerated, climb out of the Fountain, look at each other and laugh themselves silly. The homeless man awakens, and has a laugh himself. He falls into the fountain he had fallen asleep by, and laughs even more.

Hitler's Third Book

hitler’s third book has been discovered in the library of an old german aristocratic family. an historian had been looking for the book, whose existence had been hinted at. the historian interviews family members about the history of the book. it was owned by the patriarch of the family who was an enthusiastic nazi. a serial killer starts killing members of the family after kidnapping them and questioning them as to the whereabouts of the book. the serial killer learns that the historian has run off with the book, after the first sign that a serial killer was after it. the historian studies the book as he moves from hotel room to hotel room. the book talks of a saint who in discussion with others puts forth his philosophical views. the serial killer catches the historian and tortures him, but can’t get information as to the hiding place the historian has put the book.

The Devil is Driving and He Lets People off at Different Points

A bus is going to the afterlife. The vehicle is shaped like a whale on the outside. The devil is driving and he lets people off at different points. It's unclear if the people let off at early stops are good and those let off late are bad or vice versa. The devil makes comments that muddy the waters. A business man tries to barter with people on the bus to get a different ticket than what he has. One of the people he tries to barter with explains that he can't barter with the businessman, as he is merely a robot taking up space, and shows his gears. A stripper is unsure if she should trade tickets with the business man. The businessman is let off at his stop. He is in the woods in the twilight. A puppet descends from a tree holding a guitar. He plays a song about how he's a puppet with more strings than he seems to need--he plays all the six strings on the guitar, but he doesn't know who is playing his marionette strings, and why some of the strings don't move.

Preoccupation with Blood

A wealthy man goes to a giant old house he's inherited in rural Maine. He brings four high priced hookers. He talks about how he fantasizes about breeding humans for intelligence or physical prowess and what a society would look like if he could do that. He imagines humans breeding as soon as they could and being paired with people with similar talents or positive traits. He imagines cloning most sexually attractive women for his own private collection. A vampire has made his home in the old house unbeknown to the group. The vampire listens to them interact and decides that in order to get the most out if them he will drain them of their blood slowly and collectively so they don't notice until they are to weak to do anything about it, on their last day at the mansion. Then he'll extract whatever he can of value from them. Debit card PINs, credit cards, cash, checks, jewelry, car and house keys, whatever, and then disappear the group in the woods. He kills them in the last day and decides to go to a Halloween party they were all planning to go to, dressing up as a vampire.

The Breeder King and his Talented German Monk

A hypnotist is a fan of the ghost writer and antiquarian MR James. Researching James, the hypnotist finds that MR James had made a study of the so-called "Breeder King," a noble who lived in Ukraine in the Middle Ages, and reputedly impregnated all his female serfs, and otherwise sought out means of breeding his serfs with each other to enhance certain traits. The Breeder King's servant, a brilliant and persuasive German monk, managed the king's breeding program. The monk was an expert in animal husbandry as well as methods of classical rhetoric. He was renowned for remarkable persuasive abilities as a member of court. The monk wrote a text in German, an unusual choice in a time when monks wrote texts in Latin, on persuasion and politics, which survived, being passed to different aristocratic book collectors throughout Europe over the ages. Hitler was said to have come into possession of this text when, as a courier during World War I, he visited a German military headquarters in an ancient French chateau, whose libraries he perused, and found an old copy of the text, which he was mesmerized by. He is said to have stolen the text. Goebbels makes reference to it, wishing to learn from it, though Hitler refused to let anyone read it.

Just the Prank He would Play

A terrorist genius has developed a remarkable autonomous AI, powered by an ever-growing bot-net, to develop and execute strategies for terrorist ends, using purely what is available through the internet and other networks of computers. The AI assembles a team based on terrorist website postings, brokers arms deals using dummy email accounts and the like, and sets into motion plots, one of which is to kill journalists at a newspaper.

Ten journalists are killed at a German magazine famous for boldness against the terrorist cause. The AI via email tells the terrorist genius to go to a coffee shop across the street from the German magazine and sit at the big front window. The terrorist genius then sees terrorists in paramilitary outfits and masks go in to the magazine office with assault rifles. The terrorists kill ten journalists.

Weeks later, the terrorist genius is thrown a surprise birthday party. His small circle of friends don't know who specifically sent the invites. They joke that the terrorist genius sent the invites. A surprise party thrown by the birthday boy himself would be just the prank he would play. One for the birthday cards he gets is made of black paper and has on it the famous photo of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in political protest. On the back, the terrorist genius' own handwriting appears scribbled--a forgery--saying, "I will not tolerate injustice." None of his friends say they gave this to him. Later they will recall the note and speculate what it meant, given what they would come to know.

In the news over the next few weeks, the police make several high-profile errors due to acting on incorrect information in their computer database systems, which causes the police to raid several incorrect addresses, terrorizing well-loved, high-profile and innocent people of the Minority Group, the people the terrorist genius wishes to mobilize against the Oppressor Population.

The terrorist genius has a hobby of long distance running. He goes for a run through the countryside and sees a micro-drone following him. Feeling threatened, he runs to dangerous exhaustion, collapses, and is brought to a hospital by an ambulance that was prompted by an anonymous call. He leaves the hospital with medication. There is confusion and delay at the pharmacy, due to a computer system problems, but he gets his pills. He takes one immediately, as his pain is strong and he's been without medication for longer than expected due to the pharmacy delay.

He hails a cab and starts to feel like he's on fire. He starts screaming for water to cool him. The cab stops. The terrorist genius leaps out of the cab in front of a government building, one that would not have been on his natural route from hospital to home, and screams for water. Several people walking by, with uncanny readiness, throw cups of liquid on him in response, then disappear into the crowd. He sees banners being held in the crowd--it's a protest of the recent bungled police raids on innocent Minority Group members. He smells gasoline.

His cell phone goes off with a ring that he's never heard before--it's a blaring voice, "We terrorists are with you! We will die for you! Here's proof!" It's a simulation of his own voice. The phone feels searingly hot in his pocket. He then bursts into flames. His screams escalate. He can't see them, but many people with smart phones around him, with uncanny readiness, record the event on video. He also would not know it, but historians would later say this was the moment when the terrorist movement began to gain a considerable following, and considerable power, in its unusually effective fight with the Oppressors.

Allston Vampire

Aaron was a serial killer. He was stalking a young man whose name was Edgar, on the streets after the bars let out in Allston around Harvard Ave. Aaron followed Edgar to an isolated spot and tried to knock him out with a taser. The shock had no effect on Edgar, who pounced on Aaron and bit his neck, drinking the blood that gushed forth.

An art student named Cassandra saw Edgar attacking and brandishing an art piece she had made in metal working class, a decorative sword, chased off Edgar and called an ambulance, while stemming the bleeding from Aaron's neck with her scarf.

A book had been dropped at the scene, a journal written about murders. A detective, Baxter Fenmore, found the book at the scene and read it. He noticed similarities to real murders and investigated further. Not finding any leads on Aaron's attacker, the detective looked into Aaron as the possible writer of the journal. He found the writing matched a sample Aaron gave and got a warrant to search Aaron's home, where he found trinkets and pictures of many men who had gone missing.

Baxter returned to the hospital to arrest Aaron but found he had succumbed to an infection. In the morgue Baxter visited the body out of morbid curiosity and was knocked unconscious. When he woke he was in the ER being treated from a blow to the head. The doctor on duty, Dr. Donald Ellis, told Baxter there had been a grotesque body desecration. Aaron's corpse had had a metal spike driven through his chest and his head had been cut off.

Encounter

Boston was on lock down because of a terrorist attack. It was starting to rain. I had just woken up, got too much sleep. It was 6pm. I got out of bed and got a beer. My head hurt. The muscles in my neck were tight. I went outside and walked to an old Puritan cemetery near my house. I stopped at a grave and a man's voice sounded behind me. "I study these grave stones," the man said. "You a professor?" I said. "Yes. At Harvard." The man nodded to the headstone. "That gentleman is said to have cursed Cambridge at his death. The explosions last night were 300 years after his death, to the day. An interesting sign. The Puritans believed in signs. Everything had significance. For example, meeting someone in a graveyard at twilight could be construed as meeting with the devil." "I'm not the devil" I said. "I wasn't talking about you."

The Book of Life from Death

Apparently Lothar wrote a book, called ‘The Book of Life from Death’ about the dark arts, and his theory of how they could be used, ironically, to do good. The dark arts were about destruction. If they were turned towards destroying the destructive forces in the world, they could be thought of as good.

Cassandra was fascinated and asked a friend of hers, Gregor, if she could use his Harvard College Library access to research the book. Gregor came along with her to the library and they found that the book did not appear to exist anymore, but some of the book had been copied-out by an antiquarian by the name N.S. Keynes at the turn of the 20th century. Cassandra and Gregor found a collection of Keynes’ papers at Harvard’s library, and in it, information about Duke Lothar.

Keynes had hired a research assistant, Harry Ian, a friend, to help track down rare manuscripts, and Harry found that the Lothar text did indeed exist in a library of an ancient English family, the Cravenwood family, in Sussex. Harry began transcribing the text with Keynes over a few weeks, but during this time they both started to have strange dreams of floating, as if on a cloud. over lakes of fire connected by many little lava-filled rivers, and up from below came howling sounds of an unclear origin. Keynes and Ian decided to stop working with the text, and returned it to the Duke of Cravenwood. His home, the ancient Foresthill Manor, had a fire in its library shortly thereafter. It destroyed many of the family’s books, one of which appears to have been Lothar’s text.

Beast in a Cage

A terrorist is wandering in a desert. He is traveling in the night and it's a full moon. It seems there is a monster following him, something human in shape but with grotesque elements. The monster disappears in the distance and the terrorist sees the creature no more in the night. He falls asleep in a cave and awakes to see a large statue that had been obscured by the night's darkness, standing before him in the cave. He comes out of the cave to find a caravan setting up camp outside in the daylight. A traveler sees him and yells to the others that it is the one who has been following them in the night. The travelers attack the terrorist. He is grabbed hold of and brought to the center of their camp. There, sits a wagon with a cage on it, containing a bear-like animal, covered in what looks like camel fur. The travelers throw the terrorist into the cage and he is torn apart by the creature. All the bits of his body fall out onto the dust below through the bars of the cage. The statue becomes animate and emerges from the cave and flies over the camp, scattering the terrified travelers. It gathers up the pieces of the dead man and puts him back together. He awakens, having passed out from fear. He sits in a square where he had planned to blow himself up with explosives. There had been a crowd. Now he is alone.

Forms of Protection

The reporter finds the living monster seemingly in hibernation in a hall. He finds a boy resting with the monster. The reporter tries to quietly get the kid away from the monster but the kid wakes and screams and bites the man. The monster stirs but is lethargic and only makes a halfhearted attempt to chase after the reporter who escapes to the surface.

The reporter writes up an article with documentation in the form of video and photos taken with his smart phone. The cave area is cordoned off and the military engages in some operations around there, presumably in the caves. The child is not identified even though his picture is in the media--one of the photos the journalist took was of the kid's face.

A folklorist from the local university emails the reporter and tells him the Native Americans in the area had stories of a rock monsters that kidnapped babies and used them as lures and as watchmen and guardians to protect the monsters while the monsters slept. The boy would have been kidnapped locally around eight to ten years ago, probably as a baby.

The reporter scours records and finds that such a boy fits the profile--kidnapped from a family outing in the woods near the caves. The journalist contacts the mother and they go to the cordon set up by the military and tell the guard there about the possibility the mother's child was kidnapped. The guard at the cordon arranges a meeting with a general, who explains that special forces were able to rescue a child, but were not able to find the monster.

The mother goes to the hospital where the child is. The kid is unruly and is restrained in his hospital room. The mother and the reporter look in on the kid through a window and are disturbed by his screaming and thrashing. The lights go out in the hospital, gun fire is heard, and the lumbering figure of the monster is seen. The monster makes its way to the room where the kid is, smashes open the wall and rescues the child from his restraints. The monster and child make their way in darkness towards the exit. The reporter and mother shadow the monster.

A policeman roaming the corridors of the hospital runs into the monster and pulls his gun. He fires in the darkness as the monster's shadowy figure. The mother and reporter yell at him to stop as the child is with the monster. The monster drops to his knees and is motionless. The gunfire ceases. The lights flicker on and the monster remains frozen, on its knees, holding the boy in his arms. The boy is dead from a gunshot.

The mother and reporter and officer approach the monster but it doesn't move. The police and military swarm the hospital. The monster never moves again, apparently dying from some unknown cause, as no bullet pierced its armor-like skin. Its body is taken by the military. Later, the mother is asked if she wishes to do a DNA test to see if she is the boy's mother, and she declines.

Hot Shot

A killer murders his ex-girlfriend. He confesses to an attorney. The lawyer wants to benefit from the high profile case. The lawyer sets out looking for someone else to hang the crime on. The lawyer’s PI manufactures evidence to cast suspicion on another man, not enough to get him convicted, but enough to create reasonable doubt. The lawyer wins the trial and the killer goes free. He then kills another woman. He tells his attorney of it before anyone else finds out, and the attorney has his PI help the killer cover up the crime. The killer and the PI cremate the body and scatter the ashes. Then the PI gives the killer a hot shot of heroin, arranges him so that it looks like an accidental overdose and reveals to the killer in his last moments that the attorney didn't want to keep cleaning up his client’s messes, to protect the lawyer’s own reputation.

The Voice from Nowhere

Otho Dick had been an SS Einsatzgruppenfuhrer who lead a penal battalion in anti-guerrilla and ethnic cleansing campaigns in Poland and the Ukraine during World War II. He had been a conman who had defrauded the Nazi Party of funds when he was treasurer of a local Bavarian section of the party in the early thirties and was caught and in the investigation myriad other crimes were discovered--extensive blackmail, shakedown work, murder for hire, pimping, pornography, corporate espionage, trading Nazi secrets with the Social Democrats and Communists--anything that could get him money or power he seemed to have a hand in.

His talents were appreciated by Himmler who thought his genius for criminal enterprises might translate to useful espionage and assassination work. Dick was offered freedom conditional on writing about applying his criminal talents to operations to further the interests of the Fatherland, and conditional upon his service as the leader of a penal battalion under close supervision by SS General Max Niflung.

The dossier was published as a book distributed to the higher ups in the SS and Wehrmacht. The main thrust of the book was that the Nazis should aim at the power elite of other countries and seek to blackmail as many of the elite as possible using a variety of honeypot style operations--tempting elite members into doing embarrassing things and then using this compromise to influence them into helping the Nazi cause, all sub rosa if possible. Hitler was impressed by these ideas and was himself of somewhat a similar mind. He employed much of Dick’s approach in his conquests, though deviated from them in his invasion of Poland which started World War II.

Dick reputedly was a lazy commander, spending little time working. His approach, unsurprisingly, was to hire some male prostitutes to proposition priests and other bachelors, and then photographs would be obtained of these single men, those who fell for the honeypot, in compromising situations. Then Dick told the compromised men to infiltrate guerrilla bands or try to start their own if possible. Dick would then gather information about guerrilla movements and seek similar blackmail opportunities within the guerilla groups his agents had penetrated, often gaining the ability to more or less control the guerrilla groups for his own purposes.

When the Nazis were overthrown in 1945, Dick had created an organization comprised of members from practically every imaginable ethnicity, political background, military or government or business affiliation, into a network centered in Eastern Europe. Officially, he died in a plane crash in Bavaria in May 1945, but a book emerged in 1975--a historian at the Univeristy of Bonn, Professor Paul Ritter, had been delivered the book--it had been left with his secretary, who did not recall seeing who had left the book for him. A note on the book explained the book had been written by Otho Dick. Dick had faked his death, the note claimed, converted his network of influence built up during the war into a criminal organization, and quietly ran it until his death in 1974. He compiled his writings into a book that he entitled, “The Voice from Nowhere”, dedicating it to Duke Lothar von Gotha.

The authenticity of the book was debated, but the case for its authenticity was considered compelling as all claims, that could be independently confirmed, were confirmed, as World War II historians poured over the documents. One tantalizing problem was whether quotations in the book attributed to Duke Lothar von Gotha, writer of the lost book, “The Book of Life from Death”, that were not from any extant fragment, were authentic. The author of the book, whether it was Otho Dick or not, claims to have come across a complete text of Lothar’s book, and found it greatly useful in exercising profound influence over events of the world through indirect but highly effective means. More sensational still were many unverifiable claims about high ranking members of the power elite of the world having been compromised by Dick--no one was exposed in the book. The final judgment about the text was that it was plausibly genuine but some claims were impossible to judge as true or false, and so the historical community would remain agnostic or skeptical of them until they were corroborated by further information. According to Professor Paul Ritter in a 20-year retrospective piece in the New York Times, he has been told by several people who were underlings of powerful people, that their bosses had fretted over being outed by the book when it had emerged, supporting the notion the book was genuine.

Familiar Haunts

The conman sees that the old man's luxurious apartment is filled with beautiful old trinkets, paintings, and ancient-looking books. With his smartphone he surreptitiously takes photos of some of the trinkets and books and investigates them on the internet in his spare time. Many of the books are rare and valuable. Some of them there is no record of. Most of them have to do with occultism. The trinkets are similar.

The conman wants to sell some of these items but believes the old man will notice. He talks with a craftsman who is renowned for creating wonderful jewelry on demand. He asks if the jeweler could create a replica of trinkets if he brought the original to him, but had to take it back within an hour or so. The jeweler said he could.

The conman brought the jeweler a trinket, a small geometrical piece of jewelry with rubies encrusted in it, made of gold. The jeweler examined it, took many photos, notes, and in a matter of an hour, said he had enough information to produce an identical copy. The conman then returned the trinket to the old man's apartment. This had been done late at night so the old man was asleep and didn’t notice.

The jeweler produced an identical copy in a matter of a week. The conman paid him and took the copy to the apartment where he replaced the original with it. He then took the original and brought it to various dealers in exotic merchandise. The trinket was apparently thousands of years old and had been used in Zoroastrian ritual magic. The trinket was exceedingly rare and would fetch a million dollars on the legitimate market, but given its origin, the trinket would have to be sold on the black market, and would fetch only about 100,000 dollars. The conman accepted this. The dealer paid the conman 50,000 dollars and would pay him the remainder, approximately 50,000 give or take depending on the market, when the trinket sold.

Later that week the old man asked the conman to make him a drink. He asked for an elaborate concoction mixed from various strange bottles in his personal bar. He then asked the conman to fix himself a drink—insisting he have some of the fine scotch he reserved for people who were important to him. They sat and the conman drank from the glass.

He awoke on a stone altar.

People in black hoods stood around him. He was naked. The room was lit by flickering orange light. The figures chanted. His body was paralyzed. A knife flickered in the hand of one of the figures. The knife dove down near the conman's belly. The conman could feel nothing below his neck. He could not make noise with his voice. The chanting increased, murmurs in strange languages.

Then all went silent and the flame went out. A voice, a laughing boy’s voice, sounded. "What’s this? That won’t do." Screams erupted from the room. Orange light exploded throughout the room for a moment. Then darkness again, and dripping sounds. The conman lied there listening, paralyzed. He closed his eyes and prayed for the first time in his life. At some point he must have passed out.

He awoke in the darkness. He felt sensation in his body. He moved. He groped in the darkness, looking for clothing. His hand touched something wet and cold. He recoiled. He felt around the altar. Clothing was at its edge. It seemed to be his clothes. He put them on in darkness. He turned on his smartphone, which was in his pants' pocket and used the flashlight function to see where he was.

A horrific scene lay before him. He would never be able to express the horrors of what he saw. He did see the much contorted visage of the old man, and in his mouth melted golden metal with fractured red glass. It was the melted counterfeit trinket the conman had produced.

He found a door, which lead to a large basement in the hotel. He took a freight elevator to a loading dock around back and ran off. The conman told the dealer to keep the remainder of his proceeds—he did not want money from the party who bought the trinket. He made some incomprehensible remark to the dealer: "The trinket helps them find treasure, and other things."

No mention was ever made in the news media of the horrific scene in the basement of the hotel. The conman was in no mood to inquire. An anonymous donation of 50,000 dollars was given to a church near the hotel, and the conman was no longer seen around, with his normal circle of friends, or haunting his old familiar haunts.

Shimmering Reptile

The painter went into the wilderness seeking the Shimmering Reptile. He used their scaly coat the way other painters used gold leaf. He had never had so much success hunting these creatures as he did that day, and filled his canvas bag to the brink with their smashed bodies--he used a club. He found the bag heavy. He put it down and went off to hunt more reptiles. He would come back to deposits the dead in the sack.

The sky darkened with storm clouds, and thunder rumbled. It was dangerous to be in the wilderness when it rained. The ground was likely to flood. He couldn't move the bag quickly. It started to rain. He couldn't move fast enough. He wouldn't leave his bag. The water poured down and washed him and his sack away.

The Experience Machine

A hacker who had been curious about the bloggers public references to a technique he used to experience much more than the average person in a condensed period of time breaks into the bloggers computer and finds the specs for the experience machine. He builds it—it requires cheap, easy-to-get materials and a computer screen, essentially. He starts using the experience machine and is blown away. He is a Trump supporter and offers to provide the Trump campaign with his expertise.

The blogger discovers that he’s been hacked and uses the experience machine to quickly develop hacker skills. He then figures out who hacked him, hacks the hacker back, and discovers emails and instant messages from the hacker to the Trump campaign. The blogger realizes the hacker is giving Trump a large advantage with his experience-machine developed insights.

The blogger uses the experience machine to figure out what to do. He spends more time on this decision than he had any other. When he comes out of the experience machine this time, he has experienced the equivalent of months of contemplation, in a matter of a few days, due to the efficiency with which he can run through experiences. He feels an electrical buzz in his head. He sits at his computer. His hands move without him feeling he is in control of them. They open up the experience machine design document saved in his computer and uploads them to google docs. He then shares the google doc with about 100 email addresses of different individuals, many of whom he only has a fuzzy recollection of their identity.

His finger hits the enter key and emails are sent to these select people notifying them of their access to the experience machine design, with a message saying they were selected and entrusted to make the best use of it, given its power and potential, for both good and bad.

The blogger then sits back in his chair, feeling as if a possessing spirit has been exorcised from him and he was in control of himself again. He feels a sense of relief from the tension of the past few days. He doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen, but his intuition says things will be okay.

Lead

After a few days of the woman being missing, the enforcer brother started looking for her. He asked around. Some people had seen her with the man. The enforcer visited the man. The man had hoped the enforcer wouldn’t come by. The man had hoped the enforcer wouldn’t know to look for him.

The man opened the door a crack, with the chain on. The enforcer asked if the man knew what happened to his sister. The man said they had spent some time together at a bar and then parted ways near a bus stop. The enforcer asked if he could come in. The man said he would meet the enforcer in public if they wanted to talk more. The enforcer said sure, and they decided to meet up at a bar down the street later that night.

The enforcer planned to hang out around the man's house and when the man left, the enforcer would break in and look around. The man left for the bar, bringing pepper spray if he needed to protect himself. The enforcer picked the lock and looked around. He found a piece of his sister’s fingernail on the carpet by the stairs—she had a distinctive design that the enforcer had seen her sporting, swirls of glittery paint on the nail. He called the bar and told the bartender to tell the man something came up and the enforcer would have to meet him another time. Then the enforcer hid in the apartment and waited for the man to come back.

When the enforcer hadn’t shown up at the bar, the man, already fearful, got more so. He came back to his house and went to unlock the door. Normally he only locked the bottom lock and not the top one, but just unlocking the bottom lock didn't work. He unlocked both locks and the door opened. He then felt intense fear. He went out back and sneaked in the back window. He got out his pepper spray. He then went through the dark apartment as quietly as possible, seeing if he could spot someone hiding in wait.

He got to his bedroom closet and opened it and the enforcer sprung out. The man blinded the enforcer with pepper spray and the enforcer fell down. The man grabbed a barbell from the bedroom floor and bludgeoned the enforcer over the head, killing him.

The man put the body in his bathtub and cleaned up the blood. He tried to figure out what to do. A missing enforcer would warrant an investigation by his gang. They might come by if they knew what the enforcer was up to.

The man should throw them off the scent by providing them with an alternative story of what happened: the enforcer got killed by their rival gang. There had been peace between the gangs but back in the day the rival gang would sometimes send a message by killing an enemy gang member and slashing an x across his face, then leaving him in a public place. The man decided he would do this.

He slashed an x across the face of the enforcer and then in the dead of night drove the body to a public park and left the body in the parking lot, face up. The next day the body was found and the police were called. The local news picked up the story. The media and cops and the enforcer's gang interpreted his death as a message from the rival gang.

A gang war exploded. By the time it cooled down, the body count was 10 people total, and 3 innocents killed incidentally during a gunfight.

No one from the enforcer’s gang came by the man’s house. No police officers came by either. He had been careful to remove any obvious evidence that could be traced back to him, and the evidence of a gangland hit was so overpowering that the cops and the enforcer's gang didn’t look in other possible directions.

The man lived out his life undiscovered. He kept the secret to his end.

The Zombie Horde and Frankenstein's Kingdom

There was Frankenstein's Kingdom. This was a kingdom founded by one mad scientist, Victor von Frankenstein, a noble who turned his dead serfs through scientific experimentation into superhumanly powerful and intelligent beings designed to be useful to Frankenstein, with varying results. Earlier monsters were often unruly and rebelled and ran off, serving at times as powerful allies of other kingdoms or becoming powerful figures in their own right, as generals or capable lords or merchants. Later monsters were much more obedient and well-suited to their particular roles in Frankenstein’s kingdom, which, when he felt he had produced a sufficiently powerful monster army, declared himself sovereign over his land and fought off attempts by the Human Kingdom to bring him back into the fold.

Course Correction

The serial killer is fascinated and decides to spare the scientist. The serial killer goes to sleep, and wakes up in his room to find he has been strapped down. The scientist aims to enhance him genetically using elements of the vampire DNA. The scientist performs a procedure on him. The scientist also removes genes associated with psychopathy from the serial killer.

When the scientist finishes the procedure, the serial killer is a superhuman without the urge to kill anymore. He feels terribly guilty over what he has done and explains to the scientist his past. The scientist suggests he be a force for good now, and the man agrees. With that he programs the ship’s navigation to burn up all the fuel and launch the ship on a trajectory away from humanity, so the scientist and the vampires can never bother mankind, while he himself takes an escape pod and pilots back towards civilization.

His pod is picked up by a large spaceship used by a touring rock star in this part of space. The ex-serial killer then becomes a roadie for the rock star to make money to pay for his education, studying science, biology and engineering so he can benefit humanity as much as possible for as long as possible. He does this as penance for the people he murdered.

The Wreckage and the Countess

A war hero is invited to the Countess’s mansion to be awarded the Valor Medal. He arrives after a trip of weeks by carriage over the wilderness roads leading to her manor. It is after midnight. He is escorted by the butler to his room and brought a meal and drink and told he will meet with the Countess tomorrow.

When he awakes there is a crowd outside his window. It’s a mob. The butler explains a group of peasants and town merchants had formed a union and were besieging the manor in anger against the Countess for her treatment of them.

The mob breaks through the gates and breaks into the mansion. The butler asks if the hero knows how to fly a plane. The war hero says yes. The butler brings the war hero to tunnels below the mansion. He shows him an experimental airplane. The butler says, ‘Please familiarize yourself as best you can with the controls. I’ll bring the Countess.. Then we can escape. The plane is sitting on a straightaway that leads to an opening we can fly out of.’

The butler fetches the Countess. She is old and frail and confused. The butler, propping her up, escorts her up the ladder and helps her into the cockpit.

“There’s no room for three,” the war hero says.

“I know,” the butler says and shuts the canopy.

He climbs down the ladder and pulls it away from the plane. The sound of yelling comes from somewhere in the caves. It’s the mob. The war hero starts the engine and takes off. The plane shoots along the straightaway and out of the cave opening into the stormy sky, going faster than any plane the war hero flew.

The Countess is groaning and has not said anything.

“Are you all right?” the hero says to no response.

Lightning flashes. The air is turbulent. There appears to be flak coming from the ground. Something strikes the plane and the hero loses control. He is able to bring the plane down for a water landing in a lake in the wilderness.

He pulls the Countess out of the cockpit. She is unconscious. He swims with one arm around her to the nearby shore. Over the next few weeks, bands of peasants scour the wilderness looking for the wreckage and the Countess. The war hero and Countess evade the bands.

They go to the outskirts of the Countess’s estate and see the butler’s head on a pike. Time passes and the war hero and the Countess adapt to life in the woods. The Union of Peasants and Merchants establishes an elected official to take the place of the Countess. The war hero spies on some peasants talking about it.

When the Countess hears the news she becomes distraught. Her health declines and she seems to be dying. She asks the war hero if he would bury her on her estate. The hero says he will and she dies.

He brings the Countess to the edge of the estate, carrying her corpse on his back. He digs a grave and buries the Countess there. The next night he goes to the pike. The butler’s skull is still there. He kicks the pike down and takes the skull. Be brings it to the Countess’s grave and buries it next to her.

The next day the war hero starts walking the road leading to his home, far away.

Jellyfish

A motorcyclist crashes his bike and flies off a bridge over the ocean. He lands on a giant jellyfish that has surfaced. The jellyfish takes him out to sea where a navy ship rescues him. The ship is bound for a port city, one of the oldest in the world.

The captain tells the motorcyclist to go to the church and ask the priest there for help getting the motorcyclist home. The motorcyclist asks the priest if he can help the motorcyclist get back to his home and the priest says he’ll pay for the motorcyclist’s ship ticket if the motorcyclist pledges to read the holy book. The priest gives him the book and money for a ticket.

The motorcyclist goes to the docks and books passage with a merchant ship going to his home. The motorcyclist starts reading the book in his cabin but grows bored with it and decides he probably won’t finish it.

He goes to sleep and that night the ship is attacked. The motorcyclist wakes up to find that the ship is entangled in a massive jellyfish’s tendrils and is being dragged under. The motorcyclist jumps into the water and swims away. He swims to a small island nearby.

Over a few days wreckage comes ashore. The motorcyclist finds the book has washed ashore unharmed, cradled in wood debris that acted like a boat. He reads the book over and over.

Years pass and no one comes for the motorcyclist. Eventually he has read the book so much that he can recite it from memory. He begins to live in the ancient world the book refers to. That world is as vivid as the island he stands on.

One day the motorcyclist becomes sick and develops a fever. He watches the sun setting in the ocean. He walks into the water towards it. He feels a sting and sees the jellyfish tendrils floating about him in the water. He becomes numb and sinks under the surface.

Systemic Infection

I was at a club watching a local punk band I liked, The Grims. They were fronted by a professional actor, Basil Cobb. A skinny, dirty-looking guy climbed up on stage and scratched Basil with his nails. Basil recoiled. The bouncers grabbed the guy and tossed him out. The show went on.

The next day, in the local news, there was a story. Basil had come down with a weird bacterial infection. He was in critical care at Boston Hospital.

I called the band's manager, Jim Stanton, a friend of mine. Jim said that the scratch Basil got caused a systemic infection. I asked about the skinny guy who scratched Basil. Had he been arrested? Jim said he didn't know what happened to the guy.

I took the train in to Boston from the suburbs. I wanted to find out about the skinny guy. Jim said Basil had noticed there was a slimy residue on the skinny guy's fingers. The skinny guy scratched Basil and rubbed the slime around the scratches before the bouncers got him away.

I went back to the club. It was closed, but the staff was there now that it was afternoon. They were prepping for the night. I asked everyone if they knew anything about the skinny guy or saw anything last night regarding him. The bartender said the skinny guy was sitting at the bar early in the evening when not many people were in the club. He ordered a few beers. The bartender asked him what his accent was and the man said he was from Serbia. He had a book on the bar. Bartender said it was a history book--'The History of...something'--the bartender said. Looked like an old book.

A bar regular got into a conversation with the skinny guy. They talked for an hour or so, said the bartender. The regular's name was George Melanson. He was a music theory lecturer at Boston University.

I looked up Melanson's address on the web. He lived in the Lower Allston neighborhood of Boston, a five-minute walk from the bar. I walked to the house and knocked on the door. Melanson opened the door. I knew him from the faculty photo I saw on the web--a fifty-something fashionably shabby man. I explained I was trying to find the skinny man because Basil was very sick. Melanson let me in.

Melanson said he got into a conversation with the skinny man because the skinny man was reading a book on the History of Serbian Folk Music, which was an interest of Melanson's. Melanson said the skinny man's name was David Markovic. Melanson went into his wallet and pulled out Markovic's card. It said Markovic worked for Thalassocratic Imports and Exports, at an office on Seaport Boulevard, Boston. There were some weird symbols imprinted on the card. I asked Melanson if he knew what they were. Melanson shrugged. I asked if I could photograph the card with my smartphone. He said sure.

Course Correction

A serial killer is roaming international and hence anarchic space looking for victims to kill with impunity. He finds his way to a self-sufficient spaceship owned by a scientist who allows him to dock and rest. The scientist explains that he is studying vampire humans who he has discovered and kidnapped. He is trying to figure out how they derive their powers and if he can genetically modify humans to have the benefits of vampirism without the downsides.

The serial killer is fascinated and decides to spare the scientist. He wakes up in his room to find he has been strapped down. The scientist aims to enhance him genetically using elements of the vampire DNA. The scientist performs a procedure on him. The scientist also removes genes associated with psychopathy from the serial killer.

When the scientist finishes the procedure, the serial killer is a superhuman without the urge to kill anymore. He feels terribly guilty over what he has done and explains to the scientist his past. The scientist suggests he be a force for good now, and the man agrees. With that he programs the ship’s navigation to burn up all the fuel and launch the ship on a trajectory away from humanity, so the scientist and the vampires can never bother mankind, while he himself takes an escape pod and pilots back towards civilization.

His pod is picked up by a large spaceship used by a touring rock star in this part of space. The ex-serial killer then becomes a roadie for the rock star to make money to pay for his education, studying science, biology and engineering so he can benefit humanity as much as possible for as long as possible. He does this as penance for the people he murdered.

The Zombie Horde and Frankenstein's Kingdom

There was the Zombie Horde. The Zombie Horde roamed the periphery of all all the kingdoms, perpetually attacking humans to eat their brains. The horde was ruled by non-zombie beings, a mix of humans, vampires, and others, who acted essentially as herders of the zombies. The Horde leaders would seek out humans who would willingly convert to zombie-hood because they were mortally ill and wished to continue on in some form of life. The horde leaders sold their services to various kingdoms, helping one, then helping another, in attacking populations who served as a ready source of brains for the zombies.

There was Frankenstein's Kingdom. This was a kingdom founded by one mad scientist, Victor von Frankenstein, a noble who turned his dead serfs through scientific experimentation into superhumanly powerful and intelligent beings designed to be useful to Frankenstein, with varying results. Earlier monsters were often unruly and rebelled and ran off, serving at times as powerful allies of other kingdoms or becoming powerful figures in their own right, as generals or capable lords or merchants. Later monsters were much more obedient and well-suited to their particular roles in Frankenstein’s kingdom, which, when he felt he had produced a sufficiently powerful monster army, declared himself sovereign over his land and fought off attempts by the Human Kingdom to bring him back into the fold.

Lead

The man accidentally killed the woman during an argument. He gave her a light shove and she fell down the stairs. He knew the woman’s brother was a low level enforcer in a gang. The man put the body in his car and buried it in the woods by the highway.

After a few days of the woman being missing, the enforcer brother started looking for her. He asked around. Some people had seen her with the man. The enforcer visited the man. The man had hoped the enforcer wouldn’t come by. The man had hoped the enforcer wouldn’t know to look for him.

The man opened the door a crack, with the chain on. The enforcer asked if the man knew what happened to his sister. The man said they had spent some time together at a bar and then parted ways near a bus stop. The enforcer asked if he could come in. The man said he would meet the enforcer in public if they wanted to talk more. The enforcer said sure, and they decided to meet up at a bar down the street later that night.

The enforcer planned to hang out around the man's house and when the man left, the enforcer would break in and look around. The man left for the bar, bringing pepper spray if he needed to protect himself. The enforcer picked the lock and looked around. He found a piece of his sister’s fingernail on the carpet by the stairs—she had a distinctive design that the enforcer had seen her sporting, swirls of glittery paint on the nail. He called the bar and told the bartender to tell the man something came up and the enforcer would have to meet him another time. Then the enforcer hid in the apartment and waited for the man to come back.

When the enforcer hadn’t shown up at the bar, the man, already fearful, got more so. He came back to his house and went to unlock the door. Normally he only locked the bottom lock and not the top one, but just unlocking the bottom lock didn't work. He unlocked both locks and the door opened. He then felt intense fear. He went out back and sneaked in the back window. He got out his pepper spray. He then went through the dark apartment as quietly as possible, seeing if he could spot someone hiding in wait.

He got to his bedroom closet and opened it and the enforcer sprung out. The man blinded the enforcer with pepper spray and the enforcer fell down. The man grabbed a barbell from the bedroom floor and bludgeoned the enforcer over the head, killing him.

The man put the body in his bathtub and cleaned up the blood. He tried to figure out what to do. A missing enforcer would warrant an investigation by his gang. They might come by if they knew what the enforcer was up to.

The man should throw them off the scent by providing them with an alternative story of what happened: the enforcer got killed by their rival gang. There had been peace between the gangs but back in the day the rival gang would sometimes send a message by killing an enemy gang member and slashing an x across his face, then leaving him in a public place. The man decided he would do this.

He slashed an x across the face of the enforcer and then in the dead of night drove the body to a public park and left the body in the parking lot, face up. The next day the body was found and the police were called. The local news picked up the story. The media and cops and the enforcer's gang interpreted his death as a message from the rival gang.

A gang war exploded. By the time it cooled down, the body count was 10 people total, and 3 innocents killed incidentally during a gunfight.

No one from the enforcer’s gang came by the man’s house. No police officers came by either. He had been careful to remove any obvious evidence that could be traced back to him, and the evidence of a gangland hit was so overpowering that the cops and the enforcer's gang didn’t look in other possible directions.

The man lived out his life undiscovered. He kept the secret to his end.

The Experience Machine

A blogger has honed his intuition by building a virtual reality device he calls an experience machine. The machine runs through many plausible scenarios by stimulating lucid dreams in the person who uses the machine. The blogger uses the dreams to test drive a wide variety of plausible ways the presidential campaign could unfold. He is able to run through many scenarios very quickly as the experience machine can slow down the experience of time, to explore many possibilities. As psychologist Gary Klein points out, gathering a lot of experience enhances intuition, so the blogger has developed a strangely accurate sixth sense when dealing with things he has thought a lot about in the experience machine.

A hacker who had been curious about the bloggers public references to a technique he used to experience much more than the average person in a condensed period of time breaks into the bloggers computer and finds the specs for the experience machine. He builds it—it requires cheap, easy-to-get materials and a computer screen, essentially. He starts using the experience machine and is blown away. He is a Trump supporter and offers to provide the Trump campaign with his expertise.

The blogger discovers that he’s been hacked and uses the experience machine to quickly develop hacker skills. He then figures out who hacked him, hacks the hacker back, and discovers emails and instant messages from the hacker to the Trump campaign. The blogger realizes the hacker is giving Trump a large advantage with his experience-machine developed insights.

The blogger uses the experience machine to figure out what to do. He spends more time on this decision than he had any other. When he comes out of the experience machine this time, he has experienced the equivalent of months of contemplation, in a matter of a few days, due to the efficiency with which he can run through experiences. He feels an electrical buzz in his head. He sits at his computer. His hands move without him feeling he is in control of them. They open up the experience machine design document saved in his computer and uploads them to google docs. He then shares the google doc with about 100 email addresses of different individuals, many of whom he only has a fuzzy recollection of their identity.

His finger hits the enter key and emails are sent to these select people notifying them of their access to the experience machine design, with a message saying they were selected and entrusted to make the best use of it, given its power and potential, for both good and bad.

The blogger then sits back in his chair, feeling as if a possessing spirit has been exorcised from him and he was in control of himself again. He feels a sense of relief from the tension of the past few days. He doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen, but his intuition says things will be okay.

Shimmering Reptile

Familiar Haunts

A conman works in the bar of a nice hotel. A wealthy old man who lives in the hotel comes for a drink every night. The conman decides he can befriend the man and then steal from him. In conversation, the conman mentions how bored he is with his bar job and how he wishes he could help people more. The old man mentions that he is having trouble getting around, and would like an assistant to help him throughout his day. The old man asks the conman if he would like to work for him, and the conman says yes.

The conman sees that the old man's luxurious apartment is filled with beautiful old trinkets, paintings, and ancient-looking books. With his smartphone he surreptitiously takes photos of some of the trinkets and books and investigates them on the internet in his spare time. Many of the books are rare and valuable. Some of them there is no record of. Most of them have to do with occultism. The trinkets are similar.

The conman wants to sell some of these items but believes the old man will notice. He talks with a craftsman who is renowned for creating wonderful jewelry on demand. He asks if the jeweler could create a replica of trinkets if he brought the original to him, but had to take it back within an hour or so. The jeweler said he could.

The conman brought the jeweler a trinket, a small geometrical piece of jewelry with rubies encrusted in it, made of gold. The jeweler examined it, took many photos, notes, and in a matter of an hour, said he had enough information to produce an identical copy. The conman then returned the trinket to the old man's apartment. This had been done late at night so the old man was asleep and didn’t notice.

The jeweler produced an identical copy in a matter of a week. The conman paid him and took the copy to the apartment where he replaced the original with it. He then took the original and brought it to various dealers in exotic merchandise. The trinket was apparently thousands of years old and had been used in Zoroastrian ritual magic. The trinket was exceedingly rare and would fetch a million dollars on the legitimate market, but given its origin, the trinket would have to be sold on the black market, and would fetch only about 100,000 dollars. The conman accepted this. The dealer paid the conman 50,000 dollars and would pay him the remainder, approximately 50,000 give or take depending on the market, when the trinket sold.

Later that week the old man asked the conman to make him a drink. He asked for an elaborate concoction mixed from various strange bottles in his personal bar. He then asked the conman to fix himself a drink—insisting he have some of the fine scotch he reserved for people who were important to him. They sat and the conman drank from the glass.

He awoke on a stone altar.

People in black hoods stood around him. He was naked. The room was lit by flickering orange light. The figures chanted. His body was paralyzed. A knife flickered in the hand of one of the figures. The knife dove down near the conman's belly. The conman could feel nothing below his neck. He could not make noise with his voice. The chanting increased, murmurs in strange languages.

Then all went silent and the flame went out. A voice, a laughing boy’s voice, sounded. "What’s this? That won’t do." Screams erupted from the room. Orange light exploded throughout the room for a moment. Then darkness again, and dripping sounds. The conman lied there listening, paralyzed. He closed his eyes and prayed for the first time in his life. At some point he must have passed out.

He awoke in the darkness. He felt sensation in his body. He moved. He groped in the darkness, looking for clothing. His hand touched something wet and cold. He recoiled. He felt around the altar. Clothing was at its edge. It seemed to be his clothes. He put them on in darkness. He turned on his smartphone, which was in his pants' pocket and used the flashlight function to see where he was.

A horrific scene lay before him. He would never be able to express the horrors of what he saw. He did see the much contorted visage of the old man, and in his mouth melted golden metal with fractured red glass. It was the melted counterfeit trinket the conman had produced.

He found a door, which lead to a large basement in the hotel. He took a freight elevator to a loading dock around back and ran off. The conman told the dealer to keep the remainder of his proceeds—he did not want money from the party who bought the trinket. He made some incomprehensible remark to the dealer: "The trinket helps them find treasure, and other things."

No mention was ever made in the news media of the horrific scene in the basement of the hotel. The conman was in no mood to inquire. An anonymous donation of 50,000 dollars was given to a church near the hotel, and the conman was no longer seen around, with his normal circle of friends, or haunting his old familiar haunts.

The Voice from Nowhere

Otto Dick had been an SS Einsatzgruppenfuhrer who lead a penal battalion in anti-guerrilla and ethnic cleansing campaigns in Poland and the Ukraine during World War II. He had been a conman who had defrauded the Nazi Party of funds when he was treasurer of a local Bavarian section of the party in the early thirties and was caught and in the investigation myriad other crimes were discovered--extensive blackmail, shakedown work, murder for hire, pimping, pornography, corporate espionage, trading Nazi secrets with the Social Democrats and Communists--anything that could get him money or power he seemed to have a hand in.

His talents were appreciated by Himmler who thought his genius for criminal enterprises might translate to useful espionage and assassination work. Dick was offered freedom conditional on writing about applying his criminal talents to operations to further the interests of the Fatherland, and conditional upon his service as the leader of a penal battalion under close supervision by SS General Max Niflung.

The dossier was published as a book distributed to the higher ups in the SS and Wehrmacht. The main thrust of the book was that the Nazis should aim at the power elite of other countries and seek to blackmail as many of the elite as possible using a variety of honeypot style operations--tempting elite members into doing embarrassing things and then using this compromise to influence them into helping the Nazi cause, all sub rosa if possible. Hitler was impressed by these ideas and was himself of somewhat a similar mind. He employed much of Dick’s approach in his conquests, though deviated from them in his invasion of Poland which started World War II.

Dick reputedly was a lazy commander, spending little time working. His approach, unsurprisingly, was to hire some male prostitutes to proposition priests and other bachelors, and then photographs would be obtained of these single men, those who fell for the honeypot, in compromising situations. Then Dick told the compromised men to infiltrate guerrilla bands or try to start their own if possible. Dick would then gather information about guerrilla movements and seek similar blackmail opportunities within the guerilla groups his agents had penetrated, often gaining the ability to more or less control the guerrilla groups for his own purposes.

When the Nazis were overthrown in 1945, Dick had created an organization comprised of members from practically every imaginable ethnicity, political background, military or government or business affiliation, into a network centered in Eastern Europe. Officially, he died in a plane crash in Bavaria in May 1945, but a book emerged in 1975--a historian at the Univeristy of Bonn, Professor Paul Ritter, had been delivered the book--it had been left with his secretary, who did not recall seeing who had left the book for him. A note on the book explained the book had been written by Otto Dick. Dick had faked his death, the note claimed, converted his network of influence built up during the war into a criminal organization, and quietly ran it until his death in 1974. He compiled his writings into a book that he entitled, “The Voice from Nowhere”, dedicating it to Duke Lothar von Gotha.

The authenticity of the book was debated, but the case for its authenticity was considered compelling as all claims, that could be independently confirmed, were confirmed, as World War II historians poured over the documents. One tantalizing problem was whether quotations in the book attributed to Duke Lothar von Gotha, writer of the lost book, “The Book of Life from Death”, that were not from any extant fragment, were authentic. The author of the book, whether it was Otto Dick or not, claims to have come across a complete text of Lothar’s book, and found it greatly useful in exercising profound influence over events of the world through indirect but highly effective means. More sensational still were many unverifiable claims about high ranking members of the power elite of the world having been compromised by Dick--no one was exposed in the book. The final judgment about the text was that it was plausibly genuine but some claims were impossible to judge as true or false, and so the historical community would remain agnostic or skeptical of them until they were corroborated by further information. According to Professor Paul Ritter in a 20-year retrospective piece in the New York Times, he has been told by several people who were underlings of powerful people, that their bosses had fretted over being outed by the book when it had emerged, supporting the notion the book was genuine.

Microfiction Draft: Hot Shot

Microfiction Draft: Forms of Protection

An ancient monster emerges from a cave and starts killing people. It's man-sized and covered in a thick armor-like skin impervious to all conventional human weapons. A reporter follows the monster through its killing spree. It appears to eat humans. The reporter follows the beast back to its cave and dives in after it deep into the earth. He finds an elaborate underground structure of passages and halls littered with skeletons of humans, as well as seemingly dead monsters of the same type as the one who just went on a killing spree.

The reporter finds the living monster seemingly in hibernation in a hall. He finds a boy resting with the monster. The reporter tries to quietly get the kid away from the monster but the kid wakes and screams and bites the man. The monster stirs but is lethargic and only makes a halfhearted attempt to chase after the reporter who escapes to the surface.

The reporter writes up an article with documentation in the form of video and photos taken with his smart phone. The cave area is cordoned off and the military engages in some operations around there, presumably in the caves. The child is not identified even though his picture is in the media--one of the photos the journalist took was of the kid's face.

A folklorist from the local university emails the reporter and tells him the Native Americans in the area had stories of a rock monsters that kidnapped babies and used them as lures and as watchmen and guardians to protect the monsters while the monsters slept. The boy would have been kidnapped locally around eight to ten years ago, probably as a baby.

The reporter scours records and finds that such a boy fits the profile--kidnapped from a family outing in the woods near the caves. The journalist contacts the mother and they go to the cordon set up by the military and tell the guard there about the possibility the mother's child was kidnapped. The guard at the cordon arranges a meeting with a general, who explains that special forces were able to rescue a child, but were not able to find the monster.

The mother goes to the hospital where the child is. The kid is unruly and is restrained in his hospital room. The mother and the reporter look in on the kid through a window and are disturbed by his screaming and thrashing. The lights go out in the hospital, gun fire is heard, and the lumbering figure of the monster is seen. The monster makes its way to the room where the kid is, smashes open the wall and rescues the child from his restraints. The monster and child make their way in darkness towards the exit. The reporter and mother shadow the monster.

A policeman roaming the corridors of the hospital runs into the monster and pulls his gun. He fires in the darkness as the monster's shadowy figure. The mother and reporter yell at him to stop as the child is with the monster. The monster drops to his knees and is motionless. The gunfire ceases. The lights flicker on and the monster remains frozen, on its knees, holding the boy in his arms. The boy is dead from a gunshot.

The mother and reporter and officer approach the monster but it doesn't move. The police and military swarm the hospital. The monster never moves again, apparently dying from some unknown cause, as no bullet pierced its armor-like skin. Its body is taken by the military. Later, the mother is asked if she wishes to do a DNA test to see if she is the boy's mother, and she declines.

Microfiction: Beast in a Cage

Microfiction Draft: Encounter

Microfiction Draft: The Book of Life from Death

The decorative sword which Cassandra designed had been modeled after an ancient sword she had seen at the Museum of Fine Arts. When she saw the sword she was fascinated and read everything on the web that she could about it, but there wasn't much. It had been owned by a Knight named Lothar von Gotha or Lothar the Dark of the Knights Templar, who fought in the crusade to bring Christianity to the pagan Prussians in Eastern Europe. The sword was reputed to possess supernatural powers and when Lothar came into its possession by means unknown near the end of his successful campaigning, he left the Knights Templar and returned to his father's duchy. His father and brother died and Lothar became a Duke and gained in wealth and power till his death at about ninety, very old now, extremely old then.

Apparently Lothar wrote a book, called ‘The Book of Life from Death’ about the dark arts, and his theory of how they could be used, ironically, to do good. The dark arts were about destruction. If they were turned towards destroying the destructive forces in the world, they could be thought of as good.

Cassandra was fascinated and asked a friend of hers, Gregor, if she could use his Harvard College Library access to research the book. Gregor came along with her to the library and they found that the book did not appear to exist anymore, but some of the book had been copied-out by an antiquarian by the name N.S. Keynes at the turn of the 20th century. Cassandra and Gregor found a collection of Keynes’ papers at Harvard’s library, and in it, information about Duke Lothar.

Keynes had hired a research assistant, Harry Ian, a friend, to help track down rare manuscripts, and Harry found that the Lothar text did indeed exist in a library of an ancient English family, the Cravenwood family, in Sussex. Harry began transcribing the text with Keynes over a few weeks, but during this time they both started to have strange dreams of floating, as if on a cloud. over lakes of fire connected by many little lava-filled rivers, and up from below came howling sounds of an unclear origin. Keynes and Ian decided to stop working with the text, and returned it to the Duke of Cravenwood. His home, the ancient Foresthill Manor, had a fire in its library shortly thereafter. It destroyed many of the family’s books, one of which appears to have been Lothar’s text.

MK's Nervous System: Concise Statement