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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 3: Let's Scare the Babysitter to Death

5/25/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 2: Heroes

For today's story, we return to Prospero of the 1980's, when fear was real and imaginations ran wild...
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Let's Scare the Babysitter to Death

By Matt Carter

Diana - 1986
Stephanie Kim was one of my best friends, but tonight we were going to make her pay.

Simple as that.

“Where is she?” I asked Sam.

He didn’t pick up his binoculars to look, “You know, there’s a ten o’clock showing of Deadly Friend down at the Canterbury. If we leave now-”

“We’re not leaving now,” I said. “We’ve put too much work into this to back out now.”

“-I mean, they say it’s a pretty crappy movie, but it’s got this basketball scene-”

“Where is she?” I asked again.

Sam sighed, lifting his binoculars to look at the Kim house. “Still in the living room. Still talking on the phone. If I could read lips I could tell you who with, but since I can’t I’ll probably just wind up making something up that would make the best story.”

“Probably Myra Denning or Harvey Kessler,” I said. They were Stephanie’s best friend and boyfriend respectively and were the most likely ones you’d find her talking to for hours on end on a Friday night when she was supposed to be grounded and babysitting her twin little brothers.

“They’re likely, but not fun,” Sam said, setting down his binoculars and checking his bag of walkie-talkies. “If I’m going to imagine something, I’d prefer to imagine something more sordid. I’m going to imagine that she’s talking to… Jack Keamy.”

“Jack Keamy?” I said, holding back a laugh. Jack Keamy was a blowhard rich kid with dreams of being an athlete that didn’t even come close to matching reality. Stephanie might not have had the greatest taste in boyfriends (as her dating of surly prick Harvey and the many arguments we had over him could attest), but she had a little more self-respect than to spend her nights talking to Keamy.

“Oh yeah,” Sam said, winding up for what I could tell would be another of his stories. “Haven’t you heard? The two of them are having an illicit affair. Sneaking off behind Harvey’s back to make out at Kirby Ridge, roof of his convertible down, Stairway to Heaven blasting on his eight-track. She wants to have sex with him, and he wants to wait-”

Now I did burst out laughing, having to clamp a hand over my mouth so nobody would hear us laughing in the bush we’d been hiding in.

“Jack Keamy? Wants to wait?”

Sam simply smiled, continuing, “It may seem a ludicrous notion to you and me, but at his core Jack Keamy is a truly spiritual man. He dreams of one day removing himself from the unfortunate shackles of his upper-class idiot, cheerleader-seducing ways and becoming an honest, faithful man.”

“By making out with Stephanie Kim?”

Sam shrugged, “I never said my imagination was particularly cohesive, just very vivid.”

As always, Sam Todd could make me laugh. It was the main reason I’d dated him longer than, well, pretty much every other boy I’d gone out with. He might not have been as good-looking as most of the other boys, but he was honest and was basically the only person in the world who could regularly make me laugh. Did we have a future? I didn’t know. It was as possible as anything else in this town, I guessed. Sure, he had a ways to grow up still, he still had to get past all his toys and comics and gadgets and puzzles, but when he did that he stood every chance of being a respectable boyfriend.

Assuming, of course, that he never got too close a glimpse at this town’s dark side.

I wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle that.

He picked up his binoculars again, “She’s off the phone.”

“Cool,” I said, grabbing the binoculars from his hands so I could see for sure. He made a mock strangling noise as the strap drew tight across his neck, but I knew enough from dating Sam to ignore it.

She was sitting alone in her family’s living room, looking disgruntled (from the call or from having to babysit on a Friday night, I couldn’t tell you). It was the only lit room in the Kims’ massive house. There was lots of empty space, lots of dark rooms (like the one her brothers slept in upstairs), and like Sam, Stephanie also had more imagination than she knew what to do with.

Which was the problem, really. If she had less imagination, we wouldn’t have to be here tonight, doing this. We could be out, having a fun Friday night, and maybe I’d have even let Sam talk me into seeing his terrible horror movie with that basketball scene he kept trying to work into every mention of it.

Instead we were hiding in these bushes, looking to scare the ever-loving crap out of one of my best friends, because she just had to go and make a joke out of them.

 

#

 

My name is Diana Wilson, and in Prospero I might as well be royalty. My family’s been a part of this town since the late 1800’s and has held seats on the Town Council almost as long. My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father all have held lifelong seats on the Council (sure, they’re technically elected, but the way this town is run, the elections are dramatically worse than our high school’s plays), and if I had a brother who didn’t die a crib death I’m sure he’d have been expected to do the same.

Instead, all my father had was me, and though I’m sure he was looking for me to marry right one day so I’d have a good strong husband to take over the job in his stead, I had no intention of doing any such thing.

If he wanted to keep the Council in the family, his seat would be mine.

Not that I had any serious interest in small town politics, because Prospero was about as pointless a town as it got. If the town were any less important, I’d have run in a heartbeat. Just take my college fund, go to school and never come back, becoming a big city lawyer in San Francisco or Los Angeles or even Portland if I really wanted to run far away. I could pull it off, and God knew the money was there.

But the thing was, Prospero was important, and my place in it was almost as important too.

Because I knew about them.

They were the family business, after all.

If you believed their stories, and I knew better than to take them at their word, they came to Prospero just after its founding. They could have taken us over, just absorbed everyone and made this a town of not-people, but they didn’t. Instead they struck up an accord with the town’s most affluent citizens to make Prospero one of their “probationary colonies”, a place where they could send their citizens who were either too raw or too tired of life but didn’t want to live on their home world. In exchange for their assistance and collaboration in covering up their nefarious deeds (including the occasional kidnapping and replacement of random townsfolk), the affluent would stay affluent and safe.

I hated them, as any sane person would, but I also knew I wasn’t in any position to do anything about them yet. One day, with that Council seat, maybe I could do something, but until then, all I could do was wait and hold my tongue and play my part as the loyal collaborator.

A big part of this, unfortunately, meant keeping the people I liked most in the dark.

Sam knew nothing, and I meant to keep him that way. Though he really loved science fiction and would get this better than anyone, he was also a gentle soul and would probably never forgive me for knowing everything that I knew about this. Sure, he would joke about our town’s strange quirks and history of UFO and monster sightings, but he kept it at just that, jokes. He would never cross any lines that would draw undue attention to himself.

Stephanie was another matter.

More popular than but slightly less beautiful than me, she was also deceptively smart and had a wicked sense of humor; a wicked sense of humor that she loved to push the envelope with. She delighted in elaborate pranks and for the most part everyone thought she was so cool for them.

Then she crossed the line from harmless jokes to jokes that would get their attention.

It was lunchtime about a week ago when she ran into the cafeteria claiming that the Freeling Farm Monster had attacked her and was chasing after her. The bright red slashes across her chest kept people from laughing. The grotesque monster that burst through the doors and tackled her to the ground made people scream.

It was all fake, of course. The slashes were makeup and the monster was one of her friends, Cindy Brooks (who, incidentally, was one of them, who got a good laugh out of this) in a heavily altered Halloween costume, but the fear they instilled wasn’t fake.

Everybody knew about the horrible deaths of those kids from Braiwood two years back up at the Freeling Farm. The official report claimed it was a bear, while the two survivors of the massacre claimed it was a monster. The truth was somewhere in between, where one of them had broken free from their world, bonded with a bear and failed at being a human, but not at being a monster. One of the survivors had killed it, and the Council and them did their best to cover the incident up, but there were still jokes and rumors and scary stories about the Freeling Farm Monster, stories that Stephanie just wanted to take advantage of for a stupid joke.

According to dad, they dealt with Cindy in their own way, but they were still furious with Stephanie for everything she had done and wanted her punished.

Knowing what their punishment usually meant, I told dad that I could take care of the Stephanie problem. I could scare her, make her never want to play any stupid jokes like this again, and he agreed.

For me, it was a win all around, for three reasons:

1)      I could save a friend from being replaced by a shapeshifting alien.

2)      I could punish a friend who did something unbelievably stupid and (hopefully) scare them so silly they wouldn’t consider doing something like it again.

3)      I would look like a hero to dad, and maybe get him to start thinking that me taking up his Council seat after he’d inevitably retire wouldn’t be such a stupid idea.

Now to put my money where my mouth was.

 

#

 

It helped that Stephanie loved horror movies and was absolutely freaked out by them.

With an imagination as vivid as hers, it wouldn’t take much to frighten her.

We’d borrowed most of the equipment we’d needed from one of Sam’s friends in the school AV club, and begged and borrowed for the rest, though dad’s under-the-table funding of our venture made this part a lot easier.

With that, it was all a matter of following the script.

Act 1: Disconnect the phone line outside the house.

Act 2: Using some of the walkie-talkies I’d hidden in her house while visiting her earlier in the day, start making her hear voices. Maybe even tap on the windows some for good measure.

Act 3: Shut off the electricity outside the house.

Act 4: While she’s freaked out and in the dark, turn on the slide projectors we’d rigged outside her windows. They were angled in such a way and full of enough shock imagery (care of one of Sam’s creepier friends on the AV club) that it’d look like her house was being besieged by some of the scariest ghosts in the world.

Act 5: Using the keys stashed under the front and back door mats, we’d provide some up-close and personal ghosts. While our makeup and costumes were cheap, in the dark with only the lights of the projectors, they would be creepy enough.

Her house was isolated enough that neighbors wouldn’t be an issue, and dad said that he would use what sway he had to keep the police and Stephanie’s parents occupied for the night. If I had any regrets, it was doing this while her little brothers were upstairs, but she always used to boast that they could sleep through a hurricane, which made this a chance worth taking.

It was finally dark enough to do what I had to do.

“Showtime,” I told Sam, sneaking through the bushes to the box that connected her house to the city’s phone lines. I quickly unscrewed the base and pulled out the necessary line before sneaking back to Sam.

“You did it?” he asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“You want to check?” he asked.

“No, I am not going to sneak over to someone’s house, dressed like this and ask to use their phone just so we could see if our prank on Stephanie’s going to work,” I said.

“It was worth asking,” he said.

“I know…” I said, planting a quick kiss on his lips. “And thank you for checking. And being so responsible. And for being so irresponsible to help me do something like this.”

“What else are boyfriends for?” he said, pumping out his chest proudly.

“Seeing if those walkies you gave me still have enough battery in them to make her think her house is haunted?” I proposed, taking the binoculars from him so I could get a good look at Stephanie.

“That’s another good thing, yes,” he said, pulling a walkie marked “LIVING ROOM 2” in masking tape, and holding onto one of the buttons on the end.

“Heeeelllloooo?” he rasped.

She jumped, her head darting around as she tried to look for the voice. I was pretty sure I could see her saying, ‘Who’s there?’

You see, Stephanie, this is why you don’t tell anyone the scariest movie you’ve ever seen is Poltergeist.

Sam and I took turns with the various walkie-talkies, doing our best scary voices and making her look around the living room, looking more freaked out with each passing minute. At one point I nearly shouted at her, “SIT DOWN!”, and she cowered onto the couch again quickly, near tears. She picked up the phone, trying to call out, then tossed it down when she couldn’t get anyone.

Now there were tears.

I didn’t like causing a friend pain, but like it or not I had to remind myself that this was for her own good. She had to know what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a prank like this, and she had to know that she could never do anything like this in this town again.

She was curled up on the couch, pulling some ancient afghan from the corner tight around her shoulders.

“Ready for Act 3?” Sam asked.

“That sounds about right,” I said. I took only one step toward the house, however, before the power cut out on its own.

“What the hell?” I muttered, lifting the binoculars to my eyes again. It took a moment to adjust to the new darkness, but the moon was bright, bright enough to let me see the hunched over, inhuman shape by the power box, stretched out and malformed. Bright enough to see it break out a window and slither inside.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Sam said.

The lie came quickly, “Someone’s breaking into the house.”

“Really?” Sam asked.

“Well, you didn’t cut the power, did you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Someone with the same idea as you?”

“Maybe,” I said, knowing the lie. “But it could be a burglar. I need you to run down to the nearest house and call for the police, tell them what’s going on and that I’m inside too.”

“What? Why are you going inside?” Sam asked.

“Because I’m faster than you and know her house better and might be able to get to her before whoever else is there can,” I said, trying quickly to find a weapon. Sam had an extra tripod for one of the projectors we didn’t wind up using. Though it wasn’t particularly heavy, it would do in a pinch.

“I can’t let you do this,” he said.

“You can and you will because you’re an awesome boyfriend who understands and respects me and who doesn’t want to get Stephanie hurt anymore than I do, right?” I said.

“Damn your logic,” he said, pulling me close and giving me a kiss. I kissed him back fiercely, knowing what I would have to do soon and hating every moment of it.

“Send help,” I repeated, getting only a nod from Sam as he ran to the nearest lit house down the road.

That would buy me some time.

I ran to the front door, scooping the key from under the doormat and let myself in.

Three steps inside the house, Stephanie finally screamed, though she was cut off quickly as a slithering hand closed over her mouth.

I ran to them, ready to fight if this was one of their more irrational citizens who might try to make a fight out of this.

Finally seeing the two of them, Stephanie fearful, her feet kicking off the floor, and her captor a swirling mass of mismatched, bony limbs and tentacles, I cleared my throat.

Stephanie looked at me like I was an angel sent from above.

The creature just smiled several of its mismatched mouths at me.

“Oh, hello Diiiiiana!” three of its mouths drawled, no two of them in proper sync with each other.

I relaxed my shoulders.

This wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

“Hi, Alexei,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much of my story I should fake for Stephanie’s visit, but I figured on honesty being the better policy with Alexei involved. He was one of the most ancient of their members in Prospero, having jumped from body to body since the formation of the town. Recently he had been in the body of Horace Gondrell, an elderly man with too many cats, and there had been talk that he’d be looking for a new body soon. Given her youth and the trouble she might cause them, I could see why he might have chosen Stephanie.

“Didn’t my dad tell you that I was taking care of this?” I said.

“He did, but we didn’t know if we could trust, so I decided to take my part instead. Besides, she’s got the beautiful black hair I like to have,” he said, stroking her hair and getting a muffled scream.

“She does, really, but I don’t think-”

There was a crash of glass from the rear of the house. Alexei and I turned to see what was going on.

Sam, you better not have-

No, there were multiple voices, sets of footsteps. An older man’s voice saying, “It’s in here.”

I put together, far faster than Alexei, what was going on. Before he could move, I darted between Alexei and the voices before they could make the living room.

There were four of them. An older man with a fedora and a hook for hand, a middle-aged woman, and two boys, one barely hitting puberty, the other a teenager maybe a year older than me. They were all very well armed, and very eager-looking.

Hunters.

Dad had told me about them, a bunch of misguided gun nuts who gathered on the fringes of town, hunting them down without any concern of what it might mean for the town itself. They’d mostly been able to kill only those creatures that had been taken over by them, but they’d made strides in the past few years to kill a number of their human copies.

Though I might have agreed with their ideas, I knew their tactics made them little better than terrorists.

“Step aside, girlie,” the older man with the hook said, pointing the lit tip of an old, World War II flamethrower at Alexei and Stephanie.

“I’d rather not,” I said, trying to think quickly.

The teenaged-boy said, “I think you really ought to do what he said, you don’t know what-”

“Don’t you dare tell her anything! She’s with the splinters. A collaborator,” the older man hissed with particular disgust. “I’ll spare you for your humanity, but don’t think I won’t end you if you try anything stupid.”

I wasn’t planning on trying anything stupid, not with a bunch of guns and sharp objects and a flamethrower pointed at me. Alexei, on the other hand, he was not one you could rely on not doing anything stupid. He might be one of the oldest known of his people, but he’d gotten pretty fried with his old age and was apt to do pretty much anything that came to mind.

“I know who you are and I know what you’re doing, but I’m asking you, right now, to reconsider and back the hell off before anyone gets hurt,” I said quickly.

“Last chance, girlie, I’m gonna count to three…”

“My boyfriend ran out-”

“ONE!”

“-he’s getting the cops and he’s going to-”

“TWO!”

“-and you know who makes up the cops and what they’ll do-”

“THR-”

“KILL HIM AND YOU’LL BE SORRY!” I yelled.

The man with the hook looked surprised, dropping the tip of his flamethrower a few inches. The other hunters looked at him, nonplussed.

“Continue,” Hook said.

Think fast, think fast, think fast.

“Do you know who you’re about to kill?” I asked.

“A splinter,” he said.

 That was a weird as hell name for them, but I wouldn’t stop him from calling them that.

“Do you know which one he is, though?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” he said. “They eat our lives and they die when we burn them.”

“Yeah, not quite,” I said. “Some of them are better than others and the one you’re about to burn’s one of the best of them. Alexei here, he’s one of the oldest and most influential in the world.”

“She’s right, you know,” Alexei said, smiling with most of his mouths.

“Shut up,” I said to him.

“So far you’re not making a good case for why we ought not kill him,” Hook said.

“Yeah, well, think of it this way. You kill someone as important as him, and there’ll be hell to pay. It’s not like he’s one of your animal monsters out there in the woods, burned and forgotten, people will miss him, they will mourn for him, and they will take revenge upon those who killed him. They will make fire rain down from the sky and they will make it rain on you, and unless you run and never stop running, they will find you and they will kill you,” I said.

“We know what we’re doing. We can take that kind of fight,” Hook said.

“Maybe, but have you considered that taking a risk as stupid as this now and dying like this means you won’t be able to keep your fight going, that you won’t be able to keep killing more of them? Kill him now and you’ll all die soon with no more victims to your name. Let him live, and your killing will only be limited by how many splinters you can get your hands on,” I said, forcing the word out and just not liking the fit.

Hook just fixed me with his gaze (impossible to see behind his sunglasses), and waved the others back. Quickly, they all ran from the house.

“Girlie, I’ll just say now you’re good at talking. And stalling for time for the police to arrive. We’ll back off, for now, but only because I think you got a future and I don’t want to end it for you right now. Just know this: you’re backing the bad guys,” he said, turning on his heels and running from the house.

“Believe me, I know,” I said under my breath.

“Diana, thank you soooooooo much,” Alexei said.

Right. Still have to deal with him.

“If there’s ever anything, anything at all I can do for you, just let me know and it is done. I’m owing you my life tonight!” he said.

“Good. I’ll call that favor now,” I said. “Let Stephanie go and never come back.”

His dozens of eyes fixed me curiously, some of them soon breaking open into laughing mouths, “What a funny joke, Diana!”

“No joke. You let her go, right now, and you never touch her again, she’s off-limits,” I said. “I think she’s been sufficiently scared tonight, and I will make sure that she is never a problem to you or your people again.”

“That is nice and all, but that is not sufficient, I think, because I am still needing a new body, you see. So, I really am needing Stephanie,” he said.

“Look. Alexei. You know you talk a little strange, right?” I said.

“A little, perhaps, but only to you. My people-”

I cut him off, something dad would hate me for, but he wasn’t around, was he?

“And you also know that Stephanie doesn’t talk like you do, right?” I said.

Clearly, he hadn’t thought of that.

“You need a body?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you like the long black hair look?” I said.

“Of course. It is the greatest look, don’t you think?” he asked.

“I honestly don’t care. There’s a vagrant who’s been hanging out under the highway bridge just south of town. He’s been harassing some of the kids from school, trying to sell them drugs,” I said.

“He sounds like a baaad man,” Alexei said.

“Probably. Anyway, he’s got long black hair, and if you cleaned him up some he might look respectable to the point where nobody would notice he’s the guy from the bridge. And since he’s a nobody who nobody knows, you could even use your real name. Wouldn’t you like every human to call you Alexei for once?” I said, trying to sell the point hard. While I didn’t like selling a human life away, it was better a stranger than a friend, especially a potentially dangerous stranger.

Alexei still didn’t look sold. Here’s where I’d have to go in for the kill.

“And you know Ms. Montoya, the drama teacher at the high school, is taking a better job in Sacramento, right? We’ll need a new drama teacher, and my dad says there’s no better dramatist than you,” I said.

That was a lie, but a pretty good one. Dad had told me about Alexei just like he’d told me about the rest of them as prominent as him in town, and how he’d always dreamed of being one of the world’s greatest stars and had known Shakespeare back in the day, but was really more weird than anything else.

Still, it was the right bait to use on Alexei.

He dropped Stephanie to the ground, too hard.

“Oh, so sorry, Stephanie girl,” Alexei said, patting her head and stepping back. There were sirens outside, and I knew the police cars would be here soon.

“So, you’re going for the drama teacher position?” I asked.

“I cannot think of anyone better. Thank you for the idea, Diiiiiiiiana!” he said, tipping one of his heads at me before darting for the back of the house.

Two problems down. Now just for number three…

Finally, I gave Stephanie my full attention. She was a mess, tears streaked down her face, shirt torn.

“Let me guess, you’re at that stage where words aren’t coming easy and you’re wondering just what the hell is going on in the world. You’re wondering if this is all just some nightmare or if you really were just attacked by some monster who wanted to steal your body because it liked your hair,” I said, calmly.

She nodded.

“Well then, I got bad news for you: it’s all real,” I said. She shuddered, pulling herself into a ball again.

“But with all bad news, there’s good news. You can prevent this from ever happening again. Just keep your head low, keep your pranks harmless, no more monsters, don’t tell anyone what you saw here tonight, and you’ll be fine,” I said. Quickly, I added, “And check in on your brothers, they might be waking up soon, when the cops come in, and you’re still their babysitter.”

She continued looking up at me, stunned, frightened and confused, finally saying, “Who are you?”

I grinned, “I’m your friend. I’m a collaborator. And who knows, I may yet be this town’s best hope.”

Do I have a future in politics or what?


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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
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When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 2: Heroes

5/10/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

Click here for Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

For today's story, we look back on some of Prospero's finest...
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Heroes

By Matt Carter

Roy - 1942
The calendar outside the gas station read, December 8th, 1942.

It had been one year. One year to the day, actually. I remembered it well, President Roosevelt’s voice echoing over the radio, talking about the dastardly, unprovoked attack by the Empire of Japan. Everyone I knew seemed to remember it for his opening line, speaking of December 7th, 1941 being a date that would live in infamy, but the line that stuck with me the most was right at the end.

“Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.”

It was hard to listen to what he, no, what the president had to say and give it no weight, much as my father might have wanted to think it nothing and impress on me the same. Seeing it in the newsreels, remembering the president’s words, I knew only one thing for sure:

I was going to be a hero.

I just wouldn’t be the town’s first hero.

Odds were that honor would go to my best friend, Dwight Matheson.

“You think they got Dr. Pepper in Tunisia?” he asked, popping the cap off his bottle with the gas station’s wall-mounted bottle opener.

“I wouldn’t imagine so, not with the war,” I said.

“Well, shit,” he said. “Guess I should make them count while I can, then.”

He took a long sip, tilted his head back, and belched loudly. He looked around, as embarrassed as I’d ever seen them (which is to say, not very) and seeing only the station’s proprietor on hand, he tipped his uniform hat and said, “Sorry, Mr. Brundle.”

“It’s okay, son. It’s on the house for our town hero!” Harold Brundle said, laughing and reaching into a nearby icebox, tossing two more bottles our way. Dwight missed his, but I was able to catch them both, which with the open bottle already in my hand gave me three bottles of awful tasting soda that I’d probably wind up drinking all of on the walk home because, well, any soda’s better than no soda.

“Thanks!” Dwight waved to Harold as we walked off. He hadn’t gotten tired of being called a hero yet. Sure, no fewer than thirty-eight young (and perhaps not so young) men from Prospero had enlisted and were either going off or had already gone off to war, but everyone called Dwight the hero because he looked the part. Handsome, tall and muscular in a way that made him look real smart in his uniform (even with a coat covering up much of it) with jet-black hair, pale blue eyes, and a chin that looked like it belonged on a movie star, or some ancient statue. If I didn’t like him so much, I’d have hated him.

But I did, so I didn’t. Not that he lacked flaws.

“You need better taste in soda,” I said.

“And you need to stop giving shit to the town hero,” he said dramatically.

“Do you even know where Tunisia is?” I asked.

He shrugged, “I’ll write you an answer when I get there. All I know is there’s Nazi’s there just asking me to put a few hundred bullets in ‘em. I mean, I’d have preferred it be the Japs, but leave that for the marines. Just means I’ll be sending people home Lugers instead of swords. You wanna be on my Luger list?”

“No,” I said, eyes cast at the ground.

“You don’t want a Luger? Okay, fine, if you don’t want yourself a gun you don’t need a gun, how about a good Nazi flag? Or a knife? Everybody loves knives…” he said.

The next part was hard to say, one I’d been building up to for a long time but wasn’t sure I’d be able to say to anyone. Dwight was about as safe as anyone to test the words on. I just hoped he wouldn’t laugh too loudly at me.

“I do want a Luger,” I said. “I just think… I think I’d like to get one myself.”

“What, like from the back of a comic book?” Dwight asked.

“No. I want to enlist,” I said. There, I said it. I braced for the laughter that was sure to come.

No, the laughter that ought to come, the laughter that the very idea of Roy Potts going to war was meant to bring on. Skinny, short Roy Potts who had glasses and a bum knee and was still pretty good at running, mostly because he’d spent a lot of his life running away.

Everyone knew Roy Potts couldn’t be a hero.

Well, almost everyone.

Dwight broke into a wide smile, a real smile I was one of the lucky few to know, not the one he used to get under girls’ skirts. He clapped me on the back, hard, nearly sending me off my feet.

“It’s about damn time!” he exclaimed. I couldn’t have hoped for a better answer, not with what my father was sure to say on the topic.

“You really think so?”

“Hell yeah! You and me on the front lines, can you see it? Shootin’ bad guys, skinning krauts!”

“Skinning?”

“Well, whatever you do, I mean they themselves are a part of an evil army bent on taking over the world, why not treat them as cruelly as they deserve?” he said.

“You’re a true humanist,” I said.

“Mayhaps I am, mayhaps I’m not, but who cares? You and me, Prospero’s finest sons, fighting together and dying together…”

“I’d rather not do the dying together part,” I said.

“Me neither, I mean, I plan on living forever, but if the situation requires and we find the need to fight and die for something bigger than us, at least we’ll die true American heroes,” he said.

I wasn’t sure we needed to die to be heroes. Superman never died, and he was a hero. I’d always thought that being a hero meant doing something great when nobody expected you to, and since nobody had ever expected much from me, it didn’t seem like it would be all that difficult, especially with such a righteous cause providing ample opportunity for someone with a form as pitiful as mine.

I smiled, trying to get him to think more positively, “Naw, you can’t even think of dying. I mean, your folks-”

“They’d be proud,” he interjected.

“-and Trudy?”

He almost dropped his bottle at the mention of her name, his smile almost gone. Very unlike him when talking about the most recent girl he called his greatest conquest.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” he said, pulling the collar of his coat higher against the cold.

“What?” I asked again.

“I said it’s nothing, just leave it at that, okay?” he said, agitation riding higher in his voice.

My memories of Dwight go back long enough to know that this was one of those moments where he’d need prodding to open up, where he’d get angry, maybe even hostile, but would then be open for discussion and honesty.

“Dwight,” I said, putting my free hand on his arm.

He grabbed me by the lapels of my coat, forcing me to face him and almost lifting me from the ground, our bottles of Dr. Pepper going flying and exploding on the road.

“I SAID-” he roared, then realizing what he was doing, his face showed nothing but shame.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” he said, setting me back down. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

“It’s just what?” I asked.

“I don’t… I’m not supposed to,” he muttered.

I put my hand on his shoulder, “You’re my best friend, and I like to hope I am yours too.”

“You are,” he said.

“Then trust me. What’s happening between you and Trudy? Did she break up with you?” I asked.

He laughed, an unpleasant, high laugh, “If only it were that easy. She’s… she’s pregnant.”

This wasn’t nearly as shocking as I think he hoped it to be to me. Whenever Dwight and Trudy were together, they took every opportunity to sneak out from under her father’s watchful eye and screw like rabbits. I always told him that if they weren’t careful something like this would happen, and he would just brush me off and say that was something that only happened to poor people and Catholics.

I could have said “I told you so”, but I doubted that would help things at the time.

“When we talked, when she told me… she was crying, but happy crying, and she said she means to keep it, and I… I got angry, I said she was doing this to try to keep me here, and that that wouldn’t work, because I’m a man and I’ve got my duties,” he said.

Now it was my turn to laugh. Trudy Carmichael was a lot of things, but the kind of woman who would let someone say that to her was not one of them.

“How hard did she slap you for that?” I asked.

“Not as hard as I wanted to slap her back after,” he said.

“But you didn’t,” I said.

“No. I didn’t,” he said.

“Because…” I said.

“Don’t make me say it,” he said.

“Aww, come on, that’s half the fun,” I taunted.

“I didn’t because I love her. There, you happy?” he said.

“Quite,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Dwight had ever said those words out loud to anyone who wasn’t his family or in his proximity whenever he was listening to his favorite boxer win on the radio.

“I just, I don’t know. I get this going right now, right here before I’m supposed to go to war, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I want to be the hero everybody wants me to be, I want to make the town, hell, my country proud, but I don’t know if I can do that with this. If I’m worried about making it home to a wife and kid, what if it makes me make the wrong choices over there?” he said.

“You won’t make the wrong choices,” I said.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because I know you,” I said. “Because you take every situation seriously. Because I can tell you take her seriously. If you love her like you say-”

“I do.”

“-then you’ll do everything you have to do to make it home to her and your child. It’s true, maybe you’ll stay your hand, maybe you won’t do what everyone thinks would make you a hero, but if you make it home and treat her right, you’ll be a hero to the only people it really matters to,” I finished.

He looked me up and down like I might’ve been an escapee from an asylum, but he didn’t say anything.

“When did you get so smart?” he asked.

“What can I say, I was born this way,” I said.

“No, you were born weird,” he said.

“A man can be smart and weird,” I said, trying to puff out my chest and sound terribly important, even if I didn’t entirely feel like a man yet.

“Maybe a man can be both of those and hero enough for both of us?” he said.

“Maybe he can,” I said, trying not to think about what had to happen next.

As if reading my mind, Dwight said, “So… have you told your father yet?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You know what he’s going to say, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

“And what are you going to say when he does?” he asked.

I straightened myself up, trying to look and feel as strong as I wanted to be, “That I’m a man, and that I’m of age, and that he couldn’t stop me if he wanted to, though his blessing would be nice.”

Some of that was even the truth.

Dwight laughed, “Well, let me know how it goes. And, well, if you have to run, you have to run. Don’t let him stop you from following your destiny. Don’t let him keep you from being a hero too.”

I smiled, though his sentiment was easier said than done.

 

#

 

It was night by the time I got home.

Father, Mother and my little, thirteen-year-old sister, Ruby, were decorating a Christmas tree that he’d cut down from the forest this morning. It was every bit as lopsided and stunted as most trees from the deeper depths of this forest were, but with some lights and glass ornaments it almost looked respectable.

I tried to bring some of Dwight’s strength and arrogance to my proposal to Father. I made my case as persuasively as I could and vowed that I would stay strong. For his part, Father remained quiet through my entire speech, continuing to help the others with the tree, even allowing me to finish. When I had, he calmly walked over to his favorite chair, put his favorite pipe between his lips and lit it up.

“I am impressed that you have put a lot of thought into this matter, and glad that you decided to ask me before doing anything, because you must know how obvious the answer is, son,” he said.

“But-”

He raised a hand, “You’re still too inexperienced and fragile to go to war, and we would be irresponsible guardians if we just let you go making a mistake like that.”

“He’s right, dear,” Mother said.

“But I, I want…”

“You want to be a hero?” Father asked.

Ruby laughed.

“You don’t think I can be a hero?” I challenged her.

“Anyone can be a hero, I just think that’s a piss-poor reason to want to go to war,” she said.

“Language, dear,” Mother chided, before turning back to me. “Though your sister is right.”

“If she wanted to go, you’d let her,” I challenged Father.

He didn’t argue this, “We would, but only because she is more mature than you and has more common sense, but this is not a world that appreciates someone of her condition and standing and so she would never be allowed to do what she could. You, on the other hand, are still young and foolish. We have put too much work and too much time into raising you and training you to let you die in some foolish border skirmish.”

“Some foolish border skirmish? They think this may be the greatest war in human history! Bigger even than the last!”

Father shook his head, “All wars are some foolish border skirmish, or some silly tiff about an ideology. You may not have been around to remember any, but try actually reading some of those books they gave you in school and you may get a better understanding of the matter.”

“But, this is against evil!”

“Says who?” Father proposed.

“Says-”

“Says propaganda,” Father said, enunciating the last word as if slowing it down would give it ample weight. “While I won’t deny that there are some particularly cruel monsters in this conflict, they are hardly anything new. Monsters, like wars, come and go, and it is up to the rest of us to keep our heads low and enjoy our lives while we have them.”

“So you would let them just waltz all over us? You’d just let them take all of our freedom and everything we’ve fought for?” I ask.

“I didn’t say that. If these villains do indeed prove themselves more capable than those of the past have proven, the necessary authorities will see that they get what is coming to them so that the status quo may be maintained,” Father said.

“Don’t you see, though? Those necessary authorities need all the help they can get, and I can help them! You know I could!”

“You could,” Father admitted. “But you also run every risk of dying. Or worse, you could show-”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said, cutting him off before he could say the unspeakable.

“You wouldn’t dare, you wouldn’t want to, but until you mature you run that risk of losing focus and doing something regrettable,” he said.

“I won’t lose focus,” I said.

“You’ve lost it before,” he said. He was right, but it had been a long time. I was better now.

“I’m a man. I can handle it,” I said.

“No, you’re a boy with dreams of being a man, like all of us were once upon a time. One day you will be a man, and it is my job to make sure you get there. Until then, I cannot let you engage in such a dangerous folly,” he said, completely dismissive.

My strength began to leave. I tried to imagine Dwight by my side, a brother in arms, what he would say, what he would do. Truth be told, he would never find himself in this situation. If he wanted something, he would take it without caring what anyone else would say.

In this situation, that was impossible. Father was an immovable object, and I was hardly an unstoppable force, not like Dwight would be.

“You’re young still,” Father continued. “And if mankind has proven anything, it’s the tendency for war. Another will come along in your time, once you have matured and gained the necessary perspective that will help keep you from getting killed. Then, maybe we’ll talk about you going on one of these heroic crusades. Now are you going to help your mother and sister with the tree, or are you just going to stand there gawking?”

And like that, the argument was done. No raised voices, no raised passions, just his decision finished and over with and no consideration for what I wanted, no, what I needed.

That was it. Roy Potts would never be a hero with a father like this.

No, if Roy Potts wanted to be a hero, he’d have to take Dwight’s advice.

Run.

Politely, I excused myself and went to my room. Once there, though, I was a man possessed. I grabbed the suitcase from beneath my bed, emptying it of all the junk that had collected in it over time, and started packing it with all the clothes from my dresser I could fit. I emptied the cigar box full of coins and wadded up bills I’d earned doing yardwork for the neighbors this past summer, at least thirty dollars, and put it at the bottom of my case.

Sneaking into Father’s room, I also stole one of his revolvers, as well as a handful of bullets. For protection.

I figured that if I started running now, I could make the road and hitch a ride over to Braiwood or Milton’s Mill. In either of those towns I could pick up a bus to Sacramento, where I could enlist. When I got there I would send a package back home with Father’s gun and a note explaining just why I did what I did, and that I was sorry but that this was my destiny. It was possible I would be disowned, or perhaps he would even hunt me down, but I was certain that if I was just given the chance, if he could just see what I was capable of, that everything would be all right, and I would be accepted for what I knew myself to truly be.

A hero.

I snuck out of my window, pulling my coat tight against the bracing cold, and with my suitcase in hand took off running into the forest.

There were clouds enough I knew it would storm soon. Soon enough to make my walk a nightmare, perhaps, but also enough to cover my trail too, I hoped. Fear gripped my heart; this was something I never would have done before, something I never would have dreamed of, but I had never really dreamed before, had I? Never wanted.

This was my time now, and I would make of it what I wanted.

The forest was dark, but unlike most I held no fear of it. The tales of monsters and strange happenings within these woods didn’t scare me. I’d always found them comforting and peaceful in their own, beautiful way. I would keep to these woods, edge my way around the town until I got to the road, and from there, with a little luck, my destiny would await.

I would be a hero.

I could see the lights of nearby houses, and in their way they called to me. They reminded me of what I had back at home, what I could have if I just turned back and listened to my Father. I hadn’t done anything unforgivable yet, I had just given into an impetuous desire.

I could still fix this.

I could still make things as they were.

The home. The warmth of a fireplace. I could practically smell it…

No, that’s not a fireplace.

There was something wrong. A harsh, bad burning smell in the air. Smoke, but not from leaves in someone’s backyard. The forest seemed to know it too, the normally sleeping birds and rodents clearly sensing that something was amiss not too far away. I looked around, stretching my senses, trying to identify its source.

Then I could hear the faint screams.

Changing course, I ran out of the forest to the homes nearby.

It did not take long to find what I was looking for.

It was a two story house, belching smoke into the night sky. The first floor was nearly consumed in flames. Neighbors stood around, baling on water from buckets and hoses, but it was not doing much good. The fire department was nowhere to be seen, but the way people were running in to town told me that they would not get here soon enough. I did not know which family lived here, but I could see them waving a white sheet out of the second floor window as smoke poured out around them. A woman, two children.

They would not last long.

I wanted to laugh. I should have laughed.

It was just too perfect. I wanted to be a hero. I ran off to be a hero. I ran all the way over here, I followed the screams, and the perfect opportunity to be a hero presented itself.

And it had to be with fire!

Fire, the one thing I’d hated and feared as long as I could remember, the one thing that just brings out that primal, animal side of me that I hate to admit still lives inside of me. Of course my opportunity to be a hero would be a fire.

Their screams became more desperate, and I was the only one who could save them.

I ran around the back of the house and found it shy of onlookers, setting my suitcase down at the base of a backyard swing set and putting my coat and shoes with it so nothing bad would happen to them.

Then, as Father said I would, I lost focus.

My body stretched and deformed, arms splitting in half forming four sets of stunted, clawed hands. My body lengthened and expanded, muscles and extra limbs bursting outward as needed, my legs now powerful and bent back at the knees. I twisted my face into some grotesquely monstrous visage that nobody would rightly believe rescued these people.

Stalking over to the house, I leapt up on to the second floor’s sloped roof and broke in a window.

Flame and smoke exploded around me, my skin feeling as if it were on fire, which, for once, it actually was. The smoke singed my lungs, and to compensate I just cut them off for now.

Getting by without breathing was never easy, but I could keep it up for at least ten minutes.

Ten minutes and I’d be out of here, or dead.

Flames licked at my clothing and skin, burning off the former and peeling the latter. Some of the extra limbs I’d grown for protection had already begun to burn through and slough off.

Run away. Get out. Flee. You’re not a hero. You’ll never be a hero. You just run like you always have, run away back home and do what you knew you were going to do the moment you left that house. Go home to Father and apologize and hopefully let all be forgiven. Be what you’ve always been.

I roared in frustration, destroying a flaming chair in the hallway before me.

I have always been a coward. Now I was a hero.

I tore down the hallway, not minding the flames and trying to grow more skin and bone to keep my body safe. I found the room where the screams came from, a towel stuffed under the doorframe to keep the smoke out. The door kicked in easily under one of my powerful legs.

In addition to the woman and the two young girls, there was a father and a younger boy, clearly passed out from the smoke. Those that could looked at me, confused for a moment, then screamed, scrabbling to get out the window that would just drop them into the flames.

There was no time for this.

I made five tentacles with hooked ends burst from my back, wrapping around each of the five. Dropping down onto all my arms and legs, I bounded back down the flaming hall, the family trailing behind me and out the window. We all landed in the backyard in a heap, but aside from some smoke and burns and a few broken bones from our rough landing, they all looked like they would make it.

Clearing my lungs for speech, I croaked, “Get them to Doctor Fallon.”

As an afterthought, I added, “And forget my face.”

The mother looked like she didn’t know what to make of me, other than a charred monster, but the smallest of the little girls looked up at me and smiled.

“Thank you Mr. Monster,” she said, wiping soot-blackened snot from her nose.

I couldn’t drop the monstrous voice, but I did give something of a horrible, toothy smile and said, “You’re welcome…”

“Lois. Lois Todd!” she piped up, barely affected by seeing me.

“You’re welcome, Lois Todd,” I said, patting her on her head despite her mother trying to hold her back. “Stay as strong as you are today, and there’s no telling where life will take you.”

Trying to look strong for the little girl, I walked back to the swing set and gathered my effects, bounding back off into the woods.

Sure I was out of sight, I finally pitched over onto the ground, coughing and vomiting up vile things. I tried sloughing off more of my burned skin, but it may have been too much this time. I was burned bad, inside and out, and what was it Father had always said? Too much fire can kill even us? Was this too much fire, this time?

I coughed violently, curling up at the base of the tree.

This was my first time away from Home, Roy Potts my first human body. If I’d played my cards right, I could get millennia out in this world, going from human body to human body, living dozens, hundreds of lives, experiencing everything this beautiful world had to offer.

But to do that, I had to play things safe. I couldn’t be a hero. I couldn’t take risks, I’d just have to go with the flow and never interfere.

And if that had happened, five people would have died tonight, instead of just one monster with no true body from another world that nobody would miss.

The world wouldn’t miss Roy Potts, and it would miss me even less (though Mother, Father, Ruby and the rest of our kind would mourn me, briefly), but as I watched my body deteriorate into the gray slime that would soon be gray dust that meant my oblivion, I realized none of that mattered.

I was a hero.


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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
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When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Four More Trips to Prospero, Part 1: Miracle Fever

5/3/2015

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In honor of the upcoming release of Shards, book 2 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're reaching back into Prospero's twisted past to bring you four more short stories of everyone’s favorite Splinter-infested small town!

(For more short tales from Prospero's twisted history, check out our four previous trips to Prospero.)

To kick things off, we’re going back to the very beginning.
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The Prospero Chronicles:
Miracle Fever

By F.J.R. Titchenell

Clarence - 1851
Mama didn’t cry until they pulled Edgar out of the rocks and he coughed out a breath of that glittering quartz and gold dust.

We didn’t come out west for the gold, she’d kept on saying, all the while he was down there, working to blast through the rock, all the while he was trapped there by the rocks that got blasted wrong, waiting to be dug out.

We came for the opportunity.

A lady alone could have a respectable business out west, same as a man, she’d heard. Nobody could tell her she couldn’t, no more than they could tell all those men, women and children from all over the world from digging in the riverbeds. The west was free for the taking, for everyone.

The riverbeds had been all but picked clean before she could plan our escape, most of the gold left worth finding buried deep in the rock. That wouldn’t matter, she promised us. Let the fools and the madmen and the big, rich mining companies with their blasting equipment go dig up the gold. We’d give them a nice comfortable place to spend as much as they could find.

Best of all, Pa would need a blessed divining rod to find us.

Edgar and I had no complaints with that plan. We got out of Kansas in the night with five horses, all the cash from the box under Pa and Mama’s bed, and all the good lace and china from grandma. We sold everything to join a guided party out to California, and when we settled in Prosperous, we were able to buy an old farmhouse for less than the cost of the boards it was made out of. There wasn’t so much as a trickle of water running through the wooded hills of Prosperous unless it was raining, which was often, but there was quartz, jagged cliffs of it, and quartz meant gold. The prospectors were just beginning to be starved out of the goldfields and had started founding towns like Prosperous around the quartz hills, making it harder for the farmers in what had been unnamed wilderness to keep a claim on their land and livestock, but for the hospitality business, we were right on time.

Miners were so desperate for a warm, dry place to sleep and so ready to throw their money into their ventures to make it back later that we hardly had to fix the place up before we started making our investment back. She put Edgar and me to work on building extra rooms, and by summer we had the biggest, busiest boarding house in town and twenty-odd of the wives and children of the miners working for us as maids, cooks and bartenders.

The Golden Featherbed, Mama named the place, and liked to joke that a featherbed made of gold wouldn’t do much of a job of keeping you warm at night, but people flocked to mention of gold just the same.

Only problem was those miners. That is, the stories they brought in with them.

Edgar was older, with two years between us, almost nineteen, and like Mama, he always had his eye on the horizon, only for him the horizon was down the dress of a particular maid named Edith.

The gold wasn’t going to last forever, he told Mama, not even in the hills, and the miners weren’t either. Maybe Prosperous would keep on thriving enough from all the folks putting down roots there to keep the Golden Featherbed alive, but it wouldn’t be the way it was now. He needed to build a life for himself, and he couldn’t spend it shingling roofs, making beds, and breaking up bar fights in his Mama’s place. He had to get all the start-up money of his own that could be gotten while the getting was good, and that meant going down in those mines himself.

The miners would boast to each other in the dining room about unearthing nuggets as big as their fists, about how they were going to make enough in a year to retire for two lifetimes. Edgar was going to dig up his and Edith’s retirement, and there was nothing Mama could say to talk him out of it.

The day we heard the news about the cave-in, Mama called him a damn fool, sent me to watch the bar, and didn’t leave her office and her ledgers all day except to check on the kitchen staff.

Her face looked harder than the cliffs in the woods, the way Pa could make it unbreakable to spite him. It was like Prosperous itself, our glittering refuge, had snapped its belt across her cheek.

For two weeks, we waited that way. No, I waited. Mama already knew he was gone, and after the first week, I should have known it to.

Now the rescue teams that gave up hope of finding anything but bodies after a few days, and could only be persuaded to keep searching for those for so long because it was the shortest route back to the vein of gold the trapped miners had been cutting into, were running through the streets shouting about magic and angels in the Prosperous forests, and Mama was crying streams of dust-blackened tears and hugging Edgar, kneeling in the mounds of loose rock.

Other parents, wives, children and friends were stumbling through the mounds to the miners, shrieking, crying, laughing. The word “witchcraft” passed between a few bystanders, and a pair of women, someone’s sisters or daughters, held each other by the hands, sobbing and exclaiming to each other and everyone passing, “Miracle! Praise God, it’s a miracle!”

Edith was at work cleaning the rooms when it happened and didn’t catch up until the commotion of the people running down the trails from the mines to the town proper shouting the news became too much for the dead to ignore.

The crowd of people stumbling across the rocks was so much that I knew I couldn’t get close to Edgar and Mama if I tried, so I was standing by the outcroppings on the other side of the trail, watching, numb from the sudden good news I’d been hanging on hearing. Edith called out to Edgar and Mama when she couldn’t reach them, and Mama turned Edgar’s head toward her to show he was regaining consciousness.

Edith found her father among the rescuing diggers, pushed through the lines of people waiting to shake their hands, and threw her arms around him in a shower of thanks.

Edgar himself hardly seemed to understand what was happening. He rested in Mama’s arms more like a child pretending to sleep than a person who had been without food, water or fresh air for a fortnight. Sometimes he would lift his head straight up and open his eyes, fresher than the morning, and look around with a grin of wonder.

The sun and trees must look beautiful after long enough in the ground.

As some of the miners’ families began to shepherd them down the trail toward homes, beds, water, Dr. Anderson’s office, there was room to get closer.

Edgar’s wondering eyes found me and widened with delighted recognition, as though I had grown a foot since he’d last seen me. When they found Edith, he got up and stumbled to her through the rocks, falling and getting up like a baby deer, held her so tightly it looked painful, and kissed her in front of half the town.

Most were in such a celebrating mood that they cheered like at a wedding, especially when Edith’s father embraced them both. I watched with Mama, who wiped at her tears before she let me help her up.

Far under her breath, “miracle” was the word she chose too.

#

“Are you going back down?”

I waited until after Edgar’s turn being checked over by Dr. Anderson. I waited until Edith and her father had gone to their room for the night, later than usual under the joking pretense of Edith finishing the work she’d left to witness the miracle.

I was willing to wait for Edgar to get a good night’s sleep as well, but even when we dressed for bed at nearly eleven at night, exhaustion didn’t seem to be making any claim on him, and I needed to know.

Mama and Edith had asked him already, but they had only been able to in front of all the other miners, curious neighbors, and even a man from the California Star who was in Prosperous to report on the progress of the mining and soon began interviewing as many of the survivors and witnesses of the cave-in rescue as would let him get a word in.

Edgar had told them no. He also told them he didn’t think he’d ever be able to blow his lantern out at night again, with a big smile at the reporter. I’d been the one living with Mama’s silence while we waited to know he was dead, I’d been the one telling the staff that the Golden Featherbed and all of them would survive either way, and I’d be the one doing it again if it came to that. I needed to know if he was serious.

After washing off the dirt, Edgar looked as though he’d never been gone. He had hardly wasted at all and looked as strong as ever, stronger than I was by half, and he didn’t have a scratch or bruise from the falling rocks. Not even his fingernails were broken. He stretched out on his cot in our room as though he had never felt anything so soft and ran his hands back and forth endlessly over the seams of the quilt.

“Are you?” I repeated when I began to wonder if he had heard me.

“What am I?” Edgar lifted his attention to me.

“Are you going back into the mines?”

“Never.” Edgar sat straight upright, looking as close to as frightened as that cave-in should have made him as he had since being rescued. 

More than the relief of not having to worry about another harrowing wait like the last two weeks, it was a relief to see a response out of him at all other than his giddiness over being back in the world. The day had been stranger than the days before it, and it hardly felt real.

“Promise?” I asked.

“Clarence, I scarcely know why I wanted to be there in the first place.”

I might have thought this a comforting thing to hear if I’d imagined it. Hearing it aloud didn’t convince me of his honesty.

“Did you realize Edith might prefer you alive than dead with a king’s ransom of a homestead to your name?” I tried convince myself that was all there was to know.

Edgar didn’t smile until I did. Then he laughed too hard.

“She did say something like that,” he agreed when his breath returned.

There was a soft, hurried knock at the door from our small common living space, connected to Mama’s room.

“Boys, are you awake?”

She had to know by Edgar’s braying.

“Come in,” I answered her.

If he was lying, another argument like the ones they were having before the cave-in would at least goad the truth out of him.

Mama swept into the room in her dressing gown, her frizzy brown hair flying loose, and sat cross-legged between our cots.

“I have a clever plan,” she announced.

The trials of the day and the weeks before it were already rolling off her as everything always did. This was the Mama we knew and liked best, the one who found us reasons to be away from the house when we were small, the one who told us everything would be good someday whether Pa liked it or not, the one who always knew what to do.

“It’s a plan for you and Edith,” she turned to Edgar. “And for all of us, I won’t lie. I know you wanted to do this on your own, but hear me out.”

She added these words from recent experience, not because Edgar was showing her anything less than earnest interest now.

“You would only have to stay a few years. Maybe months would be enough, but you could set yourself up best if you get everything you can out of the rush while it lasts. You said it yourself. You can marry her when things settle down, or sooner if you want. There’ll be a room for the two of you here as long as you want it. And you won’t have to go back in the mines to make a bigger fortune than any of them risking their necks.”

She paused and looked to me for hints to explain Edgar’s lack of resistance. I shrugged, and she went on to meat of her proposal.

“Honey, from now on, you can be the gold mine.”

#
 
It was a surprise to no one that Mama’s plan turned out to be exactly as clever as she promised.

By morning, she’d re-lettered every sign with her own hands, and the Golden Featherbed became Miracle Manor, and by a week after the rescue teams broke through, more reporters followed the lucky first one from the Star. Miner families from towns twenty miles away made the trek to see what the papers had dubbed The Miracle Mine. And every one of them came to Miracle Manor first. The ones we had room for stayed their nights, and the ones who didn’t stayed long enough to hear Edgar tell his story (for an extra dollar a head and the cost of drinks besides), and pick up a pamphlet on the wonders of the mine and how to find it (fifty cents), or follow one of the tour groups Edgar led personally to the mouth of the mine, but no further, to touch the rocks and whisper to each other of the power they could feel (five dollars).

A few of the other miners who’d survived the cave-in started trying to make a buck off their stories too, from anyone who would listen, but the other miners didn’t have Mama.

She had us all working on the flyers for Miracle Manor’s new rates and amenities and littering the town with them, the prettiest and handsomest maids and barkeeps handing them out wherever there was choked traffic. The Experience Lounge, the room she repurposed for Edgar’s performances recounting his survival story was curtained to be dark as a mineshaft even during noon matinees, except for Edgar’s lantern, and people left exclaiming that they could hear the picking of the faraway rescue team. She sat in on one show a day to give Edgar suggestions on embellishments, and she once had to pay Sheriff Auklee a fifteen dollar fine when she tried to nail a plaque for the Miracle Manor onto the town welcome sign, accidentally knocked the last two letters off of “Prosperous,” and they had to be patched back on with a plank of wood that would probably blow down in the next storm.

We made the fine back twenty times over that night.

Edgar got to keep ninety percent of the profits from the show and the tours to save up, the other ten and the extra business he brought the boarding house itself would let Mama die a rich woman even if Prosperous was mined clean and abandoned within a month, and give me a solid start whenever I was ready to move on as well.

When or how that would happen, I didn’t know. I wasn’t the one who knew how to make things happen, like Mama, or the one things always happened for, like Edgar. Even if I were ever lucky enough to have a story about a miracle to tell, I wouldn’t be able to tell it the way he could, with a voice that could fill a saloon, a steady smile when the time was right, and a breathless pause just the right length when a smile wouldn’t fit.

No pretty girl was ever going to beg her father to dig me out of a rockslide for her.

There was more worrying me than the fact that all the money in the world wouldn’t buy me the first idea about what to do with it, though.

It started with three patrons, a man so old it looked like it was taking a small miracle of his own to keep him on his feet, a woman who could have been his granddaughter with smooth hair and hands that definitely had not been working any job in a mining town for long, and a man with hair longer and skin paler than hers, whose age I couldn’t guess any better than somewhere between forty and seventy.

They crowded around the front desk together while I was checking people in and selling tickets.

“We need to speak with Edgar Hopkins,” the woman began sweetly, pushing one of the Miracle Manor flyers across the desk.

“Three dollars for the three of you for the eight o’clock Miracle Mine Experience,” I rang them up. “Will you be staying in the Manor?”

“No,” she giggled. “I mean we need to see him privately.”

“We haaave some questions,” the black-haired man said in an accent so strange I wasn’t sure at the first that he was speaking English, “about his escaaaaping.”

Prosperous was full of immigrants, looking for the gold same as folk from back East. He didn’t look or sound like he could be family to anyone I’d ever seen before, but Mama always said that one person’s money was just as good as another, so I didn’t take too much time trying to figure where he was from. The routine was the same.

“The Experience includes his whole story,” I assured them, “but private Experiences are fifty dollars for groups of less than that. Unless you’re with one of the papers?”

“Yes,” said the woman immediately. “We’re with the Prosperous Chronicle. We’d like an interview with Edgar to headline our first issue.”

Oh. A startup local paper. Represented by three people I’d never seen before in this very small town. It could have been be a great opportunity or a clear scam, and I knew Mama wouldn’t trust me to handle telling the difference.

No, that wasn’t true. Worse than that, she would trust me to handle it, and I’d find a way to handle it wrong, no question about it.

“I see. You’re going to have to talk to the owner. I’ll get someone to find her.”

“Is this soooo necessary?” the foreign man asked.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “We’ll wait.”

The elderly man nodded dreamily beside her.

I picked up the cowbell we’d repurposed from the Manor’s farmhouse days and shook it to signal for assistance.

Edith burst in from the dining room doors before the bell’s hammer had struck twice, worrying her apron with both hands and sweating in spite of the cool mist outside. The kitchen must have been in chaos.

“Take the register?” I asked. It was hardly a break, with the line newly growing for the evening performance, but it had to be more peaceful than whatever she had just come from. I gestured to the line with the three strangers at the head of it, and her already wide eyes widened further at the sight of them. “I need to find-”

“I have to talk to you.” She let go of her apron to clutch my elbow instead and pull, meaning to drag me into the first story office behind the desk then and there.

Her tone was so startlingly desperate that I wanted nothing more than to follow wherever she wanted to drag me and hear exactly what I could do to help her, but family business was a hard habit to fight.

“We have a line,” I whispered back, nodding at them.

“Rose!” Edith shouted toward the dining room without letting go of my arm. “Rose!” she took the bell from me and shook it hard. “Reception!”

Rose answered the call, calmly bewildered and wiping butter off her fingers, not an escapee from a short-staffed kitchen at all.

“Thank you!” Edith exclaimed, handing Rose the bell and pulling me farther away from the desk.

“We’ll be back in a moment,” I told the three strangers and Rose as apologetically as I could while following Edith, without stopping to worry until the office door was latched behind us how many talkative neighbors had now seen me retreating someplace private with my brother’s fiancée in a peculiar manner.

Too late to be helped now.

“What’s the matter?”

Edith let go of me to light the office lantern and held it close in front of her like a shield against the long shadows it cast behind the furniture.

“What did those people want?” she asked.

“Edgar, same as everybody,” I answered, more bitterly than I meant it.

“Same as everybody, or different?”

There was no denying their strangeness.

“They wanted a private interview,” I said. “Or a private something. Why?”

She put her eye close against the crack in the door, trying to watch the strangers’ dealings with Rose.

“Edith, why?”

She looked at me.

“Edgar isn’t himself.”

I’d been having similar thoughts in what time I’d spent with Edgar since the cave-in, which hadn’t been much. Between shows and tours, he was either walking or playing cards with Edith or drinking until he couldn’t do either.

“He nearly died,” I told her what I’d told myself. “He was buried alive. He’s good at pretending it’s all a show now, but he’ll need time to feel safe again.”

“No,” said Edith with a firm shake of her head. “I mean he isn’t Edgar Hopkins. He isn’t your brother. He isn’t the same person who went into that mine.”

I almost called her hysterical. There was little else that talk could be. But I wanted to know if she could tell me a reason for how the understanding Edgar and I had always had since we were children no longer seemed to exist.

A reason other than that she had taken up the time he had for me before.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“When we’re alone, he...” she looked over both shoulders as if eavesdroppers might have materialized in the dark office since we’d been there. “He didn’t used to be this way. We did things before, some things, when we could get privacy enough, but...” she was fighting tears and winning, barely. “It’s all he wants to do now, and it’s different. When I try to talk to him... he hates me. He hides it, but I know.”

She had more to go on than I had of late, but I had been hoping for something solid. She saw my disappointment and shook her head, the hints of tears disappearing.

“It’s not only how he acts. His body, it isn’t human. Sometimes I see him bend in ways people can’t, and once I saw him cut himself on a glass he broke, he didn’t know I was looking, and I saw the blood flow back into him!”

She peered back through the crack in the door, and I looked over her head at slits of the silhouettes of the strangers still haggling with Rose.

“I went to see Mr. Arkham,” Edith said. “I used to help tutor his daughter, and he was in that mine with Edgar for two weeks. I thought he could help me understand what happened to him there, but I haven’t been able to find him anywhere, not for days, and when I first went to his house, those three were just leaving it!” she pointed past the closed door at the strangers. “Have you seen any of the men who were rescued today? Because I can’t find any of them!”

I thought hard and suddenly couldn’t remember running into any of them all morning, not Mr. Cartwright or Mr. Hardwick, who always broke their fast at the Manor.

“No,” I said. I said, uncomfortable. “You think those reporters have been doing something to them?”

“I’m certain,” said Edith.

“And they’re looking for my brother right now!” I finished.

The strangers had left the desk by the time I ran back out of the office, Edith rushing to keep up with me.

“I told you,” she whispered, “that’s not your brother.”

“Where did the reporters go?” I asked Rose.

“They’re in the Experience Lounge.” She pointed. “With Mrs. Hopkins.”

I followed her direction.

“You told me he’s different,” I said to Edith along the way. “That doesn’t mean he’s not my brother. If those people are looking for all the survivors of the mine, they might know what happened. And if they know what happened, they might know how to fix it, but it’s not by letting him disappear, if that’s what happens to the ones they find!”

“I want him back too!” Edith reproached me. “I only wanted you to understand, if we can’t fix this, your mother wants to make the wedding a public event, she wants to do it as one of the Experiences, and I can’t, I can’t do it, but I don’t know what I’ll-”

I stopped long enough to turn to look at her.

“My mother will understand,” I promised. “I know she wouldn’t have suggested it if she didn’t think the wedding was going to happen anyway. Nobody will make you stay with him if you don’t want to, and no one will threaten your job. Not her.”

I opened the door to the Experience Lounge too late to stop when Edith said, softly,

“She’s not what I’m afraid of.”

Mama and Edgar sat at the edge of the stage where he told his story twice a day, speaking with the three strangers who shared one of the small tables closest to it.

I turned back toward the front desk. There was no way to keep everyone in the Experience Lounge from hearing without backing suspiciously out of the room again, but I said it only as loudly as I had to for Rose to hear me over the line in front of her.

“Have someone fetch Sheriff Auklee.”

The three strangers turned to look at us, though without acknowledging my words.

“You are the younger Mr. Hopkins?” the foreign man greeted me cheerfully. “Why did you not say? And am I meeting the younger Mrs. Hopkins to be? We were just to discuss an opportunity for your Edgar!”

“An opportunity for this bunch to steal him away,” Mama corrected with the friendly shit-rejecting way she kept for negotiations. “But we’ll see if they have any ideas worth considering.”

Edgar smiled and nodded, without that easy way he had in his shows, looking as if he would have preferred to be anywhere else, which was strange even by recent standards. Ever since the mine, he’d had nothing but patience for all Mama’s arrangements for his success.

“If you could just give us a few more minutes to work out the details,” said the woman, “Perhaps we’ll all be celebrating by dinnertime.”

My stomach was making uncomfortable rotations. I had never done anything like this before, almost accusing three people of murder, while asking them for help, never mind while Mama was trying to have a business meeting with them. Maybe I’d barged in too quickly. What was I planning to say?

“A matter of fact,” I started, “we had some questions about-”

That was when Edith picked up a glass from one of the tables and threw it at Edgar.

The glass shattered against his skull, leaving a red web of cuts on his forehead, but only for a few seconds.

Exactly the way Edith had described, the blood only dribbled a few inches down his face before retreating back under his skin, which healed over as if it had never been broken.

Edgar stood up from the stage and stepped sideways toward the exit, with a shrug for the three strangers, the shrug of a child caught stealing cookies, but with even more than Edgar’s grown up cockiness.

“Do you believe me?” Edith turned to me and demanded. She didn’t wait for my answer before throwing the next glass at the foreign man, producing the same unbleeding result.

I couldn’t disbelieve any of what she’d said she’d seen, anything about how strange a thing was happening, but Edgar gone completely, that I couldn’t believe. He was changed, but he was right before us, and these people meant to hurt him.

The elderly man stood.

“Julia,” he addressed Edgar in a voice too clear for his body’s feebleness, and Edgar acknowledged him with a half-bow as though he recognized the name.

“Abner,” he answered, in a voice made by Edgar’s throat, but with a woman’s lilt.

“Julia,” repeated the old man, Abner, “we can still do this quietly. There’s no reason to disturb this poor town.”

Edgar laughed, a feminine laugh, taking another step toward the door.

Edith was still throwing glasses.

“Where is the real Edgar?” she shouted between throws. “Tell me how to find him!”

The strangers ignored her as if she were an irritating downpour of rain.

Soon she worked her way to a bottle that was only half empty of whiskey. It broke against the table the strangers had been sharing, splashing all three. She picked up one of the kerosene lanterns next, lit for the occasion of the meeting, and held it high.

This caught their attention, causing all three to raise their hands defensively, and the foreign man to swing the back of his fist at her.

She was too far from him to reach, but his arm stretched after her like taffy and wrapped around her wrist, shaking her until the lantern slipped to the floor.

“You understand noooothing!” he scolded her, dragging his vowels even longer than his odd usual manner in anger. “You will make us act in too much rush now!”

His expression changed to confusion and then concern while he held her wrist, as though the feel of it was something unexpected. She tried to pull away from him, and I reached to pull her by the shoulders to help, but the foreign man dragged her past my reach and close enough for him to put his unstretched hand on her belly.

“It is from after,” he said. It didn’t sound like a question.

“What was?” Edith asked, defensive.

“Your child is from after the mine,” said the foreign man. “For this I am sorry.”

His unstretched hand changed, sharpened to the shape of an enormous straight razor, and cut her once across the belly, once across the throat, before he dropped her on the floor, her blood flowing endlessly outward and never back.

Mama was across the room and back with her shotgun from under the Experience Lounge bar before Edith hit the ground, and put a shell of buckshot in the foreign man.

The insides of his brain were only slightly slower to go back where they belonged than his trickles of blood had been.

And then started again, when the second shell struck the same target.

Abner stepped over Edith’s body and broke into a run, not at Mama, who was hurrying to reload, but at Edgar, who sprinted for the door, faster than I’d ever seen Edgar move.

Abner’s decrepit body was keeping pace with him somehow, weaving through and over the tables, limbs stretching and twisting into whatever shapes would bring him closer to Edgar with the dry sound of breaking wood, shapes no person could take, and I had to do something.

I had to do something.

I picked up the nearest lantern and threw it at Abner.

The glass shattered and the kerosene spilled in a blazing stream down one of his legs.

He fell and screamed, the flesh under his charring trouser leg melting like a combination of burning pork rinds and tallow.

“Thank you, little brother!” Edgar laughed in that strange, female tone, before escaping out the door.

When the foreign man’s face returned to its oddly angled usual shape, it searched the room and took a horrified expression.

“Where is Juuulia?”

Abner shook his head gravely from where he had fallen. His leg was regrowing as well, though slowly.

“There will be nooooo telling what she will be when we are next finding her!”

“No, there won’t,” said the woman, patting the foreign man’s arm soothingly with the beginning of a smile. “But at least we know who Abner will be.”

She grinned at the man newly entering the room, stepping sideways to block his view of Edith’s body.

“Good afternoon, Sheriff Auklee,” she said.

Abner struggled to his feet.

“Yes, good afternoon,” he shook the Sheriff’s hand, his trouser leg still smoking. “We’re so glad you’re here. Something terrible has happened at the Miracle Mine.”

“Wait!” Mama and I protested at once.

The Sheriff looked back at us, but when the woman smiled at him again, he seemed to forget why he had looked back at all and followed Abner out toward the tour trail.

“You do not know what you have unleashed on this poor nowhere.” The foreign man shook his head at me.

“And they never will, Alexei,” said the woman.

She was wresting the gun from Mama’s hands, and Mama was hardly stopping her. Her face had gone empty and faraway, and when she shook herself out of whatever daydream had taken her, she ran to wrap her arms around me, without looking at the gun or the strangers, as if she had forgotten every danger they had shown themselves to pose.

“My boy, my only boy,” Mama muttered near my ear. “I was so worried about you.”

Before I could correct her, the woman looked at me, and nothing existed but her sweet smile.

When I could see the broken glass and the dead woman on the floor, I could not for the life of me say how they had gotten there.


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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.
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When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben Pastor hopes that the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s horrors. Mina Todd knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality in Prospero, especially after she starts having crippling, unexplained hallucinations of the dead. But even she can't prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the Splinters' brewing civil war threatening to make humanity its battleground, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina and their expanding Network must face a Splinter campaign to destroy their friendship, a newly human Haley Perkins struggling to readjust to life after the Warehouse, and a Splinter assassin of untold power picking off human rebels. Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious figure hiding in the woods outside of town, a living legend who may know how to stop this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t first kill everyone himself.

Coming June 16th, 2015!
Prospero's horrors have only begun...
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Four Trips to Prospero, Part 3: Not Quite a Hollywood Ending

10/19/2014

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In honor of the recent release of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're devoting this, the greatest month of the year, to sharing a little extra Prospero with everyone.

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

 Click here for Four Trips to Prospero, Part 1: The Stuff of Legends.

Click here for Four Trips to Prospero, Part 2: The Kirby Ridge Lights

For our third tale, let's take a trip back to a time when horror reigned supreme...
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The Prospero Chronicles:

Not Quite a Hollywood Ending

By Matt Carter

Drake – 1984


These arguments only ever came up around Halloween time.

Jack started, “All I’m sayin’ is-”

“What you’re saying is wrong,” Bill said.

“Look, are you gonna let me finish or-”

“I’ll let you finish when you start talking sense,” Bill said.

“Look, do we live in America or some Soviet hellhole where free speech means shit?” Jack protested.

“My van, my determination on what counts as free speech,” Bill said.

“Awww, come on, give him a chance to make his case,” Annie said, leaning over to Bill in the driver’s seat and kissing his ear. “Even if he’s dead wrong, you know I enjoy watching you two argue.”

I couldn’t see it, but I knew Bill was rolling his eyes then.

“Fine, you may proceed,” he said.

“Thank you,” Jack said, tipping her a nod. “All I’m sayin’ is, in a completely objective, fair fight, that I do believe Jason Voorhees would defeat Michael Myers.”

Bill snorted, turning to his girlfriend, “You hear these lies?”

“I do,” Annie said. She turned back to face us. Well, more me and Jack, really. Ned and Brenda were sitting in front of us, but they were more into making out than Jack and Bill’s argument on horror movies. “Go on, Jack, back yourself up here.”

Jack was just getting started, “Well, first, Jason’s got a cooler mask.”

“If you’re Canadian,” Bill said.

Brenda pushed herself away from Ned long enough to say, “Hey, my mom’s Canadian.”

“No offense intended,” Bill said.

“She didn’t take any,” Ned said, pulling Brenda back to him.

“Even so, the hockey mask’s cooler,” Jack said.

“If he didn’t change masks every movie, you might have a point,” Bill said.

“He’s only been in two movies. The hockey mask could stick!” Jack said.

“Still doesn’t hold a candle to Michael Myers’. Pure blank equals pure terror,” Bill said.

“It’s not blank. It’s just a William Shatner mask, painted white,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Bill said.

“You really oughta read Fangoria more,” I said. “They got a lotta cool stuff like that.”

“You’re serious?” he asked me, then turning to Annie. “He’s serious?”

She turned back to me and smiled, “Yeah. You do need to read more Fangoria, and it is a spray-painted Captain Kirk mask.”

I blushed. Annie could always do that to me. I’d liked her since, well forever, I guess. It was hard not to, really, being that she was the prettiest girl in a small town in the middle of nowhere (the fact that in addition to being cute and having curly brown hair, which I always liked, she really filled out like crazy when puberty hit her, certainly helped). Of course, being that she was the way she was, there was a lot of competition, and I didn’t have a lot to offer.

Bill did.

He was my best friend for pretty much that same forever. He was smart, buff, good-looking, funny and most important of all, confident. He didn’t have any problem chasing after Annie. He didn’t have to be afraid of screwing up, not like me.

The one thing I had over him, the one thing he didn’t know as well as he thought he did, was horror movies. We’d seen all the same movies, binged on all the late-night showings down at the Canterbury Theatre in Prospero. He’d seen the movies.

I absorbed them. I let them in.

Maybe that explained why I couldn’t get a date.

“Are you sure we’re goin’ in the right direction?” Jack asked, craning his neck around to peek out of one of the van’s rear windows and seeing nothing but the endless woods we’d been watching for the past fifteen minutes.

Annie checked the map, “You did take the third dirt road off Douriff?”

“The one with the sign marked Tillerman Road?” Bill asked.

“I wouldn’t call that a sign,” Annie said.

“Well, I wouldn’t really call this a road either,” Bill said, a heavy bump that nearly sent us all flying backing him up.

“True,” Annie said.

“But I did take it,” Bill said.

She turned back to Jack, “Then yeah, we’re going the right direction. Twenty minutes down Tillerman Road if you take it safe, pass through the creek…”

“…which we just did,” Bill said.

“…then just a few more minutes and we’re there,” Annie said, showing that smile to Jack that made it impossible to argue with her.

“It also means we’re now legally in Prospero,” Bill said with a dramatic shudder.

Ned broke off from Brenda long enough to say, “Screw Prospero.”

“Screw Prospero,” Jack and Bill agreed.

Prospero.

The name brought a shudder. Bill, Jack and Ned reacted to Prospero the way they did because they were on our school’s football team, the Braiwood Tigers, and if you knew what was good for you, you trashed Prospero and their terrible, terrible football team, the Prospero Poets, every chance you got.

I shuddered because of the stories.

Everybody had heard them. That Prospero was home to aliens and monsters, that people disappeared in these woods all the time, that there were ghosts, and killers, and Bigfoot…

I knew they weren’t true. They couldn’t be true. They weren’t any more true than the movies we’d snuck in to see and now could pay for because hey, we could do R-rated movies now. I knew the difference between real and make believe, but there were parts of my mind that didn’t, and tell them, yell at them, scream at them as much as I might, they still couldn’t shake that belief that the monsters under my bed and the fairy stories the big kids tell about the woods outside Prospero just might be real. Not all of them, but maybe, just maybe some of them…

“Anyway, the mask’s immaterial. Purely cosmetic,” Bill said. “Michael was first. He was the groundbreaker, the one Jason copied.”

Actually The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas both beat Halloween by a few years, and that’s if we don’t count Psycho as the granddaddy of them all, not that I was going to correct them.

“Legacy don’t mean shit in a one on one fight,” Jack said. “Besides, if I’m still countin’ points, my second one’s a better one.”

“Oh yeah?” Bill challenged.

“Yeah, Jason’s diversified. Michael’s just into his knives. Jason’s got machetes, pick-axes, knives, knitting needles…”

“And Michael’s unstoppable!”

“Yeah, ‘cept if you shoot out his eyes and set him on fire!”

Bill looked at me in the rearview mirror, “Drake, man, back me up here?”

I shrugged. He wouldn’t like my answer, but I was having fun and looking for an excuse to jump into the conversation, “Honestly? I think Cropsey could take them both.”

Bill shook his head, “I should’ve known.”

“Nice,” Annie said.

As usual, Jack was much less diplomatic, “Cropsey? Seriously?”

“He’s faster! He’s just as strong! And he’s got those shears! I mean, did you see that raft scene?”

Jack laughed, “Next you’re gonna be makin’ a case for Harry Warden or Frank Zito. Or, hey, I know, why don’t you try to bring The Thing into it again.”

All right, now things were getting personal, “Hey, The Thing’s a good movie, if only enough people saw it-”

Bill pulled the van to a stop, “We’re here.”

Finally.

Jack and I got out the back of the van, Bill and Annie the front. Ned and Brenda stayed exactly where they were. If they got as far as it looked like they were gonna get, I began to think hitchhiking home might not be an awful idea.

Freeling Farm loomed before us. Its name was far more impressive than the reality, naturally. There was an ancient-looking and overgrown farmhouse with a rusted out hulk in front of it that might have once been a pickup truck, and an even more dilapidated barn with half of its roof caved in. Halfway between them was the stump of a tree with an old ax sticking out of it. It looked like the kind of place one of our movies would take place in, and if they’d taught me anything it’d have been to run then and there and never look back, maybe while tossing a road flare in to make sure the evil was gone for good.

But that wasn’t what we were here to do, was it?

No. Being that Bill also happened to be Bill Freeling, and being that his mother had recently inherited it from his grandfather, the farm was now his responsibility, sort of. I mean, yeah, his parents owned it, but they barely had time to do anything with it these days, certainly not until winter had passed.

Until then, they’d put it on Bill to look the place over, see if there was anything worth salvaging or if they’d be better off just selling the land.

A sharp breeze picked up, knocking a couple slats from the roof.

Yeah, selling the land was looking pretty good.

“Oh yeah, this looks like fun,” Jack said. Looking back at the van as it started to rock, he added, “Kinda wish I was in there.”

“Join them if you want, but we got some work to do here. It’ll take maybe an hour or two, but we need to check the place from top to bottom. House, barn, orchard, anything inside the fence, it belongs to my folks,” Bill said.

“This’ll go faster if we get them to join us,” Jack said, motioning to the van.

It had started rocking faster. Bill said, “They won’t be much longer. Come on, if we split up we can get this done a lot faster.”

“I’ll take the barn,” Jack said, zipping up his jacket and making tracks away from the house. Of course he wanted the barn, that’d take, what, five minutes to determine that was useless? The pockets of his letterman’s jacket always had at least two joints hidden in the lining. Odds on he’d be smoking up long before trying to figure out how useless that barn was.

“Guess that means we’ll take the house and orchard,” Bill said, leading the way to the porch.

I didn’t like the looks of any of this. Not the barn. Not the house. Not the woods.

Not Prospero.

It was stupid. Silly. Too many movies making me think too many things, but it all seemed too familiar.

Annie put her hand on my arm, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, feeling more strength from her. “Just fine.”

“Cool,” she said. “Come on, let’s stick together, this place freaks me out.”

Suddenly I felt a whole lot stronger.

We joined Bill on the porch in time to see the front door fall inward with a heavy, clattering thud.

“You broke it,” I joked.

“No I didn’t,” Bill said, picking the door back up. “It was like that when I got here. Like it had already broken off but someone laid it against the door.”

“Your grandparents?” Annie asked.

“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Bill said. “More likely squatters.”

So much for all that fear going away, “Do you think they might still be here?”

Bill sounded confident, “Doubt it, not with weather getting this cold, but just to be safe…”

He ran back to the van and slid open the side door. I could hear Ned and Brenda cursing at him and him yelling something about this being his van before he jogged back, carrying a new-looking hunting rifle.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

Bill smiled, “My seventeenth birthday present. Oughta make any squatters think twice, don’t you think?”

I can’t say how skeptical I looked, but it couldn’t have been nearly as much as Annie.

Bill called the ground floor, and I got the second. Annie was eager to take the basement, but Bill didn’t want her to go down there alone, which meant she had to stick with one of us. I’m sure Bill meant for her to join him, but she decided to join me instead, which, while being kind of awesome, kind of set me on edge. I liked her, but I liked being friends with Bill too; I didn’t want to get in the middle.

We wandered the second floor for a few minutes in silence, taking in every detail that seemed to back up Bill’s squatter theory. There was dust on the floor, sort of, but it looked like someone had swept a path in the middle of the creaky hardwood floor, if not very well. There were wide, heavy footprints the size of diving flippers that made me laughingly think of the Bigfoot stories again (at least I wanted to think they were just stories).

And then there was the bedroom.

Most of the bedrooms were every bit as dilapidated as the rest of the house, but the master bedroom had been cleaned up not that long ago by the looks of things. The bed frame was bent and discarded in a corner of the room, its saggy mattress holding place of pride in the middle of the room, though covered with about an extra foot of leaves and grass twisted into some kind of giant nest. The dresser was empty save for a small shrine of cheap trinkets and pieces of brightly colored trash that looked like the kinds of things people would have lost or thrown away on hikes; soda cans, emergency whistles, a retainer case. More odds and ends trinkets hung from the ceiling on pieces of string.

“Whoever was here was really weird,” Annie said.

“Yeah. I mean… it’s like someone’s pretending to be a person but doesn’t quite know what they’re doing. Like an animal at the zoo that’s only seen people from a distance and thinks it can escape if it does what it sees everyone else doing,” I said.

“Like they’re playing house?” she asked.

“Something like that, yeah,” I said.

Annie looked at me a little oddly, “All right, maybe they weren’t quite as weird as you.”

“Hey, I just call them like I see them,” I said.

Bill yelled from downstairs, “You guys find anything?”

“Nothing good!” Annie yelled back.

“There’s nothing down here either! Give it another ten minutes, then I say we head home!” Bill yelled.

“Works for me,” I muttered. It was getting colder by the minute and the air was feeling wet. It wouldn’t be long before it’d start storming, I knew it. And of course there was also that unpleasant feeling that whoever was in here hadn’t been gone long enough.

She turned her eyes to me, “So… you got any plans on November 9th?”

Like she had to ask; I had that day marked on my calendar. Two movies came out that day: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Silent Night, Deadly Night. The other guys were arguing about which one to see. They both had cool posters, and they both sounded pretty scary. Nightmare had Wes Craven behind it, and sounded like it had a pretty trippy story, but Silent Night had a guy killing people dressed as Santa, and there were rumblings among local parents that they might put on a protest against it.

If they were going to protest it, it had to be good, right?

Still, while the other guys were arguing between them, I had a far more pragmatic solution.

“Double feature,” I said.

She smiled, “A man after my own heart. Want some company?”

“Well, sure, I mean a bunch of us were going to go and-”

“No,” she said. “I mean… would you maybe think about wanting to go with just me. I mean, just you and me.”

She must have seen my confusion, because she quickly added, “You know, like, a date?”

Oh. So that was what she meant.

Every fiber of my being just wanted to scream yes right then and there. Unfortunately there were more rational parts of my brain that wanted to question this good fortune, and even investigate the matter further.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re nice, and you’re not that bad-looking in the right light?” she said, a playful smile forming on her very cute lips.

“No, what I meant… I mean, what I mean… Bill. Bill’s what I mean,” I said. Bill wasn’t just an obstacle between us. Bill was also my best friend. He was the guy who’d protected me from bullies ever since the third grade, not because he wanted anything from me or because I had toys he liked to play with, but just because that was what was right, and that was the kind of guy he was. Whenever I was short some change for the ice cream truck, he’d cover me, and sometimes he’d just show up to hang out with a new issue of my favorite comic that he was finished reading and give it to me.

We argued like friends, sure, but we were still friends, and I valued that a lot.

“Bill and me… we’re not working out, I don’t think,” Annie said. “I mean, I like him, he’s still really cool and all, but whenever we’re together it’s like I’m not the most important thing to him. You’ve always been so nice, and so sweet. You’ve always been a friend. And I know you like me. I know you’ve always liked me,” she said.

“Bill told you?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to, but he did verify,” she said. “Come on. Why don’t you just take a chance and let me take care of Bill?”

Great. Just great. All I had to do was say ‘yes’ and I’d get everything I’d ever wanted, but I’d probably lose my best friend in the world.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all.

But it also demanded an answer.

“Annie, I-” BLAM!

There was a gunshot outside. A pained, short squeal.

“Bill,” Annie said beneath her breath, running down the hall and hitting the stairs before I’d even figured out just what happened. Then I was after her.

I caught up to her at the house’s overgrown front lawn.

“Bill!” she called out. “BILL!”

He didn’t answer.

I put my hand on her shoulder, “It’s probably just him and Jack messing around. Trying to give us a scare.”

They always liked pulling jokes, the more messed up the better. I know Bill saw how scared I was, I didn’t put it past him to pull something with Jack to give me a good scare. Maybe even with Annie, making her give that speech to take me off guard…

No. She’d never do anything like that.

“I don’t know,” Annie said. She walked over to the van. Its sliding side door was wide open. Ned and Brenda were gone. Their clothes still covered the seat and floor, but they were nowhere to be found.

Even more disconcerting was the single drop of blood on the floor.

“What the hell?” Annie said.

My fear sensors were in overdrive.

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “We have to call for help.”

“No, it’s like you said, it’s probably a joke,” she said, rifling through the various tool and gear boxes that Bill kept on the floor of his van. She opened one, spilling flares all over the ground, before she found what she wanted: a heavy tire iron.

“You pulled that out for a joke?” I said.

“No,” she said. “In case it isn’t.”

There were drag marks on the ground, carving a path through the dry, tangled grass leading to the barn but no more blood at least, which was more comforting. Annie led the way confidently, holding the tire iron in front of her as if it were some sort of mythical sword that could slay dragons with a single swing.

“Bill? Jack? Brenda? Ned? You all in there? Are you pulling some kind of joke?” she called out, the closer we got to the barn.

I pulled at the back of her shirt, “Please, Annie, we need to get the hell out of here. I got a really bad, I really, really got a bad feeling about this. Let’s just-”

“Please,” she said as we got to one of the large barn doors. “This is all just-”

She swung the door open, and the first thing I caught was the roar of thousands of flies in the air. Then the smell. Meat, rotten. The coppery smell of blood. I bent over, trying not to puke and failing.

When I got up is when I saw the bodies. I saw the animals first, raccoons and dogs and cats and squirrels and maybe even a couple deer, butchered and half-eaten on the ground, a couple hanging from ropes from the ceiling like those things we found in the master bedroom.

Then I saw the people. There were three, maybe four that had been here a while, down to mostly dry, taut skin and broken shards of skeleton. The four closest to us, though, were fresh.

Ned, near-naked, with half his skull caved in. Bill with his throat mangled. Brenda and Jack hung upside-down from ropes. Jack was missing an arm and was clearly dead. Brenda was bleeding and in her underwear, but alive, moaning lowly for help as she reached for us.

If the thing eating Jack’s arm hadn’t seen us first, we might have even gone to help her.

It was shaped like a man, but wasn’t. It was taller, more muscular than any man could be, with a muted, bearlike face and a body covered in shaggy, black fur. Its feet were massive and powerful, and its hands ended in thick claws. It was like some animal that had wanted to look like a human and was doing a piss-poor imitation.

It turned to us, growling and coughing, its eyes too human and staring at us.

Bigfoot.

No, it couldn’t be Bigfoot. It wasn’t Bigfoot. There was no such thing as Bigfoot just like there was no such thing as monsters or horror movie bad guys. There was no Jason, no Michael, no Cropsey. Things like that didn’t exist in the real world. People like Jack and Ned and Bill didn’t just die, they didn’t just.

Annie didn’t scream when the thing stood to its full height, but I knew she wanted to. I wanted to. Maybe I did. Everything then just started to blur.

The creature growled, “Mine.”

What the he-

It cleared the distance to us in two quick steps, wrapping its arms around Annie. She didn’t even scream, didn’t even try to swing her tire iron. One second she was embraced by the beast like she was its long-lost daughter it hadn’t seen in decades, the next there was a thick twisting cracking sound and I could see her head on the floor seconds before the creature actually dropped her body.

I screamed.

I ran.

I had to make it to the van. I didn’t have my license. Maybe I’d get in trouble. Maybe getting in trouble would be good. Maybe… Oh Christ, Annie… ANNIE! WHAT THE HELL HAPPEN-

A heavy weight slammed into my back, and I was sailing through the air.

I hit the ground hard, rolling into the stump.

The creature was every bit as horrible in the light, maybe even worse. If anything it seemed to have grown. Its fur wriggled like worms as its mouth curled into a snarl. Teeth like a wolf’s mixed with teeth like a rattlesnake’s as it hissed and roared at me.

“MINE!”

It charged. Something in me had snapped, clearly, because there was no way in hell I could have gotten to my feet on my own. No way I could have circled around that stump and grabbed that ax stuck in the wood. No way I could have ripped it out and swung it into the beast’s jaw.

There was no way I should have seen that jaw fly away in a trail of thick, blackish-red blood that spattered heavy on the ground.

No way at all.

But it happened. It did. And I did it.

But just like there was no way I could have done that, there was no way it should have still been standing, roaring and pissed off at me. There was no way it should have made that snapping, splintering wood sound with tentacles and clawlike, fingerlike appendages bursting out of that place where its lower jaw should have been.

That shouldn’t have happened.

Me running away should have, and that did happen, so at least some of the day made sense.

Bill left the keys in the ignition, he would have left them there so Ned and Brenda could have the radio. All I needed to do was… Annie. No. Why’d you have to, why…

I couldn’t see it but I could hear it running after me. I knew it would catch me. I knew it would do to me like it did to the others though maybe, no, probably worse.

And so maybe that’s why I let the autopilot kick in again. I dodged to the side and stopped, let it barrel into the van. It hit hard, knocking the van onto its side. The creature fell down, stunned.

I took the chance and went crazy on it with the ax. I chopped it in the back, over and over and over, not letting up, never stopping, splattering its thick, wriggling blood everywhere. Some of it got onto my jacket and tried crawling to me, kept trying to get to my face, so I just threw off the jacket. The beast itself kept pulling itself together, reattaching parts I’d chopped off and growing new parts, growing bigger and stronger and turning to me, eyes coming out of every new wound I made.

I was going mad. I knew that then, but I didn’t care. I knew what it had done, and I knew what I would have to do.

I swung the ax into the van’s gas tank, watched it spill all over the creature.

I found one of the flares that Annie had dropped. I lit it.

Then I lit the creature and the van up.

I ran off before the gas tank itself blew, but I stood watch, holding my bloody ax as I watched the creature scream and burn into a pile of nothingness.

I collapsed to the ground, screaming and crying and laughing and wondering just what the hell I was going to tell the world. This was, after all, the part of the movies they always left out. You always saw the heroine (never the hero, there was never a hero in the end) getting carted away, to be taken care of, maybe to return in a sequel but probably not. You never saw them have to justify what they’d done, to explain to a world that could never believe them. You never saw…

You never saw…

The tears came in a torrent. Annie. Annie. Why, god, why…

“Not bad, kid. Not bad at all,” the voice behind me said.

I turned, autopilot raising my ax high. There were three of them. A large man in a heavy coat wearing a fedora and sunglasses, a middle-aged woman holding a rifle and a boy who couldn’t have been older than twelve, also holding an ax. The large man was older than them both. His smile was unpleasant, but not nearly as unpleasant as the curved iron hook where his right hand should have been.

“Killed yourself a bear-Splinter on your first try. I seen experienced hunters who couldn’t do that without some help from yours truly,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What was that?”

“Who I am ain’t relevant. What that is, is the greatest plague mankind has ever seen. These monsters wanna be us, and some of ‘em are better at pretendin’ it than others. This guy you just torched, he’s one of the others. They can try to walk like us, to talk like us, even kill like us, but they ain’t us. And he ain’t the only one in this here forest now. This is a busy time of year, and if we don’t do somethin’ about them soon, they’re gonna be a problem. So lemme now ask you somethin’, boy. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Drake. Drake Tymon,” I said.

“Well, Drake Tymon, you ready to join the war?” he said.

Jack. Ned. Bill. Annie.

“When do we start?” I asked.



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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.


The dark history of Prospero is not over.

To learn more, click here to get your copy of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles,

Or check out The Prospero Chronicles official website, for tips on defending yourself and your loved ones from Splinters.
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Four Trips to Prospero, Part 2: The Kirby Ridge Lights

10/12/2014

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In honor of the recent release of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're devoting this, the greatest month of the year, to sharing a little extra Prospero with everyone.

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

For our second tale, beware the woods, and beware the skies...
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The Prospero Chronicles:

The Kirby Ridge Lights

By F.J.R. Titchenell

Paul - 1973
I could have gone home for summer break.

I could have been watching Bewitched on the couch like I’d never been away, fan on full blast, pretending there was no such thing as a Geometry prerequisite.

We’re adults, Keith said. We can go where we want now, he said.

So on the second day of summer break, we, Keith’s cousin Sharon, and far too much luggage were jammed into the already sweltering heat of his new VW bus, going where he wanted to go. That meant Roswell, New Mexico, by way of every place on the way down from Berkeley where anyone had ever claimed to have seen anything remotely, potentially, vaguely related to aliens.

I’d had no idea there were so many such places, even accounting for the fact that Keith’s definition of “on the way” spat in the face of even my understanding of geometry.

“We’re going to be the ones, I can feel it!” Keith’s energy for this project remained undampened by the fact that we were now seven hours into our second driving day, creeping ever further south, into the smothering warm. And we weren’t close to what could be called Southern California yet. Hell, we weren’t even south of home yet after all of yesterday’s detours. “This is the summer the lid gets blown off of the whole cover up! One of these places has to have the key to introducing humanity to the outside universe once and for all, no going back. The truth never stays buried for good!”

“Of course not,” Sharon yawned, rolling over on the makeshift couch across from me, resting her head the map she hadn’t needed to glance at for the last two hours of straight highway. “And now all we have to do is find the loose end that experts have devoted their whole lives to looking for, in three weeks of touring the most obvious places. But hey, if we don’t, we’ll still come home with some cool t-shirts.”

“Ah, but we have something those ‘experts’ don’t!” Keith answered readily, as animated as an overeager professor trying to engage a class on a day this hot. “Incorruptibility!”

I’d been expecting something a little better. Sharon obviously hadn’t.

“Right,” she crossed her fingers conspicuously behind her back and rolled her eyes at me. “We’ve obviously got that.”

Keith may have had a little help talking me into roasting myself alive in the name of one of his quests. Like his little cousin casually inquiring whether I’d be coming along too.

It was my first and last summer with the advantage of being the cool older college guy, before she’d start classes in the fall. At least, I hoped I was the cool older college guy. It was worth trying to make the most of while it lasted.

“I know I’m one of the only three incorruptible people in the world,” I said, “aren’t you?”

Sharon snorted out loud and buried her face in one of the bright green cushions.

Instead of arguing with us, Keith swerved hard to the right and slammed on the brakes, sending me sideways into the back of his seat. Sharon braced herself against her pillow niche to avoid hitting her head.

“Here it is,” he said, beckoning us to look at the sign he’d almost hit on the shoulder.

Welcome to Prospero

Population: 4350

The sign was slightly askew, as if someone before Keith had topped his enthusiasm, or failed to match his precision on the pine-needle-carpeted asphalt.

“Never heard of the place,” I answered Keith’s expectant gesture.

“And you thought I only knew the obvious places,” he aimed at Sharon. “Not many people have,” he told me, “but Prospero is easily one of the top five towns in the country for verifiable paranormal history.”

“How verifiable?” One of us was obviously supposed to ask. And I wanted to know. A little.

“Well, ignoring the dozens of Bigfoot sightings,”

“Yes, let’s ignore those,” Sharon agreed.

“Ignoring those and about a hundred other one-time incidents no one on earth seems able to explain, Prospero happens to be the home of Kirby Ridge.”

“I think he’s holding for applause,” I said to Sharon after a few seconds of silence.

“Let him hold,” she said.

Keith broke the silence himself with a sigh and the crunch of pulling back onto the highway out of the needly ditch.

“Kirby Ridge, in turn,” he explained, “is home to the only known nocturnal luminescence that has yet to be explained publically by science and is predictable to within seven minutes with a ninety-five percent success rate. Is that verifiable enough for you?”

I was watching the farms and gas stations of the Prospero outskirts cut into the surrounding forest and outcroppings of rock more than I was listening. It wasn’t until Keith turned onto the unimaginatively named Main Street that anything distinguished this town from the one we had passed before it, or the one before that.

The shops had a kitschier, more welcoming front, in need of repair in places, but without giving the feeling that their remoteness was a matter of ardent preference rather than geographic circumstance. A building that could once have been a movie theater announced itself in bold letters on every side as the Prospero Museum of Unnatural History.

“So, what you’re saying is we’re going to see a light show?” Sharon translated.

“Best and most important light show in the solar system,” Keith confirmed. “Wherever it comes from, it’s been playing every twenty-nine days in the same place, twelve minutes after full sunset. We’re going to figure out who’s putting it on and what it means.”

Suddenly the time Keith had insisted on spending zigzagging up through the national parks almost to the Oregon border yesterday made a lot more sense. Now sun was already dipping behind those jagged, redwood-covered hills on what was presumably the 29th day by Keith’s count.

He steered us away from the relative hominess of Main Street, up to the hillier, darker far edge, and pulled over next to a vacant lot, thick with grass and saplings, half fenced in and looking as though it had been vacant longer than it had been anything else.

The makeshift path up through the damaged chain link was marked ahead by a roadside booth that could barely be seen through the cloud of smoke wafting out of it, carrying the scent of charcoal and fresh corn.

On this traffic-less summer Sunday evening, it had taken less than five minutes to cross from the nowhere on one side of Prospero to the nowhere on the other. Friendly town or not, I had the feeling there weren’t any motels nearby that had made it into our guidebook.

Keith looked around at the shades of green visible through the windshield with a satisfied nod and set about rolling a joint, his sign at the end of every day that the driving was finished.

Sleeping in the bus it was. Again.

Sharon snapped a Polaroid and scooted back to the rear before Keith could, in spite of all his legalization pride, snatch it out of her fingers.

“People will want to see the man who ushered in the next scientific revolution before it all happened!” The print clicked against her hand as she tried to shake it and shield it from view at the same time. “You look very sophisticated,” she assessed.

“Expands the mind,” he said on the exhale of his first long drag.

“A head your size has room for it,” said Sharon, showing us the newly visible distorted image of said head looking larger than usual.

“Just for that, you don’t get any,” said Keith, lighting and handing me the second one.

I shrugged at Sharon and took a pull on it, but only one. I could never stay on opposite sides with her for more than a few seconds, even in fun.

I gave Sharon mine.

“You need all our minds expanded if you want to find anything, right?”

With an exaggerated sigh, Keith rolled me another. Thank god. Not knowing how long we were going to be sitting in that lot staring at the sky, I wanted to be able to enjoy whatever light show did appear.

This first real stop on our quest could have been more comfortingly touristy, but it could have been less so too, I supposed. There was a decent sized gathering already in the lot once we got past the first rise of uneven earth, and the night was young.

A fair number seemed to be people like us, college aged, passing through, dressed for vacation with unmistakably new white sneakers.

Even those who were obviously local greeted us with pleasant smiles. I went straight for the roasted corn booth at the outer edge of the fence, Sharon and Keith falling in next to me without debate.

It had been three hours since our last rest stop, and we had only picked up coke and pretzels.

“Where you kids visiting from?” the woman behind the grill asked.

She was round and cheerful and reminded me, with a dose of homesickness, of Mom.

“Berkeley,” Keith answered for us all, though it wasn’t quite true for Sharon yet.

So much cooler to say than San Francisco, where we were actually from, if we were to get technical.

“For school?” she guessed.

We all nodded with some unavoidable pride.

“I think that’s wonderful,” she said, buttering the three ears of corn at once with the grace of a slight-of-hand magician. “Learning a lot? Making lots of friends?”

We nodded again, though I couldn’t honestly claim to have made any friends I hadn’t had before. Lots of acquaintances. Not friends.

I only realized when the woman’s eyes drifted over my head that Keith was still smoking. She took a deep breath of the mingled flavors of smoke and thankfully didn’t look disapproving. Interested, maybe. A little envious, even.

“Wonderful,” she repeated, handing us each one of the ears by the napkin-wrapped husk.

For the amount of research Keith had clearly put into this trip, he’d left us comparatively unprepared for the details. Camera and notebook he had. Bag full of all the mind-expansion we could need he had as well.

Blankets and deck chairs we did not have, so we stretched out on the thick, bare, and thankfully dew-less grass to eat and smoke and wait for the sky to light up.

I spotted a few “Stop the Conspiracy” t-shirts in the crowd before it got too dark to make them out.

A girl of maybe eleven or twelve walked among the groups, selling Frisbees decorated to look like flying saucers, which were soon flying over the picnicker’s heads at regular intervals.

We declined the Frisbees, but I bought a packet of “Official Kirby Rige Lights Sparklers” from her.

I wondered if she’d made (and spelled) all the labels herself.

By the time the first lights appeared between the trees at the side of the lot opposite the road, I’m not sure what I’d come to expect.

An artificially manufactured spectacle, or nothing at all, either would have been unsurprising.

This, though, did look like a naturally occurring phenomenon, though not like any I’d ever seen or read about before.

A sphere of glowing green broke over the treetops like another world’s moonrise, too pronounced to be imagination feeding off the expectant atmosphere, too subtle to be a show, unless it was a far more calculated and expertly executed one than the home of “Official Kirby Rige Lights Sparklers” was likely to be capable of.

The green sphere drifted upward like a lost balloon in slow motion, growing fainter as it rose until it could no longer be distinguished against the dark sky, but before it was gone, it was followed by a violet one to its right and a delicate, golden-white one on its left.

That was all it was, spheres of light floating up and fading away, leaving room for more, and a faint green glow surrounding the treetops, or maybe it was only a reflection of the glowing orbs.

The slow, endless flow of them was difficult to look away from. Would have been, I imagined, even without the weed, in the way a campfire, or a lava lamp, or a kaleidoscope compels you to keep looking at it as though you might miss something.

I was so engrossed in the view that I startled when Sharon elbowed me in the side and directed my attention with a jerk of her head.

Keith was on his feet, treading carefully, purposefully between the picnic blankets toward the lights, notebook in hand and camera strap around his neck.

Though the lights made no noise, sitting under them felt like being in a movie theater, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak up over everyone else’s silence, so I followed Sharon in following Keith at a quick tiptoe.

“Where are we going?” I whispered once we drew even with him, though I was afraid I probably knew the answer already.

“For a real look,” he had the decency, or perhaps the paranoia, to whisper back. “I told you we were going to be the ones to find something.”

I expected someone to stop us before we reached the treeline where the relative openness of the lot ended without fence or sign or other man-made boundary.

I hoped someone would stop us. It was dark, I was tired, I’d been limiting my fluid intake to handle the lack of bathrooms on the road for long enough to make slightly weak and bring on a dull headache, and I certainly couldn’t count on my sense of direction to bring us back to civilization when Keith was ready to join us there.

The attendant at another food booth near the edge followed us with his eyes, signaled to a nearby man in a button-down shirt who might have been some sort of unofficial event security, and they exchanged a few whispers, their heads bent so close together that they must have been touching, but no one made a move toward us.

Maybe it wasn’t only that I was tired. Maybe I looked back at all those faces staring up into the sky as one and thought they had the right idea. When we see this, we sit in groups at a safe distance and watch. Something about that felt like human instinct, like not putting your hand in that fascinating campfire. Something not to be messed with.

Or maybe that was just stoned wisdom.

I’d wake up tomorrow marveling that I’d momentarily found that thought of mine deep. For now, Keith was feeling his way into the dimly backlit trees, Sharon was rolling her eyes behind his back at me even while she followed, and I was following her.

The floating lights couldn’t be seen properly from under the tree canopy, but the soft, ambient glow they gave off became brighter the further we stumbled toward them, until we were nearly able to stop stumbling, able to see enough of the roots and rocks in our way.

“We come in peace!” Sharon called out when we were too far from the lot to disturb its silence, then giggled. “Or, I guess, we receive you in peace? Since it is our planet, and you’re the ones coming?”

Then she lapsed into giggles too thick for more words, maybe at her own crude innuendo, maybe at nothing at all.

“Shhh!” Keith hissed at her, raising a hand behind him at both of us.

Sharon humored him by pressing her own hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. “I heard something.”

He squinted into the fluctuating green and purple dimness ahead, and I squinted with him, expecting a trick of the shifting light, then seeing a trick of the shifting light, and finally understanding, with a drop of my stomach, that it wasn’t a trick of the light at all.

Three short figures stood among the trees ahead, naked and gray and featureless, except for their tiny, shapeless mouths and the huge black eyes that took up most of their disproportionately large, elongated heads.

The one in the middle opened its tiny mouth, and it took a few words before I realized that the rasping, clicking, mechanical sound that came out was English.

“In present company, little ones,” it said, “we are not the newcomers to this world.”

Sharon screamed, and at first I thought it was only for the reason I knew I would scream myself if I could get my throat to respond.

Then her feet left the ground next to me.

I reached for her, tried to make out what was happening, wildly imagining glowing tractor beams or the glittering remains of teleportation.

All I could see were the arms of a fourth creature, wrapping around her, extending far longer than the creature itself, and yanking her up into the tree with a creaking, cracking wooden sound that made me sure the whole tree would collapse under them.

It didn’t. There was a crashing rustle in the next tree, and the next, and by the time I thought to get one of the sparklers out of the packet and light it to see by, the branches above me were empty.

The three figures in front of us had not moved since announcing themselves.

Or, rather, the four figures in front of me hadn’t moved since that time.

“Keith?”

He was so completely motionless that I wondered if the creature had done something to freeze him that way.

Then he looked me with the halting turn of a music box dancer.

“It...” he looked like he wanted me to take the words out of his mouth, but I didn’t know them. “It wasn’t supposed to be real,” he whispered.

For a few seconds, he seemed to wait for me to understand him. Then he shoved me aside, into the nearest splintery trunk, and bolted past me, down the hill toward the bus.

“Keith!” He didn’t look back. “Keith!”

I started after him, slipped on the uneven dirt, dousing my sparkler in it, and realized in the time it took to get my weight back on my feet by way of my freshly skinned elbows, that the passing seconds would probably be better spent chasing after the screams coming from the opposite direction.

“Sharon!”

She didn’t call back, not exactly. There was plenty of noise to follow, though. Her screams themselves were muffled by the thunder of their thrashing through the underbrush.

I nearly overshot when I caught up. The bushes were shaking for yards in every direction, and the creature that had wrapped itself almost entirely around her had also gone a reddish brown color and begun to sprout camouflaging pine needles. I could only tell exactly where in the mess she was when she grabbed my ankle.

I lit a fresh sparkler, accidentally spilling blue-and-yellow sparks from the cheap thing all over the tangle of Sharon and the creature.

The twisted, redwood-camouflaged limbs of the thing bubbled and charred where the sparks made contact, and a sound of pained protest seemed to come from the whole thing at once.

It was something.

“Sorry,” I told Sharon. “Brace yourself.”

Her hand tightened painfully but comfortingly around my ankle, since I didn’t have enough hands to grab her as well.

I slid the rest of the packet’s contents halfway out of it, lit all the ends at once, then broke them off and let them rain down all over the thing, mini fireworks coating the stretching red and green and grey skin trapping and inadvertently protecting Sharon.

The creature sizzled and withdrew with a screech and another several snaps of breaking wood, though it barely touched the bushes around it. The wood almost sounded like it was inside the thing.

Once Sharon was able to wriggle a second hand loose, I grabbed both of hers and pulled, she kicked the smoldering mass free from the rest of her.

We both stood for a moment, absorbing the fact that it was quickly recovering, returning to its alien shape with more of that splintering noise, the burns fading out, crouching over the hole in the ground I’d found it and Sharon struggling in.

There was no ship, saucer-shaped or otherwise, to be seen anywhere, and it had been dragging her into a burrow in the ground.

“What the hell kind of aliens are you?” I asked, as if it might explain itself.

“The abducting kind!” Sharon shouted the only answer that mattered, grabbing me by the shoulder of my t-shirt and pulling me forward.

There were sparks alive in her hair and on her clothes, the smoke of them strong and acrid in her slipstream as we ran, not pausing to put them out, the moving air making them brighter.

“Where are you going?” she whispered when our ideas of forward diverged and the link of our arms went taut.

“The road!” At least, I hoped that was what I was heading toward. “Where are you going?”

“Back to the ridge!”

“With all those UFO nuts here to stare at the lights?”

“Can you think of anyone else who might believe us?”

“I don’t care who believes us!” I shouted. “I just want to go home! Please, let’s just get out of here.”

She didn’t waste long thinking.

“Okay.” She turned and led the way in a direction close to the one I’d guessed at.

They were behind us somewhere, I was sure of it, popping and snapping, or maybe it was only the twigs under our feet.

I’d never been so glad in my life for Sharon’s love of maps as I was when we tripped at the raised edge of forest and stumbled down onto the road that had been cut through it.

I couldn’t see the bus, maybe we were too far from the lot, or maybe Keith had gotten here first and taken it, but there were a few stragglers on the road from the light watching.

People. Safety.

“Do you know where there’s a phone we can use?” I asked the first human silhouette, before recognizing her as the woman from the corn stand. “Do you know where the nearest one is in town?”

I wanted to shake her for responding so slowly. Didn’t she know an emergency when she saw one?

“Jim? Annie?” she called cheerfully over her shoulder.

The man I’d taken for a security guard and the Frisbee-and-sparkler girl came close enough to make out in the fading light from the ridge. A few more familiar faces crowded in behind them. The man in the “Stop the Conspiracy” shirt looked on impassively.

“Looks like we’ve got a couple more runners,” said the corn lady.

The guard nodded and the girl smiled, cracking her knuckles with the unmistakable sound of splintering wood.



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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.


The dark history of Prospero is not over.

To learn more, click here to get your copy of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles,

Or check out The Prospero Chronicles official website, for tips on defending yourself and your loved ones from Splinters.
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Four Trips to Prospero, Part 1: The Stuff of Legends

10/5/2014

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In honor of the recent release of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles, we're devoting this, the greatest month of the year, to sharing a little extra Prospero with everyone.

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

So, without further ado, let's begin with our first tale of terror...
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The Prospero Chronicles:

The Stuff of Legends

By Matt Carter

Judy – 1955

I had two words and two words only for Prospero.

Good riddance.

There were others, too, improper words for the town’s only minister’s only daughter to know, and they would have done just as well, but the energy of summoning them was more than I wanted to give Prospero right now, or ever again.

I was going, and nothing, nothing was going to stop me.

Not even Frank Templeton.

Greasy, skinny Frank Templeton, Frank Templeton the mechanic at Brundle’s Gas & Go, breathing heavy and rubbing his hands on his coveralls and thinking that would make a difference. Frank Templeton, chewing that disgusting knob of tobacco and spitting its juices into that empty Coke bottle shoved into his workbelt. Frank Templeton who’d had his eyes on this body for too long…

One less reason to miss Prospero.

Still, it never hurt to smile sweet, even if it did encourage him.

“Hello, Frank. Fill ‘er up for me?” I asked.

He stood stock still, staring down at me. He’d stopped chewing. Spittle began to creep down his lower lip, and that damn tobacco wouldn’t be far behind. He wasn’t looking down my blouse, I’d seen him do that before and he never looked like he did now. I could almost laugh at him if he weren’t so damn pitiable.

A loud, high voice barked from the office, “Frank, ya god- I mean, ya idjit, fill up the lady’s car before it starts to rust!”

Harold Brundle was the complete opposite of Frank. Short, wide, and bald. He ran, or waddled, to my car as fast as he could, running one of his hefty hands through a head of hair that hadn’t been there in decades while the other fearfully mashed up his faded blue BRUNDLE’S cap.

“Sorry Miss Mills! You know Frank, always been a bit simple…” he said apologetically.

“No reason to be sorry,” I said, putting my hand on one of his as I stepped out of the car.

“Gee, thanks,” he said, looking relieved. Then he looked at my back seat.

“Lotta bags, planning a trip?” he asked.

“Moving out,” I said.

“Congratulations! Always knew you were bound for bigger ‘n better things!” Harold snapped his fingers at Frank, “Check her fluids too! Don’t want this fine car breakin’ down in the middle of nowhere!”

Frank didn’t look like he wanted to oblige, but finally spitting into his Coke bottle half full of sloshing, brown slime, he ambled over to the garage for his tools.

“Could I talk you into coming in to the office for a minute for a Coke? Ice-cold!” Harold said. I didn’t really want one, it was an early autumn evening and the chill in the air didn’t make ice-cold sound as tempting as he wanted it to, but if it could keep some distance between Frank and me…

“Sure!” I said, following him to the office.

Harold led the way, “Now I didn’t mean to imply there that your car’d be rusting anytime soon, Miss Mills, I mean what I was goin’ with there’s what I think you’d call a figure-of-speech, and… and what year was that?”

“1950,” I said.

“1950, great year, fantastic fu- I mean, well, it’s great. What I’m sayin’ is that the Hudson Commodore like you got there is a fine automobile and it should serve you well and I mean to say that I want to do everything it takes to make it so for you,” he said.

Like daddy always said, Harold Brundle was a toadie and a lickspittle, always trying to get in the good graces of Prospero’s better families. I’d never seen it for myself before, I’d always just thought it was him being nice, but seeing him like this now made all of daddy’s old words make sense.

His office was small and cramped, a good fit for him, less-so for me. Stupid heels. The radio was tuned to local news.

“…reports indicate that Landis, recently escaped from the Braiwood Institute for the Criminally Insane after killing two guards with an ax, may be on the road to Sacramento. He is to be considered-”

Harold dove for the dial, “You don’t want to be listening to that. Scary sh-stuff.”

The Chordettes singing about how they’d wish Mr. Sandman would bring them a dream must have been less scary for him.

“That fine?” he asked.

“Of course!” I said.

“Because I can change it if you’d-”

“It’s fine,” I said, touching his wrist. He breathed a sigh of relief, wiping his sweat-slicked forehead with his cap.

“Okay. Good. Okay,” he said, plopping down in his chair.

If he didn’t look so sad, it might have been funny. Even still, he did seem a little funny. If I wanted to give him a heart attack just now, I’d have asked him for the Coke he seemed to have forgotten about.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to hear me at first, so I asked again. Startled, he said, “All right? Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I be! I mean, that maniac from Braiwood’s got us all scared some, and you got those stories of those cops findin’ that commie nest over in Milton’s Mill, and you know how this town can be sometimes.”

I did. Probably better than most. There was nothing that could really be done about what made Prospero Prospero (or the commies in Milton’s Mill if they were even real), but at least that maniac sounded like something that could be fixed.

“Well, the police will catch him, I think,” I said. “That is their job after all.”

“Of course. Of course. It’s just… do you really think that you oughta be hitting the road tonight? Maybe consider waiting for the morning when it’ll be safer for a wo- what I mean to be sayin’ is that when it’ll be safer for someone like you…”

I tried to be proper, I tried to be nice, but after something like that, I couldn’t hold back.

“You do know who I am, right?” I asked him.

All the color of his face seemed to drain into his belly, “Yes, I mean, oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. Please, please don’t tell-”

His contrition was enough. “I won’t tell my daddy, you’re fine.”

That didn’t help him any. Quickly, I added, “Or anyone else.”

That was enough to set him at ease, “Thank you, I mean, you understand here how my business is my life. Without this my family, I got kids you know, and…”

“You’re fine,” I said. “While I must admit that your service could use a little work, you’re as kind and enthusiastic as ever. I’ll make sure to tell people about your kindness, and that I have no doubt that one day you’ll find yourself the King of Cars in Prospero.”

I probably could have come up with an even dumber title than the King of Cars if I really wanted to try, but I didn’t. I just wanted to get out. I had to get out. I didn’t particularly want to hurt his feelings on my way. He was a toadie, sure, but he was a good man, and like he said, he had kids. He did right by them as best he could, and was as good a citizen as you were bound to find in Prospero (god knew that if any commies ever found their way into town, Harold Brundle would be the first to find them).

If he played the game right, I had no doubt he’d go far in Prospero.

Harold led me outside when Frank waved. He gassed up the car, checked the fluids and gave the car a quick rub down with a rag, making it look as good as new. Frank looked oddly at my luggage in the back seat, spitting more tobacco into his bottle.

“Looks fine, looks mighty fine,” Harold said. “Except you left one of the back doors open you god- you retard!”

Harold strode over and slammed the door shut.

“Good as new!” he said, wiping his hands on his shirt.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching for my purse. “Now, what do I owe you?”

Harold shook his head, “It’s on the house. Just remember what to tell folks!”

“I will,” I said, getting into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. It purred to life beautifully.

“And God bless!” I called out as I drove off. The cool evening air was even cooler with the car moving. For a moment I thought about pulling over to put the top up, but it was such a beautiful night, why shouldn’t I enjoy the fresh air? It wasn’t going to last forever, after all.

The world became inky black maybe only a hundred feet past Brundle’s Gas & Go, my car’s headlights only showing a faint sliver of the road in front of me. It would be like this most of the way to Sacramento. There I’d find a motel for the night, and then…

And then my life would really begin.

My real life.

Prospero was a prison. It didn’t look like one, it didn’t act like one. Everybody smiled, everybody was friendly, everybody waved the flag on all the right holidays… but for me it was a prison. Maybe for all of us and I was just the only one who knew better.

Everybody was so trapped in their routines, so stuck with trying to be what everybody else expected that they didn’t dream of being anything more. I did dream, though. I dreamt because I could. I knew how bad things could be when you didn’t do anything to rock the boat…

And so I left.

I could make Sacramento before midnight. San Francisco by the end of the day tomorrow. Turn south after that, and then…

Hollywood.

I was going to be a star. I was going to be a star.

I’d heard the stories, I knew of all the girls who went down there only to find it the end of the road, never getting further than the front door (or couch) of some studio head, spending everything they have on getting there and never able to leave, whiling away their years as waitresses or maids.

I wasn’t going to be like them. There were people down there, people I knew from back Home who would help me get on my feet. People who would open doors that my legs wouldn’t have to, not that they couldn’t. I was a dish. No Marilyn, because she was one of a kind, but pretty close. Good body, not too thin, chestnut hair with just the right amount of bounce, and a face that you could easily see on a film poster. I was going to be a star.

No, better than a star. I would be a legend.

Wouldn’t daddy just love that?

I adjusted the rear-view mirror, trying to get a look at that star-making face when I saw it.

I wasn’t alone on the dark, twisting forest road.

There was a pair of headlights behind me, catching up fast. For reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of, they made me nervous.

Come on, this road is public. It could be anyone.

At first they were just a couple dots in the distance. Now they were saucers, glowing bright and catching up, now maybe only fifty feet away. Forty.

They’ll just pass on by, then you-

The lights flashed once. Twice.

Just step on the gas. Get out of here.

The highway was tight and winding and stepping on the gas was dangerous, but I did it, trying to increase the distance between us.

It didn’t work. He closed in further, flashing those lights again and laying on the horn.

I wasn’t scared, not really, not quite yet, but was pretty close to getting there.

The first time he rammed me, then I was scared.

My car was nice and sturdy, but I was nothing compared to him. His was a truck, wide and heavy. He could run right through me if he wanted to.

He rammed me again, trying to force me off the road as he honked and flashed his lights.

The next impact made me scream and nearly took me off the road. I stepped on the gas even harder, but he matched me, pulling alongside me in the opposite lane.

I knew the truck. Knew the driver.

Frank Templeton, in the Brundle’s Gas & Go tow truck.

He swerved away from me slightly, ready to try to slam into my side.

I don’t know how or why I did what I did, maybe I saw it in one of those gangster movies Johnny always loved to watch, but it worked.

Right as he tried to swerve in to me, I braked suddenly, veering to the left and smashing my fender into his right rear wheel.

The truck spun around in front of me, tipping onto its side and rolling violently into a ditch. Part of me, an old part, thought I should at least stop and take a look, just make sure he was okay.

Thankfully that old part wasn’t really loud.

I drove into the night, watching those glowing headlights disappear in my rearview mirror as I laughed and shrieked.

No matter how hard it tried, Prospero wouldn’t hold on to me. I was going to get out. I was going to escape.

I was going to be a legend.

I turned on the radio with a shaking hand, found some music. Some doo-wop band was singing about how great it would be if life could be a dream. It was cheery, but not quite what I was looking for after what just happened. I reached to change the station.

“Don’t touch that dial. I like that song.”

The voice was thick and raspy, like someone who’d lived their life breathing barbed wire.

Even worse, it was in the seat behind me.

He was fast and strong, knocking the bags he’d hidden under aside, some of them falling into the road.

One of his arms was around my throat, the other pressed the broken top of an ax into my cheek.

“You know this road?” he hissed.

“Yes, some,” I choked out.

“Good. Find a nice, quiet place to pull over,” he said.

I knew what he meant to do, but knew better than to fight him. There was a soft shoulder up ahead that led to a thin patch of trees, and I pulled off into it.

“Good girl, good girl,” he said, releasing his hand from my throat. I took in several deep, hacking breaths now that I could breathe free again. He pressed the ax more heavily into my cheek. Its blade pierced my skin, drawing a thin line of blood.

“That guy back there. In the truck. He who honks his horn too much. You did a good job to him. But I gotta wonder, what do you think he was trying to do?” he said, pushing the ax even harder into my cheek, drawing more blood.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Guess,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I sobbed, hoping that was what he wanted as his free hand found its way into my blouse.

“GUESS!” he roared.

I don’t think he expected me to smile.

“I think he was trying to warn you, Landis,” I said.

“What?” he said, dumbfounded.

He didn’t see the attack coming. I made sure of it. My blood drops on the ax head leapt into his eyes, trying to burrow in and making him scream.

It was a good sound.

I changed my body, sounding like breaking wood as I snapped my ribs open into a gaping mouth of many teeth and tongues. The tongues drew his searching hand in, and the teeth made sure it wasn’t attached to his arm anymore.

He screamed even louder, pulling the stump where his right hand once was and trying to cradle it against his near-blind face. I didn’t stop changing there, no, he deserved a good change for what he’d done, what he meant to do. Tentacles ending with hooks burst from my shoulders, back and neck and wrapped around him tight. New eyes opened at the back of my head to better see him, and a large, toothy mouth on the end of a proboscis burst from my midback and hovered in front of him.

“Oh god, oh please, someone HELP! PLEASE SOMEONE HELP!” he screamed, his cries reaching no one in the middle of this dark, forest road.

“Please, I didn’t mean, just, I, what are you? Just what the hell are you?” he sobbed.

All my mouths smiled just then as my arms bent backwards, popping with that wood crack sound, fingers stretching and growing with claws as they wrapped around his head.

“What am I?” I asked mockingly. “I’m a legend!”

I made sure his screams echoed long and loud through the night. I may have had too much fun, may have messed my car a lot more than I meant to, but it was fun seeing what this new body I’d been given was capable of.

It didn’t look like I’d make it to Sacramento by midnight after all, but as I buried the last bits of him beneath a heavy drift of pine needles, I found myself thankful for the first time in this life that I was from Prospero.

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There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.


The dark history of Prospero is not over.

To learn more, click here to get your copy of Splinters, book 1 of The Prospero Chronicles,

Or check out The Prospero Chronicles official website, for tips on defending yourself and your loved ones from Splinters.
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Matt's Top 5 Fictional Alien Moments # 1, The Thing

9/1/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my (almost) monthlong countdown of favorite alien moments in pop culture. Fiona and I have dedicated our blogs this month to this topic in honor of the upcoming release of our book, The Prospero Chronicles: Splinters, available where books are sold on September 23, 2014.
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For one last time on this list, glory in the cover, and it's hyperlink to Amazon!
Already this month I have dedicated an entry to Orson Welles' classic rendition of War of the Worlds (# 5), The Iron Giant, a.k.a. the saddest movie about an alien befriending a young boy not directed by Stephen Spielberg (# 4), the original Star Wars (# 3), and to a favorite episode of The Twilight Zone (# 2), but today I'm going to talk about my favorite scene from my favorite horror movie of all time:
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Hey, this looks kinda familiar...
We had a lot of pop culture influences shape and help us design The Prospero Chronicles, but easily the most important was John Carpenter's 1982 adaptation of The Thing. The shapeshifting, body-stealing aliens, the constant paranoia where you couldn't know who for sure was human and who was going to violently transform and take you over. Obviously we did our own spins on the idea and took it in our own directions, but The Thing was always a constant presence (all the more impressive since it's not exactly Fi's favorite movie.)
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Not even the magnificent power of Kurt Russell's hat-beard combo could win that battle.
I could go on for a pretty long while about how and why I love this movie, but since I've already done this (and it would make for a pretty damn long article), I'm going to direct you to my entry from my Halloween countdown from last year where I counted down my 31 favorite horror movies here.

And so, instead, I will dedicate this incredibly short entry (by my standards) to my favorite scene.
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Not this one, sadly, though it is an awesome scene anyway.
The scientists and roughnecks working US Outpost 31 in Antarctica have already discovered the remnants of a violent, shapeshifting alien lifeform that can take over any organism, copy them, and when threatened transform using any number of parts its absorbed from any number of previous organisms in the galaxy.
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Including this lovely... thing.
Incredibly smart and capable of copying humans and their memories perfectly, it has started turning the station staff against each other, singling out people who could be a threat to it (namely, Kurt Russell, because he's the goddamn Kurt Russell). After starting a fight between the men, one falls down, unconscious, apparently having a heart attack. When the station's doctor tries to revive him, things don't go exactly as planned.

I could more or less describe this scene frame by frame, but why do that when we've got the power of Youtube? (WARNING: For those who haven't seen this movie or have weak stomachs, this scene's kinda grisly, has some pretty awesome/a little cheesy 80's effects, and one of the most appropriate uses of an F-word in movie history.)
Seriously, try telling me that "You gotta be fuckin' kidding!" isn't the most appropriate thing to say at that moment.

So dear readers, any other fans of The Thing out there? Have any favorite alien moments in fiction? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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Matt's Top 5 Fictional Alien Moments # 2, The Twilight Zone - "The Invaders"

8/24/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my monthlong countdown of favorite alien moments in pop culture. Fiona and I have dedicated our blogs this month to this topic in honor of the upcoming release of our book, The Prospero Chronicles: Splinters, available where books are sold on September 23, 2014.
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A book with a cover so awesome, you feel compelled to click on it and pre-order from Amazon.
What, you don't? Why not? All the cool kids are doing it.
Already this month I have dedicated an entry to Orson Welles' classic rendition of War of the Worlds (# 5), The Iron Giant, a.k.a. the saddest movie about an alien befriending a young boy not directed by Stephen Spielberg (# 4), and to the original Star Wars (# 3), but today I'm going to talk about one of the greatest, creepiest shows of all time:
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God, what hasn't already been said about The Twilight Zone? I mean, like any anthology series, it was hit or miss at the best of times, but man when it hit it was some of the greatest, most iconic television in history, with villains and monsters that can still terrify to this day.
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Including, but not limited to, reasons to fear flying...
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...Chucky's Grandma...
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...and my vote for the scariest villain on TV.
Of course, being a scifi/horror show of the 1950's and 60's, a lot of its plots were based around aliens and flying saucers, and there truly are a lot of classic (and not-so-classic) episodes based on them. The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street and Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? taught us that aliens could be hiding anywhere, while To Serve Man taught us that sometimes it might be best to translate mysterious texts before turning over all of our trust to a bunch of giant aliens.
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But they look so trustworthy!
But for my money, my favorite alien-based episode of The Twilight Zone would have to be The Invaders.
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The Invaders is one of the simplest and creepiest episodes of The Twilight Zone. It only has one actress onscreen for it's 20-something minute runtime, almost no dialogue, and a constant, building terror that, if extended to feature length, would have made this an 80's horror classic.

It stars the awesome Agnes Moorehead as a single, elderly woman living out in a farm in the middle of the country. She lives a simple, quiet life, until one day she hears a strange noise and a crash into her attic. Examining the sound, she finds a flying saucer, as well as the titular invaders.
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These creepy-looking guys.
The rest of the episode is a bloody, violent fight to the death between this farmer and these two well-armed aliens. If it sounds like a mismatched 1960's version of Die Hard, well, I think there's something else I should mention to give the full picture.
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There's a bit of a size disparity between the two sides.
Even though she's easily twenty times the size of the invaders, they are determined and heavily armed with small but powerful laser weapons. It's a slow escalation, with the woman first initially scared and trying to run from the aliens, but slowly and gradually beginning to fight back, forcing the invaders themselves into a more desperate fight than they were clearly expecting.
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And for those of you who don't want spoilers on a 50 year old TV show episode's twist ending, consider this a SPOILER ALERT:

By the end of the episode, the woman has killed both invaders and smashed their flying saucer to bits with an ax. It is at this moment that we hear the first non-Rod Serling dialogue of the episodes as one of the invaders sends a last desperate transmission to his homeworld, warning them of a planet of hostile giants, right as we see the insignia on the crushed flying saucer reading US Air Force.

Cheesy? Yes, but damn is it good, creepy fun.
So dear readers, what's your favorite episode of The Twilight Zone? Have any favorite alien moments in fiction? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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Matt's Top 5 Fictional Alien Moments # 3, Star Wars

8/17/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my monthlong countdown of favorite alien moments in pop culture. Fiona and I have dedicated our blogs this month to this topic in honor of the upcoming release of our book, The Prospero Chronicles: Splinters, available where books are sold on September 23, 2014.
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There's something hiding in this picture. Hint: It's a hyperlink to Amazon.
Already this month I have dedicated an entry to Orson Welles' classic rendition of War of the Worlds (# 5) and to The Iron Giant, a.k.a. the saddest movie about an alien befriending a young boy not directed by Stephen Spielberg (# 4), but today I'm going to talk about one of the all time classics.
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A poster so awesome, you can ignore the fact that Luke and Leia don't look a thing like Luke and Leia.
I don't have to go into a lot of detail about this one, do I? Star Wars kind of speaks for itself, and enough words have been expended on it's merits and flaws and creator on the internet that I don't really have to add too terribly much to it. What I will say, is that it's the first movie I can remember watching. I was maybe three years old, right after dad and I had moved to California. He picked up a copy of it from the video store (I think they were just coming out on VHS at the time, but don't quote me), popped it in, and I was hooked.

I'd never seen anything so amazing, so awe-inspiring, that my three-year-old mind was blown.
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Mostly by realizing I'd never be as cool as Han Solo.
Nearly three decades later and I still count it among my favorite film series. I spent most of middle school as a full-blown Star Wars nerd, watching the films obsessively and memorizing every little random detail about background characters, droids and vehicles that I could look up on this new-fangled internet thing. I, like so many others, eagerly awaited the prequels, but unlike so many others I actually really enjoyed them.
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Though even I know better than to try and defend Jar Jar's existence. I really can't.
I imagine I've always been an odd duck Star Wars fan in that way. I like the prequels, while being able to admit their problems (even Episode 1 has its points, and acting aside, Episode 3 is amazing). I've never gotten the appeal of The Empire Strikes Back. And perhaps most blasphemous of all... I even love the Special Editions.
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We'll get back to you later, Greedo.
But the one thing I think a lot of Star Wars fans can agree with me on, is my personal favorite scene in the original trilogy:
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Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...
In every fantasy series you're going to get one scene where the hero is introduced to the big, fantastical world that he will soon be a part of, and Mos Eisley set the gold standard. While previous scenes in the movies had introduced us mostly to humans and a few uniform races, in Mos Eisley we get a great alien mixing pot of some dangerous, bizarre and awesomely whimsical aliens, like...
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Batboy with see-through eye action!
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The greatest band in the universe!
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The Wolfman! (who has the magical power to change into a giant lizard)
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Satan himself!
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And my two personal favorites, Momaw Nadon (a.k.a. that hammerhead alien)
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And this mysterious pair of alien knees that just randomly walks past, now framing the most stoned looking droid on Tatooine.
I could go on about this scene at length (especially the hours I spent back in the day learning the names of every character in the cantina, including each individual member of the band), but I think I'm just going to let this article end with the scene speaking for itself. For all the cantina goodness, untouched by Special Edition hands, cue up the clip to 4:30 and enjoy! Try not to get the song stuck in your head.
So dear readers, do I really have to ask if there are any other Star Wars fans out there? Have any favorite alien moments in fiction? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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Matt's Top 5 Fictional Alien Moments # 4, The Iron Giant

8/10/2014

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Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my monthlong countdown of favorite alien moments in pop culture. Fiona and I have dedicated our blogs this month to this topic in honor of the upcoming release of our book, The Prospero Chronicles: Splinters, available where books are sold on September 23, 2014.
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Why look, this picture happens to hyperlink to Amazon!
Already this month I have dedicated an entry to Orson Welles' classic rendition of War of the Worlds (# 5), but today I'm going to talk about a decidedly more family-friendly story of alien contact, about a young boy who befriends a lost alien. I am, of course, talking about...
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I'd never seen this poster before Google searching it today, and already it is one of my favorites.
Bet by that description you were thinking I was talking about E.T., weren't you? Well, assuming of course you just stumbled across my blog and didn't happen to read the title of this particular list entry. But still, if you were thinking E.T. would show up on this list, I'm sorry to disappoint you.
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Cool bikes, though.
Nothing against the movie, of course, it's as expertly-crafted as any mid-80's Spielberg movie, but I never really made the emotional connection with it that pretty much every other kid of my generation did. In fact, I've found more successful emotionally manipulative movies as an adult than I ever did as a kid, which either means I had a thicker skin back then (unlikely) or probably didn't pay as much attention to things like that then as I do now (likely). Which might be why I have a lot more fun now watching kids movies than I ever did as a kid, as its allowed me to discover some true gems.
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Like this guy.
Be warned, I'm going to give a fair SPOILER ALERT for the rest of this entry.

The Iron Giant is a wonderfully odd little film. A callback to B-movies of the 1950's (even setting itself during the period), it's a smart film about a young boy who befriends a giant, amnesiac robot who may actually be the vanguard of a coming alien invasion. It's a great movie about friendship and hate and paranoia with a fairly adult script. Naturally it bombed at the box office, because the studio didn't know how to market it, and because it was a smart animated movie not released by Pixar so people didn't really care.
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Seriously, it's a movie with a pipe-smoking commie hunter for a villain, this isn't exactly an easy sell to 90's kids.
If you haven't seen it, you really should because it really is one of the best family films of the last 20 years. You should also probably ignore the second half of this article, because that's when that SPOILER ALERT I put in earlier really comes into play.

If you have seen it, well, you probably know what moment from the film I'm going to highlight here.
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The majority of the film is made up of the friendship between the titular Iron Giant and the unfortunately named earth boy, Hogarth. He discovers the giant in the woods one night, and realizing that he's basically a big, scared kid (that sounds a lot like Vin Diesel), decides to protect him and be his friend. They share adventures, hide from government agents, and in general have the sorts of fun kids had before the internet ruined everything.

Ultimately it is revealed that the Giant was actually a very powerful, and very dangerous weapon sent from another world to enslave the Earth, but a bump on the head rendered him amnesiac and adorable.and only occasionally a killing machine.
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The kind less kid-friendly movies are made of.
Hogarth successfully teaches the Giant that it doesn't have to be a gun, that it can be just like Superman, and everything is OK, for a while at least.

Then the government guys come back and, well, one thing leads to another and this happens.
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Hogarth is knocked unconscious in the fray. Thinking him dead, the Giant goes on a rampage, destroying several army units, and causing the paranoid government agent who'd been following him throughout the movie to order a nuclear strike. Realizing that Hogarth is still alive, the Giant deactivates his weapons. Also realizing that the nuclear weapon will kill Hogarth, the military, and the entire surrounding small town, he bids goodbye to his friend, takes off and sacrifices himself to destroy the missile.

If this weren't tear-jerky enough, he has one last word on his giant steel lips before dying.
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"Superman."
I know I cry pretty easy, but this moment gets right into the heart-ripping-out territory, and I will always love it for that (even discounting the fact that he is clearly alive, if in pieces at the end, and possibly remembering his original mission, leaving a very depressing/gritty sequel where he enslaves Earth.)

So dear readers, has anyone else teared up at the end of The Iron Giant? Have any favorite alien moments in fiction? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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    Author

    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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